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so far from Philip. Philip was sullen, James jovial. Both were equally
ferocious. James II. was an easy-minded tiger; like Philip II., his
crimes lay light upon his conscience. He was a monster by the grace of
God. Therefore he had nothing to dissimulate nor to extenuate, and his
assassinations were by divine right. He, too, would not have minded
leaving behind him those archives of Simancas, with all his misdeeds
dated, classified, labelled, and put in order, each in its compartment,
like poisons in the cabinet of a chemist. To set the sign-manual to
crimes is right royal.
Every deed done is a draft drawn on the great invisible paymaster. A
bill had just come due with the ominous endorsement, Jussu regis.
Queen Anne, in one particular unfeminine, seeing that she could keep a
secret, demanded a confidential report of so grave a matter from the
Lord Chancellor--one of the kind specified as "report to the royal ear."
Reports of this kind have been common in all monarchies. At Vienna there
was "a counsellor of the ear"--an aulic dignitary. It was an ancient
Carlovingian office--the auricularius of the old palatine deeds. He
who whispers to the emperor.
William, Baron Cowper, Chancellor of England, whom the queen believed in
because he was short-sighted like herself, or even more so, had
committed to writing a memorandum commencing thus: "Two birds were
subject to Solomon--a lapwing, the hudbud, who could speak all
languages; and an eagle, the simourganka, who covered with the shadow of
his wings a caravan of twenty thousand men. Thus, under another form,
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