March 15

On the 15th in 1672, King Charles II of England issued the Royal Declaration of Indulgence. I was surprised to discover that this had absolutely nothing to do with lavish dinner parties or extravagant lapses in to unbridled hedonism, which is what I had been hoping it was. Charles II, long suspected of being a highly closeted Catholic, gave it his best shot when he tried to give a little bit of a break to the recusants in his realm. Those bad humored cretins in Parliament would have none of it however and Charles was compelled to withdraw his declaration and replace it with the first of the Test Acts, which required anyone entering public service in England to become an Anglican, which is, of course, nothing more than Catholic Lite. Oh well. At least Charles fared better than his successor, James II, who was an openly Catholic monarch. When James attempted to issue a similar declaration, irate Anglicans, a polite group, though nasty in the extreme when angered, ousted him from the throne.