"James's Catholicising policy might seem insane; it can be explained only by his naive and grossly inflated expectations of conversions. Fortified by his sense of divine mission, he believed with a conviction born of faith that converts would appear, not because he had any rational grounds for thinking that they would but because he desperately wanted them to... He blundered on with the blind optimism of a man whose mind was determinedly closed to any thought of failure... [W]hen William invaded, few were prepared to resist him. In less than four years James had destroyed the strongest political position that any Stuart ever enjoyed. He had turned the Tories from vociferous loyalty to sullen apathy. And he had achieved this by concentrating single-mindedly on the line of action that the Tories could not stomach – the promotion of Popery."