Chapter XXX.

Charles II. (1660-1685).

The monarchy of the Stuarts had, on the whole, regained possession of the throne unconditionally and without striking a blow. The English nation, with a few exceptions, gave itself up to joy and hope. It was necessary, however, to govern, and the difficulties which presented themselves at the first glance were considerable. Charles II. ruled, evading or cutting the knot of the difficulties which opposed his progress in many ways, and with the support of men of profoundly different characters. The nation accepted him blindly, voluntarily embracing illusions respecting the monarch whom she had chosen out of regard for the monarchical principle, and from weariness of revolutionary shocks. As it became possible to judge of the principles, or rather the lack of all principles, which characterized him, a gradual estrangement set in. The history of the reign of Charles II. presents the spectacle, more flagrant day by day, of the defects and vices of the government as well as of the reaction which at the same time was at work within the nation. Three periods may be noted in the history of that decline in the joyous illusions of the English people--three different conditions of the people as of the government during the reign of King Charles II. First, the constitutional and legal _régime_ under the ministry of Lord Clarendon (1660-1667); secondly, the government of intriguing and corrupt statesmen under the rule of the Cabal (1667-1674) thirdly, the epoch of conspiracies for changing the succession to the throne, the ministries of coalition and compromise: the attempts at arbitrary government and the great political trials, until the death of the king (1674-1685).

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Surrounded in the days of his exile and poverty by numerous adventurers and debauchees, Charles Stuart, disinherited and a fugitive, had the good sense and judgment to remain faithful to his old friends--to the devoted advisers who had long served his father, and who would have protected him against his worst errors if he had known how to trust himself to their wise and honest counsels. Hyde, above all, who had been almost uninterruptedly attached to the fortune and the person of Charles II., and who had directed all the negotiations with Monk before the restoration, was naturally singled out to govern in the name of the restored monarch. From 1657 he had received the title of Lord Chancellor of England: this name became a reality. "Thus the Lord Treasurer Southampton, the Marquis of Ormond, General Monk, and the two secretaries of state, Morice and Nicolas, composed, with the chancellor, that secret committee which, under the name of the Council of Foreign Affairs, was charged by the king to deliberate on all his affairs before they reached the stage of public discussion, and it was impossible to find an association of men more united in mind and feeling."

In this ministry, in which General Monk and the two secretaries of state alone constituted an element that was a stranger to the old royalist party. Clarendon was at once the most distinguished and the most politic. His principles were honest, his views upright and pure. Two faults obscured his better qualities. He was grasping, and he brought with him into England the passions and blunted perceptions of an exile. These inconveniences were not long in making themselves felt.

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In the face of a Parliament, the summoning of which had been neither regular nor legal--a Parliament which even then was called a convention, a title destined later to acquire a sad celebrity in the history of France--the great questions which it had become necessary to deal with were all the more urgent since the country demanded the election of a new Parliament. The king was pressed to disband the army, then a permanent menace and a bitter remembrance of the past. More than fifty thousand men inured to arms, kept down but discontented, were suddenly dismissed into civil life. They were well treated, but were irreconcilably hostile to the new power, and were held in check by habits of discipline and by public opinion--not by repentance for the past or the return of royalist ideas. The soldiers, in great number, were still Cromwellians or Republicans.

Their old leaders were Republicans: they were about to pay dearly for their attachment to the order of things which they desired to establish. At first an amnesty was granted to all. Monk had required that the exceptions should be limited to four; they had now become ten. The king then referred the question to the justice of Parliament. The passions of men in large assemblies are the most violent and cruel by reason of the fact that responsibility rests upon no single one. Before the arrival of Charles the spirit of vengeance had already arisen in the two Houses. {345} Some arrests had been made, and thirty persons were excluded from the amnesty by the House of Commons--all who remained of the old leaders of the revolution--Scott, Harrison, Sir Henry Vane, Sir John Haselrig, Desborough, Lambert, Fleetwood, Lenthall--politicians or soldiers. Some had already left England, distrusting, like Ludlow, the promises of the amnesty. The greater part were arrested. The House of Lords resolved that one victim ought to expiate the death of each of the members of the Upper House executed during the rebellion, and ended by excepting from the general pardon all those who had signed the sentence of Charles I., adding to this fatal list Hacker, Vane, Lambert, Haslerig, Axtel, and Peters, who had not sat among the revolutionary judges. This was too much. Monk and some others of moderate views remonstrated. Twenty-nine persons were condemned, ten perished by the tortures inflicted on traitors inflexible in their convictions and their courage. "Where is now your good old cause?" cried a bystander to Colonel Harrison, as he was being drawn to Charing Cross on a hurdle. "Here!" exclaimed the old soldier, placing his hand upon his heart, "and I am going to seal it with my blood." Indifferent to the cruelties which he believed to be necessary, Cromwell nevertheless had not accustomed the English people to the sight of torture. The spectacle soon caused a shock. The executions ceased, political vengeance was suspended. The ecclesiastical question was pressing; the king's embarrassment was great.

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At Breda, under the solicitations of the Presbyterians, who were then all-powerful, Charles II. had made promises and allowed hopes of union and toleration to be entertained. Profoundly royalist and conservative, the Presbyterians were separated from the Church of England by questions of form and ecclesiastical organization much more than by fundamental doctrines of religion. In 1660 the king promulgated an ordinance known as the Healing Declaration, which satisfied the Presbyterians without gravely offending the Anglican Church. Some distinguished theologians among the Presbyterians had already accepted the episcopal ordination and had become bishops, when Parliament rejected the Royal Declaration, refusing to give it the force of law. At the same time began the restitution of Church property and the domains of the Crown, very soon definitively settled by the new Parliament. The lands of private individuals were in part restored to them after some delays; but voluntary sales were respected, whatever might have been the conditions under which they were effected.

The reaction had commenced, and was violent and spontaneous. Charles II., cautious and indifferent, took in all this no personal part. He left full play to individual passions, which became excited by degrees. The bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw were torn out of their tombs, hung at Tyburn, then decapitated. King Henry the Seventh's Chapel at Westminster beheld its sanctuary violated for the purpose of searching for the remains of persons buried under its roof during the revolution. The tombs of the mother and daughter of Cromwell, and those of Pym and Blake, were opened, and their coffins broken. On all sides popular vengeance exhibits the same hideous and cowardly traits. The English Royalist party were furnishing an example to the revolutionary populace, who were one day in France to profane the vaults of St. Denis.

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The agitation out of doors found a counterpart in the sorrows and troubles of the royal household. The young Duke of Gloucester, an amiable and popular youth, fell a victim to the small-pox. His sister, the Princess of Orange, who had come to England to enjoy the spectacle of the restoration of her family, died soon afterwards of the same malady. The Queen Henrietta Maria had lately arrived in London; she was not popular. In spite of the splendors of her reception, the prejudices formerly excited against her were not forgotten: the English Court, moreover, furnished her with a bitter source of discontent. The secret marriage of the Duke of York with Anne Hyde, daughter of the chancellor, had been made public through the birth of a child. The anger of the queen was great; the chancellor pretended to share in her feeling; he contrived, however, to have his daughter recognized as Duchess of York. The marriage was declared almost at the same time that negotiations were in progress for a union between the Princess Henrietta and the Duke of Orleans, brother of Louis XIV., which was celebrated in March, 1661. The House of Stuart had resumed its position among the reigning families of Europe.

Public emotion in England had scarcely subsided, when a plot revealed itself in London. A handful of fanatics, led by a Fifth Monarchy man, named Venner, rushed through the streets of the city, crying, "Hail to the Lord Jesus, who is coming to reign upon the earth!" They were easily arrested; but they had made a noise, and had broken the heads of some of the city watch. This furnished a pretext for a levy of troops and for doubling the regiments of guards. {348} The military despotism of Cromwell had impressed upon the mind of the nation, and particularly on that of the Cavaliers, a dread of a standing army. It was by the Royalist Parliament that Charles II. and his honest councillors desired to govern. The Convention Parliament had restored the king, but the Presbyterians among them were numerous. They embarrassed the plans of Clarendon, who was passionately devoted to the Anglican Church. A general election was decided on. Parliament met on the 8th of May, 1661.

It was the triumph, the lasting triumph, of the Cavaliers. Fifty or sixty Presbyterians at the most were re-elected. For eighteen years (1661-1679) the Royalist Parliament was destined to sit in the teeth of the law, which prescribed new elections every three years. Great changes were about to be effected in its internal economy as well as in its tendencies. From its opening the new Parliament entered without reserve upon a course of imprudent action. The control of the military forces placed in the hands of the king alone; all resistance to the armed power of the king declared unlawful and criminal--such were the results of the proceedings of Parliament in its first session. All constituted bodies, cities, towns, and corporations, were called upon to take an oath in these terms: "I declare that it is not lawful upon any pretence whatsoever to resist the king, and I abhor the treason which would pretend to take up arms by the king's authority against his person or against those who are commissioned by him. In this, so help me God. Amen."

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The bishops were restored to their seats in the House of Lords. It was the first step, quickly to be followed by the complete triumph of the Anglican Church. The English nation had never been deeply penetrated with the Presbyterian spirit. The respect which the Puritans inspired had been greatly weakened during their ascendency, when many hypocrites had associated themselves with those who were sincerely convinced, attracted by the hope of influence and power. Their narrowness of mind and the rigidity of their principles, together with certain ridiculous traits in their manners or their habits, had alienated the popular favor from their party. The Anglican Church, ancient and persecuted, long liberal and indulgent in the application of its laws, saw with passionate regard England return to her. She took advantage of this change without moderation, without forethought, carried away, like the political parties, by the pleasure of the triumph. The Presbyterians had hoped that the project conceived by Archbishop Usher would be adhered to; this was a skillful combination of the governments of the bishops and the synod. After a series of ecclesiastical conferences, as eloquent as they were fruitless. Parliament, in the month of January, 1661, passed an Act of Uniformity which re-established in the Church of England the episcopal rule in all its rigor, leaving no alternative to the numerous Presbyterian pastors who had been appointed to benefices under the Commonwealth but to conform in all matters both to the doctrine and the practice of the Church of England, or to abandon their office to ecclesiastics completely subject to the established discipline. The Covenant, which had been solemnly sworn to by the king himself in Scotland, was ignominiously burnt in the public streets. The Presbyterians were driven out of the Church as they had previously been from Parliament.

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The ecclesiastics exhibited no hesitation. By a strange coincidence it was on the day of St. Bartholomew that two thousand of their number took farewell of their charges and their congregations, followed by their families. They retired from the spots where they had looked forward to ending their days, abandoning the care of souls to the old pastors, who had been driven out like themselves by the revolution, and who now resumed possession of their benefices. The Long Parliament had of old shown compassion, though often without effect, by ordering the application of a fifth part of the ecclesiastical revenues to the dispossessed ministers. The Royalist Parliament did not take the same precaution. The Presbyterian ministers remained long deprived of resources, an object of the spleen of the Government. The Church of England, transformed by her triumph, and become more entire and more dominant than she had hitherto been or desired to be, henceforth enjoyed an undisputed reign. She had regained possession of all her advantages, both spiritual and temporal.

This was in great part the work of the lord chancellor, recently created Lord Clarendon, who pursued with passionate ardor a labor which the king regarded with indifference. Yielding to the obstinacy or the enthusiasm of his ministers, Charles contemplated the measures neither with satisfaction nor personal sympathy. Inclining at that time, in the bottom of his heart, towards the doctrines of Catholicism, he would willingly have granted toleration to the Nonconformists in the hope of including the Catholics in the universal indulgence. {351} This his Parliament would not permit; at the same time they hurried him towards a descent which conducted to rigors of which Charles was already weary. "I am tired of hanging!" he said to Clarendon. Illustrious victims excited the furious passions of the Cavaliers. Sir Harry Vane and Lambert in England and the Marquis of Argyll in Scotland imagined themselves safe when the political executions had ceased. They were deceived, and their friends had rejoiced prematurely. Argyll died first (1661), finally ruined by some old letters which he had written to Monk, and which the latter forwarded to his judges. "I placed the crown upon the head of the king at Scone," said the marquis, "and this is my recompense!" The able defence of Vane troubled the Crown lawyers charged with his indictment. "If we do not know what to say to him, we know what to do," muttered Chief Justice Foster. The king was struck with the attitude of the accused. "He is too dangerous a man to let live if we can honestly put him out of the way," he wrote to Clarendon. Vane was executed on the 14th of June, 1662; Lambert was condemned to imprisonment for life. He was sent to the Island of Guernsey, where he was destined soon afterwards to end his days.

The execution of Vane had followed with only an interval of a few days the marriage of the king--an event but little popular in England, for he espoused a Catholic princess. Clarendon feared the influence of Spain. It was a princess of Portugal, Catherine of Braganza, to whom he had destined the sad honor of marrying King Charles II. The latter had urged objections against every proposal for a Protestant union. The dower was considerable; the fortress of Tangier offered an appearance of an acquisition of territory. {352} The Portuguese princess arrived in England in the month of May, 1662. Honest folk founded great hopes upon the marriage of the king, whose disorderly life caused much scandal. Men of foresight were not deceived. After the rigid rule of the Puritans and the heavy yoke of their moral and religious ordinances, the reaction of license and immorality, of which the king gave the example, extended to his followers, and in part corrupted his supporters throughout the country. Those innocent diversions which had been forbidden by the government of the Commonwealth yielded place under the Restoration to a vortex of pleasure and debauchery which began to alarm the serious and sober-minded.

The vices and errors of men enchain them, and bear inevitably their deplorable fruit. The wild prodigality of Charles II. left him poor in spite of the considerable revenue which Parliament assigned him. He had relinquished all the ancient revenues of the crown, relics of the feudal system which shocked those ideas of justice and liberty of the subject which for centuries had gradually been ripening in England, and which had definitely taken shape under the revolution. In lieu of these an annual sum had been fixed. All these resources, however, had been exhausted when Charles II. decided to sell Dunkirk to the young king, Louis XIV., then beginning his reign, having at last become master of that power which he was destined to exercise so long, almost always for the glory, but sometimes for the misfortune of France.

[Image] Charles At The House Of Lady Castlemaine.

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Cromwell had acquired Dunkirk at the price of the aid of his brave soldiers in the war against Spain. Charles II. sold it to Louis XIV. for five millions of livres--a step profoundly unpopular and one which hurt the pride of the English, long wounded by the loss of Calais, and for a while consoled by the acquisition of Dunkirk. The merchants of London offered the king enormous advances, in order to avert what they regarded as a national dishonor. Charles II. hoped to obtain from Louis XIV. something more and better than the price of Dunkirk; he concluded the treaty notwithstanding the public discontent.

The Queen Henrietta Maria had conducted for her son the negotiations with France. It was to her that Louis XIV. explained his reasons for remaining faithful to his alliance with the Dutch when in 1665 Charles II., under a frivolous pretext, declared war against the United Provinces. "I desired the Queen of England, who was at that time in Paris," says the king in his memoirs, "to explain to her son that in the particular esteem which I felt towards him, I could not without sorrow take the resolution to which I found myself obliged by the engagement of my word; for at the commencement of this war I felt persuaded that he had been carried by the suffrages of his subjects further than he would have gone if he had consulted only his own feelings."

The fidelity of Louis XIV. to his engagements did not induce him to hasten to afford to the Dutch substantial assistance. Defeated in the outset off Lowestoft (June, 1665), the Dutch, under the command of Ruyter and Cornelis de Witt, contended with Monk and Prince Rupert with success. "The court," says Burnet in his _History of His Own Times_, "gave out that it was a victory, and public thanksgivings were ordered, which was a horrid mockery of God and a lying to the world. We had in one respect to thank God--that we had not lost our whole fleet." {354} A secret treaty was then concluded between Louis XIV. and Charles II. Meanwhile the Dutch fleet again ascended the Thames as far as Sheerness, insulting English pride at the gates of London. Charles II. had neglected the defence of his ports; at the moment when Ruyter and De Witt were sailing proudly on his waters, the king and his associates, assembled at Lady Castlemaine's, were chasing a moth which had lost its way in her splendid apartments. Negotiations were already begun at Breda; three treaties of peace were concluded there in the month of July, 1667, between Holland, France, and Denmark.

An ancient commercial and maritime rivalry had at one time excited the hatred of the English against Holland. The conformity of manners and religion, and the principles of liberty which existed in the two countries, counterbalanced the old animosity. The war had been more royal and less popular than Louis XIV. imagined. Charles II. had never forgiven the Hollanders for the decree of exclusion which they had pronounced against his house, at the instigation of Cromwell. It was felt in England that the war was not a righteous one; the misfortunes which soon afterwards overtook the capital seemed like a punishment for it. The Plague broke out in London in 1665; in five months it destroyed more than 100,000 persons. "This did dishearten all people," says Burnet, "and coming in the very time in which so unjust a war was begun it had a dreadful appearance. All the king's enemies and the enemies of monarchy said here was a manifest character of God's heavy displeasure upon the nation, and indeed the ill life the king led and the viciousness of the whole court gave but a melancholy prospect."

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The king and court left London; Parliament was convened at Oxford; the aged Monk alone solicited the government of the capital. The expelled Nonconformist pastors returned in a mass into the midst of their old flocks now bewildered with terror. The Parliament of Oxford rejected an act of indulgence of the king tending to suspend penal legislation against the nonjurors; it forbade the dispossessed ministers to approach the scene of their old functions. When the Plague was at an end the Act of the Five Thousand once more banished the old pastors from the congregations whom they had edified and consoled during the infection. The king had scarcely returned to his capital when a fire of unparalleled extent devastated it anew. Thirteen thousand houses were burnt, eighty-nine churches destroyed in the City, sixty-three in the environs. Two hundred thousand persons, it is said, found themselves without shelter, compelled to camp out under tents in the fields. The king and the Duke of York honorably displayed their courage; but so many calamities began to weary the nation. In Scotland the tyranny of Lord Lauderdale and Archbishop Sharp provoked an insurrection which was more religious than political. The people remained passionately attached to the Presbyterian Church and the Covenant. The pressure exercised for the establishment of the Episcopate roused the Covenanters of the West at the moment when the Fire of London occupied all minds; it cost some trouble to reduce them; executions were not successful in calming the irritation. Smouldering in England, whilst it was bursting forth in Scotland, discontent was everywhere the same. National loyalty still protected the king. It was against his ministers, and particularly against the Earl of Clarendon, that public prejudice was directed.

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The Chancellor succumbed under the burden both of his virtues and his defeats. "Raised by the Restoration to the summit of authority, he succeeded to power with a hatred for all that had passed during twenty years, and with an intention of restoring everything in Church and State to the point at which the revolution had found it. But he had what is often wanting, or is quickly dissipated in active and elevated spheres of life, namely, opinions and faith in duty. He was often in error; he committed, or suffered to be committed, iniquities; but truth and virtue were not in his eyes chimeras. Often irrational and unjust in his relations with the national party, he was towards his own party firm, enlightened, and virtuous. A severe censor of the corruption of Charles II., frankly Protestant in a Papist court, notwithstanding his personal hatred towards the Presbyterians; grave and austere in the midst of frivolous and greedy courtiers; moderate by reason, though his nature was harsh and perhaps even vindictive; he constantly set his face against those wild disorders, that reckless and capricious tyranny, to which the government was unceasingly impelled by the vices of the king and the passions of the Cavaliers. As a returned exile he did not control the evil genius of the Restoration, and did not even conceive the idea of controlling it. An Englishman of the old type, he opposed to the perverse nature of his party all his power, ability, and virtue."

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It was the virtues of Clarendon that alienated from him the mind of the king. Weary of the constraint which the principles of his minister imposed upon him, the king deprived him of the seals in the month of August, 1667. "The Chancellor was as much surprised as he could have been if one had presented to him an order for his execution," says Clarendon himself in his memoirs. He had believed himself assured of the heart and the fidelity of the king against all his enemies. The House of Commons proceeded at once to the impeachment. Clarendon was avaricious, yet at the same time lavish. His princely dwelling was the object of jealousy among all the Cavaliers, who had been ruined by the sequestrations and the disadvantageous liquidations to which they had been subjected under the Commonwealth. "The Act of Indemnity for the enemies of the king had become an act of oblivion for his friends," said the country gentlemen who had been deprived of their property. They accused the Chancellor of having enriched himself more rapidly than was consistent with honor. The House of Lords defended him without success. Charles pressed his old servant to leave England, in order to prevent, as he said, the evils that might result to the kingdom from the division which had manifested itself between the two Houses. Clarendon resisted; the king at length gave him the order to depart. "It is absolutely necessary that he should go promptly; I answer upon my salvation for his safety." Such was the language addressed to the fallen minister by the Bishop of Winchester, who was charged to deliver the royal message. Clarendon, old and in weak health, set out immediately. It was on the night of the 25th of November, 1667. Scarcely had he touched the soil of France when the two Houses voted his banishment; at the same time making it unlawful to grant him any pardon without the authority of Parliament. {358} Dejected and without hope, Clarendon established himself at Montpelier. There he wrote his admirable _History of the Rebellion_, his memoirs, and several works of piety. When he died, at Rouen in 1674, he had not seen England again, and had not received from the king any testimony of affection or remembrance--a striking example of royal ingratitude, as well as of the incapacity of an exile to govern a country the life of which he had long ceased to share or to understand.

With the downfall of Clarendon commenced the reign of the intriguers, the corrupt and the corrupters, and the moral decline of the party of the government, composed at first of men who were honest even in their excesses, but were soon bought by money or favors, and led into concessions and to a line of policy often of shameful kinds. The ministry of the Cabal, as it was called, from the names of the politicians who composed it--Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale--was not formed in the interest of any settled principles either political or social. By turns flattering liberals and arbitrary absolutionists, complaisant to the whims of the king, and lavish of their favors towards men whose votes or support were necessary, they sought abroad the alliance of the King of France, and soon sank into dependence upon him, impelled towards that degradation by the need of an _éclat_ which they could find only in war, with the all-powerful succor of Louis XIV.

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The first effort of the king's new advisers was wiser and more prescient. Popularity among the Protestants in England and on the Continent was the object to which their views were directed. They sent to Holland Sir William Temple, an able and honest diplomatist, qualified to appreciate the elevated and patriotic views of the grand pensionary, John de Witt. Naturally favorable to the French alliance, which he had long sought and sustained, John de Witt had been rendered anxious by the progress of the power and ambition of Louis XIV. He desired to protect Europe against his invasions, by drawing closer that ancient union of the Protestant countries promoted of old at the instigation of Burleigh under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth. The treaty of the Triple Alliance, signed at the Hague on the 23d of January, 1668, engaged England, Sweden, and the United Provinces, to defend against France the weak monarchy of Spain. A secret article bound the allies to take up arms to restrain Louis XIV., and if possible to bring him back to the conditions of the peace of the Pyrenees. The peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was the fruit of that prudent and wise policy.

John de Witt and the Dutch were destined to pay dearly for their courageous initiative. "In the midst of all my prosperity in my campaigns of 1667," writes Louis XIV. in his memoirs, "neither England nor the Empire, convinced of the justice of my cause, offered any opposition, however much their interests were opposed to the rapidity of my conquests. On my way I found only my good, faithful, and old friends, the Hollanders, who, instead of interesting themselves in my good fortune as furnishing the foundation of their State, attempted to impose conditions on me and compel me to make peace. They even dared to employ threats in case I should refuse to accept their mediation. I confess that their insolence wounded me to the quick, and that I was tempted to risk what might happen to my conquests in the Spanish Netherlands, and to turn all my forces against that haughty and ungrateful nation. But having called prudence to my aid, I dissembled, and concluded a peace on honorable conditions, resolved to postpone the punishment of that perfidy to another occasion."

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The first care of Louis XIV. in his operations against Holland was naturally to detach Charles II. from his alliance. In this business he employed his sister-in-law, Madame Henrietta of England, an adroit and agreeable person, tenderly attached both to her brother and to France, without allowing the subjection of Charles to the all-powerful Louis XIV. to wear the appearance of a disgraceful or humiliating fact for his native country. The position of the King of England in his kingdom, in the face of his Parliament, became every day more difficult. The excesses of the court party, their corruption, their flagrant vices, had at last brought about a national reaction which was felt even in Parliament, at one time so passionately and blindly loyal. The country party was formed in opposition to the ministry of the Cabal, which was divided within itself, being now drawn towards the Dutch alliance by the Earl of Arlington, now driven towards France by the Duke of Buckingham. The nation awoke from her ecstatic loyalty, and aspired to resume her share in the government.

Shrewd and penetrating under his external appearance of indifference, Charles II. understood better than his ministers the changes of public opinion, and the risk which they compelled him to encounter. The constraint of constitutional government was burdensome to his licentious selfishness, as it had been to the timid pride of his father. {361} He desired to free himself from the trammels which Parliament imposed upon him. But he had no army; a few regiments of guards, silently recruited, were insufficient to sustain a struggle for which he had moreover no pecuniary resources. He could find no support except from abroad; the alliance which his sister had offered him in the name of Louis XIV. assured him the aid of which he stood in need. A secret treaty was concluded at Dover in the month of May, 1670, but signed only by the Catholic advisers of the king. The greater part of the ministers were ignorant of its existence.

Secrecy was necessary, and it was advantageous to conceal the conditions. The King of England undertook to declare publicly his return to the Roman Catholic Church as his brother, the Duke of York, had done. Louis XIV. promised to assist him to that end with a sum of two millions of livres, as well as with an annual subsidy of three millions when the two princes should have declared war against Holland. Peace with Spain, always popular in England, Spain being the natural enemy of France, was to be respected by the two sovereigns.

Charles II. knew what his people were capable of enduring, and what were the limits of their patience. The declaration of Catholic faith was delayed, and the article concerning it was passed over in silence in the modified treaty brought to the knowledge of the king's Protestant ministers, the representatives of the old party of the Cavaliers--Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. They obtained from Charles II. in the place of the war which the king proposed to declare against the Hollanders, a declaration of indulgence for the Protestant Nonconformists. {362} The Catholics were not included, and the Nonconformists began to breathe freely. Parliament voted a sum of £800,000 sterling for the support of the Triple Alliance; at the same time Ashley declared that the advances deposited in the hands of the Government by the merchants of London would not be refunded as usual, and that interest only would be paid on them to the proper persons. A sum of £1,300,000 sterling was thus added to the king's resources. Little did Charles heed the financial disasters which this arbitrary and unjust act entailed upon the city. He was now rich; he desired to be free. He prorogued Parliament, and declared war against Holland (March, 1672).

Louis XIV. entered the Netherlands. His conquests began to disquiet Europe, and caused in Holland the internal revolution which cost the brothers De Witt their lives, and placed at the head of the Dutch forces the young Prince of Orange. England took part in the struggle by a long series of naval engagements. The first, and the most important of all, the battle of Sole Bay, cost Admiral Montague, who had become Lord Sandwich, his life. The struggle was bitter. "Of thirty-two battles in which I have taken part," said Ruyter, who was gloriously defeated on that day, "I have never seen one like it." "He is at once an admiral, a captain, a pilot, a sailor, a soldier," said the English. The Duke of York incurred the greatest disaster during the action.

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The war continued. The Prince of Orange and the Hollanders were resolved upon a desperate resistance. "You do not perceive that your country is lost?" said to William, the Duke of Buckingham, who had been sent by Charles II. to the Hague. "There is always a way of not witnessing her loss," replied the hero, "which is to die in the last ditch." All the dykes of Holland were filled with water; the country was inundated, the winter arrived, hostilities were suspended, and the King of France returned to St. Germain's. Before his departure he wrote in his diary the memorandum: "My departure; I desire that nothing more be done." The resources of Charles II. were exhausted; it was necessary to summon Parliament.

The war was unpopular; but the Houses were occupied with other affairs, and the subsidies which the king demanded were voted without resistance if not without ill-humor. Religious questions assumed in the public mind a predominance over political or military affairs. Parliament had been passionately royalist; its attachment to the king and confidence in him diminished day by day. The two Houses remained constantly attached to the Established Church, which they had raised up, and were ready to defend against all her enemies. The royal declaration of indulgence was the object of a hostile address; Charles had already received, through Colbert, the representations of Louis XIV.: he withdrew his measure. This was not enough to satisfy the fears of Parliament: Protestant England felt that she was delivered up to the Catholics by a monarch whose faith began to appear problematical. The Test Act was passed by the two Houses; every public functionary was compelled to take the oath of allegiance and supremacy, to sign a declaration against the doctrine of transubstantiation, and to take the Communion according to the rites of the Church of England. The king's desire was to resist; but a dissolution would have resulted in a House of Commons more violent than the royalist Long Parliament: he yielded. {364} The Duke of York, declaring openly his conversion to Catholicism, resigned immediately the post of Lord High Admiral; Lord Clifford left the ministry; in all the public offices a great number of men, whose attachment to the Roman Catholic faith was previously unknown, successively sent in their resignation. Parliament, triumphing in the success of its measure, contemplated with apprehension the danger which had threatened it. All confidence in the word of the king disappeared from the public mind. The cabinet was already shaken by the resignation of Clifford; the Chancellor, Ashley, now Earl of Shaftesbury, who had long been in special favor with Charles, and who was worthy to serve him by reason of his caustic wit and moral corruption, was wounded by the secret which the king had withheld from him. He deemed the national liberties and religion in peril, and allied himself with the country party in the House of Commons in the month of November, 1673. This Parliament was scarcely prorogued when Charles commanded him to surrender the seals. "Now to put off my robe and buckle on my sword," said Shaftesbury; and he placed himself at the head of the opposition.

The Duke of Buckingham followed Shaftesbury in this political movement, at the moment when Parliament was appealing to the king to banish him from his councils, as well as the Earl of Lauderdale. The House of Commons was debating on the impeachment of Lord Arlington. Less honest than Clifford, but like him a Catholic at heart, Arlington renounced an active part in politics and entered the household of the king. Lauderdale alone remained entrusted with the affairs of Scotland, and suffered the accumulated hatred which fell upon him in consequence of his indefatigable tyranny. {365} The ministry of the Cabal was at an end; with it ended the war with Holland, which had been burdensome, unpopular, and little glorious for the arms of England. In vain had Louis XIV. sent to London the Marquis of Ruvigny, a considerable person among the French Protestants, and justly esteemed in England. Parliament desired peace, and refused the subsidies. Charles II. yielded, as was his habit, to the clearly expressed wishes of the nation; and, with like conformity to his custom, he reserved his private opinions and secret manœuvres. "Pity me; do not blame me," he wrote to Louis XIV. On the 21st of February, 1674, Charles II. proceeded to Parliament, to announce to the two Houses that he had concluded with the United Provinces "a speedy peace, in accordance with their prayer, and he hoped also an honorable and a durable one." The English and Irish auxiliary regiments, commanded by the Duke of Monmouth, a natural son of the king, remained quietly in the service of France. Louis XIV. did not withdraw his subsidies from his royal dependent.

The ladies who had served as a lien between the two crowns, and had negotiated the humiliating conditions of the alliance between the two kings, had died during the ascendency of the ministry of the Cabal--the Queen Henrietta Maria in the month of August, 1669, in France, where she habitually resided with her second husband, Lord Jermyn; the Duchess of Orleans, Madame Henrietta, in June, 1670, at the moment when she had just concluded the treaty of Dover--the latter not without a suspicion of poison. {366} Both were eulogized by Bossuet in the most magnificent language; both in a measure and with a different degree of responsibility were fatal to the destinies of England. Monk also had died on the 3rd of January, 1670, as calm before the progress of his malady as in the face of the enemy. Old and suffering as he was, he had personally hastened to encounter the Dutch when they entered the Thames. As they were re-embarking, their bullets whistled in the ears of the general. His aides-de-camp pressed him to retire. "If I was afraid of bullets, gentlemen," said Monk, "I should long ago have quitted this business."

He died erect, turning his head to breathe in silence his last sigh. "A man capable of great things, though he had no grandeur in his soul; born at once to command and to obey; sensible, patient, and brave; attached to his own interest, and yet devoted in every great position to his duty as a soldier and an Englishman; without political ambition and not aspiring to govern his country--he knew how to acknowledge his country's rights, and to restore to her the government which had become indispensable."

Charles II. had not forgotten the services rendered to him by Monk; he was neither shocked by his pecuniary greed nor by the grossness of his manners. He had loaded him with wealth and honors, and he followed him to the tomb in Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster. The general had never played any political part, and his death left no void in the direction of affairs, which were becoming every day more complicated and more violently conflicting. The court party and the country party divided the two Houses. Out of doors the country party was strikingly superior. {367} The conviction of this fact alone prolonged the existence of the Royalist Long Parliament. The time had now gone by when courtiers, probably with the assent of the king, dared to set miserable hirelings to mutilate the face of Sir John Coventry, a prominent member of the opposition in the Commons. From this time forth the country party took the measure of the royal authority, and raised its pretensions even to the question of the succession to the throne. The enthusiasm and the confidence which marked the first days of the Restoration had given way to sombre disquietude. It was not with his ordinary exaggeration that Lord Shaftesbury said, "If the king had had the happiness to be born a simple gentleman, he might have passed for a man of sense, good breeding, and good disposition. As a king he has brought his affairs to such a point that there is not a creature in the world, man or woman, who can feel the least confidence in his word or his attachment."

The refusal of the Duke of York to take the test oath, and his marriage with the daughter of the Duke of Modena, Mary Beatrice, in 1673, filled the measure of the Protestant anxieties of the nation. In vain the two daughters of Anne Hyde, who had died in May, 1671, were publicly reared in the faith and practice of the Church of England; all feelings of security had departed from men's minds, and the rumor which began to spread abroad of a secret treaty, concluded some time before, between King Charles II. and Louis XIV., increased the suspicions of the people. The choice which the king made of a new minister served for some time to reassure men's minds. Sir Thomas Osborne, soon afterwards raised to the peerage as Earl of Danby, appeared favorable, in the House of Commons, to the country party. {368} He was a Protestant, a thorough Englishman, and without being over-conscientious or scrupulous, he was yet not absolutely so wanting in principles as his predecessors in power. Ardently devoted to the royal prerogative, he endeavored to restore authority to the hands of the king, by relying not on the court party, but on the old Cavaliers and the Established Church. One element of his popularity was his antipathy to the alliance with France. Before his advent to power he had given as a toast at a public dinner in the city, "War with France!" The people felt assured that he would never lend his hand to those transactions humiliating for the honor of England and her sovereign, of which no one yet ventured to speak openly. The ambition and the weaknesses of men sometimes surpass the most gloomy apprehensions; of this, Danby was destined soon to furnish a proof.

Like the ministry of the Cabal, the new government began by making advances to the Dutch. A peace was concluded. Sir William Temple was charged with the care of foreign affairs, and was shortly afterwards despatched as an envoy to the Congress of Nimeguen, there to settle the terms of general peace. But Danby continually oscillated between the royal and the national policy, sometimes urging Charles to unite himself with Europe in a war against France, sometimes lending himself privately to the secret negotiations with Louis XIV. In the course of the year 1676 a new convention assured to Charles II. a pension of £100,000 sterling and the assistance of such French troops as might be necessary in his dominions. {369} The letters of Danby do not permit us to doubt the knowledge that he had of the situation, if not his connivance at the treaty. Charles II. undertook to prolong the prorogation of Parliament, which had endeavored to force upon him an effective action in the general pacification of Europe. The war on the Continent still continued when the Houses at length assembled again in 1677. The Duke of Buckingham and Lord Shaftesbury maintained that the length of the prorogation amounted to a dissolution, but Danby was an accomplished master of the art of corruption; he disposed of the money from France. The country party was defeated in the House of Commons, and the authors of the proposition for a dissolution were sent to the Tower, where they were detained for several months.

Meanwhile the increasing successes of Louis XIV. began to alarm Danby as they alarmed England. Suddenly looking towards Holland, he obtained from the king authority to invite William of Orange to visit London, and negotiating secretly with that prince, he concluded a marriage between him and the eldest daughter of the Duke of York, the Princess Mary, whose hand had been previously offered to William without resulting in the manifestation of any eagerness on his part for the alliance. The importance of this concession was keenly felt in Paris. "Louis XIV. sent immediately for Montague, our ambassador," says Burnet, "who when he came to Versailles saw the king the most moved that he had ever observed him to be. He asked him when was the marriage to be made. Montague understood not what he meant, so he explained all to him. Montague protested to him that he knew nothing of the whole matter. The king said he always believed the journey would end in this, and he seemed to think that our court had now forsaken him. Lord Danby, who recalled Montague to London, asked him how the king had received the news of the marriage. The ambassador answered, 'As he would have done the loss of an army.'"

{370}

In England the joy was great. "The first tokens that I had of the marriage were the bonfires which were lighted in London," wrote Louis XIV. The alliance, offensive and defensive, concluded with Holland, and which at length compelled Louis to recall his auxiliary regiments, broke for the moment the secret relations between Louis XIV. and his crowned pensioner. The quarrel was not of long duration. The understandings constantly maintained between France and the English Parliament, as with their sovereign, kept the policy of England in a state of indecision and inconsistency, which rendered powerful aid to the firm and resolute conduct of Louis XIV., who was absolute master of his kingdom, his army, and his finances. "I do not envy the Grand Seignior, with his mutes and their bowstrings always ready to strangle according to his pleasure," said Charles II. to the Earl of Essex; "but I shall never think myself a king as long as those fellows keep watch on all my actions, interrogate my ministers, and demand an account of my expenses."

This was just what Parliament had attempted to do. Dreading at once the prodigality of the king and the growth of his power, demanding a war with France, and fearing to allow the sums voted for that purpose to be wasted, or to see troops, raised for the struggle with Louis XIV., turn their arms against the liberties of England, the House of Commons endeavored to limit the application of the sums voted to specific purposes, and required that an account should be rendered of expenditure. Such arrogance excited the indignation of the king, and his anger increased the feeling of alarm.

{371}

As a consequence of treachery and contradictory manœuvres the king of England ceased to have any weight on the Continent, even in the quality of mediator, when the general peace was concluded at Nimeguen. It was signed in July, 1678, under the influence of the States-General of Holland.

Thenceforth Louis XIV. was the arbiter of Europe. The English nation had learnt to distrust its king; but he was at the head of a small army, the subsidies from France were not yet exhausted, and Lord Danby was menaced in Parliament, over which he had so long exercised a paramount influence. Convicted of having taken part in the secret negotiations between Louis XIV. and his master, he was impeached in the House of Commons in 1678, and soon afterwards sent to a prison, where he remained until the death of Charles II. The court dreaded a trial which threatened to show the comparative innocence of the Lord Treasurer at the same time that it exposed the king's shame. Lord Shaftesbury was more eager to obtain the dissolution of Parliament than to bring his rival to trial. The Parliament of 1661--the "pensioned Parliament," as it had been nicknamed during the latter years of its existence--at length succumbed. The new Parliament assembled on the 6th of March, 1679.

{372}

One thought, one passion alone--terror and hatred of the Catholics--filled the breasts of the new members. Some months before the downfall of Lord Danby a terrible and unparalleled piece of news had overwhelmed the mind of the nation, clouded the strongest judgments, and impelled the most moderate to violence. King Charles, while taking a walk in St. James's Park, received from a certain Captain Kirby, an unknown and insignificant personage, the revelation of a plot stated to have been hatched against his life. The informer, Kirby, referred to Dr. Tonge, an ecclesiastic of the Church of England, and known to some persons of the court. Tonge affirmed the existence of a great Papist conspiracy. Letters were seized; the king and the Duke of York judged them to be forgeries. Tonge produced his principal witness, Titus Oates, son of an Anabaptist preacher, but in holy orders, a chaplain in the navy, thence soon dismissed, a convert to Catholicism, and twice ignominiously expelled from the College of the Jesuits. As audacious as he was corrupt, he maintained with effrontery that his relations with the Jesuits had given him occasion to discover the entire plot; that documents had passed into his hands; the Pope had assigned the government of England to the Jesuits, who were spread over all parts of the three kingdoms in order to labor in the work of the general conversion; the life of the king was threatened, as well as that of all obstinate Protestants; the Fire of London had been the work of the Jesuits; a second fire was preparing for the port of London; all the ships were to be delivered to the flames; the Pope had already named the ministers who were to govern England for him. The good sense of the king, favored by his secret confidence with regard to the Catholics, enabled him at once to reject this monstrous tissue of falsehoods and calumnies. {373} Some persons, however, were mentioned, and public opinion began to be excited. The papers of Coleman, who had been occasionally employed by the Duke of York, were seized at the moment when he was beginning to burn them. Enough remained to furnish evidence, not of a plot properly so called, but of the hopes which the Catholicism of the heir to the throne, as well as the personal inclinations of the king, had engendered in the Church of Rome. "We have a great work in hand," wrote Coleman to Father La Chaise, confessor to Louis XIV.; "it is a question of nothing less than the conversion of the three kingdoms, and perhaps by this means of the destruction of that odious heresy which has so long prevailed over the people of the North. Never have such hopes been able to flourish since the death of our Queen Mary. God has given us a prince who has, by a miracle, become ardently desirous of being the author and the instrument of this glorious enterprise; but we are certain to meet with so many obstacles and so much opposition, that it is important to afford us all the help that one can." Coleman fled the country.

This was more than was wanted to inflame the minds and excite the fears of all the members of the council, before which Oates and Tonge appeared. A terrible incident came to add to the public anxiety and indignation. Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey, a magistrate of London, who had received the depositions of Titus Oates, and perhaps even the confessions of Coleman, whose friend he was, disappeared from his house for some days, then was found murdered in a ditch not far from the church of St. Pancras. His sword was plunged into his breast. An attempt was made to represent this as a case of suicide, but both the medical examination and popular feeling denounced the murderers. {374} The body remained exposed for two days. "Many went to see it," says Burnet, "who went away much moved by the sight, and indeed men's spirits were so sharpened upon it that we all looked on it as a very great happiness that the people did not vent their fury upon the Popish about the town." An immense crowd gathered at the interment of Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey; he was regarded as a martyr to Protestantism.

The fears of Parliament were as great as those of the people of London. The king had announced an intention of bringing the affair before the ordinary tribunals. The Houses of Parliament had summoned Titus Oates before them; voted him their thanks and a pension of £1,200 sterling; they indicted all the Roman Catholic lords named by the renegade; the prisons were crowded with Papists; for the first time the question of the succession to the throne was agitated in Parliament. The Duke of York had ceased to take his place in the Privy Council; this prudent course secured him an exemption from the general measure which soon afterwards forbade the Catholic Peers to sit in Parliament. The Test Act had already excluded Papists from the House of Commons. The denunciations continued, and to Titus Oates was now added one Bedloe: the executions commenced; a few obscure Catholics had already paid with their lives for the terrors of England when the new Parliament assembled at Westminster.

{375}

The state of parties had undergone an important change. The great divisions which were destined so long to distinguish opinions in England, began to appear in the legislature of 1675: the Tories, under the direction of Lord Godolphin and Lawrence Hyde, second son of Lord Clarendon, occupying the place of the court party, and remaining devoted to the royal authority; the Whigs, who had for their leaders Lord Shaftesbury, Lord Essex, and Lord William Russell, and forming the country party, more concerned for the rights of the nation than for the prerogatives of the crown; and an intermediate group, distinguished under the insulting name of "Trimmers," inclining, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left, according to the impulse of the lively, penetrating, and critical mind of their chief, Lord Halifax. Lord Sunderland, clever and unpopular, was as a rule in accord with Halifax. Nearly all formed part of the new council of thirty members which Sir William Temple had proposed to the king as a constitutional experiment. That wise diplomatist also hoped, by thus engaging in the royal council the Parliamentary leaders, to protect the crown against the encroachments of Parliament, and to secure in equal degree the nation against the pretensions of the crown.

The nature of things and the necessities of affairs were not slow in prevailing over the scheme thus ably planned; the new council had scarcely entered upon its duties when an inner council began to direct all its deliberations, and found itself alone in charge of the government. Sir William Temple, Lord Essex, Lord Halifax, and Lord Sunderland were the real members. Lord Shaftesbury was president of the council.

{376}

It was the latter who placed himself at the head of the Protestant party in Parliament. The nation had become alive to the danger which threatened its faith as well as its liberties under the future reign of the Duke of York. The king had in vain removed his brother, who had retired to Brussels. The House of Commons solemnly voted his exclusion from the throne. Before the Bill could be carried to the House of Lords, Charles prorogued Parliament.

The indignation was profound. "I will bring to the block those who have advised the prorogation," cried Shaftesbury in a transport of anger. The chief of the Whigs had, however, on that day obtained the success of a measure which he had long cherished; the royal assent had been accorded to the Habeas Corpus Bill, securing the personal liberty of every English subject, and the right to be released on bail from the prisons of detention. This guarantee of the rights rendered sacred by Magna Charta was hailed with enthusiasm by the people, who justly attributed the credit of it to the president of the council. This title was not destined to be long accorded to him. In July, 1679, the king dissolved Parliament. Some months later he recalled his brother from Brussels and dismissed Lord Shaftesbury. The friends of the latter suffered his fate; Lord William Russell, Lord Cavendish, and Lord Essex retired from the council. Sir William Temple, disgusted by the failure of his new plan of government, returned to his country-house to cultivate his beautiful gardens, which he had never wished to leave. Halifax and Sunderland alone remained in power. Lawrence Hyde and Sidney Godolphin were soon associated with them. Under the presidency of the chief of the Trimmers the power passed once more into the hands of the Tories. [Footnote 2]

[Footnote 2: The appellations Whig and Tory were originally given to the fanatical Covenanters and Catholic Outlaws in Scotland and Ireland. From them they passed to the political parties.]

{377}

Up to this time the ministry had kept in its midst, at the head of the affairs of Scotland, an abettor of tyranny who had already more than once caused grave embarrassment to the government of the king. Lord Lauderdale, supported in Scotland by Archbishop Sharp, had transgressed the limits of Presbyterian patience. In spite of his ordinances, and of the atrocious penalties by which he punished offences against them, conventicles multiplied on all hands. Once already the Archbishop had been threatened by assassins who failed in their purpose. He pursued them with pitiless vengeance, exacting from all the landed gentry of the west an engagement not to tolerate on their estates the forbidden religious assemblies, or to be present at them themselves. On the refusal of these gentlemen, they were required "to deliver up their arms and to keep no horse of greater value than £4 sterling." To this edict, as to the former one, they refused obedience; at the news of this step the Duke of Lauderdale fell into such a fit of rage that in full council he turned his sleeves up to his elbows and swore by Jehovah "that he would know how to put them in irons again." Halifax obtained the king's consent to examine for himself the complaints broached against his minister. "Kings," says Burnet, "naturally love to hear their prerogative magnified; yet on this occasion the king had nothing to say in defence of the administration. But when May, the Master of the Privy Purse, asked him, in his familiar way, what he thought now of his Lauderdale, he answered, as May himself told me, that he had objected to many things that he had done against them, but there was nothing objected that was against his service." Strange infatuation of a sovereign so long a prey to the vicissitudes of fortune, but who had not yet learnt that his interests were inseparable from those of his people.

{378}

The Duke of Monmouth had been charged with the affairs of Scotland. He arrived there in the midst of a recrudescence of religious ardor. The Presbyterians felt that Lauderdale was beaten. They repaired in crowds into the conventicles. Some wretches carried their rage further. Archbishop Sharp was passing in his carriage through the environs of St. Andrew's; his servants were in advance, or following at some distance; he was alone with his daughter when the carriage encountered a group of armed fanatics. "Behold the day of the Lord," cried the Covenanters; "the Eternal has delivered our enemy into our hands." The archbishop was not deceived. "God have pity upon me!" he exclaimed to his daughter; "I am lost." The horsemen followed the carriage; the horses and the postilion were wounded; the murderers presented themselves at the door of the vehicle. "Come forth, Judas!" they cried. The old man and his daughter knelt to implore for mercy. The hatred of their persecutors was too violent for them to allow their prey to escape; the archbishop fell pierced by daggers. "Take away your priest," said the assassins to the terrified servants; and they retired into a cottage to return thanks to God. The forbidden assemblies had become so numerous that they were able to repulse the regiments sent to disperse them. The Covenanters had taken possession of Glasgow, when the Duke of Monmouth marched against them, on the 22d of June, 1679, at Bothwell Bridge on the Clyde.

[Image] Portrait Of Monmouth.

{379}

The insurgents were completely defeated, and the massacre would have been great if the duke had not imposed a limit to the vengeance of Graham of Claverhouse, already famous, who had once been conquered by the fanatics. When Monmouth returned to England, the king remarked to him that if he himself had been engaged in the affair, he should not have concerned himself so much about the prisoners. "I do not kill in cold blood," replied the duke; "that is the work of a butcher." The moderation which the young duke exhibited in victory may have been politic as well as charitable and humane. Some fumes of greatness had begun to mount to his head: he imagined that he foresaw a future hitherto unhoped for. Moved by personal hostility towards the Prince of Orange, the cause of which has never been made known, Lord Shaftesbury, who pursued with ardor his campaign in favor of the Bill of Exclusion, extended his animosity to the Protestant children of the Duke of York. A rumor began to spread that the birth of Monmouth was legitimate, and that the king had secretly espoused his mother, Lucy Walters. Long unknown, under the name of James Croft, because he had been confided in his infancy to the care of Lord Croft, Monmouth had recently married the daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch, the greatest heiress in Scotland; he bore his name joined to the title of the Duke of Monmouth, which the king had given him. Handsome, brave, thoughtless, he had inspired in Charles II. an attachment of which the adroit Shaftesbury reckoned upon availing himself in the rivalry which he sought to establish between the young man and the Duke of York. When James was recalled from Brussels by his brother, he required that Monmouth should be stripped of his appointment and sent back to the Continent.

{380}

Meanwhile the new Parliament had met (October, 1680); it was more ardently Protestant and patriotic than its predecessors. The Exclusion Bill was passed by a great majority; for a moment there was reason to believe that it would be adopted by the House of Lords. Godolphin advised the king to yield to public feeling; the Duchess of Portsmouth, the French favorite of Charles, implored him not to rush upon his ruin. He hesitated for some days, endeavoring to conclude a bargain with the Legislature. But mutual distrust was deep-seated and carefully nourished by very different influences. The royal honor and a remnant of natural affection mingled with the anger of a sovereign upon whom his people sought to impose an unjust law. Charles II. adopted his course, and engaged in a contest against the Exclusion Bill, being present himself at the sittings of the House of Lords. The debate was long and violent; more than once hands grasped the hilts of swords: the eloquence of Halifax prevailed over the alliance of Shaftesbury, Essex, and the treacherous Sunderland; the Bill was rejected by a very large majority.

The threatened Catholics were destined to pay for that check to national and Protestant anxieties. Several small plots, fictitious or real, were discovered; but the ordinary tribunals seemed weary of condemnations. It was the House of Lords itself which pronounced the sentence against Lord Stafford, youngest son of the old Earl of Arundel, and consequently uncle of the Duke of Norfolk. "He was a weak, but a fair-conditioned man," says Burnet. {381} Titus Oates and one of his compeers, named Turbervil, accused Lord Stafford of having plotted the assassination of the king. The charge had not a shadow of foundation; the viscount was nevertheless condemned by 55 voices against 31. The royal favor exempted him from the odious punishment of traitors. Charles II. was convinced of the innocence of the victims; he had too much sense to believe in the existence of those plots incessantly arising which so alarmed England, but his cold selfishness troubled itself little with the warrants which he signed, or the lives which he sacrificed to his repose. "The king appeared very calm, and his mind very cheerful," wrote Algernon Sidney, "although one might then have thought that he would be overwhelmed with cares, having no other resource but to dissolve Parliament, and trust himself to the good pleasure of his subjects; but the embarrassment in which he was did not seem to trouble him."

A renewed attempt in the House of Commons in favor of the Exclusion Bill led to the dissolution foreseen by Algernon Sidney; and it was a token of the royal intentions that the new Parliament was convened for the 21St of March, 1681, not at Westminster, but at Oxford. Charles had concluded with Louis XIV. a new treaty, kept profoundly secret, by which the king of France engaged himself to give for the current year a subsidy of two million livres, which was to be reduced to fifteen hundred thousand during the three following years. At this price Charles broke the alliance which he had contracted with Spain for the maintenance of the treaty of Nimeguen. He returned to his dependence upon Louis XIV.

{382}

The violence of Shaftesbury and his adherents went on increasing; it passed the bounds of the national temperament. The sentiments of passionate loyalty which had hailed the Restoration were not completely extinguished, and when the leader of the Whigs, arriving armed at Oxford, affixed to the hats of his domestics the motto from one of his speeches, "No Popery! no slavery!" the echo which it occasioned in the hearts of the people was not powerful enough to sustain him in his audacious designs. The nation rejected, as he did, Popery and slavery; but it was not yet disposed to attribute to its king all the sinister views which Shaftesbury laid to his account. In the last Parliament Shaftesbury had proposed to deprive the Duke of York, upon his accession to the throne, of the power to treat with foreign governments, and to nominate civil and military functionaries. At Oxford he offered to leave to the heir-apparent the empty title of king, while entrusting the power to the Prince of Orange as the representative of the Princess Mary. These various expedients, more specious and ingenious than practicable, were insufficient to satisfy the violent passions excited in the House of Commons. The proposition of Halifax was rejected. On the 26th of March, a new Exclusion Bill was presented and carried. "On the 28th," says Burnet, "very suddenly and not very decently, the king came to the House of Lords, the crown being carried between his feet in a sedan. And he put on his robes in haste, without any previous notice, and called up the Commons, and dissolved Parliament." This was the fifth Parliament dissolved by King Charles II. The Parliament of Oxford was the last which was convoked during his reign.

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He hastened, however, to reassure the nation, and to explain the motives of his actions. A royal manifesto was immediately published, complaining of the undutiful behavior of the three last Parliaments towards him, and of their disrespectful conduct in many instances. "Nothing, however," he added, "shall ever alter my affection to the Protestant religion as established by law, nor my love to Parliament, for I will still have frequent Parliaments." The Whigs replied to the royal protestations, insisting upon the necessity of the exclusion of the Duke of York; but their passions had blinded them regarding the state of public opinion. A mass of addresses were presented to the throne, some ardently Protestant, but assuring the king of their fidelity and confidence; others asserting the right of the regular succession to the throne, while a considerable number openly accepted the doctrine of non-resistance, and absolute submission to the will of the king. The country gentlemen and the inhabitants of towns scented in the air the spirit of 1641; the remembrance of the Civil War had not yet faded from men's minds; the king found himself once more supported by the national sentiment; and he believed himself powerful enough to employ it against his enemies. Proceedings were taken against the men who had insulted the royal majesty. Fitzharris had written a seditious pamphlet. College was accused of having endeavored to corrupt the king's guard; both were condemned and executed. Lord Shaftesbury, indicted as a suborner of false witnesses, was sent to the Tower. The sheriffs of London were still Whigs; the Grand Jury chosen by them triumphantly acquitted Shaftesbury. {384} The wretches previously concerned in the proceedings against the Catholics reappeared in the proceedings against the Whigs. Lord Howard, arrested for the moment, owed his liberty to the Habeas Corpus Act. The king determined to release himself from the trammels imposed upon him by the opinions of the magistrates of London. By a movement of doubtful legality, it was contrived to have sheriffs elected who belonged to the Tory party; the latter, in their turn, chose juries devoted to them. Certain Whig magistrates were sued, and condemned in enormous damages. The king prepared his measures against the charters of the city, and the municipal liberties which everywhere protected the corporations of towns. A visit of the Prince of Orange did not suffice to arrest the absolutist reaction. "The Whigs seem to me in a majority," said the prince to the king, his uncle. "You see only them," replied Charles.

The Duke of York reappeared in London. During his absence from the court, he had exercised in Scotland a harsh and perfidious authority. The rigor to which the Nonconformists had been subjected had excited the hot-headed. A preacher named Cameron, a name still remembered among his partisans, had raised the banner of revolt against a king faithless to the Protestant religion and the government to which he had sworn. He was killed in an engagement. His successor, Donald Cargill, was arrested and soon afterwards executed with a large number of his disciples. Men and women walked to the scaffold singing songs of triumph. The Scotch Parliament instituted an oath of submission to the royal authority, which went so far as to require passive obedience. Fletcher of Saltoun and Lord Stair demanded the insertion of a clause for the protection of the Protestant religion. {385} The Duke of York would not sanction it under this form. When it was proposed to dispense with it, Lord Belhaven declared that the utility of the oath was to exclude Papists from the succession; he was sent to prison. The Earl of Argyll, son of him who had been executed at the commencement of the reign, made some reservation in taking the oath of submission; he was arrested in his turn. The Duke of York disclaimed on his part any sinister intention towards him. "God forbid that the life and fortune of the earl should be imperilled," he said. Yet on the 12th of December, Argyll was condemned by a jury presided over by the Marquis of Montrose. He was assured of the royal pardon; but the earl put no faith in the protestation of his enemies. The Duke of York refused to grant him an audience. Argyll escaped, disguised in the attire of the page of his daughter-in-law. Lady Sophia Lindsay. Condemned, _per contumaciam_, to all the horrors of the punishment of traitors, his property had been confiscated, and his children declared unworthy of their inheritance; but the king, more considerate and wiser than his advisers, returned a part of his fortune to Lord Lome, the eldest son of the earl. The latter prudently remained in Holland.

The Duke of Monmouth did not act with the same wisdom. When he found the Duke of York established at the court, recognized again as Lord High Admiral and lodged by the king in St. James's Palace, he regarded as void the promise he had given to remain on the Continent so long as his rival should govern in Scotland, and returning to London without the king's permission, was received with exclamations of joy by the people. {386} Leaving the city with a cortege almost regal, he journeyed slowly through the kingdom, received by the gentry and by deputations from the towns, mixing with the crowd wherever he went with a proud but amicable and popular condescension, and saluted on the road by the enthusiastic cries of "Monmouth! Monmouth!"

This triumphant progress led the imprudent young man as far as Chester. The chief justice of that city was George Jeffreys, already known for his violence, his ability, and his unscrupulousness in the furtherance of his unbridled ambition. Corruptly attached at that time to the interests of the Duke of York, he easily found a pretext for arresting the Duke of Monmouth at Stafford, June, 1682. On being conducted to London, the duke was immediately liberated, but was held to bail.

Shaftesbury did not put his trust in the Habeas Corpus Act. Alarmed by the measures which he saw in progress against the Whigs, he sought refuge in the city. It was an old saying of his that he "would constrain the king to leave his kingdom quietly; but as for the Duke of York, he would compel him to wander on the face of the earth, a vagabond like Cain!" The attitude of the king, the fears that he entertained for his party and for himself, the tendency of his restless disposition, again impelled him to dangerous projects. The national party demanded that Charles II., in disinheriting his brother, should with his own hands destroy the monarchy. Charles required that the national party should at all risks submit to a prince who evidently aspired to destroy the religion and constitution of the country. Thus urged on to extremes on one side and the other, the king decided for despotism; the national party for insurrection. {387} In 1682 two statesmen, Lord Shaftesbury and Lord Russell, were at the head of the contest: Shaftesbury, already old, ambitious, indefatigable, corrupted by every source of corruption--the court, the government, and the seductions of popularity; accustomed from his youth upwards to seek and find his fortune in intriguing and plotting; bold and supple in mind; sagacious and fertile in expedients; powerful in influencing men; equally skilled to render service and to injure, to please and to irritate; attached nevertheless by pride and foresight to the Protestant and national party, which was certainly in his eyes the strongest and the ultimate victor; and determined, in any event, to preserve his life in order to enjoy the fruit of his manœuvres or to pursue them afresh: Lord William Russell, still young, sincere, ardent, inexperienced, endowed with an inflexible temper, a heart full of faith and honor, conscientious in conspiring; ready to sacrifice his life for his cause, but incapable of doing anything indifferently for the sake of success or for his own safety. The web was woven; Lord Shaftesbury rallied around him all the malcontents.

The conspirators met occasionally; they were not always the same persons; they were suspicious of each other, and mutually concealed the ultimate object of their plans. Russell projected an armed resistance against the royal tyranny, accepting, perhaps, in the bottom of his heart, though without avowing it to himself, the consequences of such a resolution. Shaftesbury saw his way clearly to his design, and prepared at all cost the overthrow of the king and the advent of a successor other than the veritable heir. Some meditated a sudden attack and the assassination of the king. There were among them some republicans who cherished their dreams, and also some traitors either already in the pay of the court or ready to deliver up to it their secret and their accomplices, in order to withdraw themselves from peril. {388} One day when they were met together, Russell saw enter with Colonel Sidney and Mr. Hampden, a man whom he despised--Lord Howard. "What have we to do with that fellow?" he asked of Lord Essex, his intimate friend, and he desired to retire; but Essex detained him, having a better opinion of Lord Howard, and not suspecting that this was the man whose testimony was destined soon to ruin both.

Lord Howard was already sold to the court. By a lucky accident Shaftesbury was informed of this circumstance; he immediately determined to leave England. The order was actually issued for his arrest when he stealthily left his house, and concealing himself for some days, embarked at Harwich to take refuge in Holland, hoping to find with the Prince of Orange an asylum and an avenger. When chancellor he had violently favored the war with Holland, and more than once had repeated _Delenda est Carthago_. On his arrival at Amsterdam he requested permission to remain there from the burgomaster, who replied, "Carthage, not yet destroyed, willingly receives the Earl of Shaftesbury within her walls."

He had forever bidden farewell to England. Two months after his flight, while his imprisoned accomplices were undergoing their examination before the judges, the troubled soul and restless mind of Shaftesbury for the first time found repose. He died on the 21st of January, 1683.

[Image] Lord Russell's Trial.

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Lord William Russell was already in the Tower when Shaftesbury landed in Holland. As he passed under the Traitor's Gate, he said to his valet, Taunton, "I am sworn against; my enemies will have my life," And when Taunton expressed a hope that they would not succeed, "They will have it," Russell repeated, "the devil is loose."

The conspirators were all arrested. Grey had contrived to escape. Howard had purchased his life by treason; Essex, troubled to the very depths of his soul, cut his throat in prison. Algernon Sidney and Hampden refused to reply to the interrogatories "Seek elsewhere for evidence against me," answered the republican Sidney proudly. It was proposed to Baillie of Jerviswood, to save himself by giving information. "Those who talk to me thus know neither me nor my country," replied the Scotch gentleman.

Witnesses, true or false, were not wanting to the proceedings. Several obscure conspirators had already been executed when Russell was placed at the bar of the Court of the Old Bailey, on the 13th of July, 1683. He asked for a pen and ink to take notes; then turning towards the judges, "May I have somebody to write, and help my memory?" he asked. "Yes, my lord, a servant." "My wife," he replied, "is here to do it." Lady Rachel Russell rose to express her assent; all the bystanders knew her virtuous character, and the passionate attachment which united her to her husband. She served him as his secretary during the whole time of the proceedings. When he was condemned it was she again who pursued without resting every means of obtaining his pardon. "All me is true," replied the king to Lord Dartmouth; "but it is equally true that if I do not take his life he will very soon take mine." {390} And as the arrival was announced of the Marquis of Ruvigny, uncle of Lady Rachel, with a pressing letter from Louis XIV., "I am well assured that the king, my brother, would not advise me to pardon a man who would have shown me no quarter," said the king to Barillon, then ambassador of France at the English court. "I have no wish to prevent M. Ruvigny coming here, but my Lord Russell's head will be off before he arrives."

On the 21st of July, 1683, Russell died upon the scaffold. "The bitterness of death is passed," he said to Tillotson and Burnet, after embracing his wife for the last time; and showing the watch which he handed to Burnet, he said, "I have now done with time, and am going to eternity."

The complications of projects and the various conspiracies served the purpose of the royal vengeance. A criminal plot, much exaggerated in its importance, and entered into by obscure men, which was known under the name of the "Rye House Plot," had been mixed up, whether involuntarily or intentionally, with the revolutionary designs of the great lords. Algernon Sidney had indulged the dream of the return of the Republic; he defended himself with a degree of ability and self-possession which for a moment troubled Chief Justice Jeffreys himself. When sentence was pronounced, Sidney lifted his hand towards heaven: "I implore Thee, O Lord," he said, "to sanctify my sufferings and not to impute my blood to this nation or this city. If one day it should be avenged, let vengeance fall entirely on those who have unjustly persecuted me in the name of justice." He was executed on the 26th of November, 1683. {391} Several of the conspirators shared his fate. The trial of Hampden did not take place till the month of February, 1684. Condemned to imprisonment, he ransomed himself afterwards by payment of a sum of money. The royal power was thenceforth freed from every trammel and from all anxiety. The subsidies of Louis XIV. rendered Charles independent of his people. He refused to summon a Parliament; the Court of King's Bench declared that the city had exceeded its privileges; the charter was withdrawn in 1684; the franchises of all the towns known for their liberal opinions were abolished, like those of the capital. The Duke of York had resumed his place in the Privy Council.

While the absolute reaction acquired every day more strength and audacity, the influence of Lord Halifax with the king diminished. The minister himself was weary of the struggle which he sustained in the Council against Lawrence Hyde, created Lord Rochester, who was devoted to the Duke of York, his brother-in-law. "Life would be worthless," he exclaimed one day, when they were discussing the Charter of Massachusetts, "if we had to drag out existence in a country in which liberty and prosperity were at the mercy of an absolute master." The Duke of York was irritated by this language. "How can you keep about you a man nourished on the worst principles of Marvell and Sidney?" he asked the king. Charles laughed. More sagacious and prudent than his brother, he knew how to conquer without needlessly exasperating the vanquished. Rochester, convicted of malversation while Lord Treasurer, was transferred from the control of the finances to the dignified but not lucrative post of President of the Council. "I have often seen people kicked down stairs," said Halifax; "my Lord Rochester is the first person that I have ever seen kicked up."

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The day arrived when the Duke of York was to find himself free to apply without stint his theories of government. The king seemed weary and languishing. His humor, habitually cheerful in exile and in the midst of the crudest misfortunes, had for a short time past become gloomy. On the 2nd of February, 1685, at the moment of his rising from bed, the courtiers around him were struck by his altered looks. His utterance was embarrassed; his intelligence seemed clouded. A doctor who happened to be at hand to assist the king in his chemical experiments bled him without delay. Charles recovered his senses. A second attack soon put an end to all hope of cure. The Duke of York had already taken possession of the government. He gave his orders in all directions. It was the king's favorite, the Duchess of Portsmouth, who, in the heart of this depraved court, took care of the soul of the expiring monarch. She apprised Barillon, who hastened to inform the Duke of York. "It is true," cried James, "my brother is a Catholic at heart; he will assuredly declare it, and fulfill the rites of his religion; there is not a moment to lose." Some difficulty was experienced in procuring a priest. The Anglican bishops had not delayed so long to press the king to be mindful of his spiritual welfare. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Sancroft, and the Bishop of Bath, the pious Ken, had addressed Charles in the firmest language. "It is time to speak, Sire, for you are about to appear before a Judge who is no respecter of persons." The king made no reply.

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The Duke of York at last succeeded in finding a priest; it was a poor Benedictine monk, named Huddleston, who had saved the king immediately after the battle of Worcester. Charles had a grateful remembrance of this circumstance. Huddleston had been excepted by name from all the proceedings against the Catholics. James himself introduced him into his brother's chamber. All present were desired to retire with the exception of the Frenchman, Louis de Duras, Earl of Feversham, and of the Earl of Bath. They could count on the fidelity of each other. "Sire," said the duke, "this holy man once saved your life; he comes to-day to save your soul." "He is welcome," said the king in a feeble voice. The poor monk had never fulfilled the holy offices. He had just taken instructions hurriedly from a Portuguese ecclesiastic in the suite of the Count de Castelmelhor. When the pious ceremonies were completed, all the natural children of the king were admitted to his presence. Monmouth alone was absent. He had sought his safety in exile; the king did not mention his name.

The queen was in too much trouble and suffering to appear at the bedside of the dying monarch. She sent her excuses by Halifax, asking pardon of the king. "Poor woman," murmured Charles, "I ask hers with all my heart!"

The agony was protracted. The king asked that the curtains might be drawn, so that he could see once more the light of day. "I beg your pardon for giving you so much trouble," he said to those who stood around him; "I am a very long time dying." His utterance failed him; at noon on the 6th of February, 1685, King Charles II. expired gently. He was not yet fifty-five years of age.

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"He had received from nature," says Lord Macaulay, "excellent parts and a happy temper. His education had been such as might have been expected to develop his understanding, and to form him to the practice of every public and private virtue. ... He had been taught by bitter experience how much baseness, perfidy, and ingratitude may lie hid under the obsequious demeanor of courtiers. He had found, on the other hand, in the huts of the poorest, true nobility of soul. ... From such a school it might have been expected that a young man, who wanted neither abilities nor amiable qualities, would have come forth a great and good king. Charles came forth from that school with social habits, with polite and engaging manners, and with some talent for lively conversation, addicted beyond measure to sensual indulgence, fond of sauntering and of frivolous amusements, incapable of self-denial and of exertion, without faith in human virtue or in human attachment, without desire of renown, and without sensibility to reproach. According to him, every person was to be bought, but some people haggled more about their price than others. ... Thinking thus of mankind, Charles naturally cared very little what they thought of him. ... He was a slave without being a dupe. ... He detested business. ... He wished merely to be a king such as Louis XV. of France afterwards was." Without regard for the state of his kingdom, shut up in the selfish circle of his material pleasures, indifferent to all religion, hostile to the Puritans from memory of the past, from contempt for their ridiculous characteristics, and from fear of their austerity; without faith or rule of conduct; absolutely wanting in principles and moral sense, he had worn out the respect of the nation without completely exhausting its affection, for he was sagacious, prudent, little addicted to hazardous enterprises; and he had measured with a cool and practical judgment the degree of oppression which his people were capable of enduring. {395} The popular saying did him injustice in affirming that "he never said a foolish thing, and never did a wise one." He was wise enough more than once to stop in the path of despotism. His brother, who had often impelled him in this direction, was now about to advance to the brink of the abyss. England wept for the loss of Charles II. Without being fully conscious of the feeling, she regarded James II. with presentiment and with dread.

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