But courage and wit and ability seemed to have been bestowed on Charles

in vain. He only laughed when Tom Killigrew told him frankly that badly

as things were going on there was one man whose industry could set them

right, "and this is one Charles Stuart, who now spends his time in using

his lips about the Court and hath no other employment." Charles made no

secret in fact of his hatred of business. Nor did he give to outer

observers any sign of ambition. The one thing he seemed in earnest about

was sensual pleasure, and he took his pleasure with a cynical

shamelessness which roused the disgust even of his shameless courtiers.

Mistress followed mistress, and the guilt of a troop of profligate women

was blazoned to the world by the gift of titles and estates. The royal

bastards were set amongst English nobles. The ducal house of Grafton

springs from the king's adultery with Barbara Palmer, whom he created

Duchess of Cleveland. The Dukes of St. Albans owe their origin to his

intrigue with Nell Gwynn, a player and a courtezan. Louise de

Quérouaille, a mistress sent by France to win him to its interests,

became Duchess of Portsmouth and ancestress of the house of Richmond. An

earlier mistress, Lucy Walters, declared him, it is believed falsely,

father of the boy whom he raised to the dukedom of Monmouth, and to whom

the Dukes of Buccleuch trace their line. But Charles was far from being

content with these recognized mistresses or with a single form of

self-indulgence. Gambling and drinking helped to fill up the vacant

moments when he could no longer toy with his favourites or bet at

Newmarket. No thought of remorse or of shame seems ever to have crossed

his mind. "He could not think God would make a man miserable," he said

once, "only for taking a little pleasure out of the way." From shame he

was shielded by his cynical disbelief in human virtue. Virtue indeed he

regarded simply as a trick by which clever hypocrites imposed upon

fools. Honour among men seemed to him as mere a pretence as chastity

among women. Gratitude he had none, for he looked upon self-interest as

the only motive of men's actions, and though soldiers had died and women

had risked their lives for him, "he loved others as little as he thought

they loved him." But if he felt no gratitude for benefits he felt no

resentment for wrongs. He was incapable either of love or of hate. The

only feeling he retained for his fellow-men was that of an amused

contempt.

It was difficult for Englishmen to believe that any real danger to

liberty could come from an idler and a voluptuary such as Charles the

Second. But in the very difficulty of believing this lay half the king's

strength. He had in fact no taste whatever for the despotism of the

Stuarts who had gone before him. His shrewdness laughed his

grandfather's theories of Divine Right down the wind, while his

indolence made such a personal administration as that which his father

delighted in burthensome to him. He was too humorous a man to care for

the pomp and show of power, and too good-natured a man to play the

tyrant. But he believed as firmly as his father or his grandfather had

believed in his right to a full possession of the older prerogatives of

the Crown. He looked on Parliaments as they had looked on them with

suspicion and jealousy. He clung as they had clung to the dream of a

dispensing power over the execution of the laws. He regarded

ecclesiastical affairs as lying within his own personal control, and

viewed the interference of the two Houses with church matters as a sheer

usurpation. Above all he detested the notion of ministerial

responsibility to any but the king, or of a Parliamentary right to

interfere in any way with the actual administration of public affairs.

"He told Lord Essex," Burnet says, "that he did not wish to be like a

Grand Signior, with some mutes about him, and bags of bowstrings to

strangle men; but he did not think he was a king so long as a company of

fellows were looking into his actions, and examining his ministers as

well as his accounts." "A king," he thought, "who might be checked, and

have his ministers called to an account, was but a king in name."

[Sidenote: The king's Policy.]

In other words Charles had no settled plan of tyranny, but he meant to

rule as independently as he could, and from the beginning to the end of

his reign there never was a moment when he was not doing something to

carry out his aim. But he carried it out in a tentative, irregular

fashion which it was as hard to detect as to meet. Whenever there was

any strong opposition he gave way. If popular feeling demanded the

dismissal of his ministers, he dismissed them. If it protested against

his declaration of religious indulgence, he recalled it. If it cried for

victims in the frenzy of the Popish Plot, he gave it victims till the

frenzy was at an end. It was easy for Charles to yield and to wait, and

just as easy for him to take up the thread of his purpose afresh the

moment the pressure was over. There was one fixed resolve in fact which

overrode every other thought in the king's mind, and this was a resolve

"not to set out on his travels again." His father had fallen through a

quarrel with the two Houses, and Charles was determined to remain on

good terms with the Parliament till he was strong enough to pick a

quarrel to his profit. At no time has party strife raged more fiercely;

in no reign has the temper of the Parliament been more threatening to

the Crown. But the cynicism of Charles enabled him to ride out storms

which would have wrecked a better and a nobler king. He treated the

Lords with an easy familiarity which robbed opposition of its

seriousness. "Their debates amused him," he said in his indolent way;

and he stood chatting before the fire while peer after peer poured

invectives on his ministers, and laughed louder than the rest when

Shaftesbury directed his coarsest taunts at the barrenness of the queen.

Courtiers were entrusted with the secret "management" of the Commons;

obstinate country gentlemen were brought to the Royal closet to kiss the

king's hand and listen to the king's pleasant stories of his escape

after Worcester; and still more obstinate country gentlemen were bribed.

Where bribes, flattery, and management failed Charles was content to

yield and to wait till his time came again.

[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Union.]

But even while yielding and waiting he never lost sight of the aim he

had set himself. If he had no mind to play the tyrant, he was resolved

to be something more than "a king in name." If he could not get back all

that his father had had he could go on patiently gathering up what

fragments of the old royal power still survived, and availing himself

of whatever new resources offered themselves. One means of recovering

somewhat of the older authority of the Crown lay in the simple refusal

to recognize the union of the three kingdoms. If he could not undo what

the Puritans had done in England Charles could undo their work in

Scotland and in Ireland. Before the Civil War these kingdoms had served

as useful checks on English liberty, and by simply regarding the Union

which the Long Parliament and the Protector had brought about as a

nullity in law it was possible they might become checks again. In his

refusal to recognize the Union Charles was supported by public opinion

among his English subjects, partly from sheer abhorrence of changes

wrought during "the troubles," and partly from a dread that the Scotch

and Irish members would form a party in the English Parliament which

would always be at the service of the Crown. In both the lesser kingdoms

too a measure which seemed to restore somewhat of their national

independence was for the moment popular.

[Sidenote: Scotland and Ireland.]

But the results of this step were quick in developing themselves. In

Scotland the Covenant was at once abolished. The Scotch Parliament which

assembled at Edinburgh, the Drunken Parliament as it was called, outdid

the wildest loyalty of the English Cavaliers by annulling in a single

Act all the proceedings of its predecessors during the last

eight-and-twenty years. By this measure the whole existing Church system

of Scotland was deprived of legal sanction. The General Assembly had

already been prohibited from meeting by Cromwell; the kirk-sessions' and

ministers' synods were now suspended. The Scotch bishops were again

restored to their spiritual pre-eminence and to their seats in

Parliament. An iniquitous trial sent the Marquis of Argyle, the only

noble strong enough to oppose the Royal will, to the block; and the

government was entrusted to a knot of profligate statesmen till it fell

into the hands of Lauderdale, one of the ablest and most unscrupulous of

the king's ministers. Their policy was steadily directed to two

purposes, the first, that of humbling Presbyterianism--as the force

which could alone restore Scotland to freedom and enable her to lend aid

as before to English liberty in any struggle with the Crown--the second,

that of raising a royal army which might be ready in case of need to

march over the Border to the king's support. In Ireland the dissolution

of the Union brought back the bishops to their sees; but whatever wish

Charles may have had to restore the balance of Catholic and Protestant

as a source of power to the Crown was baffled by the obstinate

resistance of the Protestant settlers to any plans for redressing the

confiscations of Cromwell. Five years of bitter struggle between the

dispossessed loyalists and the new occupants left the Protestant

ascendency unimpaired; and in spite of a nominal surrender of one-third

of the confiscated estates to their old possessors hardly a sixth of the

profitable land in the island remained in Catholic holding. The claims

of the Duke of Ormond too made it necessary to leave the government in

his hands, and Ormond's loyalty was too moderate and constitutional to

lend itself to any of the schemes of absolute rule which played so great

a part in the next reign under Tyrconnell.

[Sidenote: The Royal Army.]

But the severance of the two kingdoms from England was in itself a gain

to the Royal authority; and Charles turned quietly to the building up of

a royal army at home. A standing army had become so hateful a thing to

the body of the nation, and above all to the Royalists whom the New

Model had trodden under foot, that it was impossible to propose its

establishment. But in the mind of both Charles and his brother James,

the Duke of York, their father's downfall had been owing to the want of

a disciplined force which would have trampled out the first efforts of

national resistance; and while disbanding the New Model Charles availed

himself of the alarm created by a mad rising of some Fifth-Monarchy men

in London under an old soldier called Venner to retain five thousand

horse and foot in his service under the name of his guards. A body of

"gentlemen of quality and veteran soldiers, excellently clad, mounted,

and ordered," was thus kept ready for service near the royal person;

and in spite of the scandal which it aroused the king persisted,

steadily but cautiously, in gradually increasing its numbers. Twenty

years later it had grown to a force of seven thousand foot and one

thousand seven hundred horse and dragoons at home, with a reserve of six

fine regiments abroad in the service of the United Provinces.

[Sidenote: Charles and English Politics.]

But it was rather on policy than on open force that Charles counted for

success. His position indeed was a strange and perplexing one. All the

outer pomp of the monarchy had returned with the restoration. Charles,

like his father, was served by the highest nobles on their knees. Nor

had the theory of his position in appearance changed. The principle

indeed of hereditary kingship had gained a new strength from the

troubles of the last twenty years. The fall of the monarchy had been

followed so closely by that of the other institutions, political and

religious, of the realm, its restoration coincided so exactly with their

revival, that the Crown had become the symbol of that national

tradition, that historical continuity, without which the practical sense

of Englishmen felt then, as Burke felt afterwards, that men were "but as

flies in a summer." How profound a disgust the violent interruption of

this continuous progress by the clean sweep of the Civil War had left

behind it was seen in the indifference with which measures such as the

union of the three kingdoms or the reform of parliamentary

representation were set aside as sharing in the general vice of the time

from which they sprang. It was seen as vividly at even a later time in

the instant ruin of Shaftesbury's popularity from the moment when he was

believed to be plotting the renewal of civil war. But if the Monarchy

was strengthened by its association with the tradition of constitutional

freedom it was henceforth inseparably bound to the freedom which

strengthened it. The Cavalier who had shouted for the king's return had

shouted also for the return of a free Parliament. The very Chief-Justice

who asserted at the trial of the Regicides the personal freedom of the

king from any responsibility to the nation asserted just as strongly

that doctrine of ministerial responsibility against which Charles the

First had struggled. "The law in all cases preserves the person of the

king to be authorized," said Sir Orlando Bridgeman, "but what is done by

his ministers unlawfully, there is a remedy against his ministers for

it." It was the desire of every Royalist to blot out the very memory of

the troubles in which monarchy and freedom had alike disappeared, to

take up again as if it had never been broken the thread of our political

history. But the point at which even Royalists took it up was not at the

moment of the Tyranny, but at the moment of the Long Parliament's first

triumph when that tyranny had been utterly undone. In his wish to

revive those older claims of the Crown which the Long Parliament had for

ever set aside the young king found himself alone. His closest

adherents, his warmest friends, were constitutional Royalists of the

temper of Falkland or Colepepper; partizans of an absolute monarchy, of

such a monarchy as his grandfather had dreamed of and his father for a

few years carried into practice, there now were none.

[Sidenote: Charles and English Religion.]

In his political aims therefore Charles could look for no help within

his realm. Nor did he stand less alone in his religious aims. In heart,

whether the story of his renunciation of Protestantism during his exile

be true or no, he had long ceased to be a Protestant. Whatever religious

feeling he had was on the side of Catholicism; he encouraged conversions

among his courtiers, and the last act of his life was to seek formal

admission into the Roman Church. But his feelings were rather political

than religious. The English Roman Catholics formed a far larger part of

the population then than now, and their wealth and local influence gave

them a political importance which they have long since lost. The Stuarts

had taught them to look to the Crown for protection against the

Protestant bigotry around them, and they repaid this shelter by aiding

Charles the First in his war on the Parliament, and by liberally

supplying his son with money during his exile. He had promised in return

to procure toleration for their worship, and every motive of gratitude

as well as self-interest led him to redeem his pledge. But he was

already looking, however vaguely, to something more than Catholic

toleration. He saw that despotism in the State could hardly co-exist

with free inquiry and free action in matters of the conscience; and that

government, in his own words, "was a safer and easier thing where the

authority was believed infallible, and the faith and submission of the

people were implicit." The difficulties in the way of such a religious

change probably seemed the less to him from his long residence in Roman

Catholic countries and from his own religious scepticism. Two years

indeed after his restoration he had already despatched an agent to Rome

to arrange the terms of a reconciliation between the Anglican Church and

the Papacy. But though he counted much for the success of his project of

toleration on taking advantage of the dissensions between Protestant

Churchmen and Protestant Dissenters, he soon discovered that in this or

any wider religious project he stood utterly alone. Clarendon and the

Cavaliers were as bitterly anti-Catholic as the wildest fanatic in his

realm. For any real success in his religious as in his political aims he

must look elsewhere than at home.

[Sidenote: State of Europe.]

Holland had been the first power to offer him its aid in the renewal of

the old defensive alliance which had united the two countries before the

Civil War, and it had accompanied its offer by hints of a heavy

subsidy. But offers and hints were alike withdrawn when it was found

that the new government persisted in enforcing the Navigation Act which

the Long Parliament had passed. Spain, to which Charles looked with

greater hope, demanded terms of alliance which were impossible--the

restoration of Jamaica and the cession of Dunkirk. One ally only

remained. At this moment France was the dominant power in Christendom.

The religious wars which began with the Reformation had broken the

strength of the nations around her. Spain was no longer able to fight

the battle of Catholicism. The Peace of Westphalia, by the independence

it gave to the German princes and the jealousy it kept alive between the

Protestant and Catholic powers of Germany, destroyed the strength of the

Empire. The German branch of the House of Austria, spent with the long

struggle of the Thirty Years War, had enough to do in battling hard

against the advance of the Turks from Hungary on Vienna. The victories

of Gustavus and of the generals whom he formed had been dearly purchased

by the exhaustion of Sweden. The United Provinces were as yet hardly

regarded as a great power, and were trammelled by their contest with

England for the empire of the seas.

[Sidenote: France.]

France alone profited by the general wreck. The wisdom of Henry the

Fourth in securing religious peace by a grant of toleration to the

Protestants had undone the ill effects of its religious wars. The

Huguenots were still numerous south of the Loire, but the loss of their

fortresses had turned their energies into the peaceful channels of

industry and trade. Feudal disorder was roughly put down by Richelieu;

and the policy which gathered all local power into the hands of the

Crown, though fatal in the end to the real welfare of France, gave it

for the moment an air of good government and a command over its internal

resources which no other country could boast. Its compact and fertile

territory, the natural activity and enterprise of its people, and the

rapid growth of its commerce and manufactures, were sources of natural

wealth which even its heavy taxation failed to check. In the latter half

of the seventeenth century France was looked upon as the wealthiest

power in Europe. The yearly income of the French crown was double that

of England, and even Lewis the Fourteenth trusted as much to the credit

of his treasury as to the triumphs of his arms. "After all," he said,

when the fortunes of war began to turn against him, "it is the last

louis d'or which must win!"

It was in fact this superiority in wealth which enabled France to set on

foot forces such as had never been seen in Europe since the downfall of

Rome. At the opening of the reign of Lewis the Fourteenth its army

mustered a hundred thousand men. With the war against Holland it rose

to nearly two hundred thousand. In the last struggle against the Grand

Alliance there was a time when it counted nearly half-a-million of men

in arms. Nor was France content with these enormous land forces. Since

the ruin of Spain the fleets of Holland and of England had alone

disputed the empire of the seas. Under Richelieu and Mazarin France

could hardly be looked upon as a naval power. But the early years of

Lewis saw the creation of a navy of a hundred men-of-war, and the fleets

of France soon held their own against England or the Dutch.

[Sidenote: Lewis the Fourteenth.]

Such a power would have been formidable at any time; but it was doubly

formidable when directed by statesmen who in knowledge and ability were

without rivals in Europe. No diplomatist could compare with Lionne, no

war minister with Louvois, no financier with Colbert. Their young

master, Lewis the Fourteenth, bigoted, narrow-minded, commonplace as he

was, without personal honour or personal courage, without gratitude and

without pity, insane in his pride, insatiable in his vanity, brutal in

his selfishness, had still many of the qualities of a great ruler,

industry, patience, quickness of resolve, firmness of purpose, a

capacity for discerning ability and using it, an immense self-belief and

self-confidence, and a temper utterly destitute indeed of real

greatness, but with a dramatic turn for seeming to be great. As a

politician Lewis had simply to reap the harvest which the two great

Cardinals who went before him had sown. Both had used to the profit of

France the exhaustion and dissension which the wars of religion had

brought upon Europe. Richelieu turned the scale against the House of

Austria by his alliance with Sweden, with the United Provinces, and with

the Protestant princes of Germany; and the two great treaties by which

Mazarin ended the Thirty Years War, the Treaty of Westphalia and the

Treaty of the Pyrenees, left the Empire disorganized and Spain

powerless. From that moment indeed Spain sank into a strange

decrepitude. Robbed of the chief source of her wealth by the

independence of Holland, weakened at home by the revolt of Portugal, her

infantry annihilated by Condé in his victory of Rocroi, her fleet ruined

by the Dutch, her best blood drained away to the Indies, the energies of

her people destroyed by the suppression of all liberty, civil or

religious, her intellectual life crushed by the Inquisition, her

industry crippled by the expulsion of the Moors, by financial

oppression, and by the folly of her colonial system, the kingdom which

under Philip the Second had aimed at the empire of the world lay

helpless and exhausted under Philip the Fourth.

[Sidenote: France and Spain.]

The aim of Lewis was to carry on the policy of his predecessors, and

above all to complete the ruin of Spain. The conquest of the Spanish

provinces in the Netherlands would carry his border to the Scheldt. A

more distant hope lay in the probable extinction of the Austrian line

which now sat on the throne of Spain. By securing the succession to that

throne for a French prince not only Castille and Aragon with the Spanish

dependencies in Italy and the Netherlands but the Spanish empire in the

New World would be added to the dominions of France. Nothing could save

Spain but a union of the European powers, and to prevent this union was

the work to which the French negotiators were now bending their energies

with singular success. The intervention of the Emperor was guarded

against by a renewal of the old alliances between France and the lesser

German princes. A league with the Turks gave the court of Vienna enough

to do on its eastern border. The old league with Sweden, the old

friendship with Holland, were skilfully maintained. England alone

remained as a possible foe, and at this moment the policy of Charles

bound England to the side of Lewis.

[Sidenote: England and France.]

France was the wealthiest of European powers, and her subsidies could

free Charles from his dependence on the Parliament. The French army was

the finest in the world, and French soldiers could put down, it was

thought, any resistance from English patriots. The aid of Lewis could

alone realize the aims of Charles, and Charles was willing to pay the

price, that of a silent concurrence in his Spanish projects, which

Lewis demanded for his aid. It was to France therefore, in spite of the

resentment he felt at his treatment by her in his time of exile, that

Charles turned in the earliest days of his reign. There was no trace as

yet of any formal alliance, but two marriages showed the close connexion

which was to be established between the kings. Henrietta, the sister of

Charles, was wedded to the Duke of Orleans, the brother of Lewis: and

this match served as the prelude to that of Charles himself with

Catharine of Braganza, a daughter of the king of Portugal. The English

ministers were dazzled by the dowry which the new queen brought with

her: half-a-million in money, the fortress of Tangier in the

Mediterranean, the trading port of Bombay in the Indies, and a pledge of

religious toleration for all English merchants throughout the Portuguese

colonies. The world at large saw rather the political significance of

the marriage. As the conquest of Portugal by Philip the Second had

crowned the greatness of the Spanish monarchy, so with its revolt had

begun the fall of Spain. To recover Portugal was the dream of every

Spaniard, as to aid Portugal in the preservation of its independence was

the steady policy of France. The Portuguese marriage, the Portuguese

alliance which followed it, ranged England definitely amongst the

friends of Lewis and the foes of Spain.

[Sidenote: Charles and his first Ministry.]

In England itself these indications of the king's foreign policy passed

as yet almost without notice. The attention of the nation was naturally

concentrated on the work of political and social restoration. What shape

the new England would take, what was to be its political or religious

form, was still uncertain. It was still doubtful which political or

religious party had really the upper hand. The show of power lay as yet

with the Presbyterians. It was by the Presbyterians that the chief part

in the Restoration had in fact been played; and it was the Presbyterians

who still almost exclusively possessed the magistracy and all local

authority. The first ministry which Charles ventured to form bore on it

the marks of a compromise between this powerful party and their old

opponents. Its most influential member indeed was Sir Edward Hyde, the

adviser of the king during his exile, who soon became Earl of Clarendon

and Lord Chancellor. Lord Southampton, a steady Royalist, accepted the

post of Lord Treasurer; and the devotion of Ormond was rewarded with a

dukedom and the dignity of Lord Steward. But the Presbyterian interest

was represented by Monk, who remained Lord-General of the army with the

title of Duke of Albemarle; and though the king's brother, James, Duke

of York, was made Lord Admiral, the administration of the fleet was

virtually in the hands of one of Cromwell's followers, Montagu, the new

Earl of Sandwich. An old Puritan, Lord Say and Sele, was made Lord

Privy Seal. Sir Ashley Cooper, a leading member of the same party, was

rewarded for his activity in bringing about the Restoration by a barony

and the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Of the two Secretaries of

State, the one, Nicholas, was a devoted Royalist; the other, Morice, was

a steady Presbyterian. Of the thirty members of the Privy Council,

twelve had borne arms against the king.

[Sidenote: The Convention.]

It was clear that such a ministry was hardly likely to lend itself to a

mere policy of reaction, and the temper of the new Government therefore

fell fairly in with the temper of the Convention when that body, after

declaring itself a Parliament, proceeded to consider the measures which

were requisite for a settlement of the nation. The Convention had been

chosen under ordinances which excluded Royalist "Malignants" from the

right of voting; and the bulk of its members were men of Presbyterian

sympathies, loyalist to the core, but as adverse to despotism as the

Long Parliament itself. In its earlier days a member who asserted that

those who had fought against the king were as guilty as those who cut

off his head was sternly rebuked from the Chair. The first measure which

was undertaken by the House, the Bill of Indemnity and Oblivion for all

offences committed during the recent troubles, showed at once the

moderate character of the Commons. In the punishment of the regicides

indeed a Presbyterian might well be as zealous as a Cavalier. In spite

of a Proclamation issued in the first days of his return, which

virtually promised mercy to all the judges of the late king who

surrendered themselves to justice, Charles pressed for revenge on those

whom he regarded as his father's murderers, and the Lords went hotly

with the king. It is to the credit of the Commons that they steadily

resisted the cry for blood. By the original provisions of the Bill of

Oblivion and Indemnity only seven of the living regicides were excluded

from pardon; and though the rise of Royalist fervour during the three

months in which the bill was under discussion forced the House in the

end to leave almost all to the course of justice, yet a clause which

made a special Act of Parliament necessary for the execution of those

who had surrendered under the Proclamation protected the lives of most

of them. Twenty-eight of the king's Judges were in the end arraigned at

the bar of a Court specially convened for their trial, but only thirteen

were executed, and only one of these, General Harrison, had played any

conspicuous part in the rebellion. Twenty others, who had been prominent

in what were now called "the troubles" of the past twenty years, were

declared incapable of holding office under the State: and by an

unjustifiable clause which was introduced into the Act before its final

adoption Sir Harry Vane and General Lambert, though they had taken no

part in the king's death, were specially exempted from the general

pardon.

[Sidenote: Settlement of the Nation.]

In dealing with the questions of property which arose from the

confiscations and transfers of estates during the Civil Wars the

Convention met with greater difficulties. No opposition was made to the

resumption of all Crown-lands by the State, but the Convention desired

to protect the rights of those who had purchased Church property and of

those who were in actual possession of private estates which had been

confiscated by the Long Parliament or by the government which succeeded

it. The bills however which they prepared for this purpose were delayed

by the artifices of Hyde; and at the close of the Session the bishops

and the evicted Royalists quietly re-entered into the occupation of

their old possessions. The Royalists indeed were far from being

satisfied with this summary confiscation. Fines and sequestrations had

impoverished all the steady adherents of the royal cause, and had driven

many of them to forced sales of their estates; and a demand was made for

compensation for their losses and the cancelling of these sales. Without

such provisions, said the frenzied Cavaliers, the bill would be "a Bill

of Indemnity for the king's enemies, and of Oblivion for his friends."

But here the Convention stood firm. All transfers of property by sale

were recognized as valid, and all claims of compensation for losses by

sequestration were barred by the Act.

From the settlement of the nation the Convention passed to the

settlement of the relations between the nation and the Crown. So far was

the constitutional work of the Long Parliament from being undone that

its more important measures were silently accepted as the base of future

government. Not a voice demanded the restoration of the Star Chamber or

of monopolies or of the Court of High Commission; no one disputed the

justice of the condemnation of Ship-money or the assertion of the sole

right of Parliament to grant supplies to the Crown. The Militia indeed

was placed in the king's hands; but the army was disbanded, though

Charles was permitted to keep a few regiments for his guard. The revenue

was fixed at £1,200,000, and this sum was granted to the king for life,

a grant which might have been perilous for freedom had not the taxes

voted to supply the sum fallen constantly below this estimate, while the

current expenses of the Crown, even in time of peace, greatly exceeded

it. But even for this grant a heavy price was exacted. Though the rights

of the Crown over lands held, as the bulk of English estates were held,

in military tenure had ceased to be of any great pecuniary value, they

were indirectly a source of considerable power. The rights of wardship

and of marriage above all enabled the sovereign to exercise a galling

pressure on every landed proprietor in his social and domestic

concerns. Under Elizabeth the right of wardship had been used to secure

the education of all Catholic minors in the Protestant faith; and under

James and his successor the charge of minors had been granted to Court

favourites or sold in open market to the highest bidder. But the real

value of these rights to the Crown lay in the political pressure which

it was able to exert through them on the country gentry. A squire was

naturally eager to buy the good will of a sovereign who might soon be

the guardian of his daughter and the administrator of his estate. But

the same motives which made the Crown cling to this prerogative made the

Parliament anxious to do away with it. Its efforts to bring this about

under James the First had been foiled by the king's stubborn resistance;

but the long interruption of these rights during the troubles made their

revival almost impossible at the Restoration. One of the first acts

therefore of the Convention was to free the country gentry by abolishing

the claims of the Crown to reliefs and wardship, purveyance, and

pre-emption, and by the conversion of lands held till then in chivalry

into lands held in common socage. In lieu of his rights Charles accepted

a grant of £100,000 a year; a sum which it was originally purposed to

raise by a tax on the lands thus exempted from feudal exactions; but

which was provided for in the end with less justice by a general excise.

[Sidenote: England and the Church.]

Successful as the Convention had been in effecting a settlement of

political matters it failed in bringing about a settlement of the

Church. In his proclamation from Breda Charles had promised to respect

liberty of conscience, and to assent to any Acts of Parliament which

should be presented to him for its security. The Convention was in the

main Presbyterian; but it soon became plain that the continuance of a

purely Presbyterian system was impossible. "The generality of the

people," wrote Sharpe, a shrewd Scotch observer, from London, "are

doting after Prelacy and the Service-book." The Convention however still

hoped for some modified form of Episcopalian government which would

enable the bulk of the Puritan party to remain within the Church. A

large part of the existing clergy indeed were Independents, and for

these no compromise with Episcopacy was possible: but the greater number

were moderate Presbyterians who were ready "for fear of worse" not only

to submit to such a plan of Church government as Archbishop Usher had

proposed, a plan in which the bishop was only the president of a

diocesan board of presbyters, but to accept the Liturgy itself with a

few amendments and the omission of "superstitious practices." It was to

a compromise of this kind that the king himself leant at the beginning,

and a Royal declaration announced his approval of the Puritan demands,

limited the authority of the bishops by the counsel of their

presbyters, and promised a revision of the Book of Common Prayer. The

royal declaration was read at a conference of the two parties, and with

it a petition from the Independents praying for religious liberty. The

king proposed to grant the prayer of the petition, not for the

Independents only but for all Christians. Dexterous as the move was, it

at once spread alarm. The silence of the bishops, the protest of Baxter,

proved that on the point of tolerating the Catholics all were at one. In

itself however the declaration satisfied the Puritan party, and one of

their leaders, Dr. Reynolds, accepted a bishopric on the strength of it.

But the king's disappointment at the check given to his plans showed

itself in the new attitude of the government when a bill was introduced

into the House of Commons by Sir Matthew Hale to turn the declaration

into a law. The opposition of the Episcopalian party was secretly

encouraged by the Royalist section of the ministry, and the bill thrown

out by a small majority. A fresh conference was promised, but in the

absence of any Parliamentary action the Episcopal party boldly availed

themselves of their legal rights. The ejected clergy who still remained

alive entered again into their parsonages, the bishops returned to their

sees, and the dissolution of the Convention-Parliament destroyed the

last hope of an ecclesiastical compromise.

[Sidenote: The Constitutional Royalists.]

The tide of loyalty had in fact been rising fast during its session,

and its influence was already seen in a shameful outrage wrought under

the very orders of the Convention itself. The bodies of Cromwell,

Bradshaw, and Ireton were torn from their graves and hung on gibbets at

Tyburn, while those of Pym and Blake were cast out of Westminster Abbey

into St. Margaret's churchyard. But it was only on the dissolution of

the Convention-Parliament at the end of 1660 that the new political

temper made itself vigorously felt. For the first time during twenty

years half England found itself able to go to the poll. From the outset

of the war all who had taken part on the Royalist side had been

disfranchised as "malignants," and this disfranchisement had been

rigorously enforced even in the elections to the Convention. But

"malignity" had now ceased to be a crime, and the voters so long

deprived of all share in the suffrage, vicars, country gentlemen,

farmers, with the whole body of the Catholics, rushed again to the poll.

Their temper, as might be expected, was one of vengeance on the men who

had held them down so long. In counties and towns alike the zeal for

Church and king, the two causes for which the voters had suffered, swept

all hope of moderation or compromise before it. The ruling impulse was

to get utterly rid of the old representatives. The Presbyterians,

dominant in the Convention, sank in the Cavalier Parliament, as that of

1661 was called, to a handful of fifty members.

[Sidenote: The Parliament of 1661.]

The new House of Commons was made up for the most part of young men, of

men, that is, who had but a faint memory of the Stuart tyranny under

which their childhood had been spent, but who had a keen memory of

living from manhood beneath the tyranny of the Commonwealth. They had

seen their fathers driven from the justice-bench, driven from the

polling-booth, half-beggared and imprisoned for no other cause but their

loyalty to the king. They had seen the family oaks felled and the family

plate sent to the melting-pot to redeem their estates from the pitiless

hands of the committee at Goldsmiths' Hall. They had themselves been

brought like poachers before the justices for a horse-race or a

cock-fight. At every breath of a rising a squad of the New Model had

quartered itself in the manor-house and a warrant from the Major-general

of the district had cleared the stables. Nor was this all. The same

tyranny which pressed on their social and political life had pressed on

their religious life too. The solemn petitions of the Book of Common

Prayer, the words which had rung like sweet chimes in their ears from

their first childhood, had been banned from every village church as

accursed things. It had been only by stealth and at home that the cross

could be signed on the brow of the babe whom the squire brought to be

christened. Hardly by stealth had it been possible to bury their dead

with the words of pathetic hope which have so often brought comfort to

the ears of mourners.

[Sidenote: The Parliament and the Church.]

And now the young squires felt that their time had come. The Puritan,

the Presbyterian, the Commonwealthman, all were at their feet. Their

very bearing was that of wild revolt against the Puritan past. To a

staid observer, Roger Pepys, they seemed a following of "the most

profane, swearing fellows that ever I heard in my life." Their whole

policy appeared to be dictated by a passionate spirit of reaction. They

would drive the Presbyterians from the bench and the polling-booth as

the Presbyterians had driven them. They would make belief in a

Commonwealth as much a sign of "malignity" as their enemies had made

belief in a king. They would have no military rule: they hated indeed

the very name of a standing army. They were hot Royalists and they were

hot churchmen. The old tyranny of the bishops was forgotten, the old

jealousy of the clergy set aside in the memory of a common suffering.

The oppressors of the parson had been the oppressors of the squire. The

sequestrator who had driven the one from his parsonage had driven the

other from his manor-house. Both had been branded with the same charge

of malignity. Both had been robbed alike of the same privileges of

citizenship. Both had suffered together, and the new Parliament was

resolved that both should triumph together. For the first time since

the Reformation the English gentry were ardent not for king only but

for Church and King.

The zeal of the Parliament at its outset therefore far outran that of

Charles or his ministers. Though it confirmed the other acts of its

predecessor, the Convention, it could with difficulty be brought to

confirm the Act of Indemnity. The Commons pressed for the prosecution of

Vane. Vane was protected alike by the spirit of the law and by the

king's pledge to the Convention that, even if convicted of treason, he

would not suffer him to be sent to the block. But he was now brought to

trial on the charge of treason against a king, "kept out of his royal

authority by traitors and rebels," and his spirited defence served as an

excuse for his execution. "He is too dangerous a man to let live,"

Charles wrote with characteristic coolness, "if we can safely put him

out of the way." But the new members were yet better churchmen than

loyalists. At the opening of their session they ordered every member to

receive the communion, and the League and Covenant to be solemnly burnt

by the common hangman in Westminster Hall. The bill which excluded the

bishops from their seats in the House of Lords was repealed. The

conference at the Savoy between the Episcopalians and Presbyterians

broke up in anger, and the few alterations made in the Liturgy were made

with a view to disgust rather than to conciliate the Puritan party.

[Sidenote: Clarendon.]

In spite of these outbursts however it would be unjust to look on the

temper of the new Parliament as a mere temper of revenge. Its wish was

in the main to restore the constitutional system which the civil war had

violently interrupted. The Royalist party, as we have seen, had no sort

of sympathy with the policy of the early Stuarts. Their notions and

their aims were not those of Laud and Strafford, but of the group of

constitutional loyalists who had followed Falkland in his break with the

Long Parliament in 1642. And of that group by a singular fortune the

most active and conspicuous member now filled the chief place in the

counsels of the king. Edward Hyde had joined Charles the First before

the outbreak of the war, he had become his Chancellor of the Exchequer,

and it was to his pen that the bulk of the royal manifestoes were

attributed. He had passed with the young Prince of Wales into exile, and

had remained the counsellor of Charles the Second during the long years

which preceded his return. His faithfulness had been amply rewarded. He

was now Earl of Clarendon and Lord Chancellor; and his influence in the

royal council, which had been great from the first, became supreme when

the temper of the new Parliament shattered the hopes of his Presbyterian

opponents there. But his aim was simply to carry out the policy he had

clung to with Falkland. He was a lawyer by breeding, and his theory of

the State was a lawyer's theory. He looked on the English constitution,

not as the sum of political forces which were still in process of

developement, but as a mass of fixed and co-ordinated institutions whose

form and mutual relations had been settled in some distant past. He had

opposed the Stuart tyranny because--as he held--it had broken down this

constitution to the profit of the Crown. He worked with the men of the

Long Parliament in what he regarded as the work of restoring it; he left

them the moment that he fancied they were themselves about to break it

down to the profit of the People. Years of exile had only hardened his

ideas. He came back with the fixed resolve to hold the State together at

the exact point where the first reforms of the Long Parliament had left

it. The power and prerogative of the Crown, the authority of the Church,

were to be jealously preserved, but they were to be preserved by the

free will and conviction of the Parliament. It was on this harmonious

co-operation of these three great institutions that Clarendon's system

hung. Its importance to future times lay in his regarding Parliament and

the Church, not as mere accidents or checks in the system of English

government, but as essential parts of it, parts which were as needful

for its healthy working as the Crown itself, and through which the power

of the Crown was to be exercised. Wholly to realize such a conception

it was necessary that the Parliament should be politically, the Church

religiously, representatives of the whole nation.

[Sidenote: Test and Corporation Act.]

The first of Clarendon's assumptions was not only a fact but a far

greater fact than he imagined. Hence it came about that his assembly of

the Parliament year after year, and the steady way in which he used it

to do the Crown's work by setting its stamp on every great political

measure, became of the highest importance in our constitutional

developement. The second was a fiction, for half England had passed from

the grasp of the Church, but it was to make it a fact that Clarendon

buckled himself to a desperate struggle with Nonconformity. It was under

his guidance that the Parliament turned to the carrying out of that

principle of uniformity in Church as well as in State on which the

minister was resolved. The chief obstacle to such a policy lay in the

Presbyterians, and the strongholds of the Presbyterians were the

corporations of the boroughs. In many of the boroughs the corporation

actually returned the borough members--in all they exercised a powerful

influence on their election. To drive the Presbyterians therefore from

municipal posts was to weaken if not to destroy the Presbyterian party

in the House of Commons. It was with a view of bringing about this

object that the Cavalier Parliament passed a severe Corporation Act,

which required as a condition of entering on any municipal office a

reception of the communion according to the rites of the Anglican

Church, a renunciation of the League and Covenant, and a declaration

that it was unlawful on any grounds to take up arms against the king.

The attempt was only partially successful, and test and oath were taken

after a while by men who regarded both simply as insults to their

religious and political convictions. But if Clarendon was foiled in his

effort to secure political uniformity by excluding the Presbyterian

party from any connexion with the government of the State, he seemed for

the time more successful in his attempt to secure a religious uniformity

by their exclusion from the Church.

[Sidenote: Act of Uniformity.]

An effectual blow was dealt at the Puritans in 1662 by the renewal of

the Act of Uniformity. Not only was the use of the Prayer-Book, and the

Prayer-Book only, enforced in all public worship, but an unfeigned

consent and assent was demanded from every minister of the Church to all

which was contained in it; while for the first time since the

Reformation all orders save those conferred by the hands of bishops were

legally disallowed. To give a political stamp to the new measure the

declaration exacted from corporations, that it was unlawful in any case

to take up arms against the Crown, was exacted from the clergy, and a

pledge was required that they would seek to make no change in Church or

State. It was in vain that Ashley opposed the bill fiercely in the

Lords, that the peers pleaded for pensions to the ejected ministers and

for the exemption of schoolmasters from the necessity of subscription,

and that even Clarendon, who felt that the king's word was at stake,

pressed for the insertion of clauses enabling the Crown to grant

dispensations from its provisions. Every suggestion of compromise was

rejected by the Commons; and Charles whose aim was to procure a

toleration for the Catholics by allowing the Presbyterians to feel the

pressure of persecution at last assented to the bill.

[Sidenote: St. Bartholomew's Day.]

The bill passed in May, but its execution was deferred till August; and

in the interval the Presbyterian party in the royal Council struggled

hard to obtain from the king a suspension of its provisions by the

exercise of his prerogative. Charles had promised this, but the bishops

were resolute to enforce the law; and on St. Bartholomew's Day, August

the 24th, the last day allowed for compliance with its requirements,

nearly two thousand rectors and vicars, or about a fifth of the English

clergy, were driven from their parishes as Nonconformists. No such

sweeping alteration in the religious aspect of the Church had ever been

seen before. The ecclesiastical changes of the Reformation had been

brought about with little change in the clergy itself. Even the

severities of the High Commission under Elizabeth ended in the expulsion

of a few hundreds. If Laud had gone zealously to work in emptying

Puritan pulpits his zeal had been to a great extent foiled by the

restrictions of the law and by the growth of Puritan sentiment in the

clergy as a whole. A far wider change had been brought about in the

expulsion of Royalist clergy from their benefices during the Civil War;

but the change had been gradual, and had been at least ostensibly

wrought for the most part on political or moral rather than on religious

grounds. The parsons expelled were expelled as "malignants," or as

unfitted for their office by idleness or vice or inability to preach.

But the change wrought by St. Bartholomew's Day was a distinctly

religious change, and it was a change which in its suddenness and

completeness stood utterly alone. The rectors and vicars who were driven

out were the most learned and the most active of their order. The bulk

of the great livings throughout the country were in their hands. They

stood at the head of the London clergy, as the London clergy stood in

general repute at the head of their class throughout England. They

occupied the higher posts at the two Universities. No English divine

save Jeremy Taylor rivalled Howe as a preacher. No parson was so

renowned a controversialist or so indefatigable a parish priest as

Baxter. And behind these men stood a fifth of the whole body of the

clergy, men whose zeal and labour had diffused throughout the country a

greater appearance of piety and religion than it had ever displayed

before.

[Sidenote: Its religious results.]

But the expulsion of these men was far more to the Church of England

than the loss of their individual services. It was the definite

expulsion of a great party which from the time of the Reformation had

played the most active and popular part in the life of the Church. It

was the close of an effort which had been going on ever since

Elizabeth's accession to bring the English Communion into closer

relations with the Reformed Communions of the Continent and into greater

harmony with the religious instincts of the nation at large. The Church

of England stood from that moment isolated and alone among all the

Churches of the Christian world. The Reformation had severed it

irretrievably from those which still clung to the obedience of the

Papacy. By its rejection of all but episcopal orders the Act of

Uniformity severed it as irretrievably from the general body of the

Protestant Churches whether Lutheran or Reformed. And while thus cut off

from all healthy religious communion with the world without it sank into

immobility within. With the expulsion of the Puritan clergy all change,

all efforts after reform, all national developement, suddenly stopped.

From that time to this the Episcopal Church has been unable to meet the

varying spiritual needs of its adherents by any modifications of its

government or its worship. It stands alone among all the religious

bodies of Western Christendom in its failure through two hundred years

to devise a single new service of prayer or of praise.

[Sidenote: Its political results.]

But if the issues of St. Bartholomew's Day have been harmful to the

spiritual life of the English Church they have been in the highest

degree advantageous to the cause of religious liberty. At the

Restoration religious freedom seemed again to have been lost. Only the

Independents and a few despised sects, such as the Quakers, upheld the

right of every man to worship God according to the bidding of his own

conscience. The bulk of the Puritan Party, with the Presbyterians at its

head, was at one with its opponents in desiring a uniformity of worship,

if not of belief, throughout the land. Had the two great parties within

the Church held together their weight would have been almost

irresistible. Fortunately the great severance of St. Bartholomew's Day

drove out the Presbyterians from the Church to which they clung, and

forced them into a general union with sects which they had hated till

then almost as bitterly as the bishops themselves. A common persecution

soon blended the Nonconformists into one. Persecution broke down before

the numbers, the wealth, and the political weight of the new sectarians;

and the Church for the first time in its history found itself confronted

with an organized body of Dissenters without its pale. The impossibility

of crushing such a body as this wrested from English statesmen the first

legal recognition of freedom of worship in the Toleration Act; their

rapid growth in later times has by degrees stripped the Church of almost

all the exclusive privileges which it enjoyed as a religious body, and

now threatens what remains of its official connexion with the State.

With these remoter consequences however we are not as yet concerned. It

is enough to note here that with the Act of Uniformity and the expulsion

of the Puritan clergy a new element in our religious and political

history, the element of Dissent, the influence of the Nonconformist

churches, comes first into play.

[Sidenote: Charles and Clarendon.]

The sudden outbreak and violence of the persecution, the breaking up of

conventicles, the imprisonment of those who were found worshipping in

them, turned the disappointment of the Presbyterians into despair. Many

were for retiring to Holland, others proposed a general flight to New

England and the American colonies. Among the Baptists and Independents

there was vague talk of an appeal to arms. So threatening indeed did the

attitude of the Sectaries become that Clarendon was anxious to provide

himself with men and money and above all with foreign aid for such a

struggle, should it come. Different indeed as were the aims of the king

and his Chancellor the course of events drew them inevitably together.

If Charles desired the friendship of France as a support in any possible

struggle with the Parliament Clarendon desired it as a support in the

possible struggle with the Nonconformists. The first step in this French

policy had been the marriage with Catharine of Braganza; the second was

the surrender of Dunkirk. The maintenance of the garrison at Dunkirk was

a heavy drag upon the royal treasury, and a proposal for its sale to

Spain, which was made by Lord Sandwich in council, was seized by Charles

and Clarendon as a means of opening a bargain with France. To France the

profit was immense. Not only was a port gained in the Channel which

served during the next hundred years as a haunt for privateers in every

war between the two powers, but the withdrawal of the English garrison

at the close of 1662 from a port which necessarily drew England into

every contest between France and Spain freed the hands of Lewis for the

stroke he was patiently planning against the Low Countries. Lewis

however proved a shrewd bargainer, and not a half of the sum originally

demanded as its price found its way into the royal treasury. But the

money was accepted as a pledge of the close connexion which was to bind

the two crowns together. Charles declared the cession to be "one of the

greatest proofs he could give of his friendship for the French king,"

and the Duke of York pressed the bargain with assurances that his

strongest desire, like that of his brother, was "to unite our interests

with those of France." Clarendon was as desirous of such a union as his

master. In his eyes the friendship of France, the money, the force

placed in his hands by the return of the garrison of Dunkirk to England,

were so many safeguards against the outbreak of rebellion which his

policy had provoked.

[Sidenote: Ashley Cooper.]

But he had reckoned without Charles, and the time was come when the king

was to show how widely his temper and aim differed from those of his

Chancellor. Charles had no taste for civil war, nor had he the slightest

wish to risk his throne in securing the supremacy of the Church. His aim

was to use the strife between the two great bodies of Protestant

religionists so as to secure toleration for the Catholics and revive at

the same time his prerogative of dispensing with the execution of laws.

At the close of 1662 therefore he suddenly broke from the policy of

Clarendon and laid his plans for toleration before the Presbyterian

party who were struggling against the Chancellor in the royal council.

Of that party Ashley Cooper, Lord Ashley, was now in influence, though

not in rank, the chief. Every step in his career had brought out the

boldness, the self-reliance, the versatility and readiness of resource

which distinguished his character. In mere boyhood he had saved his

estate from the greed of his guardians by boldly appealing in person for

protection to Noy, who was then attorney-general. As an undergraduate at

Oxford he organized a rebellion of the freshmen against the oppressive

customs which were enforced by the senior men of his college, and

succeeded in abolishing them. At eighteen he was a member of the Short

Parliament. On the outbreak of the Civil War he took part with the king;

but in the midst of the royal successes he foresaw the ruin of the royal

cause, passed to the Parliament, attached himself to the fortunes of

Cromwell, and became member of the Council of State. A temporary

disgrace during the last years of the Protectorate only quickened him to

a restless hatred which did much to bring about its fall. His bitter

invectives against the dead Protector, his intrigues with Monk, and the

active part which he took in the king's recall, were rewarded at the

Restoration with a peerage and with promotion to a foremost share in the

royal councils.

Ashley was then a man of forty, and under the Commonwealth he had been

famous in Dryden's contemptuous phrase as "the loudest bagpipe of the

squeaking train"; but he was no sooner a minister of Charles than he

flung himself into the debauchery of the Court with an ardour which

surprised even his master. "You are the wickedest dog in England!"

laughed the king at some unscrupulous jest of his counsellor's. "Of a

subject, sir, I believe I am!" was the unabashed reply. But the

debauchery of Ashley was simply a mask. He was in fact temperate by

nature and habit, and his ill-health rendered any great excess

impossible. Men soon found that the courtier who lounged in Lady

Castlemaine's boudoir, or drank and jested with Sedley and Buckingham,

was a diligent and able man of business. "He is a man," says the puzzled

Pepys, three years after the Restoration, "of great business and yet of

pleasure and dissipation too." His rivals were as envious of the ease

and mastery with which he dealt with questions of finance as of the

"nimble wit" which won the favour of the king. Even in later years his

industry earned the grudging praise of his enemies. Dryden owned that as

Chancellor he was "swift to despatch and easy of access," and wondered

at the fevered activity which "refused his age the needful hours of

rest." His activity indeed was the more wonderful that his health was

utterly broken. An accident in early days left behind it an abiding

weakness whose traces were seen in the furrows which seamed his long

pale face, in the feebleness of his health, and the nervous tremor which

shook his puny frame. The "pigmy body" was "fretted to decay" by the

"fiery soul" within it. But pain and weakness brought with them no

sourness of spirit. Ashley was attacked more unscrupulously than any

statesman save Walpole; but Burnet, who did not love him, owns that he

was never bitter or angry in speaking of his assailants. Even the wit

with which he crushed them was commonly good-humoured. "When will you

have done preaching?" a bishop murmured testily, as he was speaking in

the House of Peers. "When I am a bishop, my Lord!" was the laughing

reply.

[Sidenote: Ashley's Policy.]

As a statesman Ashley not only stood high among his contemporaries from

his wonderful readiness and industry, but he stood far above them in his

scorn of personal profit. Even Dryden, while raking together every fault

in his character, owns that his hands were clean. As a political leader

his position was to modern eyes odd enough. In religion he was at most a

Deist, with some fanciful notions "that after death our souls lived in

stars," and his life was that of a debauchee. But Deist and debauchee as

he was he remained the representative of the Presbyterian and

Nonconformist party in the Royal Council. He was the steady and vehement

advocate of toleration, but his advocacy was based on purely political

grounds. He saw that persecution would fail to bring back the Dissenters

to the Church, and that the effort to recall them only left the country

disunited. He saw too that such a disunion exposed English liberty to

invasion from the Crown, while it robbed England herself of all

influence in Europe at a time when her influence alone could effectually

check the ambition of France. The one means of uniting Churchmen and

Dissidents was by a policy of toleration, but in the temper of England

after the Restoration he saw no hope of obtaining toleration save from

the king. Wit, debauchery, rapidity in the despatch of business, were

all therefore used as a means to gain influence over the king, and to

secure him as a friend in the struggle which Ashley carried on against

the intolerance of Clarendon.

[Sidenote: The first Declaration of Indulgence.]

Charles, as we have seen, had his own game to play, and his own reasons

for protecting Ashley during his vehement struggle against the Test and

Corporation Act, the Act of Uniformity, and the persecution of the

Dissidents. But the struggle had been fruitless, and the only chance--as

it seemed to Ashley--of securing toleration was to receive it on the

king's own terms. It was with the assent therefore of the Presbyterian

party in the Council that Charles issued in December a royal

proclamation which expressed the king's resolve to exempt from the

penalties of the Acts which had been passed "those who living peaceably

do not conform themselves thereunto through scruple and tenderness of

misguided conscience, but modestly and without scandal perform their

devotions in their own way." The desire for toleration had in fact not

only overcome their dread of Catholicism, but even blinded them to the

political dangers of a revival of the dispensing power. The indulgence

applied equally to Catholics as to Protestants; it was in itself a bold

assertion of the royal prerogative of suspending the execution of the

law. The Presbyterian statesmen indeed aimed at giving the dispensing

power a legal basis. A bill introduced by Lords Ashley and Robartes in

the opening of 1663, in redemption of a pledge contained in the

declaration itself, gave Charles the power to dispense not only with the

provisions of the Act of Uniformity but with the penalties provided by

all laws which enforced religious conformity or which imposed religious

tests. But the policy of Charles as of Ashley broke instantly down

before the good sense as well as the religious passion of the people at

large. If the Presbyterian leaders in the council had stooped to accept

the aid of the declaration, the bulk of the Dissidents had no mind to

have their grievances used as a means of procuring by a side wind

toleration for Roman Catholics, or of building up again that dispensing

power which the civil wars had thrown down. The Churchmen on the other

hand with the bishops at their head were resolute in opposition. Ever

since the issue of the Declaration of Indulgence the hatred felt by the

Churchmen for the Dissidents had been embittered by suspicions of a

secret league between the Dissidents and the Catholics in which the king

was taking part. The Houses therefore struck simultaneously at both

their opponents. They forced Charles by an address to withdraw his

pledge of toleration. They then extorted from him a proclamation for the

banishment of all Catholic priests, and followed this up by a

Conventicle Act, which punished with fine, imprisonment, and

transportation on a third offence all persons who met in greater number

than five for any religious worship save that of the Common Prayer.

[Sidenote: Clarendon's triumph.]

What added to the sting of this defeat was the open opposition which

Clarendon had offered to his master's scheme in Parliament. From that

moment Charles resolved on his minister's ruin. But Clarendon's position

was too strong to be easily shaken. Hated by the Catholics and the

Dissenters, opposed in the Council itself by Ashley and the Presbyterian

leaders, opposed in the Court by the king's mistress, Lady Castlemaine,

as well as by the supple and adroit Henry Bennet, a creature of the

king's who began to play a foremost part in politics, Clarendon was

still strong in his long and intimate connexion with the king's affairs,

his alliance with the royal house through the marriage of his daughter,

Anne Hyde, with the Duke of York, in his untiring industry, his wide

capacity for business, above all in the support of the Church and the

confidence of the royalist and orthodox House of Commons. To the Commons

and the Church he was only bound the closer by the hatred of Catholics

and Nonconformists or by the futile attempts at impeachment which were

made by the Catholic Earl of Bristol in the summer of 1663. The

"Declaration" indeed had strengthened Clarendon's position. It had

identified his policy of persecution with the maintenance of

constitutional liberty, and had thrown on Ashley and his opponents the

odium of an attempt to set up again the dispensing power and of

betraying, as it was thought, the interests of Protestantism into the

hands of Rome. Never in fact had Clarendon's power seemed stronger than

in 1664; and the only result of the attempt to shake his system of

intolerance was an increase of persecution. Of the sufferings of the

expelled clergy one of their number, Richard Baxter, has given us an

account. "Many hundreds of them with their wives and children had

neither house nor bread. . . . Their congregations had enough to do,

besides a small maintenance, to help them out of prisons or to maintain

them there. Though they were as frugal as possible they could hardly

live; some lived on little more than brown bread and water, many had but

eight or ten pounds a year to maintain a family, so that a piece of

flesh has not come to one of their tables in six weeks' time; their

allowance could scarce afford them bread and cheese. One went to plow

six days and preached on the Lord's Day. Another was forced to cut

tobacco for a livelihood." But poverty was the least of their

sufferings. They were jeered at by the players. They were hooted through

the streets by the mob. "Many of the ministers being afraid to lay down

their ministry after they had been ordained to it, preached to such as

would hear them in fields and private houses, till they were apprehended

and cast into gaols, where many of them perished." They were

excommunicated in the Bishop's Court or fined for non-attendance at

church; and a crowd of informers grew up who made a trade of detecting

the meetings they held at midnight. Alleyn, the author of the well-known

"Alarm to the Unconverted," died at thirty-six from the sufferings he

endured in Taunton Gaol. Vavasour Powell, the apostle of Wales, spent

the eleven years which followed the Restoration in prisons at

Shrewsbury, Southsea, and Cardiff, till he perished in the Fleet.

[Sidenote: England and the Dutch.]

The success however of this experiment in the repression of religious

opinion rested mainly on the absence of any disturbing influences from

without; and in the midst of his triumph over his opponents at home

Clarendon was watching anxiously the growth of a quarrel which

threatened war with the Dutch. The old commercial jealousy between the

two rival merchant nations, which had been lulled in 1662 by a formal

treaty of peace, but which still lived on in petty squabbles at sea, was

embittered by the cession of Bombay--a port which gave England an entry

into the profitable trade with India--as well as by the establishment of

a West Indian Company in London which opened a traffic with the Gold

Coast of Africa, and brought back from Guinea the gold from which our

first "guineas" were struck. In both countries there was a general

irritation which vented itself in cries for war, and in the session of

1664 the English Parliament presented an address to the Crown praying

for the exaction of redress for wrongs done by the Dutch to English

merchants. But the squabble was of long standing, and there was nothing

to threaten any immediate strife. Charles himself indeed shrank from

wars which he foresaw would leave him at the mercy of his Parliament;

and Clarendon with Ormond, the bishops, and the whole Church party, were

conscious that the maintenance of peace was needful for their system of

religious repression. The quarrel therefore would have dragged on in

endless recriminations had not the restless hatred of the Chancellor's

opponents seen in it a means of bringing about the end in which they had

as yet been foiled. Bennet and the Court, Ashley and the Presbyterian

party in the Council, Bristol and the Catholics, foresaw that the

pressure of such a war, the burdens it would bring with it, and the

supplies for which he would be driven to ask, would soon ruin the

Chancellor's popularity with the Commons. Stripped of their support, it

was easy to bring about his fall and clear the stage for fresh efforts

after a religious toleration. The popular temper made their task of

forcing on a war an easy one. The king was won over, partly by playing

on his old resentment at the insults he had suffered from Holland during

his exile, partly by his hope that the suffering which war would bring

on Holland would end in the overthrow of the aristocratic republicans

who had governed the United Provinces ever since the fall of the House

of Orange, and in the restoration of his young nephew, William of

Orange, to the old influence of his family over the State. Such a

restoration would not only repay the debt of gratitude which the

Royalist cause owed to the efforts of William's father in its support,

but would remove the dread which the English government never ceased to

feel of the encouragement which the Dissidents at home derived from the

mere existence close by of a presbyterian and republican government in

Holland. Against the combined pressure of the king, the people, and his

enemies in the cabinet and the court, Clarendon was unable to contend.

Attacks on the Dutch settlements, on the Gold Coast, and the American

coast, made war inevitable; a fleet was manned; and at the close of 1664

the Parliament in a fit of unwonted enthusiasm voted two millions and a

half for the coming struggle.

[Sidenote: The Dutch War.]

The war at sea which followed was a war of giants. No such mighty fleets

have ever disputed the sovereignty of the seas, nor have any naval

battles equalled the encounters of the two nations in dogged and

obstinate fighting. In the spring of 1665 the two fleets, each a hundred

ships strong, mustered in the Channel, the Dutch under Opdam, the

English under the Duke of York. Their first battle off Lowestoft,

obstinate as all the engagements between the two nations, ended in a

victory for the English, a victory due chiefly to the superiority of

their guns and to a shot which blew up the flag-ship of the Dutch

Admiral in the midst of the engagement. But the thought of triumph was

soon forgotten in a terrible calamity which now fell on London. In six

months a hundred thousand Londoners died of the Plague which broke out

in May in the crowded streets of the capital, and which drove the

Parliament from London to assemble in October at Oxford. To the dismay

caused by the Plague was added the growing irritation at the increasing

pressure of the war and a sense of the grave dangers into which the

struggle with Holland was plunging the country both at home and abroad.

The enormous grant which had been made at the outset for three years was

already spent and a fresh supply had to be granted. But hard and costly

as the Dutch war had proved, a far graver and costlier struggle seemed

opening in its train. The war was a serious stumbling-block in the way

of the French projects. Holland on the strength of old treaties, England

on the strength of her new friendship, alike called on Lewis for aid;

but to give aid to either was to run the risk of throwing the other on

the aid of the House of Austria, and of building up the league which

could alone check France in its designs upon Spain. Only peace could

keep the European states disunited, and it was on their disunion that

Lewis counted for success in his design of seizing Flanders, a design

which was now all but ripe for execution. At the outset of the war

therefore he offered his mediation, and suggested the terms of a

compromise. But his attempt was fruitless, and the defeat off Lowestoft

forced him to more effective action. He declared himself forced to give

aid to the Dutch though he cautiously restricted his help to the promise

of a naval reinforcement. But the chief work of his negotiators was to

prevent any extension of the struggle. Sweden and Brandenburg, from both

of which powers Charles counted on support, were held in check by the

intervention of France; and the Bishop of Münster, whom an English

subsidy had roused to an attack on his Dutch neighbours, was forced by

the influence of Lewis to withdraw his troops. Sir William Temple, the

English ambassador at Brussels, strove to enlist Spain on the side of

England by promising to bring about a treaty between that country and

Portugal which would free its hands for an attack on Lewis, and so

anticipate his plans for an attack under more favourable circumstances

on herself. But Lewis knew how to play on the Catholic bigotry of Spain,

and the English offers were set aside.

[Sidenote: England and France.]

Lewis thus succeeded in isolating England and in narrowing the war

within the limits of a struggle at sea, a struggle in which the two

great sea-powers could only weaken one another to the profit of his own

powerful navy. But his intervention was far from soaring England into

peace. The old hatred of France had quickened the English people to an

early perception of the dangers which were to spring from French

ambition; and as early as 1661 the London mob backed the Spanish

ambassador in a street squabble for precedence with the ambassador of

France. "We do all naturally love the Spanish," Pepys comments on this

at the time, "and hate the French." The marriage of Catharine, the sale

of Dunkirk, were taken as signs of the growth of a French influence over

English policy, and the jealousy and suspicion they had aroused were

seen in the reception with which the Parliament met the announcement of

Lewis's hostility. No sooner had the words fallen from Charles's lips

than "there was a great noise in the Parliament," writes the French

statesman Louvois, "to show the joy of the two Houses at the prospect of

a fight with us." But even the warlike temper of the Parliament could

not blind it to the new weight which was given to the struggle by this

intervention of France. Above all it woke men to the dangers at home.

The policy of Clarendon had broken England into two nations. Whatever

might be the attitude of Monk or Ashley in the royal closet the

sympathies of the Nonconformists as a whole could not fail to be opposed

to a war with the Dutch; and as Charles was striving with some show of

success to rouse the Orange party in the States to active opposition

against the dominant republicans, so the Dutch statesmen summoned the

banished regicides to Holland, and dreamed of a landing in England which

would bring about a general rising of the Dissidents against Charles.

The less scrupulous diplomacy of Lewis availed itself of every element

of opposition, called Algernon Sidney to Paris and supplied him with

money as a possible means of rousing the English republicans, while it

corresponded with the Presbyterians in Scotland and the hardly less

bitter Catholics of Ireland.

[Sidenote: The Religious Persecution.]

The dread of internal revolt was quickened by the new attitude of

resistance taken by the Nonconformists. When the clergy fled from London

at the appearance of the Plague, their pulpits were boldly occupied in

open defiance of the law by the ministers who had been ejected from

them. The terror and hatred roused by this revival of a foe that seemed

to have been crushed was seen in the Five Mile Act, which completed in

1665 the code of persecution. By its provisions every clergyman who had

been driven out by the Act of Uniformity was called on to swear that he

held it unlawful under any pretext to take up arms against the king, and

that he would at no time "endeavour any alteration of government in

Church or State." In case of refusal he was forbidden to go within five

miles of any borough or of any place where he had been wont to

minister. As the main body of the Nonconformists belonged to the city

and trading classes, the effect of this measure was to rob them of any

religious teaching at all. But the tide of religious intolerance was now

slowly ebbing and, bigoted as the House was, a motion to impose the oath

of the Five Mile Act on every person in the nation was rejected in the

same session by a majority of six. The sufferings of the Nonconformists

indeed could hardly fail to tell on the sympathies of the people. The

thirst for revenge which had been roused by the tyranny of the

Presbyterians in their hour of triumph was satisfied by their

humiliation in their hour of defeat. The sight of pious and learned

clergymen driven from their homes and their flocks, of religious

meetings broken up by the constables, of preachers set side by side with

thieves and outcasts in the dock, of gaols crammed with honest

enthusiasts whose piety was their only crime, pleaded more eloquently

for toleration than all the reasoning in the world.

[Sidenote: Milton.]

We have a clue to the extent of the persecution from what we know to

have been its effect on a single sect. The Quakers had excited alarm by

their extravagances of manner as well as by their refusal to bear arms

or to take oaths, and a special Act was passed for their repression.

They were one of the smallest of the Nonconformist bodies, but more than

four thousand were soon in prison, and five hundred of these were

imprisoned in London alone. The king's Declaration of Indulgence twelve

years later set free twelve hundred Quakers who had found their way to

the gaols. For not only had persecution failed to kill religious

liberty, but the very Puritanism which the Cavalier Parliament believed

itself to have trodden under foot was at this moment proving the noble

life it had drawn from suffering and defeat. It was at this moment that

Milton produced the "Paradise Lost." During the Civil War he had been

engaged in strife with Presbyterians and with Royalists, pleading for

civil and religious freedom, for freedom of social life and freedom of

the press. At a later time he became Latin secretary to the Protector in

spite of a blindness which had been brought on by the intensity of his

study. The Restoration found him of all living men the most hateful to

the Royalists, for it was his "Defence of the English People" which had

justified throughout Europe the execution of the king. Parliament

ordered his book to be burnt by the common hangman; he was for a time

imprisoned; and even when released he had to live amidst threats of

assassination from fanatical Cavaliers. To the ruin of his cause were

added personal misfortunes in the bankruptcy of the scrivener who held

the bulk of his property, and in the Fire of London which deprived him

of much of what was left. As age drew on he found himself reduced to

comparative poverty and driven to sell his library for subsistence.

Even among the Sectaries who shared his political opinions Milton stood

in religious opinion alone, for he had gradually severed himself from

every accepted form of faith, had embraced Arianism, and had ceased to

attend at any place of worship.

[Sidenote: His Life.]

Nor was his home a happy one. The grace and geniality of his youth

disappeared in the drudgery of a schoolmaster's life and amongst the

invectives of controversy. In age his temper became stern and exacting.

His daughters, who were forced to read to their blind father in

languages which they could not understand, revolted against their

bondage. But solitude and misfortune only brought into bolder relief

Milton's inner greatness. There was a grand simplicity in the life of

his later years. He listened every morning to a chapter of the Hebrew

Bible, and after musing in silence for a while pursued his studies till

mid-day. Then he took exercise for an hour, played for another hour on

the organ or viol, and renewed his studies. The evening was spent in

converse with visitors and friends. For, lonely and unpopular as Milton

was, there was one thing about him which made his house in Bunhill

Fields a place of pilgrimage to the wits of the Restoration. He was the

last of the Elizabethans. He had possibly seen Shakspere, as on his

visits to London after his retirement to Stratford the playwright

passed along Bread Street to his wit combats at the Mermaid. He had been

the contemporary of Webster and Massinger, of Herrick and Crashaw. His

"Comus" and "Arcades" had rivalled the masques of Ben Jonson. It was

with a reverence drawn from thoughts like these that men looked on the

blind poet as he sate, clad in black, in his chamber hung with rusty

green tapestry, his fair brown hair falling as of old over a calm serene

face that still retained much of its youthful beauty, his cheeks

delicately coloured, his clear grey eyes showing no trace of their

blindness. But famous whether for good or ill as his prose writings had

made him, during fifteen years only a few sonnets had broken his silence

as a singer. It was now in his blindness and old age, with the cause he

loved trodden under foot by men as vile as the rabble in "Comus," that

the genius of Milton took refuge in the great poem on which through

years of silence his imagination had been brooding.

[Sidenote: The "Paradise Lost."]

On his return from his travels in Italy Milton spoke of himself as

musing on "a work not to be raised from the heat of youth or the vapours

of wine, like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar

amourist or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite, nor to be obtained

by the invocation of Dame Memory and her Siren daughters, but by devout

prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and

knowledge, and sends out His Seraphim with the hallowed fire of His

altar to touch and purify the lips of whom He pleases." His lips were

touched at last. In the quiet retreat of his home in Bunhill Fields he

mused during these years of persecution and loneliness on the "Paradise

Lost." The poem was published in 1667, seven years after the

Restoration, and four years later appeared the "Paradise Regained" and

"Samson Agonistes," in the severe grandeur of whose verse we see the

poet himself "fallen," like Samson, "on evil days and evil tongues, with

darkness and with danger compassed round." But great as the two last

works were their greatness was eclipsed by that of their predecessor.

The whole genius of Milton expressed itself in the "Paradise Lost." The

romance, the gorgeous fancy, the daring imagination which he shared with

the Elizabethan poets, the large but ordered beauty which he had drunk

in from the literature of Greece and Rome, the sublimity of conception,

the loftiness of phrase which he owed to the Bible, blended in this

story "of man's first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden

tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our woe."

It is only when we review the strangely mingled elements which make up

the poem that we realize the genius which fused them into such a perfect

whole. The meagre outline of the Hebrew legend is lost in the splendour

and music of Milton's verse. The stern idealism of Geneva is clothed in

the gorgeous robes of the Renascence. If we miss something of the free

play of Spenser's fancy, and yet more of the imaginative delight in

their own creations which gives so exquisite a life to the poetry of the

early dramatists, we find in place of these the noblest example which

our literature affords of the majesty of classic form.

[Sidenote: The Epic of Puritanism.]

But it is not with the literary value of the "Paradise Lost" that we are

here concerned. Its historic importance lies in this, that it is the

Epic of Puritanism. Its scheme is the problem with which the Puritan

wrestled in hours of gloom and darkness--the problem of sin and

redemption, of the world-wide struggle of evil against good. The intense

moral concentration of the Puritan had given an almost bodily shape to

spiritual abstractions before Milton gave life and being to the forms of

Sin and Death. It was the Puritan tendency to mass into one vast "body

of sin" the various forms of human evil, and by the very force of a

passionate hatred to exaggerate their magnitude and their power, to

which we owe the conception of Milton's Satan. The greatness of the

Puritan aim in the long and wavering struggle for justice and law and a

higher good, the grandeur of character which the contest developed, the

colossal forms of good and evil which moved over its stage, the debates

and conspiracies and battles which had been men's life for twenty years,

the mighty eloquence and the mightier ambition which the war had roused

into being--all left their mark on the "Paradise Lost." Whatever was

highest and best in the Puritan temper spoke in the nobleness and

elevation of the poem, in its purity of tone, in its loftiness of

conception, in its ordered and equable realization of a great purpose.

Even in his boldest flights Milton is calm and master of himself. His

touch is always sure. Whether he passes from Heaven to Hell or from the

council hall of Satan to the sweet conference of Adam and Eve his tread

is steady and unfaltering.

[Sidenote: Its defects.]

But if the poem expresses the higher qualities of the Puritan temper it

expresses no less exactly its defects. Throughout it we feel almost

painfully a want of the finer and subtler sympathies, of a large and

genial humanity, of a sense of spiritual mystery. Dealing as Milton does

with subjects the most awful and mysterious that poet ever chose, he is

never troubled by the obstinate questionings of invisible things which

haunted the imagination of Shakspere. We look in vain for any Æschylean

background of the vast unknown. "Man's disobedience" and the scheme for

man's redemption are laid down as clearly and with just as little

mystery as in a Puritan discourse. On topics such as these, even God the

Father (to borrow Pope's sneer) "turns a school divine." As in his

earlier poems he had ordered and arranged nature, so in the "Paradise

Lost" Milton orders and arranges Heaven and Hell. His mightiest

figures, Angel or Archangel, Satan or Belial, stand out colossal but

distinct. There is just as little of the wide sympathy with all that is

human which is so lovable in Chaucer and Shakspere. On the contrary the

Puritan individuality is nowhere so overpowering as in Milton. He leaves

the stamp of himself deeply graven on all he creates. We hear his voice

in every line of his poem. The cold, severe conception of moral virtue

which reigns throughout it, the intellectual way in which he paints and

regards beauty (for the beauty of Eve is a beauty which no mortal man

may love) are Milton's own. We feel his inmost temper in the stoical

self-repression which gives its dignity to his figures. Adam utters no

cry of agony when he is driven from Paradise. Satan suffers in a defiant

silence. It is to this intense self-concentration that we must attribute

the strange deficiency of humour which the poet shared with the Puritans

generally, and which here and there breaks the sublimity of the poem

with strange slips into the grotesque. But it is above all to this

Puritan deficiency in human sympathy that we must attribute Milton's

wonderful want of dramatic genius. Of the power which creates a thousand

different characters, which endows each with its appropriate act and

word, which loses itself in its own creations, no great poet ever had

less.

[Sidenote: The Naval War.]

While Milton was busy with his verse events were moving fast in favour

of the cause which he saw trodden under foot. Defeat had only spurred

the Dutch to fresh efforts. Their best seaman, De Ruyter, had

reorganized their fleet, and appeared off the North Foreland in May

1666, with eighty-eight vessels, stronger and better armed than those of

Opdam. The English fleet was almost as strong; but a squadron had been

detached under Prince Rupert to meet a French force reported to be at

Belleisle, and it was with but sixty ships that the new admiral, Monk,

Duke of Albemarle, fell in with De Ruyter's armament. There was no

thought however of retreat, and a fight at once began, the longest and

most stubborn that the seas have ever seen. The battle had raged for two

whole days, and Monk, left with only sixteen ships uninjured, saw

himself on the brink of ruin, when on the morning of the third he was

saved by the arrival of Rupert. Though still greatly inferior in force,

the dogged admiral renewed the fight on the fourth day as the Dutch drew

off to their own coast, but the combat again ended in De Ruyter's favour

and the English took refuge in the Thames. Their fleet was indeed

ruined; twenty ships had been taken or sunk and a far larger number

disabled; but the losses of the enemy had been hardly less. What the

Dutch had discovered, owned De Witt, was, "that English sailors might be

killed and English ships burned, but that there was no conquering

Englishmen." At the close of July in fact the two fleets, again

refitted, met anew off the North Foreland; and a second fight, as hard

fought as that which had gone before, ended in an English victory.

Twenty Dutch sail had struck or sunk, seven thousand Dutch seamen had

been slain, while the English loss was comparatively small. The

victorious fleet sailed along the rich coast of Holland, burning

merchantmen and plundering its undefended towns. But Holland was as

unconquerable as England herself. In a short time the Dutch fleet was

again refitted and at sea, and Lewis, whose aid had hitherto been only

in words, thought it time to act. The French fleet joined the Dutch, and

the English found themselves too inferior in force to venture on a fresh

battle for the command of the Channel.

[Sidenote: Parliament and the War.]

It was at this moment of national disappointment, with the fruit of

great efforts snatched away and the sea lost, that a fresh calamity at

home was added to the sufferings of the war. In the night of the second

of September a fire broke out in the heart of London which raged for

four days and reduced the city to ashes from the Tower to the Temple.

Thirteen hundred houses and ninety churches were destroyed. The loss of

merchandise and property was beyond count. Again the Parliament with

stubborn pride voted a subsidy of nearly two millions to refit the

fleet. But the money came in slowly. The treasury was so utterly

drained that it was agreed to fit out no large ships for the coming

year. The ministers indeed were already seeking to conclude a peace

through the mediation of France. It was not the public distress alone

which drove Clarendon to peace negotiations: his own fears and those of

the king had been alike fulfilled as the war went on. The country

squires were disgusted at the obstinacy and cost of the struggle, and

they visited their disgust on Clarendon as its supposed author. He had

lost the support of the Houses, and the admission of fresh opponents

into the royal council spoke of the secret enmity of the king. But

Charles too had his reasons for desiring peace. He had a sleepless

distrust of Parliaments, and his distrust was already justified. The

"Cavalier" Parliament had met in a passion of loyalty. It had pressed

for the death of the regicides. It had hardly been hindered from

throwing all England into confusion by refusing its assent to the

Amnesty Bill. It had ordered the League and Covenant, as well as the act

deposing Charles Stuart, to be burned by the common hangman. It had

declared the taking up arms against the king on any pretext to be

treason, and had turned its declaration into a test to be exacted from

every parson and every alderman. And yet this loyal Parliament had faced

and checked the Crown as boldly and pertinaciously as the Long

Parliament itself. It had carried out its own ecclesiastical policy in

the teeth of the known wishes of the king. It had humiliated him by

forcing him to cancel his public declaration in favour of the

Nonconformists. It gave counsel in foreign affairs, and met the king's

leanings towards Lewis by expressions of its will for a contest with

France. It voted large subsidies indeed, but at this juncture it

inserted into the Subsidy Bill a clause which appointed a Parliamentary

commission with powers to examine into the royal expenditure, and to

question royal officers upon oath.

[Sidenote: The Dutch in the Medway.]

To Clarendon such a demand seemed as great an usurpation on the rights

of the Crown as any measure of the Long Parliament, and he advised a

dissolution. But the advice was rejected, for there was no hope that

fresh elections could bring together a more royalist House of Commons

than that of 1661. The attitude of the Houses showed in fact that the

hottest Royalists had learned, whether they would or no, the lesson of

the Civil War. Whatever might in other ways be the temper of the Commons

who assembled at Westminster, it was certain that the great

constitutional revolution which was slowly removing the control of

affairs from the hands of the Crown into those of the Parliament would

go just as steadily on. But if Charles refused to dissolve the

Parliament he longed to free himself from its power; and the mediation

of France enabled a peace congress to assemble at Breda in May 1667. To

Holland, eager to free its hands so as to deal with the French invasion

of the Netherlands, an invasion which was now felt to be impending,

peace was yet more important than to England; and a stroke of singular

vigour placed peace within her grasp. Aware of the exhaustion of the

English treasury and of the miserable state of the English navy, the

persevering De Witt suddenly ordered the Dutch fleet, sixty vessels

strong, to sail in June to the Thames. England was taken utterly by

surprise. Neither ships nor forts were manned when the Hollanders

appeared at the Nore. Pushing their light vessels without show of

opposition up the Thames to Gravesend they forced the boom which

protected the Medway, burned three men-of-war which lay anchored in the

river, and withdrew only to sail proudly along the coast, the masters of

the Channel.

[Sidenote: Fall of Clarendon.]

The thunder of the Dutch guns in the Medway and the Thames woke England

to a bitter sense of its degradation. The dream of loyalty was roughly

broken. "Everybody nowadays," Pepys tells us, "reflect upon Oliver and

commend him, what brave things he did, and made all the neighbour

princes fear him." But Oliver's successor was coolly watching this shame

and discontent of his people with the one aim of turning it to his own

advantage. To Charles the Second the degradation of England was only a

move in the political game which he was playing, a game played with so

consummate a secrecy and skill that it not only deceived close observers

of his own day but still misleads historians in ours. The blow at once

brought about the peace he desired. Each of the combatants retained what

it had won, save that Holland gained the isle of Polaroon on the Bombay

coast, and England the settlement of New Amsterdam on the Hudson, which

was soon to be better known as her colony of New York. A result still

more to the king's taste was the ruin of Clarendon. Clarendon had had no

part in the reduction of the navy which had proved so fatal to English

renown, but the public resentment fell on him alone. The Parliament,

enraged by his counsel for its dissolution, saw in his call for forces

to defend the coast an attempt to re-establish the one thing they hated

most, a standing army. Charles could at last free himself from the

minister who had held him in check so long. In August 1667 the

Chancellor was dismissed from office, and driven by the express command

of the king to take refuge in France.

CHAPTER II

THE POPISH PLOT

1667-1683

[Sidenote: The Cabal Ministry.]

The fall of Clarendon marks a new epoch in the history of the

Restoration. By the exile of the Chancellor, the death of Lord

Southampton, which had preceded, and the retirement of Ormond and

Nicholas which followed it, the constitutional loyalists who had

hitherto shaped the policy of the government disappeared from the royal

council. The union between King, Church, and Parliament, on which their

system had been based, was roughly dissolved. The House of Commons,

which had been elected in a passion of loyalty only six years before,

found itself thrown into a position of antagonism to the Crown. The

Church saw the most formidable opponent of its supremacy in the king.

For the first time since his accession Charles came boldly forward to

the front of public affairs. He had freed himself, as he believed, from

the domination of the constitutional loyalists and of the ministers who

represented them. The new ministry was mainly made up of that section of

the original ministry of 1660 which then represented the Presbyterians,

and which under Ashley's guidance had bent to purchase toleration even

at the cost of increasing the prerogatives of the Crown. Ashley himself

remained Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Duke of Buckingham, whose

marriage with the daughter of Lord Fairfax allied him with the

Presbyterians, and who carried on political relations even with the

Independents, held a leading position in the new Cabinet, though at

first without office. Sir William Coventry, a bitter opponent of

Clarendon, took his seat at the Treasury board. The direction of Scotch

affairs was left to Lord Lauderdale, a man of rough and insolent manner

but of striking ability, and whose political views coincided as yet

mainly with those of Ashley. Two great posts however were filled by men

whose elevation showed the new part which Charles himself was resolved

to take in the task of administration. Foreign affairs the king

determined to take into his own hands: and this was adroitly managed by

the nomination of Henry Bennet, now become Earl of Arlington, as

Secretary of State. Bennet was a man of sense and experience, but he was

flexible and unprincipled, he was in heart a Catholic, and ready to

serve as a creature of the royal will. Sir Thomas Clifford, the new

head of the Treasury, was a Catholic by conviction, and ready to

sacrifice English freedom if the sacrifice would bring back England to

his faith.

[Sidenote: The Cabal.]

Such was the ministry which from the accidental coincidence of the

initial letters of the names of five of its members with those which

make up the word was known as the Cabal. But the word Cabala, or Cabal,

had as yet none of the odious meaning which after events attached to it;

it meant indeed simply what we mean by "cabinet." Nor was there anything

in the temper or conduct of the new ministers which foreboded ill. To

all but the king and themselves the Catholic sympathies of Clifford and

Arlington were unknown. The ministry seemed to represent the

Presbyterians, and the Presbyterians as a party were true to the cause

of freedom for which they had fought. Nor did the earlier acts of the

"Cabal" belie its origin. Few ministries in fact have shown at their

outset greater vigour or wisdom. Its first work was the Triple Alliance.

The warlike outburst of feeling in the Parliament at the prospect of a

struggle with France had warned the French and English kings that a

strife which both desired rather to limit than to widen must be brought

to an end. The dexterous delays of Charles were seconded by the

eagerness with which Lewis pressed on the Peace of Breda between England

and the Dutch. To Lewis indeed it seemed as if the hour he had so long

waited for was come. He had secured the neutrality of the Emperor by a

secret treaty which provided for a division of the Spanish dominions

between the two monarchs in case the king of Spain died without an heir.

England, as he believed, was held in check by Charles, and like Holland

was too exhausted by the late war to meddle with a new one. On the very

day therefore on which the Treaty of Breda was signed he sent in his

formal claims on the Low Countries, and his army at once took the field.

Flanders was occupied and six great fortresses secured in two months.

Franche Comté was overrun in seventeen days.

[Sidenote: English Diplomacy.]

But the suddenness and completeness of the French success woke a general

terror before which the king's skilful diplomacy gave way. Holland,

roused to a sense of danger by the appearance of French arms on the

Rhine, protested and appealed to England for aid; and though her appeals

remained at first unanswered, even England was roused from her lethargy

by the French seizure of the coast towns of Flanders. The earlier

efforts of English diplomacy indeed were of a selfish and unscrupulous

kind. Holland, Spain, and France were tempted in turn by secret offers

of alliance. A treaty offensive and defensive against all powers for the

defence of the Spanish Netherlands was proposed to the Dutch. Spain was

offered alliance and aid in return for the concession of free trade

with her dominions in America and the Philippines. Before France was

laid the project of an offensive and defensive alliance directed

especially against Holland, and perhaps against Spain, in return for

which England stipulated for admission to a share in the eventual

partition of the Spanish dominions, and for an assignment to her in such

a case of the Spanish Empire in the New World. Each of these offers was

alike refused. Spain looked on them as insincere. France regarded the

terms of alliance as extravagant, while she was anxious to hold the

Dutch to their present friendship and inactivity rather than to stir

them to war. Holland itself, while desirous to check French ambition,

still clung to its French alliance.

[Sidenote: The Triple Alliance.]

Repulsed as they were on every side, the need of action became clearer

every hour to the English ministers. The common refusal of France and

the Dutch roused fears that these powers were secretly leagued for a

partition of the Netherlands between them. Wider views too gradually set

aside the narrow dreams of merely national aggrandizement. To Ashley and

his followers an increase of the French power seemed dangerous not only

to the European balance of power but to English Protestantism. Even

Arlington, Catholic as in heart he was, thought more of the political

interests of England and of the invariable resolve of its statesmen

since Elizabeth's day to keep the French out of Flanders than of the

interests of Catholicism. One course alone remained. To lull the

general excitement Lewis had offered peace to Spain on terms either of

the cession of Franche Comté or of the retention of his conquests in the

Netherlands. The plan of John de Witt, the Pensionary of Holland, was to

take France at its word and to force on Spain the acceptance of these

terms by the joint pressure of England and the United Provinces. It was

this plan which England suddenly adopted. In the opening of 1668 Sir

William Temple was despatched to the Hague, and an alliance was

concluded between England and Holland, in which Sweden, the third great

Protestant power, was soon included.

Few measures have won a greater popularity than this Triple Alliance.

"It is the only good public thing," says Pepys, "that hath been done

since the king came to England." Even Dryden, writing at the time as a

Tory, counted among the worst of Shaftesbury's crimes that "the Triple

Bond he broke." In form indeed the alliance simply bound Lewis to adhere

to terms of peace proposed by himself and those advantageous terms, the

possession of the southern half of Flanders and of a string of

fortresses which practically left him master of the Spanish Netherlands.

But in fact it utterly ruined his plans. His offer of peace had been

meant only as a blind. At the moment when Temple reached the Hague Lewis

was writing to his general, Turenne, "I am turning over in my head

things that are far from impossible, and go to carry them into execution

whatever they may cost." Three armies were ready to march at once on

Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands, when the intervention of the three

powers suddenly arrested these schemes of conquest and forced Lewis to

conclude peace at Aix-la-Chapelle. But the immediate gain was the least

result of the Triple Alliance. It brought about that union of the powers

of Europe against which, as Lewis felt instinctively, his ambition would

dash itself in vain. It was Arlington's aim to make the Alliance the

nucleus of a greater confederation: and he tried not only to perpetuate

it but to include within it the Swiss Cantons, the Empire, and the House

of Austria. His efforts were foiled; but the "Triple Bond" bore within

it the germs of the Grand Alliance which at last saved Europe. To

England it at once brought back the reputation which she had lost since

the death of Cromwell. It was a sign of her re-entry on the general

stage of European politics, and of her formal adoption of the balance of

power as a policy essential to the welfare not of one or another nation

but of Europe at large.

[Sidenote: Lewis and Holland.]

Lewis was maddened by the check. But it was not so much the action of

England which galled his pride as the action of Holland. That "a nation

of shopkeepers," for Lewis applied the phrase to the United Provinces

long before Napoleon applied it to England, should have foiled his

plans at the very moment of their realization "stung him," as he owned,

"to the quick." He had always disliked the Dutch as Protestants and

Republicans; he hated them now as an obstacle which must be taken out of

his way ere he could resume his projects upon Spain. If he refrained

from an instant attack on them it was to nurse a surer revenge. Four

years were spent in preparations for a decisive blow. The French army

was gradually raised to a hundred and eighty thousand men, while Colbert

created a fleet which rivalled that of Holland in number and equipment.

The steady aim of French diplomacy from the moment when Lewis was forced

to sign the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was to isolate the United

Provinces, to secure the neutrality of the Empire in any attack on them,

to break the Triple Alliance by detaching Sweden from it and securing

Charles, and to leave the Dutch without help save from the ineffectual

good-will of Brandenburg and Spain.

[Sidenote: Charles and the Cabal.]

In England the French designs were favoured by the political

difficulties which at once followed on the fall of Clarendon. The new

Ministry, representing as it did the Presbyterian party and a policy of

toleration, was in itself a declaration on the king's part that the

executive power was no longer necessarily to act in harmonious

co-operation with the Parliament. Its first steps in releasing

Nonconformists from prison, in suffering conventicles to reopen, and

suspending the operation of the Act of Uniformity, were in open defiance

of the known will of the two Houses. But when Charles again proposed to

his counsellors a general toleration he no longer found himself

supported by them as in 1663. Even Ashley's mood was changed. The policy

of the Council in fact was determined by the look of public affairs

abroad. The victories of Lewis, the sudden revelation of the strength of

France, roused even in the most tolerant minds a dread of Catholicism.

Men felt instinctively that the very existence of Protestantism and with

it of civil freedom was again to be at stake. Instead of toleration

therefore the ministers pressed for a union of Protestants which would

have utterly foiled the king's projects; and a scheme of Protestant

comprehension which had been approved by the moderate divines on both

sides, by Tillotson and Stillingfleet on the part of the Church as well

as by Manton and Baxter on the part of the Nonconformists, was laid

before the House of Commons in the session of 1668. Even its rejection

failed to bring back Ashley and his party to their old position. They

were still for toleration. But they were for a toleration the benefit of

which did not extend to Catholics, "in respect the laws have determined

the principles of the Romish religion to be inconsistent with the safety

of your Majesty's person and government."

[Sidenote: Parliament and the Cabal.]

Again Charles was baffled. He had overthrown Clarendon in the belief

that the Nonconformists must necessarily support him in the general

reversal of Clarendon's policy. He found not only that to obtain a

toleration for Catholics from his new ministers was as impossible as to

obtain it from Clarendon himself, but that they were resolute to bring

about that union of Protestants which Charles regarded as fatal to his

designs and which the Chancellor's policy had at any rate prevented.

Luckily for the king neither their new attitude at home nor their

success abroad could win them the confidence of the House of Commons. As

soon as it met they became the object of bitter attack. Their

Comprehension Bill was rejected. Their suspension of the penalties for

Nonconformity was denounced. "We shall remain unhappy," said one of the

leaders of the Commons, Sir Edward Seymour, "so long as his Majesty

retains his present counsellors." It was in fact only by an early

prorogation which was prolonged throughout the year that the ministers

were saved from impeachment. Such a course however gave but a temporary

respite; and Buckingham and Ashley pressed on Charles the advisability

of a dissolution. The House of Commons, they held, chosen as it had been

eight years before in a moment of reaction, no longer really represented

public opinion, and a new House would contain a larger proportion of

members inclined to a policy of Protestant union. But Charles refused

to dissolve the House. A Protestant union in fact was precisely what he

wished to avoid. The pressure of a Parliament with Presbyterian leanings

would be yet more fatal to the administrative independence he wished to

maintain than a Cavalier Parliament. Above all such a Parliament would

at once force him to take up a distinctly Protestant attitude, and to

place himself at the head of the Protestant States as the leader in a

European resistance to the supremacy of Catholicism and of France as the

representative of Catholicism. How little such an attitude was to the

king's taste we have already seen. He had been stirred to a momentary

pride by the success of the Triple Alliance, but he had never in heart

abandoned his older policy. He still looked to France and to Catholicism

as the most effective means of restoring his prerogative; and the sudden

revelation of the power of Lewis, however it might startle his ministers

into anxiety for freedom and Protestantism, only roused in the heart of

their royal master a longing to turn it to the advantage of his crown.

[Sidenote: Conversion of James.]

Tempted however as he must have been to a new turn in his policy by the

failure of his older plans at home and the display of French greatness,

the sudden and decisive turn which he actually gave it was due above all

to an event which, unknown as it as yet remained to Englishmen, was

destined to exercise a vast influence from this moment on English

politics. This was the conversion of his brother and presumptive

successor James, Duke of York, to the Catholic faith. Though finally

completed in the spring of 1672, this had for some time been imminent.

The dull, truthful temper of the Duke hindered him from listening to his

brother's remonstrances against this step; but Charles was far too

keen-witted to be blind to the difficulties in which it was certain to

involve him. That either Churchman or Presbyterian should sit still and

wait patiently the advent of a Catholic king, and above all a king whose

temper would necessarily make him a Catholic bigot, was, as he foresaw,

impossible. The step could not long be concealed; and when once it was

known a demand would arise for the exclusion of James from the

succession, or at the least for securities which would fetter the Crown.

Even if such a demand were surmounted a struggle between James and the

Parliament was in the end inevitable, and such a struggle, if it ever

arose, could end only in the establishment of Catholicism and despotism

or in the expulsion of James from the throne. To foresee these

consequences required no great keenness of sight; they were as plainly

foreseen by Ashley and the bulk of Englishmen, when once the truth was

known, as by Charles. But Charles was far from contenting himself with

foreseeing them. He resolved to anticipate the danger by hurrying on

the struggle which was certain to come. France alone could help him in

forcing despotism and Catholicism on England, and from this moment

Charles surrendered himself utterly to France. He declared to Lewis his

purpose of entering into an alliance with him, offensive and defensive.

He owned to being the only man in his kingdom who desired such a league,

but he was determined, he said, to realize his desire, whatever might be

the sentiments of his ministers.

[Sidenote: Treaty of Dover.]