outwit. Two of them, Arlington and Clifford, were Catholics in heart
like the king; and in January 1669 they were summoned with the Duke of
York and two Catholic nobles, Lords Bellasys and Arundell, to a
conference in which Charles, after pledging them to secrecy, declared
himself a Catholic and asked their counsel as to the means of
establishing the Catholic religion in his realm. It was resolved to
apply to Lewis for aid in this purpose; and Charles proceeded to seek
from the king a "protection," to use the words of the French ambassador,
"of which he always hoped to feel the powerful effects in the execution
of his design of changing the present state of religion in England for a
better, and of establishing his authority so as to be able to retain his
subjects in the obedience they owe him." He was fully aware of the price
he must pay for such a protection. Lewis was bent on the ruin of
Holland and the annexation of Flanders. With the ink of the Triple
Alliance hardly dry Charles promised help in both these designs. The
Netherlands indeed could not be saved if Holland fell, and the fall of
Holland was as needful for the success of the plans of Charles as of
Lewis. It was impossible for Holland to look with indifference on the
conversion of England into a Catholic power, and in the struggle to make
it one the aid of the Dutch would be secured for the king's opponents.
Charles offered therefore to declare his religion and to join France in
an attack on Holland if Lewis would grant him a subsidy equal to a
million a year. In the event of the king of Spain's death without a son
Charles pledged himself to support France in her claims upon Flanders,
while Lewis, made wiser by the results of his previous refusal, promised
in such a case to assent to the designs of England on the Spanish
dominions in America. On this basis, after a year's negotiations, a
secret treaty was concluded in May 1670 at Dover in an interview between
Charles and his sister Henrietta, the Duchess of Orleans. It provided
that Charles should announce his conversion, and that in case of any
disturbance arising from such a step he should be supported by a French
army and a French subsidy. War was to be declared by both powers against
Holland, England furnishing only a small land force, but bearing the
chief burthen of the contest at sea on condition of an annual subsidy of
three hundred thousand pounds.
[Sidenote: The Cabal and the War.]
Nothing marks better the political profligacy of the age than that
Arlington, the author of the Triple Alliance, should have been chosen as
the confidant of Charles in his Treaty of Dover. But to all save
Arlington and Clifford the king's change of religion or his political
aims remained utterly unknown. It would have been impossible to obtain
the consent of the party in the royal council which represented the old
Presbyterians, of Ashley or Lauderdale or the Duke of Buckingham, to the
Treaty of Dover. But it was possible to trick them into approval of a
war with Holland by playing on their desire for a toleration of the
Nonconformists. The announcement of the king's Catholicism was therefore
deferred; and a series of mock negotiations, carried on through
Buckingham, ended in the conclusion of a sham treaty which was
communicated to Lauderdale and to Ashley, a treaty which suppressed all
mention of the religious changes, or of the promise of French aid in
bringing them about, and simply stipulated for a joint war against the
Dutch. In such a war there was no formal breach of the Triple Alliance,
for the Triple Alliance only guarded against an attack on the dominions
of Spain, and Ashley and his colleagues were lured into assent to it in
1671 by the promise of toleration.
[Sidenote: Ashley and the Dutch War.]
Toleration was still Ashley's first thought. He had provided for it only
a year before in the constitution which he had drawn up with the aid of
Locke for the new Colony of Carolina, which drew its name from King
Charles. He looked the more hopefully to the king that in Scotland
toleration had already been brought about by the royal authority.
Nowhere had the system of conformity been more rigidly carried out than
in the northern kingdom. Not only was the renunciation of the Covenant
exacted from every parson and official, but it was proposed to extend it
to every subject in the realm. The fall of Clarendon, however, at once
brought about a change. Lauderdale, who now took the lead in Scotch
affairs, published in 1669 a royal decree which enabled many of the
Presbyterian ministers to return to their flocks. A parliament which was
called under his influence not only recognized the royal supremacy, but
owned the king's right to order the government of the Church and to
dispense with ecclesiastical laws. The new system was just set on foot
in Scotland when Charles came forward to tempt his English ministers
with the same pledge of toleration. With characteristic audacity he
removed the one stumbling-block in the way of his project by yielding
the point to which he had hitherto clung, and promising, as Ashley
demanded, that no Catholic should be benefited by the Indulgence.
Whether the pledge of toleration was the only motive which induced the
ministers to consent to the war with Holland it is hard to tell. Ashley
had shown in bringing about the previous strife that he was no friend of
the Dutch. He regarded a close alliance with France as the one means by
which Charles could find himself strong enough to maintain religious
liberty against the pressure of the Parliament. It is possible that like
most statesmen of the time he looked on the ruin of Holland as a thing
inevitable, and was willing to gain for England whatever he could out of
the wreck. If the United Provinces were to become a part of France it
was better that a part of their territory, and that the most important
part, the Brill, Flushing, and the mouths of the Scheldt, should fall as
had been stipulated to England than that Lewis should have all.
[Sidenote: The Declaration of Indulgence.]
But whatever may have been the motives which influenced Ashley and his
colleagues the bargain was at last struck; and now that his ministers
were outwitted it only remained for Charles to outwit his Parliament. At
the close of 1670 a large subsidy was demanded for the fleet under the
pretext of upholding the Triple Alliance; and the subsidy was granted.
In the spring of 1671 the two Houses were adjourned and vigorous
preparations were made for the coming struggle. But as the rumours of
war gathered strength the country at once became restless and
dissatisfied. The power of Lewis, the renewed persecutions of the
Huguenots, had increased the national hatred of the French. Protestants'
hearts too trembled, as Baxter tells us, at the menacing armaments of
the "Catholic King." On the other hand the sense of a common interest
and a common danger had changed the old jealousy of Holland into a
growing inclination towards the Dutch. Charles and his ministers stood
almost alone in their resolve. "Nearly all the court and all the members
of Parliament that are in town," wrote the French ambassador, "make
cabals to turn the king from his designs." Prince Rupert and the Duke of
Ormond, the heads of the old Royalist and constitutional party,
supported the Dutch embassy which was sent to meet the offers of
mediation made by Spain. So great was the pressure that Charles was only
able to escape from it by plunging hastily into hostilities. In March
1672 a captain in the king's service attacked a Dutch convoy in the
Channel. The attack was at once followed by a declaration of war, and
fresh supplies were obtained for the coming struggle by closing the
Exchequer and suspending, under Clifford's advice, the payment of either
principal or interest on loans advanced to the public Treasury. The
suspension spread bankruptcy among half the goldsmiths of London; but
with the opening of the war Ashley and his colleagues gained the
toleration they had bought so dear. By virtue of his ecclesiastical
powers the king ordered "that all manner of penal laws on matters
ecclesiastical against whatever sort of Nonconformists or recusants
should be from that day suspended," and gave liberty of public worship
to all dissidents save Catholics who were allowed to say mass only in
private houses.
[Sidenote: Bunyan.]
The effect of the Declaration of Indulgence went far to justify Ashley
and his colleagues (if anything could justify their course) in the
bargain by which they purchased toleration. Ministers returned after
years of banishment to their homes and flocks. Chapels were reopened.
The gaols were emptied. Hundreds of Quakers who had been the special
objects of persecution were set free to worship God after their own
fashion. John Bunyan left the prison which had for twelve years been his
home. We have seen the atmosphere of excited feeling in which the youth
of Bunyan had been spent. From his childhood he heard heavenly voices
and saw visions of heaven; from his childhood too he had been wrestling
with an overpowering sense of sin which sickness and repeated escapes
from death did much as he grew up to deepen. But in spite of his
self-reproaches his life was a religious one; and the purity and
sobriety of his youth were shown by his admission at seventeen into the
ranks of the "New Model." Two years later the war was over, and Bunyan,
though hardly twenty, found himself married in 1645 to a "godly" wife
as young and penniless as himself. So poor were the young couple that
they could scarce muster a spoon and a plate between them; and the
poverty of their home deepened perhaps the gloom of the young tinker's
restlessness and religious depression. His wife did what she could to
comfort him, teaching him again to read and write for he had forgotten
his school-learning, and reading with him in two little "godly" books
which formed his library. But darkness only gathered the thicker round
his imaginative soul. "I walked," he tells us of this time, "to a
neighbouring town; and sate down upon a settle in the street, and fell
into a very deep pause about the most fearful state my sin had brought
me to; and after long musing I lifted up my head; but methought I saw as
if the sun that shineth in the heavens did grudge to give me light and
as if the very stones in the street and tiles upon the houses did band
themselves against me. Methought that they all combined together to
banish me out of the world. I was abhorred of them, and wept to dwell
among them, because I had sinned against the Saviour. Oh, how happy now
was every creature over I; for they stood fast and kept their station.
But I was gone and lost."
[Sidenote: Bunyan in prison.]
At last in 1653 after more than two years of this struggle the darkness
broke. Bunyan felt himself "converted" and freed from the burthen of
his sin. He joined a Baptist church at Bedford, and a few years later he
became famous as a preacher. As he held no formal post of minister in
the congregation, his preaching even under the Protectorate was illegal
and "gave great offence," he tells us, "to the doctors and priests of
that county." He persisted, however, with little real molestation until
the Restoration, but only six months had passed after the king's return
when he was committed to Bedford Gaol on a charge of preaching in
unlicensed conventicles. His refusal to promise to abstain from
preaching kept him there eleven years. The gaol was crowded with
prisoners like himself, and amongst them he continued his ministry,
supporting himself by making tagged thread laces, and finding some
comfort in the Bible, the "Book of Martyrs," and the writing materials
which he was suffered to have with him in his prison. But he was in the
prime of life; his age was thirty-two when he was imprisoned; and the
inactivity and severance from his wife and little children were hard to
bear. "The parting with my wife and poor children," he says in words of
simple pathos, "hath often been to me in this place as the pulling of
the flesh from the bones, and that not only because I am somewhat too
fond of those great mercies, but also because I should have often
brought to my mind the many hardships, miseries, and wants that my poor
family was like to meet with should I be taken from them, especially my
poor blind child who lay nearer to my heart than all besides. Oh, the
thoughts of the hardships I thought my poor blind one might go under
would break my heart to pieces. 'Poor child,' thought I, 'what sorrow
art thou like to have for thy portion in this world! Thou must be
beaten, must beg, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand
calamities, though I cannot now endure the wind should blow upon thee.'"
But suffering could not break his purpose, and Bunyan found compensation
for the narrow bounds of his prison in the wonderful activity of his
pen. Tracts, controversial treatises, poems, meditations, his "Grace
Abounding," and his "Holy City," followed each other in quick
succession. It was in his gaol that he wrote the first and greatest part
of his "Pilgrim's Progress."
[Sidenote: The "Pilgrim's Progress."]
The book had only just been completed when the Indulgence set Bunyan
free. Its publication was the earliest result indeed of his deliverance,
and the popularity which it enjoyed from the first proves that the
religious sympathies of the English people were still mainly Puritan.
Before Bunyan's death in 1688 ten editions of the "Pilgrim's Progress"
had already been sold; and though even Cowper hardly dared to quote it a
century later for fear of moving a smile in the polite world about him,
its favour among the middle classes and the poor has grown steadily
from its author's day to our own. It is now the most popular and the
most widely known of all English books. In none do we see more clearly
the new imaginative force which had been given to the common life of
Englishmen by their study of the Bible. Its English is the simplest and
homeliest English which has ever been used by any great English writer;
but it is the English of the Bible. The images of the "Pilgrim's
Progress" are the images of prophet and evangelist; it borrows for its
tenderer outbursts the very verse of the Song of Songs and pictures the
Heavenly City in the words of the Apocalypse. But so completely has the
Bible become Bunyan's life that one feels its phrases as the natural
expression of his thoughts. He has lived in the Bible till its words
have become his own. He has lived among its visions and voices of heaven
till all sense of possible unreality has died away. He tells his tale
with such a perfect naturalness that allegories become living things,
that the Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle are as real to us as
places we see every day, that we know Mr. Legality and Mr. Worldly
Wiseman as if we had met them in the street. It is in this amazing
reality of impersonation that Bunyan's imaginative genius specially
displays itself. But this is far from being his only excellence. In its
range, in its directness, in its simple grace, in the ease with which it
changes from lively dialogue to dramatic action, from simple pathos to
passionate earnestness, in the subtle and delicate fancy which often
suffuses its childlike words, in its playful humour, its bold
character-painting, in the even and balanced power which passes without
effort from the Valley of the Shadow of Death to the land "where the
Shining Ones commonly walked because it was on the borders of heaven,"
in its sunny kindliness unbroken by one bitter word, the "Pilgrim's
Progress" is among the noblest of English poems. For if Puritanism had
first discovered the poetry which contact with the spiritual world
awakes in the meanest souls, Bunyan was the first of the Puritans who
revealed this poetry to the outer world. The journey of Christian from
the City of Destruction to the Heavenly City is simply a record of the
life of such a Puritan as Bunyan himself, seen through an imaginative
haze of spiritual idealism in which its commonest incidents are
heightened and glorified. He is himself the pilgrim who flies from the
City of Destruction, who climbs the hill Difficulty, who faces Apollyon,
who sees his loved ones cross the river of Death towards the Heavenly
City, and how, because "the Hill on which the City was framed was higher
than the clouds, they therefore went up through the region of the air,
sweetly talking as they went."
[Sidenote: The attack on Holland.]
Great, however, as was the relief of the Indulgence to men like Bunyan,
it was difficult to wring from the bulk of the Nonconformists any
expression of gratitude or satisfaction. Dear as toleration was to them,
the general interests of religion were dearer, and not only these but
national freedom was now at stake. Holland, the bulwark of Protestantism
abroad, seemed to crumble into ruin at the first blow of France. Lewis
passed the Rhine on the twelfth of June, and overran three of the States
without opposition. It was only by skill and desperate courage that the
Dutch ships under De Ruyter held the English fleet under the Duke of
York at bay in an obstinate battle off the coast of Suffolk. Till almost
the eve of the struggle, in fact, the Dutch had been wrapt in a false
security. The French alliance had been their traditional policy since
the days of Henry the Fourth, and it was especially dear to the great
merchant class which had mounted to power on the fall of the House of
Orange. John de Witt, the leader of this party, though he had been
forced to conclude the Triple Alliance by the previous advance of Lewis
to the Rhine, had expressly refused to join England in an attack on
France, and still clung blindly to her friendship. His trust only broke
down when the glare of the French watch-fires was seen from the walls of
Amsterdam.
[Sidenote: The Prince of Orange.]
For the moment Holland lay crushed at the feet of Lewis, but the
arrogant demands of the conqueror roused again the stubborn courage
which had wrested victory from Alva and worn out the pride of Philip
the Second. De Witt was murdered in a popular tumult, and his fall
called William, the Prince of Orange, to the head of the Republic. The
new Stadtholder had hardly reached manhood; but he had no sooner taken
the lead in public affairs than his great qualities made themselves
felt. His earlier life had schooled him in a wonderful self-control. He
had been left fatherless and all but friendless in childhood; he had
been bred among men who regarded his very existence as a danger to the
State; his words had been watched, his looks noted, his friends
jealously withdrawn. In such an atmosphere the boy grew up silent, wary,
self-contained, grave in temper, cold in demeanour, blunt and even
repulsive in address. He was weak and sickly from his cradle, and
manhood brought with it an asthma and consumption which shook his frame
with a constant cough; his face was sullen and bloodless, and scored
with deep lines which told of ceaseless pain. But beneath this cold and
sickly presence lay a fiery and commanding temper, an immovable courage,
and a political ability of the highest order. William was a born
statesman. Neglected as his education had been in other ways, for he
knew nothing of letters or of art, he had been carefully trained in
politics by John de Witt; and the wide knowledge with which in his first
address to the States-General the young Stadtholder reviewed the
general state of Europe, the sagacity with which he calculated the
chances of the struggle, at once won him the trust of his countrymen.
[Sidenote: William and the French Invasion.]
Their trust was soon rewarded. The plot of the two courts hung for its
success on the chances of a rapid surprise, and with the approach of
winter, a season in which military operations were then suspended, all
chance of a surprise was over. William rapidly turned the respite to
good account. Young as he was, he displayed from the first the cool
courage and dogged tenacity of his race. "Do you not see your country is
lost?" asked the Duke of Buckingham when he was sent to negotiate at the
Hague. "There is a sure way never to see it lost," replied William, "and
that is to die in the last ditch." With the spring of 1673 the tide
began to turn. Holland was saved, and province after province won back
from the arms of France by William's dauntless resolve. Like his great
ancestor, William the Silent, he was a luckless commander, and no
general had to bear more frequent defeats. But he profited by defeat as
other men profit by victory. His bravery indeed was of that nobler cast
which rises to its height in moments of ruin and dismay. The coolness
with which, boy-general as he was, he rallied his broken squadrons
amidst the rout of Seneff and wrested from Condé at the last the fruits
of his victory moved his veteran opponent to a generous admiration. It
was at such moments indeed that the real temper of the man broke through
the veil of his usual reserve. A strange light flashed from his eyes as
soon as he was under fire; and in the terror and confusion of defeat his
cold and repulsive manner was thrown aside for an ease and gaiety which
charmed every soldier around him.
[Sidenote: Parliament and the War.]
The gallant struggle of the prince was hardly needed to win the
sympathies of Englishmen to the cause of the Dutch. In the exultation of
the first moment of triumph Charles had lavished honours on the leaders
of both the parties in his cabinet. Clifford became Lord Treasurer,
Ashley was made Chancellor and raised to the earldom of Shaftesbury. But
the dream of triumph soon passed away. The Duke of York had owned at the
outset of the war that recourse could only be had to Parliament when
success had put Charles in a position "to obtain by force what he could
not get by pleasanter ways." But the delay of winter exhausted the
supplies which had been procured so unscrupulously, while the closing of
the Treasury had shaken credit and rendered it impossible to raise a
loan. It was necessary therefore in 1673, though the success Charles had
counted on was still delayed, to appeal to the Commons. But the Commons
met in a mood of angry distrust. The war, unpopular as it was, they left
alone. What overpowered all other feelings was a vague sense, which we
know now to have been justified by the facts, that liberty and religion
were being unscrupulously betrayed. There was a suspicion that the whole
armed force of the nation was in Catholic hands. The Duke of York was
suspected of being in heart a Catholic, and he was in command of the
fleet. Catholics had been placed as officers in the land force which was
being raised for a descent upon Holland. Lady Castlemaine, the king's
mistress, paraded her change of faith; and doubts were fast gathering
over the Protestantism of the king. There was a general dread that a
plot was on foot for the establishment of Catholicism and despotism, and
that the war and the Indulgence were parts of the plot.
[Sidenote: The Test Act.]
The change of temper in the Commons was marked by the appearance of what
was from that time called the Country party with Lord Russell, Lord
Cavendish, and Sir William Coventry at its head, a party which
sympathized with the desire of the Nonconformists for religious
toleration, but looked on it as its first duty to guard against the
political and religious designs of the Court. The House listened unmoved
to the fiery address of the new Lord Chancellor in favour of the war, an
address which ended with the phrase, "Delenda est Carthago," so often
quoted against him afterwards, as they listened unmoved to the king's
declaration of his steady adherence to the Indulgence. "I shall take it
very ill," said Charles, with unusual haughtiness, "to receive
contradiction in what I have done; and, I will deal plainly with you, I
am resolved to stick to my declaration." As to the Declaration of
Indulgence, however, all parties in the House were at one. The Commons
resolved "that penal statutes in matters ecclesiastical cannot be
suspended but by consent of Parliament," and refused supplies till the
Declaration was recalled. The king yielded after long hesitation, for
the grant of supplies was still before the House and France counselled
compliance. But the Declaration was no sooner recalled than the
Parliament passed from considerations of the past to provisions for the
future. A Test Act was passed through both Houses without opposition,
which required that every one in the civil and military employment of
the State should take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, subscribe a
declaration against transubstantiation, and receive the sacrament
according to the rites of the Church of England. It was known that the
dissidents were prepared to waive all objection either to oath or
sacrament, and the result of the Bill therefore was to bring
Protestants, if not to union, yet a step nearer to one another.
Catholics, on the other hand, were wholly excluded from all share in the
government of the State. The Act was fatal to the king's schemes, and
Clifford at once counselled resistance while Buckingham talked
flightily about bringing the army to London. But the grant of a subsidy
was still held in suspense till the Test was accepted: and Arlington,
who saw that all hope of carrying the "great plan" through was at an end
and looked to the Test as a means of freeing himself from Clifford's
rivalry in the cabinet, pressed Charles to yield. A dissolution in fact
was the king's only resource, but in the temper of the nation a new
Parliament would have been yet more violent than the present one.
Charles therefore sullenly gave his assent to the Bill.
[Sidenote: Shaftesbury.]
Few measures have ever brought about more startling results than the
Test Act. It was no sooner passed than the Duke of York owned himself a
Catholic and resigned his office as Lord High Admiral. Throngs of
excited people gathered round the Lord Treasurer's house at the news
that Clifford too had owned to being a Catholic and had laid down his
staff of office. Their resignation was followed by that of hundreds of
others in the army and the civil service of the Crown. On public opinion
the effect of these discoveries was wonderful. "I dare not write all the
strange talk of the town," says Evelyn. The resignations were held to
have proved the existence of the dangers which the Test had been framed
to meet. From this moment all trust in Charles was at an end. "The
king," Shaftesbury said bitterly, "who if he had been so happy as to
have been born a private gentleman had certainly passed for a man of
good parts, excellent breeding, and well natured, hath now, being a
Prince, brought his affairs to that pass that there is not a person in
the world, man or woman, that dares rely upon him or put any confidence
in his word or friendship." The one man in England indeed on whom the
discovery of the king's perfidy fell with the most crushing effect was
Shaftesbury himself. Ashley Cooper had piqued himself on a penetration
which read the characters of men around him and on a political instinct
which discerned every coming change. He had bought, as he believed, the
Declaration of Indulgence, the release of the imprisoned Nonconformists,
and freedom of worship for all dissidents, at the price of a consent to
the second attack on Holland; and he was looked on by the public at
large as the minister most responsible both for the measures he advised
and the measures he had nothing to do with. But while facing the
gathering storm of unpopularity, Ashley learnt in a moment of drunken
confidence the secret of the king's religion. He owned to a friend "his
trouble at the black cloud which was gathering over England"; but
troubled as he was he still believed himself strong enough to use
Charles for his own purposes. His acceptance of the Chancellorship and
of the earldom of Shaftesbury, as well as his violent defence of the war
on opening the Parliament, identified him yet more with the royal
policy. It was after the opening of the Parliament, if we credit the
statement of the French Ambassador, a statement which squares with the
sudden change in his course, that he learnt from Arlington, who desired
to secure his help in driving Clifford from the royal councils, the
secret of the Treaty of Dover.
[Sidenote: Shaftesbury's change of Policy.]
Whether this was so, or whether suspicion as in the people at large
deepened into certainty, Shaftesbury saw he had been duped. To the
bitterness of such a discovery was added the bitterness of having aided
in schemes which he abhorred. His change of policy was rapid and
complete. He pressed in the royal council for the withdrawal of the
Declaration of Indulgence. In Parliament he supported the Test Act with
extraordinary vehemence. But he was far from any thought of resigning
his post. He clung to it in fact more tenaciously than ever, for the
displacement of James and Clifford by the test left him, as he thought,
dominant in the royal council, and gave him hopes of revenging the
deceit which had been practised on him by forcing his policy on the
king. He was resolved to end the war. He had dreams of meeting the
danger of a Catholic successor by a dissolution of the king's marriage
with Catharine and by a fresh match with a Protestant princess. For the
moment indeed Charles was helpless. He found himself, as he had told
Lewis long before, alone in his realm. The Test Act had been passed
unanimously by both Houses. Even the Nonconformists deserted him and
preferred persecution to the support of his plans. The dismissal of the
Catholic officers made the employment of force, if he ever contemplated
it, impossible, while the ill success of the Dutch war robbed him of all
hope of aid from France. The firmness of the Prince of Orange had roused
the stubborn energy of his countrymen; the French conquests on land were
slowly won back; and at sea the fleet of the allies was still held in
check by the fine seamanship of De Ruyter. Nor was William less
successful in diplomacy than in war. The House of Austria was at last
stirred to action by the danger which threatened Europe; and its union
with the United Provinces laid the foundation of the Grand Alliance.
[Sidenote: Shaftesbury's dismissal.]
Charles indeed was still firm to continue the war. He had gathered an
army on the coast for a descent upon Holland, and he again sent his
fleet to sea under Prince Rupert to clear the way for its landing. But
the gallantry and seamanship of Tromp forced Rupert to withdraw after an
indecisive engagement, and the descent on the Dutch coast had become
impossible when the Parliament again met in October. The House was
resolved upon peace, and Shaftesbury was as determined to end the war as
the House itself. It was for this purpose that he threw himself into
hearty alliance with the Country party in the Commons and welcomed the
Duke of Ormond and Prince Rupert, who were looked upon as "great
Parliament men," back to the royal council. It was to Shaftesbury's
influence that Charles attributed the dislike which the Commons
displayed to the war and their refusal of a grant of supplies for it
until fresh religious securities were devised. It was at his instigation
that an address was presented by both Houses at the end of 1673 against
the plan of marrying James to a Catholic princess, Mary of Modena, a
plan which as James was still without a male heir promised to secure the
succession, should a son be the result of the marriage, in a Catholic
line. But Charles was not yet inclined to play the part of a mere puppet
in other men's hands, and the projects of Shaftesbury were suddenly
interrupted by an unexpected act of vigour on the part of the king. The
Houses were prorogued in November, and the Chancellor was ordered to
deliver up the Seals.
[Sidenote: The Public Panic.]
"It is only laying down my gown and buckling on my sword," Shaftesbury
is said to have replied to the royal bidding; and though the words were
innocent enough, for the sword was part of the usual dress of a
gentleman which he must necessarily resume when he laid aside the gown
of the Chancellor, they were taken as conveying a covert threat. He was
still determined to force on the king a peace with the States. But he
looked forward to the dangers of the future with even greater anxiety
than to those of the present. The Duke of York, the successor to the
throne, had owned himself a Catholic; and almost every one agreed that
securities for the national religion would be necessary in the case of
his accession. But Shaftesbury saw, and it is his especial merit that he
did see, that with a king like James, convinced of his Divine Right and
bigoted in his religious fervour, securities were valueless. From the
first he determined to force on Charles his brother's exclusion from the
throne, and his resolve was justified by the Revolution, which finally
did the work he proposed to do. Unhappily he was equally determined to
fight Charles with weapons as vile as his own. The result of Clifford's
resignation, of James's acknowledgement of his conversion, had been to
destroy all belief in the honesty of public men. A panic of distrust had
begun. The fatal truth was whispered that Charles himself was a
Catholic. In spite of the Test Act it was suspected that men Catholics
in heart still held high office in the State, and we know that in
Arlington's case the suspicion was just. Shaftesbury seized on this
public alarm, stirred above all by a sense of inability to meet the
secret dangers which day after day was disclosing, as the means of
carrying out his plans. He began fanning the panic by tales of a Papist
rising in London and of a coming Irish revolt with a French army to back
it. He retired to his house in the City to find security against a
conspiracy which had been formed, he said, to cut his throat. Meanwhile
he rapidly organized the Country party in the Parliament and placed
himself openly at its head. An address for the removal of ministers
"popishly affected or otherwise obnoxious or dangerous" was presented on
the reassembling of the Houses in 1674. The Lower House called on the
king to dismiss Lauderdale, Buckingham, and Arlington, and to disband
the troops he had raised since 1664. A bill was brought in to prevent
all Catholics from approaching the Court, in other words for removing
James from the king's Councils. A far more important bill was that of
the Protestant Securities which was pressed by Shaftesbury, Halifax, and
Carlisle, the leaders of the new Opposition in the House of Lords, a
bill which enacted that any prince of the blood should forfeit his right
to the Crown on his marriage with a Catholic.
[Sidenote: Peace with Holland.]
The bill, which was the first sketch of the later Exclusion Bill, failed
to pass, but its failure left the Houses excited and alarmed.
Shaftesbury intrigued busily in the City, corresponded with William of
Orange, and pressed for a war with France which Charles could only avert
by an appeal to Lewis, a subsidy from whom enabled him to prorogue the
Parliament. But Charles saw that the time had come to give way. Spain
was now joining Holland, and a war with Spain would have deprived
English merchants of their most lucrative branch of commerce. The
refusal of supplies by the Commons hastened the king's resolve. "Things
have turned out ill," he said to Temple with a burst of unusual
petulance, "but had I been well served I might have made a good business
of it." His concessions however were as usual complete. He dismissed
Buckingham and Arlington from office. He made peace with the Dutch. But
Charles was never more formidable than in the moment of defeat, and he
had already determined on a new policy by which the efforts of
Shaftesbury and the Country party might be held at bay. Ever since the
opening of his reign he had clung to a system of balance, had pitted
Churchman against Nonconformist and Ashley against Clarendon, partly to
preserve his own independence and partly with a view of winning some
advantage to the Catholics from the political strife. The temper of the
Commons had enabled Clarendon to baffle the king's attempts; and on his
fall Charles felt strong enough to abandon the attempt to preserve a
political balance and had sought to carry out his designs with the
single support of the Nonconformists. But the new policy had broken down
like the old. The Nonconformists refused to betray the cause of
Protestantism, and Shaftesbury, their leader, was pressing on measures
which would rob Catholicism of the hopes it had gained from the
conversion of James. In straits like these Charles resolved to win back
the Commons by boldly adopting the policy on which the House was set.
[Sidenote: Danby.]
The majority of its members were still a mass of Cavalier Churchmen, who
regarded Sir Thomas Osborne, a dependant of Arlington's, as their
representative in the royal councils. The king had already created
Osborne Earl of Danby and raised him to the post of Lord Treasurer in
Clifford's room. In 1674 he frankly adopted the policy of Danby and of
his party in the Parliament. The policy of Danby was in the main that of
Clarendon. He had all Clarendon's love of the Church, his equal hatred
of Popery and Dissent, his high notions of the prerogative tempered by a
faith in Parliament and the law. His policy rested like Clarendon's on a
union between the king and the two Houses. He was a staunch Protestant,
and his English pride revolted against any schemes which involved
dependence on France. But he was a staunch Royalist. He wished for a
French war, but he would not force the king to fight France against his
will. His terror of Popery failed to win him over to any plans for a
change in the succession. The first efforts indeed of the king and his
minister were directed to strengthen James's position by measures which
would allay the popular panic. Mary, the Duke's eldest child and after
him the presumptive heir to the Crown, was confirmed by the royal order
as a Protestant. It was through Mary indeed that Charles aimed at
securing the Prince of Orange. The popularity of William throughout the
Protestant world was great; and in England, as the terror of a Popish
king increased, men remembered that were James and his house excluded
from the throne William as the king's nephew, the son of his sister Mary
and the grandson of Charles the First, stood next in succession to the
Crown. The Prince was drawn by his desire to detach England from the
French alliance into close connexion with Shaftesbury and the leaders of
the Country party, and already pledges from this quarter had reached him
that he should be declared heir to the throne. It was to meet this
danger that Charles resolved to offer William the hand of the Duke's
daughter, Mary. Such a marriage secured James against the one formidable
rival to his claims, while it opened to William a far safer chance of
mounting the throne at his father-in-law's death in right of his wife.
The prospect too of such a Protestant succession might well allay much
of the panic which was spreading through the country as men looked
forward to the accession of a Catholic king.
[Sidenote: Danby and the Commons.]
The secret negotiations for this marriage which began at the close of
1674 were accompanied by conferences between Danby and the bishops which
restored the union between the Church and the Crown. The first fruits of
this agreement were seen in the rigorous enforcement of the law against
conventicles and the exclusion of all Catholics from Court; while the
Parliament which reassembled in 1675 was assured that the Test Act
should be rigorously enforced. The change in the royal policy came not a
moment too soon. As it was the aid of the Cavalier party which rallied
round Danby hardly saved the king from the humiliation of being forced
to recall the troops he still maintained in the French service. To gain
a majority on this point Danby was forced to avail himself of a resource
which from this time played for nearly a hundred years an important part
in English politics. Every hour showed more clearly how fatal to its
healthy working was the abandonment of the reforms which the Long
Parliament and Cromwell had introduced into the composition of the House
of Commons. The influence of that House was growing greater and greater
on public affairs. In spite of the king's vigorous resistance it was
reviewing expenditure, dictating its own policy in Church and State,
checking the royal action even in foreign affairs, denouncing ministers
and driving them from office, meddling now even with the succession to
the Crown. It did this as representing the people, and yet the people
could hardly be said to be represented. The counties alone really
returned their own members, and in the counties the franchise was
limited to freeholders. In all but the larger towns the nomination of
members lay in the hands of close corporations. A large number of
so-called boroughs had ceased to have any real existence at all. Their
representatives were simply nominees of the Crown or of neighbouring
landowners.
[Sidenote: Policy of corruption and persecution.]
On great questions so imperfect a composition of the representative body
mattered indeed little, for whatever were their origin the members
shared in the general national feeling and expressed fairly the national
sentiment. But in the common business of Parliament and in questions of
detail it told fatally on the temper of the House. The members were
conscious of their power, but they were checked by little sense of
responsibility for its exercise. They were open therefore to the meanest
and most selfish influences. Charles had done much by "closeting" them.
Danby, bolder and less ingenious, trusted to coarser means. With him
began the system of direct bribery which was to culminate in the
Parliamentary corruption of the Pelhams. He was more successful in
winning back the majority of the Commons from their alliance with the
Country party by reviving the old spirit of religious persecution. With
the view of breaking up the growing union between the Churchmen and the
Nonconformists as well as of driving from Parliament the Presbyterian
members who formed the strength of the Country party, and whose numbers
increased as time brought fresh elections, he proposed that the test
which had been imposed by Clarendon on municipal officers should be
extended to all functionaries of the State, that every member of either
House, every magistrate and public officer, should swear never to take
arms against the king or to "endeavour any alteration of the Protestant
religion now established by law in the Church of England, or any
alteration in the Government in Church and State as it is by law
established." The Bill was forced through the Lords by the bishops and
the Cavalier party, and its passage through the Commons was only averted
by a quarrel on privilege between the two Houses which Shaftesbury
dexterously fanned into flame.
[Sidenote: Charles turns to France.]
On the other hand the Country party remained strong enough to hamper
their grant of supplies with conditions which rendered it unacceptable
to the king. Eager as they were for the war with France which Danby
promised, the Commons could not trust the king; and Danby was soon to
discover how wise their distrust had been. For the Houses were no sooner
prorogued in November 1675 than Charles revealed to him the negotiations
he had been all the while carrying on with Lewis. To France, hard
pressed as she was by the allies, the entry of England into the war
would have been ruinous; and Lewis was eager to avert this danger by
promising Charles a subsidy should the Parliament strive to force on him
a war policy by refusing or limiting supplies. Charles, who still looked
to France for aid in his plans and who believed war would deliver him
helplessly into the power of the Parliament, was as ready to accept the
money as Lewis to give it. At this juncture therefore he called on Danby
to sign a treaty by which, on consideration of a yearly pension
guaranteed on the part of France, the two sovereigns bound themselves to
enter into no engagements with other powers, and to lend each other aid
in case of rebellion in their dominions. Such a treaty not only bound
England to dependence on France, but freed the king from all
Parliamentary control. But his minister pleaded in vain for delay and
for the advice of the Council. Charles answered his entreaties by
signing the treaty with his own hand.
[Sidenote: Danby's measures.]
Danby found himself duped by the king as Shaftesbury had found himself
duped; but his bold temper was only spurred to fresh plans for rescuing
the king from his bondage to Lewis. To do this the first step was fully
to reconcile the king and the Parliament, which met again in February
1677 after a prorogation of fifteen months. The Country party stood in
the way of such a reconciliation, but Danby resolved to break its
strength by measures of unscrupulous vigour for which a blunder of
Shaftesbury's gave an opportunity. Shaftesbury despaired of bringing the
House of Commons, elected as it had been fifteen years before in a
moment of religious and political reaction, to any steady opposition to
the Crown. He had already moved an address for its dissolution; and he
now urged that as a statute of Edward the Third ordained that
Parliaments should be held "once a year or oftener if need be" the
Parliament by the recent prorogation of a year and a half had ceased
legally to exist. The Triennial Act deprived such an argument of any
force, and its only effect was to place the Country party in an
injudicious position of general hostility to the existing Parliament.
But Danby represented it as a contempt of the House, and the Lords at
his bidding committed its supporters, Shaftesbury, Buckingham,
Salisbury, and Wharton, to the Tower. While the Opposition cowered under
the blow Danby pushed on a measure which was designed to win back
alarmed Churchmen to confidence in the Crown. The terror of a Catholic
successor grew steadily throughout the country, and it was to meet this
terror that Danby devised his Bill for the security of the Church. By
this Bill it was provided that on the succession of any king who was not
a member of the Established Church the appointment of bishops should be
vested in the existing body of prelates, and that the king's children
should be placed in the guardianship of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
[Sidenote: The cry for War.]
The bill however failed in the Commons; and a grant of supply unchecked
by the appropriation of the money to special services, a limitation
which Charles steadily opposed, was only obtained by Danby's profuse
bribery. The progress of the war abroad indeed was rousing panic in
England faster than Danby could allay it. New successes of the French
arms in Flanders and a defeat of the Prince of Orange at Cassel stirred
the whole country to a cry for war. The two Houses united in an address
to the Crown which prayed that England might enter into the Great
Alliance that William had built up, but Charles parried the blow by
demanding a supply before the war was declared and by a new prorogation
of the House on a new refusal. Fresh and larger subsidies from France
enabled him to continue this prorogation for seven months. But the
silence of the Parliament did little to silence the country; and Danby
took advantage of the popular cry for war to press an energetic course
of action on the king. In its will to check French aggression the
Cavalier party was as earnest as the Puritan, and Danby aimed at
redeeming his failure at home by uniting the Parliament through a
vigorous policy abroad.
[Sidenote: Marriage of William and Mary.]
As usual Charles appeared to give way. He was himself for the moment
uneasy at the appearance of the French on the Flemish coast, and he
owned that "he could never live at ease with his subjects" if Flanders
were abandoned. He allowed Danby therefore to press on both parties the
necessity for mutual concessions, and to define the new attitude of
England by reviving the project for a match between Mary and William of
Orange. William's distrust of Arlington, by whom the proposal of it had
been made to him, had led the Prince at first to set aside the scheme.
But he had never lost sight of it, and the counsels of Sir William
Temple had brought him in 1677 to make overtures for its realization.
Charles and Danby had still the same reasons for desiring it, and the
marriage took place on William's visit to England in September. As the
king was childless and James had no son Mary was presumptive heiress of
the Crown. The marriage therefore promised a close political union in
the future with Holland, and a corresponding opposition to the ambition
of France. With the country it was popular as a Protestant match and as
ensuring a Protestant successor to James. But Lewis was bitterly
angered; he rejected the English propositions of peace and again sent
his army into the field. Danby was ready to accept the challenge. The
withdrawal of the English ambassador from Paris was followed in 1678 by
an assembly of the Parliament; a warlike speech from the throne was
answered by a warlike address from the House, large supplies were voted
and an army raised.
[Sidenote: Peace of Nimeguen.]
But the actual declaration of war still failed to appear; indeed Charles
was in heart as disinclined for war as ever. While Danby threatened
France the king was busy turning the threat to his own profit, and
gaining time by prorogations for a series of base negotiations. At one
stage he demanded from Lewis a fresh pension for the next three years
as the price of his good offices with the allies. Danby stooped to write
the demand, and Charles added "This letter is written by my order, C.
R." A force of three thousand English soldiers was landed at Ostend; but
the allies were already broken by their suspicions of the king's real
policy, and Charles soon agreed for a fresh pension to recall the
brigade. The bargain was hardly struck when Lewis withdrew the terms of
peace he had himself offered and on the faith of which England had
ostensibly retired from the scene. Once more Danby offered aid to the
allies. But all faith in England had now disappeared. One hostile power
after another gave assent to the new conditions laid down by France, and
though Holland, the original cause of the war, was saved, the Peace of
Nimeguen in July 1678 made Lewis the arbiter of Europe.
[Illustration: EUROPE From 1648 to 1700 from Spruner.]
[Sidenote: The Catholic hopes.]
Disgraceful as the peace was to England, it left Charles the master of a
force of twenty thousand men levied for a war he had refused to declare.
It left him too with nearly a million of French money in his pocket. His
course had roused into fresh life the old suspicions of his perfidy and
of a secret plot with Lewis for the ruin of English freedom and of
English religion. That there was such a plot we know; and from the
moment of the Treaty of Dover the hopes of the Catholic party had
mounted even faster than the panic of the Protestants. But they had
been bitterly disappointed by the king's sudden withdrawal from the
prosecution of his schemes after his four years' ineffectual struggle,
and roused to wild anger by his seeming return to the policy of
Clarendon. Their anger and disappointment were revealed in the letters
from English Jesuits which were afterwards to play so fatal a part in
begetting a belief in the plot, and in the correspondence of Coleman.
Coleman was secretary of the Duchess of York and a busy intriguer, who
had gained sufficient knowledge of the real plans of the king and of his
brother to warrant him in begging money from Lewis for the work of
saving Catholic interests from Danby's hostility by intrigues in the
Parliament. A passage from one of his letters gives us a glimpse of the
wild dreams which were stirring among the hotter Catholics of the time.
"They had a mighty work on their hands," he wrote, "no less than the
conversion of three kingdoms, and by that perhaps the utter subduing of
a pestilent heresy which had so long domineered over a great part of the
northern world. Success would give the greatest blow to the Protestant
religion that it had received since its birth." But while the despair of
the Catholic party was unknown their previous attitude of confidence had
stirred suspicions in the public mind which mounted into alarm when the
Peace of Nimeguen suddenly left Charles master--as it seemed--of the
position, and it was of this general panic that one of the vile
impostors who are always thrown to the surface at times of great public
agitation was ready to take advantage by the invention of a Popish plot.
[Sidenote: Titus Oates.]
Titus Oates, a Baptist minister before the Restoration, a curate and
navy chaplain after it, but left penniless by his infamous repute, had
sought bread in a conversion to Catholicism, and had been received into
Jesuit houses at Valladolid and St. Omer. While he remained there he
learnt the fact of a secret meeting of the Jesuits in London which was
probably nothing but the usual congregation of the order, and on his
expulsion for misconduct this single fact widened in his fertile brain
into a plot for the subversion of Protestantism and the death of the
king. His story was laid before Charles in the August of 1678 and
received, as was natural enough, with the cool incredulity of one who
knew what plot there really had been; but Oates made affidavit of its
truth before a London magistrate, Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey, and at last
managed to appear before the Council. He declared that he had been
trusted with letters which disclosed the Jesuit plans. They were
stirring rebellion in Ireland; in Scotland they disguised themselves as
Cameronians; in England their aim was to assassinate the king and to
leave the throne open to the Papist Duke of York. The extracts from
Jesuit letters, however, which he produced, though they showed the
bitter disappointment and anger of their writers at the king's
withdrawal from his schemes, threw no light on the monstrous charges of
a plot for his assassination. Oates would have been dismissed indeed
with contempt but for the seizure of Coleman's correspondence. The
letters of this intriguer, believed as he was to be in the confidence of
the Duke of York, gave a new colour to the plot. Danby himself,
conscious of the truth that there really were designs which Charles
dared not avow, was shaken in his rejection of the disclosures and
inclined to use them as weapons to check the king in his Catholic
policy. But a more dexterous hand had already seized on the growing
panic. Lord Shaftesbury, released after a long imprisonment from the
Tower, ready since his discovery of the Treaty of Dover to believe in
any conspiracy between the Catholics and the king, and hopeless of
foiling the king's policy in any other way, threw himself into the plot.
"Let the Treasurer cry as loud as he pleases against Popery," he
laughed, "I will cry a note louder." But no cry was needed to heighten
the popular frenzy from the moment when Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey, the
magistrate before whom Oates had laid his information, was found in a
field near London with his sword run through his heart. His death was
assumed to be murder, and the murder to be an attempt of the Jesuits to
"stifle the plot." A solemn funeral added to the public agitation; and
the two Houses named committees to investigate the charges made by
Oates.
[Sidenote: Shaftesbury and the Plot.]
In this investigation Shaftesbury took the lead. Whatever his personal
ambition may have been, his public aims in all that followed were wise
and far-sighted. He aimed at forcing Charles to dissolve the Parliament
and appeal again to the nation. He aimed at driving Danby out of office
and at forcing on Charles a ministry which should break his dependence
on France and give a constitutional turn to his policy. He saw that no
security would really avail to meet the danger of a Catholic sovereign,
and he aimed at excluding James from the throne. But in pursuing these
aims he threw himself from that moment wholly on the plot. He fanned the
popular panic by accepting without question some fresh depositions in
which Oates charged five Catholic peers with part in the Jesuit
conspiracy. Two of these five, Lords Arundell and Bellasys, had in fact
taken part in the preliminary conference which led to the Treaty of
Dover. Of this nothing was known, but the five were sent to the Tower
and two thousand suspected persons were hurried to prison. A
proclamation ordered every Catholic to leave London. The train-bands
were called to arms, and patrols paraded through the streets to guard
against the Catholic rising which Oates declared to be at hand.
Meanwhile Shaftesbury turned the panic to political account. He
fiercely demanded in the House of Lords the exclusion of the Duke of
York from the king's Council, and his demand was repeated in an address
of the Commons. Charles met the attack with consummate skill.
Anticipating the future Exclusion Bill, he declared himself ready to
sanction any measures which secured the Protestant religion so long as
they left untouched the right of hereditary succession and the just
power of the Crown. Shaftesbury retorted by forcing through Parliament
at the end of 1678 a bill which excluded Catholics from a seat in either
House. The exclusion remained in force for a century and a half; but it
had really been aimed against the Duke of York, and Shaftesbury was
defeated by a proviso which exempted James from the operation of the
bill.
[Sidenote: Lewis and the Plot.]
The plot, which had been supported for four months by the sole evidence
of Oates, began to hang fire at the opening of 1679; but a promise of
reward brought forward a villain named Bedloe with tales beside which
those of Oates seemed tame. The two informers were pressed forward by an
infamous rivalry to stranger and stranger revelations. Bedloe swore to
the existence of a plot for the landing of a Catholic army and a general
massacre of the Protestants. Oates capped the revelations of Bedloe by
charging the queen herself at the bar of the Lords with knowledge of the
plot to murder her husband. Monstrous as such charges were they revived
the waning frenzy of the people and of the two Houses. The peers under
arrest were ordered to be impeached. A new proclamation enjoined the
arrest of every Catholic in the realm. A series of judicial murders
began with the trial and execution of Coleman which even now can only be
remembered with horror. But the alarm must soon have worn out had it
only been supported by perjury. What gave force to the false plot was
the existence of a true one. Coleman's letters had won credit for the
perjuries of Oates, and a fresh discovery now won credit for the
perjuries of Bedloe.
[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Parliament.]
From the moment when the pressure of the Commons and of Danby had forced
Charles into a position of seeming antagonism to France Lewis had
resolved to bring about the dissolution of the Parliament, the fall of
the minister, and the disbanding of the army which Danby still looked on
as a weapon against him. The aims of the Country party were the same as
those of the French king, and even before the Peace of Nimeguen the
French ambassador, Barillon, had succeeded in opening a correspondence
on these points with its leaders, with Shaftesbury, Halifax, and Lord
Russell. A closer connexion was negotiated in 1678 through the mediation
of Algernon Sidney; and money was entrusted to Russell and other
prominent members of the Country party by Barillon to be used in the
bribery which, disgraceful as it was, was now almost necessary to
counteract the bribery of Danby. The confederates soon brought a more
effective weapon into play. The English ambassador at Paris, Ralph
Montagu, returned home on a quarrel with Danby, obtained a seat in the
House of Commons, and in spite of the seizure of his papers laid on the
table of the House the despatch which had been forwarded to Lewis,
demanding payment for the king's services to France during the late
negotiations. The Commons were thunderstruck; for strong as had been the
general suspicion the fact of the dependence of England on a foreign
power had never before been proved. Danby's name was signed to the
despatch, and he was at once impeached on a charge of high treason. But
Shaftesbury was more eager to secure the election of a new Parliament
than to punish his rival, and Charles was resolved to prevent at any
price a trial which could not fail to reveal the disgraceful secret of
his foreign policy. Charles was in fact at Shaftesbury's mercy, and the
end for which Shaftesbury had been playing was at last secured. In
January 1679 the Parliament of 1661, after the longest unbroken life in
our Parliamentary annals, was at last dissolved.
[Sidenote: The New Ministry.]
A new Parliament was at once summoned and its election took place in a
tumult of national excitement. The process of Parliamentary corruption
now took a further step. Danby had begun the bribery of members. With
the election of 1679 began on a large and systematic scale the bribery
or "treating" of constituents. If members had come to realize the money
value of the seats they held, the voters for these members were quick to
realize the money value of the seats they bestowed. "I am told," writes
the Venetian ambassador, Sarotti, "that in the more conspicuous and
populous places their election will cost some of the candidates five
thousand scudi (about a thousand pounds) each." The new members were
still for the most part Churchmen and country gentlemen, but they shared
the alarm of the country, and even before their assembly in March their
temper had told on the king's policy. James was sent to Brussels.
Charles began to disband the army and promised that Danby should soon
withdraw from office. In his speech from the throne he asked for
supplies to maintain the Protestant attitude of his Government in
foreign affairs. But it was impossible to avert Danby's fall. The
Commons insisted on carrying his impeachment to the bar of the Lords. It
was necessary to dismiss him from his post of Treasurer and to construct
a new ministry. In the existing temper of the Houses such a ministry
could only be found in the men who had brought about Danby's fall.
Shaftesbury became President of the Council. The chiefs of the Country
party, Lord Russell and Lord Cavendish, took their seats at the board
with Lords Holles and Robartes, the older representatives of the
Presbyterian party which had merged in the general Opposition. Savile,
Lord Halifax, as yet known only as a keen and ingenious speaker, entered
the ministry in the train of Shaftesbury with whom his family was
connected. Lord Sunderland, a man adroit and unscrupulous but as yet
ranked in the Opposition, was admitted to the Council; while Lord Essex
and Sir H. Capel, two of the most popular among the Country leaders,
went to the Treasury and Admiralty. The recall of Sir William Temple,
the negotiator of the Triple Alliance, from his embassy at the Hague to
fill the post of Secretary of State promised a foreign policy which
would again place England high among the European powers.
[Sidenote: Temple and his Council.]
Temple returned with a plan of administration which, fruitless as it
directly proved, is of great importance as marking the silent change
which was passing over the English Constitution. Like many men of his
time he was equally alarmed at the power both of the Crown and of the
Parliament. In moments of national excitement the power of the Houses
seemed irresistible. They had overthrown Clarendon. They had overthrown
Clifford and the Cabal. They had just overthrown Danby. But though they
were strong enough in the end to punish ill government they showed no
power of securing good government or of permanently influencing the
policy of the Crown. For nineteen years in fact with a Parliament
always sitting Charles had had it pretty much his own way. He had made
war against the will of the nation and he had refused to make war when
the nation demanded it. While every Englishman hated France he had made
England a mere dependency of the French king. The remedy for this state
of things, as it was afterwards found, was a very simple one. By a
change which we shall have to trace the ministry has now become a
Committee of State-officers named by the majority of the House of
Commons from amongst the more prominent of its representatives in either
House, whose object in accepting office is to do the will of that
majority. So long as the majority of the House of Commons itself
represents the more powerful current of public opinion it is clear that
such an arrangement makes government an accurate reflection of the
national will. But obvious as such a plan may seem to us, it had as yet
occurred to no English statesman. To Temple the one remedy seemed to lie
in the restoration of the royal Council to its older powers.
[Sidenote: The Cabinet.]
This body, composed as it was of the great officers of the Court, the
royal Treasurer and Secretaries, and a few nobles specially summoned to
it by the sovereign, formed up to the close of Elizabeth's reign a sort
of deliberative assembly to which the graver matters of public
administration were commonly submitted by the Crown. A practice,
however, of previously submitting such measures to a smaller body of the
more important councillors must always have existed; and under James
this secret committee, which was then known as the Cabala or Cabal,
began almost wholly to supersede the Council itself. In the large and
balanced Council which was formed after the Restoration all real power
rested with the "Cabala" of Clarendon, Southampton, Ormond, Monk, and
the two Secretaries; and on Clarendon's fall these were succeeded by
Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. It was by a
mere coincidence that the initials of the latter names formed the word
"Cabal," which has ever since retained the sinister meaning their
unpopularity gave to it. The effect of these smaller committees had
undoubtedly been to remove the check which the larger numbers and the
more popular composition of the royal Council laid upon the Crown. The
unscrupulous projects which made the Cabal of Clifford and his fellows a
byword among Englishmen could never have been laid before a Council of
great peers and hereditary officers of State. To Temple therefore the
organization of the Council seemed to furnish a check on mere personal
government which Parliament was unable to supply. For this purpose he
proposed that the Cabala or Cabinet, as it was now becoming the fashion
to term the confidential committee of the Council, should be abolished.
The Council itself was restricted to thirty members, and their joint
income was not to fall below £300,000, a sum little less than what was
estimated as the income of the whole House of Commons. A body of great
nobles and proprietors, not too numerous for secret deliberation and
wealthy enough to counterbalance either the Commons or the Crown, would
form, Temple hoped, a barrier against the violence and aggression of the
one power and a check on the mere despotism of the other.
[Sidenote: The Habeas Corpus Act.]
Whatever might be the fate of these schemes the new Council and the new
ministry gave fair hope of a wise and patriotic government. But the
difficulties were still great. The nation was frenzied with suspicion
and panic. The elections to the new Parliament had taken place amidst a
whirl of excitement which left no place for candidates of the Court. The
appointment of the new ministry indeed was welcomed with a general burst
of joy, and its policy and that of the two Houses showed at once that a
more liberal spirit had entered into public affairs. In two remarkable
acts of the new Parliament English freedom made an advance even on the
work of 1641. From the moment when printing began to tell on public
opinion it had been gagged by a system of licenses. The regulations
framed under Henry the Eighth subjected the press to the control of the
Star Chamber, and the Martin Marprelate libels brought about a yet more
stringent control under Elizabeth. Even the Long Parliament laid a
heavy hand on the press, and the great remonstrance of Milton in his
"Areopagitica" fell dead on the ears of his Puritan associates. But the
statute for the regulation of printing which was passed immediately
after the Restoration expired finally in 1679 and the temper of the
present Parliament at once put an end to any attempt at re-establishing
the censorship. To the new freedom of the press the Habeas Corpus Act
added new security for the personal freedom of every Englishman. Against
arbitrary imprisonment provision had been made in the earliest ages by a
famous clause in the Great Charter. No free man could be held in prison
save on charge or conviction of crime or for debt; and every prisoner on
a criminal charge could demand as a right from the court of King's Bench
the issue of a writ of "habeas corpus," which bound his gaoler to
produce both the prisoner and the warrant on which he was imprisoned
that the court might judge whether he was imprisoned according to law.
In cases, however, of imprisonment on a warrant of the royal Council it
had been sometimes held by judges that the writ could not be issued, and
under Clarendon's administration instances had in this way occurred of
imprisonment without legal remedy. But his fall was quickly followed by
the introduction of a bill to secure this right of the subject, and
after a long struggle the Act which is known as the Habeas Corpus Act
passed finally in the Parliament of 1679. By this great statute the old
practice of the law was freed from all difficulties and exceptions.
Every prisoner committed for any crime save treason or felony was
declared entitled to his writ even in the vacations of the courts, and
heavy penalties were enforced on judges or gaolers who refused him this
right. Every person committed for felony or treason was entitled to be
released on bail unless indicted at the next session of gaol-delivery
after his commitment, and to be discharged if not indicted at the
sessions which followed. It was forbidden under the heaviest penalties
to evade this operation of the writ as it had been evaded under
Clarendon by sending a prisoner to any places or fortresses beyond the
seas.
[Sidenote: The Bill of Securities.]
Great as was the value of the Habeas Corpus Act it passed almost
unnoticed amidst the political storm which the ministry had to face. The
question of the Succession threw all others into the shade. At the
bottom of the national panic lay the dread of a Catholic king, a dread
which the after history of James fully justified. Unluckily on the
question of the succession the new ministers were themselves divided.
Shaftesbury was earnest for the exclusion of James and he was followed
in his plan of exclusion by Lord Russell. Against a change in the order
of hereditary succession however Charles was firm; and he was supported
in his resistance by a majority of the Council with Temple and Lord
Essex, Lord Halifax, and Lord Sunderland at its head. It was with the
assent of this party that Charles brought forward a plan for preserving
the rights of the Duke of York while restraining his powers as
sovereign. By this project the presentation to Church livings was to be
taken out of his hands on his accession. The last Parliament of the
preceding reign was to continue to sit; and the appointment of all
Councillors, Judges, Lord-Lieutenants, and officers in the fleet, was
vested in the two Houses so long as a Catholic sovereign was on the
throne. The extent of these provisions showed the pressure which Charles
felt, but Shaftesbury was undoubtedly right in setting the plan aside as
at once insufficient and impracticable. The one real security for
English freedom lay in a thorough understanding between King and
Parliament; and the scheme of Charles set them against one another as
rival powers in the realm. It was impossible in fact that such a harmony
could exist between a Protestant Parliament and a Catholic sovereign.
[Sidenote: The Exclusion Bill.]
Shaftesbury therefore continued to advocate the Exclusion in the royal
Council; and a bill for depriving James of his right to the Crown and
for devolving it on the next Protestant in the line of succession was
introduced into the Commons by his adherents. In spite of a powerful
opposition from patriots like Lord Cavendish and Sir William Coventry
who still shrank from a change in the succession the bill passed the
House by a large majority. It was known that Charles would use his
influence with the Peers for its rejection, and the Earl therefore fell
back on the tactics of Pym. A bold Remonstrance was prepared in the
Commons. The City of London, in which Shaftesbury's popularity had now
risen to its greatest height, was ready with an address to the two
Houses in favour of the bill. All Charles could do was to gain time by a
sudden prorogation of the Parliament and by its dissolution at the end
of May. But delay would have been useless had the Country party remained
at one. The temper of the nation and of the House of Commons was so
hotly pronounced in favour of the Exclusion of the Duke that but for the
disunion among the ministers it must in the end have been secured.
England would then have been spared the necessity for the Revolution of
1688. Though the disunion grew greater and hotter indeed the wiser
leaders of the Country party were already leaning to the very change
which the Revolution brought about. If James were passed over his
daughter Mary, the wife of the Prince of Orange, stood next in the order
of succession; and the plan devised by Temple, Lord Essex, and Lord
Halifax after the failure of their Bill of Securities was to bring the
Prince over to England during the prorogation, to introduce him into
the Council, and to pave his way to the throne.
[Sidenote: Shaftesbury and Monmouth.]
Unhappily Shaftesbury was contemplating a very different course. Ever
since William had set aside his proposals in 1674, and above all since
his marriage with the Duke's daughter, Shaftesbury had looked on the
Prince of Orange as a mere adherent of the royal house and a supporter
of the royal plans. He saw, too, that firm as was William's
Protestantism he was as jealous as Charles himself of any weakening of
the royal power or invasion of the royal prerogative. Shaftesbury's keen
wit was already looking forward to the changes which a few years were to
bring about; and his motive for setting aside William's claims is
probably to be found in the maxim ascribed to him, that "a bad title
makes a good king." Whatever were his motives however he had resolved
not only to set aside the claims of the Duke and the Duke's children,
Mary and Anne, as well as William's own claim as grandson of Charles I.,
but to place the Duke of Monmouth on the throne. Monmouth, reputed to be
the eldest of the king's bastards, a weak and worthless profligate in
temper, was popular through his personal beauty and his reputation for
bravery. The tale was set about of a secret marriage between the king
and his mother which would have made him lawful heir to the throne, and
Shaftesbury brought him into public notice by inducing the king to put
him at the head of the troops sent to repress a rising of the extreme
Covenanters which broke out at this moment in the western counties of
Scotland. Monmouth showed courage in routing the insurgents at Bothwell
Brig on the Clyde as well as judgement in the mercy he extended to them
after their defeat; and on his return Shaftesbury pressed the king to
give him the command of the Guards, which would have put the only
military force possessed by the Crown in Monmouth's hands.
[Sidenote: Shaftesbury's Second Dismissal.]
Sunderland, Halifax, and Essex, on the other hand--for Temple took less
and less part in public affairs--were not only steadily opposed to
Shaftesbury's project, but saw themselves marked out for ruin in the
event of its success. They had advised the dissolution of the last
Parliament; and the Earl's anger had vented itself in threats that the
advisers of the dissolution should pay for it with their heads. The
danger came home to them when a sudden illness of the king and the
absence of James made Monmouth's accession a possible contingency. The
three ministers at once induced Charles to recall the Duke of York; and
though he withdrew to Scotland on the king's recovery Charles deprived
Monmouth of his charge as Captain-General of the Forces and ordered him
like James to leave the realm. Left alone in his cause by the opposition
of his colleagues, Shaftesbury threw himself more and more on the
support of the Plot. The prosecution of its victims was pushed
recklessly on. Three Catholics were hanged in London. Eight priests were
put to death in the country. Pursuivants and informers spread terror
through every Catholic household. He counted on the reassembling of the
Parliament to bring all this terror to bear upon the king. But Charles
had already marked the breach which the Earl's policy had made in the
ranks of the Country party. He saw that Shaftesbury was unsupported by
any of his colleagues save Russell. To Temple, Essex, or Halifax, it
seemed possible to bring about the succession of Mary without any
violent revolution; but to set aside the rights not only of James but of
his Protestant children and even of the Prince of Orange was to ensure a
civil war. It was with their full support therefore that Charles in
October 1679 deprived Shaftesbury of his post of Lord President of the
Council.
[Sidenote: Shaftesbury's struggle.]
The dismissal was the signal for a struggle to whose danger Charles was
far from blinding himself. What had saved him till now was his cynical
courage. In the midst of the terror and panic of the Plot men "wondered
to see him quite cheerful amidst such an intricacy of troubles," says
the courtly Reresby, "but it was not in his nature to think or perplex
himself much about anything." Even in the heat of the tumult which
followed on Shaftesbury's dismissal Charles was seen fishing and
sauntering as usual in Windsor Park. But closer observers than Reresby
saw beneath this veil of indolent unconcern a consciousness of new
danger. "From this time," says Burnet, "his temper was observed to
change very visibly." He became in fact "sullen and thoughtful; he saw
that he had to do with a strange sort of people, that could neither be
managed nor frightened." But he faced the danger with his old
unscrupulous coolness. He reopened secret negotiations with France.
Lewis was as alarmed as Charles himself at the warlike temper of the
nation, and as anxious to prevent the calling of a Parliament; but the
terms on which he offered a subsidy were too humiliating even for the
king's acceptance. The failure forced him to summon a new Parliament;
and the panic which Shaftesbury was busily feeding with new tales of
massacre and invasion returned members even more violent than the
members of the House he had just dismissed. The project of Monmouth's
succession was pressed with more daring than ever. Pamphlets appeared in
open support of his claim. The young Duke himself suddenly quitted
Holland and reappeared at Court; and though Charles forced him after a
time to leave London he refused to leave England altogether. Shaftesbury
counted on the new Parliament to back the Duke's claim, and a host of
petitions called on the king to suffer it to meet at the opening of
1680. Even the Council shrank from the king's proposal to prorogue its
assembly to the coming November. But Charles prorogued it in the teeth
of his counsellors. Alone as he stood he was firm in his resolve to gain
time, for time, as he saw, was working in his favour. The tide of public
sympathy was beginning to turn. The perjury of Oates was proving too
much at last for the credulity of juries; and the acquittal of four of
his victims showed that the panic was beginning to ebb. A far stronger
proof of this was seen in the immense efforts which Shaftesbury made to
maintain a belief in the plot. Fresh informers were brought forward to
swear to a conspiracy for the assassination of the Earl himself, and to
the share of the Duke of York in the designs of his fellow-religionists.
A paper found in a meal-tub was produced as evidence of the new danger.
Gigantic torchlight processions paraded the streets of London, and the
effigy of the Pope was burnt amidst the wild outcry of a vast multitude.
[Sidenote: The Reaction begins.]
Acts of yet greater daring showed the lengths to which Shaftesbury was
ready to go. He had grown up amidst the tumults of civil war, and,
greyheaded as he was, the fire and vehemence of his early days seemed to
wake again in the recklessness with which he drove on the nation to a
struggle in arms. Early in 1680 he formed a committee for promoting
agitation throughout the country; and the petitions which it drew up for
the assembly of the Parliament were sent to every town and grand jury
and sent back again with thousands of signatures. Monmouth, in spite of
the king's orders, returned at Shaftesbury's call to London; and a
daring pamphlet pointed him out as the nation's leader in the coming
struggle "against Popery and tyranny." So great was the alarm of the
Council that the garrison in every fortress was held in readiness for
instant war. But the danger was really less than it seemed. The tide of
opinion had fairly turned. Acquittal followed acquittal. A reaction of
horror and remorse at the cruelty which had hurried victim after victim
to the gallows succeeded to the pitiless frenzy which Shaftesbury had
fanned into a flame. Anxious as the nation was for a Protestant
sovereign its sense of justice revolted against the wrong threatened to
James's Protestant children; and every gentleman in the realm felt
insulted at the project of setting Mary aside to put the crown of
England on the head of a royal bastard.
[Sidenote: Petitioners and Abhorrers.]
The memory too of the Civil War was still fresh and keen, and the rumour
of an outbreak of revolt rallied men more and more round the king. The
host of petitions which Shaftesbury procured from the counties was
answered by a counter-host of addresses from thousands who declared
their "abhorrence" of the plans against the Crown; and the country saw
itself divided into two great factions of "petitioners" and "abhorrers,"
the germs of the two great parties which have played so prominent a
part in our political history from the time of the Exclusion Bill. It
was now indeed that these parties began to receive the names of Whig and
Tory by which they were destined to be known. Each was originally a term
of reproach. "Whig" was the name given to the extreme Covenanters of the
west of Scotland, and in applying it to the members of the Country party
the "abhorrer" meant to stigmatize them as rebels and fanatics. "Tory"
was at this time the name for a native Irish outlaw or "bogtrotter," and
in fastening it on the loyalist adherents of James's cause the
"petitioner" meant to brand the Duke and his party as the friends of
Catholic rebels.
Charles at once took advantage of this turn of affairs. He recalled the
Duke of York to the Court. He received the resignation of Lord Russell
as well as those of Lord Cavendish and the Earl of Essex who had at last
gone over to Shaftesbury's projects "with all his heart." Temple had all
but withdrawn from the Council; and public affairs were now left in the
hands of Lord Sunderland and Lord Halifax, of Godolphin, a laborious
financier, and of Laurence Hyde, a younger son of Lord Clarendon.
Shaftesbury met the king's defiance with as bold a defiance of his own.
Followed by a crowd of his adherents he attended before the Grand Jury
of Middlesex to indict the Duke of York as a Catholic recusant and the
king's mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, as a national nuisance,
while Monmouth made a progress through the country and gained favour
everywhere by his winning demeanour. Above all Shaftesbury relied on the
temper of the Commons, elected as they had been in the very heat of the
panic and irritated by the long delay in calling the Houses together.
[Sidenote: France and Europe.]
At this moment, however, a new and formidable opponent to Shaftesbury's
plans presented himself in the Prince of Orange. The position of William
had for some time been one of singular difficulty. He had been forced,
and chiefly through the treacherous diplomacy of Charles the Second, to
consent to the Treaty of Nimeguen which left France matchless in arms
and dominant over Europe as she had never been before. Holland indeed
was saved from the revenge of Lewis, but fresh spoils had been wrested
from Spain, and Franche-Comté which had been restored at the close of
the former war was retained at the end of this. Above all, France
overawed Europe by the daring and success with which she had faced
single-handed the wide coalition against her. From the moment when the
war came to an end her king's arrogance became unbounded. Lorraine was
turned into a subject-state. Genoa was bombarded and its Doge forced to
seek pardon in the ante-chambers of Versailles. The Pope was humiliated
by the march of an army upon Rome to avenge a slight offered to the
French ambassador. The Empire was outraged by a shameless seizure of
Imperial fiefs in Elsass and elsewhere which provoked remonstrances
even from Charles. The whole Protestant world was defied by the
increasing persecution of the Huguenots, a persecution which was to
culminate in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
[Sidenote: William and England.]
In the mind of Lewis peace meant a series of outrages on the powers
around him; but every outrage helped the cool and silent adversary who
was looking on from the Hague in his task of building up that Great
Alliance of all Europe from which alone he looked for any effectual
check to the ambition of France. The experience of the last war had
taught William that of such an alliance England must form a part, and
the efforts of the Prince ever since the peace had been directed to
secure her co-operation. A reconciliation of the king with his
Parliament was an indispensable step towards freeing Charles from his
dependence on France, and it was such a reconciliation that William at
first strove to bring about; but he was for a long time foiled by the
steadiness with which Charles clung to the power whose aid was needful
to carry out the schemes which he was contemplating. The change of
policy, however, which followed on the fall of the Cabal and the entry
of Danby into power raised new hopes in William's mind, and his marriage
with Mary dealt Lewis what proved to be a fatal blow. James was without
a son, and the marriage with Mary would at any rate ensure William the
aid of England in his great enterprise on his father-in-law's death. But
it was impossible to wait for that event, and though the Prince used his
new position to bring Charles round to a decided policy his efforts
remained fruitless. The storm of the Popish Plot complicated his
position. In the earlier stages of the Exclusion Bill, when the
Parliament seemed resolved simply to pass over James and to seat Mary at
once on the throne after her uncle's death, William stood apart from the
struggle, doubtful of its issue though prepared to accept the good luck
if it came to him. But the fatal error of Shaftesbury in advancing the
claims of Monmouth forced him into action. To preserve his wife's right
of succession with all the great issues which were to come of it, as
well as to secure his own, no other course was left than to adopt the
cause of the Duke of York. Charles too seemed at last willing to
purchase the support of the Prince in England by a frank adhesion to his
policy abroad. He protested against the encroachments which Lewis was
making in Germany. He promised aid to Holland in case of attack. He
listened with favour to William's proposal of a general alliance of the
European powers, and opened negotiations for that purpose with
Brandenburg and Spain. William indeed believed that the one step now
needed to bring England to his side in the coming struggle with Lewis
was a reconciliation between Charles and the Parliament grounded on the
plan for providing Protestant securities which Charles was ready again
to bring forward.
[Sidenote: William and the Exclusion.]
But he still remained in an attitude of reserve when the Parliament at
last met in October. The temper of the Commons was as bitter as
Shaftesbury had hoped. It was in vain that Charles informed them of his
negotiations for an European alliance and called on them to support him
by reason and moderation. The House was too full of the sense of danger
at home to heed dangers abroad. Its first act was to vote that its care
should be "to suppress Popery and prevent a Popish successor." Rumours
of a Catholic plot in Ireland were hardly needed to set aside all
schemes of Protestant securities, and to push the Exclusion Bill through
the Commons without a division. So strong had Monmouth's party become
that a proposal to affirm the rights of Mary and William by name in the
Bill was evaded and put aside. From this moment the course of the Prince
became clear. So resolute was the temper of the Lower House that even
Temple and Essex now gave their adhesion to the Exclusion Bill as a
necessity, and Sunderland himself wavered towards accepting it. But
Halifax, whose ability and eloquence had now brought him fairly to the
front, opposed it resolutely and successfully in the Lords; and Halifax
was but the mouthpiece of William. "My Lord Halifax is entirely in the
interest of the Prince of Orange," the French ambassador, Barillon,
wrote to his master, "and what he seems to be doing for the Duke of York
is really in order to make an opening for a compromise by which the
Prince of Orange may benefit." The Exclusion Bill once rejected, Halifax
followed up the blow by bringing forward a plan of Protestant securities
which would have taken from James on his accession the right of veto on
any bill passed by the two Houses, the right of negotiating with foreign
states, or of appointing either civil or military officers save with the
consent of Parliament. This plan, like his opposition to the Exclusion,
was no doubt prompted by the Prince of Orange; and the States of Holland
supported it by pressing Charles to come to an accommodation with his
subjects which would enable them to check the perpetual aggressions
which France was making on her neighbours.
[Sidenote: Trial of Lord Stafford.]
But if the Lords would have no Exclusion Bill the Commons with as good
reason would have no Securities Bill. They felt--as one of the members
for London fairly put it--that such securities would break down at the
very moment they were needed. A Catholic king, should he ever come to
the throne, would have other forces besides those in England to back
him. "The Duke rules over Scotland; the Irish and the English Papists
will follow him; he will be obeyed by the officials of high and low rank
whom the king has appointed; he will be just such a king as he thinks
good." Shaftesbury, however, was far from resting in a merely negative
position. He made a despairing effort to do the work of exclusion by a
Bill of Divorce, which would have enabled Charles to put away his queen
on the ground of barrenness and by a fresh marriage to give a Protestant
heir to the throne. The Earl's course shows that he felt the weakness of
Monmouth's cause; and perhaps that he was already sensible of a change
in public feeling. This, however, Shaftesbury resolved to check and turn
by a great public impeachment which would revive and establish the
general belief in the Plot. Lord Stafford, who from his age and rank was
looked on as the leader of the Catholic party, had lain a prisoner in
the Tower since the first outburst of popular frenzy. He was now
solemnly impeached; and his trial in December 1680 mustered the whole
staff of informers to prove the truth of a Catholic conspiracy against
the king and the realm. The evidence was worthless; but the trial
revived, as Shaftesbury had hoped, much of the old panic, and the
condemnation of the prisoner by a majority of his peers was followed by
his death on the scaffold. The blow produced its effect on all but
Charles. Sunderland again pressed the king to give way. But deserted as
he was by his ministers and even by his mistress, for the Duchess of
Portsmouth had been cowed into supporting the Exclusion by the threats
of Shaftesbury, Charles was determined to resist. On the coupling of a
grant of supplies with demands for a voice in the appointment of
officers of the royal garrisons he prorogued the Parliament.
[Sidenote: Charles turns again to France.]
William's policy had failed to bring the Commons round to the king's
plans and Charles sullenly turned again to France. All dreams of heading
Europe in her strife against Lewis were set aside. Charles became deaf
to the projects of the Prince of Orange, and listened to the
remonstrances which James addressed to him through his favourite
Churchill in favour of an alliance with the Catholic king. With
characteristic subtlety, however, he dissolved the existing Parliament
and called a new one to meet in March 1681. The act was a mere blind.
The king's aim was to frighten the country into reaction by the dread of
civil strife; and his summons of the Parliament to Oxford was an appeal
to the country against the disloyalty of the capital, and an adroit
means of reviving the memories of the Civil War. With the same end he
ordered his guards to accompany him on the pretext of anticipated
disorder; and Shaftesbury, himself terrified at the projects of the
Court, aided the king's designs by appearing with his followers in arms
on the plea of self-protection. The violence of the Earl's party only
strengthened the resolution of the king. Monmouth renewed his progresses
through the country, and was met by deputations and addresses in every
town he visited. London was so restless that riots broke out in its
streets. Revolt seemed at hand, and Charles hastened to conclude his
secret negotiations with France. Lewis was as ready for an agreement as
Charles. The one king verbally pledged himself to a policy of peace, in
other words to withdrawal from any share in the Grand Alliance which
William was building up. The other promised a small subsidy which with
the natural growth of the Royal revenue sufficed to render Charles, if
he remained at peace, independent of Parliamentary aids.
[Sidenote: The Parliament at Oxford.]
It was with this arrangement already concluded that Charles met his
Parliament at Oxford. The members of the House of Commons were the same
as those who had been returned to the Parliaments he had just dissolved,
and their temper was naturally embittered by the two dissolutions. But
their violence simply played into the king's hands. William's party
still had hopes of bringing about a compromise; but the rejection of a
new Limitation Bill brought forward by Halifax, which while conceding to
James the title of king would have vested the actual functions of
government in the Prince and Princess of Orange during his reign,
alienated the more moderate and sensible of the Country party. They were
alienated still more by a bold appeal of Shaftesbury to Charles himself
to recognize Monmouth as his successor. The attempt of the Lower House
to revive the panic by impeaching an informer named Fitzharris before
the House of Lords, in defiance of the constitutional rule which
entitled him as a commoner to a trial by his peers in the course of
common law, did still more to throw public opinion on the side of the
Crown. Shaftesbury's course, in fact, went wholly on a belief that the
penury of the Treasury left Charles at his mercy, and that a refusal of
supplies must wring from the king his assent to the Exclusion. But the
gold of France had freed the king from his thraldom. He had used the
Parliament simply to exhibit himself as a sovereign whose patience and
conciliatory temper were rewarded with insult and violence; and now that
his end was accomplished he no sooner saw the Exclusion Bill
reintroduced into the Commons than he suddenly dissolved the Houses
after but a month's sitting and appealed in a royal declaration to the
justice of the nation at large.
[Sidenote: Dryden.]
The appeal was met by an almost universal burst of loyalty. The Church
rallied to the king; his declaration was read from every pulpit; and the
Universities solemnly decided that "no religion, no law, no fault, no
forfeiture" could avail to bar the sacred right of hereditary
succession. The arrest of Shaftesbury on a charge of suborning false
witnesses to the Plot marked the new strength of the Crown. The answer
of the nation at large was uttered in the first great poem of John
Dryden. Born in 1631 of a good Northamptonshire family, Dryden had grown
up amidst the tumult of the civil wars in a Puritan household. His
grandfather, Sir Erasmus Dryden, had gone to prison at seventy rather
than contribute to a forced loan. His father had been a committee-man
and sequestrator under the Commonwealth. He entered life under the
protection of a cousin, Sir Gilbert Pickering, who sate as one of the
judges at the king's trial. Much of this early training lived in Dryden
to the last. He never freed himself from the Puritan sense of religion,
from the Puritan love for theological discussion and ecclesiastical
controversy. Two of his greatest poems, the "Religio Laici," and the
"Hind and Panther," are simply theological treatises in verse. Nor did
the Commonwealth's man ever die in him. "All good subjects," he could
say boldly in an hour of royal triumph, "abhor arbitrary power whether
in one or in many"; and no writer has embodied in more pregnant words
the highest claim of a people's right, that
"right supreme
To make their kings, for kings are made for them."
Dryden grew up too amidst the last echoes of the Elizabethan verse.
Jonson and Massinger, Webster and Shirley, were still living men in his
childhood. The lyrics of Herrick, the sweet fancies of George Herbert,
were fresh in men's ears as he grew to manhood. Even when he entered
into the new world of the Restoration some veterans of this nobler
school, like Denham and Waller, were still lingering on the stage. The
fulness and imaginative freedom of Elizabethan prose lived on till 1677
in Jeremy Taylor, while Clarendon preserved to yet later years the
grandeur and stateliness of its march. Above all Milton still sate
musing on the "Paradise Lost" in the tapestried chamber of his house in
Bunhill Fields.
[Sidenote: Dryden and the Critical Poets.]
Throughout his life something of the spirit of the age which he was the
last to touch lived on in Dryden. He loved and studied Chaucer and
Spenser even while he was copying Molière and Corneille. His noblest
panegyric was pronounced over Shakspere. At the time when Rymer, the
accepted critic of the Restoration, declared "our poetry of the last age
as rude as our architecture," and sneered at "that Paradise Lost of
Milton's which some are pleased to call a poem," Dryden saw in it "one
of the greatest, most noble and sublime poems which either this age or
nation hath produced." But whether in mind or in life Dryden was as
unlike the Elizabethans as he was in his earlier years unlike the men of
the poetic school which followed him. Of that school, the critical
school as it has been called of English poetry, he was indeed the
founder. He is the first of our great poets in whom "fancy is but the
feather of the pen." Whether he would or no Dryden's temper was always
intellectual. He was a poet, for if dead to the subtler and more
delicate forms of imaginative delight he loved grandeur, and his
amazing natural force enabled him to realize in great part the grandeur
which he loved. But beneath all his poetry lay a solid bottom of reason.
His wildest outbursts of passion are broken by long passages of cool
argument. His heroes talk to his heroines in a serried dialectic. Every
problem of morals, of religion, of politics, forces itself into his
verse, and is treated there in the same spirit of critical inquiry.
[Sidenote: His Tragedies.]
In other words Dryden was the poet of his day. But he was the poet of a
time of transition, and his temper is transitional. It was only by slow
and uncertain steps that he advanced to the full rationalism of the
Critical school. His first little poem, some verses written in 1659 on
the death of Lord Hastings, is a mass of grotesque extravagances in the
worst style of Donne. The dramas of his early work after the Restoration
are crowded with the bombastic images, the affected conceits, the
far-fetched metaphors which it is the merit of the critical school to
have got rid of. In his tragedies indeed the tradition of a freer and
larger time jarred against the unities and the critical rules with which
he strove to bind himself. If he imitated the foreign stage he could not
be blind to the fact that the Elizabethan playwrights possessed "a more
masculine fancy and a greater spirit in the writing than there is in any
of the French." He followed Corneille but he was haunted by memories of
"the divine Shakspere." His failure indeed sprang from the very truth
of his poetic ideal. He could not be imaginative in the highest dramatic
sense, but the need of imaginativeness pressed on him while it was
ceasing to press on his brother playwrights. He could not reach the
sublime, but neither could he content himself as they did with the
prosaic; he rants, fumes, and talks wild bombast in the vain effort
after sublimity.
[Sidenote: His Comedies.]
Dryden failed in Comedy as he failed in Tragedy, but here the failure
sprang from the very force and vigour of his mind. He flung himself like
the men of his day into the reaction against Puritanism. His life was
that of a libertine; and his marriage with a woman of fashion who was
yet more dissolute than himself only gave a new spur to his
debaucheries. Large as was his income from the stage, and it equalled
for many years the income of a country squire, he was always in debt and
forced to squeeze gifts from patrons by fulsome adulation. Like the rest
of the fine gentlemen about him he aired his Hobbism in sneers at the
follies of religion and the squabbles of creeds. The grossness of his
comedies rivalled that of Wycherley himself. But it is the very
extravagance of his coarseness which shows how alien it was to the real
temper of the man. A keen French critic has contrasted the libertinism
of England under the Restoration with the libertinism of France, and has
ruthlessly pointed out how the gaiety, the grace, the naturalness of
the one disappears in the forced, hard, brutal brilliancy of the other.
The contrast is a just one. The vice of the English libertine was hard
and unnatural just because his real nature took little share in it. In
sheer revolt against the past he was playing a part which was not his
own and which he played badly, which he forced and exaggerated, just
because it was not his own. Dryden scoffs at priests and creeds, but his
greater poetry is coloured throughout with religion. He plays the rake,
but the two pictures which he has painted with all his heart are the
pictures of the honest country squire and the poor country parson. He
passes his rivals in the grossness of his comedies, he flings himself
recklessly into the evil about him because it is the fashion and because
it pays. But he cannot sport lightly and gaily with what is foul. He is
driven if he is coarse at all to be brutally coarse. His freedom of
tone, to borrow Scott's fine remark, is like the forced impudence of a
timid man.
[Sidenote: The New Criticism.]
Slowly but ceaselessly, however, the critical taste of his time told on
Dryden. The poetry of good sense, as it proudly called itself, triumphed
in Boileau, and the rules of taste and form which Boileau laid down were
accepted as the law of letters on the one side of the Channel as well as
on the other. Andrew Marvell, in whom the older imaginative beauty still
found a worshipper, stood alone in his laughter at the degradation of
poetry into prose. Fancy was set aside for reason, "that substantial
useful part which gains the head, while Fancy wins the heart." It was
the head and not the heart that poetry now cared to gain. But with all
its prose the new criticism did a healthy work in insisting on
clearness, simplicity, and good sense. In his "Rehearsal" Buckingham
quizzed fairly enough the fume and bombast of Dryden's tragedies. But
Dryden was already echoing his critics' prayer for a year "of prose and
sense." He was tired of being "the Sisyphus of the stage, to roll up a
stone with endless labour, which is perpetually falling down again." "To
the stage," he owned, "my genius never much inclined me," and he had
long had dreams, stirred no doubt by his admiration for Milton, of
undertaking some epic story. But need held him to the boards and years
passed by, and Dryden still stood in the second rank of English poetry,
outdone in comedy by men like Etherege and rivalled in tragedy by men
like Settle. Only in a single poem, that of the "Annus Mirabilis," in
1671, had he given any true indications of his surpassing powers.
[Sidenote: Dryden and the Plot.]
It was in this mood of failure and disappointment that the Popish Plot
found him. Of its reality he made no question; "a plot," he says
emphatically, "there was." But his cool good sense saw how the truth had
been "dashed and brewed with lies." What stirred him more was, as he
believed, the return of anarchy. Puritan as his training had been he had
grown up like the bulk of the men about him with a horror of the social
and religious disorders which the civil war had brought in its train. He
clung to authority as a security against revolution. It was this that
drove him from the Puritanism of his youth to the Anglican dogmatism of
the "Religio Laici," and from thence to the tempered Catholicism of the
"Hind and Panther." It was this which made him sing by turns the praises
of Cromwell and the praises of the king whom Cromwell had hunted from
one refuge to another. No man denounced the opponents of the Crown with
more ruthless invective. No man humbled himself before the throne with
more fulsome adulation. Some of this no doubt was mere flattery, but not
all of it. Dryden like his age was conscious that new currents of
feeling and opinion were sweeping him from the old moorings of mankind.
But he shrank in terror from the wide ocean over whose waters he
drifted. In religion he was a rationalist, a sceptic, whether he would
or no; but he recoiled from the maze of "anxious thoughts" which spread
before him, of thoughts "that in endless circles roll without a centre
where to fix the soul," and clung to the Church that would give him, if
not peace, at least quiet. In politics he was as much a rationalist as
in religion, but he turned horrorstruck from the sight of a "state
drawn to the dregs of a democracy," and in the crisis of the Popish Plot
he struck blindly for the Crown.
[Sidenote: "Absalom and Achitophel."]
Dryden like the Royalists generally believed that the arrest of
Shaftesbury had alone saved England from civil war, and from that worst
of civil wars where a son fights against his father's throne. In his
"Absalom and Achitophel" the poet told the story of the threatened
strife under the thin veil of the revolt against David. Charles was the
Hebrew king, Monmouth was Absalom, Shaftesbury was the wily Achitophel
who drew him into revolt. The "Absalom" was a satire, and it was the
first great English satire, for the satires of Marston and Hall were
already forgotten. It is in ages indeed like the Restoration that satire
naturally comes to the front. In the reaction after a time of high
ideals and lofty efforts the sense of contrast between the aims and the
powers of man, between his hopes and their fulfilment, takes form
whether in the kindly pitifulness of humour or in the bitter revulsion
of satire. And mingled with this in Dryden was an honest indignation at
the hypocrisy around him. The men he attacks are not real men but
actors. Buckingham and Shaftesbury, the infidel leader of the
Independents and the deistical leader of the Presbyterians, were alike
playing a part. But the largeness and fairness of his temper saved
Dryden's satire from the vicious malignity of that of Pope. He has an
artistic love of picturesque contrast, he has a great writer's pride in
the consciousness of power. But he has no love of giving pain for the
mere pain's sake, and he has a hatred of unfairness. Even in his
contempt for the man he is just to Buckingham, and his anger does not
blind him to the great qualities of Shaftesbury.
[Sidenote: Progress of the Reaction.]
The even and effortless force of the poem, the disappearance of
inequalities and faults of taste, showed that Dryden was at last master
of his powers. But it was not this nervous strength alone which suddenly
brought him to the forefront of English letters. It was the general
sense that his "Absalom" was the opening of a new literary developement.
Its verse, free from the old poetic merits as from the old poetic
faults, clear, nervous, condensed, argumentative, proclaimed the final
triumph of the "poetry of good sense." Its series of portraits showed
the new interest in human character which had been stirred by the Civil
War, and which was deepening with the growing indifference to larger
thoughts of nature and the growing concentration of man's thoughts on
man. They led the way to that delight in the analysis of character in
its lowest as in its highest forms which produced the essayists and the
novel. Above all the "Absalom" was the first work in which literature
became a great political power. In it Dryden showed himself the
precursor of Swift and of Bolingbroke, of Burke and of Cobbett. The
poem was bought eagerly, and it undoubtedly helped to bring about that
triumph of the king with the prophecy of which it closed. But prisoner
as Shaftesbury was, the struggle with him was not yet over. London was
still true to him; only a few days after the appearance of the "Absalom
and Achitophel" the Middlesex Grand Jury ignored the bill of his
indictment, and his discharge from the Tower was welcomed in every
street with bonfires and ringing of bells. But a fresh impulse was given
to the loyal enthusiasm of the country at large by the publication of a
plan said to have been found among his papers, the plan of a secret
association for the furtherance of the Exclusion whose members bound
themselves to obey the orders of Parliament even after its prorogation
or dissolution by the Crown. So general was the reaction that Halifax,
who had now become the most conspicuous member of the royal Council,
though scared by the Whig threats of impeachment, advised the calling of
a new Parliament in the belief that it would be a loyal one. William of
Orange too visited England to take advantage of the turn of affairs to
pin Charles to the policy of the Alliance.
[Sidenote: Shaftesbury's Death.]
The king met both counsels with evasion. He kept his own secret. Hyde
was the only one of his ministers whom he had trusted with the knowledge
of his French negotiations, and they remained as unknown to William as
to Halifax. But their effect was seen in the new vigour which Lewis
gave to his policy at home and abroad. He was resolved to bring about
national unity by crushing the French Protestants, to gain a strong
frontier to the East, and to be ready to seize the Spanish heritage on
the death of Charles the Fourth. The agreement was no sooner made with
Charles than persecution fell heavy on the Huguenots; and the seizure of
Strassburg and Casale, the keys of Germany and Italy, with that of
Luxemburg, the key of the United Provinces, brought Europe to the verge
of war. Charles, indeed, was anxious to avoid war and he was as anxious
to avoid Parliaments whose assembly war would certainly force upon him
as Lewis himself. The tide of loyal reaction was mounting in fact higher
every day. The king secured the adhesion of the Church by a renewed
persecution of the Nonconformists, which drove Penn from England and
thus brought about the settlement of Pennsylvania as a refuge for his
fellow-Quakers. He was soon strong enough to call back James to Court
and to arrest Monmouth, who had resumed his almost royal progresses as a
means of again stirring opinion in his favour. London alone remained
firm for the Whigs; but the friendship of a Tory mayor secured the
nomination of Tory sheriffs in the summer of 1682, and the juries they
packed left the life of every Exclusionist at the mercy of the Crown.
Shaftesbury saw himself threatened with ruin. It was in vain that he
offered to waive his plans of exclusion and to fall in with the king's
older proposals of a limited monarchy in the case of James's accession.
The loss of London left him without a shelter, and drove him to wild
conspiracies with a handful of adventurers who were as desperate as
himself. He hid himself in the City where he boasted that ten thousand
"brisk boys" were ready to appear at his call. From his hiding-place he
urged his friends to rise in arms. But their delays drove him to flight;
and in January 1683, two months after his arrival in Holland, the soul
of the great leader, great from his immense energy and the wonderful
versatility of his genius, but whose genius and energy had ended in
wrecking for the time the fortunes of English freedom and in associating
the noblest of causes with the vilest of crimes, found its first quiet
in death.
[Sidenote: The Rye-House Plot.]
The flight of Shaftesbury proclaimed the triumph of the king. His
marvellous sagacity had told him when the struggle was over and further
resistance useless. But the country leaders who had delayed to answer
the Earl's call still believed opposition possible, and looked for
support to the discontent of the Nonconformists at the revival of the
penal laws. Monmouth, with Lord Essex, Lord Howard of Escrick, Lord
Russell, Hampden, and Algernon Sidney, held meetings with the view of
founding an association whose agitation should force on the king the
assembly of a Parliament. The more desperate spirits who had clustered
round Shaftesbury as he lay hidden in the City took refuge in plots of
assassination, and in a plan for murdering Charles and his brother as
they passed the Rye-House on the road from London to Newmarket. Both
projects were betrayed, and though they were wholly distinct from one
another the cruel ingenuity of the Crown lawyers blended them into one.
Lord Essex saved himself from a traitor's death by suicide in the Tower.
Lord Russell, convicted on a charge of sharing in the Rye-House plot,
was beheaded on the 21st of July 1683, in front of his father the Earl
of Bedford's house in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The same fate awaited
Algernon Sidney. Monmouth fled in terror over sea, and his flight was
followed by a series of prosecutions for sedition directed against his
followers.
END OF VOL. VI
* * * * * *
Transcriber's Notes:
The following words appear with and without hyphens. They have
been left as in the original.
Franche-Comté Franche Comté
good-will goodwill
Ellipses match the original.