Charles II. (1660-1685).
The monarchy of the Stuarts had, on the whole, regained
possession of the throne unconditionally and without striking a
blow. The English nation, with a few exceptions, gave itself up
to joy and hope. It was necessary, however, to govern, and the
difficulties which presented themselves at the first glance were
considerable. Charles II. ruled, evading or cutting the knot of
the difficulties which opposed his progress in many ways, and
with the support of men of profoundly different characters. The
nation accepted him blindly, voluntarily embracing illusions
respecting the monarch whom she had chosen out of regard for the
monarchical principle, and from weariness of revolutionary
shocks. As it became possible to judge of the principles, or
rather the lack of all principles, which characterized him, a
gradual estrangement set in. The history of the reign of Charles
II. presents the spectacle, more flagrant day by day, of the
defects and vices of the government as well as of the reaction
which at the same time was at work within the nation. Three
periods may be noted in the history of that decline in the joyous
illusions of the English people--three different conditions of
the people as of the government during the reign of King Charles
II. First, the constitutional and legal _régime_ under the
ministry of Lord Clarendon (1660-1667); secondly, the government
of intriguing and corrupt statesmen under the rule of the Cabal
(1667-1674) thirdly, the epoch of conspiracies for changing the
succession to the throne, the ministries of coalition and
compromise: the attempts at arbitrary government and the great
political trials, until the death of the king (1674-1685).
{343}
Surrounded in the days of his exile and poverty by numerous
adventurers and debauchees, Charles Stuart, disinherited and a
fugitive, had the good sense and judgment to remain faithful to
his old friends--to the devoted advisers who had long served his
father, and who would have protected him against his worst errors
if he had known how to trust himself to their wise and honest
counsels. Hyde, above all, who had been almost uninterruptedly
attached to the fortune and the person of Charles II., and who
had directed all the negotiations with Monk before the
restoration, was naturally singled out to govern in the name of
the restored monarch. From 1657 he had received the title of Lord
Chancellor of England: this name became a reality. "Thus the Lord
Treasurer Southampton, the Marquis of Ormond, General Monk, and
the two secretaries of state, Morice and Nicolas, composed, with
the chancellor, that secret committee which, under the name of
the Council of Foreign Affairs, was charged by the king to
deliberate on all his affairs before they reached the stage of
public discussion, and it was impossible to find an association
of men more united in mind and feeling."
In this ministry, in which General Monk and the two secretaries
of state alone constituted an element that was a stranger to the
old royalist party. Clarendon was at once the most distinguished
and the most politic. His principles were honest, his views
upright and pure. Two faults obscured his better qualities. He
was grasping, and he brought with him into England the passions
and blunted perceptions of an exile. These inconveniences were
not long in making themselves felt.
{344}
In the face of a Parliament, the summoning of which had been
neither regular nor legal--a Parliament which even then was
called a convention, a title destined later to acquire a sad
celebrity in the history of France--the great questions which it
had become necessary to deal with were all the more urgent since
the country demanded the election of a new Parliament. The king
was pressed to disband the army, then a permanent menace and a
bitter remembrance of the past. More than fifty thousand men
inured to arms, kept down but discontented, were suddenly
dismissed into civil life. They were well treated, but were
irreconcilably hostile to the new power, and were held in check
by habits of discipline and by public opinion--not by repentance
for the past or the return of royalist ideas. The soldiers, in
great number, were still Cromwellians or Republicans.
Their old leaders were Republicans: they were about to pay dearly
for their attachment to the order of things which they desired to
establish. At first an amnesty was granted to all. Monk had
required that the exceptions should be limited to four; they had
now become ten. The king then referred the question to the
justice of Parliament. The passions of men in large assemblies
are the most violent and cruel by reason of the fact that
responsibility rests upon no single one. Before the arrival of
Charles the spirit of vengeance had already arisen in the two
Houses.
{345}
Some arrests had been made, and thirty persons were excluded from
the amnesty by the House of Commons--all who remained of the old
leaders of the revolution--Scott, Harrison, Sir Henry Vane, Sir
John Haselrig, Desborough, Lambert, Fleetwood,
Lenthall--politicians or soldiers. Some had already left England,
distrusting, like Ludlow, the promises of the amnesty. The
greater part were arrested. The House of Lords resolved that one
victim ought to expiate the death of each of the members of the
Upper House executed during the rebellion, and ended by excepting
from the general pardon all those who had signed the sentence of
Charles I., adding to this fatal list Hacker, Vane, Lambert,
Haslerig, Axtel, and Peters, who had not sat among the
revolutionary judges. This was too much. Monk and some others of
moderate views remonstrated. Twenty-nine persons were condemned,
ten perished by the tortures inflicted on traitors inflexible in
their convictions and their courage. "Where is now your good old
cause?" cried a bystander to Colonel Harrison, as he was being
drawn to Charing Cross on a hurdle. "Here!" exclaimed the old
soldier, placing his hand upon his heart, "and I am going to seal
it with my blood." Indifferent to the cruelties which he believed
to be necessary, Cromwell nevertheless had not accustomed the
English people to the sight of torture. The spectacle soon caused
a shock. The executions ceased, political vengeance was
suspended. The ecclesiastical question was pressing; the king's
embarrassment was great.
{346}
At Breda, under the solicitations of the Presbyterians, who were
then all-powerful, Charles II. had made promises and allowed
hopes of union and toleration to be entertained. Profoundly
royalist and conservative, the Presbyterians were separated from
the Church of England by questions of form and ecclesiastical
organization much more than by fundamental doctrines of religion.
In 1660 the king promulgated an ordinance known as the Healing
Declaration, which satisfied the Presbyterians without gravely
offending the Anglican Church. Some distinguished theologians
among the Presbyterians had already accepted the episcopal
ordination and had become bishops, when Parliament rejected the
Royal Declaration, refusing to give it the force of law. At the
same time began the restitution of Church property and the
domains of the Crown, very soon definitively settled by the new
Parliament. The lands of private individuals were in part
restored to them after some delays; but voluntary sales were
respected, whatever might have been the conditions under which
they were effected.
The reaction had commenced, and was violent and spontaneous.
Charles II., cautious and indifferent, took in all this no
personal part. He left full play to individual passions, which
became excited by degrees. The bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and
Bradshaw were torn out of their tombs, hung at Tyburn, then
decapitated. King Henry the Seventh's Chapel at Westminster
beheld its sanctuary violated for the purpose of searching for
the remains of persons buried under its roof during the
revolution. The tombs of the mother and daughter of Cromwell, and
those of Pym and Blake, were opened, and their coffins broken. On
all sides popular vengeance exhibits the same hideous and
cowardly traits. The English Royalist party were furnishing an
example to the revolutionary populace, who were one day in France
to profane the vaults of St. Denis.
{347}
The agitation out of doors found a counterpart in the sorrows and
troubles of the royal household. The young Duke of Gloucester, an
amiable and popular youth, fell a victim to the small-pox. His
sister, the Princess of Orange, who had come to England to enjoy
the spectacle of the restoration of her family, died soon
afterwards of the same malady. The Queen Henrietta Maria had
lately arrived in London; she was not popular. In spite of the
splendors of her reception, the prejudices formerly excited
against her were not forgotten: the English Court, moreover,
furnished her with a bitter source of discontent. The secret
marriage of the Duke of York with Anne Hyde, daughter of the
chancellor, had been made public through the birth of a child.
The anger of the queen was great; the chancellor pretended to
share in her feeling; he contrived, however, to have his daughter
recognized as Duchess of York. The marriage was declared almost
at the same time that negotiations were in progress for a union
between the Princess Henrietta and the Duke of Orleans, brother
of Louis XIV., which was celebrated in March, 1661. The House of
Stuart had resumed its position among the reigning families of
Europe.
Public emotion in England had scarcely subsided, when a plot
revealed itself in London. A handful of fanatics, led by a Fifth
Monarchy man, named Venner, rushed through the streets of the
city, crying, "Hail to the Lord Jesus, who is coming to reign
upon the earth!" They were easily arrested; but they had made a
noise, and had broken the heads of some of the city watch. This
furnished a pretext for a levy of troops and for doubling the
regiments of guards.
{348}
The military despotism of Cromwell had impressed upon the mind of
the nation, and particularly on that of the Cavaliers, a dread of
a standing army. It was by the Royalist Parliament that Charles
II. and his honest councillors desired to govern. The Convention
Parliament had restored the king, but the Presbyterians among
them were numerous. They embarrassed the plans of Clarendon, who
was passionately devoted to the Anglican Church. A general
election was decided on. Parliament met on the 8th of May, 1661.
It was the triumph, the lasting triumph, of the Cavaliers. Fifty
or sixty Presbyterians at the most were re-elected. For eighteen
years (1661-1679) the Royalist Parliament was destined to sit in
the teeth of the law, which prescribed new elections every three
years. Great changes were about to be effected in its internal
economy as well as in its tendencies. From its opening the new
Parliament entered without reserve upon a course of imprudent
action. The control of the military forces placed in the hands of
the king alone; all resistance to the armed power of the king
declared unlawful and criminal--such were the results of the
proceedings of Parliament in its first session. All constituted
bodies, cities, towns, and corporations, were called upon to take
an oath in these terms: "I declare that it is not lawful upon any
pretence whatsoever to resist the king, and I abhor the treason
which would pretend to take up arms by the king's authority
against his person or against those who are commissioned by him.
In this, so help me God. Amen."
{349}
The bishops were restored to their seats in the House of Lords.
It was the first step, quickly to be followed by the complete
triumph of the Anglican Church. The English nation had never been
deeply penetrated with the Presbyterian spirit. The respect which
the Puritans inspired had been greatly weakened during their
ascendency, when many hypocrites had associated themselves with
those who were sincerely convinced, attracted by the hope of
influence and power. Their narrowness of mind and the rigidity of
their principles, together with certain ridiculous traits in
their manners or their habits, had alienated the popular favor
from their party. The Anglican Church, ancient and persecuted,
long liberal and indulgent in the application of its laws, saw
with passionate regard England return to her. She took advantage
of this change without moderation, without forethought, carried
away, like the political parties, by the pleasure of the triumph.
The Presbyterians had hoped that the project conceived by
Archbishop Usher would be adhered to; this was a skillful
combination of the governments of the bishops and the synod.
After a series of ecclesiastical conferences, as eloquent as they
were fruitless. Parliament, in the month of January, 1661, passed
an Act of Uniformity which re-established in the Church of
England the episcopal rule in all its rigor, leaving no
alternative to the numerous Presbyterian pastors who had been
appointed to benefices under the Commonwealth but to conform in
all matters both to the doctrine and the practice of the Church
of England, or to abandon their office to ecclesiastics
completely subject to the established discipline. The Covenant,
which had been solemnly sworn to by the king himself in Scotland,
was ignominiously burnt in the public streets. The Presbyterians
were driven out of the Church as they had previously been from
Parliament.
{350}
The ecclesiastics exhibited no hesitation. By a strange
coincidence it was on the day of St. Bartholomew that two
thousand of their number took farewell of their charges and their
congregations, followed by their families. They retired from the
spots where they had looked forward to ending their days,
abandoning the care of souls to the old pastors, who had been
driven out like themselves by the revolution, and who now resumed
possession of their benefices. The Long Parliament had of old
shown compassion, though often without effect, by ordering the
application of a fifth part of the ecclesiastical revenues to the
dispossessed ministers. The Royalist Parliament did not take the
same precaution. The Presbyterian ministers remained long
deprived of resources, an object of the spleen of the Government.
The Church of England, transformed by her triumph, and become
more entire and more dominant than she had hitherto been or
desired to be, henceforth enjoyed an undisputed reign. She had
regained possession of all her advantages, both spiritual and
temporal.
This was in great part the work of the lord chancellor, recently
created Lord Clarendon, who pursued with passionate ardor a labor
which the king regarded with indifference. Yielding to the
obstinacy or the enthusiasm of his ministers, Charles
contemplated the measures neither with satisfaction nor personal
sympathy. Inclining at that time, in the bottom of his heart,
towards the doctrines of Catholicism, he would willingly have
granted toleration to the Nonconformists in the hope of including
the Catholics in the universal indulgence.
{351}
This his Parliament would not permit; at the same time they
hurried him towards a descent which conducted to rigors of which
Charles was already weary. "I am tired of hanging!" he said to
Clarendon. Illustrious victims excited the furious passions of
the Cavaliers. Sir Harry Vane and Lambert in England and the
Marquis of Argyll in Scotland imagined themselves safe when the
political executions had ceased. They were deceived, and their
friends had rejoiced prematurely. Argyll died first (1661),
finally ruined by some old letters which he had written to Monk,
and which the latter forwarded to his judges. "I placed the crown
upon the head of the king at Scone," said the marquis, "and this
is my recompense!" The able defence of Vane troubled the Crown
lawyers charged with his indictment. "If we do not know what to
say to him, we know what to do," muttered Chief Justice Foster.
The king was struck with the attitude of the accused. "He is too
dangerous a man to let live if we can honestly put him out of the
way," he wrote to Clarendon. Vane was executed on the 14th of
June, 1662; Lambert was condemned to imprisonment for life. He
was sent to the Island of Guernsey, where he was destined soon
afterwards to end his days.
The execution of Vane had followed with only an interval of a few
days the marriage of the king--an event but little popular in
England, for he espoused a Catholic princess. Clarendon feared
the influence of Spain. It was a princess of Portugal, Catherine
of Braganza, to whom he had destined the sad honor of marrying
King Charles II. The latter had urged objections against every
proposal for a Protestant union. The dower was considerable; the
fortress of Tangier offered an appearance of an acquisition of
territory.
{352}
The Portuguese princess arrived in England in the month of May,
1662. Honest folk founded great hopes upon the marriage of the
king, whose disorderly life caused much scandal. Men of foresight
were not deceived. After the rigid rule of the Puritans and the
heavy yoke of their moral and religious ordinances, the reaction
of license and immorality, of which the king gave the example,
extended to his followers, and in part corrupted his supporters
throughout the country. Those innocent diversions which had been
forbidden by the government of the Commonwealth yielded place
under the Restoration to a vortex of pleasure and debauchery
which began to alarm the serious and sober-minded.
The vices and errors of men enchain them, and bear inevitably
their deplorable fruit. The wild prodigality of Charles II. left
him poor in spite of the considerable revenue which Parliament
assigned him. He had relinquished all the ancient revenues of the
crown, relics of the feudal system which shocked those ideas of
justice and liberty of the subject which for centuries had
gradually been ripening in England, and which had definitely
taken shape under the revolution. In lieu of these an annual sum
had been fixed. All these resources, however, had been exhausted
when Charles II. decided to sell Dunkirk to the young king, Louis
XIV., then beginning his reign, having at last become master of
that power which he was destined to exercise so long, almost
always for the glory, but sometimes for the misfortune of France.
[Image]
Charles At The House Of Lady Castlemaine.
{353}
Cromwell had acquired Dunkirk at the price of the aid of his
brave soldiers in the war against Spain. Charles II. sold it to
Louis XIV. for five millions of livres--a step profoundly
unpopular and one which hurt the pride of the English, long
wounded by the loss of Calais, and for a while consoled by the
acquisition of Dunkirk. The merchants of London offered the king
enormous advances, in order to avert what they regarded as a
national dishonor. Charles II. hoped to obtain from Louis XIV.
something more and better than the price of Dunkirk; he concluded
the treaty notwithstanding the public discontent.
The Queen Henrietta Maria had conducted for her son the
negotiations with France. It was to her that Louis XIV. explained
his reasons for remaining faithful to his alliance with the Dutch
when in 1665 Charles II., under a frivolous pretext, declared war
against the United Provinces. "I desired the Queen of England,
who was at that time in Paris," says the king in his memoirs, "to
explain to her son that in the particular esteem which I felt
towards him, I could not without sorrow take the resolution to
which I found myself obliged by the engagement of my word; for at
the commencement of this war I felt persuaded that he had been
carried by the suffrages of his subjects further than he would
have gone if he had consulted only his own feelings."
The fidelity of Louis XIV. to his engagements did not induce him
to hasten to afford to the Dutch substantial assistance. Defeated
in the outset off Lowestoft (June, 1665), the Dutch, under the
command of Ruyter and Cornelis de Witt, contended with Monk and
Prince Rupert with success. "The court," says Burnet in his
_History of His Own Times_, "gave out that it was a victory,
and public thanksgivings were ordered, which was a horrid mockery
of God and a lying to the world. We had in one respect to thank
God--that we had not lost our whole fleet."
{354}
A secret treaty was then concluded between Louis XIV. and Charles
II. Meanwhile the Dutch fleet again ascended the Thames as far as
Sheerness, insulting English pride at the gates of London.
Charles II. had neglected the defence of his ports; at the moment
when Ruyter and De Witt were sailing proudly on his waters, the
king and his associates, assembled at Lady Castlemaine's, were
chasing a moth which had lost its way in her splendid apartments.
Negotiations were already begun at Breda; three treaties of peace
were concluded there in the month of July, 1667, between Holland,
France, and Denmark.
An ancient commercial and maritime rivalry had at one time
excited the hatred of the English against Holland. The conformity
of manners and religion, and the principles of liberty which
existed in the two countries, counterbalanced the old animosity.
The war had been more royal and less popular than Louis XIV.
imagined. Charles II. had never forgiven the Hollanders for the
decree of exclusion which they had pronounced against his house,
at the instigation of Cromwell. It was felt in England that the
war was not a righteous one; the misfortunes which soon
afterwards overtook the capital seemed like a punishment for it.
The Plague broke out in London in 1665; in five months it
destroyed more than 100,000 persons. "This did dishearten all
people," says Burnet, "and coming in the very time in which so
unjust a war was begun it had a dreadful appearance. All the
king's enemies and the enemies of monarchy said here was a
manifest character of God's heavy displeasure upon the nation,
and indeed the ill life the king led and the viciousness of the
whole court gave but a melancholy prospect."
{355}
The king and court left London; Parliament was convened at
Oxford; the aged Monk alone solicited the government of the
capital. The expelled Nonconformist pastors returned in a mass
into the midst of their old flocks now bewildered with terror.
The Parliament of Oxford rejected an act of indulgence of the
king tending to suspend penal legislation against the nonjurors;
it forbade the dispossessed ministers to approach the scene of
their old functions. When the Plague was at an end the Act of the
Five Thousand once more banished the old pastors from the
congregations whom they had edified and consoled during the
infection. The king had scarcely returned to his capital when a
fire of unparalleled extent devastated it anew. Thirteen thousand
houses were burnt, eighty-nine churches destroyed in the City,
sixty-three in the environs. Two hundred thousand persons, it is
said, found themselves without shelter, compelled to camp out
under tents in the fields. The king and the Duke of York
honorably displayed their courage; but so many calamities began
to weary the nation. In Scotland the tyranny of Lord Lauderdale
and Archbishop Sharp provoked an insurrection which was more
religious than political. The people remained passionately
attached to the Presbyterian Church and the Covenant. The
pressure exercised for the establishment of the Episcopate roused
the Covenanters of the West at the moment when the Fire of London
occupied all minds; it cost some trouble to reduce them;
executions were not successful in calming the irritation.
Smouldering in England, whilst it was bursting forth in Scotland,
discontent was everywhere the same. National loyalty still
protected the king. It was against his ministers, and
particularly against the Earl of Clarendon, that public prejudice
was directed.
{356}
The Chancellor succumbed under the burden both of his virtues and
his defeats. "Raised by the Restoration to the summit of
authority, he succeeded to power with a hatred for all that had
passed during twenty years, and with an intention of restoring
everything in Church and State to the point at which the
revolution had found it. But he had what is often wanting, or is
quickly dissipated in active and elevated spheres of life,
namely, opinions and faith in duty. He was often in error; he
committed, or suffered to be committed, iniquities; but truth and
virtue were not in his eyes chimeras. Often irrational and unjust
in his relations with the national party, he was towards his own
party firm, enlightened, and virtuous. A severe censor of the
corruption of Charles II., frankly Protestant in a Papist court,
notwithstanding his personal hatred towards the Presbyterians;
grave and austere in the midst of frivolous and greedy courtiers;
moderate by reason, though his nature was harsh and perhaps even
vindictive; he constantly set his face against those wild
disorders, that reckless and capricious tyranny, to which the
government was unceasingly impelled by the vices of the king and
the passions of the Cavaliers. As a returned exile he did not
control the evil genius of the Restoration, and did not even
conceive the idea of controlling it. An Englishman of the old
type, he opposed to the perverse nature of his party all his
power, ability, and virtue."
{357}
It was the virtues of Clarendon that alienated from him the mind
of the king. Weary of the constraint which the principles of his
minister imposed upon him, the king deprived him of the seals in
the month of August, 1667. "The Chancellor was as much surprised
as he could have been if one had presented to him an order for
his execution," says Clarendon himself in his memoirs. He had
believed himself assured of the heart and the fidelity of the
king against all his enemies. The House of Commons proceeded at
once to the impeachment. Clarendon was avaricious, yet at the
same time lavish. His princely dwelling was the object of
jealousy among all the Cavaliers, who had been ruined by the
sequestrations and the disadvantageous liquidations to which they
had been subjected under the Commonwealth. "The Act of Indemnity
for the enemies of the king had become an act of oblivion for his
friends," said the country gentlemen who had been deprived of
their property. They accused the Chancellor of having enriched
himself more rapidly than was consistent with honor. The House of
Lords defended him without success. Charles pressed his old
servant to leave England, in order to prevent, as he said, the
evils that might result to the kingdom from the division which
had manifested itself between the two Houses. Clarendon resisted;
the king at length gave him the order to depart. "It is
absolutely necessary that he should go promptly; I answer upon my
salvation for his safety." Such was the language addressed to the
fallen minister by the Bishop of Winchester, who was charged to
deliver the royal message. Clarendon, old and in weak health, set
out immediately. It was on the night of the 25th of November,
1667. Scarcely had he touched the soil of France when the two
Houses voted his banishment; at the same time making it unlawful
to grant him any pardon without the authority of Parliament.
{358}
Dejected and without hope, Clarendon established himself at
Montpelier. There he wrote his admirable _History of the
Rebellion_, his memoirs, and several works of piety. When he
died, at Rouen in 1674, he had not seen England again, and had
not received from the king any testimony of affection or
remembrance--a striking example of royal ingratitude, as well as
of the incapacity of an exile to govern a country the life of
which he had long ceased to share or to understand.
With the downfall of Clarendon commenced the reign of the
intriguers, the corrupt and the corrupters, and the moral decline
of the party of the government, composed at first of men who were
honest even in their excesses, but were soon bought by money or
favors, and led into concessions and to a line of policy often of
shameful kinds. The ministry of the Cabal, as it was called, from
the names of the politicians who composed it--Clifford,
Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale--was not formed in
the interest of any settled principles either political or
social. By turns flattering liberals and arbitrary
absolutionists, complaisant to the whims of the king, and lavish
of their favors towards men whose votes or support were
necessary, they sought abroad the alliance of the King of France,
and soon sank into dependence upon him, impelled towards that
degradation by the need of an _éclat_ which they could find
only in war, with the all-powerful succor of Louis XIV.
{359}
The first effort of the king's new advisers was wiser and more
prescient. Popularity among the Protestants in England and on the
Continent was the object to which their views were directed. They
sent to Holland Sir William Temple, an able and honest
diplomatist, qualified to appreciate the elevated and patriotic
views of the grand pensionary, John de Witt. Naturally favorable
to the French alliance, which he had long sought and sustained,
John de Witt had been rendered anxious by the progress of the
power and ambition of Louis XIV. He desired to protect Europe
against his invasions, by drawing closer that ancient union of
the Protestant countries promoted of old at the instigation of
Burleigh under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth. The treaty of
the Triple Alliance, signed at the Hague on the 23d of January,
1668, engaged England, Sweden, and the United Provinces, to
defend against France the weak monarchy of Spain. A secret
article bound the allies to take up arms to restrain Louis XIV.,
and if possible to bring him back to the conditions of the peace
of the Pyrenees. The peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was the fruit of
that prudent and wise policy.
John de Witt and the Dutch were destined to pay dearly for their
courageous initiative. "In the midst of all my prosperity in my
campaigns of 1667," writes Louis XIV. in his memoirs, "neither
England nor the Empire, convinced of the justice of my cause,
offered any opposition, however much their interests were opposed
to the rapidity of my conquests. On my way I found only my good,
faithful, and old friends, the Hollanders, who, instead of
interesting themselves in my good fortune as furnishing the
foundation of their State, attempted to impose conditions on me
and compel me to make peace. They even dared to employ threats in
case I should refuse to accept their mediation. I confess that
their insolence wounded me to the quick, and that I was tempted
to risk what might happen to my conquests in the Spanish
Netherlands, and to turn all my forces against that haughty and
ungrateful nation. But having called prudence to my aid, I
dissembled, and concluded a peace on honorable conditions,
resolved to postpone the punishment of that perfidy to another
occasion."
{360}
The first care of Louis XIV. in his operations against Holland
was naturally to detach Charles II. from his alliance. In this
business he employed his sister-in-law, Madame Henrietta of
England, an adroit and agreeable person, tenderly attached both
to her brother and to France, without allowing the subjection of
Charles to the all-powerful Louis XIV. to wear the appearance of
a disgraceful or humiliating fact for his native country. The
position of the King of England in his kingdom, in the face of
his Parliament, became every day more difficult. The excesses of
the court party, their corruption, their flagrant vices, had at
last brought about a national reaction which was felt even in
Parliament, at one time so passionately and blindly loyal. The
country party was formed in opposition to the ministry of the
Cabal, which was divided within itself, being now drawn towards
the Dutch alliance by the Earl of Arlington, now driven towards
France by the Duke of Buckingham. The nation awoke from her
ecstatic loyalty, and aspired to resume her share in the
government.
Shrewd and penetrating under his external appearance of
indifference, Charles II. understood better than his ministers
the changes of public opinion, and the risk which they compelled
him to encounter. The constraint of constitutional government was
burdensome to his licentious selfishness, as it had been to the
timid pride of his father.
{361}
He desired to free himself from the trammels which Parliament
imposed upon him. But he had no army; a few regiments of guards,
silently recruited, were insufficient to sustain a struggle for
which he had moreover no pecuniary resources. He could find no
support except from abroad; the alliance which his sister had
offered him in the name of Louis XIV. assured him the aid of
which he stood in need. A secret treaty was concluded at Dover in
the month of May, 1670, but signed only by the Catholic advisers
of the king. The greater part of the ministers were ignorant of
its existence.
Secrecy was necessary, and it was advantageous to conceal the
conditions. The King of England undertook to declare publicly his
return to the Roman Catholic Church as his brother, the Duke of
York, had done. Louis XIV. promised to assist him to that end
with a sum of two millions of livres, as well as with an annual
subsidy of three millions when the two princes should have
declared war against Holland. Peace with Spain, always popular in
England, Spain being the natural enemy of France, was to be
respected by the two sovereigns.
Charles II. knew what his people were capable of enduring, and
what were the limits of their patience. The declaration of
Catholic faith was delayed, and the article concerning it was
passed over in silence in the modified treaty brought to the
knowledge of the king's Protestant ministers, the representatives
of the old party of the Cavaliers--Buckingham, Ashley, and
Lauderdale. They obtained from Charles II. in the place of the
war which the king proposed to declare against the Hollanders, a
declaration of indulgence for the Protestant Nonconformists.
{362}
The Catholics were not included, and the Nonconformists began to
breathe freely. Parliament voted a sum of £800,000 sterling for
the support of the Triple Alliance; at the same time Ashley
declared that the advances deposited in the hands of the
Government by the merchants of London would not be refunded as
usual, and that interest only would be paid on them to the proper
persons. A sum of £1,300,000 sterling was thus added to the
king's resources. Little did Charles heed the financial disasters
which this arbitrary and unjust act entailed upon the city. He
was now rich; he desired to be free. He prorogued Parliament, and
declared war against Holland (March, 1672).
Louis XIV. entered the Netherlands. His conquests began to
disquiet Europe, and caused in Holland the internal revolution
which cost the brothers De Witt their lives, and placed at the
head of the Dutch forces the young Prince of Orange. England took
part in the struggle by a long series of naval engagements. The
first, and the most important of all, the battle of Sole Bay,
cost Admiral Montague, who had become Lord Sandwich, his life.
The struggle was bitter. "Of thirty-two battles in which I have
taken part," said Ruyter, who was gloriously defeated on that
day, "I have never seen one like it." "He is at once an admiral,
a captain, a pilot, a sailor, a soldier," said the English. The
Duke of York incurred the greatest disaster during the action.
{363}
The war continued. The Prince of Orange and the Hollanders were
resolved upon a desperate resistance. "You do not perceive that
your country is lost?" said to William, the Duke of Buckingham,
who had been sent by Charles II. to the Hague. "There is always a
way of not witnessing her loss," replied the hero, "which is to
die in the last ditch." All the dykes of Holland were filled with
water; the country was inundated, the winter arrived, hostilities
were suspended, and the King of France returned to St. Germain's.
Before his departure he wrote in his diary the memorandum: "My
departure; I desire that nothing more be done." The resources of
Charles II. were exhausted; it was necessary to summon
Parliament.
The war was unpopular; but the Houses were occupied with other
affairs, and the subsidies which the king demanded were voted
without resistance if not without ill-humor. Religious questions
assumed in the public mind a predominance over political or
military affairs. Parliament had been passionately royalist; its
attachment to the king and confidence in him diminished day by
day. The two Houses remained constantly attached to the
Established Church, which they had raised up, and were ready to
defend against all her enemies. The royal declaration of
indulgence was the object of a hostile address; Charles had
already received, through Colbert, the representations of Louis
XIV.: he withdrew his measure. This was not enough to satisfy the
fears of Parliament: Protestant England felt that she was
delivered up to the Catholics by a monarch whose faith began to
appear problematical. The Test Act was passed by the two Houses;
every public functionary was compelled to take the oath of
allegiance and supremacy, to sign a declaration against the
doctrine of transubstantiation, and to take the Communion
according to the rites of the Church of England. The king's
desire was to resist; but a dissolution would have resulted in a
House of Commons more violent than the royalist Long Parliament:
he yielded.
{364}
The Duke of York, declaring openly his conversion to Catholicism,
resigned immediately the post of Lord High Admiral; Lord Clifford
left the ministry; in all the public offices a great number of
men, whose attachment to the Roman Catholic faith was previously
unknown, successively sent in their resignation. Parliament,
triumphing in the success of its measure, contemplated with
apprehension the danger which had threatened it. All confidence
in the word of the king disappeared from the public mind. The
cabinet was already shaken by the resignation of Clifford; the
Chancellor, Ashley, now Earl of Shaftesbury, who had long been in
special favor with Charles, and who was worthy to serve him by
reason of his caustic wit and moral corruption, was wounded by
the secret which the king had withheld from him. He deemed the
national liberties and religion in peril, and allied himself with
the country party in the House of Commons in the month of
November, 1673. This Parliament was scarcely prorogued when
Charles commanded him to surrender the seals. "Now to put off my
robe and buckle on my sword," said Shaftesbury; and he placed
himself at the head of the opposition.
The Duke of Buckingham followed Shaftesbury in this political
movement, at the moment when Parliament was appealing to the king
to banish him from his councils, as well as the Earl of
Lauderdale. The House of Commons was debating on the impeachment
of Lord Arlington. Less honest than Clifford, but like him a
Catholic at heart, Arlington renounced an active part in politics
and entered the household of the king. Lauderdale alone remained
entrusted with the affairs of Scotland, and suffered the
accumulated hatred which fell upon him in consequence of his
indefatigable tyranny.
{365}
The ministry of the Cabal was at an end; with it ended the war
with Holland, which had been burdensome, unpopular, and little
glorious for the arms of England. In vain had Louis XIV. sent to
London the Marquis of Ruvigny, a considerable person among the
French Protestants, and justly esteemed in England. Parliament
desired peace, and refused the subsidies. Charles II. yielded, as
was his habit, to the clearly expressed wishes of the nation;
and, with like conformity to his custom, he reserved his private
opinions and secret manœuvres. "Pity me; do not blame me," he
wrote to Louis XIV. On the 21st of February, 1674, Charles II.
proceeded to Parliament, to announce to the two Houses that he
had concluded with the United Provinces "a speedy peace, in
accordance with their prayer, and he hoped also an honorable and
a durable one." The English and Irish auxiliary regiments,
commanded by the Duke of Monmouth, a natural son of the king,
remained quietly in the service of France. Louis XIV. did not
withdraw his subsidies from his royal dependent.
The ladies who had served as a lien between the two crowns, and
had negotiated the humiliating conditions of the alliance between
the two kings, had died during the ascendency of the ministry of
the Cabal--the Queen Henrietta Maria in the month of August,
1669, in France, where she habitually resided with her second
husband, Lord Jermyn; the Duchess of Orleans, Madame Henrietta,
in June, 1670, at the moment when she had just concluded the
treaty of Dover--the latter not without a suspicion of poison.
{366}
Both were eulogized by Bossuet in the most magnificent language;
both in a measure and with a different degree of responsibility
were fatal to the destinies of England. Monk also had died on the
3rd of January, 1670, as calm before the progress of his malady
as in the face of the enemy. Old and suffering as he was, he had
personally hastened to encounter the Dutch when they entered the
Thames. As they were re-embarking, their bullets whistled in the
ears of the general. His aides-de-camp pressed him to retire. "If
I was afraid of bullets, gentlemen," said Monk, "I should long
ago have quitted this business."
He died erect, turning his head to breathe in silence his last
sigh. "A man capable of great things, though he had no grandeur
in his soul; born at once to command and to obey; sensible,
patient, and brave; attached to his own interest, and yet devoted
in every great position to his duty as a soldier and an
Englishman; without political ambition and not aspiring to govern
his country--he knew how to acknowledge his country's rights, and
to restore to her the government which had become indispensable."
Charles II. had not forgotten the services rendered to him by
Monk; he was neither shocked by his pecuniary greed nor by the
grossness of his manners. He had loaded him with wealth and
honors, and he followed him to the tomb in Henry VII.'s Chapel at
Westminster. The general had never played any political part, and
his death left no void in the direction of affairs, which were
becoming every day more complicated and more violently
conflicting. The court party and the country party divided the
two Houses. Out of doors the country party was strikingly
superior.
{367}
The conviction of this fact alone prolonged the existence of the
Royalist Long Parliament. The time had now gone by when
courtiers, probably with the assent of the king, dared to set
miserable hirelings to mutilate the face of Sir John Coventry, a
prominent member of the opposition in the Commons. From this time
forth the country party took the measure of the royal authority,
and raised its pretensions even to the question of the succession
to the throne. The enthusiasm and the confidence which marked the
first days of the Restoration had given way to sombre
disquietude. It was not with his ordinary exaggeration that Lord
Shaftesbury said, "If the king had had the happiness to be born a
simple gentleman, he might have passed for a man of sense, good
breeding, and good disposition. As a king he has brought his
affairs to such a point that there is not a creature in the
world, man or woman, who can feel the least confidence in his
word or his attachment."
The refusal of the Duke of York to take the test oath, and his
marriage with the daughter of the Duke of Modena, Mary Beatrice,
in 1673, filled the measure of the Protestant anxieties of the
nation. In vain the two daughters of Anne Hyde, who had died in
May, 1671, were publicly reared in the faith and practice of the
Church of England; all feelings of security had departed from
men's minds, and the rumor which began to spread abroad of a
secret treaty, concluded some time before, between King Charles
II. and Louis XIV., increased the suspicions of the people. The
choice which the king made of a new minister served for some time
to reassure men's minds. Sir Thomas Osborne, soon afterwards
raised to the peerage as Earl of Danby, appeared favorable, in
the House of Commons, to the country party.
{368}
He was a Protestant, a thorough Englishman, and without being
over-conscientious or scrupulous, he was yet not absolutely so
wanting in principles as his predecessors in power. Ardently
devoted to the royal prerogative, he endeavored to restore
authority to the hands of the king, by relying not on the court
party, but on the old Cavaliers and the Established Church. One
element of his popularity was his antipathy to the alliance with
France. Before his advent to power he had given as a toast at a
public dinner in the city, "War with France!" The people felt
assured that he would never lend his hand to those transactions
humiliating for the honor of England and her sovereign, of which
no one yet ventured to speak openly. The ambition and the
weaknesses of men sometimes surpass the most gloomy
apprehensions; of this, Danby was destined soon to furnish a
proof.
Like the ministry of the Cabal, the new government began by
making advances to the Dutch. A peace was concluded. Sir William
Temple was charged with the care of foreign affairs, and was
shortly afterwards despatched as an envoy to the Congress of
Nimeguen, there to settle the terms of general peace. But Danby
continually oscillated between the royal and the national policy,
sometimes urging Charles to unite himself with Europe in a war
against France, sometimes lending himself privately to the secret
negotiations with Louis XIV. In the course of the year 1676 a new
convention assured to Charles II. a pension of £100,000 sterling
and the assistance of such French troops as might be necessary in
his dominions.
{369}
The letters of Danby do not permit us to doubt the knowledge that
he had of the situation, if not his connivance at the treaty.
Charles II. undertook to prolong the prorogation of Parliament,
which had endeavored to force upon him an effective action in the
general pacification of Europe. The war on the Continent still
continued when the Houses at length assembled again in 1677. The
Duke of Buckingham and Lord Shaftesbury maintained that the
length of the prorogation amounted to a dissolution, but Danby
was an accomplished master of the art of corruption; he disposed
of the money from France. The country party was defeated in the
House of Commons, and the authors of the proposition for a
dissolution were sent to the Tower, where they were detained for
several months.
Meanwhile the increasing successes of Louis XIV. began to alarm
Danby as they alarmed England. Suddenly looking towards Holland,
he obtained from the king authority to invite William of Orange
to visit London, and negotiating secretly with that prince, he
concluded a marriage between him and the eldest daughter of the
Duke of York, the Princess Mary, whose hand had been previously
offered to William without resulting in the manifestation of any
eagerness on his part for the alliance. The importance of this
concession was keenly felt in Paris. "Louis XIV. sent immediately
for Montague, our ambassador," says Burnet, "who when he came to
Versailles saw the king the most moved that he had ever observed
him to be. He asked him when was the marriage to be made.
Montague understood not what he meant, so he explained all to
him. Montague protested to him that he knew nothing of the whole
matter. The king said he always believed the journey would end in
this, and he seemed to think that our court had now forsaken him.
Lord Danby, who recalled Montague to London, asked him how the
king had received the news of the marriage. The ambassador
answered, 'As he would have done the loss of an army.'"
{370}
In England the joy was great. "The first tokens that I had of the
marriage were the bonfires which were lighted in London," wrote
Louis XIV. The alliance, offensive and defensive, concluded with
Holland, and which at length compelled Louis to recall his
auxiliary regiments, broke for the moment the secret relations
between Louis XIV. and his crowned pensioner. The quarrel was not
of long duration. The understandings constantly maintained
between France and the English Parliament, as with their
sovereign, kept the policy of England in a state of indecision
and inconsistency, which rendered powerful aid to the firm and
resolute conduct of Louis XIV., who was absolute master of his
kingdom, his army, and his finances. "I do not envy the Grand
Seignior, with his mutes and their bowstrings always ready to
strangle according to his pleasure," said Charles II. to the Earl
of Essex; "but I shall never think myself a king as long as those
fellows keep watch on all my actions, interrogate my ministers,
and demand an account of my expenses."
This was just what Parliament had attempted to do. Dreading at
once the prodigality of the king and the growth of his power,
demanding a war with France, and fearing to allow the sums voted
for that purpose to be wasted, or to see troops, raised for the
struggle with Louis XIV., turn their arms against the liberties
of England, the House of Commons endeavored to limit the
application of the sums voted to specific purposes, and required
that an account should be rendered of expenditure. Such arrogance
excited the indignation of the king, and his anger increased the
feeling of alarm.
{371}
As a consequence of treachery and contradictory manœuvres the
king of England ceased to have any weight on the Continent, even
in the quality of mediator, when the general peace was concluded
at Nimeguen. It was signed in July, 1678, under the influence of
the States-General of Holland.
Thenceforth Louis XIV. was the arbiter of Europe. The English
nation had learnt to distrust its king; but he was at the head of
a small army, the subsidies from France were not yet exhausted,
and Lord Danby was menaced in Parliament, over which he had so
long exercised a paramount influence. Convicted of having taken
part in the secret negotiations between Louis XIV. and his
master, he was impeached in the House of Commons in 1678, and
soon afterwards sent to a prison, where he remained until the
death of Charles II. The court dreaded a trial which threatened
to show the comparative innocence of the Lord Treasurer at the
same time that it exposed the king's shame. Lord Shaftesbury was
more eager to obtain the dissolution of Parliament than to bring
his rival to trial. The Parliament of 1661--the "pensioned
Parliament," as it had been nicknamed during the latter years of
its existence--at length succumbed. The new Parliament assembled
on the 6th of March, 1679.
{372}
One thought, one passion alone--terror and hatred of the
Catholics--filled the breasts of the new members. Some months
before the downfall of Lord Danby a terrible and unparalleled
piece of news had overwhelmed the mind of the nation, clouded the
strongest judgments, and impelled the most moderate to violence.
King Charles, while taking a walk in St. James's Park, received
from a certain Captain Kirby, an unknown and insignificant
personage, the revelation of a plot stated to have been hatched
against his life. The informer, Kirby, referred to Dr. Tonge, an
ecclesiastic of the Church of England, and known to some persons
of the court. Tonge affirmed the existence of a great Papist
conspiracy. Letters were seized; the king and the Duke of York
judged them to be forgeries. Tonge produced his principal
witness, Titus Oates, son of an Anabaptist preacher, but in holy
orders, a chaplain in the navy, thence soon dismissed, a convert
to Catholicism, and twice ignominiously expelled from the College
of the Jesuits. As audacious as he was corrupt, he maintained
with effrontery that his relations with the Jesuits had given him
occasion to discover the entire plot; that documents had passed
into his hands; the Pope had assigned the government of England
to the Jesuits, who were spread over all parts of the three
kingdoms in order to labor in the work of the general conversion;
the life of the king was threatened, as well as that of all
obstinate Protestants; the Fire of London had been the work of
the Jesuits; a second fire was preparing for the port of London;
all the ships were to be delivered to the flames; the Pope had
already named the ministers who were to govern England for him.
The good sense of the king, favored by his secret confidence with
regard to the Catholics, enabled him at once to reject this
monstrous tissue of falsehoods and calumnies.
{373}
Some persons, however, were mentioned, and public opinion began
to be excited. The papers of Coleman, who had been occasionally
employed by the Duke of York, were seized at the moment when he
was beginning to burn them. Enough remained to furnish evidence,
not of a plot properly so called, but of the hopes which the
Catholicism of the heir to the throne, as well as the personal
inclinations of the king, had engendered in the Church of Rome.
"We have a great work in hand," wrote Coleman to Father La
Chaise, confessor to Louis XIV.; "it is a question of nothing
less than the conversion of the three kingdoms, and perhaps by
this means of the destruction of that odious heresy which has so
long prevailed over the people of the North. Never have such
hopes been able to flourish since the death of our Queen Mary.
God has given us a prince who has, by a miracle, become ardently
desirous of being the author and the instrument of this glorious
enterprise; but we are certain to meet with so many obstacles and
so much opposition, that it is important to afford us all the
help that one can." Coleman fled the country.
This was more than was wanted to inflame the minds and excite the
fears of all the members of the council, before which Oates and
Tonge appeared. A terrible incident came to add to the public
anxiety and indignation. Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey, a magistrate of
London, who had received the depositions of Titus Oates, and
perhaps even the confessions of Coleman, whose friend he was,
disappeared from his house for some days, then was found murdered
in a ditch not far from the church of St. Pancras. His sword was
plunged into his breast. An attempt was made to represent this as
a case of suicide, but both the medical examination and popular
feeling denounced the murderers.
{374}
The body remained exposed for two days. "Many went to see it,"
says Burnet, "who went away much moved by the sight, and indeed
men's spirits were so sharpened upon it that we all looked on it
as a very great happiness that the people did not vent their fury
upon the Popish about the town." An immense crowd gathered at the
interment of Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey; he was regarded as a martyr
to Protestantism.
The fears of Parliament were as great as those of the people of
London. The king had announced an intention of bringing the
affair before the ordinary tribunals. The Houses of Parliament
had summoned Titus Oates before them; voted him their thanks and
a pension of £1,200 sterling; they indicted all the Roman
Catholic lords named by the renegade; the prisons were crowded
with Papists; for the first time the question of the succession
to the throne was agitated in Parliament. The Duke of York had
ceased to take his place in the Privy Council; this prudent
course secured him an exemption from the general measure which
soon afterwards forbade the Catholic Peers to sit in Parliament.
The Test Act had already excluded Papists from the House of
Commons. The denunciations continued, and to Titus Oates was now
added one Bedloe: the executions commenced; a few obscure
Catholics had already paid with their lives for the terrors of
England when the new Parliament assembled at Westminster.
{375}
The state of parties had undergone an important change. The great
divisions which were destined so long to distinguish opinions in
England, began to appear in the legislature of 1675: the Tories,
under the direction of Lord Godolphin and Lawrence Hyde, second
son of Lord Clarendon, occupying the place of the court party,
and remaining devoted to the royal authority; the Whigs, who had
for their leaders Lord Shaftesbury, Lord Essex, and Lord William
Russell, and forming the country party, more concerned for the
rights of the nation than for the prerogatives of the crown; and
an intermediate group, distinguished under the insulting name of
"Trimmers," inclining, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the
left, according to the impulse of the lively, penetrating, and
critical mind of their chief, Lord Halifax. Lord Sunderland,
clever and unpopular, was as a rule in accord with Halifax.
Nearly all formed part of the new council of thirty members which
Sir William Temple had proposed to the king as a constitutional
experiment. That wise diplomatist also hoped, by thus engaging in
the royal council the Parliamentary leaders, to protect the crown
against the encroachments of Parliament, and to secure in equal
degree the nation against the pretensions of the crown.
The nature of things and the necessities of affairs were not slow
in prevailing over the scheme thus ably planned; the new council
had scarcely entered upon its duties when an inner council began
to direct all its deliberations, and found itself alone in charge
of the government. Sir William Temple, Lord Essex, Lord Halifax,
and Lord Sunderland were the real members. Lord Shaftesbury was
president of the council.
{376}
It was the latter who placed himself at the head of the
Protestant party in Parliament. The nation had become alive to
the danger which threatened its faith as well as its liberties
under the future reign of the Duke of York. The king had in vain
removed his brother, who had retired to Brussels. The House of
Commons solemnly voted his exclusion from the throne. Before the
Bill could be carried to the House of Lords, Charles prorogued
Parliament.
The indignation was profound. "I will bring to the block those
who have advised the prorogation," cried Shaftesbury in a
transport of anger. The chief of the Whigs had, however, on that
day obtained the success of a measure which he had long
cherished; the royal assent had been accorded to the Habeas
Corpus Bill, securing the personal liberty of every English
subject, and the right to be released on bail from the prisons of
detention. This guarantee of the rights rendered sacred by Magna
Charta was hailed with enthusiasm by the people, who justly
attributed the credit of it to the president of the council. This
title was not destined to be long accorded to him. In July, 1679,
the king dissolved Parliament. Some months later he recalled his
brother from Brussels and dismissed Lord Shaftesbury. The friends
of the latter suffered his fate; Lord William Russell, Lord
Cavendish, and Lord Essex retired from the council. Sir William
Temple, disgusted by the failure of his new plan of government,
returned to his country-house to cultivate his beautiful gardens,
which he had never wished to leave. Halifax and Sunderland alone
remained in power. Lawrence Hyde and Sidney Godolphin were soon
associated with them. Under the presidency of the chief of the
Trimmers the power passed once more into the hands of the Tories.
[Footnote 2]
[Footnote 2: The appellations Whig and Tory were originally
given to the fanatical Covenanters and Catholic Outlaws in
Scotland and Ireland. From them they passed to the political
parties.]
{377}
Up to this time the ministry had kept in its midst, at the head
of the affairs of Scotland, an abettor of tyranny who had already
more than once caused grave embarrassment to the government of
the king. Lord Lauderdale, supported in Scotland by Archbishop
Sharp, had transgressed the limits of Presbyterian patience. In
spite of his ordinances, and of the atrocious penalties by which
he punished offences against them, conventicles multiplied on all
hands. Once already the Archbishop had been threatened by
assassins who failed in their purpose. He pursued them with
pitiless vengeance, exacting from all the landed gentry of the
west an engagement not to tolerate on their estates the forbidden
religious assemblies, or to be present at them themselves. On the
refusal of these gentlemen, they were required "to deliver up
their arms and to keep no horse of greater value than £4
sterling." To this edict, as to the former one, they refused
obedience; at the news of this step the Duke of Lauderdale fell
into such a fit of rage that in full council he turned his
sleeves up to his elbows and swore by Jehovah "that he would know
how to put them in irons again." Halifax obtained the king's
consent to examine for himself the complaints broached against
his minister. "Kings," says Burnet, "naturally love to hear their
prerogative magnified; yet on this occasion the king had nothing
to say in defence of the administration. But when May, the Master
of the Privy Purse, asked him, in his familiar way, what he
thought now of his Lauderdale, he answered, as May himself told
me, that he had objected to many things that he had done against
them, but there was nothing objected that was against his
service." Strange infatuation of a sovereign so long a prey to
the vicissitudes of fortune, but who had not yet learnt that his
interests were inseparable from those of his people.
{378}
The Duke of Monmouth had been charged with the affairs of
Scotland. He arrived there in the midst of a recrudescence of
religious ardor. The Presbyterians felt that Lauderdale was
beaten. They repaired in crowds into the conventicles. Some
wretches carried their rage further. Archbishop Sharp was passing
in his carriage through the environs of St. Andrew's; his
servants were in advance, or following at some distance; he was
alone with his daughter when the carriage encountered a group of
armed fanatics. "Behold the day of the Lord," cried the
Covenanters; "the Eternal has delivered our enemy into our
hands." The archbishop was not deceived. "God have pity upon me!"
he exclaimed to his daughter; "I am lost." The horsemen followed
the carriage; the horses and the postilion were wounded; the
murderers presented themselves at the door of the vehicle. "Come
forth, Judas!" they cried. The old man and his daughter knelt to
implore for mercy. The hatred of their persecutors was too
violent for them to allow their prey to escape; the archbishop
fell pierced by daggers. "Take away your priest," said the
assassins to the terrified servants; and they retired into a
cottage to return thanks to God. The forbidden assemblies had
become so numerous that they were able to repulse the regiments
sent to disperse them. The Covenanters had taken possession of
Glasgow, when the Duke of Monmouth marched against them, on the
22d of June, 1679, at Bothwell Bridge on the Clyde.
[Image]
Portrait Of Monmouth.
{379}
The insurgents were completely defeated, and the massacre would
have been great if the duke had not imposed a limit to the
vengeance of Graham of Claverhouse, already famous, who had once
been conquered by the fanatics. When Monmouth returned to
England, the king remarked to him that if he himself had been
engaged in the affair, he should not have concerned himself so
much about the prisoners. "I do not kill in cold blood," replied
the duke; "that is the work of a butcher." The moderation which
the young duke exhibited in victory may have been politic as well
as charitable and humane. Some fumes of greatness had begun to
mount to his head: he imagined that he foresaw a future hitherto
unhoped for. Moved by personal hostility towards the Prince of
Orange, the cause of which has never been made known, Lord
Shaftesbury, who pursued with ardor his campaign in favor of the
Bill of Exclusion, extended his animosity to the Protestant
children of the Duke of York. A rumor began to spread that the
birth of Monmouth was legitimate, and that the king had secretly
espoused his mother, Lucy Walters. Long unknown, under the name
of James Croft, because he had been confided in his infancy to
the care of Lord Croft, Monmouth had recently married the
daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch, the greatest heiress in
Scotland; he bore his name joined to the title of the Duke of
Monmouth, which the king had given him. Handsome, brave,
thoughtless, he had inspired in Charles II. an attachment of
which the adroit Shaftesbury reckoned upon availing himself in
the rivalry which he sought to establish between the young man
and the Duke of York. When James was recalled from Brussels by
his brother, he required that Monmouth should be stripped of his
appointment and sent back to the Continent.
{380}
Meanwhile the new Parliament had met (October, 1680); it was more
ardently Protestant and patriotic than its predecessors. The
Exclusion Bill was passed by a great majority; for a moment there
was reason to believe that it would be adopted by the House of
Lords. Godolphin advised the king to yield to public feeling; the
Duchess of Portsmouth, the French favorite of Charles, implored
him not to rush upon his ruin. He hesitated for some days,
endeavoring to conclude a bargain with the Legislature. But
mutual distrust was deep-seated and carefully nourished by very
different influences. The royal honor and a remnant of natural
affection mingled with the anger of a sovereign upon whom his
people sought to impose an unjust law. Charles II. adopted his
course, and engaged in a contest against the Exclusion Bill,
being present himself at the sittings of the House of Lords. The
debate was long and violent; more than once hands grasped the
hilts of swords: the eloquence of Halifax prevailed over the
alliance of Shaftesbury, Essex, and the treacherous Sunderland;
the Bill was rejected by a very large majority.
The threatened Catholics were destined to pay for that check to
national and Protestant anxieties. Several small plots,
fictitious or real, were discovered; but the ordinary tribunals
seemed weary of condemnations. It was the House of Lords itself
which pronounced the sentence against Lord Stafford, youngest son
of the old Earl of Arundel, and consequently uncle of the Duke of
Norfolk. "He was a weak, but a fair-conditioned man," says
Burnet.
{381}
Titus Oates and one of his compeers, named Turbervil, accused
Lord Stafford of having plotted the assassination of the king.
The charge had not a shadow of foundation; the viscount was
nevertheless condemned by 55 voices against 31. The royal favor
exempted him from the odious punishment of traitors. Charles II.
was convinced of the innocence of the victims; he had too much
sense to believe in the existence of those plots incessantly
arising which so alarmed England, but his cold selfishness
troubled itself little with the warrants which he signed, or the
lives which he sacrificed to his repose. "The king appeared very
calm, and his mind very cheerful," wrote Algernon Sidney,
"although one might then have thought that he would be
overwhelmed with cares, having no other resource but to dissolve
Parliament, and trust himself to the good pleasure of his
subjects; but the embarrassment in which he was did not seem to
trouble him."
A renewed attempt in the House of Commons in favor of the
Exclusion Bill led to the dissolution foreseen by Algernon
Sidney; and it was a token of the royal intentions that the new
Parliament was convened for the 21St of March, 1681, not at
Westminster, but at Oxford. Charles had concluded with Louis XIV.
a new treaty, kept profoundly secret, by which the king of France
engaged himself to give for the current year a subsidy of two
million livres, which was to be reduced to fifteen hundred
thousand during the three following years. At this price Charles
broke the alliance which he had contracted with Spain for the
maintenance of the treaty of Nimeguen. He returned to his
dependence upon Louis XIV.
{382}
The violence of Shaftesbury and his adherents went on increasing;
it passed the bounds of the national temperament. The sentiments
of passionate loyalty which had hailed the Restoration were not
completely extinguished, and when the leader of the Whigs,
arriving armed at Oxford, affixed to the hats of his domestics
the motto from one of his speeches, "No Popery! no slavery!" the
echo which it occasioned in the hearts of the people was not
powerful enough to sustain him in his audacious designs. The
nation rejected, as he did, Popery and slavery; but it was not
yet disposed to attribute to its king all the sinister views
which Shaftesbury laid to his account. In the last Parliament
Shaftesbury had proposed to deprive the Duke of York, upon his
accession to the throne, of the power to treat with foreign
governments, and to nominate civil and military functionaries. At
Oxford he offered to leave to the heir-apparent the empty title
of king, while entrusting the power to the Prince of Orange as
the representative of the Princess Mary. These various
expedients, more specious and ingenious than practicable, were
insufficient to satisfy the violent passions excited in the House
of Commons. The proposition of Halifax was rejected. On the 26th
of March, a new Exclusion Bill was presented and carried. "On the
28th," says Burnet, "very suddenly and not very decently, the
king came to the House of Lords, the crown being carried between
his feet in a sedan. And he put on his robes in haste, without
any previous notice, and called up the Commons, and dissolved
Parliament." This was the fifth Parliament dissolved by King
Charles II. The Parliament of Oxford was the last which was
convoked during his reign.
{383}
He hastened, however, to reassure the nation, and to explain the
motives of his actions. A royal manifesto was immediately
published, complaining of the undutiful behavior of the three
last Parliaments towards him, and of their disrespectful conduct
in many instances. "Nothing, however," he added, "shall ever
alter my affection to the Protestant religion as established by
law, nor my love to Parliament, for I will still have frequent
Parliaments." The Whigs replied to the royal protestations,
insisting upon the necessity of the exclusion of the Duke of
York; but their passions had blinded them regarding the state of
public opinion. A mass of addresses were presented to the throne,
some ardently Protestant, but assuring the king of their fidelity
and confidence; others asserting the right of the regular
succession to the throne, while a considerable number openly
accepted the doctrine of non-resistance, and absolute submission
to the will of the king. The country gentlemen and the
inhabitants of towns scented in the air the spirit of 1641; the
remembrance of the Civil War had not yet faded from men's minds;
the king found himself once more supported by the national
sentiment; and he believed himself powerful enough to employ it
against his enemies. Proceedings were taken against the men who
had insulted the royal majesty. Fitzharris had written a
seditious pamphlet. College was accused of having endeavored to
corrupt the king's guard; both were condemned and executed. Lord
Shaftesbury, indicted as a suborner of false witnesses, was sent
to the Tower. The sheriffs of London were still Whigs; the Grand
Jury chosen by them triumphantly acquitted Shaftesbury.
{384}
The wretches previously concerned in the proceedings against the
Catholics reappeared in the proceedings against the Whigs. Lord
Howard, arrested for the moment, owed his liberty to the Habeas
Corpus Act. The king determined to release himself from the
trammels imposed upon him by the opinions of the magistrates of
London. By a movement of doubtful legality, it was contrived to
have sheriffs elected who belonged to the Tory party; the latter,
in their turn, chose juries devoted to them. Certain Whig
magistrates were sued, and condemned in enormous damages. The
king prepared his measures against the charters of the city, and
the municipal liberties which everywhere protected the
corporations of towns. A visit of the Prince of Orange did not
suffice to arrest the absolutist reaction. "The Whigs seem to me
in a majority," said the prince to the king, his uncle. "You see
only them," replied Charles.
The Duke of York reappeared in London. During his absence from
the court, he had exercised in Scotland a harsh and perfidious
authority. The rigor to which the Nonconformists had been
subjected had excited the hot-headed. A preacher named Cameron, a
name still remembered among his partisans, had raised the banner
of revolt against a king faithless to the Protestant religion and
the government to which he had sworn. He was killed in an
engagement. His successor, Donald Cargill, was arrested and soon
afterwards executed with a large number of his disciples. Men and
women walked to the scaffold singing songs of triumph. The Scotch
Parliament instituted an oath of submission to the royal
authority, which went so far as to require passive obedience.
Fletcher of Saltoun and Lord Stair demanded the insertion of a
clause for the protection of the Protestant religion.
{385}
The Duke of York would not sanction it under this form. When it
was proposed to dispense with it, Lord Belhaven declared that the
utility of the oath was to exclude Papists from the succession;
he was sent to prison. The Earl of Argyll, son of him who had
been executed at the commencement of the reign, made some
reservation in taking the oath of submission; he was arrested in
his turn. The Duke of York disclaimed on his part any sinister
intention towards him. "God forbid that the life and fortune of
the earl should be imperilled," he said. Yet on the 12th of
December, Argyll was condemned by a jury presided over by the
Marquis of Montrose. He was assured of the royal pardon; but the
earl put no faith in the protestation of his enemies. The Duke of
York refused to grant him an audience. Argyll escaped, disguised
in the attire of the page of his daughter-in-law. Lady Sophia
Lindsay. Condemned, _per contumaciam_, to all the horrors of
the punishment of traitors, his property had been confiscated,
and his children declared unworthy of their inheritance; but the
king, more considerate and wiser than his advisers, returned a
part of his fortune to Lord Lome, the eldest son of the earl. The
latter prudently remained in Holland.
The Duke of Monmouth did not act with the same wisdom. When he
found the Duke of York established at the court, recognized again
as Lord High Admiral and lodged by the king in St. James's
Palace, he regarded as void the promise he had given to remain on
the Continent so long as his rival should govern in Scotland, and
returning to London without the king's permission, was received
with exclamations of joy by the people.
{386}
Leaving the city with a cortege almost regal, he journeyed slowly
through the kingdom, received by the gentry and by deputations
from the towns, mixing with the crowd wherever he went with a
proud but amicable and popular condescension, and saluted on the
road by the enthusiastic cries of "Monmouth! Monmouth!"
This triumphant progress led the imprudent young man as far as
Chester. The chief justice of that city was George Jeffreys,
already known for his violence, his ability, and his
unscrupulousness in the furtherance of his unbridled ambition.
Corruptly attached at that time to the interests of the Duke of
York, he easily found a pretext for arresting the Duke of
Monmouth at Stafford, June, 1682. On being conducted to London,
the duke was immediately liberated, but was held to bail.
Shaftesbury did not put his trust in the Habeas Corpus Act.
Alarmed by the measures which he saw in progress against the
Whigs, he sought refuge in the city. It was an old saying of his
that he "would constrain the king to leave his kingdom quietly;
but as for the Duke of York, he would compel him to wander on the
face of the earth, a vagabond like Cain!" The attitude of the
king, the fears that he entertained for his party and for
himself, the tendency of his restless disposition, again impelled
him to dangerous projects. The national party demanded that
Charles II., in disinheriting his brother, should with his own
hands destroy the monarchy. Charles required that the national
party should at all risks submit to a prince who evidently
aspired to destroy the religion and constitution of the country.
Thus urged on to extremes on one side and the other, the king
decided for despotism; the national party for insurrection.
{387}
In 1682 two statesmen, Lord Shaftesbury and Lord Russell, were at
the head of the contest: Shaftesbury, already old, ambitious,
indefatigable, corrupted by every source of corruption--the
court, the government, and the seductions of popularity;
accustomed from his youth upwards to seek and find his fortune in
intriguing and plotting; bold and supple in mind; sagacious and
fertile in expedients; powerful in influencing men; equally
skilled to render service and to injure, to please and to
irritate; attached nevertheless by pride and foresight to the
Protestant and national party, which was certainly in his eyes
the strongest and the ultimate victor; and determined, in any
event, to preserve his life in order to enjoy the fruit of his
manœuvres or to pursue them afresh: Lord William Russell, still
young, sincere, ardent, inexperienced, endowed with an inflexible
temper, a heart full of faith and honor, conscientious in
conspiring; ready to sacrifice his life for his cause, but
incapable of doing anything indifferently for the sake of success
or for his own safety. The web was woven; Lord Shaftesbury
rallied around him all the malcontents.
The conspirators met occasionally; they were not always the same
persons; they were suspicious of each other, and mutually
concealed the ultimate object of their plans. Russell projected
an armed resistance against the royal tyranny, accepting,
perhaps, in the bottom of his heart, though without avowing it to
himself, the consequences of such a resolution. Shaftesbury saw
his way clearly to his design, and prepared at all cost the
overthrow of the king and the advent of a successor other than
the veritable heir. Some meditated a sudden attack and the
assassination of the king. There were among them some republicans
who cherished their dreams, and also some traitors either already
in the pay of the court or ready to deliver up to it their secret
and their accomplices, in order to withdraw themselves from
peril.
{388}
One day when they were met together, Russell saw enter with
Colonel Sidney and Mr. Hampden, a man whom he despised--Lord
Howard. "What have we to do with that fellow?" he asked of Lord
Essex, his intimate friend, and he desired to retire; but Essex
detained him, having a better opinion of Lord Howard, and not
suspecting that this was the man whose testimony was destined
soon to ruin both.
Lord Howard was already sold to the court. By a lucky accident
Shaftesbury was informed of this circumstance; he immediately
determined to leave England. The order was actually issued for
his arrest when he stealthily left his house, and concealing
himself for some days, embarked at Harwich to take refuge in
Holland, hoping to find with the Prince of Orange an asylum and
an avenger. When chancellor he had violently favored the war with
Holland, and more than once had repeated _Delenda est
Carthago_. On his arrival at Amsterdam he requested permission
to remain there from the burgomaster, who replied, "Carthage, not
yet destroyed, willingly receives the Earl of Shaftesbury within
her walls."
He had forever bidden farewell to England. Two months after his
flight, while his imprisoned accomplices were undergoing their
examination before the judges, the troubled soul and restless
mind of Shaftesbury for the first time found repose. He died on
the 21st of January, 1683.
[Image]
Lord Russell's Trial.
{389}
Lord William Russell was already in the Tower when Shaftesbury
landed in Holland. As he passed under the Traitor's Gate, he said
to his valet, Taunton, "I am sworn against; my enemies will have
my life," And when Taunton expressed a hope that they would not
succeed, "They will have it," Russell repeated, "the devil is
loose."
The conspirators were all arrested. Grey had contrived to escape.
Howard had purchased his life by treason; Essex, troubled to the
very depths of his soul, cut his throat in prison. Algernon
Sidney and Hampden refused to reply to the interrogatories "Seek
elsewhere for evidence against me," answered the republican
Sidney proudly. It was proposed to Baillie of Jerviswood, to save
himself by giving information. "Those who talk to me thus know
neither me nor my country," replied the Scotch gentleman.
Witnesses, true or false, were not wanting to the proceedings.
Several obscure conspirators had already been executed when
Russell was placed at the bar of the Court of the Old Bailey, on
the 13th of July, 1683. He asked for a pen and ink to take notes;
then turning towards the judges, "May I have somebody to write,
and help my memory?" he asked. "Yes, my lord, a servant." "My
wife," he replied, "is here to do it." Lady Rachel Russell rose
to express her assent; all the bystanders knew her virtuous
character, and the passionate attachment which united her to her
husband. She served him as his secretary during the whole time of
the proceedings. When he was condemned it was she again who
pursued without resting every means of obtaining his pardon. "All
me is true," replied the king to Lord Dartmouth; "but it is
equally true that if I do not take his life he will very soon
take mine."
{390}
And as the arrival was announced of the Marquis of Ruvigny, uncle
of Lady Rachel, with a pressing letter from Louis XIV., "I am
well assured that the king, my brother, would not advise me to
pardon a man who would have shown me no quarter," said the king
to Barillon, then ambassador of France at the English court. "I
have no wish to prevent M. Ruvigny coming here, but my Lord
Russell's head will be off before he arrives."
On the 21st of July, 1683, Russell died upon the scaffold. "The
bitterness of death is passed," he said to Tillotson and Burnet,
after embracing his wife for the last time; and showing the watch
which he handed to Burnet, he said, "I have now done with time,
and am going to eternity."
The complications of projects and the various conspiracies served
the purpose of the royal vengeance. A criminal plot, much
exaggerated in its importance, and entered into by obscure men,
which was known under the name of the "Rye House Plot," had been
mixed up, whether involuntarily or intentionally, with the
revolutionary designs of the great lords. Algernon Sidney had
indulged the dream of the return of the Republic; he defended
himself with a degree of ability and self-possession which for a
moment troubled Chief Justice Jeffreys himself. When sentence was
pronounced, Sidney lifted his hand towards heaven: "I implore
Thee, O Lord," he said, "to sanctify my sufferings and not to
impute my blood to this nation or this city. If one day it should
be avenged, let vengeance fall entirely on those who have
unjustly persecuted me in the name of justice." He was executed
on the 26th of November, 1683.
{391}
Several of the conspirators shared his fate. The trial of Hampden
did not take place till the month of February, 1684. Condemned to
imprisonment, he ransomed himself afterwards by payment of a sum
of money. The royal power was thenceforth freed from every
trammel and from all anxiety. The subsidies of Louis XIV.
rendered Charles independent of his people. He refused to summon
a Parliament; the Court of King's Bench declared that the city
had exceeded its privileges; the charter was withdrawn in 1684;
the franchises of all the towns known for their liberal opinions
were abolished, like those of the capital. The Duke of York had
resumed his place in the Privy Council.
While the absolute reaction acquired every day more strength and
audacity, the influence of Lord Halifax with the king diminished.
The minister himself was weary of the struggle which he sustained
in the Council against Lawrence Hyde, created Lord Rochester, who
was devoted to the Duke of York, his brother-in-law. "Life would
be worthless," he exclaimed one day, when they were discussing
the Charter of Massachusetts, "if we had to drag out existence in
a country in which liberty and prosperity were at the mercy of an
absolute master." The Duke of York was irritated by this
language. "How can you keep about you a man nourished on the
worst principles of Marvell and Sidney?" he asked the king.
Charles laughed. More sagacious and prudent than his brother, he
knew how to conquer without needlessly exasperating the
vanquished. Rochester, convicted of malversation while Lord
Treasurer, was transferred from the control of the finances to
the dignified but not lucrative post of President of the Council.
"I have often seen people kicked down stairs," said Halifax; "my
Lord Rochester is the first person that I have ever seen kicked
up."
{392}
The day arrived when the Duke of York was to find himself free to
apply without stint his theories of government. The king seemed
weary and languishing. His humor, habitually cheerful in exile
and in the midst of the crudest misfortunes, had for a short time
past become gloomy. On the 2nd of February, 1685, at the moment
of his rising from bed, the courtiers around him were struck by
his altered looks. His utterance was embarrassed; his
intelligence seemed clouded. A doctor who happened to be at hand
to assist the king in his chemical experiments bled him without
delay. Charles recovered his senses. A second attack soon put an
end to all hope of cure. The Duke of York had already taken
possession of the government. He gave his orders in all
directions. It was the king's favorite, the Duchess of
Portsmouth, who, in the heart of this depraved court, took care
of the soul of the expiring monarch. She apprised Barillon, who
hastened to inform the Duke of York. "It is true," cried James,
"my brother is a Catholic at heart; he will assuredly declare it,
and fulfill the rites of his religion; there is not a moment to
lose." Some difficulty was experienced in procuring a priest. The
Anglican bishops had not delayed so long to press the king to be
mindful of his spiritual welfare. The Archbishop of Canterbury,
Sancroft, and the Bishop of Bath, the pious Ken, had addressed
Charles in the firmest language. "It is time to speak, Sire, for
you are about to appear before a Judge who is no respecter of
persons." The king made no reply.
{393}
The Duke of York at last succeeded in finding a priest; it was a
poor Benedictine monk, named Huddleston, who had saved the king
immediately after the battle of Worcester. Charles had a grateful
remembrance of this circumstance. Huddleston had been excepted by
name from all the proceedings against the Catholics. James
himself introduced him into his brother's chamber. All present
were desired to retire with the exception of the Frenchman, Louis
de Duras, Earl of Feversham, and of the Earl of Bath. They could
count on the fidelity of each other. "Sire," said the duke, "this
holy man once saved your life; he comes to-day to save your
soul." "He is welcome," said the king in a feeble voice. The poor
monk had never fulfilled the holy offices. He had just taken
instructions hurriedly from a Portuguese ecclesiastic in the
suite of the Count de Castelmelhor. When the pious ceremonies
were completed, all the natural children of the king were
admitted to his presence. Monmouth alone was absent. He had
sought his safety in exile; the king did not mention his name.
The queen was in too much trouble and suffering to appear at the
bedside of the dying monarch. She sent her excuses by Halifax,
asking pardon of the king. "Poor woman," murmured Charles, "I ask
hers with all my heart!"
The agony was protracted. The king asked that the curtains might
be drawn, so that he could see once more the light of day. "I beg
your pardon for giving you so much trouble," he said to those who
stood around him; "I am a very long time dying." His utterance
failed him; at noon on the 6th of February, 1685, King Charles
II. expired gently. He was not yet fifty-five years of age.
{394}
"He had received from nature," says Lord Macaulay, "excellent
parts and a happy temper. His education had been such as might
have been expected to develop his understanding, and to form him
to the practice of every public and private virtue. ... He had
been taught by bitter experience how much baseness, perfidy, and
ingratitude may lie hid under the obsequious demeanor of
courtiers. He had found, on the other hand, in the huts of the
poorest, true nobility of soul. ... From such a school it might
have been expected that a young man, who wanted neither abilities
nor amiable qualities, would have come forth a great and good
king. Charles came forth from that school with social habits,
with polite and engaging manners, and with some talent for lively
conversation, addicted beyond measure to sensual indulgence, fond
of sauntering and of frivolous amusements, incapable of
self-denial and of exertion, without faith in human virtue or in
human attachment, without desire of renown, and without
sensibility to reproach. According to him, every person was to be
bought, but some people haggled more about their price than
others. ... Thinking thus of mankind, Charles naturally cared
very little what they thought of him. ... He was a slave without
being a dupe. ... He detested business. ... He wished merely to
be a king such as Louis XV. of France afterwards was." Without
regard for the state of his kingdom, shut up in the selfish
circle of his material pleasures, indifferent to all religion,
hostile to the Puritans from memory of the past, from contempt
for their ridiculous characteristics, and from fear of their
austerity; without faith or rule of conduct; absolutely wanting
in principles and moral sense, he had worn out the respect of the
nation without completely exhausting its affection, for he was
sagacious, prudent, little addicted to hazardous enterprises; and
he had measured with a cool and practical judgment the degree of
oppression which his people were capable of enduring.
{395}
The popular saying did him injustice in affirming that "he never
said a foolish thing, and never did a wise one." He was wise
enough more than once to stop in the path of despotism. His
brother, who had often impelled him in this direction, was now
about to advance to the brink of the abyss. England wept for the
loss of Charles II. Without being fully conscious of the feeling,
she regarded James II. with presentiment and with dread.
{396}