4. Charles a Pensionary of France. 1675-1676.—Parliament, in its distrust of the king, refused him supplies, upon which Charles prorogued it for fifteen months. Louis, who feared lest Parliament should drive Charles into joining the alliance against him, was so pleased to see its sittings interrupted for so long a time that he granted to Charles a pension of 100,000l. a year, to make him independent of his subjects. The result was that whilst Charles allowed Danby to have his own way in domestic affairs, he refused to allow him to detach England from the French alliance. It was not, however, merely his personal interests which drew him to Louis, as he took a real interest in the prosperity of English trade, and was unable to get over his jealousy of the Dutch. In November 1676, he obtained from Louis a treaty by which the French renounced a claim made by them to seize Dutch goods conveyed in English ships, hoping by this to gain the goodwill of Parliament at its next meeting. He could not understand how completely the alarm of his subjects lest their national religion and independence should be assailed by the French had made them forgetful of their commercial jealousy of the Dutch.

5. Two Foreign Policies. 1677.—On February 15, 1677, Parliament again met. Shaftesbury and his allies attempted to steal a march on Danby by producing two old statutes of Edward III. which directed that Parliaments should be held every year, founding on it an argument that the existing Parliament, not having met for a year, had legally ceased to exist. The House of Lords sent Shaftesbury and three other peers to the Tower for their pains, and the Commons contemptuously rejected a similar argument put forward in their own House. Danby found himself triumphant. The Commons granted 600,000l. for increasing the navy. Danby then carried a Bill through the House of Lords for securing the Protestant religion in the event of a Catholic—James being, of course, intended—coming to the throne, though the Bill did not pass the Commons, apparently from a feeling that its provisions were insufficient. The eyes of Englishmen were, however, principally fixed on the Continent. In the preceding year the French had gained two great naval victories, in one of which De Ruyter had been slain, and in the spring of 1677 Louis carried one place after another in the Spanish Netherlands. Both Houses now asked Charles to join the alliance against France, whereupon Charles indignantly prorogued Parliament. When he was urged by the Dutch ambassador to act upon the wishes of the Houses he threw his handkerchief into the air, with the accompanying words: "I care just that for Parliament."

7. Danby's Position. 1677.—Though Danby had brought Charles round to support his foreign as well as his domestic policy, his success was more apparent than real. The fact was that his foreign and domestic policies were inconsistent with one another. In the long run it would be found impossible to contend against the French king and the English Catholics supported by him, without calling in the aid of those Protestant Dissenters who were most hostile to Louis. Englishmen attached to the Church were being led by their growing distrust of France to a tenderer feeling towards Dissenters, and the spread of this feeling made in favour of Shaftesbury, who favoured toleration, and not in favour of Danby, who opposed it. For the present, however, Danby could count on the Parliamentary majority which agreed with him, and neither he nor the king wished to risk a dissolution.

8. The Peace of Nymwegen. 1678.—When Parliament met in February 1678, Charles appeared full of determination. He declared that, unless Louis agreed to make peace with the Dutch on reasonable terms, he would go to war with France. The Commons at once resolved to grant him 1,000,000l., and to support an army of 30,000 men and a fleet of 90 ships. Before this resolution was embodied in an Act, without which Charles could not touch the money, the followers of Shaftesbury took alarm. They believed—and, as is now known, not without reason—that Charles intended to use the troops to make himself absolute. They not only pressed him to disband what troops he had, but they entered into communication with Louis' ambassador, in the hope that he would support them in forcing Charles to dismiss his troops and to dissolve Parliament, some of them even accepting from him gifts of money. Charles, on his part, vacillated, doubting which was the best policy for him to adopt. At one time he was eager to assist the Dutch, and sent troops to their succour in the hope that a victorious army might afterwards be useful to him in England. At another time he made overtures to Louis with the object of securing his support. In the end, on July 31, Louis and the Dutch made peace at Nymwegen without consulting Charles at all. Louis gained Franche Comté and a large number of fortresses on his northern frontier, which had formerly belonged to Spain. Though he had failed to destroy the Dutch Republic, he had shown himself superior in war to a great continental coalition, and had made France the predominant power in Europe.

10. Growing Excitement. 1678.—Oates's depositions were taken before a Middlesex magistrate, Sir Edmond Berry Godfrey. Not long afterwards Godfrey was found murdered in the fields near Primrose Hill. All London was wild with excitement. It was widely believed that 'the Papists' had murdered him to punish him for listening to Oates. It was also held to be an undoubted truth that 'the Papists' were about to set fire to London, and to murder all good Protestants. A joiner named College made his fortune by inventing a pocket flail, tipped with lead, which was called the Protestant flail, and was to be used by sober citizens to brain 'Popish' assassins. When Parliament met on October 21 Shaftesbury, who had been liberated early in the year, unscrupulously encouraged belief in the supposed plot. Up to that time Catholic peers had kept their seats in the House of Lords, and a few Catholics had surreptitiously sat in the Commons. A new Test Act was now passed by which they were excluded[32] from both Houses, though the Duke of York was exempted by name from its operation. Five Catholic peers were thrown into the Tower, and Coleman, the secretary of the Duchess of York, who had in his custody papers implying that James had a design for forwarding the interests of his religion, was tried and executed.

12. The Meeting of the First Short Parliament. 1679.—When the elections to a new Parliament—the first of three short Parliaments—were completed, Charles found that, with the exception of at most thirty members, the opposition had gained every seat. Bowing to the storm, he sent his brother to Brussels, and expressed his readiness to place himself at the head of the Protestants of the Continent. When, however, Parliament met, on March 6, 1679, it was found that both Houses were more anxious about the fate of Protestantism at home than about that of Protestants abroad. The Commons renewed the impeachment of Danby, upon which Danby produced a free pardon from the king. The Lords decided that a pardon could not be pleaded in bar of an impeachment, but, in the end, proceedings against Danby were dropped on his being deprived of office and committed to the Tower. By the advice of Sir William Temple, Charles tried a new experiment in government. A new Privy Council was appointed of thirty members, fifteen being ministers of the Crown and fifteen influential lords and commoners, by the advice of which the king was always to be guided. Shaftesbury was appointed President of this Council, but it was soon found to be too large a body to manage affairs which required secrecy, and a small committee was therefore formed out of it for the consideration of all important business.

14. Shaftesbury and the King. 1679.—New elections were held, with the result that a House of Commons was chosen even more bitterly hostile to the Court than its predecessor. Shaftesbury was now at the height of his glory. Oates and other informers were adding new lies to those which they had told before, and the continual trials and executions of the Catholics for participation in the supposed Popish Plot kept the excitement in favour of the Exclusion Bill at a fever heat. Shaftesbury's position was very similar to Pym's in 1641. He had on his side the fundamental principle that a nation cannot safely be governed by a ruler whose ideas on the most important question of the day are directly opposed to those of his subjects, and he was right, as the result showed, in holding that, in the seventeenth century, a Catholic king could not satisfactorily govern a Protestant people. After Danby's fall, the king became the real head of the party opposed to Shaftesbury. His ability had always been great, but hitherto he had alienated those who were disposed to be his friends by attempting to establish an absolute government with the help of the king of France and of an army dependent on himself. He now set himself to overthrow Shaftesbury by appealing to a popular sentiment which was quite as strong, and might be stronger, than the dislike of a Catholic successor; that is to say, to the horror with which anything which threatened a new civil war filled the hearts of his subjects.

15. Shaftesbury and Halifax. 1679.—Shaftesbury had already allowed it to be known that he intended, if he carried the Exclusion Bill, to propose that the future king should be the Duke of Monmouth. Monmouth was the eldest of Charles's illegitimate sons, and it was currently, though falsely, believed that Charles had been privately married to his mother, so that he might rightly be regarded as the heir to the Crown. Charles, who knew better than any one else that this story was untrue, stood faithfully by his brother, and, though his constancy made little impression as yet, he had on his side a man whose judgment might usually be taken as an indication of the ultimate decision of public opinion. That man was George Savile, Earl, and afterwards Marquis of Halifax. He had been one of the bitterest enemies of Danby, but he devoted himself to no party. He called himself a Trimmer, as if his business was to trim the boat, and to throw himself against each party in turn as it grew violent in consequence of success. He now supported the king against Shaftesbury, on the ground that it was uncertain whether James would survive his brother, and that, if he did, he was not likely to survive him long; whereas, the succession of the Duke of Monmouth would not only exclude from the throne the Catholic James, but also his daughters, who were both Protestants. As Monmouth had no real hereditary right, there was every likelihood that, even if he ascended the throne, his claim would be opposed by partisans of James's eldest daughter, the Princess of Orange, and that a civil war would ensue.

18. Drumclog and Bothwell Bridge. 1679.—When the Highland Host had done its work it left behind a people whose temper was thoroughly soured. Political hatred of the oppressors mingled with religious zeal. The Covenanters, as those were called who denounced episcopacy as a breach of the Covenant (see p. 525), regarded themselves as God's chosen people and all who supported their persecutors as the children of the devil, against whom it was lawful to draw the sword. To many of the Scottish gentry such talk as this appeared to be contemptible and dangerous fanaticism. Amongst those who strove most heartily against it was an active officer, John Graham of Claverhouse, who, being employed to quiet the country, shot or haled to prison men whom he thought likely to be forward in rebellion. On May 3, 1679, a band of fanatics murdered, on Magus Moor, near St. Andrews, James Sharp, Archbishop of St. Andrews, who was known to be eager to call for the persecution of the Covenanters, and who was peculiarly hated as having been once a Presbyterian himself. On June 3 Claverhouse was driven back at Drumclog by an armed conventicle which he attempted to suppress. The peasants of the West rose in arms and declared against the king's supremacy over the Church, and against Popery, Prelacy, and the succession of the Duke of York, but on June 22, Monmouth, who had been sent at the head of an army against them, defeated them at Bothwell Bridge, near Hamilton, and entirely suppressed the rebellion. Many of the prisoners were executed after being tortured to extract from them information against their accomplices, and this cruelty was exercised under the orders of the Duke of York, who had been sent to Scotland as Lord High Commissioner.[33]

20. The Second Short Parliament. 1680-1681.—Each party did all that could be done to court popularity. Monmouth made a triumphant progress in the west of England. On the other hand, James, on his return from Scotland, had a good reception even in London, the headquarters of his opponents. On June 26, 1680, Shaftesbury appeared at Westminster and indicted James as a recusant. At last, on October 21, the second Short Parliament met. The Exclusion Bill was rapidly passed through the Commons. In the Lords, Halifax carried the House with him by an eloquent and closely-reasoned speech, in which the claims of the Princess of Orange were dwelt on as superior to those of Monmouth, and the Bill was, in consequence, rejected. On December 29 Lord Stafford, a Catholic peer, was executed on a false charge of a design to murder the king. When he protested his innocence on the scaffold, shouts were raised of "God bless you, my lord! We believe you, my lord!" Charles saw in these shouts an indication that the tide of opinion was turning in his favour, and, on January 18, 1681, dissolved Parliament.

21. The Third Short Parliament. 1681.—Charles summoned a new Parliament to meet at Oxford, where it would not be exposed to any violent interruption by Shaftesbury's 'brisk boys'—as his noisy London supporters were called—who might, it was feared, repeat the exploits of the City mob in 1641 (see p. 535). The new House of Commons was again predominantly Whig, and it was thought by the Whigs that Oxford had been selected as the place of meeting because the University was eminently Tory, with the deliberate intention of overpowering them by force. Their alarm increased when they learned that the king was bringing his guards with him. Accordingly the Whigs armed themselves and their servants in self-defence, and, in this guise, rode into Oxford. Parliament was opened on March 21, 1681, and Charles then offered to assent to any scheme for stripping his brother of royal authority, if only he were recognised as king. Shaftesbury replied that the only way of ending the dispute was to declare Monmouth heir to the Crown. As the Commons supported Shaftesbury, Charles, on March 28, dissolved his third Short Parliament. So much was he afraid that the Whig members and their servants might lay violent hands on him, that he drove in one coach to Christchurch Hall, where the House of Lords was sitting, and sent his robes by another, in order that it might not be guessed that a dissolution was intended. He soon found that he could now count on popular support in almost every part of England. The mass of people judge more by what they see than by what they hear. The pistols in the hands of the Whig members when they rode into Oxford had driven into men's heads the belief that they intended to gain their ends by civil war, and, much as the nation disliked the idea of having a 'Popish' king, it disliked the idea of civil war still more, and rallied round the king.

1. Tory Reaction. 1681.—The Tory reaction which followed made itself especially felt in the law-courts. Judges and juries who had combined to send to death innocent Catholics, upon the testimony of forsworn informers, now combined to send to death ardent Whigs, upon the testimony of informers equally base. College, the inventor of the Protestant flail (see p. 615), was condemned to death, as having borne arms in Oxford during the last Parliament, and others shared his fate on equally slight grounds. In the City of London, however, it was still impossible to secure a verdict against a Whig. Juries were everywhere nominated by the sheriff of the county, and sheriffs were, in political cases, ready to compose a jury of political partisans. In every part of England except Middlesex, the sheriffs were named by the king, and were, therefore, Tories. The City of London, which was strongly Whig, had the privilege of electing sheriffs for London and Middlesex, and these sheriffs took care that Middlesex juries should be composed of Whigs. Shaftesbury was accused of high treason, but before he could be tried the Grand Jury of Middlesex had to find a true bill against him—that is to say, to declare that there was sufficient evidence against him to call for a trial. On November 24, 1681, the Grand Jury, composed of his own political partisans, threw out the bill, and he was at once set at liberty.

2. 'Absolom and Achitophel.' 1681.—A few days before Shaftesbury's release, Dryden, the greatest living master of the heroic couplet, strove to stir up men's minds against the prisoner by his satire of 'Absolom and Achitophel,' in which the part of the tempter Achitophel was assigned to Shaftesbury and the part of the tempted Absolom to Monmouth. Shaftesbury was described as

For close designs and crooked councils fit;
Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit;
Restless, unfixed in principles and place;
In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace;
A fiery soul, which worketh out its way,
Fretted the pigmy body to decay,
And o'er-informed the tenement of clay.
A daring pilot in extremity;
Pleased with the danger when the waves ran high,
He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit,
Would steer too nigh the sands to show his wit.

4. The City Elections. 1682.—The first thing on which, after James's return, the king's ministers set their heart, was to strike a blow at Shaftesbury. As he lived in his house in Aldersgate Street and took care never to leave the City, it was impossible to bring him to trial as long as the sheriffs of London and Middlesex were Whigs. The Lord Mayor, Moore, was gained by the Court, and, by various unscrupulous contrivances, he secured the appointment of two Tory sheriffs, and, even before the end of 1682, of a Tory Lord Mayor named Prichard as his own successor. There would no longer be any difficulty in filling the Middlesex jury box with Tories.

7. The Remodelling of the Corporations. 1683-1684.—A large number of other corporate towns were treated as London had been treated. By a plentiful use of writs of Quo Warranto, the judges on circuit obtained the surrender of their charters, after which the king issued new ones in which Tories alone were named as members of the corporations. It was said of Jeffreys, one amongst the judges who was most subservient, that he 'made all charters, like the walls of Jericho, fall down before him.' The object of these proceedings was to make sure of a Tory Parliament when the time came for fresh elections. In a large number of boroughs the corporations chose the members, and in such cases wherever the corporation had been remodelled, there would be a safe Tory seat. At the same time the laws against the Dissenters were strictly executed, and the prisons filled with their ministers.

10. Trial and Execution of Lord Russell. 1683.—Russell was accordingly put on his trial as a traitor. In those days no one on his trial for treason was allowed to be defended by a lawyer, as far as the facts of the case were concerned, but no objection was taken to his having some one near him to take notes of the evidence and to assist his memory. "Your friends," wrote his wife to him shortly before the trial, "believing I can do you some service at your trial, I am extremely willing to try. My resolution will hold out, pray let yours." Her offer was accepted, and she gave her husband all the help that it was possible to give. The jury, however, brought in a verdict of guilty, and sentence of death followed. In prison Russell was visited by two ministers, Tillotson and Burnet. No clergymen in England were more liberal-minded than these two, yet they urged the prisoner to acknowledge that resistance to the king was in all cases unlawful. Russell maintained that, in extreme cases, subjects might resist. Here lay the root of the political animosity between Whig and Tory. Whether an extreme case had occurred was a matter of opinion. "As for the share I had in the prosecution of the Popish Plot," Russell declared on the scaffold, "I take God to witness that I proceeded in it in the sincerity of my heart, being then really convinced, as I am still, that there was a conspiracy against the king, the nation, and the Protestant religion." It was because the nation at large no longer held this to be true that the Tories were in power.

12. Parties at Court. 1684.—In the spring of 1684 three years had passed without a Parliament, although the statute repealing the Triennial Act (see p. 588) had declared that Parliament ought to be summoned every three years. So sure was Charles of his ground that he liberated Danby without causing a murmur of complaint. At Court there were two parties, one led by Halifax, which urged that, by summoning a Parliament now, Charles would not only comply with the law, but would have a Parliament as loyal as the Cavalier Parliament had been; the other, led by Lawrence Hyde, the second son of Clarendon, who had recently been created Earl of Rochester. Rochester, who was the highest of Tories, pointed out that the law prescribed no means by which the king could be compelled to call a Parliament if he did not wish to do so, and that, after all, the Cavalier Parliament, loyal as it was at first, had made itself very disagreeable to the king during the latter years of its existence. All through the year Charles hesitated and left the question undecided. The king of France, who was renewing his aggressions on the Continent under the guise of legal claims, was ready to do all he could to prevent the meeting of an English Parliament, which would, in all probability, declare against him, and by sending money to Charles from time to time, he saved him from the necessity of asking his subjects for support.

14. Constitutional Progress. 1660-1685.—The twenty-five years of the reign of Charles II. were years of substantial constitutional progress. Charles did not, indeed, acknowledge that Parliament had that right of directing the choice of his ministers which the Long Parliament had upheld against his father in the Grand Remonstrance; but though he took care that his ministers should be responsible to himself and not to Parliament, he had also taken care, on the whole, to adapt the selection of his ministers to the changing temper of Parliament and the nation. Clarendon, the Cabal, and Danby had all been allowed to disappear from office when Parliament turned against them. The formation of Parliamentary parties, again, was itself a condition of Parliamentary strength. The Cavalier Parliament had been weakened in its later years by the uncertainty of its aims. At one time the king's reliance upon France and his tendency to rest his government on armed force provoked a majority to vote against him. At another time some concession made by him to their wishes brought round a majority to his side. In the latter years of Charles's reign this uncertainty was at an end. Charles had thrown his dependence on France and the army into the background, and in a struggle, the successful issue of which would bring no personal advantage to himself, had taken his stand on the intelligible principle of defending his brother's succession. He had consequently rallied round the throne all who thought the maintenance of order to be of supreme importance, whilst all who suspected that the order which Charles maintained was hurtful and oppressive combined against him. This sharp division of parties ultimately strengthened the power of Parliament. The intemperance of Charles's adversaries had indeed given him the upper hand for the time, but, if ever the day came when a king made himself unpopular, a Parliament opposed to him would be all the stronger if its majority were of one mind in supporting definite principles under definite leaders. Charles II., in short, did not live to see the establishment of Parliamentary government, but he unwittingly prepared the way for it.

15. Prosperity of the Country.—The horror of a renewal of civil war, which was partly the result of sad experience, was also the result of the growth of the general well-being of the community. The population of England now exceeded 5,000,000. Rents were rising, and commerce was rapidly on the increase. Fresh colonies—amongst them Pennsylvania and Carolina—were founded in America. In England itself the growth of London was an index to the general prosperity. In those days the City was the home of the merchants, who did not then leave the place where their business was done to spend the evening and night in the suburbs. Living side by side, they clung to one another, and their civic ardour created a strength which weighed heavily in the balance of parties. The opposition of the City to Charles I. had given the victory to Parliament in the civil war, and its dislike of military government had done much to bring about the Restoration. The favour of the City had been the chief support of Shaftesbury, and it was only by overthrowing its municipal institutions that Charles II. had succeeded in crippling its power to injure him. In the meantime a new forest of houses was springing up on sites between Lincoln's Inn and what is now known as Soho Square, and round St. James's Church. The Court and the frequent meetings of Parliament attracted to London many families which, a generation earlier, would have lived entirely in the country.