Charles, though destitute of personal beauty—his features were thin and harsh—had an affable address, a lively wit, and perfect manners. Supple and suave, he could make himself agreeable among any company. He had the careless good-humour that so often accompanies selfishness, and his character was too light and easy to make him a good hater. He was quite prepared to take to himself any allies who might appear, and to sell himself to any bidder whose terms were high enough.

Charles appeared in England as the representative of legality and constitutional rule, as the saviour of society who was to lay once more the foundations of peace and order, after ten years of military despotism. He was ready to accept just so much power as might be offered him, with the full intention of ultimately gaining as much more as he could safely assume. The "Convention Parliament," with which he had at first to deal, was a cautious body, containing many elderly men, who had fought against Charles I. and only accepted his son because of the dismal experience of ten years of rule by military "saints." The new king was therefore bound to be careful at first. Any unwise movement of opposition might upset his still unsteady throne.

The Parliament, however, was prepared to deal very liberally with Charles. They disbanded the old Cromwellian standing army. They granted him an annual revenue of £1,200,000 for life, to be raised from customs and excise. In return, the old vexatious feudal dues of the crown from reliefs, wardships, alienations, etc., were abolished. An amnesty was voted to all who had fought against the king in the old wars, with the single exception of those who had sat in the "High Court of Justice" of 1649, and been concerned in the execution of Charles I. Eighty-seven persons, of whom twenty-four were dead, came under this category. Of the survivors some score fled over-seas; the remainder were tried before a court of High Commission. Thirteen were executed, [43] twenty-five imprisoned for life, the rest punished with less rigour; at the same time the Earl of Argyle, the chief of the Scottish Covenanters, was executed at Edinburgh. The bodies of Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Ireton were ordered to be disinterred and gibbeted—an unworthy and uncomely act for which the spirit of the time is no sufficient excuse. An "Act of Oblivion and Indemnity" was passed to cover acts of the governments of the last twelve years. It stipulated that Crown and Church lands which the Commonwealth had granted away should be restored by their present holders, who were not, however, to suffer any other penalty. Private lands were to be restored if they had been actually confiscated by the government, but not if they had been sold by the Cavalier owners under pressure of war or debt. Thus many who had served Charles I. to the best of their ability got no compensation from his son. Gratitude was not the new king's strong point.

There was a third problem on which the Convention Parliament found the gravest difficulty in arriving at an agreement—the settlement of the Church. The benefices of England were at the moment in the hands of Presbyterian and Independent ministers of various shades of creed. Many of them had replaced incumbents of the Church of England thrust out by the Long Parliament. Others had succeeded in more peaceful wise. On the other hand, the extruded clergy of the old Church were claiming restoration to the cures from which they had been so ruthlessly ejected. What was to be done between the old holders and the new? Was the Church of England to be restored in all its ancient organization, and to become Anglican and Episcopal once more, or was it to be a lax organization including all manner of beliefs within its fold? The Parliament included many who were for "comprehension," and many who were pledged to a rigid restoration of the old order. It had been unable to come to any conclusion when it was dissolved in December, 1660. The king, however, had issued a declaration that a conference should be held between an equal number of Presbyterian and Episcopal divines, with the object of arriving at a compromise.

The new House of Commons which met in the spring of 1661 was a very different body from the "Convention." Elected in the full flush of Royalist enthusiasm at the restoration of law and order, it contained a very small proportion of the old Roundhead party. Its members, young and old, were for the most part such zealous adorers of Church and King, that they received the name of the "Cavalier Parliament." Charles was ready to take all they cared to give him, while his prime minister Clarendon was a High Churchman, and an advocate of hereditary divine right; but even they found it necessary to restrain from time to time the exuberant loyalty of the Commons.

The "Cavalier Parliament" showed the blindest confidence in the king, whose real character his subjects had not yet discovered. They passed bills asserting the incompetency of the two Houses to legislate without the sovereign's consent, declaring that under no circumstances was it lawful to levy war against the king, and placing all the military and naval forces of the realm in his hands. The "Solemn League and Covenant," which had been the shibboleth of the old Roundheads, they ordered to be burnt by the common hangman.

These comparatively harmless beginnings were followed by a series of bills prompted by a spirit of unwise rancour against the men who had ruled England from 1648 to 1660. The Cavaliers had twelve years of spiritual and temporal oppression to revenge, and were determined to do as they had been done by. The Church settlement, which had been left pending by the Convention, they carried out in the most summary way. The king had promised that a meeting between divines of the old Church and Presbyterian ministers should be held, in order to endeavour to bring about a union. But the scheme came to nothing; at the "Savoy Conference" of 1661, each side refused to move an inch from its position. The Parliament then proceeded to pass the "Act of Uniformity," to force the Puritans either to conform or to leave the Church. The Book of Common Prayer, slightly revised, and the Thirty-nine Articles were to be the rule of faith, and every minister was ordered to use and abide by them. Every incumbent was to declare his assent to them by August 24, 1662, or to vacate his benefice; such was also to be the fate of all who refused to accept Episcopal ordination. This left the Puritan ministers three months to choose between conformity and expulsion—a longer shrift than they had allowed the Anglican clergy in the days of the triumph of Presbyterianism. The large majority of them conformed, and accepted Episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer; these men became the parents of the "Low Church" party of the succeeding age. The more stubborn souls refused obedience; about 2000 of them were expelled from their livings on St. Bartholomew's Day, 1662. They and their followers are the original progenitors of the dissenting sects of modern England. The extrusion of the Puritans was most thoroughly carried out, not only in the case of beneficed clergy, but in the Universities and schools. No University professor and no schoolmaster was to be allowed to teach, unless he got a certificate of orthodoxy from his bishop.

Not content with thrusting out the Puritan ministers from the livings they had held, the Parliament went on to legislate against the Puritan laity. The "Corporation Act" of 1661 enacted that all mayors, aldermen, and other office-holders in the cities and boroughs of England should, on assuming their functions, abjure the Covenant, take the oath of supremacy and allegiance to the king, and receive the Holy Communion according to the rites of the Anglican Church. Thus the Sacrament was made into a political test, a scandalous perversion of the Holy Table. This bill excluded all sectarians of the more conscientious and honest sort from municipal authority, but it also produced the unsatisfactory class of "occasional conformists," dissenters who took the oaths and the Communion according to law, but remained outside the Church.

Before passing on to matters outside the sphere of things ecclesiastical, we must mention two other persecuting bills passed, at a somewhat later date, by the "Cavalier Parliament." The "Conventicle Act" of 1664 forbade religious meetings of dissenters. Family worship was to be allowed, but if any number of persons more than five were present, beyond the members of the family, such a gathering was to be held a "conventicle," and the hearers to be punished. Lastly, the "Five-Mile Act" of 1665 forbade any minister who had refused to sign the "Act of Uniformity" to dwell within five miles of any city or corporate borough. It also prohibited such men from acting as tutors or schoolmasters, unless they took an oath "to attempt no alteration of the constitution in Church or State." These acts were purely vexatious and spiteful, as the Nonconformists were now completely crushed and harmless. Their numbers were already rapidly dwindling, and by the end of the century they did not number a fifth of the population of the realm. The vast majority of them had gone to swell the Low Church party within the Anglican establishment.

For the first seven years of the reign of Charles II., the days of the "Cavalier Parliament," the chief minister of the realm was Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon. He was a survivor from the days of the Long Parliament, being one of the original reforming members of that body who had gone over to the royal side when the Puritan majority commenced to attack the Church. He had been one of the wiser and more moderate councillors of Charles I., and had followed Charles II. all through the days of his exile. His daughter, Anne Hyde, had married James, Duke of York, the king's brother. Fourteen years of exile had put him somewhat out of touch of English politics, and his political ideals were more like those of the Elizabethan monarchy than those of his own day. He was an honest and capable, but not a very strong man. All through his life he preserved the theories which had guided him in the early days of the Long Parliament, wishing to keep a balance between the royal Prerogative and the power of the two Houses. Of course he failed to satisfy either king or Parliament, Charles thought that he was not so zealous a servant as he might have been; while the advocates of stringent checks on the monarchy thought him too subservient to his master. Clarendon was a strong Churchman, and must bear his share of the responsibility for the iniquitous "Conventicle" and "Five-Mile" acts. In secular matters he was more judicious; he always opposed the attempts of the king or Parliament to slur over the "Act of Oblivion and Indemnity" and hunt down the adherents of the Commonwealth. In foreign affairs he was a strong advocate of the old Elizabethan policy of war with Spain and friendship with France, a system which was rapidly becoming very dangerous, owing to the growing preponderance of France under the vigorous and ambitious young king, Lewis XIV. The first sign of his views was the sale of Dunkirk, Cromwell's old conquest, to the French for 5,000,000 francs.

Clarendon's great fault was that he had no influence over his master, the king. He allowed Charles to develop his unworthy personal habits without remonstrance. The king filled both his palace and the public service with disreputable favourites. He neglected his amiable but unattractive wife, Catherine of Portugal, [44] and filled his court with a perfect harem of mistresses, whose sons he made dukes and earls. England had never seen shameless immorality in high places so rampant in any previous age. The king's companions and servants were, as might have been expected, men of scandalous life, and quite unfit for the offices into which he thrust them. The tone of the court had a profound and unhappy influence on the manners of the day. Never were the private vices displayed so unblushingly; as if in protest against the formal piety and bleak austerity of the days of the Puritans, England—or at least its governing classes—plunged into extravagance and evil living of all sorts. Drunkenness, profanity, thriftless luxury, gambling, duelling, shameless lust, were accounted no discredit. The literature, and more especially the drama, of the Restoration is coarse and foul beyond belief. Even great poets like Dryden felt constrained to be scurrilous when they wished to please. The days of the great civil war had brought out the sterner virtues of Englishmen; the Restoration and the reign of domestic peace were marked by the outburst of all the folly and lewd frivolity which had so long been dormant beneath the surface.

The chief political event of Clarendon's administration was the second Dutch war, a struggle into which the minister was forced somewhat against his will. It was an unwise war, for, in spite of the fact that their commercial interests often clashed, England and Holland needed each other's aid against the dangerous and restless power of France. Narrow trade jealousy, however, sufficed to bring on a conflict which ended with little credit to England. The fleet was very unsuccessful at sea, not so much owing to its own fault, as to the unskilful hands of its admirals. Charles gave the command to two old military men—General Monk, the author of the Restoration, and Prince Rupert. These gallant cavalry officers were wholly unable to handle a fleet; they led their ships into battle, whatever the odds against them, and then left the day to be decided by hard fighting. At a great three-days' engagement in the Downs (January 1-2-3, 1666) Monk was totally defeated by the Dutch admiral, De Ruyter, and his ill-success was very insufficiently revenged by some predatory descents on the coast of Holland in the next autumn.

The days of the Dutch war were some of the most unhappy that England has ever known. In the summer and autumn of 1665, the land was smitten with the worst outbreak of pestilence that it has ever suffered. The "Great Plague" raged in London with awful severity. The crowded and ill-built city, utterly destitute of any sanitary appliances, and foul with the accumulated filth of centuries, became a very hotbed of contagion. Whole streets and parishes were swept clear of their inhabitants by death or desertion; the clergy fled from their cures, the physicians from their patients. All who could escape removed into the country, and London in the late autumn looked like a city of the dead, the grass growing high in its streets. The great plague-pits by St. Martin's-in-the-Fields and Mile-end had been filled one after another, as fast as they could be opened, with huddled bodies gathered in the dreaded death-cart. At least a hundred thousand persons perished; contemporary rumour named an even greater figure.

London had hardly recovered from the Plague, when in the next year it suffered a fresh calamity, the Great Fire. A chance conflagration, bursting out in the heart of the city, was carried west and north by a strong wind, and swept away two-thirds of the inhabited houses of the capital. All the great buildings of mediaeval London perished in the flames, the old Gothic Cathedral of St. Paul's, eighty-eight other churches, the Guildhall, the historic mansions of the nobility, the halls of the rich City Companies, hospitals, old monastic remains, all were swept away. Hence it comes that central London is poorer in ancient architectural monuments than many a country town. The popular dismay at such an unexampled catastrophe was so great that a rumour went abroad that the conflagration was no accident, but had been planned and spread by the Papists, who were believed capable of any enormity since the wild attempt of Guy Fawkes. The Great Fire was not without its benefits; it swept away for ever a thousand mediaeval fever-dens, and allowed of the rebuilding of the city with wider streets and more direct communications. Perhaps we may add that it gave a unique opportunity to the great architect Christopher Wren, to display his talents in the new St. Paul's and the many other churches which he was commissioned to rebuild.

London was hardly beginning to rise again from its ashes, when the Dutch war ended, in some disgrace, but no loss to England. The English fleet had not recovered from the disaster in the Downs, for Charles II. had squandered on his palace and harem the liberal grants which Parliament made him to repair his navy. While the seas were unguarded, a Dutch squadron slipped up the Thames, burnt the English dockyard and ships at Chatham, and held the port of London blockaded for some days. But negotiations were already on foot before this disaster was suffered, and the Peace of Breda (1667) put an end to the war. The terms were less unfavourable than might have been expected; England modified the Navigation Act of Cromwell's day in favour of Holland, but kept the valuable conquest of New Amsterdam, a Dutch colony in North America, which lay between New England and Virginia. The settlement changed its name, and was called in the future New York, after the king's brother, James, Duke of York.

Just after the Peace of Breda, Clarendon lost his place as the king's chief minister. The disasters and mismanagement of the war were, very unjustly, imputed to him rather than to his master. The Commons impeached him for permitting corruption among the public servants, and for wilfully misconducting the war. Bowing to the storm, he left England and dwelt in exile till his death.

No one was more glad than the king at Clarendon's departure. He filled the place of his well-intentioned, if narrow-minded, minister with a clique of his disreputable friends. This administration was called the "Cabal" (from Cabala, the Hebrew word for strange and occult knowledge), as being the depository of the king's secrets. The name became popular because it chanced that the initials of the names of the five men who formed it spelt the word "Cabal." They were Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. Lord Clifford and the Earl of Arlington were Romanists, a fact which brought much odium and suspicion on their doings. George, Duke of Buckingham, the son of the favourite of Charles I., a volatile, insincere man—

as Dryden wrote. He was the most profligate and unscrupulous man in England. Lauderdale, an ambitious Scottish peer, was a renegade Covenanter who had sold himself to the king for power. Anthony Ashley, Lord Shaftesbury, was also an old Roundhead, whose love of office and preferment had overcome his principles. He was an active, unscrupulous man, whose ready talents were only prevented from achieving greatness by his want of honesty and clear judgment.

In replacing Clarendon by the "Cabal," Charles had two objects. So far as he cared for anything beyond his own pleasures, he was set on attaining two ends which he knew to be hateful to the nation: one was to render himself independent of Parliamentary control; the other to secure toleration, and if possible predominance, in England for Romanism. He thought that his new ministers were sufficiently free from scruples to aid him in his projects.

His main helper in the scheme was to be his cousin Lewis XIV., the zealous champion of Roman Catholicism on the continent, and the most busy and ambitious monarch that France had ever known. Lewis had already started on his long career of aggression against Spain, Holland, and Austria. He was set on seizing for himself the frontier of the Rhine, the dream of all French statesmen since his day. To achieve this, he wished to conquer the Spanish Netherlands—the modern Belgium—and the petty principalities of the middle and lower Rhine. At the same time he was set on striking a blow against Protestantism, whenever he had the chance, and most especially against the Protestant power of Holland—for the "United Provinces" were both republican and Calvinist, the two things that he hated most in the world.

After diverting suspicions from his object for a moment, by concluding a treaty of alliance with Holland and Sweden, which met with universal approval, the king began to broach his scheme. It was worked out in the iniquitous "Treaty of Dover" (May, 1670). By this Charles undertook to join Lewis in destroying Holland and dividing up the Spanish Netherlands. In return for this service he was to receive a subsidy of £200,000 a year from France, and to have the aid of 6000 French troops to crush any rebellion that might arise in England when he took in hand the great project of restoring Catholic predominance in the realm. This last clause was only known to the king, and to Arlington and Clifford, the Romanist members of the Cabal. It was concealed from Lauderdale, Buckingham, and Shaftesbury, who only knew of the plan for the partition of Holland and the Spanish dominions.

Having concluded this iniquitous agreement with his cousin, Charles prorogued Parliament—he kept it from meeting for two years—and declared war on the Dutch, without any ostensible cause or reason. At the same time the French king launched a great army over his northern frontier, overran the Spanish Netherlands, and penetrated far into Holland. The Dutch were only saved from destruction by their desperate resistance. Their fleet fought a drawn battle with the English at Southwold, and staved off a naval invasion. Meanwhile the young William of Orange, the heir of the old stadtholders, saved Amsterdam from the French by breaking down the dykes and inundating South Holland. Driven back by the floods, the French had to evacuate their Dutch conquests (1672).

Meanwhile Charles began to carry out his agreement with Lewis for restoring Romanism, by issuing his "Declaration of Indulgence," suspending all the penal laws which imposed penalties on Roman Catholics. To cloak his design, he made the proclamations cover Protestant Nonconformists, as well as dissidents belonging to the older creed.

But the king had miscalculated the feeling of England. The "Declaration of Indulgence" raised a storm about his ears which he dared not face. So wrathful were the Churchmen, Low Church and High Church alike, that he felt in serious danger of deposition. The Parliament met in February, 1673, and passed an address requiring the king to withdraw the "Declaration." Charles felt his nerve give way; instead of standing his ground, and calling in his French auxiliaries, he yielded, and withdrew his edict of toleration. The Parliament then passed the "Test Act," which excluded all Nonconformists, Protestant and Romanist alike, from all official positions. This made it impossible for Charles to retain his Catholic ministers, Arlington and Clifford, and caused the downfall of the Cabal, which went out of office in the end of 1673. The Test Act also drove from his place as Lord High Admiral the king's brother James, who had become an avowed Romanist.

The failure of the king's schemes was still further marked by the conclusion of peace with Holland in February, 1674, and the appointment as chief minister of Thomas Osborne, Lord Danby, a good Churchman and an enemy of France. Determined "not to go on his travels again," Charles gave way on all points, to the deep disgust of his cousin of France, who despised him greatly for his craven desertion of the cause of Romanism.

But the king had not really given up his design. He was quite ready to renew his alliance with France when the times should be more favourable. Meanwhile he was compelled to profess an attachment to Holland, and married his heiress, the Princess Mary, his brother James's daughter, to the young Prince of Orange, the sworn foe of France (1677). By such means he was able to keep himself safe, and to laugh at the efforts of the Low Church party in Parliament.

This faction, the "country party," as it called itself, was now headed by the unscrupulous adventurer Shaftesbury, who from being a minister had become the king's deadly enemy, and was trying to stir up trouble by warning the nation to beware of the Romanist and absolutist tendencies of his old master—of whose reality none had a better knowledge than himself.

Danby was driven from office in 1678, owing to the discovery of some of the king's secret negotiations with France, to which he had been weak enough to give his assent for the moment, though his own views were opposed to the alliance with Lewis XIV. The French king knew this fact, and treacherously made the negotiations known, in order that Danby might be discredited, and replaced by a minister more suited to his tastes. His wily scheme was successful; Danby was hounded from office, impeached, and condemned to imprisonment in the Tower, though he produced the king's warrant for all he had done. But the Parliament voted that the king could do no wrong, and that a minister was responsible for all his acts, even when he acted under the strongest pressure from his master. Thus the theory of "ministerial responsibility" was fixedly and unequivocally proclaimed as part of the Constitution.

The fact that secret treaties with France were again in the air, gave Shaftesbury and his friends, the ultra-Protestants, a fine opportunity for a demonstration. Soon after Danby's fall, they raised a cry that the kingdom was in danger from a plot to restore Romanism by the aid of armed force from France. This was true enough, and the criminal was the King of England. But Shaftesbury did not strike at the king; he feared the loyalty of the Churchmen to the heir of Charles I., and thought that his sovereign was so supple and weak that he might be terrorized into becoming his instrument. The king was to be reduced to nullity, not removed.

When the cry against the Romanists was growing strong, there came forward a certain depraved clergyman named Titus Oates, who had been for a time perverted to Romanism, and had dwelt much with the Jesuits. He made himself Shaftesbury's tool, by declaring that he had gained knowledge of a great conspiracy against the peace of the realm. This "Popish Plot" was, he said, an agreement by a number of English Catholics to slay the king and introduce a French army into the realm in order to place James of York, the king's Romanist brother, on the throne. Now, it is probable enough that some of the accused were in correspondence with France, and letters were discovered from Coleman, secretary to the Duchess of York, written to friends abroad, which spoke of an approaching blow to the Protestant cause. But the blow was really to be dealt by Charles, not against him. It was he who was in truth conspiring to bring over the French and conquer his own realm by their aid.

Oates, however, perjured himself up to the hilt, bringing forward accusations against all the leading English Romanists, and hinting that even Queen Catherine herself was privy to a plot to murder her husband. Many minor informers also sprang up to corroborate the venomous tale of Oates. The nation was seriously alarmed. A perfect outburst of frenzy followed, and every Romanist in England was denounced as a disciple of Guy Fawkes. Charles, to his shame, pretended to take the story seriously, though none knew better than he its folly.

A new Parliament met in March, 1679; it was elected in the full flood of indignation against the "Plot," and Shaftesbury found that he could command a clear majority of its votes. He used his power to bring in a bill excluding the Duke of York, as an avowed Romanist, from the throne. To save his brother's rights, Charles dissolved the Commons before they could pass it. The only work that this Parliament had succeeded in carrying through was the Habeas Corpus Act, a very important enactment prohibiting arbitrary imprisonment without a trial. No man was to be kept in gaol untried, and penalties were imposed on the gaoler who should detain him, and the judge who should refuse to hear him plead. This principle required to be explicitly reasserted under the later Stuarts, though it is found formulated in Magna Carta itself.

The second Parliament of 1679 was, to the king's disgust, almost as much under the influence of Shaftesbury and the alarmists as the first. The nation was still in a ferment; month after month prominent Catholics were imprisoned on the evidence of Oates and his gang, tried, and condemned to death. So great was the fear felt of the Romanist Duke of York, that a preposterous plan was formed by Shaftesbury and his friends to replace him as heir to the throne by the Duke of Monmouth, the eldest of the natural sons of King Charles. This was a manifest injustice to the Princess Mary, the Protestant daughter of Duke James. Her father's religion could not vitiate her rights. But Monmouth was a popular youth, of fair parts and abilities. He had won some military reputation by putting down a dangerous rebellion of the Scottish Covenanters, who had murdered the Archbishop of St. Andrews, risen in arms, and got possession of the Western Lowlands. After routing them at Bothwell Brig (June, 1679), Monmouth was saluted as a conquering hero, and rumours were put about that his mother, Lucy Walters, had been secretly married to the king. Charles himself hastened to deny this lie, but it had its effect, and a serious effort was made to substitute Monmouth for his uncle.

All through 1680 the struggle was at its height, though Shaftesbury was gradually losing ground, owing to the unwise violence of his conduct, and the growing disrepute of his tool, Titus Oates, whose reckless falsehoods were beginning to be detected by sober men. The contest turned on the fate of the Exclusion Bill, which declared James incapable of reigning, and transferred his rights to his daughter Mary, the Princess of Orange, though many suspected that Shaftesbury intended to substitute Monmouth for the princess.

It is at this moment that the famous political names which were to rule England for the next century and a half come into sight. At first the opponents of the Exclusion Bill, the supporters of the divine right of hereditary succession, and the defenders of the Duke of York, were called "Abhorrers," from the numerous addresses which they sent to the king declaring their abhorrence of the Exclusion Bill. On the other hand, the supporters of Shaftesbury, and the believers in the Popish Plot, were called "Petitioners," from the petitions which they kept signing in favour of the bill. But soon two less cumbrous, if stranger, names were found for the two parties. The "Abhorrers" were nicknamed "Tories" by their enemies, from the appellation of a horde of banditti, who lurked in the bogs of Ireland. The Petitioners, on the other hand, were christened "Whigs" by their rivals, after the name of a fanatical sect of Scottish Covenanters. These titles, bestowed in ridicule at first, were finally accepted in earnest, and became the usual denomination of the two great parties.

The Exclusion Bill was passed by Shaftesbury and his majority of Whigs in the Commons, once in 1679, and once in 1680. But the House of Lords threw it out, and Charles dissolved the Parliament once and again, till in 1681 the fear of the Popish Plot began to blow over, and the violence of Shaftesbury to disgust the moderate members of his own party. The cruel execution, in December, 1680, of Lord Stafford, an old Romanist peer of blameless life, whose innocence was known to all, was the last and most damaging triumph of the Whigs. Its injustice caused many of Shaftesbury's supporters to fall away. His intrigues in favour of Monmouth, and the open support which he gave to the lying Oates, had ruined him.

In 1681 the king accused him of high treason for collecting armed followers to overawe Parliament. A London jury refused to convict him, and he plunged into still more desperate courses. Conspiring with Lord William Russell and Algernon Sydney to raise rebellion, he was detected and fled over-sea to escape punishment. Some of his more desperate followers went on with his plot, which they developed into a plan for assassinating Charles as he passed the Rye House in Hertfordshire, on his way to Newmarket. The disclosure of this reckless conspiracy ruined the Whigs; the whole party was believed to have been privy to it, though it was in truth the work of a very small clique, headed by one Colonel Rumbold, an old Cromwellian officer (1682).

The king, finding that public opinion was veering round to his side, was emboldened to strike a blow at the whole Whig faction. Mixing up the Rye-House Plot with Shaftesbury's abortive plans, he seized all their chief leaders, and had them tried for high treason. Subservient judges and a packed jury made their fall easy. Lord William Russell and Algernon Sydney were beheaded; Lord Essex committed suicide in prison. The evidence connecting Russell and Sydney with the assassination plot was trivial, and their execution little else than a judicial murder (1683).

Charles was now in a better position to carry out his long-concealed plan for the restoration of arbitrary government and the furthering of Romanism than at any previous time in his reign. He left Parliament unsummoned for more than two years, prepared to renew his alliance with France, endeavoured to collect a body of ministers who would second his views, and largely increased his standing army. He made several unconstitutional encroachments on the liberty of his subjects—such as forfeiting the charters of many cities, including London itself—and was cautiously feeling his way towards more decisive measures. But on February 6, 1685, his plans were suddenly interrupted by a fatal apoplectic stroke, which carried him off before he had attained the age of fifty-five. On his death-bed he had himself openly received into the Roman Catholic faith, of which he had so long been the secret partisan. It was fortunate that his schemes were brought to such an untimely end, for if a cautious foe to the liberties of England, he was a very clever and insidious one. Of the stubborn folly which ruined his successor, he would never have been guilty.