On the 27th of April Sir John Grenville presented himself at the door of the Council of State, requesting leave to speak with the Lord-general. Monk came out from the house; Grenville placed in his hand a packet sealed with the king's arms. Monk seemed surprised. The messenger was desired to enter. The president inquired from whom he had received these letters. "The king, my master," he answered, "gave them to me with his own hand." It was determined that they should be handed to Parliament, that alone had the right to receive them. Some one proposed to place Grenville meanwhile under arrest. "I have not seen Sir John Grenville for some years," said Monk, "but he is my near kinsman, and I will answer for his presenting himself before the House." Grenville retired at liberty.
Three days later, on the 1st of May, he was introduced to the House of Commons, and he handed to the Speaker a letter from the king, dated from Breda, "in the twelfth year of our reign." As soon as Grenville had retired, Grimstone, standing and uncovered, read aloud the king's letter. The House listened also standing and uncovered. In the House of Lords the president rose, and went to meet Grenville, accompanied by forty-one peers who were then present; and the messenger, recalled shortly afterwards into the House, received the thanks of the assembly.
The king's letters, written by Hyde, were elegant and simple. They promised a general amnesty and liberty of conscience, with only such exceptions or limits as Parliament should think well to assign. All questions of delicacy were in like manner referred to Parliament. The king preserved his freedom of action under the pretext of his responsibility. Similar declarations addressed to the city, the army, and the fleet, were received with acclamations. Admiral Montague despatched on the morrow a message to the king. "I rejoice," he said, "that the king has no need of aid from foreign powers. He will find a sufficient stay in the affection and loyalty of his subjects. I covet nothing so much in the world as the honor of presenting myself before your Majesty, which I hope will not long be delayed."
The two Houses on their part lost no time, and the Lords declared on the 3d of May that, in accordance with the fundamental laws of the realm, the supreme power resided and ought to reside in King, Lords, and Commons. The House of Commons immediately adopted the same resolution, and also decided that a gift of £50,000 sterling should be immediately offered to the king; £10,000 and £5,000 were also voted for his brothers. A jewel valued at £500 sterling was voted to Grenville, but the treasury was exhausted. It was necessary to have recourse to the city, which provided at once for pressing needs. When Grenville arrived at Breda, the bearer of £30,000 in bills of exchange and specie, the king, overjoyed at the sight, sent for the Princess of Orange and the Duke of York, desiring that they should see this gold, so long strange to their hands, taken out of the portmanteau of the messenger.
The two Houses sent commissioners charged with their answers to the king; many other deputations preceded or followed them. Clarges conveyed to Charles II. a letter from Monk; the delegates from the city and the Presbyterian ministers met at Breda. Parliament proclaimed the king in the presence of the people at the gate of Westminster, before Whitehall, and in the city. Workmen were busily engaged in repairing all the royal palaces. "Mistress Monk, with a zeal void of all vanity," wrote Broderick to Hyde, "is taking care that his Majesty shall be provided with all the linen he will require, saying frankly that she has not forgotten her old occupation, and that she is assured that she will be able to make a saving of one-half in the king's household."
In the presence of all these facts, what had become of the intention of the Presbyterians and the political reformers to treat with the king and secure for the liberties of the people and themselves strong guarantees? The work of restoration was accomplished, driven forward by the national feeling: the most resolute of the moderate party had lent a hand, and were lending a hand every day, to this spontaneous re-establishment of the monarchy. The royal declaration of Breda, the assurances of moderation and respect for old laws, and the promise to settle all great questions in concert with Parliament, such were the only guarantees which the restoration of the Stuarts offered to England.
Above all the numerous civil and religious questions which were thus about to be discussed, and the fate of which might already cause anxiety to the faithful friends of liberty, one question arose which was paramount to all others—a question of life or death—that of amnesty. It seemed to have been settled. In the first communication with the king, Monk had expressly advised a general amnesty, with four exceptions only, and the king appeared disposed to clemency, but the danger still existed. "We grant a free and general pardon," said Charles in the Declaration of Breda, "save and except such persons as shall hereafter be excepted by act of Parliament." And in his letter to the House of Commons: "If there is a crying sin by reason of which the nation is stained with dishonor, we doubt not but you will be as forward as ourselves in redeeming it, and cleansing the nation from that odious crime." On Monday, the 9th of May, on the first reading of the Amnesty Bill, the question of the regicides arose. After a violent debate, in which those of the inculpated persons who were present—Ingoldsby and Hutchinson—vainly sought to defend themselves, they left the House, and the Commons resolved that seven exceptions should be made in the Amnesty Bill. At the same time the arrest was ordered of all the judges of the High Court, and their property was placed under sequestration. Others, strangers to the royal indictment, Thurloe being at their head, were sent to the Tower. The reaction spread, and became more bitter every day. The Amnesty Bill remained in suspense, like all those measures which were destined to settle the great questions opened by the Declaration of Breda. The promised concessions became doubtful. The crowd of courtiers increased at the Hague, whither the king had gone on invitation of the States-General. The favors and good graces of the king were lavished upon the commissioners of Parliament; the Presbyterian ministers, though well received, were put off with vague promises. But, in the midst of the general joy, a certain amount of distrust on their part manifested itself, which on the side of the king and his intimate friends was returned with much haughtiness and reserve. The country was anxious to receive the king, and Charles was the more disposed to hasten, because he feared the conditions of the Presbyterians. Admiral Montague had arrived in sight of the Hague, in the Bay of Schevelingen, aboard his ship called the "Naseby"—a sad reminder of the great defeat of King Charles I.
The king had taken his farewell of the States-General, from whom he had received the most magnificent hospitality. He recommended to them his sister, the Princess of Orange, and his nephew, Prince William, then a child. "I will remember," he said, "all the effects of your good affection towards them, as if I had received them in my own person." John de Witt replied in the name of the States, overflowing with protestations of respect and friendship. As politic as he was proud, the republican patrician, who was contending in Holland against the House of Orange, sought with some solicitude the goodwill of the new ruler of England, with which country he desired peace, whatever might be the name and the form of her government. All proper ceremonies having been accomplished, the king left the Hague on the 23d of May, 1660, accompanied by a brilliant suite, and stepping aboard the "Naseby," which he immediately renamed the "Royal Charles," he set sail for England with his two brothers, the Dukes of York and Gloucester. On the morning of the 25th he landed at Dover in the presence of a great multitude, at the head of whom marched Monk, saluting the king "with such humility," says an eye-witness, "that he seemed rather to be asking pardon than receiving thanks." The king embraced him with filial reverence, and was more anxious to testify his gratitude by presenting him with the Order of the Garter than to take his advice regarding the government of the country, or appointments to great offices. The general handed to the king a list of persons whom he judged fitted to compose the privy council. The greater part of the names suited the views neither of Charles nor of Hyde. They intimated this to Monk, who made scarcely any opposition, confining himself to recommending some persons in particular "whom the king would find it better for his affairs to have within than without." Charles, confirmed in his opinion of the obstinacy of Monk, continued his advance towards the capital, reviewed the army, who, sullen and resigned, were awaiting him on Blackheath, and at length entered London amidst the ringing of all the bells, the music of the regiments, the acclamations of an eager, joyous, and triumphant people.
"I was in the Strand," says an eye-witness. "I beheld this sight, and I was thankful to God. All this was done without the spilling of a drop of blood. It was indeed the Lord's will; for since the return of the Jews from captivity in Babylon, no history, ancient or modern, has had to record a like restoration." The king himself expressed his surprise at it with a touch of irony. "It is assuredly my own fault," he said, "that I did not come back sooner; for I have not met any one to-day who did not protest that he always wished for my return."
The restoration was accomplished; but the obstacles which had so long prevented it had not disappeared. The nation, however, entirely occupied with its joyful demonstrations, neither saw them nor were anxious about them. Having set up again the king and Parliament, they fancied their troubles at an end and their wishes fulfilled. The people are short-sighted, but their lack of foresight neither affects the bottom of their hearts nor changes the course of their destiny. The epoch of civil war was passed; that of party struggles and parliamentary compromises was about to begin. The triumph of the Protestant religion and the decisive influence of the country in its own government—such were the objects for which the Revolutionary party in England had struggled. The English royalists were to struggle for it still more, and were to find no repose till they had won their cause.
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).
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.
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. 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.
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.
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. 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."
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.
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. 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. 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.
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Charles At The House Of Lady Castlemaine.
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." 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."
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.
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."
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. 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.
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."
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. 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. 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.