The war continued. The Prince of Orange and the Hollanders were resolved upon a desperate resistance. "You do not perceive that your country is lost?" said to William, the Duke of Buckingham, who had been sent by Charles II. to the Hague. "There is always a way of not witnessing her loss," replied the hero, "which is to die in the last ditch." All the dykes of Holland were filled with water; the country was inundated, the winter arrived, hostilities were suspended, and the King of France returned to St. Germain's. Before his departure he wrote in his diary the memorandum: "My departure; I desire that nothing more be done." The resources of Charles II. were exhausted; it was necessary to summon Parliament.

The war was unpopular; but the Houses were occupied with other affairs, and the subsidies which the king demanded were voted without resistance if not without ill-humor. Religious questions assumed in the public mind a predominance over political or military affairs. Parliament had been passionately royalist; its attachment to the king and confidence in him diminished day by day. The two Houses remained constantly attached to the Established Church, which they had raised up, and were ready to defend against all her enemies. The royal declaration of indulgence was the object of a hostile address; Charles had already received, through Colbert, the representations of Louis XIV.: he withdrew his measure. This was not enough to satisfy the fears of Parliament: Protestant England felt that she was delivered up to the Catholics by a monarch whose faith began to appear problematical. The Test Act was passed by the two Houses; every public functionary was compelled to take the oath of allegiance and supremacy, to sign a declaration against the doctrine of transubstantiation, and to take the Communion according to the rites of the Church of England. The king's desire was to resist; but a dissolution would have resulted in a House of Commons more violent than the royalist Long Parliament: he yielded. The Duke of York, declaring openly his conversion to Catholicism, resigned immediately the post of Lord High Admiral; Lord Clifford left the ministry; in all the public offices a great number of men, whose attachment to the Roman Catholic faith was previously unknown, successively sent in their resignation. Parliament, triumphing in the success of its measure, contemplated with apprehension the danger which had threatened it. All confidence in the word of the king disappeared from the public mind. The cabinet was already shaken by the resignation of Clifford; the Chancellor, Ashley, now Earl of Shaftesbury, who had long been in special favor with Charles, and who was worthy to serve him by reason of his caustic wit and moral corruption, was wounded by the secret which the king had withheld from him. He deemed the national liberties and religion in peril, and allied himself with the country party in the House of Commons in the month of November, 1673. This Parliament was scarcely prorogued when Charles commanded him to surrender the seals. "Now to put off my robe and buckle on my sword," said Shaftesbury; and he placed himself at the head of the opposition.

The Duke of Buckingham followed Shaftesbury in this political movement, at the moment when Parliament was appealing to the king to banish him from his councils, as well as the Earl of Lauderdale. The House of Commons was debating on the impeachment of Lord Arlington. Less honest than Clifford, but like him a Catholic at heart, Arlington renounced an active part in politics and entered the household of the king. Lauderdale alone remained entrusted with the affairs of Scotland, and suffered the accumulated hatred which fell upon him in consequence of his indefatigable tyranny. The ministry of the Cabal was at an end; with it ended the war with Holland, which had been burdensome, unpopular, and little glorious for the arms of England. In vain had Louis XIV. sent to London the Marquis of Ruvigny, a considerable person among the French Protestants, and justly esteemed in England. Parliament desired peace, and refused the subsidies. Charles II. yielded, as was his habit, to the clearly expressed wishes of the nation; and, with like conformity to his custom, he reserved his private opinions and secret manœuvres. "Pity me; do not blame me," he wrote to Louis XIV. On the 21st of February, 1674, Charles II. proceeded to Parliament, to announce to the two Houses that he had concluded with the United Provinces "a speedy peace, in accordance with their prayer, and he hoped also an honorable and a durable one." The English and Irish auxiliary regiments, commanded by the Duke of Monmouth, a natural son of the king, remained quietly in the service of France. Louis XIV. did not withdraw his subsidies from his royal dependent.

The ladies who had served as a lien between the two crowns, and had negotiated the humiliating conditions of the alliance between the two kings, had died during the ascendency of the ministry of the Cabal—the Queen Henrietta Maria in the month of August, 1669, in France, where she habitually resided with her second husband, Lord Jermyn; the Duchess of Orleans, Madame Henrietta, in June, 1670, at the moment when she had just concluded the treaty of Dover—the latter not without a suspicion of poison. Both were eulogized by Bossuet in the most magnificent language; both in a measure and with a different degree of responsibility were fatal to the destinies of England. Monk also had died on the 3rd of January, 1670, as calm before the progress of his malady as in the face of the enemy. Old and suffering as he was, he had personally hastened to encounter the Dutch when they entered the Thames. As they were re-embarking, their bullets whistled in the ears of the general. His aides-de-camp pressed him to retire. "If I was afraid of bullets, gentlemen," said Monk, "I should long ago have quitted this business."

He died erect, turning his head to breathe in silence his last sigh. "A man capable of great things, though he had no grandeur in his soul; born at once to command and to obey; sensible, patient, and brave; attached to his own interest, and yet devoted in every great position to his duty as a soldier and an Englishman; without political ambition and not aspiring to govern his country—he knew how to acknowledge his country's rights, and to restore to her the government which had become indispensable."

Charles II. had not forgotten the services rendered to him by Monk; he was neither shocked by his pecuniary greed nor by the grossness of his manners. He had loaded him with wealth and honors, and he followed him to the tomb in Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster. The general had never played any political part, and his death left no void in the direction of affairs, which were becoming every day more complicated and more violently conflicting. The court party and the country party divided the two Houses. Out of doors the country party was strikingly superior. The conviction of this fact alone prolonged the existence of the Royalist Long Parliament. The time had now gone by when courtiers, probably with the assent of the king, dared to set miserable hirelings to mutilate the face of Sir John Coventry, a prominent member of the opposition in the Commons. From this time forth the country party took the measure of the royal authority, and raised its pretensions even to the question of the succession to the throne. The enthusiasm and the confidence which marked the first days of the Restoration had given way to sombre disquietude. It was not with his ordinary exaggeration that Lord Shaftesbury said, "If the king had had the happiness to be born a simple gentleman, he might have passed for a man of sense, good breeding, and good disposition. As a king he has brought his affairs to such a point that there is not a creature in the world, man or woman, who can feel the least confidence in his word or his attachment."

The refusal of the Duke of York to take the test oath, and his marriage with the daughter of the Duke of Modena, Mary Beatrice, in 1673, filled the measure of the Protestant anxieties of the nation. In vain the two daughters of Anne Hyde, who had died in May, 1671, were publicly reared in the faith and practice of the Church of England; all feelings of security had departed from men's minds, and the rumor which began to spread abroad of a secret treaty, concluded some time before, between King Charles II. and Louis XIV., increased the suspicions of the people. The choice which the king made of a new minister served for some time to reassure men's minds. Sir Thomas Osborne, soon afterwards raised to the peerage as Earl of Danby, appeared favorable, in the House of Commons, to the country party. He was a Protestant, a thorough Englishman, and without being over-conscientious or scrupulous, he was yet not absolutely so wanting in principles as his predecessors in power. Ardently devoted to the royal prerogative, he endeavored to restore authority to the hands of the king, by relying not on the court party, but on the old Cavaliers and the Established Church. One element of his popularity was his antipathy to the alliance with France. Before his advent to power he had given as a toast at a public dinner in the city, "War with France!" The people felt assured that he would never lend his hand to those transactions humiliating for the honor of England and her sovereign, of which no one yet ventured to speak openly. The ambition and the weaknesses of men sometimes surpass the most gloomy apprehensions; of this, Danby was destined soon to furnish a proof.

Like the ministry of the Cabal, the new government began by making advances to the Dutch. A peace was concluded. Sir William Temple was charged with the care of foreign affairs, and was shortly afterwards despatched as an envoy to the Congress of Nimeguen, there to settle the terms of general peace. But Danby continually oscillated between the royal and the national policy, sometimes urging Charles to unite himself with Europe in a war against France, sometimes lending himself privately to the secret negotiations with Louis XIV. In the course of the year 1676 a new convention assured to Charles II. a pension of £100,000 sterling and the assistance of such French troops as might be necessary in his dominions. The letters of Danby do not permit us to doubt the knowledge that he had of the situation, if not his connivance at the treaty. Charles II. undertook to prolong the prorogation of Parliament, which had endeavored to force upon him an effective action in the general pacification of Europe. The war on the Continent still continued when the Houses at length assembled again in 1677. The Duke of Buckingham and Lord Shaftesbury maintained that the length of the prorogation amounted to a dissolution, but Danby was an accomplished master of the art of corruption; he disposed of the money from France. The country party was defeated in the House of Commons, and the authors of the proposition for a dissolution were sent to the Tower, where they were detained for several months.

Meanwhile the increasing successes of Louis XIV. began to alarm Danby as they alarmed England. Suddenly looking towards Holland, he obtained from the king authority to invite William of Orange to visit London, and negotiating secretly with that prince, he concluded a marriage between him and the eldest daughter of the Duke of York, the Princess Mary, whose hand had been previously offered to William without resulting in the manifestation of any eagerness on his part for the alliance. The importance of this concession was keenly felt in Paris. "Louis XIV. sent immediately for Montague, our ambassador," says Burnet, "who when he came to Versailles saw the king the most moved that he had ever observed him to be. He asked him when was the marriage to be made. Montague understood not what he meant, so he explained all to him. Montague protested to him that he knew nothing of the whole matter. The king said he always believed the journey would end in this, and he seemed to think that our court had now forsaken him. Lord Danby, who recalled Montague to London, asked him how the king had received the news of the marriage. The ambassador answered, 'As he would have done the loss of an army.'"

In England the joy was great. "The first tokens that I had of the marriage were the bonfires which were lighted in London," wrote Louis XIV. The alliance, offensive and defensive, concluded with Holland, and which at length compelled Louis to recall his auxiliary regiments, broke for the moment the secret relations between Louis XIV. and his crowned pensioner. The quarrel was not of long duration. The understandings constantly maintained between France and the English Parliament, as with their sovereign, kept the policy of England in a state of indecision and inconsistency, which rendered powerful aid to the firm and resolute conduct of Louis XIV., who was absolute master of his kingdom, his army, and his finances. "I do not envy the Grand Seignior, with his mutes and their bowstrings always ready to strangle according to his pleasure," said Charles II. to the Earl of Essex; "but I shall never think myself a king as long as those fellows keep watch on all my actions, interrogate my ministers, and demand an account of my expenses."

This was just what Parliament had attempted to do. Dreading at once the prodigality of the king and the growth of his power, demanding a war with France, and fearing to allow the sums voted for that purpose to be wasted, or to see troops, raised for the struggle with Louis XIV., turn their arms against the liberties of England, the House of Commons endeavored to limit the application of the sums voted to specific purposes, and required that an account should be rendered of expenditure. Such arrogance excited the indignation of the king, and his anger increased the feeling of alarm.

As a consequence of treachery and contradictory manœuvres the king of England ceased to have any weight on the Continent, even in the quality of mediator, when the general peace was concluded at Nimeguen. It was signed in July, 1678, under the influence of the States-General of Holland.

Thenceforth Louis XIV. was the arbiter of Europe. The English nation had learnt to distrust its king; but he was at the head of a small army, the subsidies from France were not yet exhausted, and Lord Danby was menaced in Parliament, over which he had so long exercised a paramount influence. Convicted of having taken part in the secret negotiations between Louis XIV. and his master, he was impeached in the House of Commons in 1678, and soon afterwards sent to a prison, where he remained until the death of Charles II. The court dreaded a trial which threatened to show the comparative innocence of the Lord Treasurer at the same time that it exposed the king's shame. Lord Shaftesbury was more eager to obtain the dissolution of Parliament than to bring his rival to trial. The Parliament of 1661—the "pensioned Parliament," as it had been nicknamed during the latter years of its existence—at length succumbed. The new Parliament assembled on the 6th of March, 1679.

One thought, one passion alone—terror and hatred of the Catholics—filled the breasts of the new members. Some months before the downfall of Lord Danby a terrible and unparalleled piece of news had overwhelmed the mind of the nation, clouded the strongest judgments, and impelled the most moderate to violence. King Charles, while taking a walk in St. James's Park, received from a certain Captain Kirby, an unknown and insignificant personage, the revelation of a plot stated to have been hatched against his life. The informer, Kirby, referred to Dr. Tonge, an ecclesiastic of the Church of England, and known to some persons of the court. Tonge affirmed the existence of a great Papist conspiracy. Letters were seized; the king and the Duke of York judged them to be forgeries. Tonge produced his principal witness, Titus Oates, son of an Anabaptist preacher, but in holy orders, a chaplain in the navy, thence soon dismissed, a convert to Catholicism, and twice ignominiously expelled from the College of the Jesuits. As audacious as he was corrupt, he maintained with effrontery that his relations with the Jesuits had given him occasion to discover the entire plot; that documents had passed into his hands; the Pope had assigned the government of England to the Jesuits, who were spread over all parts of the three kingdoms in order to labor in the work of the general conversion; the life of the king was threatened, as well as that of all obstinate Protestants; the Fire of London had been the work of the Jesuits; a second fire was preparing for the port of London; all the ships were to be delivered to the flames; the Pope had already named the ministers who were to govern England for him. The good sense of the king, favored by his secret confidence with regard to the Catholics, enabled him at once to reject this monstrous tissue of falsehoods and calumnies. Some persons, however, were mentioned, and public opinion began to be excited. The papers of Coleman, who had been occasionally employed by the Duke of York, were seized at the moment when he was beginning to burn them. Enough remained to furnish evidence, not of a plot properly so called, but of the hopes which the Catholicism of the heir to the throne, as well as the personal inclinations of the king, had engendered in the Church of Rome. "We have a great work in hand," wrote Coleman to Father La Chaise, confessor to Louis XIV.; "it is a question of nothing less than the conversion of the three kingdoms, and perhaps by this means of the destruction of that odious heresy which has so long prevailed over the people of the North. Never have such hopes been able to flourish since the death of our Queen Mary. God has given us a prince who has, by a miracle, become ardently desirous of being the author and the instrument of this glorious enterprise; but we are certain to meet with so many obstacles and so much opposition, that it is important to afford us all the help that one can." Coleman fled the country.

This was more than was wanted to inflame the minds and excite the fears of all the members of the council, before which Oates and Tonge appeared. A terrible incident came to add to the public anxiety and indignation. Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey, a magistrate of London, who had received the depositions of Titus Oates, and perhaps even the confessions of Coleman, whose friend he was, disappeared from his house for some days, then was found murdered in a ditch not far from the church of St. Pancras. His sword was plunged into his breast. An attempt was made to represent this as a case of suicide, but both the medical examination and popular feeling denounced the murderers. The body remained exposed for two days. "Many went to see it," says Burnet, "who went away much moved by the sight, and indeed men's spirits were so sharpened upon it that we all looked on it as a very great happiness that the people did not vent their fury upon the Popish about the town." An immense crowd gathered at the interment of Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey; he was regarded as a martyr to Protestantism.

The fears of Parliament were as great as those of the people of London. The king had announced an intention of bringing the affair before the ordinary tribunals. The Houses of Parliament had summoned Titus Oates before them; voted him their thanks and a pension of £1,200 sterling; they indicted all the Roman Catholic lords named by the renegade; the prisons were crowded with Papists; for the first time the question of the succession to the throne was agitated in Parliament. The Duke of York had ceased to take his place in the Privy Council; this prudent course secured him an exemption from the general measure which soon afterwards forbade the Catholic Peers to sit in Parliament. The Test Act had already excluded Papists from the House of Commons. The denunciations continued, and to Titus Oates was now added one Bedloe: the executions commenced; a few obscure Catholics had already paid with their lives for the terrors of England when the new Parliament assembled at Westminster.

The state of parties had undergone an important change. The great divisions which were destined so long to distinguish opinions in England, began to appear in the legislature of 1675: the Tories, under the direction of Lord Godolphin and Lawrence Hyde, second son of Lord Clarendon, occupying the place of the court party, and remaining devoted to the royal authority; the Whigs, who had for their leaders Lord Shaftesbury, Lord Essex, and Lord William Russell, and forming the country party, more concerned for the rights of the nation than for the prerogatives of the crown; and an intermediate group, distinguished under the insulting name of "Trimmers," inclining, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left, according to the impulse of the lively, penetrating, and critical mind of their chief, Lord Halifax. Lord Sunderland, clever and unpopular, was as a rule in accord with Halifax. Nearly all formed part of the new council of thirty members which Sir William Temple had proposed to the king as a constitutional experiment. That wise diplomatist also hoped, by thus engaging in the royal council the Parliamentary leaders, to protect the crown against the encroachments of Parliament, and to secure in equal degree the nation against the pretensions of the crown.

The nature of things and the necessities of affairs were not slow in prevailing over the scheme thus ably planned; the new council had scarcely entered upon its duties when an inner council began to direct all its deliberations, and found itself alone in charge of the government. Sir William Temple, Lord Essex, Lord Halifax, and Lord Sunderland were the real members. Lord Shaftesbury was president of the council.

It was the latter who placed himself at the head of the Protestant party in Parliament. The nation had become alive to the danger which threatened its faith as well as its liberties under the future reign of the Duke of York. The king had in vain removed his brother, who had retired to Brussels. The House of Commons solemnly voted his exclusion from the throne. Before the Bill could be carried to the House of Lords, Charles prorogued Parliament.

The indignation was profound. "I will bring to the block those who have advised the prorogation," cried Shaftesbury in a transport of anger. The chief of the Whigs had, however, on that day obtained the success of a measure which he had long cherished; the royal assent had been accorded to the Habeas Corpus Bill, securing the personal liberty of every English subject, and the right to be released on bail from the prisons of detention. This guarantee of the rights rendered sacred by Magna Charta was hailed with enthusiasm by the people, who justly attributed the credit of it to the president of the council. This title was not destined to be long accorded to him. In July, 1679, the king dissolved Parliament. Some months later he recalled his brother from Brussels and dismissed Lord Shaftesbury. The friends of the latter suffered his fate; Lord William Russell, Lord Cavendish, and Lord Essex retired from the council. Sir William Temple, disgusted by the failure of his new plan of government, returned to his country-house to cultivate his beautiful gardens, which he had never wished to leave. Halifax and Sunderland alone remained in power. Lawrence Hyde and Sidney Godolphin were soon associated with them. Under the presidency of the chief of the Trimmers the power passed once more into the hands of the Tories. [Footnote 2]

[Footnote 2: The appellations Whig and Tory were originally given to the fanatical Covenanters and Catholic Outlaws in Scotland and Ireland. From them they passed to the political parties.]

Up to this time the ministry had kept in its midst, at the head of the affairs of Scotland, an abettor of tyranny who had already more than once caused grave embarrassment to the government of the king. Lord Lauderdale, supported in Scotland by Archbishop Sharp, had transgressed the limits of Presbyterian patience. In spite of his ordinances, and of the atrocious penalties by which he punished offences against them, conventicles multiplied on all hands. Once already the Archbishop had been threatened by assassins who failed in their purpose. He pursued them with pitiless vengeance, exacting from all the landed gentry of the west an engagement not to tolerate on their estates the forbidden religious assemblies, or to be present at them themselves. On the refusal of these gentlemen, they were required "to deliver up their arms and to keep no horse of greater value than £4 sterling." To this edict, as to the former one, they refused obedience; at the news of this step the Duke of Lauderdale fell into such a fit of rage that in full council he turned his sleeves up to his elbows and swore by Jehovah "that he would know how to put them in irons again." Halifax obtained the king's consent to examine for himself the complaints broached against his minister. "Kings," says Burnet, "naturally love to hear their prerogative magnified; yet on this occasion the king had nothing to say in defence of the administration. But when May, the Master of the Privy Purse, asked him, in his familiar way, what he thought now of his Lauderdale, he answered, as May himself told me, that he had objected to many things that he had done against them, but there was nothing objected that was against his service." Strange infatuation of a sovereign so long a prey to the vicissitudes of fortune, but who had not yet learnt that his interests were inseparable from those of his people.

The Duke of Monmouth had been charged with the affairs of Scotland. He arrived there in the midst of a recrudescence of religious ardor. The Presbyterians felt that Lauderdale was beaten. They repaired in crowds into the conventicles. Some wretches carried their rage further. Archbishop Sharp was passing in his carriage through the environs of St. Andrew's; his servants were in advance, or following at some distance; he was alone with his daughter when the carriage encountered a group of armed fanatics. "Behold the day of the Lord," cried the Covenanters; "the Eternal has delivered our enemy into our hands." The archbishop was not deceived. "God have pity upon me!" he exclaimed to his daughter; "I am lost." The horsemen followed the carriage; the horses and the postilion were wounded; the murderers presented themselves at the door of the vehicle. "Come forth, Judas!" they cried. The old man and his daughter knelt to implore for mercy. The hatred of their persecutors was too violent for them to allow their prey to escape; the archbishop fell pierced by daggers. "Take away your priest," said the assassins to the terrified servants; and they retired into a cottage to return thanks to God. The forbidden assemblies had become so numerous that they were able to repulse the regiments sent to disperse them. The Covenanters had taken possession of Glasgow, when the Duke of Monmouth marched against them, on the 22d of June, 1679, at Bothwell Bridge on the Clyde.

[Image]
Portrait Of Monmouth.

The insurgents were completely defeated, and the massacre would have been great if the duke had not imposed a limit to the vengeance of Graham of Claverhouse, already famous, who had once been conquered by the fanatics. When Monmouth returned to England, the king remarked to him that if he himself had been engaged in the affair, he should not have concerned himself so much about the prisoners. "I do not kill in cold blood," replied the duke; "that is the work of a butcher." The moderation which the young duke exhibited in victory may have been politic as well as charitable and humane. Some fumes of greatness had begun to mount to his head: he imagined that he foresaw a future hitherto unhoped for. Moved by personal hostility towards the Prince of Orange, the cause of which has never been made known, Lord Shaftesbury, who pursued with ardor his campaign in favor of the Bill of Exclusion, extended his animosity to the Protestant children of the Duke of York. A rumor began to spread that the birth of Monmouth was legitimate, and that the king had secretly espoused his mother, Lucy Walters. Long unknown, under the name of James Croft, because he had been confided in his infancy to the care of Lord Croft, Monmouth had recently married the daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch, the greatest heiress in Scotland; he bore his name joined to the title of the Duke of Monmouth, which the king had given him. Handsome, brave, thoughtless, he had inspired in Charles II. an attachment of which the adroit Shaftesbury reckoned upon availing himself in the rivalry which he sought to establish between the young man and the Duke of York. When James was recalled from Brussels by his brother, he required that Monmouth should be stripped of his appointment and sent back to the Continent.

Meanwhile the new Parliament had met (October, 1680); it was more ardently Protestant and patriotic than its predecessors. The Exclusion Bill was passed by a great majority; for a moment there was reason to believe that it would be adopted by the House of Lords. Godolphin advised the king to yield to public feeling; the Duchess of Portsmouth, the French favorite of Charles, implored him not to rush upon his ruin. He hesitated for some days, endeavoring to conclude a bargain with the Legislature. But mutual distrust was deep-seated and carefully nourished by very different influences. The royal honor and a remnant of natural affection mingled with the anger of a sovereign upon whom his people sought to impose an unjust law. Charles II. adopted his course, and engaged in a contest against the Exclusion Bill, being present himself at the sittings of the House of Lords. The debate was long and violent; more than once hands grasped the hilts of swords: the eloquence of Halifax prevailed over the alliance of Shaftesbury, Essex, and the treacherous Sunderland; the Bill was rejected by a very large majority.

The threatened Catholics were destined to pay for that check to national and Protestant anxieties. Several small plots, fictitious or real, were discovered; but the ordinary tribunals seemed weary of condemnations. It was the House of Lords itself which pronounced the sentence against Lord Stafford, youngest son of the old Earl of Arundel, and consequently uncle of the Duke of Norfolk. "He was a weak, but a fair-conditioned man," says Burnet. Titus Oates and one of his compeers, named Turbervil, accused Lord Stafford of having plotted the assassination of the king. The charge had not a shadow of foundation; the viscount was nevertheless condemned by 55 voices against 31. The royal favor exempted him from the odious punishment of traitors. Charles II. was convinced of the innocence of the victims; he had too much sense to believe in the existence of those plots incessantly arising which so alarmed England, but his cold selfishness troubled itself little with the warrants which he signed, or the lives which he sacrificed to his repose. "The king appeared very calm, and his mind very cheerful," wrote Algernon Sidney, "although one might then have thought that he would be overwhelmed with cares, having no other resource but to dissolve Parliament, and trust himself to the good pleasure of his subjects; but the embarrassment in which he was did not seem to trouble him."

A renewed attempt in the House of Commons in favor of the Exclusion Bill led to the dissolution foreseen by Algernon Sidney; and it was a token of the royal intentions that the new Parliament was convened for the 21St of March, 1681, not at Westminster, but at Oxford. Charles had concluded with Louis XIV. a new treaty, kept profoundly secret, by which the king of France engaged himself to give for the current year a subsidy of two million livres, which was to be reduced to fifteen hundred thousand during the three following years. At this price Charles broke the alliance which he had contracted with Spain for the maintenance of the treaty of Nimeguen. He returned to his dependence upon Louis XIV.

The violence of Shaftesbury and his adherents went on increasing; it passed the bounds of the national temperament. The sentiments of passionate loyalty which had hailed the Restoration were not completely extinguished, and when the leader of the Whigs, arriving armed at Oxford, affixed to the hats of his domestics the motto from one of his speeches, "No Popery! no slavery!" the echo which it occasioned in the hearts of the people was not powerful enough to sustain him in his audacious designs. The nation rejected, as he did, Popery and slavery; but it was not yet disposed to attribute to its king all the sinister views which Shaftesbury laid to his account. In the last Parliament Shaftesbury had proposed to deprive the Duke of York, upon his accession to the throne, of the power to treat with foreign governments, and to nominate civil and military functionaries. At Oxford he offered to leave to the heir-apparent the empty title of king, while entrusting the power to the Prince of Orange as the representative of the Princess Mary. These various expedients, more specious and ingenious than practicable, were insufficient to satisfy the violent passions excited in the House of Commons. The proposition of Halifax was rejected. On the 26th of March, a new Exclusion Bill was presented and carried. "On the 28th," says Burnet, "very suddenly and not very decently, the king came to the House of Lords, the crown being carried between his feet in a sedan. And he put on his robes in haste, without any previous notice, and called up the Commons, and dissolved Parliament." This was the fifth Parliament dissolved by King Charles II. The Parliament of Oxford was the last which was convoked during his reign.

He hastened, however, to reassure the nation, and to explain the motives of his actions. A royal manifesto was immediately published, complaining of the undutiful behavior of the three last Parliaments towards him, and of their disrespectful conduct in many instances. "Nothing, however," he added, "shall ever alter my affection to the Protestant religion as established by law, nor my love to Parliament, for I will still have frequent Parliaments." The Whigs replied to the royal protestations, insisting upon the necessity of the exclusion of the Duke of York; but their passions had blinded them regarding the state of public opinion. A mass of addresses were presented to the throne, some ardently Protestant, but assuring the king of their fidelity and confidence; others asserting the right of the regular succession to the throne, while a considerable number openly accepted the doctrine of non-resistance, and absolute submission to the will of the king. The country gentlemen and the inhabitants of towns scented in the air the spirit of 1641; the remembrance of the Civil War had not yet faded from men's minds; the king found himself once more supported by the national sentiment; and he believed himself powerful enough to employ it against his enemies. Proceedings were taken against the men who had insulted the royal majesty. Fitzharris had written a seditious pamphlet. College was accused of having endeavored to corrupt the king's guard; both were condemned and executed. Lord Shaftesbury, indicted as a suborner of false witnesses, was sent to the Tower. The sheriffs of London were still Whigs; the Grand Jury chosen by them triumphantly acquitted Shaftesbury. The wretches previously concerned in the proceedings against the Catholics reappeared in the proceedings against the Whigs. Lord Howard, arrested for the moment, owed his liberty to the Habeas Corpus Act. The king determined to release himself from the trammels imposed upon him by the opinions of the magistrates of London. By a movement of doubtful legality, it was contrived to have sheriffs elected who belonged to the Tory party; the latter, in their turn, chose juries devoted to them. Certain Whig magistrates were sued, and condemned in enormous damages. The king prepared his measures against the charters of the city, and the municipal liberties which everywhere protected the corporations of towns. A visit of the Prince of Orange did not suffice to arrest the absolutist reaction. "The Whigs seem to me in a majority," said the prince to the king, his uncle. "You see only them," replied Charles.

The Duke of York reappeared in London. During his absence from the court, he had exercised in Scotland a harsh and perfidious authority. The rigor to which the Nonconformists had been subjected had excited the hot-headed. A preacher named Cameron, a name still remembered among his partisans, had raised the banner of revolt against a king faithless to the Protestant religion and the government to which he had sworn. He was killed in an engagement. His successor, Donald Cargill, was arrested and soon afterwards executed with a large number of his disciples. Men and women walked to the scaffold singing songs of triumph. The Scotch Parliament instituted an oath of submission to the royal authority, which went so far as to require passive obedience. Fletcher of Saltoun and Lord Stair demanded the insertion of a clause for the protection of the Protestant religion. The Duke of York would not sanction it under this form. When it was proposed to dispense with it, Lord Belhaven declared that the utility of the oath was to exclude Papists from the succession; he was sent to prison. The Earl of Argyll, son of him who had been executed at the commencement of the reign, made some reservation in taking the oath of submission; he was arrested in his turn. The Duke of York disclaimed on his part any sinister intention towards him. "God forbid that the life and fortune of the earl should be imperilled," he said. Yet on the 12th of December, Argyll was condemned by a jury presided over by the Marquis of Montrose. He was assured of the royal pardon; but the earl put no faith in the protestation of his enemies. The Duke of York refused to grant him an audience. Argyll escaped, disguised in the attire of the page of his daughter-in-law. Lady Sophia Lindsay. Condemned, per contumaciam, to all the horrors of the punishment of traitors, his property had been confiscated, and his children declared unworthy of their inheritance; but the king, more considerate and wiser than his advisers, returned a part of his fortune to Lord Lome, the eldest son of the earl. The latter prudently remained in Holland.

The Duke of Monmouth did not act with the same wisdom. When he found the Duke of York established at the court, recognized again as Lord High Admiral and lodged by the king in St. James's Palace, he regarded as void the promise he had given to remain on the Continent so long as his rival should govern in Scotland, and returning to London without the king's permission, was received with exclamations of joy by the people. Leaving the city with a cortege almost regal, he journeyed slowly through the kingdom, received by the gentry and by deputations from the towns, mixing with the crowd wherever he went with a proud but amicable and popular condescension, and saluted on the road by the enthusiastic cries of "Monmouth! Monmouth!"

This triumphant progress led the imprudent young man as far as Chester. The chief justice of that city was George Jeffreys, already known for his violence, his ability, and his unscrupulousness in the furtherance of his unbridled ambition. Corruptly attached at that time to the interests of the Duke of York, he easily found a pretext for arresting the Duke of Monmouth at Stafford, June, 1682. On being conducted to London, the duke was immediately liberated, but was held to bail.

Shaftesbury did not put his trust in the Habeas Corpus Act. Alarmed by the measures which he saw in progress against the Whigs, he sought refuge in the city. It was an old saying of his that he "would constrain the king to leave his kingdom quietly; but as for the Duke of York, he would compel him to wander on the face of the earth, a vagabond like Cain!" The attitude of the king, the fears that he entertained for his party and for himself, the tendency of his restless disposition, again impelled him to dangerous projects. The national party demanded that Charles II., in disinheriting his brother, should with his own hands destroy the monarchy. Charles required that the national party should at all risks submit to a prince who evidently aspired to destroy the religion and constitution of the country. Thus urged on to extremes on one side and the other, the king decided for despotism; the national party for insurrection. In 1682 two statesmen, Lord Shaftesbury and Lord Russell, were at the head of the contest: Shaftesbury, already old, ambitious, indefatigable, corrupted by every source of corruption—the court, the government, and the seductions of popularity; accustomed from his youth upwards to seek and find his fortune in intriguing and plotting; bold and supple in mind; sagacious and fertile in expedients; powerful in influencing men; equally skilled to render service and to injure, to please and to irritate; attached nevertheless by pride and foresight to the Protestant and national party, which was certainly in his eyes the strongest and the ultimate victor; and determined, in any event, to preserve his life in order to enjoy the fruit of his manœuvres or to pursue them afresh: Lord William Russell, still young, sincere, ardent, inexperienced, endowed with an inflexible temper, a heart full of faith and honor, conscientious in conspiring; ready to sacrifice his life for his cause, but incapable of doing anything indifferently for the sake of success or for his own safety. The web was woven; Lord Shaftesbury rallied around him all the malcontents.

The conspirators met occasionally; they were not always the same persons; they were suspicious of each other, and mutually concealed the ultimate object of their plans. Russell projected an armed resistance against the royal tyranny, accepting, perhaps, in the bottom of his heart, though without avowing it to himself, the consequences of such a resolution. Shaftesbury saw his way clearly to his design, and prepared at all cost the overthrow of the king and the advent of a successor other than the veritable heir. Some meditated a sudden attack and the assassination of the king. There were among them some republicans who cherished their dreams, and also some traitors either already in the pay of the court or ready to deliver up to it their secret and their accomplices, in order to withdraw themselves from peril. One day when they were met together, Russell saw enter with Colonel Sidney and Mr. Hampden, a man whom he despised—Lord Howard. "What have we to do with that fellow?" he asked of Lord Essex, his intimate friend, and he desired to retire; but Essex detained him, having a better opinion of Lord Howard, and not suspecting that this was the man whose testimony was destined soon to ruin both.

Lord Howard was already sold to the court. By a lucky accident Shaftesbury was informed of this circumstance; he immediately determined to leave England. The order was actually issued for his arrest when he stealthily left his house, and concealing himself for some days, embarked at Harwich to take refuge in Holland, hoping to find with the Prince of Orange an asylum and an avenger. When chancellor he had violently favored the war with Holland, and more than once had repeated Delenda est Carthago. On his arrival at Amsterdam he requested permission to remain there from the burgomaster, who replied, "Carthage, not yet destroyed, willingly receives the Earl of Shaftesbury within her walls."

He had forever bidden farewell to England. Two months after his flight, while his imprisoned accomplices were undergoing their examination before the judges, the troubled soul and restless mind of Shaftesbury for the first time found repose. He died on the 21st of January, 1683.

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Lord Russell's Trial.

Lord William Russell was already in the Tower when Shaftesbury landed in Holland. As he passed under the Traitor's Gate, he said to his valet, Taunton, "I am sworn against; my enemies will have my life," And when Taunton expressed a hope that they would not succeed, "They will have it," Russell repeated, "the devil is loose."

The conspirators were all arrested. Grey had contrived to escape. Howard had purchased his life by treason; Essex, troubled to the very depths of his soul, cut his throat in prison. Algernon Sidney and Hampden refused to reply to the interrogatories "Seek elsewhere for evidence against me," answered the republican Sidney proudly. It was proposed to Baillie of Jerviswood, to save himself by giving information. "Those who talk to me thus know neither me nor my country," replied the Scotch gentleman.

Witnesses, true or false, were not wanting to the proceedings. Several obscure conspirators had already been executed when Russell was placed at the bar of the Court of the Old Bailey, on the 13th of July, 1683. He asked for a pen and ink to take notes; then turning towards the judges, "May I have somebody to write, and help my memory?" he asked. "Yes, my lord, a servant." "My wife," he replied, "is here to do it." Lady Rachel Russell rose to express her assent; all the bystanders knew her virtuous character, and the passionate attachment which united her to her husband. She served him as his secretary during the whole time of the proceedings. When he was condemned it was she again who pursued without resting every means of obtaining his pardon. "All me is true," replied the king to Lord Dartmouth; "but it is equally true that if I do not take his life he will very soon take mine." And as the arrival was announced of the Marquis of Ruvigny, uncle of Lady Rachel, with a pressing letter from Louis XIV., "I am well assured that the king, my brother, would not advise me to pardon a man who would have shown me no quarter," said the king to Barillon, then ambassador of France at the English court. "I have no wish to prevent M. Ruvigny coming here, but my Lord Russell's head will be off before he arrives."

On the 21st of July, 1683, Russell died upon the scaffold. "The bitterness of death is passed," he said to Tillotson and Burnet, after embracing his wife for the last time; and showing the watch which he handed to Burnet, he said, "I have now done with time, and am going to eternity."

The complications of projects and the various conspiracies served the purpose of the royal vengeance. A criminal plot, much exaggerated in its importance, and entered into by obscure men, which was known under the name of the "Rye House Plot," had been mixed up, whether involuntarily or intentionally, with the revolutionary designs of the great lords. Algernon Sidney had indulged the dream of the return of the Republic; he defended himself with a degree of ability and self-possession which for a moment troubled Chief Justice Jeffreys himself. When sentence was pronounced, Sidney lifted his hand towards heaven: "I implore Thee, O Lord," he said, "to sanctify my sufferings and not to impute my blood to this nation or this city. If one day it should be avenged, let vengeance fall entirely on those who have unjustly persecuted me in the name of justice." He was executed on the 26th of November, 1683. Several of the conspirators shared his fate. The trial of Hampden did not take place till the month of February, 1684. Condemned to imprisonment, he ransomed himself afterwards by payment of a sum of money. The royal power was thenceforth freed from every trammel and from all anxiety. The subsidies of Louis XIV. rendered Charles independent of his people. He refused to summon a Parliament; the Court of King's Bench declared that the city had exceeded its privileges; the charter was withdrawn in 1684; the franchises of all the towns known for their liberal opinions were abolished, like those of the capital. The Duke of York had resumed his place in the Privy Council.

While the absolute reaction acquired every day more strength and audacity, the influence of Lord Halifax with the king diminished. The minister himself was weary of the struggle which he sustained in the Council against Lawrence Hyde, created Lord Rochester, who was devoted to the Duke of York, his brother-in-law. "Life would be worthless," he exclaimed one day, when they were discussing the Charter of Massachusetts, "if we had to drag out existence in a country in which liberty and prosperity were at the mercy of an absolute master." The Duke of York was irritated by this language. "How can you keep about you a man nourished on the worst principles of Marvell and Sidney?" he asked the king. Charles laughed. More sagacious and prudent than his brother, he knew how to conquer without needlessly exasperating the vanquished. Rochester, convicted of malversation while Lord Treasurer, was transferred from the control of the finances to the dignified but not lucrative post of President of the Council. "I have often seen people kicked down stairs," said Halifax; "my Lord Rochester is the first person that I have ever seen kicked up."