A Student's History of England, v. 2: 1509-1689

20. The Five Mile Act. 1665.– In October, Parliament met at Oxford, through fear of the Plague. It offered the king 1,250,000l. for the war if he would consent to fresh persecution of the Dissenters. He took the money, and gave his assent to the Five Mile Act. The Conventicle Act had been largely evaded, and, during the Plague, Dissenting ministers had preached in pulpits from which the clergy had fled through fear of infection. The Five Mile Act was to strike at the ministers ejected on St. Bartholomew's day. Not one of them was allowed to come within five miles of a borough town, or of any place in which he had once held a cure, and was therefore likely to find a congregation, unless he would take the oath of non-resistance, and swear that he would never endeavour to alter the government in Church or State, a condition to which few, if any, of the Dissenters were willing to submit.

21. Continued Struggle with the Dutch. 1665-1666. In the autumn of 1665 the ravages of the Plague kept the English fleet in the Thames, and the Dutch held the sea. On land they were exposed to some peril. Ever since their peace with Spain, in 1648, they had allowed their military defences to fall into decay, on the supposition that they would have no more enemies who could dispose of any formidable land-force. Now even a petty prince like the Bishop of Münster, hired by Charles, was able, in October, to over-run two of their eastern provinces. The Dutch called upon the king of France, Louis XIV., for help, and he, being bound by treaty to assist them, declared war against England in January 1666. If he had given earnest support to the Dutch the consequences would have been serious for England, but though he and other continental allies of the Dutch frightened off the Bishop of Münster from his attack on the Republic, Louis had no wish to help in the destruction of the English navy. What he wanted was to see the Dutch and English fleets destroy one another in order that his own might be mistress of the sea. Through the first four days of June a desperate naval battle was fought between the English and the Dutch, off the North Foreland, at the end of which the English fleet, under Albemarle and Rupert, was driven to take shelter in the Thames, whilst the Dutch had been so crippled as to be forced to put back to refit. On July 25 and 26 there was another battle off the mouth of the Thames. This time the Dutch had the worst, and in August the English fleet sailed along the islands at the entrance of the Zuyder Zee, destroying 160 merchant ships and burning a town. The struggle had been a terrible one. The sailors of both nations were equally brave, and equally at home in a sea-fight, but the English ships were better built and the English guns were better, whilst the Dutch commanders did not work well together in consequence of personal and political jealousies.

22. The Fire of London. 1666.– In September, 1666, London suffered a calamity only second to that of the Plague. A fire broke out, and burnt for three days. All the City from the Tower to the Temple, and from the Thames to Smithfield, was absolutely destroyed. Old St. Paul's, the longest cathedral in England, perished in the flames. Great as the suffering caused by the fire was, it was not without its benefits, as the old houses with their overhanging storeys were destroyed by it, and were replaced by new ones built in the modern fashion, so that there was more air in the streets. After this reconstruction of London it was never again visited by the Plague.

23. Designs of Louis XIV. 1665-1667.– Soon after the fire died down Parliament voted 1,800,000l. for continuing the war, but the country was exhausted, and it was known that it would be impossible to collect so large a sum. Both king and Parliament were therefore anxious for peace, and there were now reasons which made the Dutch also ready to make peace. In 1665 Philip IV. of Spain died, and was succeeded by his only surviving son, Charles II., as yet a mere child, hopelessly weak in body and mind. Philip also left two daughters, the elder, Maria Theresa, a child of his first wife, being the wife of Louis, whilst the younger, Margaret Theresa, the wife of the Emperor Leopold I., was, with Charles II., the offspring of a second marriage.27 Both of the daughters had renounced all future claim to the Spanish Crown, but Louis, knowing that the young Charles II. of Spain was so sickly as to make his early death probable, was prepared to assert his wife's claim whenever that event took place. In the meanwhile he put forward a demand that the greater part of the Spanish Netherlands should be immediately handed over to her, because in those countries there was a law, known as the law of devolution, enacting that the daughter of a first wife should receive a larger share of her father's property than a son of the second. Louis chose to construe a right to succeed to property as though it implied a right to govern. In March, 1667, he made a secret treaty with Charles II. of England, in which, on condition of his engaging not to help the Dutch, he was allowed to do as he pleased in the Spanish Netherlands. In May he began what is known as the War of Devolution, with Spain. Spain had neither money nor means to defend her territory in the Netherlands, and the French armies captured one place after another.

24. The Dutch in the Medway, and the Peace of Breda. 1667.– The advance of Louis into the Spanish Netherlands and the establishment of the French armies so near their frontier in the place of the now exhausted forces of Spain greatly alarmed the Dutch. The mere risk of this danger had, even before the war between France and Spain began, inclined them to peace with England, and a conference was opened at Breda to consider the terms. All was quickly agreed on except the question about the right of England to Pularoon (see p. 589), and Charles, imagining that this would be settled in his favour, dismissed his sailors and dismantled his fleet, in order to save money to spend on his own extravagant pleasures. The Dutch fleet at once entered the Thames, sailed up the Medway, burnt three men-of-war, and carried off a fourth. For some days it blockaded the Thames, so that the Londoners could get no coals. Men openly said that such things would not have happened if Oliver had been living. Orders were sent to the English ambassadors at Breda to give up Pularoon, and on July 31 the Treaty of Breda was signed. It was not wholly disastrous. If England lost her last hold on the spice islands of the East, she gained New York and all the territory formerly Dutch in the West, which had broken up the continuity of her colonies in America.

25. Clarendon and the House of Commons. 1667.– The events of the last months of the war had produced important effects upon the temper of Parliament. Long before the Dutch appeared in the Medway, the House of Commons had demanded an inquiry into the expenditure of the money granted to the Crown, suspecting that much of the supply distinctly intended for purposes of war had been diverted to pay for the amusements of the Court. This demand, which opened a new chapter in the history of the financial struggle between the House of Commons and the Crown, brought the Commons into collision with Clarendon. It had been settled by the Long Parliament that the king was to levy no taxes without a grant from Parliament. The Cavalier Parliament, Royalist as it was, was beginning to ask that the king should not spend the proceeds of taxes without the approbation of Parliament. When once this had been secured, Parliament would indubitably become supreme. Against this attempt to obtain the mastery Clarendon struggled. He was a good lawyer and an excellent man of business, but he was not a statesman of genius. He wanted each part of the government to act in harmony with the others; but he could never understand the meaning of the saying that if two men ride on horseback, one must ride in front. He wanted the king and Parliament both to ride in front, both – that is to say – to have their own way in certain directions. His notion of a king was that of one prudently doing his best for his people, always ruling according to law, and irresponsible in everything, even in the expenditure of money. A wasteful, riotous Charles II. was a phenomenon for the control of which his constitutional formulas were not prepared.

26. The Fall of Clarendon. 1667.– Though Clarendon was unable to concur in any diminution of the power of the Crown, his eyes were widely open to the profligacy of Charles's life. Again and again he had remonstrated with him, and had refused to pass under the great seal grants in favour of Lady Castlemaine, to whom, amongst his many mistresses, Charles was at this time most completely subjugated. As might have been expected, this abandoned woman irritated her paramour against his upright Chancellor, telling him that he was no king as long as he was ruled by Clarendon. As Parliament continued its attacks, Charles, on August 30, dismissed Clarendon from office. On October 10, the fallen minister was impeached by the House of Commons, on charges the greater part of which were ridiculously untrue. He tried to rouse Charles to support him, reminding him that, after Charles I. allowed Strafford to die, the king's own head had fallen on the scaffold. Charles II., an easy-going but clever politician, probably thought that he could always escape his father's fate by refraining from imitating his father's stiffness. He gave Clarendon a strong hint to withdraw, and on November 29 the minister who had done more than any other man to establish the restored monarchy, fled to France, never to return alive.

27. Scotland and Ireland. 1660.– At the Restoration, the close connection established by Cromwell between England and Scotland was necessarily broken up. Scotland hated English control even when it came in the guise of a union of Parliaments, and the old relation of separate states united only by the Crown was at once resumed. Argyle and his principal followers were executed as traitors. The main profit of the restoration in Scotland, however, fell to the nobility. The clergy was discredited by its divisions, and the noblemen, whose fathers had supported Presbyterianism against Charles I., now supported Charles II. against Presbyterianism. Once more, as in the days of James I., the clergy were muzzled by the restoration of episcopacy and the assertion of the authority of the Crown. In Ireland the main question was how to satisfy alike the recent English immigrants who had received lands from Cromwell and the Irish proprietors who had been deprived of their lands in favour of the intruders. In 1661, at the king's desire, an Act of Settlement was passed, making, in elaborate detail, an attempt to satisfy as many as possible of both parties; but as men of English descent and Protestant religion filled the Irish House of Commons, the English settlers contrived to maintain, by constitutional authority, much of what they had taken with the strong hand. According to the best evidence now procurable, whereas before 1641 about two-thirds of Irish lands fit for cultivation had been in the hands of Catholics, before the end of the reign of Charles II. two-thirds were in the hands of Protestants.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

CHARLES II. AND THE CABAL. 1667-1674

LEADING DATESReign of Charles II., 1660-1685

• Treaty of Dover June 1, 1670

• Second Dutch War of the Restoration March 13, 1672

• Declaration of Indulgence March 15, 1672

• Test Act March 29, 1673

• Dismissal of Shaftesbury Nov. 9, 1673

• Peace with the Dutch Feb. 19, 1674

1. Milton and Bunyan.– Whilst Clarendon and his allies were fortifying the legal position of the Church of England, the old Puritanism which they attempted to crush found a voice in literature. Milton, who had become blind, in consequence of his intense devotion to the service of the State, as the secretary of Cromwell, at last, after long preparation, gave to the world 'Paradise Lost,' in 1667. The poem was Puritan, not only because its main theme was the maintenance or destruction of the purity of a single human soul, but because it based that purity on obedience to the commands of the great Taskmaster; whilst, in the solemn cadence of its blank verse there is something to remind the reader of the stern world of duty, in the midst of which the nobler spirits of the Commonwealth and Protectorate had moved. As Milton was the poet of Puritanism, John Bunyan was the prose-poet of Dissent. He had himself fought as a soldier on the side of Parliament in the Civil War, and, having become an earnest Baptist preacher, he continued to preach after the Restoration, and, boldly defying the law, was requited with a long imprisonment. His masterpiece, 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' was probably not written till 1675, but many of his religious writings were published before that date. His force of imagination made him the greatest allegorist the world has seen. His moral aim lay in the preservation of a few choice souls from the perils and temptations of a society wholly given up to evil.

2. Butler and the Dramatists.– There was, doubtless, much in the world round Milton and Bunyan to awake indignation. Samuel Butler was a man of genius, but his 'Hudibras,' which appeared in 1663, shows but poorly by the side of 'Paradise Lost' and 'The Pilgrim's Progress.' This mock-heroic account of a Puritan knight is the work of a strong writer, who can find nothing better to do with the warriors and disputants who had lately controlled England than to laugh at them. The mass of Restoration poetry was far weaker than 'Hudibras,' whilst its dramatic writers vied with one another in the expression of licentious thought either in prose or in the regular heroic couplets which were, at this time, in vogue. It was, indeed, impossible to put much human passion into two neat lines which had to be made to rhyme; but at Court love-making had been substituted for passion, and the theatres, now re-opened, after they had been suppressed by the Puritans, were meant for the vicious Court and not for the people at large.

3. Reason and Science.– The satire of Butler, and the licentiousness of the dramatists, both sprang from a reaction against the severe morality of the Puritans; but it would have been a poor prospect for the generation following that of Puritan repression if the age had not produced any positive work of its own. Its work was to be found in the increase of respect for human reason. In the better minds amongst the clergy of the Restoration, the reasonable character of the Church of England was more than ever predominant. A few, such as Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, and Stillingfleet, Dean of St. Paul's, were even anxious to find some way of comprehension by which Dissenters might be reconciled to the Church, whilst others, like Morley and Barrow, attached far more importance to arguments addressed to the understanding, than to that uniformity of ceremonial which had been so dear to the mind of Laud. Still more important was the spread of devotion to natural science. The Royal Society, founded for its promotion in 1660, brought together men who thought more about air-pumps than about the mysteries of theology; and it was mainly the results of their inquiries which made any renewed triumph of Puritanism impossible. In 'The Pilgrim's Progress' the outer world was treated as a mere embarrassment to the pursuit of spiritual perfection. By the Fellows of the Royal Society it was treated as calling for reverent investigation, in order that, in the words of Bacon, nature might be brought into the service of man by his obedience to her laws.

4. Charles II. and Toleration. 1667.– In the long run the rise of the scientific spirit would conduce to religious toleration, because scientific men have no reason to desire the suppression of any form of religious belief. The first step taken after the restoration in the direction of religious toleration had come from Charles (see p. 581), who was actuated partly by a sneaking fondness for the Roman Catholic Church and partly by dislike of being dictated to by Parliament. He therefore, after Clarendon's fall, gave his confidence mainly to men who, for various reasons, were inclined to support his wishes in this respect.

5. Buckingham and Arlington. 1667-1669.– Amongst these men the principal were the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Arlington. Buckingham, the son of the favourite of Charles I. – 'everything by turns and nothing long' – was trying his hand at politics by way of amusement. Arlington, who, like Charles, hardly knew whether he was Catholic or Protestant, was entrusted, as Secretary of State, with the direction of foreign affairs. He was a man of considerable ability, but perfectly unscrupulous in shifting his ground to suit his personal ambition. Both hated Clarendon as sour and austere, and both were ready to support the king in any scheme upon which he might set his heart. The Dissenters confined to prison were liberated, and a Bill prepared to modify the ceremonies of the Church, so as to enable the expelled Presbyterians to re-enter the Church. When, however, Parliament met in February, 1668, it showed its determination to have nothing to do with either toleration or comprehension (see p. 598). It offered the king 300,000l., but only under the implied condition that he would abandon his scheme. Charles took the money and dropped his scheme. He prorogued Parliament in May, and did not re-assemble it till October, 1669. Whilst Parliament was not in session Charles sheltered the Dissenters from persecution, and even thought of dissolving Parliament. Albemarle (see p. 580), however, cautiously reminded him that, even if he got a new Parliament in which the Dissenters and their friends were predominant, it would probably cause him trouble by wanting to persecute those who had hitherto persecuted the Dissenters. Accordingly Charles, who hated nothing so much as trouble, not only allowed the old Parliament to meet again, but even issued a proclamation enforcing the penal laws against Dissenters.

6. The Triple Alliance. 1668.– In 1668 a triple alliance was formed between England, the Dutch Republic, and Sweden, to put an end to the War of Devolution (see p. 593). Its originators were De Witt, and Sir William Temple, the English ambassador at the Hague. The allies demanded that Louis should content himself with certain strong towns on his northern frontier which he had already conquered from Spain, and should desist from attempting to conquer more. Louis assented, and the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was signed on these conditions. In England there was already a rising feeling against the French, and Charles acquired no little popularity by his supposed firmness. In reality he had betrayed the secrets of the alliance to Louis, and had only shown his teeth to gain good terms for himself from the French king.

7. Charles's Negotiations with France. 1669-1670.– Louis owed the Dutch a deep grudge, and set himself to win Charles to neutrality, if not to active help, in the war which he now purposed to make against them. Charles disliked the Dutch as the commercial rivals of England, and was ready to sell himself to Louis if only the price offered was high enough. Though Charles never suffered religion of any kind to be a check on his conduct, his facile nature yearned after the imposing authority of the Roman Church. In 1669 his brother, James, avowed himself a Catholic, and in the same year Charles, under the strictest secrecy, declared his own conversion to a small circle of men whom he could trust. Before the end of the war he offered Louis support against the Dutch, but asked such enormous concessions in return that Louis refused to agree to them. Charles, before lowering the terms of his bargain with Louis, drove another bargain with his Parliament. In the spring of 1670, by dropping his demand for toleration, he obtained a grant of 300,000l. a year for eight years. In return he gave the royal assent to a second Conventicle Act, even more stringent than the first.

8. The Treaty of Dover. 1670.– Having secured a grant, Charles prorogued Parliament, which he had deceived by giving it to understand that he had abandoned the idea of toleration, and turned to Louis. Louis sent over Charles's youngest sister, Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, to conclude an alliance, and on June 1, 1670, a treaty between England and France was secretly signed at Dover. Charles agreed to join Louis in his projected war against the Dutch, by sending an English force of 6,000 men to serve in the French army, and to assist Louis to seize upon the territories of the Spanish monarchy in the event of the death of Charles II. of Spain without male heirs. Charles was also to acknowledge himself a Catholic whenever he thought fit to do so. To support Charles against his subjects in case of their resisting him in the declaration of his conversion, Louis was to give him 154,000l. and the aid of 6,000 troops to be employed in England in his defence. Moreover, Charles was to receive 230,000l. a year during the proposed war, and thirty French ships were to serve under an English admiral. At the end of the war he was to receive Walcheren, Sluys and Cadsand from the Dutch Republic, and ultimately, if Louis made good his claims to the Spanish monarchy, he was to gain from Spain, Ostend, Minorca, and various territories in South America. Charles II. was no more scrupulous than his father had been about using the troops of foreign princes to suppress the opposition of his own subjects, but he was shrewd enough to know – what Charles I. had never known – that foreign princes would not lend him troops unless he gave them something in return. The breach of the Triple Alliance and the assistance offered by Charles to Louis in the proposed war against the Dutch were considered in France to be a fair equivalent for the payments which Louis had bound himself to make. It was another question whether Charles could be kept to his engagements. To secure this as much as possible Louis sent him over a new French mistress, Louise de Keroualle. Charles soon created her Duchess of Portsmouth, and she fulfilled her duty to her own king by betraying to him all the secrets of her lover.

9. The Cabal. 1670.– After Clarendon's fall Charles had been his own chief minister. The ministers whom he consulted from time to time were known as his Cabal, a word then applied to any body of secret advisers, without carrying with it the opprobrious meaning which it now has. At last the wits discovered that the initials of five ministers who were principally consulted about the time of the Treaty of Dover, Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale, spelt the word cabal, and writers have since talked about them as forming what has been called the Cabal Ministry, though no such ministry, in the modern sense of the word, ever existed. Not only did they not form a council meeting for purposes of government, but, though they agreed together in favouring toleration, they disagreed on other points. Nor were they usually consulted by Charles in a body. Sometimes he took the advice of persons not of their number; sometimes he took the advice of some of them only, whilst he kept the others entirely in the dark. Thus Clifford, who was a brave and honest Catholic, and Arlington, who would support any measure as long as it was his interest to do so, knew all about the Treaty of Dover, whilst Buckingham, Lauderdale, and Ashley were in complete ignorance of it. Of Buckingham and Arlington enough has been already said (see p. 599). Lauderdale, who had little to do with English affairs, kept himself almost entirely to the task of building up the king's authority in Scotland, where he had already got together an army completely at Charles's disposal. The character of Ashley deserves a longer consideration.

10. Ashley's Policy.– Anthony Ashley Cooper,28 who had been created Lord Ashley since the Restoration, had changed sides again and again during the late troubles. He was a born party-leader, and had signalised himself as a youth at Exeter College, Oxford, by leading a successful revolt of the freshmen against the older undergraduates, who, according to custom, tried to skin the chins of the freshmen and to force them to drink a nauseous compound prepared for the occasion. Though in party conflict he was quite unscrupulous and despised no means which would enable him to gain his ends, he had the statesmanlike qualities of common sense and moderation. He had deserted Charles I. when he leant upon the Catholics (see p. 541), had supported Cromwell in his struggle with the zealots of the Barebone's Parliament (see p. 566), and had left him when he rejected the constitutional scheme of the first Parliament of the Protectorate (see p. 570). In disgust at the humours of the Rump and the army, he had done everything in his power to hasten the Restoration, and had soon shown hostility to Clarendon and to the persecuting laws of the Cavalier Parliament. In fact, there were two principles to which he was never entirely false, a love of Parliamentary government and a love of toleration, which last was based, not as was that of Oliver, upon sympathy with religious zeal of every kind, but upon dislike of clerical interference. At present he attached himself to Charles, because he knew of Charles's alleged wish to establish toleration, and knew nothing of the conspiracy against Parliament on which Charles had embarked, or of Charles's secret design to favour the Roman Church under cover of a general scheme of toleration.