Chapter VII: Charles II (2)

On the recall of Charles to the throne, both Mazarin and his master, Louis XIV., saw their mistake, for they had not only treated Charles with as much indifference as if it were a moral certainty that he could never again reach the throne of England, but had even sent him out of the country at the demand of Cromwell. Mazarin now offered his niece, but the scene was changed, and Charles no longer stooped to the niece of a cardinal. Louis, who had no suitable princess of France to offer him, and who wanted to prevent Portugal from falling into the power of Spain, recommended to him Donna Catarina of Braganza, the Portuguese monarch's sister. Could he accomplish this match, Louis, who was bound by treaty with Spain to offer no aid to Portugal, might be able to do it under cover of the King of England. The king's ministers, after some apprehension on the score of the lady's religion, were of opinion that the match was desirable, if it were only for the great dowry offered--five hundred thousand pounds, the Settlements of Tangier in Africa, and Bombay in the East Indies, besides a free trade to all the Portuguese colonies. De Mello, the Portuguese ambassador in London, was informed that the proposal met the approbation of the king. To link the interests of France and England closer, the Princess Henrietta, Charles's youngest sister, was married to the Duke of Orleans, the only brother of the French king.

On the 13th of May the Portuguese princess arrived at Spithead; Charles was not there to receive her, pretending pressure of Parliamentary business, but he sent to request of her that the marriage ceremony after the Catholic form, which he had promised, might be waived. Catherine would not consent. On the 20th, Charles having arrived at Portsmouth, they were, therefore, married in private by Catherine's almoner, Stuart D'Aubigny, in the presence of Philip, afterwards Cardinal Howard, and five other witnesses, and subsequently in public by the Bishop of London.

On the journey to Hampton Court, and for a few days afterwards, Charles appeared extremely pleased with his wife, who--though she could not compete in person with the dazzling Lady Castlemaine, and has been described by some contemporaries as a homely person, as "a little swarthy body, proud, and ill-favoured"--is stated by others also to have been "a most pretty woman." According to Lely's portrait of her, she is a very pleasing brunette beauty, and by all accounts she was extremely amiable; but the misfortune was, that she had been brought up as in a convent, completely secluded from society, and therefore was little calculated, by the amount of her information, or the graces of her manners, to fascinate a person of Charles's worldly and volatile character.

How was such a woman to support her influence with such a man against the beauty and determined temper of Lady Castlemaine, a woman as dissolute and unprincipled as she was handsome? In her fits of passion she often threatened the king to tear their children to pieces, and set his palace on fire; and when she was in these tempers, a contemporary says, "she resembled Medusa less than one of her dragons." Charles was the perfect slave of her charms and her passions. She had wrung from him a promise that his marriage should not cause him to withdraw himself from her, and having borne him a son a few days after his marriage, she only awaited her convalescence to take her place as one of the queen's own ladies. Catherine had heard of his amour before coming to England, for it was the talk of Europe, and her mother had bade her never to allow her name to be mentioned in her presence. But very soon the king presented her a list of the ladies of her household, and the first on the list she saw, to her astonishment, was Lady Castlemaine. She at once struck it out and, notwithstanding the king's remonstrances, declared that sooner than submit to such an indignity, she would return to Portugal. But she was not long in learning that no regard to her feelings was to be expected from this sensual and unfeeling monster. He brought Lady Castlemaine into the Queen's chamber, leading her by the hand, and presenting her before the assembled Court. Such a scandalous offence to public decorum, such a brutal insult to a young wife in a strange land, was perhaps never perpetrated before. Catherine, who did not recognise the name uttered by the king, received her graciously, and permitted her to kiss her hand; but a whisper from one of the Portuguese ladies made her aware of the outrage. She burst into tears, the blood gushed from her nostrils in the violent effort to subdue her feelings, and she fell senseless into the arms of her attendants. Instead of feeling any compunction for the pain thus inflicted on his wife, the demoralised reprobate was enraged at her for thus, as he called it, casting a slur on the reputation of the fair lady. He abused the queen for her perversity, and vowed that she should receive Lady Castlemaine as a lady of her bedchamber, as a due reparation for this public insult. It was in vain, however, that he stormed at his unhappy wife; she remained firm in her resolve, either to be freed from the pollution of the mistress's presence, or to return to Portugal. Clarendon and Ormond ventured to remonstrate with Charles on his cruelty, but Charles was especially indignant that they should "level the mistresses of kings and princes with other lewd women, it being his avowed doctrine that they ought to be looked upon as above other men's wives." However opposed such a doctrine may be to the more refined taste and purer morality of the present age, it was quite in harmony with the habits and feelings which regulated the social system of Europe at that period. Charles was at least no worse than Louis XIV., whose mistresses were admitted to the intimacy of married ladies of approved virtue and chastity. The same, too, may be said of the English Court under the first two kings of the House of Brunswick.

The part which Clarendon played on this occasion is greatly at variance with that reputation for honour, wisdom, virtue, and true dignity with which his admirers invest him. It shows that however much he might recoil at it, however deeply disgraceful and degrading he might feel it, he was ready to stoop to this disgrace and degradation, rather than sacrifice his interest at Court. Accordingly Charles let him know that he expected him not only to cease to object to his unmanly conduct to his wife, but to make himself the instrument of inducing her to submit to the ignominy; and the hoary moralist, the great minister and historian, showed himself humbly pliant, and set to work in earnest to bend the mind of this virtuous and outraged woman to the shame of receiving her husband's harlot as her daily companion and attendant. And this Clarendon did perseveringly, and at length successfully. When Catherine talked of returning to Portugal, he bade her understand that she was utterly in the power of her husband; that so far from going to Portugal, she could not even go out of the palace without his permission; and, in fact, he so worked upon the poor creature's terrors, backed by the savage threats of the king, that he broke her spirit, and taught her to acquiesce in an example of profligacy, which at once scandalised and corrupted the morals of the age. Charles, when Catherine repeated her determination to return to Portugal, told her rudely that she must first see whether her mother would receive her, and that he would send her Portuguese servants to ascertain that point; and he discharged all her attendants. Thus abandoned in a foreign country, the miserable queen told the Chancellor that she had to struggle with greater difficulties than any woman of her condition before; but that pattern minister only showed her that it was the more necessary to submit. And thus Clarendon complacently writes:--"In all this the king preserved his point; the lady came to Court, was lodged there, was every day in the queen's presence, and the king in continual conference with her, whilst the queen sat untaken notice of; and if her Majesty rose at the indignity, and retired into her chamber, it may be one or two attended her; but all the company remained in the room she left, and too often said those things aloud which nobody ought to have whispered. She alone was left out in all jollities, and not suffered to have any part of those pleasant applications and caresses which she saw made abroad to everybody else; a universal mirth in all company but in hers, and in all places but in her chamber, her own servants showing more respect and more diligence to the person of the lady than towards their own mistress, who, they found, could do them less good. All these mortifications were too heavy to be borne, so that at last, when it was least expected or suspected, the queen of a sudden let herself fall first to conversation, and then to familiarity, and even in the same instant to a confidence with the lady; was merry with her in public, talked kindly of her, and in private used nobody more friendly."

Catherine was subdued to her yoke, and this was the treatment of an English king to a princess who brought him besides a splendid money dowry, the Settlement of Tangier, which might in any reign of sense and policy have been made a commanding station in the Mediterranean, and Bombay, our first Settlement in India, the nucleus of our present magnificent Indian empire.

Whilst these scenes had been passing in the palace, the lives of Cromwell's supporters were brought into question without. Vane and Lambert were put upon their trial before the Court of King's Bench on the 2nd of June. The prominent actors in the drama of the late Rebellion had both in their different ways done immense damage to Royalty; and though the Convention Parliament had requested Charles to leave them unpunished--notwithstanding that they were not included in the Bill of Indemnity--and Charles had assented, the Cavaliers could not rest satisfied without their blood. Lambert had been one of Cromwell's chief generals--one of his major-generals--and to the last he had done his best to maintain the cause of the Commonwealth by his sword, and had attempted to prevent the march of Monk at the very time that he was planning the return of the king. Vane had been one of the very ablest counsellors and diplomatists that the Commonwealth had had. True, he had not sat on the trial of the king, he had had no hand whatever in his death; but he had done two things which could never be forgotten or forgiven by the Royalists. He had furnished the minutes of the Privy Council from his father's cabinet, which determined the fate of Strafford, and the Court held him to be the real author of his death; next, though he did not assist in condemning the king, he accepted office under what was now termed the rebel Government. Besides and beyond these, he was a man of the highest diplomatic abilities, and of a spotless character and high religious temperament, which caused the vile spirit and lives of the new reigning power and party to look even viler by the contrast. The prisoners were charged with conspiring and compassing the death of the present king, and the recent acts in proof of this were alleged to be consulting with others to bring the king to destruction, and to keep him out of his kingdom and authority, and actually assembling in arms. These were vague and general charges, which might have been applied to all who had been engaged in the late Government, and on the same pleas all the Commonwealth men might have been put to death.

Lambert, who had been most courageous in the field, appeared, before a court of justice, a thorough coward. His late transactions had shown that he was a man of no military genius, and now he trembled at the sight of his judges. He assumed a very humble tone, pretended that when he opposed General Monk he did not know that he was a favourer of the house of Stuart, and he threw himself on the royal clemency. As there was clearly nothing to be feared from such a man, he received judgment of death, but was then sent to a prison in Guernsey for life, where he amused himself with painting and gardening.

But Vane showed by the ability with which he defended himself that he was a most dangerous man to so corrupt and contemptible a dynasty as now reigned. The nobility of his sentiments, the dignity of his conduct, and the acuteness of his reasonings, all marked a man who kept alive most perilous and disparaging reminiscences. Every plea that he advanced, and the power with which he advanced it, which before a fair and independent tribunal would have excited admiration, and ensured his acquittal, here only inspired terror and rage, and ensured his destruction. He contended that he was no traitor. By all principles of civil government, and by the statute of Henry VII., he had only contended against a man who was no longer king _de facto_. The Parliament, he said, before his union with it, had entered on the contest with the late king, and put him, on what they held to be sufficient grounds, out of his former position and authority. Moreover, by the law of the land--the statute of the 11th of Henry VII., and the practice based upon it--the Parliament were become the reigning and rightful power. Under that power, and by the constitutional, acknowledged Government he had acted, taking no part in the shedding of the king's blood; and what he did after he did by the authority of the only ruling Government. He therefore denied the right of any court but the High Court of Parliament to call him in question, and he demanded counsel to assist him in any case in rebutting the charges against him. But every argument that he advanced only the more militated against himself. The court was met to condemn him and get rid of him, and the more he could prove its incompetence, the worse must their arbitrary injustice appear. The more he could prove the Commonwealth a rightful Government, the more must the present Government hate and dread him. The judges declared that Charles had never ceased to be king either _de facto_ or _de jure_ from the moment of his father's death. That he was not king _de facto_, but an outcast from England, deprived of all power and name, was notorious enough, but that mattered little; they were resolved to have it so. In order to induce Vane to plead, they promised him counsel, but when he had complied, and pleaded not guilty, they answered his demand for counsel by telling him _they_ would be his counsel.

Before such a tribunal there could be but one result--right or wrong, the prisoner must be condemned; but Vane made so able and unanswerable a defence, that the counsel employed against him were reduced to complete silence: whereupon Chief-Justice Foster said to his colleagues, "Though we know not what to say to him, we know what to do with him." And when he adverted to the promise of the king that he should not be condemned for what was past, and to his repeated demand for counsel, the Solicitor-General exclaimed, "What counsel does he think would dare to speak for him in such a manifest case of treason, unless he could call down the heads of his fellow traitors--Bradshaw or Coke--from the top of Westminster Hall?" He might have added--in that vile state of things, that disgraceful relapse of the English public into moral and political slavery--what jury would dare to acquit him? The king was so exasperated at the accounts carried to him at Hampton Court of the bold and unanswerable defence of Vane, that he wrote to Clarendon, "The relation that hath been made to me of Sir Harry Vane's carriage yesterday in the hall is the occasion of this letter, which, if I am rightly informed, was so insolent as to justify all that he had done, acknowledging no supreme power in England but Parliament, and many things to that purpose. You have had a true account of all, and if he has given new occasion to be hanged, certainly he is too dangerous a man to let live, if we can honestly put him out of the way. Think of this, and give me some account of it to-morrow." What account Clarendon gave we may imagine, for he is careful in his own autobiography to pass over altogether so small a matter as the trial and death of this eminent man.

Vane was condemned, and executed on Tower Hill on the 14th of June, 1662, on the very spot where Strafford suffered, thus studiously making his death an act of retribution for his evidence against that nobleman. On taking leave of his wife and friends, Sir Harry confidently predicted--as the former victims, Harrison, Scott, and Peters had done--that his blood would rise from the ground against the reigning family in judgment, on earth as well as in heaven. "As a testimony and seal," he said, "to the justness of that quarrel, I leave now my life upon it, as a legacy to all the honest interests in these three nations. Ten thousand deaths rather than defile my conscience, the chastity and purity of which I value beyond all this world." So alarmed were the king and courtiers at the impression which this heroic and virtuous conduct was likely to make on the public, that they took every means to prevent the prisoner from being heard on the scaffold. They placed drummers and trumpeters under the scaffold, to drown his voice when he addressed the people. When he complained of the unfairness of his trial, Sir John Robinson, the Lieutenant of the Tower, rudely and furiously contradicted him, saying, "It's a lie; I am here to testify that it is a lie. Sir, you must not rail at the judges." When he began again, the drummers and trumpeters made the loudest din that they could, but he ordered them to be stopped, saying he knew what was meant by it. Again, as he attempted to proceed, they burst forth louder than ever; and Robinson, furious, attempted to snatch the paper out of his hand which contained his notes. Vane, however, held it firmly, and then Robinson, seeing several persons taking notes of what the prisoner said, exclaimed in a rage, "He utters rebellion, and you write it;" and the books were seized, or all that could be discovered. They next, two or three of them, attempted to wrest his papers from him, and thrust their hands into his pockets, on pretence of searching for others. A more indecent scene never was witnessed, and Vane, seeing that it was useless to attempt being heard, laid his head on the block, and it was severed at a stroke.

FROM THE PAINTING BY F. W. W. TOPHAM, R.I.

"IT WAS THE CHILD OF A VERY ABLE CITIZEN OF GRACIOUS [GRACECHURCH] STREET. A SADDLER, WHO HAD BURIED ALL THE REST OF HIS CHILDREN OF THE PLAGUE, AND HIMSELF AND WIFE NOW BEING SHUT UP IN DESPAIR OF ESCAPING DID DESIRE ONLY TO SAVE THE LIFE OF THIS LITTLE CHILD; I SO PREVAILED TO HAVE IT RECEIVED STARK NAKED INTO THE ARMS OF A FRIEND, WHO BROUGHT IT (HAVING PUT IT INTO FRESH CLOTHES) TO GREENWICH."--_Pepys's Diary._]

But the effect of Vane's words and conduct died not with him. The people, degraded as they had become, could not avoid perceiving that the spirit of evil was abroad; that revenge was being taken for the virtue and the great principles of the Commonwealth; that the base and worthless were exterminating the true--those who were the real glory of the nation. Burnet says, "It was generally thought that the Government lost more than it gained by the death of Vane;" and even the gossiping Pepys said that he was told that "Sir Harry Vane was gone to heaven, for he died as much a saint and martyr as ever man did, and that the king had lost more by that man's death than he would get again for a long while."

But these plain signs could not stop the thirst for blood. Colonels Okey, Corbet, and Barkstead, three of the Regicides, had got away to Holland, as Goffe, Whalley, and Dixwell had to the New England settlements. The last three managed, in various disguises, but in continual fears, to escape; but Okey, Corbet, and Barkstead were hunted out by Downing, who, having been Cromwell's ambassador at the Hague, had made his peace with the new Government, and was ready to earn favour by making himself its bloodhound in running down his former friends. He had once been chaplain to Okey's regiment. Having secured them, the States were mean enough to surrender them, and they suffered all the horrors of hanging and embowelling at the gallows. General Ludlow, Mr. Lisle, and others of the Commonwealth men had retired to Switzerland, which nobly refused to give them up; but the Royalists determined to assassinate them if they could not have them to hack and mangle at the gibbet. Murderers were sent after them to dog them, and though Ludlow escaped, as by a miracle, from several attempts, Lisle was shot, on Sunday of all days, as he was entering the church at Lausanne; and the murderers rode away shouting, "God save the king!" and made their escape into France.

If the country was discontented at the destruction of its most eminent and virtuous men, it found that it must prepare to see its foreign prestige sold to France. The king wanted money; Louis XIV. wanted Dunkirk back again, which Cromwell had wrested from France, and which remained a proof of the ascendency of England under that great ruler. Clarendon, who should have endeavoured to save the nation from that disgrace, did not know where else to look for the necessary supplies for Charles's pleasures, and if he did not suggest, actually counselled the measure. It was contended that Dunkirk was useless to England, and that the expense of maintaining it was onerous. But not only France, but Spain and Holland, knew very well its value as a bulwark against the notorious designs of Louis of adding Belgium, and if possible Holland, to France. Charles knew this very well, too, and was ready to sell it to the highest bidder. Spain and Holland were eager to make the purchase, but Charles was expecting other favours from France, and could not get them if he sold Dunkirk to either of those nations. He was in treaty with Louis for ten thousand foot and a body of cavalry, to enable him to tread down the remaining liberties of the people. He therefore gave the preference to France--for not a patriotic feeling, but the most base personal views swayed him in such matters--and struck a bargain with D'Estrades for five million livres. Charles struggled for the payment in cash, but Louis would only give bills for the amount; and then, knowing Charles's necessity, he privately sent a broker, who discounted the bills at sixteen per cent.; and Louis himself boasts, in his published works, that he thus saved five hundred thousand livres out of the bargain, without Charles being aware of it. The indignation of the public at this transaction was loud and undisguised; the merchants of London had in vain offered themselves to advance the king money, so that Dunkirk might not be sacrificed, and now the people openly said that the place was sold only to satisfy the rapacity of the king's mistresses, of whom he was getting more and more--Miss Stewart, Nell Gwynn, and others of less mark. The reprobation of the affair was so universal and violent, and Clarendon was so fiercely accused of being a party to it, that from this hour his favour with the nation was gone for ever.

Whilst the king was thus spilling the best blood, and selling the possessions of the country, the Nonconformists were vainly hoping for his fulfilment of his Declaration of Breda, as it regarded liberty to tender consciences. The Act of Uniformity came into force on the 24th of August, St. Bartholomew's Day, on which day the deprivation of two thousand Presbyterian ministers would be enforced. They therefore petitioned for three months' delay, which Charles promised, on condition that during that time they should use the Book of Common Prayer. But no sooner was this promise given than the Royalists, and especially the bishops, contended that the king was under no obligation to keep the Declaration of Breda, inasmuch as it had only been made to the Convention Parliament, which had never called for its fulfilment. Clarendon did not venture to counsel Charles to break his word, but he advised the summoning of the bishops to Hampton Court, where the question was discussed in the presence of Ormond, Monk, and the chief law-officers and ministers of State. The bishops expressed much disgust at "those fellows," the Nonconformists, still insisting on interrupting the king in the exercise of his undoubted prerogative; they were supported by the Crown lawyers, and the Act was enforced in all its rigour, despite the royal promise, which had over and over lost its slightest value. The storm of persecution burst forth on the Nonconformists with fury. Their meetings were forcibly broken up by soldiery, and their preachers and many of themselves thrust into prison on charges of heresy and violation of the laws. Numbers again prepared for flight to New England, and to prevent this sweeping emigration of useful artisans, the Earl of Bristol, the former impetuous and eccentric Lord Digby of the Civil Wars, and Ashley Cooper planned a scheme which should at once relieve both Dissenters and Catholics. This was to induce the king, on the plea of fulfilling his Declaration of Breda, to issue a declaration of indulgence of a broad and comprehensive character. This was supported in the Council by Robartes, Lord Privy Seal, and Bennet, the new Secretary of State. Accordingly, Charles, on the 6th of December, issued his declaration, called "a Declaration for Refuting Four Scandals cast on the Government"--namely, that the Act of Indemnity had been merely intended to be temporary; that there was an intention to keep a large standing army; that the king was a persecutor; and that he was a favourer of Popery. In answer to the third scandal, he declared he would submit to Parliament a Bill for ample indulgence to tender consciences; and though he would not refuse to make the Catholics, like the rest of his subjects, a partaker in this privilege, yet to show the fallacy of the fourth scandal, if they abused his goodness he would pursue them with all the rigour of the laws already existing against them.

FROM THE PICTURE BY E. M. WARD, R.A.
IN THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, SOUTH KENSINGTON.
]

This announcement was received with an outburst of indignation by all parties except the Independents and the other Dissenters who partook of their ideas of general toleration. But the Presbyterians adhered to their ancient bigotry so firmly, that rather than Catholics should enjoy toleration, they were ready to forego it themselves. The Church, and a vast number of people of no religion at all, joined in the cry out of their hereditary alarm at Popery. The moment that the session of 1663 opened, on the 18th of February, both houses attacked the Declaration, and the Commons, though the Bill was not before them, sent an address to the king, thanking him for the other parts of the Declaration, but represented the third clause as pregnant with schism, endless liberties and importunities of sects, and certain disturbance of the national tranquillity. In the Lords the Lord-Treasurer led the opposition, and the bishops supported him with all their energies, and, to the astonishment of Charles himself, Clarendon, who had been laid up with gout, on the second day of the debate went to the House, and attacked it with a vehemence of language which gave great offence to the king. Probably Clarendon calculated on more serious damage from the popular feeling, of which his Dunkirk policy had recently given him a sharp taste, than on any strong resentment of Charles, but he was mistaken; the Bill was defeated, but the king expressed his wrath to Southampton, the Treasurer, and Clarendon, in such terms as struck terror into them, and from that time it was evident that neither of them possessed his confidence any longer. Nor did he spare the bishops. He reproached them with bigotry and ingratitude. He told them that it was owing to his Declaration of Breda that they owed their restoration, and that now they were driving him to break that promise. The intolerance of the bishops in his father's time had caused, he said, the destruction of the hierarchy, and done much to ruin the monarchy itself; and no sooner were they reinstated, than they were pursuing the same blind and fatal course. From that day, too, his manner to them changed, and his courtiers, quick to perceive the change, imitated it, and, glad to excuse their profligacy, indulged in ridicule of their persons, and mockery of their sermons.

But though Charles had boldly spoken much severe truth in the moment of his resentment, all parties calculated too well on the evanescence of anything in him like a wise or virtuous perseverance, and they pursued their object with an obstinacy which compelled the ease-loving monarch to give way. The Commons passed a Bill to check the growth of Popery, and another that of Nonconformity, but though strongly supported in the Lords, they were defeated by the Presbyterian and Catholic members. They then changed their tack, and presented an address to the king, praying him to put in force all the penal laws against the Catholics and sectaries of every description. Having expressed their wishes, the Commons granted the king four subsidies, and he was about to prorogue Parliament, when a strange incident delayed this event for some time. The king, during the discussion on the Supplies, made a statement which seemed to commit the Earl of Bristol with Parliament. The earl and the king becoming warm in mutual explanation before Lord Arlington, Charles used strong language, and Bristol, losing his temper, reproached the king with his amours, his indolence, and the sacrifice of his best friends to the malice of Clarendon, and vowed that unless justice was done him within twenty-four hours, he would do a thing that would astonish both the king and the Chancellor. This thing was to impeach Clarendon of high treason on the ground that he had, both publicly and privately, endeavoured to fix the character of a papist on the king, and had represented that he alone protected the Protestant establishment. Bristol's hasty temper had betrayed him into a charge which he could not substantiate. He was foiled with disgrace, and he only escaped being arrested by flight.

When the next session of Parliament opened, on the 16th of March, 1664, the Commons returned with unabated animus, and circumstances in the interim had occurred, which, as they favoured both the orthodox scheme and a scheme of the king's, enabled them to carry their point by conceding his. In October, a trifling insurrection broke out at Farnley Wood, in Yorkshire. The people, who were of an obscure class, appeared to be Fifth-Monarchy men and Republicans, who complained of the persecutions for religion, and of the violation of the Triennial Act, and contended that as the present Parliament had sat more than three years, it was illegal, and the people had nothing to do but to elect another of their own accord. This was a mistake; the Act did not limit the duration of Parliament, but the interval between one Parliament and another. The Triennial Act, passed in the 16th of Charles I., when his Parliament wrung a number of those guarantees from him, authorised the sheriffs to issue writs for an election after any Parliament had ceased to sit three years, if the Government did not summon one, and in default of the sheriffs issuing such writs, the people might assemble, and proceed to election without writs.

The Government wanted to be rid of this Act, and therefore the Duke of Buckingham set Gere, sheriff of Yorkshire, and others, to send incendiaries amongst the people to excite them to proceedings of this sort. They were then arrested to the number of about fifty persons in Yorkshire and Westmoreland, on the plea that they were assembled without lawful cause, the Parliament, so far from having ceased to sit three years, being still sitting. The ignorant people had been probably purposely misinformed, and some of them were hanged for it. The end of Charles was gained. He told the Parliament that the Act thus encouraged seditious meetings, and that though he never wished to be without a Parliament for three years, he was resolved never to allow of a Parliament summoned by such means as prescribed by that Act. The Parliament readily repealed the Act, and passed another, still requiring a Parliament at farthest after three years' interval, but sweeping away what Charles called the "wonderful clauses" of the Bill.

In return for this favour, the Commons now solicited his assent to the Conventicle Act, which it was hoped would extinguish Dissent altogether. This was a continuation of those tyrannic Acts which were passed in this infamous reign, some of which, as the Corporation and Test Acts, even survived the revolution of 1688. The Test Act, the Act of Uniformity, by which Bishop Sheldon, the Laud of his time, ejected two thousand ministers, now the Conventicle, and soon after this the Five Mile Act, completed the code of despotism.

Here was the king, who, in the last session of Parliament, published his declaration for the indulgence of tender consciences, now wheeling round like a weathercock, and consenting to the Conventicle Act. And what was this Act? It forbade more than five persons to meet together for worship, except that worship was according to the Common Prayer Book. All magistrates were empowered to levy ten pounds on the ministers, five pounds on every hearer, and twenty pounds on the house where this conventicle, as it was called, was held. This fine, or three months' imprisonment, was the punishment for the first offence; ten pounds a hearer or six months' imprisonment for the second offence; one hundred pounds a hearer or seven years' transportation for the third; and death without benefit of clergy in case of return or escape. This diabolical Act Clarendon applauded, and said that if rigorously executed, it would have produced entire Conformity. What was Clarendon's idea of rigour?

Sheldon, the Bishop of London, let loose all the myrmidons of the law on the devoted country. The houses of Nonconformists were invaded by informers, constables, and the vilest and lowest rabble of their assailants. They broke open the houses of all Nonconformists, in search of offenders, but still more in search of plunder; they drove them from their meetings with soldiery, and thrust them into prisons--and such prisons! No language can describe the horrors and vileness of the pestiferous prisons of those days. The two thousand Nonconformist ministers were starving. "Their wives and children," says Baxter, "had neither house nor home." Such as dared to preach in fields and private houses were dragged to those horrible prisons; those who ventured to offer them food or shelter, if discovered, were treated the same. To prevent the Nonconformist ministers from remaining amongst their old friends, Sheldon, the very next session, procured the Five Mile Act, which restrained all dissenting clergy from coming within five miles of any place where they had exercised their ministry, and from teaching school, under a penalty of forty pounds for each offence.

In Scotland it was not against sects, but against the whole Presbyterian Church that the fury of the persecutors was directed. The Presbyterians had effectually crushed out all Dissenters, and now they themselves felt the iron hand of intolerance. No sooner did the Conventicle Act pass in England than the Royalist Parliament passed one there in almost the same terms, and another Act offering Charles twenty thousand foot and two thousand horse to march into England, to assist in putting down his subjects there, if necessary. Sharp was wonderfully elated by the Conventicle Act, and, establishing what proved to be a High Commission Court, he managed to place his creature, Lord Rothes, at the head of the law department as Chancellor, who brow-beat magistrates and lawyers, and twisted the laws as Sharp thought fit. The prisons were soon crammed as full as those in England, and proceedings of the law courts more resembled those of an inquisition than anything else, till the peasantry rose and endeavoured to defend themselves. The names of Lauderdale and Archbishop Sharp are made immortal for the infliction of infernal tortures; their racks and thumbscrews, their iron boots and gibbets are riveted fast and firm to their names.

And now the king was about to plunge into war to serve the purposes of his paymaster, the ambitious French king. Whatever could weaken or embarrass Holland suited exactly the plans of Louis XIV., and to have England contending with Holland whilst he was contemplating an attack on Spain was extremely convenient. The immediate cause, however, came from the complaints of the merchants, or rather of the Duke of York. The duke was governor of an African company, which imported gold dust from the coast of Guinea, and was deeply engaged in the slave trade, supplying West Indian planters with negroes. The Dutch complained of the encroachments of the English, both there and in the East Indies, and the English replied by similar complaints. The duke advocated hostilities against the Dutch, but found Charles unwilling to be diverted from his pleasures by the anxieties of war. He was worked on, however, by appeals to his resentment against the Louvestein faction in Holland, which had treated him with great indignity whilst he was an exile, and though the differences might have been readily settled by a little honest negotiation, the duke was desirous of a plea for further aggression on the Dutch, and his plans were fostered by Downing, the ambassador at the Hague, a most unprincipled man, who under Cromwell had held the same post, and traded most profitably on the fears of the Dutch.

In the spring of 1664, James's admiral, Sir Robert Holmes, arrived on the coast of Africa with a few small ships of war, to recover the castle of Cape Coast, which the Dutch had claimed and seized. He exceeded his commission as an officer of the African Company, and not only reduced the castle of Cape Coast, but the forts of Goree, and then sailed away to America, and cast anchor at the settlement of New Amsterdam, lately taken from the Dutch by Sir Richard Nicholas, and named it after his patron, New York. The Dutch ambassador now presented the strongest remonstrances, and the king, excusing himself on the plea that Holmes had gone out on a private commission, assured the ambassador that he would have him recalled and put upon his trial. Holmes, indeed, was recalled, and sent to the Tower, but was soon after liberated. The Dutch were not disposed to sit down under this indignity, and De Ruyter attacked the English settlements on the coast of Guinea, committed great depredations, and then, sailing to the West Indies, captured above twenty sail of English merchantmen. There was now a vehement cry for war, and Charles appealed to Parliament, which granted the unprecedented supply of two millions and a half. The City of London also presented several large sums of money, for which they received the thanks of Parliament. A very remarkable circumstance attended the Act granting this Parliamentary supply. The ancient mode of subsidies was abandoned, and a mode of assessment, copied from the plan of the Commonwealth, was adopted; the first time that the Royalists practically paid homage to the Republican superiority of finance. The tax was to be raised by quarterly assessments. Moreover, the clergy, instead of voting their money separately in Convocation, were called upon to pay their taxes with the laity, and thus ended the separate jurisdiction of Convocation: it became a mere form.

The Duke of York, who, with all his faults, was by no means destitute of courage, took the command of the fleet as Lord Admiral against the Dutch, and showed much ability in his command. He divided the fleet into three squadrons, one of which he commanded himself, the second he gave to Prince Rupert, who here again appeared in English affairs, and the third to the Earl of Sandwich, formerly Admiral Montagu. The whole fleet consisted of ninety-eight sail of the line and four fire-ships. On the 4th of June, 1665, he came to an engagement near Lowestoft with the Dutch under Admiral Opdam, a gallant and experienced seaman, followed by a hundred and thirteen men-of-war, manned by the most spirited and distinguished youth of Holland. The battle was terrible, but James, discharging all his guns into Opdam's vessel, caused it to blow up, and thus destroyed the admiral with five hundred men. The Dutch having lost their chief commander, drew off towards the Texel, but Van Tromp collected the scattered vessels, and there was a prospect of a second fight; but the duke went to bed, and Lord Brounker, a gentleman of the bedchamber, went on deck and ordered Penn to slacken sail. The consequence was that the Dutch were allowed to retire in safety, and much of the honour won by the duke was lost again by this circumstance. It was said that the duke knew nothing of it, and that Brounker had given the order of his own accord; but the prevailing opinion was that the duke thought he had got honour enough, and the Earl of Montague, who was serving as a volunteer, said the duke had been much impressed by seeing, in the heat of the action, the Earl of Falmouth, Lord Muskerry, and Boyle, son of the Earl of Burlington, killed by his side. Penn, moreover, was said to have told the duke that if they engaged again, the fight would be more bloody than ever, for the Dutch would grow desperate with revenge. The fleet, therefore, made homeward, and, says Pepys, the duke and his officers returned from sea "all fat and ruddy with being in the sun." It was given out as a great victory, and the duke received one hundred and twenty thousand pounds for his services; but the public was far from satisfied, and Lord Sandwich far less so. He complained to Pepys that he had borne the brunt of the battle, and that all the honour was given to the duke in the printed account. That there was much in these statements was sanctioned by the fact that the duke was removed from the fleet, and the command restored to the brave but unprincipled Sandwich. In the battle the Dutch are stated to have lost seven thousand men, and eighteen sail burnt, sunk, or taken. The English are reported to have lost only one ship, and six hundred men in killed and wounded. Amongst the slain were the Earls of Marlborough and Portland, and Admirals Lawson and Sampson.

Sandwich was scarcely in independent command when he heard of a most magnificent chance. Two Dutch merchant fleets, one from the East Indies and one from the Levant, to avoid the English fleet at the Texel, united and sailed round the north of Ireland and Scotland, and took shelter in the neutral harbour of Bergen, in Norway. They were jointly valued at twenty-five millions of livres. Sandwich sailed thither after them, and the King of Denmark, the sovereign of Norway, though at peace with the Dutch, was tempted, by the hope of sharing the booty, to let Sandwich attack them in port. Sandwich, however, was not satisfied to give the king half, as demanded, and in spite of Alefeldt, the governor, who begged him to wait till the terms were finally settled with the monarch, he ordered Captain Tyddiman to dash in and cut the ships out and all the Dutch vessels. But Tyddiman found himself between two fires; the Dutch defended themselves resolutely and the Danes, resenting this lawless proceeding, fired on them from the fort and batteries. Five of Sandwich's commanders were killed, one ship was sunk, much damage was done to the fleet, and it was glad to escape out of the harbour. Sandwich, however, was lucky enough soon after to secure eight men-of-war and about thirty other vessels, including two of the richest Indiamen, which were dispersed by a storm whilst under the convoy of De Witt. The unscrupulous Sandwich made free to appropriate two thousand pounds' worth of the booty, and allowed his officers to do the same, which occasioned his dismissal from the fleet; but to soften his disgrace, he was sent as ambassador to Spain. Parliament, to carry on the war, granted the king a fresh supply of one million two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, and, at the same time, voted the one hundred and twenty thousand pounds to the duke.

Whilst these events had been transpiring the plague had been raging in the City of London, and had thence spread itself to various parts of the country. It raged with a fury almost unexampled in any age or nation. It had shown itself during the previous winter in a few individual cases, and as spring advanced, it terribly extended its devastations. In May it burst forth with frightful violence in St. Giles's, and, spreading over the adjoining parishes, soon threatened both Whitehall and the City. The nobility fled to the country, the Court retreated to Salisbury, and left Monk to represent the Government in his own person, and he boldly maintained his ground through the whole deadly time. As the hot weather advanced the mortality became terrible, and the people fled in crowds into the country, till the Lord Mayor refused to grant fresh bills of health, and the people of the neighbouring towns and villages declined to receive any one from London into them. Those who escaped out of the metropolis had to camp in the fields, whichever way they turned the inhabitants being in arms to drive them away. In June the City authorities put in force an Act of James I. They divided the City into districts, and allotted to each a staff of examiners, searchers, nurses, and watchmen. As soon as the plague was ascertained to be in a house, they made a red cross upon the door a foot in length, and wrote over, "Lord, have mercy upon us!" No one was allowed to issue out of the houses bearing that fatal sign for a month, if they could keep them in. Persons escaping out of these infected houses, and mingling with others, were liable to suffer death as felons. But to remain in these houses was to perish of plague or famine, and numbers broke wildly from them at all hazards, thus carrying the infection on all sides. Many in their frenzy jumped naked from the windows, rushed wildly through the streets, and plunged into the river.

It was calculated that forty thousand work-people and servants were left destitute by the flight of their employers, and subscriptions were made to prevent them from starving, for they were not allowed to leave the City. The king gave one thousand pounds a week, the City, six hundred pounds, the Queen Dowager, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and many noblemen contributed liberally. But the aspect of the place was terrible. The dead carts were going to and fro continually to collect the bodies put out into the streets, announced by the tinkling of a bell, and at night by the glare of links. The corpses were cast into pits, and covered up as fast as possible. The most populous and lately busy streets were grass-grown; the people who walked through them kept along the middle, except they were meeting others, and then they got as far from each other as possible. Amid all this horror, the sight of ghastly death, and the ravings of delirium, whilst some brave souls devoted themselves to the assistance of the suffering and dying, crowds of others rushed to taverns, theatres, and places of debauch, and a strange maniacal mirth startled the silence of the night, and added horror to the work of death. The weekly numbers who perished rose from one thousand to eight thousand. The wildest rumours of apparitions and strange omens were afloat. The ghosts of the dead were said to be seen walking round the pits where their bodies lay; a flaming sword was said to stretch across the heavens from Westminster to above the Tower, and men, raised by the awful excitement of the scene into an abnormal state, went about, as was done at the destruction of Jerusalem, announcing the judgments of God. One man cried as he passed, "Yet forty days, and London shall be destroyed;" another stalked nakedly along, bearing on his head a chafing-dish of burning coal, and declaring that the Almighty would purge them with fire. Another came suddenly from side streets and alleys in the darkness of the night, or in open day, uttering in a deep and fearful tone, the unvarying exclamation, "Oh, the great and dreadful God!" The confounded people declared that it was a judgment of God on the nation for its sins, and especially the sins of the King and Court, and the dreadful persecution of the religious by the Government and clergy. The Presbyterian ejected preachers frequently mounted into the pulpits now deserted by their usual occupants, and preached with a solemn eloquence to audiences who listened to them from amid the shadows of death, and thus gave great offence to the incumbents, who had abandoned their own charges. This was made one plea, after the danger was over, for passing the Five Mile Act in October of this year (1665). Many other metropolitan clergy stood by their flocks, and displayed the noblest characters during the pestilence. This terrible plague swept off upwards of one hundred thousand people during the year; and though it ceased with the winter, it raged the following summer in Colchester, Norwich, Cambridge, Salisbury, and even in the Peak of Derbyshire.

Whilst the plague had been raging, numbers of the Republicans, Algernon Sidney among the rest, had gone over to Holland and taken service in its army, urging the States to invade England, and restore the Commonwealth, and a conspiracy was detected in London itself for seizing the Tower and burning the City. Rathbone, Tucker, and six others, were seized and hanged, but Colonel Danvers, their leader, escaped. Parliament attainted a number of the conspirators by name, and also every British subject who should remain in the Dutch service after a fixed day. But neither plague nor insurrection had any effect in checking the wild licence and riot of the Court. The same scenes of drinking, gambling, and debauchery went on faster than ever after the Court removed from Salisbury to Oxford. The king was in pursuit of a new flame, Miss Stewart, one of the queen's maids of honour, and the Duke of York was as violently in love with her. Charles could not eat his breakfast till he visited both her and Castlemaine; and even Clarendon complains that "it was a time when all licence in discourse and in actions was spread over the kingdom, to the heart-breaking of many good men, who had terrible apprehensions of the consequences of it."