History of the English People Volume Vi Part 9

[Sidenote: William and the French Invasion.]

Their trust was soon rewarded. The plot of the two courts hung for its success on the chances of a rapid surprise, and with the approach of winter, a season in which military operations were then suspended, all chance of a surprise was over. William rapidly turned the respite to good account. Young as he was, he displayed from the first the cool courage and dogged tenacity of his race. "Do you not see your country is lost?" asked the Duke of Buckingham when he was sent to negotiate at the Hague. "There is a sure way never to see it lost," replied William, "and that is to die in the last ditch." With the spring of 1673 the tide began to turn. Holland was saved, and province after province won back from the arms of France by William's dauntless resolve. Like his great ancestor, William the Silent, he was a luckless commander, and no general had to bear more frequent defeats. But he profited by defeat as other men profit by victory. His bravery indeed was of that n.o.bler cast which rises to its height in moments of ruin and dismay. The coolness with which, boy-general as he was, he rallied his broken squadrons amidst the rout of Seneff and wrested from Conde at the last the fruits of his victory moved his veteran opponent to a generous admiration. It was at such moments indeed that the real temper of the man broke through the veil of his usual reserve. A strange light flashed from his eyes as soon as he was under fire; and in the terror and confusion of defeat his cold and repulsive manner was thrown aside for an ease and gaiety which charmed every soldier around him.

[Sidenote: Parliament and the War.]

The gallant struggle of the prince was hardly needed to win the sympathies of Englishmen to the cause of the Dutch. In the exultation of the first moment of triumph Charles had lavished honours on the leaders of both the parties in his cabinet. Clifford became Lord Treasurer, Ashley was made Chancellor and raised to the earldom of Shaftesbury. But the dream of triumph soon pa.s.sed away. The Duke of York had owned at the outset of the war that recourse could only be had to Parliament when success had put Charles in a position "to obtain by force what he could not get by pleasanter ways." But the delay of winter exhausted the supplies which had been procured so unscrupulously, while the closing of the Treasury had shaken credit and rendered it impossible to raise a loan. It was necessary therefore in 1673, though the success Charles had counted on was still delayed, to appeal to the Commons. But the Commons met in a mood of angry distrust. The war, unpopular as it was, they left alone. What overpowered all other feelings was a vague sense, which we know now to have been justified by the facts, that liberty and religion were being unscrupulously betrayed. There was a suspicion that the whole armed force of the nation was in Catholic hands. The Duke of York was suspected of being in heart a Catholic, and he was in command of the fleet. Catholics had been placed as officers in the land force which was being raised for a descent upon Holland. Lady Castlemaine, the king's mistress, paraded her change of faith; and doubts were fast gathering over the Protestantism of the king. There was a general dread that a plot was on foot for the establishment of Catholicism and despotism, and that the war and the Indulgence were parts of the plot.

[Sidenote: The Test Act.]

The change of temper in the Commons was marked by the appearance of what was from that time called the Country party with Lord Russell, Lord Cavendish, and Sir William Coventry at its head, a party which sympathized with the desire of the Nonconformists for religious toleration, but looked on it as its first duty to guard against the political and religious designs of the Court. The House listened unmoved to the fiery address of the new Lord Chancellor in favour of the war, an address which ended with the phrase, "Delenda est Carthago," so often quoted against him afterwards, as they listened unmoved to the king's declaration of his steady adherence to the Indulgence. "I shall take it very ill," said Charles, with unusual haughtiness, "to receive contradiction in what I have done; and, I will deal plainly with you, I am resolved to stick to my declaration." As to the Declaration of Indulgence, however, all parties in the House were at one. The Commons resolved "that penal statutes in matters ecclesiastical cannot be suspended but by consent of Parliament," and refused supplies till the Declaration was recalled. The king yielded after long hesitation, for the grant of supplies was still before the House and France counselled compliance. But the Declaration was no sooner recalled than the Parliament pa.s.sed from considerations of the past to provisions for the future. A Test Act was pa.s.sed through both Houses without opposition, which required that every one in the civil and military employment of the State should take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, subscribe a declaration against transubstantiation, and receive the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. It was known that the dissidents were prepared to waive all objection either to oath or sacrament, and the result of the Bill therefore was to bring Protestants, if not to union, yet a step nearer to one another.

Catholics, on the other hand, were wholly excluded from all share in the government of the State. The Act was fatal to the king's schemes, and Clifford at once counselled resistance while Buckingham talked flightily about bringing the army to London. But the grant of a subsidy was still held in suspense till the Test was accepted: and Arlington, who saw that all hope of carrying the "great plan" through was at an end and looked to the Test as a means of freeing himself from Clifford's rivalry in the cabinet, pressed Charles to yield. A dissolution in fact was the king's only resource, but in the temper of the nation a new Parliament would have been yet more violent than the present one.

Charles therefore sullenly gave his a.s.sent to the Bill.

[Sidenote: Shaftesbury.]

Few measures have ever brought about more startling results than the Test Act. It was no sooner pa.s.sed than the Duke of York owned himself a Catholic and resigned his office as Lord High Admiral. Throngs of excited people gathered round the Lord Treasurer's house at the news that Clifford too had owned to being a Catholic and had laid down his staff of office. Their resignation was followed by that of hundreds of others in the army and the civil service of the Crown. On public opinion the effect of these discoveries was wonderful. "I dare not write all the strange talk of the town," says Evelyn. The resignations were held to have proved the existence of the dangers which the Test had been framed to meet. From this moment all trust in Charles was at an end. "The king," Shaftesbury said bitterly, "who if he had been so happy as to have been born a private gentleman had certainly pa.s.sed for a man of good parts, excellent breeding, and well natured, hath now, being a Prince, brought his affairs to that pa.s.s that there is not a person in the world, man or woman, that dares rely upon him or put any confidence in his word or friendship." The one man in England indeed on whom the discovery of the king's perfidy fell with the most crushing effect was Shaftesbury himself. Ashley Cooper had piqued himself on a penetration which read the characters of men around him and on a political instinct which discerned every coming change. He had bought, as he believed, the Declaration of Indulgence, the release of the imprisoned Nonconformists, and freedom of worship for all dissidents, at the price of a consent to the second attack on Holland; and he was looked on by the public at large as the minister most responsible both for the measures he advised and the measures he had nothing to do with. But while facing the gathering storm of unpopularity, Ashley learnt in a moment of drunken confidence the secret of the king's religion. He owned to a friend "his trouble at the black cloud which was gathering over England"; but troubled as he was he still believed himself strong enough to use Charles for his own purposes. His acceptance of the Chancellorship and of the earldom of Shaftesbury, as well as his violent defence of the war on opening the Parliament, identified him yet more with the royal policy. It was after the opening of the Parliament, if we credit the statement of the French Amba.s.sador, a statement which squares with the sudden change in his course, that he learnt from Arlington, who desired to secure his help in driving Clifford from the royal councils, the secret of the Treaty of Dover.

[Sidenote: Shaftesbury's change of Policy.]

Whether this was so, or whether suspicion as in the people at large deepened into certainty, Shaftesbury saw he had been duped. To the bitterness of such a discovery was added the bitterness of having aided in schemes which he abhorred. His change of policy was rapid and complete. He pressed in the royal council for the withdrawal of the Declaration of Indulgence. In Parliament he supported the Test Act with extraordinary vehemence. But he was far from any thought of resigning his post. He clung to it in fact more tenaciously than ever, for the displacement of James and Clifford by the test left him, as he thought, dominant in the royal council, and gave him hopes of revenging the deceit which had been practised on him by forcing his policy on the king. He was resolved to end the war. He had dreams of meeting the danger of a Catholic successor by a dissolution of the king's marriage with Catharine and by a fresh match with a Protestant princess. For the moment indeed Charles was helpless. He found himself, as he had told Lewis long before, alone in his realm. The Test Act had been pa.s.sed unanimously by both Houses. Even the Nonconformists deserted him and preferred persecution to the support of his plans. The dismissal of the Catholic officers made the employment of force, if he ever contemplated it, impossible, while the ill success of the Dutch war robbed him of all hope of aid from France. The firmness of the Prince of Orange had roused the stubborn energy of his countrymen; the French conquests on land were slowly won back; and at sea the fleet of the allies was still held in check by the fine seamanship of De Ruyter. Nor was William less successful in diplomacy than in war. The House of Austria was at last stirred to action by the danger which threatened Europe; and its union with the United Provinces laid the foundation of the Grand Alliance.

[Sidenote: Shaftesbury's dismissal.]

Charles indeed was still firm to continue the war. He had gathered an army on the coast for a descent upon Holland, and he again sent his fleet to sea under Prince Rupert to clear the way for its landing. But the gallantry and seamanship of Tromp forced Rupert to withdraw after an indecisive engagement, and the descent on the Dutch coast had become impossible when the Parliament again met in October. The House was resolved upon peace, and Shaftesbury was as determined to end the war as the House itself. It was for this purpose that he threw himself into hearty alliance with the Country party in the Commons and welcomed the Duke of Ormond and Prince Rupert, who were looked upon as "great Parliament men," back to the royal council. It was to Shaftesbury's influence that Charles attributed the dislike which the Commons displayed to the war and their refusal of a grant of supplies for it until fresh religious securities were devised. It was at his instigation that an address was presented by both Houses at the end of 1673 against the plan of marrying James to a Catholic princess, Mary of Modena, a plan which as James was still without a male heir promised to secure the succession, should a son be the result of the marriage, in a Catholic line. But Charles was not yet inclined to play the part of a mere puppet in other men's hands, and the projects of Shaftesbury were suddenly interrupted by an unexpected act of vigour on the part of the king. The Houses were prorogued in November, and the Chancellor was ordered to deliver up the Seals.

[Sidenote: The Public Panic.]

"It is only laying down my gown and buckling on my sword," Shaftesbury is said to have replied to the royal bidding; and though the words were innocent enough, for the sword was part of the usual dress of a gentleman which he must necessarily resume when he laid aside the gown of the Chancellor, they were taken as conveying a covert threat. He was still determined to force on the king a peace with the States. But he looked forward to the dangers of the future with even greater anxiety than to those of the present. The Duke of York, the successor to the throne, had owned himself a Catholic; and almost every one agreed that securities for the national religion would be necessary in the case of his accession. But Shaftesbury saw, and it is his especial merit that he did see, that with a king like James, convinced of his Divine Right and bigoted in his religious fervour, securities were valueless. From the first he determined to force on Charles his brother's exclusion from the throne, and his resolve was justified by the Revolution, which finally did the work he proposed to do. Unhappily he was equally determined to fight Charles with weapons as vile as his own. The result of Clifford's resignation, of James's acknowledgement of his conversion, had been to destroy all belief in the honesty of public men. A panic of distrust had begun. The fatal truth was whispered that Charles himself was a Catholic. In spite of the Test Act it was suspected that men Catholics in heart still held high office in the State, and we know that in Arlington's case the suspicion was just. Shaftesbury seized on this public alarm, stirred above all by a sense of inability to meet the secret dangers which day after day was disclosing, as the means of carrying out his plans. He began fanning the panic by tales of a Papist rising in London and of a coming Irish revolt with a French army to back it. He retired to his house in the City to find security against a conspiracy which had been formed, he said, to cut his throat. Meanwhile he rapidly organized the Country party in the Parliament and placed himself openly at its head. An address for the removal of ministers "popishly affected or otherwise obnoxious or dangerous" was presented on the rea.s.sembling of the Houses in 1674. The Lower House called on the king to dismiss Lauderdale, Buckingham, and Arlington, and to disband the troops he had raised since 1664. A bill was brought in to prevent all Catholics from approaching the Court, in other words for removing James from the king's Councils. A far more important bill was that of the Protestant Securities which was pressed by Shaftesbury, Halifax, and Carlisle, the leaders of the new Opposition in the House of Lords, a bill which enacted that any prince of the blood should forfeit his right to the Crown on his marriage with a Catholic.

[Sidenote: Peace with Holland.]

The bill, which was the first sketch of the later Exclusion Bill, failed to pa.s.s, but its failure left the Houses excited and alarmed.

Shaftesbury intrigued busily in the City, corresponded with William of Orange, and pressed for a war with France which Charles could only avert by an appeal to Lewis, a subsidy from whom enabled him to prorogue the Parliament. But Charles saw that the time had come to give way. Spain was now joining Holland, and a war with Spain would have deprived English merchants of their most lucrative branch of commerce. The refusal of supplies by the Commons hastened the king's resolve. "Things have turned out ill," he said to Temple with a burst of unusual petulance, "but had I been well served I might have made a good business of it." His concessions however were as usual complete. He dismissed Buckingham and Arlington from office. He made peace with the Dutch. But Charles was never more formidable than in the moment of defeat, and he had already determined on a new policy by which the efforts of Shaftesbury and the Country party might be held at bay. Ever since the opening of his reign he had clung to a system of balance, had pitted Churchman against Nonconformist and Ashley against Clarendon, partly to preserve his own independence and partly with a view of winning some advantage to the Catholics from the political strife. The temper of the Commons had enabled Clarendon to baffle the king's attempts; and on his fall Charles felt strong enough to abandon the attempt to preserve a political balance and had sought to carry out his designs with the single support of the Nonconformists. But the new policy had broken down like the old. The Nonconformists refused to betray the cause of Protestantism, and Shaftesbury, their leader, was pressing on measures which would rob Catholicism of the hopes it had gained from the conversion of James. In straits like these Charles resolved to win back the Commons by boldly adopting the policy on which the House was set.

[Sidenote: Danby.]

The majority of its members were still a ma.s.s of Cavalier Churchmen, who regarded Sir Thomas...o...b..rne, a dependant of Arlington's, as their representative in the royal councils. The king had already created Osborne Earl of Danby and raised him to the post of Lord Treasurer in Clifford's room. In 1674 he frankly adopted the policy of Danby and of his party in the Parliament. The policy of Danby was in the main that of Clarendon. He had all Clarendon's love of the Church, his equal hatred of Popery and Dissent, his high notions of the prerogative tempered by a faith in Parliament and the law. His policy rested like Clarendon's on a union between the king and the two Houses. He was a staunch Protestant, and his English pride revolted against any schemes which involved dependence on France. But he was a staunch Royalist. He wished for a French war, but he would not force the king to fight France against his will. His terror of Popery failed to win him over to any plans for a change in the succession. The first efforts indeed of the king and his minister were directed to strengthen James's position by measures which would allay the popular panic. Mary, the Duke's eldest child and after him the presumptive heir to the Crown, was confirmed by the royal order as a Protestant. It was through Mary indeed that Charles aimed at securing the Prince of Orange. The popularity of William throughout the Protestant world was great; and in England, as the terror of a Popish king increased, men remembered that were James and his house excluded from the throne William as the king's nephew, the son of his sister Mary and the grandson of Charles the First, stood next in succession to the Crown. The Prince was drawn by his desire to detach England from the French alliance into close connexion with Shaftesbury and the leaders of the Country party, and already pledges from this quarter had reached him that he should be declared heir to the throne. It was to meet this danger that Charles resolved to offer William the hand of the Duke's daughter, Mary. Such a marriage secured James against the one formidable rival to his claims, while it opened to William a far safer chance of mounting the throne at his father-in-law's death in right of his wife.

The prospect too of such a Protestant succession might well allay much of the panic which was spreading through the country as men looked forward to the accession of a Catholic king.

[Sidenote: Danby and the Commons.]

The secret negotiations for this marriage which began at the close of 1674 were accompanied by conferences between Danby and the bishops which restored the union between the Church and the Crown. The first fruits of this agreement were seen in the rigorous enforcement of the law against conventicles and the exclusion of all Catholics from Court; while the Parliament which rea.s.sembled in 1675 was a.s.sured that the Test Act should be rigorously enforced. The change in the royal policy came not a moment too soon. As it was the aid of the Cavalier party which rallied round Danby hardly saved the king from the humiliation of being forced to recall the troops he still maintained in the French service. To gain a majority on this point Danby was forced to avail himself of a resource which from this time played for nearly a hundred years an important part in English politics. Every hour showed more clearly how fatal to its healthy working was the abandonment of the reforms which the Long Parliament and Cromwell had introduced into the composition of the House of Commons. The influence of that House was growing greater and greater on public affairs. In spite of the king's vigorous resistance it was reviewing expenditure, dictating its own policy in Church and State, checking the royal action even in foreign affairs, denouncing ministers and driving them from office, meddling now even with the succession to the Crown. It did this as representing the people, and yet the people could hardly be said to be represented. The counties alone really returned their own members, and in the counties the franchise was limited to freeholders. In all but the larger towns the nomination of members lay in the hands of close corporations. A large number of so-called boroughs had ceased to have any real existence at all. Their representatives were simply nominees of the Crown or of neighbouring landowners.

[Sidenote: Policy of corruption and persecution.]

On great questions so imperfect a composition of the representative body mattered indeed little, for whatever were their origin the members shared in the general national feeling and expressed fairly the national sentiment. But in the common business of Parliament and in questions of detail it told fatally on the temper of the House. The members were conscious of their power, but they were checked by little sense of responsibility for its exercise. They were open therefore to the meanest and most selfish influences. Charles had done much by "closeting" them.

Danby, bolder and less ingenious, trusted to coa.r.s.er means. With him began the system of direct bribery which was to culminate in the Parliamentary corruption of the Pelhams. He was more successful in winning back the majority of the Commons from their alliance with the Country party by reviving the old spirit of religious persecution. With the view of breaking up the growing union between the Churchmen and the Nonconformists as well as of driving from Parliament the Presbyterian members who formed the strength of the Country party, and whose numbers increased as time brought fresh elections, he proposed that the test which had been imposed by Clarendon on munic.i.p.al officers should be extended to all functionaries of the State, that every member of either House, every magistrate and public officer, should swear never to take arms against the king or to "endeavour any alteration of the Protestant religion now established by law in the Church of England, or any alteration in the Government in Church and State as it is by law established." The Bill was forced through the Lords by the bishops and the Cavalier party, and its pa.s.sage through the Commons was only averted by a quarrel on privilege between the two Houses which Shaftesbury dexterously fanned into flame.

[Sidenote: Charles turns to France.]

On the other hand the Country party remained strong enough to hamper their grant of supplies with conditions which rendered it unacceptable to the king. Eager as they were for the war with France which Danby promised, the Commons could not trust the king; and Danby was soon to discover how wise their distrust had been. For the Houses were no sooner prorogued in November 1675 than Charles revealed to him the negotiations he had been all the while carrying on with Lewis. To France, hard pressed as she was by the allies, the entry of England into the war would have been ruinous; and Lewis was eager to avert this danger by promising Charles a subsidy should the Parliament strive to force on him a war policy by refusing or limiting supplies. Charles, who still looked to France for aid in his plans and who believed war would deliver him helplessly into the power of the Parliament, was as ready to accept the money as Lewis to give it. At this juncture therefore he called on Danby to sign a treaty by which, on consideration of a yearly pension guaranteed on the part of France, the two sovereigns bound themselves to enter into no engagements with other powers, and to lend each other aid in case of rebellion in their dominions. Such a treaty not only bound England to dependence on France, but freed the king from all Parliamentary control. But his minister pleaded in vain for delay and for the advice of the Council. Charles answered his entreaties by signing the treaty with his own hand.

[Sidenote: Danby's measures.]

Danby found himself duped by the king as Shaftesbury had found himself duped; but his bold temper was only spurred to fresh plans for rescuing the king from his bondage to Lewis. To do this the first step was fully to reconcile the king and the Parliament, which met again in February 1677 after a prorogation of fifteen months. The Country party stood in the way of such a reconciliation, but Danby resolved to break its strength by measures of unscrupulous vigour for which a blunder of Shaftesbury's gave an opportunity. Shaftesbury despaired of bringing the House of Commons, elected as it had been fifteen years before in a moment of religious and political reaction, to any steady opposition to the Crown. He had already moved an address for its dissolution; and he now urged that as a statute of Edward the Third ordained that Parliaments should be held "once a year or oftener if need be" the Parliament by the recent prorogation of a year and a half had ceased legally to exist. The Triennial Act deprived such an argument of any force, and its only effect was to place the Country party in an injudicious position of general hostility to the existing Parliament.

But Danby represented it as a contempt of the House, and the Lords at his bidding committed its supporters, Shaftesbury, Buckingham, Salisbury, and Wharton, to the Tower. While the Opposition cowered under the blow Danby pushed on a measure which was designed to win back alarmed Churchmen to confidence in the Crown. The terror of a Catholic successor grew steadily throughout the country, and it was to meet this terror that Danby devised his Bill for the security of the Church. By this Bill it was provided that on the succession of any king who was not a member of the Established Church the appointment of bishops should be vested in the existing body of prelates, and that the king's children should be placed in the guardianship of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

[Sidenote: The cry for War.]

The bill however failed in the Commons; and a grant of supply unchecked by the appropriation of the money to special services, a limitation which Charles steadily opposed, was only obtained by Danby's profuse bribery. The progress of the war abroad indeed was rousing panic in England faster than Danby could allay it. New successes of the French arms in Flanders and a defeat of the Prince of Orange at Ca.s.sel stirred the whole country to a cry for war. The two Houses united in an address to the Crown which prayed that England might enter into the Great Alliance that William had built up, but Charles parried the blow by demanding a supply before the war was declared and by a new prorogation of the House on a new refusal. Fresh and larger subsidies from France enabled him to continue this prorogation for seven months. But the silence of the Parliament did little to silence the country; and Danby took advantage of the popular cry for war to press an energetic course of action on the king. In its will to check French aggression the Cavalier party was as earnest as the Puritan, and Danby aimed at redeeming his failure at home by uniting the Parliament through a vigorous policy abroad.

[Sidenote: Marriage of William and Mary.]

As usual Charles appeared to give way. He was himself for the moment uneasy at the appearance of the French on the Flemish coast, and he owned that "he could never live at ease with his subjects" if Flanders were abandoned. He allowed Danby therefore to press on both parties the necessity for mutual concessions, and to define the new att.i.tude of England by reviving the project for a match between Mary and William of Orange. William's distrust of Arlington, by whom the proposal of it had been made to him, had led the Prince at first to set aside the scheme.

But he had never lost sight of it, and the counsels of Sir William Temple had brought him in 1677 to make overtures for its realization.

Charles and Danby had still the same reasons for desiring it, and the marriage took place on William's visit to England in September. As the king was childless and James had no son Mary was presumptive heiress of the Crown. The marriage therefore promised a close political union in the future with Holland, and a corresponding opposition to the ambition of France. With the country it was popular as a Protestant match and as ensuring a Protestant successor to James. But Lewis was bitterly angered; he rejected the English propositions of peace and again sent his army into the field. Danby was ready to accept the challenge. The withdrawal of the English amba.s.sador from Paris was followed in 1678 by an a.s.sembly of the Parliament; a warlike speech from the throne was answered by a warlike address from the House, large supplies were voted and an army raised.

[Sidenote: Peace of Nimeguen.]

But the actual declaration of war still failed to appear; indeed Charles was in heart as disinclined for war as ever. While Danby threatened France the king was busy turning the threat to his own profit, and gaining time by prorogations for a series of base negotiations. At one stage he demanded from Lewis a fresh pension for the next three years as the price of his good offices with the allies. Danby stooped to write the demand, and Charles added "This letter is written by my order, C.

R." A force of three thousand English soldiers was landed at Ostend; but the allies were already broken by their suspicions of the king's real policy, and Charles soon agreed for a fresh pension to recall the brigade. The bargain was hardly struck when Lewis withdrew the terms of peace he had himself offered and on the faith of which England had ostensibly retired from the scene. Once more Danby offered aid to the allies. But all faith in England had now disappeared. One hostile power after another gave a.s.sent to the new conditions laid down by France, and though Holland, the original cause of the war, was saved, the Peace of Nimeguen in July 1678 made Lewis the arbiter of Europe.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EUROPE From 1648 to 1700 from Spruner.]

[Sidenote: The Catholic hopes.]

Disgraceful as the peace was to England, it left Charles the master of a force of twenty thousand men levied for a war he had refused to declare.

It left him too with nearly a million of French money in his pocket. His course had roused into fresh life the old suspicions of his perfidy and of a secret plot with Lewis for the ruin of English freedom and of English religion. That there was such a plot we know; and from the moment of the Treaty of Dover the hopes of the Catholic party had mounted even faster than the panic of the Protestants. But they had been bitterly disappointed by the king's sudden withdrawal from the prosecution of his schemes after his four years' ineffectual struggle, and roused to wild anger by his seeming return to the policy of Clarendon. Their anger and disappointment were revealed in the letters from English Jesuits which were afterwards to play so fatal a part in begetting a belief in the plot, and in the correspondence of Coleman.

Coleman was secretary of the d.u.c.h.ess of York and a busy intriguer, who had gained sufficient knowledge of the real plans of the king and of his brother to warrant him in begging money from Lewis for the work of saving Catholic interests from Danby's hostility by intrigues in the Parliament. A pa.s.sage from one of his letters gives us a glimpse of the wild dreams which were stirring among the hotter Catholics of the time.

"They had a mighty work on their hands," he wrote, "no less than the conversion of three kingdoms, and by that perhaps the utter subduing of a pestilent heresy which had so long domineered over a great part of the northern world. Success would give the greatest blow to the Protestant religion that it had received since its birth." But while the despair of the Catholic party was unknown their previous att.i.tude of confidence had stirred suspicions in the public mind which mounted into alarm when the Peace of Nimeguen suddenly left Charles master--as it seemed--of the position, and it was of this general panic that one of the vile impostors who are always thrown to the surface at times of great public agitation was ready to take advantage by the invention of a Popish plot.

[Sidenote: t.i.tus Oates.]

t.i.tus Oates, a Baptist minister before the Restoration, a curate and navy chaplain after it, but left penniless by his infamous repute, had sought bread in a conversion to Catholicism, and had been received into Jesuit houses at Valladolid and St. Omer. While he remained there he learnt the fact of a secret meeting of the Jesuits in London which was probably nothing but the usual congregation of the order, and on his expulsion for misconduct this single fact widened in his fertile brain into a plot for the subversion of Protestantism and the death of the king. His story was laid before Charles in the August of 1678 and received, as was natural enough, with the cool incredulity of one who knew what plot there really had been; but Oates made affidavit of its truth before a London magistrate, Sir Edmondsbury G.o.dfrey, and at last managed to appear before the Council. He declared that he had been trusted with letters which disclosed the Jesuit plans. They were stirring rebellion in Ireland; in Scotland they disguised themselves as Cameronians; in England their aim was to a.s.sa.s.sinate the king and to leave the throne open to the Papist Duke of York. The extracts from Jesuit letters, however, which he produced, though they showed the bitter disappointment and anger of their writers at the king's withdrawal from his schemes, threw no light on the monstrous charges of a plot for his a.s.sa.s.sination. Oates would have been dismissed indeed with contempt but for the seizure of Coleman's correspondence. The letters of this intriguer, believed as he was to be in the confidence of the Duke of York, gave a new colour to the plot. Danby himself, conscious of the truth that there really were designs which Charles dared not avow, was shaken in his rejection of the disclosures and inclined to use them as weapons to check the king in his Catholic policy. But a more dexterous hand had already seized on the growing panic. Lord Shaftesbury, released after a long imprisonment from the Tower, ready since his discovery of the Treaty of Dover to believe in any conspiracy between the Catholics and the king, and hopeless of foiling the king's policy in any other way, threw himself into the plot.

"Let the Treasurer cry as loud as he pleases against Popery," he laughed, "I will cry a note louder." But no cry was needed to heighten the popular frenzy from the moment when Sir Edmondsbury G.o.dfrey, the magistrate before whom Oates had laid his information, was found in a field near London with his sword run through his heart. His death was a.s.sumed to be murder, and the murder to be an attempt of the Jesuits to "stifle the plot." A solemn funeral added to the public agitation; and the two Houses named committees to investigate the charges made by Oates.

[Sidenote: Shaftesbury and the Plot.]

In this investigation Shaftesbury took the lead. Whatever his personal ambition may have been, his public aims in all that followed were wise and far-sighted. He aimed at forcing Charles to dissolve the Parliament and appeal again to the nation. He aimed at driving Danby out of office and at forcing on Charles a ministry which should break his dependence on France and give a const.i.tutional turn to his policy. He saw that no security would really avail to meet the danger of a Catholic sovereign, and he aimed at excluding James from the throne. But in pursuing these aims he threw himself from that moment wholly on the plot. He fanned the popular panic by accepting without question some fresh depositions in which Oates charged five Catholic peers with part in the Jesuit conspiracy. Two of these five, Lords Arundell and Bellasys, had in fact taken part in the preliminary conference which led to the Treaty of Dover. Of this nothing was known, but the five were sent to the Tower and two thousand suspected persons were hurried to prison. A proclamation ordered every Catholic to leave London. The train-bands were called to arms, and patrols paraded through the streets to guard against the Catholic rising which Oates declared to be at hand.

Meanwhile Shaftesbury turned the panic to political account. He fiercely demanded in the House of Lords the exclusion of the Duke of York from the king's Council, and his demand was repeated in an address of the Commons. Charles met the attack with consummate skill.

Antic.i.p.ating the future Exclusion Bill, he declared himself ready to sanction any measures which secured the Protestant religion so long as they left untouched the right of hereditary succession and the just power of the Crown. Shaftesbury retorted by forcing through Parliament at the end of 1678 a bill which excluded Catholics from a seat in either House. The exclusion remained in force for a century and a half; but it had really been aimed against the Duke of York, and Shaftesbury was defeated by a proviso which exempted James from the operation of the bill.

[Sidenote: Lewis and the Plot.]

The plot, which had been supported for four months by the sole evidence of Oates, began to hang fire at the opening of 1679; but a promise of reward brought forward a villain named Bedloe with tales beside which those of Oates seemed tame. The two informers were pressed forward by an infamous rivalry to stranger and stranger revelations. Bedloe swore to the existence of a plot for the landing of a Catholic army and a general ma.s.sacre of the Protestants. Oates capped the revelations of Bedloe by charging the queen herself at the bar of the Lords with knowledge of the plot to murder her husband. Monstrous as such charges were they revived the waning frenzy of the people and of the two Houses. The peers under arrest were ordered to be impeached. A new proclamation enjoined the arrest of every Catholic in the realm. A series of judicial murders began with the trial and execution of Coleman which even now can only be remembered with horror. But the alarm must soon have worn out had it only been supported by perjury. What gave force to the false plot was the existence of a true one. Coleman's letters had won credit for the perjuries of Oates, and a fresh discovery now won credit for the perjuries of Bedloe.

[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Parliament.]

From the moment when the pressure of the Commons and of Danby had forced Charles into a position of seeming antagonism to France Lewis had resolved to bring about the dissolution of the Parliament, the fall of the minister, and the disbanding of the army which Danby still looked on as a weapon against him. The aims of the Country party were the same as those of the French king, and even before the Peace of Nimeguen the French amba.s.sador, Barillon, had succeeded in opening a correspondence on these points with its leaders, with Shaftesbury, Halifax, and Lord Russell. A closer connexion was negotiated in 1678 through the mediation of Algernon Sidney; and money was entrusted to Russell and other prominent members of the Country party by Barillon to be used in the bribery which, disgraceful as it was, was now almost necessary to counteract the bribery of Danby. The confederates soon brought a more effective weapon into play. The English amba.s.sador at Paris, Ralph Montagu, returned home on a quarrel with Danby, obtained a seat in the House of Commons, and in spite of the seizure of his papers laid on the table of the House the despatch which had been forwarded to Lewis, demanding payment for the king's services to France during the late negotiations. The Commons were thunderstruck; for strong as had been the general suspicion the fact of the dependence of England on a foreign power had never before been proved. Danby's name was signed to the despatch, and he was at once impeached on a charge of high treason. But Shaftesbury was more eager to secure the election of a new Parliament than to punish his rival, and Charles was resolved to prevent at any price a trial which could not fail to reveal the disgraceful secret of his foreign policy. Charles was in fact at Shaftesbury's mercy, and the end for which Shaftesbury had been playing was at last secured. In January 1679 the Parliament of 1661, after the longest unbroken life in our Parliamentary annals, was at last dissolved.