The Leading Facts of English History Part 44

The first of these new laws was ent.i.tled the "Corporation Act"

(1661). It ordered all holders of munic.i.p.al offices to renounce the Covenant[2] which had been put in force in 1647, and to take the sacrament of the Church of England. Next, a new Act of Uniformity (1662) (S382) enforced the use of the Episcopal Prayer Book upon all clergymen and congregations. This was followed by the Conventicle Act[3] (1664), which forbade the meeting of any religious a.s.semblies except such as worshiped according to the Established Church of England. Lastly, the Five-Mile Act (1665) forbade all dissenting ministers to teach in schools, or to settle within five miles of an incorporated town.

[2] Covenant: the oath or agreement to maintain the Presbyterian faith and worship. It originated in Scotland (S438).

[3] See, too, on these acts, the Summary of Const.i.tutional History in the Appendix, p. xix, S20.

The second of these stringent retaliatory statutes, the Act of Uniformity, drove two thousand Presbyterian ministers from their parishes in a single day, and reduced them to the direst distress.

The able-bodied among them might indeed pick up a precarious livelihood by hard labor, but the old and the weak soon found their refuge in the grave.

Those who dared to resist these intolerant and inhuman laws were punished with fines, imprisonment, or slavery. The Scottish Parliament abolished Presbyterianism and restored Episcopacy. It vied with the Cavalier or King's party in England in persecution of the Dissenters,[4] and especially of the Covenanters (S438).

[4] The Scottish Parliament granted what was called the "Indulgence"

to Presbyterian ministers who held moderate views. The extreme Covenanters regarded these "indulged Presbyterians" as deserters and traitors who were both weak and wicked. For this reason they hated them worse than they did the Episcopalians. See Burton's "Scotland,"

VII, 457-468.

Claverhouse, who figures as the "Bonny Dundee" of Sir Walter Scott, hunted the Covenanters with bugle and bloodhound, like so many deer; and his men hanged and drowned those who gathered secretly in glens and caves to worship G.o.d.[1] The father of a family would be dragged from his cottage by the soldiers, asked if he would take the test of conformity to the Church of England and the oath of allegiance to King Charles II; if he refused, the officer in command gave the order, "Make ready--take aim--fire!"--and there lay the corpse of the rebel.

[1] See the historical poem of the "Maiden Martyr of Scotland," in the collection of "Heroic Ballads," Ginn and Company.

Among the mult.i.tudes who suffered in England for religion's sake was a poor tinker and day laborer named John Bunyan. He had served against the King in the civil wars, and later had become converted to Puritanism, and turned exhorter and itinerant preacher. He was arrested, while preaching in a farmhouse, and convicted of having "devilishly and perniciously abstained from coming to church."

The judge sentenced him to the Bedford county jail, where he remained a prisoner for twelve years (1660-1672). Later on, he was again arrested (1675) and sent to the town jail on Bedford Bridge. It was, he says, a squalid "Denn."[2] But in his marvelous dream of "A Pilgrimage from this World to the Next," which he wrote while shut up within the narrow limits of that filthy prison house, he forgot the misery of his surroundings. Like Milton in his blindness, loneliness, and poverty, he looked within and found that

"The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of h.e.l.l."[3]

[2] "As I walk'd through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where there was a Denn, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and as I slept I dreamed a dream."--"The Pilgrim's Progress," 1678.

[3] "Paradise Lost," Book I, 253.

473. Seizure of a Dutch Colony in America (1664).

While these things were going on in England, a strange event took place abroad. The Dutch had established a colony on the Hudson River.

It was on territory which the English claimed (S335), but which they had never explored or settled. The Dutch had built a town at the mouth of the Hudson, which they called New Amsterdam. They held the place undisturbed for fifty years, and if "Possession is nine points of the law," they seem to have acquired it. Furthermore, during the period of Cromwell's Protectorate (S455), England had made a treaty with Holland and had recognized the claims of the Dutch in the New World.

Charles had found shelter and generous treatment in Holland when he needed it most. But he now cooly repudiated the treaty, and, though the two nations were at peace, he treacherously sent out a secret expedition to capture the Dutch colony for his brother James, Duke of York, to whom he had granted it.

One day a small English fleet suddenly appeared (1664) in the harbor of the Dutch town, and demanded its immediate and unconditional surrender. The governor was unprepared to make any defense, and the place was given up. Thus, without so much as the firing of a gun, New Amsterdam got the name of New York in honor of the man who had now become its owner. The acquisition of this territory, which had separated the northern English colonies from the southern, gave England complete control of the Atlantic coast from Maine to northern Florida.

474. The Plague and the Fire, 1665, 1666.

The next year a terrible outbreak of the plague occurred in London, 1665, which spread throughout the kingdom (S244). All who could, fled from the city. Hundreds of houses were left vacant, while on hundreds more a cross marked on the doors in red chalk, with the words "Lord have mercy on us," written underneath, told where the work of death was going on.[1]

[1] Pepys writes in his "Diary," describing the beginning of the plague: "The 7th of June, 1665, was the hottest day I ever felt in my life. This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses with a red cross upon the door, and `Lord have mercy upon us' writ there, which was a sad sight."--Pepys, "Diary," 1660-1669.

Defoe wrote a journal of the plague in 1722, based, probably, on the reports of eyewitnesses. It gives a vivid and truthful account of its horrors.

The pestilence swept off over a hundred thousand victims within six months. Among the few brave men who voluntarily remained in the stricken city were the Puritan ministers, who stayed to comfort and console the sick and dying. After the plague was over, they received their reward through the enforcement of those acts of persecution which drove them homeless and helpless from their parishes and friends (S472).

The dead cart had hardly ceased to go its rounds, when a fire broke out, 1666, of which Evelyn, a courtier who witnessed it, wrote that it "was not to be outdone until the final conflagration of the world."[1]

By it the city of London proper was reduced to ruins, little more being left than a fringe of houses on the northeast.

[1] Evelyn's "Diary," 1641-1705; also compare Dryden's poem "Annus Mirabilis."

Great as the calamity was, yet from a sanitary point of view it did immense good. Nothing short of fire could have effectually cleansed the London of that day, and so put a stop to the periodical ravages of the plague. By sweeping away miles of narrow streets crowded with miserable buildings black with the encrusted filth of ages, the conflagration in the end proved friendly to health and life.

A monument near London Bridge still marks the spot where the flames first burst out. For many years it bore an inscription affirming that the Catholics kindled them in order to be revenged on their persecutors. The poet Pope, at a later period, exposed the falsehood in the lines:

"Where London's column pointing toward the skies Like a tall bully lifts its head and lies."[2]

[2] "Moral Essays," Epistle III.

Sir Christopher Wren, the most famous architect of the period, rebuilt the city. The greater part of it had been of wood, but it rose from the ashes brick and stone. One irreparable loss was the old Gothic church of St. Paul. Wren erected the present cathedral on the foundations of the ancient structure. On a tablet near the tomb of the great master builder one reads the inscription in Latin, "Reader, if you seek his monument, look around."[1]

[1] "Lector, si monumentum requiris, circ.u.mspice."

475. Invasion by the Dutch (1667).

The new city had not risen from the ruins of the old, when a third calamity overtook it. Charles was at war with France and Holland.

The contest with the latter nation grew out of the rivalry of the English and the Dutch to get the exclusive possession of foreign trade (S459). Parliament granted the King large sums of money to build and equip a navy, but the pleasure-loving monarch wasted it in dissipation. The few ships he had were rotten old hulks, but half provisioned, with crews ready to mutiny because they could not get their pay.

A Dutch fleet sailed up the Thames. It was manned in part by English sailors who had deserted in disgust because when they asked for cash to support their families they got only worthless government tickets.

There was no force to oppose them. They burned some half-built men-of-war, blockaded London for several weeks, and then made their own terms of peace.

476. The "Cabal" (1667-1673); Treaty of Dover, 1670; the King robs the Exchequer (1672).

Shortly after this humiliating event the enemies of Clarendon drove him from office (S471). The fallen minister was accused of high treason. He had been guilty of certain arbitrary acts, and, rather than stand trial, he fled to France, and was banished for life. He sent a humble pet.i.tion to the Lords, but they promptly ordered the hangman to burn it. Six years later the old man begged piteously that he might "come back and die in his own coutnry and among his own children." Charles refused to let him return, for Clarendon had committed the unpardonable offense of daring to look "sourly" at the vices of the King and his shameless companions flushed "with insolence and wine." Charles now formed a new ministry or "Cabal,"[1]

consisting of five of his most intimate friends. Several of its members were notorious for their depravity, and Macaulay calls it the "most profligate administration ever known."[2] The chief object of its leaders was to serve their own private interests by making the King's power supreme. The "Cabal's" true spirit was not unlike that of the council of the "infernal peers" which Milton portrays in "Paradise Lost," first published at that time. There he shows us the five princes of evil, Moloch, Belial, Mammon, Beelzebub, and Satan, meeting in the palace of Pandemonium to plot the ruin of the world.[3]

he chief ambition of Charles was to rule without a Parliament; he did not like to have that body inquire too closely how he spent the money which the taxpayers granted him. But his lavish outlays on his favorites made it more and more difficult for him to avoid summoning a Parliament in order to get supplies of cash. At length he hit on a plan for securing the funds he wanted without begging help from Parliament.

[1] This word was originally used to designate the confidential members of the King's private council, and meant perhaps no more than the word "cabinet" does to-day. In 1667 it happened, however, by a singular coincidence, that the initial letters of the five persons comprising it, namely, (C)lifford, (A)shley-Cooper [Lord Shaftesbury], (B)uckingham, (A)rlington, and (L)auderdale, formed the word "CABAL,"

which henceforth came to have the odious meaning of secret and unscrupulous intrigue that it has ever since retained. It was to Charles II's time what the political "ring" is to our own.

[2] Macaulay's "Essay on Sir William Temple."

[3] Milton's "Paradise Lost," Book II. The first edition was published in 1667, the year the "Cabal" came into power, though its members had long been favorites with the King. It has been supposed by some that the great Puritan poet had them in his mind when he represented the Pandemonic debate. Shaftesbury and Buckingham are also two of the most prominent characters in Dryden's noted political satire of "Absalom and Achitophel," published in 1681; and compare Butler's "Hudibras."

Louis XIV of France, then the most powerful monarch in Europe, wished to conquer Holland, with the double object of extending his own kingdom and the power of Catholicism. He saw in Charles the tool he wanted to gain this end. With the aid of two members of the "Cabal,"

Charles negotiated the secret Treaty of Dover, 1670. Thereby Louis bribed the English King with a gift of 300,000 pounds to help him carry out his scheme. Thus, without the knowledge of Parliament, Charles deliberately sold himself to the French sovereign, who was plotting to destroy the political liberty and Protestant faith of Holland.

In addition to the above sum, it was furthermore agreed that Louis should pay Charles a pension of 200,000 pounds a year from the date when the latter should openly avow himself a Roman Catholic. Later (1671), Charles made a sham treaty with Louis XIV in which the article about his avowing himself a Catholic was omitted in order to deceive Parliament.[1]

[1] See Summary of Const.i.tutional History in the Appendix, p. xix, S21.

True to his infamous contract, Charles provoked a new war with the Dutch, but found that he needed more money to prosecute it successfully. Not knowing where to borrow, he determined to steal it. Various London merchants, bankers, and also persons of moderate means had lent to the government sums of money on promise of repayment from the taxes.

A part of the national revenue amounting to about 1,300,000 pounds, a sum equal to at least $10,000,000 now, had been deposited in the exchequer, or government treasury, to meet the obligation. The King seized this money,[2] partly for his needs, but chiefly to squander on his vices, and to satisfy the insatiate demands of his favorites,--of whom a single one, the d.u.c.h.ess of Portsmouth, had spent 136,000 pounds within the s.p.a.ce of a twelvemonth! The King's treacherous act caused a financial panic which shook London to its foundatyions and ruined great numbers of people.

[2] "`Rob me the Exchequer, Hal,' said the King to his favorite minister in the `Cabal'; then `all went merry as a marriage bell.'"--Evelyn's "Diary."

477. More Money Schemes; Declaration of Indulgence; Test Act, 1673.

By declaring war against Holland Charles had now fulfilled the first part of his secret treaty with Louis (S476), but he was afraid to undertake the second part and openly declare himself a convert to the Church of Rome. He, however, did the next thing to it, by issuing a cautiously worded Declaration of Indulgence, 1673, suspending all penal laws affecting the religious liberty of Protestant Dissenters (SS382, 472) and Roman Catholics. Under cover of this act the King could show especial favor to the Catholics. Parliament issued such a vigorous protest, however, that the King withdrew the Declaration.

Parliament next pa.s.sed the Test Act,[1] 1673, requiring every government officer to acknowledge himself a Protestant according to the rites of the Church of England. Charles became alarmed at this decided stand, and now tried to conciliate Parliament, and coax from it another grant of money by marrying his niece, the Princess Mary, to William of Orange, President of the Dutch republic, and head of the Protestant party on the Continent.