[1667 A.D.] believed that he was reconciled; and in dedicating himself to a renewal of that literary employment which has given him the best title to the respectful remembrance of mankind, he found that consolation which industry never failed to bestow upon a robust understanding, that was also open to religious impressions. BUCKINGHAM AND THE CABAL MINISTRY When the seals were taken away from Clarendon they were given to Sir Orlando Bridgman. The conduct of affairs fell into new hands. Southampton, the most respectable of Charles' first advisers was dead. Monk was worn out. Buckingham first came into power with Arlington as secretary of state, and Sir William Coventry. But soon the ministry comprised the five persons known as "The Cabal"-a name which signified what we now call the cabinet; but which name was supposed incorrectly to have been formed out of the initial letters of the names of the members-Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, Lauderdale. The word cabal had been used long before, to indicate a secret council. Of the new advisers of Charles, Buckingham was the most influential at court, and he made great efforts to be at the same time the most popular. When Buckingham was taken to the Tower, Clarendon was depressed by the acclamations of the people, who shouted round the prisoner. As Clarendon had supported the church, Buckingham was the champion of the sectaries. Baxter says, o "As the chancellor had made himself the head of the prelatical party, who were all for setting up themselves by force, and suffering none that were against them, so Buckingham would now be the head of all those parties that were for liberty of conscience." The candid non-conformist adds, For the man was of no religion, but notoriously and professedly lustful"; but he qualifies his censure with this somewhat high praise-"and yet of greater wit and parts, and sounder principles as to the interests of humanity and the common good, than most lords in the court." The duke lived in York House, the temporary palace which his father had built, of which nothing now remains but the Water Gate. Here he dwelt during the four or five years of the Cabal administration, affording, as he always continued to afford, abundant materials for the immortal character of Zimri in Dryden's "Absalom and Achitophel": "A man so various, that he seem'd to be Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon: Ashley, afterwards earl of Shaftesbury-the Antony Ashley Cooper of the protectorate, who clung to the Rump Parliament till he saw that Monk had sealed its fate, and then made his peace with Charles with surprising readiness the ablest, and in some respects the most incomprehensible of the statesmen of his time-has had the double immortality of the satire of Butler as well as of Dryden. In Thanet House, in Aldersgate street, Ashley was at hand to influence the politics of the city. When the mob were roasting rumps in the streets, and were about to handle him roughly as he passed in his carriage, he turned their anger into mirth by his jokes. When the king [1667 A.D.] frowned upon him he went straight from office to opposition, and made the court disfavour as serviceable to his ambition as the court's honours and rewards. The history of the Cabal ministry, which extends over a period of six years, is not the history of a cabinet united by a common principle of agreement upon great questions of domestic and foreign policy. Nor is it the history of a sovereign asserting his own opinions, and watching over the administration of affairs, under the advice of a council, and through the agency of the great officers of state. Charles I, whether aiming to be despotic, or struggling for his crown and his life, was zealous, active, and selfconfident. Charles II was absolutely indifferent to any higher objects than personal gratification; and to this circumstance we must refer some of the extraordinary anomalies of the government after the fall of Clarendon. He was neither honest nor able, with reference to any aptitude for the condition of life to which he was called. He did not desire, he said, to sit like a Turkish sultan, and sentence men to the bowstring; but he could not endure that a set of fellows should inquire into his conduct. Always professing his love of parliaments, he was always impatient of their interference. With such a sovereign, as utterly indifferent to the proprieties of his public station as to the decencies of his private life, we can scarcely expect that there should have been any consistent principle of administration. The terrible experience of thirty years imposed upon Charles some caution in the manifestation of his secret desire to be as absolute as his brother Louis of France. The great Bourbon was encumbered with no parliament; he had not to humble himself to beg for supplies of insolent commons; he was not troubled with any set of fellows to inquire into his conduct, and ask for accounts of expenditure; he had the gabelle and other imposts which fell upon the prostrate poor, without exciting the animosity of the dangerous rich; he was indeed a king, whose shoe-latchet nobles were proud to unloose, and whose transcendent genius and virtue prelates rejoiced to compare with the divine attributes. Such a blissful destiny as that of the Bourbon could not befall the Stuart by ordinary means. Charles would become as great as Louis, as far as his notion of greatness went, by becoming the tributary of Louis. He would sell his country's honour-he would renounce the religion he had sworn to uphold-for an adequate price. But this bargain should be a secret one. It should be secret even from a majority of his own ministers. Upon this point hinges the disgraceful history of the Cabal. The story of the next twenty years, which brings us to the great era of our modern history, would be incomprehensible, if we did not constantly bear in mind, that public opinion had become a real element in national progress. The crown was constantly dreaming of the revival of despotism, to be accomplished by force and by corruption. Yet the crown, almost without a struggle, was bereft of the power of imprisoning without trial, by the passing of the Habeas Corpus Act; and it lost its control over the freedom of the press by the expiration of the licensing system. The church thought it possible to destroy non-conformity by fines and fetters. In its earlier liturgy it prayed to be delivered from "false doctrine, heresy, and schism." Yet when it had ejected the Puritans from the churches, and had shut up the conventicles, it laid the foundation of schisms which, in a few years, made dissent a principle which churchmen could not hope to crush and statesmen could not dare to despise. How can we account for the striking anomaly, that with a profligate court, a corrupt administration, a venal house of commons, a tyrannous church, the nation during the reign of Charles II was manifestly [1668 A.D.] progressing in the essentials of freedom, unless we keep in view that from the beginning of the century there had been an incessant struggle of the national mind against every form of despotic power? The desire for liberty, civil and spiritual, had become almost an instinct. The great leaders in this battle had passed away. The men who by fits aspired to be tribunes of the people were treacherous or inconstant. But the spirit of the nation was not dead. It made itself heard in parliament, with a voice that grew louder and louder, till the torrent was once again dammed up. A few more years of tyranny without disguise - and then the end. The first movements of the Cabal ministry were towards a high and liberal policy - toleration for non-conformists, and an alliance with free Protestant states. A greater liberty to dissenters from the church followed the fall of Clarendon. We see transient and accidental motives for this passing toleration, rather than the assertion of a fixed principle. But when the parliament met, the active prelates and prelatists prevailed to prevent any bill of comprehension or indulgence to be brought in. THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE (1668 A.D.) At the opening of the session of parliament in 1668, the king announced that he had made a league defensive with the states-general of the United Provinces, to which Sweden had become a party. This was the Triple Alliance. The nation saw with reasonable apprehension the development of the vast schemes of ambition of Louis XIV. He was at war with Spain; but the great empire upon which the sun never set was fast falling to pieces - not perishing like a grand old house, overthrown by a hurricane's fury, but mouldering away with the dry-rot in every timber. France, on the contrary, was rising into the position of the greatest power in Europe. Her able but vainglorious king already looked upon the Spanish Netherlands as his certain prey. The United Provinces were hateful to him as the seat of religious and civil liberty. The crisis was come when England, by a return to the policy of Cromwell, might have taken her place again at the head of the free Protestant states of Europe. When Charles announced to parliament this league with the United Provinces and Sweden, it was thought to be, says Pepys, "the only good public thing that hath been done since the king came into England." It was a marvel of diplomacy. De Witt and Sir William Temple met at the Hague as two honest men, without any finesse; and they quickly concluded a treaty which they believed to be for the honour and safety of both their countries. This treaty, says Burnet,f "was certainly the masterpiece of King Charles' life; and if he had stuck to it, it would have been both the strength and glory of his reign. This disposed the people to forgive all that was past, and to renew their confidence in him, which was shaken by the whole conduct of the Dutch war." At the very time when the ambassador of England was negotiating the treaty which promised to be "the strength and glory of his reign," the king was making proposals to Louis for a clandestine treaty, by which England was to be leased out" to France, "Like a tenement or pelting farm."k MACAULAY'S CONTRAST OF ENGLAND AND FRANCE AT THAT PERIOD We have now reached a point at which the history of the great English Revolution begins to be complicated with the history of foreign politics. The [1668 A.D.] power of Spain had, during many years, been declining. She still, it is true, held in Europe the Milanese and the two Sicilies, Belgium, and Franche Comté. In America her dominions still spread, on both sides of the equator, far beyond the limits of the torrid zone. But this great body had been smitten with palsy, and was not only incapable of giving molestation to other states, but could not, without assistance, repel aggression. France was now, beyond all doubt, the greatest power in Europe. Her resources have, since those days, absolutely increased, but have not increased so fast as the resources of England. It must also be remembered that, a hundred and eighty years ago, the empire of Russia, now a monarchy of the first class, was as entirely out of the system of European politics as Abyssinia or Siam, that the house of Brandenburg was then hardly more powerful than the house of Saxony, and that the republic of the United States had not then begun to exist. The weight of France, therefore, though still very considerable, has relatively diminished. Her territory was not in the days of Louis the Fourteenth quite so extensive as at present: but it was large, compact, fertile, well placed both for attack and for defence, situated in a happy climate, and inhabited by a grave, active, and ingenious people. The state implicitly obeyed the direction of a single mind. The great fiefs which, three hundred years before, had been, in all but name, independent principalities, had been annexed to the crown. Only a few old men could remember the last meeting of the states-general. The resistance which the Huguenots, the nobles, and the parliaments had offered to the kingly power, had been put down by the two great cardinals who had ruled the nation during forty years. The government was now a despotism, but, at least in its dealings with the upper classes, a mild and generous despotism, tempered by courteous manners and chivalrous sentiments. The means at the disposal of the sovereign were, for that age, truly formidable. His revenue, raised, it is true, by a severe and unequal taxation which pressed heavily on the cultivators of the soil, far exceeded that of any other potentate. His army, excellently disciplined, and commanded by the greatest generals then living, already consisted of more than a hundred and twenty thousand men. Such an array of regular troops had not been seen in Europe since the downfall of the Roman Empire. Of maritime powers France was not the first. But, though she had rivals on the sea, she had not yet a superior. Such was her strength during the last forty years of the seventeenth century, that no enemy could singly withstand her, and that two great coalitions, in which half Christendom was united against her, failed of success. In England, however, the whole stock of popularity, great as it was, with which the king had commenced his administration, had long been expended. To loyal enthusiasm had succeeded profound disaffection. The public mind had now measured back again the space over which it had passed between 1640 and 1660, and was once more in the state in which it had been when the Long Parliament met. The prevailing discontent was compounded of many feelings. One of these was wounded national pride. That generation had seen England, during a few years, allied on equal terms with France, victorious over Holland and Spain, the mistress of the sea, the terror of Rome, the head of the Protestant interest. Her resources had not diminished; and it might have been expected that she would have been at least as highly considered in Europe under a legitimate king, strong in the affection and willing obedience of his subjects, as she had been under an usurper whose utmost vigilance and energy were required to keep down a mutinous people. Yet she had, in [1668 A.D.] consequence of the imbecility and meanness of her rulers, sunk so low that any German or Italian principality which brought five thousand men into the field was a more important member of the commonwealth of nations. With the sense of national humiliation was mingled anxiety for civil liberty. Rumours, indistinct indeed, but perhaps the more alarming by reason of their indistinctness, imputed to the court a deliberate design against all the constitutional rights of Englishmen. It had even been whispered that this design was to be carried into effect by the intervention of foreign arms. The thought of such intervention made the blood, even of the cavaliers, boil in their veins, h |