1667-1669

PEACE OF AIX-LA-CHAPELLE

599

Roman Catholic Church and partly by dislike of being dictated to by Parliament. He therefore, after Clarendon's fall, gave his confidence mainly to men who, for various reasons, were inclined to support his wishes in this respect.

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

6. The Triple Alliance. 1668. -In 1668 a triple alliance was formed between England, the Dutch Republic, and Sweden, to put an end to the War of Devolution (see p. 593). Its originators were De Witt, and Sir William Temple, the English ambassador at the Hague. The allies demanded that Louis should content himself with certain strong towns on his northern frontier which he had already conquered from Spain, and should desist from attempting to conquer more. Louis assented, and the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was signed on these conditions. In England

there was already a rising feeling against the French, and Charles acquired no little popularity by his supposed firmness. In reality he had betrayed the secrets of the alliance to Louis, and had only shown his teeth to gain good terms for himself from the French king.

7. Charles's Negotiations with France.

1669-1670.-Louis

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

8. The Treaty of Dover. 1670.-Having secured a grant, Charles prorogued Parliament, which he had deceived by giving it to understand that he had abandoned the idea of toleration, and turned to Louis. Louis sent over Charles's youngest sister, Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, to conclude an alliance, and on June 1, 1670, a treaty between England and France was secretly signed at Dover. Charles agreed to join Louis in his projected war against the Dutch, by sending an English force of 6,000 men to serve in the French army, and to assist Louis to seize upon the territories of the Spanish monarchy in the event of the death of Charles II. of Spain without male heirs. Charles was also to acknowledge himself a Catholic whenever he thought fit to do so. To support Charles against his subjects in case of their resisting him in the declaration of his conversion, Louis was to give him 154,000l. and the aid of 6,000 troops to be employed in England in his defence. Moreover, Charles was to receive 230,000l. a year during the proposed war, and thirty French ships were to serve under an English admiral. At the end of the war he was to receive Walcheren,

Sluys and Cadsand from the Dutch Republic, and ultimately, if Louis made good his claims to the Spanish monarchy, he was to gain from Spain, Ostend, Minorca, and various territories in South America. Charles II. was no more scrupulous than his father had been about using the troops of foreign princes to suppress the opposition of his own subjects, but he was shrewd enough to know-what Charles I. had never known-that foreign princes would not lend him

troops unless he gave them something in return. The breach of the Triple Alliance and the assistance offered by Charles to Louis in the proposed war against the Dutch were considered in France to be a fair equivalent for the payments which Louis had bound himself to make. It was another question whether Charles could be kept to his engagements. To secure this as much as possible Louis sent

him over a new French mistress, Louise de Keroualle. Charles soon created her Duchess of Portsmouth, and she fulfilled her duty to her own king by betraying to him all the secrets of her lover.

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

10. Ashley's Policy.-Anthony Ashley Cooper,' who had been created Lord Ashley since the Restoration, had changed sides again and again during the late troubles. He was a born partyleader, and had signalised himself as a youth at Exeter College, Oxford, by leading a successful revolt of the freshmen against the older undergraduates, who, according to custom, tried to skin the chins of the freshmen and to force them to drink a nauseous compound prepared for the occasion. Though in party conflict he was quite unscrupulous and despised no means which would enable him to gain his ends, he had the statesmanlike qualities of common sense and moderation. He had deserted Charles I. when he leant upon the Catholics (see p. 541), had supported Cromwell in his struggle 1 Two Christian names were exceedingly rare in the seventeenth century.

1671-1672

ASHLEY AND BUCKINGHAM

603

with the zealots of the Barebone's Parliament (see p. 566), and had left him when he rejected the constitutional scheme of the first Parliament of the Protectorate (see p. 570). In disgust at the humours of the Rump and the army, he had done everything in his power to hasten the Restoration, and had soon shown hostility to Clarendon and to the persecuting laws of the Cavalier Parliament. In fact, there were two principles to which he was never entirely false, a love of Parliamentary government and a love of toleration, which last was based, not as was that of Oliver, upon sympathy with religious zeal of every kind, but upon dislike of clerical interference. At present he attached himself to Charles, because he knew of Charles's alleged wish to establish toleration, and knew nothing of the conspiracy against Parliament on which Charles had embarked, or of Charles's secret design to favour the Roman Church under cover of a general scheme of toleration.

11. Buckingham's Sham Treaty. 1671.-To deceive those who were in ignorance of the secret treaty of the previous year, Buckingham was sent to Paris to negotiate a sham treaty in which all mention of Charles's conversion was omitted, and the whole of the money offered by Louis represented as given solely for the war. Charles particularly enjoyed making a fool of Buckingham, who imagined himself to be exceedingly clever, and he had also the temporary satisfaction of gaining the hearty support of Ashley as well as Buckingham, because Ashley was quite ready to accept Louis' help in a joint enterprise for crushing the commerce of the Dutch, and had no scruples about abandoning the Triple Alliance. Charles was the more ready to begin the war because he had lately succeeded in obtaining from Parliament another 800,000l. on the false plea that he wanted the money to enable him to hold head at sea against the French as well as the Dutch. As soon as the money was obtained he prorogued Parliament.

12. The Stop of the Exchequer. 1672.-Charles prudently delayed the declaration of his conversion to a more convenient season, but the opening of the war was fixed for the spring of 1672. In spite of the large sums which he drew from Louis and from Parliament, his finances were in hopeless confusion, because of the enormous amount of money which he squandered on his numerous mistresses and his illegitimate children. It is said that the yearly income of the Duchess of Portsmouth was 40,000l., and that in one year she received no less than 136,000l. A caricature published in Holland aptly represented him as standing between two women, with empty pockets hanging out. At this time he had in his