Parliament reassembling, demands war with France. 1677.

prorogation from November 1675 to February 1677. In the interval the two Kings bound themselves by formal treaty, with the connivance of Danby and Lauderdale, not to enter into any treaty but by mutual consent, and Charles promised, in consideration of a pension, to prorogue or dissolve Parliament if they should attempt to force on such a treaty. It was upon the conclusion of this prorogation that, as has been mentioned, four Peers had been imprisoned. The Commons, upon reassembling, were induced by bribery to make a considerable grant. But that grant was devoted chiefly to the navy, and paid not to Government but to their own receivers. They then passed an address requesting the King to save the Netherlands; but when Charles demanded money for the purpose it was refused. The army was indeed collected, between 20,000 and 30,000 men. The sight of such a force, and their well-founded dread of the objects of the Court, made the Parliament demand its dismissal. It indeed seems probable that both Charles and his brother fully intended to use it for their own purposes. Nor could the French King, in spite of his connection with Charles, feel the least certain that it would not after all be employed against him; he therefore used his influence to get the disbanded. This brief session of Parliament army had convinced Louis of the wisdom of securing lengthened prorogations. He therefore again bribed Charles with a subsidy of 2,000,000 livres to prorogue Parliament till April 1678. But meanwhile, for a time, the influence of the Treasurer had got the upper hand; and not without great opposition from her father, Mary, the eldest daughter of the Duke of York and Anne Hyde, had been married to the Prince of Orange, the head of the Protestant interest in Europe, and the chief opponent to the growth of French influence. This was regarded as such an act of treachery by Louis that he cut off the subsidy he had just promised, and Parliament, already prorogued till April, was in revenge suddenly summoned in February. So complete was now Louis' mistrust of the miserable palterer upon the English throne, that he began a new line of policy. It seemed to him hopeless to rely in any way on Charles's word. The only course left for him was to deprive him of all power, either of helping him or hindering him, by keeping him constantly employed at home. He therefore entered into negotiations with the Country party. His ambassadors, Barillon and Ruvigny, were ordered constantly to foster the

Louis again

secures a prorogation.

Mary marries the Prince

of Orange.

1678.

Louis' anger. ⚫
Charles
summons the
Parliament.

Louis intrigues with the Opposition.

1678]

INTRIGUES OF LOUIS XIV.

749

quarrels between the King and his people, and undoubtedly even the very best of the Country party, such as Lord Holles and Lord Russell, entered into communication with them. Neither of these leaders received anything from France. The same cannot be said of a considerable number of the other leaders of the party. At the same time, though the reception of money from a foreign Prince for the purpose of influencing domestic politics is repugnant to our present ideas of honour, it is scarcely fair to say that the leaders of the Opposition were bribed; in the first place, because the sums given (between £300 and £500) were too small to have had much influence upon men of property and position; and secondly, because no change of principle was required from the recipients. At the worst, they were only paid for following their own political objects more energetically. Under the influence of these intrigues, parties appeared for the moment to have exchanged positions. The King, angry at the stoppage of his subsidy, urged by the Treasurer, thinking perhaps to please his Parliament, and probably with an ulterior view of establishing his own power, again collected an army of some 20,000 men, nominally against France; and the Country party, which had hitherto urged him to adopt that course, at once demanded that it should be disbanded.

with France.

Peace of

Again, disgusted at the ill success of his new policy, Charles recurred to Louis, and in May 1678 made a private treaty Secret treaty with him, signed by himself, but written by Danby, by which he promised, on receipt of 6,000,000 livres, to re- Nimeguen. main neutral if Holland refused to accept reasonable terms of peace; for the exhaustion of war was pressing upon France, and though victorious, Louis was anxious to treat. A congress for that purpose had been sitting at Nimeguen since the close of 1676. The effect of this neutrality was virtually to force Holland to treat, and in spite of the opposition of the Prince of Orange, who wished to continue that war, and who has been falsely charged with fighting the battle of St. Denis with the full knowledge of the treaty, in hopes of breaking it off, the Peace of Nimeguen was completed, the loss again falling almost wholly upon Spain.

Louis no longer wanted the friendship of Charles, and determined to punish him for the marriage of his niece, and for his Louis makes duplicity at the beginning of the year. He therefore it known. refused his pension, declaring that it had not been earned, and at the same time wreaked his vengeance upon Danby, whom he knew to be his consistent enemy, by causing Montague, the English ambassador

Consequent anger against Danby.

in Paris, to make known the treaty by which the King was to have received 6,000,000 livres. As that treaty was dated only five days after a grant of money from the Parliament for carrying on the war against France, it excited the extremest wrath in England. As the King himself could not be touched, all this wrath was directed against the minister, and before the close of the session he was impeached. Danby pleaded the King's direct order and the King's pardon. On the Tory view of the position of ministers, his first plea was probably good. But the modern Whig theory was on this occasion established, that a minister is answerable for the character as well as the legality of the measures of which he makes himself the instrument. This was a great step in the change rapidly arriving in England, by which the executive was brought under the control of the Houses of Parliament. The question how far a pardon can be pleaded to stay an impeachment was by no means a clear one. It might well seem that a pardon before was very little different from a pardon after conviction. The matter was on this occasion left undetermined, as the impeachment was not completed. Subsequently, by the Act of Settlement, it was arranged that such a pardon could not be pleaded.

Country being excited by the Popish plot.

The impeachment of the minister would perhaps have been less vehement had it not been preceded by an extraordinary event which drove the nation to a state of madness. This was the discovery of a pretended Popish plot, including the death of the King and the establishment by violence of the Roman Catholic religion. It is possible that there was some germ of truth in the story. Several events connected with it-the contents of the letters of the Jesuit Coleman, which seemed to allude to some such plot, the murder of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey, the fact that some of the witnesses were undoubtedly tampered with by the Catholics-tend to rouse a suspicion that after all there was some truth in the plot. On the other hand, Coleman's words may have alluded to the general scheme of the King; the murder of Godfrey has never been brought home to the Catholics; in the excited temper of the people, and in the fear of being convicted, whether proved guilty or not, innocent people may have been willing to use any means to withdraw witnesses. Be that as it may, the stories told by Titus Oates and the other informers, who, jealous of his success, vied with him in their fabrications, were a tissue of absurdities. This man, a clergyman of the Church of England, who had been degraded for evil living, had afterwards become a Roman Catholic,

1678]

THE POPISH PLOT

751

and joined the Jesuits at St. Omer. It was the knowledge gained there, and afterwards in London, which supplied him with the material for the stories he subsequently retailed. Brought before the

Council, he made a variety of extraordinary assertions. The Jesuits were to govern England, the King was to be killed, Romanists were already appointed to the chief places in the State, a French invasion was preparing, a general massacre of the Protestants might be expected. He went on to add minute particulars and to accuse many individuals. He was taken before Sir Edmundbury Godfrey, a Protestant magistrate, to swear to his narrative; and the credulity and horror of the people, already sufficiently excited by Oates's narrative, became a perfect panic when, some days after, Godfrey was found mysteriously murdered on Primrose Hill. No man felt his life safe unless armed. It became the custom to carry a little flail loaded with lead, called a Protestant flail. At Godfrey's funeral, at the sermon, "besides the preacher, two other thumping divines stood up in the pulpit" to guard him from being killed, and when Parliament met on the 21st of October, after hearing the letters of Coleman the Jesuit, secretary to the Duchess of York, whom Oates had charged, the Lower House came to a resolution, "That this House is of opinion that there hath been and still is a damnable and hellish plot, carried on by Papist recusants, for assassinating and murdering the King, for subverting the Government, and rooting out the Protestant religion." It has been thought that Danby may have hoped to excite the Commons to some loyalty by the threatened assault on the King, and may therefore at first have given his countenance to the stories of the plot; it is more certain that Shaftesbury at once saw the opportunity offered him of lashing the Protestant temper of the people to fury, and directing it against the Duke of York. This political side of the plot, coupled with the fixed idea which constant repetition had excited in the minds of Protestants that Catholics were capable of any enormity, explains the extraordinary lengths to which the informers were allowed to go. Oates, followed by a man of the name of Bedloe, and subsequently by Dangerfield, Carstairs and others, named five Peers as privy to this plot, who were therefore imprisoned in the Tower, and secured the conviction and execution of a considerable number of Jesuits and Catholics. In fact, for some time, it was useless for the accused to hope for justice; Chief-Justice Scroggs lent himself shamelessly to uphold the false stories of the informers. At length Oates ventured even to assert that, standing behind a door in Somerset House, he had heard the Queen give her consent to the

Parliament dissolved to save Danby.

death of the King. The informer himself was well paid for his task; guards were assigned him, lodgings in Whitehall, and £1200 a year. He dressed like a Bishop, and called himself the Saviour of the nation. Every one he pointed out was taken up,-"the very breath of him was pestilential." It was while the country was in the midst of this wild panic that the revelations of Montague were made against Danby. In December that minister was impeached ; and, threatening though the state of England was, in the hope of saving him, Charles ventured upon dissolving his Parliament, which had now sat for eighteen years, and which during this time had changed from fervid loyalty to a state of the bitterest hostility to the Court and Crown. As was to be expected in the midst of the national ferment, the election was a scene of extreme excitement. Devices, hitherto unheard of, were employed to procure votes, seldom had so great a poll been seen; the triumph of the Country party was complete, almost everywhere the elections went against the Court. Members came up in a furious temper, burning with Protestant zeal, and full of anger against Danby. In spite of the dissolution, which had generally been held to put an end to an impeachment, proceedings against him were at once resumed. New Parliament, In vain he pleaded the pardon of the King under the

March 6, sentences Danby

to the Tower.

Great Seal, it was decided that the Minister must be responsible for his actions; he was put into the Tower, and remained there till the prorogation. The Commons, headed by Shaftesbury, continued their violent course. To avoid the excitement which his presence caused, the King had induced the Duke of York to retire from England. The step was taken in vain. In the last Parliament, when a Bill had been passed which prevented Catholic Peers from sitting in the House, the Lords had succeeded in obtaining a proviso in favour of the Duke of York; no such lenity was now to be looked for. Brings in the The Country party was convinced Exclusion Bill, that the only way of securing the liberties of the country was to exclude James from the throne; a Bill for that purpose was introduced into the House.

Meanwhile, in terror at the vehemence of his Parliament, Charles Temple's scheme had had recourse to the most popular statesman of the of government. time, Sir William Temple, author of the Triple Alliance. He formed a scheme which he hoped might oppose some barrier between the King and the rising excesses of the Commons. For this purpose he utilized the Privy Council. The Cabinet, even as it then existed, was but a Committee of that large and unwieldy body.