204

"Madame."-The Treaty of Dover.

[1670

France was not to support him in a prolonged dispute with his subjects, unless it were conducive to success on the Continent: to put religion first might mean postponing the Dutch war indefinitely, while the strength that would accrue to him in money and arms by the success of a war supported by English commercial jealousy would put his opponents at home in an inferior position when he turned on them afterwards. On May 5, 1670, the Duchess of Orleans reached Dover, whither Charles, whose hand was strengthened by the substantial supply voted at the spring sitting of Parliament, journeyed to meet her. The negotiations were complete; the time was spent by Charles and his sister in unaffected happiness; and on June 1 the Treaty of Dover was signed by Colbert for France, by Arlington, Clifford, Arundel, and Sir Richard Bellings for England. Henrietta did not live to see the fruits of the treaty in which her share had been so great that it was named by the French "le traité de Madame." She had been ill before her arrival in England; on her return to Paris on June 18 her symptoms continued, and on the 29th, after drinking a glass of chicory water, she died in a few hours, believing herself and believed by all the world to be the victim of poison. The cause of her death is now scientifically known to have been a perforating ulcer of the stomach.

The treaty, which consisted of ten articles and three additional clauses, set forth the joint policy of the two monarchs in some detail for the subjugation of England. Louis was to furnish Charles with six thousand men at his own expense and £150,000, and was, together with Charles, to fix the date of the stroke. For the attack on Holland Charles was to furnish six thousand men to serve under the French commander-in-chief, and fifty ships of war to serve together with thirty French under the Duke of York as admiral-the whole at the expense of Louis. Charles was to take Walcheren, Sluys, and Cadsand as his share of the spoil; the rights of the Prince of Orange were as far as possible to be preserved; and Louis was to pay Charles £225,000 yearly while the war lasted. For the success of "la grande affaire," as Charles called it to his sister, he reckoned further on his resources at home. The Governor of Hull was a Catholic; those of Portsmouth, Plymouth, Windsor, and other strong places, were devoted to his service; the Catholic sentiment and force of Ireland were ready to hand; and Lauderdale controlled an army twenty thousand strong in Scotland, bound to serve anywhere within the British dominions. If the design should succeed, he would find himself at the head of a Catholic State and master of his kingdom.

A necessary consequence of the Treaty of Dover was a second treaty All the Ministers knew of the negotiations; but only those who wen in the Catholic plot could be acquainted with their result. Therefor to cover the traces of the real business, an elaborate sham treaty wa drafted at Charles' suggestion by Buckingham, who was led to imagin

1670-2] Le traité simulé.-Nell Gwyn & "Madam Carwell.” 205

that he was doing the work for which all the trouble had been taken. "Le traité simulé" went over the ground of the real treaty, except that no mention was made of Catholicism, while the subsidy offered towards its establishment was added to that offered for the purpose of the Dutch war, and that the combined military forces were to serve under an English general. As Buckingham expected to be that general, he was all the more delighted with the treaty, which was signed in February, 1671, by himself, Ashley and Lauderdale. He only began to discover his mistake, when Charles induced Louis to forego the troops thus provided for and replied by a jeer to Buckingham's expostulations on his deprivation of the command.

In April, 1670, as the price for the renewed Conventicle Act, the Commons had voted a tax calculated to bring in £300,000 a year for eight years, and in the October session they added a supply of £800,000; but, as the annual expenses of the services alone amounted to half a million, and the King's debts to over two million pounds, the financial prospects, despite a further supply obtained in the following March in response to a royal proclamation against Papists, could hardly be considered brilliant. The attitude of the Commons, moreover, made it clear that, although Parliament was now prorogued from one date to another, doing little business till February, 1673, the French ambassador had been only too accurate in his prophecy of the results that would follow the King's public change of religion. In promising the late proclamation Charles had only ventured to hint at exemption for the Catholic Royalists who had fought for his father; and there could be no doubt that any attempt to put in action the great Catholic scheme would ruin the hopes of the Dutch war, interrupt the stream of French gold, and perhaps overturn the monarchy itself in the fury it would let loose in England. Arlington, who had been of the King's original opinion, agreed with Charles that the declaration must be definitely postponed till the war had placed him in an overwhelmingly strong position. In the meantime Charles amused himself with two new mistresses, the two most famous of the thirteen whose names have been preserved. Nell Gwyn, the darling of London audiences, did not cost the nation above £4000 a year in revenues; the other, a young Breton lady who had come to England in the suite of Henrietta of Orleans, Louise de Kéroualle, soon Duchess of Portsmouth, drew an income of £40,000 besides gifts amounting to many times that sum.

Money was always a difficulty at Charles' Court, and, now that the spring of 1672 was fixed by Louis for his attack on Holland, a difficulty that pressed. Further, the French preparations for the war and the likelihood that England would assist in it were becoming known; and to summon Parliament would be to court disaster. The audacity of Clifford suggested a source of supply that needed nothing but a proclamation to tap it. During the Commonwealth and since the Restoration

206

The Stop of the Exchequer.

[1672

the Government had acquired the habit of obtaining assistance from the London goldsmiths, who thus became bankers. The public deposited their money with the bankers, who paid 6 per cent. on deposits, and made loans at 8 per cent. to merchants and others requiring advances. Charles' Government found the system particularly useful as a means of realising the taxes that had been voted but not collected: supplies were rendered immediately available by bankers' advances on the security of the votes, and the Exchequer derived a certain continuity from the process. At the present time nearly £1,400,000 had been advanced by the bankers to the Exchequer, when it was suddenly announced that none of the capital would be repaid for a whole year. A panic ensued; bankers were forced to suspend their engagements; merchants were unable to meet their bills; and a large proportion of the ten thousand persons to whom the sum thus quietly pocketed by Charles belonged were ruined. Nor did the mischief end there. Although the "Stop of the Exchequer" was intended for a period of twelve months only, and although in the following year the Lord Chancellor actually assured Parliament that all arrears had been made good and that interest would continue to be paid at the bankers' rate, as promised in the proclamation, not a penny was forthcoming till 1674, when interest at about 6 per cent. was paid on the capital without arrears and continued till 1683. Legal proceedings were instituted by the creditors, who finally obtained an Act under William III for payment of arrears at 3 per cent. till half the capital was refunded; but the Act remained inoperative, and the debt, which was first taken over by the South Sea Company, was ultimately incorporated in the National Debt. It was estimated that the total loss to the bankers and their creditors amounted to three million pounds.

One startling event after another now broke upon the nation and made, said Baxter, "all Protestant hearts to tremble." The Stop of the Exchequer took place on January 2, 1672. On March 15 the King issued a Declaration of Indulgence, suspending “all manner of penal laws in matters ecclesiastical against whatsoever sort of Nonconformists or recusants." On March 17 war was declared against the Dutch Republic. Hostilities had actually begun before their official declaration; for after seeking in vain for a plausible pretext to break with their allies, and after de Witt had gone almost to the extreme of conciliation to keep the peace, the Government gave orders to force a war by an act of open piracy. On March 13 Holmes, the admiral in command at Portsmouth, who had opened the first Dutch war, sailed out to where a Dutch merchant fleet, laden with a rich cargo from the Levant, lay at anchor off the Isle of Wight, and opened fire upon it. War was rendered inevitable; but the treasure, the expected capture of which would help to defray it, escaped, for the Government and the admiral had laid their plans so badly that the

1672-3]

The Declaration of Indulgence.

207

Dutch, after returning the English fire, were able to sail off with the loss of only two ships.

The story of the war, which may be regarded as one thread in the double policy of the Dover treaty, does not belong to this chapter. The Declaration of Indulgence (March 15, 1672), which was the other, was a kind of trial flight of the grand religious revolution that had been planned by Charles. Even at the time it was vehemently suspected that its true object was to favour the Catholics; but it was a fact that owing to Bridgeman's protest Catholics could only claim the right to worship privately, while Protestant dissenters could do so in public, and that it was actively supported by Ashley and other prominent men whose Protestantism was less suspected than the King's. The gaols were opened; Bunyan left his prison at Bedford; and hundreds of nonconformists, and especially Quakers (for the persecution had been very fierce against them), walked the streets again in freedom. Still there was much hesitation. The Presbyterians, with their strongly democratic views on Church matters, disliked the personal nature of the relief accorded them by the King, and also being relieved as merely part of the whole body of dissenters, most of whom had experienced a less conciliatory treatment in the past. All feared to bring on themselves the disapprobation of Parliament. However, the Government had succeeded for the moment. A nonconformist deputation to thank the King was introduced by Arlington, Bridgeman surrendered the Privy Seal; Clifford, with a peerage, stepped into the high place of Lord Treasurer; Ashley became Earl of Shaftesbury and Lord Chancellor; Arlington was made an Earl, Lauderdale a Duke, and both received the Garter. Although the Declaration was but a shadow of the real scheme in Charles' head, it was considered by sound Anglicans to be a staggering blow to the Church: "Papists and swarms of sectaries" astonished the world of London by the numbers in which they met publicly; and on the following Easter Day it was remarked to the general scandal that the Duke of York, who attended church with the King, refrained from partaking of the Communion for the second year in succession. So lively was the agitation on the subject of Catholic toleration that when Parliament met in February, 1673, after a recess of practically two years, Charles attempted to ride the storm that was known to be brewing by a display of personal authority. "I shall take it very ill," he said, "to receive contradiction in what I have done. And I will deal plainly with you: I am resolved to stick to my Declaration.”

Meanwhile, negotiations had been proceeding with the Dutch. The war had gone badly for Holland; but neither had it gone well for England, and the despatch, after all, of an English contingent to Louis' army had by no means mollified Buckingham's disappointment, since it had gone under command of the Duke of Monmouth. Consequently Buckingham was more inclined to the Dutch, and less to the French, than he had been two years before. Ambassadors arrived from the

208

"Delenda est Carthago."

[1673

Republic; and Buckingham and Arlington created a sensation by crossing the Channel in person, ostensibly to discuss terms of peace. They found themselves in the midst of a revolution. The successes of Louis had enraged the populace against their magistrates; and on the very day of the ambassadors' arrival at the Hague the young Prince of Orange, as Stadholder, had been raised to the office of his ancestors. Scarcely six weeks later Cornelius and John de Witt were torn to pieces in the streets. The news of his nephew's restored and quasi-monarchical authority could not but be pleasing to Charles, who had entertained him on a visit to England in the autumn of 1670; but it soon appeared that William was impervious both to threats and to bribes. Lord Halifax, who joined the two Ministers in the Prince's camp, inclined to peace on terms favourable to the Dutch; and Buckingham, though still demanding a high price for England's defection from France, was urgent for peace, and indeed at one moment could scarcely be restrained by Arlington from signing a treaty on the spot. But the lowest terms offered were such as William would not accept. Then Buckingham tried to work on his despair. "Do you not see," he said, "that all is lost? Do you not see?" "I know a sure way never to see it," answered the Prince-"to die on the last dyke." The embassy moved on to the French King's camp, and here the true nature of the mission, which was known to Louis and had been secretly entrusted by Charles to Arlington, came out. The peace overtures had been arranged primarily in order to throw dust in Protestant eyes and put the Republic in the position of having rejected an offer: the real business was the signature of an engagement between Charles and Louis that neither would make peace before the demands of the other were satisfied, while they agreed upon joint terms which the Prince of Orange was sure to refuse. Buckingham had been tricked again.

Charles had thus prepared opinion at home for the prosecution of the war and for a large supply to support it. No better advocate for his cause could have been found than the new Chancellor, Shaftesbury, who followed the Speech from the Throne with a skilful and inflammatory harangue on the text "Delenda est Carthago," that obtained an immediate vote of a million and a quarter pounds, to be spread over a period of eighteen months. But the Commons were less manageable on the delicate question of the Indulgence. Though, when the subject was introduced, the House showed a general hesitation to touch it, the silence was that of a calm before the storm; once loosened, tongues wagged freely. Why had not legal and ecclesiastical advice been taken before the Declaration? What authority could such a Declaration have? It was not even made under the Great Seal, the judges appointed under which swore to carry out the Acts of Parliament that the King now claimed to override. Acts of Parliament! Why, the Declaration broke forty of them. Sufficient doubt, however, existed on the whole subject of the