1667.] THE CABAL MINISTRY. 303 who shouted round the prisoner. As Clarendon had supported the Church, Buckingham was the champion of the sectaries. Baxter says, "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." York House. 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 : "A man so various, that he seem'd to be But, in the course of one revolving moon, Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon: Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking, "Life," Part iii. p. 21. + Dryden, "Absalom and Achitophel." 304 THE CABAL MINISTRY. [1667 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 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: "For by the witchcraft of rebellion But got the start of every state, And at a change ne'er came too late." * In a few years more Shaftesbury had earned the praise, or dispraise, of Dryden, "A daring pilot in extremity, Pleas'd with the danger when the waves run high." * "Hudibras," Part iii. 1667.] THE CABAL MINISTRY. 305 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. The monarchs of England, from the Norman times, had been, for the most part, men of remarkable energy of character; and in default of their capacity for warlike action and public business, some representative of adequate qualifications wielded the executive power. The great kings of the Plantagenet race were essentially their own ministers. Henry VII., Henry VIII., Elizabeth, were remarkable for their laborious attention to the duties of their great office. Charles I., whether aiming to be despotic, or struggling for his crown and his life, was zealous, active, and self-confident. 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. Abraham Cowley heard Tom Killigrew say to the king, "There is a good, honest, able man that I could name, that if your majesty would employ, and command to see all things well executed, all things would soon be mended; and this is one Charles Stuart, who now spends his time in employing his lips about the Court, and hath no other employment; but if you would give him this employment, he were the fittest man in the world to perform it." Killigrew's estimate of the character of his royal master was altogether false. 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. There is something irresistibly comic in the way in which he tried to manage the House of Lords, in 1669, by being present at their debates. He first sat decently upon the throne, thinking to prevent unpleasant reflections by this restraint upon the freedom of speech. But what he commenced out of policy, under the advice of the crafty Lauderdale, he continued for mere amusement. "The king," writes Burnet, "who was often weary of time, and did not know how to get round the day, liked the going to the House as a pleasant diversion: so he went constantly. And he quickly left the throne, and stood by the fire, which drew a crowd about him, that broke all the decency of that House; for, before that time every lord sat regularly in his place; but the king's coming broke the order of their sitting as became senators. The king's coming thither had a much worse effect; for he became a common solicitor, not only in public affairs, but even in matters of justice. He would in a very little time have gone the round of the House, and spoke to every one that he thought worth speaking to. And he was apt to do that upon the solicitation of any of the ladies in favour, or of any that had credit with them." 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 306 THE CABAL MINISTRY. [1667. 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 transcendant 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. 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. He would sell his But though Charles and two of his ministers, Arlington and Clifford, were ready to go any length to make the policy of Whitehall utterly subservient to the policy of the Louvre, and to bring the creed of Lambeth into very near if not exact conformity with the creed of the Vatican-though Buckingham and Shaftesbury had some complicity in these iniquitous purposes-yet there was a power in the State which had become too formidable for king and ministers utterly to despise. The Parliament, servile and corrupt in many compliances, was yet a power that might be roused into sudden indignation by any outrageous exercise of prerogative, and, above all, by any daring attack upon the Protestant tendencies of the nation. The shiftings of politicians, of whom Shaftesbury was the type, from courtiers one day to demagogues the next, were the natural result of the want, during the first ten years of the Restoration, of any great principle of action which would raise politicians on either side above the mere influences of personal ambition. The Monarchy was an accomplished fact: to fight again for a Commonwealth was no longer possible. The Church was re-established, in triumphant intolerance: Presbyterians and Independents had no standing place for a new struggle. The Crown and the Parliament were both open to corruption; and their venality tainted, though not in an equal degree, the advocates of non-resistance and the enemies of that debasing principle. Placemen and patriots each held out the "itching palm" to France. There was no manifest struggle of opinion against power, till the design to bring back England to the communion of Rome became evident. The resistance to this attempt roused the nation out of its apparent apathy. The intolerant passion of the multitude-blind, cruel, frantic in its fears-was quickly absorbed into the general determination that England should be Protestant, which identified itself with civil liberty. Religious liberty grew slowly out of the contest, when the reign of the great enemies of all freedom was terminated by their own folly and bigotry. 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 pro 1668.] ATTEMPTS AT TOLERATION. 307 gress. 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 and heresy;" it now prayed for deliverance 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 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. The bishops had supported Clarendon, and the king and his new ministers and favorites were therefore out of humour with the bishops. The fire of London had rendered it impossible to carry on the spiritual instruction of the people by the estab lished Clergy; and therefore assemblies to hear the sermons of Presbyterians and Independents were not visited with the penalties of the Conventicle Act. It was, says Baxter, "at the first a thing too gross to forbid an undone people all public worshipping of God, with too great rigour; and if they had been so forbidden, poverty had left them so little to lose as would have made them desperately go on." Sir Orlando Bridgman, now Lord Keeper, desired a conference with Baxter, "about a comprehension and toleration," in January 1668. The Lord Chief Baron Hale, and Bishop Wilkins, were agreed with the Lord Keeper in promoting this salutary work. The king, says Burnet," seemed now to go into moderation and comprehension with so much heartiness, that both Bridgman and Wilkins believed he was in earnest in it; though there was nothing that the popish councils were more fixed in, than to oppose all motions of that kind. But the king saw it was necessary to recover the affections of his people." The opportunity of recovering the affections of the great Puritan body, scattered, depressed, but still influential, was thrown away. There were propositions on the part of the non-confor "Life," Part iii. p. 22. |