CHAPTER I.

ENGLISH POLITICS AND LITERATURE FROM 1667 TO 1674.

THERE are few periods during which it is more difficult to describe the mechanism of the English government than during the seven years following the fall of Clarendon. The difficulty has been acknowledged, rather than explained, by calling the period, or the greater part of it, THE TIME OF THE CABAL ADMINISTRATION.

No need now to correct the old popular fallacy that the word cabal was an invention of that time. Most people know that the word cabal had already been in use in England, as a designation for any number of persons putting their heads together for any object whatever, but more especially as an alternative name for that secret committee of the King's privy council and ministry which had been long known as The Junto, and which we now call The Cabinet. Though the strict constitutional theory was that the right and duty of advising the sovereign lay in the whole body of the privy council, and that each minister was the independent servant of the crown in his own department, the two connected institutions of The Junto and The Premiership are so rooted in the very necessities of politics and of human nature that the existence of one or other, or of both together, had been more or less an open fact in the reigns of all recent English sovereigns. That neither was liked, that both were regarded as unconstitutional, and that the premier or favourite for the time being, and other members of the Junto or Cabal for the time being, always ran peculiar risks, had not prevented the

definite transmission of both institutions through the reigns of James I, and Charles I. The Clarendon Administration for Charles II. from 1660 to 1667 had been in reality a government by intermixed cabal and premiership. What, then, was the difference from 1667 onwards? It was that, instead of a government by continued cabal and premiership in combination, there was now a government by continued cabal without any steady premiership. In other words, Charles himself, so far as he took trouble with public affairs, was now more the master than he had been. No one stood now by his side as indubitably and necessarily the prime minister; and, while he still had his general privy council and ministry of some thirty or forty persons, to be used as a formal agency of state, he could depute the real work of deliberation for him and co-operation with him in stateaffairs to any five or six, or any seven or eight, of the privy councillors and ministers most in his confidence. These were his Cabal or Cabinet, as distinct from the general body of the privy council and ministry; and the peculiarity was that, as the composition of the cabal depended entirely on his own pleasure, it might fluctuate from month to month, or even from week to week. At certain times, indeed, there might even be two halves of the one nominal cabal, separately employed and consulted by the King, and played off against each other.

FROM AUGUST 1667 TO APRIL 1670.

Immediately after the fall of Clarendon, the Duke of Ormond being then absent in his Lord-Lieutenancy of Ireland, the cabal round Charles for English affairs consisted of the Duke of York, the Duke of Albemarle, the Duke of Buckingham, Sir Orlando Bridgman (made Lord Keeper in succession to Clarendon as Lord Chancellor), Lord Privy Seal Roberts, and Lord Arlington and Sir William Morrice, the two Secretaries of State; with whom, for occasional purposes, were associated Lord Ashley, as Chancellor of the Exchequer and one of the Commissioners of the Treasury, Sir Thomas Clifford, as Comptroller of the Household and one

of the Commissioners of the Treasury, and Sir William Coventry, as one of the Commissioners of the Treasury. This cabal was modified by some subsequent changes. In June 1668 Clifford was promoted to the Treasurership of the Household, the Comptrollership going to Lord Newport. In September in the same year Sir William Morrice, who had been dwindling in importance, retired from his Secretaryship of State for £10,000, and was succeeded by Sir John Trevor. In March 1668-9, in consequence of a quarrel with Buckingham, Sir William Coventry was dismissed. Early in 1669, the Duke of Ormond having been removed from the Lord-Lieutenancy of Ireland by Buckingham's contrivance, Lord Roberts went to Ireland as his successor. On the 3rd of January 1669-70 Monk died of a dropsy, at the age of sixty-one, and there was to be no farther influence of his in the affairs of the Restoration. The general effect of these changes had been to increase the importance of Ashley and Clifford in the cabal. On the whole, however, the chiefs from the beginning were Buckingham (without office till he became Master of Horse by purchase from Monk) and Lord Secretary Arlington. A kind of pseudo-premiership, indeed, had been accorded to Buckingham, which might have been turned into a real premiership but for his incorrigible fitfulness and the scandal of his private profligacies. As it was, the steadier, calmer, and more laborious Arlington was more than his rival, especially in the foreign department. Ashley was first distinctly adopted into the cabal as an adherent of Buckingham, and Clifford as an adherent of Arlington 1.

Consisting mainly of a selection of the politicians that had been in opposition to Clarendon, the very characteristic of this cabal of Buckingham's pseudo-premiership was its willing agreement with the King in an endeavour to reverse some parts of Clarendon's policy, and more especially his rigid church-policy, as it had taken shape in such barbarities as the Act of Uniformity, the Conventicles Act, and the Five Miles Act.

1 Beatson's Political Index; several Articles in Wood's Ath. and Fasti;

Pepys in various places; Christie's
Life of Shaftesbury, II. 1-4.

Already, since the Great Fire of London, and partly in consequence of that event, there had been a considerable relaxation of the severities against Nonconformists. After the burning of so many churches, it was thought "a thing too gross" to try to prevent the ejected Nonconformist ministers of London from meeting their distressed and impoverished old congregations in the open air, or in temporary tabernacles amid the ruins. The liberty thus recovered by sheer necessity in London had extended itself by contagion into most parts of the country. Nonconformist ministers everywhere were preaching openly, and crowds were flocking to hear them. With this breaking down of the practice of the Acts against Nonconformity there had naturally come a disposition to revive the question of their expediency. Now that England had an established Episcopal Church, with abundant powers and revenues, and that Church was safe, was there no other mode of dealing with the dissenters from that Church than the systematic coercion by pains and penalties, the systematic persecution, that had seemed necessary to Clarendon, Sheldon, and the rest, and had been organized into statutes by the Cavalier Parliament? Might there not be a return to that policy of a moderate indulgence in religious matters, a regulated toleration of Nonconformist worship, which the King had promised from the first, which he had again and again recommended in vain, and which he was understood still to favour 1?

Buckingham's Cabal, if we may so call it, took this very proper view of things, and were all so far of the King's mind in that matter. There were, however, two sets of politicians in the Cabal, with a corresponding difference in their reasons for inclining to a policy of toleration. There was the Protestant Liberal section of the Cabal, consisting of Lord Keeper Bridgman, who was an Episcopalian of a temperate order, Monk and Roberts, who had been Presbyterians and retained Presbyterian sympathies, and Buckingham and Ashley, who were Sceptics or Deists in the guise of Church-of-England

1 Baxter, Part III. p. 22.

men. There was also the crypto-Catholic section of the Cabal, represented by the Duke of York, Arlington, and Sir Thomas Clifford. The former were inclined to a policy of toleration by arguments of natural good sense, Buckingham by far the most liberal of them, and willing to go to great lengths, but the rest recognising limits, and Ashley with an express reservation, which he had put on paper, that no toleration to be granted could with political safety be extended to the Roman Catholics or the Fifth Monarchy men1. One of the very motives of the crypto-Catholics of the Cabal, on the other hand, in concurring in a policy of toleration for the Presbyterians, the Independents, the Baptists, and other Protestant sects, was that the Roman Catholics might be included, and there might thus be farther study of Roman Catholic interests and prospects in England. Charles himself, it was to appear very notoriously, was inspired, and had all along been inspired, by this peculiar motive in his efforts for a toleration. His Majesty, therefore, was best represented, and knew himself to be best represented, in the religious question, by the crypto-Catholic section of his Cabal. They were sincere enough in their desire for a general toleration, and were influenced by the same reasons of good sense and good nature that actuated their liberal Protestant colleagues; but their conduct of the toleration question practically was liable to a subtle influence from their secret motive. A toleration of the Roman Catholics being a notion to which the mass of the English people were obstinately opposed, might not the only way to educate them in that notion, and to obtain a toleration for the Roman Catholics, be to give full rein now and then to the persecution of the Protestant Nonconformists of all varieties? Might not the Nonconformists be thus driven, for their own sakes, into conjunction with the Roman Catholics and a demand for a general toleration of all religionists? This peculiar subtlety of motive on the part of the crypto-Catholic tolerationists of the Cabal of 1667 was to take effect in occasional infidelities to their principle of toleration, and relapses into the persecuting policy.

1 Memorial on Toleration by Ashley in Christie's Shaftesbury, Vol. II. Appendix.