Defeated by the noble endurance of this truly English jury, the court fined every member of it forty marks, for not doing as the bench required, and committed them to prison till it was paid. They also fined Penn and Mead for contempt of court, and sent them to prison, too, till it was paid. The parties thus shamefully treated, however, had shown they were Englishmen, and were not likely to sit down with this tyranny quietly. They brought the case before the Lord Chief Justice Vaughan, who pronounced the whole proceedings illegal, and from the bench delivered a noble defence of the rights of juries.

This trial is a fair specimen of the spirit and practice of those times. The greater part of the magistrates and judges took their cue from the spirit of the Government; and the scenes of violence and injustice, of persecution for religion, and of robbery by officials of the outraged people, were of a kind not easily conceivable at this day.

Parliament being prorogued to October, Charles was now engaged in completing the secret treaty between himself and Louis, by which he was to be an annual pensioner on France to an extent releasing him in a great measure from dependence on his own Parliament. On his part, he was to employ the naval and military power of England to promote the wicked designs of Louis against his neighbours on the Continent. The conditions of the treaty were these:—1st, That the King of England should profess himself Catholic at such time as should seem to him most expedient, and after that profession should join Louis in a war on Holland when the French king thought proper; 2nd, That to prevent or suppress any insurrection in consequence of this public avowal, Louis should furnish him with two millions of livres (nearly one hundred thousand pounds) and an armed force of six thousand troops if necessary; 3rd, That Louis should not violate the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, and Charles should be allowed to maintain it; 4th, That if new rights on the Spanish monarchy should accrue to Louis, Charles should aid him with all his power in obtaining these rights; 5th, That both monarchs should make war on Holland, and neither conclude peace without the knowledge and consent of the other; 6th, That the King of France should bear the charge of the war, but receive from England a force of six thousand men; 7th, That Charles should furnish fifty, Louis thirty men-of-war, the combined fleet to be commanded by the Duke of York; and that to support the charge of the war, the King of England should, during the war, receive annually three million of livres, about one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. England was to receive of the Dutch spoil Walcheren, Sluys, and the Island of Cadsand, and the interests of the Prince of Orange were to be guaranteed. These were the chief provisions of the Treaty of Dover.

THE ASSAULT ON SIR JOHN COVENTRY. (See p. [233].)

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Perhaps the whole history of the world does not furnish a more infamous bargain, not even the partition of Poland in later days. Here was a King of England selling himself to the French monarch for money, to enable him to put down Protestantism and Parliament in Britain, to do all and more than his father lost his head for attempting—for Charles I. never plotted against the Protestant religion. This was bad enough, but the bargain went to enable France to put its foot on the neck of England, and to employ its forces to destroy Protestantism abroad—Protestantism and liberty; to throw Holland, and eventually all the Netherlands, and then Spain, into the power of France, making of it an empire so gigantic that neither freedom, nor Protestantism, nor any political independence could ever more exist. Had this infamous scheme come to light in Charles's time, the Stuarts would not have been driven out in 1688, but then and there. But that this odious bargain did actually take place, and was acted on, so far as Charles's domestic vices and extravagance permitted, later times produced the fullest evidence. The above Treaty was deposited with Sir Thomas Clifford; and Sir John Dalrymple, seeking in the archives at Paris for material for his "Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland," published in 1790, unexpectedly stumbled on the damning evidences—under the hands of Charles and his ministers themselves—of this unholy transaction and its reward. The Duke of York was at first said to be averse from this secret treason and slavery, but he fell into it, and received his share of the money, as well as Buckingham, through whose agency a second treaty was effected, raising the annual sum to five million of livres, or nearly two hundred and fifty thousand pounds a year; the article requiring the king's change of religion being omitted altogether, Charles, meanwhile, having shown his readiness to engage in the Dutch war, which was the main question. Ashley and Lauderdale, Clifford and Arlington were also in the secret, and had their reward. Many were the suspicions of this diabolical business which oozed out, and much talk was the consequence at times; the proofs were preserved with inscrutable secrecy during the lives of the parties concerned, discovery being utter and inevitable destruction. The French copy of the Treaty has hitherto escaped all research.

THE DISGRACE OF LORD CLARENDON AFTER HIS LAST INTERVIEW WITH THE KING IN WHITEHALL PALACE, 1667.

From the Painting by E. M. WARD in the National Gallery of British Art.