Charles, however, was determined to have money by fair means or foul. A group of London goldsmiths had loaned more than a million and a quarter pounds sterling to the government. In 1672 Charles announced that instead of paying the money back, he would consider it a permanent loan. Two years earlier he had signed the secret treaty of Dover (1670) with Louis XIV, by which Louis promised him an annual subsidy of £200,000 and troops in case of rebellion, while Charles was openly to join the Roman Catholic Church and to aid Louis in his French wars against Spain and Holland.
[Sidenote: Continued Religious Complications]
[Sidenote: Legislation against Protestant Dissenters]
In his ambition to reëstablish Catholicism in England, Charles underestimated the intense hostility of the bulk of the English squires to any religious innovation. During the first decade of the Restoration, Puritanism had been most feared. Some two thousand clergymen, mostly Presbyterian, had been deprived of their offices by an Act of Uniformity (1662), requiring their assent to the Anglican prayer-book; these dissenting clergymen might not return within five miles of their old churches unless they renounced the "Solemn League and Covenant" and swore loyalty to the king (Five-mile Act, 1665); for repeated attendance at their meetings (conventicles) Dissenters might be condemned to penal servitude in the West Indies against (Conventicle Act, 1664); and the Corporation Act of 1661 excluded Dissenters from town offices.
[Sidenote: Leanings of Charles II toward Roman Catholicism]
As the danger from Puritanism disappeared, the Catholic cloud darkened the horizon. In 1672 Prince James, the heir to the throne, embraced Catholicism; and in the same year Charles II issued a "Declaration of Indulgence," suspending the laws which oppressed Roman Catholics and incidentally the Dissenters likewise. The Declaration threw England into paroxysms of fear; it was believed that the Catholic monarch of France was about to aid in the subversion of the Anglican Church.
[Sidenote: Leanings of Charles II toward Roman Catholicism]
[Sidenote: The Exclusion Bill]
Parliament, already somewhat distrustful of Charles's foreign policy, and fearful of his leanings toward Roman Catholicism, found in the Declaration of Indulgence a serious infraction of parliamentary authority. The royal right to "suspend" laws upon occasion had undoubtedly been exercised before, but Parliament was now strong enough to insist upon the binding force of its enactments and to oblige Charles to withdraw his Indulgence. The fear of Catholicism ever increased; gentlemen who at other times were quite rational gave unhesitating credence to wild tales of a "Popish Plot" (1678). In 1679 an Exclusion Bill was brought forward which would debar Prince James from the throne, because of his conversion to Roman Catholicism.
[Sidenote: The "Whigs">[
In the excitement over this latest assertion of parliamentary power, [Footnote: In the course of the debate over Exclusion, the parliamentary party won an important concession—the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, which was designed to prevent arbitrary imprisonment.] two great factions were formed. The supporters of Exclusion were led by certain great nobles who were jealous of the royal power, and were recruited from merchants and shop-keepers who looked to Parliament to protect their economic interests. Since many of the adherents of this political group were Dissenters, whose dislike of Anglicanism was exceeded only by their hatred of "popery," the whole party was called by a nickname—"Whig"—which had formerly been applied to rebellious Presbyterians in Scotland.
[Sidenote: The "Tories">[