The Cabal.
No one was more glad than the king at Clarendon's departure. He filled the place of his well-intentioned, if narrow-minded, minister with a clique of his disreputable friends. This administration was called the "Cabal" (from Cabala, the Hebrew word for strange and occult knowledge), as being the depository of the king's secrets. The name became popular because it chanced that the initials of the names of the five men who formed it spelt the word "Cabal." They were Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. Lord Clifford and the Earl of Arlington were Romanists, a fact which brought much odium and suspicion on their doings. George, Duke of Buckingham, the son of the favourite of Charles I., a volatile, insincere man—
"Stiff in opinion, always in the wrong,
Was everything by starts, and nothing long,"
as Dryden wrote. He was the most profligate and unscrupulous man in England. Lauderdale, an ambitious Scottish peer, was a renegade Covenanter who had sold himself to the king for power. Anthony Ashley, Lord Shaftesbury, was also an old Roundhead, whose love of office and preferment had overcome his principles. He was an active, unscrupulous man, whose ready talents were only prevented from achieving greatness by his want of honesty and clear judgment.
Policy of Charles.
In replacing Clarendon by the "Cabal," Charles had two objects. So far as he cared for anything beyond his own pleasures, he was set on attaining two ends which he knew to be hateful to the nation: one was to render himself independent of Parliamentary control; the other to secure toleration, and if possible predominance, in England for Romanism. He thought that his new ministers were sufficiently free from scruples to aid him in his projects.
Schemes of Lewis XIV.
His main helper in the scheme was to be his cousin Lewis XIV., the zealous champion of Roman Catholicism on the continent, and the most busy and ambitious monarch that France had ever known. Lewis had already started on his long career of aggression against Spain, Holland, and Austria. He was set on seizing for himself the frontier of the Rhine, the dream of all French statesmen since his day. To achieve this, he wished to conquer the Spanish Netherlands—the modern Belgium—and the petty principalities of the middle and lower Rhine. At the same time he was set on striking a blow against Protestantism, whenever he had the chance, and most especially against the Protestant power of Holland—for the "United Provinces" were both republican and Calvinist, the two things that he hated most in the world.