Charles At The House Of Lady Castlemaine.
Cromwell had acquired Dunkirk at the price of the aid of his brave soldiers in the war against Spain. Charles II. sold it to Louis XIV. for five millions of livres—a step profoundly unpopular and one which hurt the pride of the English, long wounded by the loss of Calais, and for a while consoled by the acquisition of Dunkirk. The merchants of London offered the king enormous advances, in order to avert what they regarded as a national dishonor. Charles II. hoped to obtain from Louis XIV. something more and better than the price of Dunkirk; he concluded the treaty notwithstanding the public discontent.
The Queen Henrietta Maria had conducted for her son the negotiations with France. It was to her that Louis XIV. explained his reasons for remaining faithful to his alliance with the Dutch when in 1665 Charles II., under a frivolous pretext, declared war against the United Provinces. "I desired the Queen of England, who was at that time in Paris," says the king in his memoirs, "to explain to her son that in the particular esteem which I felt towards him, I could not without sorrow take the resolution to which I found myself obliged by the engagement of my word; for at the commencement of this war I felt persuaded that he had been carried by the suffrages of his subjects further than he would have gone if he had consulted only his own feelings."
The fidelity of Louis XIV. to his engagements did not induce him to hasten to afford to the Dutch substantial assistance. Defeated in the outset off Lowestoft (June, 1665), the Dutch, under the command of Ruyter and Cornelis de Witt, contended with Monk and Prince Rupert with success. "The court," says Burnet in his History of His Own Times, "gave out that it was a victory, and public thanksgivings were ordered, which was a horrid mockery of God and a lying to the world. We had in one respect to thank God—that we had not lost our whole fleet." A secret treaty was then concluded between Louis XIV. and Charles II. Meanwhile the Dutch fleet again ascended the Thames as far as Sheerness, insulting English pride at the gates of London. Charles II. had neglected the defence of his ports; at the moment when Ruyter and De Witt were sailing proudly on his waters, the king and his associates, assembled at Lady Castlemaine's, were chasing a moth which had lost its way in her splendid apartments. Negotiations were already begun at Breda; three treaties of peace were concluded there in the month of July, 1667, between Holland, France, and Denmark.
An ancient commercial and maritime rivalry had at one time excited the hatred of the English against Holland. The conformity of manners and religion, and the principles of liberty which existed in the two countries, counterbalanced the old animosity. The war had been more royal and less popular than Louis XIV. imagined. Charles II. had never forgiven the Hollanders for the decree of exclusion which they had pronounced against his house, at the instigation of Cromwell. It was felt in England that the war was not a righteous one; the misfortunes which soon afterwards overtook the capital seemed like a punishment for it. The Plague broke out in London in 1665; in five months it destroyed more than 100,000 persons. "This did dishearten all people," says Burnet, "and coming in the very time in which so unjust a war was begun it had a dreadful appearance. All the king's enemies and the enemies of monarchy said here was a manifest character of God's heavy displeasure upon the nation, and indeed the ill life the king led and the viciousness of the whole court gave but a melancholy prospect."
The king and court left London; Parliament was convened at Oxford; the aged Monk alone solicited the government of the capital. The expelled Nonconformist pastors returned in a mass into the midst of their old flocks now bewildered with terror. The Parliament of Oxford rejected an act of indulgence of the king tending to suspend penal legislation against the nonjurors; it forbade the dispossessed ministers to approach the scene of their old functions. When the Plague was at an end the Act of the Five Thousand once more banished the old pastors from the congregations whom they had edified and consoled during the infection. The king had scarcely returned to his capital when a fire of unparalleled extent devastated it anew. Thirteen thousand houses were burnt, eighty-nine churches destroyed in the City, sixty-three in the environs. Two hundred thousand persons, it is said, found themselves without shelter, compelled to camp out under tents in the fields. The king and the Duke of York honorably displayed their courage; but so many calamities began to weary the nation. In Scotland the tyranny of Lord Lauderdale and Archbishop Sharp provoked an insurrection which was more religious than political. The people remained passionately attached to the Presbyterian Church and the Covenant. The pressure exercised for the establishment of the Episcopate roused the Covenanters of the West at the moment when the Fire of London occupied all minds; it cost some trouble to reduce them; executions were not successful in calming the irritation. Smouldering in England, whilst it was bursting forth in Scotland, discontent was everywhere the same. National loyalty still protected the king. It was against his ministers, and particularly against the Earl of Clarendon, that public prejudice was directed.