The Chancellor succumbed under the burden both of his virtues and his defeats. "Raised by the Restoration to the summit of authority, he succeeded to power with a hatred for all that had passed during twenty years, and with an intention of restoring everything in Church and State to the point at which the revolution had found it. But he had what is often wanting, or is quickly dissipated in active and elevated spheres of life, namely, opinions and faith in duty. He was often in error; he committed, or suffered to be committed, iniquities; but truth and virtue were not in his eyes chimeras. Often irrational and unjust in his relations with the national party, he was towards his own party firm, enlightened, and virtuous. A severe censor of the corruption of Charles II., frankly Protestant in a Papist court, notwithstanding his personal hatred towards the Presbyterians; grave and austere in the midst of frivolous and greedy courtiers; moderate by reason, though his nature was harsh and perhaps even vindictive; he constantly set his face against those wild disorders, that reckless and capricious tyranny, to which the government was unceasingly impelled by the vices of the king and the passions of the Cavaliers. As a returned exile he did not control the evil genius of the Restoration, and did not even conceive the idea of controlling it. An Englishman of the old type, he opposed to the perverse nature of his party all his power, ability, and virtue."
It was the virtues of Clarendon that alienated from him the mind of the king. Weary of the constraint which the principles of his minister imposed upon him, the king deprived him of the seals in the month of August, 1667. "The Chancellor was as much surprised as he could have been if one had presented to him an order for his execution," says Clarendon himself in his memoirs. He had believed himself assured of the heart and the fidelity of the king against all his enemies. The House of Commons proceeded at once to the impeachment. Clarendon was avaricious, yet at the same time lavish. His princely dwelling was the object of jealousy among all the Cavaliers, who had been ruined by the sequestrations and the disadvantageous liquidations to which they had been subjected under the Commonwealth. "The Act of Indemnity for the enemies of the king had become an act of oblivion for his friends," said the country gentlemen who had been deprived of their property. They accused the Chancellor of having enriched himself more rapidly than was consistent with honor. The House of Lords defended him without success. Charles pressed his old servant to leave England, in order to prevent, as he said, the evils that might result to the kingdom from the division which had manifested itself between the two Houses. Clarendon resisted; the king at length gave him the order to depart. "It is absolutely necessary that he should go promptly; I answer upon my salvation for his safety." Such was the language addressed to the fallen minister by the Bishop of Winchester, who was charged to deliver the royal message. Clarendon, old and in weak health, set out immediately. It was on the night of the 25th of November, 1667. Scarcely had he touched the soil of France when the two Houses voted his banishment; at the same time making it unlawful to grant him any pardon without the authority of Parliament. Dejected and without hope, Clarendon established himself at Montpelier. There he wrote his admirable History of the Rebellion, his memoirs, and several works of piety. When he died, at Rouen in 1674, he had not seen England again, and had not received from the king any testimony of affection or remembrance—a striking example of royal ingratitude, as well as of the incapacity of an exile to govern a country the life of which he had long ceased to share or to understand.
With the downfall of Clarendon commenced the reign of the intriguers, the corrupt and the corrupters, and the moral decline of the party of the government, composed at first of men who were honest even in their excesses, but were soon bought by money or favors, and led into concessions and to a line of policy often of shameful kinds. The ministry of the Cabal, as it was called, from the names of the politicians who composed it—Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale—was not formed in the interest of any settled principles either political or social. By turns flattering liberals and arbitrary absolutionists, complaisant to the whims of the king, and lavish of their favors towards men whose votes or support were necessary, they sought abroad the alliance of the King of France, and soon sank into dependence upon him, impelled towards that degradation by the need of an éclat which they could find only in war, with the all-powerful succor of Louis XIV.
The first effort of the king's new advisers was wiser and more prescient. Popularity among the Protestants in England and on the Continent was the object to which their views were directed. They sent to Holland Sir William Temple, an able and honest diplomatist, qualified to appreciate the elevated and patriotic views of the grand pensionary, John de Witt. Naturally favorable to the French alliance, which he had long sought and sustained, John de Witt had been rendered anxious by the progress of the power and ambition of Louis XIV. He desired to protect Europe against his invasions, by drawing closer that ancient union of the Protestant countries promoted of old at the instigation of Burleigh under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth. The treaty of the Triple Alliance, signed at the Hague on the 23d of January, 1668, engaged England, Sweden, and the United Provinces, to defend against France the weak monarchy of Spain. A secret article bound the allies to take up arms to restrain Louis XIV., and if possible to bring him back to the conditions of the peace of the Pyrenees. The peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was the fruit of that prudent and wise policy.
John de Witt and the Dutch were destined to pay dearly for their courageous initiative. "In the midst of all my prosperity in my campaigns of 1667," writes Louis XIV. in his memoirs, "neither England nor the Empire, convinced of the justice of my cause, offered any opposition, however much their interests were opposed to the rapidity of my conquests. On my way I found only my good, faithful, and old friends, the Hollanders, who, instead of interesting themselves in my good fortune as furnishing the foundation of their State, attempted to impose conditions on me and compel me to make peace. They even dared to employ threats in case I should refuse to accept their mediation. I confess that their insolence wounded me to the quick, and that I was tempted to risk what might happen to my conquests in the Spanish Netherlands, and to turn all my forces against that haughty and ungrateful nation. But having called prudence to my aid, I dissembled, and concluded a peace on honorable conditions, resolved to postpone the punishment of that perfidy to another occasion."
The first care of Louis XIV. in his operations against Holland was naturally to detach Charles II. from his alliance. In this business he employed his sister-in-law, Madame Henrietta of England, an adroit and agreeable person, tenderly attached both to her brother and to France, without allowing the subjection of Charles to the all-powerful Louis XIV. to wear the appearance of a disgraceful or humiliating fact for his native country. The position of the King of England in his kingdom, in the face of his Parliament, became every day more difficult. The excesses of the court party, their corruption, their flagrant vices, had at last brought about a national reaction which was felt even in Parliament, at one time so passionately and blindly loyal. The country party was formed in opposition to the ministry of the Cabal, which was divided within itself, being now drawn towards the Dutch alliance by the Earl of Arlington, now driven towards France by the Duke of Buckingham. The nation awoke from her ecstatic loyalty, and aspired to resume her share in the government.
Shrewd and penetrating under his external appearance of indifference, Charles II. understood better than his ministers the changes of public opinion, and the risk which they compelled him to encounter. The constraint of constitutional government was burdensome to his licentious selfishness, as it had been to the timid pride of his father. He desired to free himself from the trammels which Parliament imposed upon him. But he had no army; a few regiments of guards, silently recruited, were insufficient to sustain a struggle for which he had moreover no pecuniary resources. He could find no support except from abroad; the alliance which his sister had offered him in the name of Louis XIV. assured him the aid of which he stood in need. A secret treaty was concluded at Dover in the month of May, 1670, but signed only by the Catholic advisers of the king. The greater part of the ministers were ignorant of its existence.