Secrecy was necessary, and it was advantageous to conceal the conditions. The King of England undertook to declare publicly his return to the Roman Catholic Church as his brother, the Duke of York, had done. Louis XIV. promised to assist him to that end with a sum of two millions of livres, as well as with an annual subsidy of three millions when the two princes should have declared war against Holland. Peace with Spain, always popular in England, Spain being the natural enemy of France, was to be respected by the two sovereigns.
Charles II. knew what his people were capable of enduring, and what were the limits of their patience. The declaration of Catholic faith was delayed, and the article concerning it was passed over in silence in the modified treaty brought to the knowledge of the king's Protestant ministers, the representatives of the old party of the Cavaliers—Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. They obtained from Charles II. in the place of the war which the king proposed to declare against the Hollanders, a declaration of indulgence for the Protestant Nonconformists. The Catholics were not included, and the Nonconformists began to breathe freely. Parliament voted a sum of £800,000 sterling for the support of the Triple Alliance; at the same time Ashley declared that the advances deposited in the hands of the Government by the merchants of London would not be refunded as usual, and that interest only would be paid on them to the proper persons. A sum of £1,300,000 sterling was thus added to the king's resources. Little did Charles heed the financial disasters which this arbitrary and unjust act entailed upon the city. He was now rich; he desired to be free. He prorogued Parliament, and declared war against Holland (March, 1672).
Louis XIV. entered the Netherlands. His conquests began to disquiet Europe, and caused in Holland the internal revolution which cost the brothers De Witt their lives, and placed at the head of the Dutch forces the young Prince of Orange. England took part in the struggle by a long series of naval engagements. The first, and the most important of all, the battle of Sole Bay, cost Admiral Montague, who had become Lord Sandwich, his life. The struggle was bitter. "Of thirty-two battles in which I have taken part," said Ruyter, who was gloriously defeated on that day, "I have never seen one like it." "He is at once an admiral, a captain, a pilot, a sailor, a soldier," said the English. The Duke of York incurred the greatest disaster during the action.
The war continued. The Prince of Orange and the Hollanders were resolved upon a desperate resistance. "You do not perceive that your country is lost?" said to William, the Duke of Buckingham, who had been sent by Charles II. to the Hague. "There is always a way of not witnessing her loss," replied the hero, "which is to die in the last ditch." All the dykes of Holland were filled with water; the country was inundated, the winter arrived, hostilities were suspended, and the King of France returned to St. Germain's. Before his departure he wrote in his diary the memorandum: "My departure; I desire that nothing more be done." The resources of Charles II. were exhausted; it was necessary to summon Parliament.
The war was unpopular; but the Houses were occupied with other affairs, and the subsidies which the king demanded were voted without resistance if not without ill-humor. Religious questions assumed in the public mind a predominance over political or military affairs. Parliament had been passionately royalist; its attachment to the king and confidence in him diminished day by day. The two Houses remained constantly attached to the Established Church, which they had raised up, and were ready to defend against all her enemies. The royal declaration of indulgence was the object of a hostile address; Charles had already received, through Colbert, the representations of Louis XIV.: he withdrew his measure. This was not enough to satisfy the fears of Parliament: Protestant England felt that she was delivered up to the Catholics by a monarch whose faith began to appear problematical. The Test Act was passed by the two Houses; every public functionary was compelled to take the oath of allegiance and supremacy, to sign a declaration against the doctrine of transubstantiation, and to take the Communion according to the rites of the Church of England. The king's desire was to resist; but a dissolution would have resulted in a House of Commons more violent than the royalist Long Parliament: he yielded. The Duke of York, declaring openly his conversion to Catholicism, resigned immediately the post of Lord High Admiral; Lord Clifford left the ministry; in all the public offices a great number of men, whose attachment to the Roman Catholic faith was previously unknown, successively sent in their resignation. Parliament, triumphing in the success of its measure, contemplated with apprehension the danger which had threatened it. All confidence in the word of the king disappeared from the public mind. The cabinet was already shaken by the resignation of Clifford; the Chancellor, Ashley, now Earl of Shaftesbury, who had long been in special favor with Charles, and who was worthy to serve him by reason of his caustic wit and moral corruption, was wounded by the secret which the king had withheld from him. He deemed the national liberties and religion in peril, and allied himself with the country party in the House of Commons in the month of November, 1673. This Parliament was scarcely prorogued when Charles commanded him to surrender the seals. "Now to put off my robe and buckle on my sword," said Shaftesbury; and he placed himself at the head of the opposition.
The Duke of Buckingham followed Shaftesbury in this political movement, at the moment when Parliament was appealing to the king to banish him from his councils, as well as the Earl of Lauderdale. The House of Commons was debating on the impeachment of Lord Arlington. Less honest than Clifford, but like him a Catholic at heart, Arlington renounced an active part in politics and entered the household of the king. Lauderdale alone remained entrusted with the affairs of Scotland, and suffered the accumulated hatred which fell upon him in consequence of his indefatigable tyranny. The ministry of the Cabal was at an end; with it ended the war with Holland, which had been burdensome, unpopular, and little glorious for the arms of England. In vain had Louis XIV. sent to London the Marquis of Ruvigny, a considerable person among the French Protestants, and justly esteemed in England. Parliament desired peace, and refused the subsidies. Charles II. yielded, as was his habit, to the clearly expressed wishes of the nation; and, with like conformity to his custom, he reserved his private opinions and secret manœuvres. "Pity me; do not blame me," he wrote to Louis XIV. On the 21st of February, 1674, Charles II. proceeded to Parliament, to announce to the two Houses that he had concluded with the United Provinces "a speedy peace, in accordance with their prayer, and he hoped also an honorable and a durable one." The English and Irish auxiliary regiments, commanded by the Duke of Monmouth, a natural son of the king, remained quietly in the service of France. Louis XIV. did not withdraw his subsidies from his royal dependent.
The ladies who had served as a lien between the two crowns, and had negotiated the humiliating conditions of the alliance between the two kings, had died during the ascendency of the ministry of the Cabal—the Queen Henrietta Maria in the month of August, 1669, in France, where she habitually resided with her second husband, Lord Jermyn; the Duchess of Orleans, Madame Henrietta, in June, 1670, at the moment when she had just concluded the treaty of Dover—the latter not without a suspicion of poison. Both were eulogized by Bossuet in the most magnificent language; both in a measure and with a different degree of responsibility were fatal to the destinies of England. Monk also had died on the 3rd of January, 1670, as calm before the progress of his malady as in the face of the enemy. Old and suffering as he was, he had personally hastened to encounter the Dutch when they entered the Thames. As they were re-embarking, their bullets whistled in the ears of the general. His aides-de-camp pressed him to retire. "If I was afraid of bullets, gentlemen," said Monk, "I should long ago have quitted this business."
He died erect, turning his head to breathe in silence his last sigh. "A man capable of great things, though he had no grandeur in his soul; born at once to command and to obey; sensible, patient, and brave; attached to his own interest, and yet devoted in every great position to his duty as a soldier and an Englishman; without political ambition and not aspiring to govern his country—he knew how to acknowledge his country's rights, and to restore to her the government which had become indispensable."
Charles II. had not forgotten the services rendered to him by Monk; he was neither shocked by his pecuniary greed nor by the grossness of his manners. He had loaded him with wealth and honors, and he followed him to the tomb in Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster. The general had never played any political part, and his death left no void in the direction of affairs, which were becoming every day more complicated and more violently conflicting. The court party and the country party divided the two Houses. Out of doors the country party was strikingly superior. The conviction of this fact alone prolonged the existence of the Royalist Long Parliament. The time had now gone by when courtiers, probably with the assent of the king, dared to set miserable hirelings to mutilate the face of Sir John Coventry, a prominent member of the opposition in the Commons. From this time forth the country party took the measure of the royal authority, and raised its pretensions even to the question of the succession to the throne. The enthusiasm and the confidence which marked the first days of the Restoration had given way to sombre disquietude. It was not with his ordinary exaggeration that Lord Shaftesbury said, "If the king had had the happiness to be born a simple gentleman, he might have passed for a man of sense, good breeding, and good disposition. As a king he has brought his affairs to such a point that there is not a creature in the world, man or woman, who can feel the least confidence in his word or his attachment."