Charles having got all he could out of the people, for the purposes of war, thought he might as well be paid on both sides, and began to think of selling peace to his enemies. He entered into negotiations with the Dutch, but before they had come to terms, he commenced cutting down the expenses by selling the furniture of his fleets to the dealers in marine stores, and dismissing his soldiers, in order to put their pay into his own pocket. He was properly served for his selfish parsimony by De Buyter, the Dutch admiral, who, hearing that Charles was doing everything upon a low and paltry scale, dashed at the Medway, surprised Sheerness, and sacked not only the place, but several cargoes of coal that were lying there. Upon the old English principle of guarding the stable door after the furtive removal of the horse, Charles prepared to collect a force to guard his country against the injury it had already experienced. Twelve thousand men were enrolled; but during the process of enrolment, the enemy had got safely off, and when the soldiers were assembled, it occurred suddenly to the king that he had no means of paying them. As the Parliament seemed quite unwilling to take this little responsibility off his hands, the twelve thousand men were disbanded, all of them grumbling furiously at having been made fools of by the bankrupt monarch. Peace was concluded with De Ruyter just as if nothing had happened; and though the English did not obtain all they asked, they got the colony of New York, which was destined to give them so much trouble at a far distant period.
The people were by no means satisfied with the terms of the treaty, and as national ill-humour must always have a victim of some kind, poor old Clarendon, the Chancellor, was pounced upon. The Nonconformists hated him because he was a high churchman; the high church party hated him because he wasn't; while the papists hated him, they didn't exactly know why; and the courtiers hated him because they had got a large balance of general animosity on hand, which they were determined to expend upon somebody. Clarendon, in fact, was the grand centre in which all the detestation of the country appeared to meet, or he might be more appropriately called the bull's-eye of the target towards which the shafts of public malignity were directed. Clarendon had been a faithful servant to Charles, but the monarch's stock of gratitude had always been very small, and what little he once possessed he had paid away long ago, to less worthy objects. He accordingly sent to the Chancellor for the Great Seal, but Clarendon, pleading gout for not immediately leaving home, promised that when he could get out he would call and leave the official emblem at the palace. Charles replied, that as to Clarendon's postponing his resignation till he could get out, he must get out at once, if he wished to avoid an ejection of a not very agreeable character. Urged by this formidable message, he took Whitehall in his way during a morning's walk, and having seen the king, made a desperate but useless struggle to retain the seal, which he was forced to surrender. His misfortunes did not end here, for the Commons impeached him; and Clarendon, as if owning the not very soft impeachment, absconded to France, where he ended his days in exile.
A change of ministry ensued on the downfall of Clarendon, and a Government was formed which gave rise to almost the only constitutional pun which we find recorded in history. The cabinet received the name of the Cabal, from the five initial letters of the names of the quintette to whom public affairs were intrusted. This great national acrostic deserves better treatment than it has hitherto received at the hands of the historians; and taking down our rhyming dictionary from the cupboard in which it had been shelved, we proceed to invest the political jeu d'esprit with the dignity of poetry.
C was a Clifford, the Treasury's chief;
A was an Arlington, brilliant and brief;
B was a Buckingham—horrible scamp;
A was an Ashley, of similar stamp;
L was a Lauderdale, Buckingham's pal.
Now take their initials to form a Cabal.
These five individuals looked upon politics as a trade, and principles as the necessary capital, which must be tinned over and over again in order to realise extraordinary profits. They were all of them out-pensioners on the bounty of France, and they soon persuaded Charles that it was better to receive a fixed salary from abroad, than trust for his supplies to the caprice of a Parliament. The king, therefore, intrigued with several States at the same moment, and was taking money from two or three different Governments, on the strength of treaties with each, some of which he all the while intended to violate. He nevertheless did not disdain the money of his own people, and extracted a sum of £310,000 from the public pocket, in the shape of a supply from Parliament.
The domestic proceedings of the king were always of the most disreputable kind, and he had lately taken up with one Mary or Molly Davies, a jig dancer, who pretended to come of a very ancient family in Moldavia. This wretched little ballet-girl was introduced at Court by the king, who was positively ambitious of being thought rather "fast," an epithet which is generally bestowed on loose characters. He had also formed an intimacy with Eleanor, or Nell Gwynne, originally a vendor of "oranges, apples, nuts, and pears," but subsequently an actress; and it was said at the time—which is some excuse perhaps for our saying it again—that Eleanor sounded the knell of older favourites. Lady Castlemaine, who went by the name of "the lady," was cut by the king in favour of the fruit girl and the figurante.
Notwithstanding the rivalry to which "the lady" was exposed, her influence over the mind of Charles—if we may be allowed the allegory—was still very considerable; and in the year 1670, which was very soon after Miss M. Davies had danced herself into the good graces of the king, he conferred the title of Duchess of Cleveland on Lady Castlemaine. As many of our aristocratic families are fond of tracing their origin to its very remotest source, we shall perhaps be thanked for assisting some of them in the search to find the root of their nobility. We, however, decline the, to us, wholly uninteresting task, for we are quite content to take our peerage as it comes, and estimate its members for their personal worth, without reference to their ancestors. We certainly should not value the vinegar in our cruet any the more if we knew it comprised within it a dissolved pearl, nor should we treasure a lump of charcoal on account of its supposed relationship to some late lamented diamond.
With our accustomed fairness, we on the other hand have no wish to throw a degraded and abandoned ancestry into the faces of those who do not presume upon birth, but are decently thankful for its worldly advantages. It is only when we find rank turning up its nose at all inferior stations that we feel delight in seizing the offending snout, and driving home the iron ring, to show a connection between the proboscis of pride and the humbler materials of humanity.