On great questions so imperfect a composition of the representative body mattered indeed little, for whatever were their origin the members shared in the general national feeling and expressed fairly the national sentiment. But in the common business of Parliament and in questions of detail it told fatally on the temper of the House. The members were conscious of their power, but they were checked by little sense of responsibility for its exercise. They were open therefore to the meanest and most selfish influences. Charles had done much by "closeting" them. Danby, bolder and less ingenious, trusted to coarser means. With him began the system of direct bribery which was to culminate in the Parliamentary corruption of the Pelhams. He was more successful in winning back the majority of the Commons from their alliance with the Country party by reviving the old spirit of religious persecution. With the view of breaking up the growing union between the Churchmen and the Nonconformists as well as of driving from Parliament the Presbyterian members who formed the strength of the Country party, and whose numbers increased as time brought fresh elections, he proposed that the test which had been imposed by Clarendon on municipal officers should be extended to all functionaries of the State, that every member of either House, every magistrate and public officer, should swear never to take arms against the king or to "endeavour any alteration of the Protestant religion now established by law in the Church of England, or any alteration in the Government in Church and State as it is by law established." The Bill was forced through the Lords by the bishops and the Cavalier party, and its passage through the Commons was only averted by a quarrel on privilege between the two Houses which Shaftesbury dexterously fanned into flame.
Charles turns to France.
On the other hand the Country party remained strong enough to hamper their grant of supplies with conditions which rendered it unacceptable to the king. Eager as they were for the war with France which Danby promised, the Commons could not trust the king; and Danby was soon to discover how wise their distrust had been. For the Houses were no sooner prorogued in November 1675 than Charles revealed to him the negotiations he had been all the while carrying on with Lewis. To France, hard pressed as she was by the allies, the entry of England into the war would have been ruinous; and Lewis was eager to avert this danger by promising Charles a subsidy should the Parliament strive to force on him a war policy by refusing or limiting supplies. Charles, who still looked to France for aid in his plans and who believed war would deliver him helplessly into the power of the Parliament, was as ready to accept the money as Lewis to give it. At this juncture therefore he called on Danby to sign a treaty by which, on consideration of a yearly pension guaranteed on the part of France, the two sovereigns bound themselves to enter into no engagements with other powers, and to lend each other aid in case of rebellion in their dominions. Such a treaty not only bound England to dependence on France, but freed the king from all Parliamentary control. But his minister pleaded in vain for delay and for the advice of the Council. Charles answered his entreaties by signing the treaty with his own hand.
Danby's measures.
Danby found himself duped by the king as Shaftesbury had found himself duped; but his bold temper was only spurred to fresh plans for rescuing the king from his bondage to Lewis. To do this the first step was fully to reconcile the king and the Parliament, which met again in February 1677 after a prorogation of fifteen months. The Country party stood in the way of such a reconciliation, but Danby resolved to break its strength by measures of unscrupulous vigour for which a blunder of Shaftesbury's gave an opportunity. Shaftesbury despaired of bringing the House of Commons, elected as it had been fifteen years before in a moment of religious and political reaction, to any steady opposition to the Crown. He had already moved an address for its dissolution; and he now urged that as a statute of Edward the Third ordained that Parliaments should be held "once a year or oftener if need be" the Parliament by the recent prorogation of a year and a half had ceased legally to exist. The Triennial Act deprived such an argument of any force, and its only effect was to place the Country party in an injudicious position of general hostility to the existing Parliament. But Danby represented it as a contempt of the House, and the Lords at his bidding committed its supporters, Shaftesbury, Buckingham, Salisbury, and Wharton, to the Tower. While the Opposition cowered under the blow Danby pushed on a measure which was designed to win back alarmed Churchmen to confidence in the Crown. The terror of a Catholic successor grew steadily throughout the country, and it was to meet this terror that Danby devised his Bill for the security of the Church. By this Bill it was provided that on the succession of any king who was not a member of the Established Church the appointment of bishops should be vested in the existing body of prelates, and that the king's children should be placed in the guardianship of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The cry for War.
The bill however failed in the Commons; and a grant of supply unchecked by the appropriation of the money to special services, a limitation which Charles steadily opposed, was only obtained by Danby's profuse bribery. The progress of the war abroad indeed was rousing panic in England faster than Danby could allay it. New successes of the French arms in Flanders and a defeat of the Prince of Orange at Cassel stirred the whole country to a cry for war. The two Houses united in an address to the Crown which prayed that England might enter into the Great Alliance that William had built up, but Charles parried the blow by demanding a supply before the war was declared and by a new prorogation of the House on a new refusal. Fresh and larger subsidies from France enabled him to continue this prorogation for seven months. But the silence of the Parliament did little to silence the country; and Danby took advantage of the popular cry for war to press an energetic course of action on the king. In its will to check French aggression the Cavalier party was as earnest as the Puritan, and Danby aimed at redeeming his failure at home by uniting the Parliament through a vigorous policy abroad.
Marriage of William and Mary.
As usual Charles appeared to give way. He was himself for the moment uneasy at the appearance of the French on the Flemish coast, and he owned that "he could never live at ease with his subjects" if Flanders were abandoned. He allowed Danby therefore to press on both parties the necessity for mutual concessions, and to define the new attitude of England by reviving the project for a match between Mary and William of Orange. William's distrust of Arlington, by whom the proposal of it had been made to him, had led the Prince at first to set aside the scheme. But he had never lost sight of it, and the counsels of Sir William Temple had brought him in 1677 to make overtures for its realization. Charles and Danby had still the same reasons for desiring it, and the marriage took place on William's visit to England in September. As the king was childless and James had no son Mary was presumptive heiress of the Crown. The marriage therefore promised a close political union in the future with Holland, and a corresponding opposition to the ambition of France. With the country it was popular as a Protestant match and as ensuring a Protestant successor to James. But Lewis was bitterly angered; he rejected the English propositions of peace and again sent his army into the field. Danby was ready to accept the challenge. The withdrawal of the English ambassador from Paris was followed in 1678 by an assembly of the Parliament; a warlike speech from the throne was answered by a warlike address from the House, large supplies were voted and an army raised.
Peace of Nimeguen.