He came to do what Courtin had considered improbable, and what would have been impossible but for the help he received from the Duchess of Portsmouth. Between Barillon and the spy there was the most perfect understanding. Only a miracle could keep England passive while Louis XIV. crossed the Rhine, but the two magicians performed it. With all his cunning Charles II. had at last over-reached himself in his dealings with the nation. He had squandered his Fortunatus' purse of power and, like all spendthrifts, he was forced to go to the usurers. There were only two in Europe able to advance Charles the sums he required. These were his partner, England, and Louis Quatorze. The usury exacted by the former became with each call higher and higher; by this fortuitous means the English people were gradually recovering the liberties they had allowed themselves to be swindled out of at the beginning of the reign. At each session of Parliament Charles was obliged by his extravagance to relinquish more and more power. He had so fallen into the hands of this usurer that it was even proposed in the House of Lords to impeach the Duchess of Portsmouth. Whereupon one peer cynically remarked "that they ought rather to erect statues to the ladies who made their lover dependent on Parliament for his subsistence."
Charles was faced with the humiliating prospect of sinking from the head of the firm to the position of mere clerk, when Barillon and the Duchess of Portsmouth offered to set him on his feet again. They stipulated for one condition only: that he would calmly look on while Louis ate up Spain, Holland, Germany, and even the Pope. To have escaped from the hands of the Parliament Charles would willingly have consented if Louis had proposed to make himself master of Asia, Africa, and America as well. But the sum he required to clear him of his difficulties staggered Louis; there was such a thing as paying too big a price even for Europe. "The plea," says Mrs. Jameson, "used by Charles to persuade Louis to come to his terms was, 'that it would render England for ever dependent on him, and put it out of the power of the English to oppose him.' These were the King's own words." France had already spent immense sums in bribes without any satisfactory remuneration, but Louis now exacted usury for the money he advanced. The English Parliament was to be dissolved sine die, in order that Charles should do Louis' bidding without the remonstrance of his subjects. In return for this independence Charles was to receive four million pounds, the receipt of which he was to acknowledge duly. In this way if Charles tried to be slippery Louis could threaten him with exposure. Barillon admits that he had orders to blackmail him the moment he attempted to be independent. Charles's receipts are still to be seen in the French Archives. He had fallen from the frying-pan into the fire with a vengeance. One had to have one's wits about one to get the better of Louis XIV.
The rage of the English people at finding themselves "done" in this way by their King was overmastering. Totally ignorant of Charles's compact with Louis, they nevertheless beheld the result in the triumph of France against coalesced Europe. Nor was England's rage at this triumph lessened by the knowledge that it was due to her own neutrality. "The English people," says Forneron, "were carried away against the Catholics by one of those frenzies of contagious hatred which sometimes take hold of a nation like an epidemic. When a nation is possessed by a fit of such fury, there is always a statesman ready to pander to it."
It is not here that we can describe the character of Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, and all the details of that tissue of iniquity known as the Popish Plot. For this English Dreyfus Affair the reader is recommended to any History of England. "Shiftsbury," or "the most vicious dog in England," as Charles called him, was a seventeenth-century opportunist with a truly marvellous faculty of recognising psychological moments. He was also that exceedingly rare individual, a genuinely bad man. He organised the Popish Plot, and sprung it on the nation at the ripe moment to clear the road for his own ambition. On the wave of terror it created he was carried to power. In the intense excitement of the time the life of no Catholic in the country was safe, and Shaftesbury's creature, Titus Oates, accused even poor Queen Catherine. The Catholic Duke of York, like the coward he was, fled from England; the King himself, for his own security, dismissed his band of French musicians and was ready, if necessary at a moment's notice, to abandon his favourites to the popular fury. Revolution was shaking the throne. Among the strange phenomena that were witnessed in this period of chaos not the least curious was that of Nell Gwynn, posing as the head of the Protestants. It is, perhaps, not too much to say that the part she played in this religious convulsion of the English people explains the leniency, closely resembling popularity, with which she alone of Charles's mistresses is regarded by posterity. Of all the volumes that have been written on the Restoration no light has ever been shed so clearly on the character of the times as the fact that Protestant England could hail with acclaim a king's mistress as its champion. A while before it had been the Duchesse de Mazarin, now it was Nell's turn. The atmosphere of the Restoration had contaminated even morality itself.
In such a state of affairs the position of the Duchess of Portsmouth was very grave. Both Houses of Parliament demanded her impeachment, and the people clamoured that she should be executed in the Tower along with the fallen minister, Danby, who was already there. She fell ill from sheer fright. Barillon, however, alone of mortals, kept his head. He advised her, if possible, to make friends with Shaftesbury, and this, as if to make confusion still more confounded, she succeeded in doing. But in this hour of unparalleled success Shaftesbury made the first blunder of his political career. A severe attack of malignant fever threatening the King's life, the question of the succession became acute. Shaftesbury proposed the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, the King's eldest bastard, as the heir to the throne in place of the Duke of York, and the Duchess of Portsmouth got drawn into this Monmouth intrigue. Hereupon the Prince of Orange, afterwards William III., as a Protestant and the next legitimate male heir after the Duke of York, appeared on the scene—the Prince of Orange, a cold Northern Machiavelli, with an openly avowed and undying hatred of Louis XIV. and France. Shaftesbury and the Popish Plot had turned England into a pandemonium.
"I believe," wrote Barillon to Louis, "each now wishes to save himself at the cost of the others."
A profound darkness seemed to have fallen on the frenzied nation, in which for a time Barillon and the Duchess of Portsmouth became separated. Monmouth was effaced by the lampoons which, owing to the imprudence of her Grace's maid, Mrs. Wall, connected him with the hated Duchess. Shaftesbury was dislodged from power by his rival Sunderland, who maintained himself largely by the aid of the cunning Frenchwoman who by her devotion, by the knowledge she had of Charles's shameful secret understanding with Louis, and by her ability, with which she deeply impressed her royal lover, still continued maîtresse en titre and spy of the Court of France at Whitehall.
But in the darkness in which all groped the adventures of none were more curious than Louis'. He bribed lavishly every one he stumbled against, so to speak, to show him the way towards the light. No price was too great to pay, no abasement too shameless, that would keep the Prince of Orange from succeeding Charles II. History has revealed the extraordinary spectacle of the Presbyterians hobnobbing with his Most Christian Majesty, the Republican party in England allied to the French tyrant!
"Baber continues to work the Presbyterians," wrote Barillon. "It is through him that I have gained two popular preachers who can insinuate things that it would never do to say openly. I know that they have spoken in the pulpit of a matter which would not count anywhere else, unless here, but which in England is no trifle. It is that the Prince of Orange hunts on Sundays."
Barillon had got into the skin of the nation to which he was accredited. Whether Louis laughed at the depth of religious hypocrisy that took his bribes and objected to hunting on Sundays, is not recorded; perhaps not, the situation was too serious even for his sardonic humour.