Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/448

414 spect, and the women, especially, were treated with brutal indecency.

But though the Quakers were pre-eminent in suffering in England—in Scotland, the scenes that were enacting under Lauderdale, with Ids hell-hound commander. Sir James Turner, were most frightful. Of Lauderdale, the tyrant deputy of Scotland at this period, Macaulay draws this true portrait:—"Lauderdale, loud and course both in mirth and anger, was perhaps, under the outward show of boisterous frankness, the most dishonest man in the whole cabal. He had made himself conspicuous amongst the Scotch insurgents of 1638 by his zeal for the covenant. He was accused of being deeply concerned in the sale of Charles I. to the English parliament, and was, therefore, in the estimation of good cavaliers, a traitor, if possible, of a worse description than those who had sate in the High Court of Justice. He often talked with noisy jocularity of the days when he was a canter and a rebel. He was now the chief instrument employed by the court in the work of forcing episcopacy on his reluctant countrymen; nor did he in that cause shrink from the unsparing use of the sword, the halter, and the boot. Yet those who knew him knew that thirty years had made no change in his real sentiments, that he still hated the memory of Charles I., and that he still preferred the presbyterian form of church government to any other." If we add to this picture Carlyle's additional touch of "his big red head," we have a sufficient idea of this monster of a man, as he was now at work in Scotland with his renegade archbishop Sharpe, with their racks, thumbscrews, and the boot, so vividly described by Sir Walter Scott in "Old Mortality" and the "Tales of a Grandfather;" and Turner pursuing the flying covenanters to the mountains and morasses with fire and sword.

In Scotland it was not against sects, but against the whole presbyterian church that the fury of the persecutors was directed. The presbyterians had effectually crashed out all dissenters, and now they themselves felt the iron hand of intolerance. No sooner did the conventicle act pass in England, than the royalist parliament passed one there in almost the same terms, and another act offering Charles twenty thousand foot and two thousand horse to march into England, to assist in putting down his subjects there, if necessary. Sharpe was wonderfully elated by the conventicle act, and, establishing what proved to be a high commission court, he managed to place his creature, lord Rothes, at the head of the law department as chancellor, who brow-beated magistrates and lawyers, and twisted the laws as Sharpe thought fit. The prisons were soon crammed as full as those in England, and proceedings of the law courts more resembled those of an inquisition than anything else, till the peasantry rose and endeavoured to defend themselves. The names of Lauderdale and archbishop Sharpe are made immortal for the infliction of infernal tortures; their racks and thumbscrews, their iron boots and gibbets are riveted fast and firm to their names. We shall have to see Sharpe called to his account anon, and we will here close the general view of this dreadful period by this summary. The writer of the preface to Mr. De Laune's "Plea for the Nonconformists," says, that De Laune was one of near who perished in prison in the reign of Charles II., and that merely for dissenting from the church in some points, for which they were able to bring good reason. That they suffered in their estates to the amount of within five years. Another writer adds that Mr. Jeremy White had carefully collected a list of the dissenting sufferers, and of their sufferings, and had the names of sixty thousand persons who had suffered on a religious account between the restoration of Charles II. and the revolution of king William. That James, during his reign, heard of this manuscript, and offered a thousand guineas for it, but White refused to part with it, and afterwards committed it to the flames.

And how was "our most religious king" employed whilst his subjects were thus in all quarters harassed, imprisoned, plundered, tortured, shot, or beheaded? He was leading the most lewd and infamous life recorded in history. His court swarmed with mistresses, pimps, procurers, and parasites of every description. We have seen how he forced the lady Castlemaine—with whom he was living in double adultery, towards his own wife and towards her own husband. Palmer—on his revolting queen. He kept a fellow of the name of Chifinch as procurer and master of his harem, who had his agents out always seeking fresh women for him, whom he introduced into the palace, so that when an act was passed for putting down brothels, the mob cried, "Let us go first and pull down the great one at Whitehall." Some of the offspring of his by Castemaine, Lucy Walters, Mary Davies, Nell Gwynne, and others, remain to this day, and the country has been especially saddled with three of them, as dukes of Grafton, St. Albans, and Richmond. To support the countless extravagance of all the ladies of his harem, his pimps, procurers, and their profligate hangers on, he was, as we have seen, and shall see further, compelled to sell himself and his country to the French king for money. What a fall from the glorious splendour, the purity and decorum of the commonwealth! What a ghastly and grinning ogre does this very "merry monarch" appear under this statement of most melancholy facts!

And now he was about to plunge into war to serve the purposes of his paymaster, the ambitious French king. Whatever could weaken or embarrass Holland suited exactly the plans of Louis XIV., and to have England contending with Holland whilst he was contemplating an attack on Spain, was extremely convenient. The immediate cause, however, came from the complaints of the merchants, or rather of the duke of York. The duke was governor of an African company, which imported gold dust from the coast of Guinea, and was deeply engaged in the slave trade, supplying the West India planters with negroes. The Dutch complained of the encroachments of the English both there and in the East Indies, and the English replied by similar complaints. The duke advocated hostilities against the Dutch, but found Charles unwilling to be diverted from his pleasures by the anxieties of war. He was worked on, however, by appeals to his resentment against the Louvestein faction in Holland, which had treated him with great indignity whilst he was an exile, and though the differences might have been readily settled by a little honest negotiation, the duke was desirous of a plea for further aggression on the Dutch, and his plans were fostered by Downing, the