Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/451

] scene into an abnormal state, went about, as was done at the destruction of Jerusalem, announcing the judgments of God. One man cried as he passed, "Yet forty days and London shall be destroyed; "another stalked nakedly along, bearing on his head a chafing-dish of burning coal, and declaring that the Almighty would purge them with fire. Another came suddenly from side streets and alleys in the darkness of the night, or in open day, uttering in a deep and fearful tone, the unvarying exclamation, "Oh, the great and dreadful God!" The confounded people declared that it was a judgment of God on the nation for its sins, and especially the sins of the king and court, and the dreadful persecution of the religious by the government and clergy. The presbyterian ejected preached frequently mounted into the pulpits now deserted by their usual occupants, and preached with a solemn eloquence to audiences who listened to them from amid the shadows of death, and thus gave great cause of offence to the incumbents, who had fled their own charge, after the danger was over, and was made one plea for pacing the five mile act in October of this year. Many other metropolitan clergy stood firm by their flocks, and displayed the noblest characters during the pestilence. This terrible plague swept off upwards of one hundred thousand people during the year; and though it ceased with the winter, it raged the following summer in Colchester, Norwich, Cambridge, Salisbury, and even in the Peak of Derbyshire.

Whilst the plague had been raging, numbers of the republicans, Algernon Sydney amongst the rest, had gone over to Holland and taken service in its army, urging the States to invade England and restore the commonwealth, and a conspiracy was detected in London itself for seizing the Tower and burning the city. Rathbone, Tucker, and six others were seized and hanged, but colonel Danvers, their leader, escaped. The parliament attainted a number of the conspirators by name, and also every British subject who should remain in the Dutch service after a fixed day. But neither plague nor inssurection had any effect in checking the wild licence and riot of the court. The same scenes of drinking, gambling, and debauchery went on faster than ever after the court removed from Salisbury to Oxford. The king was in pursuit of a new flame, a Miss Stewart, one of the queen's maids of honour, and the duke of York was as violently in love with her. Charles could not eat his breakfast till he visited both her and Castlemaine; and even Clarendon complains that "it was a time when all license in discourse and in actions was spread over the kingdom, to the heart-breaking of many good men, who had terrible apprehensions of the consequences of it." The example of king and court was demoralising the whole nation, and its literatme was fast assuming the same obscene and debauched tone, so that to read the comedies of those times is very much akin to plunging into a town sewer.

The war, meantime, went on, and now assumed a more formidable aspect, for Louis XIV. made a sudden veer round in his politics, and joined the Dutch. He was actually under conditions of peace and assistance with them, and they called upon him to fulfil his engagements; but they publicly would have called in vain, had not Charles of late become too independent of his French paymaster, by having received liberal supplies from parliament. Louis liked extremely to see Holland and England exhausting one another whilst he was aiming at the acquisition of the Netherlands; but it was not his policy to leave Charles free from his control. Charles, meanwhile, had been neglecting the very sailors who were to fight his battles against the united power of France and Holland. The sailors who had fought so gallantly last summer had lain during the winter in the streets, having received no pay. Pepys says, whilst the plague was raging in London, that they were besieging the nay office with clamorous demands. "Did business, though not much, at the navy office, because of the horrible crowd and lamentable moan of the poor seamen that he starving in the streets for lack of money, which do trouble and perplex me to the heart; and more at noon when we were to go through them, for then above a whole hundred of them followed us, some cursing, some swearing, and some praying to us."

Whilst the royal duke had received one hundred and twenty thousand pounds for fighting one battle and leaving it unfinished, and the poor men were thus turned adrift to starvation and danger of death from the plague, the fleet had lost nearly all its experienced officers, who had been turned off because of their having helped the immortal Blake to shed glory on the commonwealth, and their places were supplied by young, insolent, ignorant sprigs of the aristocracy, who neither knew their business, nor were disposed to do it if they did. Pepys, who, as secretary to the admiralty, saw all this, says:—"The gentlemen captains will undo us, for they are not to be kept in order; their friends about the king and duke, and their own houses, are so free, that it is not for any person but the duke himself to have any command over them." He adds that admiral Penn spoke very freely to him on the subject, and lamented the loss which the fleet had experienced in the cashiered officers. "That our very flag officers do stand in need of exercising amongst themselves, and discovering the business of commanding a fleet; he told me that even one of our flag-men did not know which tack lost the wind or kept it in an engagement."

Such was the state of our navy when it put to sea to face the enemy. The command was intrusted to Monk and prince Rupert. And here were fresh proofs of the miserable management of this miserable monarch. Monk, whose conscience probably was not very easy with the part he had played, had taken desperately to drinking, and to this drunken commander the fortunes of England were intrusted in conjunction with Rupert, who, with the corn-age of a lion, was never in the right place at the right time. On the 1st of June, Monk discovered the Dutch fleet under De Ruyter and De Witt lying at anchor off the North Foreland. They had eighty-four sad, and Monk would have had an equal number, but Rupert had received an order to go in quest of the French fleet with thirty sail.!Monk, therefore, having little more than fifty sail, was strongly advised by Sir John Hannan and Sir Thomas Tyddiman not to engage with such unequal numbers, especially as the wind and sea were such as would prevent the use of their lower tier of guns. But Monk, who was probably drunk, would not listen, and was encouraged by the younger and more inexperienced officers. He bore down rapidly on the Dutch fleet, having the weather-gauge, and the Dutchmen were taken so muck