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444 men magnified his valour, genius, and patriotism. Everywhere it was remembered how, when he ruled, all foreign powers had trembled at the name of England; how the States-general, now so haughty, had crouched at his feet, and how, when it was known that ho was no more, Amsterdam was lighted up for a great deliverance, and children ran along the canals, shouting for joy that the 'Devil' was dead. Even royalists exclaimed that the state could be saved only by calling the old soldiers of the commonwealth to arms. Soon the capital began to feel the miseries of a blockade. Fuel was scarcely to be procured. Tilbury Fort, the place where Elizabeth had, with manly spirit, hurled foul scorn at Parma and Spain, was insulted by the invaders. The roar of foreign guns was heard for the first and last time by the citizens of London In the council it was seriously proposed that, if the enemy advanced, the Tower should be abandoned. Great multitudes of people assembled in the streets, crying out that England was bought and sold. The houses and carriages of ministers were attacked by the populace, and it seemed likely that the government would have to deal at once with an invasion and an insurrection."

Whilst the Dutch had thus been humiliating England, Louis XIV. had been pushing his conquests in Flanders. With an army of seventy thousand men he compelled Binche, Tournay, Oudenarde, Courtrai, and Douai to surrender; and he was besieging Lisle when the States of Holland hastened to come to terms with Finance and England to prevent the nearer approach of Louis to their own territories. On the 21st of July peace was signed betwixt England and Holland and England and France, by which the Dutch kept the disputed island of Pulerone, and ceded to the English Albany and New York. France restored Antigua, Monserrat, and part of St. Kitts, and received back Nova Scotia. Denmark, which had sided with the Dutch, also signed a treaty of peace with England.

The peace was immediately succeeded by the fall of Clarendon. He had been the companion and adviser of Charles from the very boyhood of the king, and accordingly the mischief of every measure, and the disgrace which had now fallen on the nation, were all attributed to him. With great talents Clarendon had too much virtue to approve, far less flatter, the vices and follies of the court in which he lived, and not enough to make him abandon it, and assume the character of a noble and disinterested censor. He had the sternness and gravity of Cato, but he lacked his great and patriotic principles. He began as a liberal, but went over to the royalist cause, and was a rigid advocate of the high prerogatives of the crown, and of the supremacy of the church. The puritans looked on him as a combination of Strafford and Laud. He certainly would not have so far violated public right as to countenance the raising of ship-money, or the violation of the privileges of parliament by the seizure of its members. But the puritans hated him for the support that he gave to the act of uniformity, and for so hotly resisting the king's grant of indulgence to tender consciences. On the other hand, the royalists hated him because he maintained the inviolability of the bill of indemnity, by which they were restrained from ousting the purchasers from their estates lost during the commonwealth; and they hated him not the less because he had managed to raise his daughter to the rank of duchess of York, and from himself being an insignificant commoner, apparently aiming at being not only father-in-law of the next king, but father of a line of kings. They accused him of having selected the present queen as one not likely to have children, to favour the succession of his own, and probably one of the real causes of Charles's change of feeling towards him resulted from the courtiers having inspired him with this belief. The commons hated him because he had uniformly endeavoured to repress their authority. He never could be brought to see the enlarged influence which the progress of wealth and intelligence had given to the commons; nor had all that had passed under his eyes of their extraordinary power under Charles I., opened them to the knowledge of their real position in the state. In vain did more clear-sighted men point out to him the concessions which were necessary to enable the parliament and the government to move on harmoniously together. The nobility disliked him because he had, by his influence with the king and the marriage of his daughter with the heir-apparent, placed himself above them, and, from the haughtiness of his nature, taken no pains to conceal that invidious position. The people detested him, for they believed that he ruled the king, and therefore was the author of all their miseries and disgraces. They accused him of selling Dunkirk, and therefore called his splendid palace, overlooking and everyway outshining the royal one, Dunkirk House. The chancellor, undoubtedly, had an incurable passion for money and acquisition of wealth, and for displaying it in the grandeur of his house, and the magnificent collection of his pictures. When the Dutch fleet was riding in the Thames, the enraged people turned all their fury on him. They broke his windows, destroyed the trees in his grounds, trod down his garden, and erected a gallows at his door.

But the intensity of aversion to him was felt at court He was from a youth of a grave and decorous character. The lewdness and fooleries of the courtiers excited his undisguised disgust. We have seen that he could stoop to persuade the queen to tolerate the most insufferable indignities, yet he never ceased to speak to Charles of the infamy and extravagance of his mistresses, and the scandalous lives of the courtiers that fluttered around them. The only wonder is, that the malice of Castlemaine and her allies had not long ago driven him from the court; and it speaks volumes for the hold which he had on the regard of the monarch, that he could resist their hatred so long. But now Buckingham, who had quarrelled with Lady Castlemaine, and had done his best to expose her, had made up the feud, and they directed their common enmity against their common foe. Shaftesbury, Monk, Clifford, Lauderdale, Sir William Coventry, Arlington, and others, now joined them in one determined and concentrated attack. They made their onslaught when all classes were uttering their execrations upon him. He had advised the king, when the Dutch fleet was at Chatham, to dissolve parliament, and maintain ten thousand men that he had raised by forced contribution, from the neighbouring counties, to be repaid out of the next supplies; this caught wind, and was regarded as returning to the idea of the king ruling by a standing army and without a parliament. Charles had grown tired of his