Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/463

] upon the mayor said, "That conscience of yours would cut my throat, but will cut yours as soon as I can." The recorder added, addressing Bushell, "You are a factious fellow; I will set a mark upon you, and whilst I have anything to do in the city, I will have an eye upon you." The lord mayor, addressing the jury, "Have you no more wit than to be led by such a pitiful fellow? I will cut his nose."

Penn protested against their jury being thus insulted and abused. "Unhappy," he exclaimed, "are these juries, who are threatened to be starved, fined, and ruined, if they give not in their verdict contrary to their consciences." "My lord," cried the recorder, "you must take a course with this fellow;" and the mayor shouted, "Stop his mouth! Gaoler, bring fetters and stake him to the ground!" To which Penn replied, "Do your pleasure: I matter not your fetters!" On this the recorder exclaimed, "Till now I never understood the reason of the policy and prudence of the Spaniards in suffering the inquisition among them; and certainly it will never be well with us till something like the Spanish inquisition be in England." The jury was again shut up all night under the same condition of starvation, darkness, and destitution of common conveniences; but like brave men, after being thus imprisoned and starved for two days and two nights, they shortened their verdict into "Not guilty!"

Defeated by the noble endurance of this truly English jury, the court fined every member of it forty marks, for not doing as the bench required, and committed them to prison till it was paid. They also fined Penn and Mead for contempt of court, and sent them to prison, too, till paid. The parties thus shamefully treated, however, had shown they were Englishmen, and were not likely to sit down with this tyranny quietly. They brought the case before the lord chief justice Vaughan, who pronounced the whole proceeding illegal, and from the bench delivered a noble defence of the rights of juries.

This trial is a fair specimen of the spirit and practice of those times. The greater part of the magistrates and judges took their cue from the spirit of the government; and the scenes of violence and injustice, of persecution for religion, and of robbery by officials of the outraged people, were of a kind not easily conceivable at this day. Parliament being prorogued to October, Charles was busily engaged in completing the secret treaty betwixt himself and Louis, by which he was to be an annual pensioner on France to an extent releasing him in a great measure from dependence on his own parliament. On his part, he was to employ the naval and military power of England to promote the wicked designs of Louis against his neighbours on the continent. The conditions of the treaty were these:—1st, That the king of England should profess himself catholic at such time as should seem to him most expedient, and after that profession should join Louis in a war on Holland when the French king thought proper. 2nd, That to prevent or suppress any insurrection in consequence of this public avowal, Louis should furnish him with two millions of livres, nearly one hundred thousand pounds, and an armed force of six thousand troops, if necessary. 3rd, That Louis should not violate the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, and Charles should be allowed to maintain it. 4th, That if new rights on the Spanish monarchy should accrue to Louis, Charles should aid him with all his power in obtaining those rights. 5th, That both monarchs should make war on Holland, and neither conclude the peace without the knowledge and consent of the other. 6th, The king of France to bear the charge of the war, but receiving from England a force of six thousand men. 7th, That Charles should furnish fifty, Louis thirty men-of-war, the combined fleet to be commanded by the duke of York; and that to support the charge of the war, the king of England should, during the war, receive annually three million of livres, about one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. England was to receive of the Dutch spoil Walcheren, Sluys, and the island of Cadsand, and the interests of the prince of Orange were to be guaranteed. There was also to be a treaty of commerce.

Perhaps the whole history of the world does not furnish a more infamous bargain, not even the partition of Poland in later days. Here was a king of England selling himself to the French monarch for money, to enable him to put down protestantism and parliament in this country, to do all and more than his father lost his head for attempting—for Charles I never plotted against the protestant religion. This was bad enough, but the bargain went to enable France to put its foot on the neck of this country, and to employ its forces to destroy protestantism abroad—protestantism and liberty; to throw Holland, and eventually all the Netherlands, and then Spain, into the power of France, making of it an empire so gigantic that neither freedom, nor protestantism, nor any political independence could ever more exist. Had this infamous scheme come to light in Charles's time, the Stuarts would not have been driven out in 1688, but then and there. But that this odious bargain did actually take place, and was acted on, so far as Charles's domestic vices and extravagance permitted, our times have produced the fullest evidence. The above treaty, which was deposited with Sir Thomas Clifford, still exists in the cabinet of his descendants at Chudleigh; and Sir John Dalrymple, seeking in the archives at Paris for material for his "Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland," published in 1790, unexpectedly stumbled on the damning evidences—under the hands of Charles and his ministers themselves—of this unholy transaction and its filthy reward. The duke of York was at first said to be averse to this secret treason and slavery, but he fell into it, and received his share of the pecunium, as well as Buckingham, through whose agency a second treaty was effected, raising the annual sum to five million of livres, or nearly two hundred and fifty thousand pounds a year; the article requiring the king's change of religion being omitted altogether, Charles, meanwhile, having shown his readiness to engage in the Dutch war, which was the main question. Ashley and Lauderdale, Clifford and Arlington were also in the secret, and had their reward. Many were the suspicions of this diabolical business which oozed out, and much talk was the consequence at times; the proofs were preserved with inscrutable secrecy during the lives of the parties concerned, discovery being utter and inevitable destruction. The French copy of the treaty has hitherto escaped all research.