Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/491

] could condescend to receive the same common brand as that vile herd.

When the new parliament met it was found to be more violently anti-popish than the old one. The duke's known, the king's suspected, popery was a sentiment in the nation that nothing could remove, and which the recent excitements about a popish plot had roused into a universal flame. This then the popular party took every means to fan; and though the government exerted all its power, its candidates were everywhere received with exertions, and assertions of the bloody machinations of the papists. The new parliament, therefore, came up with vehement zeal against the plotters, and with unabated determination to punish Danby. But the warning which the progress of the election gave was not lost on Danby. He considered that it would be one of the most powerful means of, abating the public jealousy of popery, if the king could be induced to send the duke out of the kingdom. Charles recoiled at so harsh a measure, and tried the vain expedient of inducing James to pretend at least conversion, by sending the primate and other bishops to persuade him to return to the established church. It was of course useless, and then Charles was obliged to advise James to withdraw for awhile, and reside at Brussels. James complied on two conditions—that the king should give him a formal order to leave the kingdom, so that he might not seem to steal away out of fear; and to pledge himself publicly that he would never acknowledge the legitimacy of Monmouth, who had given out that he had four witnesses, in case of Charles's death, to prove his marriage with his mother. This was done in presence of the council, the members adding their signatures, and Charles ordered the instrument to be enrolled in chancery. James quitted London with the duchess on the 4th of March, leaving his daughter Anne with her uncle, that the people might not suppose that he sought to seduce her to popery at Brussels.

On the 6th of March the parliament met, and the commons were immediately engaged in a dispute with the crown regarding the election of a speaker. They elected their old one, Mr. Seymour; the lord treasurer appointed Sir Thomas Mears, one of his most active opponents in the last parliament. But during the interval since the dissolution, Danby had been hard at work to convert, by soma means or other, some of his most formidable enemies. After some altercation the commons gave way, and Mears was appointed.

But this exercise of royal prerogative only embittered the house to punish Danby and screen Montague. The lords passed a resolution that the dissolution of parliament did not affect an impeachment—a doctrine which has become constitutional. Montague had absconded, but reappeared when his election to parliament gave him personal protection. Everything, therefore, portending the conviction of Danby, Charles ordered him to resign his staff, and then announced this fact to parliament, at the same time informing them that as he had ordered him to write the letters in question, he had granted him a pardon, and that he would renew the pardon a dozen times if there were a continued attempt to prosecute him for an act simply of obedience to his sovereign.

But this attempt to take their victim out of their hands was resented by the commons as a direct breach of their privileges, and having looked for a copy of this pardon in chancery, and not finding it, they learned from the lord chancellor that the pardon had been brought ready drawn by Danby to the king, who signed it; and that the seal had not been affixed by himself, but by the person who carried the bag, at Charles's own order. This irregularity the more inflamed the parliament. Powle, one of the members whose name figures in the above list of French pensioners, with that air of injured virtue which politicians so easily assume, inveighed indignantly agiainst Danby, who, he said, had brought the country to the brink of ruin, by pandering to the mercenary policy of Louis—the very thing he had opposed—had raised a standing army and paid it with French money. That he had concealed the popish plot, and then spoken of Oates with great contempt. The commons forthwith passed a bill of attainder, and the lords sent to take Danby into custody; but he had absconded. On the 10th of April, however, he surrendered himself to the lords, and was sent to the Tower. Lord Essex was appointed lord treasurer in his stead, and lord Sunderland, secretary of state, took the station of prime minister. Essex was popular, solid, and grave in his temperament, but not of brilliant talent. Sunderland was a very different man. He was clever, intriguing, insinuating in his manners, but as thoroughly corrupt and unprincipled as the worst part of the generation in which he lived. He had long been ambassador at the court of France, and the very fact of his holding that post betwixt two such monarchs as Louis and Charles, was proof enough that he was supple, and not restrained by any nice service of morals or honesty. He was perfidious to all parties—a cavalier by profession, and at the same time that he was serving arbitrary monarchs most slavishly, he was republican in heart. He was especially attentive to the mother of Monmouth and the duchess of Portland, because he knew that they had great influence with his master.

At this crisis Sir William Temple proposed to Charles a measure which he thought most likely to abate the virulence of parliament, and at the same time prevent ministers pursuing any clandestine purposes likely to excite the suspicion of the parliament and nation. Temple had always shown himself above and apart from the mere interested ambitious and selfish purposes of the king's ministers. Whenever he was wanted, he was called from his philosophic retreat of Moor Park, in Surrey, to do some work of essential benefit to the nation, which required a man of character and ability to accomplish. He had effected the triple alliance, the marriage of the princess Jlary with William of Orange; he had refused to have any concern with the intrigues of the cabal; and now, when the parliament was fast hastening to press on the prerogative, he came forward, and proposed that the privy council should be increased to thirty members, half consisting of his ministers, and half of leading and independent members of the lords and commons. All these were to be intrusted with every secret movement and proposition of government; and the king was to pledge himself to be guided by their advice. Temple augured that nothing pernicious could be broached by designing ministers in a body where half were independent members of parliament, holding no office from the crown; and that, on the other