Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/66

 58 COUNCIL AND CABINET, 1670-88 January resemblance, for seven members are found sitting on both com- mittees. As to the remainder, the ill health of Rupert and the support Godolphin x had given to the Exclusion Bill may account for their absence, and the appointment of Conway as the successor to Sunderland at the end of January 1681 will explain his presence at the meeting in 1682. The next list of councillors is that of North, 2 and seems to belong to the end of December 1682, after the deaths of Rupert and Nottingham, the lord chancellor, whose place was filled by the promotion of Chief Justice North to be lord keeper. The first five members named by North belonged to the committee for foreign affairs, and the new-comers were Ormonde, who returned from Ireland in the spring of 1682, and Godolphin. The last list of the cabinet for Charles II's reign, July 1683, is supplied by Tillotson in his examination in 1689. 3 Four of the seven names given by Tillotson belong to North's list, the fifth is that of North himself, and the remaining two are those of the king and the duke of York. Therefore no objection to a theory that the committee of intelligence became the committee for foreign affairs, and that the committee for foreign affairs was the cabinet, is to be found by comparing the membership. A passage in Roger North's life of his brother, 4 the lord keeper Guilford, may seem to frustrate any attempt to prove that the cabinet and the committee for foreign affairs were the same body. After stating that the lord keeper was a member of the cabinet (which is certainly true), he says that his brother ' always declined giving any opinion in that branch of royal economy called foreign affairs. . . . And although he was for the most part at the com- mittees of the privy council, as for trade and plantations, &c., which might be called English business, he never cared to attend at the committee for foreign affairs.' If North were an infallible authority, if he had written that his brother never did attend the committee, and if he had given what Carlyle used to call ' time of day ', this passage might be decisive. As it is two other explanations are possible in addition to the view that North meant to distinguish between two different bodies. One is that he carelessly called the committee of intelligence (1679-80, -of which his brother was not a member) the committee for foreign affairs ; the other is that he merely intended to explain that his brother did not attend when only foreign affairs were to be discussed, and that he was a silent auditor when they were 1 Of course Godolphin's absence may be merely due to accidental and temporary circumstances. 3 Lords' Journals, xiv. 378. 4 Lives of the Norths (ed. Jessopp), i. 328.
 * Vide appendix i for the date and contents of North's remarks on the cabinet.