Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/262

 and Sidney, but all men able to form a competent opinion, believed that some kind of plot was on foot. Those who had fought and suffered in the Civil War—whether Royalist or Republican—were conscious that the Queen Dowager, foreign alike in blood and religion, had been 'the principal instrument to advise and encourage the King in his illegal actions;' and when she returned after the Restoration the watchful Pepys noticed that 'there were very few bonfires in the city, whereby he guessed that, as he believed before, her coming do please but very few.' The Queen had indeed long since removed to France, but the conversion of the Duke of York, his open preference for the French and Irish, the intrigues of his sister, the Duchess of Orleans, and the infamies of the Treaty of Dover, unknown in their full extent but even then suspected, had together concurred in raising a belief that the removal from the scene of the mischievous personality of Henrietta Maria had indeed altered the characters, but had not changed the nature of the permanent conspiracy which was being constantly renewed on the Continent against the civil and religious liberties of Protestant England. The quarrels of Louis XIV. with the Pope did not deceive the acute statesmen of the time, as these differences seemed a mere repetition of the quarrels of Philip II. with Paul IV., which had never prevented ultimate co-operation against the common enemy. First to ruin Holland, the home of the religious and political refugees from every country, and while engaged in that operation to cajole the Nonconformists in England by a pretended support of religious liberty against the Church; then to overawe both with a large standing army when the projected war with Holland had been brought to a successful close; and, lastly, to put down the assertors of 'pretended liberties,' who wished 'to advance the sovereignty of old hateful laws above the more sacred majesty of princes, the only rightful legislators,' were the carefully marked stages