diary writers of the time, are inconceivable in their utter abandonment of morality and sense of decorum. It was one scene, not only of adulterous, but of incestuous crimes in the highest quarters. The people were so enraged that, having pulled down several brothels in the city, they stuck up placards, saying they would next go and pull down the great one at Whitehall.

Pepys, in one entry of his diary, says, "The two royal brothers, the king and Duke of York, are both making love to the same court woman-the infamous Mrs. Palmer. The duke hath got my Lord Chancellor's daughter with child; high gambling is common at court, and the people are beginning to open their eyes in astonishment." In another place he says, "At court things are in a very ill condition, there being so much emulation, poverty, and the vices of drinking, swearing, and love amours, that I know not what will be the end of it but confusion. The clergy so high that all people that I meet with do protest against their practice."

The kept mistresses of the king, as he was not true to his wife, nor to any of them, were also, in general, equally free in their practices. Their houses swarmed with children, and all these the king was made the reputed father of, and they must be provided for, and married into noble families, and have estates conferred on them. For all this folly, vice, and debauchery, all the money which parliament could grant, or his emissaries and venal judges could wring from the people, was just like so much cash flung into the bottomless pit. Of this bastard brood there are many traces yet in different families of the aristocracy; but the country was especially saddled with three of them as Dukes of St. Albans, Grafton, and Richmond, whose descendants under these names stand aloft in the peerage to this day. Luckily, the Duke of Monmouth, another of them by Lucy Walters, was cut off.

But the mischief did not stop here. To meet the boundless demands of his profligacy, his harem, and all his pimps and panders, with their troops of hangers-on, the whole resources of England were not enough; and he sold himself to the French king,—to that king who, for more than half a century, was the common disturber of all Europe, and the haughty enemy of all liberty and religion. Like his father, he determined to be absolute; but he had learned that it did not do to threaten, and therefore he resolved to have a standing army, and when that was strong enough, to dismiss all parliaments, and rule like a regular grand Turk, as in other respects he was. Luckily, the eternal demands for his pleasures saved the country from the

schemes of his power; but the story of his infamy as a pensioned slave of France, and that for the destruction of his country's liberties, not only broke forth in his own day, but has since come more broadly to the light through the discoveries made by Sir John Dalrymple amongst the despatches in the Dépôt des Affaires étrangers at Versailles.*

Louis XIV., in his ambitious designs on the continent, found it very convenient to pension the king of England for his noninterference; and this base king, whom a credulous people had received again to the throne, found it equally convenient, to avoid being compelled to have recourse to parliament, to take his money. Both he and his brother James having long resolved to make the crown of England absolute, by the aid of Louis and French money, proposed to fortify Plymouth, Hull, and Portsmouth. James was lord admiral; the guards were increased; and with the aid of Louis and 6000 French infantry, they calculated on putting down all opposition. Charles was to have a pension of 200,000l., and was to proclaim popery as the established religion.t

The French king sent over Charles's sister, the Duchess of Orleans, and Mademoiselle Kerouaille, the latter of whom, as a useful spy here, staid as chief sultana of Charles's harem. Though the immediate objects of this treaty failed, Charles still continued a pensioner, and soon after we hear of his receipt of 500,000 crowns from Louis, to enable him to put off the session of parliament, whose demands might seriously interfere with Louis's proceedings against Holland. In 1676 we find him signing a secret treaty with his own hand for his pension; and in 1677, putting off the sitting of parliament for a whole year, to favour Louis's campaign against the Prince of Orange, his own nephew, and own ally. The next year he pretended to go to war with France, and got 400,000l. voted by parliament for the army and navy, meaning nothing more than to get the cash for his necessities; being all the while in the secret pay of Louis; and while the public were expecting that he would send off his troops to assist his nephew, he was laughing with Barillon, the French ambassador, in the apartments of his French mistress, the Duchess of Portland, at the credulity of his good English subjects. For this hocus-pocus he demanded more money of Louis. But in December of this year, enmity amongst Charles's ministers brought out some of these recent proceedings before parliament. Danby, the prime minister, sought to impeach

*Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland, by Sir John Dalrymple. + Lingard, from the original treaty in possession of Lord Clifford.

Montague, who had been ambassador in France, of treasonable conferences with the Pope's nuncio. Montague, to save himself, accused Danby of soliciting money from Louis in the king's name. The Commons ordered these papers before them, and were astounded to find one of these applications of the minister attested by a postscript by Charles himself "This is written by my order." The House was thrown into a flame; and, to prevent fresh exposures, Charles at once dismissed this Pension Parliament, which had now sat for seventeen years. And well might it be called the Pension Parliament !

The corruption of the court had, as is generally the case, soon descended to all around it. Louis, having secured the king of England, had next proceeded to secure the influential members of parliament, ministers, and other active men. The scene of

corruption and French pensioners in this dreadful reign, as laid bare by Dalrymple, from the French Archives, make one shudder. The king and his ministers were dearly purchased; Montague himself having received 50,000 crowns to win Danby; and his sister, Lady_Hervey, others of his friends, Buckingham, the Duchess of Portsmouth, the Earl of Sunderland, &c., being all greedy claimants and receivers of this base French pay.

Charles told Barillon, the French ambassador, and agent in this infamous business, that this was the way for Louis "de mettre pour toute sa vie l'Angleterre dans sa dependance." The king, the duke of York, Churchill, afterwards the celebrated duke of Marlborough, Hyde, earl of Clarendon, Danby, and others, besides the courtiers just mentioned, were all engaged in this nefarious traffic. Churchill was sent by James to Paris as his agent in it. Barillon repeatedly tells Louis that the Duchess of Portsmouth and Lord Sunderland expected gratifications for themselves; that Sunderland could not be secured without a great deal of money; and Louis ordered the payment of 10,000 pistoles to Sunderland, and 5000 to the Duchess of Portsmouth, with promise of more if they kept Charles in the interests of France. It is calculated that Charles himself could not have received less than a million of money from Louis.

Such was this" most religious king," his court and aristocracy; such the corruption of morals, manners, and principles which they diffused through England, and the despotism they rivetted on the nation; such the infamy they piled on its name. A libidinous and traitor-king; a debauched court and aristocracy; a slavish parliament; a persecuting church; our arms used at home to destroy and enslave our countrymen; our fleets disgraced on the ocean;-what a contrast to the sober dignity,

victorious career, the awful fame of the Commonwealth! To descend lower in the scale of national infamy, it were impossible; a little more endurance, and this wretched dynasty shall be annihilated. But if ever Providence displayed its chastisements in the fury of his elements, it was in this reign, by the plagues and fire that desolated London.

The closing scenes of it were worthy of it and the king. He was carried off suddenly in the midst of his vice. The man who had suffered the kingdom to be torn to pieces with factitious popish plots and Titus Oates' denunciations of the Papists, and would never lift a finger to save the Catholics from their enemies, though he laughed in private at the sham plots,— in his last moments, with the bishops and clergy crowding round his bed, walks them all out, and-takes the last unction from a popish priest !

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I can never forget," says Evelyn, "the inexpressible luxury and profaneness, gaming, and all dissoluteness, and, as it were, total forgetfulness of God, it being Sunday evening, which this day se'nnight I was witness of; the king sitting and toying with his concubines, Portsmouth, Cleveland, Mazarin, &c.a French boy singing love songs in that glorious gallery; whilst about twenty of the great courtiers and other dissolute persons were at basset round a large table, a bank of at least 20007. in gold before them, upon which two gentlemen who were with me made reflections. Six days after was all in the dust!"

CHAPTER XV.

THE last and the worst of the Stuarts now mounted the throne. It was a race curst with a judicial blindness. It had had warnings from heaven, and from men. Dethronement, decapitation, expulsion from the country, long sufferings and indignities were all lost upon it. Charles II. had only come back to spread vice like a foul plague through moral England; to outrage its high sense of propriety by a public display of every low species of debauchery; to mock the vaunted beauty of England's domestic purity, and the purity of English women, by making harlots the companions of his wife, by clothing them in the highest titles of nobility, and by planting his illegitimate brood forever amongst the highest nobles, thus telling them at what rate he valued their proud dignities. After he had set the

bastards of player-women (after all the most respectable women he had to do with), and of French courtezans, in the rank of dukes, there could be no more serious pretence about pure blood, or great distinction in a ducal coronet. But this James was not only a more confirmed, but a more unattractive tyrant. He was a heartless, pitiless, and senseless bigot. Gloomy and cruel, he was prepared to rival in deeds of savage ruthlessness any Spanish Philip, any Alva, or any inquisitor of Spain's infernal catalogue. His father's falling head, or ten falling heads, would have had no warning voice for him. Moses and the Prophets might have risen from the dead-ay, the trump of doom have sounded in his ear-without altering his nature. They might have scared him, for, like all tyrants, he was a miserable coward, but they could never have cured him. The only thing resembling a virtue in him arose out of the vice of his nature he was too pig-headed to play long or well the hypocrite. Charles, if till his last moments he had any sense of religion at all, played the hypocrite well. He went along with the Established Church; suffered the Catholics to be persecuted and harassed; suffered parliament even to pass an act excluding any Papist from the throne. He never threatened, but sold himself to France for secret help, and watched for the hour when he might overturn our liberties. But James had seen all this, and took no warning. He was a notorious Papist; and was notoriously surrounded by them. He roused the jealousy of both church and nation to such a degree, during Charles's reign, that he was actually banished by popular opinion. The Commons passed a bill which excluded him, as a Papist, from the succession, which, however, was thrown out at the king's earnest prayer by the Lords; yet nothing but the king's twice hastily dissolving parliament could have prevented this measure. Still, these were no warnings. He came to the throne, and speedily set to work in such earnest to introduce popery, that all parties were glad to chase him away. He had no sense of courtesy and of popular conciliation. Even in his vices, he was the more disgusting from his utter want of taste. Charles did at least select beautiful women, but James's mistresses were notoriously plain. Charles used to say that his brother's mistresses were given him as a penance by his father confessor, they were so ugly ;-and one of them, Miss Sedley, manufactured into a Countess of Dorchester, is, according to Horace Walpole, made to say herself, that she wondered what James chose his mistresses for. "We are none of us handsome," said she," and if we had wit, he has not enough to find it out."

But his master qualities were his cruelty and bigotry. He