England, scarcely reconciled to the Dutch, now formed with them, in conjunction with Sweden, a triple alliance to oppose the successes of Louis XIV. against the Spanish monarchy in the Low Countries; and the consequence of this triple alliance was an effectual stop to the victorious career of the French monarch, and the conclusion of the treaty of Aix-laChapelle, in the year 1668.

The domestic administration of Charles II. was far from being tranquil. It was his misfortune to be guided by very bad counsellors. His connexions with France had been extremely disagreeable to the nation; his schemes of absolute government, the favourable disposition he showed to the Catholics, and his allowing himself to be much influenced by the advice of his brother, the duke of York, who was avowedly of that religion—all these circumstances concurred to furnish grounds for complaint and dissatisfaction. The terrors of popery were now revived, and the loudest complaints resounded from all quarters of the kingdom. A bill was brought into parliament for imposing a test-oath on all who should enjoy any public office. They were obliged to take the sacrament in the established church, and to abjure the doctrine of transubstantiation; and, in consequence of this new law, to which the king was obliged to give his consent, his brother James, duke of York, lost his office of high admiral.*

But these concessions did not quiet the general fears and discontents. A worthless impostor, one Titus Oates, who had more than once changed his religion, now set the whole nation in a ferment, by the discovery of a pretended plot of the Catholics. He

It is a curious fact, that test-oaths are as old as the times of the ancient Athenians. Stobæus informs us, that there was a particular law at Athens, obliging every citizen, before his admission to any public office, to take an oath, "that he would defend the altars, and conform himself to the religious ites of his country.”

asserted that the pope, claiming the sovereignty of England, had intrusted the exercise of his power to the Jesuits, who had already got patents for the principal offices of the kingdom; that fifty Jesuits had undertaken that the king should be assassinated, and the crown bestowed on the duke of York, who, if he declined it, was likewise to be murdered; that the Jesuits, who it was supposed had already almost_reduced London to ashes in the late dreadful fire, had planned another fire and massacre, with which they intended to begin the execution of their project.

The

These most extraordinary chimeras received, however, some countenance from circumstances. duke of York's secretary was seized, and among his papers a variety of letters being found between him and the king of France's confessor and the pope's nuncio, which proved nothing else but a very indiscreet zeal for the Romish religion, it was easy to put such constructions on this correspondence as to strengthen Oates's story of the conspiracy. The informer received the thanks of parliament, with a pension of twelve hundred pounds sterling, a reward which was sufficient to incite another villain, one Bedloe, to act the same part, and to add yet more circumstances of horror to this conspiracy, of which his narrative tallied in the main with that of Oates.*

The following fact shows how much these most aston ishing prejudices had affected the minds even of those whose rank in life, education, and professional habits, ought to have more peculiarly removed them from the influence of such impostures. It is given on the authority of Mr. Hooke, the Roman historian. "Lord Chief Justice Scroggs, hearing the testimony of Oates concerning a consultation among the papists in London, at which Oates swore he was present himself, disproved, in the fullest manner, by several persons who came over from France for the purpose, and who all swore to their having seen Oates at St. Omer's on the very day he pretended to have been in London; to one of them, who, on cross-examination, said 'he was certain Oates was at St. Omer's on that day, if he could believe his own senses,' re

The popular phrensy was inflamed to the highest pitch, the parliament partook of the general madness, and a new test was proposed, by which popery was declared to be idolatry, and all members who refused this declaration were excluded from both houses. It was but by a majority of two voices that the duke of York was exempted from this test, who entreated, with tears in his eyes, that he might be allowed to exercise his religion in private. The queen was even accused of having intelligence of this conspiracy, of which the object was to murder her husband, and remove herself from the throne.

Amid these inquietudes the king's disgust was further increased by the accusation of the treasurer Danby, on the score of his having sold a peace to France. This was a direct attack upon the king himself, as it stood proved by his handwriting, that Danby's letters in this negotiation were written by his order. To prevent these dangerous scrutinies, Charles thought it his most prudent measure to dissolve the parliament.

A second parliament even went farther than the first. The treasurer was impeached and committed to prison; and a bill passed the House of Commons for excluding the Duke of York from the succession, as being a professed Catholic. The famous act of Habeas Corpus was likewise the work of this parliament; one of the chief securities of English liberty. By this excellent statute, the nature of which we shall hereafter more fully consider, it is prohibited to send any one to a prison beyond seas; no judge, under severe penalties, must refuse a prisoner a writ of habeas corpus, by which the jailer is directed to produce in court the body of the prisoner, and to certify the cause of his detainer and imprisonment;-every prisoner must be indicted the first term after his com

plied, that 'all papists were taught not to believe their senses;' and so set aside the testimony of all the witnesses who had sworn to that fact."

mitment, and brought to trial in the subsequent term. A law of this kind, so favourable to the liberty of the subject, takes place in no government except that of Britain, and even of itself is a sufficient argument of the superiority of our constitution to that of all other governments.

**

The spirit of faction among the people was, however, daily increasing. The parties of Whig and Tory now became first known by these epithets. The former were the opposers of the crown against the latter, who were its partisans; and, as in most popular factions, each party had on its side a great deal of right and a great deal of wrong, most of the tory faction would have gone the length of supporting the monarch in the most arbitrary stretches of despotic power; and most of the whigs wonld gladly have stripped him of all power whatever. But between these two extremes is the line of moderation, a course easy to be seen, bu* very difficult to be steered; almost impossible to be kept in actions, and extremely difficult even in opinions; for the moderate man must make his account to be a favourite with neither party, but to be often obnoxious to both; and he must be endowed with that strength of mind as to find in his own conscience, and in the approbation of a few, a recompense to balance the entire loss of popular applause.

The party of the Whigs seemed predominant in the next parliament, and vengeance was taken on several of the unfortunate catholics, on suspicion of concern in the popish plot. Among these was the Viscount Stafford, an old and venerable peer, who was condemned and executed upon the testimony of Titus Oates and two of his infamous and perjured associates. In the subsequent reign this wicked impostor was convicted of perjury, and condemned to the pillory and perpetual mprisonment, from which he was not released till

*The author must either have been ignorant, or have for gotten, when he wrote this, that there was such a country as these United States.

after the revolution, when his signal services and sufferings were rewarded with a considerable pension.

The king, harassed by this parliament to give his consent to the bill excluding his brother from the throne, had no other expedient but to dissolve them, and he found their successors in the next parliament to be equally violent. To pacify them, he proposed that the duke of York should be banished for life, retaining after his accession only the title of king, while the next heir should govern the kingdom as regent; but this expedient was rejected, and the consequence was a dissolution likewise of this parliament, which was the last that Charles II. assembled.

He now began to adopt an economical system, and to retrench the expenses of the crown. He found his friends increasing in proportion, and was enabled tc extend his authority; but still the great cause of dissatisfaction remained: the duke of York was at the bottom of all the measures of government, and his counsels encouraged Charles in his natural propensity to despotism. A conspiracy formed by Shaftesbury, and in which Lord Russell, Algernon Sidney, and the duke of Monmouth, the king's natural son, were concerned, might have overturned the government, had not Shaftesbury, provoked at some unforeseen delays, retired in disgust to Holland. The rest were discovered and betrayed by one of the associates. Russell and Sidney suffered death with great fortitude, and gloried in being the martyrs of the cause of liberty. Monmouth was pardoned, but afterward retracting his confession, was obliged to fly from court.

The discovery of this conspiracy strengthened the power of the crown, and Charles continued to rule till his death with an almost absolute degree of authority. The duke of York without taking the test, resumed his office of high-admiral, and was now tacitly acknowledged by the nation as the successor to the throne. Charles died in the year 1685, in the fiftyfifth year of his age, and twenty-fifth of his reign;