the public, and by secret pressure on him through his ministers, his mistress, his nephew, the prince of Orange, and his allies. Sunderland and Godolphin urged his concession to the opposition in parliament; the duchess, when he sought retirement with her, harped on the same string; Halifax, who had offended the opposition greatly by his determined resistance to the exclusion bill, now proposed a bill of limitations of the authority of James in case of his succession; and the prince of Orange warned the king on no account to adopt this bill, because it would undermine the very foundation of the monarchy. The Spaniards complained that Louis was violating the treaty of Nimeguen, and called on him, to act as their ally and a party to the treaty.
To contend with Louis required money, even if he were so disposed, and money he had none. Instead of answering his demands for it, the commons expressed their resentment of his resistance to the exclusion bill, by attacking all the supporters of the king. They summoned various tory leaders on one pretence or another to their bar; they demanded the removal of Jeffreys from the office of recorder of London, and he make haste to submit; they voted impeachments against Scroggs and North, the chief justices, and Lewis Weston and other judges. They sent a message to the king, that unless the duke of York was excluded, there was no safety to protestantism—a great truth, but one which they had most deplorably damaged by the base means which they had used to establish it. They voted that the marquis of Worcester, Halifax, Clarendon, and Feversham, were promoters of popery; that they and Lawrence Hyde, and Seymour, ought to be removed from the king's council, and that till then no money could be voted; and, moreover, that any one lending the king money upon any branch of the revenue, should be adjudged enemies of the country. As they were going on voting still further resolutions of a like kind, Charles sent and prorogued parliament, and then by proclamation dissolved it, ordering another to assemble at the end of two months at Oxford.
The very naming of the place of meeting struck the opposition with alarm. In London they had a strong protection in a strongly sympathising population; but Oxford was notorious for its royalist and tory feeling; and there Charles, amid a fiery mob of fortune-seeking gownsmen, and a strong body of soldiery, might overawe parliament, and direct particular attacks against the opposition leaders. These fears were well founded. But the king had, in the interim, also strengthened himself in another manner. He had first set to work every person of the duke's friends that he possibly could, to induce him to appear at least to conform to the demands of parliament, but finding that utterly unavailing, he had turned to his old friend Louis. The French monarch, who never liked to leave Charles at the mercy of his parliament, again gratified his desire, and agreed to pay him two millions of livres this year, and half a million of crowns in each of the two following years, on condition that he should leave the Spaniards to his overbearing encroachments. The many hints thrown out of secret treaties betwixt Charles and Louis had not been lost, and no written contract of this agreement was made, but it was treated as a matter of honour, and only the two monarchs, with Barillon on the one side, and Hyde on the other, were included in the secret.
Being thus made independent of his parliament, Charles disregarded the strongest remonstrances against holding the parliament in Oxford, and on the day appointed appeared there attended by a troop of horse guards, besides crowds of armed courtiers, and the opposition members and their party equally armed, and attended by armed followers. It appeared more like a preparation for war than for peaceful debate. Charles addressed the assembled hearers in the tone of a man who had money in his pocket. Ho spoke strongly of the factious proceedings of the last parliament, and of his determination neither to exercise arbitrary power himself, nor to suffer it in others; but to show that he had every disposition to consult the wishes of his subjects, he proposed to grant them almost everything they had solicited. He then offered the substance of the bill of limitations proposed by Halifax, that James should be banished five hundred miles from the British shores during the king's life; that, on succeeding, though he should have the title of king, the powers of government should be vested in a regent, and that regent in the first instance be his daughter, the princess Mary of Orange, and after her her sister Anne; that if James should have a son educated in the protestant faith, the regency should continue only till he reached his majority; that besides this, all catholics of incomes of more than one hundred pounds per annum, should be banished, the fraudulent conveyance of their estates be pronounced void, and their children taken from them and educated in protestantism.
This was a sweeping concession; short of expelling James altogether, nothing more could be expected, and it was scarcely to be expected that Charles would concede that. On this one point he had always displayed unusual firmness, and it was a firmness highly honourable to him, for by it he maintained the rights of a brother, at the expense of the aggrandisement of his own son. Nothing would have been easier than to have, by a little finesse, conveyed the crown to Monmouth, the favourite of the protestant bulk of the nation, and for whom he had a strong affection. But the whigs overstood their opportunity; they were blinded to their own interest by the idea of their strength, and that having so much offered, they were on the point of gaining all. This was the culminating point of their success; but they rejected the offer, and from that hour the tide of their power ebbed, and their ruin was determined.
There was another attempt to spur on the country to carry the exclusion bill, by making use of a miserable pretence of a plot got up by two low adventurers, Everard and Fitzharris. First these fellows pretended that the king was leagued with the duke to establish popery; but when Fitzharris was thrown into Newgate, he got up another story, that he had been offered ten thousand pounds to murder the king by the duchess of Modena, and that a foreign invasion was to assist the catholic attempt. The opposition were ready to seize on this man as another Dangerfield, to move the country by the disclosures of these plots. But Charles was beforehand with them, cut off all intercourse with the prisoner, and ordered the attorney-general to proceed against him. The commons claimed to deal with him, and sent up
