 Chapter 35 of A Child's History of England. Reading by Robin Cotter. November 2007. A Child's History of England. By Charles Dickens. Chapter 35. England under Charles II. Called the Mary Monarch. There never were such profligate times in England as under Charles II. Whenever you see his portrait with his swarthy, ill-looking face and great nose, you may fancy him in his court at Whitehall, surrounded by some of the very worst vagabonds in the kingdom, though they were lords and ladies, drinking, gambling, indulging in vicious conversation, and committing every kind of profligate excess. It has been a fashion to call Charles II the Mary Monarch. Let me try to give you a general idea of some of the Mary things that were done in the Mary days when this Mary gentleman sat upon his Mary throne in Mary England. The first Mary proceeding was, of course, to declare that he was one of the greatest, the wisest, and the noblest kings that ever shone, like the blessed Son itself, on this benighted earth. The next Mary and pleasant piece of business was for the Parliament in the humblest manner to give him one million two hundred thousand pounds a year, and to settle upon him for life that old disputed tonnage and poundage which had been so bravely fought for. Then General Monk, being made Earl of Albemarle, and a few other royalists similarly rewarded, the law went to work to see what was to be done to those persons, they were called regicides, who had been concerned in making a martyr of the late king. One of these were merrily executed, that is to say, six of the judges, one of the council, Colonel Hacker, and another officer who had commanded the guards, and Hugh Peters, a preacher who had preached against the martyr with all his heart. The executions were so extremely merry that every horrible circumstance which Cromwell had abandoned was revived with appalling cruelty. The hearts of the sufferers were torn out of their living bodies, their bowels were burned before their faces, the executioner cut jokes to the next victim as he rubbed his filthy hands together that were reeking with the blood of the last, and the heads of the dead were drawn on sledges with the living to the place of suffering. Still, even so Mary a Monarch could not force one of these dying men to say that he was sorry for what he had done. Nay, the most memorable thing said among them was that if the thing were to do again they would do it. Sir Harry Vane, who had furnished the evidence against Straford, and was one of the most staunch of the Republicans, was also tried, found guilty, and ordered for execution. When he came upon the scaffold on Tower Hill, after conducting his own defence, with great power, his notes of what he had meant to say to the people were torn away from him, and the drums and trumpets were ordered to sound lustily and drown his voice. For the people had been so much impressed by what the Regicides had calmly said with their last breath, that it was the custom now to have the drums and trumpets always under the scaffold ready to strike up. Vane said no more than this, it is a bad cause which cannot bear the words of a dying man, and bravely died. These merry scenes were succeeded by another, perhaps even merrier. On the anniversary of the late King's death, the bodies of Oliver Cromwell, Irton and Bradshaw were torn out of their graves in Westminster Abbey, dragged to Tyburn, hanged there on a gallows all day long, and then beheaded. Imagine the head of Oliver Cromwell set upon a pole to be stared at by a brutal crowd, not one of whom would have dared to look the living Oliver in the face for half a moment. Think after you have read this reign what England was under Oliver Cromwell, who was torn out of his grave, and what it was under this merry monarch who sold it like a merry Judas over and over again. Of course the remains of Oliver's wife and daughter were not to be spared either, though they had been most excellent women. The base clergy of that time gave up their bodies, which had been buried in the Abbey, and to the eternal disgrace of England they were thrown into a pit, together with the mouldering bones of Pym and of the brave and bold old Admiral Blake. The clergy acted this disgraceful part because they hoped to get the nonconformists, or dissenters, thoroughly put down in this reign, and to have but one prayer-book and one service for all kinds of people, no matter what their private opinions were. This was pretty well, I think, for a Protestant church which had replaced the Romish church, because people had a right to their own opinions in religious matters. However, they carried it with a high hand, and a prayer-book was agreed upon, in which the extremist opinions of Archbishop Lod were not forgotten. An act was passed, too, preventing any dissenter from holding any office under any corporation, so the regular clergy and their triumph were soon as merry as the king. The army being, by this time, disbanded, and the king crowned. Everything was to go on easily, for ever more. I must say a word here about the king's family. He had not been long upon the throne when his brother, the Duke of Gloucester, and his sister, the Princess of Orange, died within a few months of each other, of smallpox. His remaining sister, the Princess Henrietta, married the Duke of Orléans, the brother of Louis XIV, king of France. His brother, James, Duke of York, was made high admiral, and by and by became a Catholic. He was a gloomy, sullen, bilious sort of man, with remarkable partiality for the ugliest women in the country. He married, under very discreditable circumstances, Anne Hyde, the daughter of Lord Clarendon, then the king's principal minister, not at all a delicate minister either, but doing much of the dirty work in a very dirty palace. It became important now that the king himself should be married, and diverse foreign monarchs, not very particular about the character of their son-in-law, proposed their daughters to him. The king of Portugal offered his daughter, Catherine of Briganza, and fifty thousand pounds, in addition to which the French king, who was favorable to that match, offered a loan of another fifty thousand. The king of Spain, on the other hand, offered anyone out of a dozen of princesses, and other hopes of gain, but the ready money carried the day, and Catherine came over, in state, to her merry marriage. The whole court was a great flaunting crowd of debauched men and shameless women, and Catherine's merry husband insulted and outraged her in every possible way, until she consented to receive these worthless creatures as her very good friends, and to degrade herself by their companionship. A Mrs. Palmer, whom the king made Lady Castlemane, and afterwards Duchess of Cleveland, was one of the most powerful of the bad women about the court, and had great influence with the king nearly all through his reign. Another merry lady, named Maul Davies, a dancer at the theater, was afterwards her rival, so was now Gwynne, first an orange girl, and then an actress, who really had good in her, and of whom one of the worst things I know is, that actually she does seem to have been fond of the king. The first Duke of St. Albans was this orange girl's child. In like manner the son of a merry waiting lady, whom the king created Duchess of Portsmouth, became the Duke of Richmond. Upon the whole it is not so bad a thing to be a commoner. The merry monarch was so exceedingly merry among these merry ladies, and some equally merry, and equally infamous, lords and gentlemen, that he soon got through his hundred thousand pounds, and then, by way of raising a little pocket money, made a merry bargain. He sold Dunkirk to the French king for five millions of levers. When I think of the dignity to which Oliver Cromwell raised England in the eyes of foreign powers, and when I think of the manner in which he gained for England this very Dunkirk, I am much inclined to consider that if the merry monarch had been made to follow his father for this action, he would have received his just deserts. Though he was like his father in none of that father's greater qualities, he was like him in being worthy of no trust. When he sent that letter to the parliament from Breda, he did expressly promise that all sincere religious opinions should be respected, yet he was no sooner firm in his power than he consented to one of the worst acts of parliament ever passed. Under this law, every minister who should not give his solemn assent to the prayer-book by a certain day was declared to be a minister no longer, and to be deprived of his church. The consequence of this was that some two thousand honest men were taken from their congregations, and reduced to dire poverty and stress. It was followed by another outrageous law called the Coventical Act, by which any person above the age of sixteen, who was present at any religious service, not according to the prayer-book, was to be imprisoned three months for the first offence, six for the second, and to be transported for the third. This act alone filled the prisons, which were then most dreadful dungeons, to overflowing. The covenanters in Scotland had already fared no better, a base parliament usually known as the Drunken Parliament, in consequence of its principal members being seldom sober, had been got together to make laws against the covenanters, and to force all men to be of one mind in religious matters. The Marquis of Argyle, relying on the King's honour, had given himself up to him, but he was wealthy, and his enemies wanted his wealth. He was tried for treason on the evidence of some private letters in which he had expressed opinions, as well, he might, more favourable to the government of the late Lord Protector, than of the present Mary and religious King. He was executed, as were two men of Mark among the covenanters, and Sharp, a trader who had once been the friend of the Presbyterians, and betrayed them, was made Archbishop of St. Andrews, to teach the scot how to like bishops. Things being in this Mary-stated home, the Mary Monarch undertook a war with the Dutch, principally because they interfered with an African company, established with the two objects of buying gold dust and slaves, of which the Duke of York was a leading member. After some preliminary hostilities, the said Duke sailed to the coast of Holland, with a fleet of ninety-eight vessels of war, and four fire-ships. This engaged with the Dutch fleet of no fewer than one hundred and thirteen ships. In the great battle between the two forces, the Dutch lost eighteen ships, four admirals, and seven thousand men. But the English on shore were in no mood of exaltation when they heard the news. For this was the year and the time of the great plague in London. During the winter of one thousand six hundred and sixty-four, it had been whispered about that some few people had died here and there of the disease called the plague, in some of the unwholesome suburbs around London. The news was not published at that time as it is now, and some people believed these rumors, and some disbelieved them, and they were soon forgotten. But in the month of May one thousand six hundred and sixty-five, it began to be said all over the town that the disease had burst out with great violence in St. Giles's, and that the people were dying in great numbers. This soon turned out to be awfully true. The roads out of London were choked up by people endeavoring to escape from the infected city, and large sums were paid for any kind of conveyance. The disease soon spread so fast that it was necessary to shut up the houses in which sick people were, and to cut them off from communication with the living. Every one of these houses was marked on the outside of the door with a red cross, and the words, Lord, have mercy upon us. The streets were all deserted, grass grew in the public ways, and there was a dreadful silence in the air. When night came on, dismal rumblings used to be heard, and these were the wheels of the death-carts, attended by men with veiled faces, and holding cloths to their mouths, who rang doleful bells, and cried in a loud and solemn voice, Bring out your dead! The corpses put into these carts were buried by torch-light in great pits, no service being performed over them, all men being afraid to stay for a moment on the brink of the ghastly graves. In the general fear children ran away from their parents, and parents from their children. Some who were taken ill died alone, and without any help. Some were stabbed or strangled by hired nurses, who robbed them of all their money, and stole the very beds on which they lay. Some went mad, dropped from the windows, ran through the streets, and in their pain and frenzy flung themselves into the river. These were not all the horrors of the time. The wicked and desolute, in wild desperation, sat in the taverns, singing roaring songs, and were stricken as they drank, and went out and died. The fearful and superstitious persuaded themselves that they saw supernatural sights, burning swords in the sky, gigantic arms, and darts. Others pretended that at night's vast crowds of ghosts walked round and round the dismal pits. One madman, naked and carrying a brazier full of burning coals upon his head, stalked through the streets, crying out that he was a prophet, commissioned to denounce the vengeance of the Lord on wicked London. Another always went to and fro, exclaiming, yet forty days and London shall be destroyed. A third awoke the echoes in the dismal streets by night and by day, and made the blood of the sick run cold, by calling out incessantly, in a deep, hoarse voice, O the great and dreadful God. Through the months of July and August and September, the great plague raged more and more. Great fires were lighted in the streets in the hope of stopping the infection, but there was a plague of rain too, and it beat the fires out. At last the winds which usually arise at that time of the year, which is called the equinox, when day and night or of equal length all over the world, began to blow and to purify the wretched town. The deaths began to decrease, the red crosses slowly to disappear, the fugitives to return, the shops to open, pale, frightened faces to be seen in the streets. The plague had been in every part of England, but in close and unwholesome London it had killed one hundred thousand people. All this time the merry monarch was as merry as ever, and as worthless as ever. All this time the debauched lords and gentlemen and the shameless ladies danced and gamed and drank, and loved and hated one another, according to their merry ways. So little humanity did the government learn from the late affliction that one of the first things the Parliament did when it met at Oxford, being as yet afraid to come to London, was to make a law called the Five Mile Act, expressly directed against those poor ministers, who in the time of the plague had manfully come back to comfort the unhappy people. This infamous law, by forbidding them to teach in any school or to come within five miles of any city, town, or village, doomed them to starvation and death. The fleet had been at sea and healthy. The King of France was now in alliance with the Dutch, though his navy was chiefly employed in looking on while the English and Dutch fought. The Dutch gained one victory, and the English gained another, and a greater, and Prince Rupert, one of the English admirals, was out in the channel one windy night, looking for the French admiral, with the intention of giving him something more to do than he had yet, when the gale increased to a storm, and blew him into St. Helens. That night was the third of September, 1666, and that wind fanned the Great Fire of London. It broke out at a baker's shop near London Bridge, on the spot on which the monument now stands, as a remembrance of those raging flames. It spread and spread, and burned and burned, for three days. The nights were lighter than the days. In the daytime there was an immense cloud of smoke, and in the nighttime there was a great tower of fire mounting up into the sky, which lighted the whole country landscape for ten miles round. Showers of hot ashes rose into the air, and fell on distant places, flying sparks carried the conflagration to great distances, and kindled it in twenty new spots at a time. Church steeples fell down with tremendous crashes, houses crumbled into cinders by the hundred and the thousand. The summer had been intensely hot and dry, the streets were very narrow, and the houses mostly built of wood and plaster. One could stop the tremendous fire, but the want of more houses to burn, nor did it stop until the whole way from the tower to Temple Bar was a desert, composed of the ashes of thirteen thousand houses and eighty-nine churches. This was a terrible visitation at the time, and occasioned great loss and suffering to the two hundred thousand burnt out people, who were obliged to lie in the fields under the open night sky, or in hastily made huts of mud and straw, while the lanes and roads were rendered impassable by carts which had broken down as they tried to save their goods. But the fire was a great blessing to the city afterwards, for it arose from its ruins very much improved, built more regularly, more widely, more cleanly and carefully, and therefore much more healthily. It might be far more healthy than it is, but there are some people in it still, even now at this time, nearly two hundred years later, so selfish, so pig-headed, and so ignorant, that I doubt if even another great fire would warm them up to do their duty. The Catholics were accused of having willfully set London in flames. One poor Frenchman, who had been mad for years, even accused himself of having with his own hand fired the first house. There is no reasonable doubt, however, that the fire was accidental. An inscription on the monument long attributed it to the church, but it is removed now, and was always a malicious and stupid untruth. Second Part That the merry monarch might be very merry indeed, in the merry times when his people were suffering under pestilence and fire, he drank and gambled and flung away among his favourites the money which the Parliament had voted for the war. The consequence of this was that the stout-hearted English sailors were merrily starving of want and dying in the streets, while the Dutch, under their admirals, Dewitt and Derruder came into the River Thames, and up the River Medway, as far as Upnor, burned the guard-ships, silenced the weak batteries, and did what they would to the English coast for six whole weeks. Most of the English ships that could have prevented them had neither powder nor shot on board. In this merry reign public officers made themselves as marries the king did with the public money, and when it was entrusted to them to spend in national defences or preparations they put it into their own pockets with the merriest grace in the world. Lord Clarendon had by this time run as long a course as is usually allotted to the unscrupulous ministers of bad kings. He was impeached by his political opponents, but unsuccessfully. The king then commanded him to withdraw from England and to retire to France, which he did, after defending himself in writing. He was no great loss at home, and died abroad some seven years afterwards. There then came into power a ministry called the Cabel Ministry, because it was composed of Lord Clifford, the Earl of Arlington, the Duke of Buckingham, a great rascal, and the king's most powerful favourite, Lord Ashley and the Duke of Lauderdale, C-A-B-A-L. As the French were making conquests and flanders, the first cabel proceeding was to make a treaty with the Dutch for uniting with Spain to oppose the French. It was no sooner made than the merry monarch who always wanted to get money without being accountable to a parliament for his expenditure, apologized to the king of France for having had anything to do with it, and concluded a secret treaty with him, making himself his infamous pensioner to the amount of two millions of levers down and three millions more a year. And engaging to desert that very Spain to make war against those very Dutch, and to declare himself a Catholic when a convenient time should arrive. This religious king had lately been crying to his Catholic brother on the subject of his strong desire to be a Catholic, and now he merrily concluded this treasonable conspiracy against the country he governed by undertaking to become one as soon as he safely could, for all of which, though he had had ten merry heads instead of one, he richly deserved to lose them by the headsman's axe. As his one merry head might have been far from safe if these things had been known, they were kept very quiet, and war was declared by France and England against the Dutch. But a very uncommon man, afterwards most important to English history and to the religion and liberty of this land, arose among them, and for many long years defeated the whole projects of France. This was William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, son of the last Prince of Orange of the same name, who married the daughter of Charles I of England. He was a young man at this time, only just of age, but he was brave, cool, intrepid, and wise. His father had been so detested that upon his death the Dutch had abolished the authority to which this son would have otherwise succeeded. Statholder it was called, and placed the chief power in the hands of John DeWitt, who educated this young Prince. Now the Prince became very popular, and John DeWitt's brother Cornelius was sentenced to banishment on a false accusation of conspiring to kill him. John went to the prison where he was to take him away to exile in his coach, and a great mob who collected on the occasion, then and there cruelly murdered both the brothers. This left the government in the hands of the Prince, who was really the choice of the nation, and from this time he exercised it with the greatest vigor against the whole power of France under its famous generals, Condi and Turin, and in support of the Protestant religion. It was full seven years before this war ended in a treaty of peace made at Nimmigwin, and its details would occupy a very considerable space. It is enough to say that William of Orange established a famous character with the whole world, and that the merry monarch, adding to and improving on his former baseness, bound himself to do everything the King of France liked, and nothing the King of France did not like, for a pension of one hundred thousand pounds a year, which was afterwards doubled. Despite this the King of France, by means of his corrupt ambassador, who wrote accounts of his proceedings in England, which are not always to be believed, I think, bought our English members of Parliament as he wanted them. So in point of fact, during a considerable portion of this merry reign, the King of France was the real King of this country. But there was a better time to come, and it was to come, though his royal uncle little thought so, through that very William, Prince of Orange. He came over to England, saw merry the elder daughter of the Duke of York, and married her. We shall see by and by what came of that marriage, and why it is never to be forgotten. This daughter was a Protestant, but her mother died a Catholic. She and her sister Anne, also a Protestant, were the only survivors of eight children. Anne afterwards married George, Prince of Denmark, brother to the King of that country. Lest you should do the merry monarch the injustice of supposing that he was even good-humoured, except when he had everything his own way, or that he was high-spirited and honourable, I will mention here what was done to a member of the House of Commons, Sir John Coventry. He made a remark in a debate about taxing the theatres, which gave the King offence. The King agreed with his illegitimate son, who had been born abroad, and whom he had made Duke of Monmouth, to take the following merry vengeance, to wailay him at night fifteen armed men to one, and to slit his nose with a pen-knife. Like master, like man, the King's favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, was strongly suspected of setting on an assassin to murder the Duke of Ormond, as he was returning home from a dinner, and that Duke's spirited son, Lord Osirie, was so persuaded of his guilt, that he said to him at court, even as he stood beside the King, my Lord, I know very well that you are at the bottom of this late attempt upon my father. But I give you warning, if he ever come to a violent end, his blood shall be upon you, and wherever I meet you I will pistol you. I will do so, though I find you standing behind the King's chair, and I tell you this in his Majesty's presence, that you may be quite sure of my doing, what I threaten. Those were merry times, indeed. There was a fellow named Blood, who was seized for making with two companions, an audacious attempt to steal the crown, the globe, and scepter from the place where the jewels were kept in the tower. This robber, who was a swaggering ruffian, being taken, declared that he was the man who had endeavored to kill the Duke of Ormond, and that he had meant to kill the King, too, but was overawed by the Majesty of his appearance, when he might otherwise have done it, as he was bathing at Battersea. The King, being but an ill-looking fellow, I don't believe a word of this. Whether he was flattered, or whether he knew that Buckingham had really set blood on to murder the Duke, is uncertain, but it is quite certain that he pardoned this thief, gave him an estate of five hundred a year in Ireland, which had had the honour of giving him birth, and presented him at court to the debauched lords and the shameless ladies, who made a great deal of him, as I have no doubt they would have made of the devil himself if the King had introduced him. Infamously penchant as he was, the King still wanted money, and consequently was obliged to call Parliament. In these the great object of the Protestants was to thwart the Catholic Duke of York, who married a second time, his new wife being a young lady only fifteen years old, the Catholic sister of the Duke of Modena. In this they were seconded by the Protestant dissenters, though to their own disadvantage, since to exclude Catholics from power they were even willing to exclude themselves. The King's object was to pretend to be a Protestant, while he was really a Catholic, to swear to the bishops that he was devoutly attached to the English Church, while he knew he had bargained it away to the King of France, and by cheating and deceiving them, and all who were attached to royalty, to become despotic and be powerful enough to confess what a rascal he was. Meantime the King of France, knowing his merry pensioner well, intrigued with the King's opponents in Parliament, as well as with the King and his friends. The fears that the country had of the Catholic religion being restored, if the Duke of York should come to the throne, and the low cunning of the King in pretending to share their alarms, led to some very terrible results. A certain Dr. Tong, a dull clergyman in the city, fell into the hands of a certain Titus Oates, a most infamous character who pretended to have acquired among the Jesuits abroad a knowledge of a great plot for the murder of the King, and the re-establishment of the Catholic religion. Titus Oates, being produced by this unlucky Dr. Tong, and solemnly examined before the Council, contradicted himself in a thousand ways, told the most ridiculous and improbable stories, and implicated Coleman, the Secretary of the Duchess of York. Now although what he charged against Coleman was not true, and although you and I know very well that the real dangerous Catholic plot was that one of the King of France, of which the merry monarch was himself the head, there happened to be found among Coleman's papers some letters in which he did praise the days of bloody Queen Mary, and abuse the Protestant religion. This was great good fortune for Titus, as it seemed to confirm him, but better still was in store. Sir Edmund Barry Godfrey, the magistrate who had first examined him, being unexpectedly found dead near Primrose Hill, was confidently believed to have been killed by the Catholics. I think there is no doubt that he had been melancholy mad, and that he killed himself, but he had a great Protestant funeral, and Titus was called the saver of the nation, and received a pension of twelve hundred pounds a year. As soon as Oates' wickedness had met with the success, upstarted another villain, named William Bedlow, who, attracted by a reward of five hundred pounds, offered for the apprehension of the murderers of Godfrey, came forward and charged two Jesuits and some other persons with having committed it at the Queen's desire. Oates, going into partnership with this new informer, had the audacity to accuse the poor Queen herself of high treason. Then appeared a third informer, as bad as either of the two, and accused a Catholic banker, named Staley, of having said that the King was the greatest rogue in the world, which would not have been far from the truth, and that he would kill him with his own hand. This banker, being at once tried and executed, Coleman and two others were tried and executed. Then a miserable wretch named Prance, a Catholic silversmith, being accused by Bedlow, was tortured into confessing that he had taken part in Godfrey's murder, and into accusing three other men of having committed it. Then five Jesuits were accused by Oates, Bedlow, and Prance together, and were all found guilty and executed on the same kind of contradictory and absurd evidence. The Queen's physician and three monks were next put on their trial, but Oates and Bedlow had for the time gone far enough, and these four were acquitted. The public mind, however, was so full of a Catholic plot, and so strong against the Duke of York, that James consented to obey a written order from his brother, and to go with his family to Brussels, provided that his rights should never be sacrificed in his absence to the Duke of Monmouth. The House of Commons, not satisfied with this as the King hoped, passed a bill to exclude the Duke from ever succeeding to the throne. In return the King dissolved the Parliament. He had deserted his old favorite, the Duke of Buckingham, who was now in the opposition. To give any sufficient idea of the miseries of Scotland in this merry reign would occupy a hundred pages, because the people would not have bishops, and were resolved to stand by their solemn league and covenant. Such cruelties were inflicted upon them, as make the blood run cold. Ferocious dragoons galloped through the country to punish the peasants for deserting the churches. Sons were hanged up at their father's doors, for refusing to disclose where their fathers were concealed. Wives were tortured to death for not betraying their husbands. People were taken out of their fields and gardens, and shot on the public roads without trial. Lighted matches were tied to the fingers of prisoners, and the most horrible torment, called the boot, was invented, and constantly applied, which ground and mashed the victim's legs with iron wedges. Witnesses were tortured as well as prisoners. All the prisons were full. All the gibbets were heavy with bodies, murder and plunder devastated the whole country. In spite of all, the Covenanters were by no means to be dragged into the churches, and persisted in worshiping God as they thought right. A body of ferocious Highlanders, turned upon them from the mountains of their own country, had no greater effect than the English dragoons under Graham of Claverhouse, the most cruel and rapacious of all their enemies, whose name will ever be cursed through the length and breadth of Scotland. Archbishop Sharp had ever aided and abetted all these outrages. But he fell at last, for when the injuries of the Scottish people were at their height, he was seen in his coach and six, coming across a moor, by a body of men headed by one John Balfour, who were waiting for another of their oppressors. Upon this they cried out that Heaven had delivered him into their hands, and killed him with many wounds. If ever a man deserved such a death, I think Archbishop Sharp did. It made a great noise directly, and the merry monarch strongly suspected of having goaded the Scottish people on, that he might have an excuse for a greater army than the Parliament were willing to give him, sent down his son, the Duke of Monmouth, as commander-in-chief, with instructions to attack the Scottish rebels, or wigs, as they were called, whenever he came up with them. Marching with ten thousand men from Edinburgh, he found them in number four or five thousand, drawn up at Bothwell Bridge by the Clyde. They were soon dispersed, and Monmouth showed a more humane character towards them, than he had shown towards that member of Parliament whose nose he had caused to be slit with a pen-knife. But the Duke of Lauderdale was their bitter foe, and sent Claverhouse to finish them. As the Duke of York became more and more unpopular, the Duke of Monmouth became more and more popular. It would have been decent in the latter not to have voted in favour of the renewed bill, for the exclusion of James from the throne, but he did so much to the King's amusement, who used to sit in the House of Lords by the fire, hearing the debates which he said were as good as a play. The House of Commons passed the bill by a large majority, and it was carried up to the House of Lords by Lord Russell, one of the best of the leaders on the Protestant side. It was rejected there, chiefly because the bishops helped the King to get rid of it, and the fear of Catholic plots revived again. There had been another got up, by a fellow out of Newgate, named Dangerfield, which is more famous than it deserves to be, under the name of the Mealtub Plot. This jailbird, having been got out of Newgate by Mrs. Selyer, a Catholic nurse, had turned Catholic himself and pretended that he knew of a plot among the Presbyterians against the King's life. This was very pleasant to the Duke of York, who hated the Presbyterians, who returned the compliment. He gave Dangerfield twenty guineas, and sent him to the King, his brother. But Dangerfield, breaking down altogether in his charge, and being sent back to Newgate, almost astonished the Duke at his five senses, by suddenly swearing that the Catholic nurse had put that false design into his head, and that what he really knew about was a Catholic plot against the King, the evidence of which would be found in some papers concealed in a Mealtub in Mrs. Selyer's house. There they were, of course, for he had put them there himself, and so the Tub gave the name to the plot. But the nurse was acquitted on her trial, and it came to nothing. Lord Ashley of the Cabal was now Lord Shaftesbury, and was strong against the succession of the Duke of York. The House of Commons aggravated to the utmost extent, as we may well suppose, by suspicions of the King's conspiracy with the King of France, made a desperate point of the exclusion, still, and were bitter against the Catholics generally. So unjustly bitter were they, I grieve to say, that they impeached the venerable Lord Stafford, a Catholic nobleman, seventy years old, of a design to kill the King. The witnesses were that atrocious oats and two other birds of the same feather. He was found guilty, on evidence quite as foolish as it was false, and was beheaded on Tower Hill. The people were opposed to him when he first appeared upon the scaffold. But when he had addressed them, and shown them how innocent he was, and how wickedly he was sent there, their better nature was aroused, and they said, We believe you, my Lord. God bless you, my Lord. The House of Commons refused to let the King have any money until he should consent to the exclusion-bill. But as he could get it, and did get it from his master the King of France, he could afford to hold them very cheap. He called a Parliament at Oxford, to which he went down with a great show of being armed and protected, as if he were in danger of his life, and to which the opposition members also went armed and protected, alleging that they were in fear of the Papists, who were numerous among the King's guards. However, they went on with the exclusion-bill, and were so earnest upon it, that they would have carried it again, if the King had not popped his crown and state robes, into a sedan chair, bundled himself into it along with them, hurried down to the chamber where the House of Lords met and dissolved the Parliament, after which he scampered home, and the members of Parliament scampered home, too, as fast as their legs could carry them. The Duke of York, then residing in Scotland, had, under the law, which excluded Catholics from public trust, no right whatever to public employment. Nevertheless, he was openly employed as the King's representative in Scotland, and there gratified his sullen and cruel nature to his heart's content, by directing the dreadful cruelties against the Covenanters. There were two ministers named Cargill and Cameron, who had escaped from the battle of Bothwell Bridge, and who returned to Scotland, and raised the miserable, but still brave and unsubdued, Covenanters afresh, under the name of Cameroonians. As Cameron publicly posted a declaration that the King was a force-worn tyrant, no mercy was shown to his unhappy followers after he was slain in battle. The Duke of York, who was particularly fond of the boot, and derived great pleasure from having it applied, offered their lives to some of these people. If they would cry on the scaffold, God save the King. But their relations, friends, and countrymen had been so barbarously tortured and murdered in this merry rain, that they preferred to die, and did die. The Duke then obtained his merry brother's permission to hold a parliament in Scotland, which first, with most shameless deceit, confirmed the laws for securing the Protestant religion against Popery, and then declared that nothing must or should prevent the succession of the Popish Duke. After this double-faced beginning it established an oath which no human being could understand, but which everybody was to take as it proved that his religion was the lawful religion. The Earl of Argyle taking it with the explanation that he did not consider it to prevent him from favouring any alteration either in the church or state, which was not inconsistent with the Protestant religion, or with his loyalty, was tried for high treason before a Scottish jury of which the Marquis of Montrose was foreman, and was found guilty. He escaped the scaffold, for that time, by getting away in the disguise of a page in the train of his daughter, Lady Sophia Lindsay. It was absolutely proposed by certain members of the Scottish Council that this lady should be whipped through the streets of Edinburgh. But this was too much even for the Duke, who had the manliness then, he had very little at most times, to remark that Englishmen were not accustomed to treat ladies in that manner. In those merry times nothing could equal the brutal servility of the Scottish bonners, but the conduct of similar degraded beings in England. After the settlement of these little affairs the Duke returned to England, and soon resumed his place at the Council, and his office of High Admiral. All this by his brother's favour, and in open defiance of the law. It would have been no loss to the country, if he had been drowned when his ship, in going to Scotland to fetch his family, struck on a sandbank, and was lost with two hundred souls on board. But he escaped in a boat with some friends, and the sailors were so brave and unselfish that, when they saw him rowing away, they gave three cheers, while they themselves were going down, for ever. The merry monarch, having got rid of his parliament, went to work to make himself despotic, with all speed. Having had the villainy to order the execution of Oliver Plunkett, Bishop of Armagh, falsely accused of a plot to establish potpourri in that country, by means of a French army. The very thing this royal trader was himself trying to do at home, and having tried to ruin Lord Shaftesbury, and failed, he turned his hand to controlling the corporations all over the country. Because if he could only do that, he could get what juries he chose to bring in perjured verdicts, and could get what members he chose return to parliament. These merry times produced, and made Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench, a drunken ruffian of the name of Jeffries, a red-faced, swollen, bloated, horrible creature, with a bullying, roaring voice, and a more savage nature perhaps, than was ever lodged in any human breast. This monster was the merry monarch's special favorite, and he testified his admiration of him by giving him a ring from his own finger, which the people used to call Judge Jeffries Bloodstone. Him, the king employed to go about and bully the corporations, beginning with London, or as Jeffries himself elegantly called it, to give them a lick of the rough side of his tongue. And he did it so thoroughly, that they soon became the basest and most sycophantic bodies in the kingdom, except the University of Oxford, which, in that respect, was quite preeminent and unapproachable. Lord Shaftesbury, who died soon after the king's failure against him, Lord William Russell, the Duke of Monmouth, Lord Howard, Lord Jersey, Algernon Sidney, John Hampton, grandson of the Great Hampton, and some others used to hold a council together after the dissolution of the parliament, arranging what it might be necessary to do if the king carried his popish plot to the utmost height. Lord Shaftesbury, having been much the most violent of this party, brought two violent men into their secrets, Rumsey, who had been a soldier in the Republican army, and West, a lawyer. These two knew an old officer of Cromwells, called Rumbled, who had married a Malster's widow, and so had come into possession of a solitary dwelling, called the Rye House, near Hodgston, in Hartfordshire. Rumbold said to them what a capital place this house of his would be, from which to shoot at the king, who often passed there going to and fro from Newmarket. They liked the idea and entertained it, but one of their body gave information, and they, together with Shepard, a wine-merchant, Lord Russell, Algernon Sidney, Lord Essex, Lord Howard, and Hampton, were all arrested. Lord Russell might have easily escaped, but scorned to do so, being innocent of any wrong. Lord Essex might have easily escaped, but scorned to do so, lest his flight should prejudice Lord Russell. But it weighed upon his mind that he had brought into their council Lord Howard, who now turned a miserable traitor, against a great dislike Lord Russell had always had of him. He could not bear the reflection, and destroyed himself before Lord Russell was brought to trial at the old Bailey. He knew very well that he had nothing to hope, having always been manful in the Protestant cause against the two false brothers, the one on the throne and the other standing next to it. He had a wife, one of the noblest and best of women, who acted as his secretary on the trial, who comforted him in his prison, who supped with him on the night before he died, and whose love and virtue and devotion have made her name imperishable. Of course he was found guilty, and was sentenced to be beheaded in Lincoln's infields, not many yards from his own house. When he had parted from his children on the evening before his death, his wife stayed with him until ten o'clock at night, and when their final separation in this world was over, and he had kissed her many times, he still sat for a long while in his prison, talking of her goodness. Hearing the rain fall fast at that time, he calmly said, Such a rain to-morrow will spoil a great show, which is a dull thing on a rainy day. At midnight he went to bed, and slept till four, even when his servant called him, he fell asleep again while his clothes were being made ready. He rode to the scaffold in his own carriage, attended by two famous clergymen, Tillitson and Burnett, and sang a psalm to himself very softly as he went along. He was as quiet and as steady as if he had been going out for an ordinary ride. After saying that he was surprised to see so great a crowd, he laid down his head upon the block, as if upon the pillow of his bed, and had it struck off at the second blow. His noble wife was busy for him even then, for that true-hearted lady printed and widely circulated his last words, of which he had given her a copy. They made the blood of all the honest men in England boil. The University of Oxford distinguished itself in the very same day by pretending to believe that the accusation against Lord Russell was true, and by calling the king in a written paper, the breath of their nostrils, and the anointed of the Lord. This paper the Parliament afterwards caused to be burned by the common hangmen, which I am sorry for, as I wish it had been framed and glazed, and hung up in some public place as a monument of baseness for the scorn of mankind. Next came the trial of Algernon Sidney, at which Jeffries presided, like a great crimson toad, sweltering and swelling with rage. I pray God, Mr. Sidney, said this chief justice of a merry reign, after passing sentence, to work in you a temper fit to go to the other world, for I see you are not fit for this. My Lord, said the prisoner, composedly holding out his arm, feel my pulse, and see if I be disordered. I thank heaven I never was in a better temper than I am now. Algernon Sidney was executed on Tower Hill on the 7th of December 1683. He died a hero, and died in his own words, for that good old cause in which he had been engaged from his youth, and for which God had so often and so wonderfully declared himself. The Duke of Monmouth had been making his uncle, the Duke of York, very jealous, by going about the country in a royal sort of way, playing at the people's games, becoming Godfather to their children, and even touching for the king's evil, or stroking the faces of the sick, to cure them. Though for the matter of that I should say he did them about as much good as any crowned king could have done. His father had got him to write a letter, confessing his having had a part in the conspiracy for which Lord Russell had been beheaded. But he was ever a weak man, and as soon as he had written it he was ashamed of it, and got it back again. For this he was banished to the Netherlands, but he soon returned and had an interview with his father, unknown to his uncle. It would seem that he was coming into the merry monarch's favour again, and that the Duke of York was sliding out of it, when death appeared to the merry galleries at Whitehall, and astonished the debauched lords and gentlemen, and the shameless ladies very considerably. On Monday, the 2nd of February, 1685, the merry pensioner and servant of the King of France fell down in a fit of apoplexy. By the Wednesday his case was hopeless, and on the Thursday he was told so. As he made a difficulty about taking the sacrament from the Protestant bishop of Bath, the Duke of York got all who were present away from the bed, and asked his brother in a whisper, if he should send for a Catholic priest. The King replied, For God's sakes, brother, do. The Duke smuggled in up the back stairs, disguised in a wig and gown, a priest named Huddleston, who had saved the King's life after the battle of Worcester, telling him that this worthy man in the wig had once saved his body, and was now come to save his soul. The merry monarch lived through that night, and died before noon on the next day, which was Friday the 6th. Two of the last things he said were of a human sort, and your remembrance will give him the full benefit of them. When the Queen sent to say she was too unwell to attend him and to ask his pardon, he said, Alas, poor woman, she beg my pardon, I beg hers with all my heart, take back that answer to her. And he also said in reference to Nell Gwynne, do not let poor Nellie starve. He died in the fifty-fifth year of his age, and the twenty-fifth year of his reign. End of chapter thirty-five. Chapter thirty-six of A Child's History of England. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Gwyneth Connell. A Child's History of England by Charles Dickens. Chapter thirty-six, England under James II. King James II was a man so very disagreeable that even the best of historians has favored his brother Charles as becoming by comparison quite a pleasant character. The one object of his short reign was to re-establish the Catholic religion in England, and this he doggedly pursued with such a stupid obstinacy that his career very soon came to a close. The first thing he did was to assure his counsel that he would make it his endeavor to preserve the government, both in church and state, as it was by law established and that he would always take care to defend and support the church. Great public acclamations were raised over this fair speech, and a great deal was said from the pulpits and elsewhere about the word of a king which was never broken by credulous people who little supposed that he had formed a secret council for Catholic affairs of which a mischievous Jesuit called Father Petrie was one of the chief members. With tears of joy in his eyes he received as the beginning of his pension from the King of France five hundred thousand levers, yet with a mixture of meanness and arrogance that belonged to his contemptible character he was always jealous of making some show of being independent of the King of France while he pocketed his money, as notwithstanding his publishing two papers in favor of Popery, and not likely to do it much service I should think, written by the King, his brother, and found in his strongbox, and his open display of himself attending Mass. When the Parliament was very obsequious and granted him a large sum of money he began his reign with a belief that he could do it he pleased and with a determination to do it. Before we proceed to its principal events let us dispose of Titus Oates. He was tried for perjury a fortnight after the coronation, and besides being very heavily fined was sentenced to stand twice in the pillory to be whipped from Aldgate to New Gate one day, and from New Gate to Tibern two days afterwards, and to stand in the pillory five times a year as long as he lived. This fearful sentence was actually inflicted on the rascal. Being unable to stand after his first flogging he was dragged on a sledge from New Gate to Tibern and flogged as he was drawn along. He was so strong a villain that he did not die under the torture, but lived to be afterwards pardoned and rewarded, though not to be ever believed in any more. Dangerfield, the only other one of that crew left alive, was not so fortunate. He was almost killed by a whipping from New Gate to Tibern, and as if that were not punishment enough, a ferocious barrister of Grayson gave him a poke in the eye with his cane, which caused his death, for which the ferocious barrister was deservedly tried and executed. As soon as James was on the throne, Argyle and Monmouth went from Brussels to Rotterdam, and attended a meeting of Scottish exiles held there to concert measures for a rising in England. It was agreed that Argyle should affect a landing in Scotland and Monmouth in England, and that two Englishmen should be sent with Argyle to be in his confidence, and two Scotchmen with the Duke of Monmouth. Argyle was the first to act upon this contract, but two of his men being taken prisoners at the Orkney Islands, the government became aware of his intention, and was able to act against him with such vigor as to prevent his raising more than 2,000 or 3,000 Highlanders, although he sent a fiery cross by trusty messengers from clan to clan and from glen to glen, as the custom then was when those wild people were to be excited by their chiefs. As he was moving towards Glasgow with his small forest, he was betrayed by some of his followers, taken and carried with his hands tied behind his back to his old prison in Edinburgh Castle. James ordered him to be executed on his old shamefully unjust sentence within three days, and he appears to have been anxious that his legs should have been pounded with his old favourite, the boot. However, the boot was not applied. He was simply beheaded, and his head was set upon the top of Edinburgh jail. One of those Englishmen who had been assigned to him was that old soldier Rumble, the master of the Rye House. He was sorely wounded, and within a week after Argyle had suffered with great courage, was brought up for trial, lest he should die and disappoint the king. He, too, was executed after defending himself with great spirit, and saying that he did not believe that God had made the greater part of mankind to carry saddles on their backs and bridles in their mouths and to be ridden by a few, booted and spurred for the purpose, in which I thoroughly agree with Rumble. The Duke of Monmouth, partly through being detained and partly through idling his time away, was five or six weeks behind his friend when he landed at Lime in Dorset, having at his right hand an unlucky nobleman called Lord Gray of Work, who of himself would have ruined a far more promising expedition. He immediately set up his standard in the marketplace and proclaimed the king a tyrant and a pope-issuesurper, and I know not what else, charging him not only with what he had done, which was bad enough, but with what neither he nor anybody else had done, such as setting fire to London and poisoning the late king. Raising some four thousand men by these means, he marched on to Taunton, where there were many Protestant dissenters who were strongly opposed to the Catholics. Here, both the rich and poor turned out to receive him. Ladies waved a welcome to him from all the windows as he passed along the streets. Flowers were strewn in his way, and every compliment and honor that could be devised was showered upon him. Among the rest, twenty young ladies came forward in their best clothes and in their brightest beauty, and gave him a Bible ornamented with their own fair hands, together with other presents. Encouraged by this homage, he proclaimed himself king and went on to Bridgewater. But here the government troops under the Earl of Fieberscham were close at hand, and he was so dispirited at finding that he made but few powerful friends after all that it was a question whether he should disband his army and endeavor to escape. It was resolved, at the instance of that unlucky lord Grey, to make a night attack on the king's army as it laying camped on the edge of a morass called Sedgemore. The horsemen were commanded by the same unlucky lord, who was not a brave man. He gave up the battle almost at the first obstacle, which was a deep drain, and although the poor countrymen who had turned out for Monmouth fought bravely with sides, poles, and pitchforks, and such poor weapons as they had, they were soon dispersed by the trained soldiers and fled in all directions. When the Duke of Monmouth himself fled, was not known in the confusion, but the unlucky lord Grey was taken early next day, and then another of the party was taken who confessed that he had parted from the Duke only four hours before. Strict search being made, he was found disguised as a peasant, hidden in a ditch under fern and nettles with a few peas in his pocket which he had gathered in the fields to eat. The only other articles he had upon him were a few papers and little books, one of the latter being a strange jumble in his own writing of charms, songs, recipes, and prayers. He was completely broken. He wrote a miserable letter to the king, beseeching and intriguing to be allowed to see him. When he was taken to London and conveyed bound into the king's presence, he crawled to him on his knees and made a most degrading exhibition. As James never forgave or relented towards anybody, he was not likely to soften towards the issuer of the line proclamation, so he told the supplient to prepare for death. On the 15th of July, 1685, this unfortunate favorite of the people was brought out to die on Tower Hill. The crowd was immense, and the tops of all the houses were covered with gazers. He had seen his wife, the daughter of the Duke of Bookluch, in the tower, and had talked much of a lady whom he loved far better, the lady Harriet Wentworth, who was one of the last persons he remembered in this life. Before laying down his head upon the block, he felt the edge of the ax and told the executioner that he feared it was not sharp enough and that the ax was not heavy enough. On the executioner replying that it was of the proper kind, the Duke said, I pray you have a care and do not use me so awkwardly as you used my Lord Russell. The executioner, made nervous by this and trembling, struck once and merely gashed him in the neck. Upon this, the Duke of Monmouth raised his head and looked the man reproachfully in the face. Then he struck twice, and then thrice, and then threw down the ax, and cried out in a voice of horror that he could not finish that work. The sheriffs, however, threatening him with what should be done to himself if he did not, he took it up again and struck a fourth time and a fifth time. Then the wretched head at last fell off, and James Duke of Monmouth was dead in the 36th year of his age. He was a showy, graceful man with many popular qualities and had found much favor in the open hearts of the English. The atrocities committed by the government, which followed this Monmouth rebellion, formed the blackest and most lamentable page in English history. The poor peasants, having been dispersed with great loss and their leaders having been taken, one would think that the Implacable King might have been satisfied. But no, he let loose upon them, among other intolerable monsters, a Colonel Kirk, who had served against the Moors, and whose soldiers, called by the people Kirk's lambs, because they bore a lamb upon their flag as the emblem of Christianity, were worthy of their leader. The atrocities committed by these demons and human shape are far too horrible to be related here. It is enough to say that besides most ruthlessly murdering and robbing them, and ruining them by making them by their pardons at the price of all they possessed, it was one of Kirk's favorite amusements, as he and his officers set drinking after dinner and toasting the King, to have batches of prisoners hanged outside the windows for the company's diversion, and that when their feet quivered in the convulsions of death, he used to swear that they should have music to their dancing and would order the drums to beat and the trumpets to play. The detestable King informed him, as an acknowledgment of these services, that he was very well satisfied with his proceedings. But the King's great delight was in the proceedings of Jeffries, now a peer, who went down into the West with four other judges to try persons accused of having had any share in the rebellion. The King pleasantly called this Jeffries' campaign. The people down in that part of the country remember it to this day as the bloodiest size. It began at Winchester where a poor deaf old lady, Mrs. Alicia Lyle, the widow of one of the judges of Charles the First, who had been murdered abroad by some royalist assassins, was charged with having given shelter in her house to two fugitives from Sedgemore. Three times the jury refused to find her guilty until Jeffries bullied and frightened them into that false verdict. When he had extorted it from them, he said, gentlemen, if I had been one of you and she had been my own mother, I would have found her guilty, as I dare say he would. He sentenced her to be burned alive that very afternoon. The clergy of the cathedral and some others interfered in her favor, and she was beheaded within a week. As a high mark of his approbation, the King made Jeffries' lord chancellor, and he then went on to Dorchester, to Exeter, to Taunton, and to Wells. It is astonishing, when we read of the enormous injustice and barbarity of this beast, to know that no one struck him dead on the judgment seat. It was enough for any man or woman to be accused by an enemy before Jeffries, to be found guilty of high treason. One man who pleaded not guilty, he ordered to be taken out of court upon the incident and hanged, and this so terrified the prisoners in general that they mostly pleaded guilty at once. At Dorchester alone, in the course of a few days, Jeffries hanged 80 people, besides whipping, transporting, imprisoning, and selling his slaves great numbers. He executed in all 250 or 300. These executions took place among the neighbors and friends of the sentenced in 36 towns and villages. Their bodies were mangled, steeped in cauldrons of boiling pitch and tar, and hung up by the roadsides and the streets over the very churches. The sight and smell of heads and limbs, the hissing and bubbling of the infernal cauldrons, and the tears and terrors of the people were dreadful beyond all description. One rustic, who was forced to steep the remains in the black pot, was ever afterwards called Tom Boyleman. The hangman has ever since been called Jack Ketch, because a man of that name went hanging and hanging all day long in the train of Jeffries. You will hear much of the horrors of the Great French Revolution. Many and terrible they were, there is no doubt, but I know of nothing worse done by the maddened people of France in that awful time than was done by the highest judge in England with the express approval of the king of England in the bloodiest size. Nor was this even this all. Jeffries was as fond of money for himself as of misery for others, and he sold Pardons wholesale to fill his pockets. The king ordered at one time 1,000 prisoners to be given to certain of his favorites in order that they might bargain with them for their pardons. The young ladies of Taunton, who had presented the Bible, were bestowed upon the maids of honor at court, and those precious ladies made very hard bargains with them indeed. When the bloodiest size was at its most dismal height, the king was diverting himself with horse races in the very place where Mrs. Lyle had been executed. When Jeffries had done his worst and came home again, he was particularly complimented in the royal gazette, and when the king heard that through drunkenness and raging he was very ill, his odious majesty remarked that such another man could not easily be found in England. Besides all this, a former sheriff of London named Cornish was hanged within sight of his own house after an abominably conducted trial for having had a share in the Rye House plot on evidence given by Rumsey, which that villain was obliged to confess was directly opposed to the evidence he had given on the trial of Lord Russell, and on the very same day a worthy widow named Elizabeth Gaunt was burned alive at Tyburn for having sheltered a wretch who himself gave evidence against her. She settled the fuel about herself with her own hands so that the flames should reach her quickly, and nobly said with her last breath that she had obeyed the sacred command of God to give refuge to the outcast and not to betray the wanderer. After all this hanging, beheading, burning, boiling, mutilating, exposing, robbing, transporting, and selling into slavery of his unhappy subjects, the king not unnaturally thought that he could do whatever he would, so he went to work to change the religion of the country with all possible speed, and what he did was this. He first of all tried to get rid of what was called the Test Act, which prevented the Catholics from holding public employments by his own power of dispensing with the penalties. He tried it in one case, and eleven of the twelve judges deciding in his favour he exercised it in three others, being those of three dignitaries of University College Oxford who had become papists, and whom he kept in their places and sanctioned. He revived the hated ecclesiastical commission to get rid of Compton, Bishop of London, who manfully opposed him. He solicited the pope to favour England with an ambassador, which the pope, who was a sensible man then, rather unwillingly did. He flourished Father Petrie before the eyes of the people on all possible occasions. He favoured the establishment of convents in several parts of London. He was delighted to have the streets, and even the court itself, filled with monks and friars in the habits of their orders. He constantly endeavored to make Catholics of the Protestants about him. He held private interviews, which he called closetings, with those members of Parliament who held offices to persuade them to consent to the design he had in view. When they did not consent, they were removed or resigned of themselves, and their places were given to Catholics. He displaced Protestant officers from the army by every means in his power, and got Catholics into their places too. He tried the same thing with the corporations, and also, though not so successfully, with the Lord Lieutenants of Counties. To terrify the people into the endurance of all these measures, he kept an army of 15,000 men encamped on Hounsloe Heath, where mass was openly performed in the General's tent, and where priests went among the soldiers endeavouring to persuade them to become Catholics. For circulating a paper among those men advising them to be true to their religion, a Protestant clergyman named Johnson, the chaplain of the late Lord Russell, was actually sentenced to stand three times in the pillory, and was actually whipped from New Gate to Tibern. He dismissed his own brother-in-law from his council because he was a Protestant, and made a privy counsellor of the before-mentioned Father Petrie. He handed Ireland over to Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrkonel, a worthless disloot knave who played the same game there for his master, and who played the deeper game for himself of one day putting it under the protection of the French king. In going to these extremities, every man of sense and judgment among the Catholics, from the Pope to a porter, knew that the king was a mere bigoted fool, who would undo himself in the cause he sought to advance, but he was deaf to all reason and happily for England afterwards went tumbling off his throne in his own blind way. A spirit began to arise in the country, which the besotted blunderer little expected. He first founded out in the University of Cambridge. Having made a Catholic a dean at Oxford without any opposition, he tried to make a monk a master of arts at Cambridge, which attempted the university resisted and defeated him. He then went back to his favorite, Oxford. On the death of the president of Maudlin College, he commanded that there should be elected to succeed him when Mr. Anthony Farmer, whose only recommendation was that he was of the king's religion. The university plucked up courage at last and refused. The king substituted another man, and it still refused, resolving to stand by its own election of a Mr. Howe. The dull tyrant upon this punished Mr. Howe and five and twenty more by causing them to be expelled, and declared incapable of holding any church performant. Then he proceeded to what he supposed to be his highest step, but to what was, in fact, his last plunge head foremost in his tumble off his throne. He had issued a declaration that there should be no religious tests or penal laws in order to let in the Catholics more easily, but the Protestant dissenters, unmindful of themselves, had gallantly joined the regular church in opposing it tooth and nail. The king and Father Petrie now resolved to have this red on a certain Sunday in all the churches, and to order it to be circulated for that purpose by the bishops. The latter took counsel with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was in disgrace, and they resolved that the declaration should not be read, and that they would petition the king against it. The Archbishop himself wrote out the petition, and six bishops went into the king's bed-chamber the same night to present it to his infinite astonishment. Next day was the Sunday fixed for the reading, and it was only read by 200 clergymen out of ten thousand. The king resolved against all advice to prosecute the bishops in the court of king's bench, and within three weeks they were summoned before the privy council and committed to the tower. As the six bishops were taken to that dismal place by water, the people who were assembled in immense numbers fell upon their knees and wept for them and prayed for them. When they got to the tower, the officers and soldiers on guard besought them for their blessing. While they were confined there, the soldiers every day drank to their release with loud shouts. When they were brought up to the court of king's bench for their trial, which the Attorney General said was for the high offence of censuring the government, and giving their opinion about affairs of state, they were attended by similar multitudes and surrounded by a throng of noblemen and gentlemen. When the jury went out at seven o'clock at night to consider of their verdict, everybody except the king knew that they would rather starve than yield to the king's brewer, who was one of them, and wanted a verdict for his customer. When they came into court next morning, after resisting the brewer all night and gave a verdict of not guilty, such a shout rose up in Westminster Hall as it had never heard before, and it was passed on among the people away to Temple Bar and away again to the tower. It did not pass only to the east, but passed to the west too until it reached the camp at Hounslow, where the fifteen thousand soldiers took it up and echoed it. And still when the dull king, who was then with Lord Feverisham, heard the mighty roar, asked an alarm what it was, and was told that it was nothing but the acquittal of the bishops, he said in his dogged way, call you that nothing? It is so much the worse for them. Between the petition and the trial, the queen had given birth to a son, with which Father Petrie rather thought was owing to St. Winifred. But I doubt if St. Winifred had much to do with it as the king's friend, in as much as the entirely new prospect of a Catholic successor, for both the king's daughters were Protestants, determined the earls of Shrewsbury, Danby, and Devonshire, Lord Lumley, the Bishop of London, Admiral Russell, and Colonel Sydney, to invite the Prince of Orange over to England. The royal mole, seeing his danger at last, made in his fright many great concessions, besides raising an army of forty thousand men, but the Prince of Orange was not a man for James II to cope with. His preparations were extraordinarily vigorous and his mind was resolved. For a fortnight after the Prince was ready to sail for England, a great wind from the west prevented the departure of his fleet. Even when the wind lulled and it did sail, it was dispersed by a storm, and was obliged to put back to refit. At last, on the first of November, one thousand six hundred and eighty-eight, the Protestant East Wind, as it was long called, began to blow, and on the third, the people of Dover and the people of Calais saw a fleet twenty miles long sailing gallantly by between the two places. On Monday the fifth, it anchored at Torbay and Devonshire, and the Prince, with a splendid retinue of officers and men, marched into Exeter. But the people in that western part of the country had suffered so much in the bloodiest eyes that they had lost heart. Few people joined him, and he began to think of returning, and publishing the invitation he had received from those lords is his justification for having come at all. At this crisis some of the gentry joined him. The Royal Army began to falter, and engagement was signed by which all who set their hand to it declared that they would support one another in defense of the laws and liberties of the three kingdoms of the Protestant religion and of the Prince of Orange. From that time the cause received no check, the greatest towns in England began one after another to declare for the Prince, and he knew that it was all safe with him when the University of Oxford offered to melt down its plate if he wanted any money. By this time the King was running about in a pitiable way, touching people for the King's evil in one place, reviewing his troops in another, and bleeding from the nose in a third. The young Prince was sent to Portsmouth. Father Petrie went off like a shot to France, and there was a general and swift dispersal of all the priests and friars. One after another the King's most important officers and friends deserted him and went over to the Prince. In the night his daughter Anne fled from Whitehall Palace, and the Bishop of London who had once been a soldier rode before her with a drawn sword in his hand and pistols at his saddle. God help me cried the miserable King, my very children have forsaken me. In his wildness, after debating with such lords as were in London, whether he should or should not call a parliament, and after naming three of them to negotiate with the Prince, he resolved to fly to France. He had the little Prince of Wales brought back from Portsmouth, and the child and the Queen crossed the river to Lambeth in an open boat on a miserable wet night and got safely away. This was on the night of the 9th of December. At one o'clock on the morning of the 11th, the King, who had in the meantime received a letter from the Prince of Orange, stating his objects, got out of bed, told Lord Northumberland who lay in his room not to open the door until the usual hour in the morning, and went down the back stairs, the same, I suppose, by which the priest and the wig and gown had come up to his brother, and crossed the river in a small boat, sinking the great seal of England, by the way. Horses having been provided, he rode, accompanied by Sir Edward Hales, to Fiebersham, where he embarked in a custom house hoy. The master of this hoy, wanting more ballast, ran into the Isle of Sheppy to get it, where the fishermen and smugglers crowded about the boat, and informed the King of their suspicions that he was a hatchet-faced Jesuit. As they took his money and would not let him go, he told them who he was, and that the Prince of Orange wanted to take his life, and he began to scream for a boat, and then to cry, because he had lost a piece of wood on his ride, which he called a fragment of our Saviour's cross. He put himself into the hands of the Lord Lieutenant of the country, and his detent- detention was made known to the Prince of Orange at Windsor, who only wanted to get rid of him, and not carrying where he went, so that he went away, was very much disconcerted that they did not let him go. However, there was nothing for it but to have him brought back, with some state in the way of life-guards, to Whitehall. And as soon as he got there, in his infatuation, he heard mass, and set a Jesuit to say grace at his public dinner. The people had been thrown into the strangest state of confusion by his flight, and had taken it into their heads that the Irish part of the army were going to murder the Protestants. Therefore, they set the bells of ringing, and lighted watch-fires, and burned Catholic chapels, and looked about in all directions for Father Petrie and the Jesuits, while the Pope's ambassador was running away in the dress of a footman. They found no Jesuits, but a man who had once been a frightened witness before Geoffrey's in court, saw a swollen, drunken face looking through a window down at Wapping, which he well remembered. The face was in a sailor's dress, but he knew it to be the face of that accursed judge, and he seized him. The people, to their lasting honor, did not tear him to pieces. After knocking him about a little, they took him in the basest agonies of terror to the Lord Mayor, who sent him at his own shrieking petition to the Tower for safety. There he died. There bewilderment continuing, the people now lighted bonfires and made rejoicings, as if they had any reason to be glad to have the king back again. But his stay was very short, for the English guards were removed from Whitehall, Dutch guards were marched up to it, and he was told by one of his late ministers that the prince would enter London next day, and he had better go to Ham. He said, Ham was a cold, damp place, and he would rather go to Rochester. He thought himself very cunning in this, as he meant to escape from Rochester to France. The Prince of Orange and his friends knew that perfectly well, and desired nothing more. So he went to Gravesend in his royal barge, attended by certain lords, and watched by Dutch troops, and pitted by the generous people who were far more forgiving than he had ever been when they saw him in his humiliation. On the night of the 23rd of December, not even then understanding that everybody wanted to get rid of him, he went out absurdly through his Rochester garden down to the Medway, and got away to France, where he rejoined the Queen. There had been a council in his absence of the lords and the authorities of London. When the prince came on the day after the king's departure he summoned the lords to meet him, and soon afterwards all those who had served in any of the parliaments of King Charles II. It was finally resolved by these authorities that the throne was vacant by the conduct of King James II, that it was inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom to be governed by a Popish prince, that the prince and Princess of Orange should be king and queen during their lives, and the life of the survivor of them, and that their children should succeed them if they had any. That if they had none, the princess Anne and her children should succeed, that if she had none, the heirs of the Prince of Orange should succeed. On the 13th of January 1689 the Prince and Princess, sitting on a throne in Whitehall, bound themselves to these conditions. The Protestant religion was established in England, and England's great and glorious revolution was complete. It's the end of chapter 36, recording by Gwyneth Connell, New York City. Chapter 37 of A Child's History of England. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Rose. A Child's History of England. By Charles Dickens. Chapter 37. Epilogue. I have now arrived at the close of my little history. The events which succeeded the famous revolution of 1688, would neither be easily related nor easily understood in such a book as this. William and Mary reigned together five years. After the death of his good wife, William occupied the throne alone for seven years longer. During his reign on the 16th of September 1701, the poor weak creature who had once been James the Second of England died in France. In the meantime he had done his utmost, which was not much, to cause William to be assassinated and to regain his lost dominions. James's son was declared by the French king, the rightful king of England, and was called in France the Chevalier Saint George, and in England the Pretender. Some infatuated people in England, and particularly in Scotland, took up the Pretender's cause from time to time, as if the country had not had stewards enough, and many lives were sacrificed, and much misery was occasioned. King William died on Sunday the 7th of March 1702 of the consequences of an accident occasioned by his horse stumbling with him. He was always a brave patriotic prince, and a man of remarkable abilities. His manner was cold, and he made but few friends, but he had truly loved his queen. When he was dead, a lock of her hair, in a ring, was found tied with a black ribbon around his left arm. He was succeeded by the Princess Anne, a popular queen who reigned 12 years. In her reign, in the month of May 1707, the union between England and Scotland was affected, and the two countries were incorporated under the name of Great Britain. Then from the year 1714 to the year 1830 reigned the four Georges. It was in the reign of George II, 1745, that the pretender did his last mischief and made his last appearance. Being an old man by that time, he and the Jacobites, as his friends were called, put forward his son, Charles Edward, known as the young Chevalier. The Highlanders of Scotland, an extremely troublesome and wrong-headed race on the subject of the stewards, espoused his cause, and he joined them, and there was a Scottish rebellion to make him king, in which many gallant and devoted gentlemen lost their lives. It was a hard matter for Charles Edward to escape abroad again, with a high price on his head, but the Scottish people were extraordinarily faithful to him, and after undergoing many romantic adventures, not unlike those of Charles II, he escaped to France. A number of charming stories and delightful songs rose out of the Jacobite feelings, and belonged to the Jacobite times. Otherwise, I think the stewards were a public nuisance altogether. It was in the reign of George III that England lost North America by persisting and taxing her without her own consent. That immense country made independent under Washington, and left to itself, became the United States, one of the greatest nations of the earth. In these times in which I write, it is unremarkable for protecting its subjects, wherever they may travel, with a dignity and a determination, which is a model for England. Between you and me England has rather lost ground in this respect, since the days of Oliver Cromwell. The Union of Great Britain with Ireland, which had been getting on very ill by itself, took place in the reign of George III, on the 2nd of July 1798. William IV succeeded George IV in the year 1830, and reigned seven years. Queen Victoria, his niece, the only child of the Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III, came to the throne on the 20th of June 1837. She was married to Prince Albert of Saxcotha on the 10th of February 1840. She is very good and much beloved, so I end like the crier with God Save the Queen, end of chapter 37, end of A Child's History of England by Charles Dickens.