United Kingdom

In the long run Charles’s spasmodically aggressive foreign policy solved the crown’s perpetual fiscal crises. But in the short run it made matters worse. TheLondon" class="md-crosslink"> Great Plague of London (1664–66) and the Great Fire of London (1666) were interpreted as divine judgments against a sinful nation. These catastrophes were compounded when the Dutch burned a large portion of the English fleet in 1667, which led to the dismissal and exile of Clarendon. The crown’s debts led to the Stop of the Exchequer (1672), by which Charles suspended payment of his bills. The king now ruled through a group of ministers known as the Cabal, an anagram of the first letters of their names. None of the five was Anglican, and two were Roman Catholic.

Charles had wearied of repressive Anglicanism, underestimating its strength among rural gentry and clergy, and desired comprehension and toleration in his church. This fit with his foreign-policy objectives, for in the Treaty of Dover (1670) he allied himself with Catholic France against Protestant Holland. In exchange he received a large subsidy from Louis XIV and, in the treaty’s secret clauses, known only to the king’s Catholic ministers, the promise of an even larger one if Charles undertook, at some unspecified moment, to declare himself a Catholic. That moment came for the king on his deathbed, by which time his brother and heir, the duke of York, had already openly professed his conversion. In 1672 Charles promulgated the Declaration of Indulgence, which suspended the penal code against all religious Nonconformists, Catholic and Dissenter alike. But a declaration of toleration could not bring together these mortal enemies, and the king found himself faced by a unified Protestant front. Parliamentary Anglicans would not vote money for war until the declaration was abrogated. The passage of the Test Act (1673), which the king reluctantly signed, effectively barred all but Anglicans from holding national office and forced the duke of York to resign the admiralty.

The Popish Plot

Anti-Catholicism united the disparate elements of English Protestantism as did nothing else. Anglicans vigorously persecuted the Protestant sects, especially Quakers and Baptists, who were imprisoned by the thousands whenever the government claimed to have discovered a radical plot. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), which became one of the most popular works in the English language, was composed in jail. Yet Dissenters held out against persecution and continued to make their converts in towns and cities. They railed against the debauchery of court life, naming the duke of York, whose shotgun wedding to the daughter of his brother’s lord chancellor had scandalized even his own family, and the king himself, who acknowledged 17 bastard children but did not produce one legitimate heir. Most of all they feared a Catholic revival, which by the late 1670s was no paranoid delusion. The alliance with Catholic France and rumours of (an all too true) secret treaty, the open conversion of the duke of York, heir to the throne, and the king’s efforts to suspend the laws against Catholic officeholders were potent signs.

John Bunyan, pencil drawing on vellum by Robert White; in the British Museum, London.Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum