A Child's History of England

by Dickens, Charles

  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

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  bargain. He sold Dunkirk to the French King for five millions of

  livres. 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 distress. It was followed by another

  outrageous law, called the Conventicle 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 merry and

  religious King. He was executed, as were two men of mark among the

  Covenanters; and SHARP, a traitor who had once been the friend of

  the Presbyterians and betrayed them, was made Archbishop of St.

  Andrew's, to teach the Scotch how to like bishops.

  Things being in this merry state at home, the Merry 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 exultation 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. News was not published at that time as it

  is now, and some people believed these rumours, 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

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  of London were choked up by people endeavouring 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 torchlight 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

  dissolute, 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 nights 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 are 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

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  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 had yet, when the

  gale increased to a storm, and blew him into Saint Helen's. That

  night was the third of September, one thousand six hundred and

  sixty-six, 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 night-time 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. Nothing

  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 pigheaded,

  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 wilfully 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 Catholics;

  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

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  their admirals DE WITT and DE RUYTER, 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 merry as 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 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 Cabal 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 in Flanders, the

  first Cabal 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, apologised

  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 livres 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 the

  First 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

  (Stadtholder it was called), and placed the chief power in the

  hands of JOHN DE WITT, who educated this young prince. Now, the

  Prince became very popular, and John de Witt'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 vigour, against the whole power of France, under its

  famous generals CONDE and TURENNE, and in support of the Protestant

  religion. It was full seven years before this war ended in a

  treaty of peace made at Nimeguen, and its details would occupy a

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  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