A
group of London goldsmiths had loaned more than a million and a quarter
pounds sterling to the government. In 1672 Charles announced that
instead of paying the money back, he would consider it a permanent
loan. Two years earlier he had signed the secret treaty of Dover (1670)
with Louis XIV, by which Louis promised him an annual subsidy of
L200,000 and troops in case of rebellion, while Charles was openly to
join the Roman Catholic Church and to aid Louis in his French wars
against Spain and Holland.
[Sidenote: Continued Religious Complications]
[Sidenote: Legislation against Protestant Dissenters]
In his ambition to reestablish Catholicism in England, Charles
underestimated the intense hostility of the bulk of the English squires
to any religious innovation. During the first decade of the
Restoration, Puritanism had been most feared. Some two thousand
clergymen, mostly Presbyterian, had been deprived of their offices by
an Act of Uniformity (1662), requiring their assent to the Anglican
prayer-book; these dissenting clergymen might not return within five
miles of their old churches unless they renounced the "Solemn League
and Covenant" and swore loyalty to the king (Five-mile Act, 1665); for
repeated attendance at their meetings (conventicles) Dissenters might
be condemned to penal servitude in the West Indies against (Conventicle
Act, 1664); and the Corporation Act of 1661 excluded Dissenters from
town offices.
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