set to his court; and it would have been well for him, and for the nation at large, had he adhered to his resolutions; but his infamous paramour, Castlemaine, resumed her imperious sway within a few days after the king's marriage, and the poor queen was compelled not only to receive her at court, but to treat her as a friend, and load her with favours.

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The following particulars from Pepys' diary will better illustrate the shameful licentiousness of this most religious and gracious' king, and his court, than any statements of our own :-"In the privy-garden," says Pepys, saw the finest smocks and linen petticoats of my Lady Castlemaine's, laced with rich lace at the bottom, that ever I saw ; and did me good to look at them. Sarah told me how the king dined at my Lady Castlemaine's, and supped, every day and night the last week; and that the night that the bonfires were made for joy of the Queene's arrivall, the King was there; But there was no fire at her door, though at all the rest of the doors almost in the street; which was much observed: and that the King and she did send for a pair of scales and weighed one another; and she, being with child, was said to be heaviest.

"Mr Pickering tells me the story is very true of a child being dropped at the ball at court; and that the king had it in his closet a week after, and did dissect it; and making great sport of it, said that in his opinion it must have been a month and three hours old; and that, whatever others think, he hath the greatest loss, (it being a boy, as he says,) that hath lost a subject by the business. He told me also how loose the court is, nobody looking after business, but every man his lust and gain; and how the king is now become besotted upon Mrs Stewart, that he gets into corners, and will be with her half an hour together kissing her to the observation of all the world; and she now stays by herself and expects it, as my Lady Castlemaine did use to do: to whom the king, he says, is still kind, &c.

"Coming to St James's, I hear that the queen did sleep five hours pretty well to-night. The king, they all say, is most fondly disconsolate for her, and weeps by her, which makes her weep; which one this day told me he reckons a good sign, for that it carries away some rheum from the head! She tells us that the queen's sickness is the spotted fever; that she was as full of the spots as a leopard: which is very strange that it should be no more known; but perhaps it is not so. And that the king do seem to take it much to heart, for that he hath wept before her; but, for all that, that he hath not missed one night since she was sick, of supping with my Lady Castlemaine; which I believe is true, for she says that her husband hath dressed the suppers every night; and I confess I saw him myself coming through the street dressing up a great supper to-night, which Sarah says is also for the king and her; which is a very strange thing.

"Pierce do tell me, among other news, the late frolick and debauchery of Sir Charles Sedley and Buckhurst running up and down all the night, almost naked, through the streets and at last fighting, and being beat by the watch and clapped up all night; and how the king takes their parts; and my Lord-chief-justice Keeling hath laid the constable by the heels to answer it next sessions; which is a horrid shame. Also how the king and these gentlemen did make the fiddlers

of Thetford, this last progress, to sing them all the obscene songs they could think of! That the king was drunk at Saxam with Sedley, Buckhurst, &c. the night that my Lord Arlington came thither, and would not give him audience, or could not: which is true, for it was the night that I was there and saw the king go up to his chamber, and was told that the king had been drinking. He tells me that the king and my Lady Castlemaine are quite broke of, and she is gone away, and is with child, and swears the king shall own it; and she will have it christened in the chapel at White Hall so, and owned for the king's, as other kings have done; or she will bring it into White Hall gallery, and dash the brains of it out before the king's face! He tells me that the king and court were never in the world so bad as they are now, for gaming, swearing, women, and drinking, and the most abominable vices that ever were in the world; so that all must come to nought.

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"They came to Sir G. Carteret's house at Cranbourne, and there were entertained, and all made drunk; and, being all drunk, Armerer did come to the king, and swore to him by God, Sir,' says he, 'you are not so kind to the duke of York of late as you used to be.'-' Not I?' says the king. Why so? Why,' says he, if you are, let us drink his health. Why let us,' says the king. Then he fell on his knees and drank it; and having done, the king began to drink it. 'Nay, Sir,' says Armerer, by God you must do it on your knees!' So he did, and then all the company: and having done it, all fell acrying for joy, being all maudlin and kissing one another! the king the duke of York, and the duke of York the king! and in such a maudlin pickle as never people were: and so passed the day !"

These licentious courses kept the royal finances in a wretchedly low state. With the infanta, Charles had received a portion of £350,000. This sum afforded but a temporary relief to the needy monarch. The chancellor suggested the sale of Dunkirk to the French king as a means of recruiting the royal finances; the proposal was eagerly caught at, and a bargain was ultimately concluded for 5,000,000 of livres. This base transaction roused the public indignation, and Charles was ultimately compelled to dismiss his chancellor, who sought his own safety in exile. In 1663, a rupture took place with Holland, which, as it proceeded from commercial rivalry, was willingly supported by the nation. The commons voted a supply of £2,500,000 for the expenses of the war, and James, as lord-high-admiral, soon put to sea with ninety-eight sail of the line. Victory crowned the English fleet, after a tremendous engagement off Lowestoffe, on the 3d of June 1665; but the breaking out of the plague in London so depressed the public mind that the intelligence of the triumphant success of the national arms was received without any adequate demonstration of joy. The great fire of London, by which two-thirds of the metropolis were reduced to ashes, added to the national gloom and Charles's embarrassment. An insurrection in the west and south of Scotland, provoked by the intolerance of the episcopal party, next engaged the distracted attention of the ministry. It was repressed by the efforts of Dalziel ; but in appearance only. An unsubdued spirit of opposition to prelacy, and a keen sense of injury, still burned in the bosoms of the Scottish whigs, or covenanters, as they were called, and the new and rigorous laws passed by the parliament of Scotland in 1669 1670, and 1672, aided by the still more tyranni

cal regulations of the privy council, and the sanguinary administration of that heartless ruffian, Lauderdale, soon drove them once more into open insurrection.

The successful conclusion of Sir William Temple's mission to the Hague in 1668, for the purpose of negotiating an alliance against France, was one of the few public measures of this reign which deserve approbation; but whatever merit was due to the king himself, in this transaction, was more than neutralised by the secret treaty which he entered into with France in less than two years thereafter, for the purpose of changing "the religion and subverting the constitution of England." Of this treaty little was certainly known at the time. All the parties concerned observed an impenetrable secrecy respecting it. It is now known that the principal articles were-1st. That the king of England should publicly profess himself a catholic, at such time as should appear to him most expedient, and, subsequently to that profession, should join with Louis in a war against the Dutch republic; and 2dly. That, to enable the king of England to suppress any insurrection which might be occasioned by the avowal of his conversion, the king of France should grant him an aid of £2,000,000 of livres, besides assisting him with an armed force. It is uncertain when Charles II. first thought of becoming a catholic. But it is a fact that in the beginning of the year 1659, the duke of Ormond accidentally detected him on his knees at mass, in a church at Brussels. He imparted the secret to Clarendon and Southampton, who judged it prudent to conceal the truth. Accordingly, the act for the better security of his majesty's person and government' provided that to affirm the king to be a papist should be punishable by disability to hold any office in the state, civil, military, or ecclesiastical.

Nothing could be more disgraceful than Charles's utter abandonment of every principle of honour, and justice, and morality, from the time that he threw himself into the hands of the five unprincipled ministers, Arlington, Clifford, Buckingham, Lauderdale and Ashley, collectively called the Cabal. In 1677, however, he performed a popular act by marrying his niece, the princess Mary, to the prince of Orange.

The next year was distinguished by the pretended discovery of the popish plot, founded upon the monstrous fictions of Titus Oates and Bedloe. The fears of the country were now so effectually excited, that the duke of York found it prudent to retire to Brussels, and Charles was obliged to grant his consent to that great palladium of civil liberty, the habeas corpus bill. At last, the king came to an open rupture with his parliament, and finding that he could not bend it to his own purposes, he resolved to govern without it. Already had the blood of Russell and of Sidney flowed upon the scaffold, and new and still fiercer measures were preparing for extinguishing the last spark of lberty, and converting the government of England into an absolute monarchy, when the hand of death arrested the profligate monarch in the midst of his licentious and unprincipled career. He expired in February, 1685, in the fifty-fifth year of his age.

The character of Charles II. has been thus drawn by Mr Fox :"From the facts which have been stated," he observes, 66 we may collect, that his ambition was directed solely against his subjects, while

he was completely indifferent concerning the figure which he or they might make in the general affairs of Europe; and that his desire of power was more unmixed with the love of glory than that of any other man whom history has recorded; that he was unprincipled, ungrateful, mean and treacherous; to which may be added, vindictive and remorseless. For Burnet, in refusing to him the praise of clemency and forgiveness, seems to be perfectly justifiable; nor is it conceivable upon what pretence his partizans have taken this ground of panegyric. I doubt whether a single instance can be produced, of his having spared the life of any one, whom motives either of policy, or of revenge, prompted him to destroy.

"On the other hand, it would be want of candour to maintain, that Charles was entirely destitute of good qualities; nor was the propriety of Burnet's comparison between him and Tiberius ever felt, I imagine, by any one but its author. He was gay and affable; and, if incapable of the sentiments belonging to pride of a laudable sort, he was at least free from haughtiness and insolence. The praise of politeness-which the Stoics are not perhaps wrong in classing among the moral virtues, provided they admit it to be one of the lowest order has never been denied him; and he had in an eminent degree that facility of temper which, though considered by some moralists as nearly allied to vice, yet, inasmuch as it contributes greatly to the happiness of those around us, is, in itself, not only an engaging, but an estimable quality. His support of the queen during the heats raised by the Popish plot, ought to be taken rather as a proof that he was not a monster, than to be ascribed to him as a merit; but his steadiness to his brother, though it may and ought, in a great measure, to be accounted for upon selfish principles, had at least a strong resemblance to virtue.

"The best part of this prince's character seems to have been his kindness towards his mistresses, and his affection for his children, and others nearly connected to him by the ties of blood. His recommendation of the dutchess of Portsmouth and Mrs Gwyn upon his deathbed, to his successor, is much to his honour; and they who censure it, seem, in their zeal to show themselves strict moralists, to have suffered their notions of vice and virtue to have fallen into strange confusion. Charles's connexion with those ladies might be vicious; but, at a mo ment when that connexion was upon the point of being finally and irrevocably dissolved, to concern himself about their future welfare, and to recommend them to his brother with earnest tenderness, was virtue. It is not for the interest of morality that the good and evil actions, even of bad men, should be confounded. His affection for the duke of Gloucester, and for the dutchess of Orleans, seems to have been sincere and cordial. To attribute, as some have done, his grief for the loss of the first to political considerations, founded upon an intended balance of power between his two brothers, would be an absurd refinement, whatever were his general disposition; but when we reflect upon that carelessness which, especially in his youth, was a conspicuous feature of his character, the absurdity becomes still more striking And though Burnet more covertly, and Ludlow more openly, insinuate that his fondness for his sister was of a criminal nature, I never could find that there was any ground whatever for such a suspicion; nor does the little that remains of their epistolary correspondence give it the smallest

countenance. Upon the whole, Charles the Second was a bad man, and a bad king: let us not palliate his crimes; but neither let us adopt false or doubtful imputations, for the purpose of making him a monster."

Sir George Ayscough.

DIED CIR. A. D. 1673.

THE maritime annals of Great Britain, during the reign of the second Charles, present many illustrious names, among which that of Sir George Ayscough holds a distinguished place. Sir George was descended of an ancient Lincolnshire family. On the breaking out of the civil wars, he adhered to the parliament; and when seventeen ships went over to the prince of Wales in 1648, Sir George brought his ship, the Lion, into the Thames. This conduct procured for him the confidence of the parliament, who immediately sent him over to the Dutch coast to observe the motions of his late associates. In 1649, he was constituted admiral of the Irish seas; and in 1651 he was sent to reduce the Scilly islands, then held by Sir John Grenville for Charles II. In this latter year he sailed for Barbadoes, where he summoned Lord Willoughby to submit to the authority of the parliament of England, and finally compelled that nobleman to acquiesce in the conditions offered to him.

In Lilly's almanack for 1653, we find the following observations under the head of August 16, 1652:-"Sir George Ayscue, near Plymouth, with 14 or 15 ships only, fought 60 sail of Dutch men-ofwar; had thirty shot in the hull of his own ship. Twenty merchantmen never came in to assist him, yet he made the Dutch give way. Why our state shall pay those ships that fought not, we of the people know not. This is he that is a gentleman, lives like a gentleman, and acts the part of a generous commander in all his actions." The issue of this action, as well as the strength of the opposing fleets, is variously related by different historians. In the life of De Ruyter, it is affirmed that his squadron consisted of 50 men-of-war; and that advice of their arrival off the isle of Wight having been received by the English pariament, Sir George, who then commanded a fleet of 40 men-of-war in the west, was ordered to stretch over the channel to hinder, or at least dispute the passage of the Dutch fleet; that the two fleets came to close quarters about four in the afternoon, and that the fight was obstinately maintained on both sides until nightfall. Whitlocke says the Dutch fleet consisted of 80 sail; that the action lasted three days; that Sir George Ayscough's squadron consisted of 38 ships of war, and four fire-ships, and that the Dutch admiral was sunk. Ledyard, who probably had access to good private information, says Sir George broke the enemy's line, and weathered them; but that, after this advantage, not being duly supported by the other ships, he retired to Plymouth during the night.

The parliament acknowledged Sir George's merits by granting him an estate of £300 per annum in Ireland, with the present of a sum of money; but not wholly approving of his conduct at Barbadoes, they dismissed him from service. Sir George bore his disappointment with