The Cabal, Party Politics and Rule Without Parliament
The Fall of Clarendon
Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, had been Charles II’s chief minister since 1660. He survived the religious settlement, the marriage to Catherine of Braganza in 1662 and the sale of Dunkirk to France — but he could not survive the disaster of the Second Dutch War. The Dutch raid on the Medway in June 1667, when Admiral De Ruyter towed the English flagship out of Chatham, made Clarendon a public scapegoat. Parliament impeached him; Charles dismissed him; and Clarendon fled to France in November 1667, dying in exile in 1674. With Clarendon gone, the king turned to a new style of government: not a single chief minister, but a small inner circle of five.
The Cabal Ministry, 1668–1674
The Cabal took its nickname from the initials of its five members — Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale — though the word ‘cabal’ meaning a secret faction was already in use. They were not a unified team. They disagreed on religion, on France and on the Dutch. What held them together was the king’s confidence and shared work on his most secret project: the Treaty of Dover.
Sir Thomas Clifford was a Catholic convert and Lord Treasurer 1672–73, who pushed the Stop of the Exchequer in January 1672 to keep the Crown solvent. Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, ran foreign policy and patronage as Secretary of State. The Duke of Buckingham was Charles’s childhood friend, a witty courtier and a religious sceptic. Anthony Ashley Cooper (later Earl of Shaftesbury) was a former Cromwellian who supported toleration and would soon switch sides. The Duke of Lauderdale ran Scotland with a free hand for the king. They worked separately rather than as a cabinet, and Charles deliberately kept them divided so that no one of them could dominate.
The Secret Treaty of Dover, 1670
In May 1670 Charles signed the Treaty of Dover with Louis XIV of France. Two of the Cabal — Clifford and Arlington — knew the full text, including the secret clause in which Charles promised to declare himself a Catholic at a suitable moment in return for French troops and a subsidy. The other three Cabal ministers were shown only a sham public version, in which Charles agreed to join France in war against the Dutch. Louis promised Charles a French subsidy worth around £225,000 a year while the war lasted. The arrangement bound English foreign policy to France for the rest of the reign and made Charles personally beholden to Louis XIV.
The Cabal of 1668–1674 was Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale — whose initials spelled the nickname. They negotiated the secret 1670 Treaty of Dover with Louis XIV, binding England to France for the rest of the reign in return for a subsidy.
The Test Act and the Break-Up of the Cabal
When Charles issued the Declaration of Indulgence in 1672, he expected Parliament to vote the taxes for the Third Dutch War. Parliament refused unless he withdrew it. He withdrew it in March 1673; Parliament passed the First Test Act. The consequences were political. Clifford, by now openly Catholic, resigned the Treasurership and died within months. James, Duke of York, the king’s heir, refused to take the Anglican test and resigned as Lord High Admiral — the first public confirmation that he was Catholic. Shaftesbury fell out with the king over Catholic toleration in 1673 and was dismissed in November. Buckingham was forced out in 1674 by impeachment. By the end of 1674 the Cabal was finished.
From Faction to Party
After the Cabal, Charles relied on the Earl of Danby (Lord Treasurer 1673–79) to manage Parliament with patronage and pensions. Danby tried to build a stable Anglican royalist majority — the beginning of what historians call the Court party. Against him, Shaftesbury organised an opposition of those alarmed by France, by secret Catholic plans and by Crown corruption — the Country party. The labels Whig and Tory only emerged during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81, but the underlying division was already in place. England was developing real party politics for the first time.
The Personal Rule, 1681–1685
After the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament on 28 March 1681, Charles refused to summon another. He governed for the last four years of his reign through a small council, the Treasury commission, and his own household. He could afford to do this for two reasons. First, customs and excise revenue grew strongly through the 1680s as English trade boomed. Second, Louis XIV paid Charles a fresh subsidy of around £385,000 between 1681 and 1685 in return for English neutrality. The combination kept the Crown solvent without parliamentary supply.
The personal rule was politically successful in its own terms. Legal challenges to borough charters had begun in 1681; the discovery of the Rye House Plot in 1683 let Charles press them much harder and purge Whig sympathisers from the corporations. By 1685 around fifty corporations had surrendered their charters and accepted new ones written in the Crown’s favour. James II, when he succeeded in February 1685, inherited a Treasury that had run a small surplus in the previous year, and the elections he called that spring returned a Parliament of Tory loyalists — the strongest royal position in fifty years.
Charles II ruled without Parliament from March 1681 until his death in February 1685. He paid for it through booming customs and excise revenue and a French subsidy of around £385,000 from Louis XIV in return for English neutrality.