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Charles II
ment, face to face with a ‘Tory’ House of Commons, and so he would have to dismiss his Whig ministers, take Tory ministers, and drop his ‘Whig’ war or his ‘Whig’ law. No doubt it has made Kings govern according to what was supposed to be the wish of their people for the time being; but, in the first place, a people as a whole seldom wishes the same thing for many years on end, and does not by any means always wish what is best for the country; in the second place, the system leads to friction and quarrel between parties, and so to waste of power and lack of union in the nation.
Question of the succession.All this was only beginning in Charles II’s reign, but it was beginning, and it was going to go on and get worse. It has gone on and got worse every day until now. In Charles II's time Parliament was constantly the scene of fierce party disputes, mainly upon religion. Charles had no lawful sons, and his heir was his brother James, who after the death of his first wife had become a Catholic and married an Italian Catholic lady; Charles himself was accused of favouring Catholics, even of being secretly a Catholic. The ‘Popish Plot’, 1678.Wild stories were started and believed of ‘Popish plots’ to kill Charles and set up James. (Charles, who was perhaps the most genuinely humorous of all our Kings, said to his brother, ‘Dear James, no one would be such a fool as to kill me in order to make you king’.) The Whigs got up a plan to shut out James from the succession and to set up a bastard son of Charles in his place; in 1680, 1681, it looked almost like a civil war between Tories and Whigs. Death of Charles II, 1685.But all moderate men dreaded this, and the King played his game so cleverly that, when he died in 1685, his brother James succeeded him without trouble. Charles had taken sharp vengeance on some