by Ruvigny to Louis XIV. as intensely antagonistic to France and French interests, and as doing his utmost to prevent the treaty of that year.[1] In 1678, on the rupture of relations between Charles and Louis, a splendid opportunity was afforded Louis of paying off old scores by disclosing Danby’s participation in the king’s demands for French gold.
Every circumstance now conspired to effect his fall. Although both abroad and at home his policy had generally embodied the wishes of the ascendant party in the state, Danby had never obtained the confidence of the nation. His character inspired no respect, and he could not reckon during the whole of his long career on the support of a single individual. Charles is said to have told him when he made him treasurer that he had only two friends in the world, himself and his own merit.[2] He was described to Pepys on his acquiring office as “one of a broken sort of people that have not much to lose and therefore will venture all,” and as “a beggar having £1100 or £1200 a year, but owes above £10,000.” His office brought him in £20,000 a year,[3] and he was known to be making large profits by the sale of offices; he maintained his power by corruption and by jealously excluding from office men of high standing and ability. Burnet described him as “the most hated minister that had ever been about the king.” Worse men had been less detested, but Danby had none of the amiable virtues which often counteract the odium incurred by serious faults. Evelyn, who knew him intimately from his youth, describes him as “a man of excellent natural parts but nothing of generous or grateful.” Shaftesbury, doubtless no friendly witness, speaks of him as an inveterate liar, “proud, ambitious, revengeful, false, prodigal and covetous to the highest degree,”[4] and Burnet supports his unfavourable judgment to a great extent. His corruption, his mean submission to a tyrant wife, his greed, his pale face and lean person, which had succeeded to the handsome features and comeliness of earlier days,[5] were the subject of ridicule, from the witty sneers of Halifax to the coarse jests of the anonymous writers of innumerable lampoons. By his championship of the national policy he had raised up formidable foes abroad without securing a single friend or supporter at home,[6] and his fidelity to the national interests was now, through a very mean and ignoble act of personal spite, to be the occasion of his downfall.
Danby in appointing a new secretary of state had preferred Sir W. Temple, a strong adherent of the anti-French policy, to Montagu. The latter, after a quarrel with the duchess of Cleveland, was dismissed from the king’s employment. He immediately went over to the opposition, and in concert with Louis XIV. and Barillon, the French ambassador, by whom he was supplied with a large sum of money, arranged a plan for effecting Danby’s ruin. He obtained a seat in parliament; and in spite of Danby’s endeavour to seize his papers by an order in council, on the 20th of December 1678 caused two of the incriminating letters written by Danby to him to be read aloud to the House of Commons by the Speaker. The House immediately resolved on Danby’s impeachment. At the foot of each of the letters appeared the king’s postscripts, “I approve of this letter. C.R.,” in his own handwriting; but they were not read by the Speaker, and were entirely neglected in the proceedings against the minister, thus emphasizing the constitutional principle that obedience to the orders of the sovereign can be no bar to an impeachment. He was charged with having encroached to himself royal powers by treating matters of peace and war without the knowledge of the council, with having promoted the raising of a standing army on pretence of a war with France, with having obstructed the assembling of parliament, with corruption and embezzlement in the treasury. Danby, while communicating the “Popish Plot” to the parliament, had from the first expressed his disbelief in the so-called revelations of Titus Oates, and his backwardness in the matter now furnished an additional charge of having “traitorously concealed the plot.” He was voted guilty by the Commons; but while the Lords were disputing whether the accused peer should have bail, and whether the charges amounted to more than a misdemeanour, parliament was prorogued on the 30th of December and dissolved three weeks later. In March 1679 a new parliament hostile to Danby was returned, and he was forced to resign the treasurership; but he received a pardon from the king under the Great Seal, and a warrant for a marquessate.[7] His proposed advancement in rank was severely reflected upon in the Lords, Halifax declaring it in the king’s presence the recompense of treason, “not to be borne”; and in the Commons his retirement from office by no means appeased his antagonists. The proceedings against him were revived, a committee of privileges deciding on the 19th of March 1679 that the dissolution of parliament was no abatement of an impeachment. A motion was passed for his committal by the Lords, who, as in Clarendon’s case, voted his banishment. This was, however, rejected by the Commons, who now passed an act of attainder. Danby had removed to the country, but returned on the 21st of April to avoid the threatened passing by the Lords of the attainder, and was sent to the Tower. In his written defence he now pleaded the king’s pardon, but on the 5th of May 1679 it was pronounced illegal by the Commons. This declaration was again repeated by the Commons in 1689 on the occasion of another attack made upon Danby in that year, and was finally embodied in the Act of Settlement in 1701.
The Commons now demanded judgment against the prisoner from the Lords. Further proceedings, however, were stopped by the dissolution of parliament again in July; but for nearly five years Danby remained a prisoner in the Tower. A number of pamphlets asserting the complicity of the fallen minister in the Popish Plot, and even accusing him of the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, were published in 1679 and 1680; they were answered by Danby’s secretary, Edward Christian, in Reflections; and in May 1681 Danby was actually indicted by the Grand Jury of Middlesex for Godfrey’s murder on the accusation of Edward FitzHarris. His petition to the king for a trial by his peers on this indictment was refused, and an attempt to prosecute the publishers of the false evidence in the king’s bench was unsuccessful. For some time all appeals to the king, to parliament, and to the courts of justice were unavailing; but on the 12th of February 1684 his application to Chief Justice Jeffreys was at last successful, and he was set at liberty on finding bail to the amount of £40,000, to appear in the House of Lords in the following session. He visited the king at court the same day; but took no part in public affairs for the rest of the reign.
After James’s accession Danby was discharged from his bail by the Lords on the 19th of May 1685, and the order declaring a dissolution of parliament to be no abatement of an impeachment was reversed. He again took his seat in the Lords as a leader of the moderate Tory party. Though a strong Tory and supporter of the hereditary principle, James’s attacks on Protestantism soon drove him into opposition. He was visited by Dykvelt, William of Orange’s agent; and in June 1687 he wrote to William assuring him of his support. On the 30th of June 1688 he was one of the seven leaders of the Revolution who signed the invitation to William. In November he occupied York in the prince’s interest, returning to London to meet William on the 26th of December. He appears to have thought that William would not claim the crown,[8] and at first supported the theory that the throne having been vacated by James’s flight the succession fell as of right to Mary; but as this met with little support, and was rejected both by William and by Mary herself, he voted against the regency and joined with
- ↑ Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland, by Sir J. Dalrymple (1773), i. app. 104.
- ↑ Letters to Sir Joseph Williamson (Camden Soc., 1874), i. 64.
- ↑ Halifax note-book in Devonshire House collection, quoted in Foxcroft’s Life of Halifax, ii. 63, note.
- ↑ Life of Shaftesbury, by W. D. Christie (1871), ii. 312.
- ↑ Macky’s Memoirs, 46; Pepys’s Diary, viii. 143.
- ↑ See the description of his position at this time by Sir W. Temple in Lives of Illustrious Persons (1714), 40.
- ↑ Add. MSS. 28094, f. 47.
- ↑ Boyer’s Annals (1722), 433.
