necessity the Protestant population could retire till reinforcements arrived from England; that the English fleet would prevent the Irish getting any foreign assistance; that no foreign power now wished to assist the Irish, as none had ever got any benefit by so doing; and that England was full of men discontented with their present situation, who would gladly throw themselves into a new war for the suppression of an Irish rebellion.[1] These memoranda he sent to Southwell.[2] 'I think,' he wrote to him towards the end of the year, 'that the apprehensions of men are allayed since they were composed. The world was then full of Fury. But the Temper of these papers, I conceive to be such as may serve in all Times: therefore keep them till Antichrist comes.'[3]
The passions let loose at the time of the Popish Plot had a powerful effect on the general course of national history and on the development of the powers of Parliament and of the House of Commons in particular. The reign of Charles II. was a period of transition, not only in finance, but in the civil administration also, and in the political relations inter se of the different powers of the State. The first indications of the rise of the Cabinet are to be recognised and of the steady decline of the powers of the Privy Council. Sir William Temple in 1679, jealous of the growth of the Cabinet system, had persuaded the King to place the Privy Council on a new and extended basis, so as to be representative of all parties loyal to the Crown. The scheme was intended to maintain the Privy Council as a living power in the State, by including in it all the leading men both in Church and State, and to constitute a body of known and responsible statesmen to act as the advisers of the King and prevent him trusting himself to whatever small knot of political or religious intriguers might have caught the royal ear in private, or have got possession of the House of Commons. The plan was aimed
- ↑ Political Anatomy, ch. v. p. 318.
- ↑ 'Considerations how the Protestants or non-Papists of Ireland may disable the Papists, both for intestine rebellion there, and also from assisting a French invasion as the state of both parties now standeth in the present year, 1679.'—Petty MSS. The opinion of Archbishop Boyle, given in Burnet, History of his Own Times, i. 459, points to the same conclusion.
- ↑ To Southwell, June 10, 1679.
