Charles II - The Last Rally

Text extracted from opening pages of book: CHARLES II THE LAST RALLY By Hilaire Belloc HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS New York and London 1939 CONTENTS I. THE LAST RALLY I H. THE TASK 12 III. THE FORMATION 34 IV. THE ANNEALING 58 V. FIRST GRASP OF THE HELM 80 VI. THE FAIR RUN I0y VH. THE FLEET AND EMPIRE 125 Vin. THE SUNKEN REEF 139 K. THE TRIANGLE 165 X. GATHERING STORM 185 XI. WHIGGERY 208 XII. THE WOMEN 222 xra. FULL GALE: THE POPISH PLOT 238 XIV. HURRICANE AND HARBOR 261 XV. DROP ANCHOR 271 CHARLES 11 THE LAST RALLY I THE LAST RALLY THIS BOOK IS A SEQUEL AND COMPANION TO THE BOOK which I published last year upon Louis XIV. In that book my theme was the eternal conflict between One Man Government and the Rich. Napoleon said it: The only institution ever devised by men for mastering the Money Power in the State is Mon archy. It is obviously true and is the most practically im portant of all political truths. The Government of the United States with its large development of presidential powers in modern times and the present struggle between those powers and plutocracy is a very good example in point. A still more forcible example is to be seen actively at work before our eyes: the new governments calling themselves totalitarian are essentially extreme. Monarchies at issue with the plutoc racies rule in the older world around them: to a large extent in France and obviously in Great Britain. As I dealt in my former book with the leading case of Louis XIV of France as a monarch standing up to the Money Power ( and, upon the whole, successfully), so in this book I deal with the parallel and complementary case of his con temporary and first cousin, Charles II, Stuart King of England. He alsofound himself faced by that unescapable conflict between the Money Power and Monarchy; but, unlike his [ i] Charles II cousin Louis, Charles failed. The Money Power was too much for him. So long as he lived he managed to fend it off though not to tame it; but immediately after his death, in the less competent hands of his brother James ( the last real and active King of England, as also the last by hereditary right), Mon archy went down. The Monarch was driven out and the powers of government in England were taken over by a gov erning class of wealthy men, which class has remained in the saddle ever since. For England in this our day is the one great example of aristocratic government in the Old World. It is essential to affirm here, at the outset, that the conflict between Monarchy and Money Power is not a conflict be tween good and evil. One may legitimately prefer govern ment by the wealthy to government by one man, which is the opposite of, and the corrective to, government by the wealthy. In the particular case of the English monarchy its breakdown after Charles II had struggled so manfully to main tain it did not involve the ruin of England: quite the contrary. The aristocratic government which then succeeded to mon archy proceeded from one triumph to another. It expanded the English Dominions beyond the seas. It laid the foundations of a vastly enhanced position by the acquisition of India in the face of French rivalry; it triumphantly maintained the power of England against European rivals. It produced an unrivaled fleet which at last, after a century of aristocratic government, obtained ( in 1794) complete mastery of the seas and was largely instrumental in defeating the FrenchRevolution and Xapoleon the heir thereof. Meanwhile during those two and a half centuries of aristo cratic government the commerce and wealth of England perpetually increased, and increased enormously. So did the population after Charles IFs time. Even at the end of the The Last Rally reign in 1684 England had not many more than 6,000,000 inhabitants; at the end of the next century ( 1800) England had 12,000,000 inhabitants. Today Great Britain, as a whole, has nearer four times as many inhabitants as it had then. Further, under class government and the directio