seems to have persuaded the Bishop of London that if the charter could be annulled, episcopacy might be established in Massachusetts as in England.  In February, 1682, a letter came from the king demanding submission and threatening legal proceedings against the charter.  Dudley was then sent as agent to London, and with him was sent a Mr. Richards, of the extreme clerical party, to watch him. [Sidenote:  Massachusetts answers the king]

Meanwhile the king’s position at home had been changing.  He had made up his mind to follow his father’s example and try the experiment of setting his people at defiance and governing without a parliament.  This could not be done without a great supply of money.  Louis XIV. had plenty of money, for there was no constitution in France to prevent his squeezing what he wanted out of the pockets of an oppressed people.  France was thriving greatly now, for Colbert had introduced a comparatively free system of trade between the provinces and inaugurated an era of prosperity soon to be cut short by the expulsion of the Huguenots.  Louis could get money enough for the asking, and would be delighted to foment civil disturbances in England, so as to tie the hands of the only power which at that moment could interfere with his seizing Alsace and Lorraine and invading Flanders.  The pretty Louise de Keroualle Duchess of Portsmouth, with her innocent baby face and heart as cold as any reptile’s, was the French Delilah chosen to shear the locks of the British Samson.  By such means and from such motives a secret treaty was made in February, 1681, by which Louis agreed to pay Charles 2,000,000 livres down, and 500,000 more in each of the next two years, on condition that he should summon no more parliaments within that time.  This bargain for securing the means of overthrowing the laws and liberties of England was, on the part of Charles II., an act no less reprehensible than some of those for which his father had gone to the block.  But Charles could now afford for a while to wreak his evil will.  He had already summoned a parliament for the 21st of March, to meet at Oxford within the precincts of the subservient university, and out of reach of the high-spirited freemen of London.  He now forced a quarrel with the new parliament and dissolved it within a week.  A joiner named Stephen College, who had spoken his mind too freely in the taverns at Oxford with regard to these proceedings, was drawn and quartered.  The Whig leader Lord Shaftesbury was obliged to flee to Holland.  In the absence of a parliament the only power of organized resistance to the king’s tyranny resided in the corporate governments of the chartered towns.  The charter of London was accordingly attacked by a writ of quo warranto, and in June, 1683, the time-serving judges declared it confiscated.  George Jeffreys, a low drunken fellow whom Charles had made Lord Chief Justice, went on a circuit through the country; and, as Roger North says, “made