476.  The “Cabal” (1667-1673); Treaty of Dover, 1670; the King robs the Exchequer (1672).

Shortly after this humiliating event the enemies of Clarendon drove him from office (S471).  The fallen minister was accused of high treason.  He had been guilty of certain arbitrary acts, and, rather than stand trial, he fled to France, and was banished for life.  He sent a humble petition to the Lords, but they promptly ordered the hangman to burn it.  Six years later the old man begged piteously that he might “come back and die in his own coutnry and among his own children.”  Charles refused to let him return, for Clarendon had committed the unpardonable offense of daring to look “sourly” at the vices of the King and his shameless companions flushed “with insolence and wine.”  Charles now formed a new ministry or “Cabal,"[1] consisting of five of his most intimate friends.  Several of its members were notorious for their depravity, and Macaulay calls it the “most profligate administration ever known."[2] The chief object of its leaders was to serve their own private interests by making the King’s power supreme.  The “Cabal’s” true spirit was not unlike that of the council of the “infernal peers” which Milton portrays in “Paradise Lost,” first published at that time.  There he shows us the five princes of evil, Moloch, Belial, Mammon, Beelzebub, and Satan, meeting in the palace of Pandemonium to plot the ruin of the world.[3] he chief ambition of Charles was to rule without a Parliament; he did not like to have that body inquire too closely how he spent the money which the taxpayers granted him.  But his lavish outlays on his favorites made it more and more difficult for him to avoid summoning a Parliament in order to get supplies of cash.  At length he hit on a plan for securing the funds he wanted without begging help from Parliament.

[1] This word was originally used to designate the confidential members of the King’s private council, and meant perhaps no more than the word “cabinet” does to-day.  In 1667 it happened, however, by a singular coincidence, that the initial letters of the five persons comprising it, namely, (C)lifford, (A)shley-Cooper [Lord Shaftesbury], (B)uckingham, (A)rlington, and (L)auderdale, formed the word “CABAL,” which henceforth came to have the odious meaning of secret and unscrupulous intrigue that it has ever since retained.  It was to Charles II’s time what the political “ring” is to our own. [2] Macaulay’s “Essay on Sir William Temple.” [3] Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Book II.  The first edition was published in 1667, the year the “Cabal” came into power, though its members had long been favorites with the King.  It has been supposed by some that the great Puritan poet had them in his mind when he represented the Pandemonic debate.  Shaftesbury and Buckingham are also two of the most prominent characters in Dryden’s noted political satire of “Absalom and Achitophel,” published in 1681; and compare Butler’s “Hudibras.”