The execution of Vane had followed with only an interval of a few days the marriage of the king--an event but little popular in England, for he espoused a Catholic princess. Clarendon feared the influence of Spain. It was a princess of Portugal, Catherine of Braganza, to whom he had destined the sad honor of marrying King Charles II. The latter had urged objections against every proposal for a Protestant union. The dower was considerable; the fortress of Tangier offered an appearance of an acquisition of territory. {352} The Portuguese princess arrived in England in the month of May, 1662. Honest folk founded great hopes upon the marriage of the king, whose disorderly life caused much scandal. Men of foresight were not deceived. After the rigid rule of the Puritans and the heavy yoke of their moral and religious ordinances, the reaction of license and immorality, of which the king gave the example, extended to his followers, and in part corrupted his supporters throughout the country. Those innocent diversions which had been forbidden by the government of the Commonwealth yielded place under the Restoration to a vortex of pleasure and debauchery which began to alarm the serious and sober-minded. The vices and errors of men enchain them, and bear inevitably their deplorable fruit. The wild prodigality of Charles II. left him poor in spite of the considerable revenue which Parliament assigned him. He had relinquished all the ancient revenues of the crown, relics of the feudal system which shocked those ideas of justice and liberty of the subject which for centuries had gradually been ripening in England, and which had definitely taken shape under the revolution. In lieu of these an annual sum had been fixed. All these resources, however, had been exhausted when Charles II. decided to sell Dunkirk to the young king, Louis XIV., then beginning his reign, having at last become master of that power which he was destined to exercise so long, almost always for the glory, but sometimes for the misfortune of France. [Image] Charles At The House Of Lady Castlemaine. {353} Cromwell had acquired Dunkirk at the price of the aid of his brave soldiers in the war against Spain. Charles II. sold it to Louis XIV. for five millions of livres--a step profoundly unpopular and one which hurt the pride of the English, long wounded by the loss of Calais, and for a while consoled by the acquisition of Dunkirk. The merchants of London offered the king enormous advances, in order to avert what they regarded as a national dishonor. Charles II. hoped to obtain from Louis XIV. something more and better than the price of Dunkirk; he concluded the treaty notwithstanding the public discontent.