The author of these cruel Acts was not long to sit high in the king’s favour. He was a grave, ponderous man, with the utmost scorn for the idle triflers and wicked spendthrifts amongst whom the king wasted his days. Frequently he took Charles to task for his misdemeanours, and by his importunity goaded him into keeping his promises. “He often said it was the making those promises which had brought the king home, and the keeping of them must keep him at home.” The king’s friends hated the solemn, long-winded Polonius, and one of them used to whisper in Charles’s ear, “There goes your schoolmaster.” After the second Dutch War, in which England was covered with disgrace, Clarendon was a convenient scapegoat, and Charles dismissed him without a shade of regret and no single mark of gratitude for the long and faithful service which the deposed chancellor had rendered him both in exile and after the Restoration. Clarendon’s fall was the signal for great rejoicing amongst the shameless crew which surrounded the king. As he left Whitehall, disgraced and abandoned, a courtier assured Charles “that this was the first time he could ever call him King of England, being freed from this great man.” And now, “freed from this great man,” Charles began to descend deeper and deeper into the mire. He formed a ministry of his friends, and laid deep plans for ruling as an absolute king, but without running any undue risks. Hitherto he had laughed at religion; now, when sick and serious, he turned to the Church of Rome, and desired to re-establish it in his land, but again without running undue risks. On one principle and one principle alone Charles was absolutely fixed—he would never go on his travels again. Then he perpetrated his last and foullest piece of infamy—he sold himself to Lewis of France for a miserable £200,000 a year. Henceforth he was the pensioner of the French king and a secret traitor to his own subjects. No king so absolute as Charles when suddenly he was stricken with apoplexy. On his deathbed he was openly received into the Roman Catholic Church, to which he had long secretly belonged. He lingered until Friday, February 6, 1685. As the morning light began to peep through the windows he apologized to those who had watched him through the night for all the trouble which he had caused them. “He had been,” he said, “a most unconscionable time dying, but he hoped they would excuse it.” So passes Charles. One of his friends had previously suggested this epitaph:— “Here lies our sovereign lord the king, Whose word no man relies on; Who never said a foolish thing, And never did a wise one.”