England under Charles II. from the Restoration to the Treaty of Nimeguen, 1660-1678: English History from Contemporary Writers
Taylor, W. F.
1889
1672.-The Cabal in existence. Opinion of the French Court concerning the members of the Cabal.
Letter in the Secret Hist. of Whitehall, Lond. , vol. i., PP. 78, 79. Paris. | |
The ministers of this Court are not only the most inquisitive persons in the world into the affairs of other Courts, but even into the persons who manage them; whose natures, dispositions, religion, natural and acquired abilities, as well as respective infirmities, they endeavour to sift out to the quick that so they may use them or shun them as they find occasion: and for this reason it is that they make some remarks upon them in their minutes, as well as upon the affairs transacted by them. And therefore since the five persons who made up the Cabal in England . . . . , and who your lordship may remember were the dukes of Buckingham and Lauderdale, the earls of Shaftesbury and Arlington, and the Lord Treasurer Clifford, were very distinguishable for the stations they filled the offices they held and the parts each of them acted in the government; I find this character given of them: for the duke of Buckingham, as he was the king's favourite, so he really deserved to be so, as being very capable to be a minister of state if his application to business had been answerable to his talents; if his mind, which was furnished with excellent endowments, had not been distracted by libertinism, which was in him to an extreme degree; and by a love to his pleasures, | |
108 | which made one of those persons in the world that was fittest for great and solid things vain and frivolous. Of the duke of Lauderdale there is little or nothing said but that he is a great and quaint politician, and no question but he has merited that character at their hand. Of my lord Clifford they are as profuse in their praises, as I doubt they have been too of their money; saying he was a person who wanted nothing but a theatre where virtue and reason had been much more in use than it was in his country in the age wherein he lived, for to be superior to and overtop the rest. My lord of Arlington they make to be a person of meaner capacity, and a more limited genius than any of the five, but say his experiences supply the defect, and have acquired him especially a very great knowledge of foreign affairs. Last of all, they bring in Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the renowned earl of Shaftesbury; of whom they say he was by far the fittest person of any of them to manage a great enterprise, and so was as the soul to all the rest, being endued with a vast capacity, clear judgment, bold nature, and subtle wit, equally firm and constant in all he undertook; a constant friend but an implacable enemy; with many other expressions, such as his not being terrified either with the greatness or the multitude of crimes he judges necessary for his own preservation, or the destruction of others much to his lordship's dishonour, which is a clear argument he was not for their interest, and for which he is much beholden to them. |