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Chapters from the Sixth Volume of The Life of John Milton
Chapters from the Sixth Volume of The Life of John Milton Author:David Masson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BOOK III—CHAPTER I ENGLISH POLITICS AND LITERATURE FROM 1667 TO 1674 There are few periods during which it is more difficult to describe the mechanism of t... more »he English government than during the seven years following the fall of Clarendon. The difficulty has been acknowledged, rather than explained, by calling the period, or the greater part of it, THE TIME OF THE CABAL ADMINISTRATION. No need now to correct the old popular fallacy that the word cabal was an invention of that time. Most people know that the word cabal had already been in use in England, as a designation for any number of persons putting their heads together for any object whatever, but more especially as an alternative name for that secret committee of the King's privy council and ministry which had been long known as The Junto, and which ve now call The Cabinet. Though the strict constitutional theory was that the right and duty of advising the sovereign lay in the whole body of the privy council, and that each minister was the independent servant of the crown in his own department, the two connected institutions of The Junto and The Premiership are so rooted in the very necessities of politics and of human nature that the existence of one or other, or of both together, had been more or less an open fact in the reigns of all recent Englishsovereigns. That neither was liked, that both were regarded as unconstitutional, and that the premier or favourite for the time being, and other members of the Junto or Cabal for the time being, always ran peculiar risks, had not prevented the definite transmission of both institutions through the reigns of James I. and Charles I. The Clarendon Administration for Charles II. from 1660 to 1667 had been in reality a government by intermixed cabal and premiership. What, t...« less