With these advisers
Charles entered into those schemes so antagonistic to the national
interests which have disgraced his reign. His plan was to render himself
independent of parliament and of the nation by binding himself to France
and the French policy of aggrandizement, and receiving a French pension
with the secret intention as well of introducing the Roman Catholic
religion again into England. In 1661 under Clarendon's rule, the evil
precedent had been admitted of receiving money from France, in 1662
Dunkirk had been sold to Louis, and in February 1667 during the Dutch
war a secret alliance had been made with Louis, Charles promising him a
free hand in the Netherlands and Louis undertaking to support Charles's
designs "in or out of the kingdom." In January 1668 Sir W. Temple had
made with Sweden and Holland the Triple Alliance against the
encroachments and aggrandizement of France, but this national policy was
soon upset by the king's own secret plans. In 1668 the conversion of his
brother James to Romanism became known to Charles. Already in 1662 the
king had sent Sir Richard Bellings to Rome to arrange the terms of
England's conversion, and now in 1668 he was in correspondence with
Oliva, the general of the Jesuits in Rome, through James de la Cloche,
the eldest of his natural sons, of whom he had become the father when
scarcely sixteen during his residence at Jersey. On the 25th of January
1669, at a secret meeting between the two royal brothers, with
Arlington, Clifford and Arundell of Wardour, it was determined to
announce to Louis XIV. the projected conversion of Charles and the
realm, and subsequent negotiations terminated in the two secret treaties
of Dover. The first, signed only, among the ministers, by Arlington and
Clifford, the rest not being initiated, on the 20th of May 1670,
provided for the return of England to Rome and the joint attack of
France and England upon Holland, England's ally, together with Charles's
support of the Bourbon claims to the throne of Spain, while Charles
received a pension of L200,000 a year. In the second, signed by
Arlington, Buckingham, Lauderdale and Ashley on the 31st of December
1670, nothing was said about the conversion, and the pension provided
for that purpose was added to the military subsidy, neither of these
treaties being communicated to parliament or to the nation. An immediate
gain to Charles was the acquisition of another mistress in the person of
Louise de K