ealth, and the political weight of the new sectarians;
and the Church for the first time in its history found itself confronted
with an organized body of Dissenters without its pale. The impossibility
of crushing such a body as this wrested from English statesmen the first
legal recognition of freedom of worship in the Toleration Act; their
rapid growth in later times has by degrees stripped the Church of almost
all the exclusive privileges which it enjoyed as a religious body, and
now threatens what remains of its official connexion with the State.
With these remoter consequences however we are not as yet concerned. It
is enough to note here that with the Act of Uniformity and the expulsion
of the Puritan clergy a new element in our religious and political
history, the element of Dissent, the influence of the Nonconformist
churches, comes first into play.

[Sidenote: Charles and Clarendon.]

The sudden outbreak and violence of the persecution, the breaking up of
conventicles, the imprisonment of those who were found worshipping in
them, turned the disappointment of the Presbyterians into despair. Many
were for retiring to Holland, others proposed a general flight to New
England and the American colonies. Among the Baptists and Independents
there was vague talk of an appeal to arms. So threatening indeed did the
attitude of the Sectaries become that Clarendon was anxious to provide
himself with men and money and above all with foreign aid for such a
struggle, should it come. Different indeed as were the aims of the king
and his Chancellor the course of events drew them inevitably together.
If Charles desired the friendship of France as a support in any possible
struggle with the Parliament Clarendon desired it as a support in the
possible struggle with the Nonconformists. The first step in this French
policy had been the marriage with Catharine of Braganza; the second was
the surrender of Dunkirk. The maintenance of the garrison at Dunkirk was
a heavy drag upon the royal treasury, and a proposal for its sale to
Spain, which was made by Lord Sandwich in council, was seized by Charles
and Clarendon as a means of opening a bargain with France. To France the
profit was immense. Not only was a port gained in the Channel which
served during the next hundred years as a haunt for privateers in every
war between the two powers, but the withdrawal of the English garrison
at the close of 1662 from a port which necessarily drew Eng