ated in the Bishop's Court or fined for non-attendance at
church; and a crowd of informers grew up who made a trade of detecting
the meetings they held at midnight. Alleyn, the author of the well-known
"Alarm to the Unconverted," died at thirty-six from the sufferings he
endured in Taunton Gaol. Vavasour Powell, the apostle of Wales, spent
the eleven years which followed the Restoration in prisons at
Shrewsbury, Southsea, and Cardiff, till he perished in the Fleet.

[Sidenote: England and the Dutch.]

The success however of this experiment in the repression of religious
opinion rested mainly on the absence of any disturbing influences from
without; and in the midst of his triumph over his opponents at home
Clarendon was watching anxiously the growth of a quarrel which
threatened war with the Dutch. The old commercial jealousy between the
two rival merchant nations, which had been lulled in 1662 by a formal
treaty of peace, but which still lived on in petty squabbles at sea, was
embittered by the cession of Bombay--a port which gave England an entry
into the profitable trade with India--as well as by the establishment of
a West Indian Company in London which opened a traffic with the Gold
Coast of Africa, and brought back from Guinea the gold from which our
first "guineas" were struck. In both countries there was a general
irritation which vented itself in cries for war, and in the session of
1664 the English Parliament presented an address to the Crown praying
for the exaction of redress for wrongs done by the Dutch to English
merchants. But the squabble was of long standing, and there was nothing
to threaten any immediate strife. Charles himself indeed shrank from
wars which he foresaw would leave him at the mercy of his Parliament;
and Clarendon with Ormond, the bishops, and the whole Church party, were
conscious that the maintenance of peace was needful for their system of
religious repression. The quarrel therefore would have dragged on in
endless recriminations had not the restless hatred of the Chancellor's
opponents seen in it a means of bringing about the end in which they had
as yet been foiled. Bennet and the Court, Ashley and the Presbyterian
party in the Council, Bristol and the Catholics, foresaw that the
pressure of such a war, the burdens it would bring with it, and the
supplies for which he would be driven to ask, would soon ruin the
Chancellor's popularity with the Commons. Stripped of their support, it