t was passed, too, preventing any dissenter from holding any office
under any corporation. So, the regular clergy in their triumph were soon
as merry as the King. The army being by this time disbanded, and the
King crowned, everything was to go on easily for evermore.

I must say a word here about the King's family. He had not been long
upon the throne when his brother the Duke of Gloucester, and his sister
the PRINCESS OF ORANGE, died within a few months of each other, of small-
pox. His remaining sister, the PRINCESS HENRIETTA, married the DUKE OF
ORLEANS, the brother of LOUIS THE FOURTEENTH, King of France. His
brother JAMES, DUKE OF YORK, was made High Admiral, and by-and-by became
a Catholic. He was a gloomy, sullen, bilious sort of man, with a
remarkable partiality for the ugliest women in the country. He married,
under very discreditable circumstances, ANNE HYDE, the daughter of LORD
CLARENDON, then the King's principal Minister--not at all a delicate
minister either, but doing much of the dirty work of a very dirty palace.
It became important now that the King himself should be married; and
divers foreign Monarchs, not very particular about the character of their
son-in-law, proposed their daughters to him. The KING OF PORTUGAL
offered his daughter, CATHERINE OF BRAGANZA, and fifty thousand pounds:
in addition to which, the French King, who was favourable to that match,
offered a loan of another fifty thousand. The King of Spain, on the
other hand, offered any one out of a dozen of Princesses, and other hopes
of gain. But the ready money carried the day, and Catherine came over in
state to her merry marriage.

The whole Court was a great flaunting crowd of debauched men and
shameless women; and Catherine's merry husband insulted and outraged her
in every possible way, until she consented to receive those worthless
creatures as her very good friends, and to degrade herself by their
companionship. A MRS. PALMER, whom the King made LADY CASTLEMAINE, and
afterwards DUCHESS OF CLEVELAND, was one of the most powerful of the bad
women about the Court, and had great influence with the King nearly all
through his reign. Another merry lady named MOLL DAVIES, a dancer at the
theatre, was afterwards her rival. So was NELL GWYN, first an orange
girl and then an actress, who really had good in her, and of whom one of
the worst things I know is, that actually she does seem to have been fond
of the King. The first