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THE COMMONWEALTH.

[BOOK IX.

If there was to be a traitor, which of the parties was to win the prize of betrayal? The Presbyterians would have received the king on conditions securing the ascendancy of their church, and their right to persecute all others; others would have made more valuable agreements, and have limited the royal power within legal bounds; but events marched too fast. A new parliament was called in April, and Monk and Charles had finally come to terms. The terms were very easy. Monk was to restore the king, and the king was to enrich and ennoble Monk. The nation was to do the best it could. The high contracting parties left it out of consideration altogether.

§ 6. When the Parliament met, the House of Lords was as fully recognised as the Lower House. Letters were presented to both the assemblies from his Majesty King Charles. In these he promised a general pardon and full liberty of conscience. The fever of loyalty was so strong, he need not have promised anything. Lords and Commons accepted the Declaration of Breda as a new edition of Magna Charta, and sent over fifty thousand pounds to the penniless king; and on the 2nd of May a formal speech was made by the Speaker, which ended, amid the cheers of the whole body, with the words, "Long live King Charles the Second!"

FRANCE.-Louis XIV.

SPAIN.-Philip IV.; Charles II.

Emperor of GERMANY.—Leopold I.

POPES. Alexander VII.; Clement IX.; Clement X.; Innocent XI.

§ 1. Restoration of Charles II. Great national rejoicings. Special acts of indemnity.-§ 2. Trial and execution of several of the regicides. 3. Sanguinary prosecutions in Scotland. General Monk made Duke of Albemarle.-§ 4. Contentions among the ministers of dif ferent sects. § 5. Profligacy of Charles and his court. James, Duke of York, married to the daughter of Lord Clarendon.-§ 6. The king married to Catherine, daughter of the King of Portugal.-§ 7. Charles sells Dunkirk to the King of France.§ 8. Act of Uniformity passed. Religious intolerance.-§ 9. War with the Dutch. Capture of New York. Naval victory over the Dutch.-§ 10. Great efforts made by the Dutch, who are joined by Louis XIV. The Dutch squadron sails up the Medway, destroys the dockyard of Chatham, and burns several ships of war.-§ 11. Political degradation of England. Charles becomes a pensioner to Louis XIV. Plague of London, the great fire, and universal misrule. The Cabal ministry.

12. Stringency of the measures of Parliament to resist the domination of Popery on the one hand and Puritanism on the other. The Five-mile Act.-§ 13. Charles's secret alliance with France against the Dutch for the destruction of Protestantism. He seizes the bankers' funds in the Exchequer. § 14. The French and English forces overrun Holland. Prince William of Orange.§ 15. Efforts of Charles and his brother in favour of popery. Passing of the Test and Corporation Act.-§ 16. Charles's treacherous con

duct. Interference of Louis XIV. with the British Parliament.§ 17. The Popish plot. Titus Oates. Earl of Danby, prime minister. General alarm through the nation. Execution of Coleman, secretary to the Duke of York.-§ 18. The Habeas Corpus Act.-§ 19. Insurrection of the Covenanters of Scotland. They are defeated at Bothwell Bridge.-§ 20. Bitterness of political parties. Whigs and Tories.- 21. Claims of the Duke of Monmouth to the throne. The Cameronians of Scotland.-§ 22. Despotic measures of the king. The Rye-house Plot. Execution of Lord William Russell and Algernon Sidney. Judge Jeffreys.-§ 23. Cowardice and treachery of Howard of Estrich and the Duke of Monmouth. Sanguinary persecutions in Scotland.-§ 24. Atrocious cruelties of the king, and infamous character of his brother James. The king's death-bed scene. He dies a Roman Catholic. His frivolous character.

§ 1. If ever there was a nation intoxicated-not merely by a figure of speech, but actually drunk with excitement and strong potations-it was England on the 25th of May, 1660, when his sacred Majesty Charles II. set foot on the shore at Dover. For days and weeks the delirious joy continued— bonfires, joy-bells, cavalcades, and addresses were everywhere to be heard and seen; and the exile of Breda could only wonder, since his return had created so much happiness, that the nation had deprived itself of his presence so long. Profuse in pleasant speeches and promises of future reward, the restored king was the idol of all his subjects. The first acts of his Parliament confirmed their good impressions, for the past was declared forgotten and forgiven; no men, with very few exceptions, were to be called in question for their behaviour; the army and navy were paid off or greatly reduced; the clergy, who had survived their deprivation during the rebellion and usurpation, were restored to their livings; feudal privileges interfering with trade and property were formally abolished; an income was settled on the king for life; and, finally, the anniversary of his glorious restoration was ordered to be kept with solemn thanksgivings for all generations.

§ 2. Yet the joyous Cavalier was not to be altogether deprived of the luxury of revenge. The persons excepted from the Act of Oblivion were arrested. Among these were twentynine who had sat on the trial of the late king, of whom ten

A.D. 1660.] PUNISHMENT OF THE REGICIDES.

609

Harrison was

were executed with the barbarities of the law. also put to death, along with his confederates in the seizure of the king's person; and fiery Hugh Peters, the fighting chaplain of the Commonwealth, shared their fate. The rest of those deeply implicated were declared traitors, and their estates confiscated whether they were living or dead. And death was no protection against the deeper malignity which burned towards Cromwell. His body was removed from its tomb in Westminster Abbey, and hung on the gibbet at Tyburn. Stories were afterwards spread abroad, to the confusion of the loyalists, that an exchange of corpses had taken place, and that Charles had been substituted on the gallows for Oliver. We know, however, from the opening of the grave at Windsor, that Charles's remains were undisturbed, and the whole disgrace of profaning the sanctuary of the grave is left with the champions, as they called themselves, of the mitre and crown. The bodies of Ireton and Bradshaw were suspended at the same time, and the half-drunken Cavalier could hiccup insolent ballads in presence of the decayed and unrecognisable features of the three men he had chiefly feared while they were alive.

§ 3. In Scotland the prosecutions were more bitter, as the passions had been more excited. Argyle, the leader of the Presbyterians, was pronounced guilty of having aided the Protector, and executed at the market-cross of Edinburgh— an offering to the manes of the Cavalier Montrose. Vengeance followed the enemies of the king, till, in the eyes of the furious Covenanters, they became martyrs in the cause of truth. Some of their ministers were imprisoned, and one put to death, for having preached against Charles ten years before. The smaller lairds paid in purse for their faults in politics, and the stiff persistents in their republican ideas were hanged. A herd of renegades from the Commonwealth, who had served Cromwell with the servility of slaves, now atoned for their crime by cringing to Charles. The price they paid for office and salary was the blood of their late allies. Monk, in "'

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hideous work, was badly eminent. He was ready with the confidential letters he had received, when in the service of the usurper, to convict his friends of having helped the same cause. Fletcher, the Lord Advocate, had been a tool of the late government as of the present, and could be both counsel and witness against the accused. In both countries baseness and cruelty were passports to rank and riches. Monk was made Duke of Albemarle and commander-in-chief-a traitor to all sides in turn, with the sole advantage of an impenetrable face and a genius for holding his tongue. Milton, on the other hand, the greatest of poets and most consistent of politicians, narrowly escaped with his life for having acted as Latin Secretary to Cromwell, and written a very eloquent defence of the English people in the matter of the king's death. He was only reduced to poverty, and debarred from public employment; owing his comparative immunity to the obscurity which fortunately hung over his name. He was only known as a blind old man who wrote poetry, and was not thought worthy of further notice.

4. For a while at first the unanimity of the nation, in hailing the king's return, extended to the theological parties. An attempt was even made to widen the platform of the Establishment sufficiently to admit the Presbyterian ministers within its pale, and certain compromises were proposed on the subject of surplices and attitudes; but as the king, for purposes of his own, attempted to extend toleration to the sectaries and the Papists, the Protestantism of such distinguished men as Calamy and Baxter took the alarm, and they continued firm in their dissent. The Church, deprived of the strong support of the Puritan divines, was driven into the other excess, and there were soon prominent, in many of the pulpits, orators declaiming about divine right and absolute power in a style to which Laud himself had not ventured to aspire. It was not till many years had elapsed that the middle space between those two extremes was filled up by a