found to do the work required; but the style in which they built was not English but Italian. The rows of pillars and round arches, with the meaningless decorations which bespoke an age preferring sumptuousness to beauty, superseded the quaint Elizabethan and early Jacobean houses, which seemed built for comfort rather than for display, such as Ingestre Hall (see p. 471) and Hatfield House

(see p. 485). In the reign of James I., Inigo Jones planned the great banqueting hall at Whitehall (see p. 493), and so contemptuous was he of the great architecture of the middle ages, that he fitted on an Italian portico to the west front of the old St. Paul's. This style of building culminated in the work of Sir Christopher Wren. The fire of London gave him an opportunity which he did not throw away. The steeple of St. Mary-le-Bow is an example of his powers of design (see p. 614), but his greatest achievement, the new St. Paul's, was, when Charles II. died, only slowly rising from the ground, and it remained uncompleted till long after Charles II. had been laid in the grave.

20. Science. The foundation of the Royal Society (see p. 598) had borne ample fruit. Halley and Flamsteed were the astronomers of the time till their fame was eclipsed by that of Isaac Newton, who before the end of the reign

of Charles II. was already meditating on the views contained in his 'Principia,' in which the law of gravitation was set forth, though that work was not written till after the death of that king.

21. Difficulties of Communication.-Difficulties of communication served both to encourage town life and to hinder the increase of manufactures at any considerable distance from the sea. The roads were left to each parish to repair, and the parishes usually did as little as possible. In many places a mere quagmire took the

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place of the road. Young and active men, and sometimes ladies, travelled on horseback, and goods of no great weight were transmitted on packhorses. The family coach, in which those who were too dignified or too weak to ride made their way from one part of the country to another, was dragged by six horses, and often sank so deeply in the mud as only to be extricated by the loan of additional plough horses from a neighbouring farm, whilst heavy goods were conveyed in lumbering waggons, still more difficult to move even at a moderate speed. For passengers who could not afford to keep a coach the carrier's waggon served as a slow conveyance ; but before the end of the reign of Charles II. there had been introduced a vehicle known as The Flying Coach, which managed to perform a journey at the rate of fifty miles a day in summer and thirty in winter, in districts in which roads were exceptionably good.

22. The Country Gentry and the Country Clergy. - These difficulties of communication greatly affected the less wealthy of the country gentry and the country clergy. A country gentleman of large fortune, indeed, would occasionally visit London and appear as a visitor at the house of some relative or friend to whom he was specially attached. The movements, however, even of this class were much restricted, whilst men of moderate estate seldom moved at all. The refinements which at present adorn country life were not then to be found. Books were few, and the man of comparatively slender means found sufficient occupation in the management of his land and in the enjoyment of field sports. His ideas on politics were crude, and, because they were crude, were pertinaciously held. The country clergyman was relatively poorer than the country squire ; and had few means of cultivating his mind or of elevating the religion of his parishioners. The ladies of the houses of even the richest of the landed gentry were scarcely educated at all, and, though there were bright exceptions, any one familiar with the correspondence of the seventeenth century knows that, if he comes across a letter particularly illegible and uninteresting, there is a strong probability that the writer was a woman.

23. Alliance between the Gentry and the Church.-A common life passed in the country under much the same conditions naturally drew together the squire and the rector or vicar of his parish. A still stronger bond united them for the most part in a common Toryism. They had both suffered from the same oppression: the squire, or his predecessor, had been heavily fined by a Puritan

Parliament or a Puritan Lord Protector, whilst the incumbent or his predecessor had been expelled from his parsonage and deprived of his livelihood by the same authority. They therefore naturally combined in thinking that the first axiom in politics was to keep Dissenters down, lest they should do again what men like-minded with themselves had done before. Unless some other fear, stronger still, presented itself to them, they would endure almost anything from the king rather than risk the return to power of the Dissenters or of the Whigs, the friends of the Dissenters.

1. The Accession of James II. 1685. The character of the new king, James II., resembled that of his father. He had the same unalterable belief that whatever he wished to do was absolutely right; the same incapacity for entering into the feelings or motives of his opponents, and even more than his father's inability to see faults in those who took his side. He was bent on procuring religious liberty for the Catholics, and at first imagined it possible to do this with the help of the clergy and laity of the Church of Engiand. In his first speech to the Privy Council he announced his intention of preserving the established government in Church and State. He had mass, indeed, celebrated with open doors in his chapel at Whitehall, and he continued to levy taxes which had been granted to his brother for life only; yet, as he issued writs for a Parliament, these things did not count much against him.

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Unless, indeed, he was to set the law and constitution at defiance he could do no otherwise than summon Parliament, as out of 1,400,000l. which formed the revenue of the Crown, 900,000l. lapsed on Charles's death. James, however, secured himself against all eventualities by procuring from Louis a promise of financial aid in case of Parliament's proving restive. Before Parliament met, the king's inclinations were manifested by sentences pronounced by

James II.: from the National Portrait Gallery.

judges eager to gain his favour. On the one hand, Titus Oates was subjected to a flogging so severe that it would have killed anyone less hardy than himself. On the other hand, Richard Baxter, the most learned and moderate of Dissenters, was sent to prison after being scolded and insulted by Jeffreys, who, at the end of the late reign, had, through James's influence, been made Chief Justice of the King's Bench.

2. A Tory Parliament. 1685.-Parliament met on May 19. The House of Commons was Tory by an enormous majority, partly because the remodelled corporations (see p. 625) returned Tory members, but still more because the feeling of the country ran strongly in James's favour. The Commons granted to him the full revenue which had been enjoyed by his brother, and refused to listen to a few of its members who raised objections to some things which had been recently done. The House had not been long in session when it heard of two invasions, the one in Scotland and the other in England.

3. Argyle's Landing. 1685.-In Scotland the upper classes

were animated by a savage resolve to keep no terms with the Covenanters, whose fanatical violence alarmed them. The Scottish Parliament, soon after the accession of James, passed a law punishing with death any one attending a conventicle. Argyle, believing, in his exile in Holland, that all honest Scots would be ready to join him against the tyranny of Government,

the

sailed early in May at the head of a small expedition, and arrived in the Firth of Clyde. He had himself no military skill, and his followers, no less ignorant than himself, overruled everything that he proposed. Soon after landing he was captured and carried to Edinburgh, where, as he was already legally condemned to death (see p. 623), he was executed on June 30 without further trial. On the night before his death a member of the Council came to see him in his cell, where he found him in a placid slumber. The visitor rushed off in agony to the house of a friend. "I have