BOOK VIII. PERIOD FROM THE RESTORATION OF CHARLES II. TO THE CHAPTER I.-CIVIL AND MILITARY HISTORY.-A.D. 1660-1661. CHARLES II.-ACCESSION, A.D. 1660-DEATH, A.D. 1685. Charles II. lands in England-His reception-Choice of his principal counsellors-His exercise of a royal attribute -First proceedings of the Restoration-Selection of regicides for punishment-Revenue assigned to the king -Unsatisfactory settlement of the question of toleration-Usher's scheme of union between Episcopalians and Presbyterians-Its unsatisfactory discussion before the king-Trial of the regicides-Trials of General Harrison, Colonel Carew, and Harry Martin-Trials of William Hewlet, Garland, and Hugh Peters-Execution of General Harrison-Execution of other regicides-Arrival of the queen-mother in England-Marriage of the Duke of York to the daughter of Lord Clarendon-Conformity to the Church of England enjoined-Violation of the graves of regicides, and execution of dead bodies-Venner's insurrection in London, and its suppression -New troops raised-Claims of Scotland on the gratitude of Charles II.-His hatred to the Kirk of Scotland -The Marquis of Argyle entrapped, tried, and executed-Other Scottish executions-Evil government of Scotland by Lauderdale and Middleton-Sharp made Archbishop of St. Andrews-His persecution of the Covenanters-The new or "Pension Parliament"-Its intolerant church measures-Persecution of eminent Commonwealth men-A rigorous conformity bill passed-Marriage of Charles II. to Catherine of BraganzaHe continues his open profligacies- Afflictions of the new queen-She threatens to return to Portugal-Trial of Sir Harry Vane-His defence-His sentence-His conduct on the scaffold, and execution-Assassination of Mr. Lisle at Lausanne. EN the 25th of May, Charles and his two brothers, the Dukes of York and Gloucester, landed near Dover, where Monk met them. The king embraced and kissed his restorer, calling him "Father." On the 29th, which was Charles's birthday, and that on which he completed his thirtieth year, he made his solemn entry into London, attended by the members of both houses, by bishops, ministers, knights of the Bath, lord-mayor and aldermen, kettle-drums and trumpets. All was joy and jubilee. And when Charles met the House of Lords, the Earl of Manchester hailed him as "great king," "dread sovereign," "native king," "son of the wise," &c., and prophesied to him that he would prove an example to all kings, of piety, justice, VOL. II. prudence, and power. Nor were the commons much behind the lords: their speaker, Sir Harbottle Grimston, told Charles that he was deservedly called the "king of hearts;" that he would receive from his people a crown of hearts; that he could not fail to be the happiest and most glorious king of the happiest people. The king's principal adviser was, and for some time had been, the Earl of Clarendon-the reforming Edward Hyde of former days; but in the formation of a government or a ministry, Clarendon was obliged to consult the interest of Monk. In Charles's first privy council there were admitted almost as many Presbyterians as Church of England men and Cavaliers; but Clarendon evidently hoped to be able to displace these Presbyterians by degrees. Among the members of this new cabinet were the king's two brothers, the Marquis of Ormond, the Earl of 188 Lindsay, Lord Say and Sele, General Monk, the | Clarendon told them that his majesty would in Earl of Manchester, Mr. Denzil Hollis, and Sir all points make good his declaration from Breda; Antony Ashley Cooper. Monk was continued that he granted a free pardon to all except those captain-general of all the forces of the three whom the parliament might except; and that kingdoms, and he was soon gratified by a long no man should be disquieted for differences of list of titles of nobility, ending in that of Duke of opinion in matters of religion. Albemarle. The Duke of York was made lord high-admiral, lord-warden of the Cinque-ports, &c. The Earl of Southampton became lord hightreasurer; the high-church Marquis of Ormond, lord-steward of the household; and the Presbyterian Earl of Manchester, lord-chamberlain. Lord Clarendon, retaining the chancellorship, was intrusted with the chief management of affairs. The Presbyterians were startled at the reproduction of the Thirty-nine Articles; but they were gratified by a royal proclamation against vice, debauchery, and profaneness, and by seeing one of the most debauched and profane of princes admit into the number of his chaplains Baxter and Calamy, two eloquent and famous Presbyterian preachers. To keep the lord-mayor, the aldermen, sheriffs, and principal officers of the city militia in good humour and loyalty, the honour of knighthood was showered upon them, and the king went into the city to feast with them. That none of the old attributes of royalty might remain in the shade, his majesty began to touch for the king'sevil, sitting under his canopy of state with his surgeons and chaplains, and stroking the faces of all the sick that were brought to him, one of the chaplains saying at each touching -"He put his hands upon them and he healed them." This disgusting and even blasphemous ceremony - this pretension to Fifteen days before Charles's joyous entrance into London, the lords had caused the Book of Common Prayer to be read in their house; and at the same time they and the commons had begun to arrest as traitors all such as spoke amiss of his gracious majesty or of kingly government. They had also seized Clement, one of the late king's judges; and had ordered the seizure of the goods of all that sat as judges upon that memorable trial; thus plainly intimating, even before Charles's arrival, that vengeance was to be taken upon the regicides. And now the Presbyterian majority of the commons, led on by the noisy, hot-headed, and vindictive Denzil Hollis, voted that neither they themselves nor the people of England could be freed from the horrid guilt of the late unnatural rebellion, or from the punishment which that guilt merited, unless they CHARLES II.-After Sir P. Lely. formally availed themselves of his majesty's grace and pardon, as set forth in the declaration of Breda; and they went in a body to the Banqueting House, and threw themselves at the feet of Charles, who recommended them to despatch what was called a bill of indemnity and oblivion. Clarendon had all along counted upon punishing with death all such as had been immediately concerned in the death of the late king. Monk, however, when arranging the Restoration, had advised that not more than four should be excepted; and now he stepped in to check the vindictive an hereditary right of working miracles-greatly | fury of the commons, and prevailed upon them incensed the Puritans. The lords and commons who, under Monk, had recalled the king, were not properly a parliament, but only a convention Therefore one of the first proceedings after his arrival was to pass an act constituting this convention a parliament. They then voted £70,000 a-month to the king for present necessities. The Chancellor to limit the number of their victims to sevenScott, Holland, Lisle, Barkstead, Harrison, Say, and Jones-who, it was voted, should lose the benefit of the indemnity both as to life and estate. But the number of seven was presently raised to ten by the addition of Coke, the active solicitor; Broughton, clerk to the High Court of Justice; and Dendy, who had acted as serjeant-at-armis during the trial. These ten, it was understood, were all to suffer a horrible death. But without losing time, the commons proceeded to select a still larger number that were to suffer the minor penalties of imprisonment for life, loss of property, and beggary to their posterity. They voted that a petition should be drawn and presented to the king, begging him to issue a proclamation commanding all those who had been concerned in managing his father's trial, or otherwise forward in promoting his death, to surrender themselves within fourteen days. Charles issued this proclamation accordingly, and nineteen individuals came in to stand their trial, hoping that, as ten had been fixed upon already for execution, their lives, at least, would be spared; while nineteen or twenty, measuring more accurately the vindictiveness of the Cavaliers and Presbyterians, hid themselves or fled beyond sea. Then the commons selected twenty more to be excepted out of the general act of oblivion, to suffer such penalties and forfeitures, not extending to life, as should be thought fit to be inflicted on them by an act to pass for that purpose.' These twenty were-Sir Harry Vane, St. John, Hazlerig, Ireton, Desborough, Lambert, Fleetwood, Axtell, Sydenham, Lenthall, Burton, Keble, Pack, Blackwell, Pyne, Dean, Creed, Nye, Goodwin, and Cobbett. Nor did the commons stop here, going on to except from all benefit of the indemnity such of the late king's judges as had not surrendered upon the proclamation. And in this state the bill of indemnity and oblivion went up to the lords, who found it much too moderate and merciful. Their lordships began with a vote of the most fierce and barbarous kind. "The lords were inclined to revenge their own order on the persons of some in the High Court of Justice, by whom some of their number had been condemned, and to except one of the judges for every lord they had put to death; the nomination of the person to be excepted being referred to that lord who was most nearly related to the person that had suffered. According to this rule, Colonel Croxton was nominated by the next relation to the Earl of Derby, Major Waring by the kinsman of another, and Colonel Titchburn by a third: the Earl of Denbigh, whose sister had been married to the Duke of Hamilton, being desired by the lords to nominate one to be excepted in satisfaction for the death of his brother-in-law, named a person who had been some time dead, of which some of the house being informed, they called upon him to name another; but he said that since it had so fallen out, he desired to be excused from naming any more. This action, although seeming to proceed from chance, was generally esteemed to have been voluntary, Kennet, Register. | 2 the Earl of Denbigh being known to be a generous man and a lover of his country." After this return to the spirit of the execrable lex talionis of the most barbarous times, the lords voted that all who had signed the death-warrant against Charles I., or sat when sentence was pronounced upon him, and six others not in that category-namely, Hacker, Vane, Lambert, Hazlerig, Axtell, and Peters--should be excepted, as capital traitors, from the indemnity. They were going on to make the bill more severe, but the king was more eager for money than for revenge, and, after several messages had been sent from Whitehall by the Chancellor Clarendon and others, praying the lords to despatch the bill, he himself, regardless of the constitutional rule, which precluded the sovereign from taking any cognizance of a pending bill, sent down a positive order to hasten their proceedings, in order that the commons might pass that for the grant of money. Hereupon the lords, without noticing the irregularity, returned the bill of indemnity to the commons with the alterations we have mentioned; and the commons adopted it in that form. They, however, were anxious to save the lives of Sir Harry Vane and General Lambert; and the lords joined with them in an address to the king, praying that if, after trial, these two should be attainted, execution should be remitted. The lords also agreed that Lenthall, who had intrigued with the royalists before the Restoration, and had offered the king a bribe of £3000, should be spared both in life and estate. That rash republican, Sir Arthur Hazlerig, who unwittingly had played into the hands of Monk, had a narrow escape; but the astucious general who had duped him stepped in considerately, and saved his life. Whitelock, that easy-tempered vassal of circumstances, was aimed at by the fanatic Presbyterians, who detested him because he had been active under Oliver Cromwell in promoting toleration; but it was found, on a vote, that he had more friends than enemies; and he, too, escaped, As the principle that vengeance should be taken only upon the late king's judges was departed from, it was but natural to expect that they should fall upon him who had been the bosom friend of Cromwell, and who had defended, in the eyes of all Europe, the proceedings of the High Court of Justice. And the immortal John Milton was committed to the custody of the serjeant-at-arms, and threatened with destruction, for having written his Defence of the English People, and his Eikonoclastes. His glorious friend Andrew Marvel, and two other admirers of genius (and no more), raised their voices in the poet's favour. They were told that he had 2 Ludlow. For the infamous vote, see also the Lords' Journal, been Latin secretary to Cromwell, and so deserved to be hanged; but in the end, after he had been plundered by the serjeant-at-arms, who called his robberies fees, Milton escaped with no other punishment than a general disqualification for the public service, the public burning of his Defensio pro Populo Anglicano and Eikonoclastes, and the spectacle of the moral decline and political degradation of his country, under the misrule of the restored Stuart. Prynne, who had many of the properties of the bloodhound, would have hunted down the weak, inoffensive, and amiable Richard Cromwell, but no one would join him in that chase; and the son of a great man, after travelling for some time on the Continent, was allowed to live quietly in the pleasant retirement of Cheshunt. In the end, twenty-nine victims were given over to the vengeance, rather than to the justice of the courts of law, with a mocking proviso in favour of such as had surrendered, that sentence should not be executed without special act of parliament. A number of other bills were hurried through the houses, and presented to the king at the same time with this indemnity bill. The duty of tonnage and poundage, one of the great starting points in the late revolution, was voted to Charles for life; the king's birth-day and glorious restoration the 29th of May-was made a perpetual anniversary, to be observed with thanksgiving to God for his miraculous deliverance of this poor nation; and another bill enacted that a speedy provision of money should be made, to disband the old army and navy. In giving his assent to these bills, which were presented with every possible prostration, Charles told the speaker that he willingly pardoned all such as the parliament had pardoned, and that he was much in want of money, not having wherewith to keep house at Whitehall. Presently after, a committee was appointed to consider of settling a suitable revenue on his sacred majesty. This committee reported that it appeared that the revenue of Charles I., from the year 1637 to 1641, had amounted, on an average, to about £900,000, of which £200,000 flowed from sources that were either not warranted by law, or now no longer available. Calculating the difference in the value of money, and contenting themselves with the vague promises of a faithless prince, the commons proposed raising the royal income to £1,200,000 per annum; but the means of providing this money were reserved for consideration in another session. But there remained something more difficult to settle than indemnity or revenue; and this was the great question of religion. Charles, in the declaration from Breda, had most distinctly promised toleration. But this "Convention Par liament" was incapable of any such act, and the nation at large was incapable of a generous toleration, which had only been upheld for a time by the sword of the Independents and the wonderful management of Oliver Cromwell. Charles himself, notwithstanding the recent declaration of Clarendon, that he was the best Protestant in the kingdom, was, if he were anything in religion, a Catholic, even now; but he was certainly no bigot, and, if he had been left to his own indolence and indifference, he would probably have tolerated all sects alike: but the high churchmen wanted back all their old pre-eminence their property and their old power of persecuting, undiminished; and if the Presbyterians, or the trimming portion of them, who had considered themselves the national church under the Commonwealth, were disposed to tolerate and coalesce with a modified prelacy, they were resolved not to tolerate any of the sects which had been known under the general denomination of Independents. On the 9th of July there was a stormy debate in a grand committee of the commons upon the Thirty-nine Articles; and then Sir Heneage Finch, as a leader of the high-church and court party, declared that the government of the church by bishops had never been legally altered; and that as for liberty for tender consciences, no man knew what it was. After seven hours of very unchristian-like contention, and a blowing-out and re-lighting of candles, it was carried by a slight majority that the settlement of religion should be left to the king, who "should be petitioned to convene a select number of divines to treat concerning the matter." It was voted that whatever had belonged to the king and queen, or all the crown lands, should be restored forthwith; but the question of the church lands was left in abeyance for the present. The ministers' bill, which aimed at the immediate restoration of all the clergy who had been expelled, and the expulsion of all who had been inducted by the Commonwealth men or by Cromwell, was carried, but with a large proviso-that the intrusive churchmen should not be bound to give back those livings which were legally vacant when they obtained them. But there was another proviso which, however harmless to the mass of the Presbyterians, was fatal to all such Independent ministers as Cromwell had put into the church, for it excluded every incumbent that had not been ordained by an ecclesiastic, or had renounced his ordination, or had petitioned for bringing the late king to trial, or had justified that trial and execution in preaching or in writing, or had committed himself in the vexed question of infant baptism. These bills satisfied no party and no sect. The royalists complained Parl. Hist. of their being left to suffer the consequences of their forfeitures, sequestrations, and compositions for delinquency, under the Long Parliament and Cromwell; and they called the first great bill "a bill of indemnity for the king's enemies, and of oblivion for his friends." On the 13th of September Charles made a very short, and Clarendon a very long speech to the two houses. The chancellor thought it expedient to speak to the suspicions already entertained of the king's desire of keeping up a strong standing army, and of governing absolutely, and to defend the court against the popular and wellfounded charges of profligacy and irreligion.' And, at the close of this long speech, parliament adjourned to the 6th of November. During the recess "the healing question" of religion was discussed, and ten of the regicides were butchered. their chancellors, officials, proctors, paritors, and powers; declaring that they could not grant that the extent of any diocese should be altered or anything reformed; and affirming that the laying aside of the Book of Common Prayer was one of the greatest causes of the misfortunes of the nation, &c. But the Presbyterians were told that his majesty would adjust all these differences; and they, together with the Episcopalians, were invited to attend him, on the 22d of October, at the house of the chancellor. There the Presbyterians found assembled his majesty, Monk, Duke of Albemarle (who was a Presbyterian through his wife), the Earl of Manchester, Denzil Hollis (the most fiery of Presbyterians), the Duke of Ormond (a high churchman), and one or two other noblemen of the same persuasion, together with Dr. Sheldon (Bishop of London), Dr. Morley (Bishop of Worcester), Dr. Henchman (Bishop of Salisbury), the famous Dr. Cosens (who had been one of the most active coadjutors of Laud, who had been prosecuted by the Long Parliament, and who was promoted to the bishopric of Durham a few weeks after this meeting), Dr. Gauden (Bishop of Exeter), Dr. Hacket (Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry), the Episcopalian Dr. Gunning, the Presbyterian Drs. Spurstow and Wallis, and some two or three others. The Presbyterians intrusted their cause to the eloquence and learning of Calamy and Baxter. The debate could scarcely be otherwise than hot: on both sides the odium theologicum was intense: on both sides there was a con The learned Archbishop Usher, who was a Calvinist in doctrinal creed, and whose Episcopalianism was very moderate, had left, as a legacy to the Protestant world, a scheme of union and a plan of church government (by suffragan bishops and synods or presbyteries conjointly) which, he had fondly hoped, might reconcile the two great sects. The Presbyterians, in their hopelessness of obtaining an entire supremacy, professed their willingness to make this scheme the basis of an agreement and concord; and they delivered the paper to the king with an humble address concerning godly preaching, the strict observance of the Sabbath, &c. They were promised a meeting with some Epis-viction that the business had been settled before copal divines before the king; but none of that persuasion deigned to attend; and, instead of a meeting, the Presbyterian ministers received a paper, written in the old and bitter spirit of controversy, rejecting their proposals; insisting that the Anglican hierarchy was the true, ancient, primitive Episcopacy, and that the ancient apostoli-, cal bishops had their courts, their prerogatives, EDWARD HYDE, Earl of Clarendon.2 1A few days after this date Pepys notes in his diary that the two royal brothers, the king and the Duke of York, were both making love to the same court-woman, the infamous Mrs. Palmer; that the Duke of York got my lord-chancellor's daughter with child; that high gambling was becoming common at court; and that people were beginning to open their eyes with astonishment. by irrefragable arguments. The Presbyterians said that the Eikon Basiliké showed that his late majesty had approved of Archbishop Usher's scheme; but the king, who knew very well that his father had not written it, said that all in that book was not gospel. The Chancellor Clarendon told the controversialists that it was proposed to add the following clause to the declaration for religious liberty:-"That others shall also be permitted to meet for religious worship, so be they do it not to the disturbance of the peace, and that no justice of the peace or officer shall disturb 2 From the statue by William Calder Marshall, R.A., in St. Stephen's Hall, new Houses of Parliament. |