[Sidenote: Cromwell's theory.]

Never had the fame of an English, ruler stood higher; but in the midst of his glory the hand of death was falling on the Protector. He had long been weary of his task. "God knows," he had burst out to the Parliament a year before, "God knows I would have been glad to have lived under my woodside, and to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than to have undertaken this government." Amidst the glory of his aims, Cromwell's heart was heavy with this sense of failure. Whatever dreams of personal ambition had mingled with his aim, his aim had in the main been a high and unselfish one; in the course that seems to modern eyes so strange and complex he had seen the leading of a divine hand that drew him from the sheepfolds to mould England into a people of God. What convinced him that the nation was called by a divine calling was the wonder which men felt at every step in its advance. The England which he saw around him was not an England which Pym or Hampden had foreseen, which Vane in his wildest dreams had imagined, or for which the boldest among the soldiers of the New Model had fought. Step by step the nation had been drawn to changes from which it shrank, to principles which it held in horror. When the struggle began the temper of the men who waged it was a strictly conservative temper; they held themselves to be withstanding the revolutionary changes of the king, to be vindicating the existing constitution both of Church and State. But the strife had hardly opened when they were drawn by very need to a revolutionary platform. What men found themselves fighting for at Edgehill and Marston Moor was the substitution of government by the will of the nation for government by the will of the king, and a setting aside of the religious compromise embodied in the Church of the Tudors for a Church which was the mere embodiment of the Puritan section of the people at large. Defeat drove England to the New Model; and again it found itself drawn to a new advance. No sooner was the sword in the hand of the "Godly," than the conception of religious purity widened into that of religious liberty, and the thought of a nation self-governed into the dream of a kingdom of God. Dunbar and Worcester, the strife with the Houses, the final strife with the king, turned the dream into a practical policy. Every obstacle fell before it. Episcopal Church and Presbyterian Church alike passed away. The loyalty of the nation, the stubborn efforts of Cromwell and Ireton, failed to uphold the Monarchy. Lords and Commons fell in the very moment of their victory over the king. Desperately as men clung to the last shadow of a Parliament, the victories of Blake, the statesmanship of Vane, failed to preserve the life of the Rump. In the crash of every political and religious institution the Army found itself the one power in the land, and the dream of its soldiers grew into a will to set up on earth a Commonwealth of the Saints.

[Sidenote: The Puritan State.]

In this resolve Cromwell was at one with the New Model. Like every soldier in his army, he held that by the victories God had given them He had "so called them to look after the government of the land, and so entrusted them with the welfare of all His people, that they were responsible for it, and might not in conscience stand still while anything was done which they thought was against the interest of the people of God." But he never doubted that the nation would own its calling as zealously as his soldiers did. He had no wish to change the outer form of its political or its social life; he would maintain social distinctions as he would maintain Parliaments. But the old institutions must be penetrated with a new spirit. Conscience and worship must be free. Holiness must be the law of England's life. Its rulers must be found among "godly men," and their rule must be widened beyond the common sphere of temporal government. The old distinctions of the secular and the spiritual world must be done away. In public and in private life the new government must enforce obedience to the will of God. Socially such a theory seemed realized at last in the administration of the major-generals. Never had Cromwell been so satisfied. The "malignants" who had so long trodden pious men under foot lay helpless at the feet of the godly. The "Cavalier interest," which was but "the badge and character of countenancing profaneness, disorder, and wickedness in all places," was crushed and powerless. "Christian men" reigned supreme. Cromwell recalled how "it was a shame to be a Christian within these fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen years in this nation. It was a shame, it was a reproach to a man; and the badge of Puritan was put upon it!" But the shame and reproach were now rolled away. The Puritan was master in the land. All government was in the hands of godly men. Piety was as needful for an officer in the army, for a magistrate, for a petty constable, as for a minister of religion. The aim of the Protector was that England should be ruled and administered by "the best," by men ruling and administering in the fear of God. In Church as in State all that such men had longed to do could now be done. Superstitious usages were driven from the churches. No minister wore a surplice. No child was signed in baptism with a cross. The very pastimes of the world had to conform themselves to the law of God. The theatres were closed. Sunday sports were summarily abolished. There were no more races, no more bull-baitings, no more cock-fighting, no more dances under the Maypole. Christmas had to pass without its junketings, or mummers, or mince-pies.

[Sidenote: Its failure.]

To the eyes of mere zealots the work of Puritanism seemed done. But Cromwell was no mere zealot. Strangely mingled with the enthusiasm of his temper was a cool, passionless faculty of seeing things as they actually were about him; and he saw that in its very hour of triumph the cause he loved was losing ground. From this effort to turn England into a kingdom of God England itself stood aloof. Its traditional instincts were outraged by the wreck of its institutions, its good sense by the effort to enforce godliness by civil penalties, its self-respect by the rule of the sword. Never had England shown a truer nobleness than when it refused to be tempted from the path of freedom even by the genius of Cromwell, never a truer wisdom than when it refused to be lured from its tradition of practical politics by the dazzling seductions of the Puritan ideal. And not only did the nation stand aloof from Cromwell's work, but its opposition grew hourly stronger. The very forces which seemed to have been annihilated by the Civil War drew a fresh life from the national ill-will to their conquerors. Men forgot the despotism of the Monarchy when the Monarchy and the Parliament lay wrecked in a common ruin. They forgot the tyranny of Laud when the Church was trampled under foot by men who trampled under foot the constitution. By a strange turn of fortune the restoration of the Church and of the Crown became identified with the restoration of legal government and with the overthrow of a rule of brute force. And for such a restoration the vast majority of the nation were longing more and more. The old enmities of party and sect were forgotten in the common enmity of every party and every sect to the tyranny of the sword. A new national unity was revealing itself, as one jarring element after another came in to swell the mass of the national opposition to the system of the Protectorate. The moderate Royalist joined hands with the Cavalier, the steady Presbyterian came to join the moderate Royalist, and their ranks were swelled at last by the very founders of the Commonwealth. Nothing marked more vividly the strength of the reaction against the Protector's system than the union in a common enmity of Vane and Haselrig with the partizans of the Stuart pretender.

[Sidenote: The Scientific Movement.]

It was the steady rise of this tide of opposition in which Cromwell saw the doom of his cause. That it could permanently be upheld by the sword he knew to be impossible. What he had hoped for was the gradual winning of England to a sense of its worth. But every day the current of opinion ran more strongly against it. The army stood alone in its purpose. Papist and sceptic, mystic and ceremonialist, latitudinarian and Presbyterian, all were hostile. The very pressure of Cromwell's system gave birth to new forms of spiritual and intellectual revolt. Science, rationalism, secularism, sprang for the first time into vivid life in their protest against the forced concentration of human thought on the single topic of religion, the effort to prison religion itself in a system of dogma, and to narrow humanity with all its varied interests within the sphere of the merely spiritual. Nothing is more significant, though to Cromwell nothing would have been more unintelligible, than the simple story which tells us how from the vexed problems, political and religious, of the times, men turned to the peaceful study of the natural world about them. Bacon had already called men with a trumpet-voice to such studies; but in England at least Bacon stood before his age. The beginnings of physical science were more slow and timid there than in any country of Europe. Only two discoveries of any real value came from English research before the Restoration: the first, Gilbert's discovery of terrestrial magnetism in the close of Elizabeth's reign; the next, the great discovery of the circulation of the blood, which was taught by Harvey in the reign of James. Apart from these illustrious names England took little share in the scientific movement of the Continent; and her whole energies seemed to be whirled into the vortex of theology and politics by the Civil War.

But the war had not reached its end when, in 1645, a little group of students were to be seen in London, men "inquisitive," says one of them, "into natural philosophy and other parts of human learning, and particularly of what had been called the New Philosophy . . . which from the times of Galileo at Florence, and Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam) in England, hath been much cultivated in Italy, France, Germany, and other parts abroad, as well as with us in England." The strife of the time indeed aided in directing the minds of men to natural inquiries. "To have been always tossing about some theological question," says the first historian of the Royal Society, Bishop Sprat, "would have been to have made that their private diversion, the excess of which they disliked in the public. To have been eternally musing on civil business and the distresses of the country was too melancholy a reflection. It was nature alone which could pleasantly entertain them in that estate." Foremost in the group stood Doctors Wallis and Wilkins, whose removal to Oxford, which had just been reorganized by the Puritan Visitors, divided the little company in 1648 into two societies, one at the university, the other remaining at the capital. The Oxford society, which was the more important of the two, held its meetings at the lodgings of Dr. Wilkins, who had become Warden of Wadham College; and added to the names of its members that of the eminent mathematician Dr. Ward, and that of the first of English economists, Sir William Petty. "Our business," Wallis tells us, "was (precluding matters of theology and State affairs) to discourse and consider of philosophical enquiries and such as related thereunto, as Physick, Anatomy, Geometry, Astronomy, Navigation, Statics, Magnetics, Chymicks, Mechanicks, and Natural Experiments: with the state of these studies, as then cultivated at home and abroad. We then discoursed of the circulation of the blood, the valves in the venae lacteae, the lymphatic vessels, the Copernican hypothesis, the nature of comets and new stars, the satellites of Jupiter, the oval shape of Saturn, the spots in the sun and its turning on its own axis, the inequalities and selenography of the moon, the several phases of Venus and Mercury, the improvement of telescopes, the grinding of glasses for that purpose, the weight of air, the possibility or impossibility of vacuities, and Nature's abhorrence thereof, the Torricellian experiment in quicksilver, the descent of heavy bodies and the degree of acceleration therein, and divers other things of like nature."

[Sidenote: The Latitudinarians.]

To what great results this protest against the Puritan concentration of all human thought on spiritual issues was to lead none could foresee. But results almost as great were to spring from the protest against the Puritan dogmatism which gave birth to the Latitudinarians. Whatever verdict history may pronounce on Falkland's political career, his name must remain memorable in the history of religious thought. A new era in English theology began with the speculations of the men he gathered round him in his country house at Great Tew in the years that preceded the meeting of the Long Parliament. Their work was above all to deny the authority of tradition in matters of faith, as Bacon had denied it in matters of physical research; and to assert in the one field as in the other the supremacy of reason as a test of truth. Of the authority of the Church, its Fathers, and its Councils, John Hales, a Canon of Windsor, and a friend of Laud, said briefly, "It is none." He dismissed with contempt the accepted test of universality. "Universality is such a proof of truth as truth itself is ashamed of. The most singular and strongest part of human authority is properly in the wisest and the most virtuous, and these, I trow, are not the most universal." William Chillingworth, a man of larger if not keener mind, had been taught by an early conversion to Catholicism, and by a speedy return, the insecurity of any basis for belief but that of private judgement. In his "Religion of Protestants" he set aside ecclesiastical tradition or Church authority as grounds of faith in favour of the Bible, but only of the Bible as interpreted by the common reason of men. Jeremy Taylor, the most brilliant of English preachers, a sufferer like Chillingworth on the Royalist side during the troubles, and who was rewarded at the Restoration with the bishopric of Down, limited even the authority of the Scriptures themselves. Reason was the one means which Taylor approved of in interpreting the Bible; but the certainty of the conclusions which reason drew from the Bible varied, as he held, with the conditions of reason itself. In all but the simplest truths of natural religion "we are not sure not to be deceived." The deduction of points of belief from the words of the Scriptures was attended with all the uncertainty and liability to error which sprang from the infinite variety of human understandings, the difficulties which hinder the discovery of truth, and the influences which divert the mind from accepting or rightly estimating it.

It was plain to a mind like Chillingworth's that this denial of authority, this perception of the imperfection of reason in the discovery of absolute truth, struck as directly at the root of Protestant dogmatism as at the root of Catholic infallibility. "If Protestants are faulty in this matter [of claiming authority] it is for doing it too much and not too little. This presumptuous imposing of the senses of man upon the words of God, of the special senses of man upon the general words of God, and laying them upon men's consciences together under the equal penalty of death and damnation, this vain conceit that we can speak of the things of God better than in the words of God, this deifying our own interpretations and tyrannous enforcing them upon others, this restraining of the word of God from that latitude and generality, and the understandings of men from that liberty wherein Christ and His apostles left them, is and hath been the only foundation of all the schisms of the Church, and that which makes them immortal." In his "Liberty of Prophesying" Jeremy Taylor pleaded the cause of toleration with a weight of argument which hardly required the triumph of the Independents and the shock of Naseby to drive it home. But the freedom of conscience which the Independent founded on the personal communion of each soul with God, the Latitudinarian founded on the weakness of authority and the imperfection of human reason. Taylor pleads even for the Anabaptist and the Romanist. He only gives place to the action of the civil magistrate in "those religions whose principles destroy government," and "those religions—if there be any such—which teach ill life." Hales openly professed that he would quit the Church to-morrow if it required him to believe that all that dissented from it must be damned. Chillingworth denounced persecution in words of fire. "Take away this persecution, burning, cursing, damning of men for not subscribing the words of men as the words of God; require of Christians only to believe Christ and to call no man master but Him; let them leave claiming infallibility that have no title to it, and let them that in their own words disclaim it, disclaim it also in their actions. . . . Protestants are inexcusable if they do offer violence to other men's consciences."

From the denunciation of intolerance the Latitudinarians passed easily to the dream of comprehension which had haunted every nobler soul since the "Utopia" of More. Hales based his loyalty to the Church of England on the fact that it was the largest and the most tolerant Church in Christendom. Chillingworth pointed out how many obstacles to comprehension were removed by such a simplification of belief as flowed from a rational theology, and asked, like More, for "such an ordering of the public service of God as that all who believe the Scripture and live according to it might without scruple or hypocrisy or protestation in any part join in it." Taylor, like Chillingworth, rested his hope of union on the simplification of belief. He saw a probability of error in all the creeds and confessions adopted by Christian Churches. "Such bodies of confessions and articles," he said, "must do much hurt." "He is rather the schismatic who makes unnecessary and inconvenient impositions, than he who disobeys them because he cannot do otherwise without violating his conscience." The Apostles' Creed in its literal meaning seemed to him the one term of Christian union which the Church had any right to impose.

[Sidenote: Hobbes.]

The impulse which such men were giving to religious speculation was being given to political and social inquiry by a mind of far greater keenness and power. Bacon's favourite secretary was Thomas Hobbes. "He was beloved by his Lordship," Aubrey tells us, "who was wont to have him walk in his delicate groves, where he did meditate; and when a notion darted into his mind, Mr. Hobbes was presently to write it down. And his Lordship was wont to say that he did it better than any one else about him; for that many times when he read their notes he scarce understood what they writ, because they understood it not clearly themselves." The long life of Hobbes covers a memorable space in our history. He was born in the year of the victory over the Armada; he died in 1679 at the age of ninety-two, only nine years before the Revolution. His ability soon made itself felt, and in his earlier days he was the secretary of Bacon, and the friend of Ben Jonson and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. But it was not till the age of fifty-four, when he withdrew to France on the eve of the great Rebellion in 1642, that his speculations were made known to the world in his treatise "De Cive." He joined the exiled Court at Paris, and became mathematical tutor to Charles the Second, whose love and regard for him seem to have been real to the end. But his post was soon forfeited by the appearance of his "Leviathan" in 1651; he was forbidden to approach the Court, and returned to England, where he appears to have acquiesced in the rule of Cromwell.

[Sidenote: His political speculations.]

The Restoration brought Hobbes a pension; but both his works were condemned by Parliament, and "Hobbism" became, ere he died, a popular synonym for irreligion and immorality. Prejudice of this kind sounded oddly in the case of a writer who had laid down, as the two things necessary to salvation, faith in Christ and obedience to the law. But the prejudice sprang from a true sense of the effect which the Hobbist philosophy must necessarily have whether on the current religion or on the current notions of political and social morality. Hobbes was the first great English writer who dealt with the science of government from the ground, not of tradition, but of reason. It was in his treatment of man in the stage of human developement which he supposed to precede that of society that he came most roughly into conflict with the accepted beliefs. Men, in his theory, were by nature equal, and their only natural relation was a state of war. It was no innate virtue of man himself which created human society out of this chaos of warring strengths. Hobbes in fact denied the existence of the more spiritual sides of man's nature. His hard and narrow logic dissected every human custom and desire, and reduced even the most sacred to demonstrations of a prudent selfishness. Friendship was simply a sense of social utility to one another. The so-called laws of nature, such as gratitude or the love of our neighbour, were in fact contrary to the natural passions of man, and powerless to restrain them. Nor had religion rescued man by the interposition of a Divine will. Nothing better illustrates the daring with which the new scepticism was to break through the theological traditions of the older world than the pitiless logic with which Hobbes assailed the very theory of revelation. "To say God hath spoken to man in a dream, is no more than to say man dreamed that God hath spoken to him." "To say one hath seen a vision, or heard a voice, is to say he hath dreamed between sleeping and waking." Religion, in fact, was nothing more than "the fear of invisible powers"; and here, as in all other branches of human science, knowledge dealt with words and not with things.

It was man himself who for his own profit created society, by laying down certain of his natural rights and retaining only those of self-preservation. A covenant between man and man originally created "that great Leviathan called the Commonwealth or State, which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended." The fiction of such an "original contract" has long been dismissed from political speculation, but its effect at the time of its first appearance was immense. Its almost universal acceptance put an end to the religious and patriarchal theories of society, on which kingship had till now founded its claim of a Divine right to authority which no subject might question. But if Hobbes destroyed the old ground of royal despotism, he laid a new and a firmer one. To create a society at all, he held that the whole body of the governed must have resigned all rights save that of self-preservation into the hands of a single ruler, who was the representative of all. Such a ruler was absolute, for to make terms with him implied a man making terms with himself. The transfer of rights was inalienable, and after generations were as much bound by it as the generation which made the transfer. As the head of the whole body, the ruler judged every question, settled the laws of civil justice or injustice, or decided between religion and superstition. His was a Divine Right, and the only Divine Right, because in him were absorbed all the rights of each of his subjects. It was not in any constitutional check that Hobbes looked for the prevention of tyranny, but in the common education and enlightenment as to their real end and the best mode of reaching it on the part of both subjects and Prince. And the real end of both was the weal of the Commonwealth at large. It was in laying boldly down this end of government, as well as in the basis of contract on which he made government repose, that Hobbes really influenced all later politics.

[Sidenote: Cromwell's consciousness of failure.]

That Cromwell discerned the strength of such currents of opinion as those which we have described may fairly be doubted. But he saw that Puritanism had missed its aim. He saw that the attempt to secure spiritual results by material force had failed, as it always fails. It had broken down before the indifference and resentment of the great mass of the people, of men who were neither lawless nor enthusiasts, but who clung to the older traditions of social order, and whose humour and good sense revolted alike from the artificial conception of human life which Puritanism had formed, and from its effort to force such a conception on a people by law. It broke down too before the corruption of the Puritans themselves. It was impossible to distinguish between the saint and the hypocrite as soon as godliness became profitable. Ashley Cooper, a sceptic in religion and a profligate in morals, was among "the loudest bagpipes of the squeaking train." Even amongst the really earnest Puritans prosperity disclosed a pride, a worldliness, a selfish hardness which had been hidden in the hour of persecution. What was yet more significant was the irreligious and sceptical temper of the younger generation which had grown up amidst the storms of the Civil War. The children even of the leading Puritans stood aloof from Puritanism. The eldest of Cromwell's sons made small pretensions to religion. Milton's nephews, though reared in his house, were writing satires against Puritan hypocrisy and contributing to collections of filthy songs. The two daughters of the great preacher, Stephen Marshall, were to figure as actresses on the infamous stage of the Restoration. The tone of the Protector's later speeches shows his consciousness that the ground was slipping from under his feet. He no longer dwells on the dream of a Puritan England, of a nation rising as a whole into a people of God. He falls back on the phrases of his youth, and the saints become again a "peculiar people," a remnant, a fragment among the nation at large.

[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Parliament.]

But with the consciousness of failure in realizing his ideal of government the charm of government was gone; and now to the weariness of power were added the weakness and feverish impatience of disease. Vigorous and energetic as Cromwell's life had seemed, his health was by no means as strong as his will; he had been struck down by intermittent fever in the midst of his triumphs both in Scotland and in Ireland, and during the past year he had suffered from repeated attacks of it. "I have some infirmities upon me," he owned twice over in his speech at the reopening of the Parliament in January 1658, after an adjournment of six months; and his feverish irritability was quickened by the public danger. No supplies had been voted, and the pay of the army was heavily in arrear, while its temper grew more and more sullen at the appearance of the new Constitution and the reawakening of the Royalist intrigues. Cromwell had believed that his military successes would secure compliance with his demands; but the temper of the Commons was even more irritable than his own. Under the terms of the new Constitution the members excluded in the preceding year took their places again in the House; and it was soon clear that the Parliament reflected the general mood of the nation. The tone of the Commons became captious and quarrelsome. They still delayed the grant of supplies. Meanwhile a hasty act of the Protector in giving to his nominees in "the other House," as the new second chamber he had devised was called, the title of "Lords," kindled a strife between the two Houses which was busily fanned by Haselrig and other opponents of the Government. It was contended that the "other House" had under the new Constitution simply judicial and not legislative powers. Such a contention struck at once at Cromwell's work of restoring the old political forms of English life: and the reappearance of Parliamentary strife threw him at last, says an observer at his court, "into a rage and passion like unto madness." What gave weight to it was the growing strength of the Royalist party, and its hopes of a coming rising. Such a rising had in fact been carefully prepared; and Charles with a large body of Spanish troops drew to the coast of Flanders to take advantage of it. His hopes were above all encouraged by the strife in the Commons, and their manifest dislike of the system of the Protectorate. It was this that drove Cromwell to action. Summoning his coach, by a sudden impulse, the Protector drove on the fourth of February with a few guards to Westminster; and, setting aside the remonstrances of Fleetwood, summoned the two Houses to his presence. "I do dissolve this Parliament," he ended a speech of angry rebuke, "and let God be judge between you and me."

[Sidenote: Death of Cromwell.]

Fatal as was the error, for the moment all went well. The army was reconciled by the blow levelled at its opponents, and a few murmurers who appeared in its ranks were weeded out by a careful remodelling. The triumphant officers vowed to stand or fall with his Highness. The danger of a Royalist rising vanished before a host of addresses from the counties. Great news too came from abroad, where victory in Flanders, and the cession of Dunkirk in June, set the seal on Cromwell's glory. But the fever crept steadily on, and his looks told the tale of death to the Quaker, Fox, who met him riding in Hampton Court Park. "Before I came to him," he says, "as he rode at the head of his Life Guards, I saw and felt a waft of death go forth against him, and when I came to him he looked like a dead man." In the midst of his triumph Cromwell's heart was heavy in fact with the sense of failure. He had no desire to play the tyrant; nor had he any belief in the permanence of a mere tyranny. He clung desperately to the hope of bringing over the country to his side. He had hardly dissolved the Parliament before he was planning the summons of another, and angry at the opposition which his Council offered to the project. "I will take my own resolutions," he said gloomily to his household; "I can no longer satisfy myself to sit still, and make myself guilty of the loss of all the honest party and of the nation itself." But before his plans could be realized the overtaxed strength of the Protector suddenly gave way. Early in August 1658 his sickness took a more serious form. He saw too clearly the chaos into which his death would plunge England to be willing to die. "Do not think I shall die," he burst out with feverish energy to the physicians who gathered round him; "say not I have lost my reason! I tell you the truth. I know it from better authority than any you can have from Galen or Hippocrates. It is the answer of God Himself to our prayers!" Prayer indeed rose from every side for his recovery, but death drew steadily nearer, till even Cromwell felt that his hour was come. "I would be willing to live," the dying man murmured, "to be further serviceable to God and His people, but my work is done! Yet God will be with His people!" A storm which tore roofs from houses, and levelled huge trees in every forest, seemed a fitting prelude to the passing away of his mighty spirit. Three days later, on the third of September, the day which had witnessed his victories of Worcester and Dunbar, Cromwell quietly breathed his last.

[Sidenote: Richard Cromwell, Protector.]

So absolute even in death was his sway over the minds of men, that, to the wonder of the excited Royalists, even a doubtful nomination on his death-bed was enough to secure the peaceful succession of his son, Richard Cromwell. Many in fact who had rejected the authority of his father submitted peaceably to the new Protector. Their motives were explained by Baxter, the most eminent among the Presbyterian ministers, in an address to Richard which announced his adhesion. "I observe," he says, "that the nation generally rejoice in your peaceable entrance upon the government. Many are persuaded that you have been strangely kept from participating in any of our late bloody contentions, that God might make you the healer of our breaches, and employ you in that Temple work which David himself might not be honoured with, though it was in his mind, because he shed blood abundantly and made great wars." The new Protector was a weak and worthless man; but the bulk of the nation were content to be ruled by one who was at any rate no soldier, no Puritan, and no innovator. Richard was known to be lax and worldly in his conduct, and he was believed to be conservative and even royalist in heart. The tide of reaction was felt even in his Council. Their first act was to throw aside one of the greatest of Cromwell's reforms, and to fall back in the summons which they issued for a new Parliament on the old system of election. It was felt far more keenly in the tone of the new House of Commons when it met in January 1659. The republicans under Vane, backed adroitly by the members who were secretly Royalist, fell hotly on Cromwell's system. The fiercest attack of all came from Sir Ashley Cooper, a Dorsetshire gentleman who had changed sides in the Civil War, had fought for the King and then for the Parliament, had been a member of Cromwell's Council, and had of late ceased to be a member of it. His virulent invective on "his Highness of deplorable memory, who with fraud and force deprived you of your liberty when living and entailed slavery on you at his death," was followed by an equally virulent invective against the army. "They have not only subdued their enemies," said Cooper, "but the masters who raised and maintained them! They have not only conquered Scotland and Ireland, but rebellious England too; and there suppressed a Malignant party of magistrates and laws."

[Sidenote: Divisions in the army.]

The army was quick with its reply. Already in the preceding November it had shown its suspicion of the new government by demanding the appointment of a soldier as General in the place of the new Protector, who had assumed the command. The tone of the Council of Officers now became so menacing that the Commons ordered the dismissal of all officers who refused to engage "not to disturb or interrupt the free meetings of Parliament." Richard ordered the Council of Officers to dissolve. Their reply was a demand for the dissolution of the Parliament; and with this demand, on the twenty-second of April, Richard was forced to comply. The purpose of the army however was still to secure a settled government; and setting aside the new Protector, whose weakness was now evident, they resolved to come to a reconciliation with the republican party, and to recall the fragment of the Commons whom they had expelled from St. Stephen's in 1653. The arrangement was quickly brought about; and in May, of the one hundred and sixty members who had continued to sit after the king's death, about ninety returned to their seats and resumed the administration of affairs. The continued exclusion of the members who had been "purged" from the House in 1648 proved that no real intention existed of restoring a legal rule; and the soldiers trusted that the Rump whom they had restored to power would be bound to them by the growing danger both to republicanism and to religious liberty. But not even their passion for these "causes" could make men endure the rule of the sword. The House was soon at strife with the soldiers. In spite of Vane's counsels, it proposed a reform of the officers, and though a Royalist rising in Cheshire during August threw the disputants for a moment together, the struggle revived as the danger passed away. A new hope indeed filled men's minds. Not only was the nation sick of military rule, but the army, unconquerable so long as it held together, at last showed signs of division. In Ireland and Scotland the troops protested against the attitude of their English comrades; and Monk, the commander of the Scottish army, threatened to march on London and free the Parliament from their pressure. The knowledge of these divisions encouraged Haselrig and his coadjutors in the Commons to demand the dismissal of Fleetwood and Lambert from their commands. They answered in October by driving the Parliament again from Westminster, and by marching under Lambert to the north to meet the army under Monk.

[Sidenote: Return of Charles.]

Lambert however suffered himself to be lured into inaction by negotiations, while Monk gathered a Convention at Edinburgh, and strengthened himself with money and recruits. His attitude was enough to rouse England to action. Portsmouth closed its gates against the delegates of the soldiers. The fleet declared against them. So rapidly did the tide of feeling rise throughout the country that the army at the close of December was driven to undo their work by recalling the Rump. But the concession only aided the force of resistance by showing the weakness of the tyranny which England was resolute to throw off. Lambert's men fell from him, and finding his path clear, Monk, without revealing his purport, advanced rapidly to Coldstream, and crossed the Border in the first days of 1660. His action broke the spell of terror which had weighed upon the country. The cry of "A free Parliament" ran like fire through the country. Not only Fairfax, who appeared in arms in Yorkshire, but the ships on the Thames and the mob which thronged the streets of London caught up the cry. Still steadily advancing, but lavishing protestations of loyalty to the Rump while he accepted petitions for a "Free Parliament," Monk on the third of February entered unopposed. From the moment of his entry the restoration of the Stuarts became inevitable. The army, resolute as it still remained for the maintenance of "the cause," was deceived by Monk's declarations of loyalty to it, and rendered powerless by his adroit dispersion of the troops over the country. At the instigation of Ashley Cooper, those who remained of the members who had been excluded from the House of Commons in 1648 again forced their way into Parliament, and at once resolved on a dissolution and the election of a new House of Commons. The dissolution in March was followed by a last struggle of the army for its old supremacy. Lambert escaped from the Tower and called his fellow-soldiers to arms; but he was hotly pursued, overtaken, and routed near Daventry; and on the twenty-fifth of April the new House, which bears the name of the Convention, assembled at Westminster. It had hardly taken the Solemn League and Covenant which showed its Presbyterian temper, and its leaders had only begun to draw up terms on which the king's restoration might be assented to, when they found that Monk was in negotiation with the exiled Court. All exaction of terms was now impossible; a Declaration from Breda, in which Charles promised a general pardon, religious toleration, and satisfaction to the army, was received with a burst of national enthusiasm; and the old Constitution was restored by a solemn vote of the Convention, "that according to the ancient and fundamental laws of this Kingdom, the government is, and ought to be, by King, Lords, and Commons." The king was at once invited to hasten to his realm; and on the twenty-fifth of May Charles landed at Dover, and made his way amidst the shouts of a great multitude to Whitehall. "It is my own fault," laughed the new king with characteristic irony, "that I had not come back sooner; for I find nobody who does not tell me he has always longed for my return."

[Sidenote: Fall of Puritanism.]

In his progress to the capital Charles passed in review the soldiers assembled on Blackheath. Betrayed by their general, abandoned by their leaders, surrounded as they were by a nation in arms, the gloomy silence of their ranks awed even the careless king with a sense of danger. But none of the victories of the New Model were so glorious as the victory which it won over itself. Quietly, and without a struggle, as men who bowed to the inscrutable will of God, the farmers and traders who had dashed Rupert's chivalry to pieces on Naseby field, who had scattered at Worcester the "army of the aliens," and driven into helpless flight the sovereign that now came "to enjoy his own again," who had renewed beyond sea the glories of Crecy and Agincourt, had mastered the Parliament, had brought a king to justice and the block, had given laws to England, and held even Cromwell in awe, became farmers and traders again, and were known among their fellow-men by no other sign than their greater soberness and industry. And, with them, Puritanism laid down the sword. It ceased from the long attempt to build up a kingdom of God by force and violence, and fell back on its truer work of building up a kingdom of righteousness in the hearts and consciences of men. It was from the moment of its seeming fall that its real victory began. As soon as the wild orgy of the Restoration was over, men began to see that nothing that was really worthy in the work of Puritanism had been undone. The revels of Whitehall, the scepticism and debauchery of courtiers, the corruption of statesmen, left the mass of Englishmen what Puritanism had made them, serious, earnest, sober in life and conduct, firm in their love of Protestantism and of freedom. In the Revolution of 1688 Puritanism did the work of civil liberty which it had failed to do in that of 1642. It wrought out through Wesley and the revival of the eighteenth century the work of religious reform which its earlier efforts had only thrown back for a hundred years. Slowly but steadily it introduced its own seriousness and purity into English society, English literature, English politics. The history of English progress since the Restoration, on its moral and spiritual sides, has been the history of Puritanism.



BOOK VIII

THE REVOLUTION

1660-1760



AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK VIII

The social change of the Restoration is illustrated by the picture of court life in Anthony Hamilton's "Memoirs of the Count de Grammont," by the memoirs of Reresby, Pepys, and Evelyn, and the dramatic works of Wycherly and Etherege. For the general character of its comedy see Lord Macaulay's "Essay on the Dramatists of the Restoration." The histories of the Royal Society by Thompson or Wade, with Sir D. Brewster's "Biography of Newton," preserve the earlier annals of English Science, which are condensed by Hallam in his "Literary History" (vol. iv.). Clarendon gives a detailed account of his own ministry in his "Life," which forms a continuation of his "History of the Rebellion." The relations of the Church and the Dissenters during this period may be seen in Neal's "History of the Puritans," Calamy's "Memoirs of the Ejected Ministers," Mr. Dixon's "Life of Penn," Baxter's "Autobiography," and Bunyan's account of his sufferings in his various works. For the political story of the period as a whole our best authorities are Bishop Kennet's "Register," and Burnet's lively "History of my own Times." The memoirs of Sir W. Temple, with his correspondence, are of great value up to their close in 1679. Mr. Christie's "Life of Shaftesbury" is a defence, and in some ways a successful defence, of that statesman's career and of the Whig policy at this time, which may be studied also in Earl Russell's life of his ancestor, William, Lord Russell. To these we may add the fragments of James the Second's autobiography preserved in Macpherson's "Original Papers" (of very various degrees of value), the "Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland" by Dalrymple, the first to discover the real secret of the negotiations with France, M. Mignet's "Negociations relatives a la Succession d'Espagne," a work indispensable for a knowledge of foreign affairs during this period, Welwood's "Memoirs," and Luttrell's "Diary."

Throughout the whole reign of Charles the Second Hallam's "Constitutional History" is singularly judicious and full in its information. Lingard becomes of importance during this period from the original materials to which he has had access, as well as from his clear and dispassionate statement of the Catholic side of the question. Ranke in his "History of the Seventeenth Century" has thrown great light on the diplomatic history of the later Stuart reigns: on internal and constitutional points he is cool and dispassionate but of less value. The great work of Lord Macaulay, which practically ends at the Peace of Ryswick, is continued by Lord Stanhope in his "History of England under Queen Anne," and his "History of England from the Peace of Utrecht." For Marlborough the main authority must be the Duke's biography by Archdeacon Coxe with his "Despatches." The character of the Tory opposition may be studied in Swift's Journal to Stella and his political tracts, as well as in Bolingbroke's correspondence. The French side of the war and negotiations has been given by M. Henri Martin ("Histoire de France") in what is the most accurate and judicious portion of his work. For the earlier period of the Georges Coxe's "Life of Sir Robert Walpole," Horace Walpole's "Memoirs of the Reign of George the Second," and Lord Hervey's amusing "Memoirs from the Accession of George the Second to the Death of Queen Caroline," give the main materials on the one side; Bolingbroke's "Patriot King," his "Letter to Sir W. Wyndham," and his correspondence afford some insight into the other. Horace Walpole's "Letters to Sir Horace Mann" give a minute account of his father's fall.

For the elder Pitt we have the Chatham Correspondence, a life by Thackeray, and two brilliant Essays by Lord Macaulay. Another of Lord Macaulay's Essays may be used with Sir John Malcolm's biography for the life of Lord Clive and the early history of British India, a fuller account of which may of course be found in general histories of India, such as that by James Mill. Carlyle's Frederick the Great contains a picturesque recital of the Seven Years War, and of England's share in it; while the earlier relations of England and Frederick may be studied more coolly and thoroughly in Ranke's "Nine Books of Prussian History," published in an English version under the name of his "History of Prussia." The earlier part of the "Annual Register," which begins in 1758, has been attributed to Burke. Southey's biography, or the more elaborate life by Tyerman, gives an account of Wesley and the movement he headed.



CHAPTER I

THE RESTORATION

1660-1667

[Sidenote: The New England.]

The entry of Charles the Second into Whitehall marked a deep and lasting change in the temper of the English people. With it modern England began. The influences which had up to this time moulded our history, the theological influence of the Reformation, the monarchical influence of the new kingship, the feudal influence of the Middle Ages, the yet earlier influence of tradition and custom, suddenly lost power over the minds of men. From the moment of the Restoration we find ourselves all at once among the great currents of thought and activity which have gone on widening and deepening from that time to this. The England around us becomes our own England, an England whose chief forces are industry and science, the love of popular freedom and of law, an England which presses steadily forward to a larger social justice and equality, and which tends more and more to bring every custom and tradition, religious, intellectual, and political, to the test of pure reason.

Between modern thought, on some at least of its more important sides, and the thought of men before the Restoration there is a great gulf fixed. A political thinker in the present day would find it equally hard to discuss any point of statesmanship with Lord Burleigh or with Oliver Cromwell. He would find no point of contact between their ideas of national life or national welfare, their conception of government or the ends of government, their mode of regarding economical and social questions, and his own. But no gulf of this sort parts us from the men who followed the Restoration. From that time to this, whatever differences there may have been as to the practical conclusions drawn from them, there has been a substantial agreement as to the grounds of our political, our social, our intellectual, and religious life. Paley would have found no difficulty in understanding Tillotson. Newton and Sir Humphry Davy could have talked together without a sense of severance. There would have been nothing to hinder a perfectly clear discussion on government or law between John Locke and Jeremy Bentham.

[Sidenote: The Social Revolt.]

The change from the old England to the new is so startling that we are apt to look on it as a more sudden change than it really was; and the outer aspect of the Restoration does much to strengthen this impression of suddenness. The whole face of England was changed in an instant. All that was noblest and best in Puritanism was whirled away with its pettiness and its tyranny in the current of the nation's hate. Religion had been turned into a system of political and social oppression, and it fell with that system's fall. Godliness became a byword of scorn; sobriety in dress, in speech, in manners was flouted as a mark of the detested Puritanism. Butler in his "Hudibras" poured insult on the past with a pedantic buffoonery for which the general hatred, far more than its humour, secured a hearing. Archbishop Sheldon listened to the mock sermon of a Cavalier who held up the Puritan phrase and the Puritan twang to ridicule in his hall at Lambeth. Duelling and raking became the marks of a fine gentleman; and grave divines winked at the follies of "honest fellows" who fought, gambled, swore, drank, and ended a day of debauchery by a night in the gutter. Life among men of fashion vibrated between frivolity and excess. One of the comedies of the time tells the courtier that "he must dress well, dance well, fence well, have a talent for love-letters, an agreeable voice, be amorous and discreet—but not too constant." To graces such as these the rakes of the Restoration added a shamelessness and a brutality which passes belief. Lord Rochester was a fashionable poet, and the titles of some of his poems are such as no pen of our day could copy. Sir Charles Sedley was a fashionable wit, and the foulness of his words made even the porters of Covent Garden pelt him from the balcony when he ventured to address them. The Duke of Buckingham is a fair type of the time, and the most characteristic event in the Duke's life was a duel in which he consummated his seduction of Lady Shrewsbury by killing her husband, while the Countess in disguise as a page held his horse for him and looked on at the murder.

[Sidenote: The Comedy of the Restoration.]

Vicious as the stage was when it opened its doors again on the fall of the Commonwealth it only reflected the general vice of the day. The Comedy of the Restoration borrowed everything from the contemporary Comedy of France save the poetry, the delicacy, and good taste which there veiled its grossness. Seduction, intrigue, brutality, cynicism, debauchery, found fitting expression on the English stage in dialogue of a studied and deliberate foulness, which even its wit fails to redeem from disgust. Wycherly, the popular playwright of the time, remains the most brutal among all dramatists; and nothing gives so damning an impression of his day as the fact that he found actors to repeat his words and audiences to applaud them. Men such as Wycherly gave Milton models for the Belial of his great poem, "than whom a spirit more lewd fell not from heaven, or more gross to love vice for itself." The dramatist piques himself on the frankness and "plain dealing" which painted the world as he saw it, a world of brawls and assignations, of orgies at Vauxhall and fights with the watch, of lies and doubles-ententes, of knaves and dupes, of men who sold their daughters, and women who cheated their husbands. But the cynicism of Wycherly was no greater than that of the men about him; and in mere love of what was vile, in contempt of virtue and disbelief in purity or honesty, the king himself stood ahead of any of his subjects.

[Sidenote: The New Rationalism.]

It is easy however to exaggerate the extent of this reaction. So far as we can judge from the memoirs of the time its more violent forms were practically confined to the capital and the court. The mass of Englishmen were satisfied with getting back their Maypoles and mince-pies; and a large part of the people remained Puritan in life and belief though they threw aside many of the outer characteristics of Puritanism. Nor was the revolution in feeling as sudden as it seemed. Even if the political strength of Puritanism had remained unbroken its social influence must soon have ceased. The young Englishmen who grew up in the midst of civil war knew nothing of the bitter tyranny which gave its zeal and fire to the religion of their fathers. From the social and religious anarchy around them, from the endless controversies and discussions of the time, they drank in the spirit of scepticism, of doubt, of free inquiry. If religious enthusiasm had broken the spell of ecclesiastical tradition its own extravagance broke the spell of religious enthusiasm; and the new generation turned in disgust to try forms of political government and spiritual belief by the cooler and less fallible test of reason.

It is this rationalizing tendency of the popular mind, this indifference to the traditions and ideals of the past, this practical and experimental temper, which found its highest expression in the sudden popularity of the pursuit of physical science. Of the two little companies of inquirers whom we have already noticed as gathering at the close of the Civil War, that which remained in the capital and had at last been broken up by the troubles of the Second Protectorate was revived at the Restoration by the return to London of the more eminent members of the group which had assembled at Oxford. But the little company of philosophers had hardly begun their meetings at Gresham College when they found themselves objects of a general interest. Science suddenly became the fashion of the day. Charles the Second was himself a fair chymist, and took a keen interest in the problems of navigation. The Duke of Buckingham varied his freaks of rhyming, drinking, and fiddling by fits of devotion to his laboratory. Poets like Dryden and Cowley, courtiers like Sir Robert Murray and Sir Kenelm Digby, joined the scientific company to which in token of his sympathy with it the king gave the title of "The Royal Society." The curious glass toys called Prince Rupert's drops recall the scientific inquiries which amused the old age of the great cavalry-leader of the Civil War. Wits and fops crowded to the meetings of the new Society. Statesmen like Lord Somers felt honoured at being chosen its presidents.

[Sidenote: English Science.]

The definite establishment of the Royal Society in 1662 marks the opening of a great age of scientific discovery in England. Almost every year of the half-century which followed saw some step made to a wider and truer knowledge of physical fact. Our first national observatory rose at Greenwich, and modern astronomy began with the long series of observations which immortalized the name of Flamsteed. His successor, Halley, undertook the investigation of the tides, of comets, and of terrestrial magnetism. Hooke improved the microscope and gave a fresh impulse to microscopical research. Boyle made the air-pump a means of advancing the science of pneumatics, and became the founder of experimental chymistry. Wilkins pointed forward to the science of philology in his scheme of a universal language. Sydenham introduced a careful observation of nature and facts which changed the whole face of medicine. The physiological researches of Willis first threw light upon the structure of the brain. Woodward was the founder of mineralogy. In his edition of Willoughby's "Ornithology," and in his own "History of Fishes," John Ray was the first to raise zoology to the rank of a science; and the first scientific classification of animals was attempted in his "Synopsis of Quadrupeds." Modern botany began with Ray's "History of Plants," and the researches of an Oxford professor, Robert Morrison; while Grew divided with Malpighi the credit of founding the study of vegetable physiology.

But great as some of these names undoubtedly are they are lost in the lustre of Isaac Newton. Newton was born at Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire on Christmas Day, 1642, the memorable year which saw the outbreak of the Civil War. In the year of the Restoration he entered Cambridge, where the teaching of Isaac Barrow quickened his genius for mathematics, and where the method of Descartes had superseded the older modes of study. From the close of his Cambridge career his life became a series of great physical discoveries. At twenty-three he facilitated the calculation of planetary movements by his theory of Fluxions. The optical discoveries to which he was led by his experiments with the prism, and which he partly disclosed in the lectures which he delivered as Mathematical Professor at Cambridge, were embodied in the theory of light which he laid before the Royal Society on becoming a Fellow of it. His discovery of the law of gravitation had been made as early as 1666; but the erroneous estimate which was then generally received of the earth's diameter prevented him from disclosing it for sixteen years; and it was not till 1687, on the eve of the Revolution, that the "Principia" revealed to the world his new theory of the Universe.

[Sidenote: The Latitudinarian Theology.]

It is impossible to do more than indicate in such a summary as we have given the wonderful activity of directly scientific thought which distinguished the age of the Restoration. But the sceptical and experimental temper of mind which this activity disclosed was telling at the same time upon every phase of the world around it. We see the attempt to bring religious speculation into harmony with the conclusions of reason and experience in the school of Latitudinarian theologians which sprang from the group of thinkers that gathered on the eve of the Civil War round Lord Falkland at Great Tew. With the Restoration the Latitudinarians came at once to the front. They were soon distinguished from both Puritans and High Churchmen by their opposition to dogma, by their preference of reason to tradition whether of the Bible or the Church, by their basing religion on a natural theology, by their aiming at rightness of life rather than at correctness of opinion, by their advocacy of toleration and comprehension as the grounds of Christian unity. Chillingworth and Taylor found successors in the restless good sense of Burnet, the enlightened piety of Tillotson, and the calm philosophy of Bishop Butler. From this moment indeed the work of English theologians turned from the bold assertion of the supremacy of revealed truth over natural reason to a more cautious assertion of the essential harmony of the one with the other. Boyle varied his philosophical experiments by demonstrations of the unity of dogmatic and natural religion. So moderate and philosophical was the temper displayed by Cudworth in his "Intellectual System of the Universe," that the bigots of his day charged him with the atheistic principles which he was endeavouring to refute. But the change of tone in the theologians of the Reformation was itself an indication of the new difficulties which theology had to meet. The bold scepticism of Hobbes was adopted by courtiers and politicians. Charles himself was divided between superstition and Hobbism. Shaftesbury was a Deist. The bulk of the leading statesmen of the time looked on religious questions in a purely political light.

[Sidenote: Political Philosophy.]

The impulse which was carrying religious speculation into regions hitherto strange to it told equally on political and social inquiry. The researches of Sir Josiah Child, and still more of Sir William Petty, not only threw light on the actual state of English trade but pointed forward to the future science of Political Economy. For the moment however philosophical speculation on the nature of government eclipsed the interest of statistical research. Though the Restoration brought Hobbes a pension his two great works were condemned by Parliament, and Hobbism became ere he died a popular synonym for political as well as religious immorality. But in spite of the bitter resistance offered to it his assertion of a rational method of political inquiry superseded more and more the older doctrines of a religious and traditional polity. After Clarendon no English statesman really believed in any divine right of the sovereign he served; and Charles himself probably believed it still less than his ministers. The fiction of a contract between governor and governed, on which Hobbes built up his theory of a state, passed silently into general acceptance. John Locke, the foremost political thinker of the Restoration, derived political authority like Hobbes from the consent of the governed, and adopted the common weal as the end of government. But the practical temper of the time moulded the new theory into a form which contrasted strangely with that given to it by its first inventor. The political philosophy of Locke indeed was little more than a formal statement of the conclusions which the bulk of Englishmen had drawn from the great struggle of the Civil War. In his theory the people remain passively in possession of the power which they have delegated to the Prince, and have the right to withdraw it if it be used for purposes inconsistent with the end which society was formed to promote. To the origin of all power in the people, and the end of all power for the people's good—the two great doctrines of Hobbes—Locke added the right of resistance, the responsibility of princes to their subjects for a due execution of their trust, and the supremacy of legislative assemblies as expressing the voice of the people itself.

It was in this modified and enlarged form that the new political philosophy found general acceptance after the Revolution of 1688. But powerful as was its influence in the thirty years which separated that event from the Restoration it remained during that period an influence which told but slowly on the people at large. It is indeed this severance for the time between the thinking classes and the general bulk of the nation which makes its history so difficult and perplexing. While sceptics and divines were drifting to questions which involved the very being of religion itself the mass of Englishmen were still without a doubt, and dead to every religious struggle save the old struggle of Protestantism with the Pope. While statesmen and philosophers were smiling at Sir Robert Firmer and his "Patriarchal Theory of Government," the people remained blind to any notion of an original contract, and every pulpit resounded with the doctrine of a divine right of kings. It was only by slow steps, and above all by the practical stress of events, that England was driven forward to religious toleration or to the establishment of parliamentary government in the place of monarchy.

[Sidenote: The Period of Transition.]

Slowly and gradually however it was driven forward to both. Even at the outset of the Restoration the temper of England had in fact drifted far from the past to which it thought to return. The work of the Long Parliament indeed seemed to be undone when Charles entered Whitehall. Not only was the Monarchy restored but it was restored without restriction or condition; and of the two great influences which had hitherto served as checks on its power, the first, that of Puritanism, had become hateful to the nation at large, while the second, the tradition of constitutional liberty, was discredited by the issue of the Civil War. But, wild as was the tumult of demonstrative loyalty, not one of the great steps towards constitutional freedom which had been gained by the patriots of 1641 was really lost. The prerogatives for which Charles the First had struggled were quietly relinquished by his son. The very Cavaliers who had welcomed the king to "his own again" never dreamt of restoring the system of government which their opponents had overthrown. Twenty years of parliamentary rule, however broken and mixed with political and religious tyranny, had made the return to ship-money or monopolies or the Star Chamber impossible. Men had become so accustomed to freedom that they forgot how recent a thing its unquestioned existence was. From the first therefore the great "revolution of the seventeenth century," as it has been called, went steadily on. The supreme power was gradually transferred from the Crown to the House of Commons. Step by step Parliament drew nearer to a solution of the political problem which had so long foiled its efforts, the problem how to make its will the law of administrative action without itself undertaking the task of administration. It is only by carefully fixing our eyes on this transfer of power, and by noting the successive steps towards its realization, that we can understand the complex history of the Restoration and the Revolution.

[Sidenote: Charles the Second.]

Changed to the very core, yet hardly conscious of the change, drifting indeed steadily towards a wider knowledge and a firmer freedom, but still a mere medley of Puritan morality and social revolt, of traditional loyalty and political scepticism, of bigotry and free inquiry, of science and Popish plots, the England of the Restoration was reflected in its king. What his subjects saw in Charles the Second was a pleasant, brown-faced gentleman playing with his spaniels, or drawing caricatures of his ministers, or flinging cakes to the water-fowl in the park. To all outer seeming Charles was the most consummate of idlers. "He delighted," says one of his courtiers, "in a bewitching kind of pleasure called sauntering." The business-like Pepys discovered, as he brought his work to the Council-board, that "the king do mind nothing but pleasures, and hates the very sight or thoughts of business." That Charles had great natural parts no one doubted. In his earlier days of defeat and danger he showed a cool courage and presence of mind which never failed him in the many perilous moments of his reign. His temper was pleasant and social, his manners perfect, and there was a careless freedom and courtesy in his address which won over everybody who came into his presence. His education indeed had been so grossly neglected that he could hardly read a plain Latin book; but his natural quickness and intelligence showed itself in his pursuit of chymistry and anatomy, and in the interest he showed in the scientific inquiries of the Royal Society. Like Peter the Great his favourite study was that of naval architecture, and he piqued himself on being a clever shipbuilder. He had some little love too for art and poetry, and a taste for music. But his shrewdness and vivacity showed themselves most in his endless talk. He was fond of telling stories, and he told them with a good deal of grace and humour. He held his own fairly with the wits of his Court, and bandied repartees on equal terms with Sedley or Buckingham. Even Rochester in his merciless epigram was forced to own that Charles "never said a foolish thing." He had inherited in fact his grandfather's gift of pithy sayings, and his habitual irony often gave an amusing turn to them. When his brother, the most unpopular man in England, solemnly warned him of plots against his life, Charles laughingly bade him set all fear aside. "They will never kill me, James," he said, "to make you king."

But courage and wit and ability seemed to have been bestowed on Charles in vain. He only laughed when Tom Killigrew told him frankly that badly as things were going on there was one man whose industry could set them right, "and this is one Charles Stuart, who now spends his time in using his lips about the Court and hath no other employment." Charles made no secret in fact of his hatred of business. Nor did he give to outer observers any sign of ambition. The one thing he seemed in earnest about was sensual pleasure, and he took his pleasure with a cynical shamelessness which roused the disgust even of his shameless courtiers. Mistress followed mistress, and the guilt of a troop of profligate women was blazoned to the world by the gift of titles and estates. The royal bastards were set amongst English nobles. The ducal house of Grafton springs from the king's adultery with Barbara Palmer, whom he created Duchess of Cleveland. The Dukes of St. Albans owe their origin to his intrigue with Nell Gwynn, a player and a courtezan. Louise de Querouaille, a mistress sent by France to win him to its interests, became Duchess of Portsmouth and ancestress of the house of Richmond. An earlier mistress, Lucy Walters, declared him, it is believed falsely, father of the boy whom he raised to the dukedom of Monmouth, and to whom the Dukes of Buccleuch trace their line. But Charles was far from being content with these recognized mistresses or with a single form of self-indulgence. Gambling and drinking helped to fill up the vacant moments when he could no longer toy with his favourites or bet at Newmarket. No thought of remorse or of shame seems ever to have crossed his mind. "He could not think God would make a man miserable," he said once, "only for taking a little pleasure out of the way." From shame he was shielded by his cynical disbelief in human virtue. Virtue indeed he regarded simply as a trick by which clever hypocrites imposed upon fools. Honour among men seemed to him as mere a pretence as chastity among women. Gratitude he had none, for he looked upon self-interest as the only motive of men's actions, and though soldiers had died and women had risked their lives for him, "he loved others as little as he thought they loved him." But if he felt no gratitude for benefits he felt no resentment for wrongs. He was incapable either of love or of hate. The only feeling he retained for his fellow-men was that of an amused contempt.

It was difficult for Englishmen to believe that any real danger to liberty could come from an idler and a voluptuary such as Charles the Second. But in the very difficulty of believing this lay half the king's strength. He had in fact no taste whatever for the despotism of the Stuarts who had gone before him. His shrewdness laughed his grandfather's theories of Divine Right down the wind, while his indolence made such a personal administration as that which his father delighted in burthensome to him. He was too humorous a man to care for the pomp and show of power, and too good-natured a man to play the tyrant. But he believed as firmly as his father or his grandfather had believed in his right to a full possession of the older prerogatives of the Crown. He looked on Parliaments as they had looked on them with suspicion and jealousy. He clung as they had clung to the dream of a dispensing power over the execution of the laws. He regarded ecclesiastical affairs as lying within his own personal control, and viewed the interference of the two Houses with church matters as a sheer usurpation. Above all he detested the notion of ministerial responsibility to any but the king, or of a Parliamentary right to interfere in any way with the actual administration of public affairs. "He told Lord Essex," Burnet says, "that he did not wish to be like a Grand Signior, with some mutes about him, and bags of bowstrings to strangle men; but he did not think he was a king so long as a company of fellows were looking into his actions, and examining his ministers as well as his accounts." "A king," he thought, "who might be checked, and have his ministers called to an account, was but a king in name."

[Sidenote: The king's Policy.]

In other words Charles had no settled plan of tyranny, but he meant to rule as independently as he could, and from the beginning to the end of his reign there never was a moment when he was not doing something to carry out his aim. But he carried it out in a tentative, irregular fashion which it was as hard to detect as to meet. Whenever there was any strong opposition he gave way. If popular feeling demanded the dismissal of his ministers, he dismissed them. If it protested against his declaration of religious indulgence, he recalled it. If it cried for victims in the frenzy of the Popish Plot, he gave it victims till the frenzy was at an end. It was easy for Charles to yield and to wait, and just as easy for him to take up the thread of his purpose afresh the moment the pressure was over. There was one fixed resolve in fact which overrode every other thought in the king's mind, and this was a resolve "not to set out on his travels again." His father had fallen through a quarrel with the two Houses, and Charles was determined to remain on good terms with the Parliament till he was strong enough to pick a quarrel to his profit. At no time has party strife raged more fiercely; in no reign has the temper of the Parliament been more threatening to the Crown. But the cynicism of Charles enabled him to ride out storms which would have wrecked a better and a nobler king. He treated the Lords with an easy familiarity which robbed opposition of its seriousness. "Their debates amused him," he said in his indolent way; and he stood chatting before the fire while peer after peer poured invectives on his ministers, and laughed louder than the rest when Shaftesbury directed his coarsest taunts at the barrenness of the queen. Courtiers were entrusted with the secret "management" of the Commons; obstinate country gentlemen were brought to the Royal closet to kiss the king's hand and listen to the king's pleasant stories of his escape after Worcester; and still more obstinate country gentlemen were bribed. Where bribes, flattery, and management failed Charles was content to yield and to wait till his time came again.

[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Union.]

But even while yielding and waiting he never lost sight of the aim he had set himself. If he had no mind to play the tyrant, he was resolved to be something more than "a king in name." If he could not get back all that his father had had he could go on patiently gathering up what fragments of the old royal power still survived, and availing himself of whatever new resources offered themselves. One means of recovering somewhat of the older authority of the Crown lay in the simple refusal to recognize the union of the three kingdoms. If he could not undo what the Puritans had done in England Charles could undo their work in Scotland and in Ireland. Before the Civil War these kingdoms had served as useful checks on English liberty, and by simply regarding the Union which the Long Parliament and the Protector had brought about as a nullity in law it was possible they might become checks again. In his refusal to recognize the Union Charles was supported by public opinion among his English subjects, partly from sheer abhorrence of changes wrought during "the troubles," and partly from a dread that the Scotch and Irish members would form a party in the English Parliament which would always be at the service of the Crown. In both the lesser kingdoms too a measure which seemed to restore somewhat of their national independence was for the moment popular.

[Sidenote: Scotland and Ireland.]

But the results of this step were quick in developing themselves. In Scotland the Covenant was at once abolished. The Scotch Parliament which assembled at Edinburgh, the Drunken Parliament as it was called, outdid the wildest loyalty of the English Cavaliers by annulling in a single Act all the proceedings of its predecessors during the last eight-and-twenty years. By this measure the whole existing Church system of Scotland was deprived of legal sanction. The General Assembly had already been prohibited from meeting by Cromwell; the kirk-sessions' and ministers' synods were now suspended. The Scotch bishops were again restored to their spiritual pre-eminence and to their seats in Parliament. An iniquitous trial sent the Marquis of Argyle, the only noble strong enough to oppose the Royal will, to the block; and the government was entrusted to a knot of profligate statesmen till it fell into the hands of Lauderdale, one of the ablest and most unscrupulous of the king's ministers. Their policy was steadily directed to two purposes, the first, that of humbling Presbyterianism—as the force which could alone restore Scotland to freedom and enable her to lend aid as before to English liberty in any struggle with the Crown—the second, that of raising a royal army which might be ready in case of need to march over the Border to the king's support. In Ireland the dissolution of the Union brought back the bishops to their sees; but whatever wish Charles may have had to restore the balance of Catholic and Protestant as a source of power to the Crown was baffled by the obstinate resistance of the Protestant settlers to any plans for redressing the confiscations of Cromwell. Five years of bitter struggle between the dispossessed loyalists and the new occupants left the Protestant ascendency unimpaired; and in spite of a nominal surrender of one-third of the confiscated estates to their old possessors hardly a sixth of the profitable land in the island remained in Catholic holding. The claims of the Duke of Ormond too made it necessary to leave the government in his hands, and Ormond's loyalty was too moderate and constitutional to lend itself to any of the schemes of absolute rule which played so great a part in the next reign under Tyrconnell.

[Sidenote: The Royal Army.]

But the severance of the two kingdoms from England was in itself a gain to the Royal authority; and Charles turned quietly to the building up of a royal army at home. A standing army had become so hateful a thing to the body of the nation, and above all to the Royalists whom the New Model had trodden under foot, that it was impossible to propose its establishment. But in the mind of both Charles and his brother James, the Duke of York, their father's downfall had been owing to the want of a disciplined force which would have trampled out the first efforts of national resistance; and while disbanding the New Model Charles availed himself of the alarm created by a mad rising of some Fifth-Monarchy men in London under an old soldier called Venner to retain five thousand horse and foot in his service under the name of his guards. A body of "gentlemen of quality and veteran soldiers, excellently clad, mounted, and ordered," was thus kept ready for service near the royal person; and in spite of the scandal which it aroused the king persisted, steadily but cautiously, in gradually increasing its numbers. Twenty years later it had grown to a force of seven thousand foot and one thousand seven hundred horse and dragoons at home, with a reserve of six fine regiments abroad in the service of the United Provinces.

[Sidenote: Charles and English Politics.]

But it was rather on policy than on open force that Charles counted for success. His position indeed was a strange and perplexing one. All the outer pomp of the monarchy had returned with the restoration. Charles, like his father, was served by the highest nobles on their knees. Nor had the theory of his position in appearance changed. The principle indeed of hereditary kingship had gained a new strength from the troubles of the last twenty years. The fall of the monarchy had been followed so closely by that of the other institutions, political and religious, of the realm, its restoration coincided so exactly with their revival, that the Crown had become the symbol of that national tradition, that historical continuity, without which the practical sense of Englishmen felt then, as Burke felt afterwards, that men were "but as flies in a summer." How profound a disgust the violent interruption of this continuous progress by the clean sweep of the Civil War had left behind it was seen in the indifference with which measures such as the union of the three kingdoms or the reform of parliamentary representation were set aside as sharing in the general vice of the time from which they sprang. It was seen as vividly at even a later time in the instant ruin of Shaftesbury's popularity from the moment when he was believed to be plotting the renewal of civil war. But if the Monarchy was strengthened by its association with the tradition of constitutional freedom it was henceforth inseparably bound to the freedom which strengthened it. The Cavalier who had shouted for the king's return had shouted also for the return of a free Parliament. The very Chief-Justice who asserted at the trial of the Regicides the personal freedom of the king from any responsibility to the nation asserted just as strongly that doctrine of ministerial responsibility against which Charles the First had struggled. "The law in all cases preserves the person of the king to be authorized," said Sir Orlando Bridgeman, "but what is done by his ministers unlawfully, there is a remedy against his ministers for it." It was the desire of every Royalist to blot out the very memory of the troubles in which monarchy and freedom had alike disappeared, to take up again as if it had never been broken the thread of our political history. But the point at which even Royalists took it up was not at the moment of the Tyranny, but at the moment of the Long Parliament's first triumph when that tyranny had been utterly undone. In his wish to revive those older claims of the Crown which the Long Parliament had for ever set aside the young king found himself alone. His closest adherents, his warmest friends, were constitutional Royalists of the temper of Falkland or Colepepper; partizans of an absolute monarchy, of such a monarchy as his grandfather had dreamed of and his father for a few years carried into practice, there now were none.

[Sidenote: Charles and English Religion.]

In his political aims therefore Charles could look for no help within his realm. Nor did he stand less alone in his religious aims. In heart, whether the story of his renunciation of Protestantism during his exile be true or no, he had long ceased to be a Protestant. Whatever religious feeling he had was on the side of Catholicism; he encouraged conversions among his courtiers, and the last act of his life was to seek formal admission into the Roman Church. But his feelings were rather political than religious. The English Roman Catholics formed a far larger part of the population then than now, and their wealth and local influence gave them a political importance which they have long since lost. The Stuarts had taught them to look to the Crown for protection against the Protestant bigotry around them, and they repaid this shelter by aiding Charles the First in his war on the Parliament, and by liberally supplying his son with money during his exile. He had promised in return to procure toleration for their worship, and every motive of gratitude as well as self-interest led him to redeem his pledge. But he was already looking, however vaguely, to something more than Catholic toleration. He saw that despotism in the State could hardly co-exist with free inquiry and free action in matters of the conscience; and that government, in his own words, "was a safer and easier thing where the authority was believed infallible, and the faith and submission of the people were implicit." The difficulties in the way of such a religious change probably seemed the less to him from his long residence in Roman Catholic countries and from his own religious scepticism. Two years indeed after his restoration he had already despatched an agent to Rome to arrange the terms of a reconciliation between the Anglican Church and the Papacy. But though he counted much for the success of his project of toleration on taking advantage of the dissensions between Protestant Churchmen and Protestant Dissenters, he soon discovered that in this or any wider religious project he stood utterly alone. Clarendon and the Cavaliers were as bitterly anti-Catholic as the wildest fanatic in his realm. For any real success in his religious as in his political aims he must look elsewhere than at home.

[Sidenote: State of Europe.]

Holland had been the first power to offer him its aid in the renewal of the old defensive alliance which had united the two countries before the Civil War, and it had accompanied its offer by hints of a heavy subsidy. But offers and hints were alike withdrawn when it was found that the new government persisted in enforcing the Navigation Act which the Long Parliament had passed. Spain, to which Charles looked with greater hope, demanded terms of alliance which were impossible—the restoration of Jamaica and the cession of Dunkirk. One ally only remained. At this moment France was the dominant power in Christendom. The religious wars which began with the Reformation had broken the strength of the nations around her. Spain was no longer able to fight the battle of Catholicism. The Peace of Westphalia, by the independence it gave to the German princes and the jealousy it kept alive between the Protestant and Catholic powers of Germany, destroyed the strength of the Empire. The German branch of the House of Austria, spent with the long struggle of the Thirty Years War, had enough to do in battling hard against the advance of the Turks from Hungary on Vienna. The victories of Gustavus and of the generals whom he formed had been dearly purchased by the exhaustion of Sweden. The United Provinces were as yet hardly regarded as a great power, and were trammelled by their contest with England for the empire of the seas.

[Sidenote: France.]

France alone profited by the general wreck. The wisdom of Henry the Fourth in securing religious peace by a grant of toleration to the Protestants had undone the ill effects of its religious wars. The Huguenots were still numerous south of the Loire, but the loss of their fortresses had turned their energies into the peaceful channels of industry and trade. Feudal disorder was roughly put down by Richelieu; and the policy which gathered all local power into the hands of the Crown, though fatal in the end to the real welfare of France, gave it for the moment an air of good government and a command over its internal resources which no other country could boast. Its compact and fertile territory, the natural activity and enterprise of its people, and the rapid growth of its commerce and manufactures, were sources of natural wealth which even its heavy taxation failed to check. In the latter half of the seventeenth century France was looked upon as the wealthiest power in Europe. The yearly income of the French crown was double that of England, and even Lewis the Fourteenth trusted as much to the credit of his treasury as to the triumphs of his arms. "After all," he said, when the fortunes of war began to turn against him, "it is the last louis d'or which must win!"

It was in fact this superiority in wealth which enabled France to set on foot forces such as had never been seen in Europe since the downfall of Rome. At the opening of the reign of Lewis the Fourteenth its army mustered a hundred thousand men. With the war against Holland it rose to nearly two hundred thousand. In the last struggle against the Grand Alliance there was a time when it counted nearly half-a-million of men in arms. Nor was France content with these enormous land forces. Since the ruin of Spain the fleets of Holland and of England had alone disputed the empire of the seas. Under Richelieu and Mazarin France could hardly be looked upon as a naval power. But the early years of Lewis saw the creation of a navy of a hundred men-of-war, and the fleets of France soon held their own against England or the Dutch.

[Sidenote: Lewis the Fourteenth.]

Such a power would have been formidable at any time; but it was doubly formidable when directed by statesmen who in knowledge and ability were without rivals in Europe. No diplomatist could compare with Lionne, no war minister with Louvois, no financier with Colbert. Their young master, Lewis the Fourteenth, bigoted, narrow-minded, commonplace as he was, without personal honour or personal courage, without gratitude and without pity, insane in his pride, insatiable in his vanity, brutal in his selfishness, had still many of the qualities of a great ruler, industry, patience, quickness of resolve, firmness of purpose, a capacity for discerning ability and using it, an immense self-belief and self-confidence, and a temper utterly destitute indeed of real greatness, but with a dramatic turn for seeming to be great. As a politician Lewis had simply to reap the harvest which the two great Cardinals who went before him had sown. Both had used to the profit of France the exhaustion and dissension which the wars of religion had brought upon Europe. Richelieu turned the scale against the House of Austria by his alliance with Sweden, with the United Provinces, and with the Protestant princes of Germany; and the two great treaties by which Mazarin ended the Thirty Years War, the Treaty of Westphalia and the Treaty of the Pyrenees, left the Empire disorganized and Spain powerless. From that moment indeed Spain sank into a strange decrepitude. Robbed of the chief source of her wealth by the independence of Holland, weakened at home by the revolt of Portugal, her infantry annihilated by Conde in his victory of Rocroi, her fleet ruined by the Dutch, her best blood drained away to the Indies, the energies of her people destroyed by the suppression of all liberty, civil or religious, her intellectual life crushed by the Inquisition, her industry crippled by the expulsion of the Moors, by financial oppression, and by the folly of her colonial system, the kingdom which under Philip the Second had aimed at the empire of the world lay helpless and exhausted under Philip the Fourth.

[Sidenote: France and Spain.]

The aim of Lewis was to carry on the policy of his predecessors, and above all to complete the ruin of Spain. The conquest of the Spanish provinces in the Netherlands would carry his border to the Scheldt. A more distant hope lay in the probable extinction of the Austrian line which now sat on the throne of Spain. By securing the succession to that throne for a French prince not only Castille and Aragon with the Spanish dependencies in Italy and the Netherlands but the Spanish empire in the New World would be added to the dominions of France. Nothing could save Spain but a union of the European powers, and to prevent this union was the work to which the French negotiators were now bending their energies with singular success. The intervention of the Emperor was guarded against by a renewal of the old alliances between France and the lesser German princes. A league with the Turks gave the court of Vienna enough to do on its eastern border. The old league with Sweden, the old friendship with Holland, were skilfully maintained. England alone remained as a possible foe, and at this moment the policy of Charles bound England to the side of Lewis.