No More Learning

It seemed too probable that order and liberty would
perish in one ignominious ruin.

That ruin was happily averted. It has been too much the practice of
writers zealous for freedom to represent the Restoration as a disastrous
event, and to condemn the folly or baseness of that Convention, which
recalled the royal family without exacting new securities against
maladministration. Those who hold this language do not comprehend the
real nature of the crisis which followed the deposition of Richard
Cromwell. England was in imminent danger of falling under the tyranny of
a succession of small men raised up and pulled down by military caprice.
To deliver the country from the domination of the soldiers was the first
object of every enlightened patriot: but it was an object which, while
the soldiers were united, the most sanguine could scarcely expect to
attain. On a sudden a gleam of hope appeared. General was opposed to
general, army to army. On the use which might be made of one auspicious
moment depended the future destiny of the nation. Our ancestors used
that moment well. They forgot old injuries, waved petty scruples,
adjourned to a more convenient season all dispute about the reforms
which our institutions needed, and stood together, Cavaliers and
Roundheads, Episcopalians and Presbyterians, in firm union, for the
old laws of the land against military despotism. The exact partition of
power among King, Lords, and Commons might well be postponed till it
had been decided whether England should be governed by King, Lords,
and Commons, or by cuirassiers and pikemen. Had the statesmen of the
Convention taken a different course, had they held long debates on the
principles of government, had they drawn up a new constitution and sent
it to Charles, had conferences been opened, had couriers been passing
and repassing during some weeks between Westminster and the Netherlands,
with projects and counterprojects, replies by Hyde and rejoinders by
Prynne, the coalition on which the public safety depended would have
been dissolved: the Presbyterians and Royalists would certainly have
quarrelled: the military factions might possibly have been reconciled;
and the misjudging friends of liberty might long have regretted, under
a rule worse than that of the worst Stuart, the golden opportunity which
had been suffered to escape.

The old civil polity was, therefore, by the general consent of both the
great parties, reestablished. It was again exactly what it had been when
Charles the First, eighteen years before, withdrew from his capital. All
those acts of the Long Parliament which had received the royal assent
were admitted to be still in full force. One fresh concession, a
concession in which the Cavaliers were even more deeply interested than
the Roundheads, was easily obtained from the restored King. The military
tenure of land had been originally created as a means of national
defence. But in the course of ages whatever was useful in the
institution had disappeared; and nothing was left but ceremonies and
grievances. A landed proprietor who held an estate under the crown by
knight service,--and it was thus that most of the soil of England was
held,--had to pay a large fine on coming to his property. He could not
alienate one acre without purchasing a license. When he died, if his
domains descended to an infant, the sovereign was guardian, and was not
only entitled to great part of the rents during the minority, but could
require the ward, under heavy penalties, to marry any person of suitable
rank. The chief bait which attracted a needy sycophant to the court was
the hope of obtaining as the reward of servility and flattery, a royal
letter to an heiress. These abuses had perished with the monarchy. That
they should not revive with it was the wish of every landed gentleman in
the kingdom. They were, therefore, solemnly abolished by statute; and
no relic of the ancient tenures in chivalry was allowed to remain except
those honorary services which are still, at a coronation, rendered to
the person of the sovereign by some lords of manors.

The troops were now to be disbanded. Fifty thousand men, accustomed to
the profession of arms, were at once thrown on the world: and experience
seemed to warrant the belief that this change would produce much misery
and crime, that the discharged veterans would be seen begging in every
street, or that they would be driven by hunger to pillage. But no such
result followed. In a few months there remained not a trace indicating
that the most formidable army in the world had just been absorbed into
the mass of the community. The Royalists themselves confessed that, in
every department of honest industry the discarded warriors prospered
beyond other men, that none was charged with any theft or robbery,
that none was heard to ask an alms, and that, if a baker, a mason, or a
waggoner attracted notice by his diligence and sobriety, he was in all
probability one of Oliver's old soldiers.

The military tyranny had passed away; but it had left deep and enduring
traces in the public mind. The name of standing army was long held in
abhorrence: and it is remarkable that this feeling was even stronger
among the Cavaliers than among the Roundheads. It ought to be considered
as a most fortunate circumstance that, when our country was, for the
first and last time, ruled by the sword, the sword was in the hands,
not of legitimate princes, but of those rebels who slew the King and
demolished the Church. Had a prince with a title as good as that of
Charles, commanded an army as good as that of Cromwell, there would
have been little hope indeed for the liberties of England. Happily that
instrument by which alone the monarchy could be made absolute became an
object of peculiar horror and disgust to the monarchical party, and long
continued to be inseparably associated in the imagination of Royalists
and Prelatists with regicide and field preaching. A century after the
death of Cromwell, the Tories still continued to clamour against every
augmentation of the regular soldiery, and to sound the praise of a
national militia. So late as the year 1786, a minister who enjoyed no
common measure of their confidence found it impossible to overcome their
aversion to his scheme of fortifying the coast: nor did they ever look
with entire complacency on the standing army, till the French Revolution
gave a new direction to their apprehensions.

The coalition which had restored the King terminated with the danger
from which it had sprung; and two hostile parties again appeared
ready for conflict. Both, indeed, were agreed as to the propriety of
inflicting punishment on some unhappy men who were, at that moment,
objects of almost universal hatred. Cromwell was no more; and those who
had fled before him were forced to content themselves with the miserable
satisfaction of digging up, hanging, quartering, and burning the remains
of the greatest prince that has ever ruled England.

Other objects of vengeance, few indeed, yet too many, were found among
the republican chiefs. Soon, however, the conquerors, glutted with the
blood of the regicides, turned against each other. The Roundheads,
while admitting the virtues of the late King, and while condemning the
sentence passed upon him by an illegal tribunal, yet maintained that his
administration had been, in many things, unconstitutional, and that
the Houses had taken arms against him from good motives and on strong
grounds. The monarchy, these politicians conceived, had no worse enemy
than the flatterer who exalted prerogative above the law, who condemned
all opposition to regal encroachments, and who reviled, not only
Cromwell and Harrison, but Pym and Hampden, as traitors. If the King
wished for a quiet and prosperous reign, he must confide in those who,
though they had drawn the sword in defence of the invaded privileges of
Parliament, had yet exposed themselves to the rage of the soldiers in
order to save his father, and had taken the chief part in bringing back
the royal family.

The feeling of the Cavaliers was widely different. During eighteen years
they had, through all vicissitudes, been faithful to the Crown. Having
shared the distress of their prince, were they not to share his triumph?
Was no distinction to be made between them and the disloyal subject who
had fought against his rightful sovereign, who had adhered to Richard
Cromwell, and who had never concurred in the restoration of the Stuarts,
till it appeared that nothing else could save the nation from the
tyranny of the army? Grant that such a man had, by his recent services,
fairly earned his pardon. Yet were his services, rendered at the
eleventh hour, to be put in comparison with the toils and sufferings of
those who had borne the burden and heat of the day? Was he to be ranked
with men who had no need of the royal clemency, with men who had, in
every part of their lives, merited the royal gratitude? Above all, was
he to be suffered to retain a fortune raised out of the substance of the
ruined defenders of the throne? Was it not enough that his head and his
patrimonial estate, a hundred times forfeited to justice, were secure,
and that he shared, with the rest of the nation, in the blessings of
that mild government of which he had long been the foe? Was it necessary
that he should be rewarded for his treason at the expense of men whose
only crime was the fidelity with which they had observed their oath of
allegiance. And what interest had the King in gorging his old enemies
with prey torn from his old friends? What confidence could be placed in
men who had opposed their sovereign, made war on him, imprisoned him,
and who, even now, instead of hanging down their heads in shame and
contrition, vindicated all that they had done, and seemed to think that
they had given an illustrious proof of loyalty by just stopping short of
regicide? It was true they had lately assisted to set up the throne: but
it was not less true that they had previously pulled it down, and that
they still avowed principles which might impel them to pull it down
again. Undoubtedly it might be fit that marks of royal approbation
should be bestowed on some converts who had been eminently useful: but
policy, as well as justice and gratitude, enjoined the King to give the
highest place in his regard to those who, from first to last, through
good and evil, had stood by his house. On these grounds the Cavaliers
very naturally demanded indemnity for all that they had suffered, and
preference in the distribution of the favours of the Crown. Some violent
members of the party went further, and clamoured for large categories of
proscription.

The political feud was, as usual, exasperated by a religious feud.
The King found the Church in a singular state. A short time before the
commencement of the civil war, his father had given a reluctant assent
to a bill, strongly supported by Falkland, which deprived the Bishops
of their seats in the House of Lords: but Episcopacy and the Liturgy had
never been abolished by law. The Long Parliament, however, had passed
ordinances which had made a complete revolution in Church government
and in public worship. The new system was, in principle, scarcely less
Erastian than that which it displaced. The Houses, guided chiefly by
the counsels of the accomplished Selden, had determined to keep the
spiritual power strictly subordinate to the temporal power. They had
refused to declare that any form of ecclesiastical polity was of divine
origin; and they had provided that, from all the Church courts, an
appeal should lie in the last resort to Parliament. With this highly
important reservation, it had been resolved to set up in England a
hierarchy closely resembling that which now exists in Scotland. The
authority of councils, rising one above another in regular gradation,
was substituted for the authority of Bishops and Archbishops. The
Liturgy gave place to the Presbyterian Directory. But scarcely had
the new regulations been framed, when the Independents rose to supreme
influence in the state. The Independents had no disposition to enforce
the ordinances touching classical, provincial, and national synods.
Those ordinances, therefore, were never carried into full execution. The
Presbyterian system was fully established nowhere but in Middlesex and
Lancashire. In the other fifty counties almost every parish seems to
have been unconnected with the neighbouring parishes. In some districts,
indeed, the ministers formed themselves into voluntary associations, for
the purpose of mutual help and counsel; but these associations had no
coercive power. The patrons of livings, being now checked by neither
Bishop nor Presbytery, would have been at liberty to confide the cure
of souls to the most scandalous of mankind, but for the arbitrary
intervention of Oliver. He established, by his own authority, a board
of commissioners, called Triers. Most of these persons were Independent
divines; but a few Presbyterian ministers and a few laymen had seats.
The certificate of the Triers stood in the place both of institution
and of induction; and without such a certificate no person could hold a
benefice. This was undoubtedly one of the most despotic acts ever done
by any English ruler. Yet, as it was generally felt that, without some
such precaution, the country would be overrun by ignorant and drunken
reprobates, bearing the name and receiving the pay of ministers,
some highly respectable persons, who were not in general friendly
to Cromwell, allowed that, on this occasion, he had been a public
benefactor. The presentees whom the Triers had approved took possession
of the rectories, cultivated the glebe lands, collected the tithes,
prayed without book or surplice, and administered the Eucharist to
communicants seated at long tables.

Thus the ecclesiastical polity of the realm was in inextricable
confusion. Episcopacy was the form of government prescribed by the old
law which was still unrepealed. The form of government prescribed by
parliamentary ordinance was Presbyterian. But neither the old law
nor the parliamentary ordinance was practically in force. The Church
actually established may be described as an irregular body made up of a
few Presbyteries and many Independent congregations, which were all held
down and held together by the authority of the government.

Of those who had been active in bringing back the King, many were
zealous for Synods and for the Directory, and many were desirous to
terminate by a compromise the religious dissensions which had long
agitated England. Between the bigoted followers of Laud and the bigoted
followers of Knox there could be neither peace nor truce: but it did
not seem impossible to effect an accommodation between the moderate
Episcopalians of the school of Usher and the moderate Presbyterians
of the school of Baxter. The moderate Episcopalians would admit that
a Bishop might lawfully be assisted by a council. The moderate
Presbyterians would not deny that each provincial assembly might
lawfully have a permanent president, and that this president might
lawfully be called a Bishop. There might be a revised Liturgy which
should not exclude extemporaneous prayer, a baptismal service in
which the sign of the cross might be used or omitted at discretion, a
communion service at which the faithful might sit if their conscience
forbade them to kneel. But to no such plan could the great bodies of the
Cavaliers listen with patience. The religious members of that party were
conscientiously attached to the whole system of their Church. She had
been dear to their murdered King. She had consoled them in defeat and
penury. Her service, so often whispered in an inner chamber during the
season of trial, had such a charm for them that they were unwilling to
part with a single response. Other Royalists, who made little presence
to piety, yet loved the episcopal church because she was the foe of
their foes. They valued a prayer or a ceremony, not on account of the
comfort which it conveyed to themselves, but on account of the vexation
which it gave to the Roundheads, and were so far from being disposed to
purchase union by concession that they objected to concession chiefly
because it tended to produce union.

Such feelings, though blamable, were natural, and not wholly
inexcusable. The Puritans had undoubtedly, in the day of their power,
given cruel provocation. They ought to have learned, if from nothing
else, yet from their own discontents, from their own struggles, from
their own victory, from the fall of that proud hierarchy by which they
had been so heavily oppressed, that, in England, and in the seventeenth
century, it was not in the power of the civil magistrate to drill the
minds of men into conformity with his own system of theology. They
proved, however, as intolerant and as meddling as ever Laud had been.
They interdicted under heavy penalties the use of the Book of Common
Prayer, not only in churches, but even in private houses. It was a
crime in a child to read by the bedside of a sick parent one of those
beautiful collects which had soothed the griefs of forty generations
of Christians. Severe punishments were denounced against such as
should presume to blame the Calvinistic mode of worship. Clergymen of
respectable character were not only ejected from their benefices by
thousands, but were frequently exposed to the outrages of a fanatical
rabble. Churches and sepulchres, fine works of art and curious remains
of antiquity, were brutally defaced. The Parliament resolved that all
pictures in the royal collection which contained representations of
Jesus or of the Virgin Mother should be burned. Sculpture fared as
ill as painting. Nymphs and Graces, the work of Ionian chisels, were
delivered over to Puritan stonemasons to be made decent. Against the
lighter vices the ruling faction waged war with a zeal little tempered
by humanity or by common sense. Sharp laws were passed against betting.
It was enacted that adultery should be punished with death. The illicit
intercourse of the sexes, even where neither violence nor seduction was
imputed, where no public scandal was given, where no conjugal right was
violated, was made a misdemeanour. Public amusements, from the masques
which were exhibited at the mansions of the great down to the wrestling
matches and grinning matches on village greens, were vigorously
attacked. One ordinance directed that all the Maypoles in England should
forthwith be hewn down. Another proscribed all theatrical diversions.
The playhouses were to be dismantled, the spectators fined, the
actors whipped at the cart's tail. Rope-dancing, puppet-shows, bowls,
horse-racing, were regarded with no friendly eye. But bearbaiting, then
a favourite diversion of high and low, was the abomination which
most strongly stirred the wrath of the austere sectaries. It is to be
remarked that their antipathy to this sport had nothing in common with
the feeling which has, in our own time, induced the legislature to
interfere for the purpose of protecting beasts against the wanton
cruelty of men. The Puritan hated bearbaiting, not because it gave pain
to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. Indeed,
he generally contrived to enjoy the double pleasure of tormenting both
spectators and bear. [16]

Perhaps no single circumstance more strongly illustrates the temper of
the precisians than their conduct respecting Christmas day. Christmas
had been, from time immemorial, the season of joy and domestic
affection, the season when families assembled, when children came home
from school, when quarrels were made up, when carols were heard in every
street, when every house was decorated with evergreens, and every
table was loaded with good cheer. At that season all hearts not utterly
destitute of kindness were enlarged and softened. At that season the
poor were admitted to partake largely of the overflowings of the wealth
of the rich, whose bounty was peculiarly acceptable on account of
the shortness of the days and of the severity of the weather. At that
season, the interval between landlord and tenant, master and servant,
was less marked than through the rest of the year. Where there is much
enjoyment there will be some excess: yet, on the whole, the spirit in
which the holiday was kept was not unworthy of a Christian festival. The
long Parliament gave orders, in 1644, that the twenty-fifth of December
should be strictly observed as a fast, and that all men should pass it
in humbly bemoaning the great national sin which they and their fathers
had so often committed on that day by romping under the mistletoe,
eating boar's head, and drinking ale flavored with roasted apples. No
public act of that time seems to have irritated the common people more.
On the next anniversary of the festival formidable riots broke out in
many places. The constables were resisted, the magistrates insulted, the
houses of noted zealots attacked, and the prescribed service of the day
openly read in the churches.

Such was the spirit of the extreme Puritans, both Presbyterian and
Independent. Oliver, indeed, was little disposed to be either
a persecutor or a meddler. But Oliver, the head of a party, and
consequently, to a great extent, the slave of a party, could not
govern altogether according to his own inclinations. Even under his
administration many magistrates, within their own jurisdiction, made
themselves as odious as Sir Hudibras, interfered with all the pleasures
of the neighbourhood, dispersed festive meetings, and put fiddlers in
the stocks. Still more formidable was the zeal of the soldiers. In every
village where they appeared there was an end of dancing, bellringing,
and hockey. In London they several times interrupted theatrical
performances at which the Protector had the judgment and good nature to
connive.

With the fear and hatred inspired by such a tyranny contempt was largely
mingled. The peculiarities of the Puritan, his look, his dress,
his dialect, his strange scruples, had been, ever since the time of
Elizabeth, favourite subjects with mockers. But these peculiarities
appeared far more grotesque in a faction which ruled a great empire
than in obscure and persecuted congregations. The cant, which had moved
laughter when it was heard on the stage from Tribulation Wholesome and
Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, was still more laughable when it proceeded from
the lips of Generals and Councillors of State. It is also to be noticed
that during the civil troubles several sects had sprung into existence,
whose eccentricities surpassed anything that had before been seen in
England. A mad tailor, named Lodowick Muggleton, wandered from pothouse
to pothouse, tippling ale, and denouncing eternal torments against those
who refused to believe, on his testimony, that the Supreme Being was
only six feet high, and that the sun was just four miles from the earth.
[17] George Fox had raised a tempest of derision by proclaiming that it
was a violation of Christian sincerity to designate a single person by a
plural pronoun, and that it was an idolatrous homage to Janus and Woden
to talk about January and Wednesday. His doctrine, a few years later,
was embraced by some eminent men, and rose greatly in the public
estimation. But at the time of the Restoration the Quakers were
popularly regarded as the most despicable of fanatics. By the Puritans
they were treated with severity here, and were persecuted to the
death in New England. Nevertheless the public, which seldom makes nice
distinctions, often confounded the Puritan with the Quaker. Both were
schismatics. Both hated episcopacy and the Liturgy. Both had what seemed
extravagant whimsies about dress, diversions and postures. Widely as the
two differed in opinion, they were popularly classed together as canting
schismatics; and whatever was ridiculous or odious in either increased
the scorn and aversion which the multitude felt for both.

Before the civil wars, even those who most disliked the opinions and
manners of the Puritan were forced to admit that his moral conduct was
generally, in essentials, blameless; but this praise was now no longer
bestowed, and, unfortunately, was no longer deserved. The general fate
of sects is to obtain a high reputation for sanctity while they are
oppressed, and to lose it as soon as they become powerful: and the
reason is obvious. It is seldom that a man enrolls himself in a
proscribed body from any but conscientious motives. Such a body,
therefore, is composed, with scarcely an exception, of sincere persons.
The most rigid discipline that can be enforced within a religious
society is a very feeble instrument of purification, when compared with
a little sharp persecution from without. We may be certain that very few
persons, not seriously impressed by religious convictions, applied for
baptism while Diocletian was vexing the Church, or joined themselves
to Protestant congregations at the risk of being burned by Bonner. But,
when a sect becomes powerful, when its favour is the road to riches and
dignities, worldly and ambitious men crowd into it, talk its language,
conform strictly to its ritual, mimic its peculiarities, and frequently
go beyond its honest members in all the outward indications of zeal. No
discernment, no watchfulness, on the part of ecclesiastical rulers, can
prevent the intrusion of such false brethren. The tares and wheat must
grow together. Soon the world begins to find out that the godly are
not better than other men, and argues, with some justice, that, if not
better, they must be much worse. In no long time all those signs which
were formerly regarded as characteristic of a saint are regarded as
characteristic of a knave.

Thus it was with the English Nonconformists. They had been oppressed;
and oppression had kept them a pure body. They then became supreme in
the state. No man could hope to rise to eminence and command but by
their favour. Their favour was to be gained only by exchanging with
them the signs and passwords of spiritual fraternity. One of the
first resolutions adopted by Barebone's Parliament, the most intensely
Puritanical of all our political assemblies, was that no person should
be admitted into the public service till the House should be satisfied
of his real godliness. What were then considered as the signs of real
godliness, the sadcoloured dress, the sour look, the straight hair,
the nasal whine, the speech interspersed with quaint texts, the Sunday,
gloomy as a Pharisaical Sabbath, were easily imitated by men to whom all
religions were the same. The sincere Puritans soon found themselves lost
in a multitude, not merely of men of the world, but of the very worst
sort of men of the world. For the most notorious libertine who had
fought under the royal standard might justly be thought virtuous
when compared with some of those who, while they talked about sweet
experiences and comfortable scriptures, lived in the constant practice
of fraud, rapacity, and secret debauchery. The people, with a rashness
which we may justly lament, but at which we cannot wonder, formed their
estimate of the whole body from these hypocrites. The theology, the
manners, the dialect of the Puritan were thus associated in the public
mind with the darkest and meanest vices. As soon as the Restoration
had made it safe to avow enmity to the party which had so long been
predominant, a general outcry against Puritanism rose from every corner
of the kingdom, and was often swollen by the voices of those very
dissemblers whose villany had brought disgrace on the Puritan name.

Thus the two great parties, which, after a long contest, had for a
moment concurred in restoring monarchy, were, both in politics and in
religion, again opposed to each other. The great body of the nation
leaned to the Royalists. The crimes of Strafford and Laud, the excesses
of the Star Chamber and of the High Commission, the great services
which the Long Parliament had, during the first year of its existence,
rendered to the state, had faded from the minds of men. The execution of
Charles the First, the sullen tyranny of the Rump, the violence of the
army, were remembered with loathing; and the multitude was inclined to
hold all who had withstood the late King responsible for his death and
for the subsequent disasters.

The House of Commons, having been elected while the Presbyterians were
dominant, by no means represented the general sense of the people. Most
of the members, while execrating Cromwell and Bradshaw, reverenced the
memory of Essex and of Pym. One sturdy Cavalier, who ventured to declare
that all who had drawn the sword against Charles the First were as much
traitors as those who kind cut off his head, was called to order, placed
at the bar, and reprimanded by the Speaker. The general wish of the
House undoubtedly was to settle the ecclesiastical disputes in a manner
satisfactory to the moderate Puritans. But to such a settlement both the
court and the nation were averse.

The restored King was at this time more loved by the people than any of
his predecessors had ever been. The calamities of his house, the heroic
death of his father, his own long sufferings and romantic adventures,
made him an object of tender interest. His return had delivered the
country from an intolerable bondage. Recalled by the voice of both the
contending factions, he was in a position which enabled him to arbitrate
between them; and in some respects he was well qualified for the task.
He had received from nature excellent parts and a happy temper. His
education had been such as might have been expected to develope his
understanding, and to form him to the practice of every public and
private virtue. He had passed through all varieties of fortune, and had
seen both sides of human nature. He had, while very young, been driven
forth from a palace to a life of exile. penury, and danger.
He had, at
the age when the mind and body are in their highest perfection, and when
the first effervescence of boyish passions should have subsided, been
recalled from his wanderings to wear a crown. He had been taught by
bitter experience how much baseness, perfidy, and ingratitude may lie
hid under the obsequious demeanor of courtiers. He had found, on the
other hand, in the huts of the poorest, true nobility of soul. When
wealth was offered to any who would betray him, when death was denounced
against all who should shelter him, cottagers and serving men had kept
his secret truly, and had kissed his hand under his mean disguises with
as much reverence as if he had been seated on his ancestral throne. From
such a school it might have been expected that a young man who wanted
neither abilities nor amiable qualities would have come forth a great
and good King. Charles came forth from that school with social habits,
with polite and engaging manners, and with some talent for lively
conversation, addicted beyond measure to sensual indulgence, fond of
sauntering and of frivolous amusements, incapable of selfdenial and of
exertion, without faith in human virtue or in human attachment without
desire of renown, and without sensibility to reproach. According to him,
every person was to be bought: but some people haggled more about their
price than others; and when this haggling was very obstinate and very
skilful it was called by some fine name. The chief trick by which clever
men kept up the price of their abilities was called integrity. The chief
trick by which handsome women kept up the price of their beauty was
called modesty. The love of God, the love of country, the love of
family, the love of friends, were phrases of the same sort, delicate
and convenient synonymes for the love of self. Thinking thus of mankind,
Charles naturally cared very little what they thought of him. Honour and
shame were scarcely more to him than light and darkness to the blind.
His contempt of flattery has been highly commended, but seems, when
viewed in connection with the rest of his character, to deserve no
commendation. It is possible to be below flattery as well as above it.
One who trusts nobody will not trust sycophants. One who does not value
real glory will not value its counterfeit.

It is creditable to Charles's temper that, ill as he thought of his
species, he never became a misanthrope. He saw little in men but what
was hateful. Yet he did not hate them. Nay, he was so far humane that it
was highly disagreeable to him to see their sufferings or to hear their
complaints. This, however, is a sort of humanity which, though amiable
and laudable in a private man whose power to help or hurt is bounded by
a narrow circle, has in princes often been rather a vice than a virtue.
More than one well disposed ruler has given up whole provinces to rapine
and oppression, merely from a wish to see none but happy faces round his
own board and in his own walks. No man is fit to govern great societies
who hesitates about disobliging the few who have access to him, for the
sake of the many whom he will never see. The facility of Charles was
such as has perhaps never been found in any man of equal sense. He was a
slave without being a dupe. Worthless men and women, to the very bottom
of whose hearts he saw, and whom he knew to be destitute of affection
for him and undeserving of his confidence, could easily wheedle him out
of titles, places, domains, state secrets and pardons. He bestowed
much; yet he neither enjoyed the pleasure nor acquired the fame of
beneficence. He never gave spontaneously; but it was painful to him to
refuse. The consequence was that his bounty generally went, not to those
who deserved it best, nor even to those whom he liked best, but to the
most shameless and importunate suitor who could obtain an audience.

The motives which governed the political conduct of Charles the Second
differed widely from those by which his predecessor and his successor
were actuated. He was not a man to be imposed upon by the patriarchal
theory of government and the doctrine of divine right. He was utterly
without ambition. He detested business, and would sooner have abdicated
his crown than have undergone the trouble of really directing the
administration. Such was his aversion to toil, and such his ignorance of
affairs, that the very clerks who attended him when he sate in council
could not refrain from sneering at his frivolous remarks, and at his
childish impatience. Neither gratitude nor revenge had any share
in determining his course; for never was there a mind on which both
services and injuries left such faint and transitory impressions.
He wished merely to be a King such as Lewis the Fifteenth of France
afterwards was; a King who could draw without limit on the treasury for
the gratification of his private tastes, who could hire with wealth and
honours persons capable of assisting him to kill the time, and who,
even when the state was brought by maladministration to the depths of
humiliation and to the brink of ruin, could still exclude unwelcome
truth from the purlieus of his own seraglio, and refuse to see and hear
whatever might disturb his luxurious repose. For these ends, and for
these ends alone, he wished to obtain arbitrary power, if it could
be obtained without risk or trouble. In the religious disputes
which divided his Protestant subjects his conscience was not at all
interested. For his opinions oscillated in contented suspense between
infidelity and Popery. But, though his conscience was neutral in the
quarrel between the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians, his taste was
by no means so. His favourite vices were precisely those to which the
Puritans were least indulgent. He could not get through one day without
the help of diversions which the Puritans regarded as sinful. As a man
eminently well bred, and keenly sensible of the ridiculous, he was moved
to contemptuous mirth by the Puritan oddities. He had indeed some reason
to dislike the rigid sect. He had, at the age when the passions are
most impetuous and when levity is most pardonable, spent some months in
Scotland, a King in name, but in fact a state prisoner in the hands
of austere Presbyterians. Not content with requiring him to conform to
their worship and to subscribe their Covenant, they had watched all
his motions, and lectured him on all his youthful follies. He had been
compelled to give reluctant attendance at endless prayers and sermons,
and might think himself fortunate when he was not insolently reminded
from the pulpit of his own frailties, of his father's tyranny, and of
his mother's idolatry. Indeed he had been so miserable during this part
of his life that the defeat which made him again a wanderer might be
regarded as a deliverance rather than as a calamity. Under the influence
of such feelings as these Charles was desirous to depress the party
which had resisted his father.

The King's brother, James Duke of York, took the same side. Though a
libertine, James was diligent, methodical, and fond of authority and
business. His understanding was singularly slow and narrow, and his
temper obstinate, harsh, and unforgiving. That such a prince should have
looked with no good will on the free institutions of England, and on the
party which was peculiarly zealous for those institutions, can excite
no surprise. As yet the Duke professed himself a member of the Anglican
Church but he had already shown inclinations which had seriously alarmed
good Protestants.

The person on whom devolved at this time the greatest part of the labour
of governing was Edward Hyde, Chancellor of the realm, who was soon
created Earl of Clarendon. The respect which we justly feel for
Clarendon as a writer must not blind us to the faults which he committed
as a statesman. Some of those faults, however, are explained and excused
by the unfortunate position in which he stood. He had, during the first
year of the Long Parliament, been honourably distinguished among the
senators who laboured to redress the grievances of the nation. One
of the most odious of those grievances, the Council of York, had been
removed in consequence chiefly of his exertions. When the great schism
took place, when the reforming party and the conservative party first
appeared marshalled against each other, he, with many wise and good men,
took the conservative side. He thenceforward followed the fortunes of
the court, enjoyed as large a share of the confidence of Charles the
First as the reserved nature and tortuous policy of that prince allowed
to any minister, and subsequently shared the exile and directed the
political conduct of Charles the Second. At the Restoration Hyde became
chief minister. In a few months it was announced that he was closely
related by affinity to the royal house. His daughter had become, by a
secret marriage, Duchess of York. His grandchildren might perhaps wear
the crown. He was raised by this illustrious connection over the heads
of the old nobility of the land, and was for a time supposed to be
allpowerful. In some respects he was well fitted for his great place. No
man wrote abler state papers. No man spoke with more weight and dignity
in Council and in Parliament. No man was better acquainted with general
maxims of statecraft. No man observed the varieties of character with a
more discriminating eye. It must be added that he had a strong sense of
moral and religious obligation, a sincere reverence for the laws of his
country, and a conscientious regard for the honour and interest of the
Crown. But his temper was sour, arrogant, and impatient of opposition.
Above all, he had been long an exile; and this circumstance alone would
have completely disqualified him for the supreme direction of affairs.
It is scarcely possible that a politician, who has been compelled by
civil troubles to go into banishment, and to pass many of the best years
of his life abroad, can be fit, on the day on which he returns to his
native land, to be at the head of the government. Clarendon was no
exception to this rule. He had left England with a mind heated by a
fierce conflict which had ended in the downfall of his party and of his
own fortunes. From 1646 to 1660 he had lived beyond sea, looking on all
that passed at home from a great distance, and through a false medium.
His notions of public affairs were necessarily derived from the
reports of plotters, many of whom were ruined and desperate men. Events
naturally seemed to him auspicious, not in proportion as they increased
the prosperity and glory of the nation, but in proportion as they tended
to hasten the hour of his own return. His wish, a wish which he has not
disguised, was that, till his countrymen brought back the old line, they
might never enjoy quiet or freedom. At length he returned; and, without
having a single week to look about him, to mix with society, to note
the changes which fourteen eventful years had produced in the national
character and feelings, he was at once set to rule the state. In such
circumstances, a minister of the greatest tact and docility would
probably have fallen into serious errors. But tact and docility made no
part of the character of Clarendon. To him England was still the
England of his youth; and he sternly frowned down every theory and every
practice which had sprung up during his own exile. Though he was far
from meditating any attack on the ancient and undoubted power of the
House of Commons, he saw with extreme uneasiness the growth of that
power. The royal prerogative, for which he had long suffered, and by
which he had at length been raised to wealth and dignity, was sacred
in his eyes. The Roundheads he regarded both with political and with
personal aversion. To the Anglican Church he had always been strongly
attached, and had repeatedly, where her interests were concerned,
separated himself with regret from his dearest friends. His zeal for
Episcopacy and for the Book of Common Prayer was now more ardent than
ever, and was mingled with a vindictive hatred of the Puritans, which
did him little honour either as a statesman or as a Christian.

While the House of Commons which had recalled the royal family was
sitting, it was impossible to effect the re-establishment of the
old ecclesiastical system. Not only were the intentions of the court
strictly concealed, but assurances which quieted the minds of the
moderate Presbyterians were given by the King in the most solemn manner.
He had promised, before his restoration, that he would grant liberty of
conscience to his subjects. He now repeated that promise, and added
a promise to use his best endeavours for the purpose of effecting a
compromise between the contending sects. He wished, he said, to see the
spiritual jurisdiction divided between bishops and synods. The Liturgy
should be revised by a body of learned divines, one-half of whom should
be Presbyterians. The questions respecting the surplice, the posture at
the Eucharist, and the sign of the cross in baptism, should be settled
in a way which would set tender consciences at ease. When the King
had thus laid asleep the vigilance of those whom he most feared, he
dissolved the Parliament. He had already given his assent to an act by
which an amnesty was granted, with few exceptions, to all who, during
the late troubles, had been guilty of political offences. He had also
obtained from the Commons a grant for life of taxes, the annual product
of which was estimated at twelve hundred thousand pounds. The actual
income, indeed, during some years, amounted to little more than a
million: but this sum, together with the hereditary revenue of the
crown, was then sufficient to defray the expenses of the government in
time of peace. Nothing was allowed for a standing army. The nation was
sick of the very name; and the least mention of such a force would have
incensed and alarmed all parties.

Early in 1661 took place a general election. The people were mad with
loyal enthusiasm. The capital was excited by preparations for the most
splendid coronation that had ever been known. The result was that a body
of representatives was returned, such as England had never yet seen. A
large proportion of the successful candidates were men who had fought
for the Crown and the Church, and whose minds had been exasperated by
many injuries and insults suffered at the hands of the Roundheads. When
the members met, the passions which animated each individually acquired
new strength from sympathy. The House of Commons was, during some years,
more zealous for royalty than the King, more zealous for episcopacy
than the Bishops. Charles and Clarendon were almost terrified at the
completeness of their own success. They found themselves in a situation
not unlike that in which Lewis the Eighteenth and the Duke of Richelieu
were placed while the Chamber of 1815 was sitting. Even if the King
had been desirous to fulfill the promises which he had made to the
Presbyterians, it would have been out of his power to do so. It was
indeed only by the strong exertion of his influence that he could
prevent the victorious Cavaliers from rescinding the act of indemnity,
and retaliating without mercy all that they had suffered.

The Commons began by resolving that every member should, on pain of
expulsion, take the sacrament according to the form prescribed by the
old Liturgy, and that the Covenant should be burned by the hangman in
Palace Yard. An act was passed, which not only acknowledged the power
of the sword to be solely in the King, but declared that in no extremity
whatever could the two Houses be justified in withstanding him by force.
Another act was passed which required every officer of a corporation to
receive the Eucharist according to the rites of the Church of England,
and to swear that he held resistance to the King's authority to be in
all cases unlawful. A few hotheaded men wished to bring in a bill, which
should at once annul all the statutes passed by the Long Parliament,
and should restore the Star Chamber and the High Commission; but the
reaction, violent as it was, did not proceed quite to this length. It
still continued to be the law that a Parliament should be held every
three years: but the stringent clauses which directed the returning
officers to proceed to election at the proper time, even without the
royal writ, were repealed. The Bishops were restored to their seats in
the Upper House. The old ecclesiastical polity and the old Liturgy were
revived without any modification which had any tendency to conciliate
even the most reasonable Presbyterians. Episcopal ordination was now,
for the first time, made an indispensable qualification for church
preferment. About two thousand ministers of religion, whose conscience
did not suffer them to conform, were driven from their benefices in one
day. The dominant party exultingly reminded the sufferers that the Long
Parliament, when at the height of power, had turned out a still greater
number of Royalist divines. The reproach was but too well founded: but
the Long Parliament had at least allowed to the divines whom it ejected
a provision sufficient to keep them from starving; and this example the
Cavaliers, intoxicated with animosity, had not the justice and humanity
to follow.

Then came penal statutes against Nonconformists, statutes for which
precedents might too easily be found in the Puritan legislation, but to
which the King could not give his assent without a breach of promises
publicly made, in the most important crisis of his life, to those on
whom his fate depended. The Presbyterians, in extreme distress and
terror, fled to the foot of the throne, and pleaded their recent
services and the royal faith solemnly and repeatedly plighted. The King
wavered. He could not deny his own hand and seal. He could not but be
conscious that he owed much to the petitioners. He was little in the
habit of resisting importunate solicitation. His temper was not that of
a persecutor. He disliked the Puritans indeed; but in him dislike was a
languid feeling, very little resembling the energetic hatred which had
burned in the heart of Laud. He was, moreover, partial to the Roman
Catholic religion; and he knew that it would be impossible to grant
liberty of worship to the professors of that religion without extending
the same indulgence to Protestant dissenters. He therefore made a feeble
attempt to restrain the intolerant zeal of the House of Commons; but
that House was under the influence of far deeper convictions and far
stronger passions than his own. After a faint struggle he yielded, and
passed, with the show of alacrity, a series of odious acts against
the separatists. It was made a crime to attend a dissenting place of
worship. A single justice of the peace might convict without a jury, and
might, for the third offence, pass sentence of transportation beyond sea
for seven years. With refined cruelty it was provided that the offender
should not be transported to New England, where he was likely to find
sympathising friends. If he returned to his own country before the
expiration of his term of exile, he was liable to capital punishment.
A new and most unreasonable test was imposed on divines who had been
deprived of their benefices for nonconformity; and all who refused to
take that test were prohibited from coming within five miles of any town
which was governed by a corporation, of any town which was represented
in Parliament, or of any town where they had themselves resided as
ministers. The magistrates, by whom these rigorous statutes were to
be enforced, were in general men inflamed by party spirit and by the
remembrance of wrongs suffered in the time of the commonwealth. The
gaols were therefore soon crowded with dissenters, and, among the
sufferers, were some of whose genius and virtue any Christian society
might well be proud.

The Church of England was not ungrateful for the protection which she
received from the government. From the first day of her existence, she
had been attached to monarchy. But, during the quarter of a century
which followed the Restoration, her zeal for royal authority and
hereditary right passed all bounds. She had suffered with the House of
Stuart. She had been restored with that House. She was connected with
it by common interests, friendships, and enmities. It seemed impossible
that a day could ever come when the ties which bound her to the children
of her august martyr would be sundered, and when the loyalty in which
she gloried would cease to be a pleasing and profitable duty. She
accordingly magnified in fulsome phrase that prerogative which was
constantly employed to defend and to aggrandise her, and reprobated,
much at her ease, the depravity of those whom oppression, from which
she was exempt, had goaded to rebellion. Her favourite theme was
the doctrine of non-resistance. That doctrine she taught without any
qualification, and followed out to all its extreme consequences. Her
disciples were never weary of repeating that in no conceivable case, not
even if England were cursed with a King resembling Busiris or Phalaris,
with a King who, in defiance of law, and without the presence of
justice, should daily doom hundreds of innocent victims to torture
and death, would all the Estates of the realm united be justified in
withstanding his tyranny by physical force. Happily the principles of
human nature afford abundant security that such theories will never be
more than theories. The day of trial came; and the very men who had most
loudly and most sincerely professed this extravagant loyalty were, in
every county of England arrayed in arms against the throne.

Property all over the kingdom was now again changing hands. The national
sales, not having been confirmed by Act of Parliament, were regarded by
the tribunals as nullities. The bishops, the deans, the chapters, the
Royalist nobility and gentry, reentered on their confiscated estates,
and ejected even purchasers who had given fair prices. The losses which
the Cavaliers had sustained during the ascendency of their opponents
were thus in part repaired; but in part only. All actions for mesne
profits were effectually barred by the general amnesty; and the
numerous Royalists, who, in order to discharge fines imposed by the Long
Parliament, or in order to purchase the favour of powerful Roundheads,
had sold lands for much less than the real value, were not relieved from
the legal consequences of their own acts.

While these changes were in progress, a change still more important took
place in the morals and manners of the community. Those passions
and tastes which, under the rule of the Puritans, had been sternly
repressed, and, if gratified at all, had been gratified by stealth,
broke forth with ungovernable violence as soon as the check was
withdrawn. Men flew to frivolous amusements and to criminal pleasures
with the greediness which long and enforced abstinence naturally
produces. Little restraint was imposed by public opinion. For the
nation, nauseated with cant, suspicious of all pretensions to sanctity
and still smarting from the recent tyranny of rulers austere in life and
powerful in prayer, looked for a time with complacency on the softer and
gayer vices. Still less restraint was imposed by the government.
Indeed there was no excess which was not encouraged by the ostentatious
profligacy of the King and of his favourite courtiers. A few counsellors
of Charles the First, who were now no longer young, retained the
decorous gravity which had been thirty years before in fashion at
Whitehall. Such were Clarendon himself, and his friends, Thomas
Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, Lord Treasurer, and James Butler, Duke
of Ormond, who, having through many vicissitudes struggled gallantly
for the royal cause in Ireland, now governed that kingdom as Lord
Lieutenant. But neither the memory of the services of these men, nor
their great power in the state, could protect them from the sarcasms
which modish vice loves to dart at obsolete virtue. The praise of
politeness and vivacity could now scarcely be obtained except by some
violation of decorum. Talents great and various assisted to spread the
contagion. Ethical philosophy had recently taken a form well suited
to please a generation equally devoted to monarchy and to vice. Thomas
Hobbes had, in language more precise and luminous than has ever been
employed by any other metaphysical writer, maintained that the will of
the prince was the standard of right and wrong, and that every subject
ought to be ready to profess Popery, Mahometanism, or Paganism, at the
royal command. Thousands who were incompetent to appreciate what was
really valuable in his speculations, eagerly welcomed a theory which,
while it exalted the kingly office, relaxed the obligations of morality,
and degraded religion into a mere affair of state. Hobbism soon became
an almost essential part of the character of the fine gentleman. All
the lighter kinds of literature were deeply tainted by the prevailing
licentiousness. Poetry stooped to be the pandar of every low desire.
Ridicule, instead of putting guilt and error to the blush, turned her
formidable shafts against innocence and truth. The restored Church
contended indeed against the prevailing immorality, but contended
feebly, and with half a heart. It was necessary to the decorum of
her character that she should admonish her erring children: but her
admonitions were given in a somewhat perfunctory manner. Her attention
was elsewhere engaged. Her whole soul was in the work of crushing the
Puritans, and of teaching her disciples to give unto Caesar the things
which were Caesar's. She had been pillaged and oppressed by the party
which preached an austere morality. She had been restored to opulence
and honour by libertines. Little as the men of mirth and fashion were
disposed to shape their lives according to her precepts, they were yet
ready to fight knee deep in blood for her cathedrals and places, for
every line of her rubric and every thread of her vestments. If the
debauched Cavalier haunted brothels and gambling houses, he at least
avoided conventicles. If he never spoke without uttering ribaldry and
blasphemy, he made some amends by his eagerness to send Baxter and Howe
to gaol for preaching and praying. Thus the clergy, for a time, made war
on schism with so much vigour that they had little leisure to make war
on vice. The ribaldry of Etherege and Wycherley was, in the presence and
under the special sanction of the head of the Church, publicly recited
by female lips in female ears, while the author of the Pilgrim's
Progress languished in a dungeon for the crime of proclaiming the gospel
to the poor. It is an unquestionable and a most instructive fact that
the years during which the political power of the Anglican hierarchy was
in the zenith were precisely the years during which national virtue was
at the lowest point.

Scarcely any rank or profession escaped the infection of the prevailing
immorality; but those persons who made politics their business were
perhaps the most corrupt part of the corrupt society. For they were
exposed, not only to the same noxious influences which affected the
nation generally, but also to a taint of a peculiar and of a most
malignant kind. Their character had been formed amidst frequent and
violent revolutions and counterrevolutions. In the course of a few
years they had seen the ecclesiastical and civil polity of their country
repeatedly changed. They had seen an Episcopal Church persecuting
Puritans, a Puritan Church persecuting Episcopalians, and an Episcopal
Church persecuting Puritans again. They had seen hereditary monarchy
abolished and restored. They had seen the Long Parliament thrice supreme
in the state, and thrice dissolved amidst the curses and laughter of
millions. They had seen a new dynasty rapidly rising to the height of
power and glory, and then on a sudden hurled down from the chair of
state without a struggle. They had seen a new representative system
devised, tried and abandoned.