Read Ebook: Constitutional History of England Henry VII to George II. Volume 2 of 3 by Hallam Henry

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ainst Glamorgan's presumption in concluding such a treaty, and committed him to prison on a charge of treason. He produced two commissions from the king, secretly granted without any seal or the knowledge of any minister, containing the fullest powers to treat with the Irish, and promising to fulfil any conditions into which he should enter. The king, informed of this, disavowed Glamorgan; and asserted in a letter to the parliament that he had merely a commission to raise men for his service, but no power to treat of anything else, without the privity of the lord lieutenant, much less to capitulate anything concerning religion or any property belonging either to church or laity. Glamorgan however was soon released, and lost no portion of the king's or his family's favour.

This transaction has been the subject of much historical controversy. The enemies of Charles, both in his own and later ages, have considered it as a proof of his indifference at least to the protestant religion, and of his readiness to accept the assistance of Irish rebels on any conditions. His advocates for a long time denied the authenticity of Glamorgan's commissions. But Dr. Birch demonstrated that they were genuine; and, if his dissertation could have left any doubt, later evidence might be adduced in confirmation. Hume, in a very artful and very unfair statement, admitting the authenticity of these instruments, endeavours to show that they were never intended to give Glamorgan any power to treat without Ormond's approbation. But they are worded in the most unconditional manner, without any reference to Ormond. No common reader can think them consistent with the king's story. I do not, however, impute to him any intention of ratifying the terms of Glamorgan's treaty. His want of faith was not to the protestant, but to the catholic. Upon weighing the whole of the evidence, it appears to me that he purposely gave Glamorgan, a sanguine and injudicious man, whom he could easily disown, so ample a commission as might remove the distrust that the Irish were likely to entertain of a negotiation wherein Ormond should be concerned; while by a certain latitude in the style of the instrument, and by his own letters to the lord lieutenant about Glamorgan's errand, he left it open to assert, in case of necessity, that it was never intended to exclude the former's privity and sanction. Charles had unhappily long been in the habit of perverting his natural acuteness to the mean subterfuges of equivocal language.

This party was still so far predominant, having the strong support of the city of London and its corporation, with almost all the peers who remained in their house, that the independents and other sectaries neither opposed this ordinance for its temporary establishment, nor sought anything farther than a toleration for their own worship. The question, as Neal well observes, was not between presbytery and independency, but between presbytery with a toleration, and without one. Not merely from their own exclusive bigotry, but from a political alarm by no means ungrounded, the presbyterians stood firmly against all liberty of conscience. But in this again they could not influence the House of Commons to suppress the sectaries, though no open declaration in favour of indulgence was as yet made. It is still the boast of the independents that they first brought forward the great principles of religious toleration which had been confined to a few philosophical minds; to Sir Thomas More, in those days of his better judgment when he planned his republic of Utopia, to Thuanus, or L'Hospital. Such principles are indeed naturally congenial to the persecuted; and it is by the alternate oppression of so many different sects, that they have now obtained their universal reception. But the independents also assert that they first maintained them while in power; a far higher praise, which however can only be allowed them by comparison. Without invidiously glancing at their early conduct in New England, it must be admitted that the continuance of the penal laws against catholics, the prohibition of the episcopalian worship, and the punishment of one or two anti-trinitarians under Cromwell, are proofs that the tolerant principle had not yet acquired perfect vigour. If the independent sectaries were its earliest advocates, it was the Anglican writers, the latitudinarian school of Chillingworth, Hales, Taylor, Locke, and Hoadley, that rendered it victorious.

The king, as I have said, and his party cherished too sanguine hopes from the disunion of their opponents. Though warned of it by the parliamentary commissioners at Uxbridge, though in fact it was quite notorious and undisguised, they seem never to have comprehended that many active spirits looked to the entire subversion of the monarchy. The king in particular was haunted by a prejudice, natural to his obstinate and undiscerning mind, that he was necessary to the settlement of the nation; so that, if he remained firm, the whole parliament and army must be at his feet. Yet during the negotiations at Newcastle there was daily an imminent danger that the majority of parliament, irritated by his delays, would come to some vote excluding him from the throne. The Scots presbyterians, whatever we may think of their behaviour, were sincerely attached, if not by loyal affection, yet by national pride, to the blood of their ancient kings. They thought and spoke of Charles as of a headstrong child, to be restrained and chastised, but never cast off. But in England he had absolutely no friends among the prevailing party; many there were who thought monarchy best for the nation, but none who cared for the king.

This schism nevertheless between the parliament and the army was at least in appearance very desirable for Charles, and seemed to afford him an opportunity which a discreet prince might improve to great advantage, though it unfortunately deluded him with chimerical expectations. At the conclusion of the war, which the useless obstinacy of the royalists had protracted till the beginning of 1647, the Commons began to take measures for breaking the force of their remaining enemy. They resolved to disband a part of the army, and to send the rest into Ireland. They formed schemes for getting rid of Cromwell, and even made some demur about continuing Fairfax in command. But in all measures that exact promptitude and energy, treachery and timidity are apt to enfeeble the resolutions of a popular assembly. Their demonstrations of enmity were however so alarming to the army, who knew themselves disliked by the people, and dependent for their pay on the parliament, that as early as April, 1647, an overture was secretly made to the king, that they would replace him in his power and dignity. He cautiously answered, that he would not involve the kingdom in a fresh war, but should ever feel the strongest sense of this offer from the army. Whether they were discontented at the coldness of this reply, or, as is more probable, the offer had only proceeded from a minority of the officers, no further overture was made, till not long afterwards the bold manoeuvre of Joyce had placed the king's person in their power.

Those who have once bowed their knee to force, must expect that force will be for ever their master. In a few weeks after this submission of the Commons to the army, they were insulted by an unruly, tumultuous mob of apprentices, engaged in the presbyterian politics of the city, who compelled them by actual violence to rescind several of their late votes. Trampled upon by either side, the two speakers, several peers, and a great number of the lower house, deemed it somewhat less ignominious, and certainly more politic, to throw themselves on the protection of the army. They were accordingly soon restored to their places, at the price of a more complete and irretrievable subjection to the military power than they had already undergone. Though the presbyterians maintained a pertinacious resistance within the walls of the house, it was evident that the real power of command was gone from them, and that Cromwell with the army must either become arbiters between the king and parliament, or crush the remaining authority of both.

It is, however, probable, from the king's extreme tenaciousness of his prerogative, that these were the conditions that he found it most difficult to endure. Having obtained, through Sir John Berkley, a sight of the propositions before they were openly made, he expressed much displeasure; and said that, if the army were inclined to close with him, they would never have demanded such hard terms. He seems to have principally objected, at least in words, to the exception of seven unnamed persons from pardon, to the exclusion of his party from the next parliament, and to the want of any articles in favour of the church. Berkley endeavoured to show him that it was not likely that the army, if meaning sincerely, should ask less than this. But the king, still tampering with the Scots, and keeping his eyes fixed on the city and parliament, at that moment came to an open breach with the army, disdainfully refused the propositions when publicly tendered to him, with such expressions of misplaced resentment and preposterous confidence as convinced the officers that they could neither conciliate nor trust him. This unexpected haughtiness lost him all chance with those proud and republican spirits; and, as they succeeded about the same time in bridling the presbyterian party in parliament, there seemed no necessity for an agreement with the king, and their former determinations of altering the frame of government returned with more revengeful fury against his person.

Yet in the midst of this peril and seeming abandonment, his affairs were really less desperate than they had been; and a few rays of light broke for a time through the clouds that enveloped him. From the hour that the Scots delivered him up at Newcastle, they seem to have felt the discredit of such an action, and longed for the opportunity of redeeming their public name. They perceived more and more that a well-disciplined army, under a subtle chief inveterately hostile to them, were rapidly becoming masters of England. Instead of that covenanted alliance, that unity in church and state they had expected, they were to look for all the jealousy and dissension that a complete discordance in civil and spiritual polity could inspire. Their commissioners, therefore, in England, Lanerk, always a moderate royalist, and Lauderdale, a warm presbyterian, had kept up a secret intercourse with the king at Hampton Court. After his detention at Carisbrook, they openly declared themselves against the four bills proposed by the English parliament; and at length concluded a private treaty with him, by which, on certain terms quite as favourable as he could justly expect, they bound themselves to enter England with an army, in order to restore him to his freedom and dignity. This invasion was to be combined with risings in various parts of the country; the presbyterian and royalist, though still retaining much of animosity towards each other, concurring at least in abhorrence of military usurpation; and the common people having very generally returned to that affectionate respect for the king's person, which sympathy for his sufferings, and a sense how little they had been gainers by the change of government, must naturally have excited.

There can be no more erroneous opinion than that of such as believe that the desire of overturning the monarchy produced the civil war, rather than that the civil war brought on the former. In a peaceful and ancient kingdom like England, the thought of change could not spontaneously arise. A very few speculative men, by the study of antiquity, or by observation of the prosperity of Venice and Holland, might be led to an abstract preference of republican politics; some fanatics might aspire to a Jewish theocracy; but at the meeting of the Long Parliament, we have not the slightest cause to suppose that any party, or any number of persons among its members, had formed what must then have appeared so extravagant a conception. The insuperable distrust of the king's designs, the irritation excited by the sufferings of the war, the impracticability, which every attempt at negotiation displayed, of obtaining his acquiescence to terms deemed indispensable, gradually created a powerful faction, whose chief bond of union was a determination to set him aside. What further scheme they had planned is uncertain; none probably in which any number were agreed: some looked to the Prince of Wales, others perhaps, at one time, to the elector palatine; but necessity itself must have suggested to many the idea of a republican settlement. In the new-modelled army of 1645, composed of independents and enthusiasts of every denomination, a fervid eagerness for changes in the civil polity, as well as in religion, was soon found to predominate. Not checked, like the two houses, by attachment to forms, and by the influence of lawyers, they launched forth into varied projects of reform, sometimes judicious, or at least plausible, sometimes wildly fanatical. They reckoned the king a tyrant whom, as they might fight against, they might also put to death, and whom it were folly to provoke, if he were again to become their master. Elated with their victories, they began already in imagination to carve out the kingdom for themselves; and remembered that saying so congenial to a revolutionary army, that the first of monarchs was a successful leader, the first of nobles were his followers.

We are not certainly to conclude that all who, in 1648, had made up their minds against the king's restoration, were equally averse to all regal government. The Prince of Wales had taken so active, and, for a moment, so successful a share in the war of that year, that his father's enemies were become his own. Meetings however were held, where the military and parliamentary chiefs discussed the schemes of raising the Duke of York, or his younger brother the Duke of Glocester, to the throne. Cromwell especially wavered, or pretended to waver, as to the settlement of the nation; nor is there any evidence, so far as I know, that he had ever professed himself adverse to monarchy, till, dexterously mounting on the wave which he could not stem, he led on those zealots who had resolved to celebrate the inauguration of their new commonwealth with the blood of a victim king.

A very small number among those who sat in this strange tribunal upon Charles the First were undoubtedly capable of taking statesman-like views of the interests of their party, and might consider his death a politic expedient for consolidating the new settlement. It seemed to involve the army, which had openly abetted the act, and even the nation by its passive consent, in such inexpiable guilt towards the royal family, that neither common prudence nor a sense of shame would permit them to suffer its restoration. But by far the greater part of the regicides such considerations were either overlooked or kept in the background. Their more powerful motive was that fierce fanatical hatred of the king, the natural fruit of long civil dissension, inflamed by preachers more dark and sanguinary than those they addressed, and by a perverted study of the Jewish scriptures. They had been wrought to believe, not that his execution would be justified by state-necessity or any such feeble grounds of human reasoning, but that it was a bounden duty, which with a safe conscience they could not neglect. Such was the persuasion of Ludlow and Hutchinson, the most respectable names among the regicides; both of them free from all suspicion of interestedness or hypocrisy, and less intoxicated than the rest by fanaticism. "I was fully persuaded," says the former, "that an accommodation with the king was unsafe to the people of England, and unjust and wicked in the nature of it. The former, besides that it was obvious to all men, the king himself had proved, by the duplicity of his dealing with the parliament, which manifestly appeared in his own papers, taken at the battle of Naseby and elsewhere. Of the latter I was convinced by the express words of God's law; 'that blood defileth the land, and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.' And therefore I could not consent to leave the guilt of so much blood on the nation, and thereby to draw down the just vengeance of God upon us all, when it was most evident that the war had been occasioned by the invasion of our rights and open breach of our laws and constitution on the king's part." "As for Mr. Hutchinson," says his high-souled consort, "although he was very much confirmed in his judgment concerning the cause, yet being here called to an extraordinary action, whereof many were of several minds, he addressed himself to God by prayer, desiring the Lord, that, if through any human frailty, he were led into any error or false opinion in those great transactions, he would open his eyes, and not suffer him to proceed, but that he would confirm his spirit in the truth, and lead him by a right-enlightened conscience; and finding no check, but a confirmation in his conscience, that it was his duty to act as he did, he, upon serious debate, both privately and in his addresses to God, and in conferences with conscientious, upright, unbiassed persons, proceeded to sign the sentence against the king. Although he did not then believe but it might one day come to be again disputed among men, yet both he and others thought they could not refuse it without giving up the people of God, whom they had led forth and engaged themselves unto by the oath of God, into the hands of God's and their enemies; and therefore he cast himself upon God's protection, acting according to the dictates of a conscience which he had sought the Lord to guide; and accordingly the Lord did signalise his favour afterward to him."

But, whether we may think this war to have originated in the king's or the parliament's aggression, it is still evident that the former had a fair case with the nation, a cause which it was no plain violation of justice to defend. He was supported by the greater part of the Peers, by full one-third of the Commons, by the principal body of the gentry, and a large proportion of other classes. If his adherents did not form, as I think they did not, the majority of the people, they were at least more numerous, beyond comparison, than those who demanded or approved of his death. The steady deliberate perseverance of so considerable a body in any cause takes away the right of punishment from the conquerors, beyond what their own safety or reasonable indemnification may require. The vanquished are to be judged by the rules of national, not of municipal, law. Hence, if Charles, after having by a course of victories or the defection of the people prostrated all opposition, had abused his triumph by the execution of Essex or Hampden, Fairfax or Cromwell, I think that later ages would have disapproved of their deaths as positively, though not quite as vehemently, as they have of his own. The line is not easily drawn, in abstract reasoning, between the treason which is justly punished, and the social schism which is beyond the proper boundaries of law; but the civil war of England seems plainly to fall within the latter description. These objections strike me as unanswerable, even if the trial of Charles had been sanctioned by the voice of the nation through its legitimate representatives, or at least such a fair and full convention as might, in great necessity, supply the place of lawful authority. But it was, as we all know, the act of a bold but very small minority, who having forcibly expelled their colleagues from parliament, had usurped, under the protection of a military force, that power which all England reckoned illegal. I cannot perceive what there was in the imagined solemnity of this proceeding, in that insolent mockery of the forms of justice, accompanied by all unfairness and inhumanity in its circumstances, which can alleviate the guilt of the transaction; and if it be alleged that many of the regicides were firmly persuaded in their consciences of the right and duty of condemning the king, we may surely remember that private murderers have often had the same apology.

The turn of his mind was rather peculiar, and laid him open with some justice to very opposite censures--for an extreme obstinacy in retaining his opinion, and for an excessive facility in adopting that of others. But the apparent incongruity ceases, when we observe that he was tenacious of ends, and irresolute as to means; better fitted to reason than to act; never swerving from a few main principles, but diffident of his own judgment in its application to the course of affairs. His chief talent was an acuteness in dispute; a talent not usually much exercised by kings, but which the strange events of his life called into action. He had, unfortunately for himself, gone into the study most fashionable in that age, of polemical theology; and, though not at all learned, had read enough of the English divines to maintain their side of the current controversies with much dexterity. But this unkingly talent was a poor compensation for the continual mistakes of his judgment in the art of government and the conduct of his affairs.

PART II

The House of Lords, still less able than the Crown to withstand the inroads of democracy, fell by a vote of the Commons at the same time. It had continued during the whole progress of the war to keep up as much dignity as the state of affairs would permit; tenacious of small privileges, and offering much temporary opposition in higher matters, though always receding in the end from a contention wherein it could not be successful. The Commons, in return, gave them respectful language, and discountenanced the rude innovators who talked against the rights of the peerage. They voted, on occasion of some rumours, that they held themselves obliged, by the fundamental laws of the kingdom and their covenant, to preserve the peerage with the rights and privileges belonging to the House of Peers, equally with their own. Yet this was with a secret reserve that the Lords should be of the same mind as themselves. For, the upper house having resented some words dropped from Sir John Evelyn at a conference concerning the removal of the king to Warwick Castle, importing that the Commons might be compelled to act without them, the Commons vindicating their member as if his words did not bear that interpretation, yet added, in the same breath, a plain hint that it was not beyond their own views of what might be done; "hoping that their lordships did not intend by their inference upon the words, even in the sense they took the same, so to bind up this house to one way of proceeding as that in no case whatsoever, though never so extraordinary, though never so much importing the honour and interest of the kingdom, the Commons of England might not do their duty, for the good and safety of the kingdom, in such a way as they may, if they cannot do it in such a way as they would and most desire."

After the violent seclusion of the constitutional party from the House of Commons, on the 6th of December 1648, very few, not generally more than five, peers continued to meet. Their number was suddenly increased to twelve on the 2nd of January; when the vote of the Commons that it is high treason in the King of England for the time being to levy war against parliament, and the ordinance constituting the high court of justice, were sent up for their concurrence. These were unanimously rejected with more spirit than some, at least, of their number might be expected to display. Yet, as if apprehensive of giving too much umbrage, they voted at their next meeting to prepare an ordinance, making it treasonable for any future king of England to levy war against the parliament--a measure quite as unconstitutional as that they had rejected. They continued to linger on the verge of annihilation during the month, making petty orders about writs of error, from four to six being present: they even met on the 30th of January. On the 1st of February, six peers forming the house, it was moved, "that they would take into consideration the settlement of the government of England and Ireland, in this present conjuncture of things upon the death of the king;" and ordered that these Lords following be appointed to join with a proportionable number of the House of Commons for that purpose. Soon after, the speaker acquainted the house that he had that morning received a letter from the Earl of Northumberland, with a paper enclosed, of very great concernment; and for the present the house ordered that it should be sealed up with the speaker's seal. This probably related to the impending dissolution of their house; for they found next day that their messengers sent to the Commons had not been admitted. They persisted, however, in meeting till the 6th, when they made a trifling order, and adjourned "till ten o'clock to-morrow." That morrow was the 25th of April 1660. For the Commons, having the same day rejected, by a majority of forty-four to twenty-nine, a motion that they would take the advice of the House of Lords in the exercise of the legislative power, resolved that the House of Peers was useless and dangerous, and ought to be abolished. It should be noticed that there was no intention of taking away the dignity of peerage; the Lords, throughout the whole duration of the commonwealth, retained their titles, not only in common usage, but in all legal and parliamentary documents. The Earl of Pembroke, basest among the base, condescended to sit in the House of Commons as knight for the county of Berks; and was received, notwithstanding his proverbial meanness and stupidity, with such excessive honour as displayed the character of those low-minded upstarts, who formed a sufficiently numerous portion of the house to give their tone to its proceedings.

Thus by military force, with the approbation of an inconceivably small proportion of the people, the king was put to death; the ancient fundamental laws were overthrown; and a mutilated House of Commons, wherein very seldom more than seventy or eighty sat, was invested with the supreme authority. So little countenance had these late proceedings even from those who seemed of the ruling faction, that, when the executive council of state, consisting of forty-one, had been nominated, and a test was proposed to them, declaring their approbation of all that had been done about the king and the kingly office, and about the House of Lords, only nineteen would subscribe it, though there were fourteen regicides on the list. It was agreed at length, that they should subscribe it only as to the future proceedings of the Commons. With such dissatisfaction at head-quarters, there was little to hope from the body of the nation. Hence, when an engagement was tendered to all civil officers and beneficed clergy, containing only a promise to live faithful to the commonwealth, as it was established without a king or House of Lords , it was taken with infinite reluctance, and, in fact, refused by very many; the presbyterian ministers especially showing a determined averseness to the new republican organisation.

This, however, was established far beyond the control of any national sentiment. Thirty thousand veteran soldiers guaranteed the mock parliament they had permitted to reign. The sectaries, a numerous body, and still more active than numerous, possessed, under the name of committees for various purposes appointed by the House of Commons, the principal local authorities, and restrained by a vigilant scrutiny the murmurs of a disaffected majority. Love, an eminent presbyterian minister, lost his head for a conspiracy, by the sentence of a high court of justice, a tribunal that superseded trial by jury. His death struck horror and consternation into that arrogant priesthood, who had begun to fancy themselves almost beyond the scope of criminal law. The cavaliers were prostrate in the dust; and, anxious to retrieve something from the wreck of their long sequestered estates, had generally little appetite to embark afresh in a hopeless cause; besides that the mutual animosities between their party and the presbyterians were still too irreconcilable to admit of any sincere co-operation. Hence, neither made any considerable effort in behalf of Charles on his march, or rather flight, into England; a measure, indeed, too palpably desperate for prudent men who had learned the strength of their adversaries; and the great victory of Worcester consummated the triumph of the infant commonwealth, or rather of its future master.

These projects of usurpation could not deceive the watchfulness of those whom Cromwell pretended to serve. He had on several occasions thrown off enough of his habitual dissimulation to show the commonwealth's men that he was theirs only by accident, with none of their fondness for republican polity.

It can admit of no doubt that the despotism of a wise man is more tolerable than that of political or religious fanatics; and it rarely happens that there is any better remedy in revolutions which have given the latter an ascendant. Cromwell's assumption, therefore, of the title of Protector was a necessary and wholesome usurpation, however he may have caused the necessity; it secured the nation from the mischievous lunacy of the anabaptists, and from the more cool-blooded tyranny of that little oligarchy which arrogated to itself the name of commonwealth's men. Though a gross and glaring evidence of the omnipotence of the army, the instrument under which he took his title, accorded to him no unnecessary executive authority. The sovereignty still resided in the parliament; he had no negative voice on their laws. Until the meeting of the next parliament, a power was given him of making temporary ordinances; but this was not, as Hume, on the authority of Clarendon and Warwick, has supposed, and as his conduct, if that were any proof of the law, might lead us to infer, designed to exist in future intervals of the legislature. It would be scarcely worth while, however, to pay much attention to a form of government which was so little regarded, except as it marks the jealousy of royal power, which those most attached to Cromwell, and least capable of any proper notions of liberty, continued to entertain.

In the ascent of this bold usurper to greatness, he had successively employed and thrown away several of the powerful factions who distracted the nation. He had encouraged the levellers and persecuted them; he had flattered the long parliament and betrayed it; he had made use of the sectaries to crush the commonwealth; he had spurned the sectaries in his last advance to power. These, with the royalists and the presbyterians, forming, in effect, the whole people, though too disunited for such a coalition as must have overthrown him, were the perpetual, irreconcilable enemies of his administration. Master of his army, which he well knew how to manage, surrounded by a few deep and experienced counsellors, furnished by his spies with the completest intelligence of all designs against him, he had no great cause of alarm from open resistance.

In the year 1654, the royalist intrigues in England began to grow more active and formidable through the accession of many discontented republicans. Though there could be no coalition, properly speaking, between such irreconcilable factions, they came into a sort of tacit agreement, as is not unusual, to act in concert for the only purpose they entertained alike, the destruction of their common enemy. Major Wildman, a name not very familiar to the general reader, but which occurs perpetually, for almost half a century, when we look into more secret history, one of those dark and restless spirits who delight in the deep game of conspiracy against every government, seems to have been the first mover of this unnatural combination. He had been early engaged in the schemes of the levellers, and was exposed to the jealous observation of the ruling powers. It appears most probable that his views were to establish a commonwealth, and to make the royalists his dupes. In his correspondence however with Brussels, he engaged to restore the king. Both parties were to rise in arms against the new tyranny; and the nation's temper was tried by clandestine intrigues in almost every county. Greater reliance however was placed on the project of assassinating Cromwell. Neither party were by any means scrupulous on this score: if we have not positive evidence of Charles's concurrence in this scheme, it would be preposterous to suppose that he would have been withheld by any moral hesitation. It is frequently mentioned without any disapprobation by Clarendon in his private letters; and, as the royalists certainly justified the murders of Ascham and Dorislaus, they could not in common sense or consistency have scrupled one so incomparably more capable of defence. A Mr. Gerard suffered death for one of these plots to kill Cromwell; justly sentenced, though by an illegal tribunal.

Though it cannot be said that such an interference with the privileges of advocates or the integrity of judges was without precedents in the times of the Stuarts, yet it had never been done in so public or shameless a manner. Several other instances wherein the usurper diverted justice from its course, or violated the known securities of Englishmen, will be found in most general histories; not to dwell on that most flagrant of all, the erection of his high court of justice, by which Gerard and Vowel in 1654, Slingsby and Hewit in 1658, were brought to the scaffold. I cannot therefore agree in the praises which have been showered upon Cromwell for the just administration of the laws under his dominion. That, between party and party, the ordinary civil rights of men were fairly dealt with, is no extraordinary praise; and it may be admitted that he filled the benches of justice with able lawyers, though not so considerable as those of the reign of Charles the Second; but it is manifest that, so far as his own authority was concerned, no hereditary despot, proud in the crimes of a hundred ancestors, could more have spurned at every limitation than this soldier of a commonwealth.

The scheme however of founding a new royal line failed of accomplishment, as is well known, through his own caution, which deterred him from encountering the decided opposition of his army. Some of his contemporaries seem to have deemed this abandonment, or more properly suspension, of so splendid a design rather derogatory to his firmness. But few men were better judges than Cromwell of what might be achieved by daring. It is certainly not impossible that, by arresting Lambert, Whalley, and some other generals, he might have crushed for the moment any tendency to open resistance. But the experiment would have been infinitely hazardous. He had gone too far in the path of violence to recover the high road of law by any short cut. King or protector, he must have intimidated every parliament, or sunk under its encroachments. A new-modelled army might have served his turn; but there would have been great difficulties in its formation. It had from the beginning been the misfortune of his government that it rested on a basis too narrow for its safety. For two years he had reigned with no support but the independent sectaries and the army. The army or its commanders becoming odious to the people, he had sacrificed them to the hope of popularity, by abolishing the civil prefectures of the major-generals, and permitting a bill for again decimating the royalists to be thrown out of the house. Their disgust and resentment, excited by an artful intriguer, who aspired at least to the succession of the protectorship, found scope in the new project of monarchy, naturally obnoxious to the prejudices of true fanatics, and who still fancied themselves to have contended for a republican liberty. We find that even Fleetwood, allied by marriage to Cromwell, and not involved in the discontent of the major-generals, in all the sincerity of his clouded understanding, revolted from the invidious title, and would have retired from service had it been assumed. There seems therefore reason to think that Cromwell's refusal of the crown was an inevitable mortification. But he undoubtedly did not lose sight of the object for the short remainder of his life.

The zealous opponents of royalty could not be insensible that they had seen it revive in everything except a title, which was not likely to remain long behind. It was too late however to oppose the first magistrate's personal authority. But there remained one important point of contention, which the new constitution had not fully settled. It was therein provided that the parliament should consist of two houses; namely, the Commons, and what they always termed, with an awkward generality, the other house. This was to consist of not more than seventy, nor less than forty persons, to be nominated by the protector, and, as it stood at first, to be approved by the Commons. But before the close of the session, the court party prevailed so far as to procure the repeal of this last condition; and Cromwell accordingly issued writs of summons to persons of various parties, a few of the ancient peers, a few of his adversaries, whom he hoped to gain over, or at least to exclude from the Commons, and of course a majority of his steady adherents. To all these he gave the title of Lords; and in the next session their assembly denominated itself the Lords' house. This measure encountered considerable difficulty. The republican party, almost as much attached to that vote which had declared the House of Lords useless, as to that which had abolished the monarchy, and well aware of the intimate connection between the two, resisted the assumption of this aristocratic title, instead of that of the other house, which the petition and advice had sanctioned. The real peers feared to compromise their hereditary right by sitting in an assembly where the tenure was only during life; and disdained some of their colleagues, such as Pride and Hewson, low-born and insolent men, whom Cromwell had rather injudiciously bribed with this new nobility; though, with these few exceptions, his House of Lords was respectably composed. Hence, in the short session of January 1658, wherein the late excluded members were permitted to take their seats, so many difficulties were made about acknowledging the Lords' house by that denomination, that the protector hastily and angrily dissolved the parliament.

It is a singular part of Cromwell's system of policy, that he would neither reign with parliaments nor without them; impatient of an opposition which he was sure to experience, he still never seems to have meditated the attainment of a naked and avowed despotism. This was probably due to his observation of the ruinous consequences that Charles had brought on himself by that course, and his knowledge of the temper of the English, never content without the exterior forms of liberty, as well as to the suggestions of counsellors who were not destitute of concern for the laws. He had also his great design yet to accomplish, which could only be safely done under the sanction of a parliament. A very short time, accordingly, before his death, we find that he had not only resolved to meet once more the representatives of the nation, but was tampering with several of the leading officers to obtain their consent to an hereditary succession. The majority however of a council of nine, to whom he referred this suggestion, would only consent that the protector for the time being should have the power of nominating his successor; a vain attempt to escape from that regal form of government which they had been taught to abhor. But a sudden illness, of a nature seldom fatal except to a constitution already shattered by fatigue and anxiety, rendered abortive all these projects of Cromwell's ambition.

Notwithstanding this external splendour, which has deceived some of our own, and most foreign writers, it is evident that the submission of the people to Cromwell was far from peaceable or voluntary. His strong and skilful grasp kept down a nation of enemies that must naturally, to judge from their numbers and inveteracy, have overwhelmed him. It required a dexterous management to play with the army, and without the army he could not have existed as sovereign for a day. Yet it seems improbable that, had Cromwell lived, any insurrection or conspiracy, setting aside assassination, could have overthrown a possession so fenced by systematic vigilance, by experienced caution, by the respect and terror that belonged to his name. The royalist and republican intrigues had gone on for several years without intermission; but every part of their designs was open to him; and it appears that there was not courage or rather temerity sufficient to make any open demonstration of so prevalent a disaffection.

The most superficial observers cannot have overlooked the general resemblances in the fortunes and character of Cromwell, and of him who, more recently and upon an ampler theatre, has struck nations with wonder and awe. But the parallel may be traced more closely than perhaps has hitherto been remarked. Both raised to power by the only merit which a revolution leaves uncontroverted and untarnished, that of military achievements, in that reflux of public sentiment, when the fervid enthusiasm of democracy gives place to disgust at its excesses and a desire of firm government. The means of greatness the same to both, the extinction of a representative assembly, once national, but already mutilated by violence, and sunk by its submission to that illegal force into general contempt. In military science or the renown of their exploits, we cannot certainly rank Cromwell by the side of him, for whose genius and ambition all Europe seemed the appointed quarry; but it may be said that the former's exploits were as much above the level of his contemporaries, and more the fruits of an original uneducated capacity. In civil government, there can be no adequate parallel between one who had sucked only the dregs of a besotted fanaticism, and one to whom the stores of reason and philosophy were open. But it must here be added that Cromwell, far unlike his antitype, never showed any signs of a legislative mind, or any desire to fix his renown on that noblest basis, the amelioration of social institutions. Both were eminent masters of human nature, and played with inferior capacities in all the security of powerful minds. Though both, coming at the conclusion of a struggle for liberty, trampled upon her claims, and sometimes spoke disdainfully of her name, each knew how to associate the interests of those who had contended for her with his own ascendancy, and made himself the representative of a victorious revolution. Those who had too much philosophy or zeal for freedom to give way to popular admiration for these illustrious usurpers, were yet amused with the adulation that lawful princes showered on them, more gratuitously in one instance, with servile terror in the other. Both too repaid in some measure this homage of the pretended great by turning their ambition towards those honours and titles which they knew to be so little connected with high desert. A fallen race of monarchs, which had made way for the greatness of each, cherished hopes of restoration by their power till each, by an inexpiable act of blood, manifested his determination to make no compromise with that line. Both possessed a certain coarse good nature and affability that covered the want of conscience, honour, and humanity; quick in passion, but not vindictive, and averse to unnecessary crimes. Their fortunes in the conclusion of life were indeed very different; one forfeited the affections of his people, which the other, in the character at least of their master, had never possessed; one furnished a moral to Europe by the continuance of his success, the other by the prodigiousness of his fall. A fresh resemblance arose afterwards, when the restoration of those royal families, whom their ascendant had kept under, revived ancient animosities, and excited new ones; those who from love of democratical liberty had borne the most deadly hatred to the apostates who had betrayed it, recovering some affection to their memory, out of aversion to a common enemy. Our English republicans have, with some exceptions, displayed a sympathy for the name of Cromwell; and I need not observe how remarkably this holds good in the case of his mighty parallel.

This very difference however in the personal qualifications of the father and the son, procured the latter some friends whom the former had never been able to gain. Many of the presbyterian party began to see the finger of God, as they called it, in his peaceable accession, and to think they owed subjection to one who came in neither by regicide, nor hypocrisy, nor violence. Some cool-headed and sincere friends of liberty entertained similar opinions. Pierrepont, one of the wisest men in England, who had stood aloof from the protector's government till the scheme of restoring monarchy came into discussion, had great hopes, as a writer of high authority informs us, of settling the nation in the enjoyment of its liberties under the young man; who was "so flexible," says that writer, "to good counsels, that there was nothing desirable in a prince which might not have been hoped in him, but a great spirit and a just title; the first of which sometimes doth more hurt than good in a sovereign; the latter would have been supplied by the people's deserved approbation." Pierrepont believed that the restoration of the ancient family could not be effected without the ruin of the people's liberty, and of all who had been its champions; so that no royalist, he thought, who had any regard to his country, would attempt it: while this establishment of monarchy in Richard's person might reconcile that party, and compose all differences among men of weight and of zeal for the public good. He acted accordingly on those principles; and became, as well as his friend St. John, who had been discountenanced by Oliver, a steady supporter of the young protector's administration. These two, with Thurloe, Whitelock, Lord Broghill, and a very few more, formed a small phalanx of experienced counsellors around his unstable throne. And I must confess that their course of policy in sustaining Richard's government appears to me the most judicious that, in the actual circumstances, could have been adopted. Pregnant as the restoration of the exiled family was with incalculable dangers, the English monarchy would have revived with less lustre in the eyes of the vulgar, but with more security for peace and freedom, in the line of Cromwell. Time would have worn away the stains of ignoble birth and criminal usurpation; and the young man, whose misfortune has subjected him to rather an exaggerated charge of gross incapacity, would probably have reigned as well as most of those who are born in the purple.

But this termination was defeated by the combination of some who knew not what they wished, and of some who wished what they could never attain. The general officers who had been well content to make Cromwell the first of themselves, or greater than themselves by their own creation, had never forgiven his manifest design to reign over them as one of a superior order, and owing nothing to their pleasure. They had begun to cabal during his last illness. Though they did not oppose Richard's succession, they continued to hold meetings, not quite public, but exciting intense alarm in his council. As if disdaining the command of a clownish boy, they proposed that the station of lord general should be separated from that of protector, with the power over all commissions in the army, and conferred on Fleetwood; who, though his brother-in-law, was a certain instrument in their hands. The vain ambitious Lambert, aspiring, on the credit of some military reputation, to wield the sceptre of Cromwell, influenced this junto; while the commonwealth's party, some of whom were, or had been, in the army, drew over several of these ignorant and fanatical soldiers. Thurloe describes the posture of affairs in September and October, while all Europe was admiring the peaceable transmission of Oliver's power, as most alarming; and it may almost be said that Richard had already fallen when he was proclaimed the lord protector of England.

It is not in general difficult for an armed force to destroy a government; but something else than the sword is required to create one. The military conspirators were destitute of any leader whom they would acknowledge, or who had capacity to go through the civil labours of sovereignty; Lambert alone excepted, who was lying in wait for another occasion. They might have gone on with Richard, as a pageant of nominal authority. But their new allies, the commonwealth's men, insisted upon restoring the Long Parliament. It seemed now the policy, as much as duty, of the officers to obey that civil power they had set up. For to rule ostensibly was, as I have just observed, an impracticable scheme. But the contempt they felt for their pretended masters, and even a sort of necessity arising out of the blindness and passion of that little oligarchy, drove them to a step still more ruinous to their cause than that of deposing Richard, the expulsion once more of that assembly, now worn out and ridiculous in all men's eyes, yet seeming a sort of frail protection against mere anarchy, and the terror of the sword. Lambert, the chief actor in this last act of violence, and indeed many of the rest, might plead the right of self-defence. The prevailing faction in the parliament, led by Haslerig, a bold and headstrong man, perceived that, with very inferior pretensions, Lambert was aiming to tread in the steps of Cromwell; and, remembering their negligence of opportunities, as they thought, in permitting the one to overthrow them, fancied that they would anticipate the other. Their intemperate votes cashiering Lambert, Desborough, and other officers, brought on, as every man of more prudence than Haslerig must have foreseen, an immediate revolution that crushed once more their boasted commonwealth. They revived again a few months after, not by any exertion of the people, who hated alike both parties, in their behalf, but through the disunion of their real masters, the army, and vented the impotent and injudicious rage of a desperate faction on all who had not gone every length on their side, till scarce any man of eminence was left to muster under the standard of Haslerig and his little knot of associates.

The royalists in England, who played so deep a stake on the king's account, were not unnaturally desirous that he should risk something in the game, and continually pressed that either he or one of his brothers would land on the coast. His standard would become a rallying-point for the well-affected, and create such a demonstration of public sentiment as would overthrow the present unstable government. But Charles, not by nature of a chivalrous temper, shrunk from an enterprise which was certainly very hazardous, unless he could have obtained a greater assistance of troops from the Low Countries than was to be hoped. He was as little inclined to permit the Duke of York's engaging in it, on account of the differences that had existed between them, and his knowledge of an intrigue that was going forward in England, principally among the catholics, but with the mischievous talents of the Duke of Buckingham at its head, to set up the duke instead of himself. He gave, however, fair words to his party, and continued for some time on the French coast, as if waiting for his opportunity. It was in great measure, as I suspect, to rid himself of this importunity, that he set out on his long and very needless journey to the foot of the Pyrenees. Thither the two monarchs of France and Spain, wearied with twenty years of hostility without a cause and without a purpose, had sent their minister to conclude the celebrated treaty which bears the name of those mountains. Charles had long cherished hopes that the first fruits of their reconciliation would be a joint armament to place him on the English throne: many of his adherents almost despaired of any other means of restoration. But Lewis de Haro was a timid statesman, and Mazarin a cunning one: there was little to expect from their generosity; and the price of assistance might probably be such as none but desperate and unscrupulous exiles would offer, and the English nation would with unanimous indignation reject. It was well for Charles that he contracted no public engagement with these foreign powers, whose co-operation must either have failed of success, or have placed on his head a degraded and unstable crown. The full toleration of popery in England, its establishment in Ireland, its profession by the sovereign and his family, the surrender of Jamaica, Dunkirk, and probably the Norman Islands, were conditions on which the people might have thought the restoration of the Stuart line too dearly obtained.

It was a more desirable object for the king to bring over, if possible, some of the leaders of the commonwealth. Except Vane, accordingly, and the decided republicans, there was hardly any man of consequence whom his agents did not attempt, or, at least, from whom they did not entertain hopes. There stood at this time conspicuous above the rest, not all of them in ability, but in apparent power of serving the royal cause by their defection, Fleetwood, Lambert, and Monk. The first had discovered, as far as his understanding was capable of perceiving anything, that he had been the dupe of more crafty men in the cabals against Richard Cromwell, whose complete fall from power he had neither designed nor foreseen. In pique and vexation, he listened to the overtures of the royalist agents, and sometimes, if we believe their assertions, even promised to declare for the king. But his resolutions were not to be relied upon, nor was his influence likely to prove considerable; though from his post of lieutenant-general of the army, and long accustomed precedence, he obtained a sort of outward credit far beyond his capacity. Lambert was of a very different stamp; eager, enterprising, ambitious, but destitute of the qualities that inspire respect or confidence. Far from the weak enthusiasm of Fleetwood, he gave offence by displaying less show of religion than the temper of his party required, and still more by a current suspicion that his secret faith was that of the church of Rome, to which the partiality of the catholics towards him gave support. The crafty unfettered ambition of Lambert rendered it not unlikely that--finding his own schemes of sovereignty impracticable, he would make terms with the king; and there were not wanting those who recommended the latter to secure his services by the offer of marrying his daughter; but it does not appear that any actual overtures were made on either side.

But when, through the force of circumstances and the deficiencies in the young protector's capacity, he saw the house of Cromwell for ever fallen, it was for Monk to consider what course he should follow, and by what means the nation was to be rescued from the state of anarchy that seemed to menace it. That very different plans must have passed through his mind before he commenced his march from Scotland, it is easy to conjecture; but at what time his determination was finally taken, we cannot certainly pronounce. It would be the most honourable supposition to believe that he was sincere in those solemn protestations of adherence to the commonwealth which he poured forth, as well during his march as after his arrival in London; till discovering, at length, the popular zeal for the king's restoration, he concurred in a change which it would have been absurd, and perhaps impracticable, to resist. This however seems not easily reconcilable to Monk's proceedings in new-modelling his army, and confiding power, both in Scotland and England, to men of known intentions towards royalty; nor did his assurances of support to the republican party become less frequent or explicit at a time when every one must believe that he had taken his resolution, and even after he had communicated with the king. I incline therefore, upon the whole, to believe that Monk, not accustomed to respect the Rump Parliament, and incapable, both by his temperament and by the course of his life, of any enthusiasm for the name of liberty, had satisfied himself as to the expediency of the king's restoration from the time that the Cromwells had sunk below his power to assist them; though his projects were still subservient to his own security, which he was resolved not to forfeit by any premature declaration or unsuccessful enterprise. If the coalition of cavaliers and presbyterians, and the strong bent of the entire nation, had not convinced this wary dissembler that he could not fail of success, he would have continued true to his professions as the general of a commonwealth, content with crushing his rival Lambert, and breaking that fanatical interest which he most disliked. That he aimed at such a sovereignty as Cromwell had usurped has been the natural conjecture of many, but does not appear to me either warranted by any presumptive evidence, or consonant to the good sense and phlegmatic temper of Monk.

"I going away from Fleetwood, met Vane, Desborough, and Berry in the next room, coming to speak with Fleetwood, who thereupon desired me to stay a little; and I suspected what would be the issue of their consultation, and within a quarter of an hour Fleetwood came to me and in much passion said to me, 'I cannot do it, I cannot do it.' I desired his reason why he could not do it. He answered, 'Those gentlemen have remembered me; and it is true, that I am engaged not to do any such thing without my Lord Lambert's consent.' I replied, 'that Lambert was at too great a distance to have his consent to this business, which must be instantly acted.' Fleetwood again said, 'I cannot do it without him.' Then I said, 'You will ruin yourself and your friends.' He said, 'I cannot help it.' Then I told him I must take my leave, and so we parted."

Whatever might have been in the power of Monk, by adhering to his declarations of obedience to the parliament, it would have been too late for him, after consenting to the restoration of the secluded members to their seats on February 21, 1660, to withstand the settlement which it seems incredible that he should not at that time have desired. That he continued, for at least six weeks afterwards, in a course of astonishing dissimulation, so as to deceive, in a great measure, almost all the royalists, who were distrusting his intentions at the very moment when he made his first and most private tender of service to the king through Sir John Grenville about the beginning of April, might at first seem rather to have proceeded from a sort of inability to shake off his inveterate reservedness, than from consummate prudence and discretion. For any sudden risings in the king's favour, or an intrigue in the council of state, might easily have brought about the restoration without his concurrence; and, even as it was, the language held in the House of Commons before their dissolution, the votes expunging all that appeared on their journals against the regal government and the House of Lords, and, above all, the course of the elections for the new parliament, made it sufficiently evident that the general had delayed his assurances of loyalty till they had lost a part of their value. It is however a full explanation of Monk's public conduct, that he was not secure of the army, chiefly imbued with fanatical principles, and bearing an inveterate hatred towards the name of Charles Stuart. A correspondent of the king writes to him on the 28th of March: "the army is not yet in a state to hear your name publicly." In the beginning of that month, many of the officers, instigated by Haslerig and his friends, had protested to Monk against the proceedings of the house, insisting that they should abjure the king and House of Lords. He repressed their mutinous spirit, and bade them obey the parliament, as he should do. Hence he redoubled his protestations of abhorrence of monarchy, and seemed for several weeks, in exterior demonstrations, rather the grand impediment to the king's restoration, than the one person who was to have the credit of it. Meanwhile he silently proceeded in displacing the officers whom he could least trust, and disposing the regiments near to the metropolis, or at a distance, according to his knowledge of their tempers; the parliament having given him a commission as lord general of all the forces in the three kingdoms. The commissioners appointed by parliament for raising the militia in each county were chiefly gentlemen of the presbyterian party; and there seemed likely to be such a considerable force under their orders as might rescue the nation from its ignominious servitude to the army. In fact, some of the royalists expected that the great question would not be carried without an appeal to the sword. The delay of Monk in privately assuring the king of his fidelity is still not easy to be explained, but may have proceeded from a want of confidence in Charles's secrecy, or that of his counsellors. It must be admitted that Lord Clarendon, who has written with some minuteness and accuracy this important part of his history, has more than insinuated that Monk entertained no purposes in the king's favour till the last moment; but a manifest prejudice that shows itself in all his writings against the general, derived partly from offence at his extreme reserve and caution during this period, partly from personal resentment of Monk's behaviour at the time of his own impeachment, greatly takes off from the weight of the noble historian's judgment.

These projected limitations, which but a few weeks before Charles would have thankfully accepted, seemed now intolerable; so rapidly do men learn, in the course of prosperous fortune, to scorn what they just before hardly presumed to expect. Those seemed his friends, not who desired to restore him, but who would do so at the least sacrifice of his power and pride. Several of the council, and others in high posts, sent word that they would resist the imposition of unreasonable terms. Monk himself redeemed his ambiguous and dilatory behaviour by taking the restoration, as it were, out of the hands of the council, and suggesting the judicious scheme of anticipating their proposals by the king's letter to the two houses of parliament. For this purpose he had managed, with all his dissembling pretences of commonwealth principles, or, when he was compelled to lay them aside, of insisting on rigorous limitations, to prevent any overtures from the council, who were almost entirely presbyterian, before the meeting of parliament, which would have considerably embarrassed the king's affairs. The elections meantime had taken a course which the faction now in power by no means regarded with satisfaction. Though the late House of Commons had passed a resolution that no person who had assisted in any war against the parliament since 1642, unless he should since have manifested his good affection towards it, should be capable of being elected; yet this, even if it had been regarded, as it was not, by the people, would have been a feeble barrier against the royalist party, composed in a great measure of young men who had grown up under the commonwealth, and of those who, living in the parliamentary counties during the civil war, had paid a reluctant obedience to its power. The tide ran so strongly for the king's friends, that it was as much as the presbyterians could effect, with the weight of government in their hands, to obtain about an equality of strength with the cavaliers in the convention parliament.

It has been a frequent reproach to the conductors of this great revolution, that the king was restored without those terms and limitations which might secure the nation against his abuse of their confidence; and this, not only by contemporaries who had suffered by the political and religious changes consequent on the restoration, or those who, in after times, have written with some prepossession against the English church and constitutional monarchy, but by the most temperate and reasonable men; so that it has become almost regular to cast on the convention parliament, and more especially on Monk, the imputation of having abandoned public liberty, and brought on, by their inconsiderate loyalty or self-interested treachery, the misgovernment of the two last Stuarts, and the necessity of their ultimate expulsion. But, as this is a very material part of our history, and those who pronounce upon it have not always a very distinct notion either of what was or what could have been done, it may be worth while to consider the matter somewhat more analytically; confining myself, it is to be observed, in the present chapter, to what took place before the king's personal assumption of the government on the 29th of May 1660. The subsequent proceedings of the convention parliament fall within another period.

We may remark, in the first place, that the unconditional restoration of Charles the Second is sometimes spoken of in too hyperbolical language, as if he had come in as a sort of conqueror, with the laws and liberties of the people at his discretion. Yet he was restored to nothing but the bounded prerogatives of a king of England; bounded by every ancient and modern statute, including those of the long parliament, which had been enacted for the subjects' security. If it be true, as I have elsewhere observed, that the long parliament, in the year 1641, had established, in its most essential parts, our existing constitution, it can hardly be maintained that fresh limitations and additional securities were absolutely indispensable, before the most fundamental of all its principles, the government by King, Lords, and Commons, could be permitted to take its regular course. Those who so vehemently reprobate the want of conditions at the restoration would do well to point out what conditions should have been imposed, and what mischiefs they can probably trace from their omission. They should be able also to prove that, in the circumstances of the time, it was quite as feasible and convenient to make certain secure and obligatory provisions the terms of the king's restoration, as seems to be taken for granted.

But, if the council of state, or even the parliament on its first meeting, had resolved to tender any hard propositions to the king, as the terms, if not of his recognition, yet of his being permitted to exercise the royal functions, was there not a possibility that he might demur about their acceptance, that a negotiation might ensue to procure some abatement, that, in the interchange of couriers between London and Brussels, some weeks at least might be whiled away? Clarendon, we are sure, inflexible and uncompromising of his master's honour, would have dissuaded such enormous sacrifices as had been exacted from the late king. And during this delay, while no legal authority would have subsisted, so that no officer could have collected the taxes or executed process without liability to punishment, in what a precarious state would the parliament have stood! On the one hand, the nation almost maddened with the intoxication of reviving loyalty, and rather prone to cast at the king's feet the privileges and liberties it possessed than to demand fresh security for them, might insist upon his immediate return, and impair the authority of parliament. On the other hand, the army, desperately irreconcilable to the name of Stuart, and sullenly resenting the hypocrisy that had deluded them, though they knew no longer where to seek a leader, were accessible to the furious commonwealth's men, who, rushing as it were with lighted torches along their ranks, endeavoured to rekindle a fanaticism that had not quite consumed its fuel. The escape of Lambert from the Tower had struck a panic into all the kingdom; some such accident might again furnish a rallying point for the disaffected, and plunge the country into an unfathomable abyss of confusion. Hence, the motion of Sir Matthew Hale, in the convention parliament, to appoint a committee who should draw up propositions to be sent over for the king's acceptance, does not appear to me well timed and expedient; nor can I censure Monk for having objected to it. The business in hand required greater despatch. If the king's restoration was an essential blessing, it was not to be thrown away in the debates of a committee. A wary, scrupulous, conscientious English lawyer, like Hale, is always wanting in the rapidity and decision necessary for revolutions, though he may be highly useful in preventing them from going too far.

It is, I confess, more probable that the king would have accepted almost any conditions tendered to him; such at least would have been the advice of most of his counsellors; and his own conduct in Scotland was sufficient to show how little any sense of honour or dignity would have stood in his way. But on what grounds did his English friends, nay some of the presbyterians themselves, advise his submission to the dictates of that party? It was in the expectation that the next free parliament, summoned by his own writ, would undo all this work of stipulation, and restore him to an unfettered prerogative. And this expectation there was every ground, from the temper of the nation, to entertain. Unless the convention parliament had bargained for its own perpetuity, or the privy council had been made immovable, or a military force, independent of the Crown, had been kept up to overawe the people , there was no possibility of maintaining the conditions, whatever they might have been, from the want of which so much mischief is fancied to have sprung. Evils did take place, dangers did arise, the liberties of England were once more impaired; but these are far less to be ascribed to the actors in the restoration than to the next parliament, and to the nation who chose it.

I must once more request the reader to take notice that I am not here concerned with the proceedings of the convention parliament after the king's return to England, which, in some respects, appear to me censurable; but discussing the question, whether they were guilty of any fault in not tendering bills of limitation on the prerogative, as preliminary conditions of his restoration to the exercise of his lawful authority. And it will be found, upon a review of what took place in that interregnum from their meeting together on the 25th of April 1660, to Charles's arrival in London on the 29th of May, that they were less unmindful than has been sometimes supposed, of provisions to secure the kingdom against the perils which had seemed to threaten it in the restoration.

On the 25th of April, the Commons met and elected Grimston, a moderate presbyterian, as their speaker, somewhat against the secret wish of the cavaliers, who, elated by their success in the elections, were beginning to aim at superiority, and to show a jealousy of their late allies. On the same day, the doors of the House of Lords were found open; and ten peers, all of whom had sat in 1648, took their places as if nothing more than a common adjournment had passed in the interval. There was, however, a very delicate and embarrassing question, that had been much discussed in their private meetings. The object of these, as I have mentioned, was to impose terms on the king, and maintain the presbyterian ascendancy. But the peers of this party were far from numerous, and must be outvoted, if all the other lawful members of the house should be admitted to their privileges. Of these there were three classes. The first was of the peers who had come to their titles since the commencement of the civil war, and whom there was no colour of justice, nor any vote of the house to exclude. To some of these accordingly they caused letters to be directed; and the others took their seats without objection on the 26th and 27th of April, on the latter of which days thirty-eight peers were present. The second class was of those who had joined Charles the First, and had been excluded from sitting in the house by votes of the long parliament. These it had been in contemplation among the presbyterian junto to keep out; but the glaring inconsistency of such a measure with the popular sentiment, and the strength that the first class had given to the royalist interest among the aristocracy, prevented them from insisting on it. A third class consisted of those who had been created since the great seal was taken to York in 1642; some by the late king, others by the present in exile; and these, according to the fundamental principle of the parliamentary side, were incapable of sitting in the house. It was probably one of the conditions on which some meant to insist, conformably to the articles of the treaty of Newport, that the new peers should be perpetually incapable; or even that none should in future have the right of voting, without the concurrence of both houses of parliament. An order was made therefore on May 4 that no lords created since 1642 should sit. This was vacated by a subsequent resolution of May 31.

A message was sent down to the Commons on April 27, desiring a conference on the great affairs of the kingdom. This was the first time that word had been used for more than eleven years. But the Commons, in returning an answer to this message, still employed the word nation. It was determined that the conference should take place on the ensuing Tuesday, the first of May. In this conference, there can be no doubt that the question of further securities against the power of the Crown would have been discussed. But Monk, whether from conviction of their inexpedience or to atone for his ambiguous delay, had determined to prevent any encroachment on the prerogative. He caused the king's letter to the council of state, and to the two houses of parliament, to be delivered on that very day. A burst of enthusiastic joy testified their long repressed wishes; and, when the conference took place, the Earl of Manchester was instructed to let the Commons know that the Lords do own and declare that, according to the ancient and fundamental laws of this kingdom, the government is and ought to be by King, Lords, and Commons. On the same day, the Commons resolved to agree in this vote; and appointed a committee to report what pretended acts and ordinances were inconsistent with it.

It is however so far from being true that this convention gave itself up to a blind confidence in the king, that their journals during the month of May bear witness to a considerable activity in furthering provisions which the circumstances appeared to require. They appointed a committee, on May 3rd, to consider of the king's letter and declaration, both holding forth, it will be remembered, all promises of indemnity, and everything that could tranquillise apprehension, and to propose bills accordingly, especially for taking away military tenures. One bill was brought into the house, to secure lands purchased from the trustees of the late parliament; another, to establish ministers already settled in benefices; a third, for a general indemnity; a fourth, to take away tenures in chivalry and wardship; a fifth, to make void all grants of honour or estate, made by the late or present king since May 1642. Finally, on the very 29th of May, we find a bill read twice and committed, for the confirmation of privilege of parliament, magna charta, the petition of right, and other great constitutional statutes. These measures, though some of them were never completed, proved that the restoration was not carried forward with so thoughtless a precipitancy and neglect of liberty as has been asserted.

There was undoubtedly one very important matter of past controversy, which they may seem to have avoided, the power over the militia. They silently gave up that momentous question. Yet it was become, in a practical sense, incomparably more important that the representatives of the Commons should retain a control over the land forces of the nation than it had been at the commencement of the controversy. War and usurpation had sown the dragon's teeth in our fields; and, instead of the peaceable trained bands of former ages, the citizen soldiers who could not be marched beyond their counties, we had a veteran army accustomed to tread upon the civil authority at the bidding of their superiors, and used alike to govern and obey. It seemed prodigiously dangerous to give up this weapon into the hands of our new sovereign. The experience of other countries as well as our own demonstrated that public liberty could never be secure, if a large standing army should be kept on foot, or any standing army without consent of parliament. But this salutary restriction the convention parliament did not think fit to propose; and in this respect I certainly consider them as having stopped short of adequate security. It is probable that the necessity of humouring Monk, whom it was their first vote to constitute general of all the forces in the three kingdoms, with the hope, which proved not vain, that the king himself would disband the present army whereon he could so little rely, prevented any endeavour to establish the control of parliament over the military power, till it was too late to withstand the violence of the cavaliers, who considered the absolute prerogative of the Crown in that point the most fundamental article of their creed.

FOOTNOTES:

May, p. 165.

May, 212; Baillie, 373, 391.

It is intimated by Clarendon that some at Oxford, probably Jermyn and Digby, were jealous of Holland's recovering the influence he had possessed with the queen, who seems to have retained no resentment against him. As to Bedford and Clare, they would probably have been better received, if not accompanied by so obnoxious an intriguer of the old court. This seems to account for the unanimity which the historian describes to have been shown in the council against their favourable reception. Light and passionate tempers, like that of Henrietta, are prone to forget injuries; serious and melancholic ones, like that of Charles, never lose sight of them.

Baillie deplores at this time "the horrible fears and confusions in the city, the king everywhere being victorious. In the city, a strong and insolent party for him."--P. 391. "The malignants stirred a multitude of women of the meaner and more infamous rank to come to the door of both houses, and cry tumultuously for peace on any terms. This tumult could not be suppressed but by violence, and killing some three or four women, and hurting some of them, and imprisoning many."--P. 300.

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