and uncertainties of twenty years. Five hundred and fifty-six members had been elected to the House of Commons, the greater number of whom took their seats on the 26th of April. Ten peers only met in the House of Lords on that day. The Presbyterians manoeuvred that one of their party should be elected Speaker. On the 1st of May, Grenville appeared at the door of the Lower House, and being called to the bar presented a letter addressed "To our trusty and well-beloved the Speaker of the House of Commons." He then went through the same formality at the House of Lords. With each letter was enclosed a document addressed to the whole nation-the Declaration from Breda. Grenville then proceeded to the city, and presented a letter from the king addressed to the lord mayor, aldermen, and common council, which also contained the Declaration. In all these papers, the composition of Hyde, there was little to alarm, and much to propitiate, the prudent and peaceful. The Commons were assured "upon our royal word,—that none of our predecessors have had a greater esteem for parliaments than we have." The Declaration professed the king's desire "that all our subjects may enjoy what by law is theirs, by a full and entire administration of justice throughout the land." It declared "a free and general pardon to all our subjects,"—excepting only such persons "as shall hereafter be excepted by Act of Parliament." Deploring the existence of religious animosities, "we do declare a liberty to tender consciences; and that no man shall be disquieted, or called in question, for differences of opinion in matters of religion, which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom." All matters relating to the possession of estates "shall be determined in parliament." Commissioners from both Houses were chosen to convey their answers to the king. Grenville preceded them with the best proof of loyalty and affection-four thousand five hundred pounds in gold, and a bill of exchange for twenty-five thousand pounds.

On the 8th of May the two Houses of Parliament proclaimed Charles the Second, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, at Westminster, at Whitehall, and in the City. In a fever of loyalty, Parliament never thought of making conditions for the liberties of the country. It rested the conservancy of all that the nation had won since the opening of the Long Parliament upon the flimsy foundation of the Declaration from Breda. On the 9th of May, the debate on the Amnesty Bill came on in both Houses. After warm discussion, the House at last voted as to the number of regicides to be excluded from the Amnesty, and decided that seven should be excepted. But it also resolved that every one should be arrested who had sat upon the king's trial, and their property seized. Other arrests took place. Some who had laboured best with Cromwell to uphold the honour of England, such as Thurloe, were impeached. The titles bestowed by the two protectors were annulled.

The foreign courts who had looked adversely or coldly upon Charles in his exile, now embarrassed him with their rival professions of friendship. The States of Holland invited him to take his departure from the Hague; and he arrived there from Breda on the 15th of May. Thither came the commissioners of the parliament; the town-clerk of London, with aldermen and lesser dignitaries; deputations of the Presbyterian clergy; and

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a swarm of Englishmen of every variety of opinion, who wanted to prostrate themselves at the feet of power. The king, with the dukes of York and Gloucester, embarked on the 23rd, and landed at Dover on the 25th. The royal train proceeded by Canterbury and Rochester, to Blackheath, where the army of the Commonwealth, thirty thousand men-were marshalled. Charles went on in the sight of all London to Whitehall, amidst streets strewed with flowers, past tapestried houses, and winespouting fountains; with civic authorities wearing chains of gold, and nobles covered with embroidered velvets; trumpets braying, mobs huzzaing.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE Parliament of 1660 settled the yearly revenue of the Crown at an amount considerably beyond the supplies voted to Charles I., and they voted the subsidy of tonnage and poundage for the term of the king's life. The ancient claims of the Crown upon tenures by Knight-service, with all their oppressive conditions of fines for alienation, of forfeitures, and of wardship, and also the more generally obnoxious demands of purveyance, would naturally have revived with the re-establishment of the monarchy. The Parliament, however, made a bargain to relieve the landed proprietors. Charles surrendered the Court of Wards, and Purveyance, and the Commons granted him and his successors the Excise of beer and other liquors, a tax first introduced during the Civil War. It was originally a temporary tax. The two great sources of modern revenue were thus placed absolutely in the king's hands.

At the period of the Restoration, the army consisted of fifteen regiments of horse, and twenty-two regiments of foot, besides garrisons. That army was supported by monthly assessments of seventy thousand pounds. In the first parliament of Charles II., an Act was passed for the speedy disbanding of the army and garrisons, and also for paying off twenty-five ships; followed by 'an Act for enabling the soldiers of the army now to be disbanded, to exercise Trades." The revenue assigned to the Crown did not contemplate the continuance of any standing army; but Charles retained two regiments of horse in his pay, who were called his guards.

The great question of the Church Establishment was not brought forward in the Convention Parliament. The Presbyterian members were too strong in that assembly to render it safe to make any attempt to contravene the spirit of the Declaration from Breda, "that no man shall be disquieted, or called in question, for differences of opinion in matters of religion, which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom." The parliament of 1660 enacted that as many as survived of the ministers ejected through the imposition of the Covenant should be restored to their benefices, but without the right of claiming any past emoluments. By the same statute

those who were in actual possession of those livings for which there was no claimant as previous possessor, were confirmed in their titles. Many of the Crown lands and the Church lands had been sold under the authority of the Long Parliament. A Bill was brought in to determine this matter. It was strenuously debated in the Commons, and it was at last agreed that the Crown lands should be left out of the proposal for sales to be confirmed or indemnity to be given. The House was disinclined to such an unconditional restoration of Church property. But the discussion was at length cut short by the dissolution of the parliament; and the purchasers had no protection against the due course of law, under which their titles were defective. Unconditional restitution was the necessary result. The complaints of the dispossessed purchasers were neutralised by the louder murmurings of the cavaliers, who were deprived of any compensation for their losses during the Long Parliament by the Act of Indemnity. For three months this Bill was debated in both Houses. The Commons went on adding name after name to those of the seven who were originally excepted from the proposed Amnesty. The Lords voted that all who had signed the death-warrant of Charles I., as well as five others, should be excepted, either as regarded life or estate. The king, shortly after his landing, had issued a proclamation, in which he commanded those who had sat as judges of his father to render themselves up within fourteen days, "on pain of being excepted from any pardon or indemnity as to their lives or estates." The honour of the king was unquestionably committed to the most favourable construction of the proclamation, but Hyde, now earl of Clarendon and chancellor, shuffled odiously about this document, whose ambiguity was doubtless well studied by him. The Commons debated this point of the proclamation with a more moderate and honester feeling than the majority of the Lords. The matter was at last compromised between the Lords and Commons by a proviso in the Bill, that if the nineteen persons therein named should be legally attainted, then nevertheless the execution of the persons so attainted should be suspended until execution should be ordered by Act of Parliament. The most remarkable exceptions to the Statute of Indemnity, in addition to all the regicides with few omissions, were sir Henry Vane and General Lambert; but the Houses concurred in an address to the king that if these two leading men of the revolution were tried and attainted, their lives should be spared. The king assented. In October twenty-nine persons were brought to trial as traitors, before a Court of thirty-four commissioners; and they were all convicted. Of these, the nineteen who had surrendered under the procla mation were imprisoned for life. Ten were executed. These were Harrison, and five others, who had subscribed the death-warrant of Charles; Cook, who acted as leading counsel upon the trial; Axtell and Hacker, two officers who commanded the guard over the royal prisoner; and the famous Hugh Peters.

On the 12th of September, by a special order of the king to the dean of Westminster, the bodies of Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Ireton had been taken out of their vaults, and thrown into a pit. On the 30th of January, 1661, these bodies were dragged "to Tyburn, and hanged on the gallows there from nine in the morning till six at night, and then buried under

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that fatal and ignominious monument in a deep pit; thousands of people who had seen them in all their pride being spectators." On the 4th of December, the parliament, upon the motion of colonel Titus, had voted unanimously that this revolting exhibition should take place. The body of Blake was also removed from its honoured resting place, and re-interred in St. Margaret's churchyard.

The Presbyterian party had to a great extent become powerless, and was in no condition to renew the struggles against Episcopacy; but the serious portion of the community was sufficiently represented in the Convention Parliament to render some caution necessary in the measures of the Court. Calamy, Baxter, and other Presbyterian ministers, had been appointed chaplains in ordinary to the king, in the month after his restoration. On the 25th of October Charles published a declaration, in which he avowed his own attachment to Episcopacy, but expressed his opinion that it might be so modified as to remove all reasonable objections; and he declared that the reading of the Liturgy, certain ceremonial observances, subscription to all the articles, and the oath of canonical obedience, should not be pressed upon those who had conscientious scruples. To render the declaration effectual, a bill was brought into parliament by sir Matthew Hale. It was opposed by the united power of the courtiers in parliament, and was rejected. This was the test by which the royal professions were to be tried. The Convention Parliament was dissolved on the 29th of December. It had not risen more than a week when there was a renewal of that fanatical outbreak of the Fifth-Monarchy men which Cromwell had put down with a troop of horse in 1657. These men had a meeting-house in the city; and some fifty or sixty of them, after an encounter with the feeble municipal police, marched to Caen-wood, near Highgate, and having been there concealed for two days, returned to encounter the trained bands, and even a regular body of guards, in the confidence that their cause, the establishment of the reign of Christ on earth, and the suppression of all other authority, would be miraculously upheld. The capital was in fearful alarm; the shops were shut; the city gates barricaded. But these wild men drove all before them; till a rally was made, and they were for the most part slaughtered, refusing quarter. The leader, Venner, and sixteen of his followers, who were secured, were tried and executed. This mad tumult was made the excuse for a proclamation for closing the conventicles of Quakers, Anabaptists, and other sectaries.

The coronation of the king took place on the 23rd of April. Every ceremony connected with it was of the most gorgeous nature. The people of London had not recovered from their delirium, and throughout the land men were equally intoxicated by the return to the ancient order of things. The old asceticism of the Puritans was bitterly remembered, and amidst an exaggerated contempt for their formal manners, and a real dislike of the restraint which they imposed upon audacious profligacy, the cavaliers carried the elections for a new parliament by immense majorities. In this first session the royalists laboured far more eagerly than Charles himself, or his minister, Clarendon, to prepare the way for the return of the days of the Star-Chamber and the High Commission. Before the meeting of parliament, conferences were held at the Savoy between the

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bishops and twelve of the leading Puritan divines, for the revision of the Liturgy. Whilst the churchmen were discussing this matter, the parliament was settling the question of conformity in a very summary manner; and when the Liturgy, a few months after, came to be reviewed in Convocation, the points which gave offence to "tender consciences" were left untouched. The Anglican Church felt its power; and the notion of conciliation, if ever seriously entertained, was soon supplanted by the readier and simpler principle of coercion. The altered character of the House of Commons was speedily indicated by its proceedings. The parliament met on the 8th of May. On the 17th it was voted that every member should receive the sacrament according to the forms of the Anglican Church. It was also resolved that the Solemn League and Covenant should be burned by the hands of the common hangman. The one great principle of the policy of Clarendon was to re-establish the Church of England in its ancient splendour. He had contracted a violent hatred of the whole body of the Puritan clergy; and he bitterly opposed the inclination of the king to mitigate some of the evils which the temper of the cavaliers was ready to inflict upon them.

At the opening of the second parliament, Clarendon put the king forward to desire the confirmation of the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion in stronger terms of entreaty than were usually placed in the mouth of the sovereign. The firmness of the great minister of the restoration in maintaining this Act made him as unpopular with the extreme royalists, now all-powerful, as his somewhat extravagant zeal for the Church of England rendered him odious to the Puritans, now all-humiliated. His position was one of extreme difficulty. He had become connected in a remarkable way with the royal family, by the marriage of his daughter with the duke of York. But he was an object of dislike and ridicule to Charles and his courtiers, because, from his age and his character, he looked disapprovingly upon their excesses.

The chancellor met with little opposition in leading a willing parliament to trample upon all dissent from the Episcopal Church; to restore those prerogatives of the Crown which had been set aside by the Long Parliament; and to keep alive the spirit of revenge against the republican party. The restoration of the bishops to the House of Lords was accomplished without any opposition by this parliament, in which the Presbyterians had lost all influence. The crowning measure of ecclesiastical polity was the Act of Uniformity, by which it was decreed that those of the clergy who, previous to the Feast of St. Bartholomew, 1662, had not declared their acceptance of the Book of Common Prayer, in the terms of the statute, were to be absolutely ejected from their livings. On that day more than two thousand ministers of religion went forth into the world without any provision for their future support. The same assent was required of all fellows of colleges, and all schoolmasters. By another clause in this Act, episcopal ordination was required of all persons holding ecclesiastical preferments.

Practically, since the victory of Dunbar, Scotland had ceased to be an ́independent kingdom. It was now thought expedient again to isolate the smaller and poorer portion of the island from the larger and wealthier. The survivors of the Committee of Estates, that had been nominated by