PROSE READINGS

FROM ENGLISH HISTORY.

PART III.

I.

THE RESTORATION.

MACAULAY.

[The death of Cromwell brought the rule of Puritanism to an end. The divisions of the army which occupied the three realms quarrelled among themselves; and the nation took advantage of their strife to set up again the old system of government, and to recall Charles the Second to the throne. No political change was ever welcomed with so much joy as this restoration of the monarchy, for in it men saw the restoration of law and the overthrow of a rule of the sword.]

If we had to choose a lot from among all the multitude of those which men have drawn since the beginning of the world, we would select that of Charles the Second on the day of his return. He was in a situation in which the dictates of ambition coincided with those of benevolence, in which it was easier to be virtuous than to be wicked, to be loved than to be hated, to earn pure and imperishable glory than to become infamous. For once the road of

PART III.

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goodness was a smooth descent.

He had done nothing to

merit the affection of his people. But they had paid him in advance without measure. Elizabeth, after the destruction of the Armada, or after the abolition of monopolies, had not excited a thousandth part of the enthusiasm with which the young exile was welcomed home. He was not like Lewis the Eighteenth,1 imposed on his subjects by foreign conquerors; nor did he, like Lewis the Eighteenth, come back to a country which had undergone a complete change. Happily for Charles, no European state, even when at war with the Commonwealth, had chosen to bind up its cause with that of the wanderers who were playing in the garrets of Paris and Cologne at being princes and chancellors." Under the administration of Cromwell, England was more respected and dreaded than any power in Christendom, and even under the ephemeral governments which followed his death no foreign state ventured to treat her with contempt. Thus Charles came back, not as a mediator between his people and a victorious enemy, but as a mediator between internal factions. He found the Scotch Covenanters and the Irish Papists alike subdued. He found Dunkirk and Jamaica added to the empire. He was heir to the conquests and to the influence of the able usurper who had excluded him.

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The old government of England, as it had been far milder than the old government of France, had been far less violently and completely subverted. The national institutions had been spared or imperfectly eradicated. The laws had undergone little alteration. The tenures of the soil

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1 The French king who was set on the throne after the overthrow of Napoleon by the European powers. During his exile Charles had called himself king, appointed ministers, and the like. Jamaica had been taken by an English fleet; Dunkirk taken as the price of the aid of an English army in the war of France against Spain.

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were still to be learned from Littleton and Coke.4 The Great Charter was mentioned with as much reverence in the Parliaments of the Commonwealth as in those of any earlier or of any later age. A new confession of faith and a new ritual had been introduced into the Church. But the bulk of the ecclesiastical property still remained. The colleges still held their estates. The parson still received his tithes. The Lords had, at a crisis of great excitement, been excluded by military violence from their house; but they retained their titles and an ample share of the public veneration. When a nobleman made his appearance in the House of Commons he was received with ceremonious respect. Those few peers who consented to assist at the inauguration of the Protector were placed next to himself, and the most honourable offices of the day were assigned to them. We learn from the debates in Richard's Parliament how strong a hold the old aristocracy had on the affections of the people. One member of the House of Commons went so far as to say that, unless their Lordships were peaceably restored, the country might soon be convulsed by a war of the Barons.

There was indeed no great party hostile to the Upper House. There was nothing exclusive in the constitution of that body. It was regularly recruited from among the most distinguished of the country gentlemen, the lawyers, and the clergy. The most powerful nobles of the century which preceded the civil war, the Duke of Somerset, the Duke of Northumberland, Lord Seymour of Sudely, the Earl of Leicester, Lord Burleigh, the Earl of Salisbury, the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Strafford had all been commoners, and had all raised themselves by courtly arts or by parliamentary talents, not merely to seats in the House of Lords, but to the first influence in that assembly. Nor had the 4 Compendiums of English law at the time.