THE RESTORATION OF CHARLES THE SECOND.
“Who comes with rapture greeted, and caressed
With frantic love,—his kingdom to regain?”
T is the 29th of May, 1660, and London is a gala city. The streets are hung with tapestry; flags and banners wave from the housetops; the citizens in their best attire throng the streets; the mayor, aldermen, and the gilds in all their bravery of ceremonial robes and gold chains hie them to the city gates; every balcony is full of lords and ladies clad in the sumptuous trappings of state; drums roll, trumpets sound, and bells clash from the steeples. The guns of the Tower roar out a welcome, and loud cries of “The king! the king!” are heard. His procession approaches “with a triumph of twenty thousand horse and foot, brandishing their swords and shouting with inexpressible joy.” Now you see him sitting his horse with easy grace, and bowing calmly as he responds to the acclamations of the crowd. He is tall and graceful, his countenance somewhat swarthy and forbidding. He smiles as maidens strew flowers in his way and men cheer until they can cheer no more. “It must be my own fault,” he says, “that I have not come back sooner, for I find nobody who does not tell me that he has always longed for my return.”
He passes on to Whitehall and takes possession of the palace from which his father stepped on to the scaffold. Courtiers and sycophants, and honest men with tears in their eyes, crowd the presence-chamber to kiss his hands and wish him a long and happy reign, while the citizens outside give themselves up to unrestrained joy. A special Lord Mayor’s show is paraded as part of the festivities, and several of the pageants represent scenes from the life of the king who has just come into his own again.
Look at this device now passing on a great wheeled platform. It is a scene in Boscobel Wood. In the midst is a spreading oak, and high in the branches you see a figure representing Charles hiding from the Commonwealth soldiers, who are searching for him below. This incident actually happened just nine years ago, after the “crowning mercy” of Worcester, when Cromwell thoroughly routed the Royalists and the young prince was a hunted fugitive. Another scene in the show represents him riding towards safety as the servant of faithful Jane Lane, who sits behind him trembling with anxiety. The fugitive is now receiving the obeisance of a gay, glittering throng in the palace of his sires. As he does so he recalls the shifts and subterfuges, the hairbreadth escapes, the privations and perils of those dark days, and bitterly contrasts the glorious present with the long years of his shabby and penurious exile.
And now he is crowned and anointed king—hailed with enthusiasm by the very men who overthrew his father and consented unto his death. How has this wondrous change come about? Cromwell built his power on the sand, and with his last breath it fell to pieces like a house of cards. His son Richard, an easy-going country squire devoted to hawking, hunting, and horse-racing, hated the greatness which was thrust upon him, and within a year laid down his office. Then “Honest George” Monk, in command of the army in Scotland, saw that the hour had arrived when his countrymen were eager for steady and lawful government in place of the harsh and uncertain rule of the sword. He marched south, and the Londoners hailed him with wild shouts of delight. Like the Israelites of old time they cried, “Give us a king to reign over us,” and Charles was invited to return and claim his birthright.
The monarchy has been restored, and what manner of man is he who sets up the throne anew? Nature has given him excellent parts and a good temper; he has polite and engaging manners and a unique experience of the world; but otherwise he is utterly selfish and utterly ungrateful, “without desire of renown and without sensibility to reproach.” He is a cynic; he has absolutely no faith in human nature; he believes that every man has his price; and he values his kingship precisely for the amount of selfish indulgence which it can afford him. The father who was sent to the block was an angel of light compared with the son who has now been recalled to fill the empty throne. Forthwith he tramples all that is good as well as all that is harsh and unlovely in Puritanism under foot. He sets the nation a shameless example of licence and frivolity, and his subjects are not slow to imitate it. His court is filled with every kind of open wickedness; religion is scoffed at; morality, honour, steadfastness, and justice are fit subjects for the ribald jests of reckless roysterers. The pendulum has swung to the other extreme with a vengeance. Never before has national virtue been at so low an ebb.
The reign of Charles was one long reaction in Church, State, and national life. The efficiency of old Noll’s day became a thing of the past. The king wasted huge sums of money on his follies and vices, and the services were shamefully starved. Only fourteen years ago the Dutch were forced to acknowledge England as mistress of the seas; and now they entered the Thames, destroyed Sheerness, sailed up the Medway to Chatham, and burnt eight men of war, while the navy, paralyzed by corruption and mismanagement, was powerless to chastise them. At this humiliation the anger of the nation knew no bounds. “Then at length tardy justice was done to the memory of Oliver. Everywhere men magnified his valour, genius, and patriotism. Everywhere it was remembered how, when he ruled, all foreign powers had trembled at the name of England; how the States General, now so haughty, had crouched at his feet; and how, when it was known that he was no more, Amsterdam was lighted up as for a great deliverance, and children ran along the canals shouting for joy that the devil was dead! Even Royalists exclaimed that the State could be saved only by calling the old soldiers of the Commonwealth to arms. . . . Tilbury Fort, the place where Elizabeth had, with manly spirit, hurled foul scorn at Parma and Spain, was insulted by the invaders. The roar of foreign guns was heard, for the first and last time, by the citizens of London.”
While this ignominious war was raging, London suffered two disasters of such a terrible character that men openly spoke of them as the well-deserved scourges of Almighty God. Turn to the diary of Samuel Pepys, the Admiralty clerk who so faithfully mirrored the loose, careless life of the time, and read the entry of July 7, 1665: “This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors and ‘Lord, have mercy upon us’ writ there, which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that to my remembrance I ever saw.” The Great Plague had arrived. Those who were stricken with the disease began to shiver; then they had headaches and were light-headed. On the third or fourth day they fainted suddenly, and spots broke out on the breast. As soon as these appeared, all hope was gone; the poor victim was dead within an hour.
As we follow Pepys’s pages we see alarm spreading, the clergy taking flight to the country, the stoppage of all work and trading, grass growing in the deserted streets, the bells tolling all day long, searchers going about to discover infected houses, dreaded death-carts rumbling over the stones to the mournful cry of “Bring out your dead;” then the last scene of all—the carts shooting their contents into huge pits dug at St. Martin’s in the Fields and at Mile-End. It is a terrible picture, and we shudder as we realize it.
All infected houses become prisons, with watchers at the doors so that none might come out or go in. Pepys tells us that a complaint was brought against a man for taking a child from an infected house, and the case was inquired into by the magistrates. They discovered that the child was the little daughter of a saddler. All his other children had died of the plague, and the saddler and his wife were shut up in their house, never expecting to leave it alive. They had one only wish in their despair, and that was to save the life of their little girl. At last they managed to communicate with a friend, who promised to take her away from London. The child was handed down from the window stark naked, and the friend, having dressed it in fresh clothes, took it to Greenwich, where, when the story was known, it was permitted to remain.
In all, the death-roll of that terrible year reached nearly 100,000, or about one-fifth of the total population. The worst time of all was in the first fortnight of September, when the deaths were over a thousand a day. As the summer passed, and the cold, high winds of winter blew, the plague gradually passed away.
Scarcely, however, had the dead-cart ceased to go its rounds when fire laid well-nigh the whole city in ruins. It broke out at one o’clock on Sunday morning, September 2, 1666, at the house of a baker in Pudding Lane, not far from the Monument which now commemorates the visitation. Most of the city was then built of wood, and as a high wind was blowing at the time the flames spread rapidly. The citizens could do nothing to stop the fire, and before long the city from the Tower to the Temple, and from the river to Smithfield, was one sheet of flame. A great terror seized the people, but as soon as they recovered from their fright they endeavoured to save what they could from the flames. Five, ten, and even fifty pounds were given for a cart, and the barges and boats on the river were laden to the gunwale with fugitives and their belongings. The fields round London were full of furniture and of people camping out amidst the pitiful remnants of property which they had saved. On Monday night the streets were as light as noonday, and the flames had reached St. Paul’s.
John Evelyn tells us in his diary that the stones flew like bombs, melting lead ran down the streets in streams, and the very pavements were red hot. “God grant,” says he, “my eyes may never behold the like. I now saw about ten thousand houses all in one flame. The noise and cracking and thunder of the flames, the shrieking of women and children, the hurry of the people, the fall of towers, houses, and churches, was like an awful storm. The air was so hot that at last men were not able to approach the fire, and were forced to stand still and let the flames burn on, which they did for nearly two miles in length and one in breadth. The clouds of smoke were dismal, and reached nearly fifty-six miles in length. London was, but is no more!”
At last the fire was checked by blowing up a number of houses with gunpowder. The wind fell, and on Wednesday morning the fire ceased, “as it were by a command from Heaven.” It began at Pudding Lane, and it ended at Pie Corner in Giltspur Street. Actually 13,000 houses and 89 churches were burnt down, but only fourteen persons were killed. Every dwelling and building over an area of 436 acres was destroyed. The fire, however, was a blessing in disguise, for it swept away the foul courts and alleys and destroyed the plague germs lingering in the soil. Wider and more open streets were built, and new and stately churches arose. The genius of Sir Christopher Wren was afforded a unique opportunity. He re-created St. Paul’s, his chief monument, and erected fifty-four churches, each with its own special features, yet all in harmony with the great mother-church of the city.
The restoration of Charles was a triumph for the Church of England, and marked the downfall of that religious toleration which Cromwell had established. At the instigation of Clarendon, the only man of real zeal and probity about the king, the Cavalier Parliament passed a series of spiteful Acts against the Puritans, or Nonconformists, as they may now be called. Henceforth all mayors, aldermen, councillors, and other borough officers must renounce the Solemn League and Covenant, deny the lawfulness of taking up arms against the king, and receive the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. This harsh and unfair Act was a great blow to the Nonconformists, and it practically drove them out of local government. They were next excluded from the Church by the Act of Uniformity; and then the expelled ministers began to form congregations outside the pale. But a new Act of Parliament forbidding the holding of all religious services except those of the Church of England, under pain of fine and imprisonment, was speedily passed to keep them forcibly within the fold. This shocking law actually made family worship a crime if more than five persons not belonging to the family were present. Then came another Act which forbade ministers expelled under the Act of Uniformity from teaching in a school or living within five miles of a city or corporate town. Thus the Church system which Laud had lost his head in trying to establish in the reign of Charles the First became the law of the land by the will of the people in the reign of his indifferent and cynical son.
The author of these cruel Acts was not long to sit high in the king’s favour. He was a grave, ponderous man, with the utmost scorn for the idle triflers and wicked spendthrifts amongst whom the king wasted his days. Frequently he took Charles to task for his misdemeanours, and by his importunity goaded him into keeping his promises. “He often said it was the making those promises which had brought the king home, and the keeping of them must keep him at home.” The king’s friends hated the solemn, long-winded Polonius, and one of them used to whisper in Charles’s ear, “There goes your schoolmaster.”
After the second Dutch War, in which England was covered with disgrace, Clarendon was a convenient scapegoat, and Charles dismissed him without a shade of regret and no single mark of gratitude for the long and faithful service which the deposed chancellor had rendered him both in exile and after the Restoration. Clarendon’s fall was the signal for great rejoicing amongst the shameless crew which surrounded the king. As he left Whitehall, disgraced and abandoned, a courtier assured Charles “that this was the first time he could ever call him King of England, being freed from this great man.”
And now, “freed from this great man,” Charles began to descend deeper and deeper into the mire. He formed a ministry of his friends, and laid deep plans for ruling as an absolute king, but without running any undue risks. Hitherto he had laughed at religion; now, when sick and serious, he turned to the Church of Rome, and desired to re-establish it in his land, but again without running undue risks. On one principle and one principle alone Charles was absolutely fixed—he would never go on his travels again. Then he perpetrated his last and foullest piece of infamy—he sold himself to Lewis of France for a miserable £200,000 a year. Henceforth he was the pensioner of the French king and a secret traitor to his own subjects.
No king so absolute as Charles when suddenly he was stricken with apoplexy. On his deathbed he was openly received into the Roman Catholic Church, to which he had long secretly belonged. He lingered until Friday, February 6, 1685. As the morning light began to peep through the windows he apologized to those who had watched him through the night for all the trouble which he had caused them. “He had been,” he said, “a most unconscionable time dying, but he hoped they would excuse it.”
So passes Charles. One of his friends had previously suggested this epitaph:—
“Here lies our sovereign lord the king,
Whose word no man relies on;
Who never said a foolish thing,
And never did a wise one.”
There was, however, another and a better side to Charles’s character. He frequented the society of the most learned men of his time, founded the Royal Society, and attended its meetings. He had undeniable talents and a taste for arts and sciences, but his talents only served to bring into high relief his grovelling vices and sordid treasons.
JANE LANE HELPING PRINCE CHARLES TO ESCAPE.
(From the fresco by C. W. Cope, R.A., in the Houses of Parliament.)
RESCUED FROM THE PLAGUE, LONDON, 1665.
(From the picture by Frank W. W. Topham, R.I. By permission of the Artist.)
The Fall of Clarendon.
(From the picture by E. M. Ward, R.A., in the National Gallery of British Art.)
