CHARLES II.

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After a trial in which every ingenious and valid plea was advanced by the prisoners to deaf ears, all were condemned to death, but ten only were at present executed—Harrison, Scott, Carew, Jones, Clement, Scrope, Coke, Axtel, Hacker, and Hugh Peters, Cromwell's chaplain. Peters, by his enthusiasm and wild eloquence, had undoubtedly roused the spirit of the Parliamentarians, and especially of the army, but he had had no particular concern in the king's death, and had often exerted himself to obtain mercy and kind treatment not only for the king, but for suffering Royalists. He declared on the trial that he had never been influenced by interest or malice in all that he had done; that he never received a farthing from Cromwell for his services; and that he had no hand in exciting the war, for he was abroad fourteen years, and found the war in full action on his return. Peters, whose character has been greatly maligned by the Cavaliers and their historians, appears really to have been a sincere and upright patriot; but his pleas were as useless as those of all the others.

Harrison was drawn first to Charing Cross on a hurdle. His conduct was cheerful and even animated, as with triumph he declared that many a time he had begged the Lord, if He had any hard, any reproachful, or contemptible service to be done by His people, that he might be employed in it; and that now his prayers were answered. Several times he cried out as he was drawn along, that he suffered in the most glorious cause in the world; and when a low wretch asked him, "Where's your good old cause now?" he replied, "Here it is!" clapping his hand on his heart, "and I am going to seal it with my blood." He was put to death with all the horrors of the most barbarous times, cut down alive, his bowels torn out whilst he was alive, and then his quivering heart held up to the people. Charles witnessed this revolting scene at a little distance, and yet that heartless man let the whole of the condemned suffer the same bloody barbarities. They all went to their hideous death with the same heroic spirit, and in order to daunt the old preacher, Hugh Peters, he was taken to see the hanging, drawing, and quartering of Coke, but it only seemed to animate him the more. The effect of this and of the addresses of the undaunted Regicides from the scaffold was such, that the people began to show evident disgust of these cruelties; and when Scott's turn came, the executioners endeavoured to drown his words, so that he said it must be a very bad cause that could not hear the words of a dying man. But the words and noble courage of these dying men, Bishop Burnet observes, "their show of piety, their justifying all they had done, not without a seeming joy for their suffering on that account, caused the king to be advised not to proceed further, or at least not to have the scene so near the Court as Charing Cross."

About a month before Harrison's execution, the Duke of Gloucester died of small-pox; and scarcely were the royal shambles closed for awhile when the Princess of Orange, who had come over to congratulate her brother, the king, died of small-pox, too. "At Court," says Pepys, "things are in very ill condition, there being so much emulation, poverty, and the vices of drinking, swearing, and loose amours, that I know not what will be the end of it but confusion; and the clergy are so high that all people that I meet with do protest against their practice." Sober people must have looked back with a strange feeling to the earnest and manly times of the Protectorate. But death and marriage merriments were oddly mingled in this bacchanalian Court. The daughter of old Clarendon, Ann Hyde, was married to the Duke of York, and was delivered of a son just six weeks afterwards. The queen-mother (Henrietta Maria), the Princess of Orange, and the Princess Henrietta, were violently opposed to so unroyal a marriage, but the old Chancellor had the influence with Charles to carry it through, and, instead of a disgrace, to convert it into a triumph. The wily politician pretended himself to have been not only grossly deceived in the matter, but to be intensely angry, and told Charles, according to his own account in his autobiography, on hearing the news, that if the marriage had really taken place, he would advise that "the king should immediately cause the woman to be sent to the Tower, and to be cast into a dungeon, under so strict a guard, that no living person should be permitted to come to her; and then that an Act of Parliament should be immediately passed for cutting off her head, to which he would not only give his consent, but would very willingly be the first to propose it." This picture of the heroism of a savage, however, ill agrees with the accounts of the Chancellor's real concern in the matter. Evelyn, in his diary, says, "The queen would fain have undone it, but it seems that matters were reconciled on great offers of the Chancellor's to befriend her, who was so much in debt, and was now to have the settlement of her affairs go through his hands." Accordingly, about six weeks after the arrival of Henrietta Maria at Whitehall the marriage was publicly acknowledged.

Amid all these disgraceful transactions Parliament met on the 6th of November, 1660. They proceeded to pass into a Bill the king's "healing declaration" regarding religion. The Presbyterians were in high spirits, but they were soon made to feel their folly in bringing back the Episcopalian Church with its Episcopalian head. The clergy were not so high for nothing. They knew very well what the king would do when the matter was pressed to an issue, and accordingly the expectant Presbyterians found the Court party not only voting, but openly speaking against the Bill. Morrice, the creature of Monk, and now Secretary of State, and Heneage Finch, the Solicitor-General, strenuously opposed it, Finch not scrupling to avow that "it was not the king's desire that the Bill should proceed." It was thrown out, and the duped Presbyterians, instead of being persecutors, found persecution let loose upon them. The Convention Parliament, having satisfied the Court in this measure, on the 8th of December voted the attainder of Oliver Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw, and, having got this sanction, on the 30th of January, 1661, the Court, under cover of the clergy's pious zeal, sent a rabble of constables to tear open the graves of these great Regicides, to drag their decaying corpses to Tyburn on hurdles, to hang them, to cut them down and behead them, and then, throwing their putrid bodies into a hole under the gallows, to stick their heads on poles on the top of Westminster Hall. They proceeded to perpetrate the same revolting atrocities on the bodies of innocent and virtuous women, and on some of the most illustrious men of our annals. The remains of the brave old mother of Cromwell; of his amiable daughter, Lady Claypole; of Dorislaus, the envoy of the Parliament who had been murdered by the retainers of this Charles II. at the Hague; of May, the historian of the Parliament, and the excellent translator of Lucan's "Pharsalia;" of Pym, the great and incorruptible champion of English liberty; and of Blake, the most famous admiral that the country had yet produced, whose name alone gave it a world-wide renown, were dragged forth out of their resting-places. These, and every other body which had been buried in the Abbey whilst the Commonwealth lasted, were flung into a pit in St. Margaret's churchyard.

The settlement of the revenue by the Convention Parliament was more successful than the legislation with regard to the Church. It was determined at all events to get rid of the vexatious duties of feudal tenure; for, though they had long ceased to have any real meaning, fines were still executed on alienation of property, and reliefs exacted on the accession to his property of each new Crown tenant. Minors were still wards of the Crown, and were still liable to the odious necessity of marrying at the will of their guardian. All these claims of the Crown were now abolished. Their place was supplied, not as might naturally be supposed by a land-tax, but by an excise upon beer and other liquors, the landed interests thus finding means to shift the burden upon the shoulders of the whole nation. The sum at which the revenue was fixed was one million two hundred thousand pounds a year.

This great bargain having been completed at the close of the year, the Convention Parliament was dissolved. The year 1661 opened with a Fifth-Monarchy riot. Though Harrison and some others of that faith were put to death, and others, as Overton, Desborough, Day, and Courtenay, were in the Tower, there were secret conventicles of these fanatics in the City, and one of these in Coleman Street was headed by a wine-cooper of the name of Venner, who, as we have already seen, gave Cromwell trouble in his time. On the night of the 6th of January, Venner, with fifty or sixty other enthusiasts, rushed from their conventicle, where he had been counselling his followers not to preach, but to act. They marched through the City towards St. Paul's, calling on the people to come forth and declare themselves for King Jesus. They drove some of the train-bands before them, broke the heads of opposing watchmen, but were at length dispersed by the Lord Mayor, supported by the citizens, and fled to Caen Wood, between Highgate and Hampstead. On the 9th, however, they returned again, confident that no weapons or bullets could harm them, and once more they put the train-bands and the king's life-guards to the rout. At length, however, they were surrounded, overpowered, and, after a considerable number were killed, sixteen were taken prisoners, including Venner himself. He and eleven others were hanged, the rest being acquitted for want of evidence. Pepys says there were five hundred of the insurgents, and their cry was, "The King Jesus, and their heads upon the gates!" that is, the heads of their leaders who had been executed and stuck there.

Charles at the time was at Portsmouth with his mother, and Clarendon made the most of the riot, representing it as an attempt to liberate the Regicides in the Tower, and restore the Commonwealth. Fresh troops were raised and officered with staunch Royalists, and a large standing army of that stamp would soon have been formed, had not strong remonstrances been made by the Earl of Southampton and others, and equally strong obstacles being existent in the want of money. The House of Commons, moreover, spoke out plainly before its dissolution, as to the raising of a new army, saying, they were grown too wise to be fooled into another army, for they had discovered that the man who had the command of it could make a king of himself, though he was none before. The known intention to put the Duke of York at the head of it was another strong objection. So the design for the present was abandoned.