“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.