‘The Restoration,’ says Professor Seeley, in an able essay on current perversions of seventeenth-century-history, ‘was not a return to servitude, but the precise contrary. It was a great emancipation, an exodus out of servitude into liberty . . . As to the later Stuarts, I regard them as pupils of Cromwell: . . . it was their great ambition to appropriate his methods,’ (and, we may add, to follow his foreign policy in regard to France and Holland), for the benefit of the old monarchy. They failed where their model had succeeded, and the distinction of having enslaved England remained peculiar to Cromwell.’
THE BALLAD OF KING MONMOUTH
1685
Fear not, my child, though the days be dark,
Never fear, he will come again,
With the long brown hair, and the banner blue,
King Monmouth and all his men!
The summer-smiling bay
Has doff’d its vernal gray;
A peacock breast of emerald shot with blue:
Is it peace or war that lands
On these pale quiet sands,
As round the pier the boats run-in their silent crew?
Bent knee, and forehead bare;
That moment was for prayer!
Then swords flash out, and—Monmouth!—is the cry:
The crumbling cliff o’erpast,
The hazard-die is cast,
’Tis James ’gainst James in arms! Soho! and Liberty!
—Fear not, my child, though he come with few;
Alone will he come again;
God with him, and his right hand more strong
Than a thousand thousand men!
They file by Colway now;
They rise o’er Uplyme brow;
And faithful Taunton hails her hero-knight:
And girlhood’s agile hand
Weaves for the patriot band
The crown-emblazon’d flag, their gathering star of fight.
—Ah flag of shame and woe!
For not by these who go,
Scythe-men and club-men, foot and hunger-worn,
These levies raw and rude,
Can England be subdued,
Or that ancestral throne from its foundations torn!