Surrounded in the days of his exile and poverty by numerous adventurers and debauchees, Charles Stuart, disinherited and a fugitive, had the good sense and judgment to remain faithful to his old friends—to the devoted advisers who had long served his father, and who would have protected him against his worst errors if he had known how to trust himself to their wise and honest counsels. Hyde, above all, who had been almost uninterruptedly attached to the fortune and the person of Charles II., and who had directed all the negotiations with Monk before the restoration, was naturally singled out to govern in the name of the restored monarch. From 1657 he had received the title of Lord Chancellor of England: this name became a reality. "Thus the Lord Treasurer Southampton, the Marquis of Ormond, General Monk, and the two secretaries of state, Morice and Nicolas, composed, with the chancellor, that secret committee which, under the name of the Council of Foreign Affairs, was charged by the king to deliberate on all his affairs before they reached the stage of public discussion, and it was impossible to find an association of men more united in mind and feeling."
In this ministry, in which General Monk and the two secretaries of state alone constituted an element that was a stranger to the old royalist party. Clarendon was at once the most distinguished and the most politic. His principles were honest, his views upright and pure. Two faults obscured his better qualities. He was grasping, and he brought with him into England the passions and blunted perceptions of an exile. These inconveniences were not long in making themselves felt.
In the face of a Parliament, the summoning of which had been neither regular nor legal—a Parliament which even then was called a convention, a title destined later to acquire a sad celebrity in the history of France—the great questions which it had become necessary to deal with were all the more urgent since the country demanded the election of a new Parliament. The king was pressed to disband the army, then a permanent menace and a bitter remembrance of the past. More than fifty thousand men inured to arms, kept down but discontented, were suddenly dismissed into civil life. They were well treated, but were irreconcilably hostile to the new power, and were held in check by habits of discipline and by public opinion—not by repentance for the past or the return of royalist ideas. The soldiers, in great number, were still Cromwellians or Republicans.
Their old leaders were Republicans: they were about to pay dearly for their attachment to the order of things which they desired to establish. At first an amnesty was granted to all. Monk had required that the exceptions should be limited to four; they had now become ten. The king then referred the question to the justice of Parliament. The passions of men in large assemblies are the most violent and cruel by reason of the fact that responsibility rests upon no single one. Before the arrival of Charles the spirit of vengeance had already arisen in the two Houses. Some arrests had been made, and thirty persons were excluded from the amnesty by the House of Commons—all who remained of the old leaders of the revolution—Scott, Harrison, Sir Henry Vane, Sir John Haselrig, Desborough, Lambert, Fleetwood, Lenthall—politicians or soldiers. Some had already left England, distrusting, like Ludlow, the promises of the amnesty. The greater part were arrested. The House of Lords resolved that one victim ought to expiate the death of each of the members of the Upper House executed during the rebellion, and ended by excepting from the general pardon all those who had signed the sentence of Charles I., adding to this fatal list Hacker, Vane, Lambert, Haslerig, Axtel, and Peters, who had not sat among the revolutionary judges. This was too much. Monk and some others of moderate views remonstrated. Twenty-nine persons were condemned, ten perished by the tortures inflicted on traitors inflexible in their convictions and their courage. "Where is now your good old cause?" cried a bystander to Colonel Harrison, as he was being drawn to Charing Cross on a hurdle. "Here!" exclaimed the old soldier, placing his hand upon his heart, "and I am going to seal it with my blood." Indifferent to the cruelties which he believed to be necessary, Cromwell nevertheless had not accustomed the English people to the sight of torture. The spectacle soon caused a shock. The executions ceased, political vengeance was suspended. The ecclesiastical question was pressing; the king's embarrassment was great.
At Breda, under the solicitations of the Presbyterians, who were then all-powerful, Charles II. had made promises and allowed hopes of union and toleration to be entertained. Profoundly royalist and conservative, the Presbyterians were separated from the Church of England by questions of form and ecclesiastical organization much more than by fundamental doctrines of religion. In 1660 the king promulgated an ordinance known as the Healing Declaration, which satisfied the Presbyterians without gravely offending the Anglican Church. Some distinguished theologians among the Presbyterians had already accepted the episcopal ordination and had become bishops, when Parliament rejected the Royal Declaration, refusing to give it the force of law. At the same time began the restitution of Church property and the domains of the Crown, very soon definitively settled by the new Parliament. The lands of private individuals were in part restored to them after some delays; but voluntary sales were respected, whatever might have been the conditions under which they were effected.
The reaction had commenced, and was violent and spontaneous. Charles II., cautious and indifferent, took in all this no personal part. He left full play to individual passions, which became excited by degrees. The bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw were torn out of their tombs, hung at Tyburn, then decapitated. King Henry the Seventh's Chapel at Westminster beheld its sanctuary violated for the purpose of searching for the remains of persons buried under its roof during the revolution. The tombs of the mother and daughter of Cromwell, and those of Pym and Blake, were opened, and their coffins broken. On all sides popular vengeance exhibits the same hideous and cowardly traits. The English Royalist party were furnishing an example to the revolutionary populace, who were one day in France to profane the vaults of St. Denis.