A Popular History of England, From the Earliest Times to the Reign of Queen Victoria; Vol. III

by François Guizot

The agitation out of doors found a counterpart in the sorrows and troubles of the royal household. The young Duke of Gloucester, an amiable and popular youth, fell a victim to the small-pox. His sister, the Princess of Orange, who had come to England to enjoy the spectacle of the restoration of her family, died soon afterwards of the same malady. The Queen Henrietta Maria had lately arrived in London; she was not popular. In spite of the splendors of her reception, the prejudices formerly excited against her were not forgotten: the English Court, moreover, furnished her with a bitter source of discontent. The secret marriage of the Duke of York with Anne Hyde, daughter of the chancellor, had been made public through the birth of a child. The anger of the queen was great; the chancellor pretended to share in her feeling; he contrived, however, to have his daughter recognized as Duchess of York. The marriage was declared almost at the same time that negotiations were in progress for a union between the Princess Henrietta and the Duke of Orleans, brother of Louis XIV., which was celebrated in March, 1661. The House of Stuart had resumed its position among the reigning families of Europe.

Public emotion in England had scarcely subsided, when a plot revealed itself in London. A handful of fanatics, led by a Fifth Monarchy man, named Venner, rushed through the streets of the city, crying, "Hail to the Lord Jesus, who is coming to reign upon the earth!" They were easily arrested; but they had made a noise, and had broken the heads of some of the city watch. This furnished a pretext for a levy of troops and for doubling the regiments of guards. The military despotism of Cromwell had impressed upon the mind of the nation, and particularly on that of the Cavaliers, a dread of a standing army. It was by the Royalist Parliament that Charles II. and his honest councillors desired to govern. The Convention Parliament had restored the king, but the Presbyterians among them were numerous. They embarrassed the plans of Clarendon, who was passionately devoted to the Anglican Church. A general election was decided on. Parliament met on the 8th of May, 1661.

It was the triumph, the lasting triumph, of the Cavaliers. Fifty or sixty Presbyterians at the most were re-elected. For eighteen years (1661-1679) the Royalist Parliament was destined to sit in the teeth of the law, which prescribed new elections every three years. Great changes were about to be effected in its internal economy as well as in its tendencies. From its opening the new Parliament entered without reserve upon a course of imprudent action. The control of the military forces placed in the hands of the king alone; all resistance to the armed power of the king declared unlawful and criminal—such were the results of the proceedings of Parliament in its first session. All constituted bodies, cities, towns, and corporations, were called upon to take an oath in these terms: "I declare that it is not lawful upon any pretence whatsoever to resist the king, and I abhor the treason which would pretend to take up arms by the king's authority against his person or against those who are commissioned by him. In this, so help me God. Amen."

The bishops were restored to their seats in the House of Lords. It was the first step, quickly to be followed by the complete triumph of the Anglican Church. The English nation had never been deeply penetrated with the Presbyterian spirit. The respect which the Puritans inspired had been greatly weakened during their ascendency, when many hypocrites had associated themselves with those who were sincerely convinced, attracted by the hope of influence and power. Their narrowness of mind and the rigidity of their principles, together with certain ridiculous traits in their manners or their habits, had alienated the popular favor from their party. The Anglican Church, ancient and persecuted, long liberal and indulgent in the application of its laws, saw with passionate regard England return to her. She took advantage of this change without moderation, without forethought, carried away, like the political parties, by the pleasure of the triumph. The Presbyterians had hoped that the project conceived by Archbishop Usher would be adhered to; this was a skillful combination of the governments of the bishops and the synod. After a series of ecclesiastical conferences, as eloquent as they were fruitless. Parliament, in the month of January, 1661, passed an Act of Uniformity which re-established in the Church of England the episcopal rule in all its rigor, leaving no alternative to the numerous Presbyterian pastors who had been appointed to benefices under the Commonwealth but to conform in all matters both to the doctrine and the practice of the Church of England, or to abandon their office to ecclesiastics completely subject to the established discipline. The Covenant, which had been solemnly sworn to by the king himself in Scotland, was ignominiously burnt in the public streets. The Presbyterians were driven out of the Church as they had previously been from Parliament.

The ecclesiastics exhibited no hesitation. By a strange coincidence it was on the day of St. Bartholomew that two thousand of their number took farewell of their charges and their congregations, followed by their families. They retired from the spots where they had looked forward to ending their days, abandoning the care of souls to the old pastors, who had been driven out like themselves by the revolution, and who now resumed possession of their benefices. The Long Parliament had of old shown compassion, though often without effect, by ordering the application of a fifth part of the ecclesiastical revenues to the dispossessed ministers. The Royalist Parliament did not take the same precaution. The Presbyterian ministers remained long deprived of resources, an object of the spleen of the Government. The Church of England, transformed by her triumph, and become more entire and more dominant than she had hitherto been or desired to be, henceforth enjoyed an undisputed reign. She had regained possession of all her advantages, both spiritual and temporal.

This was in great part the work of the lord chancellor, recently created Lord Clarendon, who pursued with passionate ardor a labor which the king regarded with indifference. Yielding to the obstinacy or the enthusiasm of his ministers, Charles contemplated the measures neither with satisfaction nor personal sympathy. Inclining at that time, in the bottom of his heart, towards the doctrines of Catholicism, he would willingly have granted toleration to the Nonconformists in the hope of including the Catholics in the universal indulgence. This his Parliament would not permit; at the same time they hurried him towards a descent which conducted to rigors of which Charles was already weary. "I am tired of hanging!" he said to Clarendon. Illustrious victims excited the furious passions of the Cavaliers. Sir Harry Vane and Lambert in England and the Marquis of Argyll in Scotland imagined themselves safe when the political executions had ceased. They were deceived, and their friends had rejoiced prematurely. Argyll died first (1661), finally ruined by some old letters which he had written to Monk, and which the latter forwarded to his judges. "I placed the crown upon the head of the king at Scone," said the marquis, "and this is my recompense!" The able defence of Vane troubled the Crown lawyers charged with his indictment. "If we do not know what to say to him, we know what to do," muttered Chief Justice Foster. The king was struck with the attitude of the accused. "He is too dangerous a man to let live if we can honestly put him out of the way," he wrote to Clarendon. Vane was executed on the 14th of June, 1662; Lambert was condemned to imprisonment for life. He was sent to the Island of Guernsey, where he was destined soon afterwards to end his days.

The execution of Vane had followed with only an interval of a few days the marriage of the king—an event but little popular in England, for he espoused a Catholic princess. Clarendon feared the influence of Spain. It was a princess of Portugal, Catherine of Braganza, to whom he had destined the sad honor of marrying King Charles II. The latter had urged objections against every proposal for a Protestant union. The dower was considerable; the fortress of Tangier offered an appearance of an acquisition of territory. The Portuguese princess arrived in England in the month of May, 1662. Honest folk founded great hopes upon the marriage of the king, whose disorderly life caused much scandal. Men of foresight were not deceived. After the rigid rule of the Puritans and the heavy yoke of their moral and religious ordinances, the reaction of license and immorality, of which the king gave the example, extended to his followers, and in part corrupted his supporters throughout the country. Those innocent diversions which had been forbidden by the government of the Commonwealth yielded place under the Restoration to a vortex of pleasure and debauchery which began to alarm the serious and sober-minded.

The vices and errors of men enchain them, and bear inevitably their deplorable fruit. The wild prodigality of Charles II. left him poor in spite of the considerable revenue which Parliament assigned him. He had relinquished all the ancient revenues of the crown, relics of the feudal system which shocked those ideas of justice and liberty of the subject which for centuries had gradually been ripening in England, and which had definitely taken shape under the revolution. In lieu of these an annual sum had been fixed. All these resources, however, had been exhausted when Charles II. decided to sell Dunkirk to the young king, Louis XIV., then beginning his reign, having at last become master of that power which he was destined to exercise so long, almost always for the glory, but sometimes for the misfortune of France.