At the moment when, with a small but veteran army of 7000 men, he took up his quarters in London, it seemed to be within his arbitrament which way the scale should preponderate. On one side were the wishes of the nation, but restrained by fear; on the other, established possession, maintained by the sword, but rendered precarious by disunion and treachery. It is certainly very possible that, by keeping close to the parliament, Monk might have retarded, at least for a considerable time, the great event which has immortalised him. But it can hardly be said that the king's restoration was rather owing to him than to the general sentiments of the nation and almost the necessity of circumstances, which had already made every judicious person anticipate the sole termination of our civil discord which they had prepared. Whitelock, who, incapable of refusing compliance with the ruling power, had sat in the committee of safety established in October 1659 by the officers who had expelled the parliament, has recorded a curious anecdote, whence we may collect how little was wanting to prevent Monk from being the great mover in the restoration. He had for some time, as appears by his journal, entertained a persuasion that the general meditated nothing but the king's return, to which he was doubtless himself well inclined, except from some apprehension for the public interest, and some also for his own. This induced him to have a private conference with Fleetwood, which he enters as of the 22nd December 1659, wherein, after pointing out the probable designs of Monk, he urged him either to take possession of the Tower, and declare for a free parliament, in which he would have the assistance of the city, or to send some trusty person to Breda, who might offer to bring in the king upon such terms as should be settled. Both these propositions were intended as different methods of bringing about a revolution, which he judged to be inevitable. "By this means," he contended, "Fleetwood might make terms with the king for preservation of himself and his friends, and of that cause, in a good measure, in which they had been engaged; but, if it were left to Monk, they and all that had been done would be left to the danger of destruction. Fleetwood then asked me, 'If I would be willing to go myself upon this employment?' I answered, 'that I would go, if Fleetwood thought fit to send me.' And after much other discourse to this effect, Fleetwood seemed fully satisfied to send me to the king, and desired me to go and prepare myself forthwith for the journey; and that in the meantime Fleetwood and his friends would prepare the instructions for me, so that I might begin my journey this evening or to-morrow morning early.
"I going away from Fleetwood, met Vane, Desborough, and Berry in the next room, coming to speak with Fleetwood, who thereupon desired me to stay a little; and I suspected what would be the issue of their consultation, and within a quarter of an hour Fleetwood came to me and in much passion said to me, 'I cannot do it, I cannot do it.' I desired his reason why he could not do it. He answered, 'Those gentlemen have remembered me; and it is true, that I am engaged not to do any such thing without my Lord Lambert's consent.' I replied, 'that Lambert was at too great a distance to have his consent to this business, which must be instantly acted.' Fleetwood again said, 'I cannot do it without him.' Then I said, 'You will ruin yourself and your friends.' He said, 'I cannot help it.' Then I told him I must take my leave, and so we parted."[496]
Whatever might have been in the power of Monk, by adhering to his declarations of obedience to the parliament, it would have been too late for him, after consenting to the restoration of the secluded members to their seats on February 21, 1660, to withstand the settlement which it seems incredible that he should not at that time have desired. That he continued, for at least six weeks afterwards, in a course of astonishing dissimulation, so as to deceive, in a great measure, almost all the royalists, who were distrusting his intentions at the very moment when he made his first and most private tender of service to the king through Sir John Grenville about the beginning of April, might at first seem rather to have proceeded from a sort of inability to shake off his inveterate reservedness, than from consummate prudence and discretion. For any sudden risings in the king's favour, or an intrigue in the council of state, might easily have brought about the restoration without his concurrence; and, even as it was, the language held in the House of Commons before their dissolution, the votes expunging all that appeared on their journals against the regal government and the House of Lords,[497] and, above all, the course of the elections for the new parliament, made it sufficiently evident that the general had delayed his assurances of loyalty till they had lost a part of their value. It is however a full explanation of Monk's public conduct, that he was not secure of the army, chiefly imbued with fanatical principles, and bearing an inveterate hatred towards the name of Charles Stuart. A correspondent of the king writes to him on the 28th of March: "the army is not yet in a state to hear your name publicly."[498] In the beginning of that month, many of the officers, instigated by Haslerig and his friends, had protested to Monk against the proceedings of the house, insisting that they should abjure the king and House of Lords. He repressed their mutinous spirit, and bade them obey the parliament, as he should do.[499] Hence he redoubled his protestations of abhorrence of monarchy, and seemed for several weeks, in exterior demonstrations, rather the grand impediment to the king's restoration, than the one person who was to have the credit of it.[500] Meanwhile he silently proceeded in displacing the officers whom he could least trust, and disposing the regiments near to the metropolis, or at a distance, according to his knowledge of their tempers; the parliament having given him a commission as lord general of all the forces in the three kingdoms.[501] The commissioners appointed by parliament for raising the militia in each county were chiefly gentlemen of the presbyterian party; and there seemed likely to be such a considerable force under their orders as might rescue the nation from its ignominious servitude to the army. In fact, some of the royalists expected that the great question would not be carried without an appeal to the sword.[502] The delay of Monk in privately assuring the king of his fidelity is still not easy to be explained, but may have proceeded from a want of confidence in Charles's secrecy, or that of his counsellors. It must be admitted that Lord Clarendon, who has written with some minuteness and accuracy this important part of his history, has more than insinuated (especially as we now read his genuine language, which the ill faith of his original editors had shamefully garbled) that Monk entertained no purposes in the king's favour till the last moment; but a manifest prejudice that shows itself in all his writings against the general, derived partly from offence at his extreme reserve and caution during this period, partly from personal resentment of Monk's behaviour at the time of his own impeachment, greatly takes off from the weight of the noble historian's judgment.[503]
Difficulties about the restoration.—The months of March and April 1660 were a period of extreme inquietude, during which every one spoke of the king's restoration as imminent, yet none could distinctly perceive by what means it would be effected, and much less how the difficulties of such a settlement could be overcome.[504] As the moment approached, men turned their attention more to the obstacles and dangers that lay in their way. The restoration of a banished family, concerning whom they knew little, and what they knew not entirely to their satisfaction, with ruined, perhaps revengeful, followers; the returning ascendancy of a distressed party, who had sustained losses that could not be repaired without fresh changes of property, injuries that could not be atoned without fresh severities; the conflicting pretensions of two churches, one loth to release its claim, the other to yield its possession; the unsettled dissensions between the crown and parliament, suspended only by civil war and usurpation; all seemed pregnant with such difficulties that prudent men could hardly look forward to the impending revolution without some hesitation and anxiety.[505] Hence Pierrepont, one of the wisest statesmen in England, though not so far implicated in past transactions as to have much to fear, seems never to have overcome his repugnance to the recall of the king; and I am by no means convinced that the slowness of Monk himself was not in some measure owing to his sense of the embarrassments that might attend that event. The presbyterians, generally speaking, had always been on their guard against an unconditional restoration. They felt much more of hatred to the prevailing power than of attachment to the house of Stuart; and had no disposition to relinquish, either as to church or state government, those principles for which they had fought against Charles the First. Hence they began, from the very time that they entered into the coalition, that is, the spring and summer of 1659, to talk of the treaty of Newport, as if all that had passed since their vote of 5th December 1648, that the king's concessions were a sufficient ground whereon to proceed to the settlement of the kingdom, had been like an hideous dream, from which they had awakened to proceed exactly in their former course.[506] The council of state, appointed on the 23rd of February, two days after the return of the secluded members, consisted principally of this party. And there can, I conceive, be no question that, if Monk had continued his neutrality to the last, they would, in conjunction with the new parliament, have sent over propositions for the king's acceptance. Meetings were held of the chief presbyterian lords, Manchester, Northumberland, Bedford, Say, with Pierrepont (who finding it too late to prevent the king's return, endeavoured to render it as little dangerous as possible), Hollis, Annesley, Sir William Waller, Lewis, and other leaders of that party. Monk sometimes attended on these occasions, and always urged the most rigid limitations.[507] His sincerity in this was the less suspected, that his wife, to whom he was notoriously submissive, was entirely presbyterian, though a friend to the king; and his own preference of that sect had always been declared in a more consistent and unequivocal manner than was usual to his dark temper.
These projected limitations, which but a few weeks before Charles would have thankfully accepted, seemed now intolerable; so rapidly do men learn, in the course of prosperous fortune, to scorn what they just before hardly presumed to expect. Those seemed his friends, not who desired to restore him, but who would do so at the least sacrifice of his power and pride. Several of the council, and others in high posts, sent word that they would resist the imposition of unreasonable terms.[508] Monk himself redeemed his ambiguous and dilatory behaviour by taking the restoration, as it were, out of the hands of the council, and suggesting the judicious scheme of anticipating their proposals by the king's letter to the two houses of parliament. For this purpose he had managed, with all his dissembling pretences of commonwealth principles, or, when he was (as it were) compelled to lay them aside, of insisting on rigorous limitations, to prevent any overtures from the council, who were almost entirely presbyterian, before the meeting of parliament, which would have considerably embarrassed the king's affairs.[509] The elections meantime had taken a course which the faction now in power by no means regarded with satisfaction. Though the late House of Commons had passed a resolution that no person who had assisted in any war against the parliament since 1642, unless he should since have manifested his good affection towards it, should be capable of being elected; yet this, even if it had been regarded, as it was not, by the people, would have been a feeble barrier against the royalist party, composed in a great measure of young men who had grown up under the commonwealth, and of those who, living in the parliamentary counties during the civil war, had paid a reluctant obedience to its power.[510] The tide ran so strongly for the king's friends, that it was as much as the presbyterians could effect, with the weight of government in their hands, to obtain about an equality of strength with the cavaliers in the convention parliament.[511]
It has been a frequent reproach to the conductors of this great revolution, that the king was restored without those terms and limitations which might secure the nation against his abuse of their confidence; and this, not only by contemporaries who had suffered by the political and religious changes consequent on the restoration, or those who, in after times, have written with some prepossession against the English church and constitutional monarchy, but by the most temperate and reasonable men; so that it has become almost regular to cast on the convention parliament, and more especially on Monk, the imputation of having abandoned public liberty, and brought on, by their inconsiderate loyalty or self-interested treachery, the misgovernment of the two last Stuarts, and the necessity of their ultimate expulsion. But, as this is a very material part of our history, and those who pronounce upon it have not always a very distinct notion either of what was or what could have been done, it may be worth while to consider the matter somewhat more analytically; confining myself, it is to be observed, in the present chapter, to what took place before the king's personal assumption of the government on the 29th of May 1660. The subsequent proceedings of the convention parliament fall within another period.
We may remark, in the first place, that the unconditional restoration of Charles the Second is sometimes spoken of in too hyperbolical language, as if he had come in as a sort of conqueror, with the laws and liberties of the people at his discretion. Yet he was restored to nothing but the bounded prerogatives of a king of England; bounded by every ancient and modern statute, including those of the long parliament, which had been enacted for the subjects' security. If it be true, as I have elsewhere observed, that the long parliament, in the year 1641, had established, in its most essential parts, our existing constitution, it can hardly be maintained that fresh limitations and additional securities were absolutely indispensable, before the most fundamental of all its principles, the government by King, Lords, and Commons, could be permitted to take its regular course. Those who so vehemently reprobate the want of conditions at the restoration would do well to point out what conditions should have been imposed, and what mischiefs they can probably trace from their omission.[512] They should be able also to prove that, in the circumstances of the time, it was quite as feasible and convenient to make certain secure and obligatory provisions the terms of the king's restoration, as seems to be taken for granted.
Plan of reviving the treaty of Newport inexpedient.—The chief presbyterians appear to have considered the treaty of Newport, if not as fit to be renewed in every article, yet at least as the basis of the compact into which they were to enter with Charles the Second.[513] But were the concessions wrested in this treaty from his father, in the hour of peril and necessity, fit to become the permanent rules of the English constitution? Turn to the articles prescribed by the long parliament in that negotiation. Not to mention the establishment of a rigorous presbytery in the church, they had insisted on the exclusive command of all forces by land and sea for twenty years, with the sole power of levying and expending the monies necessary for their support; on the nomination of the principal officers of state and of the judges during the same period; and on the exclusion of the king's adherents from all trust or political power. Admit even that the insincerity and arbitrary principles of Charles the First had rendered necessary such extraordinary precautions, was it to be supposed that the executive power should not revert to his successor? Better it were, beyond comparison, to maintain the perpetual exclusion of his family than to mock them with such a titular crown, the certain cause of discontent and intrigue, and to mingle premature distrust with their professions of affection. There was undoubtedly much to apprehend from the king's restoration; but it might be expected that a steady regard for public liberty in the parliament and the nation would obviate that danger without any momentous change of the constitution; or that, if such a sentiment should prove unhappily too weak, no guarantees of treaties or statutes would afford a genuine security.
Difficulty of framing conditions.—If, however, we were to be convinced that the restoration was effected without a sufficient safeguard against the future abuses of royal power, we must still allow, on looking attentively at the circumstances, that there were very great difficulties in the way of any stipulations for that purpose. It must be evident that any formal treaty between Charles and the English government, as it stood in April 1660, was inconsistent with their common principle. That government was, by its own declarations, only de facto, only temporary; the return of the secluded members to their seats, and the votes they subsequently passed, held forth to the people that everything done since the force put on the house in December 1648 was by an usurpation; the restoration of the ancient monarchy was implied in all recent measures, and was considered as out of all doubt by the whole kingdom. But between a king of England and his subjects no treaty, as such, could be binding; there was no possibility of entering into stipulations with Charles, though in exile, to which a court of justice would pay the slightest attention, except by means of acts of parliament. It was doubtless possible that the council of state might have entered into a secret agreement with him on certain terms, to be incorporated afterwards into bills, as at the treaty of Newport. But at that treaty his father, though in prison, was the acknowledged sovereign of England; and it is manifest that the king's recognition must precede the enactment of any law. It is equally obvious that the contracting parties would no longer be the same, and that the conditions that seemed indispensable to the council of state, might not meet with the approbation of parliament. It might occur to an impatient people, that the former were not invested with such legal or permanent authority as could give them any pretext for bargaining with the king, even in behalf of public liberty.
But, if the council of state, or even the parliament on its first meeting, had resolved to tender any hard propositions to the king, as the terms, if not of his recognition, yet of his being permitted to exercise the royal functions, was there not a possibility that he might demur about their acceptance, that a negotiation might ensue to procure some abatement, that, in the interchange of couriers between London and Brussels, some weeks at least might be whiled away? Clarendon, we are sure, inflexible and uncompromising of his master's honour, would have dissuaded such enormous sacrifices as had been exacted from the late king. And during this delay, while no legal authority would have subsisted, so that no officer could have collected the taxes or executed process without liability to punishment, in what a precarious state would the parliament have stood! On the one hand, the nation almost maddened with the intoxication of reviving loyalty, and rather prone to cast at the king's feet the privileges and liberties it possessed than to demand fresh security for them, might insist upon his immediate return, and impair the authority of parliament. On the other hand, the army, desperately irreconcilable to the name of Stuart, and sullenly resenting the hypocrisy that had deluded them, though they knew no longer where to seek a leader, were accessible to the furious commonwealth's men, who, rushing as it were with lighted torches along their ranks, endeavoured to rekindle a fanaticism that had not quite consumed its fuel.[514] The escape of Lambert from the Tower had struck a panic into all the kingdom; some such accident might again furnish a rallying point for the disaffected, and plunge the country into an unfathomable abyss of confusion. Hence, the motion of Sir Matthew Hale, in the convention parliament, to appoint a committee who should draw up propositions to be sent over for the king's acceptance, does not appear to me well timed and expedient; nor can I censure Monk for having objected to it.[515] The business in hand required greater despatch. If the king's restoration was an essential blessing, it was not to be thrown away in the debates of a committee. A wary, scrupulous, conscientious English lawyer, like Hale, is always wanting in the rapidity and decision necessary for revolutions, though he may be highly useful in preventing them from going too far.