[1140] As to usury in the reign of Henry VII see Busch, England unter den Tudors, i, 257, 389. On the general canonist teaching there is a very thorough research in Prof. Ashley's Introduction to Economic History, vol. ii, ch. vi.
[1141] Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, vol. ii (Modern Times), pp. 74-87.
[1142] Id. p. 100.
[1143] Id. pp. 87, 88, 102.
[1144] Cunningham, op. cit. p. 90. As to the upset of gild monopolies in the sixteenth century, see p. 76.
Chapter III
§ 1
The broad outcome of the monarchic restoration under Charles II is the intensifying of the royalist sentiment by way of reaction from the Rebellion and the autocracy of the Protector. It has been held that had Richard Cromwell had the energy of his father he might easily have maintained his position, so quietly was his accession at first accepted; and no doubt his irresolution made much of the difference between success and failure; but nothing can be clearer than the leaning of the mass of the people to the "lawful" dynasty. It is a proof of Cromwell's complete dislocation of the old state of touch between the official classes and the public,[1145] that the army leaders had no misgivings when they commenced to intrigue against Richard, and that Monk was so slow to declare for the king when the event showed how immense was the royalist preponderance. During the Rebellion, London, led by the Puritans, had dominated the country; under the Protectorate, town and country were alike dominated by a selected official and military class, representing a minority with military force to impose its rule. As soon as this class began to disrupt in factions, the released play of common sentiment began to carry all forward on a broad tide towards a Restoration; the only footing on which the English people could yet unite being one of tradition and superstition. The anarchy of a State still unfitted for republican government had before brought about the Protectorate: it now led back to the monarchy. And that the new monarchy did not become as absolute as the contemporary rule of Louis XIV was solely owing to the accident of the later adhesion of the restored dynasty to the Church of Rome, which the mass of the people feared more than they did even the prospect of another Civil War. It was the memory of the Fronde that enabled Louis to override the remains of the French constitution and set up an autocracy; and the same force was now at work in England. It was the memory of the Civil War that made the people so much more forbearing with the new king, when his private adhesion to the Catholic Church became generally suspected,[1146] than their fathers had been with his father. By temperament and from experience they were disposed to do anything for the throne; but the general fear of Popery on the one hand, and the special royalist aversion to the Puritan sects on the other, plunged the State into a new ferment of ecclesiastical politics, the strifes of which so far absorbed the general energy that ill-luck in the commercial wars with Holland seems to have been almost a necessary result, even had the king ruled well. Not that the generation of Charles II was a whit less bent on dominion and acquisition than the decade of the Protectorate.