History of the English People, Volume VI / Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683

by John Richard Green

The tide of loyalty had in fact been rising fast during its session, and its influence was already seen in a shameful outrage wrought under the very orders of the Convention itself. The bodies of Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Ireton were torn from their graves and hung on gibbets at Tyburn, while those of Pym and Blake were cast out of Westminster Abbey into St. Margaret's churchyard. But it was only on the dissolution of the Convention-Parliament at the end of 1660 that the new political temper made itself vigorously felt. For the first time during twenty years half England found itself able to go to the poll. From the outset of the war all who had taken part on the Royalist side had been disfranchised as "malignants," and this disfranchisement had been rigorously enforced even in the elections to the Convention. But "malignity" had now ceased to be a crime, and the voters so long deprived of all share in the suffrage, vicars, country gentlemen, farmers, with the whole body of the Catholics, rushed again to the poll. Their temper, as might be expected, was one of vengeance on the men who had held them down so long. In counties and towns alike the zeal for Church and king, the two causes for which the voters had suffered, swept all hope of moderation or compromise before it. The ruling impulse was to get utterly rid of the old representatives. The Presbyterians, dominant in the Convention, sank in the Cavalier Parliament, as that of 1661 was called, to a handful of fifty members.

The Parliament of 1661.

The new House of Commons was made up for the most part of young men, of men, that is, who had but a faint memory of the Stuart tyranny under which their childhood had been spent, but who had a keen memory of living from manhood beneath the tyranny of the Commonwealth. They had seen their fathers driven from the justice-bench, driven from the polling-booth, half-beggared and imprisoned for no other cause but their loyalty to the king. They had seen the family oaks felled and the family plate sent to the melting-pot to redeem their estates from the pitiless hands of the committee at Goldsmiths' Hall. They had themselves been brought like poachers before the justices for a horse-race or a cock-fight. At every breath of a rising a squad of the New Model had quartered itself in the manor-house and a warrant from the Major-general of the district had cleared the stables. Nor was this all. The same tyranny which pressed on their social and political life had pressed on their religious life too. The solemn petitions of the Book of Common Prayer, the words which had rung like sweet chimes in their ears from their first childhood, had been banned from every village church as accursed things. It had been only by stealth and at home that the cross could be signed on the brow of the babe whom the squire brought to be christened. Hardly by stealth had it been possible to bury their dead with the words of pathetic hope which have so often brought comfort to the ears of mourners.

The Parliament and the Church.

And now the young squires felt that their time had come. The Puritan, the Presbyterian, the Commonwealthman, all were at their feet. Their very bearing was that of wild revolt against the Puritan past. To a staid observer, Roger Pepys, they seemed a following of "the most profane, swearing fellows that ever I heard in my life." Their whole policy appeared to be dictated by a passionate spirit of reaction. They would drive the Presbyterians from the bench and the polling-booth as the Presbyterians had driven them. They would make belief in a Commonwealth as much a sign of "malignity" as their enemies had made belief in a king. They would have no military rule: they hated indeed the very name of a standing army. They were hot Royalists and they were hot churchmen. The old tyranny of the bishops was forgotten, the old jealousy of the clergy set aside in the memory of a common suffering. The oppressors of the parson had been the oppressors of the squire. The sequestrator who had driven the one from his parsonage had driven the other from his manor-house. Both had been branded with the same charge of malignity. Both had been robbed alike of the same privileges of citizenship. Both had suffered together, and the new Parliament was resolved that both should triumph together. For the first time since the Reformation the English gentry were ardent not for king only but for Church and King.

The zeal of the Parliament at its outset therefore far outran that of Charles or his ministers. Though it confirmed the other acts of its predecessor, the Convention, it could with difficulty be brought to confirm the Act of Indemnity. The Commons pressed for the prosecution of Vane. Vane was protected alike by the spirit of the law and by the king's pledge to the Convention that, even if convicted of treason, he would not suffer him to be sent to the block. But he was now brought to trial on the charge of treason against a king, "kept out of his royal authority by traitors and rebels," and his spirited defence served as an excuse for his execution. "He is too dangerous a man to let live," Charles wrote with characteristic coolness, "if we can safely put him out of the way." But the new members were yet better churchmen than loyalists. At the opening of their session they ordered every member to receive the communion, and the League and Covenant to be solemnly burnt by the common hangman in Westminster Hall. The bill which excluded the bishops from their seats in the House of Lords was repealed. The conference at the Savoy between the Episcopalians and Presbyterians broke up in anger, and the few alterations made in the Liturgy were made with a view to disgust rather than to conciliate the Puritan party.

Clarendon.

In spite of these outbursts however it would be unjust to look on the temper of the new Parliament as a mere temper of revenge. Its wish was in the main to restore the constitutional system which the civil war had violently interrupted. The Royalist party, as we have seen, had no sort of sympathy with the policy of the early Stuarts. Their notions and their aims were not those of Laud and Strafford, but of the group of constitutional loyalists who had followed Falkland in his break with the Long Parliament in 1642. And of that group by a singular fortune the most active and conspicuous member now filled the chief place in the counsels of the king. Edward Hyde had joined Charles the First before the outbreak of the war, he had become his Chancellor of the Exchequer, and it was to his pen that the bulk of the royal manifestoes were attributed. He had passed with the young Prince of Wales into exile, and had remained the counsellor of Charles the Second during the long years which preceded his return. His faithfulness had been amply rewarded. He was now Earl of Clarendon and Lord Chancellor; and his influence in the royal council, which had been great from the first, became supreme when the temper of the new Parliament shattered the hopes of his Presbyterian opponents there. But his aim was simply to carry out the policy he had clung to with Falkland. He was a lawyer by breeding, and his theory of the State was a lawyer's theory. He looked on the English constitution, not as the sum of political forces which were still in process of developement, but as a mass of fixed and co-ordinated institutions whose form and mutual relations had been settled in some distant past. He had opposed the Stuart tyranny because—as he held—it had broken down this constitution to the profit of the Crown. He worked with the men of the Long Parliament in what he regarded as the work of restoring it; he left them the moment that he fancied they were themselves about to break it down to the profit of the People. Years of exile had only hardened his ideas. He came back with the fixed resolve to hold the State together at the exact point where the first reforms of the Long Parliament had left it. The power and prerogative of the Crown, the authority of the Church, were to be jealously preserved, but they were to be preserved by the free will and conviction of the Parliament. It was on this harmonious co-operation of these three great institutions that Clarendon's system hung. Its importance to future times lay in his regarding Parliament and the Church, not as mere accidents or checks in the system of English government, but as essential parts of it, parts which were as needful for its healthy working as the Crown itself, and through which the power of the Crown was to be exercised. Wholly to realize such a conception it was necessary that the Parliament should be politically, the Church religiously, representatives of the whole nation.