[248] Protestant Peace Maker, by Bishop Rust, 1682.
[249] Burnet, i. 180.
[250] Life and Times, ii. 364. "Aug. 13.—A facetious Divine being commended to Lord Chancellor, Sir Edward Hyde, who loved witty men, desired to converse with him: being come to him, the Chancellor asked him his name; he said Bull; he replied he never saw a bull without horns. It is true (was the answer), for the horns go with the hide."—Worcester MS.
[251] Life and Times, ii. 365.
[252] After the Act of Uniformity, Baxter shrewdly observes, "This is worthy the noting by the way, that all that I can speak with of the conforming party, do now justify only the using and obeying, and not the imposing of these things with the penalty by which they are imposed. From whence it is evident that most of their own party do now justify our cause which we maintained at the Savoy, which was against this imposition (whilst it might have been prevented), and for which such an intemperate fury hath pursued me to this very day."—Ibid., 394.
[253] Baxter observes: men on both extremes were "offended with me, and I found what enmity, charity, and peace are like to meet with in the world."—Life and Times, 380. His experience in this respect is not an uncommon one.
[254] Clarendon (1076), says the Independents, at the Restoration, had as free access to the King as the Presbyterians—"both that he might hinder any conjunction between the other factions, and because they seemed wholly to depend upon His Majesty's will and pleasure, without resorting to the Parliament, in which they had no confidence, and had rather that Episcopacy should flourish again, than that the Presbyterians should govern." Clarendon is no authority for the policy of the Congregationalists, and goes too far in the last remark. Nor does their access to Court, which I apprehend he greatly exaggerates, prove that they had anything like the political influence of the Presbyterians.
[255] He was let off by Parliament with a simple disqualification for exercising any office, ecclesiastical, military, or civil. In a petition he humbly tendered in January, 1662, we find him representing himself as a minister of forty years' standing, now become infirm, with a wife and three children unprovided for, his present maintenance depending on voluntary contributions, which if taken away would leave him penniless and ruined.—Kennet, 269, 602.
[256] Commons' Journals, May 17.
[257] Mercurius Publicus, May 30.