signatures, was presented to Parliament on April 27, 1659, protesting, inter alia, against tithes, but protesting very pertinently: "Is this our rest and the end of our work, and is this the Reformation that must be the price of so much blood? To set the magistrate in Christ's throne to try and judge who are fit to be his Ministers, and to send out and restrain whom he thinks fit, and to force a maintenance further, even from those that for conscience sake cannot hear them nor own them; but for Christ's sake, to whom the kingdom belongs, are made to testify against both magistrate and minister as intruders into Christ's place?"

Richard

Prynne, who had learnt some wisdom since his old enemy had gone to the scaffold, voiced the public feeling in his crabbed style, in "A short, legal, medicinal, Cromwell. usefull, safe, easie prescription, to recover our Kingdom, Church, Nation, from their present dangerous, distractive, destructive confusion, and worse than Bedlam madnesse," and "the Republicans and others' spurious good old cause briefly and truly anatomised." Monk for a while hesitated as to Church as well as king. "As to a government in the Church, the want whereof hath been no small cause of these nations' distractions," he said to the reassembled Parliament on February 21, 1660, "it is most manifest that if it be monarchical in the State, the Church must follow and Prelacy must be brought in." But he professed to believe that moderate Presbyterian government, with a sufficient liberty for conscience, was the best solution. "Resolved," wrote a wit in "Several Resolves prepared by the Commanding Junto to pass the House," "that there be a restraint upon Presbytery as well as Popery and Prelacy, because it somewhat resembles Christianity."

Richard Cromwell's brief rule ended in a torrent of squibs and lampoons; the "good old cause," as the soldiers called it, was laughed at on every side: the end of the drama, that had had so many tragic scenes, was pure comedy. No movement in English history was more popular than that which brought back the Church with the king. Of what followed we do not now speak; but it must be remembered that if the majority of the nation was afterwards proved to desire new safeguards against another revolution, and to think

IX

THE RESTORATION

177

that they could be found only in intolerance, the Restoration itself came with a declaration of freedom beyond that which Cromwell had ever granted. The declaration from Breda contained these words:

Toleration promised at the Restoration.

"And because the passion and uncharitableness of the times have produced several opinions in religion, by which men are engaged in parties and animosities against. each other which, when they shall hereafter unite in a freedom of conversation, will be composed or better understood; we do declare a liberty to tender consciences, and that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matters of religion, which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom; and that we shall be ready to consent to such an Act of Parliament, as upon mature deliberation shall be offered to us, for the full granting of such indulgence."

We have passed away, in these concluding observations, from the great Protector himself; but in the months that followed his death his spirit appeared still to brood over the disturbed scene. It was his indomitable insistence which caused the execution of the king. It was his strength of will and absence of sympathy or foresight which made the difficulties of the Puritan rule insoluble. Puritanism, some modern writers tell us, was incarnate in him. It was he, certainly, who more than any one man, was responsible for its fall.

AUTHORITIES. -Tanner MSS., Bodleian Library; Evelyn, Diary; Calendar of State Papers, Domestic; Pamphlet literature of the time; Shaw, History of the English Church, 1640-66; Clarendon, Great Civil War; Cromwell's Letters and Speeches; editions of Carlyle and Stainer; Walker, Sufferings of the Clergy; Baillie's Letters; Clark Papers, ed. Firth (Camden Society); Clarendon Papers, ed. Macray; Wolf, Menasseh ben Israel. Among modern biographies of Cromwell, those by S. R. Gardiner, C. H. Firth, and John Morley. Among pamphlets on the position of the sects not favoured by the Protector should be especially noticed A Dissertation of the present sufferings of above 140 of the people of God who are now in prison, 1660. Among refutations of the Covenant, etc., William Prynne, Concordia Discors, 1660. See also "Troubles in a City Parish under the Protectorate," English Historical Review, x. 41 sqq., and Calamy's Abridgment of Mr. Baxter's History of his Life and Times, 1702. Details of the later years of Usher and of Hall are found in the Life and Death of... Dr. James Usher (a sermon), by Nicholas Bernard, 1656, and Death's Alarum (a sermon), by John Whitefoote, 1656, and in the autobiographical memorials in Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Biography, vol. v. ed.

N

1810. The Life of Hacket, by Plume (ed. Walcott, 1865), and the Lives of Juxon, Hammond, Hall, Usher, in the Dictionary of National Biography, give information. As to the establishment of Presbyterianism, the formal terms may be observed in the Ordinance of the two Houses, published 1645 (1646) by John Wright. The best account of the condition of a diocese during the interregnum is that in the Diocesan History of Bath and Wells (W. Hunt), chap. viii. Tilenus the Trier was printed by R. Royston at the Angel in Fire Lane; the copy in the possession of the present writer has, in a contemporary hand, on the title page, 'John Aston," which may possibly be the name of the writer. The copie of a paper presented, etc., London: printed by A. W. for Giles Calvert, at the Black Spread-eagle, at the West end of Paules, 1659. Speech printed by S. Griffin, 1659 (1660), on the order of "his excellency the Lord General."

CHAPTER X

THE CHURCH OF THE RESTORATION

Preparation

for the Restoration.

THE Restoration meant much more than that, after a few months' unrest under an impossible government, Oliver Cromwell's successor was Charles Stewart. The Church was restored with even fewer conditions than the king. Statesmen were fearful, but their fears were groundless. When, in 1659, Thorndike published his Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England, in which he reiterated, clearly and unhesitatingly, the doctrines which the school of Laud had inherited from the divines of the Reformation and their historical ancestry, Catholic custom was to his mind still the unbroken rule of the Church: the historic Episcopate, the use of confession and of prayers for the dead, the restoration of the Epiklesis on the elements, for these he pleaded. His principle was the appeal to the Holy Scriptures as interpreted in the primitive church; outside this there was no compromise possible for churchmen. Such statements alarmed the cautious Hyde, the faithful counsellor of the exiled Charles as of his father, and afterwards famous as Earl of Clarendon. "What do our friends think of the book?" he asked, "and is it possible that he would publish it, without ever imparting it or communicating with them ?" The king, he said, was apprehensive of danger; reports reached England from his court that "any Episcopacy, how low soever, would serve the turn and be accepted."

Some of the London clergy and laity "that adhered to the late king," drew up a declaration, in which they declared that they regarded their sufferings as inflicted by God, "and

Possibilities

therefore do not cherish any violent thoughts or inclinations to those who have been in any way instrumental of a in them." Baxter said publicly that moderate settlement. men could be easily satisfied. He, and many with him, made no exceptions to the doctrines of the Prayerbook. It seemed that the Presbyterians-so the French ambassador wrote to Cardinal Mazarin on April 1, 1660, -were still in power. But the Presbyterian system, as we

have seen, had never taken root in the country. The differences among other religious bodies, whom Presbyterians and churchmen alike contemptuously described as "sectaries," prevented any possible union on the basis of Independency, even if the essentially republican nature of the Independent system had made it possible as the religious establishment of a restored monarchy. The grievous exceptions which the late government had continued to make to a religious toleration left no precedent for a scheme which would allow freedom to all. If the lines upon which religion should be settled had been submitted to argument, it is probable that no conclusion would ever have been arrived at. But the matter was settled, as a revolution generally settles such matters, without compromise.

The views

The first factor in the settlement was the king himself. Charles had been brought up in the strict Church of England system, which was the centre of his father's ideas. of Charles II. He had undergone among the Presbyterians of Scotland uncomfortable experiences, involving, to a man of his supple dishonesty, considerable personal humiliation. He had mixed continually during his exile with Roman. Catholics, and the Commonwealth had done its best to make England believe that he was already a papist. But he had kept up the English services in what was termed his private chapels, and his advisers were for the most part sincere members of the English Church. The matter did not touch him very nearly. From his boyhood he was utterly dissolute and corrupt. "His religion was Deism, or rather that which is called so; and if in his exile, or at his death, he went into that of Rome; the first was to be imputed to a complaisance

1 The publication in 1650 of The King of Scotland's Negotiations at Rome rendered it necessary to publish a full refutation of the charges in 1660.