[1660 A.D.] from any pardon or indemnity as to their lives or estates. The obvious construction of this was, that the lives of those who came in would be in no danger, and accordingly nineteen had surrendered. It was contended that these should be set at liberty, and suffered to make their escape if they could.

A compromise at length was effected. Most of the king's judges were excepted, as also were Hacker, Axtel, and Hugh Peters; but the nineteen were not to suffer death without an act of parliament for that purpose. Vane and Lambert were also excepted; but by an address of both houses, the king was requested to spare their lives if they should be attainted. Haslerig, Lord Monson, and five others were to lose liberty and property, and Lenthall, St. John, Hutchinson, and sixteen more, all members of the high courts of justice, were to be ineligible to any office whatever. In this form the Bill of Indemnity received the royal assent.

After sitting about three months, the parliament adjourned, and during the recess the twenty-nine regicides who were in custody were brought to trial before a court of thirty-four commissioners, of whom some were old royalists; others, such as Manchester, Say, Holles, and Annesley, members of the Long Parliament; with these sat Monk, Montague, and Cooper, the associates of Cromwell, whom a feeling of delicacy should, perhaps, have withheld from the tribunal.

Most of the prisoners expressed sorrow for their crime; others said that they had borne the king no malice, that they thought his death an act of national justice, and that they had acted under the supreme authority of the nation. They were all found guilty; those who had surrendered were respited, with one exception, namely, Scroop; his having, after his surrender, expressed his real sentiments on the execution of Charles I, in reply to an insidious question, was the pretext for this breach of faith; ten were executed. These were six of the king's judges, Harrison, Scott, Carew, Jones, Clements, and Scroop; Cook, one of the counsel on the trial; Axtel and Hacker, who had commanded the guards; and Hugh Peters, the fanatic preacher. The place of execution was Charing Cross, where a gallows was erected for the purpose. General Harrison suffered first (Oct. 13). Supported here, as on his trial, by that fervid spirit of enthusiasm so perfectly free from all alloy of worldly motives, he gloried in the act for which he was brought to die as performed in the cause of God and his country, and expressed his confidence in the revival of the good cause in happier times. Carew was the next who suffered (15th); his conduct was similar. Cook and Peters were executed on the same day (16th); the latter alone, according to Burnet, is said, showed want of courage, and was obliged to have recourse to cordials. Scott, Clement, Scroop, and Jones, also suffered on the same day (17th). Hacker and Axtel closed the scene at Tyburn (19th). All died with the constancy of martyrs. It is very remarkable, that not a single man of those who had a share in the death of the late king seems to have voluntarily repented of the deed.

The narratives in the state trials were drawn up by the friends of the sufferers, and are evidently partial. Who can believe that "after Harrison's body was opened, he mounted himself and gave the executioner a box in the ear"? At the same time, it is evident, that they were treated with a degree of cruelty and barbarity, for which the conduct of their party, when in power, offered no precedent.

The lives of the remaining regicides were spared; they spent the rest of instance of Downing, and given up by the states, as an atonement for their former treatment of the king during his exile. They suffered under the act of attainder, on the 19th of April, 1662. Others sought refuge in Switzerland. — LINGARD."]

[1660 A.D.]

their days in different prisons. The witty and licentious Harry Marten died at the age of seventy-eight, in Chepstow Castle. They surely had no just reason to complain of their fate, if they recollected how many royalists they had, as far as in them lay, subjected to a similar destiny.

REVENGE ON THE CORPSES OF CROMWELL AND BLAKE

Though one must admire the constancy and magnanimity of the sufferers, most of whom were gentlemen by birth and education, the justice of their sentence is not to be denied, even on their own principles; and it was impossible for Charles to suffer such a heinous deed as the solemn execution of his father to go unpunished. But there was another part of the royal vengeance which can be regarded with no other feelings than those of abhorrence and disgust. The bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw, were taken from their tombs in the Abbey, drawn on hurdles to Tyburn on the anniversary of the death of Charles I, hung on the gallows till evening, then taken down, the heads cut off and fixed on Westminster Hall, and the trunks thrown into a pit. The bodies of about twenty persons (those of Blake, and Cromwell's respectable mother included) were afterwards taken out of the Abbey and buried in the adjoining church-yard. Yet Charles showed less enthusiasm for finding his father's body than for avenging the murder for, says Knight,k "Charles II caused a search to be made for the vault, when the parliament had voted a large sum for a public interment. The search was fruitless, and the king put the money in his pocket. George IV wished to gratify a reasonable curiosity, and the vault with its coffins was readily found. To our minds there is nothing in the whole course of this evil reign so prophetic of the coming national degradation, as the indignities offered to the remains of the greatest soldier and the greatest sailor that England had produced. Cromwell and Blake by their genius and their patriotism made their country the most honoured and dreaded of the nations. They bequeathed to the heir of the ancient kings, a national dignity which was more solid than the glories of the Edwards and Henries, and as dearly prized by the people as the triumphs of Elizabeth. This miserable heir of the grand English monarchy was utterly destitute of that nationality without which a sovereign is more degraded than the meanest of his subjects. The future pensioner of France was incapable of comprehending what England owed to the man whose corpse he hung up on the gallows at Tyburn."

Another important point for the parliament to decide on was the case of those who had purchased the crown and church lands and the estates of royalists, which had been sold by the public authority in the late times. A bill was introduced for an equitable adjustment, but it met with much opposition; and nothing having been done when the parliament was dissolved, the crown, the church, and the other proprietors entered on the lands in question, and the occupiers, having no legal titles to produce, were obliged to sit down contented with the loss of their purchase-money. But it was only the leading royalists that gained in this way; thousands of gentlemen who had sold their lands to support the royal cause, or to pay the sequestrations imposed on them for their loyalty, and had thus been reduced to poverty, remained without remedy. The sales having been legal, the present possessors were secured by the Bill of Indemnity, against which the disappointed cavaliers now exclaimed, saying it was indeed an act of oblivion and indemnity, but of indemnity for the king's enemies, and of oblivion for his friends. They taxed the king with ingratitude, and they conceived, on account of it, a mortal hatred to Hyde.

[1660-1661 A.D.] Their case was doubtless a severe one, but there was really no preventing it but at the risk of a civil war. It was observed that the most clamorous were those who had suffered least, and the petty services for which many claimed large rewards furnished matter for ridicule.

THE RESTORATION OF EPISCOPACY

The church was a difficult matter to arrange. Most of the livings were in the hands of the Presbyterians, and they had so mainly contributed to the restoration, that it would be both ungrateful and unsafe to attempt to disturb them. On the other hand, both the king and the chancellor were resolved to re-establish Episcopacy. There was also a difficulty about the livings, for such of the clergy as had been ejected for their loyalty, seemed now to have a just claim to recover what they had lost. This, however, was accommodated to a certain extent; but the vision of the jurisdiction of bishops, and the dreaded surplice, ring, and cross, alarmed the Presbyterians. They proposed Bishop Usher's model of Episcopacy, and prayed that the habits and ceremonies might not be imposed, and that the liturgy might be revised. The king issued a declaration, apparently granting all they required; but when an attempt was made to have this converted into a bill, it was frustrated by the efforts of the court party in the commons. It was quite plain from this that the royal declaration was only meant to be illusory.

At length (Dec. 29th) the Convention Parliament was dissolved, for it was urged that it was necessary to have a true parliament, to give the force of law to what it had enacted; and it was also expected that a new parliament would be more purely royalist.

In September of this year the duke of Gloucester died of small-pox, much lamented by the king his brother. Their sister, the princess of Orange, died of the same disorder in the winter. The king's other sister, the princess Henrietta, was married about this time to the duke of Orleans, brother to Louis XIV. Another marriage in the royal family was that of the duke of York to Anne Hyde, daughter of the chancellor, who had been maid of honour to the princess of Orange. She possessed wit and sense, though not beauty. The duke, whose taste on this last point was never very delicate, laid siege to her virtue, which was surrendered on a secret contract of marriage; when the consequences were becoming apparent, James kept his promise, and privately espoused her (Sept. 3rd). He informed the king and chancellor. The former, though annoyed, forgave him; the latter pretended the greatest rage against his daughter, advised the king to send her to the Tower, and that not being done, confined her to a room in his own house. The queen-mother and the princess of Orange were highly indignant; and Charles Berkeley, to recommend himself to favour, swore that Anne had been his mistress, and brought Lord Arran, Jermyn, Talbot, and Killegrew, as witnesses of her wantonness. The duke was shaken; but on the birth of her child, and her solemn assertion at that time, and Berkeley's confession of the falsehood of his story, he resolved to do her justice. He acknowledged her as his duchess, and she bore her new rank, it is said, as if she had been born in it.

THE PARLIAMENT OF 1661 AND THE ACT OF UNIFORMITY

The new year (1661) opened with a wild outbreak of the fanatics named fifth-monarchy men, under their leader, Venner, the wine-cooper. One Sunday (Jan. 6th), having heated their enthusiasm by a discourse on the speedy

[1661 A.D.]

coming of Jesus and the reign of the saints, he issued from his conventicle, in Colman street, at the head of sixty well-armed fanatics. They proceeded to St. Paul's, proclaiming King Jesus. They drove off a party of the trained bands that were sent against them, and in the evening they retired to Caenwood, between Hampstead and Highgate. Here some of them were taken: but on Wednesday morning (9th) they returned into the city, shouting as before, and dispersed some of the troops and of the trained bands. At length, some being killed, and Venner taken, they retired into a house at Cripplegate, which they defended, till a party, headed by one Lambert, a seaman, got in at the roof. Most of them were slain; Venner and the remainder were hanged. The attempt was purely an isolated act, but advantage was taken of it to issue a proclamation for suppressing the conventicles of the Quakers, Anabaptists, and other sectaries; it was also the occasion of the formation of the regiments of guards already noticed.

The king's coronation having been celebrated with great splendour (Apr. 23rd), the new parliament met (May 8th). [It is sometimes called the Cavalier Parliament.] As was to be expected, it was most decidedly royalist, the Presbyterians not having more than sixty seats. Its temper soon appeared, by votes for obliging all the members to receive the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England, and for having the Solemn League and Covenant burnt by the common hangman. It was declared that the negative and the command of the army? were rights inherent in the crown; and it was made treason to injure the king's person, or to distinguish between his person and his office. It required all the efforts of the king and Clarendon to have the Bill of Indemnity passed without further exceptions. A bill passed the commons for the immediate execution of the remaining regicides; but the lords, more humane or more honourable, rejected it, the king himself expressing his aversion to it. "I am weary of hanging," said he to Clarendon, "except for new offences. Let the bill settle in the houses, that it may not come to me, for you know that I cannot pardon them." The act depriving the bishops of their seats in parliament, which had been so violently extorted from the late king, was repealed, and the prelates were restored to their legislative functions. As a chief weapon in those times had been tumultuary bodies of petitioners, an act was passed that not more than ten persons should present any petition to the king or either house, nor should it be signed by more than twenty, unless with the order of three justices, or the major part of a grand jury.

While the parliament was thus replacing the constitution on its ancient basis, a conference (called the Savoy Conference) was going on at the bishop of London's lodgings, at the Savoy Palace, between twelve prelates and nine assistants, and an equal number of Presbyterian divines. The ostensible object was a revision of the Book of Common Prayer. It ended, of course, as all such conferences do. The bishops were predetermined to admit of none but very slight modifications, and to retain all the ceremonies. The Presbyterians, under the circumstances, required by far too much; yet surely the prelates might have conceded something to men at least as pious and as learned as themselves, and but for whom they would be probably still without

Hyde was on this occasion created earl of Clarendon, and Arthur Lord Capel (son of him who had been executed in 1649) earl of Essex.

[The act for the command of the militia went rather beyond the constitutional principle of recognising the sole power of the crown to command the forces by land or sea. It declared not only that neither house of parliament could pretend to such power, but could not lawfully levy any war, offensive or defensive, against the king. "These last words," says Hallam, "appeared to go to a dangerous length, and to sanction the suicidal doctrine of absolute nonresistance."]

[1661-1662 A.D.] their sees. If it was puerile on the one side to object so vehemently to the cross, ring, and surplice, it was surely no proof of wisdom on the other to insist on them as if they were of the very essence of religion. So little were the prelates disposed to concession, that even the innovations of Laud were retained, and they remain to this day part of the service of the Church of England.

The strength of the Presbyterian party lay in the corporations, and in these, their strongholds, the church-party proceeded to attack them. By the Corporation Act now passed it was enacted, that any person holding office

in a corporation might be removed, unless he would renounce the Solemn League and Covenant, and declare his belief of the unlawfulness of taking up arms against the king, etc.; and no future officer to be admitted unless he had previously taken the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England.

The revision of the Common Prayer was finally (Nov. 20) committed to the convocation. They made a number of alterations and additions; none, however, favourable to the Presbyterians. The amended book was presented to the king and council, and by them recommended to the house of lords.

Vane and Lambert still lay in prison. As they had had no immediate hand in the death of the late king, the convention had addressed the king in their behalf, and he had assured them that, if attainted, they should not be executed. They were now brought to trial, at the suit of the commons. Lambert, (June 9, 1662), who had never been an enthusiast, or even perhaps a republican, acted with great caution. He excused his opposing Booth and Monk by saying that he knew not that they were acting for the king, and he threw himself on the royal mercy. He was sentenced to die, but he was only confined for life in the isle of Guernsey. He lived there for thirty years, forgotten by the world, occupying his time in the cultivation of flowers and in the practise of the art of painting. It is said that he became a Catholic.

Very different was the conduct of the upright, fervid, enthusiast and