246 ACT OF INDEMNITY. [1660. the Parliament; and the purchasers had no protection against the due course of law, under which their titles were defective. Unconditional restitution was the necessary result. The Declaration of Breda had said, "because, in the continued distractions of so many years, and so many and great revolutions, many grants and purchases of estates have been made to, and by, many officers, soldiers, and others, who are now possessed of the same, and who may be liable to actions at law upon several titles, we are likewise willing that all such differences, and all things relating to such grants, sales, and possessions, shall be determined in Parliament." By the adroit management of Clarendon, Parliament was relieved from the responsibility of the determination. Loud complaints, no doubt, were made by many who had been honest purchasers; but their complaints were neutralised by the louder murmurings of the Cavaliers, who, although some had returned to the possession of their estates, were deprived of any compensation for their sequestrations, and compositions for delinquency, during the authority of the Long Parliament. They were shut out from any legal process for relief by the Act of Indemnity. Bitter were their murmurings against the ingratitude of the king, from whom they expected the magician's power of annihilating all the natural and moral consequences of twenty years of vicissitude. Such are the mortifications and miseries to be endured by all parties when revolutions have run their course. During the conflicts of great principles men are elevated above their merely selfish interests; but when the sword is sheathed there arise the bitterer animosities of changed fortunes and disappointed hopes. Then come the odious thoughts of revenge for the past,schemes of insulting triumph or dangerous machination. The calm after a great revolution is more to be dreaded than its storms. Clarendon saw this danger, though, when his own passions and prejudices were concerned he yielded to the baser influences. At the adjournment of the Parliament, in September, after the Act of Oblivion and Indemnity had been passed, he thus spoke, as Chancellor :-" Shall we fold our arms towards one another, and contract our hearts with envy and malice to each other, by any sharp memory of what hath been unneighbourly or unkindly done heretofore? What is this but to rebel against the person of the king, against the excellent example and virtue of the king, against the known law of the land, this blessed Act of Oblivion? My Lords and Gentlemen, the king is a suitor to you, makes it his suit very heartily, that you will join with him in restoring the whole nation to its primitive temper and integrity, to its old good manners, its old good humour, and its old good nature;-Good nature, a virtue so peculiar to you, so appropriated by God Almighty to this nation, that it can be translated into no other language, hardly practised by any other people: And that you will, by your example, by the candour of your conversation, by your precepts, and by your practice, and by all your interest, teach your neighbours and your friends how to pay a full obedience to this clause of the Statute, how to learn this excellent art of forgetfulness." "This excellent art of forgetfulness" was not easy to be learnt. Certainly the government did not encourage its acquirement by the example of its own magnanimity; but, eager as the Court was for the exercise of some vengeance for the past, it was but a faint expositor of the passions of many of the Lords and Commons, who cried "havoc" with their loudest voices. Three weeks before the return of Charles II., the IIouse of Commons 1660.] EXCEPTIONS OF REGICIDES AND OTHERS. 247 had decided that seven persons should be excepted from a proposed Amnesty; and that all who had sate upon the king's trial should be arrested, as well as some others who had been ministers of the Protectorate. After the Restoration it became evident that the Court was by no means satisfied with so limited an exception from a general pardon as that of seven who had been engaged in the transactions of twelve years of revolution. The debates in both Houses on the Bill of Indemnity and Oblivion are very imperfectly recorded; but there is enough to show how the spirit of the country had been abased and demoralised-how completely the feeling of national pride had departed from the public men of England-how insensible the majority had become to those principles of honour, by which the evils of the Civil War had been mitigated on both sides. For three months this Bill of Indemnity was debated in both Houses. The Commons went on adding name after name to those of the seven who were originally excepted. The Lords voted that all who had signed the death-warrant of Charles I., as well as five others, should be excepted, either as regarded life or estate. They carried the principle of private revenge so far, that they declared that the surviving relations of four peers who had been executed under the Long Parliament, should nominate four to be put to death of the surviving members of the High Court of Justice by which those peers had been condemned. There was a difficulty, however, in the way of the sweeping proscription which the Lords. desired, which became a touchstone of honourable feeling in both Houses. The king, shortly after his landing, had issued a proclamation, in which he commanded those who had sat as judges of his father to render themselves up within fourteen days, "on pain of being excepted from any pardon or indemnity as to their lives or estates." The Parliament had suggested this proclamation. Was it a trap to induce these men to surrender, or was it an indirect pledge that, so surrendering, they should partake of the benefits of a general pardon? The honour of the king was unquestionably committed to the most favourable construction of the proclamation. Some, such as Ludlow, had the prudence not to place confidence in ambiguous words; and they fled abroad. "Other poor gentlemen were trepanned that were brought in by proclamation."+ Clarendon, the chancellor, shuffled odiously about a document whose ambiguity was doubtless well studied by him. Southampton, the treasurer, with the high spirit of the old Cavaliers, maintained" that since it was not thought fit to secure the lives of those who had been ordered to surrender their persons upon the faith of the proclamation, they ought at least to give them the like number of days for saving themselves as were appointed by that paper for their coming in." The Commons debated this point of the proclamation with a more moderate and honester feeling than the majority of the Lords. Although one rabid member had the baseness to say "that these people's lives were but as a bucket of water in the ocean, in regard of so many more as were to receive benefit by the Act of Pardon;" and another had the effrontery to maintain that "their coming in upon the proclamation was, that God had infatuated them to bring them to justice,-" yet the general temper of the Commons was better represented by Hale, who + Hutchinson, vol. ii. p. 279. * Ante, p. 236. Ludlow, iii. p. 43. 248 EXECUTIONS, AND INSULTS TO THE DEAD. [1660. pleaded "for the honour of the king and the two Houses;" and by Colonel Birch, who said "if he should give articles to a garrison, he should think himself very unworthy to break them." This matter was at last compromised between the Lords and Commons by a proviso in the Bill, that if the nineteen persons therein named should be legally attainted, then nevertheless the execution of the persons so attainted should be suspended until execution should be ordered by Act of Parliament. The most remarkable exceptions to the Statute of Indemnity, in addition to all the regicides with few omissions, were Sir Henry Vane and General Lambert; but the Houses concurred in an address to the king that if these two leading men of the revolution were tried and attainted, their lives should be spared. The king assented. The trials of the regicides and others in custody, who were excepted from pardon as to life and estate, took place in October. Twenty-five of those who had sat in judgment upon Charles I. were dead: nineteen had fled to foreign countries. Twenty-nine persons were brought to trial as traitors, before a Court of thirty-four commissioners; and they were all convicted. Of these, the nineteen who had surrendered under the proclamation were imprisoned for life. Ten were executed. These were Harrison, and five others, who had subscribed the death-warrant of Charles; Cook, who acted as leading counsel upon the trial; Axtell and Hacker, two officers who commanded the guard over the royal prisoner; and the famous Hugh Peters. These men died in the belief that they unjustly suffered for the discharge of a great public duty. In their strong religious principles, which approached to the enthusiasm of martyrs, in Harrison especially, they found support under the cruelties of the old law of treason, which was executed to the minutest point of its brutality. It is not creditable to Charles that he was a spectator of these scenes. Evelyn writes, on the 17th of October, "Scott, Scroop, Cook, and Jones, suffered for reward of their iniquities at Charing Cross, in sight of the place where they put to death their natural prince, and in the presence of the king his son, whom they also sought to kill. I saw not their execution, but met their quarters, mangled, and cut, and reeking, as they were brought from the gallows in baskets on the hurdle." A more disgusting spectacle took place on the 30th of January 1661, which Evelyn also records: "This day (O the stupendous and inscrutable judgments of God!) were the carcases of those archrebels, Cromwell, Bradshaw (the judge who condemned his Majesty), and Ireton (son-in-law to the Usurper), dragged out of their superb tombs in Westminster among the kings, to Tyburn, and hanged on the gallows there from nine in the morning till six at night, and then buried under that fatal and ignominious monument in a deep pit; thousands of people who had seen them in all their pride being spectators." On the 4th of December, the Parliament, upon the motion of colonel Titus-the colonel Titus who now claimed the honour of having written "Killing no Murder "—had voted unanimously that this revolting exhibition should take place. One Englishman has recorded his sentiment upon this vote as regarded Cromwell"which, methinks, do trouble me that a man of so great courage as he was should have that dishonour." On the 12th of September, by a special order of the king to the dean of Westminster, these bodies had been taken out of * 12 Car. II. c. 11. + Pepys' "Diary," December 4, 1660. 1660.] EPISCOPACY-KING'S DECLARATION. 249 their vaults, and thrown into a pit. On the same day, the body of Blake was removed from its honoured resting-place and re-interred in St. Margaret's churchyard. 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. The restoration of surviving bishops to their sees, with the consecration of new bishops, was a policy which the Presbyterian party must have considered inevitable. That party had to a great extent become powerless; and was in no condition to renew the struggles against Episcopacy which had so materially interfered with any pacific arrangement with Charles I. For twenty years there had been no display of copes and surplices in the service of cathedrals. The young had never heard organs and choral voices in parish churches. Now, the bishops assembled in Westminster Abbey "all in their habits," as Pepys records; "But, Lord! at their going out, how people did most of them look upon them as strange creatures, and few with any kind of love or respect." * The passion for the restoration of the monarchy did not extend to this necessary consequence of that restoration. The serious citizens of London and other towns had been accustomed to the ministration of the Puritan clergy, whether Presbyterian or Independent; and they looked with apprehension and dislike to any change that would interfere with their old habits. Their spiritual welfare had not been neglected; nor had they been committed to the guidance of ignorant or unlearned men, looking at the majority of the Puritan ministers. serious portion of the community were sufficiently represented in the Convention Parliament to render some caution necessary in the measures of the Court. On the 25th of October the king published a Declaration, in which he avowed his own attachment to Episcopacy, but expressed his opinion that it might be so modified as to remove all reasonable objections; and he declared that the reading of the Liturgy, certain ceremonial observances, subscription to all the articles, and the oath of canonical obedience, should not be pressed upon those who had conscientious scruples. Calamy, Baxter, and other Presbyterian ministers, had been appointed Chaplains in ordinary to the king, in the month after his restoration. The Puritans appear to have deceived themselves into the belief that a happy concord would be established; and the Court, whether from duplicity or weakness, appears to have fostered the delusion. Some of the leading Puritan ministers, amongst whom were Calamy, Baxter, Ash, and Reynolds, were introduced to the king; and declared "their large hope of a happy "Diary," October 4, 1660. The 250 CONVENTION PARLIAMENT DISSOLVED. [1660. union among all dissenters by his means." Baxter records that the king gave them a gracious answer; professed his gladness to hear their inclinations for agreement; suggested that both sides should abate somewhat of their pretensions; nay, that he was resolved to see this agreement brought to pass;-with much more to the same effect; "insomuch that old Mr. Ash burst out into tears with joy, and could not forbear expressing what gladness this promise of his majesty had put into his heart." In less than a year the value of his majesty's promise was to be better understood, when the Act of Uniformity was passed. In two years non-conformity was made penal. We shall have briefly to notice these healing measures. Their general effect is set forth with all the bitterness of disappointed hope by the most eminent interpreter of the feelings of the Puritan divines-those who, "in times of usurpation had mercy and happy freedom," but who, “under the lawful governors which they desired, and in the days when order is said to be restored, do some of us sit in obscurity and unprofitable silence, and some lie in prisons, and all of us are accounted as the scum and sweepings and off-scourings of the earth." + The king's Declaration, and his promises to the Presbyterian ministers, were looked upon with satisfaction by honest men of both parties. There was a possibility of such an agreement upon points of discipline as would have made the Protestant Church of England a real barrier against the revival of Popery, which was not altogether a frivolous apprehension; and, through the concord of earnest men who had long exercised an important spiritual influence, would have opposed a sober religious spirit equally removed from indifference or fanaticism, to the profligacy which was fast becoming fashionable. To render the king's Declaration effectual a Bill was brought into Parliament by Sir Matthew Hale. It was opposed by the united power of the courtiers in Parliament, and was rejected. This was the test by which the royal professions were to be tried. "Such as were nearest the king's councils well knew that nothing else was intended by the Declaration than to scatter dust in men's eyes, and to prevent the interference of Parliament." Whilst the Convention Parliament lasted, all such awkward questions were tided over. It was dissolved on the 29th of December. Amongst the non-political Acts passed in this Parliament was the Navigation Act, which was in substance a re-enactment of the famous measure of the Long Parliament in 1651. § An Act for the establishment of a General Post Office in London was also framed upon the model of the Postal establishments of the Protectorate. The complex arrangements which prevailed till our own time were prescribed by this Act-one rate for a single sheet, another rate for two sheets;-one rate for a distance not exceeding eighty miles, another rate for a greater distance. The rates for foreign letters were not exorbitant. No private persons were to carry letters; and all ship letters brought from foreign ports were to be delivered to the Postmaster General or his deputies. The Parliament had not risen longer than a week when an extraordinary *Baxter, "Life," Part II. p. 231; folio. Hallam, Chap. xii. Ibid. Part I. p. 84. § Ante, p. 152. |