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. The 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.

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.

1661.]

ANABAPTIST INSURRECTION.

251

insurrection broke out in London. It was a renewal of that fanatical outbreak which Cromwell put down with a troop of horse on the 9th of April, 1657. The Fifth-Monarchy men again rose on the 6th of January, 1661, under their old leader, Thomas Venner, the wine-cooper. These men had a meeting-house in the city; and some fifty or sixty of them, after an encounter with the feeble municipal police, marched to Caen-wood, near Highgate, and having been there concealed for two days, returned to encounter the trained bands, and even a regular body of guards, in the confidence that their cause, the establishment of the reign of Christ on earth, and the suppression of all other authority, would be miraculously upheld. The capital was in fearful alarm; the shops were shut; the city gates barricaded. But these wild men drove all before them; till a rally was made, and they were for the most part slaughtered, refusing quarter. Venner, and sixteen of his followers who were secured, were tried and executed. This mad tumult was made the excuse for a proclamation for closing the conventicles of Quakers, Anabaptists, and other sectaries. The members of various sects throughout the country, who were proscribed as dangerous, were very numerous; but the severity exercised towards them was really more favourable to their extension than the toleration of Cromwell. The Quakers especially held their ground against every severity-even against an Act of Parliament of 1662, by which they were to be fined for assembling for public worship, and for a third offence to be banished.

The Coronation of the king took place on the 23rd of April. Every ceremony in Westminster Abbey, and in Westminster Hall, was of the most gorgeous nature. In the streets there were bonfires out of number; and 'many great gallants, men and women" drinking the king's health upon their knees. The people of London had not recovered from their delirium. Throughout the land men were equally intoxicated by the return to the ancient order of things. The May-poles had been again set up; the Christmaş ale was again flowing in the squire's hall; the peasantry were again wrestling and cudgel-playing on the village-green; the stocks were no longer a terror to the drunkard; the play-houses were open in London, and itinerant actors again gathered their gaping audiences in booth or barn. The old asceticism of the Puritans was bitterly remembered. Their zeal for liberty, their pure lives, their earnest religion, were regarded as disloyalty and hypocrisy. The great share which the larger number of them had taken in the restoration of the monarchy was also forgotten; and amidst an exaggerated contempt for their formal manners, and a real dislike of the restraint which they imposed upon audacious profligacy, the Cavaliers carried the elections for a new Parliament by immense majorities. The first Session lasted from the 8th of May to the 30th of July; and in that short time reflecting persons began to see "how basely things have been carried in that Parliament by the young men, that did labour to oppose all things that were moved by serious men." But "to oppose all things that were moved by serious men was a very small part of the zeal of the Parliament of 1661. Far more eagerly than Charles himself, or his minister Clarendon, the royalists laboured as much as possible to prepare the way for the return of

* Pepys.

Ibid. “Diary," August 4.

252

CONFERENCES AT THE SAVOY.

[1661. the glorious days of the Star-Chamber and the High Commission. The king and the chancellor carried on a little farther the artifice of a desire for agreement in ecclesiastical affairs. Before the meeting of Parliament, Conferences were held at the Savoy between the bishops and twelve of the leading Puritan divines, for the revision of the Liturgy. These discussions, which were protracted for more than three months, could only conclude in one way. The objections of those who called themselves "primitive Episcopalians" were put with a due acknowledgment that the Book of Common Prayer is "an excellent and worthy work;" but they desired that "such further emendations may be now made therein, as may be judged necessary for satisfying the scruples of a multitude of sober persons who cannot at all, or very hardly, comply with the use of it as now it is."* The emendations which they desired were very numerous, both in the prayers and in the rubric. Whilst the churchmen were discussing these objections, sometimes not in the most Christian spirit, the Parliament was settling the question of conformity in a very summary manner; and when the Liturgy, a few months after, came to be reviewed in Convocation, the points which gave offence to "tender consciences" were left untouched. The Anglican Church felt its power; and the notion of conciliation, if ever seriously entertained, was soon supplanted by the readier and simpler principle of coercion.

The altered character of the House of Commons was very soon indicated

Baxter, "Life," Part II. p. 316.

1661.]

CHARACTER OF THE NEW PARLIAMENT.

253

by its proceedings. The Parliament met on the 8th of May. On the 17th it was voted that every member should receive the sacrament according to the forms of the Anglican Church. It was also resolved that the Solemn League and Covenant should be burned by the hands of the common hangman. There was no hesitation now in proclaiming that the Presbyterians were a crushed and degraded party. In the common hatred of all Puritans, the Independents were necessarily included. The one great principle of the policy of Clarendon was to re-establish the Church of England in its ancient splendour; and this desire would have been as commendable as it was natural, could it have been accomplished without a violation of those principles of religious freedom to which the royal word. was pledged. But Clarendon, who in exile had been surrounded by suffering dignitaries of the Established Church, had contracted a violent hatred of the entire body of the Puritan Clergy; and he constantly speaks of them in terms of contempt, which only indicate his real ignorance of the condition of the people during the long period in which he was shut out from any intercourse with the great majority of his countrymen. With him the whole body of the non-conforming ministers were "fellows." He bitterly opposed the inclination of the king to mitigate some of the evils which the temper of the Cavaliers was ready to inflict upon them. This temper is thus accounted for by our constitutional historian: "The gentry, connected for the most part by birth or education with the episcopal clergy, could not for an instant hesitate between the ancient establishment and one composed of men whose eloquence in preaching was chiefly directed towards the common people." The gentry did "not for an instant hesitate" to deprive "the common people" of the spiritual instructors to whom they looked up with reverence; and to thrust upon them a new set of ministers who had little sympathy with their religious or political convictions. The inevitable consequence was that the indifference of "the higher classes" to all earnest principles gradually spread through the whole community; that the clergy were more intent upon preaching the doctrine of passive obedience, so as to produce a nation of slaves and sycophants, than desirous of setting forth the great truths of Christian doctrine and Christian morals, so as to separate "the common people" from the contagion of the horrible profligacy of the Court. Lauderdale related to Burnet that the king told him to let presbytery go, "for it was not a religion for gentlemen." The religion which the king and his courtiers desired, was something that would be as kind to their merits as blind to their faults; and their wishes were gratified to an extent which makes the most sincere friend of the Church of England look back with loathing at the servility, the intolerance, and the cowardice with which its hierarchy so long grovelled at the feet of tyranny and sensuality. But if Clarendon went beyond all the bounds of honest and wise statesmanship in his zeal to replace the Church in the position which it had occupied before the days of the Long Parliament, he manifested both wisdom and integrity in firmly clinging to the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion. At the opening of this Second Parliament he put the king forward to desire the confirmation of that Act, in stronger terms of entreaty than were usually placed in the mouth of the sovereign. Clarendon himself says, "This warmth of his majesty upon this subject was not then more than needful; for the armies being now disbanded, there were great combinations