signing petitions. *

The Corporation Act went much farther than justly attempting to restore the executive power to its due authority in the state. Mingling the political and religious principles of coercion, it required that all persons elected to corporate offices should have received the sacrament, according to the rites of the English Church, within one year before their election; and it required an oath from such officers that they believed it unlawful, on any pretence whatever, to take arms against the king; and required them to abjure the traitorous position of taking arms by the king's authority against himself or his officers.† In the municipal boroughs the supporters of the contest against Charles I. had been principally found-men equally resolved in their love of civil liberty and their hatred of prelacy. The Corporation Act put as strong a restraint upon them as an oath could effect. The restoration of the bishops to the House of Lords was accomplished without any opposition by this Parliament, in which the Presbyterians had lost all influence. The crowning measure of ecclesiastical polity was the Act of Uniformity. By this Statute it was required that all the beneficed clergy, all fellows of colleges, and all schoolmasters, should declare their unfeigned assent and consent to all and everything contained in the Book of Common Prayer, as amended in Convocation and approved by the king. By another clause in this Act, episcopal ordination was required of all persons `holding ecclesiastical preferments. Those of the clergy who, previous to the Feast of St. Bartholomew, 1662, had not declared their acceptance of the Book of Common Prayer, in the terms of the Statute, were to be absolutely ejected from their livings. On that day more than two thousand ministers of religion went forth into the world without any provision for their future support. They had received a striking example of conscientious integrity in the refusal of the episcopal clergy to take the Covenant in 1643. § In that revolutionary crisis the ejected incumbents had not been wholly unprovided for; one-fifth of the income of the new incumbents having been allotted to them. Such a merciful consideration for men of piety and learning-and most of the Puritan clergy were zealous in their callings and pure in their lives-was not granted by this revengeful Parliament. Measures of absolute persecution against the ejected ministers were subsequently enacted— measures which, in their application to all non-conformity, it required a long and arduous struggle to obliterate from the Statutebook.

13 Car. II. c. 5. ↑ Ibid., Session 2, c. I. 14 Car. II. c. 4.

See vol. iii. p. 488.

Scotland. The Scottish Parliament.-Execution of Argyle.-Episcopacy restored in Scotland. -Temper of the English Parliament.-Trial of Vane and Lambert.Execution of Vane.-Catherine of Braganza.-Marriage of the King.-Profligacy of the King and his Court.-Insurrection in the North.-Conventicle Act.--Repeal of the Triennial Act.-Dutch War.-The Plague.-The Five Mile Act.--The Settlement Act.

THE real spirit of the Restoration is more clearly illustrated by the proceedings of the government in Scotland than by its actions at corresponding periods in England. Practically, since the victory of Dunbar, Scotland had ceased to be an independent kingdom. For the true prosperity of both countries it was desirable that this union should have been continued. To give the Stuart a fair field for carrying matters with a high hand in his ancient kingdom, it was expedient again to isolate the smaller and poorer portion of the island from the larger and wealthier. Of course, when the survivors of the Committee of Estates, that had been nominated by Charles in 1651, were again called to resume the government of Scotland; when a Lord Commissioner and other high officers were appointed; when a parliament was summoned to meet at Edinburgh, the national pride was abundantly gratified, and Charles the Second was the best of kings. The people soon found that they had to pay a heavy price for this nationality, which was to involve the loss of the civil and religious rights which were dearest to the nation.

The Parliament which met at Edinburgh on the 1st of January, 1661, has been honoured with the name of "the drunken parlia ment." Burnet says, "It was a mad roaring time, full of extravagance; and no wonder it was so, when the men of affairs were almost perpetually drunk." In England, the passions of the Cavaliers were less fierce, and were held more in subjection by the obvious danger of provoking another Civil War. In Scotland, the dominant party had no thought beyond that of keeping its oppo. nents under its feet. Argyle, as the great leader of the Covenanters, was now to offer the satisfaction of his head for the fall of

his rival Montrose. Upon the restoration of Charles, Argyle had hastened to London to offer his homage to the king. He was arrested; and then sent to Scotland, to be brought to trial for his alleged offences. When questioned before the Parliament he pleaded the amnesty of 1651, and the English government determined to admit the plea. He was then accused of having received a grant from Cromwell; of having aided the English invaders; and of having sat in Richard Cromwell's parliament, and voted for a bill which abjured the rights of the Stuarts to the Crown. The fate of Argyle was sealed when a packet arrived from England, containing letters from him to Monk, inimical to the king and favourable to Cromwell. To produce such private letters against an old associate in the same cause, was as base in Monk as it was infamous in the Parliament to be moved by such treachery to Argyle's condemnation. He was sentenced to be beheaded within forty-eight hours. He accepted his fate with courage and resignation. At the same time Guthrie, a Presbyterian minister, violent and uncompromising in his opinions, was put to death as an example to the clergy. He was personally obnoxious to Middleton, who in this, and in every other instance, went headlong to the gratification of his revenge. He procured the condemnation by the Scottish parliament of the son of the Marquis of Argyle, for writing a letter reflecting upon the acts of the government; and he would have put this nobleman to death, under the barbarous law of "leasing making "sowing dissensions by falsehood-had not Clarendon interfered to stop the iniquity. Amidst these excesses against individuals, the more extensive tyranny of forcing Episcopacy upon a people so devoted to Presbytery was resolutely pushed forward. James Sharpe, who had been sent to London on a mission from his Presbyterian brethren, returned Bishop of St. Andrew's and Primate of Scotland. Other prelates were appointed, of whom four were consecrated in London. In the parliament of 1662, by the first Act of the session, "the whole government and jurisdiction of the church in the several dioceses was declared to be lodged in the bishops, which they were to exercise with the advice and assistance of such of their clergy as were of known loyalty and prudence: all men that held any benefice in the church were required to own and submit to the government of the church, as now by law established." The violence of the drunken Parliament was finally shown in the wanton absurdity of what was called the "Act Rescissory," by

Burnet, "Own Times," Book.

TEMPER OF THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT.

155

which every law that had been passed in the Scottish parliament during twenty-eight years was wholly annulled. The legal foundations of Presbytery were thus swept away. "The bill was put to the vote, and carried by a great majority; and the earl of Middleton immediately passed it without staying for an instruction from the king. The excuse he made for it was, that since the king had by his letter to the Presbyterians confirmed their government as it was established by law, there was no way left to get out of that, but the annulling all those laws."*

The Parliament of England, as if to furnish a little excitement to the dull debates that had reference to non-conformity, in the beginning of 1662 turned its attention to the duty of shedding a little more blood, to expiate that of the royal martyr. The Parliament was hounded on to this work from the high places of the restored Church. The 15th of January was a general fast-day, "to avert God's heavy judgments on this land," the season being unusually rainy. Dr. Ryves, or Reeves, dean of Windsor, preached before the House of Commons," showing how the neglect of exerting justice on offenders (by which he insinuated such of the old king's murderers as were yet reprieved and in the Tower) was a main cause of God's punishing a land." His text was from Joshua, c. vii. v. 13, "There is an accursed thing in the midst of thee, O Israel: thou canst not stand before thine enemies until ye take away the accursed thing from among you." In the week in which Evelyn coolly records this Christian exhortation to avert the judgments of God, he has looked upon "an accursed thing," against which the pulpit of Westminster has no denunciations—the passion of gaming "in a Court which ought to be an example of virtue to the rest of the kingdom." Mr. Pepys says of this roaring time," At Court things are in very ill condition, there being so much emulation, poverty, and the vices of drinking, swearing, and loose amours, that I know not what will be the end of it, but confusion." Rumours of conspiracies were rife at this period; and the virtuous Cavaliers of the Lower House thought with Dr. Ryves, that it would be a salutary measure to execute all the regicides whose fate, after conviction, had been suspended for the decision of Parliament. The Commons passed a Bill for their immediate execution, in direct opposition to the feeling of the Convention Parliament that their lives should be spared. The Lords read this Bill a first time, and then let it drop. Charles, to his honour, said † Evelyn "Diary."

* Burnet, "Own Times," Book ii.

to Clarendon, “I am weary of hanging, except for new offences;" and he trusted that the Bill against the regicides would not come to him; "for," said he, "you know that I cannot pardon them." Some of the minor offenders who had been excepted from the penalty of death, were now degraded from honours, and deprived of their estates. Lord Monson, Sir Henry Mildmay, and Robert Wallop, who were sentenced by Act of Parliament, * to be drawn upon sledges with ropes about their necks from the Tower to Tyburn, and back again, suffered this indignity. The nineteen condemned regicides were confined in various prisons, and wore out their lives in such hopeless captivity as Henry Marten endured at Chepstow. Three regicides, Okey, Corbet, and Barkstead, who had not surrendered upon the king's proclamation, were captured in Holland, in March, 1662, by the agency of Downing, who had been Cromwell's ambassador at the Hague. "The Dutch were a good while before they could be persuaded to let them go, they being taken prisoners in their land. But Sir G. Downing would not be answered so: though all the world takes notice of him for a most ungrateful villain for his pains." They were executed on the 19th of April, and died defending the justice of their actions. The compliance of the Dutch government in the surrender of political offenders, contrasted unfavourably with the sturdy independence of the little states of Vevay and Berne. Ludlow, and others, received ample protection and liberal hospitality in Switzerland; and the royalists thus failing to secure them, had resort to base attempts at assassination. One of these only was successful. John Lisle was shot at Lausanne, in 1664, as he was going to a church near the town-gate.

For some time after the promise of the king to the Convention Parliament that Vane and Lambert, in their exception from the Act of Indemnity, should not suffer death if found guilty of treason, they had remained prisoners in the Tower. On the 30th of October, 1661, Pepys enters in his Diary, "Sir Henry Vane, Lambert, and others, are lately sent suddenly away from the Tower, prisoners to Scilly: but I do not think there is any plot, as is said, but only a pretence." Vane solaced his captivity by compositions which show how earnestly he sought the one true and abiding comfort in misfortune. His enthusiastic religion, his ardent as pirations for civil liberty, his unselfish life, his eminent ability, render him the most interesting of the republican party. Claren13 Car. II. c. 15. ↑ Pepys, "Diary," March 17.