June 14.

The plebeian Hugh Peter had been hanged; Sir Henry Vane was to suffer on the block. The same cheerful resignation animated him on the day of his execution. As the procession moved through the streets, men from the windows and tops of houses poured out prayers for him as he passed by; and the people shouted aloud: "God go 1662. with you." Arrived on the scaffold, he was observable above all others by the intrepidity of his demeanor. Surveying the surrounding multitude with composure, he sought to awaken in their souls the love of English liberty. His voice was overpowered with trumpets; finding he could not bear an audible testimony to his principles, he was not in the least disconcerted by the rudeness, but by the serenity of his manner continued to show with what calmness an honest patriot could die. With unbroken trust in Providence, he believed in the progress of civilization; and, while he reminded those around him that "he had foretold the dark clouds which were coming thicker and thicker for a season," it was still "most clear to the eye of his faith" that a better day would dawn in the clouds. "Blessed be God," exclaimed he, as he bared his neck for the axe, "I have kept a conscience void of offence to this day, and have not deserted the righteous cause for which I suffer." That righteous cause was civil and religious liberty; in the history of the world, he was the first martyr to the principle of the paramount power of the people; and, as he had predicted, "his blood gained a voice to speak his innocence."

Puritanism, with the sects to which it gave birth, ceased to sway the destinies of England. The army of Cromwell had displayed its power in the field; Milton still lived to illustrate what poetry it could create, in works that are counted among the noblest productions of the human mind; Vane proved how fearlessly it could bear testimony for liberty in the face of death; New England is the monument of its power to establish free states. The ancient monarchy of England would not yield to new popular establishments; but the bloom of immortality belongs to

the example of Vane, to the poetry of Milton, and, let us hope, to the institutions of New England.

The new parliament was chosen just before the coronation, while the country still glowed with unreflecting loyalty. Few Presbyterians were returned: the irresistible majority, many of whom had fought for the king, was all for monarchy and prelacy. Severe enactments restrained the liberty of the press; the ancient right of petition was narrowed and placed under supervision. The restored king was a papist; but whoever should affirm him to be a papist was incapacitated from holding office in church or state. He was ready "to conspire with the king of France and wicked advisers at home, to subvert the religion and liberty of the English people;" and the parliament, in its eagerness to condemn rebellion, renounced for itself every right of withstanding him even in defensive war.

The Presbyterians formed the governing body in many municipalities; the sincere ones were dislodged by an act removing all incumbents who should not by oath declare it unlawful to take up arms against the king on any pretence whatsoever; and, for the future, requiring of every candidate that, within the year before the election, he should have received the sacrament according to the rites of the church of England.

The Book of Common Prayer and the ceremonies, having never been abrogated by law, revived with the restoration. The king from Holland had in some measure laid asleep the watchfulness of those whom he most feared, by promising that the scruples of the Presbyterians should be respected; and, with regard to ceremonies, pretended that he would have none to receive the sacrament on the knees or to use the cross in baptism. Cranmer saw no intrinsic difference between bishops and priests; and "the old common, moderate sort" of Episcopalians had taken Episcopacy to be good, but not necessary, and owned the reformed churches of the continent to be true ones. But now the royalist majority in the house of commons, though they restored a rubric declaring against any corporal presence in the Lord's Supper, in the act of uniformity went beyond

the enactments of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. "Episcopal ordination was now, for the first time," so writes a great English historian, "made an indispensable qualification for church preferment." In this manner, the reformed churches alike of England and the continent were set aside and excluded from fellowship with the Anglican church. Every minister who should not, before the twenty-fourth of August, 1662, publicly declare his assent and consent to every thing contained in the Book of Common Prayer, was by his silence deprived of his benefice; and on that day nearly two thousand persons gave up their livings rather than stain their consciences. The subscription was required even of schoolmasters: at one swoop, the right of teaching was taken away from every person in England, except high churchmen, in order that every child born there might be brought up in the strongest attachment to royal authority, hereditary right, and the established church.

The example of the unselfish, ejected ministers carried with them the reflecting middling class of England. An act of 1664 made attendance at a dissenting place of worship a crime, to be punished on conviction without a jury before a single justice of the peace, by long imprisonment for the first and second offence and by seven years' transportation for the third. Moreover, it was specially provided that the exiled Calvinist could not be shipped to New England, where he would have found sympathy and an open career. The people still looked to their old evangelical ministers for instruction and consolation. To strike a death blow at non-conformity, a statute of 1665 required the deprived to swear that it is not lawful under any pretext whatsoever to take arms against the king, and that they would not at any time endeavor any alteration in church or state. Those who refused this oath not only were forbidden to support their impoverished families by teaching: a new invention of cruelty separated them from their old friends and prohibited them from coming within five miles of any city, corporate town, borough sending members to parliament, or towns where they had themselves resided as ministers. The Catholics, led by the Duke of York, supported the act

of uniformity in its severest form, having for their ulterior object to bring about a union between themselves and all the disfranchised for their joint relief.

To the Anglican church this total expulsion of the Calvinists wrought as much evil as the extermination of the Huguenots inflicted on the kingdom of France. The Calvinists were driven out of the establishment before the ambiguity as to the mediatorial powers of the clergy was removed from the service-book; before universal education, which was the common enjoyment of every Scottish and of every New England child, had been secured to the people of England; and before the right of the people to resist a king who violates the constitution was acknowledged and confirmed. The establishment which excluded them lost all pretensions to being the church of the whole British people; the cardinal points of their creed remained behind them in the thirty-nine articles, for subscription by a clergy which till the accession of James I. had accepted that creed as indispensable, and since that epoch had been gradually becoming Arminian; while every terrible measure of oppression against the dissenters in England, in Scotland, or in Ireland, gave new energy to their stronghold in America, deepening the gulf which divided the mother country from its colonies.

The American colonies were held, alike by the nature of the English constitution and the principles of the common law, to be subordinate to the English parliament, and bound by its acts, whenever they were specially named in a statute or were clearly embraced within its provisions. An issue was thus made between England and America, where, as we have seen, Massachusetts refused to be subject to the laws of parliament, and had remonstrated against such subjection, as "the loss of English liberty." The Long Parliament had conceded the justice of the remonstrance.

On the restoration of Charles II., the convention parliament granted to the monarch a subsidy of twelvepence in the pound, that is, of five per cent,

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on all merchandise exported from or imported into the kingdom of England, or "any of his majesty's dominions.

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thereto belonging." Doubts arising, not whether the power of parliament was coextensive with the English empire, but what territories the terms of the act included, they were interpreted to exclude "the dominions not of the crown of England." The tax was never levied in the colonies; nor was it understood that the colonies were bound by a statute, unless they were expressly named.

That distinctness was not wanting, when it was required by the interests of English merchants. The navigation act of the commonwealth had not been designed to trammel the commerce of the colonies; the convention parliament, which betrayed the liberties of England, by restoring the Stuarts without conditions, now, by one of the most memorable statutes in the English maritime code, connected in one act the protection of English shipping, and a monopoly to the English merchant of the trade with the colonies. In the reign of Richard II., the commerce of English ports had been secured to English shipping: the act of navigation of 1651 had done no more. The present act renewed the same provisions, and further avowed the design of sacrificing the natural rights of the colonists to English interests. "No merchandise shall be imported into the plantations but in English vessels, navigated by Englishmen, under penalty of forfeiture." The harbors of the colonies were shut against the Dutch and every foreign vessel. America, as the asylum of the oppressed, invited emigrants from the most varied climes. Henceforward, none but native or naturalized subjects should become a merchant or factor in any English settlement, excluding the colonists from the benefits of a foreign competition.

American industry produced articles for exportation; but these articles were of two kinds. Some were produced in quantities only in America, and would not compete in the English market with English productions. These were enumerated, and it was declared that none of them, that is, no sugar, tobacco, ginger, indigo, cotton, fustic, dyeing woods, shall be transported to any other country than those belonging to the crown of England, under penalty of for