DEATH OF CROMWELL. XI. 27 the judgment of the republicans, he never could hope CHAP. the cheerful consent of the British nation to the permanence of his government. He had not even a party, except of personal friends, and his government was well understood to be co-extensive only with his life. It was essentially a state of transition. He did not connect himself with the revolution, for he put himself above it, and controlled it; nor with the monarchy, for he was an active promoter of the execution of Charles; nor with the Church, for he subverted it; nor with the Presbyterians, for he barely tolerated their worship, without gratifying their ambition. He rested on himself; his own genius and his own personal resources were the basis of his power. Having subdued the revolution, there was no firm obstacle but himself to the restoration of the Stuarts, and his death was necessarily a signal for new revolutions. The accession of Richard met with no instant opposition; for the tranquillity of expectation preceded the impending change. Like his father, he had no party in the nation; unlike his father, he had no capacity for public affairs. The restoration of the Stuarts was already resolved upon by the people of England. Richard convoked a parliament only to dissolve it; he could not control the army, and he could not govern England without the army. Involved in perplexities, he resigned. His accession had changed nothing; his abdication changed nothing; content to be the scoff of the proud, he had wisely acted upon the consciousness of his incompetency, and, in the bosom of private life, remote from wars, from ambition, from power, he lived to a great old age in the serene enjoyment of tranquil affections, and of a gentle and modest temper. English politics went forward in their course. 28 CHARACTER OF MONK. CHAP. The council of officers, the revival of the "inter XI. rupted" Long Parliament, the intrigues of Fleetwood and Desborough, the transient elevation of Lambert, were but a series of unsuccessful attempts to defeat the wishes of the people. Every new effort was soon a failure; and each successive failure did but expose the enemies of royalty to increased indignation and contempt. In vain did Milton forebode that, “of all governments, that of a restored king is the worst; nothing could long delay the restoration. The fanaticism which had made the revolution, had burnt out, and was now a spent volcano. Among the possible combinations of human character, is that of an obstinate and almost apathetic courage, a sluggish temperament, a narrowness of mind, and yet a very accurate, though a mean-spirited judgment, which, "like a twofoot rule," measures great things as well as small, not rapidly, but with equal indifference and precision. Such a man was Monk, soon to be famous in American annals, from whose title, as duke of Albemarle, Virginia named one of her most beautiful counties, and Carolina her broadest bay. Sir William Coventry, no mean judge of men, esteemed him a drudge; Lord Sandwich sneered at him plainly as a thick-skulled fool; and the more courteous Pepys paints him as "a heavy, dull man, who will not hinder business, and cannot aid it." He was precisely the man demanded by the crisis. When Monk marched his army from Scotland into England, he was only the instrument of the restoration, not its author. Originally a soldier of fortune in the army of the royalists, he had deserted his party, served against Charles I., and readily offered to Cromwell his support. He had no adequate conceptions of the nature or the value of THE RESTORATION. XI. 29 liberty, was no statesman, and was destitute of true CHAP. dignity of character. Incapable of laying among the wrecks of the English constitution the foundations of a new creation of civil liberty, he only took advantage of circumstances to make his own fortune, and gratify his vain passion for rank and place. He cared nothing for England, he cared only for himself; and therefore he made no terms for his country, but only for himself. He was not the cause of the restoration; he did but hold the Presbyterians in check, and, prodigal of perjuries to the last, he prevented the adoption of any treaty or binding compact between the returning monarch and the people. Yet the want of such a compact could not alarm the determined enthusiasm of the people of England. All classes sighed for the restoration of monarchy, as the only effectual guaranty of peace. The Presbyterians, like repentant sinners at the confessional, hoping to gain favor by an early and effectual union with the royalists, contented themselves with a vague belief that the martyrdoms of Dunbar would never be forgotten; misfortunes and the fate of Charles I. were taken as sureties that Charles II. had learned moderation in the school of exile and sorrow; and his return could have nothing humiliating for the English people, for it was the nation itself that recalled its sovereign. Every party that had opposed the dynasty of the Stuarts, had failed in the attempt to give England a government; the constitutional royalists, the Presbyterians, the Independents, the Long Parliament, the army, had all in their turn been unsuccessful; the English, preserving a latent zeal for their ancient liberties, were yet at the time inflamed and carried away with a passionate desire of their ancient king. The Long Parliament is 30 THE RESTORATION. CHAP. reassembled; the Presbyterians, expelled before the XI. trial of Charles, resume their seats; and the parlia ment is dissolved, to be succeeded by a new assembly. The king's return is at hand. They who had been its latest advocates, now endeavor to throw oblivion on their hesitancy by the excess of loyalty; men vie with one another in the display of zeal for the restoration; no one is disposed to gain the certain ill-will of the monarch by proposing conditions which might not be seconded; men forget their country in their zeal for the king; they forget liberty in their eagerness to advance their fortunes; a vague proclamation on the part of Charles II., promising a general amnesty, fidelity to the Protestant religion, regard for tender consciences, and respect for the English laws, was the only pledge from the sovereign. And now, after twenty years of storms, the light of peace dawns in the horizon. All England was in ecstasy. Groups of royalists gathered round buckets of wine in the streets, and drank the king's health on their knees. The bells in every steeple rung merry peels; the bonfires round London were so numerous and so brilliant, that the city seemed encircled with a halo;1 and under a clear sky, with a favoring wind, the path of the exiled monarch homewards to the kingdom of his fathers, is serene and unruffled; as he landed on the soil of Eng1660. land, he was received by infinite crowds with all May imaginable love. The shouting and general joy were past imagination. On the journey from Dover to London, the hillocks all the way were covered with people; the trees were filled; and such was the prodigality of flowers from maidens, such the acclama 25. 2 3 3 Gumble's Life of Monck, 386. TRIUMPH OF ROYALTY. XI. 31 tions from throngs of men, the whole kingdom seemed CHAP. gathered along the road-sides. The companies of the city received the king with loud thanks to God for his 1660. May presence;1 and he advanced to Whitehall through 29. serried ranks of admiring citizens. All hearts were open; and on the evening of his arrival in the capital of his kingdom, he employed the enthusiasm of the time to debauch a beautiful woman of nineteen, the wife of one of his subjects. In the midst of the universal gladness, the triumph of the royalist party was undisputed. The arms of the commonwealth, and the emblems of republicanism, were defaced and burned with every expression of hatred and scorn. The democratic party, which Cromwell had subdued, was now politically extinct; its adherents sought obscurity among the crowd, while its leaders were obliged to hide themselves from the feverish excitement of popular anger. The melancholic inflexibility and the self-denying austerity of republicanism were out of vogue; levity and licentiousness were now in fashion. Every party that had opposed royalty, had, in the eagerness of political strife, failed to establish a government on a permanent basis. England remembered, that, under its monarchs, it had elected parliaments, enjoyed the trial by jury, and prospered in affluent tranquillity. Except in New England, royalty was now alone in favor. The republican party in England was fallen into extreme unpopularity; the democratic revolution had been an entire failure, but that, with all its faults, its wildness, and its extravagance, it set in motion the valuable ideas of popular liberty which the experience of hap 1 Clarendon, iii. 772. |