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to war, Louis was always ready to point out to influential members of Parliament how detrimental it would be to the prospects of English liberty should the king ever find himself master of a large military force.

But, even so, harassed and betrayed, England did much for Europe. More than once, in the full tide of success, the spectacle of the seething background of hatred and fury in England, to which the clear sight of Louis looked past the compliance of alien king and abandoned courtiers, gave him pause. The mastiff was chained and muzzled; but at any moment he might break the chain and wrench loose the muzzle.

For Louis the Fourteenth Charles had a profound admiration. He was more than half French, and while in exile he had learned to regard Louis' government as the perfection of wisdom, and his object, so far as he can be said to have had an object, undoubtedly was to establish in England an intelligent despotism on the same model. "His Majesty had resided long in France, had been an eye witness of the struggle between the most Christian King and his people; had seen the latter subdued, and will and pleasure victorious: the precedent pleased him, and though he was in full possession of the affection of his people, he thought the tenure precarious, and chose rather to govern by fear than by love."

"He had made such observations on the French Government, that he thought a king who might be checked, or have his will called to account by his people, was but a king in name."

But Louis had taken to heart the maxims of Mazarin. Impostor as he was, he caused himself to be regarded by Europe almost as a sort of mythological personage, because he was for fifty years the most laborious worker in his kingdom. Charles was not idle exactly; nothing pleased him better than to sit and laugh at his Council, especially if Buckingham were there to make faces over the Lord Chancellor's shoulder; or to go to the House of Lords and annoy that dignified assembly by his sotto voce remarks.

There is no doubt, too, that in all questions of the navy or of colonization the faint dash of English blood in his veins showed itself in eager

though momentary interest. laborious days: the vagabond habits of exile and his constant debauchery had taken from him all power of sustained application. A brilliant club-lounger he would have been in any country-one wishes that he and Horace Walpole had lived together, and that their good things had been recorded-but a king in troublous times needs more than wit. "The king," says Pepys, "adheres to no man, but is at the command of any woman like a slave." Boys cry in the streets, "The King cannot go away until my Lady Castlemaine is ready to come with him." In Holland there was a caricature representing Charles between two women with his pockets inside out. On the 21st of June, 1667, while the Dutch fleet are burning the shipping in the Thames, Charles and Buckingham, and the women they carried with them, Castlemaine and the rest, are all drunk together, and are "all merry a hunting a poor moth." And Pepys says, and we all say, "It is strange how everybody do now-a-days reflect upon Oliver, what great things he did and how he made the neighbour Princes fear him." The idea of duty was as unknown to Charles as to Napoleon the Great. Gross and contemptible selfishness was his only guide. The present ease, the avoidance of worry, was his god, and his faithful worship made him a liar, a mendicant, and a thief. In all cases of difficulty his habit was to act, as mathematicians would say, along the line of least resistance. Thus he is always ready to stave off Parliamentary opposition, or to get money, by falsehood, persecution, surrender, or betrayal of his country. He usually tried falsehood first: he came into the country by force of lying, and throughout his reign the only one of Louis' maxims which he carried out with success was to cultivate his natural talent for dissimulation. Thought and speech had no apparent connection in his mind; no one indeed ever thinks of sincerity and of Charles together. North puts this very prettily-"This," he said "procures him not only great disappointment, but sometimes a necessity of contradicting himself, which gained him the character of not being true to his word." "He was honest, and did justice to all unless his affairs constrained him to fail." With his cool

But he could not, like Louis, live

head and bad heart, disbelieving the whole story of the Popish plot, "Charles," as Scott says in Peveril of the Peak, "Charles, with his usual selfish prudence, truckles to the storm, and lets axe and cord do their worst upon the noblest in the land.” "I cannot pardon him," says the worthy descendant of the person who gave up Strafford, "because I dare not."

I pass by the usual excuses for Charles, that he was less than half an Englishman, and that from eighteen to thirty he had lived abroad and in exile; and I pass by the assertion that his heart was in the right place, with only the note that as a rule people whose hearts are in the right place are the pests of society, to point out that the last anecdote regarding the execution of Plunket, the noble Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, really contains the clue to the otherwise unexplainable fact that Charles was allowed to reign in England for twenty four years.

"I cannot pardon him, because I dare not." Now no one is likely to assert that Charles was a coward. As far as any evidence goes it is the other way. But Charles knew what exile meant, and he found his present life on the whole a jolly one, and had no intention of changing it. He possessed in extreme degree that most useful of all qualities for kings, and especially for bad kings in a free country, the gift of imagination. He could enter into the feelings of other folk; he could guess pretty exactly the force of them so far as they were likely to trouble his ease; further than that he never investigated. He would have liked to give ease to Dissent, and tried to do so, not for any respect to Dissent as such, but from motives of "good nature," because I mean he thought it would save him annoyance and help to secure favour for the Roman Catholics, and because the whole commercial world, to whose interests he was always inclined, desired it. But he early learnt, as I shall show, and never failed to appreciate the fact, that he was in the grip of the Anglican Church, and that, courtly though their language might be, he had in opposition to them no will of his He would have liked over and over again to have defied Parliament openly, as he thwarted them secretly, but he never

own.

forgot his father's fate, he more than once saw the story which began in 1641 ready to unfold itself again; he regarded his father as a fool for his pains, and he always gave way in time to save himself for the present moment. He would have liked to have scoffed officially at the Popish terror as he scoffed at it to his friends; but he saw himself in the midst of a people whom his own false dealing had roused to hysterical passion, and he let the evil spirit rave without holding up a finger. Charles had eminently the gift of imagination, and he knew that he remained king as he had been made king, on sufferance alone.

Since writing this I happened to open the Fortnightly Review, and from an article there, by Mr. Swinburne, on Mary Queen of Scots, I feel disposed to quote the following passage regarding her descendants. They were a race of brilliant blunderers, with obtuse exceptions interspersed. To do the right thing at the wrong time, to fascinate many and satisfy none, to display every kind of faculty but the one which might happen to be wanted, was as fatally the sign of a Stuart as ferocity was of a Claudius, or perjury of a Bonaparte. After the time of Queen Mary there were no more such men born into the race as her father and half-brother. The habits of her son were as suggestive of debased Italian blood in the worst age of Italian debasement, as the profitless and incurable cunning with which her grandson tricked his own head off his shoulders, the swarthy levity and epicurean cynicism of his elder son, or the bloody piety and sullen profligacy of his younger."

III.—I turn now briefly to consider that great contest which is the most interesting feature of the reign, the great contest between the Anglican Church and the various masses of Dissent, which ended in the complete and permanent ascendancy of the former. And my time will not allow me to do more than to discuss one phase of the contest. And in anything I say upon this, I should wish it to be understood that I speak of Church and Dissent as they were, and with an entire absence of any sort of partisanship with the one or the other. I only wish that the historians who write on the various religious sects were as devoid of such

partisanship as I feel myself to be. We sadly need a Hallam for ecclesiastical history.

The Religious life of England at the Restoration may for our purpose be roughly divided into the Anglican Church, Presbyterians, and the Sects, the chief of the last in power and numbers being the Independents. Between these three great parties there was

bitter war.

:

But the lines must not be drawn too hardly there were Anglicans who were Presbyterian in tone, and Presbyterians who were willing to become Anglican Bishops; and John Owen was a Presbyterian for years before he found out that he was really an Independent.

Of the Sects, I do not propose to say more at present; their influence was on the whole indirect as regarded the course of political life. The struggle really lay between Anglican and Presbyterian. Both took part in the Reformation, but with very different feelings: the Church, with a hope which had in it something like ferocity; it was not in human nature that revenge should not be mingled with that hope; the Presbyterians, possessing as they did for the moment all influence in the Government, and secure of present support, displayed an eager and pathetic uneasiness, soon to be entirely justified. To make this clearer I must ask you to consider for a few moments the system of church government which had been developed by each, and the political line of thought which corresponded with that system.

When the Church in England, or rather the people in England, threw off the Pope, his place was, as a matter of course, taken by the King: it was a substitution which had long been in preparation, which had, indeed, except in name, been a practical reality since the days of the Conqueror, a statement of independence fully ratified by the national will. The Episcopalian henceforward regarded the king as being as much the Supreme and Heaven appointed Head of the Church as ever the Pope of Rome had been. In necessary combination with this feeling went a vehement attachment to monarchy, with an increasing tendency

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