THE RESTORATION.
The Puritan Commonwealth was but a brilliant military episode, and died with its founder. His son Richard, amiable, good-natured, weak and incompetent, succeeded him without opposition, but resigned a few months after (April 22, 1659). The army, which under its great commander had ruled the divided nation, was now divided, while the national sentiment in the three kingdoms became united, and demanded the restoration of the old dynasty as the safest way to escape the dangers of military despotism. Puritanism represented only a minority of the English people, and the majority of this minority were royalists. The Presbyterians, who were in the saddle during the interregnum, were specially active for the unconditional recall of the treacherous Stuarts. The event was brought about by the cautious and dexterous management of General Monk, a man of expediency, who had successively served under Charles I. and Cromwell, and worshiped with Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Independents, and at last returned to the Episcopal Church. Charles II., 'who never said a foolish thing, and never did a wise one,' was received with such general enthusiasm on his triumphal march from Dover to London that he wondered where his enemies were, or whether he ever had any. The revolution of national sentiment was complete. The people seemed as happy as a set of unruly children released from the discipline of the school. [1375]
The restoration of the monarchy was followed by the restoration of Episcopacy and the Liturgy with an exclusiveness that did not belong to it before. The Savoy Conference between twenty-one Episcopalians and an equal number of Presbyterians (April 15 till July 25, 1661) utterly failed, and left both parties more exasperated and irreconcilable than before. The Churchmen, once more masters of the situation, refused to make any concessions and changes. [1376] Thus another opportunity of comprehension was lost. In the revision of the Liturgy, which was completed by Convocation at the close of the same year (Dec., 1661), approved by the King, and ratified by Act of Parliament (April, 1662), not the slightest regard was paid to Presbyterian objections, reasonable or unreasonable, although about six hundred alterations were made; on the contrary, all the ritualistic and sacerdotal features complained of were retained and even increased. [1377] The Act of Uniformity, which received the royal assent May 19, 1662, and took effect on the ominous St. Bartholomew's Day, Aug. 24, 1662 (involuntarily calling to mind the massacre of the Huguenots), required not only from ministers, but also from all schoolmasters, absolute conformity to the revised Liturgy and episcopal ordination, or reordination. By this cruel act more than two thousand Puritan rectors and vicars--that is, about one fifth of the English clergy, including such men as Baxter, Howe, Poole, Owen, Goodwin, Bates, Manton, Caryl--were ejected and exposed to poverty, public insult, fines, and imprisonment for no other crime than obeying God rather than men. A proposition in the House of Commons to allow these heroes of conscience one fifth of their income, as the Long Parliament had done in the removal of royalist clergymen, was lost by a vote of ninety-four to eighty-seven. [1378]
Even the dead were not spared by the spirit of 'mean revenge.' The magnates of the Commonwealth, twenty-one in number (including Dr. Twisse, the Prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly), who had been buried in Westminster Abbey since 1641, were exhumed and reinterred in a pit (Sept. 12, 1661). Seven only were exempt; among them Archbishop Ussher, who had been buried there at Cromwell's express desire, and at a cost of £200 paid by him. Cromwell himself, Ireton, and Bradshaw were dug up Jan. 29, 1661, next day dragged to Tyburn, hanged (with their faces turned to Whitehall), decapitated, and buried under the gallows. Cromwell's head was planted on the top of Westminster Hall. [1379]
The Puritans were now a target of hatred and ridicule as well as persecution. They were assailed from the pulpit, the stage, and the press by cavaliers, prelatists, and libertines as a set of hypocritical Pharisees and crazy fanatics, noted for their love of Jewish names, their lank hair, their sour faces, their deep groans, their long prayers and sermons, their bigotry and cant. [1380] And yet the same Puritanism, blind, despised, forsaken, or languishing in prison, produced some of the noblest works, which can never die. It was not dead--it was merely musing and dreaming, and waiting for a resurrection in a nobler form. Milton's 'Paradise Lost' (1667) and Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress' (1678) are the shining lights which illuminate the darkness of that disgraceful period. [1381]
With the Restoration rushed in a flood of frivolity and immorality; the King himself setting the example by his shameless adulteries, which he blazoned to the world by raising his numerous mistresses and bastards to the rank and wealth of the nobility of proud old England. 'The violent return to the senses,' says a French writer who has not the slightest sympathy with Puritanism, 'drowned morality. Virtue had the semblance of Puritanism. Duty and fanaticism became mingled in a common reproach. In this great reaction, devotion and honesty, swept away together, left to mankind but the wreck and the mire. The more excellent parts of human nature disappeared; there remained but the animal, without bridle or guide, urged by his desires beyond justice and shame.' [1382]