members with objurgations, and locked the doors. This proceeding was sanctioned by addresses from the army, the fleet, and many of the chief corporations of England.

It

At

Cromwell formed a council of state, consisting of himself and eight other officers, with four civilians, April 30, and summoned a small parliament of his own nominees (one hundred and twenty-eight from England and Wales, five from Scotland, and six from Ireland), to whom he nominally committed the supreme power till November 3, 1654. This assembly was called the "Little Parliament," and sometimes "Barebone's Parliament," from the ludicrous name of one of its members-Praise God Barebone. met on July 4, 1653, and showed itself more disposed to settle the government on extreme republican principles than to submit to Cromwell. length, on December 13, Sydenham, an Independent, suddenly proposed that the parliament should resign its power into Cromwell's hands. The speaker, who was a party to the scheme, adopted the proposal by leaving the chair, the members disposed to remain were dispersed by soldiers, and a majority afterwards signed the deed of resignation. An "Instrument of Government" conferred on Cromwell the title of "His Highness the Lord Protector." He was to have a council of twenty-one members, and a standing army of 20,000 foot and 10,000 horse; and he was bound to summon, every three years, a parliament of four hundred and sixty members, who were to sit for five months without prorogation or dissolution, and whose acts would become law even if he withheld his assent. The office of protector was for life, and on his death his successor was to be appointed by the council, December 16, 1653.

The short period of the Protectorate is marked by the establishment of the power of England abroad, but by dissension and suspicion at home. On the 5th of April, 1655, Cromwell signed a treaty of peace with Holland, and a close alliance was formed between the two republics, comprehending also Denmark, the Hanseatic towns, and the Protestant cantons of Switzerland. In the same month a treaty was concluded with Sweden, and, soon after, one with Portugal. Overtures were made by France, where the wily Cardinal Mazarin governed with the queen-mother Anne of Austria during the minority of Louis XIV.; and Cromwell consented to join in

hostilities against Spain. He sent a fleet into the Mediterranean under Blake, who forced the dey of Algiers to promise the repression of piracy, and destroyed the forts and fleet of Tunis. Another squadron sailed for the West Indies under Penn and Venables, who were repulsed from St. Domingo, but made the important conquest of Jamaica. The admirals, however, were sent to the Tower for not effecting more.

War was now declared by Spain, and vigorously prosecuted by the English fleet under Blake; but his health had long been failing, and after a victory at Santa Cruz in the Canaries, April 20, 1657, he died within sight of his native shores. England was now restored to more than the foreign power of Elizabeth, for Cromwell knew nothing of Elizabeth's vacillation between parties. The last act of his foreign policy was the campaign of 1658, in combination with the French under Turenne, against the Spanish Netherlands, which gave England a compensation for Calais in Dunkirk, June 25, 1658, till it was sold to France by Charles II.

A second parliament met on Sept. 17, 1656, about one hundred members being excluded by warrants of the council. The majority thus secured offered Cromwell the title of King, March 25, 1657, which the opposition of his generals induced him to decline, after long hesitation. The house then presented to him a second "humble petition and advice," renewing the title of Lord Protector, and authorizing him to name his successor and to create a House of Peers. He was inaugurated anew with great pomp in Westminster Hall, June 26, and he appointed sixty peers. The parliament reassembled Jan. 20, 1658, but was dissolved in consequence of the opposition of the commons to the new peers.

Repeated dangers at last broke down Cromwell's health. He was in constant dread of assassination, and was haunted by the sad face of the ill-fated Charles I. His only consolation was his favorite daughter, "Mistress" Clapole, who seldom or never left his side. He died of a tertian ague on the anniversaries of his victories at Dunbar and Worcester, Sept. 3, 1658. His acts are here recorded, without attempting to discuss those features of his character which have long been treated with passion and prejudice.

On Cromwell's death, his son Richard was named Protector. But he was too mild for the times, and

on May 25, 1659, he made a formal demission of his office, and retired to the Continent. Some years after he returned to England, and lived quietly at Cheshunt till 1712. Henry Cromwell, his brother, resigned his command in Ireland, June 15, and retired to Cambridgeshire, where he died in 1674.

Dissensions soon arose between the army and the parliament, who were expelled, and a military "Committee of Safety" administered the government. But the balance of England's destinies was held by General Monk and his army. Monk commenced his march from Scotland, nominally to restore the parliament. The garrison of Portsmouth and the army round London declared for the parliament, which reassembled on Dec. 26; and on the 3d of February, 1660, Monk, who had been joined at York by Lord Fairfax, entered London without opposition. On the 13th the "Engagement" to the Commonwealth was again agreed to, and on the 25th Monk was appointed captain-general. Monk now entered into secret negotiations with Charles, and persuaded him to escape from Brussels to Breda, lest the Spaniards should detain him as a pledge for Dunkirk; and the advice came only just in time. Meanwhile, the reinstatement of the excluded members by Monk, Feb. 21, had given the moderate party a majority in the parliament, which repudiated the Engagement, March 13, and dissolved itself after appointing a new parliament to meet on April 25. Thus at last the "Long Parlia

ment" came to an end.

The Presbyterians united with the old royalists in the elections for the "Convention Parliament," in which the ancient peers returned to their house. On the 1st of May, Sir John Grenville appeared with a letter from the king to both houses, accompanied by a declaration promising liberty of conscience and a general amnesty, with no exceptions but such as parliament should itself make. The soldiers were assured of the continuance of their present pay, with all arrears. An answer was at once prepared, and both houses attended the proclamation of King Charles II., who landed at Dover, and entered London on his thirtieth birthday, May 29, 1660. So enthusiastic was his welcome that he pleasantly said it must have been his fault only which had kept him so long from a people so devoted to him.

He was possessed of many external advantages,

but he was faithless, selfish, and utterly unprincipled. Adversity seemed to have taught him no lesson, except meanness in revenging, and unscrupulousness in enjoying himself; together with a selfish prudence, which kept his arbitrary ideas in check, and which he once expressed to the Duke of York by saying, "Brother, I have no wish to go on my travels again." His character was summed up in a mock epitaph by his boon companion Rochester:"Here lies our sovereign lord the king, Whose word no man relies on; Who never said a foolish thing, And never did a wise one."

"Quite true!" rejoined the king, "for my words are my own, and my acts are my minister's."

The convention parliament, which continued to sit after the Restoration, settled on the king an income of £1,200,000 or $6,000,000. The regicides living and dead were attainted. Ten were executed, and the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw were disinterred by order of parliament, and, on the anniversary of the late king's death, they were hanged on a gibbet at Tyburn, under which the bodies were buried, the heads being struck off and exposed in Westminster Hall, Jan. 30, 1661. The army was disbanded except a force of one thousand horse, and four thousand foot, which formed the nucleus of England's standing army. In Scotland the royal authority was entirely restored. The restoration of the church kept pace with that of the crown.

The king was crowned April 25, 1661; and on May 8 he met his new parliament, which proved at first devoted to the church and subservient to the court. It lasted, though with some long prorogations, till January 24, 1679; and earned the title of the "Pension Parliament" by the bribes which its members received from the kings both of England and of France. Its first act was one "for the security of the king's person and government," by which the Covenant was pronounced unlawful, and parliament was declared to have no legislative power without the king. By the Corporation Act all corporate officers were required to receive the sacrament in the Church of England, to abjure the Covenant, and to take an oath of non-resistance, renouncing the lawfulness of bearing arms against the king or his officers, even in self-defence. In the next session was passed the celebrated Act of Uniformity,

May 29, 1662, which required all clergymen to express their "unfeigned assent and consent to all and everything in the Book of Common Prayer," as recently revised and settled by convocation; to receive episcopal ordination; to abjure the Covenant, and take the oath of non-resistance.

In foreign politics a new era was opened. A close alliance was formed between the countries of England and France, and both united to support Portugal against Spain. Henrietta, the sister of Charles II., was married to Philip, duke of Orleans, the brother of Louis XIV., and Charles himself espoused Catherine of Braganza, daughter of John IV. of Portugal, a woman of sense, spirit and virtue, whom he treated with heartless neglect, while he lived openly in the society of his mistresses. Her chief value in the king's eyes was her dowry of £500,000, $2,500,000, with the fortresses of Tangiers in Africa, and Bombay in India. The money was squandered on his pleasures; but his returning necessities led him to sell Dunkirk and Mardyk (Cromwell's conquests) to the king of France for £400,000, or $2,000,000. War was declared against Holland, and Louis XIV. came to the help of the United Provinces. The French fleet of forty ships sailed from Toulon, and Albemarle detached Prince Rupert with twenty of his seventy-four ships to keep them in check. During his absence, the Dutch fleet of eighty sail, under De Ruyter and the younger Van Tromp, appeared off the North Foreland, and were engaged by Albemarle. The battle lasted four days, June 1-4. On the second the Dutch were reinforced by sixteen ships, but the arrival of Prince Rupert on the third saved Albemarle from destruction; and after a violent combat on the fourth, both fleets returned to their harbors. A more decisive battle on the 25th of July gave the English the mastery of the sea.

The mysPlague,

These two years, however, are still more memorable for pestilence and fire than for war. terious epidemic, called distinctively the which has been known on the shores of the Levant from the earliest ages, had long since appeared in Europe (imported, as some said, by the crusaders), and the close streets of old London were seldom free from its ravages; but in 1665 it broke out with a violence unexampled except by the great plagues of Athens, B.C. 430, and Florence, A.D. 1348. In July the weekly deaths were 1,100, in September they

increased to 10,000, and in the course of the year 100,000 perished. The parliament removed to Oxford; the court and nobility fled from London; the houses were shut up, and whole streets deserted, except by the solitary passenger staggering home to die, and the heavy sound of the death-cart, with the voice of the bell-man crying, "Bring forth your dead! Bring forth your dead!" The rites of burial were soon neglected, and the corpses were flung into great pits. As in all such seasons, the presence of death gave new license to wanton pleasure; and the sounds of revelry were mingled with the cries of fanatics who stalked about denouncing "Woe unto the city!" The pestilence declined when winter had fairly set in, 1665.

The new year, 1666, earned from the pen of Dryden the celebrated title of "Annus Mirabilis " (the Year of Wonders), partly by the great seafights related above, but chiefly by the "Great Fire," which almost totally destroyed the city of London. It broke out before day-break on Sunday, Sept. 2, in a baker's house near London Bridge, at the spot marked by the column of Sir Christopher Wren called "the Monument; " and, aided by an east wind and a dry season, it devoured the close wooden houses from the Tower to the Temple, and as far north as Holborn Bridge and Cripplegate. It raged for three days and nights, defying the efforts to arrest it, which were directed by the king and his brother in person. It was only on Sept. 5 that its progress was stayed at great gaps made by blowing up houses with gunpowder. It destroyed about four hundred streets and thirteen thousand houses, though only eight lives were lost; but the remnants of the plague were burnt out as by a refiner's fire, and the city rose from its ashes, with the magnificent dome of New St. Paul's on its central hill, under the master hand of Sir Christopher Wren. The Dutch again became rampant on the sea, and sailed their war-ships under De Ruyter up the Thames as far as Tilbury. Peace, however, was proclaimed at Breda, July 21, 1667. The great chancellor, Earl of Clarendon, was now impeached, and exiled. He spent his exile in writing the "History of the Great Rebellion," and died 1674. He became, by the marriage of his daughter Anne to the Duke of York, grandfather of two queens of England-Mary and Anne.

In the government which succeeded Clarendon,

we have the semblance to the more modern "Cabinet," for it bore the equivalent name of "Cabal," that is, a secret committee. Its chief members were the Duke of Buckingham, Lord Arlington, and Sir William Coventry, with whom were associated Lord Ashley and Sir Thomas Clifford. Scotland was still governed by the Earl of Lauderdale, who was chiefly engaged in a cruel persecution of the Covenanters. The derivation of "cabal" from the initials of these statesmen is merely founded on a curious coincidence.

The Triple Alliance, between England, Holland, and Sweden, was signed on Jan. 13, 1668; and it led to the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, by which Spain gave up the towns conquered by Louis, who renounced all claim to the rest of Flanders. Meanwhile Charles was secretly selling the common cause to Louis for the promise of a revenue which might enable him to govern without a parliament; and at length a secret treaty was signed at Dover, by which Charles engaged to make an open profession of the Catholic religion, and to assist Louis in his schemes on Spain and Holland, and Louis promised Charles a pension of 3,000,000 livres (£120,000) while the war lasted, and the aid of 6,000 men in case of an insurrection in England. The Duke of York had already avowed his conversion to Roman Catholicism, 1669; and his wife died, confessing herself a Catholic, March 31, 1671. About the same time great scandal arose out of the attempt to seize the regalia in the Tower by Colonel Blood, a notorious ruffian, who was not only pardoned by the king, but presented with an estate of £500 a-year in Ireland. But even if Charles had been an accomplice in the robbery, it would not have been more shameful than his seizure of £1,300,000 which had been deposited by the bankers in the exchequer, in order to prepare for a Dutch war.

War was declared against Holland, and a desperate naval action was fought in Southwold Bay, between De Ruyter and the Duke of York, the French fleet standing aloof. On land, a small English force under the Duke of Monmouth and John Churchill (afterwards Duke of Marlborough) followed Louis, who overran the United Provinces. The Dutch army was commanded by William, Prince of Orange, then in his twenty-second year. He retired into Amsterdam, and opening the famous dykes, laid the surrounding country under water.

"There is one certain means," said the prince, "by which I can be sure never to see my country's ruin; I will die in the last ditch.”

The people were thoroughly alarmed at the influence of France and the growth of Catholicism. Parliament, Feb. 4, 1673, complained of a Declaration of Indulgence, by which the king had sus pended the penal laws. Charles gave way, and the Test Act was passed, binding all persons holding any public office to receive the sacrament in the established church, and to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, with another, abjuring belief in transubstantiation. In consequence of this, Lord Clifford and other Catholic noblemen resigned their offices, and the Duke of York gave up the command of the fleet to Prince Rupert. New offence was given by the Duke of York's marriage to Mary of Modena, against which the commons in vain protested. By the advice of Danby and Sir William Temple, Charles arranged a marriage between the Prince of Orange and the Princess Mary, daughter of the Duke of York, who afterwards reigned as William and Mary, Nov. 4, 1677. Peace was concluded between France and Holland at Nimeguen, Aug. 10, 1678.

During the last three years the opposition in parliament had constantly gained strength, and an event now occurred which made the "No Popery' party for a time triumphant. This was the discovery of the pretended "Popish Plot" by Titus Oates, a man of infamous character, who was first an Anabaptist, then a clergyman, next a convert to Romanism and a member of the English college of St. Omer, from which he had been expelled, but where he had obtained much information useful for his present purpose. He caused the king to be informed of a plot against his life, and himself laid an information before Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey, an active justice of the peace, to the following effect: The pope had delegated the sovereignty of Great Britain to the Jesuits; the king was to be assassinated as a heretic; London was to be fired, and the Protestants everywhere massacred; the crown was to be offered to James as a gift from the pope, on condition of the extirpation of Protestantism; and, in case of his refusal, he also was doomed to death. The chief agent in the plot was said to be Père la Chaise, the confessor of Louis XIV., but the Duke of York's confessor was also implicated,

Aug. 1678. When examined before the council, Oates contradicted both himself and well-known facts in the grossest manner. Nevertheless he obtained credence from the people, and even from the ministers, while the opposition took up the "plot" as a party weapon. A wretch, William Bedfoe, followed Oates, and there were numerous executions.

To the parliament that met in March, 1679, is due the celebrated Habeas Corpus Act, "for the better securing the liberty of the subject, and for prevention of imprisonments beyond the seas" (31 Car. II. c. 2). It forbids the judges, under severe penalties, to refuse to any prisoner a writ of habeas corpus, directing the jailer to produce the body of the prisoner in court, and to certify the cause of his imprisonment. It requires that every prisoner shall be indicted the first term after his commitment, and tried in the subsequent term. It secures a person, once set free by order of the court, from being again committed for the same offence. This statute forms a safeguard of England's liberties only second to Magna Charta, of which it is the necessary complement. It received the royal assent on May 26, 1679.

Scotland had now been driven into open rebellion by the tyranny of Lauderdale and Sharp, archbishop of St. Andrews and a recreant Presbyterian.. As early as 1666 an insurrection broke out in the west, where the strength of the Covenanters lay; but the insurgents were defeated, and many of them were executed. From this time the penal laws were enforced most cruelly by the council of Scotland, their chief agent being Colonel John Graham of Claverhouse, afterwards Viscount Dundee. Sharp was the chief object of popular hatred. He was cruelly murdered by a party of Covenanters at Magus Muir, in Fifeshire. The assassins retired towards Glasgow, gathered an armed force, and defeated a small body of cavalry under Claverhouse at Drumclog. They made themselves masters of Glasgow, and raised an army of 8,000 men; but were totally defeated and dispersed at Bothwell Bridge, on the Clyde, by the Duke of Monmouth, whom the king had sent on a special commission into Scotland, June 22, 1679. That unfortunate nobleman now begins to play an important part in state affairs. He was Charles's favorite illegitimate son,

by Lucy Waters, whom it was aferwards pretended that the king had married. He was of a mild and generous disposition, but utterly wanting in judgment and firmness.

While the clergy preached "passive obedience" and "non-resistance," servile judges and packed juries began those judicial murders which have handed down the names of Scroggs and Jeffreys to perpetual infamy. A plot was formed to assassinate the king on his return to London from Newmarket, by stopping his coach and shooting at him, at a farm called Rye House. Charles escaped by leaving Newmarket eight days earlier than he had proposed. Monmouth escaped, but the other leaders were taken, and the court made every effort to fasten this plot on the Whig leaders, of whom Lord William Russell was one. He acknowledged the plan of insurrection, but denied all thoughts of attempting the king's life; and the evidence for the crown confirmed his statement. Though no overt act of treason was proved, he was found guilty; and neither the prayers of his wife, nor the stronger motive of £100,000, offered by his father to the king's mistress, could obtain his pardon. "If I do not take his life," said Charles, "he will soon have mine." "Arbitrary government," said Russell, "cannot be set up in England without wading through my blood." His noble wife, who had acted as his secretary at the trial, fortified his resolution by her Christian courage; and after a calm but affecting parting with her, he was beheaded in Lincoln's Inn Fields, July 21, 1683.

Others suffered also, and the Duke of York's ascendency at court was now established. Titus Oates was convicted of libelling the duke, sentenced to £100,000 damages, and imprisoned in default of payment. Charles, freed by his French pension from the want of supplies, continued to govern without parliaments; if the entire neglect of business, and the passing all his time in indolence and profligacy, can be called government. At length, on February 2, 1685, he was seized with an apoplectic fit; and in spite of the most violent remedies, he expired on February 6, in the fifty-fifth year of his age and the twenty-fifth of his reign, after being reconciled to the Church of Rome, of which he professed to have been long secretly a member. He was buried at Westminster, February 14.