the entreaties of all the ambassadors in London.
One of Oliver's own friends, the DUKE OF OLDENBURGH, in sending him
a present of six fine coach-horses, was very near doing more to
please the Royalists than all the plotters put together. One day,
Oliver went with his coach, drawn by these six horses, into Hyde
Park, to dine with his secretary and some of his other gentlemen
under the trees there. After dinner, being merry, he took it into
his head to put his friends inside and to drive them home: a
postillion riding one of the foremost horses, as the custom was.
On account of Oliver's being too free with the whip, the six fine
horses went off at a gallop, the postillion got thrown, and Oliver
fell upon the coach-pole and narrowly escaped being shot by his own
pistol, which got entangled with his clothes in the harness, and
went off. He was dragged some distance by the foot, until his foot
came out of the shoe, and then he came safely to the ground under
the broad body of the coach, and was very little the worse. The
gentlemen inside were only bruised, and the discontented people of
all parties were much disappointed.
The rest of the history of the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell is a
history of his Parliaments. His first one not pleasing him at all,
he waited until the five months were out, and then dissolved it.
The next was better suited to his views; and from that he desired
to get - if he could with safety to himself - the title of King.
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He had had this in his mind some time: whether because he thought
that the English people, being more used to the title, were more
likely to obey it; or whether because he really wished to be a king
himself, and to leave the succession to that title in his family,
is far from clear. He was already as high, in England and in all
the world, as he would ever be, and I doubt if he cared for the
mere name. However, a paper, called the 'Humble Petition and
Advice,' was presented to him by the House of Commons, praying him
to take a high title and to appoint his successor. That he would
have taken the title of King there is no doubt, but for the strong
opposition of the army. This induced him to forbear, and to assent
only to the other points of the petition. Upon which occasion
there was another grand show in Westminster Hall, when the Speaker
of the House of Commons formally invested him with a purple robe
lined with ermine, and presented him with a splendidly bound Bible,
and put a golden sceptre in his hand. The next time the Parliament
met, he called a House of Lords of sixty members, as the petition
gave him power to do; but as that Parliament did not please him
either, and would not proceed to the business of the country, he
jumped into a coach one morning, took six Guards with him, and sent
them to the right-about. I wish this had been a warning to
Parliaments to avoid long speeches, and do more work.
It was the month of August, one thousand six hundred and fiftyeight,
when Oliver Cromwell's favourite daughter, ELIZABETH
CLAYPOLE (who had lately lost her youngest son), lay very ill, and
his mind was greatly troubled, because he loved her dearly.
Another of his daughters was married to LORD FALCONBERG, another to
the grandson of the Earl of Warwick, and he had made his son
RICHARD one of the Members of the Upper House. He was very kind
and loving to them all, being a good father and a good husband; but
he loved this daughter the best of the family, and went down to
Hampton Court to see her, and could hardly be induced to stir from
her sick room until she died. Although his religion had been of a
gloomy kind, his disposition had been always cheerful. He had been
fond of music in his home, and had kept open table once a week for
all officers of the army not below the rank of captain, and had
always preserved in his house a quiet, sensible dignity. He
encouraged men of genius and learning, and loved to have them about
him. MILTON was one of his great friends. He was good humoured
too, with the nobility, whose dresses and manners were very
different from his; and to show them what good information he had,
he would sometimes jokingly tell them when they were his guests,
where they had last drunk the health of the 'King over the water,'
and would recommend them to be more private (if they could) another
time. But he had lived in busy times, had borne the weight of
heavy State affairs, and had often gone in fear of his life. He
was ill of the gout and ague; and when the death of his beloved
child came upon him in addition, he sank, never to raise his head
again. He told his physicians on the twenty-fourth of August that
the Lord had assured him that he was not to die in that illness,
and that he would certainly get better. This was only his sick
fancy, for on the third of September, which was the anniversary of
the great battle of Worcester, and the day of the year which he
called his fortunate day, he died, in the sixtieth year of his age.
He had been delirious, and had lain insensible some hours, but he
had been overheard to murmur a very good prayer the day before.
The whole country lamented his death. If you want to know the real
worth of Oliver Cromwell, and his real services to his country, you
can hardly do better than compare England under him, with England
under CHARLES THE SECOND.
He had appointed his son Richard to succeed him, and after there
had been, at Somerset House in the Strand, a lying in state more
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splendid than sensible - as all such vanities after death are, I
think - Richard became Lord Protector. He was an amiable country
gentleman, but had none of his father's great genius, and was quite
unfit for such a post in such a storm of parties. Richard's
Protectorate, which only lasted a year and a half, is a history of
quarrels between the officers of the army and the Parliament, and
between the officers among themselves; and of a growing discontent
among the people, who had far too many long sermons and far too few
amusements, and wanted a change. At last, General Monk got the
army well into his own hands, and then in pursuance of a secret
plan he seems to have entertained from the time of Oliver's death,
declared for the King's cause. He did not do this openly; but, in
his place in the House of Commons, as one of the members for
Devonshire, strongly advocated the proposals of one SIR JOHN
GREENVILLE, who came to the House with a letter from Charles, dated
from Breda, and with whom he had previously been in secret
communication. There had been plots and counterplots, and a recall
of the last members of the Long Parliament, and an end of the Long
Parliament, and risings of the Royalists that were made too soon;
and most men being tired out, and there being no one to head the
country now great Oliver was dead, it was re
adily agreed to welcome
Charles Stuart. Some of the wiser and better members said - what
was most true - that in the letter from Breda, he gave no real
promise to govern well, and that it would be best to make him
pledge himself beforehand as to what he should be bound to do for
the benefit of the kingdom. Monk said, however, it would be all
right when he came, and he could not come too soon.
So, everybody found out all in a moment that the country MUST be
prosperous and happy, having another Stuart to condescend to reign
over it; and there was a prodigious firing off of guns, lighting of
bonfires, ringing of bells, and throwing up of caps. The people
drank the King's health by thousands in the open streets, and
everybody rejoiced. Down came the Arms of the Commonwealth, up
went the Royal Arms instead, and out came the public money. Fifty
thousand pounds for the King, ten thousand pounds for his brother
the Duke of York, five thousand pounds for his brother the Duke of
Gloucester. Prayers for these gracious Stuarts were put up in all
the churches; commissioners were sent to Holland (which suddenly
found out that Charles was a great man, and that it loved him) to
invite the King home; Monk and the Kentish grandees went to Dover,
to kneel down before him as he landed. He kissed and embraced
Monk, made him ride in the coach with himself and his brothers,
came on to London amid wonderful shoutings, and passed through the
army at Blackheath on the twenty-ninth of May (his birthday), in
the year one thousand six hundred and sixty. Greeted by splendid
dinners under tents, by flags and tapestry streaming from all the
houses, by delighted crowds in all the streets, by troops of
noblemen and gentlemen in rich dresses, by City companies, trainbands,
drummers, trumpeters, the great Lord Mayor, and the majestic
Aldermen, the King went on to Whitehall. On entering it, he
commemorated his Restoration with the joke that it really would
seem to have been his own fault that he had not come long ago,
since everybody told him that he had always wished for him with all
his heart.
CHAPTER XXXV - ENGLAND UNDER CHARLES THE SECOND, CALLED THE MERRY
MONARCH
THERE never were such profligate times in England as under Charles
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the Second. Whenever you see his portrait, with his swarthy, illlooking
face and great nose, you may fancy him in his Court at
Whitehall, surrounded by some of the very worst vagabonds in the
kingdom (though they were lords and ladies), drinking, gambling,
indulging in vicious conversation, and committing every kind of
profligate excess. It has been a fashion to call Charles the
Second 'The Merry Monarch.' Let me try to give you a general idea
of some of the merry things that were done, in the merry days when
this merry gentleman sat upon his merry throne, in merry England.
The first merry proceeding was - of course - to declare that he was
one of the greatest, the wisest, and the noblest kings that ever
shone, like the blessed sun itself, on this benighted earth. The
next merry and pleasant piece of business was, for the Parliament,
in the humblest manner, to give him one million two hundred
thousand pounds a year, and to settle upon him for life that old
disputed tonnage and poundage which had been so bravely fought for.
Then, General Monk being made EARL OF ALBEMARLE, and a few other
Royalists similarly rewarded, the law went to work to see what was
to be done to those persons (they were called Regicides) who had
been concerned in making a martyr of the late King. Ten of these
were merrily executed; that is to say, six of the judges, one of
the council, Colonel Hacker and another officer who had commanded
the Guards, and HUGH PETERS, a preacher who had preached against
the martyr with all his heart. These executions were so extremely
merry, that every horrible circumstance which Cromwell had
abandoned was revived with appalling cruelty. The hearts of the
sufferers were torn out of their living bodies; their bowels were
burned before their faces; the executioner cut jokes to the next
victim, as he rubbed his filthy hands together, that were reeking
with the blood of the last; and the heads of the dead were drawn on
sledges with the living to the place of suffering. Still, even so
merry a monarch could not force one of these dying men to say that
he was sorry for what he had done. Nay, the most memorable thing
said among them was, that if the thing were to do again they would
do it.
Sir Harry Vane, who had furnished the evidence against Strafford,
and was one of the most staunch of the Republicans, was also tried,
found guilty, and ordered for execution. When he came upon the
scaffold on Tower Hill, after conducting his own defence with great
power, his notes of what he had meant to say to the people were
torn away from him, and the drums and trumpets were ordered to
sound lustily and drown his voice; for, the people had been so much
impressed by what the Regicides had calmly said with their last
breath, that it was the custom now, to have the drums and trumpets
always under the scaffold, ready to strike up. Vane said no more
than this: 'It is a bad cause which cannot bear the words of a
dying man:' and bravely died.
These merry scenes were succeeded by another, perhaps even merrier.
On the anniversary of the late King's death, the bodies of Oliver
Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw, were torn out of their graves in
Westminster Abbey, dragged to Tyburn, hanged there on a gallows all
day long, and then beheaded. Imagine the head of Oliver Cromwell
set upon a pole to be stared at by a brutal crowd, not one of whom
would have dared to look the living Oliver in the face for half a
moment! Think, after you have read this reign, what England was
under Oliver Cromwell who was torn out of his grave, and what it
was under this merry monarch who sold it, like a merry Judas, over
and over again.
Of course, the remains of Oliver's wife and daughter were not to be
spared either, though they had been most excellent women. The base
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clergy of that time gave up their bodies, which had been buried in
the Abbey, and - to the eternal disgrace of England - they were
thrown into a pit, together with the mouldering bones of Pym and of
the brave and bold old Admiral Blake.
The clergy acted this disgraceful part because they hoped to get
the nonconformists, or dissenters, thoroughly put down in this
reign, and to have but one prayer-book and one service for all
kinds of people, no matter what their private opinions were. This
was pretty well, I think, for a Protestant Church, which had
displaced the Romish Church because people had a right to their own
opinions in religious matters. However, they carried it with a
high hand, and a prayer-book was agreed upon, in wh
ich the
extremest opinions of Archbishop Laud were not forgotten. An Act
was passed, too, preventing any dissenter from holding any office
under any corporation. So, the regular clergy in their triumph
were soon as merry as the King. The army being by this time
disbanded, and the King crowned, everything was to go on easily for
evermore.
I must say a word here about the King's family. He had not been
long upon the throne when his brother the Duke of Gloucester, and
his sister the PRINCESS OF ORANGE, died within a few months of each
other, of small-pox. His remaining sister, the PRINCESS HENRIETTA,
married the DUKE OF ORLEANS, the brother of LOUIS THE FOURTEENTH,
King of France. His brother JAMES, DUKE OF YORK, was made High
Admiral, and by-and-by became a Catholic. He was a gloomy, sullen,
bilious sort of man, with a remarkable partiality for the ugliest
women in the country. He married, under very discreditable
circumstances, ANNE HYDE, the daughter of LORD CLARENDON, then the
King's principal Minister - not at all a delicate minister either,
but doing much of the dirty work of a very dirty palace. It became
important now that the King himself should be married; and divers
foreign Monarchs, not very particular about the character of their
son-in-law, proposed their daughters to him. The KING OF PORTUGAL
offered his daughter, CATHERINE OF BRAGANZA, and fifty thousand
pounds: in addition to which, the French King, who was favourable
to that match, offered a loan of another fifty thousand. The King
of Spain, on the other hand, offered any one out of a dozen of
Princesses, and other hopes of gain. But the ready money carried
the day, and Catherine came over in state to her merry marriage.
The whole Court was a great flaunting crowd of debauched men and
shameless women; and Catherine's merry husband insulted and
outraged her in every possible way, until she consented to receive
those worthless creatures as her very good friends, and to degrade
herself by their companionship. A MRS. PALMER, whom the King made
LADY CASTLEMAINE, and afterwards DUCHESS OF CLEVELAND, was one of
the most powerful of the bad women about the Court, and had great
influence with the King nearly all through his reign. Another
merry lady named MOLL DAVIES, a dancer at the theatre, was
afterwards her rival. So was NELL GWYN, first an orange girl and
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