the root; and monarchy must go down too, or bow exceeding low before the almighty power of parliament;" and just after Shaftesbury, who, as chancellor, had opened the prisondoors of Bunyan, now, as president of the council, had carried the habeas corpus act, he was dismissed, and the commons were prorogued and dissolved. From May, 1679, the councils of the Stuarts inclined to absolutism.

Immediately a plan of universal agitation was begun to rouse the spirit of the nation. Under the influence of Shaftesbury, on Queen Elizabeth's night, the fifth of October, 1679, a vast procession, bearing devices and wax figures representing nuns and monks, bishops in copes and mitres, and bishops in lawn, cardinals in red caps, and, last of all, the pope of Rome, side by side in a litter with the devil, moved through the streets of London, under the glare of thousands of flambeaux, and in the presence of two hundred thousand spectators; the disobedient Monmouth was welcomed with bonfires and peals of bells; a panic was created, as if every Protestant freeman were to be massacred; the kingdom was divided into districts among committees to procure petitions for a parliament, one of which had twenty thousand signatures and measured three hundred feet; and at last the most cherished Anglo-Saxon institution was made to do service, when, in June, 1680, Shaftesbury, proceeding to Westminster, represented to the grand jury the mighty dangers from popery, indicted the duke of York as a recusant, and reported the duchess of Portsmouth, the king's new mistress, as "a common neusance." The agitation was successful; in these two successive parliaments of 1680 and 1681, in each of which men who were at heart dissenters had the majority, the bill for excluding the duke of York was passed by triumphant votes in the house of commons, and defeated only by the lords and the king.

The public mind, firm, even to superstition, in its respect for hereditary succession, was not ripe for the measure of exclusion. After less than a week's session, Charles II. dissolved the last parliament of his reign. His friends declared him to have no other purpose than to resist the arbitrary sway of "a republican prelacy," and the installation of the multi

tude in the chair of infallibility; the ferocious intolerance which had sustained the popish plot lost its credit; and at the moment men dreaded anarchy and civil war more than they feared the royal prerogative.

The king had already exercised the power of restricting the liberty of the press; through judges, who held places at his pleasure, he was supreme in the courts; omitting to convoke parliament, he made himself irresponsible to the people; pursuing a judicial warfare against city charters and the monopolies of boroughs, he reformed many real abuses, but at the same time subjected corporations to his influence; controlling the appointment of sheriffs, he controlled the nomination of juries; and thus, in the last three or four years of the reign of King Charles II., the government of England was administered as an absolute monarchy. An "association" against the duke of York could not succeed among a calculating aristocracy, as the Scottish covenant had done among a faithful people; and, on its disclosure and defeat, the self-exile of Shaftesbury excited no plebeian regret. No deep popular indignation attended Russell to the scaffold; and, on the seventh of December, 1683, the day on which Algernon Sidney, the purest martyr to aristocratic liberty, laid his head on the block, the university of Oxford decreed absolute obedience to be the character of the church of England, while parts of the writings of Knox, Milton, and Baxter were pronounced "false, seditious, and impious, heretical and blasphemous, infamous to the Christian religion, and destructive of all government," and were therefore ordered to be burnt.

Liberty, which at the restoration insane loyalty repressed in the public thought and purpose, glided between rakes and the king's mistress into the royal councils. Driven from the palace, it appealed to parliament and the people, and won power through the frenzied antipathy to Roman Catholics. Dismissed from parliament by its dissolution, from the people by the ebb of excitement, it concealed itself in an aristocratic association and a secret aristocratic council. Chased from its hiding-place by disclosures and executions, and having no hope from parliament, people, the press, the courts of justice, or

the king, it left the soil of England, and fled for refuge to the prince of Orange.

On the death of Charles II., in 1685, his brother ascended the throne without opposition, continued taxes by his prerogative, easily suppressed the insurrection of Monmouth, and under the new system of charters convened a parliament so subservient that it bowed its back to royal chastisement. The "Presbyterian rascals," the troublesome Calvinists, who, from the days of Edward VI., had kept English liberty alive, were consigned to the courts of law. "Richard," said Jeffries to Baxter, "Richard, thou art an old knave; thou hast written books enough to load a cart, every one as full of sedition as an egg is full of meat. I know thou hast a mighty party, and a great many of the brotherhood are waiting in corners to see what will become of their mighty Don; but, by the grace of Almighty God, I'll crush you all;" and the docile jury found "the main incendiary" guilty of sedition. Faction had ebbed; "rogues" had grown out of fashion; there was nothing left for them but to "thrive in the plantations." The royalist Dryden wrote:

The land with saints is so run o'er,

And every age produces such a store,

That now there's need of two New Englands more.

To understand fully the revolution which followed, it must be borne in mind that the great mass of dissenters were struggling for liberty; but, checked by the memory of the disastrous issue of the previous revolution, they ranged themselves, with deliberate moderation, under the more liberal party of the aristocracy. Of Cromwell's army, the officers had been, "for the most part, the meanest sort of men, even brewers, cobblers, and other mechanics;" recruits for the camp of William of Orange were led by bishops and the high *nobility. There was a vast popular movement, but it was subordinate; the proclamation of the prince took notice of the people only as "followers" of the gentry. Yet the revolution of 1688 is due to the dissenters quite as much as to the whig aristocracy; to Baxter hardly less than to Shaftesbury. It is the consummation of the collision which, in the days of Henry VIII. and Edward, began between the churchmen and

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the Puritans, between those who invoked religion on the side of passive obedience, and those who held resistance to tyranny a Christian duty. If the whig aristocracy looked to the stadholder of aristocratic Holland as the protector of their liberties, Baxter and the Presbyterians saw in William the Calvinist their tolerant avenger.

Of the two great aristocratic parties of England, both respected the established British constitution. But the tory defended his privileges against the encroachments of advancing civilization, and asserted the indefeasible rights of the bishops, of the aristocracy, and of the king, against dissenters, republicans, and whigs.

The whigs were bent on the preservation of their privileges against the encroachments of the monarch. In an age that demanded liberty, they gathered up every liberty, feudal or popular, known to English law, and sanctioned by the fictitious compact of prescription. In a period of progress in the enfranchisement of classes, they extended political influence to the merchants and bankers; in an age of religious sects, they embraced the more moderate and liberal of the church of England, and those of the dissenters whose dissent was the least glaring; in an age of speculative inquiry, they favored freedom of the press. How vast was the party is evident, since it cherished among its numbers men so opposite as Shaftesbury and Sidney, as Locke and Baxter.

These two parties embraced almost all the wealth and learning of England. But there was a third party of those who were pledged to "seek and love and chuse the best things." They insisted that all penal statutes and tests should be abolished; that, for all classes of non-conformists, whether Roman Catholics or dissenters, for the plebeian sects, "the less noble and more clownish sort of people," "the unclean kind," room should equally be made in the English ark; that the church of England, satisfied with its estates, should give up jails, whips, halters, and gibbets, and cease to plough the deep furrows of persecution; that the concession of equal freedom would give strength to the state, security to the prince, content to the multitude, wealth to the country, and would fit England for its office of asserting European liberty

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against the ambition of France; that reason, natural right, and public interest demanded a glorious magna charta for intellectual freedom, even though the grant should be followed by "a dissolution of the great corporation of conscience." These were the views which were advocated by William Penn against what he calls "the prejudices of his times;" and which overwhelmed his name with obloquy as a friend to tyranny and a Jesuit priest in disguise.

But the easy issue of the contest grew out of a division in the monarchical party itself. James II. could not comprehend the value of freedom or the obligation of law. The writ of habeas corpus he esteemed inconsistent with monarchy, and "a great misfortune to the people." A standing army, and the terrors of corrupt tribunals, were his dependence; he delighted in military parades; swayed by his confessor, he dispensed with the laws, multiplied Catholic chapels, rejoiced in the revocation of the edict of Nantes, and sought to intrust civil and military power to Roman Catholics.

The bishops had unanimously voted against his exclusion; and, as the badge of the church of England was obedience, he for a season courted the alliance of "the fairest of the spotted kind." To win her favor for Roman Catholics, he was willing to persecute Protestant dissenters. This is the period of the influence of Rochester.

The church of England refused the alliance. The king, from 1687, would put no confidence in any zealous Protestant; he applauded the bigotry of Louis XIV., from whom he solicited money. "I hope," said he, "the king of France will aid me, and that we together shall do great things for religion;" and the established church became the object of his implacable hatred. "Her day of grace was past." The royal favor was withheld, that she might silently waste and dissolve like snows in spring. To diminish her numbers, and apparently from no other motive, he granted—what Sunderland might have done from indifference, and Penn from love of justice-equal franchises to every sect; to the powerful Calvinist and to the "puny" Quaker, to Anabaptists and Independents, and "all the wild increase" which unsatisfied inquiry could generate. The declaration of indulgence was