was a strong republican party, headed by Vane and Ludlow, who were alienated by the expulsion of the Rump just as the Presbyterians had been thrown into opposition by the removal of Holles and their other leaders. These two parties were far more difficult to deal with than the Royalists and the Anabaptists, who confined their efforts to secret plots of insurrection and assassination; for they contrived invariably to secure a very strong position in Cromwell's Parliaments, and by systematic obstruction and open hostility rendered all effectual action out of the question. The imposition of oaths to support the existing Government produced little good, for the oath was taken with the lips, and rejected immediately by the heart. The natural result was the total failure and early dissolution of the Parliaments of 1654 and 1657.

The Parliament of 1654, however, will always form a memorable date in our parliamentary annals as the first Parliament which was representative of the United Kingdom, and as the first step in the direction of a reform of the representative system. Its numbers were 460 in all, of whom 400 sat for England, 30 for Scotland, 30 for Ireland. A number of rotten boroughs were disfranchised, and their members given to the counties. A number of large towns, among which was Birmingham, were enfranchised. A partial redistribution of the county seats was made so as to establish some sort of equality between population and representation, a uniform qualification of £200 being fixed for both electors and members. With the dissolution of this Parliament ended all hope of a restoration of constitutional government, for Cromwell did not dare to trust to freedom of election again.

His death plunged the country into a series of disputes between the military leaders, amid which the survivors of the Rump, declaring that their dissolution was invalid as having been effected without their consent, reassembled and endeavoured to grasp into their hands again the reins of power, only to be once more dissolved by General Monk as the first step in the direction of the restoration of the monarchy. Overtures were immediately made to Charles II., and a Convention Parliament summoned to treat for his return.

The lawyers of the Restoration declared of course that the legal constitution had been only suspended during this period,

that it revived again at its close, and that the work of Cromwell died with him. But this, however true in law, was false in reality. The monarchies of Charles I. and of his son stood on two sides of a gulf which no legal formula could successfully span; the cause of absolute monarchy was lost for ever, and the predominant influence of the House of Commons in the government of the nation was successfully established. Cromwell's dynasty indeed died with him, but the spirit which had animated the men of the Great Rebellion lived on.

CHAPTER VIII.

PARLIAMENTS OF THE RESTORATION.

PAR

(1660-88.)

SECTION 1.- -The Convention of 1660.

ARLIAMENT met the 25th of April, 1660. The Commons proceeded at once to choose a Speaker, and their choice fell on Sir Harbottle Grimston, a Presbyterian, who was very favourable to the king's return. The Peers met in the House of Lords, and elected the Earl of Manchester to be their president. Their number, moreover, having by the 27th risen to thirty-six, they signalised that day by the first public use of a privilege long proscribed, and desired a conference with the Commons on the affairs of the kingdom. The Commons meanwhile had acted strictly according to the ancient forms. Committees of Privilege had been appointed. Solemn votes of thanks had been decreed to Monk and Ingoldsby for their great and manifold services. It is highly probable that the question of imposing some limitations on the royal power would have been discussed at the conference, but when the day came the whole subject was adroitly evaded by a stroke of management. Mr. Annesley reported to the Commons, by order, that the Council of State had received letters from the king. Sir John Grenville, the bearer, was thereupon called in, and the king's letter to the Speaker was recited to the House. The royal missives to the Lord Mayor and General Monk, for the City and army, were next read, amid manifestations of the utmost loyalty and enthusiasm.

A similar scene was shortly afterwards enacted in the Lords. Loyal answers were immediately prepared by both Houses; Grenville was publicly thanked and rewarded by the Commons; and resolutions were hastily carried in favour of the re-establishment of monarchy. The Commons voted the king a present of £50,000 for his immediate necessities. The Lords ordered

that all statues of the parliamentary leaders and generals should be destroyed, and the arms of the Commonwealth taken down or defaced. A committee was appointed to prepare a settlement for the principal difficulties, such as the indemnity for those who had acted under the late Government, the abolition of the military tenures, and a provision for the royal revenue in return for the contemplated abolition of the feudal dues. Orders were issued that the king should be publicly prayed for in all religious services. The new-born loyalty of Parliament reached its climax in an attempt to obliterate the very remembrance of the Great Rebellion by a preposterous decree that the king should be held to have succeeded to the throne from the date of his father's death, with the ridiculous result that the first year of his actual reign (1660) is regarded for all legal purposes as the twelfth of Charles II.

Having thus surpassed all previous efforts, the Convention appointed commissioners to entreat the king's return. Some attempt was made by Mr. Hale, afterwards the celebrated Chief Justice, to insist that some limitations, based on the offers made to Charles I. during the revolutionary period, should be placed on the royal power as the conditions of the Restoration; but in reply Monk argued that the danger of any further delay was great and imminent, and that the king was far more likely to consent to limitations in the future if he were received with unquestioning loyalty at first. His view in the end prevailed; the enthusiasm of the moment overwhelmed the prudent counsels of cooler-headed men. The king was proclaimed on the 8th at Temple Bar, outside Whitehall, and in Palace Yard; and on the 29th he made his entry into the capital, amid a tumult of wild, unreasonable joy. Who would have imagined that all these exaggerated rejoicings would so soon be changed to suspicion, almost to hate? A number of bills, in fact, were begun without any very clear prospect of completion; but save for this the king returned to the throne of his ancestors untrammelled by any conditions, and to this cause Bishop Burnet, somewhat hastily, attributes all the errors of the reign. The sole precaution, in fact, that the Convention took against an absolute return to the old purely personal government of Charles I. was in

the form of a bill embodying a request for the confirmation of Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, and various other statutes and privileges of Parliament which had been asserted in 1641. To this statute the king gave his assent almost at the moment of his arrival. It is difficult, however, to condemn them for their inaction. There was an almost irresistible disinclination on the part of the majority for any further delay, and no little danger involved in it, as well not only of a rupture of the negotiations, but of a fresh outbreak on the part of the military party. There was, moreover, an almost insuperable obstacle in the way of treatymaking with the king. The recognition of his title involved the condemnation of the Convention as an illegal, because self-constituted body. How then could such an assembly conclude any binding agreement? No conditions, in fact, made before the king's return could have stood sound in law unless they were confirmed by Act of Parliament after the Restoration. There is little doubt, moreover, that Charles would have agreed to almost any conditions, in the firm belief that "the next free Parliament summoned by his own order would undo all this work of stipulation, and restore him to an unfettered prerogative"; and in all human probability he would have been fully justified by the event. It was more likely that a gracious and generous reception might induce him to consent to subsequent limitations by Act of Parliament, than that, in the hour of triumph, he would consider himself bound by a treaty void in law, and imposed on him solely by stern necessity.

It may be urged that the most prudent course would have been to have declared a vacancy of the throne during the period of the Commonwealth, and to have offered the crown to Charles as an elected king, as in the famous case of William of Orange. The circumstances, however, were very different, and the difference rendered such a course of action impossible. Charles II. was restored by an outbreak of returning loyalty, stimulated almost to frenzy by disgust at the anarchy which had prevailed since the death of Cromwell. The nation attributed to their rebellion against the king all the evils which had befallen them of late; they were determined both to restore the ancient dynasty and to treat as an usurpation, not an interregnum, the