but to be intensely angry, and told the king, according to his own account, in his autobiography, on hearing the news, that if the marriage had really taken place, he would advise that "the king should immediately cause the woman to be sent to the Tower, and to be cast into a dungeon, under so strict a guard, that no living person should be permitted to come to her; and then that an act of parliament should be immediately passed for cutting off her head, to which he would not only give his consent, but would very willingly be the first to propose it." This picture of the heroism of a savage, however, ill agrees with the accounts of the chancellor's real concern in the matter. Evelyn, in his diary, says, "The queen would fain have undone it, but it seems that matters were reconciled on great offers of the chancellor's to befriend her, who was so much in debt, and was now to have the settlement of her affairs go through his hands." Accordingly, about six weeks after the arrival of Henrietta. Maria at Whitehall the marriage was publicly acknowledged.
Amid all these disgraceful transactions parliament met again on the 6th of November. They proceeded to pass into a bill the king's "healing declaration" regarding religion. The presbyterians were in high spirits, but they were soon made to feel their folly in bringing back the episcopalian church with its episcopalian head. The clergy were not so high for nothing. They knew very well what the king would do when the matter was pressed to an issue, and accordingly the expectant presbyterians found the court party not only voting, but openly speaking against the bill. Morrice, the creature of Monk, and now secretary of state, and Heneage Finch, the solicitor-general, strenuously opposed it, Finch not scrupling to avow that "it was not the king's desire that the bill should proceed." It was thrown out, and the duped presbyterians, instead of persecutors, soon found persecution let loose upon them. The convention parliament having satisfied the court in this measure, proceeded to gratify its ghoulish and worse than hyæna vengeance on the illustrious dead. On the 8th of December they voted the attainder of Oliver Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw, and having got this sanction on the 30th of January, 1661, the court, under cover of the clergy's pious zeal, sent a rabble of constables to tear open the graves of these great regicides, to drag their decaying corpses to Tyburn on hurdles, to hang them, to cut them down and behead them, and then throwing their putrid bodies into a hole under the gallows, to stick their heads on poles on the top of Westminster Hall. It would have stamped both king and church with eternal infamy to have only done this vile deed—to have thus treated the senseless remains of the greatest prince, as Macaulay terms him, that ever sate on the English seat of supreme rule since Alfred. But the low, fiendish malice of this despicable monarch could not stop there. He proceeded to perpetrate the same revolting atrocities on the bodies of innocent and virtuous women, and on some of the most illustrious men of our annals. The remains of the brave old mother of Cromwell, and of his amiable daughter, lady Claypole, were dragged forth; that of Dorislaus, the envoy of the parliament who had been murdered by the retainers of this same Charles at the Hague; of Slay, the historian of the parliament, and the excellent translator of Lucan's "Pharsalia;" of Pym, the great and incorruptible champion of English liberty; and of Blake, the most famous admiral that the country had yet produced, whose name alone gave it a world-wide renown. These, and every other body which had been buried in the abbey whilst the commonwealth lasted, were dragged out and flung into a pit in St. Margaret's churchyard.
These were deeds never to be forgiven by Englishmen, deeds which for ever stripped away the ill-applied terms of gentlemen and noble cavaliers from those who did them. In the midst of these diabolical outrages the nation narrowly escaped another, which would have crowned it with eternal infamy. There was a cry to seize and hang the blind old poet of "Paradise Lost," the glorious defender of the people of England, the eloquent advocate of the liberty of the state, the purity of the church, the restricted exercise of thought and word and pen. He was ignominiously seized and dragged by sordid tipstaff hands to prison. The cry was hang him, and only three voices were raised in his favour One of these was that of his illustrious friend, and friend of his country, Andrew Marvel. But the very majesty of his divine genius, even in that terrible age, seemed to withhold the murderous hands of this vile court, and being stripped of his property under the name of fees, and his two famous works, the "Defence of the English People," and his "Eikonoclastes," burned by the hangman, he was suffered to live in poverty and neglect. It is said that Charles, in Milton's old age, had the brutality to pay him a visit, and to insult him with the loss of his eyes as a judgment for his proceedings against the king, to which he is said to have calmly replied, "If that be a judgment on me, what was the judgment on your father? I only lost my eyes, but your father lost his head."
This infamous convention parliament having shown the most abject servility to the libertine king, a bargain was now driven with it, which marks one of the greatest epochs in our history. We desire to draw the particular attention of our readers to this event, as by it the whole system of our taxation was changed, and the burden of it shifted from the shoulders of the aristocracy to those of the people; a change which was no sooner effected than the system of creating a national debt commenced, which has grown into the enormous amount of upwards of eight hundred millions sterling. Our modern historians, however—striking and unparalleled as has been this fiscal revolution, leading to enormous and incessant wars, to boundless extravagance in our government, and to all the evils of parliamentary corruption—have passed slightly over it. Some of them have just mentioned the fact that the feudal tenures were abolished, and the excise granted as a permanent revenue to the crown, and others, that the aristocracy obtained thus a release from their feudal obligations, but did not release their feudal tenants, but not one of them has perceived, or if so, has followed out the stupendous consequences of this change, one of the most vast and momentous in our history. Hume does not even allude to it. Knight merely observes generally that " at the restoration properly begins the modern history of the public revenue. That the 12 Car. II. c. 21 granted the king and his heirs and successors for ever, in full and ample recompense and satisfaction for the courts of wards and the prerogative of
