Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 111
So much for Mr. Airy, whose unwilling evidence is corroborated by the testimony of practically all the historians of the period. It is impossible to overestimate the political importance of the king’s opportune clemency or to refuse to recognise the sublimity of mind to which it bears proof. More than any of his subjects the new king had wrongs to avenge. His father’s head had fallen upon the scaffold, he himself had been hounded into exile, escaping from his kingdom after weeks of imminent peril, compelled to wander deserted and shelterless, to know the pangs of hunger and to find himself destitute and penniless, a pensioner on the niggardly bounty of continental sovereigns. Had he been sufficiently ruthless and sufficiently impolitic he might for the moment have sated his vengeance in blood. The temper of his royalist supporters would have stopped at no extremes of retaliation. Pepys has left us in his Diary an account of the horrible butchery of Major-General Harrison, one of the regicides killed amid the plaudits of a sanguinary populace. “I went out,” he writes, “to Charing Cross to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered, which was done there; he looked as cheerful as any man could look in that condition. He was presently cut down and his head and heart shown to the people at which there were great shouts of joy.” It was, as already said, Charles himself who imposed his veto on further executions. “I must confess,” he said, “that I am weary of hanging except on new offences: let it sleep.” Pepys bears witness to the king’s clemency in saying,— “The king is a man of so great compassion that he would willingly acquit them all.” If we turn from the internal history of England to the history of her colonies, we find that Charles’s clemency made itself felt even there. In Virginia the struggles of the mother country had been reproduced on a smaller scale, and the restoration of the king brought with it the restoration of the royalist governor, Sir William Berkeley. The colonists, outraged by the stringency of the governor and his cavalier associates, broke into revolt, a revolt which collapsed as rapidly as it had started, owing to the death of the rebel leader. Berkeley at once set himself to the work of retaliation, — hanging and confiscating with an unsparing hand. The slaughter found no end until an imperative personal message from King Charles ordered Berkeley to stop. “That old fool,” said Charles, in comment on the governor’s conduct, “has put to death more people in that naked country than I did here for the murder of my father.”
Enough has been said to establish on good authority the fact of Charles the Second’s extraordinary magnanimity of mind. As he had shewed himself at his accession, so he remained throughout his reign. To cherish resentment was foreign to his nature, which seemed incapable of harbouring a personal animosity.
Let us now turn from the question of Charles II’s general relation towards the monarchy to his dealings with the parliament. Doubtless we have all retained from our recollection of the history of the seventeenth century the general idea that Charles, like his father and grandfather before him, refused to govern according to the wishes of his parliaments. In this, by the way, he resembled not only his father and grandfather, but also good Queen Elizabeth, patriotic King Henry, and many other royal notabilities of preceding centuries. But let us admit in its full extent the fact that, from the beginning to the end of his reign of twenty-five years, Charles had not the remotest intention of governing according to the will of parliament. Now this may seem a very shocking and dreadful thing — it may at first sight seem to carry with it sufficient condemnation of the king’s administration. But to judge it so is to apply to the seventeenth century the ideas of the twentieth, and to confound institutions, which, while preserving their names, have entirely altered in character in the course of two hundred years. We of the twentieth century are accustomed to a royal régime that has become of a purely nominal character. Our king reigns but does not govern. It is his elevated function to deliver speeches which he does not compose, to give thanks for money which he does not get, to talk in the old lordly style of his troops, his navy, the war that he means to make, and the peace that he hopes to effect. But his real business consists in laying the foundation stones of public buildings, turning the first sod of railways, planting the first trees in botanical gardens, unveiling statues, pictures, and inscriptions, giving thanks, receiving thanks, bowing and being bowed to. These are the avocations that keep him busy, happy, harmless. To my mind there is something eminently pathetic in the twentieth-century king with his frock coat, his building trowel, his spade, his tree, his statues and the other paraphernalia of his office, his false magnificence and his actual impotence. He is colonel of ten regiments and does not command a single man, the head of a navy and has no power to fire a single gun, wears, in his days of grandeur, twenty uniforms in forty minutes and finds none to fit him. But this happy device by which the jaded monarch of the twentieth century, — the mere astral body of old-time kingship — is put through his paces at the bidding of a democratic nation, — this is the creation of the later time. In the seventeenth century nominal kingship did not exist, and was not dreamed of. To think it a proper ground of accusation against Charles II that he intended to govern his own kingdom, is to lose sight of historical perspective. As well reproach the England of his day for its lack of public education, its need of railroads, and the paucity of its newspapers, as object against a king of the seventeenth century that he intended to govern his own kingdom. William III himself had just the same intention, though the limitations of his situation and character prevented him from carrying it so fully into effect. Charles himself was perfectly clear and consistent in his views on this point. He intended to govern by royal prerogative (and I use the word in no offensive sense), aided by the advice of his parliament whenever such advice seemed sensible and reasonable. Nor did he by royal prerogative mean a monarchical tyranny. He meant the enlightened rule of the head of the nation, directed in the general interests. “I will never use arbitrary government myself,” he said to the turbulent and impossible parliament that met him at Oxford towards the close of his reign, “and am resolved not to suffer it in others.” His characteristic point of view, indicated with the king’s characteristically kindly spirit of comradeship, appears in his reception to a group of Berkshire petitioners, begging him not to delay in calling a new parliament (1680). “Gentlemen,” said the amiable monarch, “we will argue the matter over a cup of ale when we meet at Windsor, though I wonder that my neighbours should meddle with my business.”
But it is not only to be remembered that between the days of the Restoration and our time the recognised duties of the British king have altered: the parliament itself has undergone a change equally important. The parliament of our day represents the whole adult nation: it is chosen in fair open election by the people of the realm, and when it speaks it speaks with the voice of national authority. It has learned by the traditions and experience of preceding centuries to respect the existence within itself of a dissentient minority. His Majesty’s Opposition is as much a part of our working constitution as His Majesty’s administration. A modern parliament does not seek by the sheer brute force of a majority vote to slaughter its enemies, to impose its religion, to rob its opponents, and to victimize all who oppose it. Inspired by a just sense of its power and responsibilities, it seeks to represent the nation and not the uppermost faction of the hour, while the facilities offered by the modern press, ease of communication, and general enlightenment accord to its every determination the irresistible support or the irresistible condemnation of public opinion.
Now look at the parliaments of the seventeenth century. I need hardly remind my readers in how far they were representative. They were chosen from a minority of the English people. Not one person in fifty had any share in the choice of the House of Commons. England in the reign of Charles II was no more a democratic country than Spain. Its parliament represented not the nation, but merely the different factions of the land-owning class, keen in the pursuit of their own interest, firm in the suppression of the labouring masses, vindictive and implacable in their factional strife. To have turned loose the parliaments of Charles II to govern under a trowel-using, tree-planting king would have delivered the nation over to an unending strife of rival cliques and irresponsible factions. For proof of this, consider a moment the composition and character of the parliaments of Charles II. There were in all four of them. One that met in 1660 and lasted until 1679, one in 1679, one called in 1680, and a final parliament summoned in 1681 at Oxford, where the king claimed that the “air was sweeter.”
The parliament of 1660 has been described as the “worst parliament that ever sat.” This is strong language, but the authority is that of a writer of competence and long a professor at Oxford. It has been described by a contemporary as a “parliament full of young men chosen by a furious people in spite of the Puritans.” The youth of the members, it is only fair to say, did not alarm the king. “It is no great fault,” he said, “as I mean to keep them till they have got beards.” Keep them indeed he did for eighteen years, during which the record of their legislation, which would have been infinitely worse but for the opposition of the king, stands on the statute books as a lasting memorial of their incompetence and savagery. Heedless of the king’s earnest plea for full religious toleration, they insisted on passing the series of statutes that rendered the era one of bitter religious persecution. I need not recall in detail the inhuman and unjust provisions of the Act of Uniformity, the Corporation Act, the Conventicle Act, and the Five-Mile Act. Dissenters and Catholics alike groaned under the scourge of parliamentary tyranny, while the victorious faction thrust on an unwilling nation the burden of an Anglican establishment. Read if you will of the long-borne sufferings of imprisoned ministers and hunted priests, the family prayer rudely interrupted by officers of the law, the Quakers dragged through the streets of London, death, confiscation and the iron hand of bigoted intolerance throughout the land, and you may realise the part played by the restoration parliament in the history of the church. Had they been given but a king of their own complexion, or a king willing to efface himself at their bidding, the nation would have known the horrors of a religious war. Nor is it in point of religion alone that this first of Charles’s parliaments shewed its intolerance and ignorance. It was this same body that passed the Iniquitous Act of Settlement to hold the agricultural poor in their serfdom to the landed classes, and framed the Navigation Code to render the American Colonies the tributaries of the mother country.
To the second parliament of Charles II is ascribed the lasting renown of passing the Habeas Corpus Act, which has left an undeserved celebrity to its memory. This may be appreciated when it is known that the Act really was not supported by a majority, but that in order to squeeze it through the parliamentary tellers, in counting the members, counted one excessively fat gentleman by bulk instead of by tale, and reckoned him as ten votes for the bill.
Much has been written in reference to the religion or the irreligion of Charles II. It has been laid to his charge as a grave crime that he was a Roman Catholic, and that at the moment of his death he received the last sacraments of that church at the hands of a popish priest. Now let us admit that, to the minds of a great many people of the seventeenth century, to be a Roman Catholic was in and of itself a heinous offence. The Catholic belief was viewed as a sinful thing, the Catholic ritual as an idolatrous enormity. This was the era when Jesuit priests lay hidden at the risk of their lives in country homes of those who still clung to the old belief, when popish priests were forbidden on pain of death to enter the northern colonies in America. Granting the full atrocity of Catholic belief in the minds of many of Charles’s subjects, are we still to regard such a creed as a crime? Civilised humanity has long since recognised that religious opinion cannot be coerced, that every man has at least a right to his own belief about his own soul. If Charles II believed in a doctrine of salvation that is still the most widely accepted of all Christian faiths, wherein lies the sin? Let us place before the devout Protestant reader of British history a reversed case. We will imagine a French king, compelled from his policy to grant a nominal adherence to the ritual and outward formalities of Roman Catholicism, but cherishing in his secret heart a sustaining faith in the Protestant creed and calling to his death bed the services of a Scottish Calvinist to administer to him a final sermon on the inevitable damnation of the unjust. I cannot but think that such a monarch, had there ever been one, would have met from the Protestant world no such obloquy as has been given to the unfortunate Charles: his name would rather have been cited among great examples of triumphant Protestantism, a sovereign mindful of the welfare of his soul in despite of the temptations of his idolatrous surroundings.
But I do not incline to think that Charles was a Roman Catholic. In point of applied religion he was indeed a somewhat easy-going practitioner. He slept in church — this I believe being the first authenticated case of the custom — and he entertained a constitutional aversion to sermons. References to the ultimate punishment of sin were alien to his kindly instincts. The Scotch, indeed, during his ill-assorted union with them after his father’s death had cured him of all taste for theology, and the three-hour sermons to which he had been compelled to submit during his Caledonian kingship had supplied him with a fund of compressed piety quite sufficient for all his future needs. A letter written during his kingship to his sister in Paris illustrates the king’s view of sermons. “We have,” he writes, “the same disease of sermons that you complain of there, but I hope you have the same convenience that the rest of the family has, of sleeping out most of the time, which is a great ease to those who are bound to hear them.” One highly impertinent divine presumed to preach to the king upon the irregularities of his private life. Charles contented himself with a gentle admonition: “Tell him,” he said, “that I am not angry to be told of my faults; but I would have it done in gentlemanlike manner.” At another time we read of the king’s pathetic complaint of an enthusiastic preacher who had “played the fool upon the doctrine of purgatory,” and of another reverend gentleman who had compelled Charles to listen to what he called “a quite unnecessary sermon on the doctrine of original sin.”
But after properly weighing the available evidence I do not think that Charles II is to be classed as a believer in Roman Catholicism. His religious belief appears indeed to have been unusually broad and philosophic, — the natural outcome of his absence of prejudice, — and to have led him to accept tenets taken from the dogmas of many different sects while granting a full adherence to none. His point of view in some respects was decidedly Calvinistic, in others emphatically Lutheran, while in more intricate points of religion he shows a strongly Socinian temper. There was much in his creed that was decidedly Manichæan, much that was Unitarian, not a little that was Trinitarian, and a great deal that was Latitudinarian. He held for example that it made no difference to his future salvation what he did in this world. This was pure Calvinism. The Socinians, it will be remembered, held that it made no difference whether the soul was an incorporated substance or an invisible essence. In this Charles entirely agreed with them. He agreed with the Lutherans in denying the importance of justification by works, but sided with the Antinomians in doubting the need of justification by faith. He was willing to concede the Unitarian doctrine that perhaps there is no such person as the devil, while not denying the Anglican contention that perhaps there is. It appears in all that the king’s religious view was that delicately balanced character which appreciates the niceties of opposing doctrines but refrains from a final decision of the points in controversy.
Whatever was Charles’s creed, there should be no doubt of the excellence of his heart. The monster of oriental ingratitude is a fiction of ill-disposed historians. Towards the parasites and sycophants of his court, it is true, he recognised no obligation whatever: he estimated them at their true worth and thrust them aside with contempt when it suited his fancy to be rid of them. But towards his real friends — those who had befriended him in exile or counselled him well in prosperity — he bore a lasting gratitude. The dismissal of Clarendon is often laid to his charge, but the charge is without foundation. For seven years after his restoration Charles had tolerated the familiar dictation of a minister who, affectionate, loyal and well meaning as he was, never realised that the king was no longer a fugitive stripling unable to think or act for himself. Clarendon fell, as Bismarck and others have fallen, a victim to the overweening assertiveness of senile wisdom.
To understand how abiding was Charles’s sense of gratitude one need but read the long list of pensions and presents to all those, high and low, who had befriended him during his flight after the final defeat at Worcester. It has been maliciously objected that many of these handsome pensions and gratuities were left unpaid. Such an ungenerous criticism is scarcely worthy of remark. The state of Charles’s exchequer frequently compelled him to forego the satisfaction of his private gratuities. It is at any rate a fact that not a few of the pensions are paid by the British government to this day.
It has become a commonplace with historians to point to the foreign policy of Charles II (and in particular to his relations with France) as one of the gravest of his iniquities. It is quite true that he sold Dunkirk to the French, but this far from being a diplomatic blunder was dictated by the wisest policy. Dunkirk, lying as it does on the French side of the Straits of Dover, and affording to England a fortified base of operations against the French, could never have permanently remained a British possession. It is not, like Gibraltar, an isolated rock; it is an integral part of the French territory. Its retention by England would have been a standing guarantee of inveterate hostility. To sell it to the French was at once the part of prudence and generosity.
