CHAPTER X THE CHURCH OF THE RESTORATION Preparation for the Restoration. THE Restoration meant much more than that, after a few months' unrest under an impossible government, Oliver Cromwell's successor was Charles Stewart. The Church was restored with even fewer conditions than the king. Statesmen were fearful, but their fears were groundless. When, in 1659, Thorndike published his Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England, in which he reiterated, clearly and unhesitatingly, the doctrines which the school of Laud had inherited from the divines of the Reformation and their historical ancestry, Catholic custom was to his mind still the unbroken rule of the Church: the historic Episcopate, the use of confession and of prayers for the dead, the restoration of the Epiklesis on the elements, for these he pleaded. His principle was the appeal to the Holy Scriptures as interpreted in the primitive church; outside this there was no compromise possible for churchmen. Such statements alarmed the cautious Hyde, the faithful counsellor of the exiled Charles as of his father, and afterwards famous as Earl of Clarendon. "What do our friends think of the book?" he asked, "and is it possible that he would publish it, without ever imparting it or communicating with them ?" The king, he said, was apprehensive of danger; reports reached England from his court that "any Episcopacy, how low soever, would serve the turn and be accepted." Some of the London clergy and laity "that adhered to the late king," drew up a declaration, in which they declared that they regarded their sufferings as inflicted by God, "and Possibilities therefore do not cherish any violent thoughts or inclinations to those who have been in any way instrumental of a in them." Baxter said publicly that moderate settlement. men could be easily satisfied. He, and many with him, made no exceptions to the doctrines of the Prayerbook. It seemed that the Presbyterians-so the French ambassador wrote to Cardinal Mazarin on April 1, 1660, -were still in power. But the Presbyterian system, as we have seen, had never taken root in the country. The differences among other religious bodies, whom Presbyterians and churchmen alike contemptuously described as "sectaries," prevented any possible union on the basis of Independency, even if the essentially republican nature of the Independent system had made it possible as the religious establishment of a restored monarchy. The grievous exceptions which the late government had continued to make to a religious toleration left no precedent for a scheme which would allow freedom to all. If the lines upon which religion should be settled had been submitted to argument, it is probable that no conclusion would ever have been arrived at. But the matter was settled, as a revolution generally settles such matters, without compromise. The views The first factor in the settlement was the king himself. Charles had been brought up in the strict Church of England system, which was the centre of his father's ideas. of Charles II. He had undergone among the Presbyterians of Scotland uncomfortable experiences, involving, to a man of his supple dishonesty, considerable personal humiliation. He had mixed continually during his exile with Roman Catholics, and the Commonwealth had done its best to make England believe that he was already a papist.1 But he had kept up the English services in what was termed his private chapels, and his advisers were for the most part sincere members of the English Church. The matter did not touch him very nearly. From his boyhood he was utterly dissolute and corrupt. "His religion was Deism, or rather that which is called so; and if in his exile, or at his death, he went into that of Rome; the first was to be imputed to a complaisance 1 The publication in 1650 of The King of Scotland's Negotiations at Rome rendered it necessary to publish a full refutation of the charges in 1660. X CHARACTER OF CHARLES II. 181 for the company he was then obliged to keep, and the last to a lazy diffidence in all other religions, upon a review of his past life, and the near approach of an uncertain state." Such is the judgment of Dr. James Welwood, writing in 1700. And it is indubitably correct. If it is true that the Presbyterian ministers who went over to see him at the Hague were befooled by listening to him at his prayers for a heart "constant in the exercise and protection of thy true Protestant religion," and tender to nonconformists, the sorry jest was one which he must thoroughly have enjoyed. He offered liberty, no doubt gladly and honestly, but he would certainly oppose no personal convictions to the wishes of the majority of Englishmen, for fear he should "go on his travels again." And the opinion of England, or of the strongest party in England, was soon manifest. Charles II. was proclaimed in London on May 8, 1660, by order of the newly-elected Convention. On the 12th he was proclaimed at Durham. A typical parish register adds, "on which day I, Stephen Hogg, began to use again the Book of Common Prayer." The king's first Sunday in England was spent at Canterbury, where the Common Prayer was again read in the cathedral church. On the 29th of May he entered London in triumph. The Restora 29, 1660. On the king's return an Act was passed restoring to their benefices all clergy who had been deprived since the rebellion began, if they were not concerned in the king's death, or Anabaptists; and this was carried out, tion, May with some popular tumult, within a few weeks in many parts of the country. Where the Episcopalian incumbent, however, had died, or where he had remained during the interregnum, accepting the religious changes, no alteration was at first made. Church. From the day of the king's formal restoration, petitions poured in from the Episcopalian clergy, seeking the royal favour. Two days after he returned to London Petition as the Lords and Commons petitioned for the pro- to the clamation of a day of thanksgiving. The London ministers requested the restoration of "the former ecclesiastical, civil and military government." Newcastle-on-Tyne hoped that Charles might "be the instrument to unite a divided church." The ministers of Exeter and Devon expressed their joy that to his zeal for the Protestant religion "is joined a pitiful heart towards tender consciences," and hoped that he would protect "the young and weak of the flock who cannot pace it with their older brethren." Totnes left to the king "the settlement of the Church." North Wales hoped for a "resettlement of the Church." The mass of petitions that poured in with regard to Church preferment, recommendations of clergy by eminent men, and the like, showed, within the first month of the king's restoration, how certain men regarded the restoration of the Church, and that practically without conditions. Within a month, too, the king had authorised the use of the Book of Common Prayer. On the 28th of June a solemn thanksgiving was held "for the happy return of his Majesty," and Gilbert Sheldon, once warden of All Souls' College, and a warm supporter of Laud in Oxford, now dean of the Chapel Royal, preached before the king at Whitehall. In marked contrast to the fulsome words in which the Presbyterian Speaker of the Commons had assured Charles that he was ranked for his sufferings among the martyrs of Christ; Sheldon earnestly and soberly spoke of David's deliverance and thanksgiving as a pattern for king and people. "A sad bargain it is," he said, "to save wealth, honour, crowns, and sceptres, life itself, anything we have, at the loss of our God, at the expense of our soul;" and as before the Rebellion, there was 66 open, public, and national sin," so now true gratitude involved doing good; "an horrid sin it is, instead of thanking God to sacrifice to Bacchus, to express publicum gaudium per publicum dedecus" [a public joy by a public dishonour]. A right note was struck for the new reign, but it was not followed. The first great public ceremonial of the restored Church, restored almost before men had taken in hand its restoration, was the consecration of five bishops in Westminster Abbey. Of those who had held sees before the war there survived many notable men. The appointment of Juxon to the primacy, vacant since that day when the friend and patron of his youth had died on the scaffold, was inevitable. He was the Appointments to closest link with memories which the loyalists of the bishoprics. Restoration felt to be sacred. His election was confirmed in Henry VII.'s chapel, on September 20, 1660, X JUXON ARCHBISHOP 183 amid a great concourse of clergy and laity, and every sign of rejoicing and thankfulness. All men loved him. Long before, the great Falkland had said that "he never knew any one that a pair of lawn sleeves had not altered from himself, but only Bishop Juxon." He was, all through his life, what Charles I. had called him above all others, a "good man.' But he was now infirm as well as aged, and he took no part in the consecrations to any of the vacant sees. Besides him there remained several who had suffered: Wren, who had been in prison nearly twenty years; Piers, who had been impeached with Wren, but like him never brought to trial, and several others. One also there was who had been consecrated in the chapel of Magdalen College, Oxford, when the war was at its height, on April 28, 1644,-Accepted Frewen, Bishop of Lichfield, now raised to the Archbishopric of York. The new One of these was On October 28, 1660, in Henry VII.'s chapel, Gilbert Sheldon was consecrated to London; Humfrey Henchman to Salisbury, George Morley to Worcester, Robert Sanderson to Lincoln, George Griffith to St. Asaph. bishops. On December 2, seven more bishops were consecrated; on the Feast of Epiphany four more. Edward Reynolds, consecrated to Norwich, a notable Puritan, who after putting before the king his opinion as to the position of the Episcopate, cordially accepted the new settlement. Another was John Gauden, the author of the Eikon Basilike, who had, though then secretly, done more, perhaps, to bring about the Restoration than any other man save Monk. He had preached at St. Paul's on February 28, 1660, before the lord mayor and Monk, a very subtle sermon in which he hinted, without saying it, what was in every man's thoughts, that the return of the monarchy was "the right method of healing Church and State." Concerning Church he said, "the perfect healing of the Church and religion, as Christian and reformed (whose divisions, hurts, and deformities are many), will hardly be done without calling those spiritual physicians together, after the primitive pattern, in ecclesiastical synods or national councils, who are best skilled in the true state of health in the nature of the diseases, and in the aptest remedies, which in religion ought to be only humane and |