d gayly after such a leader. The first Parliament, while
it contained some noble and patriotic members, was dominated by young men
who remembered the excess of Puritan zeal, but forgot the despotism and
injustice which had compelled Puritanism to stand up and assert the manhood
of England. These young politicians vied with the king in passing laws for
the subjugation of Church and State, and in their thirst for revenge upon
all who had been connected with Cromwell's iron government. Once more a
wretched formalism--that perpetual danger to the English Church--came to
the front and exercised authority over the free churches. The House of
Lords was largely increased by the creation of hereditary titles and
estates for ignoble men and shameless women who had flattered the king's
vanity. Even the Bench, that last strong refuge of English justice, was
corrupted by the appointment of judges, like the brutal Jeffreys, whose
aim, like that of their royal master, was to get money and to exercise
power without personal responsibility. Amid all this dishonor the foreign
influence and authority of Cromwell's strong government vanished like
smoke. The valiant little Dutch navy swept the English fleet from the sea,
and only the thunder of Dutch guns in the Thames, under the very windows of
London, awoke the nation to the realization of how low it had fallen.

Two considerations must modify our judgment of this disheartening
spectacle. First, the king and his court are not England. Though our
histories are largely filled with the records of kings and soldiers, of
intrigues and fighting, these no more express the real life of a people
than fever and delirium express a normal manhood. Though king and court and
high society arouse our disgust or pity, records are not wanting to show
that private life in England remained honest and pure even in the worst
days of the Restoration. While London society might be entertained by the
degenerate poetry of Rochester and the dramas of Dryden and Wycherley,
English scholars hailed Milton with delight; and the common people followed
Bunyan and Baxter with their tremendous appeal to righteousness and
liberty. Second, the king, with all his pretensions to divine right,
remained only a figurehead; and the Anglo-Saxon people, when they tire of
one figurehead, have always the will and the power to throw it overboard
and choose a better one. The country was divided into two political
parties: the Whigs, who s