ompromise.

[Sidenote: The Constitutional Royalists.]

The tide of loyalty had in fact been rising fast during its session,
and its influence was already seen in a shameful outrage wrought under
the very orders of the Convention itself. The bodies of Cromwell,
Bradshaw, and Ireton were torn from their graves and hung on gibbets at
Tyburn, while those of Pym and Blake were cast out of Westminster Abbey
into St. Margaret's churchyard. But it was only on the dissolution of
the Convention-Parliament at the end of 1660 that the new political
temper made itself vigorously felt. For the first time during twenty
years half England found itself able to go to the poll. From the outset
of the war all who had taken part on the Royalist side had been
disfranchised as "malignants," and this disfranchisement had been
rigorously enforced even in the elections to the Convention. But
"malignity" had now ceased to be a crime, and the voters so long
deprived of all share in the suffrage, vicars, country gentlemen,
farmers, with the whole body of the Catholics, rushed again to the poll.
Their temper, as might be expected, was one of vengeance on the men who
had held them down so long. In counties and towns alike the zeal for
Church and king, the two causes for which the voters had suffered, swept
all hope of moderation or compromise before it. The ruling impulse was
to get utterly rid of the old representatives. The Presbyterians,
dominant in the Convention, sank in the Cavalier Parliament, as that of
1661 was called, to a handful of fifty members.

[Sidenote: The Parliament of 1661.]

The new House of Commons was made up for the most part of young men, of
men, that is, who had but a faint memory of the Stuart tyranny under
which their childhood had been spent, but who had a keen memory of
living from manhood beneath the tyranny of the Commonwealth. They had
seen their fathers driven from the justice-bench, driven from the
polling-booth, half-beggared and imprisoned for no other cause but their
loyalty to the king. They had seen the family oaks felled and the family
plate sent to the melting-pot to redeem their estates from the pitiless
hands of the committee at Goldsmiths' Hall. They had themselves been
brought like poachers before the justices for a horse-race or a
cock-fight. At every breath of a rising a squad of the New Model had
quartered itself in the manor-house and a warrant from the Major-general
of the district had cleared th