if convicted of treason, he
would not suffer him to be sent to the block. But he was now brought to
trial on the charge of treason against a king, "kept out of his royal
authority by traitors and rebels," and his spirited defence served as an
excuse for his execution. "He is too dangerous a man to let live,"
Charles wrote with characteristic coolness, "if we can safely put him
out of the way." But the new members were yet better churchmen than
loyalists. At the opening of their session they ordered every member to
receive the communion, and the League and Covenant to be solemnly burnt
by the common hangman in Westminster Hall. The bill which excluded the
bishops from their seats in the House of Lords was repealed. The
conference at the Savoy between the Episcopalians and Presbyterians
broke up in anger, and the few alterations made in the Liturgy were made
with a view to disgust rather than to conciliate the Puritan party.

[Sidenote: Clarendon.]

In spite of these outbursts however it would be unjust to look on the
temper of the new Parliament as a mere temper of revenge. Its wish was
in the main to restore the constitutional system which the civil war had
violently interrupted. The Royalist party, as we have seen, had no sort
of sympathy with the policy of the early Stuarts. Their notions and
their aims were not those of Laud and Strafford, but of the group of
constitutional loyalists who had followed Falkland in his break with the
Long Parliament in 1642. And of that group by a singular fortune the
most active and conspicuous member now filled the chief place in the
counsels of the king. Edward Hyde had joined Charles the First before
the outbreak of the war, he had become his Chancellor of the Exchequer,
and it was to his pen that the bulk of the royal manifestoes were
attributed. He had passed with the young Prince of Wales into exile, and
had remained the counsellor of Charles the Second during the long years
which preceded his return. His faithfulness had been amply rewarded. He
was now Earl of Clarendon and Lord Chancellor; and his influence in the
royal council, which had been great from the first, became supreme when
the temper of the new Parliament shattered the hopes of his Presbyterian
opponents there. But his aim was simply to carry out the policy he had
clung to with Falkland. He was a lawyer by breeding, and his theory of
the State was a lawyer's theory. He looked on the English constitution,
not as th