passed to the Parliament, attached himself to the fortunes of
Cromwell, and became member of the Council of State. A temporary
disgrace during the last years of the Protectorate only quickened him to
a restless hatred which did much to bring about its fall. His bitter
invectives against the dead Protector, his intrigues with Monk, and the
active part which he took in the king's recall, were rewarded at the
Restoration with a peerage and with promotion to a foremost share in the
royal councils.

Ashley was then a man of forty, and under the Commonwealth he had been
famous in Dryden's contemptuous phrase as "the loudest bagpipe of the
squeaking train"; but he was no sooner a minister of Charles than he
flung himself into the debauchery of the Court with an ardour which
surprised even his master. "You are the wickedest dog in England!"
laughed the king at some unscrupulous jest of his counsellor's. "Of a
subject, sir, I believe I am!" was the unabashed reply. But the
debauchery of Ashley was simply a mask. He was in fact temperate by
nature and habit, and his ill-health rendered any great excess
impossible. Men soon found that the courtier who lounged in Lady
Castlemaine's boudoir, or drank and jested with Sedley and Buckingham,
was a diligent and able man of business. "He is a man," says the puzzled
Pepys, three years after the Restoration, "of great business and yet of
pleasure and dissipation too." His rivals were as envious of the ease
and mastery with which he dealt with questions of finance as of the
"nimble wit" which won the favour of the king. Even in later years his
industry earned the grudging praise of his enemies. Dryden owned that as
Chancellor he was "swift to despatch and easy of access," and wondered
at the fevered activity which "refused his age the needful hours of
rest." His activity indeed was the more wonderful that his health was
utterly broken. An accident in early days left behind it an abiding
weakness whose traces were seen in the furrows which seamed his long
pale face, in the feebleness of his health, and the nervous tremor which
shook his puny frame. The "pigmy body" was "fretted to decay" by the
"fiery soul" within it. But pain and weakness brought with them no
sourness of spirit. Ashley was attacked more unscrupulously than any
statesman save Walpole; but Burnet, who did not love him, owns that he
was never bitter or angry in speaking of his assailants. Even the wit
with which he crushed the