m was commonly good-humoured. "When will you
have done preaching?" a bishop murmured testily, as he was speaking in
the House of Peers. "When I am a bishop, my Lord!" was the laughing
reply.

[Sidenote: Ashley's Policy.]

As a statesman Ashley not only stood high among his contemporaries from
his wonderful readiness and industry, but he stood far above them in his
scorn of personal profit. Even Dryden, while raking together every fault
in his character, owns that his hands were clean. As a political leader
his position was to modern eyes odd enough. In religion he was at most a
Deist, with some fanciful notions "that after death our souls lived in
stars," and his life was that of a debauchee. But Deist and debauchee as
he was he remained the representative of the Presbyterian and
Nonconformist party in the Royal Council. He was the steady and vehement
advocate of toleration, but his advocacy was based on purely political
grounds. He saw that persecution would fail to bring back the Dissenters
to the Church, and that the effort to recall them only left the country
disunited. He saw too that such a disunion exposed English liberty to
invasion from the Crown, while it robbed England herself of all
influence in Europe at a time when her influence alone could effectually
check the ambition of France. The one means of uniting Churchmen and
Dissidents was by a policy of toleration, but in the temper of England
after the Restoration he saw no hope of obtaining toleration save from
the king. Wit, debauchery, rapidity in the despatch of business, were
all therefore used as a means to gain influence over the king, and to
secure him as a friend in the struggle which Ashley carried on against
the intolerance of Clarendon.

[Sidenote: The first Declaration of Indulgence.]

Charles, as we have seen, had his own game to play, and his own reasons
for protecting Ashley during his vehement struggle against the Test and
Corporation Act, the Act of Uniformity, and the persecution of the
Dissidents. But the struggle had been fruitless, and the only chance--as
it seemed to Ashley--of securing toleration was to receive it on the
king's own terms. It was with the assent therefore of the Presbyterian
party in the Council that Charles issued in December a royal
proclamation which expressed the king's resolve to exempt from the
penalties of the Acts which had been passed "those who living peaceably
do not conform themselves thereunto through s