to have forgotten might have been wiser; but those who
are accustomed to ease are slow to learn labour, even with the best
intentions; and those who had inflicted the wrongs were scarcely the
persons who should have taunted the sufferers with the miseries they had
caused.

Charles II. commenced his reign _de facto_ in 1660, under the most
favourable auspices. People were weary of a Commonwealth which had
promised so much and performed so little; of the name of liberty without
the reality; of the exercise of kingly power without the appurtenances
or right of majesty. But the new monarch had been educated in a bad
school. Surrounded with all the prestige of royalty without its
responsibilities, and courted most ardently by followers whose only
object was their own future advancement, which they hoped to secure by
present flattery, it is scarcely a matter of surprise that Charles
should have disappointed the hopes of the nation. In England public
affairs were easily settled. Those who had been expelled from their
estates by the Cromwellian faction, drove out[504] by the new
proprietors; but in Ireland the case was very different. Even the
faithful loyalists, who had sacrificed everything for the King, and had
so freely assisted his necessities out of their poverty, were now
treated with contempt, and their claims silenced by proclamation; while
the men who had been most opposed to the royal interest, and most cruel
in their oppression of the natives, were rewarded and admitted into
favour. Coote and Broghill were of this class. Each tried to lessen the
other in opinion of their royal master as they ran the race for favour,
and each boasted of services never accomplished, and of loyalty which
never existed. The two enemies of each other and of the nation were now
appointed Lord Justices of Ireland; and a Parliament was assembled on
the 8th of May, 1661, the first meeting of the kind which had been held
for twenty years.

The Catholic, or national interest, was certainly not represented; for
there were present seventy-two Protestant peers, and only twenty-one
Catholics; while the House of Commons comprised two hundred and sixty
members, all of whom were burgesses except sixty-four, and the towns had
been so entirely peopled by Cromwell's Puritan followers, that there
could be no doubt what course they would pursue. An attempt was now made
to expel the few Catholics who were present, by requiring them to take
the oath of su