hing said among
them was, that if the thing were to do again they would do it.

Sir Harry Vane, who had furnished the evidence against Strafford, and was
one of the most staunch of the Republicans, was also tried, found guilty,
and ordered for execution. When he came upon the scaffold on Tower Hill,
after conducting his own defence with great power, his notes of what he
had meant to say to the people were torn away from him, and the drums and
trumpets were ordered to sound lustily and drown his voice; for, the
people had been so much impressed by what the Regicides had calmly said
with their last breath, that it was the custom now, to have the drums and
trumpets always under the scaffold, ready to strike up. Vane said no
more than this: 'It is a bad cause which cannot bear the words of a dying
man:' and bravely died.

These merry scenes were succeeded by another, perhaps even merrier. On
the anniversary of the late King's death, the bodies of Oliver Cromwell,
Ireton, and Bradshaw, were torn out of their graves in Westminster Abbey,
dragged to Tyburn, hanged there on a gallows all day long, and then
beheaded. Imagine the head of Oliver Cromwell set upon a pole to be
stared at by a brutal crowd, not one of whom would have dared to look the
living Oliver in the face for half a moment! Think, after you have read
this reign, what England was under Oliver Cromwell who was torn out of
his grave, and what it was under this merry monarch who sold it, like a
merry Judas, over and over again.

Of course, the remains of Oliver's wife and daughter were not to be
spared either, though they had been most excellent women. The base
clergy of that time gave up their bodies, which had been buried in the
Abbey, and--to the eternal disgrace of England--they were thrown into a
pit, together with the mouldering bones of Pym and of the brave and bold
old Admiral Blake.

The clergy acted this disgraceful part because they hoped to get the
nonconformists, or dissenters, thoroughly put down in this reign, and to
have but one prayer-book and one service for all kinds of people, no
matter what their private opinions were. This was pretty well, I think,
for a Protestant Church, which had displaced the Romish Church because
people had a right to their own opinions in religious matters. However,
they carried it with a high hand, and a prayer-book was agreed upon, in
which the extremest opinions of Archbishop Laud were not forgotten. An
Ac