Even in the United Dutch Provinces, themselves a Republic

after a fashion, and connected with England by close com-
mercial ties, this was the case. Charles II., it is true, was not
present in their capital as the public guest of the States, but
only as the private guest of the Stadtholder, his kinsman;
there were murmurs among the Dutch, it is true, against his
continued residence there, and against the Stadtholder's
activity for him; there was even, it is true, a party among
the Dutch politicians sympathetic with the new system of
things in England because they were themselves maintaining
the Republican constitution of the Provinces against a visible
tendency of the Stadtholderate to sovereignty. In the main,
however, the claims of the young Stuart to his father's throne
were popular with the Dutch, and it did not seem unlikely
that the Dutch Government might be induced to interfere in
his behalf.-Over the rest of Europe there were other chances
of interference. The great Peace of Westphalia (Oct. 1648)
'had just put an end to the Thirty Years' War, settling the
mutual relations of the various European Powers, modifying
the constitution of the German Confederacy, entitling each
State in it to make foreign alliances on its own account, and
recognising also formally, for the first time, the independence
of the Dutch Provinces and of Switzerland. The Continent
was therefore more at leisure than it had been to attend to
affairs in the British Islands, and individual powers were
more free to interfere if they thought fit. Mazarin, the
supreme minister of France during the monarchy of Louis
XIV., had hitherto been proof against all the efforts of Hen-
rietta Maria to induce him to do more than allow France to
be an asylum for herself and the English Royalist refugees;
and he had recently resisted in the same way the importunities
of Montrose. But Mazarin's views of policy might change;
his Government was trembling under the attacks of its do-
mestic enemies, the Frondeurs; who knew what might
happen? Spain and Portugal were farther off,-Spain under
Philip IV., and Portugal under John IV., the founder of
the Braganza dynasty. Neither of these had given much
sympathy to Charles I. in his troubles; and Alonzo de

66

Cardenas, the Spanish Ambassador in London, had always kept himself on good terms with the Parliamentarians. News, however, had come to the Hague that the Spanish Court was not likely to let its policy towards England be swayed any longer by the counsels of Cardenas. At Madrid, it was said, the death of Charles had been heard of with passion and indignation;" the King and the whole Court had gone into solemn mourning; the King had spoken with much tenderness and compassion of the exiled young heir to the English throne, and of the propriety of sending him an embassy. It had, accordingly, occurred to old Lord Cottington at the Hague that he and Hyde should be sent together into Spain, to cultivate these favourable dispositions. Hyde, as the younger man, would do the real work; and for himself it would be a pleasure to renew acquaintance with a country of which he had fond recollections dating from the time of the Spanish Match Project. He had confided the idea to Hyde, and it was agreed upon between them.-While such hopes were entertained of Spain, and collaterally of Portugal, expectations from the northern Protestant powers were not wanting. The Marquis of Brandenburg (Friedrich Wilhelm, "the Great Elector," great-grandfather of Frederick the Great of Prussia) was thought likely to assist; others of the German States were thought likely; and there were hopes from Queen Christina of Sweden and Frederick III. of Denmark. Montrose, who had recently made a round of visits among these northern courts, German and Scandinavian, had considerable faith in his power of rousing them to action, and had already marked out Hamburg as a place of rendezvous and embarkation for any forces or supplies they might yield.'1 Scotland having thus proclaimed and invited Charles II., Ormond in Ireland having proclaimed and invited him, and almost all the European States locking on his cause with

1 Clarendon, 714 et seq., 739 et seq.; Baillie, III. 89; Godwin, III. 352–354; Napier's Montrose, 670-672. Very curious details as to the wavering disposition and conduct of the Spanish Court towards the infant English Re

public after the death of Charles I. are to be gathered from documents (from the Simancas Archives) appended to Guizot's History of Cromwell and the English Commonwealth.

sympathy, the fortunes of the infant English Commonwealth depended solely, we may say, on England herself. If the population of England were unanimous for the new Commonwealth, it might stand against a whole adverse world; if they were not unanimous, how could it subsist?

OPPOSITION TO THE COMMONWEALTH WITHIN ENGLAND: STRENGTH AND INTENSITY OF ENGLISH ROYALISM: THE EIKON BASILIKE AND ITS EFFECTS: ROYALIST PAMPHLETS AND NEWSPAPERS: MARCHAMONT NEEDHAM AND THE

MERCURIUS PRAGMATICUS.

To say that England herself was far from unanimous for the Republic would be ludicrously short of the truth. England herself, if by England we mean the numerical majority of her inhabitants, would have torn down the Republic with her own hands. It had been set up by about sixty men of iron at the centre, representing the Army, and perhaps a third of the general population. If we add the indifferents, who had accepted the Republic as a fait accompli, the opponents of the Republic within England herself were still largely in the majority. Had Ireton's plebiscite been tried, and none excluded, this would have been found out. The Army, the Independents, the Sects, thousands and thousands of thoughtful men throughout England, with a great following of those whom the Royalists called the rag-tag of society, would certainly have voted for the Republic. With many of them it was a dream realized, a new heaven and a new earth, a possession worth dying for, the beginning of a Reign of the Saints. But with what masses of diverse substance all over England was this minority mixed! There were, in the first place, the old Episcopalian Royalists, consisting of all of the suppressed Peerage that had not gone into exile, and of the families of such, together with the ejected Anglican bishops and clergy, many of the remaining clergy who were still Anglican at heart, and numberless knights and squires, cherishing in their country houses their old faith and loyal memories, and maintaining the same among the yeomanry

and the tenantry. More numerous still were the Presbyterians, the established religious denomination of the land, strong in London and in other cities and towns, and now the more ardent in their Royalism out of remorse for their past ruthlessness in that struggle with the King which had ended so tragically. Theological antipathy mingled with their political bitterness. They hated the chiefs of the Commonwealth, not only as the murderers of the King, but also as the unabashed patrons of heresy and religious toleration. Add these Presbyterians to the Royalists of the old school, and imagine the latent Roman Catholics dispersed among both, and it will be seen what a vast proportion of the population of England were submissive to the new powers only because they were compelled and silenced.

A book, published with great secrecy, and in very mysterious circumstances, Feb. 9, 1648-9, exactly ten days after the late King's death, had done much to increase the Royalist enthusiasm. Εἰκὼν Βασιλική: The True Portraicture of His Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings.-Rom. viii. More than conquerour, &c.-Bona agere et mala pati Regium est.— MDCXLVIII: such was the title-page of this volume (of 269 pages of text, in small octavo), destined by fate, rather than by merit, to be one of the most famous books of the world. No printer's or publisher's name appeared in the first copies; but there was a prefixed allegoric design by the engraver William Marshall. It exhibited the well-known person of the late King, kneeling in robes, in a room or chapel, at a table, on which was the Bible, his royal crown tumbled off and lying on the floor, but a crown of thorns in his right hand, and his eye directed upwards to a crown of glory shining overhead. In the background was a kind of landscape, with trees, and a raging sea behind, with angels blowing at the waterspouts; and scattered through the design were many verbal mottos, such as "Clarior e tenebris," "Crescit sub pondere virtus," " In verbo tuo spes mea."

The book, so elaborately prepared and heralded, consists of twenty-eight successive chapters, purporting to have been written by the late King, and to be the essence of his spiritual

autobiography in the last years of his life. Each chapter, with scarcely an exception, begins with a little narrative, or generally rather with reflections and meditations on some passage of the King's life the narrative of which is supposed to be unnecessary, and ends with a prayer in italics appropriate to the circumstances remembered. Thus Chapter I. is entitled "Upon his Majesty's calling this last Parliament," and consists of a narrative and prayer on that subject; Chapter II. is "Upon the Earl of Strafford's Death," and gives his Majesty's meditations and compunctions on that event, with a prayer to correspond; and so on the book goes, meditation and prayer, through all the more critical junctures of the King's history from 1640 or 1641 to near his death. One notes a singular absence of dates or other indications by which it could be known whether any particular meditation and prayer were written at the moment of the juncture to which they refer or afterwards in recollection of it, and also a kind of hurry or huddling-up at the end, where there is the nearest approach to precision in this respect, and where there is most of pathos. Thus it is not till Chapter XXIII. that we are at Holmby, or the commencement of the King's real captivity in Feb. 1646-7, and then, after three chapters devoted to his experiences there the last of them specially entitled "Penitential Meditations and Vows in the King's Solitude at Holmby "-there remain but three chapters for all the rest of the "solitude," from June 1647 onwards. In these closing chapters, however, as we have said, the strain becomes most pathetic. The last chapter but one, which is pretty long, is addressed "To the Prince of Wales." It begins: "Son, if "these papers, with some others, wherein I have set down "the private reflections of my conscience, and my most impartial thoughts touching the chief passages which have "been most remarkable or disputed in my late troubles, come "to your hands, to whom they are chiefly designed, they 66 may be so far useful to you as to state your judgment aright "in what hath passed, whereof a pious is the best use can be "made, and they may also give you some directions how to "remedy the present distempers, and prevent, if God will, the