HOWEVER slightingly the French Court behaved to Charles during his exile, they sought his friendship and alliance after his restoration; and in less than a year after that event, Philip Duke of Orleans, the only brother of Louis XIV. was married to the Princess Henrietta-Anne, sister of Charles II. After a dis

cordant marriage of nearly nine years' duration, the Duchess died suddenly, with strong suspicions of poison, which was passed over by both courts as an affair of ordinary occurrence. The Duke's education had been purposely neglected by the learned, licentious and sceptical M. de la Mothe le Vayer, to whom Cardinal Mazarin said "Why should you make the King's brother a clever man? If he become more learned than the King, he will not know how to yield him implicit obedience." He was left in ignorance, and became dissipated, vain and effeminate. The Princess is described by a cotemporary writer", as very young, handsome, amiable and graceful; surrounded by the greatest coquettes of the court, who were all the mistresses of her enemies, who tried to overwhelm her with misery, by embroiling her with her husband. Her gaieties caused the Duke to be jealous, and the opposite tastes of the Duke to hers, made her indignant. His favourites, who hated her, sowed discord between the Royal couple, which lasted till the death of the Duchess.

THE restoration of monarchy to England in the

person

* Fragmens de Lettres originales de Madame Charlotte-Elisabeth de Baviere, veuve de Monsieur, frère unique du Roi. Paris, 1788. This lady became the second wife of the Duke.

of Charles the second, would have been as happy as his wearied people wished, had the King learned wisdom in exile, and the nation prudence, when they recalled him. On the death of Cromwell, Louis XIV. acknowledged Richard Cromwell, as Protector of the Commonwealth of England, and renewed his public relations, with the new chief magistrate. On the conclusion of the war between France and Spain, the year after the death of Cromwell, the exiled King, learning from England the apathy of the new Protector and the cabals among the leading men of his government, besought Cardinal Mazarin the negociator for France, and Don Louis de Haro, the Spanish Minister, to aid him in recovering the throne of his ancestors, but his applications were slighted by both. It is questionable, if his solicitations had been complied with, whether a foreign army would have been in any degree so successful, as the voluntary recall of the Royal Family by the people of England.

THE King returned after seventeen years' exile, to a rejoicing people, whom he knew not, and who knew not him. The few English people with whom he associated were mostly profligates and outcasts, such as the cast off strumpet of Algernon Sidney and his brother Robert, from whom the King purloined her, and shared the double paternity of the handsome and dissolute Duke of Monmouth, too handsome, and too much like Robert Sidney, says the biographer of James II. even to a wart on his face, to make any doubt whose child he was, and the desperate gamesters

and roués that followed his broken fortunes and reckless mockery of a court. The old nobility and gentry of England, disgusted with the hypocrisy and tyranny of the fanatics, who kept even Cromwell in awe and from assuming the regal title as well as power, sighed for the restoration of their titles, their state, and their pleasures; the Bishops in nubibus, the episcopalians, both clerical and laical, desired emancipation from the holes and corners into which themselves and their sacred services were driven, and the whole country, with the exception of the fanatics, who clung to Whitehall and the Rump, called out like the Israelites of old, for monarchy, and thought even a bad King was better than no King at all. Thus Charles returned with a dissolute train of titled libertines, profligate rakes, old and worn out Bishops, some of whom were warping towards Popery, others accused of Socinianism, but all too much gratified at the restoration of Monarchy and the hopes of toleration, and a restitution of their property, sees and rich livings, and to witness the visibility of the Church, to think much of conditions.

THE people were mad with joy, and thronged in such crowds to present themselves, and kiss his hand, that persons on real business could scarcely approach him, and left him hardly time to eat for many days;

66

"Roué s. M. scélérat qui mérite la roue" says the Dictionaire de l'Académie, roués, nom qu'un donnoit au libertins titré du temps de la regne de Louis XIV." Memoires de M. le Duc de St. Simon. "Maitresses et Roués," being the feminine and masculine genders of the genus, Titled-Libertines, or Debauchees.

and the King was as ready to receive as the people were to pay, these unconsidered compliments. Evelyn, who was ever an advocate for high-church and monarchy, in reflecting on the attacks which the Church of England sustained, in his days, from the papists on one hand, the sectaries on the other, and from that apathy within, which gave up the reins without being certain of regaining them, remarks, that* "our Bishops slipped the occasion; for, had they held a steady hand upon His Majesty's restoration, as they might easily have done, the Church of England had emerged and flourished without interruption; but they were then remiss, and covetous after advantages of another kind, whilst His Majesty suffered them to come into a harvest, with which, without any injustice, he might have remunerated innumerable gallant gentlemen for their services, who had ruined themselves in the late rebellion." Mr. Evelyn points at the large and numerous fines for renewals of leases for lives which had not been filled up during the Commonwealth, and were, after the reformation, continually being applied for. Bishop Burnell, a brother prelate and a cotemporary, says, they were much misapplied.

WREN and his philosophical colleagues of Oxford and Gresham, rejoiced no less at the restoration of monarchy and the restitution of former customs than did the rest of the nation. Plans and proposals for the improvement of manners, education, philosophy, and all things of national import, burst from the closets

* Diary, 8vo. Ed. 1850, vol. II. p. 71.

and cloisters wherein they had been digested and matured in secret, like pent-up steam released from the boiler to give life and utility to multifarious machinery. The first and greatest effect of this mental liberation, of the recommencement of the meetings and lectures at Gresham College, was the foundation of "The Royal Society for the improvement of natural knowledge by experiment." The objects of this great and useful society, as given by its historian, Bishop Sprat, was to collect faithful records of all the works of nature and art which may come within their reach; so that their age and posterity could be able to mark the errors which had been strengthened by long prescription to restore truths that had lain neglected, to advance those already known to more various uses, and to make the way more passable to those which were unrevealed. Other objects are also detailed, tending to enlarge knowledge from being confined to the custody of a few, to put it into a condition of perpetually increasing by settling an inviolable correspondence between the hand and the head; to effect reformations in philosophy, not so much by any solemnity of laws, or ostentation of ceremonies, as by solid practice and example; not by a vain-glorious pomp of words, but by the silent, effectual and unanswerable arguments of real productions; and, they finally avowed, that they professed not to lay the foundation of an English, Scotch, Irish, Popish or Protestant Philosophy, but a philosophy of mankind.

On the 28th November 1660, at the conclusion of