of suffering. Still, even so merry a monarch
could not force one of these dying men to say
that he was sorry for what he had done.
Nay, the most memorable thing 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 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 were 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 Act was passed, too,
preventing any dissenter from holding any
office under any corporation. So, the regular
clergy in their triumph were soon as merry
as the King. The army being by this time
disbanded, and the King crowned, everything
was to go on easy for evermore.

I must say a word here about the King's
family. He had not been long upon the
throne when his brother the Duke of
Gloucester, and his sister the PRINCESS OF
ORANGE, died within a few months of each
other, of the small-pox. His remaining sister,
the PRINCESS HENRIETTA, married the DUKE
OF ORLEANS, the brother of LOUIS THE
FOURTEENTH, King of France. His brother JAMES,
DUKE OF YORK, was made High Admiral,
and by and by became a Catholic. He was
a gloomy, sullen, bilious sort of man, with a
remarkable partiality for the ugliest women
in the country. He married, under very
discreditable circumstances, ANNE HYDE, the
daughter of LORD CLARENDON, then the
King's principal Minister—not at all a
delicate minister either, but doing much of
the dirty work of a very dirty palace. It
became important now, that the King
himself should be married; and divers foreign
Monarchs, not very particular about the
character of their son-in-law, proposed their
daughters to him. The KING OF PORTUGAL
offered his daughter, CATHERINE OF
BRAGANZA, and fifty thousand pounds: in addition
to which the French King, who was favourable
to that match, offered a loan of another
fifty thousand. The King of Spain, on the
other hand, offered any one out of a dozen
of Princesses, and other hopes of gain.
But the ready money carried the day, and
Catherine came over in state to her merry
marriage.

The whole Court was a great flaunting
crowd of debauched men and shameless
women; and Catherine's merry husband insulted
and outraged her in every possible way, until
she consented to receive those worthless
creatures as her very good friends, and to degrade
herself by their companionship. A MRS.
PALMER, whom the King made LADY CASTLEMAINE,
and afterwards DUCHESS OF CLEVELAND,
was one of the most powerful of the
bad women about the Court, and had
great influence with the King nearly all
through his reign. Another merry lady,
named MOLL DAVIES, a dancer at the theatre,
was afterwards her rival. So was NELL
GWYN, first an orange girl and then an
actress, who really had some good in her,
and of whom one of the worst things I know,
is, that she actually does seem to have been
fond of the King. The first DUKE OF ST.
ALBANS was this orange girl's child. In like
manner, the son of a merry waiting-lady,
whom the King created DUCHESS OF
PORTSMOUTH, became the DUKE OF RICHMOND.
Upon the whole, it is not so bad a thing to
be a commoner.

The Merry Monarch was so exceedingly
merry among these merry ladies, and some
equally merry (and equally infamous) lords
and gentlemen, that he soon got through his
hundred thousand pounds, and then, by way