a hesitation to speak out.  It was in the end of March or the first days of April 1660, when the elections had begun, that the hesitation suddenly ceased everywhere, and the torrent was at its full.  They were drinking Charles’s health openly in taverns; they were singing songs about him everywhere; they were tearing down the Arms of the Commonwealth in public buildings, and putting up the King’s instead.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Phillips, 695; Letters of M. de Bordeaux, Guizot, II. 381-395; Whitlocke, IV. 405; Pepys’s Diary, from beginning to April 11, 1660.]

Popular feeling having declared itself so unmistakeably for Charles, it was but ordinary selfish prudence in all public men who had anything to lose, or anything to fear, to be among the foremost to bid him welcome.  No longer now was it merely a rat here and there of the inferior sort, like Downing and Morland,[1] that was leaving the sinking ship.  So many were leaving, and of so many sorts and degrees, that Hyde and the other Councillors of Charles had ceased to count, on their side, the deserters as they clambered up.  He received now, Hyde tells us, “the addresses of many men who had never before applied themselves to him, and many sent to him for his Majesty’s approbation and leave to sit in the next Parliament.”  Between London and Flanders messengers were passing to and fro daily, with perfect freedom and hardly any disguise of their business.  Annesley, the President of the Council of State, was in correspondence with the King; Thurloe, now back in the Secretaryship to the Council, was in correspondence with him, and by no means dishonourably; and in the meetings of the Council of State itself, though it was bound to be corporately neutral till the Parliament should assemble, the drift of the deliberations was obvious.  The only two men whose resistance even now could have compelled a pause were Monk and Montague.  What of them?——­It was no false rumour that Montague, the Cromwellian among Cromwellians, the man who would have died for Cromwell or perhaps for his dynasty, had been holding himself free for Charles.  Under a cloud among the Republicans since his suspicious return from the Baltic in September last, but restored to command by the recent vote of the Parliament of the secluded members making him joint chief Admiral with Monk, he was at this moment (i.e. from March 23 onwards) in the Thames with his fleet, in receipt of daily orders from the Council and guarding the sea-passage between them and Flanders.  He had on board with him, as his secretary, a certain young Mr. Samuel Pepys, who had been with him already in the Baltic, had been meanwhile in a clerkship in the Exchequer office, but had now left his house in Axe Yard, Westminster, and his young wife there, for the pleasure and emoluments of being once more secretary to so kind and great a master.  In cabin talk with the trusty Pepys the Lord Admiral made no secret of his belief that the King would come in; but it was