“And because the passion and uncharitableness of the times have produced several opinions in Religion by which men are engaged in parties and animosities against each other (which, when they shall hereafter unite in a freedom of conversation, will be composed or better understood) we do declare a liberty to tender Consciences, and that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matters of Religion which do not disturb the peace of the Kingdom; and that we shall be ready to consent to such an Act of Parliament as upon mature deliberation shall be offered to us for the full granting of that indulgence.”

It is only doing the king bare justice to say that he was always ready and willing to keep this part of his royal word—­but it proved an impossibility.

A Roman Catholic as a matter of creed, a Hobbist in conversation, a sensualist in practice, and the shrewdest though most indolent of cynics in council, Charles, in this matter of religious toleration, would gladly have kept his word, not indeed because it was his word, for on the point of honour he was indifferent, but because it jumped with his humour, and would have mitigated the hard lot of the Catholics.  Charles was not a theorist, all his tastes being eminently practical, not to say scientific.  He was not a tyrant, but a de facto man from head to heel.  For the jure divino of the English Episcopate he cared as little as Oliver had ever done for the jure divino of the English Crown.  Oliver once said, and he was not given to braggadocio, that he would fire his pistol at the king “as soon as at another if he met him in battle,” and the second Charles would have thought no more of beheading an Anglican bishop than he did of sending Sir Harry Vane to the scaffold.  Honesty and virtue, on the rare occasions Charles encountered them, he admired much as a painter admires the colours of a fine sunset.  Above everything else Charles was determined never again, if he could help it, to be sent on his travels, to be snubbed and starved in foreign courts.

Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromartie, the first and best translator of Rabelais, is said to have died of laughing on hearing of the Restoration; Charles did not die, but he must have laughed inwardly at the spectacle that met his eyes everywhere as he made his often-described progress from Dover to London, and examined the gorgeous beds and quilts, fine linen and carpets, couches, horses and liveries, his faithful Commons had been at the pains and at the expense of providing for his comfort.

A few years afterwards Marvell wrote the following lines:—­

    “Of a tall stature and of sable hue,
    Much like the son of Kish, that lofty Jew;
    Twelve years complete he suffered in exile
    And kept his father’s asses all the while. 
    At length, by wonderful impulse of fate,
    The people called him home