The king, of course, wanted money, nor was Parliament disposed to refuse it, we being still at war with Holland; but to the horror of that elderly pedant, Lord Clarendon, the Commons passed a Bill appointing a commission of members of both Houses “to inspect”—­I am now quoting Marvell—­“and examine thoroughly the former expense of the L2,800,000, of the L1,250,000 of the Militia money, of the prize goods, etc.”  In an earlier letter Marvell attributes the new temper of Parliament, “not to any want of ardour to supply the public necessities, but out of our House’s sense also of the burden to be laid upon the subject.”  Clarendon was so alarmed that he advised a dissolution.  Charles was alarmed, too, knowing well that both Carteret, the Treasurer of the Navy, and Lord Ashley, the Treasurer of the Prize Money, issued out many sums upon the king’s warrant, for which no accounts could be produced, but he was still more frightened of a new Parliament.  In the present Parliament he had, so Clarendon admits, “a hundred members of his own menial servants and their near relations.”  The bishops were also against a dissolution, dreading the return of Presbyterian members, so Clarendon’s advice was not followed, and the king very reluctantly consented to the commission, about which Pepys has so much to say.  It did not get appointed at once, but when it did Pepys rejoices greatly that its secretary, Mr. Jessopp, was “an old fashioned Cromwell man”; in other words, both honest and efficient.

The shrewd Secretary of the Navy Office here puts his finger on the real plague-spot of the Restoration.  Our Puritan historians write rather loosely about “the floodgates of dissipation,” etc., having been flung open by that event as if it had wrought a sudden change in human nature.  Mr. Pepys, whose frank Diary begins during the Protectorate, underwent no such change.  He was just the same sinner under Cromwell as he was under Charles.  Sober, grave divines may be found deploring the growing profligacy of the times long before the 29th of May 1660.  An era of extravagance was evidently to be expected.  No doubt the king’s return assisted it.  No country could be anything but the worse for having Charles the Second as its “most religious King.”  The Restoration of the Stuarts was the best “excuse for a glass” ever offered to an Englishman.  He availed himself of it with even more than his accustomed freedom.  But it cannot be said that the king’s debauchery was ever approved of even in London.  Both the mercurial Pepys and the grave Evelyn alike deplore it.  The misfortune clearly attributable to the king’s return was the substitution of a corrupt, inefficient, and unpatriotic administration for the old-fashioned servants of the public whom Cromwell had gathered round him.

Parliament was busy with new taxes.  In November 1666 Marvell writes:—­