The advocates of Charles, like the advocates of other malefactors against whom overwhelming evidence is produced, generally decline all controversy about the facts, and content themselves with calling testimony to character.  He had so many private virtues!  And had James the Second no private virtues?  Was Oliver Cromwell, his bitterest enemies themselves being judges, destitute of private virtues?  And what, after all, are the virtues ascribed to Charles?  A religious zeal, not more sincere than that of his son, and fully as weak and narrow-minded, and a few of the ordinary household decencies which half the tombstones in England claim for those who lie beneath them.  A good father!  A good husband!  Ample apologies indeed for fifteen years of persecution, tyranny, and falsehood!

We charge him with having broken his coronation oath; and we are told that he kept his marriage vow!  We accuse him of having given up his people to the merciless inflictions of the most hot-headed and hard-hearted of prelates; and the defence is, that he took his little son on his knee and kissed him!  We censure him for having violated the articles of the Petition of Right, after having, for good and valuable consideration, promised to observe them; and we are informed that he was accustomed to hear prayers at six o’clock in the morning!  It is to such considerations as these, together with his Vandyck dress, his handsome face, and his peaked beard, that he owes, we verily believe, most of his popularity with the present generation.

For ourselves, we own that we do not understand the common phrase, a good man, but a bad king.  We can as easily conceive a good man and an unnatural father, or a good man and a treacherous friend.  We cannot, in estimating the character of an individual, leave out of our consideration his conduct in the most important of all human relations; and if in that relation we find him to have been selfish, cruel, and deceitful, we shall take the liberty to call him a bad man, in spite of all his temperance at table, and all his regularity at chapel.

We cannot refrain from adding a few words respecting a topic on which the defenders of Charles are fond of dwelling.  If, they say, he governed his people ill, he at least governed them after the example of his predecessors.  If he violated their privileges, it was because those privileges had not been accurately defined.  No act of oppression has ever been imputed to him which has not a parallel in the annals of the Tudors.  This point Hume has laboured, with an art which is as discreditable in a historical work as it would be admirable in a forensic address.  The answer is short, clear, and decisive.  Charles had assented to the Petition of Right.  He had renounced the oppressive powers said to have been exercised by his predecessors, and he had renounced them for money.  He was not entitled to set up his antiquated claims against his own recent release.