their novelty. Even the old and savage things they
invoked became more savage in becoming more new. In observing what is
called their Jewish Sabbath, they would have had to stone the strictest
Jew. And they (and indeed their age generally) turned witch-burning from
an episode to an epidemic. The destroyers and the things destroyed
disappeared together; but they remain as something nobler than the
nibbling legalism of some of the Whig cynics who continued their work.
They were above all things anti-historic, like the Futurists in Italy;
and there was this unconscious greatness about them, that their very
sacrilege was public and solemn like a sacrament; and they were
ritualists even as iconoclasts. It was, properly considered, but a very
secondary example of their strange and violent simplicity that one of
them, before a mighty mob at Whitehall, cut off the anointed head of the
sacramental man of the Middle Ages. For another, far away in the western
shires, cut down the thorn of Glastonbury, from which had grown the
whole story of Britain.

XIV

THE TRIUMPH OF THE WHIGS

Whether or no we believe that the Reformation really reformed, there can
be little doubt that the Restoration did not really restore. Charles II.
was never in the old sense a King; he was a Leader of the Opposition to
his own Ministers. Because he was a clever politician he kept his
official post, and because his brother and successor was an incredibly
stupid politician, he lost it; but the throne was already only one of
the official posts. In some ways, indeed, Charles II. was fitted for the
more modern world then beginning; he was rather an eighteenth-century
than a seventeenth-century man. He was as witty as a character in a
comedy; and it was already the comedy of Sheridan and not of
Shakespeare. He was more modern yet when he enjoyed the pure
experimentalism of the Royal Society, and bent eagerly over the toys
that were to grow into the terrible engines of science. He and his
brother, however, had two links with what was in England the losing
side; and by the strain on these their dynastic cause was lost. The
first, which lessened in its practical pressure as time passed, was, of
course, the hatred felt for their religion. The second, which grew as it
neared the next century, was their tie with the French Monarchy. We will
deal with the religious quarrel before passing on to a much more
irreligious age; but the truth about it is tangled