ded with the doctrine of a divine right of kings. It
was only by slow steps, and above all by the practical stress of events,
that England was driven forward to religious toleration or to the
establishment of parliamentary government in the place of monarchy.

[Sidenote: The Period of Transition.]

Slowly and gradually however it was driven forward to both. Even at the
outset of the Restoration the temper of England had in fact drifted far
from the past to which it thought to return. The work of the Long
Parliament indeed seemed to be undone when Charles entered Whitehall.
Not only was the Monarchy restored but it was restored without
restriction or condition; and of the two great influences which had
hitherto served as checks on its power, the first, that of Puritanism,
had become hateful to the nation at large, while the second, the
tradition of constitutional liberty, was discredited by the issue of the
Civil War. But, wild as was the tumult of demonstrative loyalty, not one
of the great steps towards constitutional freedom which had been gained
by the patriots of 1641 was really lost. The prerogatives for which
Charles the First had struggled were quietly relinquished by his son.
The very Cavaliers who had welcomed the king to "his own again" never
dreamt of restoring the system of government which their opponents had
overthrown. Twenty years of parliamentary rule, however broken and mixed
with political and religious tyranny, had made the return to ship-money
or monopolies or the Star Chamber impossible. Men had become so
accustomed to freedom that they forgot how recent a thing its
unquestioned existence was. From the first therefore the great
"revolution of the seventeenth century," as it has been called, went
steadily on. The supreme power was gradually transferred from the Crown
to the House of Commons. Step by step Parliament drew nearer to a
solution of the political problem which had so long foiled its efforts,
the problem how to make its will the law of administrative action
without itself undertaking the task of administration. It is only by
carefully fixing our eyes on this transfer of power, and by noting the
successive steps towards its realization, that we can understand the
complex history of the Restoration and the Revolution.

[Sidenote: Charles the Second.]

Changed to the very core, yet hardly conscious of the change, drifting
indeed steadily towards a wider knowledge and a firmer freedom, but