rs would form a party in the English Parliament which
would always be at the service of the Crown. In both the lesser kingdoms
too a measure which seemed to restore somewhat of their national
independence was for the moment popular.

[Sidenote: Scotland and Ireland.]

But the results of this step were quick in developing themselves. In
Scotland the Covenant was at once abolished. The Scotch Parliament which
assembled at Edinburgh, the Drunken Parliament as it was called, outdid
the wildest loyalty of the English Cavaliers by annulling in a single
Act all the proceedings of its predecessors during the last
eight-and-twenty years. By this measure the whole existing Church system
of Scotland was deprived of legal sanction. The General Assembly had
already been prohibited from meeting by Cromwell; the kirk-sessions' and
ministers' synods were now suspended. The Scotch bishops were again
restored to their spiritual pre-eminence and to their seats in
Parliament. An iniquitous trial sent the Marquis of Argyle, the only
noble strong enough to oppose the Royal will, to the block; and the
government was entrusted to a knot of profligate statesmen till it fell
into the hands of Lauderdale, one of the ablest and most unscrupulous of
the king's ministers. Their policy was steadily directed to two
purposes, the first, that of humbling Presbyterianism--as the force
which could alone restore Scotland to freedom and enable her to lend aid
as before to English liberty in any struggle with the Crown--the second,
that of raising a royal army which might be ready in case of need to
march over the Border to the king's support. In Ireland the dissolution
of the Union brought back the bishops to their sees; but whatever wish
Charles may have had to restore the balance of Catholic and Protestant
as a source of power to the Crown was baffled by the obstinate
resistance of the Protestant settlers to any plans for redressing the
confiscations of Cromwell. Five years of bitter struggle between the
dispossessed loyalists and the new occupants left the Protestant
ascendency unimpaired; and in spite of a nominal surrender of one-third
of the confiscated estates to their old possessors hardly a sixth of the
profitable land in the island remained in Catholic holding. The claims
of the Duke of Ormond too made it necessary to leave the government in
his hands, and Ormond's loyalty was too moderate and constitutional to
lend itself to any of the schemes o