diers of the Commonwealth to arms. Soon the capital began to feel
the miseries of a blockade. Fuel was scarcely to be procured. Tilbury
Fort, the place where Elizabeth had, with manly spirit, hurled foul
scorn at Parma and Spain, was insulted by the invaders. The roar of
foreign guns was heard, for the first time, by the citizens of London.
In the Council it was seriously proposed that, if the enemy advanced,
the Tower should be abandoned. Great multitudes of people assembled in
the streets crying out that England was bought and sold. The houses and
carriages of the ministers were attacked by the populace; and it seemed
likely that the government would have to deal at once with an invasion
and with an insurrection. The extreme danger, it is true, soon passed
by. A treaty was concluded, very different from the treaties which
Oliver had been in the habit of signing; and the nation was once more
at peace, but was in a mood scarcely less fierce and sullen than in the
days of shipmoney.

The discontent engendered by maladministration was heightened by
calamities which the best administration could not have averted. While
the ignominious war with Holland was raging, London suffered two great
disasters, such as never, in so short a space of time, befel one city.
A pestilence, surpassing in horror any that during three centuries
had visited the island, swept away, in six mouths, more than a hundred
thousand human beings. And scarcely had the dead cart ceased to go its
rounds, when a fire, such as had not been known in Europe since the
conflagration of Rome under Nero, laid in ruins the whole city, from the
Tower to the Temple, and from the river to the purlieus of Smithfield.

Had there been a general election while the nation was smarting under so
many disgraces and misfortunes, it is probable that the Roundheads would
have regained ascendency in the state. But the Parliament was still
the Cavalier Parliament, chosen in the transport of loyalty which had
followed the Restoration. Nevertheless it soon became evident that no
English legislature, however loyal, would now consent to be merely what
the legislature had been under the Tudors. From the death of Elizabeth
to the eve of the civil war, the Puritans, who predominated in the
representative body, had been constantly, by a dexterous use of the
power of the purse, encroaching on the province of the executive
government. The gentlemen who, after the Restoration, filled the Low