duced several opinions in Religion by which men are engaged in
parties and animosities against each other (which, when they shall
hereafter unite in a freedom of conversation, will be composed or
better understood) we do declare a liberty to tender Consciences, and
that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences
of opinion in matters of Religion which do not disturb the peace of
the Kingdom; and that we shall be ready to consent to such an Act of
Parliament as upon mature deliberation shall be offered to us for the
full granting of that indulgence."

It is only doing the king bare justice to say that he was always ready
and willing to keep this part of his royal word--but it proved an
impossibility.

A Roman Catholic as a matter of creed, a Hobbist in conversation, a
sensualist in practice, and the shrewdest though most indolent of cynics
in council, Charles, in this matter of religious toleration, would
gladly have kept his word, not indeed because it was his word, for on
the point of honour he was indifferent, but because it jumped with his
humour, and would have mitigated the hard lot of the Catholics. Charles
was not a theorist, all his tastes being eminently practical, not to say
scientific. He was not a tyrant, but a _de facto_ man from head to heel.
For the _jure divino_ of the English Episcopate he cared as little as
Oliver had ever done for the _jure divino_ of the English Crown. Oliver
once said, and he was not given to _braggadocio_, that he would fire his
pistol at the king "as soon as at another if he met him in battle," and
the second Charles would have thought no more of beheading an Anglican
bishop than he did of sending Sir Harry Vane to the scaffold. Honesty
and virtue, on the rare occasions Charles encountered them, he admired
much as a painter admires the colours of a fine sunset. Above everything
else Charles was determined never again, if he could help it, to be sent
on his travels, to be snubbed and starved in foreign courts.

Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromartie, the first and best translator of
Rabelais, is said to have died of laughing on hearing of the
Restoration; Charles did not die, but he must have laughed inwardly at
the spectacle that met his eyes everywhere as he made his
often-described progress from Dover to London, and examined the gorgeous
beds and quilts, fine linen and carpets, couches, horses and liveries,
his faithful Commons had been