besotted
is Hallam's word) loyalty which had characterised the Restoration.

The king, of course, wanted money, nor was Parliament disposed to refuse
it, we being still at war with Holland; but to the horror of that
elderly pedant, Lord Clarendon, the Commons passed a Bill appointing a
commission of members of both Houses "to inspect"--I am now quoting
Marvell--"and examine thoroughly the former expense of the L2,800,000,
of the L1,250,000 of the Militia money, of the prize goods, etc." In an
earlier letter Marvell attributes the new temper of Parliament, "not to
any want of ardour to supply the public necessities, but out of our
House's sense also of the burden to be laid upon the subject." Clarendon
was so alarmed that he advised a dissolution. Charles was alarmed, too,
knowing well that both Carteret, the Treasurer of the Navy, and Lord
Ashley, the Treasurer of the Prize Money, issued out many sums upon the
king's warrant, for which no accounts could be produced, but he was
still more frightened of a new Parliament. In the present Parliament he
had, so Clarendon admits, "a hundred members of his own menial servants
and their near relations." The bishops were also against a dissolution,
dreading the return of Presbyterian members, so Clarendon's advice was
not followed, and the king very reluctantly consented to the commission,
about which Pepys has so much to say. It did not get appointed at once,
but when it did Pepys rejoices greatly that its secretary, Mr. Jessopp,
was "an old fashioned Cromwell man"; in other words, both honest and
efficient.

The shrewd Secretary of the Navy Office here puts his finger on the
real plague-spot of the Restoration. Our Puritan historians write rather
loosely about "the floodgates of dissipation," etc., having been flung
open by that event as if it had wrought a sudden change in human nature.
Mr. Pepys, whose frank Diary begins during the Protectorate, underwent
no such change. He was just the same sinner under Cromwell as he was
under Charles. Sober, grave divines may be found deploring the growing
profligacy of the times long before the 29th of May 1660. An era of
extravagance was evidently to be expected. No doubt the king's return
assisted it. No country could be anything but the worse for having
Charles the Second as its "most religious King." The Restoration of the
Stuarts was the best "excuse for a glass" ever offered to an Englishman.
He availed himself of it with even more