me. I should be loath by any
act of mine he should forfeit the credit he has with you.'"

In England Charles gave his Royal Indulgence to Dissenters, and granted
them full liberty of conscience. They who had been horribly plundered
and ill-treated now built meeting-houses, and thronged to them in
public. Shaftesbury, who afterwards became a Papist, exclaimed, "Let us
bless God and the king that our religion is safe, that parliaments are
safe, that our properties and liberties are safe. What more hath a good
Englishman to ask, but that the king may long reign, and that this
triple alliance of king, parliament, and the people may never be
dissolved?" But Charles had a standing army in Scotland, with the Duke
of Lauderdale as Lord High Commissioner, and all classes of people in
that country were obliged to depose on oath their knowledge of persons
worshipping as Dissenters, on penalty of fine, imprisonment, banishment,
transportation, and of being sold as slaves. Persecutions of former
times were surpassed, the thumbscrew and the boot were used as mild
punishments, the rack dislocated the limbs of those who respected
conscience, and the stake consumed their bodies to ashes. Villagers were
driven to the mountains, and eighteen thousand Dissenters perished, not
counting those who were accused of rebellion. He was "a man of words,"
and the rhyme of this period depicts his whole character.

* * * * *

Two of the courtezans of Charles II.'s time were Lucy Locket and Kitty
Fisher. The following rhyme suggests that Kitty Fisher supplanted Lucy
Locket in Charles' fickle esteem--

"Lucy Locket lost her pocket,
Kitty Fisher found it;
Nothing in it, nothing in it,
But the binding round it."

On his death-bed the monarch commended the Duchesses of Cleveland and
Portsmouth to his successor, and said to James, "Do not let poor Nelly
(Nell Gwynne) starve!" Even their pockets were as badly lined as Lucy
Locket's.

The hatred of the Roman Catholic religion "had become," said Macaulay,
"one of the ruling passions of the community, and was as strong in the
ignorant and profane as in those who were Protestants from conviction."
Charles II. was suspected by many of leaning towards the Roman Catholic
religion. His brother, and heir presumptive, was discovered to be a
bigoted Catholic, and in defiance to the remonstrances of the House of
Commons had married another papist--Mary of Modena