The Loyalists, Volumes 1-3 | Page 3

degraded shield of Britain, our forefathers, as we are informed by the noble historian of his country's woes and shames[1], experienced an unusual share of prosperity. During the early part of the reign of King Charles the First, he tells us, "this nation enjoyed the greatest calm, and the fullest measure of felicity that any people of any age for so long a time together had been blessed with, to the envy and wonder of all the other parts of Christendom." The portrait he draws is so striking, that I must exhibit it in its native colours. "A happiness invidiously set off by this distinction, that every other kingdom, every other state, were entangled and almost destroyed by the fury of arms. The court was in great plenty, or rather (which is the discredit of plenty) excess and luxury, the country rich, and what is more, fully enjoying the pleasure of its own wealth, and so the more easily corrupted with the pride and wantonness of it. The church flourishing with learned and extraordinary men; trade increased to that degree, that we were the exchange of Christendom; foreign merchants looking upon nothing so much their own, as what they had laid up in the warehouses of this kingdom; the royal navy in number and equipage, very formidable at sea; lastly, for a complement of all these blessings, they were enjoyed under the protection of a King of the most harmless disposition; the most exemplary piety; the greatest sobriety, chastity, and mercy, that ever Prince had been endowed with: But all these blessings could but enable, not compel, us to be happy. We wanted that sense, acknowledgement, and value of our own happiness, which all but we had; and we took pains to make, when we could not find ourselves miserable. There was in truth a strange absence of understanding in most, and a strange perverseness of understanding in the rest. The court full of excess, idleness, and luxury; the country full of pride, mutiny, and discontent. Every man more troubled and perplexed at what they called the violation of one law, than delighted or pleased with the observance of all the rest of the charter. Never imputing the increase of their receipts, revenue, and plenty, to the wisdom, virtue, and merit of the crown; but objecting every small imposition to the exorbitancy and tyranny of the government. The growth of knowledge and virtue were disrelished for the infirmities of some learned men, and the increase of grace and favour to the church was more repined and murmured at than the increase of piety and devotion in it were regarded."
Such was the lowering calm of ungrateful discontent, which ushered in a fearful season of crime and punishment, described at large by one who was an illustrious actor on that eventful stage, and composed his history, "that posterity might not be deceived by the prosperity of wickedness into a belief that nothing less than a general combination of an whole nation, and a universal apostacy from their religion and allegiance, could, in so short a time, have produced such a prodigious and total alteration; and that the memory of those, who out of duty and conscience have opposed that torrent which overwhelmed them, may not lose the recompence due to their virtues, but having undergone the injuries and reproaches of that, might find a vindication in a better age."
In describing the scenes which ensued, "when an infatuated people, ripe and prepared for destruction, plunged by the just judgment of God into all the perverse actions of folly and madness," he reads us such important lessons as must strike an enlightened public, if recalled to their attention. He tells us, by fatal experience, "that the weak contributed to the designs of the wicked, while the latter, out of a conscience of their guilt, grew by desperation worse than they intended to be. That the wise were often imposed upon by men of small understandings. That the innocent were possessed with laziness, and slept in the most visible article of danger, and that the ill-disposed, though of the most different opinions, opposite interests, and distant affections, united in a firm and constant league of mischief, while those whose opinions and interests were the same, divided into factions and emulations more pernicious to the public than the treasons of others. Meanwhile the community, under pretence of zeal for religion, law, liberty, and parliament, (words of precious esteem in their just signification,) were furiously hurried into actions introducing atheism, and dissolving all the elements of the Christian religion."
So great were the miseries incident to civil commotion, so soon did the mask fall off from those pseudo-patriots, that all parties except the creatures of the ambitious Cromwel, ardently looked for the restoration of their imprisoned King, as