INTR OD UCTOR Y. 13 



cannot speak of him as a successful statesman, or doubt that 

 the unhappy and enduring reaction which followed his career 

 was due to his political errors. 



The reaction was singularly complete. The Church re- 

 covered all its power, and the efforts of Laud were as nothing 

 beside the severity of the Clarendon code. Mutilation and 

 transportation were out of fashion for theological offences, but 

 a long imprisonment in a seventeenth-century jail was no great 

 mercy when compared with the punishment inflicted on Prynne, 

 Burton, and Bastwick. The doctrine of the Divine right of 

 kings and the Divine right of the clergy became a dogma 

 which it was heresy to dispute, instead of an opinion which it 

 was politic to affirm. The ancient capitular and even parochial 

 endowments of the Church, open before the Act of Uniformity 

 to laymen, or at least to other than English orders, were now 

 limited to those who had received episcopal ordination. Only 

 the rights of the Crown could be infringed by no Act of 

 Parliament, and the Sovereign of England is still a prebendary 

 of S. David's. Two works of one of the men who suffered much 

 from the reaction are valuable, beyond their intrinsic merits, as 

 pictures of the age. Bunyan's Holy War is the best account 

 that has been preserved (with of course his particular touches) 

 of the armies who fought in the Civil War. His Life and 

 Death of Mr. Badman is an equally vivid picture of the 

 tradesman of the age, and, of course with a difference, shows 

 how retail business was carried on after the Restoration. 



The real victory of the Restoration remained with the 

 nobles and country party. The Church recovered her capit- 

 ular lands, which had often been purchased at their full value, 

 without compensation to innocent purchasers. The business- 

 like loyalty of the restored cavaliers would have employed 

 ; uncut as the means for recovering the estates which they 

 sold under legal forms. Clarendon however saw, or 

 thought he saw, that these pretensions might lead to a 

 counter-revolution, and he thwarted even Parliament, in 

 r to obvi.ite the risk. So the country party, adroitly 



