IXTKODUCTORY. 31 



servile enough, but the judicial bench was never occupied by 

 such monsters as Scroggs, Jeffreys, and Williams. The army 

 of the Cavaliers never bred such ruffians as Claverhouse and 

 Mohun. 



Puritan England could never have bred or have been de- 

 ceived by such men as Gates, Bedloe and Dangerfield, Narra- 

 tive Smith, as his contemporaries called him, and Fuller. 

 Puritan England would never have endured the harem of the 

 restored king, and the dukes which it bestowed on the English 

 parliament. No royalist of the pre-Restoration age would have 

 stolen the goldsmiths' money in the Exchequer, as the brigands 

 of the Cabal did. No English patriot of the earlier period 

 would have taken bribes from France and Spain as Sidney did 

 from Louis. Arbitrary and violent as Strafford was, there was 

 nothing mean in his political offences, but there was always 

 something mean and sordid even in the best acts of the post- 

 Restoration statesman. We owe this degraded morality, a 

 morality which infected England for a century and a-half, even 

 if it has disappeared in our own day, to the Court of Charles 

 the second. We are told, with a unanimity which probably 

 implies conviction, though it may not enshrine a truth, that 

 monarchical institutions have developed national unity. But 

 from time to time, nations have paid a heavy, an over-heavy 

 price for a benefit, which is after all a problem. 



I have already referred to Laud rather as a politician and 

 a man of letters than as a churchman. In the latter capacity, 

 -; a prominent feature in the great drama of the one hun- 

 dred and twenty years of which this volume treats the 

 economical side. In this period, ecclesiastical events are forced 

 great prominence. They had an influence, though 

 only a dying influence, for twelve years after my volumes 

 c. It would not be proper, even in a work on economical 

 history, to omit all reference to the great movements which 

 characterised the last twenty years of Elizabeth and the 

 reigns of the first four Stewart princes. 



At the beginning of my period, then, Elizabeth's Anglican 



