six hours. In May an Act was passed for suppressing the detestable sins of incest, adultery, and fornication. Of this Act the most material provisions were these: That all persons guilty of incest shall suffer death, without benefit of clergy; that incestuous marriages shall be void, and the children illegitimate: that adultery shall also be deemed felony, and punished with death; but this shall not extend to every man who, at the time of committing such offence, did not know the woman to be married; nor to any woman whose husband shall be three years absent from her, so as she did not know him to be living. In case of fornication, both parties, for the first offence, were to suffer three months' imprisonment without bail, and also give security for their good behaviour for one whole year after. Every common bawd, for the first offence, was to be openly whipped, set in the pillory, and there marked with a hot iron in the forehead; also to be committed to the house of correction for three years without bail, and until sufficient security be given for good behaviour during life: and the persons a second time found guilty of the last recited offences were to suffer death.1

In addition to this, the Long Parliament put down all public amusements whatever. There might undoubtedly be much that was objectionable in bear-baiting as well as in stage-plays; but they did not consider sufficiently the necessary consequences of their purblind fanatical tyranny. And yet they might have reflected, from what they had themselves seen only some ten years before in the fate of Archbishop Laud's attempt to enforce conformity to his notions of religious doctrine and discipline, what was likely to be the ultimate fate of a similar attempt on their part. In some points too their attempt was even more 1 Scobell, 121.

dangerous than his. For if amusements are prohibited, vices are apt to take their place. Where the theatre is closed and all public amusements are put down, the tavern takes the place of the theatre, and cards and dice are substituted for stage-plays and farces.1 I have no doubt that such consequences followed the legislation of the Long Parliament I mean among the people during the period before the Restoration-for with regard to the irruption of profligacy that made its appearance at the Restoration in the Court circle, that I think had a remoter origin than the Puritan legislation of the Long Parliament; though that legislation may have undoubtedly had its effect in giving to it an added impulse.

Every one with the least experience of life must have known cases of some of the greatest reprobates having been those who were subjected in their youth to such discipline as formed the Puritan code. There is one case of this kind belonging to this time which has a curiously melancholy interest, and furnishes another illustration of the remark that truth is stranger than fiction.

There was a certain Presbyterian divine, by name Stephen Marshall, who was held in high repute among the leading men of the Long Parliament, and bore a prominent part in those long prayers, and still longer preachings, with which that Parliament diversified their secular business. When John Pym lay on his deathbed, Stephen Marshall attended him, and also preached the sermon at Pym's funeral, in which he gave a narrative of some of the

1 When Prynne wrote his Histriomastix and condemned utterly the theatre as an amusement, he should have recollected that every man had not like himself an amusement that

never failed in writing a sheet for every day of his life. Between the tyranny of the Stuarts and the tyranny of the Puritans it was rather a hard choice.

"1

particulars of the great parliamentary leader's last moments, telling his audience, which included all the members of Parliament in London, with what "clear evidence of God's love in Jesus Christ and subjection to God's will" Pym met death; and how he declared to him (Marshall) "that if he died he should go to that God whom he had served, and who would carry on his work by some others." Some twenty years after this time, when a strange change had come over the aspect of England since that day, we find some facts recorded by Pepys respecting two daughters of Stephen Marshall which were enough to make their father's bones move with horror in their grave. Pepys in his Diary frequently mentions as celebrated actresses of that evil time, when actress and courtesan were convertible terms, Anne Marshall and her younger sister Becke. Their career was probably the effect, so often observed, as to be called the natural effect, of religious exercises carried to an immoderate excess to the total exclusion of all even innocent amusements. The result of such a course of discipline is intense disgust for the discipline itself, and a violent desire, amounting to a sort of insane passion, to rush into the very worst of all the long and sternly-forbidden pleasures. This is an extreme, at least a remarkable case since the daughters were as celebrated as actresses at a time when as Lord Macaulay has said, "the comic poet was the mouthpiece of the most deeply-corrupted part of a corrupted society," as the father had been as a

2

1 Stephen Marshall's sermon preached before the Parliament at the funeral of

Mr. Pym, 4to, 1644. This Stephen

Marshall is the first of the five ministers (Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen, William Spinstow) of whose names the first letters made the word

Smectymnuus, celebrated in the controversies of those times.

2 Under date Oct. 26th, 1667, Pepys says, "Mrs. Pierce tells me that the two Marshalls at the King's house are Stephen Marshall's the great Presbyterian's daughters."

1650.] TWOFOLD CHARACTER OF THE PURITAN REBELLION. 183

Puritan divine and preacher. But even the average result would be that the bending the bow so forcibly in the direction of the conventicle would be its rebounding as forcibly in the opposite direction.

It seems to be a law of human nature that all governments, unless when under strong pressure from without, should make a job of appointments, that is, should appoint persons to offices for other reasons than their fitness for such offices. There is reason to think that even Oliver Cromwell, who knew better than most men the value of the right man in the right place, when the brunt of the war was over, in the disposal of any considerable officer's place, looked not so much at the man's valour as at his opinions.1 And the two greatest rulers that England ever had, Queen Elizabeth and Oliver Cromwell, in the selection of a successor, showed no more discrimination and foresight than the feeblest and most short-sighted of the sons or daughters of Adam. Elizabeth had an intelligent agent at the Court of James in Scotland who kept her well informed, as his despatches prove, of what passed there, and she must have known what manner of man she was imposing as a king upon England. Yet such was her prejudice in favour of kings that she considered all men not born kings as "rascals" in her phraseology, and declared that "no rascal" but the thing which at that time in Scotland "the semblance of a kingly crown had on should be her successor on the throne of England. And Oliver Cromwell, although he knew that he with all his capacity and valour could hardly keep his seat, so far forgot, we may say, all his former self as to imagine that bis son Richard could succeed him. It took a struggle of near a hundred years' duration to repair the mistake of Elizabeth, for it was supported by a gigantic

1 Richard Baxter's Life by Himself. Part I. p. 57, folio. London, 1695.

array of blind and barbarous prejudices that carried with them the force of an old religion. Oliver's mistake as far as it regarded the choice of his son Richard was repaired in almost as many hours, but as it regarded wider interests than those of the family of Cromwell, it left consequences lasting and disastrous, and will remain to all time one of the most remarkable "follies of the wise."

Though the stringent legislation of the Long Parliament against immorality and against stage-plays and other amusements had undoubtedly the effect which attends all such legislation, the deeply-corrupted state of society which prevailed after the Restoration in England cannot be justly viewed as altogether due to that legislation, but must be considered not as an innovation, as has been usually supposed, but only as a restoration. The great puritan rebellion had a twofold character. It was an insurrection against tyranny and it was also an insurrection against vice-vice in the revolting and infamous shape it had assumed at the Court of James the First. It was this latter feature of the insurrection which gave to it so much of the character of interfering with matters beyond its reach, of attempting to make men saints by Act of Parliament, instead of being content to confine its authority to the legitimate object of protecting religion and public morals from insult. As it was, when the Royalists returned to power, a Court more resembling that of James the First than that of Charles the First returned with them. Although the personal character of Charles II. differed very much from the personal character of James I., contemporary writers describe the character of the Court of Charles in language very similar to that applied by contemporaries to the Court of James. In one place Pepys writes "Mr.