George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 2, 17th edition.

[438] the measure of exclusion. After less than a week's

Chap. XVII.} 1681. March 21 to 27.

session, Charles II. dissolved the last parliament of his reign, and appealed to the people against his enemies. To avoid the charge of despotism, he still hanged a Papist whom he knew to be innocent; and his friends declared him to have no other purpose than to resist the arbitrary sway of ‘a republican prelacy,’ and the installation of the multitude in the chair of infallibility. The ferocious intolerance which had sustained the Popish plot, lost its credit; men dreaded anarchy and civil war more than they feared the royal prerogative.

The king had already exercised the power of restricting the liberty of the press; through judges, who held places at his pleasure, he was supreme in the courts; omitting to convoke parliament, he made himself irresponsible to the people; pursuing a judicial warfare against city charters and the monopolies of boroughs, he reformed many real abuses, but, at the same time, subjected the corporations to his influence. Controlling the appointment of sheriffs, he controlled the nomination of juries; and thus, in the last three or four years of the reign of King Charles II., the government of England was administered as an absolute monarchy. An ‘association’ against the duke of York could not succeed among a calculating aristocracy, as the Scottish covenant had done among a faithful people; and, on its disclosure and defeat, the voluntary exile of Shaftesbury excited no plebeian regret. No deep popular indignation attended Russel to the scaffold; and on the day on which the purest martyr to aristocratic liberty laid his head on the block, the university of Oxford decreed absolute obedience to be the character of the Church of England, while parts of the writings of Knox, Milton, and Baxter, were pronounced