Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The three Cromwellian Parliaments had come into power by the imposition of such tyrannical limitations upon the electors and the elected, as made them mere political and courtierly cliques; though there was in Richard’s short-lived Parliament a fraction of constitutional popularity and nationality, utterly wanting in either of his father’s Parliaments. Moreover, the restoration of the Rump Republic, and the restoration of the Long Parliament?which had preceded the great restoration of the common Church and the common King?had already denied the name and quality of a Parliament to either of the four political councils which sat and passed Acts from 1653 to 1660. Partisan historians of the Act of Uniformity commonly picture it as the dastardly work of the
licentious king, rather than the deliberate act of the Parliament. So it is treated in nearly all the modern Dissenting and Liberationist variations of the uncriticallegend of
the Two Thousand Nonconformist Confessors V But if it had been a despotic Ordinance of
the profligate Charles ?instead of being, as it was, the deliberate law of the National Parliament?it would have had quite a different character. Charlesthe Second would have made it much more indulgent to the Nonconformist party, and to the individual Nonconformist rector or vicar, and more adverse to the old English Catholicity, than the resolute and popular House of Commons would permit it to be. Dr. Stoughton is obliged to concede that
the House of Commons, Royalist as it was, and corrupt and pensionary as it-afterwards became, had enough of English spirit to maintain its liberties free from kingly despotism1. We may also add that the House of Commons had enough of fidelity to the English common folk, and of loyalty to the Catholic principles of the Englis…