He died erect, turning his head to breathe in silence his last sigh. "A man capable of great things, though he had no grandeur in his soul; born at once to command and to obey; sensible, patient, and brave; attached to his own interest, and yet devoted in every great position to his duty as a soldier and an Englishman; without political ambition and not aspiring to govern his country--he knew how to acknowledge his country's rights, and to restore to her the government which had become indispensable."
Charles II. had not forgotten the services rendered to him by Monk; he was neither shocked by his pecuniary greed nor by the grossness of his manners. He had loaded him with wealth and honors, and he followed him to the tomb in Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster. The general had never played any political part, and his death left no void in the direction of affairs, which were becoming every day more complicated and more violently conflicting. The court party and the country party divided the two Houses. Out of doors the country party was strikingly superior. { 367} The conviction of this fact alone prolonged the existence of the Royalist Long Parliament. The time had now gone by when courtiers, probably with the assent of the king, dared to set miserable hirelings to mutilate the face of Sir John Coventry, a prominent member of the opposition in the Commons. From this time forth the country party took the measure of the royal authority, and raised its pretensions even to the question of the succession to the throne. The enthusiasm and the confidence which marked the first days of the Restoration had given way to sombre disquietude. It was not with his ordinary exaggeration that Lord Shaftesbury said, "If the king had had the happiness to be born a simple gentleman, he might have passed for a man of sense, good breeding, and good disposition. As a king he has brought his affairs to such a point that there is not a creature in the world, man or woman, who can feel the least confidence in his word or his attachment."
The refusal of the Duke of York to take the test oath, and his marriage with the daughter of the Duke of Modena, Mary Beatrice, in 1673, filled the measure of the Protestant anxieties of the nation. In vain the two daughters of Anne Hyde, who had died in May, 1671, were publicly reared in the faith and practice of the Church of England; all feelings of security had departed from men's minds, and the rumor which began to spread abroad of a secret treaty, concluded some time before, between King Charles II. and Louis XIV., increased the suspicions of the people. The choice which the king made of a new minister served for some time to reassure men's minds. Sir Thomas Osborne, soon afterwards raised to the peerage as Earl of Danby, appeared favorable, in the House of Commons, to the country party. { 368} He was a Protestant, a thorough Englishman, and without being over-conscientious or scrupulous, he was yet not absolutely so wanting in principles as his predecessors in power. Ardently devoted to the royal prerogative, he endeavored to restore authority to the hands of the king, by relying not on the court party, but on the old Cavaliers and the Established Church. One element of his popularity was his antipathy to the alliance with France. Before his advent to power he had given as a toast at a public dinner in the city, "War with France!" The people felt assured that he would never lend his hand to those transactions humiliating for the honor of England and her sovereign, of which no one yet ventured to speak openly. The ambition and the weaknesses of men sometimes surpass the most gloomy apprehensions; of this, Danby was destined soon to furnish a proof.