190

HISTORY OR ENGLAND,

chap, heightened by calamities -which the best administration could

- : — not have averted. While the ignominious war with Holland

was raging, London suffered two great disasters, such asnever, in so short a space of time, befell one city. ' A pesti-lence, surpassing in horror any that during three centurieshad visited the island, swept away, in six months, more thana hundred thousand human beings. And scarcely had thedead cart ceased to go its rounds, when a fire, such as hadnot been known in Europe since the conflagration of Romeunder Nero, laid in ruins the whole City, from the Towerto the Temple, and from the river to the purlieus of Smith-field.

Opposi- Had there been a general election while the nation wasHouse of° smarting under so many disgraces and misfortunes, it is pro-Commons. jj a ble the Roundheads would have regained ascendencyin the state. But the Parliament was still the Cavalier Par-liament, chosen in the transport of loyalty which had followedthe Restoration. Nevertheless it soon became evident thatno English legislature, however loyal, would now consentto be merely what the legislature had been under the Tudors.From the death of Elizabeth to the eve of the civil war, thePuritans, who predominated in the representative body, hadbeen constantly, by a dexterous use of the power of thepurse, encroaching on the province of the executive govern-ment. The gentlemen who, after the Restoration, filled theLower House, though they abhorred the Puritan name, werewell pleased to inherit the fruit of the Puritan policy. Theywere indeed most willing to employ the power which theypossessed in the state for the purpose of making their Kingmighty and honoured, both at home and abroad: but withthe power itself they were resolved not to part. The greatEnglish revolution of the seventeenth century, that is tosay, the transfer of the supreme control of the executive ad-ministration from the crown to the House of Commons, was,