Of the Scottish rule of “His Highness, the Lord Protector,” it may be said that after a long period of conflict and general unsettledness, it was a time of peace. The laws were administered, even amongst highland hills and border wastelands. Monk, with a small army, and a few forts garrisoned by English troops, managed, after their several defeats, to keep a brave, and naturally a patriotic and freedom-loving people, in thorough subjection. They did not love the man; but, although he would not allow the General Assembly to sit, their church had that freedom of worship which under a Covenanted king they had failed to accomplish. There were two leading Presbyterian parties, the _Resolutionists_, who had placed the Scottish crown on the head of Charles, and still called themselves king’s men, praying for him in the public devotions; and the _Remonstrators_, who had never, in spite of all his oaths and promises, adopted or believed in Charles, and studiously kept him out of their prayers. (One might have thought that the worse a man he was, the more he needed praying for). Cromwell favoured the latter party, making a certificate from three or four of its ministers the condition of a minister, although he might be called to a church, being paid his stipend. Cromwell taxed the Scots very heavily, but perhaps, all considered, they got fair value for their money. On the whole, so far as Scotland was concerned, we may indorse what, in his _History of his own Time_, Bishop Burnet says of the Protectorate generally:—“There was good justice done, and vice was suppressed and punished. So that we always reckon those eight years of Usurpation a time of great peace and prosperity.”
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At the death of Cromwell there was not, in the general aspect of political matters, any definite forecast of what twelve months after would be the form of government; certainly an easy and unopposed restoration of the Stuart monarchy was about the last idea, warranted by the history of the previous fifteen years. But one man, the still- tongued, close-minded General Monk, solved the question. By his influence as head of the army, and his tact and sagacity in party wire- pulling, he so managed that within eight months of the Protector’s death, Charles II. was quietly proclaimed King of Great Britain and Ireland. It was a twenty-seven years of as mean rule, as has ever darkened the pages of British history. Retaliations and persecutions—one long attempt to turn back the stream of progress—a corrupt court, leavening the national life with foulness and frivolity, such might be the general headings of the chapters chronicling the reign of the “Merry Monarch.”