If the debauched
cavalier haunted brothels and gambling houses, he at least avoided
conventicles. If he never spoke without uttering ribaldry and
blasphemy, he made some amends by his eagerness to send Baxter and
Howe to gaol for preaching and praying. Thus the clergy, for a time,
made war on schism with so much vigour that they had little leisure to
make war on vice."
"Charles the Second wished merely to be a King who could draw without
limit on the treasury for the gratification of his private tastes, who
could hire with wealth and honours persons capable of assisting him
to kill the time, and who, even when the state was brought by
maladministration to the depths of humiliation and to the brink of
ruin, could still exclude unwelcome truth from the purlieus of his
own seraglio, and refuse to see and hear whatever might disturb his
luxurious repose. Later in life, the ill-bred familiarity of the
Scottish divines had given him a distaste for Presbyterian discipline,
while the heats and animosities between the members of the Established
Church and the Nonconformists, with which his reign commenced, made
him think indifferently of both.
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