"We are winning our liberties from him," Denzil said.
"For the mess of pottage we give, the money he squanders on libertine
pleasures, England is buying freedom. Yet why, in the name of common sense,
maintain this phantom King, this Court which shocks and outrages every
decent Englishman's sense of right, and maintains an ever-widening hotbed
of corruption, so that habits and extravagances once unknown beyond that
focus of all vice, are now spreading as fast as London; and wherever there
are bricks and mortar there are profligacy and irreligion? Can you wonder
that all the best and wisest in this city regret Cromwell's iron rule, the
rule of the strongest, and deplore that so bold a stroke for liberty should
have ended in such foolish subservience to a King of whom we knew nothing
when we begged him to come and reign over us?"
"But if you win liberty while he is King, if wise laws are established--"
"Yes; but we might have been noble as well as free. There is something so
petty in our resumed bondage. Figure to yourself a thoroughbred horse that
had kicked off the traces, and stood free upon the open plain with arched
neck and lifted nostrils, sniffing the morning air! and behold he creeps
back to his harness, and makes himself again a slave! We had done with
the Stuarts, at the cost of a tragedy, and in ten years we call them back
again, and put on the old shackles; and for common sense, religion, and
freedom, we have the orgies of Whitehall, and the extravagance of Lady
Castlemaine.
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