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CHAP.
I.
THE RESTORA TION IN ENGLAND. 1660
clue to many of the problems of the reign. It explains why
parliament was enabled to recover within a few years much
of that efficient control over the executive which it seemed to
have abandoned of its own accord in the first eager outburst of
loyalty. And the only excuse which has been offered for a
foreign policy which is one of Charles' worst offences against
the state, is that pressing financial needs, due in some measure
at least to the inadequacy of the revenue allowed him, made
patriotism and independence luxuries which he could not afford.
Charles was the son of a French princess, he had passed
some of the most impressionable years of his life at the French
court, and he had returned with a devout admiration of the
French monarchy, 1 which had emerged from the troubles of
the Fronde to attain its zenith of power and magnificence in
the hands of Louis XIV. France had given its king a standing
army in the fifteenth century, and with its aid the crown
had been able to humble first foreign enemies and then overmighty
subjects at home. Such an army had been created for
the first time in England in the New Model, and it was still
at full strength at the Restoration. An ambitious prince who
aspired to make some noise in the world must have felt reluctant
to disband a force which had raised Cromwell to be the
courted arbiter between the great powers of the continent.
But Charles had no alternative. If the army had been as loyal
as it was the reverse he could not have afforded to keep it
together. The strongest argument against giving the king
too ample a revenue was that he would be saved from the
temptation to maintain a permanent military force. And so
parliament was urged to find money t6 discharge the arrears
of pay, and one by one the famous regiments which had
humbled Spain in the battle of the Dunes 2 were disbanded.
The process of disbandment was almost completed when it was
arrested in January, 1661, by a rising of fanatics in London.
The rising was suppressed with little difficulty, but it called
attention to the danger of abolishing all regular troops. Accordingly
Monk's regiment of infantry was retained as the
Coldstream Guards, and a carefully selected regiment of horse
was formed as a body-guard to the king. The number of these
1 See Clarendon, Life, ii, 76; Burnet, i., 167. 2 See vol. vii., 455-6.