general, who in the end could scarcely 116 brook the thin veil of a nominally independent Parliament. The effects of the disappointment of the purist republicans, like Colonel Hutchinson, were sternly repressed, and still more so the little spurts of rebellion tried by the religious enthusiasts, amongst whom we must count the Levellers, whose doctrines included a commission of a similar character to that put forward by John of Leyden in the first half of the sixteenth century.
It is worth noting, as illustrating the growth of a widespread Puritanism in England, which in fact embraced the whole population, and which no political change has much affected, that both sides in the struggle were steeped in Bible phrases and illustrations, showing, amongst other things, the extent to which the English version was being read by the population.
On the other hand, the severity of triumphant Puritanism, and the iron rule of the Lord Protector, made his government unpopular amongst a people who have always resented harsh mechanical organisation of any kind. 117 The latitudinarians, always the most numerous, became the most powerful, and at last it was an easy matter for a ambitious self-seekers to bring about the restoration of the hereditary monarchy in Britain.
This restoration of the Stuart was, however, after all but a makeshift put up with because the defection from the high-strung principle of the earlier period of the revolution left nothing to take the place of Cromwell’s absolutism. The nation was mainly out of sympathy with the Court, which was unnational and Catholic in tendency, and quite openly debauched. The nation itself, though it had got rid of the severity of Puritanism, was still Puritan, and welcomed the Sunday Act of Charles II., which gave the due legal stamp to Puritanism of the duller and more respectable kind. But though enthusiastic Puritanism was no longer dominant, it was not extinct. John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress