The experiment in Puritan republicanism had resulted only in convincing the majority of the people that "the government is, and ought to be, by King, Lords, and Commons." The people merely asked for some assurances against despotism,--and when a throne was thus to be purchased with promises, Charles II was a ready buyer. He swore to observe _Magna Carta_ and the "Petition of Right," to respect Parliament, not to interfere with its religious policy, nor to levy illegal taxes. Bound by these promises, he was welcomed back to England in 1660 and crowned the following year. The reinstatement of the king was accompanied by a general resumption by bishops and royalist nobles of their offices and lands: things seemed to slip back into the old grooves. Charles II dated his reign not from his actual accession but from his father's death, and his first Parliament declared invalid all those acts and ordinances passed since 1642 which it did not specifically confirm. The history of constitutional government under the restored Stuarts is a history of renewed financial and religious disputes. Charles II and his younger brother and heir, Prince James, duke of York, alike adhered to the political faith of their Stuart father and grandfather. Cousins on their mother's side of Louis XIV of France, in whose court they had been reared, they were more used to the practices of French absolutism than to the peculiar customs of parliamentary government in England. Unlike their father, who had been most upright in private life and most loyal to the Anglican Church, both Charles and James had acquired from their foreign environment at once a taste for vicious living and a strong attachment to the Roman Catholic Church. In these two Stuarts Catholicism was combined with absolutism; and the Englishmen represented in Parliament were therefore brought face to face not only with a revival of the earlier Stuart theory of divine-right monarchy but with a new and far more hateful possibility of the royal establishment of Roman Catholicism in England. Charles II did not publicly confess his conversion to Catholicism until his deathbed, but James became a zealous convert in 1672. That Charles II was able to round out a reign of twenty-five years and die a natural death as king of England was due not so much to his virtues as to his faults. He was so hypocritical that his real aims were usually successfully concealed. He was so indolent that with some show of right he could blame his ministers and advisers for his own mistakes and misdeeds. He was so selfish that he would make concessions here and there rather than "embark again upon his travels." In fact, pure selfishness was the basis of his policy in domestic and foreign affairs, but it was always a selfishness veiled in wit, good humor, and captivating affability. [Sidenote: Renewal of Financial Disputes between King and Parliament]