Surrounded in the days of his exile and poverty by numerous adventurers and debauchees, Charles Stuart, disinherited and a fugitive, had the good sense and judgment to remain faithful to his old friends--to the devoted advisers who had long served his father, and who would have protected him against his worst errors if he had known how to trust himself to their wise and honest counsels. Hyde, above all, who had been almost uninterruptedly attached to the fortune and the person of Charles II., and who had directed all the negotiations with Monk before the restoration, was naturally singled out to govern in the name of the restored monarch. From 1657 he had received the title of Lord Chancellor of England: this name became a reality. "Thus the Lord Treasurer Southampton, the Marquis of Ormond, General Monk, and the two secretaries of state, Morice and Nicolas, composed, with the chancellor, that secret committee which, under the name of the Council of Foreign Affairs, was charged by the king to deliberate on all his affairs before they reached the stage of public discussion, and it was impossible to find an association of men more united in mind and feeling." In this ministry, in which General Monk and the two secretaries of state alone constituted an element that was a stranger to the old royalist party. Clarendon was at once the most distinguished and the most politic. His principles were honest, his views upright and pure. Two faults obscured his better qualities. He was grasping, and he brought with him into England the passions and blunted perceptions of an exile. These inconveniences were not long in making themselves felt. {344} In the face of a Parliament, the summoning of which had been neither regular nor legal--a Parliament which even then was called a convention, a title destined later to acquire a sad celebrity in the history of France--the great questions which it had become necessary to deal with were all the more urgent since the country demanded the election of a new Parliament. The king was pressed to disband the army, then a permanent menace and a bitter remembrance of the past. More than fifty thousand men inured to arms, kept down but discontented, were suddenly dismissed into civil life. They were well treated, but were irreconcilably hostile to the new power, and were held in check by habits of discipline and by public opinion--not by repentance for the past or the return of royalist ideas. The soldiers, in great number, were still Cromwellians or Republicans.