Faithful to the fortunes of his masters in discouragement and defeat, we find the lad in Guernsey with his father, defending Castle Cornet manfully against the Parliament, and, after its surrender, receiving his first lessons in the field in Holland under Prince Henry of Nassau. (It is a curious fact, trifling in appearance, but possibly not without significance, that during the last year of the Commonwealth, and at the time of the restoration, Increase Mather was chaplain of some of the troops in Guernsey, and may have, even at that early date, formed the bitter prejudice that is so evident in his later actions.)[104] The services of the Andros family were so conspicuous in this period of trial and discouragement, that Edmund with his father and his uncle were specially exempted by name from a general pardon that was issued to the people of Guernsey by Charles II. on his restoration, on the ground that they “have, to their great honor, during the late rebellion, continued inviolably faithful to his majesty, and consequently have no need to be included in this general pardon.”[105] The young soldier, who found himself restored to home and safety at the age of twenty-three, had passed a stormy youth; his natural boyish loyalty had been strengthened by what he had suffered on account of it. He had seen those whom he most respected and revered dethroned and exiled, living as pensioners on the grudging bounty of inhospitable princes. He had seen the legal government of England subverted by force of arms by men whose professions of their respect for law were never louder than when they were overthrowing it, and had seen England ground down under the harsh rule of a military despotism. He had seen the orderly and regular services of the Church of England proscribed, its ministers turned out of their parishes to make room, not only for severe Presbyterians and iconoclastic Independents, but for ranting sectaries who made the name of religion a by-word and a mockery. It cannot be wondered that the young cavalier grew up deeply impressed with the horrors of rebellion and usurped authority, and with the conviction that much might be sacrificed for the sake of lawful and regular government, or that, being as he was a member of the church that had been proscribed and persecuted during the reign of the self-styled “godly,” he should have been rendered all the warmer in his attachment to her orderly and decent rights and ceremonies, as by law established. It should be remembered that the severity shown to the Dissenters at the Restoration came largely from their close association with the civil war and the government of the Commonwealth. The cloak of religion had been made to cover the overthrow of the liberties of Parliament, the killing of the king, and the rule of Cromwell; and it is not unnatural, though most regrettable, that the victorious cavaliers should have failed to make the proper distinction between dissent and rebellion.