The reign of Charles was one long reaction in Church, State, and national life. The efficiency of old Noll’s day became a thing of the past. The king wasted huge sums of money on his follies and vices, and the services were shamefully starved. Only fourteen years ago the Dutch were forced to acknowledge England as mistress of the seas; and now they entered the Thames, destroyed Sheerness, sailed up the Medway to Chatham, and burnt eight men of war, while the navy, paralyzed by corruption and mismanagement, was powerless to chastise them. At this humiliation the anger of the nation knew no bounds. “Then at length tardy justice was done to the memory of Oliver. Everywhere men magnified his valour, genius, and patriotism. Everywhere it was remembered how, when he ruled, all foreign powers had trembled at the name of England; how the States General, now so haughty, had crouched at his feet; and how, when it was known that he was no more, Amsterdam was lighted up as for a great deliverance, and children ran along the canals shouting for joy that the devil was dead! Even Royalists exclaimed that the State could be saved only by calling the old soldiers of the Commonwealth to arms. . . . Tilbury Fort, the place where Elizabeth had, with manly spirit, hurled foul scorn at Parma and Spain, was insulted by the invaders. The roar of foreign guns was heard, for the first and last time, by the citizens of London.” While this ignominious war was raging, London suffered two disasters of such a terrible character that men openly spoke of them as the well-deserved scourges of Almighty God. Turn to the diary of Samuel Pepys, the Admiralty clerk who so faithfully mirrored the loose, careless life of the time, and read the entry of July 7, 1665: “This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors and ‘Lord, have mercy upon us’ writ there, which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that to my remembrance I ever saw.” The Great Plague had arrived. Those who were stricken with the disease began to shiver; then they had headaches and were light-headed. On the third or fourth day they fainted suddenly, and spots broke out on the breast. As soon as these appeared, all hope was gone; the poor victim was dead within an hour. As we follow Pepys’s pages we see alarm spreading, the clergy taking flight to the country, the stoppage of all work and trading, grass growing in the deserted streets, the bells tolling all day long, searchers going about to discover infected houses, dreaded death-carts rumbling over the stones to the mournful cry of “Bring out your dead;” then the last scene of all—the carts shooting their contents into huge pits dug at St. Martin’s in the Fields and at Mile-End. It is a terrible picture, and we shudder as we realize it.