His fall may be traced to several causes: to the fact that the puritan party proper, who supported him, the 'sober men' mentioned by Baxter 'that called his father no better than a traitorous hypocrite,' had not power to resist the fanatic cabal of army chiefs: to the necessity he was under of protecting some justly-odious confederates of Oliver: his own want of ability or energy to govern,--a point fully recognized during Oliver's supremacy; and to his own honourable decision not to 'have a drop of blood shed on his poor account.' Yet there is ample evidence to show that Richard, had he chosen, might have made a struggle to retain the throne,--sufficient, at least, to have thus deluged the kingdom. Richard's life was passed in great quiet after 1660: Charles II, according to Clarendon, with a wise and humorous lenity, not thinking it 'necessary to inquire after a man so long forgotten.' His letters reveal a man of affectionate and honest disposition; he uses the Puritan phraseology of the day without leaving a sense of nausea in the reader's mind. At Hursley he was buried at a good old age in 1712. F: p. 152 _A nation's craven rage_; The want of public spirit in England shown during the war of 1745-6 is astonishing. 'England,' wrote Henry Fox, 'is for the first comer . . . Had 5,000 [French troops] landed in any part of this island a week ago, I verily believe the entire conquest of it would not have cost them a battle.' And other weighty testimonies might be added, in support of Lord Mahon's view as to the great probability of the Prince's success, had he been allowed by his followers to march upon London from Derby. This apathy and the panic which followed found their natural issue in the sanguinary punishment of the followers of Prince Charles. 'The city and the generality,' wrote H. Walpole in August, 1746, 'are very angry that so many rebels have been pardoned.' The vindictive cruelty then shown makes, in truth (if we compare the magnitude and duration of the rebellion for which punishment was to be exacted), an unsatisfactory contrast to the leniency of 1660. But History supplies only too numerous proofs that a century's march in civilisation may be always undone at once by the demons of Panic or of Party in the hour of their respective triumphs. G: p. 169