-8-                             
 
 
defeated all efforts before 1660 to set up a landed  social order
reflective of the reactionary ideals of the well-to-do.  However, when
the clever Edward Hyde and George Monck manuvered Charles II back to
his father's throne, one more grand effort was made.
 
 
                            III.                            
 
 
There has rarely been a group of leaders who so seriously shifted the
course of modern history as did the little clique who surrounded
Charles II from the summer of 1660 to the autumn of 1667.  Only three
of them, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon after the Restoration, Ashley
Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury after 1673, and John Lord Berkeley, brother
of the
Virginia Governor, were of high aristocratic stock.  The others were
self-made men who knew even better than  Clarendon and Shaftsbury the
art of personal aggrandizement: George Monck, Earl of Albemarie, Henry
Bennet, Earl of Arlington, Sir George Carteret, one-time pirate and the
"richest man in England," Sir Goerge Downing of Harvard College, and
two merchants, Martin Noell and Thomas Povey (1). Nearly all of these
 
 
1. Burnet, Thomas; Bishop of Salisbury: 
History of His Own Time
, 1818, Vol. I, Book II, gives contemporary appraisals of these
characters.  The 
Dictionary of National Biography
 (British) gives corrective facts.