<123>The permanent interest of the judicial proceedings which have just been narrated centres in Eliot’s protest. Their importance for 1630.The judges and the Petition of Right.the immediate future lay in the tacit renunciation by the judges of that high authority which the Commons had thrust upon them in 1628. They refused to be arbitrators between the King and the nation. They accepted the position which Bacon had assigned them, of lions beneath the throne, upon whom was imposed the duty of guarding the throne from attack. All that had been gained by the Petition of Right seemed to be lost in an instant. What would it matter that the judges were ready to enforce the specification of the cause of committal, if they were ready to be satisfied with the cause shown, whatever it might be? The Petition, in truth, had laid down a great principle, which could only be carried out to its logical results by the strenuous efforts of future Parliaments.
Would Parliament ever meet again? The real line of separation between the King and the House of Commons had lain 1629.The religious question.in the religious question. So decided had been the opposition that it seemed hardly possible that a compromise could be discovered which would enable them to meet on friendly terms. At first sight, indeed, it might seem that the policy involved in the King’s Declaration on Religion was more likely to win general support than the zealous intolerance of the Commons. Laud’s comment on the <124>Resolution in which the Lower House had taken its stand upon the Calvinistic interpretation of the Articles, was full of promise. March.Laud’s comment on the resolution of the Commons.“All consent in all ages,” he wrote, “as far as I have observed, to an article or canon, is to itself, as it is laid down in the body of it; and if it bear more senses than one it is lawful for any man to choose what sense his judgment directs him to, so that it be a sense according to the analogy of the faith, and that he hold it peaceably, without distracting the Church, and this till the Church which made the article determine the sense; and the wisdom of the Church hath been in all ages, or the most, to require consent to articles in general as much as may be, because that is the way of unity, and the Church in high points requiring assent to particulars hath been rent.”[171]
A few words in a letter to a foreign correspondent carry us still more deeply into those inmost feelings of Laud’s heart which July 14.His letter to Vossius.he usually veiled from the eye of the world. “I have moved every stone,” he wrote to the learned Vossius, “that those thorny and perplexed questions might not be discussed in public before the people, lest we should violate charity under the appearance of truth. I have always counselled moderation, lest everything should be thrown into confusion by fervid minds to which the care of religion is not the first object. This perhaps has not given satisfaction; but I remember how seriously the Saviour commanded charity to his disciples, and how cautiously and patiently the Apostles commanded us to treat the weak. If I perish by these efforts of mine,[172] and become, as usually happens, a prey to the victorious litigant, my reward is in my own bosom, nor shall I seek comfort out of myself, except in God. For the present I have little to hope, much to fear. The Reformed Church has no greater reason for regret and precaution than the danger lest, at a time when she is being attacked by the sword amongst other nations, she should here and with you where she dwells more safely, be torn in pieces by her own hands, and so by a <125>cruel rent should first be broken up into fragments and then, by gradual subdivision, into minute atoms, and should so vanish into nothing. … For my own part, I will labour with the grace of God that truth and peace may kiss one another. If, for our sins, God refuses to grant this, I will hope for eternal peace for myself as soon as possible, leaving to God those who break that kiss asunder, that He may either convert them, as I heartily desire, or may visit them with punishment.”[173]
Dislike of arrogant and self-sufficient dogmatists is plainly to be read in these words of Laud. For all that, the true ring of liberty How far did Laud accept the idea of toleration?is not in them. There is none of that sympathy with the aspirations of the limited human mind to win by arduous struggle a footing on the outworks of truth which is the sustenance of the spirit of toleration. For speculative thought Laud cared nothing. Not truth, but peace, was the object which he pursued. Hence the interest which he took in the fortunes of that Dutch Church which came so short of his own episcopal standard gave no warrant of equal liberality at home. He never felt himself to be burdened with faults committed outside his own special sphere of action, and he might therefore be easily moved to treat with extreme severity in England practices which in a foreign country would cause him no more than a passing annoyance. In England His estimate of external influences.his hand was likely to be heavily felt. The pursuit of peace in preference to the pursuit of truth was certain to be accompanied by an exaggerated estimate of the importance of external influences over the mind. It was characteristic in him to speak of Aristotle, the philosopher who taught that virtue owed its strength to the formation of habits, as his great master in humanis.[174] His love of outward observances, of the Beauty of Holiness, as he fondly called it, was partly founded on a keen sense of the incongruity of dirt and disorder with sacred things; partly upon the recognition of the educative influence of regularity and arrangement. There was in his mind no dim sense of the spiritual depths of life, no reaching forward to ineffable mysteries veiled <126>from the eye of flesh. It was incomprehensible to him why men should trouble themselves about matters which they could not understand. His acts of reverence had nothing in common with the utter self-abnegation of the great Italian falling as a dead body falls before the revelation of those things which eye had not seen, nor ear heard. If he is called upon to defend his practice of bowing towards the altar upon entering a church, he founds his arguments not on any high religious theme, but upon the custom of the Order of the Garter. To him a church was not so much the temple of a living Spirit, as the palace of an invisible King. He had a plain prosaic reason for everything that he did.
Even those strange entries in his diary which have sometimes been treated as if they contained the key of his mind have His dreams and omens.nothing imaginative in them. There is no thought of following a heavenly voice when he records the falling down of a picture or the dropping out of a tooth. “God grant,” he writes, “that this be no omen,” as if there were just a possibility that the invisible King might have something to tell him in this way. Yet though he notices the occurrence sufficiently to make him think it worth while to jot it down for future comparison with events, he never thinks of acting upon it.
To form the habits of Englishmen in order that there might be peace amongst them, was the task which Laud set before him. Policy of the Declaration on Religion.The Declaration on Religion had been the first great step in this direction. The excitement caused by polemical controversy must be allayed by the prohibition of controversy. It remained to foster a sense of union amongst those whom theological argument had divided. If all men worshipped in the same way, used the same forms and ceremonies, pronounced the same words, and accompanied them with the same gestures, a feeling of brotherhood would gradually spring up. The outward and visible was to be the road to the inward and spiritual. “Since I came into this place,” he wrote long afterwards in defence of his conduct, “I laboured nothing more than that the external public worship <127>of God — too much slighted in most parts of this kingdom — Uniformity and unity.might be preserved, and that with as much decency and uniformity as might be; being still of opinion that unity cannot long continue in the Church where uniformity is shut out at the church door. And I evidently saw that the public neglect of God’s service in the outward face of it, and the nasty lying of many places dedicated to that service, had almost cast a damp upon the true and inward worship of God; which, while we live in the body, needs external helps, and all little enough to keep it in any vigour.”[175]
Forming so high an estimate of the value of external influence, he had no difficulty in accepting fully the Royal supremacy. As Laud and the Royal authority.the task of a bishop was in his eyes chiefly the enforcement of regulations, he naturally looked with the highest respect to that authority which was able to compel the observance of those regulations. All the thoughts which had led the great ecclesiastics of the Middle Ages to regard the merely external authority of kings as something infinitely inferior to the spiritual power of the guardians of the divinely appointed faith had no place in his mind. What he wanted was force to carry out his ideas, and that force he found in the King. He did not even care to theorise about the source of this authority. The notion of a Divine right of kingship hardly assumed any real prominence anywhere till Charles’s title to rule was questioned, and it never assumed prominence at any time in the mind of Laud. It was enough for him to accept the Royal supremacy in the Church as it was established by existing law and custom, and to use it for the great ends which he hoped to accomplish by its means.
Laud, therefore, was ready to speak everywhere in the name of the King. Charles was ready to accept the responsibility. Though He has the King’s confidence.he could no more originate a scheme for the reform of the Church than he could originate a scheme for the recovery of the Palatinate, he would give his confidence to Laud as he had given his confidence to Buckingham. He, too, thought of the outward and visible before the inward and spiritual. To him, too, the fervent <128>individual zeal of Puritanism was an unfathomable mystery, and its fierce dogmatism a hateful annoyance. When it had been driven out of the land, England would be herself again, as loyal and obedient as she had been to her Tudor sovereigns. He took counsel, as Bacon would have said, of the time past, not of the time present.
Hitherto Laud had not been the foremost object of the attacks of the Puritans. During the last session Neile and the March 29.His unpopularity in London.Durham ceremonialists had almost covered their field of vision. In his own diocese Laud was regarded more correctly. His name was coupled with that of Weston in the popular imagination of the Londoners. Libels were scattered about the streets, threatening his life. “Laud, look to thyself,” was read upon one of these; “be assured thy life is sought. As thou art the fountain of all wickedness, repent thee of thy monstrous sins, before thou be taken out of the world.” Weston, to whom similar threats were addressed, was easily frightened. Dread of assassination haunted him to the last. Laud was absolutely above fear, as he was absolutely above self-seeking and corruption. “Lord,” he wrote in his diary, as the only notice fit for him to take of the insult, “I am a grievous sinner; but, I beseech thee, deliver my soul from them that hate me without a cause.”[176]
As long as Abbot lived, Laud’s sway in the English Church could never be complete. With the King’s authority to rely upon Laud the centre of opposition to Puritanism.there might be no active opposition to his wishes, but there would be a force of inertia at the very centre of the ecclesiastical machinery which it would be impossible to overcome. Yet if he could not do all that he wished, he could accomplish much. Every man who was at issue with Puritanism knew that he could count upon a favourable hearing if he poured his complaints into the ear of the Bishop of London, and that the Bishop of London was sure of a favourable hearing from the King. Eavesdroppers and talebearers soon discovered how to set at naught the orders of their own bishops or the commands of laymen in authority.
<129>Laud’s influence made itself felt in the disputes by which the Chapter of Durham was distracted. At the Summer Assizes, July 19.Smart’s case.Smart repeated his charges of the preceding year against the prebendaries who had deprived him of his prebend. The judges on this occasion were Yelverton and Trevor. Yelverton at once took Smart’s part. He spoke in conversation of Smart’s sermon as good and honest. It was quite right, he added, to condemn the singing of the service. When the organ was playing it was impossible to know what was said. One of the prebendaries asked him how he contrived to sing psalms to the accompaniment of music. Trevor told him that if he would look at his Prayer-book, he would have no difficulty in understanding what was said. Yelverton would hear nothing in favour of the organ. He did not like whistling at the service. He had always been called a Puritan. He thanked God for it, and as such he would live and die.
In this spirit he charged the jury on the following day. Innovations in the Church, he said, were fair matters to be dealt with at the assizes. July 20.Yelverton’s charge.The jury accordingly found a true bill against the prebendaries. Smart and his friends were in high spirits. The next morning they were plunged into bitter disappointment. Yelverton had all his life been accustomed to pass suddenly from blustering independence to servile humility. He now changed his tone, scolded Smart for his conduct, delivered an address in commendation of peace and charity, and refused to allow the proceedings to be carried further.
All this was duly reported to Laud. Smart’s own fate might easily be predicted. He was sentenced to degradation from the clerical office by 1630.Nov. 18.Smart’s sentence.the Northern High Commission, to whose jurisdiction he had been returned. The disputes at Durham did not end here. Bishop Howson was no Puritan, and he had been one of the four bishops who had supported Montague in 1625; but he had been frightened at the rapid ceremonial changes at Durham, and had come to look upon Cosin as a firebrand whose persistence in his own crotchets was endangering the maintenance of peace. Laud was appealed to, and after a long correspondence the <130>King commanded Howson to carry the dispute no further. Such interference with a bishop tended to bring episcopal authority into contempt, by showing that it might be wielded in one direction or another according to the varying influences which prevailed at Court.[177]
In the suppression of books in which the predestinarian doctrine was handled, Laud had no need of the King’s assistance. A 1629.Suppression of unlicensed books.decree of the Star Chamber in Elizabeth’s reign had prohibited the printing of books without the licence of one of the Archbishops or of the Bishop of London. Printers and authors in vain urged the argument which Selden had supported in Parliament that the Star Chamber had exceeded its powers. Printers and authors were brought before the High Commission, and were taught to obey the restrictions imposed upon them at the risk of fine and imprisonment.
In his own diocese, at least, Laud was able greatly to restrict, if not altogether to bring to an end, that diversity of practice Prohibition of nonconformity.which had long been suffered to prevail. The Book of Common Prayer was to be accepted as the complete rule of worship. The ministers of the Church were no longer to be permitted to omit this or that prayer at pleasure, to stand when they were bidden to kneel, or to kneel when they were bidden to stand.
Laud’s chief difficulty lay with the lecturers. The parish clergy could hardly avoid reading Morning or Evening Prayer in a The lecturers.more or less mutilated form; but a lecturer was under no such obligation. He was paid by a Corporation, or by individuals, to preach and to do nothing more. He might remain sitting in the vestry, if he chose, till the service was at an end, when he could come out to ascend the pulpit, and to shine forth in the eyes of the congregation as one who was far superior to the man by whom the printed prayers had been recited. The lecturers were to be found <131>chiefly in towns where there was a strong Puritan element in the population, and they were themselves Puritans almost to a man.
To those who think it desirable that the teaching of a Church should be in harmony with the prevalent opinions of the congregations of which it is composed, the arrangement may seem not to have been a bad one after all. The existence of the lecturers provided a certain elasticity in the ecclesiastical institutions of the country, without which the enforcement of uniformity would in the long run prove impracticable. Laud was not likely to regard the lecturers from so favourable a point of view. Not only were they careless about forms and ceremonies, but they owed their appointment to the private action of the laity. Those who appointed might dismiss as well, and if Laud’s eyes were closed to the evils of subjecting the clergy to the word of command from the Court, they were opened widely to the evils of leaving them in entire dependence upon the varying humours of the richer members of their congregations.
In December Laud’s meditations on the subject of lecturers took shape in a series of instructions sent out by the King to the bishops. December.The King’s instructions.Some clauses were applicable to special abuses committed by the bishops themselves in the administration of the property of their sees. But those which were of most general importance touched the preachers, and more especially the lecturers. In the first place the King’s Declaration forbidding the introduction of controversial topics was to be strictly observed. Further, there were no longer to be any afternoon sermons at all. Catechizing of children was to take their place. In the morning sermons were still permitted, but no lecturer was to be suffered to open his mouth unless he had first ‘read Divine Service according to the Liturgy printed by authority, in his surplice.’ Nor was any lecturer to receive an appointment in a corporate town unless he was ready to accept ‘a living with cure of souls’ within the limits of the Corporation. The bishops were to gather information on the behaviour of the preachers, and to ‘take order for any abuse accordingly.’ Lastly, in order to <132>discourage the entertainment by the wealthier country gentlemen of private chaplains who were dependent entirely upon their patrons, the Bishops were to ‘suffer none but noblemen and men qualified by law to have a chaplain in their houses.’
The King’s instructions were the first step taken in narrowing the limits of Church union. If the lectureships were not a very satisfactory provision for meeting the strain of enforced conformity, they at least permitted diversity of opinion to manifest itself without an absolute breach of religious continuity. They could not be suppressed without suppressing the independent development of religious thought. In some way or another, in spite of Laud, Puritanism would find a voice in England. The silenced lecturer of 1629 would, if he lived long enough, be the triumphant Presbyterian or Independent of 1645, and the excluded Nonconformist of 1662.
The King’s resolution to allow no polemics in the pulpit was firmly taken. Davenant, Bishop of Salisbury, a man of mark 1630.March.Davenant’s sermon.amongst the Calvinistic prelates, ventured to touch upon the forbidden topic of predestination in a sermon preached at Whitehall. He was at once summoned before the Council table to answer for his disobedience. He pleaded that he had done no more than explain the Articles. He was told that it was the King’s will that ‘for the peace of the Church these high questions should be forborne.’ He received a sound rating from Harsnet, now Archbishop of York, and only escaped actual punishment by promising a judicious silence for the future.[178]
In their attempt to close discussion for ever, Charles and Laud were at least impartial. In vain Dr. Brooke, the Master of December.Brooke’s book.Trinity at Cambridge, implored permission to publish a book which, as he affirmed, would crush the Puritans and reconcile all the difficulties. Laud told him coldly that he should have no objection to read his argument, but that he had not changed his opinion that ‘something about these controversies’ was ‘unmasterable in this life.’ As the book never reached the press, it is to be presumed that <133>in spite of a vehement tirade against Puritanism from the author, Laud’s objection was insuperable.[179]
An unexpected event brought to Laud an increase of work and responsibility. On April 10, 1630, the Earl of Pembroke died suddenly.[180] April 10.Pembroke’s death.Several times during the past years men had looked up to him hopefully as a possible leader. He was known to be averse to all rash and unpopular measures, and he had a high character for disinterestedness. His disinterestedness, however, was merely that of a wealthy man with nothing to seek for himself, and who was happy in the possession of an affable and unruffled disposition. He had no force of character to enable him to control events. As Bacon said of him, he was ‘for his person not effectual.’[181] He easily passed from hot opposition to the tamest submission. With an intelligence greater than his power of will, he was the Hamlet of Charles’s Court.
No attempt was made to fill up the office of Steward of the Household, left vacant by Pembroke’s death. Charles seemed to think that April 12.Laud Chancellor of Oxford.by leaving such posts vacant he would have a stronger hold upon those who aspired to fill them. Pembroke, however, had been Chancellor of the University of Oxford as well, and that post, at least, could not be left vacant. The Earl of Montgomery, who now succeeded his brother in the earldom of Pembroke, was put in nomination by those who were faithful to the traditions of Calvinism, though it must have been difficult to discover in one who, as Clarendon assures us, cared for nothing but dogs and horses, any of those qualities which make up the Calvinist ideal. The election, however, fell upon Laud, though only by a majority of nine. The defeated party complained of unfair dealing; whether truthfully or not it is now impossible to say.[182]
The University was made to feel that the days of slack <134>government were at an end. Laud at once attacked the riotous and May.Discipline revived.disorderly habits of the place. Academical costume was no longer to be neglected. Undergraduates were no longer to occupy seats destined for Masters of Arts. Above all the King’s Declaration was to be enforced. Even a preacher who ventured to praise Arminianism and to revile the Synod of Dort was severely reprimanded. Another preacher had offended in a different way. He had declared ‘directly against all reverence in churches, and all obeisance or any devout gesture in or at the receiving of’ the Communion. “If this be true,” wrote Laud, “belike we shall not kneel neither.”[183]
There was little in common between the bustling energy of the Bishop prying into every corner of the land, and counting Contrast between Laud and Weston.nothing too small for his regulative authority, and the ponderous inertia of the Lord Treasurer, to whom it was the highest of arts to leave difficulties alone, and who was well satisfied if he could leave to a future generation the problems which he was himself incapable of solving. There was but one man in England as untiring as Laud, and that man, though long admitted into the King’s service, had only recently acquired even a very slight hold upon the King’s favour. But 1629.Wentworth and Laud.little is known of Wentworth for nearly a year after his speech at York.[184] He was in his place in the House of Lords during the short session which followed, and it needs no evidence to prove that the proceedings of the Lower House must have left an indelible impression upon his mind. Whatever distrust he had felt before of the intolerant predominance of Calvinism; whatever shrinking he had felt from the rule of a dominant House of Commons, was now doubled. In the maintenance and elevation of the Royal authority lay for him henceforth the only path of safety and wisdom. It was impossible for him to be content, as Charles and Weston were content, with the mere suspension of Parliamentary life. He knew too well that the habit of insubordination to authority could not be uprooted by mere passive <135>expectation. Like Land he perceived that it must be met face to face, be wrestled with and overthrown. Yet if he did not despise the remedial measures which seemed all-sufficient to Laud — the training of the mind to obedience by uniformity of external worship, and Wentworth’s policy.the silencing of preachers who claimed the right of declaring doctrines which engendered strife — he had too much genius to be content with them. He required active co-operation in the service of the commonwealth from every man who received protection from the Government. In thought, if not in expression, he anticipated the watchword which the nation was hereafter to accept from the dying lips of her greatest sailor, that England expects every man to do his duty; but he did not see that only by enlisting the active sympathies of those whose co-operation he desired could he reasonably hope for the assistance upon which he was forced to depend. Knowing that the mass of men are ignorant and prejudiced, he fancied that they would not merely submit to be guided, but that they would throw themselves heart and soul upon his side, if only he commanded their services in a right direction. Wisdom, simply because it was wise, was to bind folly and slothfulness to its car, and to compel them to bear it swiftly onward on its triumphant path. He could not stoop to the slow and irregular progress which is all that can be expected when a nation guides its own course, nor could he acknowledge that a progress thus made is surer than the most brilliant achievement into which it is dragged panting and gasping for breath in the hands of a master.
In spite of all that he succeeded in accomplishing, Wentworth was never able to shake himself free from the sense of impending failure, though he never dreamt of tracing the mischief to anything in himself. He lamented that his lot had fallen in an age in which he was forced to wish with all his heart that ‘men knew less and practised more.’[185]
No idealist, it has been often said, commits so many errors as the practical man of the world. Eliot, with all his superabundant trust in the wisdom of the House of Commons <136>and his superabundant reliance upon the all-sufficiency of the Its weakness.average religious feeling of his day, never entered upon a course so hopeless as did Wentworth when he set his hand to build up a compact constitutional edifice of which Charles was to be the corner-stone. Nor would Wentworth have been likely to achieve permanent success even if Charles had been other than he was. Willing co-operation can never be looked for where there is no sympathy between the governors and the governed, no spontaneousness of action in those whose assistance is required. Experience teaches that such a sympathy and such spontaneousness of action can only be maintained where the government is in one sense or another representative. Either by the election of a controlling assembly or by some less direct means, the nation must be able to make its voice heard, unless a gulf is to open between Government and people which nothing short of revolutionary violence can close up.
Eliot and Wentworth indeed were of one mind as to wishing such a catastrophe to be averted; but they differed as to the Eliot and Wentworth.means to be employed to ward off the danger. For Eliot it was enough that the House of Commons had spoken. That House in his eyes truly represented the nation in the fervour of its religion, in the wisdom and gravity of its political aspirations. In Wentworth’s eyes it only partially represented the nation, if it represented it at all. The lawyers and country gentlemen of whom it was composed were not to be trusted to govern England. The lawyers with their quirks and formulas too often stood in the way of substantial justice. The country gentlemen too often misused the opportunities of their wealth to tyrannise over their poorer neighbours. Wentworth therefore would appeal to the nation outside the House of Commons, as Chatham afterwards appealed to the nation outside the House of Commons. The King was to do judgment and justice fairly and equally to rich and poor. So would come the day when Parliament could be allowed to meet again. The King would not have altered his course to put himself in harmony with the nation, but the nation would have grown in intelligence to take hold of the hand offered to it by the King.
<137>Thus Wentworth seemed to himself to be contending for the old and undoubted liberties of Englishmen, for their right to Wentworth regards himself as the maintainer of the constitution.freedom from vexatious injustice. He was standing in the ancient paths. His knowledge of history told him how a Henry II. and an Edward I., a Henry VIII. and an Elizabeth, had actually guided a willing people. It told him nothing of a dominant House of Commons reducing its Sovereign to insignificance. What it told him of control from the baronage, or even from Parliament as a body, might safely be set down as irregular and unconstitutional, the deplorable result of misgovernment. That Charles should ever make such violence necessary he could not bring himself to believe. At all events, he did not see that the King had made it necessary by his resistance to the House of Commons. As he had accused Buckingham once, so he might accuse Eliot now ‘of ravishing at once the spheres of all ancient government.’
Was there indeed a nation behind the House of Commons to which Wentworth could give an articulate voice, or had he miscalculated his strength and over-estimated his power of raising the inert masses to a level with the effective strength of the nation, in the same way as he undervalued the worth of those religious and moral ideas to which the political classes clung so tenaciously? This was the secret of the future. Others, Charles more especially, would have to contribute to the solution of the problem. Yet even if all power had been concentrated in Wentworth’s hands, it is unlikely that he would have solved it successfully. He had too little attractive force to overcome the difficulties in his path. He was too self-reliant, too ready to leave his deeds to speak for themselves, too haughty and arrogant towards adversaries, to conciliate opposition, or even to be regarded by those whose cause he supported with that mingled feeling of reverence and familiarity which marks out the true leaders of mankind. He might come to be looked upon as the embodiment of force. Men might quail before his knitted brow and his clear commanding voice. They would not follow him to the death as Gustavus was followed, or hasten to his succour as the freeholders of Bucks <138>hastened to the succour of Hampden. Wentworth in his strength and Charles in his weakness were alike lonely amidst their generation. They understood not the voices which sounded on every side; they drew no strength from the earth beneath nor from the heaven over their heads. They set before them the task of making men other than they were, not the task of helping men to make themselves other than they were. What could come of it but failure, disgrace, and ruin?
In the beginning of November 1629 a paper fell into Wentworth’s hands which stirred his indignation to the utmost. Nov. 5.Wentworth places in the King’s hands a paper which he has found.The writer urged the King ‘to bridle the impertinency of Parliament’ by taking military possession of the country, establishing fortresses guarded by mercenary soldiers in every town, and compelling the payment of new and unheard-of taxes to be levied by the sole authority of the Crown.[186] There was just enough resemblance between the course thus recommended and the constitutional position assumed by Wentworth to rouse his resentment at so gross a caricature of his own principles. He took the paper at once to the King, who regarded it as the result of a plot to bring his government into disrepute, and ordered inquiry to be made for the author.[187]
Wentworth, at least, was the gainer by the discovery. Five days after he had placed the paper in Charles’s hands he took his seat in the Privy Council. Nov. 10.Wentworth a Privy Councillor.He owed his promotion to his resolution to guard from all attack the prerogatives of the Crown, without infringing upon the outward decencies of English constitutional practice.
The paper which shocked Wentworth and the King had a curious history. Soon after the dissolution of the Parliament of 1614, Dudley’s paper of advice.It gets into circulation.Sir Robert Dudley, the illegitimate son of Elizabeth’s favourite Leicester, who was living in exile at Florence, fancied that he saw a way of gaining permission to return to his native soil. Together with a proposal to communicate to James certain naval inventions which as he asserted were such as to change entirely the <139>face of maritime warfare, he forwarded to Sir David Foulis, a Scotchman in the King’s service, the very paper which was at last brought into unexpected notoriety.[188]
Foulis gave the paper to Somerset, and Somerset, at that time at the height of his favour, showed it to James. James would have nothing to say to it, and it was laid aside and forgotten. Some years later it found its way into that great receptacle of manuscript treasures, Sir Robert Cotton’s library. Time went on, and Cotton entrusted the care of his books to his librarian, Richard James, a clever, well-informed man, who was not above earning money by lending his master’s papers to the curious. In the summer of 1629, when all men were talking about the encroachments upon Parliament, James lent this particular paper to Oliver St. John, a young lawyer on the popular side, who showed the copy which he took of it to his client, the Earl of Bedford. Bedford showed it to Somerset, who distinctly remembered that the original had once been in his hands. From Somerset the copy passed to the Earl of Clare, the father of Denzil Holles, and Clare carried it to Cotton. Cotton, who had quite forgotten that the original had long been in his own library, fancying that he had before him a revelation of the immediate designs of the Court, sat down to reply to its arguments, no doubt with the intention of publishing his refutation.
Cotton was not well served. In his house was a youth who passed by the name of Flood, but who was commonly, though perhaps untruly, reported to be his natural son.[189] Like James, Flood saw in the paper a means of making money. He sold copies freely, one of which fell into Wentworth’s hands.[190]
The investigation ordered traced the document through Cotton and the three earls to St. John. St. John was committed to the Tower, and his chambers were searched for incriminatory evidence. He stoutly affirmed that the paper had <140>come to him from Cotton’s library, and Cotton who, as well as the earls, had been committed to private custody, as stoutly declared that Nov. 15.The King renounces the advice of the paper.he knew nothing about the matter. On November 15, as no further light seemed likely to be thrown on the mystery, Charles protested in the Council that the suggestions made in the paper were ‘fitter to be practised in a Turkish state than amongst Christians.’ Nov. 26.Discovery of the original.Eleven days later, much to Cotton’s surprise, the original manuscript was discovered in his own library, and Foulis, who was still living, deposed to the circumstances in which it had formerly come into his hands. The paper thus lost much of its supposed importance. Orders had, however, Prosecution ordered.already been given to prosecute Cotton, St. John, and the earls in the Star Chamber, for concealment of the paper, and the proceedings were allowed to run their course.[191]
What Charles wanted was evidently an opportunity of making a protestation of his resolution to abide by the law. 1630.May 29.The defendants pardoned in consequence of the birth of a Prince.He could have had no angry feeling against those who circulated the paper as soon as the circumstances had been explained. The hearing of the cause had been fixed for May 29. The day arrived and a few words had been spoken when a messenger hastily entered the Court and whispered in the Lord Keeper’s ear. Coventry at once interrupted the proceedings. It had pleased Heaven, he said, to bless his Majesty with a son, ‘a hopeful Prince, the great joy and expectation both of the King and kingdom.’ His Majesty, therefore, was inclined to think rather of mercy than of justice. Dudley’s paper should be burnt, but those who had circulated it might depart unharmed. This was the last appearance of the most notable of the defendants before the eyes of the world. The fact that an important state paper had been Nov. 24.Search in Cotton’s library.discovered in Cotton’s library, gave rise to the suspicion that other documents of the same kind might be found in his possession. Orders were accordingly given that he should <141>himself prepare a catalogue of the manuscripts, with the assistance of two clerks of the Council, and that he should only enter the library in their presence.[192] The old man felt the grievance deeply. Though he was not, it is true, excluded from the sight of his beloved books, it was one thing to be permitted to visit his treasures in the presence of two unwelcome companions: it was another thing to sit at ease as the master of the house, with his friends chatting around him, each eager 1631.May 6.Death of Cotton.to pay court to the dispenser of such stores of knowledge. His death, which was at the time ascribed to his annoyance, took place within the year after his visit to the Star Chamber. The services which he rendered to historical literature will never be forgotten. In his own day the services which he rendered to political controversy were more highly appreciated. His function was to collect materials for others to use. His own antiquarianism was not enlightened by any steady and consistent view of society and life. At one time it led him to associate with Somerset and Gondomar. At another time it drew him to Eliot and Selden.[193]
The child whose birth formed an excuse for dropping a hastily undertaken prosecution was destined to strange vicissitudes. Through 1630.May 29.The future Charles II.the fault of his parents he was early to taste the bitterness of exile, and to be recalled after years of apparently hopeless wandering to sit upon his father’s throne. To his mother the child, dark and ugly as she playfully acknowledged him to be,[194] was the more welcome after her disappointment a year before. There were others Dissatisfaction of the Puritans.who were very far from sharing her delight. The birth of the infant seemed to be a pledge of the permanence of the existing system of government, even if he were not nurtured in his mother’s <142>faith to trouble Protestant England when he came to sit upon the throne. Till now there had been a prospect, however remote, of seeing the golden crown of England encircling the fair brow of Elizabeth, and it was never doubted that if Elizabeth took her seat upon the throne, there would be no place for Laud and Weston upon its steps. No wonder the Puritans hung their heads whilst bells were ringing and bonfires blazing. “God,” said one, “had already better provided for us than we had deserved in giving such a hopeful progeny by the Queen of Bohemia, brought up in the Reformed religion; whereas it is uncertain what religion the King’s children will follow, being to be brought up under a mother so devoted to the Church of Rome.”[195]
It was only with difficulty that Charles was induced to avoid emphasizing in the eyes of all men the risk which would have to be faced at last. On the very day of his son’s birth, he announced that the child was to be entrusted to the charge of the Roman Catholic Lady Roxburgh, who, as Jane Drummond, had been the main instrument in attaching the infant’s grandmother, Queen Anne, to the religion which she herself professed. Although it was hard for Charles, at such a moment, to resist the entreaties of his wife, he yielded at last to the remonstrances of his ministers, and Lady Dorset, an Englishwoman and a Protestant, was finally appointed. Charles, however, continued as usual to mar the graciousness of concession by the coldness of his manner. “This king,” wrote the Venetian ambassador, “is so constituted by nature that he never obliges anyone, either by word or deed.”[196]
To no one, except to his parents, was the birth of the heir more welcome than to Laud. Wentworth’s attachment to Charles, Laud’s attachment to Charles.though not without a romantic tinge, was political at the bottom. Laud regarded him with the warmest personal affection. The two men had so much in common. Nor did Laud, like Wentworth, soar into <143>regions in which Charles was incapable of following him. He simply found in Charles’s mind the receptive soil in which June 27.Baptism of the Prince.he might hopefully plant his ideas of external order. Laud joyfully composed a prayer commending the royal babe to its heavenly Protector,[197] and on June 27 he was called upon to baptize him by his father’s name.
At the time of the Prince’s birth, Laud and Wentworth had as yet formed no special tie of friendship. They were brought together by Alexander Leighton.a common dislike of subversive doctrines, and a common resolution to visit with the harshest penalties those who spread them amongst the people. Such a one, at least in the eyes of courtiers and councillors, was Alexander Leighton. A Scot by birth, the father of the gentle and thoughtful student who became Archbishop of Glasgow in the next generation, he, after becoming a Master of Arts at the University of St. Andrews, at some unknown date migrated to England, and became a preacher in the diocese of Durham. He then moved on to London, and ultimately, in 1617, betook himself to Leyden, where he applied himself to the study of medicine, taking in due course the degree of doctor in that faculty. Returning to London, he attempted to practise his new profession; but was soon brought before the College of Physicians, charged partly with being a quack and partly with daring to smuggle himself into a profession from which his orders excluded him. He was subjected to an examination in which he failed to satisfy examiners who were probably not very anxious to detect his knowledge, and he was then interdicted from practising in England. He continued, however, to prescribe clandestinely, and he also reverted to his clerical work, collecting around him, doubtless in the 1624.His first book.privacy of his own house, a considerable number of disciples. His first book, the Speculum Belli Sacri, was launched into the world in 1624, as an incentive to the declaration of war against Spain. It was chiefly <144>distinguished by the furiousness of its intolerance, and by the cool presumption with which, supported by quotations from the Scriptures and the writers of Greece and Rome, he ventured to give dogmatic opinions on the military art.
In 1628, after the Houses had been prorogued and the Remonstrance of the Commons was passing from hand to hand to 1628.Sion’s Plea against Prelacy.fan the flame of opposition, the enthusiasts who gathered at Leighton’s house began to talk over plans for carrying on the war against the prevalent ecclesiastical system in the coming session. Some talked of abating the authority of the bishops, others of various minor reforms. Leighton, like a true Scotchman as he was, went to the root of the matter. His ‘opinion was right down for extirpation of the prelates, with all their dependencies and supporters.’ This audacious proposal was well received, and he was requested to embody his views in a petition to Parliament. A draft was soon prepared and circulated amongst those whom Leighton described as the ‘godliest, learnedest, and most judicious of the land.’ Before long he had five hundred signatures to his petition, some of them being those of members of Parliament. Satisfied with the number, he crossed over to Holland, to print the petition without fear of interruption. In its passage through the press it was elaborated into a lengthy treatise, dated, apparently with the object of exciting indignation against the Government, ‘in the year and month wherein Rochelle was lost.’
Two early copies were sent over, to be laid before the two Houses when they met for their last session. The dissolution came 1629.Copies intended for Parliament.before they had reached those for whom they were intended. In the meanwhile Leighton had passed through some vicissitudes. In March he was chosen to be preacher of the English Church in Utrecht. In less than three months he had come to July.Leighton in Holland.an open breach with his congregation. He dissented from some of the orders laid down for the guidance of ministers in the province, and he refused to preach on Christmas Day, Good Friday, and other similar days which the English in the Netherlands — Puritans as they were — were accustomed to observe. Though <145>his congregation dismissed him from his post, he continued to occupy the pulpit, till the magistrates of the city intervened, and forced him to forbear preaching. A few weeks later, finding that there was no place for him in the Netherlands, he returned to England, probably thinking that his work had escaped notice. His book, however, though it could not be sold openly, was circulated in private, under the title of An Appeal to Parliament; or, Sion’s Plea against Prelacy. In the following February 1630.Feb. 17.Arrest of Leighton.a copy fell into Laud’s hands. The pursuivants were at once put upon the track of the daring author, and, before long, he was arrested by a warrant from the High Commission, and lodged, if his description is correct, ‘in a nasty dog-hole full of rats and mice.’[198]
Leighton’s treatise was undoubtedly the production of a vigorous understanding. There is an intellectual freshness in Character of his book.its composition which is wholly wanting in the ponderous learning of Prynne. It is, however, the work of a man with a single fixed idea. Whatever evil existed in the world was laid to the charge of the bishops, the antichristian and Satanical prelacy. If the season was unhealthy, if provisions were dear, if ladies displayed extravagance in dress, it was all the fault of the bishops. They had poisoned the ear of the late King, telling him that if he would support their authority he might have ‘absolute liberty to do what he list.’ They had supported Buckingham in his resistance to Parliaments till God cut him off. They were ‘men of blood,’ persecuting the saints, ‘knobs and wens and bunchy popish flesh’; they were the ‘trumpery of Antichrist,’ by whom the land was filled with swearing, drunkenness, pride, idleness, and all kinds of sin.
Though Leighton spoke respectfully of the King, he did not hesitate to wound his tenderest feelings. He described Buckingham as ‘that great Goliath,’ who had been made ‘to fall <146>unexpectedly’ by ‘the Lord of Hosts.’ Buckingham had set ‘all things to sale, and sold the fee-simple of England to Rome, that he might have the tenant-right.’ The King’s own marriage was not spared. God had ‘suffered him to match with the daughter of Heth, though he missed an Egyptian.’
Sion’s Plea was more than an ecclesiastical manifesto. It was an appeal to political Presbyterianism to take the sword in hand. Its political Presbyterianism.“Put the case,” wrote Leighton, hypothetically, “that the good harmless King be a captivated Joash by Athaliah’s Arminianised and Jesuitical crew, or a misled Henry VI., dispossessed of his faithfullest friends and best counsel by the pride of the French; or a Henry III., overawed by a devilish domineering favourite; or an Edward VI., overpoised and borne down from his good purposes to God’s glory and the good of the State by the halting and falsehood of the prelates and their Romish confederacies, so that such a king, though he hold the sceptre, neither can be free himself nor execute his designs, because the sons of the man of sin are too hard for him.”[199]
Leighton did not shrink from calling upon Parliament to take up the work which had been left undone by the King. “Then,” he said, Leighton calls upon Parliament to interfere,addressing the two Houses, which the book contemplated as still in session, “you, the great Council of State, must remove the wicked from the head, and take away the corrupting and corroding dross from the silver excellency and excellent argentry[200] of the King. … Strike neither at great nor small, but at these troublers of Israel. Smite that Hazael in the fifth rib.”[201] The words were no doubt intended to be taken metaphorically, but they were easily capable of another interpretation.
Leighton ended his book with a deliberate invitation to Parliament to resist a dissolution. Its members, he argued, were and to resist a dissolution.bound to stay in the ship. “Every dissolution of Parliament without real information is against right, reason, and record.”[202] This long indictment of Royalty and <147>Episcopacy was brought to a close with the following suggestive lines:—
‘High must you soar, but glory gives thee wings,No low attempt a starlike glory brings.’[203]
The invitation to Parliament to constitute itself into a permanent body was naturally regarded by the Government as an Did Leighton stand alone?invitation to revolution. The Attorney-General, as might have been expected, was anxious to know whether Leighton stood alone. He lavished all his powers of persuasion to draw from him the names of those five hundred persons who had signed the petition. It was all in vain. No offers of forgiveness or liberty could draw a single name from Leighton’s lips. The form of his book he distinctly asserted to be entirely his own.[204]
At the present day Leighton’s attack would doubtless be left to the contemptuous indifference of all sensible men. But the June 4.Proceedings against him in the Star Chamber.conduct which commends itself to a Government so strong as to defy treason to do its worst is hardly to be expected from a Government conscious of weakness. Leighton’s attack came too near Eliot’s attack to be treated as an isolated occurrence. Unhappily, the contemplation of the danger was not likely to be accompanied by any profitable reflections. That the House of Commons, so loyal and submissive to Elizabeth, should have raised a thinly disguised demand for supremacy in the State; that the forcible introduction of Presbyterianism should be regarded as anything more than a dream; were surely phenomena to induce the King and his counsellors to ask themselves what they had done to make such things possible. No such thought, however, passed through their minds for an instant. His sentence.All that was thought of was to crush a fanatic who could only be dangerous through their own maladministration. The Court of Star Chamber was called upon to punish his offence. The two Chief Justices, in their <148>place in that court, declared that if the King had so pleased, Leighton might have been put on his trial for high treason, and some of the Privy Councillors assured him that ‘it was his Majesty’s exceeding mercy and goodness’ which had brought him there. In order to show his Majesty’s mercy and goodness, Leighton was condemned to pay a fine of 10,000l., to be set in the pillory at Westminster, and there whipped, and after his whipping to ‘have one of his ears cut off and his nose slit, and be branded in the face with SS, for a sower of sedition.’ At some future time he was to be taken to the pillory at Cheapside. The lash was again to descend upon his back, his other ear was to be sliced off, and he was then to be imprisoned for life, ‘unless his Majesty shall be graciously pleased to enlarge him.’
It is not probable that any one of the judges expected Leighton to pay a hundredth part of the fine which had been set upon him. In truth the enormous fines which have left such a mark upon the history of this reign were seldom exacted, and became little more than a conventional mode in which the judges expressed their horror of the offence,[205] except so far as they may have been intended to bring the offender to an early confession of his fault. The rest of Leighton’s sentence, however, was far from nominal. In its treatment of criminals, the age was hard and brutal. The constant passing of the death-cart along the road to Tyburn raised no <149>compunction in the minds of Londoners. The pillory, with its accompanying brandings and mutilation, was an ordinary penalty known to the law, and there was nothing in Leighton’s sentence which was not authorised by the practice of the Court of Star Chamber.[206] Changed position of the court.What was new was that the members of the court were now virtually parties in the case. They had a personal interest in avenging an insult directed against themselves. If this was true of the judges and the temporal lords, it was still more true of the bishops. If Leighton’s account of the proceedings, given many years afterwards, when his temper was soured by cruel sufferings, is to be accepted as at all approaching to accuracy, the bishops took a leading part in insisting upon the heaviest sentence. Neile opposed the theory of the divine right of Episcopacy to Leighton’s theory of the divine right of Presbytery. He had his calling, he said, ‘from the Holy Ghost. If he could not make it good, he would <150>fling his rochet and all the rest from his back.’[207] Laud’s speech lasted for two hours. “Until the time of Luther, Calvin, and Beza,” he said, “the world heard not of any other government of the Church but by bishops, and although Calvin and Beza did abjure bishops and their government, yet he found them to be more proud and imperious in their government than any bishops in England.”[208] According to the same authority, as soon as judgment had been delivered, Laud took off his cap, and raising his hands, ‘gave thanks to God who had given him the victory over his enemies.’[209]
Whether this last anecdote be true or false, it illustrates the position into which Laud had come. He looked upon those who opposed his opinions as his enemies, and upon his enemies as the enemies of God.
Before the terrible sentence could be carried out Leighton was to be degraded from his ministerial office by the High Commission, Leighton to be degraded.in order that he might not appear in his clerical character in the pillory. As the High Commission was not then sitting, an effort was vainly made in the course of the vacation to extract from him the names of his supporters. Leighton was, however, of the stuff of which martyrs are made. Nov. 4.His degradation.Introduced before the Commission at last, he refused to take off his hat to the court, and declared defiantly that it had no authority to touch him. Leighton’s clerical dress was stripped from his back, and he was sent back to prison to prepare for suffering.[210] The King, it is said, was meditating the remission of his corporal punishment,[211] <151>when on the night before the day fixed for his appearance in the pillory Nov. 9.His escape and recapture.he contrived to make his escape from prison with the aid of two of his countrymen named Livingston and Anderson. A fortnight afterwards he was captured in Bedfordshire. His flight put an end to all thoughts of mercy. Nov. 26.His punishment.Leighton went bravely to his suffering, together with two other culprits who had in some way offended against the law. His wife walked before him as if in some triumphal procession. “As Christ,” she said, “was crucified between two thieves, so is my husband led between two knaves.” His own courage did not fail him. “All the arguments brought against me,” he said to the spectators, “are prison, fine, brands, knife, and whip.” “This is Christ’s yoke,” he cried, as his neck was thrust into the pillory. Then, as the sharp knife of the executioner rent away his ear, he exclaimed, “Blessed be God, if I had a hundred, I would lose them all for the cause.” But in the opinion of some he marred the simple dignity of these words by others which trenched upon profanity. ‘He told the people he suffered for their sins; and out of the Psalms and Isaiah applied unto himself the prophecies of Christ’s sufferings, to the great scandal of many.’[212]
Leighton was carried back bleeding and fainting to his prison, there to endure long years of misery. The second agony Part of it remitted.at the Cheapside pillory was spared him. One ear was left uncropped; one scourging was not inflicted. So far the mercy of Charles extended.[213]
There is no evidence that Leighton met with anything like general sympathy. He had his followers, no doubt, who regarded him as How far was he popular?a martyr for the truth; but nothing is heard of any popular movement in his favour round the pillory at Westminster. At the Inns of Court, when search <152>was made for him at the time of his escape, the lawyers ‘took it unkindly that they should be suspected for Puritans.’[214] It may well be doubted whether the feeling of opposition had as yet reached below the political classes. Even amongst them Leighton’s subversive Presbyterianism could have found but few defenders. It required many years of misgovernment to convert dissatisfaction with particular acts of the King and the bishops into the torrent of revolutionary abhorrence which was to sweep away King and bishops together.
It has been said, and it is by no means improbable, that Leighton’s denunciations were the means of drawing Laud and Wentworth Laud and Wentworth.into close communication with one another.[215] To them at least they would contain the same lesson of warning. Presbyterianism in the Church and Parliamentarism in the State would seem to be two forms of one disease — of the error which sought to control the government of the wise few by the voice of the ignorant many.
Governments do themselves little direct harm by the punishment which they inflict upon violent and unreasonable opponents. Indirectly, the temper which encourages harsh and extreme repression leads to an unwise antagonism to the moderate demands of those who are neither violent nor fanatical. Charles might long have treated the claims of the House of Commons with contempt, and might long have bidden defiance to Presbyterian enthusiasts, if he could have understood how to make use of the higher devotional tendencies of the Puritanism of his day. It was of no good omen for the State that by choice or by compulsion men who would have added strength to any Government stood aside from participation in public duties, and that some even sought elsewhere than in England <153>for homes in which they might pass the remainder of their lives in peace.
Foremost amongst these latter was John Winthrop. Sprung from an ancient family which had enriched itself by trade, and John Winthrop.born at Groton in Suffolk in 1588, he had grown up under the influence of the tide of Protestantism which swept over the nation in the years of triumph which followed upon the ruin of the Armada, and was nowhere so strongly felt as in the eastern counties. His sensitive mind was early racked by the agonies of religious despondency. Self-examination, leading to self-condemnation, became the habit of his daily life, albeit it was chequered by intervals of calm refreshment in the remembrance of his Saviour’s mercies. He had ‘an insatiable thirst after the word of God,’ so as never willingly ‘to miss a good sermon, though many miles off, especially of such as did search deep into the conscience.’[216]
To Winthrop the God whom he worshipped seemed to be very near, an invisible presence detecting and bringing to light his faults, and even saving him from bodily harm in the occurrences of daily life, ‘crossing him in his delights,’ if he fell into idleness, or revealing to his wife a spider in the children’s porridge.[217] For many years the consciousness of being unworthy of such favour gave rise to a morbid feeling. He could not attend the sessions as justice of the peace without dreading lest he should be entangled in the vanities of the world, or without thinking with self-conscious shyness of the smiles which rose to the lips of his gayer neighbours as they glanced at his plain and unadorned dress.
Domestic trouble came to add its depressing influence. Married at eighteen to an illiterate wife four years older than himself, he accepted his lot without repining; but there was no intensity of love, no tenderness of feeling to soften the rigours of his life. When his wife died, after eleven years of wedlock, she had borne him six children. He quickly married <154>again, but it was only to lay his second wife in the grave, after a brief year of happiness. In his third wife, Margaret Tyndal, he found his mate; she it was who made him what he now became. From the day that his faith was plighted to her, 1618.His third marriage.nothing more was heard of the old moodiness and timidity. He learned to step boldly out amongst his equals, to take his share in the world’s work. He became a practising attorney in the Court of Wards, and in his letters of this period there is nothing to distinguish him from any other God-fearing Puritan of the time, excepting the almost feminine tenderness and sensitiveness of his disposition.[218]
To this stage of Winthrop’s life the dissolution of Parliament in 1629 sounded the death-knell. There was no proneness 1629.Determines to go to New England.to despondency in his own religion; but as he looked around him he despaired of his native country. Evil times were coming, when the Church must ‘fly to the wilderness.’ Where Eliot saw a passing sickness, Winthrop’s softer nature turned sadly from the symptoms of mortal disease. Population, he thought, was overtaking the means of subsistence. The rich were vying with one another in sumptuousness of dress and fare. At the universities men had learned to ‘strain at gnats and swallow camels,’ to ‘use all severity for the maintenance of caps,’ but to ‘suffer all ruffian-like fashions and disorders in manners to pass uncontrolled.’ Winthrop resolved to seek in New England the congenial home which Old England could not afford him.[219]
Though emigration to New England was no longer the <155>service of danger which it had been when Bradford and Brewster State of New England.crossed the Atlantic in the ‘Mayflower,’ it was still a work demanding endurance of hardship. The Plymouth colony had succeeded in establishing its footing, and other exiles had come out in scanty numbers to settle here and there upon the neighbouring coast. Few Englishmen were tempted to leave their native land for a home in the wilderness, and of those who tried the experiment many succumbed to the difficulties of the undertaking.
It was time that a fresh stream of English emigration should be directed to the coasts of America. The Dutch had already erected Settlements of the Dutch and French.Fort Amsterdam at the mouth of the Hudson, on the island which was afterwards to bear the great commercial city of New York. The French had settled at Port Royal in Nova Scotia, and had established a trading post for the purchase of furs from the Indians at Quebec. Though Sir William Alexander claimed the whole district under a grant from the Crown, and his emissary, Captain Kirk, had seized Port Royal and stormed Quebec, negotiations were already on foot in Europe for the restoration of the French settlers.
Religious enthusiasm was to secure the preponderance on the continent for men of English race. At the close of 1628 about 1628.Settlement at Salem.fifty or sixty persons had formed a settlement at Salem in Massachusetts Bay under authority of a company in London which had received a grant of lands from the Council for New England. In the following year fresh members were admitted to the company; and on March 4, two days after the Speaker had been held down in his chair by Holles and Valentine, it was reconstituted by royal charter, The Company of Massachusetts Bay.under the name of the ‘Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England.’ About two hundred persons were despatched in April, and Charlestown rose by the side of Salem. They carried with them two clergymen who were dissatisfied with the state of things in England, and they immediately on their arrival constituted themselves into a church after the Separatist model. Bradford came over from Plymouth to offer them the right <156>hand of fellowship. “That which is our greatest comfort,” wrote one of them, “is that we have here the true religion and holy ordinances of Almighty God taught among us. Thanks be to God, we have here plenty of preaching and diligent catechizing, with strict and careful exercise, and good and commendable orders to bring our people into a Christian conversation.”
In setting up their worship these men had no idea of admitting the principle of toleration. Two brothers who attempted to worship apart, Toleration not allowed.using the English Common Prayer, were at once placed on board ship and sent back across the Atlantic. It may be that the rulers of the little community were wise in their resolution. Their own religious liberty would have been in danger if a population had grown up around them ready to offer a helping hand to any repressive measures of the home government.
It was in this settlement that Winthrop proposed to find his new home; but neither he nor those who were ready to join him were July 28.Transfer of the Massachusetts Company to America.willing to go if they were to be merely the subjects of a trading company in London liable to be controlled by the King. An unexpected way was found to meet the difficulty. On July 28, Cradock, the governor of the company, proposed that the government of the corporation should be transferred to America, ‘for the advancement of the plantation, the inducing and encouraging persons of worth and quality to transplant themselves and families thither.’ He did not say, what he must have been clearly understood to mean, that in this way the King would have some difficulty in laying his hand upon the governor. On August 26 Aug. 26.Winthrop agrees to emigrate.Winthrop and eleven other gentlemen signed an agreement to emigrate if this condition were fulfilled. Two days later the transference was voted by the company, and on October 20 Winthrop was elected governor in Cradock’s place.
In April, 1630, Winthrop was 1630.April.Winthrop sails.on his way to Massachusetts. His name was a powerful magnet to draw his friends and neighbours to associate their fortunes with his own. Either in the fleet in which he sailed or in vessels <157>which shortly followed, a thousand persons were added to the struggling settlements on the New England coast.[220] It was His principles.not the love of democratic equality which led these men — many of them gentlemen of wealth and position — to wrestle with the hardships of an unkindly soil, and of a harsh and rigorous climate. If they had their share with Bradford and Brewster and Winslow as the founders of a nation, it was because temporal blessings were added to them who first sought the Lord and his righteousness. They had set an ideal before them which they strove to realise upon earth; and in spite of human shortcomings in its conception, and of human errors in its embodiment in action, their lives and the lives of those around them were ennobled by their high spiritual earnestness. The old world, they believed, was growing very old, falling swiftly into corruption and decay. The immoralities around them, they thought, would be strengthened, not weakened, by the ecclesiastical ceremonialism which was in favour in high places in England. Winthrop believed thoroughly in the Calvinistic system of theology; but for him, as for every noble nature, that theology was clothed in the heartfelt appreciation of the personal nearness of his Saviour. It was this which to him and to so many others rendered a ceremonial worship so hateful. It was a mere distraction from the burning self-sustained passion of devotion. All that was needed to impose a check upon the intense individuality of his creed he found in the study of the Scriptures, in which he recognised the voice of his heavenly guide. To such a soul, hungering and thirsting after righteousness, the Bible was a code of moral law perfect and complete. Earthly life, as those Massachusetts settlers held, was to be the expression of the heavenly life. Church membership and political rights.By their charter, which they carried with them to America, the members of the company who formed the governing body had been empowered to admit freemen to share in their privileges, and they used this power to establish a commonwealth into which none were to enter as masters who did not fully share in the religious conceptions of <158>the existing members. “The only way,” wrote Winthrop, “to avoid shipwreck is to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God.”[221] Church membership was declared to be the indispensable condition of admission to the governing body. A religious oligarchy was thereby established, around which gathered hundreds of persons who were unable or unwilling to satisfy the test imposed. But for the mingled firmness and gentleness of the rulers, such an arrangement could not have lasted for a month. The year after Winthrop’s arrival only 126 freemen were admitted, and it took ten years of immigration and selection to add 1,200 more.[222]
Massachusetts was not a place where men might do as they liked. Those who gave signs of proving troublesome to the colony were 1631.Severe rule.simply placed on shipboard and sent back to England. Those who were guilty in any special way were condemned to harsher penalties. A quack doctor was fined 5l. Captain Stone, for assaulting a member of the community ‘and calling him a just ass,’ was fined 100l. and banished. Edward Palmer, who made the Boston stocks and charged too highly for the wood, had to sit in them himself. Swearers had to stand with their tongues fixed in cleft sticks. Philip Ratcliff, the Leighton of the colony, was ordered to ‘be whipped, have his ears cut off, fined 40l., and banished’ out of the limits of the ‘jurisdiction,’ for uttering malicious and scandalous speeches against the government.[223]
In proportion as the student of the history of the seventeenth century perceives clearly that religious toleration was Toleration rejected.the goal to which it was tending, and that in it alone could its difficulties find their appropriate solution, he is tempted to think harshly and bitterly of those men who turned their backs upon such a benefit. Eliot and Winthrop would hear as little of it as Laud and Wentworth. Even the intellectual perception of the value of toleration had not yet dawned upon the world. The obstacle was, however, not purely intellectual. The real difficulty was to know who was to begin. The problem as it presented itself to the men of that <159>generation was not whether they were to tolerate others, but whether they were to give to others the opportunity of being intolerant to themselves. Was Laud to allow Leighton to gather strength to sweep away the whole Church system of England? Was Winthrop to allow the dissidents to gather strength to sweep away the whole Church system of New England? It is only when a sentiment of mutual forbearance has sprung up which renders it improbable that the spread of any given opinion will be used to repress other opinions by force, that the principle of toleration can possibly commend itself to a wise people. Even in these days we are tolerant because we believe that freedom of thought, besides being a good thing in itself, is not likely to be turned against ourselves; not because we feel bound in principle to give to the holders of one particular doctrine a chance of establishing their own authority on the ruins of the rest.
It was the glory of England that she had approached more nearly than other nations to the condition of mutual forbearance which The Church of England.renders toleration possible. It was the misfortune of the reign of Charles I. that the tacit compact between the two great parties in the Church was broken. The Puritan demanded exact conformity with the doctrine which he professed. Laud demanded exact conformity with the practices of which he approved. The largeness of view, the power of concession, the recollection on the one hand that personal and individual religion need not throw off regard for the demands of external authority and ceremonial, and, on the other hand, that the devotees of external authority and ceremonial need not reject the demands of personal and individual religion, were being lost sight of. Each party was coming to look upon the other as something to be repressed and extirpated. Yet each party regarded itself, not without excuse, as standing on the defensive. Winthrop explained his refusal of the use of the Common Prayer-book by calling to mind the persecution to which the emigrants had been subjected in England. Cosin preached on the text, “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.” Cosin’s sermon.“Those other men,” he said, “have but little to do, it seems, who are finding fault with the public prayers of the Church when, according to the <160>prophet’s rule here, we pray for the continuance of our peace, and desire to be kept from battle and persecution. … ‘Pray for the peace of Jerusalem,’ saith the prophet here; pray that you may live a peaceable and a godly life under your king, saith St. Paul. No; pray for no peace, pray not against any battle, saith our Puritan, directly against the text; and for so saying, let us ever think what spirit governs the sect, we shall be sure to find that it is none of the Spirit of peace. They are all for contentions and brabbles, both at home and abroad, and He everywhere against them, as we also ought to be.”[224]
The tendency of these words is unmistakable. To Cosin disputatiousness was not the mere waste thrown off in the process of maintaining intellectual vigour. It was a sheer evil, without any compensating good whatever, from which it was the duty of the governors to protect the helpless mass of the population. Something of the same idea lies at the root of the action of the Privy Council in social matters. It would be a Wentworth in the Council.great mistake to attribute to Wentworth at this time anything like the influence which he subsequently acquired. In the general direction of the Government he had, as far as we know, no hand whatever, and his name was not even thought worthy of mention by those who chronicled the doings of the King and his ministers. Yet it can hardly be by accident that his accession to the Privy Council was followed by a series of measures aiming at the benefit of the people in general, and at the protection of the helpless against the pressure caused by the self-interest of particular classes. No doubt much was done which in later days would be regarded as injudicious; but there can be no doubt of the existence of a tendency to find a sphere of action in the pursuance of the common good.
The aid of the Council was first invoked by a visitation against which the March.The plague in England.science of that age afforded little or no protection. The plague, which had committed such devastations in 1625, reappeared in England in the spring of 1630.[225] The Council sounded the alarm. <161>Magistrates were ordered to stop the passage of rogues and vagabonds April 23.Measures taken.who might carry the infection. Houses in which the disease already prevailed were to be closed. Householders were to refuse relief to wandering beggars, and to cause them to be apprehended by the nearest constable. On the other hand, the deserving poor were to be protected against want and suffering, and the laws on their behalf were to be strictly put in force.[226]
Three months later an attempt was made to deal with the evil in London, where its consequences were most to be dreaded. July 24.Proclamation against new buildings.There is no doubt that our forefathers were indebted for the existence of this as well as of other forms of disease to the overcrowded habitations in which they dwelt, and to the neglect of the most elementary sanitary precautions. In such a city as London, growing from year to year, it seemed hopeless to cope with the evil in any other way than by strictly controlling the influx of population to the city. An Act of Parliament in Elizabeth’s reign had prohibited the building of new houses, and the reception of an increased number of lodgers in the old ones, but it had been passed for a limited period of seven years, and when the term came to an end it had not been renewed. In James’s reign, however, the same difficulty had been felt. Recourse had been had to the judges, who had declared that the excessive building of houses was illegal as a nuisance, and could therefore be dealt with whether the Act of Parliament were renewed or not.[227] James had accordingly proceeded to execute the powers thus acknowledged to be his, and Charles followed in his father’s steps. All previous orders on the subject were reinforced by a fresh proclamation not long after the outbreak of the plague. Injurious as the intervention was, there is no reason to doubt that it was well intended, and the prohibitions against building new rooms under a certain height, and against <162>erecting houses with the upper storeys overhanging the streets deserve unqualified praise.[228]
This time the pestilence was accompanied by an extraordinary drought which caused a failure in the harvest. As early as in June June 13.Measures to avert famine.the alarm was taken, and the exportation of corn was prohibited.[229] In September a proclamation was issued which sounds strange at the present day. The observance of Lent and other special days by abstinence from meat September.Lent to be observed.had been a practice handed down from the mediæval Church. Elizabeth’s Parliaments had sought to find an economical basis for that which had ceased to be acknowledged by most persons as a religious duty, and had enjoined abstention from meat at those seasons as a means of encouraging the fisheries. The Elizabethan statutes, with some alteration in details, had been re-enacted in the last Parliament of Charles, and the proclamation which now demanded the observance of the law only carried out the views which had been accepted by that House of Commons which had risen up in indignation against Laud and Weston. The fast, as was stated in the proclamation, was observed in his Majesty’s household, in the houses of the greater part of the nobility, at the Inns of Court, and at the Universities; but it was treated with contempt at taverns and other places of entertainment. More meat was eaten there on fasting nights than on any other day. Private persons were therefore to be admonished to use abstinence, and the City companies to suspend their festivities, devoting the money thus saved to the starving poor, unless they wished the King ‘to remember the hardness of their hearts.’[230]
More direct measures were taken at the same time. The Lord Mayor and Aldermen were ordered to prevent the price of corn from rising in the London market. Directions were sent to Ireland, which had not been reached by the dearth, to transmit to England all the grain which was not absolutely required to meet the wants of its own population. Justices of <163>the peace in counties where corn was by any accident plentiful were to supply the wants of less fortunate neighbourhoods. No one was to venture to ask more than seven shillings a bushel for wheat, about two shillings more than the highest ordinary price, nor was more than a limited quantity to be purchased, or the storing of grain permitted for re-sale. It was not in the nature of things that such directions should be submitted to without opposition. Again and again the Council complained of resistance. In spite of threats, corn was held back from the market, and prices continued to rise. Justices had to be reminded that it was their duty to visit the markets week by week. Starchmakers had to be reminded that their work was not absolutely necessary to human existence. Maltsters were told to limit the quantity of barley consumed by them. In some places there were riots and disturbances, but on the whole order was maintained. Fortunately the next harvest proved to be a good one, and in the summer of 1631 prices fell as rapidly as they had risen.[231]
It was perhaps the experience gained in this struggle with famine which suggested to the Council the propriety of more Dec. 31.Commission for the relief of debtors.permanent intervention on behalf of the poor. Bankrupt debtors are never likely to meet with much pity from the prosperous tradesman, and it had been one of the charges against Bacon before his fall, that he had been inclined to stretch his authority in their favour. A body of commissioners was now appointed to mediate with the creditors of prisoners whose debts were under 200l., and whose cases were reported by the judge by whom they had been committed as worthy of commiseration. The mediation of Privy Councillors would be apt to express itself in language difficult to resist, and was sure to be regarded by the creditors as an attack upon their legal rights. “What care I,” said one who was summoned to give account of his harshness, “for the King or his Commissioners, for they have no power to give away my debt? … Unless the commission be confirmed by Act of Parliament, I will go when I list and come when I <164>list, nor never a messenger in England shall make me come but when I list.”[232]
Still more sweeping was the appointment of commissioners to see that the laws for the relief of the poor were duly carried out. Jan. 5.Commission for the relief of the poor.The country justices of the peace were charged, doubtless with truth in many instances, with neglecting their duties where their interests were concerned. Few, it was said, dared complain of the great landowners of their neighbourhood. ‘Poor people’ had once been better relieved than now they were. Such abuses were to continue no longer. Money bequeathed for charitable uses was to be applied to the purposes for which it had been given. Rogues and vagabonds were to be punished, alehouses to be kept in good order, children without visible means of subsistence to be put out as apprentices, and those who had fallen into distress to be provided with support. The justices were ordered to report from time to time the result of their labours; and in this way a check was put upon the tendency of the local powers to slacken in their efforts for the public good.[233]
Such measures on the part of the Government may serve as an indication that there were some at least in the Council who, in their quarrel with the aristocracy, were anxious to fall back upon an alliance with the people. It was hardly likely that their good deeds in this direction would weigh very heavily in the balance. When the whole state of society is rotten, when the upper classes use the superiority of their position freely for oppression, a Government may deservedly rise to power by substituting the despotism of one for the tyranny of many. Such had been the cause of the extraordinary powers acquired by the Tudor sovereigns at the beginning of the sixteenth century. But it was only by the grossest exaggeration that anything of the kind could be apprehended in the reign of Charles. If <165>justices of the peace were sometimes ignorant or harsh, if country gentlemen were sometimes violent or oppressive, the evil was not sufficiently widely spread to call for so drastic a remedy. There was nothing to show that the propertied classes would fail as a body to respond to a demand from the Government that justice should be done.
One instance had not long before occurred in which all the efforts of the Government would have proved futile to avert in- justice July 10.The Huntingdon Charter.without local co-operation. In the summer of 1630 a new charter was granted to the borough of Huntingdon.[234] A dislike of popular action prevailed at Court, and at the petition, it was said, of the burghers themselves, the rule of the town was handed over to a mayor and twelve aldermen appointed for life, in the first instance by the King himself, and authorised to fill up all future vacancies in their own body. The change seems to have been made with Cromwell’s consent,[235] and he himself was named one of the three justices of the peace for the borough. If, however, Cromwell Cromwell’s objections.did not care much for democratic theories, he was easily moved to anger by injustice, especially by injustice to the poor. He saw that under the new charter the aldermen might deal as they pleased with the common property of the borough, and in pointing out the hardship thus entailed upon the less prominent members of the community, he spoke roughly to Robert Barnard, the new mayor, who had been the prime instigator of the change. A complaint was quickly Nov. 26.He is summoned before the Council.carried to London, and Cromwell was summoned before the Council. In the end the matter was referred to the arbitration of the Earl of Manchester, whose brother was now the owner of Hinchinbrook. Manchester was not likely to be prejudiced in Cromwell’s favour, but December.His objections admitted.he sustained his objections in every point, and ordered that care should be taken to guard against the risk which he had pointed out. On the other hand, Cromwell acknowledged that he had ‘spoken in heat <166>and passion,’ and begged that his angry words might not be remembered against him.[236] A few weeks later Cromwell withdrew from Huntingdon, selling his property, and renting lands near St. Ives. It is possible that some very prosaic motive may have influenced him in making the change; but it may be that he found that his influence was at an end in a town the governors of which he had successfully opposed.
It is hardly possible for a Government to break loose from popular control without falling into financial difficulties. Sooner or later Financial difficulties.it is certain to engage in enterprises the expenses of which the nation is unwilling to meet, and which necessitate the imposition of taxation the levy of which gives rise to discontent out of all proportion to the burthen imposed. In Weston, however, Charles had a minister who would put off the evil day as long as possible. He had no fancy for bold and startling remedies, and would rather submit to a deficit than resort to new and unpopular schemes. Yet even Weston was unable to avoid doing something. Ever since the dissolution, he had been engaged in meeting the most pressing debts of the Crown with the help of the subsidies which had been voted in 1628. Still the creditors cried for more. There were claims arising from the expenditure of Rhé, from the expedition of Stade, and even from the Cadiz voyage. A debt of 40,000l. was owing to the Earl of Holland. A debt of 42,000l. was owing to the Earl of Carlisle. Carlisle was put off with a grant of fines to be paid by persons who had encroached upon the King’s landed property,[237] and which would bring him in a few hundred pounds annually for some time to come. Holland had to content himself with promises[238] which several years after remained unfulfilled. But the mass of creditors could not be so dealt with, and it was absolutely necessary, if Charles was not to acknowledge himself a bankrupt, that either <167>Parliament should be summoned, or that resort should be had to some unusual mode of obtaining money.
Of all men Charles was the least likely to perceive the risk attending upon the revival of obsolete but technically legal forms of levying money. If, however, Jan. 28.Composition for knighthood.recourse was to be had to any such measures, the one which was actually adopted was probably open to fewer objections than any other. No lawyer doubted that the King had the right to summon such of his subjects as were owners of an estate worth 40l. a year to receive knighthood. No lawyer doubted that he had the right of fining them if they neglected or refused to obey the summons, and though this right had not been put in force for more than a century, it could not be said that the King was asking for anything illegal. The first demand was made in January 1630.[239] It was some time before those who were asked to pay could be convinced that Charles was in earnest. In July July 13.it was thought necessary to appoint commissioners to receive compositions. Up to Michaelmas, however, only 13,000l. had been thus brought in. The judges then came to the aid of the Government. In August the Barons of the Exchequer pronounced the King’s right to be undoubted, and 1631.Feb. 7.in the following February they overruled a series of special objections on points of form. Payment could no longer be avoided. By Michaelmas 1631, 115,000l. had been collected, and much more was still to come.[240]
Charles was evidently determined to put in force his legal rights, and he doubtless persuaded himself that nothing more could be demanded from him than conformity to the requirements of the law as interpreted by the judges. To the court which vindicated his right to the compositions for knighthood he was also indebted for a support which was at least practically sufficient Tonnage and poundage.to enable him to levy tonnage and poundage. Vassall, who had refused to pay the imposition on currants, was told by the Court of Exchequer that in the <168>preceding reign the court had decided that imposition to be due, and June 5.Vassall’s case.its decision was not to be departed from. He was therefore to pay the duty. Vassall sturdily replied that he would have nothing to do with the currants under such circumstances. ‘The order did not constrain him to fetch them away, and he would let them lie where they were.’ He was at once committed to custody for contempt of the court; and the judges were at last obliged to order the sale of the currants without the intervention of their owner.[241] Chambers, indeed, pleaded in vain that the wide issues raised by his case might be brought to a hearing. His case was postponed from time to time, and in the end he was forced to pay the duties without any special order of the court.
Those who still continued to resist payment were no longer assured of the support of their fellow-merchants. Before the year 1630 came to an end, General resistance dies out.a treaty of peace was signed with Spain. Trade revived with the cessation of hostilities, and the mass of persons engaged in commerce were indisposed to hold back from the pursuit of wealth for the sake of a political principle.
[171] Prynne, Canterbury’s Doom, 163.
[172] I suppose this is the meaning of ‘si his artibus peream.’ The letter is in Latin.
[173] Laud to Vossius, July 14, Works, vi. 265.
[174] Works, iv. 59.
[175] Works, iv. 60.
[176] Works, iii. 210.
[177] Cosin’s Correspondence, i. 155. Acts of the High Commission, App. A. (Surtees Society). Much correspondence is scattered through the State Papers. The first letter from the King to Howson is dated Nov. 3, 1631, Tanner MSS. lxx. 128.
[178] Fuller, vi. 74.
[179] Brooke to Laud, Nov. 17, Dec. 1, S. P. Dom. clxxv. 69; clxxvi. 2; Laud to Brooke, Dec. 9, Laud’s Works, vi. 292; Brooke to Laud, Dec. 15, Prynne, Canterbury’s Doom, 167.
[180] Meade to Stuteville, April 17, Court and Times, ii. 71.
[181] Works, vii. 446.
[182] Laud’s Works, v. 4.
[183] Laud to Tolson, May 7, Laud’s Works, v. 15.
[185] Wentworth to Conway, Oct. 14, S. P. Dom. cl. 61.
[186] A proposition for his Majesty’s service, Rushworth, i. App. 12.
[187] Rawson to D’Ewes, Nov. 6, Harl. MSS. 383, fol. 90.
[188] Dudley to Foulis, May 8, 1614, Fortescue Papers, 6, and note at p. 11.
[189] The statement rests on the assertion of D’Ewes, who is not always to be trusted when he brings personal charges.
[190] Harsnet to Vane, Nov. 6, Court and Times, ii. 37. Dorchester to Edmondes, Nov. 7, 18, S. P. France. D’Ewes’s Autobiography, ii. 39. Examinations of Somerset and Bedford, State Trials, iii. 396.
[191] Dorchester to Edmondes, Nov. 26, S. P. France.
[192] Council Register, Nov. 24.
[193] D’Ewes’s Autobiography, ii. 41. After a decent interval orders were given that the catalogue should be continued in the presence of Cotton’s son. Council Register, July 23.
[194] The Queen to Madame de St. George, Strickland’s Lives of the Queens, v. 252.
[195] Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, 198. Soranzo’s despatch, June 4⁄14, Ven. MSS.
[196] Soranzo’s despatch, July 2, 16⁄12, 26, Ven. MSS.
[197] Hacket (ii. 96) records Williams’s expression of dissatisfaction with a phrase in this prayer, “Double his father’s graces, O Lord, upon him, if it be possible.” As printed in Laud’s Works, iii. 103, it is simply, “And when fulness of days must gather time, Lord, double his graces, and make them apparent in this his heir.”
[198] The greater part of the evidence on which this narrative is based is collected in the introduction to Heath’s speech in the Camden Miscellany, vol. vii. Some important corrections are due to information given me by Mr. James Christie.
[199] Sion’s Plea, p. 207.
[200] “ingentrie” as printed.
[201] Sion’s Plea, p. 240.
[202] Ibid. 337.
[203] Sion’s Plea, 344. I do not understand why former inquirers have failed to discover most of the passages here quoted.
[204] Leighton’s Answer, Sloane MSS. 41.
[205] Every individual payment of the fines is set down in the Receipt Books of the Exchequer. The only question is whether those not there mentioned were paid underhand. I think if this had been the case we should have heard something of it. There is, moreover, one instance in which, if ever, concealment would have been maintained. When the heavy fine of 70,000l. was set on the City of London in 1635, nothing was heard of any payment for some time. In 1638, however, there is a pardon for the whole sum (Pat. Rolls, 14 Charles I., Part 14). About the same time the Receipt Books (June 29) show a payment of 12,000l. from the City. The explanation is found in a Privy Seal of April 23 of the same year (Chapter House Records), in which the King states that he had promised the Queen 10,000l. out of this fine, and that he thought fit to make it 12,000l. Surely if the Queen’s grant passed through the Exchequer, money given to inferior persons would have been dealt with in the same way. See, however, Alington’s case at p. 251.
[206] Hudson’s Treatise on the Star Chamber, being written in James’s reign, is good evidence of past practice on this point, as well as on the point of the fines. “The punishment,” he writes, “is by fine, imprisonment, loss of ears, or nailing to the pillory, slitting the nose, branding the forehead, whipping; of late days, wearing of papers in public places, or any punishment but death.
“Fines are now of late imposed secundum quantitatem delicti; and not fitted to the estate of the person, so that they are rather in terrorem populi than for the true end for which they were intended when fine and ransom was appointed; the ransom of a beggar and a gentleman being all one, to the loss of the Crown and the great detriment of the Commonwealth.
“Imprisonment always accompanieth a fine, for if the party be fined he must be imprisoned, and there remain until he find security to pay his fine, and then must pay his fee to the Warden of the Fleet.
“Loss of ears is the punishment inflicted upon perjured persons, infamous libellers, scandalers of the State, and such like.
“Branding in the face and slitting the nose is inflicted upon forgers of false deeds, conspirators to take away the life of innocents, false scandals upon the great, judges, and justice of the realm.
“Whipping hath been used at the punishment in great deceipts and unnatural offences, as the wife against the husband, but never constantly observed in any case but where a clamorous person in formâ pauperis prosecuteth another falsely, and is not able to pay him his cost. Then, quod non habet in ære, luet in corpore.”
[207] Leighton’s Epitome, 75.
[208] Ibid. 70. Leighton, however, does not seem to have been present at this part of the proceedings, as he says, ‘I have set down his own words as they were related unto me,’ p. 73, misnumbered 65.
[209] Ibid. 78. The part of Laud’s speech given above seems just what he would have said. Other things attributed to him seem unlikely, and the story of raising the cap may have been invented or distorted. This book of Leighton’s seems to have been entirely overlooked.
[210] Leighton’s Epitome, 83. Meade to Stuteville, Nov. 27, Court and Times, ii. 79.
[211] “For, at the censuring of those that helped him to escape, some of the Lords said that, had he not made an escape, his Majesty was graciously <151>inclined to have pardoned all his corporal punishments.” Meade to Stuteville, Dec. 5, ibid. ii. 82.
[212] Ibid.
[213] The infliction of the second part of the sentence is noticed only in the forged entry in Laud’s diary (Rushworth, ii. 57). It is conclusive against it that Leighton says nothing of it in the Epitome. The sentence had not been executed when Meade’s letter of Dec. 5 was written. Court and Times, ii. 82. Mr. Christie has referred me, in corroboration of my view, to Granger’s Biog. Hist. 614, p. 21.
[214] Meade to Stuteville, Nov. 27, Court and Times, ii. 79.
[215] Leighton, in his Epitome, says that ‘a man of eminent quality told me that the book and my sufferings did occasion their combination; for the prelate seeing that the book struck at the root and branch of the hierarchy, and Strafford perceiving that the support and defence of the hierarchy would make him great, they struck a league, like sun and moon to govern day and night, religion and state.’ He also says that in the Star Chamber Wentworth ‘used many violent and virulent expressions against’ him.
[216] Winthrop’s Life of John Winthrop, i. 61.
[217] A spider, it should be remembered, was believed to be poisonous. Winter’s Tale, ii. 1.
[218] It is only by inference that the evident change can be connected with Winthrop’s marriage. He says (Life, ii. 171): “I was about thirty years of age, and now was the time come that the Lord would reveal Christ unto me. I could now no more look at what I had been, or what I had done, nor be discontented for want of strength or assurance; mine eyes were only upon his free mercy in Jesus Christ.” Winthrop was thirty on January 22, 1618. His father, writing on March 31, speaks of the marriage as already arranged. I am responsible for this and other conclusions on Winthrop’s character, but they are based on the facts as narrated in the Life, the memorial which has been raised by the devotion of the Hon. R. C. Winthrop to illustrate the deeds of his ancestor.
[219] Reasons to be considered, Life, i. 309.
[220] Life of Winthrop, i. 305. Palfrey, Hist. of New England, i. 283.
[221] Life of Winthrop, ii. 18.
[222] Lowell Institute Lectures, 237.
[223] Ibid. 86.
[224] Sermon vii., Cosin’s Works, i. 115.
[225] Meade to Stuteville, March 20, Court and Times, ii. 68.
[226] Proclamation, April 23, Rymer, xix. 160.
[227] “About 6 Jacobi the judges resolved in the Star Chamber and declared that these buildings were nuisances and against the law.” Notes in the hand of Secretary Coke, February (?) 1632, S. P. Dom. ccxi. 92.
[228] Proclamation, July 24, Rymer, xix. 177.
[229] Proclamation, June 13, ibid. xix. 175.
[230] Proclamation, September 28, ibid. xix. 116, 195.
[231] The whole course of the proceedings can be traced in the Council Register.
[232] Commission, December 31, Rymer, xix. 228. Affidavit of R. Steevens, August 28, 1632, S. P. Dom. ccxxxi. 48.
[233] Commission, January 5, Rushw. ii. App. 82. There is a copy of the orders in Lord Verulam’s Library, apparently printed for general circulation. The State Papers are full of the Justices’ Reports as long as Charles maintained his authority.
[234] Huntingdon Charter, July 10, Patent Rolls, 6 Charles I., Part ii.
[235] This seems placed beyond doubt by Dr. Beard’s certificate, printed in the Duke of Manchester’s Court and Society from Elizabeth to Anne.
[236] See the whole story in the Preface to Mr. Bruce’s Calendar, 1629–31, xiii.–xiv.
[237] Commission for Defective Titles, February 24, Rymer, xix. 123. The payments appear from the Receipt Books of the Exchequer.
[238] Inrolment of Privy Seals, April 9, No. 11, p. 167.
[239] Commission, January 28. Proclamation, July 13, Rymer, xix. 119, 175. The King to Mildmay, August 4, S. P. Dom. clxxii. 16. Proceedings in the Exchequer, February 5, 7, Add. MSS. 11,764, 53.
[240] Receipt Books of the Exchequer.
[241] Exchequer Decrees and Orders, viii. 269, 309 b; ix. 204 b; xi. 466 b.