<220>It is impossible to pass from the foreign to the domestic politics of 1631 and 1632 without being conscious of the immense gulf between them. 1631.Contrast between foreign and domestic politics.On the Continent great problems were presented to the human mind, and great intellects applied themselves to their solution with the pen and with the sword. Gustavus, Richelieu, and Frederick Henry tower above ordinary men. At home all things appear tame and quiet. English life seems to be unruffled by any breeze of discontent. It is only here and there that some solitary person puts forth opinions which, read in the light of subsequent events, are seen to be the precursors of the storm, only here and there that the legal action of the Government is put forth to settle controversies which, but for those subsequent events, would not seem to possess any very great importance. It was a time of preparation and development for good or for evil, which Charles, if he had been other than he was, might have guided to fruitful ends, but in which it was impossible for the man whose diplomatic helplessness has just passed before us to act with forethought or decision.
One great advantage Charles had. The lawyers began to rally to his side. In August 1631 Chief Justice Hyde died, little regretted, and August.Legal promotions.his place was taken by Richardson. The Chief Justiceship of the Common Pleas thus vacated was deservedly allotted to Heath.
To the surprise of all men the new Attorney-General was William Noy. His long Parliamentary opposition was <221>remembered, but the special opinions which had separated him from October.Noy Attorney-General.the leaders of that Opposition, like the special opinions of Wentworth, were forgotten. In 1628 he had supported Wentworth’s conciliatory policy. In 1629, though he had declared strongly for the Parliamentary view of the question of tonnage and poundage, he had opposed Eliot’s mode of action, and had expressed his dislike of the interference of the Commons with the law courts and of their claim to make the ministers of the Crown responsible to themselves. A link too between him and the Government was probably found in his dislike of Puritanism. He had never made pretensions to any grasp of constitutional law, and to one whose brain was a mere storehouse of legal facts, it may have seemed as easy to quote precedents on one side as on the other. Contemporaries appear rather to have amused themselves with the oddity of seeing a man so rugged and uncourtly in such a situation, than to have censured him as a turncoat. They told how he replied to the King’s offer of the post by asking bluntly what his wages were to be, and how when Coventry, seeing him proceed unattended to Westminster Hall like an ordinary lawyer, directed a messenger to accompany him, he drove the man away, telling him that ‘people would take him to be his prisoner.’[327]
Two months later, Lyttelton, who had also distinguished himself on the popular side, accepted the Recordership of the City. Though Dec. 7.Lyttelton Recorder.the office was not directly in the King’s gift, it was virtually at the disposal of the Crown. Other lawyers less distinguished were not long in following Lyttelton’s example in desisting from an apparently hopeless opposition.
The acceptance of Charles’s claims by the principal lawyers of the day may no doubt be ascribed, to a great extent, to the hope of Legal position of the Government.professional advancement. Other causes may also have been at work with them. Revolutionary as Charles’s government in reality was, he did not profess to have broken with the old constitutional system. He took his stand upon rights which had been possessed by <222>English kings for centuries, and if he disregarded other rights which had been possessed by English Parliaments, he could argue that these rights were necessarily in abeyance till the Commons consented to resume their proper place in the State. In truth there was much to induce a lawyer to cast in his lot with Charles rather than with the House of Commons. If only the judges could make up their minds to avoid challenging the King’s claim to supreme headship of the nation, and the consequences which he deduced from it, they were certain to be treated with the highest respect. Charles’s attack upon the independence of the Bench was directed against individuals. Though in the persons of Crewe and Walter, the whole legal profession had in reality been assailed, no other member of the profession need feel personally insulted. The House of Commons, on the other hand, had proceeded much more undisguisedly. It had openly found fault with a judicial declaration solemnly pronounced in the Court of Exchequer, and had summoned the Barons to give account of the reasons by which they had been guided. It is not strange if many lawyers preferred the silken chains of the Court to the iron yoke of a popular assembly not yet conscious of the necessity of submitting to those restraints which it was one day to impose upon itself in the hour of victory.
How far the lawyers who now took the side of Charles were led by these considerations we have no means of knowing. In Sir Symonds D’Ewes.the case of Sir Symonds D’Ewes, however, we are able to examine the feelings of a man who, without being a practising lawyer himself, had received a legal education, and whose Puritanical turn of mind would lead us to expect a decided antagonism to the King. A prim and acrid young man in his twenty-eighth year, he had made the study of legal antiquities the delight of his life, though he kept a human corner in his heart for his wife, the little lady who possessed, as he boasted, the smallest foot in England. As a proof of the tenderness of his affection, he tells how at the time of his courtship, he ‘could not find leisure once to visit the Court of Common Pleas, or continue’ his ‘course of reporting law cases, but devoted mornings and afternoons to the service and <223>attendance of’ his ‘dearest.’ Happily his two passions coalesced into one. The lady had so many ancestors that his ‘very study of records grew more delightful and pleasant than ever before,’ as he ‘often met with several particulars of moment which concerned some of those families to which she was heir, both of their bloods and coat-armour.’ His religious sympathies.The happiness of the antiquary’s domestic life was sustained and permeated by an abiding sense of religious duty and of religious sympathy, not the less real because it ran in narrow and sectarian channels. A Protestant victory on the Continent called forth a triumphant outburst of thanksgiving. A Protestant defeat thrust him into the depths of despair.[328]
That such a man should not have sided with Eliot's resistance to the Crown may indeed to some extent be accounted for His view of the late dissolution.by the smallness of his nature; but it is also some evidence of the amount of support on which Royalty was still able to reckon. The day of the late dissolution indeed, he pronounced to be ‘the most gloomy, sad, and dismal day for England that had happened in five hundred years;’ but he added his opinion that ‘the cause of the breach and dissolution was immaterial and frivolous, in the carriage whereof divers fiery spirits in the House of Commons were very faulty and cannot be excused.’ They ought never, he says, to have attempted to summon the King’s officers to their bar. The quarrel, he thinks, was the work of some ‘Machiavellian politics, who seemed zealous for the liberty of the commonwealth,’ but who sought to ‘raise dispute between the King and his people, as they verily feared that their new Popish adorations and cringes would not only be inhibited but punished.’[329]
The explanation is ridiculous enough, and looks like the suggestion of personal vanity or dislike. What is worthy of notice is the decision which the man of precedents and records gives against the claim of the House of Commons to seize the <224>supreme power into its own hands. As yet the lawyers and the antiquaries are on Charles’s side. A few years later he will have alienated both.
It is no wonder that the lawyers and antiquaries did not venture as yet to justify that claim. Even Eliot himself, who Eliot’s Monarchy of Man.had done more than any man living to give it prominence, hid from his own mind the full significance of his actions. In the Monarchy of Man, the political and philosophical treatise which was the result of his enforced leisure in the Tower, Eliot drew a picture of government as he conceived that it ought to be. Of all governments he pronounced monarchy the best. The King was to rule for the good of his subjects, not for his own private advantage. He was to conform his actions to the law. But beyond this there was a sphere particularly his own. He had to look to ‘the safety and preservation of the whole.’ In this was ‘involved a higher care and providence for prevention of those evils which the law by power or terror cannot reach, … the practice and invasion of their enemies, or sedition and defection in the subjects, as also for the operation of all good which industry and wisdom shall invent for the benefit and commodity of the kingdom, wherein, though the notions flow from others, princes only can reduce them into act.’ To all this Charles might fully have subscribed. Even when Eliot speaks of the way in which this power is to be exercised, the difference between his view and Charles’s is rather suggested than expressed. Charles had once said, that he was ready to allow to Parliament the right of counselling him, not the right of controlling him. Eliot here asks for no more. He dwells, indeed, upon the wisdom of Parliaments, and upon the safety which lies in taking advice. But he distinctly argues that it is ‘the true explication of a Senate and the duty it sustains, to conceive and form all actions and designs,’ ‘to give them preparation and maturity, but no further, the resolution and production resting wholly in the King.’[330]
Such an argument was no contribution to practical politics. <225>The King’s case was that Parliament had come persistently and hopelessly to a wrong conclusion, and that it threatened to make all government impossible till its own errors had been carried into practice. Eliot held that the conclusion come to by Parliament had been right, but he did not touch the question whether in such a case Parliament might in any way force its opinions upon the King.
If, however, Eliot had no particular medicine to offer for the sickness of the commonwealth, he could lay his hand, as Bacon had laid his hand before him, on the true source of the disease. It had all come, he held, because there had been no sympathy between the King and his people, because the King had not striven to understand their thoughts, or to feel for their grievances. To the misfortunes of the State he declared the art of government must now be applied, ‘so to dispose the several parts and members that they may be at peace and amity with each other, reciprocally helpful and assistant by all mutual offices and respects as fellow-citizens and friends, brethren of the same mother, members of one body, nay individually one body, one consolid substance; … and likewise to compose them to that concord and agreement as they may be at unity in themselves, rendering that harmony of the heavens, that pure diapason and concent,[331] and in that strength to encounter all opposition of the contrary for the public utility and good, the conservation and felicity of the whole. For these, because no single ability is sufficient, helps and advantages are provided,’ laws, ‘which are a level and direction,’ and a council ‘to be aiding and assistant … a supply of that defect which may be in one person by the abilities of more, that by many virtues so contracted one Panaretus might be formed, an all-sufficiency in virtue and fulness of perfection, the true texture and concinnity of a king.’[332]
Eliot had not many more months of life before him. “I have these three days been abroad,” he wrote to Hampden in March, “and as often brought in new impressions of the colds, <226>yet both in strength and appetite I find myself bettered by the motion. 1632.March 29.Eliot’s last letter.Cold at first was the reason of my sickness, heat and tenderness by close keeping in my chamber has since increased my weakness. Air and exercise are thought most proper to repair it. As children learn to go, I shall get acquainted with the air. O the infinite mercy of our Master! Dear friend, how it abounds in us that are unworthy of His service! How broken, how imperfect, how perverse and crooked are our ways in obedience to Him! How exactly straight is the line of His providence unto us, drawn out through all occurrents and particulars to the whole length and measure of our time! … What can we render? what retribution can we make worthy of so great a Majesty, worthy such love and favour! We have nothing but ourselves, who are unworthy above all; and yet that, as all other things, is His. For us to offer up that is but to give Him of His own, and that in far worse condition than we at first received it, yet, — so infinite is His goodness for the merits of His Son,— He is contented to accept. This, dear friend, must be the comfort of His children; this is the physic we must use in all our sickness and extremities; this is the strengthening of the weak, the enriching of the poor, the liberty of the captive, the health of the diseased, the life of those that die, the death of that wretched life of sin! And this happiness have his saints. … Friends should communicate their joys; this as the greatest, therefore, I could not but impart unto my friend.”
For six months the curtain drops on Eliot’s sufferings and upon his abounding joyfulness. Then he petitioned the Court of King’s Bench for October.He petitions for leave to go abroad.leave to go into the country for the benefit of his health. Richardson, the new Chief Justice, referred him to the King. Charles answered that the prisoner’s request was not sufficiently humble. Eliot would not save his life by an acknowledgment that he had erred. ‘Sir,’ — this was the utmost to which he could be drawn,— ‘I am heartily sorry I have displeased your Majesty, and having so said, do humbly beseech you once again to set me at liberty, that when I have recovered my health I may return back to my prison, there to undergo such punishment as God hath <227>allotted unto me.’ It was not in Charles’s nature to listen to such a petition. No hope in this life remained for Eliot. The dying patriot had no harsh words for him who was causing his death. Anger on account of his own sufferings was not a feeling which found entrance into his mind. What he had endured was to him but part of the great purpose of God working out the deliverance of His Church and of the English nation. His enforced leisure, as the motto prefixed to The Monarchy of Man testified,[333] had proceeded from the hand of God. The misery in the Tower, as the last petition testified, had been a punishment allotted by God. He had fought a good fight, he had wrestled hard for his fellow-countrymen, for generations yet unborn. As a testimony to those coming generations who would take up his work he had prepared his Negotium Posterorum, the unfinished record of his unfinished labours. One thing remained, to bequeath to his own family the memorial of his great struggle. When his descendants one after another took their place at Port Eliot they must not be allowed to think of him only as he was represented in the portrait taken in the days of early manhood. The dying man sent for a painter, bidding him to reproduce upon canvas the wan, emaciated features which were Nov. 27.Eliot’s death.all the reward of his heroic persistency. Then a few days later came the end. On November 27 that noble and unconquered spirit passed away from amongst living men.
The life of Gustavus had ended in far other fashion but three weeks before. In the main the task of the two men was the same, to defend Eliot and Gustavus.the living spirit of nations against the pressure of misinterpreted legal obligations. Charles had heard of the death of Gustavus with a feeling of relief. When Eliot died the feeling of relief was tinged with Charles refuses leave to transport the body to Port Eliot.rancorous animosity. To Charles, Eliot was but a factious and unprincipled rebel who had murdered Buckingham with his tongue, and who would have pulled down the throne itself if it had been in his power. He drily refused a request from the son of his deceased <228>prisoner, that he might convey his father’s mortal remains to rest at Port Eliot, where he had been loved and honoured in his life. ‘Let Sir John Eliot,’ wrote the King on the petition, ‘be buried in the church of that parish where he died.’
The dust of the first of England’s Parliamentary statesmen lies unnoticed and undistinguishable amongst that of so many others, none more noble than himself. The idea for which he lived and died was the idea that the safest rule of government was to be found in the free utterance of the thoughts of the representatives of the people. He was the martyr, not of spiritual and intellectual, but of political liberty. He had confidence in the common sense of ordinary citizens, not indeed to govern directly, but to call in question those who were guilty of crime or mismanagement, and to insist that the direction of affairs should be entrusted to purer or abler hands.
It is not the punishment inflicted, but the character of the victim, which constitutes the martyr. Eliot’s sufferings have Valentine and Strode remain in prison.never been forgotten; but, till a very recent time, posterity had entirely forgotten that two of his companions in misfortune, Valentine and Strode, resisted as firmly as he did, the temptation to buy liberty by subservience, and remained in prison till the Short Parliament was summoned, more than seven years after Eliot’s death.[334]
What the House of Commons was to Eliot, the King’s authority was to Wentworth. He had no confidence in the 1631.Wentworth in the North.common sense of ordinary citizens. With him, government was a question of ability and authority. “It is a chaste ambition if rightly placed,” he said afterwards when he was put upon his defence, “to have as much power as may be, that there may be power to do the more good in the place where a man lives.”[335] When his enemies brought him to bay, they had much to say about the illegality of the Court over which he presided, and of its incompatibility with the ordinary legal system of the country. They had no charge to bring of personal injustice against Wentworth, <229>except so far as masterful dealing with those who resisted his own authority and the King’s might count for injustice.
It was perhaps not altogether a matter of accident that whilst the West and South of England produced the warmest The North and South.defenders of the predominance of Parliament, the warmest defender of the King’s authority should come from the North. Beyond the Trent, government by the strong hand was far more needed than it was in Hampden’s Buckinghamshire or Eliot’s Cornwall. Old men could still remember the day when the Northern earls burnt the Bibles in Durham Cathedral and laid siege to Elizabeth’s representative in Barnard Castle. Those northern shires were still the stronghold of recusancy, and, except in the south of Yorkshire, where a scanty manufacturing population gathered in Leeds, Bradford, and Sheffield, poverty was great, and the power of the gentry was great in consequence. The gentry themselves were far less politically advanced than in the South of England, and banded themselves together from the consideration of social ties and the memory of ancient feuds rather than from any difference of ideas on affairs of State. In looking upon the rule of the gentry as synonymous with the predominance of faction, Wentworth was but transferring to the whole of England an inference which might fairly be drawn from the condition of his native county. He knew well enough how little of public virtue had given him the victory over his rival Savile in the electoral conflicts of his earlier life.
In returning to Yorkshire, therefore, as Lord President of the North, Wentworth had to encounter a personal as well as a political opposition. Wentworth insulted by Bellasys.One of those who grudged him his new honours was Henry Bellasys, the son of Lord Fauconberg, a young man of haughty disposition and uncontrollable temper. Coming one day into the hall in which Wentworth was sitting in full council, he neglected to make the customary reverence to the King’s representative, and when at the close of the business the President left the room, he alone of all who were present, kept his head covered.
Bellasys was sent for by the Privy Council, to answer for his offensive conduct. He showed as little good breeding in London <230>as he had done at York. He appeared before the Council with He is brought before the Privy Council.a large stick in his hand, and omitted to kneel, as the custom then was. He passed his rudeness off lightly. He asserted that he had no intention of showing disrespect to the President, but that, being in the midst of an interesting conversation, he had not noticed that he was leaving the hall.
The Privy Council took him at his word. All that was asked of him was that, in their presence, and again before the Council of the North, he should acknowledge that he had not intended any disrespect to Wentworth. Upon his refusal to make May 6.He makes his submission.any public declaration of the kind, he was sent to the Gatehouse. After a month’s imprisonment, he expressed himself ready to make the required submission if it was clearly understood to be offered to the Lord President’s place, not to his person. Wentworth, who was present, repudiated the wish to take cognisance of any personal offence. He had even asked his Majesty, he said, to excuse Bellasys from repeating the acknowledgment at York. As, however, the young man had chosen to draw the distinction, he could interfere no further on his behalf. Bellasys accordingly had to make the submission at York as well as in London, and received, at some cost to himself, a lesson in politeness.[336]
It would be interesting to know how far Wentworth was rewarded by the affection of the poor at the time when he was flouted by October.Death of Lady Wentworth.this unmannerly youth; but only very indirect evidence exists of the feelings of those who had most to gain by a prompt and vigorous execution of justice. The year 1631 was a year of sorrow to Wentworth. In September one of his children died. In October, his dearly-loved wife, the sister of Denzil Holles, ‘that departed saint now in heaven,’ to whom his heart turned in his hour of trial long afterwards, was taken from him. His affections were as strong as his passions, and the stern demeanour which he bore in the presence of the many melted into the tenderest attachment to the few whom he really loved and respected. His grief was the more abundant as he was himself the innocent cause of <231>his wife’s death. One day, when she was in an advanced stage of pregnancy, he stepped from the garden into the room in which she was. A large fly, which had settled on his breast, spread its wings and frightened the weakly, delicate lady. She was prematurely brought to bed of a daughter, at the cost of her own life. The widower had many companions in his grief. ‘The whole city’ had ‘a face of mourning, never any woman so magnified and lamented even of those that never saw her face.’[337] Such an expression of feeling would hardly have been manifested if Wentworth himself had been generally unpopular in York.
Whether Wentworth had succeeded or not in securing the regard of the lower and middle classes in the North, he had undoubtedly succeeded in 1632.January.Wentworth appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland.securing the regard of the King. In January 1632 he was called upon, as Lord Deputy of Ireland, to face difficulties infinitely more alarming than any which he was likely to encounter in the North of England. As, however, he did not leave England for eighteen months, he had yet time to arouse and to bear down opposition amongst the gentry, whose submission to his authority July.Case of Sir D. Foulis.he was resolved to enforce. Sir David Foulis, a Scotchman who had received a large estate in Yorkshire from the liberality of James, was one of those who chafed against the strong hand which held him down. He had lately been compelled by Wentworth to pay a sum of money which he owed to the Crown, but which he had long retained in his own possession. Though he was himself a member of the Council of the North, he seized every opportunity of opposing its President. Wentworth’s zeal in exacting the compositions for knighthood enabled Foulis to make common cause with He attacks Wentworth.the gentlemen with whom that exaction was naturally unpopular. He said publicly that the people of Yorkshire ‘did adore the Lord Viscount Wentworth, and <232>were so timorous and fearful to offend his lordship that they would undergo any charge rather than displease him;’ and that ‘his lordship was much respected in Yorkshire, but at Court he was no more respected than an ordinary man;’ and that, as soon as his back was turned for Ireland, his place of Presidentship of the Council would be bestowed on another man. Then came a direct attack upon Wentworth’s personal honesty. Foulis asserted that he had put the knighthood fines into his own pocket. A few days later he took a fresh opportunity of aspersing the character of the President. Sir Thomas Layton, the Sheriff of Yorkshire, received orders from the Exchequer to levy the fine on the goods of a Mr. Wyville, who had already compounded with Wentworth. Wentworth interfered on Wyville’s behalf. He sent for the sheriff to come to him at York. Foulis urged him to refuse obedience. The President’s Court, he argued, had no authority over him in the execution of his office. It owed its authority simply to the King’s Commission. A mere justice of the peace held office under an Act of Parliament.[338]
These words touched the weak point in Wentworth’s position. The Court The Council of the North without Parliamentary authority.over which he presided was not established by any law. It had come into being by an act of prerogative in the days of Henry VIII. after the suppression of the Pilgrimage of Grace. Its powers had increased gradually, till there was little room left for the execution of the ordinary law by its side.
It may be that such a tribunal was needed in the North. A case occurred in Yorkshire in this very year which seems to carry us back to Lord Eure’s case.the Norfolk of the days in which the Paston Letters were written. Lord Eure, the possessor of an ancient barony, had fallen into debt, and had executed a deed July.surrendering his estate to feoffees in order that they might be sold for the benefit of his creditors. When the feoffees, fortified by an order from the Court of Chancery, attempted to take possession of the family mansion at Malton, he peremptorily refused them admission, garrisoned <233>the house, and stood a siege. Layton, who was still sheriff, discovered that he was absolutely helpless without Wentworth’s aid. Wentworth at once ordered cannon from Scarborough Castle to be brought up. It was not till a breach was made by these guns that Lord Eure submitted to the authority of the law.[339]
In consequence of the language used by Foulis, Wentworth had taken occasion at the Summer Assizes to point out that August.Wentworth’s speech at York.the King’s demand upon those who willingly paid a composition for omitting to take up their knighthood was only a third or a quarter of the sum which would be exacted as a fine by the Court of Exchequer from those who refused to compound. The little finger of the law was heavier than the loins of the King.[340]
Foulis was left to feel the weight of the loins of the King. He attempted indeed to seek an interview with Wentworth, but Wentworth Wentworth vindicates his position.refused to discuss with him in private a question which concerned the King’s service. “My Lord,” wrote Wentworth to Carlisle, “you best know how much the regal power is become infirm by the easy way such have found who with rough hands have laid hold upon the flowers of it, and with unequal and swaggering paces have trampled upon the rights of the Crown, and how necessary examples are (as well for the subject as the sovereign) to retain licentious spirits within the sober bounds of humility and fear. <234>And surely if in any other, then in the case of this man, who hath the most wantonly, the most disdainfully demeaned himself towards his Majesty and his ministers that is possible, so as if he do not taste of the rod, it will be impossible to have his Majesty’s Council here to be obeyed, and should I say less were to betray the trust my master hath honoured me with. I hear he cries out of oppression; so did my Lord Fauconberg too — your lordship heard with what reason or truth. Believe me, this man hath more wit, but his cause is so much the worse as he hath notwithstanding less to say for himself; in this nevertheless they are tied by the tails together, that both of them dared to strike the crown upon my shoulders, without being at all concerned in my own interest, or having any other part to play than such as innocence and patience shall suggest unto me. And truly give me leave to assure your lordship I have much reason to carry my eyes along with me wherever I go, and to expect my actions, from the highest to the lowest, shall all be cast into the balance and tried whether heavy or light. Content in the name of God! Let them take me up and cast me down. If I do not fall square, and — to use a word of art — paragon, in every point of my duty to my master; nay, if I do not fully comply with that public and common protection which good kings afford their good people, let me perish, and let no man pity me. In the meantime none of these clamours or other apprehensions shall shake me or cause me to decline my master’s honour and service, thereby to please or soothe these popular frantic humours; and if I miscarry this way, I shall not even then be found either so indulgent to myself or so narrowly-hearted towards my master as to think myself too good to die for him. … Only this I will protest to your lordship in the words of truth, I have been hitherto known to this gentleman only by courtesies. That I bear no malice to his person, or at all consider my own interests in this proceeding, which in truth are none at all, but simply the honour and service of his Majesty and the seasonable correcting an humour and liberty I find reign in these parts, of observing a superior command no further than they like themselves, and of questioning any profit of the Crown, called upon by his <235>Majesty’s ministers, which might enable it to subsist of itself, without being necessitated to accept of such conditions as others might vainly think to impose upon it. ’Tis true this way is displeasing for the present, lays me open to calumny and hatred, causeth me by some ill-disposed people to be, it may be, ill-reported; whereas the contrary would make me pass smooth and still along without noise; but I have not so learnt my master, nor am I so indulgent to my own ease as to see his affairs suffer shipwreck whilst I myself rest secure in harbour. No, let the tempest be never so great, I will much rather put forth to sea, work forth the storm, or at least be found dead with the rudder in my hands; and all that I shall desire is that his Majesty and my other friends should narrowly observe me, and see if ever I question any man in my own interests, but where they are only interlaced as accessories, his Majesty’s service and the just aspect towards the public and duty of my place set before them as principals.”[341]
Having failed to make his peace with Wentworth, Foulis next tried to curry favour with Charles, by offering to bring the gentry of the county October.Foulis offers to serve the King.to a better temper. He was ready, he said, ‘to lead and persuade others.’ He would ‘by his example much better the King’s service,’ whereas much harm might be done ‘by his disgrace.’ Wentworth’s indignation blazed up at once. With a grand impetuosity he Oct. 24.Wentworth protests.swept away the pretensions of any single man to offer terms to his sovereign. “Lord!” he wrote scornfully again to Carlisle, “with Æsop’s fly upon the axletree of the wheel what a dust he makes! Where are those he can lead or persuade? … Surely if he leave it to be considered by the best affected, their verdict will be, his Majesty shall contribute more to his own authority by making him an example of his justice than can possibly be gained by taking him in again. But this is an arrogance grown frequent now-a-days which I cannot endure. Every ordinary man must put himself in balance with the King, as if it were a measuring cast betwixt them who were like to prove the greater losers upon the parting. Let me cast then this grain of truth in, and it shall turn the scale. Silly wretches! Let us not deceive ourselves. The King’s service cannot suffer by the disgrace of him, and me, and forty more such. The ground whereupon government stands will not so easily be washed away; so as the sooner we unfool ourselves of this error, the sooner we shall learn to know ourselves, and shake off that self-pride which hath to our own esteem represented us much bigger, more considerable, than indeed there is cause for.”[342]
<237>The best, the highest side of Wentworth’s character stands here revealed. It had been the crowning evil of the days of anarchy which Wentworth’s struggle against the influences of wealth and position.preceded the establishment of the Tudor Monarchy, that wealth and high position had enabled men to bargain with the King, and to grind the faces of the poor by terrifying or influencing juries. It was one day to be the evil attendant upon the victory of the Parliamentary system, that the territorial aristocracy were to make use of the forms of the constitution to fill their own pockets at the expense of the nation, and to heap honours and rewards upon their own heads. Against such a degradation of the functions of the State, Wentworth struggled with all his might. The depositary of the national authority, he held, must be above all persons and all parties, that he might dispense justice to all alike. Unhappily for the great cause which Wentworth represented, Charles’s course was running counter to those national instincts upon which alone national authority can be securely based. It is not on Charles alone that the blame of failure must be laid. Wentworth himself had too little sympathy with the religious and political feelings of the prosperous and orderly South to be entitled to speak in the name of the whole of England, or to comprehend what a basis of authority might be gained by the admission that the complaints which had found so revolutionary an expression in the last Parliament were not without serious foundation.
Foulis was left to his fate. In the following year a sentence in the Star Chamber stripped him of the office which he occupied 1633.Sentence upon Foulis.under the Crown, fined him 500l., and imprisoned him in the Fleet. He remained in confinement till the Long Parliament came to set him free. Wentworth himself had urged the members of the Court to show no mercy in a case in which his own personal quarrel perhaps seemed to him to be merged in the public interest.
In addition to his conflict with the country gentlemen, Wentworth had to do battle with 1632.Case of Sir Thomas Gower.the courts of law at Westminster, which naturally regarded the special jurisdiction of the Council of the North with a jealous eye. On one case which arose he felt himself on <238>particularly strong ground. Sir Thomas Gower insulted the King’s Attorney in open court, and then took refuge in London. Wentworth’s officers met him in Holborn, and attempted in vain to arrest him. The Lord President appealed to the Privy Council. “Upon these oppositions,” he wrote, “and others of like nature, all rests are up, and the issue joined, as we conceive. A provincial court at York or none? It is surely the state of the question, the very mark they shoot at; all eyes are at gaze there, and every ear listening here what becomes of it: so as it behoves us to attend it, and clearly to acknowledge it before your lordships, that unless this court have in itself coercive power, after it be possessed justly and fairly of a cause, to compel the parties to an answer and to obey the final decrees thereof, all the motions of it become bruta fulmina, fruitless to the people, useless to the King, and ourselves altogether unable to govern and contain within the bounds of sobriety a people sometimes so stormy as live under it, which partly appeared in the late business of Malton, where, we dare without vanity speak it, had it not been for the little power and credit that is yet left us here, the injunction of the Chancery itself had been as ill obeyed, as little respected, as either our commission or sergeant in Holborn.”
Other questions of jurisdiction arose between the Council of the North and the Courts of Westminster. Persons Prohibitions.worsted in their suits appealed to the judges of the King’s Bench, who welcomed their complaints and issued prohibitions to stop the execution of their sentences. Wentworth utterly refused to pay any attention to these prohibitions. ‘As for the question of jurisdiction of courts,’ he wrote, ‘which indeed little concerns the subject, much more the Crown, and which it may restrain or enlarge from time to time as shall in his Majesty’s wisdom seem best for the good government of his people and dominions,’ he was well able to give satisfaction to the Council.[343]
Wentworth was clearly right in holding that it was not fit <239>to leave such matters to be settled by the judges at Westminster. Whether Jurisdiction a question for the supreme political power.exceptional jurisdictions were to be created or maintained was a question to be determined on broad political grounds rather than upon legal arguments. It was one moreover upon which the judges had clearly their own interests at stake, whilst it might very well happen that the interests of the community lay on the other side. At the present day new courts are created and their functions defined, not by the judges, but by Parliament, acting as the supreme political authority of the nation.
The real objection to Wentworth’s course lay elsewhere. Was the King, acting alone, the proper depositary of that power? In other words, Where was the depositary of that power?was he capable of acting in the real interests of the community, or not? Did he maintain the claims of the Council of the North as an exceptional jurisdiction, suitable to exceptional circumstances, or was his support of it merely a part of an impatience of control, of a desire to cast himself loose from the necessity of deferring to the ideas and opinions of his subjects. If the latter was the case, the Court at York would stand or fall with the good or ill success of Charles’s aims in the more populous and wealthy parts of the kingdom.
For the moment, Wentworth secured his wish. In January 1633 he left the North, to prepare for his removal to Ireland. 1633.January.Wentworth leaves the North.He retained his title of Lord President, and continued to exercise a general supervision over the affairs of the North. The particular question at issue was decided in his favour. Gower was sent back to York, and expiated his offence by an imprisonment of eighteen months. In March The new instructions.a new set of instructions was issued to the Council of the North, giving it the widest and most undefined authority, more especially by clothing it with all the powers of the Court of Star Chamber at Whitehall.[344] Wentworth afterwards declared that these powers were affirmed to be in accordance with the law by the legal advisers of the Crown; but it was evident that they would provoke discussion <240>and resistance if ever the existence of the great parent Court of Star Chamber at Westminster was seriously attacked.
In the North, Wentworth had far more to do with the opposition of the country gentlemen than with the opposition of the Puritans. 1632.Action of the Government in the South.In the South, the Government found more resistance from the Puritans than from the country gentlemen. The spirit of submission to the King’s authority was widely spread even amongst those who shared the feelings of the Parliamentary Opposition. It is true that the system of expecting men to assist in carrying out the orders of the Government whilst no pains were taken to consult their wishes or to conciliate their prejudices, was one which was likely to break down if any strain were put upon it. But as yet no strain had come, and it seemed as if Charles had no danger to fear in this direction.
An illustration of the bearing of the Government towards the gentry is to be found in a proclamation issued in the summer of 1632, June 20.Proclamation for leaving London.directing all gentlemen to leave London and to return to their houses in the country.[345] The judges were expressly ordered by the Lord Keeper to enforce obedience to it at the assizes. The King, said Coventry, had June 22.power by ancient precedents to send the gentlemen to their homes. They formed the principal part of the county organisation. In their absence there would be no one to preside over musters or suppress rebellions, no one to perform the duties of the justices of the peace, or to supply a higher element in the composition of juries. In London they only wasted their time. “Themselves,” said the Lord Keeper, “go from ordinaries to dicing-houses, and from thence to play-houses. Their wives dress themselves in the morning, visit in the afternoon and perhaps make a journey to Hyde Park, and so home again.” As the November.Sentence on Palmer.exhortations of the judges did not produce the desired effect, a Mr. Palmer, who had remained in London during the summer, was brought before the Star Chamber. He pleaded in vain that his house in the country had been burnt down, and that he had nowhere to live except <241>in London. A fine of 1,000l. was the only answer vouchsafed to his reasoning.[346]
If the feeling of the country gentlemen was one of dissatisfaction, that of the Puritan clergy was far more bitter wherever 1631.Limits of Laud’s influence.the hand of Laud reached. As yet, indeed, it did not reach very far. In his own diocese and in the University of Oxford he was supreme. To the rest of England he was able to issue mandates in the King’s name; but he could not personally see to their execution, nor could he engage other bishops to be very zealous in carrying his theories into practice. Practically, therefore, the Puritan was safe, excepting in certain localities. Those localities, however, the University of Oxford, the City of London, with the counties of Middlesex and Essex, were precisely those where Puritanism was exceptionally strong, and where a defeat would be most ruinous to it.
If the settlement at which Charles aimed by the issue of his Declaration, had been less onesided than it was in reality, it could not have secured peace for more than a very short time. Even if the contending parties had agreed to forget all about predestination, some other question would of necessity have arisen, about which they would contend as bitterly. When men are divided by opposing tendencies of thought, it matters little what is the actual point round which the storm of discussion gathers. Such a discussion is not to be judged worthy or unworthy of notice according to the subject by which it is provoked, or the temper in which it is conducted, but according to the intellectual and moral problems which are raised by it. There have been times when opposite views of the deepest problems of human nature have been called out by a dispute about the colour of a vestment, as there have been times when questions of infinite importance to mankind have been approached by men of the meanest intellects and the most wrangling temper.
In his anxiety to carry out the directions of the Church to the letter, Laud soon gave positive offence even to those of the <242>Puritan clergy who had submitted with more or less willingness to the King’s Declaration. Bowing in church.The Canons of 1604 had enjoined upon congregations the duty of expressing reverence by bowing their heads whenever the name of Jesus was uttered. Laud, however, went farther than this. He held it right that everyone who entered a church should bow in like manner, not, as he explained it, to the altar, but towards the altar as the throne of the invisible King in whose house the worshipper stood. No general law enjoined this practice, but it was inculcated by the special statutes of certain churches, and Laud sought to commend it both by exhortation and example.[347]
In January 1631 attention was publicly called to Laud’s views on the subject by his proceedings at the church of St. Catherine Cree, in the City of London. It had been lately January.The consecration of churches.rebuilt by the liberality of the parishioners. The Church of England had provided no form for the consecration of churches. In Elizabeth’s time there had been but little church-building,[348] and when the practice <243>again came into favour, individual bishops seem either to have omitted the ceremony altogether, or to have introduced a form of Precedents of consecration.their own devising. In 1616 Abbot set apart by a special form of prayer the chapel which formed part of the buildings which Alleyne, the player, had prepared at Dulwich for the college which he was about to found.[349] In 1620 Andrewes consecrated another chapel near Southampton, after a more ornate form of his own composition. With Laud, the authority of Andrewes was conclusive. He had recently been engaged, with the assistance of Buckeridge, in issuing to the world a collected edition of Andrewes’ sermons, and his whole life was an effort to carry out in a hard practical way the ideas which cast a gleam of poetry over the unworldly bishop. On January 16, accompanied by his official attendants, he appeared in full canonicals in Leadenhall Street before the church of Jan. 16.Laud consecrates the church of St. Catherine Cree.St. Catherine Cree, which had just been rebuilt. He adopted the form which had been prepared by Andrewes. After two Psalms had been sung by all who chose to join in them, he entered the church, and kneeling in the doorway, set apart the building for the worship of God. Passing from one end to the other he pronounced the church, with all its distinctive parts, to be consecrated.[350] Then followed other prayers and the Communion Service, Laud doubtless bowing low ‘towards the altar’ on the appropriate occasions.
No contemporary account has reached us to tell what <244>impression was made upon the bystanders. Eight years before an almost similar ceremony had taken place when Bishop Montaigne consecrated the neighbouring parish church of St. James’ in Aldgate, in the presence of the Lord Mayor and aldermen.[351] Archbishop Abbot himseif had taken part in the service, and there is no rumour of any objection having been made by anyone. A London crowd in 1631, however, was not in quite the same temper as a London crowd in 1623, and it may be that if it were now possible to examine some of those who were present at the consecration of St. Catherine Cree, better evidence than that of the two witnesses who drew so largely on their imagination before the Long Parliament might be found to show that some feeling of disapprobation was evinced.[352]
<245>In all matters connected with the construction and repair of ecclesiastical buildings Laud is to be seen at his best. In our time Laud’s buildings at St. John’s.he would have been in his place as the dean of a cathedral in need of restoration. His works at his own College of St. John’s at Oxford were forwarded with an ungrudging but measured and businesslike liberality which have to this day kept his memory green amongst a generation of students which has drifted far from his principles in religion and politics. No surveyor of works was a better judge of the execution of a contract or the correctness of an account than the Bishop of London. To such a man the ruinous condition of St. Paul’s was an eyesore not to be borne. He was scarcely settled in his see before he called The repair of St. Paul’s.upon the King to carry out the plans for the restoration of the church which had been made and abandoned by his father. In 1631 Charles visited the Cathedral, and appointed commissioners to gather money for the repair of the fabric. The money of the citizens did not flow in very freely. After two years only 5,400l. had been collected.[353] Laud, however, was not the man to allow the undertaking to sleep. He brought his own personal influence to bear upon the wealthy. He caused the Privy Council to put in motion the wide machinery of the justices for the peace to gather contributions from every county in England. The clergy were the special object of his appeals, and few liked to risk their chances of promotion by refusing to carry out his wishes.[354] Something, however, must be allowed for the <246>growing zeal for the building and adornment of churches, which was only encouraged by the jeers of such Puritans as thought it seemly to speak of the grand old fabric as ‘a rotten relic,’ and to argue that ‘it was more agreeable to the rules of piety to demolish such old monuments of superstition and idolatry than keep them standing.’[355]
Already preliminary steps had been taken. Houses built up against the walls not only concealed the architectural 1632.Houses removed.proportions of the great Cathedral, but threw obstacles in the way of a searching investigation into the causes of its decay. The houses had been raised, if Laud is to be trusted, on land belonging to the church in defiance of legal right. The Privy Council therefore issued orders for their speedy demolition, offering at the same time sufficient compensation for their value. Though some of the owners resisted the order, the Council stood firm, and before the end of 1632 the long nave stood exposed to view in its unrivalled proportions.[356]
Although complaints were afterwards made that the action of the Council was illegal, none of the complainants seem to have thought at the time of submitting their grievances to a court of law. Indeed it would hardly have been prudent for a private person to contest the King’s authority in a case so manifestly for the public advantage. In our own day powers would easily be obtained from the legislature to treat the owners of such houses precisely as they were then treated by Laud and the Privy Council.
It was only occasionally that churches required consecration or repair. 1631.January.Puritan feeling about bowing.The practice of bowing towards the east gave daily annoyance to the Puritan. The idea of God having a throne at all except in the hearts of men was abominable to him, and it was still worse to be told that that throne was an altar — a name which <247>he directly associated with idolatry and superstition. Prynne, as usual, was at once in the thick of the fight. His first antagonist was Controversy between Prynne and Widdowes.a certain Giles Widdowes, who had written in defence of the practice of bowing, and whom he scornfully attacked in a book characteristically entitled Lame Giles, his haltings. In one place Widdowes argued that men ought to take off their hats on entering a church, because it was ‘the place of God’s presence, the chiefest place of His honour amongst us, where He is worshipped with holy worship; where His ambassadors deliver His embassage; where His priests sacrifice their own and the militant Church’s prayer, and the Lord’s Supper to reconcile us to God, offended with our daily sins.’ “Ergo,” rejoined Prynne, triumphantly, “the priests of the Church of England — especially those who erect, adore and cringe to altars — are sacrificing priests, and the Lord’s Supper a propitiatory sacrifice, sacrificed by those priests for men’s daily sins.”[357]
Prynne was not allowed to have the last word. An Oxford writer named Page commenced a reply. It was evident that a May 31.Abbot’s interference.controversy about gestures was impending which was likely to prove as bitter as the controversy about predestination. Abbot imagined that he would be allowed, as Archbishop of Canterbury, to say something on the matter, and that the principle of abstinence from disputation which had been used against his own side would hold good against the other. “Good Mr. Page,” wrote Abbot’s secretary, “my Lord of Canterbury is informed that you are publishing a treatise touching the question of bowing at the name of Jesus, an argument wherein Mr. Widdowes foolishly, and Mr. Prynne scurrilously, have already, to the scandal of the Church, exercised their pens.” To keep this question on foot would be to foment ‘bitterness and intestine contestations.’ If Page had not been a mere theorist, living in a cell of his own, he would never have touched a subject ‘wherein the governors and chief pilots of the Church discern more harm and tempest to the Church than’ it was possible that one who was ‘unacquainted with <248>ecclesiastical estate and the well-ordering of it’ could ‘any way attain unto.’
Abbot forgot that he had to reckon with Laud, and that Laud had the King at his back. The University of Oxford had June 22.Laud represses Abbot.power to license books for the press whether the Archbishop approved of them or not; and at that University Laud was now supreme. Page was therefore encouraged to continue his work. His Majesty, wrote Laud, was unwilling that Prynne’s ignorant writings should be left unanswered.[358]
The encouragement to carry on July.Party feeling at Oxford.the controversy was likely to be more bitterly felt, as Laud was at the very time engaged in enforcing the King’s Declaration at Oxford with the utmost strictness. Party feeling was running high in the University. Preachers, not content with asserting their own views on the forbidden topic of predestination proceeded to vilify their antagonists as wantonly promulgating heretical opinions for the sake of Court favour. The Vice-Chancellor’s authority was openly set at naught, and he found no support in Convocation, which was still predominantly Calvinistic. Aug. 23.The King interferes.Charles himself intervened, and summoned the offenders before him at Woodstock. He ordered the preachers whose sermons had been complained of to be expelled from the University, and the proctors who had failed to call them to account to be deprived of their offices.[359]
Silence on controverted points of doctrine combined with encouragement to argue on one side alone of ceremonial dispute was Meaning of the course taken.the arrangement favoured by the Government. It is easy to see how Charles and Laud came to approve of such a solution of their difficulties. On the one hand, they regarded speculative theology as a mere intrusion on religion, and they had no confidence in the attainment of truth by the hot conflict of thought with thought. On the other hand, they were unable to understand that a ceremony which conveyed to their own minds a pious or innocent <249>impression, might be associated in the minds of others with thoughts which were neither pious nor innocent. The result was none the less deplorable. All that had been gained by opposition to the doctrinal intolerance of the Commons was thrown away. Under the show of impartiality in questions of doctrine, and doubtless with the firm conviction that impartiality had been actually attained, Charles had deliberately assumed the position of a partisan. Whatever vantage-ground he possessed in 1629 was surrendered in 1631.
Partial, however, as Laud’s administration was, he justified it to himself as an appeal to law against caprice. On a subject Laud’s view of conformity.the most difficult to confine within legal restrictions, the most spiritual and undefinable of all objects of human thought, he appealed simply to the strictest possible interpretation of the law of the Church. Even when the Prayer-book had been drawn up, and still more when the Canons had been voted, the ecclesiastical legislature had been very far from representing the currents of opinion which swept over the ecclesiastical body. It was notorious that in Laud’s own day the contrast between the opinion of Convocation and the opinion of the religious laity was still more striking. This contrast was no matter to Laud. It was no part of his belief that law ought in any way to conform itself to opinion. It was enough for him that it existed. The Canons and the Common Prayer-book were to be accepted by all the clergy. Those who objected had no such resource as they have at the present day. They could not pass from the church to the chapel. They could not address their countrymen on religious subjects even in private houses. They must conform to the least tittle, or abandon their position as teachers.
The utmost that can be said is that if Laud’s pressure was unremitting, it was not spiteful or violent. “Concerning some ministers,” Laud and the Puritan clergy.wrote a Puritan clergyman who had complied with Laud’s demands, “I am a witness of your patient forbearing them, giving them time again and again to consult thereabout with what conformable ministers they themselves thought best.”[360] Others, however, complained <250>bitterly at the sudden tightening of the string. “It is no easy matter,” wrote 1632.January.the despairing Vicar of Braintree, “to reduce a numerous congregation into order that hath been disorderly this fifty years, and that for these seven years last past hath been encouraged in that way by all the refractory ministers of that country. … If I had suddenly and hastily fallen upon the strict practice of conformity, I had undone myself and broken the town to pieces. For upon the first notice of alteration many were resolving to go to New England, others to remove elsewhere, by whose departure the burden of the poor and charges of the town had grown insupportable to those who should have stayed behind. By my moderate and slow proceeding I have made stay of some, and do hope to settle their judgment and abode with us, when the rest that are inexorable are shipped and gone.”[361]
Laud, in short, was a lawyer in a rochet, and that not a lawyer of the highest sort. He could understand the necessity of Laud’s respect for legality.conducting life in accordance with fixed rules. He could not understand that all existing rules were but the product of fallible human intelligence perpetually needing correction, perpetually halting in its effort to grasp the infinite life and diversity of nature.
Above all, the ill-feeling which his proceedings aroused was unintelligible to Laud. He could not endure to be misunderstood, or perceive that May 6.Bernard’s sermon at Cambridge.it was in the nature of things that his own misrepresentations of others should be returned in kind. One of those who paid the penalty for his too vivid indignation was Nathaniel Bernard. He was not a man of either reticence or prudence. Three years before he had startled his congregation by praying, “O Lord, open the eyes of the Queen’s Majesty, that she may see Jesus Christ, whom she hath pierced with her infidelity, superstition, and idolatry.” He now, in preaching at Cambridge, attacked those who went about to deprive the nation of God’s ordinances for His public worship; “whereby,” he added, “we may learn what to account of those amongst ourselves — if any such be, which is <251>better known to you than me — who endeavour to quench the light and abate the glory of Israel by bringing in their Pelagian errors into the doctrine of our Church established by law, and the superstitions of the Church of Rome into our worship of God; as high altars, crucifixes, and bowing to them, that is, in plain English, worshipping them, whereby they symbolise with the Church of Rome very shamefully, to the irreparable shipwreck of many souls who split upon the rock.”[362]
Bernard was fined and imprisoned by the High Commission. Of that Court Laud was the ruling spirit. Yet it must not be forgotten that The High Commission.Abbot was constantly in attendance, and was almost as energetic as Laud in his enforcement of conformity. In the only case affecting ceremonial in the records which have been preserved, and which reach from October 1631 to June 1632,[363] Abbot declared his opinion to be strongly against the right of certain parishes in London Matrimonial cases.to place seats above the communion-table. In questions relating to marriage the court struggled, against every kind of opposition, to uphold the standard of a high morality. The case of Alington’s case.Sir Giles Alington, who married his niece, was doubtless exceptional; but it needed all Laud’s firmness to put an end even to this scandal. Alington appealed to the Court of Common Pleas, and the judges of that court May.issued a prohibition to stay proceedings. The High Commission set the interference at naught. “If this prohibition,” said Laud at the Council table, “had taken place, I hope my Lord’s Grace of Canterbury would have excommunicated throughout his province all the judges who should have had a hand therein. For mine own part, I will assure you, if he would not, I would have done it in my diocese, and myself in person denounced it both in Paul’s church and other churches of the same against the authors of so enormous a scandal to our Church and religion.” In clerical circles the bishop’s firmness gave the highest satisfaction. “I know not,” wrote Meade from Cambridge, “what you will say in the country, but we say here it was spoken like <252>a bishop indeed.”[364] Alington’s fine was 12,000l., with a bond of 2,000 l., to be forfeited if he ever lived again with his niece as his wife. For him, at least, there was little mercy, and he actually paid no less than 10,000l. of his heavy fine, a sum which was placed at the disposal of the Queen.[365]
The court showed a special consideration for the misfortunes of injured women. “The law of England,” as an advocate pleading before it said, “is a husband’s law,” and many a time the commissioners interfered to enforce a separate maintenance for the victim of infidelity or brutality.
Excepting so far as the suppression of lectureships was concerned, there does not seem to have been any thought at this time of treating ordinary Puritanism as a crime; but anything Cases of Antinomianism.approaching to Antinomianism was put down with a strong hand. No man was to preach the doctrine of free grace in such a way as to lead his hearers to suppose that the commission of sin was a matter of indifference. A fanatic named Richard Lane was imprisoned for saying that through Christ’s grace he was above sin and needed no repentance, and clergymen who maintained the same opinion were deprived of their livings. Private meetings for prayers or preaching were June.The Separatists in Newington Woods.strictly forbidden. “We took another conventicle of separatists,” wrote Laud merrily, “in Newington Woods on Sunday last, in the very brake where the King’s stag should have been lodged for his hunting the next morning.”[366] Those who were captured were sturdy representatives of a sturdy sect. Brought before the High Commission, they refused to take the ex-officio oath to answer whatever questions might be proposed to them. They said that they owed obedience to none but to God and the King, and those who were lawfully sent by him. “You do show yourselves,” said Abbot, “the most ungrateful to God and to his Majesty the King, and to us the fathers of the Church. If you <253>have any knowledge of God, it hath come through or by us or some of our predecessors. We have taken care, under God, to give milk to the babes and younglings, and strong meat to the men of understanding. You have the word of God to feed you, the sacraments to strengthen you, and we support you by prayer. For all this what despite do you return us. You call us abominable men, to be hated of all; that we carry the mark of the Beast, that we are his members. We do bear this patiently, not because we have no law to right us, but because of your obstinacy. But for the dishonouring of God and disobeying of the King, it is not to be endured. When you have reading, preaching, singing, teaching, you are your own ministers. The blind lead the blind, whereas his Majesty is God’s Vicegerent in the Church. The Church is nothing with you, and its ministers not to be regarded; and you run into woods as if you lived in persecution. Such an one you make the King, to whom we are so much bound for his great care for the truth to be preserved among us, and you would have men believe that he is a tyrant; this besides your wickedness, unthankfulness, and ungraciousness towards us the fathers of the Church. Therefore let these men be put, two and two, in separate prisons.”
The idea of tolerating separate worship had not occurred to either party in the Church. Until that idea had made its way, Difficulties of Church government.the difficulties of governing the Church were almost insuperable. If the rule of the law were strictly enforced, many earnest and conscientious preachers would be put to silence. If it were laxly enforced, congregations would suffer from the mere vagaries of eccentric clergymen. It is noticeable that the only important case of irregular teaching, not Antinomian, which was brought before the court during the eight months over which the report extends, was that of Case of Vicars.John Vicars, vicar of Stamford, prosecuted, not by the bishop of the diocese, but by the inhabitants of the parish, with the town clerk at their head. Vicars had invited persons from other parishes to attend his sermons in words not complimentary to their own clergy. ‘They must have a care,’ he said, ‘to hear that minister that <254>preached the Word, and not those who brought chaff.’ His own preaching seemed very like chaff to many of his congregation. He had a theory that Christmas Day ought to be kept in September. He had peculiar views about married life, which he enunciated with such plainness of speech as to give offence even in that plainspoken age. He held meetings of preparation before the administration of the Communion, and in his sermons he spoke scornfully, with irritating emphasis, of those who abstained from attending them. He told his congregation that it was a sin to receive the Sacrament except upon the Sabbath-day. He had warned them that persecution was at hand. A specimen of the objurgations with which he ventured to interlard the exhortation in the Communion Service was given: “Thou son of the devil,” he cried out to one who presented himself before him, “thou art damned and the son of damnation. Get thee to the devil. Take hell for thy portion.” The High Commission does not deserve blame for removing this man from his ministry at Stamford. He was, however, upon promise of obedience, subsequently reinstated in the ministry, but not in his cure.[367]
On the whole, it would seem that as long as Abbot lived there was nothing done by the Court of High Commission Ecclesiastical cases in the Star Chamber and Exchequer.likely to give offence to moderate men of either party. We must look elsewhere for the two great ecclesiastical processes of the day, and even those processes aimed not so much at the suppression of any particular opinions as at the gathering up of all authority in the Church into the hands of the central government. Laud was rather sharpening the instrument of power than making use of it in any special direction.
In 1629 Henry Sherfield returned home to Salisbury from the Parliament in which he had represented the city with no kindly 1629.Sherfield at Salisbury.feeling towards bishops or ceremonies. He was recorder of the borough, and a member of the vestry of the parish of St Edmund’s. Like the great majority of the laity of his day, he had no objection to bring <255>against the services of the Church as he had been in the habit of seeing them carried out — that is to say, with some omissions. He had, however, been accustomed to kneel at the reception of the Communion, and had been active in punishing separatists. Together with his fellow-vestrymen he had a special grievance to complain of. The painted windows at St. Edmund’s.The windows of the church were of painted glass, and one of them contained a representation of the First Person of the Trinity as an old man measuring the world with a pair of compasses, and raising Eve out of the side of Adam.
It was easy to take offence at such a picture; and, though to most persons entering the church it was probably a mere piece of coloured glass and nothing more, there were relics of old mediæval superstitions still floating about under the shadow of the most graceful of English cathedrals. One Emily Browne bowed before the window as she passed to her seat. “I do it,” she replied to Sherfield’s remonstrance, “to my Lord God.” “Why,” said the Puritan lawyer, “where is He?” “In the window, is He not?” was 1630.Jan. 16.The vestry give orders to remove it.the answer he received. In February 1630 Sherfield brought the matter before the vestry, and the vestry directed him to remove the painting and to replace it by plain white glass. They did not, however, care to place on record the real motive of their decision. “The said window,” they explained, “is somewhat decayed and broken, and is very darksome, whereby such as sit near the same cannot see to read in their books.”[368]
The affair was not long in reaching the ears of Davenant, the bishop of the see. Davenant was regarded as the theologian of The bishop objects.the Calvinistic party in the Church, and had been one of the representatives of the King of England at the Synod of Dort. Nevertheless, he at once sent for the churchwardens of St. Edmund’s, and forbade them to carry out the order of the vestry.
Accordingly no action was taken in the matter. About Michaelmas, Sherfield was called by business to the neighbouring village of Steeple Aston. The vicar showed him over the church. The windows glowed with ‘painted images and <256>pictures of saints.’ Not far off a knight lately dead had left in his will September.Sherfield’s visit to Steeple Aston.a sum of money to put up windows representing ‘works of mercy.’ The mischief, as Sherfield considered it, was plainly spreading. “For my part,” he said to the vicar, “I do not like these painted windows in churches. They obscure the light, and may be a cause of much superstition.” He then spoke of the window at St. Edmund’s, and complained of the bishop’s interference.[369]
Sherfield returned to Salisbury with his mind made up. He had personally received no official notice of the bishop’s inhibition, and October.He breaks the window.he resolved to set it at defiance. Obtaining the key of the church from the sexton’s wife, he went in alone, locked the door behind him, climbed up on the back of a seat, and dashed his stick through the glass. In his vehemence he lost his balance and fell to the ground.
A Star Chamber prosecution was the result. The case was postponed till February 1633.[370] It was Noy’s first appearance 1633.Feb. 8.The case in the Star Chamber.as Attorney-General in an important State prosecution. He said something to show that Sherfield had acted independently of the vestry’s order; but the main scope of his argument went to urge that a vestry had no power to make such an order at all. It might make or mend seats, or place a reading desk in a more convenient position; but it was not in its power to carry out a change which implied a special religious view without the bishop’s consent. If every vestry could deal at pleasure with the fabric of the building in its charge, one church might be pulled down because it was in the form of a cross, another because it stood east and west. One man might hold that to be idolatry which was not idolatry to another. These differences of opinion would engender strife, and strife would lead to sedition and insurrection.
The Star Chamber unanimously concurred in Noy’s view <257>of the case; but there was much difference of opinion as to The sentence.the penalty to be inflicted. The lawyers — Coventry, Heath, and Richardson — were on the side of leniency; the bishops — Laud and Neile — were on the side of harshness. The sentence was at last fixed at 500l. and a public acknowledgment of the fault.
Though on the general question Noy’s argument was unanswerable, the objections of the lawyers in the court went deeper than The bishops and the lawyers.the lowering or raising of a fine by a few hundred pounds. It was well that the authority to remove such a window as had been removed by Sherfield should be in the hands of persons of larger views than the members of a parish vestry were likely to be; but it would be to little purpose to assign this authority to the bishops, if the bishops were to have as little sympathy as Laud had with the dominant religious feelings of the country. Works of art are worth preserving, but the religious sentiments of the worshippers demand consideration also. It was evident from the language employed by Coventry and the Chief Justices that, though they objected to the way in which Sherfield’s act had been done, they shared his dislike of the representation which had given him offence. Laud was so occupied with his detestation of the unruly behaviour of the man that he had no room for consideration whether his dislike was justifiable or not. He treated the reasonings of the lawyers as an assault upon the episcopal order. He told them that the authority of the bishops was derived from the authority of the King, and that if they attacked that, they would fall as low as bishops had once fallen. Yet though Laud carried his point in referring all questions relating to the ornamentation of churches to the bishop of the diocese, the objection against the figure which had attracted such notice at Salisbury was too widely felt to be treated with contempt. Charles ordered Bishop Davenant to see that the broken window was repaired at Sherfield’s expense, but to take care that it was repaired, as the vestry had before ordered, with white and not with coloured glass. Before long Sherfield made due acknowledgment of his fault to the bishop, but he <258>died not long afterwards, leaving the bill to be paid by his relatives.[371]
A few days afterwards a case of still greater importance was decided by the Court of Exchequer. In the beginning of the reign, 1625.The feoffees for impropriations.four citizens of London, four lawyers, and four Puritan clergymen of note had associated themselves for the purpose of doing something to remedy the evil of an impoverished clergy. They established a fund by means of voluntary contributions, from which they bought up impropriate tithes, and were thus enabled to increase the stipends of ministers, lecturers, and schoolmasters. Naturally the persons selected for their favours were Puritans, and Laud had early marked the feoffees for impropriations, as they were called, for destruction.
The first to lift up his voice publicly against them was Peter Heylyn, Laud’s chaplain and future biographer. In a 1630.July 11.Heylyn’s sermon.sermon preached at Oxford in 1630, he said that the enemy had been sowing tares. The feoffees were ‘chief patrons of the faction.’ They preferred those who were ‘serviceable to their dangerous innovations.’ In time they would ‘have more preferments to bestow, and therefore more dependencies, than all the prelates in the kingdom.’[372]
Laud took the matter up warmly. At his instigation, Noy exhibited against the feoffees an information in the Exchequer Chamber, 1632.Noy’s information.a court of equity in which the Lord Treasurer and the Chancellor of the Exchequer sat as judges by the side of the barons. The charge against the feoffees was that they had illegally constituted themselves into a body holding property without the sanction of the King. An argument of more general interest was that, instead of employing the money collected in the permanent increase of endowments, they had paid the favoured ministers or schoolmasters by grants revocable at their own pleasure. <259>They had already diverted the tithes of Presteign in Radnorshire to provide lectures for a church in the city of London, where the lecturers would be obliged to conform their teaching to 1633.Feb. 11.The sentence.the opinions of their paymasters. The court decreed the dissolution of the feoffment, and directed that all the patronage in their hands should be placed at the King’s disposal.[373]
If it were possible to look upon this sentence apart from the circumstances of the time, it would not be difficult to adduce arguments in its favour. Of all modes of supporting a clergy yet invented, their maintenance by a body of capitalists living for the most part at a distance from the scene of their ministrations, is, in all probability, the worst. There are, however, times when the most irregular manifestations of life are welcome, and in making his attack upon the feoffees Laud was not merely assailing the special system under which they acted, but was taking one more step in the work of suppressing a form of belief which was deeply rooted in the heart of the nation, and of setting aside the life and energy of individual initiative in favour of the cold hard pressure of official interference. The action of Charles, of Laud, and of Wentworth was all of a piece. Instead of finding their work in the control and guidance of the irregular and often ignorant action of individuals and corporations, they sought to substitute their own ways of thought for those of the generation in which they lived. They forgot that they too were but fallible mortals, and that if they had been possessed of infallibility itself, they would have been the first to learn that the path to excellence lay in the struggle and the aspiration, not in mute and unresisting obedience to the word of command.
The first two names on the list of the feoffees, those of William Gouge and Richard Sibbes, William Gouge.offered sufficient guarantees that no destructive influences were here at work. Gouge’s sermons at Blackfriars were preached in the <260>presence of an overflowing auditory, of very varying character. It was from his church that Leighton had stepped forth when he was seized by the pursuivants. It was in his church that Lord Keeper Coventry learned to do judgment and justice. Merchants, lawyers, scholars flocked to hear him. Strangers did not consider their business in London to be finished till they had heard the lecture at Blackfriars. Gouge’s life was a constant stream of benevolent labour, and many a man in the next generation could bear witness that the first seeds of godliness and virtue had been sown in his mind by one of his sermons.[374] Gouge did his best to satisfy Laud. He received his admonitions on account of some irregularities in the administration of the Communion with meekness. He detested, as he declared, those who despised authorities.[375]
Sibbes was a still more notable personage in the ranks of the moderate Puritans. The son of a Suffolk wheelwright, Richard Sibbes.he had been sent to a neighbouring school. His father grudged the expense, and fetched him home, saying that he would rather see him hammering at the forge than conning his book. The village clergyman and the village lawyer, however, had their eyes upon the hopeful boy, and sent him to Cambridge to be educated, making up by the help of friends the scanty sum which they had shamed the wheelwright into allowing him.
Ever since the days of Cartwright there had been a strong Puritan element at Cambridge. Perkins had handed on the torch of Sibbes at Cambridge.religious oratory to Bayne, and Bayne was the spiritual father of Sibbes. Sibbes early became a preacher in London. Then he returned to Cambridge. In 1609 he was chosen College preacher of St. John’s, and in the next year was 1610.Trinity lecture.invited to undertake the weekly lecture at Trinity parish church. In his hands the Trinity lecture became a great power in Cambridge. Men like Cotton, afterwards the light of New England, and Goodwin, the noted Independent divine, traced their spiritual generation to Sibbes. “Young man,” he said to Goodwin, “if <261>you ever would do good, you must preach the gospel and the free grace of God in Christ Jesus.”
The free grace of God, the loving kindness of a merciful Saviour looking down in pity upon each individual soul, and bidding it 1615.be of good cheer, was the message which Sibbes delivered to men. In 1615, for some unexplained reason, he was deprived of his lectureship.[376] In 1617, at Yelverton’s suggestion, 1617.Preachership of Gray’s Inn.he was chosen preacher to Gray’s Inn. There, men bearing the first names in England, Bacon, it may be, himself dropping in amongst his old companions, flocked to hear him. If the worth of a man is to be known by those who combine to honour him, Sibbes needs no further testimony. In 1626 he was chosen, at Usher’s recommendation, 1626.Sibbes returns to Cambridge.Provost of Trinity College, Dublin. Almost at the same moment he was elected Master of Catherine Hall. The choice between his old University and a removal to Ireland was soon made, and he took his place once more at Cambridge.[377] By the statutes of Gray’s Inn his preachership was vacated by the acceptance of office elsewhere; but the lawyers would not spare him, and he was allowed, by a special Act, to hold both preferments at once. Cambridge submitted once more to the charm of his fervid eloquence. St. Mary’s pulpit was thrown open to him. The church was so thronged that the parishioners had to draw up regulations to prevent their being thrust out of their seats by strangers.
Such a man was sure to come into collision with the Court. In 1627, together with Gouge and two others, he issued a circular letter Collections for the Palatinate.asking for alms for the exiles from the Palatinate. The four were summoned to the Star Chamber, and were reprimanded for this act of invitation to charity, which seemed likely to be more favourably received than the forced loan had been.
<262>Then came the trouble about the impropriations. Though Laud and the King might look askance at Sibbes’s work, they 1633.Becomes Vicar of Trinity.could not charge him with being a disturber of the peace. In November, Charles, anxious perhaps to show that he had no personal grudge against him, presented him to the Vicarage of Trinity, and about the same time the grateful Master of Catherine Hall contributed some glowing lines to a collection of Latin verses written in honour of the birth of the King’s second son, the future James II.
Such words were not mere flattery. Although there were doubtless many things in the Church which Sibbes regarded with His letter to Goodwin.grave dissatisfaction, he had no more wish than Gouge to cast off the ties which bound him to his countrymen. He dissuaded Goodwin from separating himself from the Church of which he was a minister in the most urgent terms. That Church, he wrote, had all the marks of a true Church of Christ. It had ‘begot many spiritual children to the Lord.’ As for ceremonies, even if it were admitted that they were evil, it would be a remedy worse than the disease to tear the Church in sunder on their account. He begged his correspondent to forsake his ‘extravagant courses, and submissively to render’ himself ‘to the sacred communion of this truly evangelical Church of England.’
That Church would never remain united unless its rulers knew Necessity of conciliation.how to conciliate such moderate opponents. They would have to conciliate others too, whose minds were cast in a very different mould. They would have to find room by the side of Gouge and Sibbes for Nicholas Ferrar and George Herbert.
Nicholas Ferrar was the younger son of a wealthy London merchant. Having received the rite of confirmation when only Childhood of Nicholas Ferrar.five years old, as the custom then was, the child slipped in unnoticed on a second occasion, and was twice confirmed. “I did it,” he said, “because it was a good thing to have the bishop’s prayers and blessing twice, and I have got it.” He was a studious youth, loving above all other books the Bible, and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. After a course of study full of promise at Cambridge, he travelled on <263>the Continent, where he attracted attention by the quickness of his observation and the retentiveness of his memory. At his return he found employment under the Virginia Company, and drew upon himself the notice of the leading statesmen of the day by 1623.Defends the Virginia Company.the vigour and ability with which he defended its charter when it was called in question in 1623. Elected to Parliament in the next year, he took part in the impeachment of Middlesex, who had roused his indignation by his attack upon the Company.
It was Ferrar’s last appearance in public life. He took no pleasure in the political and religious conflict which was evidently impending when Charles ascended the throne; and the plague which devasted London in that year gave the final impress to a determination which had long been floating in his mind. His widowed mother bought the manor of Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire. 1625.Purchase of Little Gidding.The once smiling fields had been long ago converted into pasture land, and the cottages of the tillers of the soil had disappeared. A single shepherd’s hut contained all the inhabitants of the estate. The manor house was in ruins. The church was used as a hay-barn and a pig-sty. Here mother and son met after a long separation. The Ferrars take possession.The young man invited his aged parent to take the rest which she needed in the house, ruined as it was. She refused to follow him. First, she said, she must give thanks in the house of God for his preservation from the plague during his stay in London. The church was full of hay. She pushed her way in as far as she could, knelt down and prayed with many tears. She would take no rest till all the available labourers had been summoned to clear the building.
As soon as the church was cleared, the old lady invited all her children and grandchildren to share her home. Nicholas was The Little Gidding community.ordained deacon by Laud. Preferment in the Church was at once placed at his disposal; but he had made up his mind to live and die at Little Gidding. Nothing would induce him even to take priest’s orders. All he wanted was to be the chaplain to the community — some forty persons in all — who had devoted themselves <264>to a special life in the service of God. There were prayers in the church twice a day, and four times in the house. Two of the inhabitants watched all night, to read the Psalms through from beginning to end. Ferrar drew up a harmony of the Scriptures, and this, together with narratives of history and adventure, more especially his old favourite, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, was read from time to time. Besides those who lived in the house, he had his Psalm-children, as he called them, who came in from the neighbouring parishes to receive, in addition to a breakfast, a penny for every Psalm that they could repeat by heart. He had schoolmasters for his nephews and nieces, and the children who lived near were welcomed to share in the instruction given. Everyone there was obliged to learn some useful work, and the art of bookbinding was carried to great perfection. Once a month, on Communion Sunday, the servants of the establishment sat down at table with the other members of the community. Two of Ferrar’s nieces devoted themselves to perpetual virginity, and all were obliged to remain celibate as long as they continued at Little Gidding. But there was no compulsory injunction on the subject, and not a few who passed many years with the Ferrars, left them without reproach to enter into marriage.
Such an institution naturally gave rise to strange reports. Ferrar, it was said, was a Roman Catholic in disguise. He Reports about the establishment.repelled the charge with energy. One day he was asked what he would do if mass were to be celebrated in his house. “I would build down the room, and build it up again,” was his reply. To another who told him that his proceedings ‘might savour of superstition and popery,’ he answered quietly, “I as verily believe the Pope to be Antichrist as any article of my faith.”
Visitors brought nothing but good reports away. Williams, in whose diocese Little Gidding was, Visit of Williams.expressed his warm approbation, more especially perhaps as the communion-table was placed east and west, and not along the wall.
In Ferrar the devotional spirit of the age reached the extreme limits possible within the bounds of Protestantism. Life <265>at Little Gidding was preserved from all moral questionings by Character of the life chosen by Ferrar.submission to external rule and order. Those who were always praying or working had not much time left for thought. Each day passed away as like the last as possible. Ferrar sought but a harbour from the changes of life. There was no striving after an ideal perfection, no fierce asceticism or self-torture in him. His life was the application to himself of that dislike of mental and moral unrest which was at the bottom of Laud’s disciplinarian efforts. That which existed acquired a sacredness in his eyes merely because it existed. He was once asked why he did not place a crucifix in his church. “If there had been any when we came,” he answered, “I would not have pulled it down except authority had commanded; so neither will I set up anything without command of authority.” He at least would be free as long as possible from the responsibility of decision.[378]
It was not by such negative virtues that the old monasticism had gained a hold on the mediæval world. Men came to look at Ferrar’s community, wondered, admired, and turned away George Herbert.to their own activities. George Herbert had much in common with Ferrar; but he never could have arrived at this perfect quiescence of spirit. A younger brother of that Edward Herbert who had been created by Charles Lord Herbert of Cherbury, 1609.he was fired, at an early age, with an ambition to rise in the service of the State. At Westminster and Cambridge he was noted for George Herbert at Cambridge.1612.industry and intelligence, wrote lines, like so many others, to the memory of Prince Henry, and flashed before the University as the author of a series of Latin poems in defence of the ceremonies of the Church against Andrew Melville. If the reader misses in these sarcastic poems any manifestation of high spiritual devotion, they need not, on that account, be set down as a mere offering upon the altar of courtiership. Herbert was a ceremonialist by nature. The outward sign was to him more than to most men the expression of the inward fact. His religion fed itself upon that <266>which he could handle and see, and that quaintness which strict criticism reprehends in his poetry, was the effect of his irresistible tendency to detect a hidden meaning in the most unexpected objects of sense.
In these Cambridge days Herbert’s mind was distracted between two different aims, which yet appeared to him to be but one. Marked out by his character for a peaceful devotional life, and absolutely unfitted for the turmoil of political controversy, his youthful spirits were too buoyant to allow him to acknowledge at once his inability to play a stirring part in the world. One day he was writing religious poetry. Another day he was canvassing for preferment, and he contrived to persuade himself that preferment would enable him to help on 1619.Is chosen Public Orator.the cause of religion better than writing poetry. In 1619 he succeeded Nethersole as Public Orator of the University. The position delighted him as giving him precedence next to the doctors, ‘and such like gaynesses, which will please a young man well.’ On the other hand, he reminded himself that progress in the study of divinity was still to be his main object. “This dignity,” he wrote, “hath no such earthiness in it but it may very well be joined with heaven; or if it had to others, yet to me it should not, for aught I yet know.”
Herbert’s efforts after worldly distinction ended in failure. He had good friends at Court. Hamilton, Lennox, and James himself loved him well; but he was too honest to sink to the lower arts of a courtier’s life, and he had not the practical abilities of a statesman. 1623.His oration to Charles.The oration with which he welcomed Charles on his return from Spain was an evidence of the sincerity with which he could not help accompanying flatteries neither more nor less absurd than those which flowed unmitigated from the pens of so many of his contemporaries. It was no secret that the Prince had come back bent upon war. Herbert disliked war, and he could not refrain from the maladroit compliment of commending Charles for going to Madrid in search of peace. All that he could bring himself to say was that, as war was sometimes necessary, he would be content to believe any war to be necessary to <267>which James should give his consent. If Herbert bowed down, it was not to the Prince whom it was his interest to captivate, but to the peaceful King who had maintained the ceremonies of the Church against their assailants.
A change came over Herbert’s life. His three patrons — Hamilton, Lennox, and James — died. From Charles, rushing headlong into war, 1625.He resolves to take orders.the lover of peace had no favour to expect. His health, always feeble, broke down. In this time of depression he formed a resolution to take orders, to become, as he said, one of ‘the domestic servants of the King of heaven.’ The clerical office was not in those days held in very high esteem. A friend dissuaded him from entering upon ‘too mean an employment, and too much below his birth and the excellent abilities and endowments of his mind.’ “Though the iniquity of the late times,” he answered, “have made clergymen meanly valued, and the sacred name of priest contemptible, yet I will labour to make it honourable, by consecrating all my learning and all my poor abilities to advance the glory of that God that gave them, and I will labour to be like my Saviour by making humility lovely in the eyes of all men, and by following the merciful and meek example of my dear Jesus.”
Nevertheless, Herbert hesitated long. He was still a layman when Williams presented him to the prebend of Leighton Ecclesia 1626.Leighton Ecclesia.in the diocese of Lincoln. The church was in ruins, and Herbert signalised his connection with it by collecting money from his wealthy friends for its repair. As in Cosin’s church at Brancepeth and Ferrar’s at Little Gidding, the reading-desk and the pulpit were placed side by side, and both were made of the same height, in order that it might appear that ‘they should neither have a precedency or priority of the other; but that prayer and preaching, being equally useful, might agree like brethren and have an equal honour and estimation.’
Four years after his acceptance of 1630.Herbert at Bemerton.preferment in the Church, Herbert was still a layman. In 1630, at the request of the head of his family, the new Earl of Pembroke, he was presented by the King to the Rectory <268>of Fugglestone and Bemerton, two hamlets lying between Salisbury and Wilton. Stories were afterwards told of his reluctance to undertake a duty which he held to be too high for his powers, and it is said that he only gave an unwilling consent on Laud’s representation ‘that the refusal of it was a sin.’ It was doubtless at this time that he received ordination, either from Laud, or from Davenant his diocesan.[379]
The charm of Herbert’s life at Bemerton lies in the harmony which had arisen between the discordant elements of his Cambridge life. His life and poetry.The love of action, which was wanting in Ferrar, is still there. “A pastor,” he declares, “is the deputy of Christ for reducing of man to the obedience of God.” But it has blended with a quiet meditative devotion, and out of this soil spring the tenderest blossoms of poetic feeling. His own life was a daily sacrifice, but it was a sacrifice, made not by the avoidance, but by the pursuance of work. For him the sacraments and observances of the Church had a fellowship with the myriad-sided sacrament of nature. As the bee hummed and the tree sent forth its branches, they conveyed to his pure and observant mind the inward and spiritual grace which was to him a comfort and a strength. The things of nature formed a standing protest against idleness. “Every gift of ability,” he said, “is a talent to be accounted for.” There was to be no mere crucifying of the flesh for its own sake, no turning of the back upon the world as evil. His sermons were filled with homely illustrations, and he took good care to explain to his parishioners the meaning of the prayers which they used. His own life was the best sermon. His predecessor had lived sixteen or twenty miles off, and had left the church in need of repair, whilst the parsonage-house was in ruins. The congregation was that of an ordinary country parish, long untaught and untended, and accustomed to regard <269>their rector as a mere grasper of tithe corn. The change produced by Herbert’s presence was magical. Wherever he turned he gathered love and reverence round him, and when his bell tolled for prayers the hardworked labourer, weary with the toils of the day, would let his plough rest for a moment, and breathe a prayer to heaven before resuming his labour.
The dominant note of Herbert’s poetry is the eagerness for action, mingled with a sense of its insufficiency. The disease which Pathos of his poetry.wasted his body filled him with the consciousness of weakness, and he welcomed death as the awakening to a higher life. Sometimes the sadness overpowers the joy, as in those pathetic lines:—
“Life is a business, not good cheer,Ever in wars,The sun still shineth there or here;Whereas the starsWatch an advantage to appear.“Oh that I were an orange tree,That busy plant!Then should I ever laden be,And never wantSome fruit for him that dressed me.“But we are still too young or old;The man is goneBefore we do our wares unfold;So we freeze on,Until the grave increase our cold.”
To Herbert the life of the orange tree was the best; the life of strenuous restfulness which brings forth fruit without effort. He lived 1633.Herbert’s death.less than three years at Bemerton. When he died he left behind him a name which will never perish in England.
Herbert and Ferrar were instinct with the feminine tendencies of spiritual thought. The masculine energy of life is to be Tendencies of thought.sought elsewhere. The self-reliant strength is with the Puritan. The voices of Sibbes and Gouge are raised in great cities. Wherever men are thickest their prevailing eloquence is heard. Herbert and Ferrar allow the <270>waves of change to pass over them, glad if they can find a refuge at last where they may, if but for a little time, be hidden from the storm. From them comes no note of the abounding joyfulness, the calm assurance of success, which breathes alike in the sermons of the Puritan divine, and in the firm conviction of the dying Eliot.
Even where there was much similarity in thought and expression, the two influences which were passing over England are Herbert and Milton on music.immutably distinguished by the passive or active part assigned to the individual human soul. Herbert dearly loved music. Twice a week he would shake off his daily cares by a walk along the banks of the river to Salisbury, to drink in delight by listening to the cathedral choir. It was for him a medicine against the monotony of life and the pains of irresistible disease, healing by the charm of self-forgetfulness.
“Sweetest of sweets, I thank you; when displeasureDid through my body wound my mind,You took me thence, and in your house of pleasureA dainty lodging me assigned.”
From this height of rapt abstraction, those upon whom the burden of the world rested were but objects of distant pity.
“Now I in you without a body move,Rising and falling with your wings,We both together sweetly live and love,Yet say sometimes, ‘God help poor kings!’”
Another singer, quickening in the first flush of youth to the consciousness of poetic power, loved music as dearly as Herbert. John Milton, the son of the London scrivener, had the open ear for —
“That undisturbed song of pure concentAy sung before the sapphire-coloured throne.”
The earthly music lifted Herbert to heaven; the heavenly music sent Milton forth to perform his duties upon earth. The lesson of Puritanism stands as clearly written thus early in the lines At a Solemn Music, as on the last page of Paradise Regained:—
<271>“That we on earth with undiscording voiceMay rightly answer that melodious noise;As once we did till disproportioned sinJarred against Nature’s chime, and with harsh dinBroke the fair music that all creatures madeTo their great Lord, whose love their motion swayedIn perfect diapason, whilst they stoodIn first obedience, and their state of good.O may we soon again renew that song,And keep in time with Heaven, till God ere longTo his celestial comfort us unite,To live with Him and sing in endless morn of light.”
To Milton God was ever ‘the great Taskmaster’ who had set him to cultivate the field of his own mind that he might afterwards Milton’s consciousness of work to be done.hold out help to others. Early in life he had perceived that ‘he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem — that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things; not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and practice of all that which is praiseworthy.’ Thus he grew up in his father’s house in Bread Street, and amongst the thoughtless, scoffing academic youth of Cambridge, breathing the highest life of Puritanism, its serious thoughtfulness, its love of all things good and honourable, its pure morality and aversion to low and degrading vice, yet with nothing exclusive or narrow-minded in him. If he drank deeply of the Bible, he drank deeply of the writers of Greece and Rome as well, and the influence of the philosophers and poets of Greece and Rome was as marked upon his style as that of the prophets and psalmists of Jerusalem. Even in the great religious controversy of the day, the voice of the future assailant of Episcopacy and the ceremonies gives as yet no certain sound. The tone is Puritan, but there is nothing there of the fierce dogmatism of Prynne. Milton not yet hostile to the order of the Church.At the age of seventeen he not only joined in the praises of Andrewes, the prelate whom Laud most reverenced, but described him as entering heaven dressed in the vestments of the <272>Church.[380] A few years later, in Il Penseroso, he showed a power of entering into the thoughts of men with whom he was soon to come into deadly conflict, in the well-remembered lines:—
“But let my due feet never failTo walk the studious cloisters pale,And love the high embowed roofWith antic pillars massy proof,And storied windows richly dight,Casting a dim religious light.There let the pealing organ blowTo the full-voiced choir belowIn service high, and anthems clear,As may with sweetness through mine earDissolve me into ecstasiesAnd bring all heaven before mine eyes.”
To the historian these early poems of Milton have the deepest interest. They tell of a time when the great intellectual The intellectual opposition not yet complete.disruption of the age was still capable of being averted. Between Herbert and Milton there is a difference in the point of view which may lead to absolute opposition, but which has not led to it yet. It is the same with men as unlike as Ferrar and Gouge. When Ferrar was asked whether ‘he thought the chapel more holy than his house,’ he replied ‘that God was more immediately present when we were worshipping Him in the temple.’[381] “Though the Lord,” wrote Gouge, “in His infinite essence be everywhere present, yet the special presence of His grace and favour abideth in those places where He is truly and duly worshipped.”[382] The one lays stress upon the place where the worshippers meet, the other upon the temper of those who meet in it; but there is no breach of continuity, no violent opposition making a conflict necessary.
Never, in spite of all that had occurred, had civil war appeared farther off than in the spring of 1633. Never did there <273>seem to be a fairer prospect of overcoming the irritation that had 1633.Civil war apparently far off.prevailed four years before. If only the rulers of England could comprehend the virtue of moderation, and could learn the strength which is to be gained by conciliation, all might yet be well. Unhappily, Charles was still at the helm, and Charles had promised the Archbishopric of Canterbury to the most conscientious, the most energetic, and the most indiscreet man in his dominions. Abbot’s death would be the signal for violent changes, followed by a still more violent reaction. Abbot had yet a few months of life before him. During those months Charles, with Laud in his company, paid a visit to his northern kingdom.
[327] Gresley to Puckering, Oct. 27, Court and Times, ii. 136.
[328] D’Ewes, Autobiography, i. 321.
[329] Selden and Noy seem to be aimed at, Selden as an Arminian, or at least an anti-Calvinist; Noy as an anti-Puritan. The whole passage displays complete want of intelligence, and should put the reader on his guard against attaching too much importance to D’Ewes’s opinion.
[330] Harl. MSS. 2228. Mr. Forster, in his extracts, took no notice of these important words. The whole work has since been published by Dr. Grosart.
[331] Had Eliot seen a copy of Milton’s lines At a Solemn Music, supposed to have been written in 1630?
[332] Mon. of Man, p. 67.
[333] Deus nobis hæc otia.
[334] Rossingham’s News-Letter, Jan. 24, 1640. Add. MSS. 11,645, fol. 87.
[335] Rushworth, Trial of Strafford, 146.
[336] Council Register, April 6, May 6. Rushworth, ii. 88.
[337] Ferdinando Fairfax to Lord Fairfax, Oct. 8, Fairfax Correspondence, ii. 237. Sir G. Radcliffe gives the birth of the child and the death of the mother as both occurring in October, and as the mother died before the 8th, and was on her feet when the accident occurred, the order of events follows as given above, though they are nowhere clearly stated.
[338] Rushworth, ii. 215.
[339] Dominus Arundel c. Dominus Eure. Chancery Order Books. Wentworth and the Council of the North to the Privy Council, Oct. 14. Mason’s affidavit, Nov. 20, S. P. Dom. ccxxiv. 28; ccxxv. 47.
[340] Rushworth, viii. 150. This is Wentworth’s account of the matter. It is corroborated by other evidence, and this is exactly what he might have been expected to say under the circumstances. At his trial, he was charged with having said that the little finger of the King was heavier than the loins of the law. On the whole, I rather think he made use of both expressions at different times, the latter perhaps on some occasion when obedience had been refused on the ground that some demand was not warranted by law. The theory of a repetition of words is not usually a desirable one to adopt, but Foulis’s evidence at the trial reads as if it referred to a different occasion from these assizes, and Wentworth was so fond of Scriptural expressions that he might easily have repeated this one.
[341] Wentworth to Carlisle, Sept. 24, Forster MSS., South Kensington Museum. No one who has studied Wentworth’s letters and speeches can fail to notice his habit of repeating or echoing a phrase which he had used on some other occasions long before, a habit which in some men might be explained as a thoughtless repetition of formulas, but which in a man of Wentworth’s character, can only be interpreted as arising from the fixity of his views on the main principles on which he founded his practice. In the extracts given above, two cases of this kind occur. The sentence in the last paragraph about the Crown being enabled ‘to subsist of itself without being necessitated to accept of such conditions as others might vainly think to impose upon it,’ carries us on to the well-known phrase which he used in 1637 of ship-money as vindicating ‘Royalty at home from under the conditions and restraints of subjects,’ whilst by the way in which the idea is here connected with the proceedings of Foulis, we get a little nearer to Wentworth’s conception of the danger which he dreaded as likely to arise from the power of subjects to enforce upon the Crown a policy which suited their own private ends. Another phrase, earlier in the letter, carries us back in quite another direction. When Wentworth speaks of the rights of the Crown as trampled on, and declares ‘how necessary examples are — as well for the subject as the sovereign — to retain licentious spirits within the sober bounds of humility and fear,’ we are at once reminded of the call made by the writer on the Commons of 1628, to vindicate their ‘ancient, sober, and vital liberties, by reinforcing of the ancient laws of our ancestors; by setting such a stamp upon them as no licentious spirit shall <236>dare hereafter to enter upon them.’ Then, too, as here he had declared the interest of sovereign and subject to be the same. “I speak truly,” he had said, “both for the interest of the King and people. If we enjoy not these it is impossible to relieve him.” Mistaken as Wentworth’s idea of government was, there is a unity of conception in both its parts. He waged war against ‘licentious spirits’ in the country as in the court. Alas! that one so highly endowed by nature and inspired by such rectitude of purpose, should himself have become the ‘licentious spirit’ to work unwittingly what mischief he could in his day of power.
[342] Wentworth to Carlisle, Oct. 24. Printed in the Preface to Bruce’s Calendar of S. P. Dom. 1631–33.
[343] Wentworth and the Council of the North to the Privy Council, Dec. 1, S. P. Dom. ccxxvi. 1.
[344] Instructions, March 21, Rymer, xix. 410.
[345] Proclamation, Rymer, xix. 374.
[346] D’Ewes, Autobiography, ii. 78.
[347] This was the line taken by him at the censure of Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton in 1637. “The Government,” he then said, “is so moderate … that no man is constrained, no man questioned, only religiously called upon, Venite adoremus, Come, let us worship.” Works, i. 56. This would not, however, apply to officials of a church in which the practice was enjoined by the statutes.
[348] “Wherein the first thing that moveth them thus to cast up their poison, are certain solemnities usual at the first erection of churches. Now, although the same should be blameworthy, yet this age, thanks be to God, hath reasonably well forborne to incur the danger of any such blame. It cannot be laid to many men’s charge at this day living, either that they have been so curious as to trouble bishops with placing the first stone in the churches they built, or so scrupulous as, after the erection of them, to make any great ado for their dedication. In which kind notwithstanding as we do neither allow unmeet, nor purpose the stiff defence of any unnecessary custom heretofore received; so we know no reason wherefore churches would be the worse, if at the first erecting of them, at the making of them public, at the time when they are delivered, as it were, in God’s own possession, and when the use whereunto they shall ever serve is established, ceremonies fit to betoken such intents and to accompany such actions be used, as in the present times they have been.” Hooker, Eccl. Pol. Book v, xii. 1.
[349] Wilkins, Conc. iv. 455.
[350] The general consecration was as follows:— “God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost accept, sanctify, and bless this place to the end whereunto, according to His own ordinance, we have ordained it, to be a sanctuary to the Most High, and a church for the living God. The Lord with His favour ever mercifully behold it, and so send upon it His spiritual benediction and grace, that it may be the house of God to him and the gate of heaven to us.” The consecration of the Communion-table was: “Grant us that all they that shall at any time partake at this table the highest blessing of all, Thy Holy Communion, may be fulfilled with Thy grace and heavenly benediction, and may, to their great and endless comfort, obtain remission of their sins, and all other benefits of Thy passion.” Andrewes, Minor Works, 316.
[351] A sketch of the ceremony is preserved in Strype’s edition of Stow’s Survey of London, Book ii. 60. One point objected to in Laud’s conduct is to be found here. The Lord Mayor and Aldermen presented the keys of the church to the Bishop, praying him to proceed to consecration, ‘which the Bishop receiving, he unlocked and opened the doors which before were locked, and entered with the Archbishop, etc., and took possession.’ Then ‘in the very threshold at his entrance’ he ‘blessed the place.’ Then ‘going a little forward, with bended knees, and hands towards the east, lifted up to heaven, he made a devout prayer, thereby devoting, dedicating the place from that day for ever unto God.’
[352] Prynne (Cant. Doom, 113) merely gives the story as it was told to the Long Parliament, and Rushworth (ii. 77), whom most modern writers have followed like sheep, does the same. When it is remembered that they both adopted the forged entry in Laud’s diary about Leighton’s punishment, it is plain that they add nothing to the credit of the witnesses. Laud (Works, iv. 247) not only denied the statements made, but asserted that he had used Bishop Andrewes’ form. It is intelligible that the Long Parliament should have neglected to send for a copy of that form, but modern historians might have been expected to take the trouble of looking at it. No part of the charge has been so often repeated as that which relates to Laud’s mode of consecrating the sacrament. “As he approached the communion-table,” we are told, “he made many several lowly bowings, and coming up to the side of the table, where the bread and wine were covered, he bowed seven times, and then after the reading of many prayers, he came near the bread, and gently lifted up the corner of the napkin wherein the bread was laid, and when he beheld the bread he laid it down again, flew back a step or two, bowed three several times towards it, then he drew near again and opened the napkin and bowed as before,” etc. <245>Laud did not contradict the statement in particulars, thinking perhaps that he had already said enough to discredit the witnesses. But it is altogether incredible, and is worthless except as an illustration of the sort of stuff that men were prepared to believe about Laud twelve years afterwards. He was not given to histrionics. His observance of formalities was of a more sober cast. Besides, if he had done anything like this once, he would have been sure to do it again, and Prynne would not have neglected to inform us of his follies.
[353] Heylyn, 208. Jones, Carter, and Cooke to the Commissioners, May 22, 1633, S. P. Dom. ccxxxix. 20.
[354] The existence of this motive is distinctly admitted by Heylyn. “Some men,” he says, “in hope of favour and preferment from him, others <246>to hold fair quarter with him, and not a few for fear of incurring his displeasure, contributing more largely to it than they had done otherwise, if otherwise they had contributed at all.”
[355] Heylyn, 209.
[356] Council Register, Oct. 28, 1631. March 7, 16, May 9, Aug. 9, Aug. 24, 1632. Windebank to the King, Oct. 20, S. P. Dom. ccxxiv. 40.
[357] Widdowes, The lawless, kneeless, schismatical Puritan, 33. Prynne, Lame Giles, his haltings, 34.
[358] Baker to Page, May 31. Laud to Smith, June 22, Laud’s Works, v. 39.
[359] Laud’s Works, v. 49–70.
[360] Baker to Laud, Oct. 19, S. P. Dom. ccii. 3.
[361] Collins to Duck, Jan. 18, 1632, S. P. Dom. ccx. 41.
[362] Prynne, Canterbury’s Doom, 363.
[363] Harl. MSS. 4130, and Rawlinson MSS. 128.
[364] Meade to Stuteville, May 20, Court and Times, ii. 119.
[365] Pardon to Alington, July 14, Sign Manuals, xiii. 32. This, however, was only intended to conceal the secret payment tc the Queen, as appears from a release to Sir T. Hatton. Patent Rolls, 13 Charles I. Part 33, No. 5.
[366] Laud to Windebank, June 13, S. P. Dom. ccxviii. 46.
[367] S. P. Dom. cclxi. fol. 5 b, 295 b.
[368] Order of the Vestry in Hoare’s History of Wiltshire, vi. 371.
[369] Webb’s Deposition, Jan. (?) 1631, S. P. Dom. clxxviii. 58.
[370] The date 1631⁄2, which even Mr. Bruce accepted (S. P. Dom. ccxi. 20) is clearly wrong. The fact that Windebank took part in the sentence is decisive against it.
[371] Coke to Davenant, Feb. 15, Melbourne MSS. State Trials, iii. 519. Nicholas to E. Nicholas, written early in 1634, not in 1632, as calendared. S. P. Dom. ccxiv. 92. Narrative, March 15, 1633, S. P. Dom. cxxxiii. 89.
[372] Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, 199.
[373] Exchequer Decrees, iv. 88. The decree is carefully deleted by penstrokes by order of the Lords in Parliament, March 3, 1648. See Bills and Answers, Charles I. London and Middlesex, No. 533. The receipts had been 6,361l. 6s. 1d.
[374] Clarke, Lives of Ten Eminent Divines, 95.
[375] Gouge to Laud, Oct. 19, 1631, S. P. Dom. ccii. 3.
[376] Dr. Grosart, from whose biography, prefixed to his edition of Sibbes’s Works, I extract these particulars, suggests that Laud had something to do with it,— an evident anachronism.
[377] Trinity College chose Joseph Meade to succeed him, and then upon his refusal, William Bedell, afterwards the celebrated bishop. Sir J. Ware’s Diary. Crowcombe Court MSS.
[378] Two Lives of Nicholas Ferrar. Edited by J. E. B. Mayor.
[379] Walton’s well-known story that the Court was at Wilton, and that the tailor was sent for from Salisbury to provide a clerical dress, is certainly untrue. The Court was at Whitehall, and the presentation, printed from the Patent Rolls in Rymer (xix. 258), is dated from Westminster. It also describes Herbert simply as a master of arts. The omission of the usual Clericus shows that he was still a layman at this time.
[381] Mayor’s Two Lives of Ferrar, xxxiv.
[382] Gouge, The Saint’s Sacrifice (1632), 259.