and showed that Laud was governed by the rigid ideas he had borrowed from past times, and had no capacity for comprehending the requirements of the dissimilar age in which he lived. The persons who laboured to stretch the boundaries of ecclesiastical authority dwelt little upon the saving doctrines of the Gospel. 'The chief subjects of their sermons,' says Lord Falkland, were the jus divinum of bishops and tithes, the sacredness of the clergy, the sacrilege of impropriations, the demolishing of puritanism, the building up of the prerogative.' They constituted merely a party in the Church, but seemed to represent it because their leaders stood round the throne and had the ear of the King, while less aspiring men continued to fulfil their duties in quietness. By the testimony of Lord Falkland the more moderate bishops were neither proud nor ambitious; their lives were untouched, not only by guilt but by malice.'

There was nothing which Laud had more at heart than the repression of nonconformity, and he committed errors in the attempt which proved grievously injurious both to Church and State, to his sovereign and to himself. The worst legacy which had been left us from Roman Catholic times was the ignorance of the priesthood. The evil had not yet been entirely repaired, and numerous livings were still held by uneducated men. A considerable body of these persons never preached at all, and few of them in the afternoon; but they allowed their pulpits to be occupied by nonconformists, whose objections to the liturgy, the surplice, and the ceremonies prevented them from reading prayers or from accepting a cure. Many even of the more competent clergy availed themselves of the services of assistants whose piety they admired without sharing their scruples. It is obvious, however, that if dissenters from the ritual were allowed to preach they might use the establishment for the purpose of undermining it; and had Laud, as in the case of the week-day sermons, which had been founded under the name of lectures, required that the road to the pulpit should be through the reading-desk, no valid objection could have been made. In an evil hour he prohibited the afternoon sermon altogether, and insisted instead that the children should be questioned in the words of the Church Catechism, without alteration or comment. Devout Christians, who conformed in every particular, were indignant at a regulation which seemed wantonly to debar them of a religious privilege. A second step, more fatal than the first, completed the dissatisfaction of the stricter part of the community with the Government. James I. had published a declaration, called the Book of Sports,' which was to be read in churches, permitting all who had attended divine

service

service to indulge in May-games, dances, and revels on the Sunday. The permission was accepted by the people, but the reading the declaration was not enforced upon the clergy. The licence gave rise to drunkenness, quarrels, and profanation; and, in 1632, the judges on the western circuit, at the request of the justices, prohibited the continuance of these disorderly entertainments. The King was angry at the interference, and renewed his father's declaration. The clergy were required to publish it to their congregations during divine service, and those who refused were suspended. Baxter relates that the dancers, at the place where he lived, used to come into church in their antic-dresses, with morrice-bells jingling at their legs. His father could hardly read his Bible or pray with his family for the noise of the pipe and tabor and the shoutings of the crowd. Such indecorums were peculiarly offensive to the puritans; but to deprive the ministers of religion of their cures for not inviting their parishioners, in the very house of God, to desecrate the Sabbath, shocked thousands of the laity who were far removed from a puritanical bias. Thirty refractory incumbents were ejected in the diocese of Norwich alone; others read the fourth commandment along with the declaration of the King, repeating after the first, 'This is the injunction of God,' and after the second, 'This is the injunction of man;' others, more timid, allowed their curates to obey an order from which they shrunk themselves. Numbers of the sufferers were thorough adherents of the establishment, and it proved less a question, in the issue, between orthodoxy and nonconformity than between devotion and laxity. The disastrous consequences to the Church and the throne will be seen when we come to the outbreak of the civil war.

The deprived ministers were not suffered to have places of worship of their own; no book which advocated their opinions could be printed at home or imported from abroad; and when Baxter in 1636 wished to study the arguments of the nonconformists, he was long unable to buy or borrow a single one of their treatises. Denied toleration in England, the puritans fled for freedom to America. An order in council was published in 1637 to forbid them this refuge. No layman was to embark without a certificate of conformity from his minister-no clergyman without a testimonial from the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London. The reason assigned in the proclamation was, that they transported themselves to the plantations to escape from ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and took liberty to nourish their factious and schismatical humours' in those remote wilds. Laud could never understand that there was

the

the slightest tyranny in first oppressing men and then forbidding them to fly from the oppression. When he was accused at his trial of having said of a nonconformist, who had emigrated to America, that his arm should reach him there, he replied that he could not see any harm in the speech, for there was no reason why the plantations should secure offenders against the Church of England from the edge of the law.'* He believed that his duty was to prohibit what he did not approve, and to force the conscience of every man to the model of his own. In the same spirit he withdrew the privileges which had been granted to the foreign refugees, and insisted that those who were born in England should attend the parish church. Nothing is more revolting to the feelings of parents than to be forbidden to train up their children in their own persuasion. Several of the Dutch and Walloon congregations were dissolved rather than submit to these terms, and three thousand manufacturers in the single diocese of Norwich left the kingdom.

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All the violence which was practised fell short of the wishes of Laud. He complained that the church was so bound up in the forms of the common law, that it was not possible for him to do the good he would.' Thorough and thorough,' he wrote to Strafford, congratulating him on his success in Ireland: 'Oh! that I were where I might go so to!' But whatever might be the hindrances which arose in England from the law, Charles set aside the ordinary courts to the utmost of his power. Arbitrary measures could only be enforced by arbitrary tribunals. He enlarged the jurisdiction of the Star-Chamber, in which the privy-councillors were the judges. Not only were they persons in the interests of the crown, but they were in reality the same body under different names. As a council, says Lord Clarendon, they put forth illegal proclamations, and as a judicial tribunal they maintained them with fine and imprisonment. Every case which, by a forced construction, could be reckoned among the ill-defined offences that precedent had assigned to the decision of the StarChamber was brought before it. The judgments showed how often calm justice had been superseded by passion. It was here that Bishop Williams, on a slight pretence, was condemned to be imprisoned during the royal pleasure and to pay a fine of 10,0007.; it was here that the same prelate was mulcted in a further fine of 50007. to the King and 3000l. to Laud, because, when his papers

* It forms no part of our subject to follow the puritans across the Atlantic, but lest any one should suppose that they were less intolerant than their opponents, it may be as well to mention that they set up a tyranny of their own in America infinitely more cruel and intrusive than the system from which they fled with indignation.

were

were seized, two letters were found from one Osbaldeston, a schoolmaster, informing his patron that there were quarrels and jealousies between the treasurer Portland, whom he designates as the Leviathan,' and the Primate, whom he calls a little urchin' and 'a meddling hocus-pocus.' It was here, again, that Leighton, a clergyman, for coarse invectives against prelacy and prelates, received the sentence by which he was severely whipped in public, was put in the pillory, had one ear cut off, one side of his nose slit, and one cheek branded with the letters S.S. to denote that he was a sower of sedition. On that day week,' says Laud, who instigated the prosecution, the sores upon his back, ear, nose, and face being not cured, he was whipped again at the pillory, and there had the remainder of his sentence executed upon him, by cutting off the other ear, slitting the other side of his nose, and branding the other cheek.' He was, in addition, degraded from his ministry, fined 10,000%, and ordered to be retained in confinement for life. It was in the Star-Chamber, again, that the barrister Prynne, for asserting the immorality of players and dancers, was directed to be put out of his profession, to stand in the pillory at Westminster and Cheapside, to have an ear cut off on each occasion, to pay 50007., and be kept in gaol for the remainder of his days. It was here for a libel on the prelates, which was written in his confinement, that he was ordered to pay another 5000l., and lose the stumps of his ears, which the lords on his trial were 'displeased to find had been formerly no more cut off.' On this occasion he had two companions in his misfortune, Bastwick, a physician, and Burton, a divine. The executioner took care not to merit a second reproof, and pared the ears of the latter so close that he wounded one of the arteries in his head. Both these new offenders were condemned, like Prynne, to perpetual imprisonment and to forfeit 5000l. a piece. They had all been guilty of scurrilous language, but the frightful disproportion between the punishment and the offence reversed the sentiments which attend upon an upright administration of the law. The sympathy was with the criminals, the indignation was against their judges. What increased the dissatisfaction was the belief that the pecuniary penalties were inflicted less to satisfy justice, than to fill an empty exchequer. A gentleman was fined 10,0001. for marrying his niece; another, for calling the Earl of Suffolk a base lord, had to pay 80007., half to the Earl and half to the Crown; and Sir Anthony Cooper had to atone for the offence of converting arable land into pasture by disbursing 40007.

The High Commission Court, founded by Elizabeth, was another fruitful source of oppression. It was a mixed assembly

of

of bishops, privy-councillors, inferior clergy, and civilians, who took cognizance of offences against doctrine or morality. The modes of procedure were inquisitorial; the punishments were penance, excommunication, fines, imprisonment and deprivation. None of its rigours were spared during the supremacy of Laud, and, with his active endeavours to produce uniformity of religion, there was hardly any check to its comprehensive jurisdiction, except what arose out of the watchful jealousy of the common-law judges. Their directions to the court to stay proceedings in numerous cases where it exceeded its dangerous powers were a great annoyance to Laud. I will break the back,' he said, of prohibitions, or they shall break mine.' He felt so strongly on the point, that he asserted in a sermon that those who granted prohibitions to the disturbance of the right of the Church would be prohibited by God from entering into the kingdom of heaven. Several persons were imprisoned under the plea that they had delivered these offensive documents in an unmannerly way, throwing them on the table, or handing them over the heads of others on a stick.' Sometimes the commissioners obeyed the injunctions of the judges, and sometimes disregarded them. They had more reason to be thankful than indignant at the restraint; for if any truth be especially apparent in the history of these irregular tribunals, it is, that an arbitrary ruler should in very selfishness respect the rights and maintain the independence of the courts of justice, since they alone can save him and his adherents from the suicidal effects of their passing passions.

There were few of the acts of Charles which had not a foundation in precedent or law, but some had been long in abeyance; some had never been pushed so far, or employed so often; others had been protested against in former reigns, or were dubious at best. His peculiarity was to gather together all the doctrines which favoured the prerogative, and combine them into a settled system of government. Exerting his authority alike in church and state, every power was set in motion at once, while the suspension of parliaments took away from the country the expectation of relief. This extension of the monarchical element coming into contact with a growing spirit of liberty, could not fail to provoke excessive irritation. There is a time,' said Burke, speaking of Charles and his policy, when men will not suffer bad things because their ancestors have suffered worse.' But whatever may have been his want of political wisdom it must be admitted to be some apology for many parts of his conduct, that he was either exercising hereditary powers, or was tempted to encroach on the rights of his opponents to maintain his own. Discontent

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