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was made known; the case of Rolles was brought before the house, and the sheriff of London and the officers of the customs had to appear at the bar. The king then summoned both houses to meet him at Whitehall, and there urged them to put an end to all disputes by passing the bill for tonnage and poundage, assuring them that he did not take these duties as a part of his prerogative, but by the gift of his people; and that if he had levied them hitherto, he did it out of necessity, and not "by any right which he assumed." The commons however took no heed of this and other attempts to obtain money without conditions. It was their fixed and just principle, that inquiry into and redress of grievances should precede supplies. This they immediately set about, directing their attention first to the all-important subject of religion. On the 27th sir John Eliot addressed the house in an able speech, on the subject of the innovations lately made in religion, and the result was a "vow," made on the journals, to admit no new sense of the articles of religion. After a few days the house adjourned to the 25th of February, on which day it was agreed to present charges to the king against Laud, bishop of London. The king then sent his command for both houses to adjourn to the 2nd of March.

On this memorable day Eliot entered the house, having a protestation prepared to propose to the members. It contained these articles: 1. Whoever shall innovate in religion by introducing popery, Arminianism, etc., is an enemy to the kingdom and commonwealth. 2. Whoever shall counsel to take or assist in taking tonnage and poundage not granted by parliament, is an enemy, etc. 3. Whoever shall pay the same is an enemy, etc. When he had introduced these by a speech directed chiefly against the lord treasurer Weston, he desired sir John Finch, the speaker, to read them, but he refused; the clerk did the same; Eliot read them out himself, and then required the speaker to put them to the vote. He replied " he was commanded otherwise by the king," and rose to quit the

chair; but two members, Hollis and Valentine, held him down. A tumult arose; swords were near being drawn: Eliot gave the protestation to Hollis to put it to the house, and it was heard with acclamations. The king sent the sergeant to take away the mace, but he was detained, and the doors were locked: the usher of the black-rod then came; he could not gain admission: in a rage the king ordered the captain of the guard to go and force the doors, but the members having passed the protestation, and adjourned to the 10th, now issued forth in a body. Eliot, Hollis, Valentine, and others, were forthwith summoned before the council, and on their refusing to answer out of parliament for things said and done in it, were committed to the Tower; on the 10th the king went down to the house of lords and dissolved the parliament, on account, he said, of "the seditious carriage of some vipers, members of the lower house."

The imprisoned members applied for their habeas corpus; but the king, by removing them from the custody of the officers to whom the writs were directed, frustrated their efforts. They were offered their liberty if they would petition the king, and express contrition for having offended him. This course they at once rejected, as it would be an acknowledgement of the legality of the arbitrary acts which they opposed. Eliot, Hollis, and Valentine, were finally proceeded against in the king's bench, and sentenced to be imprisoned during pleasure; and Eliot was fined 1000%., Hollis 1000 marks, and Valentine 500l. The others were released after a confinement of eighteen months; Eliot ended his days in the Tower. When the decline of his health had made him yield to the entreaties of his friends, and petition for his liberty, the answer given was, "It is not humble enough." He sent a second petition by his young son, offering to return to his prison when he should have recovered his health. This also was ineffectual. When he died, his children petitioned to be allowed to take his body to Cornwall, to lay it in the tomb of his ancestors.

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"Let sir John Eliot's body be buried in the church of that parish where he died," was the unfeeling reply of the monarch.

Thus terminated Charles's third parliament. As we shall now find him for some years dispensing with these assemblies, taking his subjects' money at his own arbitrary will, and running the full career of despotism, we will transcribe the following passage from his panegyrist, lord Clarendon. "It is not to be denied," says he, "that there were in all those parliaments, especially in that of the fourth year, several passages and distempered speeches of particular persons not fit for the dignity and honour of those places, and unsuitable to the reverence due to his majesty and his councils. But I do not know any formal act of either house (for neither the remonstrance or votes of the last day were such) that was not agreeable to the wisdom and justice of great courts on those extraordinary occasions. And whoever considers the acts of power and injustice in the intervals of parliament, will not be much scandalized at the warmth and vivacity of those meetings."

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CHAPTER IV.

CHARLES I. (CONTINUED).

1629-1640.

The cabinet.-Laud and the church.-Persecution of Leighton, Prynne, and others.-Mode of raising a revenue.-Ship-money.-John Hampden.-Settlement of New England.-Affairs of Scotland.-Attempt to introduce a liturgy. The Covenant.-The Episcopal war.-The Short Parliament.— Scots enter England.-Despotism of Charles.

FOR a period of twelve years we are now to witness the exercise of absolute monarchy in England; the king, like his brethren of France and Spain, taking his subjects' money at his will, giving no account of the expenditure, and arbitrarily punishing all who ventured to murmur or oppose the civil and religious despotism now established.

External tranquillity being requisite for his designs, Charles made peace with the courts of France and Spain. When the illustrious Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden put himself at the head of the protestant cause in Germany, six thousand men were raised for his aid in Great Britain, in the name of the marquess of Hamilton, who commanded them, but at the expense of the king. This was the only money employed for foreign purposes; the produce of the taxes and impositions in general went to the support of the government, and to the maintenance of a most brilliant

court.

After the death of Buckingham, the only man he seems ever to have loved, Charles had no favourite, and he became his own minister. The queen, a vain, selfish, selfwilled woman, possessed an undue influence over his mind. He had drawn from the popular side not only Wentworth and Savile, but sir Dudley Digges, whom he made master of the rolls, and the two lawyers Noy and Littleton, who

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became his attorney- and solicitor-general: sir Richard Weston, the lord treasurer, a suspected catholic, was one of the most unscrupulous instruments of the royal despotism.

In his project of abolishing the liberties of the people, Charles was aided by the hierarchy of the church, headed by William Laud, whom the favour of Buckingham had raised rapidly through various episcopal gradations to the see of London, and whom on the death of Abbot (1632), the king advanced to the primacy. Laud was a man of a narrow mind, but of much reading; matters of little importance to enlarged intellects, were, therefore, of great moment to him; he had thus conceived a ridiculously exalted notion of the value of ceremonies in sustaining religion, and a preposterous opinion of the peculiar sanctity and sublimity of the episcopal character; he also held the Arminian tenets. In all these matters his sincerity is not to be questioned, but he was actuated by a cruel, persecuting spirit, and he would allow none to maintain opinions contrary to his own.

It is, we think, a matter not to be disputed, that the fathers and founders of our church were not Arminians, and most surely the articles of our church evince that those who compiled them agreed with St. Austin on the abstruse points of predestination, original sin, and such like, however ambiguously they may have expressed themselves. Our early reformers also seem to have regarded episcopacy as a thing of human rather than divine institution, and they drew close the bonds of fellowship with the foreign churches, even those of France and Geneva, which had cast it off altogether. In the church of Rome they saw only Antichrist, the enemy of Christ, and not a part of his mystic body. But Laud, Montague, Heylin, and the other high-church divines as they were now termed, recognised the church of Rome as a true church; they strongly asserted the divine origin of episcopacy, and the necessity of a regular transmission from the time of the apostles, and