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CRUELTY OF CHARLES.

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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 1. (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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THE CABINET.

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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

therefore looked on the other protestant churches as mere schismatics. In fact, the approximation now made to Rome was so great, that the pope actually sent to offer Laud a cardinal's hat, an offer that was not spurned at*. It was the court rather than the church of Rome that Laud disliked; he would willingly be himself the pope of England, and he could not brook submission to him of Rome.

The following are some of the changes made at this time. Strange ceremonies were employed in the consecration of churches, the communion table was removed from the centre of the churches to the east end, railed in and called an altar, and obeisance was made to it: the officiating minister was named a priest, and his habit became more gaudy; the use of pictures, images, crucifixes, and lights in the churches was contended for; prayers for the dead, confession and absolution were inculcated. The doctrine of the real presence, or something very nearly resembling it, seems to have been held by Laud and others t.

The catholics were full of hopes at witnessing these favourable symptoms in the church of England, and the court of Rome was induced to send an envoy named Panzani to London. A negotiation for the union of the churches was commenced with him by lord Cottington, secretary Windebank and bishop Montague, but entirely unknown to Laud and the clergy in general. Like all projects of the kind, it was a mere abortion, for Rome will never recede from any one of her pretensions. The king in return for the courtesies which the court of Rome lavished on him stopped the prosecution of the recusants; it was agreed that diplomatic relations should be established between the two courts in the name of the queen, and Panzani was succeeded in his post at London by a Scotsman named Conn,

* "My answer was," says Laud, "that somewhat dwelt within me, which would not suffer that till Rome were other than it is."

+ See Appendix (E).

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whose place was afterwards taken by an agent of higher rank, the Count Rosetti. As usual, the catholics behaved with great insolence; "they attempted," says Clarendon, " and sometimes obtained proselytes of weak uninformed ladies, with such circumstances as provoked the rage and destroyed the charity of great and powerful families," and they urged the court on in all its ruinous and oppressive measures. "To conclude," he adds, "they carried themselves so as if they had been suborned by the Scots to root out their own religion."*

The punishments of those who impugned the innovations in the church were very severe, and the licensing of the press being in the hands of the dominant party, no works in opposition to them could be printed. It was not even permitted to assail the church of Rome; and it will scarcely be believed, that Fox's Book of Martyrs, Jewell's works, and the celebrated Practice of Piety now failed to obtain a license to be printed.

The treatment of the father of the excellent archbishop Leighton at this time will serve to give an idea of the punishments inflicted on those who drew down on themselves the vengeance of the implacable Laud. Leighton, a Scots divine, had printed in Holland a book named 'Zion's Plea against Prelacy,' addressed to the members of the late parliament. In this he no doubt treated the bishops with great rudeness and violence, terming them "men of blood" and prelacy "antichristian," showing "the fearful sin of their pestering God's worship, and overlaying people's con

* Mrs. Hutchinson (p. 59.) says, "A great cause of these abominations (murder, incest, etc.) was the mixt marriages of papist and protestant families, which, no question, was a design of the popish party to compass and procure, and so successful, that I have observed that there was not one house of ten where such a marriage was made but the better part was corrupted; the children's souls were sacrificed to devils; the worship of God was laid aside in that family for fear of distasting the idolater; the kindred, tenants and neighbours either quite turned from it or cooled in their zeal for religion." Making due allowance for the zeal of this excellent woman, her remarks are correct in the main.