THE PERSONAL GOVERNMENT
1629-1635
[Sidenote: The policy of Charles.]
At the opening of his third Parliament Charles had hinted in ominous
words that the continuance of Parliament at all depended on its
compliance with his will. "If you do not your duty," said the king,
"mine would then order me to use those other means which God has put
into my hand." When the threat failed to break the resistance of the
Commons the ominous words passed into a settled policy. "We have
showed," said a proclamation which followed on the dissolution of the
Houses, on the tenth of March, "by our frequent meeting our people our
love to the use of Parliament. Yet the late abuse having for the present
drawn us unwillingly out of that course, we shall account it presumption
for any to prescribe any time unto us for Parliament."
No Parliament in fact met for eleven years. But it would be unfair to
charge the king at the outset of this period with any definite scheme
of establishing a tyranny, or of changing what he conceived to be the
older constitution of the realm. He "hated the very name of
Parliaments"; but in spite of his hate he had as yet no purpose of
abolishing them. His belief was that England would in time recover its
senses, and that then Parliament might reassemble without inconvenience
to the Crown. In the interval, however long it might be, he proposed to
govern single-handed by the use of "those means which God had put into
his hands." Resistance indeed he was resolved to put down. The leaders
of the country party in the last Parliament were thrown into prison; and
Eliot died, the first martyr of English liberty, in the Tower. Men were
forbidden to speak of the reassembling of a Parliament. But here the
king stopped. The opportunity which might have suggested dreams of
organized despotism to a Richelieu suggested only means of filling his
exchequer to Charles. He had in truth neither the grander nor the meaner
instincts of a born tyrant. He did not seek to gain an absolute power
over his people, because he believed that his absolute power was already
a part of the constitution of the country. He set up no standing army to
secure it, partly because he was poor, but yet more because his faith in
his position was such that he never dreamed of any effectual resistance.
He believed implicitly in his own prerogative, and he never doubted
that his subjects would in the end come to believe in it too. His system
rested not on force, but on a moral basis, on an appeal from opinion ill
informed to opinion, as he looked on it, better informed. What he relied
on was not the soldier, but the judge. It was for the judges to show
from time to time the legality of his claims, and for England at last to
bow to the force of conviction.
[Sidenote: Peace.]
He was resolute indeed to free the Crown from its dependence on
Parliament; but his expedients for freeing the Crown from a dependence
against which his pride as a sovereign revolted were simply peace and
economy. With France an accommodation had been brought about in 1629 by
the fall of Rochelle. The terms which Richelieu granted to the defeated
Huguenots showed the real drift of his policy; and the reconciliation of
the two countries set the king's hands free to aid Germany in her hour
of despair. The doom of the Lutheran princes of the north had followed
hard on the ruin of the Calvinistic princes of the south. The selfish
neutrality of Saxony and Brandenburg received a fitting punishment in
their helplessness before the triumphant advance of the Emperor's
troops. His general, Wallenstein, encamped on the Baltic; and the last
hopes of German Protestantism lay in the resistance of Stralsund. The
danger called the Scandinavian powers to its aid. Denmark and Sweden
leagued to resist Wallenstein; and Charles sent a squadron to the Elbe
while he called on Holland to join in a quadruple alliance against the
Emperor. Richelieu promised to support the alliance with a fleet: and
even the withdrawal of Denmark, bribed into neutrality by the
restitution of her possessions on the mainland, left the force of the
league an imposing one. Gustavus of Sweden remained firm in his purpose
of entering Germany, and appealed for aid to both England and France.
But at this moment the dissolution of the Parliament left Charles
penniless. He at once resolved on a policy of peace, refused aid to
Gustavus, withdrew his ships from the Baltic, and opened negotiations
with Spain, which brought about a treaty at the end of 1630 on the
virtual basis of an abandonment of the Palatinate. Ill luck clung to
Charles in peace as in war. He had withdrawn from his efforts to win
back the dominions of his brother-in-law at the very moment when those
efforts were about to be crowned with success. The treaty with Spain was
hardly concluded when Gustavus landed in Germany and began his wonderful
career of victory. Charles at once strove to profit by his success; and
in 1631 he suffered the Marquis of Hamilton to join the Swedish king
with a force of Scotch and English regiments. After some service in
Silesia, this force aided in the battle of Breitenfeld and followed
Gustavus in his reconquest of the Palatinate. But the conqueror
demanded, as the price of its restoration to Frederick, that Charles
should again declare war upon Spain; and this was a price that the king
would not pay. The danger in Germany was over; the power of France and
of Holland threatened the supremacy of England on the seas; and even had
these reasons not swayed him to friendship with Spain, Charles was
stubborn not to plunge into a combat which would again force him to
summon a Parliament.
[Sidenote: Financial measures.]
What absorbed his attention at home was the question of the revenue. The
debt was a large one; and the ordinary income of the Crown, unaided by
Parliamentary supplies, was inadequate to meet its ordinary expenditure.
Charles himself was frugal and laborious; and the economy of Weston, the
new Lord Treasurer, whom he raised to the earldom of Portland,
contrasted advantageously with the waste and extravagance of the
government under Buckingham. But economy failed to close the yawning
gulf of the Treasury, and the course into which Charles was driven by
the financial pressure showed with how wise a prescience the Commons had
fixed on the point of arbitrary taxation as the chief danger to
constitutional freedom. It is curious to see to what shifts the royal
pride was driven in its effort at once to fill the Exchequer, and yet to
avoid, as far as it could, any direct breach of constitutional law in
the imposition of taxes by the sole authority of the Crown. The dormant
powers of the prerogative were strained to their utmost. The right of
the Crown to force knighthood on the landed gentry was revived, in order
to squeeze them into composition for the refusal of it. Fines were
levied on them for the redress of defects in their title-deeds. A
Commission of the Forests exacted large sums from the neighbouring
landowners for their encroachments on Crown lands. Three hundred
thousand pounds were raised by this means in Essex alone. London, the
special object of courtly dislike, on account of its stubborn
Puritanism, was brought within the sweep of royal extortion by the
enforcement of an illegal proclamation which James had issued,
prohibiting its extension. Every house throughout the large suburban
districts in which the prohibition had been disregarded was only saved
from demolition by the payment of three years' rental to the Crown. The
Treasury gained a hundred thousand pounds by this clever stroke, and
Charles gained the bitter enmity of the great city whose strength and
resources were fatal to him in the coming war. Though the Catholics were
no longer troubled by any active persecution, and the Lord Treasurer was
in heart a Papist, the penury of the Exchequer forced the Crown to
maintain the old system of fines for "recusancy."
[Sidenote: Fines and monopolies.]
Vexatious measures of extortion such as these were far less hurtful to
the state than the conversion of justice into a means of supplying the
royal necessities by means of the Star Chamber. The jurisdiction of the
King's Council had been revived by Wolsey as a check on the nobles; and
it had received great developement, especially on the side of criminal
law, during the Tudor reigns. Forgery, perjury, riot, maintenance,
fraud, libel, and conspiracy, were the chief offences cognizable in this
court, but its scope extended to every misdemeanour, and especially to
charges where, from the imperfection of the common law, or the power of
offenders, justice was baffled in the lower courts. Its process
resembled that of Chancery: it usually acted on an information laid
before it by the King's Attorney. Both witnesses and accused were
examined on oath by special interrogatories, and the Court was at
liberty to adjudge any punishment short of death. The possession of such
a weapon would have been fatal to liberty under a great tyrant; under
Charles it was turned simply to the profit of the Exchequer. Large
numbers of cases which would ordinarily have come before the Courts of
Common Law were called before the Star Chamber, simply for the purpose
of levying fines for the Crown. The same motive accounts for the
enormous penalties which were exacted for offences of a trivial
character. The marriage of a gentleman with his niece was punished by
the forfeiture of twelve thousand pounds, and fines of four and five
thousand pounds were awarded for brawls between lords of the Court.
Fines such as these however affected a smaller range of sufferers than
the financial expedient to which Weston had recourse in the renewal of
monopolies. Monopolies, abandoned by Elizabeth, extinguished by Act of
Parliament under James, and denounced with the assent of Charles himself
in the Petition of Right, were again set on foot, and on a scale far
more gigantic than had been seen before; the companies who undertook
them paying a fixed duty on their profits as well as a large sum for the
original concession of the monopoly. Wine, soap, salt, and almost every
article of domestic consumption fell into the hands of monopolists, and
rose in price out of all proportion to the profit gained by the Crown.
"They sup in our cup," Colepepper said afterwards in the Long
Parliament, "they dip in our dish, they sit by our fire; we find them in
the dye-fat, the wash bowls, and the powdering tub. They share with the
cutler in his box. They have marked and sealed us from head to foot."
[Sidenote: Customs and benevolences.]
In spite of the financial expedients we have described the Treasury
would have remained unfilled had not the king persisted in those
financial measures which had called forth the protest of the Parliament.
The exaction of customs duties went on as of old at the ports. The
resistance of the London merchants to their payment was roughly put down
by the Star Chamber; and an alderman who complained bitterly that men
were worse off in England than in Turkey was ruined by a fine of two
thousand pounds. Writs for benevolences, under the old pretext of gifts,
were issued for every shire. But the freeholders of the counties were
more difficult to deal with than London aldermen. When those of Cornwall
were called together at Bodmin to contribute to a voluntary gift, half
the hundreds refused, and the yield of the rest came to little more than
two thousand pounds. One of the Cornishmen has left an amusing record of
the scene which took place before the Commissioners appointed for
assessment of the gift. "Some with great words and threatenings, some
with persuasions," he says, "were drawn to it. I was like to have been
complimented out of my money; but knowing with whom I had to deal, I
held, when I talked with them, my hands fast in my pockets."
[Sidenote: General prosperity.]
By means such as these the financial difficulty was in some measure met.
During Weston's five years of office the debt, which had mounted to
sixteen hundred thousand pounds, was reduced by one half. On the other
hand the annual revenue of the Crown was raised from half-a-million to
eight hundred thousand. Nor was there much sign of active discontent.
Vexatious indeed and illegal as were the proceedings of the Crown, there
seems in these earlier years of personal rule to have been little
apprehension of any permanent danger to freedom in the country at large.
To those who read the letters of the time there is something
inexpressibly touching in the general faith of their writers in the
ultimate victory of the Law. Charles was obstinate, but obstinacy was
too common a foible amongst Englishmen to rouse any vehement resentment.
The people were as stubborn as their king, and their political sense
told them that the slightest disturbance of affairs must shake down the
financial fabric which Charles was slowly building up, and force him
back on subsidies and a Parliament. Meanwhile they would wait for better
days, and their patience was aided by the general prosperity of the
country. The great Continental wars threw wealth into English hands. The
intercourse between Spain and Flanders was carried on solely in English
ships, and the English flag covered the intercourse of Portugal with its
colonies in Africa, India, and the Pacific. The long peace was producing
its inevitable results in an extension of commerce and a rise of
manufactures in the towns of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Fresh land
was being brought into cultivation, and a great scheme was set on foot
for reclaiming the Fens. The new wealth of the country gentry, through
the increase of rent, was seen in the splendour of the houses which
they were raising. The contrast of this peace and prosperity with the
ruin and bloodshed of the Continent afforded a ready argument to the
friends of the king's system. So tranquil was the outer appearance of
the country that in Court circles all sense of danger had disappeared.
"Some of the greatest statesmen and privy councillors," says May, "would
ordinarily laugh when the word 'liberty of the subject' was named."
There were courtiers bold enough to express their hope that "the king
would never need any more Parliaments."
[Sidenote: Wentworth.]
But beneath this outer calm "the country," Clarendon honestly tells us
while eulogizing the Peace, "was full of pride and mutiny and
discontent." Thousands were quitting England for America. The gentry
held aloof from the Court. "The common people in the generality and the
country freeholders would rationally argue of their own rights and the
oppressions which were laid upon them." If Charles was content to
deceive himself, there was one man among his ministers who saw that the
people were right in their policy of patience, and that unless other
measures were taken the fabric of despotism would fall at the first
breath of adverse fortune. Sir Thomas Wentworth, a great Yorkshire
landowner and one of the representatives of his county in Parliament,
had stood during the Parliament of 1628 among the more prominent
members of the Country party in the Commons. But he was no Eliot. He had
no faith in Parliaments, save as means of checking exceptional
misgovernment. He had no belief in the general wisdom of the realm, or
in its value, when represented by the Commons, as a means of bringing
about good government. Powerful as his mind was, it was arrogant and
contemptuous; he knew his own capacity for rule, and he looked with
scorn on the powers or wits of meaner men. He was a born administrator;
and, like Bacon, he panted for an opportunity of displaying his talent
in what then seemed the only sphere of political action. From the first
moment of his appearance in public his passionate desire had been to
find employment in the service of the Crown. At the close of the
preceding reign he was already connected with the Court, he had secured
a seat in Yorkshire for one of the royal ministers, and was believed to
be on the high road to a peerage. But the consciousness of political
ability which spurred his ambition roused the jealousy of Buckingham;
and the haughty pride of Wentworth was flung by repeated slights into an
attitude of opposition, which his eloquence--grander in its sudden
outbursts, though less earnest and sustained than that of Eliot--soon
rendered formidable. His intrigues at Court roused Buckingham to crush
by a signal insult the rival whose genius he instinctively dreaded.
While sitting in his court as sheriff of Yorkshire, Wentworth received
the announcement of his dismissal from office and of the gift of his
post to Sir John Savile, his rival in the county. "Since they will thus
weakly breathe on me a seeming disgrace in the public face of my
country," he said, with a characteristic outburst of contemptuous pride,
"I shall crave leave to wipe it away as openly, as easily!" His whole
conception of a strong and able rule revolted against the miserable
government of the favourite, his maladministration at home, his failures
and disgraces abroad. Wentworth's aim was to force on the king, not such
a freedom as Eliot longed for, but such a system as the Tudors had clung
to, where a large and noble policy placed the sovereign naturally at the
head of the people, and where Parliaments sank into mere aids to the
Crown. But before this could be, Buckingham and the system of blundering
misrule that he embodied must be cleared away. It was with this end that
Wentworth sprang to the front of the Commons in urging the Petition of
Right. Whether in that crisis of his life some nobler impulse, some true
passion for the freedom he was to trample under foot, mingled with his
thirst for revenge, it is hard to tell. But his words were words of
fire. "If he did not faithfully insist for the common liberty of the
subject to be preserved whole and entire," it was thus he closed one of
his speeches on the Petition, "it was his desire that he might be set as
a beacon on a hill for all men else to wonder at."
[Sidenote: Wentworth as minister.]
It is as such a beacon that his name has stood from that time to this.
He had shown his powers to good purpose; and at the prorogation of the
Parliament he passed into the service of the Crown. He became President
of the Council of the North, a court set up in limitation of the common
law, and which wielded almost unbounded authority beyond the Humber. In
1629 the death of Buckingham removed the obstacle that stood between his
ambition and the end at which it had aimed throughout. All pretence to
patriotism was set aside; Wentworth was admitted to the royal Council;
and as he took his seat at the board he promised to "vindicate the
Monarchy for ever from the conditions and restraints of subjects." So
great was the faith in his zeal and power which he knew how to breathe
into his royal master that he was at once raised to the peerage, and
placed with Laud in the first rank of the king's councillors. Charles
had good ground for this rapid confidence in his new minister. In
Wentworth the very genius of tyranny was embodied. He soon passed beyond
the mere aim of restoring the system of the Tudors. He was far too
clear-sighted to share his master's belief that the arbitrary power
which Charles was wielding formed any part of the old constitution of
the country, or to dream that the mere lapse of time would so change the
temper of Englishmen as to reconcile them to despotism. He knew that
absolute rule was a new thing in England, and that the only way of
permanently establishing it was not by reasoning, or by the force of
custom, but by the force of fear. His system was the expression of his
own inner temper; and the dark gloomy countenance, the full heavy eye,
which meet us in Strafford's portrait are the best commentary on his
policy of "Thorough." It was by the sheer strength of his genius, by the
terror his violence inspired amid the meaner men whom Buckingham had
left, by the general sense of his power, that he had forced himself upon
the Court. He had none of the small arts of a courtier. His air was that
of a silent, proud, passionate man; and when he first appeared at
Whitehall his rough uncourtly manners provoked a smile in the royal
circle. But the smile soon died into a general hate. The Queen,
frivolous and meddlesome as she was, detested him; his fellow-ministers
intrigued against him, and seized on his hot speeches against the great
lords, his quarrels with the royal household, his transports of passion
at the very Council-table, to ruin him in his master's favour. The king
himself, while steadily supporting him against his rivals, was utterly
unable to understand his drift. Charles valued him as an administrator,
disdainful of private ends, crushing great and small with the same
haughty indifference to men's love or hate, and devoted to the one aim
of building up the power of the Crown. But in his purpose of preparing
for the great struggle with freedom which he saw before him, of building
up by force such a despotism in England as Richelieu was building up in
France, and of thus making England as great in Europe as France had been
made by Richelieu, he could look for little sympathy and less help from
the king.
[Sidenote: Ireland under the Stuarts.]
Wentworth's genius turned impatiently to a sphere where it could act
alone, untrammelled by the hindrances it encountered at home. His
purpose was to prepare for the coming contest by the provision of a
fixed revenue, arsenals, fortresses, and a standing army, and it was in
Ireland that he resolved to find them. Till now this miserable country
had been but a drain on the resources of the Crown. Under the
administration of Mountjoy's successor, Sir Arthur Chichester, an able
and determined effort had been made for the settlement of the conquered
province by the general introduction of a purely English system of
government, justice, and property. Every vestige of the old Celtic
constitution of the country was rejected as "barbarous." The tribal
authority of the chiefs was taken from them by law. They were reduced to
the position of great nobles and landowners, while their tribesmen rose
from subjects into tenants, owing only fixed and customary dues and
services to their lords. The tribal system of property in common was set
aside, and the communal holdings of the tribesmen turned into the
copyholds of English law. In the same way the chieftains were stripped
of their hereditary jurisdiction, and the English system of judges and
trial by jury substituted for their proceedings under Brehon or
customary law. To all these changes the Celts opposed the tenacious
obstinacy of their race. Irish juries, then as now, refused to convict.
Glad as the tribesmen were to be freed from the arbitrary exactions of
their chiefs, they held them for chieftains still. The attempt made by
Chichester, under pressure from England, to introduce the English
uniformity of religion ended in utter failure; for the Englishry of the
Pale remained as Catholic as the native Irishry; and the sole result of
the measure was to build up a new Irish people out of both on the common
basis of religion. Much however had been done by the firm yet moderate
government of the Deputy, and signs were already appearing of a
disposition on the part of the people to conform gradually to the new
usages, when the English Council under James suddenly resolved upon and
carried through the revolutionary measure which is known as the
Colonization of Ulster. In 1610 the pacific and conservative policy of
Chichester was abandoned for a vast policy of spoliation. Two-thirds of
the north of Ireland was declared to have been confiscated to the Crown
by the part that its possessors had taken in a recent effort at revolt;
and the lands which were thus gained were allotted to new settlers of
Scotch and English extraction. In its material results the Plantation of
Ulster was undoubtedly a brilliant success. Farms and homesteads,
churches and mills, rose fast amidst the desolate wilds of Tyrone. The
Corporation of London undertook the colonization of Derry, and gave to
the little town the name which its heroic defence has made so famous.
The foundations of the economic prosperity which has raised Ulster high
above the rest of Ireland in wealth and intelligence were undoubtedly
laid in the confiscation of 1610. Nor did the measure meet with any
opposition at the time save that of secret discontent. The evicted
natives withdrew sullenly to the lands which had been left them by the
spoiler, but all faith in English justice had been torn from the minds
of the Irishry, and the seed had been sown of that fatal harvest of
distrust and disaffection which was to be reaped through tyranny and
massacre in the age to come.
[Sidenote: Wentworth in Ireland.]
But the bitter memories of conquest and spoliation only pointed out
Ireland to Wentworth as the best field for his experiment. The balance
of Catholic against Protestant might be used to make both parties
dependent on the royal authority; the rights of conquest which in
Wentworth's theory vested the whole land in the absolute possession of
the Crown gave him scope for his administrative ability; and for the
rest he trusted, and trusted justly, to the force of his genius and of
his will. In the summer of 1633 he sailed as Lord Deputy to Ireland, and
five years later his aim seemed almost realized. "The king," he wrote to
Laud, "is as absolute here as any prince in the world can be." The
government of the new deputy indeed was a rule of terror. Archbishop
Usher, with almost every name which we can respect in the island, was
the object of his insult and oppression. His tyranny strode over all
legal bounds. Wentworth is the one English statesman of all time who may
be said to have had no sense of law; and his scorn of it showed itself
in his coercion of juries as of parliaments. The highest of the Irish
nobles learned to tremble when a few insolent words, construed as
mutiny, were enough to bring Lord Mountnorris before a council of war,
and to inflict on him a sentence of death. But his tyranny aimed at
public ends, and in Ireland the heavy hand of a single despot delivered
the mass of the people at any rate from the local despotism of a hundred
masters. The Irish landowners were for the first time made to feel
themselves amenable to the law. Justice was enforced, outrage was
repressed, the condition of the clergy was to some extent raised, the
sea was cleared of the pirates who infested it. The foundation of the
linen manufacture which was to bring wealth to Ulster, and the first
developement of Irish commerce, date from the Lieutenancy of Wentworth.
Good government however was only a means with him for further ends. The
noblest work to be done in Ireland was the bringing about a
reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant, and an obliteration of
the anger and thirst for vengeance which had been raised by the Ulster
Plantation. Wentworth, on the other hand, angered the Protestants by a
toleration of Catholic worship and a suspension of the persecution which
had feebly begun against the priesthood, while he fed the irritation of
the Catholics by urging in 1635 a new Plantation of Connaught. His
purpose was to encourage a disunion which left both parties dependent
for support and protection on the Crown. It was a policy which was to
end in bringing about the horrors of the Irish revolt, the vengeance of
Cromwell, and the long series of atrocities on both sides which make the
story of the country he ruined so terrible to tell. But for the hour it
left Ireland helpless in his hands. He doubled the revenue. He raised an
army. To provide for its support he ventured, in spite of the panic with
which Charles heard of his project, to summon in 1634 an Irish
Parliament. His aim was to read a lesson to England and the king by
showing how completely that dreaded thing, a Parliament, could be made
an organ of the royal will; and his success was complete. The task of
overawing an Irish Parliament indeed was no very difficult one.
Two-thirds of its House of Commons consisted of the representatives of
wretched villages which were pocket-boroughs of the Crown, while absent
peers were forced to entrust their proxies to the Council to be used at
its pleasure. But precautions were hardly needed. The two Houses
trembled at the stern master who bade their members not let the king
"find them muttering, or to speak it more truly, mutinying in corners,"
and voted with a perfect docility the means of maintaining an army of
five thousand foot and five hundred horse. Had the subsidy been refused,
the result would have been the same. "I would undertake," wrote
Wentworth, "upon the peril of my head, to make the king's army able to
subsist and provide for itself among them without their help."
[Sidenote: Laud.]
While Strafford was thus working out his system of "Thorough" on one
side of St. George's Channel, it was being carried out on the other by a
mind inferior indeed to his own in genius, but almost equal to it in
courage and tenacity. Cold, pedantic, superstitious as he was (he notes
in his diary the entry of a robin-redbreast into his study as a matter
of grave moment), William Laud rose out of the mass of court-prelates by
his industry, his personal unselfishness, his remarkable capacity for
administration. At a later period, when immersed in State business, he
found time to acquire so complete a knowledge of commercial affairs that
the London merchants themselves owned him a master in matters of trade.
Of statesmanship indeed he had none. The shrewdness of James had read
the very heart of the man when Buckingham pressed for his first
advancement to the see of St. David's. "He hath a restless spirit," said
the old king, "which cannot see when things are well, but loves to toss
and change, and to bring matters to a pitch of reformation floating in
his own brain. Take him with you, but by my soul you will repent it."
But Laud's influence was really derived from this oneness of purpose. He
directed all the power of a clear, narrow mind and a dogged will to the
realization of a single aim. His resolve was to raise the Church of
England to what he conceived to be its real position as a branch, though
a reformed branch, of the great Catholic Church throughout the world;
protesting alike against the innovations of Rome and the innovations of
Calvin, and basing its doctrines and usages on those of the Christian
communion in the centuries which preceded the Council of Nicaea. The
first step in the realization of such a theory was the severance of
whatever ties had hitherto united the English Church to the Reformed
Churches of the Continent. In Laud's view episcopal succession was of
the essence of a Church; and by their rejection of bishops the Lutheran
and Calvinistic Churches of Germany and Switzerland had ceased to be
Churches at all. The freedom of worship therefore which had been allowed
to the Huguenot refugees from France, or the Walloons from Flanders, was
suddenly withdrawn; and the requirement of conformity with the Anglican
ritual drove them in crowds from the southern ports to seek toleration
in Holland. The same conformity was required from the English soldiers
and merchants abroad, who had hitherto attended without scruple the
services of the Calvinistic churches. The English ambassador in Paris
was forbidden to visit the Huguenot conventicle at Charenton.
[Sidenote: Laud and the Puritans.]
As Laud drew further from the Protestants of the Continent, he drew,
consciously or unconsciously, nearer to Rome. His theory owned Rome as a
true branch of the Church, though severed from that of England by errors
and innovations against which the Primate vigorously protested. But with
the removal of these obstacles reunion would naturally follow; and his
dream was that of bridging over the gulf which ever since the
Reformation had parted the two Churches. The secret offer of a
cardinal's hat proved Rome's sense that Laud was doing his work for her;
while his rejection of it, and his own reiterated protestations, prove
equally that he was doing it unconsciously. Union with the great body
of Catholicism indeed he regarded as a work which only time could bring
about, but for which he could prepare the Church of England by raising
it to a higher standard of Catholic feeling and Catholic practice. The
great obstacle in his way was the Puritanism of nine-tenths of the
English people, and on Puritanism he made war without mercy. Till 1633
indeed his direct range of action was limited to his own diocese of
London, though his influence with the king enabled him in great measure
to shape the general course of the government in ecclesiastical matters.
But on the death of Abbot Laud was raised to the Archbishopric of
Canterbury, and no sooner had his elevation placed him at the head of
the English Church, than he turned the High Commission into a standing
attack on the Puritan ministers. Rectors and vicars were scolded,
suspended, deprived for "Gospel preaching." The use of the surplice, and
the ceremonies most offensive to Puritan feeling, were enforced in every
parish. The lectures founded in towns, which were the favourite posts of
Puritan preachers, were rigorously suppressed. They found a refuge among
the country gentlemen, and the Archbishop withdrew from the country
gentlemen the privilege of keeping chaplains, which they had till then
enjoyed. As parishes became vacant the High Church bishops had long been
filling them with men who denounced Calvinism, and declared passive
obedience to the sovereign to be part of the law of God. The Puritans
felt the stress of this process, and endeavoured to meet it by buying up
the appropriations of livings, and securing through feoffees a
succession of Protestant ministers in the parishes of which they were
patrons: but in 1633 Laud cited the feoffees into the Star Chamber, and
roughly put an end to them.
[Sidenote: Sunday pastimes.]
Nor was the persecution confined to the clergy. Under the two last
reigns the small pocket-Bibles called the Geneva Bibles had become
universally popular amongst English laymen; but their marginal notes
were found to savour of Calvinism, and their importation was prohibited.
The habit of receiving the communion in a sitting posture had become
common, but kneeling was now enforced, and hundreds were excommunicated
for refusing to comply with the injunction. A more galling means of
annoyance was found in the different views of the two religious parties
on the subject of Sunday. The Puritans identified the Lord's day with
the Jewish Sabbath, and transferred to the one the strict observances
which were required for the other. The Laudian clergy, on the other
hand, regarded it simply as one among the holidays of the Church, and
encouraged their flocks in the pastimes and recreations after service
which had been common before the Reformation. The Crown under James had
taken part with the latter, and had issued a "Book of Sports" which
recommended certain games as lawful and desirable on the Lord's day. On
the other hand judges of assize and magistrates had issued orders
against Sunday "wakes" and "profanation of God's Sabbath." The general
religious sense of the country was undoubtedly tending to a stricter
observance of the day, when Laud brought the contest to a sudden issue.
He summoned the Chief-Justice, Richardson, who had issued the orders in
the western shires, to the Council-table, and rated him so violently
that the old man came out complaining he had been all but choked by a
pair of lawn sleeves. He then ordered every minister to read the
declaration in favour of Sunday pastimes from the pulpit. One Puritan
minister had the wit to obey, and to close the reading with the
significant hint, "You have heard read, good people, both the
commandment of God and the commandment of man! Obey which you please."
But the bulk refused to comply with the Archbishop's will. The result
followed at which Laud no doubt had aimed. Puritan ministers were cited
before the High Commission, and silenced or deprived. In the diocese of
Norwich alone thirty parochial clergymen were expelled from their cures.
[Sidenote: Laud and the clergy.]
The suppression of Puritanism in the ranks of the clergy was only a
preliminary to the real work on which the Archbishop's mind was set, the
preparation for Catholic reunion by the elevation of the clergy to a
Catholic standard in doctrine and ritual. Laud publicly avowed his
preference of an unmarried to a married priesthood. Some of the bishops,
and a large part of the new clergy who occupied the posts from which the
Puritan ministers had been driven, advocated doctrines and customs which
the Reformers had denounced as sheer Papistry; the practice, for
instance, of auricular confession, a Real Presence in the Sacrament, or
prayers for the dead. One prelate, Montagu, was in heart a convert to
Rome. Another, Goodman, died acknowledging himself a Papist. Meanwhile
Laud was indefatigable in his efforts to raise the civil and political
status of the clergy to the point which it had reached ere the fatal
blow of the Reformation fell on the priesthood. Among the archives of
his see lies a large and costly volume in vellum, containing a copy of
such records in the Tower as concerned the privileges of the clergy. Its
compilation was entered in the Archbishop's diary as one among the
"twenty-one things which I have projected to do if God bless me in
them," and as among the fifteen to which before his fall he had been
enabled to add his emphatic "done." The power of the Bishops' Courts,
which had long fallen into decay, revived under his patronage. In 1636
he was able to induce the king to raise a prelate, Juxon, Bishop of
London, to the highest civil post in the realm, that of Lord High
Treasurer. "No Churchman had it since Henry the Seventh's time," Laud
comments proudly. "I pray God bless him to carry it so that the Church
may have honour, and the State service and content by it. And now, if
the Church will not hold up themselves, under God I can do no more."
[Sidenote: Laud and ritual.]
And as Laud aimed at a more Catholic standard of doctrine in the clergy,
so he aimed at a nearer approach to the pomp of Catholicism in public
worship. His conduct in his own house at Lambeth brings out with
singular vividness the reckless courage with which he threw himself
across the religious instincts of a time when the spiritual aspect of
worship was overpowering in most minds its aesthetic and devotional
sides. Men noted as a fatal omen an accident which marked his first
entry into Lambeth; for the overladen ferry-boat upset in the passage of
the river, and though the horses and servants were saved, the
Archbishop's coach remained at the bottom of the Thames. But no omen,
carefully as he might note it, brought a moment's hesitation to the
bold, narrow mind of the new Primate. His first act, he boasted, was the
setting about a restoration of his chapel; and, as Laud managed it, his
restoration was a simple undoing of all that had been done there by his
predecessors since the Reformation. With characteristic energy he aided
with his own hands in the replacement of the painted glass in its
windows, and racked his wits in piecing the fragments together. The
glazier was scandalized by the Primate's express command to repair and
set up again the "broken crucifix" in the east window. The holy table
was removed from the centre, and set altarwise against the eastern wall,
with a cloth of arras behind it, on which was embroidered the history of
the Last Supper. The elaborate woodwork of the screen, the rich copes of
the chaplain, the silver candlesticks, the credence table, the organ and
the choir, the stately ritual, the bowings at the sacred name, the
genuflexions to the altar made the chapel at last such a model of
worship as Laud desired. If he could not exact an equal pomp of devotion
in other quarters, he exacted as much as he could. Bowing to the altar
was introduced into all cathedral churches. A royal injunction ordered
the removal of the communion table, which for the last half-century or
more had in almost every parish church stood in the middle of the nave,
back to its pre-Reformation position in the chancel, and secured it from
profanation by a rail. The removal implied, and was understood to imply,
a recognition of the Real Presence, and a denial of the doctrine which
Englishmen generally held about the Lord's Supper. But, strenuous as was
the resistance which the Archbishop encountered, his pertinacity and
severity warred it down. Parsons who denounced the change from their
pulpits were fined, imprisoned, and deprived of their benefices.
Churchwardens who refused or delayed to obey the injunction were rated
at the Commission-table, and frightened into compliance.
[Sidenote: The Puritan panic.]
In their last Remonstrance to the king the Commons had denounced Laud as
the chief assailant of the Protestant character of the Church of
England; and every year of his Primacy showed him bent upon justifying
the accusation. His policy was no longer the purely Conservative policy
of Parker or Whitgift; it was aggressive and revolutionary. His "new
counsels" threw whatever force there was in the feeling of conservatism
into the hands of the Puritan, for it was the Puritan who seemed to be
defending the old character of the Church of England against its
Primate's attacks. But backed as Laud was by the power of the Crown, the
struggle became more hopeless every day. While the Catholics owned that
they had never enjoyed a like tranquillity, while the fines for
recusancy were reduced and their worship suffered to go on in private
houses, the Puritan saw his ministers silenced or deprived, his Sabbath
profaned, the most sacred act of his worship brought near, as he
fancied, to the mass. Roman doctrine met him from the pulpit, Roman
practices met him in the Church. It was plain that the purpose of Laud
aimed at nothing short of the utter suppression of Puritanism, in other
words, of the form of religion which was dear to the mass of Englishmen.
Already indeed there were signs of a change of temper which might have
made a bolder man pause. Thousands of "the best," scholars, merchants,
lawyers, farmers, were flying over the Atlantic to seek freedom and
purity of religion in the wilderness. Great landowners and nobles were
preparing to follow. Ministers were quitting their parsonages rather
than abet the royal insult to the sanctity of the Sabbath. The Puritans
who remained among the clergy were giving up their homes rather than
consent to the change of the sacred table into an altar, or to silence
in their protests against the new Popery. The noblest of living
Englishmen refused to become the priest of a Church whose ministry could
only be "bought with servitude and forswearing."
[Sidenote: Milton at Horton.]
We have seen John Milton leave Cambridge, self-dedicated "to that same
lot, however mean or high, to which time leads me and the will of
Heaven." But the lot to which these called him was not the ministerial
office to which he had been destined from his childhood. In later life
he told bitterly the story how he had been "Church-outed by the
prelates." "Coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving what
tyranny had invaded in the Church, that he who would take orders must
subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which unless he took with a
conscience that would retch he must either straight perjure or split his
faith, I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before the
sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and
forswearing." In spite therefore of his father's regrets, he retired in
1633 to a new home which the scrivener had found at Horton, a village in
the neighbourhood of Windsor, and quietly busied himself with study and
verse. The poetic impulse of the Renascence had been slowly dying away
under the Stuarts. The stage was falling into mere coarseness and
horror. Shakspere had died quietly at Stratford in Milton's childhood;
the last and worst play of Ben Jonson appeared in the year of his
settlement at Horton; and though Ford and Massinger still lingered on,
there were no successors for them but Shirley and Davenant. The
philosophic and meditative taste of the age had produced indeed poetic
schools of its own: poetic satire had become fashionable in Hall, better
known afterwards as a bishop, and had been carried on vigorously by
George Wither; the so-called "metaphysical" poetry, the vigorous and
pithy expression of a cold and prosaic good sense, began with Sir John
Davies and buried itself in fantastic affectations in Donne; religious
verse had become popular in the gloomy allegories of Quarles and the
tender refinement which struggles through a jungle of puns and
extravagances in George Herbert. But what poetic life really remained
was to be found only in the caressing fancy and lively badinage of lyric
singers like Herrick, whose grace is untouched by passion and often
disfigured by coarseness and pedantry; or in the school of Spenser's
more direct successors, where Browne in his pastorals and the two
Fletchers, Phineas and Giles, in their unreadable allegories, still
preserved something of their master's sweetness, if they preserved
nothing of his power.
[Sidenote: His early poems.]
Milton was himself a Spenserian; he owned to Dryden in later years that
"Spenser was his original," and in some of his earliest lines at Horton
he dwells lovingly on "the sage and solemn tones" of the "Faerie Queen,"
its "forests and enchantments drear, where more is meant than meets the
ear." But of the weakness and affectation which characterized Spenser's
successors he had not a trace. In the "Allegro" and "Penseroso," the
first results of his retirement at Horton, we catch again the fancy and
melody of the Elizabethan verse, the wealth of its imagery, its wide
sympathy with nature and man. There is a loss perhaps of the older
freedom and spontaneity of the Renascence, a rhetorical rather than
passionate turn in the young poet, a striking absence of dramatic power,
and a want of subtle precision even in his picturesque touches. Milton's
imagination is not strong enough to identify him with the world which he
imagines; he stands apart from it, and looks at it as from a distance,
ordering it and arranging it at his will. But if in this respect he
falls both in his earlier and later poems below Shakspere or Spenser,
the deficiency is all but compensated by his nobleness of feeling and
expression, the severity of his taste, his sustained dignity, and the
perfectness and completeness of his work. The moral grandeur of the
Puritan breathes, even in these lighter pieces of his youth, through
every line. The "Comus," which he planned as a masque for some
festivities which the Earl of Bridgewater was holding at Ludlow Castle,
rises into an almost impassioned pleading for the love of virtue.
[Sidenote: Puritan fanaticism.]
The historic interest of Milton's "Comus" lies in its forming part of a
protest made by the more cultured Puritans at this time against the
gloomier bigotry which persecution was fostering in the party at large.
The patience of Englishmen, in fact, was slowly wearing out. There was a
sudden upgrowth of virulent pamphlets of the old Martin Marprelate type.
Men, whose names no one asked, hawked libels, whose authorship no one
knew, from the door of the tradesman to the door of the squire. As the
hopes of a Parliament grew fainter, and men despaired of any legal
remedy, violent and weak-headed fanatics came, as at such times they
always come, to the front. Leighton, the father of the saintly
archbishop of that name, had given a specimen of their tone at the
outset of this period by denouncing the prelates as men of blood,
Episcopacy as Antichrist, and the Popish Queen as a daughter of Heth.
The "Histriomastix" of Prynne, a lawyer distinguished for his
constitutional knowledge, but the most obstinate and narrow-minded of
men, marked the deepening of Puritan bigotry under the fostering warmth
of Laud's persecution. The book was an attack on players as the
ministers of Satan, on theatres as the Devil's chapels, on hunting,
maypoles, the decking of houses at Christmas with evergreens, on cards,
music, and false hair. The attack on the stage was as offensive to the
more cultured minds among the Puritan party as to the Court itself;
Selden and Whitelock took a prominent part in preparing a grand masque
by which the Inns of Court resolved to answer its challenge, and in the
following year Milton wrote his masque of "Comus" for Ludlow Castle. To
leave Prynne however simply to the censure of wiser men than himself was
too sensible a course for the angry Primate. No man was ever sent to
prison before or since for such a sheer mass of nonsense; but a passage
in the book was taken as a reflection on the Queen, who had purposed to
take part in a play at the time of its publication; and the sentence
showed the hard cruelty of the Primate's temper. In 1634 Prynne was
dismissed from the bar, deprived of his university degree, and set in
the pillory. His ears were clipped from his head, and the stubborn
lawyer was then taken back to prison to be kept there during the king's
pleasure.
With such a world around them we can hardly wonder that men of less
fanatical turn than Prynne gave way to despair. But it was in this hour
of despair that the Puritans won their noblest triumph. They "turned,"
to use Canning's words in a far truer and grander sense than that which
he gave to them, "they turned to the New World to redress the balance of
the Old." It was during the years which followed the close of the third
Parliament of Charles that a great Puritan migration founded the States
of New England.
[Sidenote: Virginia.]
Ralegh's settlement on the Virginian coast, the first attempt which
Englishmen had made to claim North America for their own, had soon
proved a failure. The introduction of tobacco and the potato into Europe
dates from his voyage of discovery, but the energy of his colonists was
distracted by the delusive dream of gold, the hostility of the native
tribes drove them from the coast, and it is through the gratitude of
later times for what he strove to do, rather than for what he did, that
Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina, preserves his name. The first
permanent settlement on the Chesapeake was effected in the beginning of
the reign of James the First, and its success was due to the conviction
of the settlers that the secret of the New World's conquest lay simply
in labour. Among the hundred and five colonists who originally landed,
forty-eight were gentlemen, and only twelve were tillers of the soil.
Their leader, John Smith, however, not only explored the vast Bay of
Chesapeake and discovered the Potomac and the Susquehannah, but held
the little company together in the face of famine and desertion till the
colonists had learned the lesson of toil. In his letters to the
colonizers at home he set resolutely aside the dream of gold. "Nothing
is to be expected thence," he wrote of the new country, "but by labour";
and supplies of labourers, aided by a wise allotment of land to each
colonist, secured after five years of struggle the fortunes of Virginia.
"Men fell to building houses and planting corn"; the very streets of
Jamestown, as their capital was called from the reigning sovereign, were
sown with tobacco; and in fifteen years the colony numbered five
thousand souls.
[Illustration: THE AMERICAN COLONIES in 1640.]
[Sidenote: The Pilgrim Fathers.]
Only a few years after the settlement of Smith in Virginia, the church
of Brownist or Independent refugees, whom we saw driven in Elizabeth's
reign to Amsterdam, resolved to quit Holland and find a home in the
wilds of the New World. They were little disheartened by the tidings of
suffering which came from the Virginian settlement. "We are well
weaned," wrote their minister, John Robinson, "from the delicate milk of
the mother-country, and inured to the difficulties of a strange land:
the people are industrious and frugal. We are knit together as a body in
a most sacred covenant of the Lord, of the violation whereof we make
great conscience, and by virtue whereof we hold ourselves strictly tied
to all care of each other's good and of the whole. It is not with us as
with men whom small things can discourage." Returning from Holland to
Southampton, they started in two small vessels for the new land: but one
of these soon put back, and only its companion, the _Mayflower_, a bark
of a hundred and eighty tons, with forty-one emigrants and their
families on board, persisted in prosecuting its voyage. In 1620 the
little company of the "Pilgrim Fathers," as after-times loved to call
them, landed on the barren coast of Massachusetts at a spot to which
they gave the name of Plymouth, in memory of the last English port at
which they touched. They had soon to face the long hard winter of the
north, to bear sickness and famine: even when these years of toil and
suffering had passed there was a time when "they knew not at night where
to have a bit in the morning." Resolute and industrious as they were,
their progress was very slow; and at the end of ten years they numbered
only three hundred souls. But small as it was, the colony was now firmly
established and the struggle for mere existence was over. "Let it not be
grievous unto you," some of their brethren had written from England to
the poor emigrants in the midst of their sufferings, "that you have been
instrumental to break the ice for others. The honour shall be yours to
the world's end."
[Sidenote: The Puritan migration.]
From the moment of their establishment the eyes of the English Puritans
were fixed on this little Puritan settlement in North America. Through
the early years of Charles projects were being canvassed for the
establishment of a new settlement beside the little Plymouth; and the
aid which the merchants of Boston in Lincolnshire gave to the
realization of this project was acknowledged in the name of its
capital. At the moment when he was dissolving his third Parliament
Charles granted the charter which established the colony of
Massachusetts; and by the Puritans at large the grant was at once
regarded as a Providential call. Out of the failure of their great
constitutional struggle and the pressing danger to "godliness" in
England rose the dream of a land in the West where religion and liberty
could find a safe and lasting home. The Parliament was hardly dissolved
when "conclusions" for the establishment of a great colony on the other
side of the Atlantic were circulating among gentry and traders, and
descriptions of the new country of Massachusetts were talked over in
every Puritan household. The proposal was welcomed with the quiet, stern
enthusiasm which marked the temper of the time; but the words of a
well-known emigrant show how hard it was even for the sternest
enthusiasts to tear themselves from their native land. "I shall call
that my country," wrote the younger Winthrop in answer to feelings of
this sort, "where I may most glorify God and enjoy the presence of my
dearest friends." The answer was accepted, and the Puritan emigration
began on a scale such as England had never before seen. The two hundred
who first sailed for Salem were soon followed by John Winthrop with
eight hundred men; and seven hundred more followed ere the first year of
personal government had run its course. Nor were the emigrants, like
the earlier colonists of the South, "broken men," adventurers,
bankrupts, criminals; or simply poor men and artisans, like the Pilgrim
Fathers of the _Mayflower_. They were in great part men of the
professional and middle classes; some of them men of large landed
estate, some zealous clergymen like Cotton, Hooker, and Roger Williams,
some shrewd London lawyers, or young scholars from Oxford. The bulk were
God-fearing farmers from Lincolnshire and the Eastern counties. They
desired in fact "only the best" as sharers in their enterprise; men
driven forth from their fatherland not by earthly want, or by the greed
of gold, or by the lust of adventure, but by the fear of God, and the
zeal for a godly worship. But strong as was their zeal, it was not
without a wrench that they tore themselves from their English homes.
"Farewell, dear England!" was the cry which burst from the first little
company of emigrants as its shores faded from their sight. "Our hearts,"
wrote Winthrop's followers to the brethren whom they had left behind,
"shall be fountains of tears for your everlasting welfare, when we shall
be in our poor cottages in the wilderness."
[Sidenote: New England.]
For a while, as the first terrors of persecution died down, there was a
lull in the emigration. But no sooner had Laud's system made its
pressure felt than again "godly people in England began to apprehend a
special hand of Providence in raising this plantation" in Massachusetts;
"and their hearts were generally stirred to come over." It was in vain
that weaker men returned to bring news of hardships and dangers, and
told how two hundred of the new-comers had perished with their first
winter. A letter from Winthrop told how the rest toiled manfully on. "We
now enjoy God and Jesus Christ," he wrote to those at home, "and is not
that enough? I thank God I like so well to be here as I do not repent my
coming. I would not have altered my course though I had foreseen all
these afflictions. I never had more content of mind." With the strength
and manliness of Puritanism, its bigotry and narrowness crossed the
Atlantic too. Roger Williams, a young minister who held the doctrine of
freedom of conscience, was driven from the new settlement to become a
preacher among the settlers of Rhode Island. The bitter resentment
stirred in the emigrants by persecution at home was seen in their
abolition of Episcopacy and their prohibition of the use of the Book of
Common Prayer. The intensity of its religious sentiments turned the
colony into a theocracy. "To the end that the body of the Commons may be
preserved of honest and good men, it was ordered and agreed that for the
time to come no man shall be admitted to the freedom of the body politic
but such as are members of some of the churches within the bounds of the
same." But the fiercer mood which persecution was begetting in the
Puritans only welcomed this bigotry. As years went by and the contest
grew hotter at home, the number of emigrants rose fast. Three thousand
new colonists arrived from England in a single year. Between the sailing
of Winthrop's expedition and the assembling of the Long Parliament, in
the space, that is, of ten or eleven years, two hundred emigrant ships
had crossed the Atlantic, and twenty thousand Englishmen had found a
refuge in the West.