The bill of October for removing Bishops from the House of Peers had
hung fire. On its reaching the Upper House it had been once read,
and then laid aside. The conduct of the bishops, which led to their
impeachment, also induced the Commons to urge upon the Lords the
passing of this measure. After some hesitation, they read the bill
a third time, on the 5th of February; and the Commons, now become
impatient, expressed their sorrow, three days afterwards, that the
royal assent had not been immediately given. The King's reluctance was
at the same time expressed at a conference on the 8th of February,
by the Earl of Monmouth, who said, "that it was a matter of weight
which his Majesty would take into consideration, and send an answer in
convenient time."[259] On the 14th of February came the tardy "Le Roy
le veult." No prelate now remaining to read prayers, the Peers ordered
that the Lord Chancellor's or the Lord Keeper's chaplain should "say
prayers before the Lords in Parliament," and in his absence, the Lord
Chancellor or Lord Keeper should appoint some other person for that
service. The vacant benches, staring their lordships in the face,
appeared unsightly; in consequence of which they named a committee to
consider "how the peers should sit in the House, now that the Bishops'
seats were empty."[260]
[Sidenote: 1642, February.]
Thus fell, after threatening assaults for fourteen months, the temporal
power of the prelates. Their exclusion from the Upper House is opposed
to the ancient laws and customs of the realm, and it does violence
to those ideas of the English Constitution which are based upon the
history of the middle ages. Then Church and State were bound in the
closest ties, and Churchmen, from their presumed superior intelligence,
were esteemed amongst the fittest men to make laws and to direct public
affairs. But matters had undergone a vast change by the middle of the
seventeenth century, and many persons of enlarged minds had come to
perceive, that there was no more necessity for seeking senators than
seeking chancellors from the clerical ranks; that neither the liberties
of the subject, nor the prerogatives of the crown, appeared to be in
danger from the change; and that the removal of the bench of Bishops
would not destroy the integrity and completeness of the Upper House,
or put out of working gear the machinery of the Constitution. On
political grounds they saw no valid objection to the measure, whilst in
a religious point of view they deemed it highly desirable.
The Act which deprived Bishops of their legislative functions did not
touch their revenues; but there followed, within a little more than two
months, an ordinance which absolutely deprived some amongst them of
their estates, personal as well as real, and placed the possessions of
all the rest in jeopardy; so that from affluence they were reduced to
poverty, or to the imminent hazard of losing whatever they had.
Those who lived beyond the year 1650 will be noticed hereafter. Those
who died before that time are recorded now.
[Sidenote: _Bishops._]
Robert Wright, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, one of the protesters,
remained in the Tower eighteen weeks; and when set at liberty, retired
to his episcopal castle of Eccleshall, in Staffordshire, which
he--like a military Churchman of the middle ages--defended against the
Parliament. He died during a siege in the summer of 1643.
Dr. Accepted Frewen, nominated by the King as successor to Wright,
derived but little from his see before the Restoration.[261]
Thomas Westfield, bishop of Bristol, who died in 1644, won the good
opinion of all parties; so that the Puritan committee, appointed by
the ordinance for sequestering delinquents' estates, on being informed
that his tenants refused to pay their rents, ordered them to yield to
him the revenues of his bishopric, and gave him and his family a safe
conduct to Bristol. It is said of him, that "he made not that wearisome
which should be welcome; never keeping his glass (the hour glass in the
pulpit), except upon extraordinary occasions, more than a quarter of an
hour: he made not that common which should be precious, either by the
coarseness or cursoriness of his manner. He never, though almost fifty
years a preacher, went up into the pulpit but he trembled; and never
preached before the King but once, and then he fainted."[262]
[Sidenote: 1641-1650.]
His immediate successor in the see, Thomas Howell, consecrated at
Oxford during the siege of that city, is reported to have been
treated at first by the people of Bristol with great indignity and
violence--his palace being turned into a malt-house and a mill--but
the mildness of his disposition overcame all enemies, and though he
found few well-affected on his appointment to the diocese, he left few
ill-affected towards him at his death. He died in 1646, and was buried
in his own cathedral.
George Coke, bishop of Hereford, forfeited his estate, like the other
protesters. Colonel Birch, a Parliamentary officer, took possession of
his palace on the surrender of the episcopal city in 1645. His wife and
children had an exhibition granted for one year out of his sequestered
estate at Eardsley, on condition that neither she nor her husband
should assist the malignants. He died in 1646.
Morgan Owen, bishop of Llandaff--said to be under the influence of
Laud, and connected with him by the Puritans, in a story respecting
some popish image of the virgin at Oxford--was a protester, and
imprisoned accordingly. His death occurred towards the end of 1644.
Walter Curle, bishop of Winchester, resided in that city when the
Parliamentary forces besieged it. Upon its surrender, he retired
to Subberton, in Hampshire, where he died in 1647, after suffering
the sequestration of his own proper estate for refusing to take the
covenant.
John Towers, bishop of Peterborough, having been confined for his
connection with the protest, subsequently repaired to the King, at
Oxford, and remained there till its surrender to the Parliament, when
he returned to Peterborough, and there found himself, as a delinquent,
stripped of his revenues. He died in 1649.[263]
[Sidenote: _Bishops._]
John Prideaux, a man of eminent learning, promoted to the bishopric
of Worcester amidst the troubles of 1641, excommunicated all in his
diocese who took up arms on the Parliament's behalf. By such conduct
of course he subjected himself to penalties; and it is related, that
he turned his books and everything else into bread for himself and his
family, so that, when he was saluted in the usual way, "How doth your
lordship do?" he facetiously replied, "Never better in my life, only
I have too great a stomach, for I have eaten that little plate which
the sequestrators left me; I have eaten a great library of excellent
books; I have eaten a great deal of linen, much of my brass, some of
my pewter, and now I am come to eat iron, and what will come next I
know not."[264] This humorous prelate died in 1650, leaving to his
children--"no legacy but pious poverty, God's blessing, and a father's
prayers."
John Williams, archbishop of York, who has appeared prominently in
this volume, after the imprisonment and sequestration which he brought
upon himself by the conduct which we have already described, took, by
royal command, the charge of Conway Castle and the government of North
Wales, in which country he was born; and, at last--either in accordance
with his established character for trimming his sails according to the
wind, or to gratify a personal grudge against the Royalist captain, by
whom he had been violently displaced--he joined a Parliamentary troop
in order to recover his old fortress; after which military transaction
he ended his strange and chequered career, in 1650, at Glodded, in the
house of his kinswoman, Lady Mostyn. It is related of him, that during
the last year of his life, he rose out of bed regularly at midnight
for one quarter of an hour, when he knelt on his bare knees, and prayed
earnestly, "Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly, and put an end to these
days of sin and misery."[265]
[Sidenote: 1641, October.]
On returning to the complicated web of religious interests and
excitements at the close of the year 1641, some dark threads remain to
be unravelled.
The following letter was written in London on the 4th of November,
1641, and indicates the alarm excited by intelligence just received
from Ireland:--[266]
[Sidenote: _Irish Rebellion._]
"This week hath brought forth strange discoveries of horrible treasons
hatched by the Papists in Ireland, and that upon the 23rd of October
past, they should have been put in execution throughout the north of
that kingdom upon all the Protestants at one instant, who were then
designed to have their throats cut by them; but, God be thanked, the
night before, being the 22nd October, one Owen Connellie, a servant
of Sir John Clotworthy, a member of the House of Commons, being then
newly made acquainted with the wickedness of the plot, by a friend of
his, that the next day should have been an actor in it, went (though
with much ado) to the Lords the Justices in Dublin, and revealed it:
whereupon the gates were instantly commanded to be shut, and a matter
of thirty-eight that were in town of the conspirators taken, whereof
the Lord Marquis and Mac Mahon are the chief, and have since confessed,
that by the next morning they expected to come to their aid twenty well
armed Papists, out of every county in Ireland, that they might all,
upon a sudden, have surprised the castle with the ammunition, and so
commanded the city and the lives of all the inhabitants. The treason
being thus discovered did spread apace throughout the north of Ireland,
where the rebellion first began, and in several places in several
bodies are of the Papists up in arms above 10,000 men, which doth much
perplex the poor Protestants, and [there is] great fear whether they
shall be able to suppress or resist them. Whereupon our Parliament
hath ordered my Lord of Leicester, Lord Lieutenant, and all other
commanders here, speedily to repair thither, and do furnish £50,000 to
carry along with them, which the City of London advances for providing
of men and arms to secure that kingdom. Some blood the villains have
shed, and committed great outrages, and taken some castles and places
of strength; but if they had taken Dublin, upon the rack divers have
confessed, in a short time they would not have left a Protestant alive
in the whole kingdom; but God, in His mercy, hath prevented that
slaughter, and hath turned part of it upon themselves. The traitors
give out the late tyranny of the Lord of Strafford upon them moved them
to it; and that, by the example of the Scots, they hoped to purchase
such privileges, by this means, in their religion, as otherwise they
never expected to have granted to them. You see the distempers of the
three kingdoms--God forgive them that have been the cause of it, and
then to be despatched into the other world, that they may trouble us no
more in this again."[267]
[Sidenote: 1641, October.]
[Sidenote: _Irish Rebellion._]
It is difficult for us--now that the reformation has become a remote
event, and Protestantism holds undisputed supremacy; now that the
principles of liberty are well understood, and the asperities and
virulence of old controversies, except in a few cases, have, been
softened down--to enter into the anti-papal feelings which moved our
stout-hearted fathers more than two centuries ago. At that period, the
Reformation, under Elizabeth, had lasted little more than eighty years.
The parents of some who were now living had witnessed the cruelties
of the Marian persecution; the men and women under Charles the First,
had, as boys and girls, in ingle-nook at Christmas-tide, felt their
blood run cold whilst listening to stories of the Smithfield fires
from eye-witnesses. A few, then in London, had actually beheld with
their own eyes a scene which stirs our hearts when only represented
by the pencil--Elizabeth haranguing her troops at Tilbury Fort. More
had heard, with their own ears, the current contemporary talk about
the Spanish Armada, as it sailed up the channel, and had caught the
first tidings of the proud armament being scattered to the winds--just
after the subsiding of the storm which sunk the accursed ships--and
they could never forget how the nation drew breath after a gasp of
most awful suspense in 1588. These last events were about as near to
the times we are describing, as the Battle of Waterloo is to our
own. The gunpowder plot was an incident of no very distant occurrence;
only as far back in the memory of members of the Long Parliament, as
the Bristol riots, and the Swing rick burning in our own. Numbers of
the gentlemen in high-crowned hats and short cloaks, who walked into
the House of Commons in 1641, filled with alarm respecting Popery,
had participated in the sensation produced by that discovery, which
is celebrated now only by a few boys on the 5th of November. Besides
all this, the sufferings of French Huguenots were fresh in everybody's
mind. Refugees who had escaped the galleys were still in London. The
massacre at Paris, commemorated by the Pope's medal, hardly fell
beyond the recollections of existing persons, whilst new religious
conflicts in France, and the siege of Rochelle, had occurred but a
few years before. The thirty years' war in Germany was not concluded;
and the battle of Prague, the execution of the Protestant patriots in
front of the Rathhaus, the expulsion of the disciples of Huss, and
the barbarities of the Papists throughout Bohemia, were in everyone's
memory.
[Sidenote: 1641, October.]
With so many alarming events recently connected with Popery, and
while the question of the Reformation in Europe appeared unsettled,
and Jesuits were intriguing, and catholic tendencies had reached
such a height in the Church of England, it is no wonder that staunch
Protestants at home, who made common cause with staunch Protestants
abroad, had such an intense dread of their old enemy. It was then with
the Puritans of England, as it has ever been, and still is, with the
Protestants of France. The latter have never forgotten the massacre
of St. Bartholomew, and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. They
have cherished, more than we have, the traditions of a suffering
Church, a Church struggling to keep its ground against neighbours
as powerful as they are antagonistic. Catholic tendencies do not
appear amongst the descendants of the Huguenots; the line is distinct
between the two Churches, and the trumpet of defiance, in the case
of French Protestantism, gives no uncertain sound. A like relative
position to papal Europe was maintained by the Puritans of 1641, with
animosities even more intense, inasmuch as the tragedies remembered
were more recent, and the danger apprehended seemed just at hand: and
it explains how the outburst of a neighbouring rebellion on the part of
the spiritual subjects of the Pope, struck terror in all Protestants
throughout this kingdom, from the Orkneys to the Land's End.
[Sidenote: _Irish Rebellion._]
The Protestant Church never flourished in Ireland. Bedell, Bishop
of Kilmore, and Bramhall, then Bishop of Derry, laboured to produce
reform. Bedell, seeing that the native Irish were little regarded
by the Protestant clergy and were left almost entirely in the hands
of the Popish priests, aimed at instructing them in the truths of
Christianity; a wise method, which however did not meet the views of
Strafford, whose policy was "to enforce religious unity by Church
discipline, and to invigorate Church discipline with the secular
arm."[268] Bramhall, in 1633, gave a deplorable account of the Irish
Church to Archbishop Laud. It was hard to say whether the fabrics
were more ruinous, or the people more irreverent. One parochial
church, in Dublin, had been turned into a stable, a second into a
dwelling, and a third into a tennis court, the vicar acting as keeper.
The vaults of Christchurch, from one end to another, were used as
tippling rooms, and were frequented for that purpose at the time
of Divine service. The very altar had become a seat for maids and
apprentices. The bishop also doubted the orthodoxy of his clergy. The
inferior sort of ministers (he said) were below contempt in respect
of poverty and ignorance, and the boundless heaping together of
benefices by _commendams_ and _dispensations_ was but too apparent.
Rarely ten pounds a year fell to the incumbent, and yet one prelate
held three-and-twenty benefices.[269] Such a state of things, not
described by an enemy but by a friend, speaks volumes. Bramhall, in
meditating reform, followed too much Laud's method, first looking at
the external condition of the Church, striving to improve edifices, to
preserve and rightly administer emoluments, to regulate worship and
secure uniformity--doubtless with far higher ultimate aims--instead of
going at once to the root of the evil, and promoting the spread of the
Gospel of Christ, and the revival of spiritual religion. Some outward
improvement followed the Churchman's endeavours, but very little of
that pure vital piety, and that Christian love, without which a Church,
no less than an individual, is but as "sounding brass and a tinkling
cymbal." Protestantism, even with the best endeavours of its advocates,
had not laid hold on the Irish heart; and Papists, who were immensely
in the majority, looked with bitter feeling on the chronic disease of
Ireland--the absorption of ecclesiastical emoluments by a sect in the
minority. Puritanism too was active. People complained of "the unblest
way of the prelacy," of fines, fees, and imprisonments, of silencing
and banishing "learned and conscionable ministers," and of the prelates
favouring popery.[270] Moreover, political heart-burnings mingled with
all this ecclesiastical strife.
[Sidenote: 1641, October.]
The Popish rebellion broke out in October. On the 1st of November,
Mr. Pym rose in the House of Commons, and stated that a noble lord, a
Privy Councillor, with other noble lords, stood at the door, waiting
to deliver important intelligence. Chairs were ordered to be placed
for these distinguished visitors, who entered uncovered--the serjeant
carrying the mace before them. The Commons doffed their hats till
the strangers were seated; when, having covered their heads again,
each, in breathless silence, with eager inquisitive eye, perhaps with
pressed ear, listened to the Lord Keeper, as he proceeded to tell them
the purpose for which he had come. The alarm increased as the Earl of
Leicester, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, one of the deputation from the
Lords, took off his hat, and said: That letters and papers had been
sent from Ireland by the Lord Justices, communicating information of
the shedding of much blood; that all Protestants were to be cut off;
that no British man, woman, or child was to be left alive; that the
horrid deed had been fixed for Saturday, the 23rd of October, being the
feast of St. Ignatius; that the King's forts were to be seized, and
the Justices and Privy Council slain. A timely supply of men and money
therefore was needed to save the country.
[Sidenote: _Irish Rebellion._]
These vague tidings ran through England like wildfire, and then there
followed details of unparalleled barbarities. It was reported, that in
the county of Armagh alone, a thousand Protestants were forced over
the Bridge of Portadown, and drowned in the River Bann. A wife was
compelled to hang her own husband. Two-and-twenty people were put into
a thatched house, and burned alive. Women, great with child, had their
bellies ripped up, and were then drowned. Three hundred Protestants
were stripped naked, and crowded into the Church of Loghill, a hundred
of whom were murdered, one being quartered alive, whose quarters
were flung in the face of the unhappy father. A hundred men, women,
and children were driven like hogs for six miles to a river, into
which they were pitched headlong with pikes and swords.[271] These
instances are only a few taken from the reports: page after page in
Rushworth, and other collections, is filled with the like enormities.
The computation was that between one and two hundred thousand persons
perished in these massacres. Common sense, knowledge of human nature,
and the recollection of rumours in our own time respecting Indian
massacres and Jamaica atrocities, must lead us to suspect the accuracy
of these reports.
Allowance should be made for exaggeration at a time of maddening
terror, and in the case of an excitable and imaginative people like
the Irish. It should also be remembered that our poor sister island
had endured wrongs from a Protestant Government; that the Puritans had
alarmed the Papists; that the Papists had exasperated the Puritans;
and that mutual intolerance increased mutual hatred. But, after all
fair abatements, that Irish Rebellion must be regarded as one of the
blackest crimes recorded in history, as an outburst of demoniacal fury,
which nothing could excuse, and which the utmost provocation could but
slenderly palliate.[272] If, as supposed by some, it was a desperate
stroke for Popish ascendancy in Ireland, encouraged by the example
of the Scots, who by rising in arms had asserted their right to a
Presbyterian Government, it must be admitted by all to have been, as
Carlyle says, "a most wretched imitation."
[Sidenote: 1641, October.]
It is not our business to investigate the sources of the Irish
rebellion, or to weigh evidence as to its horrors. Enough is admitted
by historians of every school to shew that it was a very great
calamity, and all to be done here is to indicate the impression it made
in England, and how it further complicated the already intricate causes
which conspired to complete the great ecclesiastical revolution of the
age.
Puritans in England were terror-stricken. Fasts were held, and young
people were worn out by abstinence and prayer. Amidst a crowded
congregation, near Bradford, where all were groaning and weeping, there
came a man, who cried, "Friends, we are all as good as dead men, for
the Irish rebels are coming; they are come as far as Rochdale, and
Littleborough, and the Batings, and will be at Halifax and Bradford
shortly."[273] Upon hearing this, the congregation fell into utter
confusion, and began to run for their lives,--screaming about the
bloody Papists, and expecting every moment to meet the cut-throats.
Not only were ignorant multitudes thus panic-stricken, but Richard
Baxter believed that the Irish had threatened to come over, and, he
remarks, that such threats, "with the name of 200,000 murdered, and
the recital of the monstrous cruelties of those cannibals, made many
thousands in England think that nothing could be more necessary than
for the Parliament to put the country into an armed posture for their
own defence."[274]
[Sidenote: _Irish Rebellion._]
Not only did aversion to Popery proper increase through what had
happened in Ireland, but that aversion regarded much which bore but a
very partial resemblance to Popery. It was not easy then, with cool
discrimination, to distinguish between things which differed; and some
things, it must be remembered, were more alike then than they are at
present. What would be folly in one age may be something like wisdom in
another; what would be groundless fear now might be caution then; that
which all would pronounce insanity in a Protestant of the nineteenth
century was probably only a reasonable apprehension in a Puritan of the
seventeenth. At that time there not only rose a stronger determination
to resist the power of Rome, but also a stronger determination to put
an end to the power at Lambeth. The tiara became more hateful than
ever, and not less so the mitre: images of the Virgin were pronounced
intolerable, so were all superstitious ornaments in churches. The
Popish rebellion helped on the measure for removing Bishops from
amongst the rulers of the country, and imparted a fresh impulse to the
desire for abolishing Episcopacy.
[Sidenote: 1641, October.]
The actual plot in Ireland gave countenance to the belief of imaginary
plots in England. One day in November, John Hampden went up to the
Lords to let them know that a man had come to the door of the House
of Commons, and sent in word how he had matters of a high nature to
reveal concerning certain noble Peers and honourable Commons. They had
therefore sent the man to their Lordships' House, for examination.
Upon this, one Thomas Beal, a tailor of Whitecross Street, appeared,
who told a long rambling story to the effect, that on that very day,
at twelve o'clock, as he went into the fields near the Pest House, and
was walking on a private bank, he heard some people talking warily.
Going nearer, he heard somebody say, "it was a wicked thing that the
last plot did not take," but that one now was going on which would be
the making of them all. A hundred and eight conspirators were to kill
one hundred and eight members of Parliament--all Puritans--and the
sacrament was to be administered to the murderers. Beal was commanded
to withdraw, and an order followed to arrest certain Jesuits on
suspicion. This conspiracy, as might be expected from the man's story,
turned out to be mere smoke.[275] Yet we relate the circumstance as an
illustration of the excitement of the period; and to exemplify how men,
like the inhabitants of the Hartz mountains looking at the clouds, saw
their own fears reflected in gigantic shadows, which they mistook for
most awful and threatening realities.
[Illustration]