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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, History of the English People, Volume V (of
+8) , by John Richard Green
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) 
+       Puritan England, 1603-1660
+
+
+Author: John Richard Green
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 27, 2007  [eBook #23642]
+Most recently updated: May 20, 2008
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE,
+VOLUME V (OF 8) ***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Paul Murray, Lisa Reigel, Michael Zeug, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original map and links to
+      images of the original pages.
+      See 23642-h.htm or 23642-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/3/6/4/23642/23642-h/23642-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/3/6/4/23642/23642-h.zip)
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+      Text in italics in the original is surrounded by _underscores_.
+
+      The index for the entire 8 volume set of _History of
+      the English People_ was located at the end of Volume
+      VIII. For ease in accessibility, it has been removed
+      and produced as a separate volume
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/25533).
+
+      An additional transcriber's note will be found at the end of
+      the text.
+
+
+
+
+
+HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
+
+by
+
+JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.
+Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford
+
+VOLUME V
+
+PURITAN ENGLAND, 1603-1644
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+London
+MacMillan and Co., Ltd.
+New York: MacMillan & Co.
+1896
+
+First Edition 1879; Reprinted 1882, 1886, 1891.
+Eversley Edition, 1896.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+   BOOK VI
+
+      CHAPTER VII
+                                                    PAGE
+      THE ENGLAND OF SHAKSPERE. 1593-1603              1
+
+
+   BOOK VII
+
+   PURITAN ENGLAND. 1603-1660
+
+
+      CHAPTER I
+
+      ENGLAND AND PURITANISM. 1603-1660               75
+
+
+      CHAPTER II
+
+      THE KING OF SCOTS.                             120
+
+
+      CHAPTER III
+
+      THE BREAK WITH THE PARLIAMENT. 1603-1611       146
+
+
+      CHAPTER IV
+
+      THE FAVOURITES. 1611-1625                      183
+
+
+      CHAPTER V
+
+      CHARLES I. AND THE PARLIAMENT. 1625-1629       242
+
+
+      CHAPTER VI
+
+      THE PERSONAL GOVERNMENT. 1629-1635             272
+
+
+      CHAPTER VII
+
+      THE RISING OF THE SCOTS. 1635-1640             315
+
+
+      CHAPTER VIII
+
+      THE LONG PARLIAMENT. 1640-1644                 344
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE ENGLAND OF SHAKSPERE
+
+1593-1603
+
+
+[Sidenote: English Literature.]
+
+The defeat of the Armada, the deliverance from Catholicism and Spain,
+marked the critical moment in our political developement. From that hour
+England's destiny was fixed. She was to be a Protestant power. Her
+sphere of action was to be upon the seas. She was to claim her part in
+the New World of the West. But the moment was as critical in her
+intellectual developement. As yet English literature had lagged behind
+the literature of the rest of Western Christendom. It was now to take
+its place among the greatest literatures of the world. The general
+awakening of national life, the increase of wealth, of refinement, and
+leisure that characterized the reign of Elizabeth, was accompanied by a
+quickening of intelligence. The Renascence had done little for English
+letters. The overpowering influence of the new models both of thought
+and style which it gave to the world in the writers of Greece and Rome
+was at first felt only as a fresh check to the revival of English poetry
+or prose. Though England shared more than any European country in the
+political and ecclesiastical results of the New Learning, its literary
+results were far less than in the rest of Europe, in Italy, or Germany,
+or France. More alone ranks among the great classical scholars of the
+sixteenth century. Classical learning indeed all but perished at the
+Universities in the storm of the Reformation, nor did it revive there
+till the close of Elizabeth's reign. Insensibly however the influences
+of the Renascence fertilized the intellectual soil of England for the
+rich harvest that was to come. The court poetry which clustered round
+Wyatt and Surrey, exotic and imitative as it was, promised a new life
+for English verse. The growth of grammar-schools realized the dream of
+Sir Thomas More, and brought the middle-classes, from the squire to the
+petty tradesman, into contact with the masters of Greece and Rome. The
+love of travel, which became so remarkable a characteristic of
+Elizabeth's age, quickened the temper of the wealthier nobles.
+"Home-keeping youths," says Shakspere in words that mark the time, "have
+ever homely wits"; and a tour over the Continent became part of the
+education of a gentleman. Fairfax's version of Tasso, Harrington's
+version of Ariosto, were signs of the influence which the literature of
+Italy, the land to which travel led most frequently, exerted on English
+minds. The classical writers told upon England at large when they were
+popularized by a crowd of translations. Chapman's noble version of Homer
+stands high above its fellows, but all the greater poets and historians
+of the ancient world were turned into English before the close of the
+sixteenth century.
+
+[Sidenote: Historic Literature.]
+
+It is characteristic of England that the first kind of literature to
+rise from its long death was the literature of history. But the form in
+which it rose marked the difference between the world in which it had
+perished and that in which it reappeared. During the Middle Ages the
+world had been without a past, save the shadowy and unknown past of
+early Rome; and annalist and chronicler told the story of the years
+which went before as a preface to their tale of the present without a
+sense of any difference between them. But the religious, social, and
+political change which passed over England under the New Monarchy broke
+the continuity of its life; and the depth of the rift between the two
+ages is seen by the way in which History passes on its revival under
+Elizabeth from the mediæval form of pure narrative to its modern form of
+an investigation and reconstruction of the past. The new interest which
+attached to the bygone world led to the collection of its annals, their
+reprinting and embodiment in an English shape. It was his desire to give
+the Elizabethan Church a basis in the past, as much as any pure zeal
+for letters, which induced Archbishop Parker to lead the way in the
+first of these labours. The collection of historical manuscripts which,
+following in the track of Leland, he rescued from the wreck of the
+monastic libraries created a school of antiquarian imitators, whose
+research and industry have preserved for us almost every work of
+permanent historical value which existed before the Dissolution of the
+Monasteries. To his publication of some of our earlier chronicles we owe
+the series of similar publications which bear the name of Camden,
+Twysden, and Gale. But as a branch of literature, English History in the
+new shape which we have noted began in the work of the poet Daniel. The
+chronicles of Stowe and Speed, who preceded him, are simple records of
+the past, often copied almost literally from the annals they used, and
+utterly without style or arrangement; while Daniel, inaccurate and
+superficial as he is, gave his story a literary form and embodied it in
+a pure and graceful prose. Two larger works at the close of Elizabeth's
+reign, the "History of the Turks" by Knolles, and Raleigh's vast but
+unfinished plan of the "History of the World," showed a widening of
+historic interest beyond the merely national bounds to which it had
+hitherto been confined.
+
+[Sidenote: Euphuism.]
+
+A far higher developement of our literature sprang from the growing
+influence which Italy was exerting, partly through travel and partly
+through its poetry and romances, on the manners and taste of the time.
+Men made more account of a story of Boccaccio's, it was said, than of a
+story from the Bible. The dress, the speech, the manners of Italy became
+objects of almost passionate imitation, and of an imitation not always
+of the wisest or noblest kind. To Ascham it seemed like "the enchantment
+of Circe brought out of Italy to mar men's manners in England." "An
+Italianate Englishman," ran the harder proverb of Italy itself, "is an
+incarnate devil." The literary form which this imitation took seemed at
+any rate ridiculous. John Lyly, distinguished both as a dramatist and a
+poet, laid aside the tradition of English style for a style modelled on
+the decadence of Italian prose. Euphuism, as the new fashion has been
+named from the prose romance of Euphues which Lyly published in 1579, is
+best known to modern readers by the pitiless caricature in which
+Shakspere quizzed its pedantry, its affectation, the meaningless
+monotony of its far-fetched phrases, the absurdity of its extravagant
+conceits. Its representative, Armado in "Love's Labour's Lost," is "a
+man of fire-new words, fashion's own knight," "that hath a mint of
+phrases in his brain; one whom the music of his own vain tongue doth
+ravish like enchanting harmony." But its very extravagance sprang from
+the general burst of delight in the new resources of thought and
+language which literature felt to be at its disposal; and the new sense
+of literary beauty which it disclosed in its affectation, in its love of
+a "mint of phrases," and the "music of its own vain tongue," the new
+sense of pleasure which it revealed in delicacy or grandeur of
+expression, in the structure and arrangement of sentences, in what has
+been termed the atmosphere of words, was a sense out of which style was
+itself to spring.
+
+[Sidenote: Sidney.]
+
+For a time Euphuism had it all its own way. Elizabeth was the most
+affected and detestable of Euphuists; and "that beauty in Court which
+could not parley Euphuism," a courtier of Charles the First's time tells
+us, "was as little regarded as she that now there speaks not French."
+The fashion however passed away, but the "Arcadia" of Sir Philip Sidney
+shows the wonderful advance which prose had made under its influence.
+Sidney, the nephew of Lord Leicester, was the idol of his time, and
+perhaps no figure reflects the age more fully and more beautifully. Fair
+as he was brave, quick of wit as of affection, noble and generous in
+temper, dear to Elizabeth as to Spenser, the darling of the Court and of
+the camp, his learning and his genius made him the centre of the
+literary world which was springing into birth on English soil. He had
+travelled in France and Italy, he was master alike of the older learning
+and of the new discoveries of astronomy. Bruno dedicated to him as to a
+friend his metaphysical speculations; he was familiar with the drama of
+Spain, the poems of Ronsard, the sonnets of Italy. Sidney combined the
+wisdom of a grave councillor with the romantic chivalry of a
+knight-errant. "I never heard the old story of Percy and Douglas," he
+says, "that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet." He
+flung away his life to save the English army in Flanders, and as he lay
+dying they brought a cup of water to his fevered lips. He bade them give
+it to a soldier who was stretched on the ground beside him. "Thy
+necessity," he said, "is greater than mine." The whole of Sidney's
+nature, his chivalry and his learning, his thirst for adventures, his
+freshness of tone, his tenderness and childlike simplicity of heart, his
+affectation and false sentiment, his keen sense of pleasure and delight,
+pours itself out in the pastoral medley, forced, tedious, and yet
+strangely beautiful, of his "Arcadia." In his "Defence of Poetry" the
+youthful exuberance of the romancer has passed into the earnest vigour
+and grandiose stateliness of the rhetorician. But whether in the one
+work or the other, the flexibility, the music, the luminous clearness of
+Sidney's style remains the same.
+
+[Sidenote: The Novelists.]
+
+But the quickness and vivacity of English prose was first developed in a
+school of Italian imitators which appeared in Elizabeth's later years.
+The origin of English fiction is to be found in the tales and romances
+with which Greene and Nash crowded the market, models for which they
+found in the Italian novels. The brief form of these novelettes soon led
+to the appearance of the "pamphlet"; and a new world of readers was seen
+in the rapidity with which the stories or scurrilous libels that passed
+under this name were issued, and the greediness with which they were
+devoured. It was the boast of Greene that in the eight years before his
+death he had produced forty pamphlets. "In a night or a day would he
+have yarked up a pamphlet, as well as in seven years, and glad was that
+printer that might be blest to pay him dear for the very dregs of his
+wit." Modern eyes see less of the wit than of the dregs in the books of
+Greene and his compeers; but the attacks which Nash directed against the
+Puritans and his rivals were the first English works which shook utterly
+off the pedantry and extravagance of Euphuism. In his lightness, his
+facility, his vivacity, his directness of speech, we have the beginning
+of popular literature. It had descended from the closet to the street,
+and the very change implied that the street was ready to receive it. The
+abundance indeed of printers and of printed books at the close of the
+Queen's reign shows that the world of readers and writers had widened
+far beyond the small circle of scholars and courtiers with which it
+began.
+
+[Sidenote: Influence of the age.]
+
+But to the national and local influences which were telling on English
+literature was added that of the restlessness and curiosity which
+characterized the age. At the moment which we have reached the sphere of
+human interest was widened as it has never been widened before or since
+by the revelation of a new heaven and a new earth. It was only in the
+later years of the sixteenth century that the discoveries of Copernicus
+were brought home to the general intelligence of mankind by Kepler and
+Galileo, or that the daring of the Buccaneers broke through the veil
+which the greed of Spain had drawn across the New World of Columbus.
+Hardly inferior to these revelations as a source of intellectual impulse
+was the sudden and picturesque way in which the various races of the
+world were brought face to face with one another through the universal
+passion for foreign travel. While the red tribes of the West were
+described by Amerigo Vespucci, and the strange civilization of Mexico
+and Peru disclosed by Cortes and Pizarro, the voyages of the Portuguese
+threw open the older splendours of the East, and the story of India and
+China was told for the first time to Christendom by Maffei and Mendoza.
+England took her full part in this work of discovery. Jenkinson, an
+English traveller, made his way to Bokhara. Willoughby brought back
+Muscovy to the knowledge of Western Europe. English mariners penetrated
+among the Esquimaux, or settled in Virginia. Drake circumnavigated the
+globe. The "Collection of Voyages" which was published by Hakluyt in
+1582 disclosed the vastness of the world itself, the infinite number of
+the races of mankind, the variety of their laws, their customs, their
+religions, their very instincts. We see the influence of this new and
+wider knowledge of the world, not only in the life and richness which it
+gave to the imagination of the time, but in the immense interest which
+from this moment attached itself to Man. Shakspere's conception of
+Caliban, like the questioning of Montaigne, marks the beginning of a new
+and a truer, because a more inductive, philosophy of human nature and
+human history. The fascination exercised by the study of human character
+showed itself in the essays of Bacon, and yet more in the wonderful
+popularity of the drama.
+
+[Sidenote: The new English temper.]
+
+And to these larger and world-wide sources of poetic power was added in
+England, at the moment which we have reached in its story, the impulse
+which sprang from national triumph, from the victory over the Armada,
+the deliverance from Spain, the rolling away of the Catholic terror
+which had hung like a cloud over the hopes of the new people. With its
+new sense of security, its new sense of national energy and national
+power, the whole aspect of England suddenly changed. As yet the interest
+of Elizabeth's reign had been political and material; the stage had been
+crowded with statesmen and warriors, with Cecils and Walsinghams and
+Drakes. Literature had hardly found a place in the glories of the time.
+But from the moment when the Armada drifted back broken to Ferrol the
+figures of warriors and statesmen were dwarfed by the grander figures of
+poets and philosophers. Amidst the throng in Elizabeth's antechamber the
+noblest form is that of the singer who lays the "Faerie Queen" at her
+feet, or of the young lawyer who muses amid the splendours of the
+presence over the problems of the "Novum Organum." The triumph at Cadiz,
+the conquest of Ireland, pass unheeded as we watch Hooker building up
+his "Ecclesiastical Polity" among the sheepfolds, or the genius of
+Shakspere rising year by year into supremer grandeur in a rude theatre
+beside the Thames.
+
+[Sidenote: Spenser.]
+
+The glory of the new literature broke on England with Edmund Spenser. We
+know little of his life; he was born in 1552 in East London, the son of
+poor parents, but linked in blood with the Spencers of Althorpe, even
+then--as he proudly says--"a house of ancient fame." He studied as a
+sizar at Cambridge, and quitted the University while still a boy to live
+as a tutor in the north; but after some years of obscure poverty the
+scorn of a fair "Rosalind" drove him again southwards. A college
+friendship with Gabriel Harvey served to introduce him to Lord
+Leicester, who sent him as his envoy into France, and in whose service
+he first became acquainted with Leicester's nephew, Sir Philip Sidney.
+From Sidney's house at Penshurst came in 1579 his earliest work, the
+"Shepherd's Calendar"; in form, like Sidney's own "Arcadia," a pastoral
+where love and loyalty and Puritanism jostled oddly with the fancied
+shepherd life. The peculiar melody and profuse imagination which the
+pastoral disclosed at once placed its author in the forefront of living
+poets, but a far greater work was already in hand; and from some words
+of Gabriel Harvey's we see Spenser bent on rivalling Ariosto, and even
+hoping "to overgo" the "Orlando Furioso" in his "Elvish Queen." The
+ill-will or the indifference of Burleigh however blasted the
+expectations he had drawn from the patronage of Sidney or Leicester, and
+from the favour with which he had been welcomed by the Queen. Sidney, in
+disgrace with Elizabeth through his opposition to the marriage with
+Anjou, withdrew to Wilton to write the "Arcadia" by his sister's side;
+and "discontent of my long fruitless stay in princes' courts," the poet
+tells us, "and expectation vain of idle hopes" drove Spenser into exile.
+In 1580 he followed Lord Grey as his secretary into Ireland, and
+remained there on the Deputy's recall in the enjoyment of an office and
+a grant of land from the forfeited estates of the Earl of Desmond.
+Spenser had thus enrolled himself among the colonists to whom England
+was looking at the time for the regeneration of Munster, and the
+practical interest he took in the "barren soil where cold and want and
+poverty do grow" was shown by the later publication of a prose tractate
+on the condition and government of the island. It was at Dublin or in
+his castle of Kilcolman, two miles from Doneraile, "under the foot of
+Mole, that mountain hoar," that he spent the ten years in which Sidney
+died and Mary fell on the scaffold and the Armada came and went; and it
+was in the latter home that Walter Raleigh found him sitting "alwaies
+idle," as it seemed to his restless friend, "among the cooly shades of
+the green alders by the Mulla's shore" in a visit made memorable by the
+poem of "Colin Clout's come home again."
+
+[Sidenote: The Faerie Queen.]
+
+But in the "idlesse" and solitude of the poet's exile the great work
+begun in the two pleasant years of his stay at Penshurst had at last
+taken form, and it was to publish the first three books of the "Faerie
+Queen" that Spenser returned in Raleigh's company to London. The
+appearance of the "Faerie Queen" in 1590 is the one critical event in
+the annals of English poetry; it settled in fact the question whether
+there was to be such a thing as English poetry or no. The older national
+verse which had blossomed and died in Caedmon sprang suddenly into a
+grander life in Chaucer, but it closed again in a yet more complete
+death. Across the Border indeed the Scotch poets of the fifteenth
+century preserved something of their master's vivacity and colour, and
+in England itself the Italian poetry of the Renascence had of late found
+echoes in Surrey and Sidney. The new English drama too was beginning to
+display its wonderful powers, and the work of Marlowe had already
+prepared the way for the work of Shakspere. But bright as was the
+promise of coming song, no great imaginative poem had broken the silence
+of English literature for nearly two hundred years when Spenser landed
+at Bristol with the "Faerie Queen." From that moment the stream of
+English poetry has flowed on without a break. There have been times, as
+in the years which immediately followed, when England has "become a nest
+of singing birds"; there have been times when song was scant and poor;
+but there never has been a time when England was wholly without a
+singer.
+
+The new English verse has been true to the source from which it sprang,
+and Spenser has always been "the poet's poet." But in his own day he was
+the poet of England at large. The "Faerie Queen" was received with a
+burst of general welcome. It became "the delight of every accomplished
+gentleman, the model of every poet, the solace of every soldier." The
+poem expressed indeed the very life of the time. It was with a true
+poetic instinct that Spenser fell back for the framework of his story on
+the faery world of Celtic romance, whose wonder and mystery had in fact
+become the truest picture of the wonder and mystery of the world around
+him. In the age of Cortes and of Raleigh dreamland had ceased to be
+dreamland, and no marvel or adventure that befell lady or knight was
+stranger than the tales which weather-beaten mariners from the Southern
+Seas were telling every day to grave merchants upon 'Change. The very
+incongruities of the story of Arthur and his knighthood, strangely as it
+had been built up out of the rival efforts of bard and jongleur and
+priest, made it the fittest vehicle for the expression of the world of
+incongruous feeling which we call the Renascence. To modern eyes perhaps
+there is something grotesque in the strange medley of figures that crowd
+the canvas of the "Faerie Queen," in its fauns dancing on the sward
+where knights have hurtled together, in its alternation of the
+salvage-men from the New World with the satyrs of classic mythology, in
+the giants, dwarfs, and monsters of popular fancy who jostle with the
+nymphs of Greek legend and the damosels of mediæval romance. But,
+strange as the medley is, it reflects truly enough the stranger medley
+of warring ideals and irreconcileable impulses which made up the life of
+Spenser's contemporaries. It was not in the "Faerie Queen" only, but in
+the world which it pourtrayed, that the religious mysticism of the
+Middle Ages stood face to face with the intellectual freedom of the
+Revival of Letters, that asceticism and self-denial cast their spell on
+imaginations glowing with the sense of varied and inexhaustible
+existence, that the dreamy and poetic refinement of feeling which
+expressed itself in the fanciful unrealities of chivalry co-existed
+with the rough practical energy that sprang from an awakening sense of
+human power, or the lawless extravagance of an idealized friendship and
+love lived side by side with the moral sternness and elevation which
+England was drawing from the Reformation and the Bible.
+
+But strangely contrasted as are the elements of the poem, they are
+harmonized by the calmness and serenity which is the note of the "Faerie
+Queen." The world of the Renascence is around us, but it is ordered,
+refined, and calmed by the poet's touch. The warmest scenes which he
+borrows from the Italian verse of his day are idealized into purity; the
+very struggle of the men around him is lifted out of its pettier
+accidents and raised into a spiritual oneness with the struggle in the
+soul itself. There are allusions in plenty to contemporary events, but
+the contest between Elizabeth and Mary takes ideal form in that of Una
+and the false Duessa, and the clash of arms between Spain and the
+Huguenots comes to us faint and hushed through the serener air. The
+verse, like the story, rolls on as by its own natural power, without
+haste or effort or delay. The gorgeous colouring, the profuse and often
+complex imagery which Spenser's imagination lavishes, leave no sense of
+confusion in the reader's mind. Every figure, strange as it may be, is
+seen clearly and distinctly as it passes by. It is in this calmness,
+this serenity, this spiritual elevation of the "Faerie Queen," that we
+feel the new life of the coming age moulding into ordered and harmonious
+form the life of the Renascence. Both in its conception, and in the way
+in which this conception is realized in the portion of his work which
+Spenser completed, his poem strikes the note of the coming Puritanism.
+In his earlier pastoral, the "Shepherd's Calendar," the poet had boldly
+taken his part with the more advanced reformers against the Church
+policy of the Court. He had chosen Archbishop Grindal, who was then in
+disgrace for his Puritan sympathies, as his model of a Christian pastor;
+and attacked with sharp invective the pomp of the higher clergy. His
+"Faerie Queen" in its religious theory is Puritan to the core. The worst
+foe of its "Red-cross Knight" is the false and scarlet-clad Duessa of
+Rome, who parts him for a while from Truth and leads him to the house of
+Ignorance. Spenser presses strongly and pitilessly for the execution of
+Mary Stuart. No bitter word ever breaks the calm of his verse save when
+it touches on the perils with which Catholicism was environing England,
+perils before which his knight must fall "were not that Heavenly Grace
+doth him uphold and steadfast Truth acquite him out of all." But it is
+yet more in the temper and aim of his work that we catch the nobler and
+deeper tones of English Puritanism. In his earlier musings at Penshurst
+the poet had purposed to surpass Ariosto, but the gaiety of Ariosto's
+song is utterly absent from his own. Not a ripple of laughter breaks the
+calm surface of Spenser's verse. He is habitually serious, and the
+seriousness of his poetic tone reflects the seriousness of his poetic
+purpose. His aim, he tells us, was to represent the moral virtues, to
+assign to each its knightly patron, so that its excellence might be
+expressed and its contrary vice trodden under foot by deeds of arms and
+chivalry. In knight after knight of the twelve he purposed to paint, he
+wished to embody some single virtue of the virtuous man in its struggle
+with the faults and errors which specially beset it; till in Arthur, the
+sum of the whole company, man might have been seen perfected, in his
+longing and progress towards the "Faerie Queen," the Divine Glory which
+is the true end of human effort.
+
+The largeness of his culture indeed, his exquisite sense of beauty, and
+above all the very intensity of his moral enthusiasm, saved Spenser from
+the narrowness and exaggeration which often distorted goodness into
+unloveliness in the Puritan. Christian as he is to the core, his
+Christianity is enriched and fertilized by the larger temper of the
+Renascence, as well as by a poet's love of the natural world in which
+the older mythologies struck their roots. Diana and the gods of
+heathendom take a sacred tinge from the purer sanctities of the new
+faith; and in one of the greatest songs of the "Faerie Queen" the
+conception of love widens, as it widened in the mind of a Greek, into
+the mighty thought of the productive energy of Nature. Spenser borrows
+in fact the delicate and refined forms of the Platonist philosophy to
+express his own moral enthusiasm. Not only does he love, as others have
+loved, all that is noble and pure and of good report, but he is fired as
+none before or after him have been fired with a passionate sense of
+moral beauty. Justice, Temperance, Truth, are no mere names to him, but
+real existences to which his whole nature clings with a rapturous
+affection. Outer beauty he believed to spring, and loved because it
+sprang, from the beauty of the soul within. There was much in such a
+moral protest as this to rouse dislike in any age, but it is the glory
+of the age of Elizabeth that, "mad world" as in many ways it was, all
+that was noble welcomed the "Faerie Queen." Elizabeth herself, says
+Spenser, "to mine oaten pipe inclined her ear," and bestowed a pension
+on the poet. In 1595 he brought three more books of his poem to England.
+He returned to Ireland to commemorate his marriage in Sonnets and the
+most beautiful of bridal songs, and to complete the "Faerie Queen"
+amongst love and poverty and troubles from his Irish neighbours. But
+these troubles soon took a graver form. In 1599 Ireland broke into
+revolt, and the poet escaped from his burning house to fly to England,
+and to die broken-hearted in an inn at Westminster.
+
+[Sidenote: The Drama.]
+
+If the "Faerie Queen" expressed the higher elements of the Elizabethan
+age, the whole of that age, its lower elements and its higher alike, was
+expressed in the English drama. We have already pointed out the
+circumstances which throughout Europe were giving a poetic impulse to
+the newly-aroused intelligence of men, and this impulse everywhere took
+a dramatic shape. The artificial French tragedy which began about this
+time with Garnier was not indeed destined to exert any influence over
+English poetry till a later age; but the influence of the Italian
+comedy, which had begun half a century earlier with Machiavelli and
+Ariosto, was felt directly through the Novelle, or stories, which served
+as plots for our dramatists. It left its stamp indeed on some of the
+worst characteristics of the English stage. The features of our drama
+that startled the moral temper of the time and won the deadly hatred of
+the Puritans, its grossness and profanity, its tendency to scenes of
+horror and crime, its profuse employment of cruelty and lust as grounds
+of dramatic action, its daring use of the horrible and the unnatural
+whenever they enable it to display the more terrible and revolting sides
+of human passion, were derived from the Italian stage. It is doubtful
+how much the English playwrights may have owed to the Spanish drama,
+which under Lope and Cervantes sprang suddenly into a grandeur that
+almost rivalled their own. In the intermixture of tragedy and comedy,
+in the abandonment of the solemn uniformity of poetic diction for the
+colloquial language of real life, the use of unexpected incidents, the
+complication of their plots and intrigues, the dramas of England and
+Spain are remarkably alike; but the likeness seems rather to have sprung
+from a similarity in the circumstances to which both owed their rise,
+than from any direct connexion of the one with the other. The real
+origin of the English drama, in fact, lay not in any influence from
+without but in the influence of England itself. The temper of the nation
+was dramatic. Ever since the Reformation, the Palace, the Inns of Court,
+and the University had been vying with one another in the production of
+plays; and so early was their popularity that even under Henry the
+Eighth it was found necessary to create a "Master of the Revels" to
+supervise them. Every progress of Elizabeth from shire to shire was a
+succession of shows and interludes. Dian with her nymphs met the Queen
+as she returned from hunting; Love presented her with his golden arrow
+as she passed through the gates of Norwich. From the earlier years of
+her reign the new spirit of the Renascence had been pouring itself into
+the rough mould of the Mystery Plays, whose allegorical virtues and
+vices, or scriptural heroes and heroines, had handed on the spirit of
+the drama through the Middle Ages. Adaptations from classical pieces
+began to alternate with the purely religious "Moralities"; and an
+attempt at a livelier style of expression and invention appeared in the
+popular comedy of "Gammer Gurton's Needle"; while Sackville, Lord
+Dorset, in his tragedy of "Gorbudoc" made a bold effort at sublimity of
+diction, and introduced the use of blank verse as the vehicle of
+dramatic dialogue.
+
+[Sidenote: The theatre and the people.]
+
+But it was not to these tentative efforts of scholars and nobles that
+the English stage was really indebted for the amazing outburst of genius
+which dates from the year 1576, when "the Earl of Leicester's servants"
+erected the first public theatre in Blackfriars. It was the people
+itself that created its Stage. The theatre indeed was commonly only the
+courtyard of an inn, or a mere booth such as is still seen at a country
+fair. The bulk of the audience sate beneath the open sky in the "pit" or
+yard; a few covered seats in the galleries which ran round it formed the
+boxes of the wealthier spectators, while patrons and nobles found seats
+upon the actual boards. All the appliances were of the roughest sort: a
+few flowers served to indicate a garden, crowds and armies were
+represented by a dozen scene-shifters with swords and bucklers, heroes
+rode in and out on hobby-horses, and a scroll on a post told whether the
+scene was at Athens or London. There were no female actors, and the
+grossness which startles us in words which fell from women's lips took
+a different colour when every woman's part was acted by a boy. But
+difficulties such as these were more than compensated by the popular
+character of the drama itself. Rude as the theatre might be, all the
+world was there. The stage was crowded with nobles and courtiers.
+Apprentices and citizens thronged the benches in the yard below. The
+rough mob of the pit inspired, as it felt, the vigorous life, the rapid
+transitions, the passionate energy, the reality, the lifelike medley and
+confusion, the racy dialogue, the chat, the wit, the pathos, the
+sublimity, the rant and buffoonery, the coarse horrors and vulgar
+bloodshedding, the immense range over all classes of society, the
+intimacy with the foulest as well as the fairest developements of human
+temper, which characterized the English stage. The new drama represented
+"the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure." The people
+itself brought its nobleness and its vileness to the boards. No stage
+was ever so human, no poetic life so intense. Wild, reckless, defiant of
+all past tradition, of all conventional laws, the English dramatists
+owned no teacher, no source of poetic inspiration, but the people
+itself.
+
+[Sidenote: The early dramatists.]
+
+Few events in our literary history are so startling as this sudden rise
+of the Elizabethan drama. The first public theatre was erected only in
+the middle of the Queen's reign. Before the close of it eighteen
+theatres existed in London alone. Fifty dramatic poets, many of the
+first order, appeared in the fifty years which precede the closing of
+the theatres by the Puritans; and great as is the number of their works
+which have perished, we still possess a hundred dramas, all written
+within this period, and of which at least a half are excellent. A glance
+at their authors shows us that the intellectual quickening of the age
+had now reached the mass of the people. Almost all of the new
+playwrights were fairly educated, and many were university men. But
+instead of courtly singers of the Sidney and Spenser sort we see the
+advent of the "poor scholar." The earlier dramatists, such as Nash,
+Peele, Kyd, Greene, or Marlowe, were for the most part poor, and
+reckless in their poverty; wild livers, defiant of law or common fame,
+in revolt against the usages and religion of their day, "atheists" in
+general repute, "holding Moses for a juggler," haunting the brothel and
+the alehouse, and dying starved or in tavern brawls. But with their
+appearance began the Elizabethan drama. The few plays which have reached
+us of an earlier date are either cold imitations of the classical and
+Italian comedy, or rude farces like "Ralph Roister Doister," or
+tragedies such as "Gorbudoc" where, poetic as occasional passages may
+be, there is little promise of dramatic developement. But in the year
+which preceded the coming of the Armada the whole aspect of the stage
+suddenly changes, and the new dramatists range themselves around two
+men of very different genius, Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe.
+
+[Sidenote: Greene.]
+
+Of Greene, as the creator of our lighter English prose, we have already
+spoken. But his work as a poet was of yet greater importance, for his
+perception of character and the relations of social life, the
+playfulness of his fancy, and the liveliness of his style, exerted an
+influence on his contemporaries which was equalled by that of none but
+Marlowe and Peele. In spite of the rudeness of his plots and the unequal
+character of his work, Greene must be regarded as the creator of our
+modern comedy. No figure better paints the group of young playwrights.
+He left Cambridge to travel through Italy and Spain, and to bring back
+the debauchery of the one and the scepticism of the other. In the words
+of remorse he wrote before his death he paints himself as a drunkard and
+a roysterer, winning money only by ceaseless pamphlets and plays to
+waste it on wine and women, and drinking the cup of life to the dregs.
+Hell and the after-world were the butts of his ceaseless mockery. If he
+had not feared the judges of the Queen's Courts more than he feared God,
+he said in bitter jest, he should often have turned cutpurse. He
+married, and loved his wife, but she was soon deserted; and the wretched
+profligate found himself again plunged into excesses which he loathed,
+though he could not live without them. But wild as was the life of
+Greene, his pen was pure. He is steadily on virtue's side in the love
+pamphlets and novelettes he poured out in endless succession, and whose
+plots were dramatized by the school which gathered round him.
+
+[Sidenote: Marlowe.]
+
+The life of Marlowe was as riotous, his scepticism even more daring,
+than the life and scepticism of Greene. His early death alone saved him
+in all probability from a prosecution for atheism. He was charged with
+calling Moses a juggler, and with boasting that, if he undertook to
+write a new religion, it should be a better religion than the
+Christianity he saw around him. But he stood far ahead of his fellows as
+a creator of English tragedy. Born in 1564 at the opening of Elizabeth's
+reign, the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, but educated at Cambridge,
+Marlowe burst on the world in the year which preceded the triumph over
+the Armada with a play which at once wrought a revolution in the English
+stage. Bombastic and extravagant as it was, and extravagance reached its
+height in a scene where captive kings, the "pampered jades of Asia,"
+drew their conqueror's car across the stage, "Tamburlaine" not only
+indicated the revolt of the new drama against the timid inanities of
+Euphuism, but gave an earnest of that imaginative daring, the secret of
+which Marlowe was to bequeath to the playwrights who followed him. He
+perished at thirty in a shameful brawl, but in his brief career he had
+struck the grander notes of the coming drama. His Jew of Malta was the
+herald of Shylock. He opened in "Edward the Second" the series of
+historical plays which gave us "Cæsar" and "Richard the Third." His
+"Faustus" is riotous, grotesque, and full of a mad thirst for pleasure,
+but it was the first dramatic attempt to touch the problem of the
+relations of man to the unseen world. Extravagant, unequal, stooping
+even to the ridiculous in his cumbrous and vulgar buffoonery, there is a
+force in Marlowe, a conscious grandeur of tone, a range of passion,
+which sets him above all his contemporaries save one. In the higher
+qualities of imagination, as in the majesty and sweetness of his "mighty
+line," he is inferior to Shakspere alone.
+
+[Sidenote: Shakspere.]
+
+A few daring jests, a brawl, and a fatal stab, make up the life of
+Marlowe; but even details such as these are wanting to the life of
+William Shakspere. Of hardly any great poet indeed do we know so little.
+For the story of his youth we have only one or two trifling legends, and
+these almost certainly false. Not a single letter or characteristic
+saying, not one of the jests "spoken at the Mermaid," hardly a single
+anecdote, remain to illustrate his busy life in London. His look and
+figure in later age have been preserved by the bust over his tomb at
+Stratford, and a hundred years after his death he was still remembered
+in his native town; but the minute diligence of the enquirers of the
+Georgian time was able to glean hardly a single detail, even of the most
+trivial order, which could throw light upon the years of retirement
+before his death. It is owing perhaps to the harmony and unity of his
+temper that no salient peculiarity seems to have left its trace on the
+memory of his contemporaries; it is the very grandeur of his genius
+which precludes us from discovering any personal trait in his works. His
+supposed self-revelation in the Sonnets is so obscure that only a few
+outlines can be traced even by the boldest conjecture. In his dramas he
+is all his characters, and his characters range over all mankind. There
+is not one, or the act or word of one, that we can identify personally
+with the poet himself.
+
+[Sidenote: His actor's life.]
+
+He was born in 1564, the sixth year of Elizabeth's reign, twelve years
+after the birth of Spenser, three years later than the birth of Bacon.
+Marlowe was of the same age with Shakspere: Greene probably a few years
+older. His father, a glover and small farmer of Stratford-on-Avon, was
+forced by poverty to lay down his office of alderman as his son reached
+boyhood; and stress of poverty may have been the cause which drove
+William Shakspere, who was already married at eighteen to a wife older
+than himself, to London and the stage. His life in the capital can
+hardly have begun later than in his twenty-third year, the memorable
+year which followed Sidney's death, which preceded the coming of the
+Armada, and which witnessed the production of Marlowe's "Tamburlaine."
+If we take the language of the Sonnets as a record of his personal
+feeling, his new profession as an actor stirred in him only the
+bitterness of self-contempt. He chides with Fortune "that did not better
+for my life provide than public means that public manners breed"; he
+writhes at the thought that he has "made himself a motley to the view"
+of the gaping apprentices in the pit of Blackfriars. "Thence comes it,"
+he adds, "that my name receives a brand, and almost thence my nature is
+subdued to that it works in." But the application of the words is a more
+than doubtful one. In spite of petty squabbles with some of his dramatic
+rivals at the outset of his career, the genial nature of the newcomer
+seems to have won him a general love among his fellows. In 1592, while
+still a mere actor and fitter of old plays for the stage, a
+fellow-playwright, Chettle, answered Greene's attack on him in words of
+honest affection: "Myself have seen his demeanour no less civil than he
+excellent in the quality he professes: besides, divers of worship have
+reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his
+facetious grace in writing, that approves his art." His partner Burbage
+spoke of him after death as a "worthy friend and fellow"; and Jonson
+handed down the general tradition of his time when he described him as
+"indeed honest, and of an open and free nature."
+
+[Sidenote: His early work.]
+
+His profession as an actor was at any rate of essential service to him
+in the poetic career which he soon undertook. Not only did it give him
+the sense of theatrical necessities which makes his plays so effective
+on the boards, but it enabled him to bring his pieces as he wrote them
+to the test of the stage. If there is any truth in Jonson's statement
+that Shakspere never blotted a line, there is no justice in the censure
+which it implies on his carelessness or incorrectness. The conditions of
+poetic publication were in fact wholly different from those of our own
+day. A drama remained for years in manuscript as an acting piece,
+subject to continual revision and amendment; and every rehearsal and
+representation afforded hints for change which we know the young poet
+was far from neglecting. The chance which has preserved an earlier
+edition of his "Hamlet" shows in what an unsparing way Shakspere could
+recast even the finest products of his genius. Five years after the
+supposed date of his arrival in London he was already famous as a
+dramatist. Greene speaks bitterly of him under the name of "Shakescene"
+as an "upstart crow beautified with our feathers," a sneer which points
+either to his celebrity as an actor or to his preparation for loftier
+flights by fitting pieces of his predecessors for the stage. He was
+soon partner in the theatre, actor, and playwright; and another
+nickname, that of "Johannes Factotum" or Jack-of-all-Trades, shows his
+readiness to take all honest work which came to hand.
+
+[Sidenote: His first plays.]
+
+With his publication in 1593 of the poem of "Venus and Adonis," "the
+first heir of my invention," as Shakspere calls it, the period of
+independent creation fairly began. The date of its publication was a
+very memorable one. The "Faerie Queen" had appeared only three years
+before, and had placed Spenser without a rival at the head of English
+poetry. On the other hand the two leading dramatists of the time passed
+at this moment suddenly away. Greene died in poverty and self-reproach
+in the house of a poor shoemaker. "Doll," he wrote to the wife he had
+abandoned, "I charge thee, by the love of our youth and by my soul's
+rest, that thou wilt see this man paid; for if he and his wife had not
+succoured me I had died in the streets." "Oh that a year were granted me
+to live," cried the young poet from his bed of death, "but I must die,
+of every man abhorred! Time, loosely spent, will not again be won! My
+time is loosely spent--and I undone!" A year later the death of Marlowe
+in a street brawl removed the only rival whose powers might have
+equalled Shakspere's own. He was now about thirty; and the twenty-three
+years which elapsed between the appearance of the "Adonis" and his
+death were filled with a series of masterpieces. Nothing is more
+characteristic of his genius than its incessant activity. Through the
+five years which followed the publication of his early poem he seems to
+have produced on an average two dramas a year. When we attempt however
+to trace the growth and progress of the poet's mind in the order of his
+plays we are met in the case of many of them by an absence of certain
+information as to the dates of their appearance. The facts on which
+enquiry has to build are extremely few. "Venus and Adonis," with the
+"Lucrece," must have been written before their publication in 1593-4;
+the Sonnets, though not published till 1609, were known in some form
+among his private friends as early as 1598. His earlier plays are
+defined by a list given in the "Wit's Treasury" of Francis Meres in
+1598, though the omission of a play from a casual catalogue of this kind
+would hardly warrant us in assuming its necessary non-existence at the
+time. The works ascribed to him at his death are fixed in the same
+approximate fashion through the edition published by his fellow-actors.
+Beyond these meagre facts and our knowledge of the publication of a few
+of his dramas in his lifetime all is uncertain; and the conclusions
+which have been drawn from these, and from the dramas themselves, as
+well as from assumed resemblances with, or references to, other plays of
+the period, can only be accepted as approximations to the truth.
+
+[Sidenote: His earlier comedies.]
+
+The bulk of his lighter comedies and historical dramas can be assigned
+with fair probability to a period from about 1593, when Shakspere was
+known as nothing more than an adapter, to 1598, when they are mentioned
+in the list of Meres. They bear on them indeed the stamp of youth. In
+"Love's Labour's Lost" the young playwright, fresh from his own
+Stratford, its "daisies pied and violets blue," with the gay bright
+music of its country ditties still in his ears, flings himself into the
+midst of the brilliant England which gathered round Elizabeth, busying
+himself as yet for the most part with the surface of it, with the
+humours and quixotisms, the wit and the whim, the unreality, the
+fantastic extravagance, which veiled its inner nobleness. Country-lad as
+he is, Shakspere shows himself master of it all; he can patter euphuism
+and exchange quip and repartee with the best; he is at home in their
+pedantries and affectations, their brag and their rhetoric, their
+passion for the fantastic and the marvellous. He can laugh as heartily
+at the romantic vagaries of the courtly world in which he finds himself
+as at the narrow dulness, the pompous triflings, of the country world
+which he has left behind him. But he laughs frankly and without malice;
+he sees the real grandeur of soul which underlies all this quixotry and
+word-play; and owns with a smile that when brought face to face with
+the facts of human life, with the suffering of man or the danger of
+England, these fops have in them the stuff of heroes. He shares the
+delight in existence, the pleasure in sheer living, which was so marked
+a feature of the age; he enjoys the mistakes, the contrasts, the
+adventures, of the men about him; his fun breaks almost riotously out in
+the practical jokes of the "Taming of the Shrew" and the endless
+blunderings of the "Comedy of Errors." In these earlier efforts his work
+had been marked by little poetic elevation, or by passion. But the easy
+grace of the dialogue, the dexterous management of a complicated story,
+the genial gaiety of his tone, and the music of his verse promised a
+master of social comedy as soon as Shakspere turned from the superficial
+aspects of the world about him to find a new delight in the character
+and actions of men. The interest of human character was still fresh and
+vivid; the sense of individuality drew a charm from its novelty; and
+poet and essayist were busy alike in sketching the "humours" of mankind.
+Shakspere sketched with his fellows. In the "Two Gentlemen of Verona"
+his painting of manners was suffused by a tenderness and ideal beauty
+which formed an effective protest against the hard though vigorous
+character-painting which the first success of Ben Jonson in "Every Man
+in his Humour" brought at the time into fashion. But quick on these
+lighter comedies followed two in which his genius started fully into
+life. His poetic power, held in reserve till now, showed itself with a
+splendid profusion in the brilliant fancies of the "Midsummer Night's
+Dream"; and passion swept like a tide of resistless delight through
+"Romeo and Juliet."
+
+[Sidenote: His historical plays.]
+
+Side by side however with these passionate dreams, these delicate
+imaginings and piquant sketches of manners, had been appearing during
+this short interval of intense activity a series of dramas which mark
+Shakspere's relation to the new sense of patriotism, the more vivid
+sense of national existence, national freedom, national greatness, which
+gives its grandeur to the age of Elizabeth. England itself was now
+becoming a source of literary interest to poet and prose-writer. Warner
+in his "Albion's England," Daniel in his "Civil Wars," embalmed in verse
+the record of her past; Drayton in his "Polyolbion" sang the fairness of
+the land itself, the "tracts, mountains, forests, and other parts of
+this renowned isle of Britain." The national pride took its highest
+poetic form in the historical drama. No plays seem to have been more
+popular from the earliest hours of the new stage than dramatic
+representations of our history. Marlowe had shown in his "Edward the
+Second" what tragic grandeur could be reached in this favourite field;
+and, as we have seen, Shakspere had been led naturally towards it by his
+earlier occupation as an adapter of stock pieces like "Henry the Sixth"
+for the new requirements of the stage. He still to some extent followed
+in plan the older plays on the subjects he selected, but in his
+treatment of their themes he shook boldly off the yoke of the past. A
+larger and deeper conception of human character than any of the old
+dramatists had reached displayed itself in Richard the Third, in
+Falstaff, or in Hotspur; while in Constance and Richard the Second the
+pathos of human suffering was painted as even Marlowe had never dared to
+paint it.
+
+[Sidenote: His religious sympathies.]
+
+No dramas have done so much for Shakspere's enduring popularity with his
+countrymen as these historical plays. They have done more than all the
+works of English historians to nourish in the minds of Englishmen a love
+of and reverence for their country's past. When Chatham was asked where
+he had read his English history he answered, "In the plays of
+Shakspere." Nowhere could he have read it so well, for nowhere is the
+spirit of our history so nobly rendered. If the poet's work echoes
+sometimes our national prejudice and unfairness of temper, it is
+instinct throughout with English humour, with our English love of hard
+fighting, our English faith in goodness and in the doom that waits upon
+triumphant evil, our English pity for the fallen. Shakspere is
+Elizabethan to the core. He stood at the meeting-point of two great
+epochs of our history. The age of the Renascence was passing into the
+age of Puritanism. Rifts which were still little were widening every
+hour, and threatening ruin to the fabric of Church and State which the
+Tudors had built up. A new political world was rising into being; a
+world healthier, more really national, but less picturesque, less wrapt
+in the mystery and splendour that poets love. Great as were the faults
+of Puritanism, it may fairly claim to be the first political system
+which recognized the grandeur of the people as a whole. As great a
+change was passing over the spiritual sympathies of men. A sterner
+Protestantism was invigorating and ennobling life by its morality, its
+seriousness, its intense conviction of God. But it was at the same time
+hardening and narrowing it. The Bible was superseding Plutarch. The
+"obstinate questionings" which haunted the finer souls of the Renascence
+were being stereotyped into the theological formulas of the Puritan. The
+sense of a divine omnipotence was annihilating man. The daring which
+turned England into a people of "adventurers," the sense of
+inexhaustible resources, the buoyant freshness of youth, the
+intoxicating sense of beauty and joy, which created Sidney and Marlowe
+and Drake, were passing away before the consciousness of evil and the
+craving to order man's life aright before God.
+
+From this new world of thought and feeling Shakspere stood aloof. Turn
+as others might to the speculations of theology, man and man's nature
+remained with him an inexhaustible subject of interest. Caliban was
+among his latest creations. It is impossible to discover whether his
+religious belief was Catholic or Protestant. It is hard indeed to say
+whether he had any religious belief or no. The religious phrases which
+are thinly scattered over his works are little more than expressions of
+a distant and imaginative reverence. But on the deeper grounds of
+religious faith his silence is significant. He is silent, and the doubt
+of Hamlet deepens his silence, about the after-world. "To die," it may
+be, was to him as it was to Claudio, "to go we know not whither." Often
+as his questionings turn to the riddle of life and death he leaves it a
+riddle to the last without heeding the common theological solutions
+around him. "We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little
+life is rounded with a sleep."
+
+[Sidenote: His political sympathies.]
+
+Nor were the political sympathies of the poet those of the coming time.
+His roll of dramas is the epic of civil war. The Wars of the Roses fill
+his mind, as they filled the mind of his contemporaries. It is not till
+we follow him through the series of plays from "Richard the Second" to
+"Henry the Eighth" that we realize how profoundly the memory of the
+struggle between York and Lancaster had moulded the temper of the
+people, how deep a dread of civil war, of baronial turbulence, of
+disputes over the succession to the throne, it had left behind it. Men
+had learned the horrors of the time from their fathers; they had drunk
+in with their childhood the lesson that such a chaos of weakness and
+misrule must never be risked again. From such a risk the Crown seemed
+the one security. With Shakspere as with his fellow-countrymen the Crown
+is still the centre and safeguard of the national life. His ideal
+England is an England grouped around a noble king, a king such as his
+own Henry the Fifth, devout, modest, simple as he is brave, but a lord
+in battle, a born ruler of men, with a loyal people about him and his
+enemies at his feet. Socially the poet reflects the aristocratic view of
+social life which was shared by all the nobler spirits of the
+Elizabethan time. Coriolanus is the embodiment of a great noble; and the
+taunts which Shakspere hurls in play after play at the rabble only echo
+the general temper of the Renascence. But he shows no sympathy with the
+struggle of feudalism against the Crown. If he paints Hotspur with a
+fire which proves how thoroughly he could sympathize with the rough,
+bold temper of the baronage, he suffers him to fall unpitied before
+Henry the Fourth. Apart however from the strength and justice of its
+rule, royalty has no charm for him. He knows nothing of the "right
+divine of kings to govern wrong" which became the doctrine of prelates
+and courtiers in the age of the Stuarts. He shows in his "Richard the
+Second" the doom that waits on a lawless despotism, as he denounces in
+his "Richard the Third" the selfish and merciless ambition that severs
+a ruler from his people. But the dread of misrule was a dim and distant
+one. Shakspere had grown up under the reign of Elizabeth; he had known
+no ruler save one who had cast a spell over the hearts of Englishmen.
+His thoughts were absorbed, as those of the country were absorbed, in
+the struggle for national existence which centred round the Queen. "King
+John" is a trumpet-call to rally round Elizabeth in her fight for
+England. Again a Pope was asserting his right to depose an English
+sovereign and to loose Englishmen from their bond of allegiance. Again
+political ambitions and civil discord woke at the call of religious war.
+Again a foreign power was threatening England at the summons of Rome,
+and hoping to master her with the aid of revolted Englishmen. The heat
+of such a struggle as this left no time for the thought of civil
+liberties. Shakspere casts aside the thought of the Charter to fix
+himself on the strife of the stranger for England itself. What he sang
+was the duty of patriotism, the grandeur of loyalty, the freedom of
+England from Pope or Spaniard, its safety within its "water-walled
+bulwark," if only its national union was secure. And now that the nation
+was at one, now that he had seen in his first years of London life
+Catholics as well as Protestants trooping to the muster at Tilbury and
+hasting down Thames to the fight in the Channel, he could thrill his
+hearers with the proud words that sum up the work of Elizabeth:--
+
+     "This England never did, nor never shall,
+     Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
+     But when it first did help to wound itself.
+     Now that her princes are come home again,
+     Come the three corners of the world in arms,
+     And we shall shock them! Nought shall make us rue
+     If England to itself do rest but true."
+
+[Sidenote: Shakspere's prosperity.]
+
+With this great series of historical and social dramas Shakspere had
+passed far beyond his fellows whether as a tragedian or as a writer of
+comedy. "The Muses," said Meres in 1598, "would speak with Shakspere's
+fine-filed phrase, if they would speak English." His personal popularity
+was now at its height. His pleasant temper and the vivacity of his wit
+had drawn him early into contact with the young Earl of Southampton, to
+whom his "Adonis" and "Lucrece" are dedicated; and the different tone of
+the two dedications shows how rapidly acquaintance ripened into an
+ardent friendship. Shakspere's wealth and influence too were growing
+fast. He had property both in Stratford and London, and his
+fellow-townsmen made him their suitor to Lord Burleigh for favours to be
+bestowed on Stratford. He was rich enough to aid his father, and to buy
+the house at Stratford which afterwards became his home. The tradition
+that Elizabeth was so pleased with Falstaff in "Henry the Fourth" that
+she ordered the poet to show her Falstaff in love--an order which
+produced the "Merry Wives of Windsor"--whether true or false, proves his
+repute as a playwright. As the group of earlier poets passed away, they
+found successors in Marston, Dekker, Middleton, Heywood, and Chapman,
+and above all in Ben Jonson. But none of these could dispute the
+supremacy of Shakspere. The verdict of Meres that "Shakspere among the
+English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage," represented
+the general feeling of his contemporaries. He was at last fully master
+of the resources of his art. The "Merchant of Venice" marks the
+perfection of his developement as a dramatist in the completeness of its
+stage effect, the ingenuity of its incidents, the ease of its movement,
+the beauty of its higher passages, the reserve and self-control with
+which its poetry is used, the conception and unfolding of character, and
+above all the mastery with which character and event are grouped round
+the figure of Shylock. Master as he is of his art, the poet's temper is
+still young; the "Merry Wives of Windsor" is a burst of gay laughter;
+and laughter more tempered, yet full of a sweeter fascination, rings
+round us in "As You Like It."
+
+[Sidenote: His gloom.]
+
+But in the melancholy and meditative Jaques of the last drama we feel
+the touch of a new and graver mood. Youth, so full and buoyant in the
+poet till now, seems to have passed almost suddenly away. Though
+Shakspere had hardly reached forty, in one of his Sonnets which cannot
+have been written at a much later time than this there are indications
+that he already felt the advance of premature age. And at this moment
+the outer world suddenly darkened around him. The brilliant circle of
+young nobles whose friendship he had shared was broken up in 1601 by the
+political storm which burst in a mad struggle of the Earl of Essex for
+power. Essex himself fell on the scaffold; his friend and Shakspere's
+idol, Southampton, passed a prisoner into the Tower; Herbert Lord
+Pembroke, a younger patron of the poet, was banished from the Court.
+While friends were thus falling and hopes fading without, Shakspere's
+own mind seems to have been going through a phase of bitter suffering
+and unrest. In spite of the ingenuity of commentators, it is difficult
+and even impossible to derive any knowledge of Shakspere's inner history
+from the Sonnets; "the strange imagery of passion which passes over the
+magic mirror," it has been finely said, "has no tangible evidence before
+or behind it." But its mere passing is itself an evidence of the
+restlessness and agony within. The change in the character of his dramas
+gives a surer indication of his change of mood. The fresh joyousness,
+the keen delight in life and in man, which breathes through Shakspere's
+early work disappears in comedies such as "Troilus" and "Measure for
+Measure." Disappointment, disillusion, a new sense of the evil and
+foulness that underlie so much of human life, a loss of the old frank
+trust in its beauty and goodness, threw their gloom over these
+comedies. Failure seems everywhere. In "Julius Cæsar" the virtue of
+Brutus is foiled by its ignorance of and isolation from mankind; in
+Hamlet even penetrating intellect proves helpless for want of the
+capacity of action; the poison of Iago taints the love of Desdemona and
+the grandeur of Othello; Lear's mighty passion battles helplessly
+against the wind and the rain; a woman's weakness of frame dashes the
+cup of her triumph from the hand of Lady Macbeth; lust and
+self-indulgence blast the heroism of Antony; pride ruins the nobleness
+of Coriolanus.
+
+[Sidenote: His passion plays.]
+
+But the very struggle and self-introspection that these dramas betray
+were to give a depth and grandeur to Shakspere's work such as it had
+never known before. The age was one in which man's temper and powers
+took a new range and energy. Sidney or Raleigh lived not one but a dozen
+lives at once; the daring of the adventurer, the philosophy of the
+scholar, the passion of the lover, the fanaticism of the saint, towered
+into almost superhuman grandeur. Man became conscious of the immense
+resources that lay within him, conscious of boundless powers that seemed
+to mock the narrow world in which they moved. All through the age of the
+Renascence one feels this impress of the gigantic, this giant-like
+activity, this immense ambition and desire. The very bombast and
+extravagance of the times reveal cravings and impulses before which
+common speech broke down. It is this grandeur of humanity that finds
+its poetic expression in the later work of Shakspere. As the poet
+penetrated deeper and deeper into the recesses of the soul, he saw how
+great and wondrous a thing was man. "What a piece of work is a man,"
+cries Hamlet; "how noble in reason; how infinite in faculty; in form and
+moving how express and admirable; in action how like an angel; in
+apprehension how like a god; the beauty of the world; the paragon of
+animals!" It is the wonder of man that spreads before us as the poet
+pictures the wide speculation of Hamlet, the awful convulsion of a great
+nature in Othello, the terrible storm in the soul of Lear which blends
+with the very storm of the heavens themselves, the awful ambition that
+nerved a woman's hand to dabble itself with the blood of a murdered
+king, the reckless lust that "flung away a world for love." Amid the
+terror and awe of these great dramas we learn something of the vast
+forces of the age from which they sprang. The passion of Mary Stuart,
+the ruthlessness of Alva, the daring of Drake, the chivalry of Sidney,
+the range of thought and action in Raleigh or Elizabeth, come better
+home to us as we follow the mighty series of tragedies which began in
+"Hamlet" and ended in "Coriolanus."
+
+[Sidenote: Bacon.]
+
+Shakspere's last dramas, the three exquisite works in which he shows a
+soul at rest with itself and with the world, "Cymbeline," "The
+Tempest," "Winter's Tale," were written in the midst of ease and
+competence, in a house at Stratford to which he withdrew a few years
+after the death of Elizabeth. In them we lose all relation with the
+world or the time and pass into a region of pure poetry. It is in this
+peaceful and gracious close that the life of Shakspere contrasts most
+vividly with that of his greatest contemporary. If the imaginative
+resources of the new England were seen in the creators of Hamlet and the
+Faerie Queen, its purely intellectual capacity, its vast command over
+the stores of human knowledge, the amazing sense of its own powers with
+which it dealt with them, were seen in the work of Francis Bacon. Bacon
+was born in 1561, three years before the birth of Shakspere. He was the
+younger son of a Lord Keeper, as well as the nephew of Lord Burleigh,
+and even in childhood his quickness and sagacity won the favour of the
+Queen. Elizabeth "delighted much to confer with him, and to prove him
+with questions: unto which he delivered himself with that gravity and
+maturity above his years that her Majesty would often term him 'the
+young Lord Keeper.'" Even as a boy at college he expressed his dislike
+of the Aristotelian philosophy, as "a philosophy only strong for
+disputations and contentions but barren of the production of works for
+the benefit of the life of man." As a law student of twenty-one he
+sketched in a tract on the "Greatest Birth of Time" the system of
+inductive enquiry which he was already prepared to substitute for it.
+The speculations of the young thinker however were interrupted by his
+hopes of Court success. But these were soon dashed to the ground. He was
+left poor by his father's death; the ill-will of the Cecils barred his
+advancement with the Queen: and a few years before Shakspere's arrival
+in London Bacon entered as a barrister at Gray's Inn. He soon became one
+of the most successful lawyers of the time. At twenty-three Bacon was a
+member of the House of Commons, and his judgement and eloquence at once
+brought him to the front. "The fear of every man that heard him was lest
+he should make an end," Ben Jonson tells us. The steady growth of his
+reputation was quickened in 1597 by the appearance of his "Essays," a
+work remarkable, not merely for the condensation of its thought and its
+felicity and exactness of expression, but for the power with which it
+applied to human life that experimental analysis which Bacon was at a
+later time to make the key of Science.
+
+His fame at once became great at home and abroad, but with this nobler
+fame Bacon could not content himself. He was conscious of great powers
+as well as great aims for the public good: and it was a time when such
+aims could hardly be realized save through the means of the Crown. But
+political employment seemed farther off than ever. At the outset of his
+career in Parliament he irritated Elizabeth by a firm opposition to her
+demand of a subsidy; and though the offence was atoned for by profuse
+apologies and by the cessation of all further resistance to the policy
+of the Court, the law offices of the Crown were more than once refused
+to him, and it was only after the publication of his "Essays" that he
+could obtain some slight promotion as a Queen's Counsel. The moral
+weakness which more and more disclosed itself is the best justification
+of the Queen in her reluctance--a reluctance so greatly in contrast with
+her ordinary course--to bring the wisest head in her realm to her
+Council-board. The men whom Elizabeth employed were for the most part
+men whose intellect was directed by a strong sense of public duty. Their
+reverence for the Queen, strangely exaggerated as it may seem to us, was
+guided and controlled by an ardent patriotism and an earnest sense of
+religion; and with all their regard for the royal prerogative, they
+never lost their regard for the law. The grandeur and originality of
+Bacon's intellect parted him from men like these quite as much as the
+bluntness of his moral perceptions. In politics, as in science, he had
+little reverence for the past. Law, constitutional privileges, or
+religion, were to him simply means of bringing about certain ends of
+good government; and if these ends could be brought about in shorter
+fashion he saw only pedantry in insisting on more cumbrous means. He had
+great social and political ideas to realize, the reform and codification
+of the law, the civilization of Ireland, the purification of the Church,
+the union--at a later time--of Scotland and England, educational
+projects, projects of material improvement, and the like; and the direct
+and shortest way of realizing these ends was, in Bacon's eyes, the use
+of the power of the Crown. But whatever charm such a conception of the
+royal power might have for her successor, it had little charm for
+Elizabeth; and to the end of her reign Bacon was foiled in his efforts
+to rise in her service.
+
+[Sidenote: The Novum Organum.]
+
+Political activity however and Court intrigue left room in his mind for
+the philosophical speculation which had begun with his earliest years.
+Amidst debates in Parliament and flatteries in the closet Bacon had been
+silently framing a new philosophy. It made its first decisive appearance
+after the final disappointment of his hopes from Elizabeth in the
+publication of the "Advancement of Learning." The close of this work
+was, in his own words, "a general and faithful perambulation of
+learning, with an enquiry what parts thereof lie fresh and waste and not
+improved and converted by the industry of man; to the end that such a
+plot, made and recorded to memory, may both minister light to any public
+designation and also serve to excite voluntary endeavours." It was only
+by such a survey, he held, that men could be turned from useless
+studies, or ineffectual means of pursuing more useful ones, and directed
+to the true end of knowledge as "a rich storehouse for the glory of the
+Creator and the relief of man's estate." The work was in fact the
+preface to a series of treatises which were intended to be built up into
+an "Instauratio Magna," which its author was never destined to complete,
+and of which the parts that we possess were published in the following
+reign. The "Cogitata et Visa" was a first sketch of the "Novum Organum,"
+which in its complete form was presented to James in 1621. A year later
+Bacon produced his "Natural and Experimental History." This, with the
+"Novum Organum" and the "Advancement of Learning," was all of his
+projected "Instauratio Magna" which he actually finished; and even of
+this portion we have only part of the last two divisions. The "Ladder of
+the Understanding," which was to have followed these and led up from
+experience to science, the "Anticipations," or provisional hypotheses
+for the enquiries of the new philosophy, and the closing account of
+"Science in Practice" were left for posterity to bring to completion.
+"We may, as we trust," said Bacon, "make no despicable beginnings. The
+destinies of the human race must complete it, in such a manner perhaps
+as men looking only at the present world would not readily conceive.
+For upon this will depend, not only a speculative good, but all the
+fortunes of mankind, and all their power."
+
+When we turn from words like these to the actual work which Bacon did,
+it is hard not to feel a certain disappointment. He did not thoroughly
+understand the older philosophy which he attacked. His revolt from the
+waste of human intelligence which he conceived to be owing to the
+adoption of a false method of investigation blinded him to the real
+value of deduction as an instrument of discovery; and he was encouraged
+in his contempt for it as much by his own ignorance of mathematics as by
+the non-existence in his day of the great deductive sciences of physics
+and astronomy. Nor had he a more accurate prevision of the method of
+modern science. The inductive process to which he exclusively directed
+men's attention bore no fruit in Bacon's hands. The "art of
+investigating nature" on which he prided himself has proved useless for
+scientific purposes, and would be rejected by modern investigators.
+Where he was on a more correct track he can hardly be regarded as
+original. "It may be doubted," says Dugald Stewart, "whether any one
+important rule with regard to the true method of investigation be
+contained in his works of which no hint can be traced in those of his
+predecessors." Not only indeed did Bacon fail to anticipate the methods
+of modern science, but he even rejected the great scientific
+discoveries of his own day. He set aside with the same scorn the
+astronomical theory of Copernicus and the magnetic investigations of
+Gilbert. The contempt seems to have been fully returned by the
+scientific workers of his day. "The Lord Chancellor wrote on science,"
+said Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, "like a
+Lord Chancellor."
+
+In spite however of his inadequate appreciation either of the old
+philosophy or the new, the almost unanimous voice of later ages has
+attributed, and justly attributed, to the "Novum Organum" a decisive
+influence on the developement of modern science. If he failed in
+revealing the method of experimental research, Bacon was the first to
+proclaim the existence of a Philosophy of Science, to insist on the
+unity of knowledge and enquiry throughout the physical world, to give
+dignity by the large and noble temper in which he treated them to the
+petty details of experiment in which science had to begin, to clear a
+way for it by setting scornfully aside the traditions of the past, to
+claim for it its true rank and value, and to point to the enormous
+results which its culture would bring in increasing the power and
+happiness of mankind. In one respect his attitude was in the highest
+degree significant. The age in which he lived was one in which theology
+was absorbing the intellectual energy of the world. He was the servant
+too of a king with whom theological studies superseded all others. But
+if he bowed in all else to James, Bacon would not, like Casaubon, bow in
+this. He would not even, like Descartes, attempt to transform theology
+by turning reason into a mode of theological demonstration. He stood
+absolutely aloof from it. Though as a politician he did not shrink from
+dealing with such subjects as Church Reform, he dealt with them simply
+as matters of civil polity. But from his exhaustive enumeration of the
+branches of human knowledge he excluded theology, and theology alone.
+His method was of itself inapplicable to a subject where the premisses
+were assumed to be certain, and the results known. His aim was to seek
+for unknown results by simple experiment. It was against received
+authority and accepted tradition in matters of enquiry that his whole
+system protested; what he urged was the need of making belief rest
+strictly on proof, and proof rest on the conclusions drawn from evidence
+by reason. But in theology--all theologians asserted--reason played but
+a subordinate part. "If I proceed to treat of it," said Bacon, "I shall
+step out of the bark of human reason, and enter into the ship of the
+Church. Neither will the stars of philosophy, which have hitherto so
+nobly shone on us, any longer give us their light."
+
+The certainty indeed of conclusions on such subjects was out of harmony
+with the grandest feature of Bacon's work, his noble confession of the
+liability of every enquirer to error. It was his especial task to warn
+men against the "vain shows" of knowledge which had so long hindered any
+real advance in it, the "idols" of the Tribe, the Den, the Forum, and
+the Theatre, the errors which spring from the systematizing spirit which
+pervades all masses of men, or from individual idiosyncrasies, or from
+the strange power of words and phrases over the mind, or from the
+traditions of the past. Nor were the claims of theology easily to be
+reconciled with the position which he was resolute to assign to natural
+science. "Through all those ages," Bacon says, "wherein men of genius or
+learning principally or even moderately flourished, the smallest part of
+human industry has been spent on natural philosophy, though this ought
+to be esteemed as the great mother of the sciences; for all the rest, if
+torn from this root, may perhaps be polished and formed for use, but can
+receive little increase." It was by the adoption of the method of
+inductive enquiry which physical science was to make its own, and by
+basing enquiry on grounds which physical science could supply, that the
+moral sciences, ethics and politics, could alone make any real advance.
+"Let none expect any great promotion of the sciences, especially in
+their effective part, unless natural philosophy be drawn out to
+particular sciences; and, again, unless these particular sciences be
+brought back again to natural philosophy. From this defect it is that
+astronomy, optics, music, many mechanical arts, and (what seems
+stranger) even moral and civil philosophy and logic rise but little
+above the foundations, and only skim over the varieties and surfaces of
+things." It was this lofty conception of the position and destiny of
+natural science which Bacon was the first to impress upon mankind at
+large. The age was one in which knowledge was passing to fields of
+enquiry which had till then been unknown, in which Kepler and Galileo
+were creating modern astronomy, in which Descartes was revealing the
+laws of motion, and Harvey the circulation of the blood. But to the mass
+of men this great change was all but imperceptible; and it was the
+energy, the profound conviction, the eloquence of Bacon which first
+called the attention of mankind as a whole to the power and importance
+of physical research. It was he who by his lofty faith in the results
+and victories of the new philosophy nerved its followers to a zeal and
+confidence equal to his own. It was he above all who gave dignity to the
+slow and patient processes of investigation, of experiment, of
+comparison, to the sacrifice of hypothesis to fact, to the single aim
+after truth, which was to be the law of modern science.
+
+[Sidenote: Advance of the Parliament.]
+
+While England thus became "a nest of singing birds," while Bacon was
+raising the lofty fabric of his philosophical speculation, the people
+itself was waking to a new sense of national freedom. Elizabeth saw the
+forces, political and religious, which she had stubbornly held in check
+for half a century pressing on her irresistibly. In spite of the rarity
+of its assemblings, in spite of high words and imprisonment and
+dexterous management, the Parliament had quietly gained a power which,
+at her accession, the Queen could never have dreamed of its possessing.
+Step by step the Lower House had won the freedom of its members from
+arrest save by its own permission, the right of punishing and expelling
+members for crimes committed within its walls, and of determining all
+matters relating to elections. The more important claim of freedom of
+speech had brought on from time to time a series of petty conflicts in
+which Elizabeth generally gave way. But on this point the Commons still
+shrank from any consistent repudiation of the Queen's assumption of
+control. A bold protest of Peter Wentworth against her claim to exercise
+such a control in 1575 was met indeed by the House itself with his
+committal to the Tower; and the bolder questions which he addressed to
+the Parliament of 1588, "Whether this Council is not a place for every
+member of the same freely and without control, by bill or speech, to
+utter any of the griefs of the Commonwealth," brought on him a fresh
+imprisonment at the hands of the Council, which lasted till the
+dissolution of the Parliament and with which the Commons declined to
+interfere. But while vacillating in its assertion of the rights of
+individual members, the House steadily claimed for itself a right to
+discuss even the highest matters of State. Three great subjects, the
+succession, the Church, and the regulation of trade, had been regarded
+by every Tudor sovereign as lying exclusively within the competence of
+the Crown. But Parliament had again and again asserted its right to
+consider the succession. It persisted in spite of censure and rebuff in
+presenting schemes of ecclesiastical reform. And three years before
+Elizabeth's death it dealt boldly with matters of trade. Complaints made
+in 1571 of the licences and monopolies by which internal and external
+commerce was fettered were repressed by a royal reprimand as matters
+neither pertaining to the Commons nor within the compass of their
+understanding. When the subject was again stirred nearly twenty years
+afterwards, Sir Edward Hoby was sharply rebuked by "a great personage"
+for his complaint of the illegal exactions made by the Exchequer. But
+the bill which he promoted was sent up to the Lords in spite of this,
+and at the close of Elizabeth's reign the storm of popular indignation
+which had been roused by the growing grievance nerved the Commons, in
+1601, to a decisive struggle. It was in vain that the ministers opposed
+a bill for the Abolition of Monopolies, and after four days of vehement
+debate the tact of Elizabeth taught her to give way. She acted with her
+usual ability, declared her previous ignorance of the existence of the
+evil, thanked the House for its interference, and quashed at a single
+blow every monopoly that she had granted.
+
+[Sidenote: Growth of Puritanism.]
+
+Dexterous as was Elizabeth's retreat, the defeat was none the less a
+real one. Political freedom was proving itself again the master in the
+long struggle with the Crown. Nor in her yet fiercer struggle against
+religious freedom could Elizabeth look forward to any greater success.
+The sharp suppression of the Martin Marprelate pamphlets was far from
+damping the courage of the Presbyterians. Cartwright, who had been
+appointed by Lord Leicester to the mastership of an hospital at Warwick,
+was bold enough to organize his system of Church discipline among the
+clergy of that county and of Northamptonshire. His example was widely
+followed; and the general gatherings of the whole ministerial body of
+the clergy and the smaller assemblies for each diocese or shire, which
+in the Presbyterian scheme bore the name of Synods and Classes, began to
+be held in many parts of England for the purposes of debate and
+consultation. The new organization was quickly suppressed, but
+Cartwright was saved from the banishment which Whitgift demanded by a
+promise of submission, and his influence steadily widened. With
+Presbyterianism itself indeed Elizabeth was strong enough to deal. Its
+dogmatism and bigotry were opposed to the better temper of the age, and
+it never took any popular hold on England. But if Presbyterianism was
+limited to a few, Puritanism, the religious temper which sprang from a
+deep conviction of the truth of Protestant doctrines and of the
+falsehood of Catholicism, had become through the struggle with Spain and
+the Papacy the temper of three-fourths of the English people. Unluckily
+the policy of Elizabeth did its best to give to the Presbyterians the
+support of Puritanism. Her establishment of the Ecclesiastical
+Commission had given fresh life and popularity to the doctrines which it
+aimed at crushing by drawing together two currents of opinion which were
+in themselves perfectly distinct. The Presbyterian platform of Church
+discipline had as yet been embraced by the clergy only, and by few among
+the clergy. On the other hand, the wish for a reform in the Liturgy, the
+dislike of "superstitious usages," of the use of the surplice, the sign
+of the cross in baptism, the gift of the ring in marriage, the posture
+of kneeling at the Lord's Supper, was shared by a large number of the
+clergy and the laity alike. At the opening of Elizabeth's reign almost
+all the higher Churchmen save Parker were opposed to them, and a motion
+for their abolition in Convocation was lost but by a single vote. The
+temper of the country gentlemen on this subject was indicated by that
+of Parliament; and it was well known that the wisest of the Queen's
+Councillors, Burleigh, Walsingham, and Knollys, were at one in this
+matter with the gentry. If their common persecution did not wholly
+succeed in fusing these two sections of religious opinion into one, it
+at any rate gained for the Presbyterians a general sympathy on the part
+of the Puritans, which raised them from a clerical clique into a popular
+party.
+
+[Sidenote: Philip and Ireland.]
+
+But if Elizabeth's task became more difficult at home, the last years of
+her reign were years of splendour and triumph abroad. The overthrow of
+Philip's hopes in France had been made more bitter by the final
+overthrow of his hopes at sea. In 1596 his threat of a fresh Armada was
+met by the daring descent of an English force upon Cadiz. The town was
+plundered and burned to the ground; thirteen vessels of war were fired
+in its harbour, and the stores accumulated for the expedition utterly
+destroyed. In spite of this crushing blow a Spanish fleet gathered in
+the following year and set sail for the English coast; but as in the
+case of its predecessor storms proved more fatal than the English guns,
+and the ships were wrecked and almost destroyed in the Bay of Biscay.
+Meanwhile whatever hopes remained of subjecting the Low Countries were
+destroyed by the triumph of Henry of Navarre. A triple league of France,
+England, and the Netherlands left Elizabeth secure to the eastward; and
+the only quarter in which Philip could now strike a blow at her was the
+great dependency of England in the west. Since the failure of the
+Spanish force at Smerwick the power of the English government had been
+recognized everywhere throughout Ireland. But it was a power founded
+solely on terror, and the outrages and exactions of the soldiery who had
+been flushed with rapine and bloodshed in the south sowed during the
+years which followed the reduction of Munster the seeds of a revolt more
+formidable than any which Elizabeth had yet encountered. The tribes of
+Ulster, divided by the policy of Sidney, were again united by a common
+hatred of their oppressors; and in Hugh O'Neill they found a leader of
+even greater ability than Shane himself. Hugh had been brought up at the
+English court and was in manners and bearing an Englishman. He had been
+rewarded for his steady loyalty in previous contests by a grant of the
+earldom of Tyrone, and in his contest with a rival chieftain of his clan
+he had secured aid from the government by an offer to introduce the
+English laws and shire-system into his new country. But he was no sooner
+undisputed master of the north than his tone gradually changed. Whether
+from a long-formed plan, or from suspicion of English designs upon
+himself, he at last took a position of open defiance.
+
+[Sidenote: Revolt of Ulster.]
+
+It was at the moment when the Treaty of Vervins and the wreck of the
+second Armada freed Elizabeth's hands from the struggle with Spain that
+the revolt under Hugh O'Neill broke the quiet which had prevailed since
+the victories of Lord Grey. The Irish question again became the chief
+trouble of the Queen. The tide of her recent triumphs seemed at first to
+have turned. A defeat of the English forces in Tyrone caused a general
+rising of the northern tribes, and a great effort made in 1599 for the
+suppression of the growing revolt failed through the vanity and
+disobedience, if not the treacherous complicity, of the Queen's
+lieutenant, the young Earl of Essex. His successor, Lord Mountjoy, found
+himself master on his arrival of only a few miles round Dublin. But in
+three years the revolt was at an end. A Spanish force which landed to
+support it at Kinsale was driven to surrender; a line of forts secured
+the country as the English mastered it; all open opposition was crushed
+out by the energy and the ruthlessness of the new Lieutenant; and a
+famine which followed on his ravages completed the devastating work of
+the sword. Hugh O'Neill was brought in triumph to Dublin; the Earl of
+Desmond, who had again roused Munster into revolt, fled for refuge to
+Spain; and the work of conquest was at last brought to a close.
+
+[Sidenote: The last years of Elizabeth.]
+
+The triumph of Mountjoy flung its lustre over the last days of
+Elizabeth, but no outer triumph could break the gloom which gathered
+round the dying Queen. Lonely as she had always been, her loneliness
+deepened as she drew towards the grave. The statesmen and warriors of
+her earlier days had dropped one by one from her Council-board.
+Leicester had died in the year of the Armada; two years later Walsingham
+followed him to the grave; in 1598 Burleigh himself passed away. Their
+successors were watching her last moments, and intriguing for favour in
+the coming reign. Her favourite, Lord Essex, not only courted favour
+with James of Scotland, but brought him to suspect Robert Cecil, who had
+succeeded his father at the Queen's Council-board, of designs against
+his succession. The rivalry between the two ministers hurried Essex into
+fatal projects which led to his failure in Ireland and to an insane
+outbreak of revolt which brought him in 1601 to the block. But Cecil had
+no sooner proved the victor in this struggle at Court than he himself
+entered into a secret correspondence with the king of Scots. His action
+was wise: it brought James again into friendly relations with the Queen;
+and paved the way for a peaceful transfer of the crown. But hidden as
+this correspondence was from Elizabeth, the suspicion of it only added
+to her distrust. The troubles of the war in Ireland brought fresh cares
+to the aged Queen. It drained her treasury. The old splendour of her
+Court waned and disappeared. Only officials remained about her, "the
+other of the Council and nobility estrange themselves by all occasions."
+The love and reverence of the people itself lessened as they felt the
+pressure and taxation of the war. Of old men had pressed to see the
+Queen as if it were a glimpse of heaven. "In the year 1588," a bishop
+tells us, who was then a country boy fresh come to town, "I did live at
+the upper end of the Strand near St. Clement's church, when suddenly
+there came a report to us (it was in December, much about five of the
+clock at night, very dark) that the Queen was gone to Council, 'and if
+you will see the Queen you must come quickly.' Then we all ran, when the
+Court gates were set open, and no man did hinder us from coming in.
+There we came, where there was a far greater company than was usually at
+Lenten sermons; and when we had staid there an hour and that the yard
+was full, there being a number of torches, the Queen came out in great
+state. Then we cried, 'God save your Majesty! God save your Majesty!'
+Then the Queen turned to us and said, 'God bless you all, my good
+people!' Then we cried again, 'God bless your Majesty! God bless your
+Majesty!' Then the Queen said again to us, 'You may well have a greater
+prince, but you shall never have a more loving prince.' And so looking
+one upon another a while the Queen departed. This wrought such an
+impression on us, for shows and pageantry are ever best seen by
+torchlight, that all the way long we did nothing but talk what an
+admirable Queen she was, and how we would adventure our lives to do her
+service." But now, as Elizabeth passed along in her progresses, the
+people whose applause she courted remained cold and silent. The temper
+of the age in fact was changing, and isolating her as it changed. Her
+own England, the England which had grown up around her, serious, moral,
+prosaic, shrank coldly from this brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous child
+of earth and the Renascence.
+
+[Sidenote: Elizabeth's death.]
+
+But if ministers and courtiers were counting on her death, Elizabeth had
+no mind to die. She had enjoyed life as the men of her day enjoyed it,
+and now that they were gone she clung to it with a fierce tenacity. She
+hunted, she danced, she jested with her young favourites, she coquetted
+and scolded and frolicked at sixty-seven as she had done at thirty. "The
+Queen," wrote a courtier a few months before her death, "was never so
+gallant these many years nor so set upon jollity." She persisted, in
+spite of opposition, in her gorgeous progresses from country-house to
+country-house. She clung to business as of old, and rated in her usual
+fashion "one who minded not to giving up some matter of account." But
+death crept on. Her face became haggard, and her frame shrank almost to
+a skeleton. At last her taste for finery disappeared, and she refused to
+change her dresses for a week together. A strange melancholy settled
+down on her. "She held in her hand," says one who saw her in her last
+days, "a golden cup, which she often put to her lips: but in truth her
+heart seemed too full to need more filling." Gradually her mind gave
+way. She lost her memory, the violence of her temper became unbearable,
+her very courage seemed to forsake her. She called for a sword to lie
+constantly beside her and thrust it from time to time through the arras,
+as if she heard murderers stirring there. Food and rest became alike
+distasteful. She sate day and night propped up with pillows on a stool,
+her finger on her lip, her eyes fixed on the floor, without a word. If
+she once broke the silence, it was with a flash of her old queenliness.
+When Robert Cecil declared that she "must" go to bed the word roused her
+like a trumpet. "Must!" she exclaimed; "is _must_ a word to be addressed
+to princes? Little man, little man! thy father, if he had been alive,
+durst not have used that word." Then, as her anger spent itself, she
+sank into her old dejection. "Thou art so presumptuous," she said,
+"because thou knowest I shall die." She rallied once more when the
+ministers beside her bed named Lord Beauchamp, the heir to the Suffolk
+claim, as a possible successor. "I will have no rogue's son," she cried
+hoarsely, "in my seat." But she gave no sign, save a motion of the head,
+at the mention of the king of Scots. She was in fact fast becoming
+insensible; and early the next morning, on the twenty-fourth of March
+1603, the life of Elizabeth, a life so great, so strange and lonely in
+its greatness, ebbed quietly away.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VII
+
+PURITAN ENGLAND
+
+1603-1660
+
+
+
+
+AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK VII
+
+1603-1660
+
+
+For the reign of James the First we have Camden's "Annals" of that king,
+Goodman's "Court of King James I.," Weldon's "Secret History of the
+Court of James I.," Roger Coke's "Detection," the correspondence in the
+"Cabala," the letters published under the title of "The Court and Times
+of James I.," the documents in Winwood's "Memorials of State," and the
+reported proceedings of the last two Parliaments. The Camden Society has
+published the correspondence of James with Cecil, and Walter Yonge's
+"Diary." The letters and works of Bacon, now fully edited by Mr.
+Spedding, are necessary for any true understanding of the period.
+Hacket's "Life of Williams" and Harrington's "Nugæ Antiquæ" throw
+valuable side-light on the politics of the time. But the Stuart system,
+both at home and abroad, can only fairly be read by the light of the
+state-papers of this and the following reign, calendars of which are now
+being published by the Master of the Rolls. It is his employment of
+these, as well as his own fairness and good sense, which gives value to
+the series of works which Mr. Gardiner has devoted to this period; his
+"History of England from the Accession of James the First," his "Prince
+Charles and the Spanish Marriage," "England under the Duke of
+Buckingham," and "The Personal Government of Charles the First." The
+series has as yet been carried to 1637. To Mr. Gardiner also we owe the
+publication, through the Camden Society, of reports of some of the
+earlier Stuart Parliaments. Ranke's "History of England during the
+Seventeenth Century" has the same documentary value as embodying the
+substance of state-papers in both English and foreign archives, which
+throw great light on the foreign politics of the Stuart kings. It covers
+the whole period of Stuart rule. With the reign of Charles the First our
+historical materials increase. For Laud we have his remarkable "Diary";
+for Strafford the "Strafford Letters." Hallam has justly characterized
+Clarendon's "History of the Rebellion" as belonging "rather to the class
+of memoirs" than of histories; and the rigorous analysis of it by Ranke
+shows the very different value of its various parts. Though the work
+will always retain a literary interest from its nobleness of style and
+the grand series of character-portraits which it embodies, the worth of
+its account of all that preceded the war is almost destroyed by the
+contrast between its author's conduct at the time and his later
+description of the Parliament's proceedings, as well as by the
+deliberate and malignant falsehood with which he has perverted the whole
+action of his parliamentary opponents. With the outbreak of the war he
+becomes of greater value, and he gives a good account of the Cornish
+rising; but from the close of the first struggle his work becomes
+tedious and unimportant. May's "History of the Long Parliament" is
+fairly accurate and impartial; but the basis of any real account of it
+must be found in its own proceedings as they have been preserved in the
+notes of Sir Ralph Verney and Sir Simonds D'Ewes. The last remain
+unpublished; but Mr. Forster has drawn much from them in his two works,
+"The Grand Remonstrance" and "The Arrest of the Five Members." The
+collections of state-papers by Rushworth and Nalson are indispensable
+for this period. It is illustrated by a series of memoirs, of very
+different degrees of value, such as those of Whitelock, Ludlow, Sir
+Philip Warwick, Holles, and Major Hutchinson, as well as by works like
+Mrs. Hutchinson's memoir of her husband, Baxter's "Autobiography," or
+Sir Thomas Herbert's memoirs of Charles during his last two years. The
+Diary of Nehemiah Wallington gives us the common life of Puritanism
+during this troubled time. For Cromwell the primary authority is Mr.
+Carlyle's "Life and Letters of Cromwell," an invaluable store of
+documents, edited with the care of an antiquarian and the genius of a
+poet. Fairfax may be studied in the "Fairfax Correspondence," and in the
+documents embodied in Mr. Clements Markham's life of him. Sprigge's
+"Anglia Rediviva" gives an account of the New Model and its doings.
+Thurlow's State Papers furnish an immense mass of documents for the
+period of the Protectorate; and Burton's "Diary" gives an account of the
+proceedings in the Protector's second Parliament. For Irish affairs we
+have a vast store of materials in the Ormond papers and letters
+collected by Carte; for Scotland we have "Baillie's Letters," Burnet's
+"Lives of the Hamiltons," and Sir James Turner's "Memoir of the Scotch
+Invasion." Among the general accounts of this reign we may name
+Disraeli's "Commentaries of the Reign of Charles I." as prominent on one
+side, Brodie's "History of the British Empire" and Godwin's "History of
+the Commonwealth" on the other. Guizot in his three works on "Charles I.
+and the Revolution," "Cromwell and the Protectorate," and "Richard
+Cromwell and the Restoration," is accurate and impartial; and the
+documents he has added are valuable for the foreign history of the time.
+A good deal of information may be found in Forster's "Lives of the
+Statesmen of the Commonwealth," and Sandford's "Illustrations of the
+Great Rebellion."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+ENGLAND AND PURITANISM
+
+1603-1660
+
+
+[Sidenote: England at the death of Elizabeth.]
+
+The death of Elizabeth is one of the turning-points of English history.
+The age of the Renascence and of the New Monarchy passed away with the
+Queen. The whole face of the realm had been silently changing during the
+later years of her reign. The dangers which had hitherto threatened our
+national existence and our national unity had alike disappeared. The
+kingdom which had been saved from ruin but fifty years before by the
+jealousies of its neighbours now stood in the forefront of European
+powers. France clung to its friendship. Spain trembled beneath its
+blows. The Papacy had sullenly withdrawn from a fruitless strife with
+the heretic island. The last of the Queen's labours had laid Ireland at
+her feet, and her death knit Scotland to its ancient enemy by the tie of
+a common king. Within England itself the change was as great. Religious
+severance, the most terrible of national dangers, had been averted by
+the patience and the ruthlessness of the Crown. The Catholics were weak
+and held pitilessly down. The Protestant sectaries were hunted as
+pitilessly from the realm. The ecclesiastical compromise of the Tudors
+had at last won the adhesion of the country at large. Nor was the social
+change less remarkable. The natural growth of wealth and a patient good
+government had gradually put an end to all social anarchy. The dread of
+feudal revolt had passed for ever away. The fall of the Northern Earls,
+of Norfolk, and of Essex, had broken the last strength of the older
+houses. The baronage had finally made way for a modern nobility, but
+this nobility, sprung as it was from the court of the Tudors, and
+dependent for its existence on the favour of the Crown, had none of that
+traditional hold on the people at large which made the feudal lords so
+formidable a danger to public order.
+
+[Sidenote: Growth of social wealth.]
+
+If the older claims of freedom had been waived in presence of the
+dangers which so long beset even national existence, the disappearance
+of these dangers brought naturally with it a revival of the craving for
+liberty and self-government. And once awakened such a craving found a
+solid backing in the material progress of the time, in the upgrowth of
+new social classes, in the intellectual developement of the people, and
+in the new boldness and vigour of the national temper. The long outer
+peace, the tranquillity of the realm, the lightness of taxation till the
+outbreak of war with Spain, had spread prosperity throughout the land.
+Even the war failed to hinder the enrichment of the trading classes. The
+Netherlands were the centre of European trade, and of all European
+countries England had for more than half-a-century been making the
+greatest advance in its trade with the Netherlands. As early as in the
+eight years which preceded Elizabeth's accession and the eight years
+that followed it, while the trade of Spain with the Low Countries had
+doubled, and that of France and Germany with them had grown threefold,
+the trade between England and Antwerp had increased twentyfold. The
+increase remained at least as great through the forty years that
+followed, and the erection of stately houses, marriages with noble
+families, and the purchase of great estates, showed the rapid growth of
+the merchant class in wealth and social importance. London above all was
+profiting by the general advance. The rapidity of its growth awoke the
+jealousy of the royal Council. One London merchant, Thomas Sutton,
+founded the great hospital and school of the Charter House. Another,
+Hugh Myddelton, brought the New River from its springs at Chadwell and
+Amwell to supply London with pure water. Ere many years had gone the
+wealth of the great capital was to tell on the whole course of English
+history. Nor was the merchant class alone in this elevation. If the
+greater nobles no longer swayed the State, the spoil of the Church
+lands, and the general growth of national wealth, were raising the
+lesser landowners into a new social power. An influence which was to
+play a growing part in our history, the influence of the gentry, of the
+squires--as they were soon to be called--told more and more on English
+politics. In all but name indeed the leaders of this class were the
+equals of the peers whom they superseded. Men like the Wentworths in the
+north, or the Hampdens in the south, boasted as long a rent-roll and
+wielded as great an influence as many of the older nobles. The attitude
+of the Lower House towards the Higher throughout the Stuart Parliaments
+sprang mainly from the consciousness of the Commons that in wealth as
+well as in political consequence the merchants and country gentlemen who
+formed the bulk of their members stood far above the mass of the peers.
+
+[Sidenote: Growth of national spirit.]
+
+While a new social fabric was thus growing up on the wreck of feudal
+England, new influences were telling on its developement. The immense
+advance of the people as a whole in knowledge and intelligence
+throughout the reign of Elizabeth was in itself a revolution. The hold
+of tradition, the unquestioning awe which formed the main strength of
+the Tudor throne, had been sapped and weakened by the intellectual
+activity of the Renascence, by its endless questionings, its historic
+research, its philosophic scepticism. Writers and statesmen were alike
+discussing the claims of government and the wisest and most lasting
+forms of rule, travellers turned aside from the frescoes of Giorgione to
+study the aristocratic polity of Venice, and Jesuits borrowed from the
+schoolmen of the Middle Ages a doctrine of popular rights which still
+forms the theory of modern democracy. On the other hand the nation was
+learning to rely on itself, to believe in its own strength and vigour,
+to crave for a share in the guidance of its own life. His conflict with
+the two great spiritual and temporal powers of Christendom, his strife
+at once with the Papacy and the House of Austria, had roused in every
+Englishman a sense of supreme manhood, which told, however slowly, on
+his attitude towards the Crown. The seaman whose tiny bark had dared the
+storms of far-off seas, the young squire who crossed the Channel to
+flesh his maiden sword at Ivry or Ostend, brought back with them to
+English soil the daring temper, the sense of inexhaustible resources,
+which had borne them on through storm and battle-field. The nation which
+gave itself to the rule of the Stuarts was another nation from the
+panic-struck people that gave itself in the crash of social and
+religious order to the guidance of the Tudors. It was plain that a new
+age of our history must open when the lofty patriotism, the dauntless
+energy, the overpowering sense of effort and triumph, which rose into
+their full grandeur through the war with Spain, turned from the strife
+with Philip to seek a new sphere of activity at home.
+
+[Sidenote: The spirit of religion.]
+
+What had hindered this force from telling as yet fully on national
+affairs was the breadth and largeness which characterized the temper of
+the Renascence. Through the past half-century the aims of Englishmen had
+been drawn far over the narrow bounds of England itself to every land
+and every sea; while their mental activity spent itself as freely on
+poetry and science as on religion and politics. But at the moment which
+we have reached the whole of this energy was seized upon and
+concentrated by a single force. For a hundred years past men had been
+living in the midst of a spiritual revolution. Not only the world about
+them but the world of thought and feeling within every breast had been
+utterly transformed. The work of the sixteenth century had wrecked that
+tradition of religion, of knowledge, of political and social order,
+which had been accepted without question by the Middle Ages. The sudden
+freedom of the mind from these older bonds brought a consciousness of
+power such as had never been felt before; and the restless energy, the
+universal activity of the Renascence were but outer expressions of the
+pride, the joy, the amazing self-confidence, with which man welcomed
+this revelation of the energies which had lain slumbering within him.
+But his pride and self-reliance were soon dashed by a feeling of dread.
+With the deepening sense of human individuality came a deepening
+conviction of the boundless capacities of the human soul. Not as a
+theological dogma, but as a human fact, man knew himself to be an all
+but infinite power, whether for good or for ill. The drama towered into
+sublimity as it painted the strife of mighty forces within the breast of
+Othello or Macbeth. Poets passed into metaphysicians as they strove to
+unravel the workings of conscience within the soul. From that hour one
+dominant influence told on human action: and all the various energies
+that had been called into life by the age that was passing away were
+seized, concentrated, and steadied to a definite aim by the spirit of
+religion.
+
+[Sidenote: The Bible.]
+
+The whole temper of the nation felt the change. "Theology rules there,"
+said Grotius of England only two years after Elizabeth's death; and when
+Casaubon was invited by her successor to his court he found both king
+and people indifferent to pure letters. "There is a great abundance of
+theologians in England," he says; "all point their studies in that
+direction." Even a country gentleman, like Colonel Hutchinson, felt the
+theological impulse. "As soon as he had improved his natural
+understanding with the acquisition of learning, the first studies he
+exercised himself in were the principles of religion." It was natural
+that literature should reflect the tendency of the time; and the dumpy
+little quartos of controversy and piety which still crowd our older
+libraries drove before them the classical translations and Italian
+novelettes of the age of the Renascence. But their influence was small
+beside that of the Bible. The popularity of the Bible had been growing
+fast from the day when Bishop Bonner set up the first six copies in St.
+Paul's. Even then, we are told, "many well-disposed people used much to
+resort to the hearing thereof, especially when they could get any that
+had an audible voice to read to them."... "One John Porter used
+sometimes to be occupied in that goodly exercise, to the edifying of
+himself as well as others. This Porter was a fresh young man and of a
+big stature; and great multitudes would resort thither to hear him,
+because he could read well and had an audible voice." But the "goodly
+exercise" of readers such as Porter was soon superseded by the continued
+recitation of both Old Testament and New in the public services of the
+Church; while the small Geneva Bibles carried the Scripture into every
+home, and wove it into the life of every English family.
+
+[Sidenote: Its literary influence.]
+
+Religion indeed was only one of the causes for this sudden popularity of
+the Bible. The book was equally important in its bearing on the
+intellectual developement of the people. All the prose literature of
+England, save the forgotten tracts of Wyclif, has grown up since the
+translation of the Scriptures by Tyndale and Coverdale. So far as the
+nation at large was concerned, no history, no romance, hardly any poetry
+save the little-known verse of Chaucer, existed in the English tongue
+when the Bible was ordered to be set up in churches. Sunday after
+Sunday, day after day, the crowds that gathered round the Bible in the
+nave of St. Paul's, or the family group that hung on its words in the
+devotional exercises at home, were leavened with a new literature.
+Legend and annal, war song and psalm, State-roll and biography, the
+mighty voices of prophets, the parables of Evangelists, stories of
+mission journeys, of perils by the sea and among the heathen,
+philosophic arguments, apocalyptic visions, all were flung broadcast
+over minds unoccupied for the most part by any rival learning. The
+disclosure of the stores of Greek literature had wrought the revolution
+of the Renascence. The disclosure of the older mass of Hebrew literature
+wrought the revolution of the Reformation. But the one revolution was
+far deeper and wider in its effects than the other. No version could
+transfer to another tongue the peculiar charm of language which gave
+their value to the authors of Greece and Rome. Classical letters
+therefore remained in the possession of the learned, that is, of the
+few; and among these, with the exception of Colet and More, or of the
+pedants who revived a Pagan worship in the gardens of the Florentine
+Academy, their direct influence was purely intellectual. But the
+language of the Hebrew, the idiom of the Hellenistic Greek, lent
+themselves with a curious felicity to the purposes of translation. As a
+mere literary monument the English version of the Bible remains the
+noblest example of the English tongue, while its perpetual use made it
+from the instant of its appearance the standard of our language.
+
+[Sidenote: Its social influence.]
+
+For the moment however its literary effect was less than its social. The
+power of the book over the mass of Englishmen showed itself in a
+thousand superficial ways, and in none more conspicuously than in the
+influence it exerted on ordinary speech. It formed, we must repeat, the
+whole literature which was practically accessible to ordinary
+Englishmen; and when we recall the number of common phrases which we owe
+to great authors, the bits of Shakspere, or Milton, or Dickens, or
+Thackeray, which unconsciously interweave themselves in our ordinary
+talk, we shall better understand the strange mosaic of Biblical words
+and phrases which coloured English talk two hundred years ago. The mass
+of picturesque allusion and illustration which we borrow from a thousand
+books, our fathers were forced to borrow from one; and the borrowing was
+the easier and the more natural that the range of the Hebrew literature
+fitted it for the expression of every phase of feeling. When Spenser
+poured forth his warmest love-notes in the "Epithalamion," he adopted
+the very words of the Psalmist, as he bade the gates open for the
+entrance of his bride. When Cromwell saw the mists break over the hills
+of Dunbar, he hailed the sun-burst with the cry of David: "Let God
+arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Like as the smoke vanisheth, so
+shalt thou drive them away!" Even to common minds this familiarity with
+grand poetic imagery in prophet and apocalypse gave a loftiness and
+ardour of expression that with all its tendency to exaggeration and
+bombast we may prefer to the slipshod vulgarisms of to-day.
+
+[Sidenote: Its religious influence.]
+
+But far greater than its effect on literature or social phrase was the
+effect of the Bible on the character of the people at large. The Bible
+was as yet the one book which was familiar to every Englishman; and
+everywhere its words, as they fell on ears which custom had not deadened
+to their force and beauty, kindled a startling enthusiasm. The whole
+moral effect which is produced nowadays by the religious newspaper, the
+tract, the essay, the missionary report, the sermon, was then produced
+by the Bible alone; and its effect in this way, however dispassionately
+we examine it, was simply amazing. The whole nation became a church. The
+problems of life and death, whose questionings found no answer in the
+higher minds of Shakspere's day, pressed for an answer not only from
+noble and scholar but from farmer and shopkeeper in the age that
+followed him. The answer they found was almost of necessity a
+Calvinistic answer. Unlike as the spirit of Calvinism seemed to the
+spirit of the Renascence, both found a point of union in their
+exaltation of the individual man. The mighty strife of good and evil
+within the soul itself which had overawed the imagination of dramatist
+and poet became the one spiritual conception in the mind of the Puritan.
+The Calvinist looked on churches and communions as convenient groupings
+of pious Christians; it might be as even indispensable parts of a
+Christian order. But religion in its deepest and innermost sense had to
+do not with churches but with the individual soul. It was each Christian
+man who held in his power the issues of life and death. It was in each
+Christian conscience that the strife was waged between Heaven and Hell.
+Not as one of a body, but as a single soul, could each Christian claim
+his part in the mystery of redemption. In the outer world of worship and
+discipline the Calvinist might call himself one of many brethren, but at
+every moment of his inner existence, in the hour of temptation and of
+struggle, in his dark and troubled wrestling with sin, in the glory of
+conversion, in the peace of acceptance with God, he stood utterly alone.
+With such a conception of human life Puritanism offered the natural form
+for English religion at a time when the feeling with which religion
+could most easily ally itself was the sense of individuality. The
+'prentice who sate awed in the pit of the theatre as the storm in the
+mind of Lear outdid the storm among the elements passed easily into the
+Calvinist who saw himself day by day the theatre of a yet mightier
+struggle between the powers of light and the powers of darkness, and his
+soul the prize of an eternal conflict between Heaven and Hell.
+
+[Sidenote: Growth of Calvinism.]
+
+It was thus by its own natural developement that the temper of
+Englishmen became above all religious, and that their religion took in
+most cases the form of Calvinism. But the rapid spread of Calvinism was
+aided by outer causes as well as inner ones. The reign of Elizabeth had
+been a long struggle for national existence. When Shakspere first trod
+the streets of London it was a question whether England should still
+remain England or whether it should sink into a vassal of Spain. In that
+long contest the creed which Henry and Elizabeth had constructed, the
+strange compromise of old tradition with new convictions which the
+country was gradually shaping into a new religion for itself, had done
+much for England's victory. It had held England together as a people. It
+had hindered any irreparable severance of the nation into warring
+churches. But it had done this unobserved. To the bulk of men the
+victory seemed wholly due to the energy and devotion of Calvinism. Rome
+had placed herself in the forefront of England's enemies, and it was the
+Calvinistic Puritan who was the irreconcileable foe of Rome. It was the
+Puritan who went forth to fight the Spaniard in France or in the
+Netherlands. It was the Puritan who broke into the Spanish Main, and who
+singed Philip's beard at Cadiz. It was the Puritan whose assiduous
+preachings and catechizings had slowly won the mass of the English
+people to any real acceptance of Protestantism. And as the war drifted
+on, as the hatred of Spain and resentment at the Papacy grew keener and
+fiercer, as patriotism became more identified with Protestantism, and
+Protestantism more identified with hatred of Rome, the side of English
+religion which lay furthest from all contact with the tradition of the
+past grew more and more popular among Englishmen.
+
+[Sidenote: Puritanism and the people.]
+
+To Elizabeth, whether on religious or political grounds, Calvinism was
+the most hateful of her foes. But it was in vain that she strove by a
+rigorous discipline to check its advance. Her discipline could only tell
+on the clergy, and the movement was far more a lay than a clerical one.
+Whether she would or no, in fact, the Queen's policy favoured the
+Puritan cause. It was impossible to befriend Calvinism abroad without
+furthering Calvinism at home. The soldiers and adventurers who flocked
+from England to fight in the Huguenot camps came back steeped in the
+Huguenot theology. The exiles who fled to England from France and from
+the Netherlands spread their narrower type of religion through the
+towns where they found a refuge. As the strife with Rome grew hotter the
+government was forced to fill Parliament and the magistracy with men
+whose zealous Protestantism secured their fidelity in the case of a
+Catholic rising. But a zealous Protestant was almost inevitably a
+Calvinist; and to place the administration of the country in Calvinist
+hands was to give an impulse to Puritanism. How utterly Elizabeth failed
+was seen at the beginning of her successor's reign. The bulk of the
+country gentlemen, the bulk of the wealthier traders, had by that time
+become Puritans. In the first Parliament of James the House of Commons
+refused for the first time to transact business on a Sunday. His second
+Parliament chose to receive the communion at St. Margaret's Church
+instead of Westminster Abbey "for fear of copes and wafer-cakes."
+
+[Sidenote: Puritanism in the Church.]
+
+The same difficulty met Elizabeth in her efforts to check the growth of
+Puritanism in the Church itself. At the very outset of her reign the
+need of replacing the Marian bishops by staunch Protestants forced her
+to fill the English sees with men whose creed was in almost every case
+Calvinistic. The bulk of the lower clergy indeed were left without
+change; but as the older parsons died out their places were mostly
+filled by Puritan successors. The Universities furnished the new clergy,
+and at the close of Elizabeth's reign the tone of the Universities was
+hotly Puritan. Even the outer uniformity on which the Queen set her
+heart took a Puritan form. The use of the Prayer-book indeed was
+enforced; but the aspect of English churches and of English worship
+tended more and more to the model of Geneva. The need of more light to
+follow the service in the new Prayer-books served as a pretext for the
+removal of stained glass from the church windows. The communion table
+stood almost everywhere in the midst of the church. If the surplice was
+generally worn during the service, the preacher often mounted the pulpit
+in a Geneva gown. We see the progress of this change in the very chapel
+of the Primates themselves. The chapel of Lambeth House was one of the
+most conspicuous among the ecclesiastical buildings of the time; it was
+a place "whither many of the nobility, judges, clergy, and persons of
+all sorts, as well strangers as natives, resorted." But all pomp of
+worship gradually passed away from it. Under Cranmer the stained glass
+was dashed from its windows. In Elizabeth's time the communion table was
+moved into the middle of the chapel, and the credence table destroyed.
+Under James Archbishop Abbott put the finishing stroke on all attempts
+at a high ceremonial. The cope was no longer used as a special vestment
+in the communion. The Primate and his chaplains forbore to bow at the
+name of Christ. The organ and choir were alike abolished, and the
+service reduced to a simplicity which would have satisfied Calvin.
+
+[Sidenote: Puritanism and politics.]
+
+Foiled as it was, the effort of Elizabeth to check the spread of
+Puritanism was no mere freak of religious bigotry. It sprang from a
+clear realization of the impossibility of harmonizing the new temper of
+the nation with the system of personal government which had done its
+work under the Tudors. With the republican and anti-monarchical theories
+indeed that Calvinism had begotten elsewhere, English Calvinism showed
+as yet no sort of sympathy. The theories of resistance, of a people's
+right to judge and depose its rulers, which had been heard in the heat
+of the Marian persecution, had long sunk into silence. The loyalty of
+the Puritan gentleman was as fervent as that of his fellows. But with
+the belief of the Calvinist went necessarily a new and higher sense of
+political order. The old conception of personal rule, the dependence of
+a nation on the arbitrary will of its ruler, was jarring everywhere more
+and more with the religious as well as the philosophic impulses of the
+time. Men of the most different tendencies were reaching forward to the
+same conception of law. Bacon sought for universal laws in material
+nature. Hooker asserted the rule of law over the spiritual world. It was
+in the same way that the Puritan sought for a divine law by which the
+temporal kingdoms around him might be raised into a kingdom of Christ.
+The diligence with which he searched the Scriptures sprang from his
+earnestness to discover a Divine Will which in all things, great or
+small, he might implicitly obey. But this implicit obedience was
+reserved for the Divine Will alone; for human ordinances derived their
+strength only from their correspondence with the revealed law of God.
+The Puritan was bound by his religion to examine every claim made on his
+civil and spiritual obedience by the powers that be; and to own or
+reject the claim, as it accorded with the higher duty which he owed to
+God. "In matters of faith," a Puritan wife tells us of her husband, "his
+reason always submitted to the Word of God; but in all other things the
+greatest names in the world would not lead him without reason."
+
+[Sidenote: Puritanism and the Crown.]
+
+It was plain that an impassable gulf parted such a temper as this from
+the temper of unquestioning devotion to the Crown which the Tudors
+termed loyalty; for it was a temper not only legal, but even pedantic in
+its legality, intolerant from its very sense of a moral order and law of
+the lawlessness and disorder of a personal tyranny, a temper of
+criticism, of judgement, and, if need be, of stubborn and unconquerable
+resistance. The temper of the Puritan indeed was no temper of mere
+revolt. His resistance, if he was forced to resist, would spring not
+from any disdain of kingly authority, but from his devotion to an
+authority higher and more sacred than that of kings. He had as firm a
+faith as the nation at large in the divine right of the sovereign, in
+the sacred character of the throne. It was in fact just because his
+ruler's authority had a divine origin that he obeyed him. But the nation
+about the throne seemed to the Puritan not less divinely ordered a thing
+than the throne itself; it was the voice of God, inspiring and
+directing, which spoke through its history and its laws; it was God that
+guided to wisdom the hearts of Englishmen in Parliament assembled as He
+guided to wisdom the hearts of kings. Never was the respect for positive
+law so profound; never was the reverence for Parliaments so great as at
+the death of Elizabeth. There was none of the modern longing for a king
+that reigned without governing; no conscious desire shows itself
+anywhere to meddle with the actual exercise of the royal administration.
+But the Puritan could only conceive of the kingly power as of a power
+based upon constitutional tradition, controlled by constitutional law,
+and acting in willing harmony with that body of constitutional
+counsellors in the two Houses, who represented the wisdom and the will
+of the realm.
+
+[Sidenote: Puritanism and society.]
+
+It was in the creation of such a temper as this that Puritanism gave its
+noblest gift to English politics. It gave a gift hardly less noble to
+society at large in its conception of social equality. Their common
+calling, their common brotherhood in Christ, annihilated in the mind of
+the Puritans that overpowering sense of social distinctions which
+characterized the age of Elizabeth. There was no open break with social
+traditions; no open revolt against the social subordination of class to
+class. But within these forms of the older world beat for the first time
+the spirit which was to characterize the new. The meanest peasant felt
+himself ennobled as a child of God. The proudest noble recognized a
+spiritual equality in the poorest "saint." The great social revolution
+of the Civil Wars and the Protectorate was already felt in the demeanour
+of English gentlemen. "He had a loving and sweet courtesy to the
+poorest," we are told of one of them, "and would often employ many spare
+hours with the commonest soldiers and poorest labourers." "He never
+disdained the meanest nor flattered the greatest." But it was felt even
+more in the new dignity and self-respect with which the consciousness of
+their "calling" invested the classes beneath the rank of the gentry.
+Take such a portrait as that which a turner in Eastcheap, Nehemiah
+Wallington, has left us of a London housewife, his mother. "She was very
+loving," he says, "and obedient to her parents, loving and kind to her
+husband, very tender-hearted to her children, loving all that were
+godly, much misliking the wicked and profane. She was a pattern of
+sobriety unto many, very seldom was seen abroad except at church; when
+others recreated themselves at holidays and other times, she would take
+her needlework and say 'here is my recreation.'... God had given her a
+pregnant wit and an excellent memory. She was very ripe and perfect in
+all stories of the Bible, likewise in all the stories of the Martyrs,
+and could readily turn to them; she was also perfect and well seen in
+the English Chronicles, and in the descents of the kings of England. She
+lived in holy wedlock with her husband twenty years, wanting but four
+days."
+
+[Sidenote: Puritanism and human conduct.]
+
+Where the new conception of life told even more powerfully than on
+politics or society was in its bearing on the personal temper and
+conduct of men. There was a sudden loss of the passion, the caprice, the
+subtle and tender play of feeling, the breadth of sympathy, the quick
+pulse of delight, which had marked the age of Elizabeth; but on the
+other hand life gained in moral grandeur, in a sense of the dignity of
+manhood, in orderliness and equable force. The larger geniality of the
+age that had passed away was replaced by an intense tenderness within
+the narrower circle of the home. Home, as we conceive it now, was the
+creation of the Puritan. Wife and child rose from mere dependants on the
+will of husband or father, as husband and father saw in them saints
+like himself, souls hallowed by the touch of a divine Spirit and called
+with a divine calling like his own. The sense of spiritual fellowship
+gave a new tenderness and refinement to the common family affections.
+"He was as kind a father," says a Puritan wife of her husband, "as dear
+a brother, as good a master, as faithful a friend as the world had." The
+wilful and lawless passion of the Renascence made way for a manly
+purity. "Neither in youth nor riper years could the most fair or
+enticing woman draw him into unnecessary familiarity or dalliance. Wise
+and virtuous women he loved, and delighted in all pure and holy and
+unblameable conversation with them, but so as never to excite scandal or
+temptation. Scurrilous discourse even among men he abhorred; and though
+he sometimes took pleasure in wit and mirth, yet that which was mixed
+with impurity he never could endure." A higher conception of duty
+coloured men's daily actions. To the Puritan the wilfulness of life, in
+which the men of the Renascence had revelled, seemed unworthy of life's
+character and end. His aim was to attain self-command, to be master of
+himself, of his thought and speech and acts. A certain gravity and
+reflectiveness gave its tone to the lightest details of his converse
+with the world about him. His temper, quick as it might naturally be,
+was kept under strict control. In his discourse he was on his guard
+against talkativeness and frivolity, striving to be deliberate in
+speech, and "ranking the words beforehand." His life was orderly and
+methodical, sparing of diet and self-indulgence; he rose early; "he
+never was at any time idle, and hated to see any one else so." The new
+sobriety and self-restraint showed itself in a change of dress. The
+gorgeous colours and jewels of the Renascence disappeared. The Puritan
+squire "left off very early the wearing of anything that was costly, yet
+in his plainest negligent habit appeared very much a gentleman."
+
+[Sidenote: Puritanism and culture.]
+
+The loss of colour and variety in costume reflected no doubt a certain
+loss of colour and variety in life itself. But as yet Puritanism was
+free from any break with the harmless gaieties of the world about it.
+The lighter and more elegant sides of the Elizabethan culture harmonized
+well enough with the temper of the Calvinist gentleman. The figure of
+such a Puritan as Colonel Hutchinson stands out from his wife's canvas
+with the grace and tenderness of a portrait by Vandyck. She dwells on
+the personal beauty which distinguished his youth, on "his teeth even
+and white as the purest ivory," "his hair of brown, very thick-set in
+his youth, softer than the finest silk, curling with loose great rings
+at the ends." Serious as was his temper in graver matters, the young
+squire of Owthorpe was fond of hawking, and piqued himself on his skill
+in dancing and fence. His artistic taste showed itself in a critical
+love of "paintings, sculpture, and all liberal arts," as well as in the
+pleasure he took in his gardens, "in the improvement of his grounds, in
+planting groves and walks and forest-trees." If he was "diligent in his
+examination of the Scriptures," "he had a great love for music and often
+diverted himself with a viol, on which he played masterly."
+
+[Sidenote: Milton.]
+
+The strength however of the religious movement lay rather among the
+middle and professional classes than among the gentry; and it is in a
+Puritan of this class that we find the fullest and noblest expression of
+the new influence which was leavening the temper of the time. John
+Milton is not only the highest but the completest type of Puritanism.
+His life is absolutely contemporaneous with his cause. He was born when
+it began to exercise a direct influence over English politics and
+English religion; he died when its effort to mould them into its own
+shape was over, and when it had again sunk into one of many influences
+to which we owe our English character. His earlier verse, the pamphlets
+of his riper years, the epics of his age, mark with a singular precision
+the three great stages in its history. His youth shows us how much of
+the gaiety, the poetic ease, the intellectual culture of the Renascence,
+lingered in a Puritan home. Scrivener and "precisian" as his father was,
+he was a skilled musician, and the boy inherited his father's skill on
+lute and organ. One of the finest outbursts in the scheme of education
+which he put forth at a later time is a passage in which he vindicates
+the province of music as an agent in moral training. His home, his
+tutor, his school were all rigidly Puritan; but there was nothing narrow
+or illiberal in his early training. "My father," he says, "destined me
+while yet a little boy to the study of humane letters; which I seized
+with such eagerness that from the twelfth year of my age I scarcely ever
+went from my lessons to bed before midnight." But to the Greek, Latin,
+and Hebrew he learned at school, the scrivener advised him to add
+Italian and French. Nor were English letters neglected. Spenser gave the
+earliest turn to the boy's poetic genius. In spite of the war between
+playwright and precisian, a Puritan youth could still in Milton's days
+avow his love of the stage, "if Jonson's learned sock be on, or sweetest
+Shakspere, Fancy's child, warble his native woodnotes wild," and gather
+from the "masques and antique pageantry" of the court-revel hints for
+his own "Comus" and "Arcades." Nor does any shadow of the coming
+struggle with the Church disturb the young scholar's reverie, as he
+wanders beneath "the high embowed roof, with antique pillars massy
+proof, and storied windows richly dight, casting a dim religious light,"
+or as he hears "the pealing organ blow to the full-voiced choir below,
+in service high and anthem clear."
+
+Milton's enjoyment of the gaiety of life stands in bright contrast with
+the gloom and sternness which strife and persecution fostered in
+Puritanism at a later time. In spite of a "certain reservedness of
+natural disposition," which shrank from "festivities and jests, in which
+I acknowledge my faculty to be very slight," the young singer could
+still enjoy the "jest and youthful jollity" of the world around him, its
+"quips and cranks and wanton wiles"; he could join the crew of Mirth,
+and look pleasantly on at the village fair, where "the jocund rebecks
+sound to many a youth and many a maid, dancing in the chequered shade."
+There was nothing ascetic in Milton's look, in his slender, vigorous
+frame, his face full of a delicate yet serious beauty, the rich brown
+hair which clustered over his brow; and the words we have quoted show
+his sensitive enjoyment of all that was beautiful. But his pleasures
+were "unreproved." From coarse or sensual self-indulgence the young
+Puritan turned with disgust: "A certain reservedness of nature, an
+honest haughtiness and self-esteem, kept me still above those low
+descents of mind." He drank in an ideal chivalry from Spenser, though
+his religion and purity disdained the outer pledge on which chivalry
+built up its fabric of honour. "Every free and gentle spirit," said
+Milton, "without that oath, ought to be born a knight." It was with this
+temper that he passed from his London school, St. Paul's, to Christ's
+College at Cambridge, and it was this temper that he preserved
+throughout his University career. He left Cambridge, as he said
+afterwards, "free from all reproach, and approved by all honest men,"
+with a purpose of self-dedication "to that same lot, however mean or
+high, towards which time leads me and the will of heaven."
+
+[Sidenote: The narrowness of Puritanism.]
+
+Even in the still calm beauty of a life such as this we catch the
+sterner tones of the Puritan temper. The very height of the Puritan's
+aim, the intensity of his moral concentration, brought with them a loss
+of the genial delight in all that was human which gave its charm to the
+age of Elizabeth. "If ever God instilled an intense love of moral beauty
+into the mind of any man," said the great Puritan poet, "he has
+instilled it into mine." "Love Virtue," closed his "Comus," "she alone
+is free!" But this passionate love of virtue and of moral beauty, if it
+gave strength to human conduct, narrowed human sympathy and human
+intelligence. Already in Milton we note "a certain reservedness of
+temper," a contempt for "the false estimates of the vulgar," a proud
+withdrawal from the meaner and coarser life around him. Great as was his
+love for Shakspere, we can hardly fancy him delighting in Falstaff. In
+minds of a less cultured order, this moral tension ended, no doubt, in a
+hard unsocial sternness of life. The ordinary Puritan "loved all that
+were godly, much misliking the wicked and profane." His bond to other
+men was not the sense of a common manhood, but the recognition of a
+brotherhood among the elect. Without the pale of the saints lay a world
+which was hateful to them, because it was the enemy of their God. It is
+this utter isolation from the "ungodly" that explains the contrast which
+startles us between the inner tenderness of the Puritans and the
+ruthlessness of so many of their actions. Cromwell, whose son's death
+(in his own words) went to his heart "like a dagger, indeed it did!" and
+who rode away sad and wearied from the triumph of Marston Moor, burst
+into horse-play as he signed the death-warrant of the king.
+
+[Sidenote: Its extravagance.]
+
+A temper which had lost sympathy with the life of half the world around
+it could hardly sympathize with the whole of its own life. Humour, the
+faculty which above all corrects exaggeration and extravagance, died
+away before the new stress and strain of existence. The absolute
+devotion of the Puritan to a Supreme Will tended more and more to rob
+him of all sense of measure and proportion in common matters. Little
+things became great things in the glare of religious zeal; and the godly
+man learnt to shrink from a surplice, or a mince-pie at Christmas, as he
+shrank from impurity or a lie. Nor was this all. The self-restraint and
+sobriety which marked the Calvinist limited itself wholly to his outer
+life. In his inner soul sense, reason, judgement, were too often
+overborne by the terrible reality of invisible things. Our first
+glimpse of Oliver Cromwell is as a young country squire and farmer in
+the marsh-levels around Huntingdon and St. Ives, buried from time to
+time in a deep melancholy, and haunted by fancies of coming death. "I
+live in Meshac," he writes to a friend, "which they say signifies
+Prolonging; in Kedar, which signifies Darkness; yet the Lord forsaketh
+me not." The vivid sense of a Divine Purity close to such men made the
+life of common men seem sin. "You know what my manner of life has been,"
+Cromwell adds. "Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated light. I
+hated godliness." Yet his worst sin was probably nothing more than an
+enjoyment of the natural buoyancy of youth, and a want of the deeper
+earnestness which comes with riper years. In imaginative tempers, like
+that of Bunyan, the struggle took a more picturesque form. John Bunyan
+was the son of a poor tinker at Elstow in Bedfordshire, and even in
+childhood his fancy revelled in terrible visions of Heaven and Hell.
+"When I was but a child of nine or ten years old," he tells us, "these
+things did so distress my soul, that then in the midst of my merry
+sports and childish vanities, amidst my vain companions, I was often
+much cast down and afflicted in my mind therewith; yet could I not let
+go my sins." The sins he could not let go were a love of hockey and of
+dancing on the village green; for the only real fault which his bitter
+self-accusation discloses, that of a habit of swearing, was put an end
+to at once and for ever by a rebuke from an old woman. His passion for
+bell-ringing clung to him even after he had broken from it as a "vain
+practice"; and he would go to the steeple-house and look on, till the
+thought that a bell might fall and crush him in his sins drove him
+panic-stricken from the door. A sermon against dancing and games drew
+him for a time from these indulgences; but the temptation again
+overmastered his resolve. "I shook the sermon out of my mind, and to my
+old custom of sports and gaming I returned with great delight. But the
+same day, as I was in the midst of a game of cat, and having struck it
+one blow from the hole, just as I was about to strike it the second
+time, a voice did suddenly dart from heaven into my soul, which said,
+'Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or have thy sins and go to
+Hell?' At this I was put in an exceeding maze; wherefore, leaving my cat
+upon the ground, I looked up to heaven; and was as if I had with the
+eyes of my understanding seen the Lord Jesus looking down upon me, as
+being very hotly displeased with me, and as if He did severely threaten
+me with some grievous punishment for those and other ungodly practices."
+
+[Sidenote: Belief in witchcraft.]
+
+The vivid sense of a supernatural world which breathes through words
+such as these, the awe and terror with which it pressed upon the life of
+men, found their most terrible expression in the belief in witchcraft.
+The dread of Satanic intervention indeed was not peculiar to the
+Puritan. It had come down from the earliest ages of the Christian
+Church, and had been fanned into a new intensity at the close of the
+Middle Ages by the physical calamities and moral scepticism which threw
+their gloom over the world. Joan of Arc was a witch to every Englishman,
+and the wife of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester paced the streets of London,
+candle in hand, as a convicted sorceress. But it was not till the chaos
+and turmoil of the Reformation put their strain on the spiritual
+imagination of men that the belief in demoniacal possession deepened
+into a general panic. The panic was common to both Catholics and
+Protestants; it was in Catholic countries indeed that the persecution of
+supposed witches was carried on longest and most ruthlessly. Among
+Protestant countries England was the last to catch the general terror;
+and the Act of 1541, the first English statute passed against
+witchcraft, was far milder in tone than the laws of any other European
+country. Witchcraft itself, where no death could be proved to have
+followed from it, was visited only with pillory and imprisonment; where
+death had issued from it, the penalty was the gallows and not the stake.
+Even this statute was repealed in the following reign. But the fierce
+religious strife under Mary roused a darker fanaticism; and when
+Elizabeth mounted the throne preacher after preacher assured her that a
+multitude of witches filled the land. "Witches and sorcerers," cried
+Bishop Jewel, "within these few years are marvellously increased within
+your grace's realm. Your grace's subjects pine away even unto the death;
+their colour fadeth, their flesh rotteth, their speech is benumbed,
+their senses are bereft!" Before remonstrances such as these the statute
+against witchcraft was again enacted; but though literature and the
+drama show the hold which a belief in satanic agency had gained on the
+popular fancy, the temper of the times was too bold and self-reliant,
+its intelligence too keen and restless, its tone too secular, to furnish
+that atmosphere of panic in which fanaticism is bred.
+
+It was not till the close of the Queen's reign, as hope darkened round
+Protestantism and the Puritan temper woke a fresh faith in the
+supernatural, that the belief in witchcraft and the persecution of the
+unhappy women who were held to be witches became a marked feature of the
+time. To men who looked on the world about them and the soul within them
+as battle-fields for a never-ceasing contest between God and the Devil,
+it was natural enough to ascribe every evil that happened to man, either
+in soul or body, to the invisible agency of the spirit of ill. A share
+of his supernatural energies was the bait by which he was held to lure
+the wicked to their own destruction; and women above all were believed
+to barter their souls for the possession of power which lifted them
+above the weakness of their sex. Sober men asserted that the beldame,
+whom boys hooted in the streets and who groped in the gutter for bread,
+could blast the corn with mildew and lame the oxen in the plough, that
+she could smite her persecutors with pains and sickness, that she could
+rouse storms in the sky and strew every shore with the wrecks of ships
+and the corpses of men, that as night gathered round she could mount her
+broomstick and sweep through the air to the witches' Sabbath, to yield
+herself in body and soul to the demons of ill. The nascent scepticism
+that startled at tales such as these was hushed before the witness of
+the Bible, for to question the existence of sorcerer or dæmoniac seemed
+questioning the veracity of the Scriptures themselves. Pity fell before
+the stern injunction, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"; and the
+squire who would have shrunk from any conscious cruelty as from a blow
+looked on without ruth as the torturers ran needles into the witch's
+flesh, or swam her in the witch's pool, or hurried her to the witch's
+stake.
+
+[Sidenote: The Protestant defeat.]
+
+But the terror with which the Puritan viewed these proofs of a new
+energy in the powers of ill found a wider sphere of action as he saw
+their new activity and success in the religious and political world
+about him. At the opening of Elizabeth's reign every Protestant had
+looked forward to a world-wide triumph of the Gospel. If Italy and
+Spain clung blindly to the Papacy, elsewhere, alike on the Danube or the
+Rhine, on the Elbe or the Seine, the nations of Europe seemed to have
+risen in irreconcileable revolt against Rome. But the prospect of such a
+triumph had long since disappeared. At the crisis of the struggle a
+Catholic reaction had succeeded in holding Protestantism at bay, and
+after years of fierce combat Rome had begun definitely to win ground.
+The peaceful victories of the Jesuits were backed by the arms of Spain,
+and Europe was gradually regained till the policy of Philip the Second
+was able to aim its blows at the last strongholds of Calvinism in the
+west. Philip was undoubtedly worsted in the strife. England was saved by
+its defeat of the Armada. The United Provinces of the Netherlands rose
+into a great power as well through their own dogged heroism as through
+the genius of William the Silent. At a moment too when all hope seemed
+gone France was rescued from the grasp of the Catholic League by the
+unconquerable energy of Henry of Navarre. But even in its defeat
+Catholicism gained ground. England alone remained unaffected by its
+efforts. In the Low Countries the Reformation was finally driven from
+the Walloon Provinces, from Brabant, and from Flanders. In France Henry
+the Fourth found himself compelled to purchase Paris by a mass; and the
+conversion of the king was the beginning of a quiet breaking-up of the
+Huguenot party. Nobles and scholars alike forsook the cause of heresy,
+and though Calvinism remained dominant south of the Loire, it lost all
+hope of winning France as a whole to its side.
+
+[Sidenote: Puritan intolerance.]
+
+At Elizabeth's death therefore the temper of every earnest Protestant,
+in England as elsewhere, was that of a man who after cherishing the hope
+of a crowning victory is forced to look on at a crushing and
+irremediable defeat. The dream of a Reformation of the universal Church
+was utterly at an end. Though the fierce strife of religions seemed for
+a while to have died down, the borders of Protestantism were narrowing
+every day, nor was there a sign that the triumph of the Papacy was
+arrested. Even the older Lutheranism of Germany was threatened; and the
+minds of men were already presaging the struggle which was to end in the
+Thirty Years War. Such a struggle could be no foreign strife to the
+Puritan. The war in the Palatinate kindled a fiercer flame in the
+English Parliament than all the aggressions of the monarchy; and
+Englishmen followed the campaigns of Gustavus with even keener interest
+than the trial of Hampden. We shall see how great a part this sympathy
+with outer Protestantism played in the earlier struggle between England
+and the Stuarts: but it played as great a part in determining the
+Puritan attitude towards religion at home. As hope after hope died into
+defeat and disaster the mood of the Puritan grew sterner and more
+intolerant. The system of compromise by which the Tudors had held
+England together became more and more distasteful to him. To one who
+looked on himself as a soldier of God and as a soldier who was fighting
+a losing battle, the struggle with the Papacy was no matter for
+compromise. It was a struggle between light and darkness, between life
+and death. No innovation in faith or worship was of small account if it
+tended in the direction of Rome. The peril in fact was too great to
+admit of tolerance or moderation. At a moment when all that he hated was
+gaining ground on all that he loved, the Puritan saw the one security
+for what he held to be truth in drawing a hard-and-fast line between
+that truth and what he held to be falsehood.
+
+[Sidenote: Hooker.]
+
+This dogged concentration of thought and feeling on a single issue told
+with a fatal effect on his theology. The spirit of the Renascence had
+been driven for a while from the field of religion by the strife between
+Catholic and Protestant; and in the upgrowth of a more rigid system of
+dogma, whether on the one side or on the other, the work of More and
+Colet seemed to be undone. But no sooner had the strife lost its older
+intensity, no sooner had a new Christendom fairly emerged from the
+troubled waters, than the Renascence again made its influence felt. Its
+voice was heard above all in Richard Hooker, a clergyman who had been
+Master of the Temple, but had been driven by his distaste for the
+controversies of its pulpit from London to a Wiltshire vicarage at
+Boscombe, which he exchanged at a later time for the parsonage of
+Bishopsbourne among the quiet meadows of Kent. During the later years of
+Elizabeth he built up in these still retreats the stately fabric of his
+"Ecclesiastical Polity." The largeness of temper which marked all the
+nobler minds of his day, the philosophic breadth which is seen as
+clearly in Shakspere as in Bacon, was united in Hooker with a grandeur
+and stateliness of style which raised him to the highest rank among
+English prose-writers. Divine as he was, his spirit and method were
+philosophical rather than theological. Against the ecclesiastical
+dogmatism of Presbyterian or Catholic he set the authority of reason. He
+abandoned the narrow ground of Scriptural argument to base his
+conclusions on the general principles of moral and political science, on
+the eternal obligations of natural law. The Puritan system rested on the
+assumption that an immutable rule for human action in all matters
+relating to religion, to worship, and to the discipline and constitution
+of the Church, was laid down, and only laid down, in the words of
+Scripture. Hooker urged that a divine order exists not in written
+revelation only, but in the moral relations, the historical
+developement, and the social and political institutions of men. He
+claimed for human reason the province of determining the laws of this
+order; of distinguishing between what is changeable and unchangeable in
+them, between what is eternal and what is temporary in the Bible itself.
+It was easy for him to push on to the field of ecclesiastical
+controversy where men like Cartwright were fighting the battle of
+Presbyterianism, to show that no form of Church government had ever been
+of indispensable obligation, and that ritual observances had in all ages
+been left to the discretion of churches and determined by the
+differences of times.
+
+[Sidenote: His influence on the Church.]
+
+From the moment of its appearance the effect of the "Ecclesiastical
+Polity" was felt in the broader and more generous stamp which it
+impressed on the temper of the national Church. Hooker had in fact
+provided with a theory and placed on grounds of reason that policy of
+comprehension which had been forced on the Tudors by the need of holding
+England together, and from which the church, as it now existed, had
+sprung. But the truth on which Hooker based his argument was of far
+higher value than his argument itself. The acknowledgement of a divine
+order in human history, of a divine law in human reason, harmonized with
+the noblest instincts of the Elizabethan age. Ralegh's efforts to grasp
+as a whole the story of mankind, Bacon's effort to bring all outer
+nature to the test of human intelligence, were but the crowning
+manifestations of the two main impulses of their time, its rationalism
+and its humanity. Both found expression in the work of Hooker; and
+coloured through its results the after history of the English Church.
+The historical feeling showed itself in a longing to ally the religion
+of the present with the religion of the past, to find a unity of faith
+and practice with the Church of the Fathers, to claim part in that great
+heritage of Catholic tradition, both in faith and worship, which the
+Papacy so jealously claimed as its own. Such a longing seized as much on
+tender and poetic tempers like George Herbert's as on positive and
+prosaic tempers, such as that of Laud. The one started back from the
+bare, intense spiritualism of the Puritan to find nourishment for his
+devotion in the outer associations which the piety of ages had grouped
+around it, in holy places and holy things, in the stillness of church
+and altar, in the pathos and exultation of prayer and praise, in the
+awful mystery of sacraments. The narrow and external mood of the other,
+unable to find standing ground in the purely personal relation between
+man and God which formed the basis of Calvinism, fell back on the
+consciousness of a living Christendom, preserving through the ages a
+definite faith and worship, and which, torn and rent as it seemed, was
+soon to resume its ancient unity.
+
+[Sidenote: The Arminians.]
+
+While the historical feeling which breathes in Hooker's work took form
+in the new passion for tradition and ceremonialism, the appeal which it
+addressed to human reason produced a school of philosophical thinkers
+whose timid upgrowth was almost lost in the clash of warring creeds
+about them, but who were destined--as the latitudinarians of later
+days--to make as deep an impression as their dogmatic rivals on the
+religious thought of their countrymen. As yet however this rationalizing
+movement hovered on the borders of the system of belief which it was so
+keenly to attack; it limited itself rather to the work of moderating and
+reconciling, to recognizing with Calixtus the pettiness of the points of
+difference which parted Christendom and the greatness of its points of
+agreement, or to revolting with Arminius from the more extreme tenets of
+Calvin and Calvin's followers and pleading like him for some
+co-operation on man's part with the work of grace. As yet Arminianism
+was little more than a reaction against a system that contradicted the
+obvious facts of life, a desire to bring theology into some sort of
+harmony with human experience; but it was soon to pass by a fatal
+necessity into a wider variance, and to gather round it into one mass of
+opposition every tendency of revolt which time was disclosing against
+the Calvinism which now reigned triumphant in Protestant theology.
+
+[Sidenote: The doctrinal bigotry of Puritanism.]
+
+From the belief in humanity or in reason which gave strength to such a
+revolt the Puritan turned doggedly away. In the fierce white light of
+his idealism human effort seemed weakness, human virtue but sin, human
+reason but folly. Absorbed as he was in the thought of God, craving for
+nothing less than a divine righteousness, a divine wisdom, a divine
+strength, he grasped the written Bible as the law of God and
+concentrated every energy in the effort to obey it. The dogma of
+justification, the faith that without merit or act of man God would save
+and call to holiness His own elect, was the centre of his creed. And
+with such a creed he felt that the humanity of the Renascence, the
+philosophy of the thinker, the comprehension of the statesman, were
+alike at war. A policy of comprehension seemed to him simply a policy of
+faithlessness to God. Ceremonies which in an hour of triumph he might
+have regarded as solaces to weak brethren, he looked on as acts of
+treason in this hour of defeat. Above all he would listen to no words of
+reconciliation with a religious system in which he saw nothing but a
+lie, nor to any pleas for concession in what he held to be truth. The
+craving of the Arminian for a more rational theology he met by a fiercer
+loyalty to the narrowest dogma. Archbishop Whitgift had striven to force
+on the Church of England a set of articles which embodied the tenets of
+an extreme Calvinism; and one of the wisest acts of Elizabeth had been
+to disallow them. But hateful as Whitgift on every other ground was to
+the Puritans, they never ceased to demand the adoption of his Lambeth
+Articles.
+
+[Sidenote: Its hatred of sectaries.]
+
+And as he would admit no toleration within the sphere of doctrine, so
+would the Puritan admit no toleration within the sphere of
+ecclesiastical order. That the Church of England should both in
+ceremonies and in teaching take a far more distinctively Protestant
+attitude than it had hitherto done, every Puritan was resolved. But
+there was as yet no general demand for any change in the form of its
+government, or of its relation to the State. Though the wish to draw
+nearer to the mass of the Reformed Churches won a certain amount of
+favour for the Presbyterian form of organization which they had adopted,
+as an obligatory system of Church discipline Presbyterianism had been
+embraced by but a few of the English clergy, and by hardly any of the
+English laity. Nor was there any tendency in the mass of the Puritans
+towards a breach in the system of religious conformity which Elizabeth
+had constructed. On the contrary, what they asked was for its more
+rigorous enforcement. That Catholics should be suffered under whatever
+pains and penalties to preserve their faith and worship in a Protestant
+Commonwealth was abhorrent to them. Nor was Puritan opinion more
+tolerant to the Protestant sectaries who were beginning to find the
+State Church too narrow for their enthusiasm. Elizabeth herself could
+not feel a bitterer abhorrence of the "Brownists" (as they were called
+from the name of their founder Robert Brown) who rejected the very
+notion of a national Church, and asserted the right of each congregation
+to perfect independence of faith and worship. To the zealot whose whole
+thought was of the fight with Rome, such an assertion seemed the claim
+of a right to mutiny in the camp, a right of breaking up Protestant
+England into a host of sects too feeble to hold Rome at bay. Cartwright
+himself denounced the wickedness of the Brownists; Parliament, Puritan
+as it was, passed in 1593 a statute against them; and there was a
+general assent to the stern measures of repression by which Brown
+himself was forced to fly to the Netherlands. Two of his
+fellow-congregationalists were seized and put to death on charges of
+sedition and heresy. Of their followers many, as we learn from a
+petition in 1592, were driven into exile, "and the rest which remain in
+her Grace's land greatly distressed through imprisonment and other great
+troubles." The persecution in fact did its work. "As for those which we
+call Brownists," wrote Bacon, "being when they were at the most a very
+small number of very silly and base people, here and there in corners
+dispersed, they are now, thanks to God, by the good remedies that have
+been used, suppressed and worn out; so that there is scarce any news of
+them." The execution of three Nonconformists in the following year was
+in fact followed by the almost utter extermination of their body. But
+against this persecution no Puritan voice was raised.
+
+[Sidenote: Its wish for reforms.]
+
+All in fact that the bulk of the Puritans asked was a change in the
+outer ritual of worship which should correspond to the advance towards a
+more pronounced Protestantism that had been made by the nation at large
+during the years of Elizabeth's reign. Their demands were as of old for
+the disuse of "superstitious ceremonies." To modern eyes the points
+which they selected for change seem trivial enough. But they were in
+fact of large significance. To reject the sign of the Cross in baptism
+was to repudiate the whole world of ceremonies of which it was a
+survivor. The disuse of the surplice would have broken down the last
+outer difference which parted the minister from the congregation, and
+manifested to every eye the spiritual equality of layman and priest.
+Kneeling at the Communion might be a mere act of reverence, but formally
+to discontinue such an act was emphatically to assert a disbelief in the
+sacramental theories of Catholicism. During the later years of Elizabeth
+reverence for the Queen had hindered any serious pressure for changes to
+which she would never assent; but a general expectation prevailed that
+at her death some change would be made. Even among men of secular stamp
+there was a general conviction of the need of some concession to the
+religious sentiment of the nation. They had clung to the usages which
+the Puritans denounced so long as they were aids in hindering a
+religious severance throughout the land. But whatever value the
+retention of such ceremonies might have had in facilitating the quiet
+passage of the bulk of Englishmen from the old worship to the new had
+long since passed away. England as a whole was Protestant; and the
+Catholics who remained were not likely to be drawn to the national
+Church by trifles such as these. Instead of being the means of hindering
+religious division, the usages had now become means of creating it. It
+was on this ground that statesmen who had little sympathy with the
+religious spirit about them pleaded for the purchase of religious and
+national union by ecclesiastical reforms. "Why," asked Bacon, "should
+the civil state be purged and restored by good and wholesome laws made
+every three years in Parliament assembled, devising remedies as fast as
+time breedeth mischief, and contrariwise the ecclesiastical state still
+continue upon the dregs of time, and receive no alteration these
+forty-five years or more?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE KING OF SCOTS
+
+
+Such was the temper of England at the death of Elizabeth; and never had
+greater issues hung on the character of a ruler than hung on the
+character of her successor. Had he shared the sympathy with popular
+feeling which formed the strength of the Tudors, time might have brought
+peaceably about that readjustment of political forces which the growth
+of English energies had made a necessity. Had he possessed the genius of
+a great statesman, he might have distinguished in the mingled mass of
+impulses about him between the national and the sectarian, and have
+given scope to the nobleness of Puritanism while resolutely checking its
+bigotry. It was no common ill-fortune that set at such a crisis on the
+throne a ruler without genius as without sympathy, and that broke the
+natural progress of the people by a conflict between England and its
+kings.
+
+[Sidenote: James Stuart.]
+
+Throughout the last days of Elizabeth most men had looked forward to a
+violent struggle for the Crown. The more bigoted Catholics supported the
+pretensions of Isabella, the eldest daughter of Philip the Second of
+Spain. The house of Suffolk, which through the marriage of Lady
+Catharine Grey with Lord Hertford was now represented by their son, Lord
+Beauchamp, still clung to its parliamentary title under the will of
+Henry the Eighth. Even if the claim of the house of Stuart was admitted,
+there were some who held that the Scottish king, as an alien by birth,
+had no right of inheritance, and that the succession to the crown lay in
+the next Stuart heiress, Arabella Stuart, a granddaughter of Lady Lennox
+by her younger son, Darnley's brother. But claims such as these found no
+general support. By a strange good fortune every great party in the
+realm saw its hopes realized in King James. The mass of the Catholics,
+who had always been favourable to a Scottish succession, were persuaded
+that the son of Mary Stuart would at least find toleration for his
+mother's co-religionists; and as they watched the distaste for
+Presbyterian rule and the tendency to comprehension which James had
+already manifested, they listened credulously to his emissaries. On the
+other hand the Puritans saw in him the king of a Calvinistic people,
+bred in a Church which rejected the ceremonies that they detested and
+upheld the doctrines which they longed to render supreme, and who had
+till now, whatever his strife might have been with the claims of its
+ministers, shown no dissent from its creed or from the rites of its
+worship. Nor was he less acceptable to the more secular tempers who
+guided Elizabeth's counsels. The bulk of English statesmen saw too
+clearly the advantages of a union of the two kingdoms under a single
+head to doubt for a moment as to the succession of James. If Elizabeth
+had refused to allow his claim to be formally recognized by Parliament
+she had pledged herself to suffer no detriment to be done to it there;
+and in her later days Cecil had come forward to rescue the young king
+from his foolish intrigues with English parties and Catholic powers, and
+to assure him of support. No sooner in fact was the Queen dead than
+James Stuart was owned as king by the Council without a dissentient
+voice.
+
+[Sidenote: His youth.]
+
+To James himself the change was a startling one. He had been a king
+indeed from his cradle. But his kingdom was the smallest and meanest of
+European realms, and his actual power had been less than that of many an
+English peer. For years he had been the mere sport of warring nobles who
+governed in his name. Their rule was a sheer anarchy. For a short while
+after Mary's flight Murray showed the genius of a born master of men;
+but at the opening of 1570 his work was ended by the shot of a Hamilton.
+"What Bothwellhaugh has done," Mary wrote joyously from her English
+prison at the news, "has been done without order of mine: but I thank
+him all the more for it." The murder in fact plunged Scotland again into
+a chaos of civil war which, as the Queen shrewdly foresaw, could only
+tend to the after-profit of the Crown. A year later the next regent, the
+child-king's grandfather, Lord Lennox, was slain in a fray at Stirling;
+and it was only when the regency passed into the strong hand of Morton
+at the close of 1572, and when England intervened in the cause of order,
+that the land won a short breathing-space. Edinburgh, the last fortress
+held in Mary's name, surrendered to a force sent by Elizabeth; its
+captain, Kirkaldy of Grange, was hanged for treason in the market-place;
+and the stern justice of Morton forced peace upon the warring lords. But
+hardly five years had passed when a union of his rivals and their adroit
+proclamation of the boy-king put an end to Morton's regency and gave a
+fresh aim to the factions who were tearing Scotland to pieces. To get
+hold of the king's person, to wield in his name the royal power, became
+the end of their efforts. The boy was safe only at Stirling; and even at
+Stirling a fray at the gate all but transferred him from the Erskines to
+fresh hands. It was in vain that James sought security in a bodyguard;
+or strove to baffle the nobles by recalling a cousin, Esme Stuart, from
+France, and giving him the control of affairs. A sudden flight back to
+Stirling only saved him from seizure at Doune; and a few months later,
+as James hunted at Ruthven, he found the hand of the Master of Glamis on
+his bridle-rein. "Better bairns greet than bearded men," was the gruff
+answer to his tears, as his favourite fled into exile and the boy-king
+saw himself again a tool in the hands of the lords.
+
+[Sidenote: His purpose.]
+
+Such was the world in which James had grown to manhood; a world of
+brutal swordsmen, in whose hands the boy who shrank from the very sight
+of a sword seemed helpless. But if the young king had little physical
+courage, morally he proved fearless enough. He drew confidence in
+himself from a sense of his intellectual superiority to the men about
+him. From his earliest years indeed James showed a precocious
+cleverness; and as a child he startled grave councillors by his
+"discourse, walking up and down in the Lady Mar's hand, of knowledge and
+ignorance." It was his amazing self-reliance which enabled him to bear
+the strange loneliness of his life. He had nothing in common with the
+turbulent nobles whose wild cries he had heard from the walls of
+Stirling Castle, as they slew his grandfather in the streets of the town
+below. But he had just as little sympathy with the spiritual or
+political world which was springing into life around his cradle. The
+republican Buchanan was his tutor, and he was bred in the religious
+school of Knox; but he shrank instinctively from Calvinism with its
+consecration of rebellion, its assertion of human equality, its
+declaration of the responsibility of kings, while he detected and hated
+the republican drift of the thinkers of the Renascence. In later years
+James denounced the chronicles of both Buchanan and Knox as "infamous
+invectives," and would have had their readers punished "even as it were
+their authors risen again." His temper and purpose were in fact simply
+those of the kings who had gone before him. He was a Stuart to the core;
+and from his very boyhood he set himself to do over again the work which
+the Stuarts had done.
+
+[Sidenote: The work of the Stuarts.]
+
+Their work had been the building up of the Scottish realm, its change
+from a medley of warring nobles into an ordered kingdom. Never had
+freedom been bought at a dearer price than it was bought by Scotland in
+its long War of Independence. Wealth and public order alike disappeared.
+The material prosperity of the country was brought to a standstill. The
+work of civilization was violently interrupted. The work of national
+unity was all but undone. The Highlanders were parted by a sharp line of
+division from the Lowlanders, while within the Lowlands themselves
+feudalism overmastered the Crown. The nobles became almost wholly
+independent. The royal power, under the immediate successors of Bruce,
+sank into insignificance. From the walls of Stirling the Scotch kings of
+that earlier time looked out on a realm where they could not ride
+thirty miles to north or to south save at the head of a host of armed
+men. With James the First began the work of building the monarchy up
+again from this utter ruin; but the wresting of Scotland from the grasp
+of its nobles was only wrought out in a struggle of life and death. Few
+figures are more picturesque than the figures of the young Scotch kings
+as they dash themselves against the iron circle which girds them round
+in their desperate efforts to rescue the Crown from serfdom. They carry
+their life in their hands; a doom is on them; they die young and by
+violent deaths. One was stabbed by plotters in his bedchamber. Another
+was stabbed in a peasant's hut where he had crawled for refuge after
+defeat. Another was slain by the bursting of a cannon. The fourth James
+fell more nobly at Flodden. The fifth died of a broken heart on the news
+of Solway Moss. But hunted and slain as they were, the kings clung
+stubbornly to the task they had set themselves.
+
+[Sidenote: The Stuarts and the Reformation.]
+
+They stood almost alone. The Scottish people was too weak as yet to form
+a check on the baronage; and the one force on which the Crown could
+reckon was the force of the Church. To enrich the Church, to bind its
+prelates closely to the monarchy by the gift of social and political
+power, was the policy of every Stuart. A greater force than that of the
+Church lay in the dogged perseverance of the kings themselves. Little by
+little their work was done. The great house of Douglas was broken at
+last. The ruin of lesser houses followed in its train, and under the
+fifth of the Jameses Scotland saw itself held firmly in the royal grasp.
+But the work of the Stuarts was hardly done when it seemed to be undone
+again by the Reformation. The prelates were struck down. The nobles were
+enormously enriched. The sovereign again stood alone in the face of the
+baronage. It was only by playing on their jealousies and divisions that
+Mary Stuart could withstand the nobles who banded themselves together to
+overawe the Crown. Once she broke their ranks by her marriage with
+Darnley; and after the ill-fated close of this effort she strove again
+to break their ranks by her marriage with Bothwell. Again the attempt
+failed; and Mary fled into lifelong exile, while the nobles, triumphant
+at last in the strife with the Crown, governed Scotland in the name of
+her child.
+
+[Sidenote: James and the nobles.]
+
+It was thus that in his boyhood James looked on the ruin of all that his
+fathers had wrought. But the wreck was not as utter as it seemed. Even
+in the storm of the Reformation the sense of royal authority had not
+wholly been lost; the craving for public order, and the conviction that
+order could only be found in obedience to the sovereign, had in fact
+been quickened by the outbreak of faction; and the rule of Murray and
+Morton had shown how easily the turbulent nobles could be bent by an
+energetic use of the royal power. Lonely and helpless as he seemed,
+James was still king, and he was a king who believed in his kingship.
+The implicit faith in his own divine right to rule the greatest in the
+land gave him a strength as great as that of the regents. At seventeen
+he was strong enough to break the yoke of the Douglases and to drive
+them over the English border. At eighteen he could bring the most
+powerful of the Protestant nobles, the Earl of Gowrie, to the block. A
+year later indeed the lords were back again; for the Armada was at hand,
+and Elizabeth distrusted the young king, who was intriguing at Paris and
+Madrid. English help brought back the exiles; "there was no need of
+words," James said bitterly to the lords as they knelt before him with
+protestations of loyalty; "weapons had spoken loud enough." But their
+return was far from undoing his work. Elizabeth's pledges as to the
+succession, James's alliance with her against the Armada, restored the
+friendship of England; and once secure against English intervention the
+king had little difficulty in resuming his mastery at home. A
+significant ceremony showed that the strife with the nobles was at an
+end. James summoned them to Edinburgh, and called on them to lay aside
+their feuds with one another. The pledge was solemnly given, and each
+noble, "holding his chief enemy by the hand," walked in his doublet to
+the market-cross of the city, while the people sang aloud for joy.
+
+[Sidenote: The Scotch people.]
+
+The policy of the Stuarts had at last reached its end, and James was
+master of the great houses that had so long overawed the Crown. But he
+was farther than ever from being absolute master of his realm. Amidst
+the turmoil of the Reformation a new force had come to the front. This
+was the Scottish people itself. Till now peasant and burgher had been of
+small account in the land. The towns were little more than villages. The
+peasants, scattered thinly over valley and hillside and winning a scant
+subsistence from a thankless soil, were too few and too poor to be a
+political force. They were of necessity dependent on their lords; and in
+the centuries of feudal anarchy which followed the War of Independence
+the strife of lord against lord made their life a mere struggle for
+existence. To know neither rest nor safety, to face danger every hour,
+to plough the field with arms piled carefully beside the furrow, to
+watch every figure that crossed the hillside in doubt whether it were
+foe or friend, to be roused from sleep by the slogan of the Highlander
+or the cry of the borderer as they swept sheep and kye from every
+homestead in the valley, to bear hunger and thirst and cold and
+nakedness, to cower within the peel-tower or lurk in the moorland while
+barn and byre went up in pitiless flame, to mount and ride at a lord's
+call on forays as pitiless, this was the rough school in which the
+Scotch peasant was trained through two hundred years. But it was a
+school in which he learned much. Suffering that would have degraded a
+meaner race into slaves only hardened and ennobled the temper of the
+Scotchman. It was from these ages of oppression and lawlessness that he
+drew the rugged fidelity, the dogged endurance, the shrewdness, the
+caution, the wariness, the rigid thrift, the noble self dependence, the
+patience, the daring, which have distinguished him ever since. Nowhere
+did the Reformation do a grander work than in Scotland, but it was
+because nowhere were the minds of men so prepared for its work. The soil
+was ready for the seed. The developement of a noble manhood brought with
+it the craving for a spiritual and a national existence, and at the call
+of the Reformation the Scotch people rose suddenly into a nation and a
+Church.
+
+[Sidenote: Knox.]
+
+One well-known figure embodied the moral strength of the new movement.
+In the king's boyhood, amidst the wild turmoil which followed on
+Murray's fall, an old man bent with years and toil might have been seen
+creeping with a secretary's aid to the pulpit of St. Giles. But age and
+toil were powerless over the spirit of John Knox. In the pulpit "he
+behoved to lean at his first entry: but ere he had done with his sermon
+he was so active and vigorous that he was like to ding the pulpit into
+blads and fly out of it." It was in vain that men strove to pen the
+fiery words of the great preacher. "In the opening up of his text," says
+a devout listener, "he was moderate; but when he entered into
+application he made me so grue and tremble that I could not hold a pen
+to write." What gave its grandeur to the doctrine of Knox was his
+resolute assertion of a Christian order before which the social and
+political forces of the world about him shrank into insignificance. The
+meanest peasant, once called of God, felt within him a strength that was
+stronger than the might of nobles, and a wisdom that was wiser than the
+statecraft of kings. In that mighty elevation of the masses which was
+embodied in the Calvinist doctrines of election and grace lay the germs
+of the modern principles of human equality. The fruits of such a
+teaching soon showed themselves in a new attitude of the people. "Here,"
+said Morton, over the grave of John Knox, "here lies one who never
+feared nor flattered any flesh"; and if Scotland still reverences the
+memory of the reformer it is because at that grave her peasant and her
+trader learned to look in the face of nobles and kings and "not be
+ashamed."
+
+[Sidenote: The Kirk and the people.]
+
+The moral power which Knox created was to express itself through the
+ecclesiastical forms which had been devised by the genius of Calvin. The
+new force of popular opinion was concentrated and formulated in an
+ordered system of kirk-sessions and presbyteries and provincial synods,
+while chosen delegates formed the General Assembly of the Kirk. In this
+organization of her churches, Scotland saw herself for the first time
+the possessor of a really representative system, of a popular
+government. In her Parliaments the peasant had no voice, the burgher a
+feeble and unimportant one. They were in fact but feudal gatherings of
+prelates and nobles, whose action was fettered by the precautions of the
+Crown. Of real parliamentary life, such as was seen across the border,
+not a trace could be found in the assemblies which gathered round the
+Scottish kings; but a parliamentary life of the keenest and intensest
+order at once appeared among the lay and spiritual delegates who
+gathered to the General Assembly of the Kirk. Not only did
+Presbyterianism bind Scotland together as it had never been bound before
+by its administrative organization, but by the power it gave the lay
+elders in each congregation, and by the summons of laymen in an
+overpowering majority to the earlier Assemblies, it called the people at
+large to a voice, and as it turned out a decisive voice, in the
+administration of affairs. If its government by ministers gave it the
+outer look of an ecclesiastical despotism, no Church constitution has
+proved in practice so democratic as that of Scotland. Its influence in
+raising the nation at large to a consciousness of its power was shown by
+the change which passed from the moment of its establishment over the
+face of Scottish history.
+
+[Sidenote: The Kirk and the king.]
+
+The sphere of action to which it called the people was in fact not a
+mere ecclesiastical but a national sphere. Formally the Assembly meddled
+only with matters of religion; but in the creed of the Calvinist, as in
+the creed of the Catholic, the secular and the religious world were one.
+It was the office of the Church to enforce good and to rebuke evil; and
+social and political life fell alike within her "discipline." Feudalism
+received its death-blow when the noble who had wronged his wife or
+murdered his tenant sate humbled before the peasant elders on the stool
+of repentance. The new despotism which was growing up under the form of
+the monarchy found a sudden arrest in the challenge of the Kirk. When
+James summoned the preachers before his Council and arraigned their
+meetings as without warrant and seditious, "Mr. Andrew Melville could
+not abide it, but broke off upon the king in so zealous, powerful, and
+unresistible a manner that howbeit the king used his authority in most
+crabbed and choleric manner, yet Mr. Andrew bore him down, and uttered
+the commission as from the mighty God, calling the king but 'God's silly
+vassal'; and taking him by the sleeve, says this in effect, though with
+much hot reasoning and many interruptions: 'Sir, we will humbly
+reverence your Majesty always--namely, in public. But since we have
+this occasion to be with your Majesty in private, and the truth is that
+you are brought in extreme danger both of your life and crown, and with
+you the country and kirk of Christ is like to wreck, for not telling you
+the truth and giving of you a faithful counsel, we must discharge our
+duty therein or else be traitors both to Christ and you! And therefore,
+sir, as divers times before, so now again I must tell you, there are two
+kings and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is Christ Jesus the King, and
+his kingdom the Kirk, whose subject James the Sixth is, and of whose
+kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member. And they whom
+Christ hath called to watch over his kirk and govern his spiritual
+kingdom have sufficient power and authority so to do both together and
+severally; the which no Christian king nor prince should control and
+discharge, but fortify and assist, otherwise not faithful servants nor
+members of Christ!'"
+
+[Sidenote: The ministers and the people.]
+
+It is idle to set aside words like these as the mere utterances of
+fanaticism or of priestly arrogance. James and his Council would have
+made swift work of mere fanatics or of arrogant priests. Why Melville
+could withdraw unharmed was because a people stood behind him, a people
+suddenly wakened to a consciousness of its will, and stern in the belief
+that a divine duty lay on it to press that will on its king. Through all
+the theocratic talk of the Calvinist ministers we see a popular power
+that fronts the Crown. It is the Scotch people that rises into being
+under the guise of the Scotch Kirk. The men who led it were men with no
+official position or material power, for the nobles had stripped the
+Church of the vast endowments which had lured their sons and the royal
+bastards within the pale of its ministry. The ministers of the new
+communion were drawn from the burghers and peasantry or at best from the
+smaller gentry; and nothing in their social position aided them in
+withstanding the nobles or the Crown. Their strength lay simply in the
+popular sympathy behind them, in their capacity of rousing national
+opinion through the pulpit, of expressing it through the Assembly. The
+claims which such men advanced, ecclesiastical as their garb might be,
+could not fail to be national in their issues. In struggling against
+episcopacy they were in fact struggling against any breaking-up or
+impeding of that religious organization which alone enabled Scotland to
+withstand the claims of the Crown. In jealously asserting the right of
+the General Assembly to meet every year and to discuss every question
+that met it, they were vindicating in the only possible fashion the
+right of the nation to rule itself in a parliamentary way. In asserting
+the liberty of the pulpit they were for the first time in the history of
+Europe recognizing the power of public opinion and fighting for freedom
+whether of thought or of speech. Strange to modern ears as their
+language may be, bigoted and narrow as their temper must often seem, it
+is well to remember the greatness of the debt we owe them. It was their
+stern resolve, their energy, their endurance that saved Scotland from a
+civil and religious despotism, and that in saving the liberty of
+Scotland saved English liberty as well.
+
+[Sidenote: Andrew Melville.]
+
+The greatest of the successors of Knox was Andrew Melville. Two years
+after Knox's death Melville came fresh from a training among the French
+Huguenots to take up and carry forward his work. With less prophetic
+fire than his master he possessed as fierce a boldness, a greater
+disdain of secular compromises, a lofty pride in his calling, a bigoted
+faith in Calvinism that knew neither rest nor delay in its full
+establishment throughout the land. As yet the system of Presbyterian
+faith and discipline, with the synods and assemblies in which it was
+embodied, though it had practically won its hold over southern Scotland,
+was without legal sanction. The demand of the ministers for a
+restitution of the Church lands and the resolve of the nobles not to
+part with their spoil had caused the rejection of the Book of Discipline
+by the Estates. The same spirit of greed secured the retention of a
+nominal episcopacy. Though the name of bishops and archbishops appeared
+"to many to savour of Papistry," bishops and archbishops were still
+named to vacant dioceses as milch-cows, through whom the revenues of
+the sees might be drained by the great nobles. Against such
+"Tulchan-bishops," as they were nicknamed by the people's scorn, a
+"Tulchan" being a mere calf-skin stuffed with hay by which a cow was
+persuaded to give her milk after her calf was taken from her, Knox had
+not cared to protest; he had only taken care that they should be subject
+to the General Assembly, and deprived of all jurisdiction or authority
+beyond that of a Presbyterian "Superintendent." His strong political
+sense hindered a conflict on such a ground with the civil power, and
+without a conflict it was plain that no change could come. The Regent
+Morton, Calvinist as he was, supported the cause of Episcopacy, and the
+fact that bishops formed an integral part of the estates of the realm
+made any demand for their abolition distasteful to the large mass of men
+who always shrink from any constitutional revolution.
+
+[Sidenote: Presbyterianism established.]
+
+But Melville threw aside all compromise. In 1580 the General Assembly
+declared the office of bishop abolished, as having "no sure warrant,
+authority, or good ground out of the Word of God." In 1581 it adopted a
+second Book of Discipline which organized the Church on the pure
+Calvinistic model and advanced the full Calvinistic claim to its
+spiritual independence and supremacy within the realm. When the Estates
+refused to sanction this book the Assembly sent it to every presbytery,
+and its gradual acceptance secured the organization of the Church. It
+was at this crisis that the appearance of Esme Stuart brought about the
+first reaction towards a revival of the royal power; and the Council
+under the guidance of the favourite struck at once at the preachers who
+denounced it. But their efforts to "tune the pulpits" were met by a bold
+defiance. "Though all the kings of the earth should call my words
+treason," replied one minister who was summoned to the Council-board, "I
+am ready by good reason to prove them to be the very truth of God, and
+if need require to seal them with my blood." Andrew Melville, when
+summoned on the same charge of seditious preaching, laid a Hebrew Bible
+on the Council-table and "resolved to try conclusions on that only."
+What the Council shrank from "trying conclusions" with was the popular
+enthusiasm which backed these protests. When John Durie was exiled for
+words uttered in the pulpit, the whole town of Edinburgh met him on his
+return, "and going up the street with bare heads and loud voices sang to
+the praise of God till heaven and earth resounded."
+
+[Sidenote: James and the Kirk.]
+
+But it was this very popularity which roused the young king to action.
+Boy of eighteen as he was, no sooner had the overthrow of the Douglases
+and the judicial murder of Lord Gowrie freed James from the power of the
+nobles than he faced this new foe. Theologically his opinions were as
+Calvinistic as those of Melville himself, but in the ecclesiastical
+fabric of Calvinism, in its organization of the Church, in its annual
+assemblies, in its public discussion and criticism of acts of government
+through the pulpit, he saw an organized democracy which threatened his
+crown. And at this he struck as boldly as his forefathers had struck at
+the power of feudalism. The nobles, dreading the resumption of church
+lands, were with the king; and in 1584 an Act of the Estates denounced
+the judicial and legislative authority assumed by the General Assembly,
+provided that no subjects, temporal or spiritual, "take upon them to
+convocate or assemble themselves together for holding of councils,
+conventions, or assemblies," and demanded a pledge of obedience from
+every minister. For the moment the ministers submitted; and James
+prepared to carry out his victory by a policy of religious balance. The
+Catholic lords were still strong in northern and western Scotland; and
+firmly as the King was opposed to the dogmas of Catholicism he saw the
+use he might make of the Catholics as a check on the power of the
+Congregation. It was with this view that he shielded Lord Huntly and the
+Catholic nobles while he intrigued with the Guises abroad. But such a
+policy at such a juncture forced England to intervene. At a moment when
+the Armada was gathering in the Tagus, Elizabeth felt the need of
+securing Scotland against any revival of Catholicism; and her aid
+enabled the exiled lords to return in triumph in 1585. For the next ten
+years James was helpless in their hands. He was forced to ally himself
+with Elizabeth, to offer aid against the Armada, to make a Protestant
+marriage, to threaten action against Philip, to attack Huntly and the
+Catholic lords of the north on a charge of correspondence with Spain and
+to drive them from the realm. The triumph of the Protestant lords was a
+triumph of the Kirk. In 1592 the Acts of 1584 were repealed; Episcopacy
+was formally abolished; and the Calvinistic organization of the Church
+at last received legal sanction. All that James could save was the right
+of being present at the General Assembly, and of fixing a time and place
+for its annual meeting. It was in vain that the young king struggled and
+argued; in vain that he resolutely asserted himself to be supreme in
+spiritual as in civil matters; in vain that he showed himself a better
+scholar and a more learned theologian than the men who held him down.
+The preachers scolded him from the pulpit and bade him "to his knees" to
+seek pardon for his vanity; while the Assembly chided him for his
+"banning and swearing" and sent a deputation to confer with his Queen
+touching the "want of godly exercise among her maids."
+
+[Sidenote: James and Presbyterianism.]
+
+The bitter memory of these years of humiliation dwelt with James to the
+last. They were fiercely recalled, when he mounted the English throne.
+"A Scottish Presbytery," he exclaimed at the Hampton Court Conference,
+"as well fitteth with monarchy as God and the Devil." Year after year he
+watched for the hour of deliverance, and every year brought it nearer.
+His mother's death gave fresh strength to his throne. The alliance with
+England, Elizabeth's pledge not to oppose his succession, left him
+practically heir of the English Crown. Freed from the dread of a
+Catholic reaction, the Queen was at liberty to indulge in her dread of
+Calvinism, and to sympathize with the fresh struggle which James was
+preparing to make against it. Her attitude, as well as the growing
+certainty of his coming greatness as sovereign of both realms, had no
+doubt their influence in again strengthening the king's position; and
+his new power was seen in his renewed mastery over the Scottish lords.
+But this triumph over feudalism was only the opening of a decisive
+struggle with Calvinism. If he had defeated Huntly and his
+fellow-plotters, he refused to keep them in exile or to comply with the
+demand of the Church that he should refuse their services on the ground
+of religion. He would be king of a nation, he contended, and not of a
+part of it. The protest was a fair one; but the real secret of the
+king's policy towards the Catholics, as of his son's after him, was a
+"king-craft" which aimed at playing off one part of the nation against
+another to the profit of the Crown. "The wisdom of the Council," said a
+defiant preacher, "is this, that ye must be served with all sorts of men
+to serve your purpose and grandeur, Jew and Gentile, Papist and
+Protestant. And because the ministers and Protestants in Scotland are
+over strong and control the King, they must be weakened and brought
+low."
+
+[Sidenote: The struggle with the Church.]
+
+It was with this end before him that James set finally to work in 1597.
+Cool, adroit, firm in his purpose, the young king seized on some wild
+outbreaks of the pulpit to assert a control over its utterances; a riot
+in Edinburgh in defence of the ministers enabled him to bring the town
+to submission by flooding its streets with Highlanders and Borderers;
+the General Assembly itself was made amenable to royal influence by its
+summons to Perth, where the cooler temper of the northern ministers
+could be played off against the hot Presbyterianism of the ministers of
+the Lothians. It was the Assembly itself which consented to curtail the
+liberty of preaching and the liberty of assembling in presbytery and
+synod, as well as to make the king's consent needful for the appointment
+of every minister. What James was as stubbornly resolved on was the
+restoration of Episcopacy. He wished not only to bridle but to rule the
+Church; and it was only through bishops that he could effectively rule
+it. The old tradition of the Stuarts had looked to the prelates for the
+support of the Crown, and James saw keenly that the new force which had
+overthrown them was a force which threatened to overthrow the monarchy
+itself. It was the people which in its religious or its political guise
+was the assailant of both. And as their foe was the same, so James
+argued with the shrewd short-sightedness of his race, their cause was
+the same. "No bishop," ran his famous adage, "no king!" To restore the
+episcopate was from this moment his steady policy. But its actual
+restoration only followed on the failure of a long attempt to bring the
+Assembly round to a project of nominating representatives of itself in
+the Estates. The presence of such representatives would have
+strengthened the moral weight of the Parliament, while it diminished
+that of the Assembly, and in both ways would have tended to the
+advantage of the Crown. But, cowed as the ministers now were, no
+pressure could bring them to do more than name delegates to vote
+according to their will in the Estates; and as such a plan foiled the
+king's scheme James was at last driven to use a statute which empowered
+him to name bishops as prelates with a seat in the Estates, though they
+possessed no spiritual status or jurisdiction. In 1600 two such prelates
+appeared in Parliament; and James followed up his triumph by the
+publication of his "Basilicon Dôron," an assertion of the divine right
+and absolute authority of kings over all orders of men within their
+realms.
+
+It is only by recalling the early history of James Stuart that we can
+realize the attitude and temper of the Scottish Sovereign at the moment
+when the death of Elizabeth called him to the English throne. He came
+flushed with a triumph over Calvinism and democracy, but embittered by
+the humiliations he had endured from them, and dreading them as the
+deadly enemies of his crown. Raised at last to a greatness of which he
+had hardly dreamed, he was little likely to yield to a pressure, whether
+religious or political, against which in his hour of weakness he had
+fought so hard. Hopes of ecclesiastical change found no echo in a king
+whose ears were still thrilling with the defiance of Melville and his
+fellow ministers, and who among all the charms that England presented to
+him saw none so attractive as its ordered and obedient Church, its
+synods that met but at the royal will, its courts that carried out the
+royal ordinances, its bishops that held themselves to be royal officers.
+Nor were the hopes of political progress likely to meet with a warmer
+welcome. Politics with a Stuart meant simply a long struggle for the
+exaltation of the Crown. It was a struggle where success had been won
+not by a reverence for law or a people's support, but by sheer personal
+energy, by a blind faith in monarchy and the rights of monarchy, by an
+unscrupulous use of every weapon which a king possessed. Craft had been
+met by craft, violence by violence. Justice had been degraded into a
+weapon in the royal hand. The sacredness of law had disappeared in a
+strife where all seemed lawful for the preservation of the Crown. By
+means such as these feudalism had been humbled and the long strife with
+the baronage brought at last to a close. Strife with the people had yet
+to be waged. But in whatever forms it might present itself, whether in
+his new land or his old, it would be waged by James as by his successors
+in the same temper and with the same belief, a belief that the welfare
+of the nation lay in the unchecked supremacy of the Crown, and a temper
+that held all means lawful for the establishment of such a supremacy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE BREAK WITH THE PARLIAMENT
+
+1603-1611
+
+
+[Sidenote: James the First.]
+
+On the sixth of May 1603, after a stately progress through his new
+dominions, King James entered London. In outer appearance no sovereign
+could have jarred more utterly against the conception of an English
+ruler which had grown up under Plantagenet or Tudor. His big head, his
+slobbering tongue, his quilted clothes, his rickety legs stood out in as
+grotesque a contrast with all that men recalled of Henry or Elizabeth as
+his gabble and rhodomontade, his want of personal dignity, his
+buffoonery, his coarseness of speech, his pedantry, his personal
+cowardice. Under this ridiculous exterior indeed lay no small amount of
+moral courage and of intellectual ability. James was a ripe scholar,
+with a considerable fund of shrewdness, of mother-wit, and ready
+repartee. His canny humour lights up the political and theological
+controversies of the time with quaint incisive phrases, with puns and
+epigrams and touches of irony which still retain their savour. His
+reading, especially in theological matters, was extensive; and he was
+already a voluminous author on subjects which ranged from predestination
+to tobacco. But his shrewdness and learning only left him, in the phrase
+of Henry the Fourth of France, "the wisest fool in Christendom." He had
+in fact the temper of a pedant, a pedant's conceit, a pedant's love of
+theories, and a pedant's inability to bring his theories into any
+relation with actual facts. It was this fatal defect that marred his
+political abilities. As a statesman he had shown no little capacity in
+his smaller realm; his cool humour and good temper had held even
+Melville at bay; he had known how to wait and how to strike; and his
+patience and boldness had been rewarded with a fair success. He had
+studied foreign affairs as busily as he had studied Scotch affairs; and
+of the temper and plans of foreign courts he probably possessed a
+greater knowledge than any Englishman save Robert Cecil. But what he
+never possessed, and what he never could gain, was any sort of knowledge
+of England or Englishmen. He came to his new home a Scotchman, a
+foreigner, strange to the life, the thoughts, the traditions of the
+English people. And he remained strange to them to the last. A younger
+man might have insensibly imbibed the temper of the men about him. A man
+of genius would have flung himself into the new world of thought and
+feeling and made it his own. But James was neither young nor a man of
+genius. He was already in middle age when he crossed the Border; and his
+cleverness and his conceit alike blinded him to the need of any
+adjustment of his conclusions or his prejudices to the facts which
+fronted him.
+
+[Sidenote: The foreign rule.]
+
+It was this estrangement from the world of thought and feeling about
+them which gave its peculiar colour to the rule of the Stuarts. It was
+not the first time that England had submitted to foreign kings. But it
+was the first time that England experienced a foreign rule. Foreign
+notions of religion, foreign maxims of state, foreign conceptions of the
+attitude of the people or the nobles towards the Crown, foreign notions
+of the relation of the Crown to the people, formed the policy of James
+as of his successors. For the Stuarts remained foreigners to the last.
+Their line filled the English throne for more than eighty years; but
+like the Bourbons they forgot nothing and they learned nothing. To all
+influences indeed save English influences they were accessible enough.
+As James was steeped in the traditions of Scotland, so Charles the First
+was open to the traditions of Spain. The second Charles and the second
+James reflected in very different ways the temper of France. But what no
+Stuart seemed able to imbibe or to reflect was the temper of England.
+The strange medley of contradictory qualities which blended in the
+English character, its love of liberty and its love of order, its
+prejudice and open-mindedness, its religious enthusiasm and its cool
+good sense, remained alike unintelligible to them. And as they failed to
+understand England, so in many ways England failed to understand them.
+It underrated their ability, nor did it do justice to their aims. Its
+insular temper found no hold on a policy which was far more European
+than insular. Its practical sense recoiled from the unpractical
+cleverness that, while it seldom said a foolish thing, yet never did a
+wise one.
+
+[Sidenote: The new policy.]
+
+From the first this severance between English feeling and the feeling of
+the king was sharply marked. If war and taxation had dimmed the
+popularity of Elizabeth in her later years, England had still a
+reverence for the Queen who had made her great. But James was hardly
+over the Border when he was heard expressing his scorn of the character
+and statecraft of his predecessor. Her policy, whether at home or
+abroad, he came resolved to undo. Men who had fought side by side with
+Dutchman and Huguenot against Spaniard and Leaguer heard angrily that
+the new king was seeking for peace with Spain, that he was negotiating
+with the Papacy, while he met the advances of France with a marked
+coolness, and denounced the Hollanders as rebels against their king. It
+was with scarcely less anger that they saw the stern system of
+repression which had prevailed through the close of Elizabeth's reign
+relaxed in favour of the Catholics, and recusants released from the
+payments of fines. It was clear that both at home and abroad James
+purposed to withdraw from that struggle with Catholicism which the
+hotter Protestants looked upon as a battle for God. What the king really
+aimed at was the security of his throne. The Catholics alone questioned
+his title; and a formal excommunication by Rome would have roused them
+to dispute his accession. James had averted this danger by intrigues
+both with the Papal Court and the English Catholics during the later
+years of Elizabeth; and his vague assurances had mystified the one and
+prevented the others from acting. The disappointment of the Catholics
+when no change followed on the king's accession found vent in a wild
+plot for the seizure of his person, devised by a priest named Watson;
+and the alarm this created quickened James to a redemption of his
+pledges. In July 1603 the leading Catholics were called before the
+Council and assured that the fines for recusancy would no longer be
+exacted; while an attempt was made to open a negotiation with Rome and
+to procure the support of the Pope for the new government. But the real
+strength of the Catholic party lay in the chance of aid from Spain. So
+long as the war continued they would look to Spain for succour, and the
+influence of Spain would be exerted to keep them in antagonism to the
+Crown. Nor was this the only ground for a cessation of hostilities. The
+temper of James was peaceful; the royal treasury was exhausted; and the
+continuance of the war necessitated a close connexion with the
+Calvinistic and republican Hollanders. At the same time therefore that
+the Catholics were assured of a relaxation of the penal laws,
+negotiations for peace were opened with Spain.
+
+[Sidenote: James and the Puritans.]
+
+However justifiable such steps might be, it was certain that they would
+rouse alarm and discontent among the sterner Protestants. For a time
+however it seemed as if concessions on one side were to be balanced by
+concessions on the other, as if the tolerance which had been granted to
+the Catholic would be extended to the Puritan. James had hardly crossed
+the Border when he was met by what was termed the Millenary Petition,
+from a belief that it was signed by a thousand of the English clergy. It
+really received the assent of some eight hundred, or of about a tenth of
+the clergy of the realm. The petitioners asked for no change in the
+government or organization of the Church, but for a reform of its
+courts, the removal of superstitious usages from the Book of Common
+Prayer, the disuse of lessons from the apocryphal books of Scripture, a
+more rigorous observance of Sundays, and the provision and training of
+ministers who could preach to the people. Concessions on these points
+would as yet have satisfied the bulk of the Puritans; and for a while
+it seemed as if concession was purposed. The king not only received the
+petition, but promised a conference of bishops and divines in which it
+should be discussed. Ten months however were suffered to pass before the
+pledge was redeemed; and a fierce protest from the University of Oxford
+in the interval gave little promise of a peaceful settlement. The
+university denounced the Puritan demands as preludes of a Presbyterian
+system in which the clergy would "have power to bind their king in
+chains and their prince in links of iron, that is (in their learning) to
+censure him, to enjoin him penance, to excommunicate him, yea--in case
+they see cause--to proceed against him as a tyrant."
+
+[Sidenote: Hampton Court conference.]
+
+The warning was hardly needed by James. The voice of Melville was still
+in his ears when he summoned four Puritan ministers to meet the
+Archbishop and eight of his suffragans at Hampton Court in January 1604.
+From the first he showed no purpose of discussing the grievances alleged
+in the petition. He revelled in the opportunity for a display of his
+theological reading; but he viewed the Puritan demands in a purely
+political light. He charged the petitioners with aiming at a Scottish
+presbytery, "where Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall meet, and at
+their pleasure censure me and my Council and all their proceedings.
+Stay," he went on with amusing vehemence, "stay, I pray you, for one
+seven years before you demand that from me, and if you find me pursy and
+fat and my windpipe stuffed, I will perhaps hearken to you, for let that
+government be once up, and I am sure I shall be kept in health." No
+words could have better shown the new king's unconsciousness that he had
+passed into a land where parliaments were realities, and where the
+"censure" of king and council was a national tradition. But neither his
+theology nor his politics met with any protest from the prelates about
+him. On the contrary, the bishops declared that the insults James
+showered on their opponents were inspired by the Holy Ghost. The
+Puritans however still ventured to question his infallibility, and the
+king broke up the conference with a threat which disclosed the policy of
+the Crown. "I will make them conform," he said of the remonstrants, "or
+I will harry them out of the land!"
+
+[Sidenote: The Parliament of 1604.]
+
+It is only when we recall the temper of England at the time that we can
+understand the profound emotion which was roused by threats such as
+these. Three months after the conference at Hampton Court the members
+were gathering to the first parliament of the new reign; and the
+Parliament of 1604 met in another mood from that of any parliament which
+had met for a hundred years. Under the Tudors the Houses had more than
+once at great crises in our history withstood the policy of the Crown.
+But in the main that policy had been their own; and it was the sense of
+this oneness in aim which had averted any final collision even in the
+strife with Elizabeth. But this trust in the unity of the nation and the
+Crown was now roughly shaken. The squires and merchants who thronged the
+benches at Westminster listened with coldness and suspicion to the
+self-confident assurances of the king. "I bring you," said James, "two
+gifts, one peace with foreign nations, the other union with Scotland";
+and a project was laid before them for a union of the two kingdoms under
+the name of Great Britain. "By what laws," asked Bacon, "shall this
+Britain be governed?" Great in fact as were the advantages of such a
+scheme, the House showed its sense of the political difficulties
+involved in it by referring it to a commission. James in turn showed his
+resentment by passing over the attempts made to commute for a fixed sum
+the oppressive rights of Purveyance and Wardship. But what the House was
+really set upon was religious reform; and the first step of the Commons
+had been the naming of a committee to frame bills for the redress of the
+more crying ecclesiastical grievances. The influence of the Crown
+secured the rejection of these bills by the Lords; and the irritation of
+the Lower House showed itself in an outspoken address to the king. The
+Parliament, it said, had come together in a spirit of peace. "Our
+desires were of peace only, and our device of unity." Their aim had been
+to put an end to the long-standing dissension among the ministers, and
+to preserve uniformity by the abandonment of "a few ceremonies of small
+importance," by the redress of some ecclesiastical abuses, and by the
+establishment of an efficient training for a preaching clergy. If they
+had waived their right to deal with these matters during the old age of
+Elizabeth, they asserted it now. "Let your Majesty be pleased to receive
+public information from your Commons in Parliament, as well of the
+abuses in the Church as in the civil state and government." Words yet
+bolder, and which sound like a prelude to the Petition of Right, met the
+claim of absolutism which was so frequently on the new king's lips.
+"Your majesty would be misinformed," said the address, "if any man
+should deliver that the kings of England have any absolute power in
+themselves, either to alter religion or make any laws concerning the
+same, otherwise than as in temporal causes, by consent of Parliament."
+
+[Sidenote: The Canons of 1604.]
+
+The address was met by a petulant scolding, and as the Commons met
+coldly the king's request for a subsidy the Houses were adjourned. James
+at once assumed the title to which Parliament had deferred its assent,
+of King of Great Britain; while the support of the Crown emboldened the
+bishops to a fresh defiance of the Puritan pressure. The act of
+Elizabeth which gave parliamentary sanction to the Thirty-nine Articles
+compelled ministers to subscribe only to those which concerned the faith
+and the sacraments, and thus implicitly refused to compel their
+signatures to the articles which related to points of discipline and
+Church government. The compromise had been observed from 1571 till now;
+but the Convocation of 1604 by its canons required the subscription of
+the clergy to the articles touching rites and ceremonies. The king
+showed his approval of this step by raising its prime mover, Bancroft,
+to the vacant See of Canterbury; and Bancroft added to the demand of
+subscription a requirement of rigid conformity with the rubrics on the
+part of all beneficed clergymen. In the spring of 1605 three hundred of
+the Puritan clergy were driven from their livings for a refusal to
+comply with these demands.
+
+[Sidenote: Fresh breach with the Catholics.]
+
+If James had come to his new throne with dreams of conciliation and of a
+greater unity among his subjects, his dream was to be speedily
+dispelled. At the moment when the persecution of Bancroft announced a
+final breach between the Crown and the Puritans, a revival of the old
+rigour made a fresh breach between the Crown and the Catholics. In
+remitting the fines for recusancy James had never purposed to suffer any
+revival of Catholicism; and in the opening of 1604 a proclamation which
+bade all Jesuits and seminary priests depart from the land proved that
+on its political side the Elizabethan policy was still adhered to. But
+the effect of the remission of fines was at once to swell the numbers of
+avowed Catholics. In the diocese of Chester the number of recusants
+increased by a thousand. Rumours of Catholic conversions spread a panic
+which showed itself in an act of the Parliament of 1604 confirming the
+statutes of Elizabeth; and to this James gave his assent. He promised
+indeed that the statute should remain inoperative; but rumours of his
+own conversion, which sprang from his secret negotiation with Rome, so
+angered the king that in the spring of 1605 he bade the judges put it in
+force, while the fines for recusancy were levied more strictly than
+before. The disappointment of their hopes, the quick breach of the
+pledges so solemnly given to them, drove the Catholics to despair. They
+gave fresh life to a conspiracy which a small knot of bigots had been
+fruitlessly striving to bring to an issue since the king's accession.
+Catesby, a Catholic zealot who had taken part in the rising of Essex,
+had busied himself during the last years of Elizabeth in preparing for a
+revolt at the Queen's death, and in seeking for his project the aid of
+Spain. He was joined in his plans by two fellow-zealots, Winter and
+Wright; but the scheme was still unripe when James peaceably mounted the
+throne; and for the moment his pledge of toleration put an end to it.
+But the zeal of the plotters was revived by the banishment of the
+priests; and the conspiracy at last took the form of a plan for blowing
+up both Houses of Parliament and profiting by the terror caused by such
+a stroke. In Flanders Catesby found a new assistant in his schemes,
+Guido Fawkes, an Englishman who was serving in the army of the Archduke;
+and on his return to England he was joined by Thomas Percy, a cousin of
+the Earl of Northumberland and a pensioner of the king's guard. In May
+1604 the little group hired a tenement near the Parliament House, and
+set themselves to dig a mine beneath its walls.
+
+[Sidenote: The Gunpowder Plot.]
+
+As yet however they stood alone. The bulk of the Catholics were content
+with the relaxation of the penal laws; and in the absence of any aid the
+plotters were forced to suspend their work. It was not till the sudden
+change in the royal policy that their hopes revived. But with the
+renewal of persecution Catesby at once bestirred himself; and at the
+close of 1604 the lucky discovery of a cellar beneath the Parliament
+House facilitated the execution of this plan. Barrels of gunpowder were
+placed in the cellar, and the little group waited patiently for the
+fifth of November 1605, when the Houses were again summoned to assemble.
+In the interval their plans widened into a formidable conspiracy. It was
+arranged that on the destruction of the king and the Parliament the
+Catholics should rise, seize the young princes, use the general panic
+to make themselves masters of the realm, and call for aid from the
+Spaniards in Flanders. With this view Catholics of greater fortune, such
+as Sir Everard Digby and Francis Tresham, were admitted to Catesby's
+confidence, and supplied money for the larger projects he designed. Arms
+were bought in Flanders, horses were held in readiness, a meeting of
+Catholic gentlemen was brought about under show of a hunting party to
+serve as the beginning of a rising. Wonderful as was the secrecy with
+which the plot was concealed, the family affection of Tresham at the
+last moment gave a clue to it by a letter to Lord Monteagle, his
+relative, which warned him to absent himself from the Parliament on the
+fatal day; and further information brought about the discovery of the
+cellar and of Guido Fawkes, who was charged with its custody. The
+hunting party broke up in despair, the conspirators, chased from county
+to county, were either killed or sent to the block; and Garnet, the
+Provincial of the English Jesuits, was brought to trial and executed.
+Though he had shrunk from all part in the plot, its existence had been
+made known to him by way of confession by another Jesuit, Greenway; and
+horror-stricken as he represented himself to have been, he had kept the
+secret and left the Parliament to its doom.
+
+[Sidenote: The Impositions.]
+
+The failure of such a plot necessarily gives strength to a government;
+and for the moment the Parliament was drawn closer to the king by the
+deliverance from a common peril. When the Houses again met in 1606 they
+listened in a different temper to the demand for a subsidy. The needs of
+the Treasury indeed were great. Elizabeth had left behind her a war
+expenditure, and a debt of four hundred thousand pounds. The first
+ceased with the peace, but the debt remained; and the prodigality of
+James was fast raising the charges of the Crown in time of peace to as
+high a level as they had reached under his predecessor in time of war.
+The Commons voted a sum which was large enough to meet the royal debt.
+The fixed charges of the Crown they held should be met by its ordinary
+revenues; but James had no mind to bring his expenditure down to the
+level of Elizabeth's. The growth of English commerce offered a means of
+recruiting his treasury which seemed to lie within the limits of
+customary law; and of this he availed himself. The right of the Crown to
+levy impositions on exports and imports other than those of wool,
+leather, and tin, had been the last financial prerogative for which the
+Edwards had struggled. They had been forced indeed to abandon it; but
+the tradition of such a right lingered on at the royal council-board;
+and under the Tudors the practice had been to some slight extent
+revived. A duty on imports had been imposed in one or two instances by
+Mary, and this impost had been extended by Elizabeth to currants and
+wine. These instances however were too trivial and exceptional to break
+in upon the general usage; but a more dangerous precedent had been
+growing up in the duties which the great trading companies, such as
+those to the Levant and to the Indies, were allowed to exact from
+merchants, in exchange--as was held--for the protection they afforded
+them in far-off and dangerous seas. The Levant Company was now
+dissolved, and James seized on the duties it had levied as lapsing
+naturally to the Crown.
+
+[Sidenote: Bates's case.]
+
+The Parliament at once protested against these impositions; but the
+prospect of a fresh struggle with the Commons told less with the king
+than the prospect of a revenue which might free him from dependence on
+the Commons altogether. His fanatical belief in the rights and power of
+the Crown hindered all sober judgement of such a question. James cared
+quite as much to assert his absolute authority as to fill his treasury.
+In the course of 1606 therefore the case of a Levant merchant called
+Bates, who refused to pay the imposition, was brought before the
+Exchequer Chamber. The judgement of the court justified the king's
+confidence in his claim. It went far beyond the original bounds of the
+case itself, or the right of the Crown to levy on the ground of
+protection the dues which had been levied on that ground by the leading
+companies. It asserted the king's right to levy what customs duties he
+would. "All customs," said the judges, "are the effects of foreign
+commerce; but all affairs of commerce and treaties with foreign nations
+belong to the king's absolute power. He therefore who has power over the
+cause has power over the effect." The importance of such a decision
+could hardly be overrated. English commerce was growing fast. English
+merchants were fighting their way to the Spice Islands, and establishing
+settlements in the dominions of the Mogul. The judgement gave James a
+revenue which was certain to grow rapidly, and whose growth would go far
+to free the Crown from any need of resorting for supplies to Parliament.
+
+[Sidenote: The Post-Nati.]
+
+But no immediate step was taken to give effect to the judgement; and the
+Commons contented themselves with a protest against impositions at the
+close of the session of 1606. When they reassembled in the following
+year their attention was absorbed by the revival of the questions which
+sprang from the new relations of Scotland to England through their
+common king. There was now no question of a national union. The
+commission to which the whole matter had been referred had reported in
+favour of the abolition of hostile laws, the establishment of a general
+free trade between the two kingdoms, and the naturalization as
+Englishmen of all living Scotchmen who had been born before the king's
+accession to the English throne. The judges had already given their
+opinion that all born after it were naturalized Englishmen by force of
+their allegiance to a sovereign who had become King of England. The
+constitutional danger of such a theory was easily seen. Had the marriage
+of Philip and Mary produced a son, every Spaniard and every Fleming
+would under it have counted as Englishmen, and England would have been
+absorbed in the mass of the Spanish monarchy. The opinion of the judges
+in fact implied that nationality hung not on the existence of the nation
+itself, but on its relation to a king. It was to escape from such a
+theory that the Commons asked that the question should be waived, and
+offered on that condition to naturalize all Scotchmen whatever by
+statute. But James would not assent. To him the assertion of a right
+inherent in the Crown was far dearer than a peaceful settlement of the
+matter; the bills for free trade were dropped; and on the adjournment of
+the Houses a case was brought before the Exchequer Chamber; and the
+naturalization of the "Post-nati," as Scots born after the king's
+accession were styled, established by a formal judgement.
+
+[Sidenote: James and Scotland.]
+
+James had won a victory for his prerogative; but he had won it at the
+cost of Scotland. To the smaller and poorer kingdom the removal of all
+obstacles to her commerce with England would have been an inestimable
+gain. The intercourse which it would have necessitated could hardly have
+failed in time to bring about a more perfect union. But as the king's
+reign drew on, the union of the two realms seemed more distant than
+ever. Bacon's shrewd question, "Under which laws is this Britain to be
+governed?" took fresh meaning as men saw James asserting in Scotland an
+all but absolute authority, and breaking down the one constitutional
+check which had hitherto hampered him. The energy which he had shown in
+his earlier combat with the democratic forces embodied in the Kirk was
+not likely to slacken on his accession to the southern throne. It was in
+the General Assembly that the new force of public opinion took
+legislative and administrative form; and even before he crossed the
+Border James had succeeded in asserting a right to convene and be
+personally present at the proceedings of the General Assembly. But once
+King of England he could venture on heavier blows. In spite of his
+assent to an act legalizing its annual convention, James hindered any
+meeting of the General Assembly for five successive years by repeated
+prorogations. The protests of the clergy were roughly met. When nineteen
+ministers appeared in 1605 at Aberdeen and, in defiance of the
+prorogation, constituted themselves an Assembly, they were called before
+the Council, and on refusal to own its jurisdiction banished as traitors
+from the realm. Of the leaders who remained the boldest were summoned in
+1606 with Andrew Melville to confer with the king in England on his
+projects of change. On their refusal to betray the freedom of the Church
+they were committed to prison; and an epigram which Melville wrote on
+the usages of the English communion was seized on as a ground for
+bringing him before the English Privy Council with Bancroft at its head.
+But the insolence of the Primate fell on ears less patient than those of
+the Puritans he had insulted at Hampton Court. As he stood at the
+council-table Melville seized the Archbishop by the sleeves of his
+rochet, and shaking them in his manner, called them Popish rags and
+marks of the beast. He was sent to the Tower, and released after some
+years of imprisonment only to go into exile.
+
+[Sidenote: Submission of the Kirk.]
+
+The trial of Scotchmen before a foreign court, the imprisonment of
+Scotchmen in foreign prisons, were steps that showed the powerlessness
+of James to grasp the first principles of law; but they were effective
+for the purpose at which he aimed. They struck terror into the Scotch
+ministers. Their one weapon lay in the enthusiasm of the people; but,
+strongly as Scotch enthusiasm might tell on a king at Edinburgh, it was
+powerless over a king at London. The time had come when James might pass
+on from merely silencing the General Assembly to the use of it in the
+enslavement of the Church. Successful as he had been in gagging the
+pulpits and silencing the Assembly, he had been as yet less successful
+in his efforts to revive the power of the Crown over the Church by a
+restoration of Episcopacy. He had nominated a few bishops, and had won
+back for them their old places in Parliament; but his bishops remained
+purely secular nobles, unrecognized in their spiritual capacity by the
+Church, and without any ecclesiastical jurisdiction. It was in vain that
+James had striven to bring Melville and his fellows to any recognition
+of prelacy. But with their banishment and imprisonment the field was
+clear for more vigorous action. Deprived of their leaders, threatened
+with bonds and exile, deserted by the nobles, ill supported as yet by
+the mass of the people, to whom the real nature of their struggle was
+unknown, the Scotch ministers bent at last before the pressure of the
+Crown. They still shrank indeed from any formal acceptance of
+episcopacy; but they allowed the bishops to act as perpetual moderators
+or presidents in the synods of their presbyteries.
+
+[Sidenote: Restoration of Scotch Episcopacy.]
+
+With such moderators the General Assembly might be suffered to meet.
+Their influence in fact secured the return of royal nominees to
+Assemblies which met in 1608 and in 1610; and in the second of these
+assemblies episcopacy was at last formally recognized by the Scottish
+Church. The bishops were owned as permanent heads of each provincial
+synod; the power of ordination was committed to them; the ecclesiastical
+sentences pronounced by synod or presbytery were henceforth to be
+submitted for their approval. The new organization of the Church was at
+once carried out. The vacant sees were filled. Two archbishops were
+created at St. Andrews and Glasgow, and set at the head of Courts of
+High Commission for their respective provinces; while three of the
+prelates were sent to receive consecration in England, and on their
+return communicated it to their fellow-bishops. With such a measure of
+success James was fairly content. The prelacy he had revived fell far
+short of English episcopacy; to the eyes of religious dogmatists such as
+Laud indeed it seemed little better than the presbyterianism it
+superseded. But the aim of James was political rather than religious. He
+had no dislike for presbyterianism as a system of Church-government;
+what he dreaded was the popular force to which it gave form in its
+synods and assemblies, and which, in the guise of ecclesiastical
+independence, was lifting the nation into equality with the Crown. In
+seizing on the control of the Church through his organized prelacy James
+held himself to have seized the control of the forces which acted
+through the Church, and to have won back that mastery of his realm which
+the Reformation had reft from the Scottish kings.
+
+[Sidenote: England and the Prerogative.]
+
+What he had really done was to commit the Scotch Crown to a lasting
+struggle with the religious impulses of the Scottish people. The cause
+of episcopacy was ruined by his triumph. Belief in bishops ceased to be
+possible for a Scotchman when bishops were forced on Scotland as mere
+tools of the royal will. Presbyterianism on the other hand became
+identified with patriotism. It was no longer an ecclesiastical system;
+it was the guise under which national freedom and even national
+existence were to struggle against an arbitrary rule,--against a rule
+which grew more and more the rule of a foreign king. Nor was the sight
+of the royal triumph lost on the southern realm. England had no love for
+presbyters or hatred for bishops; but as she saw the last check on the
+royal authority broken down over the border she looked the more
+jealously at the effort which James was making to break down such checks
+at home. Under Elizabeth proclamations had been sparingly used, and for
+the most part only to enforce what was already the law. Not only was
+their number multiplied under James, but their character was changed.
+They created new offences, imposed new penalties, and directed offenders
+to be brought before courts which had no legal jurisdiction over them.
+To narrow indeed the sphere of the common law seemed the special aim of
+the royal policy; the four counties of the western border had been
+severed from the rest of England and placed under the jurisdiction of
+the President and Council of Wales, a court whose constitution and
+procedure rested on the sheer will of the Crown. The province of the
+spiritual courts was as busily enlarged. It was in vain that the judges,
+spurred no doubt by the old jealousy between civil and ecclesiastical
+lawyers, entertained appeals against the High Commission, and strove by
+a series of decisions to set bounds to its limitless claims of
+jurisdiction or to restrict its powers of imprisonment to cases of
+schism and heresy. The judges were powerless against the Crown; and
+James was vehement in his support of courts which were closely bound up
+with his own prerogative. What work the courts spiritual might be
+counted on to do, if the king had his way, was plain from the
+announcement of a civilian named Cowell that "the king is above law by
+his absolute power," and that "notwithstanding his oath he may alter and
+suspend any particular law that seemeth hurtful to the public estate."
+
+[Sidenote: The claims of the king.]
+
+Cowell's book was suppressed on a remonstrance of the House of Commons;
+but the party of passive obedience grew fast. Even before his accession
+to the English throne James had formulated his theory of rule in a work
+on _The True Law of Free Monarchy_, and announced that "although a good
+king will frame his actions to be according to law, yet he is not bound
+thereto, but of his own will and for example giving to his subjects."
+With the Tudor statesmen who used the phrase, "an absolute king" or "an
+absolute monarchy" meant a sovereign or rule complete in themselves and
+independent of all foreign or Papal interference. James chose to regard
+the words as implying the freedom of the monarch from all control by law
+or from responsibility to anything but his own royal will. The king's
+theory was already a system of government; it was soon to become a
+doctrine which bishops preached from the pulpit, and for which brave men
+laid their heads on the block. The Church was quick to adopt its
+sovereign's discovery. Some three years after his accession Convocation
+in its book of Canons denounced as a fatal error the assertion that "all
+civil power, jurisdiction, and authority were first derived from the
+people and disordered multitude, or either is originally still in them,
+or else is deduced by their consent naturally from them; and is not
+God's ordinance originally descending from him and depending upon him."
+In strict accordance with the royal theory these doctors declared
+sovereignty in its origin to be the prerogative of birthright, and
+inculcated passive obedience to the Crown as a religious obligation. The
+doctrine of passive obedience was soon taught in the schools. A few
+years before the king's death the University of Oxford decreed solemnly
+that "it was in no case lawful for subjects to make use of force against
+their princes, or to appear offensively or defensively in the field
+against them." But what gave most force to such teaching were the
+reiterated expressions of James himself. If the king's "arrogant
+speeches" woke resentment in the Parliaments to which they were
+addressed, they created by sheer force of repetition a certain amount of
+belief in the arbitrary power they challenged for the Crown. One
+sentence from a speech delivered in the Star Chamber may serve as an
+instance of their tone. "As it is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what
+God can do, so," said James, "it is presumption and a high contempt in a
+subject to dispute what a king can do, or to say that a king cannot do
+this or that."
+
+[Sidenote: Distrust of the king.]
+
+"If the practice follow the positions," commented a thoughtful observer
+on words such as these, "we are not likely to leave to our successors
+the freedom we received from our forefathers." Their worst effect was in
+changing the whole attitude of the nation towards the Crown. England had
+trusted the Tudors, it distrusted the Stuarts. The mood indeed both of
+king and people had grown to be a mood of jealousy, of suspicion, which,
+inevitable as it was, often did injustice to the purpose of both. King
+James looked on the squires and merchants of the House of Commons as his
+Stuart predecessors had looked on the Scotch baronage. He regarded their
+discussions, their protests, their delays, not as the natural hesitation
+of men called suddenly, and with only half knowledge, to the settlement
+of great and complex questions, but as proofs of a conspiracy to fetter
+and impede the action of the Crown. The Commons on the other hand
+listened to the king's hectoring speeches, not as the chance talk of a
+clever and garrulous theorist, but as proofs of a settled purpose to
+change the character of the monarchy. In a word, James had succeeded in
+some seven years of rule in breaking utterly down that mutual
+understanding between the Crown and its subjects on which all
+government, save a sheer despotism, must necessarily rest.
+
+[Sidenote: Robert Cecil.]
+
+It was this mutual distrust which brought about the final breach between
+the Parliament and the king. The question of the impositions had seemed
+for a while to have been waived. The Commons had contented themselves
+with a protest against their levy. James had for two years hesitated in
+acting on the judgement which asserted his right to levy them. But the
+needs of the treasury became too great to admit of further hesitation,
+and in 1608 a royal proclamation imposed customs duties on many articles
+of import and export. The new duties came in fast; but unluckily the
+royal debt grew faster. To a king fresh from the penniless exchequer of
+Holyrood the wealth of England seemed boundless; money was lavished on
+court-feasts and favourites; and with each year the expenditure of James
+reached a higher level. It was in vain that Robert Cecil took the
+treasury into his own hands, and strove to revive the frugal traditions
+of Elizabeth. The king's prodigality undid his minister's work; and in
+1610 Cecil was forced to announce to his master that the annual revenue
+of the Crown must be supplemented by fresh grants from Parliament. The
+scheme which Cecil laid before the king and the Commons is of great
+importance as the last effort of that Tudor policy which had so long
+hindered an outbreak of strife between the nation and the Crown. Differ
+as the Tudors might from one another, they were alike in their keen
+sense of national feeling and in their craving to carry it along with
+them. Masterful as Henry or Elizabeth might be, what they "prized most
+dearly," as the Queen confessed, was "the love and goodwill of their
+subjects." They prized it because they knew the force it gave them. And
+Cecil knew it too. He had grown up among the traditions of the Tudor
+rule. He had been trained by his father in the system of Elizabeth.
+Whether as a minister of the Queen, or as a minister of her successor,
+he had striven to carry that system into effect. His conviction of the
+supremacy of the Crown was as strong as that of James himself, but it
+was tempered by as strong a conviction of the need of the national
+good-will. He had seen what weight the passionate enthusiasm that
+gathered round Elizabeth gave to her policy both at home and abroad; and
+he saw that a time was drawing near when the same weight would be
+needed by the policy of the Crown.
+
+[Sidenote: Protestantism in Germany.]
+
+Slowly but steadily the clouds of religious strife were gathering over
+central Europe. From such a strife, should it once break out in war,
+England could not hold aloof unless the tradition of its policy was
+wholly set aside. And so long as Cecil lived, whatever change might take
+place at home, in all foreign affairs the Elizabethan policy was mainly
+adhered to. Peace indeed was made with Spain; but a close alliance with
+the United Provinces, and a more guarded alliance with France, held the
+ambition of Spain in check almost as effectually as war. The peace in
+fact set England free to provide against dangers which threatened to
+become greater than those from Spanish aggression in the Netherlands.
+Wearily as war in that quarter might drag on, it was clear that the
+Dutchmen could hold their own, and that all that Spain and Catholicism
+could hope for was to save the rest of the Low Countries from their
+grasp. But no sooner was danger from the Spanish branch of the House of
+Austria at an end than Protestantism had to guard itself against its
+German branch. The vast possessions of Charles the Fifth had been parted
+between his brother and his son. While Philip took Spain, Italy, the
+Netherlands, and the Indies, Ferdinand took the German dominions, the
+hereditary Duchy of Austria, the Suabian lands, Tyrol, Styria,
+Carinthia, Carniola. Marriage and fortune brought to the German branch
+the dependent states of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia; and it had
+succeeded in retaining the Imperial crown. The wisdom and moderation of
+Ferdinand and his successor secured tranquillity for Germany through
+some fifty years. They were faithful to the Peace of Passau, which had
+been wrested by Maurice of Saxony from Charles the Fifth, and which
+secured both Protestants and Catholics in the rights and possessions
+which they held at the moment it was made. Their temper was tolerant;
+and they looked on quietly while Protestantism spread over Southern
+Germany and solved all doubtful questions which arose from the treaty in
+its own favour. The Peace had provided that all church land already
+secularized should remain so; of the later secularization of other
+church land it said nothing. It provided that states already Protestant
+should abide so, but it said nothing of the right of other states to
+declare themselves Protestant. Doubt however was set aside by religious
+zeal; new states became Lutheran, and eight great bishoprics of the
+north were secularized. Meanwhile the new faith was spreading fast over
+the dominions of the House of Austria. The nobles of their very Duchy
+embraced it: Moravia, Silesia, Hungary all but wholly abandoned
+Catholicism. Through the earlier reign of Elizabeth it seemed as if by
+a peaceful progress of conversion Germany was about to become
+Protestant.
+
+[Sidenote: The Catholic reaction.]
+
+German Catholicism was saved by the Catholic revival and by the energy
+of the Jesuits. It was saved perhaps as much by the strife which broke
+out in the heart of German Protestantism between Lutheran and Calvinist.
+But the Catholic zealots were far from resting content with having
+checked the advance of their opponents. They longed to undo their work.
+They did not question the Treaty of Passau or the settlement made by it;
+but they disputed the Protestant interpretation of its silences; they
+called for the restoration to Catholicism of all church lands
+secularized, of all states converted from the older faith, since its
+conclusion. Their new attitude woke little terror in the Lutheran
+states. The treaty secured their rights, and their position in one
+unbroken mass stretching across Northern Germany seemed to secure them
+from Catholic attack. But the Calvinistic states, Hesse, Baden, and the
+Palatinate, felt none of this security. If the treaty were strictly
+construed it gave them no right of existence, for Calvinism had arisen
+since the treaty was signed. Their position too was a hazardous one.
+They lay girt in on all sides but one by Catholic territories, here by
+the bishops of the Rhineland with the Spaniards in Franche Comté and the
+Netherlands to back them, there by Bavaria and by the bishoprics of the
+Main. Foes such as these indeed the Calvinists could fairly have faced;
+but behind them lay the House of Austria; and the influence of the
+Catholic revival was at last telling on the Austrian princes. In 1606 an
+attempt of the Emperor Rudolf to force Catholicism again on his people
+woke revolt in the Duchy; and though the troubles were allayed by his
+removal, his successor Matthias persevered though more quietly in the
+same anti-Protestant policy.
+
+[Sidenote: The Union and the League.]
+
+The accession of the House of Austria to the number of their foes
+created a panic among the Calvinistic states, and in 1608 they joined
+together in a Protestant Union with Christian of Anhalt at its head. But
+zeal was at once met by zeal; and the formation of the Union was
+answered by the formation of a Catholic League among the states about it
+under Maximilian, the Duke of Bavaria. Both were ostensibly for
+defensive purposes: but the peace of Europe was at once shaken.
+Ambitious schemes woke up in every quarter. Spain saw the chance of
+securing a road along western Germany which would enable her to bring
+her whole force to bear on the rebels in the Low Countries. France on
+the other hand had recovered from the exhaustion of her own religious
+wars, and was eager to take up again the policy pursued by Francis the
+First and his son, of weakening and despoiling Germany by feeding and
+using religious strife across the Rhine. In 1610 a quarrel over Cleves
+afforded a chance for her intervention, and it was only an assassin's
+dagger that prevented Henry the Fourth from doing that which Richelieu
+was to do. England alone could hinder a second outbreak of the Wars of
+Religion; but the first step in such a policy must be a reconciliation
+between King and Parliament. James might hector about the might of the
+Crown, but he had no power of acting with effect abroad save through the
+national good-will. Without troops and without supplies, his threat of
+war would be ridiculous; and without the backing of such a threat Cecil
+knew well that mediation would be a mere delusion. Whether for the
+conduct of affairs at home or abroad it was needful to bring the
+widening quarrel between the king and the Parliament to a close; and it
+was with a settled purpose of reconciliation that Cecil brought James to
+call the Houses again together in 1610.
+
+[Sidenote: The Great Contract.]
+
+He never dreamed of conciliating the Commons by yielding unconditionally
+to their demands. Cecil looked on the right to levy impositions as
+legally established; and the Tudor sovereigns had been as keen as James
+himself in seizing on any rights that the law could be made to give
+them. But as a practical statesman he saw that the right could only be
+exercised to the profit of the Crown if it was exercised with the
+good-will of the people. To win that good-will it was necessary to put
+the impositions on a legal footing; while for the conduct of affairs it
+was necessary to raise permanently the revenue of the Crown. On the
+Tudor theory of politics these were concessions made by the nation to
+the king; and it was the Tudor practice to buy such concessions by
+counter-concessions made by the king to the nation. Materials for such a
+bargain existed in the feudal rights of the Crown, above all those of
+marriage and wardship, which were harassing to the people while they
+brought little profit to the Exchequer. The Commons had more than once
+prayed for some commutation of these rights, and Cecil seized on their
+prayer as the ground of an accommodation. He proposed that James should
+waive his feudal rights, that he should submit to the sanction by
+Parliament of the impositions already levied, and that he should bind
+himself to levy no more by his own prerogative, on condition that the
+Commons assented to this arrangement, discharged the royal debt, and
+raised the royal revenue by a sum of two hundred thousand a year.
+
+[Sidenote: Attitude of the Commons.]
+
+Such was the "great contract" with which Cecil met the Houses when they
+once more assembled in 1610. It was a bargain which the Commons must
+have been strongly tempted to accept; for heavy as were its terms it
+averted the great danger of arbitrary taxation, and again brought the
+monarchy into constitutional relations with Parliament. What hindered
+their acceptance of it was their suspicion of James. Purveyance and the
+Impositions were far from being the only grievance against which they
+came to protest; they had to complain of the increase of proclamations,
+the establishment of new and arbitrary courts of law, the encroachments
+of the spiritual jurisdiction; and consent to such a bargain, if it
+remedied two evils, would cut off all chance of redressing the rest.
+Were the treasury once full, no means remained of bringing the Crown to
+listen to their protest against the abuses of the Church, the silencing
+of godly ministers, the maintenance of pluralities and non-residence,
+the want of due training for the clergy. Nor had the Commons any mind to
+pass in silence over the illegalities of the preceding years. Whether
+they were to give legal sanction to the impositions or no, they were
+resolute to protest against their levy without sanction of law. James
+forbade them to enter on the subject, but their remonstrance was none
+the less vigorous. "Finding that your majesty, without advice or counsel
+of Parliament, hath lately in time of peace set both greater impositions
+and more in number than any of your noble ancestors did ever in time of
+war," they prayed "that all impositions set without the assent of
+Parliament may be quite abolished and taken away," and that "a law be
+made to declare that all impositions set upon your people, their goods
+or merchandise, save only by common consent in Parliament, are and shall
+be void." As to Church grievances their demands were in the same spirit.
+They prayed that the deposed ministers might be suffered to preach, and
+that the jurisdiction of the High Commission should be regulated by
+statute; in other words, that ecclesiastical like financial matters
+should be taken out of the sphere of the prerogative and be owned as
+lying henceforth within the cognizance of Parliament.
+
+[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Parliament.]
+
+It was no doubt the last demand that roused above all the anger of the
+king. As to some of the grievances he was ready to make concessions. He
+had consulted the judges as to the legality of his proclamations, and
+the judges had pronounced them illegal. It never occurred to James to
+announce his withdrawal from a claim which he now knew to be wholly
+against law, and he kept the opinion of the judges secret; but it made
+him ready to include the grievance of proclamations in his bargain with
+the Commons, if they would grant a larger subsidy. The question of the
+court of Wales he treated in the same temper. But on the question of the
+Church, of Church reform, or of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, he would
+make no concession whatever. He had just wrought his triumph over the
+Scottish Kirk; and had succeeded, as he believed, in transferring the
+control of its spiritual life from the Scottish people to the Crown. He
+was not likely to consent to any reversal of such a process in England
+itself. The claim of the Commons had become at last a claim that England
+through its representatives in Parliament should have a part in the
+direction of its own religious affairs. Such a claim sprang logically
+from the very facts of the Reformation. It was by the joint action of
+the Crown and Parliament that the actual constitution of the English
+Church had been established; and it seemed hard to deny that the same
+joint action was operative for its after reform. But it was in vain that
+the Commons urged their claim. Elizabeth had done wisely in resisting
+it, for her task was to govern a half-Catholic England with a Puritan
+Parliament; and in spite of constitutional forms the Queen was a truer
+representative of national opinion in matters of religion than the House
+of Commons. In her later years all had changed; and the Commons who
+fronted her successor were as truly representative of the religious
+opinion of the realm as Elizabeth had been. But James saw no ground for
+changing the policy of the Crown. The control of the Church and through
+it of English religion lay within the sphere of his prerogative, and on
+this question he was resolute to make a stand. The Commons were as
+resolute as the king. The long and intricate bargaining came on both
+sides to an end; and in February 1611 the first Parliament of James was
+dissolved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE FAVOURITES
+
+1611-1625
+
+
+[Sidenote: England and the Crown.]
+
+The dissolution of the first Stuart Parliament marks a stage in our
+constitutional history. With it the system of the Tudors came to an end.
+The oneness of aim which had carried nation and government alike through
+the storms of the Reformation no longer existed. On the contrary the
+aims of the nation and the aims of the government were now in open
+opposition. The demand of England was that all things in the realm,
+courts, taxes, prerogatives, should be sanctioned and bounded by law.
+The policy of the king was to reserve whatever he could within the
+control of his personal will. James in fact was claiming a more personal
+and exclusive direction of affairs than any English sovereign that had
+gone before him. England, on the other hand, was claiming a greater
+share in its own guidance than it had enjoyed since the Wars of the
+Roses. Nor were the claims on either side speculative or theoretical.
+Differences in the theory of government or on the relative jurisdiction
+of Church and State might have been left as of old to the closet and the
+pulpit. But the opposition between the Crown and the people had gathered
+itself round practical questions, and round questions that were of
+interest to all. Every man's conscience was touched by the question of
+religion. Every man's pocket was touched by the question of taxation.
+The strongest among human impulses, the passion of religious zeal and
+that of personal self-interest, nerved Englishmen to a struggle with the
+Crown. What gave the strife a yet more practical bearing was the fact
+that James had provided the national passion with a constitutional
+rallying-point. There was but one influence which could match the
+reverence which men felt for the Crown, and that was the reverence that
+men felt for the Parliament; nor had that reverence ever stood at a
+greater height than at the moment when James finally broke with the
+Houses. The dissolution of 1611 proclaimed to the whole people a breach
+between two powers which it had hitherto looked upon as one. Not only
+did it disperse to every corner of the realm a crowd of great landowners
+and great merchants who formed centres of local opposition to the royal
+system, but it carried to every shire and every borough the news that
+the Monarchy had broken with the Great Council of the realm.
+
+[Sidenote: James his own minister.]
+
+On Cecil his failure fell like a sentence of doom. Steeped as he was in
+the Tudor temper, he could not understand an age when the Tudor system
+had become impossible; the mood of the Commons and the mood of the king
+were alike unintelligible to him. He could see no ground for the failure
+of the Great Contract save that "God had not blessed it." But he had
+little time to wonder at the new forces which were rising about him, for
+only a year after the dissolution, in May 1612, he died, killed by
+overwork. With him died the last check on the policy of James. So long
+as Cecil lived the Elizabethan tradition, weakened and broken as it
+might be, lived with him. In foreign affairs there was still the
+conviction that the Protestant states must not be abandoned in any fresh
+struggle with the House of Austria. In home affairs there was still the
+conviction that the national strength hung on the establishment of
+good-will between the nation and the Crown. But traditions such as these
+were no longer to hamper the policy of the king. To him Cecil's death
+seemed only to afford an opportunity for taking further strides towards
+the establishment of a purely personal rule. For eight years James had
+borne with the check of a powerful minister. He was resolved now to have
+no real minister but himself. Cecil's amazing capacity for toil, as well
+as his greed of power, had already smoothed the way for such a step.
+The great statesman had made a political solitude about him. Of his
+colleagues some had been removed by death, some set aside by his
+jealousy. Ralegh lay in prison; Bacon could not find office under the
+Crown. And now that Cecil was removed, there was no minister whose
+character or capacity seemed to give him any right to fill his place.
+James could at last be his own minister. The treasury was put into
+commission. The post of secretary was left vacant, and it was announced
+that the king would be his own Secretary of State. Such an arrangement
+soon broke down, and the great posts of state were again filled with men
+of whose dependence James felt sure. But whoever might nominally hold
+these offices, from the moment of Cecil's death the actual direction of
+affairs was in the hands of the king.
+
+[Sidenote: The Council set aside.]
+
+Another constitutional check remained in the royal Council. As the
+influence of Parliament died down during the Wars of the Roses, that of
+the Council took to some extent its place. Composed as it was not only
+of ministers of the Crown but of the higher nobles and hereditary
+officers of state, it served under Tudor as under Plantagenet as an
+efficient check on the arbitrary will of the sovereign. Even the
+despotic temper of Henry VIII. had had to reckon with his Council; it
+had checked act after act of Mary; it played a great part in the reign
+of Elizabeth. In the administrative tradition indeed of the last hundred
+years the Council had become all-important to the Crown. It brought it
+in contact with public opinion, less efficiently, no doubt, but more
+constantly than the Parliament itself; it gave to its acts an imposing
+sanction and assured to them a powerful support; above all it provided a
+body which stood at every crisis between the nation and the monarchy,
+which broke the shock of any conflict, and which could stand forth as
+mediator, should conflict arise, without any loss of dignity on the part
+of the sovereign. But to the practical advantages or to the traditional
+weight of such a body James was utterly blind. His cleverness made him
+impatient of its discussions; his conceit made him impatient of its
+control; while the foreign traditions which he had brought with him from
+a foreign land saw in the great nobles who composed it nothing but a
+possible force which might overawe the Crown. One of his chief aims
+therefore had been to lessen the influence of the Council. So long as
+Cecil lived this was impossible, for the practical as well as the
+conservative temper of Cecil would have shrunk from so violent a change.
+But he was no sooner dead than James hastened to carry out his plans.
+The lords of the Council found themselves of less and less account. They
+were practically excluded from all part in the government; and the whole
+management of affairs passed into the hands of the king or of the
+dependent ministers who from this time became mere agents of the king's
+will.
+
+[Sidenote: The Favourites.]
+
+Such a personal rule as this, concentrating as it does the whole
+business of government in a single man, requires for its actual conduct
+the entire devotion of the ruler to public affairs. The work of
+Ferdinand of Aragon or of Frederick the Great was the work of
+galley-slaves. It was work which had broken down the strength of Wolsey,
+and which was to bow the iron frame of Oliver Cromwell. But James had no
+mind for work such as this. His intellect was quick, inventive, fruitful
+in device, eager to plan, and confident in the wisdom of its plans. But
+he had none of the quality which distinguishes intellectual power from
+mere cleverness, the capacity not only to plan, but to know what plans
+can actually be carried out, and by what means they can be carried out.
+Like all merely clever men, he looked down on the drudgery of details.
+The posts which he had held vacant were soon filled up; and before many
+months were over James ceased to be his own Treasurer or his own
+Secretary of State. But he still claimed the absolute direction of all
+affairs; he was resolved to be his own chief minister. Even here however
+he felt the need of a more active and practical mood than his own for
+giving shape to the schemes with which his brain was fermenting; and he
+fell back as of old on the tradition of his house. It was so long since
+England had seen a favourite that the memory of Gaveston or De Vere had
+almost faded away. But favourites had been part of the system of the
+Scottish kings. Hemmed in by turbulent barons, unable to find
+counsellors among the nobles to whom the interests of the Crown were
+dearer than the interests of their class or their house, Stuart after
+Stuart had been driven to look for a counsellor and a minister in some
+dependant, bound to them by ties of personal attachment and of common
+danger. The Scotch nobles had dealt with such favourites after their
+manner. One they had hung, others they had stabbed; the last, David
+Rizzio, had fallen beneath their daggers at Mary's feet. But the notion
+of a personal dependant through whom his designs might take form for the
+outer world was as dear to James as to his predecessors, and the death
+of Cecil was soon followed by the appearance of favourites.
+
+[Sidenote: Carr.]
+
+There was an æsthetic element in the character of the Stuarts which had
+shown itself in the poems and architectural skill of those who had gone
+before James, as it was to show itself in the artistic and literary
+taste of his successor. In James, grotesque as was his own personal
+appearance, it took the form of a passionate admiration of manly beauty.
+It is possible that with the fanciful Platonism of the time he saw in
+the grace of the outer form evidence of a corresponding fairness in the
+soul within. If so, he was egregiously deceived. The first favourite
+whom he raised to honour, a Scotch page named Carr, was as worthless as
+he was handsome. But his faults passed unheeded. Without a single claim
+to distinction save the favour of the king, Carr rose at a bound to
+honours which Elizabeth had denied to Ralegh and to Drake. He was
+enrolled among English nobles, and raised to the peerage as Viscount
+Rochester. Young as he was, he at once became sole minister. The lords
+of the Council found themselves to be mere ciphers. "At the
+Council-table," writes the Spanish Ambassador only a year after Cecil's
+death, "the Viscount Rochester showeth much temper and modesty without
+seeming to press or sway anything; but afterwards the king resolveth all
+business with him alone." So sudden and complete a revolution in the
+system of the state would have drawn ill-will on the favourite, even had
+Rochester shown himself worthy of the king's trust. But he seemed only
+eager to show his unworthiness. Through the year 1613 all England was
+looking on with wonder and disgust at his effort to break the marriage
+of Lord Essex with his wife, Frances Howard. Both had been young when
+they wedded; the passionate girl soon learned to hate her cold and
+formal husband; and she yielded readily enough to the seductions of the
+brilliant favourite. The guilty passion of the two was greedily seized
+on by the political intriguers of the court. Frances was daughter of a
+Howard, the Earl of Suffolk; and her father and uncle, the Earl of
+Northampton, who had already felt the influence of the favourite
+displacing their own, saw in the girl's shame a chance of winning this
+influence to their side. With this view they resolved to break the
+marriage with Essex, and to wed her to Rochester. A charge of impotency
+was trumped up against Essex as a ground of divorce, and a commission
+was named for its investigation. The charge was disproved, and with this
+disproof the case broke utterly down; but a fresh allegation was made
+that the Earl lay under a spell of witchcraft which incapacitated him
+from intercourse with his wife, though with her alone. The scandal grew
+as it became clear that the cause of Lady Essex was backed by the king.
+The resolute protest of Archbishop Abbot against the proceedings was met
+by a petulant scolding from James, and when the Commissioners were
+evenly divided in their judgement the king added two known partizans of
+the Countess to turn their verdict. By means such as these, after four
+months of scandal and shame, a sentence of divorce was at last procured,
+and Lady Essex set free to marry the favourite.
+
+[Sidenote: Overbury's murder.]
+
+In the foul process of the divorce James had been either dupe or
+confederate. But throughout the same four months he had been either
+confederate or dupe in a more terrible tragedy. In his rise to greatness
+Rochester had been aided by the counsels of Sir Thomas Overbury.
+Overbury was a young man of singular wit and ability, but he had as few
+scruples as his master, and he was as ready to lend himself to the
+favourite's lust as to his ambition. He dictated for him in fact the
+letters which won the heart of Lady Essex. But if he backed the
+intrigue, he seems, from whatever cause, to have opposed the project of
+marriage. So great was his power over Rochester that the Howards deemed
+it needful to take him out of the way while the divorce was being
+brought about, and with this end they roused the king's jealousy of this
+influence over the favourite. James became as resolute to get rid of him
+as the Howards; he offered him an embassy if he would quit England, and
+when he refused, he treated his refusal as an offence against the state.
+Overbury was committed to the Tower, and he remained a close prisoner
+while the suit took its course. Whether more than imprisonment was
+designed by the Howards, or what was the part the two Earls played in
+the deeds that followed, is hard to tell. Still harder is it to tell the
+part of Rochester or of the king. But behind the web of political
+intrigue lay a woman's passion, and the part of Lady Essex is clear.
+Overbury had the secret of her shame to disclose, and she was resolved
+to silence him by death. A few days after the sentence of divorce was
+pronounced, he died in his prison, poisoned by her agents. The crime
+remained unknown; and not a whisper of it broke the king's exultation
+over his favourite's success. At the close of 1613 the scandal was
+crowned by the elevation of Rochester to the Earldom of Somerset and his
+union with Frances Howard. Murderess and adulteress as she was, the girl
+moved to her bridal through costly pageants which would have fitted the
+bridal of a queen. The marriage was celebrated in the king's presence.
+Ben Jonson devised the wedding song. Bacon spent two thousand pounds in
+a wedding masque. The London Companies offered sumptuous gifts. James
+himself forced the Lord Mayor to entertain the bride with a banquet in
+Merchant Taylors' House, and the gorgeous wedding-train wound in triumph
+from Westminster to the City.
+
+[Sidenote: Immorality of the Court.]
+
+The shameless bridal was a fitting close to the shameless divorce, as
+both were outrages on the growing sense of morality. But they harmonized
+well enough with the profusion and profligacy of the Stuart Court. In
+spite of Cecil's economy, the treasury was drained to furnish masques
+and revels on a scale of unexampled splendour. While debts remained
+unpaid, lands and jewels were lavished on young adventurers whose fair
+faces caught the royal fancy. Two years back Carr had been a penniless
+fortune-seeker. Now, though his ostensible revenues were not large, he
+was able to spend ninety thousand pounds in a single twelvemonth. The
+Court was as shameless as it was profuse. If the Court of Elizabeth was
+as immoral as that of her successor, its immorality had been shrouded by
+a veil of grace and chivalry. But no veil shrouded the degrading
+grossness of the Court of James. James was no drunkard, but he was a
+hard drinker, and with the people at large his hard drinking passed for
+drunkenness. When the Danish king visited England actors in a masque
+performed at Court were seen rolling intoxicated at his feet. The suit
+of Lady Essex had shown great nobles and officers of state content to
+play panders to their kinswoman. A yet more scandalous trial was soon to
+show them in league with cheats and astrologers and poisoners. James had
+not shrunk from meddling busily in the divorce or from countenancing the
+bridal. Before scenes such as these the half-idolatrous reverence with
+which the sovereign had been regarded throughout the age of the Tudors
+died away into abhorrence and contempt. Court prelates might lavish
+their adulation on the virtues and wisdom of the Lord's anointed; but
+the players openly mocked at the king on the stage, while Puritans like
+Mrs. Hutchinson denounced the orgies of Whitehall in words as fiery as
+those with which Elijah denounced the profligacy of Jezebel.
+
+[Sidenote: Parliament of 1614.]
+
+But profligate and prodigal as was the Court, Somerset had to face the
+stern fact of an empty Exchequer. The debt was growing steadily. It had
+now risen to seven hundred thousand pounds, while, in spite of the
+impositions, the annual deficit had mounted to two hundred thousand. The
+king had no mind to face the Parliament again; but a little experience
+of affairs had sobered the arrogance of the favourite, and there still
+remained counsellors of the same mind as Cecil, who pressed on him the
+need of reconciling the Houses with the Crown. What at last prevailed on
+the king were the pledges of some officious meddlers known as
+"undertakers" who promised to bring about the return to the House of
+Commons of a majority favourable to the demand of a subsidy. But pledges
+such as these fell dead before the general excitement which greeted the
+tidings of a new Parliament. Never had an election stirred so much
+popular passion as that of 1614. In every case where rejection was
+possible, the Court candidates were rejected. All the leading members of
+the country party, or as we should now term it, the Opposition, were
+again returned. But three hundred of the members were wholly new men;
+and among them we note for the first time the names of the leaders in
+the later struggle with the Crown. Calne returned John Pym; Yorkshire
+sent Thomas Wentworth; St. Germans chose John Eliot. Signs of
+unprecedented excitement were seen in the vehement cheering and hissing
+which for the first time marked the proceedings of the Commons. But,
+excited as they were, their policy was precisely that of the Parliament
+which had been dissolved three years before. James indeed was farther
+off from any notion of concession than ever; he had no mind to offer
+again the Great Contract or even to allow the subject of impositions to
+be named. But the Parliament was as firm as the king. It refused to
+grant supplies till it had considered public grievances, and it fixed on
+the impositions and the abuses of the Church as the first grievances to
+be redressed. Unluckily the inexperience of the bulk of the House of
+Commons led it into quarrelling on a point of privilege with the Lords;
+and though the Houses had sate but two months James seized on the
+quarrel as a pretext for a fresh dissolution.
+
+[Sidenote: Benevolences.]
+
+The courtiers mocked at the "addled Parliament," but a statesman would
+have learned much from the anger and excitement that ran through its
+stormy debates. During the session the king had been frightened beyond
+his wont by the tone of the Commons, but the only impressions which
+remained in his mind were those of wounded pride and stubborn
+resistance. He sent four of the leading members of the Lower House to
+the Tower, and fell back on an obstinate resolve to govern without any
+Parliament at all. The resolve was carried recklessly out through the
+next seven years. The protests of the Commons James looked on as a
+defiance of the Crown, and he met them in a spirit of counter-defiance.
+The abuses which Parliament after Parliament had denounced were not
+only continued but carried to a greater extent than before. The
+spiritual courts were encouraged in fresh encroachments. Though the
+Crown lawyers admitted the illegality of proclamations they were issued
+in greater numbers than ever. Impositions were strictly levied. But a
+policy of defiance did little to fill the empty treasury. A large sum
+was gained by the sale to the Dutch of the towns which had been left by
+the States in pledge with Elizabeth; but even this supply was exhausted,
+and a fatal necessity drove James on to a formal and conscious breach of
+law. Whatever question might exist as to the legality of impositions, no
+question could exist since the statute of Richard the Third that
+benevolences were illegal. Nor was there any question that the levy of
+benevolences would rouse a deep and abiding resentment in the nation at
+large. Even in the height of the Tudor power Wolsey had been forced to
+abandon a resource which stirred England to revolt. But the Crown
+lawyers advised that while the statute forbade the exaction of gifts it
+left the king free to ask for them; and James resolved to raise money by
+benevolences. At the close of the Parliament of 1614 therefore letters
+were sent out to the counties and boroughs in the name of the Council
+requesting contributions. The letters remained generally unanswered; and
+in the autumn fresh letters had to be sent out in which the war which
+now threatened German Protestantism in the Palatinate was used to spur
+the loyalty of the country to a response. The judges on assize were
+ordered to press the king's demand. But prayer and pressure failed
+alike. In the three years which followed the dissolution the strenuous
+efforts of the sheriffs only raised sixty thousand pounds, a sum less
+than two-thirds of the value of a single subsidy. Devonshire,
+Nottinghamshire, and Warwickshire protested against the benevolences,
+and Somersetshire appealed to the statute which forbade them. It was in
+vain that the western remonstrants were silenced by threats from the
+Council, and that the laggard shires were rated for their sluggishness
+in payment. Two counties, those of Hereford and Stafford, sent not a
+penny to the last.
+
+[Sidenote: Increase of the Peerage.]
+
+In his distress for money the king was driven to expedients which
+widened the breach between the gentry and the Crown. He had refused to
+part with the feudal rights which came down to him from the Middle Ages,
+such as his right to the wardship of young heirs and the marriage of
+heiresses. These were now recklessly used as a means of extortion.
+Similar abuses of the prerogative alienated the merchant class. London,
+the main seat of their trade and wealth, was growing fast; and its
+growth roused terror in the government. In 1611 a proclamation forbade
+any increase of buildings. But the proclamation remained inoperative
+till it was seized as a means of extortion. A Commission was issued in
+1614 with power to fine all who had disobeyed the king's injunctions,
+and by its means a considerable sum was gathered into the treasury. All
+that remained to be done was to alienate the nobles, and this James
+succeeded in doing by a measure in which political design went hand in
+hand with the needs of his finance. The Tudors had watched the baronage
+with jealousy, but they had made no attempt to degrade it. The nobles
+were sent to the prison and the block, but their rank and honours
+remained dignities which the Crown was chary to bestow even on the
+noblest of its servants. During the forty-five years of her reign
+Elizabeth raised but seven persons to the peerage, and with the
+exception of Burleigh all of these were of historic descent. The number
+of lay peers indeed had hardly changed for two centuries; they were
+about fifty at the accession of Henry the Fifth and counted but sixty at
+the accession of James. In so small an assembly, where the Crown could
+count on the unwavering support of ministers, courtiers, and bishops,
+the royal influence had through the last hundred years been generally
+supreme. But among the lords of the "old blood," as those whose honours
+dated from as far back as the Plantagenets were called, there lingered a
+spirit of haughty independence which, if it had quailed before the
+Tudors, showed signs of bolder life now the Tudors had gone. It was the
+policy of James to raise up a new nobility more dependent on the court,
+a nobility that might serve as a bridle on the older lords, while the
+increase in the numbers of the baronage which their creation brought
+about lessened the weight which a peer had drawn from his special and
+unique position in the realm. Such a policy fell in with the needs of
+his treasury. Not only could he degrade the peerage by lavishing its
+honours, but he could degrade it yet more by putting them up to sale. Of
+the forty-five lay peers whom he added to the Upper House during his
+reign, a large number were created by sheer bargaining. Baronies were
+sold to bidders at ten thousand pounds apiece. Ten nobles were created
+in a batch. Peerages were given to the Scotch dependants whom James
+brought with him, to Hume and Hay, and Bruce and Ramsay, as well as to
+his favourites Carr and Villiers. Robartes, of Cornwall, a man who had
+risen to great wealth through the Cornish mines, complained that he had
+been forced to take a baronage, for which he had to pay ten thousand
+pounds to a favourite's use.
+
+[Sidenote: The dismissal of Coke.]
+
+That this profuse creation of peers was more than the result of passing
+embarrassment was shown by its continuance under James's successors.
+Charles the First bestowed no less than fifty-six peerages; Charles the
+Second forty-eight. But in its immediate application it was no doubt
+little more than one of those financial shifts by which the king put off
+from day to day the necessity of again facing the one body which could
+permanently arrest his effort after despotic rule. There still however
+remained a body whose tradition was strong enough, if not to arrest, at
+any rate to check it. The lawyers had been subservient beyond all other
+classes to the Crown. Their narrow pedantry bent slavishly then, as now,
+before isolated precedents, while then, as now, their ignorance of
+general history hindered them from realizing the conditions under which
+these precedents had been framed, and to which they owed their very
+varying value. It was thus that the judges had been brought to support
+James in his case of the Post-Nati or in the levy of impositions. But
+beyond precedents even the judges refused to go. They had done their
+best in a case that came before them to restrict the jurisdiction of the
+ecclesiastical courts within legal and definite bounds, and their effort
+at once brought down on them the wrath of the king. All that affected
+the spiritual jurisdiction affected, he said, his prerogative; and
+whenever any case which affected his prerogative came before a court of
+justice he asserted that the king possessed an inherent right to be
+consulted as to the decision upon it. The judges timidly, though firmly,
+repudiated such a right as unknown to the law. To a king whose notions
+of law and of courts of law were drawn from those of Scotland, where
+justice had for centuries been a ready weapon in the royal hand, such a
+protest was utterly unintelligible. James sent for them to the royal
+closet. He rated them like schoolboys till they fell on their knees and
+with a single exception pledged themselves to obey his will. The one
+exception was the Chief Justice, Sir Edward Coke, a narrow-minded and
+bitter-tempered man, but of the highest eminence as a lawyer, and with a
+reverence for the law that overrode every other instinct. He had for
+some time been forced to evade the king's questions and "closetings" on
+judicial cases by timely withdrawal from the royal presence. But now
+that he was driven to answer, he answered well. When any case came
+before him, he said he would act as it became a judge to act. Coke was
+at once dismissed from the Council, and a provision which made the
+judicial office tenable at the king's pleasure, but which had long
+fallen into disuse, was revived to humble the common law in the person
+of its chief officer. In November 1616, on the continuance of his
+resistance, he was deprived of his post of Chief Justice.
+
+[Sidenote: The Crown and the Law.]
+
+No act of James seems to have stirred a deeper resentment among
+Englishmen than this announcement of his resolve to tamper with the
+course of justice. The firmness of Coke in his refusal to consult with
+the king on matters affecting his prerogative was justified by what
+immediately followed. As James interpreted the phrase, to consult with
+the king meant simply to obey the king's bidding as to what the
+judgement of a court should be. In the case which was then at issue he
+summoned the judges simply to listen to his decision; and the judges
+promised to enforce it. The king's course was an outrage on the growing
+sense of law; but his success was not without useful results. In his
+zeal to assert his personal will as the source of all power, whether
+judicial or other, James had struck one of its most powerful instruments
+from the hands of the Crown. He had broken the spell of the royal
+courts. If the good sense of Englishmen had revolted against their
+decisions in favour of the prerogative, the English reverence for law
+had made men submit to them. But now that all show of judicial
+independence was taken away, and the judges debased into mere
+mouthpieces of the king's will, the weight of their judgements came to
+an end. The nation had bent before their decision in favour of the
+Post-Nati; it had never a thought of bending before their decision in
+favour of Ship-money.
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of Somerset.]
+
+What an impassable gulf lay between the English conception of justice
+and that of James was shown even more vividly by the ruin of one who
+stood higher than Coke. At the opening of 1615 Somerset was still
+supreme. He held the rank of Lord Chamberlain; but he was practically
+the King's minister in state affairs, domestic or foreign. He was backed
+since his marriage by the influence of the Howards; and his
+father-in-law, Suffolk, was Lord Treasurer. He was girt round indeed by
+rivals and foes. The Queen was jealous of his influence over James;
+Archbishop Abbot dreaded his intrigues with Spain, intrigues which drew
+fresh meaning from the Catholic sympathies of the Howards; above all the
+older Lords of the Council, whom he ousted from any share in the
+government, watched eagerly for the moment when they hoped to regain
+their power by his fall. As he moved through the crowd of nobles he
+heard men muttering "that one man should not for ever rule them all."
+But Somerset's arrogance only grew with the danger. A new favourite was
+making way at court, and the king was daily growing colder. But Somerset
+only rated James for his coldness, demanded the dismissal of the new
+favourite, and refused to be propitiated by the king's craven apologies.
+His enemies however had a fatal card to play. In the summer whispers
+stole about of Overbury's murder, and of Somerset's part in it. The
+charge was laid secretly before the king, and a secret investigation
+conducted by his order threw darker and darker light on the story of
+guilt. Somerset was still unconscious of his peril, and the news that
+some meaner agents in the crime were arrested found him still with the
+king and in the seeming enjoyment of his wonted favour. He at once took
+horse for London to face his foes, and James parted from him with his
+usual demonstrations of affection. "He would neither eat nor drink," he
+said, "till he saw him again." He was hardly gone when James added, "I
+shall never see him more." His ruin in fact was already settled. In a
+few days he was a prisoner with his wife in the Tower; the agents in the
+fatal plot were sent to trial and to the gallows; and in May 1616 the
+young Countess was herself brought before the Lord Steward's Court to
+avow her guilt. Somerset's daring nature made a more stubborn stand. He
+threatened the king with disclosures, we know not of what, and when
+arraigned denied utterly any share in the murder. All however was in
+vain; and he and the Countess were alike sentenced to death.
+
+If ever justice called for the rigorous execution of the law, it was in
+the case of Frances Howard. Not only was the Countess a murderess, but
+her crime passed far beyond the range of common murders. Girl as she was
+when it was wrought, she had shown the coolness and deliberation of a
+practised assassin in her lust to kill. Chance foiled her efforts again
+and again, but she persisted for months, she changed her agents and her
+modes of death, till her victim was slain. Nor was her crime without
+profit. She gained by it all she wanted. The secret of her adultery was
+hidden. There was no one to reveal the perjuries of her divorce. Her
+ambition and her passion were alike gratified. She became the bride of
+the man she desired. Her kindred filled the court. Her husband ruled the
+king. If crime be measured by its relentless purpose, if the guilt of
+crime be heightened by its amazing success, then no woman that ever
+stood in the dock was a greater criminal than the wife of Rochester. Nor
+was this all. The wretched agents in her crime were sent pitilessly to
+the gallows. The guilt of two of them was at least technically doubtful,
+but the doubt was not suffered to interfere with their punishment. Only
+in the one case where no doubt existed, in the case of the woman who had
+spurred and bribed these tools to their crime, was punishment spared. If
+life was left to such a criminal, the hanging of these meaner agents was
+a murder. But this was the course on which James had resolved, and he
+had resolved on it from the first. There was no more pressure on him.
+The rivals of Somerset had no need for his blood. The councillors and
+the new favourite required only his ruin, and James himself was content
+with being freed from a dependant who had risen to be his master. His
+pride probably shrank from the shame which the public death of such
+criminals on such a charge might bring on himself and his crown; his
+good-nature pleaded for pity, and the claims of justice never entered
+his head. Before the trial began he had resolved that neither should
+die, and the sentence of the Earl and the Countess was soon commuted
+into that of an easy confinement during a few years in the Tower.
+
+[Sidenote: Villiers.]
+
+The fall of Somerset seemed to restore the old system of rule; and for a
+short time the Council regained somewhat of its influence. But when the
+Queen gave her aid in Somerset's overthrow she warned Archbishop Abbot
+that it was only the investiture of a new favourite with Somerset's
+power. And a new favourite was already on the scene. It had only been
+possible indeed to overthrow the Earl by bringing a fresh face into the
+court. In the autumn of 1614 the son of a Leicestershire knight, George
+Villiers, presented himself to James. He was poor and friendless, but
+his personal beauty was remarkable, and it was by his beauty that he
+meant to make his way with the king. His hopes were soon realized.
+Queen, Primate, Councillors seized on the handsome youth to pit him
+against the favourite; in spite of Somerset's struggles he rose from
+post to post; and the Earl's ruin sealed his greatness. He became Master
+of the Horse; before the close of 1616 he was raised to the peerage as
+Viscount Villiers, and gifted with lands to the value of eighty thousand
+pounds. The next year he was Earl of Buckingham; in 1619 he was made
+Lord High Admiral; a marquisate and a dukedom raised him to the head of
+the English nobility. What was of far more import was the hold he gained
+upon the king. Those who had raised the handsome boy to greatness as a
+means of establishing their own power found themselves foiled. From the
+moment when Somerset entered the Tower, Villiers virtually took his
+place as Minister of State. The councillors soon found themselves again
+thrust aside. The influence of the new favourite surpassed that of his
+predecessor. The payment of bribes to him or marriage to his greedy
+kindred became the one road to political preferment. Resistance to his
+will was inevitably followed by dismissal from office. Even the highest
+and most powerful of the nobles were made to tremble at the nod of this
+young upstart.
+
+[Sidenote: His character.]
+
+"Never any man in any age, nor, I believe, in any country," says the
+astonished Clarendon in reviewing his strange career, "rose in so short
+a time to so much greatness of honour, power, or fortune, upon no other
+advantage or recommendation than of the beauty or gracefulness of his
+person." Such, no doubt, was the general explanation of his rise among
+men of the time; and it would have been well had the account been true.
+The follies and profusion of a handsome minion pass lightly over the
+surface of a nation's life. Unluckily Villiers owed his fortune to other
+qualities besides personal beauty. He was amazingly ignorant, his greed
+was insatiate, his pride mounted to sheer midsummer madness. But he had
+no inconsiderable abilities. He was quick of wit and resolute of
+purpose; he shrank from no labour; his boldness and self-confidence
+faced any undertaking which was needful for the king's service; he was
+devoted, heart and soul, to the Crown. Over James his hold was that of a
+vehement and fearless temper over a mind infinitely better informed,
+infinitely more thoughtful and reflective, but vague and hesitating
+amidst all its self-conceit, crowded with theories and fancies, and with
+a natural bent to the unpractical and unreal. To such a mind the
+shallow, brilliant adventurer came as a relief. James found all his wise
+follies and politic moonshine translated for him into positive fact. He
+leant more and more heavily on an adviser who never doubted and was
+always ready to act. He drew strength from his favourite's
+self-confidence. Rochester had bent before greatness and listened more
+than once, even in the hour of his triumph, to the counsels of wiser
+men. But on the conceit of Villiers the warnings of Abbot, the counsels
+of Bacon, were lavished in vain. He saw no course but his own; and the
+showy, audacious temper of the man made that course always a showy and
+audacious one. It was this that made the choice of the new favourite
+more memorable than the choice of Carr. At a moment when conciliation
+and concession were most needed on the part of the Crown, the character
+of Villiers made concession and conciliation impossible. To James his
+new adviser seemed the weapon he wanted to smite with trenchant edge the
+resistance of the realm. He never dreamed that the haughty young
+favourite, on whose neck he loved to loll, and whose cheek he slobbered
+with kisses, was to drag down in his fatal career the throne of the
+Stuarts.
+
+[Sidenote: The Spanish marriage.]
+
+As yet the temper of Villiers was as little known to the country as to
+the king. But the setting up of a new favourite on the ruin of the old
+had a significance which no Englishman could miss. It proved beyond
+question that the system of personal rule which was embodied in these
+dependent ministers was no passing caprice, but the settled purpose of
+the king. And never had such immense results hung on his resolve. Great
+as was the importance of the struggle at home, it was for a while to be
+utterly overshadowed by the greatness of the struggle which was opening
+abroad. The dangers which Cecil had foreseen in Germany were fast
+drawing to a head. Though he had failed to put England in a position to
+meet them, the dying statesman remained true to his policy. In 1612 he
+brought about a marriage between the king's daughter, Elizabeth, and the
+heir of the Elector Palatine, who was the leading prince in the
+Protestant Union. Such a marriage was a pledge that England would not
+tamely stand by if the Union was attacked; while the popularity of the
+match showed how keenly England was watching the dangers of German
+Protestantism, and how ready it was to defend it. But the step was
+hardly taken when Cecil's death left James free to pursue a policy of
+his own. The king was as anxious as his minister to prevent an outbreak
+of strife; and his daughter's bridal gave him a personal interest in the
+question. But he was far from believing with Cecil that the support of
+England was necessary for effective action. On the contrary, his quick,
+shallow intelligence held that it had found a way by which the Crown
+might at once exert weight abroad and be rendered independent of the
+nation at home. This was by a joint action with Spain. Weakened as were
+the resources of Spain by her struggle in the Netherlands, she was known
+to be averse from the opening of new troubles in Germany; and James
+might fairly reckon on her union with him in the work of peace. Her
+influence with the German branch of the House of Austria, as well as the
+weight her opinion had with every Catholic power, made her efforts even
+more important than those of James with the Calvinists. And that such a
+union could be brought about the king never doubted. His son was growing
+to manhood; and for years Spain had been luring James to a closer
+friendship by hints of the Prince's marriage with an Infanta. Such a
+match would not only gratify the pride of a sovereign who in his
+earlier days in his little kingdom had been overawed by the great
+Catholic monarchy, and on whose imagination it still exercised a spell,
+but it would proclaim to the world the union of the powers in the work
+of peace, while it provided James with the means of action. For poor as
+Spain really was, she was still looked upon as the richest state in the
+world; and the king believed that the bride would bring with her a dowry
+of some half-a-million. Such a dowry would set him free from the need of
+appealing to his Parliament, and give him the means of acting
+energetically on the Rhine.
+
+[Sidenote: The policy of Spain.]
+
+That there were difficulties in the way of such a policy, that Spain
+would demand concessions to the English Catholics, that the marriage
+would give England a Catholic queen, that the future heir of its crown
+must be trained by a Catholic mother, above all that the crown would be
+parted by plans such as these yet more widely from the sympathy of the
+nation, James could not but know. What he might have known as clearly,
+had he been a wise man instead of a merely clever man, was that, however
+such a bargain might suit himself, it was hardly likely to suit Spain.
+Spain was asked in effect to supply a bankrupt king with the means of
+figuring as the protector of Protestantism in Germany, while the only
+consideration offered to her was the hand of Prince Charles. But it
+never occurred to James to look at his schemes in any other light than
+his own. On the dissolution of the Parliament of 1614 he addressed a
+proposal of marriage to the Spanish court. Whatever was its ultimate
+purpose, Spain was careful to feed hopes which secured, so long as they
+lasted, better treatment for the Catholics, and which might be used to
+hold James from any practical action on behalf of the Protestants in
+Germany. Her cordiality increased as she saw, in spite of her protests,
+the crisis approaching. One member of the Austrian house, Ferdinand, had
+openly proclaimed and carried out his purpose of forcibly suppressing
+heresy in the countries he ruled, the Tyrol, Carinthia, Carniola, and
+Styria; and his succession to the childless Matthias in the rest of the
+Austrian dominions would infallibly be followed by a similar repression.
+To the Protestants of the Duchy, of Bohemia, of Hungary, therefore, the
+accession of Ferdinand meant either utter ruin or civil war, and a civil
+war would spread like wildfire along the Danube to the Rhine. But
+Matthias was resolved on bringing about the recognition of Ferdinand as
+his successor; and Spain saw that the time was come for effectually
+fettering James. If troubles must arise, religion and policy at once
+dictated the use which Spain would have to make of them. She could not
+support heretics, and she had very good reasons for supporting their
+foes. The great aim of her statesmen was to hold what was left of the
+Low Countries against either France or the Dutch, and now that she had
+lost the command of the sea, the road overland from her Italian
+dominions along the Rhine through Franche Comté to the Netherlands was
+absolutely needful for this purpose. But this road led through the
+Palatinate; and if war was to break out Spain must either secure the
+Palatinate for herself or for some Catholic prince on whose good-will
+she could rely. That the Dutch would oppose such a scheme was
+inevitable; but James alone could give fresh strength to the Dutch; and
+James could be duped into inaction by playing with his schemes for a
+marriage with the Infanta. In 1617 therefore negotiations for this
+purpose were formally opened between the courts of London and Madrid.
+
+[Sidenote: Ralegh's death.]
+
+Anger and alarm spread through England as the nation learned that James
+aimed at placing a Catholic queen upon its throne. Even at the court
+itself the cooler heads of statesmen were troubled by this disclosure of
+the king's projects. The old tradition of Cecil's policy lingered among
+a powerful party which had its representatives among the royal
+ministers; and powerless as these were to influence the king's course,
+they still believed they could impede it. If by any means war could be
+stirred up between England and Spain the marriage-treaty would fall to
+ruin, and James be forced into union with the Protestants abroad and
+into some reconciliation with the Parliament at home. The wild project
+by which they strove to bring war about may have sprung from a brain
+more inventive than their own. Of the great statesmen and warriors of
+Elizabeth's day one only remained. At the opening of the new reign Sir
+Walter Ralegh had been convicted on a charge of treason; but though
+unpardoned the sentence was never carried out, and he had remained ever
+since a prisoner in the Tower. As years went by the New World, where he
+had founded Virginia and where he had gleaned news of a Golden City,
+threw more and more a spell over his imagination; and at this moment he
+disclosed to James his knowledge of a gold-mine on the Oronoco, and
+prayed that he might sail thither and work its treasures for the king.
+No Spanish settlement, he said, had been made there; and like the rest
+of the Elizabethans he took no heed of the Spanish claims to all lands
+in America, whether settled or no. The king was tempted by the bait of
+gold; but he had no mind to be tricked out of his friendship with Spain;
+he exacted a pledge against any attack on Spanish territory, and told
+Ralegh that the shedding of Spanish blood would cost him his head. The
+threat told little on a man who had risked his head again and again; who
+believed in the tale he told; and who knew that if war could be brought
+about between England and Spain a new career was open to him. He found
+the coast occupied by Spanish troops; and while evading direct orders to
+attack, he sent his men up the country. They plundered a Spanish town,
+found no gold-mine, and soon came broken and defeated back. Ralegh's son
+had fallen in the struggle; but, heart-broken as he was by the loss and
+disappointment, the natural daring of the man saw a fresh resource. He
+proposed to seize the Spanish treasure ships as he returned, to sail
+with their gold to England, and like Drake to turn the heads of nation
+and king by the immense spoil. But the temper of the buccaneers was now
+strange to English seamen; his men would not follow him; and he was
+brought home to face his doom. James at once put his old sentence in
+force; and the death of Ralegh on the scaffold atoned for the affront to
+Spain.
+
+[Sidenote: The troubles in Bohemia.]
+
+The failure of Ralegh came at a critical moment in German history. In
+1617, while he was traversing the Southern seas, Ferdinand was presented
+by Matthias to the Diet of Bohemia, and acknowledged by it as successor
+to that kingdom. As had been foreseen, he at once began the course of
+forcible suppression of Protestantism which had been successful in his
+other dominions. But the Bohemian nobles were not men to give up their
+faith without a fight for it; and in May 1618 they rose in revolt, flung
+Ferdinand's deputies out of the window of the palace at Prague, and
+called the country to arms. The long-dreaded crisis had come for
+Germany; but, as if with a foresight of the awful sufferings that the
+struggle was to bring, the Germans strove to look on it as a local
+revolt. The Lutheran princes longed only "to put the fire out"; the
+Calvinistic Union refused aid to the Bohemians; the Catholic League
+remained motionless. What partly accounted for the inaction of the
+Protestants was the ability of the Bohemians to hold their own. They
+were a match for all Ferdinand's efforts; through autumn and winter they
+held him easily at bay. In the spring of 1619 they even marched upon
+Vienna and all but surprised their enemy within his capital. But at this
+juncture the death of Matthias changed the face of affairs. Ferdinand
+became master of the whole Austrian heritage in Germany, and he offered
+himself as candidate for the vacant Imperial crown. Union among the
+Protestants might have hindered his accession, and with it the terrible
+strife which he was to bring upon the Empire. But an insane quarrel
+between Lutherans and Calvinists paralyzed their efforts; and in August
+1619 Ferdinand became Emperor. Bohemia knew that its strength was
+insufficient to check a foe such as this; and two days before his formal
+election to the Empire its nobles declared the realm vacant, and chose
+Frederick, the young Elector-Palatine, as their king.
+
+[Sidenote: Outbreak of the Thirty Years War.]
+
+Frederick accepted the crown; but he was no sooner enthroned at Prague
+than the Bohemians saw themselves foiled in the hopes which had
+dictated their choice. They had trusted that Frederick's election would
+secure them support from the Calvinist Union, of which he was the
+leading member, and from James, whose daughter was his wife. But support
+from the Union was cut off by the jealousy of the French Government,
+which saw with suspicion the upgrowth of a great Calvinistic power,
+stretching from Bohemia to its own frontier, and pushing its influence
+through its relations with the Huguenot party into the very heart of
+France. James on the other hand was bitterly angered at Frederick's
+action. He could not recognize the right of subjects to depose a prince,
+or support Bohemia in what he looked on as revolt, or Frederick in what
+he believed to be the usurpation of a crown. By envoy after envoy he
+called on his son-in-law to lay down his new royalty, and to return to
+the Palatinate. His refusal of aid to the Protestant Union helped the
+pressure of France in paralyzing its action, while he threatened war
+against Holland, the one power which was earnest in the Palatine's
+cause. It was in vain that in England both court and people were
+unanimous in a cry for war, or that Archbishop Abbot from his sick-bed
+implored James to strike one blow for Protestantism. James still called
+on Frederick to withdraw from Bohemia, and relied in such a case on the
+joint efforts of England and Spain for a re-establishment of peace. But
+no consent to his plans could be wrung from Frederick; and the spring of
+1620 saw Spain ready to throw aside the mask. The time had come for
+securing her road to the Netherlands, as well as for taking her old
+stand as a champion of Catholicism. Rumours of her purpose had already
+stolen over the Channel, and James was brought at last to suffer Sir
+Horace Vere to take some English volunteers to the Palatinate. But the
+succour came too late. Spinola, the Spanish general in the Low
+Countries, was ordered to march to the aid of the Emperor; and the
+famous Spanish battalions were soon moving up the Rhine. Their march
+turned the local struggle in Bohemia into a European war. The whole face
+of affairs was changed as by enchantment. The hesitation of the Union
+was ended by the needs of self-defence; but it could only free its hands
+for action against the Spaniards by signing a treaty of neutrality with
+the Catholic League. The treaty sealed the fate of Bohemia. It enabled
+the army of the League under Maximilian of Bavaria to march down the
+valley of the Danube; Austria was forced to submit unconditionally to
+Ferdinand; and in August, as Spinola reached the frontier of the
+Palatinate, the joint army of Ferdinand and the League prepared to enter
+Bohemia.
+
+[Sidenote: The Parliament of 1621.]
+
+On James the news of these events burst like a thunderbolt. He had been
+duped; and for the moment he bent before the burst of popular fury
+which the danger to German Protestantism called forth throughout the
+land. The cry for a Parliament, the necessary prelude to a war,
+overpowered the king's secret resistance; and the Houses were again
+called together. But before they could meet the game of Protestantism
+was lost. Spinola beat the troops of the Union back upon Worms, and
+occupied with ease the bulk of the Palatinate. On the 8th of November
+the army of the League forced Frederick to battle before the walls of
+Prague; and before the day was over he was galloping off, a fugitive, to
+North Germany. Such was the news that met the Houses on their assembly
+at Westminster in January 1621. The instinct of every Englishman told
+him that matters had now passed beyond the range of mediation or
+diplomacy. Armies were moving, fierce passions were aroused, schemes of
+vast ambition and disturbance were disclosing themselves; and at such a
+moment the only intervention possible was an intervention of the sword.
+The German princes called on James to send them an army. "The business
+is gone too far to be redressed with words only," said the Danish king,
+who was prepared to help them. "I thank God we hope, with the help of
+his Majesty of Great Britain and the rest of our friends, to give unto
+the Count Palatine good conditions. If ever we are to do any good for
+the liberty of Germany and religion now is the time." But this appeal
+met offers of "words only" and Denmark withdrew from the strife in
+despair. James in fact was as confident in his diplomatic efforts as
+ever; but even he saw at last that they needed the backing of some sort
+of armed force, and it was to procure this backing that he called for
+supplies from the Parliament.
+
+[Sidenote: Impeachment of the monopolists.]
+
+The Commons were bitterly chagrined. They had come together, trusting
+that their assembly meant such an attitude on the part of the Crown as
+would have rallied the Protestants of Germany round England, and have
+aided the enterprise of the Dane. Above all they hoped for war with the
+power which had at once turned the strife to its own profit, whose
+appearance in the Palatinate had broken the strength of German
+Protestantism, and set the League free to crush Frederick at Prague.
+They found only demands for supplies, and a persistence in the old
+efforts to patch up a peace. Fresh envoys were now labouring to argue
+the Emperor into forgiveness of Frederick, and to argue the Spaniards
+into an evacuation of Frederick's dominions. With such aims not only was
+no war against the Spaniard to be thought of, but his good-will must be
+sought by granting permission for the export of arms from England to
+Spain. The Commons could only show their distrust of such a policy by a
+small vote of supplies and refusal of further aid in the future. But if
+their resentment could find no field in foreign affairs, it found a
+field at home. The most crying constitutional grievance arose from the
+revival of monopolies, in spite of the pledge of Elizabeth to suppress
+them. To the Crown they brought little profit; but they gratified the
+king by their extension of the sphere of his prerogative, and they put
+money into the pockets of his greedy dependants. A parliamentary right
+which had slept ever since the reign of Henry the Sixth, the right of
+the Lower House to impeach great offenders at the bar of the Lords, was
+revived against the monopolists; and James was driven by the general
+indignation to leave them to their fate. But the practice of monopolies
+was only one sign of the corruption of the court. Sales of peerages,
+sales of high offices of State, had raised a general disgust; and this
+disgust showed itself in the impeachment of the highest among the
+officers of State.
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of Bacon.]
+
+At the accession of James the rays of royal favour, so long looked for
+in vain, had broken slowly upon Francis Bacon. He became successively
+Solicitor and Attorney-General; the year of Shakspere's death saw him
+called to the Privy Council; he verified Elizabeth's prediction by
+becoming Lord Keeper. At last the goal of his ambition was reached. He
+had attached himself to the rising fortunes of Buckingham, and in 1618
+the favour of Buckingham made him Lord Chancellor. He was raised to the
+peerage as Baron Verulam, and created, at a later time, Viscount St.
+Albans. But the nobler dreams for which these meaner honours had been
+sought escaped Bacon's grasp. His projects still remained projects,
+while to retain his hold on office he was stooping to a miserable
+compliance with the worst excesses of Buckingham and his master. The
+years during which he held the Chancellorship were, in fact, the most
+disgraceful years of a disgraceful reign. They saw the execution of
+Ralegh, the sacrifice of the Palatinate, the exaction of benevolences,
+the multiplication of monopolies, the supremacy of Buckingham. Against
+none of the acts of folly and wickedness which distinguished James's
+government did Bacon do more than protest; in some of the worst, and
+above all in the attempt to coerce the judges into prostrating the law
+at the king's feet, he took a personal part. But even his protests were
+too much for the young favourite, who regarded him as the mere creature
+of his will. It was in vain that Bacon flung himself on the Duke's
+mercy, and begged him to pardon a single instance of opposition to his
+caprice. A Parliament was impending, and Buckingham resolved to avert
+from himself the storm which was gathering by sacrificing to it his
+meaner dependants.
+
+To ordinary eyes the Chancellor was at the summit of human success.
+Jonson had just sung of him as one "whose even thread the Fates spin
+round and full out of their choicest and their whitest wool" when the
+storm burst. The Commons charged Bacon with corruption in the exercise
+of his office. It had been customary among Chancellors to receive gifts
+from successful suitors after their suit was ended. Bacon, it is
+certain, had taken such gifts from men whose suits were still unsettled;
+and though his judgement may have been unaffected by them, the fact of
+their reception left him with no valid defence. He at once pleaded
+guilty to the charge. "I do plainly and ingenuously confess that I am
+guilty of corruption, and do renounce all defence. I beseech your
+Lordships," he added, "to be merciful to a broken reed." Though the
+heavy fine laid on him was remitted by the Crown, he was deprived of the
+Great Seal and declared incapable of holding office in the State or
+sitting in Parliament. Fortunately for his after fame Bacon's life was
+not to close in this cloud of shame. His fall restored him to that
+position of real greatness from which his ambition had so long torn him
+away. "My conceit of his person," says Ben Jonson, "was never increased
+towards him by his place or honours. But I have and do reverence him for
+his greatness that was only proper to himself, in that he seemed to me
+ever by his work one of the greatest men, and most worthy of admiration,
+that had been in many ages. In his adversity I ever prayed that God
+would give him strength; for greatness he could not want." Bacon's
+intellectual activity was never more conspicuous than in the last four
+years of his life. He began a digest of the laws and a history of
+England under the Tudors, revised and expanded his essays, and dictated
+a jest-book. He had presented "Novum Organum" to James in the year
+before his fall; in the year after it he produced his "Natural and
+Experimental History." Meanwhile he busied himself with experiments in
+physics which might carry out the principles he was laying down in these
+works; and it was while studying the effect of cold in preventing animal
+putrefaction that he stopped his coach to stuff a fowl with snow and
+caught the fever which ended in his death.
+
+[Sidenote: James clings to Spain.]
+
+James was too shrewd to mistake the importance of Bacon's impeachment;
+but the hostility of Buckingham to the Chancellor, and Bacon's own
+confession of his guilt, made it difficult to resist his condemnation.
+Energetic too as its measures were against corruption and monopolists,
+the Parliament respected scrupulously the king's prejudices in other
+matters; and even when checked by an adjournment, resolved unanimously
+to support him in any earnest effort for the Protestant cause. A warlike
+speech from a member at the close of the session in June roused an
+enthusiasm which recalled the days of Elizabeth. The Commons answered
+the appeal by a unanimous vote, "lifting their hats as high as they
+could hold them," that for the recovery of the Palatinate they would
+adventure their fortunes, their estates, and their lives. "Rather this
+declaration," cried a leader of the country party when it was read by
+the Speaker, "than ten thousand men already on the march." For the
+moment indeed the energetic declaration seemed to give vigour to the
+royal policy. James had aimed throughout at the restitution of Bohemia
+to Ferdinand, and at inducing the Emperor, through the mediation of
+Spain, to abstain from any retaliation on the Palatinate. He now freed
+himself for a moment from the trammels of diplomacy, and enforced a
+cessation of the attack on his son-in-law's dominions by a threat of
+war. The suspension of arms lasted through the summer of 1621; but
+threats could do no more. Frederick still refused to make the
+concessions which James pressed on him, and the army of the League
+advancing from Bohemia drove the forces of the Elector out of the upper
+or eastern portion of the Palatinate. Again the general restoration
+which James was designing had been thrown further back than ever by a
+Catholic advance; but the king had no mind to take up the challenge. He
+was only driven the more on his old policy of mediation through the aid
+of Spain. An end was put to all appearance of hostilities. The
+negotiations for the marriage with the Infanta, which had never ceased,
+were pressed more busily. Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, who had
+become all-powerful at the English Court, was assured that no effectual
+aid should be sent to the Palatinate. The English fleet, which was
+cruising by way of menace off the Spanish coast, was called home. The
+king dismissed those of his ministers who still opposed a Spanish
+policy; and threatened on trivial pretexts a war with the Dutch, the one
+great Protestant power that remained in alliance with England, and was
+ready to back the Elector.
+
+[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Parliament.]
+
+But he had still to reckon with his Parliament; and the first act of the
+Parliament on its reassembling in November was to demand a declaration
+of war with Spain. The instinct of the nation was wiser than the
+statecraft of the king. Ruined and enfeebled as she really was, Spain to
+the world at large still seemed the champion of Catholicism. It was the
+entry of her troops into the Palatinate which had widened the local war
+in Bohemia into a struggle for the suppression of Protestantism along
+the Rhine; above all it was Spanish influence, and the hopes held out of
+a marriage of his son with a Spanish Infanta, which were luring the king
+into his fatal dependence on the great enemy of the Protestant cause.
+But the Commons went further than a demand for war. It was impossible
+any longer to avoid a matter so perilous to English interests, and in
+their petition the Houses coupled with their demands for war the demand
+of a Protestant marriage for their future king. Experience proved in
+later years how dangerous it was for English freedom that the heir to
+the Crown should be brought up under a Catholic mother; but James was
+beside himself at the presumption of the Commons in dealing with
+mysteries of State. "Bring stools for the Ambassadors," he cried in
+bitter irony as their committee appeared before him. He refused the
+petition, forbade any further discussion of State policy, and threatened
+the speakers with the Tower. "Let us resort to our prayers," a member
+said calmly as the king's letter was read, "and then consider of this
+great business." The temper of the House was seen in a Protestation with
+which it met the royal command to abstain from discussion. It resolved
+"That the liberties, franchises, privileges, and jurisdictions of
+Parliament are the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of
+the subjects of England; and that the arduous and urgent affairs
+concerning the king, State, and defence of the realm, and of the Church
+of England, and the making and maintenance of laws, and redress of
+grievances, which daily happen within this realm, are proper subjects
+and matter of council and debate in Parliament. And that in the handling
+and proceeding of those businesses every member of the House hath, and
+of right ought to have, freedom of speech to propound, treat, reason,
+and bring to conclusion the same." The king answered the Protestation
+by a characteristic outrage. He sent for the Journals of the House, and
+with his own hand tore out the pages which contained it. "I will
+govern," he said, "according to the common weal, but not according to
+the common will." A few days after, on the nineteenth of December, he
+dissolved the Parliament.
+
+[Sidenote: Spain holds back.]
+
+"It is the best thing that has happened in the interests of Spain and of
+the Catholic religion since Luther began preaching," wrote the Count of
+Gondomar to his master, in his joy that all danger of war had passed
+away. "I am ready to depart," Sir Henry Savile on the other hand
+murmured on his death-bed, "the rather that having lived in good times I
+foresee worse." In the obstinacy with which he clung to his Spanish
+policy James stood indeed absolutely alone; for not only the old
+nobility and the statesmen who preserved the tradition of the age of
+Elizabeth, but even his own ministers, with the exception of Buckingham
+and the Treasurer, Cranfield, were at one with the Commons in their
+distrust of Spain. But James persisted in his plans. By the levy of a
+fresh benevolence he was able to keep Vere's force on foot for a few
+months while his diplomacy was at work in Germany and at Madrid. The
+Palatinate indeed was lost in spite of his despatches; but he still
+trusted to bring about its restitution to the Elector through his
+influence with Spain. It was to secure this influence that he pressed
+for a closer union with the great Catholic power. What really bound him
+to such a foreign policy was his policy at home. If James cared for the
+restoration of the Palatinate, he cared more for the system of
+government he had carried out since 1610; and with that system, as he
+well knew, Parliaments were incompatible. But a policy of war would at
+once throw him on the support of Parliaments; and the experience of 1621
+had shown him at what a price that support must be bought. From war too,
+as from any policy which implied a decided course of action, the temper
+of James shrank. What he clung to was a co-operation with Spain in which
+the burden of enforcing peace on the German disputants should fall
+exclusively on that power. Of such a co-operation the marriage of his
+son Charles with the Infanta, which had so long been held out as a lure
+to his vanity, was to be the sign. But the more James pressed for this
+consummation of his projects, the more Spain held back. She too was
+willing to co-operate with James so long as such a co-operation answered
+her own purposes. Her statesmen had not favoured the war in Germany;
+even now they were willing to bring it to a close by the restoration of
+the Palatinate. But they would not abandon the advantages which the war
+had given to Catholicism; and their plan was to restore the Palatinate
+not to Frederick but to his son, and to bring up that son as a Catholic
+at Vienna. Of such a simple restoration of the religious and political
+balance in the Empire as James was contemplating, the statesmen of
+Madrid thought no more than they thought of carrying out the scheme of a
+marriage with his son. Spain had already gained all she wanted from the
+marriage-negotiations. They had held James from action; they had now
+made action even less possible by supplying a fresh ground of quarrel
+with the House of Commons. Had the match been likely to secure the
+conversion of England, or even a thorough toleration for Catholics, it
+might have been possible to consent to the union of a Spanish princess
+with a heretic. But neither result seemed probable: and the Spanish
+Court saw no gain in such a union as would compensate it for the loss of
+the Palatinate or the half-million which James counted on as the dowry
+of the bride.
+
+[Sidenote: End of the Spanish marriage.]
+
+But the more Spain hung back the hotter grew the impatience of
+Buckingham and James. At last the young favourite proposed to force the
+Spaniard's hand by the appearance of Prince Charles himself at Madrid.
+To the wooer in person Buckingham believed Spain would not dare to
+refuse either Infanta or Palatinate. James was too shrewd to believe in
+such a delusion, but in spite of his opposition the Prince quitted
+England in disguise in 1623, and at the beginning of March he appeared
+with Buckingham at Madrid to claim his promised bride. It was in vain
+that the Spanish Court rose in its demands; for every new demand was met
+by fresh concessions on the part of England. The abrogation of the penal
+laws against the worship of Catholics in private houses, a Catholic
+education for the Prince's children, a Catholic household for the
+Infanta, the erection of a Catholic church for her at Court, to which
+access should be free for all comers, were stipulations no sooner asked
+than they were granted. "We are building a chapel to the devil," said
+James when the last condition was laid before him; but he swore to the
+treaty and forced his councillors to swear to it. The marriage, however,
+was no nearer than before. The one thing which would have made it
+possible was a conversion of Charles to Catholicism; and though the
+Prince listened silently to arguments on the subject he gave no sign of
+becoming a Catholic. The aim of the Spanish ministers was to break off
+the match without a quarrel. They could only throw themselves on a
+policy of delay, and with this view the court theologians decided that
+the Infanta must in any case stay in Spain for a year after its
+conclusion till the conditions were fully carried out. Against such a
+condition Charles remonstrated in vain. And meanwhile the influence of
+the new policy on the war in Germany was hard to see. The Catholic
+League and its army under the command of Count Tilly won triumph after
+triumph over their divided foes. The reduction of Heidelberg and
+Mannheim completed the conquest of the Palatinate, whose Elector fled
+helplessly to Holland, while his Electoral dignity was transferred by
+the Emperor to the Duke of Bavaria. But there was still no sign of the
+hoped-for intervention on the part of Spain. At last the pressure of
+Charles on the subject of the Palatinate brought about a disclosure of
+the secret of Spanish policy. "It is a maxim of state with us," the
+Count of Olivares confessed, as the Prince demanded an energetic
+interference in Germany, "that the King of Spain must never fight
+against the Emperor. We cannot employ our forces against the Emperor."
+"If you hold to that," replied the Prince, "there is an end of all."
+Quitting Madrid he found a fleet at Santander, and on the fifth of
+October he again landed with Buckingham on the shores of England.
+
+[Sidenote: Prince Charles.]
+
+His return was the signal for a burst of national joy. All London was
+alight with bonfires in her delight at the failure of the Spanish match,
+and of the collapse, humiliating as it was, of a policy which had so
+long trailed English honour at the chariot-wheels of Spain. War seemed
+at last inevitable; for not only did James's honour call for some effort
+to win back the Palatinate for his daughter's children, but the
+resentment of Charles and Buckingham was ready to bear down any
+reluctance of the king. From the moment of their return indeed the
+direction of English affairs passed out of the hands of James into those
+of the favourite and the Prince. Charles started on his task of
+government with the aid of a sudden burst of popularity. To those who
+were immediately about him the journey to Madrid had revealed the
+strange mixture of obstinacy and weakness in the Prince's character, the
+duplicity which lavished promises because it never purposed to be bound
+by any, the petty pride that subordinated every political consideration
+to personal vanity or personal pique. Charles had granted demand after
+demand till the very Spaniards lost faith in his concessions. With rage
+in his heart at the failure of his efforts, he had renewed his betrothal
+on the very eve of his departure only that he might insult the Infanta
+by its contemptuous withdrawal as soon as he was safe at home. But to
+England at large the baser features of his character were still unknown.
+The stately reserve, the personal dignity and decency of manners which
+distinguished the Prince, contrasted favourably with the gabble and
+indecorum of his father. The courtiers indeed who saw him in his youth
+would often pray God that "he might be in the right way when he was set;
+for if he were in the wrong he would prove the most wilful of any king
+that ever reigned." But the nation was willing to take his obstinacy for
+firmness; as it took the pique which inspired his course on the return
+from Spain for patriotism and for the promise of a nobler rule.
+
+[Sidenote: The Parliament of 1624.]
+
+At the back of Charles stood the favourite Buckingham. The policy of
+James had recoiled upon its author. In raising his favourites to the
+height of honour James had looked to being at last an independent king.
+He had broken with parliaments, he had done away with the old
+administrative forms of government, that his personal rule might act
+freely through these creatures of his will. And now that his policy had
+reached its end, his will was set aside more ruthlessly than ever by the
+very instrument he had created to carry it out. In his zeal to establish
+the greatness of the monarchy he had brought on the monarchy a
+humiliation such as it had never known. Church, or Baronage, or Commons
+had many times in our history forced a king to take their policy for his
+own; but never had a mere minister of the Crown been able to force his
+policy on a king. This was what Buckingham set himself to do. The
+national passion, the Prince's support, his own quick energy, bore down
+the hesitation and reluctance of James. The king still clung desperately
+to peace. He still shrank from parliaments. But Buckingham overrode
+every difficulty. In February 1624 James was forced to meet a
+Parliament, and to concede the point on which he had broken with the
+last by laying before it the whole question of the Spanish negotiation.
+Buckingham and the Prince gave their personal support to a demand of the
+Houses for a rupture of the treaties with Spain and a declaration of
+war. A subsidy was eagerly voted; and as if to mark a new departure in
+the policy of the Stuarts, the persecution of the Catholics, which had
+long been suspended out of deference to Spanish intervention, began with
+new vigour. The favourite gave a fresh pledge of his constitutional aims
+by consenting to a new attack on a minister of the Crown. The Lord
+Treasurer, Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, had done much by his management
+of the finances to put the royal revenues on a better footing. But he
+was the head of the Spanish party; and he still urged the king to cling
+to Spain and to peace. Buckingham and Charles therefore looked coldly on
+while he was impeached for corruption and dismissed from office.
+
+[Sidenote: Buckingham's plans.]
+
+Though James was swept along helplessly by the tide, his shrewdness saw
+clearly the turn that affairs were taking; and it was only by hard
+pressure that the favourite succeeded in wresting his consent to
+Cranfield's disgrace. "You are making a rod for your own back," said the
+king. But Buckingham and Charles persisted in their plans of war. That
+these were utterly different from the plans of the Parliament troubled
+them little. What money the Commons had granted, they had granted on
+condition that the war should be exclusively a war against Spain, and a
+war waged as exclusively by sea. Their good sense shrank from plunging
+into the tangled and intricate medley of religious and political
+jealousies which was turning Germany into a hell. What they saw to be
+possible was to aid German Protestantism by lifting off it the pressure
+of the armies of Spain. That Spain was most assailable on the sea the
+ministers at Madrid knew as well as the leaders of the Commons. What
+they dreaded was not a defeat in the Palatinate, but the cutting off of
+their fleets from the Indies and a war in that new world which they
+treasured as the fairest flower of their crown. A blockade of Cadiz or a
+capture of Hispaniola would have produced more effect at the Spanish
+council-board than a dozen English victories on the Rhine. But such a
+policy had little attraction for Buckingham. His flighty temper exulted
+in being the arbiter of Europe, in weaving fanciful alliances, in
+marshalling imaginary armies. A treaty was concluded with Holland, and
+negotiations set on foot with the Lutheran princes of North Germany, who
+had looked coolly on at the ruin of the Elector Palatine, but were
+scared at last into consciousness of their own danger. Yet more
+important negotiations were opened for an alliance with France. To
+restore the triple league of France, England, and Holland was to restore
+the system of Elizabeth. Such a league would in fact have been strong
+enough to hold in check the House of Austria and save German
+Protestantism, while it would have hindered France from promoting and
+profiting by German disunion, as it did under Richelieu. But, as of old,
+James could understand no alliance that rested on merely national
+interests. A dynastic union seemed to him the one sure basis for joint
+action; and the plan for a French alliance became a plan for marriage
+with a French princess.
+
+[Sidenote: The French marriage.]
+
+The plan suited the pride of Charles and of Buckingham. But the first
+whispers of it woke opposition in the Commons. They saw the danger of a
+Roman Catholic queen. They saw yet more keenly the danger of pledges of
+toleration given to a foreign government, pledges which would furnish it
+with continual pretexts for interfering in the civil government of the
+country. Such an interference would soon breed on either side a mood for
+war. Before making these grants therefore they had called for a promise
+that no such pledges should be given, and as a subsidy hung on his
+consent James had solemnly promised this. But it was soon found that
+France was as firm on this point as Spain; and that toleration for the
+Catholics was a necessary condition of any marriage-treaty. The pressure
+of Buckingham and Charles was again brought to bear upon the king. The
+promise was broken and the marriage-treaty was signed. Its difficulties
+were quick to disclose themselves. It was impossible to call Parliament
+again together at winter tide, while such perfidy was fresh; and the
+subsidies, which had been counted on, could not be asked for. But a
+hundred schemes were pushed busily on; and twelve thousand Englishmen
+were gathered under an adventurer, Count Mansfield, to march to the
+Rhine. They reached Holland only to find themselves without supplies and
+to die of famine and disease.
+
+[Sidenote: Death of James.]
+
+If the blow fell lightly on the temper of the favourite, it fell heavily
+on the king. James was already sinking to the grave, and in the March of
+1625 he died with the consciousness of failure. Even his sanguine temper
+was broken at last. He had struggled with the Parliament, and the
+Parliament was stronger than ever. He had broken with Puritanism, and
+England was growing more Puritan every day. He had claimed for the Crown
+authority such as it had never known, and the Commons had impeached and
+degraded his ministers. He had raised up dependants to carry out a
+purely personal rule, and it was a favourite who was now treading his
+will under foot. He had staked everything on his struggle with English
+freedom, and the victory of English freedom was well-nigh won. James had
+himself destroyed that enthusiasm of loyalty which had been the main
+strength of the Tudor throne. He had disenchanted his people of their
+blind faith in the monarchy by a policy both at home and abroad which
+ran counter to every national instinct. He had alienated alike the
+noble, the gentleman, and the trader. In his feverish desire for
+personal rule he had ruined the main bulwarks of the monarchy. He had
+destroyed the authority of the Council. He had accustomed men to think
+lightly of the ministers of the Crown, to see them browbeaten by
+favourites, and driven from office for corruption. He had degraded the
+judges and weakened the national reverence for their voice as an
+expression of law. He had turned the Church into a mere engine for
+carrying out the royal will. And meanwhile he had raised up in the very
+face of the throne a power which was strong enough to cope with it. He
+had quarrelled with and insulted the Houses as no English sovereign had
+ever done before; and all the while the authority he boasted of was
+passing without his being able to hinder it to the Parliament which he
+outraged. There was shrewdness as well as anger in his taunt at its
+"ambassadors." A power had at last risen up in the Commons with which
+the monarchy was to reckon. In spite of the king's petulant outbreaks
+Parliament had asserted with success its exclusive right of taxation. It
+had suppressed monopolies. It had reformed abuses in the courts of law.
+It had impeached and driven from office the highest ministers of the
+Crown. It had asserted its privilege of freely discussing all questions
+connected with the welfare of the realm. It had claimed to deal with
+the question of religion. It had even declared its will on the sacred
+"mystery" of foreign policy. The utter failure of the schemes of James
+at home can only be realized by comparing the attitude of the Houses at
+his death with their attitude during the last years of Elizabeth. Nor
+was his failure less abroad than at home. He had found England among the
+greatest of European powers. He had degraded her into a satellite of
+Spain. And now from a satellite he had dropped to the position of a
+dupe. In one plan alone could he believe himself successful. If his son
+had missed the hand of a Spanish Infanta, he had gained the hand of a
+daughter of France. But the one success of James was the most fatal of
+all his blunders; for in the marriage with Henrietta Maria lay the doom
+of his race. It was the fierce and despotic temper of the Frenchwoman
+that was to nerve Charles more than all to his fatal struggle against
+English liberty. It was her bigotry--as the Commons foresaw--that
+undermined the Protestantism of her sons. It was when the religious and
+the political temper of Henrietta mounted the throne in James the Second
+that the full import of the French marriage was seen in the downfall of
+the Stuarts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+CHARLES I. AND THE PARLIAMENT
+
+1625-1629
+
+
+[Sidenote: Charles the First.]
+
+Had Charles mounted the throne on his return from Spain his accession
+would have been welcomed by a passionate burst of enthusiasm. He had
+aired himself as a staunch Protestant who had withstood Catholic
+seductions, and had come to nerve his father to a policy at one with the
+interests of religion and with the national will. But the few months
+that had passed since the last session of Parliament had broken the
+spell of this heroic attitude. The real character of the part which
+Charles had played in Spain was gradually becoming known. It was seen
+that he had been as faithless to Protestantism as his revenge had made
+him faithless to the Infanta. Nor had he shown less perfidy in dealing
+with England itself. In common with his father, he had promised that his
+marriage with a princess of France should in no case be made conditional
+on the relaxation of the penal laws against the Catholics. It was
+suspected, and the suspicion was soon to be changed into certainty, that
+in spite of this promise such a relaxation had been stipulated, and that
+a foreign power had again been given the right of intermeddling in the
+civil affairs of the realm. The general distrust of the new king was
+intensified by the conduct of the war. In granting its subsidies the
+Parliament of 1624 had restricted them to the purposes of a naval war,
+and that a war with Spain. It had done this after discussing and
+rejecting the wider schemes of the favourite for an intervention of
+England by land in the war of the Palatinate. But the grants once made,
+Buckingham's plans had gone on without a check. Alliances had been
+formed, subsidies promised to Denmark, and twelve thousand men actually
+despatched to join the armies on the Rhine. It was plain that the policy
+of the Crown was to be as unswayed by the will of the nation as in the
+days of King James. What it was really to be swayed by was the
+self-sufficient incapacity of the young favourite.
+
+[Sidenote: The king's policy.]
+
+A few months of action had shown Buckingham to England as he really was,
+vain, flighty, ingenious, daring, a brilliant but shallow adventurer,
+without political wisdom or practical ability, as little of an
+administrator as of a statesman. While projects without number were
+seething and simmering in his restless brain, while leagues were being
+formed and armies levied on paper, the one practical effort of the new
+minister had ended in the starvation of thousands of Englishmen on the
+sands of Holland. If English policy was once more to become a real and
+serious thing, it was plain that the great need of the nation was the
+dismissal of Buckingham. But Charles clung to Buckingham more blindly
+than his father had done. The shy reserve, the slow stubborn temper of
+the new king found relief in the frank gaiety of the favourite, in his
+rapid suggestions, in the defiant daring with which he set aside all
+caution and opposition. James had looked on Buckingham as his pupil.
+Charles clung to him as his friend. Nor was the new king's policy likely
+to be more national in Church affairs than in affairs of state. The war
+had given a new impulse to religious enthusiasm. The patriotism of the
+Puritan was strengthening his bigotry. To the bulk of Englishmen a fight
+with Spain meant a fight with Catholicism; and the fervour against
+Catholicism without roused a corresponding fervour against Catholicism
+within the realm. To Protestant eyes every English Catholic seemed a
+traitor at home, a traitor who must be watched and guarded against as
+the most dangerous of foes. A Protestant who leant towards Catholic
+usage or Catholic dogma was yet more formidable. To him men felt as
+towards a secret traitor in their own ranks. But it was to men with
+such leanings that Charles seemed disposed to show favour. Bishop Laud
+was recognized as the centre of that varied opposition to Puritanism,
+whose members were loosely grouped under the name of Arminians; and Laud
+now became the king's adviser in ecclesiastical matters. With Laud at
+its head the new party grew in boldness as well as numbers. It naturally
+sought for shelter for its religious opinions by exalting the power of
+the Crown; and its union of political error with theological heresy
+seemed to the Puritan to be at last proclaimed to the world when
+Montague, a court chaplain, ventured to slight the Reformed Churches of
+the Continent in favour of the Church of Rome, and to advocate in his
+sermon the Real Presence in the Sacrament and a divine right in kings.
+
+[Sidenote: The Parliament of 1625.]
+
+The Houses had no sooner met in the May of 1625 than their temper in
+religious matters was clear to every observer. "Whatever mention does
+break forth of the fears and dangers in religion and the increase of
+Popery," wrote a member who was noting the proceedings of the Commons,
+"their affections are much stirred." The first act of the Lower House
+was to summon Montague to its bar and to commit him to prison. In their
+grants to the Crown they showed no ill-will indeed, but they showed
+caution. They suspected that the pledge of making no religious
+concessions to France had been broken. They knew that the conditions on
+which the last subsidy had been granted had been contemptuously set
+aside. In his request for a fresh grant Charles showed the same purpose
+of carrying out his own policy without any regard for the national will
+by simply asking for supplies for the war without naming a sum or giving
+any indication of what war it was to support. The reply of the Commons
+was to grant a hundred and forty thousand pounds. A million would hardly
+cover the king's engagements, and Charles was bitterly angered. He was
+angered yet more by the delay in granting the permanent revenue of the
+Crown. The Commons had no wish to refuse their grant of tonnage and
+poundage, or the main customs duties, which had ever since Edward the
+Fourth's day been granted to each new sovereign for his life. But the
+additional impositions laid by James on these duties required further
+consideration, and to give time for a due arrangement of this vexed
+question the grant of the customs was made for a year only. But the
+limitation at once woke the jealousy of Charles. He looked on it as a
+restriction of the rights of the Crown, refused to accept the grant on
+such a condition, and adjourned the Houses. When they met again at
+Oxford it was in a sterner temper, for Charles had shown his defiance of
+Parliament by promoting Montague, who had been released on bond, to a
+royal chaplaincy, and by levying the disputed customs without authority
+of law. "England," cried Sir Robert Phelips, "is the last monarchy that
+yet retains her liberties. Let them not perish now." But the Commons had
+no sooner announced their resolve to consider public grievances before
+entering on other business than they were met in August by a
+dissolution.
+
+[Sidenote: The descent on Cadiz.]
+
+To the shallow temper of Buckingham the cautious firmness of the Commons
+seemed simply the natural discontent which follows on ill success. If he
+dissolved the Houses, it was in the full belief that their
+constitutional demands could be lulled by a military triumph. His hands
+were no sooner free than he sailed for the Hague to conclude a general
+alliance against the House of Austria, while a fleet of ninety vessels
+and ten thousand soldiers left Plymouth in October for the coast of
+Spain. But these vast projects broke down before Buckingham's
+administrative incapacity. The plan of alliance proved fruitless. After
+an idle descent on Cadiz the Spanish expedition returned broken with
+mutiny and disease; and the enormous debt which had been incurred in its
+equipment forced the favourite to advise a new summons of the Houses in
+the coming year. But he was keenly alive to the peril in which his
+failure had plunged him, and to a coalition which had been formed
+between his rivals at Court and the leaders of the last Parliament. The
+older nobles looked to his ruin to restore the power of the Council; and
+in this the leaders of the Commons went with them. Buckingham's
+reckless daring led him to anticipate the danger by a series of blows
+which should strike terror into his opponents. The Councillors were
+humbled by the committal of Lord Arundel to the Tower. Sir Robert
+Phelips, Coke, and four other leading patriots were made sheriffs of
+their counties, and thus prevented from sitting in the coming
+Parliament.
+
+[Sidenote: Eliot.]
+
+But their exclusion only left the field free for a more terrible foe. If
+Hampden and Pym are the great figures which embody the later national
+resistance, the earlier struggle for Parliamentary liberty centres in
+the figure of Sir John Eliot. Of an old family which had settled under
+Elizabeth near the fishing hamlet of St. Germans, and whose stately
+mansion gives its name of Port Eliot to a little town on the Tamar, he
+had risen to the post of Vice-Admiral of Devonshire under the patronage
+of Buckingham, and had seen his activity in the suppression of piracy in
+the Channel rewarded by an unjust imprisonment. He was now in the first
+vigour of manhood, with a mind exquisitely cultivated and familiar with
+the poetry and learning of his day, a nature singularly lofty and
+devout, a fearless and vehement temper. There was a hot impulsive
+element in his nature which showed itself in youth in his drawing sword
+on a neighbour who denounced him to his father, and which in later years
+gave its characteristic fire to his eloquence. But his intellect was as
+clear and cool as his temper was ardent. What he believed in was the
+English Parliament. He saw in it the collective wisdom of the realm; and
+in that wisdom he put a firmer trust than in the statecraft of kings. In
+the general enthusiasm which followed on the failure of the Spanish
+marriage, Eliot had stood almost alone in pressing for a recognition of
+the rights of Parliament as a preliminary to any real reconciliation
+with the Crown. He fixed, from the very outset of his career, on the
+responsibility of the royal ministers to Parliament as the one critical
+point for English liberty.
+
+[Sidenote: The Parliament of 1626.]
+
+It was to enforce the demand of this that he availed himself of
+Buckingham's sacrifice of the Treasurer, Cranfield, to the resentment of
+the Commons. "The greater the delinquent," he urged, "the greater the
+delict. They are a happy thing, great men and officers, if they be good,
+and one of the greatest blessings of the land: but power converted into
+evil is the greatest curse that can befall it." But the Parliament of
+1626 had hardly met when Eliot came to the front to threaten a greater
+criminal than Cranfield. So menacing were his words, as he called for an
+enquiry into the failure before Cadiz, that Charles himself stooped to
+answer threat with threat. "I see," he wrote to the House, "you
+especially aim at the Duke of Buckingham. I must let you know that I
+will not allow any of my servants to be questioned among you, much less
+such as are of eminent place and near to me." A more direct attack on a
+right already acknowledged in the impeachment of Bacon and Cranfield
+could hardly be imagined, but Eliot refused to move from his
+constitutional ground. The king was by law irresponsible, he "could do
+no wrong." If the country therefore was to be saved from a pure
+despotism, it must be by enforcing the responsibility of the ministers
+who counselled and executed his acts. Eliot persisted in denouncing
+Buckingham's incompetence and corruption, and the Commons ordered the
+subsidy which the Crown had demanded to be brought in "when we shall
+have presented our grievances, and received his Majesty's answer
+thereto." Charles summoned them to Whitehall, and commanded them to
+cancel the condition. He would grant them "liberty of counsel, but not
+of control"; and he closed the interview with a significant threat.
+"Remember," he said, "that Parliaments are altogether in my power for
+their calling, sitting, and dissolution: and therefore, as I find the
+fruits of them to be good or evil, they are to continue or not to be."
+But the will of the Commons was as resolute as the will of the king.
+Buckingham's impeachment was voted and carried to the Lords.
+
+[Sidenote: Impeachment of Buckingham.]
+
+The favourite took his seat as a peer to listen to the charge with so
+insolent an air of contempt that one of the managers appointed by the
+Commons to conduct it turned sharply on him. "Do you jeer, my Lord!"
+said Sir Dudley Digges. "I can show you when a greater man than your
+Lordship--as high as you in place and power, and as deep in the king's
+favour--has been hanged for as small a crime as these articles contain."
+But his arrogance raised a more terrible foe than Sir Dudley Digges. The
+"proud carriage" of the Duke provoked an attack from Eliot which marks a
+new era in Parliamentary speech. From the first the vehemence and
+passion of his words had contrasted with the grave, colourless reasoning
+of older speakers. His opponents complained that Eliot aimed to "stir up
+affections." The quick emphatic sentences he substituted for the
+cumbrous periods of the day, his rapid argument, his vivacious and
+caustic allusions, his passionate appeals, his fearless invective,
+struck a new note in English eloquence. The frivolous ostentation of
+Buckingham, his very figure blazing with jewels and gold, gave point to
+the fierce attack. "He has broken those nerves and sinews of our land,
+the stores and treasures of the king. There needs no search for it. It
+is too visible. His profuse expenses, his superfluous feasts, his
+magnificent buildings, his riots, his excesses, what are they but the
+visible evidences of an express exhausting of the state, a chronicle of
+the immensity of his waste of the revenues of the Crown?" With the same
+terrible directness Eliot reviewed the Duke's greed and corruption, his
+insatiate ambition, his seizure of all public authority, his neglect of
+every public duty, his abuse for selfish ends of the powers he had
+accumulated. "The pleasure of his Majesty, his known directions, his
+public acts, his acts of council, the decrees of courts--all must be
+made inferior to this man's will. No right, no interest may withstand
+him. Through the power of state and justice he has dared ever to strike
+at his own ends." "My Lords," he ended, after a vivid parallel between
+Buckingham and Sejanus, "you see the man! What have been his actions,
+what he is like, you know! I leave him to your judgement. This only is
+conceived by us, the knights, citizens, and burgesses of the Commons
+House of Parliament, that by him came all our evils, in him we find the
+causes, and on him must be the remedies! Pereat qui perdere cuncta
+festinat! Opprimatur ne omnes opprimat!"
+
+[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Parliament.]
+
+In calling for Buckingham's removal the Houses were but exercising a
+right or a duty which was inherent in their very character of
+counsellors of the Crown. There had never been a time from the earliest
+days of the English Parliament when it had not called for the dismissal
+of evil advisers. What had in older time been done by risings of the
+baronage had been done since the Houses gathered at Westminster by their
+protests as representatives of the realm. They were far from having
+dreamed as yet of the right which Parliament exercises to-day of naming
+the royal ministers, nor had they any wish to meddle with the common
+administration of government. It was only in exceptional instances of
+evil counsel, when some favourite like Buckingham broke the union of the
+nation and the king, that they demanded a change. To Charles however
+their demand seemed a claim to usurp his sovereignty. His reply was as
+fierce and sudden as the attack of Eliot. He hurried to the House of
+Peers to avow as his own the deeds with which Buckingham was charged;
+while Eliot and Digges were called from their seats and committed
+prisoners to the Tower. The Commons however refused to proceed with
+public business till their members were restored; and after a ten-days'
+struggle Eliot was released. But his release was only a prelude to the
+close of the Parliament. "Not one moment," the king replied to the
+prayer of his Council for delay; and a final remonstrance in which the
+Commons begged him to dismiss Buckingham from his service for ever was
+met on the sixteenth of June by their instant dissolution. The
+remonstrance was burnt by royal order; Eliot was deprived of his
+Vice-Admiralty; and on the old pretext alleged by James for evading the
+law, the pretext that what it forbade was the demand of forced loans and
+not of voluntary gifts to the Crown, the subsidies which the Parliament
+had refused to grant till their grievances were redressed were levied in
+the arbitrary form of benevolences.
+
+[Sidenote: The Forced Loan.]
+
+But the tide of public resistance was slowly rising. Refusals to give
+anything "save by way of Parliament" came in from county after county.
+When the subsidy-men of Middlesex and Westminster were urged to comply,
+they answered with a tumultuous shout of "A Parliament! a Parliament!
+else no subsidies!" Kent stood out to a man. In Bucks the very justices
+neglected to ask for the "free gift." The freeholders of Cornwall only
+answered that, "if they had but two kine, they would sell one of them
+for supply to his Majesty--in a Parliamentary way." The failure of the
+voluntary benevolence forced Charles to pass from evasion into open
+defiance of the law. He met it in 1627 by the levy of a forced loan. It
+was in vain that Chief Justice Crewe refused to acknowledge that such
+loans were legal. The law was again trampled under foot, as in the case
+of his predecessor, Coke; and Crewe was dismissed from his post.
+Commissioners were named to assess the amount which every landowner was
+bound to lend, and to examine on oath all who refused. Every means of
+persuasion, as of force, was resorted to. The pulpits of the Laudian
+clergy resounded with the cry of "passive obedience." Dr. Mainwaring
+preached before Charles himself, that the king needed no Parliamentary
+warrant for taxation, and that to resist his will was to incur eternal
+damnation. Soldiers were quartered on recalcitrant boroughs. Poor men
+who refused to lend were pressed into the army or navy. Stubborn
+tradesmen were flung into prison. Buckingham himself undertook the task
+of overawing the nobles and the gentry. Among the bishops, the Primate
+and Bishop Williams of Lincoln alone resisted the king's will. The first
+was suspended on a frivolous pretext, and the second was disgraced. But
+in the country at large resistance was universal. The northern counties
+in a mass set the Crown at defiance. The Lincolnshire farmers drove the
+Commissioners from the town. Shropshire, Devon, and Warwickshire
+"refused utterly." Eight peers, with Lord Essex and Lord Warwick at
+their head, declined to comply with the exaction as illegal. Two hundred
+country gentlemen, whose obstinacy had not been subdued by their
+transfer from prison to prison, were summoned before the Council; and
+John Hampden, as yet only a young Buckinghamshire squire, appeared at
+the board to begin that career of patriotism which has made his name
+dear to Englishmen. "I could be content to lend," he said, "but fear to
+draw on myself that curse in Magna Charta, which should be read twice a
+year against those who infringe it." So close an imprisonment in the
+Gate House rewarded his protest "that he never afterwards did look like
+the same man he was before."
+
+[Sidenote: Charles and France.]
+
+The fierce energy with which Buckingham pressed the forced loan was no
+mere impulse of angry tyranny. Never was money so needed by the Crown.
+The blustering and blundering of the favourite had at last succeeded in
+plunging him into war with his own allies. England had been told that
+the friendship of France, a friendship secured by the king's marriage
+with a French princess, was the basis on which Charles was building up
+his great European alliance against Spain. She now suddenly found
+herself at war with Spain and France together. The steps by which this
+result had been brought about throw an amusing light on the capacity of
+the young king and his minister. The occupation of the Palatinate had
+forced France to provide for its own safety. Spain already fronted her
+along the Pyrenees and the border of the Netherlands; if the Palatinate
+was added to the Spanish possession of Franche-Comté, it would close
+France in on the east as well as the north and the south. War therefore
+was being forced on the French monarchy when Charles and Buckingham
+sought its alliance against Spain; and nothing hindered an outbreak of
+hostilities but a revolt of the Protestant town of Rochelle. Lewis the
+Thirteenth pleaded the impossibility of engaging in such a struggle so
+long as the Huguenots could rise in his rear; and he called on England
+to help him by lending ships to blockade Rochelle into submission in
+time for action in the spring of 1625. The Prince and Buckingham brought
+James to assent; but Charles had no sooner mounted the throne than he
+shrank from sending ships against a Protestant city, and secretly
+instigated the crews to mutiny against their captains on an order to
+sail. The vessels, it was trusted, would then arrive too late to take
+part in the siege. Unluckily for this intrigue they arrived to find the
+city still in arms, and it was the appearance of English ships among
+their enemies which forced the men of Rochelle to submit. While
+Englishmen were angered by the use of English vessels against
+Protestantism, France resented the king's attempt to evade his pledge.
+Its Court resented yet more the hesitation which Charles showed in face
+of his Parliament in fulfilling the promise he had given in the
+marriage-treaty of tolerating Catholic worship; and its resentment was
+embittered by an expulsion from the realm of the French attendants on
+the new Queen, a step to which Charles was at last driven by their
+insolence and intrigues. On the other hand, French statesmen were
+offended by the seizure of French ships charged with carrying materials
+of war to the Spaniards, and by an attempt of the English sovereign to
+atone for his past attack on Rochelle by constituting himself mediator
+of a peace on behalf of the Huguenots.
+
+[Sidenote: The siege of Rochelle.]
+
+But though grounds of quarrel multiplied every day, the French minister,
+Richelieu, had no mind for strife. He was now master of the Catholic
+faction which had fed the dispute between the Crown and the Huguenots
+with the aim of bringing about a reconciliation with Spain; he saw that
+in the European conflict which lay before him the friendship or the
+neutrality of England was all but essential; and though he gathered a
+fleet in the Channel and took a high tone of remonstrance, he strove by
+concession after concession to avert war. But on war Buckingham was
+resolved. Of policy in any true sense of the word the favourite knew
+nothing; for the real interest of England or the balance of Europe he
+cared little; what he saw before him was the chance of a blow at a power
+he had come to hate, and the chance of a war which would make him
+popular at home. The mediation of Charles in favour of Rochelle had
+convinced Richelieu that the complete reduction of that city was a
+necessary prelude to any effective intervention in Germany. If Lewis was
+to be master abroad, he must first be master at home. But it was hard
+for lookers-on to read the Cardinal's mind or to guess with what a
+purpose he resolved to exact submission from the Huguenots. In England,
+where the danger of Rochelle seemed a fresh part of the Catholic attack
+upon Protestantism throughout the world, the enthusiasm for the
+Huguenots was intense; and Buckingham resolved to take advantage of this
+enthusiasm to secure such a triumph for the royal arms as should silence
+all opposition at home. It was for this purpose that the forced loan
+was pushed on; and in July 1627 a fleet of a hundred vessels sailed
+under Buckingham's command for the relief of Rochelle. But imposing as
+was his force, Buckingham showed himself as incapable a soldier as he
+had proved a statesman. The troops were landed on the Isle of Rhé, in
+front of the harbour; but after a useless siege of the Castle of St.
+Martin, the English soldiers were forced in October to fall back along a
+narrow causeway to their ships, and two thousand fell in the retreat
+without the loss of a single man to their enemies.
+
+[Sidenote: The Parliament of 1628.]
+
+The first result of the failure at Rhé was the summoning of a new
+Parliament. Overwhelmed as he was with debt and shame, Charles was
+forced to call the Houses together again in the spring of 1628. The
+elections promised ill for the Court. Its candidates were everywhere
+rejected. The patriot leaders were triumphantly returned. To have
+suffered in the recent resistance to arbitrary taxation was the sure
+road to a seat. It was this question which absorbed all others in men's
+minds. Even Buckingham's removal was of less moment than the redress of
+personal wrongs; and some of the chief leaders of the Commons had not
+hesitated to bring Charles to consent to summon Parliament by promising
+to abstain from attacks on Buckingham. Against such a resolve Eliot
+protested in vain. But on the question of personal liberty the tone of
+the Commons when they met in March was as vehement as that of Eliot. "We
+must vindicate our ancient liberties," said Sir Thomas Wentworth in
+words soon to be remembered against himself: "we must reinforce the laws
+made by our ancestors. We must set such a stamp upon them, as no
+licentious spirit shall dare hereafter to invade them." Heedless of
+sharp and menacing messages from the king, of demands that they should
+take his "royal word" for their liberties, the House bent itself to one
+great work, the drawing up a Petition of Right. The statutes that
+protected the subject against arbitrary taxation, against loans and
+benevolences, against punishment, outlawry, or deprivation of goods,
+otherwise than by lawful judgement of his peers, against arbitrary
+imprisonment without stated charge, against billeting of soldiery on the
+people or enactment of martial law in time of peace, were formally
+recited. The breaches of them under the last two sovereigns, and above
+all since the dissolution of the last Parliament, were recited as
+formally. At the close of this significant list, the Commons prayed
+"that no man hereafter be compelled to make or yield any gift, loan,
+benevolence, tax, or such like charge, without common consent by Act of
+Parliament. And that none be called to make answer, or to take such
+oaths, or to be confined or otherwise molested or disputed concerning
+the same, or for refusal thereof. And that no freeman may in such
+manner as is before mentioned be imprisoned or detained. And that your
+Majesty would be pleased to remove the said soldiers and mariners, and
+that your people may not be so burthened in time to come. And that the
+commissions for proceeding by martial law may be revoked and annulled,
+and that hereafter no commissions of like nature may issue forth to any
+person or persons whatsoever to be executed as aforesaid, lest by colour
+of them any of your Majesty's subjects be destroyed and put to death,
+contrary to the laws and franchises of the land. All which they humbly
+pray of your most excellent Majesty, as their rights and liberties,
+according to the laws and statutes of the realm. And that your Majesty
+would also vouchsafe to declare that the awards, doings, and proceedings
+to the prejudice of your people in any of the premisses shall not be
+drawn hereafter into consequence or example. And that your Majesty would
+be pleased graciously for the further comfort and safety of your people
+to declare your royal will and pleasure, that in the things aforesaid
+all your officers and ministers shall serve you according to the laws
+and statutes of this realm, as they tender the honour of your Majesty
+and the prosperity of the kingdom."
+
+[Sidenote: The Petition of Right.]
+
+It was in vain that the Lords strove to conciliate Charles by a
+reservation of his "sovereign power." "Our petition," Pym quietly
+replied, "is for the laws of England, and this power seems to be another
+power distinct from the power of the law." The Lords yielded, but
+Charles gave an evasive reply; and the failure of the more moderate
+counsels for which his own had been set aside called Eliot again to the
+front. In a speech of unprecedented boldness he moved the presentation
+to the king of a Remonstrance on the state of the realm. But at the
+moment when he again touched on Buckingham's removal as the preliminary
+of any real improvement the Speaker of the House interposed. "There was
+a command laid on him," he said, "to interrupt any that should go about
+to lay an aspersion on the king's ministers." The breach of their
+privilege of free speech produced a scene in the Commons such as St.
+Stephen's had never witnessed before. Eliot sate abruptly down amidst
+the solemn silence of the House. "Then appeared such a spectacle of
+passions," says a letter of the time, "as the like had seldom been seen
+in such an assembly: some weeping, some expostulating, some prophesying
+of the fatal ruin of our kingdom, some playing the divines in confessing
+their sins and country's sins which drew these judgements upon us, some
+finding, as it were, fault with those that wept. There were above an
+hundred weeping eyes, many who offered to speak being interrupted and
+silenced by their own passions." Pym himself rose only to sit down
+choked with tears. At last Sir Edward Coke found words to blame himself
+for the timid counsels which had checked Eliot at the beginning of the
+Session, and to protest "that the author and source of all those
+miseries was the Duke of Buckingham." Shouts of assent greeted the
+resolution to insert the Duke's name in the Remonstrance. But at this
+moment the king's obstinacy gave way. A fresh expedition, which had been
+sent to Rochelle, returned unsuccessful; and if the siege was to be
+raised far greater and costlier efforts must be made. And that the siege
+should be raised Buckingham was still resolved. All his energies were
+now enlisted in this project; and to get supplies for his fleet he bent
+the king to consent in June to the Petition of Right. As Charles
+understood it, indeed, the consent meant little. The one point for which
+he really cared was the power of keeping men in prison without bringing
+them to trial or assigning causes for their imprisonment. On this he had
+consulted his judges; and they had answered that his consent to the
+Petition left his rights untouched; like other laws, they said, the
+Petition would have to be interpreted when it came before them, and the
+prerogative remained unaffected. As to the rest, while waiving all claim
+to levy taxes not granted by Parliament, Charles still reserved his
+right to levy impositions paid customarily to the Crown, and amongst
+these he counted tonnage and poundage. Of these reserves however the
+Commons knew nothing. The king's consent won a grant of subsidy, and
+such a ringing of bells and lighting of bonfires from the people "as
+were never seen but upon his Majesty's return from Spain."
+
+[Sidenote: Death of Buckingham.]
+
+But, like all the king's concessions, it came too late to effect the end
+at which he aimed. The Commons persisted in presenting their
+Remonstrance. Charles received it coldly and ungraciously; while
+Buckingham, who had stood defiantly at his master's side as he was
+denounced, fell on his knees to speak. "No, George!" said the king as he
+raised him; and his demeanour gave emphatic proof that the Duke's favour
+remained undiminished. "We will perish together, George," he added at a
+later time, "if thou dost." He had in fact got the subsidies which he
+needed; and it was easy to arrest all proceedings against Buckingham by
+proroguing Parliament at the close of June. The Duke himself cared
+little for a danger which he counted on drowning in the blaze of a
+speedy triumph. He had again gathered a strong fleet and a fine body of
+men, and his ardent fancy already saw the harbour of Rochelle forced and
+the city relieved. No shadow of his doom had fallen over the brilliant
+favourite when he set out in August to take command of the expedition.
+But a lieutenant in the army, John Felton, soured by neglect and wrongs,
+had found in the Remonstrance some imaginary sanction for the revenge
+he plotted; and, mixing with the throng which crowded the hall at
+Portsmouth, he stabbed Buckingham to the heart. Charles flung himself on
+his bed in a passion of tears when the news reached him; but outside the
+Court it was welcomed with a burst of joy. Young Oxford bachelors, grave
+London Aldermen, vied with each other in drinking healths to Felton.
+"God bless thee, little David," cried an old woman, as the murderer
+passed manacled by; "the Lord comfort thee," shouted the crowd, as the
+Tower gates closed on him. The very forces in the Duke's armament at
+Portsmouth shouted to the king, as he witnessed their departure, a
+prayer that he would "spare John Felton, their sometime fellow-soldier."
+But whatever national hopes the fall of Buckingham had aroused were
+quickly dispelled. Weston, a creature of the Duke, became Lord
+Treasurer, and his system remained unchanged. "Though our Achan is cut
+off," said Eliot, "the accursed thing remains."
+
+[Sidenote: The Laudian Clergy.]
+
+It seemed as if no act of Charles could widen the breach which his
+reckless lawlessness had made between himself and his subjects. But
+there was one thing dearer to England than free speech in Parliament,
+than security for property, or even personal liberty; and that one thing
+was, in the phrase of the day, "the Gospel." The gloom which at the
+outset of this reign we saw settling down on every Puritan heart had
+deepened with each succeeding year. The great struggle abroad had gone
+more and more against Protestantism, and at this moment the end of the
+cause seemed to have come. In Germany Lutheran and Calvinist alike lay
+at last beneath the heel of the Catholic House of Austria. The fall of
+Rochelle, which followed quick on the death of Buckingham, seemed to
+leave the Huguenots of France at the feet of a Roman Cardinal. In such a
+time as this, while England was thrilling with excitement at the thought
+that her own hour of deadly peril might come again, as it had come in
+the year of the Armada, the Puritans saw with horror the quick growth of
+Arminianism at home. Laud was now Bishop of London as well as the
+practical administrator of Church affairs, and to the excited
+Protestantism of the country Laud and the Churchmen whom he headed
+seemed a danger more really formidable than the Popery which was making
+such mighty strides abroad. To the Puritans they were traitors, traitors
+to God and their country at once. Their aim was to draw the Church of
+England farther away from the Protestant Churches, and nearer to the
+Church which Protestants regarded as Babylon. They aped Roman
+ceremonies. Cautiously and tentatively they were introducing Roman
+doctrine. But they had none of the sacerdotal independence which Rome
+had at any rate preserved. They were abject in their dependence on the
+Crown. Their gratitude for the royal protection which enabled them to
+defy the religious instincts of the realm showed itself in their
+erection of the most dangerous pretensions of the monarchy into
+religious dogmas. Their model, Bishop Andrewes, had declared James to
+have been inspired by God. They preached passive obedience to the worst
+tyranny. They declared the person and goods of the subject to be at the
+king's absolute disposal. They were turning religion into a systematic
+attack on English liberty, nor was their attack to be lightly set aside.
+Up to this time they had been little more than a knot of courtly
+parsons, for the mass of the clergy, like their flocks, were steady
+Puritans; but the well-known energy of Laud and the open patronage of
+the Court promised a speedy increase of their numbers and their power.
+It was significant that upon the prorogation of 1628 Montague had been
+made a bishop, and Mainwaring, who had called Parliaments ciphers in the
+state, had been rewarded with a fat living. Instances such as these
+would hardly be lost on the mass of the clergy, and sober men looked
+forward to a day when every pulpit would be ringing with exhortations to
+passive obedience, with denunciations of Calvinism and apologies for
+Rome.
+
+[Sidenote: The Avowal.]
+
+Of all the members of the House of Commons Eliot was least fanatical in
+his natural bent, but the religious crisis swept away for the moment
+all other thoughts from his mind. "Danger enlarges itself in so great a
+measure," he wrote from the country, "that nothing but Heaven shrouds us
+from despair." When the Commons met again in January 1629, they met in
+Eliot's temper. The first business called up was that of religion. The
+House refused to consider any question of supplies, or even that of
+tonnage and poundage, which still remained unsettled though Charles had
+persisted in levying these duties without any vote of Parliament, till
+the religious grievance was discussed. "The Gospel," Eliot burst forth,
+"is that Truth in which this kingdom has been happy through a long and
+rare prosperity. This ground therefore let us lay for a foundation of
+our building, that that Truth, not with words, but with actions we will
+maintain!" "There is a ceremony," he went on, "used in the Eastern
+Churches, of standing at the repetition of the Creed, to testify their
+purpose to maintain it, not only with their bodies upright, but with
+their swords drawn. Give me leave to call that a custom very
+commendable!" The Commons answered their leader's challenge by a solemn
+avowal. They avowed that they held for truth that sense of the Articles
+as established by Parliament, which by the public act of the Church, and
+the general and current exposition of the writers of their Church, had
+been delivered unto them. It is easy to regard such an avowal as a mere
+outburst of Puritan bigotry, and the opposition of Charles as a defence
+of the freedom of religious thought. But the real importance of the
+avowal both to king and Commons lay in its political significance. In
+the mouth of the Commons it was a renewal of the claim that all affairs
+of the realm, spiritual as well as temporal, were cognizable in
+Parliament. To Charles it seemed as if the Commons were taking to
+themselves, in utter defiance of his rights as governor of the Church,
+"the interpretation of articles of religion; the deciding of which in
+doctrinal points," to use his own words, "only appertaineth to the
+clergy and Convocation." To use more modern phrases, the king insisted
+that the nation should receive its creed at the hands of the priesthood
+and the Crown. England in the avowal of Parliament asserted that the
+right to determine the belief of a nation lay with the nation itself.
+
+[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Parliament.]
+
+But the debates over religion were suddenly interrupted. In granting the
+Petition of Right we have seen that Charles had no purpose of parting
+with his power of arbitrary arrest or of levying customs. Both practices
+in fact went on as before, and the goods of merchants who refused to pay
+tonnage and poundage were seized as of old. At the reopening of the
+Session indeed the king met the Commons with a proposal that they should
+grant him tonnage and poundage and pass silently over what had been
+done by his officers. But the House was far from assenting to the
+interpretation which Charles had put on the Petition, and it was
+resolved to vindicate what it held to be the law. It deferred all grant
+of customs till the wrong done in the illegal levy of them was
+redressed, and summoned the farmers of those dues to the bar. But though
+they appeared, they pleaded the king's command as a ground for their
+refusal to answer. The House was proceeding to a protest, when on the
+second of March the Speaker signified that he had received an order to
+adjourn. Dissolution was clearly at hand, and the long-suppressed
+indignation broke out in a scene of strange disorder. The Speaker was
+held down in the chair, while Eliot, still clinging to his great
+principle of ministerial responsibility, denounced the new Treasurer as
+the adviser of the measure. "None have gone about to break Parliaments,"
+he added in words to which after events gave a terrible significance,
+"but in the end Parliaments have broken them." The doors were locked,
+and in spite of the Speaker's protests, of the repeated knocking of the
+usher at the door, and the gathering tumult within the House itself, the
+loud "Aye, Aye!" of the bulk of the members supported Eliot in his last
+vindication of English liberty. By successive resolutions the Commons
+declared whomsoever should bring in innovations in religion, or whatever
+minister endorsed the levy of subsidies not granted in Parliament, "a
+capital enemy to the kingdom and commonwealth," and every subject
+voluntarily complying with illegal acts and demands "a betrayer of the
+liberty of England and an enemy of the same."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+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 Nicæa. 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 æsthetic 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE RISING OF THE SCOTS
+
+1635-1640
+
+
+[Sidenote: England in 1635.]
+
+When Weston died in 1635 six years had passed without a Parliament, and
+the Crown was at the height of its power. Its financial difficulties
+seemed coming to an end. The long peace, the rigid economy of
+administration, the use of forgotten rights and vexatious monopolies,
+had now halved the amount of debt, while they had raised the revenue to
+a level with the royal expenditure. Charles had no need of subsidies;
+and without the need of subsidies he saw no ground for again
+encountering the opposition of Parliament. The religious difficulty gave
+him as little anxiety. If Laud was taking harsh courses with the
+Puritans, he seemed to be successful in his struggle with Puritanism.
+The most able among its ministers were silenced or deprived. The most
+earnest of its laymen were flying over seas. But there was no show of
+opposition to the reforms of the Primate or the High Commission. In the
+two dependent kingdoms all appeared to be going well. In Scotland
+Charles had begun quietly to carry further his father's schemes for
+religious uniformity; but there was no voice of protest. In Ireland
+Wentworth could point to a submissive Parliament and a well-equipped
+army, ready to serve the king on either side St. George's Channel. The
+one solitary anxiety of Charles, in fact, lay in the aspect of foreign
+affairs. The union of Holland and of France had done the work that
+England had failed to do in saving German Protestantism from the grasp
+of the House of Austria. But if their union was of service to Germany,
+it brought danger to England. France was its ancient foe. The commercial
+supremacy of the Dutch was threatening English trade. The junction of
+their fleets would at once enable them to challenge the right of
+dominion which England claimed over the Channel. And at this moment
+rumours came of a scheme of partition by which the Spanish Netherlands
+were to be shared between the French and the Dutch, and by which Dunkirk
+was at once to be attacked and given into the hands of France.
+
+[Sidenote: Ship-money.]
+
+To suffer the extension of France along the shores of the Netherlands
+had seemed impossible to English statesmen from the days of Elizabeth.
+To surrender the command of the Channel was equally galling to the
+national pride. Even Weston, fond as he was of peace, had seen the need
+of putting a strong fleet upon the seas; and in 1634 Spain engaged to
+defray part of the expense of equipping such a fleet in the hope that
+the king's demand would bring on war with Holland and with France. But
+money had to be found at home, and as Charles would not hear of the
+gathering of a Parliament means had to be got by a new stretch of
+prerogative. The legal research of Noy, one of the law-officers of the
+Crown, found precedents among the records in the Tower for the provision
+of ships for the king's use by the port-towns of the kingdom, and for
+the furnishing of their equipment by the maritime counties. The
+precedents dated from times when no permanent fleet existed, and when
+sea warfare could only be waged by vessels lent for the moment by the
+various ports. But they were seized as a means of equipping a permanent
+navy without cost to the Exchequer; the first demand of ships was soon
+commuted into a demand of money for the provision of ships; and the
+writs for the payment of ship-money which were issued to London and
+other coast-towns were enforced by fine and imprisonment. The money was
+paid, and in 1635 a fleet put to sea. The Spaniards however were too
+poor to fulfil their share of the bargain; they sent neither money nor
+vessels; and Charles shrank from a contest single-handed with France and
+the Dutch. But with the death of the Earl of Portland a bolder hand
+seized the reins of power. To Laud as to Wentworth the system of Weston
+had hardly seemed government at all. In the correspondence which passed
+between the two ministers the king was censured as over-cautious, the
+Star Chamber as feeble, the judges as over-scrupulous. "I am for
+Thorough," the one writes to the other in alternate fits of impatience
+at the slow progress they are making. Wentworth was anxious that his
+good work might not "be spoiled on that side." Laud echoed the wish,
+while he envied the free course of the Lord Lieutenant. "You have a good
+deal of humour here," he writes, "for your proceeding. Go on a' God's
+name. I have done with expecting of Thorough on this side."
+
+[Sidenote: The new ship-money.]
+
+With feelings such as these Laud no sooner took the direction of affairs
+than a more vigorous and unscrupulous impulse made itself felt. Far from
+being drawn from his projects by the desertion of Spain, Charles was
+encouraged to carry them out by his own efforts. It was determined to
+strengthen the fleet; and funds for this purpose were raised by an
+extension of the levy of ship-money. The pretence of precedents was
+thrown aside, and Laud resolved to find a permanent revenue in the
+conversion of the "ship-money," till now levied on ports and the
+maritime counties, into a general tax imposed by the royal will upon the
+whole country. The sum expected from the tax was no less than a quarter
+of a million a year. "I know no reason," Wentworth had written
+significantly, "but you may as well rule the common lawyers in England
+as I, poor beagle, do here"; and the judges no sooner declared the new
+impost to be legal than he drew the logical deduction from their
+decision. "Since it is lawful for the king to impose a tax for the
+equipment of the navy, it must be equally so for the levy of an army:
+and the same reason which authorizes him to levy an army to resist, will
+authorize him to carry that army abroad that he may prevent invasion.
+Moreover what is law in England is law also in Scotland and Ireland. The
+decision of the judges will therefore make the king absolute at home and
+formidable abroad. Let him only abstain from war for a few years that he
+may habituate his subjects to the payment of that tax, and in the end he
+will find himself more powerful and respected than any of his
+predecessors." "The debt of the Crown being taken off," he wrote to
+Charles, "you may govern at your will."
+
+[Sidenote: John Hampden.]
+
+But there were men who saw the danger to freedom in this levy of
+ship-money as clearly as Wentworth himself. The bulk of the country
+party abandoned all hope of English freedom. There was a sudden revival
+of the emigration to New England; and men of blood and fortune now
+prepared to seek a new home in the West. Lord Warwick secured the
+proprietorship of the Connecticut valley. Lord Saye and Sele and Lord
+Brooke began negotiations for transporting themselves to the New World.
+Oliver Cromwell is said, by a doubtful tradition, to have only been
+prevented from crossing the seas by a royal embargo. It is more certain
+that John Hampden purchased a tract of land on the Narragansett. No
+visionary danger would have brought the soul of Hampden to the thought
+of flight. He was sprung of an ancient line, which had been true to the
+House of Lancaster in the Wars of the Roses, and whose fidelity had been
+rewarded by the favour of the Tudors. On the brow of the Chilterns an
+opening in the woods has borne the name of "the Queen's Gap" ever since
+Griffith Hampden cleared an avenue for one of Elizabeth's visits to his
+stately home. His grandson, John, was born at the close of the Queen's
+reign; the dissipations of youth were cut short by an early marriage at
+twenty-five to a wife he loved; and the young squire settled down to a
+life of study and religion. His wealth and lineage opened to him a
+career such as other men were choosing at the Stuart court. Few English
+commoners had wider possessions; and under James it was easy to purchase
+a peerage by servility and hard cash. "If my son will seek for his
+honour," wrote his mother from the court, "tell him now to come, for
+here are multitudes of lords a-making!" But Hampden had nobler aims than
+a peerage. From the first his choice was made to stand by the side of
+those who were struggling for English freedom; and at the age of
+twenty-six he took his seat in the memorable Parliament of 1621. Young
+as he was, his ability at once carried him to the front; he was employed
+in "managing conferences with the Lords" and other weighty business, and
+became the friend of Eliot and of Pym. He was again returned to the two
+first Parliaments of Charles; and his firm refusal to contribute to
+forced loans at the close of the second marked the quiet firmness of his
+temper. "I could be content to lend," he replied to the demand of the
+Council, "but for fear to draw on myself that curse in Magna Charta
+which should be read twice a year against those that do infringe it." He
+was rewarded with so close an imprisonment in the Tower, "that he never
+afterwards did look the same man he was before." But a prison had no
+force to bend the steady patriotism of John Hampden, and he again took a
+prominent part in the Parliament of 1628, especially on the religious
+questions which came under debate.
+
+With the dissolution of this Parliament Hampden again withdrew to his
+home, the home that, however disguised by tasteless changes without,
+still stands unaltered within on a rise of the Chilterns, its
+Elizabethan hall girt round with galleries and stately staircases
+winding up beneath shadowy portraits in ruffs and farthingales. Around
+are the quiet undulations of the chalk-country, billowy heavings and
+sinkings as of some primæval sea suddenly hushed into motionlessness,
+soft slopes of grey grass or brown-red corn falling gently to dry
+bottoms, woodland flung here and there in masses over the hills. A
+country of fine and lucid air, of far shadowy distances, of hollows
+tenderly veiled by mist, graceful everywhere with a flowing
+unaccentuated grace, as though Hampden's own temper had grown out of it.
+As we look on it, we recall the "flowing courtesy to all men," the
+"seeming humility and submission of judgement," the "rare affability and
+temper in debate," that woke admiration and regard even in the fiercest
+of his opponents. But beneath the outer grace of Hampden's demeanour lay
+a soul of steel. Buried as he seemed in the affections of his home, the
+great patriot waited patiently for the hour of freedom that he knew must
+come. Around him gathered the men that were to stand by his side in the
+future struggle. He had been the bosom friend of Eliot till the victim
+of the king's resentment lay dead in the Tower. He was now the
+bosom-friend of Pym. His mother had been a daughter of the great
+Cromwell house at Hinchinbrook, and he was thus closely linked by blood
+to Oliver Cromwell and connected with Oliver St. John. The marriages of
+two daughters united him to the Knightleys and the Lynes. Selden and
+Whitelock were among his closest counsellors. It was in steady commune
+with these that the years passed by, while outer eyes saw in him only a
+Puritan squire of a cultured sort, popular among his tenantry and
+punctual at Quarter-Sessions, with "an exceeding propenseness to field
+sports" and "busy in the embellishment of his estate, of which he was
+very fond."
+
+[Sidenote: Hampden and ship-money.]
+
+At last the quiet patience was broken by the news of the ship-money, and
+of a writ addressed to the High Sheriff, Sir Peter Temple of Stave,
+ordering him to raise £4500 on the county of Buckingham. Hampden's
+resolve was soon known. In the January of 1636 a return was made of the
+payments for ship-money from the village of Great Kimble at the foot of
+the Chilterns round which his chief property lay, and at the head of
+those who refused to pay stood the name of John Hampden. For a while
+matters moved slowly; and it was not till the close of June that a
+Council warrant summoned the High Sheriff to account for arrears.
+Hampden meanwhile had been taking counsel in the spring with Whitelock
+and others of his friends concerning the means of bringing the matter to
+a legal issue. Charles was as eager to appeal to the law as Hampden
+himself; but he followed his father's usage in privately consulting the
+judges on the subject of his claim, and it was not till the February of
+1637 that their answer asserted its legality. The king at once made
+their opinion public in the faith that all resistance would cease. But
+the days were gone by when the voice of the judges was taken
+submissively for law by Englishmen. They had seen the dismissal of Coke
+and of Crewe. They knew that in matters of the prerogative the judges
+admitted a right of interference and of dictation on the part of the
+Crown. "The judges," Sir Harbottle Grimston could say in the Long
+Parliament, "the judges have overthrown the law, as the bishops
+religion!" What Hampden aimed at was not the judgement of such judges,
+but an open trial where England might hear, in spite of the silence of
+Parliament, a discussion of this great inroad on its freedom. His wishes
+were realized at last by the issue in May of a writ from the Exchequer,
+calling on him to show cause why payment of ship-money for his lands
+should not be made.
+
+[Sidenote: Charles and Scotland.]
+
+The news of Hampden's resistance thrilled through the country at a
+moment when men were roused by news of resistance in the north. Since
+the accession of James Scotland had bent with a seeming tameness before
+aggression after aggression. Its pulpits had been bridled. Its boldest
+ministers had been sent into exile. Its General Assembly had been
+brought to submission by the Crown. Its Church had been forced to accept
+bishops, if not with all their old powers, still with authority as
+permanent superintendents of the diocesan synods. The ministers and
+elders had been deprived of their right of excommunicating offenders,
+save with a bishop's sanction. A Court of High Commission enforced the
+supremacy of the Crown. But with this enforcement of his royal authority
+James was content. He had no wish for a doctrinal change, or for the
+bringing about of a strict uniformity with the Church of England. It was
+in vain that Laud in his earlier days invited James to draw his Scotch
+subjects "to a nearer conjunction with the liturgy and canons of this
+nation." "I sent him back again," said the shrewd old king, "with the
+frivolous draft he had drawn. For all that, he feared not my anger, but
+assaulted me again with another ill-fangled platform to make that
+stubborn Kirk stoop more to the English platform; but I durst not play
+fast and loose with my word. He knows not the stomach of that people."
+The earlier policy of Charles followed his father's line of action. It
+effected little save a partial restoration of Church-lands, which the
+lords were forced to surrender. But Laud's vigorous action made itself
+felt. His first acts were directed rather to points of outer observance
+than to any attack on the actual fabric of Presbyterian organization.
+The estates were induced to withdraw the control of ecclesiastical
+apparel from the Assembly, and to commit it to the Crown; and this step
+was soon followed by a resumption of their episcopal costume on the part
+of the Scotch bishops. When the Bishop of Moray preached before Charles
+in his rochet, on the king's visit to Edinburgh in 1633, it was the
+first instance of its use since the Reformation. The innovation was
+followed by the issue of a Royal warrant which directed all ministers to
+use the surplice in divine worship.
+
+[Sidenote: The new Liturgy.]
+
+The enforcement of the surplice woke Scotland from its torpor, and alarm
+at once spread through the country. Quarterly meetings were held in
+parishes with fasting and prayer to consult on the dangers which
+threatened religion, and ministers who conformed to the new ceremonies
+were rebuked and deserted by their congregations. The popular discontent
+soon found leaders in the Scotch nobles. Threatened in power by the
+attempts of the Crown to narrow their legal jurisdiction, in purse by
+projects for the resumption and restoration to the Church of the
+bishops' lands, irritated by the restoration of the prelates to their
+old rank, by their reintroduction to Parliament and the Council, by the
+nomination of Archbishop Spottiswood to the post of Chancellor, and
+above all by the setting up again the worrying bishops' courts, the
+nobles with Lord Lorne at their head stood sullenly aloof from the new
+system. But Charles was indifferent to the discontent which his measures
+were rousing. Under Laud's pressure he was resolved to put an end to the
+Presbyterian character of the Scotch Church altogether, and to bring it
+to a uniformity with the Church of England in organization and ritual.
+With this view a book of Canons was issued in 1636 on the sole
+authority of the king. These Canons placed the government of the Church
+absolutely in the hands of its bishops; and made a bishop's licence
+necessary for instruction and for the publication of books. The
+authority of the prelates indeed was jealously subordinated to the
+supremacy of the Crown. No Church Assembly might be summoned but by the
+king, no alteration in worship or discipline introduced but by his
+permission. As daring a stretch of the prerogative superseded what was
+known as Knox's Liturgy--the book of Common Order drawn up on the
+Genevan model by that Reformer, and generally used throughout
+Scotland--by a new Liturgy based on the English Book of Common Prayer.
+
+[Sidenote: Its rejection.]
+
+The Liturgy and Canons had been Laud's own handiwork; in their
+composition the General Assembly had neither been consulted nor
+recognized; and taken together they formed the code of a political and
+ecclesiastical system which aimed at reducing Scotland to an utter
+subjection to the Crown. To enforce them on the land was to effect a
+revolution of the most serious kind. The books however were backed by a
+royal injunction, and Laud flattered himself that the revolution had
+been wrought. But the patience of Scotland found an end at last. In the
+summer of 1637, while England was waiting for the opening of the great
+cause of ship-money, peremptory orders from the king forced the clergy
+of Edinburgh to introduce the new service into their churches. On the
+23rd of July the Prayer-Book was used at the church of St. Giles. But
+the book was no sooner opened than a murmur ran through the
+congregation, and the murmur grew into a formidable riot. The church was
+cleared, and the service read; but the rising discontent frightened the
+judges into a decision that the royal writ enjoined the purchase, not
+the use, of the Prayer-Book, and its use was at once discontinued. The
+angry orders which came from England for its restoration were met by a
+shower of protests from every part of Scotland. The ministers of Fife
+pleaded boldly the want of any confirmation of the book by a General
+Assembly. "This Church," they exclaimed, "is a free and independent
+Church, just as this kingdom is a free and independent kingdom." The
+Duke of Lennox alone took sixty-eight petitions with him to the Court;
+while ministers, nobles, and gentry poured into Edinburgh to organize a
+national resistance.
+
+[Sidenote: The temper of England.]
+
+The effect of these events in Scotland was at once seen in the open
+demonstration of discontent south of the border. The prison with which
+Laud had rewarded Prynne's dumpy quarto had tamed his spirit so little
+that a new tract, written within its walls, denounced the bishops as
+devouring wolves and lords of Lucifer. A fellow-prisoner, John
+Bastwick, declared in his "Litany" that "Hell was broke loose, and the
+devils in surplices, hoods, copes, and rochets were come amongst us."
+Burton, a London clergyman silenced by the High Commission, called on
+all Christians to resist the bishops as "robbers of souls, limbs of the
+beast, and factors of Antichrist." Raving of this sort might well have
+been passed by, had not the general sympathy with Prynne and his
+fellow-pamphleteers, when Laud dragged them in 1637 before the Star
+Chamber as "trumpets of sedition," shown how fast the tide of general
+anger against the Government was rising. The three culprits listened
+with defiance to their sentence of exposure in the pillory and
+imprisonment for life; and the crowd who filled Palace Yard to witness
+their punishment groaned at the cutting off of their ears, and "gave a
+great shout" when Prynne urged that the sentence on him was contrary to
+law. A hundred thousand Londoners lined the road as they passed on the
+way to prison; and the journey of these "Martyrs," as the spectators
+called them, was like a triumphal progress. Startled as he was at the
+sudden burst of popular feeling, Laud remained dauntless as ever.
+Prynne's entertainers, as he passed through the country, were summoned
+before the Star Chamber, while the censorship struck fiercer blows at
+the Puritan press. But the real danger lay not in the libels of silly
+zealots, but in the attitude of Scotland, and in the effect which was
+being produced in England at large by the trial of Hampden. Wentworth
+was looking on from Ireland with cool insolence at the contest between a
+subject and the Crown. "Mr. Hampden," he wrote, "is a great brother; and
+the genius of that faction of people leads them always to oppose, both
+civilly and ecclesiastically, all that ever authority ordains." But
+England looked on with other eyes. "The eyes of all men," owns
+Clarendon, "were fixed upon him as their _Pater Patriæ_ and the pilot
+who must steer the vessel through the tempests and storms that
+threatened it." In November and December 1637 the cause of ship-money
+was solemnly argued for twelve days before the full bench of judges. It
+was proved that the tax in past times had been levied only in cases of
+sudden emergency, and confined to the coast and port towns alone, and
+that even the show of legality had been taken from it by formal statute,
+and by the Petition of Right.
+
+[Sidenote: The judgement on ship-money.]
+
+The case was adjourned, but its discussion told not merely on England,
+but on the temper of the Scots. Charles had replied to their petitions
+by a simple order to all strangers to leave the capital. But the Council
+at Edinburgh was unable to enforce his order; and the nobles and gentry
+before dispersing to their homes petitioned against the bishops,
+resolved not to own the jurisdiction of their courts, and named in
+November 1637 a body of delegates, under the odd title of "the Tables."
+These delegates carried on through the winter a series of negotiations
+with the Crown. The negotiations were interrupted in the spring of 1638
+by a renewed order for their dispersion, and for the acceptance of a
+Prayer-Book; while the judges in England delivered in June their
+long-delayed decision on Hampden's case. Two judges only pronounced in
+his favour; though three followed them on technical grounds. The
+majority, seven in number, laid down the broad principle that no statute
+prohibiting arbitrary taxation could be pleaded against the king's will.
+"I never read or heard," said Judge Berkeley, "that lex was rex, but it
+is common and most true that rex is lex." Finch, the Chief-Justice,
+summed up the opinions of his fellow-judges. "Acts of Parliament to take
+away the king's royal power in the defence of his kingdom are void," he
+said: "they are void Acts of Parliament to bind the king not to command
+the subjects, their persons, and goods, and I say their money too, for
+no Acts of Parliament make any difference."
+
+[Sidenote: The Covenant.]
+
+The case was ended; and Charles looked for the Puritans to give way. But
+keener eyes discerned that a new spirit of resistance had been stirred
+by the trial. The insolence of Wentworth was exchanged for a tone of
+angry terror. "I wish Mr. Hampden and others to his likeness," the Lord
+Deputy wrote bitterly from Ireland, "were well whipt into their right
+senses." Amidst the exultation of the Court over the decision of the
+judges, Wentworth saw clearly that Hampden's work had been done. Legal
+and temperate as his course had been, he had roused England to a sense
+of the danger to her freedom, and forced into light the real character
+of the royal claims. How stern and bitter the temper even of the noblest
+Puritans had become at last we see in the poem which Milton produced at
+this time, his elegy of "Lycidas." Its grave and tender lament is broken
+by a sudden flash of indignation at the dangers around the Church, at
+the "blind mouths that scarce themselves know how to hold a sheephook,"
+and to whom "the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed," while "the grim
+wolf" of Rome "with privy paw daily devours apace, and nothing said!"
+The stern resolve of the people to demand justice on their tyrants spoke
+in his threat of the axe. Strafford and Laud, and Charles himself, had
+yet to reckon with "that two-handed engine at the door" which stood
+"ready to smite once, and smite no more." But stern as was the general
+resolve, there was no need for immediate action, for the difficulties
+which were gathering in the north were certain to bring a strain on the
+Government which would force it to seek support from the people. The
+king's demand for immediate submission, which reached Scotland while
+England was waiting for the Hampden judgement, in the spring of 1638,
+gathered the whole body of remonstrants together round "the Tables" at
+Stirling; and a protestation, read at Edinburgh, was followed, on
+Johnston of Warriston's suggestion, by a renewal of the Covenant with
+God which had been drawn up and sworn to in a previous hour of peril,
+when Mary was still plotting against Protestantism, and Spain was
+preparing its Armada. "We promise and swear," ran the solemn engagement
+at its close, "by the great name of the Lord our God, to continue in the
+profession and obedience of the said religion, and that we shall defend
+the same, and resist all their contrary errors and corruptions,
+according to our vocation and the utmost of that power which God has put
+into our hands all the days of our life."
+
+[Sidenote: Charles and Scotland.]
+
+The Covenant was signed in the churchyard of the Greyfriars at Edinburgh
+on the first of March, in a tumult of enthusiasm, "with such content and
+joy as those who, having long before been outlaws and rebels, are
+admitted again into covenant with God." Gentlemen and nobles rode with
+the document in their pockets over the country, gathering subscriptions
+to it, while the ministers pressed for a general consent to it from the
+pulpit. But pressure was needless. "Such was the zeal of subscribers
+that for a while many subscribed with tears on their cheeks"; some were
+indeed reputed to have "drawn their own blood and used it in place of
+ink to underwrite their names." The force given to Scottish freedom by
+this revival of religious fervour was seen in the new tone adopted by
+the Covenanters. The Marquis of Hamilton, who came as Royal Commissioner
+to put an end to the quarrel, was at once met by demands for an
+abolition of the Court of High Commission, the withdrawal of the Books
+of Canons and Common Prayer, a free Parliament, and a free General
+Assembly. He threatened war; but the threat proved fruitless, and even
+the Scotch Council pressed Charles to give fuller satisfaction to the
+people. "I will rather die," the king wrote to Hamilton, "than yield to
+these impertinent and damnable demands"; but it was needful to gain
+time. "The discontents at home," wrote Lord Northumberland to Wentworth,
+"do rather increase than lessen"; and Charles was without money or men.
+It was in vain that he begged for a loan from Spain on promise of
+declaring war against Holland, or that he tried to procure two thousand
+troops from Flanders, with which to occupy Edinburgh. The loan and
+troops were both refused, and some contributions offered by the English
+Catholics did little to recruit the Exchequer.
+
+[Sidenote: The Scotch Revolution.]
+
+Charles had directed the Marquis to delay any decisive breach till the
+royal fleet appeared in the Forth; but it was hard to equip a fleet at
+all. Scotland in fact was sooner ready for war than the king. The Scotch
+volunteers who had been serving in the Thirty Years War streamed home
+at the call of their brethren; and General Leslie, a veteran trained
+under Gustavus, came from Sweden to take the command of the new forces.
+A voluntary war tax was levied in every shire. Charles was so utterly
+taken by surprise that he saw no choice but to yield, if but for the
+moment, to the Scottish demands. Hamilton announced that the king
+allowed the Covenant, the service book was revoked; a pledge was given
+that the power of the bishops should be lessened; a Parliament was
+promised for the coming year; and a General Assembly summoned at once.
+The Assembly met at Glasgow in November 1638; it had been chosen
+according to the old form which James had annulled, and its 144
+ministers were backed by 96 lay elders amongst whom all the leading
+Covenanters found a place. They had hardly met when, at the news of
+their design to attack the Bishops, Hamilton declared the Assembly
+dissolved. But the Church claimed its old freedom of meeting apart from
+any licence from kings; and by an almost unanimous vote the Assembly
+resolved to continue its session. Its acts were an undoing of all that
+the Stuarts had done. The two books of Canons and Common Prayer, the
+High Commission, the Articles of Perth, were all set aside as invalid.
+Episcopacy was abjured, the bishops were deposed from their office, and
+the system of Presbyterianism re-established in its fullest extent.
+
+[Sidenote: The Scotch War.]
+
+Scotland was fighting England's battle as well as her own. The bold
+assertion of a people's right to frame its own religion was a practical
+carrying out of the claim which had been made by the English Parliament
+of 1629. But Charles was as resolute to resist it now as then. He was
+firm in his resolve of war, and the strong remonstrances of his Scotch
+councillors against it were met by a fierce pressure from Wentworth and
+Laud. Both felt that the question had ceased to be one for Scotland
+only; they saw that a concession to the Scots must now be fatal to the
+political and ecclesiastical system they had built up in Ireland and
+England alike. In both countries those who opposed the Government were
+looking to the rising in the North. They were suspicious of
+correspondence between the Puritans in England and the Scotch leaders;
+and whether these suspicions were true or no, of the sympathy with which
+the proceedings at Edinburgh were watched south of the Border there
+could be little doubt. It was with the conviction that the whole Stuart
+system was at stake that the two ministers pressed for war. But angered
+as he was, Charles was a Scotchman, and a Scotch king; and he shrank
+from a march with English troops into his hereditary kingdom. He counted
+rather on the sympathy of the northern clans and of Huntly, on the
+impression produced by the appearance of Hamilton with a fleet in the
+Forth, and by the suspension of trade with Holland, than on any actual
+force of arms from the South. The 20,000 men he gathered at York were to
+serve rather as a demonstration, and to protect the border, than as an
+invading force. But again his plans broke down before the activity and
+resolution of the Scots. The news that Charles was gathering an army at
+York, and reckoning for support on the clans of the north, was answered
+in the spring of 1639 by the seizure of Edinburgh, Dumbarton, and
+Stirling; while 10,000 well-equipped troops under Leslie and the Earl of
+Montrose entered Aberdeen, and brought the Earl of Huntly a prisoner to
+the south. Instead of overawing the country, the appearance of the royal
+fleet in the Forth was the signal for Leslie's march with 20,000 men to
+the Border. Charles had hardly pushed across the Tweed, when the "old
+little crooked soldier," encamping on the hill of Dunse Law, a few miles
+from Berwick, fairly offered him battle.
+
+[Sidenote: Scotland and France.]
+
+The king's threats at once broke down. Charles had a somewhat stronger
+force than Leslie, but his men had no will to fight; and he was forced
+to evade a battle by consenting to the gathering of a free Assembly and
+of a Scotch Parliament. But he had no purpose of being bound by terms
+which had been wrested from him by rebel subjects. In his eyes the
+pacification at Berwick was a mere suspension of arms; and the king's
+summons of Wentworth from Ireland was a proof that violent measures
+were in preparation. The Scotch leaders were far from deceiving
+themselves as to the king's purpose; and in the struggle which they
+foresaw they sought aid from a power which Scotch tradition had looked
+on for centuries as the natural ally of their country. The jealousy
+between France and England had long been smouldering, and only the
+weakness of Charles and the caution of Richelieu had prevented its
+bursting into open flame. In the weary negotiations which the English
+king still carried on for the restoration of his nephew to the
+Palatinate, he had till now been counting rather on the friendly
+mediation of Spain with the Emperor than on any efforts of France or its
+Protestant allies. At this moment however a strange piece of fortune
+brought about a sudden change in his policy. A Spanish fleet, which had
+been attacked by the Dutch in the Channel, took refuge under the guns of
+Dover; and Spain appealed for its protection to the friendship of the
+king. But Charles saw in the incident a chance of winning the Palatinate
+without a blow. He at once opened negotiations with Richelieu. He
+offered to suffer the Spanish vessels to be destroyed, if France would
+pledge itself to restore his nephew. Richelieu on the other hand would
+only consent to his restoration if Charles would take an active part in
+the war. But the negotiations were suddenly cut short by the daring of
+the Dutch. In spite of the king's threats they attacked the Spanish
+fleet as it lay in English waters, and drove it broken to Ostend. Such
+an act of defiance could only embitter the enmity which Charles already
+felt towards France and its Dutch allies; and Richelieu grasped gladly
+at the Scotch revolt as a means of hindering England from joining in the
+war. His agents opened communications with the Scottish leaders; and
+applications for its aid were forwarded by the Scots to the French
+court.
+
+[Sidenote: The Short Parliament.]
+
+The discovery of this correspondence roused anew the hopes of the king.
+He was resolved not to yield to rebels; and the proceedings in Scotland
+since the pacification of Berwick seemed to him mere rebellion. A fresh
+General Assembly adopted as valid the acts of its predecessor. The
+Parliament only met to demand that the council should be responsible to
+it for its course of government. The king prorogued both that he might
+use the weapon which fortune had thrown into his hand. He never doubted
+that if he appealed to the country English loyalty would rise to support
+him against Scottish treason. He yielded at last to the counsels of
+Wentworth. Wentworth was still for war. He had never ceased to urge that
+the Scots should be whipped back to their border; and the king now
+avowed his concurrence in this policy by raising him to the earldom of
+Strafford, and from the post of Lord Deputy to that of Lord Lieutenant.
+Strafford agreed with Charles that a Parliament should be summoned, the
+correspondence laid before it, and advantage taken of the burst of
+indignation on which the king counted to procure a heavy subsidy. But he
+had foreseen that it might refuse all aid; and in such a case the Earl
+and the Council held that the King would have a right to fall back on
+"extraordinary means." Strafford himself hurried to Ireland to read a
+practical lesson to the English Parliament. In fourteen days he had
+procured four subsidies from the Irish Commons, and set on foot a force
+of 8000 men to take part in the attack on the Scots. He came back,
+flushed with his success, in time for the meeting of the Houses at
+Westminster in the middle of April 1640. But the lesson failed in its
+effect. Statesmen like Hampden and Pym were not fools enough to aid the
+great enemy of English freedom against men who had risen for freedom
+across the Tweed. Every member of the Commons knew that Scotland was
+fighting the battle of English liberty. All hope of bringing them to any
+attack upon the Scots proved fruitless. The intercepted letters were
+quietly set aside; and the Commons declared as of old that redress of
+grievances must precede any grant of supplies. No subsidy could be
+granted till security was had for religion, for property, and for the
+liberties of Parliament. An offer to relinquish ship-money proved
+fruitless; and after three weeks sitting the "Short Parliament" was
+dissolved. "Things must go worse before they go better" was the cool
+comment of St. John. But the country was strangely moved. After eleven
+years of personal rule, its hopes had risen again with the summons of
+the Houses to Westminster; and their rough dismissal after a three weeks
+sitting brought all patience to an end. "So great a defection in the
+kingdom," wrote Lord Northumberland, "hath not been known in the memory
+of man."
+
+[Sidenote: The Bishops' War.]
+
+Strafford alone stood undaunted. He had provided for the resolve of the
+Parliament by the decision of the Council that in such a case the king
+might resort to "extraordinary means"; and he now urged that by the act
+of the Commons Charles was "freed from all rule of government," and
+entitled to supply himself at his will. The Irish army, he said, was at
+the king's command, and Scotland could be subdued in a single summer. He
+was bent, in fact, on war; and he took command of the royal army, which
+again advanced to the north. But the Scots were as ready for war as
+Strafford. As early as March they had reassembled their army; and their
+Parliament commissioned the Committee of Estates, of which Argyle was
+the most influential member, to carry on the government. Encouraged by
+the refusal of the English Houses to grant supplies, they now published
+a new manifesto and resolved to meet the march of Strafford's army by an
+advance into England. On the twentieth of August the Scotch army crossed
+the Border; Montrose being the first to set foot on English soil.
+Forcing the passage of the Tyne in the face of an English detachment,
+they occupied Newcastle, and despatched from that town their proposals
+of peace. They prayed the king to consider their grievances, and "with
+the advice and consent of the Estates of England convened in Parliament,
+to settle a firm and desirable peace." The prayer was backed by
+preparations for a march upon York, where Charles had abandoned himself
+to despair. The warlike bluster of Strafford had broken utterly down the
+moment he attempted to take the field. His troops were a mere mob; and
+neither by threats nor prayers could the earl recall them to their duty.
+He was forced to own that two months were needed before they could be
+fit for action. Charles was driven again to open negotiations with the
+Scots, and to buy a respite in their advance by a promise of pay for
+their army and by leaving Northumberland and Durham in their hands as
+pledges for the fulfilment of his engagements. But the truce only met
+half his difficulties. Behind him England was all but in revolt. The
+Treasury was empty, and London and the East India merchants alike
+refused a loan. The London apprentices mobbed Laud at Lambeth, and
+broke up the sittings of the High Commission at St. Paul's. The war was
+denounced everywhere as "the Bishops' War," and the new levies murdered
+officers whom they suspected of Papistry, broke down altar-rails in
+every church they passed, and deserted to their homes. To all but
+Strafford it was plain that the system of Charles had broken hopelessly
+down. Two peers, Lord Wharton and Lord Howard, ventured to lay before
+the king himself a petition for peace with the Scots; and though
+Strafford arrested and proposed to shoot them as mutineers, the English
+Council shrank from desperate courses. But if desperate courses were not
+taken, there was nothing for it but to give way. Penniless, without an
+army, with a people all but in revolt, the obstinate temper of the king
+still strove to escape from the humiliation of calling a Parliament. He
+summoned a Great Council of the Peers at York. But his project broke
+down before its general repudiation by the nobles; and with wrath and
+shame at his heart Charles was driven to summon again the Houses to
+Westminster.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE LONG PARLIAMENT
+
+1640-1644
+
+
+[Sidenote: John Pym.]
+
+If Strafford embodied the spirit of tyranny, John Pym, the leader of the
+Commons from the first meeting of the new Houses at Westminster, stands
+out for all after time as the embodiment of law. A Somersetshire
+gentleman of good birth and competent fortune, he entered on public life
+in the Parliament of 1614, and was imprisoned for his patriotism at its
+close. He had been a leading member in that of 1620, and one of the
+"twelve ambassadors" for whom James ordered chairs to be set at
+Whitehall. Of the band of patriots with whom he had stood side by side
+in the constitutional struggle against the earlier despotism of Charles
+he was almost the one survivor. Coke had died of old age; Cotton's heart
+was broken by oppression; Eliot had perished in the Tower; Wentworth had
+apostatized. But Pym remained, resolute, patient as of old; and as the
+sense of his greatness grew silently during the eleven years of
+deepening misrule, the hope and faith of better things clung almost
+passionately to the man who never doubted of the final triumph of
+freedom and the law. At their close, Clarendon tells us, in words all
+the more notable for their bitter tone of hate, "he was the most popular
+man, and the most able to do hurt, that have lived at any time." He had
+shown he knew how to wait, and when waiting was over he showed he knew
+how to act. On the eve of the Long Parliament he rode through England to
+quicken the electors to a sense of the crisis which had come at last;
+and on the assembling of the Commons he took his place, not merely as
+member for Tavistock, but as their acknowledged head. Few of the country
+gentlemen indeed who formed the bulk of the members, had sat in any
+previous House; and of the few none represented in so eminent a way the
+Parliamentary tradition on which the coming struggle was to turn. Pym's
+eloquence, inferior in boldness and originality to that of Eliot or
+Wentworth, was better suited by its massive and logical force to
+convince and guide a great party; and it was backed by a calmness of
+temper, a dexterity and order in the management of public business, and
+a practical power of shaping the course of debate, which gave a form and
+method to Parliamentary proceedings such as they had never had before.
+
+[Sidenote: His political theory.]
+
+Valuable however as these qualities were, it was a yet higher quality
+which raised Pym into the greatest, as he was the first, of
+Parliamentary leaders. Of the five hundred members who sate round him at
+St. Stephen's, he was the one man who had clearly foreseen, and as
+clearly resolved how to meet, the difficulties which lay before them. It
+was certain that Parliament would be drawn into a struggle with the
+Crown. It was probable that in such a struggle the House of Commons
+would be hampered, as it had been hampered before, by the House of
+Lords. The legal antiquarians of the older constitutional school stood
+helpless before such a conflict of co-ordinate powers, a conflict for
+which no provision had been made by the law, and on which precedents
+threw only a doubtful and conflicting light. But with a knowledge of
+precedent as great as their own, Pym rose high above them in his grasp
+of constitutional principles. He was the first English statesman who
+discovered, and applied, to the political circumstances around him, what
+may be called the doctrine of constitutional proportion. He saw that as
+an element of constitutional life Parliament was of higher value than
+the Crown; he saw too that in Parliament itself the one essential part
+was the House of Commons. On these two facts he based his whole policy
+in the contest which followed. When Charles refused to act with the
+Parliament, Pym treated the refusal as a temporary abdication on the
+part of the sovereign, which vested the executive power in the two
+Houses until new arrangements were made. When the Lords obstructed
+public business, he warned them that obstruction would only force the
+Commons "to save the kingdom alone." Revolutionary as these principles
+seemed at the time, they have both been recognized as bases of our
+constitution since the days of Pym. The first principle was established
+by the Convention and Parliament which followed on the departure of
+James the Second; the second by the acknowledgement on all sides since
+the Reform Bill of 1832 that the government of the country is really in
+the hands of the House of Commons, and can only be carried on by
+ministers who represent the majority of that House.
+
+[Sidenote: His political genius.]
+
+It was thus that the work of Pym brought about a political revolution
+greater than any that England has ever experienced since his day. But
+the temper of Pym was the very opposite of the temper of a
+revolutionist. Few natures have ever been wider in their range of
+sympathy or action. Serious as his purpose was, his manners were genial
+and even courtly; he turned easily from an invective against Strafford
+to a chat with Lady Carlisle; and the grace and gaiety of his social
+tone, even when the care and weight of public affairs were bringing him
+to his grave, gave rise to a hundred silly scandals among the prurient
+royalists. It was this striking combination of genial versatility with
+a massive force in his nature which marked him out from the first moment
+of power as a born ruler of men. He proved himself at once the subtlest
+of diplomatists and the grandest of demagogues. He was equally at home
+in tracking the subtle intricacies of royalist intrigues, or in kindling
+popular passion with words of fire. Though past middle life when his
+work really began, for he was born in 1584, four years before the coming
+of the Armada, he displayed from the first meeting of the Long
+Parliament the qualities of a great administrator, an immense faculty
+for labour, a genius for organization, patience, tact, a power of
+inspiring confidence in all whom he touched, calmness and moderation
+under good fortune or ill, an immovable courage, an iron will. No
+English ruler has ever shown greater nobleness of natural temper or a
+wider capacity for government than the Somersetshire squire whom his
+enemies, made clear-sighted by their hate, greeted truly enough as "King
+Pym."
+
+[Sidenote: The meeting of the Parliament.]
+
+On the eve of the elections he rode with Hampden through the counties to
+rouse England to a sense of the crisis which had come. But his ride was
+hardly needed, for the summons of a Parliament at once woke the kingdom
+to a fresh life. The Puritan emigration to New England was suddenly and
+utterly suspended; "the change," said Winthrop, "made all men to stay in
+England in expectation of a new world." The public discontent spoke
+from every Puritan pulpit, and expressed itself in a sudden burst of
+pamphlets, the first-fruits of the thirty thousand which were issued in
+the twenty years that followed, and which turned England at large into a
+school of political discussion. The resolute looks of the members, as
+they gathered at Westminster on the third of November 1640, contrasted
+with the hesitating words of the king; and each brought from borough or
+county a petition of grievances. Fresh petitions were brought every day
+by bands of citizens or farmers. The first week was spent in receiving
+these petitions, and in appointing forty committees to examine and
+report on them, whose reports formed the grounds on which the Commons
+subsequently acted. The next work of the Commons was to deal with the
+agents of the royal system. It was agreed that the king's name should be
+spared; but in every county a list of officers who had carried out the
+plans of the Government was ordered to be prepared and laid before the
+House. But the Commons were far from dealing merely with these meaner
+"delinquents." They resolved to strike at the men whose counsels had
+wrought the evil of the past years of tyranny; and their first blow was
+at the leading ministers of the king.
+
+[Sidenote: Impeachment of Strafford.]
+
+Even Laud was not the centre of so great and universal a hatred as the
+Earl of Strafford. Strafford's guilt was more than the guilt of a
+servile instrument of tyranny, it was the guilt of "that grand apostate
+to the Commonwealth who," in the terrible words which closed Lord
+Digby's invective, "must not expect to be pardoned in this world till he
+be despatched to the other." He was conscious of his danger, but Charles
+forced him to attend the Court; and with characteristic boldness he
+resolved to anticipate attack by accusing the Parliamentary leaders of a
+treasonable correspondence with the Scots. He reached London a week
+after the opening of the Parliament; and hastened the next morning to an
+interview with the king. But he had to deal with men as energetic as
+himself. He was just laying his scheme before Charles when the news
+reached him that Pym was at the bar of the Lords with his impeachment
+for high treason. On the morning of the 11th of November the doors of
+the House of Commons had been locked, Strafford's impeachment voted, and
+carried by Pym with 300 members at his back to the bar of the Lords. The
+Earl hurried at once to the Parliament. "With speed," writes an
+eye-witness, "he comes to the House: he calls rudely at the door," and,
+"with a proud glooming look, makes towards his place at the board-head.
+But at once many bid him void the House, so he is forced in confusion to
+go to the door till he was called." He was only recalled to hear his
+committal to the Tower. He was still resolute to retort the charge of
+treason on his foes, and "offered to speak, but was commanded to be gone
+without a word." The keeper of the Black Rod demanded his sword as he
+took him in charge. "This done, he makes through a number of people
+towards his coach, no man capping to him, before whom that morning the
+greatest of all England would have stood uncovered."
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of the Ministers.]
+
+The blow was quickly followed up. Windebank, the Secretary of State, was
+charged with a corrupt favouring of recusants, and escaped to France;
+Finch, the Lord Keeper, was impeached, and fled in terror over sea. In
+December Laud was himself committed to the charge of the Usher. The
+shadow of what was to come falls across the pages of his diary, and
+softens the hard temper of the man into a strange tenderness. "I stayed
+at Lambeth till the evening," writes the Archbishop, "to avoid the gaze
+of the people. I went to evening prayer in my chapel. The Psalms of the
+day and chapter fifty of Isaiah gave me great comfort. God make me
+worthy of it, and fit to receive it. As I went to my barge, hundreds of
+my poor neighbours stood there and prayed for my safety and return to my
+house. For which I bless God and them." In February Sir Robert Berkeley,
+one of the judges who had held that ship-money was legal, was seized
+while sitting on the Bench and committed to prison. In the very first
+days of the Parliament a yet more emphatic proof of the downfall of the
+royal system had been given by the recall of Prynne and his fellow
+"martyrs" from their prisons, and by their entry in triumph into London,
+amidst the shouts of a great multitude who strewed laurels in their
+path.
+
+[Sidenote: Work of the Houses.]
+
+The effect of these rapid blows was seen in the altered demeanour of the
+king. Charles at once dropped his old tone of command. He ceased to
+protest against the will of the Commons, and looked sullenly on while
+one by one the lawless acts of his Government were undone. Ship-money
+was declared illegal; and the judgement in Hampden's case was annulled.
+In February 1641 a statute declaring "the ancient right of the subjects
+of this kingdom that no subsidy, custom, impost, or any charge
+whatsoever ought or may be laid or imposed upon any merchandise exported
+or imported by subjects, denizens, or aliens, without common consent in
+Parliament," put an end for ever to all pretensions to a right of
+arbitrary taxation on the part of the Crown. A Triennial Bill enforced
+the assembly of the Houses every three years, and bound the returning
+officers to proceed to election if no royal writ were issued to summon
+them.
+
+[Sidenote: Church reform.]
+
+The subject of religion was one of greater difficulty. In ecclesiastical
+as in political matters the aim of the parliamentary leaders was
+strictly conservative. Their purpose was to restore the Church of
+England to its state under Elizabeth, and to free it from the
+"innovations" introduced by Laud and his fellow-prelates. With this view
+commissioners were sent in January 1641 into every county "for the
+defacing, demolishing, and quite taking away of all images, altars, or
+tables turned altarwise, crucifixes, superstitious pictures, monuments,
+and reliques of idolatry out of all churches and chapels." But the bulk
+of the Commons as of the Lords were averse from any radical changes in
+the constitution or doctrine of the Church. All however were agreed on
+the necessity of reform; and one of the first acts of the Parliament was
+to appoint a Committee of Religion to consider the question. Within as
+without the House the general opinion was in favour of a reduction of
+the power and wealth of the prelates, as well as of the jurisdiction of
+the Church courts. Even among the bishops themselves the more prominent
+saw the need for consenting to an abolition of Chapters and Bishops'
+Courts, as well as to the election of a council of ministers in each
+diocese, which had been suggested by Archbishop Usher as a check on
+episcopal autocracy. A scheme to this effect was drawn up by Bishop
+Williams of Lincoln; but it was far from meeting the wishes of the
+general body of the Commons. The part which the higher clergy had taken
+in lending themselves to do political work for the Crown was fresh in
+the minds of all; and in addition to the changes which Williams
+proposed, Pym and Lord Falkland demanded a severance of the clergy from
+all secular or state offices, and an expulsion of the bishops from the
+House of Lords. Such a measure seemed needful to restore the independent
+action of the Peers; for the number and servility of the bishops were
+commonly strong enough to prevent the Upper House from taking any part
+which was disagreeable to the Crown.
+
+[Sidenote: The Bishops and Parliament.]
+
+Further the bulk of the Commons had no will to go. There were others
+indeed who were pressing hard to go further. A growing party demanded
+the abolition of Episcopacy altogether. The doctrines of Cartwright had
+risen into popularity under the persecution of Laud, and Presbyterianism
+was now a formidable force among the middle classes. Its chief strength
+lay in the eastern counties and in London, where a few clergymen such as
+Calamy and Marshall formed a committee for its diffusion; while in
+Parliament it was represented by Lord Brooke, Lord Mandeville, and Lord
+Saye and Sele. In the Commons Sir Harry Vane represented a more extreme
+party of reformers, the Independents of the future, whose sentiments
+were little less hostile to Presbyterianism than to Episcopacy, but who
+acted with the Presbyterians for the present, and formed a part of what
+became known as the "root and branch" party, from its demand for the
+utter extirpation of prelacy. The attitude of Scotland in the struggle
+against tyranny, and the political advantages of a religious union
+between the two kingdoms, gave force to the Presbyterian party; and the
+agitation which it set on foot found a vigorous support in the Scotch
+Commissioners who had been sent to treat of peace with the Parliament.
+Thoughtful men, too, were moved by a desire to knit the English Church
+more closely to the general body of Protestantism. Milton, who after the
+composition of his "Lycidas" had spent a year in foreign travel,
+returned to throw himself on this ground into the theological strife. He
+held it "an unjust thing that the English should differ from all
+churches as many as be reformed." In spite of this pressure however, and
+of a Presbyterian petition from London with fifteen thousand signatures
+which had been presented at the very opening of the Houses, the
+Parliament remained hostile to any change in the constitution of the
+Church. The Committee of Religion reported in favour of the reforms
+proposed by Falkland and Pym; and on the tenth of March 1641 a bill for
+the removal of bishops from the House of Peers passed the Commons almost
+unanimously.
+
+[Sidenote: Trial of Strafford.]
+
+As yet all had gone well. The king made no sign of opposition. He was
+known to be resolute against the abolition of Episcopacy; but he
+announced no purpose of resisting the removal of the bishops from the
+House of Peers. Strafford's life he was determined to save; but he
+threw no obstacle in the way of his impeachment. The trial of the Earl
+opened on the twenty-second of March. The whole of the House of Commons
+appeared in Westminster Hall to support it, and the passion which the
+cause excited was seen in the loud cries of sympathy or hatred which
+burst from the crowded benches on either side as Strafford for fifteen
+days struggled with a remarkable courage and ingenuity against the list
+of charges, and melted his audience to tears by the pathos of his
+defence. But the trial was suddenly interrupted. Though tyranny and
+misgovernment had been conclusively proved against the Earl, the
+technical proof of treason was weak. "The law of England," to use
+Hallam's words, "is silent as to conspiracies against itself," and
+treason by the Statute of Edward the Third was restricted to a levying
+of war against the king or a compassing of his death. The Commons
+endeavoured to strengthen their case by bringing forward the notes of a
+meeting of the Council in which Strafford had urged the use of his Irish
+troops "to reduce that kingdom to obedience"; but the Lords would only
+admit the evidence on condition of wholly reopening the case. Pym and
+Hampden remained convinced of the sufficiency of the impeachment; but
+the House broke loose from their control. Under the guidance of St. John
+and Lord Falkland the Commons resolved to abandon these judicial
+proceedings, and fall back on the resource of a Bill of Attainder. The
+bill passed the Lower House on the 21st of April by a majority of 204 to
+59; and on the 29th it received the assent of the Lords. The course
+which the Parliament took has been bitterly censured by some whose
+opinion in such a matter is entitled to respect. But the crime of
+Strafford was none the less a crime that it did not fall within the
+scope of the Statute of Treasons. It is impossible indeed to provide for
+some of the greatest dangers which can happen to national freedom by any
+formal statute. Even now a minister might avail himself of the temper of
+a Parliament elected in some moment of popular panic, and, though the
+nation returned to its senses, might simply by refusing to appeal to the
+country govern in defiance of its will. Such a course would be
+technically legal, but such a minister would be none the less a
+criminal. Strafford's course, whether it fell within the Statute of
+Treasons or no, was from beginning to end an attack on the freedom of
+the whole nation. In the last resort a nation retains the right of
+self-defence, and a Bill of Attainder is the assertion of such a right
+for the punishment of a public enemy who falls within the scope of no
+written law.
+
+[Sidenote: The Army Plot.]
+
+The counsel of Pym and of Hampden had been prompted by no doubt of the
+legality of the attainder. But they looked on the impeachment as still
+likely to succeed, and they were anxious at this moment to conciliate
+the king. The real security for the permanence of the changes they had
+wrought lay in a lasting change in the royal counsels; and such a change
+it seemed possible to bring about. To save Strafford and Episcopacy
+Charles listened in the spring of 1641 to a proposal for entrusting the
+offices of state to the leaders of the Parliament. In this scheme the
+Earl of Bedford was to become Lord Treasurer, Pym Chancellor of the
+Exchequer, Holles Secretary of State, while Lords Essex, Mandeville, and
+Saye and Sele occupied various posts in the administration. Foreign
+affairs would have been entrusted to Lord Holland, whose policy was that
+of alliance with Richelieu and Holland against Spain, a policy whose
+adoption would have been sealed by the marriage of a daughter of Charles
+with the Prince of Orange. With characteristic foresight Hampden sought
+only the charge of the Prince of Wales. He knew that the best security
+for freedom in the after-time would be a patriot king. Charles listened
+to this project with seeming assent; the only conditions he made were
+that Episcopacy should not be abolished, nor Strafford executed; and
+though the death of Lord Bedford put an end to it for the moment, the
+Parliamentary leaders seem still to have had hopes of their entry into
+the royal Council. But meanwhile Charles was counting the chances of a
+very different policy. The courtiers about him were rallying from their
+first panic. His French Queen, furious at what she looked on as insults
+to royalty, and yet more furious at the persecution of the Catholics,
+was spurring him to violent courses. And for violence there seemed at
+the moment an opportunity. In Ireland Strafford's army refused to
+disband itself. In Scotland the union of the nobles was already broken
+by the old spirit of faction; and in his jealousy of the power gained by
+his hereditary enemy, the Earl of Argyle, Lord Montrose had formed a
+party with other great nobles, and was pressing Charles to come and
+carry out a counter-revolution in the North. Above all the English army,
+which still lay at York, was discontented by its want of pay and by the
+favour shown to the Scottish soldiers in its front. The discontent was
+busily fanned by its officers; and a design was laid before Charles by
+which advantage might be taken of the humour of the army to march it
+upon London, to seize the Tower and free Strafford. With the Earl at
+their head, the soldiers could then overawe the Houses and free the king
+from his thraldom. Charles listened to the project; he refused any
+expression of assent; but he kept the secret, and suffered the plot to
+go on, while he continued the negotiations with the Parliamentary
+leaders.
+
+[Sidenote: Death of Strafford.]
+
+But he was now in the hands of men who were his match in intrigue as
+they were more than his match in quickness of action. In the beginning
+of May, it is said through a squabble among the conspirators, the army
+plot became known to Pym. The moment was a critical one. Much of the
+energy and union of the Parliament was already spent. The Lords were
+beginning to fall back into their old position of allies of the Court.
+They were holding at bay the bill for the expulsion of the bishops from
+their seats in Parliament which had been sent up by the Lower House,
+though the measure aimed at freeing the Peers as a legislative body by
+removing from among them a body of men whose servility made them mere
+tools of the Crown, while it averted--if but for the moment--the growing
+pressure for the abolition of episcopacy. Things were fast coming to a
+standstill, when the discovery of the army plot changed the whole
+situation. Waver as the Peers might, they had no mind to be tricked by
+the king and overawed by his soldiery. The Commons were stirred to their
+old energy, London itself was driven to panic at the thought of passing
+into the hands of a mutinous and unpaid army. The general alarm sealed
+Strafford's doom. In plotting for his release, the plotters had marked
+him out as a life which was the main danger to the new state of things.
+Strafford still hoped in his master; he had a pledge from Charles that
+his life should be saved; and on the first of May the king in a formal
+message to the Parliament had refused his assent to the Bill of
+Attainder. But the Queen had no mind that her husband should suffer for
+a minister whom she hated, and before her pressure the king gave way. On
+the tenth of May he gave his assent to the bill by commission, and on
+the twelfth Strafford passed to his doom. He died as he had lived. His
+friends warned him of the vast multitude gathered before the Tower to
+witness his fall. "I know how to look death in the face, and the people
+too," he answered proudly. "I thank God I am no more afraid of death,
+but as cheerfully put off my doublet at this time as ever I did when I
+went to bed." As the axe fell, the silence of the great multitude was
+broken by a universal shout of joy. The streets blazed with bonfires.
+The bells clashed out from every steeple. "Many," says an observer,
+"that came to town to see the execution rode in triumph back, waving
+their hats, and with all expressions of joy through every town they
+went, crying, 'His head is off. His head is off!'"
+
+[Sidenote: The Panic.]
+
+The failure of the attempt to establish a Parliamentary ministry, the
+discovery of the army plot, the execution of Strafford, were the turning
+points in the history of the Long Parliament. Till May 1641 there was
+still hope for an accommodation between the Commons and the Crown by
+which the freedom that had been won might have been taken as the base of
+a new system of government. But from that hour little hope of such an
+agreement remained. The Parliament could put no trust in the king. The
+air at Westminster, since the discovery of the army conspiracy, was full
+of rumours and panic; the creak of a few boards revived the memory of
+the Gunpowder Plot, and the members rushed out of the House of Commons
+in the full belief that it was undermined. On the other hand, Charles
+put by all thought of reconciliation. If he had given his assent to
+Strafford's death, he never forgave the men who had wrested his assent
+from him. From that hour he regarded his consent to the new measures as
+having been extorted by force, and to be retracted at the first
+opportunity. His opponents were quick to feel the king's resolve of a
+counter-revolution; and both Houses, in their terror, swore to defend
+the Protestant religion and the public liberties, an oath which was
+subsequently exacted from every one engaged in civil employment, and
+voluntarily taken by the great mass of the people. The same terror of a
+counter-revolution induced even Hyde and the "moderate men" in the
+Commons to bring in a bill providing that the present Parliament should
+not be dissolved but by its own consent; and the same commission which
+gave the king's assent to Strafford's attainder gave his assent to this
+bill for perpetuating the Parliament.
+
+[Sidenote: Charles in Scotland.]
+
+Of all the demands of the Parliament this was the first that could be
+called distinctly revolutionary. To consent to it was to establish a
+power permanently co-ordinate with the Crown. But Charles signed the
+bill without protest. He had ceased to look on his acts as those of a
+free agent; and he was already planning the means of breaking the
+Parliament. What had hitherto held him down was the revolt of Scotland
+and the pressure of the Scotch army across the border. But its payment
+and withdrawal could no longer be delayed. The death of Strafford was
+immediately followed by the conclusion of a pacification between the two
+countries; and the sum required for the disbanding of both armies was
+provided by a poll-tax. Meanwhile the Houses hastened to complete their
+task of reform. The civil and judicial jurisdiction of the Star Chamber
+and the Court of High Commission, the irregular jurisdictions of the
+Council of the North, the Duchy of Lancaster, the County of Chester,
+were summarily abolished with a crowd of lesser tribunals. The work was
+pushed hastily on, for haste was needed. On the sixth of August the two
+armies were alike disbanded; and the Scots were no sooner on their way
+homeward than the king resolved to prevent their return. In spite of
+prayers from the Parliament, he left London for Edinburgh, yielded to
+every demand of the Assembly and the Scotch Estates, attended the
+Presbyterian worship, lavished titles and favours on the Earl of Argyle
+and the patriot leaders, and gained for a while a popularity which
+spread dismay in the English Parliament. Their dread of his designs was
+increased when he was found to have been intriguing all the while with
+the Earl of Montrose--whose conspiracy had been discovered before the
+king's coming and rewarded with imprisonment in the castle of
+Edinburgh--and when Hamilton and Argyle withdrew suddenly from the
+capital, and charged Charles with a treacherous plot to seize and carry
+them out of the realm.
+
+[Sidenote: The Irish Rising.]
+
+The fright was fanned to frenzy by news which came suddenly from
+Ireland. The quiet of that unhappy country under Strafford's rule had
+been a mere quiet of terror. The Catholic Englishry were angered by the
+Deputy's breach of faith. Before his coming Charles had promised for a
+sum of £120,000 to dispense with the oath of supremacy, to suffer
+recusants to practise in the courts of law, and to put a stop to the
+constant extortion of their lands by legal process. The money was paid;
+but by the management of Wentworth, the "Graces" which it was to bring
+received no confirmation from the Irish Parliament. The Lord-Deputy's
+policy aimed at keeping the recusants still at the mercy of the Crown;
+what it really succeeded in doing was to rob them of any hope of justice
+or fair dealing from the government. The native Irishry were yet more
+bitterly outraged by his dealings in Connaught. Under pretext that as
+inhabitants of a conquered country Irishmen had no rights but by
+express grant from the Crown, the Deputy had wrested nearly a half of
+the lands in that province from their native holders with the view of
+founding a new English plantation. The new settlers were slow in coming,
+but the evictions and spoliation renewed the bitter wrath which had been
+stirred by the older plantation in Ulster. All however remained quiet
+till the fall of Strafford put an end to the semblance of rule. The
+disbanded soldiers of the army he had raised spread over the country,
+and stirred the smouldering disaffection into a flame. In October 1641,
+a rising, organized with wonderful power and secrecy by Roger O'Moore
+and Owen Roe O'Neill, burst forth under Sir Phelim O'Neill in Ulster,
+where the confiscation of the Settlement had never been forgiven, and
+spread like wildfire over the centre and west of the island. Dublin was
+saved by a mere chance; but in the open country the rebellion went on
+unchecked. The trembling planters fled for shelter to the towns as the
+clansmen poured back over their old tribal lands, and rumour doubled and
+trebled the number of the slain. Tales of horror and outrage, such as
+maddened our own England when they reached us from Cawnpore, came day
+after day over the Irish Channel; and sworn depositions told how
+husbands were cut to pieces in presence of their wives, their children's
+brains dashed out before their faces, their daughters brutally violated
+and driven out naked to perish frozen in the woods.
+
+[Sidenote: Its effect on England.]
+
+Much of all this was no doubt the wild exaggeration of panic, and the
+research of later times has shown how fraud lent a terrible aid to panic
+in multiplying a hundredfold the tales of outrage. But there was enough
+in the revolt to carry terror to the hearts of Englishmen. It was unlike
+any earlier rising in its religious character. It was no longer a
+struggle, as of old, of Celt against Saxon, but of Catholic against
+Protestant. The Papists within the Pale joined hands in it with the wild
+kernes outside the Pale. When the governing body of the rebels met at
+Kells in the following spring they called themselves "Confederate
+Catholics," resolved to defend "the public and free exercise of the true
+and Catholic Roman religion." The panic waxed greater when it was found
+that they claimed to be acting by the king's commission, and in aid of
+his authority. They professed to stand by Charles and his heirs against
+all that should "directly and indirectly endeavour to suppress their
+royal prerogatives." They showed a Commission, purporting to have been
+issued by royal command at Edinburgh, and styled themselves "the king's
+army." The Commission was a forgery, but belief in it was quickened by
+the want of all sympathy with the national honour which Charles
+displayed. To him the revolt seemed a useful check on his opponents. "I
+hope," he wrote coolly, when the news reached him, "this ill news of
+Ireland may hinder some of these follies in England." In any case it
+would necessitate the raising of an army, and with an army at his
+command he would again be the master of the Parliament. The Parliament,
+on the other hand, saw in the Irish revolt, the news of which met them
+but a few days after their reassembly at the close of October, the
+disclosure of a vast scheme for a counter-revolution, of which the
+withdrawal of the Scotch army, the reconciliation of Scotland, the
+intrigues at Edinburgh were all parts. Its terror was quickened into
+panic by the exultation of the royalists at the king's return to London
+at the close of November, and by the appearance of a royalist party in
+the Parliament itself.
+
+[Sidenote: The new Royalists.]
+
+The new party had been silently organized by Hyde, the future Lord
+Clarendon. To Hyde and to the men who gathered round him enough seemed
+to have been done. They clung to the law, but the law had been
+vindicated. They bitterly resented the system of Strafford and of Laud;
+but the system was at an end. They believed that English freedom hung on
+the assembly of Parliament and on the loyal co-operation of the Crown
+with this Great Council of the Realm; but the assembly of Parliaments
+was now secured by the Triennial Bill, and the king professed himself
+ready to rule according to the counsels of Parliament. On the other
+hand they desired to preserve to the Crown the right and power it had
+had under the Tudors. They revolted from any attempt to give the Houses
+a share in the actual work of administration. On both political and
+religious grounds they were resolute to suffer no change in the
+relations of the Church to the State, or to weaken the prerogative of
+the Crown by the establishment of a Presbyterianism which asserted any
+sort of spiritual independence. More complex impulses told on the course
+of Lord Falkland. Falkland was a man learned and accomplished, the
+centre of a circle which embraced the most liberal thinkers of his day.
+He was a keen reasoner and an able speaker. But he was the centre of
+that Latitudinarian party which was slowly growing up in the reaction
+from the dogmatism of the time, and his most passionate longing was for
+liberty of religious thought. Such a liberty the system of the Stuarts
+had little burdened; what Laud pressed for was uniformity, not of
+speculation, but of practice and ritual. But the temper of Puritanism
+was a dogmatic temper, and the tone of the Parliament already threatened
+a narrowing of the terms of speculative belief for the Church of
+England. While this fear estranged Falkland from the Parliament, his
+dread of a conflict with the Crown, his passionate longing for peace,
+his sympathy for the fallen, led him to struggle for a king whom he
+distrusted, and to die in a cause that was not his own. Behind Falkland
+and Hyde soon gathered a strong force of supporters; chivalrous soldiers
+like Sir Edmund Verney ("I have eaten the king's bread and served him
+near thirty years, and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him"),
+as well as men frightened at the rapid march of change, or by the
+dangers which threatened Episcopacy and the Church. And with these stood
+the few but ardent partizans of the Court; and the time-servers who had
+been swept along by the tide of popular passion, but who had believed
+its force to be spent, and looked forward to a new triumph of the Crown.
+
+[Sidenote: The Remonstrance.]
+
+With a broken Parliament, and perils gathering without, Pym resolved to
+appeal for aid to the nation itself. The Grand Remonstrance which he
+laid before the House of Commons in November was in effect an appeal to
+the country at large. It is this purpose that accounts for its unusual
+form. The Remonstrance was more an elaborate State-Paper than a petition
+to the king. It told in a detailed narrative the work which the
+Parliament had done, the difficulties it had surmounted, and the new
+dangers which lay in its path. The Parliament had been charged with a
+design to abolish Episcopacy, it declared its purpose to be simply that
+of reducing the power of bishops. Politically it repudiated the taunt of
+revolutionary aims. It demanded only the observance of the existing
+laws against recusancy, securities for the due administration of
+justice, and the employment of ministers who possessed the confidence of
+Parliament. The new king's party fought fiercely against its adoption;
+debate followed debate; the sittings were prolonged till lights had to
+be brought in; and it was only at midnight, and by a majority of eleven,
+that the Remonstrance was finally adopted. On an attempt of the minority
+to offer a formal protest against a subsequent vote for its publication
+the slumbering passion broke out into a flame. "Some waved their hats
+over their heads, and others took their swords in their scabbards out of
+their belts, and held them by the pommels in their hands, setting the
+lower part on the ground." Only Hampden's coolness and tact averted a
+conflict. The Remonstrance was felt on both sides to be a crisis in the
+struggle. "Had it been rejected," said Cromwell as he left the House, "I
+would have sold to-morrow all I possess, and left England for ever!" It
+was presented to Charles on the first of December, and the king listened
+to it sullenly; but it kindled afresh the spirit of the country. London
+swore to live and die with the Parliament; associations were formed in
+every county for the defence of the Houses; and when the guard which the
+Commons had asked for in the panic of the army plot was withdrawn by the
+king, the populace crowded down to Westminster to take its place.
+
+[Sidenote: Cavaliers and Roundheads.]
+
+The gathering passion soon passed into actual strife. Pym and his
+colleagues saw that the disunion in their ranks sprang above all from
+the question of the Church. On the one side were the Presbyterian
+zealots who were clamouring for the abolition of Episcopacy. On the
+other were the conservative tempers who in the dread of such demands
+were beginning to see in the course of the Parliament a threat against
+the Church which they loved. To put an end to the pressure of the one
+party and the dread of the other Pym took his stand on the compromise
+suggested by the Committee of Religion in the spring. The bill for the
+removal of bishops from the House of Lords had been rejected by the
+Lords on the eve of the king's journey to Scotland. It was now again
+introduced. But, in spite of violent remonstrances from the Commons, the
+bill still hung fire among the Peers; and the delay roused the excited
+crowd of Londoners who gathered round Whitehall. The bishops' carriages
+were stopped, and the prelates themselves rabbled on their way to the
+House. At the close of December the angry pride of Williams induced ten
+of his fellow-bishops to declare themselves prevented from attendance in
+Parliament, and to protest against all acts done in their absence as
+null and void. Such a protest was utterly unconstitutional; and even on
+the part of the Peers who had been maintaining the bishops' rights it
+was met by the committal of the prelates who had signed it to the
+Tower. But the contest gave a powerful aid to the projects of the king.
+The courtiers declared openly that the rabbling of the bishops proved
+that there was "no free Parliament," and strove to bring about fresh
+outrages by gathering troops of officers and soldiers of fortune, who
+were seeking for employment in the Irish war, and pitting them against
+the crowds at Whitehall. The combatants pelted one another with
+nicknames which were soon to pass into history. To wear his hair long
+and flowing almost to the shoulder was at this time the mark of a
+gentleman, whether Puritan or anti-Puritan. Servants on the other hand
+or apprentices wore the hair closely cropped to the head. The crowds who
+flocked to Westminster were chiefly made up of London apprentices; and
+their opponents taunted them as "Roundheads." They replied by branding
+the courtiers about Whitehall as soldiers of fortune or "Cavaliers." The
+gentlemen who gathered round the king in the coming struggle were as far
+from being military adventurers as the gentlemen who fought for the
+Parliament were from being London apprentices; but the words soon passed
+into nicknames for the whole mass of royalists and patriots.
+
+[Sidenote: Seizure of the Five Members.]
+
+From nicknames the soldiers and apprentices soon passed to actual
+brawls; and the strife beneath its walls created fresh alarm in the
+Parliament. But Charles persisted in refusing it a guard. "On the
+honour of a king" he engaged to defend them from violence as completely
+as his own children, but the answer had hardly been given when his
+Attorney appeared at the bar of the Lords, and accused Hampden, Pym,
+Holles, Strode, and Haselrig of high treason in their correspondence
+with the Scots. A herald-at-arms appeared at the bar of the Commons, and
+demanded the surrender of the five members. All constitutional law was
+set aside by a charge which proceeded personally from the king, which
+deprived the accused of their legal right to a trial by their peers, and
+summoned them before a tribunal that had no pretence to a jurisdiction
+over them. The Commons simply promised to take the demand into
+consideration. They again requested a guard. "I will reply to-morrow,"
+said the king. He had in fact resolved to seize the members in the House
+itself; and on the morrow, the 4th of January 1642, he summoned the
+gentlemen who clustered about Whitehall to follow him, and, embracing
+the Queen, whose violent temper had urged him to this outrage, promised
+her that in an hour he would return master of his kingdom. A mob of
+Cavaliers joined him as he left the palace, and remained in Westminster
+Hall as Charles, accompanied by his nephew, the Elector-Palatine,
+entered the House of Commons. "Mr. Speaker," he said, "I must for a time
+borrow your chair!" He paused with a sudden confusion as his eye fell
+on the vacant spot where Pym commonly sate: for at the news of his
+approach the House had ordered the five members to withdraw.
+"Gentlemen," he began in slow broken sentences, "I am sorry for this
+occasion of coming unto you. Yesterday I sent a Sergeant-at-arms upon a
+very important occasion to apprehend some that by my command were
+accused of high treason, whereunto I did expect obedience and not a
+message." Treason, he went on, had no privilege, "and therefore I am
+come to know if any of these persons that were accused are here." There
+was a dead silence, only broken by his reiterated "I must have them
+wheresoever I find them." He again paused, but the stillness was
+unbroken. Then he called out, "Is Mr. Pym here?" There was no answer;
+and Charles, turning to the Speaker, asked him whether the five members
+were there. Lenthall fell on his knees, and replied that he had neither
+eyes nor tongue to see or say anything save what the House commanded
+him. "Well, well," Charles angrily retorted, "'tis no matter. I think my
+eyes are as good as another's!" There was another long pause while he
+looked carefully over the ranks of members. "I see," he said at last,
+"my birds are flown, but I do expect you will send them to me." If they
+did not, he added, he would seek them himself; and with a closing
+protest that he never intended any force "he went out of the House,"
+says an eye-witness, "in a more discontented and angry passion than he
+came in."
+
+[Sidenote: Charles withdraws from London.]
+
+Nothing but the absence of the five members and the calm dignity of the
+Commons had prevented the king's outrage from ending in bloodshed. "It
+was believed," says Whitelock, who was present at the scene, "that if
+the king had found them there, and called in his guards to have seized
+them, the members of the House would have endeavoured the defence of
+them, which might have proved a very unhappy and sad business." Five
+hundred gentlemen of the best blood in England would hardly have stood
+tamely by while the bravoes of Whitehall laid hands on their leaders in
+the midst of the Parliament. But Charles was blind to the danger of his
+course. The five members had taken refuge in the City, and it was there
+that on the next day the king himself demanded their surrender from the
+aldermen at Guildhall. Cries of "Privilege" rang round him as he
+returned through the streets: the writs issued for the arrest of the
+five were disregarded by the Sheriffs; and a proclamation issued four
+days later, declaring them traitors, passed without notice. Terror drove
+the Cavaliers from Whitehall, and Charles stood absolutely alone; for
+the outrage had severed him for the moment from his new friends in the
+Parliament, and from the ministers, Falkland and Colepepper, whom he had
+chosen among them. But, lonely as he was, Charles had resolved on war.
+The Earl of Newcastle was despatched to muster a royal force in the
+north; and on the tenth of January news that the five members were about
+to return in triumph to Westminster drove Charles from Whitehall. He
+retired to Hampton Court and to Windsor, while the Trained Bands of
+London and Southwark on foot, and the London watermen on the river, all
+sworn "to guard the Parliament, the Kingdom, and the King," escorted Pym
+and his fellow-members along the Thames to the House of Commons. Both
+sides prepared for a struggle which was now inevitable. The Queen sailed
+from Dover with the Crown jewels to buy munitions of war. The Cavaliers
+again gathered round the king, and the royalist press flooded the
+country with State papers drawn up by Hyde. On the other hand, the
+Commons resolved by vote to secure the great arsenals of the kingdom,
+Hull, Portsmouth, and the Tower; while mounted processions of
+freeholders from Buckinghamshire and Kent traversed London on their way
+to St. Stephen's, vowing to live and die with the Parliament.
+
+[Sidenote: Preparations for war.]
+
+The Lords were scared out of their policy of obstruction by Pym's bold
+announcement of the position taken by the House of Commons. "The
+Commons," said their leader, "will be glad to have your concurrence and
+help in saving the kingdom: but if they fail of it, it should not
+discourage them in doing their duty. And whether the kingdom be lost or
+saved, they shall be sorry that the story of this present Parliament
+should tell posterity that in so great a danger and extremity the House
+of Commons should be enforced to save the kingdom alone." The effect of
+these words was seen in the passing of the bill for excluding bishops
+from the House of Lords, the last act of this Parliament to which
+Charles gave his assent. The great point however was to secure armed
+support from the nation at large, and here both sides were in a
+difficulty. Previous to the innovations introduced by the Tudors, and
+which had been taken away by the bill against pressing soldiers, the
+king in himself had no power of calling on his subjects generally to
+bear arms, save for the purposes of restoring order or meeting foreign
+invasion. On the other hand no one contended that such a power has ever
+been exercised by the two Houses without the king; and Charles steadily
+refused to consent to a Militia bill, in which the command of the
+national force was given in every county to men devoted to the
+Parliamentary cause. Both parties therefore broke through constitutional
+precedent, the Parliament in appointing Lord Lieutenants of the Militia
+by ordinance of the two Houses, Charles in levying forces by royal
+commissions of array.
+
+[Sidenote: Outbreak of war.]
+
+But the king's great difficulty lay in procuring arms, and on the
+twenty-third of April he suddenly appeared before Hull, the magazine of
+the north, and demanded admission. The new governor, Sir John Hotham,
+fell on his knees, but refused to open the gates: and the avowal of his
+act by the Parliament was followed at the end of May by the withdrawal
+of the royalist party among its members from their seats at Westminster.
+Falkland, Colepepper, and Hyde, with thirty-two peers and sixty members
+of the House of Commons, joined Charles at York; and Lyttelton, the Lord
+Keeper, followed with the Great Seal. But one of their aims in joining
+the king was to put a check on his projects of war; and their efforts
+were backed by the general opposition of the country. A great meeting of
+the Yorkshire freeholders which Charles convened on Heyworth Moor ended
+in a petition praying him to be reconciled to the Parliament; and in
+spite of gifts of plate from the universities and nobles of his party
+arms and money were still wanting for his new levies. The two Houses, on
+the other hand, gained in unity and vigour by the withdrawal of the
+royalists. The militia was rapidly enrolled, Lord Warwick named to the
+command of the fleet, and a loan opened in the City to which the women
+brought even their wedding-rings. The tone of the two Houses rose with
+the threat of force. It was plain at last that nothing but actual
+compulsion could bring Charles to rule as a constitutional sovereign;
+and the last proposals of the Parliament demanded the powers of
+appointing and dismissing the ministers, of naming guardians for the
+royal children, and of virtually controlling military, civil, and
+religious affairs. "If I granted your demands," replied Charles, "I
+should be no more than the mere phantom of a king."
+
+
+END OF VOL. V
+
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
+
+
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+The following words appear with and without hyphens. They have been
+left as in the original.
+
+     Franche Comté      Franche-Comté
+     goodwill           good-will
+     middle classes     middle-classes
+     newcomer           new-comers
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE,
+VOLUME V (OF 8) ***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 23642-8.txt or 23642-8.zip *******
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, History of the English People, Volume V (of
+8) , by John Richard Green</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p class="noindent">Title: History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) </p>
+<p class="noindent">       Puritan England, 1603-1660</p>
+<p class="noindent">Author: John Richard Green</p>
+<p class="noindent">Release Date: November 27, 2007  [eBook #23642]<br />
+Most recently updated: May 20, 2008</p>
+<p class="noindent">Language: English</p>
+<p class="noindent">Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p class="noindent">***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, VOLUME V (OF 8) ***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Paul Murray, Lisa Reigel, Michael Zeug,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="notebox">
+<p class="noindent">Transcriber's Note:<br />
+<br />
+Click on the page number in the left margin
+to see an image of the page.<br />
+<br />
+The index for the entire 8 volume
+set of <i>History of the English People</i> was located
+at the end of Volume VIII. For ease in
+accessibility, it has been removed and produced as a
+separate volume
+(<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/25533">http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/25533</a>).
+</p>
+</div>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii"></a>[<a href="./images/iii.png">5-iii</a>]</span></p>
+<div class="titlepage">
+<span class="main">HISTORY<br />
+OF<br />
+THE ENGLISH PEOPLE</span>
+
+
+<div class="byline">BY<br />
+
+<span class="docauthor">JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.<br />
+HONORARY FELLOW OF JESUS COLLEGE, OXFORD</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<span class="sub">VOLUME V</span>
+
+<ul>
+  <li>PURITAN ENGLAND, 1603-1644</li>
+</ul>
+
+
+<div class="byline">
+London<br />
+MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap" style="display: inline;">Ltd.</span><br />
+NEW YORK: MACMILLAN &amp; CO.<br />
+1896</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv"></a>[<a href="./images/iv.png">5-iv</a>]</span></p>
+<div class="titlepage">
+<ul>
+  <li><i>First Edition 1879; Reprinted 1882, 1886, 1891.</i></li>
+  <li><i>Eversley Edition, 1896.</i></li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<div class="toc">
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v"></a>[<a href="./images/v.png">5-v</a>]</span></p>
+
+
+<div class="header">CONTENTS</div>
+
+
+<div class="centered">
+<table summary="Table of contents" border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0">
+<tr class="book">
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">BOOK VI</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER VII</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright" colspan="2">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdleft"><span class="smcap">The England of Shakspere.</span> 1593-1603</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr class="book">
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">BOOK VII<br />
+  PURITAN ENGLAND. 1603-1660</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER I</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdleft"><span class="smcap">England and Puritanism.</span> 1603-1660</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_75">75</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER II</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdleft"><span class="smcap">The King of Scots.</span></td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_120">120</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi"></a>[<a href="./images/vi.png">5-vi</a>]</span>CHAPTER III</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdleft" style="padding-right: 5em;"><span class="smcap">The Break with the Parliament.</span> 1603-1611</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_146">146</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER IV</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdleft"><span class="smcap">The Favourites.</span> 1611-1625</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_183">183</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER V</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdleft"><span class="smcap">Charles I. and the Parliament.</span> 1625-1629</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_242">242</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER VI</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdleft"><span class="smcap">The Personal Government.</span> 1629-1635</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_272">272</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER VII</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdleft"><span class="smcap">The Rising of the Scots.</span> 1635-1640</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_315">315</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER VIII</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdleft"><span class="smcap">The Long Parliament.</span> 1640-1644</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_344">344</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+<hr />
+</div>
+
+
+<div class="volume">
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1"></a><a href="./images/1.png">5-001</a>]</span></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+
+<ul>
+  <li>CHAPTER VII</li>
+  <li>THE ENGLAND OF SHAKSPERE</li>
+  <li>1593-1603</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">English Literature.</span></p>
+
+<p>The defeat of the Armada, the deliverance from Catholicism and Spain,
+marked the critical moment in our political developement. From that hour
+England's destiny was fixed. She was to be a Protestant power. Her
+sphere of action was to be upon the seas. She was to claim her part in
+the New World of the West. But the moment was as critical in her
+intellectual developement. As yet English literature had lagged behind
+the literature of the rest of Western Christendom. It was now to take
+its place among the greatest literatures of the world. The general
+awakening of national life, the increase of wealth, of refinement, and
+leisure that characterized the reign of Elizabeth, was accompanied by a
+quickening of intelligence. The Renascence had done little for English
+letters. The overpowering influence of the new models both of thought
+and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2"></a><a href="./images/2.png">5-002</a>]</span>style which it gave to the world in the writers of Greece and Rome
+was at first felt only as a fresh check to the revival of English poetry
+or prose. Though England shared more than any European country in the
+political and ecclesiastical results of the New Learning, its literary
+results were far less than in the rest of Europe, in Italy, or Germany,
+or France. More alone ranks among the great classical scholars of the
+sixteenth century. Classical learning indeed all but perished at the
+Universities in the storm of the Reformation, nor did it revive there
+till the close of Elizabeth's reign. Insensibly however the influences
+of the Renascence fertilized the intellectual soil of England for the
+rich harvest that was to come. The court poetry which clustered round
+Wyatt and Surrey, exotic and imitative as it was, promised a new life
+for English verse. The growth of grammar-schools realized the dream of
+Sir Thomas More, and brought the middle-classes, from the squire to the
+petty tradesman, into contact with the masters of Greece and Rome. The
+love of travel, which became so remarkable a characteristic of
+Elizabeth's age, quickened the temper of the wealthier nobles.
+"Home-keeping youths," says Shakspere in words that mark the time, "have
+ever homely wits"; and a tour over the Continent became part of the
+education of a gentleman. Fairfax's version of Tasso, Harrington's
+version of Ariosto, were signs of the influence which the literature of
+Italy, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3"></a><a href="./images/3.png">5-003</a>]</span>the land to which travel led most frequently, exerted on English
+minds. The classical writers told upon England at large when they were
+popularized by a crowd of translations. Chapman's noble version of Homer
+stands high above its fellows, but all the greater poets and historians
+of the ancient world were turned into English before the close of the
+sixteenth century.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Historic Literature.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is characteristic of England that the first kind of literature to
+rise from its long death was the literature of history. But the form in
+which it rose marked the difference between the world in which it had
+perished and that in which it reappeared. During the Middle Ages the
+world had been without a past, save the shadowy and unknown past of
+early Rome; and annalist and chronicler told the story of the years
+which went before as a preface to their tale of the present without a
+sense of any difference between them. But the religious, social, and
+political change which passed over England under the New Monarchy broke
+the continuity of its life; and the depth of the rift between the two
+ages is seen by the way in which History passes on its revival under
+Elizabeth from the medi&aelig;val form of pure narrative to its modern form of
+an investigation and reconstruction of the past. The new interest which
+attached to the bygone world led to the collection of its annals, their
+reprinting and embodiment in an English shape. It was his desire to give
+the Elizabethan <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4"></a><a href="./images/4.png">5-004</a>]</span>Church a basis in the past, as much as any pure zeal
+for letters, which induced Archbishop Parker to lead the way in the
+first of these labours. The collection of historical manuscripts which,
+following in the track of Leland, he rescued from the wreck of the
+monastic libraries created a school of antiquarian imitators, whose
+research and industry have preserved for us almost every work of
+permanent historical value which existed before the Dissolution of the
+Monasteries. To his publication of some of our earlier chronicles we owe
+the series of similar publications which bear the name of Camden,
+Twysden, and Gale. But as a branch of literature, English History in the
+new shape which we have noted began in the work of the poet Daniel. The
+chronicles of Stowe and Speed, who preceded him, are simple records of
+the past, often copied almost literally from the annals they used, and
+utterly without style or arrangement; while Daniel, inaccurate and
+superficial as he is, gave his story a literary form and embodied it in
+a pure and graceful prose. Two larger works at the close of Elizabeth's
+reign, the "History of the Turks" by Knolles, and Raleigh's vast but
+unfinished plan of the "History of the World," showed a widening of
+historic interest beyond the merely national bounds to which it had
+hitherto been confined.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Euphuism.</span></p>
+
+<p>A far higher developement of our literature sprang from the growing
+influence which Italy <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5"></a><a href="./images/5.png">5-005</a>]</span>was exerting, partly through travel and partly
+through its poetry and romances, on the manners and taste of the time.
+Men made more account of a story of Boccaccio's, it was said, than of a
+story from the Bible. The dress, the speech, the manners of Italy became
+objects of almost passionate imitation, and of an imitation not always
+of the wisest or noblest kind. To Ascham it seemed like "the enchantment
+of Circe brought out of Italy to mar men's manners in England." "An
+Italianate Englishman," ran the harder proverb of Italy itself, "is an
+incarnate devil." The literary form which this imitation took seemed at
+any rate ridiculous. John Lyly, distinguished both as a dramatist and a
+poet, laid aside the tradition of English style for a style modelled on
+the decadence of Italian prose. Euphuism, as the new fashion has been
+named from the prose romance of Euphues which Lyly published in 1579, is
+best known to modern readers by the pitiless caricature in which
+Shakspere quizzed its pedantry, its affectation, the meaningless
+monotony of its far-fetched phrases, the absurdity of its extravagant
+conceits. Its representative, Armado in "Love's Labour's Lost," is "a
+man of fire-new words, fashion's own knight," "that hath a mint of
+phrases in his brain; one whom the music of his own vain tongue doth
+ravish like enchanting harmony." But its very extravagance sprang from
+the general burst of delight in the new resources <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6"></a><a href="./images/6.png">5-006</a>]</span>of thought and
+language which literature felt to be at its disposal; and the new sense
+of literary beauty which it disclosed in its affectation, in its love of
+a "mint of phrases," and the "music of its own vain tongue," the new
+sense of pleasure which it revealed in delicacy or grandeur of
+expression, in the structure and arrangement of sentences, in what has
+been termed the atmosphere of words, was a sense out of which style was
+itself to spring.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Sidney.</span></p>
+
+<p>For a time Euphuism had it all its own way. Elizabeth was the most
+affected and detestable of Euphuists; and "that beauty in Court which
+could not parley Euphuism," a courtier of Charles the First's time tells
+us, "was as little regarded as she that now there speaks not French."
+The fashion however passed away, but the "Arcadia" of Sir Philip Sidney
+shows the wonderful advance which prose had made under its influence.
+Sidney, the nephew of Lord Leicester, was the idol of his time, and
+perhaps no figure reflects the age more fully and more beautifully. Fair
+as he was brave, quick of wit as of affection, noble and generous in
+temper, dear to Elizabeth as to Spenser, the darling of the Court and of
+the camp, his learning and his genius made him the centre of the
+literary world which was springing into birth on English soil. He had
+travelled in France and Italy, he was master alike of the older learning
+and of the new discoveries of astronomy. Bruno <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7"></a><a href="./images/7.png">5-007</a>]</span>dedicated to him as to a
+friend his metaphysical speculations; he was familiar with the drama of
+Spain, the poems of Ronsard, the sonnets of Italy. Sidney combined the
+wisdom of a grave councillor with the romantic chivalry of a
+knight-errant. "I never heard the old story of Percy and Douglas," he
+says, "that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet." He
+flung away his life to save the English army in Flanders, and as he lay
+dying they brought a cup of water to his fevered lips. He bade them give
+it to a soldier who was stretched on the ground beside him. "Thy
+necessity," he said, "is greater than mine." The whole of Sidney's
+nature, his chivalry and his learning, his thirst for adventures, his
+freshness of tone, his tenderness and childlike simplicity of heart, his
+affectation and false sentiment, his keen sense of pleasure and delight,
+pours itself out in the pastoral medley, forced, tedious, and yet
+strangely beautiful, of his "Arcadia." In his "Defence of Poetry" the
+youthful exuberance of the romancer has passed into the earnest vigour
+and grandiose stateliness of the rhetorician. But whether in the one
+work or the other, the flexibility, the music, the luminous clearness of
+Sidney's style remains the same.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Novelists.</span></p>
+
+<p>But the quickness and vivacity of English prose was first developed in a
+school of Italian imitators which appeared in Elizabeth's later years.
+The origin of English fiction is to be found in the tales <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8"></a><a href="./images/8.png">5-008</a>]</span>and romances
+with which Greene and Nash crowded the market, models for which they
+found in the Italian novels. The brief form of these novelettes soon led
+to the appearance of the "pamphlet"; and a new world of readers was seen
+in the rapidity with which the stories or scurrilous libels that passed
+under this name were issued, and the greediness with which they were
+devoured. It was the boast of Greene that in the eight years before his
+death he had produced forty pamphlets. "In a night or a day would he
+have yarked up a pamphlet, as well as in seven years, and glad was that
+printer that might be blest to pay him dear for the very dregs of his
+wit." Modern eyes see less of the wit than of the dregs in the books of
+Greene and his compeers; but the attacks which Nash directed against the
+Puritans and his rivals were the first English works which shook utterly
+off the pedantry and extravagance of Euphuism. In his lightness, his
+facility, his vivacity, his directness of speech, we have the beginning
+of popular literature. It had descended from the closet to the street,
+and the very change implied that the street was ready to receive it. The
+abundance indeed of printers and of printed books at the close of the
+Queen's reign shows that the world of readers and writers had widened
+far beyond the small circle of scholars and courtiers with which it
+began.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Influence of the age.</span></p>
+
+<p>But to the national and local influences which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9"></a><a href="./images/9.png">5-009</a>]</span>were telling on English
+literature was added that of the restlessness and curiosity which
+characterized the age. At the moment which we have reached the sphere of
+human interest was widened as it has never been widened before or since
+by the revelation of a new heaven and a new earth. It was only in the
+later years of the sixteenth century that the discoveries of Copernicus
+were brought home to the general intelligence of mankind by Kepler and
+Galileo, or that the daring of the Buccaneers broke through the veil
+which the greed of Spain had drawn across the New World of Columbus.
+Hardly inferior to these revelations as a source of intellectual impulse
+was the sudden and picturesque way in which the various races of the
+world were brought face to face with one another through the universal
+passion for foreign travel. While the red tribes of the West were
+described by Amerigo Vespucci, and the strange civilization of Mexico
+and Peru disclosed by Cortes and Pizarro, the voyages of the Portuguese
+threw open the older splendours of the East, and the story of India and
+China was told for the first time to Christendom by Maffei and Mendoza.
+England took her full part in this work of discovery. Jenkinson, an
+English traveller, made his way to Bokhara. Willoughby brought back
+Muscovy to the knowledge of Western Europe. English mariners penetrated
+among the Esquimaux, or settled in Virginia. Drake circumnavigated the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10"></a><a href="./images/10.png">5-010</a>]</span>globe. The "Collection of Voyages" which was published by Hakluyt in
+1582 disclosed the vastness of the world itself, the infinite number of
+the races of mankind, the variety of their laws, their customs, their
+religions, their very instincts. We see the influence of this new and
+wider knowledge of the world, not only in the life and richness which it
+gave to the imagination of the time, but in the immense interest which
+from this moment attached itself to Man. Shakspere's conception of
+Caliban, like the questioning of Montaigne, marks the beginning of a new
+and a truer, because a more inductive, philosophy of human nature and
+human history. The fascination exercised by the study of human character
+showed itself in the essays of Bacon, and yet more in the wonderful
+popularity of the drama.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The new English temper.</span></p>
+
+<p>And to these larger and world-wide sources of poetic power was added in
+England, at the moment which we have reached in its story, the impulse
+which sprang from national triumph, from the victory over the Armada,
+the deliverance from Spain, the rolling away of the Catholic terror
+which had hung like a cloud over the hopes of the new people. With its
+new sense of security, its new sense of national energy and national
+power, the whole aspect of England suddenly changed. As yet the interest
+of Elizabeth's reign had been political and material; the stage had been
+crowded with statesmen and warriors, with Cecils and Walsinghams and
+Drakes. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11"></a><a href="./images/11.png">5-011</a>]</span>Literature had hardly found a place in the glories of the time.
+But from the moment when the Armada drifted back broken to Ferrol the
+figures of warriors and statesmen were dwarfed by the grander figures of
+poets and philosophers. Amidst the throng in Elizabeth's antechamber the
+noblest form is that of the singer who lays the "Faerie Queen" at her
+feet, or of the young lawyer who muses amid the splendours of the
+presence over the problems of the "Novum Organum." The triumph at Cadiz,
+the conquest of Ireland, pass unheeded as we watch Hooker building up
+his "Ecclesiastical Polity" among the sheepfolds, or the genius of
+Shakspere rising year by year into supremer grandeur in a rude theatre
+beside the Thames.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Spenser.</span></p>
+
+<p>The glory of the new literature broke on England with Edmund Spenser. We
+know little of his life; he was born in 1552 in East London, the son of
+poor parents, but linked in blood with the Spencers of Althorpe, even
+then&mdash;as he proudly says&mdash;"a house of ancient fame." He studied as a
+sizar at Cambridge, and quitted the University while still a boy to live
+as a tutor in the north; but after some years of obscure poverty the
+scorn of a fair "Rosalind" drove him again southwards. A college
+friendship with Gabriel Harvey served to introduce him to Lord
+Leicester, who sent him as his envoy into France, and in whose service
+he first became acquainted with Leicester's nephew, Sir Philip Sidney.
+From Sidney's house at <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12"></a><a href="./images/12.png">5-012</a>]</span>Penshurst came in 1579 his earliest work, the
+"Shepherd's Calendar"; in form, like Sidney's own "Arcadia," a pastoral
+where love and loyalty and Puritanism jostled oddly with the fancied
+shepherd life. The peculiar melody and profuse imagination which the
+pastoral disclosed at once placed its author in the forefront of living
+poets, but a far greater work was already in hand; and from some words
+of Gabriel Harvey's we see Spenser bent on rivalling Ariosto, and even
+hoping "to overgo" the "Orlando Furioso" in his "Elvish Queen." The
+ill-will or the indifference of Burleigh however blasted the
+expectations he had drawn from the patronage of Sidney or Leicester, and
+from the favour with which he had been welcomed by the Queen. Sidney, in
+disgrace with Elizabeth through his opposition to the marriage with
+Anjou, withdrew to Wilton to write the "Arcadia" by his sister's side;
+and "discontent of my long fruitless stay in princes' courts," the poet
+tells us, "and expectation vain of idle hopes" drove Spenser into exile.
+In 1580 he followed Lord Grey as his secretary into Ireland, and
+remained there on the Deputy's recall in the enjoyment of an office and
+a grant of land from the forfeited estates of the Earl of Desmond.
+Spenser had thus enrolled himself among the colonists to whom England
+was looking at the time for the regeneration of Munster, and the
+practical interest he took in the "barren soil where cold and want and
+poverty do grow" was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13"></a><a href="./images/13.png">5-013</a>]</span>shown by the later publication of a prose tractate
+on the condition and government of the island. It was at Dublin or in
+his castle of Kilcolman, two miles from Doneraile, "under the foot of
+Mole, that mountain hoar," that he spent the ten years in which Sidney
+died and Mary fell on the scaffold and the Armada came and went; and it
+was in the latter home that Walter Raleigh found him sitting "alwaies
+idle," as it seemed to his restless friend, "among the cooly shades of
+the green alders by the Mulla's shore" in a visit made memorable by the
+poem of "Colin Clout's come home again."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Faerie Queen.</span></p>
+
+<p>But in the "idlesse" and solitude of the poet's exile the great work
+begun in the two pleasant years of his stay at Penshurst had at last
+taken form, and it was to publish the first three books of the "Faerie
+Queen" that Spenser returned in Raleigh's company to London. The
+appearance of the "Faerie Queen" in 1590 is the one critical event in
+the annals of English poetry; it settled in fact the question whether
+there was to be such a thing as English poetry or no. The older national
+verse which had blossomed and died in Caedmon sprang suddenly into a
+grander life in Chaucer, but it closed again in a yet more complete
+death. Across the Border indeed the Scotch poets of the fifteenth
+century preserved something of their master's vivacity and colour, and
+in England itself the Italian poetry of the Renascence had of late found
+echoes in Surrey and Sidney. The new <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14"></a><a href="./images/14.png">5-014</a>]</span>English drama too was beginning to
+display its wonderful powers, and the work of Marlowe had already
+prepared the way for the work of Shakspere. But bright as was the
+promise of coming song, no great imaginative poem had broken the silence
+of English literature for nearly two hundred years when Spenser landed
+at Bristol with the "Faerie Queen." From that moment the stream of
+English poetry has flowed on without a break. There have been times, as
+in the years which immediately followed, when England has "become a nest
+of singing birds"; there have been times when song was scant and poor;
+but there never has been a time when England was wholly without a
+singer.</p>
+
+<p>The new English verse has been true to the source from which it sprang,
+and Spenser has always been "the poet's poet." But in his own day he was
+the poet of England at large. The "Faerie Queen" was received with a
+burst of general welcome. It became "the delight of every accomplished
+gentleman, the model of every poet, the solace of every soldier." The
+poem expressed indeed the very life of the time. It was with a true
+poetic instinct that Spenser fell back for the framework of his story on
+the faery world of Celtic romance, whose wonder and mystery had in fact
+become the truest picture of the wonder and mystery of the world around
+him. In the age of Cortes and of Raleigh dreamland had ceased to be
+dreamland, and no marvel or adventure that befell <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15"></a><a href="./images/15.png">5-015</a>]</span>lady or knight was
+stranger than the tales which weather-beaten mariners from the Southern
+Seas were telling every day to grave merchants upon 'Change. The very
+incongruities of the story of Arthur and his knighthood, strangely as it
+had been built up out of the rival efforts of bard and jongleur and
+priest, made it the fittest vehicle for the expression of the world of
+incongruous feeling which we call the Renascence. To modern eyes perhaps
+there is something grotesque in the strange medley of figures that crowd
+the canvas of the "Faerie Queen," in its fauns dancing on the sward
+where knights have hurtled together, in its alternation of the
+salvage-men from the New World with the satyrs of classic mythology, in
+the giants, dwarfs, and monsters of popular fancy who jostle with the
+nymphs of Greek legend and the damosels of medi&aelig;val romance. But,
+strange as the medley is, it reflects truly enough the stranger medley
+of warring ideals and irreconcileable impulses which made up the life of
+Spenser's contemporaries. It was not in the "Faerie Queen" only, but in
+the world which it pourtrayed, that the religious mysticism of the
+Middle Ages stood face to face with the intellectual freedom of the
+Revival of Letters, that asceticism and self-denial cast their spell on
+imaginations glowing with the sense of varied and inexhaustible
+existence, that the dreamy and poetic refinement of feeling which
+expressed itself in the fanciful unrealities of chivalry <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16"></a><a href="./images/16.png">5-016</a>]</span>co-existed
+with the rough practical energy that sprang from an awakening sense of
+human power, or the lawless extravagance of an idealized friendship and
+love lived side by side with the moral sternness and elevation which
+England was drawing from the Reformation and the Bible.</p>
+
+<p>But strangely contrasted as are the elements of the poem, they are
+harmonized by the calmness and serenity which is the note of the "Faerie
+Queen." The world of the Renascence is around us, but it is ordered,
+refined, and calmed by the poet's touch. The warmest scenes which he
+borrows from the Italian verse of his day are idealized into purity; the
+very struggle of the men around him is lifted out of its pettier
+accidents and raised into a spiritual oneness with the struggle in the
+soul itself. There are allusions in plenty to contemporary events, but
+the contest between Elizabeth and Mary takes ideal form in that of Una
+and the false Duessa, and the clash of arms between Spain and the
+Huguenots comes to us faint and hushed through the serener air. The
+verse, like the story, rolls on as by its own natural power, without
+haste or effort or delay. The gorgeous colouring, the profuse and often
+complex imagery which Spenser's imagination lavishes, leave no sense of
+confusion in the reader's mind. Every figure, strange as it may be, is
+seen clearly and distinctly as it passes by. It is in this calmness,
+this serenity, this spiritual elevation of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17"></a><a href="./images/17.png">5-017</a>]</span>"Faerie Queen," that we
+feel the new life of the coming age moulding into ordered and harmonious
+form the life of the Renascence. Both in its conception, and in the way
+in which this conception is realized in the portion of his work which
+Spenser completed, his poem strikes the note of the coming Puritanism.
+In his earlier pastoral, the "Shepherd's Calendar," the poet had boldly
+taken his part with the more advanced reformers against the Church
+policy of the Court. He had chosen Archbishop Grindal, who was then in
+disgrace for his Puritan sympathies, as his model of a Christian pastor;
+and attacked with sharp invective the pomp of the higher clergy. His
+"Faerie Queen" in its religious theory is Puritan to the core. The worst
+foe of its "Red-cross Knight" is the false and scarlet-clad Duessa of
+Rome, who parts him for a while from Truth and leads him to the house of
+Ignorance. Spenser presses strongly and pitilessly for the execution of
+Mary Stuart. No bitter word ever breaks the calm of his verse save when
+it touches on the perils with which Catholicism was environing England,
+perils before which his knight must fall "were not that Heavenly Grace
+doth him uphold and steadfast Truth acquite him out of all." But it is
+yet more in the temper and aim of his work that we catch the nobler and
+deeper tones of English Puritanism. In his earlier musings at Penshurst
+the poet had purposed to surpass <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18"></a><a href="./images/18.png">5-018</a>]</span>Ariosto, but the gaiety of Ariosto's
+song is utterly absent from his own. Not a ripple of laughter breaks the
+calm surface of Spenser's verse. He is habitually serious, and the
+seriousness of his poetic tone reflects the seriousness of his poetic
+purpose. His aim, he tells us, was to represent the moral virtues, to
+assign to each its knightly patron, so that its excellence might be
+expressed and its contrary vice trodden under foot by deeds of arms and
+chivalry. In knight after knight of the twelve he purposed to paint, he
+wished to embody some single virtue of the virtuous man in its struggle
+with the faults and errors which specially beset it; till in Arthur, the
+sum of the whole company, man might have been seen perfected, in his
+longing and progress towards the "Faerie Queen," the Divine Glory which
+is the true end of human effort.</p>
+
+<p>The largeness of his culture indeed, his exquisite sense of beauty, and
+above all the very intensity of his moral enthusiasm, saved Spenser from
+the narrowness and exaggeration which often distorted goodness into
+unloveliness in the Puritan. Christian as he is to the core, his
+Christianity is enriched and fertilized by the larger temper of the
+Renascence, as well as by a poet's love of the natural world in which
+the older mythologies struck their roots. Diana and the gods of
+heathendom take a sacred tinge from the purer sanctities of the new
+faith; and in one of the greatest songs of the "Faerie Queen" the
+conception of love <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19"></a><a href="./images/19.png">5-019</a>]</span>widens, as it widened in the mind of a Greek, into
+the mighty thought of the productive energy of Nature. Spenser borrows
+in fact the delicate and refined forms of the Platonist philosophy to
+express his own moral enthusiasm. Not only does he love, as others have
+loved, all that is noble and pure and of good report, but he is fired as
+none before or after him have been fired with a passionate sense of
+moral beauty. Justice, Temperance, Truth, are no mere names to him, but
+real existences to which his whole nature clings with a rapturous
+affection. Outer beauty he believed to spring, and loved because it
+sprang, from the beauty of the soul within. There was much in such a
+moral protest as this to rouse dislike in any age, but it is the glory
+of the age of Elizabeth that, "mad world" as in many ways it was, all
+that was noble welcomed the "Faerie Queen." Elizabeth herself, says
+Spenser, "to mine oaten pipe inclined her ear," and bestowed a pension
+on the poet. In 1595 he brought three more books of his poem to England.
+He returned to Ireland to commemorate his marriage in Sonnets and the
+most beautiful of bridal songs, and to complete the "Faerie Queen"
+amongst love and poverty and troubles from his Irish neighbours. But
+these troubles soon took a graver form. In 1599 Ireland broke into
+revolt, and the poet escaped from his burning house to fly to England,
+and to die broken-hearted in an inn at Westminster.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20"></a><a href="./images/20.png">5-020</a>]</span></p>
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Drama.</span></p>
+
+<p>If the "Faerie Queen" expressed the higher elements of the Elizabethan
+age, the whole of that age, its lower elements and its higher alike, was
+expressed in the English drama. We have already pointed out the
+circumstances which throughout Europe were giving a poetic impulse to
+the newly-aroused intelligence of men, and this impulse everywhere took
+a dramatic shape. The artificial French tragedy which began about this
+time with Garnier was not indeed destined to exert any influence over
+English poetry till a later age; but the influence of the Italian
+comedy, which had begun half a century earlier with Machiavelli and
+Ariosto, was felt directly through the Novelle, or stories, which served
+as plots for our dramatists. It left its stamp indeed on some of the
+worst characteristics of the English stage. The features of our drama
+that startled the moral temper of the time and won the deadly hatred of
+the Puritans, its grossness and profanity, its tendency to scenes of
+horror and crime, its profuse employment of cruelty and lust as grounds
+of dramatic action, its daring use of the horrible and the unnatural
+whenever they enable it to display the more terrible and revolting sides
+of human passion, were derived from the Italian stage. It is doubtful
+how much the English playwrights may have owed to the Spanish drama,
+which under Lope and Cervantes sprang suddenly into a grandeur that
+almost rivalled their own. In the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21"></a><a href="./images/21.png">5-021</a>]</span>intermixture of tragedy and comedy,
+in the abandonment of the solemn uniformity of poetic diction for the
+colloquial language of real life, the use of unexpected incidents, the
+complication of their plots and intrigues, the dramas of England and
+Spain are remarkably alike; but the likeness seems rather to have sprung
+from a similarity in the circumstances to which both owed their rise,
+than from any direct connexion of the one with the other. The real
+origin of the English drama, in fact, lay not in any influence from
+without but in the influence of England itself. The temper of the nation
+was dramatic. Ever since the Reformation, the Palace, the Inns of Court,
+and the University had been vying with one another in the production of
+plays; and so early was their popularity that even under Henry the
+Eighth it was found necessary to create a "Master of the Revels" to
+supervise them. Every progress of Elizabeth from shire to shire was a
+succession of shows and interludes. Dian with her nymphs met the Queen
+as she returned from hunting; Love presented her with his golden arrow
+as she passed through the gates of Norwich. From the earlier years of
+her reign the new spirit of the Renascence had been pouring itself into
+the rough mould of the Mystery Plays, whose allegorical virtues and
+vices, or scriptural heroes and heroines, had handed on the spirit of
+the drama through the Middle Ages. Adaptations from classical <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22"></a><a href="./images/22.png">5-022</a>]</span>pieces
+began to alternate with the purely religious "Moralities"; and an
+attempt at a livelier style of expression and invention appeared in the
+popular comedy of "Gammer Gurton's Needle"; while Sackville, Lord
+Dorset, in his tragedy of "Gorbudoc" made a bold effort at sublimity of
+diction, and introduced the use of blank verse as the vehicle of
+dramatic dialogue.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The theatre and the people.</span></p>
+
+<p>But it was not to these tentative efforts of scholars and nobles that
+the English stage was really indebted for the amazing outburst of genius
+which dates from the year 1576, when "the Earl of Leicester's servants"
+erected the first public theatre in Blackfriars. It was the people
+itself that created its Stage. The theatre indeed was commonly only the
+courtyard of an inn, or a mere booth such as is still seen at a country
+fair. The bulk of the audience sate beneath the open sky in the "pit" or
+yard; a few covered seats in the galleries which ran round it formed the
+boxes of the wealthier spectators, while patrons and nobles found seats
+upon the actual boards. All the appliances were of the roughest sort: a
+few flowers served to indicate a garden, crowds and armies were
+represented by a dozen scene-shifters with swords and bucklers, heroes
+rode in and out on hobby-horses, and a scroll on a post told whether the
+scene was at Athens or London. There were no female actors, and the
+grossness which startles us in words which fell from <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23"></a><a href="./images/23.png">5-023</a>]</span>women's lips took
+a different colour when every woman's part was acted by a boy. But
+difficulties such as these were more than compensated by the popular
+character of the drama itself. Rude as the theatre might be, all the
+world was there. The stage was crowded with nobles and courtiers.
+Apprentices and citizens thronged the benches in the yard below. The
+rough mob of the pit inspired, as it felt, the vigorous life, the rapid
+transitions, the passionate energy, the reality, the lifelike medley and
+confusion, the racy dialogue, the chat, the wit, the pathos, the
+sublimity, the rant and buffoonery, the coarse horrors and vulgar
+bloodshedding, the immense range over all classes of society, the
+intimacy with the foulest as well as the fairest developements of human
+temper, which characterized the English stage. The new drama represented
+"the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure." The people
+itself brought its nobleness and its vileness to the boards. No stage
+was ever so human, no poetic life so intense. Wild, reckless, defiant of
+all past tradition, of all conventional laws, the English dramatists
+owned no teacher, no source of poetic inspiration, but the people
+itself.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The early dramatists.</span></p>
+
+<p>Few events in our literary history are so startling as this sudden rise
+of the Elizabethan drama. The first public theatre was erected only in
+the middle of the Queen's reign. Before the close of it eighteen
+theatres existed in London alone. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24"></a><a href="./images/24.png">5-024</a>]</span>Fifty dramatic poets, many of the
+first order, appeared in the fifty years which precede the closing of
+the theatres by the Puritans; and great as is the number of their works
+which have perished, we still possess a hundred dramas, all written
+within this period, and of which at least a half are excellent. A glance
+at their authors shows us that the intellectual quickening of the age
+had now reached the mass of the people. Almost all of the new
+playwrights were fairly educated, and many were university men. But
+instead of courtly singers of the Sidney and Spenser sort we see the
+advent of the "poor scholar." The earlier dramatists, such as Nash,
+Peele, Kyd, Greene, or Marlowe, were for the most part poor, and
+reckless in their poverty; wild livers, defiant of law or common fame,
+in revolt against the usages and religion of their day, "atheists" in
+general repute, "holding Moses for a juggler," haunting the brothel and
+the alehouse, and dying starved or in tavern brawls. But with their
+appearance began the Elizabethan drama. The few plays which have reached
+us of an earlier date are either cold imitations of the classical and
+Italian comedy, or rude farces like "Ralph Roister Doister," or
+tragedies such as "Gorbudoc" where, poetic as occasional passages may
+be, there is little promise of dramatic developement. But in the year
+which preceded the coming of the Armada the whole aspect of the stage
+suddenly changes, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25"></a><a href="./images/25.png">5-025</a>]</span>and the new dramatists range themselves around two
+men of very different genius, Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Greene.</span></p>
+
+<p>Of Greene, as the creator of our lighter English prose, we have already
+spoken. But his work as a poet was of yet greater importance, for his
+perception of character and the relations of social life, the
+playfulness of his fancy, and the liveliness of his style, exerted an
+influence on his contemporaries which was equalled by that of none but
+Marlowe and Peele. In spite of the rudeness of his plots and the unequal
+character of his work, Greene must be regarded as the creator of our
+modern comedy. No figure better paints the group of young playwrights.
+He left Cambridge to travel through Italy and Spain, and to bring back
+the debauchery of the one and the scepticism of the other. In the words
+of remorse he wrote before his death he paints himself as a drunkard and
+a roysterer, winning money only by ceaseless pamphlets and plays to
+waste it on wine and women, and drinking the cup of life to the dregs.
+Hell and the after-world were the butts of his ceaseless mockery. If he
+had not feared the judges of the Queen's Courts more than he feared God,
+he said in bitter jest, he should often have turned cutpurse. He
+married, and loved his wife, but she was soon deserted; and the wretched
+profligate found himself again plunged into excesses which he loathed,
+though he could not live <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26"></a><a href="./images/26.png">5-026</a>]</span>without them. But wild as was the life of
+Greene, his pen was pure. He is steadily on virtue's side in the love
+pamphlets and novelettes he poured out in endless succession, and whose
+plots were dramatized by the school which gathered round him.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Marlowe.</span></p>
+
+<p>The life of Marlowe was as riotous, his scepticism even more daring,
+than the life and scepticism of Greene. His early death alone saved him
+in all probability from a prosecution for atheism. He was charged with
+calling Moses a juggler, and with boasting that, if he undertook to
+write a new religion, it should be a better religion than the
+Christianity he saw around him. But he stood far ahead of his fellows as
+a creator of English tragedy. Born in 1564 at the opening of Elizabeth's
+reign, the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, but educated at Cambridge,
+Marlowe burst on the world in the year which preceded the triumph over
+the Armada with a play which at once wrought a revolution in the English
+stage. Bombastic and extravagant as it was, and extravagance reached its
+height in a scene where captive kings, the "pampered jades of Asia,"
+drew their conqueror's car across the stage, "Tamburlaine" not only
+indicated the revolt of the new drama against the timid inanities of
+Euphuism, but gave an earnest of that imaginative daring, the secret of
+which Marlowe was to bequeath to the playwrights who followed him. He
+perished at thirty <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27"></a><a href="./images/27.png">5-027</a>]</span>in a shameful brawl, but in his brief career he had
+struck the grander notes of the coming drama. His Jew of Malta was the
+herald of Shylock. He opened in "Edward the Second" the series of
+historical plays which gave us "C&aelig;sar" and "Richard the Third." His
+"Faustus" is riotous, grotesque, and full of a mad thirst for pleasure,
+but it was the first dramatic attempt to touch the problem of the
+relations of man to the unseen world. Extravagant, unequal, stooping
+even to the ridiculous in his cumbrous and vulgar buffoonery, there is a
+force in Marlowe, a conscious grandeur of tone, a range of passion,
+which sets him above all his contemporaries save one. In the higher
+qualities of imagination, as in the majesty and sweetness of his "mighty
+line," he is inferior to Shakspere alone.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Shakspere.</span></p>
+
+<p>A few daring jests, a brawl, and a fatal stab, make up the life of
+Marlowe; but even details such as these are wanting to the life of
+William Shakspere. Of hardly any great poet indeed do we know so little.
+For the story of his youth we have only one or two trifling legends, and
+these almost certainly false. Not a single letter or characteristic
+saying, not one of the jests "spoken at the Mermaid," hardly a single
+anecdote, remain to illustrate his busy life in London. His look and
+figure in later age have been preserved by the bust over his tomb at
+Stratford, and a hundred years after his death he was still remembered
+in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28"></a><a href="./images/28.png">5-028</a>]</span>his native town; but the minute diligence of the enquirers of the
+Georgian time was able to glean hardly a single detail, even of the most
+trivial order, which could throw light upon the years of retirement
+before his death. It is owing perhaps to the harmony and unity of his
+temper that no salient peculiarity seems to have left its trace on the
+memory of his contemporaries; it is the very grandeur of his genius
+which precludes us from discovering any personal trait in his works. His
+supposed self-revelation in the Sonnets is so obscure that only a few
+outlines can be traced even by the boldest conjecture. In his dramas he
+is all his characters, and his characters range over all mankind. There
+is not one, or the act or word of one, that we can identify personally
+with the poet himself.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His actor's life.</span></p>
+
+<p>He was born in 1564, the sixth year of Elizabeth's reign, twelve years
+after the birth of Spenser, three years later than the birth of Bacon.
+Marlowe was of the same age with Shakspere: Greene probably a few years
+older. His father, a glover and small farmer of Stratford-on-Avon, was
+forced by poverty to lay down his office of alderman as his son reached
+boyhood; and stress of poverty may have been the cause which drove
+William Shakspere, who was already married at eighteen to a wife older
+than himself, to London and the stage. His life in the capital can
+hardly have begun later than in his twenty-third year, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29"></a><a href="./images/29.png">5-029</a>]</span>the memorable
+year which followed Sidney's death, which preceded the coming of the
+Armada, and which witnessed the production of Marlowe's "Tamburlaine."
+If we take the language of the Sonnets as a record of his personal
+feeling, his new profession as an actor stirred in him only the
+bitterness of self-contempt. He chides with Fortune "that did not better
+for my life provide than public means that public manners breed"; he
+writhes at the thought that he has "made himself a motley to the view"
+of the gaping apprentices in the pit of Blackfriars. "Thence comes it,"
+he adds, "that my name receives a brand, and almost thence my nature is
+subdued to that it works in." But the application of the words is a more
+than doubtful one. In spite of petty squabbles with some of his dramatic
+rivals at the outset of his career, the genial nature of the newcomer
+seems to have won him a general love among his fellows. In 1592, while
+still a mere actor and fitter of old plays for the stage, a
+fellow-playwright, Chettle, answered Greene's attack on him in words of
+honest affection: "Myself have seen his demeanour no less civil than he
+excellent in the quality he professes: besides, divers of worship have
+reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his
+facetious grace in writing, that approves his art." His partner Burbage
+spoke of him after death as a "worthy friend and fellow"; and Jonson
+handed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30"></a><a href="./images/30.png">5-030</a>]</span>down the general tradition of his time when he described him as
+"indeed honest, and of an open and free nature."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His early work.</span></p>
+
+<p>His profession as an actor was at any rate of essential service to him
+in the poetic career which he soon undertook. Not only did it give him
+the sense of theatrical necessities which makes his plays so effective
+on the boards, but it enabled him to bring his pieces as he wrote them
+to the test of the stage. If there is any truth in Jonson's statement
+that Shakspere never blotted a line, there is no justice in the censure
+which it implies on his carelessness or incorrectness. The conditions of
+poetic publication were in fact wholly different from those of our own
+day. A drama remained for years in manuscript as an acting piece,
+subject to continual revision and amendment; and every rehearsal and
+representation afforded hints for change which we know the young poet
+was far from neglecting. The chance which has preserved an earlier
+edition of his "Hamlet" shows in what an unsparing way Shakspere could
+recast even the finest products of his genius. Five years after the
+supposed date of his arrival in London he was already famous as a
+dramatist. Greene speaks bitterly of him under the name of "Shakescene"
+as an "upstart crow beautified with our feathers," a sneer which points
+either to his celebrity as an actor or to his preparation for loftier
+flights by fitting pieces of his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31"></a><a href="./images/31.png">5-031</a>]</span>predecessors for the stage. He was
+soon partner in the theatre, actor, and playwright; and another
+nickname, that of "Johannes Factotum" or Jack-of-all-Trades, shows his
+readiness to take all honest work which came to hand.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His first plays.</span></p>
+
+<p>With his publication in 1593 of the poem of "Venus and Adonis," "the
+first heir of my invention," as Shakspere calls it, the period of
+independent creation fairly began. The date of its publication was a
+very memorable one. The "Faerie Queen" had appeared only three years
+before, and had placed Spenser without a rival at the head of English
+poetry. On the other hand the two leading dramatists of the time passed
+at this moment suddenly away. Greene died in poverty and self-reproach
+in the house of a poor shoemaker. "Doll," he wrote to the wife he had
+abandoned, "I charge thee, by the love of our youth and by my soul's
+rest, that thou wilt see this man paid; for if he and his wife had not
+succoured me I had died in the streets." "Oh that a year were granted me
+to live," cried the young poet from his bed of death, "but I must die,
+of every man abhorred! Time, loosely spent, will not again be won! My
+time is loosely spent&mdash;and I undone!" A year later the death of Marlowe
+in a street brawl removed the only rival whose powers might have
+equalled Shakspere's own. He was now about thirty; and the twenty-three
+years which elapsed between the appearance of the "Adonis" <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32"></a><a href="./images/32.png">5-032</a>]</span>and his
+death were filled with a series of masterpieces. Nothing is more
+characteristic of his genius than its incessant activity. Through the
+five years which followed the publication of his early poem he seems to
+have produced on an average two dramas a year. When we attempt however
+to trace the growth and progress of the poet's mind in the order of his
+plays we are met in the case of many of them by an absence of certain
+information as to the dates of their appearance. The facts on which
+enquiry has to build are extremely few. "Venus and Adonis," with the
+"Lucrece," must have been written before their publication in 1593-4;
+the Sonnets, though not published till 1609, were known in some form
+among his private friends as early as 1598. His earlier plays are
+defined by a list given in the "Wit's Treasury" of Francis Meres in
+1598, though the omission of a play from a casual catalogue of this kind
+would hardly warrant us in assuming its necessary non-existence at the
+time. The works ascribed to him at his death are fixed in the same
+approximate fashion through the edition published by his fellow-actors.
+Beyond these meagre facts and our knowledge of the publication of a few
+of his dramas in his lifetime all is uncertain; and the conclusions
+which have been drawn from these, and from the dramas themselves, as
+well as from assumed resemblances with, or references to, other plays of
+the period, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33"></a><a href="./images/33.png">5-033</a>]</span>can only be accepted as approximations to the truth.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His earlier comedies.</span></p>
+
+<p>The bulk of his lighter comedies and historical dramas can be assigned
+with fair probability to a period from about 1593, when Shakspere was
+known as nothing more than an adapter, to 1598, when they are mentioned
+in the list of Meres. They bear on them indeed the stamp of youth. In
+"Love's Labour's Lost" the young playwright, fresh from his own
+Stratford, its "daisies pied and violets blue," with the gay bright
+music of its country ditties still in his ears, flings himself into the
+midst of the brilliant England which gathered round Elizabeth, busying
+himself as yet for the most part with the surface of it, with the
+humours and quixotisms, the wit and the whim, the unreality, the
+fantastic extravagance, which veiled its inner nobleness. Country-lad as
+he is, Shakspere shows himself master of it all; he can patter euphuism
+and exchange quip and repartee with the best; he is at home in their
+pedantries and affectations, their brag and their rhetoric, their
+passion for the fantastic and the marvellous. He can laugh as heartily
+at the romantic vagaries of the courtly world in which he finds himself
+as at the narrow dulness, the pompous triflings, of the country world
+which he has left behind him. But he laughs frankly and without malice;
+he sees the real grandeur of soul which underlies all this quixotry and
+word-play; and owns with a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34"></a><a href="./images/34.png">5-034</a>]</span>smile that when brought face to face with
+the facts of human life, with the suffering of man or the danger of
+England, these fops have in them the stuff of heroes. He shares the
+delight in existence, the pleasure in sheer living, which was so marked
+a feature of the age; he enjoys the mistakes, the contrasts, the
+adventures, of the men about him; his fun breaks almost riotously out in
+the practical jokes of the "Taming of the Shrew" and the endless
+blunderings of the "Comedy of Errors." In these earlier efforts his work
+had been marked by little poetic elevation, or by passion. But the easy
+grace of the dialogue, the dexterous management of a complicated story,
+the genial gaiety of his tone, and the music of his verse promised a
+master of social comedy as soon as Shakspere turned from the superficial
+aspects of the world about him to find a new delight in the character
+and actions of men. The interest of human character was still fresh and
+vivid; the sense of individuality drew a charm from its novelty; and
+poet and essayist were busy alike in sketching the "humours" of mankind.
+Shakspere sketched with his fellows. In the "Two Gentlemen of Verona"
+his painting of manners was suffused by a tenderness and ideal beauty
+which formed an effective protest against the hard though vigorous
+character-painting which the first success of Ben Jonson in "Every Man
+in his Humour" brought at the time into fashion. But quick on these
+lighter comedies followed two <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35"></a><a href="./images/35.png">5-035</a>]</span>in which his genius started fully into
+life. His poetic power, held in reserve till now, showed itself with a
+splendid profusion in the brilliant fancies of the "Midsummer Night's
+Dream"; and passion swept like a tide of resistless delight through
+"Romeo and Juliet."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His historical plays.</span></p>
+
+<p>Side by side however with these passionate dreams, these delicate
+imaginings and piquant sketches of manners, had been appearing during
+this short interval of intense activity a series of dramas which mark
+Shakspere's relation to the new sense of patriotism, the more vivid
+sense of national existence, national freedom, national greatness, which
+gives its grandeur to the age of Elizabeth. England itself was now
+becoming a source of literary interest to poet and prose-writer. Warner
+in his "Albion's England," Daniel in his "Civil Wars," embalmed in verse
+the record of her past; Drayton in his "Polyolbion" sang the fairness of
+the land itself, the "tracts, mountains, forests, and other parts of
+this renowned isle of Britain." The national pride took its highest
+poetic form in the historical drama. No plays seem to have been more
+popular from the earliest hours of the new stage than dramatic
+representations of our history. Marlowe had shown in his "Edward the
+Second" what tragic grandeur could be reached in this favourite field;
+and, as we have seen, Shakspere had been led naturally towards it by his
+earlier occupation as an adapter <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36"></a><a href="./images/36.png">5-036</a>]</span>of stock pieces like "Henry the Sixth"
+for the new requirements of the stage. He still to some extent followed
+in plan the older plays on the subjects he selected, but in his
+treatment of their themes he shook boldly off the yoke of the past. A
+larger and deeper conception of human character than any of the old
+dramatists had reached displayed itself in Richard the Third, in
+Falstaff, or in Hotspur; while in Constance and Richard the Second the
+pathos of human suffering was painted as even Marlowe had never dared to
+paint it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His religious sympathies.</span></p>
+
+<p>No dramas have done so much for Shakspere's enduring popularity with his
+countrymen as these historical plays. They have done more than all the
+works of English historians to nourish in the minds of Englishmen a love
+of and reverence for their country's past. When Chatham was asked where
+he had read his English history he answered, "In the plays of
+Shakspere." Nowhere could he have read it so well, for nowhere is the
+spirit of our history so nobly rendered. If the poet's work echoes
+sometimes our national prejudice and unfairness of temper, it is
+instinct throughout with English humour, with our English love of hard
+fighting, our English faith in goodness and in the doom that waits upon
+triumphant evil, our English pity for the fallen. Shakspere is
+Elizabethan to the core. He stood at the meeting-point of two great
+epochs of our history. The age of the Renascence was passing into the
+age of Puritanism. Rifts which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37"></a><a href="./images/37.png">5-037</a>]</span>were still little were widening every
+hour, and threatening ruin to the fabric of Church and State which the
+Tudors had built up. A new political world was rising into being; a
+world healthier, more really national, but less picturesque, less wrapt
+in the mystery and splendour that poets love. Great as were the faults
+of Puritanism, it may fairly claim to be the first political system
+which recognized the grandeur of the people as a whole. As great a
+change was passing over the spiritual sympathies of men. A sterner
+Protestantism was invigorating and ennobling life by its morality, its
+seriousness, its intense conviction of God. But it was at the same time
+hardening and narrowing it. The Bible was superseding Plutarch. The
+"obstinate questionings" which haunted the finer souls of the Renascence
+were being stereotyped into the theological formulas of the Puritan. The
+sense of a divine omnipotence was annihilating man. The daring which
+turned England into a people of "adventurers," the sense of
+inexhaustible resources, the buoyant freshness of youth, the
+intoxicating sense of beauty and joy, which created Sidney and Marlowe
+and Drake, were passing away before the consciousness of evil and the
+craving to order man's life aright before God.</p>
+
+<p>From this new world of thought and feeling Shakspere stood aloof. Turn
+as others might to the speculations of theology, man and man's nature
+remained with him an inexhaustible subject of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38"></a><a href="./images/38.png">5-038</a>]</span>interest. Caliban was
+among his latest creations. It is impossible to discover whether his
+religious belief was Catholic or Protestant. It is hard indeed to say
+whether he had any religious belief or no. The religious phrases which
+are thinly scattered over his works are little more than expressions of
+a distant and imaginative reverence. But on the deeper grounds of
+religious faith his silence is significant. He is silent, and the doubt
+of Hamlet deepens his silence, about the after-world. "To die," it may
+be, was to him as it was to Claudio, "to go we know not whither." Often
+as his questionings turn to the riddle of life and death he leaves it a
+riddle to the last without heeding the common theological solutions
+around him. "We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little
+life is rounded with a sleep."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His political sympathies.</span></p>
+
+<p>Nor were the political sympathies of the poet those of the coming time.
+His roll of dramas is the epic of civil war. The Wars of the Roses fill
+his mind, as they filled the mind of his contemporaries. It is not till
+we follow him through the series of plays from "Richard the Second" to
+"Henry the Eighth" that we realize how profoundly the memory of the
+struggle between York and Lancaster had moulded the temper of the
+people, how deep a dread of civil war, of baronial turbulence, of
+disputes over the succession to the throne, it had left behind it. Men
+had learned the horrors of the time from their fathers; they <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39"></a><a href="./images/39.png">5-039</a>]</span>had drunk
+in with their childhood the lesson that such a chaos of weakness and
+misrule must never be risked again. From such a risk the Crown seemed
+the one security. With Shakspere as with his fellow-countrymen the Crown
+is still the centre and safeguard of the national life. His ideal
+England is an England grouped around a noble king, a king such as his
+own Henry the Fifth, devout, modest, simple as he is brave, but a lord
+in battle, a born ruler of men, with a loyal people about him and his
+enemies at his feet. Socially the poet reflects the aristocratic view of
+social life which was shared by all the nobler spirits of the
+Elizabethan time. Coriolanus is the embodiment of a great noble; and the
+taunts which Shakspere hurls in play after play at the rabble only echo
+the general temper of the Renascence. But he shows no sympathy with the
+struggle of feudalism against the Crown. If he paints Hotspur with a
+fire which proves how thoroughly he could sympathize with the rough,
+bold temper of the baronage, he suffers him to fall unpitied before
+Henry the Fourth. Apart however from the strength and justice of its
+rule, royalty has no charm for him. He knows nothing of the "right
+divine of kings to govern wrong" which became the doctrine of prelates
+and courtiers in the age of the Stuarts. He shows in his "Richard the
+Second" the doom that waits on a lawless despotism, as he denounces in
+his "Richard the Third" the selfish and merciless ambition that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40"></a><a href="./images/40.png">5-040</a>]</span>severs
+a ruler from his people. But the dread of misrule was a dim and distant
+one. Shakspere had grown up under the reign of Elizabeth; he had known
+no ruler save one who had cast a spell over the hearts of Englishmen.
+His thoughts were absorbed, as those of the country were absorbed, in
+the struggle for national existence which centred round the Queen. "King
+John" is a trumpet-call to rally round Elizabeth in her fight for
+England. Again a Pope was asserting his right to depose an English
+sovereign and to loose Englishmen from their bond of allegiance. Again
+political ambitions and civil discord woke at the call of religious war.
+Again a foreign power was threatening England at the summons of Rome,
+and hoping to master her with the aid of revolted Englishmen. The heat
+of such a struggle as this left no time for the thought of civil
+liberties. Shakspere casts aside the thought of the Charter to fix
+himself on the strife of the stranger for England itself. What he sang
+was the duty of patriotism, the grandeur of loyalty, the freedom of
+England from Pope or Spaniard, its safety within its "water-walled
+bulwark," if only its national union was secure. And now that the nation
+was at one, now that he had seen in his first years of London life
+Catholics as well as Protestants trooping to the muster at Tilbury and
+hasting down Thames to the fight in the Channel, he could thrill his
+hearers with the proud words that sum up the work of Elizabeth:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41"></a><a href="./images/41.png">5-041</a>]</span>
+<span class="i0">"This England never did, nor never shall,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">But when it first did help to wound itself.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Now that her princes are come home again,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Come the three corners of the world in arms,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And we shall shock them! Nought shall make us rue</span><br />
+<span class="i0">If England to itself do rest but true."</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Shakspere's prosperity.</span></p>
+
+<p>With this great series of historical and social dramas Shakspere had
+passed far beyond his fellows whether as a tragedian or as a writer of
+comedy. "The Muses," said Meres in 1598, "would speak with Shakspere's
+fine-filed phrase, if they would speak English." His personal popularity
+was now at its height. His pleasant temper and the vivacity of his wit
+had drawn him early into contact with the young Earl of Southampton, to
+whom his "Adonis" and "Lucrece" are dedicated; and the different tone of
+the two dedications shows how rapidly acquaintance ripened into an
+ardent friendship. Shakspere's wealth and influence too were growing
+fast. He had property both in Stratford and London, and his
+fellow-townsmen made him their suitor to Lord Burleigh for favours to be
+bestowed on Stratford. He was rich enough to aid his father, and to buy
+the house at Stratford which afterwards became his home. The tradition
+that Elizabeth was so pleased with Falstaff in "Henry the Fourth" that
+she ordered the poet to show her Falstaff in love&mdash;an order which
+produced the "Merry Wives of Windsor"&mdash;whether true or false, proves his
+repute as a playwright. As the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42"></a><a href="./images/42.png">5-042</a>]</span>group of earlier poets passed away, they
+found successors in Marston, Dekker, Middleton, Heywood, and Chapman,
+and above all in Ben Jonson. But none of these could dispute the
+supremacy of Shakspere. The verdict of Meres that "Shakspere among the
+English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage," represented
+the general feeling of his contemporaries. He was at last fully master
+of the resources of his art. The "Merchant of Venice" marks the
+perfection of his developement as a dramatist in the completeness of its
+stage effect, the ingenuity of its incidents, the ease of its movement,
+the beauty of its higher passages, the reserve and self-control with
+which its poetry is used, the conception and unfolding of character, and
+above all the mastery with which character and event are grouped round
+the figure of Shylock. Master as he is of his art, the poet's temper is
+still young; the "Merry Wives of Windsor" is a burst of gay laughter;
+and laughter more tempered, yet full of a sweeter fascination, rings
+round us in "As You Like It."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His gloom.</span></p>
+
+<p>But in the melancholy and meditative Jaques of the last drama we feel
+the touch of a new and graver mood. Youth, so full and buoyant in the
+poet till now, seems to have passed almost suddenly away. Though
+Shakspere had hardly reached forty, in one of his Sonnets which cannot
+have been written at a much later time than this there are indications
+that he already felt the advance of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43"></a><a href="./images/43.png">5-043</a>]</span>premature age. And at this moment
+the outer world suddenly darkened around him. The brilliant circle of
+young nobles whose friendship he had shared was broken up in 1601 by the
+political storm which burst in a mad struggle of the Earl of Essex for
+power. Essex himself fell on the scaffold; his friend and Shakspere's
+idol, Southampton, passed a prisoner into the Tower; Herbert Lord
+Pembroke, a younger patron of the poet, was banished from the Court.
+While friends were thus falling and hopes fading without, Shakspere's
+own mind seems to have been going through a phase of bitter suffering
+and unrest. In spite of the ingenuity of commentators, it is difficult
+and even impossible to derive any knowledge of Shakspere's inner history
+from the Sonnets; "the strange imagery of passion which passes over the
+magic mirror," it has been finely said, "has no tangible evidence before
+or behind it." But its mere passing is itself an evidence of the
+restlessness and agony within. The change in the character of his dramas
+gives a surer indication of his change of mood. The fresh joyousness,
+the keen delight in life and in man, which breathes through Shakspere's
+early work disappears in comedies such as "Troilus" and "Measure for
+Measure." Disappointment, disillusion, a new sense of the evil and
+foulness that underlie so much of human life, a loss of the old frank
+trust in its beauty and goodness, threw their gloom <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44"></a><a href="./images/44.png">5-044</a>]</span>over these
+comedies. Failure seems everywhere. In "Julius C&aelig;sar" the virtue of
+Brutus is foiled by its ignorance of and isolation from mankind; in
+Hamlet even penetrating intellect proves helpless for want of the
+capacity of action; the poison of Iago taints the love of Desdemona and
+the grandeur of Othello; Lear's mighty passion battles helplessly
+against the wind and the rain; a woman's weakness of frame dashes the
+cup of her triumph from the hand of Lady Macbeth; lust and
+self-indulgence blast the heroism of Antony; pride ruins the nobleness
+of Coriolanus.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His passion plays.</span></p>
+
+<p>But the very struggle and self-introspection that these dramas betray
+were to give a depth and grandeur to Shakspere's work such as it had
+never known before. The age was one in which man's temper and powers
+took a new range and energy. Sidney or Raleigh lived not one but a dozen
+lives at once; the daring of the adventurer, the philosophy of the
+scholar, the passion of the lover, the fanaticism of the saint, towered
+into almost superhuman grandeur. Man became conscious of the immense
+resources that lay within him, conscious of boundless powers that seemed
+to mock the narrow world in which they moved. All through the age of the
+Renascence one feels this impress of the gigantic, this giant-like
+activity, this immense ambition and desire. The very bombast and
+extravagance of the times reveal cravings and impulses before which
+common <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45"></a><a href="./images/45.png">5-045</a>]</span>speech broke down. It is this grandeur of humanity that finds
+its poetic expression in the later work of Shakspere. As the poet
+penetrated deeper and deeper into the recesses of the soul, he saw how
+great and wondrous a thing was man. "What a piece of work is a man,"
+cries Hamlet; "how noble in reason; how infinite in faculty; in form and
+moving how express and admirable; in action how like an angel; in
+apprehension how like a god; the beauty of the world; the paragon of
+animals!" It is the wonder of man that spreads before us as the poet
+pictures the wide speculation of Hamlet, the awful convulsion of a great
+nature in Othello, the terrible storm in the soul of Lear which blends
+with the very storm of the heavens themselves, the awful ambition that
+nerved a woman's hand to dabble itself with the blood of a murdered
+king, the reckless lust that "flung away a world for love." Amid the
+terror and awe of these great dramas we learn something of the vast
+forces of the age from which they sprang. The passion of Mary Stuart,
+the ruthlessness of Alva, the daring of Drake, the chivalry of Sidney,
+the range of thought and action in Raleigh or Elizabeth, come better
+home to us as we follow the mighty series of tragedies which began in
+"Hamlet" and ended in "Coriolanus."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Bacon.</span></p>
+
+<p>Shakspere's last dramas, the three exquisite works in which he shows a
+soul at rest with itself <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46"></a><a href="./images/46.png">5-046</a>]</span>and with the world, "Cymbeline," "The
+Tempest," "Winter's Tale," were written in the midst of ease and
+competence, in a house at Stratford to which he withdrew a few years
+after the death of Elizabeth. In them we lose all relation with the
+world or the time and pass into a region of pure poetry. It is in this
+peaceful and gracious close that the life of Shakspere contrasts most
+vividly with that of his greatest contemporary. If the imaginative
+resources of the new England were seen in the creators of Hamlet and the
+Faerie Queen, its purely intellectual capacity, its vast command over
+the stores of human knowledge, the amazing sense of its own powers with
+which it dealt with them, were seen in the work of Francis Bacon. Bacon
+was born in 1561, three years before the birth of Shakspere. He was the
+younger son of a Lord Keeper, as well as the nephew of Lord Burleigh,
+and even in childhood his quickness and sagacity won the favour of the
+Queen. Elizabeth "delighted much to confer with him, and to prove him
+with questions: unto which he delivered himself with that gravity and
+maturity above his years that her Majesty would often term him 'the
+young Lord Keeper.'" Even as a boy at college he expressed his dislike
+of the Aristotelian philosophy, as "a philosophy only strong for
+disputations and contentions but barren of the production of works for
+the benefit of the life of man." As a law student of twenty-one he
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47"></a><a href="./images/47.png">5-047</a>]</span>sketched in a tract on the "Greatest Birth of Time" the system of
+inductive enquiry which he was already prepared to substitute for it.
+The speculations of the young thinker however were interrupted by his
+hopes of Court success. But these were soon dashed to the ground. He was
+left poor by his father's death; the ill-will of the Cecils barred his
+advancement with the Queen: and a few years before Shakspere's arrival
+in London Bacon entered as a barrister at Gray's Inn. He soon became one
+of the most successful lawyers of the time. At twenty-three Bacon was a
+member of the House of Commons, and his judgement and eloquence at once
+brought him to the front. "The fear of every man that heard him was lest
+he should make an end," Ben Jonson tells us. The steady growth of his
+reputation was quickened in 1597 by the appearance of his "Essays," a
+work remarkable, not merely for the condensation of its thought and its
+felicity and exactness of expression, but for the power with which it
+applied to human life that experimental analysis which Bacon was at a
+later time to make the key of Science.</p>
+
+<p>His fame at once became great at home and abroad, but with this nobler
+fame Bacon could not content himself. He was conscious of great powers
+as well as great aims for the public good: and it was a time when such
+aims could hardly be realized save through the means of the Crown. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48"></a><a href="./images/48.png">5-048</a>]</span>But
+political employment seemed farther off than ever. At the outset of his
+career in Parliament he irritated Elizabeth by a firm opposition to her
+demand of a subsidy; and though the offence was atoned for by profuse
+apologies and by the cessation of all further resistance to the policy
+of the Court, the law offices of the Crown were more than once refused
+to him, and it was only after the publication of his "Essays" that he
+could obtain some slight promotion as a Queen's Counsel. The moral
+weakness which more and more disclosed itself is the best justification
+of the Queen in her reluctance&mdash;a reluctance so greatly in contrast with
+her ordinary course&mdash;to bring the wisest head in her realm to her
+Council-board. The men whom Elizabeth employed were for the most part
+men whose intellect was directed by a strong sense of public duty. Their
+reverence for the Queen, strangely exaggerated as it may seem to us, was
+guided and controlled by an ardent patriotism and an earnest sense of
+religion; and with all their regard for the royal prerogative, they
+never lost their regard for the law. The grandeur and originality of
+Bacon's intellect parted him from men like these quite as much as the
+bluntness of his moral perceptions. In politics, as in science, he had
+little reverence for the past. Law, constitutional privileges, or
+religion, were to him simply means of bringing about certain ends of
+good government; and if these ends could be <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49"></a><a href="./images/49.png">5-049</a>]</span>brought about in shorter
+fashion he saw only pedantry in insisting on more cumbrous means. He had
+great social and political ideas to realize, the reform and codification
+of the law, the civilization of Ireland, the purification of the Church,
+the union&mdash;at a later time&mdash;of Scotland and England, educational
+projects, projects of material improvement, and the like; and the direct
+and shortest way of realizing these ends was, in Bacon's eyes, the use
+of the power of the Crown. But whatever charm such a conception of the
+royal power might have for her successor, it had little charm for
+Elizabeth; and to the end of her reign Bacon was foiled in his efforts
+to rise in her service.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Novum Organum.</span></p>
+
+<p>Political activity however and Court intrigue left room in his mind for
+the philosophical speculation which had begun with his earliest years.
+Amidst debates in Parliament and flatteries in the closet Bacon had been
+silently framing a new philosophy. It made its first decisive appearance
+after the final disappointment of his hopes from Elizabeth in the
+publication of the "Advancement of Learning." The close of this work
+was, in his own words, "a general and faithful perambulation of
+learning, with an enquiry what parts thereof lie fresh and waste and not
+improved and converted by the industry of man; to the end that such a
+plot, made and recorded to memory, may both minister light to any public
+designation and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50"></a><a href="./images/50.png">5-050</a>]</span>also serve to excite voluntary endeavours." It was only
+by such a survey, he held, that men could be turned from useless
+studies, or ineffectual means of pursuing more useful ones, and directed
+to the true end of knowledge as "a rich storehouse for the glory of the
+Creator and the relief of man's estate." The work was in fact the
+preface to a series of treatises which were intended to be built up into
+an "Instauratio Magna," which its author was never destined to complete,
+and of which the parts that we possess were published in the following
+reign. The "Cogitata et Visa" was a first sketch of the "Novum Organum,"
+which in its complete form was presented to James in 1621. A year later
+Bacon produced his "Natural and Experimental History." This, with the
+"Novum Organum" and the "Advancement of Learning," was all of his
+projected "Instauratio Magna" which he actually finished; and even of
+this portion we have only part of the last two divisions. The "Ladder of
+the Understanding," which was to have followed these and led up from
+experience to science, the "Anticipations," or provisional hypotheses
+for the enquiries of the new philosophy, and the closing account of
+"Science in Practice" were left for posterity to bring to completion.
+"We may, as we trust," said Bacon, "make no despicable beginnings. The
+destinies of the human race must complete it, in such a manner perhaps
+as men looking only at the present world would not <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51"></a><a href="./images/51.png">5-051</a>]</span>readily conceive.
+For upon this will depend, not only a speculative good, but all the
+fortunes of mankind, and all their power."</p>
+
+<p>When we turn from words like these to the actual work which Bacon did,
+it is hard not to feel a certain disappointment. He did not thoroughly
+understand the older philosophy which he attacked. His revolt from the
+waste of human intelligence which he conceived to be owing to the
+adoption of a false method of investigation blinded him to the real
+value of deduction as an instrument of discovery; and he was encouraged
+in his contempt for it as much by his own ignorance of mathematics as by
+the non-existence in his day of the great deductive sciences of physics
+and astronomy. Nor had he a more accurate prevision of the method of
+modern science. The inductive process to which he exclusively directed
+men's attention bore no fruit in Bacon's hands. The "art of
+investigating nature" on which he prided himself has proved useless for
+scientific purposes, and would be rejected by modern investigators.
+Where he was on a more correct track he can hardly be regarded as
+original. "It may be doubted," says Dugald Stewart, "whether any one
+important rule with regard to the true method of investigation be
+contained in his works of which no hint can be traced in those of his
+predecessors." Not only indeed did Bacon fail to anticipate the methods
+of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52"></a><a href="./images/52.png">5-052</a>]</span>modern science, but he even rejected the great scientific
+discoveries of his own day. He set aside with the same scorn the
+astronomical theory of Copernicus and the magnetic investigations of
+Gilbert. The contempt seems to have been fully returned by the
+scientific workers of his day. "The Lord Chancellor wrote on science,"
+said Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, "like a
+Lord Chancellor."</p>
+
+<p>In spite however of his inadequate appreciation either of the old
+philosophy or the new, the almost unanimous voice of later ages has
+attributed, and justly attributed, to the "Novum Organum" a decisive
+influence on the developement of modern science. If he failed in
+revealing the method of experimental research, Bacon was the first to
+proclaim the existence of a Philosophy of Science, to insist on the
+unity of knowledge and enquiry throughout the physical world, to give
+dignity by the large and noble temper in which he treated them to the
+petty details of experiment in which science had to begin, to clear a
+way for it by setting scornfully aside the traditions of the past, to
+claim for it its true rank and value, and to point to the enormous
+results which its culture would bring in increasing the power and
+happiness of mankind. In one respect his attitude was in the highest
+degree significant. The age in which he lived was one in which theology
+was absorbing the intellectual energy of the world. He was the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53"></a><a href="./images/53.png">5-053</a>]</span>servant
+too of a king with whom theological studies superseded all others. But
+if he bowed in all else to James, Bacon would not, like Casaubon, bow in
+this. He would not even, like Descartes, attempt to transform theology
+by turning reason into a mode of theological demonstration. He stood
+absolutely aloof from it. Though as a politician he did not shrink from
+dealing with such subjects as Church Reform, he dealt with them simply
+as matters of civil polity. But from his exhaustive enumeration of the
+branches of human knowledge he excluded theology, and theology alone.
+His method was of itself inapplicable to a subject where the premisses
+were assumed to be certain, and the results known. His aim was to seek
+for unknown results by simple experiment. It was against received
+authority and accepted tradition in matters of enquiry that his whole
+system protested; what he urged was the need of making belief rest
+strictly on proof, and proof rest on the conclusions drawn from evidence
+by reason. But in theology&mdash;all theologians asserted&mdash;reason played but
+a subordinate part. "If I proceed to treat of it," said Bacon, "I shall
+step out of the bark of human reason, and enter into the ship of the
+Church. Neither will the stars of philosophy, which have hitherto so
+nobly shone on us, any longer give us their light."</p>
+
+<p>The certainty indeed of conclusions on such <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54"></a><a href="./images/54.png">5-054</a>]</span>subjects was out of harmony
+with the grandest feature of Bacon's work, his noble confession of the
+liability of every enquirer to error. It was his especial task to warn
+men against the "vain shows" of knowledge which had so long hindered any
+real advance in it, the "idols" of the Tribe, the Den, the Forum, and
+the Theatre, the errors which spring from the systematizing spirit which
+pervades all masses of men, or from individual idiosyncrasies, or from
+the strange power of words and phrases over the mind, or from the
+traditions of the past. Nor were the claims of theology easily to be
+reconciled with the position which he was resolute to assign to natural
+science. "Through all those ages," Bacon says, "wherein men of genius or
+learning principally or even moderately flourished, the smallest part of
+human industry has been spent on natural philosophy, though this ought
+to be esteemed as the great mother of the sciences; for all the rest, if
+torn from this root, may perhaps be polished and formed for use, but can
+receive little increase." It was by the adoption of the method of
+inductive enquiry which physical science was to make its own, and by
+basing enquiry on grounds which physical science could supply, that the
+moral sciences, ethics and politics, could alone make any real advance.
+"Let none expect any great promotion of the sciences, especially in
+their effective part, unless natural philosophy be drawn out to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55"></a><a href="./images/55.png">5-055</a>]</span>particular sciences; and, again, unless these particular sciences be
+brought back again to natural philosophy. From this defect it is that
+astronomy, optics, music, many mechanical arts, and (what seems
+stranger) even moral and civil philosophy and logic rise but little
+above the foundations, and only skim over the varieties and surfaces of
+things." It was this lofty conception of the position and destiny of
+natural science which Bacon was the first to impress upon mankind at
+large. The age was one in which knowledge was passing to fields of
+enquiry which had till then been unknown, in which Kepler and Galileo
+were creating modern astronomy, in which Descartes was revealing the
+laws of motion, and Harvey the circulation of the blood. But to the mass
+of men this great change was all but imperceptible; and it was the
+energy, the profound conviction, the eloquence of Bacon which first
+called the attention of mankind as a whole to the power and importance
+of physical research. It was he who by his lofty faith in the results
+and victories of the new philosophy nerved its followers to a zeal and
+confidence equal to his own. It was he above all who gave dignity to the
+slow and patient processes of investigation, of experiment, of
+comparison, to the sacrifice of hypothesis to fact, to the single aim
+after truth, which was to be the law of modern science.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Advance of the Parliament.</span></p>
+
+<p>While England thus became "a nest of singing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56"></a><a href="./images/56.png">5-056</a>]</span>birds," while Bacon was
+raising the lofty fabric of his philosophical speculation, the people
+itself was waking to a new sense of national freedom. Elizabeth saw the
+forces, political and religious, which she had stubbornly held in check
+for half a century pressing on her irresistibly. In spite of the rarity
+of its assemblings, in spite of high words and imprisonment and
+dexterous management, the Parliament had quietly gained a power which,
+at her accession, the Queen could never have dreamed of its possessing.
+Step by step the Lower House had won the freedom of its members from
+arrest save by its own permission, the right of punishing and expelling
+members for crimes committed within its walls, and of determining all
+matters relating to elections. The more important claim of freedom of
+speech had brought on from time to time a series of petty conflicts in
+which Elizabeth generally gave way. But on this point the Commons still
+shrank from any consistent repudiation of the Queen's assumption of
+control. A bold protest of Peter Wentworth against her claim to exercise
+such a control in 1575 was met indeed by the House itself with his
+committal to the Tower; and the bolder questions which he addressed to
+the Parliament of 1588, "Whether this Council is not a place for every
+member of the same freely and without control, by bill or speech, to
+utter any of the griefs of the Commonwealth," brought on him a fresh
+imprisonment at <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57"></a><a href="./images/57.png">5-057</a>]</span>the hands of the Council, which lasted till the
+dissolution of the Parliament and with which the Commons declined to
+interfere. But while vacillating in its assertion of the rights of
+individual members, the House steadily claimed for itself a right to
+discuss even the highest matters of State. Three great subjects, the
+succession, the Church, and the regulation of trade, had been regarded
+by every Tudor sovereign as lying exclusively within the competence of
+the Crown. But Parliament had again and again asserted its right to
+consider the succession. It persisted in spite of censure and rebuff in
+presenting schemes of ecclesiastical reform. And three years before
+Elizabeth's death it dealt boldly with matters of trade. Complaints made
+in 1571 of the licences and monopolies by which internal and external
+commerce was fettered were repressed by a royal reprimand as matters
+neither pertaining to the Commons nor within the compass of their
+understanding. When the subject was again stirred nearly twenty years
+afterwards, Sir Edward Hoby was sharply rebuked by "a great personage"
+for his complaint of the illegal exactions made by the Exchequer. But
+the bill which he promoted was sent up to the Lords in spite of this,
+and at the close of Elizabeth's reign the storm of popular indignation
+which had been roused by the growing grievance nerved the Commons, in
+1601, to a decisive struggle. It was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58"></a><a href="./images/58.png">5-058</a>]</span>in vain that the ministers opposed
+a bill for the Abolition of Monopolies, and after four days of vehement
+debate the tact of Elizabeth taught her to give way. She acted with her
+usual ability, declared her previous ignorance of the existence of the
+evil, thanked the House for its interference, and quashed at a single
+blow every monopoly that she had granted.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Growth of Puritanism.</span></p>
+
+<p>Dexterous as was Elizabeth's retreat, the defeat was none the less a
+real one. Political freedom was proving itself again the master in the
+long struggle with the Crown. Nor in her yet fiercer struggle against
+religious freedom could Elizabeth look forward to any greater success.
+The sharp suppression of the Martin Marprelate pamphlets was far from
+damping the courage of the Presbyterians. Cartwright, who had been
+appointed by Lord Leicester to the mastership of an hospital at Warwick,
+was bold enough to organize his system of Church discipline among the
+clergy of that county and of Northamptonshire. His example was widely
+followed; and the general gatherings of the whole ministerial body of
+the clergy and the smaller assemblies for each diocese or shire, which
+in the Presbyterian scheme bore the name of Synods and Classes, began to
+be held in many parts of England for the purposes of debate and
+consultation. The new organization was quickly suppressed, but
+Cartwright was saved from the banishment which Whitgift demanded by a
+promise <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59"></a><a href="./images/59.png">5-059</a>]</span>of submission, and his influence steadily widened. With
+Presbyterianism itself indeed Elizabeth was strong enough to deal. Its
+dogmatism and bigotry were opposed to the better temper of the age, and
+it never took any popular hold on England. But if Presbyterianism was
+limited to a few, Puritanism, the religious temper which sprang from a
+deep conviction of the truth of Protestant doctrines and of the
+falsehood of Catholicism, had become through the struggle with Spain and
+the Papacy the temper of three-fourths of the English people. Unluckily
+the policy of Elizabeth did its best to give to the Presbyterians the
+support of Puritanism. Her establishment of the Ecclesiastical
+Commission had given fresh life and popularity to the doctrines which it
+aimed at crushing by drawing together two currents of opinion which were
+in themselves perfectly distinct. The Presbyterian platform of Church
+discipline had as yet been embraced by the clergy only, and by few among
+the clergy. On the other hand, the wish for a reform in the Liturgy, the
+dislike of "superstitious usages," of the use of the surplice, the sign
+of the cross in baptism, the gift of the ring in marriage, the posture
+of kneeling at the Lord's Supper, was shared by a large number of the
+clergy and the laity alike. At the opening of Elizabeth's reign almost
+all the higher Churchmen save Parker were opposed to them, and a motion
+for their abolition in Convocation was lost but by a single vote. The
+temper of the country <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60"></a><a href="./images/60.png">5-060</a>]</span>gentlemen on this subject was indicated by that
+of Parliament; and it was well known that the wisest of the Queen's
+Councillors, Burleigh, Walsingham, and Knollys, were at one in this
+matter with the gentry. If their common persecution did not wholly
+succeed in fusing these two sections of religious opinion into one, it
+at any rate gained for the Presbyterians a general sympathy on the part
+of the Puritans, which raised them from a clerical clique into a popular
+party.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Philip and Ireland.</span></p>
+
+<p>But if Elizabeth's task became more difficult at home, the last years of
+her reign were years of splendour and triumph abroad. The overthrow of
+Philip's hopes in France had been made more bitter by the final
+overthrow of his hopes at sea. In 1596 his threat of a fresh Armada was
+met by the daring descent of an English force upon Cadiz. The town was
+plundered and burned to the ground; thirteen vessels of war were fired
+in its harbour, and the stores accumulated for the expedition utterly
+destroyed. In spite of this crushing blow a Spanish fleet gathered in
+the following year and set sail for the English coast; but as in the
+case of its predecessor storms proved more fatal than the English guns,
+and the ships were wrecked and almost destroyed in the Bay of Biscay.
+Meanwhile whatever hopes remained of subjecting the Low Countries were
+destroyed by the triumph of Henry of Navarre. A triple league of France,
+England, and the Netherlands left Elizabeth secure to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61"></a><a href="./images/61.png">5-061</a>]</span>eastward; and
+the only quarter in which Philip could now strike a blow at her was the
+great dependency of England in the west. Since the failure of the
+Spanish force at Smerwick the power of the English government had been
+recognized everywhere throughout Ireland. But it was a power founded
+solely on terror, and the outrages and exactions of the soldiery who had
+been flushed with rapine and bloodshed in the south sowed during the
+years which followed the reduction of Munster the seeds of a revolt more
+formidable than any which Elizabeth had yet encountered. The tribes of
+Ulster, divided by the policy of Sidney, were again united by a common
+hatred of their oppressors; and in Hugh O'Neill they found a leader of
+even greater ability than Shane himself. Hugh had been brought up at the
+English court and was in manners and bearing an Englishman. He had been
+rewarded for his steady loyalty in previous contests by a grant of the
+earldom of Tyrone, and in his contest with a rival chieftain of his clan
+he had secured aid from the government by an offer to introduce the
+English laws and shire-system into his new country. But he was no sooner
+undisputed master of the north than his tone gradually changed. Whether
+from a long-formed plan, or from suspicion of English designs upon
+himself, he at last took a position of open defiance.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Revolt of Ulster.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was at the moment when the Treaty of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62"></a><a href="./images/62.png">5-062</a>]</span>Vervins and the wreck of the
+second Armada freed Elizabeth's hands from the struggle with Spain that
+the revolt under Hugh O'Neill broke the quiet which had prevailed since
+the victories of Lord Grey. The Irish question again became the chief
+trouble of the Queen. The tide of her recent triumphs seemed at first to
+have turned. A defeat of the English forces in Tyrone caused a general
+rising of the northern tribes, and a great effort made in 1599 for the
+suppression of the growing revolt failed through the vanity and
+disobedience, if not the treacherous complicity, of the Queen's
+lieutenant, the young Earl of Essex. His successor, Lord Mountjoy, found
+himself master on his arrival of only a few miles round Dublin. But in
+three years the revolt was at an end. A Spanish force which landed to
+support it at Kinsale was driven to surrender; a line of forts secured
+the country as the English mastered it; all open opposition was crushed
+out by the energy and the ruthlessness of the new Lieutenant; and a
+famine which followed on his ravages completed the devastating work of
+the sword. Hugh O'Neill was brought in triumph to Dublin; the Earl of
+Desmond, who had again roused Munster into revolt, fled for refuge to
+Spain; and the work of conquest was at last brought to a close.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The last years of Elizabeth.</span></p>
+
+<p>The triumph of Mountjoy flung its lustre over the last days of
+Elizabeth, but no outer triumph <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63"></a><a href="./images/63.png">5-063</a>]</span>could break the gloom which gathered
+round the dying Queen. Lonely as she had always been, her loneliness
+deepened as she drew towards the grave. The statesmen and warriors of
+her earlier days had dropped one by one from her Council-board.
+Leicester had died in the year of the Armada; two years later Walsingham
+followed him to the grave; in 1598 Burleigh himself passed away. Their
+successors were watching her last moments, and intriguing for favour in
+the coming reign. Her favourite, Lord Essex, not only courted favour
+with James of Scotland, but brought him to suspect Robert Cecil, who had
+succeeded his father at the Queen's Council-board, of designs against
+his succession. The rivalry between the two ministers hurried Essex into
+fatal projects which led to his failure in Ireland and to an insane
+outbreak of revolt which brought him in 1601 to the block. But Cecil had
+no sooner proved the victor in this struggle at Court than he himself
+entered into a secret correspondence with the king of Scots. His action
+was wise: it brought James again into friendly relations with the Queen;
+and paved the way for a peaceful transfer of the crown. But hidden as
+this correspondence was from Elizabeth, the suspicion of it only added
+to her distrust. The troubles of the war in Ireland brought fresh cares
+to the aged Queen. It drained her treasury. The old splendour of her
+Court waned and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64"></a><a href="./images/64.png">5-064</a>]</span>disappeared. Only officials remained about her, "the
+other of the Council and nobility estrange themselves by all occasions."
+The love and reverence of the people itself lessened as they felt the
+pressure and taxation of the war. Of old men had pressed to see the
+Queen as if it were a glimpse of heaven. "In the year 1588," a bishop
+tells us, who was then a country boy fresh come to town, "I did live at
+the upper end of the Strand near St. Clement's church, when suddenly
+there came a report to us (it was in December, much about five of the
+clock at night, very dark) that the Queen was gone to Council, 'and if
+you will see the Queen you must come quickly.' Then we all ran, when the
+Court gates were set open, and no man did hinder us from coming in.
+There we came, where there was a far greater company than was usually at
+Lenten sermons; and when we had staid there an hour and that the yard
+was full, there being a number of torches, the Queen came out in great
+state. Then we cried, 'God save your Majesty! God save your Majesty!'
+Then the Queen turned to us and said, 'God bless you all, my good
+people!' Then we cried again, 'God bless your Majesty! God bless your
+Majesty!' Then the Queen said again to us, 'You may well have a greater
+prince, but you shall never have a more loving prince.' And so looking
+one upon another a while the Queen departed. This wrought such an
+impression on us, for shows and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65"></a><a href="./images/65.png">5-065</a>]</span>pageantry are ever best seen by
+torchlight, that all the way long we did nothing but talk what an
+admirable Queen she was, and how we would adventure our lives to do her
+service." But now, as Elizabeth passed along in her progresses, the
+people whose applause she courted remained cold and silent. The temper
+of the age in fact was changing, and isolating her as it changed. Her
+own England, the England which had grown up around her, serious, moral,
+prosaic, shrank coldly from this brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous child
+of earth and the Renascence.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Elizabeth's death.</span></p>
+
+<p>But if ministers and courtiers were counting on her death, Elizabeth had
+no mind to die. She had enjoyed life as the men of her day enjoyed it,
+and now that they were gone she clung to it with a fierce tenacity. She
+hunted, she danced, she jested with her young favourites, she coquetted
+and scolded and frolicked at sixty-seven as she had done at thirty. "The
+Queen," wrote a courtier a few months before her death, "was never so
+gallant these many years nor so set upon jollity." She persisted, in
+spite of opposition, in her gorgeous progresses from country-house to
+country-house. She clung to business as of old, and rated in her usual
+fashion "one who minded not to giving up some matter of account." But
+death crept on. Her face became haggard, and her frame shrank almost to
+a skeleton. At last her taste for finery disappeared, and she refused to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66"></a><a href="./images/66.png">5-066</a>]</span>change her dresses for a week together. A strange melancholy settled
+down on her. "She held in her hand," says one who saw her in her last
+days, "a golden cup, which she often put to her lips: but in truth her
+heart seemed too full to need more filling." Gradually her mind gave
+way. She lost her memory, the violence of her temper became unbearable,
+her very courage seemed to forsake her. She called for a sword to lie
+constantly beside her and thrust it from time to time through the arras,
+as if she heard murderers stirring there. Food and rest became alike
+distasteful. She sate day and night propped up with pillows on a stool,
+her finger on her lip, her eyes fixed on the floor, without a word. If
+she once broke the silence, it was with a flash of her old queenliness.
+When Robert Cecil declared that she "must" go to bed the word roused her
+like a trumpet. "Must!" she exclaimed; "is <i>must</i> a word to be addressed
+to princes? Little man, little man! thy father, if he had been alive,
+durst not have used that word." Then, as her anger spent itself, she
+sank into her old dejection. "Thou art so presumptuous," she said,
+"because thou knowest I shall die." She rallied once more when the
+ministers beside her bed named Lord Beauchamp, the heir to the Suffolk
+claim, as a possible successor. "I will have no rogue's son," she cried
+hoarsely, "in my seat." But she gave no sign, save a motion of the head,
+at the mention of the king of Scots. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67"></a><a href="./images/67.png">5-067</a>]</span>She was in fact fast becoming
+insensible; and early the next morning, on the twenty-fourth of March
+1603, the life of Elizabeth, a life so great, so strange and lonely in
+its greatness, ebbed quietly away.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68"></a><a href="./images/68.png">5-068</a>]</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69"></a><a href="./images/69.png">5-069</a>]</span></p>
+
+
+<div class="book">
+<div class="head">
+<hr />
+
+<ul style="margin-top: 3em; margin-bottom: 3em;">
+  <li>BOOK VII</li>
+  <li>PURITAN ENGLAND</li>
+  <li>1603-1660</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70"></a><a href="./images/70.png">5-070</a>]</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71"></a><a href="./images/71.png">5-071</a>]</span></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr />
+
+<ul>
+  <li>AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK VII</li>
+  <li>1603-1660</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>For the reign of James the First we have Camden's "Annals" of that king,
+Goodman's "Court of King James I.," Weldon's "Secret History of the
+Court of James I.," Roger Coke's "Detection," the correspondence in the
+"Cabala," the letters published under the title of "The Court and Times
+of James I.," the documents in Winwood's "Memorials of State," and the
+reported proceedings of the last two Parliaments. The Camden Society has
+published the correspondence of James with Cecil, and Walter Yonge's
+"Diary." The letters and works of Bacon, now fully edited by Mr.
+Spedding, are necessary for any true understanding of the period.
+Hacket's "Life of Williams" and Harrington's "Nug&aelig; Antiqu&aelig;" throw
+valuable side-light on the politics of the time. But the Stuart system,
+both at home and abroad, can only fairly be read by the light of the
+state-papers of this and the following reign, calendars of which are now
+being published by the Master of the Rolls. It is his employment of
+these, as well as his own fairness and good sense, which gives value to
+the series of works which Mr. Gardiner has devoted to this period; his
+"History of England from the Accession of James the First," his "Prince
+Charles and the Spanish Marriage," "England under the Duke of
+Buckingham," and "The Personal Government of Charles the First." The
+series has as yet been carried to 1637. To Mr. Gardiner also we owe the
+publication, through <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72"></a><a href="./images/72.png">5-072</a>]</span>the Camden Society, of reports of some of the
+earlier Stuart Parliaments. Ranke's "History of England during the
+Seventeenth Century" has the same documentary value as embodying the
+substance of state-papers in both English and foreign archives, which
+throw great light on the foreign politics of the Stuart kings. It covers
+the whole period of Stuart rule. With the reign of Charles the First our
+historical materials increase. For Laud we have his remarkable "Diary";
+for Strafford the "Strafford Letters." Hallam has justly characterized
+Clarendon's "History of the Rebellion" as belonging "rather to the class
+of memoirs" than of histories; and the rigorous analysis of it by Ranke
+shows the very different value of its various parts. Though the work
+will always retain a literary interest from its nobleness of style and
+the grand series of character-portraits which it embodies, the worth of
+its account of all that preceded the war is almost destroyed by the
+contrast between its author's conduct at the time and his later
+description of the Parliament's proceedings, as well as by the
+deliberate and malignant falsehood with which he has perverted the whole
+action of his parliamentary opponents. With the outbreak of the war he
+becomes of greater value, and he gives a good account of the Cornish
+rising; but from the close of the first struggle his work becomes
+tedious and unimportant. May's "History of the Long Parliament" is
+fairly accurate and impartial; but the basis of any real account of it
+must be found in its own proceedings as they have been preserved in the
+notes of Sir Ralph Verney and Sir Simonds D'Ewes. The last remain
+unpublished; but Mr. Forster has drawn much from them in his two works,
+"The Grand Remonstrance" and "The Arrest of the Five Members." The
+collections of state-papers by Rushworth and Nalson are indispensable
+for this period. It is illustrated by a series of memoirs, of very
+different degrees of value, such as those of Whitelock, Ludlow, Sir
+Philip Warwick, Holles, and Major Hutchinson, as well as by works like
+Mrs. Hutchinson's memoir of her husband, Baxter's "Autobiography," or
+Sir Thomas Herbert's memoirs of Charles during his last two years. The
+Diary of Nehemiah <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73"></a><a href="./images/73.png">5-073</a>]</span>Wallington gives us the common life of Puritanism
+during this troubled time. For Cromwell the primary authority is Mr.
+Carlyle's "Life and Letters of Cromwell," an invaluable store of
+documents, edited with the care of an antiquarian and the genius of a
+poet. Fairfax may be studied in the "Fairfax Correspondence," and in the
+documents embodied in Mr. Clements Markham's life of him. Sprigge's
+"Anglia Rediviva" gives an account of the New Model and its doings.
+Thurlow's State Papers furnish an immense mass of documents for the
+period of the Protectorate; and Burton's "Diary" gives an account of the
+proceedings in the Protector's second Parliament. For Irish affairs we
+have a vast store of materials in the Ormond papers and letters
+collected by Carte; for Scotland we have "Baillie's Letters," Burnet's
+"Lives of the Hamiltons," and Sir James Turner's "Memoir of the Scotch
+Invasion." Among the general accounts of this reign we may name
+Disraeli's "Commentaries of the Reign of Charles I." as prominent on one
+side, Brodie's "History of the British Empire" and Godwin's "History of
+the Commonwealth" on the other. Guizot in his three works on "Charles I.
+and the Revolution," "Cromwell and the Protectorate," and "Richard
+Cromwell and the Restoration," is accurate and impartial; and the
+documents he has added are valuable for the foreign history of the time.
+A good deal of information may be found in Forster's "Lives of the
+Statesmen of the Commonwealth," and Sandford's "Illustrations of the
+Great Rebellion."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74"></a><a href="./images/74.png">5-074</a>]</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75"></a><a href="./images/75.png">5-075</a>]</span></p>
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr />
+
+<ul>
+  <li>CHAPTER I</li>
+  <li>ENGLAND AND PURITANISM</li>
+  <li>1603-1660</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">England at the death of Elizabeth.</span></p>
+
+<p>The death of Elizabeth is one of the turning-points of English history.
+The age of the Renascence and of the New Monarchy passed away with the
+Queen. The whole face of the realm had been silently changing during the
+later years of her reign. The dangers which had hitherto threatened our
+national existence and our national unity had alike disappeared. The
+kingdom which had been saved from ruin but fifty years before by the
+jealousies of its neighbours now stood in the forefront of European
+powers. France clung to its friendship. Spain trembled beneath its
+blows. The Papacy had sullenly withdrawn from a fruitless strife with
+the heretic island. The last of the Queen's labours had laid Ireland at
+her feet, and her death knit Scotland to its ancient enemy by the tie of
+a common king. Within England itself the change was as great. Religious
+severance, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76"></a><a href="./images/76.png">5-076</a>]</span>the most terrible of national dangers, had been averted by
+the patience and the ruthlessness of the Crown. The Catholics were weak
+and held pitilessly down. The Protestant sectaries were hunted as
+pitilessly from the realm. The ecclesiastical compromise of the Tudors
+had at last won the adhesion of the country at large. Nor was the social
+change less remarkable. The natural growth of wealth and a patient good
+government had gradually put an end to all social anarchy. The dread of
+feudal revolt had passed for ever away. The fall of the Northern Earls,
+of Norfolk, and of Essex, had broken the last strength of the older
+houses. The baronage had finally made way for a modern nobility, but
+this nobility, sprung as it was from the court of the Tudors, and
+dependent for its existence on the favour of the Crown, had none of that
+traditional hold on the people at large which made the feudal lords so
+formidable a danger to public order.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Growth of social wealth.</span></p>
+
+<p>If the older claims of freedom had been waived in presence of the
+dangers which so long beset even national existence, the disappearance
+of these dangers brought naturally with it a revival of the craving for
+liberty and self-government. And once awakened such a craving found a
+solid backing in the material progress of the time, in the upgrowth of
+new social classes, in the intellectual developement of the people, and
+in the new boldness and vigour of the national temper. The long <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77"></a><a href="./images/77.png">5-077</a>]</span>outer
+peace, the tranquillity of the realm, the lightness of taxation till the
+outbreak of war with Spain, had spread prosperity throughout the land.
+Even the war failed to hinder the enrichment of the trading classes. The
+Netherlands were the centre of European trade, and of all European
+countries England had for more than half-a-century been making the
+greatest advance in its trade with the Netherlands. As early as in the
+eight years which preceded Elizabeth's accession and the eight years
+that followed it, while the trade of Spain with the Low Countries had
+doubled, and that of France and Germany with them had grown threefold,
+the trade between England and Antwerp had increased twentyfold. The
+increase remained at least as great through the forty years that
+followed, and the erection of stately houses, marriages with noble
+families, and the purchase of great estates, showed the rapid growth of
+the merchant class in wealth and social importance. London above all was
+profiting by the general advance. The rapidity of its growth awoke the
+jealousy of the royal Council. One London merchant, Thomas Sutton,
+founded the great hospital and school of the Charter House. Another,
+Hugh Myddelton, brought the New River from its springs at Chadwell and
+Amwell to supply London with pure water. Ere many years had gone the
+wealth of the great capital was to tell on the whole course of English
+history. Nor was the merchant class <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78"></a><a href="./images/78.png">5-078</a>]</span>alone in this elevation. If the
+greater nobles no longer swayed the State, the spoil of the Church
+lands, and the general growth of national wealth, were raising the
+lesser landowners into a new social power. An influence which was to
+play a growing part in our history, the influence of the gentry, of the
+squires&mdash;as they were soon to be called&mdash;told more and more on English
+politics. In all but name indeed the leaders of this class were the
+equals of the peers whom they superseded. Men like the Wentworths in the
+north, or the Hampdens in the south, boasted as long a rent-roll and
+wielded as great an influence as many of the older nobles. The attitude
+of the Lower House towards the Higher throughout the Stuart Parliaments
+sprang mainly from the consciousness of the Commons that in wealth as
+well as in political consequence the merchants and country gentlemen who
+formed the bulk of their members stood far above the mass of the peers.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Growth of national spirit.</span></p>
+
+<p>While a new social fabric was thus growing up on the wreck of feudal
+England, new influences were telling on its developement. The immense
+advance of the people as a whole in knowledge and intelligence
+throughout the reign of Elizabeth was in itself a revolution. The hold
+of tradition, the unquestioning awe which formed the main strength of
+the Tudor throne, had been sapped and weakened by the intellectual
+activity of the Renascence, by its endless questionings, its historic
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79"></a><a href="./images/79.png">5-079</a>]</span>research, its philosophic scepticism. Writers and statesmen were alike
+discussing the claims of government and the wisest and most lasting
+forms of rule, travellers turned aside from the frescoes of Giorgione to
+study the aristocratic polity of Venice, and Jesuits borrowed from the
+schoolmen of the Middle Ages a doctrine of popular rights which still
+forms the theory of modern democracy. On the other hand the nation was
+learning to rely on itself, to believe in its own strength and vigour,
+to crave for a share in the guidance of its own life. His conflict with
+the two great spiritual and temporal powers of Christendom, his strife
+at once with the Papacy and the House of Austria, had roused in every
+Englishman a sense of supreme manhood, which told, however slowly, on
+his attitude towards the Crown. The seaman whose tiny bark had dared the
+storms of far-off seas, the young squire who crossed the Channel to
+flesh his maiden sword at Ivry or Ostend, brought back with them to
+English soil the daring temper, the sense of inexhaustible resources,
+which had borne them on through storm and battle-field. The nation which
+gave itself to the rule of the Stuarts was another nation from the
+panic-struck people that gave itself in the crash of social and
+religious order to the guidance of the Tudors. It was plain that a new
+age of our history must open when the lofty patriotism, the dauntless
+energy, the overpowering sense of effort and triumph, which rose <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80"></a><a href="./images/80.png">5-080</a>]</span>into
+their full grandeur through the war with Spain, turned from the strife
+with Philip to seek a new sphere of activity at home.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The spirit of religion.</span></p>
+
+<p>What had hindered this force from telling as yet fully on national
+affairs was the breadth and largeness which characterized the temper of
+the Renascence. Through the past half-century the aims of Englishmen had
+been drawn far over the narrow bounds of England itself to every land
+and every sea; while their mental activity spent itself as freely on
+poetry and science as on religion and politics. But at the moment which
+we have reached the whole of this energy was seized upon and
+concentrated by a single force. For a hundred years past men had been
+living in the midst of a spiritual revolution. Not only the world about
+them but the world of thought and feeling within every breast had been
+utterly transformed. The work of the sixteenth century had wrecked that
+tradition of religion, of knowledge, of political and social order,
+which had been accepted without question by the Middle Ages. The sudden
+freedom of the mind from these older bonds brought a consciousness of
+power such as had never been felt before; and the restless energy, the
+universal activity of the Renascence were but outer expressions of the
+pride, the joy, the amazing self-confidence, with which man welcomed
+this revelation of the energies which had lain slumbering within him.
+But his pride and self-reliance <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81"></a><a href="./images/81.png">5-081</a>]</span>were soon dashed by a feeling of dread.
+With the deepening sense of human individuality came a deepening
+conviction of the boundless capacities of the human soul. Not as a
+theological dogma, but as a human fact, man knew himself to be an all
+but infinite power, whether for good or for ill. The drama towered into
+sublimity as it painted the strife of mighty forces within the breast of
+Othello or Macbeth. Poets passed into metaphysicians as they strove to
+unravel the workings of conscience within the soul. From that hour one
+dominant influence told on human action: and all the various energies
+that had been called into life by the age that was passing away were
+seized, concentrated, and steadied to a definite aim by the spirit of
+religion.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Bible.</span></p>
+
+<p>The whole temper of the nation felt the change. "Theology rules there,"
+said Grotius of England only two years after Elizabeth's death; and when
+Casaubon was invited by her successor to his court he found both king
+and people indifferent to pure letters. "There is a great abundance of
+theologians in England," he says; "all point their studies in that
+direction." Even a country gentleman, like Colonel Hutchinson, felt the
+theological impulse. "As soon as he had improved his natural
+understanding with the acquisition of learning, the first studies he
+exercised himself in were the principles of religion." It was natural
+that literature should reflect the tendency of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82"></a><a href="./images/82.png">5-082</a>]</span>time; and the dumpy
+little quartos of controversy and piety which still crowd our older
+libraries drove before them the classical translations and Italian
+novelettes of the age of the Renascence. But their influence was small
+beside that of the Bible. The popularity of the Bible had been growing
+fast from the day when Bishop Bonner set up the first six copies in St.
+Paul's. Even then, we are told, "many well-disposed people used much to
+resort to the hearing thereof, especially when they could get any that
+had an audible voice to read to them." ... "One John Porter used
+sometimes to be occupied in that goodly exercise, to the edifying of
+himself as well as others. This Porter was a fresh young man and of a
+big stature; and great multitudes would resort thither to hear him,
+because he could read well and had an audible voice." But the "goodly
+exercise" of readers such as Porter was soon superseded by the continued
+recitation of both Old Testament and New in the public services of the
+Church; while the small Geneva Bibles carried the Scripture into every
+home, and wove it into the life of every English family.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Its literary influence.</span></p>
+
+<p>Religion indeed was only one of the causes for this sudden popularity of
+the Bible. The book was equally important in its bearing on the
+intellectual developement of the people. All the prose literature of
+England, save the forgotten tracts of Wyclif, has grown up since the
+translation <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83"></a><a href="./images/83.png">5-083</a>]</span>of the Scriptures by Tyndale and Coverdale. So far as the
+nation at large was concerned, no history, no romance, hardly any poetry
+save the little-known verse of Chaucer, existed in the English tongue
+when the Bible was ordered to be set up in churches. Sunday after
+Sunday, day after day, the crowds that gathered round the Bible in the
+nave of St. Paul's, or the family group that hung on its words in the
+devotional exercises at home, were leavened with a new literature.
+Legend and annal, war song and psalm, State-roll and biography, the
+mighty voices of prophets, the parables of Evangelists, stories of
+mission journeys, of perils by the sea and among the heathen,
+philosophic arguments, apocalyptic visions, all were flung broadcast
+over minds unoccupied for the most part by any rival learning. The
+disclosure of the stores of Greek literature had wrought the revolution
+of the Renascence. The disclosure of the older mass of Hebrew literature
+wrought the revolution of the Reformation. But the one revolution was
+far deeper and wider in its effects than the other. No version could
+transfer to another tongue the peculiar charm of language which gave
+their value to the authors of Greece and Rome. Classical letters
+therefore remained in the possession of the learned, that is, of the
+few; and among these, with the exception of Colet and More, or of the
+pedants who revived a Pagan worship in the gardens of the Florentine
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84"></a><a href="./images/84.png">5-084</a>]</span>Academy, their direct influence was purely intellectual. But the
+language of the Hebrew, the idiom of the Hellenistic Greek, lent
+themselves with a curious felicity to the purposes of translation. As a
+mere literary monument the English version of the Bible remains the
+noblest example of the English tongue, while its perpetual use made it
+from the instant of its appearance the standard of our language.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Its social influence.</span></p>
+
+<p>For the moment however its literary effect was less than its social. The
+power of the book over the mass of Englishmen showed itself in a
+thousand superficial ways, and in none more conspicuously than in the
+influence it exerted on ordinary speech. It formed, we must repeat, the
+whole literature which was practically accessible to ordinary
+Englishmen; and when we recall the number of common phrases which we owe
+to great authors, the bits of Shakspere, or Milton, or Dickens, or
+Thackeray, which unconsciously interweave themselves in our ordinary
+talk, we shall better understand the strange mosaic of Biblical words
+and phrases which coloured English talk two hundred years ago. The mass
+of picturesque allusion and illustration which we borrow from a thousand
+books, our fathers were forced to borrow from one; and the borrowing was
+the easier and the more natural that the range of the Hebrew literature
+fitted it for the expression of every phase of feeling. When Spenser
+poured forth his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85"></a><a href="./images/85.png">5-085</a>]</span>warmest love-notes in the "Epithalamion," he adopted
+the very words of the Psalmist, as he bade the gates open for the
+entrance of his bride. When Cromwell saw the mists break over the hills
+of Dunbar, he hailed the sun-burst with the cry of David: "Let God
+arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Like as the smoke vanisheth, so
+shalt thou drive them away!" Even to common minds this familiarity with
+grand poetic imagery in prophet and apocalypse gave a loftiness and
+ardour of expression that with all its tendency to exaggeration and
+bombast we may prefer to the slipshod vulgarisms of to-day.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Its religious influence.</span></p>
+
+<p>But far greater than its effect on literature or social phrase was the
+effect of the Bible on the character of the people at large. The Bible
+was as yet the one book which was familiar to every Englishman; and
+everywhere its words, as they fell on ears which custom had not deadened
+to their force and beauty, kindled a startling enthusiasm. The whole
+moral effect which is produced nowadays by the religious newspaper, the
+tract, the essay, the missionary report, the sermon, was then produced
+by the Bible alone; and its effect in this way, however dispassionately
+we examine it, was simply amazing. The whole nation became a church. The
+problems of life and death, whose questionings found no answer in the
+higher minds of Shakspere's day, pressed for an answer not only from
+noble and scholar but from <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86"></a><a href="./images/86.png">5-086</a>]</span>farmer and shopkeeper in the age that
+followed him. The answer they found was almost of necessity a
+Calvinistic answer. Unlike as the spirit of Calvinism seemed to the
+spirit of the Renascence, both found a point of union in their
+exaltation of the individual man. The mighty strife of good and evil
+within the soul itself which had overawed the imagination of dramatist
+and poet became the one spiritual conception in the mind of the Puritan.
+The Calvinist looked on churches and communions as convenient groupings
+of pious Christians; it might be as even indispensable parts of a
+Christian order. But religion in its deepest and innermost sense had to
+do not with churches but with the individual soul. It was each Christian
+man who held in his power the issues of life and death. It was in each
+Christian conscience that the strife was waged between Heaven and Hell.
+Not as one of a body, but as a single soul, could each Christian claim
+his part in the mystery of redemption. In the outer world of worship and
+discipline the Calvinist might call himself one of many brethren, but at
+every moment of his inner existence, in the hour of temptation and of
+struggle, in his dark and troubled wrestling with sin, in the glory of
+conversion, in the peace of acceptance with God, he stood utterly alone.
+With such a conception of human life Puritanism offered the natural form
+for English religion at a time when the feeling with which religion
+could most easily <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87"></a><a href="./images/87.png">5-087</a>]</span>ally itself was the sense of individuality. The
+'prentice who sate awed in the pit of the theatre as the storm in the
+mind of Lear outdid the storm among the elements passed easily into the
+Calvinist who saw himself day by day the theatre of a yet mightier
+struggle between the powers of light and the powers of darkness, and his
+soul the prize of an eternal conflict between Heaven and Hell.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Growth of Calvinism.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was thus by its own natural developement that the temper of
+Englishmen became above all religious, and that their religion took in
+most cases the form of Calvinism. But the rapid spread of Calvinism was
+aided by outer causes as well as inner ones. The reign of Elizabeth had
+been a long struggle for national existence. When Shakspere first trod
+the streets of London it was a question whether England should still
+remain England or whether it should sink into a vassal of Spain. In that
+long contest the creed which Henry and Elizabeth had constructed, the
+strange compromise of old tradition with new convictions which the
+country was gradually shaping into a new religion for itself, had done
+much for England's victory. It had held England together as a people. It
+had hindered any irreparable severance of the nation into warring
+churches. But it had done this unobserved. To the bulk of men the
+victory seemed wholly due to the energy and devotion of Calvinism. Rome
+had placed herself in the forefront of England's enemies, and it was the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88"></a><a href="./images/88.png">5-088</a>]</span>Calvinistic Puritan who was the irreconcileable foe of Rome. It was the
+Puritan who went forth to fight the Spaniard in France or in the
+Netherlands. It was the Puritan who broke into the Spanish Main, and who
+singed Philip's beard at Cadiz. It was the Puritan whose assiduous
+preachings and catechizings had slowly won the mass of the English
+people to any real acceptance of Protestantism. And as the war drifted
+on, as the hatred of Spain and resentment at the Papacy grew keener and
+fiercer, as patriotism became more identified with Protestantism, and
+Protestantism more identified with hatred of Rome, the side of English
+religion which lay furthest from all contact with the tradition of the
+past grew more and more popular among Englishmen.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Puritanism and the people.</span></p>
+
+<p>To Elizabeth, whether on religious or political grounds, Calvinism was
+the most hateful of her foes. But it was in vain that she strove by a
+rigorous discipline to check its advance. Her discipline could only tell
+on the clergy, and the movement was far more a lay than a clerical one.
+Whether she would or no, in fact, the Queen's policy favoured the
+Puritan cause. It was impossible to befriend Calvinism abroad without
+furthering Calvinism at home. The soldiers and adventurers who flocked
+from England to fight in the Huguenot camps came back steeped in the
+Huguenot theology. The exiles who fled to England from France and from
+the Netherlands <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89"></a><a href="./images/89.png">5-089</a>]</span>spread their narrower type of religion through the
+towns where they found a refuge. As the strife with Rome grew hotter the
+government was forced to fill Parliament and the magistracy with men
+whose zealous Protestantism secured their fidelity in the case of a
+Catholic rising. But a zealous Protestant was almost inevitably a
+Calvinist; and to place the administration of the country in Calvinist
+hands was to give an impulse to Puritanism. How utterly Elizabeth failed
+was seen at the beginning of her successor's reign. The bulk of the
+country gentlemen, the bulk of the wealthier traders, had by that time
+become Puritans. In the first Parliament of James the House of Commons
+refused for the first time to transact business on a Sunday. His second
+Parliament chose to receive the communion at St. Margaret's Church
+instead of Westminster Abbey "for fear of copes and wafer-cakes."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Puritanism in the Church.</span></p>
+
+<p>The same difficulty met Elizabeth in her efforts to check the growth of
+Puritanism in the Church itself. At the very outset of her reign the
+need of replacing the Marian bishops by staunch Protestants forced her
+to fill the English sees with men whose creed was in almost every case
+Calvinistic. The bulk of the lower clergy indeed were left without
+change; but as the older parsons died out their places were mostly
+filled by Puritan successors. The Universities furnished the new clergy,
+and at the close of Elizabeth's <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90"></a><a href="./images/90.png">5-090</a>]</span>reign the tone of the Universities was
+hotly Puritan. Even the outer uniformity on which the Queen set her
+heart took a Puritan form. The use of the Prayer-book indeed was
+enforced; but the aspect of English churches and of English worship
+tended more and more to the model of Geneva. The need of more light to
+follow the service in the new Prayer-books served as a pretext for the
+removal of stained glass from the church windows. The communion table
+stood almost everywhere in the midst of the church. If the surplice was
+generally worn during the service, the preacher often mounted the pulpit
+in a Geneva gown. We see the progress of this change in the very chapel
+of the Primates themselves. The chapel of Lambeth House was one of the
+most conspicuous among the ecclesiastical buildings of the time; it was
+a place "whither many of the nobility, judges, clergy, and persons of
+all sorts, as well strangers as natives, resorted." But all pomp of
+worship gradually passed away from it. Under Cranmer the stained glass
+was dashed from its windows. In Elizabeth's time the communion table was
+moved into the middle of the chapel, and the credence table destroyed.
+Under James Archbishop Abbott put the finishing stroke on all attempts
+at a high ceremonial. The cope was no longer used as a special vestment
+in the communion. The Primate and his chaplains forbore <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91"></a><a href="./images/91.png">5-091</a>]</span>to bow at the
+name of Christ. The organ and choir were alike abolished, and the
+service reduced to a simplicity which would have satisfied Calvin.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Puritanism and politics.</span></p>
+
+<p>Foiled as it was, the effort of Elizabeth to check the spread of
+Puritanism was no mere freak of religious bigotry. It sprang from a
+clear realization of the impossibility of harmonizing the new temper of
+the nation with the system of personal government which had done its
+work under the Tudors. With the republican and anti-monarchical theories
+indeed that Calvinism had begotten elsewhere, English Calvinism showed
+as yet no sort of sympathy. The theories of resistance, of a people's
+right to judge and depose its rulers, which had been heard in the heat
+of the Marian persecution, had long sunk into silence. The loyalty of
+the Puritan gentleman was as fervent as that of his fellows. But with
+the belief of the Calvinist went necessarily a new and higher sense of
+political order. The old conception of personal rule, the dependence of
+a nation on the arbitrary will of its ruler, was jarring everywhere more
+and more with the religious as well as the philosophic impulses of the
+time. Men of the most different tendencies were reaching forward to the
+same conception of law. Bacon sought for universal laws in material
+nature. Hooker asserted the rule of law over the spiritual world. It was
+in the same way that the Puritan <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92"></a><a href="./images/92.png">5-092</a>]</span>sought for a divine law by which the
+temporal kingdoms around him might be raised into a kingdom of Christ.
+The diligence with which he searched the Scriptures sprang from his
+earnestness to discover a Divine Will which in all things, great or
+small, he might implicitly obey. But this implicit obedience was
+reserved for the Divine Will alone; for human ordinances derived their
+strength only from their correspondence with the revealed law of God.
+The Puritan was bound by his religion to examine every claim made on his
+civil and spiritual obedience by the powers that be; and to own or
+reject the claim, as it accorded with the higher duty which he owed to
+God. "In matters of faith," a Puritan wife tells us of her husband, "his
+reason always submitted to the Word of God; but in all other things the
+greatest names in the world would not lead him without reason."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Puritanism and the Crown.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was plain that an impassable gulf parted such a temper as this from
+the temper of unquestioning devotion to the Crown which the Tudors
+termed loyalty; for it was a temper not only legal, but even pedantic in
+its legality, intolerant from its very sense of a moral order and law of
+the lawlessness and disorder of a personal tyranny, a temper of
+criticism, of judgement, and, if need be, of stubborn and unconquerable
+resistance. The temper of the Puritan indeed was no temper of mere
+revolt. His resistance, if he was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93"></a><a href="./images/93.png">5-093</a>]</span>forced to resist, would spring not
+from any disdain of kingly authority, but from his devotion to an
+authority higher and more sacred than that of kings. He had as firm a
+faith as the nation at large in the divine right of the sovereign, in
+the sacred character of the throne. It was in fact just because his
+ruler's authority had a divine origin that he obeyed him. But the nation
+about the throne seemed to the Puritan not less divinely ordered a thing
+than the throne itself; it was the voice of God, inspiring and
+directing, which spoke through its history and its laws; it was God that
+guided to wisdom the hearts of Englishmen in Parliament assembled as He
+guided to wisdom the hearts of kings. Never was the respect for positive
+law so profound; never was the reverence for Parliaments so great as at
+the death of Elizabeth. There was none of the modern longing for a king
+that reigned without governing; no conscious desire shows itself
+anywhere to meddle with the actual exercise of the royal administration.
+But the Puritan could only conceive of the kingly power as of a power
+based upon constitutional tradition, controlled by constitutional law,
+and acting in willing harmony with that body of constitutional
+counsellors in the two Houses, who represented the wisdom and the will
+of the realm.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Puritanism and society.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was in the creation of such a temper as this that Puritanism gave its
+noblest gift to English <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94"></a><a href="./images/94.png">5-094</a>]</span>politics. It gave a gift hardly less noble to
+society at large in its conception of social equality. Their common
+calling, their common brotherhood in Christ, annihilated in the mind of
+the Puritans that overpowering sense of social distinctions which
+characterized the age of Elizabeth. There was no open break with social
+traditions; no open revolt against the social subordination of class to
+class. But within these forms of the older world beat for the first time
+the spirit which was to characterize the new. The meanest peasant felt
+himself ennobled as a child of God. The proudest noble recognized a
+spiritual equality in the poorest "saint." The great social revolution
+of the Civil Wars and the Protectorate was already felt in the demeanour
+of English gentlemen. "He had a loving and sweet courtesy to the
+poorest," we are told of one of them, "and would often employ many spare
+hours with the commonest soldiers and poorest labourers." "He never
+disdained the meanest nor flattered the greatest." But it was felt even
+more in the new dignity and self-respect with which the consciousness of
+their "calling" invested the classes beneath the rank of the gentry.
+Take such a portrait as that which a turner in Eastcheap, Nehemiah
+Wallington, has left us of a London housewife, his mother. "She was very
+loving," he says, "and obedient to her parents, loving and kind to her
+husband, very tender-hearted to her children, loving all that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95"></a><a href="./images/95.png">5-095</a>]</span>were
+godly, much misliking the wicked and profane. She was a pattern of
+sobriety unto many, very seldom was seen abroad except at church; when
+others recreated themselves at holidays and other times, she would take
+her needlework and say 'here is my recreation.' ... God had given her a
+pregnant wit and an excellent memory. She was very ripe and perfect in
+all stories of the Bible, likewise in all the stories of the Martyrs,
+and could readily turn to them; she was also perfect and well seen in
+the English Chronicles, and in the descents of the kings of England. She
+lived in holy wedlock with her husband twenty years, wanting but four
+days."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Puritanism and human conduct.</span></p>
+
+<p>Where the new conception of life told even more powerfully than on
+politics or society was in its bearing on the personal temper and
+conduct of men. There was a sudden loss of the passion, the caprice, the
+subtle and tender play of feeling, the breadth of sympathy, the quick
+pulse of delight, which had marked the age of Elizabeth; but on the
+other hand life gained in moral grandeur, in a sense of the dignity of
+manhood, in orderliness and equable force. The larger geniality of the
+age that had passed away was replaced by an intense tenderness within
+the narrower circle of the home. Home, as we conceive it now, was the
+creation of the Puritan. Wife and child rose from mere dependants on the
+will of husband or father, as husband and father saw in them <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96"></a><a href="./images/96.png">5-096</a>]</span>saints
+like himself, souls hallowed by the touch of a divine Spirit and called
+with a divine calling like his own. The sense of spiritual fellowship
+gave a new tenderness and refinement to the common family affections.
+"He was as kind a father," says a Puritan wife of her husband, "as dear
+a brother, as good a master, as faithful a friend as the world had." The
+wilful and lawless passion of the Renascence made way for a manly
+purity. "Neither in youth nor riper years could the most fair or
+enticing woman draw him into unnecessary familiarity or dalliance. Wise
+and virtuous women he loved, and delighted in all pure and holy and
+unblameable conversation with them, but so as never to excite scandal or
+temptation. Scurrilous discourse even among men he abhorred; and though
+he sometimes took pleasure in wit and mirth, yet that which was mixed
+with impurity he never could endure." A higher conception of duty
+coloured men's daily actions. To the Puritan the wilfulness of life, in
+which the men of the Renascence had revelled, seemed unworthy of life's
+character and end. His aim was to attain self-command, to be master of
+himself, of his thought and speech and acts. A certain gravity and
+reflectiveness gave its tone to the lightest details of his converse
+with the world about him. His temper, quick as it might naturally be,
+was kept under strict control. In his discourse he was on his guard
+against talkativeness <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97"></a><a href="./images/97.png">5-097</a>]</span>and frivolity, striving to be deliberate in
+speech, and "ranking the words beforehand." His life was orderly and
+methodical, sparing of diet and self-indulgence; he rose early; "he
+never was at any time idle, and hated to see any one else so." The new
+sobriety and self-restraint showed itself in a change of dress. The
+gorgeous colours and jewels of the Renascence disappeared. The Puritan
+squire "left off very early the wearing of anything that was costly, yet
+in his plainest negligent habit appeared very much a gentleman."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Puritanism and culture.</span></p>
+
+<p>The loss of colour and variety in costume reflected no doubt a certain
+loss of colour and variety in life itself. But as yet Puritanism was
+free from any break with the harmless gaieties of the world about it.
+The lighter and more elegant sides of the Elizabethan culture harmonized
+well enough with the temper of the Calvinist gentleman. The figure of
+such a Puritan as Colonel Hutchinson stands out from his wife's canvas
+with the grace and tenderness of a portrait by Vandyck. She dwells on
+the personal beauty which distinguished his youth, on "his teeth even
+and white as the purest ivory," "his hair of brown, very thick-set in
+his youth, softer than the finest silk, curling with loose great rings
+at the ends." Serious as was his temper in graver matters, the young
+squire of Owthorpe was fond of hawking, and piqued himself on his skill
+in dancing and fence. His artistic taste showed itself in a critical
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98"></a><a href="./images/98.png">5-098</a>]</span>love of "paintings, sculpture, and all liberal arts," as well as in the
+pleasure he took in his gardens, "in the improvement of his grounds, in
+planting groves and walks and forest-trees." If he was "diligent in his
+examination of the Scriptures," "he had a great love for music and often
+diverted himself with a viol, on which he played masterly."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Milton.</span></p>
+
+<p>The strength however of the religious movement lay rather among the
+middle and professional classes than among the gentry; and it is in a
+Puritan of this class that we find the fullest and noblest expression of
+the new influence which was leavening the temper of the time. John
+Milton is not only the highest but the completest type of Puritanism.
+His life is absolutely contemporaneous with his cause. He was born when
+it began to exercise a direct influence over English politics and
+English religion; he died when its effort to mould them into its own
+shape was over, and when it had again sunk into one of many influences
+to which we owe our English character. His earlier verse, the pamphlets
+of his riper years, the epics of his age, mark with a singular precision
+the three great stages in its history. His youth shows us how much of
+the gaiety, the poetic ease, the intellectual culture of the Renascence,
+lingered in a Puritan home. Scrivener and "precisian" as his father was,
+he was a skilled musician, and the boy inherited his father's skill on
+lute and organ. One of the finest outbursts in the scheme of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99"></a><a href="./images/99.png">5-099</a>]</span>education
+which he put forth at a later time is a passage in which he vindicates
+the province of music as an agent in moral training. His home, his
+tutor, his school were all rigidly Puritan; but there was nothing narrow
+or illiberal in his early training. "My father," he says, "destined me
+while yet a little boy to the study of humane letters; which I seized
+with such eagerness that from the twelfth year of my age I scarcely ever
+went from my lessons to bed before midnight." But to the Greek, Latin,
+and Hebrew he learned at school, the scrivener advised him to add
+Italian and French. Nor were English letters neglected. Spenser gave the
+earliest turn to the boy's poetic genius. In spite of the war between
+playwright and precisian, a Puritan youth could still in Milton's days
+avow his love of the stage, "if Jonson's learned sock be on, or sweetest
+Shakspere, Fancy's child, warble his native woodnotes wild," and gather
+from the "masques and antique pageantry" of the court-revel hints for
+his own "Comus" and "Arcades." Nor does any shadow of the coming
+struggle with the Church disturb the young scholar's reverie, as he
+wanders beneath "the high embowed roof, with antique pillars massy
+proof, and storied windows richly dight, casting a dim religious light,"
+or as he hears "the pealing organ blow to the full-voiced choir below,
+in service high and anthem clear."</p>
+
+<p>Milton's enjoyment of the gaiety of life stands <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100"></a><a href="./images/100.png">5-100</a>]</span>in bright contrast with
+the gloom and sternness which strife and persecution fostered in
+Puritanism at a later time. In spite of a "certain reservedness of
+natural disposition," which shrank from "festivities and jests, in which
+I acknowledge my faculty to be very slight," the young singer could
+still enjoy the "jest and youthful jollity" of the world around him, its
+"quips and cranks and wanton wiles"; he could join the crew of Mirth,
+and look pleasantly on at the village fair, where "the jocund rebecks
+sound to many a youth and many a maid, dancing in the chequered shade."
+There was nothing ascetic in Milton's look, in his slender, vigorous
+frame, his face full of a delicate yet serious beauty, the rich brown
+hair which clustered over his brow; and the words we have quoted show
+his sensitive enjoyment of all that was beautiful. But his pleasures
+were "unreproved." From coarse or sensual self-indulgence the young
+Puritan turned with disgust: "A certain reservedness of nature, an
+honest haughtiness and self-esteem, kept me still above those low
+descents of mind." He drank in an ideal chivalry from Spenser, though
+his religion and purity disdained the outer pledge on which chivalry
+built up its fabric of honour. "Every free and gentle spirit," said
+Milton, "without that oath, ought to be born a knight." It was with this
+temper that he passed from his London school, St. Paul's, to Christ's
+College at Cambridge, and it was this temper that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101"></a><a href="./images/101.png">5-101</a>]</span>he preserved
+throughout his University career. He left Cambridge, as he said
+afterwards, "free from all reproach, and approved by all honest men,"
+with a purpose of self-dedication "to that same lot, however mean or
+high, towards which time leads me and the will of heaven."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The narrowness of Puritanism.</span></p>
+
+<p>Even in the still calm beauty of a life such as this we catch the
+sterner tones of the Puritan temper. The very height of the Puritan's
+aim, the intensity of his moral concentration, brought with them a loss
+of the genial delight in all that was human which gave its charm to the
+age of Elizabeth. "If ever God instilled an intense love of moral beauty
+into the mind of any man," said the great Puritan poet, "he has
+instilled it into mine." "Love Virtue," closed his "Comus," "she alone
+is free!" But this passionate love of virtue and of moral beauty, if it
+gave strength to human conduct, narrowed human sympathy and human
+intelligence. Already in Milton we note "a certain reservedness of
+temper," a contempt for "the false estimates of the vulgar," a proud
+withdrawal from the meaner and coarser life around him. Great as was his
+love for Shakspere, we can hardly fancy him delighting in Falstaff. In
+minds of a less cultured order, this moral tension ended, no doubt, in a
+hard unsocial sternness of life. The ordinary Puritan "loved all that
+were godly, much misliking the wicked and profane." His bond to other
+men was not the sense of a common <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102"></a><a href="./images/102.png">5-102</a>]</span>manhood, but the recognition of a
+brotherhood among the elect. Without the pale of the saints lay a world
+which was hateful to them, because it was the enemy of their God. It is
+this utter isolation from the "ungodly" that explains the contrast which
+startles us between the inner tenderness of the Puritans and the
+ruthlessness of so many of their actions. Cromwell, whose son's death
+(in his own words) went to his heart "like a dagger, indeed it did!" and
+who rode away sad and wearied from the triumph of Marston Moor, burst
+into horse-play as he signed the death-warrant of the king.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Its extravagance.</span></p>
+
+<p>A temper which had lost sympathy with the life of half the world around
+it could hardly sympathize with the whole of its own life. Humour, the
+faculty which above all corrects exaggeration and extravagance, died
+away before the new stress and strain of existence. The absolute
+devotion of the Puritan to a Supreme Will tended more and more to rob
+him of all sense of measure and proportion in common matters. Little
+things became great things in the glare of religious zeal; and the godly
+man learnt to shrink from a surplice, or a mince-pie at Christmas, as he
+shrank from impurity or a lie. Nor was this all. The self-restraint and
+sobriety which marked the Calvinist limited itself wholly to his outer
+life. In his inner soul sense, reason, judgement, were too often
+overborne by the terrible reality of invisible things. Our first
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103"></a><a href="./images/103.png">5-103</a>]</span>glimpse of Oliver Cromwell is as a young country squire and farmer in
+the marsh-levels around Huntingdon and St. Ives, buried from time to
+time in a deep melancholy, and haunted by fancies of coming death. "I
+live in Meshac," he writes to a friend, "which they say signifies
+Prolonging; in Kedar, which signifies Darkness; yet the Lord forsaketh
+me not." The vivid sense of a Divine Purity close to such men made the
+life of common men seem sin. "You know what my manner of life has been,"
+Cromwell adds. "Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated light. I
+hated godliness." Yet his worst sin was probably nothing more than an
+enjoyment of the natural buoyancy of youth, and a want of the deeper
+earnestness which comes with riper years. In imaginative tempers, like
+that of Bunyan, the struggle took a more picturesque form. John Bunyan
+was the son of a poor tinker at Elstow in Bedfordshire, and even in
+childhood his fancy revelled in terrible visions of Heaven and Hell.
+"When I was but a child of nine or ten years old," he tells us, "these
+things did so distress my soul, that then in the midst of my merry
+sports and childish vanities, amidst my vain companions, I was often
+much cast down and afflicted in my mind therewith; yet could I not let
+go my sins." The sins he could not let go were a love of hockey and of
+dancing on the village green; for the only real fault which his bitter
+self-accusation discloses, that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104"></a><a href="./images/104.png">5-104</a>]</span>of a habit of swearing, was put an end
+to at once and for ever by a rebuke from an old woman. His passion for
+bell-ringing clung to him even after he had broken from it as a "vain
+practice"; and he would go to the steeple-house and look on, till the
+thought that a bell might fall and crush him in his sins drove him
+panic-stricken from the door. A sermon against dancing and games drew
+him for a time from these indulgences; but the temptation again
+overmastered his resolve. "I shook the sermon out of my mind, and to my
+old custom of sports and gaming I returned with great delight. But the
+same day, as I was in the midst of a game of cat, and having struck it
+one blow from the hole, just as I was about to strike it the second
+time, a voice did suddenly dart from heaven into my soul, which said,
+'Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or have thy sins and go to
+Hell?' At this I was put in an exceeding maze; wherefore, leaving my cat
+upon the ground, I looked up to heaven; and was as if I had with the
+eyes of my understanding seen the Lord Jesus looking down upon me, as
+being very hotly displeased with me, and as if He did severely threaten
+me with some grievous punishment for those and other ungodly practices."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Belief in witchcraft.</span></p>
+
+<p>The vivid sense of a supernatural world which breathes through words
+such as these, the awe and terror with which it pressed upon the life of
+men, found their most terrible expression in the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105"></a><a href="./images/105.png">5-105</a>]</span>belief in witchcraft.
+The dread of Satanic intervention indeed was not peculiar to the
+Puritan. It had come down from the earliest ages of the Christian
+Church, and had been fanned into a new intensity at the close of the
+Middle Ages by the physical calamities and moral scepticism which threw
+their gloom over the world. Joan of Arc was a witch to every Englishman,
+and the wife of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester paced the streets of London,
+candle in hand, as a convicted sorceress. But it was not till the chaos
+and turmoil of the Reformation put their strain on the spiritual
+imagination of men that the belief in demoniacal possession deepened
+into a general panic. The panic was common to both Catholics and
+Protestants; it was in Catholic countries indeed that the persecution of
+supposed witches was carried on longest and most ruthlessly. Among
+Protestant countries England was the last to catch the general terror;
+and the Act of 1541, the first English statute passed against
+witchcraft, was far milder in tone than the laws of any other European
+country. Witchcraft itself, where no death could be proved to have
+followed from it, was visited only with pillory and imprisonment; where
+death had issued from it, the penalty was the gallows and not the stake.
+Even this statute was repealed in the following reign. But the fierce
+religious strife under Mary roused a darker fanaticism; and when
+Elizabeth mounted the throne preacher after <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106"></a><a href="./images/106.png">5-106</a>]</span>preacher assured her that a
+multitude of witches filled the land. "Witches and sorcerers," cried
+Bishop Jewel, "within these few years are marvellously increased within
+your grace's realm. Your grace's subjects pine away even unto the death;
+their colour fadeth, their flesh rotteth, their speech is benumbed,
+their senses are bereft!" Before remonstrances such as these the statute
+against witchcraft was again enacted; but though literature and the
+drama show the hold which a belief in satanic agency had gained on the
+popular fancy, the temper of the times was too bold and self-reliant,
+its intelligence too keen and restless, its tone too secular, to furnish
+that atmosphere of panic in which fanaticism is bred.</p>
+
+<p>It was not till the close of the Queen's reign, as hope darkened round
+Protestantism and the Puritan temper woke a fresh faith in the
+supernatural, that the belief in witchcraft and the persecution of the
+unhappy women who were held to be witches became a marked feature of the
+time. To men who looked on the world about them and the soul within them
+as battle-fields for a never-ceasing contest between God and the Devil,
+it was natural enough to ascribe every evil that happened to man, either
+in soul or body, to the invisible agency of the spirit of ill. A share
+of his supernatural energies was the bait by which he was held to lure
+the wicked to their own destruction; and women above all were believed
+to barter their <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107"></a><a href="./images/107.png">5-107</a>]</span>souls for the possession of power which lifted them
+above the weakness of their sex. Sober men asserted that the beldame,
+whom boys hooted in the streets and who groped in the gutter for bread,
+could blast the corn with mildew and lame the oxen in the plough, that
+she could smite her persecutors with pains and sickness, that she could
+rouse storms in the sky and strew every shore with the wrecks of ships
+and the corpses of men, that as night gathered round she could mount her
+broomstick and sweep through the air to the witches' Sabbath, to yield
+herself in body and soul to the demons of ill. The nascent scepticism
+that startled at tales such as these was hushed before the witness of
+the Bible, for to question the existence of sorcerer or d&aelig;moniac seemed
+questioning the veracity of the Scriptures themselves. Pity fell before
+the stern injunction, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"; and the
+squire who would have shrunk from any conscious cruelty as from a blow
+looked on without ruth as the torturers ran needles into the witch's
+flesh, or swam her in the witch's pool, or hurried her to the witch's
+stake.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Protestant defeat.</span></p>
+
+<p>But the terror with which the Puritan viewed these proofs of a new
+energy in the powers of ill found a wider sphere of action as he saw
+their new activity and success in the religious and political world
+about him. At the opening of Elizabeth's reign every Protestant had
+looked forward to a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108"></a><a href="./images/108.png">5-108</a>]</span>world-wide triumph of the Gospel. If Italy and
+Spain clung blindly to the Papacy, elsewhere, alike on the Danube or the
+Rhine, on the Elbe or the Seine, the nations of Europe seemed to have
+risen in irreconcileable revolt against Rome. But the prospect of such a
+triumph had long since disappeared. At the crisis of the struggle a
+Catholic reaction had succeeded in holding Protestantism at bay, and
+after years of fierce combat Rome had begun definitely to win ground.
+The peaceful victories of the Jesuits were backed by the arms of Spain,
+and Europe was gradually regained till the policy of Philip the Second
+was able to aim its blows at the last strongholds of Calvinism in the
+west. Philip was undoubtedly worsted in the strife. England was saved by
+its defeat of the Armada. The United Provinces of the Netherlands rose
+into a great power as well through their own dogged heroism as through
+the genius of William the Silent. At a moment too when all hope seemed
+gone France was rescued from the grasp of the Catholic League by the
+unconquerable energy of Henry of Navarre. But even in its defeat
+Catholicism gained ground. England alone remained unaffected by its
+efforts. In the Low Countries the Reformation was finally driven from
+the Walloon Provinces, from Brabant, and from Flanders. In France Henry
+the Fourth found himself compelled to purchase Paris by a mass; and the
+conversion of the king was the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109"></a><a href="./images/109.png">5-109</a>]</span>beginning of a quiet breaking-up of the
+Huguenot party. Nobles and scholars alike forsook the cause of heresy,
+and though Calvinism remained dominant south of the Loire, it lost all
+hope of winning France as a whole to its side.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Puritan intolerance.</span></p>
+
+<p>At Elizabeth's death therefore the temper of every earnest Protestant,
+in England as elsewhere, was that of a man who after cherishing the hope
+of a crowning victory is forced to look on at a crushing and
+irremediable defeat. The dream of a Reformation of the universal Church
+was utterly at an end. Though the fierce strife of religions seemed for
+a while to have died down, the borders of Protestantism were narrowing
+every day, nor was there a sign that the triumph of the Papacy was
+arrested. Even the older Lutheranism of Germany was threatened; and the
+minds of men were already presaging the struggle which was to end in the
+Thirty Years War. Such a struggle could be no foreign strife to the
+Puritan. The war in the Palatinate kindled a fiercer flame in the
+English Parliament than all the aggressions of the monarchy; and
+Englishmen followed the campaigns of Gustavus with even keener interest
+than the trial of Hampden. We shall see how great a part this sympathy
+with outer Protestantism played in the earlier struggle between England
+and the Stuarts: but it played as great a part in determining the
+Puritan attitude towards religion at home. As hope after hope died into
+defeat and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110"></a><a href="./images/110.png">5-110</a>]</span>disaster the mood of the Puritan grew sterner and more
+intolerant. The system of compromise by which the Tudors had held
+England together became more and more distasteful to him. To one who
+looked on himself as a soldier of God and as a soldier who was fighting
+a losing battle, the struggle with the Papacy was no matter for
+compromise. It was a struggle between light and darkness, between life
+and death. No innovation in faith or worship was of small account if it
+tended in the direction of Rome. The peril in fact was too great to
+admit of tolerance or moderation. At a moment when all that he hated was
+gaining ground on all that he loved, the Puritan saw the one security
+for what he held to be truth in drawing a hard-and-fast line between
+that truth and what he held to be falsehood.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Hooker.</span></p>
+
+<p>This dogged concentration of thought and feeling on a single issue told
+with a fatal effect on his theology. The spirit of the Renascence had
+been driven for a while from the field of religion by the strife between
+Catholic and Protestant; and in the upgrowth of a more rigid system of
+dogma, whether on the one side or on the other, the work of More and
+Colet seemed to be undone. But no sooner had the strife lost its older
+intensity, no sooner had a new Christendom fairly emerged from the
+troubled waters, than the Renascence again made its influence felt. Its
+voice was heard above all in Richard Hooker, a clergyman who <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111"></a><a href="./images/111.png">5-111</a>]</span>had been
+Master of the Temple, but had been driven by his distaste for the
+controversies of its pulpit from London to a Wiltshire vicarage at
+Boscombe, which he exchanged at a later time for the parsonage of
+Bishopsbourne among the quiet meadows of Kent. During the later years of
+Elizabeth he built up in these still retreats the stately fabric of his
+"Ecclesiastical Polity." The largeness of temper which marked all the
+nobler minds of his day, the philosophic breadth which is seen as
+clearly in Shakspere as in Bacon, was united in Hooker with a grandeur
+and stateliness of style which raised him to the highest rank among
+English prose-writers. Divine as he was, his spirit and method were
+philosophical rather than theological. Against the ecclesiastical
+dogmatism of Presbyterian or Catholic he set the authority of reason. He
+abandoned the narrow ground of Scriptural argument to base his
+conclusions on the general principles of moral and political science, on
+the eternal obligations of natural law. The Puritan system rested on the
+assumption that an immutable rule for human action in all matters
+relating to religion, to worship, and to the discipline and constitution
+of the Church, was laid down, and only laid down, in the words of
+Scripture. Hooker urged that a divine order exists not in written
+revelation only, but in the moral relations, the historical
+developement, and the social and political institutions of men. He
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112"></a><a href="./images/112.png">5-112</a>]</span>claimed for human reason the province of determining the laws of this
+order; of distinguishing between what is changeable and unchangeable in
+them, between what is eternal and what is temporary in the Bible itself.
+It was easy for him to push on to the field of ecclesiastical
+controversy where men like Cartwright were fighting the battle of
+Presbyterianism, to show that no form of Church government had ever been
+of indispensable obligation, and that ritual observances had in all ages
+been left to the discretion of churches and determined by the
+differences of times.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His influence on the Church.</span></p>
+
+<p>From the moment of its appearance the effect of the "Ecclesiastical
+Polity" was felt in the broader and more generous stamp which it
+impressed on the temper of the national Church. Hooker had in fact
+provided with a theory and placed on grounds of reason that policy of
+comprehension which had been forced on the Tudors by the need of holding
+England together, and from which the church, as it now existed, had
+sprung. But the truth on which Hooker based his argument was of far
+higher value than his argument itself. The acknowledgement of a divine
+order in human history, of a divine law in human reason, harmonized with
+the noblest instincts of the Elizabethan age. Ralegh's efforts to grasp
+as a whole the story of mankind, Bacon's effort to bring all outer
+nature to the test of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113"></a><a href="./images/113.png">5-113</a>]</span>human intelligence, were but the crowning
+manifestations of the two main impulses of their time, its rationalism
+and its humanity. Both found expression in the work of Hooker; and
+coloured through its results the after history of the English Church.
+The historical feeling showed itself in a longing to ally the religion
+of the present with the religion of the past, to find a unity of faith
+and practice with the Church of the Fathers, to claim part in that great
+heritage of Catholic tradition, both in faith and worship, which the
+Papacy so jealously claimed as its own. Such a longing seized as much on
+tender and poetic tempers like George Herbert's as on positive and
+prosaic tempers, such as that of Laud. The one started back from the
+bare, intense spiritualism of the Puritan to find nourishment for his
+devotion in the outer associations which the piety of ages had grouped
+around it, in holy places and holy things, in the stillness of church
+and altar, in the pathos and exultation of prayer and praise, in the
+awful mystery of sacraments. The narrow and external mood of the other,
+unable to find standing ground in the purely personal relation between
+man and God which formed the basis of Calvinism, fell back on the
+consciousness of a living Christendom, preserving through the ages a
+definite faith and worship, and which, torn and rent as it seemed, was
+soon to resume its ancient unity.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Arminians.</span></p>
+
+<p>While the historical feeling which breathes in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114"></a><a href="./images/114.png">5-114</a>]</span>Hooker's work took form
+in the new passion for tradition and ceremonialism, the appeal which it
+addressed to human reason produced a school of philosophical thinkers
+whose timid upgrowth was almost lost in the clash of warring creeds
+about them, but who were destined&mdash;as the latitudinarians of later
+days&mdash;to make as deep an impression as their dogmatic rivals on the
+religious thought of their countrymen. As yet however this rationalizing
+movement hovered on the borders of the system of belief which it was so
+keenly to attack; it limited itself rather to the work of moderating and
+reconciling, to recognizing with Calixtus the pettiness of the points of
+difference which parted Christendom and the greatness of its points of
+agreement, or to revolting with Arminius from the more extreme tenets of
+Calvin and Calvin's followers and pleading like him for some
+co-operation on man's part with the work of grace. As yet Arminianism
+was little more than a reaction against a system that contradicted the
+obvious facts of life, a desire to bring theology into some sort of
+harmony with human experience; but it was soon to pass by a fatal
+necessity into a wider variance, and to gather round it into one mass of
+opposition every tendency of revolt which time was disclosing against
+the Calvinism which now reigned triumphant in Protestant theology.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The doctrinal bigotry of Puritanism.</span></p>
+
+<p>From the belief in humanity or in reason which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115"></a><a href="./images/115.png">5-115</a>]</span>gave strength to such a
+revolt the Puritan turned doggedly away. In the fierce white light of
+his idealism human effort seemed weakness, human virtue but sin, human
+reason but folly. Absorbed as he was in the thought of God, craving for
+nothing less than a divine righteousness, a divine wisdom, a divine
+strength, he grasped the written Bible as the law of God and
+concentrated every energy in the effort to obey it. The dogma of
+justification, the faith that without merit or act of man God would save
+and call to holiness His own elect, was the centre of his creed. And
+with such a creed he felt that the humanity of the Renascence, the
+philosophy of the thinker, the comprehension of the statesman, were
+alike at war. A policy of comprehension seemed to him simply a policy of
+faithlessness to God. Ceremonies which in an hour of triumph he might
+have regarded as solaces to weak brethren, he looked on as acts of
+treason in this hour of defeat. Above all he would listen to no words of
+reconciliation with a religious system in which he saw nothing but a
+lie, nor to any pleas for concession in what he held to be truth. The
+craving of the Arminian for a more rational theology he met by a fiercer
+loyalty to the narrowest dogma. Archbishop Whitgift had striven to force
+on the Church of England a set of articles which embodied the tenets of
+an extreme Calvinism; and one of the wisest acts of Elizabeth had been
+to disallow them. But hateful as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116"></a><a href="./images/116.png">5-116</a>]</span>Whitgift on every other ground was to
+the Puritans, they never ceased to demand the adoption of his Lambeth
+Articles.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Its hatred of sectaries.</span></p>
+
+<p>And as he would admit no toleration within the sphere of doctrine, so
+would the Puritan admit no toleration within the sphere of
+ecclesiastical order. That the Church of England should both in
+ceremonies and in teaching take a far more distinctively Protestant
+attitude than it had hitherto done, every Puritan was resolved. But
+there was as yet no general demand for any change in the form of its
+government, or of its relation to the State. Though the wish to draw
+nearer to the mass of the Reformed Churches won a certain amount of
+favour for the Presbyterian form of organization which they had adopted,
+as an obligatory system of Church discipline Presbyterianism had been
+embraced by but a few of the English clergy, and by hardly any of the
+English laity. Nor was there any tendency in the mass of the Puritans
+towards a breach in the system of religious conformity which Elizabeth
+had constructed. On the contrary, what they asked was for its more
+rigorous enforcement. That Catholics should be suffered under whatever
+pains and penalties to preserve their faith and worship in a Protestant
+Commonwealth was abhorrent to them. Nor was Puritan opinion more
+tolerant to the Protestant sectaries who were beginning to find the
+State Church too <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117"></a><a href="./images/117.png">5-117</a>]</span>narrow for their enthusiasm. Elizabeth herself could
+not feel a bitterer abhorrence of the "Brownists" (as they were called
+from the name of their founder Robert Brown) who rejected the very
+notion of a national Church, and asserted the right of each congregation
+to perfect independence of faith and worship. To the zealot whose whole
+thought was of the fight with Rome, such an assertion seemed the claim
+of a right to mutiny in the camp, a right of breaking up Protestant
+England into a host of sects too feeble to hold Rome at bay. Cartwright
+himself denounced the wickedness of the Brownists; Parliament, Puritan
+as it was, passed in 1593 a statute against them; and there was a
+general assent to the stern measures of repression by which Brown
+himself was forced to fly to the Netherlands. Two of his
+fellow-congregationalists were seized and put to death on charges of
+sedition and heresy. Of their followers many, as we learn from a
+petition in 1592, were driven into exile, "and the rest which remain in
+her Grace's land greatly distressed through imprisonment and other great
+troubles." The persecution in fact did its work. "As for those which we
+call Brownists," wrote Bacon, "being when they were at the most a very
+small number of very silly and base people, here and there in corners
+dispersed, they are now, thanks to God, by the good remedies that have
+been used, suppressed and worn out; so that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118"></a><a href="./images/118.png">5-118</a>]</span>there is scarce any news of
+them." The execution of three Nonconformists in the following year was
+in fact followed by the almost utter extermination of their body. But
+against this persecution no Puritan voice was raised.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Its wish for reforms.</span></p>
+
+<p>All in fact that the bulk of the Puritans asked was a change in the
+outer ritual of worship which should correspond to the advance towards a
+more pronounced Protestantism that had been made by the nation at large
+during the years of Elizabeth's reign. Their demands were as of old for
+the disuse of "superstitious ceremonies." To modern eyes the points
+which they selected for change seem trivial enough. But they were in
+fact of large significance. To reject the sign of the Cross in baptism
+was to repudiate the whole world of ceremonies of which it was a
+survivor. The disuse of the surplice would have broken down the last
+outer difference which parted the minister from the congregation, and
+manifested to every eye the spiritual equality of layman and priest.
+Kneeling at the Communion might be a mere act of reverence, but formally
+to discontinue such an act was emphatically to assert a disbelief in the
+sacramental theories of Catholicism. During the later years of Elizabeth
+reverence for the Queen had hindered any serious pressure for changes to
+which she would never assent; but a general expectation prevailed that
+at her death some change would be made. Even among men of secular <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119"></a><a href="./images/119.png">5-119</a>]</span>stamp
+there was a general conviction of the need of some concession to the
+religious sentiment of the nation. They had clung to the usages which
+the Puritans denounced so long as they were aids in hindering a
+religious severance throughout the land. But whatever value the
+retention of such ceremonies might have had in facilitating the quiet
+passage of the bulk of Englishmen from the old worship to the new had
+long since passed away. England as a whole was Protestant; and the
+Catholics who remained were not likely to be drawn to the national
+Church by trifles such as these. Instead of being the means of hindering
+religious division, the usages had now become means of creating it. It
+was on this ground that statesmen who had little sympathy with the
+religious spirit about them pleaded for the purchase of religious and
+national union by ecclesiastical reforms. "Why," asked Bacon, "should
+the civil state be purged and restored by good and wholesome laws made
+every three years in Parliament assembled, devising remedies as fast as
+time breedeth mischief, and contrariwise the ecclesiastical state still
+continue upon the dregs of time, and receive no alteration these
+forty-five years or more?"</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120"></a><a href="./images/120.png">5-120</a>]</span></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr />
+
+<ul>
+  <li>CHAPTER II</li>
+  <li>THE KING OF SCOTS</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+<p>Such was the temper of England at the death of Elizabeth; and never had
+greater issues hung on the character of a ruler than hung on the
+character of her successor. Had he shared the sympathy with popular
+feeling which formed the strength of the Tudors, time might have brought
+peaceably about that readjustment of political forces which the growth
+of English energies had made a necessity. Had he possessed the genius of
+a great statesman, he might have distinguished in the mingled mass of
+impulses about him between the national and the sectarian, and have
+given scope to the nobleness of Puritanism while resolutely checking its
+bigotry. It was no common ill-fortune that set at such a crisis on the
+throne a ruler without genius as without sympathy, and that broke the
+natural progress of the people by a conflict between England and its
+kings.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">James Stuart.</span></p>
+
+<p>Throughout the last days of Elizabeth most <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121"></a><a href="./images/121.png">5-121</a>]</span>men had looked forward to a
+violent struggle for the Crown. The more bigoted Catholics supported the
+pretensions of Isabella, the eldest daughter of Philip the Second of
+Spain. The house of Suffolk, which through the marriage of Lady
+Catharine Grey with Lord Hertford was now represented by their son, Lord
+Beauchamp, still clung to its parliamentary title under the will of
+Henry the Eighth. Even if the claim of the house of Stuart was admitted,
+there were some who held that the Scottish king, as an alien by birth,
+had no right of inheritance, and that the succession to the crown lay in
+the next Stuart heiress, Arabella Stuart, a granddaughter of Lady Lennox
+by her younger son, Darnley's brother. But claims such as these found no
+general support. By a strange good fortune every great party in the
+realm saw its hopes realized in King James. The mass of the Catholics,
+who had always been favourable to a Scottish succession, were persuaded
+that the son of Mary Stuart would at least find toleration for his
+mother's co-religionists; and as they watched the distaste for
+Presbyterian rule and the tendency to comprehension which James had
+already manifested, they listened credulously to his emissaries. On the
+other hand the Puritans saw in him the king of a Calvinistic people,
+bred in a Church which rejected the ceremonies that they detested and
+upheld the doctrines which they longed to render supreme, and who had
+till <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122"></a><a href="./images/122.png">5-122</a>]</span>now, whatever his strife might have been with the claims of its
+ministers, shown no dissent from its creed or from the rites of its
+worship. Nor was he less acceptable to the more secular tempers who
+guided Elizabeth's counsels. The bulk of English statesmen saw too
+clearly the advantages of a union of the two kingdoms under a single
+head to doubt for a moment as to the succession of James. If Elizabeth
+had refused to allow his claim to be formally recognized by Parliament
+she had pledged herself to suffer no detriment to be done to it there;
+and in her later days Cecil had come forward to rescue the young king
+from his foolish intrigues with English parties and Catholic powers, and
+to assure him of support. No sooner in fact was the Queen dead than
+James Stuart was owned as king by the Council without a dissentient
+voice.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His youth.</span></p>
+
+<p>To James himself the change was a startling one. He had been a king
+indeed from his cradle. But his kingdom was the smallest and meanest of
+European realms, and his actual power had been less than that of many an
+English peer. For years he had been the mere sport of warring nobles who
+governed in his name. Their rule was a sheer anarchy. For a short while
+after Mary's flight Murray showed the genius of a born master of men;
+but at the opening of 1570 his work was ended by the shot of a Hamilton.
+"What Bothwellhaugh has done," Mary wrote joyously from her <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123"></a><a href="./images/123.png">5-123</a>]</span>English
+prison at the news, "has been done without order of mine: but I thank
+him all the more for it." The murder in fact plunged Scotland again into
+a chaos of civil war which, as the Queen shrewdly foresaw, could only
+tend to the after-profit of the Crown. A year later the next regent, the
+child-king's grandfather, Lord Lennox, was slain in a fray at Stirling;
+and it was only when the regency passed into the strong hand of Morton
+at the close of 1572, and when England intervened in the cause of order,
+that the land won a short breathing-space. Edinburgh, the last fortress
+held in Mary's name, surrendered to a force sent by Elizabeth; its
+captain, Kirkaldy of Grange, was hanged for treason in the market-place;
+and the stern justice of Morton forced peace upon the warring lords. But
+hardly five years had passed when a union of his rivals and their adroit
+proclamation of the boy-king put an end to Morton's regency and gave a
+fresh aim to the factions who were tearing Scotland to pieces. To get
+hold of the king's person, to wield in his name the royal power, became
+the end of their efforts. The boy was safe only at Stirling; and even at
+Stirling a fray at the gate all but transferred him from the Erskines to
+fresh hands. It was in vain that James sought security in a bodyguard;
+or strove to baffle the nobles by recalling a cousin, Esme Stuart, from
+France, and giving him the control of affairs. A sudden flight back to
+Stirling only saved him <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124"></a><a href="./images/124.png">5-124</a>]</span>from seizure at Doune; and a few months later,
+as James hunted at Ruthven, he found the hand of the Master of Glamis on
+his bridle-rein. "Better bairns greet than bearded men," was the gruff
+answer to his tears, as his favourite fled into exile and the boy-king
+saw himself again a tool in the hands of the lords.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His purpose.</span></p>
+
+<p>Such was the world in which James had grown to manhood; a world of
+brutal swordsmen, in whose hands the boy who shrank from the very sight
+of a sword seemed helpless. But if the young king had little physical
+courage, morally he proved fearless enough. He drew confidence in
+himself from a sense of his intellectual superiority to the men about
+him. From his earliest years indeed James showed a precocious
+cleverness; and as a child he startled grave councillors by his
+"discourse, walking up and down in the Lady Mar's hand, of knowledge and
+ignorance." It was his amazing self-reliance which enabled him to bear
+the strange loneliness of his life. He had nothing in common with the
+turbulent nobles whose wild cries he had heard from the walls of
+Stirling Castle, as they slew his grandfather in the streets of the town
+below. But he had just as little sympathy with the spiritual or
+political world which was springing into life around his cradle. The
+republican Buchanan was his tutor, and he was bred in the religious
+school of Knox; but he shrank instinctively from Calvinism with its
+consecration of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125"></a><a href="./images/125.png">5-125</a>]</span>rebellion, its assertion of human equality, its
+declaration of the responsibility of kings, while he detected and hated
+the republican drift of the thinkers of the Renascence. In later years
+James denounced the chronicles of both Buchanan and Knox as "infamous
+invectives," and would have had their readers punished "even as it were
+their authors risen again." His temper and purpose were in fact simply
+those of the kings who had gone before him. He was a Stuart to the core;
+and from his very boyhood he set himself to do over again the work which
+the Stuarts had done.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The work of the Stuarts.</span></p>
+
+<p>Their work had been the building up of the Scottish realm, its change
+from a medley of warring nobles into an ordered kingdom. Never had
+freedom been bought at a dearer price than it was bought by Scotland in
+its long War of Independence. Wealth and public order alike disappeared.
+The material prosperity of the country was brought to a standstill. The
+work of civilization was violently interrupted. The work of national
+unity was all but undone. The Highlanders were parted by a sharp line of
+division from the Lowlanders, while within the Lowlands themselves
+feudalism overmastered the Crown. The nobles became almost wholly
+independent. The royal power, under the immediate successors of Bruce,
+sank into insignificance. From the walls of Stirling the Scotch kings of
+that earlier time looked out on a realm <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126"></a><a href="./images/126.png">5-126</a>]</span>where they could not ride
+thirty miles to north or to south save at the head of a host of armed
+men. With James the First began the work of building the monarchy up
+again from this utter ruin; but the wresting of Scotland from the grasp
+of its nobles was only wrought out in a struggle of life and death. Few
+figures are more picturesque than the figures of the young Scotch kings
+as they dash themselves against the iron circle which girds them round
+in their desperate efforts to rescue the Crown from serfdom. They carry
+their life in their hands; a doom is on them; they die young and by
+violent deaths. One was stabbed by plotters in his bedchamber. Another
+was stabbed in a peasant's hut where he had crawled for refuge after
+defeat. Another was slain by the bursting of a cannon. The fourth James
+fell more nobly at Flodden. The fifth died of a broken heart on the news
+of Solway Moss. But hunted and slain as they were, the kings clung
+stubbornly to the task they had set themselves.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Stuarts and the Reformation.</span></p>
+
+<p>They stood almost alone. The Scottish people was too weak as yet to form
+a check on the baronage; and the one force on which the Crown could
+reckon was the force of the Church. To enrich the Church, to bind its
+prelates closely to the monarchy by the gift of social and political
+power, was the policy of every Stuart. A greater force than that of the
+Church lay in the dogged perseverance of the kings themselves. Little by
+little <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127"></a><a href="./images/127.png">5-127</a>]</span>their work was done. The great house of Douglas was broken at
+last. The ruin of lesser houses followed in its train, and under the
+fifth of the Jameses Scotland saw itself held firmly in the royal grasp.
+But the work of the Stuarts was hardly done when it seemed to be undone
+again by the Reformation. The prelates were struck down. The nobles were
+enormously enriched. The sovereign again stood alone in the face of the
+baronage. It was only by playing on their jealousies and divisions that
+Mary Stuart could withstand the nobles who banded themselves together to
+overawe the Crown. Once she broke their ranks by her marriage with
+Darnley; and after the ill-fated close of this effort she strove again
+to break their ranks by her marriage with Bothwell. Again the attempt
+failed; and Mary fled into lifelong exile, while the nobles, triumphant
+at last in the strife with the Crown, governed Scotland in the name of
+her child.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">James and the nobles.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was thus that in his boyhood James looked on the ruin of all that his
+fathers had wrought. But the wreck was not as utter as it seemed. Even
+in the storm of the Reformation the sense of royal authority had not
+wholly been lost; the craving for public order, and the conviction that
+order could only be found in obedience to the sovereign, had in fact
+been quickened by the outbreak of faction; and the rule of Murray and
+Morton had shown how easily the turbulent nobles <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128"></a><a href="./images/128.png">5-128</a>]</span>could be bent by an
+energetic use of the royal power. Lonely and helpless as he seemed,
+James was still king, and he was a king who believed in his kingship.
+The implicit faith in his own divine right to rule the greatest in the
+land gave him a strength as great as that of the regents. At seventeen
+he was strong enough to break the yoke of the Douglases and to drive
+them over the English border. At eighteen he could bring the most
+powerful of the Protestant nobles, the Earl of Gowrie, to the block. A
+year later indeed the lords were back again; for the Armada was at hand,
+and Elizabeth distrusted the young king, who was intriguing at Paris and
+Madrid. English help brought back the exiles; "there was no need of
+words," James said bitterly to the lords as they knelt before him with
+protestations of loyalty; "weapons had spoken loud enough." But their
+return was far from undoing his work. Elizabeth's pledges as to the
+succession, James's alliance with her against the Armada, restored the
+friendship of England; and once secure against English intervention the
+king had little difficulty in resuming his mastery at home. A
+significant ceremony showed that the strife with the nobles was at an
+end. James summoned them to Edinburgh, and called on them to lay aside
+their feuds with one another. The pledge was solemnly given, and each
+noble, "holding his chief enemy by the hand," walked in his doublet to
+the market-cross <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129"></a><a href="./images/129.png">5-129</a>]</span>of the city, while the people sang aloud for joy.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Scotch people.</span></p>
+
+<p>The policy of the Stuarts had at last reached its end, and James was
+master of the great houses that had so long overawed the Crown. But he
+was farther than ever from being absolute master of his realm. Amidst
+the turmoil of the Reformation a new force had come to the front. This
+was the Scottish people itself. Till now peasant and burgher had been of
+small account in the land. The towns were little more than villages. The
+peasants, scattered thinly over valley and hillside and winning a scant
+subsistence from a thankless soil, were too few and too poor to be a
+political force. They were of necessity dependent on their lords; and in
+the centuries of feudal anarchy which followed the War of Independence
+the strife of lord against lord made their life a mere struggle for
+existence. To know neither rest nor safety, to face danger every hour,
+to plough the field with arms piled carefully beside the furrow, to
+watch every figure that crossed the hillside in doubt whether it were
+foe or friend, to be roused from sleep by the slogan of the Highlander
+or the cry of the borderer as they swept sheep and kye from every
+homestead in the valley, to bear hunger and thirst and cold and
+nakedness, to cower within the peel-tower or lurk in the moorland while
+barn and byre went up in pitiless flame, to mount and ride at a lord's
+call on forays as pitiless, this was the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130"></a><a href="./images/130.png">5-130</a>]</span>rough school in which the
+Scotch peasant was trained through two hundred years. But it was a
+school in which he learned much. Suffering that would have degraded a
+meaner race into slaves only hardened and ennobled the temper of the
+Scotchman. It was from these ages of oppression and lawlessness that he
+drew the rugged fidelity, the dogged endurance, the shrewdness, the
+caution, the wariness, the rigid thrift, the noble self dependence, the
+patience, the daring, which have distinguished him ever since. Nowhere
+did the Reformation do a grander work than in Scotland, but it was
+because nowhere were the minds of men so prepared for its work. The soil
+was ready for the seed. The developement of a noble manhood brought with
+it the craving for a spiritual and a national existence, and at the call
+of the Reformation the Scotch people rose suddenly into a nation and a
+Church.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Knox.</span></p>
+
+<p>One well-known figure embodied the moral strength of the new movement.
+In the king's boyhood, amidst the wild turmoil which followed on
+Murray's fall, an old man bent with years and toil might have been seen
+creeping with a secretary's aid to the pulpit of St. Giles. But age and
+toil were powerless over the spirit of John Knox. In the pulpit "he
+behoved to lean at his first entry: but ere he had done with his sermon
+he was so active and vigorous that he was like to ding the pulpit into
+blads and fly out of it." <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131"></a><a href="./images/131.png">5-131</a>]</span>It was in vain that men strove to pen the
+fiery words of the great preacher. "In the opening up of his text," says
+a devout listener, "he was moderate; but when he entered into
+application he made me so grue and tremble that I could not hold a pen
+to write." What gave its grandeur to the doctrine of Knox was his
+resolute assertion of a Christian order before which the social and
+political forces of the world about him shrank into insignificance. The
+meanest peasant, once called of God, felt within him a strength that was
+stronger than the might of nobles, and a wisdom that was wiser than the
+statecraft of kings. In that mighty elevation of the masses which was
+embodied in the Calvinist doctrines of election and grace lay the germs
+of the modern principles of human equality. The fruits of such a
+teaching soon showed themselves in a new attitude of the people. "Here,"
+said Morton, over the grave of John Knox, "here lies one who never
+feared nor flattered any flesh"; and if Scotland still reverences the
+memory of the reformer it is because at that grave her peasant and her
+trader learned to look in the face of nobles and kings and "not be
+ashamed."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Kirk and the people.</span></p>
+
+<p>The moral power which Knox created was to express itself through the
+ecclesiastical forms which had been devised by the genius of Calvin. The
+new force of popular opinion was concentrated and formulated in an
+ordered system of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132"></a><a href="./images/132.png">5-132</a>]</span>kirk-sessions and presbyteries and provincial synods,
+while chosen delegates formed the General Assembly of the Kirk. In this
+organization of her churches, Scotland saw herself for the first time
+the possessor of a really representative system, of a popular
+government. In her Parliaments the peasant had no voice, the burgher a
+feeble and unimportant one. They were in fact but feudal gatherings of
+prelates and nobles, whose action was fettered by the precautions of the
+Crown. Of real parliamentary life, such as was seen across the border,
+not a trace could be found in the assemblies which gathered round the
+Scottish kings; but a parliamentary life of the keenest and intensest
+order at once appeared among the lay and spiritual delegates who
+gathered to the General Assembly of the Kirk. Not only did
+Presbyterianism bind Scotland together as it had never been bound before
+by its administrative organization, but by the power it gave the lay
+elders in each congregation, and by the summons of laymen in an
+overpowering majority to the earlier Assemblies, it called the people at
+large to a voice, and as it turned out a decisive voice, in the
+administration of affairs. If its government by ministers gave it the
+outer look of an ecclesiastical despotism, no Church constitution has
+proved in practice so democratic as that of Scotland. Its influence in
+raising the nation at large to a consciousness of its power was shown by
+the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133"></a><a href="./images/133.png">5-133</a>]</span>change which passed from the moment of its establishment over the
+face of Scottish history.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Kirk and the king.</span></p>
+
+<p>The sphere of action to which it called the people was in fact not a
+mere ecclesiastical but a national sphere. Formally the Assembly meddled
+only with matters of religion; but in the creed of the Calvinist, as in
+the creed of the Catholic, the secular and the religious world were one.
+It was the office of the Church to enforce good and to rebuke evil; and
+social and political life fell alike within her "discipline." Feudalism
+received its death-blow when the noble who had wronged his wife or
+murdered his tenant sate humbled before the peasant elders on the stool
+of repentance. The new despotism which was growing up under the form of
+the monarchy found a sudden arrest in the challenge of the Kirk. When
+James summoned the preachers before his Council and arraigned their
+meetings as without warrant and seditious, "Mr. Andrew Melville could
+not abide it, but broke off upon the king in so zealous, powerful, and
+unresistible a manner that howbeit the king used his authority in most
+crabbed and choleric manner, yet Mr. Andrew bore him down, and uttered
+the commission as from the mighty God, calling the king but 'God's silly
+vassal'; and taking him by the sleeve, says this in effect, though with
+much hot reasoning and many interruptions: 'Sir, we will humbly
+reverence your Majesty always&mdash;namely, in public. But since we <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134"></a><a href="./images/134.png">5-134</a>]</span>have
+this occasion to be with your Majesty in private, and the truth is that
+you are brought in extreme danger both of your life and crown, and with
+you the country and kirk of Christ is like to wreck, for not telling you
+the truth and giving of you a faithful counsel, we must discharge our
+duty therein or else be traitors both to Christ and you! And therefore,
+sir, as divers times before, so now again I must tell you, there are two
+kings and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is Christ Jesus the King, and
+his kingdom the Kirk, whose subject James the Sixth is, and of whose
+kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member. And they whom
+Christ hath called to watch over his kirk and govern his spiritual
+kingdom have sufficient power and authority so to do both together and
+severally; the which no Christian king nor prince should control and
+discharge, but fortify and assist, otherwise not faithful servants nor
+members of Christ!'"</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The ministers and the people.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is idle to set aside words like these as the mere utterances of
+fanaticism or of priestly arrogance. James and his Council would have
+made swift work of mere fanatics or of arrogant priests. Why Melville
+could withdraw unharmed was because a people stood behind him, a people
+suddenly wakened to a consciousness of its will, and stern in the belief
+that a divine duty lay on it to press that will on its king. Through all
+the theocratic talk of the Calvinist ministers we see <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135"></a><a href="./images/135.png">5-135</a>]</span>a popular power
+that fronts the Crown. It is the Scotch people that rises into being
+under the guise of the Scotch Kirk. The men who led it were men with no
+official position or material power, for the nobles had stripped the
+Church of the vast endowments which had lured their sons and the royal
+bastards within the pale of its ministry. The ministers of the new
+communion were drawn from the burghers and peasantry or at best from the
+smaller gentry; and nothing in their social position aided them in
+withstanding the nobles or the Crown. Their strength lay simply in the
+popular sympathy behind them, in their capacity of rousing national
+opinion through the pulpit, of expressing it through the Assembly. The
+claims which such men advanced, ecclesiastical as their garb might be,
+could not fail to be national in their issues. In struggling against
+episcopacy they were in fact struggling against any breaking-up or
+impeding of that religious organization which alone enabled Scotland to
+withstand the claims of the Crown. In jealously asserting the right of
+the General Assembly to meet every year and to discuss every question
+that met it, they were vindicating in the only possible fashion the
+right of the nation to rule itself in a parliamentary way. In asserting
+the liberty of the pulpit they were for the first time in the history of
+Europe recognizing the power of public opinion and fighting for freedom
+whether of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136"></a><a href="./images/136.png">5-136</a>]</span>thought or of speech. Strange to modern ears as their
+language may be, bigoted and narrow as their temper must often seem, it
+is well to remember the greatness of the debt we owe them. It was their
+stern resolve, their energy, their endurance that saved Scotland from a
+civil and religious despotism, and that in saving the liberty of
+Scotland saved English liberty as well.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Andrew Melville.</span></p>
+
+<p>The greatest of the successors of Knox was Andrew Melville. Two years
+after Knox's death Melville came fresh from a training among the French
+Huguenots to take up and carry forward his work. With less prophetic
+fire than his master he possessed as fierce a boldness, a greater
+disdain of secular compromises, a lofty pride in his calling, a bigoted
+faith in Calvinism that knew neither rest nor delay in its full
+establishment throughout the land. As yet the system of Presbyterian
+faith and discipline, with the synods and assemblies in which it was
+embodied, though it had practically won its hold over southern Scotland,
+was without legal sanction. The demand of the ministers for a
+restitution of the Church lands and the resolve of the nobles not to
+part with their spoil had caused the rejection of the Book of Discipline
+by the Estates. The same spirit of greed secured the retention of a
+nominal episcopacy. Though the name of bishops and archbishops appeared
+"to many to savour of Papistry," bishops and archbishops were still
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137"></a><a href="./images/137.png">5-137</a>]</span>named to vacant dioceses as milch-cows, through whom the revenues of
+the sees might be drained by the great nobles. Against such
+"Tulchan-bishops," as they were nicknamed by the people's scorn, a
+"Tulchan" being a mere calf-skin stuffed with hay by which a cow was
+persuaded to give her milk after her calf was taken from her, Knox had
+not cared to protest; he had only taken care that they should be subject
+to the General Assembly, and deprived of all jurisdiction or authority
+beyond that of a Presbyterian "Superintendent." His strong political
+sense hindered a conflict on such a ground with the civil power, and
+without a conflict it was plain that no change could come. The Regent
+Morton, Calvinist as he was, supported the cause of Episcopacy, and the
+fact that bishops formed an integral part of the estates of the realm
+made any demand for their abolition distasteful to the large mass of men
+who always shrink from any constitutional revolution.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Presbyterianism established.</span></p>
+
+<p>But Melville threw aside all compromise. In 1580 the General Assembly
+declared the office of bishop abolished, as having "no sure warrant,
+authority, or good ground out of the Word of God." In 1581 it adopted a
+second Book of Discipline which organized the Church on the pure
+Calvinistic model and advanced the full Calvinistic claim to its
+spiritual independence and supremacy within the realm. When the Estates
+refused to sanction this book the Assembly sent it <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138"></a><a href="./images/138.png">5-138</a>]</span>to every presbytery,
+and its gradual acceptance secured the organization of the Church. It
+was at this crisis that the appearance of Esme Stuart brought about the
+first reaction towards a revival of the royal power; and the Council
+under the guidance of the favourite struck at once at the preachers who
+denounced it. But their efforts to "tune the pulpits" were met by a bold
+defiance. "Though all the kings of the earth should call my words
+treason," replied one minister who was summoned to the Council-board, "I
+am ready by good reason to prove them to be the very truth of God, and
+if need require to seal them with my blood." Andrew Melville, when
+summoned on the same charge of seditious preaching, laid a Hebrew Bible
+on the Council-table and "resolved to try conclusions on that only."
+What the Council shrank from "trying conclusions" with was the popular
+enthusiasm which backed these protests. When John Durie was exiled for
+words uttered in the pulpit, the whole town of Edinburgh met him on his
+return, "and going up the street with bare heads and loud voices sang to
+the praise of God till heaven and earth resounded."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">James and the Kirk.</span></p>
+
+<p>But it was this very popularity which roused the young king to action.
+Boy of eighteen as he was, no sooner had the overthrow of the Douglases
+and the judicial murder of Lord Gowrie freed James from the power of the
+nobles than he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139"></a><a href="./images/139.png">5-139</a>]</span>faced this new foe. Theologically his opinions were as
+Calvinistic as those of Melville himself, but in the ecclesiastical
+fabric of Calvinism, in its organization of the Church, in its annual
+assemblies, in its public discussion and criticism of acts of government
+through the pulpit, he saw an organized democracy which threatened his
+crown. And at this he struck as boldly as his forefathers had struck at
+the power of feudalism. The nobles, dreading the resumption of church
+lands, were with the king; and in 1584 an Act of the Estates denounced
+the judicial and legislative authority assumed by the General Assembly,
+provided that no subjects, temporal or spiritual, "take upon them to
+convocate or assemble themselves together for holding of councils,
+conventions, or assemblies," and demanded a pledge of obedience from
+every minister. For the moment the ministers submitted; and James
+prepared to carry out his victory by a policy of religious balance. The
+Catholic lords were still strong in northern and western Scotland; and
+firmly as the King was opposed to the dogmas of Catholicism he saw the
+use he might make of the Catholics as a check on the power of the
+Congregation. It was with this view that he shielded Lord Huntly and the
+Catholic nobles while he intrigued with the Guises abroad. But such a
+policy at such a juncture forced England to intervene. At a moment when
+the Armada was gathering in the Tagus, Elizabeth <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140"></a><a href="./images/140.png">5-140</a>]</span>felt the need of
+securing Scotland against any revival of Catholicism; and her aid
+enabled the exiled lords to return in triumph in 1585. For the next ten
+years James was helpless in their hands. He was forced to ally himself
+with Elizabeth, to offer aid against the Armada, to make a Protestant
+marriage, to threaten action against Philip, to attack Huntly and the
+Catholic lords of the north on a charge of correspondence with Spain and
+to drive them from the realm. The triumph of the Protestant lords was a
+triumph of the Kirk. In 1592 the Acts of 1584 were repealed; Episcopacy
+was formally abolished; and the Calvinistic organization of the Church
+at last received legal sanction. All that James could save was the right
+of being present at the General Assembly, and of fixing a time and place
+for its annual meeting. It was in vain that the young king struggled and
+argued; in vain that he resolutely asserted himself to be supreme in
+spiritual as in civil matters; in vain that he showed himself a better
+scholar and a more learned theologian than the men who held him down.
+The preachers scolded him from the pulpit and bade him "to his knees" to
+seek pardon for his vanity; while the Assembly chided him for his
+"banning and swearing" and sent a deputation to confer with his Queen
+touching the "want of godly exercise among her maids."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">James and Presbyterianism.</span></p>
+
+<p>The bitter memory of these years of humiliation <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141"></a><a href="./images/141.png">5-141</a>]</span>dwelt with James to the
+last. They were fiercely recalled, when he mounted the English throne.
+"A Scottish Presbytery," he exclaimed at the Hampton Court Conference,
+"as well fitteth with monarchy as God and the Devil." Year after year he
+watched for the hour of deliverance, and every year brought it nearer.
+His mother's death gave fresh strength to his throne. The alliance with
+England, Elizabeth's pledge not to oppose his succession, left him
+practically heir of the English Crown. Freed from the dread of a
+Catholic reaction, the Queen was at liberty to indulge in her dread of
+Calvinism, and to sympathize with the fresh struggle which James was
+preparing to make against it. Her attitude, as well as the growing
+certainty of his coming greatness as sovereign of both realms, had no
+doubt their influence in again strengthening the king's position; and
+his new power was seen in his renewed mastery over the Scottish lords.
+But this triumph over feudalism was only the opening of a decisive
+struggle with Calvinism. If he had defeated Huntly and his
+fellow-plotters, he refused to keep them in exile or to comply with the
+demand of the Church that he should refuse their services on the ground
+of religion. He would be king of a nation, he contended, and not of a
+part of it. The protest was a fair one; but the real secret of the
+king's policy towards the Catholics, as of his son's after him, was a
+"king-craft" which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142"></a><a href="./images/142.png">5-142</a>]</span>aimed at playing off one part of the nation against
+another to the profit of the Crown. "The wisdom of the Council," said a
+defiant preacher, "is this, that ye must be served with all sorts of men
+to serve your purpose and grandeur, Jew and Gentile, Papist and
+Protestant. And because the ministers and Protestants in Scotland are
+over strong and control the King, they must be weakened and brought
+low."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The struggle with the Church.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was with this end before him that James set finally to work in 1597.
+Cool, adroit, firm in his purpose, the young king seized on some wild
+outbreaks of the pulpit to assert a control over its utterances; a riot
+in Edinburgh in defence of the ministers enabled him to bring the town
+to submission by flooding its streets with Highlanders and Borderers;
+the General Assembly itself was made amenable to royal influence by its
+summons to Perth, where the cooler temper of the northern ministers
+could be played off against the hot Presbyterianism of the ministers of
+the Lothians. It was the Assembly itself which consented to curtail the
+liberty of preaching and the liberty of assembling in presbytery and
+synod, as well as to make the king's consent needful for the appointment
+of every minister. What James was as stubbornly resolved on was the
+restoration of Episcopacy. He wished not only to bridle but to rule the
+Church; and it was only through bishops that he could effectively rule
+it. The old tradition <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143"></a><a href="./images/143.png">5-143</a>]</span>of the Stuarts had looked to the prelates for the
+support of the Crown, and James saw keenly that the new force which had
+overthrown them was a force which threatened to overthrow the monarchy
+itself. It was the people which in its religious or its political guise
+was the assailant of both. And as their foe was the same, so James
+argued with the shrewd short-sightedness of his race, their cause was
+the same. "No bishop," ran his famous adage, "no king!" To restore the
+episcopate was from this moment his steady policy. But its actual
+restoration only followed on the failure of a long attempt to bring the
+Assembly round to a project of nominating representatives of itself in
+the Estates. The presence of such representatives would have
+strengthened the moral weight of the Parliament, while it diminished
+that of the Assembly, and in both ways would have tended to the
+advantage of the Crown. But, cowed as the ministers now were, no
+pressure could bring them to do more than name delegates to vote
+according to their will in the Estates; and as such a plan foiled the
+king's scheme James was at last driven to use a statute which empowered
+him to name bishops as prelates with a seat in the Estates, though they
+possessed no spiritual status or jurisdiction. In 1600 two such prelates
+appeared in Parliament; and James followed up his triumph by the
+publication of his "Basilicon D&ocirc;ron," an assertion of the divine <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144"></a><a href="./images/144.png">5-144</a>]</span>right
+and absolute authority of kings over all orders of men within their
+realms.</p>
+
+<p>It is only by recalling the early history of James Stuart that we can
+realize the attitude and temper of the Scottish Sovereign at the moment
+when the death of Elizabeth called him to the English throne. He came
+flushed with a triumph over Calvinism and democracy, but embittered by
+the humiliations he had endured from them, and dreading them as the
+deadly enemies of his crown. Raised at last to a greatness of which he
+had hardly dreamed, he was little likely to yield to a pressure, whether
+religious or political, against which in his hour of weakness he had
+fought so hard. Hopes of ecclesiastical change found no echo in a king
+whose ears were still thrilling with the defiance of Melville and his
+fellow ministers, and who among all the charms that England presented to
+him saw none so attractive as its ordered and obedient Church, its
+synods that met but at the royal will, its courts that carried out the
+royal ordinances, its bishops that held themselves to be royal officers.
+Nor were the hopes of political progress likely to meet with a warmer
+welcome. Politics with a Stuart meant simply a long struggle for the
+exaltation of the Crown. It was a struggle where success had been won
+not by a reverence for law or a people's support, but by sheer personal
+energy, by a blind faith in monarchy and the rights of monarchy, by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145"></a><a href="./images/145.png">5-145</a>]</span>an
+unscrupulous use of every weapon which a king possessed. Craft had been
+met by craft, violence by violence. Justice had been degraded into a
+weapon in the royal hand. The sacredness of law had disappeared in a
+strife where all seemed lawful for the preservation of the Crown. By
+means such as these feudalism had been humbled and the long strife with
+the baronage brought at last to a close. Strife with the people had yet
+to be waged. But in whatever forms it might present itself, whether in
+his new land or his old, it would be waged by James as by his successors
+in the same temper and with the same belief, a belief that the welfare
+of the nation lay in the unchecked supremacy of the Crown, and a temper
+that held all means lawful for the establishment of such a supremacy.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146"></a><a href="./images/146.png">5-146</a>]</span></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<div class="head">
+<hr />
+
+<ul>
+  <li>CHAPTER III</li>
+  <li>THE BREAK WITH THE PARLIAMENT</li>
+  <li>1603-1611</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">James the First.</span></p>
+
+<p>On the sixth of May 1603, after a stately progress through his new
+dominions, King James entered London. In outer appearance no sovereign
+could have jarred more utterly against the conception of an English
+ruler which had grown up under Plantagenet or Tudor. His big head, his
+slobbering tongue, his quilted clothes, his rickety legs stood out in as
+grotesque a contrast with all that men recalled of Henry or Elizabeth as
+his gabble and rhodomontade, his want of personal dignity, his
+buffoonery, his coarseness of speech, his pedantry, his personal
+cowardice. Under this ridiculous exterior indeed lay no small amount of
+moral courage and of intellectual ability. James was a ripe scholar,
+with a considerable fund of shrewdness, of mother-wit, and ready
+repartee. His canny humour lights up the political and theological
+controversies of the time with quaint incisive phrases, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147"></a><a href="./images/147.png">5-147</a>]</span>with puns and
+epigrams and touches of irony which still retain their savour. His
+reading, especially in theological matters, was extensive; and he was
+already a voluminous author on subjects which ranged from predestination
+to tobacco. But his shrewdness and learning only left him, in the phrase
+of Henry the Fourth of France, "the wisest fool in Christendom." He had
+in fact the temper of a pedant, a pedant's conceit, a pedant's love of
+theories, and a pedant's inability to bring his theories into any
+relation with actual facts. It was this fatal defect that marred his
+political abilities. As a statesman he had shown no little capacity in
+his smaller realm; his cool humour and good temper had held even
+Melville at bay; he had known how to wait and how to strike; and his
+patience and boldness had been rewarded with a fair success. He had
+studied foreign affairs as busily as he had studied Scotch affairs; and
+of the temper and plans of foreign courts he probably possessed a
+greater knowledge than any Englishman save Robert Cecil. But what he
+never possessed, and what he never could gain, was any sort of knowledge
+of England or Englishmen. He came to his new home a Scotchman, a
+foreigner, strange to the life, the thoughts, the traditions of the
+English people. And he remained strange to them to the last. A younger
+man might have insensibly imbibed the temper of the men about him. A man
+of genius would have flung himself into <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148"></a><a href="./images/148.png">5-148</a>]</span>the new world of thought and
+feeling and made it his own. But James was neither young nor a man of
+genius. He was already in middle age when he crossed the Border; and his
+cleverness and his conceit alike blinded him to the need of any
+adjustment of his conclusions or his prejudices to the facts which
+fronted him.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The foreign rule.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was this estrangement from the world of thought and feeling about
+them which gave its peculiar colour to the rule of the Stuarts. It was
+not the first time that England had submitted to foreign kings. But it
+was the first time that England experienced a foreign rule. Foreign
+notions of religion, foreign maxims of state, foreign conceptions of the
+attitude of the people or the nobles towards the Crown, foreign notions
+of the relation of the Crown to the people, formed the policy of James
+as of his successors. For the Stuarts remained foreigners to the last.
+Their line filled the English throne for more than eighty years; but
+like the Bourbons they forgot nothing and they learned nothing. To all
+influences indeed save English influences they were accessible enough.
+As James was steeped in the traditions of Scotland, so Charles the First
+was open to the traditions of Spain. The second Charles and the second
+James reflected in very different ways the temper of France. But what no
+Stuart seemed able to imbibe or to reflect was the temper of England.
+The strange medley of contradictory <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149"></a><a href="./images/149.png">5-149</a>]</span>qualities which blended in the
+English character, its love of liberty and its love of order, its
+prejudice and open-mindedness, its religious enthusiasm and its cool
+good sense, remained alike unintelligible to them. And as they failed to
+understand England, so in many ways England failed to understand them.
+It underrated their ability, nor did it do justice to their aims. Its
+insular temper found no hold on a policy which was far more European
+than insular. Its practical sense recoiled from the unpractical
+cleverness that, while it seldom said a foolish thing, yet never did a
+wise one.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The new policy.</span></p>
+
+<p>From the first this severance between English feeling and the feeling of
+the king was sharply marked. If war and taxation had dimmed the
+popularity of Elizabeth in her later years, England had still a
+reverence for the Queen who had made her great. But James was hardly
+over the Border when he was heard expressing his scorn of the character
+and statecraft of his predecessor. Her policy, whether at home or
+abroad, he came resolved to undo. Men who had fought side by side with
+Dutchman and Huguenot against Spaniard and Leaguer heard angrily that
+the new king was seeking for peace with Spain, that he was negotiating
+with the Papacy, while he met the advances of France with a marked
+coolness, and denounced the Hollanders as rebels against their king. It
+was with scarcely less anger that they saw the stern system of
+repression which had <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150"></a><a href="./images/150.png">5-150</a>]</span>prevailed through the close of Elizabeth's reign
+relaxed in favour of the Catholics, and recusants released from the
+payments of fines. It was clear that both at home and abroad James
+purposed to withdraw from that struggle with Catholicism which the
+hotter Protestants looked upon as a battle for God. What the king really
+aimed at was the security of his throne. The Catholics alone questioned
+his title; and a formal excommunication by Rome would have roused them
+to dispute his accession. James had averted this danger by intrigues
+both with the Papal Court and the English Catholics during the later
+years of Elizabeth; and his vague assurances had mystified the one and
+prevented the others from acting. The disappointment of the Catholics
+when no change followed on the king's accession found vent in a wild
+plot for the seizure of his person, devised by a priest named Watson;
+and the alarm this created quickened James to a redemption of his
+pledges. In July 1603 the leading Catholics were called before the
+Council and assured that the fines for recusancy would no longer be
+exacted; while an attempt was made to open a negotiation with Rome and
+to procure the support of the Pope for the new government. But the real
+strength of the Catholic party lay in the chance of aid from Spain. So
+long as the war continued they would look to Spain for succour, and the
+influence of Spain would be exerted to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151"></a><a href="./images/151.png">5-151</a>]</span>keep them in antagonism to the
+Crown. Nor was this the only ground for a cessation of hostilities. The
+temper of James was peaceful; the royal treasury was exhausted; and the
+continuance of the war necessitated a close connexion with the
+Calvinistic and republican Hollanders. At the same time therefore that
+the Catholics were assured of a relaxation of the penal laws,
+negotiations for peace were opened with Spain.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">James and the Puritans.</span></p>
+
+<p>However justifiable such steps might be, it was certain that they would
+rouse alarm and discontent among the sterner Protestants. For a time
+however it seemed as if concessions on one side were to be balanced by
+concessions on the other, as if the tolerance which had been granted to
+the Catholic would be extended to the Puritan. James had hardly crossed
+the Border when he was met by what was termed the Millenary Petition,
+from a belief that it was signed by a thousand of the English clergy. It
+really received the assent of some eight hundred, or of about a tenth of
+the clergy of the realm. The petitioners asked for no change in the
+government or organization of the Church, but for a reform of its
+courts, the removal of superstitious usages from the Book of Common
+Prayer, the disuse of lessons from the apocryphal books of Scripture, a
+more rigorous observance of Sundays, and the provision and training of
+ministers who could preach to the people. Concessions on these points
+would as yet <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152"></a><a href="./images/152.png">5-152</a>]</span>have satisfied the bulk of the Puritans; and for a while
+it seemed as if concession was purposed. The king not only received the
+petition, but promised a conference of bishops and divines in which it
+should be discussed. Ten months however were suffered to pass before the
+pledge was redeemed; and a fierce protest from the University of Oxford
+in the interval gave little promise of a peaceful settlement. The
+university denounced the Puritan demands as preludes of a Presbyterian
+system in which the clergy would "have power to bind their king in
+chains and their prince in links of iron, that is (in their learning) to
+censure him, to enjoin him penance, to excommunicate him, yea&mdash;in case
+they see cause&mdash;to proceed against him as a tyrant."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Hampton Court conference.</span></p>
+
+<p>The warning was hardly needed by James. The voice of Melville was still
+in his ears when he summoned four Puritan ministers to meet the
+Archbishop and eight of his suffragans at Hampton Court in January 1604.
+From the first he showed no purpose of discussing the grievances alleged
+in the petition. He revelled in the opportunity for a display of his
+theological reading; but he viewed the Puritan demands in a purely
+political light. He charged the petitioners with aiming at a Scottish
+presbytery, "where Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall meet, and at
+their pleasure censure me and my Council and all their proceedings.
+Stay," he went on with amusing vehemence, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153"></a><a href="./images/153.png">5-153</a>]</span>"stay, I pray you, for one
+seven years before you demand that from me, and if you find me pursy and
+fat and my windpipe stuffed, I will perhaps hearken to you, for let that
+government be once up, and I am sure I shall be kept in health." No
+words could have better shown the new king's unconsciousness that he had
+passed into a land where parliaments were realities, and where the
+"censure" of king and council was a national tradition. But neither his
+theology nor his politics met with any protest from the prelates about
+him. On the contrary, the bishops declared that the insults James
+showered on their opponents were inspired by the Holy Ghost. The
+Puritans however still ventured to question his infallibility, and the
+king broke up the conference with a threat which disclosed the policy of
+the Crown. "I will make them conform," he said of the remonstrants, "or
+I will harry them out of the land!"</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Parliament of 1604.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is only when we recall the temper of England at the time that we can
+understand the profound emotion which was roused by threats such as
+these. Three months after the conference at Hampton Court the members
+were gathering to the first parliament of the new reign; and the
+Parliament of 1604 met in another mood from that of any parliament which
+had met for a hundred years. Under the Tudors the Houses had more than
+once at great crises in our history withstood the policy <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154"></a><a href="./images/154.png">5-154</a>]</span>of the Crown.
+But in the main that policy had been their own; and it was the sense of
+this oneness in aim which had averted any final collision even in the
+strife with Elizabeth. But this trust in the unity of the nation and the
+Crown was now roughly shaken. The squires and merchants who thronged the
+benches at Westminster listened with coldness and suspicion to the
+self-confident assurances of the king. "I bring you," said James, "two
+gifts, one peace with foreign nations, the other union with Scotland";
+and a project was laid before them for a union of the two kingdoms under
+the name of Great Britain. "By what laws," asked Bacon, "shall this
+Britain be governed?" Great in fact as were the advantages of such a
+scheme, the House showed its sense of the political difficulties
+involved in it by referring it to a commission. James in turn showed his
+resentment by passing over the attempts made to commute for a fixed sum
+the oppressive rights of Purveyance and Wardship. But what the House was
+really set upon was religious reform; and the first step of the Commons
+had been the naming of a committee to frame bills for the redress of the
+more crying ecclesiastical grievances. The influence of the Crown
+secured the rejection of these bills by the Lords; and the irritation of
+the Lower House showed itself in an outspoken address to the king. The
+Parliament, it said, had come together in a spirit of peace. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155"></a><a href="./images/155.png">5-155</a>]</span>"Our
+desires were of peace only, and our device of unity." Their aim had been
+to put an end to the long-standing dissension among the ministers, and
+to preserve uniformity by the abandonment of "a few ceremonies of small
+importance," by the redress of some ecclesiastical abuses, and by the
+establishment of an efficient training for a preaching clergy. If they
+had waived their right to deal with these matters during the old age of
+Elizabeth, they asserted it now. "Let your Majesty be pleased to receive
+public information from your Commons in Parliament, as well of the
+abuses in the Church as in the civil state and government." Words yet
+bolder, and which sound like a prelude to the Petition of Right, met the
+claim of absolutism which was so frequently on the new king's lips.
+"Your majesty would be misinformed," said the address, "if any man
+should deliver that the kings of England have any absolute power in
+themselves, either to alter religion or make any laws concerning the
+same, otherwise than as in temporal causes, by consent of Parliament."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Canons of 1604.</span></p>
+
+<p>The address was met by a petulant scolding, and as the Commons met
+coldly the king's request for a subsidy the Houses were adjourned. James
+at once assumed the title to which Parliament had deferred its assent,
+of King of Great Britain; while the support of the Crown emboldened the
+bishops to a fresh defiance of the Puritan pressure. The act of
+Elizabeth which gave parliamentary <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156"></a><a href="./images/156.png">5-156</a>]</span>sanction to the Thirty-nine Articles
+compelled ministers to subscribe only to those which concerned the faith
+and the sacraments, and thus implicitly refused to compel their
+signatures to the articles which related to points of discipline and
+Church government. The compromise had been observed from 1571 till now;
+but the Convocation of 1604 by its canons required the subscription of
+the clergy to the articles touching rites and ceremonies. The king
+showed his approval of this step by raising its prime mover, Bancroft,
+to the vacant See of Canterbury; and Bancroft added to the demand of
+subscription a requirement of rigid conformity with the rubrics on the
+part of all beneficed clergymen. In the spring of 1605 three hundred of
+the Puritan clergy were driven from their livings for a refusal to
+comply with these demands.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Fresh breach with the Catholics.</span></p>
+
+<p>If James had come to his new throne with dreams of conciliation and of a
+greater unity among his subjects, his dream was to be speedily
+dispelled. At the moment when the persecution of Bancroft announced a
+final breach between the Crown and the Puritans, a revival of the old
+rigour made a fresh breach between the Crown and the Catholics. In
+remitting the fines for recusancy James had never purposed to suffer any
+revival of Catholicism; and in the opening of 1604 a proclamation which
+bade all Jesuits and seminary priests depart from the land proved that
+on its <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157"></a><a href="./images/157.png">5-157</a>]</span>political side the Elizabethan policy was still adhered to. But
+the effect of the remission of fines was at once to swell the numbers of
+avowed Catholics. In the diocese of Chester the number of recusants
+increased by a thousand. Rumours of Catholic conversions spread a panic
+which showed itself in an act of the Parliament of 1604 confirming the
+statutes of Elizabeth; and to this James gave his assent. He promised
+indeed that the statute should remain inoperative; but rumours of his
+own conversion, which sprang from his secret negotiation with Rome, so
+angered the king that in the spring of 1605 he bade the judges put it in
+force, while the fines for recusancy were levied more strictly than
+before. The disappointment of their hopes, the quick breach of the
+pledges so solemnly given to them, drove the Catholics to despair. They
+gave fresh life to a conspiracy which a small knot of bigots had been
+fruitlessly striving to bring to an issue since the king's accession.
+Catesby, a Catholic zealot who had taken part in the rising of Essex,
+had busied himself during the last years of Elizabeth in preparing for a
+revolt at the Queen's death, and in seeking for his project the aid of
+Spain. He was joined in his plans by two fellow-zealots, Winter and
+Wright; but the scheme was still unripe when James peaceably mounted the
+throne; and for the moment his pledge of toleration put an end to it.
+But the zeal of the plotters was revived by the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158"></a><a href="./images/158.png">5-158</a>]</span>banishment of the
+priests; and the conspiracy at last took the form of a plan for blowing
+up both Houses of Parliament and profiting by the terror caused by such
+a stroke. In Flanders Catesby found a new assistant in his schemes,
+Guido Fawkes, an Englishman who was serving in the army of the Archduke;
+and on his return to England he was joined by Thomas Percy, a cousin of
+the Earl of Northumberland and a pensioner of the king's guard. In May
+1604 the little group hired a tenement near the Parliament House, and
+set themselves to dig a mine beneath its walls.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Gunpowder Plot.</span></p>
+
+<p>As yet however they stood alone. The bulk of the Catholics were content
+with the relaxation of the penal laws; and in the absence of any aid the
+plotters were forced to suspend their work. It was not till the sudden
+change in the royal policy that their hopes revived. But with the
+renewal of persecution Catesby at once bestirred himself; and at the
+close of 1604 the lucky discovery of a cellar beneath the Parliament
+House facilitated the execution of this plan. Barrels of gunpowder were
+placed in the cellar, and the little group waited patiently for the
+fifth of November 1605, when the Houses were again summoned to assemble.
+In the interval their plans widened into a formidable conspiracy. It was
+arranged that on the destruction of the king and the Parliament the
+Catholics should rise, seize the young princes, use the general <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159"></a><a href="./images/159.png">5-159</a>]</span>panic
+to make themselves masters of the realm, and call for aid from the
+Spaniards in Flanders. With this view Catholics of greater fortune, such
+as Sir Everard Digby and Francis Tresham, were admitted to Catesby's
+confidence, and supplied money for the larger projects he designed. Arms
+were bought in Flanders, horses were held in readiness, a meeting of
+Catholic gentlemen was brought about under show of a hunting party to
+serve as the beginning of a rising. Wonderful as was the secrecy with
+which the plot was concealed, the family affection of Tresham at the
+last moment gave a clue to it by a letter to Lord Monteagle, his
+relative, which warned him to absent himself from the Parliament on the
+fatal day; and further information brought about the discovery of the
+cellar and of Guido Fawkes, who was charged with its custody. The
+hunting party broke up in despair, the conspirators, chased from county
+to county, were either killed or sent to the block; and Garnet, the
+Provincial of the English Jesuits, was brought to trial and executed.
+Though he had shrunk from all part in the plot, its existence had been
+made known to him by way of confession by another Jesuit, Greenway; and
+horror-stricken as he represented himself to have been, he had kept the
+secret and left the Parliament to its doom.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Impositions.</span></p>
+
+<p>The failure of such a plot necessarily gives strength to a government;
+and for the moment the Parliament was drawn closer to the king by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160"></a><a href="./images/160.png">5-160</a>]</span>the
+deliverance from a common peril. When the Houses again met in 1606 they
+listened in a different temper to the demand for a subsidy. The needs of
+the Treasury indeed were great. Elizabeth had left behind her a war
+expenditure, and a debt of four hundred thousand pounds. The first
+ceased with the peace, but the debt remained; and the prodigality of
+James was fast raising the charges of the Crown in time of peace to as
+high a level as they had reached under his predecessor in time of war.
+The Commons voted a sum which was large enough to meet the royal debt.
+The fixed charges of the Crown they held should be met by its ordinary
+revenues; but James had no mind to bring his expenditure down to the
+level of Elizabeth's. The growth of English commerce offered a means of
+recruiting his treasury which seemed to lie within the limits of
+customary law; and of this he availed himself. The right of the Crown to
+levy impositions on exports and imports other than those of wool,
+leather, and tin, had been the last financial prerogative for which the
+Edwards had struggled. They had been forced indeed to abandon it; but
+the tradition of such a right lingered on at the royal council-board;
+and under the Tudors the practice had been to some slight extent
+revived. A duty on imports had been imposed in one or two instances by
+Mary, and this impost had been extended by Elizabeth to currants and
+wine. These instances <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161"></a><a href="./images/161.png">5-161</a>]</span>however were too trivial and exceptional to break
+in upon the general usage; but a more dangerous precedent had been
+growing up in the duties which the great trading companies, such as
+those to the Levant and to the Indies, were allowed to exact from
+merchants, in exchange&mdash;as was held&mdash;for the protection they afforded
+them in far-off and dangerous seas. The Levant Company was now
+dissolved, and James seized on the duties it had levied as lapsing
+naturally to the Crown.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Bates's case.</span></p>
+
+<p>The Parliament at once protested against these impositions; but the
+prospect of a fresh struggle with the Commons told less with the king
+than the prospect of a revenue which might free him from dependence on
+the Commons altogether. His fanatical belief in the rights and power of
+the Crown hindered all sober judgement of such a question. James cared
+quite as much to assert his absolute authority as to fill his treasury.
+In the course of 1606 therefore the case of a Levant merchant called
+Bates, who refused to pay the imposition, was brought before the
+Exchequer Chamber. The judgement of the court justified the king's
+confidence in his claim. It went far beyond the original bounds of the
+case itself, or the right of the Crown to levy on the ground of
+protection the dues which had been levied on that ground by the leading
+companies. It asserted the king's right to levy what customs duties he
+would. "All customs," said the judges, "are the effects <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162"></a><a href="./images/162.png">5-162</a>]</span>of foreign
+commerce; but all affairs of commerce and treaties with foreign nations
+belong to the king's absolute power. He therefore who has power over the
+cause has power over the effect." The importance of such a decision
+could hardly be overrated. English commerce was growing fast. English
+merchants were fighting their way to the Spice Islands, and establishing
+settlements in the dominions of the Mogul. The judgement gave James a
+revenue which was certain to grow rapidly, and whose growth would go far
+to free the Crown from any need of resorting for supplies to Parliament.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Post-Nati.</span></p>
+
+<p>But no immediate step was taken to give effect to the judgement; and the
+Commons contented themselves with a protest against impositions at the
+close of the session of 1606. When they reassembled in the following
+year their attention was absorbed by the revival of the questions which
+sprang from the new relations of Scotland to England through their
+common king. There was now no question of a national union. The
+commission to which the whole matter had been referred had reported in
+favour of the abolition of hostile laws, the establishment of a general
+free trade between the two kingdoms, and the naturalization as
+Englishmen of all living Scotchmen who had been born before the king's
+accession to the English throne. The judges had already given their
+opinion that all born after it were <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163"></a><a href="./images/163.png">5-163</a>]</span>naturalized Englishmen by force of
+their allegiance to a sovereign who had become King of England. The
+constitutional danger of such a theory was easily seen. Had the marriage
+of Philip and Mary produced a son, every Spaniard and every Fleming
+would under it have counted as Englishmen, and England would have been
+absorbed in the mass of the Spanish monarchy. The opinion of the judges
+in fact implied that nationality hung not on the existence of the nation
+itself, but on its relation to a king. It was to escape from such a
+theory that the Commons asked that the question should be waived, and
+offered on that condition to naturalize all Scotchmen whatever by
+statute. But James would not assent. To him the assertion of a right
+inherent in the Crown was far dearer than a peaceful settlement of the
+matter; the bills for free trade were dropped; and on the adjournment of
+the Houses a case was brought before the Exchequer Chamber; and the
+naturalization of the "Post-nati," as Scots born after the king's
+accession were styled, established by a formal judgement.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">James and Scotland.</span></p>
+
+<p>James had won a victory for his prerogative; but he had won it at the
+cost of Scotland. To the smaller and poorer kingdom the removal of all
+obstacles to her commerce with England would have been an inestimable
+gain. The intercourse which it would have necessitated could hardly have
+failed in time to bring about a more perfect <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164"></a><a href="./images/164.png">5-164</a>]</span>union. But as the king's
+reign drew on, the union of the two realms seemed more distant than
+ever. Bacon's shrewd question, "Under which laws is this Britain to be
+governed?" took fresh meaning as men saw James asserting in Scotland an
+all but absolute authority, and breaking down the one constitutional
+check which had hitherto hampered him. The energy which he had shown in
+his earlier combat with the democratic forces embodied in the Kirk was
+not likely to slacken on his accession to the southern throne. It was in
+the General Assembly that the new force of public opinion took
+legislative and administrative form; and even before he crossed the
+Border James had succeeded in asserting a right to convene and be
+personally present at the proceedings of the General Assembly. But once
+King of England he could venture on heavier blows. In spite of his
+assent to an act legalizing its annual convention, James hindered any
+meeting of the General Assembly for five successive years by repeated
+prorogations. The protests of the clergy were roughly met. When nineteen
+ministers appeared in 1605 at Aberdeen and, in defiance of the
+prorogation, constituted themselves an Assembly, they were called before
+the Council, and on refusal to own its jurisdiction banished as traitors
+from the realm. Of the leaders who remained the boldest were summoned in
+1606 with Andrew Melville to confer with the king in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165"></a><a href="./images/165.png">5-165</a>]</span>England on his
+projects of change. On their refusal to betray the freedom of the Church
+they were committed to prison; and an epigram which Melville wrote on
+the usages of the English communion was seized on as a ground for
+bringing him before the English Privy Council with Bancroft at its head.
+But the insolence of the Primate fell on ears less patient than those of
+the Puritans he had insulted at Hampton Court. As he stood at the
+council-table Melville seized the Archbishop by the sleeves of his
+rochet, and shaking them in his manner, called them Popish rags and
+marks of the beast. He was sent to the Tower, and released after some
+years of imprisonment only to go into exile.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Submission of the Kirk.</span></p>
+
+<p>The trial of Scotchmen before a foreign court, the imprisonment of
+Scotchmen in foreign prisons, were steps that showed the powerlessness
+of James to grasp the first principles of law; but they were effective
+for the purpose at which he aimed. They struck terror into the Scotch
+ministers. Their one weapon lay in the enthusiasm of the people; but,
+strongly as Scotch enthusiasm might tell on a king at Edinburgh, it was
+powerless over a king at London. The time had come when James might pass
+on from merely silencing the General Assembly to the use of it in the
+enslavement of the Church. Successful as he had been in gagging the
+pulpits and silencing the Assembly, he had been as yet less successful
+in his efforts to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166"></a><a href="./images/166.png">5-166</a>]</span>revive the power of the Crown over the Church by a
+restoration of Episcopacy. He had nominated a few bishops, and had won
+back for them their old places in Parliament; but his bishops remained
+purely secular nobles, unrecognized in their spiritual capacity by the
+Church, and without any ecclesiastical jurisdiction. It was in vain that
+James had striven to bring Melville and his fellows to any recognition
+of prelacy. But with their banishment and imprisonment the field was
+clear for more vigorous action. Deprived of their leaders, threatened
+with bonds and exile, deserted by the nobles, ill supported as yet by
+the mass of the people, to whom the real nature of their struggle was
+unknown, the Scotch ministers bent at last before the pressure of the
+Crown. They still shrank indeed from any formal acceptance of
+episcopacy; but they allowed the bishops to act as perpetual moderators
+or presidents in the synods of their presbyteries.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Restoration of Scotch Episcopacy.</span></p>
+
+<p>With such moderators the General Assembly might be suffered to meet.
+Their influence in fact secured the return of royal nominees to
+Assemblies which met in 1608 and in 1610; and in the second of these
+assemblies episcopacy was at last formally recognized by the Scottish
+Church. The bishops were owned as permanent heads of each provincial
+synod; the power of ordination was committed to them; the ecclesiastical
+sentences pronounced by synod or presbytery were <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167"></a><a href="./images/167.png">5-167</a>]</span>henceforth to be
+submitted for their approval. The new organization of the Church was at
+once carried out. The vacant sees were filled. Two archbishops were
+created at St. Andrews and Glasgow, and set at the head of Courts of
+High Commission for their respective provinces; while three of the
+prelates were sent to receive consecration in England, and on their
+return communicated it to their fellow-bishops. With such a measure of
+success James was fairly content. The prelacy he had revived fell far
+short of English episcopacy; to the eyes of religious dogmatists such as
+Laud indeed it seemed little better than the presbyterianism it
+superseded. But the aim of James was political rather than religious. He
+had no dislike for presbyterianism as a system of Church-government;
+what he dreaded was the popular force to which it gave form in its
+synods and assemblies, and which, in the guise of ecclesiastical
+independence, was lifting the nation into equality with the Crown. In
+seizing on the control of the Church through his organized prelacy James
+held himself to have seized the control of the forces which acted
+through the Church, and to have won back that mastery of his realm which
+the Reformation had reft from the Scottish kings.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">England and the Prerogative.</span></p>
+
+<p>What he had really done was to commit the Scotch Crown to a lasting
+struggle with the religious impulses of the Scottish people. The <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168"></a><a href="./images/168.png">5-168</a>]</span>cause
+of episcopacy was ruined by his triumph. Belief in bishops ceased to be
+possible for a Scotchman when bishops were forced on Scotland as mere
+tools of the royal will. Presbyterianism on the other hand became
+identified with patriotism. It was no longer an ecclesiastical system;
+it was the guise under which national freedom and even national
+existence were to struggle against an arbitrary rule,&mdash;against a rule
+which grew more and more the rule of a foreign king. Nor was the sight
+of the royal triumph lost on the southern realm. England had no love for
+presbyters or hatred for bishops; but as she saw the last check on the
+royal authority broken down over the border she looked the more
+jealously at the effort which James was making to break down such checks
+at home. Under Elizabeth proclamations had been sparingly used, and for
+the most part only to enforce what was already the law. Not only was
+their number multiplied under James, but their character was changed.
+They created new offences, imposed new penalties, and directed offenders
+to be brought before courts which had no legal jurisdiction over them.
+To narrow indeed the sphere of the common law seemed the special aim of
+the royal policy; the four counties of the western border had been
+severed from the rest of England and placed under the jurisdiction of
+the President and Council of Wales, a court whose constitution and
+procedure <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169"></a><a href="./images/169.png">5-169</a>]</span>rested on the sheer will of the Crown. The province of the
+spiritual courts was as busily enlarged. It was in vain that the judges,
+spurred no doubt by the old jealousy between civil and ecclesiastical
+lawyers, entertained appeals against the High Commission, and strove by
+a series of decisions to set bounds to its limitless claims of
+jurisdiction or to restrict its powers of imprisonment to cases of
+schism and heresy. The judges were powerless against the Crown; and
+James was vehement in his support of courts which were closely bound up
+with his own prerogative. What work the courts spiritual might be
+counted on to do, if the king had his way, was plain from the
+announcement of a civilian named Cowell that "the king is above law by
+his absolute power," and that "notwithstanding his oath he may alter and
+suspend any particular law that seemeth hurtful to the public estate."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The claims of the king.</span></p>
+
+<p>Cowell's book was suppressed on a remonstrance of the House of Commons;
+but the party of passive obedience grew fast. Even before his accession
+to the English throne James had formulated his theory of rule in a work
+on <i>The True Law of Free Monarchy</i>, and announced that "although a good
+king will frame his actions to be according to law, yet he is not bound
+thereto, but of his own will and for example giving to his subjects."
+With the Tudor statesmen who used the phrase, "an absolute king" or "an
+absolute <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170"></a><a href="./images/170.png">5-170</a>]</span>monarchy" meant a sovereign or rule complete in themselves and
+independent of all foreign or Papal interference. James chose to regard
+the words as implying the freedom of the monarch from all control by law
+or from responsibility to anything but his own royal will. The king's
+theory was already a system of government; it was soon to become a
+doctrine which bishops preached from the pulpit, and for which brave men
+laid their heads on the block. The Church was quick to adopt its
+sovereign's discovery. Some three years after his accession Convocation
+in its book of Canons denounced as a fatal error the assertion that "all
+civil power, jurisdiction, and authority were first derived from the
+people and disordered multitude, or either is originally still in them,
+or else is deduced by their consent naturally from them; and is not
+God's ordinance originally descending from him and depending upon him."
+In strict accordance with the royal theory these doctors declared
+sovereignty in its origin to be the prerogative of birthright, and
+inculcated passive obedience to the Crown as a religious obligation. The
+doctrine of passive obedience was soon taught in the schools. A few
+years before the king's death the University of Oxford decreed solemnly
+that "it was in no case lawful for subjects to make use of force against
+their princes, or to appear offensively or defensively in the field
+against them." But what gave <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171"></a><a href="./images/171.png">5-171</a>]</span>most force to such teaching were the
+reiterated expressions of James himself. If the king's "arrogant
+speeches" woke resentment in the Parliaments to which they were
+addressed, they created by sheer force of repetition a certain amount of
+belief in the arbitrary power they challenged for the Crown. One
+sentence from a speech delivered in the Star Chamber may serve as an
+instance of their tone. "As it is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what
+God can do, so," said James, "it is presumption and a high contempt in a
+subject to dispute what a king can do, or to say that a king cannot do
+this or that."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Distrust of the king.</span></p>
+
+<p>"If the practice follow the positions," commented a thoughtful observer
+on words such as these, "we are not likely to leave to our successors
+the freedom we received from our forefathers." Their worst effect was in
+changing the whole attitude of the nation towards the Crown. England had
+trusted the Tudors, it distrusted the Stuarts. The mood indeed both of
+king and people had grown to be a mood of jealousy, of suspicion, which,
+inevitable as it was, often did injustice to the purpose of both. King
+James looked on the squires and merchants of the House of Commons as his
+Stuart predecessors had looked on the Scotch baronage. He regarded their
+discussions, their protests, their delays, not as the natural hesitation
+of men called suddenly, and with only half knowledge, to the settlement
+of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172"></a><a href="./images/172.png">5-172</a>]</span>great and complex questions, but as proofs of a conspiracy to fetter
+and impede the action of the Crown. The Commons on the other hand
+listened to the king's hectoring speeches, not as the chance talk of a
+clever and garrulous theorist, but as proofs of a settled purpose to
+change the character of the monarchy. In a word, James had succeeded in
+some seven years of rule in breaking utterly down that mutual
+understanding between the Crown and its subjects on which all
+government, save a sheer despotism, must necessarily rest.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Robert Cecil.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was this mutual distrust which brought about the final breach between
+the Parliament and the king. The question of the impositions had seemed
+for a while to have been waived. The Commons had contented themselves
+with a protest against their levy. James had for two years hesitated in
+acting on the judgement which asserted his right to levy them. But the
+needs of the treasury became too great to admit of further hesitation,
+and in 1608 a royal proclamation imposed customs duties on many articles
+of import and export. The new duties came in fast; but unluckily the
+royal debt grew faster. To a king fresh from the penniless exchequer of
+Holyrood the wealth of England seemed boundless; money was lavished on
+court-feasts and favourites; and with each year the expenditure of James
+reached a higher level. It was in vain that Robert Cecil <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173"></a><a href="./images/173.png">5-173</a>]</span>took the
+treasury into his own hands, and strove to revive the frugal traditions
+of Elizabeth. The king's prodigality undid his minister's work; and in
+1610 Cecil was forced to announce to his master that the annual revenue
+of the Crown must be supplemented by fresh grants from Parliament. The
+scheme which Cecil laid before the king and the Commons is of great
+importance as the last effort of that Tudor policy which had so long
+hindered an outbreak of strife between the nation and the Crown. Differ
+as the Tudors might from one another, they were alike in their keen
+sense of national feeling and in their craving to carry it along with
+them. Masterful as Henry or Elizabeth might be, what they "prized most
+dearly," as the Queen confessed, was "the love and goodwill of their
+subjects." They prized it because they knew the force it gave them. And
+Cecil knew it too. He had grown up among the traditions of the Tudor
+rule. He had been trained by his father in the system of Elizabeth.
+Whether as a minister of the Queen, or as a minister of her successor,
+he had striven to carry that system into effect. His conviction of the
+supremacy of the Crown was as strong as that of James himself, but it
+was tempered by as strong a conviction of the need of the national
+good-will. He had seen what weight the passionate enthusiasm that
+gathered round Elizabeth gave to her policy both at home and abroad; and
+he saw <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174"></a><a href="./images/174.png">5-174</a>]</span>that a time was drawing near when the same weight would be
+needed by the policy of the Crown.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Protestantism in Germany.</span></p>
+
+<p>Slowly but steadily the clouds of religious strife were gathering over
+central Europe. From such a strife, should it once break out in war,
+England could not hold aloof unless the tradition of its policy was
+wholly set aside. And so long as Cecil lived, whatever change might take
+place at home, in all foreign affairs the Elizabethan policy was mainly
+adhered to. Peace indeed was made with Spain; but a close alliance with
+the United Provinces, and a more guarded alliance with France, held the
+ambition of Spain in check almost as effectually as war. The peace in
+fact set England free to provide against dangers which threatened to
+become greater than those from Spanish aggression in the Netherlands.
+Wearily as war in that quarter might drag on, it was clear that the
+Dutchmen could hold their own, and that all that Spain and Catholicism
+could hope for was to save the rest of the Low Countries from their
+grasp. But no sooner was danger from the Spanish branch of the House of
+Austria at an end than Protestantism had to guard itself against its
+German branch. The vast possessions of Charles the Fifth had been parted
+between his brother and his son. While Philip took Spain, Italy, the
+Netherlands, and the Indies, Ferdinand took the German dominions, the
+hereditary Duchy <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175"></a><a href="./images/175.png">5-175</a>]</span>of Austria, the Suabian lands, Tyrol, Styria,
+Carinthia, Carniola. Marriage and fortune brought to the German branch
+the dependent states of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia; and it had
+succeeded in retaining the Imperial crown. The wisdom and moderation of
+Ferdinand and his successor secured tranquillity for Germany through
+some fifty years. They were faithful to the Peace of Passau, which had
+been wrested by Maurice of Saxony from Charles the Fifth, and which
+secured both Protestants and Catholics in the rights and possessions
+which they held at the moment it was made. Their temper was tolerant;
+and they looked on quietly while Protestantism spread over Southern
+Germany and solved all doubtful questions which arose from the treaty in
+its own favour. The Peace had provided that all church land already
+secularized should remain so; of the later secularization of other
+church land it said nothing. It provided that states already Protestant
+should abide so, but it said nothing of the right of other states to
+declare themselves Protestant. Doubt however was set aside by religious
+zeal; new states became Lutheran, and eight great bishoprics of the
+north were secularized. Meanwhile the new faith was spreading fast over
+the dominions of the House of Austria. The nobles of their very Duchy
+embraced it: Moravia, Silesia, Hungary all but wholly abandoned
+Catholicism. Through the earlier reign of Elizabeth <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176"></a><a href="./images/176.png">5-176</a>]</span>it seemed as if by
+a peaceful progress of conversion Germany was about to become
+Protestant.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Catholic reaction.</span></p>
+
+<p>German Catholicism was saved by the Catholic revival and by the energy
+of the Jesuits. It was saved perhaps as much by the strife which broke
+out in the heart of German Protestantism between Lutheran and Calvinist.
+But the Catholic zealots were far from resting content with having
+checked the advance of their opponents. They longed to undo their work.
+They did not question the Treaty of Passau or the settlement made by it;
+but they disputed the Protestant interpretation of its silences; they
+called for the restoration to Catholicism of all church lands
+secularized, of all states converted from the older faith, since its
+conclusion. Their new attitude woke little terror in the Lutheran
+states. The treaty secured their rights, and their position in one
+unbroken mass stretching across Northern Germany seemed to secure them
+from Catholic attack. But the Calvinistic states, Hesse, Baden, and the
+Palatinate, felt none of this security. If the treaty were strictly
+construed it gave them no right of existence, for Calvinism had arisen
+since the treaty was signed. Their position too was a hazardous one.
+They lay girt in on all sides but one by Catholic territories, here by
+the bishops of the Rhineland with the Spaniards in Franche Comt&eacute; and the
+Netherlands to back them, there by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177"></a><a href="./images/177.png">5-177</a>]</span>Bavaria and by the bishoprics of the
+Main. Foes such as these indeed the Calvinists could fairly have faced;
+but behind them lay the House of Austria; and the influence of the
+Catholic revival was at last telling on the Austrian princes. In 1606 an
+attempt of the Emperor Rudolf to force Catholicism again on his people
+woke revolt in the Duchy; and though the troubles were allayed by his
+removal, his successor Matthias persevered though more quietly in the
+same anti-Protestant policy.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Union and the League.</span></p>
+
+<p>The accession of the House of Austria to the number of their foes
+created a panic among the Calvinistic states, and in 1608 they joined
+together in a Protestant Union with Christian of Anhalt at its head. But
+zeal was at once met by zeal; and the formation of the Union was
+answered by the formation of a Catholic League among the states about it
+under Maximilian, the Duke of Bavaria. Both were ostensibly for
+defensive purposes: but the peace of Europe was at once shaken.
+Ambitious schemes woke up in every quarter. Spain saw the chance of
+securing a road along western Germany which would enable her to bring
+her whole force to bear on the rebels in the Low Countries. France on
+the other hand had recovered from the exhaustion of her own religious
+wars, and was eager to take up again the policy pursued by Francis the
+First and his son, of weakening and despoiling Germany by feeding <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178"></a><a href="./images/178.png">5-178</a>]</span>and
+using religious strife across the Rhine. In 1610 a quarrel over Cleves
+afforded a chance for her intervention, and it was only an assassin's
+dagger that prevented Henry the Fourth from doing that which Richelieu
+was to do. England alone could hinder a second outbreak of the Wars of
+Religion; but the first step in such a policy must be a reconciliation
+between King and Parliament. James might hector about the might of the
+Crown, but he had no power of acting with effect abroad save through the
+national good-will. Without troops and without supplies, his threat of
+war would be ridiculous; and without the backing of such a threat Cecil
+knew well that mediation would be a mere delusion. Whether for the
+conduct of affairs at home or abroad it was needful to bring the
+widening quarrel between the king and the Parliament to a close; and it
+was with a settled purpose of reconciliation that Cecil brought James to
+call the Houses again together in 1610.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Great Contract.</span></p>
+
+<p>He never dreamed of conciliating the Commons by yielding unconditionally
+to their demands. Cecil looked on the right to levy impositions as
+legally established; and the Tudor sovereigns had been as keen as James
+himself in seizing on any rights that the law could be made to give
+them. But as a practical statesman he saw that the right could only be
+exercised to the profit of the Crown if it was exercised with the
+good-will of the people. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179"></a><a href="./images/179.png">5-179</a>]</span>To win that good-will it was necessary to put
+the impositions on a legal footing; while for the conduct of affairs it
+was necessary to raise permanently the revenue of the Crown. On the
+Tudor theory of politics these were concessions made by the nation to
+the king; and it was the Tudor practice to buy such concessions by
+counter-concessions made by the king to the nation. Materials for such a
+bargain existed in the feudal rights of the Crown, above all those of
+marriage and wardship, which were harassing to the people while they
+brought little profit to the Exchequer. The Commons had more than once
+prayed for some commutation of these rights, and Cecil seized on their
+prayer as the ground of an accommodation. He proposed that James should
+waive his feudal rights, that he should submit to the sanction by
+Parliament of the impositions already levied, and that he should bind
+himself to levy no more by his own prerogative, on condition that the
+Commons assented to this arrangement, discharged the royal debt, and
+raised the royal revenue by a sum of two hundred thousand a year.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Attitude of the Commons.</span></p>
+
+<p>Such was the "great contract" with which Cecil met the Houses when they
+once more assembled in 1610. It was a bargain which the Commons must
+have been strongly tempted to accept; for heavy as were its terms it
+averted the great danger of arbitrary taxation, and again brought the
+monarchy into constitutional relations <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180"></a><a href="./images/180.png">5-180</a>]</span>with Parliament. What hindered
+their acceptance of it was their suspicion of James. Purveyance and the
+Impositions were far from being the only grievance against which they
+came to protest; they had to complain of the increase of proclamations,
+the establishment of new and arbitrary courts of law, the encroachments
+of the spiritual jurisdiction; and consent to such a bargain, if it
+remedied two evils, would cut off all chance of redressing the rest.
+Were the treasury once full, no means remained of bringing the Crown to
+listen to their protest against the abuses of the Church, the silencing
+of godly ministers, the maintenance of pluralities and non-residence,
+the want of due training for the clergy. Nor had the Commons any mind to
+pass in silence over the illegalities of the preceding years. Whether
+they were to give legal sanction to the impositions or no, they were
+resolute to protest against their levy without sanction of law. James
+forbade them to enter on the subject, but their remonstrance was none
+the less vigorous. "Finding that your majesty, without advice or counsel
+of Parliament, hath lately in time of peace set both greater impositions
+and more in number than any of your noble ancestors did ever in time of
+war," they prayed "that all impositions set without the assent of
+Parliament may be quite abolished and taken away," and that "a law be
+made to declare that all impositions set upon your people, their <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181"></a><a href="./images/181.png">5-181</a>]</span>goods
+or merchandise, save only by common consent in Parliament, are and shall
+be void." As to Church grievances their demands were in the same spirit.
+They prayed that the deposed ministers might be suffered to preach, and
+that the jurisdiction of the High Commission should be regulated by
+statute; in other words, that ecclesiastical like financial matters
+should be taken out of the sphere of the prerogative and be owned as
+lying henceforth within the cognizance of Parliament.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Dissolution of the Parliament.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was no doubt the last demand that roused above all the anger of the
+king. As to some of the grievances he was ready to make concessions. He
+had consulted the judges as to the legality of his proclamations, and
+the judges had pronounced them illegal. It never occurred to James to
+announce his withdrawal from a claim which he now knew to be wholly
+against law, and he kept the opinion of the judges secret; but it made
+him ready to include the grievance of proclamations in his bargain with
+the Commons, if they would grant a larger subsidy. The question of the
+court of Wales he treated in the same temper. But on the question of the
+Church, of Church reform, or of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, he would
+make no concession whatever. He had just wrought his triumph over the
+Scottish Kirk; and had succeeded, as he believed, in transferring the
+control of its spiritual life from the Scottish people to the Crown. He
+was not likely to consent to any <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182"></a><a href="./images/182.png">5-182</a>]</span>reversal of such a process in England
+itself. The claim of the Commons had become at last a claim that England
+through its representatives in Parliament should have a part in the
+direction of its own religious affairs. Such a claim sprang logically
+from the very facts of the Reformation. It was by the joint action of
+the Crown and Parliament that the actual constitution of the English
+Church had been established; and it seemed hard to deny that the same
+joint action was operative for its after reform. But it was in vain that
+the Commons urged their claim. Elizabeth had done wisely in resisting
+it, for her task was to govern a half-Catholic England with a Puritan
+Parliament; and in spite of constitutional forms the Queen was a truer
+representative of national opinion in matters of religion than the House
+of Commons. In her later years all had changed; and the Commons who
+fronted her successor were as truly representative of the religious
+opinion of the realm as Elizabeth had been. But James saw no ground for
+changing the policy of the Crown. The control of the Church and through
+it of English religion lay within the sphere of his prerogative, and on
+this question he was resolute to make a stand. The Commons were as
+resolute as the king. The long and intricate bargaining came on both
+sides to an end; and in February 1611 the first Parliament of James was
+dissolved.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183"></a><a href="./images/183.png">5-183</a>]</span></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr />
+
+<ul>
+  <li>CHAPTER IV</li>
+  <li>THE FAVOURITES</li>
+  <li>1611-1625</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">England and the Crown.</span></p>
+
+<p>The dissolution of the first Stuart Parliament marks a stage in our
+constitutional history. With it the system of the Tudors came to an end.
+The oneness of aim which had carried nation and government alike through
+the storms of the Reformation no longer existed. On the contrary the
+aims of the nation and the aims of the government were now in open
+opposition. The demand of England was that all things in the realm,
+courts, taxes, prerogatives, should be sanctioned and bounded by law.
+The policy of the king was to reserve whatever he could within the
+control of his personal will. James in fact was claiming a more personal
+and exclusive direction of affairs than any English sovereign that had
+gone before him. England, on the other hand, was claiming a greater
+share in its own guidance than it had <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184"></a><a href="./images/184.png">5-184</a>]</span>enjoyed since the Wars of the
+Roses. Nor were the claims on either side speculative or theoretical.
+Differences in the theory of government or on the relative jurisdiction
+of Church and State might have been left as of old to the closet and the
+pulpit. But the opposition between the Crown and the people had gathered
+itself round practical questions, and round questions that were of
+interest to all. Every man's conscience was touched by the question of
+religion. Every man's pocket was touched by the question of taxation.
+The strongest among human impulses, the passion of religious zeal and
+that of personal self-interest, nerved Englishmen to a struggle with the
+Crown. What gave the strife a yet more practical bearing was the fact
+that James had provided the national passion with a constitutional
+rallying-point. There was but one influence which could match the
+reverence which men felt for the Crown, and that was the reverence that
+men felt for the Parliament; nor had that reverence ever stood at a
+greater height than at the moment when James finally broke with the
+Houses. The dissolution of 1611 proclaimed to the whole people a breach
+between two powers which it had hitherto looked upon as one. Not only
+did it disperse to every corner of the realm a crowd of great landowners
+and great merchants who formed centres of local opposition to the royal
+system, but it carried to every shire and every borough the news that
+the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185"></a><a href="./images/185.png">5-185</a>]</span>Monarchy had broken with the Great Council of the realm.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">James his own minister.</span></p>
+
+<p>On Cecil his failure fell like a sentence of doom. Steeped as he was in
+the Tudor temper, he could not understand an age when the Tudor system
+had become impossible; the mood of the Commons and the mood of the king
+were alike unintelligible to him. He could see no ground for the failure
+of the Great Contract save that "God had not blessed it." But he had
+little time to wonder at the new forces which were rising about him, for
+only a year after the dissolution, in May 1612, he died, killed by
+overwork. With him died the last check on the policy of James. So long
+as Cecil lived the Elizabethan tradition, weakened and broken as it
+might be, lived with him. In foreign affairs there was still the
+conviction that the Protestant states must not be abandoned in any fresh
+struggle with the House of Austria. In home affairs there was still the
+conviction that the national strength hung on the establishment of
+good-will between the nation and the Crown. But traditions such as these
+were no longer to hamper the policy of the king. To him Cecil's death
+seemed only to afford an opportunity for taking further strides towards
+the establishment of a purely personal rule. For eight years James had
+borne with the check of a powerful minister. He was resolved now to have
+no real minister but himself. Cecil's amazing capacity for toil, as well
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186"></a><a href="./images/186.png">5-186</a>]</span>as his greed of power, had already smoothed the way for such a step.
+The great statesman had made a political solitude about him. Of his
+colleagues some had been removed by death, some set aside by his
+jealousy. Ralegh lay in prison; Bacon could not find office under the
+Crown. And now that Cecil was removed, there was no minister whose
+character or capacity seemed to give him any right to fill his place.
+James could at last be his own minister. The treasury was put into
+commission. The post of secretary was left vacant, and it was announced
+that the king would be his own Secretary of State. Such an arrangement
+soon broke down, and the great posts of state were again filled with men
+of whose dependence James felt sure. But whoever might nominally hold
+these offices, from the moment of Cecil's death the actual direction of
+affairs was in the hands of the king.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Council set aside.</span></p>
+
+<p>Another constitutional check remained in the royal Council. As the
+influence of Parliament died down during the Wars of the Roses, that of
+the Council took to some extent its place. Composed as it was not only
+of ministers of the Crown but of the higher nobles and hereditary
+officers of state, it served under Tudor as under Plantagenet as an
+efficient check on the arbitrary will of the sovereign. Even the
+despotic temper of Henry VIII. had had to reckon with his Council; it
+had checked act after act of Mary; it played a great <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187"></a><a href="./images/187.png">5-187</a>]</span>part in the reign
+of Elizabeth. In the administrative tradition indeed of the last hundred
+years the Council had become all-important to the Crown. It brought it
+in contact with public opinion, less efficiently, no doubt, but more
+constantly than the Parliament itself; it gave to its acts an imposing
+sanction and assured to them a powerful support; above all it provided a
+body which stood at every crisis between the nation and the monarchy,
+which broke the shock of any conflict, and which could stand forth as
+mediator, should conflict arise, without any loss of dignity on the part
+of the sovereign. But to the practical advantages or to the traditional
+weight of such a body James was utterly blind. His cleverness made him
+impatient of its discussions; his conceit made him impatient of its
+control; while the foreign traditions which he had brought with him from
+a foreign land saw in the great nobles who composed it nothing but a
+possible force which might overawe the Crown. One of his chief aims
+therefore had been to lessen the influence of the Council. So long as
+Cecil lived this was impossible, for the practical as well as the
+conservative temper of Cecil would have shrunk from so violent a change.
+But he was no sooner dead than James hastened to carry out his plans.
+The lords of the Council found themselves of less and less account. They
+were practically excluded from all part in the government; and the whole
+management of affairs passed into the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188"></a><a href="./images/188.png">5-188</a>]</span>hands of the king or of the
+dependent ministers who from this time became mere agents of the king's
+will.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Favourites.</span></p>
+
+<p>Such a personal rule as this, concentrating as it does the whole
+business of government in a single man, requires for its actual conduct
+the entire devotion of the ruler to public affairs. The work of
+Ferdinand of Aragon or of Frederick the Great was the work of
+galley-slaves. It was work which had broken down the strength of Wolsey,
+and which was to bow the iron frame of Oliver Cromwell. But James had no
+mind for work such as this. His intellect was quick, inventive, fruitful
+in device, eager to plan, and confident in the wisdom of its plans. But
+he had none of the quality which distinguishes intellectual power from
+mere cleverness, the capacity not only to plan, but to know what plans
+can actually be carried out, and by what means they can be carried out.
+Like all merely clever men, he looked down on the drudgery of details.
+The posts which he had held vacant were soon filled up; and before many
+months were over James ceased to be his own Treasurer or his own
+Secretary of State. But he still claimed the absolute direction of all
+affairs; he was resolved to be his own chief minister. Even here however
+he felt the need of a more active and practical mood than his own for
+giving shape to the schemes with which his brain was fermenting; and he
+fell back as of old on the tradition of his house. It was so <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189"></a><a href="./images/189.png">5-189</a>]</span>long since
+England had seen a favourite that the memory of Gaveston or De Vere had
+almost faded away. But favourites had been part of the system of the
+Scottish kings. Hemmed in by turbulent barons, unable to find
+counsellors among the nobles to whom the interests of the Crown were
+dearer than the interests of their class or their house, Stuart after
+Stuart had been driven to look for a counsellor and a minister in some
+dependant, bound to them by ties of personal attachment and of common
+danger. The Scotch nobles had dealt with such favourites after their
+manner. One they had hung, others they had stabbed; the last, David
+Rizzio, had fallen beneath their daggers at Mary's feet. But the notion
+of a personal dependant through whom his designs might take form for the
+outer world was as dear to James as to his predecessors, and the death
+of Cecil was soon followed by the appearance of favourites.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Carr.</span></p>
+
+<p>There was an &aelig;sthetic element in the character of the Stuarts which had
+shown itself in the poems and architectural skill of those who had gone
+before James, as it was to show itself in the artistic and literary
+taste of his successor. In James, grotesque as was his own personal
+appearance, it took the form of a passionate admiration of manly beauty.
+It is possible that with the fanciful Platonism of the time he saw in
+the grace of the outer form evidence of a corresponding fairness in the
+soul within. If so, he was egregiously deceived. The <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190"></a><a href="./images/190.png">5-190</a>]</span>first favourite
+whom he raised to honour, a Scotch page named Carr, was as worthless as
+he was handsome. But his faults passed unheeded. Without a single claim
+to distinction save the favour of the king, Carr rose at a bound to
+honours which Elizabeth had denied to Ralegh and to Drake. He was
+enrolled among English nobles, and raised to the peerage as Viscount
+Rochester. Young as he was, he at once became sole minister. The lords
+of the Council found themselves to be mere ciphers. "At the
+Council-table," writes the Spanish Ambassador only a year after Cecil's
+death, "the Viscount Rochester showeth much temper and modesty without
+seeming to press or sway anything; but afterwards the king resolveth all
+business with him alone." So sudden and complete a revolution in the
+system of the state would have drawn ill-will on the favourite, even had
+Rochester shown himself worthy of the king's trust. But he seemed only
+eager to show his unworthiness. Through the year 1613 all England was
+looking on with wonder and disgust at his effort to break the marriage
+of Lord Essex with his wife, Frances Howard. Both had been young when
+they wedded; the passionate girl soon learned to hate her cold and
+formal husband; and she yielded readily enough to the seductions of the
+brilliant favourite. The guilty passion of the two was greedily seized
+on by the political intriguers of the court. Frances was daughter of a
+Howard, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191"></a><a href="./images/191.png">5-191</a>]</span>the Earl of Suffolk; and her father and uncle, the Earl of
+Northampton, who had already felt the influence of the favourite
+displacing their own, saw in the girl's shame a chance of winning this
+influence to their side. With this view they resolved to break the
+marriage with Essex, and to wed her to Rochester. A charge of impotency
+was trumped up against Essex as a ground of divorce, and a commission
+was named for its investigation. The charge was disproved, and with this
+disproof the case broke utterly down; but a fresh allegation was made
+that the Earl lay under a spell of witchcraft which incapacitated him
+from intercourse with his wife, though with her alone. The scandal grew
+as it became clear that the cause of Lady Essex was backed by the king.
+The resolute protest of Archbishop Abbot against the proceedings was met
+by a petulant scolding from James, and when the Commissioners were
+evenly divided in their judgement the king added two known partizans of
+the Countess to turn their verdict. By means such as these, after four
+months of scandal and shame, a sentence of divorce was at last procured,
+and Lady Essex set free to marry the favourite.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Overbury's murder.</span></p>
+
+<p>In the foul process of the divorce James had been either dupe or
+confederate. But throughout the same four months he had been either
+confederate or dupe in a more terrible tragedy. In his rise to greatness
+Rochester had been aided by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192"></a><a href="./images/192.png">5-192</a>]</span>the counsels of Sir Thomas Overbury.
+Overbury was a young man of singular wit and ability, but he had as few
+scruples as his master, and he was as ready to lend himself to the
+favourite's lust as to his ambition. He dictated for him in fact the
+letters which won the heart of Lady Essex. But if he backed the
+intrigue, he seems, from whatever cause, to have opposed the project of
+marriage. So great was his power over Rochester that the Howards deemed
+it needful to take him out of the way while the divorce was being
+brought about, and with this end they roused the king's jealousy of this
+influence over the favourite. James became as resolute to get rid of him
+as the Howards; he offered him an embassy if he would quit England, and
+when he refused, he treated his refusal as an offence against the state.
+Overbury was committed to the Tower, and he remained a close prisoner
+while the suit took its course. Whether more than imprisonment was
+designed by the Howards, or what was the part the two Earls played in
+the deeds that followed, is hard to tell. Still harder is it to tell the
+part of Rochester or of the king. But behind the web of political
+intrigue lay a woman's passion, and the part of Lady Essex is clear.
+Overbury had the secret of her shame to disclose, and she was resolved
+to silence him by death. A few days after the sentence of divorce was
+pronounced, he died in his prison, poisoned by her agents. The crime
+remained unknown; and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193"></a><a href="./images/193.png">5-193</a>]</span>not a whisper of it broke the king's exultation
+over his favourite's success. At the close of 1613 the scandal was
+crowned by the elevation of Rochester to the Earldom of Somerset and his
+union with Frances Howard. Murderess and adulteress as she was, the girl
+moved to her bridal through costly pageants which would have fitted the
+bridal of a queen. The marriage was celebrated in the king's presence.
+Ben Jonson devised the wedding song. Bacon spent two thousand pounds in
+a wedding masque. The London Companies offered sumptuous gifts. James
+himself forced the Lord Mayor to entertain the bride with a banquet in
+Merchant Taylors' House, and the gorgeous wedding-train wound in triumph
+from Westminster to the City.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Immorality of the Court.</span></p>
+
+<p>The shameless bridal was a fitting close to the shameless divorce, as
+both were outrages on the growing sense of morality. But they harmonized
+well enough with the profusion and profligacy of the Stuart Court. In
+spite of Cecil's economy, the treasury was drained to furnish masques
+and revels on a scale of unexampled splendour. While debts remained
+unpaid, lands and jewels were lavished on young adventurers whose fair
+faces caught the royal fancy. Two years back Carr had been a penniless
+fortune-seeker. Now, though his ostensible revenues were not large, he
+was able to spend ninety thousand pounds in a single twelvemonth. The
+Court was as shameless as it <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194"></a><a href="./images/194.png">5-194</a>]</span>was profuse. If the Court of Elizabeth was
+as immoral as that of her successor, its immorality had been shrouded by
+a veil of grace and chivalry. But no veil shrouded the degrading
+grossness of the Court of James. James was no drunkard, but he was a
+hard drinker, and with the people at large his hard drinking passed for
+drunkenness. When the Danish king visited England actors in a masque
+performed at Court were seen rolling intoxicated at his feet. The suit
+of Lady Essex had shown great nobles and officers of state content to
+play panders to their kinswoman. A yet more scandalous trial was soon to
+show them in league with cheats and astrologers and poisoners. James had
+not shrunk from meddling busily in the divorce or from countenancing the
+bridal. Before scenes such as these the half-idolatrous reverence with
+which the sovereign had been regarded throughout the age of the Tudors
+died away into abhorrence and contempt. Court prelates might lavish
+their adulation on the virtues and wisdom of the Lord's anointed; but
+the players openly mocked at the king on the stage, while Puritans like
+Mrs. Hutchinson denounced the orgies of Whitehall in words as fiery as
+those with which Elijah denounced the profligacy of Jezebel.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Parliament of 1614.</span></p>
+
+<p>But profligate and prodigal as was the Court, Somerset had to face the
+stern fact of an empty Exchequer. The debt was growing steadily. It had
+now risen to seven hundred thousand pounds, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195"></a><a href="./images/195.png">5-195</a>]</span>while, in spite of the
+impositions, the annual deficit had mounted to two hundred thousand. The
+king had no mind to face the Parliament again; but a little experience
+of affairs had sobered the arrogance of the favourite, and there still
+remained counsellors of the same mind as Cecil, who pressed on him the
+need of reconciling the Houses with the Crown. What at last prevailed on
+the king were the pledges of some officious meddlers known as
+"undertakers" who promised to bring about the return to the House of
+Commons of a majority favourable to the demand of a subsidy. But pledges
+such as these fell dead before the general excitement which greeted the
+tidings of a new Parliament. Never had an election stirred so much
+popular passion as that of 1614. In every case where rejection was
+possible, the Court candidates were rejected. All the leading members of
+the country party, or as we should now term it, the Opposition, were
+again returned. But three hundred of the members were wholly new men;
+and among them we note for the first time the names of the leaders in
+the later struggle with the Crown. Calne returned John Pym; Yorkshire
+sent Thomas Wentworth; St. Germans chose John Eliot. Signs of
+unprecedented excitement were seen in the vehement cheering and hissing
+which for the first time marked the proceedings of the Commons. But,
+excited as they were, their policy was precisely <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196"></a><a href="./images/196.png">5-196</a>]</span>that of the Parliament
+which had been dissolved three years before. James indeed was farther
+off from any notion of concession than ever; he had no mind to offer
+again the Great Contract or even to allow the subject of impositions to
+be named. But the Parliament was as firm as the king. It refused to
+grant supplies till it had considered public grievances, and it fixed on
+the impositions and the abuses of the Church as the first grievances to
+be redressed. Unluckily the inexperience of the bulk of the House of
+Commons led it into quarrelling on a point of privilege with the Lords;
+and though the Houses had sate but two months James seized on the
+quarrel as a pretext for a fresh dissolution.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Benevolences.</span></p>
+
+<p>The courtiers mocked at the "addled Parliament," but a statesman would
+have learned much from the anger and excitement that ran through its
+stormy debates. During the session the king had been frightened beyond
+his wont by the tone of the Commons, but the only impressions which
+remained in his mind were those of wounded pride and stubborn
+resistance. He sent four of the leading members of the Lower House to
+the Tower, and fell back on an obstinate resolve to govern without any
+Parliament at all. The resolve was carried recklessly out through the
+next seven years. The protests of the Commons James looked on as a
+defiance of the Crown, and he met them in a spirit of counter-defiance.
+The <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197"></a><a href="./images/197.png">5-197</a>]</span>abuses which Parliament after Parliament had denounced were not
+only continued but carried to a greater extent than before. The
+spiritual courts were encouraged in fresh encroachments. Though the
+Crown lawyers admitted the illegality of proclamations they were issued
+in greater numbers than ever. Impositions were strictly levied. But a
+policy of defiance did little to fill the empty treasury. A large sum
+was gained by the sale to the Dutch of the towns which had been left by
+the States in pledge with Elizabeth; but even this supply was exhausted,
+and a fatal necessity drove James on to a formal and conscious breach of
+law. Whatever question might exist as to the legality of impositions, no
+question could exist since the statute of Richard the Third that
+benevolences were illegal. Nor was there any question that the levy of
+benevolences would rouse a deep and abiding resentment in the nation at
+large. Even in the height of the Tudor power Wolsey had been forced to
+abandon a resource which stirred England to revolt. But the Crown
+lawyers advised that while the statute forbade the exaction of gifts it
+left the king free to ask for them; and James resolved to raise money by
+benevolences. At the close of the Parliament of 1614 therefore letters
+were sent out to the counties and boroughs in the name of the Council
+requesting contributions. The letters remained generally unanswered; and
+in the autumn fresh letters had to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198"></a><a href="./images/198.png">5-198</a>]</span>be sent out in which the war which
+now threatened German Protestantism in the Palatinate was used to spur
+the loyalty of the country to a response. The judges on assize were
+ordered to press the king's demand. But prayer and pressure failed
+alike. In the three years which followed the dissolution the strenuous
+efforts of the sheriffs only raised sixty thousand pounds, a sum less
+than two-thirds of the value of a single subsidy. Devonshire,
+Nottinghamshire, and Warwickshire protested against the benevolences,
+and Somersetshire appealed to the statute which forbade them. It was in
+vain that the western remonstrants were silenced by threats from the
+Council, and that the laggard shires were rated for their sluggishness
+in payment. Two counties, those of Hereford and Stafford, sent not a
+penny to the last.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Increase of the Peerage.</span></p>
+
+<p>In his distress for money the king was driven to expedients which
+widened the breach between the gentry and the Crown. He had refused to
+part with the feudal rights which came down to him from the Middle Ages,
+such as his right to the wardship of young heirs and the marriage of
+heiresses. These were now recklessly used as a means of extortion.
+Similar abuses of the prerogative alienated the merchant class. London,
+the main seat of their trade and wealth, was growing fast; and its
+growth roused terror in the government. In 1611 a proclamation forbade
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199"></a><a href="./images/199.png">5-199</a>]</span>any increase of buildings. But the proclamation remained inoperative
+till it was seized as a means of extortion. A Commission was issued in
+1614 with power to fine all who had disobeyed the king's injunctions,
+and by its means a considerable sum was gathered into the treasury. All
+that remained to be done was to alienate the nobles, and this James
+succeeded in doing by a measure in which political design went hand in
+hand with the needs of his finance. The Tudors had watched the baronage
+with jealousy, but they had made no attempt to degrade it. The nobles
+were sent to the prison and the block, but their rank and honours
+remained dignities which the Crown was chary to bestow even on the
+noblest of its servants. During the forty-five years of her reign
+Elizabeth raised but seven persons to the peerage, and with the
+exception of Burleigh all of these were of historic descent. The number
+of lay peers indeed had hardly changed for two centuries; they were
+about fifty at the accession of Henry the Fifth and counted but sixty at
+the accession of James. In so small an assembly, where the Crown could
+count on the unwavering support of ministers, courtiers, and bishops,
+the royal influence had through the last hundred years been generally
+supreme. But among the lords of the "old blood," as those whose honours
+dated from as far back as the Plantagenets were called, there lingered a
+spirit of haughty independence <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200"></a><a href="./images/200.png">5-200</a>]</span>which, if it had quailed before the
+Tudors, showed signs of bolder life now the Tudors had gone. It was the
+policy of James to raise up a new nobility more dependent on the court,
+a nobility that might serve as a bridle on the older lords, while the
+increase in the numbers of the baronage which their creation brought
+about lessened the weight which a peer had drawn from his special and
+unique position in the realm. Such a policy fell in with the needs of
+his treasury. Not only could he degrade the peerage by lavishing its
+honours, but he could degrade it yet more by putting them up to sale. Of
+the forty-five lay peers whom he added to the Upper House during his
+reign, a large number were created by sheer bargaining. Baronies were
+sold to bidders at ten thousand pounds apiece. Ten nobles were created
+in a batch. Peerages were given to the Scotch dependants whom James
+brought with him, to Hume and Hay, and Bruce and Ramsay, as well as to
+his favourites Carr and Villiers. Robartes, of Cornwall, a man who had
+risen to great wealth through the Cornish mines, complained that he had
+been forced to take a baronage, for which he had to pay ten thousand
+pounds to a favourite's use.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The dismissal of Coke.</span></p>
+
+<p>That this profuse creation of peers was more than the result of passing
+embarrassment was shown by its continuance under James's successors.
+Charles the First bestowed no less than fifty-six <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201"></a><a href="./images/201.png">5-201</a>]</span>peerages; Charles the
+Second forty-eight. But in its immediate application it was no doubt
+little more than one of those financial shifts by which the king put off
+from day to day the necessity of again facing the one body which could
+permanently arrest his effort after despotic rule. There still however
+remained a body whose tradition was strong enough, if not to arrest, at
+any rate to check it. The lawyers had been subservient beyond all other
+classes to the Crown. Their narrow pedantry bent slavishly then, as now,
+before isolated precedents, while then, as now, their ignorance of
+general history hindered them from realizing the conditions under which
+these precedents had been framed, and to which they owed their very
+varying value. It was thus that the judges had been brought to support
+James in his case of the Post-Nati or in the levy of impositions. But
+beyond precedents even the judges refused to go. They had done their
+best in a case that came before them to restrict the jurisdiction of the
+ecclesiastical courts within legal and definite bounds, and their effort
+at once brought down on them the wrath of the king. All that affected
+the spiritual jurisdiction affected, he said, his prerogative; and
+whenever any case which affected his prerogative came before a court of
+justice he asserted that the king possessed an inherent right to be
+consulted as to the decision upon it. The judges timidly, though firmly,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202"></a><a href="./images/202.png">5-202</a>]</span>repudiated such a right as unknown to the law. To a king whose notions
+of law and of courts of law were drawn from those of Scotland, where
+justice had for centuries been a ready weapon in the royal hand, such a
+protest was utterly unintelligible. James sent for them to the royal
+closet. He rated them like schoolboys till they fell on their knees and
+with a single exception pledged themselves to obey his will. The one
+exception was the Chief Justice, Sir Edward Coke, a narrow-minded and
+bitter-tempered man, but of the highest eminence as a lawyer, and with a
+reverence for the law that overrode every other instinct. He had for
+some time been forced to evade the king's questions and "closetings" on
+judicial cases by timely withdrawal from the royal presence. But now
+that he was driven to answer, he answered well. When any case came
+before him, he said he would act as it became a judge to act. Coke was
+at once dismissed from the Council, and a provision which made the
+judicial office tenable at the king's pleasure, but which had long
+fallen into disuse, was revived to humble the common law in the person
+of its chief officer. In November 1616, on the continuance of his
+resistance, he was deprived of his post of Chief Justice.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Crown and the Law.</span></p>
+
+<p>No act of James seems to have stirred a deeper resentment among
+Englishmen than this announcement of his resolve to tamper with the
+course of justice. The firmness of Coke in his refusal to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203"></a><a href="./images/203.png">5-203</a>]</span>consult with
+the king on matters affecting his prerogative was justified by what
+immediately followed. As James interpreted the phrase, to consult with
+the king meant simply to obey the king's bidding as to what the
+judgement of a court should be. In the case which was then at issue he
+summoned the judges simply to listen to his decision; and the judges
+promised to enforce it. The king's course was an outrage on the growing
+sense of law; but his success was not without useful results. In his
+zeal to assert his personal will as the source of all power, whether
+judicial or other, James had struck one of its most powerful instruments
+from the hands of the Crown. He had broken the spell of the royal
+courts. If the good sense of Englishmen had revolted against their
+decisions in favour of the prerogative, the English reverence for law
+had made men submit to them. But now that all show of judicial
+independence was taken away, and the judges debased into mere
+mouthpieces of the king's will, the weight of their judgements came to
+an end. The nation had bent before their decision in favour of the
+Post-Nati; it had never a thought of bending before their decision in
+favour of Ship-money.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Fall of Somerset.</span></p>
+
+<p>What an impassable gulf lay between the English conception of justice
+and that of James was shown even more vividly by the ruin of one who
+stood higher than Coke. At the opening of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204"></a><a href="./images/204.png">5-204</a>]</span>1615 Somerset was still
+supreme. He held the rank of Lord Chamberlain; but he was practically
+the King's minister in state affairs, domestic or foreign. He was backed
+since his marriage by the influence of the Howards; and his
+father-in-law, Suffolk, was Lord Treasurer. He was girt round indeed by
+rivals and foes. The Queen was jealous of his influence over James;
+Archbishop Abbot dreaded his intrigues with Spain, intrigues which drew
+fresh meaning from the Catholic sympathies of the Howards; above all the
+older Lords of the Council, whom he ousted from any share in the
+government, watched eagerly for the moment when they hoped to regain
+their power by his fall. As he moved through the crowd of nobles he
+heard men muttering "that one man should not for ever rule them all."
+But Somerset's arrogance only grew with the danger. A new favourite was
+making way at court, and the king was daily growing colder. But Somerset
+only rated James for his coldness, demanded the dismissal of the new
+favourite, and refused to be propitiated by the king's craven apologies.
+His enemies however had a fatal card to play. In the summer whispers
+stole about of Overbury's murder, and of Somerset's part in it. The
+charge was laid secretly before the king, and a secret investigation
+conducted by his order threw darker and darker light on the story of
+guilt. Somerset was still unconscious of his peril, and the news that
+some meaner <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205"></a><a href="./images/205.png">5-205</a>]</span>agents in the crime were arrested found him still with the
+king and in the seeming enjoyment of his wonted favour. He at once took
+horse for London to face his foes, and James parted from him with his
+usual demonstrations of affection. "He would neither eat nor drink," he
+said, "till he saw him again." He was hardly gone when James added, "I
+shall never see him more." His ruin in fact was already settled. In a
+few days he was a prisoner with his wife in the Tower; the agents in the
+fatal plot were sent to trial and to the gallows; and in May 1616 the
+young Countess was herself brought before the Lord Steward's Court to
+avow her guilt. Somerset's daring nature made a more stubborn stand. He
+threatened the king with disclosures, we know not of what, and when
+arraigned denied utterly any share in the murder. All however was in
+vain; and he and the Countess were alike sentenced to death.</p>
+
+<p>If ever justice called for the rigorous execution of the law, it was in
+the case of Frances Howard. Not only was the Countess a murderess, but
+her crime passed far beyond the range of common murders. Girl as she was
+when it was wrought, she had shown the coolness and deliberation of a
+practised assassin in her lust to kill. Chance foiled her efforts again
+and again, but she persisted for months, she changed her agents and her
+modes of death, till her victim was slain. Nor was her crime without
+profit. She gained by it all she <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206"></a><a href="./images/206.png">5-206</a>]</span>wanted. The secret of her adultery was
+hidden. There was no one to reveal the perjuries of her divorce. Her
+ambition and her passion were alike gratified. She became the bride of
+the man she desired. Her kindred filled the court. Her husband ruled the
+king. If crime be measured by its relentless purpose, if the guilt of
+crime be heightened by its amazing success, then no woman that ever
+stood in the dock was a greater criminal than the wife of Rochester. Nor
+was this all. The wretched agents in her crime were sent pitilessly to
+the gallows. The guilt of two of them was at least technically doubtful,
+but the doubt was not suffered to interfere with their punishment. Only
+in the one case where no doubt existed, in the case of the woman who had
+spurred and bribed these tools to their crime, was punishment spared. If
+life was left to such a criminal, the hanging of these meaner agents was
+a murder. But this was the course on which James had resolved, and he
+had resolved on it from the first. There was no more pressure on him.
+The rivals of Somerset had no need for his blood. The councillors and
+the new favourite required only his ruin, and James himself was content
+with being freed from a dependant who had risen to be his master. His
+pride probably shrank from the shame which the public death of such
+criminals on such a charge might bring on himself and his crown; his
+good-nature pleaded <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207"></a><a href="./images/207.png">5-207</a>]</span>for pity, and the claims of justice never entered
+his head. Before the trial began he had resolved that neither should
+die, and the sentence of the Earl and the Countess was soon commuted
+into that of an easy confinement during a few years in the Tower.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Villiers.</span></p>
+
+<p>The fall of Somerset seemed to restore the old system of rule; and for a
+short time the Council regained somewhat of its influence. But when the
+Queen gave her aid in Somerset's overthrow she warned Archbishop Abbot
+that it was only the investiture of a new favourite with Somerset's
+power. And a new favourite was already on the scene. It had only been
+possible indeed to overthrow the Earl by bringing a fresh face into the
+court. In the autumn of 1614 the son of a Leicestershire knight, George
+Villiers, presented himself to James. He was poor and friendless, but
+his personal beauty was remarkable, and it was by his beauty that he
+meant to make his way with the king. His hopes were soon realized.
+Queen, Primate, Councillors seized on the handsome youth to pit him
+against the favourite; in spite of Somerset's struggles he rose from
+post to post; and the Earl's ruin sealed his greatness. He became Master
+of the Horse; before the close of 1616 he was raised to the peerage as
+Viscount Villiers, and gifted with lands to the value of eighty thousand
+pounds. The next year he was Earl of Buckingham; in 1619 he was made
+Lord <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208"></a><a href="./images/208.png">5-208</a>]</span>High Admiral; a marquisate and a dukedom raised him to the head of
+the English nobility. What was of far more import was the hold he gained
+upon the king. Those who had raised the handsome boy to greatness as a
+means of establishing their own power found themselves foiled. From the
+moment when Somerset entered the Tower, Villiers virtually took his
+place as Minister of State. The councillors soon found themselves again
+thrust aside. The influence of the new favourite surpassed that of his
+predecessor. The payment of bribes to him or marriage to his greedy
+kindred became the one road to political preferment. Resistance to his
+will was inevitably followed by dismissal from office. Even the highest
+and most powerful of the nobles were made to tremble at the nod of this
+young upstart.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His character.</span></p>
+
+<p>"Never any man in any age, nor, I believe, in any country," says the
+astonished Clarendon in reviewing his strange career, "rose in so short
+a time to so much greatness of honour, power, or fortune, upon no other
+advantage or recommendation than of the beauty or gracefulness of his
+person." Such, no doubt, was the general explanation of his rise among
+men of the time; and it would have been well had the account been true.
+The follies and profusion of a handsome minion pass lightly over the
+surface of a nation's life. Unluckily Villiers owed his fortune to other
+qualities besides personal beauty. He was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209"></a><a href="./images/209.png">5-209</a>]</span>amazingly ignorant, his greed
+was insatiate, his pride mounted to sheer midsummer madness. But he had
+no inconsiderable abilities. He was quick of wit and resolute of
+purpose; he shrank from no labour; his boldness and self-confidence
+faced any undertaking which was needful for the king's service; he was
+devoted, heart and soul, to the Crown. Over James his hold was that of a
+vehement and fearless temper over a mind infinitely better informed,
+infinitely more thoughtful and reflective, but vague and hesitating
+amidst all its self-conceit, crowded with theories and fancies, and with
+a natural bent to the unpractical and unreal. To such a mind the
+shallow, brilliant adventurer came as a relief. James found all his wise
+follies and politic moonshine translated for him into positive fact. He
+leant more and more heavily on an adviser who never doubted and was
+always ready to act. He drew strength from his favourite's
+self-confidence. Rochester had bent before greatness and listened more
+than once, even in the hour of his triumph, to the counsels of wiser
+men. But on the conceit of Villiers the warnings of Abbot, the counsels
+of Bacon, were lavished in vain. He saw no course but his own; and the
+showy, audacious temper of the man made that course always a showy and
+audacious one. It was this that made the choice of the new favourite
+more memorable than the choice of Carr. At a moment when conciliation
+and concession <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210"></a><a href="./images/210.png">5-210</a>]</span>were most needed on the part of the Crown, the character
+of Villiers made concession and conciliation impossible. To James his
+new adviser seemed the weapon he wanted to smite with trenchant edge the
+resistance of the realm. He never dreamed that the haughty young
+favourite, on whose neck he loved to loll, and whose cheek he slobbered
+with kisses, was to drag down in his fatal career the throne of the
+Stuarts.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Spanish marriage.</span></p>
+
+<p>As yet the temper of Villiers was as little known to the country as to
+the king. But the setting up of a new favourite on the ruin of the old
+had a significance which no Englishman could miss. It proved beyond
+question that the system of personal rule which was embodied in these
+dependent ministers was no passing caprice, but the settled purpose of
+the king. And never had such immense results hung on his resolve. Great
+as was the importance of the struggle at home, it was for a while to be
+utterly overshadowed by the greatness of the struggle which was opening
+abroad. The dangers which Cecil had foreseen in Germany were fast
+drawing to a head. Though he had failed to put England in a position to
+meet them, the dying statesman remained true to his policy. In 1612 he
+brought about a marriage between the king's daughter, Elizabeth, and the
+heir of the Elector Palatine, who was the leading prince in the
+Protestant Union. Such a marriage was a pledge that England would not
+tamely stand by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211"></a><a href="./images/211.png">5-211</a>]</span>if the Union was attacked; while the popularity of the
+match showed how keenly England was watching the dangers of German
+Protestantism, and how ready it was to defend it. But the step was
+hardly taken when Cecil's death left James free to pursue a policy of
+his own. The king was as anxious as his minister to prevent an outbreak
+of strife; and his daughter's bridal gave him a personal interest in the
+question. But he was far from believing with Cecil that the support of
+England was necessary for effective action. On the contrary, his quick,
+shallow intelligence held that it had found a way by which the Crown
+might at once exert weight abroad and be rendered independent of the
+nation at home. This was by a joint action with Spain. Weakened as were
+the resources of Spain by her struggle in the Netherlands, she was known
+to be averse from the opening of new troubles in Germany; and James
+might fairly reckon on her union with him in the work of peace. Her
+influence with the German branch of the House of Austria, as well as the
+weight her opinion had with every Catholic power, made her efforts even
+more important than those of James with the Calvinists. And that such a
+union could be brought about the king never doubted. His son was growing
+to manhood; and for years Spain had been luring James to a closer
+friendship by hints of the Prince's marriage with an Infanta. Such a
+match would not only gratify <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212"></a><a href="./images/212.png">5-212</a>]</span>the pride of a sovereign who in his
+earlier days in his little kingdom had been overawed by the great
+Catholic monarchy, and on whose imagination it still exercised a spell,
+but it would proclaim to the world the union of the powers in the work
+of peace, while it provided James with the means of action. For poor as
+Spain really was, she was still looked upon as the richest state in the
+world; and the king believed that the bride would bring with her a dowry
+of some half-a-million. Such a dowry would set him free from the need of
+appealing to his Parliament, and give him the means of acting
+energetically on the Rhine.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The policy of Spain.</span></p>
+
+<p>That there were difficulties in the way of such a policy, that Spain
+would demand concessions to the English Catholics, that the marriage
+would give England a Catholic queen, that the future heir of its crown
+must be trained by a Catholic mother, above all that the crown would be
+parted by plans such as these yet more widely from the sympathy of the
+nation, James could not but know. What he might have known as clearly,
+had he been a wise man instead of a merely clever man, was that, however
+such a bargain might suit himself, it was hardly likely to suit Spain.
+Spain was asked in effect to supply a bankrupt king with the means of
+figuring as the protector of Protestantism in Germany, while the only
+consideration offered to her was the hand of Prince Charles. But it
+never occurred to James to look <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213"></a><a href="./images/213.png">5-213</a>]</span>at his schemes in any other light than
+his own. On the dissolution of the Parliament of 1614 he addressed a
+proposal of marriage to the Spanish court. Whatever was its ultimate
+purpose, Spain was careful to feed hopes which secured, so long as they
+lasted, better treatment for the Catholics, and which might be used to
+hold James from any practical action on behalf of the Protestants in
+Germany. Her cordiality increased as she saw, in spite of her protests,
+the crisis approaching. One member of the Austrian house, Ferdinand, had
+openly proclaimed and carried out his purpose of forcibly suppressing
+heresy in the countries he ruled, the Tyrol, Carinthia, Carniola, and
+Styria; and his succession to the childless Matthias in the rest of the
+Austrian dominions would infallibly be followed by a similar repression.
+To the Protestants of the Duchy, of Bohemia, of Hungary, therefore, the
+accession of Ferdinand meant either utter ruin or civil war, and a civil
+war would spread like wildfire along the Danube to the Rhine. But
+Matthias was resolved on bringing about the recognition of Ferdinand as
+his successor; and Spain saw that the time was come for effectually
+fettering James. If troubles must arise, religion and policy at once
+dictated the use which Spain would have to make of them. She could not
+support heretics, and she had very good reasons for supporting their
+foes. The great aim of her statesmen was to hold what was left of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214"></a><a href="./images/214.png">5-214</a>]</span>Low Countries against either France or the Dutch, and now that she had
+lost the command of the sea, the road overland from her Italian
+dominions along the Rhine through Franche Comt&eacute; to the Netherlands was
+absolutely needful for this purpose. But this road led through the
+Palatinate; and if war was to break out Spain must either secure the
+Palatinate for herself or for some Catholic prince on whose good-will
+she could rely. That the Dutch would oppose such a scheme was
+inevitable; but James alone could give fresh strength to the Dutch; and
+James could be duped into inaction by playing with his schemes for a
+marriage with the Infanta. In 1617 therefore negotiations for this
+purpose were formally opened between the courts of London and Madrid.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Ralegh's death.</span></p>
+
+<p>Anger and alarm spread through England as the nation learned that James
+aimed at placing a Catholic queen upon its throne. Even at the court
+itself the cooler heads of statesmen were troubled by this disclosure of
+the king's projects. The old tradition of Cecil's policy lingered among
+a powerful party which had its representatives among the royal
+ministers; and powerless as these were to influence the king's course,
+they still believed they could impede it. If by any means war could be
+stirred up between England and Spain the marriage-treaty would fall to
+ruin, and James be forced into union with the Protestants <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215"></a><a href="./images/215.png">5-215</a>]</span>abroad and
+into some reconciliation with the Parliament at home. The wild project
+by which they strove to bring war about may have sprung from a brain
+more inventive than their own. Of the great statesmen and warriors of
+Elizabeth's day one only remained. At the opening of the new reign Sir
+Walter Ralegh had been convicted on a charge of treason; but though
+unpardoned the sentence was never carried out, and he had remained ever
+since a prisoner in the Tower. As years went by the New World, where he
+had founded Virginia and where he had gleaned news of a Golden City,
+threw more and more a spell over his imagination; and at this moment he
+disclosed to James his knowledge of a gold-mine on the Oronoco, and
+prayed that he might sail thither and work its treasures for the king.
+No Spanish settlement, he said, had been made there; and like the rest
+of the Elizabethans he took no heed of the Spanish claims to all lands
+in America, whether settled or no. The king was tempted by the bait of
+gold; but he had no mind to be tricked out of his friendship with Spain;
+he exacted a pledge against any attack on Spanish territory, and told
+Ralegh that the shedding of Spanish blood would cost him his head. The
+threat told little on a man who had risked his head again and again; who
+believed in the tale he told; and who knew that if war could be brought
+about between England and Spain a new career was open to him. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216"></a><a href="./images/216.png">5-216</a>]</span>He found
+the coast occupied by Spanish troops; and while evading direct orders to
+attack, he sent his men up the country. They plundered a Spanish town,
+found no gold-mine, and soon came broken and defeated back. Ralegh's son
+had fallen in the struggle; but, heart-broken as he was by the loss and
+disappointment, the natural daring of the man saw a fresh resource. He
+proposed to seize the Spanish treasure ships as he returned, to sail
+with their gold to England, and like Drake to turn the heads of nation
+and king by the immense spoil. But the temper of the buccaneers was now
+strange to English seamen; his men would not follow him; and he was
+brought home to face his doom. James at once put his old sentence in
+force; and the death of Ralegh on the scaffold atoned for the affront to
+Spain.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The troubles in Bohemia.</span></p>
+
+<p>The failure of Ralegh came at a critical moment in German history. In
+1617, while he was traversing the Southern seas, Ferdinand was presented
+by Matthias to the Diet of Bohemia, and acknowledged by it as successor
+to that kingdom. As had been foreseen, he at once began the course of
+forcible suppression of Protestantism which had been successful in his
+other dominions. But the Bohemian nobles were not men to give up their
+faith without a fight for it; and in May 1618 they rose in revolt, flung
+Ferdinand's deputies out of the window of the palace at Prague, and
+called the country to arms. The long-dreaded crisis had come for
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217"></a><a href="./images/217.png">5-217</a>]</span>Germany; but, as if with a foresight of the awful sufferings that the
+struggle was to bring, the Germans strove to look on it as a local
+revolt. The Lutheran princes longed only "to put the fire out"; the
+Calvinistic Union refused aid to the Bohemians; the Catholic League
+remained motionless. What partly accounted for the inaction of the
+Protestants was the ability of the Bohemians to hold their own. They
+were a match for all Ferdinand's efforts; through autumn and winter they
+held him easily at bay. In the spring of 1619 they even marched upon
+Vienna and all but surprised their enemy within his capital. But at this
+juncture the death of Matthias changed the face of affairs. Ferdinand
+became master of the whole Austrian heritage in Germany, and he offered
+himself as candidate for the vacant Imperial crown. Union among the
+Protestants might have hindered his accession, and with it the terrible
+strife which he was to bring upon the Empire. But an insane quarrel
+between Lutherans and Calvinists paralyzed their efforts; and in August
+1619 Ferdinand became Emperor. Bohemia knew that its strength was
+insufficient to check a foe such as this; and two days before his formal
+election to the Empire its nobles declared the realm vacant, and chose
+Frederick, the young Elector-Palatine, as their king.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Outbreak of the Thirty Years War.</span></p>
+
+<p>Frederick accepted the crown; but he was no sooner enthroned at Prague
+than the Bohemians <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218"></a><a href="./images/218.png">5-218</a>]</span>saw themselves foiled in the hopes which had
+dictated their choice. They had trusted that Frederick's election would
+secure them support from the Calvinist Union, of which he was the
+leading member, and from James, whose daughter was his wife. But support
+from the Union was cut off by the jealousy of the French Government,
+which saw with suspicion the upgrowth of a great Calvinistic power,
+stretching from Bohemia to its own frontier, and pushing its influence
+through its relations with the Huguenot party into the very heart of
+France. James on the other hand was bitterly angered at Frederick's
+action. He could not recognize the right of subjects to depose a prince,
+or support Bohemia in what he looked on as revolt, or Frederick in what
+he believed to be the usurpation of a crown. By envoy after envoy he
+called on his son-in-law to lay down his new royalty, and to return to
+the Palatinate. His refusal of aid to the Protestant Union helped the
+pressure of France in paralyzing its action, while he threatened war
+against Holland, the one power which was earnest in the Palatine's
+cause. It was in vain that in England both court and people were
+unanimous in a cry for war, or that Archbishop Abbot from his sick-bed
+implored James to strike one blow for Protestantism. James still called
+on Frederick to withdraw from Bohemia, and relied in such a case on the
+joint efforts of England and Spain for a re-establishment <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219"></a><a href="./images/219.png">5-219</a>]</span>of peace. But
+no consent to his plans could be wrung from Frederick; and the spring of
+1620 saw Spain ready to throw aside the mask. The time had come for
+securing her road to the Netherlands, as well as for taking her old
+stand as a champion of Catholicism. Rumours of her purpose had already
+stolen over the Channel, and James was brought at last to suffer Sir
+Horace Vere to take some English volunteers to the Palatinate. But the
+succour came too late. Spinola, the Spanish general in the Low
+Countries, was ordered to march to the aid of the Emperor; and the
+famous Spanish battalions were soon moving up the Rhine. Their march
+turned the local struggle in Bohemia into a European war. The whole face
+of affairs was changed as by enchantment. The hesitation of the Union
+was ended by the needs of self-defence; but it could only free its hands
+for action against the Spaniards by signing a treaty of neutrality with
+the Catholic League. The treaty sealed the fate of Bohemia. It enabled
+the army of the League under Maximilian of Bavaria to march down the
+valley of the Danube; Austria was forced to submit unconditionally to
+Ferdinand; and in August, as Spinola reached the frontier of the
+Palatinate, the joint army of Ferdinand and the League prepared to enter
+Bohemia.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Parliament of 1621.</span></p>
+
+<p>On James the news of these events burst like a thunderbolt. He had been
+duped; and for the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220"></a><a href="./images/220.png">5-220</a>]</span>moment he bent before the burst of popular fury
+which the danger to German Protestantism called forth throughout the
+land. The cry for a Parliament, the necessary prelude to a war,
+overpowered the king's secret resistance; and the Houses were again
+called together. But before they could meet the game of Protestantism
+was lost. Spinola beat the troops of the Union back upon Worms, and
+occupied with ease the bulk of the Palatinate. On the 8th of November
+the army of the League forced Frederick to battle before the walls of
+Prague; and before the day was over he was galloping off, a fugitive, to
+North Germany. Such was the news that met the Houses on their assembly
+at Westminster in January 1621. The instinct of every Englishman told
+him that matters had now passed beyond the range of mediation or
+diplomacy. Armies were moving, fierce passions were aroused, schemes of
+vast ambition and disturbance were disclosing themselves; and at such a
+moment the only intervention possible was an intervention of the sword.
+The German princes called on James to send them an army. "The business
+is gone too far to be redressed with words only," said the Danish king,
+who was prepared to help them. "I thank God we hope, with the help of
+his Majesty of Great Britain and the rest of our friends, to give unto
+the Count Palatine good conditions. If ever we are to do any good for
+the liberty of Germany and religion now is the time." But this <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221"></a><a href="./images/221.png">5-221</a>]</span>appeal
+met offers of "words only" and Denmark withdrew from the strife in
+despair. James in fact was as confident in his diplomatic efforts as
+ever; but even he saw at last that they needed the backing of some sort
+of armed force, and it was to procure this backing that he called for
+supplies from the Parliament.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Impeachment of the monopolists.</span></p>
+
+<p>The Commons were bitterly chagrined. They had come together, trusting
+that their assembly meant such an attitude on the part of the Crown as
+would have rallied the Protestants of Germany round England, and have
+aided the enterprise of the Dane. Above all they hoped for war with the
+power which had at once turned the strife to its own profit, whose
+appearance in the Palatinate had broken the strength of German
+Protestantism, and set the League free to crush Frederick at Prague.
+They found only demands for supplies, and a persistence in the old
+efforts to patch up a peace. Fresh envoys were now labouring to argue
+the Emperor into forgiveness of Frederick, and to argue the Spaniards
+into an evacuation of Frederick's dominions. With such aims not only was
+no war against the Spaniard to be thought of, but his good-will must be
+sought by granting permission for the export of arms from England to
+Spain. The Commons could only show their distrust of such a policy by a
+small vote of supplies and refusal of further aid in the future. But if
+their resentment could find no field in foreign <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222"></a><a href="./images/222.png">5-222</a>]</span>affairs, it found a
+field at home. The most crying constitutional grievance arose from the
+revival of monopolies, in spite of the pledge of Elizabeth to suppress
+them. To the Crown they brought little profit; but they gratified the
+king by their extension of the sphere of his prerogative, and they put
+money into the pockets of his greedy dependants. A parliamentary right
+which had slept ever since the reign of Henry the Sixth, the right of
+the Lower House to impeach great offenders at the bar of the Lords, was
+revived against the monopolists; and James was driven by the general
+indignation to leave them to their fate. But the practice of monopolies
+was only one sign of the corruption of the court. Sales of peerages,
+sales of high offices of State, had raised a general disgust; and this
+disgust showed itself in the impeachment of the highest among the
+officers of State.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Fall of Bacon.</span></p>
+
+<p>At the accession of James the rays of royal favour, so long looked for
+in vain, had broken slowly upon Francis Bacon. He became successively
+Solicitor and Attorney-General; the year of Shakspere's death saw him
+called to the Privy Council; he verified Elizabeth's prediction by
+becoming Lord Keeper. At last the goal of his ambition was reached. He
+had attached himself to the rising fortunes of Buckingham, and in 1618
+the favour of Buckingham made him Lord Chancellor. He was raised to the
+peerage as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223"></a><a href="./images/223.png">5-223</a>]</span>Baron Verulam, and created, at a later time, Viscount St.
+Albans. But the nobler dreams for which these meaner honours had been
+sought escaped Bacon's grasp. His projects still remained projects,
+while to retain his hold on office he was stooping to a miserable
+compliance with the worst excesses of Buckingham and his master. The
+years during which he held the Chancellorship were, in fact, the most
+disgraceful years of a disgraceful reign. They saw the execution of
+Ralegh, the sacrifice of the Palatinate, the exaction of benevolences,
+the multiplication of monopolies, the supremacy of Buckingham. Against
+none of the acts of folly and wickedness which distinguished James's
+government did Bacon do more than protest; in some of the worst, and
+above all in the attempt to coerce the judges into prostrating the law
+at the king's feet, he took a personal part. But even his protests were
+too much for the young favourite, who regarded him as the mere creature
+of his will. It was in vain that Bacon flung himself on the Duke's
+mercy, and begged him to pardon a single instance of opposition to his
+caprice. A Parliament was impending, and Buckingham resolved to avert
+from himself the storm which was gathering by sacrificing to it his
+meaner dependants.</p>
+
+<p>To ordinary eyes the Chancellor was at the summit of human success.
+Jonson had just sung of him as one "whose even thread the Fates spin
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224"></a><a href="./images/224.png">5-224</a>]</span>round and full out of their choicest and their whitest wool" when the
+storm burst. The Commons charged Bacon with corruption in the exercise
+of his office. It had been customary among Chancellors to receive gifts
+from successful suitors after their suit was ended. Bacon, it is
+certain, had taken such gifts from men whose suits were still unsettled;
+and though his judgement may have been unaffected by them, the fact of
+their reception left him with no valid defence. He at once pleaded
+guilty to the charge. "I do plainly and ingenuously confess that I am
+guilty of corruption, and do renounce all defence. I beseech your
+Lordships," he added, "to be merciful to a broken reed." Though the
+heavy fine laid on him was remitted by the Crown, he was deprived of the
+Great Seal and declared incapable of holding office in the State or
+sitting in Parliament. Fortunately for his after fame Bacon's life was
+not to close in this cloud of shame. His fall restored him to that
+position of real greatness from which his ambition had so long torn him
+away. "My conceit of his person," says Ben Jonson, "was never increased
+towards him by his place or honours. But I have and do reverence him for
+his greatness that was only proper to himself, in that he seemed to me
+ever by his work one of the greatest men, and most worthy of admiration,
+that had been in many ages. In his adversity I ever prayed that God
+would give him strength; for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225"></a><a href="./images/225.png">5-225</a>]</span>greatness he could not want." Bacon's
+intellectual activity was never more conspicuous than in the last four
+years of his life. He began a digest of the laws and a history of
+England under the Tudors, revised and expanded his essays, and dictated
+a jest-book. He had presented "Novum Organum" to James in the year
+before his fall; in the year after it he produced his "Natural and
+Experimental History." Meanwhile he busied himself with experiments in
+physics which might carry out the principles he was laying down in these
+works; and it was while studying the effect of cold in preventing animal
+putrefaction that he stopped his coach to stuff a fowl with snow and
+caught the fever which ended in his death.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">James clings to Spain.</span></p>
+
+<p>James was too shrewd to mistake the importance of Bacon's impeachment;
+but the hostility of Buckingham to the Chancellor, and Bacon's own
+confession of his guilt, made it difficult to resist his condemnation.
+Energetic too as its measures were against corruption and monopolists,
+the Parliament respected scrupulously the king's prejudices in other
+matters; and even when checked by an adjournment, resolved unanimously
+to support him in any earnest effort for the Protestant cause. A warlike
+speech from a member at the close of the session in June roused an
+enthusiasm which recalled the days of Elizabeth. The Commons answered
+the appeal by a unanimous vote, "lifting their hats as high as they
+could hold <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226"></a><a href="./images/226.png">5-226</a>]</span>them," that for the recovery of the Palatinate they would
+adventure their fortunes, their estates, and their lives. "Rather this
+declaration," cried a leader of the country party when it was read by
+the Speaker, "than ten thousand men already on the march." For the
+moment indeed the energetic declaration seemed to give vigour to the
+royal policy. James had aimed throughout at the restitution of Bohemia
+to Ferdinand, and at inducing the Emperor, through the mediation of
+Spain, to abstain from any retaliation on the Palatinate. He now freed
+himself for a moment from the trammels of diplomacy, and enforced a
+cessation of the attack on his son-in-law's dominions by a threat of
+war. The suspension of arms lasted through the summer of 1621; but
+threats could do no more. Frederick still refused to make the
+concessions which James pressed on him, and the army of the League
+advancing from Bohemia drove the forces of the Elector out of the upper
+or eastern portion of the Palatinate. Again the general restoration
+which James was designing had been thrown further back than ever by a
+Catholic advance; but the king had no mind to take up the challenge. He
+was only driven the more on his old policy of mediation through the aid
+of Spain. An end was put to all appearance of hostilities. The
+negotiations for the marriage with the Infanta, which had never ceased,
+were pressed more busily. Gondomar, the Spanish <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227"></a><a href="./images/227.png">5-227</a>]</span>ambassador, who had
+become all-powerful at the English Court, was assured that no effectual
+aid should be sent to the Palatinate. The English fleet, which was
+cruising by way of menace off the Spanish coast, was called home. The
+king dismissed those of his ministers who still opposed a Spanish
+policy; and threatened on trivial pretexts a war with the Dutch, the one
+great Protestant power that remained in alliance with England, and was
+ready to back the Elector.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Dissolution of the Parliament.</span></p>
+
+<p>But he had still to reckon with his Parliament; and the first act of the
+Parliament on its reassembling in November was to demand a declaration
+of war with Spain. The instinct of the nation was wiser than the
+statecraft of the king. Ruined and enfeebled as she really was, Spain to
+the world at large still seemed the champion of Catholicism. It was the
+entry of her troops into the Palatinate which had widened the local war
+in Bohemia into a struggle for the suppression of Protestantism along
+the Rhine; above all it was Spanish influence, and the hopes held out of
+a marriage of his son with a Spanish Infanta, which were luring the king
+into his fatal dependence on the great enemy of the Protestant cause.
+But the Commons went further than a demand for war. It was impossible
+any longer to avoid a matter so perilous to English interests, and in
+their petition the Houses coupled with their demands for war the demand
+of a Protestant <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228"></a><a href="./images/228.png">5-228</a>]</span>marriage for their future king. Experience proved in
+later years how dangerous it was for English freedom that the heir to
+the Crown should be brought up under a Catholic mother; but James was
+beside himself at the presumption of the Commons in dealing with
+mysteries of State. "Bring stools for the Ambassadors," he cried in
+bitter irony as their committee appeared before him. He refused the
+petition, forbade any further discussion of State policy, and threatened
+the speakers with the Tower. "Let us resort to our prayers," a member
+said calmly as the king's letter was read, "and then consider of this
+great business." The temper of the House was seen in a Protestation with
+which it met the royal command to abstain from discussion. It resolved
+"That the liberties, franchises, privileges, and jurisdictions of
+Parliament are the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of
+the subjects of England; and that the arduous and urgent affairs
+concerning the king, State, and defence of the realm, and of the Church
+of England, and the making and maintenance of laws, and redress of
+grievances, which daily happen within this realm, are proper subjects
+and matter of council and debate in Parliament. And that in the handling
+and proceeding of those businesses every member of the House hath, and
+of right ought to have, freedom of speech to propound, treat, reason,
+and bring to conclusion the same." <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229"></a><a href="./images/229.png">5-229</a>]</span>The king answered the Protestation
+by a characteristic outrage. He sent for the Journals of the House, and
+with his own hand tore out the pages which contained it. "I will
+govern," he said, "according to the common weal, but not according to
+the common will." A few days after, on the nineteenth of December, he
+dissolved the Parliament.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Spain holds back.</span></p>
+
+<p>"It is the best thing that has happened in the interests of Spain and of
+the Catholic religion since Luther began preaching," wrote the Count of
+Gondomar to his master, in his joy that all danger of war had passed
+away. "I am ready to depart," Sir Henry Savile on the other hand
+murmured on his death-bed, "the rather that having lived in good times I
+foresee worse." In the obstinacy with which he clung to his Spanish
+policy James stood indeed absolutely alone; for not only the old
+nobility and the statesmen who preserved the tradition of the age of
+Elizabeth, but even his own ministers, with the exception of Buckingham
+and the Treasurer, Cranfield, were at one with the Commons in their
+distrust of Spain. But James persisted in his plans. By the levy of a
+fresh benevolence he was able to keep Vere's force on foot for a few
+months while his diplomacy was at work in Germany and at Madrid. The
+Palatinate indeed was lost in spite of his despatches; but he still
+trusted to bring about its restitution to the Elector through his
+influence with Spain. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230"></a><a href="./images/230.png">5-230</a>]</span>It was to secure this influence that he pressed
+for a closer union with the great Catholic power. What really bound him
+to such a foreign policy was his policy at home. If James cared for the
+restoration of the Palatinate, he cared more for the system of
+government he had carried out since 1610; and with that system, as he
+well knew, Parliaments were incompatible. But a policy of war would at
+once throw him on the support of Parliaments; and the experience of 1621
+had shown him at what a price that support must be bought. From war too,
+as from any policy which implied a decided course of action, the temper
+of James shrank. What he clung to was a co-operation with Spain in which
+the burden of enforcing peace on the German disputants should fall
+exclusively on that power. Of such a co-operation the marriage of his
+son Charles with the Infanta, which had so long been held out as a lure
+to his vanity, was to be the sign. But the more James pressed for this
+consummation of his projects, the more Spain held back. She too was
+willing to co-operate with James so long as such a co-operation answered
+her own purposes. Her statesmen had not favoured the war in Germany;
+even now they were willing to bring it to a close by the restoration of
+the Palatinate. But they would not abandon the advantages which the war
+had given to Catholicism; and their plan was to restore the Palatinate
+not to Frederick but to his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231"></a><a href="./images/231.png">5-231</a>]</span>son, and to bring up that son as a Catholic
+at Vienna. Of such a simple restoration of the religious and political
+balance in the Empire as James was contemplating, the statesmen of
+Madrid thought no more than they thought of carrying out the scheme of a
+marriage with his son. Spain had already gained all she wanted from the
+marriage-negotiations. They had held James from action; they had now
+made action even less possible by supplying a fresh ground of quarrel
+with the House of Commons. Had the match been likely to secure the
+conversion of England, or even a thorough toleration for Catholics, it
+might have been possible to consent to the union of a Spanish princess
+with a heretic. But neither result seemed probable: and the Spanish
+Court saw no gain in such a union as would compensate it for the loss of
+the Palatinate or the half-million which James counted on as the dowry
+of the bride.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">End of the Spanish marriage.</span></p>
+
+<p>But the more Spain hung back the hotter grew the impatience of
+Buckingham and James. At last the young favourite proposed to force the
+Spaniard's hand by the appearance of Prince Charles himself at Madrid.
+To the wooer in person Buckingham believed Spain would not dare to
+refuse either Infanta or Palatinate. James was too shrewd to believe in
+such a delusion, but in spite of his opposition the Prince quitted
+England in disguise in 1623, and at the beginning of March he appeared
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232"></a><a href="./images/232.png">5-232</a>]</span>with Buckingham at Madrid to claim his promised bride. It was in vain
+that the Spanish Court rose in its demands; for every new demand was met
+by fresh concessions on the part of England. The abrogation of the penal
+laws against the worship of Catholics in private houses, a Catholic
+education for the Prince's children, a Catholic household for the
+Infanta, the erection of a Catholic church for her at Court, to which
+access should be free for all comers, were stipulations no sooner asked
+than they were granted. "We are building a chapel to the devil," said
+James when the last condition was laid before him; but he swore to the
+treaty and forced his councillors to swear to it. The marriage, however,
+was no nearer than before. The one thing which would have made it
+possible was a conversion of Charles to Catholicism; and though the
+Prince listened silently to arguments on the subject he gave no sign of
+becoming a Catholic. The aim of the Spanish ministers was to break off
+the match without a quarrel. They could only throw themselves on a
+policy of delay, and with this view the court theologians decided that
+the Infanta must in any case stay in Spain for a year after its
+conclusion till the conditions were fully carried out. Against such a
+condition Charles remonstrated in vain. And meanwhile the influence of
+the new policy on the war in Germany was hard to see. The Catholic
+League and its army under the command of Count Tilly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233"></a><a href="./images/233.png">5-233</a>]</span>won triumph after
+triumph over their divided foes. The reduction of Heidelberg and
+Mannheim completed the conquest of the Palatinate, whose Elector fled
+helplessly to Holland, while his Electoral dignity was transferred by
+the Emperor to the Duke of Bavaria. But there was still no sign of the
+hoped-for intervention on the part of Spain. At last the pressure of
+Charles on the subject of the Palatinate brought about a disclosure of
+the secret of Spanish policy. "It is a maxim of state with us," the
+Count of Olivares confessed, as the Prince demanded an energetic
+interference in Germany, "that the King of Spain must never fight
+against the Emperor. We cannot employ our forces against the Emperor."
+"If you hold to that," replied the Prince, "there is an end of all."
+Quitting Madrid he found a fleet at Santander, and on the fifth of
+October he again landed with Buckingham on the shores of England.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Prince Charles.</span></p>
+
+<p>His return was the signal for a burst of national joy. All London was
+alight with bonfires in her delight at the failure of the Spanish match,
+and of the collapse, humiliating as it was, of a policy which had so
+long trailed English honour at the chariot-wheels of Spain. War seemed
+at last inevitable; for not only did James's honour call for some effort
+to win back the Palatinate for his daughter's children, but the
+resentment of Charles and Buckingham was ready to bear down any
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234"></a><a href="./images/234.png">5-234</a>]</span>reluctance of the king. From the moment of their return indeed the
+direction of English affairs passed out of the hands of James into those
+of the favourite and the Prince. Charles started on his task of
+government with the aid of a sudden burst of popularity. To those who
+were immediately about him the journey to Madrid had revealed the
+strange mixture of obstinacy and weakness in the Prince's character, the
+duplicity which lavished promises because it never purposed to be bound
+by any, the petty pride that subordinated every political consideration
+to personal vanity or personal pique. Charles had granted demand after
+demand till the very Spaniards lost faith in his concessions. With rage
+in his heart at the failure of his efforts, he had renewed his betrothal
+on the very eve of his departure only that he might insult the Infanta
+by its contemptuous withdrawal as soon as he was safe at home. But to
+England at large the baser features of his character were still unknown.
+The stately reserve, the personal dignity and decency of manners which
+distinguished the Prince, contrasted favourably with the gabble and
+indecorum of his father. The courtiers indeed who saw him in his youth
+would often pray God that "he might be in the right way when he was set;
+for if he were in the wrong he would prove the most wilful of any king
+that ever reigned." But the nation was willing to take his obstinacy for
+firmness; as it took the pique which inspired <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235"></a><a href="./images/235.png">5-235</a>]</span>his course on the return
+from Spain for patriotism and for the promise of a nobler rule.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Parliament of 1624.</span></p>
+
+<p>At the back of Charles stood the favourite Buckingham. The policy of
+James had recoiled upon its author. In raising his favourites to the
+height of honour James had looked to being at last an independent king.
+He had broken with parliaments, he had done away with the old
+administrative forms of government, that his personal rule might act
+freely through these creatures of his will. And now that his policy had
+reached its end, his will was set aside more ruthlessly than ever by the
+very instrument he had created to carry it out. In his zeal to establish
+the greatness of the monarchy he had brought on the monarchy a
+humiliation such as it had never known. Church, or Baronage, or Commons
+had many times in our history forced a king to take their policy for his
+own; but never had a mere minister of the Crown been able to force his
+policy on a king. This was what Buckingham set himself to do. The
+national passion, the Prince's support, his own quick energy, bore down
+the hesitation and reluctance of James. The king still clung desperately
+to peace. He still shrank from parliaments. But Buckingham overrode
+every difficulty. In February 1624 James was forced to meet a
+Parliament, and to concede the point on which he had broken with the
+last by laying before it the whole question of the Spanish <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236"></a><a href="./images/236.png">5-236</a>]</span>negotiation.
+Buckingham and the Prince gave their personal support to a demand of the
+Houses for a rupture of the treaties with Spain and a declaration of
+war. A subsidy was eagerly voted; and as if to mark a new departure in
+the policy of the Stuarts, the persecution of the Catholics, which had
+long been suspended out of deference to Spanish intervention, began with
+new vigour. The favourite gave a fresh pledge of his constitutional aims
+by consenting to a new attack on a minister of the Crown. The Lord
+Treasurer, Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, had done much by his management
+of the finances to put the royal revenues on a better footing. But he
+was the head of the Spanish party; and he still urged the king to cling
+to Spain and to peace. Buckingham and Charles therefore looked coldly on
+while he was impeached for corruption and dismissed from office.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Buckingham's plans.</span></p>
+
+<p>Though James was swept along helplessly by the tide, his shrewdness saw
+clearly the turn that affairs were taking; and it was only by hard
+pressure that the favourite succeeded in wresting his consent to
+Cranfield's disgrace. "You are making a rod for your own back," said the
+king. But Buckingham and Charles persisted in their plans of war. That
+these were utterly different from the plans of the Parliament troubled
+them little. What money the Commons had granted, they had granted on
+condition that the war <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237"></a><a href="./images/237.png">5-237</a>]</span>should be exclusively a war against Spain, and a
+war waged as exclusively by sea. Their good sense shrank from plunging
+into the tangled and intricate medley of religious and political
+jealousies which was turning Germany into a hell. What they saw to be
+possible was to aid German Protestantism by lifting off it the pressure
+of the armies of Spain. That Spain was most assailable on the sea the
+ministers at Madrid knew as well as the leaders of the Commons. What
+they dreaded was not a defeat in the Palatinate, but the cutting off of
+their fleets from the Indies and a war in that new world which they
+treasured as the fairest flower of their crown. A blockade of Cadiz or a
+capture of Hispaniola would have produced more effect at the Spanish
+council-board than a dozen English victories on the Rhine. But such a
+policy had little attraction for Buckingham. His flighty temper exulted
+in being the arbiter of Europe, in weaving fanciful alliances, in
+marshalling imaginary armies. A treaty was concluded with Holland, and
+negotiations set on foot with the Lutheran princes of North Germany, who
+had looked coolly on at the ruin of the Elector Palatine, but were
+scared at last into consciousness of their own danger. Yet more
+important negotiations were opened for an alliance with France. To
+restore the triple league of France, England, and Holland was to restore
+the system of Elizabeth. Such a league would in fact have been strong
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238"></a><a href="./images/238.png">5-238</a>]</span>enough to hold in check the House of Austria and save German
+Protestantism, while it would have hindered France from promoting and
+profiting by German disunion, as it did under Richelieu. But, as of old,
+James could understand no alliance that rested on merely national
+interests. A dynastic union seemed to him the one sure basis for joint
+action; and the plan for a French alliance became a plan for marriage
+with a French princess.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The French marriage.</span></p>
+
+<p>The plan suited the pride of Charles and of Buckingham. But the first
+whispers of it woke opposition in the Commons. They saw the danger of a
+Roman Catholic queen. They saw yet more keenly the danger of pledges of
+toleration given to a foreign government, pledges which would furnish it
+with continual pretexts for interfering in the civil government of the
+country. Such an interference would soon breed on either side a mood for
+war. Before making these grants therefore they had called for a promise
+that no such pledges should be given, and as a subsidy hung on his
+consent James had solemnly promised this. But it was soon found that
+France was as firm on this point as Spain; and that toleration for the
+Catholics was a necessary condition of any marriage-treaty. The pressure
+of Buckingham and Charles was again brought to bear upon the king. The
+promise was broken and the marriage-treaty was signed. Its difficulties
+were quick to disclose themselves. It was impossible to call <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239"></a><a href="./images/239.png">5-239</a>]</span>Parliament
+again together at winter tide, while such perfidy was fresh; and the
+subsidies, which had been counted on, could not be asked for. But a
+hundred schemes were pushed busily on; and twelve thousand Englishmen
+were gathered under an adventurer, Count Mansfield, to march to the
+Rhine. They reached Holland only to find themselves without supplies and
+to die of famine and disease.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Death of James.</span></p>
+
+<p>If the blow fell lightly on the temper of the favourite, it fell heavily
+on the king. James was already sinking to the grave, and in the March of
+1625 he died with the consciousness of failure. Even his sanguine temper
+was broken at last. He had struggled with the Parliament, and the
+Parliament was stronger than ever. He had broken with Puritanism, and
+England was growing more Puritan every day. He had claimed for the Crown
+authority such as it had never known, and the Commons had impeached and
+degraded his ministers. He had raised up dependants to carry out a
+purely personal rule, and it was a favourite who was now treading his
+will under foot. He had staked everything on his struggle with English
+freedom, and the victory of English freedom was well-nigh won. James had
+himself destroyed that enthusiasm of loyalty which had been the main
+strength of the Tudor throne. He had disenchanted his people of their
+blind faith in the monarchy by a policy both at home and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240"></a><a href="./images/240.png">5-240</a>]</span>abroad which
+ran counter to every national instinct. He had alienated alike the
+noble, the gentleman, and the trader. In his feverish desire for
+personal rule he had ruined the main bulwarks of the monarchy. He had
+destroyed the authority of the Council. He had accustomed men to think
+lightly of the ministers of the Crown, to see them browbeaten by
+favourites, and driven from office for corruption. He had degraded the
+judges and weakened the national reverence for their voice as an
+expression of law. He had turned the Church into a mere engine for
+carrying out the royal will. And meanwhile he had raised up in the very
+face of the throne a power which was strong enough to cope with it. He
+had quarrelled with and insulted the Houses as no English sovereign had
+ever done before; and all the while the authority he boasted of was
+passing without his being able to hinder it to the Parliament which he
+outraged. There was shrewdness as well as anger in his taunt at its
+"ambassadors." A power had at last risen up in the Commons with which
+the monarchy was to reckon. In spite of the king's petulant outbreaks
+Parliament had asserted with success its exclusive right of taxation. It
+had suppressed monopolies. It had reformed abuses in the courts of law.
+It had impeached and driven from office the highest ministers of the
+Crown. It had asserted its privilege of freely discussing all questions
+connected with the welfare <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241"></a><a href="./images/241.png">5-241</a>]</span>of the realm. It had claimed to deal with
+the question of religion. It had even declared its will on the sacred
+"mystery" of foreign policy. The utter failure of the schemes of James
+at home can only be realized by comparing the attitude of the Houses at
+his death with their attitude during the last years of Elizabeth. Nor
+was his failure less abroad than at home. He had found England among the
+greatest of European powers. He had degraded her into a satellite of
+Spain. And now from a satellite he had dropped to the position of a
+dupe. In one plan alone could he believe himself successful. If his son
+had missed the hand of a Spanish Infanta, he had gained the hand of a
+daughter of France. But the one success of James was the most fatal of
+all his blunders; for in the marriage with Henrietta Maria lay the doom
+of his race. It was the fierce and despotic temper of the Frenchwoman
+that was to nerve Charles more than all to his fatal struggle against
+English liberty. It was her bigotry&mdash;as the Commons foresaw&mdash;that
+undermined the Protestantism of her sons. It was when the religious and
+the political temper of Henrietta mounted the throne in James the Second
+that the full import of the French marriage was seen in the downfall of
+the Stuarts.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242"></a><a href="./images/242.png">5-242</a>]</span></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr />
+
+<ul>
+  <li>CHAPTER V</li>
+  <li>CHARLES I. AND THE PARLIAMENT</li>
+  <li>1625-1629</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Charles the First.</span></p>
+
+<p>Had Charles mounted the throne on his return from Spain his accession
+would have been welcomed by a passionate burst of enthusiasm. He had
+aired himself as a staunch Protestant who had withstood Catholic
+seductions, and had come to nerve his father to a policy at one with the
+interests of religion and with the national will. But the few months
+that had passed since the last session of Parliament had broken the
+spell of this heroic attitude. The real character of the part which
+Charles had played in Spain was gradually becoming known. It was seen
+that he had been as faithless to Protestantism as his revenge had made
+him faithless to the Infanta. Nor had he shown less perfidy in dealing
+with England itself. In common with his father, he had promised that his
+marriage with a princess of France should in no case be made conditional
+on <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243"></a><a href="./images/243.png">5-243</a>]</span>the relaxation of the penal laws against the Catholics. It was
+suspected, and the suspicion was soon to be changed into certainty, that
+in spite of this promise such a relaxation had been stipulated, and that
+a foreign power had again been given the right of intermeddling in the
+civil affairs of the realm. The general distrust of the new king was
+intensified by the conduct of the war. In granting its subsidies the
+Parliament of 1624 had restricted them to the purposes of a naval war,
+and that a war with Spain. It had done this after discussing and
+rejecting the wider schemes of the favourite for an intervention of
+England by land in the war of the Palatinate. But the grants once made,
+Buckingham's plans had gone on without a check. Alliances had been
+formed, subsidies promised to Denmark, and twelve thousand men actually
+despatched to join the armies on the Rhine. It was plain that the policy
+of the Crown was to be as unswayed by the will of the nation as in the
+days of King James. What it was really to be swayed by was the
+self-sufficient incapacity of the young favourite.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The king's policy.</span></p>
+
+<p>A few months of action had shown Buckingham to England as he really was,
+vain, flighty, ingenious, daring, a brilliant but shallow adventurer,
+without political wisdom or practical ability, as little of an
+administrator as of a statesman. While projects without number were
+seething and simmering in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244"></a><a href="./images/244.png">5-244</a>]</span>his restless brain, while leagues were being
+formed and armies levied on paper, the one practical effort of the new
+minister had ended in the starvation of thousands of Englishmen on the
+sands of Holland. If English policy was once more to become a real and
+serious thing, it was plain that the great need of the nation was the
+dismissal of Buckingham. But Charles clung to Buckingham more blindly
+than his father had done. The shy reserve, the slow stubborn temper of
+the new king found relief in the frank gaiety of the favourite, in his
+rapid suggestions, in the defiant daring with which he set aside all
+caution and opposition. James had looked on Buckingham as his pupil.
+Charles clung to him as his friend. Nor was the new king's policy likely
+to be more national in Church affairs than in affairs of state. The war
+had given a new impulse to religious enthusiasm. The patriotism of the
+Puritan was strengthening his bigotry. To the bulk of Englishmen a fight
+with Spain meant a fight with Catholicism; and the fervour against
+Catholicism without roused a corresponding fervour against Catholicism
+within the realm. To Protestant eyes every English Catholic seemed a
+traitor at home, a traitor who must be watched and guarded against as
+the most dangerous of foes. A Protestant who leant towards Catholic
+usage or Catholic dogma was yet more formidable. To him men felt as
+towards a secret traitor in their own ranks. But it was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245"></a><a href="./images/245.png">5-245</a>]</span>to men with
+such leanings that Charles seemed disposed to show favour. Bishop Laud
+was recognized as the centre of that varied opposition to Puritanism,
+whose members were loosely grouped under the name of Arminians; and Laud
+now became the king's adviser in ecclesiastical matters. With Laud at
+its head the new party grew in boldness as well as numbers. It naturally
+sought for shelter for its religious opinions by exalting the power of
+the Crown; and its union of political error with theological heresy
+seemed to the Puritan to be at last proclaimed to the world when
+Montague, a court chaplain, ventured to slight the Reformed Churches of
+the Continent in favour of the Church of Rome, and to advocate in his
+sermon the Real Presence in the Sacrament and a divine right in kings.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Parliament of 1625.</span></p>
+
+<p>The Houses had no sooner met in the May of 1625 than their temper in
+religious matters was clear to every observer. "Whatever mention does
+break forth of the fears and dangers in religion and the increase of
+Popery," wrote a member who was noting the proceedings of the Commons,
+"their affections are much stirred." The first act of the Lower House
+was to summon Montague to its bar and to commit him to prison. In their
+grants to the Crown they showed no ill-will indeed, but they showed
+caution. They suspected that the pledge of making no religious
+concessions to France had been broken. They knew that the conditions <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246"></a><a href="./images/246.png">5-246</a>]</span>on
+which the last subsidy had been granted had been contemptuously set
+aside. In his request for a fresh grant Charles showed the same purpose
+of carrying out his own policy without any regard for the national will
+by simply asking for supplies for the war without naming a sum or giving
+any indication of what war it was to support. The reply of the Commons
+was to grant a hundred and forty thousand pounds. A million would hardly
+cover the king's engagements, and Charles was bitterly angered. He was
+angered yet more by the delay in granting the permanent revenue of the
+Crown. The Commons had no wish to refuse their grant of tonnage and
+poundage, or the main customs duties, which had ever since Edward the
+Fourth's day been granted to each new sovereign for his life. But the
+additional impositions laid by James on these duties required further
+consideration, and to give time for a due arrangement of this vexed
+question the grant of the customs was made for a year only. But the
+limitation at once woke the jealousy of Charles. He looked on it as a
+restriction of the rights of the Crown, refused to accept the grant on
+such a condition, and adjourned the Houses. When they met again at
+Oxford it was in a sterner temper, for Charles had shown his defiance of
+Parliament by promoting Montague, who had been released on bond, to a
+royal chaplaincy, and by levying the disputed customs without authority
+of law. "England," cried Sir <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247"></a><a href="./images/247.png">5-247</a>]</span>Robert Phelips, "is the last monarchy that
+yet retains her liberties. Let them not perish now." But the Commons had
+no sooner announced their resolve to consider public grievances before
+entering on other business than they were met in August by a
+dissolution.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The descent on Cadiz.</span></p>
+
+<p>To the shallow temper of Buckingham the cautious firmness of the Commons
+seemed simply the natural discontent which follows on ill success. If he
+dissolved the Houses, it was in the full belief that their
+constitutional demands could be lulled by a military triumph. His hands
+were no sooner free than he sailed for the Hague to conclude a general
+alliance against the House of Austria, while a fleet of ninety vessels
+and ten thousand soldiers left Plymouth in October for the coast of
+Spain. But these vast projects broke down before Buckingham's
+administrative incapacity. The plan of alliance proved fruitless. After
+an idle descent on Cadiz the Spanish expedition returned broken with
+mutiny and disease; and the enormous debt which had been incurred in its
+equipment forced the favourite to advise a new summons of the Houses in
+the coming year. But he was keenly alive to the peril in which his
+failure had plunged him, and to a coalition which had been formed
+between his rivals at Court and the leaders of the last Parliament. The
+older nobles looked to his ruin to restore the power of the Council; and
+in this the leaders of the Commons went with them. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248"></a><a href="./images/248.png">5-248</a>]</span>Buckingham's
+reckless daring led him to anticipate the danger by a series of blows
+which should strike terror into his opponents. The Councillors were
+humbled by the committal of Lord Arundel to the Tower. Sir Robert
+Phelips, Coke, and four other leading patriots were made sheriffs of
+their counties, and thus prevented from sitting in the coming
+Parliament.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Eliot.</span></p>
+
+<p>But their exclusion only left the field free for a more terrible foe. If
+Hampden and Pym are the great figures which embody the later national
+resistance, the earlier struggle for Parliamentary liberty centres in
+the figure of Sir John Eliot. Of an old family which had settled under
+Elizabeth near the fishing hamlet of St. Germans, and whose stately
+mansion gives its name of Port Eliot to a little town on the Tamar, he
+had risen to the post of Vice-Admiral of Devonshire under the patronage
+of Buckingham, and had seen his activity in the suppression of piracy in
+the Channel rewarded by an unjust imprisonment. He was now in the first
+vigour of manhood, with a mind exquisitely cultivated and familiar with
+the poetry and learning of his day, a nature singularly lofty and
+devout, a fearless and vehement temper. There was a hot impulsive
+element in his nature which showed itself in youth in his drawing sword
+on a neighbour who denounced him to his father, and which in later years
+gave its characteristic fire to his eloquence. But his intellect was as
+clear and cool <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249"></a><a href="./images/249.png">5-249</a>]</span>as his temper was ardent. What he believed in was the
+English Parliament. He saw in it the collective wisdom of the realm; and
+in that wisdom he put a firmer trust than in the statecraft of kings. In
+the general enthusiasm which followed on the failure of the Spanish
+marriage, Eliot had stood almost alone in pressing for a recognition of
+the rights of Parliament as a preliminary to any real reconciliation
+with the Crown. He fixed, from the very outset of his career, on the
+responsibility of the royal ministers to Parliament as the one critical
+point for English liberty.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Parliament of 1626.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was to enforce the demand of this that he availed himself of
+Buckingham's sacrifice of the Treasurer, Cranfield, to the resentment of
+the Commons. "The greater the delinquent," he urged, "the greater the
+delict. They are a happy thing, great men and officers, if they be good,
+and one of the greatest blessings of the land: but power converted into
+evil is the greatest curse that can befall it." But the Parliament of
+1626 had hardly met when Eliot came to the front to threaten a greater
+criminal than Cranfield. So menacing were his words, as he called for an
+enquiry into the failure before Cadiz, that Charles himself stooped to
+answer threat with threat. "I see," he wrote to the House, "you
+especially aim at the Duke of Buckingham. I must let you know that I
+will not allow any of my servants to be questioned among you, much less
+such as are <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250"></a><a href="./images/250.png">5-250</a>]</span>of eminent place and near to me." A more direct attack on a
+right already acknowledged in the impeachment of Bacon and Cranfield
+could hardly be imagined, but Eliot refused to move from his
+constitutional ground. The king was by law irresponsible, he "could do
+no wrong." If the country therefore was to be saved from a pure
+despotism, it must be by enforcing the responsibility of the ministers
+who counselled and executed his acts. Eliot persisted in denouncing
+Buckingham's incompetence and corruption, and the Commons ordered the
+subsidy which the Crown had demanded to be brought in "when we shall
+have presented our grievances, and received his Majesty's answer
+thereto." Charles summoned them to Whitehall, and commanded them to
+cancel the condition. He would grant them "liberty of counsel, but not
+of control"; and he closed the interview with a significant threat.
+"Remember," he said, "that Parliaments are altogether in my power for
+their calling, sitting, and dissolution: and therefore, as I find the
+fruits of them to be good or evil, they are to continue or not to be."
+But the will of the Commons was as resolute as the will of the king.
+Buckingham's impeachment was voted and carried to the Lords.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Impeachment of Buckingham.</span></p>
+
+<p>The favourite took his seat as a peer to listen to the charge with so
+insolent an air of contempt that one of the managers appointed by the
+Commons to conduct it turned sharply on him. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251"></a><a href="./images/251.png">5-251</a>]</span>"Do you jeer, my Lord!"
+said Sir Dudley Digges. "I can show you when a greater man than your
+Lordship&mdash;as high as you in place and power, and as deep in the king's
+favour&mdash;has been hanged for as small a crime as these articles contain."
+But his arrogance raised a more terrible foe than Sir Dudley Digges. The
+"proud carriage" of the Duke provoked an attack from Eliot which marks a
+new era in Parliamentary speech. From the first the vehemence and
+passion of his words had contrasted with the grave, colourless reasoning
+of older speakers. His opponents complained that Eliot aimed to "stir up
+affections." The quick emphatic sentences he substituted for the
+cumbrous periods of the day, his rapid argument, his vivacious and
+caustic allusions, his passionate appeals, his fearless invective,
+struck a new note in English eloquence. The frivolous ostentation of
+Buckingham, his very figure blazing with jewels and gold, gave point to
+the fierce attack. "He has broken those nerves and sinews of our land,
+the stores and treasures of the king. There needs no search for it. It
+is too visible. His profuse expenses, his superfluous feasts, his
+magnificent buildings, his riots, his excesses, what are they but the
+visible evidences of an express exhausting of the state, a chronicle of
+the immensity of his waste of the revenues of the Crown?" With the same
+terrible directness Eliot reviewed the Duke's greed and corruption, his
+insatiate ambition, his seizure of all <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252"></a><a href="./images/252.png">5-252</a>]</span>public authority, his neglect of
+every public duty, his abuse for selfish ends of the powers he had
+accumulated. "The pleasure of his Majesty, his known directions, his
+public acts, his acts of council, the decrees of courts&mdash;all must be
+made inferior to this man's will. No right, no interest may withstand
+him. Through the power of state and justice he has dared ever to strike
+at his own ends." "My Lords," he ended, after a vivid parallel between
+Buckingham and Sejanus, "you see the man! What have been his actions,
+what he is like, you know! I leave him to your judgement. This only is
+conceived by us, the knights, citizens, and burgesses of the Commons
+House of Parliament, that by him came all our evils, in him we find the
+causes, and on him must be the remedies! Pereat qui perdere cuncta
+festinat! Opprimatur ne omnes opprimat!"</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Dissolution of the Parliament.</span></p>
+
+<p>In calling for Buckingham's removal the Houses were but exercising a
+right or a duty which was inherent in their very character of
+counsellors of the Crown. There had never been a time from the earliest
+days of the English Parliament when it had not called for the dismissal
+of evil advisers. What had in older time been done by risings of the
+baronage had been done since the Houses gathered at Westminster by their
+protests as representatives of the realm. They were far from having
+dreamed as yet of the right which Parliament exercises to-day of naming
+the royal <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253"></a><a href="./images/253.png">5-253</a>]</span>ministers, nor had they any wish to meddle with the common
+administration of government. It was only in exceptional instances of
+evil counsel, when some favourite like Buckingham broke the union of the
+nation and the king, that they demanded a change. To Charles however
+their demand seemed a claim to usurp his sovereignty. His reply was as
+fierce and sudden as the attack of Eliot. He hurried to the House of
+Peers to avow as his own the deeds with which Buckingham was charged;
+while Eliot and Digges were called from their seats and committed
+prisoners to the Tower. The Commons however refused to proceed with
+public business till their members were restored; and after a ten-days'
+struggle Eliot was released. But his release was only a prelude to the
+close of the Parliament. "Not one moment," the king replied to the
+prayer of his Council for delay; and a final remonstrance in which the
+Commons begged him to dismiss Buckingham from his service for ever was
+met on the sixteenth of June by their instant dissolution. The
+remonstrance was burnt by royal order; Eliot was deprived of his
+Vice-Admiralty; and on the old pretext alleged by James for evading the
+law, the pretext that what it forbade was the demand of forced loans and
+not of voluntary gifts to the Crown, the subsidies which the Parliament
+had refused to grant till their grievances were redressed were levied in
+the arbitrary form of benevolences.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254"></a><a href="./images/254.png">5-254</a>]</span></p>
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Forced Loan.</span></p>
+
+<p>But the tide of public resistance was slowly rising. Refusals to give
+anything "save by way of Parliament" came in from county after county.
+When the subsidy-men of Middlesex and Westminster were urged to comply,
+they answered with a tumultuous shout of "A Parliament! a Parliament!
+else no subsidies!" Kent stood out to a man. In Bucks the very justices
+neglected to ask for the "free gift." The freeholders of Cornwall only
+answered that, "if they had but two kine, they would sell one of them
+for supply to his Majesty&mdash;in a Parliamentary way." The failure of the
+voluntary benevolence forced Charles to pass from evasion into open
+defiance of the law. He met it in 1627 by the levy of a forced loan. It
+was in vain that Chief Justice Crewe refused to acknowledge that such
+loans were legal. The law was again trampled under foot, as in the case
+of his predecessor, Coke; and Crewe was dismissed from his post.
+Commissioners were named to assess the amount which every landowner was
+bound to lend, and to examine on oath all who refused. Every means of
+persuasion, as of force, was resorted to. The pulpits of the Laudian
+clergy resounded with the cry of "passive obedience." Dr. Mainwaring
+preached before Charles himself, that the king needed no Parliamentary
+warrant for taxation, and that to resist his will was to incur eternal
+damnation. Soldiers were quartered on recalcitrant boroughs. Poor men
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255"></a><a href="./images/255.png">5-255</a>]</span>who refused to lend were pressed into the army or navy. Stubborn
+tradesmen were flung into prison. Buckingham himself undertook the task
+of overawing the nobles and the gentry. Among the bishops, the Primate
+and Bishop Williams of Lincoln alone resisted the king's will. The first
+was suspended on a frivolous pretext, and the second was disgraced. But
+in the country at large resistance was universal. The northern counties
+in a mass set the Crown at defiance. The Lincolnshire farmers drove the
+Commissioners from the town. Shropshire, Devon, and Warwickshire
+"refused utterly." Eight peers, with Lord Essex and Lord Warwick at
+their head, declined to comply with the exaction as illegal. Two hundred
+country gentlemen, whose obstinacy had not been subdued by their
+transfer from prison to prison, were summoned before the Council; and
+John Hampden, as yet only a young Buckinghamshire squire, appeared at
+the board to begin that career of patriotism which has made his name
+dear to Englishmen. "I could be content to lend," he said, "but fear to
+draw on myself that curse in Magna Charta, which should be read twice a
+year against those who infringe it." So close an imprisonment in the
+Gate House rewarded his protest "that he never afterwards did look like
+the same man he was before."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Charles and France.</span></p>
+
+<p>The fierce energy with which Buckingham pressed the forced loan was no
+mere impulse of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256"></a><a href="./images/256.png">5-256</a>]</span>angry tyranny. Never was money so needed by the Crown.
+The blustering and blundering of the favourite had at last succeeded in
+plunging him into war with his own allies. England had been told that
+the friendship of France, a friendship secured by the king's marriage
+with a French princess, was the basis on which Charles was building up
+his great European alliance against Spain. She now suddenly found
+herself at war with Spain and France together. The steps by which this
+result had been brought about throw an amusing light on the capacity of
+the young king and his minister. The occupation of the Palatinate had
+forced France to provide for its own safety. Spain already fronted her
+along the Pyrenees and the border of the Netherlands; if the Palatinate
+was added to the Spanish possession of Franche-Comt&eacute;, it would close
+France in on the east as well as the north and the south. War therefore
+was being forced on the French monarchy when Charles and Buckingham
+sought its alliance against Spain; and nothing hindered an outbreak of
+hostilities but a revolt of the Protestant town of Rochelle. Lewis the
+Thirteenth pleaded the impossibility of engaging in such a struggle so
+long as the Huguenots could rise in his rear; and he called on England
+to help him by lending ships to blockade Rochelle into submission in
+time for action in the spring of 1625. The Prince and Buckingham brought
+James to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257"></a><a href="./images/257.png">5-257</a>]</span>assent; but Charles had no sooner mounted the throne than he
+shrank from sending ships against a Protestant city, and secretly
+instigated the crews to mutiny against their captains on an order to
+sail. The vessels, it was trusted, would then arrive too late to take
+part in the siege. Unluckily for this intrigue they arrived to find the
+city still in arms, and it was the appearance of English ships among
+their enemies which forced the men of Rochelle to submit. While
+Englishmen were angered by the use of English vessels against
+Protestantism, France resented the king's attempt to evade his pledge.
+Its Court resented yet more the hesitation which Charles showed in face
+of his Parliament in fulfilling the promise he had given in the
+marriage-treaty of tolerating Catholic worship; and its resentment was
+embittered by an expulsion from the realm of the French attendants on
+the new Queen, a step to which Charles was at last driven by their
+insolence and intrigues. On the other hand, French statesmen were
+offended by the seizure of French ships charged with carrying materials
+of war to the Spaniards, and by an attempt of the English sovereign to
+atone for his past attack on Rochelle by constituting himself mediator
+of a peace on behalf of the Huguenots.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The siege of Rochelle.</span></p>
+
+<p>But though grounds of quarrel multiplied every day, the French minister,
+Richelieu, had no mind for strife. He was now master of the Catholic
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258"></a><a href="./images/258.png">5-258</a>]</span>faction which had fed the dispute between the Crown and the Huguenots
+with the aim of bringing about a reconciliation with Spain; he saw that
+in the European conflict which lay before him the friendship or the
+neutrality of England was all but essential; and though he gathered a
+fleet in the Channel and took a high tone of remonstrance, he strove by
+concession after concession to avert war. But on war Buckingham was
+resolved. Of policy in any true sense of the word the favourite knew
+nothing; for the real interest of England or the balance of Europe he
+cared little; what he saw before him was the chance of a blow at a power
+he had come to hate, and the chance of a war which would make him
+popular at home. The mediation of Charles in favour of Rochelle had
+convinced Richelieu that the complete reduction of that city was a
+necessary prelude to any effective intervention in Germany. If Lewis was
+to be master abroad, he must first be master at home. But it was hard
+for lookers-on to read the Cardinal's mind or to guess with what a
+purpose he resolved to exact submission from the Huguenots. In England,
+where the danger of Rochelle seemed a fresh part of the Catholic attack
+upon Protestantism throughout the world, the enthusiasm for the
+Huguenots was intense; and Buckingham resolved to take advantage of this
+enthusiasm to secure such a triumph for the royal arms as should silence
+all <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259"></a><a href="./images/259.png">5-259</a>]</span>opposition at home. It was for this purpose that the forced loan
+was pushed on; and in July 1627 a fleet of a hundred vessels sailed
+under Buckingham's command for the relief of Rochelle. But imposing as
+was his force, Buckingham showed himself as incapable a soldier as he
+had proved a statesman. The troops were landed on the Isle of Rh&eacute;, in
+front of the harbour; but after a useless siege of the Castle of St.
+Martin, the English soldiers were forced in October to fall back along a
+narrow causeway to their ships, and two thousand fell in the retreat
+without the loss of a single man to their enemies.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Parliament of 1628.</span></p>
+
+<p>The first result of the failure at Rh&eacute; was the summoning of a new
+Parliament. Overwhelmed as he was with debt and shame, Charles was
+forced to call the Houses together again in the spring of 1628. The
+elections promised ill for the Court. Its candidates were everywhere
+rejected. The patriot leaders were triumphantly returned. To have
+suffered in the recent resistance to arbitrary taxation was the sure
+road to a seat. It was this question which absorbed all others in men's
+minds. Even Buckingham's removal was of less moment than the redress of
+personal wrongs; and some of the chief leaders of the Commons had not
+hesitated to bring Charles to consent to summon Parliament by promising
+to abstain from attacks on Buckingham. Against such a resolve Eliot
+protested in vain. But on <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260"></a><a href="./images/260.png">5-260</a>]</span>the question of personal liberty the tone of
+the Commons when they met in March was as vehement as that of Eliot. "We
+must vindicate our ancient liberties," said Sir Thomas Wentworth in
+words soon to be remembered against himself: "we must reinforce the laws
+made by our ancestors. We must set such a stamp upon them, as no
+licentious spirit shall dare hereafter to invade them." Heedless of
+sharp and menacing messages from the king, of demands that they should
+take his "royal word" for their liberties, the House bent itself to one
+great work, the drawing up a Petition of Right. The statutes that
+protected the subject against arbitrary taxation, against loans and
+benevolences, against punishment, outlawry, or deprivation of goods,
+otherwise than by lawful judgement of his peers, against arbitrary
+imprisonment without stated charge, against billeting of soldiery on the
+people or enactment of martial law in time of peace, were formally
+recited. The breaches of them under the last two sovereigns, and above
+all since the dissolution of the last Parliament, were recited as
+formally. At the close of this significant list, the Commons prayed
+"that no man hereafter be compelled to make or yield any gift, loan,
+benevolence, tax, or such like charge, without common consent by Act of
+Parliament. And that none be called to make answer, or to take such
+oaths, or to be confined or otherwise molested or disputed concerning
+the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261"></a><a href="./images/261.png">5-261</a>]</span>same, or for refusal thereof. And that no freeman may in such
+manner as is before mentioned be imprisoned or detained. And that your
+Majesty would be pleased to remove the said soldiers and mariners, and
+that your people may not be so burthened in time to come. And that the
+commissions for proceeding by martial law may be revoked and annulled,
+and that hereafter no commissions of like nature may issue forth to any
+person or persons whatsoever to be executed as aforesaid, lest by colour
+of them any of your Majesty's subjects be destroyed and put to death,
+contrary to the laws and franchises of the land. All which they humbly
+pray of your most excellent Majesty, as their rights and liberties,
+according to the laws and statutes of the realm. And that your Majesty
+would also vouchsafe to declare that the awards, doings, and proceedings
+to the prejudice of your people in any of the premisses shall not be
+drawn hereafter into consequence or example. And that your Majesty would
+be pleased graciously for the further comfort and safety of your people
+to declare your royal will and pleasure, that in the things aforesaid
+all your officers and ministers shall serve you according to the laws
+and statutes of this realm, as they tender the honour of your Majesty
+and the prosperity of the kingdom."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Petition of Right.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was in vain that the Lords strove to conciliate Charles by a
+reservation of his "sovereign <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262"></a><a href="./images/262.png">5-262</a>]</span>power." "Our petition," Pym quietly
+replied, "is for the laws of England, and this power seems to be another
+power distinct from the power of the law." The Lords yielded, but
+Charles gave an evasive reply; and the failure of the more moderate
+counsels for which his own had been set aside called Eliot again to the
+front. In a speech of unprecedented boldness he moved the presentation
+to the king of a Remonstrance on the state of the realm. But at the
+moment when he again touched on Buckingham's removal as the preliminary
+of any real improvement the Speaker of the House interposed. "There was
+a command laid on him," he said, "to interrupt any that should go about
+to lay an aspersion on the king's ministers." The breach of their
+privilege of free speech produced a scene in the Commons such as St.
+Stephen's had never witnessed before. Eliot sate abruptly down amidst
+the solemn silence of the House. "Then appeared such a spectacle of
+passions," says a letter of the time, "as the like had seldom been seen
+in such an assembly: some weeping, some expostulating, some prophesying
+of the fatal ruin of our kingdom, some playing the divines in confessing
+their sins and country's sins which drew these judgements upon us, some
+finding, as it were, fault with those that wept. There were above an
+hundred weeping eyes, many who offered to speak being interrupted and
+silenced by their own passions." Pym himself <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263"></a><a href="./images/263.png">5-263</a>]</span>rose only to sit down
+choked with tears. At last Sir Edward Coke found words to blame himself
+for the timid counsels which had checked Eliot at the beginning of the
+Session, and to protest "that the author and source of all those
+miseries was the Duke of Buckingham." Shouts of assent greeted the
+resolution to insert the Duke's name in the Remonstrance. But at this
+moment the king's obstinacy gave way. A fresh expedition, which had been
+sent to Rochelle, returned unsuccessful; and if the siege was to be
+raised far greater and costlier efforts must be made. And that the siege
+should be raised Buckingham was still resolved. All his energies were
+now enlisted in this project; and to get supplies for his fleet he bent
+the king to consent in June to the Petition of Right. As Charles
+understood it, indeed, the consent meant little. The one point for which
+he really cared was the power of keeping men in prison without bringing
+them to trial or assigning causes for their imprisonment. On this he had
+consulted his judges; and they had answered that his consent to the
+Petition left his rights untouched; like other laws, they said, the
+Petition would have to be interpreted when it came before them, and the
+prerogative remained unaffected. As to the rest, while waiving all claim
+to levy taxes not granted by Parliament, Charles still reserved his
+right to levy impositions paid customarily to the Crown, and amongst
+these he counted tonnage <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264"></a><a href="./images/264.png">5-264</a>]</span>and poundage. Of these reserves however the
+Commons knew nothing. The king's consent won a grant of subsidy, and
+such a ringing of bells and lighting of bonfires from the people "as
+were never seen but upon his Majesty's return from Spain."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Death of Buckingham.</span></p>
+
+<p>But, like all the king's concessions, it came too late to effect the end
+at which he aimed. The Commons persisted in presenting their
+Remonstrance. Charles received it coldly and ungraciously; while
+Buckingham, who had stood defiantly at his master's side as he was
+denounced, fell on his knees to speak. "No, George!" said the king as he
+raised him; and his demeanour gave emphatic proof that the Duke's favour
+remained undiminished. "We will perish together, George," he added at a
+later time, "if thou dost." He had in fact got the subsidies which he
+needed; and it was easy to arrest all proceedings against Buckingham by
+proroguing Parliament at the close of June. The Duke himself cared
+little for a danger which he counted on drowning in the blaze of a
+speedy triumph. He had again gathered a strong fleet and a fine body of
+men, and his ardent fancy already saw the harbour of Rochelle forced and
+the city relieved. No shadow of his doom had fallen over the brilliant
+favourite when he set out in August to take command of the expedition.
+But a lieutenant in the army, John Felton, soured by neglect and wrongs,
+had found in the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265"></a><a href="./images/265.png">5-265</a>]</span>Remonstrance some imaginary sanction for the revenge
+he plotted; and, mixing with the throng which crowded the hall at
+Portsmouth, he stabbed Buckingham to the heart. Charles flung himself on
+his bed in a passion of tears when the news reached him; but outside the
+Court it was welcomed with a burst of joy. Young Oxford bachelors, grave
+London Aldermen, vied with each other in drinking healths to Felton.
+"God bless thee, little David," cried an old woman, as the murderer
+passed manacled by; "the Lord comfort thee," shouted the crowd, as the
+Tower gates closed on him. The very forces in the Duke's armament at
+Portsmouth shouted to the king, as he witnessed their departure, a
+prayer that he would "spare John Felton, their sometime fellow-soldier."
+But whatever national hopes the fall of Buckingham had aroused were
+quickly dispelled. Weston, a creature of the Duke, became Lord
+Treasurer, and his system remained unchanged. "Though our Achan is cut
+off," said Eliot, "the accursed thing remains."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Laudian Clergy.</span></p>
+
+<p>It seemed as if no act of Charles could widen the breach which his
+reckless lawlessness had made between himself and his subjects. But
+there was one thing dearer to England than free speech in Parliament,
+than security for property, or even personal liberty; and that one thing
+was, in the phrase of the day, "the Gospel." The gloom which at the
+outset of this reign we saw settling <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266"></a><a href="./images/266.png">5-266</a>]</span>down on every Puritan heart had
+deepened with each succeeding year. The great struggle abroad had gone
+more and more against Protestantism, and at this moment the end of the
+cause seemed to have come. In Germany Lutheran and Calvinist alike lay
+at last beneath the heel of the Catholic House of Austria. The fall of
+Rochelle, which followed quick on the death of Buckingham, seemed to
+leave the Huguenots of France at the feet of a Roman Cardinal. In such a
+time as this, while England was thrilling with excitement at the thought
+that her own hour of deadly peril might come again, as it had come in
+the year of the Armada, the Puritans saw with horror the quick growth of
+Arminianism at home. Laud was now Bishop of London as well as the
+practical administrator of Church affairs, and to the excited
+Protestantism of the country Laud and the Churchmen whom he headed
+seemed a danger more really formidable than the Popery which was making
+such mighty strides abroad. To the Puritans they were traitors, traitors
+to God and their country at once. Their aim was to draw the Church of
+England farther away from the Protestant Churches, and nearer to the
+Church which Protestants regarded as Babylon. They aped Roman
+ceremonies. Cautiously and tentatively they were introducing Roman
+doctrine. But they had none of the sacerdotal independence which Rome
+had at any rate preserved. They were abject in their dependence <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267"></a><a href="./images/267.png">5-267</a>]</span>on the
+Crown. Their gratitude for the royal protection which enabled them to
+defy the religious instincts of the realm showed itself in their
+erection of the most dangerous pretensions of the monarchy into
+religious dogmas. Their model, Bishop Andrewes, had declared James to
+have been inspired by God. They preached passive obedience to the worst
+tyranny. They declared the person and goods of the subject to be at the
+king's absolute disposal. They were turning religion into a systematic
+attack on English liberty, nor was their attack to be lightly set aside.
+Up to this time they had been little more than a knot of courtly
+parsons, for the mass of the clergy, like their flocks, were steady
+Puritans; but the well-known energy of Laud and the open patronage of
+the Court promised a speedy increase of their numbers and their power.
+It was significant that upon the prorogation of 1628 Montague had been
+made a bishop, and Mainwaring, who had called Parliaments ciphers in the
+state, had been rewarded with a fat living. Instances such as these
+would hardly be lost on the mass of the clergy, and sober men looked
+forward to a day when every pulpit would be ringing with exhortations to
+passive obedience, with denunciations of Calvinism and apologies for
+Rome.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Avowal.</span></p>
+
+<p>Of all the members of the House of Commons Eliot was least fanatical in
+his natural bent, but <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268"></a><a href="./images/268.png">5-268</a>]</span>the religious crisis swept away for the moment
+all other thoughts from his mind. "Danger enlarges itself in so great a
+measure," he wrote from the country, "that nothing but Heaven shrouds us
+from despair." When the Commons met again in January 1629, they met in
+Eliot's temper. The first business called up was that of religion. The
+House refused to consider any question of supplies, or even that of
+tonnage and poundage, which still remained unsettled though Charles had
+persisted in levying these duties without any vote of Parliament, till
+the religious grievance was discussed. "The Gospel," Eliot burst forth,
+"is that Truth in which this kingdom has been happy through a long and
+rare prosperity. This ground therefore let us lay for a foundation of
+our building, that that Truth, not with words, but with actions we will
+maintain!" "There is a ceremony," he went on, "used in the Eastern
+Churches, of standing at the repetition of the Creed, to testify their
+purpose to maintain it, not only with their bodies upright, but with
+their swords drawn. Give me leave to call that a custom very
+commendable!" The Commons answered their leader's challenge by a solemn
+avowal. They avowed that they held for truth that sense of the Articles
+as established by Parliament, which by the public act of the Church, and
+the general and current exposition of the writers of their Church, had
+been delivered unto them. It is easy to regard such an avowal as a mere
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269"></a><a href="./images/269.png">5-269</a>]</span>outburst of Puritan bigotry, and the opposition of Charles as a defence
+of the freedom of religious thought. But the real importance of the
+avowal both to king and Commons lay in its political significance. In
+the mouth of the Commons it was a renewal of the claim that all affairs
+of the realm, spiritual as well as temporal, were cognizable in
+Parliament. To Charles it seemed as if the Commons were taking to
+themselves, in utter defiance of his rights as governor of the Church,
+"the interpretation of articles of religion; the deciding of which in
+doctrinal points," to use his own words, "only appertaineth to the
+clergy and Convocation." To use more modern phrases, the king insisted
+that the nation should receive its creed at the hands of the priesthood
+and the Crown. England in the avowal of Parliament asserted that the
+right to determine the belief of a nation lay with the nation itself.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Dissolution of the Parliament.</span></p>
+
+<p>But the debates over religion were suddenly interrupted. In granting the
+Petition of Right we have seen that Charles had no purpose of parting
+with his power of arbitrary arrest or of levying customs. Both practices
+in fact went on as before, and the goods of merchants who refused to pay
+tonnage and poundage were seized as of old. At the reopening of the
+Session indeed the king met the Commons with a proposal that they should
+grant him tonnage and poundage and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270"></a><a href="./images/270.png">5-270</a>]</span>pass silently over what had been
+done by his officers. But the House was far from assenting to the
+interpretation which Charles had put on the Petition, and it was
+resolved to vindicate what it held to be the law. It deferred all grant
+of customs till the wrong done in the illegal levy of them was
+redressed, and summoned the farmers of those dues to the bar. But though
+they appeared, they pleaded the king's command as a ground for their
+refusal to answer. The House was proceeding to a protest, when on the
+second of March the Speaker signified that he had received an order to
+adjourn. Dissolution was clearly at hand, and the long-suppressed
+indignation broke out in a scene of strange disorder. The Speaker was
+held down in the chair, while Eliot, still clinging to his great
+principle of ministerial responsibility, denounced the new Treasurer as
+the adviser of the measure. "None have gone about to break Parliaments,"
+he added in words to which after events gave a terrible significance,
+"but in the end Parliaments have broken them." The doors were locked,
+and in spite of the Speaker's protests, of the repeated knocking of the
+usher at the door, and the gathering tumult within the House itself, the
+loud "Aye, Aye!" of the bulk of the members supported Eliot in his last
+vindication of English liberty. By successive resolutions the Commons
+declared whomsoever should bring in innovations in religion, or whatever
+minister endorsed the levy of subsidies <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271"></a><a href="./images/271.png">5-271</a>]</span>not granted in Parliament, "a
+capital enemy to the kingdom and commonwealth," and every subject
+voluntarily complying with illegal acts and demands "a betrayer of the
+liberty of England and an enemy of the same."</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272"></a><a href="./images/272.png">5-272</a>]</span></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr />
+
+<ul>
+  <li>CHAPTER VI</li>
+  <li>THE PERSONAL GOVERNMENT</li>
+  <li>1629-1635</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The policy of Charles.</span></p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>No Parliament in fact met for eleven years. But it would be unfair to
+charge the king at the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273"></a><a href="./images/273.png">5-273</a>]</span>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274"></a><a href="./images/274.png">5-274</a>]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Peace.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275"></a><a href="./images/275.png">5-275</a>]</span>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276"></a><a href="./images/276.png">5-276</a>]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Financial measures.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277"></a><a href="./images/277.png">5-277</a>]</span>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."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278"></a><a href="./images/278.png">5-278</a>]</span></p>
+<p><span class="sidenote">Fines and monopolies.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279"></a><a href="./images/279.png">5-279</a>]</span>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."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Customs and benevolences.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280"></a><a href="./images/280.png">5-280</a>]</span>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."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">General prosperity.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281"></a><a href="./images/281.png">5-281</a>]</span>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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282"></a><a href="./images/282.png">5-282</a>]</span>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."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Wentworth.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283"></a><a href="./images/283.png">5-283</a>]</span>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&mdash;grander in its sudden
+outbursts, though less earnest and sustained than that of Eliot&mdash;soon
+rendered formidable. His intrigues at Court roused Buckingham to crush
+by a signal insult the rival whose genius he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284"></a><a href="./images/284.png">5-284</a>]</span>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285"></a><a href="./images/285.png">5-285</a>]</span>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."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Wentworth as minister.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286"></a><a href="./images/286.png">5-286</a>]</span>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287"></a><a href="./images/287.png">5-287</a>]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Ireland under the Stuarts.</span></p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288"></a><a href="./images/288.png">5-288</a>]</span>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289"></a><a href="./images/289.png">5-289</a>]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Wentworth in Ireland.</span></p>
+
+<p>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; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290"></a><a href="./images/290.png">5-290</a>]</span>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291"></a><a href="./images/291.png">5-291</a>]</span>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292"></a><a href="./images/292.png">5-292</a>]</span>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."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Laud.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293"></a><a href="./images/293.png">5-293</a>]</span>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 Nic&aelig;a. 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294"></a><a href="./images/294.png">5-294</a>]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Laud and the Puritans.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295"></a><a href="./images/295.png">5-295</a>]</span>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296"></a><a href="./images/296.png">5-296</a>]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Sunday pastimes.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297"></a><a href="./images/297.png">5-297</a>]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Laud and the clergy.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298"></a><a href="./images/298.png">5-298</a>]</span>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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299"></a><a href="./images/299.png">5-299</a>]</span>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."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Laud and ritual.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 &aelig;sthetic 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300"></a><a href="./images/300.png">5-300</a>]</span>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301"></a><a href="./images/301.png">5-301</a>]</span>rated
+at the Commission-table, and frightened into compliance.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Puritan panic.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302"></a><a href="./images/302.png">5-302</a>]</span>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."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Milton at Horton.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303"></a><a href="./images/303.png">5-303</a>]</span>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; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304"></a><a href="./images/304.png">5-304</a>]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His early poems.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305"></a><a href="./images/305.png">5-305</a>]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Puritan fanaticism.</span></p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306"></a><a href="./images/306.png">5-306</a>]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>With such a world around them we can hardly wonder that men of less
+fanatical turn than Prynne <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307"></a><a href="./images/307.png">5-307</a>]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Virginia.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308"></a><a href="./images/308.png">5-308</a>]</span>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.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a href="./images/309bigmap.png"><img src="./images/map309.png" alt="map of the colonies of America in 1640" width="55%" /></a>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Pilgrim Fathers.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309"></a><a href="./images/309.png">5-309</a>]</span>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 <i>Mayflower</i>, a bark
+of a hundred and eighty <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310"></a><a href="./images/310.png">5-310</a>]</span>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."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Puritan migration.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311"></a><a href="./images/311.png">5-311</a>]</span>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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312"></a><a href="./images/312.png">5-312</a>]</span>the earlier colonists of the South, "broken men," adventurers,
+bankrupts, criminals; or simply poor men and artisans, like the Pilgrim
+Fathers of the <i>Mayflower</i>. 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."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">New England.</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313"></a><a href="./images/313.png">5-313</a>]</span>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314"></a><a href="./images/314.png">5-314</a>]</span>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.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315"></a><a href="./images/315.png">5-315</a>]</span></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr />
+
+<ul>
+  <li>CHAPTER VII</li>
+  <li>THE RISING OF THE SCOTS</li>
+  <li>1635-1640</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">England in 1635.</span></p>
+
+<p>When Weston died in 1635 six years had passed without a Parliament, and
+the Crown was at the height of its power. Its financial difficulties
+seemed coming to an end. The long peace, the rigid economy of
+administration, the use of forgotten rights and vexatious monopolies,
+had now halved the amount of debt, while they had raised the revenue to
+a level with the royal expenditure. Charles had no need of subsidies;
+and without the need of subsidies he saw no ground for again
+encountering the opposition of Parliament. The religious difficulty gave
+him as little anxiety. If Laud was taking harsh courses with the
+Puritans, he seemed to be successful in his struggle with Puritanism.
+The most able among its ministers were silenced or deprived. The most
+earnest of its laymen were flying over seas. But there was no show of
+opposition to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316"></a><a href="./images/316.png">5-316</a>]</span>reforms of the Primate or the High Commission. In the
+two dependent kingdoms all appeared to be going well. In Scotland
+Charles had begun quietly to carry further his father's schemes for
+religious uniformity; but there was no voice of protest. In Ireland
+Wentworth could point to a submissive Parliament and a well-equipped
+army, ready to serve the king on either side St. George's Channel. The
+one solitary anxiety of Charles, in fact, lay in the aspect of foreign
+affairs. The union of Holland and of France had done the work that
+England had failed to do in saving German Protestantism from the grasp
+of the House of Austria. But if their union was of service to Germany,
+it brought danger to England. France was its ancient foe. The commercial
+supremacy of the Dutch was threatening English trade. The junction of
+their fleets would at once enable them to challenge the right of
+dominion which England claimed over the Channel. And at this moment
+rumours came of a scheme of partition by which the Spanish Netherlands
+were to be shared between the French and the Dutch, and by which Dunkirk
+was at once to be attacked and given into the hands of France.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Ship-money.</span></p>
+
+<p>To suffer the extension of France along the shores of the Netherlands
+had seemed impossible to English statesmen from the days of Elizabeth.
+To surrender the command of the Channel was equally galling to the
+national pride. Even <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317"></a><a href="./images/317.png">5-317</a>]</span>Weston, fond as he was of peace, had seen the need
+of putting a strong fleet upon the seas; and in 1634 Spain engaged to
+defray part of the expense of equipping such a fleet in the hope that
+the king's demand would bring on war with Holland and with France. But
+money had to be found at home, and as Charles would not hear of the
+gathering of a Parliament means had to be got by a new stretch of
+prerogative. The legal research of Noy, one of the law-officers of the
+Crown, found precedents among the records in the Tower for the provision
+of ships for the king's use by the port-towns of the kingdom, and for
+the furnishing of their equipment by the maritime counties. The
+precedents dated from times when no permanent fleet existed, and when
+sea warfare could only be waged by vessels lent for the moment by the
+various ports. But they were seized as a means of equipping a permanent
+navy without cost to the Exchequer; the first demand of ships was soon
+commuted into a demand of money for the provision of ships; and the
+writs for the payment of ship-money which were issued to London and
+other coast-towns were enforced by fine and imprisonment. The money was
+paid, and in 1635 a fleet put to sea. The Spaniards however were too
+poor to fulfil their share of the bargain; they sent neither money nor
+vessels; and Charles shrank from a contest single-handed with France and
+the Dutch. But with the death of the Earl of Portland <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318"></a><a href="./images/318.png">5-318</a>]</span>a bolder hand
+seized the reins of power. To Laud as to Wentworth the system of Weston
+had hardly seemed government at all. In the correspondence which passed
+between the two ministers the king was censured as over-cautious, the
+Star Chamber as feeble, the judges as over-scrupulous. "I am for
+Thorough," the one writes to the other in alternate fits of impatience
+at the slow progress they are making. Wentworth was anxious that his
+good work might not "be spoiled on that side." Laud echoed the wish,
+while he envied the free course of the Lord Lieutenant. "You have a good
+deal of humour here," he writes, "for your proceeding. Go on a' God's
+name. I have done with expecting of Thorough on this side."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The new ship-money.</span></p>
+
+<p>With feelings such as these Laud no sooner took the direction of affairs
+than a more vigorous and unscrupulous impulse made itself felt. Far from
+being drawn from his projects by the desertion of Spain, Charles was
+encouraged to carry them out by his own efforts. It was determined to
+strengthen the fleet; and funds for this purpose were raised by an
+extension of the levy of ship-money. The pretence of precedents was
+thrown aside, and Laud resolved to find a permanent revenue in the
+conversion of the "ship-money," till now levied on ports and the
+maritime counties, into a general tax imposed by the royal will upon the
+whole country. The sum expected from the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319"></a><a href="./images/319.png">5-319</a>]</span>tax was no less than a quarter
+of a million a year. "I know no reason," Wentworth had written
+significantly, "but you may as well rule the common lawyers in England
+as I, poor beagle, do here"; and the judges no sooner declared the new
+impost to be legal than he drew the logical deduction from their
+decision. "Since it is lawful for the king to impose a tax for the
+equipment of the navy, it must be equally so for the levy of an army:
+and the same reason which authorizes him to levy an army to resist, will
+authorize him to carry that army abroad that he may prevent invasion.
+Moreover what is law in England is law also in Scotland and Ireland. The
+decision of the judges will therefore make the king absolute at home and
+formidable abroad. Let him only abstain from war for a few years that he
+may habituate his subjects to the payment of that tax, and in the end he
+will find himself more powerful and respected than any of his
+predecessors." "The debt of the Crown being taken off," he wrote to
+Charles, "you may govern at your will."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">John Hampden.</span></p>
+
+<p>But there were men who saw the danger to freedom in this levy of
+ship-money as clearly as Wentworth himself. The bulk of the country
+party abandoned all hope of English freedom. There was a sudden revival
+of the emigration to New England; and men of blood and fortune now
+prepared to seek a new home in the West. Lord Warwick secured the
+proprietorship of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320"></a><a href="./images/320.png">5-320</a>]</span>Connecticut valley. Lord Saye and Sele and Lord
+Brooke began negotiations for transporting themselves to the New World.
+Oliver Cromwell is said, by a doubtful tradition, to have only been
+prevented from crossing the seas by a royal embargo. It is more certain
+that John Hampden purchased a tract of land on the Narragansett. No
+visionary danger would have brought the soul of Hampden to the thought
+of flight. He was sprung of an ancient line, which had been true to the
+House of Lancaster in the Wars of the Roses, and whose fidelity had been
+rewarded by the favour of the Tudors. On the brow of the Chilterns an
+opening in the woods has borne the name of "the Queen's Gap" ever since
+Griffith Hampden cleared an avenue for one of Elizabeth's visits to his
+stately home. His grandson, John, was born at the close of the Queen's
+reign; the dissipations of youth were cut short by an early marriage at
+twenty-five to a wife he loved; and the young squire settled down to a
+life of study and religion. His wealth and lineage opened to him a
+career such as other men were choosing at the Stuart court. Few English
+commoners had wider possessions; and under James it was easy to purchase
+a peerage by servility and hard cash. "If my son will seek for his
+honour," wrote his mother from the court, "tell him now to come, for
+here are multitudes of lords a-making!" But Hampden had nobler aims than
+a peerage. From <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321"></a><a href="./images/321.png">5-321</a>]</span>the first his choice was made to stand by the side of
+those who were struggling for English freedom; and at the age of
+twenty-six he took his seat in the memorable Parliament of 1621. Young
+as he was, his ability at once carried him to the front; he was employed
+in "managing conferences with the Lords" and other weighty business, and
+became the friend of Eliot and of Pym. He was again returned to the two
+first Parliaments of Charles; and his firm refusal to contribute to
+forced loans at the close of the second marked the quiet firmness of his
+temper. "I could be content to lend," he replied to the demand of the
+Council, "but for fear to draw on myself that curse in Magna Charta
+which should be read twice a year against those that do infringe it." He
+was rewarded with so close an imprisonment in the Tower, "that he never
+afterwards did look the same man he was before." But a prison had no
+force to bend the steady patriotism of John Hampden, and he again took a
+prominent part in the Parliament of 1628, especially on the religious
+questions which came under debate.</p>
+
+<p>With the dissolution of this Parliament Hampden again withdrew to his
+home, the home that, however disguised by tasteless changes without,
+still stands unaltered within on a rise of the Chilterns, its
+Elizabethan hall girt round with galleries and stately staircases
+winding up beneath shadowy portraits in ruffs and farthingales. Around
+are <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322"></a><a href="./images/322.png">5-322</a>]</span>the quiet undulations of the chalk-country, billowy heavings and
+sinkings as of some prim&aelig;val sea suddenly hushed into motionlessness,
+soft slopes of grey grass or brown-red corn falling gently to dry
+bottoms, woodland flung here and there in masses over the hills. A
+country of fine and lucid air, of far shadowy distances, of hollows
+tenderly veiled by mist, graceful everywhere with a flowing
+unaccentuated grace, as though Hampden's own temper had grown out of it.
+As we look on it, we recall the "flowing courtesy to all men," the
+"seeming humility and submission of judgement," the "rare affability and
+temper in debate," that woke admiration and regard even in the fiercest
+of his opponents. But beneath the outer grace of Hampden's demeanour lay
+a soul of steel. Buried as he seemed in the affections of his home, the
+great patriot waited patiently for the hour of freedom that he knew must
+come. Around him gathered the men that were to stand by his side in the
+future struggle. He had been the bosom friend of Eliot till the victim
+of the king's resentment lay dead in the Tower. He was now the
+bosom-friend of Pym. His mother had been a daughter of the great
+Cromwell house at Hinchinbrook, and he was thus closely linked by blood
+to Oliver Cromwell and connected with Oliver St. John. The marriages of
+two daughters united him to the Knightleys and the Lynes. Selden and
+Whitelock were among his closest <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323"></a><a href="./images/323.png">5-323</a>]</span>counsellors. It was in steady commune
+with these that the years passed by, while outer eyes saw in him only a
+Puritan squire of a cultured sort, popular among his tenantry and
+punctual at Quarter-Sessions, with "an exceeding propenseness to field
+sports" and "busy in the embellishment of his estate, of which he was
+very fond."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Hampden and ship-money.</span></p>
+
+<p>At last the quiet patience was broken by the news of the ship-money, and
+of a writ addressed to the High Sheriff, Sir Peter Temple of Stave,
+ordering him to raise &pound;4500 on the county of Buckingham. Hampden's
+resolve was soon known. In the January of 1636 a return was made of the
+payments for ship-money from the village of Great Kimble at the foot of
+the Chilterns round which his chief property lay, and at the head of
+those who refused to pay stood the name of John Hampden. For a while
+matters moved slowly; and it was not till the close of June that a
+Council warrant summoned the High Sheriff to account for arrears.
+Hampden meanwhile had been taking counsel in the spring with Whitelock
+and others of his friends concerning the means of bringing the matter to
+a legal issue. Charles was as eager to appeal to the law as Hampden
+himself; but he followed his father's usage in privately consulting the
+judges on the subject of his claim, and it was not till the February of
+1637 that their answer asserted its legality. The king at once made
+their opinion public in the faith that all resistance <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324"></a><a href="./images/324.png">5-324</a>]</span>would cease. But
+the days were gone by when the voice of the judges was taken
+submissively for law by Englishmen. They had seen the dismissal of Coke
+and of Crewe. They knew that in matters of the prerogative the judges
+admitted a right of interference and of dictation on the part of the
+Crown. "The judges," Sir Harbottle Grimston could say in the Long
+Parliament, "the judges have overthrown the law, as the bishops
+religion!" What Hampden aimed at was not the judgement of such judges,
+but an open trial where England might hear, in spite of the silence of
+Parliament, a discussion of this great inroad on its freedom. His wishes
+were realized at last by the issue in May of a writ from the Exchequer,
+calling on him to show cause why payment of ship-money for his lands
+should not be made.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Charles and Scotland.</span></p>
+
+<p>The news of Hampden's resistance thrilled through the country at a
+moment when men were roused by news of resistance in the north. Since
+the accession of James Scotland had bent with a seeming tameness before
+aggression after aggression. Its pulpits had been bridled. Its boldest
+ministers had been sent into exile. Its General Assembly had been
+brought to submission by the Crown. Its Church had been forced to accept
+bishops, if not with all their old powers, still with authority as
+permanent superintendents of the diocesan synods. The ministers and
+elders had been deprived of their right of excommunicating <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325"></a><a href="./images/325.png">5-325</a>]</span>offenders,
+save with a bishop's sanction. A Court of High Commission enforced the
+supremacy of the Crown. But with this enforcement of his royal authority
+James was content. He had no wish for a doctrinal change, or for the
+bringing about of a strict uniformity with the Church of England. It was
+in vain that Laud in his earlier days invited James to draw his Scotch
+subjects "to a nearer conjunction with the liturgy and canons of this
+nation." "I sent him back again," said the shrewd old king, "with the
+frivolous draft he had drawn. For all that, he feared not my anger, but
+assaulted me again with another ill-fangled platform to make that
+stubborn Kirk stoop more to the English platform; but I durst not play
+fast and loose with my word. He knows not the stomach of that people."
+The earlier policy of Charles followed his father's line of action. It
+effected little save a partial restoration of Church-lands, which the
+lords were forced to surrender. But Laud's vigorous action made itself
+felt. His first acts were directed rather to points of outer observance
+than to any attack on the actual fabric of Presbyterian organization.
+The estates were induced to withdraw the control of ecclesiastical
+apparel from the Assembly, and to commit it to the Crown; and this step
+was soon followed by a resumption of their episcopal costume on the part
+of the Scotch bishops. When the Bishop of Moray preached before Charles
+in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326"></a><a href="./images/326.png">5-326</a>]</span>his rochet, on the king's visit to Edinburgh in 1633, it was the
+first instance of its use since the Reformation. The innovation was
+followed by the issue of a Royal warrant which directed all ministers to
+use the surplice in divine worship.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The new Liturgy.</span></p>
+
+<p>The enforcement of the surplice woke Scotland from its torpor, and alarm
+at once spread through the country. Quarterly meetings were held in
+parishes with fasting and prayer to consult on the dangers which
+threatened religion, and ministers who conformed to the new ceremonies
+were rebuked and deserted by their congregations. The popular discontent
+soon found leaders in the Scotch nobles. Threatened in power by the
+attempts of the Crown to narrow their legal jurisdiction, in purse by
+projects for the resumption and restoration to the Church of the
+bishops' lands, irritated by the restoration of the prelates to their
+old rank, by their reintroduction to Parliament and the Council, by the
+nomination of Archbishop Spottiswood to the post of Chancellor, and
+above all by the setting up again the worrying bishops' courts, the
+nobles with Lord Lorne at their head stood sullenly aloof from the new
+system. But Charles was indifferent to the discontent which his measures
+were rousing. Under Laud's pressure he was resolved to put an end to the
+Presbyterian character of the Scotch Church altogether, and to bring it
+to a uniformity with the Church of England in organization and ritual.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327"></a><a href="./images/327.png">5-327</a>]</span>With this view a book of Canons was issued in 1636 on the sole
+authority of the king. These Canons placed the government of the Church
+absolutely in the hands of its bishops; and made a bishop's licence
+necessary for instruction and for the publication of books. The
+authority of the prelates indeed was jealously subordinated to the
+supremacy of the Crown. No Church Assembly might be summoned but by the
+king, no alteration in worship or discipline introduced but by his
+permission. As daring a stretch of the prerogative superseded what was
+known as Knox's Liturgy&mdash;the book of Common Order drawn up on the
+Genevan model by that Reformer, and generally used throughout
+Scotland&mdash;by a new Liturgy based on the English Book of Common Prayer.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Its rejection.</span></p>
+
+<p>The Liturgy and Canons had been Laud's own handiwork; in their
+composition the General Assembly had neither been consulted nor
+recognized; and taken together they formed the code of a political and
+ecclesiastical system which aimed at reducing Scotland to an utter
+subjection to the Crown. To enforce them on the land was to effect a
+revolution of the most serious kind. The books however were backed by a
+royal injunction, and Laud flattered himself that the revolution had
+been wrought. But the patience of Scotland found an end at last. In the
+summer of 1637, while England was waiting for the opening of the great
+cause of ship-money, peremptory <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328"></a><a href="./images/328.png">5-328</a>]</span>orders from the king forced the clergy
+of Edinburgh to introduce the new service into their churches. On the
+23rd of July the Prayer-Book was used at the church of St. Giles. But
+the book was no sooner opened than a murmur ran through the
+congregation, and the murmur grew into a formidable riot. The church was
+cleared, and the service read; but the rising discontent frightened the
+judges into a decision that the royal writ enjoined the purchase, not
+the use, of the Prayer-Book, and its use was at once discontinued. The
+angry orders which came from England for its restoration were met by a
+shower of protests from every part of Scotland. The ministers of Fife
+pleaded boldly the want of any confirmation of the book by a General
+Assembly. "This Church," they exclaimed, "is a free and independent
+Church, just as this kingdom is a free and independent kingdom." The
+Duke of Lennox alone took sixty-eight petitions with him to the Court;
+while ministers, nobles, and gentry poured into Edinburgh to organize a
+national resistance.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The temper of England.</span></p>
+
+<p>The effect of these events in Scotland was at once seen in the open
+demonstration of discontent south of the border. The prison with which
+Laud had rewarded Prynne's dumpy quarto had tamed his spirit so little
+that a new tract, written within its walls, denounced the bishops as
+devouring wolves and lords of Lucifer. A fellow-prisoner, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329"></a><a href="./images/329.png">5-329</a>]</span>John
+Bastwick, declared in his "Litany" that "Hell was broke loose, and the
+devils in surplices, hoods, copes, and rochets were come amongst us."
+Burton, a London clergyman silenced by the High Commission, called on
+all Christians to resist the bishops as "robbers of souls, limbs of the
+beast, and factors of Antichrist." Raving of this sort might well have
+been passed by, had not the general sympathy with Prynne and his
+fellow-pamphleteers, when Laud dragged them in 1637 before the Star
+Chamber as "trumpets of sedition," shown how fast the tide of general
+anger against the Government was rising. The three culprits listened
+with defiance to their sentence of exposure in the pillory and
+imprisonment for life; and the crowd who filled Palace Yard to witness
+their punishment groaned at the cutting off of their ears, and "gave a
+great shout" when Prynne urged that the sentence on him was contrary to
+law. A hundred thousand Londoners lined the road as they passed on the
+way to prison; and the journey of these "Martyrs," as the spectators
+called them, was like a triumphal progress. Startled as he was at the
+sudden burst of popular feeling, Laud remained dauntless as ever.
+Prynne's entertainers, as he passed through the country, were summoned
+before the Star Chamber, while the censorship struck fiercer blows at
+the Puritan press. But the real danger lay not in the libels of silly
+zealots, but in the attitude of Scotland, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330"></a><a href="./images/330.png">5-330</a>]</span>and in the effect which was
+being produced in England at large by the trial of Hampden. Wentworth
+was looking on from Ireland with cool insolence at the contest between a
+subject and the Crown. "Mr. Hampden," he wrote, "is a great brother; and
+the genius of that faction of people leads them always to oppose, both
+civilly and ecclesiastically, all that ever authority ordains." But
+England looked on with other eyes. "The eyes of all men," owns
+Clarendon, "were fixed upon him as their <i>Pater Patri&aelig;</i> and the pilot
+who must steer the vessel through the tempests and storms that
+threatened it." In November and December 1637 the cause of ship-money
+was solemnly argued for twelve days before the full bench of judges. It
+was proved that the tax in past times had been levied only in cases of
+sudden emergency, and confined to the coast and port towns alone, and
+that even the show of legality had been taken from it by formal statute,
+and by the Petition of Right.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The judgement on ship-money.</span></p>
+
+<p>The case was adjourned, but its discussion told not merely on England,
+but on the temper of the Scots. Charles had replied to their petitions
+by a simple order to all strangers to leave the capital. But the Council
+at Edinburgh was unable to enforce his order; and the nobles and gentry
+before dispersing to their homes petitioned against the bishops,
+resolved not to own the jurisdiction of their courts, and named in
+November 1637 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331"></a><a href="./images/331.png">5-331</a>]</span>a body of delegates, under the odd title of "the Tables."
+These delegates carried on through the winter a series of negotiations
+with the Crown. The negotiations were interrupted in the spring of 1638
+by a renewed order for their dispersion, and for the acceptance of a
+Prayer-Book; while the judges in England delivered in June their
+long-delayed decision on Hampden's case. Two judges only pronounced in
+his favour; though three followed them on technical grounds. The
+majority, seven in number, laid down the broad principle that no statute
+prohibiting arbitrary taxation could be pleaded against the king's will.
+"I never read or heard," said Judge Berkeley, "that lex was rex, but it
+is common and most true that rex is lex." Finch, the Chief-Justice,
+summed up the opinions of his fellow-judges. "Acts of Parliament to take
+away the king's royal power in the defence of his kingdom are void," he
+said: "they are void Acts of Parliament to bind the king not to command
+the subjects, their persons, and goods, and I say their money too, for
+no Acts of Parliament make any difference."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Covenant.</span></p>
+
+<p>The case was ended; and Charles looked for the Puritans to give way. But
+keener eyes discerned that a new spirit of resistance had been stirred
+by the trial. The insolence of Wentworth was exchanged for a tone of
+angry terror. "I wish Mr. Hampden and others to his likeness," the Lord
+Deputy wrote bitterly from Ireland, "were <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332"></a><a href="./images/332.png">5-332</a>]</span>well whipt into their right
+senses." Amidst the exultation of the Court over the decision of the
+judges, Wentworth saw clearly that Hampden's work had been done. Legal
+and temperate as his course had been, he had roused England to a sense
+of the danger to her freedom, and forced into light the real character
+of the royal claims. How stern and bitter the temper even of the noblest
+Puritans had become at last we see in the poem which Milton produced at
+this time, his elegy of "Lycidas." Its grave and tender lament is broken
+by a sudden flash of indignation at the dangers around the Church, at
+the "blind mouths that scarce themselves know how to hold a sheephook,"
+and to whom "the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed," while "the grim
+wolf" of Rome "with privy paw daily devours apace, and nothing said!"
+The stern resolve of the people to demand justice on their tyrants spoke
+in his threat of the axe. Strafford and Laud, and Charles himself, had
+yet to reckon with "that two-handed engine at the door" which stood
+"ready to smite once, and smite no more." But stern as was the general
+resolve, there was no need for immediate action, for the difficulties
+which were gathering in the north were certain to bring a strain on the
+Government which would force it to seek support from the people. The
+king's demand for immediate submission, which reached Scotland while
+England was waiting for the Hampden judgement, in the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333"></a><a href="./images/333.png">5-333</a>]</span>spring of 1638,
+gathered the whole body of remonstrants together round "the Tables" at
+Stirling; and a protestation, read at Edinburgh, was followed, on
+Johnston of Warriston's suggestion, by a renewal of the Covenant with
+God which had been drawn up and sworn to in a previous hour of peril,
+when Mary was still plotting against Protestantism, and Spain was
+preparing its Armada. "We promise and swear," ran the solemn engagement
+at its close, "by the great name of the Lord our God, to continue in the
+profession and obedience of the said religion, and that we shall defend
+the same, and resist all their contrary errors and corruptions,
+according to our vocation and the utmost of that power which God has put
+into our hands all the days of our life."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Charles and Scotland.</span></p>
+
+<p>The Covenant was signed in the churchyard of the Greyfriars at Edinburgh
+on the first of March, in a tumult of enthusiasm, "with such content and
+joy as those who, having long before been outlaws and rebels, are
+admitted again into covenant with God." Gentlemen and nobles rode with
+the document in their pockets over the country, gathering subscriptions
+to it, while the ministers pressed for a general consent to it from the
+pulpit. But pressure was needless. "Such was the zeal of subscribers
+that for a while many subscribed with tears on their cheeks"; some were
+indeed reputed to have "drawn their own blood and used it in place of
+ink to underwrite their <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334"></a><a href="./images/334.png">5-334</a>]</span>names." The force given to Scottish freedom by
+this revival of religious fervour was seen in the new tone adopted by
+the Covenanters. The Marquis of Hamilton, who came as Royal Commissioner
+to put an end to the quarrel, was at once met by demands for an
+abolition of the Court of High Commission, the withdrawal of the Books
+of Canons and Common Prayer, a free Parliament, and a free General
+Assembly. He threatened war; but the threat proved fruitless, and even
+the Scotch Council pressed Charles to give fuller satisfaction to the
+people. "I will rather die," the king wrote to Hamilton, "than yield to
+these impertinent and damnable demands"; but it was needful to gain
+time. "The discontents at home," wrote Lord Northumberland to Wentworth,
+"do rather increase than lessen"; and Charles was without money or men.
+It was in vain that he begged for a loan from Spain on promise of
+declaring war against Holland, or that he tried to procure two thousand
+troops from Flanders, with which to occupy Edinburgh. The loan and
+troops were both refused, and some contributions offered by the English
+Catholics did little to recruit the Exchequer.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Scotch Revolution.</span></p>
+
+<p>Charles had directed the Marquis to delay any decisive breach till the
+royal fleet appeared in the Forth; but it was hard to equip a fleet at
+all. Scotland in fact was sooner ready for war than the king. The Scotch
+volunteers who had been <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335"></a><a href="./images/335.png">5-335</a>]</span>serving in the Thirty Years War streamed home
+at the call of their brethren; and General Leslie, a veteran trained
+under Gustavus, came from Sweden to take the command of the new forces.
+A voluntary war tax was levied in every shire. Charles was so utterly
+taken by surprise that he saw no choice but to yield, if but for the
+moment, to the Scottish demands. Hamilton announced that the king
+allowed the Covenant, the service book was revoked; a pledge was given
+that the power of the bishops should be lessened; a Parliament was
+promised for the coming year; and a General Assembly summoned at once.
+The Assembly met at Glasgow in November 1638; it had been chosen
+according to the old form which James had annulled, and its 144
+ministers were backed by 96 lay elders amongst whom all the leading
+Covenanters found a place. They had hardly met when, at the news of
+their design to attack the Bishops, Hamilton declared the Assembly
+dissolved. But the Church claimed its old freedom of meeting apart from
+any licence from kings; and by an almost unanimous vote the Assembly
+resolved to continue its session. Its acts were an undoing of all that
+the Stuarts had done. The two books of Canons and Common Prayer, the
+High Commission, the Articles of Perth, were all set aside as invalid.
+Episcopacy was abjured, the bishops were deposed from their office, and
+the system of Presbyterianism re-established in its fullest extent.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336"></a><a href="./images/336.png">5-336</a>]</span></p>
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Scotch War.</span></p>
+
+<p>Scotland was fighting England's battle as well as her own. The bold
+assertion of a people's right to frame its own religion was a practical
+carrying out of the claim which had been made by the English Parliament
+of 1629. But Charles was as resolute to resist it now as then. He was
+firm in his resolve of war, and the strong remonstrances of his Scotch
+councillors against it were met by a fierce pressure from Wentworth and
+Laud. Both felt that the question had ceased to be one for Scotland
+only; they saw that a concession to the Scots must now be fatal to the
+political and ecclesiastical system they had built up in Ireland and
+England alike. In both countries those who opposed the Government were
+looking to the rising in the North. They were suspicious of
+correspondence between the Puritans in England and the Scotch leaders;
+and whether these suspicions were true or no, of the sympathy with which
+the proceedings at Edinburgh were watched south of the Border there
+could be little doubt. It was with the conviction that the whole Stuart
+system was at stake that the two ministers pressed for war. But angered
+as he was, Charles was a Scotchman, and a Scotch king; and he shrank
+from a march with English troops into his hereditary kingdom. He counted
+rather on the sympathy of the northern clans and of Huntly, on the
+impression produced by the appearance of Hamilton with a fleet in the
+Forth, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337"></a><a href="./images/337.png">5-337</a>]</span>and by the suspension of trade with Holland, than on any actual
+force of arms from the South. The 20,000 men he gathered at York were to
+serve rather as a demonstration, and to protect the border, than as an
+invading force. But again his plans broke down before the activity and
+resolution of the Scots. The news that Charles was gathering an army at
+York, and reckoning for support on the clans of the north, was answered
+in the spring of 1639 by the seizure of Edinburgh, Dumbarton, and
+Stirling; while 10,000 well-equipped troops under Leslie and the Earl of
+Montrose entered Aberdeen, and brought the Earl of Huntly a prisoner to
+the south. Instead of overawing the country, the appearance of the royal
+fleet in the Forth was the signal for Leslie's march with 20,000 men to
+the Border. Charles had hardly pushed across the Tweed, when the "old
+little crooked soldier," encamping on the hill of Dunse Law, a few miles
+from Berwick, fairly offered him battle.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Scotland and France.</span></p>
+
+<p>The king's threats at once broke down. Charles had a somewhat stronger
+force than Leslie, but his men had no will to fight; and he was forced
+to evade a battle by consenting to the gathering of a free Assembly and
+of a Scotch Parliament. But he had no purpose of being bound by terms
+which had been wrested from him by rebel subjects. In his eyes the
+pacification at Berwick was a mere suspension of arms; and the king's
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338"></a><a href="./images/338.png">5-338</a>]</span>summons of Wentworth from Ireland was a proof that violent measures
+were in preparation. The Scotch leaders were far from deceiving
+themselves as to the king's purpose; and in the struggle which they
+foresaw they sought aid from a power which Scotch tradition had looked
+on for centuries as the natural ally of their country. The jealousy
+between France and England had long been smouldering, and only the
+weakness of Charles and the caution of Richelieu had prevented its
+bursting into open flame. In the weary negotiations which the English
+king still carried on for the restoration of his nephew to the
+Palatinate, he had till now been counting rather on the friendly
+mediation of Spain with the Emperor than on any efforts of France or its
+Protestant allies. At this moment however a strange piece of fortune
+brought about a sudden change in his policy. A Spanish fleet, which had
+been attacked by the Dutch in the Channel, took refuge under the guns of
+Dover; and Spain appealed for its protection to the friendship of the
+king. But Charles saw in the incident a chance of winning the Palatinate
+without a blow. He at once opened negotiations with Richelieu. He
+offered to suffer the Spanish vessels to be destroyed, if France would
+pledge itself to restore his nephew. Richelieu on the other hand would
+only consent to his restoration if Charles would take an active part in
+the war. But the negotiations <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339"></a><a href="./images/339.png">5-339</a>]</span>were suddenly cut short by the daring of
+the Dutch. In spite of the king's threats they attacked the Spanish
+fleet as it lay in English waters, and drove it broken to Ostend. Such
+an act of defiance could only embitter the enmity which Charles already
+felt towards France and its Dutch allies; and Richelieu grasped gladly
+at the Scotch revolt as a means of hindering England from joining in the
+war. His agents opened communications with the Scottish leaders; and
+applications for its aid were forwarded by the Scots to the French
+court.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Short Parliament.</span></p>
+
+<p>The discovery of this correspondence roused anew the hopes of the king.
+He was resolved not to yield to rebels; and the proceedings in Scotland
+since the pacification of Berwick seemed to him mere rebellion. A fresh
+General Assembly adopted as valid the acts of its predecessor. The
+Parliament only met to demand that the council should be responsible to
+it for its course of government. The king prorogued both that he might
+use the weapon which fortune had thrown into his hand. He never doubted
+that if he appealed to the country English loyalty would rise to support
+him against Scottish treason. He yielded at last to the counsels of
+Wentworth. Wentworth was still for war. He had never ceased to urge that
+the Scots should be whipped back to their border; and the king now
+avowed his concurrence in this policy by raising him to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340"></a><a href="./images/340.png">5-340</a>]</span>earldom of
+Strafford, and from the post of Lord Deputy to that of Lord Lieutenant.
+Strafford agreed with Charles that a Parliament should be summoned, the
+correspondence laid before it, and advantage taken of the burst of
+indignation on which the king counted to procure a heavy subsidy. But he
+had foreseen that it might refuse all aid; and in such a case the Earl
+and the Council held that the King would have a right to fall back on
+"extraordinary means." Strafford himself hurried to Ireland to read a
+practical lesson to the English Parliament. In fourteen days he had
+procured four subsidies from the Irish Commons, and set on foot a force
+of 8000 men to take part in the attack on the Scots. He came back,
+flushed with his success, in time for the meeting of the Houses at
+Westminster in the middle of April 1640. But the lesson failed in its
+effect. Statesmen like Hampden and Pym were not fools enough to aid the
+great enemy of English freedom against men who had risen for freedom
+across the Tweed. Every member of the Commons knew that Scotland was
+fighting the battle of English liberty. All hope of bringing them to any
+attack upon the Scots proved fruitless. The intercepted letters were
+quietly set aside; and the Commons declared as of old that redress of
+grievances must precede any grant of supplies. No subsidy could be
+granted till security was had for religion, for property, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341"></a><a href="./images/341.png">5-341</a>]</span>for the
+liberties of Parliament. An offer to relinquish ship-money proved
+fruitless; and after three weeks sitting the "Short Parliament" was
+dissolved. "Things must go worse before they go better" was the cool
+comment of St. John. But the country was strangely moved. After eleven
+years of personal rule, its hopes had risen again with the summons of
+the Houses to Westminster; and their rough dismissal after a three weeks
+sitting brought all patience to an end. "So great a defection in the
+kingdom," wrote Lord Northumberland, "hath not been known in the memory
+of man."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Bishops' War.</span></p>
+
+<p>Strafford alone stood undaunted. He had provided for the resolve of the
+Parliament by the decision of the Council that in such a case the king
+might resort to "extraordinary means"; and he now urged that by the act
+of the Commons Charles was "freed from all rule of government," and
+entitled to supply himself at his will. The Irish army, he said, was at
+the king's command, and Scotland could be subdued in a single summer. He
+was bent, in fact, on war; and he took command of the royal army, which
+again advanced to the north. But the Scots were as ready for war as
+Strafford. As early as March they had reassembled their army; and their
+Parliament commissioned the Committee of Estates, of which Argyle was
+the most influential member, to carry on the government. Encouraged by
+the refusal <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342"></a><a href="./images/342.png">5-342</a>]</span>of the English Houses to grant supplies, they now published
+a new manifesto and resolved to meet the march of Strafford's army by an
+advance into England. On the twentieth of August the Scotch army crossed
+the Border; Montrose being the first to set foot on English soil.
+Forcing the passage of the Tyne in the face of an English detachment,
+they occupied Newcastle, and despatched from that town their proposals
+of peace. They prayed the king to consider their grievances, and "with
+the advice and consent of the Estates of England convened in Parliament,
+to settle a firm and desirable peace." The prayer was backed by
+preparations for a march upon York, where Charles had abandoned himself
+to despair. The warlike bluster of Strafford had broken utterly down the
+moment he attempted to take the field. His troops were a mere mob; and
+neither by threats nor prayers could the earl recall them to their duty.
+He was forced to own that two months were needed before they could be
+fit for action. Charles was driven again to open negotiations with the
+Scots, and to buy a respite in their advance by a promise of pay for
+their army and by leaving Northumberland and Durham in their hands as
+pledges for the fulfilment of his engagements. But the truce only met
+half his difficulties. Behind him England was all but in revolt. The
+Treasury was empty, and London and the East India merchants alike
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343"></a><a href="./images/343.png">5-343</a>]</span>refused a loan. The London apprentices mobbed Laud at Lambeth, and
+broke up the sittings of the High Commission at St. Paul's. The war was
+denounced everywhere as "the Bishops' War," and the new levies murdered
+officers whom they suspected of Papistry, broke down altar-rails in
+every church they passed, and deserted to their homes. To all but
+Strafford it was plain that the system of Charles had broken hopelessly
+down. Two peers, Lord Wharton and Lord Howard, ventured to lay before
+the king himself a petition for peace with the Scots; and though
+Strafford arrested and proposed to shoot them as mutineers, the English
+Council shrank from desperate courses. But if desperate courses were not
+taken, there was nothing for it but to give way. Penniless, without an
+army, with a people all but in revolt, the obstinate temper of the king
+still strove to escape from the humiliation of calling a Parliament. He
+summoned a Great Council of the Peers at York. But his project broke
+down before its general repudiation by the nobles; and with wrath and
+shame at his heart Charles was driven to summon again the Houses to
+Westminster.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344"></a><a href="./images/344.png">5-344</a>]</span></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr />
+
+<ul>
+  <li>CHAPTER VIII</li>
+  <li>THE LONG PARLIAMENT</li>
+  <li>1640-1644</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">John Pym.</span></p>
+
+<p>If Strafford embodied the spirit of tyranny, John Pym, the leader of the
+Commons from the first meeting of the new Houses at Westminster, stands
+out for all after time as the embodiment of law. A Somersetshire
+gentleman of good birth and competent fortune, he entered on public life
+in the Parliament of 1614, and was imprisoned for his patriotism at its
+close. He had been a leading member in that of 1620, and one of the
+"twelve ambassadors" for whom James ordered chairs to be set at
+Whitehall. Of the band of patriots with whom he had stood side by side
+in the constitutional struggle against the earlier despotism of Charles
+he was almost the one survivor. Coke had died of old age; Cotton's heart
+was broken by oppression; Eliot had perished in the Tower; Wentworth had
+apostatized. But Pym remained, resolute, patient as of old; and as the
+sense of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345"></a><a href="./images/345.png">5-345</a>]</span>his greatness grew silently during the eleven years of
+deepening misrule, the hope and faith of better things clung almost
+passionately to the man who never doubted of the final triumph of
+freedom and the law. At their close, Clarendon tells us, in words all
+the more notable for their bitter tone of hate, "he was the most popular
+man, and the most able to do hurt, that have lived at any time." He had
+shown he knew how to wait, and when waiting was over he showed he knew
+how to act. On the eve of the Long Parliament he rode through England to
+quicken the electors to a sense of the crisis which had come at last;
+and on the assembling of the Commons he took his place, not merely as
+member for Tavistock, but as their acknowledged head. Few of the country
+gentlemen indeed who formed the bulk of the members, had sat in any
+previous House; and of the few none represented in so eminent a way the
+Parliamentary tradition on which the coming struggle was to turn. Pym's
+eloquence, inferior in boldness and originality to that of Eliot or
+Wentworth, was better suited by its massive and logical force to
+convince and guide a great party; and it was backed by a calmness of
+temper, a dexterity and order in the management of public business, and
+a practical power of shaping the course of debate, which gave a form and
+method to Parliamentary proceedings such as they had never had before.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His political theory.</span></p>
+
+<p>Valuable however as these qualities were, it <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346"></a><a href="./images/346.png">5-346</a>]</span>was a yet higher quality
+which raised Pym into the greatest, as he was the first, of
+Parliamentary leaders. Of the five hundred members who sate round him at
+St. Stephen's, he was the one man who had clearly foreseen, and as
+clearly resolved how to meet, the difficulties which lay before them. It
+was certain that Parliament would be drawn into a struggle with the
+Crown. It was probable that in such a struggle the House of Commons
+would be hampered, as it had been hampered before, by the House of
+Lords. The legal antiquarians of the older constitutional school stood
+helpless before such a conflict of co-ordinate powers, a conflict for
+which no provision had been made by the law, and on which precedents
+threw only a doubtful and conflicting light. But with a knowledge of
+precedent as great as their own, Pym rose high above them in his grasp
+of constitutional principles. He was the first English statesman who
+discovered, and applied, to the political circumstances around him, what
+may be called the doctrine of constitutional proportion. He saw that as
+an element of constitutional life Parliament was of higher value than
+the Crown; he saw too that in Parliament itself the one essential part
+was the House of Commons. On these two facts he based his whole policy
+in the contest which followed. When Charles refused to act with the
+Parliament, Pym treated the refusal as a temporary abdication on the
+part of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347"></a><a href="./images/347.png">5-347</a>]</span>the sovereign, which vested the executive power in the two
+Houses until new arrangements were made. When the Lords obstructed
+public business, he warned them that obstruction would only force the
+Commons "to save the kingdom alone." Revolutionary as these principles
+seemed at the time, they have both been recognized as bases of our
+constitution since the days of Pym. The first principle was established
+by the Convention and Parliament which followed on the departure of
+James the Second; the second by the acknowledgement on all sides since
+the Reform Bill of 1832 that the government of the country is really in
+the hands of the House of Commons, and can only be carried on by
+ministers who represent the majority of that House.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His political genius.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was thus that the work of Pym brought about a political revolution
+greater than any that England has ever experienced since his day. But
+the temper of Pym was the very opposite of the temper of a
+revolutionist. Few natures have ever been wider in their range of
+sympathy or action. Serious as his purpose was, his manners were genial
+and even courtly; he turned easily from an invective against Strafford
+to a chat with Lady Carlisle; and the grace and gaiety of his social
+tone, even when the care and weight of public affairs were bringing him
+to his grave, gave rise to a hundred silly scandals among the prurient
+royalists. It was this striking combination of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348"></a><a href="./images/348.png">5-348</a>]</span>genial versatility with
+a massive force in his nature which marked him out from the first moment
+of power as a born ruler of men. He proved himself at once the subtlest
+of diplomatists and the grandest of demagogues. He was equally at home
+in tracking the subtle intricacies of royalist intrigues, or in kindling
+popular passion with words of fire. Though past middle life when his
+work really began, for he was born in 1584, four years before the coming
+of the Armada, he displayed from the first meeting of the Long
+Parliament the qualities of a great administrator, an immense faculty
+for labour, a genius for organization, patience, tact, a power of
+inspiring confidence in all whom he touched, calmness and moderation
+under good fortune or ill, an immovable courage, an iron will. No
+English ruler has ever shown greater nobleness of natural temper or a
+wider capacity for government than the Somersetshire squire whom his
+enemies, made clear-sighted by their hate, greeted truly enough as "King
+Pym."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The meeting of the Parliament.</span></p>
+
+<p>On the eve of the elections he rode with Hampden through the counties to
+rouse England to a sense of the crisis which had come. But his ride was
+hardly needed, for the summons of a Parliament at once woke the kingdom
+to a fresh life. The Puritan emigration to New England was suddenly and
+utterly suspended; "the change," said Winthrop, "made all men to stay in
+England <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349"></a><a href="./images/349.png">5-349</a>]</span>in expectation of a new world." The public discontent spoke
+from every Puritan pulpit, and expressed itself in a sudden burst of
+pamphlets, the first-fruits of the thirty thousand which were issued in
+the twenty years that followed, and which turned England at large into a
+school of political discussion. The resolute looks of the members, as
+they gathered at Westminster on the third of November 1640, contrasted
+with the hesitating words of the king; and each brought from borough or
+county a petition of grievances. Fresh petitions were brought every day
+by bands of citizens or farmers. The first week was spent in receiving
+these petitions, and in appointing forty committees to examine and
+report on them, whose reports formed the grounds on which the Commons
+subsequently acted. The next work of the Commons was to deal with the
+agents of the royal system. It was agreed that the king's name should be
+spared; but in every county a list of officers who had carried out the
+plans of the Government was ordered to be prepared and laid before the
+House. But the Commons were far from dealing merely with these meaner
+"delinquents." They resolved to strike at the men whose counsels had
+wrought the evil of the past years of tyranny; and their first blow was
+at the leading ministers of the king.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Impeachment of Strafford.</span></p>
+
+<p>Even Laud was not the centre of so great and universal a hatred as the
+Earl of Strafford. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350"></a><a href="./images/350.png">5-350</a>]</span>Strafford's guilt was more than the guilt of a
+servile instrument of tyranny, it was the guilt of "that grand apostate
+to the Commonwealth who," in the terrible words which closed Lord
+Digby's invective, "must not expect to be pardoned in this world till he
+be despatched to the other." He was conscious of his danger, but Charles
+forced him to attend the Court; and with characteristic boldness he
+resolved to anticipate attack by accusing the Parliamentary leaders of a
+treasonable correspondence with the Scots. He reached London a week
+after the opening of the Parliament; and hastened the next morning to an
+interview with the king. But he had to deal with men as energetic as
+himself. He was just laying his scheme before Charles when the news
+reached him that Pym was at the bar of the Lords with his impeachment
+for high treason. On the morning of the 11th of November the doors of
+the House of Commons had been locked, Strafford's impeachment voted, and
+carried by Pym with 300 members at his back to the bar of the Lords. The
+Earl hurried at once to the Parliament. "With speed," writes an
+eye-witness, "he comes to the House: he calls rudely at the door," and,
+"with a proud glooming look, makes towards his place at the board-head.
+But at once many bid him void the House, so he is forced in confusion to
+go to the door till he was called." He was only recalled to hear his
+committal to the Tower. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351"></a><a href="./images/351.png">5-351</a>]</span>He was still resolute to retort the charge of
+treason on his foes, and "offered to speak, but was commanded to be gone
+without a word." The keeper of the Black Rod demanded his sword as he
+took him in charge. "This done, he makes through a number of people
+towards his coach, no man capping to him, before whom that morning the
+greatest of all England would have stood uncovered."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Fall of the Ministers.</span></p>
+
+<p>The blow was quickly followed up. Windebank, the Secretary of State, was
+charged with a corrupt favouring of recusants, and escaped to France;
+Finch, the Lord Keeper, was impeached, and fled in terror over sea. In
+December Laud was himself committed to the charge of the Usher. The
+shadow of what was to come falls across the pages of his diary, and
+softens the hard temper of the man into a strange tenderness. "I stayed
+at Lambeth till the evening," writes the Archbishop, "to avoid the gaze
+of the people. I went to evening prayer in my chapel. The Psalms of the
+day and chapter fifty of Isaiah gave me great comfort. God make me
+worthy of it, and fit to receive it. As I went to my barge, hundreds of
+my poor neighbours stood there and prayed for my safety and return to my
+house. For which I bless God and them." In February Sir Robert Berkeley,
+one of the judges who had held that ship-money was legal, was seized
+while sitting on the Bench and committed to prison. In the very first
+days <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352"></a><a href="./images/352.png">5-352</a>]</span>of the Parliament a yet more emphatic proof of the downfall of the
+royal system had been given by the recall of Prynne and his fellow
+"martyrs" from their prisons, and by their entry in triumph into London,
+amidst the shouts of a great multitude who strewed laurels in their
+path.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Work of the Houses.</span></p>
+
+<p>The effect of these rapid blows was seen in the altered demeanour of the
+king. Charles at once dropped his old tone of command. He ceased to
+protest against the will of the Commons, and looked sullenly on while
+one by one the lawless acts of his Government were undone. Ship-money
+was declared illegal; and the judgement in Hampden's case was annulled.
+In February 1641 a statute declaring "the ancient right of the subjects
+of this kingdom that no subsidy, custom, impost, or any charge
+whatsoever ought or may be laid or imposed upon any merchandise exported
+or imported by subjects, denizens, or aliens, without common consent in
+Parliament," put an end for ever to all pretensions to a right of
+arbitrary taxation on the part of the Crown. A Triennial Bill enforced
+the assembly of the Houses every three years, and bound the returning
+officers to proceed to election if no royal writ were issued to summon
+them.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Church reform.</span></p>
+
+<p>The subject of religion was one of greater difficulty. In ecclesiastical
+as in political matters the aim of the parliamentary leaders was
+strictly conservative. Their purpose was to restore the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353"></a><a href="./images/353.png">5-353</a>]</span>Church of
+England to its state under Elizabeth, and to free it from the
+"innovations" introduced by Laud and his fellow-prelates. With this view
+commissioners were sent in January 1641 into every county "for the
+defacing, demolishing, and quite taking away of all images, altars, or
+tables turned altarwise, crucifixes, superstitious pictures, monuments,
+and reliques of idolatry out of all churches and chapels." But the bulk
+of the Commons as of the Lords were averse from any radical changes in
+the constitution or doctrine of the Church. All however were agreed on
+the necessity of reform; and one of the first acts of the Parliament was
+to appoint a Committee of Religion to consider the question. Within as
+without the House the general opinion was in favour of a reduction of
+the power and wealth of the prelates, as well as of the jurisdiction of
+the Church courts. Even among the bishops themselves the more prominent
+saw the need for consenting to an abolition of Chapters and Bishops'
+Courts, as well as to the election of a council of ministers in each
+diocese, which had been suggested by Archbishop Usher as a check on
+episcopal autocracy. A scheme to this effect was drawn up by Bishop
+Williams of Lincoln; but it was far from meeting the wishes of the
+general body of the Commons. The part which the higher clergy had taken
+in lending themselves to do political work for the Crown was fresh in
+the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354"></a><a href="./images/354.png">5-354</a>]</span>minds of all; and in addition to the changes which Williams
+proposed, Pym and Lord Falkland demanded a severance of the clergy from
+all secular or state offices, and an expulsion of the bishops from the
+House of Lords. Such a measure seemed needful to restore the independent
+action of the Peers; for the number and servility of the bishops were
+commonly strong enough to prevent the Upper House from taking any part
+which was disagreeable to the Crown.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Bishops and Parliament.</span></p>
+
+<p>Further the bulk of the Commons had no will to go. There were others
+indeed who were pressing hard to go further. A growing party demanded
+the abolition of Episcopacy altogether. The doctrines of Cartwright had
+risen into popularity under the persecution of Laud, and Presbyterianism
+was now a formidable force among the middle classes. Its chief strength
+lay in the eastern counties and in London, where a few clergymen such as
+Calamy and Marshall formed a committee for its diffusion; while in
+Parliament it was represented by Lord Brooke, Lord Mandeville, and Lord
+Saye and Sele. In the Commons Sir Harry Vane represented a more extreme
+party of reformers, the Independents of the future, whose sentiments
+were little less hostile to Presbyterianism than to Episcopacy, but who
+acted with the Presbyterians for the present, and formed a part of what
+became known as the "root and branch" party, from its demand for the
+utter <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355"></a><a href="./images/355.png">5-355</a>]</span>extirpation of prelacy. The attitude of Scotland in the struggle
+against tyranny, and the political advantages of a religious union
+between the two kingdoms, gave force to the Presbyterian party; and the
+agitation which it set on foot found a vigorous support in the Scotch
+Commissioners who had been sent to treat of peace with the Parliament.
+Thoughtful men, too, were moved by a desire to knit the English Church
+more closely to the general body of Protestantism. Milton, who after the
+composition of his "Lycidas" had spent a year in foreign travel,
+returned to throw himself on this ground into the theological strife. He
+held it "an unjust thing that the English should differ from all
+churches as many as be reformed." In spite of this pressure however, and
+of a Presbyterian petition from London with fifteen thousand signatures
+which had been presented at the very opening of the Houses, the
+Parliament remained hostile to any change in the constitution of the
+Church. The Committee of Religion reported in favour of the reforms
+proposed by Falkland and Pym; and on the tenth of March 1641 a bill for
+the removal of bishops from the House of Peers passed the Commons almost
+unanimously.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Trial of Strafford.</span></p>
+
+<p>As yet all had gone well. The king made no sign of opposition. He was
+known to be resolute against the abolition of Episcopacy; but he
+announced no purpose of resisting the removal of the bishops from the
+House of Peers. Strafford's <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356"></a><a href="./images/356.png">5-356</a>]</span>life he was determined to save; but he
+threw no obstacle in the way of his impeachment. The trial of the Earl
+opened on the twenty-second of March. The whole of the House of Commons
+appeared in Westminster Hall to support it, and the passion which the
+cause excited was seen in the loud cries of sympathy or hatred which
+burst from the crowded benches on either side as Strafford for fifteen
+days struggled with a remarkable courage and ingenuity against the list
+of charges, and melted his audience to tears by the pathos of his
+defence. But the trial was suddenly interrupted. Though tyranny and
+misgovernment had been conclusively proved against the Earl, the
+technical proof of treason was weak. "The law of England," to use
+Hallam's words, "is silent as to conspiracies against itself," and
+treason by the Statute of Edward the Third was restricted to a levying
+of war against the king or a compassing of his death. The Commons
+endeavoured to strengthen their case by bringing forward the notes of a
+meeting of the Council in which Strafford had urged the use of his Irish
+troops "to reduce that kingdom to obedience"; but the Lords would only
+admit the evidence on condition of wholly reopening the case. Pym and
+Hampden remained convinced of the sufficiency of the impeachment; but
+the House broke loose from their control. Under the guidance of St. John
+and Lord Falkland the Commons resolved to abandon <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357"></a><a href="./images/357.png">5-357</a>]</span>these judicial
+proceedings, and fall back on the resource of a Bill of Attainder. The
+bill passed the Lower House on the 21st of April by a majority of 204 to
+59; and on the 29th it received the assent of the Lords. The course
+which the Parliament took has been bitterly censured by some whose
+opinion in such a matter is entitled to respect. But the crime of
+Strafford was none the less a crime that it did not fall within the
+scope of the Statute of Treasons. It is impossible indeed to provide for
+some of the greatest dangers which can happen to national freedom by any
+formal statute. Even now a minister might avail himself of the temper of
+a Parliament elected in some moment of popular panic, and, though the
+nation returned to its senses, might simply by refusing to appeal to the
+country govern in defiance of its will. Such a course would be
+technically legal, but such a minister would be none the less a
+criminal. Strafford's course, whether it fell within the Statute of
+Treasons or no, was from beginning to end an attack on the freedom of
+the whole nation. In the last resort a nation retains the right of
+self-defence, and a Bill of Attainder is the assertion of such a right
+for the punishment of a public enemy who falls within the scope of no
+written law.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Army Plot.</span></p>
+
+<p>The counsel of Pym and of Hampden had been prompted by no doubt of the
+legality of the attainder. But they looked on the impeachment <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358"></a><a href="./images/358.png">5-358</a>]</span>as still
+likely to succeed, and they were anxious at this moment to conciliate
+the king. The real security for the permanence of the changes they had
+wrought lay in a lasting change in the royal counsels; and such a change
+it seemed possible to bring about. To save Strafford and Episcopacy
+Charles listened in the spring of 1641 to a proposal for entrusting the
+offices of state to the leaders of the Parliament. In this scheme the
+Earl of Bedford was to become Lord Treasurer, Pym Chancellor of the
+Exchequer, Holles Secretary of State, while Lords Essex, Mandeville, and
+Saye and Sele occupied various posts in the administration. Foreign
+affairs would have been entrusted to Lord Holland, whose policy was that
+of alliance with Richelieu and Holland against Spain, a policy whose
+adoption would have been sealed by the marriage of a daughter of Charles
+with the Prince of Orange. With characteristic foresight Hampden sought
+only the charge of the Prince of Wales. He knew that the best security
+for freedom in the after-time would be a patriot king. Charles listened
+to this project with seeming assent; the only conditions he made were
+that Episcopacy should not be abolished, nor Strafford executed; and
+though the death of Lord Bedford put an end to it for the moment, the
+Parliamentary leaders seem still to have had hopes of their entry into
+the royal Council. But meanwhile Charles was counting the chances <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359"></a><a href="./images/359.png">5-359</a>]</span>of a
+very different policy. The courtiers about him were rallying from their
+first panic. His French Queen, furious at what she looked on as insults
+to royalty, and yet more furious at the persecution of the Catholics,
+was spurring him to violent courses. And for violence there seemed at
+the moment an opportunity. In Ireland Strafford's army refused to
+disband itself. In Scotland the union of the nobles was already broken
+by the old spirit of faction; and in his jealousy of the power gained by
+his hereditary enemy, the Earl of Argyle, Lord Montrose had formed a
+party with other great nobles, and was pressing Charles to come and
+carry out a counter-revolution in the North. Above all the English army,
+which still lay at York, was discontented by its want of pay and by the
+favour shown to the Scottish soldiers in its front. The discontent was
+busily fanned by its officers; and a design was laid before Charles by
+which advantage might be taken of the humour of the army to march it
+upon London, to seize the Tower and free Strafford. With the Earl at
+their head, the soldiers could then overawe the Houses and free the king
+from his thraldom. Charles listened to the project; he refused any
+expression of assent; but he kept the secret, and suffered the plot to
+go on, while he continued the negotiations with the Parliamentary
+leaders.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Death of Strafford.</span></p>
+
+<p>But he was now in the hands of men who were his match in intrigue as
+they were more than his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360"></a><a href="./images/360.png">5-360</a>]</span>match in quickness of action. In the beginning
+of May, it is said through a squabble among the conspirators, the army
+plot became known to Pym. The moment was a critical one. Much of the
+energy and union of the Parliament was already spent. The Lords were
+beginning to fall back into their old position of allies of the Court.
+They were holding at bay the bill for the expulsion of the bishops from
+their seats in Parliament which had been sent up by the Lower House,
+though the measure aimed at freeing the Peers as a legislative body by
+removing from among them a body of men whose servility made them mere
+tools of the Crown, while it averted&mdash;if but for the moment&mdash;the growing
+pressure for the abolition of episcopacy. Things were fast coming to a
+standstill, when the discovery of the army plot changed the whole
+situation. Waver as the Peers might, they had no mind to be tricked by
+the king and overawed by his soldiery. The Commons were stirred to their
+old energy, London itself was driven to panic at the thought of passing
+into the hands of a mutinous and unpaid army. The general alarm sealed
+Strafford's doom. In plotting for his release, the plotters had marked
+him out as a life which was the main danger to the new state of things.
+Strafford still hoped in his master; he had a pledge from Charles that
+his life should be saved; and on the first of May the king in a formal
+message to the Parliament had <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361"></a><a href="./images/361.png">5-361</a>]</span>refused his assent to the Bill of
+Attainder. But the Queen had no mind that her husband should suffer for
+a minister whom she hated, and before her pressure the king gave way. On
+the tenth of May he gave his assent to the bill by commission, and on
+the twelfth Strafford passed to his doom. He died as he had lived. His
+friends warned him of the vast multitude gathered before the Tower to
+witness his fall. "I know how to look death in the face, and the people
+too," he answered proudly. "I thank God I am no more afraid of death,
+but as cheerfully put off my doublet at this time as ever I did when I
+went to bed." As the axe fell, the silence of the great multitude was
+broken by a universal shout of joy. The streets blazed with bonfires.
+The bells clashed out from every steeple. "Many," says an observer,
+"that came to town to see the execution rode in triumph back, waving
+their hats, and with all expressions of joy through every town they
+went, crying, 'His head is off. His head is off!'"</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Panic.</span></p>
+
+<p>The failure of the attempt to establish a Parliamentary ministry, the
+discovery of the army plot, the execution of Strafford, were the turning
+points in the history of the Long Parliament. Till May 1641 there was
+still hope for an accommodation between the Commons and the Crown by
+which the freedom that had been won might have been taken as the base of
+a new system of government. But from that hour <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362"></a><a href="./images/362.png">5-362</a>]</span>little hope of such an
+agreement remained. The Parliament could put no trust in the king. The
+air at Westminster, since the discovery of the army conspiracy, was full
+of rumours and panic; the creak of a few boards revived the memory of
+the Gunpowder Plot, and the members rushed out of the House of Commons
+in the full belief that it was undermined. On the other hand, Charles
+put by all thought of reconciliation. If he had given his assent to
+Strafford's death, he never forgave the men who had wrested his assent
+from him. From that hour he regarded his consent to the new measures as
+having been extorted by force, and to be retracted at the first
+opportunity. His opponents were quick to feel the king's resolve of a
+counter-revolution; and both Houses, in their terror, swore to defend
+the Protestant religion and the public liberties, an oath which was
+subsequently exacted from every one engaged in civil employment, and
+voluntarily taken by the great mass of the people. The same terror of a
+counter-revolution induced even Hyde and the "moderate men" in the
+Commons to bring in a bill providing that the present Parliament should
+not be dissolved but by its own consent; and the same commission which
+gave the king's assent to Strafford's attainder gave his assent to this
+bill for perpetuating the Parliament.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Charles in Scotland.</span></p>
+
+<p>Of all the demands of the Parliament this was the first that could be
+called distinctly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363"></a><a href="./images/363.png">5-363</a>]</span>revolutionary. To consent to it was to establish a
+power permanently co-ordinate with the Crown. But Charles signed the
+bill without protest. He had ceased to look on his acts as those of a
+free agent; and he was already planning the means of breaking the
+Parliament. What had hitherto held him down was the revolt of Scotland
+and the pressure of the Scotch army across the border. But its payment
+and withdrawal could no longer be delayed. The death of Strafford was
+immediately followed by the conclusion of a pacification between the two
+countries; and the sum required for the disbanding of both armies was
+provided by a poll-tax. Meanwhile the Houses hastened to complete their
+task of reform. The civil and judicial jurisdiction of the Star Chamber
+and the Court of High Commission, the irregular jurisdictions of the
+Council of the North, the Duchy of Lancaster, the County of Chester,
+were summarily abolished with a crowd of lesser tribunals. The work was
+pushed hastily on, for haste was needed. On the sixth of August the two
+armies were alike disbanded; and the Scots were no sooner on their way
+homeward than the king resolved to prevent their return. In spite of
+prayers from the Parliament, he left London for Edinburgh, yielded to
+every demand of the Assembly and the Scotch Estates, attended the
+Presbyterian worship, lavished titles and favours on the Earl of Argyle
+and the patriot leaders, and gained for a while a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364"></a><a href="./images/364.png">5-364</a>]</span>popularity which
+spread dismay in the English Parliament. Their dread of his designs was
+increased when he was found to have been intriguing all the while with
+the Earl of Montrose&mdash;whose conspiracy had been discovered before the
+king's coming and rewarded with imprisonment in the castle of
+Edinburgh&mdash;and when Hamilton and Argyle withdrew suddenly from the
+capital, and charged Charles with a treacherous plot to seize and carry
+them out of the realm.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Irish Rising.</span></p>
+
+<p>The fright was fanned to frenzy by news which came suddenly from
+Ireland. The quiet of that unhappy country under Strafford's rule had
+been a mere quiet of terror. The Catholic Englishry were angered by the
+Deputy's breach of faith. Before his coming Charles had promised for a
+sum of &pound;120,000 to dispense with the oath of supremacy, to suffer
+recusants to practise in the courts of law, and to put a stop to the
+constant extortion of their lands by legal process. The money was paid;
+but by the management of Wentworth, the "Graces" which it was to bring
+received no confirmation from the Irish Parliament. The Lord-Deputy's
+policy aimed at keeping the recusants still at the mercy of the Crown;
+what it really succeeded in doing was to rob them of any hope of justice
+or fair dealing from the government. The native Irishry were yet more
+bitterly outraged by his dealings in Connaught. Under pretext that as
+inhabitants of a conquered <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365"></a><a href="./images/365.png">5-365</a>]</span>country Irishmen had no rights but by
+express grant from the Crown, the Deputy had wrested nearly a half of
+the lands in that province from their native holders with the view of
+founding a new English plantation. The new settlers were slow in coming,
+but the evictions and spoliation renewed the bitter wrath which had been
+stirred by the older plantation in Ulster. All however remained quiet
+till the fall of Strafford put an end to the semblance of rule. The
+disbanded soldiers of the army he had raised spread over the country,
+and stirred the smouldering disaffection into a flame. In October 1641,
+a rising, organized with wonderful power and secrecy by Roger O'Moore
+and Owen Roe O'Neill, burst forth under Sir Phelim O'Neill in Ulster,
+where the confiscation of the Settlement had never been forgiven, and
+spread like wildfire over the centre and west of the island. Dublin was
+saved by a mere chance; but in the open country the rebellion went on
+unchecked. The trembling planters fled for shelter to the towns as the
+clansmen poured back over their old tribal lands, and rumour doubled and
+trebled the number of the slain. Tales of horror and outrage, such as
+maddened our own England when they reached us from Cawnpore, came day
+after day over the Irish Channel; and sworn depositions told how
+husbands were cut to pieces in presence of their wives, their children's
+brains dashed out before their faces, their daughters <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366"></a><a href="./images/366.png">5-366</a>]</span>brutally violated
+and driven out naked to perish frozen in the woods.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Its effect on England.</span></p>
+
+<p>Much of all this was no doubt the wild exaggeration of panic, and the
+research of later times has shown how fraud lent a terrible aid to panic
+in multiplying a hundredfold the tales of outrage. But there was enough
+in the revolt to carry terror to the hearts of Englishmen. It was unlike
+any earlier rising in its religious character. It was no longer a
+struggle, as of old, of Celt against Saxon, but of Catholic against
+Protestant. The Papists within the Pale joined hands in it with the wild
+kernes outside the Pale. When the governing body of the rebels met at
+Kells in the following spring they called themselves "Confederate
+Catholics," resolved to defend "the public and free exercise of the true
+and Catholic Roman religion." The panic waxed greater when it was found
+that they claimed to be acting by the king's commission, and in aid of
+his authority. They professed to stand by Charles and his heirs against
+all that should "directly and indirectly endeavour to suppress their
+royal prerogatives." They showed a Commission, purporting to have been
+issued by royal command at Edinburgh, and styled themselves "the king's
+army." The Commission was a forgery, but belief in it was quickened by
+the want of all sympathy with the national honour which Charles
+displayed. To him the revolt seemed a useful check on his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367"></a><a href="./images/367.png">5-367</a>]</span>opponents. "I
+hope," he wrote coolly, when the news reached him, "this ill news of
+Ireland may hinder some of these follies in England." In any case it
+would necessitate the raising of an army, and with an army at his
+command he would again be the master of the Parliament. The Parliament,
+on the other hand, saw in the Irish revolt, the news of which met them
+but a few days after their reassembly at the close of October, the
+disclosure of a vast scheme for a counter-revolution, of which the
+withdrawal of the Scotch army, the reconciliation of Scotland, the
+intrigues at Edinburgh were all parts. Its terror was quickened into
+panic by the exultation of the royalists at the king's return to London
+at the close of November, and by the appearance of a royalist party in
+the Parliament itself.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The new Royalists.</span></p>
+
+<p>The new party had been silently organized by Hyde, the future Lord
+Clarendon. To Hyde and to the men who gathered round him enough seemed
+to have been done. They clung to the law, but the law had been
+vindicated. They bitterly resented the system of Strafford and of Laud;
+but the system was at an end. They believed that English freedom hung on
+the assembly of Parliament and on the loyal co-operation of the Crown
+with this Great Council of the Realm; but the assembly of Parliaments
+was now secured by the Triennial Bill, and the king professed himself
+ready to rule according to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368"></a><a href="./images/368.png">5-368</a>]</span>counsels of Parliament. On the other
+hand they desired to preserve to the Crown the right and power it had
+had under the Tudors. They revolted from any attempt to give the Houses
+a share in the actual work of administration. On both political and
+religious grounds they were resolute to suffer no change in the
+relations of the Church to the State, or to weaken the prerogative of
+the Crown by the establishment of a Presbyterianism which asserted any
+sort of spiritual independence. More complex impulses told on the course
+of Lord Falkland. Falkland was a man learned and accomplished, the
+centre of a circle which embraced the most liberal thinkers of his day.
+He was a keen reasoner and an able speaker. But he was the centre of
+that Latitudinarian party which was slowly growing up in the reaction
+from the dogmatism of the time, and his most passionate longing was for
+liberty of religious thought. Such a liberty the system of the Stuarts
+had little burdened; what Laud pressed for was uniformity, not of
+speculation, but of practice and ritual. But the temper of Puritanism
+was a dogmatic temper, and the tone of the Parliament already threatened
+a narrowing of the terms of speculative belief for the Church of
+England. While this fear estranged Falkland from the Parliament, his
+dread of a conflict with the Crown, his passionate longing for peace,
+his sympathy for the fallen, led him to struggle for a king whom he
+distrusted, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369"></a><a href="./images/369.png">5-369</a>]</span>and to die in a cause that was not his own. Behind Falkland
+and Hyde soon gathered a strong force of supporters; chivalrous soldiers
+like Sir Edmund Verney ("I have eaten the king's bread and served him
+near thirty years, and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him"),
+as well as men frightened at the rapid march of change, or by the
+dangers which threatened Episcopacy and the Church. And with these stood
+the few but ardent partizans of the Court; and the time-servers who had
+been swept along by the tide of popular passion, but who had believed
+its force to be spent, and looked forward to a new triumph of the Crown.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Remonstrance.</span></p>
+
+<p>With a broken Parliament, and perils gathering without, Pym resolved to
+appeal for aid to the nation itself. The Grand Remonstrance which he
+laid before the House of Commons in November was in effect an appeal to
+the country at large. It is this purpose that accounts for its unusual
+form. The Remonstrance was more an elaborate State-Paper than a petition
+to the king. It told in a detailed narrative the work which the
+Parliament had done, the difficulties it had surmounted, and the new
+dangers which lay in its path. The Parliament had been charged with a
+design to abolish Episcopacy, it declared its purpose to be simply that
+of reducing the power of bishops. Politically it repudiated the taunt of
+revolutionary aims. It demanded only the observance of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370"></a><a href="./images/370.png">5-370</a>]</span>existing
+laws against recusancy, securities for the due administration of
+justice, and the employment of ministers who possessed the confidence of
+Parliament. The new king's party fought fiercely against its adoption;
+debate followed debate; the sittings were prolonged till lights had to
+be brought in; and it was only at midnight, and by a majority of eleven,
+that the Remonstrance was finally adopted. On an attempt of the minority
+to offer a formal protest against a subsequent vote for its publication
+the slumbering passion broke out into a flame. "Some waved their hats
+over their heads, and others took their swords in their scabbards out of
+their belts, and held them by the pommels in their hands, setting the
+lower part on the ground." Only Hampden's coolness and tact averted a
+conflict. The Remonstrance was felt on both sides to be a crisis in the
+struggle. "Had it been rejected," said Cromwell as he left the House, "I
+would have sold to-morrow all I possess, and left England for ever!" It
+was presented to Charles on the first of December, and the king listened
+to it sullenly; but it kindled afresh the spirit of the country. London
+swore to live and die with the Parliament; associations were formed in
+every county for the defence of the Houses; and when the guard which the
+Commons had asked for in the panic of the army plot was withdrawn by the
+king, the populace crowded down to Westminster to take its place.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371"></a><a href="./images/371.png">5-371</a>]</span></p>
+<p><span class="sidenote">Cavaliers and Roundheads.</span></p>
+
+<p>The gathering passion soon passed into actual strife. Pym and his
+colleagues saw that the disunion in their ranks sprang above all from
+the question of the Church. On the one side were the Presbyterian
+zealots who were clamouring for the abolition of Episcopacy. On the
+other were the conservative tempers who in the dread of such demands
+were beginning to see in the course of the Parliament a threat against
+the Church which they loved. To put an end to the pressure of the one
+party and the dread of the other Pym took his stand on the compromise
+suggested by the Committee of Religion in the spring. The bill for the
+removal of bishops from the House of Lords had been rejected by the
+Lords on the eve of the king's journey to Scotland. It was now again
+introduced. But, in spite of violent remonstrances from the Commons, the
+bill still hung fire among the Peers; and the delay roused the excited
+crowd of Londoners who gathered round Whitehall. The bishops' carriages
+were stopped, and the prelates themselves rabbled on their way to the
+House. At the close of December the angry pride of Williams induced ten
+of his fellow-bishops to declare themselves prevented from attendance in
+Parliament, and to protest against all acts done in their absence as
+null and void. Such a protest was utterly unconstitutional; and even on
+the part of the Peers who had been maintaining the bishops' rights it
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372"></a><a href="./images/372.png">5-372</a>]</span>was met by the committal of the prelates who had signed it to the
+Tower. But the contest gave a powerful aid to the projects of the king.
+The courtiers declared openly that the rabbling of the bishops proved
+that there was "no free Parliament," and strove to bring about fresh
+outrages by gathering troops of officers and soldiers of fortune, who
+were seeking for employment in the Irish war, and pitting them against
+the crowds at Whitehall. The combatants pelted one another with
+nicknames which were soon to pass into history. To wear his hair long
+and flowing almost to the shoulder was at this time the mark of a
+gentleman, whether Puritan or anti-Puritan. Servants on the other hand
+or apprentices wore the hair closely cropped to the head. The crowds who
+flocked to Westminster were chiefly made up of London apprentices; and
+their opponents taunted them as "Roundheads." They replied by branding
+the courtiers about Whitehall as soldiers of fortune or "Cavaliers." The
+gentlemen who gathered round the king in the coming struggle were as far
+from being military adventurers as the gentlemen who fought for the
+Parliament were from being London apprentices; but the words soon passed
+into nicknames for the whole mass of royalists and patriots.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Seizure of the Five Members.</span></p>
+
+<p>From nicknames the soldiers and apprentices soon passed to actual
+brawls; and the strife beneath its walls created fresh alarm in the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373"></a><a href="./images/373.png">5-373</a>]</span>Parliament. But Charles persisted in refusing it a guard. "On the
+honour of a king" he engaged to defend them from violence as completely
+as his own children, but the answer had hardly been given when his
+Attorney appeared at the bar of the Lords, and accused Hampden, Pym,
+Holles, Strode, and Haselrig of high treason in their correspondence
+with the Scots. A herald-at-arms appeared at the bar of the Commons, and
+demanded the surrender of the five members. All constitutional law was
+set aside by a charge which proceeded personally from the king, which
+deprived the accused of their legal right to a trial by their peers, and
+summoned them before a tribunal that had no pretence to a jurisdiction
+over them. The Commons simply promised to take the demand into
+consideration. They again requested a guard. "I will reply to-morrow,"
+said the king. He had in fact resolved to seize the members in the House
+itself; and on the morrow, the 4th of January 1642, he summoned the
+gentlemen who clustered about Whitehall to follow him, and, embracing
+the Queen, whose violent temper had urged him to this outrage, promised
+her that in an hour he would return master of his kingdom. A mob of
+Cavaliers joined him as he left the palace, and remained in Westminster
+Hall as Charles, accompanied by his nephew, the Elector-Palatine,
+entered the House of Commons. "Mr. Speaker," he said, "I must for a time
+borrow your chair!" He <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374"></a><a href="./images/374.png">5-374</a>]</span>paused with a sudden confusion as his eye fell
+on the vacant spot where Pym commonly sate: for at the news of his
+approach the House had ordered the five members to withdraw.
+"Gentlemen," he began in slow broken sentences, "I am sorry for this
+occasion of coming unto you. Yesterday I sent a Sergeant-at-arms upon a
+very important occasion to apprehend some that by my command were
+accused of high treason, whereunto I did expect obedience and not a
+message." Treason, he went on, had no privilege, "and therefore I am
+come to know if any of these persons that were accused are here." There
+was a dead silence, only broken by his reiterated "I must have them
+wheresoever I find them." He again paused, but the stillness was
+unbroken. Then he called out, "Is Mr. Pym here?" There was no answer;
+and Charles, turning to the Speaker, asked him whether the five members
+were there. Lenthall fell on his knees, and replied that he had neither
+eyes nor tongue to see or say anything save what the House commanded
+him. "Well, well," Charles angrily retorted, "'tis no matter. I think my
+eyes are as good as another's!" There was another long pause while he
+looked carefully over the ranks of members. "I see," he said at last,
+"my birds are flown, but I do expect you will send them to me." If they
+did not, he added, he would seek them himself; and with a closing
+protest that he never intended any force "he went out of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375"></a><a href="./images/375.png">5-375</a>]</span>the House,"
+says an eye-witness, "in a more discontented and angry passion than he
+came in."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Charles withdraws from London.</span></p>
+
+<p>Nothing but the absence of the five members and the calm dignity of the
+Commons had prevented the king's outrage from ending in bloodshed. "It
+was believed," says Whitelock, who was present at the scene, "that if
+the king had found them there, and called in his guards to have seized
+them, the members of the House would have endeavoured the defence of
+them, which might have proved a very unhappy and sad business." Five
+hundred gentlemen of the best blood in England would hardly have stood
+tamely by while the bravoes of Whitehall laid hands on their leaders in
+the midst of the Parliament. But Charles was blind to the danger of his
+course. The five members had taken refuge in the City, and it was there
+that on the next day the king himself demanded their surrender from the
+aldermen at Guildhall. Cries of "Privilege" rang round him as he
+returned through the streets: the writs issued for the arrest of the
+five were disregarded by the Sheriffs; and a proclamation issued four
+days later, declaring them traitors, passed without notice. Terror drove
+the Cavaliers from Whitehall, and Charles stood absolutely alone; for
+the outrage had severed him for the moment from his new friends in the
+Parliament, and from the ministers, Falkland and Colepepper, whom he had
+chosen among them. But, lonely as he was, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376"></a><a href="./images/376.png">5-376</a>]</span>Charles had resolved on war.
+The Earl of Newcastle was despatched to muster a royal force in the
+north; and on the tenth of January news that the five members were about
+to return in triumph to Westminster drove Charles from Whitehall. He
+retired to Hampton Court and to Windsor, while the Trained Bands of
+London and Southwark on foot, and the London watermen on the river, all
+sworn "to guard the Parliament, the Kingdom, and the King," escorted Pym
+and his fellow-members along the Thames to the House of Commons. Both
+sides prepared for a struggle which was now inevitable. The Queen sailed
+from Dover with the Crown jewels to buy munitions of war. The Cavaliers
+again gathered round the king, and the royalist press flooded the
+country with State papers drawn up by Hyde. On the other hand, the
+Commons resolved by vote to secure the great arsenals of the kingdom,
+Hull, Portsmouth, and the Tower; while mounted processions of
+freeholders from Buckinghamshire and Kent traversed London on their way
+to St. Stephen's, vowing to live and die with the Parliament.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Preparations for war.</span></p>
+
+<p>The Lords were scared out of their policy of obstruction by Pym's bold
+announcement of the position taken by the House of Commons. "The
+Commons," said their leader, "will be glad to have your concurrence and
+help in saving the kingdom: but if they fail of it, it should not
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377"></a><a href="./images/377.png">5-377</a>]</span>discourage them in doing their duty. And whether the kingdom be lost or
+saved, they shall be sorry that the story of this present Parliament
+should tell posterity that in so great a danger and extremity the House
+of Commons should be enforced to save the kingdom alone." The effect of
+these words was seen in the passing of the bill for excluding bishops
+from the House of Lords, the last act of this Parliament to which
+Charles gave his assent. The great point however was to secure armed
+support from the nation at large, and here both sides were in a
+difficulty. Previous to the innovations introduced by the Tudors, and
+which had been taken away by the bill against pressing soldiers, the
+king in himself had no power of calling on his subjects generally to
+bear arms, save for the purposes of restoring order or meeting foreign
+invasion. On the other hand no one contended that such a power has ever
+been exercised by the two Houses without the king; and Charles steadily
+refused to consent to a Militia bill, in which the command of the
+national force was given in every county to men devoted to the
+Parliamentary cause. Both parties therefore broke through constitutional
+precedent, the Parliament in appointing Lord Lieutenants of the Militia
+by ordinance of the two Houses, Charles in levying forces by royal
+commissions of array.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Outbreak of war.</span></p>
+
+<p>But the king's great difficulty lay in procuring arms, and on the
+twenty-third of April he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378"></a><a href="./images/378.png">5-378</a>]</span>suddenly appeared before Hull, the magazine of
+the north, and demanded admission. The new governor, Sir John Hotham,
+fell on his knees, but refused to open the gates: and the avowal of his
+act by the Parliament was followed at the end of May by the withdrawal
+of the royalist party among its members from their seats at Westminster.
+Falkland, Colepepper, and Hyde, with thirty-two peers and sixty members
+of the House of Commons, joined Charles at York; and Lyttelton, the Lord
+Keeper, followed with the Great Seal. But one of their aims in joining
+the king was to put a check on his projects of war; and their efforts
+were backed by the general opposition of the country. A great meeting of
+the Yorkshire freeholders which Charles convened on Heyworth Moor ended
+in a petition praying him to be reconciled to the Parliament; and in
+spite of gifts of plate from the universities and nobles of his party
+arms and money were still wanting for his new levies. The two Houses, on
+the other hand, gained in unity and vigour by the withdrawal of the
+royalists. The militia was rapidly enrolled, Lord Warwick named to the
+command of the fleet, and a loan opened in the City to which the women
+brought even their wedding-rings. The tone of the two Houses rose with
+the threat of force. It was plain at last that nothing but actual
+compulsion could bring Charles to rule as a constitutional sovereign;
+and the last proposals <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379"></a><a href="./images/379.png">5-379</a>]</span>of the Parliament demanded the powers of
+appointing and dismissing the ministers, of naming guardians for the
+royal children, and of virtually controlling military, civil, and
+religious affairs. "If I granted your demands," replied Charles, "I
+should be no more than the mere phantom of a king."</p></div>
+
+<div class="head">
+<hr />
+END OF VOL. V
+</div>
+
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="notebox">
+<h2>Transcriber's Notes:</h2>
+
+
+<p>The following words appear with and without hyphens. They have been left
+as in the original.</p>
+
+<table summary="variations in hyphenation" style="margin-left: 10%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0">
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft" style="padding-right: 3em;">Franche Comt&eacute;</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Franche-Comt&eacute;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">goodwill</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">good-will</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">middle classes</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">middle-classes</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">newcomer</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">new-comers</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, VOLUME V (OF 8) ***</p>
+<p>******* This file should be named 23642-h.txt or 23642-h.zip *******</p>
+<p>This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:<br />
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, History of the English People, Volume V (of
+8) , by John Richard Green
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) 
+       Puritan England, 1603-1660
+
+
+Author: John Richard Green
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 27, 2007  [eBook #23642]
+Most recently updated: May 20, 2008
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE,
+VOLUME V (OF 8) ***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Paul Murray, Lisa Reigel, Michael Zeug, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original map and links to
+      images of the original pages.
+      See 23642-h.htm or 23642-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/3/6/4/23642/23642-h/23642-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/3/6/4/23642/23642-h.zip)
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+      Text in italics in the original is surrounded by _underscores_.
+
+      The index for the entire 8 volume set of _History of
+      the English People_ was located at the end of Volume
+      VIII. For ease in accessibility, it has been removed
+      and produced as a separate volume
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/25533).
+
+      An additional transcriber's note will be found at the end of
+      the text.
+
+
+
+
+
+HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
+
+by
+
+JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.
+Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford
+
+VOLUME V
+
+PURITAN ENGLAND, 1603-1644
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+London
+MacMillan and Co., Ltd.
+New York: MacMillan & Co.
+1896
+
+First Edition 1879; Reprinted 1882, 1886, 1891.
+Eversley Edition, 1896.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+   BOOK VI
+
+      CHAPTER VII
+                                                    PAGE
+      THE ENGLAND OF SHAKSPERE. 1593-1603              1
+
+
+   BOOK VII
+
+   PURITAN ENGLAND. 1603-1660
+
+
+      CHAPTER I
+
+      ENGLAND AND PURITANISM. 1603-1660               75
+
+
+      CHAPTER II
+
+      THE KING OF SCOTS.                             120
+
+
+      CHAPTER III
+
+      THE BREAK WITH THE PARLIAMENT. 1603-1611       146
+
+
+      CHAPTER IV
+
+      THE FAVOURITES. 1611-1625                      183
+
+
+      CHAPTER V
+
+      CHARLES I. AND THE PARLIAMENT. 1625-1629       242
+
+
+      CHAPTER VI
+
+      THE PERSONAL GOVERNMENT. 1629-1635             272
+
+
+      CHAPTER VII
+
+      THE RISING OF THE SCOTS. 1635-1640             315
+
+
+      CHAPTER VIII
+
+      THE LONG PARLIAMENT. 1640-1644                 344
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE ENGLAND OF SHAKSPERE
+
+1593-1603
+
+
+[Sidenote: English Literature.]
+
+The defeat of the Armada, the deliverance from Catholicism and Spain,
+marked the critical moment in our political developement. From that hour
+England's destiny was fixed. She was to be a Protestant power. Her
+sphere of action was to be upon the seas. She was to claim her part in
+the New World of the West. But the moment was as critical in her
+intellectual developement. As yet English literature had lagged behind
+the literature of the rest of Western Christendom. It was now to take
+its place among the greatest literatures of the world. The general
+awakening of national life, the increase of wealth, of refinement, and
+leisure that characterized the reign of Elizabeth, was accompanied by a
+quickening of intelligence. The Renascence had done little for English
+letters. The overpowering influence of the new models both of thought
+and style which it gave to the world in the writers of Greece and Rome
+was at first felt only as a fresh check to the revival of English poetry
+or prose. Though England shared more than any European country in the
+political and ecclesiastical results of the New Learning, its literary
+results were far less than in the rest of Europe, in Italy, or Germany,
+or France. More alone ranks among the great classical scholars of the
+sixteenth century. Classical learning indeed all but perished at the
+Universities in the storm of the Reformation, nor did it revive there
+till the close of Elizabeth's reign. Insensibly however the influences
+of the Renascence fertilized the intellectual soil of England for the
+rich harvest that was to come. The court poetry which clustered round
+Wyatt and Surrey, exotic and imitative as it was, promised a new life
+for English verse. The growth of grammar-schools realized the dream of
+Sir Thomas More, and brought the middle-classes, from the squire to the
+petty tradesman, into contact with the masters of Greece and Rome. The
+love of travel, which became so remarkable a characteristic of
+Elizabeth's age, quickened the temper of the wealthier nobles.
+"Home-keeping youths," says Shakspere in words that mark the time, "have
+ever homely wits"; and a tour over the Continent became part of the
+education of a gentleman. Fairfax's version of Tasso, Harrington's
+version of Ariosto, were signs of the influence which the literature of
+Italy, the land to which travel led most frequently, exerted on English
+minds. The classical writers told upon England at large when they were
+popularized by a crowd of translations. Chapman's noble version of Homer
+stands high above its fellows, but all the greater poets and historians
+of the ancient world were turned into English before the close of the
+sixteenth century.
+
+[Sidenote: Historic Literature.]
+
+It is characteristic of England that the first kind of literature to
+rise from its long death was the literature of history. But the form in
+which it rose marked the difference between the world in which it had
+perished and that in which it reappeared. During the Middle Ages the
+world had been without a past, save the shadowy and unknown past of
+early Rome; and annalist and chronicler told the story of the years
+which went before as a preface to their tale of the present without a
+sense of any difference between them. But the religious, social, and
+political change which passed over England under the New Monarchy broke
+the continuity of its life; and the depth of the rift between the two
+ages is seen by the way in which History passes on its revival under
+Elizabeth from the mediaeval form of pure narrative to its modern form of
+an investigation and reconstruction of the past. The new interest which
+attached to the bygone world led to the collection of its annals, their
+reprinting and embodiment in an English shape. It was his desire to give
+the Elizabethan Church a basis in the past, as much as any pure zeal
+for letters, which induced Archbishop Parker to lead the way in the
+first of these labours. The collection of historical manuscripts which,
+following in the track of Leland, he rescued from the wreck of the
+monastic libraries created a school of antiquarian imitators, whose
+research and industry have preserved for us almost every work of
+permanent historical value which existed before the Dissolution of the
+Monasteries. To his publication of some of our earlier chronicles we owe
+the series of similar publications which bear the name of Camden,
+Twysden, and Gale. But as a branch of literature, English History in the
+new shape which we have noted began in the work of the poet Daniel. The
+chronicles of Stowe and Speed, who preceded him, are simple records of
+the past, often copied almost literally from the annals they used, and
+utterly without style or arrangement; while Daniel, inaccurate and
+superficial as he is, gave his story a literary form and embodied it in
+a pure and graceful prose. Two larger works at the close of Elizabeth's
+reign, the "History of the Turks" by Knolles, and Raleigh's vast but
+unfinished plan of the "History of the World," showed a widening of
+historic interest beyond the merely national bounds to which it had
+hitherto been confined.
+
+[Sidenote: Euphuism.]
+
+A far higher developement of our literature sprang from the growing
+influence which Italy was exerting, partly through travel and partly
+through its poetry and romances, on the manners and taste of the time.
+Men made more account of a story of Boccaccio's, it was said, than of a
+story from the Bible. The dress, the speech, the manners of Italy became
+objects of almost passionate imitation, and of an imitation not always
+of the wisest or noblest kind. To Ascham it seemed like "the enchantment
+of Circe brought out of Italy to mar men's manners in England." "An
+Italianate Englishman," ran the harder proverb of Italy itself, "is an
+incarnate devil." The literary form which this imitation took seemed at
+any rate ridiculous. John Lyly, distinguished both as a dramatist and a
+poet, laid aside the tradition of English style for a style modelled on
+the decadence of Italian prose. Euphuism, as the new fashion has been
+named from the prose romance of Euphues which Lyly published in 1579, is
+best known to modern readers by the pitiless caricature in which
+Shakspere quizzed its pedantry, its affectation, the meaningless
+monotony of its far-fetched phrases, the absurdity of its extravagant
+conceits. Its representative, Armado in "Love's Labour's Lost," is "a
+man of fire-new words, fashion's own knight," "that hath a mint of
+phrases in his brain; one whom the music of his own vain tongue doth
+ravish like enchanting harmony." But its very extravagance sprang from
+the general burst of delight in the new resources of thought and
+language which literature felt to be at its disposal; and the new sense
+of literary beauty which it disclosed in its affectation, in its love of
+a "mint of phrases," and the "music of its own vain tongue," the new
+sense of pleasure which it revealed in delicacy or grandeur of
+expression, in the structure and arrangement of sentences, in what has
+been termed the atmosphere of words, was a sense out of which style was
+itself to spring.
+
+[Sidenote: Sidney.]
+
+For a time Euphuism had it all its own way. Elizabeth was the most
+affected and detestable of Euphuists; and "that beauty in Court which
+could not parley Euphuism," a courtier of Charles the First's time tells
+us, "was as little regarded as she that now there speaks not French."
+The fashion however passed away, but the "Arcadia" of Sir Philip Sidney
+shows the wonderful advance which prose had made under its influence.
+Sidney, the nephew of Lord Leicester, was the idol of his time, and
+perhaps no figure reflects the age more fully and more beautifully. Fair
+as he was brave, quick of wit as of affection, noble and generous in
+temper, dear to Elizabeth as to Spenser, the darling of the Court and of
+the camp, his learning and his genius made him the centre of the
+literary world which was springing into birth on English soil. He had
+travelled in France and Italy, he was master alike of the older learning
+and of the new discoveries of astronomy. Bruno dedicated to him as to a
+friend his metaphysical speculations; he was familiar with the drama of
+Spain, the poems of Ronsard, the sonnets of Italy. Sidney combined the
+wisdom of a grave councillor with the romantic chivalry of a
+knight-errant. "I never heard the old story of Percy and Douglas," he
+says, "that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet." He
+flung away his life to save the English army in Flanders, and as he lay
+dying they brought a cup of water to his fevered lips. He bade them give
+it to a soldier who was stretched on the ground beside him. "Thy
+necessity," he said, "is greater than mine." The whole of Sidney's
+nature, his chivalry and his learning, his thirst for adventures, his
+freshness of tone, his tenderness and childlike simplicity of heart, his
+affectation and false sentiment, his keen sense of pleasure and delight,
+pours itself out in the pastoral medley, forced, tedious, and yet
+strangely beautiful, of his "Arcadia." In his "Defence of Poetry" the
+youthful exuberance of the romancer has passed into the earnest vigour
+and grandiose stateliness of the rhetorician. But whether in the one
+work or the other, the flexibility, the music, the luminous clearness of
+Sidney's style remains the same.
+
+[Sidenote: The Novelists.]
+
+But the quickness and vivacity of English prose was first developed in a
+school of Italian imitators which appeared in Elizabeth's later years.
+The origin of English fiction is to be found in the tales and romances
+with which Greene and Nash crowded the market, models for which they
+found in the Italian novels. The brief form of these novelettes soon led
+to the appearance of the "pamphlet"; and a new world of readers was seen
+in the rapidity with which the stories or scurrilous libels that passed
+under this name were issued, and the greediness with which they were
+devoured. It was the boast of Greene that in the eight years before his
+death he had produced forty pamphlets. "In a night or a day would he
+have yarked up a pamphlet, as well as in seven years, and glad was that
+printer that might be blest to pay him dear for the very dregs of his
+wit." Modern eyes see less of the wit than of the dregs in the books of
+Greene and his compeers; but the attacks which Nash directed against the
+Puritans and his rivals were the first English works which shook utterly
+off the pedantry and extravagance of Euphuism. In his lightness, his
+facility, his vivacity, his directness of speech, we have the beginning
+of popular literature. It had descended from the closet to the street,
+and the very change implied that the street was ready to receive it. The
+abundance indeed of printers and of printed books at the close of the
+Queen's reign shows that the world of readers and writers had widened
+far beyond the small circle of scholars and courtiers with which it
+began.
+
+[Sidenote: Influence of the age.]
+
+But to the national and local influences which were telling on English
+literature was added that of the restlessness and curiosity which
+characterized the age. At the moment which we have reached the sphere of
+human interest was widened as it has never been widened before or since
+by the revelation of a new heaven and a new earth. It was only in the
+later years of the sixteenth century that the discoveries of Copernicus
+were brought home to the general intelligence of mankind by Kepler and
+Galileo, or that the daring of the Buccaneers broke through the veil
+which the greed of Spain had drawn across the New World of Columbus.
+Hardly inferior to these revelations as a source of intellectual impulse
+was the sudden and picturesque way in which the various races of the
+world were brought face to face with one another through the universal
+passion for foreign travel. While the red tribes of the West were
+described by Amerigo Vespucci, and the strange civilization of Mexico
+and Peru disclosed by Cortes and Pizarro, the voyages of the Portuguese
+threw open the older splendours of the East, and the story of India and
+China was told for the first time to Christendom by Maffei and Mendoza.
+England took her full part in this work of discovery. Jenkinson, an
+English traveller, made his way to Bokhara. Willoughby brought back
+Muscovy to the knowledge of Western Europe. English mariners penetrated
+among the Esquimaux, or settled in Virginia. Drake circumnavigated the
+globe. The "Collection of Voyages" which was published by Hakluyt in
+1582 disclosed the vastness of the world itself, the infinite number of
+the races of mankind, the variety of their laws, their customs, their
+religions, their very instincts. We see the influence of this new and
+wider knowledge of the world, not only in the life and richness which it
+gave to the imagination of the time, but in the immense interest which
+from this moment attached itself to Man. Shakspere's conception of
+Caliban, like the questioning of Montaigne, marks the beginning of a new
+and a truer, because a more inductive, philosophy of human nature and
+human history. The fascination exercised by the study of human character
+showed itself in the essays of Bacon, and yet more in the wonderful
+popularity of the drama.
+
+[Sidenote: The new English temper.]
+
+And to these larger and world-wide sources of poetic power was added in
+England, at the moment which we have reached in its story, the impulse
+which sprang from national triumph, from the victory over the Armada,
+the deliverance from Spain, the rolling away of the Catholic terror
+which had hung like a cloud over the hopes of the new people. With its
+new sense of security, its new sense of national energy and national
+power, the whole aspect of England suddenly changed. As yet the interest
+of Elizabeth's reign had been political and material; the stage had been
+crowded with statesmen and warriors, with Cecils and Walsinghams and
+Drakes. Literature had hardly found a place in the glories of the time.
+But from the moment when the Armada drifted back broken to Ferrol the
+figures of warriors and statesmen were dwarfed by the grander figures of
+poets and philosophers. Amidst the throng in Elizabeth's antechamber the
+noblest form is that of the singer who lays the "Faerie Queen" at her
+feet, or of the young lawyer who muses amid the splendours of the
+presence over the problems of the "Novum Organum." The triumph at Cadiz,
+the conquest of Ireland, pass unheeded as we watch Hooker building up
+his "Ecclesiastical Polity" among the sheepfolds, or the genius of
+Shakspere rising year by year into supremer grandeur in a rude theatre
+beside the Thames.
+
+[Sidenote: Spenser.]
+
+The glory of the new literature broke on England with Edmund Spenser. We
+know little of his life; he was born in 1552 in East London, the son of
+poor parents, but linked in blood with the Spencers of Althorpe, even
+then--as he proudly says--"a house of ancient fame." He studied as a
+sizar at Cambridge, and quitted the University while still a boy to live
+as a tutor in the north; but after some years of obscure poverty the
+scorn of a fair "Rosalind" drove him again southwards. A college
+friendship with Gabriel Harvey served to introduce him to Lord
+Leicester, who sent him as his envoy into France, and in whose service
+he first became acquainted with Leicester's nephew, Sir Philip Sidney.
+From Sidney's house at Penshurst came in 1579 his earliest work, the
+"Shepherd's Calendar"; in form, like Sidney's own "Arcadia," a pastoral
+where love and loyalty and Puritanism jostled oddly with the fancied
+shepherd life. The peculiar melody and profuse imagination which the
+pastoral disclosed at once placed its author in the forefront of living
+poets, but a far greater work was already in hand; and from some words
+of Gabriel Harvey's we see Spenser bent on rivalling Ariosto, and even
+hoping "to overgo" the "Orlando Furioso" in his "Elvish Queen." The
+ill-will or the indifference of Burleigh however blasted the
+expectations he had drawn from the patronage of Sidney or Leicester, and
+from the favour with which he had been welcomed by the Queen. Sidney, in
+disgrace with Elizabeth through his opposition to the marriage with
+Anjou, withdrew to Wilton to write the "Arcadia" by his sister's side;
+and "discontent of my long fruitless stay in princes' courts," the poet
+tells us, "and expectation vain of idle hopes" drove Spenser into exile.
+In 1580 he followed Lord Grey as his secretary into Ireland, and
+remained there on the Deputy's recall in the enjoyment of an office and
+a grant of land from the forfeited estates of the Earl of Desmond.
+Spenser had thus enrolled himself among the colonists to whom England
+was looking at the time for the regeneration of Munster, and the
+practical interest he took in the "barren soil where cold and want and
+poverty do grow" was shown by the later publication of a prose tractate
+on the condition and government of the island. It was at Dublin or in
+his castle of Kilcolman, two miles from Doneraile, "under the foot of
+Mole, that mountain hoar," that he spent the ten years in which Sidney
+died and Mary fell on the scaffold and the Armada came and went; and it
+was in the latter home that Walter Raleigh found him sitting "alwaies
+idle," as it seemed to his restless friend, "among the cooly shades of
+the green alders by the Mulla's shore" in a visit made memorable by the
+poem of "Colin Clout's come home again."
+
+[Sidenote: The Faerie Queen.]
+
+But in the "idlesse" and solitude of the poet's exile the great work
+begun in the two pleasant years of his stay at Penshurst had at last
+taken form, and it was to publish the first three books of the "Faerie
+Queen" that Spenser returned in Raleigh's company to London. The
+appearance of the "Faerie Queen" in 1590 is the one critical event in
+the annals of English poetry; it settled in fact the question whether
+there was to be such a thing as English poetry or no. The older national
+verse which had blossomed and died in Caedmon sprang suddenly into a
+grander life in Chaucer, but it closed again in a yet more complete
+death. Across the Border indeed the Scotch poets of the fifteenth
+century preserved something of their master's vivacity and colour, and
+in England itself the Italian poetry of the Renascence had of late found
+echoes in Surrey and Sidney. The new English drama too was beginning to
+display its wonderful powers, and the work of Marlowe had already
+prepared the way for the work of Shakspere. But bright as was the
+promise of coming song, no great imaginative poem had broken the silence
+of English literature for nearly two hundred years when Spenser landed
+at Bristol with the "Faerie Queen." From that moment the stream of
+English poetry has flowed on without a break. There have been times, as
+in the years which immediately followed, when England has "become a nest
+of singing birds"; there have been times when song was scant and poor;
+but there never has been a time when England was wholly without a
+singer.
+
+The new English verse has been true to the source from which it sprang,
+and Spenser has always been "the poet's poet." But in his own day he was
+the poet of England at large. The "Faerie Queen" was received with a
+burst of general welcome. It became "the delight of every accomplished
+gentleman, the model of every poet, the solace of every soldier." The
+poem expressed indeed the very life of the time. It was with a true
+poetic instinct that Spenser fell back for the framework of his story on
+the faery world of Celtic romance, whose wonder and mystery had in fact
+become the truest picture of the wonder and mystery of the world around
+him. In the age of Cortes and of Raleigh dreamland had ceased to be
+dreamland, and no marvel or adventure that befell lady or knight was
+stranger than the tales which weather-beaten mariners from the Southern
+Seas were telling every day to grave merchants upon 'Change. The very
+incongruities of the story of Arthur and his knighthood, strangely as it
+had been built up out of the rival efforts of bard and jongleur and
+priest, made it the fittest vehicle for the expression of the world of
+incongruous feeling which we call the Renascence. To modern eyes perhaps
+there is something grotesque in the strange medley of figures that crowd
+the canvas of the "Faerie Queen," in its fauns dancing on the sward
+where knights have hurtled together, in its alternation of the
+salvage-men from the New World with the satyrs of classic mythology, in
+the giants, dwarfs, and monsters of popular fancy who jostle with the
+nymphs of Greek legend and the damosels of mediaeval romance. But,
+strange as the medley is, it reflects truly enough the stranger medley
+of warring ideals and irreconcileable impulses which made up the life of
+Spenser's contemporaries. It was not in the "Faerie Queen" only, but in
+the world which it pourtrayed, that the religious mysticism of the
+Middle Ages stood face to face with the intellectual freedom of the
+Revival of Letters, that asceticism and self-denial cast their spell on
+imaginations glowing with the sense of varied and inexhaustible
+existence, that the dreamy and poetic refinement of feeling which
+expressed itself in the fanciful unrealities of chivalry co-existed
+with the rough practical energy that sprang from an awakening sense of
+human power, or the lawless extravagance of an idealized friendship and
+love lived side by side with the moral sternness and elevation which
+England was drawing from the Reformation and the Bible.
+
+But strangely contrasted as are the elements of the poem, they are
+harmonized by the calmness and serenity which is the note of the "Faerie
+Queen." The world of the Renascence is around us, but it is ordered,
+refined, and calmed by the poet's touch. The warmest scenes which he
+borrows from the Italian verse of his day are idealized into purity; the
+very struggle of the men around him is lifted out of its pettier
+accidents and raised into a spiritual oneness with the struggle in the
+soul itself. There are allusions in plenty to contemporary events, but
+the contest between Elizabeth and Mary takes ideal form in that of Una
+and the false Duessa, and the clash of arms between Spain and the
+Huguenots comes to us faint and hushed through the serener air. The
+verse, like the story, rolls on as by its own natural power, without
+haste or effort or delay. The gorgeous colouring, the profuse and often
+complex imagery which Spenser's imagination lavishes, leave no sense of
+confusion in the reader's mind. Every figure, strange as it may be, is
+seen clearly and distinctly as it passes by. It is in this calmness,
+this serenity, this spiritual elevation of the "Faerie Queen," that we
+feel the new life of the coming age moulding into ordered and harmonious
+form the life of the Renascence. Both in its conception, and in the way
+in which this conception is realized in the portion of his work which
+Spenser completed, his poem strikes the note of the coming Puritanism.
+In his earlier pastoral, the "Shepherd's Calendar," the poet had boldly
+taken his part with the more advanced reformers against the Church
+policy of the Court. He had chosen Archbishop Grindal, who was then in
+disgrace for his Puritan sympathies, as his model of a Christian pastor;
+and attacked with sharp invective the pomp of the higher clergy. His
+"Faerie Queen" in its religious theory is Puritan to the core. The worst
+foe of its "Red-cross Knight" is the false and scarlet-clad Duessa of
+Rome, who parts him for a while from Truth and leads him to the house of
+Ignorance. Spenser presses strongly and pitilessly for the execution of
+Mary Stuart. No bitter word ever breaks the calm of his verse save when
+it touches on the perils with which Catholicism was environing England,
+perils before which his knight must fall "were not that Heavenly Grace
+doth him uphold and steadfast Truth acquite him out of all." But it is
+yet more in the temper and aim of his work that we catch the nobler and
+deeper tones of English Puritanism. In his earlier musings at Penshurst
+the poet had purposed to surpass Ariosto, but the gaiety of Ariosto's
+song is utterly absent from his own. Not a ripple of laughter breaks the
+calm surface of Spenser's verse. He is habitually serious, and the
+seriousness of his poetic tone reflects the seriousness of his poetic
+purpose. His aim, he tells us, was to represent the moral virtues, to
+assign to each its knightly patron, so that its excellence might be
+expressed and its contrary vice trodden under foot by deeds of arms and
+chivalry. In knight after knight of the twelve he purposed to paint, he
+wished to embody some single virtue of the virtuous man in its struggle
+with the faults and errors which specially beset it; till in Arthur, the
+sum of the whole company, man might have been seen perfected, in his
+longing and progress towards the "Faerie Queen," the Divine Glory which
+is the true end of human effort.
+
+The largeness of his culture indeed, his exquisite sense of beauty, and
+above all the very intensity of his moral enthusiasm, saved Spenser from
+the narrowness and exaggeration which often distorted goodness into
+unloveliness in the Puritan. Christian as he is to the core, his
+Christianity is enriched and fertilized by the larger temper of the
+Renascence, as well as by a poet's love of the natural world in which
+the older mythologies struck their roots. Diana and the gods of
+heathendom take a sacred tinge from the purer sanctities of the new
+faith; and in one of the greatest songs of the "Faerie Queen" the
+conception of love widens, as it widened in the mind of a Greek, into
+the mighty thought of the productive energy of Nature. Spenser borrows
+in fact the delicate and refined forms of the Platonist philosophy to
+express his own moral enthusiasm. Not only does he love, as others have
+loved, all that is noble and pure and of good report, but he is fired as
+none before or after him have been fired with a passionate sense of
+moral beauty. Justice, Temperance, Truth, are no mere names to him, but
+real existences to which his whole nature clings with a rapturous
+affection. Outer beauty he believed to spring, and loved because it
+sprang, from the beauty of the soul within. There was much in such a
+moral protest as this to rouse dislike in any age, but it is the glory
+of the age of Elizabeth that, "mad world" as in many ways it was, all
+that was noble welcomed the "Faerie Queen." Elizabeth herself, says
+Spenser, "to mine oaten pipe inclined her ear," and bestowed a pension
+on the poet. In 1595 he brought three more books of his poem to England.
+He returned to Ireland to commemorate his marriage in Sonnets and the
+most beautiful of bridal songs, and to complete the "Faerie Queen"
+amongst love and poverty and troubles from his Irish neighbours. But
+these troubles soon took a graver form. In 1599 Ireland broke into
+revolt, and the poet escaped from his burning house to fly to England,
+and to die broken-hearted in an inn at Westminster.
+
+[Sidenote: The Drama.]
+
+If the "Faerie Queen" expressed the higher elements of the Elizabethan
+age, the whole of that age, its lower elements and its higher alike, was
+expressed in the English drama. We have already pointed out the
+circumstances which throughout Europe were giving a poetic impulse to
+the newly-aroused intelligence of men, and this impulse everywhere took
+a dramatic shape. The artificial French tragedy which began about this
+time with Garnier was not indeed destined to exert any influence over
+English poetry till a later age; but the influence of the Italian
+comedy, which had begun half a century earlier with Machiavelli and
+Ariosto, was felt directly through the Novelle, or stories, which served
+as plots for our dramatists. It left its stamp indeed on some of the
+worst characteristics of the English stage. The features of our drama
+that startled the moral temper of the time and won the deadly hatred of
+the Puritans, its grossness and profanity, its tendency to scenes of
+horror and crime, its profuse employment of cruelty and lust as grounds
+of dramatic action, its daring use of the horrible and the unnatural
+whenever they enable it to display the more terrible and revolting sides
+of human passion, were derived from the Italian stage. It is doubtful
+how much the English playwrights may have owed to the Spanish drama,
+which under Lope and Cervantes sprang suddenly into a grandeur that
+almost rivalled their own. In the intermixture of tragedy and comedy,
+in the abandonment of the solemn uniformity of poetic diction for the
+colloquial language of real life, the use of unexpected incidents, the
+complication of their plots and intrigues, the dramas of England and
+Spain are remarkably alike; but the likeness seems rather to have sprung
+from a similarity in the circumstances to which both owed their rise,
+than from any direct connexion of the one with the other. The real
+origin of the English drama, in fact, lay not in any influence from
+without but in the influence of England itself. The temper of the nation
+was dramatic. Ever since the Reformation, the Palace, the Inns of Court,
+and the University had been vying with one another in the production of
+plays; and so early was their popularity that even under Henry the
+Eighth it was found necessary to create a "Master of the Revels" to
+supervise them. Every progress of Elizabeth from shire to shire was a
+succession of shows and interludes. Dian with her nymphs met the Queen
+as she returned from hunting; Love presented her with his golden arrow
+as she passed through the gates of Norwich. From the earlier years of
+her reign the new spirit of the Renascence had been pouring itself into
+the rough mould of the Mystery Plays, whose allegorical virtues and
+vices, or scriptural heroes and heroines, had handed on the spirit of
+the drama through the Middle Ages. Adaptations from classical pieces
+began to alternate with the purely religious "Moralities"; and an
+attempt at a livelier style of expression and invention appeared in the
+popular comedy of "Gammer Gurton's Needle"; while Sackville, Lord
+Dorset, in his tragedy of "Gorbudoc" made a bold effort at sublimity of
+diction, and introduced the use of blank verse as the vehicle of
+dramatic dialogue.
+
+[Sidenote: The theatre and the people.]
+
+But it was not to these tentative efforts of scholars and nobles that
+the English stage was really indebted for the amazing outburst of genius
+which dates from the year 1576, when "the Earl of Leicester's servants"
+erected the first public theatre in Blackfriars. It was the people
+itself that created its Stage. The theatre indeed was commonly only the
+courtyard of an inn, or a mere booth such as is still seen at a country
+fair. The bulk of the audience sate beneath the open sky in the "pit" or
+yard; a few covered seats in the galleries which ran round it formed the
+boxes of the wealthier spectators, while patrons and nobles found seats
+upon the actual boards. All the appliances were of the roughest sort: a
+few flowers served to indicate a garden, crowds and armies were
+represented by a dozen scene-shifters with swords and bucklers, heroes
+rode in and out on hobby-horses, and a scroll on a post told whether the
+scene was at Athens or London. There were no female actors, and the
+grossness which startles us in words which fell from women's lips took
+a different colour when every woman's part was acted by a boy. But
+difficulties such as these were more than compensated by the popular
+character of the drama itself. Rude as the theatre might be, all the
+world was there. The stage was crowded with nobles and courtiers.
+Apprentices and citizens thronged the benches in the yard below. The
+rough mob of the pit inspired, as it felt, the vigorous life, the rapid
+transitions, the passionate energy, the reality, the lifelike medley and
+confusion, the racy dialogue, the chat, the wit, the pathos, the
+sublimity, the rant and buffoonery, the coarse horrors and vulgar
+bloodshedding, the immense range over all classes of society, the
+intimacy with the foulest as well as the fairest developements of human
+temper, which characterized the English stage. The new drama represented
+"the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure." The people
+itself brought its nobleness and its vileness to the boards. No stage
+was ever so human, no poetic life so intense. Wild, reckless, defiant of
+all past tradition, of all conventional laws, the English dramatists
+owned no teacher, no source of poetic inspiration, but the people
+itself.
+
+[Sidenote: The early dramatists.]
+
+Few events in our literary history are so startling as this sudden rise
+of the Elizabethan drama. The first public theatre was erected only in
+the middle of the Queen's reign. Before the close of it eighteen
+theatres existed in London alone. Fifty dramatic poets, many of the
+first order, appeared in the fifty years which precede the closing of
+the theatres by the Puritans; and great as is the number of their works
+which have perished, we still possess a hundred dramas, all written
+within this period, and of which at least a half are excellent. A glance
+at their authors shows us that the intellectual quickening of the age
+had now reached the mass of the people. Almost all of the new
+playwrights were fairly educated, and many were university men. But
+instead of courtly singers of the Sidney and Spenser sort we see the
+advent of the "poor scholar." The earlier dramatists, such as Nash,
+Peele, Kyd, Greene, or Marlowe, were for the most part poor, and
+reckless in their poverty; wild livers, defiant of law or common fame,
+in revolt against the usages and religion of their day, "atheists" in
+general repute, "holding Moses for a juggler," haunting the brothel and
+the alehouse, and dying starved or in tavern brawls. But with their
+appearance began the Elizabethan drama. The few plays which have reached
+us of an earlier date are either cold imitations of the classical and
+Italian comedy, or rude farces like "Ralph Roister Doister," or
+tragedies such as "Gorbudoc" where, poetic as occasional passages may
+be, there is little promise of dramatic developement. But in the year
+which preceded the coming of the Armada the whole aspect of the stage
+suddenly changes, and the new dramatists range themselves around two
+men of very different genius, Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe.
+
+[Sidenote: Greene.]
+
+Of Greene, as the creator of our lighter English prose, we have already
+spoken. But his work as a poet was of yet greater importance, for his
+perception of character and the relations of social life, the
+playfulness of his fancy, and the liveliness of his style, exerted an
+influence on his contemporaries which was equalled by that of none but
+Marlowe and Peele. In spite of the rudeness of his plots and the unequal
+character of his work, Greene must be regarded as the creator of our
+modern comedy. No figure better paints the group of young playwrights.
+He left Cambridge to travel through Italy and Spain, and to bring back
+the debauchery of the one and the scepticism of the other. In the words
+of remorse he wrote before his death he paints himself as a drunkard and
+a roysterer, winning money only by ceaseless pamphlets and plays to
+waste it on wine and women, and drinking the cup of life to the dregs.
+Hell and the after-world were the butts of his ceaseless mockery. If he
+had not feared the judges of the Queen's Courts more than he feared God,
+he said in bitter jest, he should often have turned cutpurse. He
+married, and loved his wife, but she was soon deserted; and the wretched
+profligate found himself again plunged into excesses which he loathed,
+though he could not live without them. But wild as was the life of
+Greene, his pen was pure. He is steadily on virtue's side in the love
+pamphlets and novelettes he poured out in endless succession, and whose
+plots were dramatized by the school which gathered round him.
+
+[Sidenote: Marlowe.]
+
+The life of Marlowe was as riotous, his scepticism even more daring,
+than the life and scepticism of Greene. His early death alone saved him
+in all probability from a prosecution for atheism. He was charged with
+calling Moses a juggler, and with boasting that, if he undertook to
+write a new religion, it should be a better religion than the
+Christianity he saw around him. But he stood far ahead of his fellows as
+a creator of English tragedy. Born in 1564 at the opening of Elizabeth's
+reign, the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, but educated at Cambridge,
+Marlowe burst on the world in the year which preceded the triumph over
+the Armada with a play which at once wrought a revolution in the English
+stage. Bombastic and extravagant as it was, and extravagance reached its
+height in a scene where captive kings, the "pampered jades of Asia,"
+drew their conqueror's car across the stage, "Tamburlaine" not only
+indicated the revolt of the new drama against the timid inanities of
+Euphuism, but gave an earnest of that imaginative daring, the secret of
+which Marlowe was to bequeath to the playwrights who followed him. He
+perished at thirty in a shameful brawl, but in his brief career he had
+struck the grander notes of the coming drama. His Jew of Malta was the
+herald of Shylock. He opened in "Edward the Second" the series of
+historical plays which gave us "Caesar" and "Richard the Third." His
+"Faustus" is riotous, grotesque, and full of a mad thirst for pleasure,
+but it was the first dramatic attempt to touch the problem of the
+relations of man to the unseen world. Extravagant, unequal, stooping
+even to the ridiculous in his cumbrous and vulgar buffoonery, there is a
+force in Marlowe, a conscious grandeur of tone, a range of passion,
+which sets him above all his contemporaries save one. In the higher
+qualities of imagination, as in the majesty and sweetness of his "mighty
+line," he is inferior to Shakspere alone.
+
+[Sidenote: Shakspere.]
+
+A few daring jests, a brawl, and a fatal stab, make up the life of
+Marlowe; but even details such as these are wanting to the life of
+William Shakspere. Of hardly any great poet indeed do we know so little.
+For the story of his youth we have only one or two trifling legends, and
+these almost certainly false. Not a single letter or characteristic
+saying, not one of the jests "spoken at the Mermaid," hardly a single
+anecdote, remain to illustrate his busy life in London. His look and
+figure in later age have been preserved by the bust over his tomb at
+Stratford, and a hundred years after his death he was still remembered
+in his native town; but the minute diligence of the enquirers of the
+Georgian time was able to glean hardly a single detail, even of the most
+trivial order, which could throw light upon the years of retirement
+before his death. It is owing perhaps to the harmony and unity of his
+temper that no salient peculiarity seems to have left its trace on the
+memory of his contemporaries; it is the very grandeur of his genius
+which precludes us from discovering any personal trait in his works. His
+supposed self-revelation in the Sonnets is so obscure that only a few
+outlines can be traced even by the boldest conjecture. In his dramas he
+is all his characters, and his characters range over all mankind. There
+is not one, or the act or word of one, that we can identify personally
+with the poet himself.
+
+[Sidenote: His actor's life.]
+
+He was born in 1564, the sixth year of Elizabeth's reign, twelve years
+after the birth of Spenser, three years later than the birth of Bacon.
+Marlowe was of the same age with Shakspere: Greene probably a few years
+older. His father, a glover and small farmer of Stratford-on-Avon, was
+forced by poverty to lay down his office of alderman as his son reached
+boyhood; and stress of poverty may have been the cause which drove
+William Shakspere, who was already married at eighteen to a wife older
+than himself, to London and the stage. His life in the capital can
+hardly have begun later than in his twenty-third year, the memorable
+year which followed Sidney's death, which preceded the coming of the
+Armada, and which witnessed the production of Marlowe's "Tamburlaine."
+If we take the language of the Sonnets as a record of his personal
+feeling, his new profession as an actor stirred in him only the
+bitterness of self-contempt. He chides with Fortune "that did not better
+for my life provide than public means that public manners breed"; he
+writhes at the thought that he has "made himself a motley to the view"
+of the gaping apprentices in the pit of Blackfriars. "Thence comes it,"
+he adds, "that my name receives a brand, and almost thence my nature is
+subdued to that it works in." But the application of the words is a more
+than doubtful one. In spite of petty squabbles with some of his dramatic
+rivals at the outset of his career, the genial nature of the newcomer
+seems to have won him a general love among his fellows. In 1592, while
+still a mere actor and fitter of old plays for the stage, a
+fellow-playwright, Chettle, answered Greene's attack on him in words of
+honest affection: "Myself have seen his demeanour no less civil than he
+excellent in the quality he professes: besides, divers of worship have
+reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his
+facetious grace in writing, that approves his art." His partner Burbage
+spoke of him after death as a "worthy friend and fellow"; and Jonson
+handed down the general tradition of his time when he described him as
+"indeed honest, and of an open and free nature."
+
+[Sidenote: His early work.]
+
+His profession as an actor was at any rate of essential service to him
+in the poetic career which he soon undertook. Not only did it give him
+the sense of theatrical necessities which makes his plays so effective
+on the boards, but it enabled him to bring his pieces as he wrote them
+to the test of the stage. If there is any truth in Jonson's statement
+that Shakspere never blotted a line, there is no justice in the censure
+which it implies on his carelessness or incorrectness. The conditions of
+poetic publication were in fact wholly different from those of our own
+day. A drama remained for years in manuscript as an acting piece,
+subject to continual revision and amendment; and every rehearsal and
+representation afforded hints for change which we know the young poet
+was far from neglecting. The chance which has preserved an earlier
+edition of his "Hamlet" shows in what an unsparing way Shakspere could
+recast even the finest products of his genius. Five years after the
+supposed date of his arrival in London he was already famous as a
+dramatist. Greene speaks bitterly of him under the name of "Shakescene"
+as an "upstart crow beautified with our feathers," a sneer which points
+either to his celebrity as an actor or to his preparation for loftier
+flights by fitting pieces of his predecessors for the stage. He was
+soon partner in the theatre, actor, and playwright; and another
+nickname, that of "Johannes Factotum" or Jack-of-all-Trades, shows his
+readiness to take all honest work which came to hand.
+
+[Sidenote: His first plays.]
+
+With his publication in 1593 of the poem of "Venus and Adonis," "the
+first heir of my invention," as Shakspere calls it, the period of
+independent creation fairly began. The date of its publication was a
+very memorable one. The "Faerie Queen" had appeared only three years
+before, and had placed Spenser without a rival at the head of English
+poetry. On the other hand the two leading dramatists of the time passed
+at this moment suddenly away. Greene died in poverty and self-reproach
+in the house of a poor shoemaker. "Doll," he wrote to the wife he had
+abandoned, "I charge thee, by the love of our youth and by my soul's
+rest, that thou wilt see this man paid; for if he and his wife had not
+succoured me I had died in the streets." "Oh that a year were granted me
+to live," cried the young poet from his bed of death, "but I must die,
+of every man abhorred! Time, loosely spent, will not again be won! My
+time is loosely spent--and I undone!" A year later the death of Marlowe
+in a street brawl removed the only rival whose powers might have
+equalled Shakspere's own. He was now about thirty; and the twenty-three
+years which elapsed between the appearance of the "Adonis" and his
+death were filled with a series of masterpieces. Nothing is more
+characteristic of his genius than its incessant activity. Through the
+five years which followed the publication of his early poem he seems to
+have produced on an average two dramas a year. When we attempt however
+to trace the growth and progress of the poet's mind in the order of his
+plays we are met in the case of many of them by an absence of certain
+information as to the dates of their appearance. The facts on which
+enquiry has to build are extremely few. "Venus and Adonis," with the
+"Lucrece," must have been written before their publication in 1593-4;
+the Sonnets, though not published till 1609, were known in some form
+among his private friends as early as 1598. His earlier plays are
+defined by a list given in the "Wit's Treasury" of Francis Meres in
+1598, though the omission of a play from a casual catalogue of this kind
+would hardly warrant us in assuming its necessary non-existence at the
+time. The works ascribed to him at his death are fixed in the same
+approximate fashion through the edition published by his fellow-actors.
+Beyond these meagre facts and our knowledge of the publication of a few
+of his dramas in his lifetime all is uncertain; and the conclusions
+which have been drawn from these, and from the dramas themselves, as
+well as from assumed resemblances with, or references to, other plays of
+the period, can only be accepted as approximations to the truth.
+
+[Sidenote: His earlier comedies.]
+
+The bulk of his lighter comedies and historical dramas can be assigned
+with fair probability to a period from about 1593, when Shakspere was
+known as nothing more than an adapter, to 1598, when they are mentioned
+in the list of Meres. They bear on them indeed the stamp of youth. In
+"Love's Labour's Lost" the young playwright, fresh from his own
+Stratford, its "daisies pied and violets blue," with the gay bright
+music of its country ditties still in his ears, flings himself into the
+midst of the brilliant England which gathered round Elizabeth, busying
+himself as yet for the most part with the surface of it, with the
+humours and quixotisms, the wit and the whim, the unreality, the
+fantastic extravagance, which veiled its inner nobleness. Country-lad as
+he is, Shakspere shows himself master of it all; he can patter euphuism
+and exchange quip and repartee with the best; he is at home in their
+pedantries and affectations, their brag and their rhetoric, their
+passion for the fantastic and the marvellous. He can laugh as heartily
+at the romantic vagaries of the courtly world in which he finds himself
+as at the narrow dulness, the pompous triflings, of the country world
+which he has left behind him. But he laughs frankly and without malice;
+he sees the real grandeur of soul which underlies all this quixotry and
+word-play; and owns with a smile that when brought face to face with
+the facts of human life, with the suffering of man or the danger of
+England, these fops have in them the stuff of heroes. He shares the
+delight in existence, the pleasure in sheer living, which was so marked
+a feature of the age; he enjoys the mistakes, the contrasts, the
+adventures, of the men about him; his fun breaks almost riotously out in
+the practical jokes of the "Taming of the Shrew" and the endless
+blunderings of the "Comedy of Errors." In these earlier efforts his work
+had been marked by little poetic elevation, or by passion. But the easy
+grace of the dialogue, the dexterous management of a complicated story,
+the genial gaiety of his tone, and the music of his verse promised a
+master of social comedy as soon as Shakspere turned from the superficial
+aspects of the world about him to find a new delight in the character
+and actions of men. The interest of human character was still fresh and
+vivid; the sense of individuality drew a charm from its novelty; and
+poet and essayist were busy alike in sketching the "humours" of mankind.
+Shakspere sketched with his fellows. In the "Two Gentlemen of Verona"
+his painting of manners was suffused by a tenderness and ideal beauty
+which formed an effective protest against the hard though vigorous
+character-painting which the first success of Ben Jonson in "Every Man
+in his Humour" brought at the time into fashion. But quick on these
+lighter comedies followed two in which his genius started fully into
+life. His poetic power, held in reserve till now, showed itself with a
+splendid profusion in the brilliant fancies of the "Midsummer Night's
+Dream"; and passion swept like a tide of resistless delight through
+"Romeo and Juliet."
+
+[Sidenote: His historical plays.]
+
+Side by side however with these passionate dreams, these delicate
+imaginings and piquant sketches of manners, had been appearing during
+this short interval of intense activity a series of dramas which mark
+Shakspere's relation to the new sense of patriotism, the more vivid
+sense of national existence, national freedom, national greatness, which
+gives its grandeur to the age of Elizabeth. England itself was now
+becoming a source of literary interest to poet and prose-writer. Warner
+in his "Albion's England," Daniel in his "Civil Wars," embalmed in verse
+the record of her past; Drayton in his "Polyolbion" sang the fairness of
+the land itself, the "tracts, mountains, forests, and other parts of
+this renowned isle of Britain." The national pride took its highest
+poetic form in the historical drama. No plays seem to have been more
+popular from the earliest hours of the new stage than dramatic
+representations of our history. Marlowe had shown in his "Edward the
+Second" what tragic grandeur could be reached in this favourite field;
+and, as we have seen, Shakspere had been led naturally towards it by his
+earlier occupation as an adapter of stock pieces like "Henry the Sixth"
+for the new requirements of the stage. He still to some extent followed
+in plan the older plays on the subjects he selected, but in his
+treatment of their themes he shook boldly off the yoke of the past. A
+larger and deeper conception of human character than any of the old
+dramatists had reached displayed itself in Richard the Third, in
+Falstaff, or in Hotspur; while in Constance and Richard the Second the
+pathos of human suffering was painted as even Marlowe had never dared to
+paint it.
+
+[Sidenote: His religious sympathies.]
+
+No dramas have done so much for Shakspere's enduring popularity with his
+countrymen as these historical plays. They have done more than all the
+works of English historians to nourish in the minds of Englishmen a love
+of and reverence for their country's past. When Chatham was asked where
+he had read his English history he answered, "In the plays of
+Shakspere." Nowhere could he have read it so well, for nowhere is the
+spirit of our history so nobly rendered. If the poet's work echoes
+sometimes our national prejudice and unfairness of temper, it is
+instinct throughout with English humour, with our English love of hard
+fighting, our English faith in goodness and in the doom that waits upon
+triumphant evil, our English pity for the fallen. Shakspere is
+Elizabethan to the core. He stood at the meeting-point of two great
+epochs of our history. The age of the Renascence was passing into the
+age of Puritanism. Rifts which were still little were widening every
+hour, and threatening ruin to the fabric of Church and State which the
+Tudors had built up. A new political world was rising into being; a
+world healthier, more really national, but less picturesque, less wrapt
+in the mystery and splendour that poets love. Great as were the faults
+of Puritanism, it may fairly claim to be the first political system
+which recognized the grandeur of the people as a whole. As great a
+change was passing over the spiritual sympathies of men. A sterner
+Protestantism was invigorating and ennobling life by its morality, its
+seriousness, its intense conviction of God. But it was at the same time
+hardening and narrowing it. The Bible was superseding Plutarch. The
+"obstinate questionings" which haunted the finer souls of the Renascence
+were being stereotyped into the theological formulas of the Puritan. The
+sense of a divine omnipotence was annihilating man. The daring which
+turned England into a people of "adventurers," the sense of
+inexhaustible resources, the buoyant freshness of youth, the
+intoxicating sense of beauty and joy, which created Sidney and Marlowe
+and Drake, were passing away before the consciousness of evil and the
+craving to order man's life aright before God.
+
+From this new world of thought and feeling Shakspere stood aloof. Turn
+as others might to the speculations of theology, man and man's nature
+remained with him an inexhaustible subject of interest. Caliban was
+among his latest creations. It is impossible to discover whether his
+religious belief was Catholic or Protestant. It is hard indeed to say
+whether he had any religious belief or no. The religious phrases which
+are thinly scattered over his works are little more than expressions of
+a distant and imaginative reverence. But on the deeper grounds of
+religious faith his silence is significant. He is silent, and the doubt
+of Hamlet deepens his silence, about the after-world. "To die," it may
+be, was to him as it was to Claudio, "to go we know not whither." Often
+as his questionings turn to the riddle of life and death he leaves it a
+riddle to the last without heeding the common theological solutions
+around him. "We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little
+life is rounded with a sleep."
+
+[Sidenote: His political sympathies.]
+
+Nor were the political sympathies of the poet those of the coming time.
+His roll of dramas is the epic of civil war. The Wars of the Roses fill
+his mind, as they filled the mind of his contemporaries. It is not till
+we follow him through the series of plays from "Richard the Second" to
+"Henry the Eighth" that we realize how profoundly the memory of the
+struggle between York and Lancaster had moulded the temper of the
+people, how deep a dread of civil war, of baronial turbulence, of
+disputes over the succession to the throne, it had left behind it. Men
+had learned the horrors of the time from their fathers; they had drunk
+in with their childhood the lesson that such a chaos of weakness and
+misrule must never be risked again. From such a risk the Crown seemed
+the one security. With Shakspere as with his fellow-countrymen the Crown
+is still the centre and safeguard of the national life. His ideal
+England is an England grouped around a noble king, a king such as his
+own Henry the Fifth, devout, modest, simple as he is brave, but a lord
+in battle, a born ruler of men, with a loyal people about him and his
+enemies at his feet. Socially the poet reflects the aristocratic view of
+social life which was shared by all the nobler spirits of the
+Elizabethan time. Coriolanus is the embodiment of a great noble; and the
+taunts which Shakspere hurls in play after play at the rabble only echo
+the general temper of the Renascence. But he shows no sympathy with the
+struggle of feudalism against the Crown. If he paints Hotspur with a
+fire which proves how thoroughly he could sympathize with the rough,
+bold temper of the baronage, he suffers him to fall unpitied before
+Henry the Fourth. Apart however from the strength and justice of its
+rule, royalty has no charm for him. He knows nothing of the "right
+divine of kings to govern wrong" which became the doctrine of prelates
+and courtiers in the age of the Stuarts. He shows in his "Richard the
+Second" the doom that waits on a lawless despotism, as he denounces in
+his "Richard the Third" the selfish and merciless ambition that severs
+a ruler from his people. But the dread of misrule was a dim and distant
+one. Shakspere had grown up under the reign of Elizabeth; he had known
+no ruler save one who had cast a spell over the hearts of Englishmen.
+His thoughts were absorbed, as those of the country were absorbed, in
+the struggle for national existence which centred round the Queen. "King
+John" is a trumpet-call to rally round Elizabeth in her fight for
+England. Again a Pope was asserting his right to depose an English
+sovereign and to loose Englishmen from their bond of allegiance. Again
+political ambitions and civil discord woke at the call of religious war.
+Again a foreign power was threatening England at the summons of Rome,
+and hoping to master her with the aid of revolted Englishmen. The heat
+of such a struggle as this left no time for the thought of civil
+liberties. Shakspere casts aside the thought of the Charter to fix
+himself on the strife of the stranger for England itself. What he sang
+was the duty of patriotism, the grandeur of loyalty, the freedom of
+England from Pope or Spaniard, its safety within its "water-walled
+bulwark," if only its national union was secure. And now that the nation
+was at one, now that he had seen in his first years of London life
+Catholics as well as Protestants trooping to the muster at Tilbury and
+hasting down Thames to the fight in the Channel, he could thrill his
+hearers with the proud words that sum up the work of Elizabeth:--
+
+     "This England never did, nor never shall,
+     Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
+     But when it first did help to wound itself.
+     Now that her princes are come home again,
+     Come the three corners of the world in arms,
+     And we shall shock them! Nought shall make us rue
+     If England to itself do rest but true."
+
+[Sidenote: Shakspere's prosperity.]
+
+With this great series of historical and social dramas Shakspere had
+passed far beyond his fellows whether as a tragedian or as a writer of
+comedy. "The Muses," said Meres in 1598, "would speak with Shakspere's
+fine-filed phrase, if they would speak English." His personal popularity
+was now at its height. His pleasant temper and the vivacity of his wit
+had drawn him early into contact with the young Earl of Southampton, to
+whom his "Adonis" and "Lucrece" are dedicated; and the different tone of
+the two dedications shows how rapidly acquaintance ripened into an
+ardent friendship. Shakspere's wealth and influence too were growing
+fast. He had property both in Stratford and London, and his
+fellow-townsmen made him their suitor to Lord Burleigh for favours to be
+bestowed on Stratford. He was rich enough to aid his father, and to buy
+the house at Stratford which afterwards became his home. The tradition
+that Elizabeth was so pleased with Falstaff in "Henry the Fourth" that
+she ordered the poet to show her Falstaff in love--an order which
+produced the "Merry Wives of Windsor"--whether true or false, proves his
+repute as a playwright. As the group of earlier poets passed away, they
+found successors in Marston, Dekker, Middleton, Heywood, and Chapman,
+and above all in Ben Jonson. But none of these could dispute the
+supremacy of Shakspere. The verdict of Meres that "Shakspere among the
+English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage," represented
+the general feeling of his contemporaries. He was at last fully master
+of the resources of his art. The "Merchant of Venice" marks the
+perfection of his developement as a dramatist in the completeness of its
+stage effect, the ingenuity of its incidents, the ease of its movement,
+the beauty of its higher passages, the reserve and self-control with
+which its poetry is used, the conception and unfolding of character, and
+above all the mastery with which character and event are grouped round
+the figure of Shylock. Master as he is of his art, the poet's temper is
+still young; the "Merry Wives of Windsor" is a burst of gay laughter;
+and laughter more tempered, yet full of a sweeter fascination, rings
+round us in "As You Like It."
+
+[Sidenote: His gloom.]
+
+But in the melancholy and meditative Jaques of the last drama we feel
+the touch of a new and graver mood. Youth, so full and buoyant in the
+poet till now, seems to have passed almost suddenly away. Though
+Shakspere had hardly reached forty, in one of his Sonnets which cannot
+have been written at a much later time than this there are indications
+that he already felt the advance of premature age. And at this moment
+the outer world suddenly darkened around him. The brilliant circle of
+young nobles whose friendship he had shared was broken up in 1601 by the
+political storm which burst in a mad struggle of the Earl of Essex for
+power. Essex himself fell on the scaffold; his friend and Shakspere's
+idol, Southampton, passed a prisoner into the Tower; Herbert Lord
+Pembroke, a younger patron of the poet, was banished from the Court.
+While friends were thus falling and hopes fading without, Shakspere's
+own mind seems to have been going through a phase of bitter suffering
+and unrest. In spite of the ingenuity of commentators, it is difficult
+and even impossible to derive any knowledge of Shakspere's inner history
+from the Sonnets; "the strange imagery of passion which passes over the
+magic mirror," it has been finely said, "has no tangible evidence before
+or behind it." But its mere passing is itself an evidence of the
+restlessness and agony within. The change in the character of his dramas
+gives a surer indication of his change of mood. The fresh joyousness,
+the keen delight in life and in man, which breathes through Shakspere's
+early work disappears in comedies such as "Troilus" and "Measure for
+Measure." Disappointment, disillusion, a new sense of the evil and
+foulness that underlie so much of human life, a loss of the old frank
+trust in its beauty and goodness, threw their gloom over these
+comedies. Failure seems everywhere. In "Julius Caesar" the virtue of
+Brutus is foiled by its ignorance of and isolation from mankind; in
+Hamlet even penetrating intellect proves helpless for want of the
+capacity of action; the poison of Iago taints the love of Desdemona and
+the grandeur of Othello; Lear's mighty passion battles helplessly
+against the wind and the rain; a woman's weakness of frame dashes the
+cup of her triumph from the hand of Lady Macbeth; lust and
+self-indulgence blast the heroism of Antony; pride ruins the nobleness
+of Coriolanus.
+
+[Sidenote: His passion plays.]
+
+But the very struggle and self-introspection that these dramas betray
+were to give a depth and grandeur to Shakspere's work such as it had
+never known before. The age was one in which man's temper and powers
+took a new range and energy. Sidney or Raleigh lived not one but a dozen
+lives at once; the daring of the adventurer, the philosophy of the
+scholar, the passion of the lover, the fanaticism of the saint, towered
+into almost superhuman grandeur. Man became conscious of the immense
+resources that lay within him, conscious of boundless powers that seemed
+to mock the narrow world in which they moved. All through the age of the
+Renascence one feels this impress of the gigantic, this giant-like
+activity, this immense ambition and desire. The very bombast and
+extravagance of the times reveal cravings and impulses before which
+common speech broke down. It is this grandeur of humanity that finds
+its poetic expression in the later work of Shakspere. As the poet
+penetrated deeper and deeper into the recesses of the soul, he saw how
+great and wondrous a thing was man. "What a piece of work is a man,"
+cries Hamlet; "how noble in reason; how infinite in faculty; in form and
+moving how express and admirable; in action how like an angel; in
+apprehension how like a god; the beauty of the world; the paragon of
+animals!" It is the wonder of man that spreads before us as the poet
+pictures the wide speculation of Hamlet, the awful convulsion of a great
+nature in Othello, the terrible storm in the soul of Lear which blends
+with the very storm of the heavens themselves, the awful ambition that
+nerved a woman's hand to dabble itself with the blood of a murdered
+king, the reckless lust that "flung away a world for love." Amid the
+terror and awe of these great dramas we learn something of the vast
+forces of the age from which they sprang. The passion of Mary Stuart,
+the ruthlessness of Alva, the daring of Drake, the chivalry of Sidney,
+the range of thought and action in Raleigh or Elizabeth, come better
+home to us as we follow the mighty series of tragedies which began in
+"Hamlet" and ended in "Coriolanus."
+
+[Sidenote: Bacon.]
+
+Shakspere's last dramas, the three exquisite works in which he shows a
+soul at rest with itself and with the world, "Cymbeline," "The
+Tempest," "Winter's Tale," were written in the midst of ease and
+competence, in a house at Stratford to which he withdrew a few years
+after the death of Elizabeth. In them we lose all relation with the
+world or the time and pass into a region of pure poetry. It is in this
+peaceful and gracious close that the life of Shakspere contrasts most
+vividly with that of his greatest contemporary. If the imaginative
+resources of the new England were seen in the creators of Hamlet and the
+Faerie Queen, its purely intellectual capacity, its vast command over
+the stores of human knowledge, the amazing sense of its own powers with
+which it dealt with them, were seen in the work of Francis Bacon. Bacon
+was born in 1561, three years before the birth of Shakspere. He was the
+younger son of a Lord Keeper, as well as the nephew of Lord Burleigh,
+and even in childhood his quickness and sagacity won the favour of the
+Queen. Elizabeth "delighted much to confer with him, and to prove him
+with questions: unto which he delivered himself with that gravity and
+maturity above his years that her Majesty would often term him 'the
+young Lord Keeper.'" Even as a boy at college he expressed his dislike
+of the Aristotelian philosophy, as "a philosophy only strong for
+disputations and contentions but barren of the production of works for
+the benefit of the life of man." As a law student of twenty-one he
+sketched in a tract on the "Greatest Birth of Time" the system of
+inductive enquiry which he was already prepared to substitute for it.
+The speculations of the young thinker however were interrupted by his
+hopes of Court success. But these were soon dashed to the ground. He was
+left poor by his father's death; the ill-will of the Cecils barred his
+advancement with the Queen: and a few years before Shakspere's arrival
+in London Bacon entered as a barrister at Gray's Inn. He soon became one
+of the most successful lawyers of the time. At twenty-three Bacon was a
+member of the House of Commons, and his judgement and eloquence at once
+brought him to the front. "The fear of every man that heard him was lest
+he should make an end," Ben Jonson tells us. The steady growth of his
+reputation was quickened in 1597 by the appearance of his "Essays," a
+work remarkable, not merely for the condensation of its thought and its
+felicity and exactness of expression, but for the power with which it
+applied to human life that experimental analysis which Bacon was at a
+later time to make the key of Science.
+
+His fame at once became great at home and abroad, but with this nobler
+fame Bacon could not content himself. He was conscious of great powers
+as well as great aims for the public good: and it was a time when such
+aims could hardly be realized save through the means of the Crown. But
+political employment seemed farther off than ever. At the outset of his
+career in Parliament he irritated Elizabeth by a firm opposition to her
+demand of a subsidy; and though the offence was atoned for by profuse
+apologies and by the cessation of all further resistance to the policy
+of the Court, the law offices of the Crown were more than once refused
+to him, and it was only after the publication of his "Essays" that he
+could obtain some slight promotion as a Queen's Counsel. The moral
+weakness which more and more disclosed itself is the best justification
+of the Queen in her reluctance--a reluctance so greatly in contrast with
+her ordinary course--to bring the wisest head in her realm to her
+Council-board. The men whom Elizabeth employed were for the most part
+men whose intellect was directed by a strong sense of public duty. Their
+reverence for the Queen, strangely exaggerated as it may seem to us, was
+guided and controlled by an ardent patriotism and an earnest sense of
+religion; and with all their regard for the royal prerogative, they
+never lost their regard for the law. The grandeur and originality of
+Bacon's intellect parted him from men like these quite as much as the
+bluntness of his moral perceptions. In politics, as in science, he had
+little reverence for the past. Law, constitutional privileges, or
+religion, were to him simply means of bringing about certain ends of
+good government; and if these ends could be brought about in shorter
+fashion he saw only pedantry in insisting on more cumbrous means. He had
+great social and political ideas to realize, the reform and codification
+of the law, the civilization of Ireland, the purification of the Church,
+the union--at a later time--of Scotland and England, educational
+projects, projects of material improvement, and the like; and the direct
+and shortest way of realizing these ends was, in Bacon's eyes, the use
+of the power of the Crown. But whatever charm such a conception of the
+royal power might have for her successor, it had little charm for
+Elizabeth; and to the end of her reign Bacon was foiled in his efforts
+to rise in her service.
+
+[Sidenote: The Novum Organum.]
+
+Political activity however and Court intrigue left room in his mind for
+the philosophical speculation which had begun with his earliest years.
+Amidst debates in Parliament and flatteries in the closet Bacon had been
+silently framing a new philosophy. It made its first decisive appearance
+after the final disappointment of his hopes from Elizabeth in the
+publication of the "Advancement of Learning." The close of this work
+was, in his own words, "a general and faithful perambulation of
+learning, with an enquiry what parts thereof lie fresh and waste and not
+improved and converted by the industry of man; to the end that such a
+plot, made and recorded to memory, may both minister light to any public
+designation and also serve to excite voluntary endeavours." It was only
+by such a survey, he held, that men could be turned from useless
+studies, or ineffectual means of pursuing more useful ones, and directed
+to the true end of knowledge as "a rich storehouse for the glory of the
+Creator and the relief of man's estate." The work was in fact the
+preface to a series of treatises which were intended to be built up into
+an "Instauratio Magna," which its author was never destined to complete,
+and of which the parts that we possess were published in the following
+reign. The "Cogitata et Visa" was a first sketch of the "Novum Organum,"
+which in its complete form was presented to James in 1621. A year later
+Bacon produced his "Natural and Experimental History." This, with the
+"Novum Organum" and the "Advancement of Learning," was all of his
+projected "Instauratio Magna" which he actually finished; and even of
+this portion we have only part of the last two divisions. The "Ladder of
+the Understanding," which was to have followed these and led up from
+experience to science, the "Anticipations," or provisional hypotheses
+for the enquiries of the new philosophy, and the closing account of
+"Science in Practice" were left for posterity to bring to completion.
+"We may, as we trust," said Bacon, "make no despicable beginnings. The
+destinies of the human race must complete it, in such a manner perhaps
+as men looking only at the present world would not readily conceive.
+For upon this will depend, not only a speculative good, but all the
+fortunes of mankind, and all their power."
+
+When we turn from words like these to the actual work which Bacon did,
+it is hard not to feel a certain disappointment. He did not thoroughly
+understand the older philosophy which he attacked. His revolt from the
+waste of human intelligence which he conceived to be owing to the
+adoption of a false method of investigation blinded him to the real
+value of deduction as an instrument of discovery; and he was encouraged
+in his contempt for it as much by his own ignorance of mathematics as by
+the non-existence in his day of the great deductive sciences of physics
+and astronomy. Nor had he a more accurate prevision of the method of
+modern science. The inductive process to which he exclusively directed
+men's attention bore no fruit in Bacon's hands. The "art of
+investigating nature" on which he prided himself has proved useless for
+scientific purposes, and would be rejected by modern investigators.
+Where he was on a more correct track he can hardly be regarded as
+original. "It may be doubted," says Dugald Stewart, "whether any one
+important rule with regard to the true method of investigation be
+contained in his works of which no hint can be traced in those of his
+predecessors." Not only indeed did Bacon fail to anticipate the methods
+of modern science, but he even rejected the great scientific
+discoveries of his own day. He set aside with the same scorn the
+astronomical theory of Copernicus and the magnetic investigations of
+Gilbert. The contempt seems to have been fully returned by the
+scientific workers of his day. "The Lord Chancellor wrote on science,"
+said Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, "like a
+Lord Chancellor."
+
+In spite however of his inadequate appreciation either of the old
+philosophy or the new, the almost unanimous voice of later ages has
+attributed, and justly attributed, to the "Novum Organum" a decisive
+influence on the developement of modern science. If he failed in
+revealing the method of experimental research, Bacon was the first to
+proclaim the existence of a Philosophy of Science, to insist on the
+unity of knowledge and enquiry throughout the physical world, to give
+dignity by the large and noble temper in which he treated them to the
+petty details of experiment in which science had to begin, to clear a
+way for it by setting scornfully aside the traditions of the past, to
+claim for it its true rank and value, and to point to the enormous
+results which its culture would bring in increasing the power and
+happiness of mankind. In one respect his attitude was in the highest
+degree significant. The age in which he lived was one in which theology
+was absorbing the intellectual energy of the world. He was the servant
+too of a king with whom theological studies superseded all others. But
+if he bowed in all else to James, Bacon would not, like Casaubon, bow in
+this. He would not even, like Descartes, attempt to transform theology
+by turning reason into a mode of theological demonstration. He stood
+absolutely aloof from it. Though as a politician he did not shrink from
+dealing with such subjects as Church Reform, he dealt with them simply
+as matters of civil polity. But from his exhaustive enumeration of the
+branches of human knowledge he excluded theology, and theology alone.
+His method was of itself inapplicable to a subject where the premisses
+were assumed to be certain, and the results known. His aim was to seek
+for unknown results by simple experiment. It was against received
+authority and accepted tradition in matters of enquiry that his whole
+system protested; what he urged was the need of making belief rest
+strictly on proof, and proof rest on the conclusions drawn from evidence
+by reason. But in theology--all theologians asserted--reason played but
+a subordinate part. "If I proceed to treat of it," said Bacon, "I shall
+step out of the bark of human reason, and enter into the ship of the
+Church. Neither will the stars of philosophy, which have hitherto so
+nobly shone on us, any longer give us their light."
+
+The certainty indeed of conclusions on such subjects was out of harmony
+with the grandest feature of Bacon's work, his noble confession of the
+liability of every enquirer to error. It was his especial task to warn
+men against the "vain shows" of knowledge which had so long hindered any
+real advance in it, the "idols" of the Tribe, the Den, the Forum, and
+the Theatre, the errors which spring from the systematizing spirit which
+pervades all masses of men, or from individual idiosyncrasies, or from
+the strange power of words and phrases over the mind, or from the
+traditions of the past. Nor were the claims of theology easily to be
+reconciled with the position which he was resolute to assign to natural
+science. "Through all those ages," Bacon says, "wherein men of genius or
+learning principally or even moderately flourished, the smallest part of
+human industry has been spent on natural philosophy, though this ought
+to be esteemed as the great mother of the sciences; for all the rest, if
+torn from this root, may perhaps be polished and formed for use, but can
+receive little increase." It was by the adoption of the method of
+inductive enquiry which physical science was to make its own, and by
+basing enquiry on grounds which physical science could supply, that the
+moral sciences, ethics and politics, could alone make any real advance.
+"Let none expect any great promotion of the sciences, especially in
+their effective part, unless natural philosophy be drawn out to
+particular sciences; and, again, unless these particular sciences be
+brought back again to natural philosophy. From this defect it is that
+astronomy, optics, music, many mechanical arts, and (what seems
+stranger) even moral and civil philosophy and logic rise but little
+above the foundations, and only skim over the varieties and surfaces of
+things." It was this lofty conception of the position and destiny of
+natural science which Bacon was the first to impress upon mankind at
+large. The age was one in which knowledge was passing to fields of
+enquiry which had till then been unknown, in which Kepler and Galileo
+were creating modern astronomy, in which Descartes was revealing the
+laws of motion, and Harvey the circulation of the blood. But to the mass
+of men this great change was all but imperceptible; and it was the
+energy, the profound conviction, the eloquence of Bacon which first
+called the attention of mankind as a whole to the power and importance
+of physical research. It was he who by his lofty faith in the results
+and victories of the new philosophy nerved its followers to a zeal and
+confidence equal to his own. It was he above all who gave dignity to the
+slow and patient processes of investigation, of experiment, of
+comparison, to the sacrifice of hypothesis to fact, to the single aim
+after truth, which was to be the law of modern science.
+
+[Sidenote: Advance of the Parliament.]
+
+While England thus became "a nest of singing birds," while Bacon was
+raising the lofty fabric of his philosophical speculation, the people
+itself was waking to a new sense of national freedom. Elizabeth saw the
+forces, political and religious, which she had stubbornly held in check
+for half a century pressing on her irresistibly. In spite of the rarity
+of its assemblings, in spite of high words and imprisonment and
+dexterous management, the Parliament had quietly gained a power which,
+at her accession, the Queen could never have dreamed of its possessing.
+Step by step the Lower House had won the freedom of its members from
+arrest save by its own permission, the right of punishing and expelling
+members for crimes committed within its walls, and of determining all
+matters relating to elections. The more important claim of freedom of
+speech had brought on from time to time a series of petty conflicts in
+which Elizabeth generally gave way. But on this point the Commons still
+shrank from any consistent repudiation of the Queen's assumption of
+control. A bold protest of Peter Wentworth against her claim to exercise
+such a control in 1575 was met indeed by the House itself with his
+committal to the Tower; and the bolder questions which he addressed to
+the Parliament of 1588, "Whether this Council is not a place for every
+member of the same freely and without control, by bill or speech, to
+utter any of the griefs of the Commonwealth," brought on him a fresh
+imprisonment at the hands of the Council, which lasted till the
+dissolution of the Parliament and with which the Commons declined to
+interfere. But while vacillating in its assertion of the rights of
+individual members, the House steadily claimed for itself a right to
+discuss even the highest matters of State. Three great subjects, the
+succession, the Church, and the regulation of trade, had been regarded
+by every Tudor sovereign as lying exclusively within the competence of
+the Crown. But Parliament had again and again asserted its right to
+consider the succession. It persisted in spite of censure and rebuff in
+presenting schemes of ecclesiastical reform. And three years before
+Elizabeth's death it dealt boldly with matters of trade. Complaints made
+in 1571 of the licences and monopolies by which internal and external
+commerce was fettered were repressed by a royal reprimand as matters
+neither pertaining to the Commons nor within the compass of their
+understanding. When the subject was again stirred nearly twenty years
+afterwards, Sir Edward Hoby was sharply rebuked by "a great personage"
+for his complaint of the illegal exactions made by the Exchequer. But
+the bill which he promoted was sent up to the Lords in spite of this,
+and at the close of Elizabeth's reign the storm of popular indignation
+which had been roused by the growing grievance nerved the Commons, in
+1601, to a decisive struggle. It was in vain that the ministers opposed
+a bill for the Abolition of Monopolies, and after four days of vehement
+debate the tact of Elizabeth taught her to give way. She acted with her
+usual ability, declared her previous ignorance of the existence of the
+evil, thanked the House for its interference, and quashed at a single
+blow every monopoly that she had granted.
+
+[Sidenote: Growth of Puritanism.]
+
+Dexterous as was Elizabeth's retreat, the defeat was none the less a
+real one. Political freedom was proving itself again the master in the
+long struggle with the Crown. Nor in her yet fiercer struggle against
+religious freedom could Elizabeth look forward to any greater success.
+The sharp suppression of the Martin Marprelate pamphlets was far from
+damping the courage of the Presbyterians. Cartwright, who had been
+appointed by Lord Leicester to the mastership of an hospital at Warwick,
+was bold enough to organize his system of Church discipline among the
+clergy of that county and of Northamptonshire. His example was widely
+followed; and the general gatherings of the whole ministerial body of
+the clergy and the smaller assemblies for each diocese or shire, which
+in the Presbyterian scheme bore the name of Synods and Classes, began to
+be held in many parts of England for the purposes of debate and
+consultation. The new organization was quickly suppressed, but
+Cartwright was saved from the banishment which Whitgift demanded by a
+promise of submission, and his influence steadily widened. With
+Presbyterianism itself indeed Elizabeth was strong enough to deal. Its
+dogmatism and bigotry were opposed to the better temper of the age, and
+it never took any popular hold on England. But if Presbyterianism was
+limited to a few, Puritanism, the religious temper which sprang from a
+deep conviction of the truth of Protestant doctrines and of the
+falsehood of Catholicism, had become through the struggle with Spain and
+the Papacy the temper of three-fourths of the English people. Unluckily
+the policy of Elizabeth did its best to give to the Presbyterians the
+support of Puritanism. Her establishment of the Ecclesiastical
+Commission had given fresh life and popularity to the doctrines which it
+aimed at crushing by drawing together two currents of opinion which were
+in themselves perfectly distinct. The Presbyterian platform of Church
+discipline had as yet been embraced by the clergy only, and by few among
+the clergy. On the other hand, the wish for a reform in the Liturgy, the
+dislike of "superstitious usages," of the use of the surplice, the sign
+of the cross in baptism, the gift of the ring in marriage, the posture
+of kneeling at the Lord's Supper, was shared by a large number of the
+clergy and the laity alike. At the opening of Elizabeth's reign almost
+all the higher Churchmen save Parker were opposed to them, and a motion
+for their abolition in Convocation was lost but by a single vote. The
+temper of the country gentlemen on this subject was indicated by that
+of Parliament; and it was well known that the wisest of the Queen's
+Councillors, Burleigh, Walsingham, and Knollys, were at one in this
+matter with the gentry. If their common persecution did not wholly
+succeed in fusing these two sections of religious opinion into one, it
+at any rate gained for the Presbyterians a general sympathy on the part
+of the Puritans, which raised them from a clerical clique into a popular
+party.
+
+[Sidenote: Philip and Ireland.]
+
+But if Elizabeth's task became more difficult at home, the last years of
+her reign were years of splendour and triumph abroad. The overthrow of
+Philip's hopes in France had been made more bitter by the final
+overthrow of his hopes at sea. In 1596 his threat of a fresh Armada was
+met by the daring descent of an English force upon Cadiz. The town was
+plundered and burned to the ground; thirteen vessels of war were fired
+in its harbour, and the stores accumulated for the expedition utterly
+destroyed. In spite of this crushing blow a Spanish fleet gathered in
+the following year and set sail for the English coast; but as in the
+case of its predecessor storms proved more fatal than the English guns,
+and the ships were wrecked and almost destroyed in the Bay of Biscay.
+Meanwhile whatever hopes remained of subjecting the Low Countries were
+destroyed by the triumph of Henry of Navarre. A triple league of France,
+England, and the Netherlands left Elizabeth secure to the eastward; and
+the only quarter in which Philip could now strike a blow at her was the
+great dependency of England in the west. Since the failure of the
+Spanish force at Smerwick the power of the English government had been
+recognized everywhere throughout Ireland. But it was a power founded
+solely on terror, and the outrages and exactions of the soldiery who had
+been flushed with rapine and bloodshed in the south sowed during the
+years which followed the reduction of Munster the seeds of a revolt more
+formidable than any which Elizabeth had yet encountered. The tribes of
+Ulster, divided by the policy of Sidney, were again united by a common
+hatred of their oppressors; and in Hugh O'Neill they found a leader of
+even greater ability than Shane himself. Hugh had been brought up at the
+English court and was in manners and bearing an Englishman. He had been
+rewarded for his steady loyalty in previous contests by a grant of the
+earldom of Tyrone, and in his contest with a rival chieftain of his clan
+he had secured aid from the government by an offer to introduce the
+English laws and shire-system into his new country. But he was no sooner
+undisputed master of the north than his tone gradually changed. Whether
+from a long-formed plan, or from suspicion of English designs upon
+himself, he at last took a position of open defiance.
+
+[Sidenote: Revolt of Ulster.]
+
+It was at the moment when the Treaty of Vervins and the wreck of the
+second Armada freed Elizabeth's hands from the struggle with Spain that
+the revolt under Hugh O'Neill broke the quiet which had prevailed since
+the victories of Lord Grey. The Irish question again became the chief
+trouble of the Queen. The tide of her recent triumphs seemed at first to
+have turned. A defeat of the English forces in Tyrone caused a general
+rising of the northern tribes, and a great effort made in 1599 for the
+suppression of the growing revolt failed through the vanity and
+disobedience, if not the treacherous complicity, of the Queen's
+lieutenant, the young Earl of Essex. His successor, Lord Mountjoy, found
+himself master on his arrival of only a few miles round Dublin. But in
+three years the revolt was at an end. A Spanish force which landed to
+support it at Kinsale was driven to surrender; a line of forts secured
+the country as the English mastered it; all open opposition was crushed
+out by the energy and the ruthlessness of the new Lieutenant; and a
+famine which followed on his ravages completed the devastating work of
+the sword. Hugh O'Neill was brought in triumph to Dublin; the Earl of
+Desmond, who had again roused Munster into revolt, fled for refuge to
+Spain; and the work of conquest was at last brought to a close.
+
+[Sidenote: The last years of Elizabeth.]
+
+The triumph of Mountjoy flung its lustre over the last days of
+Elizabeth, but no outer triumph could break the gloom which gathered
+round the dying Queen. Lonely as she had always been, her loneliness
+deepened as she drew towards the grave. The statesmen and warriors of
+her earlier days had dropped one by one from her Council-board.
+Leicester had died in the year of the Armada; two years later Walsingham
+followed him to the grave; in 1598 Burleigh himself passed away. Their
+successors were watching her last moments, and intriguing for favour in
+the coming reign. Her favourite, Lord Essex, not only courted favour
+with James of Scotland, but brought him to suspect Robert Cecil, who had
+succeeded his father at the Queen's Council-board, of designs against
+his succession. The rivalry between the two ministers hurried Essex into
+fatal projects which led to his failure in Ireland and to an insane
+outbreak of revolt which brought him in 1601 to the block. But Cecil had
+no sooner proved the victor in this struggle at Court than he himself
+entered into a secret correspondence with the king of Scots. His action
+was wise: it brought James again into friendly relations with the Queen;
+and paved the way for a peaceful transfer of the crown. But hidden as
+this correspondence was from Elizabeth, the suspicion of it only added
+to her distrust. The troubles of the war in Ireland brought fresh cares
+to the aged Queen. It drained her treasury. The old splendour of her
+Court waned and disappeared. Only officials remained about her, "the
+other of the Council and nobility estrange themselves by all occasions."
+The love and reverence of the people itself lessened as they felt the
+pressure and taxation of the war. Of old men had pressed to see the
+Queen as if it were a glimpse of heaven. "In the year 1588," a bishop
+tells us, who was then a country boy fresh come to town, "I did live at
+the upper end of the Strand near St. Clement's church, when suddenly
+there came a report to us (it was in December, much about five of the
+clock at night, very dark) that the Queen was gone to Council, 'and if
+you will see the Queen you must come quickly.' Then we all ran, when the
+Court gates were set open, and no man did hinder us from coming in.
+There we came, where there was a far greater company than was usually at
+Lenten sermons; and when we had staid there an hour and that the yard
+was full, there being a number of torches, the Queen came out in great
+state. Then we cried, 'God save your Majesty! God save your Majesty!'
+Then the Queen turned to us and said, 'God bless you all, my good
+people!' Then we cried again, 'God bless your Majesty! God bless your
+Majesty!' Then the Queen said again to us, 'You may well have a greater
+prince, but you shall never have a more loving prince.' And so looking
+one upon another a while the Queen departed. This wrought such an
+impression on us, for shows and pageantry are ever best seen by
+torchlight, that all the way long we did nothing but talk what an
+admirable Queen she was, and how we would adventure our lives to do her
+service." But now, as Elizabeth passed along in her progresses, the
+people whose applause she courted remained cold and silent. The temper
+of the age in fact was changing, and isolating her as it changed. Her
+own England, the England which had grown up around her, serious, moral,
+prosaic, shrank coldly from this brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous child
+of earth and the Renascence.
+
+[Sidenote: Elizabeth's death.]
+
+But if ministers and courtiers were counting on her death, Elizabeth had
+no mind to die. She had enjoyed life as the men of her day enjoyed it,
+and now that they were gone she clung to it with a fierce tenacity. She
+hunted, she danced, she jested with her young favourites, she coquetted
+and scolded and frolicked at sixty-seven as she had done at thirty. "The
+Queen," wrote a courtier a few months before her death, "was never so
+gallant these many years nor so set upon jollity." She persisted, in
+spite of opposition, in her gorgeous progresses from country-house to
+country-house. She clung to business as of old, and rated in her usual
+fashion "one who minded not to giving up some matter of account." But
+death crept on. Her face became haggard, and her frame shrank almost to
+a skeleton. At last her taste for finery disappeared, and she refused to
+change her dresses for a week together. A strange melancholy settled
+down on her. "She held in her hand," says one who saw her in her last
+days, "a golden cup, which she often put to her lips: but in truth her
+heart seemed too full to need more filling." Gradually her mind gave
+way. She lost her memory, the violence of her temper became unbearable,
+her very courage seemed to forsake her. She called for a sword to lie
+constantly beside her and thrust it from time to time through the arras,
+as if she heard murderers stirring there. Food and rest became alike
+distasteful. She sate day and night propped up with pillows on a stool,
+her finger on her lip, her eyes fixed on the floor, without a word. If
+she once broke the silence, it was with a flash of her old queenliness.
+When Robert Cecil declared that she "must" go to bed the word roused her
+like a trumpet. "Must!" she exclaimed; "is _must_ a word to be addressed
+to princes? Little man, little man! thy father, if he had been alive,
+durst not have used that word." Then, as her anger spent itself, she
+sank into her old dejection. "Thou art so presumptuous," she said,
+"because thou knowest I shall die." She rallied once more when the
+ministers beside her bed named Lord Beauchamp, the heir to the Suffolk
+claim, as a possible successor. "I will have no rogue's son," she cried
+hoarsely, "in my seat." But she gave no sign, save a motion of the head,
+at the mention of the king of Scots. She was in fact fast becoming
+insensible; and early the next morning, on the twenty-fourth of March
+1603, the life of Elizabeth, a life so great, so strange and lonely in
+its greatness, ebbed quietly away.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VII
+
+PURITAN ENGLAND
+
+1603-1660
+
+
+
+
+AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK VII
+
+1603-1660
+
+
+For the reign of James the First we have Camden's "Annals" of that king,
+Goodman's "Court of King James I.," Weldon's "Secret History of the
+Court of James I.," Roger Coke's "Detection," the correspondence in the
+"Cabala," the letters published under the title of "The Court and Times
+of James I.," the documents in Winwood's "Memorials of State," and the
+reported proceedings of the last two Parliaments. The Camden Society has
+published the correspondence of James with Cecil, and Walter Yonge's
+"Diary." The letters and works of Bacon, now fully edited by Mr.
+Spedding, are necessary for any true understanding of the period.
+Hacket's "Life of Williams" and Harrington's "Nugae Antiquae" throw
+valuable side-light on the politics of the time. But the Stuart system,
+both at home and abroad, can only fairly be read by the light of the
+state-papers of this and the following reign, calendars of which are now
+being published by the Master of the Rolls. It is his employment of
+these, as well as his own fairness and good sense, which gives value to
+the series of works which Mr. Gardiner has devoted to this period; his
+"History of England from the Accession of James the First," his "Prince
+Charles and the Spanish Marriage," "England under the Duke of
+Buckingham," and "The Personal Government of Charles the First." The
+series has as yet been carried to 1637. To Mr. Gardiner also we owe the
+publication, through the Camden Society, of reports of some of the
+earlier Stuart Parliaments. Ranke's "History of England during the
+Seventeenth Century" has the same documentary value as embodying the
+substance of state-papers in both English and foreign archives, which
+throw great light on the foreign politics of the Stuart kings. It covers
+the whole period of Stuart rule. With the reign of Charles the First our
+historical materials increase. For Laud we have his remarkable "Diary";
+for Strafford the "Strafford Letters." Hallam has justly characterized
+Clarendon's "History of the Rebellion" as belonging "rather to the class
+of memoirs" than of histories; and the rigorous analysis of it by Ranke
+shows the very different value of its various parts. Though the work
+will always retain a literary interest from its nobleness of style and
+the grand series of character-portraits which it embodies, the worth of
+its account of all that preceded the war is almost destroyed by the
+contrast between its author's conduct at the time and his later
+description of the Parliament's proceedings, as well as by the
+deliberate and malignant falsehood with which he has perverted the whole
+action of his parliamentary opponents. With the outbreak of the war he
+becomes of greater value, and he gives a good account of the Cornish
+rising; but from the close of the first struggle his work becomes
+tedious and unimportant. May's "History of the Long Parliament" is
+fairly accurate and impartial; but the basis of any real account of it
+must be found in its own proceedings as they have been preserved in the
+notes of Sir Ralph Verney and Sir Simonds D'Ewes. The last remain
+unpublished; but Mr. Forster has drawn much from them in his two works,
+"The Grand Remonstrance" and "The Arrest of the Five Members." The
+collections of state-papers by Rushworth and Nalson are indispensable
+for this period. It is illustrated by a series of memoirs, of very
+different degrees of value, such as those of Whitelock, Ludlow, Sir
+Philip Warwick, Holles, and Major Hutchinson, as well as by works like
+Mrs. Hutchinson's memoir of her husband, Baxter's "Autobiography," or
+Sir Thomas Herbert's memoirs of Charles during his last two years. The
+Diary of Nehemiah Wallington gives us the common life of Puritanism
+during this troubled time. For Cromwell the primary authority is Mr.
+Carlyle's "Life and Letters of Cromwell," an invaluable store of
+documents, edited with the care of an antiquarian and the genius of a
+poet. Fairfax may be studied in the "Fairfax Correspondence," and in the
+documents embodied in Mr. Clements Markham's life of him. Sprigge's
+"Anglia Rediviva" gives an account of the New Model and its doings.
+Thurlow's State Papers furnish an immense mass of documents for the
+period of the Protectorate; and Burton's "Diary" gives an account of the
+proceedings in the Protector's second Parliament. For Irish affairs we
+have a vast store of materials in the Ormond papers and letters
+collected by Carte; for Scotland we have "Baillie's Letters," Burnet's
+"Lives of the Hamiltons," and Sir James Turner's "Memoir of the Scotch
+Invasion." Among the general accounts of this reign we may name
+Disraeli's "Commentaries of the Reign of Charles I." as prominent on one
+side, Brodie's "History of the British Empire" and Godwin's "History of
+the Commonwealth" on the other. Guizot in his three works on "Charles I.
+and the Revolution," "Cromwell and the Protectorate," and "Richard
+Cromwell and the Restoration," is accurate and impartial; and the
+documents he has added are valuable for the foreign history of the time.
+A good deal of information may be found in Forster's "Lives of the
+Statesmen of the Commonwealth," and Sandford's "Illustrations of the
+Great Rebellion."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+ENGLAND AND PURITANISM
+
+1603-1660
+
+
+[Sidenote: England at the death of Elizabeth.]
+
+The death of Elizabeth is one of the turning-points of English history.
+The age of the Renascence and of the New Monarchy passed away with the
+Queen. The whole face of the realm had been silently changing during the
+later years of her reign. The dangers which had hitherto threatened our
+national existence and our national unity had alike disappeared. The
+kingdom which had been saved from ruin but fifty years before by the
+jealousies of its neighbours now stood in the forefront of European
+powers. France clung to its friendship. Spain trembled beneath its
+blows. The Papacy had sullenly withdrawn from a fruitless strife with
+the heretic island. The last of the Queen's labours had laid Ireland at
+her feet, and her death knit Scotland to its ancient enemy by the tie of
+a common king. Within England itself the change was as great. Religious
+severance, the most terrible of national dangers, had been averted by
+the patience and the ruthlessness of the Crown. The Catholics were weak
+and held pitilessly down. The Protestant sectaries were hunted as
+pitilessly from the realm. The ecclesiastical compromise of the Tudors
+had at last won the adhesion of the country at large. Nor was the social
+change less remarkable. The natural growth of wealth and a patient good
+government had gradually put an end to all social anarchy. The dread of
+feudal revolt had passed for ever away. The fall of the Northern Earls,
+of Norfolk, and of Essex, had broken the last strength of the older
+houses. The baronage had finally made way for a modern nobility, but
+this nobility, sprung as it was from the court of the Tudors, and
+dependent for its existence on the favour of the Crown, had none of that
+traditional hold on the people at large which made the feudal lords so
+formidable a danger to public order.
+
+[Sidenote: Growth of social wealth.]
+
+If the older claims of freedom had been waived in presence of the
+dangers which so long beset even national existence, the disappearance
+of these dangers brought naturally with it a revival of the craving for
+liberty and self-government. And once awakened such a craving found a
+solid backing in the material progress of the time, in the upgrowth of
+new social classes, in the intellectual developement of the people, and
+in the new boldness and vigour of the national temper. The long outer
+peace, the tranquillity of the realm, the lightness of taxation till the
+outbreak of war with Spain, had spread prosperity throughout the land.
+Even the war failed to hinder the enrichment of the trading classes. The
+Netherlands were the centre of European trade, and of all European
+countries England had for more than half-a-century been making the
+greatest advance in its trade with the Netherlands. As early as in the
+eight years which preceded Elizabeth's accession and the eight years
+that followed it, while the trade of Spain with the Low Countries had
+doubled, and that of France and Germany with them had grown threefold,
+the trade between England and Antwerp had increased twentyfold. The
+increase remained at least as great through the forty years that
+followed, and the erection of stately houses, marriages with noble
+families, and the purchase of great estates, showed the rapid growth of
+the merchant class in wealth and social importance. London above all was
+profiting by the general advance. The rapidity of its growth awoke the
+jealousy of the royal Council. One London merchant, Thomas Sutton,
+founded the great hospital and school of the Charter House. Another,
+Hugh Myddelton, brought the New River from its springs at Chadwell and
+Amwell to supply London with pure water. Ere many years had gone the
+wealth of the great capital was to tell on the whole course of English
+history. Nor was the merchant class alone in this elevation. If the
+greater nobles no longer swayed the State, the spoil of the Church
+lands, and the general growth of national wealth, were raising the
+lesser landowners into a new social power. An influence which was to
+play a growing part in our history, the influence of the gentry, of the
+squires--as they were soon to be called--told more and more on English
+politics. In all but name indeed the leaders of this class were the
+equals of the peers whom they superseded. Men like the Wentworths in the
+north, or the Hampdens in the south, boasted as long a rent-roll and
+wielded as great an influence as many of the older nobles. The attitude
+of the Lower House towards the Higher throughout the Stuart Parliaments
+sprang mainly from the consciousness of the Commons that in wealth as
+well as in political consequence the merchants and country gentlemen who
+formed the bulk of their members stood far above the mass of the peers.
+
+[Sidenote: Growth of national spirit.]
+
+While a new social fabric was thus growing up on the wreck of feudal
+England, new influences were telling on its developement. The immense
+advance of the people as a whole in knowledge and intelligence
+throughout the reign of Elizabeth was in itself a revolution. The hold
+of tradition, the unquestioning awe which formed the main strength of
+the Tudor throne, had been sapped and weakened by the intellectual
+activity of the Renascence, by its endless questionings, its historic
+research, its philosophic scepticism. Writers and statesmen were alike
+discussing the claims of government and the wisest and most lasting
+forms of rule, travellers turned aside from the frescoes of Giorgione to
+study the aristocratic polity of Venice, and Jesuits borrowed from the
+schoolmen of the Middle Ages a doctrine of popular rights which still
+forms the theory of modern democracy. On the other hand the nation was
+learning to rely on itself, to believe in its own strength and vigour,
+to crave for a share in the guidance of its own life. His conflict with
+the two great spiritual and temporal powers of Christendom, his strife
+at once with the Papacy and the House of Austria, had roused in every
+Englishman a sense of supreme manhood, which told, however slowly, on
+his attitude towards the Crown. The seaman whose tiny bark had dared the
+storms of far-off seas, the young squire who crossed the Channel to
+flesh his maiden sword at Ivry or Ostend, brought back with them to
+English soil the daring temper, the sense of inexhaustible resources,
+which had borne them on through storm and battle-field. The nation which
+gave itself to the rule of the Stuarts was another nation from the
+panic-struck people that gave itself in the crash of social and
+religious order to the guidance of the Tudors. It was plain that a new
+age of our history must open when the lofty patriotism, the dauntless
+energy, the overpowering sense of effort and triumph, which rose into
+their full grandeur through the war with Spain, turned from the strife
+with Philip to seek a new sphere of activity at home.
+
+[Sidenote: The spirit of religion.]
+
+What had hindered this force from telling as yet fully on national
+affairs was the breadth and largeness which characterized the temper of
+the Renascence. Through the past half-century the aims of Englishmen had
+been drawn far over the narrow bounds of England itself to every land
+and every sea; while their mental activity spent itself as freely on
+poetry and science as on religion and politics. But at the moment which
+we have reached the whole of this energy was seized upon and
+concentrated by a single force. For a hundred years past men had been
+living in the midst of a spiritual revolution. Not only the world about
+them but the world of thought and feeling within every breast had been
+utterly transformed. The work of the sixteenth century had wrecked that
+tradition of religion, of knowledge, of political and social order,
+which had been accepted without question by the Middle Ages. The sudden
+freedom of the mind from these older bonds brought a consciousness of
+power such as had never been felt before; and the restless energy, the
+universal activity of the Renascence were but outer expressions of the
+pride, the joy, the amazing self-confidence, with which man welcomed
+this revelation of the energies which had lain slumbering within him.
+But his pride and self-reliance were soon dashed by a feeling of dread.
+With the deepening sense of human individuality came a deepening
+conviction of the boundless capacities of the human soul. Not as a
+theological dogma, but as a human fact, man knew himself to be an all
+but infinite power, whether for good or for ill. The drama towered into
+sublimity as it painted the strife of mighty forces within the breast of
+Othello or Macbeth. Poets passed into metaphysicians as they strove to
+unravel the workings of conscience within the soul. From that hour one
+dominant influence told on human action: and all the various energies
+that had been called into life by the age that was passing away were
+seized, concentrated, and steadied to a definite aim by the spirit of
+religion.
+
+[Sidenote: The Bible.]
+
+The whole temper of the nation felt the change. "Theology rules there,"
+said Grotius of England only two years after Elizabeth's death; and when
+Casaubon was invited by her successor to his court he found both king
+and people indifferent to pure letters. "There is a great abundance of
+theologians in England," he says; "all point their studies in that
+direction." Even a country gentleman, like Colonel Hutchinson, felt the
+theological impulse. "As soon as he had improved his natural
+understanding with the acquisition of learning, the first studies he
+exercised himself in were the principles of religion." It was natural
+that literature should reflect the tendency of the time; and the dumpy
+little quartos of controversy and piety which still crowd our older
+libraries drove before them the classical translations and Italian
+novelettes of the age of the Renascence. But their influence was small
+beside that of the Bible. The popularity of the Bible had been growing
+fast from the day when Bishop Bonner set up the first six copies in St.
+Paul's. Even then, we are told, "many well-disposed people used much to
+resort to the hearing thereof, especially when they could get any that
+had an audible voice to read to them."... "One John Porter used
+sometimes to be occupied in that goodly exercise, to the edifying of
+himself as well as others. This Porter was a fresh young man and of a
+big stature; and great multitudes would resort thither to hear him,
+because he could read well and had an audible voice." But the "goodly
+exercise" of readers such as Porter was soon superseded by the continued
+recitation of both Old Testament and New in the public services of the
+Church; while the small Geneva Bibles carried the Scripture into every
+home, and wove it into the life of every English family.
+
+[Sidenote: Its literary influence.]
+
+Religion indeed was only one of the causes for this sudden popularity of
+the Bible. The book was equally important in its bearing on the
+intellectual developement of the people. All the prose literature of
+England, save the forgotten tracts of Wyclif, has grown up since the
+translation of the Scriptures by Tyndale and Coverdale. So far as the
+nation at large was concerned, no history, no romance, hardly any poetry
+save the little-known verse of Chaucer, existed in the English tongue
+when the Bible was ordered to be set up in churches. Sunday after
+Sunday, day after day, the crowds that gathered round the Bible in the
+nave of St. Paul's, or the family group that hung on its words in the
+devotional exercises at home, were leavened with a new literature.
+Legend and annal, war song and psalm, State-roll and biography, the
+mighty voices of prophets, the parables of Evangelists, stories of
+mission journeys, of perils by the sea and among the heathen,
+philosophic arguments, apocalyptic visions, all were flung broadcast
+over minds unoccupied for the most part by any rival learning. The
+disclosure of the stores of Greek literature had wrought the revolution
+of the Renascence. The disclosure of the older mass of Hebrew literature
+wrought the revolution of the Reformation. But the one revolution was
+far deeper and wider in its effects than the other. No version could
+transfer to another tongue the peculiar charm of language which gave
+their value to the authors of Greece and Rome. Classical letters
+therefore remained in the possession of the learned, that is, of the
+few; and among these, with the exception of Colet and More, or of the
+pedants who revived a Pagan worship in the gardens of the Florentine
+Academy, their direct influence was purely intellectual. But the
+language of the Hebrew, the idiom of the Hellenistic Greek, lent
+themselves with a curious felicity to the purposes of translation. As a
+mere literary monument the English version of the Bible remains the
+noblest example of the English tongue, while its perpetual use made it
+from the instant of its appearance the standard of our language.
+
+[Sidenote: Its social influence.]
+
+For the moment however its literary effect was less than its social. The
+power of the book over the mass of Englishmen showed itself in a
+thousand superficial ways, and in none more conspicuously than in the
+influence it exerted on ordinary speech. It formed, we must repeat, the
+whole literature which was practically accessible to ordinary
+Englishmen; and when we recall the number of common phrases which we owe
+to great authors, the bits of Shakspere, or Milton, or Dickens, or
+Thackeray, which unconsciously interweave themselves in our ordinary
+talk, we shall better understand the strange mosaic of Biblical words
+and phrases which coloured English talk two hundred years ago. The mass
+of picturesque allusion and illustration which we borrow from a thousand
+books, our fathers were forced to borrow from one; and the borrowing was
+the easier and the more natural that the range of the Hebrew literature
+fitted it for the expression of every phase of feeling. When Spenser
+poured forth his warmest love-notes in the "Epithalamion," he adopted
+the very words of the Psalmist, as he bade the gates open for the
+entrance of his bride. When Cromwell saw the mists break over the hills
+of Dunbar, he hailed the sun-burst with the cry of David: "Let God
+arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Like as the smoke vanisheth, so
+shalt thou drive them away!" Even to common minds this familiarity with
+grand poetic imagery in prophet and apocalypse gave a loftiness and
+ardour of expression that with all its tendency to exaggeration and
+bombast we may prefer to the slipshod vulgarisms of to-day.
+
+[Sidenote: Its religious influence.]
+
+But far greater than its effect on literature or social phrase was the
+effect of the Bible on the character of the people at large. The Bible
+was as yet the one book which was familiar to every Englishman; and
+everywhere its words, as they fell on ears which custom had not deadened
+to their force and beauty, kindled a startling enthusiasm. The whole
+moral effect which is produced nowadays by the religious newspaper, the
+tract, the essay, the missionary report, the sermon, was then produced
+by the Bible alone; and its effect in this way, however dispassionately
+we examine it, was simply amazing. The whole nation became a church. The
+problems of life and death, whose questionings found no answer in the
+higher minds of Shakspere's day, pressed for an answer not only from
+noble and scholar but from farmer and shopkeeper in the age that
+followed him. The answer they found was almost of necessity a
+Calvinistic answer. Unlike as the spirit of Calvinism seemed to the
+spirit of the Renascence, both found a point of union in their
+exaltation of the individual man. The mighty strife of good and evil
+within the soul itself which had overawed the imagination of dramatist
+and poet became the one spiritual conception in the mind of the Puritan.
+The Calvinist looked on churches and communions as convenient groupings
+of pious Christians; it might be as even indispensable parts of a
+Christian order. But religion in its deepest and innermost sense had to
+do not with churches but with the individual soul. It was each Christian
+man who held in his power the issues of life and death. It was in each
+Christian conscience that the strife was waged between Heaven and Hell.
+Not as one of a body, but as a single soul, could each Christian claim
+his part in the mystery of redemption. In the outer world of worship and
+discipline the Calvinist might call himself one of many brethren, but at
+every moment of his inner existence, in the hour of temptation and of
+struggle, in his dark and troubled wrestling with sin, in the glory of
+conversion, in the peace of acceptance with God, he stood utterly alone.
+With such a conception of human life Puritanism offered the natural form
+for English religion at a time when the feeling with which religion
+could most easily ally itself was the sense of individuality. The
+'prentice who sate awed in the pit of the theatre as the storm in the
+mind of Lear outdid the storm among the elements passed easily into the
+Calvinist who saw himself day by day the theatre of a yet mightier
+struggle between the powers of light and the powers of darkness, and his
+soul the prize of an eternal conflict between Heaven and Hell.
+
+[Sidenote: Growth of Calvinism.]
+
+It was thus by its own natural developement that the temper of
+Englishmen became above all religious, and that their religion took in
+most cases the form of Calvinism. But the rapid spread of Calvinism was
+aided by outer causes as well as inner ones. The reign of Elizabeth had
+been a long struggle for national existence. When Shakspere first trod
+the streets of London it was a question whether England should still
+remain England or whether it should sink into a vassal of Spain. In that
+long contest the creed which Henry and Elizabeth had constructed, the
+strange compromise of old tradition with new convictions which the
+country was gradually shaping into a new religion for itself, had done
+much for England's victory. It had held England together as a people. It
+had hindered any irreparable severance of the nation into warring
+churches. But it had done this unobserved. To the bulk of men the
+victory seemed wholly due to the energy and devotion of Calvinism. Rome
+had placed herself in the forefront of England's enemies, and it was the
+Calvinistic Puritan who was the irreconcileable foe of Rome. It was the
+Puritan who went forth to fight the Spaniard in France or in the
+Netherlands. It was the Puritan who broke into the Spanish Main, and who
+singed Philip's beard at Cadiz. It was the Puritan whose assiduous
+preachings and catechizings had slowly won the mass of the English
+people to any real acceptance of Protestantism. And as the war drifted
+on, as the hatred of Spain and resentment at the Papacy grew keener and
+fiercer, as patriotism became more identified with Protestantism, and
+Protestantism more identified with hatred of Rome, the side of English
+religion which lay furthest from all contact with the tradition of the
+past grew more and more popular among Englishmen.
+
+[Sidenote: Puritanism and the people.]
+
+To Elizabeth, whether on religious or political grounds, Calvinism was
+the most hateful of her foes. But it was in vain that she strove by a
+rigorous discipline to check its advance. Her discipline could only tell
+on the clergy, and the movement was far more a lay than a clerical one.
+Whether she would or no, in fact, the Queen's policy favoured the
+Puritan cause. It was impossible to befriend Calvinism abroad without
+furthering Calvinism at home. The soldiers and adventurers who flocked
+from England to fight in the Huguenot camps came back steeped in the
+Huguenot theology. The exiles who fled to England from France and from
+the Netherlands spread their narrower type of religion through the
+towns where they found a refuge. As the strife with Rome grew hotter the
+government was forced to fill Parliament and the magistracy with men
+whose zealous Protestantism secured their fidelity in the case of a
+Catholic rising. But a zealous Protestant was almost inevitably a
+Calvinist; and to place the administration of the country in Calvinist
+hands was to give an impulse to Puritanism. How utterly Elizabeth failed
+was seen at the beginning of her successor's reign. The bulk of the
+country gentlemen, the bulk of the wealthier traders, had by that time
+become Puritans. In the first Parliament of James the House of Commons
+refused for the first time to transact business on a Sunday. His second
+Parliament chose to receive the communion at St. Margaret's Church
+instead of Westminster Abbey "for fear of copes and wafer-cakes."
+
+[Sidenote: Puritanism in the Church.]
+
+The same difficulty met Elizabeth in her efforts to check the growth of
+Puritanism in the Church itself. At the very outset of her reign the
+need of replacing the Marian bishops by staunch Protestants forced her
+to fill the English sees with men whose creed was in almost every case
+Calvinistic. The bulk of the lower clergy indeed were left without
+change; but as the older parsons died out their places were mostly
+filled by Puritan successors. The Universities furnished the new clergy,
+and at the close of Elizabeth's reign the tone of the Universities was
+hotly Puritan. Even the outer uniformity on which the Queen set her
+heart took a Puritan form. The use of the Prayer-book indeed was
+enforced; but the aspect of English churches and of English worship
+tended more and more to the model of Geneva. The need of more light to
+follow the service in the new Prayer-books served as a pretext for the
+removal of stained glass from the church windows. The communion table
+stood almost everywhere in the midst of the church. If the surplice was
+generally worn during the service, the preacher often mounted the pulpit
+in a Geneva gown. We see the progress of this change in the very chapel
+of the Primates themselves. The chapel of Lambeth House was one of the
+most conspicuous among the ecclesiastical buildings of the time; it was
+a place "whither many of the nobility, judges, clergy, and persons of
+all sorts, as well strangers as natives, resorted." But all pomp of
+worship gradually passed away from it. Under Cranmer the stained glass
+was dashed from its windows. In Elizabeth's time the communion table was
+moved into the middle of the chapel, and the credence table destroyed.
+Under James Archbishop Abbott put the finishing stroke on all attempts
+at a high ceremonial. The cope was no longer used as a special vestment
+in the communion. The Primate and his chaplains forbore to bow at the
+name of Christ. The organ and choir were alike abolished, and the
+service reduced to a simplicity which would have satisfied Calvin.
+
+[Sidenote: Puritanism and politics.]
+
+Foiled as it was, the effort of Elizabeth to check the spread of
+Puritanism was no mere freak of religious bigotry. It sprang from a
+clear realization of the impossibility of harmonizing the new temper of
+the nation with the system of personal government which had done its
+work under the Tudors. With the republican and anti-monarchical theories
+indeed that Calvinism had begotten elsewhere, English Calvinism showed
+as yet no sort of sympathy. The theories of resistance, of a people's
+right to judge and depose its rulers, which had been heard in the heat
+of the Marian persecution, had long sunk into silence. The loyalty of
+the Puritan gentleman was as fervent as that of his fellows. But with
+the belief of the Calvinist went necessarily a new and higher sense of
+political order. The old conception of personal rule, the dependence of
+a nation on the arbitrary will of its ruler, was jarring everywhere more
+and more with the religious as well as the philosophic impulses of the
+time. Men of the most different tendencies were reaching forward to the
+same conception of law. Bacon sought for universal laws in material
+nature. Hooker asserted the rule of law over the spiritual world. It was
+in the same way that the Puritan sought for a divine law by which the
+temporal kingdoms around him might be raised into a kingdom of Christ.
+The diligence with which he searched the Scriptures sprang from his
+earnestness to discover a Divine Will which in all things, great or
+small, he might implicitly obey. But this implicit obedience was
+reserved for the Divine Will alone; for human ordinances derived their
+strength only from their correspondence with the revealed law of God.
+The Puritan was bound by his religion to examine every claim made on his
+civil and spiritual obedience by the powers that be; and to own or
+reject the claim, as it accorded with the higher duty which he owed to
+God. "In matters of faith," a Puritan wife tells us of her husband, "his
+reason always submitted to the Word of God; but in all other things the
+greatest names in the world would not lead him without reason."
+
+[Sidenote: Puritanism and the Crown.]
+
+It was plain that an impassable gulf parted such a temper as this from
+the temper of unquestioning devotion to the Crown which the Tudors
+termed loyalty; for it was a temper not only legal, but even pedantic in
+its legality, intolerant from its very sense of a moral order and law of
+the lawlessness and disorder of a personal tyranny, a temper of
+criticism, of judgement, and, if need be, of stubborn and unconquerable
+resistance. The temper of the Puritan indeed was no temper of mere
+revolt. His resistance, if he was forced to resist, would spring not
+from any disdain of kingly authority, but from his devotion to an
+authority higher and more sacred than that of kings. He had as firm a
+faith as the nation at large in the divine right of the sovereign, in
+the sacred character of the throne. It was in fact just because his
+ruler's authority had a divine origin that he obeyed him. But the nation
+about the throne seemed to the Puritan not less divinely ordered a thing
+than the throne itself; it was the voice of God, inspiring and
+directing, which spoke through its history and its laws; it was God that
+guided to wisdom the hearts of Englishmen in Parliament assembled as He
+guided to wisdom the hearts of kings. Never was the respect for positive
+law so profound; never was the reverence for Parliaments so great as at
+the death of Elizabeth. There was none of the modern longing for a king
+that reigned without governing; no conscious desire shows itself
+anywhere to meddle with the actual exercise of the royal administration.
+But the Puritan could only conceive of the kingly power as of a power
+based upon constitutional tradition, controlled by constitutional law,
+and acting in willing harmony with that body of constitutional
+counsellors in the two Houses, who represented the wisdom and the will
+of the realm.
+
+[Sidenote: Puritanism and society.]
+
+It was in the creation of such a temper as this that Puritanism gave its
+noblest gift to English politics. It gave a gift hardly less noble to
+society at large in its conception of social equality. Their common
+calling, their common brotherhood in Christ, annihilated in the mind of
+the Puritans that overpowering sense of social distinctions which
+characterized the age of Elizabeth. There was no open break with social
+traditions; no open revolt against the social subordination of class to
+class. But within these forms of the older world beat for the first time
+the spirit which was to characterize the new. The meanest peasant felt
+himself ennobled as a child of God. The proudest noble recognized a
+spiritual equality in the poorest "saint." The great social revolution
+of the Civil Wars and the Protectorate was already felt in the demeanour
+of English gentlemen. "He had a loving and sweet courtesy to the
+poorest," we are told of one of them, "and would often employ many spare
+hours with the commonest soldiers and poorest labourers." "He never
+disdained the meanest nor flattered the greatest." But it was felt even
+more in the new dignity and self-respect with which the consciousness of
+their "calling" invested the classes beneath the rank of the gentry.
+Take such a portrait as that which a turner in Eastcheap, Nehemiah
+Wallington, has left us of a London housewife, his mother. "She was very
+loving," he says, "and obedient to her parents, loving and kind to her
+husband, very tender-hearted to her children, loving all that were
+godly, much misliking the wicked and profane. She was a pattern of
+sobriety unto many, very seldom was seen abroad except at church; when
+others recreated themselves at holidays and other times, she would take
+her needlework and say 'here is my recreation.'... God had given her a
+pregnant wit and an excellent memory. She was very ripe and perfect in
+all stories of the Bible, likewise in all the stories of the Martyrs,
+and could readily turn to them; she was also perfect and well seen in
+the English Chronicles, and in the descents of the kings of England. She
+lived in holy wedlock with her husband twenty years, wanting but four
+days."
+
+[Sidenote: Puritanism and human conduct.]
+
+Where the new conception of life told even more powerfully than on
+politics or society was in its bearing on the personal temper and
+conduct of men. There was a sudden loss of the passion, the caprice, the
+subtle and tender play of feeling, the breadth of sympathy, the quick
+pulse of delight, which had marked the age of Elizabeth; but on the
+other hand life gained in moral grandeur, in a sense of the dignity of
+manhood, in orderliness and equable force. The larger geniality of the
+age that had passed away was replaced by an intense tenderness within
+the narrower circle of the home. Home, as we conceive it now, was the
+creation of the Puritan. Wife and child rose from mere dependants on the
+will of husband or father, as husband and father saw in them saints
+like himself, souls hallowed by the touch of a divine Spirit and called
+with a divine calling like his own. The sense of spiritual fellowship
+gave a new tenderness and refinement to the common family affections.
+"He was as kind a father," says a Puritan wife of her husband, "as dear
+a brother, as good a master, as faithful a friend as the world had." The
+wilful and lawless passion of the Renascence made way for a manly
+purity. "Neither in youth nor riper years could the most fair or
+enticing woman draw him into unnecessary familiarity or dalliance. Wise
+and virtuous women he loved, and delighted in all pure and holy and
+unblameable conversation with them, but so as never to excite scandal or
+temptation. Scurrilous discourse even among men he abhorred; and though
+he sometimes took pleasure in wit and mirth, yet that which was mixed
+with impurity he never could endure." A higher conception of duty
+coloured men's daily actions. To the Puritan the wilfulness of life, in
+which the men of the Renascence had revelled, seemed unworthy of life's
+character and end. His aim was to attain self-command, to be master of
+himself, of his thought and speech and acts. A certain gravity and
+reflectiveness gave its tone to the lightest details of his converse
+with the world about him. His temper, quick as it might naturally be,
+was kept under strict control. In his discourse he was on his guard
+against talkativeness and frivolity, striving to be deliberate in
+speech, and "ranking the words beforehand." His life was orderly and
+methodical, sparing of diet and self-indulgence; he rose early; "he
+never was at any time idle, and hated to see any one else so." The new
+sobriety and self-restraint showed itself in a change of dress. The
+gorgeous colours and jewels of the Renascence disappeared. The Puritan
+squire "left off very early the wearing of anything that was costly, yet
+in his plainest negligent habit appeared very much a gentleman."
+
+[Sidenote: Puritanism and culture.]
+
+The loss of colour and variety in costume reflected no doubt a certain
+loss of colour and variety in life itself. But as yet Puritanism was
+free from any break with the harmless gaieties of the world about it.
+The lighter and more elegant sides of the Elizabethan culture harmonized
+well enough with the temper of the Calvinist gentleman. The figure of
+such a Puritan as Colonel Hutchinson stands out from his wife's canvas
+with the grace and tenderness of a portrait by Vandyck. She dwells on
+the personal beauty which distinguished his youth, on "his teeth even
+and white as the purest ivory," "his hair of brown, very thick-set in
+his youth, softer than the finest silk, curling with loose great rings
+at the ends." Serious as was his temper in graver matters, the young
+squire of Owthorpe was fond of hawking, and piqued himself on his skill
+in dancing and fence. His artistic taste showed itself in a critical
+love of "paintings, sculpture, and all liberal arts," as well as in the
+pleasure he took in his gardens, "in the improvement of his grounds, in
+planting groves and walks and forest-trees." If he was "diligent in his
+examination of the Scriptures," "he had a great love for music and often
+diverted himself with a viol, on which he played masterly."
+
+[Sidenote: Milton.]
+
+The strength however of the religious movement lay rather among the
+middle and professional classes than among the gentry; and it is in a
+Puritan of this class that we find the fullest and noblest expression of
+the new influence which was leavening the temper of the time. John
+Milton is not only the highest but the completest type of Puritanism.
+His life is absolutely contemporaneous with his cause. He was born when
+it began to exercise a direct influence over English politics and
+English religion; he died when its effort to mould them into its own
+shape was over, and when it had again sunk into one of many influences
+to which we owe our English character. His earlier verse, the pamphlets
+of his riper years, the epics of his age, mark with a singular precision
+the three great stages in its history. His youth shows us how much of
+the gaiety, the poetic ease, the intellectual culture of the Renascence,
+lingered in a Puritan home. Scrivener and "precisian" as his father was,
+he was a skilled musician, and the boy inherited his father's skill on
+lute and organ. One of the finest outbursts in the scheme of education
+which he put forth at a later time is a passage in which he vindicates
+the province of music as an agent in moral training. His home, his
+tutor, his school were all rigidly Puritan; but there was nothing narrow
+or illiberal in his early training. "My father," he says, "destined me
+while yet a little boy to the study of humane letters; which I seized
+with such eagerness that from the twelfth year of my age I scarcely ever
+went from my lessons to bed before midnight." But to the Greek, Latin,
+and Hebrew he learned at school, the scrivener advised him to add
+Italian and French. Nor were English letters neglected. Spenser gave the
+earliest turn to the boy's poetic genius. In spite of the war between
+playwright and precisian, a Puritan youth could still in Milton's days
+avow his love of the stage, "if Jonson's learned sock be on, or sweetest
+Shakspere, Fancy's child, warble his native woodnotes wild," and gather
+from the "masques and antique pageantry" of the court-revel hints for
+his own "Comus" and "Arcades." Nor does any shadow of the coming
+struggle with the Church disturb the young scholar's reverie, as he
+wanders beneath "the high embowed roof, with antique pillars massy
+proof, and storied windows richly dight, casting a dim religious light,"
+or as he hears "the pealing organ blow to the full-voiced choir below,
+in service high and anthem clear."
+
+Milton's enjoyment of the gaiety of life stands in bright contrast with
+the gloom and sternness which strife and persecution fostered in
+Puritanism at a later time. In spite of a "certain reservedness of
+natural disposition," which shrank from "festivities and jests, in which
+I acknowledge my faculty to be very slight," the young singer could
+still enjoy the "jest and youthful jollity" of the world around him, its
+"quips and cranks and wanton wiles"; he could join the crew of Mirth,
+and look pleasantly on at the village fair, where "the jocund rebecks
+sound to many a youth and many a maid, dancing in the chequered shade."
+There was nothing ascetic in Milton's look, in his slender, vigorous
+frame, his face full of a delicate yet serious beauty, the rich brown
+hair which clustered over his brow; and the words we have quoted show
+his sensitive enjoyment of all that was beautiful. But his pleasures
+were "unreproved." From coarse or sensual self-indulgence the young
+Puritan turned with disgust: "A certain reservedness of nature, an
+honest haughtiness and self-esteem, kept me still above those low
+descents of mind." He drank in an ideal chivalry from Spenser, though
+his religion and purity disdained the outer pledge on which chivalry
+built up its fabric of honour. "Every free and gentle spirit," said
+Milton, "without that oath, ought to be born a knight." It was with this
+temper that he passed from his London school, St. Paul's, to Christ's
+College at Cambridge, and it was this temper that he preserved
+throughout his University career. He left Cambridge, as he said
+afterwards, "free from all reproach, and approved by all honest men,"
+with a purpose of self-dedication "to that same lot, however mean or
+high, towards which time leads me and the will of heaven."
+
+[Sidenote: The narrowness of Puritanism.]
+
+Even in the still calm beauty of a life such as this we catch the
+sterner tones of the Puritan temper. The very height of the Puritan's
+aim, the intensity of his moral concentration, brought with them a loss
+of the genial delight in all that was human which gave its charm to the
+age of Elizabeth. "If ever God instilled an intense love of moral beauty
+into the mind of any man," said the great Puritan poet, "he has
+instilled it into mine." "Love Virtue," closed his "Comus," "she alone
+is free!" But this passionate love of virtue and of moral beauty, if it
+gave strength to human conduct, narrowed human sympathy and human
+intelligence. Already in Milton we note "a certain reservedness of
+temper," a contempt for "the false estimates of the vulgar," a proud
+withdrawal from the meaner and coarser life around him. Great as was his
+love for Shakspere, we can hardly fancy him delighting in Falstaff. In
+minds of a less cultured order, this moral tension ended, no doubt, in a
+hard unsocial sternness of life. The ordinary Puritan "loved all that
+were godly, much misliking the wicked and profane." His bond to other
+men was not the sense of a common manhood, but the recognition of a
+brotherhood among the elect. Without the pale of the saints lay a world
+which was hateful to them, because it was the enemy of their God. It is
+this utter isolation from the "ungodly" that explains the contrast which
+startles us between the inner tenderness of the Puritans and the
+ruthlessness of so many of their actions. Cromwell, whose son's death
+(in his own words) went to his heart "like a dagger, indeed it did!" and
+who rode away sad and wearied from the triumph of Marston Moor, burst
+into horse-play as he signed the death-warrant of the king.
+
+[Sidenote: Its extravagance.]
+
+A temper which had lost sympathy with the life of half the world around
+it could hardly sympathize with the whole of its own life. Humour, the
+faculty which above all corrects exaggeration and extravagance, died
+away before the new stress and strain of existence. The absolute
+devotion of the Puritan to a Supreme Will tended more and more to rob
+him of all sense of measure and proportion in common matters. Little
+things became great things in the glare of religious zeal; and the godly
+man learnt to shrink from a surplice, or a mince-pie at Christmas, as he
+shrank from impurity or a lie. Nor was this all. The self-restraint and
+sobriety which marked the Calvinist limited itself wholly to his outer
+life. In his inner soul sense, reason, judgement, were too often
+overborne by the terrible reality of invisible things. Our first
+glimpse of Oliver Cromwell is as a young country squire and farmer in
+the marsh-levels around Huntingdon and St. Ives, buried from time to
+time in a deep melancholy, and haunted by fancies of coming death. "I
+live in Meshac," he writes to a friend, "which they say signifies
+Prolonging; in Kedar, which signifies Darkness; yet the Lord forsaketh
+me not." The vivid sense of a Divine Purity close to such men made the
+life of common men seem sin. "You know what my manner of life has been,"
+Cromwell adds. "Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated light. I
+hated godliness." Yet his worst sin was probably nothing more than an
+enjoyment of the natural buoyancy of youth, and a want of the deeper
+earnestness which comes with riper years. In imaginative tempers, like
+that of Bunyan, the struggle took a more picturesque form. John Bunyan
+was the son of a poor tinker at Elstow in Bedfordshire, and even in
+childhood his fancy revelled in terrible visions of Heaven and Hell.
+"When I was but a child of nine or ten years old," he tells us, "these
+things did so distress my soul, that then in the midst of my merry
+sports and childish vanities, amidst my vain companions, I was often
+much cast down and afflicted in my mind therewith; yet could I not let
+go my sins." The sins he could not let go were a love of hockey and of
+dancing on the village green; for the only real fault which his bitter
+self-accusation discloses, that of a habit of swearing, was put an end
+to at once and for ever by a rebuke from an old woman. His passion for
+bell-ringing clung to him even after he had broken from it as a "vain
+practice"; and he would go to the steeple-house and look on, till the
+thought that a bell might fall and crush him in his sins drove him
+panic-stricken from the door. A sermon against dancing and games drew
+him for a time from these indulgences; but the temptation again
+overmastered his resolve. "I shook the sermon out of my mind, and to my
+old custom of sports and gaming I returned with great delight. But the
+same day, as I was in the midst of a game of cat, and having struck it
+one blow from the hole, just as I was about to strike it the second
+time, a voice did suddenly dart from heaven into my soul, which said,
+'Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or have thy sins and go to
+Hell?' At this I was put in an exceeding maze; wherefore, leaving my cat
+upon the ground, I looked up to heaven; and was as if I had with the
+eyes of my understanding seen the Lord Jesus looking down upon me, as
+being very hotly displeased with me, and as if He did severely threaten
+me with some grievous punishment for those and other ungodly practices."
+
+[Sidenote: Belief in witchcraft.]
+
+The vivid sense of a supernatural world which breathes through words
+such as these, the awe and terror with which it pressed upon the life of
+men, found their most terrible expression in the belief in witchcraft.
+The dread of Satanic intervention indeed was not peculiar to the
+Puritan. It had come down from the earliest ages of the Christian
+Church, and had been fanned into a new intensity at the close of the
+Middle Ages by the physical calamities and moral scepticism which threw
+their gloom over the world. Joan of Arc was a witch to every Englishman,
+and the wife of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester paced the streets of London,
+candle in hand, as a convicted sorceress. But it was not till the chaos
+and turmoil of the Reformation put their strain on the spiritual
+imagination of men that the belief in demoniacal possession deepened
+into a general panic. The panic was common to both Catholics and
+Protestants; it was in Catholic countries indeed that the persecution of
+supposed witches was carried on longest and most ruthlessly. Among
+Protestant countries England was the last to catch the general terror;
+and the Act of 1541, the first English statute passed against
+witchcraft, was far milder in tone than the laws of any other European
+country. Witchcraft itself, where no death could be proved to have
+followed from it, was visited only with pillory and imprisonment; where
+death had issued from it, the penalty was the gallows and not the stake.
+Even this statute was repealed in the following reign. But the fierce
+religious strife under Mary roused a darker fanaticism; and when
+Elizabeth mounted the throne preacher after preacher assured her that a
+multitude of witches filled the land. "Witches and sorcerers," cried
+Bishop Jewel, "within these few years are marvellously increased within
+your grace's realm. Your grace's subjects pine away even unto the death;
+their colour fadeth, their flesh rotteth, their speech is benumbed,
+their senses are bereft!" Before remonstrances such as these the statute
+against witchcraft was again enacted; but though literature and the
+drama show the hold which a belief in satanic agency had gained on the
+popular fancy, the temper of the times was too bold and self-reliant,
+its intelligence too keen and restless, its tone too secular, to furnish
+that atmosphere of panic in which fanaticism is bred.
+
+It was not till the close of the Queen's reign, as hope darkened round
+Protestantism and the Puritan temper woke a fresh faith in the
+supernatural, that the belief in witchcraft and the persecution of the
+unhappy women who were held to be witches became a marked feature of the
+time. To men who looked on the world about them and the soul within them
+as battle-fields for a never-ceasing contest between God and the Devil,
+it was natural enough to ascribe every evil that happened to man, either
+in soul or body, to the invisible agency of the spirit of ill. A share
+of his supernatural energies was the bait by which he was held to lure
+the wicked to their own destruction; and women above all were believed
+to barter their souls for the possession of power which lifted them
+above the weakness of their sex. Sober men asserted that the beldame,
+whom boys hooted in the streets and who groped in the gutter for bread,
+could blast the corn with mildew and lame the oxen in the plough, that
+she could smite her persecutors with pains and sickness, that she could
+rouse storms in the sky and strew every shore with the wrecks of ships
+and the corpses of men, that as night gathered round she could mount her
+broomstick and sweep through the air to the witches' Sabbath, to yield
+herself in body and soul to the demons of ill. The nascent scepticism
+that startled at tales such as these was hushed before the witness of
+the Bible, for to question the existence of sorcerer or daemoniac seemed
+questioning the veracity of the Scriptures themselves. Pity fell before
+the stern injunction, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"; and the
+squire who would have shrunk from any conscious cruelty as from a blow
+looked on without ruth as the torturers ran needles into the witch's
+flesh, or swam her in the witch's pool, or hurried her to the witch's
+stake.
+
+[Sidenote: The Protestant defeat.]
+
+But the terror with which the Puritan viewed these proofs of a new
+energy in the powers of ill found a wider sphere of action as he saw
+their new activity and success in the religious and political world
+about him. At the opening of Elizabeth's reign every Protestant had
+looked forward to a world-wide triumph of the Gospel. If Italy and
+Spain clung blindly to the Papacy, elsewhere, alike on the Danube or the
+Rhine, on the Elbe or the Seine, the nations of Europe seemed to have
+risen in irreconcileable revolt against Rome. But the prospect of such a
+triumph had long since disappeared. At the crisis of the struggle a
+Catholic reaction had succeeded in holding Protestantism at bay, and
+after years of fierce combat Rome had begun definitely to win ground.
+The peaceful victories of the Jesuits were backed by the arms of Spain,
+and Europe was gradually regained till the policy of Philip the Second
+was able to aim its blows at the last strongholds of Calvinism in the
+west. Philip was undoubtedly worsted in the strife. England was saved by
+its defeat of the Armada. The United Provinces of the Netherlands rose
+into a great power as well through their own dogged heroism as through
+the genius of William the Silent. At a moment too when all hope seemed
+gone France was rescued from the grasp of the Catholic League by the
+unconquerable energy of Henry of Navarre. But even in its defeat
+Catholicism gained ground. England alone remained unaffected by its
+efforts. In the Low Countries the Reformation was finally driven from
+the Walloon Provinces, from Brabant, and from Flanders. In France Henry
+the Fourth found himself compelled to purchase Paris by a mass; and the
+conversion of the king was the beginning of a quiet breaking-up of the
+Huguenot party. Nobles and scholars alike forsook the cause of heresy,
+and though Calvinism remained dominant south of the Loire, it lost all
+hope of winning France as a whole to its side.
+
+[Sidenote: Puritan intolerance.]
+
+At Elizabeth's death therefore the temper of every earnest Protestant,
+in England as elsewhere, was that of a man who after cherishing the hope
+of a crowning victory is forced to look on at a crushing and
+irremediable defeat. The dream of a Reformation of the universal Church
+was utterly at an end. Though the fierce strife of religions seemed for
+a while to have died down, the borders of Protestantism were narrowing
+every day, nor was there a sign that the triumph of the Papacy was
+arrested. Even the older Lutheranism of Germany was threatened; and the
+minds of men were already presaging the struggle which was to end in the
+Thirty Years War. Such a struggle could be no foreign strife to the
+Puritan. The war in the Palatinate kindled a fiercer flame in the
+English Parliament than all the aggressions of the monarchy; and
+Englishmen followed the campaigns of Gustavus with even keener interest
+than the trial of Hampden. We shall see how great a part this sympathy
+with outer Protestantism played in the earlier struggle between England
+and the Stuarts: but it played as great a part in determining the
+Puritan attitude towards religion at home. As hope after hope died into
+defeat and disaster the mood of the Puritan grew sterner and more
+intolerant. The system of compromise by which the Tudors had held
+England together became more and more distasteful to him. To one who
+looked on himself as a soldier of God and as a soldier who was fighting
+a losing battle, the struggle with the Papacy was no matter for
+compromise. It was a struggle between light and darkness, between life
+and death. No innovation in faith or worship was of small account if it
+tended in the direction of Rome. The peril in fact was too great to
+admit of tolerance or moderation. At a moment when all that he hated was
+gaining ground on all that he loved, the Puritan saw the one security
+for what he held to be truth in drawing a hard-and-fast line between
+that truth and what he held to be falsehood.
+
+[Sidenote: Hooker.]
+
+This dogged concentration of thought and feeling on a single issue told
+with a fatal effect on his theology. The spirit of the Renascence had
+been driven for a while from the field of religion by the strife between
+Catholic and Protestant; and in the upgrowth of a more rigid system of
+dogma, whether on the one side or on the other, the work of More and
+Colet seemed to be undone. But no sooner had the strife lost its older
+intensity, no sooner had a new Christendom fairly emerged from the
+troubled waters, than the Renascence again made its influence felt. Its
+voice was heard above all in Richard Hooker, a clergyman who had been
+Master of the Temple, but had been driven by his distaste for the
+controversies of its pulpit from London to a Wiltshire vicarage at
+Boscombe, which he exchanged at a later time for the parsonage of
+Bishopsbourne among the quiet meadows of Kent. During the later years of
+Elizabeth he built up in these still retreats the stately fabric of his
+"Ecclesiastical Polity." The largeness of temper which marked all the
+nobler minds of his day, the philosophic breadth which is seen as
+clearly in Shakspere as in Bacon, was united in Hooker with a grandeur
+and stateliness of style which raised him to the highest rank among
+English prose-writers. Divine as he was, his spirit and method were
+philosophical rather than theological. Against the ecclesiastical
+dogmatism of Presbyterian or Catholic he set the authority of reason. He
+abandoned the narrow ground of Scriptural argument to base his
+conclusions on the general principles of moral and political science, on
+the eternal obligations of natural law. The Puritan system rested on the
+assumption that an immutable rule for human action in all matters
+relating to religion, to worship, and to the discipline and constitution
+of the Church, was laid down, and only laid down, in the words of
+Scripture. Hooker urged that a divine order exists not in written
+revelation only, but in the moral relations, the historical
+developement, and the social and political institutions of men. He
+claimed for human reason the province of determining the laws of this
+order; of distinguishing between what is changeable and unchangeable in
+them, between what is eternal and what is temporary in the Bible itself.
+It was easy for him to push on to the field of ecclesiastical
+controversy where men like Cartwright were fighting the battle of
+Presbyterianism, to show that no form of Church government had ever been
+of indispensable obligation, and that ritual observances had in all ages
+been left to the discretion of churches and determined by the
+differences of times.
+
+[Sidenote: His influence on the Church.]
+
+From the moment of its appearance the effect of the "Ecclesiastical
+Polity" was felt in the broader and more generous stamp which it
+impressed on the temper of the national Church. Hooker had in fact
+provided with a theory and placed on grounds of reason that policy of
+comprehension which had been forced on the Tudors by the need of holding
+England together, and from which the church, as it now existed, had
+sprung. But the truth on which Hooker based his argument was of far
+higher value than his argument itself. The acknowledgement of a divine
+order in human history, of a divine law in human reason, harmonized with
+the noblest instincts of the Elizabethan age. Ralegh's efforts to grasp
+as a whole the story of mankind, Bacon's effort to bring all outer
+nature to the test of human intelligence, were but the crowning
+manifestations of the two main impulses of their time, its rationalism
+and its humanity. Both found expression in the work of Hooker; and
+coloured through its results the after history of the English Church.
+The historical feeling showed itself in a longing to ally the religion
+of the present with the religion of the past, to find a unity of faith
+and practice with the Church of the Fathers, to claim part in that great
+heritage of Catholic tradition, both in faith and worship, which the
+Papacy so jealously claimed as its own. Such a longing seized as much on
+tender and poetic tempers like George Herbert's as on positive and
+prosaic tempers, such as that of Laud. The one started back from the
+bare, intense spiritualism of the Puritan to find nourishment for his
+devotion in the outer associations which the piety of ages had grouped
+around it, in holy places and holy things, in the stillness of church
+and altar, in the pathos and exultation of prayer and praise, in the
+awful mystery of sacraments. The narrow and external mood of the other,
+unable to find standing ground in the purely personal relation between
+man and God which formed the basis of Calvinism, fell back on the
+consciousness of a living Christendom, preserving through the ages a
+definite faith and worship, and which, torn and rent as it seemed, was
+soon to resume its ancient unity.
+
+[Sidenote: The Arminians.]
+
+While the historical feeling which breathes in Hooker's work took form
+in the new passion for tradition and ceremonialism, the appeal which it
+addressed to human reason produced a school of philosophical thinkers
+whose timid upgrowth was almost lost in the clash of warring creeds
+about them, but who were destined--as the latitudinarians of later
+days--to make as deep an impression as their dogmatic rivals on the
+religious thought of their countrymen. As yet however this rationalizing
+movement hovered on the borders of the system of belief which it was so
+keenly to attack; it limited itself rather to the work of moderating and
+reconciling, to recognizing with Calixtus the pettiness of the points of
+difference which parted Christendom and the greatness of its points of
+agreement, or to revolting with Arminius from the more extreme tenets of
+Calvin and Calvin's followers and pleading like him for some
+co-operation on man's part with the work of grace. As yet Arminianism
+was little more than a reaction against a system that contradicted the
+obvious facts of life, a desire to bring theology into some sort of
+harmony with human experience; but it was soon to pass by a fatal
+necessity into a wider variance, and to gather round it into one mass of
+opposition every tendency of revolt which time was disclosing against
+the Calvinism which now reigned triumphant in Protestant theology.
+
+[Sidenote: The doctrinal bigotry of Puritanism.]
+
+From the belief in humanity or in reason which gave strength to such a
+revolt the Puritan turned doggedly away. In the fierce white light of
+his idealism human effort seemed weakness, human virtue but sin, human
+reason but folly. Absorbed as he was in the thought of God, craving for
+nothing less than a divine righteousness, a divine wisdom, a divine
+strength, he grasped the written Bible as the law of God and
+concentrated every energy in the effort to obey it. The dogma of
+justification, the faith that without merit or act of man God would save
+and call to holiness His own elect, was the centre of his creed. And
+with such a creed he felt that the humanity of the Renascence, the
+philosophy of the thinker, the comprehension of the statesman, were
+alike at war. A policy of comprehension seemed to him simply a policy of
+faithlessness to God. Ceremonies which in an hour of triumph he might
+have regarded as solaces to weak brethren, he looked on as acts of
+treason in this hour of defeat. Above all he would listen to no words of
+reconciliation with a religious system in which he saw nothing but a
+lie, nor to any pleas for concession in what he held to be truth. The
+craving of the Arminian for a more rational theology he met by a fiercer
+loyalty to the narrowest dogma. Archbishop Whitgift had striven to force
+on the Church of England a set of articles which embodied the tenets of
+an extreme Calvinism; and one of the wisest acts of Elizabeth had been
+to disallow them. But hateful as Whitgift on every other ground was to
+the Puritans, they never ceased to demand the adoption of his Lambeth
+Articles.
+
+[Sidenote: Its hatred of sectaries.]
+
+And as he would admit no toleration within the sphere of doctrine, so
+would the Puritan admit no toleration within the sphere of
+ecclesiastical order. That the Church of England should both in
+ceremonies and in teaching take a far more distinctively Protestant
+attitude than it had hitherto done, every Puritan was resolved. But
+there was as yet no general demand for any change in the form of its
+government, or of its relation to the State. Though the wish to draw
+nearer to the mass of the Reformed Churches won a certain amount of
+favour for the Presbyterian form of organization which they had adopted,
+as an obligatory system of Church discipline Presbyterianism had been
+embraced by but a few of the English clergy, and by hardly any of the
+English laity. Nor was there any tendency in the mass of the Puritans
+towards a breach in the system of religious conformity which Elizabeth
+had constructed. On the contrary, what they asked was for its more
+rigorous enforcement. That Catholics should be suffered under whatever
+pains and penalties to preserve their faith and worship in a Protestant
+Commonwealth was abhorrent to them. Nor was Puritan opinion more
+tolerant to the Protestant sectaries who were beginning to find the
+State Church too narrow for their enthusiasm. Elizabeth herself could
+not feel a bitterer abhorrence of the "Brownists" (as they were called
+from the name of their founder Robert Brown) who rejected the very
+notion of a national Church, and asserted the right of each congregation
+to perfect independence of faith and worship. To the zealot whose whole
+thought was of the fight with Rome, such an assertion seemed the claim
+of a right to mutiny in the camp, a right of breaking up Protestant
+England into a host of sects too feeble to hold Rome at bay. Cartwright
+himself denounced the wickedness of the Brownists; Parliament, Puritan
+as it was, passed in 1593 a statute against them; and there was a
+general assent to the stern measures of repression by which Brown
+himself was forced to fly to the Netherlands. Two of his
+fellow-congregationalists were seized and put to death on charges of
+sedition and heresy. Of their followers many, as we learn from a
+petition in 1592, were driven into exile, "and the rest which remain in
+her Grace's land greatly distressed through imprisonment and other great
+troubles." The persecution in fact did its work. "As for those which we
+call Brownists," wrote Bacon, "being when they were at the most a very
+small number of very silly and base people, here and there in corners
+dispersed, they are now, thanks to God, by the good remedies that have
+been used, suppressed and worn out; so that there is scarce any news of
+them." The execution of three Nonconformists in the following year was
+in fact followed by the almost utter extermination of their body. But
+against this persecution no Puritan voice was raised.
+
+[Sidenote: Its wish for reforms.]
+
+All in fact that the bulk of the Puritans asked was a change in the
+outer ritual of worship which should correspond to the advance towards a
+more pronounced Protestantism that had been made by the nation at large
+during the years of Elizabeth's reign. Their demands were as of old for
+the disuse of "superstitious ceremonies." To modern eyes the points
+which they selected for change seem trivial enough. But they were in
+fact of large significance. To reject the sign of the Cross in baptism
+was to repudiate the whole world of ceremonies of which it was a
+survivor. The disuse of the surplice would have broken down the last
+outer difference which parted the minister from the congregation, and
+manifested to every eye the spiritual equality of layman and priest.
+Kneeling at the Communion might be a mere act of reverence, but formally
+to discontinue such an act was emphatically to assert a disbelief in the
+sacramental theories of Catholicism. During the later years of Elizabeth
+reverence for the Queen had hindered any serious pressure for changes to
+which she would never assent; but a general expectation prevailed that
+at her death some change would be made. Even among men of secular stamp
+there was a general conviction of the need of some concession to the
+religious sentiment of the nation. They had clung to the usages which
+the Puritans denounced so long as they were aids in hindering a
+religious severance throughout the land. But whatever value the
+retention of such ceremonies might have had in facilitating the quiet
+passage of the bulk of Englishmen from the old worship to the new had
+long since passed away. England as a whole was Protestant; and the
+Catholics who remained were not likely to be drawn to the national
+Church by trifles such as these. Instead of being the means of hindering
+religious division, the usages had now become means of creating it. It
+was on this ground that statesmen who had little sympathy with the
+religious spirit about them pleaded for the purchase of religious and
+national union by ecclesiastical reforms. "Why," asked Bacon, "should
+the civil state be purged and restored by good and wholesome laws made
+every three years in Parliament assembled, devising remedies as fast as
+time breedeth mischief, and contrariwise the ecclesiastical state still
+continue upon the dregs of time, and receive no alteration these
+forty-five years or more?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE KING OF SCOTS
+
+
+Such was the temper of England at the death of Elizabeth; and never had
+greater issues hung on the character of a ruler than hung on the
+character of her successor. Had he shared the sympathy with popular
+feeling which formed the strength of the Tudors, time might have brought
+peaceably about that readjustment of political forces which the growth
+of English energies had made a necessity. Had he possessed the genius of
+a great statesman, he might have distinguished in the mingled mass of
+impulses about him between the national and the sectarian, and have
+given scope to the nobleness of Puritanism while resolutely checking its
+bigotry. It was no common ill-fortune that set at such a crisis on the
+throne a ruler without genius as without sympathy, and that broke the
+natural progress of the people by a conflict between England and its
+kings.
+
+[Sidenote: James Stuart.]
+
+Throughout the last days of Elizabeth most men had looked forward to a
+violent struggle for the Crown. The more bigoted Catholics supported the
+pretensions of Isabella, the eldest daughter of Philip the Second of
+Spain. The house of Suffolk, which through the marriage of Lady
+Catharine Grey with Lord Hertford was now represented by their son, Lord
+Beauchamp, still clung to its parliamentary title under the will of
+Henry the Eighth. Even if the claim of the house of Stuart was admitted,
+there were some who held that the Scottish king, as an alien by birth,
+had no right of inheritance, and that the succession to the crown lay in
+the next Stuart heiress, Arabella Stuart, a granddaughter of Lady Lennox
+by her younger son, Darnley's brother. But claims such as these found no
+general support. By a strange good fortune every great party in the
+realm saw its hopes realized in King James. The mass of the Catholics,
+who had always been favourable to a Scottish succession, were persuaded
+that the son of Mary Stuart would at least find toleration for his
+mother's co-religionists; and as they watched the distaste for
+Presbyterian rule and the tendency to comprehension which James had
+already manifested, they listened credulously to his emissaries. On the
+other hand the Puritans saw in him the king of a Calvinistic people,
+bred in a Church which rejected the ceremonies that they detested and
+upheld the doctrines which they longed to render supreme, and who had
+till now, whatever his strife might have been with the claims of its
+ministers, shown no dissent from its creed or from the rites of its
+worship. Nor was he less acceptable to the more secular tempers who
+guided Elizabeth's counsels. The bulk of English statesmen saw too
+clearly the advantages of a union of the two kingdoms under a single
+head to doubt for a moment as to the succession of James. If Elizabeth
+had refused to allow his claim to be formally recognized by Parliament
+she had pledged herself to suffer no detriment to be done to it there;
+and in her later days Cecil had come forward to rescue the young king
+from his foolish intrigues with English parties and Catholic powers, and
+to assure him of support. No sooner in fact was the Queen dead than
+James Stuart was owned as king by the Council without a dissentient
+voice.
+
+[Sidenote: His youth.]
+
+To James himself the change was a startling one. He had been a king
+indeed from his cradle. But his kingdom was the smallest and meanest of
+European realms, and his actual power had been less than that of many an
+English peer. For years he had been the mere sport of warring nobles who
+governed in his name. Their rule was a sheer anarchy. For a short while
+after Mary's flight Murray showed the genius of a born master of men;
+but at the opening of 1570 his work was ended by the shot of a Hamilton.
+"What Bothwellhaugh has done," Mary wrote joyously from her English
+prison at the news, "has been done without order of mine: but I thank
+him all the more for it." The murder in fact plunged Scotland again into
+a chaos of civil war which, as the Queen shrewdly foresaw, could only
+tend to the after-profit of the Crown. A year later the next regent, the
+child-king's grandfather, Lord Lennox, was slain in a fray at Stirling;
+and it was only when the regency passed into the strong hand of Morton
+at the close of 1572, and when England intervened in the cause of order,
+that the land won a short breathing-space. Edinburgh, the last fortress
+held in Mary's name, surrendered to a force sent by Elizabeth; its
+captain, Kirkaldy of Grange, was hanged for treason in the market-place;
+and the stern justice of Morton forced peace upon the warring lords. But
+hardly five years had passed when a union of his rivals and their adroit
+proclamation of the boy-king put an end to Morton's regency and gave a
+fresh aim to the factions who were tearing Scotland to pieces. To get
+hold of the king's person, to wield in his name the royal power, became
+the end of their efforts. The boy was safe only at Stirling; and even at
+Stirling a fray at the gate all but transferred him from the Erskines to
+fresh hands. It was in vain that James sought security in a bodyguard;
+or strove to baffle the nobles by recalling a cousin, Esme Stuart, from
+France, and giving him the control of affairs. A sudden flight back to
+Stirling only saved him from seizure at Doune; and a few months later,
+as James hunted at Ruthven, he found the hand of the Master of Glamis on
+his bridle-rein. "Better bairns greet than bearded men," was the gruff
+answer to his tears, as his favourite fled into exile and the boy-king
+saw himself again a tool in the hands of the lords.
+
+[Sidenote: His purpose.]
+
+Such was the world in which James had grown to manhood; a world of
+brutal swordsmen, in whose hands the boy who shrank from the very sight
+of a sword seemed helpless. But if the young king had little physical
+courage, morally he proved fearless enough. He drew confidence in
+himself from a sense of his intellectual superiority to the men about
+him. From his earliest years indeed James showed a precocious
+cleverness; and as a child he startled grave councillors by his
+"discourse, walking up and down in the Lady Mar's hand, of knowledge and
+ignorance." It was his amazing self-reliance which enabled him to bear
+the strange loneliness of his life. He had nothing in common with the
+turbulent nobles whose wild cries he had heard from the walls of
+Stirling Castle, as they slew his grandfather in the streets of the town
+below. But he had just as little sympathy with the spiritual or
+political world which was springing into life around his cradle. The
+republican Buchanan was his tutor, and he was bred in the religious
+school of Knox; but he shrank instinctively from Calvinism with its
+consecration of rebellion, its assertion of human equality, its
+declaration of the responsibility of kings, while he detected and hated
+the republican drift of the thinkers of the Renascence. In later years
+James denounced the chronicles of both Buchanan and Knox as "infamous
+invectives," and would have had their readers punished "even as it were
+their authors risen again." His temper and purpose were in fact simply
+those of the kings who had gone before him. He was a Stuart to the core;
+and from his very boyhood he set himself to do over again the work which
+the Stuarts had done.
+
+[Sidenote: The work of the Stuarts.]
+
+Their work had been the building up of the Scottish realm, its change
+from a medley of warring nobles into an ordered kingdom. Never had
+freedom been bought at a dearer price than it was bought by Scotland in
+its long War of Independence. Wealth and public order alike disappeared.
+The material prosperity of the country was brought to a standstill. The
+work of civilization was violently interrupted. The work of national
+unity was all but undone. The Highlanders were parted by a sharp line of
+division from the Lowlanders, while within the Lowlands themselves
+feudalism overmastered the Crown. The nobles became almost wholly
+independent. The royal power, under the immediate successors of Bruce,
+sank into insignificance. From the walls of Stirling the Scotch kings of
+that earlier time looked out on a realm where they could not ride
+thirty miles to north or to south save at the head of a host of armed
+men. With James the First began the work of building the monarchy up
+again from this utter ruin; but the wresting of Scotland from the grasp
+of its nobles was only wrought out in a struggle of life and death. Few
+figures are more picturesque than the figures of the young Scotch kings
+as they dash themselves against the iron circle which girds them round
+in their desperate efforts to rescue the Crown from serfdom. They carry
+their life in their hands; a doom is on them; they die young and by
+violent deaths. One was stabbed by plotters in his bedchamber. Another
+was stabbed in a peasant's hut where he had crawled for refuge after
+defeat. Another was slain by the bursting of a cannon. The fourth James
+fell more nobly at Flodden. The fifth died of a broken heart on the news
+of Solway Moss. But hunted and slain as they were, the kings clung
+stubbornly to the task they had set themselves.
+
+[Sidenote: The Stuarts and the Reformation.]
+
+They stood almost alone. The Scottish people was too weak as yet to form
+a check on the baronage; and the one force on which the Crown could
+reckon was the force of the Church. To enrich the Church, to bind its
+prelates closely to the monarchy by the gift of social and political
+power, was the policy of every Stuart. A greater force than that of the
+Church lay in the dogged perseverance of the kings themselves. Little by
+little their work was done. The great house of Douglas was broken at
+last. The ruin of lesser houses followed in its train, and under the
+fifth of the Jameses Scotland saw itself held firmly in the royal grasp.
+But the work of the Stuarts was hardly done when it seemed to be undone
+again by the Reformation. The prelates were struck down. The nobles were
+enormously enriched. The sovereign again stood alone in the face of the
+baronage. It was only by playing on their jealousies and divisions that
+Mary Stuart could withstand the nobles who banded themselves together to
+overawe the Crown. Once she broke their ranks by her marriage with
+Darnley; and after the ill-fated close of this effort she strove again
+to break their ranks by her marriage with Bothwell. Again the attempt
+failed; and Mary fled into lifelong exile, while the nobles, triumphant
+at last in the strife with the Crown, governed Scotland in the name of
+her child.
+
+[Sidenote: James and the nobles.]
+
+It was thus that in his boyhood James looked on the ruin of all that his
+fathers had wrought. But the wreck was not as utter as it seemed. Even
+in the storm of the Reformation the sense of royal authority had not
+wholly been lost; the craving for public order, and the conviction that
+order could only be found in obedience to the sovereign, had in fact
+been quickened by the outbreak of faction; and the rule of Murray and
+Morton had shown how easily the turbulent nobles could be bent by an
+energetic use of the royal power. Lonely and helpless as he seemed,
+James was still king, and he was a king who believed in his kingship.
+The implicit faith in his own divine right to rule the greatest in the
+land gave him a strength as great as that of the regents. At seventeen
+he was strong enough to break the yoke of the Douglases and to drive
+them over the English border. At eighteen he could bring the most
+powerful of the Protestant nobles, the Earl of Gowrie, to the block. A
+year later indeed the lords were back again; for the Armada was at hand,
+and Elizabeth distrusted the young king, who was intriguing at Paris and
+Madrid. English help brought back the exiles; "there was no need of
+words," James said bitterly to the lords as they knelt before him with
+protestations of loyalty; "weapons had spoken loud enough." But their
+return was far from undoing his work. Elizabeth's pledges as to the
+succession, James's alliance with her against the Armada, restored the
+friendship of England; and once secure against English intervention the
+king had little difficulty in resuming his mastery at home. A
+significant ceremony showed that the strife with the nobles was at an
+end. James summoned them to Edinburgh, and called on them to lay aside
+their feuds with one another. The pledge was solemnly given, and each
+noble, "holding his chief enemy by the hand," walked in his doublet to
+the market-cross of the city, while the people sang aloud for joy.
+
+[Sidenote: The Scotch people.]
+
+The policy of the Stuarts had at last reached its end, and James was
+master of the great houses that had so long overawed the Crown. But he
+was farther than ever from being absolute master of his realm. Amidst
+the turmoil of the Reformation a new force had come to the front. This
+was the Scottish people itself. Till now peasant and burgher had been of
+small account in the land. The towns were little more than villages. The
+peasants, scattered thinly over valley and hillside and winning a scant
+subsistence from a thankless soil, were too few and too poor to be a
+political force. They were of necessity dependent on their lords; and in
+the centuries of feudal anarchy which followed the War of Independence
+the strife of lord against lord made their life a mere struggle for
+existence. To know neither rest nor safety, to face danger every hour,
+to plough the field with arms piled carefully beside the furrow, to
+watch every figure that crossed the hillside in doubt whether it were
+foe or friend, to be roused from sleep by the slogan of the Highlander
+or the cry of the borderer as they swept sheep and kye from every
+homestead in the valley, to bear hunger and thirst and cold and
+nakedness, to cower within the peel-tower or lurk in the moorland while
+barn and byre went up in pitiless flame, to mount and ride at a lord's
+call on forays as pitiless, this was the rough school in which the
+Scotch peasant was trained through two hundred years. But it was a
+school in which he learned much. Suffering that would have degraded a
+meaner race into slaves only hardened and ennobled the temper of the
+Scotchman. It was from these ages of oppression and lawlessness that he
+drew the rugged fidelity, the dogged endurance, the shrewdness, the
+caution, the wariness, the rigid thrift, the noble self dependence, the
+patience, the daring, which have distinguished him ever since. Nowhere
+did the Reformation do a grander work than in Scotland, but it was
+because nowhere were the minds of men so prepared for its work. The soil
+was ready for the seed. The developement of a noble manhood brought with
+it the craving for a spiritual and a national existence, and at the call
+of the Reformation the Scotch people rose suddenly into a nation and a
+Church.
+
+[Sidenote: Knox.]
+
+One well-known figure embodied the moral strength of the new movement.
+In the king's boyhood, amidst the wild turmoil which followed on
+Murray's fall, an old man bent with years and toil might have been seen
+creeping with a secretary's aid to the pulpit of St. Giles. But age and
+toil were powerless over the spirit of John Knox. In the pulpit "he
+behoved to lean at his first entry: but ere he had done with his sermon
+he was so active and vigorous that he was like to ding the pulpit into
+blads and fly out of it." It was in vain that men strove to pen the
+fiery words of the great preacher. "In the opening up of his text," says
+a devout listener, "he was moderate; but when he entered into
+application he made me so grue and tremble that I could not hold a pen
+to write." What gave its grandeur to the doctrine of Knox was his
+resolute assertion of a Christian order before which the social and
+political forces of the world about him shrank into insignificance. The
+meanest peasant, once called of God, felt within him a strength that was
+stronger than the might of nobles, and a wisdom that was wiser than the
+statecraft of kings. In that mighty elevation of the masses which was
+embodied in the Calvinist doctrines of election and grace lay the germs
+of the modern principles of human equality. The fruits of such a
+teaching soon showed themselves in a new attitude of the people. "Here,"
+said Morton, over the grave of John Knox, "here lies one who never
+feared nor flattered any flesh"; and if Scotland still reverences the
+memory of the reformer it is because at that grave her peasant and her
+trader learned to look in the face of nobles and kings and "not be
+ashamed."
+
+[Sidenote: The Kirk and the people.]
+
+The moral power which Knox created was to express itself through the
+ecclesiastical forms which had been devised by the genius of Calvin. The
+new force of popular opinion was concentrated and formulated in an
+ordered system of kirk-sessions and presbyteries and provincial synods,
+while chosen delegates formed the General Assembly of the Kirk. In this
+organization of her churches, Scotland saw herself for the first time
+the possessor of a really representative system, of a popular
+government. In her Parliaments the peasant had no voice, the burgher a
+feeble and unimportant one. They were in fact but feudal gatherings of
+prelates and nobles, whose action was fettered by the precautions of the
+Crown. Of real parliamentary life, such as was seen across the border,
+not a trace could be found in the assemblies which gathered round the
+Scottish kings; but a parliamentary life of the keenest and intensest
+order at once appeared among the lay and spiritual delegates who
+gathered to the General Assembly of the Kirk. Not only did
+Presbyterianism bind Scotland together as it had never been bound before
+by its administrative organization, but by the power it gave the lay
+elders in each congregation, and by the summons of laymen in an
+overpowering majority to the earlier Assemblies, it called the people at
+large to a voice, and as it turned out a decisive voice, in the
+administration of affairs. If its government by ministers gave it the
+outer look of an ecclesiastical despotism, no Church constitution has
+proved in practice so democratic as that of Scotland. Its influence in
+raising the nation at large to a consciousness of its power was shown by
+the change which passed from the moment of its establishment over the
+face of Scottish history.
+
+[Sidenote: The Kirk and the king.]
+
+The sphere of action to which it called the people was in fact not a
+mere ecclesiastical but a national sphere. Formally the Assembly meddled
+only with matters of religion; but in the creed of the Calvinist, as in
+the creed of the Catholic, the secular and the religious world were one.
+It was the office of the Church to enforce good and to rebuke evil; and
+social and political life fell alike within her "discipline." Feudalism
+received its death-blow when the noble who had wronged his wife or
+murdered his tenant sate humbled before the peasant elders on the stool
+of repentance. The new despotism which was growing up under the form of
+the monarchy found a sudden arrest in the challenge of the Kirk. When
+James summoned the preachers before his Council and arraigned their
+meetings as without warrant and seditious, "Mr. Andrew Melville could
+not abide it, but broke off upon the king in so zealous, powerful, and
+unresistible a manner that howbeit the king used his authority in most
+crabbed and choleric manner, yet Mr. Andrew bore him down, and uttered
+the commission as from the mighty God, calling the king but 'God's silly
+vassal'; and taking him by the sleeve, says this in effect, though with
+much hot reasoning and many interruptions: 'Sir, we will humbly
+reverence your Majesty always--namely, in public. But since we have
+this occasion to be with your Majesty in private, and the truth is that
+you are brought in extreme danger both of your life and crown, and with
+you the country and kirk of Christ is like to wreck, for not telling you
+the truth and giving of you a faithful counsel, we must discharge our
+duty therein or else be traitors both to Christ and you! And therefore,
+sir, as divers times before, so now again I must tell you, there are two
+kings and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is Christ Jesus the King, and
+his kingdom the Kirk, whose subject James the Sixth is, and of whose
+kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member. And they whom
+Christ hath called to watch over his kirk and govern his spiritual
+kingdom have sufficient power and authority so to do both together and
+severally; the which no Christian king nor prince should control and
+discharge, but fortify and assist, otherwise not faithful servants nor
+members of Christ!'"
+
+[Sidenote: The ministers and the people.]
+
+It is idle to set aside words like these as the mere utterances of
+fanaticism or of priestly arrogance. James and his Council would have
+made swift work of mere fanatics or of arrogant priests. Why Melville
+could withdraw unharmed was because a people stood behind him, a people
+suddenly wakened to a consciousness of its will, and stern in the belief
+that a divine duty lay on it to press that will on its king. Through all
+the theocratic talk of the Calvinist ministers we see a popular power
+that fronts the Crown. It is the Scotch people that rises into being
+under the guise of the Scotch Kirk. The men who led it were men with no
+official position or material power, for the nobles had stripped the
+Church of the vast endowments which had lured their sons and the royal
+bastards within the pale of its ministry. The ministers of the new
+communion were drawn from the burghers and peasantry or at best from the
+smaller gentry; and nothing in their social position aided them in
+withstanding the nobles or the Crown. Their strength lay simply in the
+popular sympathy behind them, in their capacity of rousing national
+opinion through the pulpit, of expressing it through the Assembly. The
+claims which such men advanced, ecclesiastical as their garb might be,
+could not fail to be national in their issues. In struggling against
+episcopacy they were in fact struggling against any breaking-up or
+impeding of that religious organization which alone enabled Scotland to
+withstand the claims of the Crown. In jealously asserting the right of
+the General Assembly to meet every year and to discuss every question
+that met it, they were vindicating in the only possible fashion the
+right of the nation to rule itself in a parliamentary way. In asserting
+the liberty of the pulpit they were for the first time in the history of
+Europe recognizing the power of public opinion and fighting for freedom
+whether of thought or of speech. Strange to modern ears as their
+language may be, bigoted and narrow as their temper must often seem, it
+is well to remember the greatness of the debt we owe them. It was their
+stern resolve, their energy, their endurance that saved Scotland from a
+civil and religious despotism, and that in saving the liberty of
+Scotland saved English liberty as well.
+
+[Sidenote: Andrew Melville.]
+
+The greatest of the successors of Knox was Andrew Melville. Two years
+after Knox's death Melville came fresh from a training among the French
+Huguenots to take up and carry forward his work. With less prophetic
+fire than his master he possessed as fierce a boldness, a greater
+disdain of secular compromises, a lofty pride in his calling, a bigoted
+faith in Calvinism that knew neither rest nor delay in its full
+establishment throughout the land. As yet the system of Presbyterian
+faith and discipline, with the synods and assemblies in which it was
+embodied, though it had practically won its hold over southern Scotland,
+was without legal sanction. The demand of the ministers for a
+restitution of the Church lands and the resolve of the nobles not to
+part with their spoil had caused the rejection of the Book of Discipline
+by the Estates. The same spirit of greed secured the retention of a
+nominal episcopacy. Though the name of bishops and archbishops appeared
+"to many to savour of Papistry," bishops and archbishops were still
+named to vacant dioceses as milch-cows, through whom the revenues of
+the sees might be drained by the great nobles. Against such
+"Tulchan-bishops," as they were nicknamed by the people's scorn, a
+"Tulchan" being a mere calf-skin stuffed with hay by which a cow was
+persuaded to give her milk after her calf was taken from her, Knox had
+not cared to protest; he had only taken care that they should be subject
+to the General Assembly, and deprived of all jurisdiction or authority
+beyond that of a Presbyterian "Superintendent." His strong political
+sense hindered a conflict on such a ground with the civil power, and
+without a conflict it was plain that no change could come. The Regent
+Morton, Calvinist as he was, supported the cause of Episcopacy, and the
+fact that bishops formed an integral part of the estates of the realm
+made any demand for their abolition distasteful to the large mass of men
+who always shrink from any constitutional revolution.
+
+[Sidenote: Presbyterianism established.]
+
+But Melville threw aside all compromise. In 1580 the General Assembly
+declared the office of bishop abolished, as having "no sure warrant,
+authority, or good ground out of the Word of God." In 1581 it adopted a
+second Book of Discipline which organized the Church on the pure
+Calvinistic model and advanced the full Calvinistic claim to its
+spiritual independence and supremacy within the realm. When the Estates
+refused to sanction this book the Assembly sent it to every presbytery,
+and its gradual acceptance secured the organization of the Church. It
+was at this crisis that the appearance of Esme Stuart brought about the
+first reaction towards a revival of the royal power; and the Council
+under the guidance of the favourite struck at once at the preachers who
+denounced it. But their efforts to "tune the pulpits" were met by a bold
+defiance. "Though all the kings of the earth should call my words
+treason," replied one minister who was summoned to the Council-board, "I
+am ready by good reason to prove them to be the very truth of God, and
+if need require to seal them with my blood." Andrew Melville, when
+summoned on the same charge of seditious preaching, laid a Hebrew Bible
+on the Council-table and "resolved to try conclusions on that only."
+What the Council shrank from "trying conclusions" with was the popular
+enthusiasm which backed these protests. When John Durie was exiled for
+words uttered in the pulpit, the whole town of Edinburgh met him on his
+return, "and going up the street with bare heads and loud voices sang to
+the praise of God till heaven and earth resounded."
+
+[Sidenote: James and the Kirk.]
+
+But it was this very popularity which roused the young king to action.
+Boy of eighteen as he was, no sooner had the overthrow of the Douglases
+and the judicial murder of Lord Gowrie freed James from the power of the
+nobles than he faced this new foe. Theologically his opinions were as
+Calvinistic as those of Melville himself, but in the ecclesiastical
+fabric of Calvinism, in its organization of the Church, in its annual
+assemblies, in its public discussion and criticism of acts of government
+through the pulpit, he saw an organized democracy which threatened his
+crown. And at this he struck as boldly as his forefathers had struck at
+the power of feudalism. The nobles, dreading the resumption of church
+lands, were with the king; and in 1584 an Act of the Estates denounced
+the judicial and legislative authority assumed by the General Assembly,
+provided that no subjects, temporal or spiritual, "take upon them to
+convocate or assemble themselves together for holding of councils,
+conventions, or assemblies," and demanded a pledge of obedience from
+every minister. For the moment the ministers submitted; and James
+prepared to carry out his victory by a policy of religious balance. The
+Catholic lords were still strong in northern and western Scotland; and
+firmly as the King was opposed to the dogmas of Catholicism he saw the
+use he might make of the Catholics as a check on the power of the
+Congregation. It was with this view that he shielded Lord Huntly and the
+Catholic nobles while he intrigued with the Guises abroad. But such a
+policy at such a juncture forced England to intervene. At a moment when
+the Armada was gathering in the Tagus, Elizabeth felt the need of
+securing Scotland against any revival of Catholicism; and her aid
+enabled the exiled lords to return in triumph in 1585. For the next ten
+years James was helpless in their hands. He was forced to ally himself
+with Elizabeth, to offer aid against the Armada, to make a Protestant
+marriage, to threaten action against Philip, to attack Huntly and the
+Catholic lords of the north on a charge of correspondence with Spain and
+to drive them from the realm. The triumph of the Protestant lords was a
+triumph of the Kirk. In 1592 the Acts of 1584 were repealed; Episcopacy
+was formally abolished; and the Calvinistic organization of the Church
+at last received legal sanction. All that James could save was the right
+of being present at the General Assembly, and of fixing a time and place
+for its annual meeting. It was in vain that the young king struggled and
+argued; in vain that he resolutely asserted himself to be supreme in
+spiritual as in civil matters; in vain that he showed himself a better
+scholar and a more learned theologian than the men who held him down.
+The preachers scolded him from the pulpit and bade him "to his knees" to
+seek pardon for his vanity; while the Assembly chided him for his
+"banning and swearing" and sent a deputation to confer with his Queen
+touching the "want of godly exercise among her maids."
+
+[Sidenote: James and Presbyterianism.]
+
+The bitter memory of these years of humiliation dwelt with James to the
+last. They were fiercely recalled, when he mounted the English throne.
+"A Scottish Presbytery," he exclaimed at the Hampton Court Conference,
+"as well fitteth with monarchy as God and the Devil." Year after year he
+watched for the hour of deliverance, and every year brought it nearer.
+His mother's death gave fresh strength to his throne. The alliance with
+England, Elizabeth's pledge not to oppose his succession, left him
+practically heir of the English Crown. Freed from the dread of a
+Catholic reaction, the Queen was at liberty to indulge in her dread of
+Calvinism, and to sympathize with the fresh struggle which James was
+preparing to make against it. Her attitude, as well as the growing
+certainty of his coming greatness as sovereign of both realms, had no
+doubt their influence in again strengthening the king's position; and
+his new power was seen in his renewed mastery over the Scottish lords.
+But this triumph over feudalism was only the opening of a decisive
+struggle with Calvinism. If he had defeated Huntly and his
+fellow-plotters, he refused to keep them in exile or to comply with the
+demand of the Church that he should refuse their services on the ground
+of religion. He would be king of a nation, he contended, and not of a
+part of it. The protest was a fair one; but the real secret of the
+king's policy towards the Catholics, as of his son's after him, was a
+"king-craft" which aimed at playing off one part of the nation against
+another to the profit of the Crown. "The wisdom of the Council," said a
+defiant preacher, "is this, that ye must be served with all sorts of men
+to serve your purpose and grandeur, Jew and Gentile, Papist and
+Protestant. And because the ministers and Protestants in Scotland are
+over strong and control the King, they must be weakened and brought
+low."
+
+[Sidenote: The struggle with the Church.]
+
+It was with this end before him that James set finally to work in 1597.
+Cool, adroit, firm in his purpose, the young king seized on some wild
+outbreaks of the pulpit to assert a control over its utterances; a riot
+in Edinburgh in defence of the ministers enabled him to bring the town
+to submission by flooding its streets with Highlanders and Borderers;
+the General Assembly itself was made amenable to royal influence by its
+summons to Perth, where the cooler temper of the northern ministers
+could be played off against the hot Presbyterianism of the ministers of
+the Lothians. It was the Assembly itself which consented to curtail the
+liberty of preaching and the liberty of assembling in presbytery and
+synod, as well as to make the king's consent needful for the appointment
+of every minister. What James was as stubbornly resolved on was the
+restoration of Episcopacy. He wished not only to bridle but to rule the
+Church; and it was only through bishops that he could effectively rule
+it. The old tradition of the Stuarts had looked to the prelates for the
+support of the Crown, and James saw keenly that the new force which had
+overthrown them was a force which threatened to overthrow the monarchy
+itself. It was the people which in its religious or its political guise
+was the assailant of both. And as their foe was the same, so James
+argued with the shrewd short-sightedness of his race, their cause was
+the same. "No bishop," ran his famous adage, "no king!" To restore the
+episcopate was from this moment his steady policy. But its actual
+restoration only followed on the failure of a long attempt to bring the
+Assembly round to a project of nominating representatives of itself in
+the Estates. The presence of such representatives would have
+strengthened the moral weight of the Parliament, while it diminished
+that of the Assembly, and in both ways would have tended to the
+advantage of the Crown. But, cowed as the ministers now were, no
+pressure could bring them to do more than name delegates to vote
+according to their will in the Estates; and as such a plan foiled the
+king's scheme James was at last driven to use a statute which empowered
+him to name bishops as prelates with a seat in the Estates, though they
+possessed no spiritual status or jurisdiction. In 1600 two such prelates
+appeared in Parliament; and James followed up his triumph by the
+publication of his "Basilicon Doron," an assertion of the divine right
+and absolute authority of kings over all orders of men within their
+realms.
+
+It is only by recalling the early history of James Stuart that we can
+realize the attitude and temper of the Scottish Sovereign at the moment
+when the death of Elizabeth called him to the English throne. He came
+flushed with a triumph over Calvinism and democracy, but embittered by
+the humiliations he had endured from them, and dreading them as the
+deadly enemies of his crown. Raised at last to a greatness of which he
+had hardly dreamed, he was little likely to yield to a pressure, whether
+religious or political, against which in his hour of weakness he had
+fought so hard. Hopes of ecclesiastical change found no echo in a king
+whose ears were still thrilling with the defiance of Melville and his
+fellow ministers, and who among all the charms that England presented to
+him saw none so attractive as its ordered and obedient Church, its
+synods that met but at the royal will, its courts that carried out the
+royal ordinances, its bishops that held themselves to be royal officers.
+Nor were the hopes of political progress likely to meet with a warmer
+welcome. Politics with a Stuart meant simply a long struggle for the
+exaltation of the Crown. It was a struggle where success had been won
+not by a reverence for law or a people's support, but by sheer personal
+energy, by a blind faith in monarchy and the rights of monarchy, by an
+unscrupulous use of every weapon which a king possessed. Craft had been
+met by craft, violence by violence. Justice had been degraded into a
+weapon in the royal hand. The sacredness of law had disappeared in a
+strife where all seemed lawful for the preservation of the Crown. By
+means such as these feudalism had been humbled and the long strife with
+the baronage brought at last to a close. Strife with the people had yet
+to be waged. But in whatever forms it might present itself, whether in
+his new land or his old, it would be waged by James as by his successors
+in the same temper and with the same belief, a belief that the welfare
+of the nation lay in the unchecked supremacy of the Crown, and a temper
+that held all means lawful for the establishment of such a supremacy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE BREAK WITH THE PARLIAMENT
+
+1603-1611
+
+
+[Sidenote: James the First.]
+
+On the sixth of May 1603, after a stately progress through his new
+dominions, King James entered London. In outer appearance no sovereign
+could have jarred more utterly against the conception of an English
+ruler which had grown up under Plantagenet or Tudor. His big head, his
+slobbering tongue, his quilted clothes, his rickety legs stood out in as
+grotesque a contrast with all that men recalled of Henry or Elizabeth as
+his gabble and rhodomontade, his want of personal dignity, his
+buffoonery, his coarseness of speech, his pedantry, his personal
+cowardice. Under this ridiculous exterior indeed lay no small amount of
+moral courage and of intellectual ability. James was a ripe scholar,
+with a considerable fund of shrewdness, of mother-wit, and ready
+repartee. His canny humour lights up the political and theological
+controversies of the time with quaint incisive phrases, with puns and
+epigrams and touches of irony which still retain their savour. His
+reading, especially in theological matters, was extensive; and he was
+already a voluminous author on subjects which ranged from predestination
+to tobacco. But his shrewdness and learning only left him, in the phrase
+of Henry the Fourth of France, "the wisest fool in Christendom." He had
+in fact the temper of a pedant, a pedant's conceit, a pedant's love of
+theories, and a pedant's inability to bring his theories into any
+relation with actual facts. It was this fatal defect that marred his
+political abilities. As a statesman he had shown no little capacity in
+his smaller realm; his cool humour and good temper had held even
+Melville at bay; he had known how to wait and how to strike; and his
+patience and boldness had been rewarded with a fair success. He had
+studied foreign affairs as busily as he had studied Scotch affairs; and
+of the temper and plans of foreign courts he probably possessed a
+greater knowledge than any Englishman save Robert Cecil. But what he
+never possessed, and what he never could gain, was any sort of knowledge
+of England or Englishmen. He came to his new home a Scotchman, a
+foreigner, strange to the life, the thoughts, the traditions of the
+English people. And he remained strange to them to the last. A younger
+man might have insensibly imbibed the temper of the men about him. A man
+of genius would have flung himself into the new world of thought and
+feeling and made it his own. But James was neither young nor a man of
+genius. He was already in middle age when he crossed the Border; and his
+cleverness and his conceit alike blinded him to the need of any
+adjustment of his conclusions or his prejudices to the facts which
+fronted him.
+
+[Sidenote: The foreign rule.]
+
+It was this estrangement from the world of thought and feeling about
+them which gave its peculiar colour to the rule of the Stuarts. It was
+not the first time that England had submitted to foreign kings. But it
+was the first time that England experienced a foreign rule. Foreign
+notions of religion, foreign maxims of state, foreign conceptions of the
+attitude of the people or the nobles towards the Crown, foreign notions
+of the relation of the Crown to the people, formed the policy of James
+as of his successors. For the Stuarts remained foreigners to the last.
+Their line filled the English throne for more than eighty years; but
+like the Bourbons they forgot nothing and they learned nothing. To all
+influences indeed save English influences they were accessible enough.
+As James was steeped in the traditions of Scotland, so Charles the First
+was open to the traditions of Spain. The second Charles and the second
+James reflected in very different ways the temper of France. But what no
+Stuart seemed able to imbibe or to reflect was the temper of England.
+The strange medley of contradictory qualities which blended in the
+English character, its love of liberty and its love of order, its
+prejudice and open-mindedness, its religious enthusiasm and its cool
+good sense, remained alike unintelligible to them. And as they failed to
+understand England, so in many ways England failed to understand them.
+It underrated their ability, nor did it do justice to their aims. Its
+insular temper found no hold on a policy which was far more European
+than insular. Its practical sense recoiled from the unpractical
+cleverness that, while it seldom said a foolish thing, yet never did a
+wise one.
+
+[Sidenote: The new policy.]
+
+From the first this severance between English feeling and the feeling of
+the king was sharply marked. If war and taxation had dimmed the
+popularity of Elizabeth in her later years, England had still a
+reverence for the Queen who had made her great. But James was hardly
+over the Border when he was heard expressing his scorn of the character
+and statecraft of his predecessor. Her policy, whether at home or
+abroad, he came resolved to undo. Men who had fought side by side with
+Dutchman and Huguenot against Spaniard and Leaguer heard angrily that
+the new king was seeking for peace with Spain, that he was negotiating
+with the Papacy, while he met the advances of France with a marked
+coolness, and denounced the Hollanders as rebels against their king. It
+was with scarcely less anger that they saw the stern system of
+repression which had prevailed through the close of Elizabeth's reign
+relaxed in favour of the Catholics, and recusants released from the
+payments of fines. It was clear that both at home and abroad James
+purposed to withdraw from that struggle with Catholicism which the
+hotter Protestants looked upon as a battle for God. What the king really
+aimed at was the security of his throne. The Catholics alone questioned
+his title; and a formal excommunication by Rome would have roused them
+to dispute his accession. James had averted this danger by intrigues
+both with the Papal Court and the English Catholics during the later
+years of Elizabeth; and his vague assurances had mystified the one and
+prevented the others from acting. The disappointment of the Catholics
+when no change followed on the king's accession found vent in a wild
+plot for the seizure of his person, devised by a priest named Watson;
+and the alarm this created quickened James to a redemption of his
+pledges. In July 1603 the leading Catholics were called before the
+Council and assured that the fines for recusancy would no longer be
+exacted; while an attempt was made to open a negotiation with Rome and
+to procure the support of the Pope for the new government. But the real
+strength of the Catholic party lay in the chance of aid from Spain. So
+long as the war continued they would look to Spain for succour, and the
+influence of Spain would be exerted to keep them in antagonism to the
+Crown. Nor was this the only ground for a cessation of hostilities. The
+temper of James was peaceful; the royal treasury was exhausted; and the
+continuance of the war necessitated a close connexion with the
+Calvinistic and republican Hollanders. At the same time therefore that
+the Catholics were assured of a relaxation of the penal laws,
+negotiations for peace were opened with Spain.
+
+[Sidenote: James and the Puritans.]
+
+However justifiable such steps might be, it was certain that they would
+rouse alarm and discontent among the sterner Protestants. For a time
+however it seemed as if concessions on one side were to be balanced by
+concessions on the other, as if the tolerance which had been granted to
+the Catholic would be extended to the Puritan. James had hardly crossed
+the Border when he was met by what was termed the Millenary Petition,
+from a belief that it was signed by a thousand of the English clergy. It
+really received the assent of some eight hundred, or of about a tenth of
+the clergy of the realm. The petitioners asked for no change in the
+government or organization of the Church, but for a reform of its
+courts, the removal of superstitious usages from the Book of Common
+Prayer, the disuse of lessons from the apocryphal books of Scripture, a
+more rigorous observance of Sundays, and the provision and training of
+ministers who could preach to the people. Concessions on these points
+would as yet have satisfied the bulk of the Puritans; and for a while
+it seemed as if concession was purposed. The king not only received the
+petition, but promised a conference of bishops and divines in which it
+should be discussed. Ten months however were suffered to pass before the
+pledge was redeemed; and a fierce protest from the University of Oxford
+in the interval gave little promise of a peaceful settlement. The
+university denounced the Puritan demands as preludes of a Presbyterian
+system in which the clergy would "have power to bind their king in
+chains and their prince in links of iron, that is (in their learning) to
+censure him, to enjoin him penance, to excommunicate him, yea--in case
+they see cause--to proceed against him as a tyrant."
+
+[Sidenote: Hampton Court conference.]
+
+The warning was hardly needed by James. The voice of Melville was still
+in his ears when he summoned four Puritan ministers to meet the
+Archbishop and eight of his suffragans at Hampton Court in January 1604.
+From the first he showed no purpose of discussing the grievances alleged
+in the petition. He revelled in the opportunity for a display of his
+theological reading; but he viewed the Puritan demands in a purely
+political light. He charged the petitioners with aiming at a Scottish
+presbytery, "where Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall meet, and at
+their pleasure censure me and my Council and all their proceedings.
+Stay," he went on with amusing vehemence, "stay, I pray you, for one
+seven years before you demand that from me, and if you find me pursy and
+fat and my windpipe stuffed, I will perhaps hearken to you, for let that
+government be once up, and I am sure I shall be kept in health." No
+words could have better shown the new king's unconsciousness that he had
+passed into a land where parliaments were realities, and where the
+"censure" of king and council was a national tradition. But neither his
+theology nor his politics met with any protest from the prelates about
+him. On the contrary, the bishops declared that the insults James
+showered on their opponents were inspired by the Holy Ghost. The
+Puritans however still ventured to question his infallibility, and the
+king broke up the conference with a threat which disclosed the policy of
+the Crown. "I will make them conform," he said of the remonstrants, "or
+I will harry them out of the land!"
+
+[Sidenote: The Parliament of 1604.]
+
+It is only when we recall the temper of England at the time that we can
+understand the profound emotion which was roused by threats such as
+these. Three months after the conference at Hampton Court the members
+were gathering to the first parliament of the new reign; and the
+Parliament of 1604 met in another mood from that of any parliament which
+had met for a hundred years. Under the Tudors the Houses had more than
+once at great crises in our history withstood the policy of the Crown.
+But in the main that policy had been their own; and it was the sense of
+this oneness in aim which had averted any final collision even in the
+strife with Elizabeth. But this trust in the unity of the nation and the
+Crown was now roughly shaken. The squires and merchants who thronged the
+benches at Westminster listened with coldness and suspicion to the
+self-confident assurances of the king. "I bring you," said James, "two
+gifts, one peace with foreign nations, the other union with Scotland";
+and a project was laid before them for a union of the two kingdoms under
+the name of Great Britain. "By what laws," asked Bacon, "shall this
+Britain be governed?" Great in fact as were the advantages of such a
+scheme, the House showed its sense of the political difficulties
+involved in it by referring it to a commission. James in turn showed his
+resentment by passing over the attempts made to commute for a fixed sum
+the oppressive rights of Purveyance and Wardship. But what the House was
+really set upon was religious reform; and the first step of the Commons
+had been the naming of a committee to frame bills for the redress of the
+more crying ecclesiastical grievances. The influence of the Crown
+secured the rejection of these bills by the Lords; and the irritation of
+the Lower House showed itself in an outspoken address to the king. The
+Parliament, it said, had come together in a spirit of peace. "Our
+desires were of peace only, and our device of unity." Their aim had been
+to put an end to the long-standing dissension among the ministers, and
+to preserve uniformity by the abandonment of "a few ceremonies of small
+importance," by the redress of some ecclesiastical abuses, and by the
+establishment of an efficient training for a preaching clergy. If they
+had waived their right to deal with these matters during the old age of
+Elizabeth, they asserted it now. "Let your Majesty be pleased to receive
+public information from your Commons in Parliament, as well of the
+abuses in the Church as in the civil state and government." Words yet
+bolder, and which sound like a prelude to the Petition of Right, met the
+claim of absolutism which was so frequently on the new king's lips.
+"Your majesty would be misinformed," said the address, "if any man
+should deliver that the kings of England have any absolute power in
+themselves, either to alter religion or make any laws concerning the
+same, otherwise than as in temporal causes, by consent of Parliament."
+
+[Sidenote: The Canons of 1604.]
+
+The address was met by a petulant scolding, and as the Commons met
+coldly the king's request for a subsidy the Houses were adjourned. James
+at once assumed the title to which Parliament had deferred its assent,
+of King of Great Britain; while the support of the Crown emboldened the
+bishops to a fresh defiance of the Puritan pressure. The act of
+Elizabeth which gave parliamentary sanction to the Thirty-nine Articles
+compelled ministers to subscribe only to those which concerned the faith
+and the sacraments, and thus implicitly refused to compel their
+signatures to the articles which related to points of discipline and
+Church government. The compromise had been observed from 1571 till now;
+but the Convocation of 1604 by its canons required the subscription of
+the clergy to the articles touching rites and ceremonies. The king
+showed his approval of this step by raising its prime mover, Bancroft,
+to the vacant See of Canterbury; and Bancroft added to the demand of
+subscription a requirement of rigid conformity with the rubrics on the
+part of all beneficed clergymen. In the spring of 1605 three hundred of
+the Puritan clergy were driven from their livings for a refusal to
+comply with these demands.
+
+[Sidenote: Fresh breach with the Catholics.]
+
+If James had come to his new throne with dreams of conciliation and of a
+greater unity among his subjects, his dream was to be speedily
+dispelled. At the moment when the persecution of Bancroft announced a
+final breach between the Crown and the Puritans, a revival of the old
+rigour made a fresh breach between the Crown and the Catholics. In
+remitting the fines for recusancy James had never purposed to suffer any
+revival of Catholicism; and in the opening of 1604 a proclamation which
+bade all Jesuits and seminary priests depart from the land proved that
+on its political side the Elizabethan policy was still adhered to. But
+the effect of the remission of fines was at once to swell the numbers of
+avowed Catholics. In the diocese of Chester the number of recusants
+increased by a thousand. Rumours of Catholic conversions spread a panic
+which showed itself in an act of the Parliament of 1604 confirming the
+statutes of Elizabeth; and to this James gave his assent. He promised
+indeed that the statute should remain inoperative; but rumours of his
+own conversion, which sprang from his secret negotiation with Rome, so
+angered the king that in the spring of 1605 he bade the judges put it in
+force, while the fines for recusancy were levied more strictly than
+before. The disappointment of their hopes, the quick breach of the
+pledges so solemnly given to them, drove the Catholics to despair. They
+gave fresh life to a conspiracy which a small knot of bigots had been
+fruitlessly striving to bring to an issue since the king's accession.
+Catesby, a Catholic zealot who had taken part in the rising of Essex,
+had busied himself during the last years of Elizabeth in preparing for a
+revolt at the Queen's death, and in seeking for his project the aid of
+Spain. He was joined in his plans by two fellow-zealots, Winter and
+Wright; but the scheme was still unripe when James peaceably mounted the
+throne; and for the moment his pledge of toleration put an end to it.
+But the zeal of the plotters was revived by the banishment of the
+priests; and the conspiracy at last took the form of a plan for blowing
+up both Houses of Parliament and profiting by the terror caused by such
+a stroke. In Flanders Catesby found a new assistant in his schemes,
+Guido Fawkes, an Englishman who was serving in the army of the Archduke;
+and on his return to England he was joined by Thomas Percy, a cousin of
+the Earl of Northumberland and a pensioner of the king's guard. In May
+1604 the little group hired a tenement near the Parliament House, and
+set themselves to dig a mine beneath its walls.
+
+[Sidenote: The Gunpowder Plot.]
+
+As yet however they stood alone. The bulk of the Catholics were content
+with the relaxation of the penal laws; and in the absence of any aid the
+plotters were forced to suspend their work. It was not till the sudden
+change in the royal policy that their hopes revived. But with the
+renewal of persecution Catesby at once bestirred himself; and at the
+close of 1604 the lucky discovery of a cellar beneath the Parliament
+House facilitated the execution of this plan. Barrels of gunpowder were
+placed in the cellar, and the little group waited patiently for the
+fifth of November 1605, when the Houses were again summoned to assemble.
+In the interval their plans widened into a formidable conspiracy. It was
+arranged that on the destruction of the king and the Parliament the
+Catholics should rise, seize the young princes, use the general panic
+to make themselves masters of the realm, and call for aid from the
+Spaniards in Flanders. With this view Catholics of greater fortune, such
+as Sir Everard Digby and Francis Tresham, were admitted to Catesby's
+confidence, and supplied money for the larger projects he designed. Arms
+were bought in Flanders, horses were held in readiness, a meeting of
+Catholic gentlemen was brought about under show of a hunting party to
+serve as the beginning of a rising. Wonderful as was the secrecy with
+which the plot was concealed, the family affection of Tresham at the
+last moment gave a clue to it by a letter to Lord Monteagle, his
+relative, which warned him to absent himself from the Parliament on the
+fatal day; and further information brought about the discovery of the
+cellar and of Guido Fawkes, who was charged with its custody. The
+hunting party broke up in despair, the conspirators, chased from county
+to county, were either killed or sent to the block; and Garnet, the
+Provincial of the English Jesuits, was brought to trial and executed.
+Though he had shrunk from all part in the plot, its existence had been
+made known to him by way of confession by another Jesuit, Greenway; and
+horror-stricken as he represented himself to have been, he had kept the
+secret and left the Parliament to its doom.
+
+[Sidenote: The Impositions.]
+
+The failure of such a plot necessarily gives strength to a government;
+and for the moment the Parliament was drawn closer to the king by the
+deliverance from a common peril. When the Houses again met in 1606 they
+listened in a different temper to the demand for a subsidy. The needs of
+the Treasury indeed were great. Elizabeth had left behind her a war
+expenditure, and a debt of four hundred thousand pounds. The first
+ceased with the peace, but the debt remained; and the prodigality of
+James was fast raising the charges of the Crown in time of peace to as
+high a level as they had reached under his predecessor in time of war.
+The Commons voted a sum which was large enough to meet the royal debt.
+The fixed charges of the Crown they held should be met by its ordinary
+revenues; but James had no mind to bring his expenditure down to the
+level of Elizabeth's. The growth of English commerce offered a means of
+recruiting his treasury which seemed to lie within the limits of
+customary law; and of this he availed himself. The right of the Crown to
+levy impositions on exports and imports other than those of wool,
+leather, and tin, had been the last financial prerogative for which the
+Edwards had struggled. They had been forced indeed to abandon it; but
+the tradition of such a right lingered on at the royal council-board;
+and under the Tudors the practice had been to some slight extent
+revived. A duty on imports had been imposed in one or two instances by
+Mary, and this impost had been extended by Elizabeth to currants and
+wine. These instances however were too trivial and exceptional to break
+in upon the general usage; but a more dangerous precedent had been
+growing up in the duties which the great trading companies, such as
+those to the Levant and to the Indies, were allowed to exact from
+merchants, in exchange--as was held--for the protection they afforded
+them in far-off and dangerous seas. The Levant Company was now
+dissolved, and James seized on the duties it had levied as lapsing
+naturally to the Crown.
+
+[Sidenote: Bates's case.]
+
+The Parliament at once protested against these impositions; but the
+prospect of a fresh struggle with the Commons told less with the king
+than the prospect of a revenue which might free him from dependence on
+the Commons altogether. His fanatical belief in the rights and power of
+the Crown hindered all sober judgement of such a question. James cared
+quite as much to assert his absolute authority as to fill his treasury.
+In the course of 1606 therefore the case of a Levant merchant called
+Bates, who refused to pay the imposition, was brought before the
+Exchequer Chamber. The judgement of the court justified the king's
+confidence in his claim. It went far beyond the original bounds of the
+case itself, or the right of the Crown to levy on the ground of
+protection the dues which had been levied on that ground by the leading
+companies. It asserted the king's right to levy what customs duties he
+would. "All customs," said the judges, "are the effects of foreign
+commerce; but all affairs of commerce and treaties with foreign nations
+belong to the king's absolute power. He therefore who has power over the
+cause has power over the effect." The importance of such a decision
+could hardly be overrated. English commerce was growing fast. English
+merchants were fighting their way to the Spice Islands, and establishing
+settlements in the dominions of the Mogul. The judgement gave James a
+revenue which was certain to grow rapidly, and whose growth would go far
+to free the Crown from any need of resorting for supplies to Parliament.
+
+[Sidenote: The Post-Nati.]
+
+But no immediate step was taken to give effect to the judgement; and the
+Commons contented themselves with a protest against impositions at the
+close of the session of 1606. When they reassembled in the following
+year their attention was absorbed by the revival of the questions which
+sprang from the new relations of Scotland to England through their
+common king. There was now no question of a national union. The
+commission to which the whole matter had been referred had reported in
+favour of the abolition of hostile laws, the establishment of a general
+free trade between the two kingdoms, and the naturalization as
+Englishmen of all living Scotchmen who had been born before the king's
+accession to the English throne. The judges had already given their
+opinion that all born after it were naturalized Englishmen by force of
+their allegiance to a sovereign who had become King of England. The
+constitutional danger of such a theory was easily seen. Had the marriage
+of Philip and Mary produced a son, every Spaniard and every Fleming
+would under it have counted as Englishmen, and England would have been
+absorbed in the mass of the Spanish monarchy. The opinion of the judges
+in fact implied that nationality hung not on the existence of the nation
+itself, but on its relation to a king. It was to escape from such a
+theory that the Commons asked that the question should be waived, and
+offered on that condition to naturalize all Scotchmen whatever by
+statute. But James would not assent. To him the assertion of a right
+inherent in the Crown was far dearer than a peaceful settlement of the
+matter; the bills for free trade were dropped; and on the adjournment of
+the Houses a case was brought before the Exchequer Chamber; and the
+naturalization of the "Post-nati," as Scots born after the king's
+accession were styled, established by a formal judgement.
+
+[Sidenote: James and Scotland.]
+
+James had won a victory for his prerogative; but he had won it at the
+cost of Scotland. To the smaller and poorer kingdom the removal of all
+obstacles to her commerce with England would have been an inestimable
+gain. The intercourse which it would have necessitated could hardly have
+failed in time to bring about a more perfect union. But as the king's
+reign drew on, the union of the two realms seemed more distant than
+ever. Bacon's shrewd question, "Under which laws is this Britain to be
+governed?" took fresh meaning as men saw James asserting in Scotland an
+all but absolute authority, and breaking down the one constitutional
+check which had hitherto hampered him. The energy which he had shown in
+his earlier combat with the democratic forces embodied in the Kirk was
+not likely to slacken on his accession to the southern throne. It was in
+the General Assembly that the new force of public opinion took
+legislative and administrative form; and even before he crossed the
+Border James had succeeded in asserting a right to convene and be
+personally present at the proceedings of the General Assembly. But once
+King of England he could venture on heavier blows. In spite of his
+assent to an act legalizing its annual convention, James hindered any
+meeting of the General Assembly for five successive years by repeated
+prorogations. The protests of the clergy were roughly met. When nineteen
+ministers appeared in 1605 at Aberdeen and, in defiance of the
+prorogation, constituted themselves an Assembly, they were called before
+the Council, and on refusal to own its jurisdiction banished as traitors
+from the realm. Of the leaders who remained the boldest were summoned in
+1606 with Andrew Melville to confer with the king in England on his
+projects of change. On their refusal to betray the freedom of the Church
+they were committed to prison; and an epigram which Melville wrote on
+the usages of the English communion was seized on as a ground for
+bringing him before the English Privy Council with Bancroft at its head.
+But the insolence of the Primate fell on ears less patient than those of
+the Puritans he had insulted at Hampton Court. As he stood at the
+council-table Melville seized the Archbishop by the sleeves of his
+rochet, and shaking them in his manner, called them Popish rags and
+marks of the beast. He was sent to the Tower, and released after some
+years of imprisonment only to go into exile.
+
+[Sidenote: Submission of the Kirk.]
+
+The trial of Scotchmen before a foreign court, the imprisonment of
+Scotchmen in foreign prisons, were steps that showed the powerlessness
+of James to grasp the first principles of law; but they were effective
+for the purpose at which he aimed. They struck terror into the Scotch
+ministers. Their one weapon lay in the enthusiasm of the people; but,
+strongly as Scotch enthusiasm might tell on a king at Edinburgh, it was
+powerless over a king at London. The time had come when James might pass
+on from merely silencing the General Assembly to the use of it in the
+enslavement of the Church. Successful as he had been in gagging the
+pulpits and silencing the Assembly, he had been as yet less successful
+in his efforts to revive the power of the Crown over the Church by a
+restoration of Episcopacy. He had nominated a few bishops, and had won
+back for them their old places in Parliament; but his bishops remained
+purely secular nobles, unrecognized in their spiritual capacity by the
+Church, and without any ecclesiastical jurisdiction. It was in vain that
+James had striven to bring Melville and his fellows to any recognition
+of prelacy. But with their banishment and imprisonment the field was
+clear for more vigorous action. Deprived of their leaders, threatened
+with bonds and exile, deserted by the nobles, ill supported as yet by
+the mass of the people, to whom the real nature of their struggle was
+unknown, the Scotch ministers bent at last before the pressure of the
+Crown. They still shrank indeed from any formal acceptance of
+episcopacy; but they allowed the bishops to act as perpetual moderators
+or presidents in the synods of their presbyteries.
+
+[Sidenote: Restoration of Scotch Episcopacy.]
+
+With such moderators the General Assembly might be suffered to meet.
+Their influence in fact secured the return of royal nominees to
+Assemblies which met in 1608 and in 1610; and in the second of these
+assemblies episcopacy was at last formally recognized by the Scottish
+Church. The bishops were owned as permanent heads of each provincial
+synod; the power of ordination was committed to them; the ecclesiastical
+sentences pronounced by synod or presbytery were henceforth to be
+submitted for their approval. The new organization of the Church was at
+once carried out. The vacant sees were filled. Two archbishops were
+created at St. Andrews and Glasgow, and set at the head of Courts of
+High Commission for their respective provinces; while three of the
+prelates were sent to receive consecration in England, and on their
+return communicated it to their fellow-bishops. With such a measure of
+success James was fairly content. The prelacy he had revived fell far
+short of English episcopacy; to the eyes of religious dogmatists such as
+Laud indeed it seemed little better than the presbyterianism it
+superseded. But the aim of James was political rather than religious. He
+had no dislike for presbyterianism as a system of Church-government;
+what he dreaded was the popular force to which it gave form in its
+synods and assemblies, and which, in the guise of ecclesiastical
+independence, was lifting the nation into equality with the Crown. In
+seizing on the control of the Church through his organized prelacy James
+held himself to have seized the control of the forces which acted
+through the Church, and to have won back that mastery of his realm which
+the Reformation had reft from the Scottish kings.
+
+[Sidenote: England and the Prerogative.]
+
+What he had really done was to commit the Scotch Crown to a lasting
+struggle with the religious impulses of the Scottish people. The cause
+of episcopacy was ruined by his triumph. Belief in bishops ceased to be
+possible for a Scotchman when bishops were forced on Scotland as mere
+tools of the royal will. Presbyterianism on the other hand became
+identified with patriotism. It was no longer an ecclesiastical system;
+it was the guise under which national freedom and even national
+existence were to struggle against an arbitrary rule,--against a rule
+which grew more and more the rule of a foreign king. Nor was the sight
+of the royal triumph lost on the southern realm. England had no love for
+presbyters or hatred for bishops; but as she saw the last check on the
+royal authority broken down over the border she looked the more
+jealously at the effort which James was making to break down such checks
+at home. Under Elizabeth proclamations had been sparingly used, and for
+the most part only to enforce what was already the law. Not only was
+their number multiplied under James, but their character was changed.
+They created new offences, imposed new penalties, and directed offenders
+to be brought before courts which had no legal jurisdiction over them.
+To narrow indeed the sphere of the common law seemed the special aim of
+the royal policy; the four counties of the western border had been
+severed from the rest of England and placed under the jurisdiction of
+the President and Council of Wales, a court whose constitution and
+procedure rested on the sheer will of the Crown. The province of the
+spiritual courts was as busily enlarged. It was in vain that the judges,
+spurred no doubt by the old jealousy between civil and ecclesiastical
+lawyers, entertained appeals against the High Commission, and strove by
+a series of decisions to set bounds to its limitless claims of
+jurisdiction or to restrict its powers of imprisonment to cases of
+schism and heresy. The judges were powerless against the Crown; and
+James was vehement in his support of courts which were closely bound up
+with his own prerogative. What work the courts spiritual might be
+counted on to do, if the king had his way, was plain from the
+announcement of a civilian named Cowell that "the king is above law by
+his absolute power," and that "notwithstanding his oath he may alter and
+suspend any particular law that seemeth hurtful to the public estate."
+
+[Sidenote: The claims of the king.]
+
+Cowell's book was suppressed on a remonstrance of the House of Commons;
+but the party of passive obedience grew fast. Even before his accession
+to the English throne James had formulated his theory of rule in a work
+on _The True Law of Free Monarchy_, and announced that "although a good
+king will frame his actions to be according to law, yet he is not bound
+thereto, but of his own will and for example giving to his subjects."
+With the Tudor statesmen who used the phrase, "an absolute king" or "an
+absolute monarchy" meant a sovereign or rule complete in themselves and
+independent of all foreign or Papal interference. James chose to regard
+the words as implying the freedom of the monarch from all control by law
+or from responsibility to anything but his own royal will. The king's
+theory was already a system of government; it was soon to become a
+doctrine which bishops preached from the pulpit, and for which brave men
+laid their heads on the block. The Church was quick to adopt its
+sovereign's discovery. Some three years after his accession Convocation
+in its book of Canons denounced as a fatal error the assertion that "all
+civil power, jurisdiction, and authority were first derived from the
+people and disordered multitude, or either is originally still in them,
+or else is deduced by their consent naturally from them; and is not
+God's ordinance originally descending from him and depending upon him."
+In strict accordance with the royal theory these doctors declared
+sovereignty in its origin to be the prerogative of birthright, and
+inculcated passive obedience to the Crown as a religious obligation. The
+doctrine of passive obedience was soon taught in the schools. A few
+years before the king's death the University of Oxford decreed solemnly
+that "it was in no case lawful for subjects to make use of force against
+their princes, or to appear offensively or defensively in the field
+against them." But what gave most force to such teaching were the
+reiterated expressions of James himself. If the king's "arrogant
+speeches" woke resentment in the Parliaments to which they were
+addressed, they created by sheer force of repetition a certain amount of
+belief in the arbitrary power they challenged for the Crown. One
+sentence from a speech delivered in the Star Chamber may serve as an
+instance of their tone. "As it is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what
+God can do, so," said James, "it is presumption and a high contempt in a
+subject to dispute what a king can do, or to say that a king cannot do
+this or that."
+
+[Sidenote: Distrust of the king.]
+
+"If the practice follow the positions," commented a thoughtful observer
+on words such as these, "we are not likely to leave to our successors
+the freedom we received from our forefathers." Their worst effect was in
+changing the whole attitude of the nation towards the Crown. England had
+trusted the Tudors, it distrusted the Stuarts. The mood indeed both of
+king and people had grown to be a mood of jealousy, of suspicion, which,
+inevitable as it was, often did injustice to the purpose of both. King
+James looked on the squires and merchants of the House of Commons as his
+Stuart predecessors had looked on the Scotch baronage. He regarded their
+discussions, their protests, their delays, not as the natural hesitation
+of men called suddenly, and with only half knowledge, to the settlement
+of great and complex questions, but as proofs of a conspiracy to fetter
+and impede the action of the Crown. The Commons on the other hand
+listened to the king's hectoring speeches, not as the chance talk of a
+clever and garrulous theorist, but as proofs of a settled purpose to
+change the character of the monarchy. In a word, James had succeeded in
+some seven years of rule in breaking utterly down that mutual
+understanding between the Crown and its subjects on which all
+government, save a sheer despotism, must necessarily rest.
+
+[Sidenote: Robert Cecil.]
+
+It was this mutual distrust which brought about the final breach between
+the Parliament and the king. The question of the impositions had seemed
+for a while to have been waived. The Commons had contented themselves
+with a protest against their levy. James had for two years hesitated in
+acting on the judgement which asserted his right to levy them. But the
+needs of the treasury became too great to admit of further hesitation,
+and in 1608 a royal proclamation imposed customs duties on many articles
+of import and export. The new duties came in fast; but unluckily the
+royal debt grew faster. To a king fresh from the penniless exchequer of
+Holyrood the wealth of England seemed boundless; money was lavished on
+court-feasts and favourites; and with each year the expenditure of James
+reached a higher level. It was in vain that Robert Cecil took the
+treasury into his own hands, and strove to revive the frugal traditions
+of Elizabeth. The king's prodigality undid his minister's work; and in
+1610 Cecil was forced to announce to his master that the annual revenue
+of the Crown must be supplemented by fresh grants from Parliament. The
+scheme which Cecil laid before the king and the Commons is of great
+importance as the last effort of that Tudor policy which had so long
+hindered an outbreak of strife between the nation and the Crown. Differ
+as the Tudors might from one another, they were alike in their keen
+sense of national feeling and in their craving to carry it along with
+them. Masterful as Henry or Elizabeth might be, what they "prized most
+dearly," as the Queen confessed, was "the love and goodwill of their
+subjects." They prized it because they knew the force it gave them. And
+Cecil knew it too. He had grown up among the traditions of the Tudor
+rule. He had been trained by his father in the system of Elizabeth.
+Whether as a minister of the Queen, or as a minister of her successor,
+he had striven to carry that system into effect. His conviction of the
+supremacy of the Crown was as strong as that of James himself, but it
+was tempered by as strong a conviction of the need of the national
+good-will. He had seen what weight the passionate enthusiasm that
+gathered round Elizabeth gave to her policy both at home and abroad; and
+he saw that a time was drawing near when the same weight would be
+needed by the policy of the Crown.
+
+[Sidenote: Protestantism in Germany.]
+
+Slowly but steadily the clouds of religious strife were gathering over
+central Europe. From such a strife, should it once break out in war,
+England could not hold aloof unless the tradition of its policy was
+wholly set aside. And so long as Cecil lived, whatever change might take
+place at home, in all foreign affairs the Elizabethan policy was mainly
+adhered to. Peace indeed was made with Spain; but a close alliance with
+the United Provinces, and a more guarded alliance with France, held the
+ambition of Spain in check almost as effectually as war. The peace in
+fact set England free to provide against dangers which threatened to
+become greater than those from Spanish aggression in the Netherlands.
+Wearily as war in that quarter might drag on, it was clear that the
+Dutchmen could hold their own, and that all that Spain and Catholicism
+could hope for was to save the rest of the Low Countries from their
+grasp. But no sooner was danger from the Spanish branch of the House of
+Austria at an end than Protestantism had to guard itself against its
+German branch. The vast possessions of Charles the Fifth had been parted
+between his brother and his son. While Philip took Spain, Italy, the
+Netherlands, and the Indies, Ferdinand took the German dominions, the
+hereditary Duchy of Austria, the Suabian lands, Tyrol, Styria,
+Carinthia, Carniola. Marriage and fortune brought to the German branch
+the dependent states of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia; and it had
+succeeded in retaining the Imperial crown. The wisdom and moderation of
+Ferdinand and his successor secured tranquillity for Germany through
+some fifty years. They were faithful to the Peace of Passau, which had
+been wrested by Maurice of Saxony from Charles the Fifth, and which
+secured both Protestants and Catholics in the rights and possessions
+which they held at the moment it was made. Their temper was tolerant;
+and they looked on quietly while Protestantism spread over Southern
+Germany and solved all doubtful questions which arose from the treaty in
+its own favour. The Peace had provided that all church land already
+secularized should remain so; of the later secularization of other
+church land it said nothing. It provided that states already Protestant
+should abide so, but it said nothing of the right of other states to
+declare themselves Protestant. Doubt however was set aside by religious
+zeal; new states became Lutheran, and eight great bishoprics of the
+north were secularized. Meanwhile the new faith was spreading fast over
+the dominions of the House of Austria. The nobles of their very Duchy
+embraced it: Moravia, Silesia, Hungary all but wholly abandoned
+Catholicism. Through the earlier reign of Elizabeth it seemed as if by
+a peaceful progress of conversion Germany was about to become
+Protestant.
+
+[Sidenote: The Catholic reaction.]
+
+German Catholicism was saved by the Catholic revival and by the energy
+of the Jesuits. It was saved perhaps as much by the strife which broke
+out in the heart of German Protestantism between Lutheran and Calvinist.
+But the Catholic zealots were far from resting content with having
+checked the advance of their opponents. They longed to undo their work.
+They did not question the Treaty of Passau or the settlement made by it;
+but they disputed the Protestant interpretation of its silences; they
+called for the restoration to Catholicism of all church lands
+secularized, of all states converted from the older faith, since its
+conclusion. Their new attitude woke little terror in the Lutheran
+states. The treaty secured their rights, and their position in one
+unbroken mass stretching across Northern Germany seemed to secure them
+from Catholic attack. But the Calvinistic states, Hesse, Baden, and the
+Palatinate, felt none of this security. If the treaty were strictly
+construed it gave them no right of existence, for Calvinism had arisen
+since the treaty was signed. Their position too was a hazardous one.
+They lay girt in on all sides but one by Catholic territories, here by
+the bishops of the Rhineland with the Spaniards in Franche Comte and the
+Netherlands to back them, there by Bavaria and by the bishoprics of the
+Main. Foes such as these indeed the Calvinists could fairly have faced;
+but behind them lay the House of Austria; and the influence of the
+Catholic revival was at last telling on the Austrian princes. In 1606 an
+attempt of the Emperor Rudolf to force Catholicism again on his people
+woke revolt in the Duchy; and though the troubles were allayed by his
+removal, his successor Matthias persevered though more quietly in the
+same anti-Protestant policy.
+
+[Sidenote: The Union and the League.]
+
+The accession of the House of Austria to the number of their foes
+created a panic among the Calvinistic states, and in 1608 they joined
+together in a Protestant Union with Christian of Anhalt at its head. But
+zeal was at once met by zeal; and the formation of the Union was
+answered by the formation of a Catholic League among the states about it
+under Maximilian, the Duke of Bavaria. Both were ostensibly for
+defensive purposes: but the peace of Europe was at once shaken.
+Ambitious schemes woke up in every quarter. Spain saw the chance of
+securing a road along western Germany which would enable her to bring
+her whole force to bear on the rebels in the Low Countries. France on
+the other hand had recovered from the exhaustion of her own religious
+wars, and was eager to take up again the policy pursued by Francis the
+First and his son, of weakening and despoiling Germany by feeding and
+using religious strife across the Rhine. In 1610 a quarrel over Cleves
+afforded a chance for her intervention, and it was only an assassin's
+dagger that prevented Henry the Fourth from doing that which Richelieu
+was to do. England alone could hinder a second outbreak of the Wars of
+Religion; but the first step in such a policy must be a reconciliation
+between King and Parliament. James might hector about the might of the
+Crown, but he had no power of acting with effect abroad save through the
+national good-will. Without troops and without supplies, his threat of
+war would be ridiculous; and without the backing of such a threat Cecil
+knew well that mediation would be a mere delusion. Whether for the
+conduct of affairs at home or abroad it was needful to bring the
+widening quarrel between the king and the Parliament to a close; and it
+was with a settled purpose of reconciliation that Cecil brought James to
+call the Houses again together in 1610.
+
+[Sidenote: The Great Contract.]
+
+He never dreamed of conciliating the Commons by yielding unconditionally
+to their demands. Cecil looked on the right to levy impositions as
+legally established; and the Tudor sovereigns had been as keen as James
+himself in seizing on any rights that the law could be made to give
+them. But as a practical statesman he saw that the right could only be
+exercised to the profit of the Crown if it was exercised with the
+good-will of the people. To win that good-will it was necessary to put
+the impositions on a legal footing; while for the conduct of affairs it
+was necessary to raise permanently the revenue of the Crown. On the
+Tudor theory of politics these were concessions made by the nation to
+the king; and it was the Tudor practice to buy such concessions by
+counter-concessions made by the king to the nation. Materials for such a
+bargain existed in the feudal rights of the Crown, above all those of
+marriage and wardship, which were harassing to the people while they
+brought little profit to the Exchequer. The Commons had more than once
+prayed for some commutation of these rights, and Cecil seized on their
+prayer as the ground of an accommodation. He proposed that James should
+waive his feudal rights, that he should submit to the sanction by
+Parliament of the impositions already levied, and that he should bind
+himself to levy no more by his own prerogative, on condition that the
+Commons assented to this arrangement, discharged the royal debt, and
+raised the royal revenue by a sum of two hundred thousand a year.
+
+[Sidenote: Attitude of the Commons.]
+
+Such was the "great contract" with which Cecil met the Houses when they
+once more assembled in 1610. It was a bargain which the Commons must
+have been strongly tempted to accept; for heavy as were its terms it
+averted the great danger of arbitrary taxation, and again brought the
+monarchy into constitutional relations with Parliament. What hindered
+their acceptance of it was their suspicion of James. Purveyance and the
+Impositions were far from being the only grievance against which they
+came to protest; they had to complain of the increase of proclamations,
+the establishment of new and arbitrary courts of law, the encroachments
+of the spiritual jurisdiction; and consent to such a bargain, if it
+remedied two evils, would cut off all chance of redressing the rest.
+Were the treasury once full, no means remained of bringing the Crown to
+listen to their protest against the abuses of the Church, the silencing
+of godly ministers, the maintenance of pluralities and non-residence,
+the want of due training for the clergy. Nor had the Commons any mind to
+pass in silence over the illegalities of the preceding years. Whether
+they were to give legal sanction to the impositions or no, they were
+resolute to protest against their levy without sanction of law. James
+forbade them to enter on the subject, but their remonstrance was none
+the less vigorous. "Finding that your majesty, without advice or counsel
+of Parliament, hath lately in time of peace set both greater impositions
+and more in number than any of your noble ancestors did ever in time of
+war," they prayed "that all impositions set without the assent of
+Parliament may be quite abolished and taken away," and that "a law be
+made to declare that all impositions set upon your people, their goods
+or merchandise, save only by common consent in Parliament, are and shall
+be void." As to Church grievances their demands were in the same spirit.
+They prayed that the deposed ministers might be suffered to preach, and
+that the jurisdiction of the High Commission should be regulated by
+statute; in other words, that ecclesiastical like financial matters
+should be taken out of the sphere of the prerogative and be owned as
+lying henceforth within the cognizance of Parliament.
+
+[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Parliament.]
+
+It was no doubt the last demand that roused above all the anger of the
+king. As to some of the grievances he was ready to make concessions. He
+had consulted the judges as to the legality of his proclamations, and
+the judges had pronounced them illegal. It never occurred to James to
+announce his withdrawal from a claim which he now knew to be wholly
+against law, and he kept the opinion of the judges secret; but it made
+him ready to include the grievance of proclamations in his bargain with
+the Commons, if they would grant a larger subsidy. The question of the
+court of Wales he treated in the same temper. But on the question of the
+Church, of Church reform, or of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, he would
+make no concession whatever. He had just wrought his triumph over the
+Scottish Kirk; and had succeeded, as he believed, in transferring the
+control of its spiritual life from the Scottish people to the Crown. He
+was not likely to consent to any reversal of such a process in England
+itself. The claim of the Commons had become at last a claim that England
+through its representatives in Parliament should have a part in the
+direction of its own religious affairs. Such a claim sprang logically
+from the very facts of the Reformation. It was by the joint action of
+the Crown and Parliament that the actual constitution of the English
+Church had been established; and it seemed hard to deny that the same
+joint action was operative for its after reform. But it was in vain that
+the Commons urged their claim. Elizabeth had done wisely in resisting
+it, for her task was to govern a half-Catholic England with a Puritan
+Parliament; and in spite of constitutional forms the Queen was a truer
+representative of national opinion in matters of religion than the House
+of Commons. In her later years all had changed; and the Commons who
+fronted her successor were as truly representative of the religious
+opinion of the realm as Elizabeth had been. But James saw no ground for
+changing the policy of the Crown. The control of the Church and through
+it of English religion lay within the sphere of his prerogative, and on
+this question he was resolute to make a stand. The Commons were as
+resolute as the king. The long and intricate bargaining came on both
+sides to an end; and in February 1611 the first Parliament of James was
+dissolved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE FAVOURITES
+
+1611-1625
+
+
+[Sidenote: England and the Crown.]
+
+The dissolution of the first Stuart Parliament marks a stage in our
+constitutional history. With it the system of the Tudors came to an end.
+The oneness of aim which had carried nation and government alike through
+the storms of the Reformation no longer existed. On the contrary the
+aims of the nation and the aims of the government were now in open
+opposition. The demand of England was that all things in the realm,
+courts, taxes, prerogatives, should be sanctioned and bounded by law.
+The policy of the king was to reserve whatever he could within the
+control of his personal will. James in fact was claiming a more personal
+and exclusive direction of affairs than any English sovereign that had
+gone before him. England, on the other hand, was claiming a greater
+share in its own guidance than it had enjoyed since the Wars of the
+Roses. Nor were the claims on either side speculative or theoretical.
+Differences in the theory of government or on the relative jurisdiction
+of Church and State might have been left as of old to the closet and the
+pulpit. But the opposition between the Crown and the people had gathered
+itself round practical questions, and round questions that were of
+interest to all. Every man's conscience was touched by the question of
+religion. Every man's pocket was touched by the question of taxation.
+The strongest among human impulses, the passion of religious zeal and
+that of personal self-interest, nerved Englishmen to a struggle with the
+Crown. What gave the strife a yet more practical bearing was the fact
+that James had provided the national passion with a constitutional
+rallying-point. There was but one influence which could match the
+reverence which men felt for the Crown, and that was the reverence that
+men felt for the Parliament; nor had that reverence ever stood at a
+greater height than at the moment when James finally broke with the
+Houses. The dissolution of 1611 proclaimed to the whole people a breach
+between two powers which it had hitherto looked upon as one. Not only
+did it disperse to every corner of the realm a crowd of great landowners
+and great merchants who formed centres of local opposition to the royal
+system, but it carried to every shire and every borough the news that
+the Monarchy had broken with the Great Council of the realm.
+
+[Sidenote: James his own minister.]
+
+On Cecil his failure fell like a sentence of doom. Steeped as he was in
+the Tudor temper, he could not understand an age when the Tudor system
+had become impossible; the mood of the Commons and the mood of the king
+were alike unintelligible to him. He could see no ground for the failure
+of the Great Contract save that "God had not blessed it." But he had
+little time to wonder at the new forces which were rising about him, for
+only a year after the dissolution, in May 1612, he died, killed by
+overwork. With him died the last check on the policy of James. So long
+as Cecil lived the Elizabethan tradition, weakened and broken as it
+might be, lived with him. In foreign affairs there was still the
+conviction that the Protestant states must not be abandoned in any fresh
+struggle with the House of Austria. In home affairs there was still the
+conviction that the national strength hung on the establishment of
+good-will between the nation and the Crown. But traditions such as these
+were no longer to hamper the policy of the king. To him Cecil's death
+seemed only to afford an opportunity for taking further strides towards
+the establishment of a purely personal rule. For eight years James had
+borne with the check of a powerful minister. He was resolved now to have
+no real minister but himself. Cecil's amazing capacity for toil, as well
+as his greed of power, had already smoothed the way for such a step.
+The great statesman had made a political solitude about him. Of his
+colleagues some had been removed by death, some set aside by his
+jealousy. Ralegh lay in prison; Bacon could not find office under the
+Crown. And now that Cecil was removed, there was no minister whose
+character or capacity seemed to give him any right to fill his place.
+James could at last be his own minister. The treasury was put into
+commission. The post of secretary was left vacant, and it was announced
+that the king would be his own Secretary of State. Such an arrangement
+soon broke down, and the great posts of state were again filled with men
+of whose dependence James felt sure. But whoever might nominally hold
+these offices, from the moment of Cecil's death the actual direction of
+affairs was in the hands of the king.
+
+[Sidenote: The Council set aside.]
+
+Another constitutional check remained in the royal Council. As the
+influence of Parliament died down during the Wars of the Roses, that of
+the Council took to some extent its place. Composed as it was not only
+of ministers of the Crown but of the higher nobles and hereditary
+officers of state, it served under Tudor as under Plantagenet as an
+efficient check on the arbitrary will of the sovereign. Even the
+despotic temper of Henry VIII. had had to reckon with his Council; it
+had checked act after act of Mary; it played a great part in the reign
+of Elizabeth. In the administrative tradition indeed of the last hundred
+years the Council had become all-important to the Crown. It brought it
+in contact with public opinion, less efficiently, no doubt, but more
+constantly than the Parliament itself; it gave to its acts an imposing
+sanction and assured to them a powerful support; above all it provided a
+body which stood at every crisis between the nation and the monarchy,
+which broke the shock of any conflict, and which could stand forth as
+mediator, should conflict arise, without any loss of dignity on the part
+of the sovereign. But to the practical advantages or to the traditional
+weight of such a body James was utterly blind. His cleverness made him
+impatient of its discussions; his conceit made him impatient of its
+control; while the foreign traditions which he had brought with him from
+a foreign land saw in the great nobles who composed it nothing but a
+possible force which might overawe the Crown. One of his chief aims
+therefore had been to lessen the influence of the Council. So long as
+Cecil lived this was impossible, for the practical as well as the
+conservative temper of Cecil would have shrunk from so violent a change.
+But he was no sooner dead than James hastened to carry out his plans.
+The lords of the Council found themselves of less and less account. They
+were practically excluded from all part in the government; and the whole
+management of affairs passed into the hands of the king or of the
+dependent ministers who from this time became mere agents of the king's
+will.
+
+[Sidenote: The Favourites.]
+
+Such a personal rule as this, concentrating as it does the whole
+business of government in a single man, requires for its actual conduct
+the entire devotion of the ruler to public affairs. The work of
+Ferdinand of Aragon or of Frederick the Great was the work of
+galley-slaves. It was work which had broken down the strength of Wolsey,
+and which was to bow the iron frame of Oliver Cromwell. But James had no
+mind for work such as this. His intellect was quick, inventive, fruitful
+in device, eager to plan, and confident in the wisdom of its plans. But
+he had none of the quality which distinguishes intellectual power from
+mere cleverness, the capacity not only to plan, but to know what plans
+can actually be carried out, and by what means they can be carried out.
+Like all merely clever men, he looked down on the drudgery of details.
+The posts which he had held vacant were soon filled up; and before many
+months were over James ceased to be his own Treasurer or his own
+Secretary of State. But he still claimed the absolute direction of all
+affairs; he was resolved to be his own chief minister. Even here however
+he felt the need of a more active and practical mood than his own for
+giving shape to the schemes with which his brain was fermenting; and he
+fell back as of old on the tradition of his house. It was so long since
+England had seen a favourite that the memory of Gaveston or De Vere had
+almost faded away. But favourites had been part of the system of the
+Scottish kings. Hemmed in by turbulent barons, unable to find
+counsellors among the nobles to whom the interests of the Crown were
+dearer than the interests of their class or their house, Stuart after
+Stuart had been driven to look for a counsellor and a minister in some
+dependant, bound to them by ties of personal attachment and of common
+danger. The Scotch nobles had dealt with such favourites after their
+manner. One they had hung, others they had stabbed; the last, David
+Rizzio, had fallen beneath their daggers at Mary's feet. But the notion
+of a personal dependant through whom his designs might take form for the
+outer world was as dear to James as to his predecessors, and the death
+of Cecil was soon followed by the appearance of favourites.
+
+[Sidenote: Carr.]
+
+There was an aesthetic element in the character of the Stuarts which had
+shown itself in the poems and architectural skill of those who had gone
+before James, as it was to show itself in the artistic and literary
+taste of his successor. In James, grotesque as was his own personal
+appearance, it took the form of a passionate admiration of manly beauty.
+It is possible that with the fanciful Platonism of the time he saw in
+the grace of the outer form evidence of a corresponding fairness in the
+soul within. If so, he was egregiously deceived. The first favourite
+whom he raised to honour, a Scotch page named Carr, was as worthless as
+he was handsome. But his faults passed unheeded. Without a single claim
+to distinction save the favour of the king, Carr rose at a bound to
+honours which Elizabeth had denied to Ralegh and to Drake. He was
+enrolled among English nobles, and raised to the peerage as Viscount
+Rochester. Young as he was, he at once became sole minister. The lords
+of the Council found themselves to be mere ciphers. "At the
+Council-table," writes the Spanish Ambassador only a year after Cecil's
+death, "the Viscount Rochester showeth much temper and modesty without
+seeming to press or sway anything; but afterwards the king resolveth all
+business with him alone." So sudden and complete a revolution in the
+system of the state would have drawn ill-will on the favourite, even had
+Rochester shown himself worthy of the king's trust. But he seemed only
+eager to show his unworthiness. Through the year 1613 all England was
+looking on with wonder and disgust at his effort to break the marriage
+of Lord Essex with his wife, Frances Howard. Both had been young when
+they wedded; the passionate girl soon learned to hate her cold and
+formal husband; and she yielded readily enough to the seductions of the
+brilliant favourite. The guilty passion of the two was greedily seized
+on by the political intriguers of the court. Frances was daughter of a
+Howard, the Earl of Suffolk; and her father and uncle, the Earl of
+Northampton, who had already felt the influence of the favourite
+displacing their own, saw in the girl's shame a chance of winning this
+influence to their side. With this view they resolved to break the
+marriage with Essex, and to wed her to Rochester. A charge of impotency
+was trumped up against Essex as a ground of divorce, and a commission
+was named for its investigation. The charge was disproved, and with this
+disproof the case broke utterly down; but a fresh allegation was made
+that the Earl lay under a spell of witchcraft which incapacitated him
+from intercourse with his wife, though with her alone. The scandal grew
+as it became clear that the cause of Lady Essex was backed by the king.
+The resolute protest of Archbishop Abbot against the proceedings was met
+by a petulant scolding from James, and when the Commissioners were
+evenly divided in their judgement the king added two known partizans of
+the Countess to turn their verdict. By means such as these, after four
+months of scandal and shame, a sentence of divorce was at last procured,
+and Lady Essex set free to marry the favourite.
+
+[Sidenote: Overbury's murder.]
+
+In the foul process of the divorce James had been either dupe or
+confederate. But throughout the same four months he had been either
+confederate or dupe in a more terrible tragedy. In his rise to greatness
+Rochester had been aided by the counsels of Sir Thomas Overbury.
+Overbury was a young man of singular wit and ability, but he had as few
+scruples as his master, and he was as ready to lend himself to the
+favourite's lust as to his ambition. He dictated for him in fact the
+letters which won the heart of Lady Essex. But if he backed the
+intrigue, he seems, from whatever cause, to have opposed the project of
+marriage. So great was his power over Rochester that the Howards deemed
+it needful to take him out of the way while the divorce was being
+brought about, and with this end they roused the king's jealousy of this
+influence over the favourite. James became as resolute to get rid of him
+as the Howards; he offered him an embassy if he would quit England, and
+when he refused, he treated his refusal as an offence against the state.
+Overbury was committed to the Tower, and he remained a close prisoner
+while the suit took its course. Whether more than imprisonment was
+designed by the Howards, or what was the part the two Earls played in
+the deeds that followed, is hard to tell. Still harder is it to tell the
+part of Rochester or of the king. But behind the web of political
+intrigue lay a woman's passion, and the part of Lady Essex is clear.
+Overbury had the secret of her shame to disclose, and she was resolved
+to silence him by death. A few days after the sentence of divorce was
+pronounced, he died in his prison, poisoned by her agents. The crime
+remained unknown; and not a whisper of it broke the king's exultation
+over his favourite's success. At the close of 1613 the scandal was
+crowned by the elevation of Rochester to the Earldom of Somerset and his
+union with Frances Howard. Murderess and adulteress as she was, the girl
+moved to her bridal through costly pageants which would have fitted the
+bridal of a queen. The marriage was celebrated in the king's presence.
+Ben Jonson devised the wedding song. Bacon spent two thousand pounds in
+a wedding masque. The London Companies offered sumptuous gifts. James
+himself forced the Lord Mayor to entertain the bride with a banquet in
+Merchant Taylors' House, and the gorgeous wedding-train wound in triumph
+from Westminster to the City.
+
+[Sidenote: Immorality of the Court.]
+
+The shameless bridal was a fitting close to the shameless divorce, as
+both were outrages on the growing sense of morality. But they harmonized
+well enough with the profusion and profligacy of the Stuart Court. In
+spite of Cecil's economy, the treasury was drained to furnish masques
+and revels on a scale of unexampled splendour. While debts remained
+unpaid, lands and jewels were lavished on young adventurers whose fair
+faces caught the royal fancy. Two years back Carr had been a penniless
+fortune-seeker. Now, though his ostensible revenues were not large, he
+was able to spend ninety thousand pounds in a single twelvemonth. The
+Court was as shameless as it was profuse. If the Court of Elizabeth was
+as immoral as that of her successor, its immorality had been shrouded by
+a veil of grace and chivalry. But no veil shrouded the degrading
+grossness of the Court of James. James was no drunkard, but he was a
+hard drinker, and with the people at large his hard drinking passed for
+drunkenness. When the Danish king visited England actors in a masque
+performed at Court were seen rolling intoxicated at his feet. The suit
+of Lady Essex had shown great nobles and officers of state content to
+play panders to their kinswoman. A yet more scandalous trial was soon to
+show them in league with cheats and astrologers and poisoners. James had
+not shrunk from meddling busily in the divorce or from countenancing the
+bridal. Before scenes such as these the half-idolatrous reverence with
+which the sovereign had been regarded throughout the age of the Tudors
+died away into abhorrence and contempt. Court prelates might lavish
+their adulation on the virtues and wisdom of the Lord's anointed; but
+the players openly mocked at the king on the stage, while Puritans like
+Mrs. Hutchinson denounced the orgies of Whitehall in words as fiery as
+those with which Elijah denounced the profligacy of Jezebel.
+
+[Sidenote: Parliament of 1614.]
+
+But profligate and prodigal as was the Court, Somerset had to face the
+stern fact of an empty Exchequer. The debt was growing steadily. It had
+now risen to seven hundred thousand pounds, while, in spite of the
+impositions, the annual deficit had mounted to two hundred thousand. The
+king had no mind to face the Parliament again; but a little experience
+of affairs had sobered the arrogance of the favourite, and there still
+remained counsellors of the same mind as Cecil, who pressed on him the
+need of reconciling the Houses with the Crown. What at last prevailed on
+the king were the pledges of some officious meddlers known as
+"undertakers" who promised to bring about the return to the House of
+Commons of a majority favourable to the demand of a subsidy. But pledges
+such as these fell dead before the general excitement which greeted the
+tidings of a new Parliament. Never had an election stirred so much
+popular passion as that of 1614. In every case where rejection was
+possible, the Court candidates were rejected. All the leading members of
+the country party, or as we should now term it, the Opposition, were
+again returned. But three hundred of the members were wholly new men;
+and among them we note for the first time the names of the leaders in
+the later struggle with the Crown. Calne returned John Pym; Yorkshire
+sent Thomas Wentworth; St. Germans chose John Eliot. Signs of
+unprecedented excitement were seen in the vehement cheering and hissing
+which for the first time marked the proceedings of the Commons. But,
+excited as they were, their policy was precisely that of the Parliament
+which had been dissolved three years before. James indeed was farther
+off from any notion of concession than ever; he had no mind to offer
+again the Great Contract or even to allow the subject of impositions to
+be named. But the Parliament was as firm as the king. It refused to
+grant supplies till it had considered public grievances, and it fixed on
+the impositions and the abuses of the Church as the first grievances to
+be redressed. Unluckily the inexperience of the bulk of the House of
+Commons led it into quarrelling on a point of privilege with the Lords;
+and though the Houses had sate but two months James seized on the
+quarrel as a pretext for a fresh dissolution.
+
+[Sidenote: Benevolences.]
+
+The courtiers mocked at the "addled Parliament," but a statesman would
+have learned much from the anger and excitement that ran through its
+stormy debates. During the session the king had been frightened beyond
+his wont by the tone of the Commons, but the only impressions which
+remained in his mind were those of wounded pride and stubborn
+resistance. He sent four of the leading members of the Lower House to
+the Tower, and fell back on an obstinate resolve to govern without any
+Parliament at all. The resolve was carried recklessly out through the
+next seven years. The protests of the Commons James looked on as a
+defiance of the Crown, and he met them in a spirit of counter-defiance.
+The abuses which Parliament after Parliament had denounced were not
+only continued but carried to a greater extent than before. The
+spiritual courts were encouraged in fresh encroachments. Though the
+Crown lawyers admitted the illegality of proclamations they were issued
+in greater numbers than ever. Impositions were strictly levied. But a
+policy of defiance did little to fill the empty treasury. A large sum
+was gained by the sale to the Dutch of the towns which had been left by
+the States in pledge with Elizabeth; but even this supply was exhausted,
+and a fatal necessity drove James on to a formal and conscious breach of
+law. Whatever question might exist as to the legality of impositions, no
+question could exist since the statute of Richard the Third that
+benevolences were illegal. Nor was there any question that the levy of
+benevolences would rouse a deep and abiding resentment in the nation at
+large. Even in the height of the Tudor power Wolsey had been forced to
+abandon a resource which stirred England to revolt. But the Crown
+lawyers advised that while the statute forbade the exaction of gifts it
+left the king free to ask for them; and James resolved to raise money by
+benevolences. At the close of the Parliament of 1614 therefore letters
+were sent out to the counties and boroughs in the name of the Council
+requesting contributions. The letters remained generally unanswered; and
+in the autumn fresh letters had to be sent out in which the war which
+now threatened German Protestantism in the Palatinate was used to spur
+the loyalty of the country to a response. The judges on assize were
+ordered to press the king's demand. But prayer and pressure failed
+alike. In the three years which followed the dissolution the strenuous
+efforts of the sheriffs only raised sixty thousand pounds, a sum less
+than two-thirds of the value of a single subsidy. Devonshire,
+Nottinghamshire, and Warwickshire protested against the benevolences,
+and Somersetshire appealed to the statute which forbade them. It was in
+vain that the western remonstrants were silenced by threats from the
+Council, and that the laggard shires were rated for their sluggishness
+in payment. Two counties, those of Hereford and Stafford, sent not a
+penny to the last.
+
+[Sidenote: Increase of the Peerage.]
+
+In his distress for money the king was driven to expedients which
+widened the breach between the gentry and the Crown. He had refused to
+part with the feudal rights which came down to him from the Middle Ages,
+such as his right to the wardship of young heirs and the marriage of
+heiresses. These were now recklessly used as a means of extortion.
+Similar abuses of the prerogative alienated the merchant class. London,
+the main seat of their trade and wealth, was growing fast; and its
+growth roused terror in the government. In 1611 a proclamation forbade
+any increase of buildings. But the proclamation remained inoperative
+till it was seized as a means of extortion. A Commission was issued in
+1614 with power to fine all who had disobeyed the king's injunctions,
+and by its means a considerable sum was gathered into the treasury. All
+that remained to be done was to alienate the nobles, and this James
+succeeded in doing by a measure in which political design went hand in
+hand with the needs of his finance. The Tudors had watched the baronage
+with jealousy, but they had made no attempt to degrade it. The nobles
+were sent to the prison and the block, but their rank and honours
+remained dignities which the Crown was chary to bestow even on the
+noblest of its servants. During the forty-five years of her reign
+Elizabeth raised but seven persons to the peerage, and with the
+exception of Burleigh all of these were of historic descent. The number
+of lay peers indeed had hardly changed for two centuries; they were
+about fifty at the accession of Henry the Fifth and counted but sixty at
+the accession of James. In so small an assembly, where the Crown could
+count on the unwavering support of ministers, courtiers, and bishops,
+the royal influence had through the last hundred years been generally
+supreme. But among the lords of the "old blood," as those whose honours
+dated from as far back as the Plantagenets were called, there lingered a
+spirit of haughty independence which, if it had quailed before the
+Tudors, showed signs of bolder life now the Tudors had gone. It was the
+policy of James to raise up a new nobility more dependent on the court,
+a nobility that might serve as a bridle on the older lords, while the
+increase in the numbers of the baronage which their creation brought
+about lessened the weight which a peer had drawn from his special and
+unique position in the realm. Such a policy fell in with the needs of
+his treasury. Not only could he degrade the peerage by lavishing its
+honours, but he could degrade it yet more by putting them up to sale. Of
+the forty-five lay peers whom he added to the Upper House during his
+reign, a large number were created by sheer bargaining. Baronies were
+sold to bidders at ten thousand pounds apiece. Ten nobles were created
+in a batch. Peerages were given to the Scotch dependants whom James
+brought with him, to Hume and Hay, and Bruce and Ramsay, as well as to
+his favourites Carr and Villiers. Robartes, of Cornwall, a man who had
+risen to great wealth through the Cornish mines, complained that he had
+been forced to take a baronage, for which he had to pay ten thousand
+pounds to a favourite's use.
+
+[Sidenote: The dismissal of Coke.]
+
+That this profuse creation of peers was more than the result of passing
+embarrassment was shown by its continuance under James's successors.
+Charles the First bestowed no less than fifty-six peerages; Charles the
+Second forty-eight. But in its immediate application it was no doubt
+little more than one of those financial shifts by which the king put off
+from day to day the necessity of again facing the one body which could
+permanently arrest his effort after despotic rule. There still however
+remained a body whose tradition was strong enough, if not to arrest, at
+any rate to check it. The lawyers had been subservient beyond all other
+classes to the Crown. Their narrow pedantry bent slavishly then, as now,
+before isolated precedents, while then, as now, their ignorance of
+general history hindered them from realizing the conditions under which
+these precedents had been framed, and to which they owed their very
+varying value. It was thus that the judges had been brought to support
+James in his case of the Post-Nati or in the levy of impositions. But
+beyond precedents even the judges refused to go. They had done their
+best in a case that came before them to restrict the jurisdiction of the
+ecclesiastical courts within legal and definite bounds, and their effort
+at once brought down on them the wrath of the king. All that affected
+the spiritual jurisdiction affected, he said, his prerogative; and
+whenever any case which affected his prerogative came before a court of
+justice he asserted that the king possessed an inherent right to be
+consulted as to the decision upon it. The judges timidly, though firmly,
+repudiated such a right as unknown to the law. To a king whose notions
+of law and of courts of law were drawn from those of Scotland, where
+justice had for centuries been a ready weapon in the royal hand, such a
+protest was utterly unintelligible. James sent for them to the royal
+closet. He rated them like schoolboys till they fell on their knees and
+with a single exception pledged themselves to obey his will. The one
+exception was the Chief Justice, Sir Edward Coke, a narrow-minded and
+bitter-tempered man, but of the highest eminence as a lawyer, and with a
+reverence for the law that overrode every other instinct. He had for
+some time been forced to evade the king's questions and "closetings" on
+judicial cases by timely withdrawal from the royal presence. But now
+that he was driven to answer, he answered well. When any case came
+before him, he said he would act as it became a judge to act. Coke was
+at once dismissed from the Council, and a provision which made the
+judicial office tenable at the king's pleasure, but which had long
+fallen into disuse, was revived to humble the common law in the person
+of its chief officer. In November 1616, on the continuance of his
+resistance, he was deprived of his post of Chief Justice.
+
+[Sidenote: The Crown and the Law.]
+
+No act of James seems to have stirred a deeper resentment among
+Englishmen than this announcement of his resolve to tamper with the
+course of justice. The firmness of Coke in his refusal to consult with
+the king on matters affecting his prerogative was justified by what
+immediately followed. As James interpreted the phrase, to consult with
+the king meant simply to obey the king's bidding as to what the
+judgement of a court should be. In the case which was then at issue he
+summoned the judges simply to listen to his decision; and the judges
+promised to enforce it. The king's course was an outrage on the growing
+sense of law; but his success was not without useful results. In his
+zeal to assert his personal will as the source of all power, whether
+judicial or other, James had struck one of its most powerful instruments
+from the hands of the Crown. He had broken the spell of the royal
+courts. If the good sense of Englishmen had revolted against their
+decisions in favour of the prerogative, the English reverence for law
+had made men submit to them. But now that all show of judicial
+independence was taken away, and the judges debased into mere
+mouthpieces of the king's will, the weight of their judgements came to
+an end. The nation had bent before their decision in favour of the
+Post-Nati; it had never a thought of bending before their decision in
+favour of Ship-money.
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of Somerset.]
+
+What an impassable gulf lay between the English conception of justice
+and that of James was shown even more vividly by the ruin of one who
+stood higher than Coke. At the opening of 1615 Somerset was still
+supreme. He held the rank of Lord Chamberlain; but he was practically
+the King's minister in state affairs, domestic or foreign. He was backed
+since his marriage by the influence of the Howards; and his
+father-in-law, Suffolk, was Lord Treasurer. He was girt round indeed by
+rivals and foes. The Queen was jealous of his influence over James;
+Archbishop Abbot dreaded his intrigues with Spain, intrigues which drew
+fresh meaning from the Catholic sympathies of the Howards; above all the
+older Lords of the Council, whom he ousted from any share in the
+government, watched eagerly for the moment when they hoped to regain
+their power by his fall. As he moved through the crowd of nobles he
+heard men muttering "that one man should not for ever rule them all."
+But Somerset's arrogance only grew with the danger. A new favourite was
+making way at court, and the king was daily growing colder. But Somerset
+only rated James for his coldness, demanded the dismissal of the new
+favourite, and refused to be propitiated by the king's craven apologies.
+His enemies however had a fatal card to play. In the summer whispers
+stole about of Overbury's murder, and of Somerset's part in it. The
+charge was laid secretly before the king, and a secret investigation
+conducted by his order threw darker and darker light on the story of
+guilt. Somerset was still unconscious of his peril, and the news that
+some meaner agents in the crime were arrested found him still with the
+king and in the seeming enjoyment of his wonted favour. He at once took
+horse for London to face his foes, and James parted from him with his
+usual demonstrations of affection. "He would neither eat nor drink," he
+said, "till he saw him again." He was hardly gone when James added, "I
+shall never see him more." His ruin in fact was already settled. In a
+few days he was a prisoner with his wife in the Tower; the agents in the
+fatal plot were sent to trial and to the gallows; and in May 1616 the
+young Countess was herself brought before the Lord Steward's Court to
+avow her guilt. Somerset's daring nature made a more stubborn stand. He
+threatened the king with disclosures, we know not of what, and when
+arraigned denied utterly any share in the murder. All however was in
+vain; and he and the Countess were alike sentenced to death.
+
+If ever justice called for the rigorous execution of the law, it was in
+the case of Frances Howard. Not only was the Countess a murderess, but
+her crime passed far beyond the range of common murders. Girl as she was
+when it was wrought, she had shown the coolness and deliberation of a
+practised assassin in her lust to kill. Chance foiled her efforts again
+and again, but she persisted for months, she changed her agents and her
+modes of death, till her victim was slain. Nor was her crime without
+profit. She gained by it all she wanted. The secret of her adultery was
+hidden. There was no one to reveal the perjuries of her divorce. Her
+ambition and her passion were alike gratified. She became the bride of
+the man she desired. Her kindred filled the court. Her husband ruled the
+king. If crime be measured by its relentless purpose, if the guilt of
+crime be heightened by its amazing success, then no woman that ever
+stood in the dock was a greater criminal than the wife of Rochester. Nor
+was this all. The wretched agents in her crime were sent pitilessly to
+the gallows. The guilt of two of them was at least technically doubtful,
+but the doubt was not suffered to interfere with their punishment. Only
+in the one case where no doubt existed, in the case of the woman who had
+spurred and bribed these tools to their crime, was punishment spared. If
+life was left to such a criminal, the hanging of these meaner agents was
+a murder. But this was the course on which James had resolved, and he
+had resolved on it from the first. There was no more pressure on him.
+The rivals of Somerset had no need for his blood. The councillors and
+the new favourite required only his ruin, and James himself was content
+with being freed from a dependant who had risen to be his master. His
+pride probably shrank from the shame which the public death of such
+criminals on such a charge might bring on himself and his crown; his
+good-nature pleaded for pity, and the claims of justice never entered
+his head. Before the trial began he had resolved that neither should
+die, and the sentence of the Earl and the Countess was soon commuted
+into that of an easy confinement during a few years in the Tower.
+
+[Sidenote: Villiers.]
+
+The fall of Somerset seemed to restore the old system of rule; and for a
+short time the Council regained somewhat of its influence. But when the
+Queen gave her aid in Somerset's overthrow she warned Archbishop Abbot
+that it was only the investiture of a new favourite with Somerset's
+power. And a new favourite was already on the scene. It had only been
+possible indeed to overthrow the Earl by bringing a fresh face into the
+court. In the autumn of 1614 the son of a Leicestershire knight, George
+Villiers, presented himself to James. He was poor and friendless, but
+his personal beauty was remarkable, and it was by his beauty that he
+meant to make his way with the king. His hopes were soon realized.
+Queen, Primate, Councillors seized on the handsome youth to pit him
+against the favourite; in spite of Somerset's struggles he rose from
+post to post; and the Earl's ruin sealed his greatness. He became Master
+of the Horse; before the close of 1616 he was raised to the peerage as
+Viscount Villiers, and gifted with lands to the value of eighty thousand
+pounds. The next year he was Earl of Buckingham; in 1619 he was made
+Lord High Admiral; a marquisate and a dukedom raised him to the head of
+the English nobility. What was of far more import was the hold he gained
+upon the king. Those who had raised the handsome boy to greatness as a
+means of establishing their own power found themselves foiled. From the
+moment when Somerset entered the Tower, Villiers virtually took his
+place as Minister of State. The councillors soon found themselves again
+thrust aside. The influence of the new favourite surpassed that of his
+predecessor. The payment of bribes to him or marriage to his greedy
+kindred became the one road to political preferment. Resistance to his
+will was inevitably followed by dismissal from office. Even the highest
+and most powerful of the nobles were made to tremble at the nod of this
+young upstart.
+
+[Sidenote: His character.]
+
+"Never any man in any age, nor, I believe, in any country," says the
+astonished Clarendon in reviewing his strange career, "rose in so short
+a time to so much greatness of honour, power, or fortune, upon no other
+advantage or recommendation than of the beauty or gracefulness of his
+person." Such, no doubt, was the general explanation of his rise among
+men of the time; and it would have been well had the account been true.
+The follies and profusion of a handsome minion pass lightly over the
+surface of a nation's life. Unluckily Villiers owed his fortune to other
+qualities besides personal beauty. He was amazingly ignorant, his greed
+was insatiate, his pride mounted to sheer midsummer madness. But he had
+no inconsiderable abilities. He was quick of wit and resolute of
+purpose; he shrank from no labour; his boldness and self-confidence
+faced any undertaking which was needful for the king's service; he was
+devoted, heart and soul, to the Crown. Over James his hold was that of a
+vehement and fearless temper over a mind infinitely better informed,
+infinitely more thoughtful and reflective, but vague and hesitating
+amidst all its self-conceit, crowded with theories and fancies, and with
+a natural bent to the unpractical and unreal. To such a mind the
+shallow, brilliant adventurer came as a relief. James found all his wise
+follies and politic moonshine translated for him into positive fact. He
+leant more and more heavily on an adviser who never doubted and was
+always ready to act. He drew strength from his favourite's
+self-confidence. Rochester had bent before greatness and listened more
+than once, even in the hour of his triumph, to the counsels of wiser
+men. But on the conceit of Villiers the warnings of Abbot, the counsels
+of Bacon, were lavished in vain. He saw no course but his own; and the
+showy, audacious temper of the man made that course always a showy and
+audacious one. It was this that made the choice of the new favourite
+more memorable than the choice of Carr. At a moment when conciliation
+and concession were most needed on the part of the Crown, the character
+of Villiers made concession and conciliation impossible. To James his
+new adviser seemed the weapon he wanted to smite with trenchant edge the
+resistance of the realm. He never dreamed that the haughty young
+favourite, on whose neck he loved to loll, and whose cheek he slobbered
+with kisses, was to drag down in his fatal career the throne of the
+Stuarts.
+
+[Sidenote: The Spanish marriage.]
+
+As yet the temper of Villiers was as little known to the country as to
+the king. But the setting up of a new favourite on the ruin of the old
+had a significance which no Englishman could miss. It proved beyond
+question that the system of personal rule which was embodied in these
+dependent ministers was no passing caprice, but the settled purpose of
+the king. And never had such immense results hung on his resolve. Great
+as was the importance of the struggle at home, it was for a while to be
+utterly overshadowed by the greatness of the struggle which was opening
+abroad. The dangers which Cecil had foreseen in Germany were fast
+drawing to a head. Though he had failed to put England in a position to
+meet them, the dying statesman remained true to his policy. In 1612 he
+brought about a marriage between the king's daughter, Elizabeth, and the
+heir of the Elector Palatine, who was the leading prince in the
+Protestant Union. Such a marriage was a pledge that England would not
+tamely stand by if the Union was attacked; while the popularity of the
+match showed how keenly England was watching the dangers of German
+Protestantism, and how ready it was to defend it. But the step was
+hardly taken when Cecil's death left James free to pursue a policy of
+his own. The king was as anxious as his minister to prevent an outbreak
+of strife; and his daughter's bridal gave him a personal interest in the
+question. But he was far from believing with Cecil that the support of
+England was necessary for effective action. On the contrary, his quick,
+shallow intelligence held that it had found a way by which the Crown
+might at once exert weight abroad and be rendered independent of the
+nation at home. This was by a joint action with Spain. Weakened as were
+the resources of Spain by her struggle in the Netherlands, she was known
+to be averse from the opening of new troubles in Germany; and James
+might fairly reckon on her union with him in the work of peace. Her
+influence with the German branch of the House of Austria, as well as the
+weight her opinion had with every Catholic power, made her efforts even
+more important than those of James with the Calvinists. And that such a
+union could be brought about the king never doubted. His son was growing
+to manhood; and for years Spain had been luring James to a closer
+friendship by hints of the Prince's marriage with an Infanta. Such a
+match would not only gratify the pride of a sovereign who in his
+earlier days in his little kingdom had been overawed by the great
+Catholic monarchy, and on whose imagination it still exercised a spell,
+but it would proclaim to the world the union of the powers in the work
+of peace, while it provided James with the means of action. For poor as
+Spain really was, she was still looked upon as the richest state in the
+world; and the king believed that the bride would bring with her a dowry
+of some half-a-million. Such a dowry would set him free from the need of
+appealing to his Parliament, and give him the means of acting
+energetically on the Rhine.
+
+[Sidenote: The policy of Spain.]
+
+That there were difficulties in the way of such a policy, that Spain
+would demand concessions to the English Catholics, that the marriage
+would give England a Catholic queen, that the future heir of its crown
+must be trained by a Catholic mother, above all that the crown would be
+parted by plans such as these yet more widely from the sympathy of the
+nation, James could not but know. What he might have known as clearly,
+had he been a wise man instead of a merely clever man, was that, however
+such a bargain might suit himself, it was hardly likely to suit Spain.
+Spain was asked in effect to supply a bankrupt king with the means of
+figuring as the protector of Protestantism in Germany, while the only
+consideration offered to her was the hand of Prince Charles. But it
+never occurred to James to look at his schemes in any other light than
+his own. On the dissolution of the Parliament of 1614 he addressed a
+proposal of marriage to the Spanish court. Whatever was its ultimate
+purpose, Spain was careful to feed hopes which secured, so long as they
+lasted, better treatment for the Catholics, and which might be used to
+hold James from any practical action on behalf of the Protestants in
+Germany. Her cordiality increased as she saw, in spite of her protests,
+the crisis approaching. One member of the Austrian house, Ferdinand, had
+openly proclaimed and carried out his purpose of forcibly suppressing
+heresy in the countries he ruled, the Tyrol, Carinthia, Carniola, and
+Styria; and his succession to the childless Matthias in the rest of the
+Austrian dominions would infallibly be followed by a similar repression.
+To the Protestants of the Duchy, of Bohemia, of Hungary, therefore, the
+accession of Ferdinand meant either utter ruin or civil war, and a civil
+war would spread like wildfire along the Danube to the Rhine. But
+Matthias was resolved on bringing about the recognition of Ferdinand as
+his successor; and Spain saw that the time was come for effectually
+fettering James. If troubles must arise, religion and policy at once
+dictated the use which Spain would have to make of them. She could not
+support heretics, and she had very good reasons for supporting their
+foes. The great aim of her statesmen was to hold what was left of the
+Low Countries against either France or the Dutch, and now that she had
+lost the command of the sea, the road overland from her Italian
+dominions along the Rhine through Franche Comte to the Netherlands was
+absolutely needful for this purpose. But this road led through the
+Palatinate; and if war was to break out Spain must either secure the
+Palatinate for herself or for some Catholic prince on whose good-will
+she could rely. That the Dutch would oppose such a scheme was
+inevitable; but James alone could give fresh strength to the Dutch; and
+James could be duped into inaction by playing with his schemes for a
+marriage with the Infanta. In 1617 therefore negotiations for this
+purpose were formally opened between the courts of London and Madrid.
+
+[Sidenote: Ralegh's death.]
+
+Anger and alarm spread through England as the nation learned that James
+aimed at placing a Catholic queen upon its throne. Even at the court
+itself the cooler heads of statesmen were troubled by this disclosure of
+the king's projects. The old tradition of Cecil's policy lingered among
+a powerful party which had its representatives among the royal
+ministers; and powerless as these were to influence the king's course,
+they still believed they could impede it. If by any means war could be
+stirred up between England and Spain the marriage-treaty would fall to
+ruin, and James be forced into union with the Protestants abroad and
+into some reconciliation with the Parliament at home. The wild project
+by which they strove to bring war about may have sprung from a brain
+more inventive than their own. Of the great statesmen and warriors of
+Elizabeth's day one only remained. At the opening of the new reign Sir
+Walter Ralegh had been convicted on a charge of treason; but though
+unpardoned the sentence was never carried out, and he had remained ever
+since a prisoner in the Tower. As years went by the New World, where he
+had founded Virginia and where he had gleaned news of a Golden City,
+threw more and more a spell over his imagination; and at this moment he
+disclosed to James his knowledge of a gold-mine on the Oronoco, and
+prayed that he might sail thither and work its treasures for the king.
+No Spanish settlement, he said, had been made there; and like the rest
+of the Elizabethans he took no heed of the Spanish claims to all lands
+in America, whether settled or no. The king was tempted by the bait of
+gold; but he had no mind to be tricked out of his friendship with Spain;
+he exacted a pledge against any attack on Spanish territory, and told
+Ralegh that the shedding of Spanish blood would cost him his head. The
+threat told little on a man who had risked his head again and again; who
+believed in the tale he told; and who knew that if war could be brought
+about between England and Spain a new career was open to him. He found
+the coast occupied by Spanish troops; and while evading direct orders to
+attack, he sent his men up the country. They plundered a Spanish town,
+found no gold-mine, and soon came broken and defeated back. Ralegh's son
+had fallen in the struggle; but, heart-broken as he was by the loss and
+disappointment, the natural daring of the man saw a fresh resource. He
+proposed to seize the Spanish treasure ships as he returned, to sail
+with their gold to England, and like Drake to turn the heads of nation
+and king by the immense spoil. But the temper of the buccaneers was now
+strange to English seamen; his men would not follow him; and he was
+brought home to face his doom. James at once put his old sentence in
+force; and the death of Ralegh on the scaffold atoned for the affront to
+Spain.
+
+[Sidenote: The troubles in Bohemia.]
+
+The failure of Ralegh came at a critical moment in German history. In
+1617, while he was traversing the Southern seas, Ferdinand was presented
+by Matthias to the Diet of Bohemia, and acknowledged by it as successor
+to that kingdom. As had been foreseen, he at once began the course of
+forcible suppression of Protestantism which had been successful in his
+other dominions. But the Bohemian nobles were not men to give up their
+faith without a fight for it; and in May 1618 they rose in revolt, flung
+Ferdinand's deputies out of the window of the palace at Prague, and
+called the country to arms. The long-dreaded crisis had come for
+Germany; but, as if with a foresight of the awful sufferings that the
+struggle was to bring, the Germans strove to look on it as a local
+revolt. The Lutheran princes longed only "to put the fire out"; the
+Calvinistic Union refused aid to the Bohemians; the Catholic League
+remained motionless. What partly accounted for the inaction of the
+Protestants was the ability of the Bohemians to hold their own. They
+were a match for all Ferdinand's efforts; through autumn and winter they
+held him easily at bay. In the spring of 1619 they even marched upon
+Vienna and all but surprised their enemy within his capital. But at this
+juncture the death of Matthias changed the face of affairs. Ferdinand
+became master of the whole Austrian heritage in Germany, and he offered
+himself as candidate for the vacant Imperial crown. Union among the
+Protestants might have hindered his accession, and with it the terrible
+strife which he was to bring upon the Empire. But an insane quarrel
+between Lutherans and Calvinists paralyzed their efforts; and in August
+1619 Ferdinand became Emperor. Bohemia knew that its strength was
+insufficient to check a foe such as this; and two days before his formal
+election to the Empire its nobles declared the realm vacant, and chose
+Frederick, the young Elector-Palatine, as their king.
+
+[Sidenote: Outbreak of the Thirty Years War.]
+
+Frederick accepted the crown; but he was no sooner enthroned at Prague
+than the Bohemians saw themselves foiled in the hopes which had
+dictated their choice. They had trusted that Frederick's election would
+secure them support from the Calvinist Union, of which he was the
+leading member, and from James, whose daughter was his wife. But support
+from the Union was cut off by the jealousy of the French Government,
+which saw with suspicion the upgrowth of a great Calvinistic power,
+stretching from Bohemia to its own frontier, and pushing its influence
+through its relations with the Huguenot party into the very heart of
+France. James on the other hand was bitterly angered at Frederick's
+action. He could not recognize the right of subjects to depose a prince,
+or support Bohemia in what he looked on as revolt, or Frederick in what
+he believed to be the usurpation of a crown. By envoy after envoy he
+called on his son-in-law to lay down his new royalty, and to return to
+the Palatinate. His refusal of aid to the Protestant Union helped the
+pressure of France in paralyzing its action, while he threatened war
+against Holland, the one power which was earnest in the Palatine's
+cause. It was in vain that in England both court and people were
+unanimous in a cry for war, or that Archbishop Abbot from his sick-bed
+implored James to strike one blow for Protestantism. James still called
+on Frederick to withdraw from Bohemia, and relied in such a case on the
+joint efforts of England and Spain for a re-establishment of peace. But
+no consent to his plans could be wrung from Frederick; and the spring of
+1620 saw Spain ready to throw aside the mask. The time had come for
+securing her road to the Netherlands, as well as for taking her old
+stand as a champion of Catholicism. Rumours of her purpose had already
+stolen over the Channel, and James was brought at last to suffer Sir
+Horace Vere to take some English volunteers to the Palatinate. But the
+succour came too late. Spinola, the Spanish general in the Low
+Countries, was ordered to march to the aid of the Emperor; and the
+famous Spanish battalions were soon moving up the Rhine. Their march
+turned the local struggle in Bohemia into a European war. The whole face
+of affairs was changed as by enchantment. The hesitation of the Union
+was ended by the needs of self-defence; but it could only free its hands
+for action against the Spaniards by signing a treaty of neutrality with
+the Catholic League. The treaty sealed the fate of Bohemia. It enabled
+the army of the League under Maximilian of Bavaria to march down the
+valley of the Danube; Austria was forced to submit unconditionally to
+Ferdinand; and in August, as Spinola reached the frontier of the
+Palatinate, the joint army of Ferdinand and the League prepared to enter
+Bohemia.
+
+[Sidenote: The Parliament of 1621.]
+
+On James the news of these events burst like a thunderbolt. He had been
+duped; and for the moment he bent before the burst of popular fury
+which the danger to German Protestantism called forth throughout the
+land. The cry for a Parliament, the necessary prelude to a war,
+overpowered the king's secret resistance; and the Houses were again
+called together. But before they could meet the game of Protestantism
+was lost. Spinola beat the troops of the Union back upon Worms, and
+occupied with ease the bulk of the Palatinate. On the 8th of November
+the army of the League forced Frederick to battle before the walls of
+Prague; and before the day was over he was galloping off, a fugitive, to
+North Germany. Such was the news that met the Houses on their assembly
+at Westminster in January 1621. The instinct of every Englishman told
+him that matters had now passed beyond the range of mediation or
+diplomacy. Armies were moving, fierce passions were aroused, schemes of
+vast ambition and disturbance were disclosing themselves; and at such a
+moment the only intervention possible was an intervention of the sword.
+The German princes called on James to send them an army. "The business
+is gone too far to be redressed with words only," said the Danish king,
+who was prepared to help them. "I thank God we hope, with the help of
+his Majesty of Great Britain and the rest of our friends, to give unto
+the Count Palatine good conditions. If ever we are to do any good for
+the liberty of Germany and religion now is the time." But this appeal
+met offers of "words only" and Denmark withdrew from the strife in
+despair. James in fact was as confident in his diplomatic efforts as
+ever; but even he saw at last that they needed the backing of some sort
+of armed force, and it was to procure this backing that he called for
+supplies from the Parliament.
+
+[Sidenote: Impeachment of the monopolists.]
+
+The Commons were bitterly chagrined. They had come together, trusting
+that their assembly meant such an attitude on the part of the Crown as
+would have rallied the Protestants of Germany round England, and have
+aided the enterprise of the Dane. Above all they hoped for war with the
+power which had at once turned the strife to its own profit, whose
+appearance in the Palatinate had broken the strength of German
+Protestantism, and set the League free to crush Frederick at Prague.
+They found only demands for supplies, and a persistence in the old
+efforts to patch up a peace. Fresh envoys were now labouring to argue
+the Emperor into forgiveness of Frederick, and to argue the Spaniards
+into an evacuation of Frederick's dominions. With such aims not only was
+no war against the Spaniard to be thought of, but his good-will must be
+sought by granting permission for the export of arms from England to
+Spain. The Commons could only show their distrust of such a policy by a
+small vote of supplies and refusal of further aid in the future. But if
+their resentment could find no field in foreign affairs, it found a
+field at home. The most crying constitutional grievance arose from the
+revival of monopolies, in spite of the pledge of Elizabeth to suppress
+them. To the Crown they brought little profit; but they gratified the
+king by their extension of the sphere of his prerogative, and they put
+money into the pockets of his greedy dependants. A parliamentary right
+which had slept ever since the reign of Henry the Sixth, the right of
+the Lower House to impeach great offenders at the bar of the Lords, was
+revived against the monopolists; and James was driven by the general
+indignation to leave them to their fate. But the practice of monopolies
+was only one sign of the corruption of the court. Sales of peerages,
+sales of high offices of State, had raised a general disgust; and this
+disgust showed itself in the impeachment of the highest among the
+officers of State.
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of Bacon.]
+
+At the accession of James the rays of royal favour, so long looked for
+in vain, had broken slowly upon Francis Bacon. He became successively
+Solicitor and Attorney-General; the year of Shakspere's death saw him
+called to the Privy Council; he verified Elizabeth's prediction by
+becoming Lord Keeper. At last the goal of his ambition was reached. He
+had attached himself to the rising fortunes of Buckingham, and in 1618
+the favour of Buckingham made him Lord Chancellor. He was raised to the
+peerage as Baron Verulam, and created, at a later time, Viscount St.
+Albans. But the nobler dreams for which these meaner honours had been
+sought escaped Bacon's grasp. His projects still remained projects,
+while to retain his hold on office he was stooping to a miserable
+compliance with the worst excesses of Buckingham and his master. The
+years during which he held the Chancellorship were, in fact, the most
+disgraceful years of a disgraceful reign. They saw the execution of
+Ralegh, the sacrifice of the Palatinate, the exaction of benevolences,
+the multiplication of monopolies, the supremacy of Buckingham. Against
+none of the acts of folly and wickedness which distinguished James's
+government did Bacon do more than protest; in some of the worst, and
+above all in the attempt to coerce the judges into prostrating the law
+at the king's feet, he took a personal part. But even his protests were
+too much for the young favourite, who regarded him as the mere creature
+of his will. It was in vain that Bacon flung himself on the Duke's
+mercy, and begged him to pardon a single instance of opposition to his
+caprice. A Parliament was impending, and Buckingham resolved to avert
+from himself the storm which was gathering by sacrificing to it his
+meaner dependants.
+
+To ordinary eyes the Chancellor was at the summit of human success.
+Jonson had just sung of him as one "whose even thread the Fates spin
+round and full out of their choicest and their whitest wool" when the
+storm burst. The Commons charged Bacon with corruption in the exercise
+of his office. It had been customary among Chancellors to receive gifts
+from successful suitors after their suit was ended. Bacon, it is
+certain, had taken such gifts from men whose suits were still unsettled;
+and though his judgement may have been unaffected by them, the fact of
+their reception left him with no valid defence. He at once pleaded
+guilty to the charge. "I do plainly and ingenuously confess that I am
+guilty of corruption, and do renounce all defence. I beseech your
+Lordships," he added, "to be merciful to a broken reed." Though the
+heavy fine laid on him was remitted by the Crown, he was deprived of the
+Great Seal and declared incapable of holding office in the State or
+sitting in Parliament. Fortunately for his after fame Bacon's life was
+not to close in this cloud of shame. His fall restored him to that
+position of real greatness from which his ambition had so long torn him
+away. "My conceit of his person," says Ben Jonson, "was never increased
+towards him by his place or honours. But I have and do reverence him for
+his greatness that was only proper to himself, in that he seemed to me
+ever by his work one of the greatest men, and most worthy of admiration,
+that had been in many ages. In his adversity I ever prayed that God
+would give him strength; for greatness he could not want." Bacon's
+intellectual activity was never more conspicuous than in the last four
+years of his life. He began a digest of the laws and a history of
+England under the Tudors, revised and expanded his essays, and dictated
+a jest-book. He had presented "Novum Organum" to James in the year
+before his fall; in the year after it he produced his "Natural and
+Experimental History." Meanwhile he busied himself with experiments in
+physics which might carry out the principles he was laying down in these
+works; and it was while studying the effect of cold in preventing animal
+putrefaction that he stopped his coach to stuff a fowl with snow and
+caught the fever which ended in his death.
+
+[Sidenote: James clings to Spain.]
+
+James was too shrewd to mistake the importance of Bacon's impeachment;
+but the hostility of Buckingham to the Chancellor, and Bacon's own
+confession of his guilt, made it difficult to resist his condemnation.
+Energetic too as its measures were against corruption and monopolists,
+the Parliament respected scrupulously the king's prejudices in other
+matters; and even when checked by an adjournment, resolved unanimously
+to support him in any earnest effort for the Protestant cause. A warlike
+speech from a member at the close of the session in June roused an
+enthusiasm which recalled the days of Elizabeth. The Commons answered
+the appeal by a unanimous vote, "lifting their hats as high as they
+could hold them," that for the recovery of the Palatinate they would
+adventure their fortunes, their estates, and their lives. "Rather this
+declaration," cried a leader of the country party when it was read by
+the Speaker, "than ten thousand men already on the march." For the
+moment indeed the energetic declaration seemed to give vigour to the
+royal policy. James had aimed throughout at the restitution of Bohemia
+to Ferdinand, and at inducing the Emperor, through the mediation of
+Spain, to abstain from any retaliation on the Palatinate. He now freed
+himself for a moment from the trammels of diplomacy, and enforced a
+cessation of the attack on his son-in-law's dominions by a threat of
+war. The suspension of arms lasted through the summer of 1621; but
+threats could do no more. Frederick still refused to make the
+concessions which James pressed on him, and the army of the League
+advancing from Bohemia drove the forces of the Elector out of the upper
+or eastern portion of the Palatinate. Again the general restoration
+which James was designing had been thrown further back than ever by a
+Catholic advance; but the king had no mind to take up the challenge. He
+was only driven the more on his old policy of mediation through the aid
+of Spain. An end was put to all appearance of hostilities. The
+negotiations for the marriage with the Infanta, which had never ceased,
+were pressed more busily. Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, who had
+become all-powerful at the English Court, was assured that no effectual
+aid should be sent to the Palatinate. The English fleet, which was
+cruising by way of menace off the Spanish coast, was called home. The
+king dismissed those of his ministers who still opposed a Spanish
+policy; and threatened on trivial pretexts a war with the Dutch, the one
+great Protestant power that remained in alliance with England, and was
+ready to back the Elector.
+
+[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Parliament.]
+
+But he had still to reckon with his Parliament; and the first act of the
+Parliament on its reassembling in November was to demand a declaration
+of war with Spain. The instinct of the nation was wiser than the
+statecraft of the king. Ruined and enfeebled as she really was, Spain to
+the world at large still seemed the champion of Catholicism. It was the
+entry of her troops into the Palatinate which had widened the local war
+in Bohemia into a struggle for the suppression of Protestantism along
+the Rhine; above all it was Spanish influence, and the hopes held out of
+a marriage of his son with a Spanish Infanta, which were luring the king
+into his fatal dependence on the great enemy of the Protestant cause.
+But the Commons went further than a demand for war. It was impossible
+any longer to avoid a matter so perilous to English interests, and in
+their petition the Houses coupled with their demands for war the demand
+of a Protestant marriage for their future king. Experience proved in
+later years how dangerous it was for English freedom that the heir to
+the Crown should be brought up under a Catholic mother; but James was
+beside himself at the presumption of the Commons in dealing with
+mysteries of State. "Bring stools for the Ambassadors," he cried in
+bitter irony as their committee appeared before him. He refused the
+petition, forbade any further discussion of State policy, and threatened
+the speakers with the Tower. "Let us resort to our prayers," a member
+said calmly as the king's letter was read, "and then consider of this
+great business." The temper of the House was seen in a Protestation with
+which it met the royal command to abstain from discussion. It resolved
+"That the liberties, franchises, privileges, and jurisdictions of
+Parliament are the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of
+the subjects of England; and that the arduous and urgent affairs
+concerning the king, State, and defence of the realm, and of the Church
+of England, and the making and maintenance of laws, and redress of
+grievances, which daily happen within this realm, are proper subjects
+and matter of council and debate in Parliament. And that in the handling
+and proceeding of those businesses every member of the House hath, and
+of right ought to have, freedom of speech to propound, treat, reason,
+and bring to conclusion the same." The king answered the Protestation
+by a characteristic outrage. He sent for the Journals of the House, and
+with his own hand tore out the pages which contained it. "I will
+govern," he said, "according to the common weal, but not according to
+the common will." A few days after, on the nineteenth of December, he
+dissolved the Parliament.
+
+[Sidenote: Spain holds back.]
+
+"It is the best thing that has happened in the interests of Spain and of
+the Catholic religion since Luther began preaching," wrote the Count of
+Gondomar to his master, in his joy that all danger of war had passed
+away. "I am ready to depart," Sir Henry Savile on the other hand
+murmured on his death-bed, "the rather that having lived in good times I
+foresee worse." In the obstinacy with which he clung to his Spanish
+policy James stood indeed absolutely alone; for not only the old
+nobility and the statesmen who preserved the tradition of the age of
+Elizabeth, but even his own ministers, with the exception of Buckingham
+and the Treasurer, Cranfield, were at one with the Commons in their
+distrust of Spain. But James persisted in his plans. By the levy of a
+fresh benevolence he was able to keep Vere's force on foot for a few
+months while his diplomacy was at work in Germany and at Madrid. The
+Palatinate indeed was lost in spite of his despatches; but he still
+trusted to bring about its restitution to the Elector through his
+influence with Spain. It was to secure this influence that he pressed
+for a closer union with the great Catholic power. What really bound him
+to such a foreign policy was his policy at home. If James cared for the
+restoration of the Palatinate, he cared more for the system of
+government he had carried out since 1610; and with that system, as he
+well knew, Parliaments were incompatible. But a policy of war would at
+once throw him on the support of Parliaments; and the experience of 1621
+had shown him at what a price that support must be bought. From war too,
+as from any policy which implied a decided course of action, the temper
+of James shrank. What he clung to was a co-operation with Spain in which
+the burden of enforcing peace on the German disputants should fall
+exclusively on that power. Of such a co-operation the marriage of his
+son Charles with the Infanta, which had so long been held out as a lure
+to his vanity, was to be the sign. But the more James pressed for this
+consummation of his projects, the more Spain held back. She too was
+willing to co-operate with James so long as such a co-operation answered
+her own purposes. Her statesmen had not favoured the war in Germany;
+even now they were willing to bring it to a close by the restoration of
+the Palatinate. But they would not abandon the advantages which the war
+had given to Catholicism; and their plan was to restore the Palatinate
+not to Frederick but to his son, and to bring up that son as a Catholic
+at Vienna. Of such a simple restoration of the religious and political
+balance in the Empire as James was contemplating, the statesmen of
+Madrid thought no more than they thought of carrying out the scheme of a
+marriage with his son. Spain had already gained all she wanted from the
+marriage-negotiations. They had held James from action; they had now
+made action even less possible by supplying a fresh ground of quarrel
+with the House of Commons. Had the match been likely to secure the
+conversion of England, or even a thorough toleration for Catholics, it
+might have been possible to consent to the union of a Spanish princess
+with a heretic. But neither result seemed probable: and the Spanish
+Court saw no gain in such a union as would compensate it for the loss of
+the Palatinate or the half-million which James counted on as the dowry
+of the bride.
+
+[Sidenote: End of the Spanish marriage.]
+
+But the more Spain hung back the hotter grew the impatience of
+Buckingham and James. At last the young favourite proposed to force the
+Spaniard's hand by the appearance of Prince Charles himself at Madrid.
+To the wooer in person Buckingham believed Spain would not dare to
+refuse either Infanta or Palatinate. James was too shrewd to believe in
+such a delusion, but in spite of his opposition the Prince quitted
+England in disguise in 1623, and at the beginning of March he appeared
+with Buckingham at Madrid to claim his promised bride. It was in vain
+that the Spanish Court rose in its demands; for every new demand was met
+by fresh concessions on the part of England. The abrogation of the penal
+laws against the worship of Catholics in private houses, a Catholic
+education for the Prince's children, a Catholic household for the
+Infanta, the erection of a Catholic church for her at Court, to which
+access should be free for all comers, were stipulations no sooner asked
+than they were granted. "We are building a chapel to the devil," said
+James when the last condition was laid before him; but he swore to the
+treaty and forced his councillors to swear to it. The marriage, however,
+was no nearer than before. The one thing which would have made it
+possible was a conversion of Charles to Catholicism; and though the
+Prince listened silently to arguments on the subject he gave no sign of
+becoming a Catholic. The aim of the Spanish ministers was to break off
+the match without a quarrel. They could only throw themselves on a
+policy of delay, and with this view the court theologians decided that
+the Infanta must in any case stay in Spain for a year after its
+conclusion till the conditions were fully carried out. Against such a
+condition Charles remonstrated in vain. And meanwhile the influence of
+the new policy on the war in Germany was hard to see. The Catholic
+League and its army under the command of Count Tilly won triumph after
+triumph over their divided foes. The reduction of Heidelberg and
+Mannheim completed the conquest of the Palatinate, whose Elector fled
+helplessly to Holland, while his Electoral dignity was transferred by
+the Emperor to the Duke of Bavaria. But there was still no sign of the
+hoped-for intervention on the part of Spain. At last the pressure of
+Charles on the subject of the Palatinate brought about a disclosure of
+the secret of Spanish policy. "It is a maxim of state with us," the
+Count of Olivares confessed, as the Prince demanded an energetic
+interference in Germany, "that the King of Spain must never fight
+against the Emperor. We cannot employ our forces against the Emperor."
+"If you hold to that," replied the Prince, "there is an end of all."
+Quitting Madrid he found a fleet at Santander, and on the fifth of
+October he again landed with Buckingham on the shores of England.
+
+[Sidenote: Prince Charles.]
+
+His return was the signal for a burst of national joy. All London was
+alight with bonfires in her delight at the failure of the Spanish match,
+and of the collapse, humiliating as it was, of a policy which had so
+long trailed English honour at the chariot-wheels of Spain. War seemed
+at last inevitable; for not only did James's honour call for some effort
+to win back the Palatinate for his daughter's children, but the
+resentment of Charles and Buckingham was ready to bear down any
+reluctance of the king. From the moment of their return indeed the
+direction of English affairs passed out of the hands of James into those
+of the favourite and the Prince. Charles started on his task of
+government with the aid of a sudden burst of popularity. To those who
+were immediately about him the journey to Madrid had revealed the
+strange mixture of obstinacy and weakness in the Prince's character, the
+duplicity which lavished promises because it never purposed to be bound
+by any, the petty pride that subordinated every political consideration
+to personal vanity or personal pique. Charles had granted demand after
+demand till the very Spaniards lost faith in his concessions. With rage
+in his heart at the failure of his efforts, he had renewed his betrothal
+on the very eve of his departure only that he might insult the Infanta
+by its contemptuous withdrawal as soon as he was safe at home. But to
+England at large the baser features of his character were still unknown.
+The stately reserve, the personal dignity and decency of manners which
+distinguished the Prince, contrasted favourably with the gabble and
+indecorum of his father. The courtiers indeed who saw him in his youth
+would often pray God that "he might be in the right way when he was set;
+for if he were in the wrong he would prove the most wilful of any king
+that ever reigned." But the nation was willing to take his obstinacy for
+firmness; as it took the pique which inspired his course on the return
+from Spain for patriotism and for the promise of a nobler rule.
+
+[Sidenote: The Parliament of 1624.]
+
+At the back of Charles stood the favourite Buckingham. The policy of
+James had recoiled upon its author. In raising his favourites to the
+height of honour James had looked to being at last an independent king.
+He had broken with parliaments, he had done away with the old
+administrative forms of government, that his personal rule might act
+freely through these creatures of his will. And now that his policy had
+reached its end, his will was set aside more ruthlessly than ever by the
+very instrument he had created to carry it out. In his zeal to establish
+the greatness of the monarchy he had brought on the monarchy a
+humiliation such as it had never known. Church, or Baronage, or Commons
+had many times in our history forced a king to take their policy for his
+own; but never had a mere minister of the Crown been able to force his
+policy on a king. This was what Buckingham set himself to do. The
+national passion, the Prince's support, his own quick energy, bore down
+the hesitation and reluctance of James. The king still clung desperately
+to peace. He still shrank from parliaments. But Buckingham overrode
+every difficulty. In February 1624 James was forced to meet a
+Parliament, and to concede the point on which he had broken with the
+last by laying before it the whole question of the Spanish negotiation.
+Buckingham and the Prince gave their personal support to a demand of the
+Houses for a rupture of the treaties with Spain and a declaration of
+war. A subsidy was eagerly voted; and as if to mark a new departure in
+the policy of the Stuarts, the persecution of the Catholics, which had
+long been suspended out of deference to Spanish intervention, began with
+new vigour. The favourite gave a fresh pledge of his constitutional aims
+by consenting to a new attack on a minister of the Crown. The Lord
+Treasurer, Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, had done much by his management
+of the finances to put the royal revenues on a better footing. But he
+was the head of the Spanish party; and he still urged the king to cling
+to Spain and to peace. Buckingham and Charles therefore looked coldly on
+while he was impeached for corruption and dismissed from office.
+
+[Sidenote: Buckingham's plans.]
+
+Though James was swept along helplessly by the tide, his shrewdness saw
+clearly the turn that affairs were taking; and it was only by hard
+pressure that the favourite succeeded in wresting his consent to
+Cranfield's disgrace. "You are making a rod for your own back," said the
+king. But Buckingham and Charles persisted in their plans of war. That
+these were utterly different from the plans of the Parliament troubled
+them little. What money the Commons had granted, they had granted on
+condition that the war should be exclusively a war against Spain, and a
+war waged as exclusively by sea. Their good sense shrank from plunging
+into the tangled and intricate medley of religious and political
+jealousies which was turning Germany into a hell. What they saw to be
+possible was to aid German Protestantism by lifting off it the pressure
+of the armies of Spain. That Spain was most assailable on the sea the
+ministers at Madrid knew as well as the leaders of the Commons. What
+they dreaded was not a defeat in the Palatinate, but the cutting off of
+their fleets from the Indies and a war in that new world which they
+treasured as the fairest flower of their crown. A blockade of Cadiz or a
+capture of Hispaniola would have produced more effect at the Spanish
+council-board than a dozen English victories on the Rhine. But such a
+policy had little attraction for Buckingham. His flighty temper exulted
+in being the arbiter of Europe, in weaving fanciful alliances, in
+marshalling imaginary armies. A treaty was concluded with Holland, and
+negotiations set on foot with the Lutheran princes of North Germany, who
+had looked coolly on at the ruin of the Elector Palatine, but were
+scared at last into consciousness of their own danger. Yet more
+important negotiations were opened for an alliance with France. To
+restore the triple league of France, England, and Holland was to restore
+the system of Elizabeth. Such a league would in fact have been strong
+enough to hold in check the House of Austria and save German
+Protestantism, while it would have hindered France from promoting and
+profiting by German disunion, as it did under Richelieu. But, as of old,
+James could understand no alliance that rested on merely national
+interests. A dynastic union seemed to him the one sure basis for joint
+action; and the plan for a French alliance became a plan for marriage
+with a French princess.
+
+[Sidenote: The French marriage.]
+
+The plan suited the pride of Charles and of Buckingham. But the first
+whispers of it woke opposition in the Commons. They saw the danger of a
+Roman Catholic queen. They saw yet more keenly the danger of pledges of
+toleration given to a foreign government, pledges which would furnish it
+with continual pretexts for interfering in the civil government of the
+country. Such an interference would soon breed on either side a mood for
+war. Before making these grants therefore they had called for a promise
+that no such pledges should be given, and as a subsidy hung on his
+consent James had solemnly promised this. But it was soon found that
+France was as firm on this point as Spain; and that toleration for the
+Catholics was a necessary condition of any marriage-treaty. The pressure
+of Buckingham and Charles was again brought to bear upon the king. The
+promise was broken and the marriage-treaty was signed. Its difficulties
+were quick to disclose themselves. It was impossible to call Parliament
+again together at winter tide, while such perfidy was fresh; and the
+subsidies, which had been counted on, could not be asked for. But a
+hundred schemes were pushed busily on; and twelve thousand Englishmen
+were gathered under an adventurer, Count Mansfield, to march to the
+Rhine. They reached Holland only to find themselves without supplies and
+to die of famine and disease.
+
+[Sidenote: Death of James.]
+
+If the blow fell lightly on the temper of the favourite, it fell heavily
+on the king. James was already sinking to the grave, and in the March of
+1625 he died with the consciousness of failure. Even his sanguine temper
+was broken at last. He had struggled with the Parliament, and the
+Parliament was stronger than ever. He had broken with Puritanism, and
+England was growing more Puritan every day. He had claimed for the Crown
+authority such as it had never known, and the Commons had impeached and
+degraded his ministers. He had raised up dependants to carry out a
+purely personal rule, and it was a favourite who was now treading his
+will under foot. He had staked everything on his struggle with English
+freedom, and the victory of English freedom was well-nigh won. James had
+himself destroyed that enthusiasm of loyalty which had been the main
+strength of the Tudor throne. He had disenchanted his people of their
+blind faith in the monarchy by a policy both at home and abroad which
+ran counter to every national instinct. He had alienated alike the
+noble, the gentleman, and the trader. In his feverish desire for
+personal rule he had ruined the main bulwarks of the monarchy. He had
+destroyed the authority of the Council. He had accustomed men to think
+lightly of the ministers of the Crown, to see them browbeaten by
+favourites, and driven from office for corruption. He had degraded the
+judges and weakened the national reverence for their voice as an
+expression of law. He had turned the Church into a mere engine for
+carrying out the royal will. And meanwhile he had raised up in the very
+face of the throne a power which was strong enough to cope with it. He
+had quarrelled with and insulted the Houses as no English sovereign had
+ever done before; and all the while the authority he boasted of was
+passing without his being able to hinder it to the Parliament which he
+outraged. There was shrewdness as well as anger in his taunt at its
+"ambassadors." A power had at last risen up in the Commons with which
+the monarchy was to reckon. In spite of the king's petulant outbreaks
+Parliament had asserted with success its exclusive right of taxation. It
+had suppressed monopolies. It had reformed abuses in the courts of law.
+It had impeached and driven from office the highest ministers of the
+Crown. It had asserted its privilege of freely discussing all questions
+connected with the welfare of the realm. It had claimed to deal with
+the question of religion. It had even declared its will on the sacred
+"mystery" of foreign policy. The utter failure of the schemes of James
+at home can only be realized by comparing the attitude of the Houses at
+his death with their attitude during the last years of Elizabeth. Nor
+was his failure less abroad than at home. He had found England among the
+greatest of European powers. He had degraded her into a satellite of
+Spain. And now from a satellite he had dropped to the position of a
+dupe. In one plan alone could he believe himself successful. If his son
+had missed the hand of a Spanish Infanta, he had gained the hand of a
+daughter of France. But the one success of James was the most fatal of
+all his blunders; for in the marriage with Henrietta Maria lay the doom
+of his race. It was the fierce and despotic temper of the Frenchwoman
+that was to nerve Charles more than all to his fatal struggle against
+English liberty. It was her bigotry--as the Commons foresaw--that
+undermined the Protestantism of her sons. It was when the religious and
+the political temper of Henrietta mounted the throne in James the Second
+that the full import of the French marriage was seen in the downfall of
+the Stuarts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+CHARLES I. AND THE PARLIAMENT
+
+1625-1629
+
+
+[Sidenote: Charles the First.]
+
+Had Charles mounted the throne on his return from Spain his accession
+would have been welcomed by a passionate burst of enthusiasm. He had
+aired himself as a staunch Protestant who had withstood Catholic
+seductions, and had come to nerve his father to a policy at one with the
+interests of religion and with the national will. But the few months
+that had passed since the last session of Parliament had broken the
+spell of this heroic attitude. The real character of the part which
+Charles had played in Spain was gradually becoming known. It was seen
+that he had been as faithless to Protestantism as his revenge had made
+him faithless to the Infanta. Nor had he shown less perfidy in dealing
+with England itself. In common with his father, he had promised that his
+marriage with a princess of France should in no case be made conditional
+on the relaxation of the penal laws against the Catholics. It was
+suspected, and the suspicion was soon to be changed into certainty, that
+in spite of this promise such a relaxation had been stipulated, and that
+a foreign power had again been given the right of intermeddling in the
+civil affairs of the realm. The general distrust of the new king was
+intensified by the conduct of the war. In granting its subsidies the
+Parliament of 1624 had restricted them to the purposes of a naval war,
+and that a war with Spain. It had done this after discussing and
+rejecting the wider schemes of the favourite for an intervention of
+England by land in the war of the Palatinate. But the grants once made,
+Buckingham's plans had gone on without a check. Alliances had been
+formed, subsidies promised to Denmark, and twelve thousand men actually
+despatched to join the armies on the Rhine. It was plain that the policy
+of the Crown was to be as unswayed by the will of the nation as in the
+days of King James. What it was really to be swayed by was the
+self-sufficient incapacity of the young favourite.
+
+[Sidenote: The king's policy.]
+
+A few months of action had shown Buckingham to England as he really was,
+vain, flighty, ingenious, daring, a brilliant but shallow adventurer,
+without political wisdom or practical ability, as little of an
+administrator as of a statesman. While projects without number were
+seething and simmering in his restless brain, while leagues were being
+formed and armies levied on paper, the one practical effort of the new
+minister had ended in the starvation of thousands of Englishmen on the
+sands of Holland. If English policy was once more to become a real and
+serious thing, it was plain that the great need of the nation was the
+dismissal of Buckingham. But Charles clung to Buckingham more blindly
+than his father had done. The shy reserve, the slow stubborn temper of
+the new king found relief in the frank gaiety of the favourite, in his
+rapid suggestions, in the defiant daring with which he set aside all
+caution and opposition. James had looked on Buckingham as his pupil.
+Charles clung to him as his friend. Nor was the new king's policy likely
+to be more national in Church affairs than in affairs of state. The war
+had given a new impulse to religious enthusiasm. The patriotism of the
+Puritan was strengthening his bigotry. To the bulk of Englishmen a fight
+with Spain meant a fight with Catholicism; and the fervour against
+Catholicism without roused a corresponding fervour against Catholicism
+within the realm. To Protestant eyes every English Catholic seemed a
+traitor at home, a traitor who must be watched and guarded against as
+the most dangerous of foes. A Protestant who leant towards Catholic
+usage or Catholic dogma was yet more formidable. To him men felt as
+towards a secret traitor in their own ranks. But it was to men with
+such leanings that Charles seemed disposed to show favour. Bishop Laud
+was recognized as the centre of that varied opposition to Puritanism,
+whose members were loosely grouped under the name of Arminians; and Laud
+now became the king's adviser in ecclesiastical matters. With Laud at
+its head the new party grew in boldness as well as numbers. It naturally
+sought for shelter for its religious opinions by exalting the power of
+the Crown; and its union of political error with theological heresy
+seemed to the Puritan to be at last proclaimed to the world when
+Montague, a court chaplain, ventured to slight the Reformed Churches of
+the Continent in favour of the Church of Rome, and to advocate in his
+sermon the Real Presence in the Sacrament and a divine right in kings.
+
+[Sidenote: The Parliament of 1625.]
+
+The Houses had no sooner met in the May of 1625 than their temper in
+religious matters was clear to every observer. "Whatever mention does
+break forth of the fears and dangers in religion and the increase of
+Popery," wrote a member who was noting the proceedings of the Commons,
+"their affections are much stirred." The first act of the Lower House
+was to summon Montague to its bar and to commit him to prison. In their
+grants to the Crown they showed no ill-will indeed, but they showed
+caution. They suspected that the pledge of making no religious
+concessions to France had been broken. They knew that the conditions on
+which the last subsidy had been granted had been contemptuously set
+aside. In his request for a fresh grant Charles showed the same purpose
+of carrying out his own policy without any regard for the national will
+by simply asking for supplies for the war without naming a sum or giving
+any indication of what war it was to support. The reply of the Commons
+was to grant a hundred and forty thousand pounds. A million would hardly
+cover the king's engagements, and Charles was bitterly angered. He was
+angered yet more by the delay in granting the permanent revenue of the
+Crown. The Commons had no wish to refuse their grant of tonnage and
+poundage, or the main customs duties, which had ever since Edward the
+Fourth's day been granted to each new sovereign for his life. But the
+additional impositions laid by James on these duties required further
+consideration, and to give time for a due arrangement of this vexed
+question the grant of the customs was made for a year only. But the
+limitation at once woke the jealousy of Charles. He looked on it as a
+restriction of the rights of the Crown, refused to accept the grant on
+such a condition, and adjourned the Houses. When they met again at
+Oxford it was in a sterner temper, for Charles had shown his defiance of
+Parliament by promoting Montague, who had been released on bond, to a
+royal chaplaincy, and by levying the disputed customs without authority
+of law. "England," cried Sir Robert Phelips, "is the last monarchy that
+yet retains her liberties. Let them not perish now." But the Commons had
+no sooner announced their resolve to consider public grievances before
+entering on other business than they were met in August by a
+dissolution.
+
+[Sidenote: The descent on Cadiz.]
+
+To the shallow temper of Buckingham the cautious firmness of the Commons
+seemed simply the natural discontent which follows on ill success. If he
+dissolved the Houses, it was in the full belief that their
+constitutional demands could be lulled by a military triumph. His hands
+were no sooner free than he sailed for the Hague to conclude a general
+alliance against the House of Austria, while a fleet of ninety vessels
+and ten thousand soldiers left Plymouth in October for the coast of
+Spain. But these vast projects broke down before Buckingham's
+administrative incapacity. The plan of alliance proved fruitless. After
+an idle descent on Cadiz the Spanish expedition returned broken with
+mutiny and disease; and the enormous debt which had been incurred in its
+equipment forced the favourite to advise a new summons of the Houses in
+the coming year. But he was keenly alive to the peril in which his
+failure had plunged him, and to a coalition which had been formed
+between his rivals at Court and the leaders of the last Parliament. The
+older nobles looked to his ruin to restore the power of the Council; and
+in this the leaders of the Commons went with them. Buckingham's
+reckless daring led him to anticipate the danger by a series of blows
+which should strike terror into his opponents. The Councillors were
+humbled by the committal of Lord Arundel to the Tower. Sir Robert
+Phelips, Coke, and four other leading patriots were made sheriffs of
+their counties, and thus prevented from sitting in the coming
+Parliament.
+
+[Sidenote: Eliot.]
+
+But their exclusion only left the field free for a more terrible foe. If
+Hampden and Pym are the great figures which embody the later national
+resistance, the earlier struggle for Parliamentary liberty centres in
+the figure of Sir John Eliot. Of an old family which had settled under
+Elizabeth near the fishing hamlet of St. Germans, and whose stately
+mansion gives its name of Port Eliot to a little town on the Tamar, he
+had risen to the post of Vice-Admiral of Devonshire under the patronage
+of Buckingham, and had seen his activity in the suppression of piracy in
+the Channel rewarded by an unjust imprisonment. He was now in the first
+vigour of manhood, with a mind exquisitely cultivated and familiar with
+the poetry and learning of his day, a nature singularly lofty and
+devout, a fearless and vehement temper. There was a hot impulsive
+element in his nature which showed itself in youth in his drawing sword
+on a neighbour who denounced him to his father, and which in later years
+gave its characteristic fire to his eloquence. But his intellect was as
+clear and cool as his temper was ardent. What he believed in was the
+English Parliament. He saw in it the collective wisdom of the realm; and
+in that wisdom he put a firmer trust than in the statecraft of kings. In
+the general enthusiasm which followed on the failure of the Spanish
+marriage, Eliot had stood almost alone in pressing for a recognition of
+the rights of Parliament as a preliminary to any real reconciliation
+with the Crown. He fixed, from the very outset of his career, on the
+responsibility of the royal ministers to Parliament as the one critical
+point for English liberty.
+
+[Sidenote: The Parliament of 1626.]
+
+It was to enforce the demand of this that he availed himself of
+Buckingham's sacrifice of the Treasurer, Cranfield, to the resentment of
+the Commons. "The greater the delinquent," he urged, "the greater the
+delict. They are a happy thing, great men and officers, if they be good,
+and one of the greatest blessings of the land: but power converted into
+evil is the greatest curse that can befall it." But the Parliament of
+1626 had hardly met when Eliot came to the front to threaten a greater
+criminal than Cranfield. So menacing were his words, as he called for an
+enquiry into the failure before Cadiz, that Charles himself stooped to
+answer threat with threat. "I see," he wrote to the House, "you
+especially aim at the Duke of Buckingham. I must let you know that I
+will not allow any of my servants to be questioned among you, much less
+such as are of eminent place and near to me." A more direct attack on a
+right already acknowledged in the impeachment of Bacon and Cranfield
+could hardly be imagined, but Eliot refused to move from his
+constitutional ground. The king was by law irresponsible, he "could do
+no wrong." If the country therefore was to be saved from a pure
+despotism, it must be by enforcing the responsibility of the ministers
+who counselled and executed his acts. Eliot persisted in denouncing
+Buckingham's incompetence and corruption, and the Commons ordered the
+subsidy which the Crown had demanded to be brought in "when we shall
+have presented our grievances, and received his Majesty's answer
+thereto." Charles summoned them to Whitehall, and commanded them to
+cancel the condition. He would grant them "liberty of counsel, but not
+of control"; and he closed the interview with a significant threat.
+"Remember," he said, "that Parliaments are altogether in my power for
+their calling, sitting, and dissolution: and therefore, as I find the
+fruits of them to be good or evil, they are to continue or not to be."
+But the will of the Commons was as resolute as the will of the king.
+Buckingham's impeachment was voted and carried to the Lords.
+
+[Sidenote: Impeachment of Buckingham.]
+
+The favourite took his seat as a peer to listen to the charge with so
+insolent an air of contempt that one of the managers appointed by the
+Commons to conduct it turned sharply on him. "Do you jeer, my Lord!"
+said Sir Dudley Digges. "I can show you when a greater man than your
+Lordship--as high as you in place and power, and as deep in the king's
+favour--has been hanged for as small a crime as these articles contain."
+But his arrogance raised a more terrible foe than Sir Dudley Digges. The
+"proud carriage" of the Duke provoked an attack from Eliot which marks a
+new era in Parliamentary speech. From the first the vehemence and
+passion of his words had contrasted with the grave, colourless reasoning
+of older speakers. His opponents complained that Eliot aimed to "stir up
+affections." The quick emphatic sentences he substituted for the
+cumbrous periods of the day, his rapid argument, his vivacious and
+caustic allusions, his passionate appeals, his fearless invective,
+struck a new note in English eloquence. The frivolous ostentation of
+Buckingham, his very figure blazing with jewels and gold, gave point to
+the fierce attack. "He has broken those nerves and sinews of our land,
+the stores and treasures of the king. There needs no search for it. It
+is too visible. His profuse expenses, his superfluous feasts, his
+magnificent buildings, his riots, his excesses, what are they but the
+visible evidences of an express exhausting of the state, a chronicle of
+the immensity of his waste of the revenues of the Crown?" With the same
+terrible directness Eliot reviewed the Duke's greed and corruption, his
+insatiate ambition, his seizure of all public authority, his neglect of
+every public duty, his abuse for selfish ends of the powers he had
+accumulated. "The pleasure of his Majesty, his known directions, his
+public acts, his acts of council, the decrees of courts--all must be
+made inferior to this man's will. No right, no interest may withstand
+him. Through the power of state and justice he has dared ever to strike
+at his own ends." "My Lords," he ended, after a vivid parallel between
+Buckingham and Sejanus, "you see the man! What have been his actions,
+what he is like, you know! I leave him to your judgement. This only is
+conceived by us, the knights, citizens, and burgesses of the Commons
+House of Parliament, that by him came all our evils, in him we find the
+causes, and on him must be the remedies! Pereat qui perdere cuncta
+festinat! Opprimatur ne omnes opprimat!"
+
+[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Parliament.]
+
+In calling for Buckingham's removal the Houses were but exercising a
+right or a duty which was inherent in their very character of
+counsellors of the Crown. There had never been a time from the earliest
+days of the English Parliament when it had not called for the dismissal
+of evil advisers. What had in older time been done by risings of the
+baronage had been done since the Houses gathered at Westminster by their
+protests as representatives of the realm. They were far from having
+dreamed as yet of the right which Parliament exercises to-day of naming
+the royal ministers, nor had they any wish to meddle with the common
+administration of government. It was only in exceptional instances of
+evil counsel, when some favourite like Buckingham broke the union of the
+nation and the king, that they demanded a change. To Charles however
+their demand seemed a claim to usurp his sovereignty. His reply was as
+fierce and sudden as the attack of Eliot. He hurried to the House of
+Peers to avow as his own the deeds with which Buckingham was charged;
+while Eliot and Digges were called from their seats and committed
+prisoners to the Tower. The Commons however refused to proceed with
+public business till their members were restored; and after a ten-days'
+struggle Eliot was released. But his release was only a prelude to the
+close of the Parliament. "Not one moment," the king replied to the
+prayer of his Council for delay; and a final remonstrance in which the
+Commons begged him to dismiss Buckingham from his service for ever was
+met on the sixteenth of June by their instant dissolution. The
+remonstrance was burnt by royal order; Eliot was deprived of his
+Vice-Admiralty; and on the old pretext alleged by James for evading the
+law, the pretext that what it forbade was the demand of forced loans and
+not of voluntary gifts to the Crown, the subsidies which the Parliament
+had refused to grant till their grievances were redressed were levied in
+the arbitrary form of benevolences.
+
+[Sidenote: The Forced Loan.]
+
+But the tide of public resistance was slowly rising. Refusals to give
+anything "save by way of Parliament" came in from county after county.
+When the subsidy-men of Middlesex and Westminster were urged to comply,
+they answered with a tumultuous shout of "A Parliament! a Parliament!
+else no subsidies!" Kent stood out to a man. In Bucks the very justices
+neglected to ask for the "free gift." The freeholders of Cornwall only
+answered that, "if they had but two kine, they would sell one of them
+for supply to his Majesty--in a Parliamentary way." The failure of the
+voluntary benevolence forced Charles to pass from evasion into open
+defiance of the law. He met it in 1627 by the levy of a forced loan. It
+was in vain that Chief Justice Crewe refused to acknowledge that such
+loans were legal. The law was again trampled under foot, as in the case
+of his predecessor, Coke; and Crewe was dismissed from his post.
+Commissioners were named to assess the amount which every landowner was
+bound to lend, and to examine on oath all who refused. Every means of
+persuasion, as of force, was resorted to. The pulpits of the Laudian
+clergy resounded with the cry of "passive obedience." Dr. Mainwaring
+preached before Charles himself, that the king needed no Parliamentary
+warrant for taxation, and that to resist his will was to incur eternal
+damnation. Soldiers were quartered on recalcitrant boroughs. Poor men
+who refused to lend were pressed into the army or navy. Stubborn
+tradesmen were flung into prison. Buckingham himself undertook the task
+of overawing the nobles and the gentry. Among the bishops, the Primate
+and Bishop Williams of Lincoln alone resisted the king's will. The first
+was suspended on a frivolous pretext, and the second was disgraced. But
+in the country at large resistance was universal. The northern counties
+in a mass set the Crown at defiance. The Lincolnshire farmers drove the
+Commissioners from the town. Shropshire, Devon, and Warwickshire
+"refused utterly." Eight peers, with Lord Essex and Lord Warwick at
+their head, declined to comply with the exaction as illegal. Two hundred
+country gentlemen, whose obstinacy had not been subdued by their
+transfer from prison to prison, were summoned before the Council; and
+John Hampden, as yet only a young Buckinghamshire squire, appeared at
+the board to begin that career of patriotism which has made his name
+dear to Englishmen. "I could be content to lend," he said, "but fear to
+draw on myself that curse in Magna Charta, which should be read twice a
+year against those who infringe it." So close an imprisonment in the
+Gate House rewarded his protest "that he never afterwards did look like
+the same man he was before."
+
+[Sidenote: Charles and France.]
+
+The fierce energy with which Buckingham pressed the forced loan was no
+mere impulse of angry tyranny. Never was money so needed by the Crown.
+The blustering and blundering of the favourite had at last succeeded in
+plunging him into war with his own allies. England had been told that
+the friendship of France, a friendship secured by the king's marriage
+with a French princess, was the basis on which Charles was building up
+his great European alliance against Spain. She now suddenly found
+herself at war with Spain and France together. The steps by which this
+result had been brought about throw an amusing light on the capacity of
+the young king and his minister. The occupation of the Palatinate had
+forced France to provide for its own safety. Spain already fronted her
+along the Pyrenees and the border of the Netherlands; if the Palatinate
+was added to the Spanish possession of Franche-Comte, it would close
+France in on the east as well as the north and the south. War therefore
+was being forced on the French monarchy when Charles and Buckingham
+sought its alliance against Spain; and nothing hindered an outbreak of
+hostilities but a revolt of the Protestant town of Rochelle. Lewis the
+Thirteenth pleaded the impossibility of engaging in such a struggle so
+long as the Huguenots could rise in his rear; and he called on England
+to help him by lending ships to blockade Rochelle into submission in
+time for action in the spring of 1625. The Prince and Buckingham brought
+James to assent; but Charles had no sooner mounted the throne than he
+shrank from sending ships against a Protestant city, and secretly
+instigated the crews to mutiny against their captains on an order to
+sail. The vessels, it was trusted, would then arrive too late to take
+part in the siege. Unluckily for this intrigue they arrived to find the
+city still in arms, and it was the appearance of English ships among
+their enemies which forced the men of Rochelle to submit. While
+Englishmen were angered by the use of English vessels against
+Protestantism, France resented the king's attempt to evade his pledge.
+Its Court resented yet more the hesitation which Charles showed in face
+of his Parliament in fulfilling the promise he had given in the
+marriage-treaty of tolerating Catholic worship; and its resentment was
+embittered by an expulsion from the realm of the French attendants on
+the new Queen, a step to which Charles was at last driven by their
+insolence and intrigues. On the other hand, French statesmen were
+offended by the seizure of French ships charged with carrying materials
+of war to the Spaniards, and by an attempt of the English sovereign to
+atone for his past attack on Rochelle by constituting himself mediator
+of a peace on behalf of the Huguenots.
+
+[Sidenote: The siege of Rochelle.]
+
+But though grounds of quarrel multiplied every day, the French minister,
+Richelieu, had no mind for strife. He was now master of the Catholic
+faction which had fed the dispute between the Crown and the Huguenots
+with the aim of bringing about a reconciliation with Spain; he saw that
+in the European conflict which lay before him the friendship or the
+neutrality of England was all but essential; and though he gathered a
+fleet in the Channel and took a high tone of remonstrance, he strove by
+concession after concession to avert war. But on war Buckingham was
+resolved. Of policy in any true sense of the word the favourite knew
+nothing; for the real interest of England or the balance of Europe he
+cared little; what he saw before him was the chance of a blow at a power
+he had come to hate, and the chance of a war which would make him
+popular at home. The mediation of Charles in favour of Rochelle had
+convinced Richelieu that the complete reduction of that city was a
+necessary prelude to any effective intervention in Germany. If Lewis was
+to be master abroad, he must first be master at home. But it was hard
+for lookers-on to read the Cardinal's mind or to guess with what a
+purpose he resolved to exact submission from the Huguenots. In England,
+where the danger of Rochelle seemed a fresh part of the Catholic attack
+upon Protestantism throughout the world, the enthusiasm for the
+Huguenots was intense; and Buckingham resolved to take advantage of this
+enthusiasm to secure such a triumph for the royal arms as should silence
+all opposition at home. It was for this purpose that the forced loan
+was pushed on; and in July 1627 a fleet of a hundred vessels sailed
+under Buckingham's command for the relief of Rochelle. But imposing as
+was his force, Buckingham showed himself as incapable a soldier as he
+had proved a statesman. The troops were landed on the Isle of Rhe, in
+front of the harbour; but after a useless siege of the Castle of St.
+Martin, the English soldiers were forced in October to fall back along a
+narrow causeway to their ships, and two thousand fell in the retreat
+without the loss of a single man to their enemies.
+
+[Sidenote: The Parliament of 1628.]
+
+The first result of the failure at Rhe was the summoning of a new
+Parliament. Overwhelmed as he was with debt and shame, Charles was
+forced to call the Houses together again in the spring of 1628. The
+elections promised ill for the Court. Its candidates were everywhere
+rejected. The patriot leaders were triumphantly returned. To have
+suffered in the recent resistance to arbitrary taxation was the sure
+road to a seat. It was this question which absorbed all others in men's
+minds. Even Buckingham's removal was of less moment than the redress of
+personal wrongs; and some of the chief leaders of the Commons had not
+hesitated to bring Charles to consent to summon Parliament by promising
+to abstain from attacks on Buckingham. Against such a resolve Eliot
+protested in vain. But on the question of personal liberty the tone of
+the Commons when they met in March was as vehement as that of Eliot. "We
+must vindicate our ancient liberties," said Sir Thomas Wentworth in
+words soon to be remembered against himself: "we must reinforce the laws
+made by our ancestors. We must set such a stamp upon them, as no
+licentious spirit shall dare hereafter to invade them." Heedless of
+sharp and menacing messages from the king, of demands that they should
+take his "royal word" for their liberties, the House bent itself to one
+great work, the drawing up a Petition of Right. The statutes that
+protected the subject against arbitrary taxation, against loans and
+benevolences, against punishment, outlawry, or deprivation of goods,
+otherwise than by lawful judgement of his peers, against arbitrary
+imprisonment without stated charge, against billeting of soldiery on the
+people or enactment of martial law in time of peace, were formally
+recited. The breaches of them under the last two sovereigns, and above
+all since the dissolution of the last Parliament, were recited as
+formally. At the close of this significant list, the Commons prayed
+"that no man hereafter be compelled to make or yield any gift, loan,
+benevolence, tax, or such like charge, without common consent by Act of
+Parliament. And that none be called to make answer, or to take such
+oaths, or to be confined or otherwise molested or disputed concerning
+the same, or for refusal thereof. And that no freeman may in such
+manner as is before mentioned be imprisoned or detained. And that your
+Majesty would be pleased to remove the said soldiers and mariners, and
+that your people may not be so burthened in time to come. And that the
+commissions for proceeding by martial law may be revoked and annulled,
+and that hereafter no commissions of like nature may issue forth to any
+person or persons whatsoever to be executed as aforesaid, lest by colour
+of them any of your Majesty's subjects be destroyed and put to death,
+contrary to the laws and franchises of the land. All which they humbly
+pray of your most excellent Majesty, as their rights and liberties,
+according to the laws and statutes of the realm. And that your Majesty
+would also vouchsafe to declare that the awards, doings, and proceedings
+to the prejudice of your people in any of the premisses shall not be
+drawn hereafter into consequence or example. And that your Majesty would
+be pleased graciously for the further comfort and safety of your people
+to declare your royal will and pleasure, that in the things aforesaid
+all your officers and ministers shall serve you according to the laws
+and statutes of this realm, as they tender the honour of your Majesty
+and the prosperity of the kingdom."
+
+[Sidenote: The Petition of Right.]
+
+It was in vain that the Lords strove to conciliate Charles by a
+reservation of his "sovereign power." "Our petition," Pym quietly
+replied, "is for the laws of England, and this power seems to be another
+power distinct from the power of the law." The Lords yielded, but
+Charles gave an evasive reply; and the failure of the more moderate
+counsels for which his own had been set aside called Eliot again to the
+front. In a speech of unprecedented boldness he moved the presentation
+to the king of a Remonstrance on the state of the realm. But at the
+moment when he again touched on Buckingham's removal as the preliminary
+of any real improvement the Speaker of the House interposed. "There was
+a command laid on him," he said, "to interrupt any that should go about
+to lay an aspersion on the king's ministers." The breach of their
+privilege of free speech produced a scene in the Commons such as St.
+Stephen's had never witnessed before. Eliot sate abruptly down amidst
+the solemn silence of the House. "Then appeared such a spectacle of
+passions," says a letter of the time, "as the like had seldom been seen
+in such an assembly: some weeping, some expostulating, some prophesying
+of the fatal ruin of our kingdom, some playing the divines in confessing
+their sins and country's sins which drew these judgements upon us, some
+finding, as it were, fault with those that wept. There were above an
+hundred weeping eyes, many who offered to speak being interrupted and
+silenced by their own passions." Pym himself rose only to sit down
+choked with tears. At last Sir Edward Coke found words to blame himself
+for the timid counsels which had checked Eliot at the beginning of the
+Session, and to protest "that the author and source of all those
+miseries was the Duke of Buckingham." Shouts of assent greeted the
+resolution to insert the Duke's name in the Remonstrance. But at this
+moment the king's obstinacy gave way. A fresh expedition, which had been
+sent to Rochelle, returned unsuccessful; and if the siege was to be
+raised far greater and costlier efforts must be made. And that the siege
+should be raised Buckingham was still resolved. All his energies were
+now enlisted in this project; and to get supplies for his fleet he bent
+the king to consent in June to the Petition of Right. As Charles
+understood it, indeed, the consent meant little. The one point for which
+he really cared was the power of keeping men in prison without bringing
+them to trial or assigning causes for their imprisonment. On this he had
+consulted his judges; and they had answered that his consent to the
+Petition left his rights untouched; like other laws, they said, the
+Petition would have to be interpreted when it came before them, and the
+prerogative remained unaffected. As to the rest, while waiving all claim
+to levy taxes not granted by Parliament, Charles still reserved his
+right to levy impositions paid customarily to the Crown, and amongst
+these he counted tonnage and poundage. Of these reserves however the
+Commons knew nothing. The king's consent won a grant of subsidy, and
+such a ringing of bells and lighting of bonfires from the people "as
+were never seen but upon his Majesty's return from Spain."
+
+[Sidenote: Death of Buckingham.]
+
+But, like all the king's concessions, it came too late to effect the end
+at which he aimed. The Commons persisted in presenting their
+Remonstrance. Charles received it coldly and ungraciously; while
+Buckingham, who had stood defiantly at his master's side as he was
+denounced, fell on his knees to speak. "No, George!" said the king as he
+raised him; and his demeanour gave emphatic proof that the Duke's favour
+remained undiminished. "We will perish together, George," he added at a
+later time, "if thou dost." He had in fact got the subsidies which he
+needed; and it was easy to arrest all proceedings against Buckingham by
+proroguing Parliament at the close of June. The Duke himself cared
+little for a danger which he counted on drowning in the blaze of a
+speedy triumph. He had again gathered a strong fleet and a fine body of
+men, and his ardent fancy already saw the harbour of Rochelle forced and
+the city relieved. No shadow of his doom had fallen over the brilliant
+favourite when he set out in August to take command of the expedition.
+But a lieutenant in the army, John Felton, soured by neglect and wrongs,
+had found in the Remonstrance some imaginary sanction for the revenge
+he plotted; and, mixing with the throng which crowded the hall at
+Portsmouth, he stabbed Buckingham to the heart. Charles flung himself on
+his bed in a passion of tears when the news reached him; but outside the
+Court it was welcomed with a burst of joy. Young Oxford bachelors, grave
+London Aldermen, vied with each other in drinking healths to Felton.
+"God bless thee, little David," cried an old woman, as the murderer
+passed manacled by; "the Lord comfort thee," shouted the crowd, as the
+Tower gates closed on him. The very forces in the Duke's armament at
+Portsmouth shouted to the king, as he witnessed their departure, a
+prayer that he would "spare John Felton, their sometime fellow-soldier."
+But whatever national hopes the fall of Buckingham had aroused were
+quickly dispelled. Weston, a creature of the Duke, became Lord
+Treasurer, and his system remained unchanged. "Though our Achan is cut
+off," said Eliot, "the accursed thing remains."
+
+[Sidenote: The Laudian Clergy.]
+
+It seemed as if no act of Charles could widen the breach which his
+reckless lawlessness had made between himself and his subjects. But
+there was one thing dearer to England than free speech in Parliament,
+than security for property, or even personal liberty; and that one thing
+was, in the phrase of the day, "the Gospel." The gloom which at the
+outset of this reign we saw settling down on every Puritan heart had
+deepened with each succeeding year. The great struggle abroad had gone
+more and more against Protestantism, and at this moment the end of the
+cause seemed to have come. In Germany Lutheran and Calvinist alike lay
+at last beneath the heel of the Catholic House of Austria. The fall of
+Rochelle, which followed quick on the death of Buckingham, seemed to
+leave the Huguenots of France at the feet of a Roman Cardinal. In such a
+time as this, while England was thrilling with excitement at the thought
+that her own hour of deadly peril might come again, as it had come in
+the year of the Armada, the Puritans saw with horror the quick growth of
+Arminianism at home. Laud was now Bishop of London as well as the
+practical administrator of Church affairs, and to the excited
+Protestantism of the country Laud and the Churchmen whom he headed
+seemed a danger more really formidable than the Popery which was making
+such mighty strides abroad. To the Puritans they were traitors, traitors
+to God and their country at once. Their aim was to draw the Church of
+England farther away from the Protestant Churches, and nearer to the
+Church which Protestants regarded as Babylon. They aped Roman
+ceremonies. Cautiously and tentatively they were introducing Roman
+doctrine. But they had none of the sacerdotal independence which Rome
+had at any rate preserved. They were abject in their dependence on the
+Crown. Their gratitude for the royal protection which enabled them to
+defy the religious instincts of the realm showed itself in their
+erection of the most dangerous pretensions of the monarchy into
+religious dogmas. Their model, Bishop Andrewes, had declared James to
+have been inspired by God. They preached passive obedience to the worst
+tyranny. They declared the person and goods of the subject to be at the
+king's absolute disposal. They were turning religion into a systematic
+attack on English liberty, nor was their attack to be lightly set aside.
+Up to this time they had been little more than a knot of courtly
+parsons, for the mass of the clergy, like their flocks, were steady
+Puritans; but the well-known energy of Laud and the open patronage of
+the Court promised a speedy increase of their numbers and their power.
+It was significant that upon the prorogation of 1628 Montague had been
+made a bishop, and Mainwaring, who had called Parliaments ciphers in the
+state, had been rewarded with a fat living. Instances such as these
+would hardly be lost on the mass of the clergy, and sober men looked
+forward to a day when every pulpit would be ringing with exhortations to
+passive obedience, with denunciations of Calvinism and apologies for
+Rome.
+
+[Sidenote: The Avowal.]
+
+Of all the members of the House of Commons Eliot was least fanatical in
+his natural bent, but the religious crisis swept away for the moment
+all other thoughts from his mind. "Danger enlarges itself in so great a
+measure," he wrote from the country, "that nothing but Heaven shrouds us
+from despair." When the Commons met again in January 1629, they met in
+Eliot's temper. The first business called up was that of religion. The
+House refused to consider any question of supplies, or even that of
+tonnage and poundage, which still remained unsettled though Charles had
+persisted in levying these duties without any vote of Parliament, till
+the religious grievance was discussed. "The Gospel," Eliot burst forth,
+"is that Truth in which this kingdom has been happy through a long and
+rare prosperity. This ground therefore let us lay for a foundation of
+our building, that that Truth, not with words, but with actions we will
+maintain!" "There is a ceremony," he went on, "used in the Eastern
+Churches, of standing at the repetition of the Creed, to testify their
+purpose to maintain it, not only with their bodies upright, but with
+their swords drawn. Give me leave to call that a custom very
+commendable!" The Commons answered their leader's challenge by a solemn
+avowal. They avowed that they held for truth that sense of the Articles
+as established by Parliament, which by the public act of the Church, and
+the general and current exposition of the writers of their Church, had
+been delivered unto them. It is easy to regard such an avowal as a mere
+outburst of Puritan bigotry, and the opposition of Charles as a defence
+of the freedom of religious thought. But the real importance of the
+avowal both to king and Commons lay in its political significance. In
+the mouth of the Commons it was a renewal of the claim that all affairs
+of the realm, spiritual as well as temporal, were cognizable in
+Parliament. To Charles it seemed as if the Commons were taking to
+themselves, in utter defiance of his rights as governor of the Church,
+"the interpretation of articles of religion; the deciding of which in
+doctrinal points," to use his own words, "only appertaineth to the
+clergy and Convocation." To use more modern phrases, the king insisted
+that the nation should receive its creed at the hands of the priesthood
+and the Crown. England in the avowal of Parliament asserted that the
+right to determine the belief of a nation lay with the nation itself.
+
+[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Parliament.]
+
+But the debates over religion were suddenly interrupted. In granting the
+Petition of Right we have seen that Charles had no purpose of parting
+with his power of arbitrary arrest or of levying customs. Both practices
+in fact went on as before, and the goods of merchants who refused to pay
+tonnage and poundage were seized as of old. At the reopening of the
+Session indeed the king met the Commons with a proposal that they should
+grant him tonnage and poundage and pass silently over what had been
+done by his officers. But the House was far from assenting to the
+interpretation which Charles had put on the Petition, and it was
+resolved to vindicate what it held to be the law. It deferred all grant
+of customs till the wrong done in the illegal levy of them was
+redressed, and summoned the farmers of those dues to the bar. But though
+they appeared, they pleaded the king's command as a ground for their
+refusal to answer. The House was proceeding to a protest, when on the
+second of March the Speaker signified that he had received an order to
+adjourn. Dissolution was clearly at hand, and the long-suppressed
+indignation broke out in a scene of strange disorder. The Speaker was
+held down in the chair, while Eliot, still clinging to his great
+principle of ministerial responsibility, denounced the new Treasurer as
+the adviser of the measure. "None have gone about to break Parliaments,"
+he added in words to which after events gave a terrible significance,
+"but in the end Parliaments have broken them." The doors were locked,
+and in spite of the Speaker's protests, of the repeated knocking of the
+usher at the door, and the gathering tumult within the House itself, the
+loud "Aye, Aye!" of the bulk of the members supported Eliot in his last
+vindication of English liberty. By successive resolutions the Commons
+declared whomsoever should bring in innovations in religion, or whatever
+minister endorsed the levy of subsidies not granted in Parliament, "a
+capital enemy to the kingdom and commonwealth," and every subject
+voluntarily complying with illegal acts and demands "a betrayer of the
+liberty of England and an enemy of the same."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE RISING OF THE SCOTS
+
+1635-1640
+
+
+[Sidenote: England in 1635.]
+
+When Weston died in 1635 six years had passed without a Parliament, and
+the Crown was at the height of its power. Its financial difficulties
+seemed coming to an end. The long peace, the rigid economy of
+administration, the use of forgotten rights and vexatious monopolies,
+had now halved the amount of debt, while they had raised the revenue to
+a level with the royal expenditure. Charles had no need of subsidies;
+and without the need of subsidies he saw no ground for again
+encountering the opposition of Parliament. The religious difficulty gave
+him as little anxiety. If Laud was taking harsh courses with the
+Puritans, he seemed to be successful in his struggle with Puritanism.
+The most able among its ministers were silenced or deprived. The most
+earnest of its laymen were flying over seas. But there was no show of
+opposition to the reforms of the Primate or the High Commission. In the
+two dependent kingdoms all appeared to be going well. In Scotland
+Charles had begun quietly to carry further his father's schemes for
+religious uniformity; but there was no voice of protest. In Ireland
+Wentworth could point to a submissive Parliament and a well-equipped
+army, ready to serve the king on either side St. George's Channel. The
+one solitary anxiety of Charles, in fact, lay in the aspect of foreign
+affairs. The union of Holland and of France had done the work that
+England had failed to do in saving German Protestantism from the grasp
+of the House of Austria. But if their union was of service to Germany,
+it brought danger to England. France was its ancient foe. The commercial
+supremacy of the Dutch was threatening English trade. The junction of
+their fleets would at once enable them to challenge the right of
+dominion which England claimed over the Channel. And at this moment
+rumours came of a scheme of partition by which the Spanish Netherlands
+were to be shared between the French and the Dutch, and by which Dunkirk
+was at once to be attacked and given into the hands of France.
+
+[Sidenote: Ship-money.]
+
+To suffer the extension of France along the shores of the Netherlands
+had seemed impossible to English statesmen from the days of Elizabeth.
+To surrender the command of the Channel was equally galling to the
+national pride. Even Weston, fond as he was of peace, had seen the need
+of putting a strong fleet upon the seas; and in 1634 Spain engaged to
+defray part of the expense of equipping such a fleet in the hope that
+the king's demand would bring on war with Holland and with France. But
+money had to be found at home, and as Charles would not hear of the
+gathering of a Parliament means had to be got by a new stretch of
+prerogative. The legal research of Noy, one of the law-officers of the
+Crown, found precedents among the records in the Tower for the provision
+of ships for the king's use by the port-towns of the kingdom, and for
+the furnishing of their equipment by the maritime counties. The
+precedents dated from times when no permanent fleet existed, and when
+sea warfare could only be waged by vessels lent for the moment by the
+various ports. But they were seized as a means of equipping a permanent
+navy without cost to the Exchequer; the first demand of ships was soon
+commuted into a demand of money for the provision of ships; and the
+writs for the payment of ship-money which were issued to London and
+other coast-towns were enforced by fine and imprisonment. The money was
+paid, and in 1635 a fleet put to sea. The Spaniards however were too
+poor to fulfil their share of the bargain; they sent neither money nor
+vessels; and Charles shrank from a contest single-handed with France and
+the Dutch. But with the death of the Earl of Portland a bolder hand
+seized the reins of power. To Laud as to Wentworth the system of Weston
+had hardly seemed government at all. In the correspondence which passed
+between the two ministers the king was censured as over-cautious, the
+Star Chamber as feeble, the judges as over-scrupulous. "I am for
+Thorough," the one writes to the other in alternate fits of impatience
+at the slow progress they are making. Wentworth was anxious that his
+good work might not "be spoiled on that side." Laud echoed the wish,
+while he envied the free course of the Lord Lieutenant. "You have a good
+deal of humour here," he writes, "for your proceeding. Go on a' God's
+name. I have done with expecting of Thorough on this side."
+
+[Sidenote: The new ship-money.]
+
+With feelings such as these Laud no sooner took the direction of affairs
+than a more vigorous and unscrupulous impulse made itself felt. Far from
+being drawn from his projects by the desertion of Spain, Charles was
+encouraged to carry them out by his own efforts. It was determined to
+strengthen the fleet; and funds for this purpose were raised by an
+extension of the levy of ship-money. The pretence of precedents was
+thrown aside, and Laud resolved to find a permanent revenue in the
+conversion of the "ship-money," till now levied on ports and the
+maritime counties, into a general tax imposed by the royal will upon the
+whole country. The sum expected from the tax was no less than a quarter
+of a million a year. "I know no reason," Wentworth had written
+significantly, "but you may as well rule the common lawyers in England
+as I, poor beagle, do here"; and the judges no sooner declared the new
+impost to be legal than he drew the logical deduction from their
+decision. "Since it is lawful for the king to impose a tax for the
+equipment of the navy, it must be equally so for the levy of an army:
+and the same reason which authorizes him to levy an army to resist, will
+authorize him to carry that army abroad that he may prevent invasion.
+Moreover what is law in England is law also in Scotland and Ireland. The
+decision of the judges will therefore make the king absolute at home and
+formidable abroad. Let him only abstain from war for a few years that he
+may habituate his subjects to the payment of that tax, and in the end he
+will find himself more powerful and respected than any of his
+predecessors." "The debt of the Crown being taken off," he wrote to
+Charles, "you may govern at your will."
+
+[Sidenote: John Hampden.]
+
+But there were men who saw the danger to freedom in this levy of
+ship-money as clearly as Wentworth himself. The bulk of the country
+party abandoned all hope of English freedom. There was a sudden revival
+of the emigration to New England; and men of blood and fortune now
+prepared to seek a new home in the West. Lord Warwick secured the
+proprietorship of the Connecticut valley. Lord Saye and Sele and Lord
+Brooke began negotiations for transporting themselves to the New World.
+Oliver Cromwell is said, by a doubtful tradition, to have only been
+prevented from crossing the seas by a royal embargo. It is more certain
+that John Hampden purchased a tract of land on the Narragansett. No
+visionary danger would have brought the soul of Hampden to the thought
+of flight. He was sprung of an ancient line, which had been true to the
+House of Lancaster in the Wars of the Roses, and whose fidelity had been
+rewarded by the favour of the Tudors. On the brow of the Chilterns an
+opening in the woods has borne the name of "the Queen's Gap" ever since
+Griffith Hampden cleared an avenue for one of Elizabeth's visits to his
+stately home. His grandson, John, was born at the close of the Queen's
+reign; the dissipations of youth were cut short by an early marriage at
+twenty-five to a wife he loved; and the young squire settled down to a
+life of study and religion. His wealth and lineage opened to him a
+career such as other men were choosing at the Stuart court. Few English
+commoners had wider possessions; and under James it was easy to purchase
+a peerage by servility and hard cash. "If my son will seek for his
+honour," wrote his mother from the court, "tell him now to come, for
+here are multitudes of lords a-making!" But Hampden had nobler aims than
+a peerage. From the first his choice was made to stand by the side of
+those who were struggling for English freedom; and at the age of
+twenty-six he took his seat in the memorable Parliament of 1621. Young
+as he was, his ability at once carried him to the front; he was employed
+in "managing conferences with the Lords" and other weighty business, and
+became the friend of Eliot and of Pym. He was again returned to the two
+first Parliaments of Charles; and his firm refusal to contribute to
+forced loans at the close of the second marked the quiet firmness of his
+temper. "I could be content to lend," he replied to the demand of the
+Council, "but for fear to draw on myself that curse in Magna Charta
+which should be read twice a year against those that do infringe it." He
+was rewarded with so close an imprisonment in the Tower, "that he never
+afterwards did look the same man he was before." But a prison had no
+force to bend the steady patriotism of John Hampden, and he again took a
+prominent part in the Parliament of 1628, especially on the religious
+questions which came under debate.
+
+With the dissolution of this Parliament Hampden again withdrew to his
+home, the home that, however disguised by tasteless changes without,
+still stands unaltered within on a rise of the Chilterns, its
+Elizabethan hall girt round with galleries and stately staircases
+winding up beneath shadowy portraits in ruffs and farthingales. Around
+are the quiet undulations of the chalk-country, billowy heavings and
+sinkings as of some primaeval sea suddenly hushed into motionlessness,
+soft slopes of grey grass or brown-red corn falling gently to dry
+bottoms, woodland flung here and there in masses over the hills. A
+country of fine and lucid air, of far shadowy distances, of hollows
+tenderly veiled by mist, graceful everywhere with a flowing
+unaccentuated grace, as though Hampden's own temper had grown out of it.
+As we look on it, we recall the "flowing courtesy to all men," the
+"seeming humility and submission of judgement," the "rare affability and
+temper in debate," that woke admiration and regard even in the fiercest
+of his opponents. But beneath the outer grace of Hampden's demeanour lay
+a soul of steel. Buried as he seemed in the affections of his home, the
+great patriot waited patiently for the hour of freedom that he knew must
+come. Around him gathered the men that were to stand by his side in the
+future struggle. He had been the bosom friend of Eliot till the victim
+of the king's resentment lay dead in the Tower. He was now the
+bosom-friend of Pym. His mother had been a daughter of the great
+Cromwell house at Hinchinbrook, and he was thus closely linked by blood
+to Oliver Cromwell and connected with Oliver St. John. The marriages of
+two daughters united him to the Knightleys and the Lynes. Selden and
+Whitelock were among his closest counsellors. It was in steady commune
+with these that the years passed by, while outer eyes saw in him only a
+Puritan squire of a cultured sort, popular among his tenantry and
+punctual at Quarter-Sessions, with "an exceeding propenseness to field
+sports" and "busy in the embellishment of his estate, of which he was
+very fond."
+
+[Sidenote: Hampden and ship-money.]
+
+At last the quiet patience was broken by the news of the ship-money, and
+of a writ addressed to the High Sheriff, Sir Peter Temple of Stave,
+ordering him to raise L4500 on the county of Buckingham. Hampden's
+resolve was soon known. In the January of 1636 a return was made of the
+payments for ship-money from the village of Great Kimble at the foot of
+the Chilterns round which his chief property lay, and at the head of
+those who refused to pay stood the name of John Hampden. For a while
+matters moved slowly; and it was not till the close of June that a
+Council warrant summoned the High Sheriff to account for arrears.
+Hampden meanwhile had been taking counsel in the spring with Whitelock
+and others of his friends concerning the means of bringing the matter to
+a legal issue. Charles was as eager to appeal to the law as Hampden
+himself; but he followed his father's usage in privately consulting the
+judges on the subject of his claim, and it was not till the February of
+1637 that their answer asserted its legality. The king at once made
+their opinion public in the faith that all resistance would cease. But
+the days were gone by when the voice of the judges was taken
+submissively for law by Englishmen. They had seen the dismissal of Coke
+and of Crewe. They knew that in matters of the prerogative the judges
+admitted a right of interference and of dictation on the part of the
+Crown. "The judges," Sir Harbottle Grimston could say in the Long
+Parliament, "the judges have overthrown the law, as the bishops
+religion!" What Hampden aimed at was not the judgement of such judges,
+but an open trial where England might hear, in spite of the silence of
+Parliament, a discussion of this great inroad on its freedom. His wishes
+were realized at last by the issue in May of a writ from the Exchequer,
+calling on him to show cause why payment of ship-money for his lands
+should not be made.
+
+[Sidenote: Charles and Scotland.]
+
+The news of Hampden's resistance thrilled through the country at a
+moment when men were roused by news of resistance in the north. Since
+the accession of James Scotland had bent with a seeming tameness before
+aggression after aggression. Its pulpits had been bridled. Its boldest
+ministers had been sent into exile. Its General Assembly had been
+brought to submission by the Crown. Its Church had been forced to accept
+bishops, if not with all their old powers, still with authority as
+permanent superintendents of the diocesan synods. The ministers and
+elders had been deprived of their right of excommunicating offenders,
+save with a bishop's sanction. A Court of High Commission enforced the
+supremacy of the Crown. But with this enforcement of his royal authority
+James was content. He had no wish for a doctrinal change, or for the
+bringing about of a strict uniformity with the Church of England. It was
+in vain that Laud in his earlier days invited James to draw his Scotch
+subjects "to a nearer conjunction with the liturgy and canons of this
+nation." "I sent him back again," said the shrewd old king, "with the
+frivolous draft he had drawn. For all that, he feared not my anger, but
+assaulted me again with another ill-fangled platform to make that
+stubborn Kirk stoop more to the English platform; but I durst not play
+fast and loose with my word. He knows not the stomach of that people."
+The earlier policy of Charles followed his father's line of action. It
+effected little save a partial restoration of Church-lands, which the
+lords were forced to surrender. But Laud's vigorous action made itself
+felt. His first acts were directed rather to points of outer observance
+than to any attack on the actual fabric of Presbyterian organization.
+The estates were induced to withdraw the control of ecclesiastical
+apparel from the Assembly, and to commit it to the Crown; and this step
+was soon followed by a resumption of their episcopal costume on the part
+of the Scotch bishops. When the Bishop of Moray preached before Charles
+in his rochet, on the king's visit to Edinburgh in 1633, it was the
+first instance of its use since the Reformation. The innovation was
+followed by the issue of a Royal warrant which directed all ministers to
+use the surplice in divine worship.
+
+[Sidenote: The new Liturgy.]
+
+The enforcement of the surplice woke Scotland from its torpor, and alarm
+at once spread through the country. Quarterly meetings were held in
+parishes with fasting and prayer to consult on the dangers which
+threatened religion, and ministers who conformed to the new ceremonies
+were rebuked and deserted by their congregations. The popular discontent
+soon found leaders in the Scotch nobles. Threatened in power by the
+attempts of the Crown to narrow their legal jurisdiction, in purse by
+projects for the resumption and restoration to the Church of the
+bishops' lands, irritated by the restoration of the prelates to their
+old rank, by their reintroduction to Parliament and the Council, by the
+nomination of Archbishop Spottiswood to the post of Chancellor, and
+above all by the setting up again the worrying bishops' courts, the
+nobles with Lord Lorne at their head stood sullenly aloof from the new
+system. But Charles was indifferent to the discontent which his measures
+were rousing. Under Laud's pressure he was resolved to put an end to the
+Presbyterian character of the Scotch Church altogether, and to bring it
+to a uniformity with the Church of England in organization and ritual.
+With this view a book of Canons was issued in 1636 on the sole
+authority of the king. These Canons placed the government of the Church
+absolutely in the hands of its bishops; and made a bishop's licence
+necessary for instruction and for the publication of books. The
+authority of the prelates indeed was jealously subordinated to the
+supremacy of the Crown. No Church Assembly might be summoned but by the
+king, no alteration in worship or discipline introduced but by his
+permission. As daring a stretch of the prerogative superseded what was
+known as Knox's Liturgy--the book of Common Order drawn up on the
+Genevan model by that Reformer, and generally used throughout
+Scotland--by a new Liturgy based on the English Book of Common Prayer.
+
+[Sidenote: Its rejection.]
+
+The Liturgy and Canons had been Laud's own handiwork; in their
+composition the General Assembly had neither been consulted nor
+recognized; and taken together they formed the code of a political and
+ecclesiastical system which aimed at reducing Scotland to an utter
+subjection to the Crown. To enforce them on the land was to effect a
+revolution of the most serious kind. The books however were backed by a
+royal injunction, and Laud flattered himself that the revolution had
+been wrought. But the patience of Scotland found an end at last. In the
+summer of 1637, while England was waiting for the opening of the great
+cause of ship-money, peremptory orders from the king forced the clergy
+of Edinburgh to introduce the new service into their churches. On the
+23rd of July the Prayer-Book was used at the church of St. Giles. But
+the book was no sooner opened than a murmur ran through the
+congregation, and the murmur grew into a formidable riot. The church was
+cleared, and the service read; but the rising discontent frightened the
+judges into a decision that the royal writ enjoined the purchase, not
+the use, of the Prayer-Book, and its use was at once discontinued. The
+angry orders which came from England for its restoration were met by a
+shower of protests from every part of Scotland. The ministers of Fife
+pleaded boldly the want of any confirmation of the book by a General
+Assembly. "This Church," they exclaimed, "is a free and independent
+Church, just as this kingdom is a free and independent kingdom." The
+Duke of Lennox alone took sixty-eight petitions with him to the Court;
+while ministers, nobles, and gentry poured into Edinburgh to organize a
+national resistance.
+
+[Sidenote: The temper of England.]
+
+The effect of these events in Scotland was at once seen in the open
+demonstration of discontent south of the border. The prison with which
+Laud had rewarded Prynne's dumpy quarto had tamed his spirit so little
+that a new tract, written within its walls, denounced the bishops as
+devouring wolves and lords of Lucifer. A fellow-prisoner, John
+Bastwick, declared in his "Litany" that "Hell was broke loose, and the
+devils in surplices, hoods, copes, and rochets were come amongst us."
+Burton, a London clergyman silenced by the High Commission, called on
+all Christians to resist the bishops as "robbers of souls, limbs of the
+beast, and factors of Antichrist." Raving of this sort might well have
+been passed by, had not the general sympathy with Prynne and his
+fellow-pamphleteers, when Laud dragged them in 1637 before the Star
+Chamber as "trumpets of sedition," shown how fast the tide of general
+anger against the Government was rising. The three culprits listened
+with defiance to their sentence of exposure in the pillory and
+imprisonment for life; and the crowd who filled Palace Yard to witness
+their punishment groaned at the cutting off of their ears, and "gave a
+great shout" when Prynne urged that the sentence on him was contrary to
+law. A hundred thousand Londoners lined the road as they passed on the
+way to prison; and the journey of these "Martyrs," as the spectators
+called them, was like a triumphal progress. Startled as he was at the
+sudden burst of popular feeling, Laud remained dauntless as ever.
+Prynne's entertainers, as he passed through the country, were summoned
+before the Star Chamber, while the censorship struck fiercer blows at
+the Puritan press. But the real danger lay not in the libels of silly
+zealots, but in the attitude of Scotland, and in the effect which was
+being produced in England at large by the trial of Hampden. Wentworth
+was looking on from Ireland with cool insolence at the contest between a
+subject and the Crown. "Mr. Hampden," he wrote, "is a great brother; and
+the genius of that faction of people leads them always to oppose, both
+civilly and ecclesiastically, all that ever authority ordains." But
+England looked on with other eyes. "The eyes of all men," owns
+Clarendon, "were fixed upon him as their _Pater Patriae_ and the pilot
+who must steer the vessel through the tempests and storms that
+threatened it." In November and December 1637 the cause of ship-money
+was solemnly argued for twelve days before the full bench of judges. It
+was proved that the tax in past times had been levied only in cases of
+sudden emergency, and confined to the coast and port towns alone, and
+that even the show of legality had been taken from it by formal statute,
+and by the Petition of Right.
+
+[Sidenote: The judgement on ship-money.]
+
+The case was adjourned, but its discussion told not merely on England,
+but on the temper of the Scots. Charles had replied to their petitions
+by a simple order to all strangers to leave the capital. But the Council
+at Edinburgh was unable to enforce his order; and the nobles and gentry
+before dispersing to their homes petitioned against the bishops,
+resolved not to own the jurisdiction of their courts, and named in
+November 1637 a body of delegates, under the odd title of "the Tables."
+These delegates carried on through the winter a series of negotiations
+with the Crown. The negotiations were interrupted in the spring of 1638
+by a renewed order for their dispersion, and for the acceptance of a
+Prayer-Book; while the judges in England delivered in June their
+long-delayed decision on Hampden's case. Two judges only pronounced in
+his favour; though three followed them on technical grounds. The
+majority, seven in number, laid down the broad principle that no statute
+prohibiting arbitrary taxation could be pleaded against the king's will.
+"I never read or heard," said Judge Berkeley, "that lex was rex, but it
+is common and most true that rex is lex." Finch, the Chief-Justice,
+summed up the opinions of his fellow-judges. "Acts of Parliament to take
+away the king's royal power in the defence of his kingdom are void," he
+said: "they are void Acts of Parliament to bind the king not to command
+the subjects, their persons, and goods, and I say their money too, for
+no Acts of Parliament make any difference."
+
+[Sidenote: The Covenant.]
+
+The case was ended; and Charles looked for the Puritans to give way. But
+keener eyes discerned that a new spirit of resistance had been stirred
+by the trial. The insolence of Wentworth was exchanged for a tone of
+angry terror. "I wish Mr. Hampden and others to his likeness," the Lord
+Deputy wrote bitterly from Ireland, "were well whipt into their right
+senses." Amidst the exultation of the Court over the decision of the
+judges, Wentworth saw clearly that Hampden's work had been done. Legal
+and temperate as his course had been, he had roused England to a sense
+of the danger to her freedom, and forced into light the real character
+of the royal claims. How stern and bitter the temper even of the noblest
+Puritans had become at last we see in the poem which Milton produced at
+this time, his elegy of "Lycidas." Its grave and tender lament is broken
+by a sudden flash of indignation at the dangers around the Church, at
+the "blind mouths that scarce themselves know how to hold a sheephook,"
+and to whom "the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed," while "the grim
+wolf" of Rome "with privy paw daily devours apace, and nothing said!"
+The stern resolve of the people to demand justice on their tyrants spoke
+in his threat of the axe. Strafford and Laud, and Charles himself, had
+yet to reckon with "that two-handed engine at the door" which stood
+"ready to smite once, and smite no more." But stern as was the general
+resolve, there was no need for immediate action, for the difficulties
+which were gathering in the north were certain to bring a strain on the
+Government which would force it to seek support from the people. The
+king's demand for immediate submission, which reached Scotland while
+England was waiting for the Hampden judgement, in the spring of 1638,
+gathered the whole body of remonstrants together round "the Tables" at
+Stirling; and a protestation, read at Edinburgh, was followed, on
+Johnston of Warriston's suggestion, by a renewal of the Covenant with
+God which had been drawn up and sworn to in a previous hour of peril,
+when Mary was still plotting against Protestantism, and Spain was
+preparing its Armada. "We promise and swear," ran the solemn engagement
+at its close, "by the great name of the Lord our God, to continue in the
+profession and obedience of the said religion, and that we shall defend
+the same, and resist all their contrary errors and corruptions,
+according to our vocation and the utmost of that power which God has put
+into our hands all the days of our life."
+
+[Sidenote: Charles and Scotland.]
+
+The Covenant was signed in the churchyard of the Greyfriars at Edinburgh
+on the first of March, in a tumult of enthusiasm, "with such content and
+joy as those who, having long before been outlaws and rebels, are
+admitted again into covenant with God." Gentlemen and nobles rode with
+the document in their pockets over the country, gathering subscriptions
+to it, while the ministers pressed for a general consent to it from the
+pulpit. But pressure was needless. "Such was the zeal of subscribers
+that for a while many subscribed with tears on their cheeks"; some were
+indeed reputed to have "drawn their own blood and used it in place of
+ink to underwrite their names." The force given to Scottish freedom by
+this revival of religious fervour was seen in the new tone adopted by
+the Covenanters. The Marquis of Hamilton, who came as Royal Commissioner
+to put an end to the quarrel, was at once met by demands for an
+abolition of the Court of High Commission, the withdrawal of the Books
+of Canons and Common Prayer, a free Parliament, and a free General
+Assembly. He threatened war; but the threat proved fruitless, and even
+the Scotch Council pressed Charles to give fuller satisfaction to the
+people. "I will rather die," the king wrote to Hamilton, "than yield to
+these impertinent and damnable demands"; but it was needful to gain
+time. "The discontents at home," wrote Lord Northumberland to Wentworth,
+"do rather increase than lessen"; and Charles was without money or men.
+It was in vain that he begged for a loan from Spain on promise of
+declaring war against Holland, or that he tried to procure two thousand
+troops from Flanders, with which to occupy Edinburgh. The loan and
+troops were both refused, and some contributions offered by the English
+Catholics did little to recruit the Exchequer.
+
+[Sidenote: The Scotch Revolution.]
+
+Charles had directed the Marquis to delay any decisive breach till the
+royal fleet appeared in the Forth; but it was hard to equip a fleet at
+all. Scotland in fact was sooner ready for war than the king. The Scotch
+volunteers who had been serving in the Thirty Years War streamed home
+at the call of their brethren; and General Leslie, a veteran trained
+under Gustavus, came from Sweden to take the command of the new forces.
+A voluntary war tax was levied in every shire. Charles was so utterly
+taken by surprise that he saw no choice but to yield, if but for the
+moment, to the Scottish demands. Hamilton announced that the king
+allowed the Covenant, the service book was revoked; a pledge was given
+that the power of the bishops should be lessened; a Parliament was
+promised for the coming year; and a General Assembly summoned at once.
+The Assembly met at Glasgow in November 1638; it had been chosen
+according to the old form which James had annulled, and its 144
+ministers were backed by 96 lay elders amongst whom all the leading
+Covenanters found a place. They had hardly met when, at the news of
+their design to attack the Bishops, Hamilton declared the Assembly
+dissolved. But the Church claimed its old freedom of meeting apart from
+any licence from kings; and by an almost unanimous vote the Assembly
+resolved to continue its session. Its acts were an undoing of all that
+the Stuarts had done. The two books of Canons and Common Prayer, the
+High Commission, the Articles of Perth, were all set aside as invalid.
+Episcopacy was abjured, the bishops were deposed from their office, and
+the system of Presbyterianism re-established in its fullest extent.
+
+[Sidenote: The Scotch War.]
+
+Scotland was fighting England's battle as well as her own. The bold
+assertion of a people's right to frame its own religion was a practical
+carrying out of the claim which had been made by the English Parliament
+of 1629. But Charles was as resolute to resist it now as then. He was
+firm in his resolve of war, and the strong remonstrances of his Scotch
+councillors against it were met by a fierce pressure from Wentworth and
+Laud. Both felt that the question had ceased to be one for Scotland
+only; they saw that a concession to the Scots must now be fatal to the
+political and ecclesiastical system they had built up in Ireland and
+England alike. In both countries those who opposed the Government were
+looking to the rising in the North. They were suspicious of
+correspondence between the Puritans in England and the Scotch leaders;
+and whether these suspicions were true or no, of the sympathy with which
+the proceedings at Edinburgh were watched south of the Border there
+could be little doubt. It was with the conviction that the whole Stuart
+system was at stake that the two ministers pressed for war. But angered
+as he was, Charles was a Scotchman, and a Scotch king; and he shrank
+from a march with English troops into his hereditary kingdom. He counted
+rather on the sympathy of the northern clans and of Huntly, on the
+impression produced by the appearance of Hamilton with a fleet in the
+Forth, and by the suspension of trade with Holland, than on any actual
+force of arms from the South. The 20,000 men he gathered at York were to
+serve rather as a demonstration, and to protect the border, than as an
+invading force. But again his plans broke down before the activity and
+resolution of the Scots. The news that Charles was gathering an army at
+York, and reckoning for support on the clans of the north, was answered
+in the spring of 1639 by the seizure of Edinburgh, Dumbarton, and
+Stirling; while 10,000 well-equipped troops under Leslie and the Earl of
+Montrose entered Aberdeen, and brought the Earl of Huntly a prisoner to
+the south. Instead of overawing the country, the appearance of the royal
+fleet in the Forth was the signal for Leslie's march with 20,000 men to
+the Border. Charles had hardly pushed across the Tweed, when the "old
+little crooked soldier," encamping on the hill of Dunse Law, a few miles
+from Berwick, fairly offered him battle.
+
+[Sidenote: Scotland and France.]
+
+The king's threats at once broke down. Charles had a somewhat stronger
+force than Leslie, but his men had no will to fight; and he was forced
+to evade a battle by consenting to the gathering of a free Assembly and
+of a Scotch Parliament. But he had no purpose of being bound by terms
+which had been wrested from him by rebel subjects. In his eyes the
+pacification at Berwick was a mere suspension of arms; and the king's
+summons of Wentworth from Ireland was a proof that violent measures
+were in preparation. The Scotch leaders were far from deceiving
+themselves as to the king's purpose; and in the struggle which they
+foresaw they sought aid from a power which Scotch tradition had looked
+on for centuries as the natural ally of their country. The jealousy
+between France and England had long been smouldering, and only the
+weakness of Charles and the caution of Richelieu had prevented its
+bursting into open flame. In the weary negotiations which the English
+king still carried on for the restoration of his nephew to the
+Palatinate, he had till now been counting rather on the friendly
+mediation of Spain with the Emperor than on any efforts of France or its
+Protestant allies. At this moment however a strange piece of fortune
+brought about a sudden change in his policy. A Spanish fleet, which had
+been attacked by the Dutch in the Channel, took refuge under the guns of
+Dover; and Spain appealed for its protection to the friendship of the
+king. But Charles saw in the incident a chance of winning the Palatinate
+without a blow. He at once opened negotiations with Richelieu. He
+offered to suffer the Spanish vessels to be destroyed, if France would
+pledge itself to restore his nephew. Richelieu on the other hand would
+only consent to his restoration if Charles would take an active part in
+the war. But the negotiations were suddenly cut short by the daring of
+the Dutch. In spite of the king's threats they attacked the Spanish
+fleet as it lay in English waters, and drove it broken to Ostend. Such
+an act of defiance could only embitter the enmity which Charles already
+felt towards France and its Dutch allies; and Richelieu grasped gladly
+at the Scotch revolt as a means of hindering England from joining in the
+war. His agents opened communications with the Scottish leaders; and
+applications for its aid were forwarded by the Scots to the French
+court.
+
+[Sidenote: The Short Parliament.]
+
+The discovery of this correspondence roused anew the hopes of the king.
+He was resolved not to yield to rebels; and the proceedings in Scotland
+since the pacification of Berwick seemed to him mere rebellion. A fresh
+General Assembly adopted as valid the acts of its predecessor. The
+Parliament only met to demand that the council should be responsible to
+it for its course of government. The king prorogued both that he might
+use the weapon which fortune had thrown into his hand. He never doubted
+that if he appealed to the country English loyalty would rise to support
+him against Scottish treason. He yielded at last to the counsels of
+Wentworth. Wentworth was still for war. He had never ceased to urge that
+the Scots should be whipped back to their border; and the king now
+avowed his concurrence in this policy by raising him to the earldom of
+Strafford, and from the post of Lord Deputy to that of Lord Lieutenant.
+Strafford agreed with Charles that a Parliament should be summoned, the
+correspondence laid before it, and advantage taken of the burst of
+indignation on which the king counted to procure a heavy subsidy. But he
+had foreseen that it might refuse all aid; and in such a case the Earl
+and the Council held that the King would have a right to fall back on
+"extraordinary means." Strafford himself hurried to Ireland to read a
+practical lesson to the English Parliament. In fourteen days he had
+procured four subsidies from the Irish Commons, and set on foot a force
+of 8000 men to take part in the attack on the Scots. He came back,
+flushed with his success, in time for the meeting of the Houses at
+Westminster in the middle of April 1640. But the lesson failed in its
+effect. Statesmen like Hampden and Pym were not fools enough to aid the
+great enemy of English freedom against men who had risen for freedom
+across the Tweed. Every member of the Commons knew that Scotland was
+fighting the battle of English liberty. All hope of bringing them to any
+attack upon the Scots proved fruitless. The intercepted letters were
+quietly set aside; and the Commons declared as of old that redress of
+grievances must precede any grant of supplies. No subsidy could be
+granted till security was had for religion, for property, and for the
+liberties of Parliament. An offer to relinquish ship-money proved
+fruitless; and after three weeks sitting the "Short Parliament" was
+dissolved. "Things must go worse before they go better" was the cool
+comment of St. John. But the country was strangely moved. After eleven
+years of personal rule, its hopes had risen again with the summons of
+the Houses to Westminster; and their rough dismissal after a three weeks
+sitting brought all patience to an end. "So great a defection in the
+kingdom," wrote Lord Northumberland, "hath not been known in the memory
+of man."
+
+[Sidenote: The Bishops' War.]
+
+Strafford alone stood undaunted. He had provided for the resolve of the
+Parliament by the decision of the Council that in such a case the king
+might resort to "extraordinary means"; and he now urged that by the act
+of the Commons Charles was "freed from all rule of government," and
+entitled to supply himself at his will. The Irish army, he said, was at
+the king's command, and Scotland could be subdued in a single summer. He
+was bent, in fact, on war; and he took command of the royal army, which
+again advanced to the north. But the Scots were as ready for war as
+Strafford. As early as March they had reassembled their army; and their
+Parliament commissioned the Committee of Estates, of which Argyle was
+the most influential member, to carry on the government. Encouraged by
+the refusal of the English Houses to grant supplies, they now published
+a new manifesto and resolved to meet the march of Strafford's army by an
+advance into England. On the twentieth of August the Scotch army crossed
+the Border; Montrose being the first to set foot on English soil.
+Forcing the passage of the Tyne in the face of an English detachment,
+they occupied Newcastle, and despatched from that town their proposals
+of peace. They prayed the king to consider their grievances, and "with
+the advice and consent of the Estates of England convened in Parliament,
+to settle a firm and desirable peace." The prayer was backed by
+preparations for a march upon York, where Charles had abandoned himself
+to despair. The warlike bluster of Strafford had broken utterly down the
+moment he attempted to take the field. His troops were a mere mob; and
+neither by threats nor prayers could the earl recall them to their duty.
+He was forced to own that two months were needed before they could be
+fit for action. Charles was driven again to open negotiations with the
+Scots, and to buy a respite in their advance by a promise of pay for
+their army and by leaving Northumberland and Durham in their hands as
+pledges for the fulfilment of his engagements. But the truce only met
+half his difficulties. Behind him England was all but in revolt. The
+Treasury was empty, and London and the East India merchants alike
+refused a loan. The London apprentices mobbed Laud at Lambeth, and
+broke up the sittings of the High Commission at St. Paul's. The war was
+denounced everywhere as "the Bishops' War," and the new levies murdered
+officers whom they suspected of Papistry, broke down altar-rails in
+every church they passed, and deserted to their homes. To all but
+Strafford it was plain that the system of Charles had broken hopelessly
+down. Two peers, Lord Wharton and Lord Howard, ventured to lay before
+the king himself a petition for peace with the Scots; and though
+Strafford arrested and proposed to shoot them as mutineers, the English
+Council shrank from desperate courses. But if desperate courses were not
+taken, there was nothing for it but to give way. Penniless, without an
+army, with a people all but in revolt, the obstinate temper of the king
+still strove to escape from the humiliation of calling a Parliament. He
+summoned a Great Council of the Peers at York. But his project broke
+down before its general repudiation by the nobles; and with wrath and
+shame at his heart Charles was driven to summon again the Houses to
+Westminster.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE LONG PARLIAMENT
+
+1640-1644
+
+
+[Sidenote: John Pym.]
+
+If Strafford embodied the spirit of tyranny, John Pym, the leader of the
+Commons from the first meeting of the new Houses at Westminster, stands
+out for all after time as the embodiment of law. A Somersetshire
+gentleman of good birth and competent fortune, he entered on public life
+in the Parliament of 1614, and was imprisoned for his patriotism at its
+close. He had been a leading member in that of 1620, and one of the
+"twelve ambassadors" for whom James ordered chairs to be set at
+Whitehall. Of the band of patriots with whom he had stood side by side
+in the constitutional struggle against the earlier despotism of Charles
+he was almost the one survivor. Coke had died of old age; Cotton's heart
+was broken by oppression; Eliot had perished in the Tower; Wentworth had
+apostatized. But Pym remained, resolute, patient as of old; and as the
+sense of his greatness grew silently during the eleven years of
+deepening misrule, the hope and faith of better things clung almost
+passionately to the man who never doubted of the final triumph of
+freedom and the law. At their close, Clarendon tells us, in words all
+the more notable for their bitter tone of hate, "he was the most popular
+man, and the most able to do hurt, that have lived at any time." He had
+shown he knew how to wait, and when waiting was over he showed he knew
+how to act. On the eve of the Long Parliament he rode through England to
+quicken the electors to a sense of the crisis which had come at last;
+and on the assembling of the Commons he took his place, not merely as
+member for Tavistock, but as their acknowledged head. Few of the country
+gentlemen indeed who formed the bulk of the members, had sat in any
+previous House; and of the few none represented in so eminent a way the
+Parliamentary tradition on which the coming struggle was to turn. Pym's
+eloquence, inferior in boldness and originality to that of Eliot or
+Wentworth, was better suited by its massive and logical force to
+convince and guide a great party; and it was backed by a calmness of
+temper, a dexterity and order in the management of public business, and
+a practical power of shaping the course of debate, which gave a form and
+method to Parliamentary proceedings such as they had never had before.
+
+[Sidenote: His political theory.]
+
+Valuable however as these qualities were, it was a yet higher quality
+which raised Pym into the greatest, as he was the first, of
+Parliamentary leaders. Of the five hundred members who sate round him at
+St. Stephen's, he was the one man who had clearly foreseen, and as
+clearly resolved how to meet, the difficulties which lay before them. It
+was certain that Parliament would be drawn into a struggle with the
+Crown. It was probable that in such a struggle the House of Commons
+would be hampered, as it had been hampered before, by the House of
+Lords. The legal antiquarians of the older constitutional school stood
+helpless before such a conflict of co-ordinate powers, a conflict for
+which no provision had been made by the law, and on which precedents
+threw only a doubtful and conflicting light. But with a knowledge of
+precedent as great as their own, Pym rose high above them in his grasp
+of constitutional principles. He was the first English statesman who
+discovered, and applied, to the political circumstances around him, what
+may be called the doctrine of constitutional proportion. He saw that as
+an element of constitutional life Parliament was of higher value than
+the Crown; he saw too that in Parliament itself the one essential part
+was the House of Commons. On these two facts he based his whole policy
+in the contest which followed. When Charles refused to act with the
+Parliament, Pym treated the refusal as a temporary abdication on the
+part of the sovereign, which vested the executive power in the two
+Houses until new arrangements were made. When the Lords obstructed
+public business, he warned them that obstruction would only force the
+Commons "to save the kingdom alone." Revolutionary as these principles
+seemed at the time, they have both been recognized as bases of our
+constitution since the days of Pym. The first principle was established
+by the Convention and Parliament which followed on the departure of
+James the Second; the second by the acknowledgement on all sides since
+the Reform Bill of 1832 that the government of the country is really in
+the hands of the House of Commons, and can only be carried on by
+ministers who represent the majority of that House.
+
+[Sidenote: His political genius.]
+
+It was thus that the work of Pym brought about a political revolution
+greater than any that England has ever experienced since his day. But
+the temper of Pym was the very opposite of the temper of a
+revolutionist. Few natures have ever been wider in their range of
+sympathy or action. Serious as his purpose was, his manners were genial
+and even courtly; he turned easily from an invective against Strafford
+to a chat with Lady Carlisle; and the grace and gaiety of his social
+tone, even when the care and weight of public affairs were bringing him
+to his grave, gave rise to a hundred silly scandals among the prurient
+royalists. It was this striking combination of genial versatility with
+a massive force in his nature which marked him out from the first moment
+of power as a born ruler of men. He proved himself at once the subtlest
+of diplomatists and the grandest of demagogues. He was equally at home
+in tracking the subtle intricacies of royalist intrigues, or in kindling
+popular passion with words of fire. Though past middle life when his
+work really began, for he was born in 1584, four years before the coming
+of the Armada, he displayed from the first meeting of the Long
+Parliament the qualities of a great administrator, an immense faculty
+for labour, a genius for organization, patience, tact, a power of
+inspiring confidence in all whom he touched, calmness and moderation
+under good fortune or ill, an immovable courage, an iron will. No
+English ruler has ever shown greater nobleness of natural temper or a
+wider capacity for government than the Somersetshire squire whom his
+enemies, made clear-sighted by their hate, greeted truly enough as "King
+Pym."
+
+[Sidenote: The meeting of the Parliament.]
+
+On the eve of the elections he rode with Hampden through the counties to
+rouse England to a sense of the crisis which had come. But his ride was
+hardly needed, for the summons of a Parliament at once woke the kingdom
+to a fresh life. The Puritan emigration to New England was suddenly and
+utterly suspended; "the change," said Winthrop, "made all men to stay in
+England in expectation of a new world." The public discontent spoke
+from every Puritan pulpit, and expressed itself in a sudden burst of
+pamphlets, the first-fruits of the thirty thousand which were issued in
+the twenty years that followed, and which turned England at large into a
+school of political discussion. The resolute looks of the members, as
+they gathered at Westminster on the third of November 1640, contrasted
+with the hesitating words of the king; and each brought from borough or
+county a petition of grievances. Fresh petitions were brought every day
+by bands of citizens or farmers. The first week was spent in receiving
+these petitions, and in appointing forty committees to examine and
+report on them, whose reports formed the grounds on which the Commons
+subsequently acted. The next work of the Commons was to deal with the
+agents of the royal system. It was agreed that the king's name should be
+spared; but in every county a list of officers who had carried out the
+plans of the Government was ordered to be prepared and laid before the
+House. But the Commons were far from dealing merely with these meaner
+"delinquents." They resolved to strike at the men whose counsels had
+wrought the evil of the past years of tyranny; and their first blow was
+at the leading ministers of the king.
+
+[Sidenote: Impeachment of Strafford.]
+
+Even Laud was not the centre of so great and universal a hatred as the
+Earl of Strafford. Strafford's guilt was more than the guilt of a
+servile instrument of tyranny, it was the guilt of "that grand apostate
+to the Commonwealth who," in the terrible words which closed Lord
+Digby's invective, "must not expect to be pardoned in this world till he
+be despatched to the other." He was conscious of his danger, but Charles
+forced him to attend the Court; and with characteristic boldness he
+resolved to anticipate attack by accusing the Parliamentary leaders of a
+treasonable correspondence with the Scots. He reached London a week
+after the opening of the Parliament; and hastened the next morning to an
+interview with the king. But he had to deal with men as energetic as
+himself. He was just laying his scheme before Charles when the news
+reached him that Pym was at the bar of the Lords with his impeachment
+for high treason. On the morning of the 11th of November the doors of
+the House of Commons had been locked, Strafford's impeachment voted, and
+carried by Pym with 300 members at his back to the bar of the Lords. The
+Earl hurried at once to the Parliament. "With speed," writes an
+eye-witness, "he comes to the House: he calls rudely at the door," and,
+"with a proud glooming look, makes towards his place at the board-head.
+But at once many bid him void the House, so he is forced in confusion to
+go to the door till he was called." He was only recalled to hear his
+committal to the Tower. He was still resolute to retort the charge of
+treason on his foes, and "offered to speak, but was commanded to be gone
+without a word." The keeper of the Black Rod demanded his sword as he
+took him in charge. "This done, he makes through a number of people
+towards his coach, no man capping to him, before whom that morning the
+greatest of all England would have stood uncovered."
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of the Ministers.]
+
+The blow was quickly followed up. Windebank, the Secretary of State, was
+charged with a corrupt favouring of recusants, and escaped to France;
+Finch, the Lord Keeper, was impeached, and fled in terror over sea. In
+December Laud was himself committed to the charge of the Usher. The
+shadow of what was to come falls across the pages of his diary, and
+softens the hard temper of the man into a strange tenderness. "I stayed
+at Lambeth till the evening," writes the Archbishop, "to avoid the gaze
+of the people. I went to evening prayer in my chapel. The Psalms of the
+day and chapter fifty of Isaiah gave me great comfort. God make me
+worthy of it, and fit to receive it. As I went to my barge, hundreds of
+my poor neighbours stood there and prayed for my safety and return to my
+house. For which I bless God and them." In February Sir Robert Berkeley,
+one of the judges who had held that ship-money was legal, was seized
+while sitting on the Bench and committed to prison. In the very first
+days of the Parliament a yet more emphatic proof of the downfall of the
+royal system had been given by the recall of Prynne and his fellow
+"martyrs" from their prisons, and by their entry in triumph into London,
+amidst the shouts of a great multitude who strewed laurels in their
+path.
+
+[Sidenote: Work of the Houses.]
+
+The effect of these rapid blows was seen in the altered demeanour of the
+king. Charles at once dropped his old tone of command. He ceased to
+protest against the will of the Commons, and looked sullenly on while
+one by one the lawless acts of his Government were undone. Ship-money
+was declared illegal; and the judgement in Hampden's case was annulled.
+In February 1641 a statute declaring "the ancient right of the subjects
+of this kingdom that no subsidy, custom, impost, or any charge
+whatsoever ought or may be laid or imposed upon any merchandise exported
+or imported by subjects, denizens, or aliens, without common consent in
+Parliament," put an end for ever to all pretensions to a right of
+arbitrary taxation on the part of the Crown. A Triennial Bill enforced
+the assembly of the Houses every three years, and bound the returning
+officers to proceed to election if no royal writ were issued to summon
+them.
+
+[Sidenote: Church reform.]
+
+The subject of religion was one of greater difficulty. In ecclesiastical
+as in political matters the aim of the parliamentary leaders was
+strictly conservative. Their purpose was to restore the Church of
+England to its state under Elizabeth, and to free it from the
+"innovations" introduced by Laud and his fellow-prelates. With this view
+commissioners were sent in January 1641 into every county "for the
+defacing, demolishing, and quite taking away of all images, altars, or
+tables turned altarwise, crucifixes, superstitious pictures, monuments,
+and reliques of idolatry out of all churches and chapels." But the bulk
+of the Commons as of the Lords were averse from any radical changes in
+the constitution or doctrine of the Church. All however were agreed on
+the necessity of reform; and one of the first acts of the Parliament was
+to appoint a Committee of Religion to consider the question. Within as
+without the House the general opinion was in favour of a reduction of
+the power and wealth of the prelates, as well as of the jurisdiction of
+the Church courts. Even among the bishops themselves the more prominent
+saw the need for consenting to an abolition of Chapters and Bishops'
+Courts, as well as to the election of a council of ministers in each
+diocese, which had been suggested by Archbishop Usher as a check on
+episcopal autocracy. A scheme to this effect was drawn up by Bishop
+Williams of Lincoln; but it was far from meeting the wishes of the
+general body of the Commons. The part which the higher clergy had taken
+in lending themselves to do political work for the Crown was fresh in
+the minds of all; and in addition to the changes which Williams
+proposed, Pym and Lord Falkland demanded a severance of the clergy from
+all secular or state offices, and an expulsion of the bishops from the
+House of Lords. Such a measure seemed needful to restore the independent
+action of the Peers; for the number and servility of the bishops were
+commonly strong enough to prevent the Upper House from taking any part
+which was disagreeable to the Crown.
+
+[Sidenote: The Bishops and Parliament.]
+
+Further the bulk of the Commons had no will to go. There were others
+indeed who were pressing hard to go further. A growing party demanded
+the abolition of Episcopacy altogether. The doctrines of Cartwright had
+risen into popularity under the persecution of Laud, and Presbyterianism
+was now a formidable force among the middle classes. Its chief strength
+lay in the eastern counties and in London, where a few clergymen such as
+Calamy and Marshall formed a committee for its diffusion; while in
+Parliament it was represented by Lord Brooke, Lord Mandeville, and Lord
+Saye and Sele. In the Commons Sir Harry Vane represented a more extreme
+party of reformers, the Independents of the future, whose sentiments
+were little less hostile to Presbyterianism than to Episcopacy, but who
+acted with the Presbyterians for the present, and formed a part of what
+became known as the "root and branch" party, from its demand for the
+utter extirpation of prelacy. The attitude of Scotland in the struggle
+against tyranny, and the political advantages of a religious union
+between the two kingdoms, gave force to the Presbyterian party; and the
+agitation which it set on foot found a vigorous support in the Scotch
+Commissioners who had been sent to treat of peace with the Parliament.
+Thoughtful men, too, were moved by a desire to knit the English Church
+more closely to the general body of Protestantism. Milton, who after the
+composition of his "Lycidas" had spent a year in foreign travel,
+returned to throw himself on this ground into the theological strife. He
+held it "an unjust thing that the English should differ from all
+churches as many as be reformed." In spite of this pressure however, and
+of a Presbyterian petition from London with fifteen thousand signatures
+which had been presented at the very opening of the Houses, the
+Parliament remained hostile to any change in the constitution of the
+Church. The Committee of Religion reported in favour of the reforms
+proposed by Falkland and Pym; and on the tenth of March 1641 a bill for
+the removal of bishops from the House of Peers passed the Commons almost
+unanimously.
+
+[Sidenote: Trial of Strafford.]
+
+As yet all had gone well. The king made no sign of opposition. He was
+known to be resolute against the abolition of Episcopacy; but he
+announced no purpose of resisting the removal of the bishops from the
+House of Peers. Strafford's life he was determined to save; but he
+threw no obstacle in the way of his impeachment. The trial of the Earl
+opened on the twenty-second of March. The whole of the House of Commons
+appeared in Westminster Hall to support it, and the passion which the
+cause excited was seen in the loud cries of sympathy or hatred which
+burst from the crowded benches on either side as Strafford for fifteen
+days struggled with a remarkable courage and ingenuity against the list
+of charges, and melted his audience to tears by the pathos of his
+defence. But the trial was suddenly interrupted. Though tyranny and
+misgovernment had been conclusively proved against the Earl, the
+technical proof of treason was weak. "The law of England," to use
+Hallam's words, "is silent as to conspiracies against itself," and
+treason by the Statute of Edward the Third was restricted to a levying
+of war against the king or a compassing of his death. The Commons
+endeavoured to strengthen their case by bringing forward the notes of a
+meeting of the Council in which Strafford had urged the use of his Irish
+troops "to reduce that kingdom to obedience"; but the Lords would only
+admit the evidence on condition of wholly reopening the case. Pym and
+Hampden remained convinced of the sufficiency of the impeachment; but
+the House broke loose from their control. Under the guidance of St. John
+and Lord Falkland the Commons resolved to abandon these judicial
+proceedings, and fall back on the resource of a Bill of Attainder. The
+bill passed the Lower House on the 21st of April by a majority of 204 to
+59; and on the 29th it received the assent of the Lords. The course
+which the Parliament took has been bitterly censured by some whose
+opinion in such a matter is entitled to respect. But the crime of
+Strafford was none the less a crime that it did not fall within the
+scope of the Statute of Treasons. It is impossible indeed to provide for
+some of the greatest dangers which can happen to national freedom by any
+formal statute. Even now a minister might avail himself of the temper of
+a Parliament elected in some moment of popular panic, and, though the
+nation returned to its senses, might simply by refusing to appeal to the
+country govern in defiance of its will. Such a course would be
+technically legal, but such a minister would be none the less a
+criminal. Strafford's course, whether it fell within the Statute of
+Treasons or no, was from beginning to end an attack on the freedom of
+the whole nation. In the last resort a nation retains the right of
+self-defence, and a Bill of Attainder is the assertion of such a right
+for the punishment of a public enemy who falls within the scope of no
+written law.
+
+[Sidenote: The Army Plot.]
+
+The counsel of Pym and of Hampden had been prompted by no doubt of the
+legality of the attainder. But they looked on the impeachment as still
+likely to succeed, and they were anxious at this moment to conciliate
+the king. The real security for the permanence of the changes they had
+wrought lay in a lasting change in the royal counsels; and such a change
+it seemed possible to bring about. To save Strafford and Episcopacy
+Charles listened in the spring of 1641 to a proposal for entrusting the
+offices of state to the leaders of the Parliament. In this scheme the
+Earl of Bedford was to become Lord Treasurer, Pym Chancellor of the
+Exchequer, Holles Secretary of State, while Lords Essex, Mandeville, and
+Saye and Sele occupied various posts in the administration. Foreign
+affairs would have been entrusted to Lord Holland, whose policy was that
+of alliance with Richelieu and Holland against Spain, a policy whose
+adoption would have been sealed by the marriage of a daughter of Charles
+with the Prince of Orange. With characteristic foresight Hampden sought
+only the charge of the Prince of Wales. He knew that the best security
+for freedom in the after-time would be a patriot king. Charles listened
+to this project with seeming assent; the only conditions he made were
+that Episcopacy should not be abolished, nor Strafford executed; and
+though the death of Lord Bedford put an end to it for the moment, the
+Parliamentary leaders seem still to have had hopes of their entry into
+the royal Council. But meanwhile Charles was counting the chances of a
+very different policy. The courtiers about him were rallying from their
+first panic. His French Queen, furious at what she looked on as insults
+to royalty, and yet more furious at the persecution of the Catholics,
+was spurring him to violent courses. And for violence there seemed at
+the moment an opportunity. In Ireland Strafford's army refused to
+disband itself. In Scotland the union of the nobles was already broken
+by the old spirit of faction; and in his jealousy of the power gained by
+his hereditary enemy, the Earl of Argyle, Lord Montrose had formed a
+party with other great nobles, and was pressing Charles to come and
+carry out a counter-revolution in the North. Above all the English army,
+which still lay at York, was discontented by its want of pay and by the
+favour shown to the Scottish soldiers in its front. The discontent was
+busily fanned by its officers; and a design was laid before Charles by
+which advantage might be taken of the humour of the army to march it
+upon London, to seize the Tower and free Strafford. With the Earl at
+their head, the soldiers could then overawe the Houses and free the king
+from his thraldom. Charles listened to the project; he refused any
+expression of assent; but he kept the secret, and suffered the plot to
+go on, while he continued the negotiations with the Parliamentary
+leaders.
+
+[Sidenote: Death of Strafford.]
+
+But he was now in the hands of men who were his match in intrigue as
+they were more than his match in quickness of action. In the beginning
+of May, it is said through a squabble among the conspirators, the army
+plot became known to Pym. The moment was a critical one. Much of the
+energy and union of the Parliament was already spent. The Lords were
+beginning to fall back into their old position of allies of the Court.
+They were holding at bay the bill for the expulsion of the bishops from
+their seats in Parliament which had been sent up by the Lower House,
+though the measure aimed at freeing the Peers as a legislative body by
+removing from among them a body of men whose servility made them mere
+tools of the Crown, while it averted--if but for the moment--the growing
+pressure for the abolition of episcopacy. Things were fast coming to a
+standstill, when the discovery of the army plot changed the whole
+situation. Waver as the Peers might, they had no mind to be tricked by
+the king and overawed by his soldiery. The Commons were stirred to their
+old energy, London itself was driven to panic at the thought of passing
+into the hands of a mutinous and unpaid army. The general alarm sealed
+Strafford's doom. In plotting for his release, the plotters had marked
+him out as a life which was the main danger to the new state of things.
+Strafford still hoped in his master; he had a pledge from Charles that
+his life should be saved; and on the first of May the king in a formal
+message to the Parliament had refused his assent to the Bill of
+Attainder. But the Queen had no mind that her husband should suffer for
+a minister whom she hated, and before her pressure the king gave way. On
+the tenth of May he gave his assent to the bill by commission, and on
+the twelfth Strafford passed to his doom. He died as he had lived. His
+friends warned him of the vast multitude gathered before the Tower to
+witness his fall. "I know how to look death in the face, and the people
+too," he answered proudly. "I thank God I am no more afraid of death,
+but as cheerfully put off my doublet at this time as ever I did when I
+went to bed." As the axe fell, the silence of the great multitude was
+broken by a universal shout of joy. The streets blazed with bonfires.
+The bells clashed out from every steeple. "Many," says an observer,
+"that came to town to see the execution rode in triumph back, waving
+their hats, and with all expressions of joy through every town they
+went, crying, 'His head is off. His head is off!'"
+
+[Sidenote: The Panic.]
+
+The failure of the attempt to establish a Parliamentary ministry, the
+discovery of the army plot, the execution of Strafford, were the turning
+points in the history of the Long Parliament. Till May 1641 there was
+still hope for an accommodation between the Commons and the Crown by
+which the freedom that had been won might have been taken as the base of
+a new system of government. But from that hour little hope of such an
+agreement remained. The Parliament could put no trust in the king. The
+air at Westminster, since the discovery of the army conspiracy, was full
+of rumours and panic; the creak of a few boards revived the memory of
+the Gunpowder Plot, and the members rushed out of the House of Commons
+in the full belief that it was undermined. On the other hand, Charles
+put by all thought of reconciliation. If he had given his assent to
+Strafford's death, he never forgave the men who had wrested his assent
+from him. From that hour he regarded his consent to the new measures as
+having been extorted by force, and to be retracted at the first
+opportunity. His opponents were quick to feel the king's resolve of a
+counter-revolution; and both Houses, in their terror, swore to defend
+the Protestant religion and the public liberties, an oath which was
+subsequently exacted from every one engaged in civil employment, and
+voluntarily taken by the great mass of the people. The same terror of a
+counter-revolution induced even Hyde and the "moderate men" in the
+Commons to bring in a bill providing that the present Parliament should
+not be dissolved but by its own consent; and the same commission which
+gave the king's assent to Strafford's attainder gave his assent to this
+bill for perpetuating the Parliament.
+
+[Sidenote: Charles in Scotland.]
+
+Of all the demands of the Parliament this was the first that could be
+called distinctly revolutionary. To consent to it was to establish a
+power permanently co-ordinate with the Crown. But Charles signed the
+bill without protest. He had ceased to look on his acts as those of a
+free agent; and he was already planning the means of breaking the
+Parliament. What had hitherto held him down was the revolt of Scotland
+and the pressure of the Scotch army across the border. But its payment
+and withdrawal could no longer be delayed. The death of Strafford was
+immediately followed by the conclusion of a pacification between the two
+countries; and the sum required for the disbanding of both armies was
+provided by a poll-tax. Meanwhile the Houses hastened to complete their
+task of reform. The civil and judicial jurisdiction of the Star Chamber
+and the Court of High Commission, the irregular jurisdictions of the
+Council of the North, the Duchy of Lancaster, the County of Chester,
+were summarily abolished with a crowd of lesser tribunals. The work was
+pushed hastily on, for haste was needed. On the sixth of August the two
+armies were alike disbanded; and the Scots were no sooner on their way
+homeward than the king resolved to prevent their return. In spite of
+prayers from the Parliament, he left London for Edinburgh, yielded to
+every demand of the Assembly and the Scotch Estates, attended the
+Presbyterian worship, lavished titles and favours on the Earl of Argyle
+and the patriot leaders, and gained for a while a popularity which
+spread dismay in the English Parliament. Their dread of his designs was
+increased when he was found to have been intriguing all the while with
+the Earl of Montrose--whose conspiracy had been discovered before the
+king's coming and rewarded with imprisonment in the castle of
+Edinburgh--and when Hamilton and Argyle withdrew suddenly from the
+capital, and charged Charles with a treacherous plot to seize and carry
+them out of the realm.
+
+[Sidenote: The Irish Rising.]
+
+The fright was fanned to frenzy by news which came suddenly from
+Ireland. The quiet of that unhappy country under Strafford's rule had
+been a mere quiet of terror. The Catholic Englishry were angered by the
+Deputy's breach of faith. Before his coming Charles had promised for a
+sum of L120,000 to dispense with the oath of supremacy, to suffer
+recusants to practise in the courts of law, and to put a stop to the
+constant extortion of their lands by legal process. The money was paid;
+but by the management of Wentworth, the "Graces" which it was to bring
+received no confirmation from the Irish Parliament. The Lord-Deputy's
+policy aimed at keeping the recusants still at the mercy of the Crown;
+what it really succeeded in doing was to rob them of any hope of justice
+or fair dealing from the government. The native Irishry were yet more
+bitterly outraged by his dealings in Connaught. Under pretext that as
+inhabitants of a conquered country Irishmen had no rights but by
+express grant from the Crown, the Deputy had wrested nearly a half of
+the lands in that province from their native holders with the view of
+founding a new English plantation. The new settlers were slow in coming,
+but the evictions and spoliation renewed the bitter wrath which had been
+stirred by the older plantation in Ulster. All however remained quiet
+till the fall of Strafford put an end to the semblance of rule. The
+disbanded soldiers of the army he had raised spread over the country,
+and stirred the smouldering disaffection into a flame. In October 1641,
+a rising, organized with wonderful power and secrecy by Roger O'Moore
+and Owen Roe O'Neill, burst forth under Sir Phelim O'Neill in Ulster,
+where the confiscation of the Settlement had never been forgiven, and
+spread like wildfire over the centre and west of the island. Dublin was
+saved by a mere chance; but in the open country the rebellion went on
+unchecked. The trembling planters fled for shelter to the towns as the
+clansmen poured back over their old tribal lands, and rumour doubled and
+trebled the number of the slain. Tales of horror and outrage, such as
+maddened our own England when they reached us from Cawnpore, came day
+after day over the Irish Channel; and sworn depositions told how
+husbands were cut to pieces in presence of their wives, their children's
+brains dashed out before their faces, their daughters brutally violated
+and driven out naked to perish frozen in the woods.
+
+[Sidenote: Its effect on England.]
+
+Much of all this was no doubt the wild exaggeration of panic, and the
+research of later times has shown how fraud lent a terrible aid to panic
+in multiplying a hundredfold the tales of outrage. But there was enough
+in the revolt to carry terror to the hearts of Englishmen. It was unlike
+any earlier rising in its religious character. It was no longer a
+struggle, as of old, of Celt against Saxon, but of Catholic against
+Protestant. The Papists within the Pale joined hands in it with the wild
+kernes outside the Pale. When the governing body of the rebels met at
+Kells in the following spring they called themselves "Confederate
+Catholics," resolved to defend "the public and free exercise of the true
+and Catholic Roman religion." The panic waxed greater when it was found
+that they claimed to be acting by the king's commission, and in aid of
+his authority. They professed to stand by Charles and his heirs against
+all that should "directly and indirectly endeavour to suppress their
+royal prerogatives." They showed a Commission, purporting to have been
+issued by royal command at Edinburgh, and styled themselves "the king's
+army." The Commission was a forgery, but belief in it was quickened by
+the want of all sympathy with the national honour which Charles
+displayed. To him the revolt seemed a useful check on his opponents. "I
+hope," he wrote coolly, when the news reached him, "this ill news of
+Ireland may hinder some of these follies in England." In any case it
+would necessitate the raising of an army, and with an army at his
+command he would again be the master of the Parliament. The Parliament,
+on the other hand, saw in the Irish revolt, the news of which met them
+but a few days after their reassembly at the close of October, the
+disclosure of a vast scheme for a counter-revolution, of which the
+withdrawal of the Scotch army, the reconciliation of Scotland, the
+intrigues at Edinburgh were all parts. Its terror was quickened into
+panic by the exultation of the royalists at the king's return to London
+at the close of November, and by the appearance of a royalist party in
+the Parliament itself.
+
+[Sidenote: The new Royalists.]
+
+The new party had been silently organized by Hyde, the future Lord
+Clarendon. To Hyde and to the men who gathered round him enough seemed
+to have been done. They clung to the law, but the law had been
+vindicated. They bitterly resented the system of Strafford and of Laud;
+but the system was at an end. They believed that English freedom hung on
+the assembly of Parliament and on the loyal co-operation of the Crown
+with this Great Council of the Realm; but the assembly of Parliaments
+was now secured by the Triennial Bill, and the king professed himself
+ready to rule according to the counsels of Parliament. On the other
+hand they desired to preserve to the Crown the right and power it had
+had under the Tudors. They revolted from any attempt to give the Houses
+a share in the actual work of administration. On both political and
+religious grounds they were resolute to suffer no change in the
+relations of the Church to the State, or to weaken the prerogative of
+the Crown by the establishment of a Presbyterianism which asserted any
+sort of spiritual independence. More complex impulses told on the course
+of Lord Falkland. Falkland was a man learned and accomplished, the
+centre of a circle which embraced the most liberal thinkers of his day.
+He was a keen reasoner and an able speaker. But he was the centre of
+that Latitudinarian party which was slowly growing up in the reaction
+from the dogmatism of the time, and his most passionate longing was for
+liberty of religious thought. Such a liberty the system of the Stuarts
+had little burdened; what Laud pressed for was uniformity, not of
+speculation, but of practice and ritual. But the temper of Puritanism
+was a dogmatic temper, and the tone of the Parliament already threatened
+a narrowing of the terms of speculative belief for the Church of
+England. While this fear estranged Falkland from the Parliament, his
+dread of a conflict with the Crown, his passionate longing for peace,
+his sympathy for the fallen, led him to struggle for a king whom he
+distrusted, and to die in a cause that was not his own. Behind Falkland
+and Hyde soon gathered a strong force of supporters; chivalrous soldiers
+like Sir Edmund Verney ("I have eaten the king's bread and served him
+near thirty years, and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him"),
+as well as men frightened at the rapid march of change, or by the
+dangers which threatened Episcopacy and the Church. And with these stood
+the few but ardent partizans of the Court; and the time-servers who had
+been swept along by the tide of popular passion, but who had believed
+its force to be spent, and looked forward to a new triumph of the Crown.
+
+[Sidenote: The Remonstrance.]
+
+With a broken Parliament, and perils gathering without, Pym resolved to
+appeal for aid to the nation itself. The Grand Remonstrance which he
+laid before the House of Commons in November was in effect an appeal to
+the country at large. It is this purpose that accounts for its unusual
+form. The Remonstrance was more an elaborate State-Paper than a petition
+to the king. It told in a detailed narrative the work which the
+Parliament had done, the difficulties it had surmounted, and the new
+dangers which lay in its path. The Parliament had been charged with a
+design to abolish Episcopacy, it declared its purpose to be simply that
+of reducing the power of bishops. Politically it repudiated the taunt of
+revolutionary aims. It demanded only the observance of the existing
+laws against recusancy, securities for the due administration of
+justice, and the employment of ministers who possessed the confidence of
+Parliament. The new king's party fought fiercely against its adoption;
+debate followed debate; the sittings were prolonged till lights had to
+be brought in; and it was only at midnight, and by a majority of eleven,
+that the Remonstrance was finally adopted. On an attempt of the minority
+to offer a formal protest against a subsequent vote for its publication
+the slumbering passion broke out into a flame. "Some waved their hats
+over their heads, and others took their swords in their scabbards out of
+their belts, and held them by the pommels in their hands, setting the
+lower part on the ground." Only Hampden's coolness and tact averted a
+conflict. The Remonstrance was felt on both sides to be a crisis in the
+struggle. "Had it been rejected," said Cromwell as he left the House, "I
+would have sold to-morrow all I possess, and left England for ever!" It
+was presented to Charles on the first of December, and the king listened
+to it sullenly; but it kindled afresh the spirit of the country. London
+swore to live and die with the Parliament; associations were formed in
+every county for the defence of the Houses; and when the guard which the
+Commons had asked for in the panic of the army plot was withdrawn by the
+king, the populace crowded down to Westminster to take its place.
+
+[Sidenote: Cavaliers and Roundheads.]
+
+The gathering passion soon passed into actual strife. Pym and his
+colleagues saw that the disunion in their ranks sprang above all from
+the question of the Church. On the one side were the Presbyterian
+zealots who were clamouring for the abolition of Episcopacy. On the
+other were the conservative tempers who in the dread of such demands
+were beginning to see in the course of the Parliament a threat against
+the Church which they loved. To put an end to the pressure of the one
+party and the dread of the other Pym took his stand on the compromise
+suggested by the Committee of Religion in the spring. The bill for the
+removal of bishops from the House of Lords had been rejected by the
+Lords on the eve of the king's journey to Scotland. It was now again
+introduced. But, in spite of violent remonstrances from the Commons, the
+bill still hung fire among the Peers; and the delay roused the excited
+crowd of Londoners who gathered round Whitehall. The bishops' carriages
+were stopped, and the prelates themselves rabbled on their way to the
+House. At the close of December the angry pride of Williams induced ten
+of his fellow-bishops to declare themselves prevented from attendance in
+Parliament, and to protest against all acts done in their absence as
+null and void. Such a protest was utterly unconstitutional; and even on
+the part of the Peers who had been maintaining the bishops' rights it
+was met by the committal of the prelates who had signed it to the
+Tower. But the contest gave a powerful aid to the projects of the king.
+The courtiers declared openly that the rabbling of the bishops proved
+that there was "no free Parliament," and strove to bring about fresh
+outrages by gathering troops of officers and soldiers of fortune, who
+were seeking for employment in the Irish war, and pitting them against
+the crowds at Whitehall. The combatants pelted one another with
+nicknames which were soon to pass into history. To wear his hair long
+and flowing almost to the shoulder was at this time the mark of a
+gentleman, whether Puritan or anti-Puritan. Servants on the other hand
+or apprentices wore the hair closely cropped to the head. The crowds who
+flocked to Westminster were chiefly made up of London apprentices; and
+their opponents taunted them as "Roundheads." They replied by branding
+the courtiers about Whitehall as soldiers of fortune or "Cavaliers." The
+gentlemen who gathered round the king in the coming struggle were as far
+from being military adventurers as the gentlemen who fought for the
+Parliament were from being London apprentices; but the words soon passed
+into nicknames for the whole mass of royalists and patriots.
+
+[Sidenote: Seizure of the Five Members.]
+
+From nicknames the soldiers and apprentices soon passed to actual
+brawls; and the strife beneath its walls created fresh alarm in the
+Parliament. But Charles persisted in refusing it a guard. "On the
+honour of a king" he engaged to defend them from violence as completely
+as his own children, but the answer had hardly been given when his
+Attorney appeared at the bar of the Lords, and accused Hampden, Pym,
+Holles, Strode, and Haselrig of high treason in their correspondence
+with the Scots. A herald-at-arms appeared at the bar of the Commons, and
+demanded the surrender of the five members. All constitutional law was
+set aside by a charge which proceeded personally from the king, which
+deprived the accused of their legal right to a trial by their peers, and
+summoned them before a tribunal that had no pretence to a jurisdiction
+over them. The Commons simply promised to take the demand into
+consideration. They again requested a guard. "I will reply to-morrow,"
+said the king. He had in fact resolved to seize the members in the House
+itself; and on the morrow, the 4th of January 1642, he summoned the
+gentlemen who clustered about Whitehall to follow him, and, embracing
+the Queen, whose violent temper had urged him to this outrage, promised
+her that in an hour he would return master of his kingdom. A mob of
+Cavaliers joined him as he left the palace, and remained in Westminster
+Hall as Charles, accompanied by his nephew, the Elector-Palatine,
+entered the House of Commons. "Mr. Speaker," he said, "I must for a time
+borrow your chair!" He paused with a sudden confusion as his eye fell
+on the vacant spot where Pym commonly sate: for at the news of his
+approach the House had ordered the five members to withdraw.
+"Gentlemen," he began in slow broken sentences, "I am sorry for this
+occasion of coming unto you. Yesterday I sent a Sergeant-at-arms upon a
+very important occasion to apprehend some that by my command were
+accused of high treason, whereunto I did expect obedience and not a
+message." Treason, he went on, had no privilege, "and therefore I am
+come to know if any of these persons that were accused are here." There
+was a dead silence, only broken by his reiterated "I must have them
+wheresoever I find them." He again paused, but the stillness was
+unbroken. Then he called out, "Is Mr. Pym here?" There was no answer;
+and Charles, turning to the Speaker, asked him whether the five members
+were there. Lenthall fell on his knees, and replied that he had neither
+eyes nor tongue to see or say anything save what the House commanded
+him. "Well, well," Charles angrily retorted, "'tis no matter. I think my
+eyes are as good as another's!" There was another long pause while he
+looked carefully over the ranks of members. "I see," he said at last,
+"my birds are flown, but I do expect you will send them to me." If they
+did not, he added, he would seek them himself; and with a closing
+protest that he never intended any force "he went out of the House,"
+says an eye-witness, "in a more discontented and angry passion than he
+came in."
+
+[Sidenote: Charles withdraws from London.]
+
+Nothing but the absence of the five members and the calm dignity of the
+Commons had prevented the king's outrage from ending in bloodshed. "It
+was believed," says Whitelock, who was present at the scene, "that if
+the king had found them there, and called in his guards to have seized
+them, the members of the House would have endeavoured the defence of
+them, which might have proved a very unhappy and sad business." Five
+hundred gentlemen of the best blood in England would hardly have stood
+tamely by while the bravoes of Whitehall laid hands on their leaders in
+the midst of the Parliament. But Charles was blind to the danger of his
+course. The five members had taken refuge in the City, and it was there
+that on the next day the king himself demanded their surrender from the
+aldermen at Guildhall. Cries of "Privilege" rang round him as he
+returned through the streets: the writs issued for the arrest of the
+five were disregarded by the Sheriffs; and a proclamation issued four
+days later, declaring them traitors, passed without notice. Terror drove
+the Cavaliers from Whitehall, and Charles stood absolutely alone; for
+the outrage had severed him for the moment from his new friends in the
+Parliament, and from the ministers, Falkland and Colepepper, whom he had
+chosen among them. But, lonely as he was, Charles had resolved on war.
+The Earl of Newcastle was despatched to muster a royal force in the
+north; and on the tenth of January news that the five members were about
+to return in triumph to Westminster drove Charles from Whitehall. He
+retired to Hampton Court and to Windsor, while the Trained Bands of
+London and Southwark on foot, and the London watermen on the river, all
+sworn "to guard the Parliament, the Kingdom, and the King," escorted Pym
+and his fellow-members along the Thames to the House of Commons. Both
+sides prepared for a struggle which was now inevitable. The Queen sailed
+from Dover with the Crown jewels to buy munitions of war. The Cavaliers
+again gathered round the king, and the royalist press flooded the
+country with State papers drawn up by Hyde. On the other hand, the
+Commons resolved by vote to secure the great arsenals of the kingdom,
+Hull, Portsmouth, and the Tower; while mounted processions of
+freeholders from Buckinghamshire and Kent traversed London on their way
+to St. Stephen's, vowing to live and die with the Parliament.
+
+[Sidenote: Preparations for war.]
+
+The Lords were scared out of their policy of obstruction by Pym's bold
+announcement of the position taken by the House of Commons. "The
+Commons," said their leader, "will be glad to have your concurrence and
+help in saving the kingdom: but if they fail of it, it should not
+discourage them in doing their duty. And whether the kingdom be lost or
+saved, they shall be sorry that the story of this present Parliament
+should tell posterity that in so great a danger and extremity the House
+of Commons should be enforced to save the kingdom alone." The effect of
+these words was seen in the passing of the bill for excluding bishops
+from the House of Lords, the last act of this Parliament to which
+Charles gave his assent. The great point however was to secure armed
+support from the nation at large, and here both sides were in a
+difficulty. Previous to the innovations introduced by the Tudors, and
+which had been taken away by the bill against pressing soldiers, the
+king in himself had no power of calling on his subjects generally to
+bear arms, save for the purposes of restoring order or meeting foreign
+invasion. On the other hand no one contended that such a power has ever
+been exercised by the two Houses without the king; and Charles steadily
+refused to consent to a Militia bill, in which the command of the
+national force was given in every county to men devoted to the
+Parliamentary cause. Both parties therefore broke through constitutional
+precedent, the Parliament in appointing Lord Lieutenants of the Militia
+by ordinance of the two Houses, Charles in levying forces by royal
+commissions of array.
+
+[Sidenote: Outbreak of war.]
+
+But the king's great difficulty lay in procuring arms, and on the
+twenty-third of April he suddenly appeared before Hull, the magazine of
+the north, and demanded admission. The new governor, Sir John Hotham,
+fell on his knees, but refused to open the gates: and the avowal of his
+act by the Parliament was followed at the end of May by the withdrawal
+of the royalist party among its members from their seats at Westminster.
+Falkland, Colepepper, and Hyde, with thirty-two peers and sixty members
+of the House of Commons, joined Charles at York; and Lyttelton, the Lord
+Keeper, followed with the Great Seal. But one of their aims in joining
+the king was to put a check on his projects of war; and their efforts
+were backed by the general opposition of the country. A great meeting of
+the Yorkshire freeholders which Charles convened on Heyworth Moor ended
+in a petition praying him to be reconciled to the Parliament; and in
+spite of gifts of plate from the universities and nobles of his party
+arms and money were still wanting for his new levies. The two Houses, on
+the other hand, gained in unity and vigour by the withdrawal of the
+royalists. The militia was rapidly enrolled, Lord Warwick named to the
+command of the fleet, and a loan opened in the City to which the women
+brought even their wedding-rings. The tone of the two Houses rose with
+the threat of force. It was plain at last that nothing but actual
+compulsion could bring Charles to rule as a constitutional sovereign;
+and the last proposals of the Parliament demanded the powers of
+appointing and dismissing the ministers, of naming guardians for the
+royal children, and of virtually controlling military, civil, and
+religious affairs. "If I granted your demands," replied Charles, "I
+should be no more than the mere phantom of a king."
+
+
+END OF VOL. V
+
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
+
+
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+The following words appear with and without hyphens. They have been
+left as in the original.
+
+     Franche Comte      Franche-Comte
+     goodwill           good-will
+     middle classes     middle-classes
+     newcomer           new-comers
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE,
+VOLUME V (OF 8) ***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 23642.txt or 23642.zip *******
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #23642 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23642)