PARLIAMENTARY VENGEANCES: DEATH OF LAUD.
Ere we pass out of the rich general history of this year 1644, the year of Marston Moor, we must take note of a few vengeances and deaths with which it was wound up. The long-deferred trial of poor Laud, begun March 12, 1643-4, after he had been more than three years a prisoner in the Tower, and they might have left him there in quiet, had straggled on through the whole of 1644. The interest in it had run, like a red thread, through the miscellany of other events. The temper of the people had been made fiercer by the length of the war, and there was a desire for the old man's blood. The Presbyterian ministers of the Assembly, I find, fostered this desire. In that very sermon of Herbert Palmer's before Parliament (Aug. 13) in which he had called for the extirpation of heresy and schism, and denounced Milton, there was an express passage on the duty of "doing justice upon Delinquents impartially and without respect of persons." [Footnote: Palmer's Sermon, p. 48.] Calamy in his sermon, Oct. 22, followed, and told the Parliament, "All the guilty blood that God requires you in justice to shed, and you spare, God will require the blood at your hands." [Footnote: Calamy's Sermon, p. 27.] Mr. Francis Woodcock, preaching Oct. 30, was even more decided. His sermon, which was on Rev. xvi. 15, is a very untastefully-worded discourse on the propriety of always being on the watch so as not to be taken by surprise without one's garments; and, among the rather ludicrous images which his literal treatment of the subject suggests, we come upon a passage describing one of four pieces of raiment which the State ought never to be caught without. He calls it the "Robe of Justice," and adds, "Would God this robe were often worn, and dyed of a deeper colour in the blood of Delinquents. It is that which God and man calls for. God repeats it, Justice, Justice; we, echoing God, cry Justice, Justice; and let me say, perhaps we should not see other garments so much rolled in blood, did we not see these so little." [Footnote: Woodcock's Sermon, pp 30, 31.] Baillie, I am glad to think, was more tender-hearted. There was, indeed, one Delinquent for whom Baillie would have had no mercy—Dr. Maxwell, the Scottish ex-Bishop of Ross, who had published at Oxford, in the King's interest, "a desperately malicious invective" against Scottish Presbytery and its leaders. "However I could hardly consent to the hanging of Canterbury himself, or of any Jesuit," Baillie had written, July 16, 1644, after his first indignant sight of this book, "yet I could give my sentence freely against that unhappy liar's [Maxwell's] life." But, indeed, the Scottish Commissioners and the Scottish nation were conjoined as parties with the English Presbyterians and the English Parliamentarians generally (Prynne ruthlessly busy in getting up the evidence) in the long prosecution of Laud. It was all over on the 10th of January, 1644-5. On that day Laud, aged 72, laid his head upon the block on a scaffold in Tower Hill. Hanging had been commuted, with some difficulty, to beheading. He died brave, raspy, and High-Church to the last. [Footnote: Rushworth's main account of the trial and last days of Laud is in Vol. V. pp, 763-786. The "History of the Troubles and Tryal of William Laud," edited by Wharton, in two vols. folio, appeared in 1695- 1700.]—Minor executions about the same time were those of Hugh Macmahon and Lord Maguire for their concern in the Irish rebellion and massacre, Sir Alexander Carew for treachery at Plymouth, and the Hothams, father and son, for treachery at Hull. One Roger L'Estrange, a younger son of a Norfolk family, had been condemned to be hanged in Smithfield for an underhand attempt to win the town of Lynn for the King; but he was reprieved, lay in Newgate for some years, and lived for sixty years longer, to be known, even in Queen Anne's time, as Sir Roger L'Estrange, the journalist.