Constitutional History of England, Henry VII to George II. Volume 2 of 3

by Henry Hallam

CHAPTER VIII

FROM THE DISSOLUTION OF CHARLES'S THIRD PARLIAMENT TO THE MEETING OF THE LONG PARLIAMENT

The dissolution of a parliament was always to the prerogative what the dispersion of clouds is to the sun. As if in mockery of the transient obstruction, it shone forth as splendid and scorching as before. Even after the exertions of the most popular and intrepid House of Commons that had ever met, and after the most important statute that had been passed for some hundred years, Charles found himself in an instant unshackled by his law or his word; once more that absolute king, for whom his sycophants had preached and pleaded, as if awakened from a fearful dream of sounds and sights that such monarchs hate to endure, to the full enjoyment of an unrestrained prerogative. He announced his intentions of government for the future in a long declaration of the causes of the late dissolution of parliament, which, though not without the usual promises to maintain the laws and liberties of the people, gave evident hints that his own interpretation of them must be humbly acquiesced in.[1] This was followed up by a proclamation that he "should account it presumption for any to prescribe a time to him for parliament, the calling, continuing, or dissolving of which was always in his own power; and he should be more inclinable to meet parliament again, when his people should see more clearly into his intents and actions, when such as have bred this interruption shall have received their condign punishment." He afterwards declares that he should "not overcharge his subjects by any more burthens, but satisfy himself with those duties that were received by his father, which he neither could nor would dispense with; but should esteem them unworthy of his protection who should deny them."[2]

Prosecutions of Eliot and others for conduct in parliament.—The king next turned his mind, according to his own and his father's practice, to take vengeance on those who had been most active in their opposition to him. A few days after the dissolution, Sir John Eliot, Holles, Selden, Long, Strode, and other eminent members of the Commons, were committed, some to the Tower, some to the King's Bench, and their papers seized. Upon suing for their habeas corpus, a return was made that they were detained for notable contempts, and for stirring up sedition, alleged in a warrant under the king's sign manual. Their counsel argued against the sufficiency of this return, as well on the principles and precedents employed in the former case of Sir Thomas Darnel and his colleagues, as on the late explicit confirmation of them in the Petition of Right. The king's counsel endeavoured, by evading the authority of that enactment, to set up anew that alarming pretence to a power of arbitrary imprisonment, which the late parliament had meant to silence for ever. "A petition in parliament," said the attorney-general Heath, "is no law, yet it is for the honour and dignity of the king to observe it faithfully; but it is the duty of the people not to stretch it beyond the words and intention of the king. And no other construction can be made of the petition, than that it is a confirmation of the ancient liberties and rights of the subjects. So that now the case remains in the same quality and degree as it was before the petition." Thus, by dint of a sophism which turned into ridicule the whole proceedings of the late parliament, he pretended to recite afresh the authorities on which he had formerly relied, in order to prove that one committed by the command of the king or privy council is not bailable. The judges, timid and servile, yet desirous to keep some measures with their own consciences, or looking forward to the wrath of future parliaments, wrote what Whitelock calls "a humble and stout letter" to the king, that they were bound to bail the prisoners; but requested that he would send his direction to do so.[3] The gentlemen in custody were, on this intimation, removed to the Tower; and the king, in a letter to the court, refused permission for them to appear on the day when judgment was to be given. Their restraint was thus protracted through the long vacation; towards the close of which, Charles, sending for two of the judges told them he was content the prisoners should be bailed, notwithstanding their obstinacy in refusing to present a petition, declaring their sorrow for having offended him. In the ensuing Michaelmas term accordingly they were brought before the court, and ordered not only to find bail for the present charge, but sureties for their good behaviour. On refusing to comply with this requisition, they were remanded to custody.

The attorney-general, dropping the charge against the rest, exhibited an information against Sir John Eliot for words uttered in the house; namely, That the council and judges had conspired to trample under foot the liberties of the subject; and against Mr. Denzil Holles and Mr. Valentine for a tumult on the last day of the session; when the speaker having attempted to adjourn the house by the king's command, had been forcibly held down in the chair by some of the members, while a remonstrance was voted. They pleaded to the court's jurisdiction, because their offences were supposed to be committed in parliament, and consequently not punishable in any other place. This brought forward the great question of privilege, on the determination of which the power of the House of Commons, and consequently the character of the English constitution, seemed evidently to depend.

Freedom of speech, being implied in the nature of a representative assembly called to present grievances and suggest remedies, could not stand in need of any special law or privilege to support it. But it was also sanctioned by positive authority. The speaker demands it at the beginning of every parliament among the standing privileges of the house; and it had received a sort of confirmation from the legislature by an act passed in the fourth year of Henry VIII., on occasion of one Strode, who had been prosecuted and imprisoned in the Stannary court, for proposing in parliament some regulations for the tinners in Cornwall; which annuls all that had been done, or might hereafter be done, towards Strode, for any matter relating to the parliament, in words so strong as to form, in the opinion of many lawyers, a general enactment. The judges however held, on the question being privately sent to them by the king, that the statute concerning Strode was a particular act of parliament extending only to him and those who had joined with him to prefer a bill to the Commons concerning tinners; but that, although the act were private and extended to them alone, yet it was no more than all other parliament men, by privilege of the house, ought to have; namely, freedom of speech concerning matters there debated.[4]

It appeared by a constant series of precedents, the counsel for Eliot and his friends argued, that the liberties and privileges of parliament could only be determined therein, and not by any inferior court; that the judges had often declined to give their opinions on such subjects, alleging that they were beyond their jurisdiction; that the words imputed to Eliot were in the nature of an accusation of persons in power which the Commons had an undoubted right to prefer; that no one would venture to complain of grievances in parliament, if he should be subjected to punishment at the discretion of an inferior tribunal; that whatever instances had occurred of punishing the alleged offences of members after a dissolution, were but acts of power, which no attempt had hitherto been made to sanction; finally, that the offences imputed might be punished in a future parliament.

The attorney-general replied to the last point, that the king was not bound to wait for another parliament; and moreover, that the House of Commons was not a court of justice, nor had any power to proceed criminally, except by imprisoning its own members. He admitted that the judges had sometimes declined to give their judgment upon matters of privilege; but contended that such cases had happened during the session of parliament, and that it did not follow, but that an offence committed in the house might be questioned after a dissolution. He set aside the application of Strode's case, as a special act of parliament; and dwelt on the precedent of an information preferred in the reign of Mary against certain members for absenting themselves from their duty in parliament, which, though it never came to a conclusion, was not disputed on the ground of right.

The court were unanimous in holding that they had jurisdiction, though the alleged offences were committed in parliament, and that the defendants were bound to answer. The privileges of parliament did not extend, one of them said, to breaches of the peace, which was the present case; and all offences against the crown, said another, were punishable in the court of King's Bench. On the parties refusing to put in any other plea, judgment was given that they should be imprisoned during the king's pleasure, and not released without giving surety for good behaviour, and making submission; that Eliot, as the greatest offender and ringleader, should be fined in £2000, Holles and Valentine to a smaller amount.[5]

Eliot, the most distinguished leader of the popular party, died in the tower without yielding to the submission required. In the long parliament, the commons came to several votes on the illegality of all these proceedings, both as to the delay in granting their habeas corpus, and the overruling their plea to the jurisdiction of the King's Bench. But the subject was revived again in a more distant and more tranquil period. In the year 1667, the Commons resolved that the act of 4 H. VIII. concerning Strode was a general law, "extending to indemnify all and every the members of both houses of parliament, in all parliaments, for and touching any bills, speaking, reasoning or declaring of any matter or matters, in and concerning the parliament to be communed and treated of, and is a declaratory law of the ancient and necessary rights and privileges of parliament." They resolved also that the judgment given 5 Car. I. against Sir John Eliot, Denzil Holles, and Benjamin Valentine, is an illegal judgment, and against the freedom and privilege of parliament. To these resolutions the Lords gave their concurrence. And Holles, then become a peer, having brought the record of the King's Bench by writ of error before them, they solemnly reversed the judgment.[6] An important decision with respect to our constitutional law, which has established beyond controversy the great privilege of unlimited freedom of speech in parliament; unlimited, I mean, by any authority except that by which the house itself ought always to restrain indecent and disorderly language in its members. It does not, however, appear to be a necessary consequence from the reversal of this judgment, that no actions committed in the house by any of its members are punishable in a court of law. The argument in behalf of Holles and Valentine goes indeed to this length; but it was admitted in the debate on the subject in 1667, that their plea to the jurisdiction of the King's Bench could not have been supported as to the imputed riot in detaining the speaker in the chair, though the judgment was erroneous in extending to words spoken in parliament. And it is obvious that the house could inflict no adequate punishment in the possible case of treason or felony committed within its walls; nor, if its power of imprisonment be limited to the session, in that of many smaller offences.

Prosecution of Chambers for refusing to pay customs.—The customs on imported merchandises were now rigorously enforced.[7] But the late discussions in parliament, and the growing disposition to probe the legality of all acts of the Crown, rendered the merchants more discontented than ever. Richard Chambers, having refused to pay any further duty for a bale of silks than might be required by law, was summoned before the privy-council. In the presence of that board he was provoked to exclaim that in no part of the world, not even in Turkey, were the merchants so screwed and wrung as in England. For these hasty words an information was preferred against him in the star-chamber; and the court, being of opinion that the words were intended to make the people believe that his majesty's happy government might be termed Turkish tyranny, manifested their laudable abhorrence of such tyranny by sentencing him to pay a fine of £2000, and to make a humble submission. Chambers, a sturdy puritan, absolutely refused to subscribe the form of submission tendered to him, and was of course committed to prison. But the court of King's Bench admitted him to bail on a habeas corpus; for which, as Whitelock tells us, they were reprimanded by the council.[8]

Commendable behaviour of judges in some instances.—There were several instances, besides this just mentioned, wherein the judges manifested a more courageous spirit than they were able constantly to preserve; and the odium under which their memory labours for a servile compliance with the court, especially in the case of ship-money, renders it but an act of justice to record those testimonies they occasionally gave of a nobler sense of duty. They unanimously declared, when Charles expressed a desire that Felton, the assassin of the Duke of Buckingham, might be put to the rack in order to make him discover his accomplices, that the law of England did not allow the use of torture. This is a remarkable proof that, amidst all the arbitrary principles and arbitrary measures of the time, a truer sense of the inviolability of law had begun to prevail, and that the free constitution of England was working off the impurities with which violence had stained it. For, though it be most certain that the law never recognised the use of torture, there had been many instances of its employment, and even within a few years.[9] In this public assertion of its illegality, the judges conferred an eminent service on their country, and doubtless saved the king and his council much additional guilt and infamy which they would have incurred in the course of their career. They declared, about the same time, on a reference to them concerning certain disrespectful words alleged to have been spoken by one Pine against the king, that no words can of themselves amount to treason within the statute of Edward III.[10] They resolved, some years after, that Prynne's, Burton's, and Bastwick's libels against the bishops were no treason.[11] In their old controversy with the ecclesiastical jurisdiction, they were inflexibly tenacious. An action having been brought against some members of the high-commission court for false imprisonment, the king, on Laud's remonstrance, sent a message to desire that the suit might not proceed till he should have conversed with the judges. The chief-justice made answer that they were bound by their oaths not to delay the course of justice; and after a contention before the privy-council, the commissioners were compelled to plead.[12]

Such instances of firmness serve to extenuate those unhappy deficiencies which are more notorious in history. Had the judges been as numerous and independent as those of the parliament of Paris, they would not probably have been wanting in equal vigour. But holding their offices at the king's will, and exposed to the displeasure of his council whenever they opposed any check to the prerogative, they held a vacillating course, which made them obnoxious to those who sought for despotic power, while it forfeited the esteem of the nation.

Means adopted to raise the revenue. Compositions for knighthood.—In pursuance of the system adopted by Charles's ministers, they had recourse to exactions, some odious and obsolete, some of very questionable legality, and others clearly against law. Of the former class may be reckoned the compositions for not taking the order of knighthood. The early kings of England, Henry III. and Edward I., very little in the spirit of chivalry, had introduced the practice of summoning their military tenants, holding £20 per annum, to receive knighthood at their hands. Those who declined this honour were permitted to redeem their absence by a moderate fine.[13] Elizabeth, once in her reign, and James, had availed themselves of this ancient right. But the change in the value of money rendered it far more oppressive than formerly, though limited to the holders of £40 per annum in military tenure. Commissioners were now appointed to compound with those who had neglected some years before to obey the proclamation, summoning them to receive knighthood at the king's coronation.[14] In particular instances, very severe fines are recorded to have been imposed upon defaulters, probably from some political resentment.[15]

Forest laws.—Still greater dissatisfaction attended the king's attempt to revive the ancient laws of the forests,—those laws, of which, in elder times, so many complaints had been heard, exacting money by means of pretensions which long disuse had rendered dubious, and showing himself to those who lived on the borders of those domains in the hateful light of a litigious and encroaching neighbour. The Earl of Holland held a court almost every year, as chief-justice in eyre, for the recovery of the king's forestal rights, which made great havoc with private property. No prescription could be pleaded against the king's title, which was to be found, indeed, by the inquest of a jury, but under the direction of a very partial tribunal. The royal forests in Essex were so enlarged, that they were hyperbolically said to include the whole county.[16] The Earl of Southampton was nearly ruined by a decision that stripped him of his estate near the New Forest.[17] The boundaries of Rockingham forest were increased from six miles to sixty, and enormous fines imposed on the trespassers; Lord Salisbury being amerced in £20,000, Lord Westmoreland in £19,000, Sir Christopher Hatton in £12,000.[18] It is probable that much of these was remitted.

Monopolies.—A greater profit was derived from a still more pernicious and indefensible measure, the establishment of a chartered company, with exclusive privileges of making soap. The recent statute against monopolies seemed to secure the public against this species of grievance. Noy, however, the attorney-general, a lawyer of uncommon eminence, and lately a strenuous asserter of popular rights in the House of Commons, devised this project, by which he probably meant to evade the letter of the law, since every manufacturer was permitted to become a member of the company. They agreed to pay eight pounds for every ton of soap made, as well as £10,000 for their charter. For this they were empowered to appoint searchers, and exercise a sort of inquisition over the trade. Those dealers who resisted their interference were severely fined, on informations in the star-chamber. Some years afterwards, however, the king received money from a new corporation of soap-makers, and revoked the patent of the former.[19]

This precedent was followed in the erection of a similar company of starch-makers, and in a great variety of other grants, which may be found in Rymer's Fœdera, and in the proceedings of the long parliament; till monopolies, in transgression or evasion of the late statute, became as common as they had been under James or Elizabeth. The king, by a proclamation at York in 1639, beginning to feel the necessity of diminishing the public odium, revoked all those grants.[20] He annulled at the same time a number of commissions that had been issued in order to obtain money by compounding with offenders against penal statutes. The catalogue of these, as well as of the monopolies, is very curious. The former were, in truth, rather vexatious than illegal, and sustained by precedents in what were called the golden ages of Elizabeth and James, though at all times the source of great and just discontent.

The name of Noy has acquired an unhappy celebrity by a far more famous invention, which promised to realise the most sanguine hopes that could have been formed of carrying on the government for an indefinite length of time without the assistance of parliament. Shaking off the dust of ages from parchments in the Tower, this man of venal diligence and prostituted learning discovered that the sea-ports and even maritime counties had in early times been sometimes called upon to furnish ships for the public service; nay, there were instances of a similar demand upon some inland places. Noy himself died almost immediately afterwards. Notwithstanding his apostasy from the public cause, it is just to remark that we have no right to impute to him the more extensive and more unprecedented scheme of ship-money as a general tax, which was afterwards carried into execution. But it sprang by natural consequence from the former measure, according to the invariable course of encroachment, which those who have once bent the laws to their will ever continue to pursue. The first writ issued from the council in October 1634. It was directed to the magistrates of London and other sea-port towns. Reciting the depredations lately committed by pirates, and slightly adverting to the dangers imminent in a season of general war on the continent, it enjoins them to provide a certain number of ships of war of a prescribed tonnage and equipage; empowering them also to assess all the inhabitants for a contribution towards this armament according to their substance. The citizens of London humbly remonstrated that they conceived themselves exempt, by sundry charters and acts of parliament, from bearing such a charge. But the council peremptorily compelled their submission; and the murmurs of inferior towns were still more easily suppressed. This is said to have cost the city of London £35,000.[21]

There wanted not reasons in the cabinet of Charles for placing the navy at this time on a respectable footing. Algerine pirates had become bold enough to infest the Channel; and what was of more serious importance, the Dutch were rapidly acquiring a maritime preponderance, which excited a natural jealousy, both for our commerce, and the honour of our flag. This commercial rivalry conspired with a far more powerful motive at court, an abhorrence of everything republican or Calvinistic, to make our course of policy towards Holland not only unfriendly, but insidious and inimical in the highest degree. A secret treaty is extant, signed in 1631, by which Charles engaged to assist the King of Spain in the conquest of that great protestant commonwealth, retaining the isles of Zealand as the price of his co-operation.[22]

Yet, with preposterous inconsistency as well as ill-faith, the two characteristics of all this unhappy prince's foreign policy, we find him in the next year carrying on a negotiation with a disaffected party in the Netherlands, in some strange expectation of obtaining the sovereignty on their separation from Spain. Lord Cottington betrayed this intrigue (of which one whom we should little expect to find in these paths of conspiracy, Peter Paul Rubens, was the negotiator) to the court of Madrid.[23] It was in fact an unpardonable and unprovoked breach of faith, and accounts for the indifference, to say no more, which that government always showed to his misfortunes. Charles, whose domestic position rendered a pacific system absolutely necessary, busied himself, far more than common history has recorded, with the affairs of Europe. He was engaged in a tedious and unavailing negotiation with both branches of the house of Austria, especially with the court of Madrid, for the restitution of the Palatinate. He took a much greater interest than his father had done in the fortunes of his sister and her family; but, like his father, he fell into the delusion that the cabinet of Madrid, for whom he could effect but little, or that of Vienna, to whom he could offer nothing, would so far realise the cheap professions of friendship they were always making, as to sacrifice a conquest wherein the preponderance of the house of Austria and the catholic religion in Germany was so deeply concerned. They drew him on accordingly through the labyrinths of diplomacy; assisted, no doubt, by that party in his councils, composed at this time of Lord Cottington, Secretary Windebank, and some others, who had always favoured Spanish connections.[24] It appears that the fleet raised in 1634 was intended, according to an agreement entered into with Spain, to restrain the Dutch from fishing in the English seas, nay even, as opportunities should arise, to co-operate hostilely with that of Spain.[25] After above two years spent in these negotiations, Charles discovered that the house of Austria were deceiving him; and, still keeping in view the restoration of his nephew to the electoral dignity and territories, entered into stricter relations with France; a policy which might be deemed congenial to the queen's inclinations, and recommended by her party in his council, the Earl of Holland, Sir Henry Vane, and perhaps by the Earls of Northumberland and Arundel. In the first impulse of indignation at the duplicity of Spain, the king yielded so far to their counsels as to meditate a declaration of war against that power.[26] But his own cooler judgment, or the strong dissuasions of Strafford, who saw that external peace was an indispensable condition for the security of despotism,[27] put an end to so imprudent a project; though he preserved, to the very meeting of the long parliament, an intimate connection with France, and even continued to carry on negotiations, tedious and insincere, for an offensive alliance.[28] Yet he still made, from time to time, similar overtures to Spain;[29] and this unsteadiness, or rather duplicity, which could not easily be concealed from two cabinets eminent for their secret intelligence, rendered both of them his enemies, and the instruments, as there is much reason to believe, of some of his greatest calamities. It is well known that the Scots covenanters were in close connection with Richlieu; and many circumstances render it probable, that the Irish rebellion was countenanced and instigated both by him and by Spain.

Extension of writs for ship-money to inland places.—This desire of being at least prepared for war, as well as the general system of stretching the prerogative beyond all limits, suggested an extension of the former writs from the sea-ports to the whole kingdom. Finch, chief justice of the common pleas, has the honour of this improvement on Noy's scheme. He was a man of little learning or respectability, a servile tool of the despotic cabal; who, as speaker of the last parliament, had, in obedience to a command from the king to adjourn, refused to put the question upon a remonstrance moved in the house. By the new writs for ship-money, properly so denominated, since the former had only demanded the actual equipment of vessels, for which inland counties were of course obliged to compound, the sheriffs were directed to assess every landholder and other inhabitant according to their judgment of his means, and to enforce the payment by distress.[30]

This extraordinary demand startled even those who had hitherto sided with the court. Some symptoms of opposition were shown in different places, and actions brought against those who had collected the money. But the greater part yielding to an overbearing power, exercised with such rigour that no one in this king's reign who had ventured on the humblest remonstrance against any illegal act had escaped without punishment. Indolent and improvident men satisfied themselves that the imposition was not very heavy, and might not be repeated. Some were content to hope that their contribution, however unduly exacted, would be faithfully applied to public ends. Others were overborne by the authority of pretended precedents, and could not yet believe that the sworn judges of the law would pervert it to its own destruction. The ministers prudently resolved to secure, not the law, but its interpreters, on their side. The judges of assize were directed to inculcate on their circuits the necessary obligation of forwarding the king's service by complying with his writ. But, as the measure grew more obnoxious, and strong doubts of its legality came more to prevail, it was thought expedient to publish an extra-judicial opinion of the twelve judges, taken at the king's special command, according to the pernicious custom of that age. They gave it as their unanimous opinion that, when the good and safety of the kingdom in general is concerned and the whole kingdom in danger, his majesty might, by writ under the great seal, command all his subjects, at their charge, to provide and furnish such number of ships, with men, munition, and victuals, and for such time as he should think fit, for the defence and safeguard of the kingdom; and that by law he might compel the doing thereof, in case of refusal or refractoriness; and that he was the sole judge both of the danger, and when and how the same was to be prevented and avoided.

This premature declaration of the judges, which was publicly read by the lord-keeper Coventry in the star-chamber, did not prevent a few intrepid persons from bringing the question solemnly before them, that the liberties of their country might at least not perish silently, nor those who had betrayed them avoid the responsibility of a public avowal of their shame. The first that resisted was the gallant Richard Chambers, who brought an action against the lord-mayor for imprisoning him on account of his refusal to pay his assessment on the former writ. The magistrate pleaded the writ as a special justification; when Berkley, one of the judges of the king's bench, declared that there was a rule of law and a rule of government, that many things which could not be done by the first rule might be done by the other, and would not suffer counsel to argue against the lawfulness of ship-money.[31] The next were Lord Say and Mr. Hampden, both of whom appealed to the justice of their country; but the famous decision which has made the latter so illustrious, put an end to all attempts at obtaining redress by course of law.

Hampden's refusal to pay.—Hampden, it seems hardly necessary to mention, was a gentleman of good estate in Buckinghamshire, whose assessment to the contribution for ship-money demanded from his county amounted only to twenty shillings.[32] The cause, though properly belonging to the court of exchequer, was heard, on account of its magnitude, before all the judges in the exchequer-chamber.[33] The precise question, so far as related to Mr. Hampden, was, Whether the king had a right, on his own allegation of public danger, to require an inland county to furnish ships, or a prescribed sum of money by way of commutation, for the defence of the kingdom? It was argued by St. John and Holborne in behalf of Hampden; by the solicitor-general Littleton and the attorney-general Banks, for the crown.[34]

Arguments on the case.—The law and constitution of England, the former maintained, had provided in various ways for the public safety and protection against enemies. First, there were the military tenures, which bound great part of the kingdom to a stipulated service at the charge of the possessors. The cinque ports also, and several other towns, some of them not maritime, held by a tenure analogous to this; and were bound to furnish a quota of ships or men, as the condition of their possessions and privileges. These for the most part are recorded in Domesday-book, though now in general grown obsolete. Next to this specific service, our constitution had bestowed on the sovereign his certain revenues, the fruits of tenure, the profits of his various minor prerogatives; whatever, in short, he held in right of his crown, was applicable, so far as it could be extended, to the public use. It bestowed on him, moreover, and perhaps with more special application to maritime purposes, the customs on importation of merchandise. These indeed had been recently augmented far beyond ancient usage. "For these modern impositions," says St. John, "of the legality thereof I intend not to speak: for in case his majesty may impose upon merchandise what himself pleaseth, there will be less cause to tax the inland counties; and in case he cannot do it, it will be strongly presumed that he can much less tax them."

But as the ordinary revenues might prove quite unequal to great exigencies, the constitution has provided another means, as ample and sufficient as it is lawful and regular, parliamentary supply. To this the kings of England have in all times had recourse; yet princes are not apt to ask as a concession what they might demand of right. The frequent loans and benevolences which they have required, though not always defensible by law, are additional proofs that they possessed no general right of taxation. To borrow on promise of repayment, to solicit, as it were, alms from their subjects, is not the practice of sovereigns whose prerogatives entitle them to exact money. Those loans had sometimes been repaid, expressly to discharge the king's conscience. And a very arbitrary prince, Henry VIII., had obtained acts of parliament to release him from the obligation of repayment.

These merely probable reasonings prepare the way for that conclusive and irresistible argument that was founded on statute law. Passing slightly over the charter of the Conqueror, that his subjects shall hold their lands free from all unjust tallage, and the clause in John's Magna Charta, that no aid or scutage should be assessed but by consent of the great council (a provision not repeated in that of Henry III.), the advocates of Hampden relied on the 25 E. I., commonly called the Confirmatio Chartarum, which for ever abrogated all taxation without consent of parliament; and this statute itself, they endeavoured to prove, was grounded on requisitions very like the present, for the custody of the sea, which Edward had issued the year before. Hence it was evident that the saving contained in that act for the accustomed aids and prises could not possibly be intended, as the opposite counsel would suggest, to preserve such exactions as ship-money; but related to the established feudal aids, and to the ancient customs on merchandise. They dwelt less however (probably through fear of having this exception turned against them) on this important statute than on one of more celebrity, but of very equivocal genuineness, denominated, De Tallagio non Concedendo; which is nearly in the same words as the Confirmatio Chartarum, with the omission of the above-mentioned saving. More than one law, enacted under Edward III., re-asserts the necessity of parliamentary consent to taxation. It was indeed the subject of frequent remonstrance in that reign, and the king often infringed this right. But the perseverance of the Commons was successful, and ultimately rendered the practice conformable to the law. In the second year of Richard II., the realm being in imminent danger of invasion, the privy council convoked an assembly of peers and other great men, probably with a view to avoid the summoning of a parliament. This assembly lent their own money, but declared that they could not provide a remedy without charging the Commons, which could not be done out of parliament, advising that one should be speedily summoned. This precedent was the more important, as it tended to obviate that argument from peril and necessity, on which the defenders of ship-money were wont to rely. But they met that specious plea more directly. They admitted that a paramount overruling necessity silences the voice of law; that in actual invasion, or its immediate prospect, the rights of private men must yield to the safety of the whole; that not only the sovereign, but each man in respect of his neighbour might do many things, absolutely illegal at other seasons; and this served to distinguish the present case from some strong acts of prerogative exerted by Elizabeth in 1588, when the liberties and religion of the people were in the most apparent jeopardy. But here there was no overwhelming danger; the nation was at peace with all the world: could the piracies of Turkish corsairs, or even the insolence of rival neighbours, be reckoned among those instant perils, for which a parliament would provide too late?

To the precedents alleged on the other side, it was replied, that no one of them met the case of an inland county; that such as were before the 25 E. I. were sufficiently repelled by that statute, such as occurred under Edward III. by the later statutes, and by the remonstrances of parliament during his reign; and there were but very few afterwards. But that, in a matter of statute law, they ought not to be governed by precedents, even if such could be adduced. Before the latter end of Edward I.'s reign, St. John observes, "all things concerning the king's prerogative and the subject's liberties were upon uncertainties." "The government," says Holborne truly, "was more of force than law." And this is unquestionably applicable, in a lesser degree, to many later ages.

Lastly, the petition of right, that noble legacy of a slandered parliament, reciting and confirming the ancient statutes, had established that no man thereafter be compelled to make or yield any gift, loan, benevolence, tax, or such-like charge, without common consent by act of parliament. This latest and most complete recognition must sweep away all contrary precedent, and could not, without a glaring violation of its obvious meaning, be stretched into an admission of ship-money.

The king's counsel, in answer to these arguments, appealed to that series of records which the diligence of Noy had collected. By far the greater part of these were commissions of array. But several, even of those addressed to inland towns (and, if there were no service by tenure in the case, it does not seem easy to distinguish these in principle from counties), bore a very strong analogy to the present. They were, however, in early times. No sufficient answer could be offered to the statutes that had prohibited unparliamentary taxation. The attempts made to elude their force were utterly ineffectual, as those who are acquainted with their emphatic language may well conceive. But the council of Charles the First, and the hirelings who ate their bread, disdained to rest their claim of ship-money (big as it was with other and still more novel schemes) on obscure records, or on cavils about the meaning of statutes. They resorted rather to the favourite topic of the times, the intrinsic, absolute authority of the king. This the attorney-general Banks placed in the very front of his argument. "This power," says he, "is innate in the person of an absolute king, and in the persons of the kings of England. All magistracy it is of nature, and obedience and subjection it is of nature. This power is not any ways derived from the people, but reserved unto the king when positive laws first began. For the king of England, he is an absolute monarch; nothing can be given to an absolute prince but what is inherent in his person. He can do no wrong. He is the sole judge, and we ought not to question him. Where the law trusts, we ought not to distrust. The acts of parliament," he observed, "contained no express words to take away so high a prerogative; and the king's prerogative, even in lesser matters, is always saved, wherever express words do not restrain it."

But this last argument appearing too modest for some of the judges who pronounced sentence in this cause, they denied the power of parliament to limit the high prerogatives of the Crown. "This imposition without parliament," says Justice Crawley, "appertains to the king originally, and to the successor ipso facto, if he be a sovereign in right of his sovereignty from the Crown. You cannot have a king without these royal rights, no, not by act of parliament." "Where Mr. Holborne," says Justice Berkley, "supposed a fundamental policy in the creation of the frame of this kingdom, that in case the monarch of England should be inclined to exact from his subjects at his pleasure, he should be restrained, for that he could have nothing from them, but upon a common consent in parliament; he is utterly mistaken herein. The law knows no such king-yoking policy. The law is itself an old and trusty servant of the king's; it is his instrument or means which he useth to govern his people by: I never read nor heard that lex was rex; but it is common and most true, that rex is lex." Vernon, another judge, gave his opinion in few words: "That the king, pro bono publico, may charge his subjects for the safety and defence of the kingdom, notwithstanding any act of parliament, and that a statute derogatory from the prerogative doth not bind the king; and the king may dispense with any law in cases of necessity." Finch, the adviser of the ship-money, was not backward to employ the same argument in its behalf. "No act of parliament," he told them, "could bar a king of his regality, as that no land should hold of him, or bar him of the allegiance of his subjects or the relative on his part, as trust and power to defend his people; therefore acts of parliament to take away his royal power in the defence of his kingdom are void; 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."

Seven of the twelve judges, namely, Finch, chief justice of the common pleas, Jones, Berkley, Vernon, Crawley, Trevor, and Weston, gave judgment for the Crown. Brampston, chief justice of the king's bench, and Davenport, chief baron of the exchequer, pronounced for Hampden, but on technical reasons, and adhering to the majority on the principal question. Denham, another judge of the same court, being extremely ill, gave a short written judgment in favour of Hampden. But Justices Croke and Hutton, men of considerable reputation and experience, displayed a most praiseworthy intrepidity in denying, without the smallest qualification, the alleged prerogative of the Crown and the lawfulness of the writ for ship-money. They had unfortunately signed, along with the other judges, the above-mentioned opinion in favour of the right. For this they made the best apology they could, that their voice was concluded by the majority. But in truth it was the ultimate success that sometimes attends a struggle between conscience and self-interest or timidity.[35]

The length to which this important cause was protracted, six months having elapsed from the opening speech of Mr. Hampden's counsel to the final judgment, was of infinite disservice to the Crown. During this long period, every man's attention was directed to the exchequer-chamber. The convincing arguments of St. John and Holborne, but still more the division on the bench, increased their natural repugnance to so unusual and dangerous a prerogative.[36] Those who had trusted to the faith of the judges were undeceived by the honest repentance of some, and looked with indignation on so prostituted a crew. That respect for courts of justice, which the happy structure of our judicial administration has in general kept inviolate, was exchanged for distrust, contempt, and desire of vengeance. They heard the speeches of some of the judges with more displeasure than even their final decision. Ship-money was held lawful by Finch and several other judges, not on the authority of precedents, which must in their nature have some bounds, but on principles subversive of any property or privilege in the subject. Those paramount rights of monarchy, to which they appealed to-day in justification of ship-money, might to-morrow serve to supersede other laws, and maintain new exertions of despotic power. It was manifest, by the whole strain of the court lawyers, that no limitations on the king's authority could exist but by the king's sufferance. This alarming tenet, long bruited among the churchmen and courtiers, now resounded in the halls of justice. But ship-money, in consequence, was paid with far less regularity and more reluctance than before.[37] The discontent that had been tolerably smothered was now displayed in every county; and though the council did not flinch in the least from exacting payment, nor willingly remit any part of its rigour towards the uncomplying, it was impossible either to punish the great body of the country gentlemen and citizens, or to restrain their murmurs by a few examples. Whether in consequence of this unwillingness or for other reasons, the revenue levied in different years under the head of ship-money is more fluctuating than we should expect from a fixed assessment; but may be reckoned at an average sum of £200,000.[38]

Proclamations.—It would doubtless be unfair to pass a severe censure on the government of Charles the First for transgressions of law, which a long course of precedents might render dubious, or at least extenuate. But this common apology for his administration, on which the artful defence of Hume is almost entirely grounded, must be admitted cautiously, and not until we have well considered how far such precedents could be brought to support it. This is particularly applicable to his proclamations. I have already pointed out the comparative novelty of these unconstitutional ordinances, and their great increase under James. They had not been fully acquiesced in; the Commons had remonstrated against their abuse; and Coke, with other judges, had endeavoured to fix limits to their authority, very far within that which they arrogated. It can hardly, therefore, be said that Charles's council were ignorant of their illegality; nor is the case at all parallel to that of general warrants, or any similar irregularity into which an honest government may inadvertently be led. They serve at least to display the practical state of the constitution, and the necessity of an entire reform in its spirit.

Various arbitrary proceedings.—The proclamations of Charles's reign are far more numerous than those of his father. They imply a prerogative of intermeddling with all matters of trade, prohibiting or putting under restraint the importation of various articles, and the home growth of others, or establishing regulations for manufactures.[39] Prices of several minor articles were fixed by proclamation, and in one instance this was extended to poultry, butter, and coals.[40] The king declares by a proclamation that he had incorporated all tradesmen and artificers within London and three miles round; so that no person might set up any trade without having served a seven years' apprenticeship, and without admission into such corporation.[41] He prohibits in like manner any one from using the trade of a maltster or that of a brewer, without admission into the corporations of maltsters or brewers erected for every county.[42] I know not whether these projects were in any degree founded on the alleged pretext of correcting abuses, or were solely designed to raise money by means of these corporations. We find, however, a revocation of the restraint on malting and brewing soon after. The illegality of these proclamations is most unquestionable.

The rapid increase of London continued to disquiet the court. It was the stronghold of political and religious disaffection. Hence the prohibitions of erecting new houses, which had begun under Elizabeth, were continually repeated.[43] They had indeed some laudable objects in view; to render the city more healthy, cleanly, and magnificent, and by prescribing the general use of brick instead of wood, as well as by improving the width and regularity of the streets, to afford the best security against fires, and against those epidemical diseases which visited the metropolis with unusual severity in the early years of this reign. The most jealous censor of royal encroachments will hardly object to the proclamations enforcing certain regulations of police in some of those alarming seasons.

It is probable, from the increase which we know to have taken place in London during this reign, that licences for building were easily obtained. The same supposition is applicable to another class of proclamation, enjoining all persons who had residences in the country to quit the capital and repair to them.[44] Yet, that these were not always a dead letter, appears from an information exhibited in the star-chamber against seven lords, sixty knights, and one hundred esquires, besides many ladies, for disobeying the king's proclamation, either by continuing in London, or returning to it after a short absence.[45] The result of this prosecution, which was probably only intended to keep them in check, does not appear. No proclamation could stand in need of support from law, while this arbitrary tribunal assumed a right of punishing misdemeanours. It would have been a dangerous aggravation of any delinquent's offence to have questioned the authority of a proclamation, or the jurisdiction of the council.

The security of freehold rights had been the peculiar boast of the English law. The very statute of Henry VIII., which has been held up to so much infamy, while it gave the force of law to his proclamations, interposed its barrier in defence of the subject's property. The name of freeholder, handed down with religious honour from an age when it conveyed distinct privileges, and as it were a sort of popular nobility, protected the poorest man against the Crown's and the lord's rapacity. He at least was recognised as the liber homo of Magna Charta, who could not be disseised of his tenements and franchises. His house was his castle, which the law respected, and which the king dared not enter. Even the public good must give way to his obstinacy; nor had the legislature itself as yet compelled any man to part with his lands for a compensation which he was loath to accept. The council and star-chamber had very rarely presumed to meddle with his right; never perhaps where it was acknowledged and ancient. But now this reverence of the common law for the sacredness of real property was derided by those who revered nothing as sacred but the interests of the Church and Crown. The privy council, on a suggestion that the demolition of some houses and shops in the vicinity of St. Paul's would show the cathedral to more advantage, directed that the owners should receive such satisfaction as should seem reasonable; or on their refusal the sheriff was required to see the buildings pulled down, "it not being thought fit the obstinacy of those persons should hinder so considerable a work."[46] By another order of council, scarcely less oppressive and illegal, all shops in Cheapside and Lombard Street, except those of goldsmiths, were directed to be shut up, that the avenue to St. Paul's might appear more splendid; and the mayor and aldermen were repeatedly threatened for remissness in executing this mandate of tyranny.[47]

In the great plantation of Ulster by James, the city of London had received a grant of extensive lands in the county of Derry, on certain conditions prescribed in their charter. The settlement became flourishing, and enriched the city. But the wealth of London was always invidious to the Crown, as well as to the needy courtiers. On an information filed in the star-chamber for certain alleged breaches of their charter, it was not only adjudged to be forfeited to the king, but a fine of £70,000 was imposed on the city. They paid this enormous mulct; but were kept out of their lands till restored by the long parliament.[48] In this proceeding Charles forgot his duty enough to take a very active share, personally exciting the court to give sentence for himself.[49] Is it then to be a matter of surprise or reproach, that the citizens of London refused him assistance in the Scottish war, and through the ensuing times of confusion, harboured an implacable resentment against a sovereign who had so deeply injured them?

We may advert in this place to some other stretches of power, which no one can pretend to justify, though in general they seem to have escaped notice amidst the enormous mass of national grievances. A commission was issued in 1635, to the recorder of London and others, to examine all persons going beyond seas, and tender to them an oath of the most inquisitorial nature.[50] Certain privy-councillors were empowered to enter the house of Sir Robert Cotton, and search his books, records, and papers, setting down such as ought to belong to the Crown.[51] This renders probable what we find in a writer who had the best means of information, that Secretary Windebank, by virtue of an order of council, entered Sir Edward Coke's house while he lay on his death-bed, took away his manuscripts, together with his last will, which was never returned to his family.[52] The high commission court were enabled, by the king's "supreme power ecclesiastical," to examine such as were charged with offences cognisable by them on oath, which many had declined to take, according to the known maxims of English law.[53]

It would be improper to notice as illegal or irregular the practice of granting dispensations in particular instances, either from general acts of parliament or the local statutes of colleges. Such a prerogative, at least in the former case, was founded on long usage and judicial recognition. Charles, however, transgressed its admitted boundaries, when he empowered others to dispense with them as there might be occasion. Thus, in a commission to the president and council of the North, directing them to compound with recusants, he in effect suspends the statute which provides that no recusant shall have a lease of that portion of his lands which the law sequestered to the king's use during his recusancy; a clause in this patent enabling the commissioners to grant such leases notwithstanding any law or statute to the contrary. This seems to go beyond the admitted limits of the dispensing prerogative.[54]

The levies of tonnage and poundage without authority of parliament, the exaction of monopolies, the extension of the forests, the arbitrary restraints of proclamations, above all, the general exaction of ship-money, form the principal articles of charge against the government of Charles, so far as relates to its inroads on the subject's property. These were maintained by a vigilant and unsparing exercise of jurisdiction in the court of star-chamber. I have, in another chapter, traced the revival of this great tribunal, probably under Henry VIII., in at least as formidable a shape as before the now-neglected statutes of Edward III. and Richard II., which had placed barriers in its way. It was the great weapon of executive power under Elizabeth and James; nor can we reproach the present reign with innovation in this respect, though in no former period had the proceedings of this court been accompanied with so much violence and tyranny. But this will require some fuller explication.

Star-chamber jurisdiction.—I hardly need remind the reader that the jurisdiction of the ancient Concilium regis ordinarium, or court of star-chamber, continued to be exercised, more or less frequently, notwithstanding the various statutes enacted to repress it; and that it neither was supported by the act erecting a new court in the third of Henry VII., nor originated at that time. The records show the star-chamber to have taken cognisance both of civil suits and of offences throughout the time of the Tudors. But precedents of usurped power cannot establish a legal authority in defiance of the acknowledged law. It appears that the lawyers did not admit any jurisdiction in the council, except so far as the statute of Henry VII. was supposed to have given it. "The famous Plowden put his hand to a demurrer to a bill," says Hudson, "because the matter was not within the statute; and, although it was then over-ruled, yet Mr. Serjeant Richardson, thirty years after, fell again upon the same rock, and was sharply rebuked for it."[55] The chancellor, who was the standing president of the court of star-chamber, would always find pretences to elude the existing statutes, and justify the usurpation of this tribunal.

The civil jurisdiction claimed and exerted by the star-chamber was only in particular cases, as disputes between alien merchants and Englishmen, questions of prize or unlawful detention of ships, and in general such as now belong to the court of admiralty; some testamentary matters, in order to prevent appeals to Rome, which might have been brought from the ecclesiastical courts; suits between corporations, "of which," says Hudson, "I dare undertake to show above a hundred in the reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII., or sometimes between men of great power and interest, which could not be tried with fairness by the common law."[56] For the corruption of sheriffs and juries furnished an apology for the irregular, but necessary, interference of a controlling authority. The ancient remedy, by means of attaint, which renders a jury responsible for an unjust verdict, was almost gone into disuse, and, depending on the integrity of a second jury, not always easy to be obtained; so that in many parts of the kingdom, and especially in Wales, it was impossible to find a jury who would return a verdict against a man of good family, either in a civil or criminal proceeding.

The statutes, however, restraining the council's jurisdiction, and the strong prepossession of the people as to the sacredness of freehold rights, made the star-chamber cautious of determining questions of inheritance, which they commonly remitted to the judges; and from the early part of Elizabeth's reign, they took a direct cognisance of any civil suits less frequently than before; partly, I suppose, from the increased business of the court of chancery, and the admiralty court, which took away much wherein they had been wont to meddle; partly from their own occupation as a court of criminal judicature, which became more conspicuous as the other went into disuse.[57] This criminal jurisdiction is that which rendered the star-chamber so potent and so odious an auxiliary of a despotic administration.

The offences principally cognisable in this court were forgery, perjury, riot, maintenance, fraud, libel, and conspiracy.[58] But besides these, every misdemeanour came within the proper scope of its enquiry; those especially of public importance, and for which the law, as then understood, had provided no sufficient punishment. For the judges interpreted the law in early times with too great narrowness and timidity; defects which, on the one hand, raised up the over-ruling authority of the court of chancery, as the necessary means of redress to the civil suitor who found the gates of justice barred against him by technical pedantry; and on the other, brought this usurpation and tyranny of the star-chamber upon the kingdom by an absurd scrupulosity about punishing manifest offences against the public good. Thus corruption, breach of trust, and malfeasance in public affairs, or attempts to commit felony, seem to have been reckoned not indictable at common law, and came in consequence under the cognisance of the star-chamber.[59] In other cases its jurisdiction was merely concurrent; but the greater certainty of conviction, and the greater severity of punishment, rendered it incomparably more formidable than the ordinary benches of justice. The law of libel grew up in this unwholesome atmosphere, and was moulded by the plastic hands of successive judges and attorneys-general. Prosecutions of this kind, according to Hudson, began to be more frequent from the last years of Elizabeth, when Coke was attorney-general; and it is easy to conjecture what kind of interpretation they received. To hear a libel sung or read, says that writer, and to laugh at it, and make merriment with it, has ever been held a publication in law. The gross error that it is not a libel if it be true, has long since, he adds, been exploded out of this court.[60]

Among the exertions of authority practised in the star-chamber which no positive law could be brought to warrant, he enumerates "punishments of breach of proclamations before they have the strength of an act of parliament; which this court hath stretched as far as ever any act of parliament did. As in the 41st of Elizabeth, builders of houses in London were sentenced, and their houses ordered to be pulled down, and the materials to be distributed to the benefit of the parish where the building was; which disposition of the goods soundeth as a great extremity, and beyond the warrant of our laws; and yet, surely, very necessary, if anything would deter men from that horrible mischief of increasing that head which is swoln to a great hugeness already."[61]

The mode of process was sometimes of a summary nature; the accused person being privately examined, and his examination read in the court, if he was thought to have confessed sufficient to deserve sentence, it was immediately awarded without any formal trial or written process. But the more regular course was by information filed at the suit of the attorney-general, or in certain cases, of a private relator. The party was brought before the court by writ of subpœna; and having given bond with sureties not to depart without leave, was to put in his answer upon oath, as well to the matters contained in the information, as to special interrogatories. Witnesses were examined upon interrogatories, and their dispositions read in court. The course of proceeding on the whole seems to have nearly resembled that of the chancery.[62]

Punishments inflicted by the star-chamber.—It was held competent for the court to adjudge any punishment short of death. Fine and imprisonment were of course the most usual. The pillory, whipping, branding, and cutting off the ears, grew into use by degrees. In the reign of Henry VII. and Henry VIII., we are told by Hudson, the fines were not so ruinous as they have been since, which he ascribes to the number of bishops who sat in the court, and inclined to mercy; "and I can well remember," he says, "that the most reverend Archbishop Whitgift did ever constantly maintain the liberty of the free charter, that men ought to be fined, salvo contenemento. But they have been of late imposed according to the nature of the offence, and not the estate of the person. The slavish punishment of whipping," he proceeds to observe, "was not introduced till a great man of the common law, and otherwise a worthy justice, forgot his place of session, and brought it in this place too much in use."[63] It would be difficult to find precedents for the aggravated cruelties inflicted on Leighton, Lilburne, and others; but instances of cutting off the ears may be found under Elizabeth.[64]

The reproach, therefore, of arbitrary and illegal jurisdiction does not wholly fall on the government of Charles. They found themselves in possession of this almost unlimited authority. But doubtless, as far as the history of proceedings in the star-chamber are recorded, they seem much more numerous and violent in the present reign than in the two preceding. Rushworth has preserved a copious selection of cases determined before this tribunal. They consist principally of misdemeanours, rather of an aggravated nature; such as disturbances of the public peace, assaults accompanied with a good deal of violence, conspiracies, and libels. The necessity, however, for such a paramount court to restrain the excesses of powerful men no longer existed, since it can hardly be doubted that the common administration of the law was sufficient to give redress in the time of Charles the First; though we certainly do find several instances of violence and outrage by men of a superior station in life, which speak unfavourably for the state of manners in the kingdom. But the object of drawing so large a number of criminal cases into the star-chamber seems to have been twofold: first, to inure men's minds to an authority more immediately connected with the Crown than the ordinary courts of law, and less tied down to any rules of pleading or evidence; secondly, to eke out a scanty revenue by penalties and forfeitures. Absolutely regardless of the provision of the Great Charter, that no man shall be amerced even to the full extent of his means, the councillors of the star-chamber inflicted such fines as no court of justice, in the present reduced value of money, would think of imposing. Little objection indeed seems to lie, in a free country, and with a well-regulated administration of justice, against the imposition of weighty pecuniary penalties, due consideration being had of the offence and the criminal. But, adjudged by such a tribunal as the star-chamber, where those who inflicted the punishment reaped the gain, and sat, like famished birds of prey, with keen eyes and bended talons, eager to supply for a moment, by some wretch's ruin, the craving emptiness of the exchequer, this scheme of enormous penalties became more dangerous and subversive of justice, though not more odious, than corporal punishment. A gentleman of the name of Allington was fined £12,000 for marrying his niece. One who had sent a challenge to the Earl of Northumberland was fined £5000; another for saying the Earl of Suffolk was a base lord, £4000 to him, and a like sum to the king. Sir David Forbes, for opprobrious words against Lord Wentworth, incurred £5000 to the king, and £3000 to the party. On some soap-boilers, who had not complied with the requisitions of the newly incorporated company, mulcts were imposed of £1500 and £1000. One man was fined and set in the pillory for engrossing corn, though he only kept what grew on his own land, asking more in a season of dearth than the overseers of the poor thought proper to give.[65] Some arbitrary regulations with respect to prices may be excused by a well-intentioned, though mistaken, policy. The charges of inns and taverns were fixed by the judges. But, even in those, a corrupt motive was sometimes blended. The company of vintners, or victuallers, having refused to pay a demand of the lord treasurer, one penny a quart for all wine drank in their houses, the star-chamber, without information filed or defence made, interdicted them from selling or dressing victuals till they submitted to pay forty shillings for each tun of wine to the king.[66] It is evident that the strong interest of the court in these fines must not only have had a tendency to aggravate the punishment, but to induce sentences of condemnation on inadequate proof. From all that remains of proceedings in the star-chamber, they seem to have been very frequently as iniquitous as they were severe. In many celebrated instances, the accused party suffered less on the score of any imputed offence than for having provoked the malice of a powerful adversary, or for notorious dissatisfaction with the existing government. Thus Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, once lord-keeper, the favourite of King James, the possessor for a season of the power that was turned against him, experienced the rancorous and ungrateful malignity of Laud; who, having been brought forward by Williams into the favour of the court, not only supplanted by his intrigues, and incensed the king's mind against his benefactor, but harassed his retirement by repeated persecutions.[67] It will sufficiently illustrate the spirit of these times to mention that the sole offence imputed to the Bishop of Lincoln in the last information against him in the star-chamber was, that he had received certain letters from one Osbaldiston, master of Westminster School, wherein some contemptuous nickname was used to denote Laud.[68] It did not appear that Williams had ever divulged these letters. But it was held that the concealment of a libellous letter was a high misdemeanour. Williams was therefore adjudged to pay £5000 to the king, and £3000 to the archbishop, to be imprisoned during pleasure, and to make a submission; Osbaldiston to pay a still heavier fine, to be deprived of all his benefices, to be imprisoned and make submission; and moreover to stand in the pillory before his school in Dean's-yard, with his ears nailed to it. This man had the good fortune to conceal himself, but the Bishop of Lincoln, refusing to make the required apology, lay above three years in the Tower, till released at the beginning of the long parliament.

It might detain me too long to dwell particularly on the punishments inflicted by the court of star-chamber in this reign. Such historians as have not written in order to palliate the tyranny of Charles, and especially Rushworth, will furnish abundant details, with all those circumstances that portray the barbarous and tyrannical spirit of those who composed that tribunal. Two or three instances are so celebrated that I cannot pass them over. Leighton, a Scots divine, having published an angry libel against the hierarchy, was sentenced to be publicly whipped at Westminster and set in the pillory, to have one side of his nose slit, one ear cut off, and one side of his cheek branded with a hot iron, to have the whole of this repeated the next week at Cheapside, and to suffer perpetual imprisonment in the Fleet.[69] Lilburne, for dispersing pamphlets against the bishops, was whipped from the Fleet prison to Westminster, there set in the pillory, and treated afterwards with great cruelty.[70] Prynne, a lawyer of uncommon erudition and a zealous puritan, had printed a bulky volume, called Histriomastix, full of invectives against the theatre, which he sustained by a profusion of learning. In the course of this, he adverted to the appearance of courtesans on the Roman stage, and by a satirical reference in his index seemed to range all female actors in the class.[71] The queen, unfortunately, six weeks after the publication of Prynne's book, had performed a part in a mask at court. This passage was accordingly dragged to light by the malice of Peter Heylin, a chaplain of Laud, on whom the archbishop devolved the burthen of reading this heavy volume in order to detect its offences. Heylin, a bigoted enemy of everything puritanical, and not scrupulous as to veracity, may be suspected of having aggravated, if not misrepresented, the tendency of a book much more tiresome than seditious. Prynne, however, was already obnoxious, and the star-chamber adjudged him to stand twice in the pillory, to be branded in the forehead, to lose both his ears, to pay a fine of £5000, and to suffer perpetual imprisonment. The dogged puritan employed the leisure of a gaol in writing a fresh libel against the hierarchy. For this, with two other delinquents of the same class, Burton a divine, and Bastwick a physician, he stood again at the bar of that terrible tribunal. Their demeanour was what the court deemed intolerably contumacious, arising in fact from the despair of men who knew that no humiliation would procure them mercy.[72] Prynne lost the remainder of his ears in the pillory; and the punishment was inflicted on them all with extreme and designed cruelty, which they endured, as martyrs always endure suffering, so heroically as to excite a deep impression of sympathy and resentment in the assembled multitude.[73] They were sentenced to perpetual confinement in distant prisons. But their departure from London, and their reception on the road, were marked by signal expressions of popular regard; and their friends resorting to them even in Launceston, Chester, and Carnarvon castles, whither they were sent, an order of council was made to transport them to the isles of the Channel. It was the very first act of the long parliament to restore these victims of tyranny to their families. Punishments by mutilation, though not quite unknown to the English law, had been of rare occurrence; and thus inflicted on men whose station appeared to render the ignominy of whipping and branding more intolerable, they produced much the same effect as the still greater cruelties of Mary's reign, in exciting a detestation for that ecclesiastical dominion which protected itself by means so atrocious.

Character of Laud.—The person on whom public hatred chiefly fell, and who proved in a far more eminent degree than any other individual the evil genius of this unhappy sovereign, was Laud. His talents, though enabling him to acquire a large portion of theological learning, seem to have been by no means considerable. There cannot be a more contemptible work than his Diary; and his letters to Strafford display some smartness, but no great capacity. He managed indeed his own defence, when impeached, with some ability; but on such occasions, ordinary men are apt to put forth a remarkable readiness and energy. Laud's inherent ambition had impelled him to court the favour of Buckingham, of Williams, and of both the kings under whom he lived, till he rose to the see of Canterbury on Abbot's death, in 1633. No one can deny that he was a generous patron of letters, and as warm in friendship as in enmity. But he had placed before his eyes the aggrandisement, first of the church, and next of the royal prerogative, as his end and aim in every action. Though not literally destitute of religion, it was so subordinate to worldly interest, and so blended in his mind with the impure alloy of temporal pride, that he became an intolerant persecutor of the puritan clergy, not from bigotry, which in its usual sense he never displayed, but systematic policy. And being subject, as his friends call it, to some infirmities of temper, that is, choleric, vindictive, harsh, and even cruel to a great degree, he not only took a prominent share in the severities of the star-chamber, but, as his correspondence shows, perpetually lamented that he was restrained from going further lengths.[74]

Laud's extraordinary favour with the king, through which he became a prime adviser in matters of state, rendered him secretly obnoxious to most of the council, jealous, as ministers must always be, of a churchman's overweening ascendancy. His faults, and even his virtues, contributed to this odium. For being exempt from the thirst of lucre, and, though in the less mature state of his fortunes a subtle intriguer, having become frank through heat of temper and self-confidence, he discountenanced all schemes to serve the private interest of courtiers at the expense of his master's exhausted treasury, and went right onward to his object, the exaltation of the Church and Crown. He aggravated the invidiousness of his own situation, and gave an astonishing proof of his influence, by placing Juxon, Bishop of London, a creature of his own, in the greatest of all posts, that of lord high-treasurer. Though Williams had lately been lord-keeper of the seal, it seemed more preposterous to place the treasurer's staff in the hands of a churchman, and of one so little distinguished even in his own profession, that the archbishop displayed his contempt of the rest of the council, especially Cottington, who aspired to it, by such a recommendation.[75] He had previously procured the office of secretary of state for Windebank. But, though overawed by the king's infatuated partiality, the faction adverse to Laud were sometimes able to gratify their dislike, or to manifest their greater discretion, by opposing obstacles to his impetuous spirit.

Lord Strafford.—Of these impediments, which a rash and ardent man calls lukewarmness, indolence, and timidity, he frequently complains in his correspondence with the lord-deputy of Ireland—that Lord Wentworth, so much better known by the title of Earl of Strafford, which he only obtained the year before his death, that we may give it him by anticipation, whose doubtful fame and memorable end have made him nearly the most conspicuous character of a reign so fertile in recollections. Strafford had in his early years sought those local dignities to which his ambition probably was at that time limited, the representation of the county of York and the post of custos rotulorum, through the usual channel of court favour. Slighted by the Duke of Buckingham, and mortified at the preference shown to the head of a rival family, Sir John Saville, he began to quit the cautious and middle course he had pursued in parliament, and was reckoned among the opposers of the administration after the accession of Charles.[76] He was one of those who were made sheriffs of their counties, in order to exclude them from the parliament of 1626. This inspired so much resentment, that he signalised himself as a refuser of the arbitrary loan exacted the next year, and was committed in consequence to prison. He came to the third parliament with a determination to make the court sensible of his power, and possibly with some real zeal for the liberties of his country. But patriotism unhappily, in his self-interested and ambitious mind, was the seed sown among thorns. He had never lost sight of his hopes from the court; even a temporary reconciliation with Buckingham had been effected in 1627, which the favourite's levity soon broke; and he kept up a close connection with the treasurer Weston. Always jealous of a rival, he contracted a dislike for Sir John Eliot, and might suspect that he was likely to be anticipated by that more distinguished patriot in royal favours.[77] The hour of Wentworth's glory was when Charles assented to the petition of right, in obtaining which, and in overcoming the king's chicane and the hesitation of the Lords, he had been pre-eminently conspicuous. From this moment he started aside from the path of true honour; and being suddenly elevated to the peerage and a great post, the presidency of the council of the North, commenced a splendid but baleful career, that terminated at the scaffold.[78] After this fatal apostasy he not only lost all solicitude about those liberties which the petition of right had been designed to secure, but became their deadliest and most shameless enemy.

The council of the North was erected by Henry VIII. after the suppression of the great insurrection of 1536. It had a criminal jurisdiction in Yorkshire and the four more northern counties, as to riots, conspiracies, and acts of violence. It had also, by its original commission, a jurisdiction in civil suits, where either of the parties were too poor to bear the expenses of a process at common law; in which case the council might determine, as it seems, in a summary manner, and according to equity. But this latter authority had been held illegal by the judges under Elizabeth.[79] In fact, the lawfulness of this tribunal in any respect was, to say the least, highly problematical. It was regulated by instructions issued from time to time under the great seal. Wentworth spared no pains to enlarge the jurisdiction of his court. A commission issued in 1632, empowering the council of the North to hear and determine all offences, misdemeanours, suits, debates, controversies, demands, causes, things, and matters whatsoever therein contained, within certain precincts, namely, from the Humber to the Scots frontier. They were specially appointed to hear and determine divers offences, according to the course of the star-chamber, whether provided for by act of parliament or not; to hear complaints according to the rules of the court of chancery, and stay proceedings at common law by injunction; to attach persons by their serjeant in any part of the realm.[80]

These inordinate powers, the soliciting and procuring of which, especially by a person so well versed in the laws and constitution, appears to be of itself a sufficient ground for impeachment, were abused by Strafford to gratify his own pride, as well as to intimidate the opposers of arbitrary measures. Proofs of this occur in the prosecution of Sir David Foulis, in that of Mr. Bellasis, in that of Mr. Maleverer, for the circumstances of which I refer the reader to more detailed history.[81]

Without resigning his presidency of the northern council, Wentworth was transplanted in 1633 to a still more extensive sphere, as lord-deputy of Ireland. This was the great scene on which he played his part; it was here that he found abundant scope for his commanding energy and imperious passions. The Richelieu of that island, he made it wealthier in the midst of exactions, and, one might almost say, happier in the midst of oppressions. He curbed subordinate tyranny; but his own left a sting behind it that soon spread a deadly poison over Ireland. But of his merits and his injustice towards that nation I shall find a better occasion to speak. Two well-known instances of his despotic conduct in respect to single persons may just be mentioned; the deprivation and imprisonment of the lord chancellor Loftus for not obeying an order of the privy council to make such a settlement as they prescribed on his son's marriage—a stretch of interference with private concerns which was aggravated by the suspected familiarity of the lord-deputy with the lady who was to reap advantage from it;[82] and, secondly, the sentence of death passed by a council of war on Lord Mountnorris, in Strafford's presence, and evidently at his instigation, on account of some very slight expressions which he had used in private society. Though it was never the deputy's intention to execute this judgment of his slaves, but to humiliate and trample upon Mountnorris, the violence and indecency of his conduct in it, his long persecution of the unfortunate prisoner after the sentence, and his glorying in the act at all times, and even on his own trial, are irrefragable proofs of such vindictive bitterness as ought, if there were nothing else, to prevent any good man from honouring his memory.[83]

Correspondence between Laud and Strafford.—The haughty and impetuous primate found a congenial spirit in the lord-deputy. They unbosom to each other, in their private letters, their ardent thirst to promote the king's service by measures of more energy than they were permitted to exercise. Do we think the administration of Charles during the interval of parliaments rash and violent? They tell us it was over-cautious and slow. Do we revolt from the severities of the star-chamber? To Laud and Strafford they seemed the feebleness of excessive lenity. Do we cast on the Crown lawyers the reproach of having betrayed their country's liberties? We may find that, with their utmost servility, they fell far behind the expectations of the court, and their scruples were reckoned the chief shackles on the half-emancipated prerogative.

The system which Laud was longing to pursue in England, and which Strafford approved, is frequently hinted at by the word Thorough. "For the state," says he, "indeed, my lord, I am for Thorough; but I see that both thick and thin stays somebody, where I conceive it should not, and it is impossible to go thorough alone."[84] "I am very glad" (in another letter) "to read your lordship so resolute, and more to hear you affirm that the footing of them that go thorough for our master's service is not upon fee, as it hath been. But you are withal upon so many Ifs, that by their help you may preserve any man upon ice, be it never so slippery. As first, if the common lawyers may be contained within their ancient and sober bounds; if the word Thorough be not left out, as I am certain it is; if we grow not faint; if we ourselves be not in fault; if we come not to a peccatum ex te Israel; if others will do their parts as thoroughly as you promise for yourself, and justly conceive of me. Now I pray, with so many and such Ifs as these, what may not be done, and in a brave and noble way? But can you tell when these Ifs will meet, or be brought together? Howsoever, I am resolved to go on steadily in the way which you have formerly seen me go; so that (to put in one if too) if anything fail of my hearty desires for the king and the church's service, the fault shall not be mine."[85] "As for my marginal note" (he writes in another place), "I see you deciphered it well" (they frequently corresponded in cipher), "and I see you make use of it too; do so still, thorough and thorough. Oh that I were where I might go so too! but I am shackled between delays and uncertainties! you have a great deal of honour for your proceedings; go on a God's name." "I have done," he says some years afterwards, "with expecting of Thorough on this side."[86]

It is evident that the remissness of those with whom he was joined in the administration, in not adopting or enforcing sufficiently energetic measures, is the subject of the archbishop's complaint. Neither he nor Strafford loved the treasurer Weston, nor Lord Cottington, both of whom had a considerable weight in the council. But it is more difficult to perceive in what respects the Thorough system was disregarded. He cannot allude to the church, which he absolutely governed through the high-commission court. The inadequate punishments, as he thought them, imposed on the refractory, formed a part, but not the whole, of his grievance. It appears to me that the great aim of these two persons was to effect the subjugation of the common lawyers. Some sort of tenderness for those constitutional privileges, so indissolubly interwoven with the laws they administered, adhered to the judges, even while they made great sacrifices of their integrity at the instigation of the Crown. In the case of habeas corpus, in that of ship-money, we find many of them display a kind of half-compliance, a reservation, a distinction, an anxiety to rest on precedents, which, though it did not save their credit with the public, impaired it at court. On some more fortunate occasions, as we have seen, they even manifested a good deal of firmness in resisting what was urged on them. Chiefly, however, in matter of prohibitions issuing from the ecclesiastical courts, they were uniformly tenacious of their jurisdiction. Nothing could expose them more to Laud's ill-will. I should not deem it improbable that he had formed, or rather adopted from the canonists, a plan, not only of rendering the spiritual jurisdiction independent, but of extending it to all civil causes, unless perhaps in questions of freehold.[87]

The presumption of common lawyers, and the difficulties they threw in the way of the church and Crown, are frequent themes with the two correspondents. "The church," says Laud, "is so bound up in the forms of the common law, that it is not possible for me or for any man to do that good which he would, or is bound to do. For your lordship sees, no man clearer, that they which have gotten so much power in and over the church will not let go their hold; they have indeed fangs with a witness, whatsoever I was once said in passion to have."[88] Strafford replies: "I know no reason but you may as well rule the common lawyers in England as I, poor beagle, do here; and yet that I do, and will do, in all that concerns my master, at the peril of my head. I am confident that the king, being pleased to set himself in the business, is able, by his wisdom and ministers, to carry any just and honourable action through all imaginary opposition, for real there can be none; that to start aside for such panic fears, fantastic apparitions as a Prynne or an Eliot shall set up, were the meanest folly in the whole world; that the debts of the Crown being taken off, you may govern as you please; and most resolute I am that work may be done without borrowing any help forth of the king's lodgings, and that it is as downright a peccatum ex te Israel as ever was, if all this be not affected with speed and ease."[89]—Strafford's indignation at the lawyers breaks out on other occasions. In writing to Lord Cottington, he complains of a judge of assize who had refused to receive the king's instructions to the council of the North in evidence, and beseeches that he may be charged with this great misdemeanour before the council-board. "I confess," he says, "I disdain to see the gownmen in this sort hang their noses over the flowers of the crown."[90] It was his endeavour in Ireland, as well as in Yorkshire, to obtain the right of determining civil suits. "I find," he says, "that my Lord Falkland was restrained by proclamation not to meddle in any cause between party and party, which did certainly lessen his power extremely: I know very well the common lawyers will be passionately against it, who are wont to put such a prejudice upon all other professions, as if none were to be trusted or capable to administer justice but themselves; yet how well this suits with monarchy, when they monopolise all to be governed by their year-books, you in England have a costly experience; and I am sure his majesty's absolute power is not weaker in this kingdom, where hitherto the deputy and council-board have had a stroke with them."[91] The king indulged him in this, with a restriction as to matters of inheritance.

The cruelties exercised on Prynne and his associates have generally been reckoned among the great reproaches of the primate. It has sometimes been insinuated that they were rather the act of other counsellors than his own. But his letters, as too often occurs, belie this charitable excuse. He expresses in them no sort of humane sentiment towards these unfortunate men, but the utmost indignation at the oscitancy of those in power, which connived at the public demonstrations of sympathy. "A little more quickness," he says, "in the government would cure this itch of libelling. But what can you think of Thorough when there shall be such slips in business of consequence? What say you to it, that Prynne and his fellows should be suffered to talk what they pleased while they stood in the pillory, and win acclamations from the people? etc. By that which I have above written, your lordship will see that the Triumviri will be far enough from being kept dark. It is true that, when this business is spoken of, some men speak as your lordship writes, that it concerns the king and government more than me. But when anything comes to be acted against them, be it but the execution of a sentence, in which lies the honour and safety of all justice, yet there is little or nothing done, nor shall I ever live to see it otherwise."[92]

The lord deputy fully concurred in this theory of vigorous government. They reasoned on such subjects as Cardinal Granville and the Duke of Alva had reasoned before them. "A prince," he says in answer, "that loseth the force and example of his punishments, loseth withal the greatest part of his dominion. If the eyes of the Triumviri be not sealed so close as they ought, they may perchance spy us out a shrewd turn, when we least expect it. I fear we are hugely mistaken, and misapply our charity thus pitying of them, where we should indeed much rather pity ourselves. It is strange indeed," he observes in another place, "to see the frenzy which possesseth the vulgar now-a-days, and that the just displeasure and chastisement of a state should produce greater estimation, nay reverence, to persons of no consideration either for life or learning, than the greatest and highest trust and employments shall be able to procure for others of unspotted conversation, of most eminent virtues and deepest knowledge: a grievous and overspreading leprosy! but where you mention a remedy, sure it is not fitted for the hand of every physician; the cure under God must be wrought by one Æsculapius alone, and that in my weak judgment to be effected rather by corrosives than lenitives: less than Thorough will not overcome it; there is a cancerous malignity in it, which must be cut forth, which long since rejected all other means, and therefore to God and him I leave it."[93]

The honourable reputation that Strafford had earned before his apostasy stood principally on two grounds; his refusal to comply with a requisition of money without consent of parliament, and his exertions in the petition of right which declared every such exaction to be contrary to law. If any therefore be inclined to palliate his arbitrary proceedings and principles in the executive administration, his virtue will be brought to a test in the business of ship-money. If he shall be found to have given countenance and support to that measure, there must be an end of all pretence to integrity or patriotism. But of this there are decisive proofs. He not only made every exertion to enforce its payment in Yorkshire during the years 1639 and 1640, for which the peculiar dangers of that time might furnish some apology, but long before, in his correspondence with Laud, speaks thus of Mr. Hampden, deploring, it seems, the supineness that had permitted him to dispute the Crown's claim with impunity. "Mr. Hampden is a great brother [i.e. a puritan], and the very genius of that people leads them always to oppose, as well civilly as ecclesiastically, all that ever authority ordains for them; but in good faith, were they right served, they should be whipt home into their right wits, and much beholden they should be to any one that would thoroughly take pains with them in that kind."[94] "In truth I still wish, and take it also to be a very charitable one, Mr. H. and others to his likeness were well whipt into their right senses; if that the rod be so used as that it smarts not, I am the more sorry."[95]

Hutton, one of the judges who had been against the Crown in this case, having some small favour to ask of Strafford, takes occasion in his letter to enter on the subject of ship-money, mentioning his own opinion in such a manner as to give the least possible offence, and with all qualifications in favour of the Crown; commending even Lord Finch's argument on the other side.[96] The lord deputy, answering his letter after much delay, says, "I must confess, in a business of so mighty importance, I shall the less regard the forms of pleading, and do conceive, as it seems my Lord Finch pressed that the power of levies of forces at sea and land for the very, not feigned, relief and safety of the public, is a property of sovereignty, as, were the Crown willing, it could not divest it thereof: Salus populi suprema lex; nay, in cases of extremity even above acts of parliament," etc.

It cannot be forgotten that the loan of 1626, for refusing which Wentworth had suffered imprisonment, had been demanded in a season of incomparably greater difficulty than that when ship-money was levied: at the one time war had been declared against both France and Spain, at the other the public tranquillity was hardly interrupted by some bickerings with Holland. In avowing therefore the king's right to levy money in cases of exigency, and to be the sole judge of that exigency, he uttered a shameless condemnation of his former virtues. But lest any doubt should remain of his perfect alienation from all principles of limited monarchy, I shall produce still more conclusive proofs. He was strongly and wisely against the war with Spain, into which Charles's resentment at finding himself the dupe of that power in the business of the Palatinate nearly hurried him in 1637. At this time Strafford laid before the king a paper of considerations dissuading him from this course, and pointing out particularly his want of regular troops.[97] "It is plain indeed," he says, "that the opinion delivered by the judges, declaring the lawfulness of the assessment for the shipping, is the greatest service that profession hath done the Crown in my time. But unless his majesty hath the like power declared to raise a land army upon the same exigent of state, the Crown seems to me to stand but upon one leg at home, to be considerable but by halves to foreign powers. Yet this sure methinks convinces a power for the sovereign to raise payments for land forces, and consequently submits to his wisdom and ordinance the transporting of the money or men into foreign states. Seeing then that this piece well fortified for ever vindicates the royalty at home from under the conditions and restraints of subjects, renders us also abroad even to the greatest kings the most considerable monarchy in Christendom; seeing again, this is a business to be attempted and won from the subject in time of peace only, and the people first accustomed to these levies, when they may be called upon, as by way of prevention for our future safety, and keep his majesty thereby also moderator of the peace of Christendom, rather than upon the bleeding evil of an instant and active war; I beseech you, what piety to alliances is there, that should divert a great and wise king forth of a path, which leads so manifestly, so directly, to the establishing his own throne, and the secure and independent seating of himself and posterity in wealth, strength, and glory, far above any their progenitors, verily in such a condition as there were no more hereafter to be wished them in this world but that they would be very exact in their care for the just and moderate government of their people, which might minister back to them again the plenties and comforts of life, that they would be most searching and severe in punishing the oppressions and wrongs of their subjects, as well in the case of the public magistrate as of private persons, and lastly to be utterly resolved to exercise this power only for public and necessary uses; to spare them as much and often as were possible; and that they never be wantonly vitiated or misapplied to any private pleasure or person whatsoever? This being indeed the very only means to preserve, as may be said, the chastity of these levies, and to recommend their beauty so far forth to the subject, as being thus disposed, it is to be justly hoped, they will never grudge the parting with their monies....

"Perhaps it may be asked, where shall so great a sum be had? My answer is, procure it from the subjects of England, and profitably for them too. By this means preventing the raising upon them a land army for defence of the kingdom, which would be by many degrees more chargeable; and hereby also insensibly gain a precedent, and settle an authority and right in the Crown to levies of that nature, which thread draws after it many huge and great advantages, more proper to be thought on at some other seasons than now."

It is however remarkable that, with all Strafford's endeavours to render the king absolute, he did not intend to abolish the use of parliaments. This was apparently the aim of Charles; but, whether from remains of attachment to the ancient forms of liberty surviving amidst his hatred of the real essence, or from the knowledge that a well-governed parliament is the best engine for extracting money from the people, this able minister entertained very different views. He urged accordingly the convocation of one in Ireland, pledging himself for the experiment's success. And in a letter to a friend, after praising all that had been done in it, "Happy it were," he proceeds, "if we might live to see the like in England, everything in its season; but in some cases it is as necessary there be a time to forget, as in others to learn; and howbeit the peccant (if I may without offence so term it) humour be not yet wholly purged forth, yet do I conceive it in the way, and that once rightly corrected and prepared, we may hope for a parliament of a sound constitution indeed; but this must be the work of time, and of his majesty's excellent wisdom; and this time it becomes us all to pray for and wait for, and when God sends it, to make the right use of it."[98]

These sentiments appear honourable and constitutional. But let it not be hastily conceived that Strafford was a friend to the necessary and ancient privileges of those assemblies to which he owed his rise. A parliament was looked upon by him as a mere instrument of the prerogative. Hence he was strongly against permitting any mutual understanding among its members, by which they might form themselves into parties, and acquire strength and confidence by previous concert. "As for restraining any private meetings either before or during parliament, saving only publicly in the house, I fully rest in the same opinion, and shall be very watchful and attentive therein, as a means which may rid us of a great trouble, and prevent many stones of offence, which otherwise might by malignant spirits be cast in among us."[99] And acting on this principle, he kept a watch on the Irish parliament, to prevent those intrigues which his experience in England had taught him to be the indispensable means of obtaining a control over the Crown. Thus fettered and kept in awe, no one presuming to take a lead in debate from uncertainty of support, parliaments would have become such mockeries of their venerable name as the joint contempt of the court and nation must soon have annihilated. Yet so difficult is it to preserve this dominion over any representative body, that the king judged far more discreetly than Strafford in desiring to dispense entirely with their attendance.

The passages which I have thus largely quoted will, I trust, leave no doubt in any reader's mind that the Earl of Strafford was party in a conspiracy to subvert the fundamental laws and liberties of his country. For here are not, as on his trial, accusations of words spoken in heat, uncertain as to proof, and of ambiguous interpretation; nor of actions variously reported, and capable of some explanation; but the sincere unbosoming of the heart in letters never designed to come to light. And if we reflect upon this man's cool-blooded apostasy on the first lure to his ambition, and on his splendid abilities, which enhanced the guilt of that desertion, we must feel some indignation at those who have palliated all his iniquities, and even ennobled his memory with the attributes of patriot heroism. Great he surely was, since that epithet can never be denied without paradox to so much comprehension of mind, such ardour and energy, such courage and eloquence; those commanding qualities of soul, which, impressed upon his dark and stern countenance, struck his contemporaries with mingled awe and hate, and still live in the unfading colours of Vandyke.[100] But it may be reckoned as a sufficient ground for distrusting any one's attachment to the English constitution, that he reveres the name of the Earl of Strafford.

Conduct of Laud in the church prosecution of puritans.—It was perfectly consonant to Laud's temper and principles of government to extirpate, as far as in him lay, the lurking seeds of disaffection to the Anglican church. But the course he followed could in nature have no other tendency than to give them nourishment. His predecessor Abbot had perhaps connived to a limited extent at some irregularities of discipline in the puritanical clergy, judging not absurdly that their scruples at a few ceremonies, which had been aggravated by a vexatious rigour, would die away by degrees, and yield to that centripetal force, that moral attraction towards uniformity and obedience to custom, which Providence has rendered one of the great preservatives of political society. His hatred to popery and zeal for Calvinism, which undoubtedly were narrow and intolerant, as well as his avowed disapprobation of those churchmen who preached up arbitrary power, gained for this prelate the favour of the party denominated puritan. In all these respects, no man could be more opposed to Abbot than his successor. Besides reviving the prosecutions for nonconformity in their utmost strictness, wherein many of the other bishops vied with their primate, he most injudiciously, not to say wickedly endeavoured, by innovations of his own, and by exciting alarms in the susceptible consciences of pious men, to raise up new victims whom he might oppress. Those who made any difficulty about his novel ceremonies, or even who preached on the Calvinistic side, were harassed by the high commission court as if they had been actual schismatics.[101] The most obnoxious, if not the most indefensible, of these prosecutions were for refusing to read what was called the Book of Sports; namely, a proclamation, or rather a renewal of that issued in the late reign, that certain feasts or wakes might be kept, and a great variety of pastimes used on Sundays after evening service.[102] This was reckoned, as I have already observed, one of the tests of puritanism. But whatever superstition there might be in that party's judaical observance of the day they called the sabbath, it was in itself preposterous, and tyrannical in its intention, to enforce the reading in churches of this licence or rather recommendation of festivity. The precise clergy refused in general to comply with the requisition, and were suspended or deprived in consequence. Thirty of them were excommunicated in the single diocese of Norwich; but as that part of England was rather conspicuously puritanical, and the bishop, one Wren, was the worst on the bench, it is highly probable that the general average fell short of this.[103]

Besides the advantage of detecting a latent bias in the clergy, it is probable that the high church prelates had a politic end in the Book of Sports. The morose gloomy spirit of puritanism was naturally odious to the young and to men of joyous tempers. The comedies of that age are full of sneers at their formality. It was natural to think that, by enlisting the common propensities of mankind to amusement on the side of the established church, they might raise a diversion against that fanatical spirit which can hardly long continue to be the prevailing temperament of a nation. The church of Rome, from which no ecclesiastical statesman would disdain to take a lesson, had for many ages perceived, and acted upon the principle, that it is the policy of governments to encourage a love of pastime and recreation in the people; both because it keeps them from speculating on religious and political matters, and because it renders them more cheerful, and less sensible to the evils of their condition; and it may be remarked by the way, that the opposite system, so long pursued in this country, whether from a puritanical spirit, or from the wantonness of petty authority, has no such grounds of policy to recommend it. Thus much at least is certain, that when the puritan party employed their authority in proscribing all diversions, in enforcing all the Jewish rigour about the sabbath, and gave that repulsive air of austerity to the face of England of which so many singular illustrations are recorded, they rendered their own yoke intolerable to the youthful and gay; nor did any other cause perhaps so materially contribute to bring about the Restoration. But mankind love sport as little as prayer by compulsion; and the immediate effect of the king's declaration was to produce a far more scrupulous abstinence from diversions on Sundays than had been practised before.

The resolution so evidently taken by the court, to admit of no half conformity in religion, especially after Laud had obtained an unlimited sway over the king's mind, convinced the puritans that England could no longer afford them an asylum. The state of Europe was not such as to encourage their emigration, though many were well received in Holland. But, turning their eyes to the newly-discovered regions beyond the Atlantic Ocean, they saw a secure place of refuge from present tyranny, and a boundless prospect for future hope. They obtained from the Crown the charter of Massachusetts Bay in 1629. About three hundred and fifty persons, chiefly or wholly of the independent sect, sailed with the first fleet. So many followed in the subsequent years, that these New England settlements have been supposed to have drawn near half a million of money from the mother country before the civil wars.[104] Men of a higher rank than the first colonists, and now become hopeless alike of the civil and religious liberties of England, men of capacious and commanding minds, formed to be the legislators and generals of an infant republic, the wise and cautious Lord Say, the acknowledged chief of the independent sect, the brave, open, and enthusiastic Lord Brook, Sir Arthur Haslerig, Hampden, ashamed of a country for whose rights he had fought alone, Cromwell, panting with energies that he could neither control nor explain, and whose unconquerable fire was still wrapt in smoke to every eye but that of his kinsman Hampden, were preparing to embark for America, when Laud, for his own and his master's curse, produced an order of council to stop their departure.[105] Besides the reflections which such an instance of destructive infatuation must suggest, there are two things not unworthy to be remarked: first, that these chiefs of the puritan sect, far from entertaining those schemes of overturning the government at home that have been imputed to them, looked only in 1638 to escape from imminent tyranny; and, secondly, that the views of the archbishop were not so much to render the Church and Crown secure from the attempts of disaffected men, as to gratify a malignant humour by persecuting them.

Favour shown to catholics—Tendency to their religion.—These severe proceedings of the court and hierarchy became more odious on account of their suspected leaning, or at least notorious indulgence, towards popery. With some fluctuations, according to circumstances or changes of influence in the council, the policy of Charles was to wink at the domestic exercise of the catholic religion, and to admit its professors to pay compositions for recusancy which were not regularly enforced.[106] The catholics willingly submitted to this mitigated rigour, in the sanguine expectation of far more prosperous days. I shall, of course, not censure this part of his administration. Nor can we say that the connivance at the resort of catholics to the queen's chapel in Somerset House, though they used it with much ostentation, and so as to give excessive scandal, was any more than a just sense of toleration would have dictated.[107] Unfortunately, the prosecution of other sectaries renders it difficult to ascribe such a liberal principle to the council of Charles the First. It was evidently true, what the nation saw with alarm, that a proneness to favour the professors of this religion, and to a considerable degree the religion itself, was at the bottom of a conduct so inconsistent with their system of government. The king had been persuaded, in 1635, through the influence of the queen, and probably of Laud,[108] to receive privately, as an accredited agent from the court of Rome, a secular priest, named Panzani, whose ostensible instructions were to effect a reconciliation of some violent differences that had long subsisted between the secular and regular clergy of his communion. The chief motive however of Charles was, as I believe, so far to conciliate the pope as to induce him to withdraw his opposition to the oath of allegiance, which had long placed the catholic laity in a very invidious condition, and widened a breach which his majesty had some hopes of closing. For this purpose he offered any reasonable explanation which might leave the oath free from the slightest appearance of infringing the papal supremacy. But it was not the policy of Rome to make any concession, or even enter into any treaty, that might tend to impair her temporal authority. It was better for her pride and ambition that the English catholics should continue to hew wood and draw water, their bodies the law's slaves, and their souls her own, than, by becoming the willing subjects of a protestant sovereign, that they should lose that sense of dependency and habitual deference to her commands in all worldly matters, which states wherein their faith stood established had ceased to display. She gave therefore no encouragement to the proposed explanations of the oath of allegiance, and even instructed her nuncio Con, who succeeded Panzani, to check the precipitance of the English catholics in contributing men and money towards the army raised against Scotland, in 1639.[109] There might indeed be some reasonable suspicion that the court did not play quite fairly with this body, and was more eager to extort what it could from their hopes than to make any substantial return.

The favour of the administration, as well as the antipathy that every parliament had displayed towards them, not unnaturally rendered the catholics, for the most part, asserters of the king's arbitrary power.[110] This again increased the popular prejudice. But nothing excited so much alarm as the perpetual conversions to their faith. These had not been quite unusual in any age since the Reformation, though the balance had been very much inclined to the opposite side. They became however under Charles the news of every day; protestant clergymen in several instances, but especially women of rank, becoming proselytes to a religion so seductive to the timid reason and sensible imagination of that sex. They whose minds have never strayed into the wilderness of doubt, vainly deride such as sought out the beaten path their fathers had trodden in old times; they whose temperament gives little play to the fancy and sentiment, want power to comprehend the charm of superstitious illusions, the satisfaction of the conscience in the performance of positive rites, especially with privation or suffering, the victorious self-gratulation of faith in its triumph over reason, the romantic tenderness that loves to rely on female protection, the graceful associations of devotion with all that the sense or the imagination can require—the splendid vestment, the fragrant censer, the sweet sounds of choral harmony, and the sculptured form that an intense piety half endows with life. These springs were touched, as the variety of human character might require, by the skilful hands of Romish priests, chiefly jesuits, whose numbers in England were about 250,[111] concealed under a lay garb, and combining the courteous manners of gentlemen with a refined experience of mankind, and a logic in whose labyrinths the most practical reasoner was perplexed. Against these fascinating wiles the puritans opposed other weapons from the same armoury of human nature; they awakened the pride of reason, the stern obstinacy of dispute, the names, so soothing to the ear, of free enquiry and private judgment. They inspired an abhorrence of the adverse party that served as a barrier against insidious approaches. But far different principles actuated the prevailing party in the church of England. A change had for some years been wrought in its tenets, and still more in its sentiments, which, while it brought the whole body into a sort of approximation to Rome, made many individuals shoot as it were from their own sphere, on coming within the stronger attraction of another.

The charge of inclining towards popery, brought by one of our religious parties against Laud and his colleagues with invidious exaggeration, has been too indignantly denied by another. Much indeed will depend on the definition of that obnoxious word; which one may restrain to an acknowledgment of the supremacy in faith and discipline of the Roman see; while another comprehends in it all those tenets which were rejected as corruptions of Christianity at the Reformation; and a third may extend it to the ceremonies and ecclesiastical observances which were set aside at the same time. In this last and most enlarged sense, which the vulgar naturally adopted, it is notorious that all the innovations of the school of Laud were so many approaches, in the exterior worship of the church, to the Roman model. Pictures were set up or repaired; the communion-table took the name of an altar; it was sometimes made of stone; obeisances were made to it; the crucifix was sometimes placed upon it; the dress of the officiating priests became more gaudy; churches were consecrated with strange and mystical pageantry.[112] These petty superstitions, which would of themselves have disgusted a nation accustomed to despise as well as abhor the pompous rites of the catholics, became more alarming from the evident bias of some leading churchmen to parts of the Romish theology. The doctrine of a real presence, distinguishable only by vagueness of definition from that of the church of Rome, was generally held.[113] Montagu, Bishop of Chichester, already so conspicuous, and justly reckoned the chief of the Romanising faction, went a considerable length towards admitting the invocation of saints; prayers for the dead, which lead at once to the tenet of purgatory, were vindicated by many; in fact, there was hardly any distinctive opinion of the church of Rome, which had not its abettors among the bishops, or those who wrote under their patronage. The practice of auricular confession, which an aspiring clergy must so deeply regret, was frequently inculcated as a duty. And Laud gave just offence by a public declaration, that in the disposal of benefices he should, in equal degrees of merit, prefer single before married priests.[114] They incurred scarcely less odium by their dislike of the Calvinistic system, and by what ardent men construed into a dereliction of the protestant cause, a more reasonable and less dangerous theory on the nature and reward of human virtue, than that which the fanatical and presumptuous spirit of Luther had held forth as the most fundamental principle of his Reformation.

It must be confessed that these English theologians were less favourable to the papal supremacy than to most other distinguishing tenets of the catholic church. Yet even this they were inclined to admit in a considerable degree, as a matter of positive, though not divine institution; content to make the doctrine and discipline of the fifth century the rule of their bastard reform. An extreme reverence for what they called the primitive church had been the source of their errors. The first reformers had paid little regard to that authority. But as learning, by which was then meant an acquaintance with ecclesiastical antiquity, grew more general in the church, it gradually inspired more respect for itself; and men's judgment in matters of religion came to be measured by the quantity of their erudition.[115] The sentence of the early writers, including the fifth and perhaps sixth centuries, if it did not pass for infallible, was of prodigious weight in controversy. No one in the English church seems to have contributed so much towards this relapse into superstition as Andrews, Bishop of Winchester, a man of eminent learning in this kind, who may be reckoned the founder of the school wherein Laud was the most prominent disciple.[116]

A characteristic tenet of this party was, as I have already observed, that episcopal government was indispensably requisite to a Christian church.[117] Hence they treated the presbyterians with insolence abroad, and severity at home. A brief to be read in churches for the sufferers in the Palatinate having been prepared, wherein they were said to profess the same religion as ourselves, Laud insisted on this being struck out.[118] The Dutch and Walloon churches in England, which had subsisted since the Reformation, and which various motives of policy had led Elizabeth to protect, were harassed by the primate and other bishops for their want of conformity to the Anglican ritual.[119] The English ambassador, instead of frequenting the Hugonot church at Charenton, as had been the former practice, was instructed to disclaim all fraternity with their sect, and set up in his own chapel the obnoxious altar and the other innovations of the hierarchy.[120] These impolitic and insolent proceedings gave the foreign protestants a hatred of Charles, which they retained through all his misfortunes.

This alienation from the foreign churches of the reformed persuasion had scarcely so important an effect in begetting a predilection for that of Rome, as the language frequently held about the Anglican separation. It became usual for our churchmen to lament the precipitancy with which the Reformation had been conducted, and to inveigh against its principal instruments. The catholic writers had long descanted on the lust and violence of Henry, the pretended licentiousness of Anne Boleyn, the rapacity of Cromwell, the pliancy of Cranmer; sometimes with great truth, but with much of invidious misrepresentation. These topics, which have no kind of operation on men accustomed to sound reasoning, produce an unfailing effect on ordinary minds. Nothing incurred more censure than the dissolution of the monastic orders, or at least the alienation of their endowments; acts accompanied, as we must all admit, with great rapacity and injustice, but which the new school branded with the name of sacrilege. Spelman, an antiquary of eminent learning, was led by bigotry or subserviency to compose a wretched tract called the "History of Sacrilege," with a view to confirm the vulgar superstition that the possession of estates alienated from the church entailed a sure curse on the usurper's posterity. There is some reason to suspect that the king entertained a project of restoring all impropriated hereditaments to the church.

It is alleged by one who had much access to Laud, that his object in these accommodations was to draw over the more moderate catholics to the English church, by extenuating the differences of her faith, and rendering her worship more palatable to their prejudices.[121] There was, however, good reason to suspect, from the same writer's account, that some leading ecclesiastics entertained schemes of a complete re-union;[122] and later discoveries have abundantly confirmed this suspicion. Such schemes have doubtless been in the minds of men not inclined to offer every sacrifice; and during this very period Grotius was exerting his talents (whether judiciously or otherwise we need not enquire) to make some sort of reconciliation and compromise appear practicable. But we now know that the views of a party in the English church were much more extensive, and went almost to an entire dereliction of the protestant doctrine.

The catholics did not fail to anticipate the most favourable consequences from this turn in the church. The Clarendon State Papers, and many other documents, contain remarkable proofs of their sanguine and not unreasonable hopes. Weston, the lord treasurer, and Cottington, were already in secret of their persuasion; though the former did not take much pains to promote their interests. No one, however, showed them such decided favour as Secretary Windebank, through whose hands a correspondence was carried on with the court of Rome by some of its agents.[123] They exult in the peaceful and flourishing state of their religion in England as compared with former times. The recusants, they write, were not molested; and if their compositions were enforced, it was rather from the king's want of money than any desire to injure their religion. Their rites were freely exercised in the queen's chapel and those of ambassadors, and, more privately, in the houses of the rich. The church of England was no longer exasperated against them; if there was ever any prosecution, it was to screen the king from the reproach of the puritans. They drew a flattering picture of the resipiscence of the Anglican party; who are come to acknowledge the truth in some articles, and differ in others rather verbally than in substance, or in points not fundamental; who hold all other protestants to be schismatical, and confess the primacy of the holy see, regretting the separation already made, and wishing for re-union; who profess to pay implicit respect to the fathers, and can best be assailed on that side.[124]

These letters contain, no doubt, a partial representation; that is, they impute to the Anglican clergy in general, what was only true of a certain number. Their aim was to inspire the court of Rome with more favourable views of that of England, and thus to pave the way for a permission of the oath of allegiance, at least with some modification of its terms. Such flattering tales naturally excited the hopes of the Vatican, and contributed to the mission of Panzani, who was instructed to feel the pulse of the nation, and communicate more unbiassed information to his court than could be expected from the English priests. He confirmed, by his letters, the general truth of the former statements, as to the tendency of the Anglican church, and the favourable dispositions of the court. The king received him secretly, but with much courtesy; the queen and the catholic ministers, Cottington and Windebank, with unreserved confidence. It required all the adroitness of an Italian emissary from the subtlest of courts to meet their demonstrations of friendship without too much committing his employers. Nor did Panzani altogether satisfy the pope, or at least his minister, Cardinal Barberini, in this respect.[125]

During the residence of Panzani in England, an extraordinary negotiation was commenced for the reconciliation of the church of England with that of Rome; and, as this fact, though unquestionable, is very little known, I may not be thought to digress in taking particular notice of it. Windebank and Lord Cottington were the first movers in that business; both calling themselves to Panzani catholics, as in fact they were, but claiming all those concessions from the see of Rome which had been sometimes held out in the preceding century. Bishop Montagu soon made himself a party, and had several interviews with Panzani. He professed the strongest desire for a union, and added that he was satisfied both the archbishops, the Bishop of London, and several others of that order, besides many of the inferior clergy, were prepared to acknowledge the spiritual supremacy of the holy see; there being no method of ending controversies but by recurring to some centre of ecclesiastical unity. For himself, he knew no tenet of the Roman church to which he would not subscribe, unless it were that of transubstantiation, though he had some scruples as to communion in one kind. But a congress of moderate and learned men, chosen on each side, might reduce the disputed points into small compass, and confer upon them.

This overture being communicated to Rome by its agent, was of course, too tempting to be disregarded, though too ambiguous to be snatched at. The re-union of England to the catholic church, in itself a most important advantage, might, at that particular juncture, during the dubious struggle of the protestant religion in Germany, and its still more precarious condition in France, very probably reduce its adherents throughout Europe to a proscribed and persecuted sect. Panzani was therefore instructed to flatter Montagu's vanity, to manifest a great desire for reconciliation, but not to favour any discussion of controverted points, which had always proved fruitless, and which could not be admitted till the supreme authority of the holy see was recognised. As to all usages founded on positive law, which might be disagreeable to the English nation, they should receive as much mitigation as the case would bear. This, of course, alluded to the three great points of discipline, or ecclesiastical institution—the celibacy of the clergy, the exclusion of the laity from the eucharistical cup, and the Latin liturgy.

In the course of the bishop's subsequent interviews, he again mentioned his willingness to acknowledge the pope's supremacy; and assured Panzani that the archbishop was entirely of his mind, but with a great mixture of fear and caution.[126] Three bishops only, Morton, Hall, and Davenant, were obstinately bent against the church of Rome; the rest might be counted moderate.[127] The agent, however, took care to obtain from another quarter a more particular account of each bishop's disposition, and transmitted to Rome a report, which does not appear. Montagu displayed a most unguarded warmth in all this treaty; notwithstanding which, Panzani suspected him of still entertaining some notions incompatible with the catholic doctrine. He behaved with much greater discretion than the bishop; justly, I suppose, distrusting the influence of a man who showed so little capacity for a business of the utmost delicacy. It appears almost certain that Montagu made too free with the name of the archbishop, and probably of many others; and it is well worthy of remark, that the popish party did not entertain any sanguine hopes of the king's conversion. They expected doubtless that, by gaining over the hierarchy, they should induce him to follow; but he had evidently given no reason to imagine that he would precede. A few casual words, not perhaps exactly reported, might sometimes elate their hopes, but cannot excite in us, who are better able to judge than his contemporaries, any reasonable suspicion of his constancy. Yet it is not impossible that he might at one time conceive a union to be more practicable than it really was.[128]

The court of Rome omitted no token of civility or good will to conciliate our king's favour. Besides expressions of paternal kindness which Urban lavished on him, Cardinal Barberini gratified his well-known taste by a present of pictures. Charles showed a due sense of these courtesies. The prosecutions of recusants were absolutely stopped, by cashiering the pursuivants who had been employed in the odious office of detecting them. It was arranged that reciprocal diplomatic relations should be established, and consequently that an English agent should constantly reside at the court of Rome, by the nominal appointment of the queen, but empowered to conduct the various negotiations in hand. Through the first person who held this station, a gentleman of the name of Hamilton, the king made an overture on a matter very near to his heart, the restitution of the Palatinate. I have no doubt that the whole of his imprudent tampering with Rome had been considerably influenced by this chimerical hope. But it was apparent to every man of less unsound judgment than Charles, that except the young elector would renounce the protestant faith, he could expect nothing from the intercession of the pope.

After the first preliminaries, which she could not refuse to enter upon, the court of Rome displayed no eagerness for a treaty which it found, on more exact information, to be embarrassed with greater difficulties than its new allies had confessed.[129] Whether this subject continued to be discussed during the mission of Con, who succeeded Panzani, is hard to determine; because the latter's memoirs, our unquestionable authority for what has been above related, cease to afford us light. But as Con was a very active intriguer for his court, it is by no means unlikely that he proceeded in the same kind of parley with Montagu and Windebank. Yet whatever might pass between them was intended rather with a view to the general interests of the Roman church, than to promote a reconciliation with that of England, as a separate contracting party. The former has displayed so systematic a policy to make no concession to the reformers, either in matters of belief, wherein, since the council of Trent, she could in fact do nothing, or even, as far as possible, in points of discipline, as to which she judged, perhaps rightly, that her authority would be impaired by the precedent of concession without any proportionate advantage: so unvarying in all cases has been her determination to yield nothing except through absolute force, and to elude force itself by every subtlety that it is astonishing how honest men on the opposite side (men, that is, who seriously intended to preserve any portion of their avowed tenets, not such as Montagu or Heylin,) could ever contemplate the possibility of reconciliation. Upon the present occasion, she manifested some alarm at the boasted approximation of the Anglicans. The attraction of bodies is reciprocal; and the English catholics might, with so much temporal interest in the scale, be impelled more rapidly towards the established church than that church towards them. "Advise the clergy," say the instructions to the nuncio in 1639, "to desist from that foolish, nay rather illiterate and childish, custom of distinction in the protestant and puritan doctrine; and especially this error is so much the greater, when they undertake to prove that protestantism is a degree nearer to the catholic faith than the other. For since both of them be without the verge of the church, it is needless hypocrisy to speak of it, yea, it begets more malice than it is worth."[130]

This exceeding boldness of the catholic party, and their success in conversions, which were, in fact, less remarkable for their number than for the condition of the persons, roused the primate himself to some apprehension. He preferred a formal complaint to the king in council against the resort of papists to the queen's chapel, and the insolence of some active zealots about the court.[131] Henrietta, who had courted his friendship, and probably relied on his connivance, if not support, seems never to have forgiven this unexpected attack. Laud gave another testimony of his unabated hostility to popery by republishing with additions his celebrated conference with the jesuit Fisher, a work reckoned the great monument of his learning and controversial acumen. This conference had taken place many years before, at the desire and in the presence of the Countess of Buckingham, the duke's mother. Those who are conversant with literary and ecclesiastical anecdote must be aware that nothing was more usual in the seventeenth century than such single combats under the eye of some fair lady whose religious faith was to depend upon the victory. The wily and polished jesuits had great advantages in these duels, which almost always, I believe, ended in their favour. After fatiguing their gentle arbitress for a time with the tedious fencing of text and citation, till she felt her own inability to award the palm, they came with their prejudices already engaged, to the necessity of an infallible judge; and as their adversaries of the English church had generally left themselves vulnerable on this side, there was little difficulty in obtaining success. Like Hector in the spoils of Patroclus, our clergy had assumed to themselves the celestial armour of authority; but found that, however it might intimidate the multitude, it fitted them too ill to repel the spear that had been wrought in the same furnace. A writer of this school in the age of Charles the First, and incomparably superior to any of the churchmen belonging to it, in the brightness and originality of his genius, Sir Thomas Brown, whose varied talents wanted nothing but the controlling supremacy of good sense to place him in the highest rank of our literature, will furnish a better instance of the prevailing bias than merely theological writings. He united a most acute and sceptical understanding with strong devotional sensibility, the temperament so conspicuous in Pascal and Johnson, and which has a peculiar tendency to seek the repose of implicit faith. "Where the Scripture is silent," says Brown in his Religio Medici, "the church is my text; where it speaks, 'tis but my comment." That jesuit must have been a disgrace to his order, who would have asked more than such a concession to secure a proselyte—the right of interpreting whatever was written, and of supplying whatever was not.

Chillingworth.—At this time, however, appeared one man in the field of religious debate, who struck out from that insidious tract, of which his own experience had shown him the perils. Chillingworth, on whom nature had bestowed something like the same constitutional temperament as that to which I have just adverted, except that the reasoning power having a greater mastery, his religious sensibility rather gave earnestness to his love of truth than tenacity to his prejudices, had been induced, like so many others, to pass over to the Roman church. The act of transition, it may be observed, from a system of tenets wherein men had been educated, was in itself a vigorous exercise of free speculation, and might be termed the suicide of private judgment. But in Chillingworth's restless mind there was an inextinguishable scepticism that no opiates could subdue; yet a scepticism of that species which belongs to a vigorous, not that which denotes a feeble understanding. Dissatisfied with his new opinions, of which he had never been really convinced, he panted to breathe the freer air of protestantism, and after a long and anxious investigation returned to the English church. He well redeemed any censure that might have been thrown on him, by his great work in answer to the jesuit Knott, entitled The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation. In the course of his reflections he had perceived the insecurity of resting the reformation on any but its original basis, the independency of private opinion. This, too, he asserted with a fearlessness and consistency hitherto little known, even within the protestant pale; combining it with another principle, which the zeal of the early reformers had rendered them unable to perceive, and for want of which the adversary had perpetually discomfited them, namely, that the errors of conscientious men do not forfeit the favour of God. This endeavour to mitigate the dread of forming mistaken judgments in religion runs through the whole work of Chillingworth, and marks him as the founder, in this country, of what has been called the latitudinarian school of theology. In this view, which has practically been the most important one of the controversy, it may pass for an anticipated reply to the most brilliant performance on the opposite side, The History of the Variations of Protestant Churches; and those who, from a delight in the display of human intellect, or from more serious motives of inquiry, are led to these two master-pieces, will have seen, perhaps, the utmost strength that either party, in the great schism of Christendom, has been able to put forth.

This celebrated work, which gained its author the epithet of immortal, is now, I suspect little studied even by the clergy. It is, no doubt, somewhat tedious, when read continuously, from the frequent recurrence of the same strain of reasoning, and from his method of following, sentence by sentence, the steps of his opponent; a method which, while it presents an immediate advantage to controversial writers, as it heightens their reputation at the expense of their adversary, is apt to render them very tiresome to posterity. But the closeness and precision of his logic, which this mode of incessant grappling with his antagonist served to display, are so admirable, perhaps, indeed, hardly rivalled in any book beyond the limits of strict science, that the study of Chillingworth might tend to chastise the verbose and indefinite declamation so characteristic of the present day. His style, though by no means elegant or imaginative, has much of a nervous energy that rises into eloquence. He is chiefly, however, valuable for a true liberality and tolerance; far removed from indifference, as may well be thought of one whose life was consumed in searching for truth, but diametrically adverse to those pretensions which seem of late years to have been regaining ground among the Anglican divines.

Hales.—The latitudinarian principles of Chillingworth appear to have been confirmed by his intercourse with a man, of whose capacity his contemporaries entertained so high an admiration, that he acquired the distinctive appellation of the ever-memorable John Hales. This testimony of so many enlightened men is not to be disregarded, even if we should be of opinion that the writings of Hales, though abounding with marks of an unshackled mind, do not quite come up to the promise of his name. He had, as well as Chillingworth, borrowed from Leyden, perhaps a little from Racow, a tone of thinking upon some doctrinal points as yet nearly unknown, and therefore highly obnoxious in England. More hardy than his friend, he wrote a short treatise on schism, which tended, in pretty blunt and unlimited language, to overthrow the scheme of authoritative decisions in any church, pointing at the imposition of unnecessary ceremonies and articles of faith, as at once the cause and the apology of separation. This having been circulated in manuscript, came to the knowledge of Laud, who sent for Hales to Lambeth, and questioned him as to his opinions on that matter. Hales, though willing to promise that he would not publish the tract, receded not a jot from his free notions of ecclesiastical power; which he again advisedly maintained in a letter to the archbishop, now printed among his works. The result was equally honourable to both parties; Laud bestowing a canonry of Windsor on Hales, which, after so bold an avowal of his opinion, he might accept without the slightest reproach. A behaviour so liberal forms a singular contrast to the rest of this prelate's history. It is a proof, no doubt, that he knew how to set such a value on great abilities and learning, as to forgive much that wounded his pride. But besides that Hales had not made public this treatise on schism, for which I think he could not have escaped the high commission court, he was known by Laud to stand far aloof from the Calvinistic sectaries, having long since embraced in their full extent the principles of Episcopius, and to mix no alloy of political faction with the philosophical hardiness of his speculations.[132]

These two remarkable ornaments of the English church, who dwelt apart like stars, to use the fine expression of a living poet, from the vulgar bigots of both her factions, were accustomed to meet, in the society of some other eminent persons, at the house of Lord Falkland near Burford. One of those, who, then in a ripe and learned youth, became afterwards so conspicuous a name in our annals and our literature, Mr. Hyde, the chosen bosom-friend of his host, has dwelt with affectionate remembrance on the conversations of that mansion. His marvellous talent of delineating character, a talent, I think, unrivalled by any writer (since, combining the bold outline of the ancient historians with the analytical minuteness of De Retz and St. Simon, it produces a higher effect than either), is never more beautifully displayed than in that part of the memoirs of his life, where Falkland, Hales, Chillingworth, and the rest of his early friends, pass over the scene.

For almost thirty ensuing years, Hyde himself becomes the companion of our historical reading. Seven folio volumes contain his History of the Rebellion, his Life, and the Letters, of which a large portion are his own. We contract an intimacy with an author who has poured out to us so much of his heart. Though Lord Clarendon's chief work seems to me not quite accurately styled a history, belonging rather to the class of memoirs,[133] yet the very reasons of this distinction, the long circumstantial narrative of events wherein he was engaged, and the slight notice of those which he only learned from others, render it more interesting, if not more authentic. Conformably to human feelings, though against the rules of historical composition, it bears the continual impress of an intense concern about what he relates. This depth of personal interest, united frequently with an eloquence of the heart and imagination that struggles through an involved, incorrect, and artificial diction, makes it, one would imagine, hardly possible for those most alien from his sentiments to read his writings without some portion of sympathy. But they are on this account not a little dangerous to the soundness of our historical conclusions; the prejudices of Clarendon, and his negligence as to truth, being full as striking as his excellencies, and leading him not only into many erroneous judgments, but into frequent inconsistencies.

Animadversions on Clarendon's account of this period.—These inconsistencies are nowhere so apparent as in the first or introductory book of his history, which professes to give a general view of the state of affairs before the meeting of the long parliament. It is certainly the most defective part of his work. A strange mixture of honesty and disingenuousness pervades all he has written of the early years of the king's reign; retracting, at least in spirit, in almost every page what has been said in the last, from a constant fear that he may have admitted so much against the government as to make his readers impute too little blame to those who opposed it. Thus, after freely censuring the exactions of the Crown, whether on the score of obsolete prerogative or without any just pretext at all, especially that of ship-money, and confessing that "those foundations of right, by which men valued their security, were never, to the apprehension and understanding of wise men, in more danger of being destroyed," he turns to dwell on the prosperous state of the kingdom during this period, "enjoying the greatest calm and the fullest measure of felicity that any people in any age for so long time together have been blessed with," till he works himself up to a strange paradox, that "many wise men thought it a time wherein those two adjuncts, which Nerva was edified for uniting, Imperium et Libertas, were as well reconciled as is possible."

Such wisdom was not, it seems, the attribute of the nation. "These blessings," he says, "could but enable, not compel, us to be happy; we wanted that sense, acknowledgement, and value of our own happiness which all but we had, and took pains to make, when we could not find, ourselves miserable. There was, in truth, a strange absence of understanding in most, and a strange perverseness of understanding in the rest; the court full of excess, idleness, and luxury; the country full of pride, mutiny, and discontent; every man more troubled and perplexed at that they called the violation of the law, than delighted or pleased with the observation of all the rest of the charter; never imputing the increase of their receipts, revenue, and plenty, to the wisdom, virtue, and merit of the Crown, but objecting every small imposition to the exorbitancy and tyranny of the government."[134]

This strange passage is as inconsistent with other parts of the same chapter, and with Hyde's own conduct at the beginning of the parliament, as it is with all reasonable notions of government.[135] For if kings and ministers may plead in excuse for violating one law, that they have not transgressed the rest (though it would be difficult to name any violation of law that Charles had not committed); if this were enough to reconcile their subjects, and to make dissatisfaction pass for a want or perversion of understanding, they must be in a very different predicament from all others who live within the pale of civil society, whose obligation to obey its discipline is held to be entire and universal. By this great writer's own admissions, the decision in the case of ship-money had shaken every man's security for the enjoyment of his private inheritance. Though as yet not weighty enough to be actually very oppressive, it might, and, according to the experience of Europe, undoubtedly would, become such by length of time and peaceable submission.

We may acknowledge without hesitation, that the kingdom had grown during this period into remarkable prosperity and affluence. The rents of land were very considerably increased, and large tracts reduced into cultivation. The manufacturing towns, the sea-ports, became more populous and flourishing. The metropolis increased in size with a rapidity that repeated proclamations against new buildings could not restrain. The country houses of the superior gentry throughout England were built on a scale which their descendants, even in days of more redundant affluence, have seldom ventured to emulate. The kingdom was indebted for this prosperity to the spirit and industry of the people, to the laws which secure the Commons from oppression, and which, as between man and man, were still fairly administered, to the opening of fresh channels of trade in the eastern and western worlds (rivulets, indeed, as they seem to us, who float in the full tide of modern commerce, yet at that time no slight contributions to the stream of public wealth); but above all, to the long tranquillity of the kingdom, ignorant of the sufferings of domestic, and seldom much affected by the privations of foreign, war. It was the natural course of things, that wealth should be progressive in such a land. Extreme tyranny, such as that of Spain in the Netherlands, might, no doubt, have turned back the current. A less violent, but long-continued despotism, such as has existed in several European monarchies, would, by the corruption and incapacity which absolute governments engender, have retarded its advance. The administration of Charles was certainly not of the former description. Yet it would have been an excess of loyal stupidity in the nation to have attributed their riches to the wisdom or virtue of the court, which had injured the freedom of trade by monopolies and arbitrary proclamations, and driven away industrious manufacturers by persecution.

If we were to draw our knowledge from no other book than Lord Clarendon's History, it would still be impossible to avoid the inference, that misconduct on the part of the Crown, and more especially of the church, was the chief, if not the sole, cause of these prevailing discontents. At the time when Laud unhappily became Archbishop of Canterbury, "the general temper and humour of the kingdom," he tells us, "was little inclined to the papist, and less to the puritan. There were some late taxes and impositions introduced, which rather angered than grieved the people, who were more than repaired by the quiet peace and prosperity they enjoyed; and the murmurs and discontent that was, appeared to be against the excess of power exercised by the Crown, and supported by the judges in Westminster Hall. The church was not repined at, nor the least inclination to alter the government and discipline thereof, or to change the doctrine. Nor was there at that time any considerable number of persons of any valuable condition throughout the kingdom, who did wish either; and the cause of so prodigious a change in so few years after was too visible from the effects." This cause, he is compelled to admit, in a passage too diffuse to be extracted, was the passionate and imprudent behaviour of the primate. Can there be a stronger proof of the personal prepossessions, which for ever distort the judgment of this author, than that he should blame the remissness of Abbot, who left things in so happy a condition; and assert that Laud executed the trust of solely managing ecclesiastical affairs, "infinitely to the service and benefit" of that church which he brought to destruction? Were it altogether true, what is doubtless much exaggerated, that in 1633 very little discontent at the measures of the court had begun to prevail, it would be utterly inconsistent with experience and observation of mankind to ascribe the almost universal murmurs of 1639 to any other cause than bad government. But Hyde, attached to Laud and devoted to the king, shrunk from the conclusion that his own language would afford; and his piety made him seek in some mysterious influences of Heaven, and in a judicial infatuation of the people, for the causes of those troubles which the fixed and uniform dispensations of Providence were sufficient to explain.[136]

Scots troubles, and distress of the government.—It is difficult to pronounce how much longer the nation's signal forbearance would have held out, if the Scots had not precipitated themselves into rebellion. There was still a confident hope that parliament must soon or late be assembled; and it seemed equally impolitic and unconstitutional to seek redress by any violent means. The patriots, too, had just cause to lament the ambition of some whom the court's favour subdued, and the levity of many more whom its vanities allured. But the unexpected success of the tumultuous rising at Edinburgh against the service-book revealed the impotence of the English government. Destitute of money, and neither daring to ask it from a parliament nor to extort it by any fresh demand from the people, they hesitated whether to employ force or to submit to the insurgents. In the exchequer, as Lord Northumberland wrote to Strafford, there was but the sum of £200; with all the means that could be devised, not above £110,000 could be raised; the magazines were all unfurnished, and the people were so discontented by reason of the multitude of projects daily imposed upon them, that he saw reason to fear a great part of them would be readier to join with the Scots than to draw their swords in the king's service.[137] "The discontents at home," he observes some months afterwards, "do rather increase than lessen, there being no course taken to give any kind of satisfaction. The king's coffers were never emptier than at this time; and to us that have the honour to be near about him, no way is yet known how he will find means either to maintain or begin a war without the help of his people."[138] Strafford himself dissuaded a war in such circumstances, though hardly knowing what other course to advise.[139] He had now awaked from the dreams of infatuated arrogance, to stand appalled at the perils of his sovereign, and his own. In the letters that passed between him and Laud after the Scots troubles had broken out, we read their hardly concealed dismay, and glimpses of "the two-handed engine at the door." Yet pride forbade them to perceive or confess the real causes of this portentous state of affairs. They fondly laid the miscarriage of the business of Scotland on failure in the execution, and an "over-great desire to do all quietly."[140]

In this imminent necessity, the king had recourse to those who had least cause to repine at his administration. The catholic gentry, at the powerful interference of their queen, made large contributions towards the campaign of 1639. Many of them volunteered their personal service. There was, indeed, a further project, so secret that it is not mentioned, I believe, till very lately, by any historical writer. This was to procure 10,000 regular troops from Flanders, in exchange for so many recruits to be levied for Spain in England and Ireland. These troops were to be for six months in the king's pay. Colonel Gage, a catholic, and the negotiator of this treaty, hints that the pope would probably contribute money, if he had hopes of seeing the penal laws repealed; and observes, that with such an army the king might both subdue the Scots, and at the same time keep his parliament in check, so as to make them come to his conditions.[141] The treaty, however, was never concluded. Spain was far more inclined to revenge herself for the bad faith she imputed to Charles, than to lend him any assistance. Hence, when, in the next year, he offered to declare war against Holland, as soon as he should have subdued the Scots, for a loan of 1,200,000 crowns, the Spanish ambassador haughtily rejected the proposition.[142]

The pacification, as it was termed, of Berwick in the summer of 1639 has been represented by several historians as a measure equally ruinous and unaccountable. That it was so far ruinous, as it formed one link in the chain that dragged the king to destruction, is most evident; but it was both inevitable and easy of explanation. The treasury, whatever Clarendon and Hume may have said, was perfectly bankrupt.[143] The citizens of London, on being urged by the council for a loan, had used as much evasion as they dared.[144] The writs for ship-money were executed with greater difficulty, several sheriffs willingly acquiescing in the excuses made by their counties.[145] Sir Francis Seymour, brother to the Earl of Hertford, and a man, like his brother, of very moderate principles, absolutely refused to pay it, though warned by the council to beware how he disputed its legality.[146] Many of the Yorkshire gentry, headed by Sir Marmaduke Langdale, combined to refuse its payment.[147] It was impossible to rely again on catholic subscriptions, which the court of Rome, as I have mentioned above, instigated perhaps by that of Madrid, had already tried to restrain. The Scots were enthusiastic, nearly unanimous, and entire masters of their country. The English nobility, in general, detested the archbishop, to whose passion they ascribed the whole mischief, and feared to see the king become despotic in Scotland. If the terms of Charles's treaty with his revolted subjects were unsatisfactory and indefinite, enormous in concession, and yet affording a pretext for new encroachments, this is no more than the common lot of the weaker side.

There was one possible, though not under all the circumstances very likely, method of obtaining the sinews of war; the convocation of parliament. This many, at least, of the king's advisers appear to have long desired, could they but have vanquished his obstinate reluctance. This is an important observation: Charles, and he perhaps alone, unless we reckon the queen, seems to have taken a resolution of superseding absolutely and for ever the legal constitution of England. The judges, the peers, Lord Strafford, nay, if we believe his dying speech, the primate himself, retained enough of respect for the ancient laws, to desire that parliaments should be summoned, whenever they might be expected to second the views of the monarch. They felt that the new scheme of governing by proclamations and writs of ship-money could not, and ought not to be permanent in England. The king reasoned more royally, and indeed much better. He well perceived that it was vain to hope for another parliament so constituted as those under the Tudors. He was ashamed (and that pernicious woman at his side would not fail to encourage the sentiment) that his brothers of France and Spain should have achieved a work, which the sovereign of England, though called an absolute king by his courtiers, had scarcely begun. All mention therefore of calling parliament grated on his ear. The declaration published at the dissolution of the last, that he should account it presumption for any to prescribe a time to him for calling parliaments, was meant to extend even to his own counsellors. He rated severely Lord-Keeper Coventry for a suggestion of this kind.[148] He came with much reluctance into Wentworth's proposal of summoning one in Ireland, though the superior control of the Crown over parliaments in that kingdom was pointed out to him. "The king," says Cottington, "at the end of 1638, will not hear of a parliament; and he is told by a committee of learned men, that there is no other way."[149] This repugnance to meet his people, and his inability to carry on the war by any other methods, produced the ignominious pacification at Berwick. But, as the Scots, grown bolder by success, had after this treaty almost thrown off all subjection, and the renewal of the war, or loss of the sovereignty over that kingdom, appeared necessary alternatives, overpowered by the concurrent advice of his council, and especially of Strafford, he issued writs for that which met in April 1640.[150] They told him that, making trial once more of the ancient and ordinary way, he would leave his people without excuse, if that should fail; and have wherewithal to justify himself to God and the world, if he should be forced contrary to his inclinations to use extraordinary means, rather than through the peevishness of some factious spirits to suffer his state and government to be lost.[151]

Parliament of April 1640.—It has been universally admitted that the parliament which met on the 13th of April 1640 was as favourably disposed towards the king's service, and as little influenced by their many wrongs, as any man of ordinary judgment could expect.[152] But though cautiously abstaining from any intemperance, so much as to reprove a member for calling ship-money an abomination (no very outrageous expression), they sufficiently manifested a determination not to leave their grievances unredressed. Petitions against the manifold abuses in church and state covered their table; Pym, Rudyard, Waller, Lord Digby, and others more conspicuous afterwards, excited them by vigorous speeches; they appointed a committee to confer with the Lords, according to some precedents of the last reign, on a long list of grievances, divided into ecclesiastical innovations, infringements of the propriety of goods, and breaches of the privilege of parliament. They voted a request of the peers, who, Clarendon says, were more entirely at the king's disposal, that they would begin with the business of supply, and not proceed to debate on grievances till afterwards, to be a high breach of privilege.[153] There is not the smallest reason to doubt that they would have insisted on redress in all those particulars, with at least as much zeal as any former parliament, and that the king, after obtaining his subsidies, would have put an end to their remonstrances, as he had done before.[154] In order to obtain the supply he demanded, namely, twelve subsidies to be paid in three years, which, though unusual, was certainly not beyond his exigencies, he offered to release his claim to ship-money, in any manner they should point out. But this the Commons indignantly repelled. They deemed ship-money the great crime of his administration, and the judgment against Mr. Hampden, the infamy of those who pronounced it. Till that judgment should be annulled, and those judges punished, the national liberties must be as precarious as ever. Even if they could hear of a compromise with so flagrant a breach of the constitution, and of purchasing their undoubted rights, the doctrine asserted in Mr. Hampden's case by the Crown lawyers, and adopted by some of the judges, rendered all stipulations nugatory. The right of taxation had been claimed as an absolute prerogative so inherent in the Crown, that no act of parliament could take it away. All former statutes, down to the petition of right, had been prostrated at the foot of the throne; by what new compact were the present parliament to give a sanctity more inviolable to their own?[155]

It will be in the recollection of my readers, that while the Commons were deliberating whether to promise any supply before the redress of grievances, and in what measure, Sir Henry Vane, the secretary, told them that the king would accept nothing less than the twelve subsidies he had required; in consequence of which the parliament was dissolved next day. Clarendon, followed by several others, has imputed treachery in this to Vane, and told us that the king regretted so much what he had done, that he wished, had it been practicable, to recall the parliament after its dissolution. This is confirmed, as to Vane, by the queen herself, in that interesting narrative which she communicated to Madame de Motteville.[156] Were it not for such authorities, seemingly independent of each other, yet entirely tallying, I should have deemed it more probable that Vane, with whom the solicitor-general Herbert had concurred, acted solely by the king's command. Charles, who feared and hated all parliaments, had not acquiesced in the scheme of calling the present, till there was no other alternative; an insufficient supply would have left him in a more difficult situation than before, as to the use of those extraordinary means, as they were called, which his disposition led him to prefer: the intention to assail parts of his administration more dear to him than ship-money, and especially the ecclesiastical novelties, was apparent. Nor can we easily give him credit for this alleged regret at the step he had taken, when we read the declaration he put forth, charging the Commons with entering on examination of his government in an insolent and audacious manner, traducing his administration of justice, rendering odious his officers and ministers of state, and introducing a way of bargaining and contracting with the king, as if nothing ought to be given him by them, but what he should purchase either by quitting somewhat of his royal prerogative, or by diminishing and lessening his revenue.[157] The unconstitutional practice of committing to prison some of the most prominent members, and searching their houses for papers, was renewed. And having broken loose again from the restraints of law, the king's sanguine temper looked to such a triumph over the Scots in the coming campaign, as no prudent man could think probable.

This dissolution of parliament in May 1640 appears to have been a very fatal crisis for the king's popularity. Those who, with the loyalty natural to Englishmen, had willingly ascribed his previous misgovernment to evil counsels, could not any longer avoid perceiving his mortal antipathy to any parliament that should not be as subservient as the cortes of Castile. The necessity of some great change became the common theme. "It is impossible," says Lord Northumberland, at that time a courtier, "that things can long continue in the condition they are now in; so general a defection in this kingdom hath not been known in the memory of any!"[158] Several of those who thought most deeply on public affairs now entered into a private communication with the Scots insurgents. It seems probable from the well-known story of Lord Saville's forged letter, that there had been very little connection of this kind until the present summer.[159] And we may conjecture that during this ominous interval, those great projects, which were displayed in the next session, acquired consistence and ripeness by secret discussions in the houses of the Earl of Bedford and Lord Say. The king meanwhile experienced aggravated misfortune and ignominy in his military operations. Ship-money indeed was enforced with greater rigour than before, several sheriffs and the lord mayor of London being prosecuted in the star-chamber for neglecting to levy it. Some citizens were imprisoned for refusing a loan. A new imposition was laid on the counties, under the name of coat-and-conduct-money, for clothing and defraying the travelling charges of the new levies.[160] A state of actual invasion, the Scots having passed the Tweed, might excuse some of these irregularities, if it could have been forgotten that the war itself was produced by the king's impolicy, and if the nation had not been prone to see friends and deliverers rather than enemies in the Scottish army. They were, at the best indeed, troublesome and expensive guests to the northern counties which they occupied; but the cost of their visit was justly laid at the king's door. Various arbitrary resources having been suggested in the council, and abandoned as inefficient and impracticable, such as the seizing the merchants' bullion in the mint, or issuing a debased coin; the unhappy king adopted the hopeless scheme of convening a great council of all the peers at York, as the only alternative of a parliament.[161] It was foreseen that this assembly would only advise the king to meet his people in a legal way. The public voice could no longer be suppressed. The citizens of London presented a petition to the king, complaining of grievances, and asking for a parliament. This was speedily followed by one signed by twelve peers of popular character.[162] The lords assembled at York almost unanimously concurred in the same advice, to which the king, after some hesitation, gave his assent. They had more difficulty in bringing about a settlement with the Scots; the English army, disaffected and undisciplined, had already made an inglorious retreat; and even Strafford, though passionately against a treaty, did not venture to advise an engagement.[163] The majority of the peers however over-ruled all opposition; and in the alarming posture of his affairs, Charles had no resource but the dishonourable pacification of Rippon. Anticipating the desertion of some who had partaken in his counsels, and conscious that others would more stand in need of his support than be capable of affording any, he awaited in fearful suspense the meeting of parliament.