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