The two chief councillors of the king in this unhappy period were William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Thomas Wentworth, Lord Strafford. The former was an honest but narrow-minded man, who had made a great reputation at Oxford as President of St. John's College, and had grown to note as the head of the High Church party in the University. He was a good scholar and an excellent organizer, but a martinet to the backbone. He accepted the archbishopric with the fixed idea of suppressing and crushing the Puritan party in and out of the Church of England. He hated the Puritan ideal of Church government on republican lines without king or bishop, and he equally detested the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination, [38] which was the shibboleth of Puritan theology. The king was a good Churchman, and gave Laud his full confidence; Laud, in return, became the zealous servant of Charles in secular no less than in religious matters. Not only did he teach consistently that it was a subject's duty to submit without question to a divinely ordained king, not only did he devote himself to molesting and harassing Puritans in the Church Courts, but he made himself the most prominent personage among the king's ministers. His name is signed at the top of every unwise ordinance that the Privy Council ever produced. He sat regularly in the two ancient but unconstitutional courts, the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission, which punished those who had offended King Charles in matters secular or spiritual. Hence it came that he was hated, not only as an ecclesiastical tyrant, but as a temporal oppressor. Yet at bottom he was an honest and well-meaning man, who did but follow the dictates of his somewhat pedantic conscience.
It is difficult to give even this moderate praise to the other great minister who served King Charles. Sir Thomas Wentworth had been a great enemy of Buckingham in Parliament,
The Earl of Strafford.—"Thorough."
but after the duke's death he suddenly went over to the king, and enlisted in his service. Wentworth loved power above all things, and sold himself to Charles for high promotion. It was this desertion of his old party that made him so well hated by the friends of liberty. The king gave him the title of Strafford, and entrusted him first with the "Presidency of the North"—the government of the counties beyond the Humber; and afterwards with the Lord-Deputyship of Ireland. Strafford was a very capable man, with a hard hand and a great talent for organization. He called his system the policy of "Thorough," by which he meant a resolute persistence in ignoring all checks of custom or constitutional usage which might restrain the king's action, and a determination to crush all who dared to stand in his way.
Strafford's Irish policy.
The tale of Strafford's government in Ireland best illustrates what "Thorough" implied. He reduced the island to a more perfect obedience than it had ever known before, made its revenue and expenditure balance, kept up a large and efficient army, and encouraged trade and manufactures. But this was done at the cost of a ruthless disregard alike for law and morality. Strafford bullied and cheated the Irish Parliament; he set up illegal courts of justice; he dragooned the Scottish settlers in Ulster into accepting episcopacy. His worst measures, however, were reserved for the native Irish. On the preposterous plea that the landlords of Connaught could show no valid title-deeds for their estates, he proposed to confiscate the whole of that province, and settle it up with English. As a matter of fact, Connaught was mostly in the hands of ancient Celtic houses, who could show a tenure of many centuries, but had never consigned their claims to parchment. Strafford proposed to take heavy fines from a few of the unfortunate landholders, and to wholly evict the rest from their ancestral estates. And he would have done it, if troubles in England had not called him away from his task.
Tyrannous measures of the king.
To enumerate all the unconstitutional acts of Charles I. in his eleven years of tyranny would be tedious. He had resolved to raise a sufficient revenue without Parliamentary grants, and to secure it he discovered the most monstrous devices. He established monopolies in the commonest products of trade, such as soap, linen, and leather. He declared whole districts of England to be under forest law, though the forests had disappeared centuries before, and took heavy fines from the inhabitants. He revived the old law of Edward I., which compelled all owners of £40 a year in land to receive knighthood, and made them pay exorbitant fees for the honour. The arbitrary Star Chamber was set to inflict heavy fines on rich men for offences which did not come under the letter of any law, it strained angry words into libel or treason, and made family broils or personal quarrels a fruitful source of revenue. The fines ran up as high as £20,000.
Ship-Money.