With the obstinancy of his race, Charles persisted in his designs. He issued proclamations denouncing as rebellion all obstruction to his remodelled church, and transferred the seat of government and the courts of law to Linlithgow. These proclamations were replied to by strong protests from nearly every Corporation in the Kingdom, and the Solemn League and Covenant, which had in the previous reign been instituted against popery, was enthusiastically renewed, and subscribed by men and women in all grades of society.

JENNY GEDDES’ STOOL.
(From the Scottish Antiquarian Museum.)

Charles sent down the Marquis of Hamilton as his High Commissioner, empowered to treat with the Covenanters. Hamilton took with him to Edinburgh a retinue of nobility and gentry, who were supposed to be friendly to the royal cause. He was met by a great concourse of people, amongst whom were six thousand ministers in their black Geneva gowns. He opened his commission, but the presbyterian leaders would hear of no terms being made, as they said, with Antichrist. So Hamilton went back to London, and reported his non-success to his master. Again he came to Edinburgh, this time with some concessions, the king offering to subscribe to the original form of the Covenant, which contained no mention of prelacy.

Under the Kings sanction, a General Assembly met in Glasgow, in November 1638. The royal commissioner protested against certain proceedings, and he formally dissolved and retired from the Assembly: but under its moderator it continued its sittings, condemning the king’s liturgy and the imposition of an episcopacy. The reply of Charles was the pouring of two armies into Scotland, one being under his own command. The Covenanters, with whose cause Parliament had identified itself, were not slack in taking up the challenge. They appointed General Leslie, a veteran from the wars of Gustavus Adolphus, to the command of a hastily raised army. He seized on all the fortified places; and he fortified Leith, to defend Edinburgh from the king’s fleet. In view of these warlike preparations, Charles temporized, and a vague kind of treaty was negotiated. Another General Assembly met next year in Edinburgh; and here the Royal Commissioner gave formal sanction to the decisions of the Glasgow Assembly. This sanction was received with an outburst of enthusiastic gratitude; and loyalty—never far from a Scotchman’s heart—was again in the ascendant. But it was a delusion and a snare. The king repudiated the concessions of his own commissioner, prorogued the Parliament which met to sanction the proceedings of the assembly, and prepared for a fresh invasion of Scotland. The Scots anticipated his purpose by sending their army into England—where many were friendly to their cause. There was a battle at Newburn, on the Tyne, in which the royal troops were defeated. The Scots occupied Newcastle—and negotiations were again opened for peace.

And Charles had by this time embroiled himself with his English subjects. He had tried to raise money by other means than through Parliament. A Parliament sitting in 1628, had refused him supplies for carrying on a war with Spain; it had also challenged his assumed right to imprison his subjects on his own warrant; and they presented to him what was called a Petition of Right, claiming exemption from arbitrary taxation and imprisonment. Charles found it expedient for the moment to sanction this Bill; but soon thereafter he dissolved Parliament, and obstinately refused to call another. For eleven years, under the influence and with the aid of Archbishop Laud, and Wentworth, Earl of Stratford, he played at the dangerous game of Thorough. He governed as an irresponsible autocrat, arbitrarily levying taxes, and imprisoning obnoxious opponents, in defiance of the Petition of Right. The Puritans, or church reformers, suffered severely. Many were dragged before a court, unknown to the constitution or common law, called the Star Chamber, which professed to take cognisance of offences against religion and the royal prerogative. Men of piety, of learning and worth, were imprisoned, were scourged through the streets, had their noses slit, or their ears cropped, for expressing differences of opinion on even minor matters in the policy of the church or the state.

Who were the Puritans? For answer we must go back to the English reign of James. There had been considerable intercourse between the Reformers of the two kingdoms, and the more democratic and anti-Romish constitution of the Scottish Church, had had many sympathisers in England. From these a party was formed, which came to be called Puritans; they were not dissenters,—none such being then recognised in the country; but were chiefly English clergymen. A petition, signed by nearly a thousand clergymen, was presented to the King, praying for a revision of the Book of Common Prayer,—the disuse of the surplice in reading, of the sign of the cross in baptism, and of bowing at the name of Jesus; also for a reform in the distribution of patronage, and the abolition of pluralities. James, in full court, and with a number of church dignitaries present, received the four professors of divinity in the universities, who represented the petitioners. The King prided himself on his polemical powers; he argued dogmatically, browbeat the professors—asserting his superior knowledge of divinity, and declared that uniformity should be enforced under severe pains and penalties. And the lay and ecclesiastical dignitaries present vied with each other in fulsome adulation. One bishop went on his knees, and thanked God for having given them a king with such divine inspiration as the world had not witnessed since Christ! The discomfited Puritans withdrew amidst the jeers and laughter of the servile court.

But through the later years of James’s reign, and throughout the whole of his son’s reign, puritanism grew, and threatened to either modify or to disintegrate the English Church. A calvinistic divine, George Abbot, was even appointed Archbishop of Canterbury;[[3]] and many holding church livings were virtually nonconformists. A system of doctrines, which denied the divine right of kings to govern as above the law, was hateful to Charles Stuart. And the Queen, Henrietta Maria of France, was a rigid Catholic; she detested the Puritans, and had inherited from her father high notions of absolute rule; and all through Charles’s life she goaded him on in the dangerous path which issued in his destruction. And Laud, almost a Catholic in opinion, and as intolerant as any Spanish inquisitor, directed the affairs of the Church; whilst Strafford was scheming for royal despotism, and to undermine the privileges of Parliament. Clergymen preaching absolute obedience were sure of preferment; the more zealous advocates of Thorough were made bishops.

An old levy on the maritime towns and counties, to equip vessels for the protection of the coasts in time of war, was, in time of peace, and on the Kings sole authority, extended under the name of ship-money to inland counties, and applied—not to the equipment of a fleet, but to the support of a standing army; and, before this army, all constitutional privileges were to be swept away. In 1637, a Buckinghamshire gentleman, John Hampden, refused to pay the guinea-and-a-half levied on his estate; but the Court of Exchequer upheld the tax.

And, hunted and persecuted, dragged before Laud’s High Commission on the most paltry charges, and by it subjected to fines, to personal injuries and imprisonment, many Puritans emigrated; some went to Holland, but the greater number to America: and these became a considerable factor in shaping the social, political, and religious history of the Greater Britain beyond the Atlantic. Three men who came to be of special note in our home history—John Hampden, John Pym, and Oliver Cromwell, were on board, bound for New England, when a government order came to stop the sailing of the vessel.