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

by Henry Hallam

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]