The loyalists

by Jane West

And never yet did Insurrection want

Such water-colours to impaint his cause.

Shakspeare.

The summer of 1643 opened with favourable omens to the royal cause. Evellin sent intelligence to Ribblesdale of the successes of the Marquis of Newcastle against Fairfax, the safe arrival of the Queen with military stores, and his own expectation of being joined to her escort, which would enable him to have an interview with the King at Oxford. This intelligence, added to that of the advantages gained over Sir William Waller in the west, revived the drooping hopes of the loyalists, and terrified the enthusiastic Eustace with apprehensions lest the contest should be decided before he could measure swords with one round-head.

Dr. Beaumont took a more comprehensive view; he saw how little had been done, and how much loyal blood had been shed. The King's cause was supported by the death or ruin of his best friends, but his victories, instead of intimidating, hardened his opponents. They were bound together by a dread of danger, and a belief that they had sinned beyond all hopes of pardon, and therefore must depend for safety entirely on the success of the rebellion they had fomented.

To insure that success, the Parliament had long since employed the most potent stimulant of human action, religion; and, by embodying their favourite teachers under the title of the Assembly of Divines, contrived to give that species of state-establishment to their own theological scheme which they had objected to, as one of the crying sins of episcopacy. This memorable body of auxiliaries was created at the time of their beginning to levy war upon the King, by seizing his military resources, and refusing him admission into his own garrison. A fact which may serve to convince the reflecting mind of the close union which subsists between monarchical and episcopal principles is, that their next step to that of employing the forces and revenues of the crown against the person of the Sovereign, was a declaration "that they intended a necessary and due reformation of the Liturgy and government of the church, and that they would consult godly and learned divines, and use their utmost endeavours to establish learned and preaching ministers, with a good and sufficient maintenance throughout the whole kingdom, where many dark corners were miserably destitute of the means of salvation, and many poor ministers wanted necessary provision."

Though wise men saw the design of this carefully-worded declaration, yet indolent, or quiet men, who were willing to hope, caught at its designing moderation, believed that Parliament only meant to reform abuses, and that its designs were not so very bad. This very declaration, which a year before would have terrified the people, in whom there was then a general submission to the church-government, and a singular reverence of the Liturgy, now when there was a general expectation of a total subversion of the one, and abolition of the other, they thought only removing what was offensive, unnecessary, or burthensome, an easy composition. Thus the well-meaning were, by degrees, prevailed on, towards ends they extremely abhorred, and what, at first, seemed prophane and impious to them, in a little time appeared only inconvenient.

But infinite is the danger of tampering with national feeling in its most important point. The mildly-worded decree above cited, cherished those principles of mutability, which overthrew the church of England, while new forms of doctrine sprang from every portion of her ruins, all contending for mastery, and each insisting on the individual right of choosing, and the uncontrolable liberty of exercising what they pleased to term religion. The first of these tenets is as inadmissible in argument, as it is desperate in practice, for if every man has a right to choose, it must follow that he has an equal right to abstain from choosing, and thus universal atheism is sanctioned by the over-strained indulgence of civil liberty, confounding what our perverse natures will do with what they properly may. And if we found this opinion on the ground of human free-will, it may be asserted that a man has a right to choose whether he will be veracious, temperate, chaste, and conscientious; whether he will be a good father, husband, citizen, or the reverse; and thus every moral offence of which human laws do not take cognizance, may be justified by the same plea, that in this land of liberty people have a right to act as they think proper. By these means that finer system of morals, which extends virtue and goodness to points which the mere letter of the law cannot reach, is at once annihilated; and the peculiar excellence, of the Gospel, as a religion of motives, is superseded by the licence allowed to rebellious wills, and the darkness of perverse understandings.

The proposition of the Parliament to consult "godly and learned divines" was exemplified, by their ordering the individuals of which the House of Commons was now composed, to name such men as they thought fit for their purpose. Every known friend to the King had been already banished, either by the clamour of the London mobs, or their own votes. "Of one hundred and twenty, who composed the assembly of Divines, though by the recommendation of some members of the Commons, whom they were not willing to displease, and by the authority of the Lords, some very reverend and worthy names were inserted, there were not above twenty, who were not declared and avowed enemies of the church, some of them very infamous in their lives and conversations, most of them of very mean parts in learning, if not of scandalous ignorance, and of no other reputation than malice to the church of England."

Of this ignorance and incapacity for every thing but the work of destruction, their own party made the most angry complaints. Yet were those men the fittest to act as Spiritual prompters to an aspiring faction, bent on overturning existing institutions, and establishing their own power. The general ground of quarrel of all the sects with the establishment, was its retaining ceremonies, prayers, and a mode of discipline, which, though bearing close affinity to the apostolical age, were rejected by violent reformers, because our church received them through that of Rome. The answer of Bishop Ridley to the Papists, "That he would be willing to admit any trifling ceremony or thing indifferent for the sake of peace," suited not the taste of those who saw Anti-christ in a square cap or a surplice, and in a written creed or doxology (though agreeing in substance with their own opinions) an infringement of the liberty of a true Protestant. Such as these cared not what confusion or infidelity prevailed, nor how Popery itself triumphed, while they were busy in overthrowing the strongest bulwark that human wisdom had erected against it. The people were inflamed against the court and the church by the charge of jesuitical designs, the palaces of the deposed bishops were converted into prisons, crowded with the champions of the protestant cause; the truly "pious, godly, and learned ministry" were driven from the flocks to which they had been appointed by their spiritual superiors, and supplanted by these champions of the rights of private judgment and unbounded liberty, who made their respective congregations not only judges of theological points, but teachers of every opinion, except those which derived support from sound learning, constitutional authority, beneficial experience, general acceptation among Christians, or a clear consistent view of the word of God. Men sought celebrity by inventing modes of faith; and sacred truths were not established by an appeal to antiquity, but by the singular ordeal of novelty, as if, after a lapse of seventeen ages, it was reserved for ignorance and fanaticism to make fresh discoveries in the sacred writings.