An Act of the 27th of September, 1650, places the religious policy of Parliament in a very doubtful light.[22] It repealed old acts of uniformity. It professed to relieve the religious and the peaceable from the rigour of previous intolerance. Yet this very law goes on to say, that it does not interfere with existing acts and ordinances for the due observance of the Lord's Day, and days of public thanksgiving and humiliation; and it therefore requires that on all such days, every person within the Commonwealth shall resort to some public place, where the service and worship of God is exercised, or shall be present at some other place, in the practice of religious duty. Latitude seems to have been given to the mode of obedience, for people were not tied up to any set form—so far they were released from the bonds of Elizabeth's statute. Still religious worship of some kind continued compulsory, and those who neglected religious duties altogether were to be proceeded against as criminals. No penalty indeed is specified—it is only declared that such as broke this law should be proceeded against accordingly—and probably the statute proved a dead letter; but such an enactment, although it might commend itself to the Puritan, was utterly inconsistent with religious liberty, as expounded by Marten, Vane, and others of the republican school.
CHAPTER II.
Royalty was now a thing of the past; it had been abolished in England. He who had perished on the scaffold came to be called plain Charles Stuart. His son could be designated by no other name. Royal statues were pulled down. Royal arms were no longer allowed in churches. But loyalty, as a sentiment, arose in greater strength than ever after the execution of the King. To Episcopalians, and to some Presbyterians also, Charles appeared a martyr, the victim of a republican faction, who were proceeding to destroy the Church after having already battered down the throne. Both parties shuddered at the idea of being ruled by men whose hands were red with royal blood. Recollections of the 30th of January were indelible. What Ussher and Philip Henry had seen, burned itself into their memories, and the tragedy, down to the minutest particular, with superadded circumstances of brutality, would form a staple of conversation in many a country walk, and by many an English fireside, for months and years afterwards.
1649, February.
A touching expression of Royalist sympathy occurs in the parish register of Woodford, in the county of Essex, where there is recorded a collection for the benefit of Charles' chaplains and servants, about a year after his death. Their claims were urged in a petition which stated that the King's domestics, to the number of forty, were in great distress, and that their means of support out of his revenues were still detained, so that they could in nowise maintain either themselves, their wives, or their families, and therefore they sought the charity of all good Christians.[23]
Scotch Treaty with Charles.
Charles Stuart was in Holland at the time of his father's execution. The Scotch estates, as early as the 5th of February, shewed their loyalty to the Stuarts by proclaiming the Prince of Wales to be their King. Robert Baillie here again comes to our assistance, and we find him writing in February, 1649, to his cousin Spang, then sojourning at the Hague, in the following terms:—