Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon — Volume 02

by Sir Henry Craik

When Parliament resumed in November, 1661, its first business was to pass certain acts for restoring the power of the Crown. The Solemn League and Covenant was pronounced illegal, and the Acts erecting the High Court of Justice for the trial of the King, and for establishing the Commonwealth, were contumeliously annulled. The power of Militia was declared to rest solely in the King, and it was enacted that no legislative power resided in Parliament without the King. These and like Acts were passed without discussion, and amounted to little more than expressions of the dominant loyalist feeling. The first step in restoring the power of the Church was the Corporation Act, which enacted that every corporation official should take an oath against the Covenant, and against the traitorous doctrine that arms might, by the King's authority, be levied against his person, and imposing upon every such official to be elected in future the obligation to take the Sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. The supremacy of the Church was vindicated. Whether wise or not as a platform on which English politics should rest—and as to this doubts are no doubt permissible—this Test Act was the expression of the convinced resolution of the nation at the time. The more difficult question remained for decision: how should the basis of the Church be arranged, and to what extent was it to be made more comprehensive?

Since the end of the Savoy Conference, the strife between the adherents of the Church and the Nonconformists had been growing in intensity. Both sides were exasperated by the uncertainty, and both were furious against what they believed to be the exaggerated claims of their opponents. The King's pliant humour had permitted to the various Dissenters an easy access to his person, and he was only too prone to give rise to expectations which were bound to be disappointed, and to unwary boasts on the part of the Nonconformists, which stimulated the Churchmen to an unyielding temper. The Bishops had been engaged during the vacation in revising the Book of Common Prayer, and sharp division of opinion had arisen amongst them—a division in regard to which Clarendon held strong views. Ought an attempt to be made to meet the views of the Nonconformists by modification of the Liturgy—or was it best to put a peremptory stop to agitation and discussion by restoring the ritual and the usages of the Church unchanged, so that the historic weight of continuity should be added to the authority of the law?

"Some of the bishops," says Clarendon, "who had greatest experience, and were in truth wise men," adhered to the latter view." Others, equally grave, of great learning and unblemished reputation, "pressed for alterations and additions. [Footnote: Life, ii. 119.] He desired to hold the balance even between these opposite opinions. But his own judgment was decided.

"The truth is," he adds, "that what show of reason so ever and appearance of charity the latter opinion seemed to carry with it, the former advice was the more prudent, and would have prevented many inconveniences which ensued." "It is," he proceeds, "an unhappy policy, and always unhappily applied, to imagine that that classes of men can be recovered and reconciled by partial concessions, or granting less than they demand. And if all were granted they would have more to ask. Their faction is their religion; nor are those combinations ever entered into upon real and substantial motives of conscience, how erroneous so ever, but consist of many glutinous materials, of will, and humour, and folly, and knavery, and malice, and ambition, which make men cling inseparably together till they have satisfaction in all their pretences, or till they are absolutely broken and subdued, which may always be more easily done than the other." [Footnote: Ibid., p. 121.]

Clarendon recognized, as clearly as did Swift a generation later, that dissent was the essential motive of dissenters, and that all concessions would be with them but an incitement to new divergences. He remembered the case of the Scottish liturgy, in which changes were introduced in order to meet the desire for a distinctive liturgy, and were afterwards resented as departures from the established order, which might otherwise have been peaceably accepted. Changes were now sought only that they might be the starting-point for further change. Meanwhile the Nonconformists inveighed with new bitterness against the old liturgy, and their angry invective provoked the House of Commons to greater impatience at the delay in its restoration. Clarendon recognized the old and ever-present fact that it was easier to preserve an old form, with all its possible defects, than to devise a new one with the view of reconciling irreconcilable divergences. He had to remember also that besides the Presbyterians there was the strong phalanx of the Independents, who would rather see episcopacy flourish than that the Presbyterians should govern.

Clarendon was not unwilling that a calm and rational spirit of concession should prevail, and that non-essential usages should be modified to meet conscientious scruples. In the abstract this ought to have been possible; but as things stood it was a hopeless ideal. He had to take account of the angry exasperation of temper that prevailed; and for the general weal he felt that some settlement, however peremptory, was essential. However unwillingly, he was compelled to decide for the drastic exercise of authority which might, once for all, compose the strife and produce a settlement. Expedition was of the first importance in the business.

It was in this spirit that the speech of the King to Parliament was framed. He had hoped, said the King, that the composing of differences in regard to non-essentials might have already been obtained. He was grieved at the delay. The Book of Common Prayer was now to be presented to him by Convocation. It would thereafter be laid before the House of Lords; and upon that foundation he trusted that an Act of Uniformity might be based.

As approved by Convocation, with certain alterations which rather strengthened than diminished the force of the ecclesiastical authority, the Book of Common Prayer was presented to the House of Lords. The Earl of Northumberland, whose Presbyterian leanings were pronounced, suggested that no change whatever should be made, and that the Act of Uniformity of Elizabeth's reign should once more be the authority for its observance. But the time for that was too late. Convocation had already done its work, and that work could not be disregarded. The legal authority had given its pronouncement; it remained only to say how that pronouncement should be enforced. In this spirit the House of Lords entered upon the discussion of the Bill of Uniformity.

The first question of importance was the imposition of episcopal ordination as a necessary condition of the tenure of any ecclesiastical office. That was decided in the affirmative; and the requisition of assent as well as consent to all contained in the Book of Common Prayer was carried against the resistance of those who, on behalf of the Nonconformists, argued that "assent" implied a more complete approbation than mere "consent." When the Bill had passed the House of Lords and was sent to the Commons, it soon appeared that the Church party there was determined to increase its severity. "Every man," says Clarendon, "according to his passion, thought of adding something to it that might make it more grievous to somebody whom he did not love." However earnest was Clarendon's loyalty to the Church, these words give evidence enough of the vexation of the Statesman at the unmeasured bitterness of ecclesiastical partizanship.

A new and rigid subscription, abjuring the lawfulness of resistance and the Solemn League and Covenant, was imposed upon every holder of a benefice, or of an office in a University. This created bitter opposition when the Bill was sent back to the Lords, and the discussion mainly turned upon the express repudiation of the Covenant, to which many laymen had already sworn. These, while they consented to its being laid aside for the future, were by no means ready to repudiate all the principles which it embodied. The Covenant still represented the charter of Presbyterianism, and to inflict a needless insult upon tenets conscientiously held by many who had given powerful aid towards the King's restoration, seemed a needless perpetuation of bitter memories. But the Lords could not refuse their assent, and this new instrument of exclusion was added to the Bill substantially in the form desired by the ultra-Royalists of the House of Commons.