As the presbyterian claims mounted higher, this became more apparent. The calling of the assembly of divines, and the adoption of the covenant, might seem to give presbyterianism a sufficiently broad charter of privilege; yet both these steps were taken by parliament with restrictions which showed its temper. The ordinance which called the assembly gave it power ‘until further order should be taken by parliament to confer of such matters concerning the liturgy, discipline, and government of the church of England, or the vindicating of the doctrine of the same from false aspersions and misconstructions, as shall be proposed by both or either house of parliament, and no other.’ [1] It concludes by providing {299} that ‘this ordinance shall not give them, nor shall they in this assembly assume to exercise, any jurisdiction, power, or authority ecclesiastical whatsoever, or any other power than is herein particularly expressed.’ This document has nothing revolutionary about it. It is the natural utterance of what Brook pronounced to have been an ‘episcopal and erastian parliament of conformists.’ This parliament, however, had soon under military necessity to raise a spirit which no episcopacy or erastianism could lay. The divines came to Westminster, according to Brook, all conformists, with the exception of eight or nine independents. They came, that is, from the cooling atmosphere of benefices, and had not yet begun to discuss the liturgy or object to a modified episcopacy. If they came conformists, however, they did not long remain so. Contact with each other, and the applause of London congregations, essentially presbyterian in their sympathies, bred a warmer temper. The introduction of the Scotch commissioners, and the adoption of the covenant, gave spirit and strength to their disciplinarian humour, and in a few months, men who had come to the assembly anxious only for some restraint on episcopal tyranny, were clamouring for the establishment of presbyterianism as jure divino.
[1] [Rushworth, June 12. 1643.]
I have spoken of the adoption of the covenant in England as matter of military necessity. It was the condition of alliance between parliament and the Scotch; without this alliance the year 1644 would in all probability have been fatal to the parliamentary cause. Supposing the Scotch army to have simply held aloof, the royal party would have been so triumphant in the north as to enable the king to advance with irresistible force on Lichfield. Till the parliament had secured it, however, it could not be trusted to stand aloof; it might at any time have been gained for the king by his consenting, as he did too late in 1648, to the covenant. The English negotiators, of whom Vane was the chief, had hoped to secure the alliance by a merely civil league, and when the Scotch insisted on the adoption of the religious covenant, they still succeeded in having the document entitled ‘league and covenant’ instead of ‘covenant’ alone. In later years, as we shall see, they always insisted on interpreting it as a league in virtue of which each kingdom was to help the other in the establishment of what religion it chose, not as binding either to any particular form. {300} The desirableness of such interpretation is more obvious than its correctness. By the first and second clauses, as they originally stood, the covenanters bound themselves to ‘the preservation of the reformed religion in Scotland,’ and ‘the reformation of religion in England and Ireland, in doctrine, worship, discipline and government’; also to the ‘extirpation of prelacy.’ After the words ‘reformation etc.’ Vane procured the insertion of the qualification ‘according to the word of God,’ in order to avoid committal to any particular form. To ease the conscience of those who favoured Usher’s form of episcopacy, prelacy was interpreted to mean ‘church government by archbishops, bishops, their chancellors and commissaries, deans, chapters, archdeacons, and all other ecclesiastical officers depending on that hierarchy.’ This modified covenant was taken by the parliament and the assembly at Westminster, and enjoined on every one over the age of eighteen. Practically it was by no means universally imposed even on the clergy; in Baxter’s neighbourhood none took it. Still, its operation was to eject from their livings some two thousand clergymen, whose places were mostly filled by presbyterians. A shifty and exacting alliance was thus dearly purchased at the cost of at once spreading loose over the country an uncontrolled element of disaffection to the parliament, and giving vent to a spirit of ecclesiastical arrogance which would soon demand to rule alone. This spirit was not long in showing itself. The Scotch army entered England at the beginning of 1644, and throughout that year the kirk, either by petition or through the commons in England, was pressing for a presbyterian settlement of church government in England. At last the assembly, still under special permission from parliament, was allowed to proceed to the discussion of this question. The first step was to propose a vote in the assembly that presbyterian government was jure divino. The only opponents of this decree were the small band of independents headed by Goodwin, the lay assessors Selden and Whitelock representing the erastian majority in parliament, whose only clerical supporter seems to have been Lightfoot the Hebraist. Selden, a layman of vast ecclesiastical lore, had a way of touching the sorest points of clerical feeling. In 1618 he had written his great work disproving the divine origin of tithes, and had been brought, in consequence, before the {301} High Commission court. There, with the ordinary suppleness of the erastian conscience, he signed the following recantation: [1]
‘My good lords, I most humbly acknowledge my error in publishing the history of tithes, and especially in that I have at all (by shewing any interpretation of scripture, or by meddling with councils, canons, fathers, or by what else soever occurs in it) offered any occasion of argument against any right of maintenance jure divino of the ministers of the gospel; beseeching your lordships to receive this ingenuous and humble acknowledgment, together with the unfeigned protestation of my grief, that I have so incurred his majesty’s and your lordships’ displeasure.’
[1] [Neal, Puritans, i. p. 471.]
The consciousness of debasement does not strengthen one’s affection for those who have been the occasion of it, and perhaps Selden’s remembrance of his usage by the ‘old priest’ may not have quickened his friendship for the ‘new presbyter.’ ‘In the debates of the divines,’ says Whitelock, ‘Mr. Selden spoke admirably and confuted divers of them in their own learning. Sometimes when they had cited a text of scripture to prove their assertion, he would tell them, “Perhaps in your little pocket bibles with gilt leaves (which they would often pull out and read) the translation may be thus, but the Greek or the Hebrew signifies thus and thus,” and so would totally silence them.’ [1] Whitelock himself opposed much grave law-logic to the claims of the divines, which he quotes at length in his memoirs, but his most satisfactory argument, to modern ears, is the simple one, ‘If this presbyterian government be not jure divino, no opinion of any council can make it to be what it is not; and if it be jure divino, it continues so still, although you do not declare it to be so.’ [2] The divines, however, thought otherwise. Presbyterianism was duly voted jure divino, and parliament in 1645 was applied to to enforce the jus divinum under pains and penalties. That the presbyterian jus was divinum parliament could never be induced to decide. It was very near doing so on one occasion, when the divines had contrived to bring the question on in a packed house, but by the skill of sergeant Glyn and Whitelock in talking against time the danger was averted. At length, however, under pressure from the Scots and city of London, it established a presbyterian régime. This régime, {302} never carried out save in London and Lancashire, was the same in kind as that existing in Scotland, except that the ‘kirk session’ was called a parochial presbytery, and the combination of parochial presbyteries not a presbytery as in Scotland, but a ‘classis.’ This was referred to in Milton’s lines,
‘To ride us with a classic hierarchy
Taught ye by mere A.S. and Rutherford.’ [3]
It was established, however, with such erastian limitations that while it excluded the independents, it gave no satisfaction to the Scots. The independent principle was violated on two points; both by the subjection of the independent congregation to the ‘classis,’ and by the method of ordination adopted which recognised the presbyter as of a distinct order, to be set apart by other presbyters, instead of as a simple officer appointed by a single congregation. The thoroughgoing presbyterians were alienated by the refusal to the church of the absolute power of the keys. The offences for which the presbyteries were allowed to suspend from the sacrament or excommunicate were distinctly enumerated, and an ultimate appeal, in all ecclesiastical cases, was given to the parliament. The whole system, moreover, was declared for the present merely provisional. The restrictions at once raised an outcry among the Scots and the presbyterians of the city, and the assembly itself was bold enough to vote a condemnation of the clause giving a final appeal to parliament. A seasonable threat of a praemunire, however, from the commons, laid the rising dust in the assembly; but the mounting spirit of the new forcers of conscience was shown in the opposition made to the petition which the independents offered to parliament, that their congregations might have the right of ordination within themselves, and that they might not be brought under the power of the ‘presbyterian classes.’ It would be tedious to follow the war of committees, sermons, pamphlets, which this request, modest in itself, and more modest in form, excited. The assembly, the city, the Scotch parliament, urged the maintenance of an absolute uniformity. No plea of conscience was to be listened to. To admit one was to admit all. The independent claim was schismatic, and, as such, excluded by the covenant. In the words of a pamphlet of the time; ‘to let men serve God {303} according to conscience is to cast out one devil that seven worse may enter.’ The new synod of the city clergy, meeting at Sion House, petitioned the assembly to oppose with all their might ‘the great Diana of the independents,’ and not to suffer their new establishment ‘to be strangled in the birth by a lawless toleration.’ The language of the Scotch parliament, addressed through their president to the two houses at Westminster, was specially high and irritating. ‘It is expected,’ says the president, ‘that the honourable houses will add the civil sanction to what the assembly have advised. I am commanded by the parliament of this kingdom to demand it, and in their name do demand it.’ The temper in which this demand was made, was shown by a declaration against ‘liberty of conscience and toleration of sectaries,’ published at the same time by the Scotch, in which, after taking due note of ‘their own great services,’ they announce that, ‘being all bound by one covenant, they will go on to the last man of the kingdom in opposing that party in England which was endeavouring to supplant true religion by pleading for liberty of conscience.’ Evidence might be tediously multiplied to show, that if Marston Moor and Naseby had been won by the Scots and the trained bands of the city, the civil sword would really have been applied ‘to force the consciences which Christ set free,’ at a time when these consciences were at their quickest, to a conformity, if not more oppressive than that exacted by Laud, yet more fatal to intellectual freedom.
[1] [Whitelock, Memorials, i. p. 209, Ed. 1853.]
[2] [Whitelock, i. p. 294.]