The levies of tonnage and poundage without authority of parliament, the exaction of monopolies, the extension of the forests, the arbitrary restraints of proclamations, above all, the general exaction of ship-money, form the principal articles of charge against the government of Charles, so far as relates to its inroads on the subject's property. These were maintained by a vigilant and unsparing exercise of jurisdiction in the court of star-chamber. I have, in another chapter, traced the revival of this great tribunal, probably under Henry VIII., in at least as formidable a shape as before the now-neglected statutes of Edward III. and Richard II., which had placed barriers in its way. It was the great weapon of executive power under Elizabeth and James; nor can we reproach the present reign with innovation in this respect, though in no former period had the proceedings of this court been accompanied with so much violence and tyranny. But this will require some fuller explication.

Star-chamber jurisdiction.—I hardly need remind the reader that the jurisdiction of the ancient Concilium regis ordinarium, or court of star-chamber, continued to be exercised, more or less frequently, notwithstanding the various statutes enacted to repress it; and that it neither was supported by the act erecting a new court in the third of Henry VII., nor originated at that time. The records show the star-chamber to have taken cognisance both of civil suits and of offences throughout the time of the Tudors. But precedents of usurped power cannot establish a legal authority in defiance of the acknowledged law. It appears that the lawyers did not admit any jurisdiction in the council, except so far as the statute of Henry VII. was supposed to have given it. "The famous Plowden put his hand to a demurrer to a bill," says Hudson, "because the matter was not within the statute; and, although it was then over-ruled, yet Mr. Serjeant Richardson, thirty years after, fell again upon the same rock, and was sharply rebuked for it."[55] The chancellor, who was the standing president of the court of star-chamber, would always find pretences to elude the existing statutes, and justify the usurpation of this tribunal.

The civil jurisdiction claimed and exerted by the star-chamber was only in particular cases, as disputes between alien merchants and Englishmen, questions of prize or unlawful detention of ships, and in general such as now belong to the court of admiralty; some testamentary matters, in order to prevent appeals to Rome, which might have been brought from the ecclesiastical courts; suits between corporations, "of which," says Hudson, "I dare undertake to show above a hundred in the reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII., or sometimes between men of great power and interest, which could not be tried with fairness by the common law."[56] For the corruption of sheriffs and juries furnished an apology for the irregular, but necessary, interference of a controlling authority. The ancient remedy, by means of attaint, which renders a jury responsible for an unjust verdict, was almost gone into disuse, and, depending on the integrity of a second jury, not always easy to be obtained; so that in many parts of the kingdom, and especially in Wales, it was impossible to find a jury who would return a verdict against a man of good family, either in a civil or criminal proceeding.

The statutes, however, restraining the council's jurisdiction, and the strong prepossession of the people as to the sacredness of freehold rights, made the star-chamber cautious of determining questions of inheritance, which they commonly remitted to the judges; and from the early part of Elizabeth's reign, they took a direct cognisance of any civil suits less frequently than before; partly, I suppose, from the increased business of the court of chancery, and the admiralty court, which took away much wherein they had been wont to meddle; partly from their own occupation as a court of criminal judicature, which became more conspicuous as the other went into disuse.[57] This criminal jurisdiction is that which rendered the star-chamber so potent and so odious an auxiliary of a despotic administration.

The offences principally cognisable in this court were forgery, perjury, riot, maintenance, fraud, libel, and conspiracy.[58] But besides these, every misdemeanour came within the proper scope of its enquiry; those especially of public importance, and for which the law, as then understood, had provided no sufficient punishment. For the judges interpreted the law in early times with too great narrowness and timidity; defects which, on the one hand, raised up the over-ruling authority of the court of chancery, as the necessary means of redress to the civil suitor who found the gates of justice barred against him by technical pedantry; and on the other, brought this usurpation and tyranny of the star-chamber upon the kingdom by an absurd scrupulosity about punishing manifest offences against the public good. Thus corruption, breach of trust, and malfeasance in public affairs, or attempts to commit felony, seem to have been reckoned not indictable at common law, and came in consequence under the cognisance of the star-chamber.[59] In other cases its jurisdiction was merely concurrent; but the greater certainty of conviction, and the greater severity of punishment, rendered it incomparably more formidable than the ordinary benches of justice. The law of libel grew up in this unwholesome atmosphere, and was moulded by the plastic hands of successive judges and attorneys-general. Prosecutions of this kind, according to Hudson, began to be more frequent from the last years of Elizabeth, when Coke was attorney-general; and it is easy to conjecture what kind of interpretation they received. To hear a libel sung or read, says that writer, and to laugh at it, and make merriment with it, has ever been held a publication in law. The gross error that it is not a libel if it be true, has long since, he adds, been exploded out of this court.[60]

Among the exertions of authority practised in the star-chamber which no positive law could be brought to warrant, he enumerates "punishments of breach of proclamations before they have the strength of an act of parliament; which this court hath stretched as far as ever any act of parliament did. As in the 41st of Elizabeth, builders of houses in London were sentenced, and their houses ordered to be pulled down, and the materials to be distributed to the benefit of the parish where the building was; which disposition of the goods soundeth as a great extremity, and beyond the warrant of our laws; and yet, surely, very necessary, if anything would deter men from that horrible mischief of increasing that head which is swoln to a great hugeness already."[61]

The mode of process was sometimes of a summary nature; the accused person being privately examined, and his examination read in the court, if he was thought to have confessed sufficient to deserve sentence, it was immediately awarded without any formal trial or written process. But the more regular course was by information filed at the suit of the attorney-general, or in certain cases, of a private relator. The party was brought before the court by writ of subpœna; and having given bond with sureties not to depart without leave, was to put in his answer upon oath, as well to the matters contained in the information, as to special interrogatories. Witnesses were examined upon interrogatories, and their dispositions read in court. The course of proceeding on the whole seems to have nearly resembled that of the chancery.[62]

Punishments inflicted by the star-chamber.—It was held competent for the court to adjudge any punishment short of death. Fine and imprisonment were of course the most usual. The pillory, whipping, branding, and cutting off the ears, grew into use by degrees. In the reign of Henry VII. and Henry VIII., we are told by Hudson, the fines were not so ruinous as they have been since, which he ascribes to the number of bishops who sat in the court, and inclined to mercy; "and I can well remember," he says, "that the most reverend Archbishop Whitgift did ever constantly maintain the liberty of the free charter, that men ought to be fined, salvo contenemento. But they have been of late imposed according to the nature of the offence, and not the estate of the person. The slavish punishment of whipping," he proceeds to observe, "was not introduced till a great man of the common law, and otherwise a worthy justice, forgot his place of session, and brought it in this place too much in use."[63] It would be difficult to find precedents for the aggravated cruelties inflicted on Leighton, Lilburne, and others; but instances of cutting off the ears may be found under Elizabeth.[64]

The reproach, therefore, of arbitrary and illegal jurisdiction does not wholly fall on the government of Charles. They found themselves in possession of this almost unlimited authority. But doubtless, as far as the history of proceedings in the star-chamber are recorded, they seem much more numerous and violent in the present reign than in the two preceding. Rushworth has preserved a copious selection of cases determined before this tribunal. They consist principally of misdemeanours, rather of an aggravated nature; such as disturbances of the public peace, assaults accompanied with a good deal of violence, conspiracies, and libels. The necessity, however, for such a paramount court to restrain the excesses of powerful men no longer existed, since it can hardly be doubted that the common administration of the law was sufficient to give redress in the time of Charles the First; though we certainly do find several instances of violence and outrage by men of a superior station in life, which speak unfavourably for the state of manners in the kingdom. But the object of drawing so large a number of criminal cases into the star-chamber seems to have been twofold: first, to inure men's minds to an authority more immediately connected with the Crown than the ordinary courts of law, and less tied down to any rules of pleading or evidence; secondly, to eke out a scanty revenue by penalties and forfeitures. Absolutely regardless of the provision of the Great Charter, that no man shall be amerced even to the full extent of his means, the councillors of the star-chamber inflicted such fines as no court of justice, in the present reduced value of money, would think of imposing. Little objection indeed seems to lie, in a free country, and with a well-regulated administration of justice, against the imposition of weighty pecuniary penalties, due consideration being had of the offence and the criminal. But, adjudged by such a tribunal as the star-chamber, where those who inflicted the punishment reaped the gain, and sat, like famished birds of prey, with keen eyes and bended talons, eager to supply for a moment, by some wretch's ruin, the craving emptiness of the exchequer, this scheme of enormous penalties became more dangerous and subversive of justice, though not more odious, than corporal punishment. A gentleman of the name of Allington was fined £12,000 for marrying his niece. One who had sent a challenge to the Earl of Northumberland was fined £5000; another for saying the Earl of Suffolk was a base lord, £4000 to him, and a like sum to the king. Sir David Forbes, for opprobrious words against Lord Wentworth, incurred £5000 to the king, and £3000 to the party. On some soap-boilers, who had not complied with the requisitions of the newly incorporated company, mulcts were imposed of £1500 and £1000. One man was fined and set in the pillory for engrossing corn, though he only kept what grew on his own land, asking more in a season of dearth than the overseers of the poor thought proper to give.[65] Some arbitrary regulations with respect to prices may be excused by a well-intentioned, though mistaken, policy. The charges of inns and taverns were fixed by the judges. But, even in those, a corrupt motive was sometimes blended. The company of vintners, or victuallers, having refused to pay a demand of the lord treasurer, one penny a quart for all wine drank in their houses, the star-chamber, without information filed or defence made, interdicted them from selling or dressing victuals till they submitted to pay forty shillings for each tun of wine to the king.[66] It is evident that the strong interest of the court in these fines must not only have had a tendency to aggravate the punishment, but to induce sentences of condemnation on inadequate proof. From all that remains of proceedings in the star-chamber, they seem to have been very frequently as iniquitous as they were severe. In many celebrated instances, the accused party suffered less on the score of any imputed offence than for having provoked the malice of a powerful adversary, or for notorious dissatisfaction with the existing government. Thus Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, once lord-keeper, the favourite of King James, the possessor for a season of the power that was turned against him, experienced the rancorous and ungrateful malignity of Laud; who, having been brought forward by Williams into the favour of the court, not only supplanted by his intrigues, and incensed the king's mind against his benefactor, but harassed his retirement by repeated persecutions.[67] It will sufficiently illustrate the spirit of these times to mention that the sole offence imputed to the Bishop of Lincoln in the last information against him in the star-chamber was, that he had received certain letters from one Osbaldiston, master of Westminster School, wherein some contemptuous nickname was used to denote Laud.[68] It did not appear that Williams had ever divulged these letters. But it was held that the concealment of a libellous letter was a high misdemeanour. Williams was therefore adjudged to pay £5000 to the king, and £3000 to the archbishop, to be imprisoned during pleasure, and to make a submission; Osbaldiston to pay a still heavier fine, to be deprived of all his benefices, to be imprisoned and make submission; and moreover to stand in the pillory before his school in Dean's-yard, with his ears nailed to it. This man had the good fortune to conceal himself, but the Bishop of Lincoln, refusing to make the required apology, lay above three years in the Tower, till released at the beginning of the long parliament.

It might detain me too long to dwell particularly on the punishments inflicted by the court of star-chamber in this reign. Such historians as have not written in order to palliate the tyranny of Charles, and especially Rushworth, will furnish abundant details, with all those circumstances that portray the barbarous and tyrannical spirit of those who composed that tribunal. Two or three instances are so celebrated that I cannot pass them over. Leighton, a Scots divine, having published an angry libel against the hierarchy, was sentenced to be publicly whipped at Westminster and set in the pillory, to have one side of his nose slit, one ear cut off, and one side of his cheek branded with a hot iron, to have the whole of this repeated the next week at Cheapside, and to suffer perpetual imprisonment in the Fleet.[69] Lilburne, for dispersing pamphlets against the bishops, was whipped from the Fleet prison to Westminster, there set in the pillory, and treated afterwards with great cruelty.[70] Prynne, a lawyer of uncommon erudition and a zealous puritan, had printed a bulky volume, called Histriomastix, full of invectives against the theatre, which he sustained by a profusion of learning. In the course of this, he adverted to the appearance of courtesans on the Roman stage, and by a satirical reference in his index seemed to range all female actors in the class.[71] The queen, unfortunately, six weeks after the publication of Prynne's book, had performed a part in a mask at court. This passage was accordingly dragged to light by the malice of Peter Heylin, a chaplain of Laud, on whom the archbishop devolved the burthen of reading this heavy volume in order to detect its offences. Heylin, a bigoted enemy of everything puritanical, and not scrupulous as to veracity, may be suspected of having aggravated, if not misrepresented, the tendency of a book much more tiresome than seditious. Prynne, however, was already obnoxious, and the star-chamber adjudged him to stand twice in the pillory, to be branded in the forehead, to lose both his ears, to pay a fine of £5000, and to suffer perpetual imprisonment. The dogged puritan employed the leisure of a gaol in writing a fresh libel against the hierarchy. For this, with two other delinquents of the same class, Burton a divine, and Bastwick a physician, he stood again at the bar of that terrible tribunal. Their demeanour was what the court deemed intolerably contumacious, arising in fact from the despair of men who knew that no humiliation would procure them mercy.[72] Prynne lost the remainder of his ears in the pillory; and the punishment was inflicted on them all with extreme and designed cruelty, which they endured, as martyrs always endure suffering, so heroically as to excite a deep impression of sympathy and resentment in the assembled multitude.[73] They were sentenced to perpetual confinement in distant prisons. But their departure from London, and their reception on the road, were marked by signal expressions of popular regard; and their friends resorting to them even in Launceston, Chester, and Carnarvon castles, whither they were sent, an order of council was made to transport them to the isles of the Channel. It was the very first act of the long parliament to restore these victims of tyranny to their families. Punishments by mutilation, though not quite unknown to the English law, had been of rare occurrence; and thus inflicted on men whose station appeared to render the ignominy of whipping and branding more intolerable, they produced much the same effect as the still greater cruelties of Mary's reign, in exciting a detestation for that ecclesiastical dominion which protected itself by means so atrocious.

Character of Laud.—The person on whom public hatred chiefly fell, and who proved in a far more eminent degree than any other individual the evil genius of this unhappy sovereign, was Laud. His talents, though enabling him to acquire a large portion of theological learning, seem to have been by no means considerable. There cannot be a more contemptible work than his Diary; and his letters to Strafford display some smartness, but no great capacity. He managed indeed his own defence, when impeached, with some ability; but on such occasions, ordinary men are apt to put forth a remarkable readiness and energy. Laud's inherent ambition had impelled him to court the favour of Buckingham, of Williams, and of both the kings under whom he lived, till he rose to the see of Canterbury on Abbot's death, in 1633. No one can deny that he was a generous patron of letters, and as warm in friendship as in enmity. But he had placed before his eyes the aggrandisement, first of the church, and next of the royal prerogative, as his end and aim in every action. Though not literally destitute of religion, it was so subordinate to worldly interest, and so blended in his mind with the impure alloy of temporal pride, that he became an intolerant persecutor of the puritan clergy, not from bigotry, which in its usual sense he never displayed, but systematic policy. And being subject, as his friends call it, to some infirmities of temper, that is, choleric, vindictive, harsh, and even cruel to a great degree, he not only took a prominent share in the severities of the star-chamber, but, as his correspondence shows, perpetually lamented that he was restrained from going further lengths.[74]

Laud's extraordinary favour with the king, through which he became a prime adviser in matters of state, rendered him secretly obnoxious to most of the council, jealous, as ministers must always be, of a churchman's overweening ascendancy. His faults, and even his virtues, contributed to this odium. For being exempt from the thirst of lucre, and, though in the less mature state of his fortunes a subtle intriguer, having become frank through heat of temper and self-confidence, he discountenanced all schemes to serve the private interest of courtiers at the expense of his master's exhausted treasury, and went right onward to his object, the exaltation of the Church and Crown. He aggravated the invidiousness of his own situation, and gave an astonishing proof of his influence, by placing Juxon, Bishop of London, a creature of his own, in the greatest of all posts, that of lord high-treasurer. Though Williams had lately been lord-keeper of the seal, it seemed more preposterous to place the treasurer's staff in the hands of a churchman, and of one so little distinguished even in his own profession, that the archbishop displayed his contempt of the rest of the council, especially Cottington, who aspired to it, by such a recommendation.[75] He had previously procured the office of secretary of state for Windebank. But, though overawed by the king's infatuated partiality, the faction adverse to Laud were sometimes able to gratify their dislike, or to manifest their greater discretion, by opposing obstacles to his impetuous spirit.

Lord Strafford.—Of these impediments, which a rash and ardent man calls lukewarmness, indolence, and timidity, he frequently complains in his correspondence with the lord-deputy of Ireland—that Lord Wentworth, so much better known by the title of Earl of Strafford, which he only obtained the year before his death, that we may give it him by anticipation, whose doubtful fame and memorable end have made him nearly the most conspicuous character of a reign so fertile in recollections. Strafford had in his early years sought those local dignities to which his ambition probably was at that time limited, the representation of the county of York and the post of custos rotulorum, through the usual channel of court favour. Slighted by the Duke of Buckingham, and mortified at the preference shown to the head of a rival family, Sir John Saville, he began to quit the cautious and middle course he had pursued in parliament, and was reckoned among the opposers of the administration after the accession of Charles.[76] He was one of those who were made sheriffs of their counties, in order to exclude them from the parliament of 1626. This inspired so much resentment, that he signalised himself as a refuser of the arbitrary loan exacted the next year, and was committed in consequence to prison. He came to the third parliament with a determination to make the court sensible of his power, and possibly with some real zeal for the liberties of his country. But patriotism unhappily, in his self-interested and ambitious mind, was the seed sown among thorns. He had never lost sight of his hopes from the court; even a temporary reconciliation with Buckingham had been effected in 1627, which the favourite's levity soon broke; and he kept up a close connection with the treasurer Weston. Always jealous of a rival, he contracted a dislike for Sir John Eliot, and might suspect that he was likely to be anticipated by that more distinguished patriot in royal favours.[77] The hour of Wentworth's glory was when Charles assented to the petition of right, in obtaining which, and in overcoming the king's chicane and the hesitation of the Lords, he had been pre-eminently conspicuous. From this moment he started aside from the path of true honour; and being suddenly elevated to the peerage and a great post, the presidency of the council of the North, commenced a splendid but baleful career, that terminated at the scaffold.[78] After this fatal apostasy he not only lost all solicitude about those liberties which the petition of right had been designed to secure, but became their deadliest and most shameless enemy.

The council of the North was erected by Henry VIII. after the suppression of the great insurrection of 1536. It had a criminal jurisdiction in Yorkshire and the four more northern counties, as to riots, conspiracies, and acts of violence. It had also, by its original commission, a jurisdiction in civil suits, where either of the parties were too poor to bear the expenses of a process at common law; in which case the council might determine, as it seems, in a summary manner, and according to equity. But this latter authority had been held illegal by the judges under Elizabeth.[79] In fact, the lawfulness of this tribunal in any respect was, to say the least, highly problematical. It was regulated by instructions issued from time to time under the great seal. Wentworth spared no pains to enlarge the jurisdiction of his court. A commission issued in 1632, empowering the council of the North to hear and determine all offences, misdemeanours, suits, debates, controversies, demands, causes, things, and matters whatsoever therein contained, within certain precincts, namely, from the Humber to the Scots frontier. They were specially appointed to hear and determine divers offences, according to the course of the star-chamber, whether provided for by act of parliament or not; to hear complaints according to the rules of the court of chancery, and stay proceedings at common law by injunction; to attach persons by their serjeant in any part of the realm.[80]

These inordinate powers, the soliciting and procuring of which, especially by a person so well versed in the laws and constitution, appears to be of itself a sufficient ground for impeachment, were abused by Strafford to gratify his own pride, as well as to intimidate the opposers of arbitrary measures. Proofs of this occur in the prosecution of Sir David Foulis, in that of Mr. Bellasis, in that of Mr. Maleverer, for the circumstances of which I refer the reader to more detailed history.[81]

Without resigning his presidency of the northern council, Wentworth was transplanted in 1633 to a still more extensive sphere, as lord-deputy of Ireland. This was the great scene on which he played his part; it was here that he found abundant scope for his commanding energy and imperious passions. The Richelieu of that island, he made it wealthier in the midst of exactions, and, one might almost say, happier in the midst of oppressions. He curbed subordinate tyranny; but his own left a sting behind it that soon spread a deadly poison over Ireland. But of his merits and his injustice towards that nation I shall find a better occasion to speak. Two well-known instances of his despotic conduct in respect to single persons may just be mentioned; the deprivation and imprisonment of the lord chancellor Loftus for not obeying an order of the privy council to make such a settlement as they prescribed on his son's marriage—a stretch of interference with private concerns which was aggravated by the suspected familiarity of the lord-deputy with the lady who was to reap advantage from it;[82] and, secondly, the sentence of death passed by a council of war on Lord Mountnorris, in Strafford's presence, and evidently at his instigation, on account of some very slight expressions which he had used in private society. Though it was never the deputy's intention to execute this judgment of his slaves, but to humiliate and trample upon Mountnorris, the violence and indecency of his conduct in it, his long persecution of the unfortunate prisoner after the sentence, and his glorying in the act at all times, and even on his own trial, are irrefragable proofs of such vindictive bitterness as ought, if there were nothing else, to prevent any good man from honouring his memory.[83]

Correspondence between Laud and Strafford.—The haughty and impetuous primate found a congenial spirit in the lord-deputy. They unbosom to each other, in their private letters, their ardent thirst to promote the king's service by measures of more energy than they were permitted to exercise. Do we think the administration of Charles during the interval of parliaments rash and violent? They tell us it was over-cautious and slow. Do we revolt from the severities of the star-chamber? To Laud and Strafford they seemed the feebleness of excessive lenity. Do we cast on the Crown lawyers the reproach of having betrayed their country's liberties? We may find that, with their utmost servility, they fell far behind the expectations of the court, and their scruples were reckoned the chief shackles on the half-emancipated prerogative.

The system which Laud was longing to pursue in England, and which Strafford approved, is frequently hinted at by the word Thorough. "For the state," says he, "indeed, my lord, I am for Thorough; but I see that both thick and thin stays somebody, where I conceive it should not, and it is impossible to go thorough alone."[84] "I am very glad" (in another letter) "to read your lordship so resolute, and more to hear you affirm that the footing of them that go thorough for our master's service is not upon fee, as it hath been. But you are withal upon so many Ifs, that by their help you may preserve any man upon ice, be it never so slippery. As first, if the common lawyers may be contained within their ancient and sober bounds; if the word Thorough be not left out, as I am certain it is; if we grow not faint; if we ourselves be not in fault; if we come not to a peccatum ex te Israel; if others will do their parts as thoroughly as you promise for yourself, and justly conceive of me. Now I pray, with so many and such Ifs as these, what may not be done, and in a brave and noble way? But can you tell when these Ifs will meet, or be brought together? Howsoever, I am resolved to go on steadily in the way which you have formerly seen me go; so that (to put in one if too) if anything fail of my hearty desires for the king and the church's service, the fault shall not be mine."[85] "As for my marginal note" (he writes in another place), "I see you deciphered it well" (they frequently corresponded in cipher), "and I see you make use of it too; do so still, thorough and thorough. Oh that I were where I might go so too! but I am shackled between delays and uncertainties! you have a great deal of honour for your proceedings; go on a God's name." "I have done," he says some years afterwards, "with expecting of Thorough on this side."[86]

It is evident that the remissness of those with whom he was joined in the administration, in not adopting or enforcing sufficiently energetic measures, is the subject of the archbishop's complaint. Neither he nor Strafford loved the treasurer Weston, nor Lord Cottington, both of whom had a considerable weight in the council. But it is more difficult to perceive in what respects the Thorough system was disregarded. He cannot allude to the church, which he absolutely governed through the high-commission court. The inadequate punishments, as he thought them, imposed on the refractory, formed a part, but not the whole, of his grievance. It appears to me that the great aim of these two persons was to effect the subjugation of the common lawyers. Some sort of tenderness for those constitutional privileges, so indissolubly interwoven with the laws they administered, adhered to the judges, even while they made great sacrifices of their integrity at the instigation of the Crown. In the case of habeas corpus, in that of ship-money, we find many of them display a kind of half-compliance, a reservation, a distinction, an anxiety to rest on precedents, which, though it did not save their credit with the public, impaired it at court. On some more fortunate occasions, as we have seen, they even manifested a good deal of firmness in resisting what was urged on them. Chiefly, however, in matter of prohibitions issuing from the ecclesiastical courts, they were uniformly tenacious of their jurisdiction. Nothing could expose them more to Laud's ill-will. I should not deem it improbable that he had formed, or rather adopted from the canonists, a plan, not only of rendering the spiritual jurisdiction independent, but of extending it to all civil causes, unless perhaps in questions of freehold.[87]

The presumption of common lawyers, and the difficulties they threw in the way of the church and Crown, are frequent themes with the two correspondents. "The church," says Laud, "is so bound up in the forms of the common law, that it is not possible for me or for any man to do that good which he would, or is bound to do. For your lordship sees, no man clearer, that they which have gotten so much power in and over the church will not let go their hold; they have indeed fangs with a witness, whatsoever I was once said in passion to have."[88] Strafford replies: "I know no reason but you may as well rule the common lawyers in England as I, poor beagle, do here; and yet that I do, and will do, in all that concerns my master, at the peril of my head. I am confident that the king, being pleased to set himself in the business, is able, by his wisdom and ministers, to carry any just and honourable action through all imaginary opposition, for real there can be none; that to start aside for such panic fears, fantastic apparitions as a Prynne or an Eliot shall set up, were the meanest folly in the whole world; that the debts of the Crown being taken off, you may govern as you please; and most resolute I am that work may be done without borrowing any help forth of the king's lodgings, and that it is as downright a peccatum ex te Israel as ever was, if all this be not affected with speed and ease."[89]—Strafford's indignation at the lawyers breaks out on other occasions. In writing to Lord Cottington, he complains of a judge of assize who had refused to receive the king's instructions to the council of the North in evidence, and beseeches that he may be charged with this great misdemeanour before the council-board. "I confess," he says, "I disdain to see the gownmen in this sort hang their noses over the flowers of the crown."[90] It was his endeavour in Ireland, as well as in Yorkshire, to obtain the right of determining civil suits. "I find," he says, "that my Lord Falkland was restrained by proclamation not to meddle in any cause between party and party, which did certainly lessen his power extremely: I know very well the common lawyers will be passionately against it, who are wont to put such a prejudice upon all other professions, as if none were to be trusted or capable to administer justice but themselves; yet how well this suits with monarchy, when they monopolise all to be governed by their year-books, you in England have a costly experience; and I am sure his majesty's absolute power is not weaker in this kingdom, where hitherto the deputy and council-board have had a stroke with them."[91] The king indulged him in this, with a restriction as to matters of inheritance.

The cruelties exercised on Prynne and his associates have generally been reckoned among the great reproaches of the primate. It has sometimes been insinuated that they were rather the act of other counsellors than his own. But his letters, as too often occurs, belie this charitable excuse. He expresses in them no sort of humane sentiment towards these unfortunate men, but the utmost indignation at the oscitancy of those in power, which connived at the public demonstrations of sympathy. "A little more quickness," he says, "in the government would cure this itch of libelling. But what can you think of Thorough when there shall be such slips in business of consequence? What say you to it, that Prynne and his fellows should be suffered to talk what they pleased while they stood in the pillory, and win acclamations from the people? etc. By that which I have above written, your lordship will see that the Triumviri will be far enough from being kept dark. It is true that, when this business is spoken of, some men speak as your lordship writes, that it concerns the king and government more than me. But when anything comes to be acted against them, be it but the execution of a sentence, in which lies the honour and safety of all justice, yet there is little or nothing done, nor shall I ever live to see it otherwise."[92]

The lord deputy fully concurred in this theory of vigorous government. They reasoned on such subjects as Cardinal Granville and the Duke of Alva had reasoned before them. "A prince," he says in answer, "that loseth the force and example of his punishments, loseth withal the greatest part of his dominion. If the eyes of the Triumviri be not sealed so close as they ought, they may perchance spy us out a shrewd turn, when we least expect it. I fear we are hugely mistaken, and misapply our charity thus pitying of them, where we should indeed much rather pity ourselves. It is strange indeed," he observes in another place, "to see the frenzy which possesseth the vulgar now-a-days, and that the just displeasure and chastisement of a state should produce greater estimation, nay reverence, to persons of no consideration either for life or learning, than the greatest and highest trust and employments shall be able to procure for others of unspotted conversation, of most eminent virtues and deepest knowledge: a grievous and overspreading leprosy! but where you mention a remedy, sure it is not fitted for the hand of every physician; the cure under God must be wrought by one Æsculapius alone, and that in my weak judgment to be effected rather by corrosives than lenitives: less than Thorough will not overcome it; there is a cancerous malignity in it, which must be cut forth, which long since rejected all other means, and therefore to God and him I leave it."[93]

The honourable reputation that Strafford had earned before his apostasy stood principally on two grounds; his refusal to comply with a requisition of money without consent of parliament, and his exertions in the petition of right which declared every such exaction to be contrary to law. If any therefore be inclined to palliate his arbitrary proceedings and principles in the executive administration, his virtue will be brought to a test in the business of ship-money. If he shall be found to have given countenance and support to that measure, there must be an end of all pretence to integrity or patriotism. But of this there are decisive proofs. He not only made every exertion to enforce its payment in Yorkshire during the years 1639 and 1640, for which the peculiar dangers of that time might furnish some apology, but long before, in his correspondence with Laud, speaks thus of Mr. Hampden, deploring, it seems, the supineness that had permitted him to dispute the Crown's claim with impunity. "Mr. Hampden is a great brother [i.e. a puritan], and the very genius of that people leads them always to oppose, as well civilly as ecclesiastically, all that ever authority ordains for them; but in good faith, were they right served, they should be whipt home into their right wits, and much beholden they should be to any one that would thoroughly take pains with them in that kind."[94] "In truth I still wish, and take it also to be a very charitable one, Mr. H. and others to his likeness were well whipt into their right senses; if that the rod be so used as that it smarts not, I am the more sorry."[95]

Hutton, one of the judges who had been against the Crown in this case, having some small favour to ask of Strafford, takes occasion in his letter to enter on the subject of ship-money, mentioning his own opinion in such a manner as to give the least possible offence, and with all qualifications in favour of the Crown; commending even Lord Finch's argument on the other side.[96] The lord deputy, answering his letter after much delay, says, "I must confess, in a business of so mighty importance, I shall the less regard the forms of pleading, and do conceive, as it seems my Lord Finch pressed that the power of levies of forces at sea and land for the very, not feigned, relief and safety of the public, is a property of sovereignty, as, were the Crown willing, it could not divest it thereof: Salus populi suprema lex; nay, in cases of extremity even above acts of parliament," etc.

It cannot be forgotten that the loan of 1626, for refusing which Wentworth had suffered imprisonment, had been demanded in a season of incomparably greater difficulty than that when ship-money was levied: at the one time war had been declared against both France and Spain, at the other the public tranquillity was hardly interrupted by some bickerings with Holland. In avowing therefore the king's right to levy money in cases of exigency, and to be the sole judge of that exigency, he uttered a shameless condemnation of his former virtues. But lest any doubt should remain of his perfect alienation from all principles of limited monarchy, I shall produce still more conclusive proofs. He was strongly and wisely against the war with Spain, into which Charles's resentment at finding himself the dupe of that power in the business of the Palatinate nearly hurried him in 1637. At this time Strafford laid before the king a paper of considerations dissuading him from this course, and pointing out particularly his want of regular troops.[97] "It is plain indeed," he says, "that the opinion delivered by the judges, declaring the lawfulness of the assessment for the shipping, is the greatest service that profession hath done the Crown in my time. But unless his majesty hath the like power declared to raise a land army upon the same exigent of state, the Crown seems to me to stand but upon one leg at home, to be considerable but by halves to foreign powers. Yet this sure methinks convinces a power for the sovereign to raise payments for land forces, and consequently submits to his wisdom and ordinance the transporting of the money or men into foreign states. Seeing then that this piece well fortified for ever vindicates the royalty at home from under the conditions and restraints of subjects, renders us also abroad even to the greatest kings the most considerable monarchy in Christendom; seeing again, this is a business to be attempted and won from the subject in time of peace only, and the people first accustomed to these levies, when they may be called upon, as by way of prevention for our future safety, and keep his majesty thereby also moderator of the peace of Christendom, rather than upon the bleeding evil of an instant and active war; I beseech you, what piety to alliances is there, that should divert a great and wise king forth of a path, which leads so manifestly, so directly, to the establishing his own throne, and the secure and independent seating of himself and posterity in wealth, strength, and glory, far above any their progenitors, verily in such a condition as there were no more hereafter to be wished them in this world but that they would be very exact in their care for the just and moderate government of their people, which might minister back to them again the plenties and comforts of life, that they would be most searching and severe in punishing the oppressions and wrongs of their subjects, as well in the case of the public magistrate as of private persons, and lastly to be utterly resolved to exercise this power only for public and necessary uses; to spare them as much and often as were possible; and that they never be wantonly vitiated or misapplied to any private pleasure or person whatsoever? This being indeed the very only means to preserve, as may be said, the chastity of these levies, and to recommend their beauty so far forth to the subject, as being thus disposed, it is to be justly hoped, they will never grudge the parting with their monies....

"Perhaps it may be asked, where shall so great a sum be had? My answer is, procure it from the subjects of England, and profitably for them too. By this means preventing the raising upon them a land army for defence of the kingdom, which would be by many degrees more chargeable; and hereby also insensibly gain a precedent, and settle an authority and right in the Crown to levies of that nature, which thread draws after it many huge and great advantages, more proper to be thought on at some other seasons than now."

It is however remarkable that, with all Strafford's endeavours to render the king absolute, he did not intend to abolish the use of parliaments. This was apparently the aim of Charles; but, whether from remains of attachment to the ancient forms of liberty surviving amidst his hatred of the real essence, or from the knowledge that a well-governed parliament is the best engine for extracting money from the people, this able minister entertained very different views. He urged accordingly the convocation of one in Ireland, pledging himself for the experiment's success. And in a letter to a friend, after praising all that had been done in it, "Happy it were," he proceeds, "if we might live to see the like in England, everything in its season; but in some cases it is as necessary there be a time to forget, as in others to learn; and howbeit the peccant (if I may without offence so term it) humour be not yet wholly purged forth, yet do I conceive it in the way, and that once rightly corrected and prepared, we may hope for a parliament of a sound constitution indeed; but this must be the work of time, and of his majesty's excellent wisdom; and this time it becomes us all to pray for and wait for, and when God sends it, to make the right use of it."[98]

These sentiments appear honourable and constitutional. But let it not be hastily conceived that Strafford was a friend to the necessary and ancient privileges of those assemblies to which he owed his rise. A parliament was looked upon by him as a mere instrument of the prerogative. Hence he was strongly against permitting any mutual understanding among its members, by which they might form themselves into parties, and acquire strength and confidence by previous concert. "As for restraining any private meetings either before or during parliament, saving only publicly in the house, I fully rest in the same opinion, and shall be very watchful and attentive therein, as a means which may rid us of a great trouble, and prevent many stones of offence, which otherwise might by malignant spirits be cast in among us."[99] And acting on this principle, he kept a watch on the Irish parliament, to prevent those intrigues which his experience in England had taught him to be the indispensable means of obtaining a control over the Crown. Thus fettered and kept in awe, no one presuming to take a lead in debate from uncertainty of support, parliaments would have become such mockeries of their venerable name as the joint contempt of the court and nation must soon have annihilated. Yet so difficult is it to preserve this dominion over any representative body, that the king judged far more discreetly than Strafford in desiring to dispense entirely with their attendance.

The passages which I have thus largely quoted will, I trust, leave no doubt in any reader's mind that the Earl of Strafford was party in a conspiracy to subvert the fundamental laws and liberties of his country. For here are not, as on his trial, accusations of words spoken in heat, uncertain as to proof, and of ambiguous interpretation; nor of actions variously reported, and capable of some explanation; but the sincere unbosoming of the heart in letters never designed to come to light. And if we reflect upon this man's cool-blooded apostasy on the first lure to his ambition, and on his splendid abilities, which enhanced the guilt of that desertion, we must feel some indignation at those who have palliated all his iniquities, and even ennobled his memory with the attributes of patriot heroism. Great he surely was, since that epithet can never be denied without paradox to so much comprehension of mind, such ardour and energy, such courage and eloquence; those commanding qualities of soul, which, impressed upon his dark and stern countenance, struck his contemporaries with mingled awe and hate, and still live in the unfading colours of Vandyke.[100] But it may be reckoned as a sufficient ground for distrusting any one's attachment to the English constitution, that he reveres the name of the Earl of Strafford.

Conduct of Laud in the church prosecution of puritans.—It was perfectly consonant to Laud's temper and principles of government to extirpate, as far as in him lay, the lurking seeds of disaffection to the Anglican church. But the course he followed could in nature have no other tendency than to give them nourishment. His predecessor Abbot had perhaps connived to a limited extent at some irregularities of discipline in the puritanical clergy, judging not absurdly that their scruples at a few ceremonies, which had been aggravated by a vexatious rigour, would die away by degrees, and yield to that centripetal force, that moral attraction towards uniformity and obedience to custom, which Providence has rendered one of the great preservatives of political society. His hatred to popery and zeal for Calvinism, which undoubtedly were narrow and intolerant, as well as his avowed disapprobation of those churchmen who preached up arbitrary power, gained for this prelate the favour of the party denominated puritan. In all these respects, no man could be more opposed to Abbot than his successor. Besides reviving the prosecutions for nonconformity in their utmost strictness, wherein many of the other bishops vied with their primate, he most injudiciously, not to say wickedly endeavoured, by innovations of his own, and by exciting alarms in the susceptible consciences of pious men, to raise up new victims whom he might oppress. Those who made any difficulty about his novel ceremonies, or even who preached on the Calvinistic side, were harassed by the high commission court as if they had been actual schismatics.[101] The most obnoxious, if not the most indefensible, of these prosecutions were for refusing to read what was called the Book of Sports; namely, a proclamation, or rather a renewal of that issued in the late reign, that certain feasts or wakes might be kept, and a great variety of pastimes used on Sundays after evening service.[102] This was reckoned, as I have already observed, one of the tests of puritanism. But whatever superstition there might be in that party's judaical observance of the day they called the sabbath, it was in itself preposterous, and tyrannical in its intention, to enforce the reading in churches of this licence or rather recommendation of festivity. The precise clergy refused in general to comply with the requisition, and were suspended or deprived in consequence. Thirty of them were excommunicated in the single diocese of Norwich; but as that part of England was rather conspicuously puritanical, and the bishop, one Wren, was the worst on the bench, it is highly probable that the general average fell short of this.[103]

Besides the advantage of detecting a latent bias in the clergy, it is probable that the high church prelates had a politic end in the Book of Sports. The morose gloomy spirit of puritanism was naturally odious to the young and to men of joyous tempers. The comedies of that age are full of sneers at their formality. It was natural to think that, by enlisting the common propensities of mankind to amusement on the side of the established church, they might raise a diversion against that fanatical spirit which can hardly long continue to be the prevailing temperament of a nation. The church of Rome, from which no ecclesiastical statesman would disdain to take a lesson, had for many ages perceived, and acted upon the principle, that it is the policy of governments to encourage a love of pastime and recreation in the people; both because it keeps them from speculating on religious and political matters, and because it renders them more cheerful, and less sensible to the evils of their condition; and it may be remarked by the way, that the opposite system, so long pursued in this country, whether from a puritanical spirit, or from the wantonness of petty authority, has no such grounds of policy to recommend it. Thus much at least is certain, that when the puritan party employed their authority in proscribing all diversions, in enforcing all the Jewish rigour about the sabbath, and gave that repulsive air of austerity to the face of England of which so many singular illustrations are recorded, they rendered their own yoke intolerable to the youthful and gay; nor did any other cause perhaps so materially contribute to bring about the Restoration. But mankind love sport as little as prayer by compulsion; and the immediate effect of the king's declaration was to produce a far more scrupulous abstinence from diversions on Sundays than had been practised before.

The resolution so evidently taken by the court, to admit of no half conformity in religion, especially after Laud had obtained an unlimited sway over the king's mind, convinced the puritans that England could no longer afford them an asylum. The state of Europe was not such as to encourage their emigration, though many were well received in Holland. But, turning their eyes to the newly-discovered regions beyond the Atlantic Ocean, they saw a secure place of refuge from present tyranny, and a boundless prospect for future hope. They obtained from the Crown the charter of Massachusetts Bay in 1629. About three hundred and fifty persons, chiefly or wholly of the independent sect, sailed with the first fleet. So many followed in the subsequent years, that these New England settlements have been supposed to have drawn near half a million of money from the mother country before the civil wars.[104] Men of a higher rank than the first colonists, and now become hopeless alike of the civil and religious liberties of England, men of capacious and commanding minds, formed to be the legislators and generals of an infant republic, the wise and cautious Lord Say, the acknowledged chief of the independent sect, the brave, open, and enthusiastic Lord Brook, Sir Arthur Haslerig, Hampden, ashamed of a country for whose rights he had fought alone, Cromwell, panting with energies that he could neither control nor explain, and whose unconquerable fire was still wrapt in smoke to every eye but that of his kinsman Hampden, were preparing to embark for America, when Laud, for his own and his master's curse, produced an order of council to stop their departure.[105] Besides the reflections which such an instance of destructive infatuation must suggest, there are two things not unworthy to be remarked: first, that these chiefs of the puritan sect, far from entertaining those schemes of overturning the government at home that have been imputed to them, looked only in 1638 to escape from imminent tyranny; and, secondly, that the views of the archbishop were not so much to render the Church and Crown secure from the attempts of disaffected men, as to gratify a malignant humour by persecuting them.

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.