CHAPTER as they were yet a party, upon the side of the king. V. CHAS. I. A.D. 1646-8. And yet they had little confidence in Charles, or he in them. They deplored his errors; he blamed their want of zeal in his service. The ground of their attachment to the king was quaintly, but very well, expressed by the old knight who charged his sons never to desert the crown, though the crown should hang upon a holly-bush. It was a high tribute to the integrity of the leaders of this party, that they received alternately from the king and parliament the homage both of ill usage and respect. They were the true reformers of the age, in religion and in politics. They saw the wants of the times and would have redressed them; and had not the infatuation of the court and the frenzy of the people driven them from power, they would probably have settled the nation very nearly on the basis of the revolution of 1688. The miseries of a civil war, the insolence of Cromwell, the viler profligacy of Charles II., and the cruelties of his still more despicable brother, might then have been spared to the blushing annals of Great Britain. But this was not the course which He who rules over the nations of the earth permitted. In the house of commons, church puritanism melted away. We have scen that a great number of its original members forsook their seats and joined the king at Oxford; those who remained renounced episcopacy; they became presbyterians, then independents, or gradually retired from public life. It was so with the clergy: great numbers of those who retained their livings as presbyterians, and even as independents, neither had, nor professed to have, any great devotion to V. CHAS. I. A.D. 1646-8. either of those systems. They acquiesced in that CHAPTER which seemed to be the national will; they asked themselves not whether these forms of discipline were the best, but simply whether they were lawful. Should they resign their cures, or should they forego episcopacy? It seemed expedient and lawful to remain, and good for the present necessity; and upon this principle they acted. It was thus the great body of the doctrinal or church puritans disappeared, the clergy becoming moderate presbyterians, and their parishioners following their example. In the reformation in the previous century the first generation of the reforming clergy had been Romish priests; so now with scarcely an exception the presbyterian and independent clergy had received episcopal orders. Most of them yielded to the pressure of the times, though some no doubt heartily approved of the change. There were others who, regarding episcopacy and the forms of the church of England with still higher reverence, adhered under peril and discouragement to that which they believed to be the only pure and apostolic church. They retained its forms as far as possible, and still made use of its liturgy in public. Many of the clergy exposed their lives, and several lost them, through a violence and ill usage, not less fatal than a public execution, in thus resisting the will of the majority, sanctioned as it was by an ordinance of the parliament. Various motives of course prevailed among the clergy who acted in this manner; in some a sentiment of loyalty, in others of devotion. The parson of IIadley was assailed by the populace in his church while reading the service: he drew a V. CHAS. I. A.D. 1646-8. CHAPTER stiletto and dared them to the attack. In a different spirit Harrison, the rector of Sandwich, with a file of musketeers drawn up before the pulpit, calmly proceeded in his duty. In his prayer before the sermon, the officer commanded him to come down, but he went on apparently unconcerned. The officer gave the necessary words of command, to make ready, then to present, but perceiving him still unmoved he hesitated to give the last word, and bid the soldiers go and drag him from the pulpit, which was done at once. He narrowly escaped the fate of Thomas A'Becket, was carried in triumph to the guard-house, and thence to prison.* The curate of Saxton in Yorkshire was reading prayers when some parliamentary soldiers burst into the church: one of them held a pistol to his breast, assailed him with abuse, and swore that if he did not immediately desist he would shoot him dead upon the spot. Such scenes were not uncommon. Driven at length from public places, the devout services of the prayer-book found a home in many a retired house and upper chamber. Bared of its splendour, episcopacy survived, more precious to churchmen because distressed. The storm gathered round the bishops with the greatest fury, for an archbishop had been Charles's adviser in his worst measures, and the whole order suffered indiscriminately for the vices of its head. The army was clamorous for its pay and the parliament was in want of money. The church lands were now sold, and the bishops' estates and residences. A large sum, upwards of eight hundred thousand pounds, * Walker's Sufferings, part ii. p. 266. † Ib. p. 412. V. CHAS. I. A.D. 1646-8. was thus raised, and episcopacy seemed to have CHAPTER perished with this last disaster. A fifth was reserved, but seldom paid, for the support of the ejected bishops. Most of them were royalists, and this was held sufficient to exclude them from the grant. Hall of Norwich, a bishop of apostolic zeal, a saint of primitive piety, was used, the axe excepted, as harshly as Laud himself; imprisoned, plundered, threatened, exposed for weeks to the yells and hootings of an unrestrained and lawless mob, and cast aside to die in poverty, if not in want. Archbishop Ussher was treated with more kindness. He took the negative oath, by which he bound himself not to oppose the existing government, and was permitted to preach at Lincoln's inn. A gleam of generosity softened for a while the bitterness of the house of commons; for a motion for a committee to examine what delinquent ministers preached, or read the book of common prayer, and silence them, “ was much opposed by divers, as contrary to that liberty of consciences which they themselves pretended to insist upon as due to every christian." This was on the 20th of December, 1647. An amusing circumstance revived within a few days all the presbyterian bigotry. Notwithstanding an ordinance to the contrary, the citizens of London closed their shops, and made holiday on Christmas-day; upon which the houses sat in alarm the same afternoon and empowered a committee to examine and punish the delinquent ministers.* Jeremy Taylor, for some time in attendance upon the king at Oxford, found a retreat amidst the *Whitelocke, ii. pp. 85, 86. V. A.D. 1646-8. CHAPTER mountains of South Wales, at the mansion of lord Carbery, whose hospitality he richly recompensed. CHAS. I. It was here, amidst congenial scenes and remote from the seat of war, that his ardent spirit, stimulated and soothed by turns, hearing only of battles and seeing only the most glorious handiwork of God, discharged itself in the finest of his gorgeous writings. In many private houses of the royalists the chaplains were retained and the ancient services of the church; and for some time a number of eminent clergymen were in attendance on the royal armies; but it was at Oxford only that the church of England still appeared in something of its former dignity. Charles himself was a religious man, especially now that trouble had chastened him. Of his own court, he was probably the best example, as he was the highest. His habitual duplicity he learned in his cradle; it was a part, and the most important part, of his father's kingcraft. He had been taught to consider it right. He practised it without hesitation, without remorse, and, it is to be feared, without repentance. On this one point his conscience was insensible to the last; in other respects he was a virtuous man and his religion was sincere. He was fond of the society of the good and wise, and found more pleasure in strolling through the libraries of Oxford with his chaplains than in the noisy revels of his court; and Sanderson and Hammond were companions with whom certainly no irreligious man would have wished to live. But before the court finally broke up at Oxford the seeds of two great evils had been sown which ripened into miserable fruit. The first of these was |