!£ #s YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Gift of LOUISE M. BRYANT Gunpowder Plot of Guv Fawkes. — Vol. iii. 257. inn ruruLAR HISTORY OF ENGLAND. BY CHARLES KNIGHT. •¦v VOLUME III. FROM THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH TO THE COMMONWEALTH. First American Edition. NEW YORK: JOHN WURTELE LOVELL. 1880. CONTENTS. CHAPTER L— a.d. 1558 to a.d. i56t. Elizabeth proclaimed queen.— She refuses to attend Mass on Christmas-day.— Philip pro poses marriage to Elizabeth— The Commons request that she would marry.— Her answer.— The Coronation progress through the City.^Cecif's plans for the restora tion of Protestantism.— Opening of Parliament.— Statute for restoring the supremacy to the Crown.— Statute for the Uniformity of Common Prayer.— Deprivation ot bishops — Peace with France — Pretensions of Mary Stuart.— Elizabeth the head of the Protestant party of Europe.— Scotland.— Hostility of the queen-regent of Scot land to the Reformers.— Their desire for an alliance with England.— French troops sent to Scotland — ^England sends an army and fleet. — Siege of Leifh. — Peace con cluded at Edinburgh. — Assembly of the parliament of Scotland.— Acts establishing the reformed religion.— Mary refuses to ratify the treaty of Edinburgh.— DeaHh of Francis II. — Mary determines to return to Scotland. —Elizabeth refuses her a safe conduct. — Mary embarks at Calais. — Arrival in Scotland.— Contrasts' in the fortunes of Mary and Elizabeth. " Page 13 — 39 CHAPTER II.— ajx 1561 to a,d. 1567. fiiblic spirit- under Elizaheth.—Sports and Processions. — England sends aid to the French Protestants. — Scotland.— Plans for Mary's marriage. — Leicester and Darnley. — Marriage of Mlary and Darnley;— The Reformers indignant at the marriage. — Re volt of Murray and other nobles. — Revolt suppressed, and the lords banished. — Darnley arid Riccio. — Quarrels of the queen and Darnley. — Plot against Riccio. — Murder1 6f* Riccio'. — Birth of a Scottish prince. — Ascendency of Bothwell. — Darnley at the Kirk ot Field. — Assassination of Darnley. — Mock trial of Bothwell.— Mary carried off. — Marriage of Mary and Bothwell. — Mary surrenders to her nobles. 46 — 64 CHAPTER III.— A.D. 1567. Mary compelled to resign the Crown. — Murray accepts the Regency. — Escape of Mary from Lochleven. — Circumstances of he* escapew-^Ba'ttle of Langsyde— Mary takes ref uge in England. — Mary's detention in England. — Conferences. qf York ^pd London.— Mary placed undercharge of the Earl of Shrewsbury,— Anxiety for her safe custody. — The duke of Norfolk and Mary. — Lady Catherine Grey. . • • • 65— Sx 6 CONTENTS. CHAPTER IV.— A.D. i568toA.D. 1572. General view of the first ten years of Elizabeth — Movement of Rome against Protestant. ism.— The persecutions in the Netherlands and in France.— Intrigues against Eliza beth.— Insurrection of the north.— Pius V. issues a bull of excommunication against Elizabeth.— Parliament of 1571 — Statutes against papists.— Puritanical party in the House of Commons.— Motion for reform of abuses in the Church. Trial and execu tion of the duke of Norfolk.— Troubles of Scotland.— The Huguenots of France pro pitiated by the marriage of the prince of Navarre.— Coligny shot.— The massacre of Saint Bartholomew resolved upon.— Its perpetration.— Effect of the news upon the court and people of England.— New danger of the queen of £cots. Page 82—97 CHAPTER V.— a.d. 1572 to A.D. 1586. Jesuits in England.— Campion.— Increased severities against Papists. — Expedition to the Netherlands.— Leicester in the Netherlands.— Death of Sir Philip Sidney.— Naval successes under JDrake.— Babington's conspiracy.— Trial of the conspirators — Alleged complicity of Mary in the plot.— Mary's papers seized. — She is removed to Fotheringay Castle 98— in CHAPTER VI.— A.D. 1584 to a.d. 1587. The Association. — Statute for the surety of the queen's person. — Commissions for trial of Mary.— Proceedings op the trial. — Judgment against Mary. — Conflicting opinions on this judgment — The parliament urge the execution of the sentence.— The judgment proclaimed. — Conduct of Elizabeth. — Interview with Davison. — Warrant of execu tion. — Mary beheaded at Fotheringay. — Elizabeth disavows her responsibility in this proceeding.— The disavowal a self-deception. — Note on the statement that Elizabeth desired that the Queen of Scots might be privately assassinated. . . 1x2 — X35 CHAPTER VII.— a.d. 1587 to A.D. 1588. Funeral of Sir Philip 'Sidney. — Preparations fbr the Invasion of England hy Spain. — Drake's Expedition to Cadiz. — Suspected policy of James VI. — The Armada an nounced. — The spirit of the country. — Camp at Tilbury. — The Mariners of Eng land. — Defences of the coast. — The demeanour of the queen. — Her oration at Til bury.— Loyalty of the Catholics 136 — 147 CHAPTER VIIL— a.d. 1588 to a.d. 1589. Sailing of the Armada. — The English fleet. — The Armada off Plymouth. — The fight up Channel — The run to Calais. — The Fire ships at Calais. — The fight off Gravelines. — The flight to the North. — The Deliverance, — The Thanksgivings. — Spain makes new preparations. — Expeditions against Spain, — The heroic time. . , 148-^165 CHAPTER IX.— a.d. 1567 to a.d. 1593. The three religious classes of the second half of the reign of Elizabeth. — Progress of Non-Conformity.— Statute against the Puritans.— Tbe Puritan enmity to the habits of society.— Philip Stubbes' Anatomy, of Abuses.— Pride of Apparel.— Gluttony and Drunkenness. — Dancing considered a vice. — Music held to be corrupting. — The Sab bath profaned by Snorts.— The Lord of Misrule.— May-games ; Wakes; Church- ales. — Country festivals.— Athletic exercises and sports. — Gaming. — Stage Plays. 166—183 CONTENTS. j CHAPTER X.— A.D. 1589 to A.D. 1598.' Henry of Navarre succeeds to the throne of France.— English expeditions to aid Henry IV.— A Parliament called.— Contests of the Crown and the Commons.— Intrigues of Spain in Scotland.— Naval expeditions.— The taking of Cadiz.— Parliament.— Stat utes regarding the Poor.— Progress of Poor Law Legislation.— Poverty and Vaga bondage. — Labourers refusing to work at usual wages. — Egyptians and pretended Egyptians.— Villanies of London.— Insecurity of the Suburbs.— Statutes against the increase of Buildings.— Almshouses.— Incidental causes of Indigence.— Fluctuation of Price. — Sickness. — Nuisances. ^-Firfis. — Insufficient household accommodation. — Increase of town populations. — Crimes of towns— Police. . . Page 184 — 205 CHAPTER XL— a.d. 1598 to A.D. 1603. Death of lord Burleigh.— Death - of Philip II.— Condition of Ireland.— Rebellion of Tyrone. — Essex appointed Lord-lieutenant of Ireland.— His bootless campaign. — Esse;x suddenly returns to England. — He is committed to free custody, and then suspended from his offices. — His discontent, and schemes for redress. — Armed , assembly at Essex-House.-rAttempt-at insurrection. — Essex and Southampton tried for high-treason.— Conduct of Bacon on that trial*— Essex executed.— Scotland. — The Gowrie conspiracy. — The last parliament of Elizabeth. — Debates on a subsidy.— Bill for abating monopolies. — The queen's wisdom is yielding to public opinion. — Death of Elizabeth. — Note on the story of Essex's ring. , . . .- 206—426 CHAPTER XII.— a.d. 1588 to a.d. 1603. Literature and Art characteristic of- the periods of their production.— First years of Eliz abethan literature bore the impress of the two preceding reigns. — Sackville. — The early popular drama. — Marlowe and the contemporary dramatists. — Growing refine ment. — Spenser. — Shakspere. — Lyrical poetry.— Its association with Music. — Rural images ii\ the poets connected with the .pleasurable aspects of country life. — Architec ture. — The palatial mansion. — Gardens. — The gentleman's manor-house* — Classical education . 227— 237 CHAPTER XIII.— a.d. 1603 to A.D. 1604. James proclaimed king of England. — Question of the Succession. — Sir Robert Carey's ride to Edinburgh. — James quits Scotland. — His progress to London. — His system of punishments and rewards. — Cecil's influence. — The coronation. — Raleigh, Cobham, Grey, and others arrested on charges of conspiracy, — The two plots. — Trial of Raleigh. — His conviction and long imprisonment. — Conferences at Hampton Court. — Meeting of Parliament. — Contest between the King and the House of Commons upon a question of Privilege.— Statutes of this session. — Wardship. — Purveyance. — Temper of the Commons.— Peace with Spain. — James proclaimed king of Great Britain. — Character, of James. ,. 238-^252 CHAPTER XIV.— A.D. 1605. The Gunpowder Plot. — Lord Mounteagle receives a letter. — Salisbury is made acquainted „, with the letter. — Its interpretation. —Search under the Parliament House.— Seizure of Fawkes. — The other Conspirators. — The preparations during eighteen previous months.— Th^iL proceedings after the discovery. — They resist the sheriff.— S^ome killed, otliers^aken prisoners. — Feelings, of the Roman Catholics-— Ben Jonson. — Trial of Fawkes and others-— Garnet the. Jesuit. — His conriction — His doctrine of EquivocatipnT . • . . • 253— 27° 8 CONTENTS. CHAPTER XV.— A-D. 1606 to A.D. 1613. Parliament of 1606. — Statutes against Papists. — Game Laws. — Manners of the Court.-* Lavishness of James upon his favourites. — Feudal aid. — Impositions upon merchan dise. — First Settlement in Virginia. — Progress of the Colony. — Settlement of the Pilgrim Fathers in Massachusetts, — Charter of the East India Company. — First Fac tory at Sural. — The Mogul Rulers of Hindostan. — Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe.— Dissolution of the Parliament. — Murder of Henry IV. of France. — Authorised translation of the Bible. — Ireland. — Plantation of Ulster. — Creation of Baronets.— The New River. — Increase of London lji — 290 CHAPTER XVI. A.D. 1604 to A.D. 1620. Arabella Stuart. — Death of Salisbury. — Robert Carr, king's favorite. — Death of Prince Henry.— Marriage of the Princess Elizabeth. — The addled Parliament. — George Villiers, the new favourite. — Murder of Overbury. — Trials for the murder. — Somerset and his countess convicted. — Conduct of the King. — Sir Edward Coke dismissed.— Proclamation for Sports. — Note on the Secret Communications between the King and Sir George More. ••••••••.. 291 — 307 CHAPTER XVII.— A.D. 1616 to a.d. 1625. Release of Raleigh. — Raleigh's expedition to Guiana.— Raleigh returns to England.— His execution under his former sentence. — Affairs of the Palatinate. — The Elector de feated at Prague.— Parliament. — Monopolists. — Lord Bacon impeached.— Conduct of Parliament in Floyd's case.— The King and the Parliament at issue. — Parliament dissolved. — Prince Charles and Villiers in Spain. — The proposed marriage of Charles with the Infanta broken off. — Rejoicings in England. — Parliament. — War declared against Spain.— Death of King James 308—324 CHAPTER XVIII.— A.D. 1625 to ad. 1630. Accession of Charles I.— Marriage of the king with Henrietta Maria. — The first Parlia ment of Charles. — Grievances. — Naval failures. — The second Parliament. — Contests of Peers and Commons with the Crown. — Subsidies illegally levied. — Imprisonments for refusals to pay.— The Queen's foreign attendants dismissed. — War with France.— Its causes. — La Rochelle. — Expedition to the Isle of Rh£. The third Parliament.— Petition of Right.— Buckingham denounced in the Commons' House. — Prorogation of Parliament. — Siege of La Rochelle.— Buckingham and Richelieu.— Assassination of Buckingham.— Felton, the assassin. — Surrender of La Rochelle. — Parliament.— Religious differences.— Parliament dissolved in anger.— -Members imprisoned. — Peace with Spain and France • ..»•». •¦¦ 325 — 345 CHAPTER XIX.— a.d. 1629 to a.d. 2638. Absolute government. — Condition of England from 1629 to 1637.— Contrasts of France and England.— Imprisoned Members.— Sir John Eliot.— His death in prison.— Went worth.— Lord President of the North.— Lord Deputy of Ireland.-**His principles of government. — Prynne's Histno-Mastix. — His punishment. — Masques and Plays. — Character of the Drama.— Book of Sports.— Tlwrough, in Church and State.— Mo nopolies. — Proclamations against building in London.— Other arbitrary Proclamations* —First project of Ship-Money.— The writ of Shu>Money extended. —The Judges CONTENTS. q sanction th* writs.— John Hampden.— Solemn trial of the validity of the writ of Ship. Money.— Hampden adjudged to pay.— Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick.— The despot ism of Charles not effective of any public improvements.— His alleged patronage of the Fine Arts.— JW/«, on the portraits of Charles 346—370 CHAPTER XX.— a.d. 1633 to a.d. 1640. Scotland.-Visit of the king ih 1633.-A Service-book commanded to be used in 1637— The National Covenant.— Progress of the troubles in Scotland.— The General As- sembly.-The king and the Scots levy forces. -The king at Berwick.-Camp of the Covenanters.— An English Parliament.— Suddenly dissolved. -Convocation continues to sit.— The Scottish war resumed.— Rout of Newbum.— Council of Peers.— Cessa tion of arms.— An English Parliament summoned.— Character of the House of Com mons. — Strafford. — Laud •••..,.,.. 37I 38e CHAPTER XXL— a.d. 1640 to a.d. 1641. The Long Parliament.— Difficulty of narrating its history in a limited space.— Of what manner of men composed on its first meeting.— Opening of the Parliament.— Election of Speaker.— Petitions from the prisoners under sentence of the Star-Chamber.— Their triumphal entry into London.— Arrival of the earl of Strafford The House of Commons resolve to impeach him.— His arrest.— Arrest of archbishop Laud.— Im peached of high-treason and committed to the Tower.— Finch, the Lord-keeper, and Windebank, Secretary of State, fly the country.— The judges in the case of ship- money proceeded against. — Destruction of crosses, and' images.— Charges against Strafford.— His trial.— Arrangements of Westminster Hall. — Daily course of pro ceedings. — Bill of attainder proposed in the House of Commons. — Disclosure of Henry Vane.— Strafford's last speech in his defence.— Pym's reply.— Close of the trial. — The bill of attainder passed by both Houses. — Army plots and popular clam ours.— Protestation.— Efforts of the king to save Strafford.— He finally abandons him. — His execution ......••••. 386 — 407 CHAPTER XXII.— a.d. 1641 to a.d. 1642. Act for the non-dissolution of Parliament. — Jealousy of the Commons. — Principal legisla tive-measures. — Ship-Money; Star-Chamber ; Local arbitrary Courts; Court of High Commission ; Forests ; Writs for knighthood.— English and Scottish armies dis banded. — The king goes to Scotland. — Intrigues with Montrose. — Parliament re-as sembles. — The Irish insurrection. — The king's progress in London. — Debate on the Remonstrance. — The kingfe entertainment in the city. — Struggle of parties. — The Remonstrance presented. — The king at Whitehall. — Tumults.— Protest, and com mittal of twelve bishops.^— Articles of treason exhibited against lord Kimbolton andr five members of the Commons. — The king attempts to seize the five members. — The house adjourned 408—428 CHAPTER XXIII.— A.D. 1642. /he king demands the Members at Guildhall.— Manifestations of popular discontent. — The king removes trom Whitehall.— The Members brought back in triumph.— The queen leaves England. — Conference at Newmarket.— The king refused entrance to Hull.— Parliamentary Ordinance for the Militia.— The king forms a bodyguard at York.-t-Propositions of the Parliament.— View of society immediately before the , commencement of the Civil War. — Arming of the People. — The Cavaliers. — Influ ence and character of the Puritans.— The Clergy.— Shutting up of the Playhouses.— IO CONTENTS. Volunteers of London.— Women petitioning.— l apprentices.— Industry af fected by the preparations for civil war.— Disturbance!! in the country districts.— Maintenance of order generally.— Influence of the Press —The Poets.— The Jour- nalists. - Superstitions.-The king sets up his Standard a-.. Nottingham. - His gloomy prospects.-Messages between the king and parliaraant.-Essex marches from London. PaSe *29-«4 CHAPTER XXIV.— a.d. 1642 to a.d. 1643. Beginnings of the Civil War— The king marches to Shrewsbury.— Skirmish at Wor- cester._Battle of Edgehill.— The night and day after the battle.— Richard Baxter visits the battle-field.— The king marches upon London.— The &t;l-t at Brentford.— The royalists retire.— The Londoners march to Turnham Green.— The war spreading through England.— The queen lands with an army.— The court at Oxford.— Adminis tration of justice.— Reading surrendered to Essex 455—474 CHAPTER XXV.— a.d. 1643. " The queen joins her husband.— Various incidents of the war.— Bristol tak^i by assault. — Proposals for peace rejected by a small majority of the Commons.— Papular disturb ances in London.— The siege of Gloucester.— Defence of Gloucester.— Essex marches to its relief. — The king and his army retire . — The Parliamentary army march towards London. — The battle of Newbury.— Prowess of the Trained Bands. — Death cf lord Falkland, — The Sortes Virgilianze. — The royal success becoming more doubtful. — Negotiations for an alliance between the Scots and the Parliament.— The solemn League and Covenant. — Essex returns to London. — Growing importance of Crom well. — Skirmish of Winceby, — Death of Pym. — The Covenant severely enforced. — Ejected ministers 475 — 489 CHAPTER XXVI— a.d. 1643 to a.d. 1645. The Scots enter England- — The Irish army' defeated at Nantwich. — A Parliament sum moned to meet at Oxford. — Combined armies besiege York. — Lathom House. — Battle of Marston Moor, — The queen leaves England. — Essex defeated in the West. — Second battle of Newbury. — Difference between the Parliamentary Commanders. — Laud con demned for treason by ordinance of parliament.— Treaty of Uxbridge. — Montrose's- victories in the Western Highlands. — Self-denying Ordinance. — Fairfax lord-general of the re-modelled army. — Cromwell lieutenant-general. — The battle of Naseby. — The king's Cabinet Opened. — Surrender of Bristol by Rupert. — Basing house taken. 490—509 CHAPTER XXVII.— a.d. 1645 to A.D. 1647. Destruction of the Manor Houses.— Miseries of Sieges.— Montrose defeated at Philip- haugh.— Defeat of Digby.— His Cabinet taken — The King in Oxford.— Overtures for Pacification.— Termination of the War in the West.— Prince of Wales leaves for Stilly— The King negotiates with the Scots.— The King's Flight from Oxford.— Adventures of the King on his way to the Scottish Army.— The King with the Army before Newark.— State of Parties.— Negotiations.— The King surrendered to English Commissioners.— Capitulation of Oxford.— End of first Civil War. 510—519 CHAPTER XXVIII.— a.d. 1647. The King at Holmly House.— Army Independents.— Cromwell. — The Army proofed to be disbanded.— Petitions lrom Officers.— Adjutators, — The King removed <\J^n CONTENTS. 1 1 Holmby by Cornet Joyce. — Commissioners at Triploe Heath. — The Army advances towards London. — The King's treatment in the Army. — Proposals of the Independents to the King. — The King rejects the Proposals.— Tumults in London.— The Army ad vances.— The Speakers and Members go to the Army. — London submits. — The King at Hampton Court. — Cromwell. — The intercepted Letter of the King. — Charles makes his escape from Hampton Court Page 530 — 551 CHAPTER XXIX.— A.D. 1647 to A.D. 1648. Narratives of the king's Escape. — He goes to the Isle of Wight. — The Levellers in the Army. — Their meeting suppressed. — Berkeley's unsuccessful mission to Fairfax and Cromwell. — Scotch and English Commissioners at Carisbrook. — Parliament declares against any further treaty with the king.— Royalist Re-action. — Riots in London, — Revolts in many districts. — The king attempts to escape from Carisbrodk. — Insurrec tions quelled. — Cromwell in Wales — Scottish. Army in England. — Cromwell's march from Wales. — Battle of Preston. — Cromwell in Edinburgh. — Note on the party-spirit during the Royalist reaction. ..•..•••• 552 — 567 CHAPTER XXX.— a.d. 1648 to A.D. 1649. Treaty of Newport. — Concessions of the King. — Remonstrance of the Army. — Crom well's Letter to Hammond. — The King carried to Hurst Castle.— Members ejected from the Commons' House. — The king removed to Windsor. — Ordinance for the king's trial — The High Court of Justice appointed. — The king before the High Court. — The king sentenced to death. — The king after his condemnation.— The king's execution. . • 568 — 586 CHAPTER XXXI.— a.d. 1649 to a.d. 1650. Proclamation against a new king.— The Icon Basilike^— Council of State appointed.— Trial and Execution of Royalists.— The Levellers.— The Levellers in the Army sup pressed. — Trial of Lilburne. — Charles II. at St. Germain's. — Ireland. — Cromwell Lord Lieutenant. — Cromwell's Campaign.— Drogheda. — Wexford.— Cromwell's Ac count of the Slaughters. — Waterford. — Rupert driven from the Coast. — Surrender of Cork.— Cromwell's Policy in Ireland. — Cromwell returns to London. . 587 — 605 CHAPTER XXXII.— A.D. 1650 to A.D. 1651. Charles II. negotiates with the Scottish Parliament.— His commission to Montrose.— Montrose in Scotland. — Execution of Montrose.— Charles goes to Scotland.— War with Scotland Cromwell General.— Cromwell's Advance.— His Danger.— Position of the two Armies at Dunbar. — Battle of Dunbar.— Charles crowned at Scone.— Perth taken by Cromwell.— Charles and the Scotch Army in England.— The Battle of Worcester.— Escape and Adventures of Charles.— Charles returns to France.— Note.— Whitelocke's Description of Cromwell's Army, in a Conversation with Christina, queen of Sweden. .....•••• 606—627 Table of Contemporary Sovereigns. 6»8 POPULAR HISTOEY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER I. Elizabeth proclaimed queen. — She refuses to attend Mass on Christmas-day. — Philip pro poses marriage to Elizabeth. — The Commons request that she would marry. — Her answer. — The Coronation progress through the City. — Cecil's plans for the restora tion of Protestantism. — Opening of Parliament. — Statute for restoring the supremacy to the Crown. — Statute for the Uniformity of Common Prayer. — Deprivation of bishops- — Peace with France — Pretensions of Mary Stuart. — Elizabeth the head of the Protestant party of Europe.— Scotland. — Hostility of the queen-regent of Scot land fo the Reformers. — Their desire for an alliance with England'.- French troops sent to Scotland — England send> an army and fleet. — Siege of' Leith. — Peace corn- eluded at Edinburgh.— Assembly of the parliament of Scotland. — Acts establishing the reformed religion.— Mary refuses to ratify the treaty of Edinburgh. — Death of Francis II. — Mary determines to return to Scotland. — Elizabeth refuses her a safe conduct. — Mary embarks at Calais. —Arrival in Scotland. — Contrasts in the fortunes of Mary and Elizabeth. On the" 17th of November, 1558, the day of her half-sister's death, Elizabeth was proclaimed queen by the Lords of the Council. It is a remarkable fact connected with the popularity of this reign, that the 17th of November was called " The Queen's Day," up to very recent times. Sir John Harrington has preserved the speech which she made to the council at her accession, in which she re quires their assistance ; " that I with my ruling, and you with your service, may make a good account to Almighty God, and leave some comfort to our posterity in earth." * Her speech to Cecil, from the same authority, is more characteristic : — " I give you this charge, that you shall be of my privy council, and content yourself to take pains for me and my realm. This judgment I have of you, that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gift, and that you will be faithful to the state, and that, without respect of my private will, you will give me that counsel that you think best; and if you shall know any thing necessary to be declared to me of * " Nugae AntiqUae." vol/i- p. 56. 14 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. secrecy, you shall show it to myself only, and assure yourself I will not fail to keep taciturnity therein. And therefore, herewith I charge you." The unanimity with which the accession of Elizabeth was re ceived, even by the servants of the late queen, may be ascribed to the caution with which she concealed her intentions on the subject of religion. .' The release of ail prisoners confined for religious opinions, which took place upon her entry into London on the 24th of November, might have been considered only as a politic act of grace. Her exception of Bonner "to the cordial reception which she gave to the bishops might have passed without any marked inference. But on the Christmas-day there was an occurrence which could not be mistaken, as far as regarded the queen's personal opinions. It is thus related, in a letter of sir William Fitzwilliam : — " This night I came home late from London ; and for news you shall understand that yesterday, being Christmas-day, the queen's majesty repaired to her great closet with her nobles and ladies as hath been accustomed in such high feasts ; and she passing a bishop preparing himself to mass, all in the old form, she tar ried there until the Gospel was done ; and when all the people looked for her to have offered according to the old fashion, she with her nobles returned again from the closet and the mass unto her privy chamber, which was strange unto divers." * The refusal to hear mass was followed, two days after, by a proc lamation- forbidding the elevation of the Host, and all unlicensed preaching. It was also ordered that the Gospels and Epistles, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Lit any, should be used in English. According to the custom of sovereign princes Elizabeth des patched messengers to the various European courts announcing her accession. Amongst these the pope was included. There can be little doubt that the queen and l:er ministers desired to temporise, in some degree. The arrogant Paul IV. replied to Elizabeth's messenger, that it was great boldness in her to assume the crown without his consent, and that she must submit all her claims to his decision. Philip of Spain thought that the principles of Elizabeth were so unsettled, that she might consent to marry him, upon the condition that she should become Catholic. He proposed himself as her husband within a month after her accession. She received these proposals with great civility ; and gave, at first, no decided " Ellis, Second Series, vol. ii, p, 262. inn yuEEN PRESSED TO MARRY. 1 5 refusal. Philip hoped to obtain a fairer bride than the wife he had lost. Elizabeth was thus described in 1557 by Micheli, the Veni etian :— " The princess is as beautiful in mind as she .is in body ; though her countenance is rather pleasing from its expression, than beautiful. She is large and well-made ; her complexion clear, and of an olive tint ; her eyes are fine, and her hands, on which she prides herself, small and delicate. She has an excellent genius, with much address and self-command, as was abundantly shown in the severe trials to which she was exposed in the earlier part of her life. In her temper she is haughty and imperious, qualities inherited from her father, king Henry VIIL, who frpm'her resem blance to himself, is said to have regarded her with peculiar fond ness." Elizabeth told the ambassador of Philip that she could take no step without consulting her parliament. The two houses met on the 21st of January, six days after the queen's coronation. She had soon the opportunity of declaring her opinions on the sub ject of marriage. On the 10th of February the Commons waited upon her with an address that she would vouchsafe some match capable of supplying heirs to her royal virtues and dominions. Elizabeth's answer was as follows : * — " The queen, after a sweet graced silence, with a princely countenance and voice, and with a gesture somewhat quick but not violent, returned answer, that she gave them great thanks (as she saw great cause) for the love and care which they did express as well towards her person as the whole state of the realm ; ' and -first,' said she, ' for the manner of your petition, I like it well, and take it in good part, because it is simple, without any limitation, either of person or place. If it had been otherwise ; if you had taken upon you to confine, or rather to bind, my choice ; to draw my love to your likings ; to frame my affections according unto your fantasy ; I must have disliked it very much ; for as, generally, the will desireth not a larger liberty in any case than in this, so had it been a great presumption for you to direct, to limit, to' command me herein, to whom you are bound in duty to obey. ' Concerning the substance of ybur suit; since my years of understanding, since I was first able to take consideration of myself, I have hitherto made choice of a single life, which hath best, I assure you, contented me, and I trust, * Sir Simonds d'Eweskept a record of the parliamentary proceedings during the whole of this reign, which is accepted as authority. We pive the speech of Elizabethfrom Sir John Hayward, which contains the substance of d' Ewes's report. — " First Four Years of Queen Elizabeth." Camden Society, p. 31, l£ HISTORY OF ENGLAND. which hath been most acceptable to God ; from which, if either ambition or high estate, offered unto me by the pleasure and ap pointment of my prince, whereof I have some testimony in this place (as you our treasurer well do know) ; or, if avoiding the malice of my enemies, or the very danger of death itself, whose messenger, or rather continual watchman, the prince's indig nation, was daily before my eyes; if any of these, I say, could have dissuaded me, I had not now remained as I do. But so con stant have I always continued in this determination — albeit my words and my youth may happily seem hardly to agree— that it is most true I stand now free from any other meaning. Neverthe less, if any of you suspect that, in case it shall please God here after to change my purpose, I will determine something to the pre judice of the realm, put the jealousy out of your heads, for I assure you — what credit my assurance have with you, I cannot tell, but what it doth determine to have, the sequel shall declare — I will never conclude anything in that matter which shall be hurtful to the realm, for the preservation and prosperity whereof as a loving mother I will never spare to spend my life. And upon whomsoever my choice shall fall, he shall be as careful for your preservation, — I will not say as myself, for I cannot for another as for myself, — but my will and best endeavour shall not fail that he shall be as careful for you as myself. And albeit it shall please God that I still persevere in a virgin's state, yet you must not fear but he will so work, both in my heart and in your wisdom, that provision shall be made, in convenient time, whereby the realm shall not remain destitute of an heir who may be a fit governor, and, peradventure, more beneficial than such, offspring as I should bring forth, for although I be careful of your well-doings, and ever purpose so to be, yet may my issue degenerate, and grow out of kind. The dan gers which you fear are neither so certain, nor of such nature, but you may repose yourselves upon the providence of God, and the good provisions of the state. Wits curious in casting things to come are often Iwirtful, for that the affairs of this world are subject to so many accidents, that seldom doth that happen which the wisdom of men doth seem to foresee. As for me, it shall be sufficient that a marble shall declare, that a queen, having lived and reigned so many years, died a virgin. And here I end, and take your coming in very good part, and again give hearty thanks to you all ; yet more for your zeal, and good meaning, than for the matter of your suit." The progress of the queen from the Tower to Westminster, on THE CORONATION PROGRESS. 17 the 14th of January, previous to her coronation on the 15th, is de scribed by Holinshed with an extraordinary fulness. The pa geants were of the most gorgeous description ; but the chronicler dwells with an evident satisfaction upon the minutest circum stances that illustrate the demeanour of Elizabeth. It is clear that she felt that her strong hold upon power was to be found in the affections of the people. She was the first sovereign of England that built up the security of dominion upon so broad a foundation. She had enough of the "haughty and imperious qualities inherited from her father ; " but from the very first she had the wisdom to see that the days had gone by when a king could repose safely upon the fear of the nobles or the amity of the churchmen. She desired to be loved and obeyed by a People, and not by a class. She and her wise advisers had taken their resolution to abide by Pro estantism, with a conviction that the English were a people un suited for burnings and inquisitions. The determination was not to be carried out without danger and difficulty ; but the affections of the People would make that easy which would have been im possible to a selfish despotism. Let us see how Elizabeth culti vated those affections in the simplest courtesies of a city pageant : •r— " When the people made the air ring with praying to God for her prosperity, she thanked them with exceeding liveliness both of countenance and voice, and wished neither prosperity nor safety to herself which might not be for their common good. As she passed by the Companies of the city, standing in their homes, she took particular knowledge of them, and graced them with many witty formalities of speech. She diligently both observed and commended such devices as were presented to her, and to that end sometimes caused her coach to stand still, sometimes to be re moved to places of best advantage for hearing and for sight ; .and in the meantime fairly entreated the people to be silent. And when she understood not the meaning of any representation, or could not perfectly hear some speeches that were made, she caused the same to be declared unto her. When the recorder of the city pre sented to her a purse of crimson satin, very richly and curiously wrought, and therein a thousand marks in gold, with request that she would continue a gracious mistress to the city ; she answered, That she was bound in a natural obligation so to do, not so much for their gold, as for their good wills : that as they had been at great expense of treasure that day, to honour her passage, so all the days of her life she would be ready to expend not only her Vol. III.— 2 l8 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. treasure, but the dearest drops of her blood, to maintain and in crease their flourishing state. When she espied a Pageant at the Little Conduit in Cheape, she demanded (as it was her custom in the rest) what should be represented therein : answer was made, that Time did there attend for her : 'Time ? (said she) how is that possible, seeing it is time that hath brought me hither ? ' Here a bible in English richly covered was let down unto her by a silk lace from a child that represented Truth. She kissed both her hands, with both her hands she received it, then she kissed it ; afterwards applied it to her breast ; and lastly held it up, thanking the city especially for that gift, and promisingtobeadiligent reader thereof. When any good wishes were cast forth for her virtuous and religious government, she would lift up her hands towards Heaven, and desire the people to answer, Amen. When it was told her that an ancient citizen turned his head back and wept: ' I warrant you,' said she, 'it is for joy ; ' and so in very deed it was. She cheerfully received not only rich gifts from persons of worth, but nosegays, flowers, rosemary-branches, and such like presents, offered unto her from very mean persons, insomuch as it may truly be said, that there was neither courtesy nor cost cast away that day upon her. It is incredible how often she caused her coach to stay, when any made offer to approach unto her, whether to make petition, or whether to manifest their loving affection." * The parliament which met on the 21st of January, 1559, nad a task before it which required the greatest discretion. A great ec clesiastical revolution was to be accomplished, with as little vio lence as possible, and with some show of conciliation. Cecil was the chief adviser of Elizabeth. He was the first person sworn of her privy council ; and to his sagacity must be attributed the com prehensive view which was taken of the whole domestic and foreign policy of the country. During the reign of Mary, the retired sec retary of Edward VI., who had been so sound a Protestant, was one of those who outwardly conformed to the Roman Catholic re ligion, though unlike Paget, Petre, and others of Edward's coun sellors, he held no office. But he was on terms of friendship with Cardinal Pole; and he lived in affluence and security. The state ments of some over-zealous writers that, under Mary, he was a conscientious adherent to protestant opinions, are disproved by documents which show that he attended mass, and confessed to *" This description by Sir John Hayward is a condensation of the more interesting (X>ints of Holinshed's account- DEVICE FOR THE ALTERATION OF RELIGION. 19 the priest, in the parish in which he held church-lands. He was more happily employed than in the disgusting service of persecu tion in which Mary's ministers were engaged. He was superin tending his mother's property at Burleigh ; making additions to the old family house there ; holding correspondence about pur chasing ewes, and setting kernels of apples, and pears, and chest nuts. It is interesting information to him that his fawns do well in the closes where the maidens go to milk, and that his calves are to be put in the horse-pasture when the snows shall be gone.* These unambitious occupations were Cecil's safety ; and in his years of comparative freedom from business of state, he was en abled to devise a broad plan of action if the sceptre should again pass into the hands of a protestant ruler. He was held by the Romanists, as we have seen, to have " the character of a prudent and virtuous man, although a heretic." When the time for action arrived, Elizabeth had the benefit cf those earnest yet temperate convictions which he had formed during his retirement. He had studied the temper of the people of England. He knew the char acter of the princess, who^ in all probability, would quickly succeed to the throne. When Cecil was called to the councils of Elizabeth he was prepared with the whole scheme for the restoration of Protestantism. He saw all the dangers of the course that was to be pursued ; but he did not counsel evasion of its difficulties ; or any delay beyond the time for the meeting of parliament. His " Device for the alteration of religion " is an interesting document, which has been thus abridged by Camden : f " It seemed necessary for the queen to do nothing before a parliament was called ; for only from that assembly could the af fections of the people be certainly gathered. The next thing she had to do was to -balance the dangers that threatened her both from abroad and at home. The Pope would certainly excommu nicate and depose her, and stir up all Christian princes against her. The king of France would lay hold of any opportunity to em broil the nation ; and by the assistance of Scotland, and of the Irish, might perhaps raise troubles in her dominions. Those that were in power in queen Mary's time, and remained firm to the old superstition, would be discontented at the Reformation of religion ; the bishops and clergy would generally oppose it ; and since there was a necessity of demanding subsidies, they would take occasion, by the discontent the people would be in on that account, to in- » Letter in Tytler, vol. ii. p. 489 t As translated by Bumet. 2o HISTORY OF ENGLAND. flame them ; and those who would be dissatisfied at the retaining . of some of the old ceremonies, would on the other hand disparage the changes that should be made, and call the religion a cloaked papistry, and so alienate many of the most zealous from it To remedy all these things, it was proposed to make peace with France, and to cherish those in that kingdom that desired the Re formation. The courses and practices of Rome were not much to be feared. In Scotland those must be encouraged who desired the like change in religion ; and a little money among the heads of the families in Ireland would go a great way. And for those who had borne rule in Queen Mary's time, ways were to be taken to lessen their credit throughout England ; they were not to be too soon trusted or employed, upon pretence of turning ; but those who were known to be well affected to religion, and the queen's person, were to be sought after and encouraged. The bishops were generally hated by the nation : it would be easy to drawr them within the statute of Praemunire, and upon their falling into it, they must be kept under it, till they had renounced the pope, and consented to the alterations that should be made. The commis sions of the peace, and for the militia, were to be carefully re viewed, and such men were to be put in them as would be firm to the queen's interests. When the changes should be made, some severe punishments would make the rest more readily submit. Great care was to be had of the universities, and other public schools, as Eton and Winchester, that the next generation might be betimes seasoned with the love and knowledge of religion. Some learned men, as Bill, Parker, May, Cox, Whitehead, Grin- dall, Pilkington, and sir Thomas Smith, were to be ordered to meet and consider of the Book of Service. In the meanwhile the people were to be restrained from innovating-without authority ; and the queen, to give some hope of a Reformation, might appoint the Communion to be given in both kinds." Sir Nicholas Bacon, the brother-in-law of Cecil — a lawyer who had filled no important office, and had attained no great distinction — was appointed lord keeper. He opened the session of parliament with a speech of which the moderation was the most remarkable feature. He exhorted the members to "fly from all manner of contentions, reasonings, and disputations, and all sophistical, -cap tious, and frivolous arguments and quiddities, meeter for ostenta tion of wit than consultation of weighty matters." He trusted that " contumelious and opprobrious words, such as heretic, schis- STATUTES FOR RELIGION. 21 fnatic, papist," would be banished out of men's mouths. He im* plored them toi use great and wary consideration that nothing be advised or done, which might "breed or nourish any kind of idolatry or superstition ; " but, on the other hand, to take heed lest, by "licentious or loose handling,- any manner of occasion be given, whereby any contempt or irreverent behaviour towards God and godly things, or any spice of irreligion might creep in, or be con ceived." * It was certainly in a spirit of moderation that the par liament, though decidedly Protestant, proceeded to establish the great religious change by statute law. The first Statute is called " an Act restoring to the Crown the ancient jurisdiction over the state ecclesiastical and spiritual, and abolishing all foreign power repugnant to the same." The Lords and Commons say that by the repeal by Philip and Mary of the statutes of Henry VIIL, the queen's subjects " were eftsoons brought under an assumed foreign power and authority, and yet do remain in that bondage." Two temporal lords, the archbishop of York, eight bishops, and the abbot of Westminster, opposed this bill. Lord Montacute, who, with the bishop of Ely, had negotiated with the pope that England might be restored to the unity of the church of Rome, contended that " the hazard would be as great as the scandal, should the pope thunder out his excommunication ; and expose the nation, by that means, to the resentment of its neighbouring enemies." f The government of Elizabeth was not to be frightened by the thunders of the Vatican. It went steadily forward in carrying the measures necessary for bringing back the kingdom to its ecclesias tical condition at the end of the reign of Edward VI. In the act against foreign jurisdiction the statute for receiving the Sacrament of the Altar in both kinds was restored ; and the statute of Philip and Mary for reviving the old laws for the punishment of heresies was repealed. All archbishops, bishops, judges, and all ministers and officers spiritual and temporal, were to make a declaration upon oath, " that the queen's highness is the only supreme gover nor of this realm, and of all other her highness's dominions and countries, as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes, as temporal." The title " supreme governor " was adopted in pref erence to that of "head of the church." The penalties under this act, against persons maintaining the authority of any foreign prince or prelate were, — fine and imprisonment for a first offence ; * As reported by D'Ewes. " Parliamentary History," vol. i. p- 638. t Ibid., p. 659. 22 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the incurring a praemunire for the second ; and death for a third, as in cases of high treason. The sagacious statesman, Walsingham, pointed out the lenity of this law, as compared with the statutes of Henry VIIL, "whereby the oath of supremacy might have been offered at the king's pleasure to any subject, so he kept his con science never so modestly to himself, and the refusal to take the same oath, without further circumstances, was made treason. But contrariwise, her majesty not liking to make windows into men's hearts and secret thoughts, except the abundance of them did over flow into overt and express acts, or affirmations, tempered her law so as it restraineth every manifest disobedience, impugning and im peaching, advisedly and maliciously, her majesty's supreme power, maintaining and extolling a foreign jurisdiction." * In contrast to this, we must not forget that some of the laws against Roman Catholics, in a later period of this reign, were conceived in a far less moderate spirit. By this law of the first year of Elizabeth, it was provided that the commissioners who might be appointed by the crown to exercise spiritual and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, were not to adjudge matters to be heresy but such as had been decided to be so by the Holy Scripture, or by the first four General Coun cils. This provision is held to be " equivalent to an exemption of Roman Catholics, as such, from the imputation of heresy." t Care was also taken, under the Act which was passed " for the uniform ity of Common Prayer " to omit from the Service book of Edward VI., the offensive passage in the liturgy, praying for deliverance "from the bishop of Rome, and all his detestable enormities." Yet the change thus established was so sweeping, after six years of the Latin mass-book, that we cannot be surprised that nine prelates and nine temporal peers voted against the statute. In the Com mons there was only one dissentient. The Act must, however, have been felt as a great grievance by a large body ; for it absolute ly interdicted the celebration of the Catholic rites, even in private ; and rendered all persons who should absent themselves from church, on Sundays and holidays, liable to a fine of one shillino-. The statute was, as all enactments are which interfere with the rights of conscience, capable of being converted into an instrument of public oppression or private malice. Many Roman Catholics went into exile, to avoid imprisonment under the authority of the Court of High Commission. The moderation which was professed by the government of Elizabeth was in some degree rendered diffi. * Barnet, part ii. book 3. t Mackintosh, " History," vol. iii. p. 10. PEACE WITH FRANCE. 23 cult, if not impossible, by the uncompromising temper of the clergy in convocation. Disregarding a warning from the queen, they set forth a document asserting the supremacy of the pope, the real presence in the sacrament, and the exclusive right of the church to treat of doctrine and regulate public worship. A solemn disputa tion, the lord-keeper presiding, was held in Westminster Abbey, between catholic and protestant divines, which only produced mu tual irritation. The new statutes for taking the oath of suprem acy, and for the use of the English liturgy, came into operation on midsummer-day, 1 559. Fifteen bishops refused the oath ; and resigned their sees, or were deprived. There were ten vacant sees. Only two bishops conformed. A very small proportion of the beneficed clergy surrendered their livings. At the end of the year Matthew Parker was consecrated archbishop of Canterbury ; and he then proceeded to the consecration of four other bishops, who had been exiles in the time of Mary. There were some peculiarities in Elizabeth's religious opinions which were not wholly in accordance with the great change which her government had carried through with so little opposition. She had a dislike to the marriages of the clergy ; and she had a linger ing fondness for some of the gorgeous ceremonies of Catholicism. But to the general principles of Protestantism she was fully com mitted, not only by inclination, but by the force of political circum stances. A peace with France was concluded in April, 1559, in which the restoration of Calais was postponed for eight years, under a condition that if either party acted in contravention of the treaty, all claim to the disputed territory should be forfeited. At the con gress during the last days of queen Mary, the English envoys said, that if they returned without the recovery of Calais they would be stoned to death by the people. The condition in the treaty of April was evidently introduced only to conciliate this popular feeling, by . the delusion that the old conquest had not been irrevocably lost. Scotland was included in this peace. Philip IL, of Spain, and Henry II., of P" ranee, were now free to pursue their plans for the extermination of heretics ; and their friendship was completed by the marriage of Philip with Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry. The duke of Alva officiated as his sovereign's proxy. In the tourna ments which followed this wedding, the French king was accident ally killed by the lance of Montgomery, a young Scottish noble. He was succeeded by his eldest son, who became Francis II. Mary Stuart was now queei of France. She was- the next heiress. *4 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. to the throne of England. According to the Catholic notions of that time that the pope had the disposal of earthly crowns, a pre tence was set up that Elizabeth's claim having been rejected by the pope, the queen of France and Scotland was now also the law ful queen of England. Amongst Cecil's papers there are " notes cf quoen Elizabeth's reign," in which are the following entries, under the year 1559 : Jan. 16. "The dauphin of France, and his wife, queen of Scots, did by the style of king and queen of Scotland, England, and Ireland, grant to the Lord Fleming certain things." June 28. " The justs at Paris, wherein the king dauphin's two heralds were appareled with the arms of England and Scotland." July 16. " Ushers, going before the Queen of Scots, being now the French queen, to the chapel, cry, '¦Place pour la Reine d'Angleferre? " At the marriage of the French king's daughter there were shown escutcheons of the arms of Scotland and England, as " the arms of Mary, queen dolphin of France," recording, moreover, that she was of Scotland queen, of England, and of Ireland. The constable Montmorency interfered to stay these dangerous exhibitions. But these pretensions were stimulated by Mary's ambitious relatives of the house of Guise ; and they became the foundation of that hos tility which was the cause of so much disquiet to Elizabeth, and of such dire calamity to Mary. Scotland became a theatre for the contests between a French party, representing Roman Catholic in terests, and the national party of Reformers, with whom Elizabeth allied herself. When the connection of Mary with France was ter minated by the death of her boyish husband, she came to a govern ment in which her own opinions were opposed to those of the pre dominant religious power, and she became an alien amidst a majority of her subjects. The character and position of Elizabeth very soon placed her at the head of the Protestant party of Europe ; and her whole reign must be viewed with reference to this leadership. It was a struggle which called forth all the decision of her own nature, all the pru dence of her counsellors, and all the energies of her people. This was a great period, in which the English mind asserted itself with a vigour and independence which heralded every future triumph of the national intellect and the national courage. There was a battle for life and death going on in Europe, and England was joined in the battle with the weaker numerical party. The serious differ- PROTESTANTISM IN EUROPE. 25 ences between the various Protestant persuasions ; — -the hostilities between the puritan party at home and the church,' which had re tained many of the ceremonials of the ancient faith ; — these dissen sions did not disqualify Elizabeth from being the acknowledged head of the reformed religion. The great leader of the Roman CathoUc party was PhilipTI. England had as her companions in the struggle the Scandinavian countries, and those who spoke the German language on the eastern shores of the Baltic. A large part of Germany was Protestant. "A Venetian ambassador reckons that only a tenth part of the inhabitants of Germany had remained faithful to the old religion."* In France Protestantism had taken root ; but its growth was to be stopped by barbarities which were in contemplation when Elizabeth came to the throne. In the Netherlands Charles V. and his son were pursuing the work of ex termination. Spain was in the grasp of the Inquisition ; one of the powers which had been organized to support the Church of Rome in the contest which had assumed such formidable dimensions. Another engine devised for the security of Catholicism was the Order of the Jesuits. With the Inquisition and the Jesuits, the Papal power had a devoted army at its command, every member of which was prepared to extinguish heresy by force or by cunning. When these spiritual arms were wielded under the temporal power of a determined bigot such as Philip 1 1., such scenes of horror were exhibited as still curdle the blood when they are related. Such sceneswould probably have been exhibited in England had the throne not been left vacant for the accession of Elizabeth. Had Philip ruled here, the spirit of her people might have been crushed, as Spain was crushed two centuries ago, when " the hand of the Inquisition drew the line which said, No Further." f The time was coming when the English government, not only for its own safety, but for the assertion of a high principle, would have to mix itself up with the affairs of Scotland in a way which involved much dissembling policy and many acts which the spirit of better times must regard as oppressive ; but which could scarcely be avoided in the position of self-defence which England was com pelled to take against the force and intrigue which would have subjected that portion of the island to a foreign Catholic domina tion. The time was close at hand when England would have to fight the Protestant battle, by giving aid to the reformed faith in France and the Netherlands. The government of Elizabeth had * Ranke, vol. ii. p. 12. t Prescott, Philip II. 26 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. taken its side, and wisely, because the cause of Protestantism was the cause of progress. The bold, masculine signature of Elizabeth to the State Papers in which she proclaimed her consistent adherence to the opinions upon which political and religious liberty were eventually to be built — a liberty much more enlarged than she and her advisers could contemplate — was the terror of superstition and tyranny ; and when we look upon that signature let us never forget, amongst her many faults, what we owe to that great woman. From the time when the ecclesiastical policy of the govern ment of Elizabeth was fully manifest, the affairs of Scotland be came all-important to England. In the relations, either by Scottish or English historians, of the complicated transactions between the two countries for more than forty years, it has been too generally assumed that the intrigues of England were constantly fomenting the divisions of Scotland ; and, to use the words of one of the most sen sible of antiquaries, " Elizabeth has been set forth in this respect as the very demon of discord, ever occupied in blowing coals of strife." * This writer adds, " Upon this point we desire to see an entire revision of the historical evidence." At the beginning of Eliza beth's reign the connexion of the house of Guise with the Queen of Scotland — a house determined to oppose Protestantism by the most violent proceedings — -made the watchfulness and even hostile intervention of England a measure of self-defence. Cecil broadly laid down this principle : " It is agreeable to God's law for every prince and public state to defend itself, not only from present peril, but from perils that may be feared to come. It is manifest that France cannot any way so readily, so puissantly offend, yea, invade and put the crown of England in danger, as if they recover an absolute authority over Scotland. The long, deep-rooted hatred of the house of Guise, which now occupieth the king's authority, against England, is well known." f Although the foolish demon strations of a claim to the throne of England on the part of the queen of Scotland had been disavowed by the French minister, that claim was not allowed to sleep by the bigoted uncles of Mary. In 1559 a great seal was sent to Scotland, on which were engraved the arms of France, Scotland, and England. Elizabeth had to choose between two policies ; either to unite in friendship with the cousin who indirectly claimed not only succession but a a prior title to the English crown — a queen whose steadfast opposi- • Mr. Bruce. Introduction to Letters of Elizabeth and James VI., p. xx. t Forbes' State Papers. THE QUEEN REGENT'S HOSTILITY TO THE REFORMERS. 27 tion to the reformed religion Was at variance with the opinions of her own subjects ;— or to manifest a sympathy with the Protestant leaders in Scotland, who were bent upon resisting the attempts of the French to rule over them. One of the reformed leaders, Mait- land of Lethington, wrote to Cecil, " When we see them, the French, attempt conquest, and you, the English, show us friendship, shall we not hate them and favour you, especially now that we are come to a conformity of doctrine ? " The differences between the regent, the mother of Mary, and the Scottish reformers, were coming to a head. By the assistance of the reformers she had attained her own position as the actual ruler of the country ; and the dauphin of France, the husband of her daughter, had been recognised as king of Scotland. But after the peace of 1559 she was won over to the designs of the house of Guise forthe re-establishment of the Roman Catholic religion in Europe, and, as a necessary consequence, for putting down the Reformation in Scotland, and eventually for re moving Elizabeth from the throne of England. The queen-regent of Scotland boldly issued a proclamation for conformity of religion ; in which all persons were commanded to resort daily to mass and confession. She was reminded of her promises of toleration, by some of the Lords of the Congregation — the leaders of the re formers being so styled — to whom she replied- that " promises ought not to be urged upon princes, unless they can conveniently fulfil them." At this junction John Knox arrived in Scotland. During an absence of two years the doctrines which he had boldly preached in the face of danger had made extraordinary progress ; although in many places the ascendency was still with the Romish party. Within a week of his arrival, under the excitement pro duced by his vehement oratory operating upon the indignation caused by the regent's hostility, there was an outburst of popular fury at Perth, when the religious houses of the Grey Friars and Carthusians were devastated and plundered. The struggle ap peared likely to end in bloodshed ; for an army was assembled on either side. But a treaty was concluded, which Knox denounced as only intended to deceive. Tranquillity was not long preserved. After various acts of violence, the reformers having obtained pos session of Perth, the army of the Congregation entered Edinburgh on the 29th of June. Knox had at this time prepared a letter to Cecil, in which, addressing the queen, he says, " My eyes have long looked to a perpetual concord betwixt these two realms, the occasion whereof is most present, if you shall move your hearts 23 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. unfeignedly to seek the same. For humility of Christ Jesus cru- cified, now begun here to be practised, may join together the hearts of those whom Satan, by pride, has long dissevered. For the furtherance hereof I would have licence to repair towards you. God move your heart rightly to consider the estate of both the realms, which stand in greater danger than many do espy. The common bruit, I doubt not, carrieth unto you the troubles that be lately here risen for the controversy in religion. The truth is, that many of the nobility, the most part of barons and gentlemen, with many towns and one city, have put to their hands to remove idolatry and the monuments of the same. The Reformation is somewhat violent, because the adversaries be stubbofn. None that pos- sesseth Christ Jesus with us usurpeth anything against the authori ties, neither yet intendeth to usurp, unless strangers be brought in to subdue and bring in bondage the liberties of this poor country; if any such thing be espied, I am uncertain what shall follow." * The great object of the leaders of the Scottish Reformation was to make a firm alliance with England. They gave repeated as surance to the ministers of Elizabeth that their design did not con template sedition or rebellion against any lawful authority. The queen-regent was diligent in spreading the contrary opinion, that their object was to overturn the existing government. Elizabeth was too cautious to give any direct encouragement to subjects to resist their rulers : and she required assurances upon this point, reserving, however, the right of resistance in a case of extreme necessity. Cecil gave them vague promises of support, if such a necessity should arise. A convention was concluded between the regent and the Lords of the Congregation ; but neither party trusted to any enduring tranquillity. The regent was looking for support from France ; the reformers to England for the aid of men and money. At last Elizabeth rendered some secret assistance ; and the Guises, who were now the real rulers of France, sent a force of a thousand Frenchmen to Scotland, who disembarked at Leith. The regent then entrenched and fortified that port, against which proceeding the leaders of the Congregation prematurely remon strated. At length they made a decided demonstration of war. On the 1 5th of October they marched into Edinburgh with a force of twelve thousand men ; and the regent retired to her stronghold of Leith. The Congregation formed two councils, one for civil affairs, another for religion ; and they addressed a letter to the regent, re- • Letter in State Paper Office, given in Tytler's " History of Scotland," vol. vi. p. 131. SIEGE OF LEITH. 2$ quiring her instantly to command all foreigners and men-at-arms to depart from Leith. She replied, that Frenchmen were naturalised subjects, and commanded the duke of Chastelherault,* who had joined the reformers, and his company, to depart from Edinburgh. They decided that the queen-regent should be deposed from her authority. The army of the Congregation, ill-disciplined, and com posed of vassals who would not remain long in the field, was de feated in an assault upon Leith ; and the capital was again occupied by the royal forces. The castle of Edinburgh was, nevertheless, held by the reformers, the governor refusing to surrender it unless under the authority of the parliament, who had committed it to his charge. Elizabeth at last consented to render real and open as sistance to the reformers, who entreated her prompt aid upon the sole ground that it was the intention of France to make a conquest of Scotland, and then to dispossess the queen' of England of her throne. In January 1560 a treaty was concluded at Berwick, in which the duke of Norfolk agreed with the commissioners of the Congregation, that Elizabeth should send assistance, and that she would support the confederated lords, whilst they recognised Mary as their queen, and maintained the rights of the crown. They stipulated that they would not sanction any other union of* Scotland with France than then existed, and, if England should be attacked by France, would furnish an auxiliary force of four thousand men. On the 2nd of April, 1 560, lord Grey entered Scotland with an army of two thousand horse and six thousand foot, and was joined at Preston by the army of the Congregation, to the number of eight thousand. The English Council very wisely did not encum ber the commander of their army with more than a soldier's work. They sent sir Ralph Sadler to negotiate, and wrote to lord Grey, - " Stick not to go through with this enterprise, and your praise will be more than all the rest of your life, if all your life were laid to gether. Take heed of French enchantments. They will win time of you, if ye take not good heed. Well ; thus we leave your lord ship to your business." The Scottish and English army marched on to Leith. The English fleet, under the command of William Winter, had entered the Frith of Forth at the end of January. When Cecil had de spatched the squadron, he wrote to Sadler, " our ships be on the seas, God speed them." In the northern parts of Scotland the French had> succeeded in forming a league, by which the clans and . f The K reuch title of the earl of Arran, who had been, regent at a Jformer period. 30 . HISTORY OF ENGLAND. men of the isles had engaged to uphold the Romish faith and the French authority. The siege of Leith commenced. At this crisis the queen-regent became dangerously ill ; and at an interview which she requested with the leaders of the Congregation, at Edin burgh, she endeavoured to reconcile the differences which had led to such extremities ; and exhorted them to send both the French and English troops out of the kingdom. She died on the loth of June. Leith was defended by the French troops with great " bravery; and the siege went slowly on. The town was at last surrendered, after the conclusion of a treaty of pacification. Hay ward has well described the extremities of hunger to which the garrison had been reduced : — " All this time the English army was well furnished with victuals from all parts of Scotland, and that upon very easy prices. But the French were so straitly girt up with in Leith, that no supplies were brought unto them. Hereupon they grew very short in strength of men; and no less in provision of food for those men which they had ; the one happening to them by the force of their enemies, the other either by disability or negli gence of their friends ; so, their old store being spent, they were enforced to make use of everything out of which hunger was able to draw nourishment. The flesh of horses was then more dainty than ever they esteemed venison before ; dogs, cats, and vermin of more vile nature were highly valued ; vines were stripped of their leaves and tender stalks ; grass and weeds were picked up, and being well seasoned with hunger, were reputed among them for dainties and delicate dishes." Upon its surrender' the French governor, D'Oysell, entertained the captains of the besiegers with in the fortress ; " where," says Stow, " was prepared for them a banquet of thirty or forty dishes, and yet not one either of flesh or fish, saying one of a powdered [salted] horse, as was avouched by one that avowed himself to have tasted thereof." The peace which put an end to this brief period of English war fare in Scotland, was concluded at Edinburgh on the 6th of July. The negotiations on the part of England had been managed with remarkable skill by Cecil. He succeeded in obtaining from the French commissioners a renunciation of the pretensions to the crown of England, which had been assumed by the king and queen of France ; and he obtained a complete recognition of the liberty of conscience for which the reformers had taken up arms. This was most difficult of accomplishment ; for they were regarded as rebels to their sovereign. But Cecil insisted that the treaty of PEACE CONCLUDED AT EDINBURGH. 3X Berwick between his mistress and the Lords of the Congregation should be recognised and confirmed. The able minister accom plished this by a flattering '' preface " to the article which secured this acknowledgment ; " and we," he writes, " content with the kernel, yielded to them the shell to play withal." The Congrega tion were to be secured by an act of oblivion ; a general peace and reconciliation were to take place amongst the nobility and sub jects of the land, including the reformers and the adherents to the ancient faith ; a Council was to govern the kingdom in the absence of the queen, of whom she was to appoint seven, and the estates five ; all foreign troops were to quit the country ; and a parliament was to be held in August. In this treaty no express recognition of the reformed worship was introduced ; and the bishops and other churchmen who had received injuries, were to be redressed. But the reformers were filled with gratitude to Elizabeth, although she had preserved a strict neutrality upon the great question of reli gion. Their queen was to send over a commission for assembling a parliament ; and they left the future to the well-known disposition of the great body of the people to favour the Reformation. The treaty of Edinburgh was so unpalatable to the house of Guise, that for nearly a year the queen of Scotland refused to ratify it. The estates of the kingdom, however, assembled, at the time stipulated by the treaty, without receiving any commission from their queen. It was held that the express words of the treaty pro vided that such a meeting of the estates should be lawful without being so convoked. There was no doubt what course affairs would take ; for the question of the legality of the parliament was carried by an overwhelming, majority. The first proceeding of the estates was to draw up a Confession of Faith, founded on the re formed doctrines as received by Calvin. The opposition of the bishops and other Romanists was useless. This remarkable sum mary of doctrine must have been the result of the most careful consideration. The solemn earnestness of its tone was character istic of the Scottish people and their spiritual leaders in the Re formation. It concludes with this prayer : " Arise, O Lord, and let thy enemeis be confoundit ; let theme flee fra thy presence that hait thy godly name : Give thy servandis strenth to speik thy worde in baldness, and lat all natiounis cleif to thy trew knawledge. Amen." * The Confession of Faith was followed up by three Acts, which established the reformed religion upon legislative sanction * " Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, a.d. 1560. 32 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. much more rapidly and sweepingly than had been accomplished i» England ; and with a more signal display of intolerance. The first abolished the power and jurisdiction of the pope in Scotland; the second repealed all statutes in favour of the Romish church ; and the third provided that all who should say mass, or hear mass, should incur confiscation of goods for the first offence, banishment for the second, and death for the third. During the sitting of this parliament Knox was preaching in Edinburgh with his accustomed vehemence ; and he scrupled not to call upon the Protestant leaders to restore the patrimony of the church, which they had appropri ated, that it might be applied for the support of ministers, the en couragement of learning, and the assistance of the poor. The proceedings in the parliament of Scotland necessarily gave offence to queen Mary ; and she again refused to ratify the treaty of Edin burgh. When urged to do so by Throckmorton, the English am bassador, she thus addressed him : — " Such answer as the king, my lord and husband, and his council hath made you in that matter, might suffice ; but, because you shall know I have reason to do as I do, I will tell you what moveth me to refuse to ratify the treaty ; my subjects in Scotland do their duty in nothing, nor have they performed one point that belongeth unto them. I am their queen, and so they call me, but they use me not so. They have done what pleaseth them, and though I have not many faithful subjects there, yet those few that be there on my party, were not present when these matters were done, nor at this assembly. I will have them assemble by my authority, and proceed in their doings, after the laws of the realm, which they so much boast of, and keep none of them. They have sent hither a poor gendeman to me, whom I disdain to have come, in the name of them all, to the king and me, in such a legation. They have sent great personages to your mis tress. I am their sovereign, but they take me not so. They must be taught to know their duty." * On the 6th of December, 1560, Francis II., the young king of France, died, after a reign of seventeen months. His death pre vented the execution of a project for rooting the reformed doc trines out of France, by holding an assembly of the States-Gen eral, at which all should sign a confession of the catholic faith, which should then be tendered for signature to every person in the kingdom, the refusal to be punished by banishment or death. * Letter of Throckmorton to Elizabeth, in State Paper Office. Tytler's " Scotland," Toi. vi. p. 225. DEATH OF FRANCIS II. ^3 Mary appears very soon to have determined upon a return to Scot land ; hoping, by previous negotiation, to have won over her sub jects to a willing obedience. She was admirably fitted by her beauty, her winning manners, and her acute intellect, to obtain the homage of all hearts, could she have resolved to separate herself from the policy of her family, even if she did not choose to conform to the religion which had been so solemnly proclaimed by a vast majority of the Scottish people assembled in parliament. It was determined in Scotland to send as an ambassador to Mary, the lord James Murray, the illegitimate son of James V. He was the chief leader of the Congregation, and was intrusted with full powers to request Mary to return home, if unaccompanied by a foreign force, in which case she might repose with confidence upon the loyalty-of her subjects. Murray wisely and bravely stipulated, in opposition to the remonstrances of the reformed ministers, that his sister should be left free to the private exercise of her own religion. After the death of Francis, Elizabeth also sent an ambassador to condole with her ; to assure her of the desire of England to remain at peace ; but to demand her confirmation of the treaty concluded by her commissioners at Edinburgh. Again Mary refused to ratify this treaty till she had returned to her own kingdom, and submitted the matter to her parliament. In her conferences with Murray, in whom she seems to have firmly trusted, although he was in intimate correspondence with the English government, Mary " did hot scruple to admit that the amity between England and Scotland was little agreeable to her, and that, considering the terms of the league lately made betwixt the two realms, she was anxious to have it dissolved."* " Murray," continues the historian, "having secret ly met the English ambassador, insidiously betrayed to him every thing that had passed between Mary and himself." Thockmorton, in conveying the particulars to Elizabeth, wrote, under date of 29th April, 1561, "At this present, thanks be to God, your majesty hath peace with all the world ; and 1 see no occasion to move unto your majesty or your realm any war from any place or person, but by the queen of Scotland and her means." Those who write of the Secret transactions of this period, as imperfectly laid open by official letters, have the craft of Elizabeth, the confiding sincerity of Mary, and the treachery of Murray and his associates always ready for argu ment or illustration. It would be well to consider what the rupture of the amity between England and Scotland, so desired by Mary, * Tytler. " Scotland," vol. vi. p. 255. VOL. III.— 3 34 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. really meant It meant a civil war in Scotland, which the alliance with England kept down. It meant the establishment of the French interest in Scotland, under the policy of the Guises, which has been described : " To put down the Huguenots in France, to encour age thus the Romanists in England and Scotland, to sow dissensions amongst the Protestant princes of Germany, to support the Council of Trent now sitting, and, in a word, to concentrate the whole strength of France, Spain, Italy, and the Empire against that great moral and religious revolution, by which light and truth were struggling to break in upon a system of long-established error, was the main object to which they directed their efforts." * That Mary Stuart was fully imbued with the desire to support this main object, and that Elizabeth Tudor was equally resolved to oppose it, may more satisfactorily account for the early hostility between these queens than the received theory that the government of England was " constant in nothing, save in a desire to profit by the strifes and embarrassments of the Scottish people." The able writer who has so justly denounced this prevailing fallacy, says, with a distinct knowledge of the historical evidence, that " there were two princi ples which consistently regulated the English policy in Scotland during the time of Elizabeth. The one was, a determination that no continental power should interfere by force of arms in Scottish affairs ; the other, a similar determination to uphold Protestantism and the Protestant party in opposition to that party which befriended Mary." f When the queen of Scotland desired to return to her native country, she was assuring the English ambassador, that she was most anxious for the friendship of Elizabeth ; I, for my part, am very desirous to have the perfect and the assured amity of the queen, my good sister ; and I will use all the means I can to give her occasion to think that I mean it indeed." She was telling Murray, in confidence, that she desired to have the amity dissolved. Elizabeth, with a perfect knowledge of her real wishes, received the ambassador, d'Oysell, whom Mary had sent to solicit a safe conduct from the queen, either on her voyage to Scotland, or should she land in the English dominions. He was also to ask for a pass port for himself to pursue his journey to Scotland. Elizabeth, with undisguised anger, refused both requests. " Let your queen," she said, "ratify the treaty, and she shall experience on my part, either by sea or land, whatever can be expected from a queen, * Tytlcr, vol. vi. p. 231. t Mr. Brace's Introduction to " Letters of Elizabeth and James VI." p. xx. MARY DESIRES TO RETURN TO SCOTLAND. 35 a relation, or a neighbour." It was the point of the renunciation of the present claim to the crown of England that made Elizabeth so resolved. Sir James Mackintosh has pointed out that Dr. Robertson " confounded the right of succession with the claim to possession ; " aad that " the claim to possession, asserted by the arms, supposed Elizabeth to be an usurper ; the right of succession recognised her as a lawful sovereign." * This most unwise preten sion of Mary, thus re-asserted by her refusal to ratify the treaty, was a real declaration of hostility, affecting the quiet of the English nation. The refusal of a safe-conduct had undoubtedly the- ap proval of Elizabeth's ministers, who could not forbear to look with apprehension upon the return to Scotland of one so opposed to their general policy. Their conduct might be ungenerous, but it was not inconsistent. Cecil thus notices the resolve in a letter to the earl of Sussex : — " Many reasons moved us to mislike her passage, but this only served us for answer — that where she had promised to send the queen's majesty a good answer for the ratifica tion of the last league of peace made in Edinburgh, and now had sent none, her majesty would not disguise with her, but plainly would forbear to show her such pleasure until she should ratify it ; and that done, she should not only have free passage, but all helps and gratuities." f ' The indignation of Mary at this refusal was such as might have been expected from so high-spirited a woman. Throckmorton has related his interview with her on this occasion, and has reported her address to him, eloquent and slightly sarcastic. She desired her attendants to retire,. and thus spoke to the ambassador: — "I know not well my own infirmity, nor how far I may with my passion be transported, but I like not to have so many witnesses of my passions as the queen, your mistress, was content to have whenshe talked with Monsieur d'Oysell. There is nothing doth more grieve me, than that I did so forget myself, as to require of the queen, your mistress, that favour which I had no need to ask. I needed no more to have made her privy to my journey than she doth me of hers. I may pass well enough home into mine own realm, 1 think, without her passport or license ; for though the late king, your master, used all the impeachment he could, both to stay me and catch me when I came hither, yet you know, Monsieur 1'Ambas- sadeur, I came hither safety, and I may have as good means to help me home again, as I had to come hither, if I would employ my » " History of England," vol. iii. p. 55. t Wright's " Queen Elizabeth." 36 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. friends. Truly, I was so far from evil meaning to the queen, your mistress, that at this time I was more willing to employ her amity to stand me in stead than all the friends I have, and yet you know, both in this realm and elsewhere, I have both friends and allies, and such as would be glad and willing to employ their forces and aid to stand me in stead. You have oftentimes told me, that the amity between the queen, your mistress, and me, was very necessary and profitable for us both ; and now I have some reason to think, that the queen, your mistress, is not of that mind, for I am sure, if she were, she would not have refused me thus unkindly. It seemeth she maketh more account of the amity of my disobedient subjects, than she doth of me their sovereign, who am her equal in degree, though inferior in wisdom and experience, her nighest kinswoman and her next neighbour." * At this interview, however, Mary said, with reference to the complaint of her assumption of the arms of England, that she acted under the commandment of Henry, th? king of France, and of her husband : " whatsoever was then done was their act, not mine, and since their death I have neither borne the arms, nor used the title, of England." Amongst the imprudent avowals of Mary was the declaration of her hatred to John Knox, before she had acquired any experience of his severe judgment cf her character, and his rough mode of urging his opinions upon her. On the eve of Mary's departure from France, Throckmorton wrote to Elizabeth— " I understand that the queen of Scotland is thoroughly persuaded that the most dangerous man in all her realm of Scotland, both to her intent there; and the dissolving of the league between your majesty and that realm, is Knox ; and therefore is fully determined to use all the means she can devise to banish him thence, or else to assure them that she will never dwell in that country as lono- as he is there ; and to make him the more odious to your majesty, and that at your hands he receive neither courage nor comfort, she mindeth to send very shortly to your majesty, (if she have not already done it,) to lay before you the book that he hath written against the government of women, (which your majesty hath seen already,) thinking thereby to animate your majesty against him." This book of " The Government of Women " was a violent attack, whilst Knox was in exile, upon the rule of Mary Tudor, and his lightest word for her was "Jezebel." There were many other works fssued to the same effect as that of Knox, in which a female monarchy * Keith's " Affairs of Scotland," quoted by Tytler, vol. vi. p. 270. MARY. EMBARKS AT CALAIS. 37. was denounced as "monstrous." It may readily be understood how the queen of Scotland thought this book presented an excel lent reason for the queen of England giving no countenance to Knox and his adherents. But Throckmorton, who knew how important it was that passions should be subjected to policy, thus gave his opinion about Knox and his " Blast " against female government : " But whatsoever the said queen shall insinuate your majesty of him, I take him to be as much for your majesty's pur pose, and that he hath done, and doth daily, as good service for the advancement of your majesty's desire in that country, and to establish a mutual benevolence and common quiet between the two realms, as any man of that nation ; his doings wherein, together with his zeal well known, have sufficiently recompensed his faults in writing that book, and therefore he is not to be driven out of that realm." He was not driven out when Mary arrived ; and she had a bitter experience how unequal she was, with her ready wit, to cope with the dogged enthusiasm of the great reformer. On the 14th of August, 1561, Mary embarked at Calais on her voyage to Scotland. There was an evil omen in the wreck of a vessel before her eyes as she left the harbour. Brantome has recorded those touching displays of her feelings, which show how reluctantly she quitted the country where she had moved amidst the universal homage of a gay court ; where pleasures surrounded her on every side ; and where there, were no severe religionists to interpret the most innocent actions into evidences of immorality. Yet at that dangerous court,,where female purity had ceased to be regarded as a virtue, and female prudence was ridiculed and despised, this fascinating woman might have learnt to forget that self-respect which would have shielded her from harm, even amongst the most stern judges of human conduct ; and thus France might have been to her a cruel step-mother. She could now only look back Upon its shores as. the seat of past joys, and exclaim, " Farewell, France ! " Again, when the evening was drawing on, would she again gaze, and say, " It is now, my dear France, that I lose sight of thee. I shall never see thee more." Awakened at the first dawning, as she had desired to be, if the coast were still in sight, she exclaimed, " Farewell, France. It is over." On they went to the North Sea, when a fog came on, and they cast anchor in the open sea. It was this fog, according to some writers, which prevented the galleys of Mary being captured by Elizabeth's cruisers. One vessel was taken and carried into port ; but, says 38 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Tytler, " as soon as it was discovered that the young queen was not on board, the prize was released, and pursued her voyage into Scotland. The incident, however, demonstrated clearly the sinister intentions of the English queen." This statement is scarcely candid, to say the least. The counter-statement, upon the authority of Cecil, is that the small English squadron was in pursuit of pirates, who were then cruising in the Scottish sea; thai this squadron saluted the royal galleys ; but detained one baggage vessel, suspected of having pirates on board. "The conduct of the English commanders towards Mary's vessels minutely corre sponds with the assurance of Elizabeth, in her letter of the 16th of August, that she suspended her displeasure at the refusal to ratify the treaty, and had given orders to her naval officers which were equivalent to a safe conduct." * This document must have been familiar enough to the historian who so boldly affirms " the sinister intentions of the English queen." Elizabeth says, "It seemeth that report hath been made to you, that we had sent out our admiral with our fleet to hinder your passage. Your servants know how false that is. We have only, at the desire of the king of Spain, sent two or three small barks to sea, in pursuit of certain Scottish pirates. " t Mary landed at the port of Leith on the 19th of August. She was received by a deputation, and conducted to the palace, or abbey, of Holyrood — that seat of Scottish royalty whose chief interest is associated with her name, but of which a very small portion of the original building remains. Mary had been accustomed to grander pageants than now welcomed her. Mean hackneys, wretchedly caparisoned, waited her arrival. She went on to Edin burgh, having no magnificence to show the French courtiers who surrounded her. Under the windows of Holvrood the citizens sang psalms to discordant three-stringed rebecks, which kept the weary queen from sleeping; and the next morning, when a popish priest was about to perform mass in her private chapel, he would have been slain by the master of Lindsay, and a furious multitude, had not Murray placed himself at the door of the chapel, and maintained the principle for which he had contended, that the queen should not be molested in the private exercise of her re ligion. The fortunes of Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor suggest the most remarkable contrasts, even up to this period. When Mary * Mackintosh, " History," vol. iii., p. 57. t Robertson, " Scotland," Appendix. CONTRASTS Off MARY AND ELIZABETH. $). was in her girlhood she was married to the heir of one of the greatest monarchies of Europe ; and she dwelt in the French c jurt, surrounded with all the pomp and luxury of a refined but licentious age. When Elizabeth had scarcely reached her twenty-first year, she became the object of suspicion to her sister ; was a close pris oner under apprehension of immediate, death ; and passed several years of durance and solitary anxiety. The taint of supposed ille gitimacy was upon her, and her succession to the crown was more than doubtful. When she came to the throne she had to decide upon heading an ecclesiastical revolution that would make her the proscribed of Rome, and the contemned of Rome's supporters, or to support a system which had become odious in England. She threw herself upon her people, — and she triumphed. When Mary became the widowed queen of France, and returned to assume the rule of Scotland, she found herself supported by the great catholic powers, but opposed to her people, — and she failed. She had to bear the rough monitions of Knox ; the ill-concealed hostility and uncertain support of her nobles ; and the secret or proclaimed dislike of an angry nation., Whilst the government of England was carrying out its resolved policy with regard to Scotland, and all there was strife and bitterness, Elizabeth was moving amongst her subjects with the love of the: many and the fear of the few. Mary could depend upon no advisers ; for the adherents to the old religion were too rash in, their weakness, and the reformers too harsh in their strength. Elizabeth had the ablest men of the time as counsellors, who held to a settled principle of action without provoking hostility by capricious and passionate- exercises of au thority. Mary was the sovereign of a people amongst whom the feudal tyrannies had not yet been held in subjection by the growth of profitable industry. Elizabeth governed a community in which the strength of the middle classes had asserted itself against monarch ical and ecclesiastical tyranny, and new channels of prosperity were being opened wherever commerce developed the energies of capitah. and adventurous men went forth for the conquests of peace. The most prosaic record of the first two years of Elizabeth's reign shows how remarkably the tranquillity of England was opposed to the turbulent of Scotland. 40 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER II. Public spirit under Elizabeth.— Sports and Processions.— England sends aid to the French Protestants. — Scotland — Plans for Mary'Smarriage. — Leicester and Damley. —Marriage of Mary and Damley.— The Reformers indignant at the marriage.— Re volt of Murray and other nobles. — Revolt suppressed, and the lords banished. — Darnley and Riccio. — Quarrels of the queen and Darnley. — Plot against Riccio. — Murder of Riccio. — Birth of a Scottish prince. — Ascendency of Bothwell. — Darnley at the Kirk of Field.— Assassination of Damley. — Mock trial of Bothwell.— Mary carried off. — Marriage of Mary and Bothwell. — Mary surrenders to her nobles. The aspect of the English metropolis under the protestant government of Elizabeth is suggestive of the change that had taken place in the thoughts and habits of the people. In 1555, when we opened the " Diary of a Resident in London," we were following the traces of burnings and penances, of processions of the host and proclamations of the papal legate. We saw little of the salu tary interference of the state with the ordinary concerns of life, in smoothing the road of industry by removal of unnatural barriers to prosperity; or in the association of municipal authority with cen tral power for the establishment of laws that directly affected every member of the community by introducing economical reforms. In 1560, when the wise Council of Elizabeth had called in the base coin, which depreciation was now acknowledged to be the main cause of the excessive dearness of commodities, members of the various crafts " walk in every market with a white rod in their hands, to look that men should take testons of the rate as the queen has proclaimed in all markets through all London." * This diffi cult operation of restoring the current money to a just value was carried through successfully, because it was set about boldly. The teston of Edward VI. had been coined to pass at the rate of twelve-pence; it was afterwards reduced to six-pence; and lastly to four-pence, its intrinsic value. Fine sterling money was ex- changed at the mint for the base coin, according to this last rate. No doubt there was individual suffering in this apparent deteriora tion of property ; but the great body of the labourers now knew that they were paid the agreed value for their labour, and were not * Machyn's Diary, p. 245. PUBLIC SPIRIT UNDER ELIZABETH. 41 deluded by receiving, as twelve-pence, what would only exchange for the third of a bushel, of wheat instead of the bushel which the honest twelve-pence would have bought. There required much public spirit in the people, as well as firmness in the government, to carry through such a change without serious confusion. But it was accomplished with no recorded difficulty ; and to this correc tion of the evils produced by the frauds of her despotic predeces sors may much of the steady commercial advance of England under Elizabeth be ascribed. Public spirit at this time also mani fested itself in a manner which has characterised our country for three centuries. In 1561, the steeple of St. Paul's was destroyed. "The 4th day of June, being Corpus Christi, between four and five of the clock at afternoon, the lightning took and entered into one of the holes that was in the outward part of the steeple, and set the steeple on fire, and consumed both wood and lead, and the bells tell below where the great organs stood beneath the chapel where the old bishop was buried." Some of the ancient devotees ascribed this calamity to the new religion ; for there were relics of saints, deposited two centuries and a half before by a bishop of London, for the express purpose of protecting the steeple from the danger of tempests. The misfortune, however, did not discourage the Protestants from instantly beginning the repairs of the beauti ful church. The magnificent steeple was never restored; but the roofs, which were entirely burnt, were replaced in the course of a year, at the cost of nearly six thousand pounds. This sum w.ts raised by contributions from the queen, from the citizens of London, from the clergy of the province of Canterbury and of the diocese, and from voluntary subscribers. In earlier times the especial -funds of the Church would have been devoted to the restoration of this splendid cathedral. But the Church property was now scattered ; and in that distribution amongst the laity, the popular interests became more identified with the ecclesiastical, and the Church ceased to stand apart in self-supporting grandeur. The union of the high and the humble, the sovereign and the burgher, the noble and the priest, to carry through some object of common good, is one of the social principles of England which we see thus developing in the restoration of St. Paul's. That principle has formed one of the foundations of a generous and confiding nation- -; ality, in which the inequality of ranks is lost in a concurrence of duties : an union whose monuments are the results of systematic growth rather than of sudden creation, and therefore more exten- 42 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. sively and permanently useful than the solitary wonders of capri cious despotism. The English love of sports and popular amusements seems to have revived after the years of martyrdoms. Though the displays of a terrible criminal justice are revolting to our present notions, and we cannot read without some disgust, month after month, of burglars and cut-purses being hanged by dozens at Hyde Park Corner and Tyburn, yet the people of that time thought these things just and right ; and went, without any sad reflections, from the scenes of the gallows and the pillory, to look upon matches of archery and aquatic games. Whilst St. Paul's is still smouldering, a great wagsr of archery was shot in Finsbury-field, in which lord Robert Dudley, afterwards earl of Leicester, was the challenger; and on Midsummer Day, there was a great triumph on the river at Greenwich, with a sham fight, and shooting of guns, and hurling of balls of wild-fire, and a bark for the queen's grace to be in to se* the pastime. On the ioth of July all London is out to behold Elizabeth go in grand procession from the Tower " unto Aldgate church, and so down Houndsditch to the Spital, and so down Hog Lane, and so over the fields to the Charter-house, my lord North's place." The next day the queen travels " from the Charter-house by Clerkenwell, over the fields into the Savoy, unto master Secre tary Cecil to supper, and there was the council and many lords and ladies and gentlewomen, and there was great cheer till midnight; and after, her grace rid to my lord North's to bed at the Charter house." These country excursions in the midst of the now " popu lous city," sound strange to the pent-up two millions and a half, for whom the fields, even " among the pleasant villages and farms ad- join'd," are a dream of the past. One more glimpse of the Eng lish queen, in her early days of triumph and splendour, if only to make us look more compassionately upon the poor Mary of Scot land, whose first recreation was to behold a pageant of the godly citizens of Edinburgh, in which Korah, Dathan, and Abiram were destroyed as they offered strange fire upon the altar— the show signifying the divine vengeance against such idolatry as that of tire Romish church. On the 14th of July all the streets of London were new gravelled, as Elizabeth set forth from the Charter-house to Whitechapel, on her progress. The houses were hung with cloth of arras, and carpets, and silk, with cloth of gold and silver, and velvet of all colours. The crafts of London stood in their liveries ; and there were trains of pensioners^ and knights and lords, and ENGLAND SENDS AID TO THE FRENCH PROTESTANTS. 43 ftie aldermen in scarlet, and heralds in their coat-armours, and my lord mayor bearing the sceptre, and the lord Hunsdon bearing the sword. Then came the queen, and her footmen. richly habited ; and ladies and gentlemen, and lords' men and knights' men in their masters' liveries ; and at Whitechapel my lord mayor and the aldermen took their leave of her grace, and so she went on he* way. All these pomps look like profitless vanity. But they were the poetry of the real life of that time ; and1 we may believe that they were not without their influence on the glorious imaginations that have reflected this age in harmonious association with the per. manent and the universal. When Charles IX., a boy eleven years old, succeeded to the crown of France, the religious differences of the people had be come so extended that they imparted their character to the political factions of the time. The direction of the government was in the hands of the duke of Guise and the cardinal his brother ; who, joined in interests with the queen-mother, were naturally opposed by the princes of the blood, headed by the prince of Conde\ The Guises persecuted the Protestants ; the other party supported them. The religious wars which divided the French into two great hostile bands of Catholic and Huguenot, now commenced in terrible earn est. There were two fierce, armies in the field, by whom the peo ple were alike plundered and harassed. In 1561, according to some writers, a hundred thousand persons were butchered by the contending factions: The Protestants, although inferior in. num bers, fought with desperation ; and the duke of Guise solicited and obtained assistance against them from Philip of Spain. The prince of Conde, on the other hand, concluded a treaty with Elizabeth, who, after some attempts at mediation, sent a force of three thou sand men to take possession of Havre. The queen was at first careful that this should not be deemed an act of hostility to France, declaring to' the French ambassador that her desire was to free the young king from the tyranny of the Guises. But the contest soon assumed a national character. The English warlike operations, though conducted with great bravery, were finally unsuccessful. The Catholics and Protestants concluded a hollow peace ; and at length, both parties agreed in determining that the English should hold no position in France. The garrison of Havre defended themselves for two months, and then capitulated. They were re leased without ransom, and came with their property to London. But they brought with them the pestilence which had thinned theit 44 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ranks ; and the French Catholics looked upon the infliction as a,. judgment upon the English heretics. In this year, 1563, the par liament again met, and a statute of increased rigour was passed against Papists. This was entitled, " An Act for the assurance of the queen's royal power over all estates and subjects within her dominions ; " and, with what has been justly called " an iniquitous and sanguinary retrospect," it provided that all persons who had been in holy orders, or taken a degree in the universities, or had practised as lawyers, or held office in the execution of the law, should take the oath of supremacy when tendered to them, under the penalty of a praemunire, and if continuing to refuse for three months, should incur the pains of high treason. The statute was inefficient from its very severity ; and although the first penalty was incurred by some of the higher clergy, archbishop Parker warned the bishops, with whom it rested to enforce the oath, to do so with great circumspection, and never to tender it a second time without his special sanction. In 1563, Edmund and Arthur Pole were convicted of a conspiracy to set Mary of Scotland on the throne. Their associates were executed, but they wore out their lives as prisoners in the Tower of London. In 1563 an Act was passed against "fond and fantastical proph ecies." * One description of prophecy that it was declared unlaw ful to promulgate was that founded upon the armorial bearings of any person. There was a famous prophecy of Thomas the Rhymer which might come within this punishable class : " However it happen for to fall, The Lion shall be lord of all ; The French queen shall bear the son Shall rule all Britain to the sea. " t The predictions which were familiar to the people of Scotland, might have become current on the English side of the border; and the notion that the son of the queen of Scots, "the lion with the floure-de-lyce " would " rule all Britain," would at that period be naturally denounced by the government of Elizabeth as " fond and fantastical," delusive and dangerous. At this time it was feared by the reformers in Scotland, ancl their fears were communicated to the English court, that intrigues were going forward for marry- * 5 Eliz., c. 15. t Mr. Aytoun, in his notes to " Bothwell, a Poem," has clearly shown that this Scot tish prophecy was referred to in a poem by Alexander Scott, addressed to Marv on her return in 1561; and that therefore the belief cf lord Mailes, that it was an interpola tion after the death of Elizabeth, is unfounded. Page 232. plans for mary's marriage. 45 ing Mary to some foreign prince of her own religion. When the Scottish parliament metin 1563 Knox preached a vehement sermon, in which he said that those who would consent that an infidel — for all Papists were infidels — should be head to their sovereign, would do as far as in them lay to banish Christ Jesus from the realm, and to bring God's vengeance on the country. The queen summoned the bold preacher before her, and asked what he had to do with her marriage ? Knox repeated . the words he had said in public ; and, with a passionate burst of tears, Mary commanded him to leave her. There can be little doubt that the queen would have sought a foreign catholic alliance had she not been deterred by the power of the reformers at home, and her apprehensions of giving dire offence to England. Whatever shows of amity might have passed between the queens at this period, their policies were sys tematically opposed, and contained the germs of hostility. Whilst Elizabeth was lending aid to the Huguenots, and Mary was writing letters to the Council of Trent, in which she professed that if she succeeded to the throne of England she would subject both king doms to the apostolic see, there must have been dissimulation on both sides. They were to have met in J562 ; but the interview was postponed, as if there were insuperable barriers to a cordial personal agreement As it was not likely that the queen of Scot land would remain a widow, with princes eager towed one so beau tiful and of such high pretensions, it was the policy of the queen of England to induce her to marry an English subject — " some noble person within the kingdom of England, having the qualities and conditions meet for such an alliance." * Lord Robert Dudley, the younger son of the duke of Northumberland, the father of lady Jane Grey, was recommended. It is one of the mysteries connected with the capricious character of all Elizabeth's own matrimonial negotiations and female preferences, that Robert Dudley, afterwards earl of Leicester, her chief favourite, should have been pressed upon Mary as a husband. But even in that protracted negotiation, it was not the reluctance of Mary to "embase herself," as she thought would be the effect of a marriage with a subject, nor any lingering wish of the queen to retain Leicester as her devoted follower, which prevented k being successfully concluded. Cecil, at the end of 1564, wrote: " I see the queen's majesty very de sirous to have my lord of Leicester to be the Scottish queen's husband ; but when it cometh to the conditions which are demand- * Cecil's Instructions to Randolph. if) HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ed, I see her then remiss of her earnestness." * Whilst Mary was always pressing that her succession to the English crown should be recognised by a declaratory Act, Elizabeth was as reluctant to comply ; for the eyes of the Roman Catholic party were constantly turned towards Mary as the legitimate branch of the Tudors — the descendant of the daughter of Henry VIL, although unrecognised in the will of Henry VIIL " The conditions which are demanded " under this proposed marriage with Leicester were probably such as Elizabeth did not choose to bring too prominently before her sub jects. She had a strong dislike even to hear of this question of the succession ; and said that Maitland, the Scottish minister, was always, like a death-watch, ringing her knell in her ears. In look ing at the delays and evasions about this demand of Mary, it is usual to represent the conduct of Elizabeth as marked by " fraud, falsehood, and selfishness ;" and that of Mary as " warm, generous, and confiding." \ This is an easy mode of disposing of a great and difficult public question. The eagerness of Mary for the recogni tion, and the reluctance of Elizabeth to grant it, may each be ex plained by the fact that Mary was the instrument of those who had determined to eradicate the reformed religion, and that Elizabeth was equally resolved to support it. The negotiations for the marriage with Leicester gradually faded away. There was another candidate for Mary's hand, ready at an opportune moment. Henry Stuart, lord Darnley, was the son of the earl of Lennox, by the daughter of Margaret Tudor, queen of Scots, who had married the earl of Angus after the death of her royal husband. The countess of Lennox was the next to Mary in hereditary succession to the Eng lish crown . The earl of Lennox had long resided in Eno-Jand as an exile, and in 1564, having returned to Scotland with letters from Elizabeth urging the reversal of his attainder, he was finally re stored. Then came his countess and their son to the Scottish court. Darnley arrived on the 13th of February, 1565. In a fort night, Randolph, the English ambassador, had observed the favours which Mary bestowed upon this youth. He soon manifested a preference for the Romish party, and gave offence to the reform ers. Within two months of Darnley's arrival an envoy was sent by Mary to desire Elizabeth's approval of her marriage with her cousin. That assent was refused by the Council on the ground that the marriage would be dangerous to the protestant religion ; would strengthen the league of catholic princes which was now organ- * Ellis, Second Series, vol ii. p. 294. t Tytler, vol. vi. p. 373. MARRIAGE OF MARY AND DARNLEY. 47 ising; and that Mary not yet having renounced her claim to the crown of England, this marriage would more imperil Elizabeth's title. That there was danger to the cause of the Reformation in Scotland may be inferred from the fact that lord Murray, who for four years had kept the kingdom in tolerable peace, holding the scales of justice even between bitterly opposing factions, though an earnest friend to the reformers, now withdrew from the court of .Mary. The strong resolve with which Murray and other protest- ants opposed this union must have been founded upon something more than vague apprehensions of the power of a husband over the queeni They dreaded him as an unreasoning tool of her more determined will. Darnley had no force of character. He was a handsome simpleton. Mary had apparently conceived a. passion for the tall stripling, whose folly was only equalled by his pride. They were married on the 29th of July, and he was proclaimed king the same day. " They were married with all the solemnities of the popish time, saving that he heard not the mass. . . . Rather he seemeth a monarch of the world than he that not long since we have seen and known the lord Darnley." * The register of marriages in the Canongate has this entry : " Henry and -Marie, kyng and qweine of Scots." The three years which followed this marriage are crowded with strange and tragical events. Romance has seized upon them as its peculiar property ; and History as been somewhat too eager to follow in the wake of Romance. The occurrences which had so material an influence upon the destinies of the Scottish and Eng lish nations are almost unheeded in their public aspects ; and thus the writer who desires to convey a sober view of what truly belongs to the province of the historian finds himself bewildered amidst in terminable controversies about the moral character of Mary, and the contradictory evidence as to her participation in the foulest of crimes. We are called upon, according to all precedent, to pronounce upon her guilt or innocence ; to hold, with the few, that she was the most shameless and abandoned of women ; or, with the many, that she was the pure and guileless victim of the most wicked conspiracies. These three years in which, whether supremely guilty or singularly unfortunate, she underwent far more than a common share of peril and anxiety, present the following salient points : In 1565, on the 29th of July, Mary married Henry Darnley. Murray, who had been her chief adviser since her return * Randolph to Leicester. Ellis, First Series, vol. ii.p. 201. 48 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. from France, headed a revolt, without success, and then took refuge in England, with other reforming leaders. Mary was now free to give the most open encouragement to the Romanists, having the countenance of her imbecile husband. The reforming party was too strong to be permanently resisted ; and Mary's husband pro fessed to have adopted their views. Within seven months of his marriage Darnley became jealous of David Riccio, an Italian favourite of the queen, and he, with a band of fierce nobles, mur dered him in Mary's presence on the 9th of March, 1566. Murray returned to Scotland. The differences between the queen and her husband became notorious. James Bothwell was now Mary's chief adviser. In 1567, on the loth of February, Darnley was murdered in a lone house in Edinburgh, called the Kirk of Field, and Bothwell was accused of the murder, but was acquitted. On the 24th of April he carried off the queen to one of his castles, and she was married to him on the 15th of May. The nobles now took up arms ; and, in little more than two months from this last mar riage, Mary was compelled to resign her crown, and was a prisoner at Lochleven. Mary's resignation of her crown to her infant son, who was born June 19th, 1566, took place on the 24th of July, 1567. After nine months' imprisonment in the castle of Lochleven, she escaped on the 2nd of May, 1568. Her Roman Catholic friends assembled an army, which encountered that of Murray the regent, on the 13th of May; and the queen's supporters being defeated, she fled to England, and landed in Cumberland on the 15th of May. We shall endeavour to tell this story as impartially as we can, keeping in view, as. much as possible, its national bearings, rather than entering into the minute details of a personal history which, even when viewed under the most favourable light, is sufficiently painful and revolting. Mary was in her twenty-third year when she married, and Darnley was nineteen. The dissatisfaction of Murray and the other reformers was so great at the prospects involved in this mar riage that they had beer, making preparations to oppose it by direct resistance in arms. Within three days of the nuptial ceremony Murray was commanded to appear at court, or to be proclaimed a rebel. If we may credit one party-representation of the troubles of this period, we must believe that the ambition of Murray and his followers, stimulated by the intrigues of England, was the sole cause of the opposition to this union. If we are to trust in another view of the matter, we must consider that the resistance of the THE REFORMERS INDIGNANT AT THE MARRIAGE. 49 lords was founded upon a sincere belief that Mary, in taking a husband of her own religious persuasion, who would give additional strength to her will, and to the desire of her foreign relations to re-establkh the Roman Catholic ascendency, was perilling the great interests of the Reformation. We must bear in mind not only the character 'of those times, but the peculiar temper of the Scottish people, to -enable us to form a right judgment of the actions of the two great parties in the state. The Reformation in England had attained its consistency, step by step ; and having passed through its most perilous crisis under Mary Tudor, had become the estab lished religion of the country, never to be seriously shaken. It had attained this position by a cautious adaptation to popular usages and opinions — a graft jipon the ancient stock rather than the forced growth of a new plant taking the place,of the old decay ing tree. The Reformation in Scotland was, from the first, a negation. Whatever was Protestant was to be diametrically opposed to Catholic. Old things were to be destroyed before new things could be established. Whatever made the slightest.approach to the ceremonies of the earlier church was idolatry. Whatever, in a stern refusal to comply with habits either harmless or indif ferent, was opposed to the practice of the Romanists, was true religion. The character of the queen, as exhibited under its most innocent aspects, was an offence to this severe judgment. Her general cheerfulness, her fondness for the chase, her balls and masquerades, her love of poetry and music, were represented as sins. It is scarcely to be wondered at, however to be lamented, that she often acted in defiance of a prudent decorum. It is less a matter of surprise that she had a deep hatred of the Reformers, and entertained a vague desire for a political alliance that would free her from the control of her Protestant subjects, and from the •supervision of England. In the first four years of her personal rule in Scotland she yielded to the strong power that was over her. She would not surrender her own habits of ceremonial religion to what had become the prevailing faith of the majority of her subjects ; but she abstained from any rash attempts to interfere with the course they were following. Had she been less cautious her fall would have been more immediate. But, supported probably by the avowed determination of France and Spain to uproot Protestantism — probably stimulated by the growing coldness, if not enmity, be tween herself and Elizabeth, and by the idle belief that the English Catholics would support her pretensions to the crown which she Vol. III.— 4 rjo HISTORY OF ENGLAND. claimed as the legitimate descendant of Henry VII.,— she grew bolder'upon the occasion of her marriage, and resolved, not indeed to persecute the Reformers in Scotland, but only to tolerate them. Cecil, in August 1565, wrote thus to the English ambassador in France :— " The duke [Chastelherault], the earls of Argyle, Murray, and Rothes, with sundry barons, are joined together, not to allow of the marriage otherwise than to have the religion established by law ; but the queen refuseth in this sort — she will not suffer it to have the force of law, but of permission to every man to live accord ing to his conscience." The great minister adds, "And herewith she hath retained a great number of Protestants from associating openly with the other." The leading Reformers knew that the queen's rejection of the legal establishment of their religion would be its destruction amongst a people whose inborn habit was to take one of two sides. If Protestantism ceased to be regarded as " established by law," Catholicism would come back to be so established. The Reformers would not accept this toleration, and they rose in arms. Murray was proclaimed a rebel. " She hath put the earl of Murray to the horn," writes Cecil. His life and estates were declared forfeited, by sound of horn. Mary, who had caused Darnley to be proclaimed king upon the occasion of their marriage, was desirous that the Scottish par liament should bestow upon him the crown-matrimonial. Chastel herault, who was next to Mary in succession, was offended at this, and took part with Murray. This able man, with kingly blood in his veins, is held to have had himself designs upon the crown. The sundry barons are reputed to have opposed Mary, lest with the re- establishment of the Romish religion they should lose their church- lands. Elizabeth envied Mary, as lord Herries writes, " the com fort of a husband and the happiness of children." These are the base and sordid motives which are assigned as the impelling causes of the opposition to the queen at this juncture. It is singular that some of the Scottish historians, and some English, will not allow anything for the strengtli of a great principle ; and constantly present to us the ministers of England as base intriguers and the Scottish statesmen as anti-national mercenaries. Elizabeth sent an envoy to Mary, to endeavour to promote her reconciliation with Murray. There were cold and sarcastic words delivered by Tam worth, Elizabeth's messenger, and haughty answers returned by Mary. She engaged for herself and her husband that they would attempt nothing to the prejudice of the queen of England ; but she REVOLT SUPPRESSED, AND THE LORDS BANISHED. 5 1 required that the English crown should be settled by Act of parlia ment upon herself and Darnley ; and that Elizabeth should afford no countenance to Scottish rebels. It is held that Murray was countenanced and assisted by Elizabeth, though to a very limited extent. Mary showed her vigour of character at this crisis. She took the field with her forces ; and- headed her troops with pistols at her saddle-bow. The revolt was cms' eel without any decisive contest. The rebel lords transmitted: to the English government a declaration that they were persecuted as traitors for their zeal for true religion, and for their attempt to redress " the great enormities lately crept into the public regimen of this miserable common wealth." They affirmed that the efforts of Mary and Darnley were solely directed to the subversion of the reformed religion within the realm,, and the re-establishment, of " superstition and papistry." There was ample, foundation for this assertion. The Roman see had sent money to Mary; and Philip II. had placed twenty thousand crowns in the hands of his ambassador at London to be employed " with secrecy and address, in the support of the Scottish queen and her husband." That the English government knew well that the combinations for the restoration of Catholicism in Scotland were connected with the pretensions of Mary to the throne filled by the Protestant Elizabeth, is evident from its inces sant watchfulness over every indication of Mary's projects. It was a measure of self-defence to hold a steadfast alliance with the Scottish Reformers. There would be intrigue and dissimulation in pursuing this policy ; but that Elizabeth was actuated by a mere womanly jealousy of Mary, as we are asked to believe, and that her ministers causelessly sought to embroil Scotland, is the dream of a very weak prejudice, which assumes the garb of a poetical nation ality. Elizabeth is held to have dissembled when, Murray having fled to her court, she " spoke very roundly to him, before the ambassadors, that whatsoever the world said or reported of her, she would hy ber actions let it appear, that she would not, for the price of a world, maintain any subject in any disobedience against a prince." * The right divine of princes was too deeply rooted in her thoughts to carry her beyond a certain point of opposition to her most dangerous enemy. In this she spoke her true mind. In the declaration of the banished lords to the English govern ment they complained that two crafty Italians, David Riccio and Francisco, with other unworthy persons, had dispossessed the ancient * Memorandum of Cecil, in Raumer, p. 70. 5 2 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. nobility of their place in the queen's council. Riccio, a Milanese, had been a singer in Mary's service, and was afterwards promoted to the office of her private secretary. He had soon acquired con siderable influence ; had been assiduous in promoting Darnley's marriage ; and when Mary's first passionate love for that weak young man had given way to contempt for his follies and vices, Riccio became her chief adviser in place of the husband she had chosen. At the beginning of 1 566 Randolph, the English ambassador, wrote to Cecil that the Protestants were in such fear and doubt that they knew not what shall become of them ; and that the wisest desire nothing more than the return of the banished lords.* There were agencies at work to inspire the Protestants with still greater dread. There came from France an envoy of the cardinal Lorraine, and a messenger from the Scottish ambassador. They had high powers entrusted to them. They were to oppose the recall of the banished lords, they were to induce Mary to sign the "Bond " which had been concluded, under the auspices of Catherine de Medici and the duke of Alva, for the extermination of the Protestants in Eu rope. " Riccio, who at this moment possessed much influence, and was on good grounds suspected to be a pensioner of Rome, sec onded these views with all his power. " t Mary did join this league ; did become a party to the dark conspiracy, whose grand result was the massacre of St. Bartholomew in France, and which, but for the wisdom of Elizabeth and her counsellors, might have produced a St. Bartholomew in England. The passionate impulses of Mary were equally the safety of Scotland. She was unfitted for the con duct of a policy which would cherish its schemes of vengeance, and smile upon its devoted victims, as in France, until thousands could be cut off as if they had but one neck. Mary had strong hatreds but she looked only at individuals for their gratification. Murray and his adherents were the objects of her wrath in 1565; when she " declared to Randolph that she would rather peril' her crown than lose her revenge." % Deeper offences than rebellion were now to agitate her. Darnley had been displaced from her confi dence, and perhaps justly so. Riccio was her most cherished counsellor. Darnley used to sign his name to public documents as king, before that of Mary. The queen now signed her name, and Riccio was provided with a stamp to add that of Darnley. The . weak young man abandoned himself to drinking ; quarrelled with * Ellis, First Series, vol. ii. p. 206. + Tytler's " Scotland,"'Vol. vii. p. 19. J Ibid., p. S. DARNLEY AND RICCIO. S3 the queen in public ; was persuaded that Riccio was the instigator of his humiliations ; and, says Mr. Tytler, " had the folly to become the dupe of a more absurd delusion — he became jealous of the Italian secretary." The absurdity of this jealousy must be esti mated by the general impression as to Mary's character. In the unhappy affair of Chastellart, three years before, Randolph pointed out " what mischief ensues of the over great familiarity that any such personage showeth unto so unworthy a creature and abject a yarlet, as even her grace used with him." * The man was hanged for the presumption which this " over great familiarity " encour aged. Mary brought to. Scotland the indiscretions of the French court, if not its vices ; and her education in this school of impurity may suggest some apology for the imprudences which her warmest advocates cannot wholly defend. No one doubts that the deport ment of Riccio was calculated to excite the suspicion of a neglected husband, and the hatred of those who saw his influence over the queen employed for their personal abasement and the subversion of their religious opinions. The common desire for revenge asso ciated Darnley with some of the fierce Scottish nobles, such as Morton and Ruthven, in a conspiracy against the life of the ob noxious secretary. The kingwas engaged with the superior Pro testant leaders,. in a separate bond for the restoration of the ban ished lords, upon their promise to support him and to give' him the crown matrimonial. They were to maintain the protestant religion as one of the conditions of this alliance. Mixing up these separate contracts, "for the murder of Riccio, the restoration of Murray, and the revolution in the government," we are told that "one only step remained : to communicate the plot to the queen of England and her ministers, and to obtain their approval and support"! On the 6th. of March the earl of Bedford and Randolph wrote to Cecil, from Berwick, of the jars between the queen and her hus band, "for that he hath assured knowledge of such usage" of her self as altogether is intolerable to be borne ; which, if it were not overwell known, we would both be very loth to think that it could be true. To take away this occasion of slander he is himself de termined to be at the apprehension and execution of him whom he is able manifestly to charge with the crime, and to have done him the most dishonour that can. be to any man, much more being as he is." They then enclose the copies of " Conditions for the earls to perform to their king," and " Conditions to be performed * Raumer, p. 21. t Tytler, vol. vii. p. 29. 54 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. by the king of Scots to the earls." Bedford and Randolph thus communicate to their government that the king of Scots has deter mined personally to revenge himself on the man who has dishon oured him ; and that he has covenanted with the Protestant leaders in Scotland and England to accomplish their recall, on the condition of receiving their support in his desire for the crown- matrimonial. A political revolution was to be accomplished against the Roman Catholic ascendency, to which ascendency the queen of Scots had lent herself. It was to be accomplished before the meeting of parliament, in which the Romanist interests would have succeeded in confiscating the estates of Murray, Rothes, Grange, and the other lords who had fled to England ; and prob ably would have attempted the re-establishment of the ancient re ligion. Bedford and Randolph add that " persuasions " would be tried with the queen ; but if they did no good, " they propose to proceed we know not in what sort." If she attempted to raise a power at home, she was to_be withstood ; if she sought any foreign support, the aid of England was to be asked. In this communica tion to the English government we can scarcely see any ground for the charges which it is held to raise against the conduct of Elizabeth. It proves, says Mr. Tytler, that the queen of England had the most precise intimation of the intended murder of Riccio. He should have added, as the personal act of Darnley. It proves, we are further told, that it was intended to put an end to Murray's banishment, to replace him in power ; and by one decided and tri umphant blow to destroy the schemes which were in agitation for the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic religion in Scotland. It is held that Elizabeth ought to have imprisoned Murray, discomfited the plans of the conspirators, saved the life of the victim marked for slaughter, and preserved Mary from captivity, " if she had been alive to the common feelings of humanity." This view of the duty of Elizabeth and her government arises out of the desire to treat such questions as personal ones, entirely separated from a great political principle. If it were safe for England that the queen of Scots should be supported in her alliances with those who sought, in the destruction of Elizabeth, the extinction of Protes tantism in Britain, then the English queen might have been what is called magnanimous. She interfered not ; and the Protestant no bles and preachers were not swept from the island. But all such reasoning upon the letter of Bedford and Randolph is wholly beside the mark. The date of this communication to the English court PLOT AGAINST RICCIO. 55 of the approaching political revolution has not heen heeded, in the eager desire to blame Elizabeth and her ministers for not having saved Riccio, and prevented the banished lords from returning to Scotland. The letter of Bedford and Randolph to Cecil was written from Berwick on the 6th of March. It enjoined the strictest secresy. It was the first intimation of " a matter of no small consequence being intended in Scotland." With extraordi nary despatch Cecil might have received that letter on the Sth of March. On the night of the 9th, Riccio was murdered. On the nth, Murray and the banished lords were in Edinburgh. When Murray was safe at Berwick on the 8th of March, ready to step across the border, he sent his secretary with a letter to Cecil to tell him of his plans. That Elizabeth or her ministers could, in consequence of their communications from Berwick, have prevented the catastro phe of the 9th, or detained Murray till the Scottish parliament, which met on the 4th, had passed a statute of treason against him and the other banished lords, will be difficult to establish in the face of these dates, to which the able historian of Scotland, in many re spects so candid, has shut his eyes. It is about an hour after sunset on Saturday, the 9th of March, when the court of Holyrood Palace is suddenly filled with armed men, and the glare of torches lights up the old monastic walls. This band, in number a hundred and fifty, is led by the earls of Morton and Lindsay. They close the outer gates ; and the inmates of Holy- rood are in their power. Bedford and Randolph, in a letter to the Council of England, give the most circumstantial relation of the ¦events which immediately followed : " The king conveyeth himself, the lord Ruthven, George Douglas, and two other, through his own 'chamber by the privy stairs up to the queen's chamber, joining to which there is a cabinet about twelve feet square, in the same a little low reposing bed, and a table, at the which there were sitting at the supper tV.e queen, the lady Argyle, and David, with his cap upon his head. Into the cabinet there cometh in the king and lord Ruthven, who willed David to come forth, saying that there was no place for him. The queen said that it was her will ; her husband answered that it was against her honour. The lord Ruthven said that he should learn better his duty, and offering to have taken him by the arm, David took the queen by the plaits of her gown and put himself behind the queen, who would>,gladly have saved him ; but the king having loosed his hands, and holding her in his arms, David was thrust out of the cabinet through the bed-chamber 5 6 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. into the Chamber of Presence, where were the lord Morton, lord Lindsay, who intending that night to have reserved him and the next day to hang him, so many being about them that bore him evil will, one thrust him into the body with a dagger, and after him a great many other, so that he had in his body above fifty-five wounds. It is told for certain that the king's own dagger was left sticking in him. Whether he stroke him or not we cannot know for certain. He was not slain in the queen's presence, as was said, but going down the stairs out of the Chamber of Presence." * There is a letter from queen Mary herself to her ambassador in Paris, which, in the main circumstances, agrees with this account. But Mary says, that when Ruthven addressed Riccio, she asked her husband if he knew anything of this attempt ; adding, " and on his denying it, we com manded lord Ruthven, on pain of treason, to quit our presence, while Riccio had sought shelter behind us." She then briefly tells of the murder in the ante-chamber, and says that immediately after the deed Ruthven returned, and upbraided her with tyranny, and her submission to the counsels of Riccio. But the letter of Bed ford and Randolph details a frightful scene of violence between Darnley and the queen, in which he reproached her with infidelity, and said that "for her honour and his own contentment he gave his consent that he should be taken away." She replied, "Well; you have taken your last of me, and your farewell." Ruthven re monstrated, and said that Riccio " was mean, base, enemy to the nobility, shame to her, and destruction to her grace's country." She rejoined : " Well ; it. shall be dear blood to some of you if his be spilt." This account exhibits a most characteristic group : " Her husband this time speaketh little. Her grace continually weepeth. The lord Ruthven being evil at ease, and weak, calleth for a drink, and saith, ' This I must do with your majesty's par don.' " The queen in a letter to the ambassador says, that against certain of her nobility, maintainers of her authority, who were in the palace at the time " the enterprise was conspired as well as for David." These were Huntley and Bothwell ; who escaped by ropes out of a back window ; Athol, Fleming, Livingston, Balfour, and Melvil, who also escaped. The concluding scene of that Saturday night is thus described by the queen : '¦ The provost and town of Edinburgh having understood this tumult in our palace, caused ring their common bell, came to us in great number, and desired to have seen our presence, intercommuned with us, and to have known * Ellis, First Series, vol. ii. p. 209, BIRTH OF A SCOTTISH PRINCE. 57 our welfare." But she was prevented speaking with these anxious citizens, " being extremely bested by those lords, who in our face declared if we desired to have spoken with them, they should cut us incollops, and cast us over the wall." The next day Murray arrived in Edinburgh. At his first interview with Mary he is said to have expressed great solicitude for her welfare, and she to have mani fested a confidence in' his affection. The reconcilement was very transient. At a meeting of the conspirators against Riccio with the lords who had returned to Scotland, strong measures were de termined on as regarded the queen: " In their council," says Mary, " they thought it most expedient we should be warded in our castle of Stirling, there to remain while we had approved in parliament of all their wicked enterprises, established their religion, and given to the king the crown-matrimonial and the whole government of our realm." But in a few days Mary, who had subdued her weak hus band to her will, persuaded him to fly with her at midnight to Dun bar. Wi.atever were the intentions of the conspirators towards her she was now out of their power. She soon gathered a large force around her ; and marching upon Edinburgh, issued writs of treason against Morton, Ruthven, and others, who fled to England. Murray denied all complicity in the-murder of Riccio ; and Darnley took refuge in denouncing those with whom he had been associated as traitors and murderers. They retaliated upon his baseness in a man ner that in eleven months led to another more fearful catastrophe. On the 4th of April Randolph writes to Cecil, "the queen hath now seen all the covenants and bonds that passed between the king and the lords ; and now findeth that his -declaration before her and the council of his innocency of the death of David, was false." From the hour of that disclosure Darnley was a doomed man. On the 19th of June, 1566, Mary gave birth to the son who was afterwards king of Scotland and of England. The differences be tween the various factions now began to be composed. Amicable relations with England were established. Elizabeth agreed to be godmother to the heir of the Scottish throne, and sent a golden font for his baptism. In November Mary renewed her claim to have a parliamentary recognition of her right of succession to the Eno-lish crown, in a letter written by her to the lords of Elizabeth's council ; but she stated her unwillingness "to press our said good sister further than shall come of her own good pleasure to put that matter in question." The English parliament, which had met in the beginning of November, had begun to debate about the succes. 58 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. sion ; and, says Camden, " on the one side the Papists propounded unto themselves the queen of Scots, which had newly brought forth a son ; on the other, the Protestants, with different affections, pro pounded to themselves, some one man, some another." Mary al ludes to this debate in her letter. Elizabeth was angry at the dis cussion of this matter ; but in her instructions to Bedford, who was. present at the baptism of James, she had, immediately previous to receiving Mary's letter, authorised him to declare that she would never suffer anything to be done prejudicial to Mary's right; but re quired that she should confirm so much of the treaty of Edinburgh.! as regarded Elizabeth's rights : " The same being since deferred upon account of some words therein prejudicial to the queen's. right and title, before all others, after us, our meaning is to require nothing to be confirmed in that treaty but that which directly apper tains to us and our children ; omitting anything in that treaty that may be prejudicial to her title as next heir of us and our children." It was added that all this might be secured by a new treaty. Mary was in no hurry to embrace this reasonable proposal ; and nothing was done to complete such an engagement, without which, Eliza beth said, "though we are inclined to preserve amity, yet occasions may happen to incline either of us to be jealous one of another." The occasions of jealousy were never removed. On the 17th of December the baptism of the infant prince took place at Stirling, according to the Roman Catholic ritual. Darnley, although living in the palace, refused to attend the ceremony. Be tween himself and the queen there was not only coldness but mani fest dislike. Mary was profoundly melancholy ; and Darnley was proud and moody. A remarkable man, James Hepburn, earl of Bothwell, had now become Mary's most intimate counsellor. She had recently manifested a more than common interest in his wel fare. Bothwell had been dangerously wounded in an attempt to ar rest Elliot of the Park, a border depredator ; and he was carried to his castle of the Hermitage. The queen had been engaged for a week holding a court of justice at Jedburgh, whilst Bothwell was slowly re covering -from his wound; and on one day she rode to the Hermitage and back, a distance altogether of forty miles. She was accompanied by Murray and others, but the visit gave occasion to scandal, upon which the historians unfavourable to Mary have not failed to dwell. After this interview the queen became dangerously ill ; and the melancholy whic'i subsequently settled upon her was frequently expressed by her exclamation, " I could wish to be ASCENDENCY OF BOTHWELL. 59 dead !" A divorce was proposed to her by Bothwell, Murray, and other counsellors ; and it has been affirmed upon the confession of Ormiston, a confederate, that a bond for the murder of the king was executed about tbe same time by several of these persons. The mysteries of this period of dark intrigues and daring plots will never be satisfactorily disclosed, and the precise degree of guilt to be attached to individuals will remain unsettled. Let us briefly relate the ascertained circumstances of the momentous crime that was perpetrated on the 10th of February, 1567. At the end of 1 566, Mary had consented to pardon Morton, Lindsay, and others, with two exceptions, who had been con cerned in the murder of Riccio. Darnley dreaded the return of the fellow conspirators with whom he had broken faith ; and he abruptly left the court and went to his father, the earl of Lennox, at Glasgow. Morton, one of the pardoned nobles, returned to Scot land early in January, 1567. Darnley had fallen sick of a dis ease which was said to be the small-pox ; and on the 22nd of Janu ary, Mary proceeded to Glasgow to visit him. Some explanation took place between them, and Darnley agreed to attend the queen to Craigmillar, by slow journeys, she having brought a litter for his conveyance. There is a deposition of Thomas Crawford, a gentleman attending iupon Lennox, in which he relates a conver sation between Darnley and himself, in which Crawford said, "She treats your majesty too like a prisoner. Whyishould you not be taken to one of your own houses at Edinburgh ? " Darnley replied, " It struck me much the same way ; and I have fears enough, but may God judge between us. 1 have her promise only to trust to ; but I have put myself in her hands, and I shall go with her, though she should murder me." * The plan of going to Craig millar was changed, and Darnley was 1 carried to Edinburgh, where he arrived on the 31st of January. Holyrood was declared to be unhealthy, from its low situation ; and the king was taken to as suburb called the Kirk of Field, where the duke of Chastelherault had a residence. The attendants were about to convey Darnley to the duke's mansion, when Mary said his apartments were to be in an adjoining house, to which she conducted him. It was a mean building belonging to Robert Balfour, one of Bothwell's depend ents. The queen daily attended upon Darnley, , and appeared assiduous in promoting his comfort, amidst the rude domestic ar- * Tytler, vol, vii. p. 78. Mr. Tytler says that-'he has not been able to discover any sufficient ground to doubt the truth of this deposition. 60 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. rangements- which this lodging afforded. Below the chamber where he slept she had one prepared for herself. On Sunday, the 9th of February, Mary passed much of the day with her husband, who is represented as having had his apprehensions of danger somewhat removed by her presence, and by the appearance of renewed confidence between them. On the evening of that Sun day, the queen went to Holyrood, to celebrate by a masque the wedding of Bastian, a foreigner of her household, with one of her favourite attendants. Bothwell was present at the festivities of the palace ; but he left about midnight. Darnley had gone to rest, after repeating the 55th Psalm, his page being in his bedroom. At two o'clock in the morning of the 10th a loud explosion roused the inhabitants of Edinburgh from their sleep ; and the terrified citi zens soon learnt that the Kirk of Field had been blown up and that the king was dead. The house was completely destroyed. Mary has herself described the extent of the destruction : " The house wherein the king was lodged was in an instant blown in the air, he lying sleeping in his bed, with a vehemency that, of the whole lodging, wails and other, there is nothing remaining — no, not a stone above another, but all carried far away, or dung in dross to the very ground-stone." * But the body of the king was not amongst these ruins. It was found lying under a tree in an orchard, about eighty yards from the house; and the body of his page was lying beside him. The account which Buchanan gives of this circumstance agrees with the general evidence: " The king had only a linen shirt on the upper part of his body ; the rest of it lay naked. His other clothes and his shoes lay just by him. The common people came in great crowds to see him, and many conjectures there were ; yet they all agreed that he could never be thrown out of the house by the force of gunpowder, for there was no part broken, bruised, or black and blue about his _body, which must necessarily have happened in a ruin by gunpow der. Besides, his clothes that lay near him were not so much as singed with the flame, or covered with any ashes." t It appears probable that -Darnley was strangled in the orchard, as he hurriedly attempted to escape, and that his page shared his fate. The bodies of four of his servants were found in the ruins. Herries o-h-es a circumstantial relation that Darnley and his attendant were stran gled by Bothwell and his accomplices, in the bedroom ; and being * Letter to Beaton. Dung is the preterite of ding , to strike down violently. t Buchanan's " History of Scotland," translated by Bond, vol. ii. p. 323. ASSASSINATION OF DARNLEY. 6 1 carried out by them by a back-gate, they fired spme barrels ol pow der which they had put in a room below the king's chamber, and so blew up the house. This was the room which the queen had oc cupied ; and according to the confessions of two servants who brought the powder, it was deposited in that room whilst Mary was with her husband above. An opinion has been expressed, with great plausibility, that the gunpowder, brought in a mail and trunk, was insufficient to destroy the. house as it was destroyed; that the walls had been undermined by another set of conspirators ; that Bothwell was uninformed of this, and was left to take his own course ; and that " in consequence, he was looked upon as the sole deviser of the murder, which, however, there are strong reasons for believing was not perpetrated by his means."* This opinion opens up the great question of the guilt or innocence of the queen — the question which we shall have briefly to notice when we come to the judicial examinations which followed Mary's flight to England. Meanwhile, no one has attempted to deny that Bothwell was deeply concerned in this crime ; that his servants placed the powder under Darnley's chamber ; that he left the palace at midnight, and "went straight to the Kirk of Field, up Roblock's Wynd ; " t that he:returned to the palace under cover of the night ; and that when a servant rushed into his chamber to tell the news of the catastrophe, he started up in well feigned terror and cried " Treason.'' Mary was made acquainted with the event by Bothwell and Hunt ley, two of the conspirators, and she shut herself up in her cham ber, as one lost in grief. Two days elapsed before any public steps were taken to dis cover the perpetrators..of this deed. . Then the proclamation was issued offering a large reward. Placards were soon displayed in the, city denouncing Bothwell, James Balfour, and others, as the murderers. Mary removed to the seat of lord Seaton. Darnley was buried with great privacy ; and his father made ineffectual solicitations to the queen that she should take steps for the immedi ate apprehension of those named in the placards. Bothwell con tinued about the queen, having the- chief management of public affairs ; and the Court at Seaton was occupied with somewhat ill- timed amusements. The opportunities for a searching inquiry into the circumstances of the murder were passing away. Some of the inferior agents who were suspected were leaving Scotland. Both- * W. E. Aytoun, Notes to " Bothwell," p. 263. t Herries.- 62 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. well rode through tjie streets of Edinburgh with fifty guards ; pas sionately declaring, that if he knew the authors of the placards he would wash his hands in their blood. The chief nobles, including Murray, absented themselves from court, as if in disgust. Even Beaton, the queen's ambassador at Paris, wrote to her in the following plain terms: "Of this deed, if 1 should write all that is spoken here, and also in England, of the miserable estate of the realm by the dishonour of the nobility, mistrust and treason"" of your whole subjects, — vea, that yourself is greatly and wrong- ously calumniated to be the motive principal of the whole, and all done by your command, — I can conclude nothing besides that which your majesty writes to me yourself that since it hath pleased God to preserve you to take a rigorous vengeance thereof, that rather than it be not actually taken, it appears to me better, in this world, that you had lost life and all." Mary did not do what this honest adviser exhorted her to do — " that you do such justice as the whole world may declare your innocence." She received from Elizabeth a message of condolence and advice ; and she promised the queen of England's envoy that Bothwell should be brought to an open trial. But she immediately admitted the guilty man to greater favour than ever ; bestowed upon him new marks of her confidence, such as the custody of Edinburgh castle ; and enabled him so to strengthen himself, that the promised trial was a mockery and an imposture. No one dared to accuse the man who commanded all the military power of the state. The father of Damley now be sought Mary to delay the trial, so that the accused should be less able to control its issue by force. He applied to Elizabeth, who exhorted her sister-queen to listen to so reasonable a request The provost-marshal of Berwick arrived with Elizabeth's letter on the 1 2th of -April, the day appointed for the trial. The city was wholly in the power of Bothwell, who had four thousand of his followers in the streets and the court of the palace. The castle was under his command. Bothweli's armed men surrounded the Tolbooth, where the trial was to take place. Lennox was commanded to enter Edinburgh with no more than six attendants, and he natur ally shrank from the danger that appeared imminent, and declined to appear in person. A gentleman, on his part, boldly re-iterated the charge against Bothwell, but requested delay. There was no accuser and no evidence, and a verdict of acquittal was pronounced. The parliament confirmed the acquittal. Murray had returned to France. Bothwell received new marks of the queen's favour ; and MARY CARRIED OFF. 63 his ultimate elevation was anticipated by the signatures of many nobles to a bond, in which they .recommended him as a suitable husband for the queen. But some of the most important men in Scotland were roused by the insolence of the favourite and the in fatuation of Mary ; who, according, to a letter written by sir William Kirkaldy, the laird of Grange, to the earl of Bedford, had said, with reference to Bothwell, — •" She cared not to lose France, England, and her own country for him, and shall go with him to the world's end in a white petticoat, before she leave him." * The indignation of the people was soon completed by a most extraordinary proceed ing. The queen had been on the 21st of April to Stirling, to see her child. As she was returning to Edinburgh, on the 24th, she was surrounded by a great band of Bothwell's followers, to the number ef eight hundred, led by him ; and was conducted, as if by force, to his castle of Dunbar. Grange, on the 26th, addressed a letter to Bedford, in which he accuses Mary of complicity in this seizure, " to the end that she may sooner end the marriage whilk she promised before she caused Bothwell murder her husband." Proceedings for a collusive divorce between Bothwell. and his wife, the lady Jane Gordon, were hurried through the courts. Craig, a protestant minister, was ordered to proclaim the banns of matri mony between the queen and Bothwell, which he did in the High Church, adding, " I take Heaven and earth to witness that I abhor , and detest this marriage." • On the 12th of May the queen came to Edinburgh, and created Bothwell duke of Orkney and Shetland. On the 1 5th they were married. If there could be happiness in such an union it was quickly over. The French ambassador, with in a fortnight after, wrote to Catherine de Medici, " On Thursday the queen sent for me, when I perceived something strange in the mutual behaviour of her and her husband. She attempted to excuse it, and said, ' If you see me melancholy, it is because I- do not choose to be cheerful ; hecause I never will be so, and wish for nothing but death.' " t It is related that she was treated with in dignity by the man for whom she had sacrificed her peace of mind and her reputation ; and that on one occasion when she had been subjected to his insults, she called aloud for a knife to stab her self. A confederacy of nobles was soon formed, with the declared intention of putting down the power of Bothwell. He and the queen were at Borthwick castle, about ten miles from Edinburgh, * Letter in State Paper Gffice, Tytler, vol. vii. p. 106.- t Raumer, p. 99. 64 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. when the place was surrounded by an armed force. Bothwell es caped by a postern, and reached his own castle of Dunbar. Mary fled, disguised as a man, and joined her new husband in his fort ress. The confederates secured the capital. The queen called her followers round the royal banner at Dunbar ; and on the 14th of June advanced with a considerable force towards Edinburgh. She entrenched herself on Carberry-hill — a place remarkable as the position which the English held before the battle of Pinkie. On Sunday the 15th the confederates marched out of Edinburgh ; and * the two armies were soon in presence of each other. Bothwell sent by a herald his personal defiance of any one who accused him of Darnley's murder. The challenge was accepted by Lindsay ; but Mary forbadethe encounter. Her own army began to desert her, and a general panic soon ensued. The queen demanded a parley. Grange came to meet her, and tendered the obedience of the lords in arms if Bothwell were dismissed. She did dismiss him. There was a brief farewell ; and they met no more. He became a pirate and an outcast. Mary was conducted to the camp of the confederates ; and she soon perceived that she was a prisoner. " Give me your hand," she said to Lindsay ; and placing her de licate fingers in his rough palm, she exclaimed, "By the hand which is now in yours, I'll have your head for this." Riding between Athol and Morton, she was conducted into Edinburgh amidst the execrations of an infuriated populace'. The soldiers carried a banner, on which was painted the body of the murdered Darnley lying under the tree near the Kirk of Field, and a child kneeling beside it, with the legend, " Judge and avenge my cause, O Lord." This terrible flag was paraded before her; and when she awoke next morning, and looked out of the window of the provost's house in which she had been lodged, the same dreadful representation was hung up to meet her first gaze. In her despair she attempted to address the people, who were moved to some pitv at her agony. That day she was carried as a prisoner to Lochleven. MARY COMPELLED TO RESIGN THE CROWN. 6 "J CHAPTER III. Mary compelled to resign the Crown. — Murray accepts the Regency. — Escape of Mary from Lochleven. — Circumstances of her escape. — -Battle of Langsyde — Mary takes ref uge in England. — Mary's detention in England. — Conferences of York and London. — Mary placed undercharge of the Earl of Shrewsbury. — Anxiety for her safe custody. — The duke of Norfolk and Mary. —Lady Catherine Grey. The captivity of queen Mary was the signal for the return of John Knox to Scotland. If he were not privy to the conspiracy for the assassination of David Riccio, he did not withhold his satis faction at an event which he considered essential to the safety of religion and the good of the commonwealth. He had fled from Edinburgh when Mary was in a condition to revenge that murder. He came back when she was a prisoner, to urge the strongest measures against her ; grounding " the lawfulness to punish her upon Scripture history, the laws of the realm, and her coronation oath." * The confederacy against Mary and Bothwell was known as the Secret Council. Knox heartily embraced their cause ; stipulating that the Reformed religion should be restored to the position in which it was placed by the parliament of 1560. After various attempts to persuade Mary to renounce Bothwell, Knox " thundered out cannon-hot against her." f Morton told Throckmor ton, the English ambassador, that he could not do for the queen what he wished ; but was obliged to give way to the zeal of the clergy and the people. Elizabeth, no doubt with sincerity, was' remonstrating against the confinement and proposed deposition of Mary ; but she was, at the same time, not prepared to take any strong measures of forcible interference for her safety. The unhappy queen was hemmed about with violent enemies and doubt ful friends. Elizabeth charged her ambassador to insist that subjects were not to be judges of a sovereign ; — it was " contrary to Scripture and unreasonable, that the head should be subject t5 the foot." Knox, Buchanan, Craig, and other preachers boldly maintained, and it was "a public speech amongst the people," that * Report of Throckmo:'to-.i, July iS. t Throckmorton to Cecil. VOL. III.— 5 66 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. " their queen hath no more liberty nor privilege to commit murder nor adultery than any other private person, neither by God's laws nor by the laws of the realm." The people were inflamed to the highest fury. Mary's life appeared in danger, and she talked of seeking refuge in a French nunnery. The General Assembly of the Church united with the lords of the Secret Council in desiring the queen to be brought to trial, and, if found guilty, to be put to death ; " and there seemed every probability that this dreadful result was about to take place, had it not been for the interference of Throckmorton."* Murray was absent in France. At last, another course was resolved upon. Lord Lindsay, under whose severe custody she had been five weeks at Lochleven castle, and who had come to the capital to attend the General Assembly, now- returned to the queen with three instruments to which her signa ture was demanded ; whose tenour was, to resign the crown in favour of her son ; to appoint Murray regent of the realm during her son's infancy ; and to constitute certain lords regents till Murray's return, or permanently if he should decline the office. Mary long refused compliance ; but the stern Lindsay terrified her into sub mission. The immediate coronation of the infant prince was their next measure. The English ambassador was invited to attend the ceremony, but he gave a peremptory refusal, stating that the proceedings of the Secret Council had -been wholly against the advice and remonstrances of Elizabeth. The abdication of Mary took place on the 24th of July ; the coronation of James on the 29th. The earl of Mar, his governor, bore the infant prince to the throne at the High Church of Stirling : the deeds of resignation by his mother were read, and Lindsay and Ruthven swore that they were her voluntary acts ; Knox preached ; the child was crowned ; Morton swore for him that he would maintain the Reformed reli gion and extirpate heresy; the lords took the oath of allegiance; and the infant of thirteen months was carried back to his cradle. The indignation of Elizabeth at this proceeding was expressed in the strongest terms through her ambassador ; but he was assured, without any reserve, that the hostility of the English government would only shorten Mary's days ; for that those who pretended to be herfriends,the party of the Hamiltons, had, within the last forty-eight hours, proposed to the interim-regents to put her to death. All that Throckmorton could accomplish in favour of the prisoner was Tytler, vol. va. p. MURRAY ACCEPTS THE REGENCY. 67 that so fearful a measure, " the outgait " of the question, as they termed it, should be suspended till the return of Murray.* Murray came from France at the beginning of August. The French government showed indifference to the fate of Mary, and great efforts were made by that government to secure the interest of the powerful man who had been chosen regent. He decided to communicate with Elizabeth. Alleged proofs of Mary being privy to her husband's murder had been put into his hands ; and he was disposed to take part with the confederate lords. He had an interview with the queen of England, who took a high tone, and expressed her determination to restore Mary to her crown. Elizabeth's advisers would have moderated her indignation at Mary's rebellious subjects ; but she kept to her resolution to sup port the cause of a sovereign held captive by an authority that set itself above the throne. When Murray reached Scotland he was irresolute as to the acceptance of the regency. On the one side, he was pressed by those who held in their hands letters and papers which they exhibited as proofs of Mary's guilt ; on the other, it was represented to him that Mary's abdication was extorted from her. He determined to see her himself. On the 15th of August, in company with Morton, Athol, and'Lindsay, he visited her at Loch leven. Mary appealed to him as her brother and her friend. He set before her all that had been alleged as the follies and crimes of her life ; and a conversation, which lasted till midnight, ended in his exhorting her to seek refuge in the mercy of God. In the morning they had another interview, when Mary exhorted him to save her life, and pressed him to accept the regency. On the 22d of August Murray was proclaimed regent. At a meet ing with the English ambassador, he declared his intention to make common cause with the lords. Though he had not been a party to their past doings, he commended what they had done ; "and seeing the queen my sovereign and they have laid on me the charge of regency, a burden I would gladly have avoided, I am re solved to maintain their action, and will reduce all men to obedi ence in the king's name, or it shall cost me my life." Throck morton having asked to see Mary, was refused ; and he was re called to England. On the 15th December, the regent summoned a parliament. The queen's resignation of the crown, the king's cor- * The undoubted details of this treachery of Mary's pretended friends are given by Mr. Tytler, vol. vii. pp, 170 to 17s, in complete disproof of the statements of " our popular historians." 68 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. onation, and the regency of Murray, were confirmed. The pope's authority was abolished ; the Confession of Faith of 1 560 was sanc tioned ; all heretics and hearers of mass were declared liable to various punishments; and the Presbyterian Church was fully estab lished as "the Immaculate Spouse of Christ." An Act of parlia ment was passed to exonerate those who had risen in arms to de mand justice on the murderers of Darnley ; which Act declared that the queen was confined for her demerits, seeing that by her private letters to Bothwell, and by her pretended marriage with him, she was cognisant, art and part, of the murder of the king her husband. These "divers her privy letters written wholly with her own hand," have been the subject of interminable controversy. They were said to Jiave been found in a silver casket, which Mary had given to Bothwell, and which came into the hands of Morton after her surrender at Carberry-hill. Hume holds that " the objec tions made to their authenticity are, in general, of small force."* These letters afterwards formed part of the evidence upon an elaborate inquiry into the guilt or innocence of Mary. After the queen had been six months under restraint, opinions came to be more divided about her conduct and character. The sympathy naturally inspired by the misfortunes of a young and beautiful woman began to operate as a counterpoise to the severe denuncia tions of the stern reformers. New factions began to be formed, each having its objects of personal ambition. Murray, as was' - almost inevitable, screened the higher delinquents in Darnley's as sassination, and proceeded severely against their tools. The Ro manists, now a marked and proscribed minority, were anxious for some revolution which might restore their influence. On the 2d of May, 156S, Scotland was convulsed by the tidings that Mary had-' escaped from that prison whose walls were girded by the waters of Lochleven, seeming to present an insurmountable barrier to her release. In that isolated castle she had passed nine months of sor row and anxiety — possibly of penitence — but never without hope of restoration to sovereign authority. Admiration she could com mand under the greatest reverse of fortune. George Douglas, the younger brother of William Douglas, the owner of "Lochleven cas tle, was subdued by her charms ; and even his proud mother, whose * History of England, vol. v. Robertson and Laing agree in this opinion. Hume supports his conviction by an argument for their genuineness under fifteen heads (Notes M vol. v.) Mr. Aytoun boldly say., " The letters are now, I believe, universally admitted to be rank forgeries." Notes to " Bothwell," p- 293. CIRCUMSTANCES OF HER ESCAPE. 69 son was the regent Murray, had mitigated her original severity under Mary's fascinating influence.' By the aid of George Doug las, she had attempted to escape in the disguise of a laundress ; but her delicate white hands had betrayed her real condition, and she was brought back to her solitary prison. This attempt was made on the 25th of April, and is described in a letter from Drury to Cecil. Mary had put on the hood of her laundress and had covered her face with a muffler or veil ; and so, with a bundle- of " plothes she entered a boat that was about to cross the Loch. " Af ter some space, one of them that rowed said merrily, ' Let us see what manner of dame this is,' and therewith offered to pull down her muffler, which to defend she put up her hands, which they espied to be very fair and white." Thus discovered, the boatmen heeded not her commands to row her over to the shore, but carried her back again to the castle. George Douglas, John Beaton, a brother of the archbishop of Glasgow, and other friends, were waiting at Kinross. A more successful attempt quickly followed. On the 2nd of May she accomplished her purpose by the aid of the same devoted admirer, the younger Douglas, who, dismissed from the castle, was still able to carry on a secret correspondence with the queen, and contrived to organise a formidable confederacy in her favour. The story of Mary's escape has been worked up into the most picturesque of narratives by the great novelist of Scotland, and with no important deviation from the actual circumstances. These - are related with some minuteness in an account transmitted by John Beaton to the king of France, and, upon his authority, re- Ipeated in an Italian letter to Cosmo de Medici from his envoy at Paris. * Beaton, nothing discouraged by the failure of the 25th of April, had contrived a new plan for her escape ; and on the evening of the 2nd of May, there are anxious watchers on the neighbouring hills, and in the village of Kinross. One solitary man is gazing towards the castle from the edge of the lake. The outer gate opens, and a -female hastens towards a boat. She leads a girl of ten years old by. the hand ; and a youth stays behind for a minute to lock the gate through which they have -passed. He is a page of the castle, called the little Douglas. He has been won to Mary's" succour, and he has rendered the most effectual aid by adroitly removing the massy key as he places a plate before the castellan, who is intent upon his evening meal. " The lad, Willie," as he is * Tytler, " Proofs and Illustrations to History of Scotland," vol. vii. p, 457. yo HISTORY OF ENGLAND. called in a letter from Kirkaldy to Douglas, has done his work like a true hero of romance ; and he has been immortalised under an other name. * The female and her two youthful attendants enter the boat. There is a white veil, with a broad red fringe, waving in the setting sun ; and the gazers upon the boat know by this sig nal that it remains for them to insure success to this perilous enter prise. It was lord Seaton and his friends who were watching the going in and the return of the boat, from their quiet hidings on the hills. It was George Douglas who was the first to receive Mary on the edge of the lake. The instant she landed, the queen was on horseback— she who once regretted " that she was not a mr.n, to lie all night in the fields, or to walk upon the causeway with a jack and a knapscap, a Glasgow buckler and a broadsword." She rode at full speed to Niddrie castle, where she rested a few hours ; wrote a letter to France ; commanded a Hepburn to go to Dunbar to claim the castle for her; and then to carry to Bothwell, in Den mark, the news of her deliverance. She then again took horse, and arrived at Hamilton, where she considered herself secure. In a few hours she was surrounded by numerous lords and their fol lowers. The deposed prisoner of a dreary castle on the 2nd of May, was on the 5th a queen at the head of an army. But the earls and bishops, the barons and abbots, who, -to the number of a hundred and fifty, had assembled at Mary's Council at Hamilton, %nd had declared the proceedings which had ended in Murray's regency as treasonable and of none effect, — these, in the want of a commanding leader, and each with his motives of vague ambition, — were unequal to cope with the master-mind of the re gent, supported as he was by able counsellors who had every thing to lose, and by enthusiastic reformers whom no peril could turn away from the great cause for which they were as ready to fight as to preach. Murray was at Glasgow, only eightymiles from Mary's camp at Hamilton with an ordinary train, who attended upon his presidency in a court of justice there. Offers of negotiation were sent to him from the queen's council; but he issued a proclamation in which he avowed his resolve to support the government of the king. Some advised retreat. He decided not to move, but to gather assistance for an instant attack upon the queen's force. In ten days he was at the head of four thousand disciplined men. Mary's soundest advisers first counselled that she should remove to Dunbarton, which castle had been secured for her ; and there, * Roland Gr:eme, the page in " The Abbot." BATTLE OF LANGSYDE. 7 1 without the hazard of a battle, to endeavour to regain that influence in the kingdom which she had lost from the time of her fatal mar riage with Bothwell. But the party of the Hamiltons thought themselves strong enough to destroy Murray, and secure their own ascendency. The march to Dunbarton on the 13th of May, was, however, decided upon ; but it was to be made in the face of an enemy who had his choice of attack or delay. Murray's camp was on the moor on the right bank of the Clyde, near Glasgow. The queen's army had its line of advance on the opposite bank. They had to defile through a narrow lane. Grange, who commanded under Murray, saw his advantage, and fording the Clyde with his horsemen, each having a foot-soldier behind him, placed them amongst cottages and gardens on each side of this lane. The queen's vanguard were driven back by the heavy fire which awaited their progress. Murray and Morton had crossed the river by a bridge, with their border pikemen. Morton led an advance, and the conflict was for some time doubtful. Murray had stood for a short time on the defensive against the charges of cavalry ; but by an attack upon the queen's ranks with his main force the battle of three-quarters of an hour was decided. The number slain was comparatively small — not more than three hundred on the queen's side, and only two persons on the side of the regent. " There is an account in the State Paper Office, headed "Advertisements of the Conflicts in Scotland," dated May 16, which, in mentioning the flight of the queen's party, says, " At the beginning of which chase the earl of Murray willed and required all his to spare for shedding of more blood." We learn from the narrative, that " the queen beheld this conflict within half a mile distant, standing upon a hill." In that civil warfare she would ill distinguish between her friends and her foes; for "there were divers of the queen's part taken and not brought in, for there was the father against the son, and brother against brother, as namely, three of the Melvins of the lords' side, and two of the queen's." When all hope was lost on the dispersion of her army, Mary rode at full speed towards Dum fries ; and never halted till she had reached the abbey of Dun- drennan, near Kirkcudbright. On the 16th, having determined to take refuge in England, she crossed the Solway in a small boat, and landed at Workington, in Cumberland. On the 17th, while remaining at Workington, she addressed a letter in French to ¦Elizabeth, in which she enumerates the wrongs she had received from her rebellious subjects ; describes the battle of Langsyde ; 72 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. and implores the queen that, having come into her country, she would receive her for safety of her life, and further assist her in her just quarrel. She adds, " I entreat you to send to fetch me as soon as you possibly can, for I am in a pitiable state not only for a queen but for a gentlewoman ; for I have nothing in the world but what I had on my person when I made my escape, travelling sixty miles across the country on the first day, and not having since dared to proceed except by night." * When Mary arrived at Workington she was received with kindness by the country gen tlemen ; and was conducted with respect to Carlisle by Mr. Low- ther, the deputy-governor. She was attended by her friends, lords Herries and Fleming. Herries had taken the precaution to write to Lowther on the 15th, to know if the queen could come safely to Carlisle ; but Mary was too impatient to wait for the answer, which was to the effect that, without instructions, he could only under take to receive her with due honour, and to keep her in safety till the pleasure of the queen of England was known. The position in which the English government was placed by the sudden events of a single fortnight was one of real embarrass ment. We say the English government ; for to attribute the policy pursued towards Mary to the personal feelings of Elizabeth, and not to the deliberate advice of her counsellors, is one of those mis takes which, in deference to popular views, historical writers have not been sufficiently careful to avoid. There is a paper extant in Cecil's handwriting which shows his extreme solicitude to arrive at a safe judgment upon the most difficult question that had ever pre sented itself to the sober regard of a statesman. That the queen of Scots should continue to be deprived of her crown, and that the administration of the country should remain under the regenc) , he holds to be the best way for England, but not the easiest. The escape from Lochleven, the claim of aid from Elizabeth of succour and protection, complicated that safer position which existed when the matters in dispute were confined to Mary and her own people. The queen of England had been strongly opposed to the deposition of Mary ; but to take measures for her restoration, in opposition to an established authority which had been confirmed by the .Scottish parliament, was to enter upon a war against those Protestant opin ions upon which the rule of Elizabeth herself was founded. To permit Mary to return to Scotland without conditions, or to seek for aid from France, would either be a course of no light danger. * EUis, First Series, vol. p. u. 236. mary's detention in England. 73 To suffer her to remain in perfect freedom in England would have been to endanger Elizabeth's own position, by giving encourage ment to that Roman Catholic party that held Mary as the legiti mate heir of the English throne. Cecil saw all these difficulties, when he had to consider whether Mary's demand of an interview with Elizabeth could be conceded. Sir James Mackintosh holds that in the arguments which Cecil had set down for the guidance of his sovereign, he " had taken a comprehensive view of all the mixed considerations of policy and justice which arose on that peculiarly debateable ground, on which the safety of a people seems to create a species of moral right, and to justify those acts which are necessary to secure the undisturbed quiet of the state, even when they deviate from rules which are, with reason, deemed inviolable in any but the most extreme and extraordinary cases."* The detention of Mary, the deposed queen of the Scots, and of Napoleon, the abdicated emperor of the French, when each had put themselves in the power of the English government without conditions, have some parallel in their exception from ordinary rules. Pointing out this general resemblance of the cases, the same wise teacher of political philosophy says, " The imprisonment, though in neither case warranted by the rules of municipal or international law, was in both justified by that neces sity from which those rules have sprung, and without which no violence can rightfully be done to a human being." f The policy of the English government with regard to Mary resolved itself into a determination that there should be a solemn investigation into the truth of the charges against her of being accessary to the murder of her husband. Elizabeth, whatever might have been her notion of the abstract right of sovereigns, was too wise, or had too wise advisers, to listen to the exhortation of Catherine de Medici, "to persevere in. the same opinion which you have hitherto maintained, that princes should assist each other to chastise and punish subjects who rise against them, and are rebels to their sovereigns." Sir Francis Knollys, a kinsman of Elizabeth, was sent by her to confer with Mary at Carlisle ; and he used an argument towards her, as reported by him to his queen, which opens a large field of exception to the doctrine of the queen-mother of France : " I objected unto her that in some cases princes might be deposed from their government by their subjects lawfully, as if a prince should fall into madness. And, said I, what difference is * History of England," vol. iii. p. 115. t Ibid; P- "'» note. 74 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. there between lunacy and cruel murdering ; for the one is an evil humour proceeding of melancholy, and the other is an evil humour proceeding of choler ; wherefore the question is whether your grace deserved to be put from the government or not." At this argument the tears tell from the eyes of the unhappy Mary. Whether Eliza beth wholly approved of the logic of her representative, or not, the decision of her government was put upon this issue. The detention of Mary at Carlisle, near the Scottish frontier being thought dangerous, she was removed in July to Bolton castle. Her indignation at being considered a prisoner was unabated. The factions in Scotland were at open war. A French army was expected with eagerness by Mar)-'s adherents, though she herself disclaimed any knowledge of their intended landing. An armistice was at length concluded between the opposing parties ; and a conference was opened at York on the 4th of October. The queen of England was represented by three commissioners, the duke of Norfolk, the earl of Sussex, and sir Ralph Sadler, who were to hear the allega tions of the queen of Scots against her rebellious subjects ; and the counter-charges against herself, made by those who had raised war against their sovereign. Mary chose the bishop of Ross and lord Herries, with others, to be her commissioners. Murray was ac companied by four commissioners, with Lethington and Buchanan as assistants. The representatives of Mary set forth the notorious facts of the revolt against her by the usurpers of her authority, of her imprisonment, her deposition, the coronation of her infant son, the regency of Murray, her enforced flight into England. Murray was placed in a position of extreme difficulty if not of danger. Before he brought forward proofs of the crimes of Mar)-, which could alone justify the course he and his' friends had pursued, he sought to receive some assurance that, if the queen of Scots should be declared guilty, he should be sanctioned by the English govern ment in his proceedings, and supported in his office. The assur ance was not given ; for the question was to be submitted to Eliza beth's own decision. The duke of Norfolk, who afterwards paid a terrible penalty for his espousal of the cause of Mary in the desire to become her husband — not without some inclination to favour her claim to the English crown— influenced Murray to withhold his accusations against the queen of Scots. " The English queen, his mi: tross," he said, " was resolved during her life to evade the question of the succession, careless what blood might be shed, of what confusion might arise upon the point : as to the true title CONFERENCES OF YORK AND LONDON. 75 none doubted that it lay in the queen of Scots and her son ; and much he marvelled that the regent, whom he had always reputed a wise and honourable man, should come hither to blacken his mis tress, and, as far as he could, destroy the prospect of her and her son's succession."* In consequence of this influence, Murraj withheld the real defence of himself and his friends, and made no public charge against Mary. But he privately exhibited to Nor folk, Sussex, and Sadler, the written proofs of Mary's guilt, alleged to have been found in the silver .casket. The commissioners of Elizabeth transmitted to her an abstract of these papers, with this strong opinion of their authenticity : — " The letters discourse of some things which were unknown to any other than herself and Bothwell ; and as it is hard to counterfeit so many, so the matter of them, and the manner in which these men came by them, are such that as it seemeth that God, in whose sight murder is abomin able, would not permit the same to be hid or concealed. "f The commissioners of Mary had now an interview with Elizabeth, when she informed them that the enemies of their queen had entirely failed in their defence ; but that another conference should be held in London. Murray, after some further hesitation, made his accu sation against the qupen in the strongest terms ; and Lennox, the father of the murdered Darnley, also accused Mary of conspiring his death. Mary's commissioners now required that she should be heard in person by Elizabeth ; which Elizabeth refused, until M urray had brought forward his proofs. The commissioners of Mary then took an extraordinary step. They made a proposal for a compromise, by which Murray and the queen should be reconciled. This proposition was rejected by Elizabeth. The bishop of Ross, arid his associates, now declared that the conferences were at an end, as Elizabeth had determined to receive from Murray proofs of his injurious charges against Mary, before she was herself heard in the presence of hy sister-queen. The discussions and recrimi nations were prolonged for some time. Murray delivered his proofs as regarded the written evidence of Mary's complicity in the guilt of Darnley's assassination ; and her commissioners still persisted in their refusal to re-open the conferences. Elizabeth, as Norfolk had intimated, would come to no final decision. Mr. * Melvil's Memoirs, quoted by Tytler as unquestionable authority, " as he was not only present at York, but the regent made him privy to this secret interview." See also Jardine's "Criminal Trials," vol. i. t Letter from York, October 11, 1568. 76 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Tytler, after fully narrating these remarkable proceedings, in which he holds that " both Elizabeth and the queen of Scots acted with great art," says, "so far as we judge of these conferences by themselves, they leave the mind under the unsatisfying and painful impression that the conduct of the Scottish queen, throughout the whole investigation, was that of a person neither directly guilty, nor yet wholly innocent."* During the conferences at York and London, Mary Stuart had remained under the care of Lord Scrope, at Bolton. By an order of Council in January, 1569, she was placed with George, earl of Shrewsbury, and was removed to his castle of Tutbury, on the 2nd of February. The earl, one of the highest of the peers of Eng land, had the burthensome, dangerous, and not very honourable office imposed upon him, of having the custody, for many years, of the deposed queen, who, however strictly watched, was in corre spondence, from first to last, with the enemies of Elizabeth and her government ; and who was the pivot of most of the domestic and foreign intrigues for the overthrow of English Protestantism. Be fore the end of 1568 the earl of Shrewsbury had written to his en ergetic wife, known as " Bess of Hardwick," that the queen had told him she meant to trust him as she would trust few, by which he understood that he was to have the custody of the queen of Scots. It is difficult to understand how any nobleman of great riches and influence, if possessed of a high spirit, could have sub mitted to the slavery of such an office. Shrewsbury and his wife were to be ever at Mary's side. She was carried about with them from Tutbury to their various castles and manor-houses — to Shef field, to Buxton, to Worksworth; to Chatsworth, to Winfield. These, indeed, were pleasant places, surrounded by cultivated fields and rich woods — far different from the solitary Lochleven. Tut bury castle stood upon a high hill, at the foot of which runs tbe river Dove; with Needwood forest around it, and the Peak moun tains in the distance. Sheffield castle was upon an eminence over looking the little town, where " the whittle " was then forged with out the tilt-hammer. In the grand old halls where John Talbot had held his state, Mary spent fourteen years of her captivity, with a few temporary changes. Tradition says that Hardwick was amongst her prison-houses ; and in that fine mansion of the Tudor days we are shown her bedroom and her tapestry-work. But tra- * " History of Scotland," vol. vii. p. 26S. ANXIETY FOR THE SAFE CUSTODY OF MARY. 77 dition is wrong, according to modern archaeology ; * although Bishop Kennet, a hundred and sixty years ago, said of Mary, " Her chamber and rooms of state, with her arms and other ensigns, are still remaining at Hardwick ; her bed was taken away for plunder in the Civil Wars." f But wherever Mary was, the anxiety of Elizabeth for her safe detention was unremitting. In August, 1569, Cecil writes to the earl that the queen was troubled that he, Shrewsbury, was going, or gone, to the baths at Buxton ; " and," he says, "if you. were gone, which she said she would hardly be lieve, then I should seek to understand what order your lordship had left for attendance upon the said queen, and that yourself should not be long absent from thence." Cecil adds, what may be con sidered as a piece of court duplicity, that " her majesty said she did as much esteem for her own honour to have the queen of Scots to be honourably attended, as for any matter of surety." f Within a fortnight . after this letter, Shrewsbury is warned not to permit persons coming to himself or his lady, " to have resort to the queen of Scots' presence." In another month, the earl of Huntingdon, in consequence of the sickness of Shrewsbury, is commanded to repair to Shrewsbury's house, with his own trusty servants, " and there to take the charge of the said queen." In a letter from Eliza beth herself to Huntingdon, she says, " We will have you also, after conference with- our said cousin of Shrewsbury, to devise how the number of the queen of Scots' train might be diminished, and reduced only to thirty persons of all sorts, as was ordered, but, as we perceive, too much enlarged of late time. You shall also, jointly with the earl of Shrewsbury, give order that no such common resort be to the queen as hath been ; nor that she have such liberty to send posts as she hath clone." § A short note from Cecil to Shrewsbury, of the same date, shows a cause for all this jealous vigilance : " The queen's majesty is entered into no small offence with the intention that she thinketh hath been to devise of a mar riage with the Scottish queen." || " We have seen how, during the conferences at York, the duke of Norfolk prevailed upon the re- gent Murray to suppress his charges against Mary. When Murray was goaded into a public accusation, Norfolk was greatly, angered ao-ainst him ¦ but they became reconciled, and Murray consented * See a paper by the Rev. J. Hunter, in " Archseologia," vol. xxxii. t Quoted in Mr. Craik's " Romance ofthe Peerage." vol. iii. p. 178. t Lodge's " Illustrations," ato, vol. ii. p. 18. § Ibid., p- 21 U Lodge's " Illustrations," 4to, vol. ii. p. 23 yg HISTORY OF ENGLAND. to favour Norfolk's project of a marriage with Mary. In 1569 this scheme was promoted by some English nobles, without the privity of Elizabeth ; and a letter was written by Leicester, and three other lords, to Mary, urging her to consent to such a marriage, to which she returned a favourable answer. A formal contract of marriage was afterwards drawn up. .In August, 1569, some ladies of Elizabeth's court got to the knowledge of this secret— with the feminine " sagacity in smelling out amatory affairs." * Leicester, wlio was subsequently accused by Norfolk as the inventor of this scheme for his ruin, revealed the transaction to the queen and was forgiven. Elizabeth then invited the duke to dine with her ; and, when he rose to leave, significantly told him " to beware on what pillow he laid his head." This is Camden's anecdote, no doubt founded upon what was urged against the duke by the queen's ser jeant, upon his trial in 1 572 ; namely, that the queen having under stood hi* intention to marry with Mary, he complained to her of the rumour ; " in which complaint," says the serjeant, " as I have heard her majesty herself declare it, and some here of my lords have likewise heard it, he said, ' To what end should I seek to marry her, being so wicked a woman, such a notorious adulteress, and murderer ? I love to sleep upon a safe pillow. I account my self, by your majesty's good favour, as good a prince at home in my bowling-alley at Norwich as she is, though she was in the mid dle of her kingdom. The revenues of the crown of Scotland are not comparable to mine own, that I enjoy by your goodness, as I have heard of the chief officers of that realm ; besides, her kingdom is not in her own hand, but possessed by another. If I should seek to match with her, knowing, as I do know, that she pretendeth a title to your crown, your majesty might justly charge me with seek ing to take your own crown from your head.' This the duke spake to the queen's majesty, in his excuse, when the rumour was spread of his proposed marriage with the Scottish queen ; and yet, at that time, he had dealt earnestly in it." f The duke of Norfolk was committed to the Tower on the 9th of October, where he continued a prisoner till the 4th of the fol lowing August. Cecil honestly protested against the duke being brought to trial for high treason upon insufficient evidence. But this autumn of 1 569 was a period of great anxiety, which sufficiently justified the vigilance and suspicion of Elizabeth's government. Immediately after the arrest of Norfolk an insurrection broke out * Camden. t Jardine, p. 162. LADY CATHERINE GREY. 70 in the northern counties, headed by the catholic lords, Percy, earl of Northumberland, and Neville, earl of Westmoreland. They proclaimed their design of restoring the old religion, and it was their intention to release the queen of Scots, and to place her upon the English throne. They also contemplated the release of Nor folk. Mary was hurriedly removed from Tutbury castle to Cov entry. The details of this insurrection will be better understood after a brief view of the progress of the country towards a settled government and established religion, since the accession of queen Elizabeth. In the desire not to interrupt the course of our narrative as re gards Mary, queen of Scots, we passed over an interesting matter of public and personal history — the touching story of lady Cathe rine Grey. This second sister of lady Jane Grey had been be trothed to lord Herbert ; but upon the fortunes of the house of Suffolk falling before the ascendency of Mary Tudor, the alliance was repudiated, and Herbert was married to a daughter of the earl of Shrewsbury. After the death of the duchess of Suffolk, the niece of Henry VIIL, in the first year of Elizabeth's reign, her daughter, lady Catherine Grey, stood next to Mary Stuart as the heir to the crown after the death of Elizabeth ; and, according to the will of Henry VIIL, she was considered by some as having the true title to its immediate possession. Lady Catherine had a court- appointment under Elizabeth, and was the intimate friend of Jane Seymour, the daughter of the Protector Somerset, who was also one of the Maids of Honour. His brother, Edward Seymour, who had been created earl of Hertford, was fascinated by Catherine ; and these lovers were privately married, the bride being about twenty-one, and the husband a year older. Hertford went abroad in 1 561, and Catherine, having been unable to conceal the conse quences of this hasty union, was sent to the Tower. The widow of the Protector writes to Cecil denying all knowledge of her son's marriage, and hopes the wilfulness of her unruly child will not di minish the queen's favour. * Harsh as the imprisonment of Cath erine Grey may seem, we must bear in mind the extreme jealousy with which alliances of persons of royal blood, made without the consent of the reigning sovereign, have at all times been regarded. But the evidence of this marriage was not forthcoming. The young people had made their way on foot from Whitehall to the earl's house, — according to their own statements after Hertford had re- * " Calendar of State Papers," August 22, 1561. 80 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. turned home and had been also imprisoned, — and a priest, whose name was unknown, had married them, the sole witness being Jane Seymour, who had soon after died. A commission of inquiry was appointed, consisting of archbishop Parker and certain divines and lawyers ; and it was declared that there had been no legal marriage. A second son was born in 1563, Hertford and Catherine being still in confinement. Some additional severity was now thought neces sary, and Hertford was fined in three several sums of five thousand pounds, by process in the Star-Chamber. * From this period till her death in 1568, Catherine continued under the queen's dis pleasure ; and there are some touching letters of her uncle, which show how deeply she felt this anger, which kept her in a dishon ourable position, and separated her from him who she maintained was her true husband. But the' common narratives which state that she wore out her life in strict confinement in the Tower, and there died, are not founded in fact. We can trace the course of her suffering years of marriage distinctly, from authentic docu ments. She was sent to the Tower in August, 1561. Her rooms were furnished somewhat sumptuously by the queen's command ; but, according to the petition of the lieutenant of the Tower, who, in September 1563, asked to have "the stuff " for his perquisite, it was "most of it so torn and tattered with her monkeys and dogs, as will serve to small purpose." Catherine and her husband were removed from the Tower in August, in 1563, on account of the plague having broken out in London ; the lady being given to the charge of her uncle, lord John Grey. The displeasure of Elizabeth might probably have passed away, had not John Hales, a partisan of the claims of the house of Suffolk to the crown, published a book in April, 1564, in which he attempted to confute the preten sions of the Scottish queen, and maintained the validity of the marriage of Hertford and Catherine Grey. On May 26, 1564, we find that the earl of Hertford was committed to the custody of the lieutenant of the Tower; t but the common statement that both he and his wife were re-committed to that prison in 1565. appears to be supported by no very clear evidence. Catherine's uncle died in November, 1564, and she was then given in charge to Mr. Sec retary Petre. On the 14th of May, 1566, sir John Wentworth writes to the Council, saying he has received a letter from the * The legitimacy of the children of this marriage was established in 1606, by an action at law, when the priest who married Hertford and Catherine was produced. " Calendar of State Papers." LADY CATHERINE GREY. 8 1 queen commanding him to take charge of the lady Catherine, but he prays to be excused. But no doubt the responsibility was forced upon him, for on the 2nd of October, 1567, the queen di rects sir Owen Hopton, in consequence of the demise of sir John Wentworth, to take into his charge the lady Catherine Grey, but to keep her from the access of, all strangers. On the nth of Jan uary, 1568, Hopton writes to Cecil that she has kept her bed three days. On the 27th of that month she died at his house at Yox- ford, in Suffolk. The common assertion that she, who was re served for a more lingering misery than her sister Jane, died in the Tower, is altogether incorrect. There is a very affecting account of the death-bed of this poor lady, and her last conversation with sir Owen Hopton; who perceiving her draw near her end, said to a bystander, " Were it not best to send to the church, that the bell be rung." * Upon this subject we have received the following interesting communication, f "When vicar of Yoxford, in Suffolk, 1 found the record of her burial there. It was the first entry I noticed in the register. This led me to examine the Manuscript in the British Museum, giving an account, as stated, of her death in the Tower. The heading of the Manuscript, indeed, is" to this effect; but the heading is not in the handwriting of the original scribe, and is of more recent date. The error is obvious, and so is its cause. Sir Owen Hopton, after wards lieutenant of the Tower, X was present, and asked, should the passing bell be tolled ? The writer of the heading was not aware that sir Owen Hopton was lord of Yoxford, and that Cath erine resided under his charge at Cockfield hall. Here her great chest with the royal arms of England may be still seen. One of the heralds in his Visitations mentions the affecting story of her lap-dog persisting to lie upon her grave there, and expiring in sor row for her loss." The lady Mary Grey, the youngest daughter of Frances Bran don, made also a rash marriage with Elizabeth's Serjeant Porter. She, the least at the court, married the biggest gentleman — as Cecil described them. They also had to endure the anger of the queen, and were sent to prison. The tiny woman survived her husband, but died many years before Elizabeth. * Harl. MS., Ellis, Second Series, vol. ii. p. 288. t Letter to the author of this History, from the Rev. Joseph D'Arcy Sirr, D. D., As sistant Chaplain to the Forces. t The first notice of sir Owen Hopton being Lieutenant of the Tower is found t " Cal endar of State Papers") under the date of March, 1571. Vol. III.— 6 82 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER IV. General view of the first ten years of Elizabeth. — Movement of Rome against Protestant ism. — The persecutions in the Netherlands and in France. — Intrigues against Eliza beth. — Insurrection of the north. — Pius V. issues a bull of excommunication against Elizabeth. — Parliament of 1571 — Statutes against papists. — Puritanical party in the House of Commons. — Motion for reform of abuses in the Church. Trial and execu tion of the duke of Norfolk. — Troubles of Scotland. — The Huguenots of France pro pitiated by the marriage of the prince of Navarre. — Coligny shot. — The massacre of Saint Bartholomew resolved upon. — Its perpetration. — Effect of the news upon tbe court and people of England. — New danger of the queen of Scots. The contemporaries of Elizabeth regarded the first ten years of her reign as " her halcyon days." The transition from the fiery Catholicism of Mary Tudor to the temperate Protestantism of her sister Elizabeth had been accomplished without bloodshed or con vulsion. In the parliament of 1559. the nation was quietly led back to its ecclesiastical condition in the time of Edward VI. ; and con formity was not rendered difficult or impossible by any needless stringency towards those who adhered to the old religion. In the parliament of 1 563 measures of a stronger character were adopted against papists. Symptoms began to manifest themselves of a more active opposition to the civil and religious settlement under Elizabeth, induced by the arguments of catholic teachers who were spread about the country. Some persons, lay and ecclesiastical, were deterred from conformity, and others left the realm. But still there was no outbreak produced either by supineness or persecu tion. The parliament of 1 566 passed no new law that, in any mat ter of importance, touched the subject of religion. Differences of opinion as to ceremonial observances had arisen amongst the Enc- lish protestants themselves ; and those who were called Puritans were fast becoming an organised power. But at the time when Mary Stuart had crossed the Solway, and the great question of policy had been raised as to her detention, the state of Protestanism in Europe, upon the maintenance of which in England the govern ment of Elizabeth was to stand or* fall, was one of great insecurity and alarm. The halcyon days were fast passing away. The people of this country had been prospering in the labours of peace. They GENERAL VIEW ^OF TEN YEARS OF THIS REIGN. 83 had been extending their commerce to distant lands where the benefits of inter-communication had been little appreciated by earlier adventurers. Their sailors had gone forth to make mari time discoveries. Frobisher was seeking a new passage to India • and Hawkins had found a fresh source of wealth in the hateful African slave-trade. Gresham was building an Exchange in Lon don, where the merchants of all nations might meet to buy and sell. The great principles of commerce were so far understood that merchandise was allowed to be exported and imported in foreign ships, upon the payment of alien imposts ; and the English and Flemish merchants united their contributions for marine insurance. The people were lightly taxed, for the government was an econom ical one. Whatever were the religious differences of the com munity, its various members united peaceably in the duties of their several callings. They felt that they were under a firm govern ment ; and in the security of such a governmeat, despotic enough but not corrupt or lavish, the wealth and intelligence of England were steadily progressing. In 1568, when Elizabeth and her ministers were displaying towards Mary Stuart a policy which it is easy to call unjust and cruel, treacherous and ungenerous, the heretical queen of England and her protestant subjects were the objects of the bitterest hatred of those who thought the time was come to extirpate heresy by fire and sword. A Dominican monk of the severest life — a zealot who had distinguished himself as an inquisitor — became pope in 1566, under the title of Pius V. A more furious bigot never sat on the papal throne ; and his bigotry was the more terrible from the cir cumstance that it was conscientious. When he sent a force to the aid of the French catholics, he told their leader " to take no Hugue not prisoner, but instantly to kill every one that fell into his hands." * When the savage duke of Alva was butchering without remorse in the Netherlands, the holy father sent him a consecrated hat and sword, in admiration of his'Christian proceedings. Pius V. avowed his desire to devote the treasures of the church, even to its chalices and crucifixes, to carry a religious war into England ; and to head such an expedition himself. The influence of this frantic perse cutor over kings who made their religious intolerance an instrument of their cruel tyranny, such as Philip II. , was enormous. This Popa of the Inquisition, as he has been called, arose, with his sole ides- of extirpating heresy by force, at a time when the two great * Ranke, vol. i. p. 383. 84 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. religious principles were coming into open conflict. The period for accommodation had passed away. In 1568 Alva was appointed by Philip, Captain-general of the Netherlands. His mission was to destroy the heretics, root and branch ; and he accomplished his work with a success that left his master -and his master's holy coun sellor nothing to desire. While Alva was in Valenciennes, Ghent, Brussels, Antwerp, hanging, beheading, racking, burning, and con fiscating, the secretary of Philip said to the papal nuncio, "are you now satisfied with the proceedings of the king ? " The smiling nuncio answered, " quite satisfied." The tribunal which condemned the victims whom their officers had ferreted out, was called the " Council of Blood." From the great commercial cities of the Netherlands there were hosts of fugitives, although the most terrible penalties were denounced against those who attempted to fly. Many came for refuge to England. The same asylum was sought by Huguenots of France, when the hopes of their party were destroyed on the field -of Moncontour. They said, — " Our hearths we abandon, our lands we resign, But, Father, we kneel to no altar but thine." * Amongst these refugees were not only a great number who pro fessed Calvinistic opinions, but others who carried their principle of liberty of conscience into the avowal of doctrines which even liberal protestants considered dangerous. Those who were op posed to infant baptism were held, with great injustice, to belong to the old sect of anabaptists, whose social opinions were deemed adverse to all regular government. Whilst the general body of exiles, by the recital of their injuries, diffused a popular hatred of papal persecution, some strengthened that dislike to many of the ceremonial observances of the English church, which gradually es tablished a large class who, in their hatred of popery, would tolerate no forms that appeared derived from the ancient worship. A few became obnoxious to that intolerance which, in the earlier days of the Reformation, hunted out those who, deservedly or not, were suspected of holding to the opinions which John of Leyden rendered infamous. But the puritan doctrines, or the more heterodox, as yet gave slight trouble to the government of Elizabeth, compared with the civil and religious dangers apprehended in the present crisis of Catholic hostility to every form of Protestantism. The furious pope had his agents in England denouncing the queen as a * Macaulay, " Songs of the Huguenots." INTRIGUES AGAINST ELIZABETH. 85 heretic. Philip was maturing plots by advances of money to his spies in London. Alva was devising plans for an invasion of the island that had cast off the successor of St. Peter. Around Mary Stuart were concentred all the intrigues that sought to place the orthodox and legitimate descendant of Henry VII. upon the throne of the heretical and illegitimate daughter of Anne Boleyn. The insurrection of the north, of 1 569, was no immature combination of a few discontented papist nobles, but a result of the general move ment against the reformers that was agitating Europe. Those who regard this crisis through the thick veil of their sentimentalities about the unfortunate Scottish queen, with the usual trashy belief in Elizabeth's jealousy of her superior charms, will do well to ab stain from the study of what they call history, and surrender them selves with an undivided trust to the professed writers of poetry and romance. History has to deal with serious truths, and not with morbid sympathies and blind nationalities. It was the glory of the first ten years of Elizabeth's reign that "no English blood had been shed on the scaffold or in the field for a public quarrel, whether civil or religious."* If, during the next twenty years, we h ive, amidst a constant advance of national prosperity, to trace the course of conspiracies and insurrections, we must look at England as the arena where the two great principles that were dividing Europe were fought out. The victory remained with the sagacious statesmen who best understood the character of the nation — states men led by a ruler unsurpassed in the highest attributes of a sov ereign; one who in every danger was equal to the emergency; who felt the grandeur of her pbsition as the head of the Reforma tion ; whose force of character made that Protestantism secure which was once more than doubtful ; who, in the hour of her great est trial, when the catholic world gathered together all its strength to crush the heretic islanders, threw herself boldly upon the affec tions of her people, one and all, and the danger was overpast ; the sovereign to whom we chiefly owe that, after the lapse of three hundred years, the faith which she built up is so safe that it allows the widest toleration to take the place of the exclusive conformity of her time. This is the queen that history should paint. The foibles of the woman belong to a lower province of literature. In the autumn of 1569 there were symptoms of disquiet in the northern counties. Cecil, in a letter of the 13th of October, to the earls of Shrewsbury and Huntingdon, says, in a postscript, " My * Mackintosh. 86 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. lords,— It may be that you have [heard] or shall hear of a fond rumour stirred up the 6th of this month, in the North Riding and the Bishopric, of a rising should be ; but it was a vain smoke, but without any spark of any account,"* When the wary minister wrote this he probably knew perfectly well that the smoke was not without fire. The general disaffection of the northern catholics was well known. Sadler wrote from the border counties, " There are not in all this country ten gentlemen that do favour and allow of her majesty's proceedings in the cause of religion." t Dr. Nor ton, who had been a prebendary of York in the time of Queen Mary, had come from Rome with the title of apostolical peniten tiary. He had incited the catholic priests and the northern gentle men by statements that the pope was about to issue a bull of deposition against Elizabeth. He was a relative of the families of Norton and Markenfield, whom Mary Stuart numbered amongst her friends. The earls of Westmorland and Northumberland were in secret communication with her. The adroitness by which Mary contrived to elude the vigilance of those who had her -custody is one of the most remarkable points of her character. She was always borne up by the belief that she had the right to the throne filled by Elizabeth, and that the people of England would support her in that right if she had her liberty. The arrest of Norfolk precipi tated the insurrection. The schemes for foreign aid were devised, but not perfected. Alva was to have sent an auxiliary force to land at Hartlepool. These schemes and preparations could not be con cealed from the vigilance of Elizabeth's ministers. On the loth of November the earls of Westmorland and Northumberland were summoned to repair to court. Apprehensive of arrest Northum berland marched with his vassals to join Westmorland at the cas tle of Brancepeth. There was no longer any disguise. A proclam ation was issued, addressed to all professing the catholic faith, to restore the ancient worship ; and the earls marched on to Durham with a banner representing the bleeding Saviour — "the banner of the five wounds." It was borne by a brave old man, whose fate, and the fate of his eight sons, have been preserved from the oblivion of dry annals by the legends which a true poet has in vested with almost historical reality 4 The Nortons of Rylstone may claim our tears ; but we have little pity for the weak earls, who, when Sussex appeared against them with a strong force, fled * Lodge, vol. ii. p. 26. t Quoted in Lingard, vol. viii. p. 54 J Wordsworth, " White Doe of Rylstone." INSURRECTION OF THE NORTH. 87 to Scotland, leaving their followers to the terrible vengeance that followed a suppressed revolt. Northumberland, after a confine: ment of several years at Lochleven, was given up to the English government and executed. Westmorland died an exile in Flan ders. There was a subsequent revolt under lord Dacres of the North, which was put down after a battle, in which the catholics fought with desperation. The English Bible and Common Prayer had been burnt by the insurgents of 1569 in the cathedral of Durham. Their avowed intention was to march to Tutbury, and release Mary. Had they succeeded, the nation would have been plunged into a terrible civil war. The Catholics of the thinly-in habited border counties were numerous as well as desperate ; but the Protestants of the more densely peopled parts of England, and especially of the great towns, were far too united to have the old worship forced back upon them, the contest involving a new strug gle for the crown. Tbeir'horror of the past days of martyrdoms — • their dread of a foreign domination, with a Council of Blood and an Inquisition — -made the ascendant party furious and the govern ment revengeful. The triumph of 1569 was disgraced by fearful executions. It might have been disgraced by a more terrible act of vengeance. There is a letter written by Leicester to Walsing- ham in 1586, in which he urges the execution of the queen of Scots, and says, " Remember how, upon a less cause, how effect ually all the Council of England once dealt with her majesty for justice to be done upon that person ; for, being suspected and in formed to be consenting with Northumberland and Westmorland in the rebellion, you know the great seal of England was sent then, and thought just and meet, upon the sudden, for her execution." * Had the powers of the great seal thus been exercised — and the ex pressions of Leicester do not imply that any trial was contemplated — the reign of Elizabeth would have been stained with a greater crime than the eventual execution of Mary, after seventeen years more of hopeless plots and ever-present suspicions. But, what ever justification there may have been for the intrigues to recover liberty and power made by this victim of an insurmountable state necessity, there can be no doubt. that her life was a constant source of alarm to the English nation ; and that at every hostile move ment against Protestantism her death was loudly called for. If the unhappy Mary had warm friends amongst the Catholic party in both divisions of the island ; if there were many who regarded her as *•" Leycester Correspondence," edited by Mr. Bruce, p. 81. 88 HISTORY OF ENCLAND. innocent of the crimes laid to her charge, and were touched by a real pity for her misfortunes ; the great body of the English peo ple, who lived in security under the sagacious government of the queen, and looked with admiration upon her extraordinary abilities and strength of character, would have most gladly heard of the re moval, even by some violence to which long years of despotism had familiarised them, of one whom they justly regarded as a public enemy. The nation was in a more earnest mood than when it had quietly passed from the Protestantism of Edward to the Cathol icism of Mary, and back again to the Protestantism of Elizabeth. The number of enthusiasts on either side was rapidly increasing. Puritan and Jesuit were coming into closer warfare. There was a great battle of principle still to be waged by the Reformers ; for their victory could scarcely be held as thoroughly achieved. Opposed to them were men as zealous and more united. The power of the state was with the Protestant cause ; the ancient habit of implicit obedience to the head of the universal church gave a coherence to every movement of the Romanists. When Pius V, on the 25th of February, 1570, signed the threatened bull of ex communication against Elizabeth, which anathematised her and her adherents as heretics ; absolved all her subjects from their oath of allegiance ; and enjoined them, under pain of excommunication, not to obey her commands ; it was not likely that the principles at issue would approach nearer to accommodation. We are told by the catholic historian, "the time was gone by when the thunders of the Vatican could shake the thrones of princes."* When Alva sent copies of the bull to England, and Felton, an enthusiastic catholic, fixed it on the gates of the bishop of London's -residence, they could scarcely have meant its publicity as harmless sport. Felton was executed ; but he died, avowing himself a martyr, and gave the queen the title of "the pretender." There was at this time a conspiracy detected in Norfolk. With a less vigilant gov ernment the thunder might not only have alarmed, but the Iightninc might have struck. The danger was not so much to be appre hended from the catholics in a united body, as from the Jesuits and refugee priests who were constantly passing from the continent to England to dissuade the wavering from conformity, and to stimulate the hostile to acts of rebellion. An English college for these zeal ous missionaries had been established at Douav, about a year before the issue of the bull of excommunication. The natural issue * Lingard, vol. viii. p. 67. STATUTES AGAINST PAPISTS. . 89 of these attempts to shake the government and the established religion was the enactment-of more stringent laws against Roman Catholics, — laws, which in the happier spirit of our own age we may justly decry as harsh and unjust, but which we can scarcely venture to consider as simply tyrannical. The parliament met on the 2nd of April, 1571, after a suspen sion of legislation for more than four years. The speech of the lord-keeper, sir Nicholas Bacon, sets forth, with • considerable eloquence, the past blessings of the queen's reign, — the setting at liberty God's Word, and deliverance from Roman tyranny ; the inestimable benefit of peace ; and the clemency and mercy of the government. " I pray you," he says, " hath it been seen or read, that any prince of this realm during ten whole years' reign, and more, hath had his hands so clean from blood ? " That this peace had been disturbed and this clemency interrupted, he then imputes to " the raging Romanist rebels." This is the prelude to the first Statute of the session, which makes it treason to set forth that the q leen ought not to possess the crown but some other persons ; or to affirm that she is a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or usurper. The second clause of this Statute is evidently directed against Mary Stuart, enacting that all persons of any degree, nation, or estate, who during the queen's life should claim title to the crown should be disabled from inheriting the same ; and that any claim ant to .the right of succession, cdntrary to any proclamation on the matter that might be issued by the queen, should be declared guilty of high treason. The queen's advisers were desirous to carry the principle of exclusion further ; and to make a law that the queen of Scots was unable and unworthy to succeed. A com mittee of the Commons presented an address to Elizabeth, asking her to proceed criminally against Mary. Divines and statesmen concurred in urging violent measures against the prisoner. With archbishop Parker she was " one desperate person." With Wal- singham she was " that dangerous woman." Each called for "justice." It is the fashion to represent Elizabeth as always thirsting for her rival's blood ; yet it is perfectly clear that she re sisted Council and Parliament when they called for extreme pro ceedings against " the pretended Scottish queen." Parker asked for justice upon the desperate person that " the papists' daily ex pectation " might be " vanquished." The difficulties of the crisis were held to be met by the enactment of strong laws against the papists themselves. The statute of the 5th of Elizabeth against 90 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. upholding the jurisdiction of' the See of Rome had been trans gressed by bringing in bulls and instru'ments of absolution. It was now enacted, that the putting in use or publishing any such bull, or giving absolution under the same, or obtaining such an instru ment from Rome, shall be adjudged high treason ; and that such as brought into the kingdom crosses, pictures, beads, or other " vain and superstitious things," claiming to be hallowed by the bishop of Rome, or under his authority, should incur the penalties of praemunire. This statute was more comprehensive in its se verity than at first sight appears ; for the outward conformity of Romanists had been tolerated under absolution, without which they were excluded from the communion of their own church. How far it was politic to force the pliant and wavering into the established religion against the rights of conscience, or to render them liable to extreme dangers in asserting these rights, is a ques tion of which we cannot wholly judge. Of the injustice of such a proceeding there can be no doubt. But we cannot quite go along with the belief of one whose opinion is entitled to the utmost re spect, that " the nation, as it was clearly ready to profess either religion, would, beyond all doubt, have been ready to tolerate both; " and that " Elizabeth might have united all conflicting sects under the shelter of the same impartial laws and the same paternal throne, and thusjiave placed the nation in the same situation, as far as the rights of conscience are' concerned, in which we at last stand."* We can as readily believe that, without the experience of three centuries, Elizabeth might have bestowed upon her peo ple the relief from the system of commercial restriction which we have at length attained. " Confidence," said Chatham, "is a plant of slow growth ; ' ' and so is toleration. Lament as we may with the great historian over " the heart-burnings, the persecutions, the conspiracies, the seditions, the revolutions, the judicial murders, the civil wars, of ten generations," we have no assurance that the rights of conscience could have been established without such fearful trials of a nation's courage and endurance. Whilst the storm of papal bigotry was raging in the Netherlands and in France, — whilst Knox was proclaiming in Scotland that one mass was more fearful to him than ten thousand armed men, and carry ing the people with him,— it is difficult to imagine that England could have been smoothed into a perfect indifferentism, or that England would have been what she is if she had been so " rocked _ » Macaulay, " Essays— Burleigh and his Times." TRIAL OF THE DUKE OF NORFOLK. 9 1 and dandled" into liberality. But there was, moreover, a strong party in England that would not have endured anything approach ing to union between Protestant and Roman Catholic. The Act of the sth of Elizabeth, which excluded Roman Catholics from the House of Commons, gave an ascendency in that house to the more earnest reformers — those • who had very influential supporters in the queen's own councils, though their hostility to any ceremony or practice of the church supposed to be an approach to the old worship, was very obnoxious to the queen herself. That contest between the establishment and the Puritans which convulsed Eng land for many a year, and of which the traces are by no means ex tinct, was actively beginning before the " halcyon days " were past. That spirit which would admit of no toleration for papists had, in a few years, to fight its own battle against intolerance. But the "ice-brook temper "of the sword, then in its sheath, which was to be drawn seventy years afterwards, was known to some in this parliament. A motion for a further reformation of religion was made in the House of Commons on the 6th of April, by Mr. Strickland, " a grave and ancient man, of great zeal," says the re porter, sir Simonds D'Ewes. Having set forth various abuses he moved that a convenient number of the house might have confer ence with the Lords spiritual. During the Easter recess, Mr. Strickland was called before the Privy Council, and commanded not to resume his seat in the house. Then rose in his place Mr. Carleton, and moved that Mr. Strickland should be sent for to the bar of the House, " forasmuch as he was not now a private man, but specially chosen to supply the room of a multitude ; " and Mr. Yelverton " showed it was fit for princes to have their prerogatives, but. yet the same to be straitened within reasonable limits." Tbe ministers of Elizabeth understood the force of such words, and they whispered with the Speaker. The debate was suspended ; and the next day Mr. Strickland took his seat, amidst cheers whose echoes reverberated in that Chapel of St. Stephen, when kings, long afterwards, had forgotten their import. The duke of Norfolk had been released from his imprisonment in the Tower on the 4th of August, 157°- On the 7th of Septem ber, 1571, he was again arrested. During the thirteen months of his comparative freedom he was in a sort of honourable custody, and was not called to Council or to Parliament. Before his release from the Tower he had sent a declaration to the queen, in which he had solemnly engaged " never to deal in that cause of marriage of g2 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the queen of Scots, nor in any other cause belonging to her, but as your majesty shall command me." In April, 1 571, a correspond ence was detected, which showed that some treasonable project was in course of formation. Further correspondence was inter cepted in August, and various persons were arrested. Amongst these was the bishop of Ross, who, after pleading in vain that his privilege as an ambassador from the queen of Scots ought to shield him from answering questions, made a full declaration, which- was corroborated by the confessions of the other prisoners. The duke was tried on a charge of high treason by his peers, on the 16th of January, 1572. All the previous transactions connected with the plan of marriage with the queen of Scots were entered into ; and it was urged that his continued desire for that alliance had a view tc Mary's claim to the present possession of the crown of England. This was very slight matter upon which to found the accusation of an overt act of treason. The more serious charge was, that through the agency of Rudolphi, an Italian, who had been sent by Mary to the pope, the king of Spam, and the duke of Alva, he had received assurances of the support of these personages to a plan for uniting Mary with the duke, for seizing the person of Elizabeth, and for landing a foreign army in England. Mr. Jardine, in his excellent report of this great trial, expresses his opinion, from a critical examination of the voluminous documents connected with the Rudolphi conspiracy, that, " though the duke was probably a tool in the hands of persons more artful than himself, he probably participated in the scheme." The trial itself was conducted with such fairness as is compatible with evidence mainly resting upon the confessions of absent persons, some of which were extorted by the rack, or by its terror. Norfolk was unanimously condemned ; but his execution was deferred till the 2nd of June. Ag^in and again, Elizabeth revoked the warrant which consigne'd him to the block. The duke was the chief of the English nobles. He was of royal lineage. He was the son of the illustrious Surrey who had perished under the jealousy of her father. There were many causes for Elizabeth hesitating when, for the first time, she was called to shed the blood of an English peer, besides the dissimula tion which some are ready to impute to her. There is a real strug gle of mind to be traced in her letter to Burleigh, received by him at two o'clock of the morning of the nth of April, when, in her obscure style, she writes, '• My lord, methinks that I am more beholding to the hinder part of my head than well dare trust the TROUBLES IN SCOTLAND. 93 forwards side of the same, and therefore sent to the lieutenant and the S. [sheriff ?], as you know best, the order to defer the execu tion till they hear further. . . The causes that move me to this are not now to be expressed, lest an irrevocable deed be in mean while committed." * The spectacle of a great nobleman perishing upon the scaffold was not amongst the experiences of the rising generation of Eng land. The catastrophe of Norfolk made a popular impression in proportion to the rarity of such an exhibition. The very aspect of the place of punishment was suggestive of political remembrances. "Upon Tower-hill," says Holinshed, "a scaffold had been builded many years ago, serving for execution ; which being old was both rotten and ruinous. For queen Elizabeth having with mercy governed her commonwealth, there was no punishment there in flicted upon any for the space of fourteen years ; wherefore a new scaffold must needs be made." The penalty which the duke had incurred by meddling with the affair of the queen of Scots could not deter others from the same dangerous course. Two Derby shire gentlemen were tried and executed in May, upon a charge of having' corresponded with Mary for the purpose of delivering her from the custodyof the earl of Shrewsbury. The affairs of Scot land had become more and more distracted since the period of the detention of the queen. The regent Murray had been assassinated, from motives of private revenge, at Linlithgow, in January, 1570. Lennox, the father of Darnley, had succeeded him. He, also, was assassinated in September, 1571. The country was enduring some of the worst miseries of a civil war between the two factions of catholic and presbyterian, contending, one in the name of Mary, and the other in the name of her son. On the 30th of July, 1572, there was a truce between these fierce opponents ; and it is pos sible that s6me negotiations might have successfully proceeded between those who made the restoration of Mary a condition of pacification, and the reformers, who might have thought it possible to secure their ascendency, even under " the wicked woman " whom Knox continued to denounce, had not an event occurred which produced a rage against the Romanists, both in England and Scot land, compared with which all previous indignation was moderate. The Huguenots of France were a body isolated from their coun trymen, who viewed them with dislike, — sometimes conciliated and sometimes persecuted by the Court,as their support was sought or re- * Ellis, First Series, vol. ii. p. 263. 94 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. jected by the mere ambitious factions that alternately prevailed. In 1570, a treaty was concluded between them and the young king, Charles IX. ; who professed great anxiety for reconciliation with this portion of his subjects. The great Huguenot leader,Coligny,Admiral of France, was earnestly pressed to repair to the king's court ; to which, after some manifestations of distrust,he went in the autumn of 1571. The sister of Charles was pressed in marriage upon the prince of Navarre, afterwards Henry IV. ; and that marriage was celebrated with great magnificence on the 1 8th of August, 1572. England had made a treaty with France, which had for one of its objects to wrest the Netherlands from Spain ; and the advisers of Elizabeth had recommended a marriage with the duke of Alencon, the younger son of Catherine de Medici, who had given intimation of his disposition to favour the Protestants. Like many other recom mendations of her Council and her Parliament, the queen of Eng land treated this proposal with civility, but with a secret determina tion, from whatever cause it proceeded, not to marry at all. Under these circumstances the apprehension that there was a deep con federacy for the annihilation of Protestantism began to be lessened. The Huguenots were drawn in large numbers to Paris by the festiv ities of the marriage of the French princess with Henry of Navarre, their acknowledged head. On the 22d of August, Coligny was shot from the window of a house occupied by a dependant of the duke of Guise. His wounds were not dangerous. The king, with his mother, Catherine, visited the wounded man. The queen- mother could ill disguise her alarm when the admiral began to speak earnestly with the king, whilst the house was filled with Coligny's armed retainers. She had concerted the assassination with the duke of Anjou and the duchess of Nemours, whose first husband had been slain by a Huguenot. A cautious historian says, speaking of Catherine de Medici, "The Huguenots won over the king, and appeared to supplant her influence over him. This per sonal danger put an end to all delay. With that resistless and ma gical power which she possessed over her children, she re-awakene d all the slumbering fanaticism of her son. It cost her but one word to rouse the populace to arms, and that word she spoke. Every in dividual Huguenot of note was delivered over to the vengeance of his personal enemy."* This is, perhaps, a better solution of a dis puted question than the theory that Charles IX., a veryyoungman, weak and impulsive, vacillating and ferocious, was such a master of * Ranke, " History of the Popes," vol. ii. p. 69. TERROR OF ENGLAND. 95 dissimulation, that for several years he could have deceived the English ambassador, Walsingham, into a belief that he was favour able to the Protestants whilst meditating their destruction. On the other hand, the jealousy of Catherine is a more rational explana tion of her conduct, than the belief that the Massacre of St. Bar tholomew had been part of a plan for the extirpation of Protestant ism, settled between that fearful woman and the duke of Alva, in their conferences at Bayonne, in 1564. These questions have form ed the subject of much historical controversy. The terrible events that followed the attempt to assassinate Coligny admit of no dis pute. On the 23rd of August, according to the account given by Charles himself to his sister Margaret, after the noontide dinner of the court he was told of a treasonable conspiracy of the Hugue nots against himself and his family. It would be necessary, his relations said, to anticipate the designs of the conspirators by their previous destruction. He gave his consent, and expressed his hope that not a single Huguenot would be left alive to reproach him with the deed. Night had descended upon Paris. There was no alarm, as bands of assassins silently congregated in the streets. A signal was to be given when the work of slaughter was to com mence. The king, his mother, and Anjou sate amidst darkness and stillness in a balcony of the Louvre. The noise of a pistol is heard, and Charles trembles in the agony of guilty expectation. At length the clocks of Paris strike two. Then the bell of St. Ger-! main l'Auxerrois tolled forth the signal. The duke of Guise bursts into the defenceless courts where Coligny slept, and three hundred men slaughter him and his followers. His body is cast out of the window, and the cry of ' Death to the Huguenots,' amidst the sound of the tocsin, wakes up the fanatical citizens, and one universal butchery of the protestants is being accomplished. For three days the slaughter goes on and the fury extends to Orleans, Lyons, Troyes, Rouen, Toulouse, Bourdeaux, and other towns. We may choose what estimate we please of the number ofthe victims, from the highest estimate of a hundred thousand, to the extenuating calculation of Dr. Lingard that there might be about sixteen hundred. What ever was the number, the massacre was considered as a glorious triumph for the catholics. The pope, now Gregory XIII., cele brated the event by a solemn procession ; and the pious Venetians expressed their satisfaction at this mark of God's favour. Charles, in his despatches to foreign courts, bewailed the massacre, and imputed it to the populace of Paris. To his parliament lie avowed 96 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. himself the author, and claimed the glory of having given peace to his kingdom. He sent an ambassador to England, to explain away the causes of this termination of his proposed tender mer cies to the Protestants. The queen was at Woodstock ; and when the envoy was admitted to a public audience, he had to pass be tween two lines of lords and ladies in deep mourning. Not a word was uttered as he advanced towards the queen, who also wore the deepest black. It was the chamber of death which he seemed to have entered. Motionless and silent was every courtier as he made his salutations. Elizabeth heard with perfect calmness the lying excuses which he was entrusted to utter. Charles wrote let ters to her, which she first refused to answer ; but afterwards re plied to with courteous words. But her measured civility produced an impression in France that Elizabeth was about to arm. There was a general terror in England that the example of St. Barthol omew's day would spread. The bishop of London writes to lord Burleigh, on the Sth of September, '• These evil times trouble all good men's heads, and make their hearts ache, fearing that this barbarous treachery will not cease in France, but will reach over unto us. . . . Hasten her majesty homeward ; her safe return to London will comfort many hearts oppressed with fear." The bishop, Edwin Sandys, then advises, amongst other precautions, "Foithwith to cutoff the Scottish queen's head." Walsingham writes from France that " certain unsound members must be cut off," for " violent diseases will have violent remedies." Elizabeth would not comply with these suggestions, pressed on her, as they were, by the terrors of her subjects and the counsels of her minis ters. But there appears little doubt that she was cognisant of a plot between some of these ministers and the earl of Mar, the re gent of Scotland, to deliver Mary up, that she might be put to death by her own people. It is not so clear, as Mr. Tytler believes, that she was to be secretly made away with. The death of Mar put an end to these dark intrigues ; and Burleigh was left to make his moan that " if her majesty will continue her delays, for provid ing for her own surety by just means given to her by God, she and we shall vainly call upon God when the calamity shall fall upon us." Those means " for her own surety " were not employed by the queen for fourteen years ; and, however indefensible they may have been when called into exercise, it is an abuse of historical evidence to represent that her perpetual anxiety was to get rid of her hated rival. There might be deep policy in Elizabeth's delays ; DANGER OF THE QUEEN OF SCOTS. 97 but her jealousies and fears must have been under some subjection to a higher feeling, when she was hounded on by those in whom she had the surest trust ; by the petitions of the Commons and the clamour of the populace ; to do a deed for which all the bells of London would have rung, but which she shrank from, to remain in perpetual apprehension of losing crown and life. Unless we can believe, against all proof, that such danger was imaginary, we must be content to think that each of these queens was the victim of a sad necessity ; and that some of the wretchedness which Mary had to endure in her lonely prisons was not unfelt by Elizabeth in her gorgeous court. But it awakens, indeed, a painful contrast to im agine the one queen wearing out her life in some inaccessible castle ; working tapestry with her maidens in gloomy rooms ; walking in the narrow garden, or gazing from the guarded turret ; waiting eagerly for news which never comes ; sending secret letters which are intercepted ; watched by a stately earl and his haughty countess ; and then to read of the other making joyful progresses, and smiling upon loving subjects ; borne on the willing shoulders of handsome courtiers, amidst "throngs of knight " and "store of ladies ; " feasting at Kenilworth with Leicester, or opening the Royal Exchange with Gresham ; speaking Greek with the Greek professor at Oxford, or correcting the exercises of the scholars at Eton. It is indeed a sad contrast. But in our pity for the one queen we must not forego our respect for the other, — for the queen who, despotic as she was, always relied upon the people — who, as Mr. Macaulay-has most justly said, "did not treat the nation as an adverse party : " the queen under whose auspices Drake circum navigated the world, and Raleigh founded Virginia; the queen whose name will be ever associated with the splendid literature of her age, for that sprang out of the emancipation of the national mind which she was the great instrument of accomplishing. Vol. III.— 7 98 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER V. Jesuits in England.— Campion.— Increased severities against Papists.— Expedition to tho Netherlands.— Leicester in the Netherlands.— Death of Sir Philip Sidney.— Naval successes under Drake. — Babington's conspiracy. — Trial of the conspirators — - Alleged complicity of Mary in the plot.— Mary's papers seized.— She is removed to Fotheringay Castle. From the terrible day of Saint Bartholomew in 1572, to the detection of the conspiracy against the life of Elizabeth in 1586, the struggles between the two great principles of Romanism and Pro testantism was incessant in England. The government was earnest ly supported in this contest by what was now a large majority of its subjects ; for although the opinions of the Puritans had be come a serious source of alarm to the Established Church, this party never swerved from a general loyalty to the queen, even under persecution. We shall defer, till another chapter, a general notice of this Protestant schism ; and here confine ourselves to a rapid view of the events in which the hostility between the old and new religions was the principal element. In 1580, the pope, Gregory XIIL, at the suggestion of William Allen, despatched a body of Jesuits to England. The mission of these religious enthusiasts was to attempt the re-conversion of the heretic islanders. They were led and organised by Robert Parsons and Edmond Campion, who had formerly belonged to colleges in Oxford, and had been avowed Protestants before their conversion to Romanism. Out of the college of Douay, in which Campion was professor of divinity, came many of those ardent spirits who pro fessed to interpret the bull of Pius V. against Elizabeth in a purely religious sense, but who, nevertheless, were not regarded by the English government as other than secret and most dangerous traitors. The parliament of 1581 met this inroad of able English men, trained in the school of Loyola to extraordinary subtlety and. invincible determination, by the most stringent enactments. The first Act of the session of the 23rd of Elizabeth recites that the Statute against bringing in bulls and writings from Rome has been evaded ; and that " divers evil-affected persons have practised con trary to the meaning of the said statute, by other means than by JESUITS IN ENGLAND. — CAMPION. 99 bulls written and printed, to withdraw the queen's majesty's sub jects from their natural obedience to her majesty," &c. This is distinctly levelled against those who interpreted the decrees of the see of Rome through their oral communications ; who, invested with especial authority, moved quietly about from town to town, and from village to village ; who were cherished and concealed in mansions where they were cautiously introduced to persons of wavering opinions. The statute makes it a treasonable offence to pretend to any power of absolving subjects from their obedience, or practising to withdraw them to the Romish religion ; and all subjects thus willingly absolved or withdrawn from their obedience were also to be deemed traitors. Those who said mass or attended mass, and those who did not attend church, were subject to heavy penalties. The proceedings against Campion and others are such as strikingly exhibit the unfairness and cruelty of trials for treason, as then con ducted. Campion was arrested in Berkshire, in July, 1581 ; and was lodged in the Tower with two other priests. He was tor tured ; and revealed the names of those who had sheltered him. He was questioned, again and again, upon the power of the pope to depose sovereigns, and, his answers being evasive, he was racked with increased severity. Finally, he was tried for high- treason, not under the statute of 1581, but under that of Edward III., for compassing and imagining the queen's death. Others were tried and convicted with him ; but three were spared, who renounced the pope's deposing power. It was a principle of the Jesuits that the pope had an undoubted right to deprive kings of their crowns. The Romanist exiles had proclaimed throughout Europe that the heretic Elizabeth was an usurper. The English government rested its defence of the severities which it had prac tised, upon the ground that the persecutions were not directed against religious tenets ; that catholics, whether of the laity or the priesthood, lived unmolested on the score of their faith, when they paid due temporal allegiance to their sovereign ; and that none were indicted for treason but such as obstinately maintained the pope's bull depriving the queen of the crown. Gregory XIIL had opened the door to evasion of this charge, by granting to Romanists a permission to dissemble, under the colour of an explanation, " that the- bull should be considered as always in force against Elizabeth and the heretics, but should only be binding on catholics when due execution of it could be had : " * — that is, that they should obey till * Hallam, " Constitutional History." IOO HISTORY OF ENGLAND. they were strong enough to throw off their allegiance. The queen's High Court of Commission would not accept this interpretation : " The prisoners were called upon to say, if the pope were to absolve them from their oath of allegiance, and to attack England, what they should do, and which side they should support. The miserable frightened men knew not how to extricate themselves from this dilemma. They answered that they would render unto God what was God's and unto Csesar what was Caesar's ; but this evasion was itself interpreted into a confession by their judges. Thus the prisons were filled ; execution followed upon execution ; and Catholicism, in its turn, had its martyrs." * The severities of the laws against papists went on increasing. In 1584, all Jesuits, seminary priests, and other priests, were commanded by Act of parliament, to depart from the kingdom within forty days, on pain of being adjudged traitors ; and penalties were to be inflicted upon those who, knowing any priest to be within the realm, should not denounce him to a magistrate . These intolerant enactments pro duced the very opposite consequences that were contemplated by the legislature. It was probably difficult to restrain the zealotry of some of the more fiery Protestants. In a memorial to the queen in 1 583, Burleigh thus sensibly speaks of the results of enforcing penal laws against such as refused the oath of supremacy : " I ac count that putting to death does no ways lessen them ; since we find by experience that it worketh no such effect, but, like hydra's heads, upon cutting off one, seven grow up ; persecution being accounted as the badge of the church : and, therefore, they should never have the honour to take any pretence of martyrdom in Eng land, where the fulness of blood and greatness of heart is such, that they will even for shameful things go bravely to death, much more when they think themselves to climb to heaven ; and this vice of obstinacy seems to the common people a divine constancy ; so that for my part, I wish no lessening of their number, but by preaching and by education of the younger under schoolmasters." f The reign of Elizabeth was, happily for the progress of the country, singularly exempt from foreign wars . Her policy was of the most cautious nature ; involving upon the face of it some insincerity. In her relations to France and to Spain, when the governments were oppressing their Protestant subjects, she ab stained, except in 1 562, from sending troops to the assistance of those with whom she was identified in principle. But indirect aid * Rauke, vol. ii. 168. t Quoted in Hallam, chap. iii. EXPEDITION TO THE NETHERLANDS. roi she on many occasions afforded. Thus, in 1577, she had assisted the revolted provinces of the Netherlands, whose commissioners had, in 1575, offered her the sovereignty, which she declined to accept. But ten years later it had become of essential importance to England to weaken the power of Philip of Spain, by keepino- alive the cause of independence and religious freedom in the Low Countries. The assassination of the prince of Orange in 1 584, by a religious fanatic, excited by the reward which Philip II. had set - upon his head, had produced a fierce indignation in England against the bigoted king of Spain. The schemes of Philip and pope Sixtus V. for the invasion of the contumacious island were no longer con cealed. The Jesuits and seminary priests had been steadily endea vouring to weaken whatever spirit of patriotism remained amongst the English catholics. It was a wise resolve, therefore, of Eliza beth's government to break through that superstitious love of peace which influenced the queen, and boldly encounter Philip on his own ground. Elizabeth was very slow to consent to engage in a war in the Netherlands. To support subjects' against their sove reign, appeared to her as treason against the rights of monarchs. The democratic government of the United Provinces was to her an anomaly which she held in scorn. Above all, she dreaded, and wisely, expenses wliich would fall heavily upon her people. But her old sagacious counsellor, Burleigh, the acule Walsingham, and the favourite Leicester, prevailed over her scruples, and an expedi tion was determined upon at the end of 1585. Burleigh, writing to Leicester, who was appointed to its command, says, " For the • avancement of the action, if I should not with all the powers of my heart continually both wish and work avancement thereto, I were to be an accursed person in the sight of God; considering the ends of this action tend to the glory of God, to the safety of the queen's person, to the preservation of this realm in a perpetual quietness." * Elizabeth had again declined the sovereignty which had been again offered her by the commissioners of the States ; and she now instructed Leicester also to refuse their offer to put themselves under the absolute control of the lieutenant she should send with her army, but to exhort them to listen to his advice. The extreme eagerness of the ambitious earl to undertake this command, offer ing even to pawn his estates to the Crown to cover some of the expenses of the undertaking, seems to indicate that he had personal designs upon that sovereignty which his queen had rejected. On * " Leycester Correspondence," p. 21. io2 HISTORY OF ENGLAND, the loth December, the English fleet was near Flushing. Leices ter was received with pageantries which appear to have thrown him off that balance which it was somewhat hazardous for one of Elizabeth's ministers to lose. On New Year's Day, 1586, the States General, by a solemn deputation, offered the queen of Eng land's lieutenant the absolute government of the United Provinces. He first hesitated, then yielded to further supplications, and on the 25th of January accepted the dangerous honour. On that day, a letter was written to him expressive of the queen's dislike of his proceedings. He had sent his secretary with explanations, but his arrival was unaccountably delayed. Then the queen herself wrote a letter to the earl, which is one of the most remarkable examples - of that force of character which she frequently displayed in the nervous words of her correspondence. There was no chance of mistaking the meaning of such sentences as these : •' We could never have imagined, had we not seen it fall out in experience, that a man raised up by ourself, and extraordinarily favoured by us above any other subject of this land, would have in so contemptible. a sort broken our commandment in a cause that so greatly toucheth us in honour. . . . Our express pleasure and commandment is, that all delays and excuses laid apart, you do presently, upon the duty of your allegiance, obey and fulfil whatsoever the bearer hereof shall direct you to do in our name ; whereof fail you not, as you will answer the contrary at your uttermost peril." * One who could thus write might not be an amiable mistress to serve ; but she was a queen fit to be at the head of a great nation. She had sent an army to assist the people of the Low Countries to maintain their civil privileges and their religious faith against Philip and against Rome ; and was she to co-itradict her own published declarations ? was her servant to disobey her positive instructions ? It was very long before the anger of the queen could be softened. She withdrew from her first intention to compel Leicester publicly to lay down his authority, but she restricted its exercise in many ways which were irksome to so proud a man. The war was alto gether mismanaged. The prince of Parma, who commanded the troops of Spain, was an experienced general. Leicesterwas always hesitating ; sometimes successful through the bravery of his cap tains ; but gradually losing fortress after fortress, and obtaining petty advantages with no permanent results. There was one in his * " To my lord of Leycester from the queen by Sir Thomas Heneage," " Leycester Correspondence," p. no. DEATH OF SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. I63 army who, in this disastrous campaign, closed a short career of military experience, but who has left a name which Englishmen still cherish amongst their most eminent examples of real greatness. Few were the heroic deeds of Philip Sidney, but his heart was the seat of true heroism. The rare scholar, the accomplished writer, the perfect gentleman, might have been forgotten as a soldier, if his night-march upon Axel, and its daring capture, had been his chief title to distinction. But his demeanour when he was carried wounded from the walls of Zutphen, will never be forgotten. His friend, lord Brooke, has told the story, which, known as it is to every schoolboy, must be repeated in every History of England if that history is to show of what material our heroes have been made. " Passing along by the rear of the army where his uncle [Leicester] the general was, and being thirsty with excess of bleed ing, he called for some drink, which was presently brought him. But as he was putting the bottle to his mouth he saw a poor soldier carried along, who had eaten his last at the same feast, ghastly cast ing up his eyes at the bottie ; which Sir Philip perceiving took it from his head before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man with these words, ' Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.' " Being repulsed at Zutphen, Leicester shortly went into winter quarters. The expedition came to an end without calling forth any higher qualities in the general than might naturally be expected from an intriguing courtier ; showing, indeed, that the raw levies of England might be led to fight valiantly ; but also showing that, without the habit ual discipline of a regular army, they could not stand up against starvation and other consequences of mismanagement. There had been a long peace ; and even in the warlike times of the Planta- genets armies were often lost from the natural difficulties of obtain- inc supplies. ¦ But in those times the feudal relations of lord and vassal kept men together under the direst pressure of want. Leicester's army was without food or clothes ; and they deserted by hundreds. The old organisation was broken up ; the organisation of modern times was not established. The partial failure of the expedition to the Low Countries was in some measure compensated by the naval successes against Spain. Philip had laid an embargo upon English vessels and property, through the extent of his wide dominions. Elizabeth did not fit out royal fleets ; but she gave her subjects permission to seize Spanish ships or merchandise wherever they were to be found. This war of privateering was perfectly suited to the Anglo-Saxon 104 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. character. The spirit of the old Norsemen was revived ; and the hope of gain sent hardy adventurers into distant seas, and eager colonists to search for new lands to subdue. The daring spirits of Elizabeth's reign have a strong similitude to the pirates and buc caneers that became odious when they were no longer wanted, and to the filibusters that are still offensive to European civilisation. But they led the way to England's maritime and colonial glories ; and if they plundered somewhat too freely, and destroyed too mercilessly, they had large national objects in view as well as private lucre. Drake, in his expedition to the West Indies in 1585, with twenty-five ships, of which only two belonged to the crown, destroyed several Spanish settlements ; took Carthagena and San Domingo ; and brought home a considerable amount of treasure and two hundred and forty pieces of ordnance. Whilst the battle between the two great principles that were dividing Europe was being fairly fought out by England and Spain, horse to horse, and ship to ship, there was a more deadly strife about to be waged, with all the inveteracy of war without its honours. In a letter from Walsingham in London to Leicester in the Low Countries, dated the 9th of July, 1 s86, we hear the first mutterings of the coming storm. The secretary alludes to " the discovery of some matter of importance, in the highest degree, through my travail and cost ; " a secret about which he cannot write, but which the gentleman who bears the letter is to communicate to the earl. He then adds, " my only fear is that her majesty will not use the matter with that secresy which appertaineth. . and surely, if the matter be well handled, it will break the neck of all dangerous practices during her majesty's reign." * The handling of such a matter by Francis Walsingham could not be other than successful — if success it could be called to "break the neck of all dangerous practices" by a deed which the historian of the Reformation mildly deems "the greatest blemish of this reign ; " which others describe as an act of unparalleled wickedness ; but which was then held as a political necessity, of which we, who live in happier times, and are trained to very different feelings, are no competent judges. Wal singham saw that the conspiracy of a missionary priest with some enthusiastic young men for the deliverance of Mary might involve her in their plot for the assassination of Elizabeth. The secretary, though a statesman of rare disinterestedness and general integrity, was so vigilant in the detection of plots against his mistress, that * " Leycester Correspondence," p. 341. BABINGTON'S CONSPIRACY. 105 his spies and secret agents were in every suspected house at home. In what is meant for panegyric it is said of him, "he outdid the Jesuits in their own bow, and over-reached them in their own equivocation and mental reservation. . . . He would cherish a plot some years together, admitting the conspirators to his own and the queen's presence familiarly. His spies waited on some men every hour for three years." * This was the man, with his maxims that "knowledge is never too dear," and that "secresy is policy and virtue," whom a dozen rash young catholics, incited by a fanatical priest, thought to circumvent. In February, 1585, Dr. William Parry was convicted of high treason, and he was executed on the 2nd of March. His career was a very extraordinary one. He was, after 1 580, employed as " a collector of secret intelligence in foreign countries." He had a pension given him in 1584. He is tried as a public enemy six months afterwards. On his trial he made a confession which implicated one Morgan, an agent of Mary at Paris for the receipt and administration of her dower as queen of France. His state ment was to this effect: "In October [1582] I came to Paris, where (upon better opinion conceived of me amongst my catholic countrymen) I found my credit well settled, and such as mistrusted me before ready to trust and embrace me. And being one day at the chamber of Thomas Morgan, a catholic gentleman (greatly beloved and- trusted on that side), amongst other gentlemen, talk ing of England, I was desired by Morgan to go up with him to another chamber, where he told me that it was hoped and looked for that 1 should do some service for God and his church. I answered him, I would do it, if it were to kill the greatest subject in England, whom I named, and in truth then hated. ' No, no,' said he, 'let him live to his greater fall and ruin of his house. It is the queen I mean.' I told him ' it were soon done if it might be lawfully done, and warranted in the opinion of some learned divines.' And so the doubt once resolved (though, as you have heard, I was before reasonably well satisfied), I vowed to undertake the enter prise for the restitution of England to the ancient obedience of the see apostolic." Elizabeth was greatly enraged against Morgan, and called upon the king of France to deliver him up. This was refused ; but Morgan was sent to the Bastile. Full of plans of revenge, he pro cured means of correspondence with Mary, and had various, agents * Lloyd, "State Worthies," pp. 514-516. Io6 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. in England, some of whom were unable to elude the vigilance of Walsingham, and yielded up their secrets to the wary minister, or became his own dark sentinels.* In the summer and autumn of 1585, a catholic priest came to England, who was dressed as an officer, and moved about under the name of Fortescue. His real name was John Ballard. One of Walsingham's intelligencers obtained his confidence ; and after visiting various parts of this island they proceeded to Paris. Here Ballard saw Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador ; and proposed to him, that during the absence of English forces in the Netherlands, an army should be landed, whose presence would be the signal for a general rising in favour of the queen of Scots. The ambassador gave little encouragement to this scheme ; and Ballard turned to other devices. There was an English officer of the name of Savage, who had undertaken to assassinate Elizabeth ; and Ballard came back to England to tempt violent partisans into listening to this proposal. He addressed himself to Anthony Babington, a gentleman of Dethick, in Derby shire. He had always professed a chivalrous devotion to the cause of Mary ; and had been the medium of transmitting letters to her when she was at Sheffield castle. He adopted the proposal that Savage should kill the queen ; but he held that it was a plan of too much importance to be left to one man's resolution ; and that six should engage in that service, whilst others should liberate the queen of Scots. There can be no doubt that here was a real plot. Young men, the friends of Babington, were induced to enter into the scheme, to their eventual destruction. One of the most interesting of these was Chidick Titchbourne, of Porchester, in Hampshire ; and in the address which he delivered at his execu tion, we may see how such rash and criminal projects found ac ceptance with ardent and generous minds : — " I had a friend, and a dear friend, of whom 1 made no small account, whose friendship hath brought me to this ; he told me the whole matter, I cannot deny, as they had laid it down to be done ; but I always thought it impious, and denied to be a dealer in it; but the regard of my friend caused me to be a man in whom the old proverb was verified ; I was silent, and so consented. Before this thing chanced, we lived together in most flourishing estate. Of whom went report in the Strand, Fleet-street, and elsewhere about London, but of Bab ington and Titchbourne ? No threshold was of force to brave our entry, Thus we lived, and wanted nothing we could wish for ; and * Lloyd's happy definition of a spy was " a dark sentinel." TRIAL OF CONSPIRATORS. I07 God knows what less in my head than matters of state. Now give me leave to declare the miseries I sustained after I was acquainted with the action; wherein I may justly compare my estate to that ot Adam's, who could not absta'n one thing forbidden, to enjoy all other things the world could afford ; the terror of conscience awaited me. After I considered the dangers whereinto I was fallen, I went to sir John Peters, in Essex, and appointed my -horses should meet me at London, intending to go down into the country. I came to London, and then heard that all was bewrayed : where upon, like Adam, we fled into the woods to hide ourselves." The employment of spies by a government necessarily leads to the belief that the spy incites the enterprise which he is commis sioned to discover. Walsingham was acquainted with this conspir acy through a seminary priest of the name of Gifford ; and, says Dr. Lingard, " that artful minister, while he smiled at the infatua tion of the youths, who had thus entangled themselves in the toils, was busily employed in weaving a new intrigue, and planning the ruin of a more illustrious victim." What that artful minister did is clear enough. He removed the difficulties which prevented Babington's correspondence with Mary; and he possessed himself of copies of that correspondence. The ruin of the more illustrious victim was accomplished by her own readiness to enter into a plan for her deliverance, founded upon invasion and insurrection, and the assassination of Elizabeth. This was the charge justly sus tained against her, if the documents produced upon her trial were not forgeries. On the 13th, 14th, and 15th of September, fourteen persons accused as treasonable conspirators were brought to trial. Babing ton, Ballard, and Savage, with four others, pleaded guilty. The remainder were also convicted. The executions of seven, on the 20th of September, were attended with the horrible barbarities of the full penalty of treason. In the case of the others these cruel ties were dispensed with. Babington is held " to have behaved ungenerously. He it was who sought to inveigle the others into the conspiracy ; and yet his confession was the chief proof against them." * In that confession, as given upon the trial of Mary, was also found what was alleged as a corroborative proof of her com plicity with this attempt : — " He set down at large what conferences passed between B. [Ballard] and him, and the whole plot of con spiracy for the murder of Elizabeth, and deliverance of Mary. He * Lingard, vol. viii. note at p. 261. 108 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. declared further, that he did write a letter to the queen of Scotland touching every particular of this plot, and sent it by the same unknown boy [through whom he had corresponded previously]. She answered twenty or thirty days [after] in the same cipher by which he wrote unto her, but by another messenger. The tenour of both which letters he carried so well in memory, that he reported and set down -all the principal points of the same, as upon con ference of the said declaration with the copies of the said letters it appeared. Babington in all particular points prayed her direction ; for instance, that six noble gentlemen would undertake that tragical execution." * The queen of Scots had two secretaries, de Naou, a French man, and Curie, a Scot. It appears from a letter of Elizabeth to Shrewsbury, that de Naou was recommended by the French king; and that she consented to his appointment, he having "promised that he shall carry himself in that even manner that becomelh an honest minister." t When the knowledge of the conspiracy was sufficiently mature, these secretaries were arrested, and the papers of Mary were seized and transmitted to the council. Tbe queen of Scots was at Chartley,}: in the county of Stafford. She had been removed from Tutbury in the beginning of 1586, which place she appears to have greatly disliked, saying, in one of her letters, " I suffered here so much rigour, insult, and indignity, that I have ever since looked on it as wretched and unfortunate." Mary was residing at Chartley when the discovery of the suspicions against her was abruptly communicated. She was riding to the chase, with sir Amyas Paulet, her two secretaries, and her usual attend ants. On the way sir Thomas Gorges told her that he had received orders from the queen to take her to Tixhall, a country seat at a short distance, and that de Naou and Curie were to be arrested. She was very angry, and even called upon her people to protect her. But Gorges went one way with the secretaries, and Paulet another with the queen. Meanwhile a messenger from the Council had taken possession of Mary's papers. § Some days after, Mary was conducted back to Chartley; and found that her private cabi nets had been opened, and her papers removed. On the 27th of August, Paulet thus reports of her demeanour as she left Tixhall, a seat of the Astons : — " As Mary was coming out of sir Walter * Raumer, p. 344. t Ellis, First Series, vol. ii. p. 278. t Lingard, perhaps by a typographical error, speaks of Mary's residence at Chertsey. § Letter from M. d'Esneval. Raumer, p. 315. ALLEGED COMPLICITY OF MARY IN THE PLOT. 109 Aston's gate, she said with a loud voice, weeping, to some poor folks which were there assembled, ' I have nothing for you, I am a beggar as well as you ; all is taken from me.' And when she came to the gentleman, she said, weeping, ' Good God ; I am not witting or privy to anything intended against the queen.' . . . On her coming hither Mr. Darell delivered the keys as well of her chamber as of her coffers to Bastian, which he refused by direction of his mistress, who required Mr. Darell to open her chamber-door, which he did, and then this lady, finding that the papers were taken away, said in great choler, that two things could not be taken away from her — her English blood and her catholic religion, which both she would keep unto her death, adding further these words, ' Some of you will be sorry for it,' meaning the taking away of her papers. I was not present when these words were spoken, but no doubt they reached unto me, in what sense she only knoweth. I may be sorry for others, but I know there is nothing in her papers that can give me cause to be sorry for myself." The sensation produced upon the citizens of London, when the news of the Babington conspiracy first opened upon them, and the determination in the mind of Elizabeth to regard Mary as a principal in the design, are described in a letter of Chateauneuf, the French ambassador, to his, king, Henry III. : — " I have not been able to send your majesty any information for the last fortnight, all -the roads tcuFrance being closed on account of a conspiracy which was directed against the queen and the state. She told me herself that she has had from twenty-five to thirty persons, all catholics, arrested on account of it, and this continues daily. A great sensa tion was caused by it in this town, where the people are much in censed against the catholics ; nay, for eight or ten days there was reason to apprehend that acts of violence would be committed upon all who were considered to be catholics. Bonfires were lighted in every street, and the bells rung for twenty-four hours together, be cause the queen had escaped from so great a danger. It was de termined, it is said, to shoot the queen on the isth of August, and according to the plan agreed upon, every catholic in the kingdom was to take up arms, and place Mary on the throne. Elizabeth, at least, ascribes the whole undertaking to her, for which reason M. d'Esneval and I repaired to Windsor last Sunday, when she said to me, ' I know that the queen of Scotland contrived this. This, in truth, is repaying evil for good, and the more so as I have sev eral times saved her life. The king of France will have news in a 110 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. few days that will little please him.' .... For the understand. ing of this, I must inform your majesty, that during the ten or twelve days that the investigations were carried on with the great est ardour, there was a report in the city that this conspiracy had its origin in France, and that even your majesty and the king of Spain took part in it ; that your fleet was in readiness to aid it, and that those leaders of the plot who had not yet been discovered were concealed in my house, and that it ought be forcibly searched. .... I have accordingly complained of this report, and also of a thousand scandalous and insulting words which my people are ex posed to in the streets ; and that I was as if besieged, and in dan ger of being plundered. The only answer I received was, ' The people are greatly excited, and cannot be restrained.' " * From .Chartley, the queen of Scots was transferred to Fother ingay castle. This feudal pile, of which scarce a trace remains, was demolished by order of James VI., when he came to tlie Eng lish throne. Here Richard III. was born, and here Mary Stuart closed her life." Its associations were necessarily painful to James ; and they probably offered some reproach to his conscience. As we proceed to the close of the tragical history of his mother, we shall find sufficient evidence of the weakness and selfishness of this king. His endeavours to procure a mitigation of the fate of Mary, and his final resentment, were never very strenuous. He was always thinking of the splendid lot that was before him as suc cessor to both thrones. It may be very reasonably conjectured, from the whole tenor of Elizabeth's conduct, that she designed James to succeed her; that she was perfectly aware of the inesti mable benefits that would result to both countries from their union under one sovereign. Her solicitude was far greater for the good government of Scotland than was to be ascribed to her desire for a peaceful and protestant neighbour. She took James under her tutelage, and read him many a sage, and many a stern admonition. There is a remarkable letter from Elizabeth to James VI., dated the 4th of October, 1 586, which is a reply to a letter of James in which he congratulates the queen upon her escape from the con spiracy directed against her life. This characteristic letter of Elizabeth gives a dark hint of her belief that the mother of the king of Scotland was accessory to this design. He would, indeed, shortly " hear all ; " for at this very date it had been determined to put Mary upon her trial. A league between England and Scot- * Raumer, p. 317. MARY REMOVED TO FOTHERINGAY CASTLE. Ill land had been concluded a short time before this eventful season. " And for that the curse of that design rose up from the wicked suggestion of the Jesuits, which make it an acceptable sacrifice to God, and meritorious to themselves, that a king not of their pro fession should be murdered, therefore I could keep my pen no longer from discharging my care of your person, that you suffer not such vipers to inhabit your land. They say you gave leave under your hand that they might safely come and go. For God's love regard your surety above all persuasions, and account him no subject that entertains them. Make not edicts for scorn, but to be observed. Let them be rebels, and so pronounced, that preserve them. For my part, I am sorrier that they cast away so many goodly gentlemen than that they sought my ruin. I thank God I have taken more dolor for some that are guilty of this mur der than bear them malice that they sought my death. I protest it before God. But such iniquity will not be hid, be it never so craftily handled ; and yet, when you shall hear all, you will wonder that one accounted wise will use such matter so fondly."* There can be no doubt to whom the singular expression " one accounted wise " refers. * " Letters of Elizabeth and James VI.," p. 38, HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER VI. The Association.— Statute for the surety of the queen's person.— Commissions for trial of Mary.— Proceedings on the trial.— Judgment against Mary.— Conflicting opinions on this judgment The parliament urge the execution of the sentence. — The judgment proclaimed.— Conduct of Elizabeth.— Interview with Davison.— Warrant of execu tion.— Mary beheaded at Fotheringay.— Elizabeth disavows her responsibility in this proceeding. — The disavowal a self-deception. — Note on the statement that Elizabeth desired that the Queen of Scots might be privately assassinated. To judge correctly of the course of proceedings against the queen of Scots, we must go back to the session of parliament of 1584-5 when the nation was alarmed by well-founded apprehensions of a Spanish invasion, and by decisive indications of plots for the de position of Elizabeth and the recognition of Mary's claim to the English crown. In that session a law was passed, entitled "An Act for provision to be made for the surety of the queen's majesty's most royal person, and the continuance of the realm in peace." * Before the passing of this Act, a most extraordinary combination had been entered into, which is thus recognised in the fourth clause of the statute for the surety of the queen's person : " And whereas of late many of her majesty's good and faithful subjects, have, in the name of God, and with the testimony of good con sciences, by one uniform manner of writing under their hands and seals, and by their several oaths voluntarily taken, joined themselves together in one Bond and Association, to withstand and revenge to the uttermost all such malicious actions and attempts against her majesty's most royal person." The specific object of the Associa tion was much more explicitly defined in the instrument to which the good and faithful subjects had set their hands and seals. It was to the effect that if any attempt against the queen's person "shall be taken in hand or procured," whereby any should pretend title to come to the crown by the untimely death of the queen so procured, the Associators not only bind themselves never to allow of any such pretended successor, by whom or for whom any such act shall be attempted, but engage to prosecute such person or * 27 Eliz., c. 1. STATUTE FOR THE SURETY OF THE QUEEN'S PERSON. 1 13 persons to death. It is not correct to state that in the statute for the surety of the queen's person, "the terms of this Association were solemnly approved by parliament." * It provided that the articles of the Association " shall and ought to be in all things ex pounded and adjudged according to the true intent and meaning of this Act ; " and the Act expressly limited its meaning by the con dition " that if any invasion or rebellion should be made by or for any person pretending title to the crown after her majesty's de cease, or if any thing be confessed or imagined tending to the hurt of her person," it should be " with the privity of any such person." In that case it was provided that a commission, composed of peers, privy councillors, and judges, should examine and give judgment on such offences ; and that, after a proclamation of such judgment under the great seal, all persons against whom such sentence shall be given and proclaimed should be disabled for ever to have any claim to the crown ; and all her majesty's subjects, by virtue of this statute, and by the queen's direction, might pursue the said persons to death. In case of the violent death of the queen, the privy council, with others, might proclaim the guilty parties, and use force in pursuing them to death. Mr. Hallam has pointed out that " this statute differs from the associators' engagement, in omitting the outrageous threat of pursuing to death any person, whether privy or not to the design, on whose behalf an attempt against the queen's life should be made."f Such was the law when the Babington conspiracy was discovered ; and Mary was put upon her trial under this law, and not under the old Statute of Treasons, to determine whether that conspiracy against the life of Elizabeth was with the privity of any person that shall or may pre tend title to the crown of this realm. % On the sth of October, 1586, a commission was issued to alarge number of the most eminent persons of the kingdom, including twenty-nine peers, nine privy councillors, the chancellor, and five judges. In this commission it was recited, that since the first day of June, in the 27th year of the queen, " divers matters have been compassed and imagined tending to the hurt of our royal person, as well by Mary, daughter and heir of James the fifth, king of Scots, and commonly called queen of Scots and dowager of France, pre tending title to this realm of England ; as by divers other persons, cum scientia, in English with the privity of the same Mary, as we are given to understand." To the commissioners was assigned * Tytler, vol. viii. t " Constitutional History." tz7 Eliz-, ».. .. clause 1. Vol. III.— 8 114 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. full power to examine' all such matters, and to give sentence and judgment, under the Act for the surety of the royal person. Thir ty-six commissioners repaired to the castle of Fotheringay; and letters from Elizabeth were delivered to Mary, apprising her of the proceedings that were to be taken against her. At some prelimi nary interviews with a deputation from the commissioners, Mary maintained that she was an absolute queen ; that she was no sub ject ; and rather would die a thousand deaths than acknowledge herself a subject. She especially objected to the recent law, — upon which the authority of the commissioners wholly depended, as un just, as devised of purpose against her. But Hatton, the vice- chamberlain of Elizabeth, urged her to lay aside the bootless privi lege of regal dignity, and by appearing before the commissioners have the means of showing her innocence. She ultimately yielded. The court was opened on Friday, the 14th of October, in the great hall at Fotheringay castle. Amongst the Cottonian MSS. there is a rough plan, in the hand-writing of lord Burleigh, for the arrange ment of the hall. The " Great Chamber " was to be divided by " a rail as is in the Parliament Chamber." Within the bar was to be a cloth of state, with a chair for the queen of England ; and oppo site, nearer the rail, a chair for the queen of Scots. On the right of the queen of England's chair, a form for four justices, and a form for fourteen earls. On the left a.form for the queen's coun sel ; a form for seven counsellors : and a form for thirteen barons. The space below the bar was " for all persons not being in commis sion, nor of the queen's learned counsel." * It is scarcely possible, within reasonable limits, to furnish an adequate relation of this so-called trial. Like all other trials for high-treason at that period, the witnesses were not examined in open court ; the accused was not allowed counsel. There sat, facing the empty chair of royal state, this acute and courageous warnan, with those before her whom she regarded as her enemies ready to overwhelm her by their accusations or their arguments. She repeated her declaration, that whatever answers she gave were made under protest against the authority of the commission to try a princess who was no subject of the queen of England. Gawdy, the queen's serjeant, went through the history of the Babington conspiracy, and brought forward arguments that she knew of it, approved it, and showed the means of its execution. She main tained that she knew not Babington ; had never received any letters * See plan in Ellis, First Series, vol. ii. PROCEEDINGS ON THE TRIAL".. IIS from him, nor written any to him ; that she never plotted the de struction of the queen ; and that to prove the same her subscription! under her own hand ought to be produced. Copies of Babington's letters to her were read. " Let it be proved," she answered, " that I received them." The confessions of Babington and others were then recited, to prove that she had written letters which showed knowledge of the conspiracy. She said this was second-hand evi dence. A copy of a letter was read, as of one written by her to Babington. She demanded that the original, said to be in cypher, should be produced. She hinted that Walsingham, who had placed spies about her, might have caused her cypher to be counterfeited. Walsingham protested that as a private person he had done nothing unbeseeming an honest man, nor as he bore the place of a public person had he done anything unworthy his place. Burleigh took part in the charges against the undaunted queen ; who thus fought. a battle single-handed against the most adroit statesmen of that age. It was not a trial, but a most unequal debate ; and it is pain ful to see how Burleigh, in many points so worthy of respect, could describe the keen encounter between himself and an inexperienced woman. " This queen of the castle was content to appear before us again in public, to be heard, but, in truth, not to be heard for her' defence, for she could say nothing but negatively, that the points of the letters that concerned the practice against the queen-majes ty's person were never by her written, nor of her knowledge. The rest, for invasion, for escaping by force, she said, she would neither deny nor affirm. But her intention was, by long artificial speeches, to move pity, to lay all blame upon the queen's majesty, or rather upon the Council, that all the troubles past did ensue, avowing her reasonable offers and our refusals ; and in this her speeches I did so encounter her with reasons out of my knowledge and experience, as she had not that advantage she looked for ; as I am assured the auditory did find her case not pitiable, her allegations untrue ; by which means great debate fell yesternight very long, and this day renewed with great stomaching." * This letter of Burleigh refers to the proceedings of the second day. Mary then acknowledged that notes had been written to Babington by her secretaries ; but said that they wholly referred to plans for her escape. She did not deny that she sought this deliv erance, even through an invasion of the realm. Letters were pro- * Letter to Davison, October 15, Ellis, First Series, vol. iii. p. 12. ir6 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. duced, of which the genuineness is now scarcely disputed,* in which she minutely expounded plans for the king of Spain " to set on the queen of England;" which invasion she would aid by in ducing the Catholic lords of Scotland to join the enterprise ; and, seizing the young king James, deliver him into the hands of the king of Spain, or of the pope, to make him to be instructed and reduced to the Catholic religion. Another letter was read, in which Mary expressed her intention of bequeathing to the Spanish king her right of succession to the English throne. The plots for invasion and the overthrow of Elizabeth's government were almost neces sarily connected with the .assassination of the queen. Whether Mary was cognisant of one part of these plots, and wholly ignorant of the other, may be reasonably questioned. At the close of the proceedings at Fotheringay, on the second da)', the court was adjourned to the 25th at Westminster. Naou and Curie, Mary's two secretaries, were then examined, in the ab sence of their mistress. Camden says that they voluntarily con firmed all and every the letters and copies of letters, before pro duced, to be most true. But this historian adds, " I have seen Naou's apology to king James, written in the year 1605, wherein, laboriously protesting, he excuseth himself, that he was neither author, nor persuader, nor the first revealer of the plot that was undertaken, nor failed of his duty through negligence or want of foresight ; yea, that this day [the 25th of October] he stoutly im pugned the chief points of accusation against his lady and mistress ; which, notwithstanding, appeareth not by records." The commis sion unanimously delivered as their sentence " that the Babington conspiracy was with the privity of Mary, pretending title to the crown of England ; and that she hath compassed and imagined within this realm, divers matters tending to the hurt, death, and destruction of our sovereign lady the queen." The commissioners added that this sentence did not derogate fram James, king of Scots, in title or honour, but that he was in the same place, degree, and right, as if the sentence had never been pronounced. Between the trial of Mary and the execution of the sentence there was- an interval of four months. They were four months of intense anxiety, not only to the unhappy queen of Scots, but to Elizabeth, to her ministers, to the parliament, to the people. There * " These, if they were genuine, and of that there can be littie doubt, showed that she had not only approved of the invasion devised at Paris, but had offered to aid its execu tion." — Lingard. JUDGMENT AGAINST MARY. 1 17 are many doubtful points in the recorded transactions of this period, and historians have too often cut the knot instead of at tempting to unloose it. Starting upon the hypothesis that if Mary were not wholly innocent, the judgment against her was illegal, she is usually represented as the victim of remorseless statesmen, of a fanatical parliament, of a ferocious people, and of a cruel and dis sembling rival queen. In the natural sympathy of mankind for a woman who had so long been acquainted with misery, the fact seems to have been overlooked that she was thrust from her le gitimate throne by her own subjects, under charges of the most atrocious nature, and with the conviction that she would never cease to plot with foreign powers for the overthrow of the reformed religion. It is equally clear that her detention in this country was upon the ground that she was a public enemy ; that she had never given up her claim to the actual possession of the cro.vn; that her efforts to induce the Catholic powers to support her claims were unceasing ; and that for years she was the centre around which all the intrigues for destroying the heretical governments of England and Scotland revolved. During her life, however strictly Mary was watched, the government of the Protestant Elizabeth was in perpetual danger. It was no popular delusion which ascribed to the bigoted popes who held the queen of England accursed, the doctrine that — "blessed shall he be that doth revolt From his allegiance to a heretic ; " that the hand which took away Elizabeth's " hateful life " should be deemed "meritorious." When Mary was pronounced guilty of privity to the Babington conspiracy, the most extensive prepara tions for the overthrow of Elizabeth were rapidly maturing. Inva sion from without, treason from within, were to work together to place upon the throne one who would call in foreign aid to destroy the religion which had been generally adopted by a whole genera tion of English, and which no differences of opinion were otherwise likely essentially to disturb. Assuming Mary to have been privy to the various plots that had ripened during the last two years of her detention, — and one of the soberest of historians says, " in Murden's State Papers we have abundant evidence of Mary's acquaintance with the plots going forward in 1585 and 1586 against Elizabeth's government, if not with those for her assassination " * — the" ques- * Hallam, Note to chap, iii, It8 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. tion arises whether the deposed queen of Scots was amenable to any English tribunal ? Camden says, that amongst contemporaries, " divers speeches were raised about the matter according to the divers dispositions of men." Some held that " she was a free and absolute princess, under the superior command of God alone, — that she could not commit treason because she was no subject." Others maintained that she was "only a titular queen, because she had resigned her kingdom, and when she first came into England had subjected herself under the protection of the qvieen of Eng land." These abstract differences were no doubt settled, for the most part, by the doctrine, with which Camden concludes his state ment of the opinions of those who defended the sentence against Mary,—" that the safety of the people is the highest law." What ever violent historical partisans may maintain, we concur in the opinion' of Mr. Hallam, that those who held Mary to be only a titular queen were in the right. "Though we must admit that Mary's resignation of her crown was compulsory, and retracted on the first occasion ; yet, after a twenty years' loss of possession, when not one of her former subjects avowed allegiance to her, when the king of Scotland had been so long acknowledged by England, and by all Europe, is it possible to consider her as more than a titular queen, divested of every substantial right to which a sovereign tribunal could have regard ? " * If we accept of the doctrine that " the safety of the people is the highest law," we must further agree that the sentence against Mary, " if not capable of complete vindica tion, has at least encountered a disproportioned censure." f But there must be censure more or less. The contendingfeelings excited by the fate of Mary have been as correctly analysed by the great contemporary poet as by any historian. There can be no doubt that Spencer's " False Duessa " was the type of Mary, the " un titled queen." Following out the poet's brief enumeration of the crimes of Duessa, Authority opposed her ; the Law of Nations rose against her ; Religion imputed God's behest to condemn her ; the People's cry and Commons' suit importuned for care of the Public Cause : Justice charged her with breach of law : — " But then, for her, on the contrary part, Rose many advocates for her to plead ; First there came Pity with full tender heart, And with her joined Regard of Womanhead ; * " Constitutional History," chap. iii. f ffi/j. PARLIAMENT. — PROCLAMATION OF THE JUDGMENT. 119 And then came Danger, threatening hidden dread And high alliance unto foreign power ; Then came Nobility of Birth, that bred Great ruth through her misfortune's tragic stour, And lastly Grief did plead, and many tears forth pour." * The Pity, the Regard of Womanhead, the ruth for fallen Nobility of Birth, the Grief -that speaks in tears, will always prevail over political considerations when we peruse the sad story of Mary Stuart. But it is not to read the past aright if we wholly shut our eyes to Justice and the Public Cause. It would be worse than mere tenderness to impute to Elizabeth and her advisers, to the parliament and to the people, a blind hostility to a suffering and harmless captive. Mary was for years the terror of England. Pier destruction was " the Great Cause " to which the highest and the humblest in the land looked as a relief. If her death were a crime it was a national crime. To regard it at the present day as an outrage upon Scotland, and to talk of it, as some do, in this spirit, appears to us one of those hallucinations of a distempered patriotism, with which men vainly endeavour to call up the shadows of long- buried rivalries and forgotten discontents. The parliament was opened by Commission, an unusual course, on the 29th of October. The chief business was to bring before the houses the proceedings against the queen of Scots ; and the principal discussions were upon what was commonly termed " the Great Cause." The members of the Council appear to have been firmly persuaded of the duty of urging Elizabeth to the most ex treme course. Davison, one of her secretaries, writes to Leicester on the 4th of November, " Your lordship's presence here were more than needful for the great cause now in hand, which is feared will receive a colder proceeding than may stand with the surety of her majesty, and necessity of our shaken estates." f On the 10th of November, a committee of both houses declared the sentence against Mary to be just; and the houses agreed in a petition to Elizabeth, that proclamation of the judgment might be made, and that further proceedings might be taken against the Scottish queen; " because upon advised and great consultation, we cannot find that there is any possible means to provide for your majesty's safety but by the just and speedy execution of the said queen." J The answer of Elizabeth is generally considered hypocritical : " If my * " Faery Queen," book v. canto ix. t " Leycester Correspondence." p. 453- t " Parliamentary History-" 120 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. life alone depended hereupon, and not the safety and welfare of all my people, I would, I protest unfcignedly, willingly and readily pardon her. Nay, if England might by my death obtain a more flourishing condition and a better prince, I would most gladly lay down my life. For, for your sakes it is, and for my people's, that I desire to live." This is egotism; but egotism which has not only the " princely dignity," but the " motherly tenderness," with which Elizabeth always spoke of her people. On this occasion she re quested time to consider. The houses again resolved that no safety can in any wise be had as long as the queen of Scots doth live. Again Elizabeth hesitated : " If I should say unto you," she re plied, "that I mean not to grant your petition, by my faith I should say unto you more than perhaps I mean. And if I should say unto you I mean to grant your petition, I should then tell you more than is fit for you to know. And thus I must deliver you an answer answerless." But the government acceded to one part of the peti tion of parliament to the queen. At the beginning of December the judgment of the Commissioners against Mary was solemnly proclaimed in London and other places. Our historians record the joy of the citizens of the capital ; the ringing of bells and the bon fires. They pass over the statutory effect of this proclamation: "After such sentence or judgment given, and declaration thereof made and published, by her majesty's proclamation, under the great seal of England, all persons against whom such sentence or judg ment shall be so given and published, shall be excluded and dis abled for ever to have or claim or to pretend to have or claim, the crown of this realm." * The dread of the great body of Protest ants had been that, in the event of Elizabeth's death, a Romanist successor would come, in the person of Mary, the next heir. The proclamation under the statute put an end to that chance ; and hence the joy. For two months a more fatal termination of the " great cause " had been suspended. When Elizabeth was threat ened by the French ambassador, she wrote a letter of defiance to his master Henry III. When James sent commissioners to Eng land upon a mission of intercession, she delayed and protested her desire to save Mary, although in a letter to James she called her " the serpent that poisons me." As these efforts became more strenuous Elizabeth became more determined ; and wrote to James "though like a most natural good son you charged them [the ambassadors] to seek all means they could devise with wit or • 27 Elii. CONDUCT OF ELIZABETH. 121 judgment to save her life, yet I cannot, nor do not, allege anyfault to you of, their persuasions; for I take it that you will remember that advice or desires ought ever agree with the surety of the party r sent to and honour of the sender."* Camden has described the state of Elizabeth's mind at this period. " She gave herself over to solitariness, sat many times melancholy and mute ; and often sighing muttered to herself, aut fer, aut fcri, — that is, either bear strokes or strike : and, out of I know not what emblem, neferiare, fjri, — that is, strike, lest thou be stricken." At last the struggle, or the simulated struggle, seemed over. On the 1st of February, the queen sent for Davison, one of the secretaries, at ten in the morn ing. After various talk, she asked if he had brought the warrant for the execution of the Scottish queen. He had been desired by the lord admiral Howard to bring it, and he delivered it to Eliza beth. That warrant had been in his hands five or six weeks ; but now, as he was told, the queen had resolved to sign it, in conse quence of rumours of invasions and rebellions spread abroad. The queen signed the warrant, and ordered Davison to carry it to the great seal, and then dispatch it with all expedition. She told him to show the warrant to Mr. Secretary Walsingham, who was sick ; saying, merrily, that she thought the sight thereof would kill him outright. This might be cruel indifference, or forced levity to hide a conflict within. He showed the warrant to Burleigh and Leices ter, and then went to the chancellor, and afterwards to Walsingham. The next morning the queen sent him a message, that if he had not been already to the chancellor he should forbear till he knew her further pleasure. He went therefore to the queen, and told her that the warrant was sealed; and she said, "whatneedeth that haste ? " She objected that this course threw the whole burthen upon herself. Davison, fearing to take the responsibility of dis patching the warrant, went to Burleigh, who assembled a Council, and gave his advice that they should join in sending the warrant to the commissioners ¦' without troubling her majesty any further in that behalf, she having done all that in law or reason could be required of her." Burleigh undertook to prepare letters to accom pany the warrant; and the next day, the 3rd, the warrant and des patches were delivered by Burleigh to Mr. Beale, who was thought the fittest messenger. Two or three days after, the queen spoke to Davison about another course " that had been propounded to her underhand by one of great place," against which Davison gave rea- * "Letters of Elizabeth and James VI.," p. 441. 122 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. sons " wherewith she seemed to rest satisfied without any show of following the new course, or altering her former resolution in any point." At this interview Elizabeth complained that the warrant was not already executed. Such is the straightforward account contained in a Manuscript which is amongst the papers in the Har leian Collection. This is, in substance, the same account as that given by Camden. But there are other statements by this unfor tunate secretary, who was prosecuted in the Star Chamber for not obeying Elizabeth's commands in the matter of the warrant, which are familiar to the most cursory reader of history, and which are usually accepted as evidence of a desire of the queen that Mary should be privately murdered. Camden refers to these statements of how Davison " excused himself in private," which he gives " compendiously," with this addition to what we have related as found in the other narrative : " Moreover she blamed Paulet and Drury that they had not eased her of this care, and wished that Walsingham would feel their minds in this matter." On a subse quent day, "she asked me whether I had received any answer from Paulet, whose letter, when I had showed her, wherein he flatly re fused to undertake that which stood not with honour and justice, she waxing angry, accused him and others, which had bound them selves by the Association, of perjury and breach of their vow." We forbear to enter here upon this remarkable story, of which, holding the evidence to be very doubtful as regards assassination, we have thrown the minuter details into the form of a note, so as not to interrupt the main narrative. * The last hours of Mary Stuart have been described with an ex actness which is far more interesting than the highest efforts of imaginative art. Indeed, the art of Schiller has borrowed its most effective touches from an official narrative whose authenticity is established by an indorsement in lord Burleigh's hand.f The scenes immediately preceding the fatal morning of the Sth of Feb ruary have been derived from various sources, and some of the inci dents are conflicting. The relations, however, agree in the most essential particulars. The earls of Shrewsbury and Kent, to whom the Lords of the Council had specially sent Mr. Beale, arrived at Fotheringay on the 7th of February, after dinner. They commu nicated to Mary the purpose for which they had arrived ; and Beale * See page 128. t ¦' 8 Feb. 1586. The manner of the Q\ of Scott's death at Fodrynghay, wr. by R. Wy." This is amongst the Lansdowne MS. Ellis. Second Series, vol. iii. p. 102. WARRANT OF EXECUTION. 1 23 read the queen's commission for her execution. She bowed her head, made the sign of the cross, and thanked her God that the summons so long expected had come at last. She asked at what time she should die, and was informed at eight the following morn ing. Having desired the presence of her priest and almoner, she was refused ; and was told that in the place of her confessor she might have the spiritual assistance of the dean of Peterborough, She necessarily declined this. This ferocious bigotry would be incomprehensible, if we did not bear in "mind that the severe Pro testant and the rigid Catholic were equally convinced that it was their duty to urge their own doctrines, even whilst the axe or the fagot were ready for those who were about to perish for their opin ions. The " bachelor of Divinity, named Elye, of Brazennose Col lege," who pressed Cranmer to recant when he was chained to the stake ; and the earl of Kent, who attempted to convert Mary, on the evening before her death, were misjudging zealots, but they meant not cruelty. Camden has it, that the earl of Kent said to Mary, "Your life will be the death of our religion, as, contrariwise, your death will be the life thereof." The doomed one saw her ad vantage in this speech : and afterwards said to her physician, " They say that I must die because I have plotted against the queen's life ; yet the earl of Kent signified! unto me that there is no other cause of my death but that they doubt their rtlig'on be cause of me." Mary then' looked over her will ; distributed money to her attendants ; wrote letters ; prayed long and fervently ; and went quietly to sleep. At the upper end of the great hall of Fotheringay had been erected a scaffold, two feet in height and twelve in breadth, railed round, and covered with black cloth. On that scaffold were a low stool, a long cushion, and a block ; all covered also with black. There were many persons assembled in that hall. The queen had dressed herself " gorgeously and curiously," says Camden, " as she was wont to do on festival days." She came forth from her cham ber, -at the bidding of Thomas Andrews, sheriff of Northampton shire ; and was met in the entry next the hall, by Shrewsbury and Kent, "with divers knights and gentlemen." Melvin, one of her old servants, fell fn his knees before her ; and said that it would be the most sorrowful message he ever carried when he should re port in Scotland that his queen and mistress was dead. The official narrative thus continues: "Then the queen of Scots, shedding ' tears, answered him, ' You ought to rejoice rather than weep for I24 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. that the end of Mary Stuart's troubles is now come. Thou know- est, Melvin, that all this world is but vanity, and full of troubles and sorrows ; carry this message from me, and tell my friends that I die a true woman to my religion, and like a true Scottish woman and a true French woman. But God forgive them that have long desired my end ; and he that is the true Judge of all secret thoughts knoweth my mind, how that ever it hath been my Gdsirs.- to have Scotland and England united together. Commend me to my son, and tell him that I have not' done anything that may prejudice his kingdom of Scotland; and so, good Melvin, farewell;' and kissing him, she bade him pray for her." We have again a scene characteristic of ah age in which to be tender was too often accounted to be weak, and to be tolerant was held to be impious. Mary requested that her servants might be present at her death. The earl of Kent refused, lest they should trouble her grace, and disquiet the company by their speeches. She replied that she would give her word that they should do noth ing of the kind. After some consultation two of her female ser vants and Melvin, with two medical attendants and an old man, were allowed to enter the hall. Melvin carrying her train, she stepped up the scaffold with a cheerful countenance, and sat down on the stool ; and there stood by her side the two earls, and the sheriff, and two executioners. The commission was read : Mary " listening unto it with as small regard as if it had not concerned her at all." The dean of Peterborough, Dr. Fletcher, standing outside the rail, directly before her, began an exhortation ; but she stopped him, saying, " Mr. Dean, I am settled in the ancient Catho lic Roman religion, and mind to spend my blood in defence of it." The pertinacious dignitary replied, with more zeal than charity, " Madam, change your opinion, and repent of your former wicked ness, and settle your faith only in Jesus Christ, by him to be saved." Mary told him to trouble himself no further ; and Shrewsbury and Kent said they would pray for her. She thanked them, "but to join with you in prayer I will not, for that you and I are not of one religion." The dean then prayed aloud from the English liturgy; and Mary with steadfast voice, having in her han * Preface to " Ecclesiastical Polity," vol i. p. 190. Oxford ed., 1820. 172 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. nunciations of the puritanic writers without qualification, we were to regard this as a period of very marked profligacy. We open " The Anatomie of Abuses " of Philip Stubbes— •' a most rigid Calvinist, a bitter enemy to Popery, and a great corrector of the vices and abuses of his time."* This lay-preacher has no grada tions in his scale of wickedness. " The horrible vice of pestiferous dancing " is as offensive to him as " the beastly vice of drunken ness ; " and "new devices and devilish fashions " of apparel are as odious in his sight as "gaming-houses, the shambles of the devil." Nevertheless, he is an honest and trustworthy observer of man ners, at a time when the moralist had a wide range for observa tion ; when he looked upon a people rather than a class — the cour tier and the citizen, the artisan and the peasant. The pursuits of all members of the social state had become blended in mutual wants and dependencies. Let us follow this quaint old writer in some of his delineations of the English of the latter part of the sixteenth century — "a strong kind of people, audacious, bold, puissant, and heroical, of great magnanimity, valiancy, and prowess ; " but, " notwithstanding that the Lord hath blessed that land with the knowledge of his truth above all other lands in the world, yet is there not a people more corrupt, wicked, or perverse, living upon the face of the earth." t Out of the manifest exag gerations of this declaimer we may collect many curious and un questionable facts. In the Epistle Dedicatory of his volumes, Stubbes says, " re formation of manners, and amendment of life, was never more needful ; for was pride, the chiefest argument of this book, ever so ripe ! " By " pride " we understand him to mean what is the ac companiment of every period of general prosperity — a love of lux ury and of luxurious display, not confined to the superior classes, but spread by the force of the imitative principle very widely through many inferior degrees of station. "Do not," he says, " both men and women, for the most part, every one, in general, go attired in silks, velvets, damasks, satins, and what not, which are attire only for the nobility and gentry, and not for the others at any hand?" The sumptuary laws of Henry VIIL had ceased to be regarded. Those who were winning wealth by industry would no longer submit, if they ever did submit, to be told by stat ute what they were not to wear, according to a scale of income * Antony a Wood. t Stubbes, p. 4. We quote from the rare reprint, edited by Mr. Turnbull. PRIDE OF APPAREL. 1 73 yarying from 200/. a year to 5/.* They utterly despised the rea son set forth^for such arbitrary regulation — namely, to prevent " the subversion of good and politic order in knowledge and dis tinction of people, according to their estates, pre-eminences, dig nities, and degrees." f A statute of Philip and Mary was directed against the wearing of silk, except by certain privileged classes. The statesmen of Elizabeth 'meddled little with these matters, but we find in the statute-book three laws which were intended, as we suppose, for the encouragement of home manufactures. By a stat ute of 1562-3, a most singular device was adopted, for preventing persons, except those of inordinate wealth, indulging too largely in the extravagance of " foreign stuff or wares " for appareling or adorning the body. If such finery was sold to any person not pos sessing 3000/. a year in lands or fees, not being paid for in ready money, the seller was debarred of any legal remedy for the recov ery of the debt.t By a statute of 1 566, velvet hats or caps were prohibited to all under the degree of a knight; and by that of 1571, every person, except ladies, lords, knights, and gentlemen having twenty marks by the year in land, was to wear upon his head, on Sundays and holidays, a home-made cap of wool, very decent and comely for all states and degrees. § If Stubbes is to be relied upon, all states and degrees rejected the statutory notion of what was decent and comely. They wore hats " perking up like the spear or shaft of a temple ; " — or hats " flat and broad on the crown, like the battlements of a house ; " or " round crowns " with bands of every colour. They wore hats of silk, velvet, taffety, sarsenet, wool, and of "fine hair, which they call beaver, fetched from beyond the seas, from whence a great sort of other vanities do come besides." He was of no estimation among men who had not a velvet or taffety hat ; "and so common a thing it is, that every serving-man, country-man, or other, even all indifferently, do wear of these hats." With these exceptional laws, which thus ap pear to have been wholly inoperative, Elizabeth and her Council left the regulation of apparel to a far higher law than any parlia ment could enact— to the tastes of the people and their ability to gratify them. The foreign fashions were copied, and the foreign silks and velvets imported, with no restraint that had the least effect. The queen herself carried her love of costly dress almost into a mania. It was the only expenditure in which she was pro- ' 24 Hen. VIII. c. 13. MUd. X 5 Eliz. c. 6. 5 13 Eliz. c. 19. 174 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. fuse. In her youth, said bishop Aylmer, " her maidenly apparelj which she used in king Edward's time, made the nohlemen's daughters, and wives to be ashamed to be dressed and painted like peacocks." Sir John Harrington has a story of a bishop, which shows how the same Elizabeth thought of such adornments at a later period of her life. " On Sunday my lord of London preached to the queen's majesty, and seemed to touch on the vanity of deck ing the body too finely. Her majesty told the ladies that ' if the bishop held more discourse on such matters, she would fit him fo> heaven, but he should walk thither without a staff, and leave hi* mantle behind him.' " * The ruff and the vardingale had then su perseded all " maidenly apparel ; " and we are now accustomed to think of Elizabeth and her ladies as they shone forth in the most gorgeous but least graceful of womanly attire. The liberty of the press, small as it was, must have been more relied upon than the liberty of the pulpit, when Philip Stubbes hurled his thunder against every article of dress with which we are familiar in the portraits of the magnificent queen. The wreaths of gold and jewels in the bolstered hair; the rings of precious stones in the pierced ears ; the " great ruffs and neckerchers of holland, lawn, cambric, and such cloth, smeared and starched in the devil's 'liquor,' starch;" the gowns " of divers fashions, changing with the moon ; " the fringed petticoats ; the coloured kirtles — these vanities of the rich and great, had, according to this minute cen sor, descended to the very humble : " So far hath this canker of pride eaten into the body of the commonwealth, that every poor yeoman's daughter, and every husbandman's daughter, and every cottager's daughter, will not stick to flaunt it out in such gowns, petticoats, and kirtles, as these." Doubtless this description of the spread of luxury is greatly overdone ; or we might receive it as a proof of the general diffusion of wealth. But when this godly satirist tells us of these cottagers' daughters, — " they are so im pudent that, albeit their poor parents have but one cow, horse or sheep, they will never let them rest till they be sold, to maintain them in their braveries,"— we may be certain that he is speaking " in Ercles' vein." The holiday finery of the village maiden was limited, to a ribbon and a coloured nether-stock. A "queen of curds and cream," transplanted to a town, might "spend the great est part of the day in sitting at the door, to show her braveries," * " Nuga: Antiquai," vol. i. p. GLUTTONY AND DRUNKENNESS. 1 75 but on her native green she was as pure and simple as the rose in her bosom. The pride of apparel, set forth by this anatomist of abuses, was scarcely more obtrusive in women than in men. All ranks, accord ing to this authority, lavished their means upon the abominations of stately bands and monstrous ruffs, upon embroidered shirts, upon slashed and laced doublets, upon French and Venetian hosen, upon knit nether-stocks (stockings), upon velvet cloaks. There never was a period in which the satirist did not affirm that the pre ceding generation was healthier and braver, and altogether nobler than that to which he had the misfortune to belong ; and so our good old Puritan writes, " how strong men were in times past, how long they lived, and how healthful they were, before such niceness and vain pampering curiosity was invented, we may read, and many that live at this day can testify. But now, through our fond toys and nice inventions, we have brought ourselves into such pusillani mity and effeminacy of condition, as we may seem rather nice dames and wanton girls, than puissant agents or manly men, as our fore fathers have been."* The year 1 588 gave a practical answer to the charge of pusillanimity. The Saxon heart was as brave as ever, though it beat under an Italian doublet. Nevertheless, if there had not been some salt in society to preserve the body politic from the taint of selfishness, these and other excesses of pride might be received as symptoms of national decay. Gluttony and drunkenness are the vices of the rudest communities ; but in the more general diffusion of wealth in the reign of Elizabeth, they assumed those forms of ostentatious display which are amongst the worst evils of social refinement. The puritan writers were not alone in their remonstrances against the luxuries of the table which marked the latter years of the sixteenth century. Stubbes com pares the variety of meats and sauces, the sweet condiments, the delicate confections of his time, with the past days, when "one dish or two of good wholesome meat was thought sufficient for a man of great worship to dine withal." Thomas Nash, whom the Puritans counted amongst the wicked, enlarges on the same theme : "We must have our tables furnished like poulterers'" stalls, or as though we were to victual Noah's ark again. . . . What a coil have we, this course and that course, removing this dish higher, setting another lower, and taking away the third. A general might in less space remove his camp, than they stand disposing of their * Stubbes, p. 44. 176 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. gluttony." * Excessive drinking, a vice which reached its climax in the degraded court of James I., was not wholly of native growth. The same writer says, " From gluttony in meats let me descend to superfluity in drink, — a sin that, ever since we have mixed our selves with the Low Countries, is counted honourable ; but before we knew their lingering wars was held in the highest degree of hatred that might be."f Stubbes says, every country, city, town, village, and other places, hath abundance of ale-houses, taverns, and inns, which are so fraught with maltworms, night and day, that you would wonder to see them." There were punishments for low debauchery, such as the drunkard's cloak. Against this growing sin, which was creeping up from the peasant and the mechanic to the yeoman and the courtier, the preachers lifted up their voices in the pulpit, and not always in vain. Robert Greene, the unhappy dramatist, who died in trie midst of his excesses, tells how he was stopped in his early career of riot by hearing a good man preach of future rewards and punishments ; but that he could not stand up against the ridicule of his companions, who called him Puritan and Precisian, and so went again to his drinking-booth, his dice, and his bear-baiting. But we may be sure thTat these earnest preachers in some degree injured the good effect of their religious exhorta tions against real vices, by denouncing those harmless recreations which to the greater number supplied the place of grosser excite ments. . In resisting " the beginnings of evil " too much zeal may -be as fatal as too much laxity. The court of Elizabeth, in which " My grave Lord-Keeper led the brawls," was a dancing court. The queen danced when she was a girl, as her sisteV Mary also danced. In 1589, at her palace of Richmond, her " ordinary exercise " was " six or seven galliards in a morn ing, besides music and singing." t. In 1600, when she was feeble, and asked for a staff when wearied, she could still delight, at the house of sir Robert Sydney, to look upon the pleasures of the young, " and smiled at the ladies, who in their dances often came up to the step on which the seat was fixed to make their obeisance, and so fell back into their order again." § The Puritans denounced all dancing in mixed companies of the sexes. The dancing-schools, which then abounded, were, they said, for teaching " the noble * " Pierce Pennilesse," edited by J. P. Collier, from the original of 1592. p. 47. t Ibid. p. 52. x Lodge, vol. ii. p. 411. § " Nugae Antiquas," vol. i. p. 315. THE SABBATH PROFANED BY SPORTS. 1 77 science of heathen devilry." They held that " men by themselves and women by themselves " might dance without sin, "to recreate the mind oppressed with some great toil and labour." The people, high and low, did not choose to accept this limitation of their favourite amusement ; and so upon the rushes of the torch-lighted hall, having before them the noble example of sir Christopher Hatton, * the courtiers danced their grave measures and corantoes, to the airs of queen Elizabeth's " Virginal Book ; " and the peasant youths and maidens, on the village green, saw the sun go down, as they tripped " the comely country-round." Puritanism thought it right to make war upon every such amusement, crying out, " Give over your occupations, you pipers, you fiddlers, you min strels, and you musicians, you drummers, you tabretters, and you fluters, and all other of that wicked bropd." f They held that " sweet music at the first delighteth the ears, but afterward corrupt' eth and depraveth the mind." In this, and in many other battles which they fought, they warred against nature, and were beaten. Music was the especial Art of the Elizabethan days. In every household there was the love of music, and in many families it was cultivated as an essential part of education. The plain tune of the church did not unfit the people for the madrigals of the fire-side — exquisite compositions, which tell us how much of the highest enjoyments of a refined taste belonged to an age which we are too apt to consider very inferior to our own in the amenities of life. We should do the Puritanic writers and preachers injuslice if we did not see and point out that many of their objections to the recreations of the people were originally directed against their use on the Sunday. The Christians' first day of the week being regarded by the Romanists as a holiday, on which, after the hours of devotion, all amusements lawful in themselves were not unlawful, the more rigid Protestants determined, in their implicit reverence for the Old Testament, to adopt the strictest Judaical observance of the Sabbath, as one of the most distinguishing attri butes of the Reformation. This view was injurious to the iesire for conciliation which influenced the majority of the conforming clergy ; who were either opposed upon principle to the application of this supposed test of a holy life, or saw the impolicy of depriv ing the people of the recreations which their forefathers deemed not only innocent but salutary. After the evening service, to shoot at the butts, to play at football, even to see an interlude, vfere not * See Gray's " Long Story." t Stubbes, p. 204. Vol III.— 12 178 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. accounted unchristian occupations. Round the old manor-house, the lads and lasses of the village would have their Sunday evening games of barley-break and handball, while the squire and even the' parson would look on approvingly. The Puritans conscientiously believed such license to be incompatible with religious principle, and set about opposing these pursuits with an earnestness commensu rate with the difficulty of their task. Cartwright, the most influen tial of their number, speaking of the way in which a clergyman per formed the service, says — "He posteth it over as fast as he can gallop ; for either he hath two places to serve, or else there are some games to be played in the afternoon." When there were daily prayers in the parish-churches, and especially at holiday-seasons, the old traditional sports and mummeries of the people were also offen sive to some, though tqlerated by man}'. Thus Puritanism came to do battle, not only against those amusements on Sundays, and at other especial times when the Church claimed serious thoughts, but against the amusements themselves, whenever practised. In 1585, a bishop of Lincoln, in his " Visitation articles of Inquiry," asks, " Whether your Minister and Churchwardens have suffered any Lords of Misrule, or Summer Lords and Ladies, or any disguised person in Christmas, or at May-games, or Morris-dancers, cr at any other time, to come unreverently into the church-yard, and there to dance or play any unseemly part, with scoffs, jests, wanton gestures, or ribald talk, namely in the time of common prayer."* The popular license on these holiday occasions, amongst a people in whom the love of fun was inbred, no doubt often went bevond the bounds of decorum ; and thus the stricter Protestants endeav oured to sweep away the merriments altogether. They were in due time successful — "the hobby-horse was forgot," and the "sealed quarts " at the alehouse-door remained the only attraction. The Lord of Misrule was a great personage in town and coun try. He was the "master of merry disports " in royal palaces and civic halls. Learned doctors of the universities, and great benchers of the inns of court, recognised his authority. He held his ground through all the troublesome times of the Reformation up to the Civil Wars, when his mock pageantry was swept away with the realities of power that then perished. The Christmas sports and their lord would have perished, even though Prynne, with other learned Puritans, had not called upon "all pious Christians etern ally to abominate them," because they were " derived from the * Quoted in " The Martin Marprelate Controversy," by the Rev. W. Maskell. THE LORD OF MISRULE. 179 Roman Saturnalia and Bacchanalian festivals." But in Elizabeth's days, though most of the so-called superstitious ceremonies of the ancient Church had been swept away, the people, high or low, would not readily surrender those festive observances which^ although common in the times of Popery, were not necessarily connected with its spirit or its practice. Thus, in every borough, and more especially in every village, the Lord of Misrule,' chosen by universal suffrage at Christmas or at Whitsuntide, headed his com pany of lusty mummers, in their gaudy liveries, their scarfs and laces, their legs hung with little bells ; and " then march this heathen com pany towards the church and churchyard, their pipers piping, their drummers thundering, their stumps dancing, their bells jingling, their handkerchiefs swinging about their heads like madmen, their hobby horses and other monsters skirmishing amongst the throng." * We laugh atthese follies which the Puritans execrated; but in this license the national character may be recognised. The riot of the multitude was placed by themselves under control. The Lord of Misrule was as absolute as the Parish Constable. The empire of Law was recognised by "the wild heads of the parish" in choosing their captain ; and " the foolish people " submitted themselves for their guidance to his authority, upon the principle of order by which their more serious liberties were upheld. Amongst such a people it was useless declaiming against May-games ; against Plough- Monday dances, with their "tipsy jollity; against Church-ales, and Wakes. The old hearty spirit of hospitality might be denounced as gluttony, and the free intercourse of joyous hearts reprobated as licentiousness. If the feasts and the merry-makings had been simply vicious they could not have so long prevailed amongst a nation essentially moral. Even in the popular gatherings, which have been so emphatically described as occasions for sin, there were objects of piety and charity connected with the harmless merriment and wild excitement. Such were the Wakes and the Church-ales. The Wake was the annual feast to commemorate the dedication of the parish church. Stubbes has described the festival with less than his usual acrimony : " Every town, parish, and village, some at one time of the year, some at another, — but so that every one keep his proper day assigned, and appropriate to itself, which they call their wake-day, — useth to make great preparation for good cheer ;' to the which all their friends and kinsfolks, far and near, are invited." He speaks the language which the Puritans ap- * Stubbes, p. 169. ISO HISTORY OF ENGLAND. plied to every relaxation, when he asks, " wherefore should the whole town, parish, village, and country, keep one and the same day, and make such gluttonous feasts as they do ?" Such declaim- ers have ever confounded abuse with use. The use of Wakes was recognised at a later period, as promoting " neighbourhood and freedom, with manlike and lawful exercises." * '¦ Neighbourhood" was that old " hearty spirit of social intercourse, constituting a practical equality between man and man, which enabled all ranks to mingle without offence and without suspicion in these public ceremonials." t The object of the Church-ale was thoroughly practical ; and in complete accordance with one great national characteristic — that of voluntary contributions for public objects. At the season of Whitsuntide, when the spring was calling up "a spirit of life in every thing," there was a parish feast, which the churchwardens had prepared for by an ale-brewing ; and the profit that was made by filling the black-jacks of the jovial countrymen was applied to the repairs of the church. Fancy-fairs have super seded Whitsun-ales. We are a more decorous people than these our ancestors, with their exuberant merry-makings for every season — their sheep-shearing feasts, with cheese-cakes and warden-pipes, — their Hock-cart at Harvest-home, — their Christmas, with the Boar's-head and the Yule-log in the great hall, the tenants sitting at their landlord's table, and the labourers and their wives and children crowding in unreproved. All these indications of a kindly spirit, not chilled by distinctions of rank, are gone. Let us strive to revive the spirit in all forms fitting our own age. Roger Ascham maintained that " to ride comely ; to run fair at the tilt or ring ; to play at all weapons ; to shoot fair in bow or surely in gun ; to vault lustily ; to run ; to leap ; to wrestle ; to swim; to dance comely; to sing, and play of instruments cunningly; to hawk ; to hunt ; to play at tennis ; and all pastimes generally which be joined with labour, used in open place, and in the day light, containing either some fit exercise for war or some pleasant pastime for peace, be not only comely and decent, but also very necessary for a courtly gentleman to use." The training of the courtly gentlemen of England has, for three centuries, been accord ing to the maxim of the wise old " Schoolmaster ; " and a better training could never have been devised to produce the leaders of a manly people. But the pastimes joined with labour— the vaulting, running, leaping, wrestling, swimming— were as necessary for the * Proclamation of Charles I., 1633. t " William Shakspere, a Biography." ATHLETIC EXERCISES AND SPORTS. l8l yeomen, the artisans, and the peasants, as for the gentlemen of England. Such training, " fit exercise for war," has won our country's battles, from Agincourt to Alma. Such training, " pleas ant pastime for peace," has still done something for brotherly kind ness amongst degrees of men whom fortune had too much isolated. It was this frank and rough fellowship in their field sports — their hunting, hawking, birding, fishing, otter-hunting ; it was this bold rivalry in their hurling and their foot-ball, their wrest ling and their single-stick, their archery, their land and water quintain, which knitted the squire and the yeoman and the plough man — the merchant, the artificer, and the sturdy apprentice, — in a companionship which made them strong enough to defy the world in Elizabeth's heroic time. The Puritans, who, when it came to the issue whether they should be slaves or fight, fought as well as the most reckless, made the mistake of trying to put down the rude games of the people because they might lead to brawling and con tention, and withdraw them from godliness. They were wiser in their denunciations of gaming and gaming-houses, which were amongst the corruptions of the town at this period. Sir John Harrington wrote " A Treatise on Playe," in which he endeavours to purify its abuses rather than banish it from the, houses of princes, and out of their dominions, as " holy and wise preachers " desired. If he were to show no indulgence to such recreations, he says, " I should have all our young lords, our fair ladies, our gallant gentle men, and the flower of all England against me." But he neverthe less draws a picture of " one that spends his whole life in play, of which there is too great choice," that sufficiently illustrates the pre vailing madness : " In the morning, perhaps, at chess, and after his belly is full then at cards ; and when his spirits wax dull at that, then for some exercise of his arms at dice ; and being weary there of, for a little motion of his body, to tennis ; and having warmed him at that, then, to cool himself alittle, play at tables ; * and, being disquieted in his patience for overseeing cinque and quatre, or missing two or three foul blots, then to an interlude ; and so, as one well compared it, like to a mill-horse treading always in the same steps, be ever as far from a worthy and wise man as the circle is from the centre." f Drinking, dicing, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, — the coarsest temp tations to profligacy, — were not such abominations in the eyes of the Puritans,' as " stage-plays, interludes, and comedies." The * " Tables," backgammon. t " Nugae Antiqua;," vol. i. p- 198. 182 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. aversion which the early Reformers entertained towards the Mys teries and Miracle Plays, were poured forth in fuller measure upon the plays of profane subjects, which had now become the universal amusements. The more it was said that some good example might be learned out of them, the more furious were those who would suppress them altogether. This was the great controversy of a cen tury. It began when the drama was in its puling infancy , it grew more violent during its erratic youth ; it ceased not when its glori ous manhood had supplied the best answer to its enemies ; it tri umphed in that drama's licentious decline. The history of the stage is an interesting chapter of our social history, through several generations. In the latter years of the reign of Elizabeth, when the Puritans, zealous, persevering, and united, had possessed them selves of much of the municipal power of the larger cities and towns, there was frequent warfare between the civic authorities and the performers of plays. The severe moralists called them " caterpillars of the commonwealth ; " the law defined them as " vagabonds." But the law, which mixed together in one common opprobrium "all fencers, bearwards, common players in interludes, minstrels, jugglers, pedlars, and petty chapmen," who wander abroad and have not license of two justices of the peace, in what shire they shall happen to wander,* — that same law excepted the established companies of players, by making those only vagabonds who were " not belonging to any baron of this realm, or towards any other honourable person of greater degree." The number of honourable persons who gave their sanction to companies of play ers was sufficient to secure a sanction for dramatic performances, wherever there was a demand for such amusements. But, notwith standing these privileges, there was frequent opposition to the acting of plays, especially in London ; and thus the earl of Leices ter's players, of which company James Burbacce was the chief share holder, being refused a license to perform within the walls of the city, erected a theatre in the Blackfriars, in 1576. The original theatrical performances were in t le inn-yards of the city, such as the Belle-Savage. The better sort of spectators sat in the gallery which connected the inn-chambers ; the larger number of the audi ence stood in the open yard. Gradually, hostelries were converted into theatres, and new buildings were erected for dramatic repre sentations. They were multiplied in various parts of the town, and especially in Southwark. The company of the Lord Chamberlain, ¦ 14 Eliz. c. 5. STAGE PLAYS. 183 frho were the queen's household servants, had two theatres — the Blackfriars and the Globe — the one for winter, the other for sum mer perfonmances. Of this company Richard Burbage was the chief actor, and William Shakspere was a shareholder in 1 589. This we know from a document, in which the "poor players " address lord Burleigh, affirming that they " have never given any cause of displeasure, in-that they have brought into their plays matters of state and religion, unfit to be handled by them, or presented to lewd spectators." A commission had been issued to inquire what companies of players had thus offended. This was the period of the Marprelate controversy ; and the stage was made an instru ment for attacking the Puritans. Nash boasted that " Vetus Co- moedia had brought forth Divinity with a scratched face, holding her heart as if she were sick." Spenser has described this period of license as one of ugly barbarism and brutish ignorance, of scoffing scurrility and scornful folly ; and he asks why " the man whom Nature self had made to mock herself" — "our pleasant Willy " chooses " to sit in idle cell " rather " than so himself to mockery to sell." There can be little doubt that " the gentle spirit," thus alluded to by the greatest poet of that time — a poet of enduring greatness — was Shakspere. He had, we are assured, already written two or three of his comedies, of which " unhurtful sport, delight, and laughter " were the characteristics. A grander labour was before him — the labour of preserving for all ages and all na tions the influences of what has been truly called " great Eliza's golden time ; " a time of free thought and heroic action, when in dividual prosperity had not deadened the sympathy for national greatness ; when men lived for their country as much as for them selves ; a time of security and comparative peace, born out of a long period of unrest. Of the great interpreter of the spirit of that age we shall have again to speak, in a brief notice of the Elizabethan Literature. 184 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER X. Henry of Navarre succeeds to the throne of France. — English expeditions to aid Henry IV. — A Parliament called. — Contests of the Crown and the Commons.— Intrigues of Spain in Scotland. — Naval expeditions. — The taking of Cadiz. — Parliament. — Stat utes regarding the Poor. — Progress of Poor Law Legislation.— Poverty and Vaga bondage. — Labourers refusing to work at usual wages. — Egyptians and pretended Egyptians. — Villa-nies of London. — Insecurity of the Suburbs. — Statutes against the increase of Buildings. — Almshouses. — Incidental causes of Indigence. — Fluctuation of Price. — Sickness. — Nuisances. — Fires. — Insum::i2:it household accommodation. — Increase of town populations. — Crimes of towns — Police. Henry of Navarre, the great champion of Protestantism, by a tragical event was suddenly placed upon the throne of France. On the 8th of August, 1589, Jacques Clement, a monk, stabbed Henry III. ; and the king died of his wounds on the following day. Henry IV. became the sovereign of a troubled kingdom, reduced by long intestine conflicts to extreme weakness and misery. Henry III., when he fell under the blow of an assassin, was in arms against the great catholic confederacy known as the League ; then exasperated by the murder of their leader, the duke of Guise, and of t: e cardinal his brother. The king was advancing against Paris with an army, to put down this formidable party, and the rebellious citizens who adhered to them; when the Dominican friar fearfully revenged the crime which his monarch had perpetrated. Henry IV., on account of his religion, had to encounter the most determined opposition to his succession to the crown, although the undoubted heir. The duke of Mayence, the brother of the murdered Guises, took the command of the League. The king of Spain was ready with his most strenuous aid, to keep a protestant out of the throne of France, coveting probably that great kingdom for himself. Elizabeth of England hesitated not to give her support to the Huguenot king, who had so long battled with the most adverse fortune. She sent him a supply of money — no large sum, it may seem in these days; being only twenty-two thousand pounds, — but Henry declared it was a larger treasure than he had ever seen. An English force, under the command of lord WiUoughby, soon after landed at Dieppe ; and the king was thus encouraged to continue a contest which without this timely assistance might have been hopeless. Henry, who had learnt the art of war in many a desperate ENGLISH EXPEDITIONS TO AID HENRY IV. 185 struggle with the powerful enemies of the reformed religion — and had early known how to win the love of all who served him, and to gain new adherents to his cause, by his kind and generous nature, his courage and endurance — was now in a position to risk a general engagement with the enemy who, at his accession to the throne, appeared well able to destroy him. At the great battle of Ivry a gallant army followed his white plume to a complete victory. But the duke of Parma, with the forces of Spain, came to the relief of the League, and compelled Henry to raise the siege of Paris. Elizabeth again sent him succour. In April, 1591, sir John Norris landed at France with a. force of three thousand men ; and in July of that year, another small army,' four thousand in number, under the earl of Essex, was also sent to the aid of Henry. But the duke of Parma, the most accomplished general of that time, again came to the relief of the League ; and the expeditions of England had no satisfactory result. Robert Devereux was the son of a distinguished but unfortu nate nobleman, Walter, earl of Essex, who died at Dublin in 1576, " his hard estate having long ebbed even to the low water mark," as he described the issue of his ruinous attempt to subdue and col onise a district of Ulster. He committed his eldest son, Robert, who was horn in 1567, to the kindness of the queen, requesting that he might be brought up in the household of lord Burleigh. The youth was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, and with a .handsome person, and many accomplishments, made his appearance at court in 1584. He was related to the queen ; and the favourite, Leicester, had become his &tep-father by marrying Letitia, the widow of the lord Walter. Honours were showered upon him, to an extent which provoked the jealousy of older courtiers, and in creased the dangerous impetuosity of his own nature. We have mentioned his participation in the attack upon Lisbon under Drake and Norris. He had displeased the queen by joining this expedition without her permission ; but on his return soon regained her favour. Raleigh and Essex were each jealous of the influence of the other ; and the Cecils, though they kept their feelings under sub jection to their policy, could ill brook the confidence which the queen placed in one so young and so indiscreet. The petted earl claimed an almost exclusive right to the royal smiles ; and having offered an insult to sir Charles Blount, to whom Elizabeth had given some mark of approbation, a duel ensued, in which Essex was wounded. The queen upon the occasion exclaimed, " By God's 186 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. death, it was fit that some one or other should take him down, and teach him better manners, otherwise there would be no rule with him." Such was Essex, at the age of twenty-four, when he was appointed to the command of the expedition sent to the aid of Henry IV. He conducted himself with his native gallantry; but made a singular display of his want of discretion, by sending a challenge to the governor of Rouen to meet him in single combat. He had attempted the same revival of the worn-out spirit of chiv alry in his Lisbon campaign. The only brother of Essex, Walter Devereux, was killed in the unsuccessful warfare of 1591. The naval enterprises of this year had no more fortunate issue. A squadron of seven ships was sent, under the command of lord Thomas Howard, to intercept the Indian fleet on its return to Spain. But Philip was prepared ; and had fitted out a force of fifty-five sail as an escort. The little English squadron fell in with this armament ; and one of Howard's vessels became a Spanish prize. This was the first ship that Spain had taken from England during the war. It was commanded by sir Richard Grenville, the vice-admiral ; and the memory of the unequal fight which this heroic captain sus tained from three in the afternoon to day-break the next morn ing, long abided with the English sailor as one of his noblest ex amples of courage and resolution. Grenville was three times wounded during the action, in which he again and again repulsed the enemy, who constantly assailed him with fresh vessels. At length the good ship lay upon the waters like a log. Her captain- proposed to blow her up rather than surrender ; but the majority of the crew compelled him to yield himself a prisoner. He died in a few days, and his last words were,—" Here die I, Richard Gren ville, with a joyful and quiet mind ; for that I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to do, fighting for his country, queen, relig ion, and honour." The mode in which the war against Spain was carried on by England made the wealth of the Indies a very insecure possession to king Philip. Rich carracks were sometimes taken and some times destroyed. Real treasures, such as fourteen hundred chests of quicksilver, which were found in two ships captured by a Lon doner, were abstracted from the riches of the Spaniard ; and the Catholic king's dealings in a commodity which he sold at great profit to his Indian subjects were also interrupted. Thomas White, the Londoner, with his valuable quicksilver, also obtained a prize, worthless in England, of two millions of papal bulls for indulgence^ CONTESTS OF THE CROWN AND THE COMMONS. 187 But this war was also costly to England ; and in 1593 Elizabeth called a parliament, for she needed a subsidy. In this parliament the Act against " Popish recusants," and the Act against the Puritans, "to restrain the queen's subjects in their obedience,"* were passed with little debate, but amidst manifest heartburnings. The queen and the Commons were beginning to be at issue. Pre rogative and Privilege were giving indications that the time was approaching when they would come into actual conflict. There was a temper growing up amongst the people which, if it appeared feeble when compared with the ancient feuds between the sovereign and the aristocracy, was, to some acute observers, the little cloud which foretold the coming tempest. Cecil, in 1569, complained of " the decay of obedience in civil policy, which being compared with the fearfulness and reverence of all inferior estates to their superiors in times past, will astonish any wise and considerate person, to behold the desperation of reformation." There is a remarkable passage in Sidney's " Arcadia," in which he, no doubt, seeks to indicate the popular temper of his times : " When they began to talk of their griefs, never bees made such confused humming : the town-dwellers demanding putting down of imposts, the country fellows laying out of commons : some would have the prince keep his court in one place, some in another: all cried out to have new counsellors ; but when they should think of any new, they liked them as well as any other that they could remember ; especially they would have the treasure so looked unto, as that he should never need to take any more subsidies. At length they fell to direct contrarieties. For the artisans they would have corn and wine set at a lower price, and bound to be kept so still ; the plough men, vine-labourers, and the farmers would have none of that. The countrymen demanded that every man might be free in the chief towns ; that could not the burgesses like of. The peasants would have all the • gentlemen destroyed; the citizens, especially such as cooks, barbers, and those other that lived most on gentlemen, would but have them reformed. And of each side were like divisions, one neighbourhood beginning to find fault with another, but no confusion was greater than of particular men's likings and dislik- ings : one dispraising such a one, whom another praised, and demanding Such a one to be punished, whom the other would have exalted. No less ado was there about choosing him who should be their spokesman. The finer sort of burgesses, as merchants, * See Chapter IX. p. 170. 1 88 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. prentices, and cloth-workers, because of their riches, disdaining the baser occupations : and they, because of their number, as much disdaining them ; all they scorning the country men's ignorance, and the country men suspecting as much their cunning." This picture of a state of things from which the " regimenting " of the Plantagenets and the two first Tudors had passed away, presents a vivid notion of the keen and jealous competition of an industrious people amongst themselves ; and the grudging submission which citizen and peasant now yielded to those who had once lorded it over their traditionary liberties. Out of such " contrarieties " is gradually formed that power of public opinion which no statesman can safely despise. When the chaotic elements have grown into form and substance — when there is liberty of speech and liberty of writing — representative government becomes the surest basis of social order. But in the first rough utterances of public opinion rulers only hear prophetic sounds of coming woe. Such a condition of society as Sidney has described, of which the more daring spirits in the House of Commons were the exponents, was calculated to precipitate a contest between the Crown and the people's repre sentatives. But the strength was as yet all on one side; and Elizabeth was too sagacious to use her strength unnecessarily. There was a discontented temper amongst some members of the parliament of 1593, and the queen put it down with a haughtiness which looks like unmitigated despotism. When the Commons asked, according to ancient usage, for Liberty of Speech, the lord keeper replied, in the name of the queen, " Privilege of speech is granted, but you must know what privilege you have ; not to speak everyone what he listeth, or what comethin his brain to utter that; but your privilege is, aye or no. Wherefore, Mr. Speaker, her majesty's pleasure is, that if you perceive any idle heads, which will not stick to hazard their own estates ; which will meddle with reforming the Church, and transforming the Commonwealth ; and do exhibit any bills to such purpose, that you receive them not, until they be viewed and considered by those who it is fitter should consider of such things, and can better judge of them." A few bold members were not daunted by this temper ; -but prepared a bill for entailing the SuGcession to the Crown. This, of all other subjects, was the most disagreeable to the queen ; and four of the members were committed to prison for this hardihood. The cour age of the Puritans was not subdued by this severity, for Mr. Morice brought in a bill for correcting the abuses of the Ecclesias- CONTESTS OF THE CROWN AND THE COMMONS. 1 89 tical Court. The queen sent for the Speaker, who delivered a message to the House, that her majesty commanded that " no bills touching matters of state, or reformation in causes ecclesiastical, be exhibited." The same day Morice was committed to custody and, according to some statements, was in confinement when he died in 1 596. In a dignified letter to Burleigh, the persecuted Morice says, " That I am no more hardly handled, I impute, next unto God, .to your honourable good-will and favour I see no cause in my conscience to repent me of what I have done, nor to be dis mayed, although grieved, by this restraint of my liberty; for I stand for the maintenance of the honour of God and of my prince, and for the preservation of public justice and the liberties of my country against wrong and oppression ; being well content, at her majesty's good pleasure and commandment, (whom I beseech God long to preserve in all princely felicity,) to suffer and abide much more. But I had thought that, the judges ecclesiastical, being charged in the great council of the realm to be dishonorers of God and of her majesty ; perverters of law and public justice ; and wrong-doers unto the liberties and freedoms of all her majesty's subjects, by their extorted oaths, wrongful imprisonments, lawless subscription and unjust absolutions ; would rather have sought means to be cleared of this weighty accusation, than to shroud themselves under the suppressing of the complaint and shadow of mine imprisonment." Such men as Morice built up the constitu- . tional freedom whose foundations were still strong, however decayed the old fabric. Upon the matter of the subsidy, the Commons met the wishes of the Crown, but with evident reluctance. Francis Bacon, then rising into importance, made a strong speech against the amount of the subsidy, and for some time lost his chance of court favour. The contest between the Crown and the Commons, in the ques tion of the succession, was the renewal of a controversy which had been conducted with some bitterness in 1566. There had been other occasions on which the queen resisted the freedom with which members uttered opinions which seemed to limit her prerog ative. Mr. Yelverton, in 1576, said that princes were to have their prerogatives, but yet to be confined within reasonable limits ; the queen could not of herself make laws, neither could she break them. In 1576, Peter Wentworth complained that the liberty of free speech had been infringed ; and he went so far as to say, " none is without fault, no, not our noble queen, — but has com- I90 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. mitted great and dangerous faults to herself." The Commons themselves consigned Wentworth to the Tower; but after a month's imprisonment, the queen said she- remitted her displeasure towards him. Before we join in the common cry against the des potism of Elizabeth as a personal attribute, we must bear in mind that in those days the doctrine of ministerial responsibility for every act of the Crown was utterly unknown. There was no in tervening authority to break the force of a collision between the sovereign and the parliament. Elizabeth was responsible to pub lic opinion for her public acts, and she almost invariably took these acts upon herself. We need therefore scarcely wonder at occa sional displays of temper when any member made an attack upon her administration of affairs. Mr. Hallam has truly remarked upon the conflicts between the Crown and the parliament, that " if the former often asserted the victory, the latter sometimes kept the field, and was left on the whole a gainer at the close of the campaign." * Whatever might have been the desire of the Crown to narrow the powers of parliament, its constitutional authority was universally recognised. Had the monarchy under Elizabeth been so wholly despotic as Hume, the defender of the divine right of the next race of kings, has chosen to maintain, Harrison, in l577, would not have dared to write the following unqualified statement of the nature of parliament : " This house hath the most high and absolute power of the realm ; for thereby kings and mighty princes have from time to time been deposed from their thrones ; laws either enacted or abrogated ; offenders of all sorts punished ; and corrupted religion either disannulled or reformed. To be short, whatsoever the people of Rome did in their centu- riatis or tribunitiis comitiis, the same is and may be done by au thority of our parliament-house, which is the head and body of all the realm, and the place wherein everv particular person is -in tended to be present, if not by himself, yet by his advocate or attorney. For this cause also any thing there enacted is not to be misliked, but obeyed of all men, without contradiction or grudge." f The war of Spain against England never lost its original char acter of a war of religious hatred, in which the utter destruction of the Protestant queen was the great object to be kept in view. In 1593 Elizabeth was to be assailed through Scotland. Philip was conspiring with the earls of Angus, Errol, and Huntley, to send an * " Constitutional History," chap. v. t " Description of England." INTRIGUES OF SPAIN IN SCOTLAND. 191 army to operate with them in re-establishing Romanism in Scot land, and to march upon England with a united force for the same purpose. This scheme to betray Scotland to Spain, and then to subdue England, had been the policy of the Roman Catholic fac tion for several years. The lord-keeper, in his speech to the par liament in 1593, says, " A greater part of the nobility in Scotland be combined in this conspiracy, and they have received great sums of money for their services therein This conspiracy the king of Scots was hardly brought to believe, but that her ma jesty advertised him thereof, having entertained intelligence thereof, as she hath of all things done and intended in these parts." This vigilance on the part of the English government was necessary for its own safety ; for James, with the weakness and cunning of his nature, suspected Elizabeth of a design to promote discord be tween himself and his friends — a design which many historians take for granted in these transactions, as in every other between the governments. A writer, who is too well informed to be led away by these historical prejudices, says, with regard to this plot of the Catholic nobles, that when the truth became too apparent to the Scottish king "to admit of denial, his childish fondness for some of the very persons who were striving to ruin him, involved his country in troubles and bloodshed, and called down upon him many an indignant remonstrance from his neighbour queen." * James at length took arms against the " Spaniolised rebels," and this danger was past. But Philip had in his armoury another Weapon against Elizabeth. He bribed her domestic physician, Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jew, to poison her. This man had been taken prisoner in one of the ships of the Armada, and his skill in medicine, according to the imperfect knowledge of that time, recommended him to the queen. He soon availed himself of his position to become a spy of the Spanish ministers. The Count de Fuentes accepted the offer of Lopez to poison the queen for a reward of fifty thousand crowns ; and he urged the mediciner to complete the business speedily, " that the king may have a merry Easter." Lopez had two Portuguese refugees as confederates. They were convicted, and hanged on the 7th of June, 1 594. The discovery of this atrocious scheme was due to the perseverance of Essex. In 1593 Henry IV. made a formal abjuration of those Protes tant opinions for which he had so long gallantly fought. Without * Bruce, Introduction to " Letters of Elizabeth and James " D. xv. 192 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. this concession he would probably never have succeeded in tran- quillising France. But he did not, as many apostates have done, persecute the religion which he had forsaken. The edict of Nan tes, by which he granted toleration to the Protestants, in 1598, may advantageously contrast with the penal laws to which the Ro man Catholics of England were so long subjected. Elizabeth, although displeased at the position which Henry had taken, still continued to render him aid in his war with Spain — the common cause of each country. An English naval armament assisted him, in 1594, in taking Brest from the Spaniards. In the attack upon this fort, sir Martin Frobisher was mortally wounded. Two other of the heroes of 1588 fell victims to disease, in an expedition against the Spanish settlements in the West Indies. Sir Francis Drake and sir John Hawkins sailed in 1595, with six of the queen's ships, and twenty others, fitted out at private charge, having on board a considerable land force, commanded by sir Thomas Basker ville. They made an assault on Porto Rico ; but they were repulsed. Hawkins soon after died. Drake went forward, and landed at Nombre di Dios, in the isthmus of Darien. The success which had attended his early exploits had now deserted him. The Spaniards were prepared, as at Porto Rico. The enterprise failed, and the great admiral succumbed to sickness and to disappoint ment. Baskerville returned home, after having fought with a Span- 'ish fleet off Cuba, with no decisive results on either side. The year 1 596 was signalised by an expedition against Philip's European dominions. He was making preparations for another invasion of England ; and the lord-high admiral, Howard, of Effing ham, counselled that the blow should be anticipated by an attack upon Spain herself. Burleigh, always cautious, but more cautious in his declining years, was opposed to so costly and doubtful an enterprise. But there was a youthful counsellor with influence greater than Burleigh's, whose sentence was for the boldest war like policy. Essex prevailed ; and was appointed commander of the expedition, but somewhat restrained by a council of war. The English fleet sailed from Plymouth on the ist of June, 1596. The harbour of Cadiz was known to be full of shipping ; and after an attempt, which failed, to land at St. Sebastian's, it was determined to attack the galleys in the bay. Essex, when the council had somewhat unwillingly come to this determination, threw his hat into the sea, in the extravagance of his joy ; and, although against the orders which had given the honour of leading the attack to THE TAKING OF CADIZ. 1 93 Raleigh and lord Thomas Howard, broke through the midst of the fleet in which he had been stationed, and was soon in the heat of the action. The Spanish ships fled to the protection of the guns at the fort of Puntal, where some were set on fire by 'their own crews. The English admiral refused to accept a price as the ran som of the remainder ; and they were all burnt by the Spanish commander. Essex now led his men to an attack upon the town of Cadiz, which was strongly fortified. The daring of this young leader called forth the impetuous courage of his " war-proof " Eng lish. At the moment when the issue of the attack seemed doubt ful, Essex threw his own standard over the wall; "giving withal a most hot assault upon the gate, where, to save the honour of their ensign, happy was he that could first leap down from the wall, and with shot and sword make way through the thickest press of the enemy." The town was taken, and given up to plunder. But Es sex, departing somewhat from the brutal spirit of ancient warfare, exerted himself as strenuously to prevent slaughter as he had done in leading the attack. The town was burnt, after the unhappy inhabitants had been permitted to withdraw. It was the wish of Essex to hold Cadiz ; but, he was over-ruled by the council. Nor was he more successful in receiving their support for other enter prises which he proposed . The fleet returned to England, with no greater success than the large destruction which had been effected of the resources of Spain, whose loss was estimated at twenty millions of ducats. Essex wrote a " Censure " upon the conduct of the expedition, in which he blamed the lord admiral and Ra leigh. His impetuous nature was calculated to draw down oppo<- sition, even in the hour of the most brilliant success. For such a teat as the capture of Cadiz he was eminently fitted ; and in being restrained in carrying forward his victory some injustice was prob ably inflicted upon him. In our time, what Essex did at Cadiz has been described as " the most brilliant military exploit that was achieved on the Continent by English arms during the long inter val which elapsed between the battle of Agincourt and that of Blenheim." * In the following year another naval armament was fitted out against Spain. A fleet sailed from Plymouth, on the 9th of July, 1597 ; but was driven back by a storm, in which many of the ships were disabled and sunk. The remainder of this shattered squad ron sailed again on the 17th of August. The commanders, Essex * Macaulay, " Essays," art. " Lord Bacon." Vol. III.— 13 194 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. and Raleigh, had disagreements ; and the only success that saved the expedition from disgrace was the profitable capture of three ships returning from the Havannah. A new- parliament was called to meet on the 24th of October, 1597, which sate till the 9th of February, 1598. In this parliament some of the most important statutes of domestic policy were passed, which require a detailed notice ; illustrating, as they all do, the condition of society at that period ; and some having held their places in our system of economical law, even to the present time. When the legislators of the reign of Edward VI. had suddenly repealed their wicked and foolish Statute of Vagabondage,* they had discovered that something more effectual than severity was necessary to be applied to the large number of the population who were unable to work, who were unwilling to work, or for whom no work was provided. They saw that there was a class for whom some public provision must be appointed — a class who would not be content to starve whilst beggary or thievery offered a last re source. The nation, generally, was growing richer in the advance of profitable industry ; but there was a large body who found no place in the ranks of the industrious. The feudal organisation was gone. The more healthful organisation of free labour was essen tially imperfect. All the irregular modes of subsistence which be longed to the transition period, when the unreclaimed portion of the land was, to some extent, for common use, were passing away. In the towns, the organisation of trades, with their strict laws of apprenticeship and their guilds, excluded from competition with the recognised artisan all those who had not the claim of caste — for caste it was, when a workman must have been brought up to a calling, and could follow that calling and no other. The popu lation of England at the end of the sixteenth century was probably not far short of five millions. Some of the more fortunate of the humbler classes were forcing their way into wealth; for although there was a jealous system of exclusion against a general invasion of the domain of profitable employment, the more resolute spirits, having conquered some small vantage-ground, could readily win a higher position by never-ceasing toil and thrift. One of the wits of this age who, as he says, " had spent many years in studying how to live, and lived a long time without money," looks around him and sees how some thrive whom he considers as base men : " I cailed to mind a cobbler that was worth five hundred pounds ; an * See ante, vol. ii. p. 469. PROGRESS OF POOR-LAW LEGISLATION. 1 95 hostler that had built a goodly inn, and might dispense forty pounds yearly by his land ; a carman, in a leather pilch, that had whipped a thousand pounds out of his horse tail." * The way to wealth was open to the meanest, if they could find an entrance into the road. But there was a large body who never found the way even to a bare subsistence. It was impossible to have been otherwise in a country where the local divisions that belonged to the times before the Conquest were still so rigidly preserved ; and where the means of communication were still- so imperfect. In such a con dition of society, with the larger number of the more fortunate prospering, and a comparatively few, but still a large body, driven into vagabondage, it was necessary to do something more than en force the old terrors of the stocks and the whip. A legal provis ion for the poor, supplied by the assessment of all property, was perfected at the close of Elizabeth's reign by bold and far-sighted legislation. This was the result of a series of experiments which arc in themselves a conclusive indication of the gradual advance of society to a condition sufficiently stable to dispense with tem porary expedients, to build up a system which would endure through all political vicissitudes, and without which the inequalities of mod ern competitive life would be fatal to the security of the whole social fabric. The tentative process by which the principle of a public con tribution for the relief ofthe poor was first approached, is distinctly set forth in the Statute of 1551-2.! A book was to be kept for each parish, in which should be entered the names of the householders and of the impotent poor. In Whitsun week two or more persons were to be appointed as collectors of alms ; and on the Sunday following, when the people are at church, "the said collectors shall gently ask and demand of every man and woman, what they of their charity will give weekly towards the relief of the poor." The sums so collected weekly were to be distributed by the same collectors, " after such sort that the more impotent may have the more help, and such as can get part of their living have the less ; and by the discretion of the collector to be put in such labour as they be able to do." If any person, being able, refused to contribute, he was to be gently exhorted by the parson and church wardens ; and if their exhortations failed, he was to be sent for by the bishop, to be induced and persuaded to so charitable a deed. * Nash, " Pierce Pennilesse," p. 6. t 5 & 6 Edw. VI. «.. 2. 196 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. A Statute of 1555, and another of 1557, continue to provide for the impotent poor by weekly collections, the principle being held " good and beneficial for the common wealth of this realm." The same principle is maintained by the Statute of 1562-3 ;* but there is to be now something more stringent than the exhortations of parson, churchwardens, and bishop. " If any person of his froward or wil ful mind shall obstinately refuse to give weekly to the relief of the poor according to his ability," the bishop had power to bind him to appear at the next sessions, when the justices, if he continued obstinate, might determine what sum he should pay, and commit him to prison if he persisted in his refusal. This first assertion of the principle of a compulsory assessment of property for the relief of the destitute is the foundation of the system of Poor Laws, which has endured through all the changes of three centuries. In a few years the general application of the principle was to be gradually effected by a far more perfect machinery. In 1572-3 was passed " An Act for the punishment of vagabonds, and for relief of the poor and impotent." t It repeals all previous enactments by one sweeping law, in which the old principle of severity against " rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars " receives little mitigation, but which also emphatically declares that poor, aged, and impotent persons should be provided for. The justices of the peace in their several divisions are to use diligent inquiry as to all such impotent poor ; to make a register of the names of those who were born within such divisions, or have been living there by alms within three preceding years ; to assign them convenient places for their habitations, if the parish does not provide for them ; to assess the inhabitants of such division to a weekly charge ; and to appoint overseers of the poor, who shall have the power of setting to work all such diseased or impotent persons who are not wholly past labour. In this Act the system of parochial administration was not fully developed ; the justices were to make the assessment. By an Act of 1575-6 a stock of wool and hemp was to be provided for setting the poor at work ; and " houses of correction " were to be established.^ The law remained in this state of transition till 1 597-8, when it took the form in which it subsisted, with various slight modifications, till within the last quarter of a century. The Statute of the 39th Elizabeth provides for the appointment of over seers of the poor in every parish, who were to make a rate with the consent of the justices. This Act " approximates very closely • { Elii. c. 4. t 14 Eliz. c. 5. { 18 Eliz. c. 3. POVERTY AND VAGABONDAGE. 197 to that passed four years afterwards (the 43rd of Elizabeth), which still continues in force, and is the foundation and ground work of our English Poor Law."* But the Act of the 39th Elizabeth, which makes so wise and merciful a provision for the helpless portion of the community, was accompanied by " An Act for the punishment of rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars." This Act repealed all previous Statutes. It prescribed the whipping, the stocks, and the passing from parish to parish, as of old; but it empowered the justices assembled at quarter-sessions to erect houses of correction within their respective counties or cities, and to provide funds for the maintenance of the same. The houses of correction were for the employment of vagrants till they could be placed in some service ; or, if infirm of body, in some alms-house. Under the law of Henry VIIL destitution was treated as a crime, and wandering poverty was to be stocked and scourged out of existence. By the law of Elizabeth the impotent poor were nurtured ; the sturdy mendicant was punished. The spirit of Christian charity had §ystematised a provision for the poor, in each parish, even while the justices, under the Act of 1572-3 had the power of assessing the district. Stubbes, writing in 1 583, says, " The sabbath-day of some is well observed, namely, in hearing the word of God read, preached, and interpreted ; in private and public prayers ; in singing of godly psalms ; in cele brating the sacraments; and in collecting for the poor and indi gent."! Individual benevolence might have mitigated much suffer ing by its merciful zeal ; but legalised benevolence, by including alike the warm-hearted and the grudging, compelled every owner of property to recognise the absolute claims of the impotent poor to a small portion in the bounty of the All-giver. The principle of compulsory assessment was immediately pro ductive of the parochial despotism that has always attached to any Law of Settlement, even in the mitigated form which the law has assumed in modern times. Long before " the Settlement Act " of Charles II., their own parish was the boundary within which the poor might endeavour to obtain a livelihood ; beyond that circle they could not pass. That Act recited that, " by reason of some defects in the law, poor people are not restrained from going from one parish to another ; and therefore do endeavour to settle them selves in those parishes where there is the best stock." By "the best stock " is meant the largest amount of capital ; and in those * Sir G. Nicholls, " History of the English Poor-law," vol. i. p. 185. t " Anatomy," &c, page 154. 198 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. parishes where there was the best stock the funds for the mainten ance of labour were most readily unlocked for the labourers there established. Of course other poor people would endeavour there to settle themselves. A natural struggle took place between those who wanted to come in, and the authorities who were resolved to keep them out. The dread that under-tenants might become chargeable led to a domestic inquisition of a very tyrannous nature. At Leicester a search was made every month to discover under tenants. At Brighton no incomerwas to be allowed until the con stable and churchwardens had ascertained that he was of sufficient ability not to be likely to become burthensome to the town. A new tailor comes to Lyme, and he is met by a peremptory notice of a day on which he is to depart. The jury in that ] lace even present a man who "harboureth his wife's sister."* We may also be as sured that, armed with two such laws as those of the 39th Eliza beth, the justices and overseers often confounded the class that was to be relieved with the class that was to be punished. After the passing of these Statutes, instructions were issued by the judges at the assizes for carrying out their provisions, f They are very minute; and their precise directions were no doubt useful. But the definition of " a rogue," however intelligible to those who were practically acquainted with the species, must have been liable to the harshest misconstruction. The articles thus begin : — " A ro°ue that saith he was* born in such a town, in such a county, he ou"ht to be sent thither." The ninth article runs thus : " No man is to be put out of the town where he dwelleth, nor to be sent to the place of birth or last dwelling, but a rogue." The third article says, " If the husband and wife have a house, and either of them rogue about, they must be sent to the town where that house is ; and so of inmates." The verb may explain what the noun leaves doubtful. To " rogue about " was to be living from hand to mouth, even if that living was derived from occasional labour; to be with out regular service under a master ; to be without a settled abode and a permanent occupation. The old definition of " a rocue " is, " an idle sturdy beggar that wanders up and down from place to place without a license."}: One statutory definition of the class is, " Persons whole and mighty in body, but having neither land • See these, and numerous other instances, in Roberts's " Southern Counties," pp. 179 —l84» t These articles, as addressed to the constables of Swanboume, Bucks, are given i. the " Verney Papers," published bv the Camden Society, p, 88. X PhiUips, " World of Words," 1696. LABOURERS REFUSING TO WORK AT USUAL WAGES. 199 nor master, nor able to give an account of how they get their liv ing." * Shakspere's Autolycus is a specimen of the clever species of the genus. When the chronicler describes " a great parcel of rogues encompassing the queen's coach near Islington one evening, when she was riding abroad to take the air, which seemed to put her in some disturbance," f we must not conclude that they were thieves who contemplated an attack upon the queen. They were " masterless men," some "valiant and sturdy rogues," but the greater number having no permanent occupation, and gradually swelling the army of professional beggars and robbers. The rogue, as distinguished from the mere vagabond and beggar, was perhaps more particularly comprised in the busy-idle classes which are minutely recited in the Statute : " All persons calling them selves scholars, going about begging ; all seafaring men pretending losses of their ships and goods on the sea ; all idle persons going about either begging, or using any subtle craft or unlawful games and plays, or feigning to have knowledge in physiognomy, palmis try, or other like crafty science, or pretending that they can tell destinies, fortunes, or such other fantastical imaginations ; all fen cers, bear-wards, common players and minstrels; all jugglers." But the poor itinerant tradesman came under the same definition. " Tinkers, pedlers, and petty chapmen " were consigned to the constable by this sweeping statute. Necessary as the severities might be for " all persons that wander abroad begging, pretending losses by fire or otherwise ; and all persons pretending them selves to be Egyptians," there was a bitter relic of the old tyr anny of capital over labour when those severities were applied to "all wandering persons and common labourers, able in body, and refusing to work for the wages commonly given." The Statute of the 5th Elizabeth, entitled " An Act touching clivers ordersof arti ficers, labourers, servants of husbandry, and apprentices," repeals all- previous statutes, chiefly because the wages limited are in many instances too small, and not answerable to that time, on account of the great advancement of prices. The rates of wages were there fore to be settled annually by the justices in sessions assembled. The rate so settled, having been approved by the Privy Council, was to be proclaimed by the sheriff ; and the payer and the re ceiver of higher wages were subjected to fine and imprisonment. The Act which declares all able-bodied labourers, wandering through their refusal to work for the wages commonly given, to be " rogues * 14 Eliz. c. 5. t Stow. 200 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. and vagabonds," and subjects them to cruel punishments, was an outrage upon the freedom of labour, which was as certain to be ineffectual as the obsolete statutes for an invariable determina tion of the rate of wages. The general impulse of society towards industrial improvement was sure to free the labourers from these galling restraints, step by step, as the true principle of the common interest of employer and employed came to be better understood, and more honestly carried out. The Statute of the 39th Elizabeth includes amongst Rogues and Vagabonds, " all persons pretending themselves to be Egyptians." The Egyptians, or Gipsies, themselves, were to be dealt with by the very summary process under the statute of Philip and Mary, by w'lich, being declared felons, they were liable to be hanged. But the pretended . Egyptians, by an early statute of Elizabeth, were also recognised as felons : " Every person which shall be seen or found in any company or fellowship of vagabonds commonly called Egyptians, or counterfeiting, transforming, or disguising themselves by their apparel, speech, or other behaviour, like unto such vagabonds, and shall continue and remain in the same by the space of one month, every such person shall be deemed and judged a felon, and suffer the pains of death."* This special Act, to meet a condition of life which we might otherwise consider most rare and exceptional, shows us that England was still a country offering facilities for existence to those who elected to go forth from the restraints of civilisation into the extremest license of vagabond age. The Robin Hood class had passed away with the Planta- genets. A lower class of denizens of the woods, with nothing heroical about them, had grown with the growth of a population amongst which the principle of competition had wholly superseded the feudal organisation. The bold spirits of the time of Elizabeth, who spurned the base mechanical arts, had many outlets of honoura ble employment. The wild profligate who had spent all his means had a new career opened to him, when the rovers became captains and admirals : " He will go to the sea, and tear the gold out of the Spaniards' throats." + But the most reckless of the large number to whom regular labour was misery went out of the towns and villages to the wealds and heaths ; discoloured their skins ; gave an oriental fashion to their ragged apparel ; learnt the gipsy-dialect ; and put on the gipsy-nature of cheating and pilfering. To some minds there must have been a charm in this mode of life, proscribed • s Eliz. c. 20. t Nash. VILLANIES OF LONDON. 201 as it was, far beyond the mere desire of a precarious subsistence. The dramatic poets saw its sunny side ; and when we read " The Beggars' Bush" of Fletcher, in which the whole aspect of vagrancy has a freshness which makes it look like an essential part of nature, we need not wonder that " pretended Egyptians " were numerous enough to have a statute to themselves. There is another Act of Elizabeth which is also an indication of an altered condition of society. * It sets forth that lewd and licentious persons '' have, of late days, wandered up and down in all parts of the realm, under the rrame of soldiers and mariners, abusing the title of that honourable profession to countenance their wicked behaviour, and do continually assemble themselves, weaponed, in the highways and elsewhere, in troops, -to the great terror and astonishment of her majesty's true subjects." There had been ten years of war with Spain at the time of passing this Act ; and in the long interval between the military service of feudality and the standing army of modern times, troops were occasionally raised for a special warfare, such as the expedi tion to Cadiz; and whether with pockets filled with plunder, or penniless, they were returned to their parishes, and were told, by this same statute, " to betake themselves to some lawful course of life, on pain of being reputed felons." This was hard measure, and we need not be surprised that " under the name of soldiers and mariners," some ofthe honourable profession were a real terror to the true men, whilst the habitual thieves and beggars became their counterfeits. In this case, as in most others where punishment was first resorted to as the cure of an evil, severity alone was found to be ineffectual ; and, four years afterwards, the parishes were required by statute to pay a weekly sum, to be determined by the justices towards the relief of sick, hurt, and maimed soldiers and mariners, having been in the queen's service. If they were found begging, after receiving such allowance, they were to forfeit all claim, and be deemed rogues and vagabonds. + The latter period of the reign of Elizabeth was a time when the ability to read was widely extended, compared with the general education of the previous century. All readers, especially those with whom study is not habitual, want amusing reading ; and there were several smart writers then ready to supply this demand. The Puritans denounced, as " invented by Belzebub," the little novels, and other " toys andbableries " which these writers produced ; and the more they railed at the Greenes and Dekkers who supplied this * 39 EKz. t. 17. t43 Eliz. c. 3. 202 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ephemeral literature, the more their productions were purchased. These men, who lived amongst the irregular frequenters of taverns and play-houses, had a keen eye for observing- the various forms of crime and imposture which presented themselves in London ; and their racy descriptions of " Coneycatching," and of the more daring " Villainies," were amongst the most popular of pamphlets. We sho-ild do great injustice to the morals of the community if we were to conclude from thes,e representations that society was then mainly composed of two classes — the rogues and the gulls. The natural attraction of the subject led to the production of such de scriptions in an age before police-reports ; and the amplitude of the details has induced some in recent times to assign far too large a proportion of folly and roguery to the composition of Elizabethan society. Cutpurses there were in abundance. There were gangs of thieves " under Pancras " and at " Hvde Park Corner."* Fleet wood, the recorder, is wearied out of his equanimity by the multi tude of rogues for whom he has to make search. When he catch es them, and the gallows is ready, gentlemen of the court can baulk justice by reprieves. t Within the city walls there is watch and ward, not altogether ineffectual ; but the suburbs are wholly unprotected. The northern side of London and Westminster is almost wholly fields and woods ; and the " ways over the country," from Finsbury-field, covered with trees and windmills, to Kilburn, with its solitary priory, surrounded by a real " St. John's Wood," are familiar to robbers by day and night. The '• Marribone jus tice," who lives in these rural parts far away from city magistrates, is the warrant-granter of the district.}: But the metropolis and its suburbs of the days of Fielding could match their robbers for num bers and audacity against those of Fleetwood. Let us not imagine chat the times of Elizabeth were marked by more than usual enor mities. The gallows then consumed about three hundred annual victims ; but the hangmen of Henry VIIL had to operate upon two thousand in each average year. Hanging was the one remedy ; and its efficacy did not begin to be much doubted till the present century. The increase of London through the rapid progress of commerce, and of Westminster as the seat of government and of legal administration, constantly brought thither a large class of " valiant anJ sturdy rogues, masterless men, vagrants, and maimed • Norden's " Essex," Camden Society. t See Ellis, First Series, vol. ii. pp. 283, 291, 299. J Jonson, " E\*/y Man in his Humour." STATUTES AGAINST INCREASE OF BUILDINGS. 203 soldiers."* Splendid houses connected the City with Westminster, some of which, in the Strand, were standing at the beginning of the present century. But a dense population was beginning to crowd into obscure alleys. In 1580 a proclamation was issued against the erection of new buildings in London. The number of beggars, it alleged, was increased ; there was greater clanger of fire and of the plague ; the old open spaces for walking and for sports were enclosed ; the trouble of governing so great a multitude was become too great. By a statute of 1593 it was providedthat- no new buildings should be erected in London and Westminster, or within three miles, unless they were fit for the habitation of persons assessed at 5/. in goods or 3/. in land. Houses were not to be converted into separate dwellings. By the increase of build ings, it is said, "great infection of sickness, and dearth of victuals and fuel, hath grown and ensued, and many idle, vagrant, and wicked persons have harboured there." In 1602, the Act had been so ineffectual, that a proclamation was issued for pulling down newly-built houses. " Little was done," says Stow, " and small effect followed." The increase of the poorer classes was sought to be prevented in the country districts upon the same principle. By a statute of 1589, no cottage was to be erected, unless four acres of land were perpetually annexed to the holding ; and one family only was to occupy the tenement. The system might be a temporary expedient ; but long experience, and in the case of Ireland bitter adversity, have shown how incompatible is the principle of small holdings of land with the proper cultivation of the country, and the inevitable increase of population as a genera tion succeeds that must be driven forth into irregular means of subsistence. It was in the merciful spirit which produced the Act for the relief of the Poor nf the 39th Elizabeth, that, in the same year, the Legislature placed Hie endowment of hospitals,or alms-houses,upon a new footing. By a special Act of Parliament the earl of Leices ter had been enabled to found his hospital at Warwick, — an insti tution which still remains to make the observer doubt whether the favourite of the great queen was altogether so bad a man as his torians have chosen to represent. Other hospitals had been founded by special Hcense under the Great Seal. By this AcLany person might, within twenty years, found and establish, with an adequate provision of 'and, "hospitals, maisons de Dieu, abiding- * Stow. 204 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. places, or houses of correction, as well for the sustentation and relief of the maimed poor, needy, or impotent people, as to set the poor to work ; and from time to time place therein such head and members, and such number of poor, as to him shall seem conven ient." * By an Act of the 21st James I., this statute was made perpetual. Such foundations, which are numerous throughout the land, are enduring monuments of the kindly spirit of our ancestors ; and others have been established in the same spirit by associations ¦ in modern times. The purposes of many of the old endowments have been abused; their funds have been misapplied; but the- value of such institutions has been universally felt as decent re treats for the unprositerous — resting-places, before the final resting-' place, where poverty may exist without degradation. As early as 1563 the Legislature had declared that the Statutes for the regulation of Wages could not be enforced, on account of the advancement of prices. The unnatural advances that had been produced by the depreciation of the currency, in previous reigns, had been wisely remedied in 1560 by reducing the coin of the realm to a just standard.-)- But there were causes in operation which tended to a steady rise in the market-rate of all commodities. The influx- of the precious metals had begun decidedly to produce this effect ; and concurrently with that increase the condition of the great body of the people was greatly improving, so that there was a more universal demand for every necessary of life. This demand produced a consequent rise of price. In the half century from 1550 to 1599, the average price of wheat had risen 100 per cent. This advance of prices is no indication of a. more impov erished condition of the labourers, but the contrary. The increase of the market rate gave an impulse to production ; and the cultiva tion of the land necessarily went on improving. But the improve ments were too slow, — the amount of agricultural produce too en tirely dependent upon good or bad seasons, — so that the utmost misery was occasionally produced by excessive fluctuations in price. Wheat was at a famine price in 1573, in 1586 and 1587, in 1596 the price per quarter in those terrible seasons of scarcity being as high, or higher, than the average prices of the present times. Tem porary relief was given, in some places, by buying up corn, and selling it at a reduced rate. The necessity in the summer of 1587 was so extreme, that some foreign hulks, belonging to the subjects of a friendly power, were seized by English vessels, and brought * 39 Eliz. t. 5. t See ante, p. 40. INCIDENTAL CAUSES OF INDIGENCE. 205 into Weymouth, being laden with corn and provisions for Spain. The Council held that they might be compelled to sell their corn ; but wisely did not attempt to enforce such a violation of commer cial freedom. The mayor of Weymouth had hoped that a com pulsory sale of these stores would relieve the distresses of that part of the country* Such fluctuations of price were amongst the most bitter inflictions that poverty had to bear. The plague was a necessary attendant upon any dearth approaching to famine. The general health of the people was habitually inferior to the sanitory condition of our own days. Medical knowledge was to a great extent empirical. The universal system of blood-letting twice a year was likely to produce more maladies than it averted. Those who lived in detached cottages and small villages were subject to fevers, from the ill-drained lands by which they were surrounded. Those who lived in towns had to endure the pestilent nuisances of the streets, which no magisterial power could keep clean. The scarcity of fuel made the mud-built cottages, in which chimneys were still rare, miserably cold in winter. The thatched cottages of the towns were often on fire ; and the rapid destruction of whole streets produced the greatest misery, when the protection of fire insurance was unknown. Such were some of the many causes that reduced the poor to helpless indigence, and which sometimes pros trated even the comparatively wealthy. It was a state of society in which a merciful provision for the relief of the poor was one of the great exigencies of the time. The old laws which equally con signed crime and misery to the fetter and the whip had happily died out. * Roberts's " Southern Counties," p. 212. 206 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER XI. Death of lord Burleigh. — Death of Philip II. — Condition of Ireland. — Rebellion of Tyrone. — Essex appointed Lord-lieutenant of Ireland. — His bootless campaign. — Essex suddenly returns to England. — He is committed to free custody, and then suspended from his offices. — His discontent, and schemes for redress. — Armed assembly at Essex-House. — Attempt at insurrection. — Essex and Southampton tried for high-treason. — Conduct of Bacon on that trial. — Essex executed. — Scotland. — The Gowrie conspiracy. — The last parliament of Elizabeth. — Debates on a subsidy. — Bill for abating monopolies. — The queen's wisdom in yielding to public opinion. — Death of Elizabeth. — Note on the story of Essex's ring. In August, 1598, died William Cecil, lord Burleigh, the faithful counsellor of Elizabeth for forty years. He was the acknowledged head, by character as well as by office, of that illustrious band, whom Mr. Macaulay terms " the first generation of statesmen by profession that England produced." His consummate prudence, his large experience, his perfect adaptation to the nature of his royal mistress, made his long tenure of power almost as much a political necessity as the security of the throne itself. In his last illness Elizabeth sent him a cordial, saying " that she did entreat Heaven for his longer life ; else would her people, nay herself, stand in need of cordials too." * Months after his death, it was written of the queen that her highness " doth often speak of him in tears, and turn aside when he is discoursed of." t Burleigh, like Elizabeth herself, had a deep and abiding sense of responsibili ty. Walsingham, seeing him come in from prayers, wished he were as good a servant of God as the lord treasurer, "but that he had not been at church for a week past." The reply of Burleigh is worthy to be held in remembrance: " I hold it meet for us to ask God's grace to keep us sound at heart who have so much in our power ; and to direct us to the well-doing of all the people, whom it is easy for us to injure- and ruin." % Cecil, Walsingham, Smith, Mildmay, Nicholas Bacon, were themselves of the people. They were English gentlemen— the best depositaries of political power that our country has produced ; with broader views for the common welfare than the views of the intriguing churchmen, and * Harrington, " Nugae Antiqux," p. 237. t Ibid., p. 244. % Harrington, "Nuga; Antique," p. 174- DEATHS OF BURLEIGH AND PHILIP Tl. 207 of the ambitious nobles, who had the chief direction of affairs before the days of Elizabeth. When Burleigh died there was a struggle for ascendancy between two court factions, which had a tragical ending, and made the last days of the queen's life dark and dreary. Within a month of the decease of Burleigh died Philip II. Henry IV. had concluded a separate peace with Spain ; for which act, though probably one of imperious necessity, Elizabeth called him "an antichrist of ingratitude." But the two sovereigns had a respect, each for the other ; and there was no permanent ill-will between England and France. The death of Philip, however, caused no abatement of the hostility between the Protestant queen and the Most Catholic king. In 1599 Spain again threatened invasion; and extensive preparations for resistance were made with the usual alacrity. The weak place of Elizabeth's dominions was Ireland. The intrigues of Jesuits, who were always scheming and negotiating with the Spanish ministers to obtain money and men for the restoration of the Roman Catholic religion in England, might be detected and defeated by ordinary prudence ; but Ireland, with its rud-e native population, under the control of the Romish priesthood, and with the ancient families of their Anglo-Irish oppressors, haters of Protestantism, was a perpetual trouble to the English government. Ireland yielded no revenue to England ; she absorbed a large annual amount of the queen's treasure for her defence. Since the time of Henry VIIL, Ireland, without having been wholly neglected, had not been governed with the same vigour that characterised the general administration of Elizabeth. Sir Henry Sidney was engaged, for eleven years in keeping down the animosities of the Desmonds and the Ormonds ; in repressing insurrections and rebellions ; in doing a little, but only a little, for the general civilisation of the people. Lord Gray succeeded Sidney, and had the same chronic difficulties to contend with. The attempt of the elder lord Essex to colonise some forfeited lands was a ruinous failure. Spenser, who made his few years' residence on the banks of the Mulla famous, had his house burned over his head, and his child slaughtered. The neglect and misrule of previous centuries was visited upon those who, in the second half of the sixteenth century, desired " to turn so goodly and commod> ous a soil to good uses," by " reducing that nation to better govern ment and civility." * So Spenser felt when he prophetically wrote, * Spenser, " View of the State of Ireland." 208 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. " whether it proceed from the very genius of the soil, or influence of the stars ; or, that Almighty God hath not yet appointed the time for her reformation ; or, that he reserveth her in this unquiet state still, for some secret scourge, which shall by her come unto England, — it is hard to be known but yet much to be feared." The poet, with the practical wisdom of a statesman, saw that the great est evils of Ireland were social evils ; and that her state would never be otherwise than unquiet until these were in some degree remedied. They were so difficult to be remedied that Spenser says that he had often heard it wished, — " even by some whose great wisdom in opinion should seem to judge more soundly of so weighty a consideration — that all that land were a sea-pool." It was Wal singham who uttered that wish. He could dive into plots with a sagacity that beat the Jesuits at their own weapons ; but he could not comprehend the height and breadth and depth of the troubles of Ireland ; or, comprehending them, could not see any instant remedy. The footing of the English was still confined to the Pale. * Beyond that narrow region there was barbarism. But where the quiet cultivator took the place of the gallow-glass and kerne, there grew up a system even worse than that of the outlaw, whose boast was that he " did never eat his meat before he had won it with his sword." It was the foolish oppression of the land lords, who " there use most shamefully to rack their tenants ; " it was the inconstancy of the tenant, who " daily looketh after change and alteration, and hovereth in expectation of new worlds," — that kept Ireland miserable, rebellious, the scourge of England, for three centuries. It was no political evil — it was not even religious differences — that made the description which Spenser gives of the cabin in 1593, the true picture of the same cabin two hundred and fifty years after ; — " rather swine-sties than houses " — these dwell ings of abject poverty being the chiefest cause of the poor cultiva tor's "beastly manner of life and savage condition, lying and living with his beast, in one house, in one room, in one bed, that is, clean straw, or rather a foul dunghill." The mode in which this accurate observer speaks of the tenure of land in" Ireland implies that a wholly contrary practice prevailed in England ; and we may thence have one solution of the different rate of industrial progress in the two countries. "There is one general inconvenience, which reigneth almost throughout all Ireland, — that is, the lords of land and freeholders do not there use to set out their land in farm, or * See ante, vol. ii. p. 393. REBELLION OF TYRONE. 209 for term of years to their tenants, but only from year to year, and some during pleasure; neither indeed will the Irish tenant or hus bandman otherwise take his land than so long as he list himself." The natural bonds of mutual interest between landlord and tenant thus hanging loose, there could be no growth of capital, and no im proved cultivation : a wretched Cottier tenantry, worn to the bone by exactions, increased in numbers and in poverty generation after generation ; till at length the great collapse came, and the merciful severity of God's providence solved the problem which man's wis dom could never wholly fathom. The first remedy for the evils of Ireland at the end of the six teenth century was to put down rebellion with a sufficient force. Hugh O'Neale, earl of Tyrone, had been for some time in insurrec tion against the English government. He had received arms and military stores from Spain ; he was the leader of all who, according to Spenser, were " waiting when the watch-word should come that they should all arise generally into rebellion." As yet he had met with no adequate resistance. Sir John Norris, with the few thousand men that the English government maintained, was unable to make head against an enemy whose defeat only drove his wild companies to the woods and morasses, again to sally forth in new strength. Norris died of fatigue and vexation in this troublesome warfare. Another commander, Sir Henry Bagnal, was defeated with great loss, and himself killed, in an attempt to relieve the fortress of Blackwater, which was besieged by Tyrone's men. It became necessary to make some great effort, if Ireland were to remain to the English crown. The determination to employ Essex in subduing the Irish rebels was unfortunate for Elizabeth's government, and more un fortunate for himself. He was a chivalrous soldier, fit for daring 'exploits, but unqualified for conducting a war requiring not only bravery and decision, but that foresight and faculty of organisation which are rarely united with an ardent temperament. He was a courtier, but not a statesman ; and as a courtier he was rash and obstinate to a degree. Friends and foes alike predicted his fall. He differed in council with the queen, and then insolently turned his back upon her. The thin jewelled hand of Elizabeth was raised in uncontrollable anger, and she boxed his ear as a mother would a petted child. The earl put his hand upon his sword, and swore that he would not have borne such an affront from Henry VIII. For months he sulked and kept away from court. At Vol. III.— 14 2IO HISTORY OF ENGLAND. length, probably to remove him without disgrace, he was appointed to the lord lieutenancy of Ireland, with higher powers than had ever before been granted to that great office. At the end of March, 1599. he left London for Dublin, surrounded by a train of nobles and knights, and greeted by the acclamations of the people, with whom he was an especial object of regard. There were those who said that the high trust bestowed upon Essex would be fatal to him. Bacon, his friend, and probably then a sincere friend, endeavoured to dissuade him from accepting the dangerous appointment ; and afterwards declared that he plainly saw his overthrow, '¦ chained as it were by destiny to that journey." Stow, describing the march of Essex from that city, amidst the blessings of the multitude, says, " When he and his company came forth of London, the sky was very calm and clear ; but before he could get past Islington, there arose a great black cloud in tbe north-east, and suddenly came lightning and thunder, with a great shower of hail and rain, the which some held as an ominous prodigy." The superstition, which saw a presage of danger in the great black cloud in the midst of sunshine, was the natural reflection of the judgment of those who anticipated evil from the too confident deportment of Essex. He swore that " he would beat Tyr-Owen in the field, for nothing worthy her majesty's honour hath yet been achieved." * He un derrated the services of all who had preceded him, and the policy they had pursued, of endeavouring to conciliate the Irish malcon tents, rather than extirpate them. He was to return from Ireland, " Bringing rebellion broached on his sword." He came back in six months, without having accomplished a single object that his predecessors in the government had not more com pletely effected with a far inferior force. He was entirelv ignorant of the difficulties of the enterprise. Raleigh, who knew the coun- " try and the people, shrank from the command. Essex maintained that a man of the highest rank, a man popular with soldiers, a man of military experience, should be the queen's vicegerent. *He pointed to himself ; and his rivals, Robert (^ecil and Raleigh, suf fered him to fall into the toils. He had a force of sixteen thou sand men when he marched out of Dublin on the loth of May. From some extraordinary vacillation, produced, it is said, by inter ested advisers in the Irish Council, instead of leading his force against Tyrone, he made a progress of seven weeks through Mun- * Harrington, p. 246. HIS CAMPAIGN AND HIS RETURN. 211 ster; now and then skirmishing with small parties of rebels, and displaying his superfluous energy, " flying like lightning from one part of the army to another;" and having his love of popularity abundantly gratified by his reception in the towns. At Kilkenny the streets were strewed with rushes. At Limerick, " where he ar rived by easy journeys," he was "entertained with two English orations." At Waterford' he " was received with two Latin ora tions, and with as much joyful concourse of people as any other town of Ireland." He had marched to Waterford ; and he marched back to Dublin by another route, having obtained some useless triumphs over small bodies of rebels, and wasted his army without the least beneficial result. Essex remained at Dublin from the 3rd of July till the 28th of August, and then set forth into Ulster to do battle with Tyrone. After a skirmish, the queen's army and the rebel's army were in sight of each other ; and Tyrone sent a message that he desired her majesty's mercy, and asked that the lord lieutenant would hear him. He proposed to meet Essex at the ford of Bellachinche. " Upon this message his lordship sent two gentlemen with H. Hagan to the ford, to. view the place. They found Tyrone there, but the water so far out as they told him they thought it no fit place to speak in. Whereupon he grew very im patient, and said, " Then I shall despair ever to speak with him ; " and at last, knowing the ford, found a place, where he, standing up to the horse's belly, might be near enough to be heard by the lord lieutenant, though he kept the hard ground ; upon which notice the lord lieutenant drew a troop of horse to the hill above the ford, and seeing Tyrone there alone, went down alone ; at whose coming Tyrone saluted his lordship with a great deal of reverence, and they talked near half an hour, and after went either of them up to their companies on the hills." * There was a second confer ence, when others on each side were present ; and the result was an armistice for six weeks. " This being concluded," says Harrington, " on the 8th of September, on the 9th the lord lieuten ant dispersed his army." Tyrone retired with his forces. On the 17th of September Elizabeth wrote a letter to Essex, disapproving of his proceedings in the strongest terms. The impetuous nature of the man would not endure this reproof. He saw, and perhaps justly, that his rivals in Elizabeth's court were working his down fall ; and, in a blind confidence in the queen's favour, he took the fatal resolution of leaving his command in Ireland.' There is a * Harrington's " Report concerning the Earl of Essex's Journeys in Ireland, p. 299. 212 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. graphic narrative by a contemporary of his arrival in England. On the 28th of September, " about ten o'clock in the morning, my lord of Essex lighted at the court-gate in post, and made all haste up to the presence, and so to the privy chamber, and stayed not till he came to the queen's bed-chamber, where he found the . queen newly up, with her hair about her face ; he kneeled unto her, kissed her hands, and had some private speech with her, which seemed to give him great contentment ; for when he came from her majesty, he was very pleasant, and thanked God, though he had suffered much trouble and storms abroad, he found a sweet calm at home. 'Tis much wondered at here that he went so boldly to her majesty's presence, she not being ready, and he so- full of dirt and mire, that his very face was full of it. About eleven he went up to the queen again, and conferred with her till half an hour past twelve. As yet all was well, and her usage very gracious towards him. He was visited frankly by all sorts here of lords and ladies, and gentlemen ; only strangeness is observed between him and Mr. Secretary, and that party. After dinner he went up to the queen, but found. her much changed in that small time, for she began to call him to question for his return, and was not satisfied in the manner of his coming away, and leaving all things at so great hazard. She appointed the lords to hear him, and so they went to council in the afternoon, and he went with them, where they sat an hour, but nothing was determined on, or yet known : belike it is referred to a full council, for all the lords are sent for to be here this day. It is mistrusted that for his disobedience he shall be committed." * The personal affection of the queen for Essex was, as in the instances of other favourites, under subjection to what she held as her public duty. We have avoided, and shall still avoid, those passages of the scandalous chronicles of the reign of this queen, which may add to the interest of a novel, but have little to do with the sober narratives of history. The passions of Elizabeth — if we may apply the term passions to her feminine weaknesses — never turned her aside from an impartial decision upon the political faults of those who appear to have had the largest share of her private regard. These favourites, it must be observed, were always men of great ability and rare accomplishments. They were no low adventurers or fierce desperadoes, such as other female sovereigns have honoured. Leicester, Hatton, Raleigh, Essex, were men that * Letter of Rowland White, in the " Sidney Papers." ESSEX AND THE QUEEN. 213 brought no disgrace upon the court ; though the queen's relation to them might be so equivocal that historians have chosen to doubt whether, in youth or age, " the imperial votaress passed on, In maiden meditation, fancy-free." The adulation which her flatterers, and even Raleigh, heaped upon her was in the exaggerated style of the euphuistic romance of the time ; and, however we may smile at the vanity with which a gray and wrinkled woman received these compliments with approving delight, we must not forget that when she went from the presence chamber to the council-board, the wisest who sat there, the most patriotic, could not excel Elizabeth in sagacity, or show a deeper solicitude for the honour and prosperity of her country. We can forgive every personal folly to the ruler who felt that she held her power as a sacred trust for the benefit of the people. There were many despotic practices recognised as lawful in that period, and the queen had enough of the arbitrary notions of the Tudors in her composition. She required obedience ; but she knew what conduct ensured the heartiest and most constant obedience. Harrington has a domestic anecdote which illustrates this principle of Eliza beth's conduct as well as her set orations : " The queen did once ask my wife in merry sort, 'how she kept my good will and love, which I did always maintain to be truly good towards her and my children.' My Mall, in wise and discreet manner, told her high ness, 'she had confidence in her husband's understanding and courage, well founded on her own stedfastness not to offend or thwart, but to cherish and obey; hereby did she persuade her husband of her own affection, and in so doing did command his.' — ' Go to, go to, mistress,' saith the queen, 'you are wisely bent I find : after such sort do_I keep the good will of all my husbands, my good people ; for if they did not rest assured of some special love toward them, they would not readily yield me such good obedience." We may understand, as Essex did not understand, why his public delinquencies would not escape the displeasure of the queen through her private regard. In the morning of the 28th of September he thought he had escaped from the dangers of his Irish career. In the evening he was commanded to keep his cham ber. On the next day he was examined before the Council, and, instead of being restored^ to favour, was commanded from court, and committed to the " free custody " of the lord keeper, and was 214 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. afterwards under the same restricted liberty at his own house. This condition, so irritating to one of the temperament of Essex, was followed by more decided humiliation. His deportment was penitential ; he addressed the queen in letters of the deepest con trition. But the affairs of Ireland had grown worse ; Tyrone was again in rebelliop. Another lord deputy was sent, and Blount, lord Mountjoy, although without military experience, soon restored obedience to the English authority by his energy and prudence. The contrast was injurious to Essex, and gave new opportunities to his rivals. He was again examined before commissioners ; and received the severest censure in being suspended from his offices of privy counsellor, of lord marshal, and of master of the ordnance. He was released from custody in August, but was still commanded not to appear at court. A valuable monopoly of sweet wines which he held having expired, the queen refused to renew the patent, saying " that in order to manage an ungovernable beast, he must be stinted of his provender." Under these indignities the mind of Essex lost all balance. Harrington relates his demeanour in his last conversation with him, before the outbreak which sealed his fate : " It resteth with me in opinion, that ambition thwarted in its career doth speedily lead on to madness. Herein I am strength ened by what I learn in my lord of Essex, who shifteth from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly, as well proveth him devoid of good reason or right mind. In my last discourse, he uttered strange words bordering on such strange designs, that made me hasten forth and leave his presence. Thank Heaven ! I am safe at home, and if I go in such troubles again, I deserve the gallows for a meddling fool. His speeches of the queen becometh no man who hath mens sana in corpore sano. He hath ill advisers, and much evil hath sprung from this source. The queen well knoweth how to humble the haughty spirit ; the haughty spirit knoweth not how to yield ; and the man's soul seemeth tossed to and fro, like the waves of a troubled sea."* It is difficult to understand what method there was in the mad ness of Essex. It is still more difficult to understand how other men, not having the same excitement of jealousy and revenge which drove the humiliated favourite to acts of treason, should have joined in his wild projects. There can be no doubt that he contemplated removing the queen's advisers by force ; believing them to be, as they to a great extent were, his personal enemies. Cecil, Raleigh, * " Nugae Antiqua;," p. 179. SCHEMES OF ESSEX AND HIS ADHERENTS. 2x5 and Cobham were held by him to be the chief obstacles to his res toration to favour. But there were circumstances which rendered his attempt not altogether hopeless. The queen was now sixty- eight years of age; and although she had sfopwn no signs of a failure of intellectual vigour, the people were naturally looking for ward to a successor. James VI. of Scotland was intriguing in various quarters to procure his official recognition as the future king of England ; but upon this point Elizabeth was unapproachable. The wary Cecil was in secret correspondence with James ; but the incautious Essex had not scrupled to contemplate the possibility of compelling the government into such recognition; and had even proposed to Mountjoy, the lord deputy of Ireland, to bring over a body of troops for that purpose. His own plans to the same end during his tardy prosecution of the Irish war were more than sus pected. There was great discontent amongst the opposing classes of Papists and Puritans, naturally, excited by the penalties to which each was subjected as recusants or non-conformists. Essex, whether conscientiously or politically, professed sentiments of toler ation. The citizens of London were greatly inclined to the Puritan opinions ; and Essex had his house open to preachers of that de nomination. The more fanatical Romanists, in which number were included several of those who were afterwards prominent in the Gunpowder Plot, did not scruple to ally themselves with those of the extreme opposite opinions, in any scheme for the overthrow of the government. Essex surrounded himself with a number of those who had been his companions in arms ; but he placed a greater re liance upon his popularity with the Londoners. Extraordinary pains were taken to familiarise the people with that great story of English history which told how a corrupt and imbecile king had been hurled from his throne. Elizabeth was apprehensive of the effect of the example thus made prominent of the deposition of Richard II. ; and when, during the period in which Essex was secluded from court, Hayward dedicated his life of Henry IV. to ttje earl, she asked Bacon whether he did not see treason in it? She persisted in her notion in spite of Bacon's witty answer, that he " saw no treason, but very much felony, for every second sen tence was stolen from Tacitus." The queen was perhaps right as to the possible effect of the popular knowledge of this passage of our annals. At any rate those who were concerned in the schemes of Essex fancied that the bringing forward upon the stage the deposition of a king might familiarise the people with an idea that 2l6 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. had long passed out of the English mind, as to the responsibility of sovereign power. Sir Gilly Meyrick, an officer of the household of Essex, on the afternoon of February I, "procured the out-dated tragedy of ' The Deposition of Richard II.' to be publicly acted at his own charge."* The overt act of treason in which Essex and his adherents were involved took place on the 8th of February. Six months after this event, Elizabeth, in a conversation with Lambarde, keeper of the records in the Tower, in examining a list of historical documents, " her majesty fell upon the reign of Richard II. , saying ' I am Richard II. ; know ye not that ? ' " In this con versation the queen also said, " This tragedy was played forty times in open streets and houses." + On Sunday morning, the Sth of February, the earls of Rutland and Southampton, the lords Sandys and Monteagle, with about three hundred gentlemen, assembled at Essex House, in the Strand. Essex had sent round to say that his life was threatened by Raleigh and Cobham. The queen was apprised of this remarkable gather ing, and she despatched the lord keeper, the comptroller of the household, the lord chief justice, and the earl of Worcester to de mand the cause of this assembly. They were admitted by the wicket, without their servants, and found the court full of men. The lord keeper declared their errand, to which Essex replied that his life was sought, and that he had been perfidiously dealt with. These great officers assured him that he should have honourable and equal justice. The evidence given by the lord chief justice upon the trial of Essex describes this scene very strikinglv. After this conversation, " There was a great clamour raised among the multitude, crying ' Away, my lord, they abuse you, they betray you, they undo you, you lose time.' Whereupon the lord keeper put on his hat, and said with a loud voice, ' My lord, let us speak with you privately, and understand your griefs ; ' and then he said to the company, ' I command you all, upon your allegiance, to lay down your weapons and to depart, which you ought all to do, being thus commanded, if you be good subjects and owe that duty to the queen's majesty which you profess.' Whereupon they all broke out into an exceeding loud shout, crying, ' All, all, all.' And whilst the lord keeper was speaking, the earl of Essex and most of the company put on their hats. Then the earl of Essex went into the * There are reasonable doubts whether this play was Shakspere's " Richarfl II." See " Studies of Shakspere," by Charles Knight. t Nicholls' " Progresses of Queen Elizabeth." ATTEMPT AT INSURRECTION. 217 house, and we followed him, thinking that his purpose had been to speak with us privately as we had required ; and at that instant one at my back cried, ' Kill them, kill them.' I know him not, if I should see him again, but he had on a white satin doublet. And as we were going into the great chamber some cried ' Cast the great seal out of the window ; ' some others cried there, ' Kill them,' and some others said, ' Nay, let us shut them up.' The lord keeper did often call to the earl of Essex to speak with us pri vately, thinking still that his meaning had been so, until the earl brought us into his back chamber, and there gave order to have the farther door of that chamber shut fast. And at his going forth out of that chamber, the lord keeper pressing again to have spoken with the earl of Essex, the earl said, ' My lords, be patient awhile and stay here, and I will go into London and take order with the mayor and sheriffs for the city, and will be here again Wi Lhhi this half hour. ' " When Essex left the lord keeper and the others in custody, he drew his sword, and rushed out of his house, followed by a large number of his adherents, and he shouted, " For the queen, for the queen, a plot is laid for my life." The people, as he rode at the head of his company, either did not comprehend his object, or were unwilling to assist him ; for though they were provided with arms, and trained, as they always were during any apprehension of foreign invasion, not a sword or a musket was brought forth to give him assistance. Camden shrewdly says, " Though the citizens were, according to the temper of the common people, desirous enough of change, yet their wealth made them cautious and loyal. And, to say the truth, poverty is that, which, above all things, prompts the English to rebellion." Disheartened, the unhappy nobleman and his friends attempted to return from the city ; but they found the streets barricaded with empty carriages. At Ludgate the chains were drawn ; and a party of soldiers opposed their progress. A fight ensued, in which several were killed, Essex escaped by water to his own house ; which he attempted to defend, with those who got in with him. But no succour from the city reached him, and they surrendered. Essex and Southampton were that night removed to the Tower. On the 19th of February the two noble friends were put upon their trial, in the court of the lord high steward. The facts against them were too clearly proved to allow of any verdict of the Peers hut that of Guilty. They were tried upon the old statute of Ed- 2l8 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ward III. "As far as can be ascertained, it seems to have been intended to rest the charge on two propositions : first, that the de sign to restrain the queen's person, and remove her counsellors, amounted to treason, in the article of compassing the queen's death, of which general treason, the consultation at Drury-house, the insurrection in London, the imprisonment of the lord keeper and his companions, and the refusal to dismiss the company upon the queen's command, were overt acts ; and, secondly, that the in surrection in the city was in itself a rebellion, and, consequently, a levying of war against the queen, within the statute of Edward III., of which the skirmish at Ludgate, the defence of Essex-house against the queen's troops, and many other actions of the earl's on that day, were overt acts." * There was no straining ofthe law to procure the condemnation of these rash men ; although we may well believe the truth of the solemn averment of Essex, " Here I protest before the living God, as he may have mercy upon me, that my conscience is clear from any disloyal thought of harm to her majesty, and my desire ever hath been to be free from blood shed." Coke, the attorney-general, bitterly alluded to that Dart of the indictment which accused him of aiming to be king, saying of Essex, " He of his earldom shall be Robert the Last, that of a kingdom sought to be Robert the First." Essex, to this charge, made his denial in these words : "And thou, O God,- which knowest the secrets of all hearts, knowest that I never sought the crown of England, nor ever wished to be of higher degree than a subject." There is an incidental circumstance connected with the trial of Essex which cannot be passed over, affecting as it does the moral character of one of the most illustrious in the roll of England's immortals. Francis Bacon was one of the queen's counsel, and he was officially employed against Essex in this trial. He was bound to Essex by no common obligations. The generous earl had given him an estate, because he could not procure for him a lucrative appointment. Essex had struggled against the ill-will of the Ce cils to advance Bacon's fortunes, in season and out of season. Yet upon the trial Bacon said stronger things against his friend than were urged by his bitterest adversaries. Bacon compared his pro ceeding in saying his life was in danger, to that of " one Pisistra- tus, in Athens, who, coming into the city with the purpose to pro cure the subversion of the kingdom, and wanting aid for the ac complishing his aspiring desires, and as the surest means to win * Jardine, " Criminal Trials," vol. i. p. 381. CONDUCT OF BACON. 219 the hearts of the citizens unto him, he entered the city, having cut his body with a knife, to the end they might conjecture he had been in danger of his life." He compared " this rebellion of my lord of Essex to the duke of Guise's, that came upon the barri cades at Paris in his doublet and hose ; and when he failed, alleged that he was there upon a private quarrel." There was a general indignation expressed against Bacon for this severity ; but what his contemporaries objected to him was mildness itself, compared with the judgment of an eloquent modern writer upon these passages of his speeches. They were intended, Mr. Macaulay holds, to de prive the prisoner of those excuses which " might incline the queen to grant a pardon " — " to produce a strong impression on the mind of the haughty and jealous princess on whose pleasure the earl's fate depended."* Bacon, in the " Apology " which he wrote of his conduct in this trial, says, " that which I performed at the bar in my public service, by the rules of duty I was bound to do it honestly and without prevarication." To shut out Essex from mercy, Mr. Macaulay says that Bacon " employed all his wit, his rhetoric, and his learning." We would, rather than impute deliberate blood-guiltiness to this great man, whose kindness of nature was as conspicuous as his genius, entertain- the belief that the temptation to a counsel, almost for the first time employed on a great cause, to show forth "his wit, his rhetoric, and his learn ing " to the best advantage, was a temptation too great to be re sisted, even at the sacrifice of his gratitude. That Bacon was a high-minded man in public transactions is as difficult to believe as that he possessed a treacherous and cruel nature. His concern with the official publication entitled " The Declaration of the Trea sons of the late earl of Essex and his complices," is as little to be defended as his rhetorical flights upon the trial. It is a garbled and partial narrative. He says, " never secretary had more partic ular and express directions and instructions, in every point, how to guide my hand in it. — Myself, indeed, gave only words and style in pursuing their directions ; " — those of certain principal coun sellors. We must feel acutely the meanness of the great writer — he who had already published a volume of his noble " Essays "— in becoming such an unworthy instrument of expediency. But there were excuses. He was poor; he was ambitious. In pen ning his Apology for his conduct in the unhappy affair of Essex, he is manifestly unconscious of his own degradation. There was a * "Essays," vol. ii., art. " Bacon." 2 20 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. singular combination, in those times, of private virtue and public immorality, amongst courtiers and statesmen. " High-erected thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy " were to be found in the English gentleman as his general characteristic ; but the rivalry for power, when power was to be reached chiefly by subserviency, made the aspirant too often a sycophant and a tool. Bacon pock eted the wages of an hireling*, when he received a large sum out of the fine which Catesby, one of the Romanist followers of Essex, pa"id for his pardon. But Bacon probably did not himself see that this was the price of his dishonour. The earl of Essex was beheaded within the walls of the Tower on Wednesday morning, the 25th of February. There were few persons present at the execution, which was stated to have been in private by his own desire. There were politic reasons for avoid ing the manifestations of popular sympathy which one so generally beloved would have called forth in his dying hour. His end was truly " pious and Christian," to use the words of Camden. To the noblemen and others who sat upon the scaffold he addressed a brief speech, in which he deplored the " last sin," which had drawn others for love of him to offend God, to offend their sovereign. But he besought them to hold a charitable opinion of him for his intention towards her majesty, " whose death I protest I never meant, nor violence to her person." Lord Southampton, who had been found guilty and sentenced to death at the same time with Essex, was spared from the scaffold but was confined during the remainder of Elizabeth's reign. Sir Gilly Meyrick, Henry Cuffe, Sir Christopher Blount, and Sir Charles Danvers, were executed as adherents to the conspiracy. The correspondence of Essex with king James VI. was cer tainly amongst the causes which prevented his restoration to the favour of Elizabeth. The harshness with which he was treated in the autumn of 1600 was a natural consequence of the indignation of the English government at the proceedings of James. At a con vention of the Scottish estates, in June of that year, the king pro posed that a tax should be levied, for the purpose of asserting his claim to the succession to the crown of England. This demand met with the most strenuous resistance. Amongst those who led the opposition was the young earl of Gowrie, who had recently returned from the court of Elizabeth. The king was furious against his parliament. They had laughed at his notion of raising money to make a conquest of England ; and altogether refused to give THE GOWRIE CONSPIRACY. 221 him more than forty thousand pounds Scots. After this, Robert Cecil was informed that James had a party in England, and in tended not to tarry for the queen's death. The mutual ill-will that subsisted at this time between James and Elizabeth has led to the belief, resting upon very insufficient foundation, that what is called the Gowrie plot may be traced to the contrivance of the English queen. * The whole of this dark affair is involved in the greatest mystery. The facts which are commonly related are briefly these. On the morning of the 5th of August, 1600, James was going forth from his palace at Falkland to hunt, when Alexander Ruthven, the younger brother of Gowrie, desired to speak with him privately. He whispered something about an unknown man having found a pot of gold ; and the treasure, which was in Gowrie house, at Perth, might be seen by the king if he would come thither without his attendants. The scent of gold was irresistible to James. Af ter the chase he rode off to Perth with young Ruthven ; but he was ultimately joined by his attendants. James dined alone ; and after dinner Gowrie, with James's suite, went into the pleasure gar den. Alexander Ruthven then told the king it was now time to go and look at the gold. They went together through various apart ments, Ruthven locking the doors as they passed along. At length they reached a small round room ; and then Ruthven, removing a curtain, disclosed a portrait of his father, and asked James who murdered him ? He held a dagger to the king's breast, and said that if he made any attempt to open the window, or to cry out, the dagger should be in his heart. There was a man in the room, Henderson, who had been placed there to aid in the plot. Young Ruthven left the king alone with this man. James appealed to Henderson for protection. Ruthven, soon returning, ran upon the king and attempted to bind him. A desperate struggle ensued ; in which James managed to reach the window and cry out for help. Lennox and the other courtiers in the garden saw the king's flush ed face at the window, as he uttered the cry of " Treason." Some rushed up the great staircase ; but found the door locked. Ram- . say, one of the suite, remembered a back stair ; and reaching the door of the round chamber, dashed it open, and found the king still struggling with Ruthven. Ramsay stabbed the youth, who was quickly dispatched by others who came up the turnpike-stair. Gowrie himself, with his servants, having seen the dead body of his brother, rushed frantically to the gallery where some of the * Robertson, " History of Scotland." 222 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. attendants of James were assembled, and was quickly slain. The populace in the streets of Perth were roused to madness when they heard of the deaths of the two Ruthvens ; and they cried to the king, as he looked out, " Come down, thou son of signor Davie ; thou hast slain a better man than thyself." Some of the preach ers of the kirk maintained that the king conspired against the Gowries, and not the Gowries against the king ; and this belief was by no means confined to the Presbyterian ministers. The last parliament of Elizabeth met on the 27th of October, 1601. There were debates on the question of a subsidy, which it would be scarcely necessary here to no'Jce, but for amis-statement of Hume. The prejudiced historian affirms that, when Mr. Ser jeant Heyle said, "all we have is her majesty's, and she may law fully at her pleasure take it from us," there was no one who" cared to take him down, or oppose those monstrous positions." In the Reports of D'Ewes, where Hume found Serjeant Heyle's speech, he would have read the reply of Mr. Montague : " If all preambles of subsidies were looked upon, he should find it were of free gift. And although her majesty requireth this at our hands, yet it is in us to give, not in her to exact of duty." Hume compares the government of England, under Elizabeth, to that of Turkey. " The sovereign possessed every power except that of imposing taxes ; and in both countries this limitation, unsupported by other privi leges, appears rather prejudicial to the people. In Turkey, it obliges the sultan to permit the extortion of the bashas and gover nors of provinces, from whom he afterwards squeezes presents or takes forfeitures : in England, it engaged the queen to erect monop olies, and grant patents for exclusive trade ; an invention so per nicious, that had she gone on during a tract of years at her own rate, England, the seat of riches, and arts, and commerce, would have contained at present as little industry as Morocco, or the coast of Barbary."* There was one difference between England and Turkey which the historian does not point out in this com mentary upon the English government. Public opinion, expressed to herself in person, and through the House of Commons, led Elizabeth, with true wisdom, entirely to reform that system which many members of her Council had an interest in upholding. On the 20th of November a bill was brought in by Mr. Lawrence Hyde, entitled, " An Act for the explanation of the Common Law in certain cases of Letters Patent." Bacon, as attorney-general, * " History of England," vol. v. Appendix iii. PARLIAMENT. — MONOPOLIES. 223 opposed the bill, saying, " the use hath been ever to humble our selves unto her majesty, and by petition desire to have our grievances remedied, especially when the remedy touchelh her so nigh in point of prerogative." Many independent members used strong language in support of the bill, for considering which a com mittee was formed. On the 25th of November, the Speaker stood up, the House wondering at the cause, and said that he had been commanded to attend upon the queen, and had a message to deliver. She thanked them, he said, most heartily for the subsidy; and then added, " that partly by the intimation of her Council, and partly by divers petitions that have been delivered unto her both going to the chapel and also to walk abroad, she understood that divers patents, which she had granted, were grievous to her subjects ; and that the. substitutes of the patentees had used great oppres sions." She concluded by declaring, said Mr. Speaker, " that further order should be taken presently, and not ' in futuro ; ' and that some should be presently repealed, some suspended, and none put in execution but such as should first have a trial according to the law, for the good of the people." Then Mr. Secretary Cecil stood up, and in a speech as important as amusing, declared that no new patents should be granted, and that the old ones should be revoked : " I say, therefore, there shall be a proclamation general throughout the realm, to notify her majesty's resolution in this behalf. And because you may eat your meat more savoury than you have done, every man shall have salt as good and cheap as he can buy it or make it, freely without danger of that patent which shall be presently revoked. The same benefit shall they have which have cold stomachs, both for aquavita? and aqua composita and the like. And they that have weak stomachs, for their satis faction, shall have vinegar and alegar, and the like, set at liberty. Train-oil shall go the same way ; oil of blubber shall march in equal rank ; brushes and bottles endure the like judgment." The proc lamation against the growth of woad was to be revoked, only the queen " prayeth thus much, that when she cometh on progress to see you in your countries, she be not driven out of your towns by suffering it to infect the air too near them. Those that desire to go sprucely in their ruffs, may at less charge than accustomed obtain their wish ; for the patent for starch, which hath so much been prosecuted, shall now be repealed." The patents for calf-skins and felts, for leather, for cards, for glass, should also be suspended, and left to the law. From this speech we may judge how extensive 224 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. was the evil of monopolies ; and although Cecil disclaimed a desire to yield to popular clamour, he was not insensible to the words which he says he heard as he came along in his coach, " God prosper those that further the overthrow of these monopolies ! God send the Pre rogative touch not our Liberty." The House was in a fever of rapture at the declaration of the queen ; and it was moved that the Speaker should convey their thanks to her majesty. On the 30th, a hundred and forty members of the House were received by Elizabeth ; and, after the Speaker's address, he, with the rest, knelt down, and the queen gave her answer. Having spoken a few sentences she begged them to rise, and then proceeded : " Mr. Speaker, you give me thanks, but I doubt me, I have more cause to thank you all, than you me ; and I charge you to thank them of the House of Commons from me ; for had I not received a knowl edge from you, I might have fallen into the lap of an error, only for lack of true information. Since I was queen, yet never did I rjut my pen to any grant, but that upon pretext and semblance made unto me that it was both good and beneficial to the subjects in general, though a private profit to some of my ancient servants who had deserved well ; but the contrary being found by experience, I am exceeding beholding to such subjects as would move the same at first. . . . I have ever used to set the last judgment-day be fore mine eyes, and so to rule as I shall be judged to answer before a higher judge. To whose judgment seat I do appeal, that never thought was cherished in my heart that tended not to my pedple's good. And now if my kingly bounty hath been abused, and my grants turned to the hurt of my people, contrary to my will and meaning ; or if any in authority under me have neglected or per verted what I have committed to them, I hope God will not lay their culps and offences to my charge Though you have had, and may have, many princes more might}- and wise, sit ting in this seat, yet you never had, or shall have, any that will be more careful and loving." This was the last address of Elizabeth to the Commons of England. The remaining events of this reign may be briefly told. Lord Mountjoy was more fortunate than Essex in his Irish administra tion. The Spaniards had landed in Ireland to assist the Roman Catholic insurgents. They took up a strong position at Kinsale, with four thousand troops. Tyrone came to the assistance of the Spanish commander, with six thousand Irish, and some foreigners. Mountjoy defeated him ; and the Spaniards capitulated. Tyrone, in 1602, surrendered, upon a promise of life and lands. DEATH OF ELIZABETH. 225 In March, 1603, Elizabeth was fast sinking. Some have held that she looked back with poignant anguish to the fate of Essex, and hence " the deep melancholy visible in her countenance and actions," noticed by Beaumont, the French ambassador. But he more justly ascribed her dejection to " the sufferings incident to her age." She died at three o'clock in the morning of the 24th of March. On the night before, she was entreated to name a succes sor. Her reply was equivocal. Cecil, however, affirmed that she declared by signs that the king of Scots should succeed her ; hold ing her hands joined over her head, in manner of a crown, when his name was mentioned. Vol. III.— 15 226 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. NOTE ON THE STORY OF ESSEX'S RING. There is, in the State Paper Office, an Account written in French, by Dudley Carleton, "ofthe-death of queen Elizabeth, as caused by melancholy on the death of the earl of Essex." * This paper, which bears the date of April 4th, 1603,-to a certain extent con firms the court belief which the French ambassador refers to, but to which he reasonably gives little credit. The story of the ring which Essex sent to E.izabeth,as the token that he ask2d her mercy, but which token was never delivered, has been circumstantially told by Hume. We have not inserted a similar narrative in our text, believing, with a very competent judge of evidence, that "it is of too doubtful authenticity." t But as we are unwilling entirely to omit so romantic a story, we here give it, as related by Dr. Birch :— " The following curious story was frequently told by lady Elizabeth Spelman, great- grand-daughter of Sir Robert Carey, brother of lady Nottingham, and afterwards earl cf Monmouth, whose curious Memoirs of himself were published a few years ago by lord Corke :— When Catherine, countess of Nottingham, was dying (as she did, according to his lordship's own account, about a fortnight before queen Elizabeth), she sent to her majesty to desire that she might see her, in order to reveal something to her majesty, with out the discovery of which she could not die in peace. Upon the queen's coming, lady Nottingham told her that while the earl of Essex lay under sentence of death, he was de sirous of asking her majesty's mercy in the manner prescribed by herself during the height of his favour ; the queen having given him a ring, which, being sent to her as a token of his distress, might entitle him to her protection. But the earl, jealous of those about him, and not caring to trust any of them with it, as he was looking out of his window one mora ine-, saw a boy with whose appearance he was pleased ; and, engaging him by money and promises, directed him to convey the ring, which he took from his finger and threw dowK, to lady Scroop, a sister of the countess of Nottingham, and a friend of his lordship, whp attended upon the queen ; and to beg of her, that she would present it to her ma]esty. The boy, by mistake, carried it to lady Nottingham, who showed it to her husband, the admiral, an enemy of lord Essex, in order to take his advice. The admiral forbade her to carry it, or return any answer to the message ; but insisted upon her keeping the rmg* The countess of Nottingham, having made this discoverv, begged the queen's forgive ness ; but her majesty answered, ( God may forgive, but I never can,* and left the room with great emotion. Her mind was so struck with the story, that she never went into bed, or took any sustenance from that instant ; for Camden is of opinion that her chief reason for suffering the earl to be executed was his supposed obstinacy in not applying to her for mercy." A sequel to this story was communicated by a trustworthv correspondent to the editor of " Old England." The substance of this communication is, that when Marv, queen of Scots, married Darnley, she sent Elizabeth a ring, being a plain gold circle, to fit the thumb having a rose diamond, in the form of a heart ; that Elizabeth gave this ring to Essex; that it passed into the hands of king James ; that it was given by him to sir Thomas Warner ; and has remained in the possession of his descendants to the present time. It must be clear to every reader that the existence of such a ring does not in the slightest degree add to the authenticity of the original ston,'. In the relation as given by Dr. Birch there is manifest exaggeration. The countess of Not iogham died, according to lord Corke, " about a fortnight before queen Elizabeth." It has been ascertained that she died on the 25th of February ; Elizabeth died on the 24th of March. The death of the queen must have been even more remarkable than her life, if, upon this fatal disc'os- ure, " she never took any sustenance from that instant." A drawing of the " Warner" ling was engraved in " Old England.'* * " Calendar of State Papers of tho rcig^i of James I." edited by Mrs. Green, 1S57. t Jardine " Criminal Trials," vol. i. p. 370. LITERATURE AND ART. 227 CHAPTER XII. Literature and Art characteristic of the periods of their production. — First years of Elir abetban literature bore the impress of the two preceding reigns. — Sackville. — The early popular drama. — Marlowe and the contemporary dramatists. — Growing refine ment. — Spenser. — Shakspere. — Lyrical poetry. — Its association with Music. — Rural images in the poets connected with the pleasurable aspects of country life. — Architec ture. — The palatial mansion. — Gardens. — The gentleman's manor-house. — Classical education. The historian Hume, in his desire to exhibit the reign of Elizabeth as a period of uncontrolled despotism, says, " It is re markable that in all the historical plays of Shakspere, where the manners and characters, and even the transactions, of the several reigns are so exactly copied, there is scarcely any mention of civil Liberty!''''* Mr. Hallam, without adverting to this passage, has furnished an answer to it: "These dramatic chronicles borrowed surprising liveliness and probability from the national character and form of government. A prince, and a courtier, and a slave, are the stuff on which the historical dramatist would have to work in some countries ; but every class of free men, in the just subor dination without which neither human society nor the stage, which should be its mirror, can be more than a chaos of huddled units, lay open to the selection of Shakspere." f The " manners and characters," not only of Shakspere's historical plays, but of all his other dramas, are instinct with all the vitality that belongs to a state of social freedom, in which what we hold as tyranny was exceptional. The very fact which Hume alleges, but which must be taken with some limitation, that in Shakspere's historical plays "there is scarcely any mention of civil liberty," is really a proof of the existence of such liberty. In our own time a French writer has recorded, that after attending a debate in our House of Com mons, he observed to an English statesman that he had heard no assertion of the general principles of constitutional freedom. The answer was, " We take all that for granted." We are not about to analyse the characters of Shakspere's dramas to show that " they * " History,'' Appendix iii. vol. v. t " Literature of Europe," vol. ii. p. 39S- 228 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. comprise every class of free men." We believe of Shakspere, as we believe of Chaucer, that neither of these great poets could have existed except under a condition of society which permitted a very large amount of civil liberty. But this is not the place to set forth any detailed reasons for this belief ; and we should scarcely have alluded to the assertion of Hume, except to show that he properly looked beyond Courts and Parliaments to discover the spirit of an age. All Poetry, as all other Art, must in a great degree be the reflection of the time in which it is produced. The Elizabethan Poetry, and especially the Drama ; the Elizabethan Music ; the Elizabethan Architecture ; bear the most decided impress of their own time. The rapid, and therefore imperfect, view which we shall take of the most prominent indications of intellectual pro gress will be principally to exhibit them as characteristics of their period. The stormy reigns of Edward VI. and of Mary were not favour able to the cultivation of Literature. Wyatt and Surrey belonged to the time of Henry VIIL, before the elements of religious conten tion had penetrated much below the surface of society. But when the nation came to be divided into two great opposing classes, earnest in their convictions, even to the point of making martyrs, orbeingmartyrs . the sonneteer and the lyrist would have little chance of being heard. There were a few such poets — Vaux, Edwards, Hunnis — but even their pleasant songs have a tincture of seriousness. The poet who at the very beginning of the reign of Elizabeth struck out a richer vein — Thomas Sackville — breathes the very spirit of the gloomy five years of persecution and almost hopeless bigotry through which England had passed into a healthier existence. There was then a long interval, during which poetry was imping her wings for her noblest flights. The drama was emerging from the childishness and buffoonery of her first period of separation from the shows of Catholicism. The same Thomas Sackville, early in the reign of Elizabeth, produced his tragedy of " Gorboduc," of which it may be sufficient to say, that Sidney describes it as " full of stately speeches and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height of Sen eca his style." * English Dramatic poetry was not born with the courtly Sackville. It was struggling into life when it first seized upon the popular mind as an instrument of education — "made the ignorant more apprehensive, taught the unlearned the knowledge of many famous histories, instructed such as cannot read in the * " Defence of Poesy." THE EARLY ELIZABETHAN DRAMA. 229 discovery of all our English chronicles." * Roughly was that useful work originally done ; but it was a reflection of the national spirit, and it produced its effect upon the national character. The early dramatists, if we may credit one of their eulogists, proposed great moral lessons in their representations : " In plays, all cozen ages, all cunning drifts, overgilded with outward holiness, all strat agems of war, all the canker-worms that breed on the rust of peace, are most lively anatomised : they show the ill-success of treason, the fall of hasty climbers, the wretched end of usurpers, the misery of civil dissention, and how just God is evermore in punishing of mur der." f Such passages have been again and again quoted ; but we re peat them to show how thoroughly the English drama became adapt ed to its time, even before its palmy state. It went forth from the courtly direction of the Master of the Revels at Whitehall and Greenwich, to delight multitudes at the Belle Savage and the Bull. The Bones of Brave Talbot were " new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least." J It was a rude stage, in which the place of action was "written in great letters upon an old door ; '' a stage without scenes, so that "ahideous monster came out with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bound to take it [the stage] for a cave." § And yet the most elaborate mechanism, the most gorgeous decoration, never produced the delight which the unassisted action and the simple dialogue of these early plays excited. The spectators were in a new world. They were there to believe, and not to criticise. " You shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then we must believe the stage to be a garden." The thousands who paid each their penny did so believe. They gave up their imaginations to the delusion, and were taken out of themselves into a higher region than that of their daily labours. When the transition period arrived, in which the first rude utterings of a mimetic life were passing into the higher art of the first race of true dramatists, — of which race Marlowe was the undoubted head — there was extravagance in action and char acter; bombast in language; learning, — for Marlowe, Peele, Greene, Lodge, Kyd, were scholars — but learning falsely applied ; yet there was real poetical power. They dealt in horrors ; their comedy was for the most part ribaldry. The Drama, says Sidney, " like an unmannerly daughter, showing a bad education, causeth her mother Poesy's h°nesty to he called in question." But the * Heywood's " Apology for Actors," — Shakspere Society, p. 52. t Nash. t Ibid. § Sidney. 23° HISTORY OF ENGLAND. bad education of the unmannerly daughter was to be greatly attributed to the examples of the outer world in which she was born. She asserted her divine origin when strength and refinement had become united, in the greater assimilation of character between the courtly and the industrious classes ; when rough ignorance was not held to be the necessary companion of martial prowess ; and elegance and effeminacy had ceased to be confounded. Against the growing refinement which was a natural conse quence of the more general diffusion of wealth, the satirist, whether he belonged to the severe religionists or to the class held by them as the licentious, directed his constant invectives. There was a general belief that luxury, as the use of the humblest com forts was termed, was lowering the national character. Harrison denounces the chimneys which had taken the place of the rere- dosse in the hall ; the feather bed and the sheets which had driven out the straw pallet ; the pewter vessels which were splendid at the yeoman's feasts, instead of the wooden platters; the carpets and the tapestry, the bowl for wine, and the dozen silver spoons. The town wits held the growing riches of the citizens as the spoils of usury and brokery ; and the lawyers who "fatted on gold" were counted the oppressors of the poor. All this is indicative of a great change of manners, resulting from the growing opulence of the middle classes, and the wide increase of competition. There was a general activity of intellect ; and it was one of the fortunate circumstances of the social condition of England, that there was a great national cause to fight for, which lifted men out of the sel fishness of unwonted industrial prosperity. At such a period arose the two greatest poets of that age, or of any age, Spense? and Shakspere. They each essentially belonged to their time. They each, in their several ways, reflected that time. Spenser dealt much more largely than Shakspere with the events and char acteristics of his age. In his " Shepherd's Kalendar," he is a de cided Church-reformer. In the " Faery Queen " he shadows forth " the most excellent and glorious person " of Elizabeth ; and many historical personages may be traced in the poem. Amongst the numerous allegorical characters we find Una, the true Church, op posed to Duessa, the type of Romanism. But it is not in these more literal marks of the time, that we discover in Spenser the spirit of the lim?. It is not in his " Mother Hubberd's Tale," where we find the boldest satire against courtly corruption — justice sold, benefices given to the unworthy, nobility despised, learning SPENSER. 231- little esteemed, the many not cared for, — that we must look for the general reflection in Spenser's verse of the spirit of his age. His. fate had been " in suing long to bide," and he took a poet's revenge for the neglect. It is in the general elevation of the tone of "the Faery Queen," and of the other poems of his matured years, that we may appreciate the moral and intellectual tastes of the educated classes of Elizabeth's latter period. Unquestionably the poet, by his creative power, may in some degree shape the character of an age, instead of being its mirror ; but in the relations of a great writer to his readers there is a mutual action', each inspiring the other. The tone of Spenser's poetry must at any rate have been in accordance with the mental condition of those with whom " the Faery Queen " became at once the most popular of all books. It ceased to be popular after two generations had passed away, and the Rochesters and Sedleys were the great literary stars. The heroic age to which Spenser belonged was then over. " Fierce wars and faithful loves " had become objects of ridicule. The type of female perfection was not " heavenly Una, with her milk- white lamb," but " Mistress Nelly " in the side-box. " The goodly golden chain of chivalry " was utterly worthless compared with the price paid for Dunkirk. Such were, the differences of morals and intellect between 1600 and 1670. Spenser was the most popular of poets while the ideal of chivalry still lingered in the period that had produced Sidney, and Essex, and Raleigh, and Grenville — when the rough Devonshire captains fought the Spaniard with an enthusiastic bravery and endurance that the Orlandos and the Red Cross Knights of Ariosto and Spenser could not excel. The great laureate's popularity was gone when the Dutch sailed up the Med- way ; for the spirit of the Elizabethan " golden time " was gone. The age of Elizabeth may pre-eminently claim the distinction of having called up a great native literature. The national mind had already put forth many blossoms of poetry, and in the instance of Chaucer the early fruit was of the richest flavour. But in the latter part of Elizabeth's reign England had a true garden of the Hesperides. It has been most justly observed that " in the time of Henry VIIL and Edward VI., a person who did not read French or Latin could read nothing or next to nothing."* Hence the learned education of the ladies of that period. The same writer asks, "over what tragedy could lady Jane Grey have wept, over what comedy could she have smiled, if the ancient dramatists had * Macaulay, "Essays,'' art. "Bacon." 232 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. not been in her library ? " Lady Jane Grey meekly laid her head upon the block in 1554. Had she lived fifty years longer she would have had in her library all Shakspere's historical plays, ex cept King John and King Henry VIIL ; she would have had Ro meo and Juliet, Love's Labour Lost, the Merchant of Venice, Mid summer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet, — for all these were printed before that period. She might have seen all these acted ; and she might also have seen As you Like it, All's Well that Ends Well, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Twelfth Night, Othello. Her pure and truly religious nature would not have shrunk from the perusal of these works, which might worthily stand by the side of her Ter ence and her Sophocles in point of genius, and have a far higher claim upon her admiration. For they were imbued, not with the lifeless imitation of heathen antiquity, but with the real vitality of the Christian era in which they were produced ; with all the intel lectual freedom which especially distinguished that era from the past ages of Christianity. The deities of the old mythology might linger in the pageants of the court ; but the inspiration of these creations of the popular dramatist was derived from the pure faith for which the lady Jane died. From no other source of high thought could have originated the exquisite creations of female loveliness which Shakspere, and Spenser equally, presented. Some portion of what was tender and graceful in the Catholic worship of " Our Lady," passed into the sober homage involuntarily paid to the perfectness of woman by the two great Protestant poets. In Shakspere was especially present a more elevated spirit of charity than belonged to the government of his times, although his tolera tion must have abided to a great extent amongst a people that had many common ties of brotherhood whatever were their differences of creed. Hence the patriotism of Shakspere — a considerate pa triotism founded upon that nationality by which he is held "to have been most connected with ordinary men." * But Shakspere lived in an age when nationality was an exceeding great virtue, which alone enabled England, in a spirit of union, to stand up against the gigantic power which sought her conquest through her religious divisions. All around the dramatist, and reflected by him in a thousand hues of "many-coloured life," were those mixed elements of society, out of whose very differences results the unity of a prosperous nation. There was a great industrious class stand- * Frederick Schlegel. LYRICAL POETRY, AND MUSIC. 233 ing between the noble and the peasant, running over with individ ual originality of character, and infusing their spirit into the sov ereign, the statesman, and the soldier. The gentlemen of Shaks pere are distinct from those of any other poet in their manly frankness ; and the same quality of straightforward independence may be traced in his yeomen and his peasants. His clowns even, are the representatives of the national humour, which itself was a growth of the national freedom. There was a select lettered class, who, having shaken off the trammels of the scholastic philosophy, were exploring the depths of science and laying the foundations of accurate reasoning. Shakspere stood between the new world of bold speculation that was opening upon him, and the world of sub mission to authority that was passing away. Thus, whilst he lin gers amidst the simplicity and even the traditionary superstitions of the multitude with evident delight — calls up their elves and their witches, and their ghosts, but in no vulgar shapes — he asserts his claim to take rank with the most elevated of the world's thinkers in the investigation of the hardest problems of man's nature. Such are a few of the relations in which the art of Shakspere stood to the period in which he lived ; and although it has been truly said, " he was not for an age, but for all time," we hold that he could not have been produced except in that age, and in the country of which he has become the highest glory. There must have been a marvellous influence of the social state working upon the highest genius, to have called forth those dramas for the people, which having their birth in a yeoman's house at Stratford, " Show, sustain, and nourish all the world." The lyrical poetry of the Elizabethan time was chiefly written to be married to music. As Shakspere's drama was drama to be acted, so his songs were songs to be sung. Their grace, their simplicity, their variety of measure, were qualities which are found in the lyrical poems of Marlowe, Green, Lodge, Raleigh, Breton, Drayton, and others less known to fame, whb contributed to the delight of many a tranquil evening in the squire's pleasure garden, and by the citizen's sea-coal fire-side, where Morley's "Airs," and other popular collections, were as familiarly known as Moore's " Melodies " in our own day. It was not that the musical taste of England was first developed in this period, but that it had spread from the court to the people. There was a greater diffusion of wealth, and therefore more leisure for the cultivation of the elegan cies of life. Property was secure. The days of feudal tyranny 234 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. were past. The whole aspect of the country was necessarily changed. If we open the county histories of this period we find an enumeration of "principal manor-houses," which shows how completely the English gentleman, of moderate fortune, had in every parish taken the place of the baron or the abbot, who were once the sole proprietors of vast districts. A poet of the pe riod has noticed this change in his description of rural scenery. " Hera on soma mount a house of pleasure vanted Where once the warring cannon had been planted." These lines are from the "Britannia's Pastorals" of William Browne, whose poems, unequal as they are, contain many exquis ite descriptions of country life. But nearly all the poetry of this age shows how thoroughly the realities of that life had become familiar to the imaginative mind. The second-hand images with which town poets make their rural descriptions wearisome are not found in the Elizabethan poets. The commonest objects of nature uniformly present their poetical aspects in Shakspere, as they did in Chaucer. The perpetual freshness and variety of creation were seen by these great masters with that rapid' power of observation which belongs to genius. But the minor poets of the end of the sixteenth century evidently studied rural scenery with that feeling of the picturesque which is always a late growth of individual or national cultivation. The country, to the educated proprietor of the soil, had become something more than the source of his rev enue. His ancestral trees had now for him a higher interest than to furnish logs for his hall-fire. His garden was no longer a mere place for growing kail and pot-herbs ; — it was to have choice flowers and shady seats — the stately terrace and the green walk — the foun tain and the vase. The poets reflect the prevailing taste. They make their posies of the peony and the pink, the rose and the columbine. They go with the huntsman to the field, and with the angler to the river. They are found nutting with the village boys, and they gather strawberries in the woods. They sit with the Lady of the May in her bower, and quaff the brown ale at the har vest-home. The country has become the seat of pleasant thoughts ; and the poets are there to aid their influences. The Architecture of the reign of Elizabeth is essentially charac teristic of the period, not only in the simple manor-house of the squire, but in the "great house" of the noble. Sidney had de scribed his own Penshurst, in the early half of that period, when ARCHITECTURE. 235 the old massive style, adapted for security rather than convenience, had not wholly passed away : — " They might see (with fit consid eration both of the air, the prospect and the nature of the ground) all such necessary additions to a great house, as might well show that provision is the foundation of hospitality, and thrift the fuel of magnificence. The house itself was built of fair and strong stone, not affecting so much any extraordinary kind of fineness, as an honourable representing of a firm stateliness. The lights, doors, and stairs, rather directed to the use of the guests than to the eye of the artificer ; and yet, as the one chiefly heeded, so the other not neglected ; each place handsome without curiosity, and homely without loathsomeness ; not so dainty as not to be trod on, nor yet slubbered up with good fellowship ; all more lasting than beautiful, but that the consideration of the exceeding lastingness made the eye believe it was exceedingly beautiful." * The " firm stateliness," the " exceeding lastingness," became of secondary importance when the lord of the house and his retainers had ceased to dine in the great hall; and that principal apartment became little more than an entrance to those rooms dedicated to privacy or to state. There was to be provided, in the latter part of the century, a gorgeous gallery "for feasts and triumphs," as Lord Bacon held; — such a gallery as may still be seen at Hardwick. Here all the quaint forms of decoration in carving and colour were lavished. The walls were covered with portraits, almost the only branch of art then cultivated or encouraged in England. In these places there were tapestried " chambers of presence ; " many bed-cham bers for the family and their guests ; lodgings for the various offi cers of the household ; bake-houses and brew-houses ; the great court in the centre ; and the whole distribution of the private rooms often regulated by " My lord's side '! and " My lady's side." The garden was an especial object of artistical decoration. Hentz- ner, in his " Travels in England," in 1 598, has described the gar den of Theobalds, one of the mansions of lord Burleigh. It was "encompassed with a ditch full of water, large enough for one to have the pleasure of going in a boat, and rowing between the shrubs ; here are great variety of trees and plants ; labyrinths made with a great deal of labour ; a jet d'eau, with its bason of white marble ; and columns and pyramids of wood and other ma terials up and down the garden. After seeing these, we were led by the gardener into the summer-house, in the lower part of which, * "Arcadia." 236 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. built semi-circularly, are the twelve Roman emperors in white mar ble, and a table of touchstone ; the upper part of it is set round with cisterns of lead, into which the water is conveyed through pipes;, so that fish may be kept in them, and in summer time they are very convenient for bathing ; in another room for entertainment very near this, and joined to it by a little bridge, was an oval table of red marble." From the gardens and terraces of these great houses the hall was entered ; but now, when the grandest apart ments were above, there was a staircase in the hall, of the most decorated character. At such mansions Elizabeth rested during her progresses, when her nobles vied with each other in the most lavish hospitality to welcome their queen; and soon turned their old dreary castles into gorgeous palaces, by the magic art of John Thorpe, the great constructive genius of that age. He perfected that union of the Italian style with the Gothic, which produced what we call the Tudor architecture. Some of these palatial edi fices still stand, although for the most part dilapidated. Their faded splendours carry us back to the days of " mask and antique pageantry," when the lavish magnificence had something poetical even in its discomfort. The Elizabethan manor-house is too well known to need any description. It is generally a plain building, with two projecting wings and a centra] porch. The initial letter of Elizabeth has been held to have suggested this form. In its homely provision for do mestic convenience, the manor-house is more completely identified with the prevailing character of English society than the more gor geous mansion. The manor-house had its hall and its buttery ; its dining-room and its parlour ; sometimes its chapel ; always ils great kitchen. It was surrounded with a moat ; it possessed its little flower-garden. When the tobacco which Raleigh introduced ceased to be worth its weight in silver, the smoking-room was ad ded. On great festival days the rich plate is brought out, and dis played on the " court-cupboard " of the dining-parlour ; and " it is merry in hall, when beards wag all." The reign of Elizabeth, which witnessed such an outburst of our native literature, had not neglected that cultivation of ancient learning, upon which sound literature and correct taste must in a great degree be built. New colleges had been founded at Oxford and Cambridge. Elizabeth had also founded Trinity College, Dublin. James VI. had erected the university of Edinburgh, in addition to the Scottish academical institutions ; and Marischal CLASSICAL EDUCATION. 237 College, Aberdeen, was built in his reign. To the London Gram mar Schools of St. Paul's and Christ Church had been added Westminster School, by the queen, and Merchant Tailors' School, by- the great city company of that name. The grammar-schools were essentially the schools of the people ; and it is a sufficient praise of Elizabeth's new foundation of Westminster to say that Camden there taught, and that Jonson there learnt. 238 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER XIIL James proclaimed king of England.— Question of the Succession.— Sir Robert Carey's ride to Edinburgh.— James quits Scotland.— His progress to London.— His system of punishments and rewards.— Cecil's influence.— The coronation.— Raleigh, Cobham, Grey, and others arrested on charges of conspiracy.— The two plots.— Trial of Raleigh. His conviction and long imprisonment.— Conferences at Hampton Court. —Meeting of Parliament.— Contest between the King and the House of Commons upon a question of Privilege.— Statutes of this session.— Wardship.— Purveyance.— Temper of the Commons— Peace with Spain.— James proclaimed king of Great Britain. — Character of James. Queen Elizabeth died at Richmond at three o'clock in the morning of the 24th of March. Before ten o'clock of that day James, king of Scotland, was proclaimed as her successor. Cecil, and others of the Council who were favourable to the claim of James to the English throne, were about the queen during her last illness, and lost riot a moment in taking the important step of proclaiming him to the people. It was a wise decision; for, although the title of the descendants of Margaret, queen of Scots, was clear, accord. ing to the principle of hereditary succession, the statute of the 35th of Henry VIIL, gave that king power to dispose of the succession to the crown by will, and in his will he passed over the descendants of Margaret. The parlimentary title was thus placed in opposition to the hereditary claim. There were descendants in existence of Mary, duchess of Suffolk, the younger sister of Henry VIIL To lord Beauchamp, one of these, it may be supposed that Eliza beth alluded, in the speech ascribed to her that she would have no " rascal " as her successor. Other titles to the throne were talked of, however remote, amongst which that of Arabella Stuart was most prominent. The queen's political sagacity would naturally have pointed out the king of Scotland as the successor whose claim would have been recognised with the least confusion; and she probably would not have hesitated, in her dying hour, however she might have unwillingly entertained the question at previous seasons, had she not had sufficient reason to think meanly of the character of James. He was weak and untruthful. Their natures were essentially opposite. There was no love between them. JAMES PROCLAIMED KING. — QUITS SCOTLAND. 239 Sir Robert Carey, at the moment of Elizabeth's death, received a token from lady Scrope, his sister, that the great queen had passed away after a placid sleep. With the ring that this lady took from the finger of her mistress, Carey posted for Scotland. On Saturday night, after an extraordinary ride of three days and two nights, the alert courtier was on his knees before James to salute him as king of England, with the royal ring as his credential. Carey had obtained the start of the slow messenger of the Privy Council, who arrived in Edinburgh on the following Tuesday. On the 3rd of April, James, having attended the service in the High Church of St. Giles, delivered a farewell harangue to the congregation f and on the 5th he Fook his departure from Edinburgh. His queen, Anne of Denmark, and his children were left behind. Curious was his progress towards London, and very characteristic of his coarse and self-sufficient nature. Men saw the respect for law which was at the foundation of English liberty and order, despised by the man who was coming to rule over them. A cut-purse was tal en at Newark, who had followed the court from Berwick ; upon which the king sent a warrant to the recorder of Newark to have the thief hanged. The wise perceived the approach of an ignorant despotism in this contempt of the ordinary course of justice : " I hear our new king," writes Harrington,"hath hanged one man before he was tried ; 'tis strangely done ; now if the wind bloweth thus, why may not a man be tried before he hath offended ? " But James's notion of kingly rewards was as absurd as his notion of kingly punish ments. During his journey of thirty-two days from Edinburgh to London, he showered the honour of knighthood on two hundred and thirty-seven gentlemen who were presented to him. Elizabeth bestowed such honours sparingly upon her statesmen and soldiers. James made the noblest title of the old chivalry ridiculous. During his progress to London James feasted at many houses, where he beheld the tokens of wealth and luxury to which he was little used. He at last rested at Theobalds, where the adroit Cecil made his arrangements for a long tenure of power. The king entered London on the 7th of May. Meanwhile Elizabeth had been followed to her grave at Westminster by fifteen hundred gentlemen in mourning. Many of her late subjects were looking to her successor for relief from the penal laws, which obstructed Puritan as well as Papist in the exercise of their relig;on. Before ' James reached London a petition was presented to him, signed by eight hundred and twenty-five ministers from various counties, 240 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. desiring the redress of ecclesiastical abuses. In the State Paper Office there is an address to him from the Catholics of England, imploring " the free exercise of their religion, in private if not in public, by sufferance if not with approbation."* Some of the Romanists, however, expected more from the new king than tolera tion. In a letter dated from Rome, May 14th, of Robert Parsons, the Jesuit, he hopes the king may become a Catholic ; says there are prayers for him in the seminaries ; and states that the pope is delighted with the king's book, " Basilicon Doron." t There can be no doubt that, before the death of Elizabeth, James had prom ised that the Roman Catholics should be tolerated. Within three months of his arrival in London, some of the leading recusants were assured that the fines for recusancy should no longer be enforced ; and in the following year the sum paid as fines was very small. That the king had no large views of toleration was soon evident. He bestowed some honours and lucrative places on a few, upon a principle which he avowed when objection was made to lord Henry Howard, a Catholic, having a seat in the Council ; James saying that by this tame duck he hoped to take many wild ones. In June, the queen of James, and his eldest son prince Henry arrived in England. The coronation took place on the 25th of July, amidst the gloom and consternation of the people of London, for the plague was making the most fearful ravages in the city. The sight of the pageant was confined to the nobility and the court. On this account, as alleged, a parliament was not sum moned, according to the usual course upon the accession of a new sovereign. Ambassadors came from the United Provinces, from the archduke of Austria, and from Henry IV., to congratulate the new king of England. To all of them James made professions of peace. Sully, the minister of France, was there to sustain the influence of his master. He did so by the power of gold, and not by the sym pathies of friendship, as in the time of the great queen. Sully wore mourning for Elizabeth when he first appeared at James's court ; but he was soon told that such a tribute of respect was disagree able, and that at Whitehall her name must no longer be mentioned. At the death of Elizabeth, the rivalry which had sprung up be tween Robert Cecil and Raleigh was to have its triumph, in the confirmed favour of James to the minister with whom he had for some time been in secret communication. The wily Secretary of State was far too strong for the bold Captain of the Guard. The • " Calendar of State Papers," edited by Mrs. Green, p. 5. Ibid. p.8. RALEIGH, COBHAM, AND OTHERS ARRESTED. 241 adroit politician, weak of body but close and circumspect, would be secure of his advantage over the accomplished soldier and naviga tor, even if James had not manifested a personal dislike for Ra leigh. It was unnecessary for Cecil to have written, within a week of the queen's death, that the Council had " stayed the journey of the captain of the guard, who was conducting many suitors to the king." * If they had met, James would probably have insulted the man whose most ardent passion was to diminish the power of Spain, while James would have laid England and Scotland at her feet. So Raleigh was deprived of his offices ; and within a few months was under a charge of high treason. Hume, in a very brief relation of " the discovery of a conspiracy to subvert the gov ernment, and to fix on the throne Arabella Stuart, a near relation of the king by the family of Lennox, and descended equally from Henry VIL," mixes up the accounts of two alleged conspiracies. He says Roman Catholic priests ; lord Grey, a puritan ; lord Cob- ham, a profligate man, and Raleigh, a freethinker ; were engaged in " a conspiracy ; " and he asks " what cement could unite men of such discordant principles, in so dangerous a combination ? " The Roman Catholic conspiracy was wholly different from that in which Raleigh, Cobham, and Grey were accused, of engaging ; and was known as " the treason of the priests," or the " Bye," — the cant word by which it was designated upon the trials of the accused. Its object was to seize the person of the king. The other treason was known as the " Main ; " and its purposes were so ill defined, that, half a century afterwards, it was described, by Rush worth, as "a dark kind of treason;" the author of the "Historical Collec tions" adding, "in his time the veil still rested upon it." Subse quent investigations have not withdrawn the veil. Cobham, a very weak man, though possessed of great power from his position, had taken part with Raleigh in his jealousy of the earl of Essex ; and James, who considered that Essex had been sacrificed through 'his anxiety to promote that claim to the succession which Elizabeth did not recognize, held them both in great dislike. Cecil, who was equally united with them in jealousy of Essex, had propitiated the king of Scotland ; and to him was confided the chief power of the government when James came to the English throne. There is little in these alleged treasons' that deserves any minute relation, except as they involve the trial- and conviction of one of the most remarkable men in the history of our country. The mind of Ra- * " Calendar of State Papers," p. z. Vol. III.— 16 242 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. leigh never was exhibited in a more heroic attitude than in his con duct on this memorable trial. On the 17th November, 1603, a Special Commission was held at Winchester, the plague then raging in London and other parts. Sir Walter Raleigh had been indicted on the previous 21st of Au gust, upon a charge of high treason ; the overt acts alleged being that he had conferred with lord Cobham as to advancing Arabella Stuart to the crown of England, dispossessing the king ; and that it was arranged that lord Cobham should go to the king of Spain and the archduke of Austria, to obtain six hundred thousand crowns for the support of Arabella's title. It was also alleged in the indictment that Cobham communicated the plan to George Brooke, and that they both said " there never would be a good world in England till the king and his cubs were taken away ; " that Cobham wrote to count Aremberg for the six hundred thou sand crowns, which Aremberg promised to give ; and that Raleigh was to receive eight thousand crowns. Raleigh pleaded Not Guilty. The conduct of the Attorney-General upon this trial, was snch as made even Cecil remonstrate against his unfairness. Coke's brutality to the prisoner remains as a perpetual warning to the bar and the bench, that if the character of the gentleman is ever pub licly dissociated from that of the lawyer in the administration of justice, the greatest learning, the most elevated rank, will not save the trickster or the bully from the contempt of his own generation and of future times. Coke began by declaring that the treason of Raleigh was '-the treason of the tiiain, the others were the bye" and then went on to mix him up, as the historian has done, with both treasons. " I pray you; gentlemen of the jury," said Raleigh, "remember I am not charged with the bye, which was the treason of the priests." To this quiet observation Coke replied, " You are not ; but your lordships will see that all these treasons, though they consisted of several points, closed in together, like Samson's foxes, which were joined in the tails, though their heads were sev ered." Let us pursue this dialogue a little further. Coke went on, again travelling far out of the indictment, to associate Raleigh with every charge against other conspirators of whose proceedings it is manifest that he knew nothing. " To what end do you speak all this ? " said the prisoner. '• I will prove you to be the most no torious traitor that ever came to the bar," rejoined Coke. " Thou art a monster. Thou hast an English face but a Spanish heart." Coke CONDUCT OF COKE THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL. 243 then proceeded with a recital of his charges against Cobham. " If my lord Cobham be a traitor, what is that to me ? " said Raleigh. Then the great lawyer replied, " All that he did was by thy instiga tion, thou viper, for I thou thee, thou traitor ! "* When Coke came to the words about "destroying the king and his cubs," which rested upon a declaration of one of the priests of what the Jesuits intended, Raleigh lost patience for a moment, and exclaimed, " O barbarous ! Do you bring the words of these hellish spiders against me ? " Coke retorted, " Thou art thyself a spider of hell." Such were the flowers of rhetoric with which the Attorney-General of that day sustained the dignity of English justice. There is an account of the trial, supposed to be written by sir Thomas Overbury, in which he contrasts the conduct of Coke, behaving himself " so violently and bitterly," and using " so great provocation to the prisoner," with the demeanour of Raleigh : " As the attorney was noted, so was the carriage of Raleigh' most remarkable ; first to the lords, humble yet not prostrate ; dutiful yet not dejected ; for in some cases he would humbly thank them for gracious speeches ; in others, when they related some circumstances, acknowledged that what they said was true ; and in such points wherein he would not yield unto them, he would crave pardon, and with reverence urge them and answer them in points of law and essential matter of fact ; towards the jury, affable, but not fawning; not in despair, but hoping in them ; carefully persuading with reason, not distemper- edly importuning with conjuration ; rather showing love of life, than fear of death. Towards the king's counsel patient, but not insensibly neglecting nor yielding to imputations laid against him by words ; and it was wondered that a man of his heroic spirit could be so valiant -in suffering that he was never once overtaken in passion." The charge against Raleigh rested solely upon the accusation of lord Cobham, of which a contemporary letter-writer says, it "was no more to be weighed than the barking of a dog." Sir Dudley Carleton, in a letter from Winchester, gives a narrative of the trial of Raleigh. He says, " The evidence against him was only Cobham's confession, which was judged sufficient to condemn him ; and a letter was produced, written by Cobham the day before, by which he accused Raleigh as the first practiser of the treason "The speech of sir Toby Belch, "if thou thou'st him some thrice it shall not be amiss," has been held to have been suggested by Coke's insult. But " Twelfth Night'' had been acted in 1602, 244 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. betwixt them, which served to turn against him; though he showed^ to countervail this, a letter written by Cobham, and deliv ered to him in the Tower, by which he was clearly acquitted." Raleigh demanded that Cobham should be confronted with him. He contended that by the law of treasons two witnesses were necessary to conviction. His eloquence was unavailing. He was found guilty, and sentenced to death. The opinion of after times is expressed by Mr. Hallam : " His conviction was obtained on the single deposition of lord Cobham, an accomplice, a prisoner, not examined in court, and known to have already retracted his accusation. Such a verdict was thought contrary to law, even in that age of ready convictions." Raleigh's contempora ries felt that his conviction was most unjust. Raleigh was un popular, for he was proud ; but his trial produced a complete change in the general feeling. One who was present at Winches ter affirmed "that whereas when he" saw him first, he was So led with the common hatred that he would have gone a hundred miles to see him hanged, — he would, ere he parted, have gone a thousand to save his life." * The priests and Brooke were found guilty of the " Bye " plot, and were executed. Cobham, Grey, and Markham were found guilty, and were brought upon the scaffold to die. After a theatrical mummery these were reprieved, and wore out long years of imprisonment. Raleigh was also reprieved, and was confined in the Tower till 1616. Those twelve years of captivity were not spent in vain repining. In his prison chamber he wrote his " History of the World " — a noble book, worthy of the man and of the days in which he had gloriously lived — full of poetry and high philosophy, and in its solemn recognitions of the " power, light, virtue, wisdom, and goodness " of the " Omnipotent Cause," and " Almighty Mover," furnishing the best answer to the scurrility of the Attorney-general, who called him " damnable atheist," and of the Chief Justice who, in sentencing him, said> " You have been taxed by the world, sir Walter Raleigh, with hold ing heathenish, atheistical, and profane opinions, which I list not to repeat, because Christian ears cannot endure to hear them ; but the authors and maintainers of such opinions cannot be suffered to live in any Christian commonwealth." When the Puritan ministers presented their petition to James on his journey to London, they asked for a conference. On the * Carleton's letter in the " Hardwicke State Papers." This, and other documents connected with Raleigh's trial, are given by Mr. Jardine. CONFERENCES AT HAMPTON COURT. 245 14th, 15th and 1 6th of January, 1604, the king summoned to Hampton Court the archbishop of Canterbury, eight bishops, five deans, and two doctors, who wete to sustain the ceremonies and practices of the Church, and to oppose all innovation. To meet them, four members of the reforming party were summoned, in cluding Dr. Reynolds, a divine of acknowledged learning and abil ity. Royalty never displayed itself in a more undignified manner. Episcopacy never degraded itself more by a servile flattery of roy alty. James, in his insolent demeanour to the representatives of a growing party in the English Church, thought to avenge himself of the humiliation he had been occasionally compelled to endure from ministers of the Scottish kirk. He was the chief talker in these conferences. Harrington, who was present, says " The king talked much Latin, and disputed with Dr. Reynolds ; but he rather used upbraidings than argument, and told the petitioners that they wanted to strip Christ again, and bid them away with their snivel ling The bishops seemed much pleased, and said his maj esty spoke by the power of inspiration. I wist not what they mean ; but the spirit was rather foul-mouthed." * A few altera tions were made in the Common Prayer Book; and a new version of the Holy Scriptures was ordered to be undertaken. James had taken his side ; but his pedantic vanity, though suited to the taste of bishop Bancroft, who fell upon his knees and thanked God for giving them such a king, was not quite fitted for the government of the English nation. In the first Parliament of his reign James was at issue with the House of Commons. On the 19th of March, 1604, the two Houses were assembled. In the proclamation by which the king called parliament together, he had, in his grand style of common places, chosen to prescribe the sort of men the people were to choose for their representa tives. " There are often," he proclaims, " many unfit persons ap pointed for that service ; and where it is so well known to every private man of wit and judgment, much more to Us, who have had so long experience of kingly government, what ill effects do fol low.'' Amongst other directions, he emphatically says, " We do command that an express care be had that there be not chosen any persons bankrupt or outlaw." Furthermore, " We notify by these presents, that all returns and certificates of knights, citizens, and burgesses ought, and are, to be brought to the Chancery, and there to be filed of record ; and if any shall be found to be made * " Nugaa Antiquae," p. 182. 246 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. contrary to this proclamation, the same is to be rejected as unlaw ful and insufficient, and the city or borough to be fined for the same." Again and again, in the. reign of Elizabeth, as they had done in former reigns, the Commons had successfully maintained the principle that no writ for a second election of knight or citizen or burgess should issue, without an order from the House .itself. It is strongly but truly observed that, in spite of these assertions ' of the constitutional principle, " a stranger is no sooner seated on the throne than he aims a blow at the very foundation of the peo ple's rights." * The House of Commons had no especial regard for bankrupts or outlaws ; but they chose themselves to examine into an allegation of this nature, and not let the Chancellor exer cise an authority which interfered with their Privileges. Sir Fran cis Goodwin had been returned for Buckinghamshire, in opposition to sir John Fortescue, who was favoured by the government. An outlawry had been found to have formerly hung over him ; and the election of Goodwin being declared void, a new writ was issued from Chancery. The House restored Goodwin to his seat ; and then James, in his impatient ignorance of the spirit of the Eng lish monarchy, told the Commons that " they derived all matters of privilege from him, and from his grant ; " and that precedents were not to be credited, when derived from " the times of minors, of tyrants, of women, of simple kings." His contemptuous men tion of " women " was an intimation of his scorn for his predeces sor, before whose genius he had crouched like a whipped school boy. The dispute went on ; and then this interpreter of the spirit of the old free monarchy of England said, " We command, as an absolute king, a conference with the judges." The matter ended by both elections being set aside. James was wise enough not to engage in such a conflict a second time. The House of Commons, at this commencement of a new dynasty, the head of which had not scrupled to proclaim principles inconsistent with the foundations of national freedom, did not care to separate without leaving a solemn record of their opinions, and a justification of their proceedings. It is entitled an " Apology of the House of Commons, made to the King, touching their Privi leges." Had the doctrines therein asserted been respected by the Stuarts, the blood that was shed forty years afterwards might have been spared. We will extract one or two passages of this remark able document. The Commons review the attempts to maintain * Brodie, " British Empire," vol. i. p. 343. STATUTES OF THE SESSION. 247 that they held not Privileges of right, but of grace only ; that they were not a Court of Record ; and that the examination upon the return of writs was without their compass ; and they thus proceed: — "Against which assertions, most gracious sovereign, tending directly and apparently to the utter overthrow of the very funda mental Privileges of our House, and therein of the Rights and Liberties of the whole Commons of your realm of England, which they and their ancestors from time immemorable have undoubtedly enjoyed under your majesty's most noble progenitors ; we, the knights, citizens, and burgesses of the House of Commons assem bled in parliament, and in the name of the whole Commons of the realm of England, with uniform consent for ourselves and our pos terity, do expressly protest, as being derogatory in the highest de gree to the true dignity, liberty, and authority of your majesty's high court of parliament, and consequently to the rights of all your majesty's said subjects, and the whole body of this your kingdom; and desire that this our protestation may be recorded to all poster ity What cause we your poor Commons have to watch over our privileges is manifest in itself to all men. The Prerogatives of Princes may easily, and do daily grow. The Privi leges of the Subject are for the most part at an everlasting stand. They may be by good providence and care preserved ; but being once lost are not recovered but with much disquiet. If good kings were immortal, as well as kingdoms, to strive so for privilege were but vanity perhaps and folly; but seeing the same God, who in his great mercy hath given us a wise king and religious, doth also sometimes permit hypocrites and tyrants in his displeasure, and for the sins of the people, from hence hath the desire of rights, liberties, and privileges, both for nobles and commons, had its just original, by which an harmonical and stable state is framed ; each member under the head enjoying that right, and performing that duty, which for the honour of the head and happiness of the whole is requisite." But it was not only upon the question of their Privileges that the Commons were not in accord with the Crown. There had been, with the king's assent, a novel code of canons established in convocation, which aimed at excluding non-conformists from civil rights, and setting up an unconstitutional authority over the laity, as well as the clergy. The Commons, in a conference with the Lords, remonstrated against such an innovation. The language in which the king was addressed in the " Apology," is the voice of 248 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. men who have been nurtured in the belief that they were freemen, and who abide in the determination to remain freemen. They say to the king, " Your Majesty would be misinformed if any man should deliver that the kings of England have any absolute power in themselves, either to alter religion, which God defend should be in the power of any mortal man whatsoever, cr to make any laws concerning the same, otherwise than, as in temporal causes, by consent of Parliament. We have, and shall, at all times by our oaths acknowledge that your majesty is sovereign lord and supreme governor in both." During this session a parliamentary title was given to king James and his descendants by an Act for " a most joyful and just recognition of the immediate, lawful, and undoubted succession, descent, and right of the Crown." * The natural and wise desire of the king for an Union of the two countries was not very cor dially met; and in their " Apology" the Commons say, "We were long in treating and debating the matter of Union. The proposi tions were new ; the importance great ; the consequence far reach ing, and not discoverable but by long disputes ; our numbers also are large, and each hath liberty to speak." But at length an Act was passed, appointing Commissioners to treat with the Scots upon this great question. f Many years elapsed before public prej udices had been softened down, and private interests conciliated, so that Scotland and England became one nation. We must not be too ready to hold the legislators of this time as peculiarly igno rant, in passing a law to declare Witchcraft felony, without benefit of clergy. { The superstition was productive of enormous cruel ties ; but it had its earnest supporters, and amongst others the king himself. The popular belief went wholly in that direction. The legislation of the Parliament of 1604 was not so remarkable as the spirit which it displayed in the resistance of encroachments upon its ancient liberties, and in the demand for reforms of ancient abuses. Amongst those who most strongly maintained the necessity of improvement was Francis Bacon. The griev ances of which the Commons had complained, in a petition, were those of purveyance, which fell upon all the people. The burthen of wardships, by which the custody, and therefore the profits, of every estate held under military tenure, was claimed by the crown during the minority of the heir, fell upon the landed proprietors. Purveyance was the relic of a condition of society * 1 Jac. I. c. 1. t 1 Jac. I. c. 2. t 1 Jac I. c. 12. TEMPER OF THE COMMONS. 249 ¦which had passed away. Before the communications between the producers'" of food and the consumers in towns were easy, those wants of the sovereign's household which could not be supplied from the royal demesnes were arranged by purveyors, — a body of officers who had the right of claiming provisions in any market for the king's use. They took corn, flesh, every description of food, at their own prices. They had the right of impressing carts and car riages in the same arbitrary manner. Statute after statute had been passed for the regulation of purveyance ; but a power so enormous was liable to the grossest abuse. Elizabeth herself called the purveyors "harpies." The evil when James came to the throne had become intolerable ; and, according to a speech of Bacon, the purveyors, under their commissions from the Board of the Green Cloth, lived at free quarters upon the country ; terrifying dealers by their claims of immense quantities of provisions at an insufficient price, out of which they made a profit ; cutting down woods with out the owner's permission ; and even demanding the labourers to work for them at their own grinding rate of payment. The Com mons now asked for a total abolition of purveyance. Their peti tion was not offensive to the king, for he hoped to make good terms for himself by the concession of this remnant of feudal pre rogative ; but nothing was done. The question of worship was also postponed, at the desire of the House of Lords. The temper of parliament, as was the temper of the people, was favourable to the quiet rule of the new king. But it was di rectly opposed to his notion of a divine right which gave him, in the exercise of his prerogative, an absolute power such as he was prompt to claim. He had declared in a book, " The true Law of Free Monarchies," printed before he came to the English throne, that " although a good king will frame all his actions to be according to law, yet he is not bound thereto, but of his own will, and for example-giving to his subjects." He was told In distinct terms that the loyalty of the people was associated with the care which the sovereign had of their welfare. " If your majesty," says the Apology, " shall vouchsafe at your best pleasure and leisure, to enter into your gracious consideration of our petition for the ease of those "burthens under which your whole people of long time mourned, hoping forrelief of your majesty, then may you be assured to be possessed of their hearts ; and, if of their hearts, of all they can do or have." * * The substance of this important paper is given by Mr. Hallam. It is to be found ill " Cobbett's Parliamentary History." 250 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. In August, 1C04, a treaty of peace was concluded between. James, king of England, the king of Sjjain, and the archduke of Austria. The policy of the country was wholly changed in the change of its sovereign. The hostility to Spain was a national sentiment ; for it was built on the conviction that no peace would be safe with that power whilst England was Protestant, and was identified with the cause of Protestantism in Europe. Robert Cecil had been bred in the political creed of Elizabeth ; but the disposition of James to abandon her policy, and to desire peace with her great enemy in a temper amounting to pusillanimity, com pelled Cecil to a subserviency in the negociations with Spain very different from the spirit which a minister of Elizabeth would have shown. The old friendship with the Netherlands was abandoned. The king of England engaged to give no further aid to the Hol landers, or other enemies of the king of Sjpain and the arch dukes. The commercial treaty, which was connected with the treaty of peace, contained clauses which the Hollanders felt were to their disadvantage. Enmity was thus to spring up between the two countries in which the struggle for the Reformation had been carried on most cordially and strenuously. There was one clause to which Elizabeth would never have consented as long as she had a ship or a cannon, — that there was to be '* moderation had in the proceedings of the Inquisition " against English traders repairing to Spain. What the people felt with regard to Spain, and to the foreign policy of England, may be collected from the boldness witlvwhich Raleigh spoke on his trial. Indignantly repelling the charge that he had been bribed with Spanish gold to engage in a conspiracy, he alluded to the warfare in which he had battled so long against a power that once aimed at universal monarchy, but was now reduced to comparative insignificance. Spain never for gave Raleigh's efforts for her humiliation, nor his public mention of them when she was suing for peace. " I was not so bare of sense but I saw that if ever this state was strong and able to defend itself, it was now. The kingdom of Scotland united, whence we were wont to fear all our troubles ; Ireland quieted, where our forces were wont to be divided ; Denmark assured, whom before we were wont to have in jealousy ; the Low Countries, oftr nearest neighbours, at peace with us ; and instead of a Lady, whom time had surprised, we had now an active King, a lawful successor to the crown, who was able to his own business. I was not such a madman as to make myself^in this time a Robin Hood, a Wat JAMES PROCLAIMED KING OF GREAT BRITAIN. 25 1 Tyler, or a Jack Cade. 1 knew also the state of Spain well ; his weakness, and poorness, and humbleness at this time. I knew that he was discouraged and dishonoured. I knew that six times we had repulsed his forces, thrice in Ireland, thrice at sea, and once at Cadiz on his own coast. Thrice had I served against him myself at sea, wherein for my country's sake I had expended of my own jjropertics 4000/. I knew that where before-time he was wont to have forty great sails at least in his jjorts, now he had not past six or seven; and for sending to his Indies he was driven to hire strange vessels ; — a thing contrary to the institutions of his proud ancestors, who forbad, in case of any necessity, that the king of Spain should make their case known to strangers. I knew that of five-and-twenty millions he had from his Indies, he had scarce any left ; nay, I knew his poorness at this time to be such that the Jesuits, his imps, were fain to beg at the church doors ; his pride so abated, as, notwithstanding his former high terms, he was glad to congratulate the king, my master, on his accession, and now cometh creeping unto him for jieace." With such a power the king of England might have concluded an honourable peace, without sacrificing the principle for which Elizabeth had fought for twenty years. She would not have forsaken the United Provinces, for any temptation which the Most Catholic king could have held out to shake her good faith and her constancy. Previous to the accession of James, the sovereign, in the unal tered style of ancient feudal assumption, had the title of " King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland." On the 24th of October, 1604, James was proclaimed "King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland." We cannot reflect upon him for retaining the absurd title of king of France, for the folly was kept up for two centuries longer. His vanity was abundantly gratified in being king of Great Britain and Ireland — an absolute king, as he believed ; and not only a king, but a master of all learning, and especially of theologi cal learning, of whom his Chancellor declared, at the Hampton Court conference, that never since our Saviour's time had the king and the priest been so wonderfully united in the same person. He was not altogether so royal a personage as Elizabeth, or her majes tic father. His figure was ungainly ; his habits were slovenly ; he was by nature a coward. Not deficient in a certain talent which he rarely jDut to a right use — "the wisest fool in Christendom," — he had no sense of that public responsibility which attached to his high office. He was a king for himself alone. He estimated the 252 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. cost of war as the principal inducement to remain at peace. But the wise economy which was opposed to the martial tendencies. of the people that he was called to govern, was not an economy for the public good. He wasted his revenues upon silly baubles for personal ornaments, and in lavish grants to unworthy favourites. He almost wholly neglected the business of the state ; for he was hunting, bolstered up on an ambling palfrey ; or he was writing pedantic treatises which nobody read ; or he was going in progress, to be flattered and feasted ; or he was moving by easy journeys from his palace of Richmond to his palace of Windsor, or in trium phal procession in his state-barge from Greenwich to Whitehall. There were some refinements in his court, for the plays that were acted before him were often those of Shakspere ; and at a later period Jonson wrote " Masques at Court," and Inigo Jones sup plied the decorations. In a short time the palace became a scene of profligacy, in which even the mask of decency was not attempted to be put on. Yet this was the king who was to try his hand at making England an absolute monarchy by divine right. Lord Thomas Howard, who had been a powerful instrument in forward ing the accession of James, wrote to Harrington, " Your queen did talk of her subjects' love and good affection, and in good truth she aimed well. Our king talketh of his subjects' fear and subjection, and herein I think he doth well too, — as long as it holdeth good." THE GUNPOWDER PLOT. 253 CHAPTER XIV. The Gunpowder Plot. — Lord Mounteagle receives a letter. — Salisbury is made acquainted with the letter. — Its interpretation. — Search under the Parliament House. — Seizure of Fawkes. — The other Conspirators. — The preparations during eighteen previous months. — Their proceedings after the discovery — They resist the sheriff. — Some killed, others taken prisoners. — Feelings of the Roman Catholics. — Ben Jonson. — Trial of Fawkes and others- — Garnet the Jesuit. — His conviction — His doctrine of Equivocation. In the last week of October, 1605, the king was contemplating "his return from his hunting exercise at Royston, upon occasion of the drawing near of the parliament time, which had been twice prorogued already." * Whilst James was at his favourite sports, hunting according to a more discreet fashion than that of the old Norman kings, his "little beagle," for so he called Robert Cecil, now earl of Salisbury, was diligently carrying forward the business of the State. Salisbury was at his post at Whitehall on the night of the 26th of October, when his wonted meditations upon the difficulty of providing money for his extravagant master and his rapacious followers, were disturbed by the demand for an audience of a Catholic peer, lord Mounteagle. The position of this noble man, who had been called to the House of Peers in the parliament of 1604, was a very equivocal one. He was the son of a Protestant peer, lord Morley ; but, when very young, married a daughter of sir Thomas Tresham, who was a pervert to Rome under the guid ance of missionary priests, and, during the reign of Elizabeth, a most uncompromising recusant. Lord Morley's son then became in volved with several leading Roman Catholics in the conspiracy of Essex, and in their invitations to the king of Spain to invade Eng land and to depose the queen. Upon the accession of James, when the king was either balancing the advantages of being -Catholic or Protestant, or holding out to the Papists professions of toleration which he had no intention of accomplishing, Mounteagle was a satisfied recipient of court favours, whilst the severities against re- *" A discourse of the Manner of the Discovery of the late intended Treason," &c Published officially. Reprinted in " Harleian Miscellany." 254 HTSTORY OF ENGLAND: cusants had been renewed, and the Roman Catholics in general were becoming hopeless of power, or even of indulgence. A strange in cident had occurred on that night of the 26th of October, when Mounteagle broke in upon the quiet of the secretary of state. The catholic peer had a house at Hoxton, from which he had been ab sent a month, when he suddenly arrived that evening to supper. Very opportune was the return, as we learn from the official " Dis course : " " Being in his own lodging ready to go to supper, at seven of the clock at night, one of his footmen, whom he had sent of an errand over the street, was met by a man of a reasonable tall person age, who delivered him a letter, charging him to put it in my lord his master's hands ; which my lord no sooner received, but that, having broken it up, and perceiving the same to be of an unknown and somewhat unlegible hand, and without either date or superscription, did call one of his men unto him, for helping him to read it." It appears from another account, that the letter was read aloud, of course in the presence of the lord's attendants. It was as fol lows : — " My lord out of the love i beare to some of youer frendz i have a caer of youer preservacion therefor i would advyse yowe as yowe tender youer lyf to devyse some exscuse to shift of your at tendance at this parleament for god and man hathe concurred to punishe the wickednes of this tyme and thinke not slightlye of this advertisment but retyere youre selfe into youre contri wheare yowe maye expect the event in safti forthowghe theare be no apparance of anni stir yet i saye they shall receyve a terrible blowe this par leament and yet they shall not seie who hurts them this cowncel is not to be contemned because it maye do yowe good and can do yowe no harme for the dangere is passed as soon as yowe have burnt the letter and i hope god will give yowe the grace to mak good use of it to whose holy proteccion i comend yowe." The letter is ad dressed ' To the right honourable the lord Mowteagle.' There have been many conjectures as to the writerof this ex traordinary letter. One probable guess is that Francis Tresham, the brother-in-law of Mounteagle, gave him this warning to save his own life", though in such obscure terms as should not lead to dis covery of the conspiracy in which Tresham and others of Mount- eagle's friends were engaged. Greenway, the Jesuit, whose relation of the plot, although written to exculpate himself and others, contains many curious details, gives in his manuscript what seems "to have been the opinion of the conspirators themselves. They attributed it SALISBURY IS INFORMED OF THE LETTER. 255 to Tresham, and suspected a secret understanding between him and lord Mounteagle, or at least the gentleman who was employed to read the letter at table. They were convinced that Tresham had no sooner given his consent than he repented of it, and sought to break up the plot without betraying his associates." * The circum stances indicate that there was a got-up scene enacted in the ho'use of lord Mounteagle at Hoxton. The unexpected return of the lord of the house ; the page met in the street by a man of tall person ; the reading aloud of the letter, which the page had received as one of great importance to be delivered to his master's own hand ; — these are all suspicious incidents. Whether the visit of Mounteagle to Salisbury, ¦' notwithstanding the lateness and darkness of the night in that season of the year," t was a part of the same wt',1 arranged mystery, may be reasonably doubted. Mr. Jardine says, " Many considerations tend to confirm the truth of Father Green- way's suggestion, that the whole story of the letter was merely a device of the government to cover Tresham's treachery, or, for some other state reason, to conceal the true source from which their information had been derived." J According to Dr. Lingard's account of Greenway's relation, he makes no such suggestion as that "the letter was merely a device of the government." It could have been no object of the government that the conspirators should escape. Thomas Winter, one of those actively concerned in the plot, had been a confidential attendant upon Mounteagle ; and Thomas Ward, the man who read the letter aloud at Mounteagle's supper, went the next .morning to Winter and urged him to fly. We can understand how Mounteagle might have sought to cover his previous knowledge of the plot by having a letter openly de livered which would convey to him the intimation of some danger ous design ; and we can also understand how the very unusual course of causing a letter to be read aloud would have been adopt ed, that his old friends should have a hint to look after their own safety. But- it appears unlikely that Salisbury should have been concerned in a device so calculated to defeat the discovery of some impending danger. It would be unsafe to affirm that the letter sent to Mounteagle gave the first intimation to the govern- * Dr. Lingard's " History," vol. ix. p. 69, 8vo ed. Dr. Lingard brought Greenway's MS. from Rome, and first made it known in his " History." t " Discourse," &c. X " Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot," 1857. This admirable narrative is an ex panded and corrected re-publication of Mr. Jardine's Introduction to " Criminal Trials," vol. ii. 256 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ment of some imminent peril. A man of the name of Thomas Coe appears to have made a communication to Salisbury which con veyed " the primary intelligence of these late dangerous treasons." He claims this merit in a letter to Salisbury of the 20th December, in which he says, " My good lord, my writing so obscurely, and entitling my narration by the name of a dream or vision, was oc casioned by the reason aforesaid " — [a doubt whether his letters might-be opened]. " Not that it was a dream or idle fantasy, but such an approved truth as was wrested from a notorious Papist, unto whom I did so far insinuate by private conference that he confessed unto me the whole circumference of this treason, as it is since fallen out." * The administrative ability of Salisbury is shown by the wariness with which he conducted his operations, from the moment that Mounteagle came to him from Hoxton on that dark October night. Whether his suspicion was first raised, or whether he had a previous knowledge, his course was unaltered. He made no fuss ; he quietly communicated the letter to others of the Council; he suffered James to go on with his hunting exercise; and when the king came to London, the Secretary, having had the ominous letter six days in his possession, presented it to the king, no other person being present. The official "discourse " claims for the king the right interpretation of the riddle, " For the danger is pas sed as soon as you have burnt the letter." If the danger was past so soon as the letter was burnt, argued Salisbury, what was the use of the warning. But the king read the mysterious sentence thus : — the danger is to be sudden and quick — the terrible hurts, of which the authors should be unseen, " should be as quickly performed and at an end, as that paper should be a blazing up in the fire." Thence, held the king, according to the " Discourse," it should be "by a blowing up of powder." It was "a divine illumination of the royal mind," said Coke on the trial of the conspirators. Salis bury, according to his own statement, had suggested the same in terpretation to several of the Council, before the king knew any thing of the matter. But Salisbury was too politic not to let the vanity of his master expatiate to his parliament upon his claim to the discovery. It was set forth in the " Discourse " howallinquiry had been postponed by the Council, "for the expectation and ex perience they had of his majesty's fortunate judgment, in clearing and solving obscure riddles and doubtful mysteries." The Sec retary completely threw the conspirators off their guard, even * Lodge, " Illustrations," vol. iii. p. 30*. SEARCH UNDER THE PARLIAMENT HOUSE. 257 when they knew that the letter to Mounteagle was in the hands of the vigilant minister. They had conferred upon their danger ; but the absence of every indication of alarm or suspicion on the part of the government made them despise the advice which Winter had re ceived from his friend in Mouriteagle's household. On Monday the 4th of November, the Lord Chamberlain, whose duty it was to make arrangements for the meeting of parliament, went to the House of Lords ; and afterwards entered the vaults under the parliament-chamber. Lord Mounteagle was of the party. They observed a large store of coals and wood in a cellar ; and standing carelessly there they saw " a very tall and desperate fellow." The Lord Chamberlain asked who the fuel belonged to: and the man answered that they belonged to his master, Mr. Percy, who had rented the cellar for a year and a half. There were no more questions. B.ut there was a general examination, by the direction of a Westminster magistrate, of neighbouring houses and cellars, under a pretence of looking for some missing property be longing to the royal wardrobe. The " tall and desperate fellow," was not yet frightened from his purpose. A little before midnight on the eve of the 5th of November, the same magistrate, with a strong body of attendants, repaired to the cellar under the parlia ment house. A man just stepjMng out of the doot was seized and searched. Slow matches and touchwood were found upon him ; and a lantern, with a light within its dark covering, was in the cellar. The heaps of billets were quickly removed, and beneath them were thirty-six barrels of gunpowder. It is one o'clock in the morning. The prisoner is led to White hall. A Council is hastily assembled in the king's bed-chamber. The resolute man is beset with hurried interrogatories by king and peers. His name, he says, is John Johnson ; he is a servant of Thomas Percy ; if he had not been ajjprehended that night, he had blown up the parliament house, when the king, peers, bishops, and others had been assembled. "Why would you have killed me?" asks the king. " Because you are excommunicated by the pope,'' is the reply. " How so ? " said James. " Every Maundy Thursday the pope doth excommunicate all heretics, who are not of the church of Rome," is the explanation. He is asked who were privy to the conspiracy, and answers, "he could not resolve to accuse any." The night was passed iii the examination ofthe prisoner; but nothing could be obtained from him that could commit his accomplices. In the morning he was taken to the Tower. Vol. III.— 17 2^8 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. That morning of the sth of November was a time of deep anxiety in London. The news of a conspiracy so daring in its objects, so mysterious in its origin, so terrible in its remorseless fanaticism, filled all classes with alarm. It was scarcely possible to exaggerate the consequences of a plot which threatened to involve the whole machinery of government in one indiscriminate destruction. Two of the conspirators had left London on the 4th. Two others fled the instant they knew that the pretended servant of Percy was seized. Two more lingered till the morning. Five of these joined company on their road to Ashby St. Legers, in Northamptonshire, all riding with extraordinary speed, having relays of horses. It had been arranged that a general rendezvous should take place at Dunchurch, on the 5th of November, after the great act of ven geance should have been accomplished in London. Towards that place various bodies of Roman Catholics were moving on the ap pointed day ; some being cognisant of a design against the govern ment, but tew having been intrusted with the secrets ofthe leaders. A party was collected on the 5th at the house of lady Catesby, at Ashby St. Legers. They were at supper when the five who had fled from London rushed in, covered with the mire of the wintry roads, exhausted, hojaeless. They had little to think of now but self-defence. Taking with them all the arms they could collect, the rode off to Dunchurch. Here they found a large assembly, with sir Everard Digby at their head, carousing, and anxiously expecting some joyful intelligence of the triumphs of their party, which they had been led to anticipate by vague hints of a coming time when heresy should no longer sit in high places. The ill- concealed fears, the pale looks, the secret whisperings of the friends who had ridden so hard to join them, told another tale. The instinct with which those who with a half-confidence, are to be made the instruments of conspiracy fly from their leaders at the first approach of detection, was now in full operation. Those who came with numerous retainers to the great chase on Dunmore heath, which was to be a gathering for more important objects than the hunting of the deer, gradually slunk away. On that night the chief conspirators were left alone. Let us now see who were the principal actors in this perilous enterprise ; and how they had been occupied for many months before the fatal fifth of November. Robert Catesby, the only son of sir William Catesby, who in the time of Elizabeth passed from the Protestant faith to the Roman Catholic, and whose mother was a sister of Thomas Throck- PREPARATIONS OF THE CONSPIRATORS. 259 morton, also a most determined recusant, was imbued with a more than common hatred to the established religion. He was con cerned in the insurrection of Essex, but was pardoned upon paying a fine of ,£3000 ; and he was prominent in other seditions during the two latter years of the queen's reign. Thomas Winter was of a Roman Catholic family, who were connected by marriage with the family of1 Catesby ; and he also had been occupied with plots, and had been in Spain to negotiate for the invasion of England by a Spanish force, in 1601. John Wright was a pervert from Pro testantism, and he had also been engaged in the treason of Essex. These men were old and intimate friends ; and these " three first devised the plot, and were the chief directors of all the particu larities of it," as their principal associate declared in one of his examinations. He who stated this, on the 19th of November, was the "tall and desjjerate fellow " who called himself John Johnson, and refused when brought to Whitehall on the 5th, to declare any who were privy to the design which he so boldly avowed. He had been compelled to disclose his real name by a hateful jDrocess ; for on the 6th of November the king projxised a number of interrogn. tories to be put to the prisoner, concluding thus : " The gentler tortures are to be first used unto him, et sic per gradus ad ima tenditur: " [and so proceed by steps to the extremest.] This recommendation produced its effect ; as we may learn from the signature of Gviido Fawkes to his examination before the torture, and his signature to an examination after the torture. He was the son of a notary of York, who was Registrar of the Consistory Court of the Cathedral ; and he was brought up as a Protestant at the free school there. He became, however, a zealous Papist ; and, having served in the Spanish army in Flanders, acquired some of the Spanish notions of the Christian treatment by which heresy was to be extirpated. Guido Fawkes and Thomas Winter came to London together in 1604; and a few days after there was a remarkable meeting between Catesby, Wright, Winter, Fawkes, and a new malcontent, Thomas Percy, a relation of the earl of Northumber land. From the time of this meeting, at which the first words which Percy uttered, were, " Shall we always, gentlemen, talk, and never do any thing ? " — there was abundant work, and very hard work, for these five fanatics. The confession of Thomas Winter, on the 23rd of November, is a very elaborate paper, minutely detailing the rise and progress of the conspiracy. It is perfectly consistent in its details with tha 260 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. facts derived from other sources ; and altogether presents so vivid a picture of the energy and perseverance of these misguided men, that we shall use occasionally its exact words in detailing their proceedings after they were solemnly banded together in then- dangerous enterrjrise. They gave each other an oath of secrecy, "in a chamber wheie no other body was ;" and, going "into the next room, heard mass, and received the blessed sacrament upon the same." The object for which the oath was taken was then disclosed by Catesby to Percy, and by Winter and Wright to Fawkes. In the State Paper Office there is an agreement between Thomas Percy and Henry Ferrers, for the hire of a house next the parliament-house. It is dated, May 24th, 1604; — and is endorsed by Salisbury. " The bargain between Ferrers and Percy for the bloody cellar, found in Winter's lodging." * Eighteen months were these five men carrying their terrible secret close in their bosoms ; imparting it to very few others ; never doubting their own unaided power to produce a revolution by one stunning blow ; and, from the very nature of the means they employed, exposed to detection at every step. " The bloody cellar," was not under the parliament chamber. They saw no chance of preparing a mine beneath that chamber, but by breaking through the massive foundation wall of the House of Lords. Fawkes received the keys of the house next the parliament-house ; and they were ready for their work previous to the expected meeting of parliament. But the parliament was again prorogued to February, 1605; so they departed to the country for awhile. They then took another house at Lambeth, " where," says Winter, " we might make provision of powder and wood for the mine, which being there made ready, should in a night be conveyed by boat to the house by the parliament, because we were loth to foil that with often going in and out." The charge of this Lambeth house was given to Robert Keyes ; who, although sworn as a member of the confederacy, appears to have been received " as a trusty honest man," who was ready to earn money for his services. At the beginning of Mi chaelmas term, 1604, Fawkes and Winter conferred with Catesby in the country, and they agreed " that now was the time to begin and set things in order for the mine." Percy's house was wanted for a meet ing of the Commissioners for the Scotch Union. It was an official house ; and Percy, its temporary tenant, was obliged to defer his un- susjDected proceedings. Percy held the office of a Gentleman-Pen sioner, which may account for the absence of all suspicion as to his • Mrs. Green's " Calendar of State Papers," p. 113. PREPARATIONS OF THE CONSPIRATORS. 261 objects. The conferences of the commissioners were ended a fortnight before Christmas ; and then other labours were com menced in right earnest within those. walls. Percy and Wright now joined Catesby, Winter, and Fawkes ; " and we," says Winter, "against their coming, had provided a good part of the powder; so as we all five entered with tools fit to begin our work, having provided ourselves with baked meats, the less to need sending abroad. We entered late in the night." They had to get through a stone wall three yards in thickness. Their labour was far beyond what they had expected ; arid they sent to Lambeth for Keyes, and obtained tbe adhesion to their plot of Christojpher Wright, the brother of John. Fawkes, with the boldness which characterised him, vindicated himself and his associates from the belief that they were men of low birth and mean employments, to whom such toil was habitual ; but that they were " gentlemen of name and blood." In his examination of the 8th of November, he says, " not any was employed in or about this action, no, not so much as in digging or mining, that was not a gentleman. And while the others wrought, I stood a sentinel to descry any man that came near; and when any man came near to the place, upon warning given by me, they ceased until they had again notice from me to proceed. All we seven lay in the house, and had shot and powder ; being resolved to die in that place before we should yield or be taken." Father Greenway expresses his surprise that men delicately nurtured should, in a short space of time, have accomplished far more rough work than men who had been bred to laborious occupation would have accomplished. They were enthusiasts. They had little sense of fatigue, in the confidence that they were engaged in a holy work to which they were called by the immediate voice of heaven. Whether they were driven on their desperate course by those who claimed to be interpreters ot the divine voice must remain to some extent a matter of doubt. They were all followers of the Jesuits. There were none of the conspirators who belonged to the more loyal body of Catholics who were guided by the secular priesthood. Tlie Jesuit missionaries were, at this period, hiding in the secret chambers of old manor-houses to avoid exjjulsion from the kingdom. But if these seven gentlemen who worked in the mine had been bound together in their atrocious jpurpose by those who ruled over their consciences, they were at least faithful to their secret advi sers. As they worked, they beguiled the time by discoursing about what should be their first proceeding when they had acconv «62 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.' plished the sweeping destruction of all the estates of the realm. They were to carry off prince Charles, and his sister Elizabeth, prince Henry having perished with the king. They were then to proclaim the heir-apparent, and appoint a Protector of the kingdom, during the minority of the sovereign. They were to ask help of foreign princes, when "the business was acted." What next they were to do with a state so "out of joint," was not manifest. They were sometimes beset with superstitious fears. They heard a sound from the middle of the wall, as of a tinkling bell. It was an unearthly sound, and was heard no more when holy water had been sprinkled again and again. They did not resume their labours till February, 1605, having learnt that parliament was to be again pro rogued. But now their plan of operations was changed. They had " wrought also another fortnight in the mine against the stone wall, which was very hard to beat through," when they heard a rushing noise above their heads. Fawkes, always foremost in any danger, went to ascertain the cause, in his usual disguise of a porter's frock. He found that above the spot where they had been mining was a cellar in the occupation of a coa'.-dealer, and that he was moving his coals, being about to give up possession. That cellar was immediately under the parliament chamber. They seized upon the opportunity. The cellar was hired, and was quickly filled with barrels of gunpowder, covered over with fagots and billets. In May all their stores were carried in, and, locking the cellar, they departed from London. Fawkes went to Flanders to see if any foreign plotting looked promising. Catesby employed the summer in raising a troop of horse, for service in Flanders, as a part of an English regiment levied by the Spanish ambassador. This troop was officered by Catesby's immediate friends. The conspiracy widened by the introduction to its secrets of sir Everard Digby, Ambrose Rookwood, and Francis Tresham. Digby was only twenty-four years of age, and was evidently a weak tool of the Jesuits, whom he secreted in his house. " He cordially joined in the project from religious zeal, as soon as he satisfied himself that the action had been approved by his spiritual advisers." * Rook wood was also a young man, who had been repeatedly prosecuted for harbouring priests in his house. He had scruples about joining in so extensive a scheme of slaughter, saying, " it was a matter of conscience to take away so much blood ; " but Catesby silenced him by saying "it had been resolved on good authority that in con- * Mr. Jardine refers to Digby's letters, published in 1678, as evidence of this. THE CONSPIRATORS IN ARMS. 263 science it might be done. Tresham and Catesby were cousins. Tresham had taken a prominent part in the Essex conspiracy ; and he very narrowly escaped arraignment and execution ; for it was he who kept guard over the Lord Keeper in Essex House, and told him that having stayed two years for a motion in Chancery, he hoped his lordship would now be at leisure to hear him. We have seen how Tresham was suspected to have been the author of the letter to lord Mounteagle ; and it appears that Catesby had great misgivings of the success of his scheme from the time that Tresham became possessed of its perilous secret. We now resume our narrative from the point at which we left the bewildered conspirators at Dunchurch, after the seizure of Fawkes. The timid adherents to some vague plan of revolt having departed, and left the bolder spirits to their own resolyes, these daring confederates determined at once to march with their armed retainers, in the hope to excite a general insurrection of Roman Catholics in the midland counties, and in Wales. They set out from Dunchurch at ten o'clock on that same night of the 5th, hav ing despatched a letter to the Jesuit Garnet, who was in the neigh bourhood with sir Everard Digby's family. They marched through Warwick, where they helped themselves to horses, on to Alcester; and having seized some armour at lord Windsor's, on Wednesday night they had reached Holbeach, the house of Stejjhen Littleton, one of their friends. Their numbers were gradually diminished by desertion. Not one man joined them. The Roman Catholic party saw that the odious enterprise would long retard any hope of toler ation from the government. The conspirators were pursued by- the sheriff of Worcestershire with his posse comitatus. Digby fled from them at Holbeach, and was seized at Dudley; for the hue and cry had gone through the country. Those who remained at Hol beach prepared to defend the house against assault. An accidental ¦ circumstance filled them with terrible forebodings — a circumstance which Coke cleverly alluded to, ujjon the trial of Fawkes and others, as an exemplification of the principle that there is no law more just than that the wicked should perish by thei»- own acts : — "Observe," he said, " a miraculous accident which befel in Stephen Littleton's house called Holbeach, in Staffordshire, after these traitors had been two days in open rebellion, immediately before their apprehension ; for some of them standing by the fire-side, and having set two pounds and a half of powder to dry in a platter before the fire, and underset the said platter with a great linen bag 264 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. full of other powder, containing some fifteen or sixteen pounds, it so fell out, that one coming to put more wood into the fire, and casting it on, there flew a coal into the platter, by reason whereof the powder taking fire and blowing up, scorched those who were nearest, as Catesby, Grant, and Rookwood, and blew up the roof of the house ; and the linen bag, which was set under the platter, being therewith suddenly carried out through the breach, fell down in the court-yard whole and unfired, which if it had taken fire in the room, would have slain them all there, so that they never should have come to this trial; and Lex justior nulla est, quam necis artifices arte perire sua." * This explosion of gunpowder was re garded even by the boldest of these men as a token that God was against them. But the next day when the sheriff arrived and sum moned them to surrender, the few who remained determined upon resistance. Thomas Winter was not jjresent when the gunpowder exploded. Stephen Littleton then fled, having asked Winter to fly with him ; but Winter, who supposed that Catesby was killed by the accident, said he would see the body of his friend, and bury him before he left. Winter tells the remainder of the story with expressive brevity: " When I came I found Mr. Catesby reasona ble well, Mr. Percy, both the Wrights, Mr. Rookwood, and Mr. Grant. I asked them 'what they resolved to do.'- They answered,- ' we mean here to die,' I said again, ' I would take such part as they did.' About eleven of the clock came the company to beset the house, and, as I walked into the court, I was shot into the shoulder, which lost me the use of my arm ; the next shot was the elder Wright struck dead ; after him the younger Mr. Wright ; and fourthly, Ambrose Rookwood. Then said Mr. Catesby to me (standing before the door they were to enter), ' stand by me, Tom, and we will die together.' ' Sir,' quoth I, ' I have lost the use of my right arm, and I fear that will cause me to be taken.' So, as we stood close together, Mr. Catesby, Mr. Percy, and myself, they two were shot, as far as I could guess, with one bullet, and then the company entered upon me, hurt me in the belly with a pike, and gave me other wounds, until one came behind, and caught hold of my both arms." Previous to the trial of the principal conspirators who remained alive, there had been twenty-three days occupied in various examina tions ; during which the general progress of the conspiracy had been slowly extracted from the confessions of the prisoners. •"Criminal Trials," vol. ii. p. 135. SOME KILLED; OTHERS TAKEN PRISONERS. 265 Tresham, who is supposed to have been instrumental in discover ing the plot to the government, was not arrested till the 12th of November, although Fawkes had distinctly mentioned him as one concerned. He died in the Tower -before the trial. In postponing the trial, it was the great object of the government to obtain evi dence that would inculpate the Jesuit missionaries. All the con spirators, with the excejation of Thomas Bates, a servant of Catesby, persisted in denying the privity of the Jesuits to the enterprise. The alarm which was felt at the revelation of a treason which con templated such awful consequences was universal ; and thus we may understand how Ben Jonson, a person who, although a writer of masques for the court, was of a sturdy and independent charac ter, appears to have lent himself to the government, in what we may regard as the odious function of a spy. There is a letter in the State Paper Office, bearing date the 8th of November, addressed by the poet to Salisbury, in which he says, " There hath been no want in me, either of labour or sincerity, in- the discharge of this ¦ business, to the satisfaction of your lordship, or the State." Upon the first mention of it the day before, he had consulted the chaplain of the Venetian ambassador, who, he says, " not only apprehended it well, but was of mind with me, that no man of conscience, or any indifferent lover of his country, would deny to do it. " The chajslain had recommended a fitting person to assist in the " business," but he could not be found. Jonson had made attempts in other places, but could speak with no one in person, " all being either removed or so concealed ujjon the present mischief." In the " second means " which he had employed, he had " received answers of doubt and difficulties, that they will make it a question to the Archpriest, with other soch like suspensions." The dramatist was himself at this time a Roman Catholic* Not believing him to have been al together in the position of a vile, informer and betrayer, we are in clined to think he was doing what other Roman Catholics were doing — assisting in the discovery of a conspiracy which the greater number of their persuasion repudiated. There was a broad line of separation between the disciples of the Jesuits and the majority of Catholics, who lived under the more quiet guidance of the ordinary priests.. Jonson was clearly endeavouring to get at some secrets which would remove from the great body of the Catholics the odium * In his Conversations with Drummond, he says that when he was imprisoned for kill ing his adversary in a duel, (which was in 1598) " then took he his religion by trust of a friend who. visited him in prison. Thereafter he was 12 years a papist. Drummond's Notes, published by Shakspeare Society, p. 19. 266 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. which attached to the supposed movers of this conspiracy. " For myself," he says, " if I had been a priest, I would have put on wings to such an occasion, and have thought it no adventure, where I might have done (besides his majesty and my country) all Chris tianity so good service." The plot was offensive to him, as it was to many others of the Romish Church, upon religious and political grounds. It was opposed to every feeling of justice and humanity. When Jonson says, " I think they are all so enweaved in it, as it will make five hundred gentlemen less of the religion within this week, if they carry their understanding about them," we hold him to mean that those Catholics who exercised their understanding would turn from a religion whose priest-led fanatics were ready to commit such an abominable crime.* We take the poet's case to be an illustration of a very general tone of feeling amongst the moder ate Papists ; who, whatever might be their grievances, did not see their way to redress in casting aside all love of country, and all re gard for religion, by being neutral and indifferent at a time when such a fearful mystery was suddenly brought to light. The trial of Robert and Thomas Winter, Guido Fawkes, John Grant, Ambrose Rookwood, Robert Keyes, and Thomas Bates, took place in Westminster Hall, on the 27th of January, 1606, be fore a Special Commission. They all pleaded, "not guilty," al though each of them had been brought to acknowledge the chief facts -set forth in the indictment. Fawkes was asked by the Lord Chief Justice how he could deny the indictment, having been actu ally taken in the cellar with the powder. The report of the trial makes him say, that he had done so, because there were certain conferences mentioned in the indictment which he knew not of. Eudasmon Jones, who published an Apology for Garnet, the Jesuit, declares that what Fawkes said went much further : that he stated that " none of them meant to deny that which they had not only volun tarily confessed before, but which was quite notorious throughout the realm. But this indictment," he added, " contains many other matters, which we neither can nor ought to countenance by our assent or silence. It is true that all of us were actors in this plot, but it is false that the holy fathers had any part in it. We never conferred with them about the matter." f In the indictment, Henry * The letter from Jonson is noticed in Mrs. Green's " Calendar of State Papers ; " and in a review of that book, in the " Athenajum " of August 15th, 1857, the docum.nt is given in full. t See Jardine's "Criminal Trials," vol. ii. p. 120. Mr. Jardine was the first to pub lish any satisfactory report of this trial, and of that of Garnet, by giving the erigirtal evi- TRIAL OF FAWKES AND OTHERS. 267 Garnet, clerk, of the profession of Jesuits, otherwise called Henry Walley; Oswald Tesmond, otherwise called Oswald Greenway and Oswald Fermour, of the aforesaid profession ; and John Gerrard, otherwise called John Brooke, also of the same profession, are in cluded as principals with other conspirators. A proclamation was issued for their apprehension ou the 15th of January. Tesmond, more commonly mentioned as Greenway, and Gerrard, escaped be yond sea. It is unnecessary for us to dwell upon the trial of Fawkes and the others. They were necessarily condemned, and sentenced to the penalties of treason. Sir Everard Digby was tried and found guilty at Northampton. They were ajl executed on the Thursday and Friday following the 27th of January. There ap pears very sufficient evidence that some of the prisoners believed to the last that their project was not a sinful one. Sir Everard Digby wrote to his wife, " If I had thought there had been the least sin in it, I would not have been of it for all the world, and no other cause drew me to hazard my fortune and life, but zeal for God's religion." Such was the fanaticism of Digby, a man of no great force of character, but amiable, and just in his domestic relations. When we look at the unswerving fidelity of these men to each other ; their undoubted confidence of success ; their utter blindness to the awful consequences of their scheme, — we can scarcely doubt that they were all working together under a strong delusion, gradually taking a firm hold upon their minds through some external influence of the most powerful nature. Grant is re ported to have said on the day of his execution, "I rely entirely upon my merits in bearing a part of that noble action, as an abun dant satisfaction and expiation for all sins committed by me during the rest of my life." But Digby, who at first thought there was not the least sin in that action, adds in his letter to his wife, " But when I heard that Catholics and priests thought it should be a great sin that should be the cause of my end, it called my conscience in doubt of my very best actions and intentions." The great body of Roman Catholics, we may well believe, were free from such a hor rible delusion. The trial of Henry Garnet, the superior of the Jesuits in England, which we shall now have briefly to notice, does not quite settle the question of the complicity of " the holy fathers ; " but it leaves very little doubt of the principles upon which they acted, dence as far as it could be ascertained . We regret that in his excellent " Narrative of th» Gunpowder Plot," these reports are not^iven. 268 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Henry Garnet, an Englishman, educated at Winchester, became a member of the Society of Jesus, in 1575. In 1586 he was ap pointed to the mission of the Society in England ; and in 1 588 he became Superior of the Jesuits here. An acconrplisbed scholar, of mild demeanour and gentle nature, he exercised great influence amongst the most devoted adherents to the ancient faith. In Sep tember, 1605, a remarkable pilgrimage, under the conduct of Garnet, was undertaken by a party of Roman Catholics to St. Winifred's Well, in Flintshire. Anne Vaux, the daughter of lord Vaux, was amongst the most devoted followers of the fascinating Jesuit ; and she, with the wife of sir Everard Digby, the wife of Ambrose Rookwood, and other ladies, walked barefoot on a part of the road to the holy fountain. Rookwood himself was amongst the pil grims ; and in their long progress from Digby's house in Bucking hamshire, they rested at the houses of John Grant and Robert Winter. The time of the pilgrimage, the persons associated in it, and its suggestion by Garnet, render it difficult to believe that the smooth Jesuit would not have found many an opportunity during this fortnight's adventure, to suggest the holiest precepts of the duty of hazarding life and fortune " for God's cause." On the 29th of October, Garnet moved with lady Digby and her family, to sir Everard's house at Coughton, near the place of general rendezvous appointed for the 5th of November. Here he received the letter from Digby and Catesby announcing the failure of the great busi ness. In December he was conducted by Oldcorne, otherwise Hall, a Jesuit, to Hendlip House, near Worcester. Here he re mained concealed before and after the proclamation against him. On the 20th of January, 1606, sir Henry Bromley, a magistrate, ar rived at Hendlip House, with a commission to search the mansion. That house was full of secret apartments, which had been con structed by Thomas Abington, a devoted recusant. There were staircases concealed in the walls; hiding places in chimneys ; trap doors ; double wainscots. On th? fourth day after the arrival of the magistrate, two men were forced from their concealment by hunger and cold. They were the servants of the two priests. On the eighth day an opening had been found to the cell where Garnet and Old corne were hidden. They had been fed through a reed with broths and warm drinks ; the reed being inserted in an aperture in a chim ney of a gentlewoman's chamber, that backed another chimney of their secret room. Garnet after being taken was kindly used. He was examined before the Privy Council on the 13th of February GARNET THE JESUIT. 269 and the examination was often repeated. But no blandishments and no threats could induce him to confess his participation in the plot. He was not subjected to torture, although his unfortunate companion, Oldcorne, and the two servants, ajppear to have been cruelly treated. One of these, Owen, died by his own hand in the dread of a second infliction of the accursed instruments which law yers and statesmen were not ashamed to employ in their blind zeal for the discovery of treason. Evidence of some kind against Gar net was at last obtained, by a pretended kindness of his keeper, who told him that by opening a concealed door in his cell he might confer with his fellow-prisoner, Oldcorne . Two persons were so placed that they could hear the greater part of whatever words were exchanged. There were several of these conferences be tween the two Jesuits ; and their conversations were taken down, and submitted to the Council. The facts which they revealed cer tainly indicated that Garnet had a knowledge of the general scope of the plot ; and that in these conferences he made no attempt to deny the truth of the accusation that he had such knowledge. When pressed upon these points he boldly asserted that he had never had any speech or conference with his fellow-prisoner. Old corne had admitted the fact ; and Garnet at length acknowledged it, justifying his jprevious untruth upon the principle that no man was bound to criminate himself until the charge against him was otherwise proved. He at length acknowledged that the design of blowing up the house of Parliament on the first day of the Session had been revealed to him by Greenway, who had received it in confession from Catesby and Wright. He maintained, however, that he had endeavoured to turn Catesby from, his purpose. The trial of Garnet took place on the 28th of March. He defended himself with ability and courage ; in which, though acknowledging " that he had done more than he could excuse by law in having concealed his privity to the design," he maintained "that he had acted upon a conscientious persuasion that he was bound to dis close nothing that he heard in sacramental confession." He was found guilty, and received the usual sentence for treason. After his condemnation his examinations were renewed. He was con demned on the 28th of March, and was not executed till the 3rd of May. Oldcorne had been tried at Worcester, and was executed on the 7th of April. Dr. Lingard is of opinion that Garnet's de fence had made a favourable impression on the mind of the king; and that his avowals on the subject of Equivocation, after his trial. 270 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. fed to his execution. His general princijjles had been thus ex pressed in apajDer written before his trial : " Concerning equivoca tion, this is my opinion ; in moral affairs, and in the common inter course of life, when the truth is asked amongst friends, it is not lawful to use equivocation, for that would cause great mischief in society — wherefore in such cases there is no place for equivocation. But in cases where it becomes necessary to an individual for his defence, or for avoiding any injustice or loss, or for obtaining any important advantage, without danger or mischief to any other per son, there equivocation is lawful." In an examination after the trial he goes further, and holds that an oath might be lawfully used to confirm a ''simple equivocation : " This, I acknowledge to be, according to my opinion, and the opinion of the schoolmen : and our reason is, for that in cases of lawful equivocation, the speech by equivocation being saved from a lie, the same speech may be without perjury confirmed by oath, or by any other usual way, though it were by receiving the sacrament, if just necessity so re quire." Dr. Lingard, with a candour very different from some apol ogies for Garnet and his doctrines which were put forth in past times, says, " The man who maintained such opinions could not reasonably complain, if the king refused credit to his asseverations of innocence, and permitted the law to take its course." Garnet's opinions were not shared by the majority of the Roman Catholics even in his own day ; any more than the same body in general ap proved of the murderous project in which Catesby and his asso ciates were involved. During the struggles between the two Churches in the seventeenth century, the Gunpowder Treason was the standing argument for denying liberty of conscience to our Roman Catholic fellow-subjects. Its traditions lingered through the eighteenth century, to support the same oppression in a miti gated form. They now scarcely survive even in popular prejudice ; for, combined with the spread of knowledge has grown up a spirit of charity and justice, in the prevalence of which the State having ceased to persecute or to exclude for religious opinions, has nothing to fear from the fanatic or the casuist. PARLIAMENT OF 1606. 2JI CHAPTER XV. Parliament of 1606. — Statutes against Papists. — Game Laws. — Manners of the Court. — Lavishness of James upon his favourites. — Feudal aid. — Impositions upon merchan dise. — First Settlement in Virginia. — Progress of the Colony. — Settlement of the Pilgrim Fathers in Massachusetts. —Charter of the East India Company, — First Fac tory at Surat. — The Mogul Rulers of Hindostan. — Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe. — Dissolution of the Parliament. — Murder of Henry IV. of France. — Authorised translation of the Bible; — Ireland. — Plantation of Ulster. — Creation of Baronets. — The New River. — Increase of London. The parliament which was to have met on the 5th of November, 1605, was necessarily prorogued to a later period. It assembled on the 21st of January, 1606. It was scarcely to be expected that the discovery of a conspiracy so atrocious as that of the Gunpowder project should have induced a parliament, becoming more and more puritan, to deal with the papists in a spirit of toleration. To the previous severities of the penal code were added various penalties which touched convicted recusants in their domestic and private relations. All Roman Catholics who had been convicted of recu sancy, and all who had not received the sacrament twice in twelve months in a Protestant church, were^also required to take an oath of allegiance. In this oath the pretended power of the pope to absolve subjects from their obedience was to be expressly re nounced ; and the Roman Catholic was further to swear that he, from his heart, abhorred, detested, and abjured, as impious and heretical, " the damnable doctrine and position that princes ex communicated or deprived by the pope may he deposed, or mur dered by their subjects." Looking at the history of the country from the time of the Reformation, it can scarcely be maintained that such an oath was unreasonable. The secular priests in Eng land recommended their brethren so to declare their allegiance. The papal court issued a. breve to forbid such a renunciation of the deposing power. Cardinal Bellarmine wrote a book to. prove the unlawfulness of the oath. King James, never more happy than When engaged in a theological controversy, published An Apologie -for the Oath of Allegiance ; " by which," says Mr. Hallam, " he 272 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. incurred the contempt of foreign courts, and of all judicious men." In spite of the threatenings of the pope and the sophistries of the cardinal, many of the Catholic clergy, and all the Catholic peers with one exception, accepted this test of their obedience to the civil government. In this Session an Act was passed " against unlawful hunting and stealing of deer and conies ; " which states that, through the insufficiency of previous statutes, "many riots,- manslaughters, mischiefs, and other inconveniences have been daily committed, and are like to be committed, if circumspect remedy be not here unto provided." * There was to be fine or imprisonment for those who took or chased game in any grounds without the consent of the owner; and, what must have been a frequent cause of riots and manslaughters, qualified persons, having lands of the clear annual value of 100/., were empowered to seize all guns and sporting implements from unqualified persons, the qualifi cation being as high as 40/. a-year. Evils enough have resulted from a harsh administration of the game-laws in our own times ; but such a distinction as this law of James made between the great proprietor and the substantial yeoman must have been as odious as it was impracticable. England had now got a sporting king, who told his ministers, when they implored him on their knees to attend to the public business, that his health was the health and welfare of all, and that he never would forego his exercise and relaxation. His brother-in-law, Christian IV., king of Denmark, came over to England in July, 1606 ; and James, having received a liberal subsidy from the parliament, indulged in every species of disgusting excess, in which the royal example was so encouraging, that, writes Harrington, "the ladies abandon their sobriety, and are seen to roll about in intoxication." t He adds, " I will now, in good sooth, declare to you, who will not blab, that the gunpowder fright is got out of all our heads, and we are going on hereabouts, as if the devil was contriving every man should blow himself up by wild riot, excess, and devastation of time and tem perance." The next session an Act was passed " for repressing the odious vice of drunkenness;" which vice it describes as "the overthrow of many good arts and manual trades, the disabling of divers workmen, and the general imvjoverishing of many good sub jects." % The Statute was directed against the sins of the humble. James and his profligate court had to bear a severer penalty than * 3 Jac. I. c. 13. f " Nuga; Antiquae," vol. i, p. 349. J 4 Jac. I- c. 5. MANNERS OF THE COURT. 273 the fine of five shillings to be levied on a convicted drunkard. They had to bearthe open exhibition of their follies on the public stage ; and the growing contempt of the great body of English gentlemen, such as Harrington, who writes : " I have passed much time in see ing the royal sports of hunting and hawking, where the manners were such as made me devise the beasts were pursuing the sober creation, and not the man in quest of exercise or food." Such were the royal sports of Theobalds, where Salisbury was entertaining the two kings ; and where king James, according to another au thority, got so drunk with king Christian, that his Britannic majesty was obliged to be carried to bed. Salisbury, in another year or two, had made a provident exchange with the king, of Theobalds for Hatfield ; and Theobalds became the favourite residence of James, where he dissipated his hereditary revenues, aided by occa sional taxation ; keeping sometimes a decent state with his family, but more frequently listening to the ribaldry of unworthy favour ites, beating his servants, and swearing and cursing habitually, in spite of the statute under which common people could not have that diversion without paying twelve pence to the relief of the poor.* Although king James was intensely devoted to his favourite sports, exhibiting himself in Waltham forest and in other Royal Chases, leading his dogs in a grass-green hunting suit, and blowing his hunting-horn with the lungs of a game-keeper, — although he was sometimes lying in bed the whole day, over- gorged with tne delicacies of the table, and filled with strong wine, — he found time for more intellectual pursuits ; and amongst other strange literary performances wrote his famous " Counter blast to Tobacco." He hated the tobacco-smokers as intensely as he'hated the Puritans ; but nevertheless both the tobacco-consumers and the Puritans went on increasing. His dislike of the Indian weed was probably diminished as he found that it brought a con siderable accession to his revenue ; for, in addition to his own in ordinate expenses, the sums which he bestowed upon his minions would appear incredible if their amount did not rest upon the most trustworthy authority. His early favourites were needy Scotsmen who had followed the court to England. His folly in this costly favouritism provoked the indignation of the House of Commons, and was one of the main causes that his laudable anxiety for a per fect Union of the two kingdoms of England and Scotland was con- * 3 Jac. T. c. 21. Vol. III.— 18 274 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. stantly defeated. In 1607, James delivered a speech tp the parlia ment for hastening the Union— sensible in many points — in which he made a sort of apology for these preferences : — " For my liber ality, I have told you of it heretofore. My three first years were to them [the Scots] as a Christmas. I could not then be miserable. Should I have been oversparing to them, they might have thought Joseph had forgotten his brethren; or that the king had been drunk with his new kingdom." * But he also said, " There is none left for whom I mean extraordinary to strain myself." How well he kept hh word may be inferred from the riches which were ob tained and lavished by sir James Hay, who was afterwards created earl of Carlisle. He was called the Scottish Heliogabalus : and first won the king's favour by giving him "a most strange and costly feast." Clarendon, who was not likely to speak with ex aggeration in such a case, has left this character of Hay : — " He was surely a man of the greatest exjDense in his own person of any in the age he lived ; and introduced more of that expense in the excess of clothes and diet than any other man ; and was indeed the original of all those inventions from which others did but tran scribe copies. He had a great universal understanding, and could have taken as much delight in any other way, if he had thought any other as pleasant and worth his care. But he found busi ness was attended with more rivals and vexations ; and, he thought, with much less pleasure, and not more innocence. He left behind him the reputation of a very fine gentleman, and a most accomplished courtier; and, after having spent in a very jovial life about four hundred thousand pounds, which upon a strict compu tation he received from the crown, he left not a house nor acre of land to be remembered by.''t Robert Carr, afterwards earl of Somerset, was another of the brothers of Joseph whom Joseph did not forget. Osborn tells a curious story of the ignorant lav ishness of James. He had given Carr an order upon the Lord High Treasurer for twenty thousand pounds ; but the Treasurer apprehended " that the king was as ignorant of the worth of what was demanded as of the desert of the person who had begged it ; " and knew, " that a pound, upon the Scottish accompt, would not pay for the shoeing of a horse, by which his master might be far ther led out of the way of thrift than in his nature he was willing to go." The wise Cecil, according to this story, placed the twenty * Cobbett's " Parliamentary History," vol. i. p. 1104. t " History of the Rebellion," book i. FEUDAL AID. 275 thousand pounds in specie upon the floor of a room to which the king was coming. " Whose money is this ? " said James. " It was your majesty's before you gave it away." The kin°- threw himself upon the heap, and swore that Carr should have no more than a few hundred pounds. The prodigality of the king was carried to such an extent that the government was precipitated into dangerous courses to find the means of its gratification. According to the practice of the Plantagenets, an aid was asked of the subject when the king's eldest son was knighted. James levied this tax when prince Henry was created prince of Wales in 1610.. The prince was justly pop ular ; but this tax was paid with great repinings. A custom which belonged to the feudal organisation of society was revolting to those who lived under a very different political and social condition. But a more strenuous resistance was made to the imposition of heavy duties on all merchandise, not by authority of parliament but under the great seal. In the House of Commons the illegality of such impositions was argued with a thorough constitutional knowledge. The king, with his wonted arrogance, commanded the Commons not to enter upon a question which so touched his prerogative. They presented a strong remonstrance, of which the nervous language proclaimed, with a warning voice, that the liber ties of England were not to be thus invaded: "The policy and constitution of this your kingdom appropriates unto the kings of this realm, with the assent of the parliament, as well the sovereign power of making laws, as that of taxing, or imposing upon the subjects' goods or merchandises, as may not, without their consent be altered or changed. This is the cause that the people of this kingdom, as they ever showed themselves faithful and loving to their kings, and ready to aid them in all their just occasions with voluntary contributions, so have they been ever careful to preserve their own liberties and rights when anything hath been done to prejudice or impeach the same. And therefore, when their princes occasioned either by their wars or their over-great bounty, or by any other necessity, have without consent of parliament set impo sitions, either within the land, or upon commodities either exported or imported by the merchants, they have, in open parliament, com plained of it, in that it was done without their consents ; and there upon never failed to obtain a speedy and full redress, without any claim made by the kings of any power or prerogative in that point." * The commerce of the country had become an important * Quoted by Mr. Hallam from Somers* Tracts. 276 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. source of its wealth ; and if the king could tax merchandise without the consent of parliament, the one great restraint upon despotic power would soon be swept away. At this period there were two events connected with commerce far more important to the England of the future than in their immediate consequences, which require- especial notice, — the colonisation of North America, and the Char ter to the East India Company. The attempts to colonise North America in the time of Eliza beth had been failures, — not from any want of energy or of fore thought in the originators and conductors of these great schemes, but as a necessary consequence of the difficulties that must always beset the first settlers in an unknown region. The long voyage by the West Indies and through the Gulf of Florida in vessels of small burthen was then attended with real dangers, of which mod ern navigation has no conception. The adventurers were gener ally men unaccustomed to labour, and they went to lands where they believed that the fruits of the earth would merely require gathering, as in the golden age, to find that starvation could only be averted by the most incessant toil. Roanoak, the island which Grenville planted under the auspices of Raleigh, had been de serted in 1590; and whether the few colonists had perished, or h id been received amongst the friendly Indian tribes, was always uncertain, although Raleigh had never lost hope of discovering them, whilst he could reward any mariners for the search. He had spent, it is said, forty thousand pounds in his noble efforts to plant an English colony on the northern coasts of the new world. He was a state-prisoner; he was defrauded of his property by his rapacious sovereign ; he was filling his declining years with high contemplation instead of heroic action. But the example of his perseverance survived his misfortunes. The colonisation of Norlh America was still the hope of generous statesmen and bold mari ners. Voyage after voyage was undertaken. Bartholomew Gos- nold, having been the first to cross the Atlantic by a direct course in 1602, discovered the promontory to which he gave no dignified name, Cape Cod; and he laid the foundation of the first New Eng land colony on Elizabeth island. Martin Pring, in 1603, surveyed the coast of Maine. George Weymouth, in 1605, ascended the western branch of the Penobscot. The undying spirit of enter prise which Raleigh had first fostered received at length some en couragement from the government. In 1606, James granted the first Charters for colonising North America, to a London Com- PROGRESS OF THE COLONY. 277 pany, and to a Plymouth Company. That same year, the London or South Virginia Conrpany sent out three ships, with one hundred and five men who were to remain as settlers. The sagacity of Raleigh had pointed out the Chesapeake Bay as a favourable place cf settlement. A storm drove these adventurers into that mag nificent anchorage. The two headlands were named Cape Henry and Cape Charles ; and having ascended a fine river which they named after their king, they planted their colony in a pleasant spot, and called it James Town. Newport, the commander of the ships, and James Smith, a man whose name will be. ever associated with the colonisation of America, ascended the James river, and saw the Indian chieftain, Powhatan. The savages were hostile to the strangers : " the em peror of the country," as Powhatan was- styled, protected them. 'But gradually the colonists, unused to manual labour, perished of want and disease. Newport left for England. Some of the lead ers had serious contentions. The evil destiny of Roanoak seemed to be coming on James Town. But Smith, who was endowed with many of the high qualities of the Elizabethan age, rallied the hopes of the disjDirited, and calmed the jealousies of the quarrel some. In the winter of 1607 the colonists had secured a supply • of food in the abundance of game, and had provided some shelter against the rain and cold. Smith set off upon an expedition to ex plore the interior. His companions were surprised and butchered by the Indians. He would have perished with them, had not the savages conceived that he was a superior being when he showed them a pocket compass, and told how the wondrous needle always pointed to one quarter. He asked that a letter should be conveyed to James Town ; and when it was known that he could so endue a 'piece of paper with intelligence as to speak to his distant compan ions from his captivity, he was beheld with superstitious awe. Amongst the tribes was the daughter of Powhatan, named Poca hontas. This maiden saved the life of the Englishman, who had gained her confidence. She hung upon his neck when the toma hawk was raised to destroy him ; and she induced her father to re ceive him in a strict friendship. When Smith returned to his col ony, the hundred and five settlers were reduced to forty. Some of these attempted to desert in the pinnace which had been left when Newport sailed to England. The fortitude of Smith never failed. He restored order, and again went forth in the summer of L608 for new discoveries. In an open boat, with two or three com- 278 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. panions, he navigated three thousand miles of the American coasts and rivers. He constructed a map of the country, which is still in existence. He explored the Patapsco and the Potamac. He es tablished a communication with native tribes. He saw the Mo hawks, " who dwelt upon a great water, and had many boats ani many men." On his return a second body of emigrants came to join the Virginian colony. The London Company required that the ship which brought them should return with gold, or laden with commodities. The settlers had accomplished no accumulations. It had been difficult to preserve their own existence. The Com pany, with the same ignorance of colonial organisation which pre vailed for two centuries, had thought that the unskilled and the idle, who would starve at home, might prosper in another hemi sphere. Smith wrote to the corporation that when they sent again, they should rather send but thirty carpenters, husbandmen, gar deners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and even diggers up of the roots of trees, than a thousand such as had last come out. But still the energy of the man triumphed. He taught the gentlemen the use of the axe and the spade ; and industry slowly achieved its rewards. A new Charter was granted in 1609. The rage for emigration extended. Other ships arrived, with men of broken fortunes and dissolute gallants. Smith still maintained his author ity over the useless members of the community. But he was dis abled by an accident, and he returned impoverished and enfeebled to England. When he left, there were four hundred and ninety persons in the colony. In six months they were reduced by their idleness and their excesses to sixty. The settlement was about to be abandoned when, in 1 610, a new body of emigrants arrived un der the leadership of lord Delaware, who had been apj ointed gov ernor of Virginia. There was again a glimmering of prosperity;- but ill-health compelled the return of the wise governor to Eng land. In 161 1 the Council at home exerted itself to prevent the great scheme of American colonisation from utterly failing; and six ships, with three hundred emigrants and abundant supplies, arrived at James Town, under sir Thomas Gates. A distribution of land to each emigrant as his private property gave a new stimu lus to industry. The colony prospered. Indian tribes submitted to the settlers. Pocahontas, the beautiful girl who had saved the life of Smith, was married to John Rolfe, a young Englishman. After four years the Indian wife and mother sailed with her hus band to England ; and there she died. It was not in the natural SETTLEMENT OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 279 course of God's Providence that there should be many such unions. The savage man gradually melted aWay as the civilised man occupied his forests, and in a few years the race of Powhatan was extinct. The Virginian colony went on to prosper. Its mem bers found more certain riches than mines of gold in the cultiva tion of tobacco. Their prosperity was confirmed by their free in stitutions. In 1621 they obtained a representative constitution, in which the object of government was declared to be "the greatest comfort and benefit to the people, and the prevention of injustice, grievances, and oppression." Such were the vicissitudes which attended the first settlement of the Anglo-Saxon race on the North American continent. There was another colony formed fourteen years later, whose planters went to their task in a solemn spirit, which recognised the finger of God jxiinting the way to a pleasant land where they might enjoy liberty of conscience, and be free from the persecution of the great and the ridicule of the licentious. The congregation of separatists from the Church of England, who, with their pastor John Robin son, had become exiles in Holland in 1608, had thought much of the settlements in North America. They desired to live under the English government, if they could be secure of toleration in the strange land which they desired to colonise. They could obtain no such promise from the government; but they were resolved upon their enterprise. They had obtained a patent from the Lon don Company, and they obtained funds, on very hard terms, from London merchants. They purchased the Speedwell, a vessel of forty tons : and hired the Mayflower, of a hundred and eighty tons. On the 22nd of July, 1620, having left some of the brethren at Leyden, they embarked at Delft-Haven. Robinson, their pas tor, did not accompany them ; but he knelt on the shore as the emigrants ascended the decks of the Mayflower, and gave them his blessings and his prayers. This event, so insignificant as it must have seemed at the time, so all-important in the real history of England, now forms the subject of a fresco in the House of Lords. The Pilgrim Fathers, as they are now affectionately called, reached, after a long and stormy voyage, the northern shores of Virginia in November. Their political constitution was a simple one. Forty-one men, whose families amounted to sixty more per sons, formed themselves by deed into a civil body politic, for their better ordering and preservation ; and agreed " to enact, consti tute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, consti- 28o HISTORY OF ENGLAND. tutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most convenient for the general good of the colony." On the nth of December, an exploring party landed in Massachusetts Bay, at a spot which they afterwards determined to call Plymouth. "A grateful posterity has marked the rock which first received their footsteps. The consequences of that day are constantly unfolding themselves as time advances. It was the origin of New England; it was the planting of the New England institutions."* On the last day of the sixteenth century a Charter was granted by queen Elizabeth to a body of adventurers, styled " The Governor and Company of merchants of London trading to the East Indies." This charter was limited, in its exclusive liberty of trading, to the term of fifteen years ; and was to be renewed if the privileges so granted were not found " prejudicial or hurtful to this our realm." A direct commercial intercourse with India had been previously carried on by the Turkey Company ; but the maritime trade had been in the possession, first of the Portuguese, and afterwards of the Dutch. The English could not compete with these rivals, whilst the merchandise in which they trafficked was burthened with the heavier cost of an overland route. The trade of England with the East Indies was henceforth to be carried on by sea. During the reign of Elizabeth the success of the new company was very doubtful. Their privileges were invaded by James at the beginning of his reign. But in 1609 their Charter was renewed without limi tation of time ; several voyages were attended with large profits ; and in 1612, the Englishman planted his foot in India, having obtained permission from the Great Mogul to establish a factory at Surat. But the prosperity of the Company was not generally held to be beneficial to the nation. Camden doubted " whether it be for the real advantage of the kingdom to have such a mass of money exported, and so many men lost yearly in the voyage." The loss of mariners by sickness and the perils of the sea was held to be the main cause of the decay of England's navigation. To the complaint of the heavy money jjavments for Indian produce it was answered that the country saved in the cost of spices alone, 70,000/. a year; and that we exported cloths to the annual value of 14,000/. The intercourse with India had its romantic aspects. The power, the magnificence, the unbounded wealth of the Mogul conquerors * Bancroft, " History of the United States," vol. i. p. 313, ed. 1839. In this brief outline of the first colonisation of North America, we have followed Mr. Bancroft's lucid narrative. THE FIRST ENGLISH FACTORY. 28 1 of Hindostan had long been familiar to the English mind. Thomas Coryat, whom Fuller described in the household of prince Henry, as " the courtiers' anvil to try their wits upon," began, in 1608, to satisfy " a very burning desire in him to survey and contemplate some of the choicest parts of this goodly fabric of the world." Having walked over many countries of Europe, and hung up in his parish church as a memorial the one pair of shoes in which he had trudged nine hundred miles, he began a longer march in 1612. He walked from Jerusalem to Agra, the seat of the Great Mogul, having occupied fifteen months in this trip. Being welcomed by the English merchants, he there rode proudly on an elephant, and was represented in his grandeur in his posthumous book. Having obtained an audience of Jehangir, who had succeeded the great Akbarinhis mighty sovereignty, the pedestrian, having a competent ¦ knowledge of the Persian and other oriental .languages, thus address ed the emperor : " Lord Protector of the world, all hail to you. I am a poor traveller and world-seer, which am come hither from a far country, namely England, which ancient historians thought to have been situated in the farthest bounds of the West, and which is the queen of all the. islands in the world. The cause of my coming hither is for four resjpects. First, to see the blessed face of your majesty, whose wonderful fame hath resounded over all Europe and the Mahometan countries. When I heard of the fame of your majesty;- 1 hastened hither with speed, and travelled very cheerfully to see your glorious court. Secondly, to see your majesty's elephants, which kind of beasts I have not seen in any other country. Thirdly, to see yourfamous river Ganges, which is the captain of all the rivers of the world. The fourth is this, to entreat your majesty that you would vouchsafe to grant me your gracious pass, that I may travel into the country of Tartaria, to visit the blessed sepulchre of the Lord of the Corners ; * whose fame by reason of his wars and victories is published over the whole world : perhajps he is not altogether so famous in his own country of Tartaria as in England." We give this part of the ora tion of the eccentric traveller to indicate the vague impression which then prevailed in England of the grandeur of the Mogul rulers of India, f "The Lord of the Corners " had become popu larly known by Marlowe's famous tragedy of " Tamburlaine.the * The Persian title of Tamerlane — Lord of the Corners of the world. t Coryat's " Commendations to his friends in England," dated from Agra, 1616, in " The Works of John Taylor, the Water-Poet," 1630, p. 81. 282 HISTORY OF ENGLAND, Great." The successors of the shepherd-king had achieved a more permanent conquest of Hindostan than the remorseless warrior, who, having destroyed Delhi, and carried the terror of his name to the Ganges, was content to recross the Indus in the same year in which he had set out upon his march over the Ghur mountains from Samarkand. In another century, his descendant, Baber, having lost his own inherited dominion, founded a new empire in India. The fourth of that dynasty sat upon the Mogul throne when James granted his charter to the East India Company. In 161 5 an English ambassador, sir Thomas Roe, was sent to the court of Agra ; and there he was resident till 1619, a favourite with the emperor Jehangir, moving about with the jovial ruler, partaking his pleasures and marvelling at the wealth that presented itself in so many tangible shapes, in the j^alaces where the disciples of Mohammed ruled as gods over the crouching tribes who lived under the Brahminical law. The ambassador of James came back, to tell the story which others had less authoritatively told, of the riches that industry might win in that region of gold and pearls, of silk and ivory. Any project for conquering that region would then have appeared as wild as the scheme of Tamerlane, to cut a channel to unite the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, " That men might quickly sail to India." * Sir Thomas Roe had looked upon Jehangir riding upon an ele phant in the streets of Agra, with a train of "twenty royal ele phants for his own ascending, so rich that in precious stones and furniture they braved the sun;" and had marvelled, when "his greatest elephants were brought up before him, some of which, being lord elephants, had their chains, bells, and furniture of gold and silver," how " they all bowed down before the king." He had beheld how the emperor's wives, "on their elephants, were carried like parakitoes half a mile behind him ; " and he had seen the closed palanquins of the female slaves, borne on men's shoulders, amidst crowds of mutes and eunuchs. He had been at the great huntings, where sport assumed the pomp of war— very different from the hunting-exercise of James at Royston and Theobalds. He had gazed at the vast cavalcades of armed horsemen, the long files of camels and mules, the thousands of servants, the " numbers numberless " of camp-followers, when the emperor went forth on a progress from one of the imperial cities. More than these ^>ar- * " Tamburlainfi," part ii. act v. s. 3. THE MOGUL RULERS OF HINDOSTAN. 283 baric splendours, he had looked upon the old gorgeous palaces of the earlier race of Pathan kings, of whose works it is said, " they built like giants, and finished like goldsmiths."* The palace and mosque of Akbar, near Agra ; the mosques and tombs of Delhi ; the public buildings in every city where the characteristics of Sar acenic and Hindoo architecture were often combined ; the tasteful groups of domes and minarets ; the ojpen colonnades, the lofty gateways, the terraces, — these were works of art rising up amidst the rich eastern vegetation, which would cause Whitehall and Non such, St. Paul's and the abbey of Westminster, the old wooden houses of Cheapside and the brick mansions of the Strand, to be remembered as comparatively mean and tasteless. But the con trast must have been almost painful to those who beheld the power and wealth of England represented by a paltry factory at Surat, for the quiet possession even of which her sailors had to fight with the Portuguese. The wildest dream could not have pic tured the palaces of the Moguls turned into English arsenals, and their polished marbles and flowered arabesques hidden beneath the whitewash characteristic of English taste, t By no prophetic power could it have been imagined by one who, at the beginning of the seventeenth century had looked upon the glories of the Tar taric emperors, that before the middle of the eighteenth century, the sovereignty which was to be carried forward under one mag nificent ruler to an unequalled height of splendour and prosperity, should then fall to pieces by its own weight, and that many princes of the divided empire should become tributaries to " a Convpany of Christian merchants of a remote island of the Northern sea." t Even if a jDartial conquest of the Mogul tyrant and the Hindoo slave had been thought possible by those who had seen how the Span iard had subdued and exterminated the descendants of the Incas, what enthusiast could have believed that, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the race of the humble settlers of Surat would have obtained a far wider dominion than the greatest of these Mo guls ; — that not only in their proudest seats, amidst the ruined palaces and the tieserted mosques of Shah Jehan and Aurungzebe, the native races would have been disciplined in the military arts of Europe, but that they would become the instrument's of bringing under one foreign dominion the Afghans and the Sikhs, the Raj poots, and the Mahrattas, who had shaken the foundations of the * Fergusson " Handbook of Architecture," vol. i. p. 444. t See Mr. Fergusson, book ix. c. 4. t Gibbon, chap. lxv. 284 , HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ancient empire. Who that then had seen how the victim of tyr- anny had his life trampled out when the despot nodded to his ele phant ; — how the rulers sat under golden canopies and were clothed with jewelled silks, because they had an unlimited command over the property of all the industrious, — could have anticipated that a stern justice and a confiding toleration would extinguish the old dominion of robbery and fraud, throughout a region twelve times more extensive than that which the lawgivers inhabited, and six times more populous ? If such a dream could have shown how the energy of our race might triumph over disunited barbarism, would not the dreamer wake to ask, will such a triumph be permanent, — will not the Moslem some day re-appear in the sanguinary pride of his oppression, and the Hindoo in the blind treachery of his super stition, to proclaim the dangers of an overweening confidence in the might of civilisation ? The strong remonstrance of the House of Commons, in 1610, against impositions upon merchandise, was not a solitary act of public spirit. They had stood ujj, session after session, to protest against the theories of the king that he was absolute ; and to make him comprehend that there was a power superior to his arbitrary will. He had issued proclamations which assumed the character of laws ; and they told him it was •" the indubitable right of the people of this kingdom, not to be made subject to any punishment that shall extend to their lives, lands, bodies, or goods, other than such as are ordained by the common laws of this land, or the statutes made by their common consent in parliament." Whenever the king wanted a subsidy, the Commons immediately preferred a petition for redress of grievances. Cecil had a scheme for making the Crown to a great extent independent of parliament, by propcs- ing that a fixed annual revenue of 200,000/. should be granted, on condition that the king should give up the right of purveyance, and the various profits derived from wardships and other branches of ancient prerogative. The session of 1610 was chiefly employed in negotiations for this object, which was termed -" the great contract with his majesty ; " but nothing had been settled when parliament was prorogued in July. The courtiers thought that the adroitness of Cecil had prevailed over the doubts and suspicions of the Com mons. " The little beagle," writes one, " hath run about, and brought the rest of the great hounds to a perfect tune."* When parliament met again in October, the Commons were out of humour. * " Calendar of State Papers." Letter of Sir Roger Aston, p. 625. DISSOLUTION OF PARLIAMENT. 285 Not a grievance had been redressed, although a temporary subsidy had been granted in the expectation that some of the evils of which they had complained would have been removed or mitigated. In November, James had become tired of the word grievance. He would dissolve parliament. He had been patient, but " he cannot have asinine patience." He was for punishing those members who had uttered offensive speeches, some of which he thought amounted nearly to treason.* The parliament was dissolved on the 9th of February, 161 1, after having sat nearly seven years. In the first session of 1610, the Treasurer communicated to the Lords the intelligence of the murder of Henry IV. of France. Cecil said that this king was an assured friend to their sovereign and to this realm ; and an especial defence and wall between the reformed religion and its opponents in Christendom. The English minister also told the parliament that Henry, at his death, had a great army in readiness ; but Cecil did not divulge what was the intent for which this army was levied. James was not likely to have joined in any martial project against the Spanish power ; or even to have seconded Henry's " grand scheme," as it was called, for a great European confederacy that would have put an end to warfare. If money had been wanting for accomplishing that, or any other elevated project, James would have stood aloof. England had now no foreign policy, but that of an almost ignominious neutrality. The cause of Protestantism in Europe, which was at the same time the cause of civil liberty, had lost its great leader when Elizabeth died. The son of Mary Stuart had no opinions but those which resulted from his cowardice or his selfishness. When the Reforming ministers lectured him in Scotland, he favoured the Papists. Whilst the terrors of the Gunpowder-plot were uppermost in his mind, he was as staunch a Protestant as the sternest Puritan in his parliament. He naturally leaned upon that jparty in the Church of England which supported his doctrine of absolute power. In his contempt for the opinions of his subjects he thrust episcopacy upon the kirk of Scotland. For the rights of conscience he had not the slightest regard. He exhorted the States of Holland to jpersecute Vorstius, an Arminian professor at Leyden. In 1 612 he signed a writ for the burning in Smithfield of Bartholomew Legate, an Arian, whose errors he had vainly attempted to remove by argument. This writ was not a mere formal instrument, but expressed that, the Church having delivered • " Calendar of State Papers." Letter of Sir Roger Aston, p. 646. 286 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the offender to the secular power, as a blasphemous heretic, the king, " as a zealot of justice, and a defender of the Catholic faith, and willing to maintain and defend the Holy Church and the rights and liberties of the same," holds that the said Bartholomew Legate "ought to be burned with fire." One other atrocity of the same kind was committed — the last of such barbarities which Eng land witnessed. To the " religious " king James is our present translation of the Bible dedicated. That translation was an excellent work, and it was right to dedicate it to the sovereign who had encouraged the undertaking. But it was in the spirit of that dangerous adulation which hid realities from James, as they were hidden from his successor, that he was told in this dedication that his conduct in going forward " with the confidence and resolution of a man in maintaining the truth of Christ, and propagating it far and near, is that which hath so bound and firmly knit the hearts of all your majesty's loyal and religious people unto you, that your very name is precious amongst them ; their eye doth behold you with comfort, and they bless you in their hearts as that sanctified person, who, under God, is the immediate author of their true happiness." It might be supposed, the king being herein called " the mover and author of this work," that the Bible had not been previously known in England. The translation of 1611 was founded upon the Bishops' Bible of 1568; and that was founded upon Cranmer's Bible ; which was founded upon the translations of the Old and New Testament of the earlier reformers — the Tyndal who was burnt, and the Wycliffe whose ashes were cast into the Avon. In such a work it was the part of true wisdom to deviate as little as possible from the text with which the people had become familiar, and which their forefathers had devoured when it was dangerous to possess the sacred volume. It does not appear to us an objection to this translation that, " in consequence of the principle of adherence to the original versions which had been kept up ever since the time of Henry VIIL, it is not the language of the reign of James I."* Nor is it wholly to be deplored that it abounds " with obsolete phraseology, and with single words long since abandoned, or retained only in familiar use." f It will be a national misfortune if, to get rid of some archaisms in this trans lation which have ceased to be difficult, the noble simplicity of our Anglo-Saxon tongue— "the tongue which Shakspere spake"— should yield to the refined Gallicisms of a later period ; and if the * Hallam, " Literature of Europe," vol. III., p. 134. j md. AUTHORISED TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE. 287 K obsolete phraseology " of the days of Hooker should be driven out by German idioms and American vulgarities. In this transla tion, as in every species of contemporary literature, there was no attempt to write down to the understandings of the people. The great preachers at Paul's Cross, in common with the great dramatic poets, employed the most elevated language and the richest imagery, in union with the most homely phrases. If some of their sentences were involved, some of their words unfamiliar, their arguments perplexing in their subtlety, their* metaphors beyond the range of ordinary comprehension, the whole tendency of what they uttered was to elevate the minds of their readers. Their doctrine might be abstruse, their illustrations pedantic, but their tone was not cold and passionless. The rudest listener caught something of their excitement ; the instructed listener did not retire into his own thoughts, wearied by platitudes and babyisms. The jpreachers, whether they followed the high-church archbishop Bancroft, or the puritan archbishop Abbot, were in earnest. They had great truths to proclaim to all men alike, and they tasked their abilities and their learning to utter them as if they really felt their grandeur and solemnity. .Whatever were the differences of opinion in the English Church, and however great the increase of non-conformists, the time for any serious attempt to re-establish Roman-Catholicism in England had evidently passed away. It was the same in Scotland. But in Ireland the great bulk of the people still clung to the Roman Catholic worship. At the beginning of the reign of James the people of some cities boldly ejected the Protestant ministers from their churches ; and they gave other demonstrations of a general resistance to the statutes of supremacy and uniformity which had been passed in the Irish parliament. They were met by a stricter execution of the laws against recusants and priests, as far as juries could be found to enforce them. In the meantime much had been done to bring the whole of the kingdom under the dominion of one system of law. The king's writ now ran in every part. Old cus toms which interfered with the administration of justice were abolished. The possession of lands by the chieftains was regulated according to English tenures ; and the tenants were relieved from many of the exactions of their lords. The one evil which inter fered with the tranquil progress of civilisation was the exclusion from civil privileges and offices which the majority had to endure, on account of their faith, at the hands of the minority. The great 288 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Irish chieftains, Tyrone and Tyrconnel, had submitted to the gor- ernment of James, and had been graciously received at the Eng lish court. But the alterations in the tenure of lands had interfered with what they considered their territorial rights ; and the denial of all toleration to the Roman Catholics had led them to conclude that, resistance to the government might once more be attempted. In 1607 they suddenly departed from Ireland, with their families. They had embarked in treasonable schemes which they had no power to carry through. Tyrone became a pensioner of Spain and of the pope, and died in 161 6 at Rome. The two earls having been attainted of treason and outlawed, their lands, to the extent of five hundred thousand acres, were forfeited to the crown. It is to the honour of the government of James that this opportunity was judiciously employed in accomplishing what is called " the planta tion of Ulster." Extraordinary inducements were held out to Eng lish capitalists to settle in the north of Ireland ; the corporation of London received large grants of lands in the county of Derry, upon their engagement to spend ^20,000 upon the colony, and to build two towns. Hence the cities of Londonderry and Coleraine. The lord deputy, sir Arthur Chichester, carried through this project with great energy and prudence. The mistake of grant ing vast tracts to individuals, as in the time of Elizabeth, was not repeated. The allotments were in portions of 2000 acres, 1500 acres, and 1000 acres, the grantees agreeing to build according to their several proportions. The forfeited lands were divided amongst a hundred and four English and Scots, fifty-six servitors, and two hundred and eighty-six natives. Thus was Ulster to become, but not without its periods of fierce contention and of terrible massacre, the most prosperous and enlightened j)rovince of Ireland. Its half a million of acres had offered a jjrecarious existence to a scattered race of half-civilised and marauding natives. It became the seat of agricultural and commercial industry — a model to the rest of Ireland for removing those social evils which were destined for two centuries to press far more heavily upon her than political jealousies or religious disunions. The plantation of Ulster was a scheme which is attributed to the king and to his able counsellor, Bacon. It soon became mix ed up with a manoeuvre to put some ready money into the royal treasury, which the sturdy parliament had refused to fill except upon conditions. Sir Antony Shirley, according to the represen tation of his son to the king, had the > merit of inventing a whole- BARONETS. — THE NEW RIVER. 289 sale mode of obtaining supplies by the sale of honours : " My father," he says, " being a man of excellent and working wit, did find out the device of making baronets, which brought to your majesty's coffers well nigh ,£100,000." A new title of honour, intermediate between a baron and a knight, was to be bestowed upon two hundred gentlemen possessing lands' to the yearly value of ,£1000; and they were each to pay into the treasury for the pat ent the sum of ,£1095, being the estimated cost of thirty soldiers to defend the settlers in Ulster for three years. The project took to a certain extent. In ten years ninety-three patents of baronetcy were sold ; but the price paid for them was employed in other purposes than the military protection of the new colony. King James, to award him no more than justice, was favourably disposed to any large enterprise of public improvement ; always pro vided that it offered him a chance of personal gain. We are indebted to him, in some degree, for a benefit which London enjoys to this day — the supply of pure water by the New River. In the third year of the king's reign was passed " An Act for the bringing in of a fresh stream of running water to the North part of the City of London." It was to be brought from the springs of Chad well and Amwell, in Hertfordshire ; and the Corporation of London were empowered to execute the work. The Corporation in that age, — and the character has not absolutely departed from the body, — was not very energetic in setting about costly enterprises for the public good. They did not undertake this work themselves; and, when a spirited citizen and goldsmith at his own risk engaged in the undertaking,- — a mighty work in those days and indeed at any time — the Corporation refused him any pecuniary aid. James, when Hugh Middleton had spent all his private fortune, covenanted with him to bear half the share of the expense. The work was completed in 1613. Before the opening of the New River, London was supplied with water from the public conduits ; and by the water works at London Bridge, erected in 1582, by Peter Morris, a Dutchman. London in the reign of James was rapidly increasing. Other supplies were needed. The city had become nearly joined to Westminster ; which an intelligent writer chiefly attributes to the union with Scotland under the king : " For the Scots, multiplying themselves here mightily, nestled themselves about the court ; so that the Strand, from mud walls and thatched houses, came to that perfection of buildings, as now we see."* Yet this mo- * Howell, " Londinopolis," 1657, p. 346. Vol. III.— 19 29O HISTORY OF ENGLAND. tropolis of the seventeenth century was very different from the metropolis of the nineteenth. It was a city whose most crowded thoroughfares were in the neighbourhood of pleasant fields. The same writer says, " Go and walk in her fields, you shall see some shooting at long marks, some at butts ; some bowling upon dainty pleasant greens." The citizens had only to step out of Moorgate into Finsbury fields, to pursue their archery. The rural occupiers of the " town of St. Giles' in the Fields " were sometimes visited by the urban dwellers of Holborn and the Strand, who went thither to take the air ; but the road which led to that village into Holborn, and by Drury Lane, through the growing traffic had become "foul and dangerous to all that pass that way."* The growth of London had been attempted to be repressed by statutory enactments under Elizabeth. James thought to accomplish the same end by proclamations. He said that the new buildings were "but a shelter for those who, when they had spent their estates in coaches, lacqueys, and fine clothes, like Frenchmen, lived mis erably in their houses, like Italians." He commanded all noblemen and gentlemen who had mansions in the country, to return to them, and there abide, till the end of the summer season. He com manded them to go home to celebrate the feast of Christmas and to keep hospitality. The great people little heeded these proclama tions ; and the House of Commons told him they were illegal. London, from the happy circumstances of her position, was sure to increase with the increase of commerce. The presence of the courts of law at Westminster, the circumstance of the capital be ing the seat of government, favoured this increase. But one great natural cause was far more important to its prosperity than these incidental advantages. James, having been refused a benevolence by the City, sent for the Corporation ; and vowed that he would remove his own court and the courts of Westminster Hall — he would send the Records in the Tower to a more loyal place — he would bring ruin upon the disobedient Londoners. The Lord Mayor replied, " Your majesty hath power to do what you please, and your City of London will obey accordingly ; but she humbly desires that when your majesty shall remove your courts you would please to leave the Thames behind you." f * Statute, Jac. 3, c. 18. t " Londinopolis," p. 19. ARABELLA STUART. 291 CHAPTER XVI. Arabella Stuart. — Death of Salisbury. — Robert Carr, king's favourite. -TDeath of Prince Henry. — Marriage of the Princess Elizabeth. — The addled Parliament. — George Villiers, the new favourite. — Murder of Overbury.— Trials for the murder.— Somerset and his countess convicted. — Conduct of the King. — Sir Edward Coke dismissed. — Proclamation for Sports. Note on the Secret Communications between the King and Sir George More. One of the overt acts of treason with which sir Walter Raleigh was charged upon his trial, was that he had conferred with lord Cobham for the support of Arabella Stuart's claim to the crown of England.* The lady herself was present at this trial. It is not at all clear that this design had been seriously entertained ; and cer tainly Arabella herself had given no sanction to it. She was the cousin of king James ; being the only child of Charles, earl of Lennox, the grandson of Margaret Tudor. Her parents died young ; and she was brought up by her maternal grandmother, the countess of Shrewsbury. If James had died childless, Arabella Stuart would have been the lineal heir to the crown. During the reign of Elizabeth she was occasionally at court ; and the queen pointed her out to the wife of the French ambassador, when she was about twelve years old, as a girl of talent, who would one day be a great lady. After the accession of James she appears to have been in much favour. In 1604 she received the grant of an annual pension for life of iooo/.f In 1609 she "had the profits of a monopoly, in the privilege of nominating the sellers of wines and spirits in Ireland. % In that year she appears to have given offence by listening" to some overtures for marriage. In 1610 it was dis covered that William Seymour, the second son of lord Beauchamp, was endeavouring to gain the lady Arabella as his wife. They were brought before the Council, and protested that they never intended marrying without the king's consent. In a few months they were privately married. The husband was sent to the Tower; the wife was placed in official custody. On the 3rd of June, 161 1, * Ante, p. 242. t " Calendar of State Papers," p. 173- t Ibid., p. 555. 292 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. she escaped from Highgate, disguised as a man ; having drawn " a pair of great French fashioned hose over her petticoats, putting on a man's doublet, a manlike perruque with long locks over her hair, a black hat, black cloak, russet boots with red tips, and a rapier by her side." Seymour meanwhile had escaped from the Tower, also in disguise. Arabella rode to Blackwall ; and then crossed to Lee. A French bark, hired for the occasion, was there lying at anchor, and when she went on board, the captain stood out to sea, without waiting for Seymour, who was expected to join his wife. They never saw each other again. Arabella was cap tured in the French bark by an English pinnace that had been sent in chase of the fugitives ; and she was carried to the Tower. Seymour escaped to Ostend. The jealousy of king James would never permit him to show any mercy to his unhappy cousin. She died in the fourth year of her imprisonment, worn out with grief which ended in mental derangement. Of the cruelty of the king to his kinswoman there can be no doubt. The illegality of her im prisonment is equally clear. It could not be justified by the very distant possibility that any issue of a marriage between two per sons who each were of the blood royal might be dangerous to the succession. * Arabella was treated by James with far greater harshness than was used to Catherine Grey by Elizabeth ; nor was there the apology in James's case, as in that of the queen, that the title of the reigning sovereign was open to dispute. Arabella was the victim of a causeless injustice, " through the oppression of a kinsman whose advocates are always vaunting his good nature." f In May, 1612, died Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury. " He was a good statesman, and no ill member of the Commonwealth," says sir Simonds D'Ewes ; but he died amidst " a general hate, almost of all sorts." X Bacon has described him as " a more fit man to keep things from growing worse, but no very fit man to reduce things to be much better." When he was gone, things did grow much worse. He had left an empty treasury, which he. had vainly attempted to fill by his scheme for a permanent revenue. The constant manifestation of an arbitrary temper on the part of the king, " willing to wound, but yet afraid to strike," made the Com mons cling with great tenacity to their undoubted power of re fusing supplies. Robert Carr succeeded Cecil, not as prime minis- * Seymour was grandson of the earl of Hertford who married Catherine Grey. See ante, p. 79. t Hallam, vol. i. p. 351. X " Autobiography," vol. i. p. 50. ROBERT CARR, KING'S FAVOURITE. 293 ter ; but he was all-powerful as prime favourite. Before the death of Cecil, the king's minions had not ostensibly influenced public affairs. James gormandised with Heliogabalus Hay; and when Carr, a raw Scotch lad, had broken his leg in the tilting-yard, the king watched over his recovery, placed him about his person, pinched his cheek, taught him Latin, * bestowed on him forfeited lands, created him baron Branspath and then viscount Rochester, and made him a knight of the garter. But neither Hay nor Carr appear to have meddled with the functions of a Treasurer or Sec retary of State while Cecil lived. For four years after that rniriis- t'er's death Carr ruled supreme, till another favourite came to eject him. The history of this period is disgusting to trace in contem porary memoirs and documents, and much of it is unfit to be re lated in a modern narrative. Justly does Mr. Carlyle say, " Somer set Ker, king's favourite, son of the Laird of Fernieherst, he and his extremely unedifying affairs — excejit as they might transiently affect the nostrils of some Cromwell of importance — do not much belong to the History of England. Carrion ought at length to be buried." -f Yet they cannot be wholly passed over. The " ex tremely unedifying affairs " of the court of James had a great deal to do with the momentous events of the next reign. The disgust of the sober and religious part of the community drove vast num bers into the opposite extreme of religious aceticism. In propor tion as the Puritans were hated by the courtiers, denounced in the high-church pulpits, ridiculed upon the stage, they grew in the real strength of their earnest principles ; and they gained an enormous accession of strength in town and country, of those who, "out of mere morality and civil honesty, discountenanced the abominations of those days." Their religion " was fenced with the liberty- of the people, and sq linked together, that it was impossible to make them slaves till they were brought to be idolaters of royalty and glorious lust, and as impossible to make them adore these gods while they continued loyal to the government of Jesus Christ." J So writes Lucy Hutchinson, one in whom the beauty of holiness is presented under its noblest aspects of manly courage and fem inine tenderness. In 1606, on Twelfth Night, a masque was performed at court, ofwhich Jonson wrote the verses, and Inigo Jones superintended * " Nugae Antique," vol. i. p. 390- t " Cromwell's Letters," Introduction, p. 32. X " Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, vol. i. p. iai, ed.a82». 294 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the decorations and machinery. This " Masque of Hymen " was to celebrate the marriage of the earl of Essex, a boy of fourteen years, with lady Frances Howard, a girl of thirteen. In 1613, there was another masque in honour of the marriage of this lady with Robert Carr, then created earl of Somerset. The young Essex had gone abroad after his marriage ; and his child-bride had lived amongst the seductions of the court — "incomparably the most dis graceful scene of profligacy which this country has ever witness ed." * The odious circumstances which attended the divorce of lady Essex, that she might be bestowed upon her paramour, Somerset, brought equal disgrace, in the eyes of the people, upon the king who urged the divorce in the most unkingly manner, and upon the Ecclesiastical Court which decreed it. The king, in pan dering to an adulterous connexion, dared to tell archbishop Abbot, who opposed the disgraceful proceeding, "the best thankfulness that you, that are so far my creature, can use towards me, is to rev erence and follow my judgment, and not to contradict it." t This profligate man was now freed from the observation of his two elder children, whose lives and opinions were not in exact agreement with his own. Prince Henry was in his nineteenth year, when, on the 6th of November, 161 2, he died, after a short illness. The prince, although there was no public difference between them, had probably as little respect for the king as the king had affection for the prince. Between Henry and Somerset there was decided enmity. The popularity of the prince, who was an especial hope of the strict religious section of the nation, was offensive to the king ; so that when the son's court was frequented by a very differ ent class of men from those who thronged round the court of the king, James was heard to exclaim, "will he bury me alive?" Henry was attached to Raleigh, whom he often visited in prison .; and he loved to hear, as he might have heard from him, stories of the martial princes of our Plantagenet race, and of the later period when the support of the Protestantism of Europe was the great policy of England. He has been reported to have said, with re gard to the imprisoned Raleigh, that only such a king as his father would keep such a bird in such a cage. When Henry died, there was an outcry that he had been poisoned. D'Ewes says, " It is not improbable but that he might overheat and distemper himself in some of those sports and recreations he used in his company; but the strength of his constitution, and the vigour of his youth, * Hallam, !. p. 342. t Amos, " The great Oyer of Poisoning," p. 6. MARRIAGE OF THE PRINCESS ELIZABETH. 295 might have overcome that, had he not tasted of some grapes as he played at tennis, supposed to have been poisoned." * Some cir cumstances which were disclosed a few years later favoured this sus picion. But whatever might be the cause of prince Henry's death, his father exhibited some strange feelings which strongly contrast with the national grief, when " the lamentation made for him was so general as even women and children partook of it." f There had been a negotiation for marrying Henry to a princess of France '; and within three days of his death Rochester directed our ambas sador, who had' the decency not then to propound the matter, to make overtures for the marriage of the same princess to the king's remaining son, Charles. Henry was buried at Westminster on the 7th of December. There was no time lost in grief ; for on the 14th of February following the princess Elizabeth was married at Whitehall to Frederick, the elector palatine. The king again de manded a feudal aid on this occasion, as he had demanded one when his eldest son was created prince of Wales. It defrayed only a portion of the enormous expenses of the marriage festivities. The . union was a happy one in the mutual affection of the prince and princess. It was doomed to be unfortunate in the loss which the elector sustained of his hereditary dominions, when he consented to be chosen king of Bohemia. The demeanour of a light-hearted girl of sixteen at her bridal ceremony was held to be prophetic of evil : — " While the archbishop of Canterbury was solemnizing the marriage, some eruscations and lightnings of joy appeared in her countenance, that expressed more than an ordinary smile, being almost elated to a laughter, which could not clear the air of her fate, but was rather a forerunner of more sad and dire events." t From the twelfth child of the princess Elizabeth the House of Brunswick inherits the crown of this kingdom. Hume has said, with some truth, " except during sessions of parliament, the history of this reign may more properly be called the history of the court than that of the nation." But the excep tion is a very considerable one. During sessions of parliament we clearly trace how the nation was growing into a power truly formi dable to the arbitrary disposition of the king and the selfish indul gences of the court. We see in these sessions of parliament of what materials the English nation was composed. When we open the parliamentary debates of this period, we find abundant evidence that * " Autobiography," vol. i. p. 47. t " Autobiography," vol. i. p. 46. X Wilson, " Life of James I." 296 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. such of the gentlemen of England as remained uncorrupted by court favours, and had not " learnt the court fashion," * were not only a spirited race but were highly intelligent. They were perfectly ac quainted with the laws of their country and the history of its constitution. They had not only solid arguments, but carefully sought precedents, to shape their resistance to impositions and benevolences, to monopolies and purveyance, to proclamations which claimed to have the force of statutes, but which were only legaLif they prescribed obedience to some established principle of constitutional government. They were practically familiar with the laws of property, and with the administration of justice in their several localities; A writer whose learning and industry, if his life had been longer spared, would have no doubt added many more able contributions to our history, says of the country gentlemen, " un doubtedly, in the earlier half of the seventeenth century a great amount of solid and polite learning distinguished them ; and to this must be attributed the energetic resistance which the king and his corrupt courtiers met with in their insane crusade against the liberties of England."! The parliament which, after an interval __ of four years, met on the 6th of April, 1614, was called, not for any purpose of general legislation, but in the expectation that by proper management it might relieve the king's necessities. Bacon, then attorney-general, sir Henry Neville, and some others, undertook to bring the Commons into a gracious frame of mind, by inducing the king to relax some of his claims of prerogative, which were called grievances, and thus to obtain a liberal supply. The scheme could not be concealed ; and hence these politicians obtained the name of "undertakers." The king in his opening speech protested that it was as false as it would have been unworthy of himself, that he should employ " private undertakers" who "would do great matters." Bacon laughed at the notion that private men should undertake for all the Commons of England. In 1621 James openly acknowledged what he had before denied. Mr. Hallam points to this circumstance as showing "the rise of a systematic parliament- ary influence, which was one day to become the mainspring of gov ernment." Hume says, " so ignorant were the Commons, that they knew not this incident to be the lirst infallible symptom of any reg ular or established liberty." The Commons knew better than the * Mrs. Hutchinson. t J. M. Kemble, Introduction to Twysden on "the Government of England," Car* den Society, p. xix. THE ADDLED PARLIAMENT. 297 historian, that, whatever might have been attempted under des potic princes, there was an ancient system of " regular or estab lished liberty," which did not require any symptoms for its mani festation. They did not acknowledge what the historian has constantly inferred, that the notion of liberty was a sudden growth of the seventeenth century ; " that the constitution of England was, at that time, an inconsistent fabric, whose jarring and discordant parts would soon destroy each other." * They opposed the parlia mentary influence because they dreaded corruption as much as they hated tyranny. The scheme of the undertakers was entirely unsuccessful. James uttered smooth words and made specious promises ; but the Commons, with one voice, passed a vote against the king's right of imposing customs at the outports, without the consent of 'parliament. A supply was demanded, under a threat that if it were not given the parliament should be dissolved. The house passed to the question of impositions. There were various bills in progress. After a session of two months of stormy debate, the parliament was dissolved, without a single bill being passed. It was named "the addled parliament." No other parliament was called till 1621. For eleven years the Statute book is a blank. The king was not satisfied with the perilous measure of attempting to govern without a parliament, but he committed to the Tower five of the members of the House of Commons who had been most strenuous in their opposition. He had to supply his necessities by fines in the star-chamber, and by exercises of the prerogative which were galling and oppressive. His first great resource was a Benevolence. Mr. Oliver St. John declined to contribute, and wrote a letter setting forth his reasons for refusal. He was brought into the star-chamber, and was fined in the sum of ,£5000. The courtiers would think this a mild punishment for one who had pre sumed to doubt the right to put his hands into the pockets of his subjects of a king who had just told his disobedient parliament, " my integrity is like the whiteness of my robe, my purity like the •metal of gold in my crown, my firmness and clearness like the pre cious stones I wear, and my affections natural like the redness of my heart." f Such was the gabble of this ridiculous pedant upon solemn occasions. When he sat at table, with a crowd of listeners, he discoursed largely of his divine right to implicit obedience, and of the superiority of his prerogative over the laws and customs of * " History of England," chap, xlvii. t " Parliamentary History," vol. i. p. 1150. 298 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. England. There is " a specimen of his usual liberty of talk," as Hume terms a story which Mr. Hallam deems " too trite for repe tition," but which we venture to repeat. Waller, the poet, when young, stood among the spectators who were allowed to see the king dine. James, with his loud sputtering voice, asked the opin ions of bishop Neile and bishop Andrews, whether he might not take his subjects' money, when he needed it, without all the fuss of parliament ? Neile replied, ' God forbid you should not, for you are the breath of our nostrils.' Andrews hesitated ; but the king insisting upon an answer, he said, ' Why, then, I think your ma jesty may lawfully take my brother Neile's money, for he offers it." By the death of the earl of Northampton, within a week of the dissolution of parliament, the king and his courtiers had an opportunity for a scramble to recruit their finances. The office of Lord Privy Seal having become vacant, the occasion was embraced to effect what we should now call a partial change of ministry. But this change was accomplished in a way that would be rather startling in modern times. Some of the high offices were sold. Sir Fulk Greville paid ^4000 for the Chancellorship of the Ex chequer. Inferior places went to the highest bidder. When Som erset sold the office of cup-bearer to George Villiers, one of the sons of a Leicestershire knight, he appears to have forgotten that another might supplant him in the favour of a king who dwelt on "good looks and handsome accoutrements."* The cup-bearer was a dangerous rival. " His first introduction into favour," says Clarendon, " was purely from the handsomeness of his person." The history of the country, to the end of this reign, is in great part the personal history of George Villiers, — the adventurer, who had in his capacity of the king's cup-bearer been " admitted to that conversation and discourse with which that prince always abounded at his meals." In a few weeks, continues Clarendon, he mounted higher; " and, being knighted, without any other qualification, he was at the same time made gentleman of the bedchamber and knight of the order of the garter ; and in a short time (very short for such a prodigious ascent) he was made a baron, a viscount, an earl, a marquis, and became lord high admiral of England, lord warden of the cinque-ports, master of the horse, and entirely dis posed of all the graces of the king, in conferring all the honours and all the offices of three kingdoms without a rival." f The marriage of the earl of Somerset with the divorced lady * " Nugje Antiqux," p. 392"; t History of the Rebellion, book i. MURDER OF OVERBURY. 299 Essex, on St. Stephen's day, 161 3, had been preceded by the death in the Tower of Somerset's friend, sir Thomas Overbury. The incense that was offered to the royal favourite on the occasion of his marriage is almost as revolting as the marriage itself. Bacon spent ^2000 upon " The Masque of Flowers," in which grave law yers spoke the flattering words which were put into the mouths of hyacinths and jonquils. Donne wrote an eclogue, in which he de scribes the eyes of the bride as sowing the court with stars. The Corporation of London gave the earl and countess a magnificent banquet at Guildhall ; and when the lady, to go to the festival, borrowed the four superb horses in which sir Ralph Winwood, the Secretary of State, took pride, he begged her to accept them, as so great a lady should not use anything borrowed. In less than two years the same sir Ralph Winwood was labouring to discover the suspected murderers of sir Thomas Overbury. According to one account, an apothecary's boy, falling sick at Flushing, confessed that he had administered a poison to Overbury, who was then a prisoner in the Tower. According to another account, the dis covery was as follows : — " It came first to light by a strange acci dent of sir Ralph Winwood, knt., one of the Secretaries of State, his dining with sir Jervis Elvis, lieutenant of the said Tower, at a great man's table, not far from Whitehall. For that great man, commending the same sir Jervis to sir Ralph Winwood as a person in respect of his many good qualities very worthy of his acquaint ance, sir Ralph answered him, that he should willingly embrace his acquaintance, but that he could first wish he had cleared himself of a foul suspicion the world generally conceived of him, touching the death of sir Thomas Overbury. As soon as sir Jervis heard that, being very ambitious of the Secretary's friendship, he took occasion to enter into private conference with him, and therein to excuse himself to have been enforced to connive at the said mur der, with much abhorring of it. He confessed the whole circum stance of the execution of it in general, and the instrument* to have been set on work by Robert, Earl of Somerset, and his wife."* The confession of Elvis, or Helwys, as thus related by D'Ewes, is not very probable. But suspicion being roused, and that sus picion pointing to the once favourite of the king — of whom, accord ing to Clarendon, his majesty "begun to be weary," — all the state machinery was put in action to bring the murder home to the in- * D'Ewes, "Autobiography," vol. i. p. 68. 3°° HISTORY OF ENGLAND. jtigators and the perpetrators. Coke, the lord chief justice, is stated by Bacon to have taken three hundred examinations. The king, according to the narrative of Roger Coke, the grandson ofthe great judge, was at . Royston, and Somerset with him, when Win wood came to tell him what had been discovered. James immediate ly sent a messenger to Coke to apprehend the earl. Coke prepared a warrant, and despatched it to Royston : " The messenger went back post to Royston, and arrived there about ten in the morning. The king had a loathsome way of lolling his arms about his favour ites' necks, and kissing them ; and in this posture the messenger found the king with Somerset, saying, ' When shall I see thee again ? ' Somerset then designing for London, when he was arrested by sir Edward's warrant. Somerset exclaimed, that never such an affront was offered to a peer of England in presence ofthe King. ' Nay, man,' said the king, ' if Coke sends for me, I must go ; ' and when he was gone, ' Now the Deel go with thee,' said the king, 'for I will never see thy face any more.' " In the afternoon, according to the same account, the chief justice arrived, and then the king commanded him to search into the bottom of the con- sjMracy, and to spare no man, however great ; concluding with an awful appeal to God to curse Coke if he spared any of them, and invoking the same curse upon himself if he pardoned any. On the 19th of October, on the 9th of November, and on the 1 6th of November, 161 5, Richard Weston, James Franklin, Anne Turner, and sir Jervis Elvis, were arraigned and condemned at Guildhall, and were executed. The countess of Somerset was committed to the Tower, where she gave birth to a daughter; and her husband was also committed. On the 24th of May, 1616, the countess was arraigned before the peers. She pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to death. The motive which induced her to be accessary to this crime was set forth by the chief justice in a re port to the king. The examinations, he said, disclosed that lady Frances, countess of Essex, had employed sorcery for the double purpose of estranging the affections of her husband and winning those of Rochester ; that Overbury, who had exhorted Somerset not to think of a divorce for the wife of Essex, to be followed by his own marriage, was, through the management of the deceased earl of Northampton, committed to the Tower ; that Wade, the lieutenant of the Tower, was removed to make room for Elvis ; that Weston was recommended as warder of the prisoner ; that the countess, by the aid of Mrs. Turner, procured poisons from SOMERSET AND HIS COUNTESS CONVICTED. 30I tFranklin ; and that by Weston they were administered, with the connivance of Elvis. The earl of Somerset was put upon his trial on the day after his countess had confessed her guilt. It is one of the disgraces of Bacon that, in managing this trial, he had tampered with the due course of justice, so as to preconcert with the king that Somerset should be convicted, but, as he says under his own hand, " It shall be my care so to moderate the manner of charging him, as it might make him not odious beyond the extent of mercy."* Somerset was convicted ; and was sentenced to die. In a few days his wife received a free pardon, which was afterwards extended to himself. He obtained a large pension ; and only lost his great offices. The mysterious circumstances which led to such a flagrant defiance of public opinion may be explained by a remarkable account given by sir A. Weldon. His little book, "The Court and Character of King James," was long held to be a libel upon the Stuart family ; but in the words of the most temperate of historians, his statement with regard to Somerset has " received the most entire confirmation by some letters from More, lieutenant of the Tower, published in Archaologia, vol. xviii." Somerset's trial was undoubtedly so managed by Bacon "as to prevent him making any imprudent dis closure, or the judges from getting any insight into that which it was not meant to reveal." f The following is the narrative of Weldon, of which he says, " this is the very relation from More's own mouth " : — " And now for the last act, enters Somerset himself on the stage, who, being told, as the manner is, by the lieutenant, that he must provide to go next day to his trial, did absolutely refuse it, and said they should carry him in his bed ; that the king had assured him he should not come to any trial, neither durst the king to bring him to trial ; this was in a high strain, and in a language not well understood by George More (lieutenant in Elwaies his room), that made More quiver and shake, and however he was accounted a wise man, yet was he near at his wits' end. " Yet away goes More to Greenwich, as late as it was (being twelve at night), bounceth at the back stairs, as if mad, to whom came Jo. Leveston, one of the grooms, out of his bed, enquires the reason of that distemper at so late a season ; More tells him he must speak with the king ; Leveston replies, he is quiet (which in * Amos, "Great Oyer," p. 459. t "Constitutional History," vol. i. p. 353> note. 302 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the Scottish dialect is fast asleep) ; More says, you must awake him ; More was called in ; the chamber left to the king and More, he tells the king those passages, and desired to be directed by the king, for he was gone beyond his own reason to hear such bold and undutiful expressions, from a faulty subject, against a just sover eign. The king falls into a passion of tears, On my soul, More, I wot not what to do ; thou art a wise man, help me in this great strait, and thou shalt find thou dost it for a thankful master , with other sad expressions. More leaves the king in that passion, but assures him he will prove the utmost of his wit, to serve his majesty, and was really rewarded with a suit worth to him ^1500 (although Annandale, his great friend, did cheat him of one half), so was there falsehood in friendship. " Sir George More returns to Somerset about three next morn ing, of that day he was to come to trial ; enters Somerset's chamber, tells him he had been with the king, found him a most affectionate master unto him, and full of grace in his intentions towards him, but (said he) to satisfy justice, you must appear, although return instantly again, without any further proceeding, only you shall know your enemies and their malice, though they shall have no power over you. With this trick of wit, he allayed his fury, and got him quietly, about eight in the morning to the Hall, yet feared his former bold language might revert again, and being brought by this trick into the toil, might have more enraged him to fly out into some strange discovery, that he had two servants placed on each side of him, with a cloak on their arms, giving them a peremptory order, if that Somerset did any way fly out on the king, they should instantly hood-wink him with that cloak, take him violently from the Bar, and carry him away ; for which, he would secure them from any danger, and they should not want also a bountiful reward. But the earl finding himself over-reached, recollected a better temper, and went on calmly in his trial, where he held the company until seven at night. But who had seen the king's restless motion all that day, sending to every boat he see landing at the bridge, cursing all that came without tidings, would have easily judged all was not right, and there had been some grounds for his fears of Somerset's boldness ; but at the last one bringing him word he was condemned, and the passages, all was quiet." * The mysteries which were involved in the death of Overbury, whose murder can scarcely be attributed solely to the revenge of * " The Court of King James, " 1650, p. 115. See Note, p. 306. SIR EDWARD COKE DISMISSED. 303 lady Somerset ; the fearful secrets which Somerset might have re vealed had he not been assured of the king's pardon, and of the rewards which he afterwards received— are conjectured to be of a nature that had better be buried with the " carrion " to which they belong. That Somerset was guilty of being accessary to the mur der of Overbury is very little to be doubted. That the murder was for the concealment of some terrible secret can as little be questioned. How far James was implicated in these dark affairs may be better judged from a careful perusal of the great body of evidence collected by Mr. Amos, than by any brief mention in this, or any other historical abstract. The conduct of sir Edward Coke upon these Somerset trials was probably not such as won the favour of the king, especially if an expression which he is said to have used during the proceedings be authentically stated. It was: "God knows what became of that sweet babe prince Henry, but I know somewhat." This has been disputed ; but it appears in a sentence from a report of Ba con to the king, that Coke was not so discreet as the courtiers could have wished. "My lord Coke," he says, "hath filled this part with many frivolous things." The chief justice was not so in- clinea to sustain the prerogative as some of his brother judges. At an earlier period of his career, he had given umbrage to the king, in saying that " his highness was defended by his laws : " James told him " he spake foolishly ;" that " he was not defended by his laws, but by God ; " and Coke went upon his knees, and beg ged pardon. In 1610, Coke had been consulted by the council, whether the king, by his proclamations, might limit the increase of buildings in London, and forbid the making of starch from wheat. Parliament was then sitting, and the Commons were then expected to remonstrate against this exercise of the prerogative. The chief justice and three judges decided that the king by his proclamations could not create any offence which was not one be fore ; that the king, by his proclamations, may admonish his sub jects that they keep the laws, and do not offend against them. The same sound doctrine was held even in the reign of Mary, when the judges laid down, that no proclamation can make a law, but only confirm and ratify an ancient one.* In 161 5, Coke opposed his legal knowledge to the preliminary proceedings in a detestable act of tyranny. Edmund Peachum, a clergyman in Somersetshire, had his study broken open ; and a manuscript sermon being there found, .* Hallam, vol. i. p. 337. 304 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. in which there was strong censure of the extravagances of the king and the oppressions of his officers, the preacher was put to the rack, and interrogated ''before torture, in torture, between torture, and after torture." He was suspected of treason ; but this horrible severity could wring no confession from him. It was doubted whether the sermon itself could be received as an overt act of treason. Bacon was directed by the king to confer with the judges of the King's Bench separately ; to which Coke objected, as " not according to the custom of this realm." The other judges were tampered with. Coke at length gave an opinion, which eva ded the question, and did not confirm the king's arguments and that of the other unscrupulous judges, that the sermon itself was treasonable. The unhappy man was, however, tried and con demned ; but he died in gaol. The chief justice again offended by contending that the equitable jurisdiction of the Court of Chan cery ought not to be exercised after a judgment obtained at law. But his greatest offence was in demurring to the authority of a letter which Bacon had written at the king's desire, to direct that the Court of King's Bench should not proceed to judgment in a case which concerned the validity of the grant of a benefice to a bishop, in connexion with his bishopric. Coke said that such a letter should be written to the judges of all the courts ; and that being done, ne induced them to take the honourable course of cer tifying to the king that they were bound by their oaths not to re gard any such letters, which were contrary to law. The king went into one of his usual fits of rage when his prerogative was ques tioned, and called the twelve judges before him to answer for their disobedience. They all tamely yielded, with the exception of Coke. He was very shortly after first suspended from his office, and then dismissed. It is not difficult to imagine, whilst such scandalous revelations and suspicions were rife as those of the Overbury case ; whilst the majority of the judges were slavish ; whilst the Court of High Commission was proceeding in its arbitrary course in matters of religion — a Court which, according to an unheeded remonstrance of the Commons, took upon itself to fine and imprison, and pass sentences without appeal ; whilst the Star Chamber was trampling upon every personal right, — that the nation was growing univer sally disgusted with the government under which it lived. The people had no constitutional organ to proclaim their grievances. Parliaments had been laid aside. The great religious body PROCLAMATION FOR SPORTS. 305 termed Puritans were offended, in 161 8, by a proclamation that all lawful recreations, such as dancing, archery, leaping, May-games, might be used on Sundays after divine service. They associated this injuJicious measure — which had a tendencyHo make the dis putes between the two parties in the Church more rancorous — with the king's visit to Scotland to enforce episcopacy upon a re luctant people. After that visit a better provision was made for the parochial clergy, by the passing of an Act in the Scottish Par liament, which compelled the impropriators of tithes to allow a stipend to the resident minister. But the ecclesiastical policy of James in Scotland was not successful; and in 1620 the preachers were inveighing against episcopal rule, and that general discontent was growing which, in a few years, broke out in bitter hostility. In neither of the kingdoms could the people be deemed happy, or the government paternal. Vol. III.— 20 306 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. NOTE ON THE SECRET COMMUNICATIONS BE TWEEN THE KING AND SIR GEORGE MORE. The letters to which Mr. Hallam refers as giving the most entire confirmation to the passage in Weldon's Memoirs, are in the handwriting cf king James ; and were pub lished in 1835, the originals being then in the possession of James More Molyneux, Esq., of Losely. They had been carefully preserved in sir G- More's family ; and were en closed in an envelope, on which was an inscription in handwriting of the early part of the seventeenth century. It thus commences: " These four letters were all in King James his own hand-writing, sent to Sir George More, Lieut, of the Tower (being put into that place by his own appointment, without the privity of any 'man), concerning my Lord Somerset, who being in the Tower and hearing that he should come to his arraignment, began to speak big words touching on the King's reputation and honour. The King therefore desired, as much as he could, to make him confess the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury, and so not to come to his arraign, but to cast himself on his mercy. But being a Courtier and beaten to these courses, would not ; fully imagining, that the King durst not or would not bring him to his trial. 16 16. May gth. " Good Sir George, " As the only confidence I had in your honesty made me, without the knowledge of any, put you in that place of trust, which you now possess, so must I now use your trust and secrecy in a thing greatly concerning my honour and service. You know Somerset's day of trial is at hand, and you know also what fair means I have used to move him by confessing the truth, to honour God and me, and leave some place for my mercy to work upon. I have now at last sent the bearer hereof, an honest Gentleman, and who once followed him, with such directions unto him, as, if there be a sponke of grace left in him, I hope they shall work a gond effect. My only desire is that you would make his con voy unto him in such secrecy, as none living may know of it, and that, after his speaking with him in private, he may be returned back again as secretly. So, reposing myself upon your faithful and secret handling of this business, I bid you heartily farewell. "Jambs R." 1616. May izth. " Good Sir George, " Although I fear that the last message I sent to your unfortunate Prisoner shall not take the effect that I wish it should, yet, I cannot leave off to use all means possible to move him to do that which is both most honorable for me, and his own best. You shall therefore give him assurance in my name, that if he will yet before his trial confess clearly unto the Commissioners his guiltiness of this fact, I will not only perform what I prom ised by my last Messenger, both towards him and his wife, but I will enlarge it, according to the phrase of the civil 1- w, quod gratix sunt amplianda;. I mean not that he shall con fess if he be innocent, know evil likely is, and of yourself you may dispute NOTE ON THE TRIAL OF SOMERSET. 307 with him what should mean his confidence now to endure a trial, when as he remembers, that this last winter he confessed to the Chief Justice that his cause was so evil likely, as he knew no jury could acquit him, Assure him that I protest upon~my honor, my end in this is for his and his wife's good ; you will do well, likewise, of yourself to cast out unto him, that you fear his wife shall plead weakly for his innocency, and that you find the Commissioners have, you know not how, some secret assurance that in the end she will confess of him : but this must only be as from yourself ; and therefore you must not let him know that I have written unto you, but only that I sent you private word to deliver him this message. Let none living know of this, and if it take good effect, move him to send in haste for the Commissioners to give them satisfaction, but if he remain obstinate, I desire not that you should trouble me with an answer, for it is to no end, and no news is better than evil news ; and so farewell, and God bless your labours. "James R." Without date. "Good Sir George, " I am extremely sorry that your unfortunate prisoner turns all the great care I have of him, not only against himself, but against me also, as far as he can. I cannot blame you, that you cannot conjecture what this may be, for God knows it is only a trick of his idle brain, hoping thereby to shift his trial ; but it is easy to be seen that he would threaten me with laying an aspersion upon me of being in some sort accessory to his crime. I can do no more (since God so abstracts his grace from him), than repeat the substance of that letter which the Lord Hay sent you yesternight, which is this : if he would write and send me any message concerning this poisoning it needs not be private ; if it be of any other business, that which I cannot now with honour receive privately, I may do it after his trial, and serve the turn as well ; for except either his trial or con fession prcecede, I cannot hear a private message from him, without laying an aspersion upon myself of being accessory to his crime, and I pray you to urge him by reason, that I refuse him no favor which I can grant him, without taking upon me the suspicion of being guilty of that crime whereof he is accused ; and so farewell. "James R." Without date. " Good Sir George. " For answer to your strange news, I am first to tell you, that I expect the Lord Hay and Sir Robert Carr have been with you before this time, which if they have not yet been, do you send for them in haste, that they may first hear him, before you say any thing unto him, and when that is done, if he shall still refuse to go, you must do your office, except he be either apparently sick or distracted of his wits, in any of which cases, you may acquaint the Chancellor with it, that he may adjourn the day till Monday next, between and which time, if his sickness or madness be counterfeited, it will manifestly appear. In the mean time, I doubt not but you have acquainted the Chancellor with this strange fit of his, and if upon> these occasions you bring him a little later than the hour appointed, the Chancellor may in the mean time protract the time best he may, whom I pray you to acquaint likewise with this my answer, as well as with the accident. If he have said any thing of moment to the Lord Hay, I expect to hear of it with all speed ; if othe'rwars, let me not be troubled with it till the trial be past. Farewell. "James R." 308 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER XVII. Release of Raleigh.— Raleigh's expedition to Guiana.— Raleigh returns to England.— His execution under his former sentence.— Affairs of the Palatinate.— The Elector de feated at Prague — Parliament. — Monopolists. — Lord Bacon impeached. — Conduct of Parliament in Floyd's case.— The King and the Parliament at issue. — Parliament dissolved.— Prince Charles and Villiers in Spain.— The proposed marriage of Charles with the Infanta broken off.— Rejoicings in England. — Parliament. — War declared against Spain. — Death of King James. Sir Walter Raleigh had been a prisoner in the Tower somewhat more than twelve years. To a man of such activity of mind even imprisonment would not be unhappiness. His wife was permitted to dwell with him. He had access to the Lieuten ant's garden ; and, says sir William Wade, one of the Lieutenants, " he hath converted a little hen-house to a still-house, where he doth spend his time all the day in distillations." Mrs. Hutchinson, whose father, sir Allen Apsley, was also Lieutenant of the Tower, gives a more intelligible account of these distillations, in relating the virtues of her mother : " Sir Walter Raleigh and Mr. Ruthin being prisoners in the Tower, and addicting themselves to chemis try, she suffered them to make their rare experiments at her cost ; partly to comfort and divert the poor prisoners, and partly to gain the knowledge of their experiments, and the medicines to help such jxior people as were not able to seek to physicians." * Ra leigh was the inventor of a famous cordial which went by his name. In an evil hour the tranquil studies and useful diversions of Raleigh were exchanged for schemes which were to renew the energies of his youth. The dream of a gold mine in Guiana never ceased to haunt his imagination. Indians had interviews with him in the Tower ; for he had kept up a correspondence, through his agents, with the natives of the country which he had partially explored in 1 595. At length he obtained permission to employ the liberty which was promised to be granted to him, through the mediation of Vil liers, in again attempting to work the gold mine in whose existence he firmly believed. He was released from his prison on the 20th of March, 1616. He was now in the sixty-fifth year of his age. But * " Memoirs of Col. Hutchinson,'' p. 22. RALEIGH S EXPEDITION TO GUIANA. 309 he was one of those who bated no jot of heart or hope, and he sent an expression of his gratitude to Villiers in a letter which smacks of the old enthusiasm : " You have, by your mediation, put me again into the world. I can but acknowledge it ; for to pay any part of your favour by any service of mine, as yet, is not in my power. If it succeed well, a good part of the honour shall be yours ; and if I do not also make it jsrofitable unto you, I shall show myself exceeding ungrateful " Raleigh risked in this scheme all he possessed in the world. When lady Raleigh went on her knees to James, to beg that her family might not be robbed of the estate at Sherborne, which had been secured to them before her husband's attainder, he exclaimed, " I maun have the land — I maun have it for Carr." Eight thousand pounds were afterwards ob tained as the " competent satisfaction " for an estate worth five thousand pounds a year. This sum, with the produce of a small estate which his wife sold, was all invested in the Guiana project. James stipulated for a share of the profits of the enterprise. But the Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, who had at that time obtained great influence over the king, at first remonstrated, and declared that the expedition was for piratical purposes. Raleigh maintained that his sole object was to settle a country which belonged to Eng land by right of discovery, and to work its gold mines; and Gon domar affected to be satisfied. Raleigh got together a squadron of fourteen vessels, and he set sail on the 28th of March, 161 7, having received a commission by which he was constituted general and commander of the expedition-, and governor of the country. It was imprudent in Raleigh to have gone upon a doubtful adven ture without having received a previous pardon, which was to be obtained for money. But it is said that Bacon, who, in 1617, had accomplished the prime object of his ambition, the custody of the great seal, said to Raleigh, " The knee-timber of your voyage is money. Spare your purse in this particular ; for upon my life you have a sufficient pardon for all that is past already, the king hav ing under his broad seal made you admiral of your fleet, and given you power of the martial law over your officers and soldiers." The outward voyage was unpropitious. There was sickness in the ships, of which many of the voyagers died. They landed in Gui ana on the 12th of November; and on the 14th Raleigh wrote in a hopeful spirit to his wife : " To tell you that I might be king of the Indians were a vanity. But my name hath still lived among them here. They feed me with fresh meat and all that the coun- 310 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. try yields. All offer to obey me." In a short time he began to have glimpses of the treacherous nature of the sovereign in whose name he had gone forth to " make new nations.'' James had ob tained from him the most minute details of his plans ; and the king had conimunicated them to Gondomar, who had sent them to his court at Madrid. The king's commander had been promised a free passage through the country. He found it fortified against him. He was himself weak from sickness, and was obliged to be carried in a litter. He sent his faithful follower, Captain Keytnis, to sail up the Orinoco with a part of the squadron in the direction of the mine. The instructions which Raleigh had given were not obeyed. If Keymis found the mine of great richness — royal, as the term was — he was to repel any attack of the Spaniards. But if not royal, he was to return with a basket or two of the ore, to satisfy James that there was a foundation of reality in the attempt to find gold. Keymis landed in the night near the Spanish town of Santa Thome, near the mine. The Spaniards attacked his en campment ; and a battle ensued. After much slaughter, the Eng lish drove back their assailants to the town ; and the Spaniards coming out in fresh force, the son of Raleigh was killed. The governor of the town, a kinsman of Gondomar, also fell. The English burnt Santa Thome, in which they found refining houses. and two ingots of gold. But the passes to the mine were defended by too strong a force to enable Keymis to accomplish the great object of the expedition. When he returned with his diminished crew, the reproaches of his commander led the unfortunate man to commit suicide. The great spirit of Raleigh was crushed. He saw nothing before him but reproach and danger. In a letter to his wife he says, " I protest before the majesty of God, that as sir Francis Drake and sir John Hawkins died heartbroken when they failed of their enterprise, I could willingly do the like, did I not contend against sorrow for your sake, in hope to provide somewhat for you to comfort and relieve you. If I live to return, resolve yourself that it is the care for you that hath strengthened my heart. It is true that Keymis might have gone directly to the mine, and meant it. But after my son's death, he made them believe that he knew not the way, and excused himself upon the want of water in the river; and counterfeiting many impediments left it unfound. When he came back, I told him that he had undone me, and that my credit was lost forever. He answered that when my son was lost, and that he left me so weak that he thought not to find me RALEIGH RETURNS TO ENGLAND. 3" alive, he had no reason to enrich a company of rascals, who, after my son's death, made no account of him." Raleigh conducted his fleet, with mutinous crews, to Newfoundland, and then sailed homeward. On the 1 8th of March, after his return, Howell wrote, " The world wonders extremely that so great a wise man as sir Walter Raleigh would return, to cast himself upon so inevitable a rock as I fear he will." * Two friends, the earls of Pembroke and Arundel, had jiledged their honour for his return, and he would not be a cause of trouble to them. This Arundel acknowledged when Raleigh, on the scaffold, reminded him of the promise that he had made to the earl that he would return. Gondomar was now su preme at the English court, negotiating a marriage between prince Charles and the Infanta of Spain. The destiny of Raleigh was in the hands of the malignant Spaniard and the revengeful king. Raleigh was arrested at Plymouth ; and after some stratagems to escape to France, and to obtain delay, having feigned madness, he was conducted to his old prison of the Tower. He was examined before commissioners, upon the charge that he fraudulently pre tended that he went to discover a mine, when his real object was to make a piratical attack upon the Spanish settlements. He de nied these charges with constancy and boldness ; but admitted his attempt to escape, and his pretence of mental derangement, which he excused by the desire which every man feels to escape death. In his imprisonment he was no longer under the care of the kind sir Allen Apsley. That lieutenant of the Tower was removed from the charge of Raleigh, to make way for sir Thomas Wilson, who wrote constant reports of his conversations with his prisoner. These are in the State Paper Office. " On the perusal of these papers, it is difficult to say whether the preponderating feeling is sympathy for the captive, or disgust and indignation for his unfeel ing and treacherous keeper." f It was the king himself who was urging on his creature to worm himself into the confidence of Ra leigh for the purpose of betraying him. But all the arts of the be trayer were unavailing. Nothing could be obtained which could furnish a new ground of accusation. The letters which passed between Raleigh and his wife were intercepted, and were read by the king. It was determined at length that the prisoner should be executed under his former sentence, by a writ of privy seal direct ed to the judges. But they held that their warrant for execution could not be issued, after so long a time had elapsed since the * " Letters,'-' p. 8. t Jardine, " Criminal Trials," vol. i. 312 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. judgment, without bringing up the prisoner to plead. Raleigh, suffering under an ague, was brought on the 24th and again on the 28th of October to the King's Bench at Westminster, and there being asked why execution should not pass against him, he urged that he was discharged of the original judgment by the king's com mission for his voyage, which gave him new life and vigour. Exe cution was granted. Raleigh asked for a little delay, to settle his affairs and his mind. He was brought out of his prison the next morning to die upon the scaffold, in the Old Palace Yard at West minster. The night before his death, he wrote these lines on a blank leaf of his Bible : — " E'en such is time ; who takes in trust Our youth, our joys, and all we have, And pays us but with age and dust ; Who, in the dark and silent grave, When we have wander* d all our ways, Shuts up the story of our days. But from this earth, this grave, this dust, The Lord will raise me up, I trust.' ' The last end of this heroic man was worthy of his great genius. He received the Sacrament; he declared his forgiveness of all persons ; he manifested the utmost cheerfulness ; he gave thanks to the Almighty who had imparted to him the strength of mind never to fear death, and to meet it with courage in the assurance of His love. He breakfasted, and smoked his usual pipe of tobac co. When he came to the scaffold he was very faint ; and com menced his speech tc the assembled crowd, by saying that during the last two days he had' been visited by two ague fits. "If there fore you perceive any weakness in me, I beseech you ascribe it to my sickness rather than to myself." His speech was of a manly tone, defending himself from slanders which had been raised against him. He implored the bystanders to join with him in prayer to that great God whom he had grievously offended ; "be ing a man full of all vanity, and one v. ho hath lived a sinful life in such callings as have been most inducing to it ; for I have been a soldier, a sailor, and a courtier, all of them courses of wickedness and vice." He was asked by the dean of Westminster in what re ligion he meant to die, and he replied, in the faith professed by the Church of England, hoping to be saved by the blood and merits of our Saviour. It was a bitter morning; and the sheriff proposed that he should descend from the scaffold and warm himself : " No, good Mr. Sheriff, let us despatch, for within this quarter of an AFFAIRS OF THE PALATINATE. 3 13 hour my ague will come upon me, and if I be not dead before that, my enemies will say I quake for fear." He took the axe in his Band, kissed the blade, and said to the sheriff, " 'Tis a sharp med icine, but a sound cure for all diseases." So died the last of Eliz abeth's heroes. The execution of Raleigh called forth indignation, " not loud but deep," in the English mind. The people felt that he was sacri ficed to Spain, against which power, its Jesuits and its inquisitions, he had waged no inglorious warfare. He was sacrificed by a king from whom the bold Protestant spirit was departed, and who remained sujiine whilst the two great principles which divided Europe were again preparing for a struggle. Thus thought the majority of the natior, at a time of extraordinary excitement in con nection with foreign events. The daughter of James had been married six years to the Elector Palatine. He was a prince of a serious character ; by nature proud and reserved ; earnest in the discharge of his duties as a ruler; not devoid of ambition to become a leader for a great public object. The Calvinists of Bohemia had been in insurrection upon a question of the posses sion of some lands of the church which were held by Catholics ; and the quarrel was under arbitration at the instance of the em peror Mathias when he died. Mathias was also king of Bohemia; and the archduke Ferdinand was chosen emperor. He had been recognized as successor to the throne of Bohemia ; but he was a determined zealot of Catholicism ; and the Bohemians, who held that their crown was elective, offered it to Frederic, who had been one of the arbitrators to settle the difference which had led to their insurrection. The Elector Palatine, after some hesitation, accepted vthe dangerous promotion, and was crowned at Prague, in Novem ber, 1 619. The resolve was the signal for a general array of hos-. tile forces throughout Europe. The great battle of Protestantism and Catholicism appeared once more likely to be fought out. Had Elizabeth been alive she would have thrown all her force into the conflict. James at first refused to give any assistance to his son- in-law. The Protestants of England were roused to an enthusiasm which had been repressed for years. They saw the armies of Austria and Spain gathering to snatch the crown from the elective king of Bohemia, and to invade the Palatinate. They saw many of the Protestant princes forming an union for his defence. Volun teers were ready to go forth from England full of zeal for the support of the Elector. James was professing an ardent desire tc 314 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Protestant deputies to assist his son-in-law ; and at the same time' vowing to the Spanish ambassador that the alliance with his Catholic master, which was to be cemented by the marriage of prince Charles to the Infanta, was the great desire of his heart. At length the Catholic powers entered the Palatinate ; and the cry to arm was so loud amongst the English and the Scotch, that James reluctantly marshalled a force of four thousand volunteers, not to support his son-in-law upon the throne of Bohemia, but to assist in defending his hereditary dominions. The scanty assist ance came too late. Frederic was defeated by the Austrians at Prague, on the 7th of November, 1620, which decisive battle en tirely destroyed his slight tenure of power in Bohemia. He was very shortly after driven from the Palatinate, which was handed over to the tender mercies of the conquerors. The supporters of the Elector, in Bohemia, a country which had been the refuge of persecuted reformers, were trodden down by the iron heel of Aus tria. The Puritan party in England considered this misfortune as " the greatest blow which the Church of God had received, since the first Reformation by Martin Luther in 1517."* The union of the Protestant princes was broken up. " The Catholic principle passed with wonderful rapidity from a moment of the utmost danger to an omnipotent sway over the south of Germany and the Austrian provinces." f It was during the excitement of this conflict, and in the month following the victory of the Austrians at Prague, that James adopted one of those arbitrary measures which weak governments resort to in their imbecile desire to control public opinion. On the 27th of December, says D'Ewes, " I saw and perused a proclamation set out by his majesty inhibiting or forbidding any of his sub jects to discourse of state-matters, either foreign or domestic ; which all men conceived to have been procured by the count of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador." The Autobiographer holds this proclamation to be "unseasonable and harsh," be cause the triumphs of Romanism •¦ required men's mutual con doling, which might prove a means to stir them up to a more zealous and earnest intercession with God by prayer." This was an inno cent delusion of the young Puritan ; for that Englishmen should cease to interchange their thoughts at the bidding of an insolent government was as impossible as to prevent them thinking. Their * D'Ewes, " Autobiography,** vol. i. p. 162. t R.i nkc, " History of the Popes," vol. ii. p. 465. PARLIAMENT. 315 thoughts broke out in! signs not to be mistaken. The Spanish ambassador, who dwelt in the bishop of Ely's house in Holborn, was obliged to have a guard of soldiers to protect him ; and " when he passed at any time through London in his horse-litter, many were the curses and execrations the people bestowed upon him." The old dread of the supremacy of Popery was coming back. Round the Spanish ambassadors a vast following of English and Irish papists had been accustomed to collect. " Their house was the resort of their brethren in the faith, and, as a Venetian said, they were regarded almost in the light of legates of the apostolic see."* It was in this excited temper of the nation that the king at length called a parliament, which met on the 30th of January, 1621. In his progress from Whitehall to Westminster, "he spake often and lovingly to the' people, standing thick and three-fold on all sides to behold him, ' God bless ye ! God bless ye ! ' contrary to his former hasty and passionate custom, which often in his sudden distemper would bid a plague on such as flocked to see him." f A little before this time he had in a proclamation directed that those.who crowded upon him in joining the royal hunt without permission, should be sent to gaol, calling their curiosity " the bold and barbarous insolency of multitudes of vulgar people." J He is bow in a gracious, humour. He has something to ask ofthe Parliament : '•' I have reigned eighteen years, iii which time you have had peace, and I have received far less supply than hath been given to any king since the Conquest. The last queen, of famous memory, had, one year with another, above a hundred thousand jjounds per annum in subsidies." James does not attempt a comparison between the manner in which the queen of famous memory spent her subsidies in the defence of her country, and in the support of Protestantism in Europe ; while he was lavishing thousands upon Hay and Somerset and Villiers, impoverishing the crown and degrading the nation. Clarendon, speaking of the reigning favourite of 1621, and his host of depend ants, says that the demesnes and revenues of the crown were sacrificed to the enriching of a private family ; " and the expenses of the court so vast and unlimited, that they had a sad prosjject of that poverty and necessity which afterwards befell the crown, almost to the ruin of it." § The parliament of 1621 was in no complacent mood. James said to them, " 1 have often piped unto you but you have not * Ranke, " History of the Popes," vol. ii p. 498. t D'Ewes, vol. i. p. 170. X " Verney Papers," p. 117. § " History of the Rebellion," book i. 316 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. danced." They gave him a small subsidy in return for unusually gracious speeches ; and then went boldly about the redress of grievances. They revived the use of the terrible word "impeach ment," which had gone out of men's mouths for nearly two centu ries. Monopolists were the first attacked with this constitutional weapon. One of the greatest of them, sir Giles Mompesson, find ing that the government which had granted him his patents for gold and silver thread, and for licensing inns and alehouses, would not stand up in his defence, fled beyond sea. In his licensing of ale houses, a justice ofthe peace, sir Francis Michell, had been the instru ment of Mompesson's oppressions. His patent for gold thread was used for the purposes of fraud. " They found out a new alchy- mistical way to make gold and silver lace with copper and other sophistical materials." * The dramatists of the time brought the monopolists into notice upon the public stage : " Here's another : Observe but what a cozening look he has ! Hold up thy head, man; if, for drawing gallants Into mortgages for commodities, or cheating heirs With your new counterfeit gold thread, and gumm'd velvets, He does not transcend all that went before him, Call in his patent." f The sir Giles Overreach of Massinger's " New Way to Pay Old Debts " was sir'Giles Mompesson, and the justice Greedy of the same popular play was justice Michell. The real Overreach and the real Greedy were degraded from knighthood, were fined, and were banished. Higher delinquents began to tremble. Yelverton, the attorney-general, was connected with the prevailing corruption, and when detected denounced Villiers as his enemy. The judge of the Prerogative Court was impeached for venality ; and the bishop of Landaff for being accessory to a matter of bribery. It was an age of universal abuses. Local magistrates were influ enced by the pettiest gifts, and were called "basket-justices," — a name which in the next century was applied to the stipendiary justices of Bow-street. Upon the highest branch of this rotten tree sat Francis Bacon, viscount St. Alban's, the great lord Chan cellor. His contemporaries were impressed with his versatile abilities and his majestic eloquence ; but they were disgusted hy his profusion, and they had little confidence in his honesty. The greatness of his intellect was to be appreciated in other ages ; and •Wilson. t Massinger, ''The Bondman," Act IL, sc. 3. LORD BACON IMPEACHED. 317 his faults were then to be slightly regarded while the eyes of all men were to be dazzled by the splendour of his genius. His con temporaries, with one accord, resolved that no excuse should in terfere with his degradation, for what he himself called his frailty in partaking of "the abuses of the times." He was charged by the Commons, before the Lords, with twenty-two acts of bribery and corruption. He attempted no defence. He saw that the court would not shield him, even if it had the power. He made a dis tinct confession in writing of the charges brought against him ; and when a deputation from the peers asked if that confession was his own voluntary act, he replied, " It is my act, my hand, my heart. Oh, my lords, spare a broken reed." The sentence of the parlia ment was that the viscount St. Alban's, late Lord Chancellor, be fined ,£40,000; be imprisoned in the Tower during the king's pleasure ; made incapable to bear office in the commonwealth, never to sit in parliament ; nor to come within the verge of the court. The king remitted the fine, and released the fallen man after an imprisonment of a few days. It is vain to attribute Bacon's fall to the malevolence of Coke or the intrigues of Villiers. The House of Commons saw that the time had come for striking at the root of some of the most flagrant of official corruptions ; and Bacon, though perhaps not more guilty than many others, was struck down as a signal example to lesser offenders. The latest editor of Bacon's Philosophical Works, pointing out that the Chancellor admitted the taking of presents, as he himself had taken them, to be indefensible, adds that he always denied he had been an unjust judge ; or, to use his own words, " had ever had bribe or reward in his eve or thought when he pronounced any sentence or order." With regard tp the degree of moral criminality, these questions are proposed : " 1. What was the understanding, open or secret, upon which the present was given or taken ? 2. To what extent the practice was prevalent at the time ? 3. How far it was toler ated ? 4. How it stood with regard to other abuses prevailing at the same time." * If these points could be satisfactorily ascertain ed the most merciful conclusion at which we could arrive would be the opinion of Bacon himself, as recorded by Dr. Rawley : " I was the justest judge that was in England these fifty years ; but it was the justest censure in parliament that was there these two hundred years." * " Works of Francis Bacon," collected and edited by James Spedding, vol. i. Note to Life by Rawley. 1S57. 318 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. If the stern severity of the House of Commons, in which the peers went along with them, towards every order of delinquents, from the griping usurer to the prodigal chancellor, demands our respect, we must regard with equal abhorrence the same popular assembly when carried away by a passionate fanaticism into an act of vindictive cruelty. The House was in a fever about the Palati nate ; and when it became known that a Roman Catholic barrister, Edward Floyd,, had expressed his joy that "goodman Palsgrave and goodwife Palsgrave " had been driven from Prague, there was no punishment too terrible to be inflicted upon the delinquent— whipping, the pillory, boring of his tongue, nailing of his ears, were small justice for such an offence. The House went beyond its powers in passing a heavy sentence upon Floyd, without hearing him. He appealed to the king, denying the accusation against him ; and the Commons were asked by the Council how they took upon them to judge offences which did not interfere with their privileges. The House paused; and Floyd was arraigned before the Lords, who confirmed the sentence, with additional severities. Whipping, which was a part of this sentence, was remitted on the motion of prince Charles. The unhappy man underwent the other unjust punishment, — to pay a fine of 5000/., and to be imprisoned for life. " There is surely no instance," says Mr. Hallam, " in the annals of our own, and hardly of any civilised country, where a trifling offence, if it were one, has been visited with such outrage ous cruelty." Let us not forget, as we proceed in tracing the his tory of this nation, that the passions of a parliament have been as marked, if not as frequent, a source of injustice as the despotic tendencies of a king ; and let us feel that a due balance of the powers of the respective estates cannot be so happily preserved that prerogative and privilege may be kept equally innoxious, except under the guidance of an enlightened public opinion. The king and the parliament had been proceeding in apparent harmony, when they were adjourned over the summer. The court had manifested no zeal about the question of the Palatinate ; but the Commons made a solemn protestation, which was entered in the Journals, that they would spend their lives and fortunes in the defence of their religion, and of the cause of the Elector. Their pledge " was sounded forth with the voices of them all, withal lifting up their hats in their hands as high as they could hold them, as a visible testimony of their unanimous consent, in such sort that the like had scarce ever been seen in parliament." The Houses met THE KING AND THE PARLIAMENT AT ISSUE. 319 again, after an interval of five months, on the 20th of November. It was announced that troops had been sent for .the defence of the Palatinate under sir Horace Vere. The Commons voted a small subsidy, which was totally inadequate to any vigorous exer tions. The clamour for warlike operations was not seconded by any liberality which could rouse James to exertion. The Parlia ment had no confidence in a king who shuddered at a drawn sword. His natural temperament and his policy were in complete accord ; and it was perhaps well for the country that they were so. Had his son Henry been on the throne, who proposed the Black Prince and Henry the Fifth as his models, England might have put her self at the head of a great religious war ; but she would have wasted that strength which enabled her, in another quarter of a century, to wage a greater battle at home for civil and religious liberty, without losing her power of commanding the respect of every gov ernment in Europe. England had in this year an opportunity to draw the sword in a necessary quarrel — the suppression of the outrages of the Barbary pirates. Spain had agreed to co-operate in an attack upon Algiers ; but she sent a very insufficient force to join the English flag. James went about this salutary work in his timid and parsimonious way. He directed the commander of his fleet, sir James Mansell not to risk his ships. The Algerines, having had only a few boats burnt, defended their harbour, and Mansell came home with noth ing achieved. The English merchantmen were now the prey of the African pirates, and the country bitterly complained of the national losses and the national dishonour. When the parliament re-assembled, it was in no conciliating humour. Lords Essex and Oxford had returned from the Palatinate, and proclaimed that the country of the Elector and the Protestant cause were lost for want of timely aid. As we have seen, the two Houses were afraid to trust the expenditure of money in uncapable hands. They could not understand how James was affecting a desire to contend against the power of Spain and Austria, when he was negotiating, in secret as he believed, for the marriage of his son to the daughter of the Most Catholic king. During the recess, a leading member of the Com mons, sir Edwin Sandys, had been committed to the Tower ; but it was protested that the commitment was unconnected with the privileges of the House. His bold manner of speaking in par liament was undoubtedly his offence. The Commons passed over this matter ; but they drew up a petition, prepared by Coke, against 320 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the growth of Popery, urging that prince Charles should marry one of his own religion, and that the king should turn his attention to wards that power which had first carried on the war in the Palatinate. That power was Spain. James had heard of this motion ; and he anticipated the receipt of the petition by sending a violent letter to the Speaker, commanding the House not to meddle with any matter which concerned his government, or the mysteries of state. He informed them also that he meant not to spare any man's insolent, behaviour in parliament. The Commons returned a temperate an swer, in which the king was told that their liberty of speech was their ancient and undoubted right. James replied that their privileges were derived from the grace and permission of his ancestors and himself. Some excuses were made for the expressions of the king, which were called a slip of the pen. The Commons deliberately re corded their opinions, in a memorable protestation, on the 18th of December, 1621, in which they solemnly affirmed, that the liberties" and jurisdictions of parliament are the ancient and undoubted birth right and inheritance of the subjects of England ; that the affairs of the king and the state, of the defence of the realm, and of the Church of England, the making of laws, the redress of grievances are proper subjects of debate in parliament; that in handling such business every member of the House hath, and of right ought to have, freedom of speech ; and that every member hath like free dom from all impeachment, imprisonment, and molestation, except by the censure of the House itself. There were great men con cerned in this protestation, — Coke, Pvm, Selden. Eminent peers, for almost the first time in the history of the country, took part with the Commons against the Crown. The king dissolved the parliament, and imprisoned the earl of Oxford, and the leading members of the Commons. The struggle which was to be fought out in the battle-field, twenty years afterwards, was already com menced in a most unmistakable manner. It was a contest for first principles. England was to be a Constitutional Monarchy or a Despotism. The parliament being dissolved, James again resorted to a Benevolence — a voluntary contribution of the people, as the courtiers pretended. Its voluntary character may be understood from a little incident : " A merchant of London, who had been a cheesemonger, but now rich, was sent for by the Council, and re quired to give the king 200/., or to go into the Palatinate and serve the army with cheese, being a man of eighty years of age." * * " Letter of Mr. Mead," February, 1622. Ellis, Second Series, vol. iii. p. 240 PRINCE CHARLES AND VILLIERS IN SPAIN. 32 1 The king, who publicly declared that "he would govern accord ing to tire good of the commonweal but not according to the com mon-will," * went on with his Spanish negotiation in utter defiance of the public feeling. His son-in-law was now a refugee at the Hague, with his queen, — a favourite of the English, — and their fam ily. Their misfortunes, as well as the defeat of the principle which they represented, excited the warmest sympathy. In no point of policy was there any concord between the government and the people. In February, 1623, London was startled with the extraor dinary news that the prince of Wales and Villiers, now marquis of Buckingham, had gone off privately for Madrid. The negotia tion for the marriage with the Spanish princes^ had been nearly concluded by the earl of Bristol, a special ambassador to the court of the young king Philip IV., the brother of the Infanta. A dis pensation from the pope was only waited for ; and James had him self written to his Holiness to urge the favour. He promised all sorts of toleration ; and to give an earnest of his disposition, sud denly released from prison a large number of Popish recusants, to the great anger of the Puritans. The motives for the strange pro ceeding of the prince and the favourite remain a mystery. Claren don holds that Villiers originated the scheme to gain favour with the prince, who had been long jealous of him. The king was at first greatly opposed to the adventure, which was not without its, danger. Smith seems to be a favourite name for disguised princes. Charles was John Smith, and the marquis Thomas Smith. They were accompanied by Sir Richard Graham. They got to Dover, after some awkward enquiries, and there were joined by sir Francis Cottington and Mr. Endymion Porter. The)" reached Paris, and in their disguise had a peep at the Court, and saw the princess Henrietta Maria, the lady whose good or evil destiny to be the future queen of England overruled that of the Spanish princess. On the 7th of March the " sweet boys and dear ventrous knights, worthy to be put in a new romanso," as James termed them, ar rived at Madrid. Howell, one of the most amusing of letter-writers, was then in the Spanish capital, and he describes how, " to the wonderment of all the world, the prince and the marquis of Buck ingham arrived at this court." He tells how they alighted at my lord of Bristol's house; how Mr. Thomas Smith came in at first with a portmantle, whilst Mr. John Smith staid on the other side of the street in the dark ; how Bristol brought in the prince to his * " Letter of Mr. Mead," February, 1622. Ellis, Second Series, vol.~iii. p. 240. Vol. Ill — 21 *22 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. bed-chamber ; how the marquis the next day had a private audience of the king of Spain ; how the king came to visit the prince ; how the royal family went out in a coach, the. Infanta having a blue ribbon about her arm that the prince might distinguish her as he took the air on the Prado ; and how when the lady saw her lover her colour rose very high. The prince and his companion were seven months absent from England. To attempt to follow out the course of the intrigues that took place during this period, would be far beyond our limits ; nor do we conceive that, however amusing may be the relation of court festivities, the bull-fights and the tournaments, the processions and the banquets, with which the heir of England's throne was received, they are necessary to be here detailed. That Charles was conducting himself with that duplicity which belonged to his nature is agreed on all hands. He was ready to promise, not only toleration for the Roman Catholics in England, but that he would never engage in any hostile measure against the Church of Rome ; but on the contrary would endeavour to bring about an unity in one faith and one church.*" In August James made oath to certain articles which had been agreed upon : that the Infanta, with her suite, was to be allowed the exercise of her religion ; that the early education of her children should be en trusted to her ; that even if they should remain Catholic their right of succession should not be interfered with. The king also prom ised not to trouble the Catholics in the private exercise of their religion ; nor to impose any oath against their faith ; and to endeav our to obtain from parliament a repeal of all penal laws against them. If the marriage had taken place, and these conditions had been observed, England would infallibly have been plunged into civil war. As it was, after a long course of deceit either to the court of Spain or to the people of England, or to both, Charles and Buckingham returned home. The ministers of Spain had in terposed many vexatious delays whilst Charles was at Madrid, and had attempted to take advantage of his presence. He made en gagements which he would not have ventured to fulfil ; and he sanc tioned misrepresentations for his vindication when he returned to England. Buckingham was jealous of the earl of Bristol; and he conceived a dislike to the Spanish court, to which his insolent manners and gross licentiousness were displeasing. His personal resentments, and perhaps the tastes of the prince, destroyed the web of policy which James had been so long weaving. The king * See Ranke, vol. ii. p. 500. PARLIAMENT. — WAR. 323 had been, quite willing to surrender all the outworks which defended England against a new invasion of papal supremacy, in his desire for a marriage which would give his son a princess with a great dowry, and secure, as he fondly expected, the restoration of his son-in-law to his hereditary dominions. The people would have made no compromise with Spain and they would have boldly sought to settle the affairs of the Palatinate by the sole argument which the Catholic powers would have regarded, success in arms. When the prince and Buckingham returned home, and the marriage treaty was broken off, there was universal rejoicing. The duke be came immediately popular ; and in his confidence in the altered tone of public feeling he persuaded the king to summon a parliament. It met on the 19th of February, 1624. The houses confided in Buck ingham's artful representations of his conduct in the transactions with Spain ; and he was hailed by Coke, in the Commons, as the saviour of his country. The king was all graciousness. It was re solved that a grant to the extent of ,£300,000 should be made, for the specific purpose of recovering the Palatinate ; and the war was thus necessarily a war against Spain, united as she was with the other branch of the house of Austria in holding the dominions of the Elector and in endeavouring to destroy Protestantism in Europe. In this Session of three months a great good was sought to be accomplished by the passing of a Statute which declared all monopolies to be contrary to law, and all such grants to be void.* The struggle to effect this object had been a long one. The prom ises of the Crown had been constantly broken ; but now, by a solemn Act of Parliament, the exclusive privileges to use any trade and to sell any merchandise were declared to be contrary to the ancient and fundamental laws of the realm, and all grants and dis pensations for such monopolies to be of none effect. How the Statute was respected will be seen in the next reign. In this last parliament of James, there was unquestionably a better understanding between the Crown and the representatives of the people : — a practical concord that, under a new king, might have been improved into a co-operation for the general good, if the altered condition of society had been understood by both rjarties. The Commons had now acquired a full confidence in their own strength. They impeached Cranfield earl of Middlesex, lord treasurer of England, for bribery and other misdemeanours. He was convicted, after a trial before the Peers, conducted by managers on the part * 21 Jac. I. c. 3. 324 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of the Commons ; was fined ,£50,000 ; and was decjared incapable of sitting in jjarliament. Buckingham's jealousy of the lord trea surer's power is held to have contributed to this result. The king warned his son and his favourite that they might live to have their fill of parliamentary impeachments ; but he could not resist, the united force of public justice and private intrigue. From the time of the failure of the Spanish treaty, the monarch who claimed to be absolute felt that he was powerless. He had lost even the respect of his son ; his insolent minion despised him. He was forced into war against his will ; and the war brought him no honour, whilst it absorbed his revenues. An army of twelve thousand men was raised in England for the service of the Elector Palatine. Half the number were lost from sickness by being embarked in foul and crowded ships ; and their commander, Count Mansfeldt, was not strong enough to undertake any offensive operations. England was not in any very glorious attitude. The people became discon tented ; and their discontents were not lightened when another ne gotiation was set on foot for the marriage of prince Charles with a princess of France, in which country Catholicism was again be coming intolerant and persecuting. In March, 1625, king James was taken ill at Theobalds. He died on the 27th of that month, in the fifty-ninth year of his age. and in the twenty-third year of his reign. ACCESSION OF CHARLES I: 325 CHAPTER XVIII. Accession of Charles I.— Marriage of the king with Henrietta Maria.— The first Parlia ment of Charles. — Grievances. — Nival failures.— The second Parliament. — Contests of Peers and Commons with the Crown.— Subsidies illegally levied.— Imprisonments for refusals to pay.— The Queen^s foreign attendants dismissed.— War with France. — Its causes.— La Rochelle.— Expedition to the Isle of Rhe\— The third Parliament.— Petition of Right. — Buckingham denounced in the Commons' House.— Prorogation of Parliament. — Siege of La Rochelle. — Buckingham and Richelieu.— Assassination of Buckingham.— Felton, the assassin.— Surrender of La Rochelle.— Parliament.— Religious differences. — Parliament dissolved in anger. — Members imprisoned.— Peace with Spain and France. Charles I. was proclaimed king on the day of his father's death. The possessor of the crown was changed. The administra tion of government was unaltered. Buckingham was still the first in power ; with equal influence over the proud and dignified Charles of twenty-five, as rotest that if her marriage were blessed with line age she would " make no choice of any but Catholic persons to nurse and bring up the children that may be born of it." It is clear that the court of France expected from this secret treaty not only toleration for Roman Catholics, but an open encouragement, which the king, however bound by his promise, could not venture to grant. The explanation which the able historian of the popes offers of the origin of this war is far more satisfactory than the ordinary solution. Pope Urban VIIL, says Ranke, represented to the French ambassador how offensive it was to France, that the English by no means adhered to the promises made at the mar riage. Either Louis XIIL ought to compel the fulfilment of these engagements, or wrest the crown from a heretic prince who was a violator of his word. To the Spanish ambassador the pope said that Philip IV. was bound to succour his kinswoman, the queen of England, who was suffering oppression on account of her religion. On the 20th of April, 1627, a treaty was signed between the French minister, Richelieu, and the Spanish minister, Olivarez, by which 334 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. it was agreed that the two powers should unite in an invasion of Eno-land. It was also agreed that in the event of conquest the pop&e should have Ireland, and govern it by a viceroy. " While the Catholic powers were devising this vast plan of an attack on England, it fell out that they were themselves surprised by an at tack from England." * This solution of an historical .problem, the cause of the French war, is far more consistent with probability than Charles's " alliance, with the Huguenot party in consequence merely of Buckingham's unwarrantable hostility to France, founded on the most extraordinary motives." t The treaty between France and Spain had become known to the Venetian ambassador at Paris, and it was not likely that the knowledge would not have been com municated to the English government, with which the Venetians held friendly relations. It is creditable to the statesmanship of Buckingham that he resolved to anticipate the projected attack upon England by a strenuous aid to the French Protestants, who were asserting their religious freedom in the ancient stronghold of the reformers, La Rochelle. The policy of the war was calculated to redeem the odium into which Buckingham had fallen. The conduct of the war, under his own generalship, only brought on him a deeper public indignation. On the 27th of June, 1627, whilst cardinal Richelieu was pre paring to besiege La Rochelle, Buckingham set sail from- Ports mouth with a fleet of a hundred shijss, carrying six or seven thou sand land forces. At the latter end of July he appeared before La Rochelle, and proffered his assistance in the defence of the town. The inhabitants, perhaps remembering that English ships had been lent to France to be employed against them, had a natural distrust of the proffered friendship ; and declined to open their gates to the duke. It was then determined to occupy the adjacent island of Rhe. Buckingham and his forces landed, having driven back the troops which opposed him. But he wanted the skill of a general, though his personal courage cannot reasonably be doubted. His plans were unformed. He remained inactive whilst the French threw reinforcements and provisions into their forts. He besieged the principal fort of St. Martin without success ; and at the time when further aid from England was expected, raised the siege and retreated towards his ships. " The retreat," says Clarendon, "had been a rout without an enemy ; and the French had their revenge by the disorder and confusion of the English themselves, in which * See the curious relation in Ranke, vol. ii. book vii. chap. 3. t Hallam. THE THIRD PARLIAMENT. 335 great numbers of noble and ignoble were crowded to death or drowned." The people had their joke upon this disastrous expe dition, for they called the isle of Rhe"the isle of Rue;" but there was something more enduring than popular sarcasm. There were mutinies, after Buckingham's return in the autumn, in the fleet and army. The people refused to suffer the soldiers to be billeted on them, and opposed an impress of fresh forces. Martial law was proclaimed, and many were executed ; " which," says Clar endon, " raised an asperity in the minds of more than of the com mon people." The general discontent was increased by an inland army being retained during the winter. Sir Robert Cotton repre sented to the king that this was an unexampled course; that Eliza beth, even in 1588, adopted no such measures ; and that the peo ple considered that this army was kept on foot to " subject their fortunes to the will of power rather than of law, and to make good some further breach upon their liberties at home, rather than de fend them from any force abroad." There was a general disaffec tion throughout the conntry. "This distemper," says Clarendon, " was so universal, that the least spark still meeting with combus tible matter enough to make a flame, all wise men looked upon it as the prediction of the destruction and dissolution that would fol low. Nor was there a serenity in the countenance of any man, who had age and experience enough to consider things to come." In this temper of the people resort was once more had to a par liament, to supply the urgent necessities created by this ill-con ducted war. In summoning his third parliament the king evinced some faint indication of a desire for a better understanding with his people, by releasing those who had been imprisoned for refusing to con tribute to the forced loan of the previous year. From seventy- seven persons thus released no submission was required ; and no concession was offered to them for the wrong. Many of them were men of fortune ; and the sense of the injustice which had been done to them was shown by their being returned to the par. Iiament which met on the 17th of March. No House of Commons more powerful from the station, the wealth, and the talent of its members, was ever before assembled in England. In the letter of a contemporary it is said, " I heard a lord intimate they were able to buy the Upper House over, notwithstanding there be of lords temporal to the number of a hundred and eighteen ; and what lord in England would be followed by so many freeholders as some of 336 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. these are?"* The ardour of their debates, the energy of their resolves, were tempered by a patience and gravity which is the more remarkable considering the personal indignities which some of their body had received. Clarendon acknowledges that he does not know any formed act of either house that was not agreeable to the wisdom and justice of great courts ; and that " whoever con siders the acts of power and injustice of some of the ministers in the intervals of parliament, will not be much scandalised at the warmth and the vivacity of those meetings." The king opened this parliament with words which the house of Stuart seemed to think essential to its dignity. He asked for a supply ; if denied a speedy relief to his necessities he would resort to other means. " Take not this as a threatening," he added ; " I scorn to threaten any but my equals." The menace passed unnoticed. The Com mons knew that commissioners had been appointed to levy imposi tions, if there was an inevitable necessity ; and that a contract had been entered into for sending over troops and arms from Flanders, under pretence to defend the country from invasion. They re solved to grant a large supply, — five subsidies, — to be paid within a year. Put your excellent resolution in the form of a bill, said the courtiers. Wait a little, was the answer. We must have securities that his money shall be no longer exacted from the sub ject in the form of loans ; that no person shall be imprisoned or molested for refusing such loans ; that soldiers shall not be billeted on pruvate persons ; that commissions for martial law shall be re voked or annulled. Upon these demands was founded the "Peti tion of Right" which became one of the Statutes of the realm. It were long to tell how hard was the struggle before this memorable petition became a law. Coke, in a conference between the Lords and Commons, exclaimed, "it lies not under Mr. Attorney's cap to answer one of our arguments." Selden stated that he had written out with his own hand all the precedents which existed in the records, and that Mr. Attorney would not find one omitted. Went worth (afterwards Strafford) said " We vindicate — what ? new things ? No ; our ancient, legal, and vital liberties, — by re-enforc ing the laws enacted by our ancestors ; by setting such a seal upon them as no licentious spirit shall dare hereafter to enter upon them." The king was extremely unwilling to give up what he thought his right of arbitrary imprisonment; and he secretly sub mitted certain questions to the judges, the most material of which * Quoted from Sloan's MSS. in Mr. Forster's " Life of Sir John Eliot," p. 57, note. PETITION OF RIGHT. 337 was whether, in assenting to the Commons' petition, he should not exclude himself from committing a subject without showing cause. The judges held out an indirect promise that this apprehended limitation should not be the effect of the Petition if it should be come law. The lord-keeper had declared that the king held Magna Charta and the other Statutes which protected the liberty of the subject to be in force, and that they would find as much security in his royal word as in any law that they could make. The secre tary, Cook, when he asked in the name of the king, whether the House would rest on the royal word, was answered thus by Pym ; " We have his majesty's coronation oath to maintain the laws of England : what need we then to take his word ? " After many at tempts to shake the resolution of the Commons, the bill was passed ; and the Houses were assembled to hear the royal assent. It was given in these words : " The king willeth that right be done accord ing to the laws and customs of the realm, and that the Statutes be put in due execution, that the subjects may have no cause to com plain of any wrong or oppression contrary to their just rights and liberties ; to the preservation whereof he holds himself in con science as well obliged, as of his prerogative." Smooth words ; but not such as would content the Commons, who had been accus tomed to hear a much more explicit answer from the throne, when a Petition was to become a law. The Commons returned to their deliberations. " Sir John Eliot," writes a member of the house, Thomas Alured, " moved that as we intended to furnish his majesty with money, we should also supply him with counsel." His speech, — "wherein," says Rushworth, "he gave forth so full and lively a representation of grievances, both general and particu lar, as if they had never before been mentioned," — was a master piece of argument and invective. The king's evasive words formed no topic of this harangue ; but " there wanted not some who said that speech was made out of distrust of his majesty's answer to the petition." * On the day after Eliot had spoken, the Commons had a message from the king to dispatch their old business without entertaining new ; and the day following another message, requir ing them " not to cast or lay any aspersion upon any minister of his majesty." Then was presented a scene such as the tame pa triotism of modern times may have difficulty in comprehending*. Mr. Alured thus describes it in his letter : " Sir Robert Philips of * Rushworth. Eliot's speech is imperfectly given by that' collector ; and is reprinted, with connecting observations, in Mr. Forster's " Life of Eliot." Vol. III.— 22 338 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Somersetshire spake, and mingled his words with weeping. Mr. Pym did the like. Sir Edward Coke, overcome with passion, seeing the desolation likely to ensue, was forced to sit down when he be gan to speak, by the abundance of tears." * The Speaker begged to retire ; and the House went into committee. Then Coke rose and with a solemnity befitting his advanced age, denounced the duke of Buckingham as the author and the cause of all the miseries of the country. There was something in that passion of tears against which the habitual obstinacy of Charles could not contend. The Petition of Right was assented to by the king in the usual manner after the two Houses had requested him to give a satisfactory answer. It now stands in the Statute Book as " The Petition ex hibited to his majesty by the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons in this present Parliament assembled, concerning divers rights and liberties of the subjects : with the King's Majesty's royal answer thereto in full parliament." That answer is " Soil droit fait come est desire." \ The Commons passed their bill of subsidies ; and there were bonfires and bell-ringing throughout the land, for there was hope that the old days of oppression were passed. But the Commons were unwilling to leave their work imperfectly finished ; and they proceeded to prepare a bill to grant the king tonnage and poundage, but delayed passing it till they had delivered a remonstrance against the levy of dues upon mer chandise without consent of parliament. The king stopped the remonstrance by a prorogation ; and told the Commons that he drew this branch of his revenue by his prerogative, and would not submit to have his right questioned. The war with France had assumed the aspect of a trial of strength between Buckingham and Richelieu. Without admitting the very questionable theory that they were rivals for the favour of Anne of Austria, there can be no doubt that on either side there was more than ordinary political hostility. The war has been called a duel between these two ministers. Never was duel fought with greater inequality. Buckingham's highest praise was that of having such " endowments as made him very capable of being a great favourite to a great king." This opinion which Clarendon formed of him indicates very different qualities than those which g,re required in a minister to a great nation. This proud, insolent, voluptuous young man, whose " inordinate appetite and passion, * This interesting letter is to be found in Rushworth, and in " Acta Regia," p. 666. t 3 Car. I. c. 1. SIEGE OF LA ROCHELLE. 339 according to the same authority, were the main cause of the na tional calamities, was to be matched against the most calculating and at the same time the boldest statesman of that age. It was the battle of a pigmy and a giant. Whilst Buckingham was wast ing his soldiers by his gross mismanagement in the isle of Rhe, Richelieu was taking a comprehensive view of the position and re sources of La Rochelle, and forming a plan for its reduction em inently characteristic of his genius. After Buckingham's inglori ous return, a second expedition had gone forth from Plymouth in the spring of 1628, under the duke's brother-in-law, the earl of Denbigh. Having looked at the French fleet in the harbour, he speedily came back to report what he had seen, after the exchange of a few harmless shots. On the 28th of May, Charles wrote to the authorities of La Rochelle, urging them to hold out to the last, and,using these solemn words of assurance to fifteen thousand people, who saw famine slowly but surely approaching, — "Be as sured that I will never abandon you, and that I will employ all the force of my kingdom for your deliverance." A third fleet was equipped, after parliament had granted the subsidies ; and in spite of a remonstrance of the Commons against the power of Bucking ham and his abuse of that jDower, the duke was again to take the command. Had he sailed, the triumph of Richelieu over the man who had aspired to be his rival would have been complete. La Rochelle was wholly blockaded on the land-side ; but the port was ojjen. An English fleet might come to the relief of the town, under better commanders than the rash Buckingham or the timid Den bigh. Richelieu had read in Ouintus Curtius how Alexander the Great had subdued Tyre, by carrying out a mole to interi-ujjt the entrance to the harbour. He caused a great mound to be made fourteen hundred yards across, with a small tide-way ; and it was nearly completed, when a storm destroyed it. He was a man not to be discouraged by one failure, and he caused the work to be begun anew. The tacticians of the army laughed at the extrava gant schemes of the j>riest whom the king had appointed their lieutenant-general. The cardinal persevered ; the mole was formed ; the fate of La Rochelle was certain. The English fleet might now come. It was getting in readiness to sail from Portsmouth. The great duke had arrived to take the command. That he would have fought to tbe death for the relief of the beleaguered Huguenots there can be no doubt. Not only was his pride engaged in the quarrel, but his future political existence depended upon the issue 340 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of this his last venture. He was not destined to fall before the superior genius of Richelieu. He perished by the tenpenny knife of an assassin. At the beginning of June, Charles sent to his minister these orders : " Buckingham, I command you to draw my army together to Portsmouth, to the end I may send them speedily to Rochelle. I shall send after you directions how and where to billet them, untihthe time that you will be able to ship them."* The duke had been at Portsmouth and its neighbourhood for several weeks. On the 23rd of August he was sitting at breakfast in a lower room of the house which he occupied in the town ; and his coach was waiting at the door to convey him to the king, who was staying at a mansion at Southwick. The breakfast-room and the ante-chamber were filled with a crowd of attendants and officers ; and amongst them passed in, unobserved, a short dark man, who, having looked upon the company, went back to the dimly-lighted lobby through which the duke would pass to the street. Buckingham stopped to speak to sir Thomas Fryer ; and the short man being behind stabbed the duke in his left side, leaving the knife in the body. The duke, exclaiming " the villain hath killed me," drew out the knife, and reeling against a chimney fell down dead. The villain was John Felton, a younger brother of a Suffolk family. He had served as lieutenant in the expedition to Rhe ; had been disap pointed of some promotion ; was " of a deep melancholy, silent, and gloomy constitution ; " t and, according to his own dying dec laration, was moved to assassinate the duke as " an enemy to the public." " In a bye-cutler's shop on Tower-hill he bought a ten- penny knife, and the sheath thereof he sewed to the lining of his pocket, that he might at any moment draw forth the blade alone with one hand, for he had maimed the other." | Felton, full of his dark design, made his way to Portsmouth, partly on foot and partly on horseback ; and he there struck down, in one instant, the man whom the shrewd Bassompierre regarded as he who governed ab solutely in England. " Within the space of not many minutes be fore the fall of the body, and removal thereof into the first room, there was not a living creature in either of the chambers." § Felton might have escaped, but in endeavouring to pass through the crowd in the ante-chamber he lost his hat. In that hat was found a paper with the following writing: " That man in my opinion is cowardly and base, and deserveth neither the name of a gentleman nor a • Harleian MS., in the king's hand. t Sir H. Wotton. % Ibid. § Ibid FELTON, THE ASSASSIN. 34 1 soldier, that is unwilling to sacrifice his life for the honour of God and the good of his king and country. Let no man commend for doing it, but rather discommend themselves ; for if God had not taken away their hearts for their sins, he had not gone so long un punished. John Felton." * The assassin went quietly unjjursued into the kitchen of the same house, whilst the people and the sol diers were wildly rushing about, and the gates of the town were closed. The search was in vain for the murderer; but when the multitude returned to the house, a hatless man, standing in the kitchen, exelaimed, " Here I am," and boldly confessed the deed. When it was pretended that the duke was not dead, he declared that he knew he was dispatched, for that it was the hand of heaven that gave the stroke, and if the duke's whole body had been cov ered with armour of proof he could not have avoided it." f Felton was removed to the Tower of London ; was brought to trial on th'e 27th of November ; was sentenced upon his voluntary confession ; and was executed on the 29th, acknowledging that he had been guilty of a great crime. Whilst in the Tower " he was at one time there threatened by Sir Edward Sackville, earl of Dorset, that he should be forced upon the rack to confess who were privy with him and consenting to the duke's death. ' I have,' said he, 'already told the truth on that point, upon my salvation ; and if I be further questioned by torture, I will accuse you, and you only, my lord of Dorset, to be of conspiracy with me." % The deportment of Charles, on receiving the news of his fa vorite minister's untimely death, was more composed than some writers have held to be compatible with a sincere grief. It is as frivolous as unjust to make any such inference. The king did what is the best thing to be done under any calamity — he tasked his faculties in active exertion. He applied himself to complete the equipment of the fleet that Buckingham was to have led to La Rochelle. In twelve days, seventy vessels sailed from Portsmouth, and thirty more quickly followed. On the 15th of September the fleet was off the Isle of Rhe. The earl of Lindsey was the admi ral. In the town of La Rochelle there was the most intense suf fering from famine. The French army surrounded it. The great mole prevented any supply of necessaries from the sea. The Eng- * This document was found amongst the Evelyn papers at Wotton ; and came into the possession of the late Mr. Upcott. t Howel, p. 204. X D'Ewes, vol. i. p. 387. 342 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. lish fleet coasted up and down without any fixed purpose. The spirit of national enterprise was gone. Lindsey looked upon the mole, and had no thought of breaking it down. He looked upon- the French camp, and had no inclination to land his men for an attack. He sent a fire-ship or two into the port, and he discharged a few cannon. On the I Sth of October La Rochelle was surren dered, in despair of receiving any help from the lukewarm or treacherous allies that had stimulated the Protestants to a des perate resistance to their persecutors. The horrors of this siege of fourteen months exceed most of the miseries recorded of be leaguered towns. Fifteen thousand persons died of hunger and disease. There was not a horse left alive in the town, for they had all been eaten. Cow-hides were a delicacy; and when these were gone, and the supply of dogs and cats was exhausted, leather was in request, so that the household of the duchess of Rohan gladly devoured the animal covering of her coach. Lindsey took his fleet back to Portsmouth ; and probably even the courtiers might think that the Commons would have some justice on their side if they repeated the words of their Remonstrance of the last Session, that the conduct of the war had "extremely wasted that stock of hon our that was left unto this kingdom, sometime terrible to all other nations, and now declining to contempt beneath the meanest." On the 20th of January, 1629, the Parliament was assembled. During the recess of six months there had been causes of discon tent and irritation, besides the calamities of La Rochelle. Tonnage and poundage had been collected, as the king had threatened to do, without consent of Parliament ; and goods had been seized when merchants resisted the demand. The king now adopted a less lofty tone. He had enforced these dues, but he was willing to receive them in future by the gift of his people. The judges had decided against the merchants who had refused, payment ; and the Commons were not content to let the matter rest without some marked condemnation of the past violation not only of the ancient Statutes, but of the recent Petition of Right. The House was soon again in a controversial attitude ; and the questions of civil liberty then became embittered by religious differences. There were now two distinct parties in the Church, the Calvinistic and the Arminian — each taking different views of the doctrines of free will and necessity. The Arminian, or High-Church party, the more powerful with the king, was proportionately weak in parliament. The great body of the Commons were puritans — the holders of RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES. 343 opinions that had been gradually strengthening from the time when king James insulted their professors. These opinions had become allied with the cause of constitutional freedom; for it was amongst the High- church party that the intemperate assertors of the divine right of kings were to be found. Laud, translated from the bishop ric of Bath and Wells, had become bishop of London in 1628 ; and was in effect the primate, for archbishop Abbot, whose principles were not in accordance with those ofthe court, had been suspended. Under Laud there had been ceremonial observances introduced into the performance of divine worship, which were offensive to those wlio dreaded a revival of popery in copes and candlesticks, prayers towards the east, and bowings to the altar. We know a little in the present day of the somewhat unchristian spirit engen dered by differences about ceremonies ; but we cannot adequately comprehend the strong feelings of the Englishmen of the seven teenth century upon these jpoirits, unless we bring to the proper understanding of their struggles a candid and tolerant admission that they were men in earnest. It is an odious blemish upon the narrative of Hume, our most popular historian, that whenever he encounters a strong instance of religious zeal in the puritans he exclaims " hypocrisy." It is an almost equal fault of other writers that they regard the desire, however ill-regulated, to invest the performance of religious rites with some ofthe decent orcygfand even pomp of the earlier churches, as mere superstition/ and idol- worship. There was a man who made his first speech in the session of 1629, who it was once the fashion to reg'.r'd as the arch- hypocrite of his times. — Hume calls him " fanatical hypocrite." He was described, as he appeared in the same house eleven years afterwards, as " a gentleman very ordinarily appareled, for it was a plain cloth suit, which seemed to have been made by an ill country- tailor," * — but this plain gentleman, with " his countenanee swol len and reddish, his voice sharp and untunable," had, according to the same observer, an " eloquence full of fervour." It was Oliver Cromwell that attracted the attention of the courtly young gentle man," as Sir Philip Warwick terms himself, in 1640: and in 1629 he was disturbing the complacency of other courtly gentlemen, by a speech thus briefly reported : " That he had heard by relation from one Dr. Beard that Dr. Alablaster had preached flat Popery at Paul's Cross ; and that the bishop of Winchester had commanded him, as his diocesan, he should preach nothing to the contrary, * Warwick's Memoirs, 1701, p. 247. 344 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Mainwaring, so justly censured in this House for his sermons, was by the same bishop's means preferred to a rich living. If these are the steps to church preferment, what are we to expect ? " At present we need not further enter into these theological complaints of the Commons than to indicate their nature by this speech. It was a declaration of opinion by one who, though new to public life in 1629, was connected with some of the great parliamentary leaders by family ties and private friendships ; and was sent to parliament from Huntingdon, the town in which he dwelt, with the reputation of sagacity and energy in his local relations. The complaints thus briefly reported to be uttered by Cromwell at this time are to be found at much greater length in the speeches of more conspicuous members. Brief, but ominous, was the session. There was a committee formed on religion ; and charges against bishop Laud were to be presented to the king. Eliot prepared a form of three protestations, — that whoever should bring in innovations in religion, extend or introduce Popery or Arminianism ; whoever should advise the levying or taking tonnage and poundage not granted by parliament ; whoever should voluntarily pay the same ; should be reputed a capital enemy to the kingdom and commonwealth. On the 2nd of March Eliot brought forward these matters, in the shape of a remonstrance. The Speaker refused to read the paper ; the clerk at the table refused to read it. Eliot then read it himself, and demanded that it should be put to the vote. The Speaker refused ; for " he hacH'een commanded otherwise by the king." He rose to quit the chai-r ; but two members dragged him back, and there forcibly h^ld/him. Eliot threw his remonstrance on the floor ; and placed hJiS -protestations in the hand of Denzil Hollis, who put them ta'Jnevite. They were carried by acclamation. The Commons then adjWned to ' 'ie 10th of March. Three days after, Eliot, /StL\ nd other members, were summoned before the Privy Council ; and four were committed to the Tower. They refused to ansv out of parliament for what they had done as members. The subsequent proceedings against them belong to the unhappy period when England was under absolute government for eleven years. On the 10th of March Charles dissolved the parliament, denouncing some members of the Lower House as " vipers ; " and he issued a proclamation which, says Clarendon, "was commonly understood to interdict all men to speak of another parliament." Before entering upon the course which was now before him of governing without parliaments, the king and his advisers saw that PEACE. 345 it would be dangerous to have the responsibility of conducting a foreign war amidst national discontents. Peace was concluded with France and Spain in the course of the next year. One public effort was made for the cause of Protestant liberty in Europe by sending a small force to the aid of Gustavus Adolphus. But this aid was not given in an open and manly way, or for the assertion of a great principle. It was pretended that the force was raised in Scotland as a private undertaking of the marquis of Hamilton. It was ill equipped; insufficiently provided with provisions; and " mouldered away in a short time," without rendering any service to the Protestant cause in Germany.* In truth there was no real affection for the Protestant cause. The majority of the foreign Protestants were regarded by the government, now closely allied with the dominant party in the church, with dislike and distrust. The doctrines of Geneva had become more offensive than the doctrines of Rome. In England the religious principles of the puritans were identified with a sturdy assertion of civil rights, whilst the arbitrary tendencies of the king were encouraged by many of the higher clergy who held the tenets from which the puritans wholly dissented. To the great body of the people the innovations in religion, as they were termed, not unnaturally seemed an approach to Romanism. To the king and the prelates the resistance to these innovations seemed a dangerous opposition to the courtly doctrine that to disobey any of the commands of sovereigns was a heinous, sin. The parliament impeached the preachers who maintained in their printed sermons that kings had an absolute power over the property of their subjects. Charles gave them preferments. The foreign Protestants were fighting, for the most part, for civil as well as religious liberty ; and thus they found no real support among the rulers of England. Gustavus Adolphus went his own way to uphold the Reformation. Charles entered into a secret treaty with Spain for the subjugation of the Seven United Prov inces ; which, after better consideration, he declined to ratify. * Whitelocke. 346 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER XIX. Absolute government. — Condition of England from 1629 to 1637. — Contrasts of France and England. — Imprisoned Members. — Sir John Eliot. — His death in prison.— Went worth.— Lord President of the North. —Lord Deputy of Ireland. — His principles of government.— Prynne's Histrio-Mastix.— His punishment. — Masques and Plays.— Character of the Drama.— Book of Sports. — Thorough, in Church and State.— Mo nopolies. — Proclamations against building in London. — Other arbitrary Proclamations. — First project of Ship-Money.— The writ of Ship-Money extended.— The Judges sanction the writs, — John Hampden.— Solemn trial of the validity of the writ of Ship- Money.— Hampden adjudged to pay.— Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick.— The despot ism of Charles not effective of any public improvements. — His alleged patronage of the Fine Arts. — Note, on the portraits of Charles. Lord Clarendon, in a passage that has been more than once quoted to show how happy a people may be under an absolute gov ernment, says, that after the dissolution of Charles's third parlia ment, " there quickly followed so excellent a composure through the whole kingdom, that the like peace, and plenty, and universal tranquillity for ten years was never enjoyed by any nation.'- The great historian, with something like impartiality, then proceeds to detail the exactions and abuses of these ten years. The imposition of duties which the parliament refused to grant ; vast sums extorted from " all persons of reasonable condition upon the law of knight hood " — that is fines for refusing knighthood ; monopolies which had been abolished renewed ; new projects of the same sort, "many scandalous, all very grievous," set on foot ; the old forest-laws re vived, under which great fines were imposed; the writ of ship- money framed, •' for an everlasting supply on all occasions ; " the jurisdictions of the council-table and the star-chamber enlarged to a vast extent, " and being the same persons in several rooms, grew both courts of law to determine right, and courts of revenue to bring money into the treasury; " proclamations enjoining what was. not en joined bylaw, and prohibiting that which was not prohibited, " so that any disrespect to any acts of state or to the persons of statesmen, was in no time more penal ; " and lastly, the abuse of justice at its fountain- head in the enforcement of arbitrary acts of power by the corrup tion of the judges. This is the catalogue of grievances presented by the eulogist of king Charles ; — a strange commentary upon his CONDITION OF ENGLAND. 347 representation of "the excellent composure through the whole kingdom " during these years of unmitigated despotism. There is, however, a far more unscrupulous defender of arbitrary power than Clarendon. It required something beyond common effrontery in Hume, after he had noticed the oppressive levies of money, the monopolies, the heavy fines and brutal punishments of the star- chamber, the iniquities of the courts of law, to write thus : " The grievances under which the English laboured, when considered in themselves without regard to the constitution, scarcely deserve the name ; nor were they either burdensome on the peorjle's properties, or any way shocking to the natural humanity of mankind." * Had this been true instead of being distinctly opposed to truth, it would have been perfectly impossible for any amount of prosperity amongst the jjeople — which prosperity really depended upon their own industrious energies — to have made " the so excellent a com posure " a real symptom that they had agreed to renounce "those foundations of right by which men valued their security " t — to accept slavery in the place of freedom. Wisely has it been said, " in the long run freedom ever brings, to those who know how to keep it, ease, comfort, and often wealth ; but there are times in which it disturbs for a season the possession of these blessings ; there are other times when despotism alone can confer the epheme ral enjoyment of them. The men who prize freedom only for such things as these, are not men who ever long preserved it." % The men who lived in England, in that fourth decade of the seven teenth century were not seduced from their allegiance to freedom by the vaunted "peace and plenty" of arbitrary power. Nor did their subsequent awful manifestation of their love of freedom sud denly arise out of their imrjatience of evil government. "They were native and to the manner born." They did not prize freedom solely because, having from very early times enjoyed a larger share of it than other nations, they found in its enjoyment a larger share than other nations of material blessings. They clung to free dom — to borrow the words of M. de Tocqueville — for "its native charms independent of its gifts — the pleasure of speaking, acting, and breathing without restraint, under no master but God and the Law." In briefly presenting the few striking incidents that vary the monotonous prospect over the dead level of ten years, we shall * History, chap. liil. t Clarendon. X De Tocqueville, " Society in France," p. 308. 348 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. endeavour to exhibit them in connection with some of the general aspects of society. There has been a battle between the crown and the parliament, and the crown keeps the field. There is not the slightest indica tion of any other collective resistance. The camp of the people is broken up, and there will be no irregular warfare. The timid amongst the puritans are in despair. The day of the dissolution, with them, " was the most gloomy, sad, and dismal day for England that happened in five hundred years last past."* A great branch had indeed been lopped off the tree of liberty ; but there stood the old gnarled trunk, and " the splitting wind " could not bend it or disturb its roots. "Be a king," said Henrietta Maria to Charles, "like the king of France." There were some barriers to be removed, besides that of a parliament, before that wish could be accomplished, France and England were essentially unlike in the whole construc tion of the machine of government. Let us point out some of these differences, without entering upon minute comparisons. The absolute monarchy of France was upheld by a most numer ous aristocracy ; standing apart from the people, and despising the people in their pride of birth ; exempt from taxation ; possessing many exclusive privileges ; abhorring any industrious occupation ; intermarrying with their own caste alone. The limited monarchy of England had strengthened its power by the destruction of the military organisation of the feudal chiefs ; but the aristocracy, being absorbed amongst the people, became identified with the in terests of the people ; formed family alliances with the rich middle classes ; were united with them in various administrative functions ; above all, were equally taxed with the very humblest yeomen and burghers. The illegal imposts of Charles were not exclusively levied upon the tradesman. They touched the nobleman and the squire ; and some of the heaviest " lighted most upon persons of quality and honour, who thought themselves above ordinary oppres sions." f The union of classes in England for great public objects is not a thing of yesterday. It was never more complete than in the period which we are now regarding. Richard Chambers, the London merchant, who refused to pay the duties illegally levied upon a bale of silk, and was imprisoned and fined ^2000 for his insolence in comparing the injustice to the practices of the govern ment of Turkey ; and John Hampden, the Buckinghamshire squire, who roused the heart of England to a quicker pulsation, in his conttst •D'Ewes, vol. i. p. 402. t Clarendon. CONTRASTS OF FRANCE AND ENGLAND. 349 with the whole power of the crown upon a question of twenty shil lings levied upon his lands at Stoke Mandeville, — these were each fighting the same battle, with the most perfect accord, and with equal sympathy amongst all ranks'. " If the English had, from the period of the Middle Ages, altogether lost, like the French, politi cal freedom and all those local franchises which cannot long exist without it, it is highly probable that each of the different classes of which the English aristocracy is composed would have seceded from the rest, as was the case in France, and more or less all over the continent, and that all those classes would have separated themselves from the people. But freedom compelled them always to remain within reach of each other, so as to combine their strength in time of need." * The " local franchises " dependent upon " general political freedom '' constituted another powerful barrier against the disposi tion of an English king to govern like a king of France. The Eng lish had been trained, from the very earliest times, to manage their own affairs. The principle of local Association was the familiar condition of an Englishman's existence. Parochial vestries, trade guilds, municipal corporations, were the life of the whole social body. Though parliaments had been suspended by Charles, these remained in their original vigour, and perhaps in a more intense activity. This existence of administrative bodies throughout the kingdom rendered it impossible for any amount of absolute power to effect more than a very partial suppression of liberty of speech and action. The proceedings of the guilds and corporations were conducted with the strict order of the highest deliberative assem blies. The entire machinery of representative administration called them together and regulated their debates. There is no parliament at Westminster from 1629 to 1640; but there is a parliament in Guildhall. There, is the elective principle in full force. There, the Lower House discusses every matter of its franchises with perfect freedom. There, is an Upper House, to which the Lower House presents its Bills, and with their mutual concurrence they pass into Acts. Could this vital representation of two or three hundred thousand inhabitants of London be in daily use, and the hin-her representation of all England be ultimately put down by the will of the king ? To be as a king of France, Charles must have swept away every local franchise, and have governed by one wide- embracing centralisation. That was simply impossible in Eng land. * De Tocqueville, p. 178. 350 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. But if there was one cause more than another why, at that period, a king of England could not govern like a king of France, it was the state of religious feeling amongst a rapidly increasing number of the most influential portion of the community. It was not the outwardly devout formalism, veiling indifference, which prevailed amongst Roman Catholic pojpulations, who had rarely been stirred to serious thought upon the great doctrinal questions that had agitated Europe for more than a century. It was an active principle, that was constantly seeking to grapple with luke- warmness in the assertion of what it held to be true, as much as with the positive tenets which it pronounced to be false. The earlier professors of the doctrine and discipline called puritan had been discountenanced by Elizabeth. But they clung with unques tionable loyalty to her government, because the hatred of popery was as much the passion of the people as it was the policy of the crown. The puritans of the time of James suffered in their worldly interests and their rights of conscience. They were visited with penalties as nonconformists, and they were hunted as schismatics if they formed independent congregations. But they were as yet without the character of a political party. When Charles had been four years on the throne, the religious dissatisfaction with church- government became essentially political. The opinions which forty years before had been heard in remote pulpits, or had crept forth in secretly-printed tracts, were now loudly proclaimed in par liament, and boldly assailed the government of the church in the same votes and remonstrances that protested against the violations of civil liberty by the crown. By this union, which gave a new vitality to the struggle for constitutional freedom, was it rendered more and more impossible that a king of England, however tran siently paramount, could govern like a king of France. It is related that when Charles put off his robes on the day of the dissolution of parliament, he vowed that he would never again put them on. The purpled dignity of the king was to be hence forth displayed only beneath the canojay of the presence-chamber, where every face was to be dressed in smiles, and no bold men who talked of rights should dare to intrude. There was now one in that presence-chamber whose voice had been of the loudest amongst the Commons in opposing the misgovernment of Bucking. ham. The death of that favourite opened a career to sir Thomas Wentworth far more congenial to his nature than that of a patriot. He was essentially different in character from the minions who had IMPRISONED MEMBERS. — SIR JOHN ELIOT. 351 governed James, and one of whom had bowed Charles to his will. Highly descended; abundantly wealthy, intellectually great, proud and despotic, he saw that the time was come when England would be ruled either by a king or by a parliament, and not by a well- balanced union of the monarchical and the democratic power. He chose the part most congenial to his nature, and became the ablest servant of the crown, the most dangerous enemy of public liberty. Pym and Wentworth had long " kept together in their chivalry." Wentworth displayed to his friend a glimpse of the sunny prospect that was opening to him. " You are going to be undone," said Pym : " But remember that though you leave us now, I will never leave you while your head is on your shoulders." * There were other companions of Wentworth in the great battle against preroga tive, who were not in a condition to utter any such prophetic threat. The members of the Commons who were committed to the Tower on the 5th of March were still imprisoned. The judges had de clared in the autumn that they were entitled to be bailed ; but that they must give securities for their good behaviour. They refused to accept their liberty upon such terms. Three were then indicted in the King's Bench ; Eiiot for words uttered in the House, and Hollis and Valentine for a tumult in forcibly detaining the Speaker in the chair. They pleaded that the jurisdiction of the Court did not extend to offences said to be committed in Parliament. The great constitutional question of privilege was thus raised. Steadily refusing to put in any other plea, judgment was given against them, to the effect that they should be imprisoned during the king's pleasure ; that Eliot should be fined two thousand pounds ; and the others fined in a smaller amount. After eighteen months the two who were considered the lighter offenders were re leased. Eliot, one of the noblest of a noble band, was sacrificed to the vengeance of the crown. He was committed to the Tower on the sth of March, 1629. He died' there, of a lingering disease brought on by confinement, on the 27th of November, 1632. In his dangerous illness his friends urged him to petition the king for his release. The county of Cornwall had in vain petitioned that their old member might be discharged. Eliot, in addressing Charles, simply stated his bodily ailment, and said — " I humbly beseech your majesty you will command your judges to set me at liberty, that for recovery of my health I may take some fresh air." *Welwood's Memorials. 352 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. The answer was that the petition was "not humble enough."* Eliot, like Raleigh, employed his prison hours in literary occupa tion. His treatise, " The Monarchie of Man," which remains un published, has been analysed by his best biographer ; f and it presents in this form many passages which show that his ardour for constitutional liberty was built upon the noblest philosophy, and that while dealing with questions that were then called " The Politicks," in a free and unsubdued spirit, he sets forth the highest views of man's duty and happiness in his exposition of the Mon archy of Mind. Such was the martyr in that contest for the liberty of speech by the representatives of the people. He perished ; but judgment against him was solemnly reversed, after the Restoration, as an illegal judgment and against the freedom and privileges of Parliament. The rise of Wentworth to power was rapid. Created a viscount, he was first placed in the great office of Lord President of the North. The authority of this functionary was almost absolute. In the reign of Henry VIIL, a commission had been granted to the Council of York, for preserving the peace in the counties of York, Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmoreland during the insur rections caused by t'.:e dissolution of the monasteries. The Coun cil had gradually fallen into disuse as a court of law, after the oc casion had passed away for its jurisdiction. But under James, a new commission was issued, by which authority the commissioners were not to determine causes by juries and according to the laws of the land, but according to secret instructions. The judges of the Common Pleas had the honesty in James's time to resist this encroachment upon the liberty of the subject, by issuing prohibi tions to the President and Council. But when Wentworth became President he declared he would lay anv one by the heels who dared to sue out prohibitions in the Courts of Westminster. During his presidency, the inhabitants of this great portion of the kingdom — not indeed so populous as the South or so wealthy, but occupied by an energetic race, whose descendants, numbered by hundreds of thousands, are now amongst the foremost in grand industries and high intelligence— the people of this great division of the North, " were disfranchised of all their privileges by Magna Charta and the Petition of Right." These are the words of Mr. Hyde, after wards lord Clarendon. The "discretion," he maintained, given * Harleian MS., quoted in Mr. Forster' s " Life of Eliot." t Ibid. Appendix, pp. 125 to 177. WENTWORTH. LORD DEPUTY OF IRELAND. 353 under the various commissions bf Charles, " hath been the quick sand which hath swallowed up their jjroperty, their liberty." When lord Wentworth removed from this theatre of arbitrary power to be Lord-Deputy of Ireland, he still held the appointment of President of the North. His particular doings in the vice-regal office may be more conveniently mentioned at a later point of his carper. It may be sufficient to say that the Lord Deputy Wentworth and Archbishop Laud had a perfect concord as to the principles upon which both England and Ireland were to be governed ; as may be perceived from the following passage of a letter from Wentworth to Laud : " I know no reason, then, 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's service, upon 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 thorough all imaginable opposition." Thorough became the watchword of these two politicians. With thorough every thing was to be ac complished — " You may govern as you jilease." * During the Lord Deputy's long residence in Dublin, he had a very indefatigable correspondent in one Reverend Mr. Garrard, a sort of Court Newsman to the great minister, and an occasional reporter of many curious matters of general interest, beyond the scope of mere fashionable chroniclers. By way of finding a few texts upon which to enlarge a little, we may as well turn to this reverend gossip's authority, as to more serious records. We begin with an extract of no small significance. " Mr. Prynne's cause in the Star-chamber held the Lords three days, and the day of censure they rose not till three in the afternoon. He is fined five thousand pounds ; adjudged perpetual imprisonment ; to lose his ears, the one in the Palace-yard, the other in Cheapside ; and his books to be burnt by the hands of the hangman." f It is extremely difficult to conceive in our days how the publication in 1633 of " Histrio- Mastix, the Player's Scourge," by " William Prynne, an Utter- barrister of Lin coins' Inn," should have involved the loss of his two ears and five thousand pounds. Learned and ardent men in those times had another mode of maintaining their opinions than by the power of " articles " and " leaders." We take Up this book ef 1006 closely-printed quarto pages, and our wonder is who would ever read its arguments against " Stage Plays, the very pomps of * Strafford's Letters, vol. i. p. 173. t /*"*> P- 207- Vol. III.— 23 354 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the devil which we renounce in baptism," drawn from "the con curring authorities of sundry texts of Scripture, of the whole prim itive Church, of 55 Synods and Councils, of 71 Fathers and Chris tian writers, of above 150 foreign and domestic Protestant and Popish authors, of 40 heathen philosophers," &c. &c. To burn the books by the hangman, under the nose of the author, " which had almost suffocated him," and thus to keep enthusiasts from losing their senses in the perusal, was indeed a public mercy in tbe gov ernment. Unquestionably no member of the Star-chamber ever read the book ; but it said that Laud and others read the Index, and finding therein a very strong phrase against " Women-Actors," so "impudent as to act, to speak publicly on a stage (perchance in man's apparel, and cut hair, here proved sinful and abominable) in the presence of sundry men and women," they determined that this was a libel upon the queen.* This marvellous book had been seven years in preparation. Her majesty had enacted a part in a pastoral at Somerset House, and the day after appeared this pon derous volume. Laud and others, according to Whitelocke, " had been angered by some of Prynne's books against Arminianism," and the king allowed them to revenge themselves upon what he was told was a libel upon his lively consort. It is clear that the affair had, in a great degree, become a personal quarrel between the arch bishop and the learned barrister ; for in Laud's Diary we have an entry that Mr. Prynne sent him " a very libellous letter about his cen sure in the Star-chamber for his Histrio-Mastix." This memorandum is dated June 11, 1634. On the previous 7th of May, Prynne had lost one ear in Palace-yard, and on the 10th another ear in Cheap- side. That he wrote bitterly enough we may well believe. Laud showed the letter to the king, who gave it to Mr. Antony Noy, who had changed his party. When Noy showed it to Mr. Prynne, the mutilated barrister was not so bewildered by his sufferings as not to have presence of mind to tear the letter in pieces, and throw it out of the window, as the archbishop records, under date of June 17, 1634^ This was not the last of Prynne's misfortunes, as we shall have to relate. Nor had he been the first who had pro voked the vengeance of those who were rushing upon a mad career of church-government. On the 26th of November, 1 530, Laud re cords that "part of his sentence was executed upon Leighton." Dr. Alexander Leighton, a Scotch divine, had written a book— • Whitelocke. t Diary of Laud> " A History of the Troubles, &c of William Laud," 1695, p. 56. MASQUES AND PLAYS. 355 " Zion's plea against Prelacy." He owned the writing of the book when brought into the Star-chamber. It will perhaps be thought that even the "part of his sentence" was not altogether consistent with the mercy of Christianity. Leighton was whipped ; put in the pillory ; had one of his ears cut off ; had one side of his nose slit ; and was branded on one cheek. But the whole process was repeated with the necessary variations of ear, nose, and cheek a week afterwards.* Within five weeks the archbishop was consecrating the church of. St. Catherine Cree, with processions, and bowings, and other ceremonies "as prescribed in the Roman pontificale." It was the matador throwing down the red rag to enrage the bull. And yet England was not apparently moved from its "so excellent a composure." From the time of the offensive attack of William Prynne upon stage-plays, in whose condemnation he included " academical inter ludes," there was a more than usual performance of masques at Whitehall, and of popular dramas. The four. Inns of Court, also, "to manifest the difference of their opinion from Mr. Prynne's new learning, and to confute his Histrio-Mastix against inter ludes,"! got: UP a masque written by Shirley, w!iich cost them ^20,000. In his "Epistle Dedicatory," Prynne says that there were above "forty thousand play-books printed within these two years ; " that " they are more vendible than the choicest sermons ; " " the multitude of our London play-haunters being so augmented now, all the ancient devils' chapels (for so the Fathers style all play-houses) being five in number, are not sufficient to contain their troops, whence we see a sixth new added." He especially notes of " the inns-of-court men," that " one of the first things they learn as soon as they are admitted, is to see stage-plays and take smoke at a play-house," and to this cause he ascribes that " they prove al together lawless instead of lawyers, and to forget that little learn ing, grace, and virtue which they had before." It must indeed be admitted that, notwithstanding the learning of Johnson, the grace and vivacity of Beaumont and Fletcher, the dignity of Massinger, and the infinite variety of the pictures of real life which these and a host of inferior dramatists present, there is a taint more or less amongst them all, which has prevented many of these most remark able productions of any age or country coming down with a sweet savour to posterity. It is not merely that we find in them loose and profane expressions,- as we sometimes find in Shakspere, but * Dr. Leighton was imprisoned till released by the Parliament in A40. t Whitelocke. 356 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. that, wholly different from the general character of his works, there is such an interweaving of licentiousness with the entire dramatic structure of many of the pieces that were once the most popular, that, as has been especially said of Fletcher, " very few of them can be so altered as to become tolerable at present on the stage." * And yet Beaumont and Fletcher's plays were those most frequently acted before the king and his court. The most serious part of the community had evidently turned with disgust from all dramatic exhibitions ; and though Charles was personally careful that all profane expressions should be removed from new plays, we may believe that if the play-books indiscriminately found admission to decent families, there were many besides the stricter Puritans who would think that Prynne was a sacrifice to the cause of public morals. There was a more marked distinction than had before existed, growing up to separate society into two great classes of the pious and the profane. This general division was as imperfect a test of real religion and sound morality as any such sweeping separations can be at any period. There were many amongst those who were first pointed at as Puritans, and afterwards as Round- Jieads, who had not that bigoted dislike of innocent amusements, that tasteless indifference to elegant literature and the arts, which were unjustly attributed to their religious earnestness. In the same way there was undoubtedly an equal proportion of those who tolerated what others held to be immoral, who were themselves of pure lives, and sincere in their devotional observances, though they did not call the Lord's day the Sabbath, and thought the re-publi cation of king James' Book of Sports was a wise measure to pre vent the hard-worked peasantry being molested in their reasonable recreations. There was no act of the government which more dis tinctly than this publication indicated a temper which set at nought the opinions of a class too powerful, because too zealous, to be crushed. Ministers might be deprived for refusing to read this Book of Sports in their churches ; the citizen who kept his ap prentices at home after evening service, instead of leading them to the archery and leaping of Finsbury fields, might be disliked by the young men of his ward ; the yeoman who was never seen on the village-green to sanction the commands of his king, might be suspected as a non-conformist. But the great party that was growing daily into a visible power only acquired solidity from this external pressure. Garrard tells his patron how the Book of Sports * Hallam, "Literature of Europe," vol. iii. p.aSo. THOROUGH, IN CHURCH AND STATE. 357" was received in some churches in London : " One Dr. Dawson read it, and presently after read the ten commandments ; then said, 'Dearly beloved, you have heard now the commandments of God and man, obey which you please.' " * The very first Statute of the reign of Charles expressed the growing feeling upon this subject, when it forbade all people to go out of their own parishes for any sports or pastimes whatsoever " on the Lord's day j " and enacted that in their own parishes there should be no bear-baitings or bull- baitings, common plays, or otlier unlawful exercises. The. Book of Sports defined certain amusements as lawful. The puritans regarded them as unlawful. It was a judicial blindness in the rulers to intermeddle in so delicate a question. The more important parts of the despatches of Laud and Went worth are in cypher ; but there are occasional expressions in the published correspondence which sufficiently show for what object they were both striving. Laud, immediately after his translation to Canterbury, apologises for his want of power to accomplish what they both desired. "As for the Church, it 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. * * * And for the State, indeed, my lord, I am for Thorough, but I see that both thick and thin stays Somebody, where I conceive it should not." The common law was indeed some shield of the na tion against the attempt which lord Falkland, who saw the errors; of the Church; but was- honestly averse to its destruction, thus dei scribed : " Some have evidently laboured to bring in an English though not a Roman popery; I mean not only the outside dress of it, but equally absolute,^a blind dependence of the people upon, the clergy and of the clergy upon themselves." f This was the Thorough which Laud contemplated. The " Somebody" who op posed the Thorough for the State was no doubt the king. Charles had the sense to see that he could not do much more than he was doing, unless he had an army to compel an obedience far beyond what the star-chamber could enforce. But he did contrive to dash through " thick and thin," to the accomplishment of many illegal acts, without drawing the sword. The partnership in Thorougk between the Church and the State was so complete, that it is some times difficult to separate the theological from the political princi- * Strafford Letters,, vol. i. p. 166. t Speech, Feb. 9, 1641, in Nalson's Historical Collections." It is quoted in Dr. Ar nold's "Lectures on Modem rHisiory," 358 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. pie of action ; and precisely in the same manner the resistance to the united movement of power became a compound of civil and religious enthusiasm. Whether the partners in power were out- -wardly acting in their conjoined or several capacities, the result was pretty much the same. During this anomalous period, when proclamations had the force of statutes, the general statements of historians give us little notion of the heartburnings which were produced by these displays of authority. When Clarendon tells us of "projects of all kinds, many ridiculous, many scandalous, all very grievous," the "re proach of which came to the king, the profit to other men," he points at the barefaced introduction of monopolies, in defiance or evasion of positive laws. Let us take one or two of these griev ances, to see how they were borne. The whole trade of soap-boil ing throughout the kingdom was to be extinguished or limited, that a Company of Soapmakers might be the sole manufacturers. These gentlemen, who were to produce better soap, and no doubt cheaper than all the rest of the world, had given the king £10,000 for the pat ent, and agreed to pay him £8 per ton upon all the soap produced. Clarendon admits that the government obtained ,£200,000 by this and similar devices, but he says that "scarce ;£l5°° came to the king's use ; " from which we infer that the king's officers pocketed the balance. Garrard tells us how the new soap was received in London. " There is much ado about the soap business. * * * * I hear a proclamation shall come forth to stop all mouths that ^ speak against it," Commissioners of rank, with the lord-mayor and aldermen, were to report upon the soap. " They have had two general washing days at Guildhall ; most of them have given their verdict for the new soap to be the better, yet continual complaints rise up that it burns linen, scalds the laundress's fingers, wastes infinitely in keeping, being full of lime and tallow." The king is indignant at the opposition ; commands the lord-mayor to be rep rimanded for his " pusillanimity iu this business, being afraid of a troop of women that clamourously petitioned him against the new soap."* Truly, the government is in a dignified attitude. One of the Lord Deputy's own schemes for keeping Ireland in dependence was to make the people " to take their salt from the king." He sets forth "the easiness of making his majesty sole merchant" of salt — an article of "so absolute necessity as it cannot possibly stay upon his hand, but must be had whether they will or no, and may * Strafford's Letters, vol. p. .176. ARBITRARY PROCLAMATIONS. 359 at all times be raised in price." To show the easiness and profit he says, " Witness the Gabelle of salt in France." Witness, in deed. Those who have read of the extremity of suffering to which the unhappy peasantry of France were reduced by the Gabelle may form some notion of the condition to which these islands were fast drifting under the rule of Thorough. There was scarcely an in dustrious occupation, from the sale of coals to the collection of rags, that was not made the subject of a monopoly. But many other ingenious devices were resorted to for the supply of the wants of the crown beyond its large hereditary rev enues. There had been proclamations by James and Charles against the increase of buildings in London. The chaplain of the Venetian ambassador, in 1617, thought that the proclamation of James was for the intent of extorting fines, rather than with the hope of preventing the extension of the capital when there was abundant space for its enlargement. * There could be no doubt of the intention of Charles, when in 1633 a Commission was har assing every owner of a new house from St. Martin's in the Fields to Blackwall, by levying enormous fines, or commanding the houses to be pulled down. Garrard is very minute in his re lation of these proceedings. Refusal to the arbitrary command was dangerous. " Writs are gone forth from the Star-chamber to the sheriff to pull down the houses of Mr. Moor, and to levy ^2000 fine for not having pulled them down by Easter." These were forty-two houses near St. Martin's Church ; and they were " pulled down to the ground." The interference with the supply of house room was not more arbitrary than the in terference with the supply of food. " The taverns," writes Gar rard, " begin to victual again ; some have got leave. 'Tis said that the vintners within the city will give £6000 to the king to dress meat, as they did before." f Proclamations were issued minutely regulating the price of all provisions. There were ex amples enough of such folly in former times which are held to be necessarily unenlightened; but in the days when the intellect of England was in the fullest activity, the rating of all eatables ap pears the merest freak of individual idiotcy. " The proclamations," says Garrard, " have done little good. They will not bring them [the provisions] in ; so that housekeeping in London is grown * See article in "Quarterly Review," October, 1857, on Mr. Rawdon Brown's " Dia* ries and Dispatches of the Venetian Embassy ' unpublished." t Strafford Letters, vol. i. p. 262. 360 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. much more chargeable than it was before these proclamations were published." Some of the proclamations of Charles appear to have had no other object than that of a wanton interference with the convenience of the people. It was the age of Hackney- Coaches. Garrard says, that there were one thousand nine hun dred in London and Westminster. At the beginning ,of 1635 he writes, " There is a proclamation coming forth to prohibit all hack ney-coaches to pass up and down in London streets ; out of town they may go at pleasure, as heretofore." It is true that the narrow streets were somewhat overcrowded with the coaches. The great enemy of these vehicles, John Taylor, the water-poet, who saw the demand for the Thames wherries grievously reduced, tells us that "butchers cannot pass with their cattle for them; market-folks, which bring provision of victuals to the city, are stopped, stayed, and hindered." The streets were kept narrow by the absurd procla mations through which the natural extension of the town was im peded. It is clear enough that no interference of the government could put down the coaches ; but the limitation of their use had the effect of encouraging the system which was introduced in 1634, by a speculating traveller, of " carrying people up and down in close chairs," called Sedans. Whilst the Star-chamber was pulling down houses in London, those who pulled down cottages in the country, called depopulators, were equally fined. " Much noise is here of the depopulators that are come into the Star-chamber; it will bring in great sums of money." Such means of filling the Treasury were, however, small affairs. Six years of irresponsible government have made the administration bolder. In the spring of 1635 Garrard writes that it was resolved in full council, "to take double rates, just as much more as was taken before, of all goods imported - into the kingdom." Double rates upon imports were nothing, however, compared to an universal tax. There is gone out a special writ to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, requiring him, for the safe guard of the sea and defence of the realm, to issue forth writs to the several counties, cities, and towns, therein mentioned, to pro vide ships, men, ammunition, provision and wages. The Lord Mayor of London demurred to the writ ; but, being threatened, the corporation yielded, "and instantly fell to seizing in all the wards." The courtly Mr. Garrard, who rejoiced in all the monopolies be cause they brought money to the king, is rather discomposed about a tax which at last touches himself. " I had rather give," he says, THE WRIT OF SHIP-MONEY. 361 "and pay ten subsidies in parliament, than ten shillings this new- old way of dead Noy's." Dead Noy, the old Attorney-General, who plagued all mankind with his writs, has in this, the last of his performances, left a terrible bequest to the government that bought his desertion of the popular party, as it had bought Wentworth's, by the offer of great place. He had always a precedent ready for an injustice, and thus Garrard calls his writ of ship-money a " new old way." Yet Noy's scheme was a very limited one compared with that which was afterwards adopted ; von the suggestion, it is said, of Finch, chief justice of the Common Pleas — the courtly Speaker whom Eliot and Hollis held in the chair, when he refused to put a remonstrance to the vote. The original writs were only sent to London and to the sea-port towns ; and there was some reason in the demand, for the English navy had fallen into such a miserable condition that Algerine pirates boldly seized upon mer chant vessels in the Channel, and the whole commerce of England had become insecure. These first writs required that certain mari time places should furnish one or more ships, or their equipments, or pay, as London had paid. In 163 J a fleet was sent to sea, for the protection of trade. In 1636 the real writs of sbip-money were issued ; under which the sheriffs were directed to make a general assessment in all counties and towns specified, according to the means of the inhabitants, to produce the proportions at which the several places were rated. The schedules appended to these writs enable us to form some notion of the comparative opulence of par ticular districts. Of the counties, Yorkshire, Devonshire, Essex, Kent, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Somersetshire, Suffolk, Wiltshire, are assessed at the highest rate ; 1 2,000/. for York, 8000/. or 6000/. others. Durham, Northumberland, and Monmouth are put at the lowest rate, 2000/. or 1500/. The inland agricultural counties are at an intermediate scale, about 4000/. Next to London, Bristol and Newcastle are the most heavily assessed. The difference of two centuries ago and the present time in local population can scarcely be more strikingly shown than by these schedules ; in which Liverpool is only rated at twenty-five pounds, whilst Bristol is set at eight hundred pounds ; Birmingham is not rated at all, nor Sheffield, nor Bradford, nor Sunderland, nor Manchester. Preston and Banbury are at the same humble scale of forty-pounds each ; Boston and Buckingham are equal ; and amongst the more flourishing towns Nottingham is not held as wealthy as Reading. But we must not jump to the conclusion that such places as Man- 362 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Chester, Sheffield and Birmingham, were too small and unimportant to have a special levy apart from their counties. Birmingham in the time of Henry VIIL was described by Leland as "a town of smiths and cutlers," and Camden, in 1607, mentions it as " swarm ing with inhabitants and echoing with the noise of anvils." Shef field was always famous for its cutlery, but Camden mentions it as "remarkable among other little towns hereabouts for blacksmiths." Manchester was undoubtedly of importance at a much earlier period than the 17th century. Leland calls it "the fairest, best builded, quickest, and most populous town of Lancashire." The statistics of the past are not more to be implicitly trusted than the statistics of the present. When these writs were issued by the sheriffs in their respective districts there was a general consternation. The people, who had been formerly accustomed to the regular collection of subsidies by commissioners, doubted the legality of this new system. But the greater number submitted, with the full knowledge that individual resistance to oppression was more dangerous under king Charles than at any previous time. The whole country was under the pres sure of tyranny. The judges, by the royal command, put forth an opinion, not arising out of any question before the courts, that the king might command, for the safety of the kingdom, all his subjects to provide such number of ships as he might think fit ; that he might compel obedience to this command ; and that he was the sole judge of the danger of the country, and the means of pre venting it. Richard Chambers, who had bravely resisted the illegal levy upon his merchandise, was again imprisoned be cause he declined to pay his assessment of ship-money. When the case was taken into the courts at Westminster, one of the judges refused to hear counsel, and said there was a rule of law and a rule of government, and that many things which could not be done by the first rule might be done by the other. It is to such that Clarendon alludes when he says " the damage and mis chief cannot be expressed, that the crown and state sustained by the deserved reproach and infamy that attended the judges, by being made use of in this and like acts of power ; there being no possibility to preserve the dignity, reverence, and estimation of the laws themselves, but by the integrity' and innocency of the judges." But if Clarendon, writing in after years, saw the damage that the State sustained by such servility, Wentworth, at the date of the extra-judicial opinion upon ship-money, was in raptures. He JOHN HAMPDEN, AND THE REFUSERS. 363 declares it to be the greatest service the profession has done the Crown in his time, and then gives this significant opinion*: " 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, and to be considerable but by halves to foreign princes abroad." Hume, in noticing the conduct of Charles in dissolving his second parliament, observes, that if the king had possessed " any military force on which he could rely, it is not improbable that he would at once have taken off the mask, and governed without any regard to parlirnentary privileges." Wentworth, now that the mask had been taken off, desired a land- army to effect many things that were not wholly to be accomplished by fine and imprisonment, administered by a merciless Star-cham ber and a corrupt bench. England lies in a dead-sleep; except that the high-sheriffs ," bestir themselves apace in their several counties : moneys they bring in daily, and I do not hear of any numbers that are refusers, so that it will prove a good business." So writes hopeful Mr. Garrard, in December, 1635. On the nth of January, 1636, there is a public assembly at which all the persons attending, the entire body of landowners and housekeepers of the parish, are " refusers." The very assessors and constables are refusers. Of what was said in the vestry of " Kimbell Magna," to make the two esquires in the list of defaulters, and the twenty-nine yeomen, so resolute not to pay the 21/. 15J. 6%d. assessed upon -that humble village amidst the Chiltern hills, there is no record. But the document which sets forth the sums assessed upon each, from 3U. 6d. to bd., is in existence, and it records the names of those bold men as " refusing to pay." At the head of that list is the name of " John Hampden, Esquire." * Great Kimble is not far'distant from the manor-house where John Hampden dwelt, in the parish called by his name. There his forefathers had dwelt even in the Saxon days, and had continued for six or more centuries to be lords of Great and Little Hampden, Stoke Mandeville, and other Buckinghamshire manors. John Hampden, who refused to pay thirty-one shillings and sixpence to king Charles, abode under the same roof where his grandfather entertained queen Elizabeth, in 1585, — a mansion whose front is now modernised and vulgarised, but of which enough is left to interest many more than the mere local antiquary. In this pleasant wood land country, whose surrounding hills were covered with beech ; * A fac-simile is given in Lord Nugent's " Memorials of Hampden," vol. i. -364 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. close by an ancient well-preserved church standing in a parklike enclosure, dwelt John Hampden. When he sent to his dear friend Eliot, a prisoner in the Tower, a buck out of his " paddock," he writes that it " must be a small one, to hold proportion with the place and soil it was bred in." * Clearly not a very wealthy man was this esquire, — a man in worldly importance not to be named with Wentworth and his hereditary six thousand a year ; a man of whom the Lord Deputy of Ireland, hearing of his very irregular proceedings at Kimble Magna and other parishes — and all for some trumpery thirty-one shillings and sixpence, or twenty shillings — said in his grand way, " In truth, I shall wish Mr. Hampden, and others to his likeness, were well whipped into their right senses." A more cumbrous instrument than the " rod " for the mendicant was necessary to bring Mr. Hampden to submit to " all that ever authority ordains '' — the test of a good subject in Wentworth's view. There were six weeks of solemn pleading in the Exchequer Cham ber before all the judges — the greatest cause that ever was tried in Westminster Hall — followed by many months of judicial delibera tion before the king's right to enforce the tax of ship-money was adjudged to be lawful ; " which judgment," says Clarendon, " proved of more advantage and credit to the gentleman condemned than to the king's service." Hampden was singled out to be pro ceeded against by the Crown upon his refusal to pay twenty shillings assessed upon his lands at Stoke Mandeville ; and the formal pleadings upon the writ of Scire Facias had occupied five months before the question came to be argued. The speeches of the crown lawyers and of Hampden's counsel occupy one hundred and seventeen pages in Rushworth's folio volume. After these protracted arguments before the judges, these twelve sages of the law occupied three terms in delivering their opinions. They were not agreed in their judgment. Two of the number had from the first decided that judgment should be given for the defendant. Two others, in the next term, followed their example. One other held that the tax was lawful, but that no portion of it ought to go into the Privy-Purse. But on the 9U1 of June, 1637, the Chief Justices decided against Hampden ; and the sentence was for the king, upon the opinion of the majority. Of Sir John Finch, one of the Chief Justices, Clarendon says, "He took up ship-money, where Mr. Noyleftit; and, being a judge, carried it up to that pinnacle from whence he almost broke his own neck ; having, in his journey * Nugent's Memorials, vol, i. p. 171. PRYNNE, BURTON, AND BASTWICK. 365 thither, had too much influence upon his brethren, to induce them to concur in a judgment they had all cause to repent." Hampden at once became " the most famous man in England " — " the pilot who must steer the vessel through the temjjests and rocks that threatened it."* After the judgment the resistance to shijj-money was much more general. Some refusers were punished ; many were threatened ; but in town and country the opposition became a very resolved manifestation of the temper of the people. It was not such " a good business " as Mr. Garrard had predicted. Thorough for the State has not altogether succeeded. Arch bishop Laud and the Star-chamber have meanwhile been seeing what they can accomplish by Thorough for the Church. Ship- money judgment for the Crown was given on the 12th of June, 1637. Two days after, William Prynne, who was brought up from his prison, but with his ears sewed on ; Henry Burton, who had been Clerk of the Closet to Prince Charles, and was incumbent of a London parish ; and Robert Bastwick, a physician of Colchester, were sentenced by the Star-chamber to be fined ^5000 each, to be degraded from their professions, to be placed in the pillory, to have their ears cut off and their cheeks and foreheads branded, and to be confined for life in distant prisons. Their offences were these. Prynne had published a book against Sabbath-breaking, in which the clergy who had read the Book of Sports were bitterly stigma tised ; Burton had offended in a sermon, and in a tract had accused the Bishop of Norwich of being guilty of Romish innovation ; Bastwick had in a book called "Elenchus Papismi," identified prelacy and popery. Garrard has a somewhat merry statement of an exhibition in Palace Yard, on the 30th of June, in fulfilment of the sentence of the 14th. " They stood two hours in the pillory, Burton by himself. . . . The place was full of people, who cried and howled terribly, especially when Burton was cropt. Dr. Bastwick was very-merry ; his wife, Dr. Poe's daughter, got a stool, kissed him; his ears being cut off she called for them, and put them in a clean handkerchief, and carried them away with her. Bastwick told the people, the lords had collar-days at court, but this was his collar-day." \ A more serious account mentions the solemn defi ance of Prynne to Lambeth, calling upon the primate to show that these practices were according to the laws of England. There are some awkward symptoms of indignation at these barbarities, be sides the howling in Palace Yard. The sheriff of Chester is sent * Clarendon. t Strafford Letters, vol. ii. p. 85. 366 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. for by a poursuivant to answer a charge of having been kind to Mr. Prynne as he passed on his way to prison at Caernarvon. '• Strange flocking of the people after Burton, when he removed from the Fleet towards Lancaster Castle. Mr. Ingram, sub-warden of the Fleet, told the king that there was not less than one hundred thousand people gathered together to see him pass by, between Smithfield and Brown's well, which is two miles beyond Highgate. His wife went along in a coach, having much money thrown to her as she passed along." * Very strange flocking indeed. Before we enter upon the stormy period which succeeded the nine or ten years of enforced tranquillity from 1629, let us inquire whether the possession of arbitrary power enabled the king and his advisers to assist the people in the development of their industry, the enlargement of the conveniences of life, or the cultivation of arts and letters. The industry of the people was in every way op pressed, — not only by irregular taxation, but by interferences to tally at variance with the advancing intelligence of the time. The merchants were unprotected from pirates ; the landowners were harassed by inquiries into their titles, and by obsolete demands under forest-laws. The plague was always in London, and no ex ercise of authority was employed for its prevention ; indeed its ravages were increased by the excessive crowding of inhabitants caused by the proclamations against new buildings. When des potism manifests itself to the world in erecting gorgeous palaces ; in sweeping away miserable dwellings from narrow streets, and sub stituting buildings that astonish by their magnificence or delight by their commodiousness ; in turning barren wastes into beauteous gardens, which the humblest may enjoy in common with the great est ; in delighting the pleasure-loving multitude with displays of military pomp, with illuminations and fireworks — the world is some what too ready to believe that despotism is a magician that can per form wonders far beyond the reach of limited authority or combined popular action. To Charles the First cannot be assigned either the praise or the blame of having expended his revenues in any such efforts to throw a factitious splendour over the decay of pub lic liberty. He was to some extent, indeed, a patron of the Fine Arts. He is looked upon by many as the English monarch from whom the Fine Arts received the highest encouragement. Charles was a large purchaser of paintings, and his galleries were adorned with several glorious works of Raffaelle and Titian, of Corregio * Strafford Letters, vol ii. p. 114. THE KING'S PATRONAGE OF THE FINE ARTS. 367 and Guido. He brought Raffaelle's Cartoons into England, as Cromwell saved them from going away. Vandyck was invited by him to his court ; and his encouragement has been amply repaid by the ideal of the king which this great painter has handed down to us. Mytens, also the court portrait-painter, was scarcely so fa voured. The one had ,£200 a year, the other ^40 as pension * Rubens painted for Charles the ceiling of the Banqueting-house. Dobson was encouraged by him, and received from him the name of " The English Tintoret." All this is highly creditable to the monarch ; but it must not be forgotten that no consideratipn of public benefit influenced this elegant expenditure of revenue. In dividual gratification was its sole end and aim. Individual vanity was abundantly satisfied by flattering portraits ; but great original compositions were not produced for this court. Nor was there wanting amongst the nobility and richer commoners a desire to cul tivate those Arts which England had in some measure neglected. The earl of Arundel had begun the formation of his noble collec tion of sculpture when Charles was a boy. To his " liberal charges and magnificence," says a writer about 1634, "this angle of the world oweth the first sight of Greek and Roman statues, with whose admired presence he began to honour the gardens and gallery of Arundel House, and hath ever since continued to transplant old Greece into England." f The Arundel collection was formed by a costly and judicious private expenditure. The royal collection might have been increased by influences not strictly honourable to the head of an independent kingdom. Charles was most anxious to obtain a statue of Adonis from a private collection at Rome. The queen's confessor urged his desire for that and other rare works of ancient art. Cardinal Barberini seconded these efforts ; and he wrote to Mazarine, " The statues go on prosperously ; nor shall I hesitate to rob Rome of her most valuable ornaments, if in exchange we might be so happy as to have the king of England's name amongst those princes who submit to the Apostolic See." J It is to be hoped that Charles resisted such temptations. During this reign there were invasions enough of the subject's liberty by proclamations against the extension of London ; but they were for no purpose of regulating that extension upon any systematic plan of convenience or beauty. There were still more direct violations of the rights of property, in ordering the sheriff * See Note at end of this chapter. t Peacham, " Compleat Gentleman." } Quoted by Mr. D' Israeli from Panzani's Memoirs. 368 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. to pull down shops and houses in the vicinity of St. Paul's, com pelling the owners to accept any compensation that was offered to them. Here was the vigour of despotism, but not such a vigour as England was formed to endure. All shops also in Cheapside and Lombard-street, except those of the goldsmiths, were commanded to be shut up, that the great avenue to the cathedral might not ex hibit any trace of vuigar industries ; and that when foreigners went to the city to see the Lord Mayor's procession, they might not be of fended by butchers' stalls and " fripperies." This was to enforce arbitrarily the custom, which partially prevailed, that those of the same trade should occupy the same street. The greatest thorough fare was to display the most striking wealth. What Cheapside then was on gala-days may be seen in a print of the entry of Mary de Medicis, who came to England very much against the wishes ©f the king, in 1638. The print accompanies a description, in French, by the Sieur de la Serre, historiographer of France,* of the ceremonies that attended this visit of the queen mother, — a visit of which Laud, in his Diary, says, " great apprehensions of this business." She came, however, and Cheapside — " la grande rue " — had its houses, which a previous visitor had described as " all windows," crowded with fair city dames and portly livery-men ; and the city companies sat on elevated platforms covered with blue cloth ; and the lord mayor and the recorder were there, and twenty- four aldermen, in their robes of scarlet ; and, above all, a sight that in a few years was not so agreeable — six thousand soldiers of the city separated in divers companies. These were trained bands, whose numbers does not seem to have varied from that of 161 7, when the chaplain of the Venetian ambassador could not eat his dinner in peace from the noise of " musket and artillery exercise " in the fields near Bishopsgate-street Without.f London was ac customed to processions and pageants, and especially to its Lord Mayor's shows, in which all the dignitaries of the land followed the civic magistrate to his dinner in Guildhall, amidst a very merry and boisterous crowd, that scarcely gave way to the " twenty sav ages or green-men, walking with squibs or fire-works to sweep the streets." Though the times were evil when Mary de Medicis came to London, the love of sight-seeing and sight-performing kept the crowd of idlers pleased, and even the discontented of the city quiet, * " Histoire de 1' EntnSe Royale de la Reyne Mere," London, 1639. Reprinted in "77S-- t " Quarterly Review," October, 1857, p. 411. MARY DE MEDICIS IN LONDON. 369 though the corporation had been fined ,£70,000 by the Star-chamber, upon a complaint that the conditions by which they held lands in Ulster had been infringed. The city offered, by way of compensa tion, to build the king a palace in St. James's park. The courtiers wanted the money to squander in masques and banquets, and the offer was refused. Charles had employed Inigo Jones to prepare plans for a magnificent Whitehall. The Banqueting-house is the only architectural monument of the taste of the two first Stuarts. Vol. III.— 24 37° HISTORY OF ENGLAND. NOTE ON THE PORTRAITS OF CHARLES I. In the Manchester Exhibition of Art Treasures an opportunity was afforded of com paring the portrait of Charles by each of the painters, Vandyck and Mytens, almost in juxtaposition. There, was a family group by Mytens, and a family group by Vandyck. In that of Mytens the king and queen are preparing to ride ; and there is Jeffrey Hudson, the dwarf, holding a small dog in aleash, the favourite spaniels, andalarger dog with amonkey. In the group by Vandyck the king is sitting by the side of his queen, with an infant on her lap. The Charles of Mytens' group is younger than in that of Vandyck. There are no decided markings of character in his face. The expression is gentle, almost feeble. The Charles of Vandyck's group has the almost invariable countenance which this painter gives to him — the well-known composed and reflective character, with a tinge of foreboding melancholy, as some imagine. Near these groups hung a whole length of the king by Mytens. The technical art of Mytens was little inferior to that of Vandyck ; and he was more faithful in portraiture, if amongst the requirements of fidelity we ask that portraits of the same person at different periods of life, and in different situations, should have some variety. The portraits of Charles by Mytens show how much of the general expression of the character of the king is due to the ideal of Vandyck, The features are the same in both artists, but the contemplative and tender expression is wholly due to Vandyck. Mytens gives us a sober and apathetic face, more remarkable for the want of sentiment than for its excess — a face not wholly pleasant. The grace also belongs to the more poetical painter. In Mytens we can see how Charles would have grown into a likeness of his father. In the head of the king by Vandyck, in the same collection, painted in 1637, there is more anima tion than in his other portraits. But in all of them, not to yield too much to the historical evidences of character, tl^ere are the indications, however faint, of suspicion and mental reservation, and an especial want of those physiognomical traits which indicate self-reli ance. Compare the Charles of Vandyck with the Strafford of Vandyck. Strafford has the care-worn expression, and the imagined presentiment of evil, to a far greater extent than his master. But it is the weight of responsibility pressing upon a powerful mind. What decision, what keenness of observation, what inflexibility, wholly wanting in the por traits of Charles. SCOTLAND. 371 CHAPTER XX. Scotland. — Visit of the king in 1633 — A Service-book commanded to be used in 1637. — The National Covenant. — Progress of the troubles in Scotland. — The General As sembly, — The king and the Scots levy forces. — The king at Berwick. — Camp of the Covenanters. — An English Parliament. — Suddenly dissolved. — Convocation continues to sit. — The Scottish war resumed. — Rout of Newburn. — Council of Peers. — Cessa tion of arms. — An English Parliament summoned. — Character of the House of Com mons* — Strafford. — Laud. In the summer of 1633 Charles had paid a visit to Scotland, and was there crowned. Not only were the two nations as distinct in their civil and ecclesiastical systems of government as if they had been still ruled by two sovereigns, but the Scottish affairs were sep arately managed by Charles himself, without any reference to the English Council. One English adviser he, however, had, whose notions upon church government wholly over-rode the prudential considerations of civil polity. Laud, then bishop of London, ac companied the king on this Scottish journey. Although the bishop enters in his Diary, " King Charles crowned at Holyrood church in Edinburgh ; — I never saw more expressions of joy than after it ; " Laud himself gave great offence by the introduction of rites at the coronation which the people considered as part of the sys tem which the Reformation had overthrown. His temper was violent; and the Scottish historians say that he thrust the arch bishop of Glasgow from the king's side, because he refused to offi ciate in embroidered robes. Some of the Scottish prelates were not imbued with this love of simplicity ; and they united with the powerful English bishop in the promotion of a plan for introducing a Service-book in Scotland, which should supersede the extempo raneous prayers of the presbyterian form of worship. The design was not then carried into effect. But in 1637, when Laud had be come archbishop, and all moderate measures for producing con formity in England had been 'laid aside, the Scottish Church, was suddenly called upon to receive a book of Canons approved at Lambeth ; and a Service-book was directed to be used in all places of divine worship. This Prayer Book varied from the English 372 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Liturgy in points which indicated a nearer approach to the Romish ritual. The consequences of this most ignorant rashness — igno rant, because of its utter blindness to the course of Scottish history during the previous hundred years, and to the character of the Scottish people — were wholly unforeseen. All political prudence was swallowed up in the one dominant passion of the king and of his prime adviser for an unvarying ecclesiastical uniformity, in and through which the minutest ceremonial observances should be rigidly enforced, as the test of orthodoxy, and therefore of loyalty. From the date of this violent defiance of the principles and habits of the Scottish people, the reign of Charles becomes the turning- point of English history. Perhaps no great public event has been without its ultimate effects upon the fortunes of a nation, although centuries may have passed away. The stirring action that com menced in Scotland in 1637 not only influenced all her own after- destinies ; — " it preserved the liberties and overthrew the monarchy of England."* Robert Baillie, Principal of the University of Glasgow, has, in his Letters and Journals, left some of the most interesting me morials of these times. f We find in the good man's narrative the ominous beginning of these Scottish disturbances. By sound of trumpet it is proclaimed that all subjects, ecclesiastical and civil. conform themselves to the Liturgy by the next Pasch [Easter]. The books were not ready till May, and then every minister was commanded to buy two copies. The book is lent about from hand to hand ; its "popish points " are shown; it is imposed without any meeting of church or state, say the dissatisfied. A letter comes down from the king commanding its use without farther de lay. " The whole body of the town murmurs and grudges all the week exceedingly ; and, who can marvel, discourses, declamations, pamphlets, everywhere." Sunday, the 23rd of June, arrives ; and thus Principal Baillie tells us what happened : — " When the bishop and his dean, in the great church, and the bishop of Argyle, in the Grayfriars, began to officiate, as they speak, incontinent the serving-maids began such a tumult as was never heard of since the Reformation in our nation." History has preserved the name of one turbulent heroine, who may have sat for the " Trulla " of Hudi- bras : " Jane or Janet Geddes (yet living at the writing of this rela- * Hallam, chap. xvii. t " Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, A. M., edited by David Laing, Esq." 3 vols. THE NATIONAL COVENANT. 373 tion) flung a little folding-stool, whereon she sat, at the dean's head, saying ' Out, thou false thief ! dost thou say the mass at my lug ?' " * A threatening outburst of popular fury followed this exhibition, but no wounds were given. The chancellor writes to the king, and there is "great fear for the king's' wrath." The country is getting hot, as well as Edinburgh. Preachers who defend the Liturgy are maltreated, and mostly by " enraged women of all qualities." Gradually the nobles, the gentry, and " burrows " [members for boroughs] take up the supplications against the Service-book. By December, some of the most influential agree together to oppose its use, and resist the further intrusion of Prelacy. They become organised. The king, Who at first had threatened the Scottish au thorities, now endeavours to moderate the people by proclamations that declare his abhorrence of Popery, and his resolution to main tain the religion then professed. But there are symptoms that these professions are delusive. The idea of submission to the authority of the Scottish prelates is utterly rejected. The whole community enters into a National Covenant to abjure the doctrines, rites, and ceremonies of the Romish Church, and to resist the in novations which the prelates had introduced. In the High Church of Edinburgh, on the ist of March, 1638, this Covenant was read, and the whole congregation rose and swore to maintain what is set forth. Copies of the deed were sent throughout the land, and with tears and protestations the Covenant was sworn to and signed by hundreds of thousands. The ecclesiastical government was an anomaly, which Clarendon describes in few words : " Though there were bishops in name, the whole jurisdiction, and they themselves were, upon the matter, subject to an assembly which was purely presbyterian." But when Clarendon adds " no form of religion in practice, no liturgy, nor the least appearance of the beauty of holiness," he speaks with a very imperfect knowledge of the Scottish earnestness in religion, in which the strength as well as the beauty of holiness was manifest. The " enraged women '' of Edinburgh were not very favourable specimens of the national spirit. But in the history of the nations there is no grander spectacle than a whole people, for the assertion of a principle, assembled in separate congregations, large or small, in the crowded city and in the mountain solitude, to defend the doctrine and discipline which their fathers had established ; and to declare, " before God, his angels, and the world," their resolution • " Continuation of Baker's Chronicle," edit, of 1670 ; quoted by Mr. Carlyle. 374 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. to adhere to the same all the days of their life. During this won derful movement in Scotland, the Council of England, and indeed the people, were as men in their midnight sleep whilst their neigh bour's house is on fire. "The truth is," says Clarendon, "there was so little curiosity either in the court, or the country, to know anything of Scotland, or what was done there, that when the whole nation was solicitous to know what passed weekly in Germany and Poland, and all other parts of Europe, no man ever inquired what was doing in Scotland, nor had that kingdom a place or mention in one page of any gazette." * There were gazettes in that day. " The Weekly News," and " The Weekly Account," and little sheets called " Currantoes," were the staple of the halfyearly " Intelligencer." Few, indeed, and very meagre, were these peep holes out of the prison in which public opinion was then locked up. For tbe Star-chamber was in full activity for the regulation of the press ; and by its decree at this very period master printers were limited to twenty who found sureties ; and " printing in corners without a license " was punishable by the orthodox process of whipping and the pillory. It was seven years later when Milton raised his eloquent voice for the " Liberty of Unlicensed Printing," and spoke the words which tyranny had always most dreaded to hear, " Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties." If the petty news papers of 1637 and 1638 had told of Janet Geddes and her doings, they would soon have been silenced. The people had no curiosity about Scotland, because they knew nothing about Scotland. The king suffered no transaction of his native kingdom to be debated or communicated to his privy-council, "but handled all these affairs himself with two or three Scotsmen." -j- Gradually the knowledge of the riots of Edinburgh creeps out : " Horrible ado against the bishops in Scotland, for seeking to bring in amongst them our Church-Service." (October, 1637.) " Small hope yet in Scot land to bring our Church-Service into use there ; they still oppose it with great violence." (November, 1637.) " Messengers come weekly thence." (March, 1638.) So writes Garrard to his great patron, but intimates that there is one who informs the Lord-Dep uty much better than himself of the proceedings there. The weekly messengers have told something of the truth in the court of purlieus ; for even the king's fool has been moved to speak his mind, poor fellow : " Archy is fallen into a great misfortune. A * " History of the Rebellion,'' temp. 1637. -f Clarendon. PROGRESS OF THE TROUBLES IN SCOTLAND. 375 fool he would be, but a foul-mouthed knave he hath proved himself. Being in a tavern in Westminster, drunk he saith himself, he was speaking of the Scottish business ; he fell a railing on my lord of Canterbury ; said he was a monk, a rogue, and a traitor. Of this his grace complained at Council, the king being present. It was ordered he should be carried to the porter's lodge, his coat pulled over his ears, and kicked out of the court, never to enter within the gates, and to be called into the Star-chamber. The first part is done ; but my lord of Canterbury hath interceded to the king that it should end." * Opinions are getting troublesome in England in higher places than taverns in Westminster. " They grow foolish at Oxford, for they had a question about the legality of Ship-money, as also, whether the Addita and Alterata in the Scottish liturgy did give just cause of scandal ; but my lord's grace of Canterbury hearing of it, forbad them such question." (July, 1638.) In an other year the very courtiers are taking the Scottish matters to heart : " Most certain it is, that the Scots is grown a most obstinate rebellious people. God turn their hearts. Daily they fall more and more from their obedience." (May 1639.) The steps by which the Scots arrived at this " obstinate rebel lious" condition were those of the steady march of an irritated popula tion under experienced leaders. The first resistance of the Service- Book was a sudden outburst. The national Covenant was a de liberate act which was to be sustained on the battle-field. Charles and his one fatal adviser chose to regard it as the affair of a rab ble ; and the king commissioned the Marquis of Hamilton to re duce " the rascally people " to obedience. The commissioner was to allow the Scots six weeks to renounce the Covenant. If not renounced, power was to be sent from England ; and the king himself would hazard his life rather than suffer authority to be contemned. In June, 1638, the Marquis of Hamilton arrived at Edinburgh. He had written to nobles and gentlemen, the most of note, to attend him at Haddington, previous to his entry into the capital. Two or three only met him, and they carried him an ex cuse in the name of all. Baillie records that huge multitudes re ceived him at Leith — nobles, gentry, women, the town magistrates. But, says the good minister, "we were most conspicuous in our black cloaks, about five hundred on a brae-side in the links." These Geneva cloaks must have suggested some serious consid erations to the Commissioners. The discussions between Hamil- * Straffo;d Letters. 376 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ton and the Covenanters only shewed how earnest and resolute they were. Nothing but a General Assembly and a Parliament would induce them to renounce their league. The Commissioner was directed to temporise, and not to take any extreme measures till an armed force was ready to support them. He went to Eng land for further instructions ; but he returned with powers to an nounce a General Assembly and a Parliament, and to propose that the Confession of Faith, of 1 589, should be signed instead of the Covenant. A proclamation was issued, setting forth that the Lit urgy and the Canons should be given up, on condition that this Confession should be adopted. The Covenanters protested against this ; as an attempt to make them, under cover of a new oath, re cant what they had been doing. " We thought this subscription," says Baillie, " a very deep and dangerous plot, and so opposed it everywhere, what we could." In November, a General Assembly was convened at Glasgow. " The Town did expect and provide for multitudes of people." On the 17th the Commissioner arrived. On the 20th there was a solemn fast. The Assembly was opened on the 21st. Seven days did this great meeting debate and pro test. The chief grounds of difference were the introduction of lay members into the Assembly ; and the general determination to remove the bishops. On the 28th the Marquis dissolved the As sembly, and left Glasgow. It continued its sittings till the 20th of December ; and, against the opinions of a few of the moderate, declared the total abolition of episcopacy in the kirk of Scotland. The determined opposition of the Scottish nobility to episcopacy may be attributed to some motives, not unjust ones, besides a de sire for the safety of the Reformed Church. The prelates had en grossed some of the high civil offices ; they formed a large propor tion of the Privy-Council ; they had Courts with very obnoxious powers, like those of the High-Commission Court in England. The whole system of episcopacy seemed to the people and to theic leaders full of danger to their consciences and their liberties. " The Canterburian faction," says Baillie, " was hayling us all away to Rome for our religion, to Constantinople for our policy." * At the beginning of 1639 it became clear that these contests would end in an appeal to arms. Charles was ill-prepared for a war. In November, 1638, Lord Cottington writes to the Lord Deputy, " Our business of Scotland grows every day worse, so as we are almost certain it will come to a war, and that a defensive one on * Letters, &c. vol. i. p. 185. THE KING AND THE SCOTS LEVY FORCES. 377 our side, and how we shall defend ourselves without money is not under my cap The king will not hear to a Parliament."* On the following 26th of January, Charles sent out a letter, " com manding all the nobles and gentry of England to attend his royal standard at York against the 1st of April, where he was to go to the border to oppose the Scots there." f But the Scots, instead of having a discontented commonalty to impede the exertions of the nobles and gentry, were all firmly banded together, peer and peasant, merchant and mechanic, to maintain a cause which they held to be the cause of God and their country. The whole land was full of military preparation. The nobles headed their forces in every shire. In every great town there were frequent drill ings ; "every one, man and woman, encouraged their neighbours." The castle of Edinburgh was surprised by Leslie, one who had gained a large experience in the great Protestant war in Ger many, and in whom all confided ; for. says Baillie, " such was the wisdom and authority of that old, little, crooked soldier, that all, with ane incredible submission, from the beginning to the end, gave over themselves to be guided by him." Dumbarton castle was seized by the Earl of Argyle. Stirling was held by a Cove nanter. Onward marched the king towards York. His army, under the lords Arundel, Holland, and Essex, was very insufficient for attack or defence, though formidable enough for the plunder of their countrymen. " As for the forces of England, they failed like the summer brooks ; the country was filled with their own griev ances." % In the same spirit Mrs. Hutchinson writes, " the com monalty of the nation, being themselves under grievous bondage, were loath to oppose a people that came only to claim their just liberties.'' Wentworth made prodigious exertions to keep down the Scottish settlers in Ulster; and he sent some Irish to the king's army — " a matter of fifteen hundred ragged Arabians," says Baillie. The marquis of Hamilton sailed into the Firth of Forth ; but his forces were quite unequal to subdue or even to awe an armed population ; and the Scots appear to have despised his "five thousand land-sojours, taken up in a violent press". The marquis made war upon his countrymen in a merciful way. s He fired no shot ; and was content with intercepting supplies. His men, closely packed in their small ships, could obtain neither fresh meat nor water, for the shores were closely watched ; and the old fortune of the miserable naval enterprises of this reign attended * Strafford Letters, vol. ii. p. 246. t Baillie. X Ibid. 378 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. them. Leslie marched towards the border. The king had ad vanced to Berwick ; and from his camp at the English side of the Tweed, saw " through a prospect " [telescope] twelve thousand Scots encamped on Dunse-Law ; the hill-top crowded with cannon ; the gentle hill-sides stirring with experienced musqueteers and " stout young ploughmen and highlanders with their plaids, targes, and dorlachs."* Before the tent of every captain was a colour bearing the Scottish arms, and a legend, in golden letters, "For Christ's Crown and Covenant." The camp was full of the kirk- ministers ; and the soldiers were encouraged, not only by the presence of their nobles, but by " the good sermons and prayers, morning and even under the roof of heaven, to which their drums did call them for bells." f The armies had looked upon each other, and certainly the English commanders had very substantial rea sons for not risking a battle. A small body of the royal cavalry- had fled before a smaller body of Scots. Some advances to pa cification were made from the Scottish side. On the 6th of June, the earl of Dunfermline was sent to the royal camp with a petition that a meeting might be held between a few worthy men of each kingdom to settle the points in dispute. Charles returned an an swer signed by his Secretary. The Covenanters required an an swer under his own hand ; and the signature was given, assenting to the proposal. On the nth of June, the Scottish deputies — con sisting of four nobles, with Alexander Henderson, Moderator of the General Assembly, and the Clerk-Register of that body, ar rived in the camp. The king appointed his Commissioners; but during the proceedings he suddenly appeared amongst the nego- ciators. His lofty tone, however, did not prevent a pacification being concluded on the 18th of June. The articles were very loosely expressed ; and it soon became clear that the peace was a hollow one. Charles returned to London on the 1st of August. The Scottish army was disbanded. The fortresses were restored to the officers appointed by the Crown. But the conditions of the Covenant were inflexibly maintained in the General Assembly, and in the Parliament which met in August. Moreover, that Par liament demanded privileges which appeared to weaken the royal authority; and the king's Commissioners decided upon its proroga tion. The members held that such prorogation was illegal without their own consent. On either side of the border the note of prep aration for war was again heard. * Baillie, p. 211-13. t Ibid. AN ENGLISH PARLIAMENT. — SUDDENLY DISSOLVED. 379 Lowered in the eyes of his English subjects by the pacification of Berwick ; the prestige of eleven years' pretensions to absolute power dissipated; without financial resources for military purposes, unless new exactions had been attempted, besides the old demands, — Charles at length summoned an English Parliament. It met on the 13th of April, 1640; it was dissolved on the 5th of May. In this Session of three weeks the great question of grievances preceding supplies was renewed with a vigour proportionate to the invasions of public liberty since 1629. But there was a mod eration in the language of the Commons which was perhaps the best evidence of the steadiness of their resolves. The king demanded twelve subsidies in three years — a sum equivalent to about 840,000/. ; and he offered to relinquish ship-money, which was estimated to produce 200,000/. a year. The Commons would hear of no compromise of such a nature. Ship-money was the opprobrium of the government; the Crown had claimed the right of taxation independent of the Commons ; the people had been unconstitutionally taxed ; the judgment of the Courts must be annulled, and the judges punished. The Commons would then enter upon the business of Supplies. The table of the House was covered with petitions against the abuses of the State and of the Church. The clouds were gathering all around ; and the king thought to avert the tempest by dissolving the Parliament. The Convocation of the Clergy continued to sit ; and large assistance was voted to the king. In that assembly Canons were framed which were well calculated to render the government of the Church more and more odious. No Englishman of sense, and especially no honest Puritan, would sanction the attack upon Laud's palace at Lambeth on the nth of May. But they would regard his Canons, — which preached passive obedience to the divine right of kings and subjected Protestant dissentients to the same penalties as Popish recusants, — as an offence against the ancient liberties of Englishmen. Many of the Clergy would look forward to the time when this new yoke should be shaken off, by which the tenure of their livings was made to depend upon taking an oath offensive to their consciences — the et catera oath as it was called. Meanwhile, members of the Commons were again imprisoned, Ship-money was more rigorously enforced. Citizens were punished for refusing a loan. The counties were subjected to novel charges for the troops that were -levied for another Scottish campaign. On the 4th of June, a month after the dissolution of Parliament, the 380 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. earl of Northumberland, a courtier, said in a letter, " It is impossible that things can long continue in the condition they are now in ; so general a defection in this kingdom hath not been known in the memory of any." * The contest between the king and Scotland — we cannot call it a contest between England and Scotland — had for some time as sumed the character of a war. Trade with Scotland had been pro hibited. The English cruisers seized Scottish merchant-ships. In March and April levies had been called out by the Covenanters. On the 2nd of June, the Parliament met in Edinburgh, and put forth manifestoes which were of more effect than the royal proc lamations denouncing the Scots as rebels and traitors. The- Parliament imposed levies, which were not, however, very promptly paid. They formed a Committee of Estates which held the execu tive power of the realm. It was resolved to march to England with a petition, supported by an army of twenty-five thousand men. On the 20th of August they crossed the Twe ed at Coldstream, wading through the river. Montrose, afterwards so prominent in another cause, was the first to pass the river on foot. The marched at leisure through Northumberland. Lord Conway, the English general of the horse, had been in cantonments between the Tweed and the Tyne since the end of July. On the day that Leslie crossed the Tweed, Charles, having received news of the advance of this great army, hastily left London for York. He called all the tenants of the Crown to his standard. He offered by proclamation to for give the Scots, if they would crave pardon for the past as penitent delinquents. Strafford had raised troops in Ireland that had joined the king's forces. Altogether twenty thousand men were in arms under the royal standard. There was no zeal in this army. There was little discipline. The courtiers, " merry lads," as Sir Philip Warwick names some of them, with a ready loyalty made no inquiry as to the principle of the war. The common soldiers " questioned in a mutinous manner whether their captains were papists or not," and uttered " in bold speeches their distaste of the cause, to the astonishment of many, that common soldiers should be sensible of public interest and religion, when lords and gentlemen seemed not to be." t The queen had recommended the Roman Catholics to make contributions to carry on the war against the Scot- tish Covenanters, and "with more noise and vanity than pru dence admitted, they had made public collections of money to a * " Sidney Papers," quoted by Mr. Hallam. t May. COUNCIL OF PEERS. 38 1 considerable sum." * To oppose the old campaigner Leslie, a man of many battles, was selected lord Conway, — one who had seen some service, such as it was, but who is described by Clarendon as " a voluptuous man in eating and drinking, and of great license in all other excesses ; " and who was said by sir P. Warwick to " lay under some reflection since the action ofthe Isle of Rhe." Strafford (Wentworth was now earl of Strafford) was to have taken the command ; but sickness prevented him from joining the army till after it had sustained a perilous defeat, in what Clarendon- terms "that infamous irreparable rout at Newburn." On the 27th of August, the Scots had reached the left bank of the Tyne about five miles above Newcastle, and on that night their camp fires blazed with the coal of the adjacent pits. The next day they oc cupied the town of Newburn. There appears to have been little disposition to come to an engagement; and the Scots had made some English welcome who visited their camp. But one of their officers having been killed by a shot from the opposite bank of the river, the artillery on both sides opened their fire. At low water two Scottish regiments crossed the Tyne. The English horse fled, and the whole army moved in great disorder to Newcastle. There was only one effort made by a gallant few to oppose the passage of the Scots across the river. Newcastle was itself abandoned at midnight. On the morrow, writes Baillie, " Newcastle was ren dered to us ; the soldiers and chief citizens had fled out of it in great haste." There they found stores of provisions and of arms. In Scotland, the Covenanters were equally successful ; and Dum barton, "questionless the strongest place in Britain," capitulated. The pastle of Edinburgh also surrendered to Argyle. The king was coming on and had reached Allerton, when he heard of the rout of Newburn ; and he returned to York. Newcastle was put by the Scots under contribution ; and there they quietly sat down whilst some attempts were made for a pacification. After these occurrences, the king, having adopted what Claren don calls " a new invention," or rather " so old that it had not been practised in some hundreds of years," called a Great Council of Peers to attend him at York on the 24th of September. The first decision of the Council was to appoint a Commission of sixteen Peers to treat with the Scots at Ripon. After various vain attempts to come to a final understanding, a cessation of arms, for two months, was agreed to, on the 26th of October, that the demands * Clarendon. 382 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of the Covenanters might be discussed in London by the Commis sioners. It had become known that the king had proposed to the peers again to summon a Parliament. During this cessation of arms the Scottish army was to be maintained by a payment of 850/. per day. " The Parliamenfwas to meet at Westminster on the 3rd of November. For the fifth time during the reign of Charles the people are look ing to a Parliament, that should establish the just distinctions be tween an absolute monarchy and a free monarchy. The barriers be- ween Liberty and Despotism had been rudely thrown down. It is no vain difference about a theory. It is a vital question which has come home to every man. There is no falling off in the popular sentiment as to the character of those who have contended in former parliaments against the insolent claims of prerogative. These men are returned for county and borough, without a doubt that they have pursued the right course. A very short time had been given between the issue of the writs and the elections ; — an advantage to the court party. Yet the elections had so completely gone against that party, that Clarendon says the House was packed by decisions upon con troverted returns. This is one of the loose assertions of that his torian, for there were only eight returns that were contested. He says also, " There was observed a marvellous elated countenance in many of the members of parliament before they met together in the house ; the same men, who, six months before, were observed to be of very moderate tempers, and to wish that gentle remedies might be applied." Thus, in this dreary November season, have the Peers, and five hundred and six members of the House of Commons, come up from every shire and borough, to take their sides in the great battle for constitutional rights and liberty of conscience. Travelling in those wintry days to parliament was costly and not very agreeable. Principal Baillie, who was to go to WestminLter from Newcastle on the Covenant business, with a safe conduct under the Great Seal, was eight days on the road; and on the eighth day he came from Ware to London, " all well, horse and men, as we could wish ; divers merchants and their ser vants with us, on little nags." The whole journey was perilous in his eyes : " The way extremely foul and deep, the journeys long and continued ; sundry of us unaccustomed with travel, we took it for God's singular goodness that all of us were so preserved We were by the way at great expenses ; their inns are all like palaces; no marvel they extort their guests."* * " Letters and Journals," vol. i. p. 271. CHARACTER OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 383 The complexion of the House of Commons was such as to alarm some of those who had been concerned in the proceedings of the absolute government of eleven years. Sir John Bramston, a devoted loyalist, the son of one of the ship-money judges, writes thus of the composition of the House : " Those gentlemen who had been imprisoned about the loans, benevolences, or any other the like matters; such citizens as had been sued, imprisoned, or mo lested about tonnage or poundage, or the customs ; all that had any ways appeared obstinate and refractory to the government and the king's commands about ship-money, coat-and-conduct money, or the Commission, were chosen either for counties or boroughs."* There were members of the government, the chief advisers of the king, to whom the presence in Parliament of " those gentlemen who had been imprisoned," &c, was not a promise of halcyon days. The Scots, before the treaty of Ripon, had demanded " the removal of three or four persons from about the king." Strafford and Laud were especially pointed at. Of Laud, they distinctly said that his removal was necessary for the preservation of the Protestant religion, " which every honest man thought at present in great dan ger, by the exorbitant power of the Archbishop of Canterbury." The enemy of Strafford, " more terrible than all the others," was "the whole Scottish nation, provoked by the declaration he had procured of Ireland, and some high carriage and expressions of his against them in that kingdom." f Strafford, though of , undaunted courage, saw his danger in this parliament, which had been called at the moment when he would have fought in the north. He wished to retire to his government of Ireland. Charles pledged himself that not a hair of Strafford's head should be touched by the parliament. Laud was suffering an agony of superstitious fear in his Lambeth palace. There was real cause for alarm in the temper of the people. On the 22nd of October, the High Com mission Court, so tyrannical and so odious, was sitting at St. Paul's. "Very near two thousand Brownists made a tumult at the end of the Court, tore down all the benches in the Consistory, and cried out they would have no bishop, nor no High Commission." J The unhappy state of Laud's own mind, credulous as ever about dreams and prognostications, may be judged by the following entry *" Autobiography of Sir John Bramston," Camden Society. "Coat-and-conduct money," the name of a particular tax for the equipment of soldiers, is misprinted " Coal, and- conduct-money," p. 73. t Clarendon. X Laud's Diary. 3«4 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of his Diary: "October 27, Tuesday, Simon and Jude's Eve. I went into my upper study, to see some manuscripts, which I was sending to Oxford. In that study hung my picture, taken by the life ; and coming in, I found it fallen down upon the face, and lying on the floor, the string being broken by which it was hanged against the wall. I am almost every day threatened with my ruin in Parliament. God grant this be no omen." The real character of Revolutions is as rarely understood as their possible range is foreseen, by those first affected by them, — princes and their ministers. Laud, and to a less extent Strafford, could see nothing in the events which disturbed their power but the malignity of personal enemies, or the influence of ambitious and irreligious despisers of lawful authority. Laud himself writes, with an amusing simplicity, and no doubt with a sincere expression of his belief, that " the adverse party in the late parliament, or by and by after before they parted, ordered things so, and filled men's minds with such strange jealousies, that the king's good people were almost generally possessed that his majesty had a purpose to alter the ancient laws and liberties of the kingdom, and to bring in slavery upon his people, — a thing which, for aught I know, his majesty never intended." * Purblind and almost stone-blind must that minister have been who did not see that the systematic action of the government during the whole reign, and more' especially from 1 629 to 1640, had been to drive such an opinion into the heads of the whole community ; and that nothing but their loyally, which was as strong a principle as the love of freedom, could have long before averted some fearful outbreak of popular indignation, in the absence of the legitimate parliamentary mode of expressing the public voice. According to Laud's view of the matter, the Scots did not come to England with a Covenant in their hands, sub scribed by an indignant nation, but because " some lords and others, who had by this time made an underhand solemn con federacy with a strong faction of the Scots, brought an army of them into the kingdom." Some may believe, as we do not, that Charles " never intended to bring in slavery upon his people;" but the people who saw the tyranny of his actions had no great reason to rely upon his intentions. The king and the archbishop, both weak men, were self-deceivers ; and of the nature of the self-deceptions of both we may form an opinion from an entry in Laud's Diary, recording that he had been fined 500/. by the Far- * Laud's " History of the Troubles," &c. p. 83. LAUD. 385 liament (December' 21, 1640), for the illegal imprisonment of sir Robert Howard : " In such a case, say the imprisonment were more than the Law allow; what may be done for Honour and Religion sake ? " When Authority rides over Law in the name of Honour and Religion, it becomes more dangerous even than the brute force which knows no law but its own passionate will. Vol. III. — 25 386 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER XXI. The Long Parliament. — Difficulty of narrating its history m a limited space. — Of what manner of men composed on its first meeting. — Opening of the Parliament. — Election of Speaker. — Petitions from the prisoners under sentence of the Star-Chamber. — Their triumphal entry into London. — Arrival of the earl of Strafford. — The Hr use of Commons resolve to impeach him. — His arrest. — Arrest of archbishop Laud. — Im peached of hizh-treason, and committed to th; Tower. — Finch, the Lord-Keeper, and Windebank, Secretary of State, fly the country. — Tlie judges in the case o» ship- money proceeded against. — Destruction of crosses and images. — Charges against Strafford. — His trial. — Arrangements of "Westminster Hall. — Daily conrse of pro ceedings. — Bill of attainder proposed in the House of Commons.— ^Disclosure of Henry Vane. — Strafford's last speech in his defence. — Pym's reply. — Close of the trial. — The bill of attainder passed by both Houses. — Army plots and popular clam ours. — Protestation. — Efforts of the king to save Strafford. — He finally abandons him. — His execution. The Long Parliament — the most memorable Parliament that England ever saw — the Parliament which, for two centuries, has been the theme of the most extravagant hatred and the most ex aggerated praise — the Parliament, whatever be its merits oj-its faults, which has the one glory of having rendered it impossible that the Monarchy of England could endure except in alliance with representative freedom — this Parliament of thirteen years' duration now claims our anxious regard. Those who are bewil dered by the crowd of persons, the rush of events, the con trariety of opinions, as they read the history of this Parliament in the more important contemporary historians and memoir-writers, will comprehend the impossibility of adequately relating the great story in a hundred or so of pages. We must necessarily go over the old track, without lingering by the way-side, if we would ar rive at the end of our journey in any reasonable time. Though this old track has been often trodden, it is still very dark and de vious ; and it has been rendered more difficult by some of its pro fessed guides, and by one especially, who has made very treacher- ons stepping stones over parts of the road now known to be foul and dangerous. We shall endeavour to pursue our wav warily but not fearfully. What should we fear? The time is past when it was thought necessary for a loyal subject of the British crown to deify MEETING OF THE LONG PARLIAMENT. 387 Charles or disabolify Cromwell, In the truer and nobler spirit of our own day, the statutes of Hampden and of Falkland now claim our united reverence as we tread the vestibule of our Houses of Lords and Commons. * In the rude wood-cut which heads a newspaper of 1642, we have a representation, almost ludicrous, of that great assemblage to which it was given to " rough-hew " the destinies of England. In a far more elaborate engraving of the Lower House, in 1623, we see the five hundred members placed in five rows, tier above tier, in that old Chapel of St. Stephen's, famous for generations, f On the 3rd of November, 1640, there were sitting on those benches men whose names will endure as long as England is a nation ; men whose memories are now venerated in lands, then undiscovered, or chiefly occupied by barbarous tribes, where the principles of repre sentative government are sustaining the Anglo-Saxon race in their career of liberty, whilst they fill new continents with their lan guage and their arts. But it is not only from the more illustrious of that Parliament that we have derived our great inheritance of civil rights. There were men there of many varieties of opinion, as to the extent to which reforms of the Church and of the State should be carried. But there were very few indeed, who did not sec that the time was come when a stand was to be made against the arbitrary power which, whether embodied in Strafford or Laud, in Finch or Windebank, had so long and so successfully carried on a warfare " against our fundamental laws— against the excel lent constitution of this kingdom, which hath made it appear to strangers rather an. idea than a real commonwealth, and produced the honour and happiness of this, as the wonder of every other nation." J Those who opposed the despotic pretensions of Charles and of his father were not the innovators, as some would pretend. When Clarendon tells us of the House of Commons, that "the major part of that body consisted of men who had no mind to break the peace of the kingdom, or to make any considerable alter ation in the government of Church or State," he correctly rep resents the general temper of the Long Parliament in its first year. But when he adds that " all inventions were set on foot from the beginning to work on them and corrupt them, by suggestions *" In our days the history of the English Revolution has changed its face The narrative and opinions of Hume have ceased to satisfy the imagination and reason of the public." — Guizot. t Engraved in Lord Nugent's " Hampden," vol. i. t Falkland's charge against Finch. 388 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of the dangers that threatened all that was precious to the sub ject in their liberty and their property, he uses the term " in ventions " in the place of the facts which no one has set forth more distinctly than himself in the earlier portion of his history. There was, indeed, many a country-gentleman and citizen who went up to this Parliament with a hatred of ship money and of all other ille gal imposts, with a horror of the Court of High Commission and the Star-Chamber, and with a determination to prosecute, even to the death, the unjust judge and the tyrannical minister, who yet had the most unshaken loyalty to the king. Charles did not under stand the character of this Parliament. He conceded much ; but in the very act of concession he showed his weakness rather than his sense of right ; and there was reasonable fear enough, how ever exaggerated by popular mistrust, that at the first favourable moment the Parliament would be dissolved, and the old arbitrary power resumed with new force. Treacherous schemes on one side, and extravagant demands on the other, rendered almost hope less any other issue than Civil War. Then, necessarily, men chose their sides. Those '¦ who had no mind to break the peace of the kingdom" were compelled to draw their swords, friend against friend, and brother against brother ; and those who had no original design " to make any considerable alteration in the govern ment of Church or State," had all to witness, and many to promote, the downfall of the ecclesiastical system which Augustin had founded, and the ruin of the monarchy which Alfred had built up. On the memorable 3rd of November Charles opened this Par liament. He met his people with no cheerful display of royal splendour. " The king himself did not ride with his accustomed equipage, nor in his usual, majesty, to Westminster, but went pri vately in his barge to the Parliament Stairs."* Very few members were absent from their places. Charles addressed the House in a tone of conciliation : " One thing I desire of you, as one of the greatest means to make this a happy Parliament, that you on your parts, as I on mine, lay aside all suspicion, one of another." It was scarcely in the power of the representatives of the people to have hastily accepted the renewal of a broken confidence, even if they had been so willing. The fatal dissolution of Parliament, six months before, had spread a spirit of resistance to the court which was not confined to idle complainings. Sir Thomas Gardi ner, the recorder of London, had been designed by the king to * Clarendon. STAR-CHAMBER PRISONERS RELEASED. 389 fill the office of Speaker in the coming Parliament. Contrary to all precedent he was rejected by the city ; and no influence could procure his election in any other place. On the morning of the meeting of Parliament, the king was told that his choice was use less. Lenthall was chosen Speaker. In a few days there was abundant work for the Commons. Troops of horsemen arrived in London, craving redress of grievances upon their petitions. From the Fleet Prison came a petition from Alexander Leighton, who had been ten years in confinement ; and another from John Lil- burne, the sturdy London apprentice who had been whipped and imprisoned for distributing Prynne's books. Lilburne's petition was presented by Oliver Cromwell. From the several distant castles in which they were confined, the petitions of Prynne, and Burton, and Bastwick, reached the House. These prisoners were ordered to be brought to London. Leighton, mutilated, deaf, blind, crept out of the cell in which he expected to die, to receive some recompense for his sufferings. Lilburne had a money compensa tion voted to him. Prynrie and one of his fellow-sufferers made a triumphal entry into London. "Burton and Prynne came through fne most of the city triumphantly : never here such a like show : aoout a thousand horse, and, as some of good note say, above four tnousand ; above a hundred coaches, and, as many say, above two hundred ; with a World of foot, every one with their rosemary bianch. Bastwick is not yet corrie from Scilly." * It was voted th*8« these sufferers should be restored to their callings ; and that those who had unjustly sentenced them should pay high damages, as compensation, to each of them. Bastwick returned at the be ginning of December, with trumpets sounding, and torches burn ing, arid a thousand horse for his: convoy. " God is making here a new world," says Baillie. Some days before the assembling of Parliament, two remarka ble men met in Westminster Hall, and began conferring together upon the state of affairs. Mr. Pym told Mr. Hyde " that they must now be of another temper than they were the last parliament ; that they must not only sweep the house clean below, but must sweep down all the cobwebs which hung in the top and corners, that they might not breed dust, and so make a foul house hereafter; that they had how an opportunity to' rilake the country happy, by removing all 'grievances, and pulling Up the causes of them by the roots, if all men would do their duties." f This was not idle talk * Bailee's " Letters aud Journal,'1 vol. i. p. 277. f Clarendon. 390 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of Mr. Pym. On the night of Monday, the 9th of November, the earl of Strafford came to London. On the morning of Wednesday, the nth, Pym rose in his place i.i the House of Commons, and, say ing that he had matters of thehighest importance to propose, de sired that strangers should be excluded and the doors of the House be locked. The member to whom Pym discoursed of pulling up the causes of grievances by the roots was in the House, and has pre served an abstract of Pym's speech. He recapitulated all that the nation had endured in the attempt to deprive them of the liberty and property which was their birthright ; " these calamities falling upon us in the reign of a pious and virtuous king, who loved his people, and was a great lover of justice." Pym's praise of the king, ac cording to Clarendon, was, that he might wound him with less sus picion. " We must inquire," said the innpassioned speaker, " from what fountain these waters of bitterness flowed." There was one man more signal than the rest in bringing these miseries upon the nation — " a man who, in the memory of many present, had sate in that House an earnest vindicator of the laws, and a most zealous supporter and champion for the liberties of the people ; but long since turned apostate from those good affections, and, according to the custom and nature of apostates, was become the greatest enemy to the liberties of his country, and the greatest promoter of tyranny that any age had produced." And then he named "the earl of Strafford." Pym concluded by expressing a hope that they would provide a remedy proportionable to the disease. The members went on debating till the usual time of rising was come; but an order was given that no one should leave the House. After many hours of bitter investigation into the actions of Strafford, it was moved, " that he might be forthwith impeached of high trea son, which was no sooner mentioned than it found an universal ap probation and consent from the whole House." We must not for get that Mr. Hyde was himself in the House ; and that whatever colour he may give, when he writes as Lord Clarendon, to the pro ceedings against Strafford, he was one of those who gave consent and approbation to the impeachment. Falkland, indeed, recom mended, though fully concurring in the determination to impeach, that there should be a farther investigation by a committee pre vious to the impeachment ; but Pym frankly said, that the moment their proceedings were known, Strafford would procure the Par liament to be dissolved, or resort to some other desperate meas ures ; whereas, if they went at once to the Lords, he would neces- IMPEACHMENT OF STRAFFORD. 39.I sarilybe committed to safe custody. Late as it was, the peers were still sitting. The doors of the House of Commons 'were thrown open, and Pym, at the head of three hundred members, proceeded to the House of Lords, and there,- at the bar, in the name of the Lower House, and of all the Commons of England, impeached Thomas, earl of Strafford, of high treason, and required his arrest. The scene which followed has been spiritedly told by the Principal of 'Ihe University of Glasgow, who, in his visit to London, had leisure to learn more than most men, and had ability to relate well what he learnt or saw : " The Lords began to con sult on that strange and unexpected motion. The word goes in haste to the Lord Lieutenant, where he was with the king : with speed he comes to the House ; he calls rudely at the door. James Maxwell, keeper of the Black Rod, opens. His lordship, with a proud glooming countenance, makes towards his place at the board-head: but at once many bid him void the House ; so he is forced in confusion to go to door till he was called. After con sultation, being called in, he stands, but is commanded to kneel* and, on his knees, to hear the sentence. Being on his knees, he is delivered to the keeper of the Black Rod, to be prisoner till he was cleared of these crimes the House of Commons did charge him with. He offered to speak, but was commanded to be gone without a word. In the outer room, James Maxwell required him, as prisoner, to deliver his sword. When he had gotten it, he cries, with a loud voice; for his man to carry my Lord Lieutenant's sword. This done, he makes through a number of people towards his coach, all gazing, no man capping to him, before whom that morning the greatest of England would have stood discovered, all crying, What is the matter ? he said, A small matter, I warrant you ! They replied, Yes, indeed, high treason is a small matter ! Coming to the place where he expected his coach, it was not there ; so he behoved to return that same way through a world of gazing people. When at last he had found his coach, and was entering, James Maxwell told him, your lordship is my prisoner, and must go in my coach ; so he behoved to do." * There were others to be dealt with by the same summary pro cess who had rendered themselves obnoxious to the nation. Straf ford had been committed to the Tower on the 25th of November. On the 4th of December there is this entry in Laud's Diary :— " The king gave way, that his Council should be examined upon * Baillie, " Letters and Journal," vol. i. p. 272. 392 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. oath in the earl of Strafford's case ; I was examined this day." Very shortly after, the archbishop himself had to undergo a more severe ordeal. On the 16th of December the Canons which had been passed in Convocation after the dissolution of the last Par liament were, to use Land's own words, " condemned in the House of Commons as being against the king's prerogative, the funda mental laws of tbe realm, the liberty and propriety of the subject, and containing other things tending to sedition, and of dangerous consequence." He adds : " Upon this I was made the author of them, and a Committee put upon me to inquire into all my actions, and to prepare a charge." On the same day he was named by the Scottish Commissioners, in the Upper House, as an " incendiary." On the 18th, Denzel Hollis carried a message to the Lords, im peaching the archbishop of high treason. Laud was handed over to the custody of the usher of the Black Rod. When he left Lambeth, there was a tribute to his private character which is touching in itself, but has no bearing upon his public errors. He says, " As I went to my barge, hundreds of my poor neighbours stood there, and prayed for my safety, and return to my house. For which I bless God and them." Ten weeks afterwards he was committed to the Tower. Articles of impeachment were pre pared against the lord-keeper Finch, and against sir Francis Windebank, secretary of state. They both fled the country. " Within less than six weeks," writes Clarendon, "for no more time was yet elapsed, these terrible reformers had caused the two greatest counsellors of the kingdom, and whom they most feared, and so hated, to be removed from the king, and imprisoned, under an accusation of high treason ; and frighted away the lord keeper of the great seal of England, and one of the principal secretaries of state, into foreign lands, for fear of the like." But the terrible reformers did not rest here. Five of the judges, who had c'eclared ship-money lawful, were visited with a just retribution for their servility. They were compelled to give securities to abide the judgment of parliament, whilst the most obnoxious of them, sir Robert Berkeley, being impeached of high treason, was taken to prison from his judgment-seat in the King's Bench, " which struck," says Whitelocke, " a great terror in the rest of his breth ren then sitting in Westminster Hall, and in all his profession." A laborious and learned writer has shown how, in the times of the Plantagenets, the judges were regarded as " indifferent arbitrators, whose decisions on constitutional points were conclusive, and be- DESTRUCTION OF CROSSES AND IMAGES. 393 yohd the possibility of doubt or suspicion," But he truly points otit the difference in the times of Charles I. " One of the primary causes of the great rebellion that overthrew the government, and that cost the king his head, was the degradation of the bench of justice." * Clarendon himself clearly saw this great source of the people's discontent.! In the proceedings of the House of Com mons which led to the arrest of Berkeley, one speaker, supposed to be Pym, but whose name does not occur in the pamphlet which contains the speech, uttered these remarkable words : J " Mr. Speaker, blasted may that tongue be that shall, in the least de gree, derogate from the glory of those halcyon days our fathers enjoyed during the government of that ever-blessed, never-to-be- forgotten royal Elizabeth. But certainly I may safely say, without detraction, it was much advantage to the peace and prosperity of her reign, that the great examples of Empson and Dudley were then fresh in memory. The civility of our law tells us, that the king' can do no wrong but then only is the state secure when judges, their ministers', dare do none. Since our times have found- the' want of suchexamples, 'tis fit we leave some to posterity ! " Whilst the leaders of the Parliament were intent upon the re-establishment of civil rights, and the punishment of those who' had violated them, the great religious party carried out the princi ples which had covered Scotland with ecclesiastical ruins, by an order that " commissions should be sent into all counties for the defacing^ demolishing, and quite taking away of all images, altars, or tables turned altar-wise, crucifixes, superstitious pictures, monu ments, and reliques of idolatry, out of all churches and chapels." § There is an interesting passage in Mrs. Hutchinson's Memoirs of her husband which illustrates the mode in which this order worked in country parishes, such as that in which1 Mr. Hutchinson's house1 of Owthorpe was situated : " The Parliament had made orders to deface the images in all churches. Within two miles of his house there was a church! where Christ upon the cross, the Virgin, and John, had been fairly set up in a window over the altar, and sundry other superstitious pointings, of the priest's own ordering, were drawn upon the walls. When the order for razing out those rel iques of superstition came,' the priest only took down the heads of- * Foss, " JodgeS of England.1" t Ante, p. 362. X Quoted by Mr. Forster, in his " Life of 'John Pym," p. 144. § By a subsequent vote the crosses of Cheapside and Charing were taken down, Evelyn, in his " Diary," May 2nd, T643, says, " I went firim Wotton'to London, wherb I saw the furious and zealous people demolish' that stately cross in Cheapside." 394 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the images, and laid them carefully up in his closet, and would have had the church officers to have certified that the thing was done according to order ; whereupon they came to Mr. Hutchinson, and desired him that he would take the pains to come and view their church, which he did, and upon discourse with the parson, persuade him to blot out all the superstitious paintings, and break the images in the glass ; which he consented to, but being ill-affected, was one of those who began to brand Mr. Hutchinson with the name of Puritan." The so-called Puritan was then a young man of twenty- three ; and he was in himself a faithful representation of the reli gious English gentleman, who had been bred up in a horror of papistical observances, and who, by study of the history of his country, and by serious meditation on the state of public affairs, was prepared to take an earnest part in the great struggle of his time: "He, applied himself," says Mrs. Hutchinson, " to under stand the things then in dispute ; and read all the public papers that came forth, between the king and parliament, besides many other private treatises, both concerning the present and foregoing times. Hereby he became abundantly informed in his understand ing, and convinced in conscience, of the righteousness of the parlia ment's cause, in point of civil right." On the 30th of January, the charges against Strafford were laid before the House of Lords. These were twenty-eight in number. The Scottish Commissioners, and a deputation from the Irish parliament, also put forward the same charges, of endeavouring to rule the north of England and Ireland by military power; of attempt ing to subvert the fundamental laws of the realm ; of labouring to overthrow parliaments and parliamentary authority. During the anxious period between the commitment of the great earl on the 1 ith of November, and his trial on the 22nd of March, the Commons had laboured assiduously in the work of legislation as well as in that of punishing the instruments of evil government. Of these legislative labours, which they continued till the close of the Session, we shall give a short general view before we conclude our narrative of the first Session of this memorable Parliament. Meanwhile, let us relate, as briefly as the importance of the subject allows, the proceedings in the trial and attainder of " the one supremely able man the king had," * — the man whose acquittal and restoration to power would, in the opinion of most persons, have given the death-blow to the liberties of England. The proceedings against that eminent * Carlyle. CHARGES AGAINST STRAFFORD. 395 man have been condemned by many, who fully admit, with Mr. Hallam, " that to bring so great a delinquent to justice according to the known process of the law was among the primary duties of the new parliament." But, " the known process of the law " having been set aside, it is held that justice was not rightly administered. The proceedings have been defended, even while it is fully admitted, as Mr. Macaulay admits, that his " attainder was, in truth, a revolu tionary measure ; " and in the same spirit they are justified, " by that which alone justifies capital punishment, or any punishment, by that alone which justifies war, by the public danger." * " In that Westminster Hall which had witnessed so many memorable scenes ; in that hall in which, re-edified by Richard II., the Parliament sat which deposed him, and Bolingbroke placed himself in the marble chair; — in that hall were More was con demned, and Henry VIIL sentenced a heretic to the fire, and the protector Somerset was doomed to the scaffold ; — in that hall was to be enacted a scene more strange than any which had gone before, — the arraignment of the great minister who was identified with the acts of the sovereign — a virtual trial of strength between the Crown and the People. Of this trial, May, the parliamentary. historian, says, " So great it was that we can hardly call it the trial of the earl of Strafford only. The king's affections towards his people and parliament, the future success of this parliament, and the hopes of three kingdoms dependent upon- it, were all tried when Strafford was arraigned. * * * Three whole kingdoms were his accu sers, and eagerly sought in one death a recompense of all their sufferings." May speaks also, of " the pompous circumstances and stately manner of the trial itself." The hall was fitted up in a manner quite unusual in any previous state-trial. There was a throne for the king at the north end ; the woolsack of the Lord- Steward, the earl of Arundel; benches for the peers, 'who sat in their red robes, lined with ermine ; sacks for the lord keeper and the judges ; and, what constituted the peculiarity of this trial, a stao-e of eleven tiers of seats on each side, of the hall, seven of which were reserved for the members of the House of Commons, who were all there in Committee. The king did not occupy the throne, but sat with the queen and his family in a box on the side of the throne. "The trellis, that made' them to be secret, the king broke down with his own hand, so they sat in the eye of all," writes Baillie, who was present in the seats appointed for the Scotch Com- * Macaulay, " Essay on Nugent's Hampden." 396 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. missioners. The doors were kept, he says, " very strai% with guards. We always behoved to be there a little after five in the morning." The Lords were in their places daily by eight o'clock ; the king was usually half-an-hour before them. Many ladies were present, in galleries allotted to them. On Monday, the 22nd of March, as on every succeeding day, the earl of Strafford was brought to Westminster from the Tower in a barge, accompanied by the lieutenant, with boats full of armed men ; and on his land ing he was guarded by the trained band. He took his place below the bar at a desk, attended by four secretaries and his counsel. " He was always in the same suit of black, as in doole [mourning]. At the entry he gave a low courtesie ; proceeding a litde he gave a second ; when he came to his desk a third ; then at the bar, the fore-face of his desk, he kneeled : rising quickly, he saluted both sides of the Houses, and then sat down. Some few of the Lords; lifted their hats to him. This was his daily carriage."* The sit ting each day was prolonged to two, three, or four o'clock. " It was daily the most glorious assembly the isle could afford ; yet the. gravity not such as I expected," writes the observant Scot. While the earl was preparing his answers to particular charges, the Lords, he says, " got to their feet, walking, and clattered." The Commons, too, made loud clattering. After ten o'clock they ate and drank, " bottles of beer and wine going thick from mouth to mouth without cups, and all this in the king's eye." But if, in the few resting minutes of this solemn trial, the wants of the animal man were supplied after a homely fashion, never was the supremacy of intellect more strikingly put forth to move pity or compel indignation. " Every day, the first week,'' writes May, " from Monday to Saturday, without intermission, the earl was brought from the Tower to Westminster Hall, and arraigned many hours together ; and the success of every day's trial was the greatest discourse or dispute in all companies." The first of these days was occupied by reading the articles of impeachment and Strafford's written answers to them. On the second day Pym, the greatest orator of the Lower House — that great assembly of high thinkers and bold doers — being commanded by the Lord-Steward to pro ceed, thus began :— " My Lords, we stand here by the command ment of the knights, citizens, and burgesses, now assembled, for the Commons in Parliament ; and we are ready to make good that, impeachment whereby Thomas earl of Strafford stands charged in * Baillie, vol. i. p. 316. BILL OF ATTAINDER. 397 their name, and in the names of all the Commons of England, with high-treason." The House of Commons had passed a vote " that the earl of Strafford had endeavoured to subvert the ancient and fundamental laws of the realm, and to introduce arbitrary and tyrannical government." To sustain this allegation was the chief object of Pym and the other managers of the impeach ment ; and although the greater number of the articles exhib ited could not be technically brought within the Statute of Trea sons, they contended that acts which tended to subvert the con stitution were acts of treason against the king. Our necessary limits will not permit us to go through the various and complicated charges upon which this principle was to be sustained. They were, chiefly, acts of oppression as president of the Council of the North ; arbitrary proceedings against individuals as governor of Ireland ; a contempt for justice, by his assertion that the Irish were a con quered nation, and that the king might do with them as he pleased. He was charged that, as chief minister of England, he had advised the king, if parliament failed to give him supplies, to levy what he needed by his prerogative ; and that after the dissolution of parlia ment, he said the king had vainly tried the affections of his people, and he was free to do whatever his power would admit. On all these points Pym spoke, having constant reference to the answers which Strafford had put in. Strafford replied; and Pym rejoined. On the third day, Maynard, a lawyer, one of the managers, followed up the accusations regarding Strafford's Irish administration; and Strafford, as before, replied with wondrous readiness — wondrous when it is considered that he was suffering from severe disease, and was alone against a host of enemies. Day after day this con test went on. " Many foul misdemeanors," says May, "committed both in England and Ireland, were daily proved against him : but that ward which the earl, being an eloquent man, especially lay at, was to keep off the blow of high treason, whatsoever misdemean ours should be laid upon him; of which some he denied, others he excused and extenuated with great subtlety, contending to make anything good, that misdemeanours, though never so many and so great, could not, by being put together, make one treason, unless some one of them had been treason in its own nature." On the thirteenth day of the trial, the loth of April, Pym moved in the House of Commons that the proceedings should take the new form of a bill of attainder against the earl of Strafford. There was a rising member of the House, Henry Vane, the son 398 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of sir Henry Vane, who was comptroller of the royal household in 1639, and in 1641 was secretary of state. The youthful member for Hull, afterwards so famous as — "Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old," who, in his early enthusiasm for civil and religious liberty had left all the prospects of ambition which naturally opened to him, to join the colony of New England, had now returned home, as his friend Milton had returned, when the mother country required the service of her children. He was the means of an extraordinary disclosure connected with the counsels of Strafford to the king. On that 10th of April Pym stood up, Henry Vane being in his seat, and produced a paper containing " a copy of notes taken at a junto of the Privy Council for the Scots affairs, about the 5th of May last.'' White locke thus relates how these notes, which were in the handwriting of old sir Henry Vane, were obtained : — " Secretary Vane, being out of town, sent a letter to his son, sir Henry Vane the younger, then in London, with the key of his study, for his son to look in his cabinet for some papers there, to send to his father. The son looking over many papers, among them alighted upon these notes ; which being of so great concernment to the public, and declaring so much against the earl of Strafford, he held himself bound in duty and conscience to discover them. He showed them to Mr. Pym, who urged him, and prevailed with him, that they might be made use of in the evidence against the earl of Strafford, as being .most material, and of great consequence, in relation to that busi ness." Young Vane's breach of his father's confidence will be judged harshly or compassionately, according to the degree in which it is believed that the public good is the supreme law. Old Vane wept in the House when the notes were produced. These notes were the record of a dialogue in which Laud, Hamilton, and Straf ford were the speakers in Council ; and the words which Strafford addressed to the king were these : "You have an army in Ireland that you may employ to reduce this kingdom to obedience." On the 13th of April, Pym read these notes in Westminster Hall. Lord Clare, Strafford's brother-in-law, contended that this kingdom meant Scotland and not England. Strafford took up this point, and maintained that a man's life should not depend upon a single word. The notes were admitted as evidence against him. The whole tenor of Strafford's correspondence can leave no doubt upon the mind of any dispassionate person, at the present day, that DISCLOSURES OF HENRY VANE. 399 Strafford would not have had the slightest hesitation in recommend ing the king to let him bring the Irish army to England, for the overthrow of the fundamental laws of the realm. The peers of 1641 had not these materials of judgment before them; but they had ample means of knowing that such an intention was in per fect accordance with the principles which Strafford proclaimed and acted upon. Whilst the bill of attainder was debated in the Commons, the Lords continued to sit judicially in Westminster Hall, as if no such measure were in agitation. After the notes discovered by the younger Vane had been received, Strafford was called upon for his general defence upon the facts, leaving the law to his counsel. He spoke two hours and a half. The hard and prejudiced Princi pal of Glasgow University says, " He repeated nought new but the best of his former answers ; and, in the end, after some lash- ness and fagging, he made such ane pathetic oration, for ane half hour, as ever comedian did upon a stage. The matter and ex pression was exceeding brave : doubtless, if he had grace or civil goodness, he is a most eloquent man. The speech you have it here in print. One passage made it most spoken of ; his break ing off in weeping and silence, when he spoke of his first wife." Whitelocke, to whom we owe many of the most interesting memo rials of this great time, has preserved this peroration in a less perishable form than that of the " Diurnal " which Baillie trans mitted to his Scottish friends : " My Lords, it. is hard to be questioned upon a law which can not be shown. Where hath this fire lain hid so many hundreds of years, without any smoke to discover it, till it thus burst forth to con sume me and my children ? That punishment should precede pro mulgation of a law, — to be punished by a law subsequent to the fact, is extreme hard: what man can be safe if this be admitted ? My Lords, it is hard in another respect, that there should be no token set, by which we should know this offence, no admonition by which we should avoid it. If a man pass the Thames in a boat, and split upon an anchor, and no buoy be floating to discover it, he who owneth the anchor shall make satisfaction ; but if a buoy-be set there, every man passeth at his own peril. Now, where is the mark, where the token upon this crime, to declare it to be high treason ? My Lords, be pleased to give that regard to the peerage of England as never to expose yourselves to such moot points, to such constructive interpretations of laws : If there must be a trial- 4.0O HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of wits, let the subject-matter be of somewhat else than the lives and honours of peers. — -It will be wisdom for yourselves, for your posterity, and for. the whole kingdom, to cast into the fire these bloody and mysterious volumes of constructive and arbitrary trea son, as the Christians did their books of curious arts, and betake yourselves to the plain letter of the law, that telleth us what is, and what is not treason, without being more ambitious to be more learned in the art of killing than our forefathers. It is now full two hundred and forty years since any man was touched for this alleged crime, to this height, before myself : Let us not awaken those sleeping lions to our destructions by raking up a few musty records that have lain by the walls so many ages forgotten or neglected. May your Lordships please not to add this to my other misfortunes : Let not a precedent be derived from me so dis advantageous as this will be in the consequence to the whole king dom. Do not through me, wound the interest of the common wealth ; and, however these gentlemen say they speak for the commonwealth, yet, in this particular, I indeed speak for it, and show the inconveniences and mischiefs that will fall upon it. For, as it is said in the statute, I Hen. IV., no man will know what to do or say for fear of such penalties. Do not put, my Lords, such difficulties upon ministers of state, that men of wisdom, of honour, and of fortune, may not with cheerfulness and safety be employed for the public: If you weigh and measure them by grains and scruples, the public affairs of the kingdom will lie waste ; no man will meddle with them who hath anything to lose. " My Lords, I have, troubled you longer than I should have done, were it not for the interest these dear pledges a saint in heaven left me." — Here he paused and shed a few tears. — "What I forfeit for myself is nothing ; but that my indiscretion should ex tend to my posterity woundeth me to the very soul. Vou will par don my infirmity ; something I should have added, but am not able, therefore let it pass. And now, my Lords, for myself, I have been by the blessing of Almighty God, taught that the afflictions of this present life are not to be compared to the eternal weight of glory which shall be revealed hereafter. And so, my Lords, even so, with all tranquillity of mind I freely submit myself to your judg ment ; and whether that judgment be of life or death, ' Te Deum laudamus.' " When we read these burning words, we can easily believe the statement of May, that the ladies in the galleries were all on PYM'S REPLY TO STRAFFORD. 40I Strafford's side. "So great," he says, "was the favour and love which they openly expressed to him, that some could not but think of that verse, " Non formosus erat, sed erat facundus Ulysses ; Et tamen asquoreas torsit amore Deas." Never was quotation more happy. Strafford was not beautiful, but he was the eloquent Ulysses, who bent the sea-goddesses to his love. After such appeals — not only to " the pity proper to their sex,'7 which May attributes to Strafford's fair friends, but appeals to all who could be moved by natural sympathy towards a man bearing up so bravely in the presence of imminent danger and under the pressure of disease, — the majestic periods of Pym's re ply would fall dull and cold. Even now Strafford'touches the heart, whilst Pym holds the understanding in his powerful grasp. There never was a grander scene in the ancient world of " famous orators " — not when Demosthenes "fulmined." against Philip, and Catiline trembled before Cicero — than when Pym, in the presence of the king, of England, proclaimed that treason against the people was1 treason against the throne, and intimated that the sovereign who abetted such treason was not himself safe from "amiserable end." We may drop a tear for the fate of Strafford; but we should ill deserve the freedom which we enjoy under a constitutional mon archy, if we did not feel how much we owe to the noble assertion of the dominion of law over arbitrary power which Pym then sent forth into the heart of England : "The law hath a power to prevent, to restrain, to repair evils. Without this, all kinds of mischief and distempers will break in upon a state. It is the law that doth entitle the king to the allegi ance and service of his people ; it entitles the people to the pro tection and justice of the king. It is God alone who subsists by himself ; all other things subsist in a mutual dependence and re lation. He was a wise man that said that the king subsisted by the field that is tilled; it is the labour of the people that supports the crown. If you take away the protection of the king, the vig our andi cheerfulness of allegiance will be taken away, though the obligation remain. The law is the boundary, the measure, betwixt the king's prerogative, and the people's liberty. Whilst these move in their own orbs, they are a support and a security to one another, — the prerogative a cover and defence to the liberty of the people, and the people by their liberty enabled to be a foundation Vol. III.— 26 402 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. to the prerogative. But if these bounds be so removed that they enter into contestation and conflict, one of these mischiefs must ensue, — if the prerogative of the king overwhelm the people, it will be turned into tyranny ; if liberty undermine the prerogative it will grow into anarchy." There was not a man in that great assembly who could refuse assent to the truth of these words. Happy would it have been; -much misery would have been spared ; we might have reached in 1641 what we were struggling for till 1688, had these oracular sen tences been equally the guide of prince and people. Charles must have started at t'.e prophetic warning which followed : — '¦ Arbitrary power is dangerous to the king's person, and dan gerous to his crown. It is apt to cherish ambition, usurpation, and oppression, in great men, and to beget sedition and discontent in the people ; and both these have been, and in reason must ever be, causes of great trouble and alteration to princes and states. If the his tories of those eastern countries be perused, where princes order their affairs according to the mischievous principles of the earl of Strafford, loose and absolved from all rules of government, they will be found to be frequent in combustions, full of massacres, and of the .tragical ends of princes. If any man shall look into their own stories, in the times when the laws were most neglected, he shall find them full of commotions, of civil distempers, whereby the kings that then reigned were always kept in want and distress ; the people consumed by civn wars ; and by such miserable counsels as these some of our princes have been brought to such a miserable end as no honest heart can remember without horror, and an earnest prayer that it may never be so again." Again and again Pym asserted his leading principle, that the offences of Strafford constituted the crime of treason, inasmuch as he had "endeavoured by his words, actions, and counsels, to subvert the fundamental laws of England and Ireland, and to introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical government." By the wise law ofthe reign of Edward VI., all treasons were reduced to the standard of the statute of Edward III., under which the offence was clearly defined as comprising seven distinct heads — 1, com passing the death of king, queen, or their heir ; 2, the offence which was alleged against the two wives of Henry VIIL, and those impli cated with them ; 3 and 4, levying war against the king, and adher ing to the king's enemies; 5 and 6, counterfeiting the king's seal, and counterfeiting the king's money ; 7, slaying the king's chancel- CLOSE OF THE TRIAL. 403 lor, treasurer, or justices. Pym's interpretation of treason appears, therefore, a somewhat forced inference from the actions and coun sels of Strafford. And yet, fanciful as it may sound, there is rea son in this grand declamation; " Shall it be treason to embase the king's coin, though but a piece of twelvepence or sixpence ? And must it not needs be the effect of a greater treason to embase the spirit of his subjects, and to set up a stamp and character of servi tude upon them, whereby they shall be disabled to do anything for the service of the king and commonwealth ? " It is natural that we should question the justice of such an extension of a definite stat ute. Mr. Hallam, however, thus qualifies our doubts : " We are not to suppose that the charges against the minister appeared so evidently to fall short of high treason, according to the apprehen sion of that age, as in later times has usually been taken for granted ; " and he points out what we shall have presently to notice, that the judges were of opinion that, upon the articles held by the Peers to be proved against Strafford, he deserved to undergo the penalties of the law. The close of this great trial in Westminster Hall was dramatic, in the highest sense of that word. Pym wound up his speech with this appalling denunciation. " The forfeitures inflicted for treason, by our law, are of life, honour, and estate, even all that can be forfeited ; and this prisoner having committed so many treasons, although he should pay all these forfeitures, will be still a debtor to the commonwealth. No thing can be more equal than that he should perish by the justice of that law which he would have subverted. Neither will this be a new way of blood. There are marks enough to trace this law to the very original of this kingdom ; and if it hath not been put in execution, as he allegeth, these two hundred and forty years, it was not for want of law, but that all that time hath not bred a man bold enough to commit such crimes as these." * Pym had a few more formal words to utter, but having turned round, his eyes met those of Strafford, who was intently gazing on his accuser — the friend of his earlier years — his associate in the great struggle which produced the Petition of Right, which Charles and his ministers trampled upon.f The ancient friend, whose blood the accuser had demanded in the name of his country, had said, * The authority for Pym's speech is Rushworth. To understand its power, it should be read complete in Mr. Forster's " Life of Pym." t Ante, p. 336. 404 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. in one passage of his defence, " It pierces my heai;t, though not with guilt yet with sorrow, that in my grey hairs I should be so misunderstood by the companions of my youth." Their eyes met Pym faltered. The unimaginative Baillie thus describes, and ac counts for, the sudden failure of the great orator : " To humble the man, God let his memory fail him a little before the end. His papers he looked on, but they could not help him to a point or two, so he behoved to pass them." * The Bill of Attainder of the earl of Strafford was passed by the Commons on the 21 st of April. Fifty-nine members voted against it out of a house of two hundred and sixty-three. Amongst them was lord Digby, son of the earl of Bristol. Although he described Strafford as " the grand apostate to the commonwealth who must not expect to be pardoned in this world till he be dispatched to the other," he said, " and yet, let me tell you, Mr. Speaker, my hand must not be to that dispatch. I protest, as my conscience stands informed, I had rather it were off." The Bill was carried to the Up per House by Pym, with a message " that it was a Bill that highly concerned the Commonwealth in the expediting of it." The king then went to the House of Lords, and stated that he had been present during the whole trial of Strafford ; that he could not con demn him of high treason ; but, said he, " I must confess for mat ter of misdemeanours, I am so clear in that, that though I will not chalk out the way, yet let me tell you, that I do think my lord Strafford is not fit hereafter to serve me or the commonwealth in any place of trust, no, not so much as that of a constable." This in terference was offensive to the Commons, who deemed it a breach of privilege for the king to take notice of any Bill during its pass age through Parliament. There were other circumstances ill-cal culated to allay the temper of the Commons or the people. Rumours, afterwards distinctly proved not to be without foundation, were rife, of a plot to bring up the army from the north to overawe the par liament, and to effect the release of Strafford. Preachers in the city poured forth invectives against the "great delinquent." Mul titudes thronged the approaches to the House of Lords, demanding* " Justice." The names ot the fifty-nine members of the Commons who had voted against the Bill of Attainder were placarded as * Baillie describes this concluding oration as " one of the most eloquent, wise, true speeches that ever we heard, or I think shall ever hear." M. Guizot, referring to the authority of the " State Trials," says that Pym read a prepared answer, without being listened to by any one ; and that the Inok of scom which Strafford gave him made him falter at the beginning of his speech, " which he had great difficulty in delivering." ARMY PLOTS. 4O3 "Straff ordians, or betrayers of their country." The Peers, conr suiting with the judges whether some of the articles against Straf ford, which they considered proved, amounted to treason, received an unanimous opinion that he had incurred the penalties which the law awarded to that crime. The articles of treason which the Peers deemed proved, were, the fifteenth, which charged, the Lord Deputy of Ireland with raising money on his own authority, and quartering troops on the people of Ireland, in order to compel obe dience to his unlawful requisitions ; and the nineteenth, that which charged him with imposing an unlawful oath on the Scots in Ire land. In a house of forty-five, twenty-six Peers voted Strafford guilty, and passed the Bill of Attainder. Whilst this question was under debate in the House of Lords, the Commons were singularly moved by the disclosures which were made of the king's own participation in the design "to disiffect the army to the Parliament ; " to bring it up from the north with the view to place absolute power in the Crown. Goring, a colcnel in the army, having taken umbrage at some preference shown to Percy, a brother-conspirator, disclosed the plan to lord Newark, who revealed it to other lords, through whom it reached the inde fatigable John Pym. He brought the whole matter before the House of Commons. The evidence of this plot, though by no means definite or conclusive, was sufficient to prove that the king had listened to a proposal of appealing to a military force to control the representatives of the people. In the Memoirs of Madame de Motteville, whp states that she had the information from the queen herself, there is a relation of this army plot, which is. described as a meritorious design, carried on at the desire of the king and queen. Henrietta's favourite, Jermyn, was deeply implicated in it. Even with the imperfect knowledge which the Commons possessed of this somewhat wild scheme of the courtjers, combined with the fact that Strafford had offered twenty thousand pounds to sir Wil liam Balfour, the lieutenant of the Tower, to permit his escape, wc can scarcely wonder at their immediate adoption of strong meas ures. Their first resolution was to draw up a Protestation, under oath to defend the Protestant Church, his majesty's person and power, the privileges of parliament, and the lawful rights and liberties of the people. This was immediately sworn to and signed by every member present ;' was sent to the House of Peers, who all signed except two ; and was circulated for general signature through the kingdom. This Protestation became a touchstone of 406 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. opinions. Some months after, four thousand Buckinghamshire petitioners rode to London with a copy of the Protestation stuck in each man's hat. But the Protestation was of far less conse quence than a short bill which was carried in this moment of alarm. Earlier in the session an Act had passed " for the prevention of inconveniences happening by the long intermission of parliament ; " but the Bill which immediately followed the Protestation, — " to pre vent inconvenience which may happen by the untimely adjourning, proroguing, or dissolving this present parliament," — made the Parliament itself the sole arbiter of its own duration. The royal assent was given by commission to this Bill on the loth of May. On the same day, the same commissioners consented to the Bill of Attainder against the earl of Strafford. On the nth of May, the king sent a letter to the Lords by the Prince of Wales, in which he desired that a conference might take place with the Commons, to the intent, he said, that "both Houses of Parliament consent, for my sake, that I should moderate the severity of the law in so important a case." This extraordinary postscript was added : — " If he must die, it were charity to reprieve him until Saturday." Straf ford had generously written a letter to the king to set his " con science at liberty," so as to allow him to pass the Bill of Attainder, " for prevention of evils which may happen by your refusal." But it is clear that the earl, who thus gave this last proof of his fidelity, expected another result ; for he exclaimed, when it was announced to him that the king had passed the Bill, " Put not your trust in princes." It is unnecessary here to enter into the question of the weakness or wickedness of the king in consenting to the sacrifice of Strafford. Charles held it, in the subsequent struggle of his life, as his one great fault, — that which was justly punished by Heaven in his misfortunes. Strafford met his fate with the same resolution which had characterised the public actions of his life. He walked to the scaffold, says Rushworth, a spectator of the scene, with the step and manner of " a general marching at the head of an army, to breathe victory, rather than those of a condemned man, to under go the sentence of death." As he passed the window of the room in which Laud was confined, he asked the blessing of the arch bishop, and moving on exclaimed, " God protect your innocency." The firm yet modest demeanour of the great earl produced little mitigation of the dislike of the people. " In the evening of the day wherein he was executed, the greatest demonstrations of joy that possibly could be expressed ran through the whole town, and EXECUTION OF STRAFFORD. 407 countries hereabout ; and many, that came up to town on purpose to see the execution, rode in triumph back, and with all expressions of joy, through every town they went, crying, ' His head is off, his head is off.'" Warwick, the zealous adherent of the court, tells this, " to show how mad the whole people were, especially in and about this then bloody and brutish city, London." * •Warwick, "Memoirs," p. 164. 408 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER XXII. Act for the non-dissolution of parliament. — Jealousy of the Commons — Principal legisla tive measures — Ship-money ; Star chamber ; Local arbitrary Courts ; Court of High Commission ; Forests ; Writs for knighthood. — English and Scottish armies dis banded. — The king goes to Scotland. — Intrigues with Montrose. — Parliament re-as sembles- — The Irish Insurrection. — The king's progress to London. — Debate on the Remonstrance. — The king's entertainment in the city. — Struggle of parties. — The Remonstrance presented. — The king at Whitehall. — Tumults. — Protest, and com mittal of twelve bishops. — Articles of treason exhibited against lord Kimbolton and five members of the Commons. — The king attempts to seize the five members. — The house adjourned. The consent of the king to the bill for the attainder of Straf ford, and to the measure which was afterwards called " The Act for the Perpetual Parliament," can scarcely be attributed to any other feeling than a sense of his immediate weakness. Mr. Hal lam imputes Charles's ready acquiescence in this parliamentary bill, to his own shame and the queen's consternation at the dis covery of the army plot.* Lord Clarendon says, " after the pass ing these two bills, the temper and spirit of the people, both within and without the walls of the two Houses, grew marvellous calm and composed." f The Parliament now went boldly and steadily forward in the work of reform. A subsidy and a poll-tox were granted ; but another subsidy of tonnage and poundage was granted for a very limited time, from May 25 to July 15 ; so that the Com mons might exercise the right of renewal, according to circumstan ces. This subsidy was renewed, by subsequent Acts, until July 2, 1642. It is difficult to blame them for this excessive jealousy of the designs of the Crown. The bill for triennial parliaments was absolutely necessary, to takeout of the hands of the king the power to govern again without a parliament. The more unconstitutional measure of preventing the dissolution of parliament by the king without its own consent, thus rendering the Commons independent of the Crown and of their own constituents, cannot be justified upon any principle consistent with the just balance of the mon- * " Constitutional History,!' c. 9. t " Rebellion," vol. i.p. 459. ed. 1628. PRINCIPAL LEGISLATIVE MEASURES. 4.09 archical and democratic interests in the State. Nothing but a well-grounded suspicion of the designs of the king could have in duced both Houses hastily to pass such a measure, upon the sim ple allegation that money could not be borrowed under the author ity of parliament if there was a prospect of. its. being suddenly dissolved. " It is impossible to think," writes sir Philip Warwick, "how so intelligent a person as this king was, should by any persuasions, which certainly were great on the queen's side, or treachery, which certainly was great on the side of many of his great courtiers, be induced thus to divest himself of all majesty and power." * The queen, under the influence of terror, as some have believed, but more probably with the hope of procuring the inter ference of foreign powers to restore the absolute authority of Charles, was preparing, to leave the country. The princess royal was betrothed to the eldest son of the prin,:e of Orange. A secret article of the treaty stipulated that the prince should assist the king, if the disputes with his Parliament came to an open rupture. The queen, a. few months later, alleging her ill-health, wished to seek a remedy in- the Spa-waters. Upon the remonstrance of both Houges of .Parliament she consented to remain in England. Amidst the contradictory and obscure traces of court secrets, one thing is manifest — that there was not the slightest approach to a real union between the king and the Parliament for the public good. Th£ royal concessions were made with a sort of recklessness which argues that there was a- hope and belief that they might become nugatory under some turn of fortune. The suspicions of the Com mons were never wholly set at rest. In the great legislative measures of this session, the Houses were invariably anxious to rest their reforms upon the ancient foundations of law and liberty. Thus in the Statute granting Ton nage and Poundage, it is declared and enacted, " That it is and hath been the ancient right of the subjects of this realm, that no subsidy, custom, impost, or other charge whatsoever ought or may be laid or imposed upon any merchandise, exported or imported by subjects, denizens, or aliens, without common consent in Parlia ment." f . In " An Act for the declaring unlawful and void the late proceedings touching ship-money," it is declared that, the writs and judgments thereupon " were and are contrary to and against the laws and statutes of the realm, the right ;of property, theliherty of the subject, former resolutions in parliament, and the • " Memoirs," p. 181. t 16 Car. I c. 8. 4IO HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Petition of Right made in the third year ofthe reign of his majesty that now is." * Again and again the principle of arbitrary taxation was made to hear its death-knell. In the Act for dissolving the Court of Star Chamber and taking away the whole of its powers, all the ancient statutes, including the Great Charter, which declare that no freeman shall be imprisoned or condemned but by judg ment of his peers, or by the law of the land, are recited ; and it is affirmed that the authority of the Star Chamber, under the Statute of Henry VIL, has been abused, and the decrees of the Court, have been found " to be an intolerable burthen to the subjects, and the means to introduce an arbitrary power and government." f This Statute not only abolishes the Court of Star Chamber, but the jurisdiction of the Courts of the Marches of Wales, of the Northern Parts, of the Duchy of Lancaster, and of the County Palatine of Chester. Under these arbitrary Courts one-third of the people had been deprived of the protection of Common-law, and were at the mercy of such local despots as Strafford. In the Act for abolishing the Court of High Commission, it is maintained that, under the Statute of the first of Elizabeth " con cerning commissioners for causes ecclesiastical," the commissioners " have to the great and insufferable wrong and oppression of the king's subjects used to fine and imprison them, and to exercise other authority not belonging to ecclesiastical jurisdiction." The Act of abolition goes farther, and takes from the Ecclesiastical Courts the power to inflict temporal penalties for spiritual offences4 The " Act for the certainty of forests, and of the meres, meets, limits, and bounds of the forests," goes back to the days of Ed ward I. as to ancient boundaries, and, reprehending their real or pretended extension confines forests within such limits as were recognised in the twentieth year of James I. § In " An Act for pre venting vexatious proceedings touching the order of knighthood," reference is made to an ancient usage that men seised of lands to the yearly value of forty pounds might be compelled to take upon themselves the order of knighthood, or else to make fine ; but it declares that many have been put to grievous fines and vexations, for declining to receive the same dignity, being wholly unfit for it in estate or quality. In all these enactments for the removal of great oppressions, constant reference is had to the origin of the abuses. There is no unreasoning pretext for their abolition, as if the subject were to be benefited by arbitrarily curtailing the preroga- * 16 Car. I. c. 14. t Ibid., c. to. X Ibid., c. 14. § Ibid., c. 16. PRINCIPAL LEGISLATIVE MEASURES. 4II tive of the Crown. Clarendon fully admits all the abuses which these enactments swept away ; and yet, in the spirit of that ignoble belief which he has done so much to perpetuate, that justice to the subject can only be derived from the favour of the sovereign, he says, of these Acts of Parliament, that they " will be acknowledged by an uncorrupted posterity, to be everlasting monuments of the king's princely and fatherly affection to his people."* Much more rationally do we now feel that, " in by far the greater part of the enactments of 1641, the monarchy lost nothing that it had anciently possessed ; and the balance of our constitution might seem rather to have been restored to its former equipoise than to have under gone any fresh change " f It is to the Long Parliament, in this triumphant session, that we owe a new era of civil liberty. If they had rested here in their great work, they would have placed the political rights of Englishmen upon the broad foundation upon which the national greatness and security has been since built up. Other questions, incident to the particular crisis, prevented that concord between the sovereign and the people upon which the safety of the monarchy must rest. The pacification with Scotland was concluded by Act of Par liament ; X and by another Act, the sum of 300,000/. was agreed " to be given for a friendly assistance and relief towards the supply of the losses and necessities of our brethren of Scotland." § On the 10th of August the king left London for Scotland. On the 9th of September the Parliament adjourned. Charles had manifested great impatience to proceed to Scotland. On his journey he passed through the English army in. the North, which was disbanding ; and he dined at Newcastle with Lesley, the general of the Scottish army, which was returning home. The king was accompanied by two commissioners named by the Lords, and four named by the Commons, amongst whom was Hampden. Clarendon calls them "spies." ' There was no discourtesy between Charles and these commissioners ; but they were evidently there to watch and coun teract his secret designs. The king had met the Scottish Parlia ment; had sanctioned all their proceedings even to the abolition of episcopacy ; and seemed bent upon securing the affections of the nation by swearing to the terms of the Covenant, and attending the presbyterian worship. There can be no doubt he was plotting to destroy those whom he chose to consider as his personal ene- * " Rebellion," vol. i. p. 504 t Hallam, vol. ii. c 9. X 16 Car. I. c. 17. § Ibid., c. 18. 412 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. mies. Montrose had been in correspondence with the king. Ar gyle had intercepted a letter in cypher, and the Parliament had im prisoned the daring man who was now the great supporter of the old order of affairs in the Scottish Church and State. Montrose contrived to correspond with Charles, through one of his pages', offering to produce proofs of the secret communications of Hamil ton and Argyle, with Hampden, Pym, and other parliamentary leaders, to bring the Scottish army into England in 1640. Hamil ton and Argyle, having learnt that they were in danger of liberty or life, absented themselves. For Montrose had endeavoured to persuade the king to arrest them, and if resistance was made, to remove them by assassination. Such was political and religious hatred, when mixed up with the semi-barbarism of Scottish clan ship. Clarendon says, " the king abhorred that expedient." There was great alarm in Edinburgh ; but the king and the Scottish par liament thought it wise to accommodate matters ; and the nobles returned to receive marks of honour from Charles. But Hampden and the other commissioners saw the danger with which they might be threatened. "The leaders," says M. Guizot, "thought their former relations with the Scottish insurgents had been pardoned, together with the rebellion itself, by the last treaty of peace." It was natural that they should so think. The Act of Parliament for the pacification has these express words : " It is expedient for making the peace and unity of his Majesty's dominions the more firm and faithful, and that his Majesty's countenance against all fears may shine upon them all the more comfortably, that an Act of Pacification and Oblivion be made in the Parliament of all the three kingdoms for burying in forgetfulness all acts of hostility, whether betwixt the king and his subjects or between subject and subject, or which may be conceived to arise upon the coming of any English army against Scotland, or the coming of the Scottish army into England, or upon any action, attempt, assistance, counsel, or device, having relation thereto and falling out by the occasion of the late troubles preceding the conclusion of the treaty and the return of the Scottish army into Scotland; that the same and what soever hath ensued thereupon whether touching upon the laws and liberties of the Church and kingdom, or upon his Majesty's honour and authority, in no time hereafter may be called in question or resented as a wrong national or personal, whatsoever be the quality of the person or persons, or of whatsoever kind or degree civil or criminal the injury be supposed to be, and that no mention be made THE IRISH INSURRECTION. 413 thereof in the time coming, neither in judgment nor out of judg ment, but that it shall be held and reputed as though never any such thing had been thought nor wrought." The Statute for the pacification does not expressly pass such an Act of Oblivion ; but after the king by his royal assent had declared its expediency, this. manifestation of duplicity could only tend to widen the breach be tween the sovereign and the legislature. During the parliamentary recess a Committee sat at Westmin ster ; and they instituted inquiries, and authorized acts, which were certainly beyond their legislative functions. The news from Scot land led this Committee to believe, according to Clarendon, that " there was some desperate design on foot ; " and he adds that the Scottish business, which was called "the incident," "had a strange influence at Westminster, and served to contribute to all the sense less fears they thought fit to entertain." * Other news soon came to Westminster that produced there, and throughout the kingdom, a consternation far more intense and lasting than any "senseless fears." The House of Commons re-assembled on the 20th of October. On the 25th the Lords of the Council communicated to the House that a fearful insurrection had broken out in Ireland ; and shortly after the king sent a letter to the Parliament, apprising them of a "formed rebellion" which must be prosecuted with a sharp war ; " the conducting and prosecuting which he wholly committed to their care and wisdom." A Committee of both houses at once took upon themselves the authority thus confided to them ; "the mischief whereof, though in the beginning little taken notice of," says Clarendon, " was afterwards felt by the king very sensibly." Such a voluntary concession of the executive power to the legislature was indeed a dangerous precedent. The Irish insurrection of 1 641 was one of the most terrible events in the history of that unhappy country. It was an event which long perpetuated the hatred between the Irish natives and the English settlers, and in a series of bitter revenges kept alive the more deadly animosity between Catholics and Protestants. The Irish army, which had been raised by Strafford, had been kept together against the desire of the Parliament. The king had wished to establish that army in Flanders, to be ready for any service under the king of Spain ; but his plan had been prevented by a parliamentary resolution, which afterwards became a law, against " the raising and transporting of forces of horse Or foot out * Appendix to " History of Rebellion," vol; ii. p. 576 (ed. 1826).' 414 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of his Majesty's dominions of England or Ireland." This Catholic army was therefore disbanded; and it became a dangerous power in a distracted country. The vigilant rule of Strafford was at an end. There was no resident viceroy. The government was ad ministered by the two lords justices. The Protestant troops in Ireland were few, and they were scattered. Charles had striven to prevent the disbanding of Strafford's eight thousand papists ; and after that measure was accomplished, he had intrigued to prevent the dispersion of these men. They were told to rally round their sovereign, and by defending the throne prevent the extirpation of the ancient religion. A general rising was at length determined upon amongst some Irish chieftains and some of the ancient set tlers of the Pale, for the purpose of seizing the castle. of Dublin, and proclaiming that they would support the sovereign in all his rights. The plot was betrayed as far as regarded the attack upon Dublin castle ; but Ulster was in open insurrection on the 22nd of October. Sir Phelim O'Neal was at the head of thirty thousand men. What was intended to be an insurrection, for the redress of civil wrongs and the removal of religious disabilities, soon became a general massacre of Protestants. The conspirators in Ulster were rendered desperate by the failure of the plot for the seizure of Dublin. The puritan settlers of the north were especially obnoxious to those who were in arms. They were driven from their houses in an inclement season. They fled to the hills and morasses, where they perished of hunger. They were put to death, with all the horrors that only savagas and fanatics can inflict. Women. and children were murdered with relentless fury. Multitudes fled towards Dublin as their only city of refuge. The number of those that perished has been variously estimated. Clarendon says that "about forty or fifty thousand of the English Protestants were murdered before they suspected themselves to be in any danger, or could provide for their defence by drawing them selves into towns or strong houses." Troops at length arrived from England ; and after months of horror the insurrection was quelled. The king could never wholly remove the belief that he had instigated this fearful rising, or had connived at it. The Irish insurgents themselves pretended that they acted under the royal authority. There is a curious illustration of this circumstance in a manuscript relation of the " Siege of Ballgaly Castle," in the County of Clare, at the beginning of 1642, written by one of the besieged. " After this the enemy would daily in our sight draw THE KING'S PROGRESS TO LONDON. 415 forth their skenes and swords, flourishing them, swearing many dangerous oaths that ere long they would draw us forth and hack us to pieces, terming us puritan rogues, and all the base names that might be invented, vowing that shortly sir Phelim O'Neal, and at least 40,000 soldiers, would come into Thomond and not leave a Protestant living, praying heartily for them, pretending that they then fought for them, but within a short time after they pretended that they were wholly the queen's army, and that she and her mother were in the north aiding them, but no Protestant admitted to look upon her. This note suddenly altered, and then they were all for the king, vowing deeply that they had his Majesty's com mission for what they did, and that they were his Majesty's Catholic forces." * When the parliamentary commissioners quitted Edinburgh they urged the king's speedy return to London. His intentions were, however, kept secret. He had left the earl of Essex com mander of the forces south of Trent ; but the earl was not in the confidence of the court. The queen, on the 20th of November, writes to the secretary of state that he may now tell Essex when the king is coming; for, she adds, " the king commanded me to tell this to my lord of Essex, but you may do it, for these lordships are too great princes now to receive any directions from me." t In his progress from Scotland the king was received with demon strations of respect and affection. At York he was told by the mayor, "our wintry woods assume spring leaves to welcome home so indulgent a sovereign." At .Stamford the mayor alluded to the Irish rebellion, expressing his conviction that "although Rome's hens should daily hatch of its preposterous eggs crocodi- liferous chickens, yet under our royal sovereign we should not fear." The king was to reach London on the 25th, and there to dine with the lord mayor, who was a devoted royalist. It was natural that the people of themselves should express these senti ments of good will to Charles. Avast number of the grievances of the nation had .been swept away, and the people would necessa rily attribute much of the merit to the king, and be willing to lay aside their doubts and complainings. It is not easy to understand why the parliamentary leaders should have chosen the moment of the king's return to greet him, not with their professions of love, but with the strongest remonstrance against the whole tenour * " Narratives of the Contests in Ireland." Caindeh Society. t Green's " Letters of Henrietta Maria, ' p. 46. 416 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.- of his past government. The only solution is that they acted under a distinct persuasion that it was impossible, at that time, that a just balance could be restored between the monarchic and the democratic principle, unless one power yielded something more than had been already conceded, or the other power gave up some of the advantages which it had already won. The con viction in the mind of the king that he had a right to be absolute had never been removed or lessened by the events of the past twelve months. The resolution of the Commons that he should not be again absolute was as strong as ever. But at this crisis the men who had been unanimous in 1640 divided into two great parties, — those who held that the monarchy should be still more abridged of its power, and those who believed that any further assertion of parliamentary authority would be to destroy the mon archy. With the question of the due limits of popular rights was mixed up the equally difficult question, whether episcopacy should be regulated or abolished ; and this question, in time, became merged in the wider question, whether England, like its neighbour kingdom, should become presbyterian, or whether all state religion should come to an end, and every congregation of Christians be a church of itself. We cannot understand the real spirit of this great time, if we judge the parties and the individuals in an uncharitable temper — if we believe that the cavaliers, as the loyalists were called, meant to fight for slavery and popery ; and that the round heads, as the parliamentarians were called, were furious anarchists or blind fanatics. An Englishman who will now look honestly and calmly at the events Of this period, will rejoice that he is descended from men who, whatever be their opinions, were earnest in their advocacy ; who were, for the most part, no trading politicians, merely intent upon their individual advancement ; who were truly heroic in their passionate loyalty or their passionate love of civil or religious liberty ; who, whether vilified as profligates or as hypo crites, displayed, each in his own way, some of the noblest traits of human character ; for they each were fighting with a conviction that the eye of God was upon them, and the greater number of them, whether Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or Independent, believ ing in his conscience that he was doing God's work in the world. The debate on the Remonstrance was the great trial of strength in the House of Commons. That debate began at nine o'clock of the morning of the 22nd of November. It went on through that day till it grew dark. Candles were called for. Twelve hours of DEBATE ON THE REMONSTRANCE. 417 passionate talk, and yet no rest. The House thinned under the faintness and exhaustion of this unusual sitting. But the excite ment was greater than the weariness. The Remonstrance was adopted by one hundred and fifty-nine votes against one hundred and forty-eight. " At three of the clock in the morning," says Philip Warwick, "when they voted it, I thought we had. all sat in the valley of the shadow of death ; for we, like Joab's and Abner's young men, had catched at each other's locks, and sheathed our swords in each other's bowels, had not the sagacity and great calmness of Mr. Hampden, by a short speech, prevented it, and led us to defer our angry debate till next day." The Remonstrance had been carried, but the " angry debate " was continued on the ques tion of printing it. As they went into the house, Falkland said to Cromwell that " it would take some debate," which Cromwell doubted. As they went out, Falkland asked Cromwell whether it had been debated ? to which he answered, " he would take his word another time ; and whispered him in the ear, with some as severation, that if the Remonstrance had been rejected, he would have sold all he had the next morning, and never -have seen Eng land more ; and he knew there many honest men of the same res olution." This statement of Clarendon has been called " a vague report, gathered over dining-tables long after, to which the reader need not pay more heed than it merits." * This Remonstrance is a document of 206 articles. It may be read in Rushworth and Rapin, and its general tone is very like a declaration of war by one potentate against another. We do not believe what Clarendon affirms, that " the only end of passing it was to incline the people to sedition ; " but we may admit with Mr. Hallam, that if Charles " were intended to reign at all, and to- reign wrth any portion either of the prerogative of an English king, or the respect claimed by every sovereign, the Remonstrance of the Commons could but pro long an irritation incompatible with public tranquillity." t The manifestations of popular feeling at this eventful period can scarcely be regarded as indications of public opinion. There can be no doubt that, on either side, many arts were practised to procure such demonstrations as might influence the temper of Par liament, or support the wishes of the king. One of the most im portant of these was the splendid welcome that was given by the city of London to Charles on the 25th of November. Clarendon says, * Carlyle's " Cromwell's Letters," vol. i. p. 95. t " Constitutional History," vol. ii, c. ix. Vol. III.— 27. 418 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. " Gourney, the lord mayor, was a man of wisdom and courage, and expressed great indignation to see the city so corrupted by the ill artifices of factious persons ; and therefore attended upon his majesty, at his entrance into the city, with all the lustre and good countenance it could show, and as great professions of duty as it could make or the king expect." The " Ovatio Carolina," as this reception was called in a pompous account of the ceremonial,* was in many respects the greatest pageant that " the royal chamber" nf London had ever witnessed. The lord mayor and aldermen, and five hundred horsemen selected from the liveries, in velvet and plush coats, with pendants, and footmen, and trumpeters, rode out to Kingsland. A new way through the fields was made to Shore- ditch, for the ordinary road was " impassable, in regard to the depth and foulness of it." The lord mayor had a tent pitched in the fields near Kingsland, and thither the king and queen, with the prince of Wales, and the duke of York, and the princess Mary, were escorted by the sheriffs. Alighting from the royal coach, the king received an address, to which he answered, that he was returned with as hearty and kind affection to his people in general, and to London in particular, as could be desired by lov ing subjects. To mark his particular affection to the city, he gave back " that part of Londonderry " from which the citizens had been evicted. "This, I confess," he said, "is now no great gift; but I intend first to recover it and then to give it you whole and en tirely." Perhaps some of that assembly might have recollected that Londonderry was taken from the citizens because they had refused to comply with the illegal demand of a forced loan. Onward went the gorgeous calvalcade to Moorgate, and so on to the Guildhall ; and the houses were' hung with tapestry, and the conduits ran with claret-wifie, and the people cried " God bless, and long live, king Charles and queen Mary." The banquet was of proportionate splendour ; and the old hall was brilliant on that November day with the gorgeous dresses of lords and ladies ; and the city dames vied in splendour with the high-born ; and it seemed in that hour of festival as if in that large town of seven hundred thousand people all were of one accord of loyal content. After the banquet the king and the court were conducted in solemn procession to Whitehall, the footmen carrying lighted torches, "so that the night seemed to be turned to day " But even amidst this well-arranged de monstration, there was doubt and alarm. The multitude gazed • " Harleian Miscellany," vol. v. p. 86, edit, of 1810. STRUGGLE OF PARTIES. 419 from behind the rails four feet distant from the houses, and admired the splendid array of courtiers and citizens, of footmen and whif- flers. But "because some seditious libels were at that time dis persed, which bred a panic fear in some, order was taken, that there should be two companies of the city's trained bands placed in several parts of the city upon that clay ; as also that at every door a man .should be placed, sufficiently appointed, to be ready upon all occasions to appease any disorders."* The reception of the king by the city appears to have given him confidence in making a demonstration of his disposition towards the Parliament. He withdrew the guard which Essex had appoint ed for the security of the two houses. The struggle of parties quickly began to assume a more formidable character. Men of great influence changed their sides. The earl of Holland, who had been a successful courtier in the time of James I. ; who was afterwards a favourite of Charles's queen ; and whom the king, says Clarendon, " but four months before had looked on as his own* creature, as he had good reason to account himself from the begin ning, joined himself close to and concurred with those councils which, with the greatest bitterness, were held against him." Hol land House, at Kensington, one of the few mansions whose quaint architecture carries us back two centuries anda-half, was the scene of many a secret deliberation of the popular party. The earl of Essex and the earl of Leicester also took their side with those who were considered the king's enemies. On the other hand, Mr. Hyde, though without office, had become an adviser of the king. So, also, sir John Colepepper, one of the most able of the parliamentary leaders. More important than either, was the subsequent acces sion of lord Falkland to the king's councils. Colepepper became chancellor of the exchequer ; and Falkland, in a short time after, secretary of state. Falkland was most reluctant to accept office ; but he yielded to the persuasions of Hyde. With this additional support of able and moderate advisers, Charles might have at tained the enviable position of a patriot king had he adhered to their advice, which, without any violent compromise of their former opinions, would have tended to the maintenance of tranquillity. The Remonstance of the Commons was presented to Charles at Hampton Court on the ist of December. He received it with tem per. The Remonstance was published ; and the king's answer to it, written by Hyde, was also published. But the king had other ad- • " Ovatio Carolina." 420 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. visers with whom moderate measures were the last in their thoughts. Falkland had not openly seceded from his party till after the king, by one rash act which we shall presently have to relate, and the Commons, by a series of demands for power which grew more imperative as the control of the House fell into the hands of the more violent, had each rendered it impossible that a pacification could be effected, without unduly crippling the mon archy, or without returning to absolutism. The battle had to be fought out by physical force. The wordy war was coming to an end. The two days after the Committee of the House of Commons had been at Hampton Court with the Remonstrance, the lord mayor and a select number of aldermen of London arrived there with an address. It was a harmless policy thus to attempt a coun ter manifestation of public opinion, as if to neutralise the acts of the Commons. But the machinery was very insufficient for the object. The lord mayor implored the king and the queen to return to Whitehall, " to give a good quickening to the retail trade ; " and the king said he would return. The lord mayor begged that the king would not impute to the city, or to the better sort of citizens, disorders which had occurred about Westminster ; for " the skirts of the city are more populous than the city itself, fuller of the meaner sort of people ; " and if any dwellers in the city should have been concerned in such disorders, " as who can deny among mil lions of people, some there may be," yet their purpose was un known to the city magistrates. This loose way of talking of mil lions of people, as inhabitants of the capital, long prevailed. And so the king and his family, at the sole instance of the obedient por tion of the corporation of London, returned to the palace of White hall a few days after, " there to keep their Christmas," as the king had promised. It was an awful Christmas and an awful new year. For six centuries of occasional troubles — of kings dethroned, of the red rose and the white alternately prevailing, of Tyler and Cade insur rections, of papist and protestant struggles, — the State had never been so near anarchy as in this winter of 1641. The real constitu tional strength, both of the king and the Parliament, was so bal anced, that military power or popular fury might each decide the preponderance. About Whitehall gathered bands of ardent gentle men of town and country, some of generous loyalty and unstained life, but more of loose habits and broken fortunes, — full of con tempt for puritans, and perfectly ignorant of the real causes of dif- TUMULTS. ' 421 ference between the king and the Parliament. Many of them were Romanists. Ludlow's account, however coloured, is true in the main as to the character of those who called themselves the king's body-guard. " The king, finding that nothing less would satisfy the Parliament than a thorough correction of what was amiss, and full security of their rights from any violation for the future, con sidered how to put a stop to their proceedings ; and to that end encouraged a great number of loose debauched fellows about the town to repair to Whitehall, where a constant table was provided for their entertainment. Many gentlemen ofthe Inns of Court were tampered with to assist him in his design, and things brought to that pass, that one of them said publicly in my hearing, ' What ! shall we suffer those fellows at Westminster to domineer thus ? Let us go into the country and bring up our tenants to pull them out.' " * The king gave a sanction to the opinion that he contem plated a resort to force, in his injudicious appointment of a Roman ist and a desperado, Colonel Lunsford, to be governor of the Tower. Clarendon thus speaks of the appointment : — " The king, finding that the seditious preachers every day prevailed in the city of Lon don, and corrupted the affections and loyalty of the meaner people towards the government of the Church and State, resolved to put that place, which some men fancied to be a bridle upon the city, into the hands of such a man as he might rely upon." f The Com mons requested the Peers to join them in a petition against this appointment ; but the king superseded Lunsford upon the private advice of the Peers. Tire popular cry finally set in against the bishops. A bill was before the Lords which had been carried in the other House six months before, for taking away the votes of bishops and removing them from the House of Peers. In August, thirteen of the bishops had been impeached by the Commons, for having taken part in passing the Canons of 1640. The arch bishop of. Canterbury was still imprisoned in the Tower. The idea of the abolition of episcopacy was become familiarised to the people by the example of Scotland, and by the ready adhesion which the king had given to the presbyterian establishment there in his recent visit. There was now a change in the demonstrations of the corporation of London. A petition of the aldermen and common council was carried to Westminster in a procession of sixty coaches, praying that the House of Commons would still be a means to concur with the king and the Lords in redressing the * " Memoires," vol- i. p. 21. t " Rebellion," vol. ii. p. 81. 422 " HISTORY OF ENGLAND. grievances of Church and State; "and for the better effecting thereof that the popish lords and bishops may be removed out of the House of Peers." The apprentices of London also agreed to a petition to the king-, -showing that they found by experience, great mischiefs coming upon their masters' tradings, " to nip them in the bud when they were first entering into the world ; the cause of which they could attribute to no other but the papists and the prelates, and that malignant party which adhered to them." Truly enough does Clarendon call this apprentices' petition " such stuff." But the popular cry daily gathered strength. It was a small poeti cal exaggeration in the author of " Hudibras " thus to unite " All cries about the town," in one " hideous shout," around the palace, " to cry the bishops down : " " The oyster-women lock'd their fish up, And trudg'd away, to cry, No Bishop. The mouse-trap men laid save-alls by, And 'gainst evil counsellors did cry. Botchers left old clothes in the lurch, And fell to turn and patch the Church. Some cry'd the Covenant, instead Of pudding-pies, and ginger-bread. And some for brooms, old boots and shoes, Bawl'd out to purge the Common-house ¦ Instead of kitchen-stuff, some cry, A Gospe!-preaching ministry : And some for old suits, coats, or cloak, No surplices nor Service-book." * " The Christmas holidays giving more leave and licence to all kinds of people, the concourse grew more numerous about West minster." -f As the audacity of the multitude increased so did the fury of the cavaliers. Colonel Lunstord, disappointed of his gov ernorship of the Tower, and other officers, were now engaged in skirmishes with the apprentices and such leaders of the daily mobs. " From these contestations the two terms of Roundhead and Cava lier grew to be received in discourse," says Clarendon. The hair of the London apprentices was cut close about their ears, and hence the name of contempt. The factions, royalist, and parlia mentarian, were bitter in their reproaches against each other as en- couragers of these passionate outbreaks. The dogged cries of the multitude, the insolent speeches of the king's friends, might have passed off without any serious results beyond a few broken heads, had not the bishops themselves become mixed up in the affray. * Part i. canto ii. line 540. t Clarendon. PROTEST OF TWELVE BISHOPS 423 Clarendon, who bore a decided ill-will to Williams, the archbishop of York, attributes the evil results to the Church, chiefly to the pride and passion of this archbishop. Hearing a youth in the street vociferating "no bishops," the fiery Welshman seized him, and there was a great scuffle, in which the archbishop's robes were torn from his back. He returned to his house, the deanery of West minster, and having assembled twelve of the bishops, who had been often prevented attending in their places in parliament through these tumults, proposed " that they might unanimously and presently prepare a protestation 'to send to the House, against the force that was used upon them: and against all the acts which were, or should be, done during the time that they should by force be kept from doing their duties in the House." The archbishop soon drew this document, which all signed ; and forthwith carried it to the king at Whitehall, who directed the lord keeper to present it to the Peers. The immediate result was that the Commons accused of high trea son all those who had signed the paper ; and the whole twelve were committed. " In all the extremity of frost, at eight o'clock in the dark evening, are we voted to the Tower," writes Joseph Hall, bishop of Norwich — one who suffered much persecution un deservedly, but whose character was safe in the hands of impartial posterity. Imprudent and illegal as was this protest, it was a bold stretch of party-feeling to call it treasonable. In the debate on the bishops' offence in the House of Commons, onememberonly spoke in their behalf, and said, " he did not believe that they were guilty of high treason, but that they were stark mad ; and therefore de sired that they might be sent to Bedlam." * The cry of " no bishop " was certainly not an expression of the national opinion. Although the arrogance and indiscretions of some of the higher clergy, and their extravagant enforcement of of fensive ceremonies, had disgusted many sober and religious per sons, and even at this time had called forth a petition for the ref ormation of the episcopal order from seven hundred beneficed clergymen, there was by no means a general sympathy with those who sought the destruction of the establishment. The Scots who- were in England in 1641 were dreading that the people would be content with a modified episcopacy. " All are for the creating," writes Baillie, " of a kind of presbytery, and for bringing down the bishops, in all things spiritual and temporal, so low as can be with any subsistence ; but their utter abolition, which is the aim * Clarendon, vol. ii. p. 121. ' 424 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of the most godly, is the knot of the question." By " the most godly" the exclusive presbyterian meant those only of his own persuasion. What was called " the root and branch party " was especially strong in London ; and the House of Commons had come to a resolution for the abolition of episcopacy before the ad journment in 1 641, by a majority of thirty-one, upon a bill brought in by sir Edward Dering. Archbishop Usher had prepared a scheme of reformation, under which each county was to be a dio cese, with a governing college, or presbytery, of twelve, under the presidency of a b 'shop ; and the House also voted for this plan. The measure for excluding the bishops from the House of Peers, which was the cause of the popular agitation in the Christmas of 1641, was supported by many who had no desire to subvert the church, or to establish an ecclesiastical democracy. Falkland was one of those who went to this extent. But to minds like that of Falkland, earnest for civil and religious liberty, but also attached to the ancient institutions ; disliking the persecutions which the non-conformists had endured, but also offended by the narrow and bitter spirit of the puritans ; opposed to popish superstitions, but yet disgusted by the desecration of holy places, and by the insults offered to the ministers of religion — to minds of this anti-fanatical and tolerent cast the temper of the parliamentary leaders, and of the populace at this period, must have been the signal for their ul timate separation from their party. In this revolution of England, as in all other revolutions, those who halt between two opinions can scarcely expect to be victors. It is for the Cromwells to go forward, ever confident and self-willed, from imminent danger to triumphant success ; but it is for the Falklands to ingeminate the word " Peace, peace ; " and to seek death in the battle-field as the only refuge of hearts broken through the desolation of their country.* With these fearful contentions around the king's palace and the houses of parliament — Lunsford and his cavaliers drawing their swords upon the city apprentices in Westminster Hall on one day, and the apprentices returning in great force on another day, crying out " Slash us now" — the Commons again petitioned the king for a guard under the command of the earl of Essex. This guard the king refused, except it were under an officer appointed by himself. The leaders of the Commons had too many friends about die court not to know that some crisis was approaching. The king had, no • See Clarendon's famous character of Falkland, vol. iv. p. 240. CHARGES OF TREASON AGAINST MEMBERS. 425 doubt, reasonable fears that it was contemplated to deprive him of the control of the military force of the kingdom; and this, which was the great point of difference in all subsequent attempts at negotiation, might have led him to the adoption of the fatal measure which shut out all hopes of tranquillity. On the 31st of December it was voted in the Commons "that the House be resolved into a Committee on Monday next, January 3rd, to take into considera tion the Militia of the kingdom." From the time of the army plot in May, 1641, it had been the object of the Commons to vest the command of the Militia in persons nominated by themselves. We have several times had occasion to point out that there was no regular military force kept up, except a few soldiers retained for the defence of fortresses. In earlier times of danger, the people were called out under commissions of array. When invasion was apprehended, as on the alarm of the Spanish Armada, the sovereign exercised the power of mustering and training the population for the common defence. The royal authority for arming the people in time of peace was very doubtful. Thus the Parliament, whilst the question of the Militia was in dispute, authorised " An Act for the better raising and levying of soldiers for the present defence of the kingdoms of England and Ireland," in which it was declared that, " by the laws of this realm, none of his majesty's subjects ought to be impressed, or compelled to go out of his county to serve as a soldier in the wars, except in case of necessity of the sudden coming in of strange enemies into the kingdom, or except they be otherwise bound by the tenure of their lands or posses sions." * There appeared no legal provision for calling out the Militia in time of peace, except by a new Act of Parliament. With our present knowledge of the constitutional powers of the sovereign, we can have no hesitation in affirming that the power of nomina ting the officers of such a force was necessarily a part of the royal prerogative ; and that the requisition of the Commons to place the command of the Militia in the hands of lords-lieutenant of each county, to be nominated in a bill, and to obey the orders of the two Houses, was an undue invasion of the rights of the Crown. But, on the other hand, we must not forget that in the case of Charles he had manifested a disposition, which Strafford had distinctly encouraged, to employ an army to make himself absolute. The king and the parliament were at issue upon the vital point as to which should wield the power of the sword. The Commons * 16 Car. I. c. 38. 426 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. suspected the king. The king hated the Commons. The question of the Militia, and the question of episcopacy, were the questions that made the opening year of 1642 the most ominous in English history. The king endeavoured to solve the grand difficulty by what, in modern times, is called a coup-d'etat. When Charles, at this period of tumult and alarm, had bestowed office on Colepepper and Falkland, and had sought the councils of Hyde, he " declared that he would do nothing that in any degree concerned or related to his service in the House of Commons with out their joint advice, and exact communication to them of all his own conceptions." So writes Clarendon, adding, " which without doubt his majesty did at this time stedfastly resolve, though in very few days he did very fatally swerve from it." The historian then describes the influence possessed over the king by lord Digby, who he represents as a man of great vanity, ambition, and self- confidence. " The king himself," he says, " was the unfittest person alive to be served by such a counsellor, being too easily inclined to sudden enterprises, and as easily startled when they were entered upon." Thus, he says, "a very unhappy counsel was proposed and resolution taken, without the least communication with either of the three who had been so lately admitted to an entire trust." It would have been difficult for an enemy of Charles to have more strongly depicted the weakness, rashness, and faith lessness of his character, than in these words of his friend and pane gyrist. On the 2nd of January, when the king sent his refusal to the Commons to appoint a guard for their security, he added, " We do engage to you solemnly, on the word of a king, that the security of all and every one of you from violence is, and ever shall be, as much our care as the preservation of ourselves and, our children." On the 3rd of January, the attorney-general, sir Edward Herbert, appeared at the bar of the House of Lords, and in the king's name accused of high-treason, lord Kimbolton. and five members of the Commons. These members were Pym, Hollis, Hampden, Hasle- rig, and Strode. The attorney-general desired that these persons should be placed in custody, and a secret committee appointed to examine witnesses. They were accused of endeavouring to subvert the fundamental laws of the kingdom, and deprive the king of his regal power ; of alienating the affections of the people from the king; of drawing his majesty's late army from their obedience ; of encouraging a foreign power, Scotland, to invade the kingdom ; of endeavouring to subvert the rights of parliament ; of compelling the THE KING ATTEMPTS TO SEIZE THE FIVE MEMBERS. 427 parliament to join with them in their traitorous designs ; and of conspiring to levy war against the king. The charge of correspond ing with the Scots, in 1640, was, as we have shown, a technical act of treason, for-which there was a legal defence under the Stat ute of Oblivion. The other charges had reference to their parlia mentary conduct, as Clarendon implies. On the same clay a ser- jeantLat-arms appeared at the bar of the House of Commons, and required the Speaker to place five members in his custody, whom the king had accused of high-treason. The five members were present when the officer named them. They remained in their places, silent. The Speaker commanded the serjeant to retire ; and sent a deputation to the king, of which Falkland and Colepep per formed part, to say that so important a message should receive their most serious consideration, and that the members should be ready to answer any legal charge. The papers of the accused had been sealed up, at their lodgings, by the king's command. The House ordered that the seals should be removed, and the Speaker's warrant issued for the apprehension of those who had affixed them. The House then adjourned. On the morning of the 4th, the five members of the Commons were in their places. It was perfectly well known to a few what was about to happen. The king had acted illegally,in the first instance, by sending a serjeant-at-arms to demand the persons of the members without any warrant of the privy council or of a magistrate. It was now known that he was about to follow up this despotic attempt by an act still more uncon stitutional. The Commons sent a message to the lord mayor, aldermen, and common council, to inform them that the privileges of parliament were in danger ; and some members were deputed to the inns of court to desire the law students not to come to West minster, as it was understood that they had been tampered with. The House then adjourned till one o'clock. In a short time, it was made known that the king was coming down the street from White hall, escorted by three or four hundred armed persons. Again it was reported that the king, with his band of attendants, had entered Westminster Hall. It was a moment of terrible suspense. Some members drew their swords. The more prudent urged the five accused to retire, to prevent bloodshed. An account of the scene which ensued has been preserved in the notes of one present, sir Ralph Verney, member for Aylesbury. It is as graphic as it is im portant as a parliamentary precedent* * Mr. Hallam prints it from the original note-, more correctly than it is given in Hat- Bell's " Precedents of Proceedings in the House of Commons." 428 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. " As soon as the House met again [after the morning adjourm ment], it was moved, considering there was an intention to take these five members away by force, to avoid all tumult, let them be commanded to absent themselves ; upon this the House gave them leave to absent themselves, but entered no order for it. And then the five gentlemen went out of the house. "A little after, the king came with all his guard, and all his. pensioners, and two or three hundred soldiers and gentlemen. The king commanded the soldiers to stay in the hall, and sent us word he was at the door. The Speaker was commanded to sit still, with the mace lying before him ; and then the king came to the door, and took the palsgrave in with him, and commanded all that came with him on their lives not to come in. So the doors were kept open, and the earl of Roxburgh stood within the door, leaning upon it. Then the king came upwards towards the chair, with his hat off, and the Speaker stepped out to meet him ; then the king stepped up to his place, and stood upon the step, but sat not down in the chair. " And after he had looked a great while he told us he would not break our privileges, but treason had no privilege ; he came for those five gentlemen, for he expected obedience yesterday, and not an answer. Then he called Mr. Pym and Mr. Hollis by name, but no answer was made. Then he asked the Speaker if they were here, or where they were ? Upon this the Speaker fell on his knees, and desired his excuse, for he was a servant to the House, and had neither eyes nor tongue to see or say anything but what they commanded him ; then the king told him he thought his own eyes were as good as his, and then said his birds had flown, but he did expect the House should send them to him ; and if they did not, he would seek them himself, for their treason was foul, and' such a one as they would all thank him to discover; then he as sured us they should have a fair trial ; and so went out, pulling off his hat till he came to the door. " Upon this the House did instantly resolve to adjourn till to morrow at one of the clock, and in the interim they might consider what to do." THE KING DEMANDS THE MEMBERS AT GUILDHALL. 429 CHAPTER XXIII. The king demands the Members at Guildhall. — Manifestations of popular discontent.— The king removes from Whitehall. — The Members brought back in triumph. — The queen leaves England. — Conference at Newmarket. — The king refused entrance to Hu'.l. — Parliamentary Ordinance for the Miiitia. — The king forms a body guard at York. — Propositions of the Parliament. — View of society immediately before the commencement of the Civil War. — Arming of the People. — The Cavaliers. — Influ ence and character of the Puritans. — The Clergy. — Shutting up of the Playhouses. — Volunteers of London. — Women petitioning. — London apprentices. — Industry af fected by the preparations for civil war. — Disturbances in the country districts. — Maintenance of order generally. — Influence of the Press. — The Poets. — The Jour nalists. — Superstitions. — The king sets up his Standard at Nottingham — His gloomy prospects. — Messages between the king and parliament. — Essex marches from London. When the king left the House of Commons, the members for a few seconds sat in mute astonishment ; but the cry of " Privilege, Privilege," then burst forth, and the House instantly adjourned. As the members passed into the lobbies, they found themselves amongst a crowd of their own servants and other spectators, who were repeating the violent expressions which had been used by the king's attendants. The accused members proceeded to the city. The night was one of general alarm. The citizens formed themselves into armed patrols. The cry was that the Cavaliers were coming to fire the city. At Whitehall there was terror and despondency. The queen, who in the morning had seen the k'ng go forth from the palace, promising her that he would return in an hour, master of his kingdom, saw him return under the disgrace of having attempted an unlawful act, and failed in the attempt. In the evening it was known that the six members were in a house in Coleman street. Lord Digby offered, says Clarendon, "with a select company of gentlemen, who would accompany him, whereof sir Thomas Lunsford was one. to seize upon them, and bring them away alive, or leave them dead in the place." The historian, who had just related the scene in the House of Commons, adds, with wonderful naivete", " but the king did not like such enterprises ." The Commons assembled on the 5th, and, declaring the king 's coming " in a warlike manner " a high breach of privilege, a i* 430 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. journed for six days, appointing Committees to sit in the city. One Committee occupied Grocers' Hall, another occupied Merchant Taylors' Hall. Charles himself on that morning rode into the city without any guards. He was received by the people generally with cold- respect, and by some with cries of " Privilege of Parlia ment." One man threw into his carriage a paper inscribed "To your tents, O Israel ! " The king had written to the lord-mayor to summon a Common Council in Guildhall. He told them that he came amongst them without a guard, to show his affection ; " that he had accused certain men of high-treason, against whom he would proceed in a legal way ; and therefore he presumed they would not shelter them in the city." Clarendon adds, " he de parted without that applause and cheerfulness which he might have expected from the extraordinary grace he vouchsafed to them." The king told one of the sheriffs whom he wished to conciliate, that he would dine with him ; and having dined, he returned homewards, hearing the cry of " Privilege of Parliament " re peated, and looking upon faces of gloom and disquiet. It was Twelfth Night. The old Christmas gaiety of Whitehall was in terrupted by such occurrences as England had never before seen. But on this Twelfth Night the one play of that Christmas was per formed in the Cock-pit. The king and queen were not present; the prince of Wales, then a boy of twelve, was there to laugh at the scenes of " The Scornful Lady," one of the most popular of the dramas of Beaumont and Fletcher. This was the last dram atic performance which Whitehall witnessed during the reign of Charles.* There were four more days of fear and vacillation whilst the king and his family remained in the capital. The Com mon Council sent a petition to the king, complaining of the attempt to arrest the members. He makes an answer which only increases the discontent. On the 8th he issues a proclamation to arrest lord Kimbolton and the five Commoners. The parliamentary commit tees in the city meet the proclamation by great preparations to bring them back in triumph to Westminster. The courtiers now became alarmed for the personal safety of the king and queen. On the evening of the loth Charles left Whitehall for Hampton Court. He never again entered that palace of the English kings, till that fatal morning when he walked across the Park from St. James's, attended by bishop Juxon, and guarded by a regiment of foot. * The book of the Master of the Revels furnishes this record. See Collier's " Annals of the Stage," vol. u. p. 102. RETURN IN TRIUMPH TO PARLIAMENT. 43 1 At two o'clock of that day se'nnight on which the king had en tered the House of Commons, the accused members were brought back to the Parliament-stairs, in a rude triumph which presented a remarkable contrast to the welcome which the city gave its sov ereign on the 25th of November. From London bridge to West minster the Thames was covered with pleasure-barges and wher ries filled with citizens. Lighters and long-boats, carrying pieces of ordnance, and dressed up with streamers, surrounded the barges of the Commons. The trained bands marched past Whitehall, bearing on their pikes the Protestation of 1 641, and the printed votes of the Commons declaring the king's breach of their privi leges, pinned on their breasts. As the crowd passed the palace they exclaimed, "Where are now the king and his cavaliers?" The House of Commons having met, the sheriffs of London were called in, and received the thanks of the Speaker. The masters and officers of ships, who had formed the river-guard, were also thanked. Then came the freeholders of Buckinghamshire, who, to the number of four thousand, had arrived in London to offer their services for the defence of Parliament. They came, each wearing the famous Protestation in his hat.* A deputation from the free- ' holders went the next day with a petition to the king, in which they prayed that their representative, Mr. Hampden, and the other mem bers who laboured under a " foul accusation," might enjoy the just privileges of parliament. The king replied, " that because of the doubt that hath been raised of the manner, he would waive his former proceedings, and proceed in an unquestionable way." This " unquestionable way " was never tried. Another attempt of the king's rashest partisans was as unpropitious as the breach of privi lege. On the day when the Buckinghamshire petition was pre sented, Lord Digby and colonel Lunsford appeared with a body of men in arms at Kingston. The parliament proclaimed them trai tors. Digby fled beyond sea; Lunsford and his cavaliers attended .the king to Windsor. In the councils of Windsor, in which we may now well believe that better advisers were listened to than the vain Digby or the truculent Lunsford, a sensible plan of operations was resolved upon. The king was to refrain from all open contests with the * Butler calls this document— " The prototype of reformation, Which all the saints, and some, since martyrs, Wore in their hats, like wedding-garters." — Hitdibras, .canto 2. 432 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Parliament ; to hold out terms of conciliation, and gradually to re tire to the north, whilst his friends were gathering s'rength, Charles invited the houses, on the 20th of January, to reduce all their complaints to one specific relation. The Peers hailed this as an omen of peace ; the Commons would put no faith in the king's desire for conciliation, unless he would transfer the military com mands of fortresses and the Militia to those who possessed the confidence of parliament. The king gave a decided refusal to the Commons' "sure ground of safety." The House then directed, by Ordinance, that Goring, the governor of Portsmouth, and Hotham, the governor of Hull, should hold those garrisons "for king and parliament," and surrender to no one but under the authority of the parliament. Day by day was the contest growing to" a fatal crisis. The Houses passed a Bill for regulating the Militia early in February. About the same time the Bill was carried " for disabling all persons in Holy Orders to exercise any temporal jurisdiction or authority," the preamble of which runs thus, " Whereas bishops and other persons in Holy Orders ought not to be entangled with secular jurisdiction, the office of the Ministry being of such great importance that it will take up the whole man." * To this Bill, by which the bishops were excluded * from the House of Lords, the king at length gave his assent. The Bill for the Militia he rejected. The queen urged her husband to accept the one bill and reject the other. On the 16th of February her majesty, escorted by the king to Dover, took her departure for Holland. She carried with her the crown-jewels ; and her real purpose was to raise forces for resisting the demands of the Par liament. There are many letters from the queen to the king, during her absence, which show how she laboured to strengthen the king's infirmity of purpose. They communicated in cipher, and the key to the cipher was always kept in the king's pocket. " Once again I remind you," she writes, " to. take care of your pocket, and not let our cipher be stolen." t The breach between the king jmd the parliament upon the question of the Militia was more tnd more widened. Commissioners were received again and again, And the matter could not be accommodated; nor would the king, at the earnest entreaty of the Houses, return to London. At last, at a conference at Newmarket, when it was asked by lord Holland and lord Pembroke, whether the Militia might not be granted for a lime, Charles replied, " No; by God, not for an hour ; you have asked • 16 Car. I. c. 27. t Green's " Letters of Henrietta Maria," p. 54. THE KING REFUSED ENTRANCE TO HULL. 433 that of me, in this, which was never asked of a king, and with which I would not trust my wife and my children." This scene, in this locality must have suggested a contrast to the usual meetings of the court at Newmarket, for the race-course there was established by Charles ; and few courtiers.fell in with the opinion of lord Herbert of Cher- bury, who said, " The exercise I do not ?pprove of is running of horses, there being much cheating in that kind." The king, after this stormy conference, went on to York. Royalist forces had been raised in the north by the marquis of Newcastle. The first step towards an actual outbreak of civil war was quickly taken. On the 23rd of April the king suddenly appeared before Hull at the head of a strong body of horse, and demanded admittance into the town. There was a large store of arms and ammunition in the fortress, The mayor was about to open the gates, when sir John Hotham went on to the ramparts, and falling on his knees begged the king to excuse a refusal to the demand, for that he, as gov ernor, had sworn to keep the place at the disposition of the parlia ment. Charles was compelled to retire", proclaiming Hotham a traitor. He then complained to the parliament, demanding justice against the governor of Hull, according to law. The two Houses voted their approval of Hotham's act. The crisis had arrived. There was nothing more to be done for reconcilement. Thirty-two Peers,~and sixty-five members of the Commons, joined the king at York. Those that remained no longer attempted to pass Bills for the royal sanction. They issued Ordinances. On the 5th of May the Parliamentary Ordinance for the Militia was directed to be carried out. The king proclaimed this ordinance to be illegal, and summoned the gentlemen of York to form his body-guard. But even in this county, which was considered the stronghold of the royal ists, opinions were divided. The lord Chancellor, Littleton, had sent the great seal to the king, that mystic symbol of legal govern ment. Many gentlemen of the county assembled in the town-hall of York, and were addressed by Charles, who was received with loud acclamations. Commissioners of the parliament, men of local influence, who had been sent to York to observe what passed, were threatened by the king and hooted by the cavaliers. But under this appearance of overwhelming strength, some fifty gentlemen, with sir Thomas Fairfax at their head, refused to join in the form ation of a body-guard. A more important demonstration of public feeling occurred in the gathering round the hall of several thou sands of the middle class, who demanded admission to the meet- Vol II I.— 28 434 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ing, and being refused, held a meeting of their own, and protested against the acts of a close assembly. The king called another general meeting upon a neighbouring moor ; and thither came forty thousand men, for the purpose of presenting a petition to the king, imploring him to be reconciled to his parliament. Charles read a paper, and was going away, when young Fairfax pressed forward, and on his knee presented the petition of the people. The king indignantly rode off, and after many violent ebullitions of contempt from the cavaliers the meeting dispersed. The councils of the king became irresolute. The decisions of the parliament, freed from the royalist members who had retired to York, became bolder. The leaders prepared for open war with marvellous en ergy. They proposed terms of accommodation which they must have anticipated would meet with rejection. These propositions went to the extent of stripping the monarch of the greater part of the constitutional powers which, happily, in our times, have been found consistent with the most perfect liberty of the people. They contemplated, more especially, the enforcement of the principle that the appointment of the king's council and the great officers of state should be subject to the approbation of the two Houses. By the gradual establishment of ministerial responsibility, and the harmonious dependence of the executive power upon the legisla tive, such a result has been attained. It was then sought to be attained by such a direct curtailment of the sovereign authority as would have made the monarch what Charles truly described, "but the picture, but the sign of a king." The courageous and. able men who drew up these propositions must have been satisfied that their adoption could have led to no permanent tranquillity; that they were incompatible with the existence of the monarchical prin ciple ; and that the executive power, under such arrangements, could have had no real strength to preserve domestic peace or re sist foreign aggression. But they dreaded a return to arbitrary power; they suspected, not without cause, the inclinations of the king. They had the great plea of self-preservation for their ac tions ; and they knew that if they fell themselves, public liberty would fall with them. Neither party was in a position to regard their rights and duties with equanimity. The most terrible ques tion that can be put to a nation was now about to be put — to which of two powers, each claiming to be supreme, will you render obe dience ? On the 9th of July, three days before the Houses came to the decisive vote, that an army shall be raised '¦ for the defence VIEW OF SOCIETY. — THE PEOPLE ARMING. 435 of the king and parliament " (such, for some time, was the phrase of the Ordinances), one member, sir Benjamin Rudyard, uttered this prophetic warning: "Mr. Speaker, it now behoves us to call up all the wisdom we have about us, for we are at the very brink of combustion and confusion. If blood once begin to touch blood, we shall presently fall into a certain misery, and must attend an uncer tain success, God knows when, and God knows what. Every man here is bound in conscience to employ his uttermost endeavours to prevent the effusion of blood. Blood is a crying sin : it pollutes the land. Let us save our liberties and our estates, as we may save our souls too. Now I have clearly delivered mine own conscience, I leave every man freely to his.i' * Let us pause at this juncture, at which the public men of Eng land are exhibiting the spirit of party in aspects so unusual and so portentous, and endeavour to catch some faint glimpses of the life of the people immediately before the commencement of the Civil War. " Before the flame of. the war broke out in the top of the chim neys, the smoke ascended in every country." So writes Lucy Hutchinson, a careful and honest observer of what was passing. She saw around her, in many places, " fierce contests and disputes, almost to blood, even at the first." The partisans of the king were carrying out his commissions of array. The partisans of the par liament were insisting upon obedience to the ordinance for the militia. The king proclaimed Essex, the captain-general of the parliament, and his officers, as traitors. The parliament voted the king's commissioners of array to be traitors. Not only were the king and parliament each struggling to obtain possession of the munitions of war by seizing the fortified places, but each barrel of gunpowder was contested for by opposite parties. Mr. Hutchin son, going by chance to Nottingham, at the time when Charles was at York, is told by the mayor's wife that the sheriff has come to take away the ammunition belonging to the trained bands of the country. He goes into the town-hall, and finds lord Newark, the lord-lieutenant, and the sheriff, with two or three captains, seeing the gunpowder weighed. The king, said the lord-lieutenant, de sired to borrow it — it should be restored in ten days. Mr. Hutch inson contended that such was the danger of the times that in four days they might be ruined for the want of the powder ; there was * His printed speech bears date July 18; It is in the " Harleian Miscellany," vol v. p. 216. 436 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. a troop of horse in the town, committing great outrages and inso» lencies, and calling divers honest men puritans and rogues. The contest went on ; but lord Newark, admitting that the powder be longing to "the country," would have it for the king. When the c mntrymen outside the hall knew what had taken place, they de sired Mr. Hutchinson to stand by them, and they would part with every drop-of blood in their bodies before the lord-lieutenant should have the powder. Lord Newark angrily gave up his demand, when he saw the multitude gathered around the hall. But still the power of the magistrate was respected, and it was agreed that the mayor and the sheriff should have the powder in their joint custody. Such cantests between those of opposite Opinions were going on through out England. Few of the members of parliament remained in Lon don. The zealous men of influence in their several counties were in their own districts, raising volunteers, gathering subscriptions, drill ing recruits, collecting arms. Each is subscribing largely " for de fence of the kingdom." Fire-arms are scarce ; and the old weapons of the long-bow and cross-bow are again put in use. Old armour, long since "hung by the wall," is brought down and furbished. The rustic, changed into a pikeman, puts on the iron skull-cap and greaves ; and the young farmer becomes a dragoon, with his car bine and pistols. In the parliamentary army there is every variety of clothing. In some companies raised by gentlemen amongst their tenants, the old liveries of each family give the prevailing colour. Hampden's men are in green ; Lord Brook's in purple ; Others are in blue ; others in red. The officers all wear an orange scarf, being the colour of their general. The buff doublet, " though not sword yet cudgel proof," is a substitute for armour. Haslerig's Lobsters, and Cromwell's Ironsides — each so called from their rough mail — are not formed as yet. Recruits are taken, at first, without much reference to their opinions. Cromwell, with his su per-eminent sagacit)', saw the danger of this course. In a later period of his life, when he had attained supreme power, he thus described his position at the commencement of the war : — " I was a person who, from my first employment, was suddenly preferred and lifted up from the lesser trust to greater ; from my first being a captain of a troop of horse." He then relates that he " had a very worthy friend, a very noble person, Mr. John Hampden, and he thus spake to him : — ' Your troops are most of them old decayed serving-men, and tapsters, and such kind of fellows ; and their troops are gentlemen's sons, younger sons, and persons of quality; INFLUENCE OF THE PURITANS. 437 do you think that the spirits of such mean and base fellows will ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have honour, and courage, and resolution in them.' " What Cromwell did to meet the ar dour of the Cavalier with a zeal equally enthusiastic, he goes on to tell: "I raised such men as had the fear of God before them, as made some conscience of what they did." * Cromwell did justice to the principle upon which the honour and courage of the Cavaliers was founded. He saw, beneath their essenced love-locks and gilded doublets, clear heads and bold hearts. The gay was not necessarily debauched ; the health-drinkers were not necessarily drunkards. There were other men in the royalist ranks than — " The bravoes of Alsatia, the pages of Whitehall.'* There were great spirits in both armies ready to measure their swords for "The King," or for " The Cause." We can scarcely assume that the bulk of the population, or even the greater number of the richer and more educated classes, at once took their sides in this great argument. We know they did not. Many of the best gentlemen of England withdrew from the quarrel which promised to be fatal either to order or to liberty. John Evelyn, whose inclinations were royalist, was one. "The Covenant being passed," he obtained a licence, signed by the king, to travel. He found it " impossible to evade the doing very unhand some things." t Sir Roger Twysden, one who had refused ship- money, dreaded on the one hand to take part with the parliament, for he "saw, if this war continued, it would prove the ruin of the Protestant religion and the laws of the land ;" but, on the other hand, he " did not love to have a king armed with book-law against me for my life and estate." Mr. Kemble, the editor of Twysden's " Government of England," from which we quote, says " Sir Roger Twysden was not the only gentleman who, being unable to join either party, desired to leave England for a time." This learned student of our history adds, by way of accounting for the flight to other lands of some of the country gentlemen, that " they felt it was impossible to serve a king who never spoke a word of truth in his life ; and yet could not arm against him, or remain neutral between the two parties." X With every respect for con scientious halting between two opinions, we must nevertheless feel that it is nobler to be a little wrong in the adoption of one party or * Carlyle's >" Cromwell," vol. iii. p. 250. This remarkable speech is also in Guizot'i " Cromwell," vol. ii. p. 316. t Diary. X Introduction, p. lxx. 43*5 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the other, than to stand aside in philosophical or interested indif ference to either party. No cause can be wholly good or wholly bad. Whilst Englishmen were girding up their loins for battle in 1642, they presented a grande/ aspect than if the Roundheads had suf fered Charles to come back in triumph to London, to be the abso lute king which he claimed to be ; or if the Cavaliers had suffered the Roundheads to trample the Monarchy and the Church in the dust, even in an honest desire to correct their abuses. The state of opinion in the country generally is thus represented by Mrs. Hutchinson : — " Some counties were in the beginning so wholly for the parliament, that the king's interest appeared not in them ; some so wholly for the king, that the godly, for those gen erally were the parliament's friends, were found to forsake their habitations, and seek other shelters." But in London, after the attempt of the king to violate the sanctuary of the House of Com mons, and his removal from the seat of government, the majority of the people became devoted to the parliament. That the influ ence of those distinguished as "the godly," was more effectual in the capital than In the country, would be manifest if there were no other evidence than the bitterness with which the Puritans, and es pecially their preachers, are spoken of by the Royalist writers. The " Gospel Trumpeter, surrounded with long-ear'd rout," — the " errant saints," — the " gifted brethren, preaching by a carnal hour glass," were the objects of Butler's ridicule. Cleaveland's coarser wit attacks the " new teacher of the town," — " his shopboard breed ing," — his "cozening cough and hollow cheek," — his "hands to thump, no knees to bow." The puritan clergy were more hated than the " preaching cobblers, pulpit praters," whom some de fended "in a merry way," saying that, when such men first began to " take up that duty which the prelates and great doctors had let fall," they each had invaded the other's calling," — "that chand lers, cutlers, weavers, and the like, preached, while the archbishop himself, instead of preaching, was busied in projects about leather, salt, soap, and such commodities as belonged to those tradesmen." * In London, the influence of the popular preachers, who filled the churches and conventicles, was irresistible. Few of the clergy were bold enough to support episcopacy ; and those who pro claimed high-church opinions had very incredulous auditors. This temper began in the hatred of popery, which the people saw lurk ing behind the most harmless ceremonials. The cause of the par- * May. STATE OF THE CLERGY. 439 liament became the cause of the more earnest religionists ; whilst the party of the king, though supported by many of sincere piety, was also the rallying point of the indifferent, the pleasure-loving, and the licentious. In the king's court, during its season of pros perity, the splendours of the church were more regarded than the ministration of the working clergy. -We have mentioned the per formance of " The Scornful Lady " on the night of the eventful 5th of January. It is perhaps significant of the real want of respect for the ministerial office, in a co.urt which was ready to risk a civil war in the cause of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, that at this time of alarm a play was acted, of which " the trivial, senseless, and un natural representation of the chaplain," was, seventy years after wards, denounced as an offence against good morals ; with the just observation that "it is so mean a thing to gratify a loose age with a scandalous representation of what is reputable among men, not to say what is sacred, that no beauty, no excellence in an author, ought to atone it." The " Spectator," in the reign of Anne, held that the character of the chaplain in " The Scornful Lady," " has done more towards the disparagement of holy orders, and consequently of virtue itself, than all the wit of that author, or any other, could make up for in the conduct of the longest life after it." The chaplain of "The Scornful Lady" is not represented as a Puritan. We see only, to use the words of the essayist, " a wretch without any notion of the dignity of his func tion." * This was the play selected by the master of the revels with an utter unconscious ness of its impropriety. How should he have been conscious that it was inconsistent with the boasted decorum of the court of Charles to ridicule the degraded condition of the clergy, when the curates who did the work were so scandalously paid, that in London they were to be found dining at " the threepenny ordinary," and in the country were glad to obtain from the churchwarden "a barley bag-pudding for the Sunday's dinner." The country curate is described as being " under a great prebend, and a double- beneficed rich man," with a salary inferior to his cook or his coach man. The London curates are represented as living "upon citizens' trenchers ; and. were it not that they were pitiful and charitable to them, there was no possibility of subsistence." t The Committee of the. Commons in 1641 received many bitter com plaints from parishes that their rectors and vicars would not preach themselves nor allow others to preach ; and they appointed * Spectator, No. 270, — 1712. t'See a curious tract, "The Curates' Conference," in " Harleian Miscellany," vol. i. 8vo, 440 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. • "The Committee of Preaching Ministers," whose business was to remedy these neglects. We can easily understand how, out of this laxity in regard to the real interests of religion, whilst some ministers were disputing whether " the Lord's table " should stand in the body of the church or at the east end, railed or without rails, covered or uncovered ; those who denounced a liturgy, or resisted all ecclesiastical government, grew stronger and stronger, and prin cipally increased in London and other great towns. From this period we cannot understand the causes and the events of the Civil War, without steadily keeping in mind that the zeal of the Puritans, in whateve.r sectarian differences it exhibited itself, was as much the sustaining principle of the great conflict, as the passionate de sire for civil liberty. These two great elements of resistance to the Crown produced impressions upon the national character, — for the most part salutary impressions,— which two centuries have not obliterated. The strength of the puritanical element in the parliament of 1642 led to bold interferences with popular habits. The parlia mentary leaders knew that they would have the support of the most powerful of the community of London, and of many other great towns, if not of the majority of the nation, when they dis couraged the ordinary amusements of the people, — the bear-bait ings, the cock-fights, the horse-races, the May-poles ; appointed a fast on Christmas-day; and shut up the theatres. Bitter must have been the heart-burnings amongst the actors when their voca tion came to an end in London, in 1642. The five regular com panies were dispersed. Their members became " vagabonds," under the old Statutes, hanging about the camps of the Cavaliers, or secretly performing in inns and private houses. Old John Lowin, who was a fellow-actor with Shakspere, went to keep " The Three Pigeons " at Brentford ; and in that ancient hostelry, a few years ago, some scenes were discovered painted on a wall. The parlia ment would not have ventured upon depriving the people of their most cherished amusement, throwing so many persons into desti tution, had not the suppression of plays been held by them as a matter cf religious obligation. There is a solemnity' in the words of " An'Ordinance of the Lords and Commons concerning Stage Plays," dated September 2. 1642, which has no sound of hypocriti cal pretence :— " Whereas the distressed estate of Ireland, steeped in her own blood, and the distracted estate of England, threat ened with a cloud of blood by a civil war, call for all possible VOLUNTEERS OF LONDON. 44 » means to appease and avert the wrath of God appearing in these judgments : amongst which fasting and prayer having been often tried to, be very effectual, have been lately and are still enjoined ; and whereas public sports do not well agree with public calamities, nor public stage-plays with the seasons of humiliation, this being an exercise of sad and pious solemnity, and the other being spec tacles of pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious mirth and levity : it is therefore thought fit and ordained by the Lords and Commons in this Parliament assembled, that while these sad causes and set times of humiliation do continue, public stage-plays shall cease and be forborne." Milton has described two of the chief aspects of the London of this period in very eloquent words : " Behold now this vast city ; a city of refuge, the mansion-house of liberty encompassed and sur rounded with His protection. The shop of war hath not there more anvils and hammers working, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed justice in defence of beleaguered truth, than there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching,, revolving new notions and ideas." * London is the shop of war ; it is the home of thought. Let us look at the vast city under the first of these aspects. It has always had its Trained-bands. It has now its Volunteers of every rank. Ludlow thus relates his first introduction to "the shop of war," when he thought it his duty, as a young man, to take part in the cause of par liament : " Soon after my engagement in this cause, I met with Mr. Richard Fynes, son to the lord Say,and Mr. Charles Fleetwood, son to sir Miles Fleetwood, then a member of the House of Commons ; with whom consulting, it was resolved by us to assemble as many young gentlemen of the Inns of Court, of which we then were, and others, as should be found disposed to this service, in order to be instructed together in the use of arms." t They frequently met at the Artillery Ground, to receive this instruction from " a person experienced in military affairs." Many who had been in the Protestant armies of the continent, some who had fought under Gustavus Adolphus, were competent to become such instructors. Such a man was Skippon, who had been appointed major-general of the London Militia. Clarendon does justice to his character : " The man had served very long in Holland ; and from a common soldier had raised himself to the degree of a captain, and to the reputation of a good officer : he was a man of order and sobriety, and untainted with * " Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing." t " Memoirs," p. 43. 442 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. any of those vices which the officers of that army are exercised in." The parliament considered this city force as a great arm of strength : " Ordered, that the House shall meet to-morrow at eight, and adjourn at ten, to the end that such as please may see the Mili tia of the city of London exercised." * Eight thousand men were mustered on this occasion. Tents were erected for the members of parliament, and there was a city feast, without which the review would have been maimed of its fair proportions. There were healths, mingled with prayers and thanksgivings, on that and other grand occasions. Skippon and his strict brethren were obliged to compromise with some of the profane customs which they held in abomination. When the parliamentary Ordinance for an army went forth, the zeal of the people was called out in a more remark able manner than by the sights of Finsbury fields. There was a work to be done which would require heavy payments. Four thou sand men had enlisted in one day, and they must have wages. The tables of Guildhall were instantly heaped up with money and plate. The wealthy brought their bags of silver and their parcel-gilt goblets ; the poorer, their smallest article of value — " a thimble, bodkin, and a spoon." May says, " it was a common jeer of men disaffected to the cause to call it ' the thimble and bodkin army.' " " Women, that left no stone untum'd In which the cause might be concem'd, Brought in their children's spoons and whistles, To purchase swords, carbines, and pistols." t Women took part in this great question of the time with an ardour in which there is nothing really ridiculous. The cavaliers laughed at "the zealous sisterhood ; " but, in a juster point of view, there is something as heroic as the royalist countess of Derby's defence of Latham House, in the demeanour of the puritan Ann Stagg, a brewer's wife, when she went to the door of the House of Com mons, at the head of a great number of women of the middle class, and presented a petition, which said,—" It may be thought strange and unbecoming our sex to show ourselves here, bearing a petition to this honourable assembly; but Christ purchased us at as dear a rate as he did men, and therefore requireth the same obedience, for the same mercy, as of men : we are sharers in the public calam ities." Pym delivered a gracious message to Ann Stagg and her companions ; " Repair," he said, " to your houses, we entreat, and » " Journals," May 9, 1642. f " Hudibras," part ii. canto 2. APPRENTICES. 443 turn your petitions into prayers at home for us." Milton, com mending the courtesy of the parliament to such petitions, says, " The meanest artisans and labourers, at other times also women, and often the younger sort of servants, attending with their com plaints, and that sometimes in a less humble guise than for peti tioners, have gone with confidence that neither their meanness would be rejected, nor their simplicity contemned." * The London apprentices, so prominent in these unhappy times, and so really formidable in their organisation, require a brief notice. They were not a low bred or illiterate class. The greater number were the sons of substantial citizens or yeomen ; and even the esquire did not disdain that his boy should serve in the shop of the London trader. Stow says, " Because the apprentices of Lon don were often children of gentlemen and persons of good quality, they did affect to go in costly apparel, and wear weapons, and fre quent schools of dancing, fencing, and music." Their principle of confederation gave them their political strength. A writer of this period says, " There is a kind of supernatural sympathy, a general union, which knits their hearts in a bond of fraternal affection, under the common notion of a London 'prentice. "t The dress of the apprentice in the reign of Charles I. was, " the flat round cap, hair close cut, narrow falling band, close side-coat, close hose, cloth stockings," — an antique habit which may still be seen in the streets of London, as worn by the youths' of that noble school, Christ's Hospital. The violence of the apprentices against epis copacy, and their general adherence to the cause of the Parliament, were probably influenced by the opinions of their puritan masters. But amongst this body there were some differences of opinion. At the beginning of 1643, there was a petition for peace, presented by "divers " London apprentices, which was not very favourably received ; and in their published vindication they say, " Though we for several considerations were not, or not suffered to be, of that number who have exposed their persons to the fury of war, yet, as they bleed outwardly, we bleed within for the distempers of this Church and State." They probably belonged to the households of the minority of citizens, or were sons of royalist families. Their assertion that when they went to present their petition, they desired " all the subscribers to meet at the Piazzas in Covent Garden, in complete civil habits, without swords or staves," seems to point to a contrast with the usual truculent demeanour of their fraternity ; * " Apology for Smectymnus." t " Honour of London Apprentices," 1647. 444 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. and suggests that " the great long club " and " the long dagger " of the " well-grown sturdy apprentices," described by Stow, were still the weapons which made the rallying-cry of " 'Prentices and clubs ! " a terror to civic dignitaries. It would have been more than strange if, amidst all the excite ments of this summer, the preparations for. civil war — the doubts and fears of those whose property or industry would surely be affected by the loss of internal peace,— the prosperity of the king dom generally, and that of the Londoners as much as any portion of the nation, had not been materially affected. There is a curious tract, issued " in the year of disasters, 1642," which sets forth the general stagnation of employments. It is a bitter outpouring of wrath against " that master-piece or idea of dissimulation, which Nature made her example to portraiture a rogue by, the Round head." Evidently written by a lawyer, it pours forth " St. Hilary's tears for want of a stirring Midsummer term." In Westminster Hall " those few judges left have time enough' to get a nap, and no noise to awake them ; " — " the lawyers, instead of perusing the breviates, and reducing the matter in question to cases, were buy ing up all the pamphlets, and dispersing themselves in corners to read them." The coaches that used to rumble up and down Palace- yard, challenging heaven with their thunder, are here and there one. The cooks in King-street lean against their door-posts. The lodgings in the Strand are empty. " At the Exchange, the only question that is asked is, what news ? — not from Aleppo, Constan tinople, the Straits, or Indies, but from York, Ireland, and the Parliament." In the halls of the City Companies there is no feast ing but for the maste'rs and wardens. In the shops there is no talk amongst the tradesmen " but condoling the want of the cour tiers' money." This is not a very touching feature of distress. It presents us nothing of the miseries of the poor, the first to suf fer in a time of public distraction. Yet, from all the indications of this remarkable period, we may collect that public order was strictly maintained in London ; that there were no attacks upon property; that life was perfectly secure. London was the general resort of those whose opinions exposed them to danger in the country. Ellwood, the quaker, says, " In my infancy, when I was but about two years old, I was carried to London." His father "favoured the parliament side, though he took not arms. Not holding himself safe at his country habitation, which lay too near some garrisons of the king's, he betook himself to London." The DISTURBANCES IN COUNTRY. DISTRICTS. 445 little boy was the playfellow of the daughter of the lady Springett ; " being admitted as such to ride with her in her little coach, drawn by her footman about Lincoln's-inn-Fields." * The children in the little coach give an appearance of perfect security to Lincoln's-inn- Fields. It was in the country that the distractions of the time bore hard upon the richer families. Every manor-house was liable to attack by a royalist or a parliamentary band. Lady Brilliana Harley had to put her castle of Brompton, in Herefordshire, in a posture of defence, whilst her husband, sir Robert Harley, was engaged in his parliamentary vocation. The courageous woman, who died at her post, writes to her son, " My dear Ned, I thank God I am not afraid ; it is the Lord's cause that we have stood for." t The people of Herfordshire were mostly for the king. In Essex, the party of the Parliament predominated. Arthur Wilson, in " The Tract of my Life," says, " The twentieth of August, 1642, the king having left the parliament, and thereby a loose rein being put into the mouth of the unruly multitude, many thousands swarmed to the pulling down of Long Melford House, a gallant seat belonging to the countess of Rivers ; and to the endangering of her person. She being a recusant, they made that their pre tence, but spoil and plunder was their aim. This fury was not only in the rabble but many of the better sort behaved themselves as if there had been a dissolution of all government. No man could remain in his own house without fear, nor be abrpad with safety." X At such a time, in a country where all were arming themselves, with the purpose, or the pretence, of joining one party or the other, lawless bands would undoubtedly seize the occasion of tumult and rapine. A circumstance recorded in July, 1643, may be anticipated in point of time as an illustration of this inevitable result of civil commotion. There was an insurrection in Kent against the Parliament. The house of Thomas Weller, the col lector of the subscription money for the parliamentary arm}', was broken into and plundered ; and one Parry, a smith, of Crayford, and another man named Smale, held the following colloquy : " We have sped well here," says Parry : "let us go to Hadlow and Peck- ham, and plunder there, for they are rich rogues, and so we will go away into the woods." Smale replied, " But we must plunder none but Roundheads." With a great oath Parry rejoined, " We will * ' * Life of Thomas Elwood, written by himself." t " Letters of Lady Brilliana Harley," p. 180. Camden Society. X Peck's " Desiderata Curiosa " lib. xii. p. 23. Folio. 446 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. make every man a Roundhead that hath anything to lose : this is the time we look for." * Amidst scenes such as these, " in all quarters of English ground, with swords getting out of their scabbards," there is one neutral power not wholly cast down — " the constable's baton still struggling to reign supreme." f That power never ceased to assert itself amidst hostile armies. The judges went their usual circuits. The Sessions and the County Courts were regularly held. The constable kept watch and ward, arrested night-walkers, pursued hue and cry after felons, apprehended vagabonds, presented disorderly ale houses. The overseer provided the common stock to set the poor to work, and relieved the impotent poor. The local organisation of England might be disturbed, but it was never destroyed. The assumption of executive authority by the Parliament, if it were some times abused, was everywhere directed to the maintenance of or der. Whilst the chief nobles and gentlemen, who were the natural conservators of the peace in their several counties, were gathered round the king at York or Oxford, the leaders of the parliament were not only looking after the particular interests of their cause, and that very sharply, but were keeping the people under a strict rule, however irregular. The sons of sir John Bramston are com ing from the king at York, in July of 1642. Near Huntingdon they are commanded to stand by certain musketeers, who start out of the corn, " telling us we must be searched, and to that end must go before Mr. Cromwell, and give account from whence we came, and whither we were going."}: Mr. Cromwell is not yet in military command, but he is a Justice of the Peace, and his name is already a word of strength. He is member for the town of Cambridge ; and has there exercised a very unusual representative power, by seizing the magazine in the Castle, and stopping the transit of the University plate to the king's quarters. The countrv gentleman " in a plain cloth-suit," who farmed the tithes at Ely, and culti vated land there, felt that he had the power within him to deal with great public exigencies. In a very startling manner did he deal with them. In 1623 Charles heard, in Ben Jonson 's "Prince's Masque," allusions to a power which was then beginning to make itself for midable. The "press in a hollow tree," worked by "two ragged * Mr. Weller's Narrative. " Camden Miscellany," vol. iii.,p. 31. t Carlyle's " Cromwell," vol. i. p. 98. t " Autobiography of Sir John Bramston," p. 86. THE PRESS. — POETS. 447 rascals," expressed the courtly contempt of that engine which was to give a new character to all political action. In 1642, wherever Charles moved, he had his own press with him. His state papers, for the most part written by Hyde, were appeals to the reason and the affections of his people, iii the place of the old assertions of ab solute authority. In the same way, the declarations of the Parlia ment approached the great questions in dispute, in the like spirit of acknowledgment that there was a court of appeal beyond the battle-field, where truth and right would ultimately prevail- This warfare of the pen gradually .engaged all the master minds of the country ; some using the nobler artillery of earnest reasoning and impassioned rhetoric ; others emptying their quivers of vehement satire, or casting their dirty missiles of abuse, on the opponents of their party. Milton enters upon his task with a solemn expression of " small willingness to leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes, put from beholding the bright coun tenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies." * Cleaveland rushes into the fray with an alacrity that suits his im petuous nature : — " Ring the bells backward ; I am all on fire ; Not all the buckets in a country quire Shall quench my rage." t Herrick was living in his vicarage of Dean Priors in Devonshire, disliking the " people currish, churlish as the seas," amongst whom he lived; scarcely venturing to print till he was ejected from his benefice ; but solacing his loyalty with the composition of the stanzas to "the Prince of Cavaliers," and recording his political faith in two lines, which comprehended the creed of the " thorough " loyalists : — " The gods to kings the judgment give to sway ; The subjects only glory to obey." t The general tone of the poets is expressed by Lovelace : — " Our careless heads with roses bound, Our hearts with loyal flames." § Butler, from the time when he left his father's cottage at Stren- sham, on the banks of the Avon, to note down those manifold * " Reason of Church Government," book ii. t " The Rebel School." X " Hesperides," p. 151, vol. i. ed. 1833. § " To Althea." .448 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. characteristics of his time which furnish the best picture of its common life, was a royalist. Cleaveland, Carew, Suckling, Den ham, Herrick, Butler, form a galaxy of cavalier versemakers. The dramatic poets, who were left to see the suppression of the theatres, such as Shirley, were naturally amongst the most ardent haters of the puritan parliament. But Milton did not quite stand alone amongst those with whom civil and religious liberty was a higher sentiment than loyalty to the king. George Wither was the poet of puritanism, as ready with bitter invective as Cleaveland. But in Wither, the exalted spirit of fervent piety, which warmed the hearts of the religious enthusiasts, whether "sitting by their studious lamps," or shouting " The Cause " amidst the noise of battle, im parts a majesty to his political poems for which we look in vain amidst the songs of the Cavaliers : — " With fury came our armed foes, To blood and slaughter fiercely bent ; And perils round us did inclose, By whatsoever way we went ; That hadst not thou our Captain been, To lead us on and off again, We on the place had dead been seen, Or masked in blood and wounds had lain.1' * The inferior men of letters then rushed to take up the weapons of party in the small newspapers of the time. Their name was legion. Their chief writers, Marchmont Needham on the parlia ment side, with his " Mercurius Britannicus," and John Birkenhead on the royalist side, with his " Mercurius Aulicus," were models of scurrility. The character which Aubrey gives of Birkenhead was probably true of the greater number of the journalists : " He was exceedingly confident, witty, not very grateful to his benefactors, would lie damnably." f The parliament writers had evidently the best of it, if we may judge by the hatred which Cleaveland bears to the whole tribe of journalists : " A Diurnal Maker is the sub-almoner of history, queen Mab's register ; one whom, by the same figure that a north-country pedlar is a merchant-man, you may style an author." X A London Diurnal he calls " a history in sippets." He says, "It begins usually with an Ordinance, which is a law still born." Its chief ingredients are "plots, horrible plots." When the time of fighting came, Cleaveland regarded " the triumphs of a * Song 88. t Lives, vol. ii. p. 239. X " Character of a Diurnal Maker," ed. 1657. SUPERSTITIONS. 44'r) Diurnal " as " so many bladders of their own blowing; " and But ler ridicules those victories which called forth " thanksgiving day amongst the churches," as mere vapourings, though " registered by fame eternal Indeatliless pages of Diuroal." * Whatever were their demerits, the little newspapers produced a powerful effect. They were distributed through the villages by the carriers and foot-posts. The country-woman brought a " Diur nal " from the market-town in her egg-basket. They gave informa tion to individuals, without committing indiscreet friends in cor respondence. They probably did something towards general en lightenment in places that would have been otherwise wholly given up to local prejudices and superstitions. In a time of such great public troubles all men had a touch of superstition. Evelyn looks with wonder upon " a shining cloud in the air, in shape resembling a sword." t After the fight of Edgehill, " in the very place where the battle was stricken, have since and doth appear strange and portentous r-iparitions of two jarring and contrary armies."' So records a tract, iu wljich the " apparitions and prodigious noises of war and battles "are certified by a justice of the peace, a preacher, and "other persons of quality" Such a relation was evidently not an attempt at imposture ; and must be received as a remarkable instance of the illusions of the imagination, when preternaturally ex cited by the immediate presence of extraordinary events. During these wars the belief in witches reached a frightful extent ; and the astrologers, with Lilly at their head, were going beyond their ancient vocation of discovering lost spoons and prophesying happy marriages, to discover in the stars the certain victory for the party which offered the best rewards for their science. Such, then, is a very imperfect sketch of a few of the salient points of English society, at the time when rival armies of English men stood front to front in the midland counties. The king in August had vainly attempted to obtain possession of Coventry. He had then gone to Leicester with a body of cavalry. On the 21st of August, the king's nephew, Prince Rupert, had joined him, and received the command of the horse. The next day they rode to Nottingham. The king's purpose was, upon Nottingham Castle, to set up his Standard — a ceremony which had not been seen in England since Richard III. had raised his standard in Bosworth- * Hudibras, part i. cauto 3. t Diary. VOL. III.— 29 45° HISTORY OF ENGLAND. field — a ceremony which was held by some legists to be equivalent to a declaration that the kingdom was in a state of war, and that the ordinary course of law was at an end. Evening was coming on. The great streamer, such as was borne by many men at a lord- mayor's show, was placed upon the highest tower, with a red battle-flag waving over it. The herald read a proclamation ; the trumpets sounded ; the friends who stood around the castle cried " God save the king." A stormy night came on ; and, omen of disaster as many thought, the standard was blown down. The setting-up of the Standard would appear from Clarendon's account to have been a hasty and somewhat desperate act. The king had previously issued a proclamation " requiring the aid and assistance of all his subjects on the north side Trent, and within twenty miles southward thereof, for the suppressing of the rebels, now marching against him." He calls, in a tone of supplication rather than of command, to invite all " whose hearts God Almighty shall touch with a true sense and apprehension of our sufferings," to attend our person at our town of Nottingham, where " we intend to erect our Standard Royal in our just and necessary defence, and whence we intend to advance forward for the suppression of the said rebellion." Clarendon says, " there appeared no conflux of men in obedience to the proclamation ; the arms and ammunition were not yet come from York, and a general sadness covered the whole town." There is a passage in his original MS. which adds, " And the king himself appeared more melancholic than he used to be." The historian of " The Rebellion " further enlarges upon the gloomy prospect that was before the king and his adherents : — " The king received intelligence the next day that the rebels' army, for such now he had declared them, was, horse and foot and cannon, at Northampton ; " besides a force at Coventry. " At Nottingham, besides some few of the trained bands, which sir John Digby, the active sheriff of that county, drew into the old ruinous castle there, there were not of foot levied for the service yet three hundred men. So that they who were not over much given to fear, finding very many places in that great river, which was looked upon as the only strength and security of the town, to be easily fordable, and nothing towards an army for defence but the Standard set up, began sadly to apprehend the danger of the king's own person." There is an interesting description of Nottingham Castle by one who, in another year, had there to endure great anxieties, and to show the tenderness as well as heroism of a noble woman's nature. THE KING'S ATTEMPT- TO NEGOTIATE. 45 1 Mrs. Hutchinson thus describes this remarkable place, of which a modern building is now also a ruin, produced not by time, but by popular outrage : — " The castle was built upon a rock, and nature had made it capable of very strong fortification ; but the buildings were very ruinous and unhabitable, neither affording room to lodge soldiers nor provisions. The castle stands at one end of the town, upon. such an eminence as commands the chief streets of the town. There had been enlargements made to this castie after the first building of it. There was a strong tower, which they called the Old Tower, built upon the top of all the rock, and this was that place where queen Isabel, the mother of king Edward the Third, was surprised with her paramour, Mortimer, who by secret windings and hollows in the rock came up into her chamber from the meadows lying low under it, through which there ran a little rivulet, called the Line, almost under the castle rock. At the entrance of this rock there was a spring, which was called Mortimer's Well, and the cavern, Mortimer's Hole : the ascent to the top is very high ; and, not without some wonder at the top of all the rock there is a spring of water. . Under that tower, which was the old castle, there was a larger castle where there had been several towers and many noble rooms, but the most of them were down ; the yard of that was pretty large ; and without the gate there was a very large yard that had been -walled, but the walls were all down, only it was situated upon an ascent of the rock, and so stood a pretty height above the streets ; and there were the ruins of an old pair of gates, with turrets on each side." The importance attached, in these days, to the royal act of hoisting a streamer of unusual size upon a commanding position, can scarcely be adequately estimated in our times. It revived all the traditions of feudality. It was the terrible symbol of the Lord Paramount summoning his vassals to war. The motto which the standard displayed might be taken as an assertion of the principle of absolute power, which the king had supposed inherent in him : " Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's." That Charles was supported throughout this contest by the belief that he was not accountable to any power for his actions, was sufficiently mani fested at this critical period. His advisers urged ah attempt to negotiate with the Parliament. Charles refused with a " composed courage and magnanimity '' which " seemed too philosophical and abstracted from the policy of self-preservation." -But -he was per- 452 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. suaded to negotiate — not in sincerity of heart, but in the desire to obtain an advantage from the mere manifestation of a disposition to negotiate : " That which prevailed with his majesty very reason ably then to yield was, ' that it was most probable (and his whole fortune was to be submitted at best to probabilities) ' that, out of their pride, and contempt of the king's weakness and want of power, the parliament would refuse to treat ; which would be so unpopular a thing, that as his majesty would highly oblige his people by making the offer, so they would lose the hearts of them by reject ing it ; which alone would raise an army for his majesty.' " * The parliamentary leaders knew that the messengers of the king came with hollow overtures. They knew his weakness at the moment when he sent a message to the Parliament that his only desire was to prevent the effusion of blood ; " our provision of men, arms, and money being such as may secure us from further violence till it pleases God to open the eyes of our people." The Parliament re turned this answer : " We have endeavoured to prevent, by our several advices and petitions, the dangerous and distracted state of this kingdom, not only without success, but that there have follow ed those several proclamations and declarations against both the Houses of Parliament, whereby their actions are declared treason able, and their persons traitors ; and, thereupon, your Majesty hath set up your standard against them, whereby you have put them, and in them the whole kingdom, out of your protection. So that, until your Majesty shall recall those proclamations and declara tions, whereby the earl of Essex and both Houses of Parliament are declared traitors or otherwise delinquents, and until the stand ard set up in pursuance of the said proclamation be taken down, your Majesty hath put us into such a condition, that, while we so remain, we cannot, by the fundamental privileges of Parliament, the public trust reposed in us, or with the general good and safety of this kingdom, give your Majesty any other answer to this mes sage." f The king, in new proclamations, repeated his declarations of the treason of the earl of Essex and others ; at the moment when he had made another proposition that he would withdraw his proclamations if the Parliament would withdraw theirs. Neither party would make the first concession. There is nothing more remarkable, amidst the anger and sus picion of this momentous period, than the evident reluctance of both parties to proceed to extremities. In such a conflict all * Clarendon, vol. iii. p. 205. * Ibid., vol. iii. REJECTED BY THE PARLIAMENT. 453 •would be losers. There was so much, of reason and justice on each side that, till the shock of arms had let loose the passions that belong to a state of war, there was a lingering hope that a day- spring of peace would succeed this gloomy night. Sir. Edmund Verney, the king's standard-bearer, thus expressed himself to Hyde : " My condition is much worse than yours, and different, I believe, from any other man's, and will very well justify the melancholic that I confess to you possesses me. You have satisfaction in your conscience that you are in the right ; that the king ought not to grant what is required of him ; and so you do your duty and your business together. But for my part, I do not like the quarrel, and do heartily wish that the king would yield and consent to what they desire ; so that my conscience is only concerned in hon our and in gratitude to follow- my master. I have eaten his bread, and served him near thirty years, and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him, and choose rather to lose my life (which I am sure I shall do) to preserve and defend those things which are against my conscience to preserve and defend." However we may feel as to the civil and religious principles involved in this fearful quarrel, our warmest sympathies go with the noble Englishmen who were engaged on opposing sides, though the ties of blood and friendship might have joined them in the same ranks. How many might truly say to his friend and brother, " Nought I did in hate, but all in honour." In a letter from sir William Waller, the parliamentarian, to sir Ralph Hopton, the royalist, this principle is enforced with a feeling which, we confess, we cannot read without deep emotion, though the actors in this tragedy have passed from the stage two centuries ago : " My affections to you are so unchangeable, that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person ; but I must be true to the cause wherein I serve. The old limitation of usque ad aras holds still The great God, who is the searcher of my heart, knows with what reluctance I go upon this service, and with what perfect hatred I look upon a war without an enemy. But I look upon it as opus Domini, and that is enough to silence all passion in me. The God of peace in his good time send us peace, and in the mean time fit us to receive it ! We are both on the stage, and we must act the parts that are assigned us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour, and without personal animosities." 454 History of englantj. And so, there being no alternative but war, the Parliament, oh the 9th of September, published a declaration to the whole king dom, setting forth the causes of the war. On that day, the earl ol Essex marched in great state out of London to join the army in the midland counties with the trained bands. A few weeks later the Parliament ordered London to be fortified ; and the population, one and all, men, women, and children, turned out, day by day, ta dig ditches, and carry stones for their bulwarks. beginnings of the civil war. 455 CHAPTER XXIV. Beginnings of the Civil War. — The king marches to Shrewsbury. — Skirmish at Wor cester.— Battle of Edgehill. — The night and day after the battle.— Richard Baxter visits the battle-field.— The king marches upon London. — The fight at Brentford.— The royalists retire. — The Londoners march toTumham Green. — The war spreading through England. — The queen lands with an army. — The court at Oxford. — Adminis tration of justice. — Reading surrendered to Essex. The flame of war is bursting forth in many places at once. Fortified towns are changing their military occupants. Ports mouth had capitulated to the parliament's army a fortnight before the king raised his standard at Nottingham. Lord Northampton, a royalist, had seized the stores at Banbury, and marched to the at tack of Warwick castle. That ancient seat of feudal grandeur was successfully defended by the commander who had been left in charge, whilst lord Brook marched with some forces to the parlia ment's quarters. Every manor-house was put by its occupiers into a posture of defence; The heroic attitude of the English ladies who, in the absence of their husbands, held out against at tacks whether of Cavaliers or Roundheads, was first exhibited at Caldecot manor-house, in the north of Warwickshire. Mrs. Pure foy, the wife of William Purefoy, a member of the House of Com mons, defended her house against prince Rupert and four hundred Cavaliers. The little garrison consisted of the brave lady and her two daughters, her son-in-law, eight male servants, and a few female. They had twelve muskets, which- the women loaded as the men discharged them from the windows. The out-buildings were set on fire, and the house would have been burnt, had not the lady gone forth, and claimed the protection of the Cavaliers. Rupert respected her courage, and would not suffer her property to be plundered. This young man, who occupies so prominent a part in the military operations of the Civil War, was only twenty- three when Charles made him his general of horse. He had served in the wars for the recovery of the Palatinate, and had exhibited the bravery for which he was ever afterwards distinguished. But in his early warfare he had seen life unsparingly sacrificed, women 456 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. and children put to the sword, villages and towns burnt, the means of subsistence for a peaceful population recklessly destroyed. His career in England did much to make the king's cause unpopular, though his predatory havoc has probably been exaggerated. The confidence which the king placed in him as a commander was not justified by his possession of the high qualities of a general. The queen who, dangerous as she was as a counsellor of the king, had remarkable abilities, thus described the nephew of Charles when he was about to sail for England : " He should have some one to advise him, for, believe me, he is yet very young and self-willed. I have had experience of him. This is why I thought it fitting to warn you of it. He is a person that is capable of doing anything that he is ordered, but he is not to be trusted to take a single step out of his own head." * About the middle of September, Charles marched with his small army from Nottingham to Derby. Essex, with the forces of the parliament, was at Northampton. The king's plans were very vague ; but he at last determined to occupy Shrewsbury. He halted his army on the 19th at Wellington, where he published a " Protesta tion," in which, amongst other assurances, he said, " I do solemnly and faithfully promise, in the sight of God, to maintain the just priv ileges and freedom of parliament, and to govern by the known laws of the land to my utmost power ; and, particularly, to observe inviolably the laws consented to by me this parliament." There is a remarkable letter of the queen to the king, dated the 3rd of No vember, in which she expresses her indignant surprise that he should have made any such engagement. " You promise to keep all that you have passed this parliament, which, I confess, had I been with you I should not have suffered it." She intimates that there are persons about him, " who at the bottom of their hearts, are not well disposed for royalty. * * * As to believing that they wish you to be absolute, their counsels plainly show the contrary. They must be made use of, notwithstanding." t The only notion that the queen had of "royalty" was that it was to be "absolute." Who can believe that Charles ever resigned that fatal idea ?'¦ Clar endon says the king's protestation " gave not more life and en couragement to the little army than it did to the gentry and inhabitants of these parts, into whom the parliament had infused, that if his majesty prevailed by force, he would, with the same power, abolish all those good laws which had been made this par- * Green's " Letters of Henrietta Maria," p. 97. t Ibid., p. 144. SKIRMISH AT WORCESTER. 457 liament."* Their comfort and satisfaction might have been less, if the queen's letter, now amongst the Harleian Manuscripts, and another of the same import, had been as public as the king's pro testation. The discovery and publication of other such letters produced unbounded- evil to the royal cause whilst the issue of the contest was doubtful. Time has revealed many more secrets of the same nature, which may somewhat qualify the enthusiasm of those who, after the lapse of two centuries, read the history of the Civil War in a spirit more cavalier than that of the Cavaliers. On the 22nd of September, Essex moved his army to Worcester. Here the first rencounter took place between the cavalry of Rupert and the parliamentary cuirassiers. The royalists had a decided advantage. Ludlow, who was in the skirmish, gives a ludicrous account of the inexperience, and something worse, of the parlia ment's raw troops. The lieutenant " commanded us to wheel about ; but our gentlemen, not yet well understanding the differ ence between wheeling, about and shifting for themselves, their backs being now towards the enemy whom they thought to be close in the rear, retired to the army in a very dishonourable manner ; and the next morning rallied at head-quarters, where we received but cold welcome from our general, as we well deserved." f After remaining at Shrewsbury about twenty days, Charles resolved to march towards London. He expected that, as the armies ap proached each other, many soldiers would come over to the royal standard. . He was almost without money, except a sum of six thousand pounds which he received by "making merchandise of honour," to use Clarendon's expression — being the price for which he created Sir Richard Newport a baron. His foot-soldiers were mostly armed with muskets ; but three or four hundred had for their only weapon a cudgel. Few of the musketeers had swords, and the pikemen were without corslets. The royal army moved from Shrewsbury on the 12th of October, on to Wolverhampton, Birmingham, and Kenilworth. Two days after, the earl of Essex marched from Worcester in the direction which Charles had taken. They were- only separated by twenty miles when the king first moved from Shrewsbury, but it was ten days before they came near each other. "Neither army," says Clarendon, "knew whera the other was." On the night of the 22nd of October, the king was at Edgcot, a villagb near Banbury. The council broke up late. There was disunion in the camp. The earl of Lindsey by his com- * " Rebellion," vol. iii. p. 222. t " Memoirs," p. 46. 458 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. mission was general of the whole army ; but when Charles ap* pointed prince Rupert his general of horse, he exempted him from receiving orders from any one but the king himself — to such extent did this king carry his over-weening pride of blood. Rupert inso lently refused to take the royal directions through lord Falkland, the secretary of state. In the same spirit, when a battle was ex pected, Charles took the advice of his nephew, rejecting the opin ion of the veteran Lindsey. At twelve o'clock on the night of the 22nd Rupert sent the king word " that the body of the rebel army was within seven or eight miles, and that the head-quarters was at a village called Keinton, on the edge of Warwickshire." On Sun day morning, the 23rd, the banner of Charles was waving on the top of Edgehill, which commanded a prospect of the valley in which a part of the army of Essex was moving. The greater portion of the parliament's artillery, with two regiments of foot and one of horse, was a day's march behind. The king, having the advantage of numbers, determined to engage. He appeared amongst his ranks, with a black. velvet mantle over his armour, and wearing his star and garter. He addressed his troops, declaring his love to his whole kingdom, but asserting his royal authority "derived from God, whose substitute, and supreme governor under Christ, I am." * At two o'clock the royal army descended the hill. Clar endon, in noticing the dissensions created by Rupert's exclusive appointment, says, it "separated all the horse from any depend ence upon the general." Lindsey went into the battle, pike in hand, at the head of the foot guards, in the centre of the first line. "Sir Jacob Astley," writes Warwick, "was major-general of the army under the earl of Lindsey ; who, before the charge of the battle at Edgehill, made a most excellent, pious, short, and sol dierly prayer ; for he lifted up his eyes and hands to heaven, say ing, ' O Lord, thou knowest how busy I must be this day ; if I forget thee, do not Thou forget me.' And with that rose up, cry ing ' March on, boys.' " f Between the town of Keinton and Edgehill was " a fair cam paign, save that near the town it was narrower, and on the right hand some hedges and inclosures." Ludlow, who was in the bat tle, confirms this description of the ground, given by Clarendon : Colonel Weston's letter, quoted in Lord Nugent's " Hampden," vol. ii. p. 239. t Warwick is the sole authority for this. It has been questioned, from the construc tion of the sentence, whether the " who" applies to Lindsey or AsHey. See Warburton** " Rupert and the Cavaliers," vol. ii. p. 21. THE NIGHT. AND DAY AFTER THE BATTLE. 459/ "The great shot was exchanged on both sides, for the space of an hour or thereabouts. By this time the foot began to engage ; and a party of the enemy being sent to line some hedges on our right wing, thereby to beat us from our ground, were repulsed by our dragoons." The foot soldiers on each side engaged with little result. But Rupert, at the head of his horse, threw the parlia ment's left wing into complete disorder. The disaster was mainly attributable to the desertion of Sir Faithful Fortescue, who went over with his. troop to the royalists, when he was ordered to charge. The fiery prince pursued the flying-squadrons for three miles; and in the town of Keinton he was engaged, in- plundering the parlia mentary baggage-waggons, whilst the main body of the king's forces was sorely pressed by the foot and horse of Essex. The king's standard was taken. Sir Edmund: Verney; the standard- bearer, was killed. The standard was afterwards recovered by a stratagem of two royalist officers, who put on the orange-scarf of> Essex, and demanded the great prize from his secretary, to whom it had been entrusted. It was yielded by the unfortunate penman to those who bore the badge of his master. Brave old Lindsey was mortally wounded and taken prisoner. Other royalists of dis tinction were killed. " When Prince- Rupert returned from the charge," writes Clarendon, "he found this great alteration in the field, and his majesty himself with few noblemen and a small ret inue about him, and the hope of so glorious a day quite banished." Many around the king counselled a retreat ; but Charles, with equal. courage and sagacity, resolved to keep his ground. " He spent the night in the field, by such a fire as could be made of the little wood and bushes which grew thereabouts." When the day ap peared, the parliamentary army still lay beneath Edgehill. "The, n-ight after the battle," says Ludlow, " our army quartered upon the- same ground that the enemy fought on the day before. No man- nor horse got any meat that night, and I had touched none since the Saturday before, neither could I find my servant who had my. cloak, so that having nothing to keep me warm but. a suit of iron, I was obliged to walk about all night, which proved, very cold by: reason of a sharp frost. Towards morning, our army having re ceived a reinforcement of Colonel Hampden's and several other regiments, to the number of about four thousand men, who had not been able to join us sooner, was drawn up ; and about day-light we saw the enemy upon the top of the hill ; so that we had time to; bury our dead,, and theirs too if we thought fit. That day- was 460 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. spent in sending trumpeters to inquire whether such as were miss ing on both sides were killed, or prisoners." * It was, in most re spects, a drawn battle. Gradually each army moved off, one to attack London, the other to defend it. There is a little incident of this Edgehill fight which has been told by the gossiping chronicler, Aubrey, of the famous Harvey, the physician. "When king Charles I., by reason of the tumults left London, he attended him, and was at the fight of Edgehill with him ; and during the fight, the prince and duke of York were committed to his care. He told me that he withdrew with them under a hedge, and took out of his pocket a book and read ; but he had not read very long before a bullet of a great gun grazed on the ground near him, which made him remove his station." The number of the slain at Edgehill was variously estimated by the two parties. Ludlow very impartially says, " it was observed that the greatest slaughter on our side was of such as ran away, and on the enemy's side of those that stood." There was no gen eral desire in either army to renew the struggle. In the royal camp there was so visible an averseness " to re-engage in most officers, as well as soldiers, that the king thought not fit to make the at tempt."! In 'he parliamentary army, Hampden and others vainly urged that their reinforcements would enable Essex to attack with decided success. " We hoped," says Ludlow, " that we should have pursued the enemy, who were marching off as fast as they could, leaving only some troops to face us upon the top of the hill ; but, instead of that, for what reason I know not, we marched' to Warwick." + The great events of the Civil War are to be traced in the pro ceedings of Parliament, the state-papers, the histories and me moirs of the politicians and soldiers who were engaged on either side, and the letters of the actors in the busy scenes. But we oc casionally meet with the relations of some who were scarcely more than lookers-on, and were, not committed to very strong opinions. Such a witness was Richard Baxter. He was, at one and the same time, a royalist and a puritan. It is most interesting to follow this re markable observer in those details of his life, which, in afew graphic touches, exhibit the general state of society far more distinctly than the laboured narratives of the contemporary historians. We see. him, in his twenty-seventh year at the beginning of the war, driven from his ministry at Kidderminster by those he calls " the * " Memoirs," p. 50. t Clarendon, vol. iii. p. 283. X " Memoirs," p. 52. RICHARD BAXTER AT EDGEHILL. 46 1 rabble ; " who reviled all the religious of the place as Roundheads ; where " every drunken sot that met them called out, ' We shall take an order with the puritans ere long.' " He says, " it was the undoing of the king and bishops that this party was encouraged by the leaders in the country against the civil religious party The fury of the rabble was so hot at home that I was fain to with draw." He goes to Worcester, where a body of the parliamentary troops were lying in a meadow. "I had a great mind to go see them, having never seen any part of an army." He there looks upon the scattering of the parliamentary forces by Rupert's horse. "This sight quicldy told me the vanity of armies, and how little confidence is to be placed in them." Essex marches into Wor cester " with many lords and knights, and a flourishing army, gal lantly clothed, but never tried in fight." The young divine had no safety in staying at home ; but '• the civility of the earl of Essex's army was such that among them was no danger, though none of them knew me ; and there was such excellent preaching among them at Worcester that I stayed there among them a few days, till the marching of the king's army occasioned their remove." Bax ter preached at Alcester on the Lord's day following. " As I was preaching, the people heard the cannon play, and perceived that the armies were engaged ; when sermon was done, in the .after noon, the report was more audible." At sun-setting many troops fled through the town, and said that all was lost on the parliament's side. The people sent a messenger to Stratford-upon-Avon to know the truth. At four o'clock in the morning the messenger re turned. He gave an account of the battle which corresponds in a remarkable manner with the authentic narratives. " The next morning, being willing to see the field where they had fought, I went to Edgehill, and found the earl of Essex with the remaining part of his army keeping the ground, and the king's army facing them upon a hill a mile off, and about a thousand dead bodies in the field between them ; and I suppose many were buried before." The armies drew off. The poor wanderer says, " I knew not what course to take. I had neither money nor friends : I knew not who would receive me in any place of safety." He went at last to Cov entry, to the minister there, an old acquaintance, "with a purpose to stay there till one side or other had got the victory, and the war was ended, and then to return home again. For so wise in matters of war was I, and all the country besides, that we com monly supposed that a very few days or weeks by one other 4f)2 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. battle would end the wars ; and I believe that no small number of the parliament-men had no more wit than to think so too." * After the battle of Edgehill the king wasted a few days in oc cupying Banbury and other small places, and on the 26th was with his army at Oxford. Essex was slowly advancing with his army towards London, and at the end of the month was at Northamp ton. The people of the metropolis had been greatly agitated by the uncertain rumours of the great fight in Warwickshire. On the night of the battle of Edgehill, the beacons had been lighted — a pre-arranged signal of the parliament's success. But the fugitives whom Rupert had chased from the field filled the roads, and pro claimed a royalist victory. But at the beginning of November the king's army was decidedly known to be marching upon London. Rupert was quartered at Maidenhead with the advanced guard. Two days after Essex arrived, and received the thanks of the two Houses. On the nth of November Charles was at Colnbrook. Thither went a deputation from the Parliament, under a safe con duct, to propose that the king should appoint some convenient place to reside, near London, "until committees of both Houses of Parliament may attend your majesty with some propositions for the removal of these bloody distempers and distractions." The king met the deputation favourably, and proposed to receive such propositions at Windsor. " Do your duty," he said, "we will not be wanting in ours. God in his mercy give a blessing." Ludlow records the duplicity which followed this negotiation : " Upon which answer the parliament thought themselves secure, at least against any sudden attempt ; but the very next day the king, taking the ad vantage of a very thick mist, marched his army within half a mile of Brentford before he was discovered, designing to surprise our train of artillery (which was then at Hammersmith), the parliament, and city." Clarendon endeavours to throw the blame of this dis honour upon Rupert. The king, he says, resolved to have gone to Windsor, if the parliament had removed their garrison there, "or at least to have stayed at Colnbrook till he heard again from the parlia ment. But prince Rupert, exalted with the terror he heard his name gave to the enemy, trusting too much to the vulgar intelli gence every man received from his friends at London — who, ac cording to their own passions and the affections of those with whom they corresponded, concluded that the king had so great a party in London, that, if his army drew near, no resistance would * " Reliauia? Baxterianx," 1691s, part i. pp. 42 and 43. THE FIGHT AT BRENTFORD. 463 be made — without any direction from the king, the very next morn ing after the committee returned to London, advanced with the horse and dragoons to Hounslow, and then sent to the king, to de sire him that the army might march after ; which was, in that case, of absolute necessity ; for the earl of Essex had a part of his army at Brentford, and the rest at Acton and Kingston." From the time of the battle of Edgehill there was a general feeling in London that the king's army, not materially discomfited, would advance to strike a blow at the capital. The parliamentary earls, Pembroke, Holland, and Say and Sele, made speeches at Guildhall, to stir up the ardour of the citizens. They spoke elo quently, especially Say and Sele. " Let every man shut up his shop ; let him take his musket ; let him offer himself readily and willingly. Let him not think with himself who shall pay me ? but rather think this, I will come forth to save the kingdom, to serve my God, to maintain his true religion, to save the parliament, to save this noble city." An ordinance of parliament declared that any apprentices who should enlist should be secured from forfeit ure of their bonds, and that their masters should receive them back again. Milton heard the din of preparation in his quiet house in Aldersgate-street ; and had perhaps slight assurance of safety from the trained bands of the neighbouring artillery ground, when he sat within his " defenceless doors," and implored protection for "the Muses' bower."* The "assault intended for the city "at last became a reality. On the morning of the 12th of November, the sound of distant guns was heard in London. Two traders who had been seized by the royalist pickets afterwards related that they saw the king and prince Rupert together on Hounslow-heath, marching towards Brentford, and that Rupert " took off his scarlet coat, which was very rich, and gave it to his man, and buckled on his arms, and put a grey coat over it." Before noon Rupert was charging in the streets of Brentford. *The regiment of Hollis was quartered there, and they were not unprepared for the attack. The long and narrow street was barricaded. The contest was obsti nately maintained for three hours by Hollis's regiment. Hampden was at Acton, and Brook in a neighbouring cantonment. Again and again the parliamentary forces charged the Cavaliers. But the main body of the royal army now invested Brentford. The fighting went on till evening, when the royalists had a decided ad vantage, and compelled their enemy to retire from the town. They * Sdnhet viii. 464 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. took many prisoners, amongst whom was John Lilburne, who be> gan his career, when an apprentice, by calling down stripes and imprisonment upon his contumacy, and was now a captain of the drained bands. The old enemies of " sturdy John " did not forget his offences. He was tried for his life, and was about to be exe cuted as a rebel, when Essex threatened that for every one of the Parliament's officers thus put to death, he would execute three roy alist prisoners. Lilburne was released, to be always foremost in opposition, whether to Charles or to Cromwell. Many of the Par liament's men were drowned in the Thames ; but the greater num ber made their way in boats down the stream. Essex had arrived at Turnham Green with some trained bands, who, whilst the fight ing was going on, had been exercising in Chelsea fields. To un derstand this scene we must figure to ourselves a London with houses extending little beyond St. James's palace ; the western roads from St. Giles's to Acton, and from Hyde Park Corner to Brentford, dotted only with scattered houses or petty hamlets, standing amidst broad- pasture lands and gardens. It was dark when the trained bands, with the parliamentary regiments then re cruited, advanced again to Brentford, and the royalists fell back to the king's quarters at Hounslow. That Saturday evening was one of confusion and alarm. " All that night the city of London poured out men towards Brentford, who every hour marched thith er ; and all the lords and gentlemen that belonged to the parlia ment army were there ready by Sunday morning, the 14th of No vember."* Skippon, the general of the city trained bands, came out with his well-disciplined shopkeepers and apprentices ; talking now with one company, now with another, and calling them about him to make that famous oration which is more telling than all the rhetoric of Livy's Romans. " Come, my boys, my brave boys, let us pray heartily and fight heartily. I will run the same fortunes and hazards with you. Remember the cause is for God, and for defence of yourselves, your wives, and children. Come, my hon est brave boys, pray heartily and fight heartily, and God will bless us." Twenty-four thousand of the parliamentary army were mar shalled on that Sunday on Turnham Green. They were subjected to no very serious privations in their short campaign. The good housewives of London sent out abundant provisions of meat and beer ; and the wine-cups were filled and the tobacco smoked, as if those thousands were assembled for a fair, instead of a battle. * May. THE LONDONERS MARCH TO TURNHAM GREEN. 465 " The soldiers were refreshed and made merry," says Whitelocke, "and the more, when they understood that the king and his army were retreated." Pacific councils again prevailed. Hampden was recalled, when, in pursuance of a settled plan of attack, he was about to march by Acton and Osterley Park to take the royal army in the rear. Essex remained inactive, instead of advancing to Hounslow as had* been agreed. The war, according to some wri ters, might have been brought to a conclusion in one day of cer tain triumph if the irresolution of Essex had yielded to the coun sels of bolder spirits. The men were not yet in the field who were resolved to make war in earnest, whatever might be the conse quences. Essex was brave and skilful ; but, like many other good men, he fought with reluctance against his countrymen and his familiar friends. Sir Philip Warwick has a passage, in which he has a gentle sneer at Essex for his indecision. At Hounslow, he says, " there was a large fair heath for the two armies to have tried once again their courage and their fortunes." The king "marched off towards a summer house of his own at Oatlands, betwixt Windsor and Hampton Court, where there were still fair heaths for the two armies to have engaged, if the parliament forces would have made the adventure."* Charles rested at this pleasant seat of royalty for two days ; then went on to Reading, where he fixed a garrison ; and on the 29th of November was in winter quarters at Oxford. After the royal army had withdrawn from the neighbourhood of London, the citizens, who had seen war so close at their doors, began to talk more earnestly of peace. The peace party comprised many persons who could not be classed amongst the thorough roy alists ; for their petitions to the parliament expressed as strongly as ever their hatred of popery and arbitrary power. But the exer tions of this moderate party produced a corresponding determina tion of " the pious and movement party " that the war should be carried on with renewed energy. The Guildhall was the scene of many an angry debate. At length, on the 2nd of January, a peti tion from the common council was carried to the king at Oxford, in which he was, asked to return to the capital, when all disturb ance should be suppressed. Charles replied, that they could not maintain tranquillity amongst themselves. He sent a gentleman to read his formal answer to the people in the Guildhall. It was full of reproaches, and breathed any language but that of concilia- * " Memoirs," p. 234. Vol. III.— 30 466 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. tion. Amidst an immense uproar, Pym and lord Manchester ad dressed the multitude, and the prospect of peace faded from the people's view. Some attempts were made in the northern and western counties to preserve a neutral attitude in the struggle ; but these were regarded with equal disfavour by Cavalier and Round head. Yorkshire and Cheshire, Devon and Cornwall, counties that had tried this impossible policy, soon became foremost in the strife. The eastern counties adopted a much more efficient course of action. They formed themselves into an " Association," in the organisation of which Cromwell was the master-spirit. Under his vigorous direction, Norfolk. Suffolk, Essex, Cambridge, Herts, not only kept the war away from their own localities, but furnished the most efficient support to its vigorous conduct in other quar ters. The counties of Lincoln and Huntingdon soon joined this Eastern Association, with the like results. In the Seven Associ ated Counties the Cavaliers were never of any importance. Dur ing the winter a partisan warfare was going on in many places. The most important incident of these minor contests was the death of lord Brook at Lichfield. A royalist party had obtained pos session of the Close of the cathedral, which was walled and moated. Lord Brook was in the command of a body of horse and foot, with artillery, brought to Lichfield to dislodge the occu piers of the Close. Sitting in a house, with the window open, he was shot in the eye, and instantly died. Laud, in his Diary, de scribes this death of lord Brook as a special wonder, for his bea ver was up, and as a judgment: "he having ever been fierce against bishops and cathedrals." The war, as it proceeded, gradually assumed a fiercer character. It became, to some extent, a war of classes. Clarendon says, " The difference in the temper of the common people on both sides was so great, that they who inclined to the parliament left nothing unperformed that might advance the cause, and were incredibly vigilant and industrious to cross and hinder whatsoever might promote the king's ; whereas they who wished well to him thought they had performed their duty in doing so, and that they had done enough for him, in that they had done nothing against him." * We may be perfectly sure that the " common people on both sides " had great reason to be dissatisfied with the temper of the Cavaliers and their followers. " Thousands," says Baxter, " had no mind to meddle with the wars, but greatly desired to live peaceably at home; * " Rebellion," vol. iii. p. 452. THE QUEEN LANDS WITH AN ARMY. 467 when the rage of soldiers and drunkards would not suffer them ; some stayed till they had been imprisoned; some till they had been plundered, perhaps twice or thrice over, and nothing left them ; some were quite tired out with the abuse of all comers that quartered on them." * But if " the common people " were puritans, " noted for praying and hearing sermons," they, as Baxter's father ex perienced, " were plundered by the king's soldiers, so that some of them had almost nothing but lumber left in their houses." In the beginning of 1643, the national feeling was exasperated by the landing of the queen with a foreign army. During a year she had been indefatigable in making the most of the funds she had acquired by the sale of the crown jewels, to purchase arms and ammunition, and to raise men. On the 22nd of February she arrived with four ships, and landed at Burlington. The admiral of the parliament had failed in intercepting her convoy ; but he adopted measures of greater vigour than generosity when he arrived two days after the queen and her men had disembarked. These pro ceedings are described in the following characteristic letter of Henrietta Maria to Charles : — " As soon as I landed in England, I sent Progers to you ; but having learned to-day that he was taken by the enemy, I sent you again this man to give you an account of my arrival, which has been very fortunate, thanks be to God ; for just as stormy as the sea was the first time I set sail, just so calm was it this time till I was with in some fifteen hours of Newcastle, and on the coast, when the wind changed to the north-west, which forced us to make for Burlington Bay, and after two hours waiting at sea, your cavalry^ arrived. I landed instantly, and the next day the rest of the army came to join me. " God, who took care of me at sea, was pleased to continue his protection by land, for that night, four of the Parliament ships arrived at Burlington without our knowledge, and in the morning about four o'clock", the alarm was given that we should send down to the harbour to secure our ammunition boats, which had not yet been able to be unloaded ; but, about an hour after, these four ships began to fire so briskly, that we were all obliged to rise in haste, and leave the village to them : at least the women, for the soldiers remained very resolutely to defend the ammunition. In case of a descent, I must act the captain, though a little low in stature, myself. * " Reliquis Baxteriana?," p. 44. 46S" HISTORY OF ENGLAND. " One of these ships had done me the favour to flank my house which fronted the pier, and before I could get out of bed, the balls were whistling upon me in such style that you may easily believe I loved not such music. Everybody came to force me to go out, the balis beating so on all the houses, that, dressed just as it happened, I went on foot to some distance from the village, to the shelter of a ditch, like those at Newmarket ; but before we could reach it, the balls were singing round us in fine style, and a serjeant was killed twenty paces from me. We placed ourselves then under this shelter, during two hours that they were firing upon us, and the balls passing always over our heads, sometimes covering us with dust. At last the Admiral of Holland sent to tell them, that if they did not cease, he would fire upon them as enemies ; that was done a little late, but he excuses himself on account of a fog he says there was. On this they stopped, and the tide went down, so there was not water enough for them to stay where they were." * The admiral, Batten, was denounced as a traitor by the royalists. The earl of Newcastle, who came to escort the queen to York, had. been authorised by the king to raise men. for his service, " without examining their consciences ; " and thus his army was styled by the parliament " the queen's army," and " the Catholic army." The prejudice against foreigners and Romanists thus came into renewed activity. .Subsequent tamperings with the more violent papists in Ireland led to the belief that the king was not sincere in his pro fessions of regard for the Protestant cause ; and thus the two parties of Cavaliers and Roundheads came to be more widely separated by religious as well as political differences ; and those who held the most extreme opinions became the most powerful — the general course of all great revolutions. The spring of 1643 was passed by the court at Oxford. The noble city of academical palaces must have presented the most singular contrasts of gown and cuirass crowding the streets; of grave doctors and ardent students talking the most impassioned loyalty to throngs of ladies in those ancient halls ; of outward splendour amidst secret want, and of gay hearts struggling with anxious fears. Lady Fanshawe, one of the most interesting of royalists, — at that time unmarried, — has given the following pic ture of the Oxford of 1643 : "My father commanded my sister and myself to come to him to Oxford, where the Court then was, but we, that had till that * " Green's Letters of Henrietta Maria," p. 166. ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE. 469 fiour lived in great plenty and great order, found ourselves like fishes out of the water, and the scene so changed, that we knew not at all how to act any part but obedience, for, from as good a house as any gentleman of England had, we came to a baker's house in an obscure street, and from rooms well furnished, to lie in a very bad bed in a garret, to one dish of meat, and that not the best ordered ; no money,_for we were as poor as Job ; nor clothes more than a man or two brought in their cloak bags : we had the perpetual discourse of losing and gaining towns and men ; at the windows the sad spectacle of war, sometimes plague, sometimes sickness of other kind, by reason of so many people being packed together, as, I believe, there never was before of that quality; always in want, yet I must needs say that most bore it with a martyr-like cheerfulness. For my own part, I began to think we should all, like Abraham, live in tents all the days of our lives." , To this Oxford came Commissioners from the parliament, to wards the end of March, authorised to negotiate a suspension of arms, and a treaty of peace. The earl of Northumberland, the chief of the commission, made the somewhat miserable city bril liant with his feasts. He had a magnificent retinue. His table was covered with luxurious dishes and rich wines. His plate was sumptuous. The royalists accepted his feasts — and persuaded the king to reject his propositions. Charles displayed his usual vacillation. He made concessions one day, and revoked them an other. The queen's especial friends were always about him. The queen wrote to him, " Why have you taken arms ? You are be trayed. I will let you see it. Never allow your army to be dis banded till it [the parliament] is ended, and never let there be a peace till that is put an end to." * The officers of the garrison, in a petition to the king, opposed a suspension of arms. Charles had instigated them to petition. The parliament peremptorily recalled its commissioners. The battle must be fought out. We have mentioned that during the Civil War the judges went their usual circuits. In the spring of 1643 this local administra tion of justice was temporarily suspended. The two Houses of Parliament, embarrassed by the king's possession of the. Great Seal, ordered that the Session of Oyer and Terminer should not be proceeded with "until it shall please God to end these distrac tions between the king and people." Charles issued a proclama tion, commanding that the Easter term should be held at Oxford * Green's " Letters of Henrietta Maria," p. 182. 470 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. instead of Westminster. The judges were ordered there to attend* the king. Had this state of things continued, a greater evil would have ensued than the bloodshed and plunder of the war. But, by- what' was a practical compromise for the remedy of an enormous social mischief — one that might have led to a general.insecurity of life and property — the Parliament resolved to establish a Great Seal: and under this authority, and that of the king, judges ex ecuted their functions as usual, after a suspension of a few months. No doubt, according to their political prepossessions, they re garded the king either as deriving his power from divine right, or as a trustee for his people. At a later period, we find a judge of assize laying down as a principle, "that kings, rulers, and govern ors, and particularly the king of this realm, should be accountable, to the people for their misgovevnments ; " and, on the other hand, there were, we may conclude; judges who maintained the position: which this judge controverts, "that the king had an original right to rule over men upon earth ; and that God had not given power to earthly men to call him to account." These were the two great theories with regard to "a pure monarchy," and "a political mon archy, or monarchy governed by laws." * But whatever was con sidered the original foundation of government, none of the admin istrators of justice relaxed the principle that the law should be rigidly maintained, as regarded all private transactions. During these unhappy times England was in a great degree exempt from crimes of violence, except those committed under the pretence of martial necessity. No bands of plunderers infested the country; no lawless and ferocious spirits who, as many passages of the his tories of other countries record, considering a time of public com motion as their opportunity, held the peaceful in terror. England was safe from those massacres and spoliations which characterise a nation when the reins of just government are loosened. This immeasurable blessing she owed to her ancient civil organisation, and to that respect for law which has made the constable's staff the efficient representative of the sovereign's sceptre. The repose of Oxford was soon broken up by new military en terprises. The suspension of arms contemplated in the negotia tions which commenced to the end of March, were, on the 15th of April, declared by the parliament to be at an end. On that day Essex marched his army to the siege of Reading. The town had been fortified; and the garrison there, although wanting provisions • Sergeant Thorpe's Charge to the Grand Jury. Harleian Miscellany, vol. vi. p. 113. READING SURRENDERED TO ESSEX. 47 T and ammunition, was composed of resolute men. The approaches were regularly constructed, batteries erected, and trenches dug. The possession of Reading was considered of great importance. The king himself, on the 24th of April, set out from Oxford to head a force for the relief of the besieged. The army which he led was numerous and well appointed. At Caversham bridge the royalist forces were repulsed by those of the parliament, and fell back upon Wallingford. That day Reading was surrendered to Essex. The cavaliers were indignant that the commander of the garrison had not longer held out ; and he was tried, and sentenced to death. The king reprieved him. Hampden, who had taken an active part in the siege of Reading, now urged Essex to follow up their success by an attack upon Oxford. The bold counsels were overruled. The parliamentary commander gradually became dis trusted by his party. His honour and his capacity were unquestion able ; but he was too inclined to forego present good in the con templation of uncertain evils. He could not make war upon his king and his fellow-countrymen as if he were in a foreign land. Such a man should not have drawn the sword at all. Meanwhile, the war was proceeding with doubtful fortune in other quarters. Sir William Waller was successful against the royalists in the .south and West. Fairfax was disputing with lord Newcastle the supremacy of the north. The Cornish men, in arms for the king, had gained a battle over lord Stamford. What could not be ac complished in the open field by the Cavaliers was sought to be effected by a secret plot. The lady Aubigny had received a per mission from the parliament, with a pass, to proceed to Oxford to transact some business arising out of the death of her husband, who was killed at Edgehill. On her return to London she was commissioned by the king to convey a box thither, with great care and secrecy. His majesty told her " it much concerned his own service." This is Clarendon's account, who represents the box to have contained a commission of array to certain persons in the city, for the promotion of the king's service. Ludlow says, " The king, to encourage his friends in the city to rise for him, sent them a commission for that purpose by the lady Aubigny, which she brought, made up in the hair of her head." Oh the 31st of May, the members of the two Houses were listening to a sermon in St. Margaret's church, when a note was delivered to Pym. He hastily left. That night Edmund Waller, once famous as a poet, but whose '•' smooth " verse we now little regard, was arrested. His brother- 472 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. in-law, Mr. Tomkins, Mr. Challoner (a citizen), and other per. sons, were also taken into custody. Waller was a member of parlia ment, and had been at Oxford, in March, with the commissioners. There was unquestionably a plot to arm the royalists in London, to seize the persons of the parliamentary leaders, and to bring the king's troops into the capital. Waller, in a base spirit which contrasts with the conduct of most of the eminent of either party, made very abject confessions, with exaggerated denunciations of others, to save his own life. The parliament behaved with honourable moderation. Five persons were condemned by court-martial ; two, Challoner and Tomkins, were executed. Waller was reserved, to exhibit in his hterary character a subserviency to power which has fortunately ceased to be an attribute of poets — to eulogise the happy restoration of Charles IL, as he had eulogised the sovereign attributes of the Protector Cromwell. " He had much ado to save his life," says Aubrey, " and in order to do it sold his estate in Bedfordshire, about 1300/. per annum, to Dr. Wright for 10,000/. (much under value), which was procured in twenty-four hours' time, or else he had been hanged. With this money he bribed the House, which was the first time a House of Commons was ever bribed." * Important events succeeded each other rapidly during this sum mer. Rupert's trumpet sounded to horse in Oxford street on the 17th of June. After the occupation of Reading, the troops of Essex were distributed in cantonments about Thame and Wy combe. Rupert dashed in amongst the small towns and villages where these troops were quartered. Hampden had been visiting the scattered pickets, and urging upon Essex a greater concentra tion of his forces. Lord Nugent, with accurate local knowledge. has described the localities into which Rupert had made his irrup tion. " Hampden had obtained in early life, from the habits of the chase, a thorough knowledge of the passes of this country. It is intersected, in the upper parts, with woods and deep chalky hollows, and in the vales, with brooks and green lanes ; the only clear roads along the foot of the hills, from east to west, and those not very good, being the two ancient Roman highways, called the upper and lower Ickeneld way." Hampden had expected some attack, and immediately he heard of Rupert's movement, he was in the saddle. On the morning of the 19th the prince was with a large force in Chalgrove Field, near Thame. Hampden, with a small * " Lives," vol. iii. p. 564. CHALGROVE FIELD. 473 detachment, attacked the cavaliers ; expecting the main body of the parliamentary army soon to come up with reinforcements. The man who had triumphed in so many civil victories fell in this skirmish. On the first charge he was shot in the shoulder. The parliamentary troops were completely routed before Essex came up. Rupert re treated across the Thames to Oxford. The news of the great lead er having received a serious wound soon reached Oxford: "One of the prisoners taken in the action said, ' that he was confident Mr. Hampden was hurt, for he saw him ride off the field before the action was done, which he never used to do, with his head hanging down, and resting his hands upon the neck of his horse.'"* He was alone. The troops of Rupert were in the plain between the battle field and Thame, where the wounded man desired to go for help. A brook crossed the grounds through which he must pass. By a sudden exercise of the old spirit of the sportsman he cleared the leap, and reached Thame ; there to die, after six days of agony. " O Lord, save my bleeding country," were his last words. Clarendon has done justice, though not full justice, to the character of the man with whom he was so intimately associated in the struggle against despotism. " He was of that rare affability and temper in debate, and of that seeming humility and submis sion of judgment, as if he brought no opinion of his own with him, but a desire of information and instruction ; yet he had so subtle a way of interrogating, and, under the notion of doubts, insinua ting his objections, that he infused his own opinions into those from whom he pretended to learn and receive them. * * * * He was indeed a very wise man, and of great parts, and possessed with the most absolute spirit of popularity, and the most absolute faculties to govern the people, of any man I ever knew. For the first year of the parliament, he seemed rather to moderate and soften the violent and distempered humours, than to inflame them. * * * * After he was among those members accused by the king of high treason, he was much altered; his nature and carriage seeming much fiercer than it did before. * * * * He was very tem perate in diet, and a supreme governor over all his passions and affections, and had thereby a great power over other men's. He was of an industry and vigilance not to be tired out or wearied by the most laborious ; and of parts not to be imposed upon by the most subtle or sharp ; and of a personal courage equal to his best parts ; so that he was an enemy not to be wished wherever he * Clarendon, vol. iv. p. 88. 474 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. might have been made a friend ; and as much to be apprehended where he was so, as any man could deserve to be. And therefore his death was no less pleasing to the party, than it was condoled in the other." * * " Rebellion," vol. iv. p. 92. THE QUEEN JOINS HER HUSBAND 475 CHAPTER XXV. The queen joins her husband. — Various incidents of the war. — Bristol taken by assault.— Proposals for peace rejected by a small majority of the Commons. — Popular disturb ances in London. — The siege of Gloucester. — Defence of Gloucester. — Essex marches to its relief. — The king and' his army retire. — The Parliamentary army march towards London. — The battle of .Newbury. — Prowess of. the Trained Bands. — Death of lord Falkland. — The Sortes Virgilianae. — The royal success becoming more doubtful. — Negotiations for ari alliance between the Scots and "the Parliament. — The solemn League and .Covenant. — Essex returns to London. — Growing importance of Crom well. — Skirmish of Winceby — Death of Pym. — The Covenant severely enforced. — Ejected ministers. Four months had elapsed between the landing of the queen in England and her return to her royal husband. However Charles might have been personally affected by her counsels, his best ad visers, the moderate men who desired peace, were afraid of her influence, and she was suspicious of their fidelity. Her dominant idea was to restore the absolute power of the king. Her ruling passion was -hatred ofthe Parliament. She writes to Charles, "to die of consumption of royalty is a death which I cannot endure, having found by experience the malady too insupportable." * Again, " I do not see the wisdom of these Messieurs rebels, in being able to imagine that they will make you come by force to their object, and to an accommodation ; for as long as you are in the world, assuredly England can have no rest nor peace, unless you consent to it, and assuredly that cannot be unless you are restored to your just prerogatives;" f She was a bold and de termined woman, who aspired to direct councils and to lead armies. On the 27th of May she writes to the king from York, " I shall stay to besiege Leeds at once, although I am dying to join you; but I am so enraged to go away without having beaten these rascals, that, if you will permit me, I will do that, and then will goto join you ; and if I go away I am afraid that they would not be beaten." X She had her favourites, especially Jermyn and Digby) whose advancement she was constantly urging. The scandalous Chroniclers of the time did not hesitate in casting the most de- • Greeks "Letters," p. 117. t Ibid.,p. 108. X Ibid, p. 202. 470 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. grading suspicions upon the queen in connection with one of these. Jermyn was made a peer. He is pointed out as " some what too ugly for a lady's favourite, yet that is nothing to some ; for the old lady [Mary de Medicis] that died in Flanders regarded not the feature." * At length Henrietta Maria determined to leave the north, and join the king at Oxford. On the nth of July she entered Stratford-upon-Avon, at the head of four thousand horse and foot soldiers. She slept at the house in which Shakspere lived and died, — then in the possession of his daughter, Mrs. Hall. On the 13th she met Charles where his first battle had been fought; and from Keinton they proceeded to Oxford. The tidings of a victory on the 15th over the parliamentary forces at Roundway Down, in Wiltshire, greeted their arrival. A previous victory over Sir William Waller at Lansdown, in Somersetshire, filled the roy alists with the most sanguine hopes. Such partial successes on the other side as the brave defence of Nottingham Castle by colonel Hutchinson had no material influence upon the state of affairs. The feelings of the adverse parties were growing more bitter. We see the proud Cavaliers and the stern Puritans hating and hated. Female tenderness and courage shine out as sunny gleams in a dark day. On each side there were women as noble as Lucy Hutchinson, who thus describes what she was doing in the spirit of Christian love, whilst the so-called teachers of religion were cruel and revengeful : — " There was a large room, which was the chapel, in the castle; this they had filled full of prisoners, besides a very bad prison, which was no better than a dungeon, called the Lion's den ; and the new captain Palmer and another minister, having nothing else to do, walked up and down the castle-yard, insulting and beating the poor prisoners as they were brought up. In the encounter, one of the Derby captains was slain, and five of our men hurt, who for want of another surgeon, were brought to. the governor's wife, and she having some excellent balsams and plaisters in her closet, with the assistance of a gentleman that had some skill, dressed all their wounds, whereof some were dangerous, being all shots, with such good success, that they were all well cured in con venient time. After our hurt men were dressed, as she stood at her chamber-door, seeing three of the prisoners sorely cut, and carried down bleeding into the Lion's den, she desired the marshal to bring them in to her, and bound up and dressed their wounds also : * " Character of an Oxford Incendiary," Harleian Miscellany, vol. v. p. 346. BRISTOL TAKEN BY RUPERT. 477 which while she was doing, captain Palmer came in and told her his soul abhorred to see this favour to the enemies of God ; she replied, she had done nothing but what she thought was her duty, in humanity to them, as fellow-creatures, not as enemies."* In the summer of 1643 the power of the Parliament is visibly in danger. On the -27th of July. Bristol, a city only exceeded by London in population and wealth, is surrendered to Rupert, after an assault, with terrible slaughter on both sides. Nathaniel Fiennes, its governor, was described by Clarendon as "for root and branch " in 1640; but one whose courage being had " in disesteem," en couraged the plan of assaulting this important place. He was sub sequently tried and condemned " for not having defended Bristol so well, and so long, as he ought to have done." He had interest enough to obtain a pardon; but he quitted the country. A design of sir John Hotham to surrender Hull to the king was detected. He and his son were committed to the Tower on a charge of be traying the cause of the Parliament. London was in a state of unusual agitation. The Lords came to resolutions, upon a propo sal of peace, of a far more moderate character than had previously been determined on. There was a conference between the two Houses, in which the upper House urged that " these unnatural dissensions " would destroy all the former blessings of peace and abundance." The Commons, by a majority of nineteen, decided that the proposals of the Lords should be considered. The city was in an uproar. A petition from the common-council called for the rejection of the proposals. Multitudes surrounded the Houses to enforce the same demand. The proposals were now rejected by a majority of seven. An attempt was then made to enforce the demand for peace by popular clamour. Bands of women, with men in women's clothes, beset the doors of the House of Com mons, crying out, " Give us up the traitors who are against peace. We'll tear them in pieces. Give us up that rascal Pym." The military forced them away; but they refused to disperse. They were at last fired upon, and two were killed, one of whom was an old ballad-singer of the London streets. Many peers now left Parliament and joined the king at Oxford, amongst whom was lord Holland. Those who remained, peers or commoners, saw that the greatest danger was in their own dissensions. The royalist army was growing stronger in every quarter. London was again in peril. There was one man of extraordinary vigor who felt the * Hutchinson's "Memoirs," vol. i. p. 274. 478 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. immediate danger of his own district. There is not a more charac teristic letter of Cromwell than the following to the Commissioners at Cambridge, dated from Huntingdon on the 6th of August: — "You see by this enclosed how sadly your affairs stand. It's no longer disputing, but out instantly all you can. Raise all your bands; send them to Huntingdon; — get up what volunteers you can ; hasten your horses. Send these letters to Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, without delay. I beseech you spare not, but be expe ditious and industrious ! Almost all our foot have quitted Stam ford; there is nothing to interrupt an enemy but our horse, that is considerable. You must act lively; do it without distraction. Neglect no means ! " * Had there been unanimity in the councils of the king at this period of dissensions in London amongst the people ; with the two houses divided amongst themselves ; men of influence desert ing the parliamentary cause ; no man yet at the head of the parlia mentary forces who appeared capable of strikihg a great blow, — it is probable that if he had marched upon the capital the war would have been at an end. There would have been peace, — and a mili tary despotism. Charles sent sir Philip Warwick to the earl of Newcastle to propose a plan of co-operation between the armies of the south and north. " But I found him very averse to this," Warwick writes, " and perceived that he apprehended nothing more than to be joined to the king's army, or to serve under prince Rupert ; for he designed himself to be the man that should turn the scale, and to be a self-subsisting and distinct army, wherever he was." f With this serious difficulty in concentrating his forces, Charles determined upon besieging Gloucester. The garrison consisted of fifteen hundred men, under Edward Massey, the parliamentary governor. The inhabitants were under five thousand. On the loth of August the king's army was stationed " upon a fair hill, in the clear view of the city, and within less than two .miles of it." Charles sent a summons for its surrender, by a trumpet to the town, offering pardon to the inhabitants, and requir ing an answer within two hours. Clarendon has described, with more than his accustomed attention to details which regard the common people, how the answer was brought: " Within less than the time prescribed, together with the trumpeter returned two citizens from the town, with lean, pale, sharp, and bad visages, in deed faces so strange and unusual, and in such a garb and posturej * Carlyle's " Cromwell Letters," vol. i. p. ng. -f " Memoirs," p. 243. GLOUCESTER RELIEVED BY ESSEX. 475 that at once made the most severe countenances merry, and the most cheerful hearts sad ; for it was impossible such ambassadors could bring less than a defiance. The men, without any circumi stances of duty, or good manners, in a pert, shrill, undismayed ac cent, said, ' they had brought an answer from the godly city of Gloucester to the king ; ' and were so ready to give insolent and seditious answers to any question, as if their business were chiefly to provoke the king to violate his own safe conduct.' * The answer was in writing, to the effect that the inhabitants and soldiers kept the city for the use of his majesty, but conceived themselves "wholly bound to obey the commands of his majesty, signified by~ both Houses of Parliament." The people of Gloucester immedi ately set fire to all the houses outside the walls. From the 10th of August till the 6th of September these resolute people, in spite of their strange and unusual faces, and their uncourtly manners, de fended their city with a resolution and bravery unsurpassed in this warfare. The king dreaded the loss of men in an assault ; and it was therefore resolved to compel a surrender by cutting off all sup plies. The continued possession of Gloucester was most import ant to the Parliament. All differences having been reconciled in London, the earl of Essex took the command of a force destined for the relief of " the godly city." At the head of fourteen thousand men he set out from London on the 24th of August. On the 5th of September he had arrived by forced marches within five miles of Gloucester. The king sent a messenger to him with pacific pro posals. The answer was returned in a spirit of' sturdy heroism: " The Parliament gave me no commission to treat, but to relieve Gloucester; I will do it, or leave my body beneath its walls." The soldiers shouted, "No propositions." Gloucester was relieved. From the Prestbury hills Essex saw the flames of burning hut's rising from the king's quarter. The royal army had moved away. On the 8th the parliamentary general entered the beleaguered city, bearing provisions to the famished people, and bestowing the due meed of honour upon their courage and constancy. On the 10th he was on his march back to London. Of the arn.y of fourteen thousand men which marched to the relief of Gloucester, fquf regiments were of the London militia. These regiments were mainly composed of artisans and appren tices. They had been drilled and reviewed iii Finsbury fields and Chelsea fields for twelve months; and they had looked upon the * " Rebellion," vol. iv. p. 176. 480 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. approach of real war when Rupert was at Brentford. But they had seen no actual service. Their forced march to Glouces ter, though scarcely exceeding a rate of ten miles a day, was a re markable feat. They had, in the latter days of their march by Bicester, Chipping-Norton, and Stow-in-the-Wold, to pass through an enemy's country, in which the people were hostile, and the royalist cavalry were hanging on their rear. At Prest- bury they had to fight their way through Rupert's squadrons; and to try how pikemen could stand up against a charge of horse. In less than a fortnight their prowess was to be proved in a pitched battle field. Charles and his army were lying round Sudeley Castle, to the north-east of Gloucester. Essex marched to the south. In Cirencester, which he surprised, he found valuable stores for his men. The king's army moved in the same direction. Essex had passed Farringdon, and was rapidly advanc ing upon Newbury, on his road to Reading, when his scattered horse were attacked by Rupert and his Cavaliers. According to Clarendon, the prince, " with near five thousand horse, marched day and night over the hills, to get between London and the enemy, before they should be able to get out of those enclosed deep coun tries in which they were engaged between narrow lanes, and to entertain them with skirmishes till the whole army should come up." * Essex had marched over Amborne Chase, intending to have quartered at Newbury that night. There was a sharp con flict for several hours, and Essex was compelled to halt at Hunger- ford. The king marched at the head of his foot soldiers ; " though his numbers, by his exceeding long and quick marches, and the licence which many officers and soldiers took whilst the king fey at Evesham, were much lessened." t When Essex came near to Newbury on the 19th of September, he found the royal army in possession of the town. The king had come there two hours be fore him. Essex was without shelter, without provisions. Charles had a good town to refresh his men in, whilst the enemy lodged in the field." X It was absolutely necessary that Essex should haz ard a battle. The road to London was barred against him. He " must make his way through or starve." In the king's quarters it was resolved not to fight, except upon such grounds as should en sure victory. On the morning of the 20th, Essex being camped upon Bigg's hill, about a mile from Newbury, the outposts of each force became engaged, and the battle was soon general. It was • " Rebellion," vol. iv. p. 232. t /***, p. 234. X Ibid. PlIKITANS. AND ifiAVALIERS. — Vol. iii. 476. PROWESS OF THE TRAINED BANDS. 481 fought all day " with great fierceness and courage ; " the Cavaliers charging " with a kind of contempt of the enemy ; " and the Round heads making the Cavaliers understand- that a year of discipline had taught them some of the best lessons of warfare. "The Lon don Trained Bands and auxiliary regiments (of whose inexperience of danger, or any kind of service, beyond the easy practice of their postures in the Artillery Garden, men had till then too cheap an estimation), behaved themselves to wonder ; and were, in truth, the preservation of that army that day. For they stood as a bulwark and rampire to defend the rest ; and, when their wings of horse were scattered and dispersed, kept their ground so steadily, that though prince Rupert himself led up the choice horse to charge them, and endured their storm of small shot, he could make no im pression upon their stand of pikes, but was forced to wheel about."* The men of London, taken from the loom and the an vil, from the shops of Ludgate or the wharfs of Billingsgate, *stood like a wall, as such men have since stood in many a charge of for eign enemies. The contempt of the Cavaliers for the "base me chanicals " was one great cause of the triumph of the Roundheads. The base mechanicals, in their turn, had an equal contempt for the Cavaliers. Of the two men who went out from Gloucester, and spoke to the king "in a pert, shrill, undismayed accent," one was a bookbinder. Such enthusiasts knew no fear, and had small respect for rank and power, as far as outward demeanour was concerned. " Their backs turned scarce thirty yards,, on clap they their caps in the king's presence, with orange ribbons in them." f But they had an ever present belief that they were doing "the Lord's work ; " and whether starving in a fortress, or ridden down by men in steel, they would not be moved " With dread of death to flight or foul retreat. On the night of the battle of Newbury, each army remained in the position it had occupied before that day of carnage. The loss of royalists of rank was more than usually great. Three noblemen fell, for whom there was lamentation beyond the ranks of their party — lord Carnarvan, lord Sunderland, and lord Falkland. Falk land, especially, still lives in our memories, as one of the noblest and purest — the true English gentleman in heart and intellect. * " Rebellion," vol. iv. p. 235. t Journal of the Siege, quoted in Warburton's " Rupert and Cavaliers," vol. ii. p. 280. Vol. III.— 31 482 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. What is called his apostacy has been bitterly denounced, and not less intemperately justified, by historical partisans. One whose in tellect was as clear as his feelings were ardent in the cause of just liberty, has thus written of Falkland : — " A man who leaves the popular cause when it is triumphant, and joins the party opposed to it, without really changing his principles and becoming a rene gade, is one of the noblest characters in history. He may not have the clearest judgment or the firmest wisdom ; he may have been mistaken, but as far as he is concerned personally, we cannot but admire him. But such a man changes his party not to conquer but to die. He does not allow the caresses of his new friends to make him forget that he is a sojourner with them and not a citizen : his old friends may have used him ill, they may be dealing" unjustly and cruelly : still their faults, though they may have driven him into exile, cannot banish from his mind the consciousness that with them Is his true home : that their cause is habitually just and habitually the weaker, although now bewildered and led astray by an unwonted gleam of success. He protests so strongly against their evil that he chooses to die by their hands rather than in their company ; but die he must, for there is no place left on earth where his sympathies can breathe freely ; he is obliged to leave the coun try of his affections, and life elsewhere is intolerable. This man is no renegade, no apostate, but the purest of martyrs : for what testimony to truth can be so pure as that which is given uncheered by any sympathy ; given not against enemies amidst applauding friends ; but against friends, amidst unpitying or half-rejoicing enemies. And such a martyr was Falkland ! " * Aubrey says of this most interesting of the heroes of the Civil War: "At the fight of Newbury, my lord Falkland being there, and having nothing to do to charge, as the two armies were en gaging rode in like a madman, as he was between them ; and was, as he needs must be, shot." Clarendon tells another and more consistent story : " In the morning before the battle, as always upon action, he was very cheerful, and put himself in the first ranks of lord Byron's regiment, then advancing upon the enemy, who had lined the hedges on both sides with musketeers ; from whence he was shot with a musket in the lower part of the belly, and in the instant falling from his horse, his body was not found till the next morning." It was not Falkland's duty to be in the battle. He was urged to stay away. " No," he said, " I am weary of the times ; * Arnold's " Lectures on Modern History," p. 238. DEATH OF LORD FALKLAND. 483 I foresee much misery to my country, but I believe I shall be out of it before night." Clarendon tells us why his life had become a burthen to Falkland : " Fron the entrance into this unnatural war, his natural cheerfulness and vivacity grew clouded, and a kind of sadness and dejection of spirit stole upon him, which he had never been used to. But after the king's return from Brentford, and the furious reso lution of the two Houses hot to admit any treaty for peace, those indispositions which had before touched him, grew into a perfect habit of uncheerfulness ; and he, who had been so exactly easy and affable to all men, that his iace and countenance was always present, and vacant to his company, and held any cloudiness and less pleasantness of the visage a kind of rudeness or incivility, became, on a sudden, less communicable ; and thence, very sad, pale, and exceedingly affected with the spleen. In his clothes and habit, which he had minded before always with more neatness, and in dustry, and expense, than is usual to so great a soul, he was not only incurious, but too negligent ; and in his reception of suitors, and the necessary or casual addresses to his place, so quick, and sharp, and severe, that there wanted not some men (strangers to his .nature and disposition), who believed him proud and imperious, from which no mortal man was ever more free. * * * * When there was any overture or hope of peace, he would be more erect and vigorous, and exceedingly solicitous to press any thing which he thought might promote it ; and, sitting among his friends, often, after a deep silence and frequent sighs, would, with a shrill and sad ac cent, ingeminate the word Peace, Peace; and would passionately profess, ' that the very agony of the war, and the view of the ca lamities and desolation the kingdom did and must endure, took his sleep from him, and would shortly break his heart.' " * The untimely death of lord Falkland must have been to some of the cavaliers, probably to the king himself, a presage of greater disaster; if we may credit the well-known anecdote which Dr. Welwood thinks not " below the majesty of history to mention." Agreeing with him, we repeat it in his own words : " The king being at Oxford during the Civil Wars, went one day to see the public library, where he was shewn among other books a Virgil nobly printed and exquisitely bound. The lord Falkland, to divert the king, would have his majesty make a trial of his fortune by the Sortes Virgilianm, which every body knows * " Rebellion," vol. iv. p. 231. 484 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. was an unusual kind of augury some ages past. Whereupon the king opening the book, the period which happened to come up was that part of Dido's imprecation against .rEneas ; which Mr. Dryden translates thus : ' Yet let a race untam'd, and haughty foes, His peaceful entrance with dire arms oppose ; Oppressed with numbers in th' unequal held, His men discourag'd, and himself expell'd, Let him for succour sue from place to place, Tom from his subjects, and his son's embrace, First let him see his friends in battle slain, And their untimely fate lament in vain ; And when at length the cruel war shall cease, On hard conditions may he buy his peace. Nor let him then enjoy supreme command, But fall untimely by some hostile hand, And lie unbury'd on the barren sand.' * It is said king Charles seemed concerned at this accident ; and that the lord Falkland observing it, would likewise try his own fortune in the same manner ; hoping he might fall upon some pas sage that could have no relation to his case, and thereby divert the king's thoughts from any impression the other might have upon him. But the place that Falkland stumbled upon, was yet more suited to his destiny than the other had been to the king's ; being the following expressions of Evander, upon the untimely death of his son Pallas, as they are translated by the same hand. ' O Pallas ! thou hast fail'd thy plighted word, To fight with caution, not to tempt the sword ; I wam'd thee, but in vain ; for well I knew What perils youthful ardour would pursue : That boiling blood would carry thee too far : Young as thou wert in danger, raw to war ! O curst essay of arms, disastrous doom, Prelude of bloody fields, and fights to come ! ' " t The relief of Gloucester and the battle of Newbury was fatal to many of the sanguine hopes of a speedy victory over disunited rebels which the royalists up to this time had entertained. They had seen how the despised Trained Bands has been disciplined into good soldiers. They had seen how such men as held the " godly city of Gloucester " for a whole month against the best troops of the king would die rather than surrender. There was a fatal concurrence of events to render it certain that, although the • " iEneid," iv. 1. 880 t Ibid., xi. 1. 230. THE SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT. 485 queen was bestowing places upon her favourite courtiers, as if Oxford were Whitehall — offering the marquis of Newcastle to be Chamberlain or lord of the bedchamber, and intriguing to make the faithless lord Holland groom of the stole, — the real power of the monarchy was fading away. The royalists called the battle of Newbury "a very great victory."* Before this issue had been tried the Parliament had appointed commissioners to negotiate a (treaty of alliance with the Scots ; for the Parliament felt weak and dispirited. Sir Henry Vane, the chief negotiator, had acceded to the imperative demand of the Scots parliament that the religious system of Scotland should be adopted as that of England. Vane, who was an Independent, and a supporter of toleration, contrived, after great debate, to satisfy the zealous Presbyterians, who pro posed " a Covenant." Vane stipulated for " a solemn league and covenant." This obligation was to be taken by both nations. The Scots proposed a clause " for the preservation of the king's person." Vane added, " in preservation of the laws of the land and liberty of the subject." To the clause for " reducing the doctrine and discipline of both churches to the pattern of the best reformed," Vane added " according to the word of God." t This solemn League and Covenant was to bind those who subscribed it, " to endeavour, without respect of persons, the extirpation of popery and prelacy." A passage from Baxter shows how earnestly it was sought to reconcile the moderate party to this declaration : " This Covenant was proposed by the Parliament to the consideration of the Synod at Westminster ; the Synod stumbled at some things in it, and especially at the word prelacy. Dr. Burges the prolocutor, Mr. Gataker, and abundance more, declared their judgments to be for episcopacy, even for the ancient moderate episcopacy, in which one stated president, with his presbyter, governed every church ; though not for the English Diocesan frame, in which one bishop, without his presbytery, did, by a lay chancellor's court, govern all the presbyters and churches of"a diocese, being many hundreds; and that in a secular manner by abundance of upstart secular officers, unknown to the primitive church. Hereupon grew some debate in the assembly : some being against every degree of ¦bishops (especially the Scottish divines), and others being for a moderate episcopacy. But these English divines would not sub scribe the Covenant, till there were an alteration suited to their judgments : and so a. parenthesis was yielded to, as describing that * Letter of the queen to Newcastle. t * See Ludlow's " Memoirs," p. 65. 486 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. sort of prelacy which they opposed, viz., that is, Church govern ment by archbishops, bishops, deans and chapters, archdeacons, and all other ecclesiastical officers depending on that hierarchy. All which conjoined are mentioned as the description of that form of church government which they meant by Prelacy, as not extending to the ancient Episcopacy. When the Covenant was agreed on, the Lords and Commons first took it themselves, and Mr. Thomas Coleman preached to the House of Lords, and gave it them with this public explication, " That by Prelacy we mean not all Episco pacy, but only the form which is here described." * Mr. Hallam says, " These controversial subtleties elude the ordinary reader of history." But history cannot be understood unless some reference be made to them. Without regarding these subtleties, we might conclude that the Parliament and the people of London were unan imous for the unconditional adoption of the same form of church government as that which was established in Scotland. The Scots no doubt expected that this would be the result. The exultation of their commissioners in London must have been unbounded when, on the 25th of September, all the members of Parliament, assembled in St. Margaret's church, swore to maintain "the solemn League and Covenant." The oath was signed by two hundred and twenty-eight members of the Commons. It was adopted in the city with enthusiastic demonstrations of religious fervour. On the next day Essex was received in London with a warmth that may have consoled him for some previous complaints of his want of energy, and for annoyances which he had received in his command. The Lords and Commons gave him an assurance of their confi dence : and he remained the general-in-chief, without the divided powers which had created a jealousy between himself and sir Wil liam Waller. Whilst the members of parliament in London are lifting up their hands in reverent appeal to Heaven as they accept the Covenant, and the people are shouting around the earl of Essex as the ban ners are displayed which he won in Newbury fight, there is one man fast growing into one of the most notable of men, who is rais ing troops, marching hither and thither, fighting whenever blows are needful — work which demands more instant attention than the ceremony of St. Margaret's church. In the early stages of his wonderful history nothing is more interesting than to trace the steps of this man, now Colonel Cromwell. Whatever he says 01 * " Reliquiae Baxtcrianae," p. 48. GROWING IMPORTANCE OF CROMWELL. 487 does has some mark of the vigour of his character, — so original, so essentially different in its manifestations from the customary displays of public men. In Cromwell's speeches and writings we must not look for the smooth and equable movement of common diplomatists and orators. His grand earnestness makes the arti fices of rhetoric appear petty by comparison. The fluency of the scholarly writer is weak by the side of his homely phrases. He is urging some great friends in Suffolk to raise recruits, and choose captains of horse : " A few honest men are better than numbers. * # * * j ijacj rather have a plain russet-coated captain, who knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call ' a Gentleman,' and is nothing else. I honour a Gentleman that is so indeed." * In this spirit Cromwell is form ing his " Ironsides," and at this period is heading them in the ear liest of those famous charges which determined so many battles. On the 10th of October, in the skirmish of Winceby, near Horn- castle, his career is well nigh ended. His horse was killed at the first charge ; and as he rose, he was knocked down by sir Ingram Hopton, who led the royalists. He seized another horse, and the enemy was routed. Denzil Hollis, in his Memoirs, more than in sinuates doubts of Cromwell's personal courage. He calls him "as errand a coward, as he is notoriously perfidious, ambitious, and hypocritical ; " and states, of his own knowledge, that he basely " kept out of the field at Keinton battle, where he, with his troop of horse, came not in, impudently and ridiculously affirming, the day after, that he had been all that day seeking the army and place of fight, though his quarters were but at a village near hand " f We must receive this testimony for what it is worth, as coming from one who had become a bitter enemy of Cromwell, as the leader of the Independents. For the ambition of such a man as Cromwell, whether as a soldier or a politician, there was, now ample room. His religious party was fast rising into importance. The sectaries of all denominations eagerly gathered under the standard of a leader who insisted that his men should be religious, but left the particular form of religion to their own choice. The religious principle of the Civil War thns became more and more prominent, when enthusiasts of every denomination regarded it as a struggle * Mr. Carlyle has done inestimable service for the historical student by his publica tion of " Oliver Cromwell's Speeches and Letters, with Elucidations." For the first time Cromwell is presented to us as a real man. t " Memoirs," p. 17. 488 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. for the right of private judgment in matters of faith, and despised, every authority but that of the Bible. Such a leader as Cromwell had tougher materials to conquer with than Hampden, with his green-coated hunters of the Chilterns. He had themes to dis course upon in his oratory, so forcible, however regardless of proem and peroration, which, far more than Pym's eloquent dec lamation, stirred the hearts of a parliament that had come to con sider " the power of godliness " to be a higher cause than " the liberties of the kingdoms." Cromwell's opportunity was come. The man who had destroyed arbitrary taxation, and the man who had sent the counsellors of a military despotism to the block, were no more. The year 1643 was memorable for the deaths of three of the greatest of the early patriots of the Long Parliament — • Hampden, Falkland, and Pym. We have seen how two of Ihe illustrious three died on the battle-field. Pym died on the Sth of December, having sunk under a lingering illness. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, his body being carried to its resting place on the shoulders of ten of the leading speakers and influential members of the House of Commons. The men who now came upon the scene as the chief actors were of a different stamp than these earlier tribunes of the people. Henceforward the war will assume a broader character and a fiercer aspect. The prospect of accommodation will grow more and more faint. The religious element will go forward into what all who look impartially upon those times must consider as relentless persecution by one domi nant party, and wild fanaticism amongst sectaries not yet banded into a common purpose. The arbitrary imposition of the Cove nant upon every minister of the Anglican Church was the first great result of the alliance with the Scots. The Presbyterian Parlia ment of England became more violent for conformity than the Court of High Commission which the Parliament had destroyed. The Canons of Laud had fallen lightly upon men who were indif ferent about the position of the altar, or the precise amount of genuflexions; but the imposition of the Covenant upon all the beneficed clergy was the declaration of an intolerant tyranny against the most conscientious. The number of incumbents ejected from their livings, for their refusal to sign this obligation, has been variously reckoned. According to Neal, the historian of the Puritans, it was sixteen hundred ; according to Walker, an ex treme high churchman, it reached eight thousand. The statement of Walker is evidently a gross exaggeration. The sixteen hun- THE COVENANT SEVERELY ENFORCED. 489 dred of Neal was about a fifth of the benefices of England. What ever was the number of ejected ministers, and however some might have been, as was alleged, of evil lives, the tyranny of this measure is most odious, as coming from men who had themselves struggled against religious persecution. " The remorseless and indiscriminate bigotry of Presbyterianism might boast that it had heaped disgrace on Walton, and driven Lydiat to beggary ; that it trampled on the old age of Hales, and embittered with insult the dying moments of Chillingworth." * Amongst the eminent public men who advocated the Covenant as a political measure, there were some who abhorred it as an instrument of persecution. The younger Vane, the chief promoter of it, declared upon the scaffold, that " the holy ends therein contained I fully assent to, and have been as desirous to observe ; but the rigid way of prosecuting it, and the oppressing uniformity that hath been endeavoured by it, I never approved." * Hallam, " Constitutional History," vol. ii. 490 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER XXVI. The Scots enter England — The Irish army defeated at Nantwich. — A Parliament sum moned to meet at Oxford. — Combined armies besiege York. — Lathom House. — Battle of Marston Moor. — The queen leaves England — Essex defeated in the West. — Second battle of Newbury. — Differences between the Parliamentary Commanders. — Laud con demned for treason by ordinance of parliament. — Treaty of Uxbridge. — Montrose's victories in the Western Highlands. — Self-denying Ordinance — Fairfax lord-general of the re-modelled army. — Cromwell lieutenant-general. — The battle of Naseby. — The king's Cabinet opened.— Surrender of Bristol by Rupert. — Basing House taken. The year 1644 opened with great events. On the 19th of January the Scottish army entered England. They marched from Dunbar, " in a great frost and snow " — " up to the knees in snow," say the narratives. Lesley, now earl of Leven, commanded them. The marquis of Newcastle was not strong enough long to oppose them. He had given up his attempt to take Hull, and was in winter- quarters at York. Lesley's army marched on to Newcastle, which they summoned to surrender. The governor and garrison were faithful to their trust. The Scots were straitened for provisions; and the royalist army of fourteen thousand men was intercepting their supplies. They determined to advance further into the heart of the country. At this juncture the English regiments that had been recalled by the king from Ireland, were besieging the parlia mentary garrison at Nantwich. Sir Thomas Fairfax hurried to the relief of the place, and totally defeated this Anglo-Irish army( which was under the command of Sir John Byron. The recall by the king of those troops who had been sent to repress the rebellion in Ireland, was preceded by the conclusion of a truce with the rebels themselves. The Irish protestants were alarmed for their safety. The English protestants became more than ever suspi cious of Charles, and especially of his queen, who had always main tained a correspondence with the Irish papists. Many of these had come over with the English troops. The cessation of arms in Ireland, says Clarendon, " was no sooner known in England, but the two Houses declared against it, with all the sharp glosses upon it to his majesty's dishonour that can be imagined." He goes on to say, with reference to Irish affairs, that " the calumnies and THE IRISH ARMY DEFEATED AT NANTWICH. 49 1 slanders raised to his majesty's disservice and dishonour made a more than ordinary impression upon the minds of men, and not only of vulgar-spirited people, but of those who resisted all other infusion and infection.'' * The historian of the rebellion seeks to acquit the king of all underhand proceedings with the Romanists of Ireland. But he must have had a difficult task for a conscientious man to perform, in slurring over in this and other instances of his master's willingness to adopt covert and dishonourable measures. The next year, when Charles was engaged in the most dangerous projects with Herbert, earl of Glamorgan, for raising a great army of Irish to invade England under the auspices of the pope and foreign princes, he kept these matters a profound secret from his council. Of these Irish transactions there is the conclusive evi dence against the king of Clarendon himself, in a letter addressed by him to the secretary Nicholas. " I must tell you, I care not how little I say in that business of Ireland, since those strange powers and instructions given to your favourite Glamorgan, which appears to me so inexcusable to justice, piety, and prudence. And I fear there is very much in that transaction of Ireland, both be fore and since, that you and I were never thought wise enough to be advised " with in. Oh, Mr. Secretary, those stratagems have given me more sad hours than all the misfortunes in war which have befallen the king, and look like the effects of God's anger to wards us." f Negotiation after negotiation between the king and the parlia ment having failed, and the appeal to the sword still remaining of doubtful issue, some strong measure was thought expedient to lower the character of the two Houses sitting at Westminster. The king's notion was to issue a proclamation declaring the parliament to be dissolved ; forbidding them to meet ; and requiring all per sons to reject their authority. Hyde told the king his honest opinion upon this project: " I cannot imagine that your majesty's forbidding them to meet any more at Westminster will prevent one man the less going there. * * * It was the first powerful re proach they corrupted the people with against your majesty, that you intended to dissolve this parliament ; and, in the same way, repeal all the other acts made by that parliament, whereof some are very precious to the people. As your majesty has always disclaimed any such thought, such a proclamation now would confirm all the jealousies and fears so excited, and trouble many of your true sut>' * " Rebellion," vol.- iv. p. 364. t " Clarendon Papers," quoted in Lingard. 492 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. jects." * Charles very unwillingly accepted Hyde's own counter- proposition. It was that of summoning the peers and commons that had adhered to the royal cause to meet him in parliament at Oxford. On the 22nd of December, 1643,- the proclamation con voking this Parliament was issued. On the 22nd of January, 1644, the parliament, or more truly convention, met at Oxford. A letter written from this assembly to the earl of Essex, expressing a desire for peace, was signed by forty-three peers, and one hundred and eighteen commoners. Others were absent on the king's ser vice. In the same January, according to Whitelocke, two hundred and eighty members appeared in the House of Commons, besides those absent on the parliamentary services. A large majority of the Commons were with the Westminster parliament; a large, majority of Peers with that of Oxford. The measure might have. been productive of advantage to the royal cause, had it not soon been manifest that the king and queen were impatient under any interference with the authority of royalty. This was more fatal than the absolute refusal of the parliament at Westminster to rec ognise "those persons now assembled at Oxford, who, contrary to their duty, have deserted your parliament," as they wrote to the king on the 9th of March. The parliament at Oxford continued to sit till the 16th of April, voting taxes and loans, passing resolutions of fidelity, but irritating the king in their refusal to be mere instru ments for registering his edicts. But they produced no visible effect upon public opinion ; and Charles congratulated the queen upon their being " freed from the place of all mutinous motions, his mongrel parliament," when he had willed its adjournment. Whilst at Oxford the king's " mongrel parliament " only proved a hindrance to the vigorous prosecution of the war, the parliament at Westminster had adopted the rational course of strengthening their executive authority. A council was formed under the title of " The Committee of the Two Kingdoms," consisting of seven Lords, fourteen members of the Commons and four Scottish com missioners. The entire conduct of the war, the correspondence with foreign states, whatever belongs to the executive power as distinguished from the legislative, devolved upon this Committee. In the spring of 1644 the Parliament had five armies in the field, paid by general or local taxation, and by voluntary contributions. Including the Scottish army there were altogether 56,000 men under arms ; the English forces being commanded, as separate * Clarendon's Life. LATHOM HOUSE. 493 armies, by Essex, Waller, Manchester, and Fairfax. Essex and Waller advanced to blockade Oxford. The queen, who was in a situation that made the thought of remaining in a city exposed to siege very irksome, determined to go to a place of greater safety. She went to Exeter in April, and never saw Charles again. He remained shut up in Oxford. Its walls were surrounded by lines of defence ; but the blockading forces had become so strong that resistance appeared to be hopeless. On the night of the 3rd of June the king secretly left the city, and passed safely between the two hostile armies. There had been jealousies and disagreements between Essex and Waller. The Committee of the two kingdoms had assigned to Waller the command of the army of the west, in the event of the separation of the two armies. Essex, supported by the council of war, resolved to march to the west himself. He was directed by the Committee to retrace his steps, and go in pur suit of the king. Essex replied to the Committee that their orders were opposed to military discipline : and he marched on. Waller, meanwhile, had gone in pursuit of the king into Worcestershire. Charles suddenly returned to Oxford ; and then defeated Waller at Cropredy Bridge, near Banbury, who had hastened back to en counter him. Essex was before the walls of Exeter, in which city the queen had given birth to a princess. The king hastened to the west. He was strong enough to meet either of the parliament ary armies, thus separated. Meanwhile the north of England be came the scene of the most momentous conflict that distracted England had yet beheld. The dashing enterprise of Rupert in the relief of Lathom House, so bravely held by Charlotte de la Tre- mouille, countess of Derby, became of small importance amidst the greater event that was to follow in the north. The moated house of the Stanleys had been defended by the heroic countess for eighteen weeks against a detachment of the army of Fairfax. Their artillery could produce little impression upon the thick walls and lofty towers ; and the demand to submit herself, her children, and followers to the mercy of Parliament, produced from the lady, immortalised by history and romance, the reply, that " the mercies of the wicked are cruel." Rupert hung the walls of Lathom House with the parliamentary banners which he had captured in a fierce battle at Bolton ; and he went on towards York to a fiercer strife and a perilous defeat. The combined English and Scottish armies were besieging York. Rupert received a letter from the king, containing these words : " I command and conjure you, by the 494 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. duty and affection which I know you bear me, that all new enter prises laid aside, you immediately march, according to your first intention, with all your force to the relief of York." He did march. Marston Moor saw the result. As Rupert advanced towards York with twenty thousand men, the allied English and Scots retired. Their councils were not unanimous. Some were for fighting, some for retreating, and at length they moved from Hessey Moor, near York, to Tadcaster. Rupert entered York with two thousand cavalry. The earl of Newcastle was in command there. He counselled a prudent delay. The impetuous Rupert said he had the orders of the king for his guidance, and he was resolved to fight. Newcastle was a man of ceremony ; jealous of interference, for he had ruled the north with vice-regal magnificence : raising large bodies of troops, and paying them with the coinage of the York mint. He was indignant with the prince ; but he left him to his own course. On the 2nd of July, having rested two days, in and near York, and enabled the city to be newly provisioned, the royalist army went forth to fight. They met their enemy on Marston Moor. The two armies looked upon each other for two hours, with scarcely a cannon-shot fired. New castle asked Rupert what office he was to take. He replied that the earl might repose, for he did not intend to begin the action till the morrow. Newcastle went to his carriage, and left the prince to his supremacy. The sun Was in the west on that July evening when the battle began. The sun had scarcely set when the battle was finished ; and there were four thousand one hundred and fifty bodies lying dead on that plain. The issue would have been more doubtful, but for Cromwell, who for the first time had headed his Ironsides in a great pitched battle. The right wing of the parlia mentary army was scattered. Rupert was chasing and slaying the Scottish cavalry. The centre of each army, each centre composed of infantry, were fighting with the sturdy resolution of Englishmen, whatever be the quarrel. The charges of Fairfax and Cromwell decided the day. The flight of the Scottish horse proclaimed that the victory of the Cavaliers was complete ; and a messenger who reached Oxford from Newark announced such news to the enrap tured courtiers as made the gothic pinnacles red with bonfires. In another day or two the terrible truth was known. The victory of the parliamentary armies was so complete, that the earl of New castle had left York, and had embarked at Scarborough for the continent. Rupert marched away also, with the wreck of his army THE QUEEN LEAVES ENGLAND. 495 to Chester. Each had announced his determination to the other, as they gloomily entered York on the night of the battle. Fifteen hundred prisoners, all the artillery, more than a hundred banners, remained with the victors. And the men who had achieved this suc cess were the despised Puritans ; those who had been a laughing stock for half a century. " We had all the evidence," writes Crom- . well to his brother-in-law, colonel Valentine Walton, " of an absolute victory obtained by the Lord's blessing upon the godly party prin cipally. We never charged but we routed the enemy. The left wing, which I commanded, being our own horse, saving afew Scots iii our rear, beat all the prince's horse. God made them as stub ble to our swords." Cromwell had to tell his brother-in-law of a calamity that would most touch a father's heart. " Sir, God hath taken away your eldest son by a cannon-shot. It brake his leg. We were necessitated to have it cut off, whereof he died." He expatiates upon this sorrow with no vain attempts at ordinary con dolence. " The Lord be your strength," is his emphatic conclu sion. When Cromwell's character came to be judged, first in an age of profligacy, and then in an age of religious indifference, np one could comprehend that he had any higher sustaining principles than craft and selfishness. The queen, sinking under a serious illness, unable to call back the high spirit which had made her so determined in her councils and her actions, now fled to France. Essex was approaching with his army towards Exeter. She asked a safe conduct from him to go to Bath or Bristol. He offered to wait upon her himself to London ; but he could not obey her desire to go to any other place without directions from the Parliament. On the 9th of July she wrote a letter from Truro, to bid her husband adieu. " I am hazarding my life that I may not incommode your affairs." She embarked from Falmouth on the 14th, and landed at Brest. Hence forth her letters to Charles will continue to show how keen was the interest she took in his proceedings, and how strenuously she field to her original idea of never conceding anything to rebels. Soon after her departure the king's arms had a considerable suc cess over lord Essex in Cornwall. The parliamentary party are in alarm. Cromwell writes, " we do with grief of heart resent the sad condition of our army in the west, and of affairs there. That busi ness has our hearts with it ; and truly had we wings we would fly thither." * The army was indeed in a " sad condition." Essex * Carlyle, vol. i. p. 156. 496 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. wrote in vain for assistance; in vain urged a diversion, to take off the pressure of the royalist army by which he was surrounded. A letter from the king was delivered to him, calling upon him to give peace to his country. Essex replied to his nephew, lord Beau champ, who brought the letter, that he should give no answer ; his advice to the king was to return to his Parliament. Another at tempt was made to win Essex to a treaty. He had no authority to treat, he said, and could not treat without a breach of trust. By the latter end of August he was encompassed by the royalists. The greater part of his army desired to capitulate, though his cav alry had succeeded in passing the enemy's posts. Essex hastily left the camp to avoid that humiliation, leaving Skippon in com mand. The old campaigner proposed to his officers to follow the example of the cavalry, at all risks. But Charles offered honour able terms of capitulation, only requiring the surrender of the artillery, arms, and ammunition. .The army of Essex returned as fugitives to London, or dispersed through the country. He wrote from Plymouth an account of " the greatest blow that ever befel our party." His fidelity to the cause he had adopted not only saved him from reproach, but the Parliament hastened to give him a new mark of their confidence. The king was resolved to march to London from the west. Montrose was in arms in Scotland, and had gained two battles. The time for a great blow was thought to have arrived. Three armies under Essex, Manchester, and Waller were called out for the defence of the capital. Essex, though re taining his authority, did not join the troops which fought the second battle of Newbury on the 27th of October. Manchester was there in command. This battle was hotly contested without any decisive results. The king withdrew to Oxford, renewing his project of advancing to London. The serious differences between the Presbyterians and the Independents were brought to an issue by this second battle of Newbury. There were no rejoicings in the city that the king had been checked in his approach. There was gloom and dissatisfaction amongst the people, which was evidently encouraged by men of bolder resolves than those who had the con duct of military affairs. In November, Cromwell, in his place in parliament, brought forward a charge against the earl of Man chester, of having "always been indisposed and backward to en gagements, and the ending of the war by the sword." He renewed his attack in December. " It is now time to speak, or for ever hold the tongue * * * I do conceive if the army be not put LAUD CONDEMNED AND EXECUTED. 497 into another method, and the war more vigorously prosecuted, the people can bear the war no longer, and will enforce you to a dis honourable peace." In a few months^ the army was put " into an other method." The Presbyterian party, including the Scottish Commissioners, were now at open hostility with the Independents. At a meeting at the house of the lord-general Essex, the Scottish chancellor pro posed that Cromwell should be proceeded against as " an incen diary." Whitelocke and Maynard, two eminent lawyers, were consulted. Whitelocke advised that they should be prepared with specific proofs before they brought forward such a charge. Whilst the supporters of Essex and the other generals were seek ing for proofs against their dangerous rival, it was moved in the Commons, by Zouch Tate, a man of no great mark, "that no member of either House shall, during the war, enjoy or execute any office or command, civil or military, and that an ordinance be brought in accordingly." Long and furious debates followed this proposition. It was passed by the Lower House on the 21st of December, and transmitted to the Lords. The Presbyterian party saw their strength passing away from them. They endeavoured to rekindle all the violence of religious intolerance, by resuming proceedings against archbishop Laud. In the previous March his trial had commenced upon specific charges, founded upon those which had first been brought forward on his impeachment. He defended himself with skill and courage. The arbitrary power of the ecclesiastical courts which he had upheld was at an end. There was meanness and cruelty in his prosecution, after four years of imprisonment. It was the triumph of a bigotry far more odious than his own attempt to tyrannise in matters of religious opinion. His most active persecutor was William Prynne, who never relaxed in his thirst for vengeance upon the intolerance which he now repaid in tenfold measure. By an ordinance of Par. liament, voted by a few lords — some say seven only — he was con demned for high-treason. There might be the plea of state neces sity for the execution of Strafford ; but to send this aged prelate to the block, whose power for good or evil was wholly gone, was atrocious in a higher degree, for this shedding of blood was useless. He was beheaded on the 10th of January, 1645. On the 3rd the Liturgy of the Church of England, which had been previously tolerated, was abolished by ordinance. Four others were sent to the scaffold at the same time for political offences ; — Sir John Vol. Ill— 32 498 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Hotham and his son : lord Macguire ; and Sir Alexander Carew. The Presbyterians were left to these courses of severity, whilst their opponents were urging the adoption of "the Self-denying Ordinance." It was rejected on the 13th of January, by the Lords. The reason for the rejection was that they did not know "what shape the army will now suddenly take." But the agitation of this question had rendered a great change necessary On the 21st of January, Fairfax was nominated general ; and, within a month, a new model for the army was arranged and carried. The Self- denying Ordinance, with modifications, was ultimately passed. The most strenuous attempt at pacification between the king and the Parliament was made at the beginning of 1645. Ludlow - has briefly recorded the main facts : " It was agreed that Commis sioners should be sent from the Parliament to treat with others to be sent from the king, about conditions of peace. The place of their meeting was at Uxbridge. * * * The king had owned the two Houses as a parliament, to which he was not without difficulty persuaded, though he had by an act engaged that they should continue to be a parliament till they had dissolved themselves, which they had not done.''* Charles wrote to his queen, " As for my calling those at London a parliament, I shall refer thee to Digby for particular satisfaction ; this in general ; if there had been but two besides myself, of my opinion, I had not done it ; and the argument that prevailed with me was, that the calling did no ways acknowledge them to be a parliament." f This was his apology to Henrietta Maria, when she bitterly reproached him, saying, " When you were resolved to make a little council of four, you showed me a paper in which were many things about which you would never relax, of which this was the first." J A negotiation en tered upon in such a spirit was not likely to end in any agreement for the public good. Clarendon, who was one of the king's commis sioners at Uxbridge, has left the amplest details of the progress of this treaty. The commissioners sent by the" Parliament were chiefly of the more moderate party. Men who had been united in the first days of the Long Parliament, but had since become political enemies, now met in a common hope that once more they might become friends. Sir Edward Hyde and lord Colepepper renewed their intercourse with Mr. Hollis and Mr. Saint John. * " Memoirs," p. 149. t " King's Cabinet Opened," Harleian Miscellany, vol. v. p. 513. + Green's " Letters," p. * TREATY OF UXBRIDGE. 499 The chancellor of Scotland, lord Loudon, and the parliamentary lords Pembroke and Denbigh, had private discussions with Hyde and others, in which they imparted their mutual hopes and fears. "There was a good house at the end of the town, which was pro vided for the treaty, where was a fair room in the middle of the house, handsomely dressed up for the commissioners to sit in." * Each party ate in its own inn, for there were " two. great ones which served very well to that purpose." The duke of Richmond presided at the table of the king's commissioners. Their debates were at first grave and courteous ; seldom disturbed by any acri monious reflections upon the past ; always difficult and protracted for many hours. The three great points which they had to discuss were, the Church, the state of Ireland, the Militia. They took each separately. The Presbyterians, with the Scottish divines, were as strenuous for the abolition of episcopacy, as the Episco palians, with the learned doctors from Oxford, were resolute for its maintenance. Some trifling concessions were made on either side ; and an approach to an agreement did not stem absolutely hopeless. The question of Ireland was not so difficult. That of the Militia, — the question which of two parties should hold the great instrument of power — was at one period of the discussion resolv ing itself into a manageable shape. Lord Southampton was de puted to proceed to Oxford to see if he could obtain some conces sion from the king that would place the military authority under the joint control of the Crown and the Parliament, each naming half of the leaders, for a limited number of years. Dr. Welwood has a remarkable story connected with this mission : " Though the Parliament's demands were high, and the king showed a more than ordinary aversion to comply with them ; yet the ill posture of the king's affairs at that time, and the fatal consequences they feared would follow upon the breaking off of the treaty, obliged a great many of the king's friends, and more particularly that noble person the earl of Southampton, who had gone post from Uxbridge to Oxford for that purpose, to press the king again and again upon their knees, to yield to the necessity of the times ; and by giving his assent to some of the most material propositions that were sent him, to settle a lasting peace with his people. The king * That " fair room," with its black oak panels, quaintly carved, was, within the last twelve years, the principal room of the "Treaty-house Inn." We have often rested there, to indulge, over a traveller's meal, in reveries of that discussion of twenty dayi which made this room famous. KOO HISTORY OF ENGLAND. was at last prevailed with to follow their counsel; and the next morning was appointed for signing a warrant to his commissioners to that effect. And so sure were they of a happy end of all differ ences, that the king at supper complaining his wine was not good, one told him merrily, he hoped that his majesty would drink better before a week was over, at Guildhall with the lord mayor. But so it was, that when they came early the next morning to wait upon him with the warrant that had been agreed upon over night, they found his majesty had changed his resolution, and was become inflexible, in these points." This sudden change in the king's resolves might have been ascribed to the capricious vacillation which he often dis played, whether from the changing moods of his own mind, or the influence of the queen and other secret advisers. In the instance before us, the altered temper is referred to a letter from Montrose, which had been received by Charles during the night. In the middle of December that daring chieftain had forced an entry into the country of the Campbells, wasting all before him. The moun tains were covered with snow ; the passes were imperfectly known ; yet Montrose made his way, burning and slaughtering, till at length Argyle himself fled from his castle of Inverary, and left the unhappy clans to the vengeance of his deadly enemy. Montrose having sated his revenge till the end of January, marched towards Inverness. Argyle had returned with some forces from the Low lands to the Western Highlands ; and was in a position near the castle of Inverlochy, when Montrose suddenly came dawn upon him from the mountains. The battle was a decisive victory on the part of the royalist leader, who wrote an account of his exploits to Charles, which letter Dr. Welwood prints, having " seen a copy under the duke of Richmond's hand." Montrose says that after he had laid waste the whole country of Argyle, "my march was through inaccessible mountains, where I could have no guides but cowherds, and they scarce acquainted with a place but six miles from their own habitations. * * * * The difficultest march of all was over the Lochaber mountains, which we at last surmounted, and came upon the back of the enemy when they least suspected us." Having described his victory over "the rebels," he then pro ceeds to offer Charles his advice. His exultation at his triumph was so unbounded, that he concluded a few victories in Scotland would again place the king, with uncontrolled power, upon the thrones of both kingdoms. He has heard news, he says, "as if your majesty was entering into a treaty with your rebel Parliament THE RE-MODELLED ARMY. 501 in England. The success of your arms in Scotland does not more rejoice my heart, as that news from England is like to break it. * * * * The more your majesty grants, the more will be asked ; and I have too much reason to know, that they will not rest satis fied with less than making your majesty a king of straw. * * * * Forgive me, sacred sovereign, to tell your majesty, that in my poor opinion, it is unworthy of a king to treat with rebel subjects while they have the sword in their hands. And though God forbid I should stint your majesty's mercy, yet I must declare the horror I am in, when I think of a treaty, while your majesty and they are in the field with two armies ; unless they disband, and submit themselves entirely to your majesty's goodness and pardon. * * * Give me leave, with all humility, to assure your majesty, that through God's blessing, I am in the fairest hopes of reducing this kingdom to your majesty's obedience. And if the measures I have concerted with your other loyal subjects fail me not, which they hardly can, I doubt not but before the end of this summer, I shall be able to come to your majesty's assistance with a brave army; which, backed with the justice of your majesty's cause, will make the rebels in England, as well as in Scotland, feel the just rewards of rebellion." * The treaty of Uxbridge was to last twenty days. The last day expired on a Saturday, and nothing was concluded. " They hav ing on Sunday performed their usual visits to each other, parted with such coolness, as if they scarce hoped to meet again." t When the parliamentary commissioners returned to London, they found that Fairfax had received his commission as sole general. The new model for the army was being practically carried into ef fect. Argyle arrived from Scotland, stung by defeat and disgrace ; and agreed with the extreme party, in urging forward whatever measures would lead to the active prosecution of the war. The Peers withdrew from their opposition to the self-denying ordinance, and it was finally passed on the 3rd of April. The military services of Cromwell were of such importance that Fairfax and his officers urged that, without regard to the ordinance, he might be tempo rarily appointed lieutenant-general, chief commander of the horse. The earls of Essex, Manchester, and Denbigh, gave in their resig nations. There was a great change in the operations of the Parlia ment. There was to be an equal change in the councils of the king. It was resolved that the prince of Wales should be sent into the * Welwood's " Memoirs," p. 306, ed. 1736. t Clarendon, vol. i. p. 81 502 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. western counties with the title of generalissimo, and that the most discreet advisers of Charles should accompany the prince, yet only fifteen years old, to direct all measures in his name. The more violent of the Cavaliers now formed the advisers of Charles. Ox ford resounded with songs of mockery against the pestilent Round heads. The royalist newspapers derided the folly which had dis- missed.the old parliamentary leaders, to place in their room untried and obscure men. The followers of such were fanatical mechanics, who would fly at the first sound of their cannon. As the summer approached the king's affairs were rapidly mending. He had taken Leicester by storm. Taunton was besieged by the royalists. Fair fax was surrounding Oxford, but inactive. Cromwell was active in the counties of the Eastern Association. Those who had opposed the re-modelling of the army complained that the new organization had produced no effective results. Fairfax, on the 5th of June, re ceived commands to raise the siege of Oxford, and go to the mid land counties after the king. The general sent a requisition to the Parliament that Cromwell might be permitted to join him. He was indispensable, Fairfax and his colonels said, as commander of the cavalry. There is alarm in the eastern counties. Cromwell writes from Cambridge to the deputy lieutenants of Suffolk : " The cloud of the enemy's army hanging still upon the borders, and drawing towards Harborough, make some supposals that they aim at the Association." A postscript adds, " Since the writing hereof we received certain intelligence that the enemy's body, with sixty carriages, was on his march towards the Association, three miles on this side Harborough, last night at four of the clock." Crom well calls for " horse and dragoons " — all your horse and dragoons to hasten to Newmarket. The foot are to rendezvous at Bury. On the 13th of June, Fairfax and Cromwell were marching after the king, who went before them from Daventry to Harborough. On the 14th of June was fought the battle of Naseby. Cromwell wrote the dispatch announcing the result of this battle to the Speaker of the House of Commons. This letter was written on the evening of that day which was fatal to the hopes of the roy alists. " He [the king] drew out to meet us. Both armies en gaged. We, after three hours' fight very doubtful, at last routed his army ; killed and took about 5000 — very many officers, but of what quality we yet know not. We took also about 200 carriao-es, all he had; and all his guns, being 12 in number, whereof two were demi-cannon, two demi-culverins, and I think the rest sackers. Wa THE BATTLE OF NASEBY. 503 pursued the enemy from three miles short of Harborough to nine beyond, even to the sight of Leicester, whither the king fled. Sir, this is none other but the hand of God ; and to him alone give the glory, wherein none are to share with Him."* Minuter chroni clers than the man who had the chief share of the work have given us ample details of this victory. f The Cavaliers were so confident of their strength that they were amusing themselves with hunting during the five days that their head-quarters were near Daventry. On the 1 2th the king was encamped on Burrough Hill, and had been hunting that day. Fairfax was near him, and saw from a place near Weedon, at four o'clock in the morning of the 13th, the huts of the royal camp on fire, for the army was moving off. At six o'clock that morning Cromwell arrived with his Ironsides from the Associated Counties ; and he was received with shouts ; " the horse gave a mighty shout for joy of his coming to them." The united parliamentary forces now marched forward towards Har borough. The king had taken up his quarters for the night at the " Hall House," at Lubenham, near Harborough, where his van was stationed. His rear was at Naseby. Late that evening, Ireton and his troopers suddenly dashed in amongst the royalists there. Some fled to the old Hall, where the king was gone to rest. He set off instantly to Rupert's quarters at Harborough ; and in a mid night council of war it was determined not to retire to Leicester, as had been previously agreed, but to fight Fairfax. " They would not stay to expect his coming," says Clarendon, " but would go back to meet him." The parliamentary army was on its march at three in the morning of the 14th, and at five was at Naseby. . Of this old hamlet on a hill in the centre of England there is a rough sketch in a curious book by a chaplain of Fairfax. X Mr. Carlyle has given the present aspect of the place in a few words : " A peaceable old hamlet of some eight hundred souls ; clay cottages for labourers, but neatly thatched and swept; smith's shop, sad dler's shop, beer-shop, all in order; formingakind of square which leads off southwards into two long streets : the old church, with its graves, stands in the centre. * * * The ground is upland, moor land, though now growing corn ; was not enclosed till the last gen eration, and is still somewhat bare of wood." According to Clarendon the king's army was drawn up early in the morning of the 14th in order of battle, about a mile from Harborough, there * Carlyle, vol. i. p. 176. t See Carlyle, vol. iii- Appendix, No vii. X Sprigge, " Anglia Rediviva." 504 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. to wait for the enemy. The several commands were thus assigned : prince Rupert commanded the left wing ; sir Marmaduke Langdale the right wing ; lord Ashley the main body. The reserves were with the king. The scout-master came in and reported that he had been three or four miles, and could gain no intelligence of any enemy near. Rupert then went forward with his horse ; and indis tinctly seeing the van of the Parliament's troops, fancied they were retreating, and sent a messenger to desire that the royalist main body should immediately move up. When Fairfax saw the king's army advancing, he formed his troops in a large fallow field north west of Naseby, the brow of the hill running east and west for about a mile. The centre was commanded by Fairfax himself and Skippon; the right wing by Cromwell; the left wing by Ireton. The reserves were commanded by Pride, Hammond, and Rains- borough. On Rupert hurried. " Thus," says Clarendon, " the army was engaged before the cannon was turned, or the grounds made choice of upon which they were to fight." The hill on which the parliamentary army was drawn up bears the name of " Mill Hill." The king's army was on a hill opposite. A wide table-ground known as " Broad Moor " was between them. Here was the chief point of the deadly struggle. Rupert charged up the hill against the left wing of Fairfax. Cromwell charged from the extreme right down the hill upon Langdale's squadrons. Rupert is carrying all, before him with his battle-cry of " Queen Mary." He has beaten Ireton's left wing back to Naseby; but there he has been tempted to lose time in taking a survey of his enemy's baggage. Cromwell has scattered the left wing of the royalists. Langdale's horse have fled through the furze-bushes and rabbit-warrens, before the battle- cry of " God is our strength." But Fairfax in the centre is hotly pressed. The king's foot have come over the hill, and poured in volley after volley upon the parliamentary ranks. They have closed. Fairfax is riding from division to division bare-headed. His helmet has been lost in the first charge. Old Skippon is wounded, but he " will not stir while a man will stand." But help is at hand. The Ironsides now turn from their flying enemies on the right ; and retrieved the day by their assaults on the king's main battle. When Rupert returns he sees the royal army in utter confusion. Fairfax has rallied his men ; and the royalists yield. But the king's reserve of horse, consisting of his own guards, what are they doing ? A panic fear seizes them, whicli Clarendon thus explains :— " The king was even upon the point of charging THE KINGS CABINET OPENED. 505 the enemy, in the head of his guards, when the earl of Carnewarth, who rode next to him, (a man never suspected for infidelity, nor yet one frora whom the king would have received counsel in such, a case,, on a sudden, laid his hand on the bridle of the king's horse, and swearing two or threefull-mouthed Scottish oaths, (for of that nation he was,) said, ' Will you go upon your death in an instant ?' and before his majesty understood what he would have, turned his horse round ; upon which a word ran through the troops, ' that they should march to the right hand ; ' which led them both from charging the enemy, and assisting their own men. Upon this they all turned their horses, and rode upon, the spur, as if they were every man to shift for himself." * Rupert's men, says Clarendon,. " having, as they thought, acted their parts, could never be brought to rally themselves again in order, or to charge the enemy. That difference was observed all along, in the discipline of the king's troops, and of those which marched under the command of Fair fax and Cromwell, (for it was only under them, and had never been remarkable under Essex or Waller,) that, though the king's troops prevailed in the charge, and routed those they charged, they seldom rallied themselves again in order, nor could be brought to make a second charge the same day." t The battle was at an end. The most precious spoil of that day was "the king's cabinet," which, when "opened," disclosed se crets which more injured his cause than any victory of his enemies. When the banners taken at Naseby were hung up in Westminster Hall, there was joy and pride ; but there was bitter indignation when the letters taken in the cabinet at Naseby were read aloud in Guildhall. There was no sincerity in the king's desire for peace ; there was no abatement of his determination to govern by absolute power. Foreign princes were asked to send their soldiers to conquer rebel England. The dreaded Papists were to be freed from every restraint on the condition of such assistance. The best blood of the Cavaliers had been shed on the Broad Moor near Naseby. J Other defenders of the king's standard might arise ; * " Rebellion," vol. v. p. 184. t Ibid., p. 185. X The slaughter of the 14th of June was terrific, both on the battle ground and in Cromwell's charge of the fugitives beyond Harborough. Mr. Thorne, in his charming " Rambles by Rivers," has well described the battle, and says, that " the field itself still retains evidence of the event. The bodies were collected and buried in several huge pits that were hastily dug ; and the earth with which they were covered has sunk considerably, so that now they form large hollows — some of the deeper, from the water collecting in them, except in very dry weather, form ponds, and being left waste round the borders, have become fringed with brambles and weeds. The plough is not carried over any o 506 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. but these letters were the damning evidence of deceit ; and those who saw that the word " loyalty " had ceased to charm, could only complain that domestic confidence was violated when the private cor respondence of a king and queen was published to the whole world. " Naseby being not far from Coventry where I was," writes Baxter, " and the noise of the victory being loud in our ears : and I having two or three that of old had been my intimate friends in Cromwell's army, whom I had not seen of above two years ; I was desirous to go see whether they were dead or alive. And so to Naseby-field I went two days after the fight, and thence by the army's quarters before Leicester, to seek my acquaintance." * The worthy man whose curiosity thus took him amongst scenes of hor ror, has left us no description of the traces of carnage here. But he has given. a vivid picture of the men by whom the work was done. In his despatch of the 14th of June to the Speaker of the Commons, Cromwell did not neglect even in his brief rest after the battle and the pursuit, to call attention to these men — the flower of the new-modelled army. " Honest men served you faith fully in this action. Sir, they are trusty ; I beseech you, in the name of God, not to discourage them. I wish this action may be get thankfulness and humility in all that are concerned in it. He that ventures his life for the liberty of his country, I wish he trust God for the liberty of his conscience," and you for the liberty he fights for." " The liberty of his conscience " thus proclaimed in the hour of Cromwell's triumph, was a startling notion to the majority of public men at that time. When Baxter found his old acquaintance in the camp, he stayed with them a night. He had been " unfeign- edly for king and Parliament." He had thought "that the war was only to save the Parliament and kingdom from papists and delinquents." He understood the Covenant to be " against papists and schismatics." He thought it a mere lie when " the court news- book told the world of the swarms of anabaptists in our armies." He came amongst Cromwell's soldiers, and " found a new face of the graves, and they have a solemn effect when it is known what they are. In cultivating the soil, bullets, cannon-balls, and fragments of arms, are frequently turned up. The man I had with me when examining the place had been a servant of Mr. Mastin's [the historian of Naseby], and had dug for him in several of the pits. The bodies, he said, were not more than eighteen inches or two feet from the surface. The arms are usually rusted to pieces, but not always ; my man had dug up ' a swoard not very long ago, and polished her up as broight as bran-new.' " " Reliquix Baxterianae," p. 56. BAXTER IN THE PARLIAMENTARY CAMP. 507' things which I never dreamt of." Sectaries in the highest places " were Cromwell's chief favourites, and by their very heat and ac tivity bore down the rest." He says, "they were far from think ing of a moderate episcopacy, or of any healing way between the Episcopal and the Presbyterians. They most honoured the Sepa ratists, Anabaptists, and Antinomians ; but Cromwell and his Coun cil took on them to join themselves to no party, but to be for the liberty of all." Shortly after, Baxter, whose reputation as a preacher was very high, was invited by colonel Whalley to be chap lain to his regiment. Whalley was "orthodox by religion, but engaged by kindred and interest to Cromwell." Baxter went. " As soon as I came to the army, Oliver Cromwell coldly bid me welcome, and never spake one word to me more while I was there." The good man was ridiculed : " There was a reformer come to the army to undeceive them, and to save Church and State." Thus discountenanced, the zealous minister pursued what he thought his duty. " I set myself day by day to find out the corruptions of the soldiers ; and to discourse and dispute them out of their mistakes, botli religious and political. My life among them was a daily con tending against seducers, and gently arguing witli the more tract able." He was ever disputing with them about Civil government, or Church order and government. " But their most frequent and vehement disputes were for liberty of conscience, as they called it; that is, that the civil magistrate had nothing to do to determine of anything in matters of religion, by constraint or restraint; but every man might not only hold, but preach and do in matters of religion what he pleased ; that the civil magistrate hath nothing to do but with civil things ; to keep the peace, and protect the Church's liberties." Amidst all this vehemence — amidst the ignorance^ pride, and self-conceitedness which Baxter reprehends— it is im possible not to be struck by the fact of a great army, after a mighty victory, being occupied with discussions which appear more prop erly to belong to parliaments and synods. But without a due per ception of the zeal which, whether rightly or wrongly directed, counted an earnest faith the one thing needful, we cannot compre hend the events of these times, and more especially those events which placed, ultimately, the monarchy and the Parliament under the power of the army. During the summer of 1645 singular confederacies had been formed in some places, avowedly for protecting their property against both parties. Those who belonged to them were known as " Club- 508 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. men." They were to some extent neutrals ; but they were prirr cipally called into activity by royalist gentry. They were not " club bable " men in Johnson's sense of the term. Their business was to use their clubs as valiantly as they might. They became annoy ing in the south-west to the parliamentary army ; and Cromwell, in a march towards Shaftesbury, encountered about two thousand of them. They fired upon a party of his horse, but of course were soon routed. "We have taken about three hundred," Cromwell writes to Fairfax, " many of which are poor silly creatures, whom if you please to let me send home, they promise to be very dutiful for time to come, and will be hanged before they come out again." Fairfax had taken some of the Clubmen previously ; and Cromwell told those who interceded for them that " they were to be tried judicially for raising a third party in the kingdom." * King Charles had fought his last battle at Naseby. The mili tary career of prince Rupert in England was now fast coming to an end. Bristol, which Rupert was charged to defend, was invested by Fairfax and Cromwell on the 22nd of August. The positions taken by the several divisions of the parliamentary army are minutely described in a letter from Cromwell to the Speaker. On the 1 oth of September the city was stormed. The royalists caused the city to be set on fire at three places. Whilst the parliamentary commanders "were viewing so sad a spectacle," Rupert sent a trumpet to propose a surrender. The articles were agreed upon; and the prince marched out with a convoy of two regiments of horse. He went to Oxford. Charles wrote him a bitter letter of reproach from Hereford : " My conclusion is, to desire you to seek your subsistence until it shall please God to determine of my con dition, somewhere beyond seas." A royal proclamation was issued the same day, revoking and disannulling all commissions of mili tary authority given to "our nephew prince Rupert." The sur render of Bristol was perhaps the wisest act of Rupert's life ; for he had no chance of holding it against the parliamentary forces, and the king was utterly unable to render him assistance. But Charles would not learn from the bitter lessons of adversity. It is justly said, " after his defeat at Naseby his affairs were, in a military sense, so irretrievable that, in prolonging the war with as much obstinacy as the broken state of his party would allow, he displayed a good deal of that indifference to the sufferings of the * Carlyle, vol. ii. p. 184. BASING HOUSE TAKEN. 509 kingdom, and of his adherents, which has been sometimes imputed to him." * At the beginning of October, Winchester surrendered to Crom well ; and he then went on to the siege of Basing House. Of the many memorable places of the Civil War there is none more in teresting than this. It was amongst the strongest of those private houses of the nobility which offered such strenuous resistance to the progress of the parliamentary troops. It had endured siege after siege for four years. The traveller on the South Western railway looks down upon a great ruined pile, not far from Basing stoke, lying on the other side of a little stream. The ruin will repay a closer inspection. This was the house called " Loyalty " which Cromwell battered from the higher ground till he had made a breach ; and then stormed with a resolution which made all resist ance vain. Never was such a rich plunder offered to the Round heads, as was found in the mansion " fit to make an emperor's court," of the magnificent Pawlet, marquis of Winchester. * Hallam, vol. ii. p. 182. 510 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER XXVII. Destruction of the Manor Houses. — Miseries of Sieges. — Montrose defeatedat Philip. haugh. — Defeat of Digby. — His Cabinet taken. — The King in Oxford. — Overtures for Pacification. — Termination of the War in the West. — Prince of Wales leaves for Scilly.— The King negotiates with the Scots.— The King's Flight from Oxford.— Adventures of the King on his way to the Scottish Army. — The King with the^ Army before Newark. — State of Parties. — Negotiations. — The King surrendered to English Commissioners. — Capitulation of Oxford. — End of first Civil War. The traces of the Civil War in England are to be found in the existing ruins of several old mansions, besides those of Basing House. Amongst the most interesting and picturesque are the remains of the manor-house of South Winfied. This was one of the estates of the Shrewsbury family ; and here Mary, Queen of Scots, resided for some time under the care of the earl, who is as sociated with her unhappy story. Sir John Gell, who was very active in the parliamentary interest in Derbyshire, here placed a garrison. In 1643 the place was taken by the Royalists. But it was retaken by Sir John Gell ; and Colonel Dalby, the governor, was killed in the storming. In 1646 the Parliament ordered the place to be dismantled. Such was the course with regard to other great mansions of historical interest. Of the various conflicts for the possession of detached castles and ma nor-houses, that of Basing House is .amongst the most memora ble. The rapine and slaughter there were probably greater than at any other of such strongholds. It was a post of importance, which had held out against the Parliament so long that it was deemed almost impregnable. Its large garrison was amply sup plied by the rich surrounding country. The roads between London and the " Western Parts " were entirely commanded by this forti fied mansion, and by Donnington Castle, near Newbury. At the siege of Basing House was present Hugh Peters, a chaplain in the parliamentary army, and at that time secretary to Cromwell. After the storm he " took a view of the works, which were many, the cir- cumvallation being above a mile in compass." He then looked about him to see the extent of the victualling department ; finding " provisions for some years rather than months ; four hundred DESTRUCTION OF MANOR HOUSES. 51 1 quarters of wheat ; bacon, divers rooms-full, containing hundreds of flitches ; cheese proportionable ; with oatmeal, beef, pork ; beer, divers cellars full, and that very good." Seventy-four persons, ac cording to Mr. Peters, were slain in the house ; amongst whom was one . lady " who by her railing provoked our soldiers, then in heat, into a further passion." Amongst the slain was " Robinson the player, who a little before the storm was known to be mocking and scorning the Parliament and our army."* Some of the details of the plunder and destruction, as given by Peters, will furnish an idea of the havoc of this terrible Civil War : " The plunder of the soldiers continued till Tuesday night ; one soldier had a hundred and twenty pieces in gold for his share ; others plate, others jewels ; among the rest, one got three bags of silver, which (he being not able to keep his own counsel) grew to be common pillage amongst the rest, and the fellow had but one half-crown left for himself at last. The soldiers sold the wheat to country-people, which they held up at good rates awhile ; but afterwards the market fell, and there were some abatements for haste. After that, they sold the household stuff, whereof there was good store, and the country loaded away many carts ; and they continued a great while fetching out all manner of household stuff, till they had fetched out all the stools, chairs, and other lumber, all which they sold to the country- people by piecemeal. In all these great buildings there was not one iron bar left in all the windows (save only what were on fire) before night. And the last work of all was the lead ; and by Thursday morning they had hardly left one gutter about the house. And what the soldiers left, the fire took hold on, which made more than ordinary haste, leaving nothing but bare walls and chimneys in less than twenty hours ; — being occasioned by the neglect of the enemy in quenching a fire-ball of ours at first. We know not how to give a just account of the number of persons that were within. For we have not quite three hundred prisoners ; and, it may be, have found a hundred slain, whose bodies, some being covered with rubbish, came not at once to our view. Only, riding to the house on Tuesday night, we heard divers crying in vaults for quarter ; but our men could neither come to them, nor they to us." * From the construction of a sentence in the report of Peters, it does not seem quite clear that Robinson was slain by Harrison, as Sir Walter Scott assumes in " Wood- Stock : " " There lay dead upon the ground Major Cufne, a man of great account amongst them, and a notorious Papist, slain by the hands of Major Harrison, that godly and gal- lant gentleman ; and Robinson, the player, who," &c (See Carlyle, vol. i. p. 194.) 512 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. The details of horror in sieges of large towns ; the misery of blockades ; the more sudden distress of assaults and bombard ments ; are generally passed over slightingly in the official narra-. fives of such scenes. But some notion of the sufferings of the people, to whichever party they belonged, may be derived even from such a formal document as an Ordinance of Parliament. Taunton had been besieged three times by the Royalists. It was undergoing the horrors of a siege on the 3rd of July, when Fairfax, after the great victory of Naseby, came to its relief. But, a month before this, the Parliament, having regard to its calamities, had ordered " that a collection be made of all well-affected persons " for the relief of " the poor distressed inhabitants of the town of Taunton," and adjacent places. This Ordinance is written with remarkable unction : " It is notoriously known to all the kingdom, that the said town hath for these two years past, endured all the calamities almost that war (the sharpest of all outward judgments) can bring upon a people They endured three as sharp and cruel sieges from a bloody enemy as ever any place hath suffered since the wars began ; in which their houses were con sumed by fire, their persons slain, the famine and the sword con- tendeth which should prey upon them first; poor mothers looking when the time would come that they should hear the children cry for bread, and there would be none to give them ; when ' they should see them swoon in the top of every street,' as Lam. ii. 11. However, God upholds their spirits with unshaken resolution in the midst of fire and blood But yet, by these calami ties and troubles, the estates of those who have escaped the sword are utterly exhausted and consumed, five hundred of their houses burnt down to the ground (being one-half of the town), by which almost one thousand families are turned harbourless and helpless to the mercy of their neighbours, who can only melt upon them, and weep over them, but are not able to relieve them. And there fore, you that have escaped these miseries are earnestly besought to look upon this sad distressed town (sometimes the most emi nent of those parts for 'building and situation, and, which is more, for Piety and true Religion), now by the just displeasure of the Lord against it raked in its own ashes, reduced almost to the extremity of misery and want, for the defence of that Cause which you profess, and take upon you to maintain : listen, and hear it crying to you in the Churches' Lamentations, ' See if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow, wherewith the Lord hath afflicted me iq MONTROSE DEFEATED AT PHILIPHAUGH. 5 13 the day of his fierce anger ; ' and do not stop your ears against their cry for pity from you, lest the Lord deal accordingly with you, and stop his ears against your crys for mercy, when you have most need of it. In such a singular and extraordinary case as this, stir up yourselves to do some extraordinary thing : do not draw out your purses only to your poor distressed brethren, but your very souls too, as the Prophet speaks This is your duty, and this will be your policy, if you desire to save your persons, houses, and estates from that heavy misery which hath exposed them to your mercy." * With the exception of a few conflicts for the possession of gar risoned towns and detached manor-houses, the war, during the autumn of 1645, was wholly in the west. The great royalist army was utterly broken and dispersed. After the surrender of Bristol all reasonable hope was gone of once more matching the Cavaliers of Rupert against the Ironsides of Cromwell. But in Scotland there was a royalist leader whose name had become a terror to the Covenanters. Wherever Montrose led his Highlanders he was victorious. As he carried the war into the Lowlands he was joined by many who had formerly dreaded to declare themselves. It was no longer a war of clanship, but a great national contest. On the 15th of August the Covenanting army, commanded by Baillie, was utterly defeated. It was the seventh great victory of Montrose; and it laid Scotland, for a few weeks, at his feet. Edinburgh surrendered to him. In the king's name he summoned a parliament at Glasgow. Before the surrender of Bristol, Charles had conceived the possibility of joining Montrose. The hope re turned even after Bristol was lost. He decided to attempt the relief of Chester, then besieged by the Parliament's forces ; for at that port only could he receive succours from Ireland. He was at Hereford, anxious and undecided, when, after a week's delay, he marched, with five thousand men, over the Welsh mountains ; and on the 24th of September was within view of Chester. Poyntz, the parliamentary commander, was watching the king's movements; and he suddenly came upon the1 rear-guard of the Royalists, at Rowton Heath. Sir Marmaduke Langdale,— he who had fought at Naseby,— vigorously charged the parliamentary forces ; but a de tachment of the besieging troops came upon his rear, and decided the day. The king retired again to the mountains. His chance of joining Montrose was gone. But at this juncture, if Charles had * Husband's '• Ordinances in Parliament," 1642 to 1646, p. 651. Vol. III.— 33 514 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. x defeated Poyntz and relieved Chester, this last faint hope would have been destroyed. On the 24th of September, Montrose was himself a fugitive. He had advanced towards the English border, with diminished followers His Highlanders had dispersed ; his Lowland adherents had fallen off. Lesley had moved from Eng land to encounter him. On the 13th of September, at Philiphaugh, on the left bank of the Ettrick, Montrose was surprised by the veteran Covenanter. There was a thick mist. No scout gave no tice of Lesley's approach. The camp of Montrose was attacked on each flank. The great leader himself was in the town of Selkirk, on the right bank of the Ettrick. He hastened upon the first alarm to cross the river with his cavalry. But it was impos sible to rally the main body of his followers. He retreated to the Highlands. Instead of being the commander of a victorious army, he was now only the leader of a few bands of mountaineers. Lesley re-established the Covenanting power in the Lowlands. His victory was disgraced by a cold-blooded slaughter of prisoners ; and by the subsequent execution of many of the royalist leaders. One, who was a true Scotsman in his nationality, but whose genius was too high to make him blindly partial, has thus compared his countrymen with the English during this warfare : " Greatly to the honour of the English nation, — owing, perhaps, to the natural gen erosity and good-humour of the people, or to the superior influence of civilization, — the civil war in that country, though contested with the utmost fury in the open field, was not marked by any thing ap proaching to the violent atrocities of the Irish, or the fierce and ruthless devastation exercised by the Scottish combatants The days of deadly feud had been long past, if the English ever fol lowed that savage custom, and the spirit of malice and hatred which it fostered had no existence in that country. The English parties contended manfully in battle, but, unless in the storming of towns, when a,n evil passions are afloat, they seem seldom to have been guilty of cruelty or wasteful ravage. They combated like men who have quarrelled on some special point, but, having had no ill-will against each other before, are resolved to fight it out fairly, with out bearing malice." * When Charles reached Denbigh Castle after the defeat near Chester, he rested there three days. After much debate it was de cided to go to Newark, which was held by a royalist garrison of %bout two thousand horse and foot. The excesses of these men, * Scott's " Tales of a Grandfather." DEFEAT OF DIGBY. — HIS CABINET TAKEN. 515 in a time of so general calamity, had excited the indignation of all the country. * News now came that Montrose had recovered his defeat, and that his army was again victorious. The king again set forward with an ill-conditioned Newark garrison to the aid of Montrose. On the way they learnt the truth of his final ruin. The king returned to Newark, but Digby, with the presumption that marked his character, went on to the north. At Sherborne, in Yorkshire, he was overtaken by the parliamentary troops, and utterly routed. Amongst Digby's baggage his private papers were taken; and these, being published by order of Parliament, "ad ministered afterwards so much occasion of discourse." Thus Clarendon glances at their contents. But the Parliament, when publishing them in the spring of 1646, took care to set forth the policy that was to be collected from this secret correspondence be tween the queen's favourite, Jermyn, and the king's chief adviser, Digby: "The reader, comparing Cabinet with Cabinet, the king's with the lord Digby's, will easily observe how the unnatural ene mies to this their native country (imitating their General, the great enemy to mankind) have gone about seeking how they may de vour it, by their restless endeavours to bring in foreign aid from Holland, Couiiand, Denmark, Portugal, Ireland, France, and from Rome itself, of shipping, arms, ammunition, men, money, horse and foot, ani that in no small proportions : 4000 foot and 1000 horse expected from France, [0,000 men from Ireland, and 10,000 more from Lorraine ; a strange conjuncture, to concur in the ends pre tended ! The king and pope to defend the Protestant religion, Denmark and Lorraine to maintain laws and liberties, bloody rebels in Ireland to uphold the privileges of Parliament in England ! But blessed be God, who hath discovered the counsels of the enemies, and thereby hath in a great part opened the eyes, and undeceived not only multitudes of their principal adherents at home, but also for eign princes and states abroad, and have withal defeated their forces and expectations both abroad and at home. This is God's work, and it is marvellous in our eyes." f The stormy meeting between the king and prince Rupert at Newark ; the half-mutinous conduct of the royal garrison there, — • events minutely related by Clarendon — are indicative of the fallen fortunes of the unhappy king. " He must undergo a new kind of mortification from his friends much sharper than any he had under gone from his enemies." Rupert and his brother Maurice left * Clarendon, vol. v. p. 289. t Husband, " Ordinances of Parliament," 1646, p. 860. 516 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Charles for ever. He was alone ; no one to counsel him. His troops were reduced to a few hundreds. Poyntz and Rossiter, the parliamentary generals, were closing round Newark, which had so long been for him a place of security. To wait there was no longer safe. At eleven o'clock on the night of the 3rd of November, the king, with four or five hundred cavaliers, set out for Oxford. After a wearisome march, with hostile- troops all around, they reached the loyal city in safety on the 6th. " So he finished the most tedi ous and grievous march that ever king was exercised in ; having been almost in perpetual motion from the loss of the battle of Naseby to this hour, with such a variety of dismal accidents as must have broken the spirits of any man who had not been truly magnanimous." * There is another magnanimity besides endur ance of fatigue and privation without loss of heart — the magna nimity of refusing to employ dishonourable means of averting dan ger and overcoming difficulty. On the day after his arrival at Ox ford, the king wrote to prince Charles, desiring him to leave Eng land ; "I have resolved," he says, "to propose a personal treaty to the rebels at London ; in order to which a trumpet is by this time there, to demand a pass for my messengers, who are to carry my propositions ; which, if admitted, as I believe it will, then my real security will be your being in another country." t Beaten in open warfare, the king now resorted to the more dangerous weapons of craft and intrigue. His ultimate destruction may in a great de gree be attributed to the fatal course of endeavouring to win by stratagem what he despaired of attaining by arms — a course which he pursued through so many winding paths after the decisive sum mer of 1645. During the long vacation of this year the Commons had resolved to fill up the vacancies in their House, caused by the absence of the royalist members, by issuing out writs for the election of repre sentatives to supply their places. Denzil Hollis complains of the artifices that were employed to procure the return of members fa vourable to the policy of the Independents ; but he adds, "that far the greater part of these new members deceived the expectations of these men." J Many persons of eminence came into parlia ment through this election. The " certain mean sort of people in the House, whom to distinguish from the more honourable gentlemen they called Worsted-stocking men," § became of less • Clarendon, vol. v. p. 302. t Ibid., p. 277. } Memoirs, p. 43. 5 Mrs. Hutchinson's "Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 71. OVERTURES FOR PACIFICATION. 517 importance, when Hutchinson, Ireion, Blake, Algernon Sidney, Fleetwood, Ludlow, Fairfax, and others of mark, were returned for counties and boroughs. But such men were not likely to yield the great points of difference for which they had so long fought. The Independents were unquestionably strengthened. They were fast becoming a real power, as much opposed to the narrower views of the Presbyterians, as to the re-establishment of the sovereign without adequate securities. The controversy be tween the king and the Parliament was becoming more perplexed. The Scottish army in the north was discontented through the want of pay. The Parliament complained that an army which had entered England as allies should ravage the district in which they were quartered. Charles meditated upon these distractions, and sought to take his advantage of them. But his overtures for peace were suspected to be hollow by the men who were now gradually assuming the lead in public affairs. The king on the 5th of December wrote to the Speaker of the House of Lords, offering to send a deputation to Westminster with propositions that should be " the foundation of a happy and well-grounded peace." He received no immediate answer; and he then proposed to proceed to West minster, to treat in pers >n. Meanwhile a reply had been returned to his first proposal, declining to receive his negotiators. He again wrote on the 29th of December, urging the plan of a personal treaty. This proposition was also rejected. To justify this rejection certain papers that had been found in the carriage of the Catholic archbishop of Tuam, who was killed in a skirmish in October, were laid before Parliament, and then published. They proved that the king had concluded a treaty of alliance with the Irish rebels, in which as the price of their landing in England with ten thousand men, under the earl of Glamorgan, popery was to be re-established in Ireland, and the Protestants brought under subjection. But Charles had gone further than these papers proved. The treaty was concluded with the Irish papists by Glamorgan, under a secret authority from the king himself to make any conditions Glamorgan pleased, whicli should be righteously observed. The marquis of Ormond, the lord-lieutenant, committed Glamorgan to prison ; but he produced two royal commissions as his justification. Charles repudiated his agent in a letter to the Parliament, maintaining that he had given no power to make conditions in the matter of religion or church property, but merely to raise men for his service. Tha 518 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Parliament disbelieved the king ; and documents, then undiscovered, prove that the Parliament was right.* The overtures for pacification, so earnesly repeated by Charles, were probably held by the sagacious and incredulous men with whom he had to treat, as containing in themselves evidence of the want of that straightforwardness which could alone be successful. In the remarkable collection of letters brought to light in 1855,! we have one to the queen, dated Oxford, January 1 Sth, 1646, in which Charles says, "Though I have stretched my wits to persuade ' them to accept of my personal treaty, yet examine my words well, and thou wilt find that I have not engaged myself in anything against my grounds. For, first, I am sure that there can be no scruple as concerning the Church. Then, for Ireland and the militia, it is true that it may be I give them leave to hope for more than I intended, but my words are only, to endeavour to give them satis faction in either." It has been remarked by Mr. Hallam that, ''• Charles had unhappily long been in the habit of perverting his natural acuteness to the mean subterfuges of equivocal language." There was this folly about his cunning that he fancied others would not examine his words well. In proposing to treat at Westminster he was clearly without any real expectation of there effecting a "happy and well-grounded peace." He was gratifying himself with the belief that he was able to triumph through the dangerous principle of " divide and govern." He writes to the queen : " Now, as to points which I expected by my treaty at London. Knowing assuredly the great animosity which is betwixt the Independents and Presbyterians, I had great reason to hope that one of the factions would so address themselves to me, that I might without great difficulty obtain my so just ends, and questionless it would have given me the fittest opportunity. For, considering the Scots treaty that would be besides, I might have found means to have put distractions amongst them though I had found none." X Li following out the remainder of this unhappy king's story for two years, we shall always trace this ruling principle of his actions ; at every turn of his affairs having the same confident belief that the day would come wlien the monarchy " would spring up again as fair as ever." The root was left, he said ; there were only "lop^ * See ante, p. 491. t " Charles I. in 1646. Letters of King Charles I. to Queen Henrietta Maria, edited by John Bn-.ce, Esq." Camden Society, 1856. X " Charles I. in 1646," p. n TERMINATION OF THE WAR IN THE WEST. 5*9 pings." In seven years the very loppings " being to return as entirely to the crown as if I had entered London at a breach." * The military events of the spring of 1646 brought the contest in the west to a termination. The remnant of the royalist army was completely demoralised. It was, says Clarendon, " terrible in plunder and resolute in running away." Lord Hopton very reluc tantly accepted the command of this western army, at the express desire of the prince of Wales. A braver man could not have been chosen ; a more high-minded friend of the royal cause ; a leader who carried on war in the spirit most opposed to the rapacity of those he was expected to change from brigands into soldiers. As might have been foreseen, this honourable man utterly failed, when he brought these bands face to face with the orderly troops of Fairfax. Hopton had possession of Torrington, and his main body was placed on a common at its east end. When Fairfax forced the barricade, horse and foot took to flight, leaving their general and a few of his friends to shift for themselves. Shortly after, Hopton collected some of his runaways ; and, with accessions of strength as he went on, marched to Truro, with Fairfax closely following. Hopton would have fought another battle ; but his officers of horse declared that their men would never be brought to fight ; and pro posed to capitulate. Fairfax offered conditions that involved no dishonour ; but the general would not yield ; and at last a treaty was concluded without him, and the western army was dissolved. On the 22nd of March, lord Astley, marching from Worcester to join the king at Oxford, was defeated at Stow-in-the-Wold, and his three thousand cavaliers were kilied, captured, or dispersed. The brave old general was himself taken prisoner. The soldiers brought him a drum to sit down upon. The Parliamentary captains respect fully surrounded the veteran : " Gentlemen," he says, " you have done your work, and may now go to play, — unless you will fall out among yourselves." These disasters at length determined the prince of Wales and his council to obey the king's injunctions to leave the country. The prince's governorship in the west was no longer a protection to his person. He first sailed to Scilly. Two days after his landing he sent lord Colepepper to France to acquaint the queen "with the wants and incommodities of the place," and to -desire " a supply of men and moneys." Lady Fanshawe, whose husband acted as secretary to the Council, 1 \nded in miserable plight, having Tjeen pillaged by the seamen with whom they sailed * " Charles I. in 1646," p. 21. 520 HISTORY OF ENGLAND from the Land's-end. The poor lady, sick, and far advanced in pregnancy, was set on shore almost dead ; and from her narrative we may obtain some notion of " the incommodities of the place." She says, When we had got to our quarters near the castle, where the prince lay, I went immediately to bed, which was so vile, that my footman ever lay in a better, and we had but three in the whole house, which consisted of four rooms, or rather partitions, two low rooms and two little lofts, with a ladder to go up : in one of these they kept dried fish, which was his trade, and in this my husband's two clerks lay, one there was for my sister, and one for myself, and one amongst the rest of the servants. But, when I waked in the morning, I was so cold I knew not what to do, but the daylight discovered that my bed was near swimming with the sea, which the " owner told us afterwards it never did so but at spring tide. With this, we were destitute of clothes ; and meat and fuel, for half the Court to serve them a month, was not to be had in the whole island ; and truly we begged our daily bread of God, for we thought every meal our last. The Council sent for provisions to France, which served us, but they were bad, and a little of them." * From Scilly, ¦ after three weeks of privation, the prince sailed for Jersey ; and in the summer proceeded to France, and afterwards to Holland. Three months had elapsed since the proposals of the king had been rejected by the Parliament. They were three months of re peated disaster. The royalist cause had never fallen so low. Charles endeavoured to carry out his hope of dividing his enemies by propitiating the Independents through their leading statesman, the younger Vane. Asburnham, in the king's name, wrote to Vane to propose that the Independents and the Royalists should unite to put down " the tyrannical domination " of the Presbyterians. It is not known whether Vane returned an answer. The king then addressed a message to Parliament, offering to come to Whitehall, and proposing much the same terms as had been re jected by him during the treaty at Uxbridge. His great object was to produce such an effect by his presence in London as would cause a popular re-action in his favour. Three days after he had sent this message to the Parliament, he wrote to Digby, " I am endeavouring to get to London, so that the conditions may be such as a gentleman may own, and that the rebels may acknowledge me king ; being not without hope that I shall be able so to draw either the Presbyterians or Independents to side with me for externum* * " Memoirs," p. 74. THE NEGOTIATES WITH THE SCOTS. 52 1 ting the one or the other, that I shall be really king again." * The leaders of both paities agreed to prevent this by a very strong ordinance, which gave the Committee of the Militia power to raise forces to prevent tumult in case of the king's coming ; to appre hend any who should come with him or resort to him ; and which commanded all who had ever borne arms for the king immediately to depart from London, upon the penalty of being proceeded against as spies. Meanwhile the army of Fairfax was advancing towards Oxford. Montreuil, a special ambassador from France, had been negotiating with the Scottish commissioners in London to induce the Scots to take up the cause of the king. His offers were received with civility, but with no distinct promises. He then proceeded to Edinburgh, and afterwards to the Scottish army. As might be expected, the question of establishing the Church in England according to the Scottish model was the great apparent difficulty. The real danger, which was perhaps most borne in mind, was the certainty of being involved in a serious quarrel with the English Parliament by a separate treaty. There were already sufficient causes of disunion ; the principal being the sufferings of the people of the north, from the long presence of the Scottish troops amongst them. Hollis, who extenuates the conduct of these troops, says : " I must be very ignorant of the carriage of an unpaid army, if I did not believe that many disor ders were committed ; many a poor countryman exceedingly op pressed and abused by the unruly soldiers ; and more by half taken and spoiled by them than would have sufficed for their pay and entertainment, if it had been orderly raised and provided by the authority and care of the state, which was to pay them." f The State did not pay them promptly, and the soldiers took their main tenance into their own hands. After two months of tedious nego tiation, Montreuil at last saw that the first advice which he had given to the king to go to the Scottish army was not borne out by any definite promises, and he then dissuaded him from the at tempt. On the 22nd of April Charles wrote to the queen from •Oxford, complaining that his condition was much worse than ever -" by the relapsed perfidiousness of the Scots." He so little sus pected it from the previous advices from Montreuil, that, he says, " I did not care what hazard I undertook for the putting myself into their army. .... And that no time might be. lost, I wrote a letter to Montrose to make him march up and join with * .Carte's " Ormond," quQted in Brodie and Hallam. t " Memoirs," p. 49. 522 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. them, in case he found by Montreuil, by whom I sent the letter, that they were really agreed with me Thou wilt as plainly see, by what secretary Nicholas sends thee, their base un worthy dealing, in retracting of almost all which was promised Montreuil from London, even to the being ashamed of my com pany, desiring me to pretend that my coming to them was only in my way to Scotland." * Nearer and nearer Fairfax was drawing his troops round Oxford. In a few days the blockade would be complete. Whither was the unhappy king to fly ? He would get privately to Lynn ; he would go by sea to Scotland, if Montrose were in a condition to receive him ; he would make for Ireland, France, or Denmark. He would go anywhere "to eschew all kind of captivity." t If he who thus breathes out his sorrows to the only being in whom he has absolute confidence were a private man, who could refuse him pity ?¦ His very errors claim our pity. He has been trained to take the most dangerous view of his own posi tion. " I am a king." — " They cannot do without me." He holds his sovereignty to be an inherent possession, and not a sacred trust. He sees only rebels ; not a people that he has misgov erned. But there is a solemn pathos even in his egoism : " I con jure thee," he says to his wife in this his saddest hour; "I con jure thee by thy constant love to me, that if I should miscarry, whether By being taken by the rebels or otherwise, to continue the same active endeavour for prince Charles as thou hast done for me, and not whine for my misfortunes in a retired way, but, like thy father's daughter, vigorously assist prince Charles to regain his own." X There were two persons in attendance upon the king at Oxford upon whom he bestowed his most secret confidences. One was his chaplain, Dr. Michael Hudson; the other, a groom of his bedchamber, Ashburnham, commonly called by Charles, Jack Ash- burnham. Each of these have left relations of the manner of the king's escape from Oxford. After noticing some ineffectual at tempts to induce Ireton to accept and protect the king's person, upon the conditions proposed to the Parliament of going to Lon don, Ashburnham thus continues : " And now his majesty con ceiving himself to be discharged from all obligation, which by any way could be fastened upon him by his Parliament, or by any au thority derived from them, settled his thoughts upon his journey to the Scots army ; and in order thereunto did acquaint some of *_" Charles I. in 1646," p. 37. t Ibid., p. 38.' X Ibid. , p. 39. THE KING'S FLIGHT FROM OXFORD. 523 his Privy Council, as he was pleased to tell me, with his intentions to leave Oxford, if they should approve of that course to be best for his affairs, and their preservation ; but did not impart the truth of his design with the Scots, conceiving that most of them would have opposed with some unreasonable heat his conjunction with them, and therefore chose rather to put the design of London upon it."* In no situation of danger or difficulty could this unfortunate king give up his system of double-dealing and half-confidence. The groom of the bedchamber then very briefly relates how the journey from Oxford began and ended. Dr. Hudson, however, has amply filled up the details. He was arrested and brought before the House of Commons, and his examinations present a very circum stantial account of nine days of wandering and peril." j On Sunday, the 26th of April, Hudson was desired by Ashburnham to come to his chamber at eleven o'clock at night. About twelve o'clock the king came with the duke of Richmond. Ashburnham "cutoff his lock, and some part of his beard," the lovelock, the well-known badge of the cavalier. Hudson was then sent to call the governor of Oxford, who arrived about two o'clock. To him the king confided his intention to leave the city ; the governor went for the keys ; and just as the clock struck three they passed over Magdalene-bridge. The king then commanded the governor that no gate of Oxford should be opened for five days. Onward rode the three — the king, Hudson, and Ashburnham — by Dorches ter, Benson, Henley, Maidenhead, and Slough. They then turned out of the road towards Uxbridge, and rested not until they reached a tavern at Hillingdon, between ten and eleven o'clock. They en countered several parties of horse on the road ; but Hudson had obtained an old pass that had been granted to another person, and he was liberal of his money when he came to any guard. He was the master, the king and Ashburnham were his servants. " One of Colonel Ireton's men," says Hudson, "rid in our company from Nettlebed to Slough ; and seeing me give money always at the guards, asked him, the king, if his master was not one of the Lords of the Parliament? He answered, No ; his master was one of the Lower House." During their short rest at Hillingdon, " the king was much perplexed what course to resolve upon, London or north ward." He at length determined " to go northward, and through Norfolk, where he was least known," and there to stay whilst * Ashburuham's " Narrative," vol. ii. p. 72. t See Peck's " Desiderata Curiosa." 524 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Hudson ascertained from Montreuil if he had effected any ar- rangement with the Scots. They slept that Monday night at St. Alban's. Such is Hudson's account in his examination before the parliamentary committee. But, in a previous examination before the deputy-mayor of Newcastle, he stated that he was commanded by the king not to reveal the place where they lodged on Monday night; he declined to answer whether the king was in London or no; and said, "that when they turned their face about for the north, his majesty lodged at Wheathamstead, near unto St. Alban's ; but the time when, he is commanded by his majesty to conceal." This would indicate far greater indecision about the movements of the king than Hudson's other narrative. It is cleai'that no energetic course of action presented itself to him after he had ridden over Mag dalene-bridge on that spring morning. Clarendon says that the king " had wasted time in several places, whereof some were gentlemen's houses (where he was not unknown, though untaken notice of), purposely to be informed of the condition of the marquis of Mon trose, and to find some secure passage that he might get to him." * On the Tuesday, according to Hudson's circumstantial narrative, he separated from the king and Ashburnham, as they rode upon their way towards Baldock; he to go in search of Montreuil, they to stay at the White Swan at Downham till he returned to them. Here they remained till the Friday, when Hudson returned with 'a statement that the Scots would condescend to all the demands which the king had made for the security of his person and the satisfaction of his conscience ; that they would declare for him if the English Parliament should refuse to restore him to his rights and prerogatives ; but that they would give nothing under their hands. " I came to the king on Friday night," says Hudson, " and related all ; and he resolved next morning to go to them." There is a relation from Miles Corbet and Valentine Walton, addressed to the Speaker of the House of Commons, which takes up the adventures of Charles at this point. Hudson and a friend, Ralph Skipwith, on the Saturday morning, " did ride to Southrie Ferry, a private way to. wards Ely ; and went, by the way, to Crimplesham, and there were the other two ; one in a parson's habit, which, by all descrip tions, was the king. Hudson procured the said Skipwith to get 9 gray coat for the doctor, as he called the king, which he did. And there the king put off his black coat and long cassock, and put on Mr. Skipwith his gray coat. The king bought a new hat at Down- * "History," vol. v. p. 294. THE KING WITH THE ARMY BEFORE NEWARK. 525 ham, and on Saturday went into the isle of Ely. Wherever they came they were private, and always writing. Hudson tore some papers when they went out of the house. Hudson did enquire for a ship to go to the north, or Newcastle, but could get none." There was nothing left for Charles but to go to the Scots' army at all risks. On the Tuesday night, the 4th of May, they met Mon treuil at Southwell. Commissioners from the Scottish army also met the king t' ere. Their troops were spread about the district, surrounding the castle of Newark, which was held for the king. Ashburnham says that when Charles arrived at the Scots' army be fore Newark, " many lords came instantly to wait on his majesty with professions of joy, to find that he had so far honoured their army, as to think it worthy his presence after so long an opposition." On the 6th of May, lord Leven, the Scots' general, and the Committee of Estates at Southwell, wrote to the Committee of both kingdoms, in the following terms : " The earnest desire which we have to keep a right understanding between the two kingdoms, moves us to ac quaint you with that strange Providence wherewith we are now surprised, together with our carriage and desires thereupon. The king came into our army yesterday in so private a way, that after we had carefully made search for him, upon the surmises of some persons who pretended to know his face, yet we could not find him out in sundry houses. And we believe your lordships will think it was matter of much astonishment to us, seeing we did not expect he would come into any place under our power. We conceived it not fit to inquire into the causes which persuaded him to come hither; but to endeavour that his being here might be improved to the best advantage, for promoting the work of uniformity, for set tling of religion and righteousness, and attaining of peace according to the League and Covenant and Treaty, by the advice of the Par liaments of both kingdoms, or their commissioners authorised for that effect." Not a night passed before the king was made to un derstand his position. A guard, called a guard of honour, was placed at his door. He claimed to give out the watchword for the night. Pardon me,. sire," said Leven, "I am the oldest soldier here. Your majesty will permit me to undertake that duty." The king consented to sign an order that his governor of Newark should give up the place to the Scots, for the Committee of both kingdoms. They rendered it to Poyntz, the English parliamentary commander ; and very shortly after, the Scottish army, with the king, was on its march to Newcastle. 526 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. From the 6th of May, 1646, till the 30th of January, 1647, the king remained in the hands of the Scots. It was a time of un wearied political intrigue and agitation, more complicated than ever with the great question of religion. The Presbyterian party had a considerable majority in Parliament. They had carried ordi nance upon ordinance for the exclusive establishment of their Church. In this great point they were completely in accord with the Scots, who held the king at their disposal. But a compact and firm minority is often more really powerful than a disjointed major ity. The men of the greatest intellect and energy had the strong est hold upon public opinion. The liberty of conscience which they proclaimed had produced its effect upon many who chose to think for themselves, without being fanatics ; and upon more who had reached the extremes of fanaticism. The eloquent reasoning of Milton had not been published in vain. The impassioned ha rangues of Vane had not fa'len upon barren ground. The Presby terian rule in spiritual affairs was slowly and imperfectly established The great hold of that church was in London. It was also established in Lancashire. In other provinces the beneficed clergy were chiefly Presbyterian ; but many pulpits were filled with sectaries of various denominations, agreeing in few things beyond the common claim of the right of men to toleration ; Papists only were excepted from the operation of this principle. Whatever was their partic ular creed, the Independents maintained the claim of every sepa rate congregation to be a church ; held that the exercise of the ministry was warranted by a call of the congregation; and denied that any spiritual powers were conferred in ordination by those who asserted their apostolical succession. But the Independents were far more powerful than the talkers in Parliament, from a su periority that had grown naturally out of the struggles of four years. The army was composed of earnest men, who had fought for a cause in which all their religious enthusiasm had been called forth. They were as formidable in their opinions as citizens, as in their unequalled bravery and discipline as soldiers. The. Inde pendent leaders had the entire control of this army. Whilst the Scottish commissioners were urging the king to adopt the Presby terian rule of church government, and the parliamentary majority was tending to the same conclusion ; the army, at the slightest sig nal from their chiefs, would have been ready to oppose its power to any such settlement. It had only to abide its time. For eight months there was interminable discussion and negotiation between NEGOTIATIONS. 537 Westminster and Newcastle. The Scots, who thought they pos sessed a preponderating influence in retaining the person of the king, were growing more and more unpopular in the sentiments of the English people. Petitions were sent to Parliament against their exactions. They came to be regarded as enemies rather than as allies. A vote was at length carried in the Commons, in June, that their presence was no longer required ; and they were re quested to return home, on receiving a payment of a hundred thousand pounds, on account of what might be due to them. They made no sign of removing. Their great object was to induce Charles to consent to the abolition of Episcopacy, and to the es tablishment of Presbyterianism in both kingdoms. They assailed him with reiterated solicitations, and even with menaces. On the 10th of June, he wrote to the queen : " I never knew what it was to be so barbarously treated before ; and these five or six days last have much surpassed, in rude pressures against my conscience, all the rest since I came to the Scotch army."* They required the king to sign the Covenant himself, and command all his subjects to sign it. They sent for the learned and eloquent Henderson to convert the king. Charles maintained a theological controversy with the great preacher with equal temper and ability. But whilst he was asserting his devotion to the Anglican Chuich, and reject ing the Presbyterian form as zealously as the Scots pressed it upon him, he was writing to Glamorgan that he would place himself, if he could do so by any means, in the hands of the pope's nuncio and his secret adviser in Ireland. His hatred of the Covenant was not altogether a religious conviction. He writes to the queen on the 26th of August : " Less will not serve them than the establishing of the Covenant in all my kingdoms, which, if it be, will ruin this. monarchy." f Charles clung with a tenacity approaching to fa naticism to the Episcopal principle ; but the maxim of his father, " no bishop, no king," was probably at the root of his inflexible resolution. The English Parliament, still governed by the Pres byterian party, sent him proposals in July. He was to adopt the Covenant ; he was to abolish the Episcopal Church ; he was to give up the command of the military arm for twenty years ; he was to exclude seventy of his adherents from a general amnesty. The queen urged him to accept even these proposals. Without an absolute rejection of these hard terms, he prepared again to come to London. The Scottish commissioners told the king that unless » " Charles I. in 1646," p. 45. t Ibid., p. 58. 528 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. he accepted the conditions, though higher in some particulars than they could have wished, he must not be expected to be received in Scotland." * The money question between the Scots and the Par liament then occupied many weeks of controversy. Four hundred thousand pounds were at last voted ; and a loan was raised fir the immediate payment of half the amount. The terms were accepted. Another difficult question then presented itself. Which nation was to retain the king? It was at last voted " that to the Parliament alone belongs the right of disposing of the king's person." In November the Scottish Parliament had met, and evinced a dispo sition to advocate the re-establishment of Charles in both king doms, with honour and safety. But the General Assembly inter fered. The obstinacy of the king upon the question of Episcopacy was quite sufficient to excite the most violent popular feeling, and the Scottish Parliament then took another tone. The treaty was completed for the retirement of the Scottish army. On the 16th of December there was a singular procession from London to the north. Thirty-six carts, laden with two hundred cases of silver, were guarded on the road to Newcastle by an escort of infantry, un der the command of Skippon. The money and the men arrived at York on the 1st of January, 1647. In three weeks the payment was made. " I am sold and bought," said the king. Nine com missioners arrived from London. On the 30th of January the Scots marched from Newcastle, and Charles remained with the English commissioners. He was treated by them with marked respect. On the 9th of February he left Newcastle, escorted by a regiment of horse, and reached Holmby House, in Northampton shire, his appointed residence, on the 16th. The first Civil War was at an end. Oxford had been surren dered to Fairfax on the 22d of June, under the terms of a treaty which allowed the garrison to " march out of the city of Oxon with their horses and complete arms that properly belong unto them, pro portionable to their present or past commands ; flying colours, trum pets sounding, drums beating, matches lighted at both ends, bullet in their mouths, and every soldier to have twelve charges of pow der, match and bullet proportionable." Those who desired to go to their houses or friends were to lay down their arms within fif teen miles of Oxford, and then to have passes, with the right of free quarter ; and a careful provision was made for those who wished to go beyond sea to serve any foreign power. The Royal- " Ludlow," p. 184. END OF THE FIRST CIVIL WAR. 529 ists and the parliamentary troops had met as honourable enemies ; and in this surrender of the loyal city they each went their way as men whom happier times might make willing friends. When Fair fax entered Oxford he secured the Bodleian Library from spolia tion, as Aubrey records : " When Oxford was surrendered (24th of June, 1646), the first thing general Fairfax did was to set a good guard of soldiers to preserve the Bodleian Library. 'Tis said there was more hurt done by the Cavaliers (during their garrison) by way of embezzling and cutting off chains of books, than there was since. He was a lover of learning, and had he not taken this special care, that noble library had been utterly destroyed, for there were ignorant senators enough who would have been contented to have had it so. This I do assure you from an ocular witness." All the royalist garrisons had yielded before the end of 1646. Great changes had taken place since Charles fought his first battle of Edgehill. Essex, who there brought his undisciplined troops into conflict with the Cavaliers, died on the 16th of September. Other men and other influences were now to be paramount. Vol III.— 34 530 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER XXVIII. The King at Holmby House. — Army Independents. — Cromwell.— The Army proposed ta be disbanded. — Petitions from Officers. — Adjutators — The King removed from Holmby by Comet Joyce. — Commissioners at Triploe Heath. — The Army advances towards London.— The King's treatment in the Army. — Proposals of the Independents to the King.— The King rejects the Proposals.— Tumults in London.— The Army ad vances. — The Speakers and Members go to the Army. — London submits. — The King at Hampton Court.— Cromwell.— The intercepted Letter of the King.— Charles makes his escape from Hampton Court- Holmby House (or Holdenby), a mansion within six miles of Northampton, built by sir Christopher Hatton, no longer exists. We cannot judge of its capacity for the accommodation of a fallen king ; but we have ample evidence that it was considered as a palace rather than a prison. There is an order of " the Committee of the Revenue " for fitting Holdenby House with hangings, bed dings, and other wardrobe stuff and necessaries ; and, with the Puritan contempt of the externals of religious worship, for melting the altar plate at Whitehall for the use of the king's table in his new abode. Seventy-six officers of the household and domestic servants are to be chosen by the earl of Northumberland, with Yeomen of the Guard. The king's diet was to be supplied at the cost of 30/. a day; and the estimate for the whole cost of the household amounted to 3000/. for twenty days. * During this spring and early summer the king was not deprived of any of the trappings of royal state.- Nor was his liberty much controlled. He rode to Althorp, and to more distant places, to enjoy his favourite game of bowls. He read, and he played at chess. He was at tended by two gentlemen selected by the Parliament, Thomas Her bert and James Harrington, who became his fast friends. Of Har rington, Aubrey says, " The king loved his company, only he would not endure to hear of a Commonwealth; and Mr. Harrington pas sionately loved his Majesty. Mr. Harrington and the king often disputed about government." f To have " a genius which lay chiefly * These orders and estimates are in Peck's " Desiderata Curiosa." \ " Lives," vol. iii. p. 370. THE KING AT HOLMBY HOUSE. 53 1 towards the politics and democratical government," as Aubrey de scribes the author of the " Oceana," was not then held a dangerous quality in a philosophical theorist. " Democratical government " in the abstract was not regarded as incompatible with the order of a well-regulated State. Charles might contend for the security de rived, from absolute monarchy, such as he believed ought to exist in England ; and Harrington might point to the republics of Hol land and Switzerland, without offending royalty by the comparison. Had Charles seen how the safety of the crown would be best pre served by the largest enjoyment by the subject of civil liberty and the rights of conscience, Harrington and other republicans might have been more readily compelled to believe that freedom and tol eration could be best secured under the free monarchy which was the basis of the English constitution. But Charles was impracti cable with his convictions of divine right; and honest advocates of democratical government were equally impracticable in regard to a due balance of constitutional power. It is time only that has recon ciled these apparent anomalies ; and has rendered the hereditary crown of England the best type of republican freedom in the strict est alliance with monarchical solidity. But through what perils has this consummation been accomplished ! Those who would properly value what we have attained, must steadily follow the dif ficult and uncertain steps of the people towards its attainment. Harrington at a later period is recorded to have found fault with " the constitution of our government, that it was by jumps." * He said, "When no Parliament, then absolute Monarchy; when a Parliament, then it runs to Commonwealth." It was long before the " jumps " were converted into steady progress ; and Monarchy and Commonwealth were reconciled into a Constitution whose practical excellence is best demonstrated by that slowness of ma turity which has rendered a successful imitation almost impossible. If the Presbyterian party, with whom were the powers of the executive government, treated the king with the respect due to his great station, they had little regard to the rights of conscience which he properly asserted. He required to have chaplains of the Epis copal church. The Parliament sent two Presbyterian ministers to Holmby; but the king refused even to let them ask a blessing upon his meals. The controversy of the dominant party with the rep resentatives of the various religious sects, was growing more and more fierce. " Liberty of conscience was now the common argu- * " Lives," vol. iii. p. 374. 532 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ment and quarrel," says Clarendon. The Presbyterians held the sectaries, as well as the prelatical party, " enemies to all godli ness ; " and they relied upon their parliamentary majority to effect another remodelling of the army. Cromwell, on the other hand, was bringing the army into a more general dislike of the narrow views of their Presbyterian rulers. Chaplains were in his camp who contended that all attempts to fetter men to the dogmas and ceremonies of any Church were " to restrain the Spirit." Crom well preached and prayed with his officers and his men. The soldiers prayed and preached amongst themselves. The Ironsides, who had the Bible with them as constantly as their powder and bullet, and who in their night-watches meditated upon all the events of the Jewish history, and repeated every inspiriting verse that had reference to the fall of tyrants and the glory of the saints, — these gradually got banded together in a common enthusiasm which only required an influential head to obtain a victory more difficult even than Marston-Moor or Naseby. Cromwell gradually became that leader, although Fairfax was the commander of the army. The indignation of the Presbyterians against those " who were called by a new name, fanatics,"* was therefore principally directed against him who was considered their military chief. Soon after the death of the earl of Essex, Cromwell, walking with Ludlow in sir Robert Cotton's garden, inveighed bitterly against the Presby terian party; saying, "that it was a miserable thing to serve a Parliament, to whom let a man be never so faithful, if one prag matical fellow amongst them rise up and asperse him, he shall never wipe it off. " f Ludlow considers that Cromwell "had already conceived the design of destroying the civil authority and setting up for himself," when, in this conversation, he concluded by .say ing, " When one serves under a general he may do as much ser vice, and yet be free from all blame and envy." This, we appre hend, is an opinion resulting from the republican convictions of Ludlow, which were firmly opposed to Cromwell's later career. Be that as it may, the rapid course of events threw a power into the hands of Cromwell which rendered the subsequent months of 1647 the most difficult and dangerous period of his life. That he should have come out of such a whirlwind of contending interests and passions with safety to himself, and without witnessing universal confusion if not anarchy, is one of the most striking proofs of the extraordi nary sagacity of -the man who saw, at every turn of affairs, a demand * Clarendon. t Ludlow, vol. i. p. 185. THE ARMY PROPOSED TO BE DISBANDED. 533 upon his common sense rather than upon any philosophical theory; and whose dominant will was sustained by the conviction that he was chosen to do the work appointed for him by a Power higher than that of man, whose aid he invoked on every occasion in which human doubts prevailed over habitual confidence. In the sense in which the new word of opprobrium was used then, and has con tinued in use, Cromwell was termed, from the religious bias of his character, the most fanatical of " the fanatics." But this remark able man's principles and conduct are fast passing out of the narrow limits of historical partisanship ; and we shall therefore be careful to speak of him without the flippant prejudice with whicli his name has been surrounded by the continued violence of the most oppo site opinions. His revilers have disagreed on every point except tlTat of calling this great Englishman, fanatic and regicide, hypo crite and tyrant. At the period when the war had terminated, the leading men of the Independent party were in thorough agreement. As to civil rights, they held that an appeal having been made to the God of battles, and the issue having been decided against the king, he ought not to be restored except upon conditions which would ren der the public liberties no longer insecure. They held that such a restoration ought to be accompanied by the most complete' provis ion for liberty of conscience. Their conviction of the king's insin cerity was fatal to any hasty re-acknowledgment of his authority. Their dislike of the Presbyterian exclusiveness prevented a cordial union with that party to rebuild the Constitution in its ancient har mony of king and parliament. The Presbyterian majority in the Houses wished to dissolve the army, from which they had to appre hend the only effectual resistance. The Independents, headed by Cromwell, Ireton, Vane, St. John, were equally determined that the army should remain intact. The City was in accord with the parliamentary majority; and in the subsequent events the two great parties seemed to resolve themselves into the City party and the Army party. There is one view of this conflict, — of which wa have only the most obscure, prejudiced, and contradictory details, — which has been so justly and forcibly put, that we shall not at. tempt to add to its impressiveness : " Modern readers ought to believe that there was a real impulse Of heavenly Faith at work in this Controversy; that on both sides, more especially on the Army's side, here lay the central element of all, modifying all other elements and passions ; — that this Controversy was, in several re- 534 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. spects, very different from the common wrestling of Greek with Greek for what are called 'political objects.' Modern readers, mindful of the French Revolution, will perhaps compare these Presbyterians and Independents to the Gironde and the Mountain. And there is an analogy ; yet with differences. With a great dif ference in the situations; with the difference, too, between English men and Frenchmen, which is always considerable ; and then with the difference between believers in Jesus Christ and believers in Jean Jacques, which is still more considerable." * Within three days after the king had arrived at Holmby House, the Commons voted that the army should be disbanded, with the exception of the troops required for the suppression of rebellion in Ireland, and for the service of the garrisons. This motion was adopted upon a division in which there was a majority of twelve. It was also voted that there should be no officers under Fairfax of higher rank than colonel ; that every officer should take the Cove nant, and conform to the Presbyterian church. There were large Arrears of pay due to the army, and a loan was raised in the City to satisfy a portion of them. What was proposed to be paid was very insufficient. There were murmurings amongst men and offi cers. On the 25th of March, a petition, signed by fourteen officers, was presented to parliament on the subject of arrears ; asking that auditors should report upon what was due to them for their ser vice ; and submitting some conditions with regard to their employ ment in Ireland. The anger of the parliamentary majority is ex pressed by a passage in the Memoirs of Hollis : " For an army, or any part of it, to join in a petition, though but for pay, when their superiors — that authority which they are to obey — require any duty to be performed, or service to be done by them, as the present relieving of Ireland was, — this, I think, by the rules of war, has in all armies been held a mutiny, and the authors at least punished with death." f The House, on the 30th of March, declared that whoever had a hand in promoting this petition, or other such peti tions, was "an enemy to the State, and a disturber of the pub lic peace." The declaration became in itself a cause of hostil ity between the army and the parliament. It was "a blot of ignominy." Deputations from the House went to the army. Offi cers were examined at the bar. On the 30th of April, Skip pon produced in his place in parliament a letter which had been brought to him by some troopers, expressing the com- * Carlyle ; " Cromwell," vol. i. p. 222. t " Memoirs," p. 77. PETITIONS FROM OFFICERS. 535 plaints and demands of eight regiments of horse. " They saw designs upon them, and upon many of the Godly Party in the king dom." Three troopers who brought the letter were examined as to the meaning of certain words which it contained. They were only the agents of their regiments, they said. Did their officers approve of their proceedings ? Very few knew anything about them. The more violent Presbyterian members were very indig nant. Cromwell whispered to Ludlow, " These men will never leave till the army pull them out by the ears." * A new class of malcontents had arisen, more dangerous than the officers, who said to the parliamentary commissioners, " We hope, by being soldiers we have not lost the capacity of subjects, nor divested ourselves thereby of our interests in the Commonwealth." The army had organised itself into a Council of Officers, and a Council of Adju- tators. The Adjutators, who came to be called Agitators, were delegates named by the common soldiers. The difficulties of re concilement are now growing very formidable. The servants are, fast advancing to become masters. Meanwhile the king has writ ten to the Parliament, with reference to the proposals made to him at Newcastle. He still declared against Presbytery ; and his ap plication was unheeded. The army Councils grow more and more resolved to have greater concessions than the Parliament is dis posed to make. They are voted eight weeks' pay. A committee goes to the army at Saffron Walden to see it disbanded. That is not so easy. We want eight times eight weeks' pay, say the Adjutators. There are disturbances in some of the military quarters. Will this contest end in something anarchical ? Fairfax is told, that if their officers refuse to take part with them in asserting their rights, they know how to meet and act without them. They petition again through their general. It is in vain that "when the House, wearied with long sitting, was grown thin, Mr. Denzil Hollis, taking that opportunity, drew up a resolution on his knee, declaring the peti tion to be seditious. It is in vain that there have been London petitions against the Army, and that the getters-up of counter-peti tions in its favour have been imprisoned. There is a great gath ering of Adjutators to confer with the general ; and it is agreed that on the 4th of June there shall be a rendezvous of all the sol diers at Newmarket. Two days before that general assembly, an event has taken place which goes much farther to decide the ques tion between Army and City, than resolutions at St. Stephen's, or * Ludlow, vol. i. p. 189. 536 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. petitions at Guildhall. A great crisis is impending. " It was pri vately resolved," says Clarendon, "by the principal persons of the House of Commons, that when Cromwell came the next day into the House, which he seldom omitted to do, they would send him to the Tower ; presuming, that if they had once severed his person from the Army, they should easily reduce it to its former temper and obedience When the House expected every min ute his presence, they were informed that he was met out of the town by break of day, with one servant only, on the way to the army." * That same morning that Cromwell left London, there was a memorable scene in Northamptonshire, also about " break of day " according to Clarendon. On the afternoon of the 2nd of June the king is playing bowls on Althorpe Down. The parliamentary commissioners and his ac customed attendants are looking on. There is a man standing amongst them, in the uniform of Fairfax's regiment. He is asked questions as to news from the army, which he answers civilly but somewhat proudly. A report spreads that a party of cavalry is in the neighbourhood. About midnight there is a tramping of horse around Holmby House'; and entrance is demanded by the man who was looking at the game of bowls on Althorpe Down. He was a cornet, he said, in the general's guard ; his name was Joyce, he desired to speak with the king. The commissioners had di rected the garrison to hold themselves in readiness to repel the presumptuous soldiers ; but the men on duty greeted their old comrades, and the gates were opened. The day wore on, amidst the alarm of the commissioners, who saw that armed resistance was impossible. At night Joyce requested to be taken to the king. He was in bed ; but the inflexible cornet was conducted to the door of the royal apartments. By the king's desire he was at length ad mitted. Charles had a long conference with him, in the presence of the commissioners, who had been sent for ; which ended in his cheerfully saying " Good night, Mr. Joyce," adding that he would readily go with him if the soldiers confirmed what the cornet had promised. The next day the king asked Joyce under what author ity he acted. He was sent, he said, by authority of the army, to prevent the designs of its enemies, who would once more plunge the kingdom in blood. " Where is your commission ? " said the king. " There, behind me," pointing to the soldiers. " Believe me," replied Charles, " your instructions are written in a very legible character." f COMMISSIONERS AT TRIPLOE HEATH. 537 The king th»n said that force must be employed to remove him, unless he was promised that nothing should be required of him against his conscience or honour. " Nothing," exclaimed the men as one voice. The commissioners asked if they all agreed in what Mr. Joyce had said. "All, all." In a few hours, the king and the unwilling commissioners were on their way towards the army. Whilst the king has been journeying towards the head-quarters of Fairfax, the appointed Rendezvous has taken place on Kentford Heath, near Newmarket. Another meeting of this military parlia ment is arranged for the 10th, at Triploe Heath, near Cambridge. The king arrives at Royston on the 7th. " Fairfax and Cromwell wait on him both together. He asks them whether they commis sioned Joyce to remove him : they deny it. ' I'll not believe you,' says the king, " unless you hang him.' "* Colonel Whalley had been sent by Fairfax, when he learnt of the king's seizure at Holmby, to take him back ; but Charles refused to go. When in presence of Fair fax and Cromwell he expressed the same desire to remain with the army. He preferred ' the air ' of Newmarket to' the air ' of Holm by. Cromwell went to London ; and took his place in the House. There is no very reliable account of what occurred when he who was held to be the chief manager of the great coup-d itat, appeared in his seat. Hollis represents Cromwell, as well as Ireton, Fleet wood, and Rainsborough, who were members of the House as well as officers of the army, "blaming the soldiers at that distance, as Cromwell did openly in the House, protesting, for his part, he would stick to the Parliament."- \ He then, continues the wrathful Presbyterian, " did steal away that evening, I may say run away post down to the Army, and presently join in the subscription of a rebellious letter." The narrative of a more candid chronicle says, that Cromwell got hastily and secretly out of town, and without stop or stay rid to Triploe Heath, his horse all on a foam, and there was welcomed with the shouts of the whole Army, to whom he de clared the actions and designs of the Parliament." X Commissioners were again coming to the Army on the 10th ; and Cromwell has arrived a little before them. Twenty-one thousand men are drawn up on Triploe Heath ; not an ordinary body of soldiers, but men, as they described themselves in one of their petitions, " who had abandoned their estates, trades, callings, and the contentments of a quiet life, for the perils and fatigues of war in defence of the public liberty." Fairfax and the commissioners ride to each regi * Warwick, p. 299. t Hollis, p. 84. X " Perfect Politician," p. 22. 1 538 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ment. The votes of parliament are first read to the general's own regiment. An officer stands forth, saying that the regiment would determine upon an answer when the votes had been submitted to a Council of Officers and Adjutators. The men" are asked if that is their answer ? " All, all." This is not a tumultuous reply ; they speak when leave is given. The question is also put, if any be of a contrary opinion to say " No." Not a voice is heard. The same formality is observed towards every regiment, with a similar result ; and a cry goes up from each, as the commissioners pass on, of "Justice, Justice." In the afternoon, this Army is on its march towards London; and the "rebellious letter; " of which Hollis speaks, is sent to the lord-mayor and aldermen. It is remarkable letter, the composition, as Mr.- Carlyle thinks, of Cromwell ; signed by Fairfax, Cromwell, Ireton, and other chief officers — in number thirteen. " We desire," a settlement of the peace of the kingdom and of the liberties of the subject, according to the votes and declara tions of Parliament which, before we took arms, were, by the Par liament, used as arguments and inducements to invite us and divers of our dear friends out, some of whom have lost their lives in this war For the obtaining of these things we are drawing near your city ; professing sincerely from our hearts, that we in tend not evil towards you ; declaring, with all confidence and assur ance, that if you appear not against us in these our just desires, to assist that wicked Party which would embroil us and the kingdom, neither we nor our soldiers shall give you the least offence And although you may suppose that a rich city may seem an entic ing bait to poor hungry soldiers to venture far to gain the wealth thereof, — yet, if not provoked by you, we do profess, rather than any such evil should fall out, the soldiers shall make their way through our blood to effect it." * This is'plain speaking. The Army has reached St. Alban's ; and a respectful answer is con veyed thither by a deputation from the City. On the 16th the Army demands the impeachment of eleven members of the Com mons, Hollis, Stapleton, Massey, and eight others of the leading Presbyterians — the men of whom Cromwell spoke when he whis pered about the army pulling them out by the ears. The City is in consternation. The Parliament is incapable of acting with any vigour. Messages are daily going between St. Alban's and West minster with the interminable arguments of each of these o-reat powers. But the one possesses a strength more immediately effect- * " Letters of Cromwell." vol. i. p. 230. THE ARMY ADVANCES TOWARDS LONDON. 539 ive than the highest ability of the pen. If the parliamentary negotiators appear obstinate, the Army advances. On the 25th of June it is at Uxbridge. The shops in the City are shut. The Army has received a month's pay, as it demanded. But it has continued to advance. The effect is instantaneous. On the 26th the eleven obnoxious members retire from Parliament ; the Com mons vote for the adoption of all the proceedings of the Army ; and commissioners are appointed on each side to regulate the affairs of the kingdom. There is no longer any talk of defending London ; and the Army falls back a few miles. For more than three months have these serious differences be tween Parliament and Army gone on. There is a pause of nearly another month, in which the kingdom does not seem approaching to a settlement. We have lost sight of the monarch during the busy two months in which London lies under the shadow of that eagle's wing. Is he a guest or a prisoner amidst that Army, so dif ferently composed from his own roystering Cavaliers ? He is cer tainly not an ill-used prisoner. " His majesty," says Clarendon, " sat still, or removed to such places as were most convenient for the march of the army; being in all places as well provided for and accommodated, as he had used to be in any progress." All persons were allowed to resort to him — " the best gentlemen of the several counties through which he passed." His own chaplains had leave to attend upon him for his devotions, and " performed their func tion at the ordinary hours, in their accustomed formalities." Roy alists of rank visited him without restraint ; " and many good offi cers who had served his majesty faithfully were civilly received by the officers of the army, and lived quietly in their quarters." The king lodged at great houses in the neighbourhood of the. army; — at the earl of Salisbury's at Hatfield, when the troops were at- St. Alban's ; at Caversham, the earl of Craven's, when the army had moved further from London. Sir Philip Warwick has a curious passage, implying that there was some general belief that the king's disgust at the harsher treatment he had received from the Presby terians would moderate his own desire for episcopal uniformity, and lead him to look with approbation upon that liberty of conscience which the Independents professed and demanded : * "At Causham [Caversham] I had the honour to come into his presence, though I staid not there ; but, by all I could perceive either from himself or * At p. 506 we gave an extract from the letter of Cromwell, in which, on the very day of the Battle of Naseby. he asserts this ruling principle of his mind. 540 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. _ any other, he was very apprehensive in what hands he was, but was not to let it be discerned. Nor had he given that countenance to Dr. Taylor's ' Liberty of Prophesying ' which some believed he had." * The prejudices of his education, and the principles of his government, were too exclusive to allow Charles to admit the doc trine of Toleration, although proclaimed by his own favourite chap lain. When Jeremy Taylor from his lowly retreat in Wales sent forth this plea for religious liberty into an unquiet world, he said, " I thought it might not misbecome my duty and endeavours to plead for peace, and charity, and forgivenness, and permissions mutual ; although I had reason to believe that such is the iniquity of men, and they so indisposed to receive such impresses, that I had as good plough the sands or till the air as persuade such doc trines." f It was reserved for a happier age to understand and act upon these principles. Taylor had been favoured by Laud ; but he had broken away from Laud's narrow estimate of what was neces sary for the security of an established Church. The problem that its power and dignity and usefulness might be upheld in connection with the most absolute spiritual freedom beyond its pale, required to be practically worked out for two centuries before it could be held to be solved. The reasoners in steel, who were as impatient of the denomination of " New Presbyter " as of " Old Priest," } were dealing more practically with this question of toleration than any previous set of men who had so advocated the rights of conscience. Few had advocated those rights, having strong religious convictions of their own. Cromwell was the great expositor of their principle ; and he probably went as far as the spirit of Protestantism would then permit. Charles hated the Presbyterians, but he gave no con fidence to the Independents. The king and his conqueror now sometimes met. The king had been allowed by Fairfax, with an instant attention to his request, to have an interview with his children, the dukes of York and Gloucester, and the princess Elizabeth. Sir John Berkeley, who came over from the queen when Charles had informed her of his reception by the army, had many conferences with Cromwell; who, although "wishing that the king was more frank, and would not tie himself so strictly to narrow maxims," told Berkeley " that he had lately seen the tenderest sight that ever his eyes beheld, which was the interview between the king and his children ; and wept plentifully at the * " Memoirs," p. 301. t " Epistle Dedicatory to Lord Hatton." X " New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large." — Milton. PROPOSALS OF THE INDEPENDENTS TO THE KING. 541 remembrance of it, saying, that never man was so abused as he in his sinister opinions of the king, who, he thought, was the upright- est and most conscientious man of his three kingdoms." And yet Berkeley, whilst he records this trait of Cromwell's character, which, after the accustomed fashion, we must call hypocrisy, writes, " I was of his majesty's sense, that men whose hands were yet hot with the blood of his most faithful subjects, ought not entirely to be trusted ; but thought they ought absolutely to be well dissembled with, whilst his majesty was in their hands at least, that he might the better get out of them."* It was towards the end of June that the king and the Inde pendents, — Cromwell and Ireton, Vane and Henry Marten, — appeared to have come to such an understanding as promised a termination to the miseries of the kingdom ; an understanding that would have restored the king to those just rights which were com patible with the existence of civil and religious liberty. Whether such an arrangement would have endured, had it been affected, may justly be questioned. But the proposals which were made by the leaders of the Army to Charles at this juncture, were far more moderate than any which had been previously tendered or sug gested. They were to the effect that the Long Parliament should be dissolved within a year ; that future Parliaments should be biennial, and not to be dissolved or adjourned except by their own consent, unless they had sat a hundred and twenty days ; that the rep resentation should be made more equal, by disfranchising decayed and inconsiderable towns, and giving a greater number of members . to counties or other divisions of the kingdom ; that the judicial power of both Houses should be limited ; that grand jurymen should be chosen in some equal way, and not at the discretion of the sheriff. These were national reforms, not materially affecting the royal prerogative ; reforms which have been gradually estab lished in the working of the constitution. The great question of the power of the sword was proposed to be settled, upon the prin ciple that the royal authority over the militia should be subject to the advice of Parliament and a Council for ten years. The other great subject of difference, that of religion, was provided for by the proposition that an Act should be passed, taking away all eccle siastical jurisdiction extending to civil penalties ; that there be a repeal of all Statutes enjoining the use of the Common Prayer under penalties, as well as of those that imposed penalties for not * " Memoirs of Sir John Berkeley," 1699. 542 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. attending the service of the Church ; and, further, that the taking- of the Covenant should not be enforced upon any, and all penalties taken away that had been imposed upon the refusers. These prop ositions being received as the basis for securing the rights, liber ties, peace, and safety of the kingdom, it was to be provided that " his majesty's person, his queen and royal issue, may be restored to a condition of safety, honour, and freedom in the nation, without diminution of their personal rights, or further limitation to the exercise of the legal power." How the proposals were received by the king is minutely detailed by sir John Berkeley. Charles ap pears to have mainly objected to the minor condition which ex cepted seven of his adherents from a general amnesty, and from the privilege of compounding for their estates ; and to that which stipulated that royalists should not sit in the next Parliament. " I procured his Majesty a sight of the Army's Proposals six or eight days before they were offered to him in public. His Majesty was much displeased with them in general, saying, That, if they had a mind to close with him, they would never impose so hard terms upon him. I replied, That, if they had demanded less than they had done, I should have suspected them more than I now did of intending not really to serve his Majesty, but only to abuse him; since it was not likely that men who had, through so great dangers and difficulties, acquired so great advantages, should ever sit down with less than was contained in the Proposals ; and, on the other side,. never was a crown (that had been so near lost) so cheaply re covered, as his Majesty's would be, if they agreed upon such terms. His Majesty was of another advice, and returned, That they could not subsist without him, and therefore he did not doubt but that he should see them very shortly be glad to condescend farther ; and then objected to three particular points ot the Proposals. The first was. The exception of seven, not named, from pardon. The second, The excluding his party from being eligible in the next ensuing Parliament. And the third, That though there was nothing done against the Church-government established, yet there was nothing clone to assert it. To these, I replied, That after his Majesty and the Army were accorded, it would be no impossible work to make them remit in the first point ; and, if he could not, when his Majesty was re-instated in his throne, he might easily supply seven persons beyond the seas, in such sort as to make their banishment supportable to them. To the second ; That the next Parliament would be necessitated to lay great TUMULTS IN LONDON. 543 burdens upon the kingdom ; and it would be a happiness to the king's Party, to have no voice in them. To the third, That the Law was security enough for the Church, and it was happy that men, who had fought against the Church, should be re duced (when they were superiors), not to speak against it. His Majesty broke from me with this expression, 'Well! I shall see them glad ere long to accept more equal terms.' " The king re jected the proposals ; and he did so in a manner that sufficiently showed his resolution to persevere in his course of endeavouring to profit by the dissensions of the two great parties, but to concede nothing of importance to either. Berkeley attributes his danger ous resolve to the secret advice of Ashburnham, and to "the en couraging messages which his majesty had, by my lord Lauder dale and others, from the Presbyterian party and the City of London, who pretended to despise the Army, and to oppose them to death." He says, " his majesty seemed very much excited, in somuch that, when the proposals were solemnly sent to him, and his concurrence most humbly and heartily desired, his majesty, not only to the astonishment of Ireton and the rest, but even to mine, entertained them with very tart and bitter discourses." The king said, " You cannot be without me ; you w»tll fall to ruin if I do not sustain you." Those leaders of the Army who were present looked with wonder upon the scene. Berkeley at last went •*¦? f" the king and whispered, " Sir, your majesty speaks as if yo^1 had some secret strength and power that I do not know of ; ar.1/? since your majesty hath concealed it from me, I wish you had concea'e" it from these men too." The king " soon recollected himself, and began to sweeten his former discourse with great power of lan guage and behaviour. But it was now of the latest." This re markable interview took place at Woburn. The cause of this de portment of the king — the " secret strength and power " which he believed himself to possess — was the expectation that the City would be too powerful for the Army. Bands of apprentices had surrounded Westminster Hall, clamorously demanding the return of the king. An engagement, signed by thousands, was entered into, pledging those who signed it to make all efforts to accom plish the king's return to London. This was at the exact period when Berkeley had shown Charles the proposals of the Army ; but before the interview with Ireton and the otlier officers. Upon the news of these proceedings in London, Fairfax and his army had moved towards the capital The tumults grew more serious. 544 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. On the 26th of July, all the avenues of the Houses were beset with a violent multitude. They brought a Petition, which was re ceived at the door of the Commons. No answer was returned, and shouts arose of " Let us go in." Members drew their swords, and drove back those who were crowding in the lobby. Some of the rioters climbed up to the windows of the House of Peers, and threw stones into the Chamber. The door of the House of Com mons was at last forced open ; and a body of men rushed in, call ing out "Vote, Vote." They demanded that a resolution of the previous day, carried by the Independents, declaring those traitors who voted for the city " engagement," should be rescinded. The Speaker left the chair, and went into the lobby, after the House had voted as the rioters desired. Ludlow thus records the scene when the Speaker "was forced back into the chair by the violence of the insolent rabble." " It was thought convenient to give way to their rage ; and the Speaker demanding what question they de sired to be put, they answered, That the king should be desired to come to London forthwith : which question being put, they were asked again what further they would have. They said that he should be invited to come with honour, freedom, and safety: to both which I gave a loud negative, and some of the members as loud an affirmative, rather out of a prudential compliance than any a/T«>rtion to the design on foot" * This was on a Monday. The army ]av at Windsor, Maidenhead, Colnbrook, and adjacent places. The ,^.-)USes adjourned to Friday, the 30th of July. The Speakers °f- the Lords and Commons have withdrawn, and many members have withdrawn with them. The eleven members whose impeach ment the Army had demanded, have now returned. The Presby terian party appears to be triumphant. New Speakers are elected. The king has had his interview with Ireton and the Council of Officers, and has indiscreetly shown his reliance upon agitations which he is more than suspected of having excited. Suddenly the whole course of the political movement is changed. A train of carriages arrives from London with lord Manchester and Mr. Lenthall, the Speakers ; and they are accompanied by fourteen of the Peers, and about one hundred members of the Commons. f Those who remain at Westminster have not been idle. Troops are to be enlisted. The army is commanded not to advance. But * " Memoirs," vol. i. p. 206. t These numbers are given by Rushworth aud Whitelock. Hollis says eight 'ords and fifty-eight commoners. THE SPEAKERS AND MEMBERS GO TO THE ARMY. 545 it does advance. On the 3rd of August, Hounslow Heath, then a vast unenclosed space, is appointed for a Rendezvous of this for midable force. It is now something more than a power strug gling against a parliamentary majority. The Speaker of the Lords, and the Speaker of the Commons, — the Sergeatit-at-Arms with the mace — the most energetic of the Members — the visible authority and the real potency of Parliament are with the Army. " They appeared at the head of them," says Ludlow, " at which the Army expressed great joy, declaring themselves resolved to live and die with them." There is yet a hope that the king will still endeavour to retain the only power that can really help him. It was clear that London will succumb without a blow. Fairfax and his twenty thousand pause for a day or two, communicating with the authorities of the City. With the party at Westminster and their new Speakers, they have no intercourse. The army is quartered about Brentford, Hounslow, Twickenham, and adjacent villages ; " without restraining any provisions, which, every day, according to custom, were carried to London ; or doing the least action that might disoblige or displease- the city: the army being, in truth, under so excellent discipline, that nobody could complain of any damage sustained by them , or any provocation by word or deed." * Berkeley says that Cromwell, Ireton, and the rest of the superior officers of the army, knew that London would certainly be theirs ; and " therefore sent an express to Mr. Ashburnham and to me, to express that, since his majesty would not yield to the proposals, yet he should, at least, send a kind letter to the army, before it were commonly known that London would submit." A meeting of the friends and advisers of the king was held at Wind sor, and a letter of this nature was prepared. But -Charles would not sign the letter till it was too late ; and when he reluctantly sent it, "it had lost all its grace and efficacy." The City had yielded. There was no longer a present hope of profiting by dissensions between Parliament and Army. Oh the 6th of August, Fairfax, surrounded by four of his regiments, and conducting the Mem bers of Parliament who had fled to the Army, proceeded to West minster. At Hyde Park they were met by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen ; at Charing Cross by the Common Council. The In dependents, now supreme in parliament, took their seats. The mace was again laid on the table. Two days after, the whole army, horse, foot, and artillery, marched through Westminster and * Clarendon, vol. v. p. 466. Vol. III.— 35 546 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the City, and over London Bridge to their various quarters in Surrey. They marched, says Clarendon, "without the least dis order, or doing the least damage to any person, or giving any dis- respective word to any man." Denzil Hollis, one of the eleven members whose little hour of supremacy had so quickly passed, describes with more than his usual bitterness, this march of the Ironsides : " Sir Thomas Fairfax and the whole Army marched in triumph, with laurel in their hats as conquerors, through.the sub dued city of London, to show it was at his mercy ; which was an airy vanity, I confess above my understanding, and might have raised a spirit of indignation, not so easily to have been laid. But a higher insolency of an Army composed of so mean people, and a more patient humble submission and bearing of a great and populous city, but a little before so full of honour and greatness, was, I think, never heard of." The king was lodged at Hampton Court. The head-quarters of the Army were at Putney. The king remained at Hampton Court for three months. The spacious quadrangles of the old palace of Wolsey were well adapted for comfort. He Jiad dwelt there with his young queen in the first year of their marriage ; and ten years had scarcely passed since he was surrounded by his brilliant court at the Revels in the Great Hall, and had listened in freedom and security to the dramas of Shakspere and Fletcher, of Davenant and Cartwright. Some of the old familiar faces came about him in this autumn of 1647. His children were frequently with him. " Persons of all conditions repaired to his majesty of all who had served him ; with whom he conferred without reservation ; and the citizens flocked thither, as they had used to do at the end of a progress." * Evelyn has this entry in his Diary of October: " On the 10th to Hampton Court, where I had the honour to kiss his majesty's hand, and give him an account of several things I had in charge, he being now in the power of those execrable villains who not long after murdered him." They were very frequently with his majesty, "those ex ecrable villains." They were really intent upon doing him as much service as lay in their power, if he could have trusted them, and they could have trusted him. Cromwell and Ireton endeavoured to serve the king, even with great danger to themselves. Charles was constantly sending messages to them at Putney by Ashburn ham, as Berkeley states ; Cromwell had many conferences with the king, according to Clarendon. " They had enough to do," says * Clarendon. CROMWELL. 547 Berkeley, " both in Parliament and Council of the Army, the one abounding with Presbyterians, the other with Levellers, and both really jealous [suspicious] that Cromwell and Ireton had made a private bargain with the king." * Lilburne, now in violent oppo sition to his old friends, was printing the most bitter denunciations against these betrayers of the people. The Presbyterians gave out that Berkeley had told lady Carlisle that Cromwell was to be earl of Essex, which statement Berkeley explicitly denied. Silly royal ists about the king tried to persuade him that it would be for his interest "to divide Cromwell and the Army." These wheels within wheels required some chief motive power which Charles was incapable of furnishing. His natural want of decision of char acter was rendered more prominent by these complications. He had to deal with men who were the very opposite to himself in that simplicity of purpose which we recognise as the foundation of de cision of character. Cromwell and Ireton had strong convictions of the value of democratic government ; but they knew how infinite were the risques of democracy btfcoming universal licence, if the liberties of the people were attempted to be raised upon any other than the ancient foundations. They would therefore endeavour to save the king, if they could do so with security to the [lOpUlar rights. None but the most prejudiced judges can trace in their actions, at this crisis, the sl'ghtest manifestation of a desire to be tray the king. They were "faithful to their trust, and to the' peo ple's interest; " but they believed "that the king might have been managed to comply with the public good of his, people after he could no longer uphold his own violent will." Mrs. Hutchinson, who expresses this confidence in Cromwell and Ireton,. shows how the king destroyed these expectations. " Upon some discourses with him, the king uttering these words to him, ' I shall play my game as well as I can ; ' Ireton replied, ' If your majesty have a game to play, you must also give us the liberty to play ours.'" The foremost men of the Independent party still endeavoured to second the reasonable wishes of the king. The Presbyterians had again pressed upon him the terms of the treaty at Newcastle, slightly modified. Charles desired a personal treaty with the Parliament, and thought the proposals which had come from the Army ap- peared a better ground of settlement. Cromwell," Vane, Ireton, and their friends strenuously supported his desire for a personal treaty. "The suspicions were so strong in the House," says * "Memoirs." 548 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Berkeley, " that they lost almost all their friends there ; and the Army that lay then about Putney, were no less ill satisfied." In the course of the autumn an incident occurred, which has so much of romance in it that historians have been some what doubtful of repeating a story so admirably calculated for stage effect. The scene is the Blue Boar inn in Holborn. There it still stands in the parish of St. Andrew, pretty much the same as it stood in the beginning of the seventeenth century — a well-preserved specimen of an ancient hostelry. The yard is dedi cated to all the purposes of traffic. -The buildings of the quad rangle form stables or common tap-rooms on the ground level. On the upper floors are the sitting-rooms and dormitories, with gal leries carried all round, forming a corridor to the first floor. To this quaint old place come two men in trooper's clothes on an October evening. They enter by the wicket in the inn gate, leaving an attendant in the street. These jolly troopers go into a "drinking- stall : " and calling for the drawer, " sit drinking cans of beer till ten of the clock." They expect an arrival. Their watcher at the gate gives them notice that " the man with the saddle " is come. Their eyes are upon him from their drinking-stall. He goes into a stable ; saddles his horse ; and as he leads the steed forth, the troopers draw their swords, and tell him their duty is to search all those who go in or out. They say, however, that he looks like an honest fellow, and therefore they would only search his saddle. Into their drinking-stall they return ; cut open " the skirts of the saddle ; " take out a letter which they suspected to be therein concealed ; and send the horseman on his way. The two troopers are Cromwell and Ireton. Cromwell told the story him self to lord Broghill, afterwards earl of Orrery, when they were serving together in Ireland. The two, with Ireton, were ridingout of Youghal, when they fell into discourse about the king's death. Cromwell said that they had once " a mind to have closed with him ; " but something happened, and they " fell off from that design." Broghill was curious to know the reason of this change. Cromwell told him that, finding the Scots and Presbyterians were growing more powerful, and were likely to agree with the king " and leave them in the lurch," they thought it best to offer first to come in upon reasonable conditions. " But," continued Cromwell, " whilst cur thoughts were taken up with this subject, there came a letter to us from one of our spies, who v>as of the king's bedcham* ber, acquainting us that our final doom was decreed that very day; THE INTERCEPTED LETTER OF THE KING. 549 that he could not possibly learn what it was, but we might discover it if we could but intercept a letter sent from the king to the queen, wherein he informed her of his resolution : that this letter was sown up in the skirt of a saddle, and the bearer of it would come with the saddle upon his head about ten of the clock that night to the Blue Boar in Holborn, where he was to take horse for Dover. The messenger knew nothing of the letter in the saddle, though some' in Dover did. We were at Windsor when we received this letter, and immediately upon the receipt of it, Ireton and I resolved to take one trusty fellow with us, and to go in troopers' habits to that inn. We did so." Cromwell then related the adventure; and further told what the discovery was that changed their purpose of closing with the king : "We found in the letter, that his majesty acquainted the queen that he was courted by both factions, the Scotch Presbyterians and the army ; and that those which bade the fairest for him should have him: but yet he thought he should close with the Scots sooner than with the other. Upon this we return ed to Windsor ; and finding we were not like to have good terms from the king, we from that time vowed his destruction." This well-known story is told by the reverend Thomas Morrice, as re lated to him by the earl of Orrery, to whom he was chaplain. The contents of the letter thus described do not appear to us sufficiently important to have caused the resolution of Cromwell and Ireton for the king's destruction. They already knew that he was courted by both factions. They knew that " those who bade the fairest for him would have him." Orrery became a cabinet-counsellor of Charles IL, and might have prudently generalised the contents of the letter which is. said to have caused the final separation of Cromwell from the interests of Charles I. There is another story of a letter, which Hume thinks contradictory to the character of the king, and therefore rejects it as " totally unworthy of credit." It is thus related by Richardson, the painter : " Lord Bolingbroke told us, June 12, 1742, (Mr. Pope, lord Marchmont, and myself), that the second carl of, Oxford had often told him that he had seen and had in his hands, an original letter that Charles I. wrote to his queen, in answer to one of hers that had been intercepted, and then forwarded to him ; wherein she had reproached him for having made those villains too great concession, viz, that Cromwell should be lord-lieutenant of Ireland for life without account ; that that kingdom should be in the hands of the party, with an army there kept which should know no head but the lieutenant ; that Cromwell 550 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. should have a garter, &c. That in this letter of the king's it was said that she should leave him to manage, who was better informed of all circumstances than she could be ; but she might be entirely easy as to whatever concessions he should make them ; for that he should know in due time how to deal with the rogues, who, instead of a silken garter, should be fitted with a hempen cord. So the letter ended ; which answer as they waited for so they intercepted accordingly, and it determined his fate. This letter lord Oxford said he had offered 500/. for." * Those who carefully examine the intricate and discordant nar ratives of this exact period will probably come to the conclusion, that there were more imperative motives for Cromwell breaking off his intercourse with the king than his own personal mortification at being promised a hempen cord instead of a silken garter. He was fast losing his influence over the Army. The conqueror at Naseby was now held to be the traitor at Hampton Court. The Agitators had become unmanageable. They issued pamphlets, setting forth the most extreme principles. They became violent against monar chy in general, and especially furious against those who appeared to favour the cause of Charles in any degree. Cromwell has ceased his visits at Hampton Court. He is alarmed for the king's safety ; or, as some hold, he pretends to be alarmed. His cousin, colonel Whalley, commands the guard about the king. Cromwell writes to him in November, " There are rumours abroad of some intended attempt on his majesty's person. Therefore, I pray, have a care of your guards. If any such thing should be done, it would be accounted a most horrid act." Charles yields to the fears natural enough in his helpless condition. He has unhappy dreams. His night-lamp going out is a presage of evil. About the 3rd of November Berkeley and Ashburnham, who had been removed from about the king's person, meet at Ditton at the desire of major Legg, who waited in the king's bed-chamber. They tell Berkeley " that his majesty was really afraid of his life by the tumultuous part of the army, and was resolved to make his escape." Berkeley after wards saw the king, and was asked to assist in the project. Where to go was yet a question. It was no especial weakness in Charles, but a credulity belonging to the age, that William Lilly, the astrol oger, was consulted by a female agent of the king, wno paid a heavy sum to the " Sidrophel," who was ready to prophesy for all *, " I have been informed that a memorandum nearly conformable to Richardson's anecdote is extant, in the handwriting of Lord Oxford." — Hallam. THE KING ESCAPES FROM HAMPTON COURT. 55 1 parties. Some plan was at last determined upon. On the evening of the 1 ith of November, the commissioners and Colonel Whalley, missing the king at supper, went into his chamber and found him gone. A newspaper of the time, " the Moderate Intelligencer," has a far more interesting notice of the event (as was the way of newspapers even then) than the offichl entries of Lords' Journals, and Commons' Journals : " November 11 — This day will be famous in after times because towards the end of it his majesty escaped a kind of restraint under which he was at Hampton Court : and according to the best relation, thus : — He, as was usual, went to be private-a little before evening prayer ; staying somewhat longer than usual, it was taken notice of ; yet at first without suspicion ; but he not coming forth suddenly, there were fears, which increased by the crying of a greyhound again and again within ; and upon search it was found the king was gone ; and by the way of Paradise, a place so called in the garden ; in probability suddenly after his going in, and about twilight. He left a paper to the Parliament, another to the commissioners, and a third to colonel Whalley." The faithful greyhound of Charles I. whining for the absence of his master, is a pretty contrast to Froissart's story of the unfaithful greyhound of Richard 1 1.; " who always waited upon the king, and would know no man else : " but who, in the hour of his adver: sity, " left the king and came to the earl of Derby, duke of Lan. caster, and made to him the same friendly countenance and chee* as he was wont to do to the king." 552 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER XXIX. Narratives of the king's Escape. — He goes to the Isle of Wight. — The Levellers in the Army. — Their meeting suppressed. — Berkeley's unsuccessful mission to Fairfax and Cromwell. — Scotch and English Commissioners at Carisbrook. — Parliament declares agai.ist any further treaty with the king. — Royalist Re-action. — Riots in London. — Revo ts in many districts. — The king attempts to escape from Carisbrook. — Insurrec tions quelled. — Cromwell in Wales. — Scottish Army in England. — Cromwell's march from Wales. — Battle of Preston — Cromwell in Edinburgh. — Note on the party-jpirit during the Royalist reaction. There are two minute relations of the circumstances that im mediately succeeded the flight of the king from Hampton Court — the narratives of Berkeley and Ashburnham. Each of these was written with the intention of justifying its author from the charge of having betrayed the king, which the Royalists affirmed; and for this purpose they were circulated in manuscript after tbe Restora tion. * Each tries to fix the unfortunate issue of the adventure upon the other adviser of the king. The interest of this contro versy has long since passed ; and we may therefore accept Claren don's opinion "that neither of them were, in any degree, corrupted in their loyalty or affection to the king, or suborned to gratify any persons with a disservice to their master." f In the main points of the story both these companions in the flight of Charles do not materially differ. The night of Thursday, the nth of November, was dark and stormy. Berkeley and Ashburnham were waiting with horses by the -Thames' side, and when Charles came out, accompanied by major Legg, they immediately rode towards Oatlands. Cromwell had been sent for, upon the escape being discovered ; and at midnight he wrote a letter to the Speaker of the Commons, announcing the withdrawal of the king; who " had left his cloak behind him in the gallery of the private way ; and had passed by the backstairs and vault towards the water-side." The four rode " through the forest," X the king being their guide ; but they lost their way, and * Berkeley's Narrative was printed in 1699- Ashbumham's not till 1S36. t " Histor\," vol. v. p. 497. X The route from Oatlands into Hampshire would lead through Windsor Forest, then comprising a vast circuit of many parishes. CHARLES GOES TO THE ISLE OF WIGHT. 553 were busied in discussions about the ultimate course they were to pursue. Ashburnham says that previous to their departure the king had told him, " he had some thoughts of going out of the kingdom, but for the shortness of the time to prepare a vessel to transport him ; and for the other reasons I had sent him by major Legg he was resolved to go to the Isle of Wight." At day-break of that dark November morning they were at Sutton in Hampshire, where they had sent a relay of horses ; and they immediately continued their way towards Southampton. As they walked down a hill with their horses in their hands, they again discussed what to do ; and then Berkeley says he heard for the first time anything of the Isle of Wight. It was arranged that the king and Legg should proceed to a house of lord Southampton at Tit.chfield ; that Berke ley and Ashburnham should go into the Isle of Wight to colonel Hammond, the governor. Robert Hammond was connected with the royalist as well as with the parliamentary party. One of his uncles was chaplain to the king. Through the friendship of Crom well he had himself married a daughter of Hampden. The two com panions of the king slept at Lymington ; and the next morning reached Carisbrook. They delivered to Hammond a message of the king, that he had been under the necessity of providing for his own safety, but would confide himself to the governor of the island, as one who had prosecuted the war against him without any ani mosity to his person; asking if he would promise protection to his majesty and his attendants to the best of his power. Berkeley .says that Hammond grew so pale, and fell into such a trembling, that he expected him to fall from his horse, exclaiming, •' O gentle men, you have undone me by bringing the king into this island, if you have brought -him." After much discussion, Hammond en gaged " to perform whatever could' be expected from a person of honour and honesty ; " and, being then partly informed where the king was, proposed to go with them. They reached Cowes, and here took boat to Titchfield, Hammond having the captain of Cowes Castle with him. The scene which followed is related by Ashburn ham, as if. it were something very creditable to himself and to the king. The king was alarmed, and said that he was sure the gov ernor would make him a prisoner; and then Ashburnham said, " I was happy that I had provided an expedient ; so that if he would say what other course he would steer,. I would take order that the governor should not interrupt him,. His majesty asked me how that could possibly be, since the governor was come with us ? I an- 554 HISTORY OF ENGLAND swered that his coming made any other way more practicable than if he had stayed behind. He then told me, that he had sent to Hampton for a vessel, to transport him into France, and was in good hope to be supplied, and that he expected news of it every moment, but very earnestly pressed to know how I would clear him of the governor. I answered that I was resolved and prepared to kill him and the captain with my own hands." The valiant Jack Ashburnham who, in his fever of loyalty, proposed to slay the man whom he believed worthy of all confidence, was not discarded by the king upon this proof that he had a treacherous nature. His re- , lation thus continues : " His majesty walking some few turns in the room, and, as he was afterwards pleased to tell me, weighing what I had proposed to him, and considering that if the ship should not come, it would not be many hours before some, in pursuance of him, would seize him, the consequence whereof he very much ap prehended, resolved he would not have execution done upon the governor, for he intended to accept of what he had proposed and to go with him, and therefore commanded he should be called up, sir John Berkeley being not yet come to the king." There was no news of the expected ship ; orders had arrived at Southampton that the port should be closed; and in two hours the king was in a boat sailing to the Fair Isle. That night he slept at Carisbrook Castle. The inevitable tendency of all revolutions to call into action violent bodies of men professing principles that strike at the foun dation of secure and orderly government, was now clearly visible. The Levellers had become conspicuous in the army — those, accord ing to Clarendon, who declared " that all degrees of men should be levelled, and an equality should be established, both in titles and estates throughout the kingdom." * The historian of the Re bellion doubts "whether the raising of this spirit was a piece of Cromwell's ordinary witchcraft, in order to some of his designs, or whether it grew amongst the tares which had been sowed in that confusion." Had Clarendon lived through a period of sixty years of far more terrible revolutions in another kingdom, he would have known that it needs no " witchcraft " to evoke such a spirit out of the passions of the enthusiastic and the rapacity of the dishonest. Whatever the historian believes of Cromwell's witchcraft, he does full justice to his human powers of " dexterity and courage," by which " he totally subdued that spirit in the army." which would * " Rebellion," vol. v. p. 486. THE LEVELLERS IN THE ARMY. 555 otherwise " have produced all imaginable mischief in the parlia ment, army, and kingdom." * Four clays after the king has quitted Hampton Court, Cromwell is dealing very summarily— in " a rough and brisk temper," as Clarendon has it — with some of those against whom he had warned colonel Whalley, in regard to the safety of Charles's person. A rendezvous is appointed at Corkbush field, between Ware and Hertford, for seven regiments. But there are nine regiments on the ground. Harrison's regiment of horse, and Lilburn's cf foot, have come without orders. Lilburn himself has been sent to the Tower ; but being permitted to ride out, for his health, has come to the rendezvous. His regiment is without its officers, for the Agitators have expelled all above the rank of lieu tenant, with the exception of one captain. They have papers in their hats, of " Liberty for England, their rights for the soldiers." Fairfax and Cromwell read to the seven regiments a remonstrance against the proceedings of the Agitators, and they are received with acclamations. Fairfax addresses Harrison's cavalry, and the troopers exclaim that they will live and die with their general, and they tear the inscriptions from their hats. Lilburn's regiment reply to Fairfax with derisive shouts. Cromwell exclaims " Take that paper from your hats." They refuse. He rushes into the ranks ; orders fourteen of the mutineers to be seized ; a drum-head court- martial is assembled, and three are condemned to death. The Council of Officers order that they shall draw lots which shall de termine the fate of one. The immediate execution of that one re stored the army to its wonted discipline . But such remedies can not frequently be repeated. The most violent of the fanatics are preaching against the severity exercised towards their " saints." The Presbyterians look coldly upon the energy of the great military Independent ; the republican politicians begin to fear and distrust him. Ludlow cries " No," when a vote of thanks to Cromwell is proposed in parliament. They do not see as clear as he does the line which separates liberty from anarchy. Colonel Hammond, according to Berkeley's relation, had many private conferences with the king ; and was earnest that some author ised person should proceed from Charles to the generals who hadput down the violence of the Agitators. Berkeley set out with letters from the king and also from the governor, and arrived at the head quarters at Windsor. He delivered his letters to Fairfax at,a general meeting of officers. Being desired to withdraw, .he was soon after- * "Rebellion," vol. v. p. 506. 556 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. wards called in ; and was sternly told by Fairfax that they were tbe Parliament's officers, and must refer the king's letters to the Parliament. Cromwell and Ireton looked coldh. upon him, as well as other officers with whom he was acquainted. His servant went out to find some one to whom Berkeley could speak ; and a general officer sent him a message to meet him in a close behind the Garter Inn, at twelve at night. They met ; and his friend urged him to persuade the king to escape ; for that it was resolved to seize his person and bring him to trial. The Agitators, he said, were not quelled; and had been repeatedly with Cromwell and Ireton to tell them that they would bring the whole army to the conviction that the king should be broug'it to trial. The general further said that he hazarded his own life in this interview ; for it was agreed that no one should speak with Berkeley, under pain of death. Cromwell had despaired of bringing the army to his sense, and must make his peace with those who were most opposed to the king. "He was re-instated in the fellowship of the faithful." Berkeley the next day sent colonel Cook to Cromwell, to say that he had letters and papers for him from the king. " He sent me word, by the same messenger, that he durst not see me, it being very dangerous to us both ; and bid me be assured that he would serve his majesty as long as he could do it without his own ruin ; but desired that I would not expect that he should perish for his sake." Cronrwell was on the edge of a precipice. There was a belief that he was privy to the escape of the king. Ludlow, the republican says, " it was visible that the king made his escape by the advice of Cromwell." It is certainly not improbable that Cromwell, knowing the dangers of the king, might sincerely desire that he might escape out of the kingdom. The notion of Hollis, that he recommended the flight to the Isle of Wight, " because he had there provided a gaoler," is irreconcileable with the facts. Charles during the first month might have escaped from Carisbrook without any difficulty, had proper means been supplied. A ship only was wanting. Berkeley went back to the king to recommend this course, which he had urged by letter ; but the false hope of dealing with another party again prevailed over the natural fears of Charles for his own life, Berkeley's first words to the king were, " Why was he still in the island, where he could not long promise himself the liberty he now had ?" Charles replied, "that he would have a care of that, time enough ; and that he was to conclude with the Scots, because from their desire to have him out of the Army's hands they would listen SCOTCH AND ENGLISH NEGOTIATING WITH CHARLES. 557 to reason." The Scottish commissioners came to Carisbrook to wards the end of December. It had been voted in the House of Lords at the end of November, that propositions should again be offered to the king in the shape of four bills, far more stringent as to the power of Parliament and the Militia than the offers at any previous time, but leaving the religious question untouched. The Scottish commissioners in London had secretly advised the king to reject these bills. Their own proposals were, that a Scot tish army should come into England to restore him to his rights, provided that he confirmed the Presbyterian establishment in Eng land for a period of three years, and then the constitution of the Church to be finally settled. " In that season of despair," says Clarendon, " they prevailed with him to sign the propositions he had formerly refused ; and having great apprehensions, from the jealousies they knew the army had of them, that they should be seized upon and searched on their return to London, they made up their precious contract in lead, and buried it in a garden in the Isle of Wight, from whence they easily found means afterwards to re ceive it." Having concluded this dangerous alliance, Charles de livered his answer to the English commissioners. He had in vain endeavoured to prevail upon lord Denbigh and the others to take back his determination in a sealed envelope. He rejected the propositions. That evening the gates of Carisbrook Castle were closed, guards surrounded the fortress ; and the greater number of the king's servants, including Berkeley and Ashburnham, were or dered to quit the island. An escape meditated for the next night was no longer practicable. The commissioners of the Parliament returned to Westminster, to proclaim what was, in truth, the com plete triumph of the republicans. The last manoeuvre of the un fortunate king rendered his difficult condition utterly desperate. Ludlow, speaking of the English and Scottish negotiations at Ca risbrook, says, " Whilst these two sorts of commissioners were one day attending the king as he walked about the castle, they observed him to throw a bone before two spaniels that ¦ followed him, and to take great delight in seeing them contending for it ; which some of them thought to be intended by him to represent that bone of con tention he had cast between the two parties." * It was a delight that was to come, to a fatal issue. Cromwell wrote to colonel Hammond on the 3rd of January, " The House of Commons is very sensible of the king's dealings, and of our brethren's [the * " Memoirs," vol. i. p. 232. 558 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Scots], in this late transaction.'' He tells his "dear Robin," that " now, blessed be God, I can write and thou receive freely." He alludes to some struggle of the governor in favour of his unhappy prisoner, — "thou in the midst of thy temptation, which, indeed, by what we understand of it, was a great one." The letter-writer ex- ultingly communicates the result of the proceedings at Carisbrook: "The House of Commons has this day voted as follows: — ist. They will make no more Addresses to the^king; 2nd. None shall apply to him without leave of the two Houses, upon pain of being guilty of high treason ; 3rd. They will receive nothing from the king, nor shall any other bring anything to them from him, nor re ceive anything from the king." The Lords adopted the resolution, after some debate. Unless there be some speedy change, the end will be accomplished that the majority in Parliament contended for, " to settle the commonwealth without the king." That majority in the Commons was a very formidable one — 141 to 91 ; and their resolution is justly described by Mr. Hallam as " a virtual renun ciation of allegiance." But, however' the notion of a sovereign representative assem bly as the government suited for England might please the politi cal enthusiasts and the military fanatics, the great body of quiet people, who desired the protection of the law under a limited monarchy, were not prepared to endure that a democracy should be thrust upon them at the point of the sword. Discontent was very generally spread. Murmurings would shortly grow into re volts. Cromwell, who saw better than most men the inevitable result of political and religious discords, whilst the supreme author ity was so unsettled, tried to effect some reconciliation between Presbyterians and Independents. The dinner at which Cromwell assembled them was given in vain. " One would endure no supe rior, the other no equal." Ludlow, who thus describes the result of this attempt, relates more minutely the proceedings of another meeting at which he was present. The Grandees of the House and Army, of whom he terms Cromwell the head, "would not declare their judgments either for a monarchical, aristocratical, or democratical government ; maintaining that any of them might be good in themselves, or for us, according as Providence should direct us." The Commonwealth's men boldly declared against monarchy ; that the king had broken his oath, and dissolved their allegiance ; maintained that he had appealed to the sword, and should be called to account for the effusion of blood; after which ROYALIST RE-ACTION. 559 an equal Commonwealth, founded upon the consent of the people. The discussion, solemn as it was, had a ludicrous termination. " Cromwell," says Ludlow, " professed himself unresolved ; and having learned what he could of the principles and inclinations of those present at the conference, took up a cushion and flung it at my head, and then ran down the stairs ; but I overtook him with another, which made him hasten down faster than he desired." * Cromwell told Ludlow the next day that " he was convinced of the desirableness of what was proposed, but not of the feasibleness of it." There was a meeting some time after, conducted in a very different mood by Cromwell — a meeting of officers of the Army at Windsor Castle, as reported by adjutant-general Allen. These zealous men spent one whole day in prayer. They were exhorted by Cromwell to a thorough consideration of their actions as an Army, and of their ways as private Christians. They became con vinced that the Lord had departed from them, through " those car nal conferences which they held in the preceding year with the king and his party." They, with bitter weeping, took sense and shame of their iniquities. They came to a clear agreement that it was their duty to go forth and fight the enemies that had ap peared against them. They finally came to a resolution, " That it was our duty, that, if ever the Lord brought us back again in peacfe, to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for that blood he had shed, and mischief he had done to his utmost, against the Lord's cause and people in these poor nations." f These men, not hypocrites, not wholly fanatics, are very terrible in their stern resolves. They will go forth to fight '• the enemies that had ap peared against them" — and then! There is a re-action in many quarters in England. The Scots are preparing to invade. A sec ond Civil War is fast approaching. When the Parliament passed their resolution to receive no more communications from the king, and to forbid all correspond ence with him, they published a declaration imputing all the mis fortunes of his reign to himself personally, and not to evil coun sellors, as had been the custom before monarchy had lost its respect even in the eyes of those who were opposed to its evil government. Clarendon ascribes the partial re-action of public opinion in a great degree to what he calls "this monstrous declara tion." But he wholly misconceives or misrepresents the temper of the people, when he sets forth "a universal discontent and » " Memoirs," p. 239. t Somcrs' Tracts, given in Carlyle's " Cromwell," vol. i. 560 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. murmuring of the three nations, and almost as general a detesta tion both of parliament and army, and a most passionate desire that all their follies and madness might be forgotten in restoring the king to all they had taken from him, and in settling that blessed government they had deprived themselves of."* Nations have sometimes unaccountable fits of oblivion ; but the memory of eleven years of the unmitigated despotism of " that blessed gov ernment " was too deeply written upon the volume of the people's brain, though Edward Hyde might choose to forget it. Neverthe less, the nation was tired of its distractions. It wearied for some permanent settlement that might end the hoarse disputes and subtile intrigues of Parliament and Army, of Presbyterian and Independent ; that might free the possessors of rank and property from the dread of wild men with notions of social equality ; that might restore industry to its healthful functions, and put an end not only to the cost of a standing military force, but to its fearful resistance to civil power. The desire of the peaceful portion of the nation was feebly heard amidst the surrounding clamour. The attempt to express their impatience of existing evils by riot and re volt was necessarily a vain attempt. This spirit was displayed in the city of London, at the beginning of April. Cromwell and some of the other leaders attend a Common-Council ; but they find the Presbyterians indisposed to listen to what they call " their subtle ties." The next day there is a formidable riot. It is Sunday. The puritan strictness in religious observances, and in minor matters, has come to be less respected than before the close of the war. Royalists, amidst their contempt for what they deem fanaticism, are now mixing again in the ordinary intercourse with the despised Roundheads. The theatre is now not wholly proscribed. • Evelyn writes in his Diary, " 5th February, saw a tragi-comedy acted in the Cockpit, after there had been none of these diversions for many years during the war." On that Sunday, the 9th of April, there are ap prentices playing at bowls in Moorfields during church-time. They are, ordered todisperse by the militia guard ; but they fight with the guard, and hold their ground. Soon routed by cavalry, they raise the old cry of " Clubs ; " are joined by the watermen, a numerous and formidable body ; fight on through the night ; and in the morn ing have possession of Ludgate and Newgate, and have stretched chains across all the great thoroughfares. There are forty hours of this tumult, in which the prevailing cry is " God and king * " Rebellion," vol. vi. p. 1. REVOLTS IN MANY DISTRICTS. 561 Charles." At last a body of cavalry arrive from Westminster; there is an irresistible charge of the men who had rode down far more terrible assailants ; and that movement is at an end. But in many towns there are similar riots. In Wales some Presbyterian officers of the parliamentary army, with colonel Poyer at their head, have raised a far more formidable insurrection. Pembroke Castle is in their hands. They soon have possession of Chepstow Castle. The gentry have proclaimed the king. It is a Presbyte rian-royalist insurrection, allied in principle with the purposes of the moderate Presbyterians of Scotland, who are organising their army for the march into England. The Welsh outbreak is some what premature ; but nevertheless it is very formidable. It is alarming enough to demand the personal care of lieutenant-general Cromwell. He leaves London on the 3rd of May, with, five regi ments. The Londoners are glad to be freed from his presence ; for a rumour has been spread that the army at Whitehall are about to attack and plunder the city. Petitions were addressed to the Commons that the army should remove further ; and that the militia should be placed under the command of Skippon. The re-action gave the Presbyterians again the command in Parlia ment ; and it was voted on the 28th of April, that the fundamental government of the kingdom by King, Lords, and Commons, should not be changed ; and that the resolutions forbidding all communi cation with the king should be rescinded. Popular demonstrations immediately followed the departure of Cromwell. Surrey gentle men, freeholders, and yeomen, came to Westminster with a peti tion that the king should be restored with all the splendour of his ancestors. . A broil ensued between the parliamentary guard and these petitioners, who asked the soldiers, " Why do you stand here to guard a company of rogues ? " Several of the Surrey men, and one of the guard, were killed. The Royalists of Kent organised themselves in a far more formidable shape. They secured Sand wich and Dover; appointed as general, Goring, earl of Norwich; and assembled at Rochester to the number of seven thousand. Troops were raised for the royal service in the eastern and mid land counties. More dangerous to the ruling powers than all these demonstrations, was the defection of the fleet. Clarendon has thus described the mariners of his time : " The seamen are in a manner a nation by themselves; a humorous, brave, and sturdy people ; fierce and resolute in whatsoever they are inclined to ; somewhat unsteady and inconstant in pursuing it ; and jealous of those to- Vol. III.— 36 562 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. morrow by whom they are governed to-day." If Clarendon's de scription be correct, it must be taken solely with reference to a reign when the maritime power of England had been allowed to fall to the lowest condition. It could not apply to the sailors of Drake and Frobisher. Less could it apply to the sailors of Blake and Penn. The unsteadiness and the inconstancy, the jealousy of the government under which they served, belonged to a period when the government had long been indifferent to the national honour. These characteristics altogether passed away when the first thought of the English fleet was how " not to be fooled by the foreigner." The sailors of 1648 put their admiral on shore, and carried their ships to Holland, to place them under the command of the prince of Wales, who appealed in the Channel, — and did nothing. The Royalists were in the highest exultation. They ex pected the king soon to be again at their head. The earl of Hol land had turned once more to what he thought would be the win ning side ; and his mansion at Kensington was again the resort of Cavaliers. But the king does not appear amongst them. An at. tempt at escape from Carisbrook has a second time failed. On the 6th of April, Cromwell had written to Hammond, " Intelligence came to the hands of a very considerable person, that the king had attempted to get out of his window ; and that he had a cord of silk with him whereby to slip down, but his breast was so big that the bar could not give him passage. This was done in one ofthe dark nights about a fortnight ago. A gentleman with you led him the way and slipped down. The guard, that night, had some quantity of wine with them. The same party assures that there is aqua fortis gone down from London, to remove that obstacle which hin dered ; and that the same design is to be put in execution on the next dark nights." He then points out that " Master Firebrace " was the gentleman assisting the king ; and mentions captain Titus, and two others, " who are not to be trusted." It is prob ably to this time that the statement of Clarendon must be re ferred, when he says that the king " from thenceforth was no more suffered to go out of the castle beyond a little ill garden that belonged to it." His pleasant walks, upon the beautiful green ramparts looking out upon the sea beyond the fertile valleys about Carisbrook, were at an end. If the local traditions are to be trusted, the barred windows of his apartment had no prospect beyond the spacious court-yard. On the 31st of May, Hammond wrote to the Parliament that the king had again nearly effected his INSURRECTIONS QUELLED. — CROMWELL IN WALES. 563 escape. Another dread now came over the Presbyterian party. They would negotiate with the king ; but they would take strong measures against the Royalists. All papists and malignants were banished from London under more severe penalties than before. Fairfax was directed to proceed with all his forces against the insurgents in Kent and Essex and the other counties around Lon don. They issued new ordinances against heresy, which affected the Independents; and against swearing, which touched the Cav aliers very nearly. The general and the army marched into Kent ; dispersed the insurgents after an obstinate fight at Maidstone ; and by rapid successes, wherever else there was resistance, put down the rising spirit. Lord Goring, after having led several thousand men to Blackheath, expecting assistance in London, was compelled to see the desertion of his followers, and he crossed the Thames into Essex. There the contest was more prolonged, Lord Capel and Sir Charles Lucas had collected a large force, with which they intended to march from Colchester upon London. Fairfax invested the town ; and for two months there was a renewal of the former work of blockade and siege, until the place was surrendered on the 27th of August. The triumph of Fairfax was tarnished by an exception to his usual humanity. Sir Charles Lucas and sir George Lisle>were tried by court-martial, and were shot. The earl of Holland and the young duke of Buckingham broke out in revolt at Kingston-upon-Thames, when the main army of the Parliament was investing Colchester. There was an action near Kingston, in which they were defeated ; and passing into Hertfordshire, the remnant was cut up at St. Neot's by a detachment from the army of Fairfax, and Holland was taken prisoner. In all. these movements, we see the absence of any supreme organizing power. They were isolated efforts, which were quickly suppressed. Whatever miseries England had still to endure, it was freed from the misery of a long partisan warfare. In Wales, where the resistance to the Parliament was more con centrated, the presence even of Cromwell was not at first success ful. He is before Pembroke, but he has no artillery to make short work of the siege. It was not till the 10th of July that the town and castle of Pembroke were surrendered to him. Six days before the capitulation the Scottish army entered England, under the duke of Hamilton. He was joined by five thousand English, under sir Marmaduke Langdale. The English general, Lambert, was retreating before them, having been directed by Cromwell to 564 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. avoid an engagement, and to fall back. Two days after the sur render of Pembroke, Cromwell was on his march from the west. He waited not for orders. He knew where he was wanted. At this juncture a charge of treason had been preferred against him by major Huntington, an officer of the army, which had been coun tenanced by some members of both Houses. He was accused of endeavouring, by betraying the king, parliament, and army, to advance himself. The occasion was not opportune for such an attempt. When he left London he was equally distasteful to the Presbyterians and the Commonwealth's men, — who, with some, went by the general name of Levellers. Mrs. Hutchinson says, " The chief of these Levellers followed him out of the town, to take their leaves of him, received such professions from him, of a spirit bent to pursue the same just and honest things that they desired, as they went away with great satisfaction, till they heard that a coachful of Presbyterian priests coming after them, went away no less pleased : by which it was apparent he dissembled with one or the other, and by so doing lost his credit with both."* The Presbyterians suppressed their dislike to Cromwell in terror of the Scoto-royalist invasion. The Commonwealth's men were compelled to lay aside their jealousies. Ludlow speaks plainly about this : — " Some of us who had opposed the lieutenant-gener al's arbitrary proceedings, when we were convinced he acted to promote a selfish and unwarrantable design, now thinking ourselves obliged to strengthen his hands in that necessary work which he was appointed to undertake, writ a letter to him to encourage him, from the consideration of the justice of the cause wherein he was engaged, and the wickedness of those with whom he was to encounter, to proceed with cheerfulness, assuring him, that not withstanding all our discouragements we would readily give him all the assistance we could." The Scottish army that entered England could not be regarded as the army of the Scottish nation. The treaty which had been concluded with the king at Carisbrook gave satisfaction only to a portion of the Presbyterians. The Scottish Parliament, influenced by the duke of Hamilton and others, who professed moderate prin ciples of ecclesiastical government, gave the engagements of that treaty their zealous support, especially that clause which provided * " Memoirs," p. 129. Mrs. Hutchinson refers this to the time when "he was sent down, after his victory in Wales, to encounter Hamilton in the north." This is an evident mistake, for Cromwell marched from Pembroke by Gloucester and Warwick. CROMWELL'S MARCH FROM WALES. 565 that a military force should be sent to England to reinstate the king in his authority. They were in consequence called the " Engagers." But the Clergy generally proclaimed that Charles had nbt conceded enough for the establishment of their form of worship in England to warrant a war for his assistance. Themar- quis of Argyle, and other powerful chiefs who had fought against Montrose, were burning with resentment against -the Royalists of their own country, and were strenuously opposed to what was meant as an aid to the Royalists of England. An army was how ever raised : and the Engagers, with a raw and ill-disciplined force, crossed the Border. The march of Cromwell, from the extremity of South Wales to the heart of Lancashire, was accomplished with a rapidity which belongs only to the movements of great commanders. He had to gather scattered forces on his way, and to unite himself with Lam bert in Yorkshire. He was determined to engage with an enemy whose numbers were held to double his own. Through the whole breadth of South Wales, then a pastoral country, but now present ing all the unpicturesque combinations of mining industry, he advanced to Gloucester. This forced march of some hundred and fifty miles through Wales was an exhausting commencement. " Send me some shoes for my poor tired soldiers," wrote Cromwell to the Executive Committee in London. At Leicester he received three thousand pairs of shoes. At Nottingham he confers with colonel Hutchinson and leaves his prisoners with him. His cav alry have pushed on, and haye joined Lambert at Barnard Castle. All Cromwell's forces have joined the northern troops by the 12th of August. The Scots, who, having passed Kendal, had debated whether they would march direct into Yorkshire, and so on towards London, have decided for the western road. The duke of Hamilton thinks he is sure of Manchester. Sir Marmaduke Lang- dale is their guide through the unkown ways into Lancashire, and lead the vanguard. There is very imperfect communication be tween the van and the rear of this army.- On the 16th of August the duke is at Preston. The same night Cromwell is at Stonyhurst. Langdale, to the left of Hamilton's main body, has ascertained that the dangerous enemy is close at hand ; and sends notice to the duke. "Impossible," exclaims Hamilton ; "he has not had time to be here." The next morning Cromwell has fallen upon sir Marmaduke, and utterly routed him, "after a very sharp dispute." Hamilton's army is a disjointed one. His cavalry, in considerable 566 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. numbers, are at Wigan, under the command of Middleton. When the affair was settled with Langdale, there was a skirmish close by Preston town between Hamilton himself and some of Cromwell's troopers. The duke was separated from his main force of infantry, under Baillie, but rejoined them only to see the bridge of the Rib- ble won by the enemy in a general battle. Cromwell describes the first four hours' fighting in a country all enclosures and miry ground, as " a hedge dispute." This being ended, the Scots were charged through Preston ; and then not o-l/ was the bridge of the Ribble won, but the bridge of Darwen. Night was approaching, which put an end to any further fighting en the 17th. The Scottish generals in a council of war determined to march off, as soon as it was dark, without waiting for Middleton and his cavalry. The weather was rainv; the roads heavy; their men were wet, weary, and hungry. They left their ammunition behind ; and the next morning were at Wigan Moor, with half their number. No general engagement took place that day ; and the Scots held Wigan. Cromwell writes, "We lay that night in the field close by the enemy; being very dirty and weary, and having marched twelve miles of such ground as I never rode in all my life, the day being very wet." The next day the Scots moved towards Warrington ; and after some hard fighting, general Baillie surrendered himself, officers, and soldiers, as prisoners of war. The duke, with three thousand horse, was gone towards Nantwich. His course was undetermined. The country people were hostile. His own men were mutinous. He surrenders to Lambert, and is sent prisoner to Nottingham. The Scottish army was now utterly broken and dispersed. The news of Hamilton's complete failure in the invasion of England was the signal for the great Presbyterian party that had opposed the policy of the Engagers to rise in arms. Argyle assembled his Highland clans. In the Western Lowlands large bodies of peas antry, headed by their preachers, marched to Edinburgh. The memory of this insurrection has endured to this hour in the name of Whig. It was called " the Whiggamore Raid," from a word used in the west of Scotland when the carter urges forward his horses with Whig, whig (get ort) ; as the English carter says, Gee, gee (go). Argyle was restored to power. The most zealous Covenanters were again at the head of the executive authority. Cromwell en tered Scotland on the 20th September, and was received at Edin burgh, not as the man to whose might their brave countrymen had been compelled to yield ; but as the deliverer from a royalist faction that might again have put the national religion in peril. PARTY-SPIRIT. 567 NOTE ON THE PARTY-SPIRIT DURING THE ROYAL- 1ST RE-ACTION. We have shown the temper of the Presbyterians and Commonwealth's men towards Cromwell when he was fighting in Wales and Lancashire. There was a general confusion of political principles in the dread of individual supremacy. May says that the chief citizens of London, and others called Presbyterians, wished good success to the Scots no less than the Malignants did. Mr. Hallam has observed that "the fugitive sheets of this year, such as the Mercurius Aulicus, bear witness to the exulting and insolent tone of the royalists. They chuckle over Fairfajuand Cromwell, as if they had caught a couple of rats in a trap." As a curious specimen of the "fugitive sheets," we give an extract from "The Cuckow's Nest at Westminster ; printed at Cuckow-time in a hollow tree, 1648." * The chief wit consists in a dialogue between Queen Fairfax and Lady Crom well . Fairfax had been ill, and was reported to have died : — " Enter Queen Fairfax and Madam Cromwell. " Mrs. Cromwell. Cheer up, madam, he is not dead, he is reserved for another end ; these wicked malignants reported as much of my Noll, but I hope it is otherwise ; yetthe profane writ an epitaph, as I think they call it, and abused him most abominably, as they will do me, or you, or any- of the faithful saints, if we but thrive by our occupations in our husbands* absence ; if we but deck our bodies with the jewels gained from the wicked, they point at us, and say, those ate plunder. But the righteous must undergo the scoffs cf the wicked ; and let them scoff on. I thank my Maker, we lived, before these holy wars were thought on, in the thriving profession of brewing, and could, of my vails of grain and yeast, wear my silk gown, and gold and silver lace too, as well as the proudest minx of them all. I am not ashamed of my profession, madam. ftQu. Fair. Pray, Mrs. Cromwell, tell not me of gowns or lace, nor no such toys! Tell me of crowns, sceptres, kingdoms, royal robes ; and, if my Tom but recovers, and thrives in his enterprise, I will not say, pish, to be queen of England. I misdoubt noth ing, if we can but keep the wicked from fetching Nebuchadnezzar's home from grass in the Isle of Wight. Well, well, my Tom is worth a thousand of him, and has a more king'y countenance ; he has such an innocent face, and a harmless look, as if he were born to b^ emperor over the saints. " Mrs- Cromwell. And is not Noll Cromwell's wife as likely a woman to be queen of England as you? yes, I warrant you, is she; and that you shall know, if my husband were but once come out of Wales, lt is he that has done the work, the conquest belongs to him. Besides, your husband is counted a fool, and wants wit to reign ; every boy scoffs at him : my Noll has a head-piece, a face of brass, full of majesty, and a nose will light the whole kingdom to walk after him. I say he will grace a crown, being naturally adorned with diamonds and rubies already ; and for myself, though I say it, I have a person as fit for a queen as another." The- dialogue is broken off by a servant running in, and exclaiming, " O, madam, cease your contention, and provide for your safeties ; both your husbands are killed, and all their forces put to the sword *, all the people crying like mad, long live King Charles I n •Reprinted in *¦ Harleian Miscellany," 8vo vol. vL 568 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER XXX. Treaty of Newport. — Concessions of the King. — Remonstrance of the Army. — Crom well's Letter to Hammond. — The King earned to Hurst Castle.— Members ejected- from the Commons' House. — The king removed to Windsor. — Ordinance for ihe king's trial — The High Court of Justice appointed. — The king before the High Court. — The king sentenced to death. — The king after his condemnation.- — The king's execution. When the news of Cromwell's victory at Preston came to the Isle of Wight, " the king said to the governor that it was the worst news that ever came to England." Colonel Hammond replied, that if Hamilton had beaten the English he would have possessed himself of the thrones of England and Scotland. " You are mis taken," said the king ; " I could have commanded him back with a wave of my hand." * It was evil news to the king that the last appeal to arms had failed. The Parliament now looked with as much alarm as the king might entertain at the approaching return of that victorious Army of the North. The Lords, especially, saw that their own power was imperilled by the dangers that beset the Crown; and they united with those who now constituted a major ity in the Commons, to conclude a treaty with the king. There were violent debates; but it was at length agreed that commission ers should proceed to the Isle of Wight. The discussions were to take place in Newport. The commissioners for the treaty ar rived there on the 15th of September. Clarendon says that those who wished ill to the treaty interposed every delay to prevent it being concluded during the absence of Cromwell ; and that those who wished well to it pressed it forward for the same reason. Yet there were men left behind who had formed as strong resolutions against the restoration of Charles to power as rYomwell himself. Ludlow had been to Fairfax at Colchester whilst the treaty was debated in Parliament, to urge upon him that it was not intended by those who pressed it on most vehemently, that the king should be bound to the performance of it; but that it-was designed prin cipally to use his authority to destroy the Army. Fairfax was * Ludlow, vol. i. p. 261. TREATY OF NEWPORT. 569 irresolute. Ireton agreed with Ludlow that it was necessary for the Army to interpose ; but did not think that the time was come for such a demonstration. With an Army ready to step in to break through the meshes of any agreement disapproved by them —with a king who in the midst of the negotiation was secretly writing, " my great concession this morning was made only to facilitate my approaching escape " — the Treaty of Newport can scarcely be regarded as more than " a piece of Dramaturgy which must be handsomely done." * For the opening of the last Act of this tragic history, the scene on the bank of the Medina is as im pressive as any pageant, " full of state and woe," that the imagina tion could devise to precede a solemn catastrophe. A house has been prepared in Newport for the king's recep tion ; and its hall has been fitted up for this great negotiation, which might extend to forty days. The first day was the i8lh of September. The king is seated under a canopy at the upper end of the hall. The parliamentary commissioners are placed round a table in advance of the royal chair. These are fifteen in number, five peers, and ten members of the Lower House. Behind the king are ranged many of his most confidential friends and advisers ; of whom there are four peers, two bishops and other divines ; five civilians ; and four of his trusted attendants. Sir Philip Warwick, who was one of the privileged number, says : — " But if at any time the king found himself in need to ask a question, or any of his lords thought fit to advise him in his ear to hesitate before he an swered, he himself would retire into his own chamber ; or one of us penmen, who stood at his chair, prayed him from the lords to do so." The king was in a position favourable to the display of his talent for discussion ; and he left upon the assembly during these tedious debates, a deep impression of his abilities, his knowledge, and his presence of mind. Nor could the sympathies of even the most prejudiced of his auditors on this occasion be withheld from his general appearance and deportment. His hair had become gray ; his face was care-worn ; " he was not dejected," writes Clar endon, "but carried himself with the same majesty he had used to do." Certainly if it be held somewhat an unequal trial to place one man to contend alone against fifteen disputants, some of ex traordinary ability, such as Vane ; on the other hand the rank of him who was thus pleading for what he believed to be his inalien able rights — his misfortunes — his display of mental powers, for * Carlyle. 570 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. which few had given him credit— would produce impressions far deeper than if the advisers around his canopy had been allowed to argue and harangue, each after his own fashion. " One day," says Warwick, " whilst I turned the king's chair when he was about to rise, the earl of Salisbury came suddenly upon me, and said, ' The king is wonderfully improved : ' to which I as suddenly replied,' ' No, my lord, he was always so ; but your lordship too late dis cerned it.' " Vane bore testimony to the talent of Charles ; but he considered his "great parts and abilities" as a reason for very stringent terms. In this manner was the prolonged discussion of Newport conducted, from the 18th of September to the 29th of November, the original term of forty days for the duration of the treaty having been three times extended. All was in vain. Charles had conceded the questions of military command and of nomina tion to the great offices of state ; he had even consented to ac knowledge the legitimacy of the resistance to his power. But he had not conceded enough upon the question of religion to satisfy the more violent of the Presbyterians. There was unwise perti nacity on both sides, in the hour of a coming storm that would sweep away this paper-fabric of a Newport treaty like straws in a whirlwind. The commissioners had no absolute power to con clude a Treaty ; the parliament discussed every point with a scru pulosity that foreboded no good result. Warwick records a speech of the king to Mr. Buckley, one of the commissioners, which shows how impracticable was a speedy agreement ; " Consider, Mr. Buck ley, if you call this a Treaty, whether it be not like the fray in the comedy ; where the man comes out, and says, there has been a fray, and no fray ; and being asked how that could be, why, says he, there hath been three blows given, and I had them all. Look, therefore, whether this be not a parallel case. Observe, whether I have not granted absolutely most of your propositions, and with great moderation limited only some few of them : nay consider, whether you have made me any one concession, and whether at this present moment you have not confessed to me, that though upon any proposition you were all concurrently satisfied, yet till you had remitted them up to vour superiors, you had not authority to concur with me in any one thing." * The conferences were broken up, after the most violent demonstrations had been made to Par liament of the temper of the Army. On the 28th of November the commissioners left Newport with the definitive propositions. * " Memoirs,'' p. 323. CONCESSIONS OF THE KING. 57 1 In forty-eight hours it had become evident that two months had been wasted in vain contentions ; that an inexorable fate was dri ving on to a dismal end of the long struggle between king and people. Warwick has recorded that, during the progress of the Treaty, " every night, when the king was alone about eight of the clock, except when he was writing his own private letters, he commanded me to come to him ; and he looked over the notes of that day's treaty, and the reasons upon which it moved ; and so dictated the heads of a dispatch, which from time to time he made concerning the treaty, unto his present majesty, then prince." Clarendon drew up his minute account of the negotiation from these pipers ; and he gives a long and very interesting extract of a letter from the king to prince Charles, which he says, " deserves to be preserved in letters of gold." The sentiments which it breathes are certainly high-minded ; but they also proclaim to what an extent the king was a self-deceiver. He writes, " by what hath been said, you see how long we have laboured in search of peace." He had solemnly prom ised during the negotiations that all hostilities in Ireland for his cause should be put an end to. At the very same time he wrote to the earl of Ormond, " Obey my wife's orders, not mine, until I shall let you know I am free from all restraint ; nor trouble yourself about my concessions as to Ireland ; they will lead to nothing." Charles goes on to say to his son, " Censure us not for having parted with so much of our own right ; the price was great, but the commodity was security to us, peace to our people." In his heart he felt that he had really not parted with anything. " We were confident," he says, " another parliament would remember how useful a king's power is to a people's liberty ; of how much thereof w-? divested curself, that we and they might meet once again in a due parlimentary way, to agree the bounds of prince and people." The unhappy monarch appears to have forgotten that " the bounds of prince and people " were agreed, " in a due parliamentary way," by the Petition of Right; and that from the day in 1629 when he declared that he would depart from that due way, making the free monarchy of EngJand absolute, the terrible misfortunes that he had endured during seVen years of Civil War were the price that he had to pay for eleven previous years of despotism. He draws a true lesson from the tyranny of others : " These men, who have forced laws which they were bound to preserve, will find their triumphs full of troubles." His prayer for his subjects " that the 572 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ancient laws, with the interpretation according to the known practice, might once more be a hedge about them," might have been more opportune when the ancient hedge was first broken down by the ministers of his own aggressions. But, with all this forgetfulness of the errors of the past, its sad lessons are not wholly forgotten, when he says, " Give belief to cur experience, never to affect more greatness or prerogative than that which is intrinsically and really for the good of subjects, not the satisfaction of favorites." * A week before the termination of the conferences at Newport, the Army from St. Alban's sends a " Remonstrance " to the Com mons, — an unmistakable document, — calling upon the Parliament to bring the king to trial ; and to decree that the future king should be elected by the representatives of the people. It was distinctly intimated that if the Parliament neglected the interests of the nation the Army would take the matter into their own hands. There was naturally a great commotion in the House ; and the debate upon this " Remonstrance " was adjourned for a week. At about the end of that time the commissioners from Newport have made their report ; and after twenty- four hours of debate it is voted that the king's concessions offered a ground for a future settlement. On the 25th of November the army of Fairfax is at Windsor. Crom well had returned from Scotland, to the north of England, on the nth of October. He is busily engaged in military affairs. The royalist governor of Pontefract refuses to surrender. A party from the garrison have sallied out on the 29th of October, and assassi nated the parliamentary colonel Rainsborough, in his lodging at Doncaster. The Northern Army is badly off for shoes, stockings, and clothes, as Cromwell writes ; but they are all full cf zeal, and petition the General of the Army against the Treaty at Newport, which petition Cromwell forwards to Fairfax on the 20th of Novem ber, saying, " I find in the officers of the regiments a very great sense of the sufferings of this poor kingdom ; and in them all a very great zeal to have impartial justice done upon offenders." There are nevertheless doubts and misgivings in the breasts of some Army men, as we may judge from a letter of Oliver to that " ingenuous young man," his friend colonel Hammond, at Caris brook, who has expressed- his dissatisfaction at the principle that " it is lawful for a lesser part, if in the right, to force a numerical majority." The king told sir Philip Warwick that the Governor * Clarendon, vol. vi. p. 189 — 191. CROMWELL'S LETTER TO HAMMOND. 573 was such a rogue that he could not be in worse hands. Though the Governor was faithful to. his trust, he yet had a conscientious doubt whether the Army had a right to determine the great ques tion at issue. The letter of Cromwell is dated from Pontefract on the 25th of November. It is altogether so characteristic of this extraordinary man, and moreover so strikingly illustrative of the nature of the principles by which he and many others were driving forward to perpetrate acts of violence and illegality, under a belief that they were moved by holy and just inspirations, that we may not unprofitably peruse one or two of its more striking passages: — '¦ You -say : ' God hath appointed authorities among the na tions, to which active or passive obedience is to be yielded. This resides, in England, in the Parliament. Therefore active or pas sive resistance,' &c. Authorities and powers are the ordinance of God. This or that species is of human institution, and limited, some with larger, others with stricter bands, each one according to its constitution. But I do not therefore think that the Authorities may do anything, and yet such obedience be due. All agree that there are cases in which it is lawful to resist. If so, your ground fails, and so likewise the inference. Indeed, dear Robin, not to multiply words, the query is, Whether ours be such a case ? This ingenuously is the true question. To this I shall say nothing, though I could say very much ; but only desire thee to see what thou findest in thy own heart to two or three plain considerations. First, Whether Salus Populi be a sound position ? Secondly, Whether in the way in hand, really and before the Lord, before whom conscience has to stand, this be provided for ;— or if the whole fruit of the War is not like to be frustrated, and all most like to turn to what it was, and worse ? And this, contrary to En gagements, explicit Covenants with those who ventured their lives upon those Covenants and Engagements, without whom perhaps, in equity, relaxation ought not to be ? Thirdly, Whether this • Army be not a lawful Power, called by God to oppose and fight against the king upon some stated grounds ; and being in power to such ends, may not oppose one Name of Authority, for those ends, as well as another Name, — since it was not the outward Au thority summoning them that by its power made the quarrel lawful, but the quarrel was lawful in itself ? If so, it may be, acting will be justified in foro humano. But truly this kind of reasonings may bei'but fleshly, either with or against: only it is good to try what truth may be in them. And the Lord teach us." 574 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. " We in this Northern Army were in a waiting posture ; desiring to see what the Lord would lead us to. And a Declaration [Re monstrance] is put out, at which many are shaken : — although we could perhaps have wished the stay of it till after the treaty, yet seeing it is come out, we trust to rejoice in the will ot the Lord, waiting His further pleasure. Dear Robin, beware of men ; look up to the Lord. Let Him be free to speak and command in thy heart. Take heed of the things I fear thou hast reasoned thyself into ; and thou shall be able through Him, without consulting flesh and blood, to do valiantly for Him and His people." ..." Dost thou not think this fear of the Levellers (of whom there is no fear) 'that they would destroy Nobility,'&c, has caused some to take up corruption, and find it lawful to make this ruining hypocritical Agreement, on one part ? Hath not this biassed even some good men ? I will not say the thing they fear will come upon them ; but if it do, they will themselves bring it upon themselves. Have not some of our friends, by their passive principle (which I judge not, only I think it liable to temptation as well as the active, and neither of them to be reasoned into, because the heart is deceitful), — been occasioned to overlook what is just and honest, and to think the people of God may have as much or more good the one way than the other ? Good by this Man, — against whom the Lord hath witnessed : and whom thou knowest ! " On the 25th of November, the day on which Cromwell's letter is dated, colonel Hammond was directed to give up his post in the Isle of Wight to another officer, and return to the Army. The king had remained in the house at Newport in which the Treaty was conducted when the commissioners quitted the town. On the evening of the 29th of November, the king was surrounded by sev eral of the noblemen and others who had been with him during the conferences. A report came to them that troops had landed in the island ; and the fact was ascertained by one of Charles' attendants, colonel Cook. He had ridden to Carisbrook and to the coast.- When he returned about midnight the king's house was surrounded by soldiers ; and its very passages were filled with armed men, their matches lighted. Cook entered the king's apartments, wet and wearied. The king's friends were persuading him to attempt to escape, at all risks ; and Cook told him that horses were at hand and a vessel off the coast. Charles now hesitates to break his pa role ; yet he had givt-.n it to Hammond, and had attempted to break it on several occasions. The resignation of despair had now come MEMBERS EJECTED FROM THE COMMONS- HOUSE. 575 over the unhappy king. He went to bed. At daybreak there was an alarm at his door. A colonel was there with a guard ; and when the door was opened, the king was told by him that he had orders to remove him to Hurst Castle. They could not have named a worse place, said Charles. He apprehended assassination; and this castle at the mouth of the Solent, — which Warwick describes as "a place which stood on the sea, for at every tide the water surrounded it, and contained only a few dog-lodgings for soldiers," — was more fitted for a deed of darkness than Berkeley or Ponte fract, where deposed kings had perished. On that 30th of Novem ber, the Parliament had voted that they would not take the " Re monstrance " of the Army into consideration. The army is at Windsor. On Saturday, the 2nd of December, it is on its march to London ; and before night is quartered in Whitehall, St. James's, and the suburbs. That Sunday must have been a clay of fear and anxious curiosity. Presbyterian preachers setting forth the atro city of the seizure of the king. Zealous soldiers, gifted with the power of eloquence, haranguing crowds in the parks. " For To- phet is ordamed of old ; yea, for the king it is prepared," was the text of many a field-preaching of that Sabbath. On the Monday the Commons are debating all day — they are debating till five o'clock on Tuesday morning the 5th, — whether the king's conces sions in the Treaty of Newport are a ground of settlement. The practised orators have been heard again and again on this great question. There is an old man amongst them — one who has only been a member three weeks — who boldly stands up for the cause of fallen majesty. He is no royal favourite, he says. The favours he has received from the king and his party were, the loss of his two ears, — his pillorihgs, his imprisonments, his fines. It was .Prynne, who spoke for hours ; with honest energy,, but with no great prudence when he described the Army at their very doors as N " inconstant, mutinous, and unreasonable servants." Yet, what ever might have been the effect of this learned man's courageous effort for reconciliation, the very recital of his ancient sufferings must have revived in some a bitter recollection of past tyrannies, and a corresponding dread of their return. The House decided, by one hundred .and twenty-nine to eighty-three, that the king's concessions are a ground of settlement. There was another as sembly on the same day whose resolutions at that moment were of more importance even than a vote of the Commons. " Some of the principal officers of the Army came to London with expectation 576 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 1 that things would be brought to this issue, and consulting with some members of parliament and others, it was concluded, after a full and free debate, that the measures taken by the Parliament were contrary to the trust reposed in them, and tending to contract the guilt of the blood that had been shed, upon themselves and the nation ; that it was therefore the duty of the Army to endeavour to' put a stop to such proceedings." * They went about this work in a very business-like manner. " Three of the members of the House, and three of the officers of the Army, withdrew into a private room to attain the ends of our said Resolution ; when we agreed that the army should be drawn up the next morning, and guards placed in Westminster hall, the Court of Requests, and the Lobby; that none might be permitted to pass into the House but such as con tinued faithful to the public interests. To this end we went over the names of all the members, one by one. . . . Commissary- general Ireton went to sir Thomas Fairfax, and acquainted him with the necessity of this extraordinary way of proceeding." f Lieutenant-general Cromwell is still in the North. What was thus deliberately resolved on the 6th of December was as promptly. effected on. the 7th. An order is given that the trained bands of the city shall withdraw from their accustomed duty of guard at Westminster. Colonel Rich's regiment of horse take up a position on that morning in Palace Yard. Colonel Pride's regiment of foot throng Westminster Hall, and block up every entrance to the House of Commons. Colonel Pride Has a written list of names in his hand, — the names of those against whom the sentence of exclusion has been passed. As the members of the House approach, lord Grey of Groby, who stands at the elbow of colonel Pride, gives a sign or word that such a one is to pass, or to be turned back. Forty-one were ordered that day to retire to " the- Queen's Court." It is easier to imagine than to describe the in dignation expressed by the ejected. They are kept under restraint all the day ; and in the evening are conducted to a tavern. There were two taverns abutting upon and partly under, the Hall known as " Heaven " and " Hell,"— very ancient places of refreshment much used by the lawyers in term-time ; mentioned by Ben Jonson ; and which, with a third house called " Purgatory," are recited in a grant of the time of Henry VII4 To " Hell," perhaps withoutthe intention of a bad joke, these forty-one of -the parliamentary * Ludlow, " Memoirs," vol. i. p. 269. , /wi| p. IJOi I Gifford. Notes to " Alchemist,"— Jonson's Works, vol. iv. p. 174. Execution of Charles I. — Vol. iii. 585. THE KING REMOVED TO WINDSOR. 577 majority were led, and lodged for the night. The process went on for. several days; till some hundred members are disposed of. Before the minority have obtained an entire ascendancy, colonel Pride is questioned for his conduct ; but no satisfaction is given. The House makes a show of disapprobation ; but the Serjeant-at- arms has brought a message that the excluded members are de tained by the Army ; and business proceeds as if the event were of small consequence. Cromwell has arrived on the night after the sharp medicine known as " Pride's purge " has been administered ; and " lay at Whitehall, where, and at other places, he declared that he had not been acquainted with this design ; yet since it was done he was glad of it, and would endeavour to maintain it." * Vane, who had spoken vehemently in the great debate of the 4th, against accepting the king's concessions as a ground of settlement, even boldly proclaiming himself for a republic, appears to have taken no part in the illegal proceedings which laid the Parliament at the feet of the Army. He retired to his estate, and did not come again to Parliament till a month after the final blow against monarchy had been struck. " Young Vane " has had justice done to his lofty capacity in being classed with the " great men " who " have been among us '' — " hands that penned and tongues that uttered wis dom." t Yet his conduct in this crisis can scarcely be attributed to his high-mindedness : and probably Mrs. Hutchinson points to him, in saying, " I know upon certain knowledge that many, yea the most part of them, retreated not for conscience, but for fear and worldly prudence, foreseeing that the insolence of the Army might grow to that height as to ruin the cause, and reduce the kingdom into the hands of the enemy ; and then those who had been most courageous in their country's cause should be given up as victims. These poor men did privately animate those who ap peared most publicly." X The parliamentary minority, being now almost unanimous in their resolve to overthrow the existing govern ment, though perhaps not yet agreed as to the mode of accomplish ing this as far as regarded the person of the king, voted to rescind all the votes which had recently passed as to the grounds of a settlement. Another act of military power soon marshalled the way to a resolution of such doubts. The drawbridge of Hurst Castle is lowered during the night of the 17th of December, and the tramp of a troop of horse is heard by the wakeful prisoner. He calls for his attendant Herbert, who * Ludlow, vol. i. p. 272. t Wordsworth. X " Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 185. Vol. III.— S7 578 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. is sent to ascertain the cause of this midnight commotion. Major Harrison is arrived. The king is agitated. He has been warned that Harrison is a man chosen to assassinate him. He is re-assured in the morning, in being informed that the major and his troop are to conduct him to Windsor. Two days after, the king sets out, under the escort of lieutenant-colonel Cobbett. At Winchester he is received in state by the mayor and aldermen ; but they retire alarmed on being told that the House has voted all to be traitors who should address the king. The troop commanded by Cobbett .ias been relieved on the route by another troop, of which Harrison has the command. They rest at Farriham. Charles expresses to Harrison, with whose soldierly appearance he is struck, the sus picions which had been hinted regarding him. The major, in his new buff coat and fringed scarf of crimson silk, told the king " that he needed not to entertain any such imagination or apprehension ; that the Parliament had too much honour and justice to ch-rish so foul an intention ; and assured him, that whatever the Parliament re solved to do would be very public, and in a way of justice, to which the world should be witness ; and would never endure a thought of secret violence." This, adds Clarendon, " his majesty could not persuade himself to believe ; nor did imagine that they durst ever produce him in the sight of the people, under any form whatsoever of a public trial." * The next day the journey was pursued to wards Windsor. The king urged his desire to stop at Bagshot, and dine in the Forest at the house of lord Newburgh. He had been apprised that his friend would have ready for him a horse of extraordinary fleetness, with which he might make one more effort to escape. The horse had been kicked by another horse the day before, and was useless. That last faint hope was gone. On the night of the 23rd of December the king slept, a prisoner surround ed with hostile guards, in the noble castle which in the days of his youth had rung with Jonson's lyrics and ribaldry ; and the Gipsy of the Masque had prophesied that his " name in peace or wars, nought should bound." f But even here he continued to cherish some of the delusions which he had indulged in situations of far less danger. He was still surrounded with something of regal pomp. He dined, as the ancient sovereigns had dined, in public — as Elizabeth, and his father, and he himself had dined, seated under a canopy, the cup presented to him on the knee, the dishes solemnly tasted before he ate. These manifestations of respect he • " Rebellion," vol. vi. p. 323. t " Gipsies Metamorphosed." ORDINANCE FOR THE KING'S TRIAL. 579 held to be indicative of an altered feeling. But he also had an Un- doubting confidence that he should be righted, by aid from Ireland, from Denmark, from other kingdoms : " I have three more cards to play, the worst of which will give me back everything." After three weeks of comparative comfort, the etiquette observed towards him was laid aside; and with a fearful sense of approaching calamity in the absence of " respect and honour, according to the ancient practice," is there anything more contemptible than a despised prince ? " During the month in which Charles had remained at Windsor, there had been* proceedings in Parliament of which he was imper fectly informed. On the day he arrived there, it was resolved by the Commons that he should Le brought to trial. On the 2nd of January, 1649, it was voted that, in making war against the Parlia ment, he had been guilty of treason ; and a High Court was ap pointed to try him. One hundred and fifty commissioners were to compose the Court, — peers, members of the Commons, aldermen of London. The ordinance was sent to the Upper House, and was rejected. On the 6th, a fresh ordinance, declaring that the people being, after God, the source of all just power, the repre sentatives of the people are the supreme power in the nation ; and that whatsoever is enacted or declared for law by the Commons in Parliament hath the force of a law, and the people are concluded „ thereby, though the consent of King or Peers be not had thereto. Asserting this power, so utterly opposed either to the ancient con stitution of the monarchy, or to the possible working of a republic, there was no hesitation in constituting the High Court of Justice in the name of the Commons alone. The number of members of the Court was now reduced to one hundred and thirty-five. They had seven preparatory meetings, at which only fifty-eight members attended. "All men," says Mrs. Hutchinson, "were left to their free liberty of acting, neither persuaded nor compelled ; and as there were some nominated in the commission who never sat, and others who sat at first,but durst not hold on, so all the rest might have declined it. if they would, when it is apparent they should have suffered nothing by so doing."* Algernon Sidney, although bent upon a republic, opposed the trial, apprehending that the pro ject of a commonwealth would fail, if the king's life were touched. It is related that Cromwell, irritated by these scruples, exclaimed, " No one will stir. I tell you, we will cut his head off with the * " Memoirs," p. 158. 580 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. crown upon it." Such daring may appear the result of ambition, or fear, or revenge, or innate cruelty, in a few men who had ob tained a temporary ascendancy. These men were, on the con trary, the organs of a widespread determination amongst thousands throughout the country, who had long preached and argued and prophesied about vengeance on " the great delinquent ; " and who had ever in their mouths the text that " blood defileth the land, and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it." * They had visions of a the ocracy, and were impatient of an earthly king. Do we believe, as some, not without reasonable*grounds, may believe, that the members of the High Court of Justice expressed such convictions upon a simulated religious confidence ? Do we think that, in the clear line of action which Cromwell especially. had laid down for his guidance, he cloaked his worldly ambition under the guise of being moved by some higher impulse than that of taking the lead in a political revolution ? Certainly we do not. The infinite mischiefs of assuming that the finger of God directly points out the way to believers, when they are walking in danger ous and devious paths, may be perfectly clear to us, who calmly look back upon the instant events which followed upon Cromwell's confidence in his solemn call to a fearful duty. But we are not the more to believe, because the events have a character of guilt in the views of most persons, that such a declared conviction was altogeth er, or in any degree, a lie. Those were times in which, more for good than for evil, men believed in the immediate direction of a special Providence in great undertakings. The words, " God hath given us the victory," were not with them a mere form. If we trace amidst these solemn impulses the workings of a deep sagacity — the union of the fierce resolves of a terrible enthusiasm with the fore sight and energy of an ever-present common sense — we are not the more to conclude that their spiritualism, or fanaticism, or whatever we please to call their ruling principle, was less sincere by being mixed up with the ordinary motives through which the affairs of the world are carried on. Indeed, when we look to the future course of English history, and see — as those who have no belief in a higher direction of the destiny of nations than that of human wis dom can alone turn away from seeing — that the inscrutable work ings of a supreme Power led our country in the fullness of time to internal peace and security after these storms, and in a great degree • Ludlow uses this text from " Numbers," c. xxxv., in explaining his convictions. THE KING BEFORE THE HIGH COURT. 58 1 in consequence of them, can we refuse our belief that the tragical events of those days were ordered for our good ? Acknowledging that the overthrow of a rotten throne was necessary for the build ing up of a throne that should have its sole stable foundation in the welfare of the people, can we affirm that the men who did the mightier portion of that work, — sternly, unflinchingly, illegally, yet ever professing to " seek to know the mind of God in all that chain of Providence," — are quite correctly described in the Statute for their attainder, as " a party of wretched men, desperately wicked, and hardened in their impiety." On the 19th of January, major Harrison appeared again at Wind sor with his troop. There was a coach with six horses in the court yard, in which the king took his seat ; and, once more, he entered London, and was lodged at St. James's palace. The next day, the High Court of Justice was opened in Westminster-hall. The king came from St. James's in a sedan ; and after the names of the mem bers of the court had been called, sixty-nine being present, Bradshaw, the president, ordered the serjeant to bring in the prisoner. Silently the king sat down in the chair prepared for him. He moved not his hat, as he looked sternly and contemptuously around. The sixty-nine rose not from their seats, and remained covered. It is scarcely eight years since he was a spectator of the last solemn trial in this hall — that of Strafford. What mighty events have happened since that time ! There are memorials hanging from the roof which tell such a history as his saddest fears in the hour of Strafford's death could scarcely have shaped out. The tattered banners taken from his Cavaliers at Marston-moor and Naseby are floating above his head. There, too, are the same memorials of Preston. But still he looks around him proudly and severely. Who are the men that are to judge him, the king, who " united in his person every possible claim by hereditary right to the English as well as the Scottish throne, being the heir both of Egbert and William the Conqueror ? " * These men are, in his view, traitors and rebels, from Bradshaw, the lawyer, who sits in the foremost chair calling himself lord-president, to Cromwell and Marten in the back seat, over whose heads are the red-cross of England and the harp of Ireland, painted on an escutcheon, whilst the proud bearing's of a line of. kings are nowhere visible. Under what law does this insolent president address him as " Charles Stuart, king of England," and say, "The Commons of England being deeply sensible of the calamities that have been brought upon this nation, * Blackstone, book i. c. iii., p. 196, Kerr's edition. 582 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. which are fixed upon you as the principal author of them, have re solved to make inquisition for blood ? " He will defy their au thority. The clerk reads the charge, and when he is accused therein of being tyrant and traitor, he laughs in the face of the Court. " Though his tongue usually hesitated, yet it was very free at this time, for he was never discomposed in mind," writes Warwick. " And yet," it is added, " as he confessed himself to the bishop of London that attended him, one action shocked him very much ; for whilst he was leaning in the Court upon his staff, which had a head of gold, the head broke off on a sudden. He took it up, but seemed unconcerned, yet told the bishop it really made a great impression upon him." It was the symbol of the treacherous hopes upon which he had rested, — golden dreams that vanished in this solemn hour. Again and again contending against the authority of the Court, the king was removed, arid the sitting was adjourned to the 22nd. On that day the same scene was renewed ; and again on the 23rd. A growing sympathy for the monarch became apparent. The cries of "Justice, justice," which were heard at first, were now mingled with " God save the king." He had refused to plead ; but the Court nevertheless em ployed the 24th and 25th of January in collecting evidence to prove the charge of his levying war against the Parliament. Coke, the solicitor-general, then demanded whether the Court would proceed to pronouncing sentence ; and the members adjourned to the Painted Chamber. On the 27th the public sitting was resumed. When the name of Fairfax was called, a voice was heard from the gallery, " He has too much wit to be here." The kingwas brought in ; and, when the president addressed the commissioners, and said that the prisoner was before the Court to answer a charge of high treason, and other crimes brought against him in the name of the people of England, the voice from the gallery was again heard, " It's a lie — not one half of them." The voice came from lady Fairfax. The Court, Bradshaw then stated, had agreed upon the sentence. Ludlow records that the king " desired to make one proposition before they proceeded to sentence ; which he earn estly pressing, as that which he thought would lead to the recon ciling of all parties, and to the peace of the three kingdoms, they permitted him to offer it : the effect of which was, that he might meet the two Houses in the Painted Chamber, to whom he doubted not to offer that which should satisfy and secure all interests." Ludlow goes on to say, " Designing, as I have been since in formed, to propose his own resignation, and the admission of his THE KING SENTENCED TO DEATH. 583 son to the throne upon such terms as should have been agreed upon." * The • commissioners retired to deliberate, " and being satisfied, upon debate, that nothing but loss of time would be the consequence of it, they returned into the Court with a negative to his demand." Bradshaw then delivered a solemn speech to the king, declaring how he had through his reign endeavoured to sub vert the laws and introduce arbitrary government ; how he had at tempted, from the beginning, either to destroy Parliaments, or to render them subservient to his own designs ; how he had levied war against the Parliament, by the terror of his power to discour age for ever such assemblies from doing their duty, and that in this war many thousands of the good people of England had lost their lives. The clerk was lastly commanded to read the sen tence, that his head should be severed from his body; "and the commissioners," says Ludlow, " testified their unanimous assent by standing up." The king attempted to speak; "but being ac counted dead in law, was not permitted." On the 29th of January, the Court met to sign the sentence of execution; addressed to " colonel Francis Hacker, colonel Huncks, arid lieutenant-colonel Phayr, and to every one of them." This is the memorable document : — " Whereas Charles Stuart, king of England, is and standeth convicted, attainted and condemned of High Treason and other high Crimes : and Sentence upon Saturday last was pronounced against him by this Court, to be put to death by the severing of his head from his body ; of. which Sentence execution remaineth to be done : " These are therefore to will and require you to see the said Sentence executed, in the open street before Whitehall, upon the morrow, being the thirtieth day of this instant month of January, between the hours of ten in the morning and five in the afternoon with full effect. And for so doing, this shall be your warrant. "And these are to require all Officers and Soldiers, and others the good People of this Nation of England, to be assisting unto you in this service. "Given under our hands and seals, "JOHN BRADSHAW. "THOMAS GREY. " OLIVER CROMWELL." And fifty-six others. • " Memoirs," vol. i. p. 280. 584 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. The statements of the heartless buffoonery, and the daring violence of Cromwell, at the time of signing the warrant, must be received with some suspicion. He smeared Henry Marten's face with the ink of his pen, and Marten in return smeared his, say the narratives. Probably so. With reference to this anecdote it has been wisely observed, " Such ' toys of desperation ' commonly bubble up from a deep flowing stream below." * Another anec dote is told by Clarendon ; that colonel Ingoldsby, one who signed the warrant, was forced to do so with great violence, by Cromwell and others ; "and Cromwell, with a loud laughter, taking his hand in his, and putting the pen between his fingers, with his own hand writ ' Richard Ingoldsby,' he making all the resistance he could." Ingoldsby gave this relation, in the desire to obtain a pardon after the Restoration ; and to confirm his story he said, " if his name there were compared with what he had ever writ himself, it could never be looked upon as his own hand." Warburton, in a note upon this passage, says, " The original warrant is still extant, and Ingoldsby's name has no such mark of its being wrote in that manner." The king knew his fate. He resigned himself to it with calm ness and dignity ; with one exceptional touch of natural human passion, when he said to bishop Juxon, although resigning himself to meet his God, " We will not talk of these rogues, in whose hands I am ; they thirst for my blood, and they will have it, and God's will be done. I thank God, I heartily forgive them, and I will talk of them no more." He took an affectionate leave of his daughter, the princess Elizabeth, twelve years old ; and of his son, the duke of Gloucester,- of the age of eight. To him he said ; — " Mark, child, what I say ; they will cut off my head, and perhaps make thee king ; but thou must not be king so long as thy brothers Charles and James live." And the child said, " I will be torn in pieces first." There were some attempts to save him. The Dutch ambassador made vigorous efforts to procure a reprieve, whilst the French and Spanish ambassadors were inert. The ambassadors from the States nevertheless persevered ; and early in the day of the 30th obtained some glimmering of hope from Fairfax. " But we found," they say in their despatch, " in front of the house in which we had just spoken with the general, about two hundred horsemen ; and we learned, as well as on our way as on reaching home, that all the streets, passages, and squares of London were * Forster. " Life of Marten," p. 314. THE KING'S EXECUTION. 585 occupied by troops, so that no one could pass, and that the ap- . proaches of the city were covered with cavalry, so as to prevent any one from coming in or going out. . . . The same day, be tween two and three o'clock, the king was taken to a scaffold cov ered with black, erected before Whitehall."* To that scaffold before Whitehall, Charles walked, surrounded by soldiers, through the leafless avenues of St. James's Park. It was a bitterly cold morning. Evelyn records that the Thames was frozen over. The season was so sharp that the king asked to have a shirt more than ordinary, when he carefully dressed himself. He left St. James's at ten o'clock. He remained in his chamber at White hall for about three hours, in prayer, and then received the sacra ment. He was pressed to dine, but refused, taking a piece of bread and a glass of wine. His purposed address to the people was delivered only to the hearing of those upon the scaffold, but its purport was that the people " mistook the nature of govern ment ; for people are free under a government, not by being sharers in it, but by due administration of the laws of it. "t His theory of government was a consistent one. He had the misfor tune not to understand that the time had been fast passing away for its assertion. The headsman did his office ; and a deep groan went up from the surrounding multitude. It is scarcely necessary that we should offer any opinion upon this tremendous event. The world had never before seen an act so daring conducted with such a calm determination ; and the few moderate men of that time balanced the illegality, and also the impolicy of the execution of Charles, by the fact that " it was not done in a corner," and that those who directed or sanctioned the act offered no apology, but maintained its absolute necessity and jus tice. " That horrible sentence upon the most innocent person in the world ; the execution of that sentence by the most execrable murder that was ever committed since that of our blessed Saviour ; " X forms the text which Clarendon gave for the rhapso dies of party during two centuries. On the other hand, the elo quent address of Milton to the people of England has been in the hearts and mouths of many who have known that the establishment of the liberties of their country, duly subordinated by the laws of a free monarchy, may be dated from this event : " God has endued * Despatch from the Ambassador Extraordinary of the States General ; in the Appen dix to Guizot's " English Revolution." t Warwick, p. 345. X " Rebellion," vol. vii. p. 236. 586 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. you with greatness of mind to be the first of mankind, who, after having conquered their own king, and having had him delivered into their hands, have not scrupled to condemn him judicially, and, pursuant to that sentence of condemnation, to put him to death." * In these times in England, when the welfare of the throne and the people are identical, we can, on the one hand, afford to refuse our assent to the blasphemous comparison of Clarendon (blasphemy more offensively repeated in the Church Service for the 30th of January), and at the same time affirm that the judicial condemna tion which Milton so admires was illegal, unconstitutional, and in its immediate results dangerous to liberty. But feeling that far greater dangers would have been incurred if " the caged tiger had been let loose," and knowing that out of the errors and anomalies of those times a wiser Revolution grew, for which the first more terrible Revolution was a preparation, we may cease to examine this great historical question in any bitterness of spirit, and even acknowledge that the death of Charles, a bad king, though in some respects a good man, was necessary for the life of England, and for her "teaching other nations how to live." We must accept as . just and true Milton's admonition to his countrymen in reference to this event, which he terms " so glorious an action," with many reasonable qualifications as to its glory ; and yet apply even to ourselves his majestic words: — "After the performing so glorious an action as this, you ought to do nothing that is mean and little, not so much as to think of, much less to do anything but what is great and sublime. Which to attain to, this is your only way : as you have subdued your enemies in the field, so to make appear, that unarmed, and in the highest outward peace and tranquillity, you of all mankind are best able to subdue ambition, avarice, the love of riches, and can best avoid the corruptions that prosperity is apt to introduce (which generally subdue and triumph over other nations), to show as great justice, temperance, and moderation in the maintaining your liberty, as you have shown courage in freeing yourselves from slavery." * " Defensio pro populo Anglicano. PROCLAMATION AGAINST A NEW KING. 587 CHAPTER XXXI. Proclamation against a new king. — The Icon Basilike. — Council of State appointed. — Trial and Execution of Royalists. — The Levellers. — The Levellers in the Army sup pressed. — Trial of Lilburne. — Charles II. at St. Germain's. — Ireland — Cromwell Lord Liei tenant. — Cromwell's Campaign. — Drogheda. — Wexford. — Cromwell's Ac count of the Slaughters. — Waterford. — Rupert driven from the Coast. — Surrender of Cork. — Cromwell's Policy in Ireland. — Cromwell returns to Londo.i. On the afternoon of Tuesday, the 30th of January, the Serjeant- at-arms accompanied by poursuivants, and surrounded by cavalry, appears at Cheapside. Trumpets sound, and crowds gather about, to hear a proclamation, that whoever shall proclaim a new king, with out authority of parliament, shall be deemed a traitor. An hour only has passed, since the last king, upon the scaffold at White hall, " bowed his comely head Down as upon a bed." * What a night of curiosity and fear in the public haunts and private chambers of the great city ! That afternoon the House of Commons order " that the Post be stayed until to-morrow morning, ten of the clock." That Post, which under the Parliament has become general, instead of being irregularly despatched upon a few roads, is now a weekly conveyance of letters into all parts of the nation. On that morning of the 31st it will go out of London with letters and little newspapers that will move terror and pity throughout the land. A few will rejoice in the great event ; some will weep over it ; others will vow a fearful revenge. " The more I ruminate upon it," writes Howell seven weeks afterwards, " the more it aston- isheth my imagination, and shaketh all the cells of my brain ; so that sometimes I struggle with my faith, and have much ado to believe it yet." J There was, at the time of the king's execution, a book being printed which was to surround his life with the attributes of a saint, and to invest him in death with the glory of a martyr. The " Icon Basilike, or Portraiture of his Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings," purported to be written by Charles * Andrew Marvel. t " Letters," vol. iii. p. 36. 588 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the first himself. Milton, who was directed by the Parliament to answer this Icon, or Image, treats it in his Iconoclastes, or Image- breaker, as if the king had "left behind him this book as the best advocate and interpreter of his own actions ; " but at the same time Milton is careful to add, " as to the author of these soliloquies, whether it were the late king, as is vulgarly believed, or any secret coadjutor (and some stick not to name him), it can add nothing, nor shall take from the weight, if any be, of reason which he brings." The question of the authorship of this book has now passed out of the region of party, violence ; the controversy on that matter lias almost merged, as a literary problem, into the belief that it was written by Dr. Gauden, afterwards bishop of Exeter. This divine probably submitted it to Charles during his long sojourn in the Isle of Wight ; he published it as the work of the king; but he claimed the authorship after the Restoration. Mr. Hallam remarks upon the internal evidence of its authenticity that "it has all the air of a fictitious composition. Cold, stiff, .elaborate, without a single allusion that bespeaks the superior knowledge of facts which the king must have possessed, it contains little but those rhetorical commonplaces which would suggest them selves to any forger." But these "rhetorical commonplaces" are the best evidence, not of the genuineness of the book, but of the skill of the author. They were precisely what was required to make " attachment to the memory of the king become passion, and re spect, worship ; " — so M. Guizot describes the effect of the Icon. It was an universal appeal to the feelings, in a style moving along with a monotonous dignity befitting royalty, though occasionally mingled with cold metaphors. It set forth the old blind claims to implicit obedience — or, as Milton has it, maintained "the common grounds of tyranny and popery, sugared a little over," — amidst the manifestations of a sincere piety and a resigned sadness. In one year there were fifty editions of this book sold. " Had it appeared a week sooner it might have preserved the king," * thinks one writer. That may be doubted. But it produced the effect which those so-called histories produce which endeavour to fix the im agination solely upon the personal attributes and sorrows of kings and queens, instead of presenting a sober view of their relations to their subjects. Sentiment with the majority is always more power ful than reason ; and thus Milton's ' Iconoclastes,' being a partisan's view of Charles's public actions — a cold though severe view, in the * Laing. COUNCIL OF STATE APPOINTED. 589 formal style of a state-paper, — produced little or no effect upon the national opinions, and is now read only for the great name of the author. On the 6th of February the Commons, now reduced to little more than a hundred members, by their vote declared the House of Lords " useless and dangerous." On the 7th another vote was recorded : "It hath been found by experience, and this house doth declare, that the office of a king, in this nation, and- to have the power thereof in any single person, is unnecessary, burthensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the peo ple of this nation, and therefore ought to be abolished." The body of king Charles, on this day, when the abolition of the royal office had'been thus decreed, was removed to Windsor. On the 8th the duke of Richmond, the marquis of Hertford, and the earls of South ampton and Lindsey, arrived at the Castle, "to perform the last duty to their dead master, and to wait upon him to his grave." Amidst a fall of snow the corpse was borne from the great hall of the Castle to St. George's Chapel ; and it was deposited " in a vault, where two coffins were laid near one another, supposed to contain the bodies of king Henry VIIL and queen Jane Seymour."* The governor of the Castle forbad the Church Service to be per formed, through his bigoted resolve that, the Common Prayer hav ing been put down, he would not suffer it to be read in the garri son where he commanded. A due provision for the Exercise of the Executive authority was speedily made by the Parliament, in the appointment of a Council of State, consisting of forty-one persons. This Council comprised the three chief judges ; the three commanders of the army; five peers, and thirty members of the House. It was re quired of the individuals composing the Council that each should sign a document expressing approbation of the proceedings by which the monarchy had been overthrown. Twenty-two refused to enter into such an engagement. There were violent debates ; but moderation ultimately prevailed. The past was to remain unnoticed, in a pledge of fidelity for the future. Sir Henry Vane has left his testimony to the course which he took under these circumstances : " When required by the Parliament to take an oath, to give my * " Herbert's Memoirs." Charles II. caused a search to be made for the vault, when the parliament had voted a large sum for a public interment. The search was fruitless, and the king put the money in his pocket. George .V. wished to gratify a rea sonable curiosity, and the vault with its coffins was readily found. 59° HISTORY OF ENGLAND. approbation, ex post facto to what was done, I utterly refused, and would not accept of sitting in the Council of State upon those terms, but occasioned a new oath to be drawn, wherein that was omitted." * Vane became an active member, of the Council. He and others who had refused to sanction the deeds of the regicides, did not shrink from labouring with them in the public service. Bradshaw was chosen President of the Council, and Milton was appointed its. Latin secretary. The members chosen saw the ne cessity of holding together in the great duty of saving the country from intestine commotion and foreign assault. The Courts of Law were re-opened ; the command of the navy was put into able hands, who soon made the flag of England respected in every sea. But although the vigilance of the Council was sufficient for the repression of anarchy, with a powerful army at its command, it was not sufficient for establishing a willing obedience to the Parlia mentary Act, " That the People of England, and of all the do minions and territories thereunto belonging, are and shall be, and are hereby constituted, made, established, and confirmed, to be a Com monwealth, or Free State." It was the 30th of May before the Commonwealth was proclaimed in the City, and the late king's statutes thrown down at the Exchange, and at the Portico of St. Paul's. The Lord Mayor had been deprived of his office, and a new chief magistrate appointed, before the scruples of the muni cipal body could be overcome. There was a like indisposition amongst the beneficed Clergy, the members of the Universities, and many civil functionaries, to accept the oath of fidelity as the condition of retaining office or privilege. But those who refused were exempt from any punishment, and thus the new government gradually acquired consistency by its abstinence from any measures of general violence. There was one striking exception to its course of moderation. Five state prisoners, royalists whom the fortune of war had thrown into the hands of the Parliament, were to be sacrificed to what was called justice upon delinquents. The duke of Hamilton, who had been in confinement since his defeat at Preston ; the earl of Holland, to whom an opportunity of chang ing his side was not again to be permitted ; the earl of Norwich ; lord Capel ; and sir John Owen, were brought to trial before a new High Court of Justice, in sittings which lasted from the loth of February to the 6th of March. Of these royalist leaders lord Capel was the most eminent in courage and ability, and therefore * Speech on his trial ; given in Mr. Forster's Life. TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF ROYALISTS. 59 1 the most dreaded by the republicans. On the day after the House had resolved upon bringing these adherents of the late king to trial, lord Capel made his escape from the Tower, by dropping from his window into the ditch of the fortress ; but he was discov ered the same evening, and conveyed back to his prison. The High Court condemned all the five to be beheaded. The honest Welch squire, sir John Owen, gave the Court thanks, saying "it was a very great honour to a poor gentleman of Wales to lose his head with , such noble lords, and swore a great oath that he was afraid they would have hanged him." * The Court, however, re ferred the execution of the sentence to the decision of Parliament. For the duke of Hamilton's reprieve there were few votes. The sentence of lord Holland was confirmed by a majority of one. The earl of Norwich was saved by the casting vote of the speaker, Lenthall. Cromwell spoke upon the petition in favour of lord Capel. He bore testimony to his high qualities ; but his affection for the public, he said, weighed down his private friendship — -" the question now is, whether you will preserve the most bitter and the most implacable enemy you have." When Cromwell alluded to private friendship, he looked back upon the time when Capel was the first in the Long Parliament to complain of grievances. He was reserved for execution, with Hamilton and Holland. Owen escaped through the intervention of Colonel Hutchinson. Mrs. Hutchinson relates the circumstance in a very interesting passage : " While there was such mighty labour and endeavour for these lords, colonel Hutchinson observed that no man spoke for this poor knight, and sitting next to colonel Ireton, he expressed himself to him arid told him, that it pitied him much to see that, while all were labouring to save the lords, a gentleman that stood in the same condemnation should not find one friend to ask his life ; and so, said he, am I moved with compassion that, if you will second me, I am resolved to speak for him, who, I perceive, is a stranger and friendless. Ireton promised to second him, and accordingly inquiring further of the man's condition, whether he had not a pe tition in any member's hands, he found that his keepers had brought one to the clerk of the house, but the man had not found any one that would interest themselves for him, thinking the lords' lives of so much more concernment than this gentleman's. This the more stirred up the colonel's generous pity, and he took the petition, deliveredit, spoke for him so nobly, and was so effectually seconded * Clarendon, vol. vi. p. 256.^ 592 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. by Ireton, that they carried his pardon clear." * The three con demned noblemen were executed on the 9th of March in Palace- yard. Capel, as Whitelocke records, carried himself " much after the manner of a stout Roman." Public indignation was loudly ex pressed against this severity. The time was not yet arrived when political offences against the reigning power could be dealt with mercifully. But the English republicans of 1649 abstained from any more such blood-shedding, the case of colonel Poyer except ed. He was tried by court-martial, and shot in Covent Garden. After these demonstrations of power the public excitement appears generally to have calmly settled down into a submission to the new order of things ; in spite of the violent demonstrations of the fa mous John Lilburne. He published several pamphlets, one being entitled " England's new chains discovered," and he was committed to the Tower to be tried in due time. Meanwhile, whilst the men of station and property, the nobles and the gentry, the citizens and the yeomen, are settling into their accustomed course of life,' a spirit is getting loose which appears to be born of all great revolutions ; and which in modern times has rendered revolutions very terrible to the apprehensions of all those who have anything to lose. The " Levellers " of 1649 were, in a small way, the precusors of the " So cialists "of 1849. At St. Margaret's HiU, and at St. George's Hill, in Surrey, — a sandy district, now " a silent sea of pines," — appeared a band of thirty men, headed by one formerly in the army who called himself a Prophet. They took possession of the ground, and began digging it, and dibbling beans, in that sowing-time. They said they should shortly be four thousand in number ; that they should pull down park -pales and lay all open. The residents near these Surrey hills were alarmed ; and requested Fairfax to send a troop of horse for their protection. The Diggers, as they called themselves, were brought before the general ; when the Prophet declared that a vision had appeared to him and said, " Arise, and dig and plough the earth, and receive the fruits there of ;" that their intent was to restore the creation to its former con dition ; that they only meant to meddle with what was common and unfilled ; but that the time was at hand, when all men shall willingly come in and give up their lands and estates, and submit to this community of goods, f These men, and many others who were adverse to the existing republic, having various schemes of per fectibility, came to be known by the general name of Levellers. * " Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 164. t Whitelocke. LEVELLERS IN THE ARMY SUPPRESSED. 593 They were only really formidable when they had arms in their hands. But it required the utmost vigilance and decision to en counter the mutinous temper which was again breaking forth amongst the military class. The civil war had burst out again in Ireland ; and it was decided that twenty-eight regiments should be sent thither, under the command of lieutenant-general Cromwell. The regiments to go are chosen by lot ; but the common men have no inclination for the service. Lilburne's pamphlets are circulating amongst them. They are brooding over his wild declamations in their London and country-quarters. A troop of Wlialley's regi ment lies at the Bull inn, at Bishopsgate ; and although not ordered for Ireland they refuse to leave London ; rise in open mutiny. Their conduct is sufficiently alarming to demand the instant pres ence of Fairfax and Cromwell. The ringleaders are seized and tried by court-martial. Five are condemned ; and one is the next day shot in St. Paul's Churchyard — a strange place for a military exe cution ; but not so strange when compared with the uses to which the grand old Gothic cathedral was now applied. It had become a stable for cavalry. " It was a bitter taunt for the Italian who passing by Paul's Church, and seeing it full of horses, ' Now I perceive,' said he, 'that in England men and beasts serve God alike.' " * The same amusing letter-writer says, " The air of this city is not sweet, specially in the heart of the city, in and about Paul's Church, where horse-dung is a yard deep." So amidst this filth was trooper Lockyer shot — and in a week after the tragedy of the 27th of April, thousands of people are following his corpse to the grave — a corpse " adorned with bunches of rosemary, one half-stained in blood " — thousands of men and women, rank and file, with sea-green and black ribbons on their hats and on their breasts. Something there is very serious in this, not only to the Commonwealth, but to any stable order of society. Lilburne, not under much restraint in the Tower, sends out another pamphlet full of crude notions of what the people were to do to establish a perfect government upon Bible principles, under which all men were to gather unheard-of happiness. A review takes place in Hyde Park, where some of the men wear the sea-green ribbon, the symbol of disaffection; but Cromwell frightens or pacifies them. Lilburne is now committed to close confinement. But there are portions of the army in distant quarters, and at Banbury two hundred men are in revolt ; at Salis bury a thousand. Fairfax and Cromwell march with all haste to * Howell, vol. iii. Letter xix. Vol. III.— 38 594 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Salisbury. The mutineers have hurried away to join their com panions in Oxfordshire. Fairfax and Cromwell are rapidly on their track ; having marched fifty miles in one day. The mutineers halt at Burford. It is midnight when Cromwell comes suddenly upon their quarters. A few shots are fired; but there is no escape for these men, who are without a head to guide them. There is no slaughter ; but the principle of military obedience is sustained, now and henceforward, by justice mingled with mercy. A Court-Mar- tial has been held ; and ten out of every hundred of the mutineers have been set aside for death. They are placed on the leads of the church, whilst a cornet and two corporals are shot. They are awaiting their own fate, when Cromwell calls them before him in the church. He speaks to them in one of his peculiar harangues, apparently so involved, but always keeping the main point in view. The men weep. They are pardoned. In a few weeks they are on tieir way to serve in Ireland. " Levelling, in the practical civil or military provinces of English things, is forbidden to be.' * Crom well had said to the Council of State, "You must make an end of this party or it will make an end of you." He accomplished the work with a moderation that shows that severity is not more powerful than mercy, in the generality of cases. The nation felt that it had escaped a great danger. There was a solemn thanks giving-day ; the House of Commons was invited to a civic feast ; and Fairfax and Cromwell were presented with services of platg by the Corporation of London. The terror of anarchical disturbances had almost wholly passed away. The Council of State laboured to reconcile differences ; to render the administration of the law more speedy and certain ; to remove the impediments to a free exercise of religious observances amongst various denominations of Protes tants. Evelyn heard the Commons Prayer read in St. Peter's church at Paul's wharf, and listened to a sermon from archbishop Usher, in Lincoln's Inn chapel. But still there was danger to be apprehended in the intrigues of the more restless of the Cavaliers with the remnant of the Levellers ; and unnatural as was such an alliance, one of those wrote to Lord Cottington, who was with Charles in France, "his majesty's friends have no possibility of embodying, unless the Levellers lead the way." Their hopes rested upon Lilburne, who was again busy with his pamphlets. Conciliation was tried in vain with this man, who possessed none of the qualifications for a popular leader but those of reckless * Carlyle, vol. ii. p. 29. TRIAL OF LILBURNE. 595 vanity and indomitable courage. The Parliament at length re solved to send him to trial. He was to be tried by a common Jury, though a Commission of members of parliament was appointed to determine his sentence. That office was spared them by his ac quittal. Towards the close of the second day's proceedings at Guildhall, Lilburne, who had defended himself with great spirit, suddenly addressed the jury with these solemn words : " You are my sole judges, the keepers of my life, at whose hands the Lord will require my blood. And therefore I desire you to know your power, and consider your duty, both to God, to me, to your own selves, and to your country ; and the gracious assisting spirit and presence of the Lord God Omnipotent, the governor pf heaven and earth, and all things therein contained, go along with you, give counsel and direct you to do that which is just, and for his glory." And then all the spectators cried out " Amen ! Amen!" The Chief Justice charged the Jury, amidst the dread of a popular disturbance. After three quarters of an hour the verdict was that John Lilburne was not guilty of all the treasons, or of any of the treasons charged upon him. A shout went up from all the people as the shout of one voice ; bonfires were lighted throughout the City ; and after a vain attempt to hold him in custody Freeborn John was set free. This event took place in October. It is satis factory to contrast the independence of a jury at this revolutionary period, with the servile compliance to the behests of the power by juries in the Tudor and Stuart times. Amidst the manifold evils of the Civil War, the people had learned to know the foundations of their liberties; and in the 'case of Lilburne and his Levellers, jurors were not carried away by a panic about property to yield to the desire of the government without a just sense of their own re sponsibility. Though in succeeding days of corrupt rulers juries were again the worst instruments of tyranny, the verdict of twelve men was to become the ultimate safeguard for an honest judgment in times of political excitement, when ministers have been as dis posed to stretch the laws as subjects have been inclined to regard even their wholesome administration with jealousy and impatience. Six months have elapsed since the death of Charles I. Charles II. is an exile at St. Germain's. He has Hyde and other ex perienced counsellors about him ; and he has also more agreeable associates in adversity — frivolous and profligate courtiers who en courage his indolence and sensuality. English royalists resort to him, and to the queen dowager, who consoled herself in the society 596 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of lord Jermyn for the loss of her husband and her great station. The course of life of mother and son was regarded with com placency even by royalists of sober conduct. The staid Mr. Evelyn, on the 19th of August, "went to St. Germain's to kiss his majesty's hand : in the coach, which was my lord Wilmot's, went Mrs. Barlow, the king's mistress and mother to the duke of Monmouth, a brown, beautiful, bold, but insipid creature." The next day he went to Paris, "to salute the French king and the queen dowager." The French king was Louis XIV., then a boy of about eleven years old ; and at that time there was a brief suspen sion to the civil war of La Fronde. Though the Stuarts had an asy lum at the French court there was no substantial aid to be expected in that quarter. Previous to his residence at St. Germain's Charles had been at the Hague, under the protection of his bro ther-in-law, the prince of Orange. He had been proclaimed king of Scotland, at Edinburgh, on the 5th of February, and Commis sioners had come to him from the Scottish parliament to invite his return to his kingdom. They did not offer him an unconditional invitation. He was to proceed to Scotland, without Montrose and those other friends who were obnoxious to the Presbyterians ; and he was to agree to the Covenant of 1638. He was urged by the sounder Scotsmen about him to accept the terms. He was coun selled by Montrose to win his dominions by the sword. The great leader of the Scottish ultra-royalists was consistent. His one idea was to revenge the death of Charles I. : — " I'll sing thine obsequies with trumpet sounds. And write thine epitaph in blood and wounds." So wrote Montrose when he heard of the execution of his master, and so he continued to believe was his own destiny in connexion with the son. The followers of Montrose carried out his feverish notions of loyalty by an act which can only find its defence in political fanaticism. On the 3d of May, whilst the Scottish com missioners were at the Hague, Dr. Isaac Dorislaus, a native of Holland, who had assisted as counsel at the trial of Charles I., and who had been sent by the parliament as one of the embassy to the United Provinces, was murdered in his inn, by six men in masks. They were Scotsmen, of the party of Montrose. This event was not calculated to smooth the difficulties of Charles's position with the Presbyterian Commissioners ; and he dismissed them, with a negative upon their proposals. At this period, he was also es- IRELAND. — CROMWELL LORD LIEUTENANT. 597 penally urged by the marquis of Ormond to show himself in Ire land, where three-fourths of the nation were his faithful adherents. It is not easy to describe the state of parties in Ireland at this time. The majority of the people and their leaders were violent Papists — those with whom Charles I. had so often and so fatally in trigued to punish his rebellious subjects and establish the Anglican church. The Protestant portion of the population, English or Irish, lived in dread and hatred of those who had perpetrated the frightful massacre of 1641 ; and they, in common with some of the more moderate Catholics, had no disposition to welcome the king for whom the large body of the Papists had declared. Ormond rallied under his banner any leader who was a royalist, and who would join the strange confederacy of Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Catholics of the Pale, Catholics of wild regions beyond the Pale — some for freedom of religion, — most for exterminating all creeds but their own. Ormond had concluded a special treaty with the Irish Catholics, on the part of Charles II., by which they agreed to maintain a large army to serve against the Commonwealth of Eng land, on condition that the free exercise of the Catholic worship should be permitted. Ireland appeared thus on the point of being separated from English control ; ready to take a prominent part in another English Civil War. The king had been proclaimed. Dublin, Belfast, and Londonderry were the only garrisons held by English commanders ; and prince Rupert was in St. George's Channel with a formidable fleet. At this juncture it was deter mined that Cromwell should proceed to Ireland with full military and administrative powers — General-in-chief and Lord Lieutenant. It was the 10th of July when Cromwell left London, "in that state and equipage as the like hath hardly been seen," said the newspapers. He proceeded to Bristol ; and there he remained several weeks. Whether he lingered there to watch the course of events in London, or to make the requisite preparations for a diffi cult enterprise, is not very clear. Before he left London, one oi the French ministers wrote to Cardinal Mazarin, " It can hardly be possible that Cromwell, who, according to the belief of many, carries his ideas beyond even the suggestions of the most undis ciplined ambition, can resolve to abandon this kingdom to the mercy of the plots which may be formed in his absence, and which his presence can prevent from being so much as undertaken."* * Letter of June 14th. 1649, " Archives des Affaires Etrangeres de France," quoted by M. Guizot, iu " History of Cromwell," vol. i. p. 88. J98 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Cromwell by the end of July had gone towards Milford-Haven ; and he embarked on the 13th of August. Meanwhile the news had reached him of a great victory obtained over the forces of the marquis of Ormond, who was besieging Dublin. Before the end of July a portion of Cromwell's army had landed ; and thus re inforced, Lieutenant-General Jones, the governor of Dublin, had sallied forth and utterly routed the besiegers at the village of Rathmines. Cromwell himself arrived in Dublin on the 15th of August. He was received, say the contemporary narratives, with the firing of guns and the acclamations of the people. The multi tude that gathered about him was very great. They were anxious to see one '' whom before they had heard so much of." He spoke to the crowd, "in an humble posture, having his hat in his hand," telling them "that as God had brought him thither in safety, so he doubted not but, by his divine Providence, to restore them all to their just liberties and properties ; " promising the favour and gratitude of the Parliament of England to " all those whose hearts' affections were real for the carrying on of the great .work against the barbarous and blood-thirsty Irish, and their adherents and con federates ; for the propagating of the Gospel of Christ, the estab lishing of truth and peace, and restoring that bleeding nation to its former happiness and tranquillity." "Answer was returned by many hundreds that they would live and die with him."* It is clear from this speech that Cromwell was preparing for some terrible work ; and it is also manifest that the Protestant people of Dublin were well disposed to second his endeavours against " the barbarous and blood-thirsty Irish." It was in the minds of many that the time was come to avenge the massacre which had desolated so many homes. But the Lord Lieutenant contemplated no general waste and destruction ; and he issued a proclamation requiring all officers and soldiers, at their utmost perils, " not to do any wrong or violence towards country people, or persons whatsoever, unless they be actually in arms or office with the enemy." The farmers and others were invited to come to the camp and sell their commodities for ready money. Neverthe less the Lord Lieutenant went forth to fight in a sterner mood than he ever showed in the English Civil Wars. He went to try his strength, not only against the hordes of half-savage men who, during the whole course of the war between the king and the par liament, had been burning and plundering and murdering, with • " Perfect Politician," p. 53, ed. of 1680 (originally printed in 1660). DROGHEDA. 599 slight regard to any common principle of actiori ; but he went to do battle wherever, under the banner of the royalists, were gathered Catholics, English or Irish — Protestants, English, Scotch, or Irish, ¦ — captains who had fought at Naseby, or wild chieftains who came from their woods to exercise all the cruelties of partisan warfare. Ireland was in such a condition that the coming of this man in his wrath was eventually a real blessing. To follow this Irish war through its terrible details would be as wearisome as repulsive. But it has a strange interest, as recorded in the letters of the chief instrument in events which were decisive as to the future destiny of that kingdom, so long unhappy, so capable of happiness. Tredah, now called Drogheda, in Leinster, was garrisoned by three thousand men under the command of sir Arthur Ashton, an old English royalist, who had lost a leg; and whose troops were chiefly English. Cromwell setting down before the place, sum? moned the governor to surrender. The governor refused. In a similar summons sent afterwards to the commander in Dundalk, Cromwell writes, " I offered mercyto the garrison at Tredah, in sending the governor a summons before I attempted the taking of it ; which being refused brought their evil upon them. If you, being warned thereby, shall surrender your garrison to the use of the Parliament of England, which by this I summon you to do, you may prevent effusion of blood. If, upon refusing this offer, that which you like not befalls you, you will know whom to blame." * We give this brief threat before we recount " their evil " at Drogheda, to show that the horrible " effusion of blood " there was not the effect of any sudden impulse. On the 10th of September, then, surrender having been refused, the place was stormed, after bombardment. The first attacking party were driven back. The second, headed by Cromwell himself, carried all the intrenchments. "Being'thus entered,"^ writes the General to the President of the Council of State, " we refused them quarter, having, the day before, summoned the town. I believe we put to the sword the whole number of the defendants. I do not think thirty of the whole number escaped with their lives. Those that did are in safe custody for the Bar- badoes." He then relates that Trim and Dundalk have surren dered; and adds, with reference to the slaughter of Drogheda, where only one officer escaped, " The enemy upon this were filled with much terror. And truly I believe this bitterness will save much effusion of blood, through the goodness of God." We look * Carlyle,- (from an Autograph,) vol. ii. p. 48. ''OO HISTORY OF ENGLAND. with horror upon such wholesale butchery ; and yet its perpetrator was in his nature the very opposite of cruel. He feels that some defence is necessary for such severities ; and in a more detailed despatch to the Speaker, he repeats his belief " that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future ; which are the satis factory grounds to such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret." We must follow this resolute man to Wex ford. There again was a terrible slaughter; but it was not set about with a deliberate purpose. It was such a slaughter as has too often been the result of a storm by an infuriated soldiery. There had been negotiations for the surrender of the castle and town, upon merciful and honourable conditions, going on from the 3rd to the nth of October. The castle was surrendered; but the town being supposed to hold out, and armed men advancing towards the castle, the troops of Cromwell stormed it; and "when they were come into the market-place, the enemy making a stiff resist ance, our forces brake them ; and then put all to the sword that came in their way." Cromwell then adds,to this account, " it hath not, without cause, been deeply set upon our hearts, that, we in tending better to this place than so great a ruin, hoping the town might be of more use to you and your army, yet God would not have it so ; but by an unexpected providence, in his righteous justice, brought a just judgment upon them ; causing them to become a prey to the soldier, who in their piracies had made prey of so many families, and now with their bloods to answer the cruelties which they had exercised upon the lives of divers poor Protestants." This confidence that an accidental and unnecessary slaughter was a divine judgment, is consistent with the whole char acter of Cromwell's mind. He did not express such opinions with out a_strong conviction. The slaughter at Drogheda, set about with a stern determination to make such a beginning of the war as should shortly bring it to an end, was perfectly comprehensible by Cromwell's contemporaries. Ludlow, no friend of Cromwell, re marks of this "extraordinary severity," that he presumes "it was used to discourage others from making opposition."* Another writer of the time says, "Yet cruelty could not be laid to his charge, for, like a politic state-physician, he here opens one vein, to preserve the whole body of the nation from a lingering war; and by this course likewise he wrought such a terror in the enemy, that ever after he made but short work of any siege, and in small * '* Memoirs," vol. i. p. 303. RUPERT DRIVEN FROM THE COAST. 6oi fime reduced the whole nation."* The Jacobite historian of the next age denounces "the execrable policy of that Regicide, which had the effect he proposed." An enlightened and truly pious minister of our own day writes of this Irish campaign, " For nine years a most insane war has been raging. Cromwell, by merciful severity, concludes it in nine months."! The view which dispas sionate persons take of these events will always be a mixed one. They will regard them somewhat, but not altogether, in the spirit of M. Guizot, when he says, " It is the ordinary artifice of bad passions to impute the cruel satisfaction with which they glut them selves, either to some great idea whose accomplishment they are earnestly pursuing, or to the absolute necessity of success ; " and they will feel with this writer, whose philosophy is so connected with a vast experience, that " human fanaticism also lies, or allows itself to be deluded by pride, when it pretends to be the executor of the high decrees of Divine justice." But, whilst they remem ber many incidents of later times in which " bad passions "' and "human fanaticism" have perpetrated cruelties and injustice, they will not, without due examination of the character of Cromwell, agree with M. Guizot, that "he was determined to succeed rapidly, and at any cost, from the necessities of his fortune, far more than for the advancement of his cause ; " or admit that " he denied no outlet to the passions of those who served him." M. Guizot, well read as he is in English history, is pointing these remarks nearer home — a mode of expressing political opinions which may be safe in its immediate purposes, but not altogether consistent with his torical impartiality. Charles II. was at St. Germain's when he received the news of Ormond's defeat before Dublin. In the heroic vein, which little suited his nature, he exclaimed, "Then must I go there to die." He went as far as Jersey, where the news of the fall of Drogheda reached him. It produced the same effect upon his spirits as upon the courtiers he had left at St. Germain's. In Evelyn's Diary of the 15th of October we have this entry: "Came news of Drogh eda being taken by the rebels, and all put to the sword ; which made us very sad, fore-running the loss of all Ireland." Cromwell marched on, taking town after town, until he met with a stout resistance at Waterford ; and the weather being very tempestuous * " Perfect Politician," p. 56. t " Lectures on Great Men," by the late Frederick Myers, M.A. p. 259. X " History of Cromwell," vol/ i. p. 98. 602 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. he went into winter-quarters. But his rapid marches from fortress to fortress have changed the whole aspect of affairs. General Blake has interrupted the operations of prince Rupert in the Irish seas. Cork Harbour is now the victualling-place for the fleet, instead of Milford Haven. Rupert, with the ships which he has commanded since the revolt of the sailors in 1648, has taken refuge in Kinsale, instead of making rich prizes of English merchantmen. Lady Fanshawe, who at this time was at Cork, writes that Crom well "so hotly marched over Ireland, that the fleet with prince Rupert was forced to set sail." This was an indirect consequence, in a little time after, of Cromwell's hot marches. A more imme diate consequence was the submission of Youghal and of Cork to the authority of the Parliament. There is a passage in the Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe, which presents a vivid picture of the mode in which such warlike operatious affect individuals; an interesting episode amidst graver matters of wars and bitter hatreds. The poor lady had been residing at Red Abbey, in Cork, for six months with her husband, who was waiting " his majesty's commands how to dis pose himself." Sir Richard Fanshawe had gone for a day to Kinsale. His wife, by the fall of a stumbling horse, had broken her left wrist ; which was ill set, and put her to great pain. She was in bed on a night early in November : " At midnight I heard the great guns go off, and thereupon I called up my family to rise, which I did as well as I could in that condition. Hearing lamentable shrieks of men, women, and children, I asked at a window the cause ; they told me they were all Irish, stripped and wounded, and turned out of the town, and that colonel Jefferies, with some others, had possessed themselves of the town for Cromwell. Upon this, I immediately wrote a letter to my husband, blessing God's provi dence that he was not there with me, persuading him to patience and hope that I should get safely out of the town, by God's assist ance, and desired him to shift for himself, for fear of a surprise, with promise that I would secure his papers. So soon as I had finished my letter, I sent it by a faithful servant, who was let down the garden wall of Red Abbey, and, sheltered by the darkness of the night, he made his escape. I immediately packed up my hus band's cabinet, with all his writings, and nearly ^1000 in gold and silver, and all other things both of clothes, linen, and household stuff that were portable, of value ; and, then, about three o'clock in the morning, by the light of a taper, and in that pain I was in, I went into the market-place, with only a man and maid, and passing SURRENDER OF CORK. 603 through an unruly tumult with their swords in their hands, searched for their chief commander Jefferies, who, whilst he was loyal, had received many civilities from your father. * I told him it was ne cessary that upon that change I should remove, and I desired his pass that would be obeyed, or else I must remain there : I hoped he would not deny me that kindness. He instantly wrote me a pass, both for myself, family, and goods, and said he would never forget. the respect he owed your father. With this I came through thou sands of naked swords to Red Abbey, and hired the next neigh bour's cart, which carried all that I could remove ; and myself, sister, and little girl Nan, with three maids and two men, set forth at five o'clock in November, having but two horses amongst us all, which we rid on by turns. In this sad condition I left Red Abbey, with as many goods as were worth 2^100 which could not be re moved, and so were plundered. We went ten miles to Kinsale, in perpetual fear of being fetched back again ; but; by little and little, I thank God, we got safe to the garrison, where I found your father the most disconsolate man in the world, for fear of his family, which he had no possibility to assist : but his joy exceeded to see me and his darling daughter, and to hear the wonderful escape we, through the assistance of God, had made. But when the rebels went to give an account to Cromwell of their meritorious act, he im mediately asked them where Mr. Fanshawe was. They replied, he was that dav gone to Kinsale. Then he demanded where his papers and his family were ? At which they all stared at one an other, but made no reply. Their General said, ' It was as much worth to have seized his papers as the town ; for I did make ac count to have known by them what these parts of the country are worth.' '' • The policy of Cromwell in Ireland was all throughout most in telligible and consistent ; and we are not to conclude from the course of events during two centuries that it was not a wise policy. He wrote to the Parliament, " I hope, before long, to see Ire land no burden to England, but a profitable part of the Common wealth." He sought to make it profitable by freeing it, in the first place, from ecclesiastical tyranny, and thus fitting it for civil free dom. In a most remarkable Declaration, which he composed in his winter-quarters, " in answer to certain late Declarations and Acts, framed by the Irish Popish prelates and clergy in a Conven- ^ tick at Clonmacnoise," he makes a furious onslaught upon the prin- * Lady Fanshawe addressed her Memoir to her only son. 604 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ciple which, he says, begins to be exploded, " that people are for kings and churches, and saints are for the pope or churchmen." He goes on in this impassioned strain : " How dare you assume to call these men your flocks, whom you have plunged into so horrid a rebel lion, by which you have made them and the country almost a ruinous heap ? And whom you have fleeced, and polled, and peeled hitherto, and make it your business to do so still. You cannot feed them. You poison them with your false, abominable, and anti-christian doctrines and practices. You keep the word of God from them ; and instead thereof give them your senseless orders and traditions." He tells them, when they allege against him, as a design to extir pate the catholic religion, his letter to the governor of Ross, — in which he says, " If by liberty of conscience you mean a liberty to exercise the Mass, that will not be allowed of," — that by the rebel lion of 1 641 alone did they recover the public exercise ofthe Mass, which had not been heard of for eighty years. He will not have the Mass ; but " as for the people, what thoughts they have in matters of religion in their own breasts I cannot reach ; but shall think it my duty, if they walk honestly and peaceably, not to cause them in the least to suffer for the same ; and shall endeavour to walk pa tiently, and in love towards them, to see if at any time it shall please God to give them another or a better mind." This is, indeed, a very limited toleration ; but we must acknowledge that in those times it was the onlv practical toleration. He would not relax the old penal laws against one form of worship ; but he would not apply new penal laws to force men into another form of worship against their consciences. The priest accused him of massacre, destruction, and banishment. He replies, " Give us an instance of one man since my coming into Ireland, not inarms, massacred, destroyed; or ban ished ; concerning the massacre or the destruction of whom justice has not been done, or endeavoured to be done." He rises into ab solute eloquence when he sets forth the motives which have brought him and his army to Ireland: "We are come to ask an account of the innocent blood that hath been shed ; and to endeavour to bring to an account, — by the blessing and presence of the Almighty, in whom alone is our hope and strength, — all who, by appearing in arms, seek to justify the same. We come to break the power of a company of lawless rebels, who having cast off the Authority of England, live as enemies to Human -Society ; whose~principles, the world hath experience, are, to destroy and subjugate all men not complying with them. We come, by the assistance of God, to hold CROMWELL RETURNS TO LONDON. 605. forth and maintain the lustre and glory of English Liberty in a Nation where we have an undoubted right to do it ; — wherein the People of Ireland (if they listen not to such seducers as you are) may equally participate in all benefits ; to use their liberty and for tune equally with Englishmen, if they keep out of arms." * Cromwell did not seek an)' long repose from his military labours. On the 15th of February, 1650, he writes to the Speaker, "having refreshed our men for some short time in our winter-quarters, and health being pretty well recovered, we thought fit to take the field." The House send the Lord-Lieutenant their thanks for all he had done ; and resolve that he " have the use of the Lodgings called the Cockpit, of the Spring Garden and St. James's House, and the command of St. James's Park." His return to London was de sired ; but he had work to do, and rather turned a deaf ear to the wishes of the Parliament. It is not necessary that we should fol low his course of success during the spring of 1650. His boldest and most sagacious stroke of policy was that of proclaiming throughout the country that the men who had been in arms, and were now scattered and utterly destitute, had full liberty to serve abroad. The ministers in London of France and Spain availed themselves of this permission, and forty-five thousand men of Ire land were levied for the service of these powers. Clarendon speaks with bitterness of hfart of this wise expedient for freeing the land from those who would have been the principal hindrance to its quiet settlement. The king's lieutenant, he says, could not, after all the promises and contracts of the confederate Roman Catholics, draw together a body of five thousand men ; whilst " Cromwell himself found a way to send above forty thousand men out of that country for service of foreign princes ; which might have been enough to have driven him from thence, and to have restored it to the king's entire obedience." Cromwell left Ireton as Deputy to complete the work which he had begun, and he ar rived himself in London on the 31st of May, ready for other ser vices to the Commonwealth. * This document, which Mr. Carlyle terms " one of the remarkablest State Papers ever published in Ireland since Strongbow, or even St. Patrick appeared there," occupies sixteen pages of tbe Cromwell Letters, p. 103 to 119, vol. ii. 606 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER XXXII. Charles II. negotiates with the Scottish Parliament. —His commission to Montrose.— Montrose in Scotland.— Execution of Montrose.— Charles goes to Scotland.— War with Scotland — Cromwell General.— Cromwell's Advance.— His Danger.— Position of the two Armies at Dunbar. — Battle of Dunbar. — Charles crowned at Scone. — Perth taken by Cromwell.— Charles and the Scotch Army in England.— The Battle of Worcester.— Escape and Adventures of Charles.— Charles returns to France.— Note.— Whitelocke's Description of Cromwell's Army, in a Conversation with Christina, queen of Sweden. Charles II., essentially different in character from his father, had inherited that quality of his family which mainly led to the tragedies of Fotheringay and Whitehall. He was a double-dealer. When the affairs of Ireland became hopeless, he listened to the proposals of the Parliament of Scotland. He received an envoy from the Presbyterian authorities while at Jersey ; and appointed them to meet him at Breda to conclude a treaty for his reception in Scotland. He was urged by his warmest friends to close with their offers, although there was no relaxation of the terms upon which the support of the great religious party, speaking the voice of the Scottish nation, was offered to him. Whilst he was thus negotiating with the Parliament, he gave Montrose a commission to levy troops in foreign countries, and wage war against the powers with whom he was bargaining. He wrote to the mortal enemy of the Covenanters, " I entreat you to go on vigorously, and with your wonted courage and care, in the prosecution of those trusts I have committed to you ; and not to be startled with any re ports you may hear, as if I were otherwise inclined to the Presby terians than when I left you. I assure you I am upon the same principles I was, and depend as much as ever upon your undertak ing and endeavours for my service." Urged thus, and by his own passionate loyalty, the exile of Philiphaugh was indefatigable in gathering followers, though with no great success. In the autumn of 1649 he had collected about twelve hundred men at Hamburg and Gottenburg, and he dispatched a portion of them, who perish ed at sea. A second body arrived safely at Kirkwall. With five MONTROSE IN SCOTLAND. 607 hundred more, Montrose himself landed in the Orkney^ early in March, 1650. He then crossed to the northern extremity of the main land ; and, says Clarendon, " quickly possessed himself of an old castle ; which, in respect of the situation in a country so impos sible for an army to march in, he thought strong enough for his purpose: thither he conveyed the arms, ammunition, and trcops which he had brought with Mm." Caithness, in which district he landed, has numerous ruins of old castles — grim monuments of days of cruel feuds and- lawless rapine. Here Montrose was ccme with his threatening banners — one of the two royal ones exhibiting the bleeding head of Charles I., with the motto, "Judge and re venge my cause, O Lord ; " and his own banner painted with a naked arm and a sword dripping with gore. Onward he marched into Sutherland. Few adherents joined him. The natives fled from him as from a public enemy, of whose military excesses the Scots had received terrible lessons. Some cavalry, under the command of colonel Strachan, were proceeding against Montrose, in advance of a main body of troops under David Lesley ; and they came sud denly upon him near a pass in the parish of Kincardine. The place is now called Craigchonichen, or the Rock of Lamentation. Here Montrose's last battle was soon ended. His Orkney re cruits quickly ran ; his Germans and his Scottish companions fought valiantly, but without effect. The ill-compacted force was wholly broken ; and he himself fled from the field, throwing away his ribbon and George, and changing clothes with a peasant. Wandering amongst the Highlands for many days, he was at last taken on the 3rd of May. Clarendon's narrative of the last enterprise of Montrose and its fatal termination is regarded as one of the finest passages of his history. It should be read as a whole * to do justice to its merits as a composition. The facts which it relates, compared with other relations, lie in a short compass. After his capture, Montrose and the other Scottish prisoners were delivered to David Lesley ; the foreigners were set at liberty. There was a ferocious exultation over the fall of the capital enemy of the Covenanters, which showed itself in such acts of meanness as carrying him frbm town to town in the unseemly garb with which he was disguised, and thus ex posing him to the jeers of the populace. An Act of Attainder had been passed by the Parliament against Montrose in IL144; and upon that Act he was now sentenced to death, before he reached * " Rebellion," vol. vi. p. 408, to 422. 608 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Edinburgh. When he arrived at the Watergate of the city he was delivered to the magistrates, and was conveyed to the Tolbooth, bound with cords, in an open cart, the common hangman riding before the cart, and wearing the livery of the fallen marquis. Thirty-four of his officers, tied together, formed part of the caval cade. The great object of popular curiosity sat serene amidst his indignities ; and his proud composure moved pity in the beholders, instead of the demonstrations of hate which were anticipated. Argyle looked ./upon his illustrious enemy from a window in the house of the eafl of Mcray,* From the first scene of this tragedy to the last, Montrose acted his heroic part to perfection. His de meanour was somewhat more theatrical than the mode in which the highest species of heroism would care to exhibit itself; but it was well calculated to dazzle those who are most taken with the showy virtues. When he alighted from the cart, he gave the hangman a reward " for driving his triumphal chariot so well." When he was brought, two days after, before the Parliament, he was splendidly dressed ; and looked around him with an air of studied haughtiness and contempt. The Chancellor Loudon spoke bitterly to him — "he had committed many horrible murders, trea sons, and impieties, for all which he was now brought to suffer condign punishment." When permitted to speak, Montrose said that " since the king had honoured them so far as to treat with them, he had appeared before them with reverence and bare headed, which otherwise he would not willingly have done. He had done nothing of which he was ashamed, or had cause to repent." He had withdrawn himself from the first ¦ Covenant, when he saw that it was intended to take away the king's just power and lawful authority. He had never taken the second Cov enant. He defended himself from the charge of cruelty ; and maintaining that having again entered the kingdom by his majesty's command, he advised them to consider well of the consequence before they proceeded against him. His- sentence was then pro nounced : — that on the morrow, the 21st of May, he should be hanged on a gallows thirty feet high; that his head should then be cut off and ^et on Edinburgh Tolbooth ; and that his legs and arms should be hung up in other towns of the kingdom. After he was conveyed back to prison he was beset by ministers and magis trates ; who only stirred his spirit to its loftiest mood. He told them that he had rather his head were stuck upon the "Tolbooth * Guizot : upon the authority of a letter of the French agent to Mazarin- Montrose in Edinburgh. — Vol. iii. 608. EXECUTION OF MONTROSE. 609 than that his picture should be hung in the king's bedchamber ; that it troubled him not that his limbs should be exposed in other towns ; " and that he heartily wished that he had flesh enough to be sent to every city in Christendom, as a testimony of the cause for which he suffered." In the same spirit he went to the scaffold. When the hangman, by way of adding to his indignities, hung about his neck the narrative of his military exploits, "the marquis smiled at this new instance of their malice, and thanked them for it, and said he was prouder of wearing it than ever he had been of the Garter." Clarendon's character of the great chieftain is .not an unmixed eulogium : " He was a gentleman of a very ancient ex traction, many of whose ancestors had exercised the highest charges under the king in that kingdom, and had been allied to the crown itself. He was of very good parts, which were improved by a good education : he had always a great emulation, or rather a great contempt, of the Marquis of Argyle (as he was too apt to contemn those he did not love), who wanted nothing but honesty and courage to be a very extraordinary man, having all other good talents in a very great degree. Montrose was in his nature fear less of danger, and never declined any enterprise for the difficulty of going through with it, but exceedingly affected those which seemed desperate to other men, and did believe somewhat to be in himself above other men, which made him live more easily towards those who were, or were willing to be, inferior to him (towards whom he exercised wonderful civility and generosity), than with his superiors or equals. He was naturally jealous, and suspected those who did not concur with him, in any way, not to mean so well as he. He was not without vanity, but his virtues were much su perior, and he well deserved to have his memory preserved, and celebrated amongst the most illustrious persons of the age in which he lived." Charles came to a conclusion with the Scottish commissioners at Breda before the death of Montrose, although he was acquaint- 'ed with the failure of his rash expedition. He consented to every proposition. He was to swear to be faithful to the Covenant; he was to submit himself to the advice of the Parliament and the Church ; he was never to permit the exercise of the Catholic relig ion in any part of his dominions. He even denied that he had authorised the enterprise of Montrose. When he heard of his friend's execution, he manifested a disposition to draw back ; but his courtiers " persuaded the king, who was enough afflicted with Vol. III.— 39 6lO HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the news, and all the circumstances of it, that he might sooner take revenge upon that people by a temporary complying with them and going to them." Upon this righteous principle " his majesty pursued his former resolution of embarking for Scotland." This is Clarendon's account ; who makes no remark in his History upon this miserable policy. But he says, in a private letter to secretary Nicolas, "If the king puts himself into the hands of the Scots, they cannot justly be accused of deceiving him ; for, on my con science, they will not use him worse than they promise, if he does all they require him to do in this last address. I wish, with all my heart, they who advise the king to comply, and join with them, would deal as clearly, and say that the king should now take the Covenant, and enjoin it to others, and all observe it ; but to say he should put himself into their hands, and hope to be excused tak ing it, and be able to defend others from submitting to it, — or that he and we should take it and break it afterwards, — is such folly and atheism that we should be ashamed to avow or think it." Such was the political morality by which Charles was guided when he was twenty years old — a season of life in which deliberate un truth and purposed treachery are rarely the governing principles of actions. We have little sympathy for him in his humiliations and adversities among the Scots. We rejoice to know that, before he had landed in Scotland on the 16th of June, he was compelled to sign the Covenant ; that few of his English friends were permitted to be about him ; and that if he were still free to listen to the ribaldry of Buckingham and Wilmot, he had to do daily penance in being compelled to attend the long prayers and longer sermons of the clergy who were placed about him. Charles probably cared little for these restraints; for he had a good table, horses to ride, and the outward shows that belong to a king; but it has been sen sibly conjectured that the gloomy austerity of these preachers "strengthened that indifference to religion and that proneness to dissipation by which his whole life was unhappily distinguished."* Cromwell had arrived in London on the 31st of May. He was received with every honour that Parliament and City could bestow ; and by the enthusiastic acclamations of the people. He did not despise popular applause : but he knew something of its intrinsic value. To the remark, " What a crowd come to see your lord ship's triumph," he replied, " If it were to see me hanged how many more would there be ! " He was soon called to other sen- * Cook, " History of the Church of Scotland," quoted by Sir Walter Scott. WAR WITH SCOTLAND. — CROMWELL GENERAL. 6 II ous work. The Parliament had been preparing forces for a war with Scotland, having no great hope of repose in the presence there of a covenanted king. The Scots are also making some prepara tion for ^ war with England, the ministers of the Commonwealth not having taken in good part their remonstrance as to the course of civil and religious policy, and their negotiations with Charles. It is a question which shall strike the first blow. Fairfax was un willing to invade the Scots ; although, says Ludlow, " we laboured to persuade him of the reasonableness and justice of our resolu tion to march into Scotland, they having already declared them selves our enemies, and by public protestation bound themselves to impose that government upon us which we had found necessary to abolish." * Cromwell pressed that Fairfax, notwithstanding his resolution, should be continued as General of the Army, " profess ing for himself that he would rather choose to serve under him in his post than to command the greatest army in Europe." A Com mittee, upon Cromwell's motion, was appointed to confer with the General ; and Ludlow adds that the Lieutenant-General "acted his part so to the life that I really thought he was in earnest." Ulti mately Fairfax resigned his commission, receiving a large pension, and Cromwell was called to the great office. " I really thought he was in earnest," says Ludlow. There is another version from one who took a part in these events : " To speak the truth of Cromwell, whereas many said he undermined Fairfax, it was false ; for in Col onel Hutchinson's presence, he most effectually importuned him to keep his commission, lest it should discourage the army and the peo ple in that juncture of time, but could by no means prevail, although he laboured it almost all the night with most earnest endeavours.- But this great man was then as unmoveable by his friends as pertina cious in obeying his wife ; whereby he then died to all his former glory, and became the monument of his own name, which every day wore out." f And so Cromwell set forth to lead an army into Scotland ; declaring in a private conversation with Ludlow, " that he looked upon the design of the Lord on this day to be the free ing of his people from every burden, and that he was now accom plishing what was prophesied in the i loth Psalm; from the con sideration of which he was often encouraged to attend the effect ing those ends."- On the 26th of June, the Act was passed for constituting " Oliver Cromwell Captain General and Commander- in-Chief of all the forces raised and to be raised within the Com- * " Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 314. t Hutchinson's "Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 172. 6l2 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. monwealth of England." On the 29th he left London. On the 22nd of July, with about sixteen thousand horse and foot, he marched through Berwick ; and setting his foot on Scottish ground he addressed a " large discourse " to his troops, " as a Christian and a soldier : " "I exhort you," he said, " to be wary and worthy, for sure enough we have work before us. But have we not had God's blessing hitherto. Let us go on faithfully, and hope for the like still." " The most dangerous of hypocrites," cries Hume. " I have asked myself," says one who has studied Oliver some what more deeply than the popular sceptic, " if anywhere in mod ern European history, or even in ancient Asiatic, there was found a man practising this mean world's affairs with a heart more filled by the Idea of the Highest ? " * Charles, as a measure of policy, was taken to the Scottish camp. It was composed of men of very different opinions, and of no opinions at all, in matters of religion ; and the young king soon ingratiated himself with royalists of loose thoughts and irregular lives. The Presbyterian leaders weeded the camp of those they called malignants ; and compelled Charles to sign a declaration against Popery and Heresy, condemning the evil deeds of his father and the idolatry of his mother, and protesting and promising all that he had been required to subscribe for the Parliament and the Church. He winced, refused, consented ; and then sent a message to Ormond that the declaration was extorted from him, and that he remained firm to 'his first principles as a true child of the Church of England, and a true Cavalier. The advance of Cromwell into Scotland was met by a vigorous measure on the part of Lesley. The population of the border dis tricts were commanded to leave their villages ; to drive their cattle from the fields, and to go with their goods towards Edinburgh. From every Presbyterian pulpit the English army was denounced as composed of sectaries and blasphemers, who would put all the men to the sword, and abuse the women with frightful tortures. The country was bare of all supplies ; and Cromwell was compelled to march by the coast, to receive provisions from English vessels. At Dunbar he got " some small pittance from our ships. On the 29th he was encamped at Musselburgh. Lesley's army was lying between Edinburgh and Leith, " entrenched by a line flankered from Edinburgh to Leith." There was a sharp skirmish on that day ; but Cromwell writes, " I did not think it advisable to attempt * Carlyle, vol. ii. p. 157. Cromwell's danger. 6r3 upon the enemy, lying as he doth." He conjectured that they desired to tempt him to attack them in their fastness ; or else hoping that his army would famish for want of provisions — " which," he coolly adds, "is very likely to be, if we be not timely and fully supplied." ' The Scottish army has a very secure position, en trenched from Leith to the Calton Hill ; well supplied, and the city protected. For a month there is little done besides letters and dec larations passing between the two armies. There was more skir mishing and manoeuvring towards the end of August, when Crom well had marched westward of Edinburgh towards Stirling ; but on the 30th he fell back to Musselburgh, and on the 21st retired to Dunbar. Lesley followed him. On the ist of September the English army was lying round the old fortress, near their ships. Cromwell is in a position of no common danger. On the 2nd he writes to. Sir Arthur Haselrig, at Newcastle or elsewhere, " The enemy hath blocked up our way at the pass at Coppers-path through which we cannot get without almost a miracle. He lieth so upon the hills that we know not how to come that way without great difficulty ; and our lying here daily consumeth our men, who fall sick beyond imagination. * * * Whatever becomes of us, it will be well for you to get what forces you can together. * * * The only wise God knows what is best." Oliver has written this letter of the 2nd ; he has gone into the town of Dunbar about four o'clock to take some refreshment; and he comes back to his camp, which extends from Belhaven Bay to Brockmouth House — occupy ing the peninsula " about a mile and a half from sea to sea." On the Doon Hill, on the edge of Lammermoor, Lesley's army of twenty thousand men is strongly placed. At Brockmouth House, a rivu let which skirts the Doon Hill enters the sea. " It runs in a deep grassy glen, which the South country officers in the old pamphlets describe as a ' deep ditch, forty feet in depth, and about as many in width,' — ditch dug out by the little brook itself, and carpeted with greensward, in the course of long thousands of years. It runs pretty close by the foot of Doon Hill : forms, from this point to the sea, the boundary of Oliver's position : his force is arranged in battle order along the left bank of this Brockburn and its grassy glen." * Early on the morning of the 2nd. Lesley's horse had come down from the hill, and occupied the right bank of the rivu-' let. On that autumn afternoon Cromwell, walking in the garden * Carlyle. The description of this battle-field, from which we derive our brief details, is a master-piece of that true picturesque which is derived from accurate observation. 614 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of Brockmouth House, sees the whole Doon Hill alive with the movement of Lesley's main force, — coming down to the edge of the Brock, and occupying the confined ground which lies between it and the Hill. The right wing has moved out to the open space. The quick military eye sees that one false move has changed the whole aspect of affairs. He tells his plan to Lambert and Monk : ¦ — Attack the right wing with our whole force ; drive it into the narrow space where the main force lies ; let the men stand to their arms all night, and begin the attack before dawn. The night is wet. The Scots are lying in the harvest-fields amongst the corn- sheaves ; they have no tents ; they have put out their matches, all but two in a company. To the left, by the pass over the Brock, several regiments march quickly, by break of day. At six o'clock in the morning, Lambert, the major-general, had joined with his force to lead the attack. It was a fierce contest, in which the ad vanced guard was repulsed; but it was not long before the infantry had broken the Scottish lines " at push of pike." Cromwell writes, " The best of the enemies' horse being broken through and through, in less than an hour's dispute, their whole army being put into confu sion, it became a total rout." There were three thousand slain on the field, and ten thousand taken prisoners. The prisoners were a serious trouble. Four or five thousand were dismissed. As many were sent to Newcastle. Cromwell on the 9th wrote to Haselrig, the governor of that town, " I hope your northern guests are come to you by this time. I pray you let humanity be exercised towards them ; I am persuaded it will be comely." These poor creatures were not treated as the General desired. Many died from eating raw cabbages at Morpeth ; many of pestilence in Durham. Others were sent to New England ; and John Cotton, the minister of Boston there, writes to Oliver in 1651, describing that they were then kindly used, having been sold for a limited servitude in a country where their labour was welcome, and not ill-rewarded. The dispatch of Cromwell on the 4th of September, in which he addresses to the Speaker of the Parliament a minute account of the victory of Dunbar, contains a remarkable paragraph, singularly illustrative of the character of the writer, and of his influence over the authority under which he is serving. He points out that this victory is " one of the most signal mercies God hath done to Eng land and his people." He is writing with all the horrors of the recent battle around him ; having just proclaimed that the inhabit ants may come to the field with carts to carry away their wounded BATTLE OF DUNBAR. 615 countrymen. But in the very thick of this turmoil he tasks his mind to tell the Parliament that success calls upon them to do their duty at home. " Disown yourselves, but own your Authority ; and improve it to curb the proud and the insolent, such as would disturb the tranquillity of England, though under what specious pretence soever. Relieve the oppressed, hear the groans of poor prisoners in England. Be pleased to reform the abuses of all professions ; and if there be any one that makes many poor to make a few rich, that suits not a Commonwealth." This is extraor dinary language from a servant to his master, and he takes an extraordinary occasion to use it. Ludlow speaks of this advice as very seasonable ; and the victory itself not more welcome than the General's letter to the Parliament, urging them "to do real things for the common good." Cromwell had left London, two months before, with these convictions full in his mind. He had told Lud low during the short interval between his return from Ireland and his departure for Scotland, " That it was his intention to contribute the utmost of his endeavours to make a thorough reformation of the Clergy and the Law : but, said he, the sons of Zeruiah are yet too strong for us.; and we cannot mention the reformation of the Law but they presently cry out, we design to destroy property: whereas the Law, as it is now constituted, serves only to maintain the lawyers, and to encourage the rich to oppress the poor." * We have here the first clear indication that this remarkable man, felt that he had other work before him than directing such attacks as those of the gray dawning of the 3rd of September. Before the days of Dunbar and Worcester, Milton's "chief of men" had decided that " peace hath her victories, No less renown' d than war ; " and that upon him was laid the task of their achievement. On the 5th of September, Cromwell marched away from the old fortress of Dunbar and the Burn of Brock. He had now the com mand of ample supplies, for Edinburgh and the country around were in his power, with the exception of Edinburgh castle. Charles, with the Scottish authorities, had retired to Perth. Lesley was gathering the wreck of his army about him at Stirling. The young king, utterly wearied with the Presbyterian statesmen and ministers, who had sent away all his Cavaliers except Buckingham, * " Memoirs," Vol. ii. p. 319. 6l6 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. attempted to escape from them to join his more ardent friends in the Highlands. He got away fifty miles from Perth ; but was quickly brought back. The Presbyterian leaders then somewhat relaxed their intolerant demeanour towards Charles ; but this gave offence to the more violent. The Presbyterian party became divided ; and the royalists obtained a higher influence in the direction of the national policy. Charles, without further question of his real intentions, was crowned at Scone on the ist of January, 1651. Cromwell was not warring upon the Scottish people, but was endeavouring to conciliate the religious party, by attending the sermons of their ministers, and expressing no resentment at their attacks upon himself. He has not been idle in his rougher work. After a three months' blockade, and then a bombardment, Edinburgh castle was surrendered to him on the 18th of December. Cromwell has little to do to make himself master of Scotland on the south of the Forth — some battery of detached castles, and some skirmishes with mosstroopers. On the 4th of February the army marched towards Stirling, but returned without any result, driven to the good quarters of Edinburgh by terrible storms of sleet and snow. The Lord-General became seriously ill through this exposure. On the day after Dunbar he wrote to his wife, " I assure thee I grow an old man, and feel infirmities of age marvel lously stealing upon me." In March, in reply to the solicitude expressed by the Council of State, he says, " I thought I should have died of this fit of sickness; but the Lord seemeth to dispose otherwise." In May his illness assumes a more dangerous ap pearance. The Parliament give him liberty to return home. But on the 5th of June he is out again ; and at the end of the month is vigorously prosecuting the campaign. The Scottish army was entrenched at Stirling. The king had been invited to take its com mand in person. Cromwell, on the 2nd of August, had succeeded in possessing himself of Perth. At that juncture the news reached him that the royal camp at Stirling was broken up, on the 3rst of July ; and that Charles was on his march southward, at the head of eleven thousand men, his Lieutenant-General being David Lesley. Argyle was opposed to this bold resolution ; and had retired to Inverary. The letter which Cromwell wrote to- the Parliament upon the receipt of this intelligence is frank and manly. He anticipated blame in leaving the road to England free for invasion, and he thus meets the certain imputation of neglect : " I do apprehend that if he goes for England, being some few days CHARLES AND THE SCOTCH ARMY IN ENGLAND. 617 march before us, it will trouble some men's thoughts ; and may occasion some inconveniences ; — which I hope we are as deeply sensible of ; and have been, and I trust shall be, as diligent to prevent as any. And indeed this is our comfort, that in simplicity of heart, as towards God, we have clone to the best of our judg ments ; knowing that if some issue were not put to this business, it would occasion another winter's war : to the ruin of your sol diery, for whom the Scots are too hard in respect of enduring the winter difficulties of this country ; and to the endless expense of the treasure of England in prosecuting this war. It may be sup posed we might have kept the enemy from this, by interposing between him and England. Which truly I believe we might : but how to remove him out of this place, without doing what we have done, unless we had had a commanding army on both sides of the river of Forth, is not clear to us ; or how to answer the inconve niences afore mentioned, we understand not. We pray therefore that (seeing there is a possibility for the enemy to put you to some trouble) you would, with the same courage, grounded upon a con fidence in God, wherein you have been supported to the great things God hath used you in hitherto, — improve, the best you can, such forces as you have in readiness, or as may on the sudden be gathered together, to give the enemy some check, until we shall be able to reach up to him ; which we trust in the Lord we shall do our utmost endeavour in." Cromwell was not mistaken in supposing that the march of Charles towards England would "trouble some men's thoughts." There were " pale and unmanly fears in some who directed the nation's councils. " Some raged and uttered discontents against Cromwell, and suspicions of his fidelity." Mrs. Hutchinson so describes this time of1 alarm. But bolder spirits went in earnest, upon Cromwell's advice, to gather forces together "to give the :enemy some check, until we shall be able to reach up to him." Charles had the advantage of the start in this race for a kingdom. He took the western road by Carlisle ; and when on English ground'issued a proclamation offering pardon to those who would return to their allegiance — excepting from his promised amnesty Bradshaw, Cromwell, and Cook. He was also proclaimed king of England, at the head of his army ; and similar proclamation was made at Penrith and other market-towns. Strict discipline was preserved ; and although the presence of Scots in arms was hate ful to the people, they were not outraged by any attempts at phi* 618 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. der. " I dare say," writes lord Lauderdale, " we have not taken the worth of a sixpence." Charles, however, had few important accessions of strength. Lord Howard of Escrick came with a troop of horse, and was knighted. The earl of Derby, coming to join him, was defeated at Wigan, and taken prisoner ; but he then escaped. There was no general rising in his favour. There was no eager surrender of walled towns to the king. The gates of Shrewsbury were shut against him. At Warrington, his passage of the Mersey was opposed by Lambert and Harrison, who had got before him with their cavalry. Cromwell was coming on with his main force, having left six thousand men under Monk in Scot land. On the 22d of August Charles reached Worcester, the par liamentary garrison having evacuated the city. He there set up his standard. On that day nine years his father had set up his standard at Nottingham. With the same solemnity attached to this act, a summons went forth for all male subjects of .due age to gather round the banner of their Sovereign Lord, at the general muster of his forces on the 26th of August. An inconsiderable number of gentlemen came, with about two hundred followers. Meanwhile Cromwell had marched rapidly from Scotland with ten thousand men. As he advanced through Yorkshire, and onward by Nottingham, Coventry, Stratford, Evesham, the Militias of the Counties joined him with a zeal which showed their belief that another Civil War would not be a national blessing. On the 28th of August the General of the Commonwealth was close to Worces- . ter, with thirty thousand men. Clarendon has described, in general terms, the advantages which Worcester offered as a resting-place for the royalist army, and as a point at which a resolute stand might be made : " Wor cester was a very good post, seated almost in the middle of the kingdom, and in as fruitful a country as any part of it ; a good city served by the noble river of Severn from all the adjacent counties ; Wales behind it, from whence levies might be made of great num bers of stout men. It was a place where the king's friends might repair, if they had the affections they pretended to have ; and it was a place where he might defend himself, if the enemy would attack him, with many advantages, and could not be compelled to engage his army in a battle, till Cromwell had gotten men enough to encompass him on every side : and then the king might choose on which side to fight, since the enemy would be on both sides the river, and could not come suddenly to relieve each other."* No * " Rebellion," vol. vi. p. 500. THE BATTLE OF WORCESTER. 619 1 doubt these were very sagacious considerations ; but Charles had to deal with a commander who thought that skill and daring might overcome disadvantages of position. Cromwell's despatch to the Parliament, written at ten o'clock of the night of the battle, tells the story of his strategy with sufficient precision to be intelligible : " Being so weary, and scarce able to write, yet I thought it my duty to let you know thus much. That upon this day, being the 3d of September (remarkable for a mercy vouchsafed to your forces on this day twelvemonth in Scotland), we built a bridge of boats over Severn, between it and Teme, about half a mile from Worces ter ; and another over Teme, within pistol-shot of our other bridge. Lieutenant-General Fleetwood and Major-General Dean marched from Upton on the southwest side of Severn up to Powick, a town which was a pass the enemy kept. We passed over some horse and foot, and were in conjunction with the Lieutenant-General's forces. We beat the enemy from hedge to hedge till we beat him into Worcester. The enemy then drew all his forces on the other side the town, all but what he had lost ; and made a very consider able fight with us, for three hours' space ; but in the end we beat him totally, and pursued him to his royal fort, which we took, — and indeed have beaten his whole army." We see from this rapid narrative that the Lord-General did not regard the risk of his forces being " on both sides the river." Clarendon says, " Cromwell had used none of the delay and circumspection which was imagined ; but directed the troops to fall on in all places at once." About noon, according to the same authority, " everybody being upon the post they were appointed, and the enemy making such a stand that it was concluded he meant to make no attempt then, and if he should he might be repelled with ease, his majesty, a little before noon, retired to his lodging to eat and to refresh himself, where he had not been near an hour when the alarm came that both armies were engaged." Another account says that Charles, and his Council of War, from the top of the cathedral, had beheld the building of the bridge of boats over Teme, and the bridge of boats over Severn ; and then came down to attack Cromwell's men on the side from which he had crossed. But Cromwell was soon back again over his bridge of boats, and now the battle raged with desperate fury. " Indeed, it was a stiff business," writes pithy Oliver. Clarendon briefly describes this fight ; and quickly comes to the catastrophe : "In no other part was there resistance made; but such a general consternation possessed the whole army, that 620 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the rest of the horse fled, and all the foot threw down their arms before they were charged. When the king came back into the town, he found a good body of horse which had been persuaded to make a stand, though much the major part passed through upon the spur. The king desired those who stayed, that they would follow him, that they might look upon the enemy, who, he believed, did not pursue them. But when his majesty had gone a little way, he found most of the horse were gone the other way, and that he had none but a few servants of his own about him. Then he sent to have the gates of the town shut, that none might get in one way, nor out the other : but all was confusion ; there were few to com mand, and none to obey : so that the king stayed till very many of the enemy's horse were entered the town, and then he was per suaded to withdraw himself." The 3d of September was a night of terror in the district round Worcester — the Scottish horsemen flying in every direction — their foot-soldiers scattered amongst the harvest-fields, or hiding in woods from the fury of the country people. Baxter, who dwelt in Kidderminster, has described a scene at his own doors : " I was newly gone to bed when the noise of the flying horse acquainted us of the overthrow : and a piece of one of Cromwell's troops that guarded Bewdley bridge having tidings of it, came into our streets, and stood in the open market place before my door, to surprise those that passed by : And so when many hundreds of the flying army came together, when the thirty troopers cried stand, and fired at them, they either hasted away, or cried quarter, not knowing in the dark what number it was that charged them : and so as many were taken there, as so few men could lay-hold on : and till midnight the bullets flying towards my door and windows, and the sorrowful fugitives hastening by for their lives, did tell me the calamitousness of war." * The prisoners taken at the battle of Worcester, and in the subsequent flight, exceeded seven thousand. They included some of the most distinguished leaders of the royalists in England and Scotland. Upon the entry of Charles into England, the Parliament had declared his adherents to be rebels and traitors to the Com monwealth. Upon this principle, courts-martial were held upon nine of the most distinguished of the prisoners ; and three, amongst whom was the earl of Derby, were executed. The duke of Hamil ton, also a prisoner, died of his wounds. But there was one who escaped from the slaughter of Worcester, for whose apprehension * " Life," p. 59. ESCAPE AND ADVENTURES OF CHARLES. 62 1 a reward was proclaimed throughout the country— a reward of a thousand pounds to the person who should " bring in to the Parlia ment Charles Stuart, son of the late tyrant." The narrative of Charles Stuart's hidings and escapes during six weeks has been transmitted to us in many trustwortliy accounts — one of which, in Magdalen College, Cambridge, purports to be " dictated to Mr. Pepys by the king hirnself." This escape is one of those episodes of history which relieves its weightier details ; and which has- a peculiar interest as exhibiting the faithfulness of high and humble to the sanctity of misfortune — a faithfulness as much to be ascribed to natural generosity under great temptation to selfishness, as to any passionate loyalty to the fallen prince. Not only was a large reward offered for his apprehension, but it was proclaimed that those who should knowingly conceal him or his adherents should be held " as partakers and abettors of their traitorous and wicked practices and designs." Charles, on the night of the battle, when he had ridden in hot haste from Worcester, found himself suddenly in the midst of a party of horse. Buckingham was with him, with Derby, Lauder dale, Wilmot, and others Charles says,- " We had such a number of beaten men with us, of the horse, that I strove, as soon as it was dark, to get from them, and though I could not get them to stand by me against the enemy, I could not get rid of them, now I had a mind to it." At last, with about sixty gentlemen and officers, he slipt away by a bye-road, when it was dark ; and by daybreak had got to a place called White Lady's. They then learnt that there were some three thousand of Scotch cavalry on an adjoining heath, all in disorder ; and the king's friends urged him to join them, and endeavour to go into Scotland. Clarendon says that " scarce any thing could worse befall the king." He resolved therefore to dis guise himself " with a pair of ordinary gray cloth breeches a leathern doublet, and a green jerkin." His notion was to walk to London, where Wilmot was to meet him. His other friends joined the Scots, who were soon routed by English horse ; " which shows," says Charles, " that my opinion was not wrong, in not sticking to men who had run away." A " country fellow," Richard Penderell, a Catholic, was recommended to him as a guide. They rested a very short time at White Lady's ; and spent all that day in a wood, without meat or drink. ' At night they got some bread and cheese ; and Charles having changed his mind about London, they walked in the direction of the Severn. ._ In the middle of the night they 622 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. were in danger from a miller, who raised an outcry of " Rogues ! rogues ! " when they refused to stand at his bidding. At last Charles found a shelter in the house of Mr. Woolfe of Madeley, a gentleman " who had hiding-holes for priests." Mr. Woolfe being told that one who had escaped from Worcester asked his protection, said he would not venture his neck for any man unless it were the king himself. Penderell told the secret. Mr. Woolfe was faithful ; and secreted them in his barn. But the locality was a dangerous one ; for the ferry was guarded at Madeley, where they expected to cross the Severn. Charles therefore resolved to return to the neighbourhood of White Lady's, hoping to hear some news of Wil mot. He went to Boscobel, the house of Richard Penderell's bro ther William, a farmer ; and there he found a royalist officer, Major Careless. They agreed to leave the house the next day ; and instead of hiding in the wood near Boscobel, to get up into a great tree standing in an open plain, where they might see around them. The king thus continues : " Of which proposition of his, I approv ing, we (that is to say, Careless and I) went, and carried up with us some victuals for the whole day, viz. : 'bread, cheese, small beer, and nothing else ; and got up into a great oak, that had been lopped three or four years before, and being grown out again, very bushy -and thick, could not be seen through, and here we stayed all the day. * * * Memorandum : That while we were in this tree we see soldiers going up and down in the thickest of the wood, searching for persons escaped ; we seeing them, now and then peeping out of the wood." The Royal Oak, the glory of sign- painters and school-boys, thus had its origin in Charles's simple narrative. Clarendon gives the story a dramatic point, in saying they saw many from " that blessed tree," who came purposely to look after the king; and that Charles "heard all their discourse, how they would use the king himself if they could take him." The battle of Worcester was fought on Wednesday ; the day of hiding in the oak was Friday. On the Saturday and Sunday Charles was concealed at Boscobel by William Penderell and his wife ; but on that afternoon he received a message from Wilmot, that he was at the house of Mr. Whitgrave, a Catholic recusant, at Moseley ; and desired the king to join him. There were six brothers of the Pen- derells ; and they formed the royal body-guard, as Charles rode upon a jolting horse to this new place of refuge. Mr. Whitgrave left a MS. account of his participation in the king's escape^* min- * First published in " Retrospective Review," vol. xiv. p. 62. ESCAPE AND ADVENTURES OF CHARLES. 623 ute and somewhat-tedious, but containing one or two interesting passages. The arrival of Charles is thus related : " His lordship [Wilmot] said to me, this gentleman under disguise, whom I have hitherto concealed, is both your master, mine, and the master of us all, to whom we all owe our duty and allegiance ; and so, kneel ing down, he gave me his hand to kiss, and bid me arise, and said he had received from my lord such a character of my loyalty and readiness in those dangers to assist him and his friends, that he would never be unmindful of me or mine ; and the next word after was, where is the private place my lord tells me of ? which being already prepared and showed him, he went into it, and when come forth, said it was the best place he was ever in. Then he return ing to his chamber, sitting down by the fire-side, we pulled off his shoes and stockings, and washed his feet, which were most sadly galled, and then pulled off likewise his apparel and shirt, which was of hurden cloth, and put him on one of Mr. Huddleston's [a priest], and other apparel of ours ; then after he had refreshed himself a little by eating some biscuit, and drinking a glass of wine, he grew very cheerful, and said, if it would please Almighty God to send him once more an army of 10,000 good and loyal sol diers and subjects, he feared not to expel all those rogues forth of his kingdom." At Moseley, Charles was again in danger from the presence of the Commonwealth's soldiers ; and it was determined that he'should leave in a new character. The countryman in the leathern doublet was now transformed into a decent serving-man ; who was to convey his mistress, the daughter of colonel Lane, of Bentley, to a relation near Bristol. The lady rode on a pillion be hind him. It was fortunate for her reputation that a male cousin was of the party. Having a pass, they reached Bristol in three days without interruption. On their way, the king's horse cast a shoe. " What news ? " said the serving-man to the smith. " None, since the beating of those rogues, the Scots ; he didn't hear that that rogue Charles Stuart had been taken yet." Charles thought that rogue ought to be hanged, and the smith applauded him as an honest man for his opinion. At Bristol, there was no vessel in which the fugitive could embark, and he had to seek an other place of refuge. After a day's rest, he went to Trent House, the residence of colonel Wyndham, a devoted royalist ; and his faithful Miss Lane and her cousin accompanied him. Here he re mained till a vessel was engaged at Charmouth, near Lyme, to convey to St. Malo a nobleman and his servant. In other dis. 624 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. guises Charles proceeded to the coast ; but the- master of the ves« sel was locked in his room by his wife, who declared that she and her children should not be ruined for the sake of any royalist. He now hurried, with Wyndham and Wilmot, to Bridport. The town was filled with soldiers, about to embark for Jersey. The king, in his old quality of servant, led the horses through a crowd of troop ers, thrusting them out of the way with many a coarse word. There was now no immediate expedient but to return to Trent House. A second ship was engaged at Southampton ; but was taken up for the transport of troops. His abode with colonel Wyndham now became unsafe. Another retreat was found in Wiltshire ; and in a week a vessel was engaged to sail from Shore- ham. The king and his friends again started on the 13th of Octo ber, with dogs, as a coursing party, proceeding to the Sussex Downs. They stopped that night at the house of a brother-in-law of one of Charles' friends ; and the next day were at Brightbelm- stone. This town of marine luxury was then a-mean village ; and there, at supper, the captain of the engaged vessel recognised the king ; and said he would venture his life and all for him. The landlord also said to him — " God bless you. I shall be a lord, and my wife a lady, before I die." At five o'clock on the morning of the 15th the proscribed Charles Stuart went on board : and on the afternoon of the 16th he and Wilmot were landed at Fecamp. The secret of the royal fugitive had been entrusted to forty-five persons, whose names are recorded ; and with no one of them was he ever in danger through treachery or want of caution. Charles and Wilmot, in the travel-stained disguises which they had been compelled to adopt in the place of silks and love-locks, reached Rouen. Their miserable appearance made it difficult for them even to obtain the shelter of an inn. The king managed to obtain some money ; and it soon became known that the fugitive of Worcester was safe. On the 29th of October he left Rouen; and, met by his mother and his brother James, he was once more safe in the Louvre. In a dispatch of the ist of November, we have a glimpse of Charles and Henrietta Maria : " The queen keeps altogether at the Louvre since the king's coming hither. * * * * She is constantly wonderful merry, and seemeth to be overjoyed to see the king safe near her ; but he is very sad, and sombre for the most part. That cheerfulness which, against his nature, he strove to show at his first coming hither, having lasted but a few clays ; and he is very silent always, whether he be CHARLES RETURNS TO FRANCE. 6^5 with his mother, or in any other company." * Certainly his con dition was not a pleasant one. It "was very deplorable," says Clarendon. " France was not at all pleased with his being come thither, nor did quickly take notice of his being there. The queen his mother was very glad of his escape, but in no degree able to contribute towards his support ; they who had interest with her finding all she had, or could get, too little for their own unlimited. expense." The queen's pension from the French court was ir regularly paid ; " nor had the king one shilling towards the sup port of himself and his family."! * Sir Richard Brown's dispatch. — Green's " Letters," p. 373. t " Rebellion," vol. vi. p. 542. Vol III.— 40 626 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. WHITELOCKE'S DESCRIPTION OF CROMWELL'S ARMY, IN A CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTINA, QUEEN OF SWEDEN. We shall have occasion, in^ts due place in the text, to notice the embassy of White locke to Sweden, at the end of 1653. His conversations with the famous queen, Chris tina, the daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, are singularly interesting ; far more so than the ordinary records of diplomacy. We select one conversation, in which the Ambassador Extraordinary describes to the accomplished sovereign — who had an admiration of Crom well very unusual amongst crowned heads — the composition of that Army with which the General won his great victories. At the first private interview between the queen of Sweden and the English minister, Whitelocke having presented her with his instructions which he saw she perfectly understood, her majesty went at once to matters in which she expressed her personal opinions, and sought for information beyond the ordinary range of state discussions : — ¦ "Queen. Your General is one of the gallantest men in the world : never were such things done as by the English in your late war. Your General had done the greatest things of any man in the world j the Prince of Conde" is next to him, but short of him. I have as great a respect and honour for your General, as for any man alive ; and I pray, let him know as much from me. " Whitelocke. My General is indeed a very brave man ; his actions shew it ; and I shall not fail to signify to him the great honour of your majesty's respects to him ; and I assure your majesty, he hath as high honour for you as for any prince in Christendom. " Queen. I have been told that many officers of your army will themselves pray and preach to their soldiers ; is that true ? " Whitelocke. Yes, madam, it is very true. When their enemies are swearing, or de bauching, or pillaging, the officers and soldiers of the parliament's army used to be encour aging and exhorting one another out of the word of God, and praying together to the Lord of Hosts for his blessing to be with them ; who hath shewed his approbation of this mili tary preaching, by the success he hath given them. " Queen- That's well. Do you use to do so too ? " Whitelocke. Yes, upon some occasions, in my own family j and think it as proper for me, being the master of it, to admonish and speak to my people when there is cause, as to be beholden to another to do it for me, which sometimes brings the chaplain into more credit than his lord. " Queen. Doth your General and other great officers do so ? " Whitelocke. Yes, madam, very often, and very well. Nevertheless, they maintain chaplains and ministers 111 their houses and regiments ; and such as are godly and worthy ministers have as much respect, and as good provision in England, as in any place in Christendom. Yet 'tis the opinion of many good men with us, that a long cassock, with a silk girdle and a great beard, do not make a learned or good preacher, without gifts of the Spirit of God, and labouring in his vineyard ; and whosoever studies the Holy Scrip ture, and is enabled to do rood to the souls of others, and endeavours the same, is no where forbidden by that Word, nor is it blameable. The officers and soldiers of the parlia- WHITELOCKE AND QUEEN CHRISTINA. 627 ment held it not unlawful, when they carried their lives in their hands, and were going to , adventure them in, the high places of the field, to encourage one another out of His Word who commands over all ; and this had more weight and impression with it than any other word could have ; and was never denied to be made use of but by the popish prelates, who by no means would admit lay people (as they call them) to gather from thence that instruction and comfort which can no where else, be found. " Queen. Me thinks you preach very well, and have now made a good sermon. I as. sure you I like it very well. " Whitelocke. Madam, I shall account it a great happiness if any of my words please you. f* Queen. Indeed, sir, these words of yours do very much please me ; and I shall be glad to hear you oftener on that strain. But I pray tell me, where did your General, and you his officers, learn this way of praying and preaching yourselves ? " Whitelocke. We learnt it from a near friend of your majesty, whose memory all the Protestant interest hath cause to honour. " Queen. My friend ! who was that ? *' Whitelocke. It was your father, the great king Gustavus Adolphus, who upon his first landing in Germany (as many then present have testified), did himself in person upon the shore, on his knees, give thanks to GocL for his blessing upon that undertaking ; and he would frequently exhort his people out of God* s word ; and God testified his great liking thereof, by the wonderful successes he was pleased to vouchsafe to that gallant king." * * " Journal oil tho Swedish Ambusey in 1653-4." England. Scotland. France. Spain. Germany. Sweden. Papal States. 155S Elizabeth 1567 James VI. 1559 Francis II. 1560 Charles IX, 1574 Henry III. 1589 Henry IV. 1599 Philip III. 1564 Maximilian II. 1576 Rudolph II. 1559 Pius IV. 1566 Pius V. 1572 Gregory XIII. 1585 Sixtus V. 1590 Urban VII. 1590 Gregory XIV. 1591 Innocent IX. 1592 Clement VIII. 1603 James I. 1604 Charles IX. 1605 Leo XI. 1610 Louis XIII. 1621 Philip IV. 1612 Matthias. 1619 Ferdinand II. 1611 Gustavus Adol phus 1605 Paul V. 1621 Gregory XV, 1625 Charles I. 1623 Urban VIII. *• 1643 Louis XIV. 1637 Ferdinand III. 1632 Christina 1644 Innocent X. Hrw ono .H w S o >o<2o3 England. France. Germany. Papal States Spain. Russia. 1625 Charles I. Louis XIIL Ferdinand II. Urban VIII. Philip III. Michael Federowitch, 1037 - - Ferdinand III. - - - 1043 - Louis XIV - - - - 1044 - - - Innocent X. - - J045 - - - - - Alexei Michaelowitch. 1049 f Charles II. , King dejure. \ Commonwealth. - - - - - >tor1 w o"J ooas HMgo>O< w S 35S THE POPULAR HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHARLES KNIGHT. VOLUME IV. FROM THE COMMONWEALTH TO THE REIGN OF WILLIAM AND MARY. First American Edition. NEW YORK: JOHN WURTELE LOVELL CONTENTS. CHAPTER I.— a.d. 1651 to A.D. 1653. Cromwell's return to London. — Reforming policy of Cromwell. — Conference on the Settle ment of the Nation. — Foreign Relations of the Commonwealth.— Differences with the United Provinces. — Dutch War.— Commerce.— The Navigation Act.— The Navy of England. — Blake.— Battles of Blake and Van Tromp. — Petition of the Army to the Parliament. — Dialogue between Cromwell and Whitelocke. — The question of future Representation. — Dissolution of the Long Parliament. — Public Opinion on- the Dis solution. — Summons for a Parliament. » . . . • Page 13 — 33 CHAPTER II.— A.D. 1653. Defeat of Van Tromp. — Character of the Little Parliament.— Cromwell's Address to this Assembly. — Its Provisional Constitution. — Their proceedings and tendencies. — Res ignation of the Little Parliament. — Oliver inaugurated as Protector. — Social Condi tion of the Kingdom. ..... . .. • • 34 — 51 CHAPTER III.— a.d. 1653 to a.d. 1655. The Protectorate. — Incentives to assassinate the Protector. — Royalist Plot concocted in France.— Cromwell's deportment to the French Government. — His Foreign Policy generally. — First Parliament of the Protectorate. — Cromwell's speech on opening the Session. — Parliament questions the Protector's authority. — The Parliament House losed. — Cromwell requires a Pledge from Members. — Recusant Members excluded-— Subsequent Temper of the Parliament.— Cromwell dissolves the Parliament. — Royalist Risings organised- — Failure of Risings in the West and North. — Resistance to Taxation. — The Major-Gene rals. — Severities against Papists and Episcopalians. —Tolerance to Sects 52 — j\ CHAPTER IV.— a.d. 1655 to a.d. 1658. Greatness of Cromwell in his Foreign Policy. — Naval armaments. — Blake's exploits.— Jamaica taken. — Cromwell's interference for the Vaudois. — He attempts to procure 6 CONTENTS. the re-admission of the Jews to settle in England.-Hostility of the Republicans to the Protector.— Cromwell requires a pledge from Republican leaders.— Meeting of the Protector's Second Parliament.— Cromwell's opening Speech.— Members ex cluded from the Parliament.— Case of James Nayler.— Sindercomb's plot.— The Parliament votes that Cromwell shall be offered the Crown.— Conferences on the subject of Kingship.— Cromwell declines to accept the title.— Blake's victory at Santa Cruz.— Cromwell inaugurated as Protector under a new Instrument of Government. —Second Session of Parliament.— The Upper House.— The old secluded Members admitted to sit.— Cromwell's Speech.— Violent dissensions.— The Parliament dis solved.— Projected rising of Royalists.— Aliied War in the Netherlands.-Dunkirk. —Cromwell's family afflictions.— His illness and death 75— >°3 CHAPTER V. — a.d. 1658 to a.d. 1660. Richard Cromwell proclaimed Protector.— General calm upon his succession to power.— Funeral of Oliver Cromwell.— A Parliament called.— Different Constitution of Parliament.— Conflicts between the Republican leaders and the majority.— Demands of the Army.— Richard Cromwell yields to their pretensions.— He is compelled by the Officers to dissolve the Parliament.— End of the Protectorate.— Assembly of the Long Parliament.— Resolutions that the Military power should be under the Civil.— Discussions as 10 the form of Government.— The Rota Club.— Disunion of Parties.— Royalist insurrection.— Sir George Booth defeated by Lambert.— Petitions of the Officers.— The Parliament, subjected to the Armj-, ceases to sit.— Committee of Safety.— Monk in Scotland.— Resolves to restore the Parliament.— Lambert sent against Monk.— The Parliament restored by the Council of Officers.— Monk marches to London.— Movements of the Royalists.— Disaffection in the City, which Monk is ordered to suppress.— His demand that a Parliament shall be called.— Popular exul tation. — Monk restores the secluded Members. — The measures of the Parliamentary majority.— Charles's Court.— The Long Parliament .finally dissolved. — Monk agrees to act for Charles.— Lambert's insurrection. — Meeting of the New Parliament.— The . King's Letter.— Debates on the Bill of Indemnity.— Charles the Second proclaimed. — He lands at Dover. — His entry into London. .... 104 — 133 CHAPTER VI.— a.d. 1660 to a.d. 1661. Statutes again present materials for history. — Long Parliament declared to be dissolved. — Tonnage and Poundage. — Excise. — Knight service and Purveyance abolished. — The Army disbanded. — Church Livings. — Church Lands and Crown lands. — Act of Indemnity. — Exceptions of the regicides, and of others. — Executions. — Insults to the dead. — Episcopacy. — King's Declaration. — Convention Parliament dissolved. — Ana baptist Insurrection. — Conferences at the Savoy. — New Parliament.— Marriage of the Duke of York. — Prerogatives of the Crown. — Corporation Act. — Act of Uni formity 134 — 15a CHAPTER VII.— a.d. 1661 to A.D. 1665. Scotland. — The Scottish Parliament. — Execution of Argyle. — Episcopacy restored in Scotland.— Temper of the English Parliament. — Trial of Vane and Lambert.— Execution of Vane. — Catherine of Braganza. — Marriage of the King. — Profligacy of the King and his Court. — Insurrection in the North. — Conventicle Act. — Repeal of the Triennial Act.— Dutch War.— The Plague.— The Five Mile Act.— The Settle ment Act 153—173 CONTENTS. 7 CHAPTER VIII.— ad. 1665 to a.d. 1666. Naval affairs. — Annus Mirabilis. — France joins the Dutch against England-— The sea- fight of four days. — The London Gazette.-r-Restraints upon the Press. — Ravages of the English' fleet on the Dutch Coast. — The Great Fire of London. — Note, on Wreir's Plan for rebuilding the City. . ¦ Page 173 — 1S5 CHAPTER IX.— A.D. 1666 to A.D. 1667. Meeting of Parliament. — Discontents. — Public Accounts. — Insurrection of Covenanters in Scotland.— State cf the Navy.— Dutch Fleet at the Nore. — Ships burnt in the Medway, — Blockade of London. — Peace with the Dutch. — Clarendon deprived of Office.— He is impeached. — He leaves England. — The Cabal Ministry. — Treaty of Triple Alliance. — Secret Negotiations of the king with Louis the Fourteenth. 186 — 207 CHAPTER X.— a.d. 1668 to a.d. 1673 Visit to England of the Duchess of Orleans. — Secret Negotiations of the king Louis XIV. — Renewed persecutions of Non-comformists. — Trial of. William Penn. — The Coventry Act. — Assault on the Duke of Ormond. — Blood attempts to steal the Regalia. — The mystery of his pardon. — Shutting-up of the Exchequer. — Alliance with France. — War with Holland. — Naval War — Invasion of the United Provinces. — Murder of the De Witts.-^The Prince of Orange. — Shaftesbury Lord Chancellor. — Declaration of Indulgence.— The Test Act 208—222 CHAPTER XI.— a.d. 1673 to A.D. 1678. The Danby Ministry. — State of Parties. — Separate Peace with Holland. — Charles pen sioned by Louis XIV. — Popular Discontents. — Coffee-houses closed by Proclama tion. — Re-opened. — Meeting of Parliament after fifteen months' prorogation. — Four Peers committed to the Tower. — Marriage of the Prince of Orange to the Princess Mary. — Violent contentions between the king and the Parliament. — Intrigues with France of the Parliamentary Opposition. — The Popish Plot. . ¦ . 223 — 243 CHAPTER XII.— a.d. 1678 to a.d. 1679. Discovery of the intrigues of the king with France. — Impeachment of Danby. — Dissolu tion of Parliament. — Elections. — The duke of York goes abroad. — Pretensior.s of Monmouth to legitimacy. — The king's declaration as to his marriage. — The new Council upon Temple's plan. — The Exclusion Bill passed in the Commons. — The Habeas Corpus Act. — Continued trials for the Popish Plot. — Analysis of Payments to the Witnesses. — Persecutions of Covenanters in Scotland- — Murder of archbishop Sharp. — Claverhouse defeated at Drumclog. — Monmouth sent to Scotland as General. —Battle of Bothwell Bridge. — Whig and Tory. — York and Monmouth rivals for the Succession. — Proclamation against Petitions. — Abhorrers. . • . 244 — 262 CHAPTER XIIL— a.d. 1680 to a.d. 1682. Charles the Second's alterations at Windsor. — The Duke of York presented as-a Rom ish Recusant. — Progress of the Duke of Monmouth. — James leaves for Scotland.— Parliament. — The Exclusion Bill. — Trial and execution of Lord Stafford. — The Par liament dissolved. — The Oxford Parliament.— Its sudden dissolution. — The King's ^ Proclamation.— The Whig Vindication. — State Prosecutions. — Stephen College.— 8 CONTENTS. Shaftesbury indicted for high treason. — The Ignoramus. — Court manoeuvres for the choice of a sheriff of London.— Shaftesbury flies to Holland.— Persecutions of tha Scotch Covenanters Page 263—280 CHAPTER XIV.— a.d. 1682 to a.d. 1683. The army establishment.— Quo Warranto Information against the Corporation of Lon don. — Surrenders of the Charters of other Corporations. —The Rye-House Plpt.— Arrests of Russell, Essex, and Sidney.— Trial of Russell.— Russell's Execution. — Trial of Sidney. — Scottish persecution.— The duke of York's power in England.— Decree of the University of Oxford.— Repeal of the Test Act.— Death of Charles the Second in the faith of the Romish Church.— William Penn.— Settlement of Pennsylvania.— Penn's Treaty with the Indians. ... . 281—294 CHAPTER XV.— a.d. 1685. Address of James the Second to his Council.— He is proclaimed.— He goes openly to Mass. — Illegal levying of Customs. — The king's ministers. — Roman Catholic coun sellors. — Roman Catholics and Quakers released from prison. — Renewed severities against Covenanters. — Elections in England. — Money from France. — Constitution of Parliament. — Its meeting. —Conviction and punishment of Titus Oates. — Conviction of Richard Baxter. — Argyle lands in Scotland. — Disastrous result of his expedition.— His execution.— Monmouth lands at Lyme. — His Declaration. — He enters Taunton in triumph. — He is proclaimed king. — March to Bristol. — Skirmish of Philip's- Norton. — Monmouth returns to Bridgewater. — Battle of Sedgemoor. — Flight of Monmouth. — His apprehension. — His abject submission to the king. — His execution, — Military executions in the Western Counties. — The legal massacres under Jeffreys. — Transportations. — The Court traffic in convicts. — The legal traffic in pardons. 295—319 CHAPTER XVI.— A.D. 1685 to A.D. 1686. Tendencies to Absolutism. — Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. — Meeting of Parliament. — James announces his appointments of Romish Officers. — Address of the Commons. Dissatisfaction of the Peers. — Parliament prorogued-— Trials for treason.— Repeated prorogations, and final dissolution of the Parliament. — Preponderance of the Jesuit party in the government. — Embassy to Rome. — Dispensing power of the king.— Court of King's Bench affirms the royal power to dispense with the Test Laws.— Roman Catholics appointed to benifices. — The Ecclesiastical Commission. — The bishop of London suspended from spiritual functions. — Monastic bodies settle in London. — Mass at Oxford. — Trial of the Rev. Samuel Johnson. — Massey, a Roman ist, Dean of Christchurch. — Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge deprived. — Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, ejected. . ..... 320 — 337 CHAPTER XVII.— a.d. 16S7 to a.d. 1688. Fall of the Hydes. — Tyrconnel Lord Deputy in Ireland. — Declarations in Scotland and England for Liberty of Conscience. — Abolition of Penal Tests. — Effects of the Declaration of Indulgence. — The camp at Hounslow Heath. — The Papal Nuncio publicly received by the King. — 'The King's policy towards Dissenters. — Dryden's Poem of " the Hind and the Panther "—The Declaration commanded to be read in Churches. — The Petition of the Seven Bishops. — They are committed to the Tower.— The public sympathy.— The trial and acquittal of the Bishops. — Birth of the Prince of Wales 338—356 CONTENTS. CHAPTER XVIII.— a.d. 1688 to A.D. 1689. William, Prince of Orange.— His character and position with regard to English affairs.— The Princess Mary, and the Succession — Invitation to the Prince of Orange. — Prep arations of William. — His Declaration. — Hopes of the English people. — Alarm of the king. — William sails from Helvoetsluys. — The voyage.— Landing at Torbay. — Public entry at Exeter.— The king goes to the army at Salisbury.— Desertions of his officers. — The Prince .of Denmark and the Princess Anne. — James calls a Meeting of Peers. — Commissioners to negotiate with the Prince of Orange. — The queen and child sent to France. — The king flies. — Provisional Government.— Riots.— The Irish night— James brought back to London. — The Dutch guards at Whitehall.— The king again leaves London. — The Prince of Orange enters.— The Interregnum. — The Con vention.— William and Mary King and Queen — The revolution the commencement of a new era in English history. . . , Page 357 — 381 CHAPTER XIX.— a.d. 1689 to a.d. 1714. View of the National Industry from the Revolution of 1688 to the Accession of the House of Brunswick. — Population. — the South-Western Counties. — The Woollen Manu facture.— Clothing trade of the West-— Domestic Character of the Manufacture. — Foreign Trade.— Bristol. — Watering-places of the Coast. — Travelling for pleasure. — Inland Watering-places. — Bath. — Arsenal of Plymouth. — Iron Manufactures. — For est of Dean,— South Wales.— Tin Mines of Cornwall. — Copper Mines. — Welsh Coal Field.— Varieties of Employment in the West of England. • . . 382—399 CHAPTER XX.— A.D. 1689 to a.d. 1714. The West-Midland and North-Midland Counties. — Birmingham. — Hardware. — The Potteries.— Glass. — Nottingham. — Stockings. — Lace. — Derby. — Silk. — Lead Mines. — Lincolnshire. — Salt. — Soda. — Soap. — Lancashire before the Cotton era. — Man chester. — Liverpool. — Linen Trade. — Yorkshire. — The Clothing Villages. — Leeds.— Sheffield.— Hull.— The Greenland Trade.— Newcastle.— Cumberland and Westmor land. — Scotland. — Agricultural Counties. — Norwich. — South-Eastern Coasts.— Cinque Ports. — Brighton. — Dover. — Portsmouth. — Southampton, . 400 — 423 CHAPTER XXI.— a.d. 1689 to a.d. 1714. Gregory King's Scheme of the Income of the several families in England. — Degrees of Society. — Town and Country Populations. — London. — Its Population. — Commerce. — Trading Companies. — Banking. — Unemployed Capital. — Projects for New Com panies. — Lotteries. — Tradesmen. — Their character and habits. — Extent of London. — Progress of Fashion Westward. — Street Economy, and Police. — Robberies and Outrages 424—438 CHAPTER XXII.— a.d. 1689 to a.d. 1714. Fixed position of the various Classes. — Difficulty of passing from one position to another. — The Rural Population. — The Cottager. — The Agricultural Labourer. — Character of the Agricultural Labourer. — The Farmers and Small Freeholders. — The Gentle men and Esquires. — Character of the Country Gentleman. — Kis Animosities. — The Nobility. — The NobiUty and Esquires in London. — The Clergy. — Great Social Evils. —Neglect. — The Press. — Liberal Arts and Sciences 439 — 456 10 CONTENTS. CHAPTER XXIII.— A.D. 1689. / Resolution and conduct of the Prince of Orange set forth in the Proclamation of William and Mary. — Character of Wiliiam. — Aspirants for office. — The king's ministers. — The judges. — Jealousy of William's Dutch friends. — The Convention declared to be a Parliament. — Oath of Allegiance. — Refused by some spiritual and lay peers. — Non jurors. — A Supply voted. — The principle of appropriation established. — Comprehen sion Bill. — Reform of the Liturgy. — The Test Act. — The Toleration Act. — High and Low Church.— Mutiny at Ipswich. — The first Mutiny Act. — Suspension of the Ha beas Corpus Act. — Bill of Indemnity postponed. — The Coronation Oath. — The Cor onation. —War with France. ....... Page 457 — 473 CHAPTER XXIV.— a.d. 1689. King James lands at Kinsale. — Schemes of Tyrconnel. — Condition of the Protestants in Ireland. — James enters Dublin. — Siege of Londonderry. — The Siege raised. — The Revolution in Scotland.— The Highlanders. — Dundee. — Battle of Kiiliecrankie.— Death of Dundee 474 — 493 CHAPTER XXV.-A.D. 1689 to a.d. 1690. Close of the first Session of the English Parliament. — The Insh Parliament. — Second .Session of the English Parliament. — The Bill of Rights. — The Princess Anne.— Whig and Tory Factions. — Parliament dissolved. — State of the Army in Ireland. — Abuses in Government Departments. — Opening of the New Parliament. — Corrup tion. — Jealousy in settling the Revenue. — Act of Recognition. — Act of Grace. — Wil liam goes to Ireland.— Landing and March of William.— The Boj'ne.— William slightly wounded. — Battle of the Boyne. — Flight of James. — His Speech at Dublin. — Naval defeat at Beachy Head — Energetic Conduct of the Queen. . . 494 — 515 CHAPTER XXVI.— a.d. 1690. James embarks for France.— William enters Dublin.— The French devastate Teign- mouth.— William's march to Limerick.— Siege of Limerick. — The siege raised.— William goes to England.— Parliament — War supply.— England and Continental Politics.— William leaves for Holland.— Congress at the Hague.— Mons capitulates to the French.— Vacant sees in England filled up.— Plot of Preston and Ashton.— Treason laws. —Marlborough in I< landers. — Limerick surrenders to Ginkeil.— Treaty of Limerick 516 537 CHAPTER XXVII.— a.d. 1690 to a.d. 1695. Scotland.— Affairs of Religion.— Plots.— The Highland Clans dispersed.— State of High lands in 1691.— Breadalbane.— Proclamation of the Government.— The Master of Stair — Tardy submission of Maclan.— Order as to rebels not submitted.— Older for Maclan of Glencoe, and his tribe.— Letters of the Master of Stair.— Highland troops arrive in Glencoe.— The Massacre of the MacDtmalds.— Inquiry into the Massacre in 1695.— Resolutions of the Scottish Parliament.— Master of Stair dismissed — The other persons implicated.— Breadalbane.— Misconceptions connected with the Massacre.— Character of William unjustly assailed 538—556 CONTENTS. 1 1 CHAPTER XXVIII.— a.d. 1692 to a.d. 1693. Marlborough dismissed from office. — Parliamentary debates. — Independence of the Judges. — The king leave* for Holland. —Threatened invasion. —Declaration of James. — Battle of La Hogue. — Siege of Namur. — Grandval's plot to assassinate William. — Battle of Steinkirk. — Parliament. — Crime and public distress. — Commencement of the National Dcbtl — The Licensing Act expires. — Place Bill. — Bill for Triennial Par liaments. — The King's Veto. — Murder of Mountfort. — Trial of Lord Mohun. Page 557—576 CHAPTER XXIX.— a.d. 1693 to a.d. 1694. Ministerial Changes. — Preparations for the Campaign.— Louis and William with their Armies. — Louis returns to Versailles. — Battle of Landen. — Naval miscarriages. — A Ministry formed. — Government by Party. — Preponderance of the Whigs. — Financial difficulties. — Establishment of the Bank of England.— Expedition against Brebt. — Illness of the Queen. — Her death 577 — 595 Table of Contemporary Sovereigns 1 . . . 596 POPULAR HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER I. Cromwell's return to London. — Reforming policy of Cromwell.— Conference on the Settle ment of the Nation.— Foreign Relations of the Commonwealth. — Differences with the United Provinces.— Dutch War. — Commerce. — The Navigation Act.^-The Navy of England. — Blake. — Battles of Blake and Van Tromp.— Petition of the Arrny to the Parliament.— Dialogue between Cromwell and Whitelocke.— The question of future Representation. — Dissolution of the Long Parliament. — Public Opinion on the Dis solution. — 'Summons for a Parliament. The Parliament and people of England felt that Cromwell had saved the Commonwealth. He had done more than maintain a form of government. He had stopped the triumphant return to unlimited power of a prince who, once seated at Whitehall by military supe riority, would have swept away every vestige of the liberty and security that had been won since 1640. The greater part of Europe was fast passing into complete despotism ; and the state vessel of England would have been borne along helplessly into that shore less sea. The enemies of Cromwell — the enthusiastic royalists and the theoretic republicans — saw, with dread and hatred, that by the natural course of events, the victorious General would become the virtual head of the Commonwealth. He probably could not sup press the same conviction in his own breast. Ludlow thus writes of Cromwell's return to London after the battle of Worcester : " The General, after this action, which he called the crowning victory, took upon -him a more stately behaviour, and chose new friends ; neither must it be omitted, that instead of acknowledging the ser vices of those who came from all parts to assist against the common enemy, though he knew they had deserved as much honour as him self and the standing army, he frowned upon them, and the very next day after the fight dismissed and sent them home, well know ing, that a useful and experienced militia was more likely to ob- 14 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. struct than to second him in his ambitions designs. Being on his way to London, many of the Members of Parliament, attended by the City, and great numbers of persons of all orders and conditions, went some miles out of the town to meet him, which tended not a little to heighten the spirit of this haughty gentleman. * * * In a word, so much was he elevated with that success, that Mr. Hugh Peters, as he since told me, took so much notice of it, aslo say in confidence to a friend upon the road in his return from Worcester, that Cromwell would make himself king."* Again and again Ludlow dwells upon the expression used by Cromwell in his letter to the Parliament, as if it were a foreshadowing of his own " crown ing." Later writers accept it in the same sense. Cromwell's real phrase is this : "The dimensions of this mercyare above my thoughts : it is, for aught I know, a crowning mercy." To one who was as familiar with Scripture phraseology as Ludlow was, it seems ex traordinary that he should attach any more recondite sense to this epithet than that of a perfeclingmercy or victory. " Thou crownest the year with thy goodness " is the same as " Thou completest the year with thy goodness." The authority of the Commonwealth being supreme in every quarter — England tranquil; Ireland subdued; Scotland incapable of attempting any further enterprise of a .royalist character ; the Channel Islands now garrisoned by a parliamentary force ; — the reduction of the army was a natural policy. The Militia had been disbanded ; but the great body of men in arms, who had so largely influenced the course of military and civil events, were still all-" powerful. The regular army was reduced to twenty-five thousand men. The General made no opposition to a measure which in some degree arose from a jealous apprehension of his power. He was now most strenuous for the advancement of two great measures — an Act of Amnesty, and a Law for the Election of future Parlia ments. These subjects had been often discussed, and as often laid aside. Upon Cromwell's return to London, he urged both measures forward with his wonted energy. They were just and salutary measures ; yet evil motives were ascribed to him by the republicans. " He grew," says Ludlow, " most familiar with those whom he used to show most aversion to ; endeavouring to oblige the royal party, by procuring for them more favourable con ditions than consisted with the justice of the Parliament to grant, uncler colour of quieting the spirits of many people." \ The Law • " Memoirs," vol. i. p. 365, and vol. ii.-p. 447. 't Ibid., vol. ii. p. 447- CONFERENCE ON THE SETTLEMENT OF THE NATION. 1$ for the Election of future Parliaments was passed,' by the House voting that it would not continue its sittings beyond the 3rd of November, 1654. Even this half measure was only carried by a small majority. It became manifest that the Parliament did not rest on very secure foundations. The old question of a Settlement of the Nation was very forcibly revived in many minds. How difficult a question it was may be collected from Whitelocke's re port of a Conference held at Speaker Lenthall's house, by request of Cromwell. We do not attempt to abridge this account, which has been termed "dramaturgic " — " of a date posterior the Restora tion " — but which, at any rate, shows us how these solid puritanical statesmen conducted their business : — " Upon the defeat at Worcester, Cromwell desired a meeting with divers members of Parliament, and some chief officers of the army, at the Speaker's house. And a great many being there, he proposed to them, That now the old king being dead, and his son being defeated, he held it necessary to come to a Settlement of the Nation. And in order thereunto, had requested this meeting ; that they together might consider and advise what was fit to be done, and to be presented to the Parliament. ' Speaker. My Lord, this company were very ready to attend your Excellence, and the business you are pleased to propound to us is very necessary to be considered. God hath given marvellous success to our forces under your command ; and if we do not im prove these mercies to some settlement, such as may be to God's honour, and the good of this Commonwealth, we shall be very much blameworthy. ' Harrison. I think that which my Lord General hath pro pounded is, To advise as to a settlement both our Civil and Spirit ual Liberties ; and so, that the mercies which the Lord hath given unto us may not be cast away. How this may be done is the great question. ' Whitelocke. It is a great question indeed, and not sudden ly to be resolved ! Yet it were pity that a meeting of so many able and worthy persons as I see here, should be fruitless. I should humbly offer, in the first place, Whether it be not requisite to be understood in what way this Settlement is desired ? Whether of . an absolute republic, or with any mixture of monarchy. ' Cromwell. My Lord Commissioner Whitelocke hath put us upon the right point ; and indeed it is mv meaning, that we should consider, Whether a Republic, or a mixed Monarchical Govern- 1 6 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ment, will be best to be settled ? And if anything Monarchical, then, in whom that power shall be placed ? ' Sir Thomas Widdrington. I think a mixed Monarchical Government will be most suitable to the Laws and People of this nation. And if any Monarchical, I suppose we shall hold it most just to place that power in one of the sons of the late king. ' Colonel Fleetwood. I think that the question, Whether an absolute Republic, or mixed Monarchy, be best to be settled in this nation, will not be very easy to be determined. ' Lord Chief-Justice St. John. It will be found, that the Government of this nation, without something of Monarchical power, will be very difficult to be so settled as not to shake the foundations of our laws, and the liberties of the people. ' Speaker. It will breed a strange confusion to settle a Government of this nation without something of Monarchy. ' Colonel Desborow. I beseech you, my Lord, why may not this, as well as other nations, be governed in the way of a Republic ? ' Whitelocke. The laws of England are so interwoven with the power and practice of Monarchy, that to settle a Government without something of Monarchy in it, would make so great an alteration in the proceedings of our Law, that you will scarce have time to rectify it, nor can we well foresee the inconveniences which will arise thereby. ' Colonel Whalley. I do not well understand matters of Law : but it seems to me the best way, not to have anything of Monarchical power in the settlement of our Government. And if we should resolve upon any, whom have we to pitch upon ? The king's eldest son hath been in arms against us, and his second son likewise is our enemy. ' Sir Thomas Widdrington. But the late king's son, the duke of Gloucester, is still among us ; and too young to have been in arms against us, or infected with the principles of our enemies. ' Whitelocke. There may be a day given for the king's eldest son, or for the duke of York, his brother, to come into the Par liament. And upon such terms as shall be thought fit and agree able, both to our Civil and Spiritual Liberties, a Settlement may be made with them. ' Cromwell. That will be a business of more than ordinary difficulty ! But really I think, if it may be done with safety, and preservation of our rights, both as Englishmen and as Christians, That a settlement with somewhat of Monarchical power ii: it would be very effectual.' " foreign relations of the commonwealth. 17 "•Vhether in this Conference the Grandees, as they were called, believed that when Cromwell expressed his thought " that a settle ment with somewhat of monarchical power in it would be very effectual," he was consulting only his own ambition; or whether they felt that he was propounding a principle of which most men saw the practical wisdom, although " a business of more than or dinary difficulty '' — this is not so clear as some have set forth. Whitelocke himself thought that Cromwell was " fishing for men's opinions " — a sort of angling in which he was generally successful. The foreign relations of the English Commonwealth with the other European States here demand a brief notice ; especially those which led to a great naval war with the Dutch. The privateering hostilities of prince Rupert were necessary to be met by the Republican Parliament with no common energy. The navy was in the lowest condition of inefficiency in 1648; in three years it had become a most formidable force in every sea. The Packet-boat from Dover could now sail without being " pil laged," unless it had "a convoy,'' as in 1649, when Evelyn writes, " We had a good passage, though chased for some hours by a pirate ; but he durst not attack our frigate, and we then chased him till he got under the protection of the castle of Calais ; it was a small privateer belonging to the -prince of Wales." Rupert had been driven by Blake from the Irish coast. The English Channel was well guarded by an adequate force. There was a Committee for the navy, of which Vane was President ; and his zealous ac tivity showed he was a man of action as well as of speech. English squadrons were cruising wherever there was a privateering enemy who could make commerce insecure ; for as yet there was no actual war with a foreign nation. When Rupert had escaped from the blockade of Kinsale, he sailed to the coast of Portugal. Blake fol lowed himto the mouth of the Tagus. The royal freebooter had ob tained favour at the Court of Lisbon, as might have been expected from a Catholic king, incensed at republican audacity. The stout hearted Captain who represented the honour of England demanded of king John IV. that he should expel from his ports the enemies of commerce between friendly nations ; or that he, Robert Blake, should be allowed to enter the harbour and assert the demands of his government. The required admittance was refused. Blake, at tempting to pass the bar, was fired on by the Portuguese forts ; and he immediately made reprisals upon the ships of king John. Rupert escaped to the coast of Spain ; and after similar demands Vol. IV.— 2 1 8 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. and refusals from the Spanish government, Blake destroyed the greater number of the privateering fleet. France and Spain were each under very doubtful relations to England, although Spain had recognised the Commonwealth. The time had not arrived when it was necessary to make any strict alliance, or to come to a de cided rupture, with either of these great powers — Spain essentially weak in the decay of national spirit ; France embarrassed by in testine commotions. The relations of the Commonwealth with the United Provinces were changed by the death of the prince of Orange in 1650. Had he lived his influence would have probably excited a war with the republicans, who had put his father-in-law to death, and abolished monarchical government There was large commercial intercourse between England and these Provinces. They were both Protestant. The Council of State of the Common wealth conceived the ambitious project of " a more intrinsical and mutual interest of each other than has hitherto been, for the good of both." Two ambassadors, Oliver St. John and Walter Strick land, were sent to the Hague to accomplish this alliance ; which really meant that the two republics should form one nation. This scheme was decidedly unpopular, as it deserved to be. At the Hague there were many English Cavaliers with the duke of York and his sister, the widow of the- prince of Orange. The Dutch populace and the English royalists joined in insults to the suite of the ambassadors. Oliver St. John and the duke of York nearly came to crossing swords in the public park. These proceedings took place before the issue of affairs in Scotland. The ambas sadors were at length recalled by the Parliament. It was manifest that the rival commercial states would not long remain at peace. A war was unavoidable, when the House carried the Navigation Act, under which no vessel could enter an English port with a cargo not produced or manufactured in the country to which the vessel belonged. This Act went to destroy the Dutch carrying trade. When the royalist cause was finally overthrown by the victory of Worcester, all the smaller states of Europe manifested the greatest eagerness for the alliance of the triumphant Common wealth. The States-General now sent ambassadors to London. They were received with all outward manifestations of respect ; but the Englisli statesmen were resolved to restore the flag of their country to that supremacy which Elizabeth had asserted, but which her successors had suffered to pass awav. The Great Seal of the Commonwealth ostentatiously exhibited the defences of THE DUTCH WAR. 19 " The British Sea." The salute of the English flag, the right of search, the limits of the fisheries, became the subjects of ardent contention between England and the States-General. Whilst these differences continued to be agitated in state papers ; whilst the Dutch statesmen were demanding the repeal of the Navigation Act, and the English Council as strenuously refusing even a tem porary suspension of that measure, so long considered the great foundation of our commercial prosperity ; the fleets of Blake and the Dutch admiral, Van Tromp, came to a conflict on the 19th of May, 1652. The Dutchman had come into the Downs, with a fleet of forty-two vessels. Blake thought it right to look after them, and appeared with twenty-three ships. He fired three signal guns, to summon Van Tromp to lower his flag. Tromp paid no regard to the summons, and sailed on. He suddenly turned round, and sent a broadside into Blake's flag-ship. An engagement immediately took place which lasted four hours. Van Tromp lost one ship ; and when morning dawned, the gazers from the heights of Dover saw no trace of a hostile fleet. There were conflicting statements from each nation. It was a premeditated attack, said the English ; he came to insult us on our own seas. Stress of weather drove our admiral to your coasts, said the Dutch ; he could have de stroyed your fleet if he had meant war. The United Provinces appear to have been anxious to remain at peace ; although there were party-divisions amongst their rulers. The English Council was probably not indisposed for a naval war. There was an end of land victories ; and the popular excitement might find in mari time successes some occupation more safe than agitations for new reforms. War was declared against the States-General on the 8th of July. The great naval power of the Dutch was founded, as naval power must necessarily be founded, upon the extent of their com merce. The industrial spirit of the reign of Elizabeth, the maritime discoveries, the bold but imperfect attempts at colonization, crea ted the material force and called out the national spirit, that swept the Spanish galleons from the seas over which they asserted-a— haughty dominion. A year or two before the Long Parliament, the commerce of England appears to have been in a languid condi tion. The East India company, the Turkey Company, the Mer chant Adventurers, had been long contending, with doubtful suc cess, against the inevitable encroachments of private enterprise. The interlopers, as they were called, were sometimes permitted or 20 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. connived at ; and sometimes repressed by stringent proclamations. Individual energy during the palmy days of the Star-Chamber was sufficiently retarded by small monopolies, in the shape of licenses and patents. Nevertheless the trade of the country went on in creasing ; and the plantations of America and the West Indies furnished new commodities in exchange for English produce. King James's " Counterblast to Tobacco " was forgotten ; and many a good ship was now laden with the weed once sold for its weight in silver. The Civil War necessarily interfered with some mercantile operations ; but if we look to the sums which were contributed by London and other commercial cities for the exigencies of the Par liament, we may be assured that in spite of fears and animosities, of civil and religious dissensions, the aggregate exchange of the country suffered no ruinous interruption. Under the Common wealth there was undoubtedly a revival of commercial enterprise. A writer after the Restoration, complaining of the low condition of trade at that time (1668), attributes it to the mistaken foreign policy of Cromwell: " When this late tyrant, or Protector as some call him, turned out the Long Parliament, the kingdom was arrived at the highest pitch of trade, wealth, and honour that it, in any age, ever yet knew. The trade appeared by the great sums offered then for the customs and excise, nine hundred thousand pounds a year being refused." * There can be no doubt that upon the ter mination of the Civil War all industry recovered the check that it must have necessarily received. It was felt that property was se cure ; that a political revolution had been accomplished without any uprooting of the great principles of social order. The nation was prosperous ; its rulers were proud of their triumphs and the peaceable results of their arduous contests. The Navigation Act, which was as real a manifestation of hostility to the Dutch as a declaration of war, originated in that increasing commerce which was grown powerful enough to contend with a long-established ri valry. The Dutch trade was founded upon many monopolies offen sive to the English spirit of free adventure. A bold struggle was 4g_be_made for disputing their rivals possession of the carrying- trade of the world. The Navigation Act was a rude invention suited to the infancy of commerce ; and it long held its influence over us, like many other political superstitions. Whether its im mediate results were beneficial to the country may be doubted. The statesmen of that period and long after did .not understand * " The World's Mi:t:k: in Oliver Cromwell ;" reprinted in Harl. Mis. vol. vii. THE NAVY QF ENGLAND. 21 that buying and selling, freighting and unloading vessels, bringing home useful or luxurious products of foreign countries to exchange with our own growth or manufacture — that these complex opera tions were not of national benefit merely as conducing to the en richment of merchants, but chiefly beneficial as they supplied the necessities, or increased the enjoyments, of the great mass of the people. And yet they had glimpses of this truth. In 1649 France prohibited all trade with England. On the 23rd of August, as Whitelocke reports, the House voted, that no wines, wool, or silk, of the growth of France, should be imported into England. But upon the question whether linen should be prohibited, "it was resolved in the negative, in regard of the general and necessary use thereof." But the Council of State could dispense with luxu ries. The French minister in London wrote to Mazarin that when he told the Council " that they could not do without our wines, they answered jocosely that men soon got accustomed to anything ; and that as they had without inconvenience dispensed with a king, contrary to the general belief, so they could also dispense with our French wines." * In the spirit of commercial rivalry, — with sailors in both fleets that were sometimes serving in the mercantile marine, but always trained to fight, for there were sea-robbers hovering about every rich cargo, — Van Tromp and Blake were to try the mettle of their crews. In every material of naval warfare the Dutch were superior to the English. Their ships were far more numerous ; their commanders were more experienced •. their men better dis ciplined. Blake, and Deane, and Popham, and other sea-captains, were land-officers. When Cromwell writes from Ireland to the Council of State, he mentions " Colonel Blake " in one letter, and " General Blake " in another. The Dutch had a more practised body of naval tacticians, who had been educated for a special ser vice connected with the rich commerce of their Indian and Amer ican settlements. But in the English fleet there was a devoted zeal which feared no encounter however unequal, and was indiffer ent to the grounds of a quarrel in the determination to uphold the national honour. In 1652, in anticipation of the Dutch war, Blake was appointed sole admiral and general of the fleet. The charac ter which Clarendon gives of this great commander is candid and discriminating; and it shows how a resolute will, seconding nat- * Guizot's "Cromwell," vol. i. p. 221; quoted from the despatch in Archives des Affaires Estrangeres de France. 22 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ural talents, may triumph over the impediments of traditionarj habits and imbecile routine : " Having done eminent service to the Parliament, especially at Taunton, at land, Jie then betook himself wholly to the sea; and quickly made himself signal there. He was the first man that declined the old track, and made it man ifest that the science might be attained in less time than was im agined, and despised those rules which had been long in practice, to keep his ship and his men out of danger ; which had been held in former times a point of great ability and circumspection ; as if the principal art requisite in the captain of a ship had been to be sure to come home safe again. He was the first man who brought the ships to contemn castles on shore, which had been thought ever very formidable, and were discovered by him to make a noise only, and to fright those who could rarely be hurt by them. He was the first that infused that proportion of courage into the sea men, by making them see by experience what mighty things they could do, if they were resolved ; and taught them to fight in fire as well as upon water : and though he hath been very well imitated and followed, he was the first that gave the example of that kind of naval courage, and bold and resolute achievements." * The great men of the Civil War and of the Commonwealth were called out by the circumstances of the times. The genius of Blake, in the chases and battles of the sea, was the same creation of a strong necessity as the genius of Cromwell in his land-fights. The great admiral was made out of an idle country gentleman ; the great gen eral was made out of a plain follower of rural industries. The statesmen of the time were fashioned by the same rough teaching. Howell, who was a sagacious observer of men's actions, and whose judgment was not much obscured by his political feelings, writes thus of the men of this period : " The world stands in admiration of the capacity and docibleness of the English,' that persons of or dinary breeding, extraction, and callings, should become statesmen and soldiers, commanders and councillors, both in the art of war and mysteries of state, and know the use of the compass in so short a tract of time." f The sea-fights between the English and the Dutch in that war of two years have no great historical interest, for they originated in no higher principle than commercial rivalry. Nevertheless they abound in traits of individual heroism ; and certainly, whatever have been her subsequent naval glories, England may still be * "Rebellion," vol. vii. p. 216. t " Letters," vol. iv. 1655, p in. BATTLE OF BLAKE AND VAN TROMP. 23 proud of the fame of Blake. Never were her great admirals op posed to one more worthy than Van Tromp. Costly as this war was to the nation, — impolitic in the leaders of the republic — it re vived that popular spirit of reliance on the navy which even the base humiliations of the next reign could not extinguish. The maritime glories of the Commonwealth could be referred to with honest pride when Englishmen blushed for the disgraces of the Restoration. We must tell the story very briefly. In June, 1652, Blake had a fleet of a hundred and five ships ; carrying nearly four thousand guns. Van Tromp had a hundred and twenty ships. Blake's first business was to assert the bounds of the English fish ery. In the seas of the north of Scotland he dispersed six hundred herring busses ; capturing or sinking twelve ships of war that were protecting the fishermen's operations. Sir George Ayscough was defending the Channel. Van Tromp came out of the Texel with seventy-nine men of war and ten fire-ships, to engage with Ays- cough's inferior squadron. He was becalmed, and unable to en gage. He turned to the North Seas ; and Blake met him between the Orkneys and Shetland. A tempest came on ; the Dutch ves-i sels were scattered and much damaged ; and Van Tromp returned to Holland, pursued by Blake. The Dutch admiral was unjustly blamed for his misfortunes as if they had been faults. He resigned his command, and was succeeded by De Ruyter. This bold sailor came into the Channel with thirty vessels ; and drove Ayscough into Plymouth. De Ruyter was joined by Cornelius De Witt ; and, with a fleet of sixtv-four sail, encountered Blake in the Downs. After a severe engagement on the 28th of September, the Dutch were driven back to their own coasts. Van Tromp was again re- • instated in command ; and he took the sea as winter was approach ing, with a fleet cf seventy-three sail. The possibility of a hostile navy appearing off the English coast at the end of November was little calculated upon. Blake had only thirty-seven ships to meet the Dutch admiral. But he resolved not to shrink from battle. The issue was a conflict off the Naze, which ended in the necessity of a retreat, with great loss, to the Thames. Van Tromp sailed up and down the Channel with a broom at his mast head, to man ifest that he would sweep the seas of the proud islanders ; and the States-General proclaimed England under a blockade. The Par liament was not disheartened ; and they were just to the merits of their admiral. They sent him again to sea in February, 1653, with a fleet of eighty sail, having Penn and Lawson under his command. 24 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. He met the Dutch fleet, on the 18th of February, between Port land Hill and Cape La Hogue. It consisted of seventy-five men of war, convoying two hundred and fifty merchantmen. The battle lasted all day, without any decided success. It was renewed on the following noon. Van Tromp made all sail for his own coasts, with Blake following him. The same running fight was maintained for two more days, with equal courage and obstinacy on both sides. It was not a decisive victory, though the Dutch lost many ships. Each government bestowed rewards upon its brave captains ; and the English parliament appointed a General Thanksgiving. The broom was not again set up at the Dutch mast-head during the war between the two republics. The large expenses of this Dutch war drove the Parliament and their Council of State to resort to very arbitrary and oppres sive measures. The Act of Amnesty afforded some security to the persons of royalists, but that indemnity was not extended to their property. Search for " delinquents " was to be strictly made. Those who had been spared were now called upon to compound for the possession of their estates. Of many Cavaliers all their real and personal property was confiscated. Hundreds of others were required to pay one-third of their property's value within very limited time. Cromwell was opposed to these proceedings. He might, as some may imagine, have desired to embarrass the government of which lie was contemplating the overthrow ; but we must do him the justice to believe, that, speaking in the face of his contemporaries, he was not making a pretence of moderation, when he thus de clared his opinion in 1654: " Poor men, under this arbitrary power, were driven like flocks of sheep, by forty in a morning, to the con fiscation of goods and estates, without any man being able to give a reason why two of them had deserved to forfeit a shilling. I tell you the truth. And my soul, and many persons' whom I see in this place, were exceedingly grieved at these things ; and knew not which way to help them, except by our mournings, and giving our negatives when occasion served.''* The victorious General of the armies of the Commonwealth had put himself into the posi tion of the leading reformer of the tyrannies and neglects of the rulers of the Commonwealth. He necessarily had a large body of supporters in the people generally ; but his strength was in that body of men whom he had led to conquest — whom he had moulded into a conviction that he was yet to be -their instrument in com- * Speech to the First Parliament of the Protectorate. Carlyle, vol. iii. p. 44. DIALOGUE BETWEEN CROMWELL AND WHITELOCKE. 25 pleting the national deliverance from the evils which were still to be striven against. Whilst the English and Dutch were fighting in the Channel in the autumn of 1652, a Petition was presented to the Parliament by " the Officers of my Lord-General's Army. They craved Reform of the Law ; they asked for a Gospel minis try ; they most especially urged a swifter progress to the Bill for a new Representation in Parliament. Upon this very expressive in timation that there was something going on which was not to be despised, the lawyers applied themselves to settle some very intri cate questions as to the possession of estates, so disturbed by the late intestine commotions ; and the House voted that "the Com mittee for regulating the Law be revived." Subsequently they appointed a Commission "to take into consideration what incon veniences there are in the Law ; and how the mischiefs that grow from the delays, the changeableness, and the irregularities in law proceedings may be prevented, and the speediest way to reform the same." The demand for a Gospel ministry — a vague demand — was only met by strong laws against " atheistical, blasphemous, and execrable opinions," and by continuing severities against Catholics and Episcopalians. The question of a new Representa tion went on very slowly to a solution. The undisguised hostility of Cromwell to the existing order of things seemed to make the prediction of Hugh Peters not unlikely to be realised. The nation began to feel the embarrassments occasioned by the union of the legislative and executive powers in an Assembly, not numerous enough to be the interpreters of opinion, and too numerous for salutary and consistent action. T/here is a well-known dialogue between Cromwell and Whitelocke which, although recorded with a little more elaboration thai-, seems natural to the relation of an evening's talk in St. James's Park, may be received as a trust worthy notion of the state of affairs, and of the temper of the man who was destined to change the mode of government. Cromwell complains of " jarrings and animosities one against another ; " he points out " the dangerous condition we are in." Whitelocke agrees with him : " My lord, I look upon our present danger as greater than ever it was in the field ; and, as your Excellency truly observes, our proneness is to destroy ourselves, when our enemies could not do it." It is "the factions and ambitious de signs " of the army to which he is pointing. Cromwell admits that " their insolency is very great ; " but, he continues, " as for the members of Parliament, the army begins to have a strange dis- 26 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. taste against them, and I wish there were not too much cause for it. And really their pride and ambition, and self-seeking, engross ing all places of honour and profit to themselves ; and their daily breaking forth into new and violent parties and factions ; their delays of business, and designs to perpetuate themselves, and to continue the power in their own hands; their meddling in private matters between party and party, contrary to the institution of Parliaments, and their injustice and partiality in those matters ; and the scandalous lives of some of the chief of them;— these things, my lord, do give too much grounds for people to open their mouths against them, and to dislike them. Nor can they be kept within the bounds of justice, and law or reason ; they themselves being the supreme power of the nation, liable to no account to any, nor to be controlled or regulated by any other power; there being none superior, or co-ordinate with them. So that, unless there be some authority and power so full and so high as to restrain and keep things in better order, and that may be a check to these ex orbitances, it will be impossible in human reason to prevent our ruin." Whitelocke somewhat defends the members of Parlia ment : " Too many of them are much to blame in those things you have mentioned, and many unfit things have passed among them ; but I hope well of the major part of them, when great matters come to a decision." Cromwell does not quite agree : " Some course must be thought on, to curb and restrain them, or we shall be ruined by them." There is a difficulty in this, as Whitelocke judges : " We our selves have acknowledged them the supreme power, and taken our commissions and authority in thehighest concernments from them; and how to restrain and rule, them after this, it will be hard to find out a way for it." The reply is startling : " What if a man should take upon him to be King ? " Whitelocke replies as if there could be no doubt that the Lord-General meant himself : " As to vour own per son, the title of king would be of no advantage, because vou have the full kingly power in you already concerning the militia, as you are General. As to the nomination of civil officers, those whom you think fittest are seldom refused : and, although vou have no nega tive vote in the passing of laws, yet what you dislike will not easily be carried ; and the taxes are already settled, and in your power to dispose the money raised. And as to foreign affairs, though the ceremonial application be made to the Parliament, yet the expecta tion of good or bad success in it is from your Excellency, and particular solicitations of foreisrn ministers are made to you only. THE QUESTION OF FUTURE REPRESENTATION. 27 So that I apprehend indeed less envy, and danger, and pomp, but not less power and real opportunities of doing good, in your being General, than would be if you had assumed "the title of King." This bold declaration of Cromwell was met by what appears a singular mode in Whitelocke to propitiate a man who had such power to carry his day-dreams into realities. " What if a man should take upon him to be King," was answered by him with an expedient which he propounds with very considerable alarm. He is re-assured when the Lord-General says, " There shall be no prejudice come to you by any private discourse between us. I shall never betray my friend." The expedient is this : " I propound for your Excellency to send to the king of Scots, and to have a private treaty with him.'' Cromwell postponed the consideration of this expedient to a further time ; and Whitelocke adds, " My Lord-General did not in words express any anger, but only by looks and carriage; and turned aside from me to other company." During the winter and spring the great question at issue between the Parliament and the man described by Whitelocke as having kingly authority in all but the name, was the long debated question of future representation. In February it was determined that the existing Parliament should dissolve on the 3rd of Novem ber of that year. The future number of Representatives was to be four hundred, to be elected by freeholders in counties, and owners or tenants in boroughs. But this was not to be wholly a new Parliament. The members then sitting were to remain as the Representatives of the counties or boroughs for which they then sat ; and it was resolved that a general Committee should pronounce upon the validity of the new returns. Against the proposal "for the perpetuating the same men in Parliament," as Cromwell after wards described this Bill, he gave his most strenuous opposition. On the 19th of April, 1653, there was great conference of members of the House, and of officers of the Army, at Cromwell's residence of Whitehall. One party pressed the necessity of the Bill ; the other desired that "they would devolve the trust over to some well- affected men, such as had an interest in the nation, and were known to be of good affection to the Commonwealth."* "At parting," continues the same narrator of these proceedings, — Cromwell him self — " one of the chief " of the members, and " two or three more, did tell us, that they would endeavour to suspend farther proceed ings about their Bill for a new Representation until they had * Cromwell's Speech to the " Little Parliament," Carlyle, vol. ii. p. 317. 28 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. another conference with us. And upon this we had great satisfac tion." * What the morrow brought forth is one of the strangest events in English history. It was late at night when the conference on the 19th of April, at Cromwell's house, the Cockpit at Whitehall, was come to an end. It was understood that the discussion was to be renewed on Wednesday, the 20th. The Lord General is ready to receive the members of Parliament, he and his officers. Some few members are come ; but the leaders have not made their appearance. Reports arrived that the Parliament was sitting ; then, that Vane, and Algernon Sidney, and Henry Martyn, were urging the immedi ate passing of the Biil for their dissolution and a new Representa tion. Colonel Ingoldsby now came in haste, and said that there was not a moment to lose. The obnoxious Bill was about to become Law. Cromwell instantly went forth, followed by Lambert and several other officers. A detachment of soldiers was ordered to march to the House of Commons. The Lord General placed his men in the lobby, and then entered the House alone. " The Parliament sitting as usual, and being in debate upon the Bill with the amend ments, which it was thought would have been passed that day, the Lord General Cromwell came into the house, clad in plain black clothes and gray worsted stockings, and sat down as he used to do, in an ordinary place." The scene which ensued has been described by Algernon Sidney, by Whitelocke, and by Ludlow. Sidney and Whitelocke were present. Ludlow was in Ireland ; but he was in a position to obtain information, and he has put his details together in a very coherent narrative, little coloured by the wrath which he ever afterwards felt towards the formidable man " in plain black clothes and gray worsted stockings." '"He sat down and heard the debate for some time. Then calling to Major-General Harrison, who was on the other side of the House, to come to him, he told him, that he judged the Parliament ripe for a dissolution, and this to be the time of doing it. The Major-General answered, as he since told me ; ' Sir, the work is very great and dangerous, there fore I desire you seriously to consider of it before you engage in it.' ' You say well,' replied the General, and thereupon sat still for about a quarter of an hour : and then the question for passing the Bill being to be put, he said again to Major-General Harrison, ' This is the time — I must do it ;' and suddenly standing up, made a speech, wherein he loaded the Parliament with the vilest * Cromwell's Speech to the " Little Parliament," Carlyle, vol. ii. p. 317. DISSOLUTION OF THE LONG PARLIAMENT. 29 reproaches, charging them not to have a heart to do anything for the public good, to have espoused the corrupt interests of Presby tery, and the lawyers, who were the supporters of tyranny and oppression, accusing them of an intention to perpetuate them selves in power, had they not been forced to the passing of this act, which he affirmed they designed never to observe, and there fore told them, that the Lord had done with them, and had chosen other instruments for the carrying on his work that were more worthy. This he spoke with so much passion and discomposure of mind, as if he had been distracted. Sir Peter Wentworth stood up to answer him, and said, That this was the first time that ever he had heard such unbecoming language given to the Parliament, and that it was the more horrid in that it came from their servant, and their servant whom they had so highly trusted and obliged : but as he was going on, the General stepped into the midst of the House, where continuing his distracted language, he said, ' Come, come, I will put an end to your prating ; ' then walking up and down the House like a madman, and kicking the ground with his feet, he cried out, ' You are no Parliament, I say you are no Parliament ; I will put an end to your sitting ; call them in, call them in.' Whereupon the serjeant attending the Parliament opened the doors, and Lieutenant-Colonel Worsley with twq files of musketeers entered the House ; which Sir Henry Vane observing from his place, said aloud, ' This is not honest ; yea, it is against morality and common honesty.' Then Cromwell fell a railing at him, crying out with a loud voice, 'O Sir Henry Vane, Sir Henry Vane ; the Lord deliver me from Sir Henry Vane.' Then looking upon one of the members, he said, ' There sits a drunkard ; ' and giving much reviling language to others, he commanded the mace to be taken away, saying, ' What shall we do with this bauble ? here, take it away.' Having brought all into this disorder, Major- General Harrison went to the Speaker as he sat in the chair, and told him, that seeing things were reduced to this pass, it would not be convenient for him to remain there. The Speaker answered, that he would not come down unless he were forced. ' Sir,' said Harrison, ' I will lend you my hand ; ' and thereupon putting his hand within his, the Speaker came down. Then Cromwell applied himself to the members of the House, who were in number between eighty and a hundred, and said to them, ' It's you that have forced me to- this, for I have sought the Lord night and day, that he would rather slay me than put me upon the doing of this work.' 30 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Hereupon Alderman Allen, a member of parliament, told him, that it was not yet gone so far, but all things might be restored again ; and that if the soldiers were commanded out of the House, and the mace returned, the public affairs might go on in their former course ; but Cromwell having now passed the Rubicon, not only rejected his advice, but charged him with an account of some hundred thousand pounds, for which he threatened to question him, he having been long treasurer for the Army, and in a rage committed him to the custody of one of the musketeers. Alderman Allen told him, that it was well known that it had not been his fault that his account was not made up long since ; that he had often tendered it to the House, and that he asked no favour from any man in that matter. Cromwell having acted this treacherous and impious part, ordered the guard to see the House cleared of all the members, and then seized upon the records that were there, and at Mr. Scobell's house. After which he went to the clerk, and snatching the Act of Dissolution, which was ready to pass, out of his hand, he put it under his cloak, and having commanded the doors to be locked up, went away to Whitehall."* The Council of State, in spite of the remonstrance of Bradshaw, its President, was dismissed the same afternoon by the same strong hand. In a newspaper of the following day, Mercurius Polilicus, appeared this semi-official paragraph : " The Lord General delivered yesterday in Parliament divers reasons wherefore a present period should be put to the sitting of this Parliament, and it was accord ingly done, the Speaker and the members all departing; the ground of which proceedings will, it is probable, be shortly made public." The French minister in London, writing to his government on the 3d of May, describes this humiliating end of the famous Long Parliament. "The people," he writes, " universally rejoice, and the higher ranks (la noblesse) equally so, in the generous action oi General Cromwell, and the fall of the Parliament, which is reviled by every mouth. There is written on the House of Parliament — ' This house is now to be let, unfurnished,' " t The forcible expulsion of that Parliament which had become supreme through a similar unconstitutional violence, that of Colonel Pride's Purge, appears to have produced very little public excite ment. Cromwell exclaimed, " We do not hear even a dog bark at * " Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 455. . t M. de Bordeaux to M. Servien, in Guizot, Appendix xxiii. PUBLIC OPINION ON THE DISSOLUTION. 3 1 their going." The republican leaders were indignant; but they were powerless. This great change had been effected without a single drop of blood- being shed. It was followed by no severities against those who were known -to be most hostile to the one man who was regarded in many things as the real ruler of England. Many knew and avowed, as he himself knew, " that a settlement with somewhat of monarchical power in it would be very effectual." Speaker Lenthall, who was handed down from his chair, on the 20th of April, had expressed his opinion that " something of monarchy " was wanting for the government of this nation.* Many rejoiced at this approach to an authority more direct, less vacillating and less contentious, than the supreme government by a Par liament. Even the republicans, who had a natural dread of Crom well's ambition, acquiesced in the instant change which had been produced by his commanding will. Mrs. Hutchinson writes of her husband, who for nearly a year had been absent from his place in the House • " He was going up to attend the business of his country alone, when news met him upon the road, near London, that Cromwell had broken the Parliament. Notwithstanding, he went on, and found divers of the members there, resolved to sub mit to the providence of God ; and to wait till He should clear their integrity, and to disprove these people who had taxed them of ambition ; by sitting still, when they had friends enough in the Army, City, and country, to have disputed the matter, and probably vanquished these accusers. They thought that if they should vex the land by war among themselves, the late subdued enemies, royalists and presbyterians, would have an opportunity to prevail on their dissensions, to the ruin of both. If these should govern well, and righteously, and moderately, they should enjoy the benefit of their good government ; and not envy them the honoura ble toil." f The republican Colonel and Independent submitted, as the majority submitted, to an usurpation which seemed not wholly unlikely to increase "good government." Suspected as Cromwell was of aspiring to monarchical power, there was nothing in his character to make the people dread that he would rule cruelly and tyrannously instead of '' righteously and moderately." The government went on without the slightest interruption. " The Lord-General and his Council of Officers " issued two declarations, in which it was promised that a certain number of persons should be summoned from all parts of the kingdom — God-fearing men, and * See ante, p. 15- t " Memoirs," voi. ii. p. 205. 32 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of approved integrity, — who should have the direction of affairs. Meanwhile, a Council of State, consisting of thirteen, was appointed, — nine military men and four civilians, with Cromwell as their president. The country remained in perfect tranquillity. The four Commissioners to whom the government of Ireland had been entrusted since the death of Ireton in November, 1651, "continued to act in their places and stations as before," Ludlow, one of them, recording their hope that all would be for the best. Blake called together the puritan captains of his fleet to consider their change of masters. He was urged by some to take part against Cromwell. " No," was his reply, "it is not for us to mind affairs of state, but to keep foreigners from fooling us." Amidst this general sub mission to what was regarded as a probable blessing, or an inevita ble evil, there was sent out, on the 6th of June, a summons to serve as a Member of Parliament, addressed to each of one hundred and thirty-nine persons. These had been selected, some after consul tations of ministers with their congregations, others by their known public qualifications, and all by the approval of Cromwell and his Council. Very different was this from a Representation^; but it was such an Assembly as had been proposed by Cromwell and his officers at the conferences which preceded the dissolution of April 20th. " That the government of the nation being in such condi tion as we saw, and things being under so much ill-sense abroad, and likely to end in confusion, we desired they would devolve the trust over to some well-affected men, such as had an interest in the nation, and were known to be of good affection to the Common wealth. Which, we told them, was no new thing when this land was under the like hurlyburlies. And we had been labouring to get precedents to convince them of it ; and it was confessed by them it was no new thing " * The following is the Summons by which the members of " the Little Parliament " were called to gether : — " Forasmuch as, upon the dissolution of the late Parliament, it became necessary, that the peace, safety, and good government of this Commonwealth should be provided for : And in order there unto, divers persons, fearing God, and of approved fidelity and honesty, are, by myself with the advice of my council of officers, nominated ; to whom the great charge and trust of so weighty af fairs is to be committed : And having good assurance of your love to, and courage for, God and the interest of His cause, and 'that' * Cromwell's Speech, July ). Carlyle, vol. ii. p. 346. SUMMONS FOR A PARLIAMENT. 33 of the good people of this Commonwealth : I, Oliver Cromwell, Captain General and Commander in Chief of all the Armies and Forces raised and to be raised within this Commonwealth, do hereby summon and require you, , being one of the per sons nominated, personally to be and appear at the Council- Chamber, commonly known or called by the name of the Council- Chamber at Whitehall, within the city of Westminster, upon the fourth day of July next ensuing the date hereof ; Then and there to take upon you the said trust ; unto which you are hereby called, and appointed to serve as a member for the county of And hereof you are not to fail. " Given under my hand and seal the 6th day of June, 1653, "Oliver Cromwell." Vol. IV.— 3 34 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER II. Defeat of Van Tromp. — Character of the Little Parliament.— Cromwell's Address to this * Assembly. — Its Provisional Constitution. — Their proceedings and tendencies. — Res ignation of the Little Parliament. — Oliver inaugurated as Protector. — Social Condi tion of the Kingdom. The summons which Cromwell sent throughout the country for the assembling of a body of men that should, in some degree, though not wholly as a parliament, represent the interest of Eng land, Scotland, and Ireland, was made public at a propitious sea son of national triumph. On the 4th of June, Blake and Monk had sent a despatch to Cromwell, announcing a great victory over the Dutch fleet. Monk and Dean were cruising, with a portion of the English fleet, between the North Foreland and Nieuport; Blake was on our northern coasts. Van Tromp decidecL to en counter the fleet thus separated from their great admiral. The engagement continued all through the day of the 2nd of June. Dean had been killed by a cannon-shot at the first broadside. Each of the fleets had been sorely crippled when night separated them. The action re-commenced on the 3rd. On that morning the sound of cannon from the north told the welcome news to Monk that the Sea-king was at hand. Blake's ships broke through the Dutch line. Van Tromp fought with desperation. His ship, the Brederode, was boarded by the crew of Penn's flag-ship, the James, after having repulsed Van Tromp's boarders. The Dutch admiral, resolved not to be a prisoner, threw a lighted match into his own powder-magazine. The explosion blew up the deck, but he himself escaped, to renew the battle in a frigate. He at last felt that he was beaten ; retreated to his own coasts ; and left with the triumphant English eleven vessels and thirteen hundred and fifty prisoners. The Council of State ordered a thanksgiving for the victory. Cromwell's Little Parliament met, on the 4th of July, under prosperous auspices. The character of this Little Parliament has been studiously misrepresented. We are taught to believe, especially in histories addressed to the youthful understanding, that " the persons pitched CHARACTER OF THE LITTLE PARLIAMENT. 35 upon for exercising this seemingly important trust were the lowest, meanest, and most ignorant among the citizens, and the very dregs of the fanatics."* Clarendon's statement, "there were among them divers of the quality and degree of gentlemen," is. wholly suppressed in the usual narratives. Hume's chief objection to them is a characteristic one — " They began with seeking God by prayer." The great scandal of this Assembly was that amongst them " was Praise-God Barebones, a leather-seller of Fleet Street ; " as Clarendon mentions, to enable men to form a judgment of the rest. It has no great historical interest to discuss, as some have done, whether the leather-merchant was named Barebones, or Bar- bone. There he is, sitting by the side of Robert Blake, when Robert has no fighting on his hands ; and with Francis Rouse, Provost of Eton, and sundry men, not altogether the lowest, mean est, and most ignorant, bearing the aristocratic names of Montagu, Howard, and Anthony Ashley Cooper. To Cromwell's Summons only two answered by non-attendance. Whitelocke, not at that ex act time in good humour with Cromwell, expresses his surprise that " many of this Assembly being persons of fortune and knowl edge " they would accept the supreme authority of the nation from such hands. The "persons of fortune and knowledge " — even the leather-seller of Fleet Street — might justly think that it became them, at a crisis when most men perceived that it would have been dangerous to summon a regular Parliament, to accept a trust which might avert the two extreme evils of military despotism or popular outrage. And so, on the 4th of July, they came to the Council- Chamber at Whitehall ; and sitting in chairs round a table, the Lord-General, surrounded by his officers, made- a speech to the Assembly — "full of the same obscurity, confusion, embarrassment, and absurdity, which appear in almost all Oliver's productions," says Hume: "All glowing with intelligibility, with credibility; with the splendour of genuine veracity, and heroic depth and man- fulness," says one who is not scandalised, as Hume is, at Crom well's words of rejoicing that a body of men was there come to supreme authority upon the principle of "owning God and being owned by Him." That this principle was to involve the exercise of justice and mercy to the people, according to Oliver's notion, mav be collected from a passage or two in his speech, which is characteristic enough of his style of oratory. " He was an entire stranger to oratorical art, to harmony of composition, and to ele- * Goldsmith. 36 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. gance of language," says a great writer and orator ; but he adds, " he impelled his auditors with resistless force towards the object which he wished to attain, by exciting in their minds, at every step, the impression which it was his object to produce."* What, we ask, can the highest oratorical art effect beyond this ? After going through a narrative of the circumstances which preceded the dissolution of the Long Parliament, and accounted for his participation in that act, Cromwell says, " Having done that we have done upon such ground of necessity as we have declared, which was not a feigned necessity but a real, — it did behove us, to the end we might manifest to the world the singleness of our hearts and our integrity who did these things, not to grasp at the power, ourselves, or keep it in military hands, no, not for a day ; but, as far as God enabled us with strength and ability, to put it into the hands of proper persons that might be called from, the several parts of the nation. This necessity, and I hope we may say for ourselves, this integrity of concluding to divest the Sword of all power in the Civil Administration, — hath been that that hath moved us to put you to the trouble of coming hither ; and having done that, truly we think we cannot, with the discharge of our own conscience, but offer somewhat to you on the devolving of the burden on your shoulders. * * * " I think, coming through our hands, though such as we are, it may not be ill taken if we do offer somewhat as to the discharge of the trust which is now incumbent upon you. And although I seem to speak of that which may have the face and interpretation of a charge, it's a very humble one; and if he that means to be a servant to you, who hath now called you to the exercise of the supreme authority, discharge what he conceives to be a duty to you, we hope you will take it in good part. And truly I shall not hold you long in it ; because I hope it's written in your hearts to approve yourselves to God. * * * " It's better to pray for you than to counsel you in that matter, that you may exercise the judgment of mercy and truth. It's bet ter, I say, to pray for you than counsel you ; to ask wisdorn from Heaven for you; which I am confident many thousands of Saints do this day, and have done, and will do, through the permission of God and His assistance. I say it's better to pray than advise ; yet truly I think of another Scripture, which is very useful, though it seems to be for a common application to every man as a Chris- * Guizot, vol. ii. p. 16. cromwell's address. 37 tian, — wherein he is counselled to ask wisdom ; and he is told what thatis. That's 'from above,' we are told; it's 'pure, peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits ; ' jt's ' without partiality and without hypocrisy.' Truly my thoughts run much upon this place, that to the execution of judgment (the judgment. of truth, for that's the judgment) you must have wisdom 'from above,' and that's 'pure.' That will teach you to exercise the judgment of truth ; it's ' without partiality.' Purity, impar tiality, sincerity ; these are the effects of ' wisdom,' and these will help you to execute the judgment of truth. And then if God give you hearts to be ' easy to be entreated,' to be 'peaceably spirited,' to be ' full of good fruits,' bearing good fruits to the nation, to men as men, to the people of God, to all in their several stations, — this will teach you to execute the judgment of mercy and truth. And I have little more to say to this. I shall rather bend my prayers for you in that behalf, as I said ; and many others will. " Truly, the ' judgment of truth,' it will teach you to be as just towards an Unbeliever as towards a Believer ; and it's our duty to do so.- I confess I have said sometimes, foolishly it maybe: I had rather miscarry to a Believer than an Unbeliever. This may seem a paradox ; but let's take heed of doing that which is evil to either ! Oh, if God fill your hearts with such a spirit as Moses had, and as Paul had, — which was not a spirit for Believers only, but for the whole people ! Moses, he could die for them ; wish himself ' blotted out of God's Book :' Paul could wish himself ' accursed for his countrymen after the flesh : ' so full of affection were their spirits unto all. And truly this would help you to exe cute the judgment of truth, and of mercy also. * * * In my pilgrimage, and some exercises I have had abroad, I did read that Scripture often, forty-first of Isaiah ; where God gave me, and some of my fellows, encouragement 'as to ' what He would do there and elsewhere ; which he hath performed for us. He said, ' He would plant in the wilderness the cedar, the shittah-tree, and the myrtle and the oil-tree ; and He would set in the desert the fir-tree, and the pine-tree, and the box-tree together.' For what end will the Lord do all this ? That they may see, and know, and consider, and understand together, that the hand of the Lord hath done this ; — that it is he who hath wrought all the salvations and deliverances we have received. For what end ? To see, and know, and understand together, that he hath done and wrought all this for the good of the Whole Flock. Therefore, I beseech you, 38 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. — but I think I need not, — have a care of the Whole Flock! Love the sheep, love the lambs ; love all, tender all, cherish and coun tenance all, in all things that are good. And if the poorest Chris tian, the most mistaken Christian, shall desire to live peaceably and quietly under you, — I say, if any shall desire but to lead a life of godliness and honesty, let him be protected." We shall not often have occasion to introduce passages of this serious character into our text. It is necessary in this place to exhibit the sort of exhortations addressed by Cromwell to those described by Hume as "low mechanics, fifth monarchy men, ana baptists, antinomians, independents, — the very dregs of fanatics;" and although the style of oratory may differ from modern usage when parliaments are addressed, it may not be regarded as wholly inappropriate and ineffectual. The constitution of Cromwell's Assembly was provisional. The supreme authority was devolved upon them by an instrument signed by the Lord-General and his officers, but they were to engage not to retain it beyond the 3rd of November, 1654; three months before that time they were to choose their successors; and these were not to sit longer than a year, and then to determine upon a future constitution of government. This was an arrange ment not altogether consistent with the theory that Cromwell aimed at an arbitrary government in his own person ; and is only explained by the assertion that he adopted a temporary expedient which he knew could not stand in the way of his own ambitious designs. Upon this principle it is held that it was "the deep policy of Cromwell to render himself the sole refuge of those who valued the laws, or the regular ecclesiastical ministry, or their own estates, all in peril from the mad enthusiasts who were in hopes to prevail "*— that he therefore chose the mad enthusiasts, "ming ling them with a sufficient proportion of a superior class whom he could direct." A deep policy, no doubt, but also a policy of very uncertain result. When we look back upon the earnestness with which Cromwell had advocated the reform of the law ; his zeal for amending the condition of the poor; his eager pleadings against the oppressions of prisoners for debt ; his desires for the promo tion of education, — it appears somewhat unlikely that if he meant these men to do nothing, and thus ultimately to throw the popu larity of remedial measures into his hands, they should at once have applied themselves to these objects with a vigour that con- * Hallam, " Constitutional History," Chap. x. CROMWELL S ASSEMBLY. 39 trasted with the comparative torpor of the last days of the Long Parliament. They formed Committees to examine these questions, and others of political importance, such as Union with Scotland, the division of lands in Ireland, and the financial condition of the kingdom. They did, however, some things which gave offence ,to two powerful classes — the clergy and the lawyers. They abolished the Court of Chancery, and they decreed by a majority of two, that tithes should be abolished. The abolition of tithes, before a maintenance by law should have been otherwise provided, was against a report of their own Committee. The more enthusiastic of the religious party had gained the ascendancy over those who despised this world's wisdom. Cromwell did not despise it; and he saw the real evils that had developed themselves in an authority of which the majority, led by Major-General Harrison, held that " the Saints shall take possession of the kingdom and keep it."f These extreme doctrines were preached in the meetinga of sec taries. Two anabaptists, Feake and Powell, were most violent in urging great social changes, at which the more moderate became alarmed. The men of station and property began to regard Crom well as the only power interposed between order and anarchy. In the next year, when he called a general Parliament, he spoke very clearly upon these dangers of the Commonwealth. He pointed to " the ranks and orders of men, whereby England had been known for hu'ndreds of years ; — a nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman — - that is a gobd interest of the nation, and a great one. For the orders of men and ranks of men, did not that Levelling principle tend to the reducing of all to an equality ? What was the pur port of it but to. make the tenant as liberal a fortune as the land lord — which, I think, if obtained, would not have lasted long. The men of that principle, after they had served their own turns, would then have cried up property and interest fast enough." With reference to the most fanatical of the sectaries, those who believed in the approach of the Fifth Monarchy,, when the Saints of Christ should alone reign in the earth, Cromwell says, " When more ful ness of the Spirit is poured forth to subdue iniquity, and bring in everlasting righteousness, then will the approach of that glory be. The carnal divisions and contentions among Christians, so com mon, are not the symptoms of that kingdom. But for men, on this principle, to betitle themselves, that they are the only men to rule kingdoms, govern nations, and give laws to the people, and * Sec Ludlow, " Memoirs," p. 565. 40 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. determine of property and liberty and everything elie, upon such a pretension as this is, — truly they had need to give clear manifesta tions of God's presence among them, before wise men will receive or submit to their conclusions. Cromwell, the hypocrite, or Crom well, the fanatic, or Cromwell, the statesman and natural ruler of men — whatever we please to call him — saw that the Fifth Monarchy men, with Major-General Harrison at their head, were too strong in their enthusiasm, to make a stable government of the people a practicable thing. There were many of his adherents of the same opinion. On the 1 2th of December, colonel Sydenham rose in his place, and forthwith accused the majority of desiring to take away the laws of the land, and substitute a Mosaic code ; of seek ing to remove a regularly appointed Christian ministry; of op posing all learning and education. He proposed that they should repair in a body to the Lord-General, and resign the trust which had been committed to them. The motion was seconded by sir Charles Wolseley. The accusations were earnestly pronounced to be unjust ; and the meritorious labours of the Assembly were dwelt upon. The Speaker suddenly left the chair, followed by about forty members. Leaving a number of members behind, not sufficient to constitute a House, they repaired to Whitehall, and there hastily wrote a paper resigning their authority into the hands of Cromwell. In the course of the next four days it was signed by eighty members, constituting a majority of the whole House. The resignation of the Little Parliament is quickly followed by the event to which it was, without doubt, a pre-arranged pre lude. " The perfidious Cromwell," writes Ludlow, " having forgot his most solemn professions and former vows, as well as the blood and treasure that had been spent in this contest, thought it high time to take off the mask, and resolved to sacrifice all our victories and deliverances to his pride and ambition, under colour of taking upon him the office as it were of a High Constable, in order to keep the peace of the nation, and to restrain men from cutting one another's throats." * This honest republican does not, however, inform us that such an office was altogether unnecessary. Look ing calmly back upon this great issue of a Civil War, we can scarcely doubt that a High Constable was absolutely wanted, and that if the man of due vigour had not been at hand, worse evils might have ensued than this — that on the 16th of December, 1653, Oliver Cromwell was inaugurated " Lord Protector of the Com- * " Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 471. OLIVER INAUGURATED AS PROTECTOR. 41 monwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland." On that day Oliver Cromwell, then fifty-four years of age, dressed in a plain suit of black velvet, sat clown on a Chair of State in the Court of Chancery, when Major-General Lambert prayed him to accept the office of Protector; and Cromwell consented "to take upon him the protection and government of these nations, in the manner expressed in the form of government." That form was an instru ment of forty-two articles. It was anything but an instrument con stituting the Protector a Dictator. The *overeignty was to reside in the Parliament. He was not to have the power of a negative on their laws. He had a power of making temporary ordinances until the meeting of a Parliament. A Council of State was to assist the Protector in the government. And so, v" having taken the oath as directed in the close of the said instrument," writes Ludlow, " Major-General Lambert kneeling, presented him with a Sword in the scabbard, representing the Civil Sword ; which Cromwell accepting, put off his own, intimating thereby that he would no longer rule by the military sword." * The indignant Ludlow adds, "though like a false hypocrite, he designed nothing more." Before this great change in the government of England, White locke had set forth on an embassy for the conclusion of a treaty with Sweden. Cromwell had especially urged this mission upon the reluctant Commissioner, but at last he had prevailed, f We here notice this embassy, to point to two remarkable passages in the conversations between queen Christina and the ambassador of the English Commonwealth, which have reference to Cromwell. In an interview, before the news of the event of the 16th of De cember had reached Sweden, the following dialogue took place : — " Queen. Much of the story of your general hath some parallel ' with that of my ancestor, Gustavus the First, who, from a private gentleman of a noble family, was advanced to the title of marshal of Sweden, because be had risen up and rescued his country from the bondage and oppression which the king of Denmark had put upon them, and expelled that king ; and for his reward, he was at last elected king of Sweden ; and I believe that your general will be king of England in conclusion. " Whitelocke. Pardon me, madam, that cannot be, because Eng land is resolved into a Commonwealth ; and my general hath • Ludlow, " Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 480. t See vol. iii. p. 626. 42 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. already sufficient power and greatness, as general of all their forces by sea and land, which may content him. " Queen. Resolve what you will, I believe he resolves to be king : and hardly can any power or greatness be called sufficient, when the nature of man is so prone (as in these days) to all am bition." But very shortly the news reached the Swedish Court of the altered relations of the English government with foreign states ; and then Christina asks these pertinent questions : — " Queen. Is your new government by => protector different from what it was before as to monarchy, or is the alteration in all points ? " Whitelocke. The government is to be the same as formerly, by successive representatives of the people in parliament; only the protector is the head or chief magistrate of the common wealth.'' The queen is still curious upon several difficult points which arise out of her meditations upon this novel form of chief magis tracy : — " Queen. Why is the title protector, when the power is kingly ? " Whitelocke. I cannot satisfy your majesty of the reasons of this title, being at so great a distance from the inventors of it. " Queen. New titles, with sovereign power, proved prejudicial to the state of Rome. " Whitelocke. One of your majesty's ancestors was not per mitted to keep the title of marshal of Sweden. " Queen. He was afterwards king, and that will be nextsfor your protector. " Whitelocke. That will not be so consonant to our Common wealth as it was to your crown. * * * " Queen. Is your protector sacred as other kings are ? " Whitelocke. He is not anointed and crowned; those ceremo nies were not used to him. " Queen. His power is the same with that of king, and why should not his title have been the same ? " Whitelocke. It is the power which makes the title, and not the title which makes the power ; our protector thinks he hath enough of both. " Queen. He is hardly a mortal man then ; but he hath brought his business notably to pass, and hath done great things. I give you my hand for it, that I have a great value for him." SOCIAL CONDITION OF THE KINGPOM. 43 Before we enter upon a narrative of the public events of the Protectorate, let us endeavour, out of very imperfect materials, to present a brief view of the social condition of the kingdom, in continuation of those "glimpses of the life of the people " which we gave at the commencement of the Civil War. * The changes of a decade are not very marked in ordinary times. But those who had lived through the fierce struggles of this decade, — had seen the fall of the Monarchy, and of the Anglican Church ; the almost utter subjection of the Cavaliers ; the growing power of the Army ; the triumphs of the Independents over the Presbyterians ; the dis solution of the Long Parliament ; and the approach once again to a monarchical form of government — these must have looked upon great vicissitudes. More than this, those who were boys when the Puritan William Prynne stood in the pillory in 1633 must have beheld an entire revolution in the domestic framework of society when the Puritan Oliver Cromwell sat in the Chair of State in 1653. Such phases of common life are rarely observed in the whirl of public events. A casual notice here and there of a letter-writer or a diarist enables us to piece together a few fragments. Such mosaic work could not be elaborated into a picture with any pre tension to verisimilitude. It can scarcely aspire to any symmetri cal proportion. The rapidity with which some nations, after they have been harassed and devastated by foreign invasion or intestine wars, re cover and become prosperous, mainly depends upon the fact of nations being constituted of an industrious or slothful race. But it also in no small degree depends upon their political institutions, — the amount of individual liberty, the seciwity of property. From a comparison of all accounts we may judge that England recovered with wonderful ease from the destruction of capital, from the taxes, the cdnfiscations of Civil War. Mrs. Hutchinson's account may be received with little qualification, that the Parliament before its dissolution " had restored the Commonwealth to such a happy, rich, and plentiful condition, as it was not so flourishing before the war ; and although the taxes that were paid were great, yet the people were rich, and were able to pay them." The forfeitures of property, so calamitous to individuals, had thrown extensive estates into the hands of the middle classes, who cultivated them to greater profit than their hereditary proprietors. The war itself, calling forth a remarkable union of religious enthusiasm with sober in- * Vol. iii. p. 435. 44 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. dustry, gave an elevation to the pursuits of the trading classes, which made the dignity of work more appreciated by themselves and by others. There was a general desire for religious knowledge which created an aspiration for higher things than money even in the humblest mechanical pursuits. It was not a period of very unequal distribution of wealth amongst those who lived by their industry, except in the larger operations of commerce. Baxter, speaking of his parishioners at Kidderminster, says, " my people were not rich. There were among them very few beggars, because their common trade of stuff-weaving would find work for all, men, women, and children, that were able. * * * * The generality of the master-workmen lived but a little better than their journeymen, from hand to mouth, but only that they laboured not altogether so hard." Yet amongst this humble community, according to this good man, " it was a great advantage to me that my neighbours were of such a trade as allowed them time enough to read or talk of holy things. * * * * As they stand in their loom they can set a book before them." * Whatever might be the contrarieties of doctrine and discipline amongst the great body of Puritans, the time of scoffing and reviling them was entirely passed. There might be secret mutterings against fanatics amongst the old Cavaliers, but the great religious body was too powerful, their influence was too universal, to meet with violent resistance or open contempt. The more extreme sectaries neces sarily provoked much suppressed ridicule ; but the great body of the puritan Clergy were too orderly in their lives, too active in their zeal for godliness and sobriety, and in many cases had estab lished so great a reputation for sound learning, that the most de voted Episcopalians and staunchest Royalists could not pretend to despise them, as in the times of Laud. The toleration which was imperfectly carried out by the republican Independents, but which Cromwell made 'the ruling principle of his ecclesi astical policy, had a tendency to mitigate some of the old feuds of the surplice and the Geneva gown. Evelyn, the most devoted of men to the past system of government, spiritual and tempo ral, is naturally disgusted when, on the 4th of December, 1653, " going this day to our church, I was surprised to see a tradesman, a mechanic, step up ; I was resolved yet to stay and see what he would make of it." The mechanic inferred from his text that " now the Saints were called to destroy temporal governments ; " and * " Life," pp. 89 and 94. SOCIAL CONDITION OF THE KINGDOM. 45 Evelyn remarks that "with such feculent stuff, so dangerous a crisis were things grown to." Cromwell rather averted the dan ger of the crisis, as we have seen. Evelyn is severe upon " the usurper " being feasted at the Lord Mayor's on Ash Wednesday ; though he expresses no grateful sense of the change which per mitted him "to hear the famous Dr. Jeremy Taylor, at St. Greg ory's." This true English gentleman has unconsciously given his testimony that the kingdom was not in a very wretched condition when " the usurper " began openly to take the regulation of affairs. He saw indeed, at Caversham, in 1634, lord Craven's woods being felled "by the rebels," — the confiscation of this- property having been an expiring act of the despotism of the Rump Parliament of which Oliver complained. But in this summer tour, he enjoys "the idle diversions " of Bath ; " trifling and bathing with the com pany whojfrequent the place for health." He goes to Bristol, " a city emulating London, not for its large extent, but manner ot building — shops, bridge, traffic, exchange, market-place "—stand ing "commodiously for Ireland and the Western world." He was welcomed with old hospitality at Oxford ; and heard the famous Independent, Dr. Owen, preach, " perstringing [glancing Upon] Episcopacy." Cromwell was Chancellor of Oxford, and Dr. Owen Vice-Chancellor ; yet Evelyn heard excellent orations ; and was delighted at All Souls, with " music, voices and theorbos, performed :by some ingenious scholars." Some of the roaring habits of the Cavaliers were not yet banished by Puritanism; for his party's coachmen, at Spie Park, the seat of sir Edward Baynton, were made " exceeding drunk " by that " humourous old knight," who ordered all gentlemen's servants to be so treated. At Wilton House, the earl of Pembroke's, he beholds the mansion and gar dens in the most beautiful order. He finds at Coventry " the streets full of great shops, clean and well-paved." In Rutlandl shire he meets an exception to the general neatness of English villages : " Most of the rural parishes are built of mud, and the people living as wretchedly as in the most impoverished parts o( France, which they much resemble, being idle and sluttish." In Leicestershire the gentry are "free drinkers." With these ex- ceptions, wherever he travels he finds stately houses, fair gardens, ample parks, orderly and contented people. He sees very few evi- dences of the ravages of war. The country seems quiet and pros perous—hot altogether a bad country to live in, though "an usurp er ' does rule it. And so Mi. Evelyn completes his purchase ol 46 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Sayes Court ; and sets out his oval garden ; and trims his holly hedge, afterwards so famous ; and is not wanting for amusements even in this strict age ; for " my lady Gerrard treated us at Mul berry Garden, now the only place of refreshment about town for persons of the best quality to be exceedingly cheated at." There are indications that some of the levities are creeping in that pre ceded the coming age of licentiousness : " I now observed how the women began to paint themselves." The healthful influence upon the morals of tbe rural population, through the exertions and examples of the religious gentry, is well illustrated by the course of life which colonel Hutchinson pursued : " He had for about a year's time applied himself, when the parlia ment could dispense with his absence, to the administration of justice in the country, and to the putting in execution those whole some laws and statutes of the land provided for the orderly regu lation of the people. And it was wonderful how, in a short space, he reformed several abuses and customary neglects in that part of the country where he lived, which, being a rich fruitful vale, drew abundance of vagrant people to come and exercise the idle trade of wandering and begging. But he took such courses that there was very suddenly not a beggar left in the country ; and all the poor in every town so maintained and provided for, as they never were so liberally maintained and relieved before nor since. He procured unnecessary alehouses to be put down in all the towns : and if any one that he heard of suffered any disorder or debauch ery in his house, he would not suffer him to brew any more. He was a little severe against drunkenness, for which the drunkards would sometimes rail at him ; but so were all the children of dark ness convinced by his light, that they were in awe more of his vir tue than his- authority." In the instance of colonel Hutchinson, an accomplished gentleman of the Independent party, Puritanism is thus exhibited in its mildest mood. It is suppressing vagrancy and assisting honest poverty. It is putting down unnecessary ale houses, and is a little severe against drunkenness. But Puritanism as exhibited in such a man is not playing the fantastic tricks which made it odious to the great body of the people, and drove the na tion into the disgusting sensuality and base self-seeking of the Restoration. Puritanism naturally offended the large remaining body who were attached to the ceremonial of the Anglican Church, when it fasted on Christmas Day, and feasted on Ash Wednes day. It took this course upon the old principle, that the greater SOCIAL CONDITION OF THE KINGDOM. 47 was the remove from Roman Catholicism the nearer was the ap proach to true religion. The people generally did not take these sour protestations against old customs very much to heart. Salt- fish and mince-pie were not banished from their boards, although v the orthodox seasons for their consumption had a little varied. They had no great reverence for those who opposed Christmas carols and mummeries ; to whom the Yule-log and the Boar's head were abominations. But in spite of them they had their dances and their health-drinkings ; and wished their neighbours a merry Christmas after the good old fashion. But when Puritanism put itself into a rampant attitude, as it did in many districts, the peo ple began to loath a power which was so intermeddling and so mo rose. The neglect of public worship in a few was not likely to be remedied by fines and the stocks. " Katherine Bartlett, widow, upon her own confession, did absent herself from Church the last Lord's day, contrary to the law, in the morning; was ordered to pay zs. bd., and in default of paying was ordered to be set in the stocks," says a record of the Dorchester justices.* From the same authority, we learn that John Samwages, not having been to Church for five weeks, and having not money to satisfy the law, was ordered to be stocked for his said offence. Nor was the just observance of Sunday likely to be greatly promoted by informa tions against husbands and wives, and also, — cruel Puritans, — against " sweethearts," for walking abroad in sermon time. One unhappy victim is stocked three hours for the heinous offence of going to Charminster immediately after dinner on Easter day, and eating milk and cream with some lads and lasses, upon which en tertainment they spent twopence each.f Even the plea that the moving about on the Sabbath-day was to hear a preacher in an other parish was no mitigation of the offence of taking a longer walk than to the Church at the offender's own door. Working on Sunday was punished by the rigid in the most exemplary manner. A tailor is brought up for labouring at two o'clock on a January morning, to have a piece of his manufacture completed in due time for some orthodox church-goer. Children were punished for play ing at nine-stones . Hanging out clothes to dry on the Sabbath was an especial offence. Swearing had been a statutable crime since the time of James I. ; but the extreme Puritans not only vis- * Hearn's MS. Book of Proceedings, quoted in "Roberts's Southern Counties," p. 344- t Hearn's MS. Book of Proceedings: 48 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ited profane cursing with fine and the stocks, but punished even such as followed lady Percy's example of " good sooth," and " God shall mend me." To swear " like a comfit-maker's wife " * was a grievous sin. " Plague take you " was finable. The magisterial interference with private affairs was unceasing. Alice Hill " is found to keep company with Philip Bartlett, in unseasonable time ; " and William Steevens is sent to gaol for frequenting the company of Christian, the wife of Edward Coles, " in a very suspi cious manner." That the extreme severity of some Puritans not only made them hateful but ridiculous when their doctrines were in the as cendant, we maj' readily believe. But at the same time we cannot fail to discover that many of the imputations against them gen erally were gross exaggerations. They did not give their children such names as " Fight the good fight of Faith," and "Stand fast on high." When Hume solemnly records that the brother of Praise-God Barebone had for a name, " If-Christ-had not-died-for- you,-you-had-then-been-damned,-Barebone," Hume is hoaxed by a joke invented half-a-century after Barebone had terminated his career of politics and leather-selling. Neither were the Puritans, after the rantings of Stubbes and Prynne against every species of recreation were forgotten, distinguished for any capricious dislike of music, or any contempt of secular knowledge. No man was more eager than Cromwell himself to protect learning and learned men. He sought out scholars for public employments. But, what is more to our present purpose, his house, during the Protector ate, was as remarkable for its refined amusements as for its decor ous piety. The love of music was with him almost a passion, as it was with Milton. But we can nowhere find a more complete refutation of the idle belief that all the Puritans were opposed to every harmless pleasure, than in Lucy Hutchinson's description of her own household. Her husband, after his retirement from pub lic affairs, was occupied with the improvement of his estate in the vale of Belvoir. He was a sportsman, and recreated himself, for a little time, with his hawks; "but when a very sober fellow, that never was guilty of the usual vices of that generation of men, rage and swearing, died, he gave over his hawks, and pleased himself with m-asic, and again fell to the practice of his viol, on which he pWed excellently well ; and, entertaining tutors for the diversion anr.i education of his children in all sorts of music, he pleased him- * Henry IV., Part 1, Act iii. sc. i. SOCIAL CONDITION OF THE KINGDOM. 49 self in these innocent recreations during Oliver's mutable reign. As he had great delight, so he had great judgment, in music, and advanced his children's practice more, than their tutors: he also was a great supervisor of their learning, and indeed himself a tutor to them all, besides all those tutors which he liberally entertained in his house for them. He spared not any cost for the education of both his sons and daughters in languages, sciences, music, dancing, and all other qualities befitting their father's house. He was himself their instructor in humility, sobriety, and all godliness and virtue, which he rather strove to make them exercise with love and delight than by constraint. As other things were his delight, this only he made his business, to attend the education of his chil dren, and the government of his own house and town. This hp performed so well that never was any man more feared and loved than he by all his domestics, tenants, and hired workmen. He was loved with such a fear and reverence as restrained all rtrde famil iarity and insolent presumptions in those who were under him, and he was feared with so much love that they all delighted to do his pleasure. As he maintained his authority in all relations, so he endeavoured to make their subjection pleasant to them, and rather to convince them by reason than to compel them to obedience, and would decline even to the lowest of his family to make them enjoy their lives in sober cheerfulness, and not find their duties burden some. * * * * As he was very hospitable, and his conversa tion no less desirable and pleasant than instructive and advan tageous, his house was much resorted to, and as kindly open to those who had in public contests been his enemies, as to his con tinued friends ; for there never lived a man that had less malice and revenge, nor more reconcileableness and kindness and gener osity in his nature than he." Aubrey records that Hollar told him that when the Civil Wars broke out he went to the Low Countries, where he stayed till 1649: "When he first came to- England, which was a serene time of peace, the people, both poor and rich, did look cheerfully ; but at his return he found the countenances of the people all changed, melancholy, spiteful, as if bewitched." * It is not an unfavourable attribute of the English character that the people did take to heart their strife and bloodshed, their uncertainty as to the present and their dread of the future. Aubrey has no direct record that the old cheerful looks ' had returned; but we may well conceive, that * " Lives," vol. iii. p. 402. Vol. IV.— 4 50 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. in spite of the Puritan rigour occasionally breaking out, the nation was gradually resuming the habits, if not wholly of merry England, of stirring and well-employed England. Prosperous industry al ways brings its own cheerfulness, if it is moderate in its desires; and not inordinate in its cravings for wealth and luxury. We see the stir of inventive genius at this period. We trace the begin nings of that experimental philosophy which was to put England at the head of all industrious nations. " Honest and learned Mr. Hartlib," the friend of Milton, has made " an ink that would give a dozen copies, moist sheets of paper being pressed on it." Robert Boyle, " that excellent person and great virtuoso," is improving the air-pump, and prosecuting his studies in chemistry. Colonel Blount invites philosophers to inspect his new-invented ploughs. Sir P. Neale is famous for his optic-glasses. Greatorex, the mathematical-instrument maker, has an invention to quench fire. The no less important principles of commerce are come to the aid of all science and industry. The City Goldsmiths have opened Bankirig establishments. Superfluous money has ceased to be buried or locked in chests. Agriculture feels the influence of the general stir of the national mind. The turnip-husbandry is teach ing the farmer that the earth can bear as useful produce as corn ; and the cultivation of clover is making a valuable addition to the "meadows trim with daisies pied," upon which the flocks of England have been hitherto sustained. Amidst the many evidences that we occasionally meet with of the intellectual and industrial activity of the people, we also en counter many proofs of their subjection to superstitious fears. Even the learned and the scientific are not free from singular fancies, engendered in the atmosphere of fanaticism. Mr. Oughtred, " that renowned mathematician," says Evelyn in 1655, " had strong appre hensions of some extraordinary event to happen the following year, from the calculation of coincidence with the diluvian period ; and added that it might possibly be to convert the Jews by our Saviour's visible appearance, and to judge the world." The Al manac makers of that time were deluding the people with those prophecies, which they continued to swallow for two centuries. Lilly was still in vogue ; and Francis Moore had joined the ranks of imposture. The most remarkable of their exploits was to frighten the isle from its- propriety, on the 29th of April, 1652, by the terrors of an eclipse of the sun. This fatal day was called Mirk Monday; and the dread of it "so exceedingly alarmed the SOCIAL CONDITION OF THE KINGDOM. 5 1 whole nation that hardly any one would work, or stir out of their houses." As regards the material prosperity of the country, we may con clude this sketch with the testimony of Howell, a devoted royalist, to the fact that the restorative powers that were possessed by an energetic people in their insular security and their ancient and re newed freedom, were the providential compensations for long years, first of tyranny and then of universal disturbance. " The calamities and confusions, which the late wars did bring upon us, were many and manifold, yet England may be said to have gained one advantage by it ; for whereas before she was like an animal that knew not his own strength, she is now better acquainted with herself, for her power and wealth did never appear more both by land and sea." * If the immediate effect of the Civil Wars was such that England "became better acquainted with herself," so that she increased in power and wealth, the more lasting consequence was that the whole nation became more earnest in its regard for the higher obligations of religion — that the great body of the people, amidst all the ex travagances of sectaries, came to have a more elevated sense of the responsibilities that belonged to a condition approaching to religious liberty. The indifference and profaneness that came in with the return of the Stuarts were chiefly manifest amongst the upper classes, — the sycophants of a debauched Court, and the herd of writers who thought that wit and immorality were neces sary companions. The fanaticism and intolerance died out ; but the best portions of the Puritan spirit were never extinguished. When the Anglican Church again became oppressive and worldly, the principle of religious liberty asserted itself in strenuous non conformity, and kept alive the zeal which ultimately placed the Church itself upon the only safe foundation for a wealthy estab lishment, that of emulation in the duty of diligently teaching, and kindly watching^ over, the congregations entrusted to its charge. Baxter, the Puritan, who was persecuted when the Episcopalians returned to power, is now regarded by -English churchmen as the model of a parish priest ; and we may well conclude this view of the period of his ministry immediately following the establishment of the Commonwealth, by his just account of the advantage to re ligion, through "the change that was made In public affairs by the success of the war : " * " Letters," vol. iv. p. 11c. 52 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. " For before, the riotous rabble had boldness enough to make serious godliness a common scorn, and call them all Puritans and Precisians that did not care as little for God and Heaven and their souls as they did ; especially if a man were not fully satisfied with their undisciplined, disorderly churches, or Lay Chancellor's ex communications, &c, then no name was bad enough for him. And the Bishop's Articles enquiring after such, and their courts and the High Commission grievously afflicting those that did but fast and pray together, or go from an ignorant drunken reader, to hear a godly able preacher at the next parish, &c. This kept religion among the vulgar under either continual reproach or terror, en couraging the rabble to despise it and revile it, and discouraging those that else would own it. And experience telleth us, that it is a lamentable impediment to men's conversion, when it is a way everywhere spoken against, and prosecuted by superiors, which they must embrace ; and when at their first approaches they must go through such dangers and obloquy as is fitter for confirmed Christians to be exercised with, than unconverted sinners or young beginners : Therefore, though Cromwell gave liberty to all sects among us, and did not set up any party alone by force, yet this much gave abundant advantage to the Gospel, removing the pre judices and the terrors which hindered it ; especially considering that godliness had countenance and reputation also, as well as liberty; whereas before, if it did not appear in all the fetters and formalities of the times, it was the way to common shame and ruin." * * " Life," p. 86. THE PROTECTORATE. 53 CHAPTER III. The Protectorate. — Incentives to assassinate the Protector. — Royalist Plot concocted in France. — Cromwell's deportment to the French Government. — His Foreign Policy generally. — First Parliament of the Protectorate. — Cromwell's speech on opening the Session. — Parliament questions the Protector's authority. — The Parliament House closed Cromwell requires a Pledge from Members. — Recusant Members excluded — Subsequent Temper of the Parliament. — Cromwell dissolves the Parliament. — Royalist Risings organised — Failure of Risings in the West and North. — Resistance to Taxation. — The Major-Generals. — Severities against Papists and Episcopalians. — Tolerance to Sects. The Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, who had been in augurated on the 1 6th of. December, 1653, had, some four months afterwards, entered upon the occupation of the royal palaces of Whitehall and of Hampton Court. Warwick, the Cavalier, who, in 1640, had looked upon a gentleman speaking in Parliament " very ordinarily apparelled," yet lived as, he records, to see this very gentleman, " having had a better tailor, and more converse among good company," appear at Whitehall "of a great and majestic deportment and comely presence."* The same courtier says, speaking of a period when the dignity of Oliver was further con firmed, " And now he models his house, that it might have some resemblance unto a Court ; and his liveries, and lacqueys, and yeo men of the guard are known who they belong to by their habit."f There was something more went to the making of the Protector Oliver than " a better tailor ; " or than " liveries and lacqueys and yeomen of the guard ; " something higher even than " more con verse among good company." There had been fourteen years of such experience as belonged to no other man in his time. " I was by birth a gentleman ; living neither in any considerable height, nor yet in obscurity. I have been called to several employments in the nation." More than this : ". My manner of life, which was to run up and down the nation, had given me to see and know the temper and spirits of all mer.'1 Thus he spoke to his first Parliament with a dignified modesty. Out of his own courage, sagacity, and abiding sense that his destiny was in the hands of a supreme di- • " Memoirs," p. 248. t Ibid., p. 382. 54 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. recting power, had a great ruler been made — one who " alone re mained to conduct the government and to save the country." Such is the panegyric of Milton. When our most eloquent historian described Cromwell as " the greatest prince that has ever ruled England,"* we had reached that state of historical counter-balance, that we could stop to inquire whether the familiar words of usurper, traitor, hypocrite, fanatic, dissembler, as applied to this prince, were not the merest echoes of the united hatred of cavalier and republican, of libertine and sceptic, which it would be well to lay aside after two centuries of abuse and misrepresentation. We shall endeavour to relate the events of the Protectorate, without being wholly carried away by our sense of the unquestionable superiority of this man over the most eminent of his contemporaries. We shall seek to regard him as the man best qualified to stand between the restoration of the monarchy and unmitigated despotism ; as one who in his own manifestations of arbitrary power was ever striving to establish a system of constitutional liberty ; as one who upheld the supremacy of the laws at a time when in the absence of such a ruler the State might have been plunged into the depths of anarchy and bloodshed. Oliver did many things that are repugnant to the principles of just freedom under an established government ; but it may be honestly asked whether his example can justify that species of revolutionary despotism which seeks only to govern by the sword, without a persistent struggle to make the civil authority ultimately supreme. The Protectorate of Oliver was a constant attempt to unite the executive authority of one with the legislative control of many. He laboured to accomplish in his own day what time only could perfect, after many reverses. Had he lived long enough to have founded a dynasty, the problem might have been more quickly solved. The partial and temporary despotism of the Protectorate is gone ; the liberty and toleration which it proposed as its final objects remain. We may apply to the history of this crisis the words of Cromwell's own earnest conviction : " What are all our Histories, and other traditions of actions in former times, but God manifesting Himself, that He hath shaken, and tumbled down, and trampled upon, everything that he hath not planted ?" f We may especially apply these memorable words, so characteristic of their utterer, and yet so universal in their truth, to the whole history of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. After the * Macaulay, " History," vol. i. c. ii. f Cromwell — Speech iv. " Carlyle," vol iii. p. 89. INCENTIVES TO ASSASSINATE ,THE PROTECTOR. 55 first great contest was over, The Divine Right of Kings came back upon England with unforgotten insolence in its pretensions, al though with somewhat diminished power of working immediate evil. But it perished; for the Divine Right had to stand a test which its most powerful enemy had proposed as a test of all polit ical action : " If it be of God, He will bear it up : If it be of man it will tumble." * In the remarkable conversation between Cromwell and White locke, which preceded the dissolution of the Long Parliament,! Whitelocke, with great sagacity, had pointed out that in the as sumption by Cromwell of monarchical power, "that question, wherein before so great parties of the nation were engaged, and which was universal, will by this means become in effect a private controversy only. Before it was national, what head of government we should have ; now it will become -particular, who shall be our governor, whether of the family of the Stuarts, or of the family of the Cromwells." Cromwell replied, " I confess you speak reason in this." The acceptance by Cromwell of the office of Protector immediately gave this character to the controversy. The great ob ject of all the discontented Republicans or Cavaliers ; the support ers of prerogative or the enemies of all government but that of the reign of the Saints ; those who would have re-entered into posses sion of the property which had changed hands, or those who sought a division of all property whatsoever ; intolerant Episcopalians, equally intolerant Presbyterians, frantic Anabaptists ; — all these classes now saw an enemy in the one man in whom the ruling power was concentrated. That power had become more vigilant, more far-seeing, more difficult to shake, than the distracted authority of the Long Parliament, or of the Little Parliament. Foreign govern ments recognised and dreaded this commanding power, well de scribed by the great minister of the next century : " Oliver Crom well, who astonished mankind by his intelligence, did not derive it from spies in the cabinet of every prince in Europe : he drew it from the cabinet of his own sagacious mind. He observed facts, and traced them forward to their consequences. From what was, he concluded what must be, and he never was deceived." X Foreign governments might therefore have rejoiced to see the downfall of this man, whose soul was bent upon sustaining the glory of his country, as well as consolidating its internal peace. But he was as * Cromwell— Speeoh iv. " Carlyle," vol. iii. p. 89. t See ante, f-2j. X Chatham's Speech on Spain, November 2, 1770. 56 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. prudent as he was watchful. He was surrounded with conspirators of every degree. The doctrine of assassination was openly preached by the Royalists abroad* From Paris, on the 23rd of April, 1654, came out a Proclamation in the name of Charles the Second, setting forth that " a certain base mechanic fellow, by name Oliver Crom well — after he had most inhumanly and barbarously butchered our dear father, of sacred memory, his just and lawful sovereign — hath most tyrannically and traitorously usurped the supreme power over our said kingdoms." It thus proceeds : "These are therefore, in our name, to give free leave and liberty to any man whomsoever, within any of our three kingdoms, by pistol, sword, or poison, or by any other way or means whatsoever, to destroy the life of the said Oliver Cromwell ; wherein they will do an act acceptable to God and good men, by cutting so detestable a villain from the face of the earth." It further promises all sorts of rewards to "whosoever, whether soldier or other, who shall be instrumental in so signal a piece of service." This proclamation has been attributed to Hyde — perhaps unjustly. It is not clear that this incentive to assassi nation " on the word and faith of a Christian king " really came from Charles Stuart, though undoubtedly it came from his " Court at Paris." But it was extensively circulated, openly abroad, secretly in England ; and it produced its natural effects. On the 20th of M'ay, being Saturday — a day on which the Protector usually went to Hampton Court — his guards were to be attacked by thirty stout men, and then and there was the deed to be done, of which the per petrator was to be honoured with knighthood, and five 'hundred pounds a year in land, and honourable employment. But the Pro tector escaped the ambuscade ; for five of the royalist projectors of the plot were arrested in their beds a few hours before its in tended accomplishment. Forty persons were subjected to exami nation as confederates with colonel John Gerard, Peter Vowell, a schoolmaster, and Somerset Fox. These three were tried before a High Court of Justice. Fox pleaded guilty, and was pardoned. The other two were executed. Of their guilt the evidence is suf ficiently clear ; and it is equally manifest that the plan had been communicated to Prince Rupert at Paris. Hyde protested, in a letter to Secretary Nicholas, that of the "whole matter the king knows no more than you do." There is one point connected with this plot which we give in the words of M. Guizot, who has pub lished the documents upon which it is established: "Whatever may have been the amount of his participation in the plan for the ROYALIST PLOT CONCOCTED IN FRANCE. 57 assassination of the Protector, and whether Charles was aware of it or not, the fact itself was incontestable, and probably even more serious than Cromwell allowed it to appear ; for there is reason to believe that M. de Baas, — at that time an envoy extraordinary of Mazarin to London, and temporarily connected with the embassy of M. de Bordeaux, — was not unacquainted either with the conspirators or their design. Cromwell was so convinced of this that he summoned M. de Baas before his council, and sharply interrogated him on the subject. But he had too much good sense to magnify the affair beyond what was required by a due regard for his own safetyfor by laying too much stress on this incident, to interrupt, for any length of time, his friendly relations with Mazarin and the Court of France, which manifested the greatest anxiety to remain on good terms with him. He merely sent M. de Baas back to France, openly stating to Louis XIV. and Mazarin his reasons for so doing, and showing in this the same moderation which had induced him to bring to trial only three of the conspirators. He had escaped the danger ; made known to England and Europe the active vigilance of his police ; and proved to the royalists that he would not spare them. He attempted nothing further. He possessed that difficult secret of the art-of governing whichconsists in a just appreciation of what will be sufficient in any given circumstance, and in resting satisfied with it." * Cromwell had made known to Europe, and especially to France, out of whose bosom the assassins came, the vigilance of his own police. He did not complain that France did not go be fore him to restrain and punish assassination, and to set a mark of reprobation upon such an incentive to the crime as the Proclama tion issued in the name of Charles the Second. When it was indis putable, even, that an envoy of the French king had employed the name of Mazarin to encourage this scheme of murder, Cromwell was not diverted from what he regarded as the true national policy, an alliance with France, by his own personal resentment. He sent M. de Baas back to his own Court. He imputed blame to him alone. He writes to Louis XIV. with the true magnanimity of one who could lay aside all meaner considerations in a strong' sense of public duty, " It has seemed advisable to us to assure your majesty that, in dismissing de Baas, we had no thought or wish to interrupt in any way the negotiations now pending ; desir ing, on the contrary, in all candour and simplicity of soul, that false interpretations and subjects of evil suspicions may be cast aside." f * "Cromwell," vol. ii. p. 51. t Ibid., Appendix ii. p. 420. 58 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Whilst France and Spain were each employing all the resources of their diplomacy to secure the alliance of England, Cromwell, after tedious negotiations, had concluded a peace with the United Provinces. The naval power of the Dutch had been finally broken by the victory of Blake, in July, 1653, when Van Tromp was him self killed by a musket-ball. The conditions of peace which Crom well exacted were moderate ; and he was reproached by his enemies with having sacrificed the advantages gained in the war for the greater popularity of his rule at home. The nation wanted peace, and rejoiced at the termination of hostilities so injurious to its commerce. The Protector, moreover, accomplished his great desire of promoting the union of the Protestant States of Europe. In the treaty with Holland, which was signed on the 5th of April, 1654, were comprehended Denmark, the Hanseatic Towns, and the Swiss Protestant Cantons. A treaty of friendship and alliance with Sweden was concluded in the same month as that with Hol land. In the foreign relations of England there was no comparison between the delays of a Parliament and the decision of the Pro tector. When the responsibility of determining great questions involving peace or war was in the hands of a supreme ruler and his council, the policy of the country was settled upon fixed prin ciples, which, whether or not they were safe and profitable, were at any rate, not timid or vacillating. Cromwell decided that the I alliance of France was preferable to that of Spain. His opinions were opposed by many of his own officers. He had taken his own view of the question ; but for a short time held himself aloof from any final measure, whilst he was assiduously courted by the am bassadors of these rival powers. Of Spain he demanded that the navigation of the West Indies should be free ; and that English men in Spain should be protected in the exercise of their religion against the interference of the Inquisition. The Spanish ambas sador said that such a demand was to ask for the two eyes of his master. From France he required the expulsion of the Stuarts ; and, in a nobler spirit, liberty and security for the French Protes tants. No treaty with France was concluded in the first year of the Protectorate, and no hostilities were offered to Spain ; but it became manifest that the disposition of Cromwell was to reject the alliance of the power that was the most devoted adherent to Rome. With Portugal he concluded a commercial treaty. But on the very day this treaty was signed, he caused the law to be unflinch ingly executed upon the brother of the Portuguese ambassador, FIRST PARLIAMENT OF THE PROTECTORATE. 59 who had killed two Englishmen, and raised a tumult with the armed servants of the embassy, at the Exchange in London. No- plea of diplomatic privileges could prevent Don Pantaleon de Sa from being tried, convicted, and executed for the offence. The foreigner beheld with dread and wonder the stern and fearless justice of the Commonwealth. Under the Instrument of Government by which Cromwell was appointed Protector, it was provided that a Parliament should be elected to meet on the 3rd of September, 1654: but that in the interim the Protector, assisted by his Council of twenty-one mem bers, should be entitled to issue Ordinances having the force of Laws, as well as to do all acts necessary for the public service. We have seen how vigorously Cromwell applied himself, during these nine months, to establish the foreign relations of the country upon a satisfactory foundation. But he devoted himself no less energetically to accomplish a series of domestic reforms, some of which have presented models to succeeding reformers ; others have been pronounced crude and impracticable ; but all have the merit of seeking the public good, though by courses which have that tincture of despotism which essentially belongs to a revolu tionary period. When the first Parliament of the Protectorate met on the 4th of September, the Lord Protector went into an elaborate explanation of his measures, domestic and foreign. The one measure of his government that was all important was this : " It hath been instrumental to call a free Parliament ; which, blessed •'. be God, we see here this day. I say, a free Parliament." There had. been no election to a Parliament in England for fourteen years. ^ This Parliament was to include Representatives of the three king doms : "You are met here on the greatest occasion that, I believe, England ever saw ; having upon your shoulders the interests of three great nations, with the territory belonging to them." The Parliament was composed of four hundred and sixty members. ^ Of four hundred for England and Wales, two hundred and fifty- \ one were to be returned by counties, and a hundred and forty-nine by cities and boroughs. Scotland, which had been declared united •>> to England by an Ordinance of the 12th of April, was to send N thirty members ; Ireland was to send also thirty members. The right of voting for representatives was in those who possessed real or personal property to the value of two hundred pounds. Roman Catholics, and those who had been in arms against the Parliament during the Civil Wars, were excluded from voting, or from being 60 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. returned as members. But by the instrument of government, and in the terms of the writ for election, it was a condition " That the persons elected shall not have power to alter the government as it is settled in one single person and a parliament." The 3rd of September, the day appointed for the assembling of Parliament, falling on a Sunday, the House adjourned to the next day, after meeting the Protector in the Painted Chamber. On that Monday the Parliament was opened with almost regal pomp. " The Protector rode in state from Whitehall to the Abbey Church in Westminster. . . . His highness was seated over against the pulpit, the members of the Parliament on both sides. . . . After the sermon, which was preached by Mr. Thomas Goodwin, his highness went in the same equipage to the Painted Chamber, where he took seat in a chair of state set upon steps, and the members upon benches round about." The long speech which Cromwell addressed to this Parliament was reported " by one who stood very near;" and was published "to prevent mistakes." Studied no doubt it was ; for its sentences, however involved, are full of meaning, — but it was not delivered from a written paper. In its .wide range, and careful explanations, it has a considerable resemblance to the speeches of the American Presidents. The Protector had a very difficult assembly to address. His own Council had been elected, with one exception. Some of the republican leaders, who were indignant at the whole course of governmenf since the dissolution of the Long Parliament, were again returned. A large body of the Presbyterians were also members, with the ever-prevailing desire to maintain their own form of Church government. There was a peculiar significance in the Protector's words when he said that the great end of their meeting was " Healing and Settling I trust it is in the minds of you all, and much more in the mind of God, to cause Healing." He would not touch upon past transactions too par ticularly, for the remembrance of such, instead of healing, "might set the wound fresh a-bleeding." The oblivion of past animosities was scarcely yet to be accomplished. The social improvements which were to grow out of a happy concord were nevertheless to be earnestly striven for. Briefly the Protector referred to what had been done in the way of Ordinances — "for the interest of the people alone, and for their good, without respect had to any other interest." The administration of finance had been regulated ; the hardships of prisoners for debt, an old grievance, had been les- CROMWELL'S SPEECH ON OPENING THE SESSION. 6 1 sened ; prison-discipline had been reformed ; highways had been improved. These were matters at which the Protector onJy glanced. But upon more important reforms he delivered himself without reserve. And first of Law Reform : " The government hath had some things to desire ; and it hath done some things actually. It hath desired to reform the Laws. I say to reform them : — and for that end it hath called together persons, without offence be it spoken, of as great ability and as great interest as are in these nations, to consider how the laws might be made plain and short, and less changeable to the people ; how to lessen expense for the good of the nation. And those things are in preparation, and bills prepared ; which in due time, I make no question, will be tendered to you. In the meanwhile there hath been care taken to put the administration of the Laws into the hands of just men ; men of the most known integrity and ability. The Chancery hath been reformed, I hope, to the satisfaction of all good men ; such as for the things depending there, which made the burden and work of the honourable persons intrusted in those services too heavy for their ability, it hath referred many of them to those places where Englishmen love to have their rights tried, the Courts of Law at Westminster." The Ordinance "for reform ing the Court of Chancery " consisted of sixty-seven articles. That Court before its reform was in full possession of the character which it long strove to preserve, in spite of law or ordinance, of public contempt and senatorial reprobation. It had twenty-three thousand causes before it, which had been depending for long years ; it was in the pleasing exercise of its power " of undoing many families." Cromwell's desire that " the Laws might be made plain and short, and less chargeable to the people," has been the desire of all honest rulers and legislators from that time to our own. But there was a task still more difficult than the reform of the Law, which the Protector had endeavoured to accomplish by Or dinances : " This Government hath endeavoured to put a stop to that heady way of every man making himself a Minister and Preacher. It hath endeavoured to settle a method for the approv ing and. sanctioning of men of piety and ability to discharge that work. And I think I may say, it hath committed the business to the trust of persons, both of the Presbyterian and Independent judgments, of as known ability, piety, and integrity, as any, I be lieve, this nation hath." . . .7 "The Government hath also taken 62 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. care, we hope, for the expulsion of all those who may be judged any way unfit for this work ; who are scandalous, and the common scorn and contempt of that function." In thus describing his measures for securing " men of piety and ability " to discharge the duties of ministers and preachers, the Protector referred to the Commissions which he had instituted — the Commission of Triers, and the Commission of Expurgation. Such measures were the necessary results of an endeavour to rem edy the evils which had been produced by the total suspension of an authorised ecclesiastical jurisdiction. _ The episcopal authority had long ceased. The presbyterian authority was not established. Church government was wholly at an end. With all his love of toleration, his strong sense perceived the necessity of something better than what he described as the " heady way of every man making himself a minister and a preacher." His Commission for the trial of public preachers comprised nine laymen and twenty- nine of the clergy. His other Commission consisted of gentry and clergy in every county, to inquire into the conduct, and eject from their livings, if necessary, " scandalous, ignorant, and insufficient " ministers. It is impossible that such Commissions should not have been in many cases arbitrary, perhaps prejudiced and unjust. But even Baxter has given his testimony to the general benefit of these irregular attempts to remedy the absence of a competent ecclesias tical authority for providing religious instruction for the people. " Because this Assembly of Triers is most heavily accused and re proached by some men, I shall speak the truth of them, and sup pose my word will be the rather taken, because most of them took me for one of their boldest adversaries, as to their opinion, and be cause I was known to disown their power. . . . The truth is, that though their authority was null, and though some few over- busy and over-rigid Independents among them were too severe against all that were Arminians, and too particular in inquiring after sanctification in those whom they examined, and somewhat too lax in their admission of unlearned and erroneous men, that favoured Antinomianism or Anabaptism ; yet to give them their due, they did abundance of good to the Church : They saved many a congregation from ignorant, ungodly, drunken teachers. . . All those that used the Ministry but as a common trade to live by, and were never likely to convert a soul ; all these they usually rejected ; and in their stead admitted of any that were able serious preachers, THE PARLIAMENT-HOUSE CLOSED. 63 and lived a godly life, of what tolerable opinion soever they were." * The exhortations of Cromwell to labour for " settling and heal ing " were addressed to unwilling listeners. There was one sore that, in the thoughts of a large number, would admit of no healing. In their view the great ulcer of the State was the supremacy of one man. They would not recognise the co-ordinate power of legislative and executive. Their idea of a Commonwealth was that of a permanent Assembly, in which all the elementary princi ples of government should be perpetually discussed ; all the rela tions of the State to foreign powers debated and re-debated; all the religious animosities of unnumbered sects continually inflamed by alternations of intolerance and liberality, according to the vote of the hour. Their complaint was, not that Cromwell and his Council had ruled unwisely ; but that he should be exalted above his fellows to rule at all. The royalist lampooners said that the Pro tector's escvitcheon should exhibit " The Brewers', with King's arms, quartered." t Those who had been saved from the annihilation of all their hopes of civil and religious liberty by the Colonel from Huntingdon, now joined with the most infuriate of the Cavaliers in abuse of the " base mechanic fellow " — the " Cajsar in a Clown " before whom they were prostrate when he returned in triumph from Dunbar and Worcester. Roundhead and Cavalier had now found a common principle of action. The Parliament had ample powers under the Instrument of Government. The authority of the Protector was great, but with very stringent limitations. The conjoined authority was, as described by the Protector himself, "likely to avoid the extremes of monarchy on the one hand, and of democracy on the other. "J Nevertheless, the very first occupation of the represen tatives assembled on the 3rd of September, 1654, was to proceed to the discussion of the question whether the House shall approve of the system of government by a Parliament and a single Person. Fo'r three days this elementary question had been debated ; and by a majority of a hundred and forty-six votes against a hundred and forty-one, the House resolved to go into Committee to deliberate still further upon this fundamental proposition. On the morning when the Committee was to meet, the doors ofthe Parliament were found closed. The member for Lynn, Mr. Goddard, has given • "Life," p. 7a. t " Cleveland's Poems." X Speech of aand January, 1655. 64 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. some details of the incidents of this Tuesday morning : " Going by water to Westminster, I was told that the Parliament doors were locked up, and guarded with soldiers , and that the barges were to attend the Protector to the Painted Chamber." He attempted to pass up the Parliament Stair, but was repulsed by soldiers ; and was required, if he was a Member, to go into the Painted Chamber. " The Speaker and all the Members were walking up and down the Hall, the Court of Requests, and the Painted Chamber, expecting the Protector's coming." The Protector did come, with his guards ; and took his seat in a chair of state ; and he then spoke for an hour and a half to the bare-headed assembly, with an earnestness to which a feeling of wounded pride gave unwonted emphasis. He had told them, not long before, that they were a free Parliament — '.' And so you are, whilst you own the government and authority which called you hither There was a reciprocity implied and expressed I called myself not to this place. I say again, I called myself not to this place If my calling be from God, and my testimony from the People, God and the People shall take it from me, else I will not part with it." He then went over many passages of the past. " Having had some occasions to see, together with my brethren and countrymen, a happy period put to our sharp wars and contests with the then common enemy, I hoped, in a private capacity, to have reaped the fruit and benefit of our hard labours and hazards I hoped to have had leave to retire to a private life. I begged to be dismissed of my charge. I begged it again and again ; and God be judge between me and all men if I lie in this matter." His dissolution ofthe Long Parliament is referred to as a measure of inevitable necessity. His summoning of the Little Parliament was " to see if a few might have been called together, for some short time, who might put the nation in some way of certain settlement." He adds, with the same solemn appeal to Heaven, "a chief end to myself was to lay down the power which was in my hands." In the unlimited con dition of General of all the forces.— that " boundless authority " conferred by Act of Parliament,— he " did not desire to live, a single day." The Little Parliament resigned the power and au thority which had been committed to them. "All things being again subject to arbitrariness," he was himself " a person having power over the three nations without bound or limit." At the re quest of that Assembly he accepted the office of Protector ; he took the oath to the government. In obedience to that trust, he CROMWELL REQUIRES A PLEDGE FROM MEMBERS. 65 and his Council had been " faithful in calling this Parliament." He maintained that the people, in the expression of their voices by Grand Juries, by addresses from Counties and Cities, were his witnesses of approbation to the place he filled. But the climax of his speech was that they, the members of Parliament, were his last witnesses. They came there by his writs directed to the sheriffs. To these writs the people gave obedience, having had the Act of Government communicated to them, by printed copies, it being also read at the places of election. The writ of return was signed with proviso " that the person so chosen should not have power to alter the government as now settled in one single Person and a Parlia ment." Certainly Oliver Protector has very conclusively settled the question which the Parliament had been three clays debating; and he can scarcely be called tyrannous, when he required "some owning of your call and of. the authority which brought you hither I must deal plainly with you : What I forbore upon a just confidence at first, you necessitate me unto now." This thing (he produces a parchment) when assented to and subscribed is " the means that will you let in'' — (through those doors which are now locked) "to act those tilings as a Parliament which are for the good of the People." The parchment to be signed at the lobby-door bore these words : " I do hereby freely promise, and engage myself, to be true and faithful to the Lord Protector and the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland ; and shall not (according to the tenor of the Indenture whereby I am returned to serve in this present Parliament) propose, or give my consent, to alter the government as it is settled in a Single Person and a Par liament." Many Members signed at once. Three hundred had signed before the end of the month. But the republican leaders refused to give any pledge ; and the Parliament was thus reduced to little more than two-thirds of the members returned. Ludlow, who was thenabsentin Ireland, deeply sympathises with his brother republicans : " So soon as this visible hand of violence appeared to be upon them, most of the eminent assertors of the liberty of their country withdrew themselves; being persuaded they should better discharge their duty to the nation by this way of expressing their abhon-ence of his tyrannical proceedings, than by surrendering their liberties under their own hands, and then treating with him who was possessed of the sword, to recover some part of them again." The Parliament, thus mutilated, resumed its duties. Its first act was an assertion of some independence in resolving that the pledge Vol. IV.— 5 66 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. not to make any change in the government did not apply beyond the first article under which the Protectorate had been constituted — that which referred to a Single Person and a Parliament ; and it adopted that article in a resolution of its own. Cromwell had con quered the Parliament into a show of effecting by its own act what was the result of his strong will. He had said to them, "The wil ful throwing away of this government, — I can sooner be willing to be rolled into my grave and buried with infamy, than I can give my consent unto." When the destinies of a nation hang upon the life of a single man, tbe importance that is attached to the slightest accidents be falling him extend from his contemporaries to history. Cromwell soon after this great trial of his strength was taking a little relaxa tion after his own simple fashion. He had been dining under the trees in Hyde Park — he might have sat under the ancient elm which still tells of a time long past. A new set of six horses had been given him by the duke of Oldenburg; and with his old coun try habits, he took the reins to drive home. The horses plunged, and my Lord Protector was thrown from the box. Marvellous to relate, a pistol went off in his pocket, — he carried a pistol, at a time when most men went armed ; and grave historians duly notice how appre hensive he must have been of his life to bear about with him such a weapon. His life was certainly unsafe. His aged mother, who died in the following November, " at the sound of a musket would often be afraid her son was shot, and could not be satisfied unless she saw him once a day at least." The good old lady died at the age of ninety-four, blessing that son, and saying " The Lord cause his face to shine upon you, and comfort you in all your Adversi ties." Yes, Adversities. The height of his power was truly an adversity ; and we may well believe him to have been sincere, when in a burst of disappointment amidst the contentions around him, he said of the task of governing, " I had rather keep a flock of sheep." But his genius was fitted for governing, however Lud low underrated it, in pointing the moral of the runaway horses : " He would needs take the place of his coachman, not dou'btingbut the threo pair of horses he was about to drive would prove as tame as the three nations which were ridden by him ; and therefore not contented with their ordinary pace he lashed them very furiously." By his fall, says the republican philosopher, "he might have been instructed how dangerous it was to intermeddle with those things in which he had no experience." Oliver's system of government TEMPER OF THE PARLIAMENT. 67 was really founded upon his experience, and not upon refined the ories aiming at impracticable perfection. He drove the state car riage for some years without tumbling from the box ; and though he knew the use of the bit and the whip, he rarely " lashed very furiously." Only when the state-carriage stood still, was he moved out of his wonted calmness. For three months the first free Par liament, although the recusant Members had retired to their homes, made small progress in "settling." From the 21st of Sep tember till the 20th of January, the Instrument of Government was in a constant course of amendments and additions. It was natural enough that attempts should be made to apply every check to arbi trary authority in the Protector ; but the mistrust was too marked ; and the disposition to nullify the existing constitution of the Pro- I tectorate too apparent, not to produce a corresponding restless ness in the nation. Very large questions were depending with foreign powers ; but the function of the executive was stultified by the perpetual discussion as to the authority in which should be confided the right of declaring war or making peace. The legisla tive power of the Parliament was absolute ; for if the Protector did not give his consent to any Bill within twenty days of its passing, it became Law without his consent. And yet the Assembly could not see the necessity of its legislative sanction to the necessary reforms which had been proposed, and partly effected, by Cromwell and his Council. These measures were suspended, and referred to Committees for revision. Other propositions of public importance, such as the celebration of marriage ; the treatment of. lunatics ; the relief of prisoners for debt; the equalisation of taxes; were intro duced as Bills, but none were adopted. They triumphed over Crom well's supposed ambition in deciding that the Protectorate should be elective and not hereditary. They outraged his principles of tolera tion, which had been recognised in the Instrument of Government, by appointing a Committee to define what was " faith in God by Jesus Christ ; " and to settle what were "damnable heresies." They went farther, and ordered that several heretics, amongst whom was John Biddle, a Socinian schoolmaster, should be imprisoned. The supplies were voted as tardily, and with as impolitic an economy, as if the foreign affairs of the country had been conducted with dishonour instead of a dignity which all nations bowed before. The government under a Parliament and a Single Person was becoming impossible. The crisis arrived. The Parliament was to sit five months. Five calendar months would have expired on the 68 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 3rd of February. Five lunar months expired on the 22nd of January. On that day the Protector summoned the House to attend him in the Painted Chamber. Another long speech— and the Parliament is dissolved. The Protector could be angry, and speak harsh truths. " Dissettlement and division, discontent and dis satisfaction, together with real dangers to the whole, have been more multiplied within these five months of your sitting than in some years before. Foundations have also been laid for the future renewing of the troubles of these nations by all the enemies of them abroad and at home." And so, concluded Oliver Protector, " I think it my duty to tell you that it is not for the profit of these nations, nor for common and public good, for you to continue here any longer." He has a difficult task before him. His army is unpaid : the people are wretched with soldiers at free quarters ; royalists are encouraged to undertake new plots ; the old Com monwealth men are ready to join with them. But Oliver keeps up his heart, though he must find his only resource in the same species of despotism against which he fought. " If the Lord take pleasure in England, and if He will do us good, He is very able to bear us up. Let the difficulties be whatsoever they will, we shall in His strength be able to encounter with them. And I bless God I have been inured to difficulties ; and I never found God failing when I trusted to Him. I can laugh and sing, in my heart, when I speak of these things to you or elsewhere. And though some may think it a hard thing to raise money without parliamentary authority upon this nation ; yet I have another argument to the good people of this nation, if they would be safe, and yet have no better principle : Whether they prefer the having of their will, though it be their destruction, rather than comply with things of necessity ? " Neces sity, the tyrant's plea in all ages, cannot be avoided even by this man who had so few of the qualities of a tyrant besides the ener getic will. It is manifest that if the Parliament had not blindly set itself to obstruct the honest exercise of that will in its labours to keep " the good people of this nation safe," any systematic display of arbitrary power would have been as impossible as it would liave been impolitic on his part, even if not alien to his nature. He is conscious of his own strength ; and he will front alone the storms that are gathering around him. But he had faithful public servants, whose devotion to their countiy was not weakened by the quarrels of factions. Blake, one of the noblest of these, thus answered Thurloe, Cromwell's secretary, when informed of the dissolution of ROYALIST RISINGS ORGANISED. 69 the Parliament : " I was not much surprised with 'the intelligence; the slow proceedings and awkward motions of that assembly giving great cause to suspect it would come to some such period. And I cannot but exceedingly wonder that there should yet remain so strong a spirit of prejudice and animosity in the minds of men who profess themselves most affectionate patriots, as to postpone the necessary ways and means for preservation of the Commonwealth, especially in such a time of concurrence of the mischievous plots and designs both of old and new enemies, tending all to the de struction of the same. But blessed be God, who hath hitherto delivered, and doth still deliver us ; and I trust will continue so to do, although He be very much tempted by us." Blake writes this letter from the Mediterranean, where he is doing some memorable things which we shall presently have to notice. Meanwhile "the mischievous plots and designs " to which the admiral refers, are making England very unquiet in this Spring of 1655. Charles the Second, who, after some wandering, has set tled himself at Cologne ; has gone with the Marquis of Ormond lo Middleburg, that he may be ready for a landing in England. Wil mot, now earl of Rochester, is in London, organising a general insurrection. "There cannot be," says Clarendon, "a greater manifestation of the universal prejudice and aversion in the whole kingdom towards Cromwell and his government, than that there . could be so many designs and conspiracies against him, which were communicated to so many men ; and that such signal and notable persons could resort to London, and remain there, without any such information or discovery as might cause them to be apprehended." * It was the policy of Cromwell, as it is of all really sagacious rulers, not to be too prompt with measures of repression — not to alarm and irritate the peaceful portion of the community by fears and suspicions, which are generally the sparks to explode combustible materials instead of being the safety lamps for their discovery. Cromwell left the "signal and notable persons" to pursue the course of their own rashness — even to the organisation of a conspiracy which Rochester represented as so sure of success, that the king's hopes " were so improved, that he thought of nothing more than how he might with the greatest secresy trans port himself into England ; for which he did expect a sudden occasion." f The narrative which Clarendon gives of the result of the enterprise which was to place Charles at the head of an Eng- * " Rebellion," vol. vii. p. 137. t Ibid., p. 138. 70 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. lish army, sufficiently shows how justly the Protector measured his own strength and that of these sanguine Cavaliers. The assizes were being held at Salisbury. The city was full of grand jurymen and petty jurymen, of magistrates and witnesses, all sleep ing quietly in their beds, before the dawning of another day on which the law should assert its wonted majesty in the judgment seat, whatever might be the political differences of republican or royalist. At five o'clock on the morning ofthe nth of March, a party of two hundred horsemen rode into the streets of Salisbury, headed by sir Joseph Wagstaff, " a stout man, who looked not far before him," — a jolly Cavalier, much beloved by the roaring set that Puritanism had not been able to tread out. Their first opera tion was to seize the sheriff and the two judges, and to break open the gaols. Clarendon recounts the proceedings of these loyal adherents of king Charles, with a solemn unconsciousness that he is showing how necessary was the government of a Cromwell to save England from utter lawlessness and bloodshed : " When the judges were brought out in their robes, and humbly produced their commissions, and the sheriff likewise, Wagstaff resolved, after he had caused the king to be proclaimed, to cause them all three to be hanged." There was a country gentleman amongst these insane royalists, John Penruddock, who had some sense of decency, although Clarendon rather blames his scrupulousness : " Poor Penruddock was so passionate to preserve their lives, as if works of this nature could be done by halves, that the major-general durst not persist in it." The judges were dismissed, their commissions being taken from them ; but the sheriff was to be hanged because he refused to proclaim the king. This likewise was resisted ; though very many of the gentlemen were much scandalised at the tender heartedness. To have hanged the sheriff " would have been a seasonable act of severity to have cemented them to perseverance who were engaged in it." No one stirred to help these valiant supporters of the true monarchy and its attributes. In a few hours they left Salisbury, and carrying the sheriff with them, went forwards into Hampshire and Devonshire. There were none to join them. They were hungry and wearied ; and a single troop of Cromwell's horse, being by chance in the country, dispersed them almost without a blow, three days afterwards. Some of the leaders, and about fifty of their followers, were taken prisoners. Wagstaff escaped to France. Penruddock, Grove, and others, were tried at Exeter. The two gallant Cavaliers, brave men who deserved much FAILURE OF RISINGS IN THE WEST AND NORTH. 7 1 commiseration, were beheaded ; a few others were hanged ; the larger number were transported to Barbadoes. In the north, Wilmot had gone to take the command of the insurrectionary army. That army never extended beyond a few rash partisans. Wilmot got back to his master, out of heart; and Charles and his court sat down again at Cologne, to wait for times when the existing government might not be quite so strong or so popular as was manifested by the town-crier of a Dorsetshire town refusing, at the peril of his life, to utter the words " Charles the Second, king of England," when Penruddock dictated a royal proclamation. The complex machine for governing England by a Single Person and a Parliament being again out of working condition, the sim pler and ruder machine of the Single Person must work as it best may to prevent all government from coming to an end. This is despotism. But despotism, however odious as a principle, has many degrees of evil, and is only rendered tolerable by the desire of a despot to perform a bad office in the least mischievous way. Burke has truly described the government of Cromwell as " some what rigid, but for a new power no savage tyranny." * The period at which his despotism put on its most rigid form was in the year that followed the dismissal of the Parliament at the beginning of 1655. He was left without a legal revenue, for the maintenance of the civil and military powers of the government. A merchant named Cony had refused to pay custom duties, as illegally levied by ordi nance. Cromwell tried to soothe the sturdy citizen, who reminded him that he himself had said in the Long Parliament, that the sub ject who yields to an illegal impost is more the enemy of his coun try than the tyrant who imposes it. The Protector sent the mer chant to prison; and then more arbitrarily imprisoned the Counsel, who had, in pleading for his writ of Habeas Corpus, used argu ments which went to deny altogether the legality of the authority of the existing government. There was a compromise in which Cony at length withdrew his opposition to the impost, and his legal defenders were released. Sir Peter Wentworth refused to pay the taxes levied upon him, and was brought before Cromwell and his Council. He was required to withdraw an action which he had commenced against the tax-collector. " If you command it I must submit," said Wentworth to the Protector. He did com mand it, and the resistance was at an end. Clarendon, who re cords these acts of oppression, and especially Cromwell's lecture * "Policy of the Allies." 72 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of the judges " that they should not suffer the lawyers to prate what it would not become them to hear," yet says, " in all other matters, which did not concern the loss of his jurisdiction, he seemed to have great reverence for the law, rarely interposing be tween party and party." In his fiscal measures the most invidious was the imposition of an especial tax upon a limited number of royalists — a property tax, under which all those of the king's party who were considered disaffected, and who either possessed an in come of a hundred a year from land, or a personal estate of fifteen hundred pounds in value, were called upon for a contribution of one-tenth. To assess and collect this tax it was necessary to call forth some new instruments. The Protector divided the country into ten districts, each under the authority of a Major-General, who had various large powers, and who had especially under his com mand the Militia of the Counties. The Militia was a force essen tially different from the regular army ; a force not without strong popular instincts, and not so manageable in carrying through acts of oppression. It was a military police, especially appointed to en force a system of partial repression. There was no resistance to the acts of the Major-Generals and their Commissioners, and there was no large amount of murmuring. The decimation of the richer royalists,- who had already been so harassed by sequestrations, and for whose relief Cromwell had himself laboured to carry through the Act of Oblivion, was truly described by Ludlow as calculated to render its victims " desperate and irreconcileable, they being not able to call anything their own, whilst by the same rule that he seized one-tenth, he might also take away the other nine parts at his pleasure."* There is a worse evil in despotic courses than that of making men " desperate and irreconcileable " — that of making them time-serving, slavish, and apathetic. A passage in Baxter's life is illustrative of this: "James Berry was made Ma jor-General of Worcestershire, Shropshire, Herefordshire, and -North Wales, — the counties in which he had formerly lived as a servant, a clerk of iron-works. His reign was modest and short; but hated and scorned by the gentry that had known his inferiority, so that it had been better for him to have chosen a stranger place. And yet many of them attended him as submissively as if they had honoured him ; so significant a thing is power and prosperity with worldly minds." f That these Major-Generals meddled with other royalists than those of good property is shown by the arrest of * " Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 519. t " Life," p. 97. SEVERITIES AGAINST PAPISTS AND EPISCOPALIANS. 73 John Cleveland, "that incomparable son of Apollo" according to the creed of the Cavaliers, for whose cause he has been writing bitter satires since the first days of the Long Parliament. Colo nel Haynes has arrested him at Norwich, and sent him to prison at Yarmouth. Cleveland addressed a petition to the Protector, though he had ridiculed his " copper-nose," in which the unfortunate poet says, " I am inclined to believe that next to the adherence to the royal party, the cause of my confinement is the narrowness of my estate, for none stand committed whose estate can bail them. I only am the prisoner who have no acres to be my hostage. Now if my poverty be criminal, with reverence be it spoken, I must im plead your highness, whose victorious arms have reduced me to it, as accessory to my guilt." The Petition, an elaborate composition far more laudatory than insulting, procured the poet's release.* At this period the government of the Protector was more than usually harsh towards the Catholics and the Clergy of the Anglican Church. The plots against the Commonwealth were generally mixed up with the intrigues of Papists, and the harshness towards them was the practical continuance of the spirit of the severe penal laws. The Episcopalians were harassed at the instance of the Presbyterians, in spite of Cromwell's own ardent desire for tolera tion. One of the most odious measures against them was an ordinance prohibiting them to be received in private families as preceptors. Archbishop Usher, for whom the Protector had a deep respect, remonstrated with him against his injustice. He did not withdraw the ordinance, but it remained inoperative. Preju dices were too strong to allow him to act up to his own principles. But with the great Puritan body, and the various sectaries that sprang from them, he was determined to keep their animosities under the control of an equal justice. " If a man of one form," he declared to the Parliament in 1656, " will be trampling upon the heels of another form ; if an Independent, for example, will de spise him who is under Baptism, and will revile him, and will re proach and provoke him, I will not suffer it iii him." Neither should the Independent censure the Presbyterian, nor the Presby terian the Independent. This toleration made him many enemies : " I have borne my reproach ; but I have, through God'.s mercy, not been unhappy in hindering any one religion to impose upon another." The Quakers, who were hunted and persecuted by every other sect, found a friend in Cromwell. George Fox, who had * Printed with the Poems, edit. 1657. 74 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. been seized in his preachings, and carried to London, managed to see the Protector, and exhorted him to keep in the fear of God ; and Cromwell, having patiently listened to his lecture, parted with him, saying " Come again to my house. If thou and I were but an hour of the day together, we should be nearer one to the other. I wish no more harm to thee than i clo my own soul." * George and some of his brethren had been dispersing " base books against the Lord Protector," as major-general Goffe informed Thurloe. Cromwell sent the Quaker unharmed away, having received from him a written promise that he would do nothing against his govern ment. * Fox's "Journal," quoted in Carlyle's " Cromwell," vol. ii. p. r2i. CROMWELL S FOREIGN POLICY. 75 CHAPTER IV. Greatness of Cromwell in his Foreign Policy. — Naval armaments.— Blake's exploits.— Jamaica taken. — Cromwell's interference for the Vaudois. — He attempts to procure the re-admission of the Jews to settle in England. — Hostility of the Republicans to the Protector. — Cromwell requires a pledge from Republican leaders. — Meeting of the Protector's Second Parliament. — Cromwell's opening Speech. — Members ex cluded from the Parliament. — Case of James Nayler. — Sindercomb's plot. — The Parliament votes that Cromwell shall be offered the Crown. — Conferences on the subject of Kingship. — Cromwell declines to accept the title. — Blake's victory at Santa Cruz. — Cromwell inaugurated as Protector under a new Instrument of Government. ¦ — Second Session of Parliament. — The Upper House. — The old secluded Members admitted to sit. — Cromwell's Speech. — Violent dissensions. — The Parliament dis solved — Projected rising of Royalists. — Allied War in the Netherlands. — Dunkirk. — Cromwell's family afflictions. — His illness and death. " His greatness at home was but a shadow of the glory he had abroad." So writes Clarendon of him who, he says, " will be looked upon by posterity as a brave bad man." The mere courtiers of Charles II. used to talk of the Protector as "that wretch, Crom well."* It is something for Clarendon to acknowledge that "he had some good qualities." He had the highest of all qualities in a prince — a sense of public duty. He was an Englishman, bent upon sustaining the honour of his country amongst the nations. In this great design his genius luxuriated. He was not beset with difficulties, as at home, when he sent forth his fleets to sweep the Barbary pirates from the Mediterranean, or employed his diplo matists to express in distinct terms, that the Protestants of the Piedmontese valleys should not be massacred by a duke of Savoy, although supported by a king of France. He went straight to his object, when he concluded the P'rench alliance, and rejected that of Spain, because " there is not liberty of conscience to be had from the Spaniard, neither is there satisfaction for injuries nor for blood." f " Elizabeth, of famous memory, that lady, that great queen," as Cromwell terms her, was the load-star of his foreign policy; "nothing being more usual than his saying 'that his ships in the Mediterranean should visit Civita Vecchia, and that the * Letter of Henrietta Maria ; Green, p. 380. t Speech, 17th September, 1656. 76 , HISTORY OF ENGLAND. sound of his cannon should be heard at Rome.' "* He raised his country out of the pitiful subjection to which the Stuarts had re duced it, to be again amongst the most respected of Christian powers. " It was hard to discover which feared him most, France, Spain, or the Low Countries, where his friendship was current at the value he put upon it." f The price which he demanded for his friendship was, that the liberties of Englishmen, their personal security, and their rights of conscience, should be respected through out the world ; that no sea should be closed against English com merce ; that no combination of crowned heads should attempt to control the domestic government of these kingdoms. He made no pretensions to national supremacy inconsistent with the rights of other countries ; but not a tittle would he abate of that respect which was due to his own country and his own government. He was raised to supreme power by a revolution upon which all mon archical rulers must have looked with dread and suspicion and secret hatred ; but he made no efforts to imbue other kingdoms with a revolutionary spirit. His moderation commanded a far higher respect than if he had formed schemes of European con quest ; or had attempted to conciliate discontented colonels and murmuring troopers, by leading them in person against Conde or Don John of Austria. Truly has it been said, " He was a soldier; he had risen by war. Had his ambition been of an impure or self ish kind, it would have been easy for him to plunge his country into continental hostilities on a large scale, and to dazzle the rest less factions which he ruled, by the splendour of his victories." X He left to Blake the glory of making the flag of England tri umphant on the seas, satisfied to counsel and encourage him. His practical spirit of doing everything for utility, and nothing for vain glory, was so infused into his officers, that when Turenne sent to Lockhart, Cromwell's general in the Netherlands, an explana tion of the plan of the battle they were to fight with their allied forces, the Englishman, with a noble common sense that could lay aside the morbid vanity which too often mars the success of joint enterprises, exclaimed, " Very good : I shall obey M. de Turen'ne's orders, and he may explain his reasons after the battle, if he pleases." § The maintenance and increase of the naval arm ot our strength was the especial care of the Protector. " I went," writes Evelyn * " Clarendon," vol. vii. p. 297. t Ibid. t Macaulay, " Essays," vol. i. § Guizot, " Cromwell," vol. ii. p. 383. BLAKE S EXPLOITS. — JAMAICA TAKEN. 77 in his Diary of the 9th of April, 1655, " to see the great ship newly built by the usurper, Oliver, carrying ninety-six brass guns and 1000 tons burthen." Some months before, two armaments were being fitted out at Portsmouth. Their destination was unknown. Cromwell was one day surrounded in the streets by a large num ber of sailors' wives. "Where are our husbands to be sent?" they demanded. " The ambassadors of France and Spain would each give me a million to know that," answered the Protector. Whilst France and Spain were each under apprehensions when Blake's fleet of twenty-five ships had sailed, the admiral appeared before Leghorn, and demanded from the grand duke of Tuscany redress for the owners of three merchant vessels, which had been captured by prince Rupert in 1650, and sold in Tuscan ports and in the Papal States. The grand duke and the pope paid the in demnity. Blake then presented himself on the coast of Africa, to demand the relief of Christian captives from the Barbary States. His terms were complied with at Algiers and Tripoli. At Tunis, the Dey pointed to his fortresses, and told the English to do their worst. Blake battered the Tunisian works, and burnt the piratical fleet in the harbour. A hundred and sixty years after this example England had again " to break the oppressor's chain, and set the captives free." The war with Spain had not yet been proclaimed, but the second armament had sailed with secret orders. Blake was waiting to take his share in the warfare, after he had chastised the African pirates. He was off Malaga, where some of the sail ors who had landed had shown disrespect to a procession of the host. A priest incited the Spanish populace to outrage, and the sailors were beaten and chased to their ships. They told their story to the admiral, who demanded that the priest should be brought to justice. The authorities replied that the civil power could not touch an ecclesiastic. "Send him on board the St. George within three hours or I will burn your city," was the ad miral's demand of the governor of Malaga. The priest was sent. The story of both sides was heard on the justice-seat of the quar ter-deck. The sailors were found to be in the wrong, and the priest was put ashore with all civility. " I would have punished the men had I been appealed to," said the admiral ; " but I would have you and all the world to know that an Englishman is not to be judged and punished except by Englishmen." The other fleet under Venables and Penn had gone for the West Indies. On the 14th of April it was before Hispaniola. There was no attempt at 78 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. once to take St. Domingo; but a portion of tbe badly assorted army landed about ten leagues to the westward of the town, and marched "through woods of incredible thickness, receiving little or no opposition except the excessive heat of the sun, and intol erable drought that oppressed them, having not had, in many miles' march, one drop of water." * The other portion of the ar mament had landed nearer the city ; and when a junction was ef fected, the whole force fell into ambuscades, and were eventually driven back to their ships. The commanders, who had lost every thing by their disputes and feeble arrangements, sailed away, and possessed themselves of Jamaica. The value of this conquest was then little estimated ; and the fertility of the island was thought small compensation for the loss of the supposed treasures of His- paniola. Cromwell was somewhat cast down by this his first fail ure ; and he sent Penn and Venables to the Tower when they came home with the tale of their disasters. But he soon saw that Jamaica gave England a solid footing in the West Indies, and was a most important acquisition, although " it produces not any mines of gold and silver, as doth Hispaniola " — a defect which the jour nalist much laments. The two unfortunate commanders were soon released. The Protector is unremitting in his watchfulness over the West Indian possessions, as his letters show, and if possible he will strike at the root of such miscarriages as that of His paniola. He writes to major-general Fortescue at Jamaica, " As we have cause to be humbled for the reproof God gave us at St. Domingo, upon the account of our own sin as well as others', so, truly, upon the reports brought hither to us of the extreme avarice, pride and confidence, disorders and debauchedness, profaneness and wickedness, commonly practised amongst the Army, we can not only bewail the same, but desire that all with you may do so ; and that a very special regard may be had so to govern, for time to come, as that all manner of vice may be thoroughly discounte nanced, and severely punished ; and that such a frame of govern ment may be exercised that virtue and godliness may receive due encouragement." The power and influence of -h ; Commonwealth was at this period signally called forth by an occurrence that was no especial injury or affront to the nation, but which more deeply moved the heart of Puritan England than any event since the Irish massacre. For many centuries there had dwelt in three small valleys of Pied- * "Journal of the English Army," Harl. Miscellany, vol. vi. p. 372. CROMWELL S. INTERFERENCE FOR THE VAUDOIS. 79 mont a race known as the Vaudois, or Valdenses — the people of the valleys — who from the earliest times had kept separate from the Church of Rome. Before the principles of the Reformation had been disseminated by Luther or Calvin, the Pope, Innocent VIII., had issued a bull for the extirpation of the pernicious sect of the Waldenses. When they declared that their ancient faith was similar to that of the Reformers, persecutions became more frequent against tjiem. They were proscribed, first by France and then by Savoy; and then sometimes tolerated, and sometimes molested. In 1655 the government of the young duke Charles Emmanuel II., having been irritated by tumults between some Vaudois of one of the valleys and a convent of Capuchins, alleged that those who had been tolerated in their religion within certain districts, prescribed by edicts, had settled upon lands beyond their proper boundaries. All the Vaudois families inhabiting eight communes in the lower part of the valley of the Pelice, were com manded to abandon, their fields and houses ; to sell their property within twenty days ; or to become Roman Catholics. This com mand was resisted ; and the duke of Savoy sent the marquis of Pianezza to enforce the manifesto. The Vaudois deserted their villages and sought refuge in the mountains. There were severe contests between the troops and the suffering people ; in which fearful cruelties were committed by the Piedmontese soldiers, and by mercenary Irish and French in the service of the duke of Savoy. An officer who was in the command of a French regiment in Piedmont that had been placed under the orders of the marquis of Pianezza, threw up his commission, " in order," he says, " that I might not assist in such wicked actions." A declaration of this brave man, captain du Petit-Bourg, is in the University Library at Cambridge, wherein he says, " I was the witness of numerous acts of. great violence and extreme cruelty, practised by the soldiers towards all ages, sexes, and conditions, whom I saw massacred, hanged, burned, and violated, and I also witnessed several terrible conflagrations." He adds that the marquis of Pianezza ordered all the prisoners to be killed, " because his highness would not have any of their religion in all his dominions." The instant that Cromwell heard of the preliminary harsh measures of the duke of Savoy towards the Vaudois, he wrote to the English resident in Switzerland to advise the persecuted people to appeal to England. The news of the massacre arrived before any request was made for succour. The Protector immediately sent an envoy extraor- 80 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. .dinary to Louis XIV. and to the duke of Savoy, with letters of re monstrance. Upon all the Protestant princes he called for assist ance in demanding justice for the Vaudois. A collection through out England was made for these poor people, and Cromwell him self gave two thousand pounds. His language was as moderate as it was firm. But his meaning could not be mistaken. France was most anxious to conclude a treaty of peace and commerce with England ; but Cromwell declared that he would not sign it till the French Court had procured from the Piedmontese govern ment the Restoration of the Vaudois to their ancient liberties. The French minister at Turin now insisted on an immediate pa cification, which should restore the Vaudois to their civil and re ligious liberties, as of old. The business was hastily concluded by the French agents, and some harsh conditions were connected with this settlement, which again caused the interference of the Protector in 1658. The earnest thought of Cromwell went through Europe clothed in the eloquent Latin of Milton ; and even those who hated the Commonwealth acknowledged that England never stood higher than when she demanded justice for a few poor cul tivators of the Alps — those who had kept the truth " When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones-" The efforts of the Protector to procure safety and liberty of Conscience for a race of Christians dwelling in three small valleys of the Alps, were more successful than his endeavours to give a legal home in England to a persecuted race, scattered through every land. The Jews were banished, and their immoveable goods were- confiscated, in 1290. In 1655 Cromwell assembled his Coun cil, and " divers eminent ministers," to consider the petition of Rabbi Manasseh-Ben-Israel of Amsterdam, that the Jews might have liberty to settle again in England. Three hundred and sixty- five years of obstinate prejudice might probably have sufficed to exhaust the bigotry of a Christian community. Cromwell thought the term quite long enough ; and so the matter of allowing the Jews to reside again amongst us, and trade, and have public syn agogues, and a cemetery out of the town to bury their dead, was discussed in four conferences ; and the Protector advocated the measure ; and one present says, " I never heard a man speak so well." But there were then, as there always will be. grave divines and learned lawyers who patch a rag of ancient intolerance into HOSTILITY OF THE REPUBLICANS TO THE PROTECTOR. 8 1 their modern garments, to show the colour and substance of the old material that all men once proudly wore. Of this species was William Prynne, who headed the cry of Christianity in danger, by publishing a manifesto against the Jews, in which " their ill-deport ment, misdemeanours, condition, sufferings, oppressions, slaugh ters, plunders by popular insurrections, royal exactions, and final banishment," were brought forward in connection with Laws and Scriptures, " to plead and conclude against their re-admission into England." The old clamour against the Jewerie was revived, es pecially in the city, where the merchants were jealous of the wealth of the Hebrews ; and the Protector, seeing it was in vain to expect any agreement on this question, sought for no legal sanction to their settling here, but raised no objection to a Portuguese syna gogue being opened in 1656. The government of the Protectorate had ample public business to engage its attention, during the twenty months in which a Single Person, without a Parliament, was the supreme director of the af fairs of three kingdoms. The alliance with France, and the war with Spain, gave occasion to new movements of royalists, and new combinations of republicans. Charles the Second was living in dissolute poverty at Cologne, caring little for state concerns, and laying no burden upon his conscience when he had to make some contrary pledge to Protestant or Papist, openly to the one, or in secret to the other. He was a little roused from his exclusive at tention to his mistresses when the war with Spain induced him to believe that he might obtain some assistance from that power against their common enemy. Colonel Sexby, a furious republi can, prepared with schemes of conspiracy and assassination, joined the Councils of Charles and the Spanish ministers. In April, 1656, a treaty of alliance was concluded between Philip IV. and the ex iled king of England, by which the Spanish monarch promised Charles a pension and an army, and Charles engaged that with the aid of the Irish serving in France he would make a landing in England. The government of the Protector was more effectually endangered by the attitude ofthe great republican leaders at home, than by preparations for war and assassination. Sir Harry Vane had come forth with a pamphlet, which Thurloe described in a letter to Henry Cromwell, as " a new form of government, plainly laying aside thereby that which now is. . At the first coming out of it, it was applauded ; but now, upon second thoughts, it is re jected as being impracticable, and aiming in truth at the setting up Vol. IV.— 6 82 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of the Long Parliament again." Cromwell, in July, had issued writs for a new Parliament. A second pamphlet, more exciting than the first, was also published, and extensively circulated. The influence of such appeals to the people, setting forth " infringed rights"—" in vaded properties " — "imprisoned friends " — would be full of danger in the result of the elections ; and Cromwell was placed in an atti tude of more determined hostility against the republican party. The elections were fiercely contested, amidst many popular tumults. The government, had secured a majority, but many of its declared op ponents were elected. Cromwell and his Council tried to persuade Vane, Harrison, and other opponents, to pledge themselves not to commit any act to the prejudice of the government. They refused ; and were imprisoned. The nature of the pledge required may be judged from a remarkable conference between Cromwell and Lud low, recorded by the sturdy republican, who had been dismissed from his employment in Ireland. When Ludlow drew near to the Council Table, Cromwell charged him with dispersing treasonable books in Ireland. He denied that they were treasonable. Crom well said that he was not ignorant of many plots to disturb the present power, and that he thought it his duty to secure such as he suspected. Ludlow replied that whether his actions were good or bad he was ready to submit to a legal trial. Cromwell then re quired him to give assurance not to act against the government. " I desired," says Ludlow, " to be excused in that particular, re minding him of the reasons I had formerly given him for my re fusal." The reasons were thus given at the previous interview referred to : " If Providence open a way, and give an opportunity of appearing in behalf of the people, I cannot consent to tie my own hands beforehand, and oblige myself not to lay hold on it * * * My dissatisfactions were not grounded upon any animosity against his person ; and that if my own father were alive, and in his place, they would, I doubted not, be altogether as great." * At this second conference Ludlow maintains the same resolute mind, and Cromwell exhibits the same desire to conciliate him : " Pray then, said he, what is it that you would have ? May not every man be as good as he will ? What can you desire more than you have ? It were easy, said I, to tell what we would have. What is that, I pray, said he ? That which we fought for, said I, that the nation might be governed by its own consent. I am, said he, as much for a government by consent as any man ; but where shall we find * "Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 554-5. CROMWELL REQUIRES A PLEDGE FROM REPUBLICANS: 83 that consent ? Amongst the Prelatical, Presbyterian, Independent, Anabaptist, or Levelling Parties ? I answered, amongst those of all sorts who had acted with fidelity and affection to the public. Then he fell into the commendation of his own government, boast ing of the protection and quiet which the People enjoyed under it,- saying, that he was resolved to keep the nation from being im brued in blood. I said, that I was of opinion too much blood had been already shed, unless there were a better account of it. You do well, said he, to charge us with the guilt of blood ; but we think there is a good return for what hath been shed ; and we under stand what clandestine correspondences are carrying on at this time between the Spaniards and those of your party, who make use of your name, and affirm that you will own them and assist them. I know not, said I, what you mean by my party, and can truly say, that if any men have entered into an engagement with Spain, they have had no advice from me so to do, and that if they will use my name I cannot help it. Then in a softer way he told me, that he desired not to put any more hardships on me than on himself ; that he had been always ready to do me all the good offices that lay in his power, and that he aimed at nothing by this proceeding but the public quiet and security. Truly Sir, said I, I know not why you should be an enemy to me who have been faithful to you in all your difficulties. I understand not, said he, what you mean by my difficulties. I am sure they were not so properly mine as those of the public ; for in respect to my outward condition I have not much improved it, as these gentlemen, pointing to his Council, well know. To which they seemed to assent, by rising from their chairs ; and therefore I thought not fit to insist farther on that point, contenting myself to say, that it was from that duty which I owed to the public, whereof he expressed such a peculiar regard, that I durst not give the security he desired, because I considered it to be against the liberty of the People, and contrary to the known law of England." * After this bold manifestation Ludlow went quietly away ; to maintain that Cromwell was a usurper, and that the only legitimate authority was the Long Parliament. " In general there is as much difference between a usurper and an he reditary king, as there is between a wild boar and a tame one ; but Cromwell had nothing in him ferocious." f * " Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 570. t Landor, " Imaginary Conversations." — Works, vol. i. p. 554. 84 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. The Parliament assembled on the 17th of September — a crowded meeting in the Painted Chamber on a hot day — so hot, that the Protector seems to imply that he will not detain them by a long speech, seeing " that condition and heat that you are now in." But he does speak at great length, with abundant words, although he says " Truly our business is to speak things " . . . " things that concern the glory of God, and his peculiar interest in the world." A large subject, — but one which Oliver mainly associates with " the being and subsistence of these nations with all their de pendencies." Of their present dangers he chiefly speaks; — of "your great enemy, the Spaniard;" of the circumstances which " justify the war which has been entered upon with the Spaniard ; " of the danger of "any peace with any State that is Popish, and subject to the determination of Rome and the Pope himself," for then "you are bound and they are loose." France was not "un der such a tie to the pope." Spain, he says, " hath espoused that interest which you all along hitherto have been conflicting with — Charles Stuart's interest." He adds, " as there is a complication of these interests abroad, so there is a complication of them here. Can we think that Papists and Cavaliers shake not hands in Eng land. . . . Your danger is so great, if you will be sensible of it, by reason of persons who pretend other things." He points to past dangers — to assassination plots, and insurrections in the preceding year. The present great danger was from " a generation of men in this nation who cry up nothing but righteousness, and justice, and liberty; and these are divided into several sects and sorts of men. They are known to shake hands with, — I should be loath to say with Cavaliers — but with all the scum and dirt of this nation." To meet such dangers " we did find but a little poor in vention, which I hear has been much regretted — the erecting of your Major-Generals. . . . Truly I think if ever anything were justifiable as to necessity, this was." He then proceeds to Reme dies : — First to consider all that ought to be done in order to Secur ity ; next doing all things that ought to be done in order to Refor mation. For outward security join heartily in the prosecution of the war. " If you can come to prosecute it, prosecute it vigor ously, or not at all." As to the distempers of people that pretend ' religion, " our practice since the last Parliament hath been, to let all this nation see that whatever pretensions to religion would con tinue quiet, peaceable, they should enjoy conscience and liberty to themselves, and not to make religion a pretence for arms and MEETING OF THE PROTECTOR'S SECOND PARLIAMENT. 85 blood." He points to the means which have been adopted " for the ejecting of scandalous ministers, and for the bringing in of them that have passed an approbation." He calls for Reforma tion of Manners. " In my conscience, it was a shame to be a Christian, within these fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen, years in this nation — whether in Cassar's house, or elsewhere. It was a shame, it was a reproach to a man, and the badge of Puritan was put upon it. We would keep up Nobility and Gentry ; and the way to keep them up is, not to suffer them to be patronisers or countenancers of debauchery and disorders." These are wise words ; and there were other words altogether as wise, which statesmen heeded not for more than a century and a half ; holding, with learned Black- stone, the necessity of entirely disregarding as unworthy of notice "the crude and abortive schemes for amending the laws in -the times of confusion which followed " the times of Charles I.* Let us conclude our brief notice of this remarkable speech of 1656, with a passage which contains, according to a high authority, " stronger in dications of a legislative mind than are to be found in the whole range of orations delivered on sucli occasions, before or since." f " There are some things which respect the estates of men ; and there is one general grievance in the Nation. It is the Law. Not that the laws are a grievance, but there are laws that are ; and the great grievance lies in the execution and administration. I think I may- say it, I have as eminent judges in this land, as have been had, as the Nation has had, for these many years. Truly I could be par ticular, as to the executive part of it, as to the administration of the Law; but that would trouble you. The truth of it is, there are wicked and abominable laws, which it will be in your power to alter. To hang a man for six-and-eightpence, and I know not what ; to hang for a trifle, and acquit murder, — is in the ministra tion of the Law, through the ill-framing of it. I have known in my experience abominable murders acquitted. And to see men lose their lives for petty matters ; this is a thing God will reckon for. And I wish it may not lie upon this nation a day longer than you have an opportunity to give a remedy ; and I hope I shall cheer fully join with you in it. This hath been a great grief to many honest hearts and conscientious people ; and I hope it is in all your hearts to rectify it." The legislative mind of Cromwell could rarely find adequate encouragement in his legislators. We have seen how earnestly he * Bookiv. Chap. 33. , t Macaulay, " Essays," vol. i. 86 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. was always calling, even from the battle-field, for reform of the laws. Surely Mr. Hallam must have been strangely prejudiced against the man and his principles, when, in his " Parallel between Cromwell and Napoleon," he says, " In civil government there can be no adequate parallel between one who had sucked only the dregs of a besotted fanaticism, and one to whom the stores of reason and philosophy were open. But it must here be added that Cromwell, far unlike his antitype, never showed any signs of a legislative mind, or any desire to fix his renown on that noblest basis, the amelioration of social institutions." Such a passage is unworthy of the usual calm and impartial tone of the " Constitu tional History." It might have been better suited to the historian who designates Cromwell as " a barbarian." It would have been better suited to that historian, David Hume, to speak of "the dregs of a besotted fanaticism," as opposed to "the stores of reason and philosophy," who had little sympathy with, if not positive hatred to, the man or the race of men, who sought to live in the. "great Task-master's eye." Cromwell, the barbarian, did not aspire to go down to posterity with a Code in his hand. He had not to build up new laws out of chaos, but to clear away the rubbish whicli en cumbered the old laws. " If he erected little that was new, it was because there had been no general devastation to clear a space for him." * The strong declamation of the Protector against men who cry up nothing but righteousness and justice and liberty — the men of several sects — the levelling party — the Commonwealth's men — seemed to point at some extraordinary course with this Parliament. About three hundred members had received a certificate in the fol lowing form : " These are to certify that is returned by inden ture one of the Knights [or Burgesses] to serve in this present Parliament for the county [city or borough] of , and approved by his Highness's Council," which certificate was signed by the " Clerk of the Commonwealth in Chancery." This was a manifest violation of the ancient parliamentary privileges, — a violation upon the broadest scale. A hundred and two members, who had re ceived no certificate, were prevented entering the House. Sixty- five sent a letter of remonstrance to the Speaker. The Clerk of the Commonwealth produced his instructions from the Council; and the House having then demanded of the Council why certain duly elected had not been admitted to sit, Nathaniel Fiennes, one * Macaulay's " Essays," vol. i. MEMBERS EXCLUDED FROM THE PARLIAMENT. 87 of the Commissioners of the Great Seal, attended, and showed that according to the Instrument of Government " no persons could be elected to serve in Parliament but such as were of known integrity, fearing God, and of good conversation ; " and that, by the same Instrument, the Council was authorised and directed " to examine whether the persons elected were agreeable to the above-mentioned qualifications." The formal letter of the Constitution had been adhered to ; its application was a bold exercise of arbitrary power. The excluded members protested against this total infraction of the conditions of a free Parliament ; and denounced all the mem bers who should continue to sit as " betrayers of the liberties of England; and adherents to the capital enemies of the Common wealth." The public indignation was great and general; but a national success came opportunely to qualify it. A squadron of Blake's fleet off Cadiz had captured two Spanish galleons returning home with the treasures of the Indies ; and the people crowded the roads and streets from Portsmouth to the Tower to look upon a procession of thirty-eight waggons laden with ingots and piastres. The treasury was replenished. The Parliament became tranquil- ised. The power of the Protector seemed established on a firm basis. He felt that he could relax in some measures of repression ; and the Major-Generals were abolished. There was a mutilated Parliament ; but the government of a Single Person was again coming within the bounds of constitutional liberty. The powers of the Parliament and the Protector now worked harmoniously togeth er. Acts were passed for the security of his person : and for dis annulling the title to the Crown of Charles Stuart and his descend ants. The war with Spain was declared to be just and necessary ; and four hundred thousand pounds were.voted for the expenses of the war. The ordinances which the Protector had issued were for the most part confirmed. His appointments to judicial offices were approved. The revolution was thought by many to have passed its period of disturbance and experiment. It was even pop ularly considered to be probable and desirable that the Protector should assume a higher title, and with the. powers of a king should receive the name. Poetical flattery talked of the Spanish gold being made into a crown and a royal sceptre. Amidst all sorts of speculations upon such an event, an incident which appeared to have little connection with a matter of such importance brought into view the necessary antagonism between the executive author ity of the Protector, and the ill-defined and ill-understood executive 88 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. power of the Parliament. Amongst the new sect of Quakers was James Nayler, who, in his frantic enthusiasm, had proclaimed that the Redeemer was incarnate in his person ; and he had moreover given a great public scandal in going about in a state of nudity.* 'I he quaker was arrested at Bristol ; and brought up to the bar of the House of Commons. There were ten days of wearisome de bate, in which it was maintained that the House possessed the right of life and death. The madman narrowly escaped hanging; for eighty-two voted for his execution. He was finally condemned to be put in the pillory, to have his tongue bored through with a hot iron, and to be whipped through the streets. Cromwell saw, as the more fanatical members had not seen, that the whole course of legal government was threatened by this procedure of the House — that this assumption of judicial power was incompatible with the due course of justice. He addressed this letter to the Speaker : " Right trusty and well-beloved, we greet you well. Having taken notice of a judgment lately given by yourselves against one James Nayler : although we detest and abhor the giving or occasioning the least countenance to persons of such opinions and practices, or who are under the guilt of the crimes commonly imputed to the said person ; yet we, being intrusted in the present government, on behalf of the people of these nations ; and not knowing how far such proceeding, entered into wholly without us, may extend in the consequence of it, — Do desire that the House will let us know the grounds and reasons whereupon they have proceeded." Part of Nayler's sentence had been inflicted when this letter was received. The House immediately rejected a proposition for deferring the completion of the punishment. The people became more and more convinced that in a due balance of the executive and legisla tive functions they must look for safety. The obstinacy of the Parliament was Cromwell's triumph with the sober part of the na tion. But his very pertinent desire to know " the grounds and reasons " for a " proceeding entered into wholly without Us," led * There is a curious passage in the very interesting autobiography of Thomas Ellwood which somewhat explains this. Ellwood's father violently opposed, even by blows and horsewhippings, his son's determination to be a Quaker. The old squire said, "they held many dangerous principles ; that they were an immodest shameless people ; and that one of them stripped himself stark naked, and went in that unseemly manner about the streets, at fairs, and on market-day at great towns." The young man replied to his father by citing " the example of Isaiah, who went naked among the people for a long time." Isaiah was a prophet, said the father. " How know we but this Quaker may be a prophet, too?" rejoined the son. SINDERCOMB'S PLOT. 89 to inquiries about the due apportionment of power, which had very remarkable results. Meanwhile a new assassination plot excited a general interest in the life of the Protector ; and, like all such abor tive schemes, made the authority stronger which it was intended to overthrow. Charles the Second was residing at Bruges at the beginning of 1657. He had obtained money from Spain, with which he was making some show of preparation for an expedition to England. - But Cromwell — there is the difficulty. Colonel Sexby has been in England, and is again with the king. He has left a trusty agent behind him, and a certain service is to be well rewarded. Miles Sindercomb was one of the Levellers of the army, who was sen tenced to be shot at Burford in 1650. But he escaped then ; was received as quartermaster into Monk's army in Scotland ; got in volved in new plots ; and was cashiered. Sexby has left this man a large sum for the conduct of his operations. He hired a house at Hammersmith, and provided deadly combustibles of a sort to blow the Protector and his carriage into atoms as he took his Sat urday ride to Hampton Court. Sindercomb arranged, moreover, to fire Whitehall, and have a safe blow at the Protector in the con fusion. On the night of the 8th of January, the sentinel at the Palace finds a basket of wildfire, and a slow match gradually burn ing onwards to explode it. A life-guardsman comes before the Council, and proclaims that Miles Sindercomb is the man who has made these midnight arrangements. Sindercomb is taken ; is tried; and convicted by a jury in the King's Bench : the day of ex ecution is fixed ; but he is found dead in his bed. His sister has conveyed poison to him. The author of "Killing no Murder" — whether Colonel Titus or Colonel Sexby — says that Sindercomb was smothered and not poisoned. With the wonted rant of politi cal fanatics, he exclaims, " The brave Sindercomb hath shown as great a mind as any old Rome could boast of ; and, had he lived there, his name had been registered with Brutus and Cato, and he had had his statues as well as they." This assassination plot was extinguished as quickly as the lighted match at Whitehall. The Parliament went in a body to congratulate the Protector on his escape ; and his Highness made an appropriate reply. A Thanks giving day followed ; and two sermons at " Margaret's Church ; " and a princely entertainment to the House by the Protector, and after dinner, " rare music, both of voices and instruments, till the evening." 9° HISTORY OF ENGLAND. When Secretary Thurloe, on the 19th of January, related the discovery of Sindercomb's plot to the Commons, and the House resolved to congratulate the Protector on his escape, Mr. Ashe, a member of no great mark, moved that it be added to the congratula tory add/ess, that his Highness would be pleased to take upon him the government according to the ancient constitution. Great was the clamour. The ancient constitution was Charles Stuart's in terest. Was a kingly government now to be set up, against which the Lord had borne testimony. The matter was dropped. On the 23rd of February, alderman Pack requested leave to read a paper " tending to the settlement of the nation." The House was again in most disorderly condition. But the alderman did read his paper, in accordance with the desire of a large majority. Thurloe de scribed the occurrence in a letter to Monk : " Yesterday we fell into a great debate in Parliament. One of the aldermen who serve for the city of London, brought in a paper called a Remonstrance, desiring my Lord Protector to assume kingly power, and to call future Parliaments, consisting of two Houses. * * * * I do assure you it ariseth from the Parliament only ; his Highness knew nothing of the preambles until they were brought into the House." Four days after Pack's Remonstrance had been read, a hundred officers, with several of the Major-Generals, amongst whom was Cromwell's son-in-law, Fleetwood, waited upon the Protector, to say' that they had heard with great dismay that there was a project in hand to make his Highness King — a hazardous project — a scan dal to the people of God. Cromwell somewhat resented this inter ference. He had not been caballing about this project, either for or against it. They need not, however, start at this title King, a feather in a hat, for they had themselves pressed it upon him when this government was undertaken. He thought the Instrument of Government did need mending. That a House of Lords, or some other check upon the arbitrary tendencies of a single House might be useful. Look at the case of James Nayler. May it not be any one's case some other day ? The deputation went their way ; and the debate upon the great question proceeded in the House with little interruption. Through the whole of March it was debated; and it was at last voted, by a majority of sixty-one, to address the Protector in these words : " That your Highness will be pleased to assume the name, style, title, dignity, and office, of King of Eng. land, Scotland, and Ireland, and the respective dominions and territories thereunto belonging; and to exercise the same according THE PARLIAMENT VOTE THAT CROMWELL SHALL BE KING. 91 to the' laws of these nations." On the 31st of March, the House proceeded to Whitehall, to present the document which they now called " Petition and Advice." It was an Instrument of eighteen articles, — touching Kingship, second House of Parliament, mode of electing members, permanent public revenue, exclusive Protest. ant religion, provision for tender consciences, — with lesser matters. The Speaker presented these articles for the Protector's accept ance, saying that they requested that all should be adopted — the rejection of one article might make all the rest impracticable. Cromwell's reply was to the effect that he asked time for con sideration : ' That seeing you have made progress in this business, and completed the work on your part, I may have some short time to ask counsel of God and of my own heart." Three days after this interview Cromwell requested that a Com. mittee might be appointed to receive his answer to the Petition and Advice. He spoke briefly, and with a tone somewhat different from his usual decision. " You do necessitate my answer to be categorical ; and you have left me without a liberty of choice save as to all" — alLof the articles. " It is a duty not to question the reason of anything you have done, * * * * But I must needs say, that that may be fit for you to offer which may not be fit for me to undertake. * * * * I must say I have been able to attain no farther than this, seeing that the way is hedged up so as it is to me, and I cannot accept the things offered unless I accept all, I have not been able to find it my duty to God and you to undertake the charge under that Title." The deputation returns to the House; reports the reluctant negative of his Highness — perhaps not exactly in the words of Casca, " There was a crown offered him, and being offered him, he put it by with the back of his hand, thus."* The House will prepare reasons for adhering to its Petition and Advice, and will go again to Whitehall. On the 8th of April they declare, in a body, to his Highness, that they do so adhere as "the Great Council and Representative of the three nations," and again de sire his assent thereto. He still hesitates. " I had, and I have, my hesitations as to that individual thing. If I undertake anything not in faith, I shall serve you in my own unbelief ; and I shall then be the most unprofitable servant that the People or Nation ever had." He wishes for more particular information upon certain points. Casca again comes in to interpret this " coy, reluctant, amorous delay : ' — " He put it by again ; but, to my thinking, he' * Shakspere, "Julius Cassar," Act i. sc. 2. g2 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. was very loth to lay his fingers off it." The next day, Londoi is in a tumult upon other questions of monarchy — not the pool temporary question of protector or king, but whether the Fifth Monarchy — the Assyrian Monarchy, the Persian, the Greek, and the Roman, being all four extinct — the greatest monarchy of all — the reign of the Saints on earth for a thousand years,— be not visibly, at hand. It is to be proclaimed this day the 9th of April, on Mile-end Green, by its great herald, Thomas Venner the wine-cooper ; with its standard of the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. A troop of horse settles the Fifth Monarchy with small difficulty ; and, without bloodshed, its lieges are lodged in the Tower. This attempt to put down all carnal Sovereignties passes quietly away, without trial or punishment. The Parliament has to debate the question of real Kingship with his Highness, which it does, for many days, by the voices of a Committee of ninety-nine, talking, and listening to my Lord Protector at Whitehall. Lord Whitelocke, and Chief Justice Glynn, and Lord Commissioner Fiennes, and lord Broghill, all have their say ; and Cromwell has his comment. He still wants a little more lime to consider. He takes counsel about this business of the kingship, with Broghill, Pierpoint, Whitelocke, Wolseley, and Thurloe — as Whitelocke re cords — and "would sometimes be Very cheerful with them; and, laying aside his greatness, he would be exceedingly familiar; and by way of diversion would make verses with them, and every one must try his fancy. He commonly called for tobacco, pipes, and a candle, and would now and then take tobacco himself. Then he would fall again to his serious and great business." On the 13th of April, he speaks at much length ; but he still hesitates : " I have nothing to answer to any arguments that were used for preferring Kingship to Protectorship. . . I am ready to serve, not as a King, but as a Constable. For truly I have, as before God, often thought that I could not tell what my business was in the place I stood in, save comparing myself to a good Constable set to keep the peace of the Parish. And truly this hath been my consent and satisfaction in the troubles I have undergone that you yet have peace." The real objection which Cromwell had to a higher dig nity than that of Protector-Constable is very manifest : "If I know, as indeed I do, that very generally good men do not swallow this Title, — though really it is no part of their goodness to be unwilling to submit to what a Parliament shall settle over them, — yet I must say, it is my duty and my conscience to beg of you that there may CONFERENCES ON THE SUBJECT OF KINGSHIP. 93 be no hard- things put upon me, — things, I mean, hard to them, which they cannot swallow." Another conference in another week. The same reluctance to accept ; the same unwillingness to offend by a refusal. It is a tedious farce, say some ; — and yet a farce with something serious about it ; quite enough of pressing solicitation to make a vain ambitious man put the precious diadem in his pocket; — not enough to make Cromwell peril' many interests, in cluding his own, by a rash consent. His Highness and the Com mittee now go into discussion of the other articles of the Petition and Advice, to which the Protector has offered a paper of amend ments. Long are the discussions ; though full of real meaning amidst a maze of words. The Parliament adopts most of the Amendments ; and, at last, again attends my Lord Protector in a body, to receive his final answer upon the great question. There was no mistaking his meaning now : " I think the Act of Govern ment doth consist of very excellent parts, in all but that one thing of the Title to me. ... I am persuaded to return this answer to you, that I cannot undertake this Government with the Title of King." The other parts of the Instrument of Government were adopted, the term Protector being substituted for that of King. "The Protector," says Whitelocke, "was satisfied in his private judgment that it was fit for him to accept the Title of King, and matters were prepared in order thereunto. But afterwards, by solicitation of the Commonwealth's men, and many officers of the army, he decided to attend some better season and opportunity in the business, and refused at this time." Ludlow tells a little anec dote of this interference of "officers of the army," which may con clude this somewhat tedious relation of the discussions about Kingship, which had gone 011 from the 23rd of February to the 8th of May : — Cromwell, says Ludlow, whilst " he scrupled to take upon him the Title of King, as a thing scandalous and of great hazard " — yet " in the meantime he endeavoured by all possible means to prevail with the officers of the army to approve his de sign, and knowing that lieutenant-general Fleetwood and colonel Desborough were particularly averse to it, he invited himself to dine personally with the colonel, and carried the lieutenant-general with him, where he began to droll with them about Monarchy, and speaking slightly of it, said it was but a feather in a man's cap, and therefore wondered that men would not please the children, and per mit them to enjoy their rattle. But he received from them, as colonel Desborough since told me, such an answer as was not at all suitable 94 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. to his expectations or desires. For they assured him that there was more in this matter than he perceived ; that those who put him upon it were no enemies to Charles Stuart ; and that if he accepted of it, he would infallibly draw ruin on himself and friends. Having thus sounded their inclinations, that he might conclude in the manner he had begun, he told them they were a couple of scrupulous fellows, and so departed. The next day he sent a mes sage to the House, to require their attendance in the Painted Chamber the next morning, designing, as all men believed, there to declare his acceptation of the crown. But in the meantime meeting with colonel Desborough in the great walk of the Park, and acquainting him with his resolution, the colonel made answer, that he then gave the cause and Cromwell's family also for lost; adding, that though he was resolved never to act against him, yet he would not act for him after that time." The public mind of England is kept sufficiently alive during the early summer of 1657. First, the long deliberations about King ship, and the unexpected refusal of the Title — unexpected by most men, for the story went that the crown was made, and was ready at Whitehall for the coronation. Then came out the daring pamphlet of "Killing no Murder," recommending the duty of putting the tyrant to death, and threatening that, in imitation of Sindercomb, " there is a great roll behind, even of those that are in his own muster-rolls, and are ambitious of the name of the deliverers of their country ; and they know what the action is that will purchase it. His bed, his table, is not secure ; and he stands in need of other guards to defend him against his own." Such words made men anxious and alarmed. But the bitterest enemies of Cromwell felt tha_t his reign was not an indolent one. The news' came of a great victory by Blake over the Spanish navy at Santa Cruz — one of those daring exploits in which there is the greatest safety in what the timid call rashness. Under the fire of tremendous batteries the great admiral attacked the Spaniards in their own harbour, and burnt their entire fleet. Oliver sent Blake a jewel in the name of the Parliament and the Protector, with instructions to return home. The noble sailor, — the true successor of Elizabeth's heroes, — the honoured predecessor of a long file of England's bravest sons — died on board his ship within sight of Plymouth. Then, six thou sand English troops land in May near Boulogne, and a fleet is cruising off that coast — an army and a fleet to co-operate with the French in an attack upon the Spanish power in the Netherlands. CROMWELL INAUGURATED AS PROTECTOR. 95 Meanwhile the Session of Parliament is coming to a close : but first is to be performed a great national ceremony — the inaugura tion, under the new Instrument of Government, of him who, with out the Title of king, is to be clothed with regal honours and powers. In Westminster Hall there is a gorgeous assembly on the 26th of June. The coronation chair, with the famous stone of Scotland, is placed beneath a canopy of state. The Protector stands up under his canopy; surrounded by his Council and for eign ambassadors ; the Speaker is seated beneath him ; the mem bers of Parliament in seats built like an amphitheatre ; the Judges on his right hand; the Corporation of London on his left; the great hall crowded with spectators. The Speaker invests the Pro tector with the Robe of Purple, " emblem of Magistracy ; " pre sents him first with a Bible, the book of books, which " doth con tain both precepts and examples for good government ; " then with the Sceptre, " not unlike a staff, for you are to be a staff to the weak and poor; " lastly, with the sword, " not a military, but civil sword." Then Cromwell takes this oath : " I do in the presence and by the name of Almighty God promise and swear, that to the uttermost of my power I will uphold and maintain the true Re formed Protestant Christian Religion, in the purity thereof, as it is contained in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, to the uttermost of my power and understanding ;' and encourage the profession and professors of the same ; and that to the utmost of my power I will endeavour, as Chief Magistrate of these three nations, the maintenance and preservation of the peace and safety, and just rights and privileges, of the people thereof ; and shall in all things,according to my best knowledge and power, govern the people of these three nations according to law." A prayer was then made ; the heralds proclaimed Oliver Cromwell Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland ; and the people shouted " God save the Lord Protector." In all but the name, these three nations were now a kingdom. The second Session of Parliament is to assemble in January. It is to be of a different composition from that of the first Session. The excluded members are to be now admitted. There is to be a " Second House." England appears approaching very nearly to its old form of government — one supreme man, by whatever name called — Lords, Commons. Still there is one something wanting — that something which lord Broghill especially pointed out in the conference about Kingship : " By your Highness bearing the title 96 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of King, all those that obey and serve you are secured by a law made long before any of our differences had a being — in the nth of Henry VII. — where a full provision is made for the safety of those that shall serve whoever is king." It was this want of the ancient title in the head of the government of which the lawyers availed themselves at the Restoration of Charles 1 1., when they held that his regnal years must be computed from the death of his father, because no one had in the interval between the 30th of January, 1649, and the 29th of May, 1660, assumed the title of king. The same absence of the ancient designation of the supreme governor unquestionably influenced the aristocracy during the life of the Protector, and compelled him to form a " Second House " of a very anomalous character. He had, however, strengthened his interest with the old nobility to some extent. In November, 1657, lord Falconbridge married his daughter Mary ; and Robert Rich, grandson of the earl of Warwick, married his daughter Frances. But of the members of the old House of Lords only seven accepted the Protector's writ of summons. He filled up its number of six ty three with great civil officers, generals, and some eminent country gentlemen and citizens. Ludlow tells us of the neglect which sir Arthur Haslerig paid to the summons to be a member of the Upper House, and of the anxiety of the old Speaker, Len- thall, to be a lord. Only one of those Peers who had accepted the writ took their seats. " The earl of Warwick himself," says Lud low, " though he ventured to marry his grandson to one of Crom well's daughters, could not be persuaded to sit with colonel Hew son and colonel Pride, whereof the one had been a shoemaker, and the other a drayman : and had they driven no worse trade, I know not why any good man should refuse to act with them. Divers of the gentry did not appear; yet others, and particularly such as were related to those in power, were prevailed with to be of this assembly." The scheme of A Second House was not favourable to the disposition of the Commons to uphold the Protector's government. Forty members took their seats as quasi-lords, who would other wise most probably have been in the Commons, and have given their support to the existing authority. The members who had been excluded in the first Session were competent to sit in this second Session, if they took the oaths. They did take them ; and were ready for a vigorous opposition. On the 20th of January the Parliament met. His Highness is now in the House of Lords, A SECOND HOUSE. 97 and the Commons are duly summoned thither by Black Rod, as of old; and the protector begins his speech, as of old, with "My Lords, and Gentlemen of the House of Commons." He made a short speech. "I have some infirmities upon me. I have not liberty to speak more unto you ; but I have desired an honourable person here by me to discourse a little more particularly what may be more proper for this occasion and this meeting." Nathaniel Fiennes, one of the commissioners of the Great Seal, made a figurative speech, recommending unanimity. The Commons, upon their return, went at once upon heady debate — day by day — as to what the new House should be called. Haslerig will not be a member of " the other House." He will obey no writ of summons. He will sit as an elected Representative. Clearly the new Con stitution is going very fast to pieces. Cromwell summons the Parliament to the Banqueting House, five days after the opening of the Session. He addresses the members in a manly speech. He speaks firmly and boldly, and says some truths that are univer sal : " Misrule is better than no rule ; and an ill-government, a, bad government, is better than none .... I know you are rational, prudent men. Have you any frame or model of things that would satisfy the minds of men, if this be not the frame, which you are now called together upon, and engaged in, — I mean the two Houses of Parliament and myself ? What hinders this nation from being an Aceldama, if this dolh not ?....! never look to see the people of England come into a just Liberty, if another Civil War overtake us. I think, at least, that the thing likely to bring us into our liberty, is a consistency and agreement at this meeting I shall be ready to stand or fall with you, in this seemingly promising Union, which God hath wrought among you, which I hope neither the pride nor envy of men shall be able to make void. ... I trust, by the grace of God, as I have taken my oath to serve this Commonwealth on such an account, I shall — I must — see it done, according to the articles of government. That every just interest may be preserved ; that a godly Min istry may be upheld, and not affronted by seducing and seduced spirits ; that all men may be preserved in their just rights, whether civil or spiritual, — upon this account did I take oaths and swear to this Government." This appeal — "the words as of a strong great captain addressed in the hour of imminent shipwreck " * — was in vain. The discontented are powerful in the Commons. * Carlyle, vol. iii. p. 247. Vol. IV.— 7 gg HISTORY OF ENGLAND. No real business can proceed, whilst the question of " the other House " is daily debated. Oliver Protector will bring the matter to an end. The Commons are again summoned by the Black Rod. " What care I for the Black Rod ? " cries Haslerig. But they obey the summons. And then the Protector speaks with an an grier voice than was his wont, even in former disquietudes : "You have not only disjointed yourselves but the whole nation, which is in likelihood of running into more confusion in these fifteen or six teen days that you have sat, than it hath been from the rising of the last Session to this day — through the intention of devising a Commonwealth again — that some people might be the men that rule all. . . . It hath not only been your endeavour to pervert the army while you have been sitting, and to draw them to state the question about a Commonwealth ; but some of you have been listing of persons, by commission of Charles Stuart, to join with any insur rection that may be made. ... If this be the end of your sitting, and this be your carriage, I think it high time that an end be put to your sitting. And I do dissolve this Parliament. And let God be judge between you and me." The Parliament is gone ; but the Protector is not left to repose. There are dangers around him of no common magnitude. He meets them bravely. The Parliament is dismissed in the morning of the 14th of February. In the afternoon Oliver is writing to his captains of militia in the country, to " be most vigilant for the sup pressing of any disturbance which may arise from any party what soever." He summons his officers to Whitehall, and asks if they are willing, with him, to maintain the Instruments of Government? Most answer, they will live and die with him. A few look gloomy, and are silent. In a day or two he removes suspected officers from the army. "The cavaliers," says Mrs. Hutchinson, "had not patience to stay till things ripened of themselves ; but were every day forming designs, and plotting for the murder of Cromwell, and other insurrections ; which, being contrived in drink, and managed by false and cowardly fellows, were still revealed to Cromwell, who had most excellent intelligence of all things that passed, even in the king's closet. And by these unsuccessful plots they were the only obstructors of what they sought to advance, while to speak truth, Cromwell's personal courage and magnanimity upheld him against all enemies and malcontents."* Lambert encouraged the disaffected officers, who desired to set him up in Cromwell's place : v " Memoirs,"" vol-ii.p. 214. PROJECTED RISING OF ROYALISTS. 99 "His ambition had this difference from the Protector's; the one was gallant and great ; the other had nothing but an unworthy pride, most insolent in prosperity, and as abject and base in ad versity." * Mrs. Hutchinson says that the disaffected officers— "some of the Lambertonians "—proposed to gain admission to Cromwell with a petition, and then, whilst he was reading it, throw him out of a window at ' Whitehall into the Thames. Colonel Hutchinson became acquainted with the plot by chance ; and re vealed it to the Protector, "judging that Lambert would be the worse tyrant of tbe two." Hutchinson warned Cromwell against petitioners ; but could not be prevailed upon to give any more in formation than was necessary to prevent the design. Royalists and fanatics, republicans and levellers, were all ready to assail the man who would not suffer them " to imbrue their hand's in blood." On the 1 2th of March Cromwell received the Corporation of Lon don at Whitehall, and explained the reasons which had induced him to dissolve the Parliament, in order to avert the dangers with which the government was threatened — invasions and insurrections — the Spaniard and the exiled being in league, — Royalists and Anabaptists plotting together. The marquis of Ormond only left London on Tuesday last, he told them ; — the marquis of Ormond, who had come disguised to London on a mission from Charles Stu art. Ormond had gone away " on Tuesday last," upon a very in telligible hint. "There is an old friend of yours in town," said Cromwell to lord Broghill. " The marquis of Ormond lodges in Drury Lane, at the Pajiist surgeon's. It would be well for him if he were gone." Ormond was very soon at Bruges, and reported to Charles that Cromwell had better be left alone for the present. Nevertheless, London is ready for trying insurrection upon a lim ited scale. There was to have been a great outbreak on the 15th of May. The royalist leaders have lost heart now Ormond is gone ; but there are malcontents ready for a rising — wild apprentices and other rash persons, who propose to fire houses, and do a consid erable amount of slaughter. The Lieutenant of the Tower comes out with five pieces of artillery, and the apprentices get within their masters' houses as fast as possible. The ringleaders of this in tended insurrection are seized at "the Mermaid in Cheapside." Others are arrested in the country. A High Court of Justice, ap pointed by Act ofthe last Parliament, is summoned for trial of the conspirators. Fifteen were arraigned; amongst whom were sir * " Memoirs,'' vol. ii. p. 214. I OP HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Henry Slingsby, and Dr. Hewit, an episcopal divine. These two were condemned and executed ; although the highest interest was made to save their lives. Six of the insurrectionists were also condemned, of which number three suffered. There were no more insurrections during the life of Cromwell. That life, like a brilliant sun-set in a 'stormy sky, has its parting glories. The foreign policy of the Protectorate was triumphant. The alliance with France was not a mere pretext for combined action rendered impossible by national jealousies on our part. When the English troops landed at Boulogne, .the young king Lewis XIV. came to review them. Lockhart, Cromwell's ambas sador, said : " Sire, the Protector has enjoined both officers and soldiers to display the same zeal in the service of your majesty, as in his own." The French government construed this too literally, and thought that England was to have an equal share of danger and expense but a very disproportionate amount of advantage. The English were employed by France in securing fortresses in the interior, instead of in combined operations against Gravelines, and Mardike, and Dunkirk, on the coast, as stipulated by treaty. Cromwell was not a man to be duped. He ordered his ambassa dor to see that the treaty was carried out, or send the English troops home. Mazarin was not inclined to quarrel with the Pro tector, and so Mardike was besieged, and delivered provisionally to the English general. The next spring, amidst all his home dis tractions, Cromwell renewed the treaty of offensive alliance with France, and sent more troops. On the 25th of May Dunkirk was invested by the allied French and English army. Turenne was the commander. The town was defended by the marquis of Ley- den. Don John of Austria marched from Brussels with a Span ish force to drive back the besiegers. Cond£ was with this army, and also the dukes of York and Gloucester. The Spaniard per sisted in giving battle, against the advice of Conde. " Did you ever see a battle fought ? " said Conde to the young duke of Glou cester. He had not. " Well : you will soon see a battle lost." The English, commanded by Lockhart, fought for four hours, and carried the most difficult posts. They were often opposed to their own countrymen, headed by the duke of York. This battle on the Dunes was a complete victory. On the 25th of June, Dunkirk surrendered ; and the town was placed in the hands of the English. It was a compensation for the Joss of Calais, as the nation thought. To have a footing on foreign ground was a proud thing for Eng- CROMWELLS FAMILY AFFLICTIONS. IOI land — a mistaken pride, but not an impolitic one in those days. Dunkirk was an English garrison, till — but it is unnecessary to anticipate the coming time of national degradation. Triumphant abroad ; freed from insurgents at home ; Cromwell again looked towards a Parliament. Were the popular desires for monarchy to be gratified by a change of name ? Was the nation to accept the subtle argument of Lord Broghill, " there is at pres ent but a divorce between the pretending king and the imperial crown of these nations, and we know that persons divorced may marry again ; but if the person be married to another it cuts off all hope." Such might have been the Protector's thoughts, until something more absorbing than worldly power or dignity obtruded itself to make him as anxious and wretched as the lowliest of those he ruled. His daughter, lady Claypole, was dying. In every domestic relation, son, husband, father, we see the tenderness of this man's nature. In 1648 his eldest son was killed in battle. There is not a trace of his father's sorrow in any letter or mem orandum of the time ; till the new affliction calls up bitter remem brances out of the sacred depths. Lady Claypole died on the 6th of August, her father having been fourteen days watching by her bedside at Hampton Court, " unable to attend to any public busi ness whatever." A few days after, says Harvey, groom of his bedchamber, "he called for his Bible, and desired an honourable and godly person there, with others present, to read. unto him that passage in Philfppians fourth: 'Not that I speak in respect of want : for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know hSwtobe abased, and I know how to abound : everywhere and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.' Which read, said he, to use bis own words as near as I can remember them : ' This Scrip ture did once save my life, when my eldest son died ; which went as a dagger to my heart, indeed it did.' " A few months before, Cromwell had lost his son-in-law, Rich; and then Rich's grand father, the earl of Warwick, the Protector's one constant friend amongst the nobility, also died. Oliver's stout heart was sorely bowed down by public cares and private griefs. He roused himself, however, and was out again at his duties. George Fox tells us something about the Protector's looks, at this season, soon after the time when London was gay with ambassadors extraordinary from France ; and Mazarin's nephew was there to assure the Pro- 102 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. tector of the profound veneration his uncle had for him — " the greatest man that ever was." The day was past for pomps and flatteries. "Taking boat I went to Kingston," says Fox, " and from thence to Hampton Court, to speak with the Protector about the sufferings of Friends. I met him riding into Hampton Court Park ; and before I came to him, as he rode at the head of his Lifeguards, I saw and felt a waft of death go forth against him ; and when I came to him, he looked like a dead man. After I had laid the sufferings of Friends before him, and had warned him, ac cording as I was moved to speak to him, he bade me come to hi:; house. So I returned to Kingston ; and the next day went up to Hampton Court, to speak further with him. But when I came, Harvey, who was one that waited on him, told me the doctors were not willing that I should speak with him. So I passed away, and never saw him more." On the 24th of August, Cromwell left Hampton Court for Whitehall. Ten days of acute suffering, and then the end. On the 30th of August, a mighty storm of wind filled the land with dismay. There is deeper cause for alarm to most men, for the Protector is dying. What is to come next ? By the Instru ment of Government he is to name his successor. His eldest son, Richard, is an idle country-gentleman, harmless, but somewhat incapable. Thurloe puts the question of Succession to the dying man. There is a sealed-up paper in a certain place at Hampton Court. The paper is not to be found. On the night of the 2nd of September, the question is put again. The answer, faintly breathed out, was said to be "Richard." That night, again one of terri ble storm, was to usher in Cromwell's " Fortunate Day," the 3rd of September, the anniversary of Dunbar and Worcester. The prince and soldier passed away, in a state of insensibility, in the afternoon of that 3rd of September. The prayer which he ad dressed to Heaven a night or two befjore his death has a consistent reference to his public life ; in connexion with his religious belief: " Lord, though I am a miserable and wretched creature, I am in cov enant with Thee through grace. And I may, I will come to thee, for Thy people. Thou hast made me, though very unworthy, a mean instrument to do them some good, and Thee service ; and many of them have set too high a value upon me, though others wish and would be glad of my death. Lord, however Thou do dispose of me, continue and go on to do good for them. Give them consistency of judgment, one heart, and mutual love ; and go on to deliver them, DEATH OF CROMWELL. 103 and with the work of reformation ; and make the name of Christ glorious in the world. Teach those who look too much on Thy instruments, to depend more upon Thyself. Pardon such as de sire to trample upon the dust of a poor worm, for they are Thy people too. And pardon the folly of this short prayer : — Even for Jesus Christ's sake. And give us a good night if it be Thy pleas ure. Amen." At this time, " wherein his heart was so carried out for God and His people," says Harvey, "he seems to forget his own family and nearest relations." His last notion, — a wrong or right notion as men may differently conclude, — was that Fe had been an instrument of good to England. The night before his death he said, " I would be willing to live to be further serviceable to God and His people : but my work is done. Yet God will be with His People. T.Q4 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER V. Richard Cromwell proclaimed Protector.— General calm upon his succession to power.— Funeral of Oliver Cromwell.— A Parliament called.— Different Constitution of Parliament. — Conflicts between the Republican leaders and the majority. — Demands of the Army.— Richard Cromwell yields to their pretensions.— He is compelled by the Officers to dissolve the Parliament.— End of the Protectorate.— Assembly of the Long Parliament.— Resolutions that the Military power should be under the Civil.— Discussions as to the form of Government.— The Rota Club.— Disunion of Parties.— Royalist insurrection.— Sir George Booth defeated by Lambert.— Petitions of the Officers. — The Parliament, subjected to the Army, ceases to sit. — Committee of Safety. — Monk in Scotland. — Resolves to restore the Parliament. — Lambert sent against Monk. — The Parliament restored by the Council of Officers. — Monk marches to London. — Movements of the Royalists. — Disaffection in the City, which Monk is ordered to suppress. — His demand that a Parliament shall be called. — Popular exul tation. — Monk restores the secluded Members. — The measures of the Parliamentary majority. — Charles's Court. — The Long Parliament finally dissolved. — Monk agrees to act for Charles. — Lambert's insurrection. — Meeting of the New Parliament. — The - King's Letter. — Debates on the Bill of Indemnity. — Charles the Second proclaimed. — He lands at Dover. — His entry into London. The death of Oliver Cromwell was followed by no popular agitation — scarcely by any immediate demonstration of party dis sensions. The Council was summoned. Evidence was given of the verbal declaration of the Protector that his son Richard should be his successor. Fleetwood, the lieutenant-general of the army, was thought by some to have been nominated to the succession in the paper which could not be discovered ; but he gave his pledge to respect the appointment of Richard. On the 4th of September the new Protector was solemnly proclaimed ; and he took the oath contained in the Instrument of Government. The ready accept ance by the nation of the son of the late ruler offers a proof that, during the contests of the Protectorate, its power had been grad ually consolidating ; and that the great name of the Protector remained as a shield for the weakness of his son. Richard was weak in all the essential qualities necessary for preserving an authority as legitimate not recognised by many. Mrs. Hutchinson describes him as " a peasant in his nature, yet gentle and virtuous, but became not greatness." If, yielding to the flattering idea of hereditary succession, his father had really nominated him, that nomination must have been against his own previous convictions RICHARD CROMWELL PROCLAIMED PROTECTOR. 105 of his eldest son's unfitness for government. On the contrary, his son Henry had displayed very high qualities as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. He had shown firmness with conciliation ; he had kept the land at peace and in subjection to the laws. Yet the accession of Richard Cromwell, if it excited no confidence in the people, produced no distrust. They saw a quiet and unambitious young man quietly take his father's seat; they scarcely thought that the mild indifference of authority may be more dangerous than its severe watchfulness. Abroad, the royalists were vexed and sur prised at the calm in England. Hyde thought there would be great changes : " I cannot believe," he writes, " that all will submit to the government of this young coxcomb." Henrietta Maria, how-' ever, doubted whether any great advantages could accrue from " the death of that wretch," as she writes to Madame de Motteville. Three months after that important event, Hyde almost lost heart : " We have not yet found that advantage by Cromwell's death as we reasonably hoped ; nay, rather, we are the worse for it, and the less esteemed, people imagining by the great calm that has fol lowed that the nation is united, and that the king has very few friends.'' Foreign governments readily gave their adherence to the Commonwealth. The Court of France put on mourning to do honour to Oliver's memory. Nevertheless "the great calm " was gradually becoming disturbed. Within six weeks of his accession, a body of officers, headed by Fleetwood, presented a petition to Richard for such organic changes in the military constitution as would have placed all control of the army out of his hand. He mildly but firmly refused his assent, as contrary to the " Petition and Advice " on which the Protectorate was founded. Henry Cromwell saw the coming danger; and wrote to his brother, "I thought those whom my father had raised from nothing would not so soon have forgot him, and endeavour to destroy his family before he is in his grave." Richard was not only harassed by the ambition of the officers, but had to encounter the greatest peril of governments, financial difficulties. His father had left no wealth —contrary to the belief of most persons. He had higher thoughts than those of making his family rich. Richard was soon embar- . rassed, the more so as the pompous funeral of the late Protector absorbed all his immediate resources, and left him greatly in debt. That funeral was deferred till the 23rd of November. The prepa rations for this public solemnity were upon an extravagant scale, utterly unsuited to the simple grandeur which the Protector had 106 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. affected in his life-time. Evelyn has briefly described this cere monial: " Saw the superb funeral of the Protector. He was car ried from Somerset House on a velvet bed of state, drawn by six horses, housed with the same ; the pall held by his new Lords ; Oliver lying in effigy, in royal robes, and crowned with a crown, sceptre, and globe, like a king. The pendants and guidons were carried by the officers of the army ; the imperial banners, achieve ments, &c, by the heralds in their coats ; a rich caparisoned horse, embroidered all over with gold ; a knight of honour armed cap-a- pied ; and, after all, his guards, soldiers, and innumerable mourn- > ers." Evelyn adds, " in this equipage they proceeded to West minster • but it was the joyfuUest funeral I ever saw ; for there were none that cried but dogs, which the soldiers hooted away with a barbarous noise, drinking and taking tobacco in the streets as they went." Ludlow, speaking with similar contempt of this pageantry, says, of the lying in state, " This folly and profusion so far provoked the people, that they threw dirt in the- night on his escutcheon that was placed over the great gate of Somerset House." In the middle of November, Thurloe wrote to Henry Cromwell that when the funeral was over the Council would begin business, " if troubles do not begin before." The Council met on the 29th and resolved on calling a Parliament. It was not to be such a Parliament as Oliver had called. The old Representative system was to be restored. Small and decayed Boroughs, which had been disfranchised, were again to elect burgesses. Commercial towns, such as Manchester, which had grown into importance, were again to cease to have members. The loss of ancient privileges by petty communities had given more offence than the gain of new fran chises by large sections of the people had afforded satisfaction. The government strove as much as possible to exclude the Repub licans from Parliament ; but it was not successful to a great extent. Many in the service of the government obtained seats. The Royalists influenced many of the elections, but few declared Royalists offered themselves as candidates. The Parliament, "\which met on the 29th of January, appeared to contain more moder ate men than violent partisans. There was nothing in its com position to indicate that the Protectorate would become insecure tli rough legislative action. The Lords, or Upper House, were summoned by the Protector's writ, as the Lords of Oliver had been summoned. The members of both Houses were required to take HOSTILITY OF THE ARMY. 107 the oath to the government. Some few republicans refused, and did not take their seats. Ludlow, and probably others, evaded the oath ; and, after some dispute, were permitted to sit. The passions of various factions soon manifested themselves. A bill having been proposed "for a recognition of the Protector," no dislike was exhibited towards Richard Cromwell. On the contrary, even the strong Republicans spoke kindly of him : " If you think of a Single Person, I would have him sooner than any man alive." said Scott, — one of the most violent against the late Protector. But the Republicans came back to their old assertion of the right of Parliament alone to exercise the government, as it had been exercised before the dissolution of the Long Parliament. By that action, said Vane, they lost their possession, not their right. " The chief magistrate's place was assumed without a law." It was dan gerous to confess a title in being that was not of their own giving, maintained Vane. After long and violent debates, the Bill for the recognition of the Protector was passed. The Royalists looked on rejoicingly at these conflicts ; believing that they would end in confusion. There was still greater disagreement when the question came to be debated, whether there should be two Houses. The Commons voted that the Parliament should consist of two> Houses ; but then proceeded to discuss the bounds and powers of the other House. After weeks of debate, it was resolved, by a consider able majority, that the House would treat with the persons now sitting in the other House, as a House of Parliament ; and that such Peers as had been faithful to the Parliament might be summoned to serve as Members of that House. The Republicans and the Royalists were beaten. But, however triumphant at Westminster, as to these material points, there was a power yet unpropitiated, which Oliver could opntrol, but which was wholly unmanageable by the gentle hand of Richard. Soon after his accession he said to the officers who came to him with a petition, " It is my disadvantage that I have been so little amongst you, and am no better known to you." He now began to feel how great was this disadvantage. There were some regiments, commanded by his friends, of whose fidelity the young Protector had no doubt. The armies of Scotland and Ireland were equally faithful. But the violent sectarian soldiers disliked his moderation. He was threatened by Desborough that the army would desert him it he attempted to conciliate the Royalists. It was objected against him that he preferred others beside "the godly." The Parliament I08 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. and the Army were secret antagonists. Their mutual hostility soon became manifest. Looking merely at their legislative influ ence, it was no serious evil that the most signal strokes of the policy of the late Protector had been condemned by the few Repub lican members; that they reprobated the peace jvith the Dutch; the alliance with France ; the war with Spain. They were insen sible to the real triumphs of Oliver; they were indifferent to the high position in which he had placed his country amongst the na tions. They made no allowance for the difficulties he had expe rienced in restraining contending factions at the least expenditure of blood. They hated the participation of one Single Person in the power of a Parliament ; and that hatred made them little careful to avoid the old strifes. But there was a serious danger when the Army fell in with this humour ; and saw, with jealousy, a majority of the Parliament inclined to peace and moderation. Richard in discreetly consented to the appointment of a general Council of Officers. Five hundred assembled at Wallingford House. A vio lent test was proposed, which was indeed laid aside, but they came to resolutions which aimed at separating the command of the Army from the Civil Power. The Parliament soon saw its danger. A member, Jord Falkland, said, " You have been a long time talking of three Estates ; there is a fourth which, if not well looked-to, will turn us all out of doors." The House of Commons then voted that no general Council of Officers should be held without permis sion of the Protector and the Parliament ; and that every officer should sign an engagement that he would not disturb the free meetings or proceedings of Parliament. Richard was urged to be firm. He went amongst the officers at Wallingford House; and told them that he would see their complaints righted in Parliament, but that he dissolved their Council. The Council obstinately con tinued to sit. Those officers who were devoted to the Protectqr urged him to adopt some strong measure. Richard shrank from the responsibility : " I have never done anybody any harm," he exclaimed, "and I never will : I will not have a drop of blood spilt for the preservation of my greatness, which is a burden to me." Broghill, and Howard, and other faithful friends, saw that one course alone was possible to avert military despotism or anarchy — to restore the legitimate king. Richard himself was solicited to assist in this object ; but he refused to forsake the cause to which he was committed. It was soon manifest that the power of the Protector was coming to an end. His brother-in-law, Fleetwood, THE LONG PARLIAMENT RESTORED. 1 09 his relative, Desborough, deserted him. The few officers who were faithful were abandoned by their men. Desborough came from St. James's to Whitehall — from St. James's, where the whole army was ordered to rendezvous, to Whitehall, where Richard had been deserted by his own guards — and demanded that the Parliament should be dissolved. Richard at length yielded, making it a con dition that he should not be required to dissolve the House in per son. An ordinance was issued, which Fiennes, as Commissioner of the Great Seal, was ordered to communicate to Parliament. On the 22nd of April the Commons was summoned to the Upper House. Very few went. Those who remained behind passed va rious resolutions, violent in proportion to their impotence. In the evening a Proclamation for dissolving the Parliament was issued, and upon the doors of the House of Commons padlocks were fast ened. The Army was supreme, with no master-mind to direct its supremacy. With the fall of the Parliament fell Richard Cromwell. " His Highness," wrote Thurloe to Lockhart, " is now excluded from ¦having any share in the government, and must retire as a private gentieman." He still continued to reside at Whitehall. But all real government was at an end. The army became insubordinate. All power of directing the affairs of the nation seemed lost. In this emergency, the officers and the republican leaders of the Com mons coalesced ; and it was determined to restore the Long Par liament. After much difficulty forty-two of the old Members were gathered together ; and that anomalous authority commenced, which was destined ignominiously to expire under the name of "The Rump." Richard Cromwell soon after left Whitehall. Henry Cromwell took no part in public affairs. The wife of Cromwell — the " domestic drudge " as she was called in the lampoons of the time — had made little provision for a transition from Whitehall to a plain country-house. The whole family passed into obscurity — humbled, but not disgraced. A sufficient number of members of the Long Parliament hav ing been assembled to form a House, " We went," says Ludlow, " to take our places, Mr. Lenthall, our Speaker, leading the way ; and the officers of the Army lining the rooms for us, as we passed through the Painted Chamber, the Court of Requests, and Lobby itself; the principal officers having placed themselves nearest to the door of the Parliament House, every one seeming to'rejoice at our restitution, and promising to live and die with us." Such HO HISTORY OF ENGLAND. promises are easily made and easily broken in revolutionary peri ods. The first step of the Parliament was to appoint a Committee of Safety ; and, subsequently, a Council of State. The Council was composed of soldiers and civilians, in nearly equal proportion. They were sincere and zealous men, faithful to their great idea of a Republic, of which all the authority should abide in a Parliament. But the theory of parliamentary supremacy soon reduced itself to the more practical question — which power should be supreme, the civil or the military ? The Parliament asserted its claims with resolute independence. Fleetwood was to be appointed Commander- in-Chief; "but instead of authorising the Lieutenant-General to grant commissions to such officers as should be appointed by the Parliament, it was ordered that the said commissions should be subscribed by the Speaker, and received from his hands ; by which it was endeavoured to bring the military sword under the power of the civil authority, as it ought to be in a free nation." Ludlow, who relates this, adds : " But observing that these things were greatly disiiked by the officers, and knowing how much it imported the very being of our cause to maintain a good correspondence between the Parliament and the Army, I earnestly pressed the House not to insist upon the restrictions."* The Parliament however, was firm, and the officers submitted, though with an i!l •grace. The government was in the hands of men of decision and energy. Its foreign policy was conciliatory. It professed its de sire for peace; and though abandoning somewhat of the high tone of Cromwell, it averted some immediate dangers by its moderation. But the people of England had no confidence in the stability of the dominion of this remnant of the Parliament, which was a ne cessity during the Civil War, but was unsuited to the monarchic?.! traditions of the country, revived, to a certain extent, in the "some thing approaching to monarchy " of Oliver. The ultimate form of government was a constant matter of debate within the House. Beyond its walls every theory of the perfection of a Common wealth was anxiously discussed. Harrington, who had twelve years before been "disputing about government" with Charles I., was now disputing " daily at coffee-houses." In 1659, writes Au brey, " at the beginning of Michaelmas time, he had every night a meeting at the Turk's Head, in the New Palace Yard, where they take water — the next house to the stairs, at one Miles's — where was made purposely a large oval table, with a passage in the mid- * " Memoirs," p, 660. DIVISIONS IN THE PARLIAMENT. Ill die for Miles to deliver his coffee. About it sate his disciples and the virtuosi." The arguments in the Parliament House were, to Aubrey, " flat " by comparison with this talk of the "virtuosi;" who had a balloting-box, and balloted " how things should be car ried," — how " the third part of the House should rote out by bal- ' lot every year, so that every ninth year the House would be wholly- altered ; — no magistrate to continue above three years, and all to be chosen by ballot." Pepys went to Harrington's Club in January, 1660, "and heard very good discourse." The Parliament contin ued debating ; with real dangers all around. The greatest danger was in its own divisions. " Parties are like so many floating islands, sometimes joining and appearing like a continent ; when the next flood or ebb separates them ; so that it can hardly be known where they will be next. " * As the natural result of this disunion, a royalisljrtsurrecljon was organised. The old Cavalier party in England had been wholly inactive since the death of Oliver. The probability is, that if the hand of Richard had been sufficiently strong to have held the Army in due subordination to the civil authority, and the Parliament could thus have proceeded in its duties without molestation, the country would have gradually settled down under a government which afforded security for property, and continued stability for the various interests that had acquired a firm footing during ten years. But underthe disunited republicans who had obtained pos session of power, the restoration of Charles the Second became a fixed idea that gradually took possession of many minds besides those of the more devoted Royalists. The impatience of the king's adherents was the most likely source of injury to the king's cause. This impatience was for some time kept down by the prudence of Hyde. But a general plan of insurrection was at length com pleted in July. The Parliament obtained a knowledge of the pro ject, and took the most active measures of precaution. Charles and his brother James met at Calais, with the intention of proceeding to England. But the chief leaders of the proposed insurrection were intimidated ; and the Royalists saw that the time for united action was not yet come. Sir George Booth had, however, ap peared in arms in Cheshire, on the 1st of August. In a few days he was at the head of several thousand men, and had obtained pos session of the citadel of Chester. Large additional forces were immediately raised by the Parliament; and their command was en- * Letter of 3rd June, quoted in Guizot's " Richard Cromwell," vol. 1. p. 183. 112 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. trusted to Lambert. He left London at the head of an adequate force, and marched rapidly to Chester. The defeat of Sir George Booth and his party was complete. The Royalist cause appeared again to be hopeless. Lambert returned to London at a very slow pace. The Parliament had voted him a thousand pounds to buy a jewel ; but he came not to receive their thanks in person. He was preparing, in concert with officers in London, to dispute their au thority. A Petition had been presented to the House from the offi cers under his command. It was to repeat certain demands for appointment of General Officers, which had been proposed before the Parliament had been restored. The House now voted against the prayer of the Petition. Other meetings of officers were held, and another Petition was resolved upon. These movements were evidently preparations for a rupture between the two powers of the State. The quarrel became serious. Lambert, Desborough, and other officers were dismissed from their posts ; and Fleetwood was removed from his command of the Army. On the 13th of October! Westminster was surrounded by troops upon whose fidelity the Parliament relied^ Lambert boldly marched thither at the head of his regiment. A conflict appeared likely to take place ; but Lam bert addressed the troops, and they quickly went over to him. Lenthall, the Speaker, was stopped by the soldiers, who laughed at him when he said he was their chief general. There was a con ference between the civil and military members of the Council of State which ended in a resolution that the Parliament should cease to sit; and that the maintenance of public tranquillity should rest with the Council of Officers. The Committee of Safety appointed by the Army began to ex ercise the functions of administration on the 23rd of October. On the 30th the French ambassador writes to Mazarin, " There is as yet no government established in England, notwithstanding the at tempts which have been made for some days by the leaders of the Army, and some ministers of the Council of State, to agree to one. .... The "conjuncture seems favourable for all sorts of en terprises."* There was one, far distant from the scene of con fusion, who was watching what this conjuncture would bring forth. George Monk, " the sly fellow" as Cromwell termed him, was courted by the republican leaders, civil and military ; but he gave no signs of adhesion to any faction. His army in Scotland was entirely de voted to him. Like its commander, that army had no great sym- * Guizot. Appendix 1, vol. ii. MONK RESOLVES TO RESTORE THE PARLIAMENT. 113 pathy with the movements of the soldiers in London. The Royal ists had long been making efforts to engage- Monk in their cause. But Monk would, not stir at the invitation of any party-. Charles himself wrote to Monk, and the letter was placed in the hands of Monk's brother, a humble clergyman. He was afraid to be the bearer of it ; but he committed it to memory, and proceeded to his brother's head-quarters at Dalkeith. Booth's insurrection was known ; and Monk was about to take some decided resolve. The news of Booth's defeat by Lambert arrived, and Monk was saved from a premature declaration against the Parliament. His soldiers had thought that their general was the man to fill the void occa sioned by the death of Cromwell ; but he was too cautious to risk this perilous advancement. When he believed the opportunity had passed for taking any steps to restore the Stuarts, he sent a letter to the Speaker, Lenthall, asking to retire from public life. The* letter was suppressed by Lenthall ; and soon afterwards, the Par liament was ejected. Monk immediately took his resolution. He addressed the troops at Edinburgh ; told them that the army in England had broken up Parliament, to hinder the settlement of the nation ; that they would next attempt to impose their insolent extravagances upon the army in Scotland ; and that he was re solved to keep the military power in obedience to the civil ; they had received their pay and commission from the Parliament, and ( it was their duty to defend it. He wrote letters to declare his in tentions to Lambert and Fleetwood, and to the Speaker, Lenthall. He cashiered those officers who opposed his views, which were ex pressly limited to a resistance to military tyranny in England. To every approach of the Royalists he was inflexibly cold arid distant. In London, the determination of Monk produced the greatest alarm amongst the factions. Their views were vacillating and discordant. At one time, they thought of recalling Richard Cromwell to the Pro-' rectorship. They finally resolved to send a deputation to Monk to effect a reconciliation ; and if that failed to proceed to a trial of strength in battle. Lambert was appointed commander of the troops in the north. More soldiers were raised in London ; and a loan from the City was asked of the Common Council. It was re fused. The commissioners sent to Monk executed their commis sion, and represented to him the dangers which surrounded his course. He called a Council of his officers ; and it was agreed that three commissioners should proceed to London to negotiate with the army there. Monk had given them instructions to en- Vol. IV.— 8 114 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. deavour to gain time ; but contrary to his instructions they had, in three days, concluded a treaty with the Committee of Safety, by which the government was left in the administration of a Council of Officers, no provision was made for the recall of the Parliament, and Monk's own appointment of officers was to be revised. Great indignation was excited in Monk's army, and it was resolved that the treaty should not be ratified. Nine members of the old Coun cil of State that had been thrust from office by the army now re solved to make common cause with Monk. He had marched to Berwick, with six thousand infantry, and four regiments of cavalry. He now fixed his head-quarters at Coldstream, where he could easily cross the Tweed. He had written to the Common Council of London, to declare his intentions ; and he was proclaimed as a deliverer by some members of the old Council of State. The peo ple were universally discontented, refusing to pay taxes, and shout ing for a free Parliament. The fleet, under the command of admiral Lawson, declared that they would obey no authority but that of a Parliament. The various leaders, civil and military, were fiercely quarrelling. Some even of the republicans talked of the restoration of the king. At last it was resolved to call a new Par liament. On the 15th of December a proclamation was issued, summoning a Parliament to meet on the 24th of January. The country was under no law but that of the tyranny of detached bands of soldiers, roving about at free quarters. Mrs. Hutchinson has described a scene to which there were probably many parallels ; — outrages that went on, " till the law was again in force : " — " Six of Lambert's troopers came to gather money, laid upon the country by an assessment of Parliament, whom the colonel telling that in regard it was levied by that authority, he had paid it, but otherwise would not ; two of them, who were in the room with the colonel, the rest being on horseback in the court, gave him such insolent terms with such insufferable reproaches of the Parliament, that the colonel drew a sword which was in the room to have chastised them. While a minister that was by held the colonel's arm, his wife, not willing to have them killed in her pres ence, opened the door and let them out, who presently ran and fetched in their companions in the yard with cocked pistols. Upon the bustle, while the colonel having disengaged himself from those that held him, was run after them with the sword drawn, his brother came out of another room, upon whom, the soldiers pressing against a door that went into the great hall, the door flew open. THE PARLIAMENT RESTORED. 115 and about fifty or sixty men appeared in the hall who were there upon andther business. For Owthrope, Knolton, and Hitchin, had a contest about a cripple that was sent from one to the other ; but at last, out of some respect they had for the colonel, the chief men of the several towns were come to him, to make some accom modation, till the law should be again in force. When the colonel heard the soldiers were come, he left them shut up in his great hall ; who by accident thus appearing, put the soldiers into a dread ful fright. When the colonel saw how pale they looked, he en couraged them to take heart, and calmly admonished them of their, insolence ; and they being changed and very humble through their fear, he called for wine for them, and sent them away. To the most insolent of them he said, ' These carriages would bring back the Stuarts.' The man,_laying his hand upon his sword, said, ' Never while he wore that' Among other things, they said to the colonel, when he demanded by what authority they came, they showed their swords, and said, ' That was their authority.' " The necessity for some immediate authority beyond that of the Council of Officers at length became manifest to the Army in Lon don. It was resolved to restore the expelled Parliament. The Generals saw that their power was gone. Fleetwood sent the keys of the House of Commons to Lenthall ; and on the 26th of De cember, forty members, with the Speaker at their head, again en tered this House, the scene of so many strange transactions, whilst groups of soldiers shouted their approval, in the torch light which glared upon anxious faces of men who had more natural fears than reasonable hopes. A contest took place the instant Lenthall had taken the chair. Twenty-three of the mem ber's who had been excluded in 1648, demanded admittance, as they had previously demanded on the 7th of May. The House resolved to take the business of the absent members into con sideration on the 5th of January. They withdrew to abide their time. Lambert was at Newcastle, and Monk at Coldstream.. But Fairfax, who had been in correspondence with Monk, assembled his friends and dependents ; and some of Lambert's officers joined him with their men. He entered York and was welcomed by the Cavaliers of that city. Lambert marched to attack Fairfax, and Monk crossed the Tweed to support him. At Wooler, Monk received a cold letter from the Parliament that had re-commenced its sittings ; and he learnt that Lambert's troops had been ordered to return to their .several quarters. When he reached Newcastle it& HISTORY OF ENGLAND. he found Lambert's army disbanded. He went on to York, and saw Fairfax. But he maintained a strict reserve as to. his future plans ; and he struck an officer with his cane who said that Monk would bring in Charles Stuart. The Royalists abroad were per plexed. The Republicans in London were suspicious. Monk sent forward his chaplain, Gumble, to express his opinions to the Par liament on certain important points of administration. Gumble wrote to Monk some truths as to the character of the parliamentary leaders : " The prevailing and governing influence of the Parlia ment is reduced into the hands of a few and inconsiderable per sons, — either harebrained and hot-headed fools, or obscure and disregarded knaves." They talked of sending the prudent and trimming Whitelocke to the Tower, and voted that the enthusiastic and honest Vane should cease to be a member of the House. Their chief thought was to propitiate Monk. He had taken his determination to march to London — with what ultimate purpose beyond that of asserting the power of civil government was uncer tain. He left many of his troops in York and others he sent to Scotland. With four regiments of foot and three of horse, he went on, amidst popular acclamations. But he would enter into no promises or make any special demonstration. He was but a servant, he said, of the Parliament, and all great questions must be left to the Parliament. He was suspected by the two Commis sioners that the House had sent to him ; but his wariness eluded all their curiosity, even while he was receiving agents from the . Royalists abroad. On the 28th of January he sent from St. Albans a letter to the Speaker, pointing out the necessity that the troops in and near London should be removed — it was not for their ser vice that the soldiers who had been so lately in rebellion against the Parliament should mingle with his faithful troops. His pro posals were agreed to, "partly from some sparks of hope that Monk could not be such a devil as to betray a trust so freely re posed in him." * The Royalists, meanwhile, were far from inactive. Some who had lived quietly under the rule of Oliver, and had not stirred whilst the government which had succeeded him was confined within some limits of legal order, now moved, however cautiously, to bring about the restoration of the ancient monarchy. Such was Evelyn. On the 22nd of January he writes in his Diary, " I went this afternoon to visit colonel Morley." Morley was one of the * Ludlow, " Memoirs," p. S16. DISAFFECTION IN THE CITY. H7 Commissioners appointed by the Long Parliament to the command of the army ; and he was faithful to his trust, when Lambert, on the 13th of October, was proceeding to Westminster to dissolve the Parliament, for Morley met him, pistol in hand, and said he would shoot him if he did not go back, upon which threat Lambert went another way. Evelyn first approached Morley by sending him a tract he had written, entitled " An Apology for the Royal Party ; " and he afterwards addressed a letter to him, exhorting him, by the remembrance of their ancient friendship, to aid " in restoring us to our ancient known laws, native and most happy liberties." * Morley, in January, 1660, was Lieutenant of the Tower of London : " I went this afternoon to visit colonel Morley. After dinner, I discoursed with him; but he was very jealous, and would not believe that Monk came in to do the king any service. I told him he might do it without him, and have all the honour. He was still doubtful, and would resolve on nothing yet, so I took leave." Evelyn, four months after, writes : " O, the sottish omis sion of this gentleman ! What did I not undergo of danger in this negotiation, to have brought him over to his majesty's interest, .when it was entirely in his hands." On the 3rd of February Monk entered London. For two days the capital had been in uproar. The regiments that had been ordered to march, had refused to obey. The apprentices were parading the city in formidable bands, crying out for " a free Parliament." Pepys, the most amusing of dia rists, presents us many glimpses of events through the " blanket of the da*rk " which the graver historians pass over. On the 25th of January, a gibbet is set up in Cheapside, and " the picture of Hew son hung upon it in the middle of the street," — Hewson, the shoe maker-Lord, that Warwick would not sit with. People in the midst of their alarms, eat and drink as usual ; and Pepys' wife, on the 26th, " had got ready a very fine dinner." On the 30th he records : " This morning, before I was up, I fell a singing of my song, ' Great, good and just,' and put myself thereby in mind that this was the fatal day, now ten years since, his majesty died." Mon trose's lines were probably in the minds of other Royalists on that anniversary. On the 2nd of February he saw the Strand full of soldiers ; and " saw the foot face the horse and beat them back, and stood bawling and calling in the street for a free Parliament and money." The next morning the soldiers were all quiet. Pepys saw Monk march in : " In his passing through the town he had * Appendix to Evelyn's "Diary," No. II. ti8 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. many calls to him for a free Parliament, but little other welcome.' He was lodged in Whitehall. The troops who came to preserve order were not very orderly. On the 7th, Pepys writes, " In the palace I saw Monk's soldiers abuse Billing and all the Quakers, that were at a meeting-place there, and indeed the soldiers did use them very roughly, and were to blame." On the 9th, Monk is gone to the City. There is arbitrary work there ; but the calm progress of the law is uninterrupted, for Pepys hears " an action very finely pleaded in Westminster Hall." Monk went to the City by com. mand of the Parliament. It was believed in the House that the powerful general was wholly with them. The more obscure Repub licans were the leading spirits in the House. There was no com manding genius to call up a new and vigorous Commonwealth out of the expiring embers of " the good old cause." The destinies of the nation were in the hands "of the cold, sullen, impenetrable George Monk, who chewed his tobacco in ominous silence, open ing his heart to no man. The Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Com mon Council of London, had voted that they would pay no taxes, but such as were imposed by a free Parliament. The Council oi State sent for Monk, and proposed that the Common Council should be forbidden to sit, the gates of the City broken down, the portcullises wedged up, and the chains across the streets removed. All the material means of resistance were to be destroyed. Monk said that he would do these things if they would give the order. " He added," says Ludlow, " that the disaffection of the City was so great, that they would neveY be quiet, till some of them were hanged." This ready consent of Monk to an unpopular act of violence may be doubted. However, on the morning of the 9th, before the citizens were awake, and the great shutters of the shops had been dropped down, Monk and his men were marching to the neighbourhood of Guildhall. He explained his orders to his officers. Some remonstrated. " Will you not obey the orders of the Par liament ? " was his answer. The posts and chains were then attacked, amidst the indignation of the people. A deputation of leading citizens came to him, to complain of the force thus used by those whom they thought their friends. He told them that his orders were to take down the gates as well as the chains ; but that he would request the Parliament to suspend the further execution of their commands. The Parliament was indignant ; sent an order to Monk to execute his instructions to the letter; ordered that the Common Council should be dissolved, and a new Council elected, A FREE PARLIAMENT TO BE CALLED. 119 with such qualifications as Parliament should dictate. The next morning Monk and his soldiers went to the completion of the work prescribed to them. In the evening of the 10th he returned to Whitehall. The slow man now came to a decisive resolution. He had seen the temper of the people, and he was prepared to defy those who claimed to be his masters. He called a Council of his officers ; and they agreed upon a letter to Parliament, expressing the public grievances, and requiring them to satisfy the nation's just demands before a certain day. Early in the morning he and hiSftrmy were on their way to the City; and the troops were halted in Finsbury Fields. Monk waited on the Lord Mayor ; requested him to summon a meeting of the Common Council at four o'clock: and the civic dignitaries ,a,nd the general and his officers sate down to dinner. Two members deputed by the House arrived to confer with Monk. His letter, which was of the boldest character, had thrown the Parliament into consternation. He was urged to return to Whitehall. Monk's only reply was, " All will be well if you attend to the letter, and issue out your writs on Friday for filling up your House." Monk went to the Common Council and told them what he had done. Guildhall resounded with cries of " God bless your Excellency ! " The soldiers were feasted. The cry went forth throughout London of " Down with the Rump." Pepys has described, as none but an eye-witness could describe, the scene of that night : " In Cheapside there was a great many bonfires, and Bow bells and all the bells in all the churches as we went home were a-ringing. Hence we went homewards, it being about ten at night. But the common joy that was everywhere to be seen ! The number of bonfires, there being fourteen between St. Dunstan's and Temple Bar, and at Strand Bridge I could at one time tell thirty-one fires. In King street seven or eight; and all along burning and roasting, and drinking for rumps. There being rumps tied upon sticks and carried up and down. The- butchers at the May Pole in the strand rang a peal with their knives when they were going to sacrifice their rump. On Ludgate Hill there was one turning of the spit that had a rump tied upon it, and another basting of it. Indeed it was past imagination, both the greatness and the suddeness of it. At one end of the street you would think there was a whole lane of fire, and so hot that we were fain to keep on the further side." Charles and his Court were at Brussels when the newsj-eacbed ' them of these events in London. " They thought all their sufferings 120 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. over," says Clarendon. And yet the best informed men in London, whether republican or royalist, could not penetrate the thick veil of Monk's real intentions. Aubrey, who lived a gossiping life in places of public resort, and had access to persons of influence, says of certain friends, "they were satisfied that he [Monk] no more intended or designed the king's restoration, when he came into England, or first came to London, than his horse did." Sir Henry Vane, after the menacing letter had been written to the Parliament, said to Ludlow, that " unless he were much mistaken, Monk had yet several masks to put off." Ludlow went to see him in 'the City, and after much discourse Monk exclaimed, "Yea, we must live and die together for a Commonwealth." Whatever were his real intentions, he maintained his ascendancy by the most earnest professions of fidelity to the republican party and their opinions. Yet his actions were more than doubtful. The House had twice resolved that the secluded Members should not be admitted. Monk had determined the contrary. The infusion of so many of these who had been originally thrust out of Parliament for the moderation of their opinions, was the surest way to neutralise the power of the republican faction, who clung to authority with a tenacity that indicated their real weakness. Monk, on the 2rst of February, sent an escort of his soldiers to accompany a body of the secluded Members to the House of Commons, he having previously read them a speech, in which he formally declared for a Common wealth. When they took their seats the greatest heats were exhibited ; and some of the Republicans withdrew from the House. Seventeen of them went in a body to Monk, to demand his reasons for these proceedings. He protested his zeal to a Commonwealth Government ; " and they then pressed him more home by demand ing, if he would join with them against Charles Stuart and his party ? " He took off his glove, and putting his hand within sir Arthur Haslerig's hand, he said, " I do here protest to you, in the presence of all these gentlemen, that I will oppose to the utmost the setting-up of Charles Stuart, a Single Person or a House of Peers." Ludlow, who records this, says that Monk then expostu lated with them touching their suspicions, saying, " What is it that I have done in bringing these Members into the House ? Are' they not the same that brought the king to the block ? though others cut off his head, and that justly." The Members thus restored by Monk were chiefly of that great Presbyterian body who had been ejected by the Independents ; and who now expected that they THE COURT OF CHARLES. 121 should be strong enough, in the event of the restoration of the monarchy, to make terms for the establishment of their form of Church government. They immediately became a majority in Parliament ; appointed Monk general-in-chief ; formed a new Coun cil of State ; and superseded sheriffs, justices of the peace, and militia officers, who were supporters of republican institutions. The Covenant was again to be promulgated ; the Confession of Faith of the Assembly of Divines to be adopted ; the penal laws against Catholics, which Cromwell rarely put in force, were to be called into full vigour. The tendencies of some of the members towards monarchy were still very feebly indicated. Uncertainty everywhere prevailed, whilst the man who had the power ofthe sword was well known to have no fixed principles of politics or religion — was more greedy of wealth than excited by any daring ambition — and would only declare himself by some irrevocable action when he had made up his mind as to the probable success and permanency of King or Com monwealth. On the 2nd of March, Pepys writes : " Great is the talk of a Single Person, and that it would now be Charles, George, or Richard. For the last of which, my lord St. John is said to speak high. Great also is the dispute now in the House, in whose name the writs shall run for the next Parliament ; and it is said that Mr. Prynne, in open House, said, ' In king Charles's !' " Admiral Montague had been appointed " general at sea," the republican admiral Lawson being put aside. He was the patron of Pepys, and told him, on the 6th of March, that there were great endeav- ouns to bring in the Protector again, but that he did not think it would last long if he were brought in. Montague added, " No, nor the king neither — though he seems to think he will come in — unless he carry himself very soberly and well." How Charles carried himself was perfectly well known to his most zealous friends — even to those who themselves lived "soberly and well." When ,a proposal was made to Oliver Cromwell that Charles should marry his daughter, the Protector objected his " debauched life " as an insuperable difficulty. The Royalists, Presbyterian or Episcopalian, saw no such objection in the marriage of Charles with the State of Englarid. Very cirrious combinations of men long separated were now forming. Old faithful friends of his house were flocking to. the king at Breda. Amongst them now and then appeared some country gentleman, whose clothes were of a soberer hue and a more English cut, than those of Charles's habitual courtiers. These had discarded the love-locks of the 122 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Cavaliers, their slashed doublets and flowing mantles, for the hideous periwigs and embroidered surtouts of the Parisian fashion. The staid royalist, who for some twenty years had seen no court costume, wondered at the metamorphosis ; and might fancy that there was more sympathy between himself and the Puritan in neat and decorous habit -of plain black, — neat from the band Io the shoe-tie, — than the men in the ugliest of laced liveries, who bent double when they approached their exiled prince, and then turned to Wilmot or Buckingham to laugh at the stalest jest or the new est scandal. Very tarnished were the gold and silver embroid eries of the courtiers at Brussels, or Breda, or the Hague, in the early spring of 1660, when Englishmen from home gathered about them. " Their clothes were not worth forty shillings, the best of them," says Pepys. London soon sent money to the exiles, and Paris was ready to provide fineries of which the Louvre might have been proud. For there was a growing confidence that the Commonwealth was fast coming to an end. Men, by a sort of in stinctive feeling, were setting up the King's arms ; and drinking the King's health, though Monk and his bands were still domina ting in the City and at Whitehall. The Long Parliament was to terminate its sittings on the 16th of March. On the 13th, that once formidable republican assembly voted that the oath of a Member of Parliament — to be "true and faithful to the Common wealth of England, as the same is now established, without a King or House of Lords," — should be abolished. On the 15th of March the popular sentiment was manifested at the Royal Ex change. A statute of Charles I. had been removed after the tragedy of the 30th January ; and in the niche where it stood was written, " Exit tyrannus, regum ultimus, anno libertatis Angliae restitutas primo, annoque Domini 1648." For twelve years few had ventured to affirm that " tyrant and the last of kings " were words of offence ; or had asserted that the year 1648 was not the first year of the restored liberty of England. On the evening of the 15th of March, a ladder was placed against this niche ; soldiers stood around ; a house painter mountedjhe ladder, painted out the inscription, and waving his cap, shouted " God bless King Charles the Second ! " Again bonfires blazed in the streets. On the 16th of March, the Parliament met to vote their own dissolution, and England hoped that a long term of rest and security had been earned by the sufferings and changes of twenty years. Some few uplifted their voices against the inevitable event ; and still clung MONK AGREES TO ACT FOR CHARLES. 123 to their faith in a Commonwealth ; to their assured belief that liberty and peace would be best maintained by the absolute au thority of a " Grand or General Council of the Nation." This was Vane's opinion, having no misgivings for his past actions and no dread of his future lot, even though it were the hardest : " He had all possible satisfaction of mind as to those actions God had enabled him to do for the Commonwealth, and hoped the same God would fortify him in his sufferings, how sharp soever, to bear a faithful and constant testimony thereto."* This was also his friend Milton's opinion : •' What I have spoken is the language of that which is not called amiss, the good old cause : if it seem strange to any, it will not seem more strange, I hope, than con vincing to backsliders : thus much I should, perhaps, have said, though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones, and had none to cry to but with the prophet, ' O earth, earth, earth ! ' to tell the very soil itself what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to. Nay, though what I have spoke should happen (which Thou suffer not who didst create mankind free ! nor Thou next who didst redeem us from being servants of men !) to be the last words of our expiring liberty." f The clouded determinations of Monk were very soon becoming more transparent. He had secretly received his cousin, sir John Grenville, who had long'sought an interview in vain to deliver a letter from the king. He would write no letter in answer; but he entrusted Grenville to promise to Charles that he would be his devoted servant. Monk made no conditions, but he tendered some advice — that there should be a general amnesty, with only four exceptions ; that the possessors of confiscated property should not be disturbed ; that there should be liberty of con science. Grenville repaired to the king at Brussels, where they met in secret. A more formal body of envoys from England now presented themselves to the king — a deputation of Presbyterians, who came to offer the same terms which had been proposed to his father in the Isle of Wight. The Parliament. was to have the con trol of the army ; the Civil War was to be declared lawful ; new patents of nobility were to be annulled. Charles laughed in his sleeve. " Little do they think," he said, "that general Monk and I are upon such good terms." The Presbyterians believed that they alone had any chance of success. " Leave the game in our hands," they said to the Cavaliers. They probably thought cor- * Ludiow, p. S28. t " Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth." 124 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. rectly that Charles was indifferent as to the form of worship under which England should be when he came to be king. But they knew that Hyde was devoted to the restoration of the Anglican Church, as a necfssary consequence of the restoration of the monarchy. They wished that Hyde should be expelled from power or influence, and used the strongest arguments to induce the belief that the Restoration could not be accomplished whilst he was a royal counsellor. In spite of their conviction of Monk's adhesion to their cause, the few to whom Charles had entrusted the secret of his correspondence with him, still sometimes doubted. The French ambassador tried to obtain Monk's confidence. He would give no opinion as to the future Government of England. That must be settled by the next Parliament. Monk's real opin ions were the less necessary to be disclosed ; for all England was becoming impatient for the Restoration. Old servants of the Commonwealth — Broghill, and Thurloe, and Lenthall — offered to Charles their submission and their advice. The king, from mixed motives of indolence and prudence, suffered matters to proceed without committing himself to any party, or making any engage ments for his future conduct. He yielded to Monk's advice in one particular. He left the Spanish Netherlands, and established himself at Breda. In the midst of the apparent certainty of the Restoration being at hand, a new cause of alarm suddenly arose. Lambert had been committed to the Tower, when Monk's interest became predom inant. He escaped on the 9th of April, and was speedily at ihe head of some soldiers, who had revolted ; and, marching through the midland counties, he called upon all to join him who would preserve the Commonwealt'.i. Monk sent Ingoldsby to encounter Lambert ; and declared to Grenville that, if Lambert met with any success, he would no longer . have any reservation, but act in the king's name and under his commission, to summon the Royalists arms. On the 22nd of April, Lambert and his men were met at Daventry by Ingoldsby's troops. A parley was proposed ; but Ingoldsby refused any accommodation. The two armies had advanced close to each other, and the conflict seemed imminent, when Lambert's cavalry threw away their pistols ; and their leader was quickly a prisoner. The last battle of the Commonwealth had now to be fought at the hustings. The elections took place. A few of the old republicans were returned. Some members were elected who believed that the restoration of the monarchy could LAMBERT'S INSURRECTION. 125 be effected, without losing any of the liberties which had been won since the days of Laud and Strafford. The greater number were men who were either led away by a fever of loyalty, or were indifferent to any re-action which would end the struggles and uncertainties of twenty years. It was impossible that a king thus restored amidst a conflict of passions and prejudices — of old hatreds and new ambitions — should be forward to make any pro fessions of public duty, or cherish any deep affection for the people he was to govern. It was fortunate that Charles was only a heartless voluptuary, and was too selfish in his craving for ease and pleasure, to add the personal energy of the tyrant to the almost inevitable tyranny of those who believed that the king and the people could return to the same condition in which they were before Hampden refused to pay ship-money. The king's position with regard to the Church was, in a similar degree, under the con trol of the same spirit of indifference. Secretly a Papist, openly a scoffer, Episcopalian,' Presbyterian, or Independent might harass each other, so that Charles was quiet. He fancied himself most safe with those who professed to believe that his authority was divine ; and that " Render unto Caesar " meant, if rightly inter preted, Let Caesar's will be the one law. Five hundred and fifty-six members had been elected to the House of Commons, the greater number of whom took their seats on the 26th of April. Ten Peers only met in the House of Lords on that day. Presbyterians and Cavaliers looked suspiciously at each other ; but the Presbyterians, more accustomed to act in union, manoeuvred that one of their party should be elected Speaker. The first business of both Houses was to return thanks to Monk for his services, and the Lords voted that a statue should be erected in his honour. Colonel Ingoldsbyalso received the thanks ofthe Commons forhis prompt action against Lambert. The House was not yet in the humour to forget the sound advice of Monk to the Lords when he returned them his thanks — " to look forward and not backward in transacting affairs." The Cavaliers soon made the House and the nation understand that the day of a triumphant re-action was fast approaching. Their spirit spread amongst the moderate and independent : "Everyone hoped in this change to change their condition, and disowned all things they had before advised. Every ballad singer sang up and down the streets ribald rhymes, made in reproach of the late Commonwealth." * The day * Mrs. Hutchinson's " Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 261. 126 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. after Parliament met, sir John Grenville went to the sitting of the Council of State, and asked to speak with the Lord General. To his hands he delivered a packet sealed with the royal arms. Monk affected surprise and alarm, and it was decided that Grenville should be called in. He said that the packet had been entrusted to him by the king, his master, at Breda. The Council resolved that the letters which Grenville brought should be delivered to the Parliament. On the first of May, Grenville appeared at the door of the Lower House, and being called to the bar presented a letter addressed " To our trusty and well beloved the Speaker of the House of Commons." He then west through the same formality at the House of Lords. With each letter was enclosed a document ad- , dressed to the whole nation — the Declaration from Breda.* Gren ville then proceeded to the City, and presented a letter from the king addressed to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Coun cil, which also contained the Declaration. In all these papers, the composition of Hyde, there was little to alarm, and much to pro pitiate, the prudent and peaceful. The Commons were assured " upon our royal word, — that none of our predecessors have had a greater esteem for Parliaments than we have ; " — Parliaments were " so vital a part of the constitution of the kingdom, and so neces sary for the government of it, that, we well know, neither prince nor people can be, in any tolerable degree, happy without them." The Declaration professed the king's desire " that all our subjects may enjoy what by law is theirs, by a full and entire administration of justice throughout the land." It declared "a free and general Pardon to all our subjects," — excepting onlv such persons " as shall hereafter be excepted by Act of Parliament." All are invited to a perfect union amongst themselves. Deploring the existence of religious animosities, "we do declare a liberty to tender con sciences ; and that no man shall be disquieted, or called in ques tion, for differences of opinion in matters of religion, which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom." All matters relating to the possession of estates " shall be determined in Parliament." Both Houses immediately applied themselves to prepare answers to the royal letters ; declared that, "according to the ancient and funda mental laws of this kingdom, the government is, and ought to be, by King, Lords, and Commons ; "—voted fifty thousand pounds to the king as a gift ; f and presented Grenville with five hundred * See Note at the end of this Chapter. t " Of a tall stature, and of sable hue, Much like the son of Kish, that lofty Jew ; DEBATES ON THE BILL OF INDEMNITY. 1 27 pounds to buy a jewel. Commissioners from both Houses were to convey their answers to the king. Grenville preceded them with the best proof of loyalty and affection — four thousand five hundred pounds in gold, and a bill of exchange for twenty-five thousand pounds. Pepys tells us that Charles, when Grenville brought him the money, was " so joyful, that he called the Princess Royal and Duke of York, to look upon it, as it lay in the portman teau before it was taken out." On the 8th of May the two Houses of Parliament proclaimed Charles the Second, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, at Westminster, at Whitehall, and in the City. Although the king had not arrived, the Restoration of the Monarchy was completed. In a delirium of loyalty the Convention Parliament never thought of making conditions for the liberties of the country. Hale, the great judge, and Prynne, the learned lawyer, had ventured to pro pose a Committee for considering what propositions should be made to Charles, before the destinies of the country were irrevo cably committed to his guidance. Monk opposed this : " I cannot answer for the peace either of the nation or of the army, if any delay is put to the sending for the king. What need is there of sending propositions to him ? Might we not as well prepare them, and offer them to him when he shall come over ? He will bring neither army nor treasure with him, either to fright or corrupt us." The House assented by acclamation. It rested the conservancy of all that the nation had won since the opening of the Long Par liament upon the flimsy foundation of the Declaration from Breda. Bills were prepared, whicli were to be presented for the acceptance of the king, "when he shall come over." Magna Charta and the Petition of Right; Privilege of Parliament; Pardon, Indemnity, and Oblivion, — were words glibly used as if they were things of course. Bills were prepared for confirming purchases of property during the times of trouble ; and for the abolition of Knight Ser vice, the feudal tenure which was most obnoxious. But tbe real temper of this Parliament was to be subjected to a severer test — ¦ the question of Amnesty had- yet to be settled. Monk had just Twelve years complete he suffered in exile, And kept his father's asses all the while. At length, by wonderful impulse of fate, The people call him home to help the State : And, what is more, they send, him money too, And clothe him all, from head to foot, anew." Andrew Marvhll. 128 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. protested that if he were to suffer any one to -be excluded from such Amnesty, he would be the arrantest rogue that ever lived. Ashley Cooper had said to Hutchinson, " If the violence of the people should bring the king upon us, let me be damned, body and soul, if ever I see a hair of any man's head touched, or a penny of any man's estate, upon this quarrel." Ingoldsby had received the thanks of the Commons for recent services. He, and others who had signed the warrant for the king's execution, were members of the Commons. On the 9th of May, the debate on the Amnesty Bill came on in both Houses. The earl of Northumberland said, that though he had no part in the death of the king, he was against questioning those concerned ; " that the example may be more useful to posterity, and profitable to future kings, by deterring them from the like exorbitances." Fairfax, in a noble spirit of generosity, exclaimed, " If any man must be excepted, I know no man that deserves it more than myself ; for I was General of the army at that time, and had power sufficient to prevent the pro ceedings against the king ; but I did not think fit to make use of it to that end." Lenthall, the son of the famous Speaker, provoked the House to tumult by boldly saying, "He that first drew his sword against the king committed as high an offence as he that cut off the king's head." The house at last voted as to the number of regicides to be excluded from the Amnesty, and decided that seven should be excepted. But it also resolved that every one should be arrested who had sat upon the king's trial, and their property seized. Other arrests took place. Some who had laboured best with Cromwell to uphold the honour of England, such as Thurloe, were impeached. The titles bestowed by the two Protectors were annulled. Upon all great questions, political or religious, which affected the future safety and liberties of these nations, postpone ment was the ruling policy of the Cavaliers. The Presbyterians, who were the first to aim at religious supremacy, began clearly to see that the day was fast approaching, when they would regret the tranquillity they had enjoyed under the toleration of that ruler whom they had now agreed to declare a traitor. The fortunes of Charles had so decidedly changed in the course of a little month, that the foreign Courts who had looked adversely or coldly upon him, now embarrassed him with their rival profes sions of friendship. He was wisely advised not to be too forward to receive such civilities from France or from Spain as might com promise him in the future policy of England. The States of THE KING EMBARKS FOR ENGLAND. 1 29 Holland invited him to take his departure from the Hague ; and he arrived there from Breda on the 16th of May. Thither came the commissioners of the Parliament ; the town-clerk of London, with aldermen and lesser dignitaries; deputations of the Presby terian clergy ; and a swarm of Englishmen of every variety of opinion, who wanted to prostrate themselves at the feet of power. Hollis, who had been one of the earliest leaders in the battle of the Long Parliament, was the orator on the part of the House of Commons. Their hearts, he said, were filled with ven eration and confidence ; their longings for their king, their desires to serve him, expressed the opinions of the whole nation — " lettings out of the soul, expressions of transported minds " Other lords had had dominion over them ; but their hearts and souls did abhor , such rulers, and ever continued faithful to their king. Anthony Ashley Cooper had civil words from Charles. Fairfax was received with kindness. The king made smooth speeches to the Presby terians ; but they obtained no satisfaction as to the future of Eng land in the great question of religious union. No one, however, pressed hardly upon him. There were no strong words spoken, as the earlier race of Puritans would have spoken. Burnet, describing the general character of Charles, says, " He was affable and easy, and loved to be made so by all about him. The great art of keep ing him long, was the being easy, and the making everything easy to him." The modern phrase is "to make things pleasant;" and both phrases mean that there should be a large ingredient of false hood in human affairs. Admiral Montague, who was to have the honour of receiving the king on board his ship, had long been in communication with him. . The ship which carried the admiral's flag had an ugly name, " The Naseby." On the 23rd, the king, with the dukes of York and Gloucester, and a large train, came on board. " After dinner," says Pepys, who was now Montague's secretary, "the king and duke altered the name of some of the ships, viz., the Naseby into Charles; the Richard, James; the Speaker, Mary; the Dunbar (which was not in company with us), the Henry." Lady Fanshawe, who was on board, is in ecstacies : " Who can express the joy and gallantry of that voyage ; to see so many great ships, the best in the world ; to hear the trumpets and all other music; to see near a hundred brave ships sail before the wind with vast cloths and streamers ; the neatness and cleanness of the ships, the gallantry of the commanders, the vast plenty of all sorts of provisions ; but, above all, the glorious majesties of the Vol. IV.— o 130 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. king and his two brothers, were so beyond man's expectation and expression." * The sky was cloudless, the sea was calm, the moon was at the full. Charles walked up and down the quarter-deck, telling all the wonders of his escape from Worcester — his green coat and his country breeches — the miller stopping his night walk — the inn-keeper bidding God bless him. " He was an everlasting talker," writes Burnet ; and his gossip amongst his new friends in this moonlight voyage gave some better promise than the cold dignity of his father, which many must have remembered. It was a merry trip, — and Pepys chuckles over " the brave discourse," and especially the stories of " Thomas Killigrew, a merry droll, but a gentleman of great esteem with the king." On the morning ofthe 25th they were close to land at Dover, and every one was preparing to go ashore. " The king and the two dukes did eat their break fast before they went, and there being set some ship's diet, they ate of nothing else but pease and pork, and boiled beef " — a politic appetite, which no doubt won the favour of Blake's old sailors. When Charles landed at Dover, Monk was at hand to kneel before him— "to receive his majesty as a malefactor would his pardon," — says a biographer of the wary general. With a feeling that belonged to another time the mayor of Dover presented the king with a Bible. " It is the thing that I love above all things in the world," said the ready actor, who knew his part without much study. The royal train went on to Canterbury. There Monk ven tured beyond his usual caution, by presenting the king a list of seventy persons that he recommended for employments — men whose names stank in the nostrils of all Cavaliers. Hyde, through Monk's confidential adviser, Morrice, made the general understand that such interference was unpleasant,"and Monk quickly apolo gised after a very awkward attempt at explanation. Hyde was at Charles's side, and prevented him being too easy. Monk received a lesson ; but he was consoled by the Order of the Garter being bestowed upon him. On the 28th of May king Charles set out from Canterbury, and slept that night at Rochester. At Blackheath the royal cavalcade had to pass the Army of the Commonwealth. Thirty thousand men were there marshalled. Many of these veterans had fought against the family and the cause which was now triumphant. The name of Charles Stuart had been with them a name of hatred and contempt. They had assisted in building up and pulling down * " Memoirs," p. 131. THE KING ENTERS LONDON. 131 governments, which had no unity but in their determination to re sist him who was now called to command them, with no sympathy for their courage, no respect for their stern enthusiasm. The great soldier and prince who had led them to so many victories had now his memory profaned, by being proclaimed a traitor by a Parliament that when he was living would have been humbled at his slightest frown. The procession passed on in safety ; for the old discipline, that no enemy was ever able to prevail against in the battle-field was still supreme in this pageant, — this last harmless exhibition of that might through which the liberties of England had been won ; through whose misdirection they were now imperilled. Charles went on in the sight of all London to Whitehall, — a wearisome procession, which lasted till nine at night, amidst streets strewed with flowers, past tapestried houses and wine-spouting fountains ; with civic authorities wearing chains of gold, and nobles covered with embroidered velvets ; trumpets braying, mobs huzza ing. In this delirium of joy there was something beyond the idle shouts of popular intoxication. It was the expression of the nation's opinion that the government/of England Kad at length a solid foundation upon which peace and security, liberty and re ligion, might be established. 132 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. NOTE. HIS MAJESTY'S DECLARATION FROM BREDA, TO ALL HIS LOVING SUBJECTS. c. R. Charles, by the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, &c. To all our loving subjects, of what degree or quality soever, greeting : If the general distraction and confusion which is spread over the whole king dom, doth not awaken all men to a desire and longing that those wounds, which have so many years together been kept bleeding, may be bound up, all we can say will be to no purpose ; however, after this long silence, we have thought it our duty to declare how much we desire to contribute thereunto ; and that as we can never give over the hope, io good time, to obtain the possession of that right whicli God and nature hath made our due ; so we do make it our daily suit to the Divine Providence, that lie will, in compassion to us and our subjecfs, after so long misery and sufferings, remit, and put us into a quiet and peaceable possession df that our right, with as little blood and damage to our people as is possible ; nor do we desire more to enjoy what is ours than that all our subjects may enjoy what by law is theirs, by a full and entire administration of justice throughout the land, and by extending our mercy where it is wanted and deserved. And to the end that the fear of punishment may not engage any, conscious to themselves of what is past, to a perseverance in guilt for the future, by opposing the quiet and happiness of their country, in tbe Restoration both of king, peers, and people, to their just, ancient, and fundamen tal rights, we do, by these presents, declare, That we do grant a free and general Pardon, which we are ready, upon demand, to pass under our Great Seal of England, to all our subjects, of what degree or quality soever, who, within forty days after the publishing hereof, shall lay hold upon this our grace and favour, and shall by any public act, declare their doing so, and that they return to the loyalty and obedience of good subjects ; except ing only such persons as shall hereafter -be excepted by parliament, those only to be ex cepted. Let all our subjects, how faulty soever, rely upon the word of a king, solemnly given by this present Declaration, That no crime whatsoever, committed against us or our royal father before the publication of this, shall ever rise in jud. ment, or be brought in question, against any of them, to the least endamagement of them, either in their lives, liberties, or estates, or (as far forth as lies in our power) so much as to the prejudice of their reputations, by any reproach or term of distinction from the rest of our best subjects ; we desiring and ordaining, that henceforth all notes of discord, separation, and difference of parties be utterly abolished among all our subjects, whom we invite and conjure to a perfert union among themselves under our protection, for the Resettlement of our jnst Rights and theirs, in a Free Parliament, by which, upon the word of a king, we will be advised. And because the passion and un charitableness of the times have produced sev eral opinions in Religion, by which men are engaged in parties and animosities against each other, (which, when they shall hereafter unite in a freedom of conversation, will be composed, or better understood) we do declare a Liberty to tender Consciences, and that no man shall be disquieted, or called in question, for differences of opinion in matters of Religion, which do not disturb the peace of the Kingdom ; and that we shall be ready to HIS MAJESTY S DECLARATION. 133 consent to such an act of parliament as, upon mature deliberation, shall be offered to us, for the full granting - that indulgence. — And because, in the continued distractions of so many years, and so many and great revolutions, many grants and purchases of estates have been made to, and by, many officers, soldiers, and others, who are now possessed of the same, and who may be liable to actions at law upon several titles, we are likewise wil ling that all such differences, and all things relating to such grants, sales, and purchases, shall be determined in parliament ; which can best provide for the just satisfaction of all men who are concerned. — And we do further declare, That we will be ready to consent to any act or acts of parliament to the purposes aforesaid, and for the full satisfaction of all arrears due to the officers and soldiers of the army under the command of general Monk, and that they shall be received into our service upon as good pay and conditions as they now enjoy. Given under Our Sign Manual and Privy-Signet, at our Court at Bredaj this 14th day of April, 1660, in the 12th year of our reign. 134 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER VI. Statutes again present materials for history. — Long Parliament declared to be dissolved. — Tonnage and Poundage. — Excise. — Knight service and Purveyance abolished. — The Army disbanded. — Church Livings. — Church Lands and Crown lands. — Act of Indemnity. — Exceptions of the regicides, and of others. — Executions. — Insults to the dead. — Episcopacy. — King's Declaration. — Convention Parliament dissolved. — Ana baptist Insurrection. — Conferences at the Savoy. — New Parliament. — Marriage of the Duke of York. — Prerogatives of the Crown. — Corporation Act. — Act of Uni formity. We can once more open the ponderous " Statutes of the Realm,"" and therein find the most important materials for the his tory of the State and the history of the People. The last Statute of Charles I. bears the date of 1640. The first Statute of Charles II. bears the date of 1660. During these twenty years of Civil War, and of the Commonwealth, there were Ordinances and Acts of Par liament which had the force of Laws — many directed to temporary objects, but many, also, of permanent utility. Some of the Statutes of the Restored Monarchy were founded upon these, — often with out the slightest reference to them. But occasionally, when a wise law of the Long Parliament or of the Protectorate had become an established principle, it was recognised in a new Statute, in which it was called " a pretended Act." The royalist theory of the Constitution was, that there was no vitality in any legislative body not called into being by the Crown — that all laws were a dead letter that had not received the assent of the Crown. The royalists maintained that from the 30th of January, 1649, Charles the Sec ond had been king de facto as well as king de jure ; that although kept out of the exercise of his authority by traitors and rebels, he had been for twelve years the sole governor of England ; that 1660 was the twelfth year of his reign, as the dates of Acts of Parlia ment, and of other instruments set forth.* The Parliament of the Restoration, which was begun to be holden on the 25th of April, 1660 — the Convention Parliament, as it is called — in their first * "This had not been the usage of former times.— Edward IV., Richard III., Henry VII., had dated their instruments either from their proclamation, or at least from some act of possession." — Hallam. KNIGHT-SERVICE AND PURVEYANCE ABOLISHED. 135 Statute declared the Long Parliament to be dissolved, and enacted that the Lords and Commons then sitting at Westminster were the two Houses of Parliament " notwithstanding any want of the King's Majesty's W"it or Writs of Summons." * They had recalled the legitimate heir of the Crown ; but this their first Act virtually acknowledged that they had no constitutional power to do so. The next Parliament, which was duly summoned by the King's writ, always termed this Convention Parliament " the last Assembly ; " for the second Parliament was far more servile in its royalist fer vour than the first ; and many of its members regarded Charles Stuart simply as the heir who had come to take possession of his estate of England, together with five millions of people, his lawful chattels. In a few years this so-called loyalty put on more offen sive shapes ; and the people began to see that the old battle against arbitrary power had to be renewed, with full benefit of a bitter experience. The Parliament of 1660, in the exuberance of its devotion, but not altogether unwisely, resolved to make such an ample provision for the executive power as should place it beyond the pretended necessity of raising money by. unlawful means. They settled the yearly revenue cf the Crown at an amount considerably beyond the supplies voted to Charles I., and they voted the subsidy of tonnage and poundage, for the term of the king's life.f One stipulation, of great importance to the owners qf landed property, was associated with this liberality of the Commons. When the king and the Parliament came to the fatal issue of Civil War in 1641, the feudal revenues of the Crown were necessarily set aside. There was an end to the ancient claims of the Crown upon tenures by Knight-Service, with all their oppressive conditions of fines for alienation, of forfeitures, and of wardship. There was an end, also, of the more generally obnoxious demands of purveyance. * 12 Car. II. t. i. t Ibid., *-. 4. The duties of Tonnage and poundage, or, as we now term them, Customs, as settled by the Schedule of Rates of Merchandise in this Statute, continued with little variation, through the reigns of Charles II., James II., William III., and part of the reign of Anne. Reduced to one-half, they continued till George III. had reigned twenty-seven years. This Statute of the Convention Parliament was thus the foun dation of that system of taxing at a separate rate the smallest as well as the largest article of Merchandise — a system which embarrassed all commercial operations almost up to the pres ent day. In the table of Rates of 1660. there are about fourteen hundred articles of im port upon which there is a varying duty. Looking at the value of money at that time, tbe duties were enormous, and their effect in retarding all manufacturing and commercial pro gress for half a century cannot be over-estimated. 136 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. These relics of prerogative would have revived with the re-estab lishment of the monarchy. The Parliament made a bargain to re lieve the landed proprietors ; but this bargain was completed at the expense of the Commonalty. Charles surrendered the Court of Wards, and Purveyance, and the Commons granted him and his successors the Excise of beer and other liquors,* a tax first introduced during the Civil War. It was originally a temporary tax. The two great sources of modern revenue were thus placed absolutely in the king's hands. Charles was rendered more inde pendent of Parliament for the ordinary expenditure of the Crown than his father, or grandfather, or Elizabeth, had been. No one seems to have dreaded that the money destined in great part for the proper dignity of the sovereign, and the due administration of all executive authority, was likely to be wasted in the most unblush ing profligacy. The character of the king, and the habits of his as sociates, were not unknown ; but men deceived themselves into the belief that long years of exile and poverty would have taught their lessons of prudence and moderation ; that Adversity, " stern, rugged nurse," would have inspired some thoughts of honour and justice. But with Charles " self-pleasing Folly's idle brood " had not been scared at Adversity's frown. The House had voted an especial sum, to be raised by an especial mode of taxation, for dis banding the army. In his speech at the close of the Session the king said, " I do promise you, which is the best way I can take to gratify you, I will not apply one penny of that money to my own particular occasions, what shift soever I make, till it is evident to me that the public will not stand in need of it." f He seems to think that there is something magnanimous in this declaration ; — that be might do what he liked with the sum which was considered as entrusted to him for a specific purpose, but that he would abstain from exercising his right of doing what he pleased with his own as a gracious condescension to "the public." In six years more the Parliament discovered the value of his majesty's self-denial; and in the bill for a poll-tax introduced a clause that a commission should be appointed to inspect all the accounts of the money sup plied, and the expenses incurred, during the war. Pepys records that in the lord treasurer's accounts there was a sum unaccounted for of more than two millions ; and that it was thought that ,£400,- 000 of the money voted for the war had gone to the Privy Purse. He then says that the notion of a commission to inspect the accounts * 12 Car. II. c. 24. t "Pari. Hist." vol. iv. p. 122. THE ARMY DISEANDED. I37 " makes the king and court mad; the king having given order to my lord chamberlain to send to the playhouses and brothels, to bid all the parliament-men that were there to go the parliament pres ently." * To the playhouses and brothels to search for the parlia ment-men ! ' The times were altered since they were to be sought for in the churches and conventicles. At the period of the Restoration, the Army, which had been the instrument of effecting that great change, as it had effected so many other great changes, consisted of fifteen regiments of horse, and twenty-two regiments of foot, besides garrisons. That army was supported by monthly assessments of seventy-thousand pounds. An Act was passed " for the speedy provision of money for dis banding and paying off the forces of this kingdom both by land and sea."f A contribution was to be raised from all ranks and degrees, under a commission in every county; and large sums were voted for the complete disbanding, in subsequent Acts.f The Act for the speedy disbanding of the Army and garrisons, and also for paying off twenty-five ships, § was followed by " an Act for en abling the soldiers of the Army now to be disbanded, to exercise Trades." This salutary Statute provides that the disbanded men, who would willingly employ themselves in the trades they had for merly been accustomed to, or those who are apt and fit for trades, might exercise their employments in corporate cities and towns, without being restrained by any bye-laws ; and that those who had been apprenticed to trades, but had not served the seven years required by the Statute of the 5th of Elizabeth, should be qualified to labour in their vocation as freely as if they had completed their legal term. The industry of the country absorbed this formidable Army. It was composed of a higher order of men than were usu ally found in military service ; and they became the most industri ous of citizens as they had been the best disciplined of soldiers. The revenue assigned to the crown did not contemplate the con tinuance of any standing army ; but Charles retained two regiments of horse in his pay, who were called his guards. Upon this nar row foundation was the present regular army of the United King dom established. In 1662, the king had five thousand troops in his service. A few years afterwards he began to talk of making the Commons "a courageous speech," for that he was "master of an army." || * "Diary," December 8, 1666. t 12 Car. II. c. 9. X Ibid., c. 26, and c. 21. § Ibid., c. 15. It Pepys, October 4, 1666. 138 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. The great question of the Church Establishment was not brouo-ht forward in the Convention Parliament. The Presbyterian members were too strong in that Assembly to render it safe to pro pose such a sweeping change as would again make the Anglican Church supreme in endowments and political power. Amidst all the sectarian violence of the Civil War and of the Commonwealth, the legal provision of the Clergy had never been disturbed, and the private rights of presentation to benefices had been uninterrupt edly exercised. The pulpits were, indeed, for the most part filled with ministers of Puritan principles. Presbyterian or Independent ; and the Liturgy, with the ceremonial observances connected with it, had been abolished. These ministers, although they were not encouraged to believe that the Presbyterian form, which had never been universal, would be adopted, hoped for some com promise that would ensure them the quiet possession of their liv ings, and free them from any obligations repugnant to their con sciences. " Because," said the king's Declaration from Breda, "the passion and uncharitableness of the times have produced several opinions in Religion, by which men are engaged in parties and animosities against each other (which, when they shall here after unite in freedom of conversation will be composed, or better understood), we do declare a liberty to tender consciences, and that no man shall be disquieted, or called in question, for differen ces of opinion in matters of Religion, which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom." In the Convention Parliament no attempt was made to contravene the spirit of this Declaration. The imposi tion of the Covenant upon all the beneficed Clergy had ejected large numbers of conscientious men from their livings.* Seven teen years had intervened ; and another large body of conscientious men, differing as to Church government, had succeeded to the duties and emoluments of the Episcopal Clergy. The Parliament of 1660 enacted that all the ejected ministers who survived should be restored to their benefices, but without the right of claiming any past emoluments. By the same Statute those who were in actual possession of those livings for which there was no claimant as previous possessor, were confirmed in their titles. This meas ure, apparently so just, was in reality a delusion. Clarendon, the ruling minister of the first years of the Restoration, although infin itely superior in honesty and ability to the profligate courtiers and unprincipled politicians with whom he was associated, seldom scru- # See vol. iii. p. 4SS. ACT OF INDEMNITY. 139 pled to " palter " with " the word of promise," when he had a long- cherished hope to realize, or a deliberate revenge to gratify. The settlement of the Church establishment was only one amongst the complicated questions that arose, of necessity, out of the Restoration. Many of the Crown lands and the Church lands had been sold under the authority of the Long Parliament. The title seemed so safe that in many cases they had been sold at fifteen, and even eighteen years' purchase. A Bill was brought in to determine this matter, which involved so many adverse inter ests. It was strenuously debated by the Commons, in 1660; and the only agreement that the House came to was, that the Crown lands should be left out of the proposal for sales to be confirmed or indemnity to be given. One member declared himself against the purchasers of the Crown lands by quoting a proverb that " he that eats the king's goose should be choked by its feathers." The House was disinclined to such an unconditional restoration of Church property. But the discussion was at length cut short by the dissolution of the Parliament ; and the purchasers had no pro tection against the due course of law, under which their titles were defective. Unconditional restitution was the necessary result. The Declaration of Breda had said, " because, in the continued distractions of so many years, and so many and great revolutions, many grants and purchases of estates have been made to, and by, many officers, soldiers, and others, who are now possessed of the same, and who may be liable to actions at law upon several titles, we are likewise willing that all such differences, and all things re lating to such grants, sales, and possessions, shall be determined in Parliament." By the adroit management of Clarendon, Parlia ment was relieved from the responsibility of the determination. Loud complaints, no doubt, were made by many who had been honest purchasers ; but their complaints were neutralised b)' the louder murmurings of the Cavaliers, who, although some had re turned to the possession of their estates, were deprived of any compensation for their sequestrations, and compositions for delin quency, during the authority of the Long Parliament. They were shut out from any legal process for relief by the Act of Indemnity. Bitter were their murmurings against the ingratitude of the king, from whom they expected the magician's power of annihilating all the natural and moral consequences of twenty years of vicissitude. Such are the mortifications and miseries tabe endured by all par ties when revolutions have run their course. During the conflicts 140 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of great principles men are elevated above their merely selfish in terests ; but when the sword is sheathed there arise the bitterer animosities of changed fortunes and disappointed hopes. Then come the odious thoughts of revenge for the past,— schemes of insulting triumph or dangerous machination. The calm after a great revolution is more to be dreaded than its storms. Clarendon saw this danger, though, when his own passions and prejudices were concerned he yielded to the baser influences At the ad journment of the Parliament, in September, after the Act of Obliv ion and Indemnity had been passed, he thus spoke, as Chancel lor : — " Shall we fold our arms towards one another, and contract our hearts with envy and malice to each other, by any sharp mem ory of what hath been unneighbourly or unkindly done hereto fore ? What is this but to rebel against the person of the king, against the excellent example and virtue of the king, against the known law of the land, this blessed Act of Oblivion ? My Lords and Gentlemen, the king is a suitor to you, makes it his suit very heartily, that you will join with him in restoring the whole nation to its primitive temper and integrity, to -its old good manners, its old good humour, and its old good nature ; — Good nature, a virtue so peculiar to you, so appropriated by God Almighty to this nation, that it can be translated into no other lan guage, hardly practised by any other people : And that you will, by your example, by the candour of your conversation, by your pre cepts, and by your practice, and by all your interest, teach your neighbours and your friends how to pay a full obedience to this clause of the Statute, how to learn this excellent art of forgetful- ness." "This excellent art of forgetfulness " was not easy to be learnt. Certainly the government did not encourage its acquire ment by the example of its own magnanimity ; but, eager as the Court was for the exercise of some vengeance for the past, it was but a faint expositor of the passions of many of the Lords and Commons, who cried " havoc '' with their loudest voices. Three weeks before the return of Charles II., the House of Com mons had decided that seven persons should be excepted from a proposed Amnesty ; and that all who had sate upon the king's trial should be arrested, as well as some others who had been ministers of the Protectorate.* After the Restoration it became evident that the Court was by no means satisfied with so limited an exception from a general pardon as that of seven who had been * A nte, p. 128. EXCEPTIONS OF REGICIDES AND OTHERS. 141 engaged in the transactions of twelve years of revolution. The de. bates in both Houses on the Bill of Indemnity and Oblivion are very imperfectly recorded ; but there is enough to show how the spirit of the country had been abased and demoralised — how com pletely the feeling of national pride had departed from the public men of England — how insensible the majority had become to those principles of honour, by which the evils of the Civil War had been mitigated on both sides. For three months this Bill of Indemnity was debated in both Houses. The Commons went on adding name after name to those of the seven who were originally excepted. The Lords voted that all who had signed the death-warrant of Charles I., as well as five others, should be excepted, either as regarded life or estate. They carried the principle of private revenge so far, that they declared that the surviving relations of four peers who had been executed under the Long Parliament, should nominate four to be put to death of the surviving members of the High Court of Justice by which those peers had been condemned. There was a difficulty, however, in the way of the sweeping proscription which the Lords desired, which became a touchstone of honourable feel ing in both Houses. The king, shortly after his landing, had issued a proclamation, in which he commanded those who had sat as judges of his father to render themselves up within fourteen days, "on pain of being excepted from any pardon or indemnity as to their lives or estates." The Parliament had suggested this proc lamation. Was it a trap to induce these men to surrender, or was it an indirect pledge that, so surrendering, they should partake of the benefits of a general pardon ? The honour of the king was un questionably committed to the most favourable construction of the proclamation. Some, such as Ludlow, had the prudence not to place confidence in ambiguous words ; and they fled abroad. " Other poor gentlemen were trepanned that were brought m by proclamation."* Clarendon, the chancellor, shuffled odiously about a document whose ambiguity was doubtless well studied by him. Southampton, the treasurer, with the high spirit of the old Cavaliers, maintained " that since it was not thought fit to secure the lives of those who had been ordered to surrender their persons upon the faith ofthe proclamation, they ought at least to give them the like number of days for saving themselves as were appointed by that paper for their coming in." f The Commons debated this point of the proclamation with a more moderate and honester feel- * Hutchinson, vol. ii. p. 279. Ludlow, iii. p. 43. 142 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ing than the majority of the Lords. Although one rabid member had the baseness to say " that these people's lives were but as a bucket of water in the ocean, in regard of so many more as were to receive benefit by the Act of Pardon ; " and another had the effrontery to maintain that "their coming in upon the proclamation was, that God had infatuated them to bring them to justice,—" yet the general temper of the Commons was better represented by Hale, who pleaded "for the honour of the king and the two Houses;" and by Colonel Birch,, who said "if he should give articles to a garrison, he should think himself very unworthy to break them." This matter was at last compromised between the Lords and Commons by a proviso in the Bill, that if the nineteen persons therein named should be legally attainted, then neverthe less the execution of the persons so attainted should be suspended until execution should be ordered by Act of Parliament." * The most remarkable exceptions to the Statute of Indemnity, in addi tion to all the regicides with few omissions, were Sir Henry Vane and General Lambert ; but the Houses concurred in an address to the king that if these two leading men of the revolution were tried and attainted, their lives should be spared. The king assented. I / The trials of the regicides and others in custody, who were excepted from pardon as to life and estate, took place in October. Twenty-five of those who had sat in judgment upon Charles I. were dead : nineteen had fled to foreign countries. Twenty-nine per sons were brought to trial as traitors, before a Court of thirty-four commissioners ; and they were all convicted. Of these, the nine teen who had surrendered under the proclamation were imprisoned for life. Ten were executed. These were Harrison, and five others, who had subscribed the death-warrant of Charles ; Cook, who acted as leading counsel upon the trial ; Axtell and Hacker, two officers who commanded the guard over the royal prisoner ; and the famous Hugh Peters. These men died in the belief that they unjustly suffered for the discharge of a great public duty. In their strong religious principles, which approached to the enthu siasm of martyrs, in Harrison especially, they found support under the cruelties of the old law of treason, which was executed to the minutest point of its brutality. It is not creditable to Charles that he was a spectator of these scenes. Evelyn writes, on the 17th of October, " Scott, Scroop, Cook, and Jones, suffered for reward of their iniquities at Charing Cross, in sight of the place where # 12 Car. II. c. ix. EXECUTIONS, AND INSULTS TO THE DEAD. 1 43 they put to death their natural prince, and in the presence of the king his son, whom they also sought to kill. I saw not their exe cution, but met their quarters, mangled, and cut, and reeking, as they were brought from the gallows in baskets on the hurdle." A more disgusting spectacle took place on the 30th of January, 1661, which Evelyn also records : " This day (O the stupendous and in scrutable judgments of God !) were the carcases of those arch- rebels, Cromwell, Bradshaw (the judge who condemned his Maj esty), and Ireton (son-in-law to the Usurper), dragged out of their superb tombs in Westminster among the kings, to Tyburn, and hanged on the gallows there from nine in the morning till six at night, and then buried under that fatal and ignominious monume.nt in a deep pit; thousands of people who had seen them in all their pride being spectators." On the 4th of December, the Parliament, upon the motion of colonel Titus — the colonel Titus who now claimed the honour of having written "Killing no Murder " — had voted unan imously that this revolting exhibition should take place. One Eng lishman has recorded his sentiment upon this vote as regarded Crom well — " which, methinks, do trouble me that a man of so great courage as he was should have that dishonour." * On the 12th of Sep tember, by a special order of the king to the dean of Westminster, these bodies had been taken out of their vaults, and thrown into a pit. On the same day, the body of Blake was removed from its hon oured resting-place and re-interred in St. Margaret's churchyard. To our minds there is nothing in the whole course of this evil reign so prophetic of the coming national degradation, as the indignities offered to the remains of the greatest soldier and the greatest sailor that England had produced. Cromwell and Blake by their genius and their patriotism made their country the most honoured and dreaded of the nations. They bequeathed to the heir of the ancient kings, a national dignity which was more solid than the glories of the Edwards and Henries, and as dearly prized by the people as the triumphs of Elizabeth. This miserable heir of the grand English monarchy was utterly destitute of that na tionality without which a sovereign is more degraded than the meanest of his subjects. The future pensioner of France was in capable of comprehending what England owed to the man whose corpse he hung up on the gallows at Tyburn. The restoration of surviving bishops to their sees, "with the con secration of new bishops, was a policy which the Presbyterian * Pepys' " Diary," December, 4, 1660. 144 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. party must have considered inevitable. That party had to a great extent become powerless ; and was in no condition to renew the struggles against Episcopacy which had so materially interfered with any pacific arrangement with Charles I. For twenty years there had been no display of copes and surplices in the service of cathedrals. The young had never heard organs and choral voices in parish churches. Now, the bishops assembled in Westminster Abbey " all in their habits," as Pepys records; "But, Lord! at their going out, how people did most of them look upon them as strange creatures, and few with any kind of love or respect." * The passion for the restoration of the monarchy did not extend to this necessary consequence of that restoration. The serious citi zens of London and other towns had been accustomed to the min istration of the Puritan clergy, whether Presbyterian or Indepen dent ; and they looked with apprehension and dislike to any change that would interfere with their old habits. Their spiritual welfare had not been neglected ; nor had they been committed to the guid ance of ignorant or unlearned men, looking at the majority of the Puritan ministers. The serious portion of the community were sufficiently represented in the Convention Parliament to render some caution necessary in the measures of the Court. On the 25th of October the king published a Declaration, in which he avowed his own attachment to Episcopacy, but expressed his opinion that it might be so modified as to remove all reasonable objections ; and he declared that the reading of the Liturgy, certain ceremonial observances, subscription to all the articles, and the oath of canon ical obedience, should not be pressed upon those who had consci entious scruples. Calamy, Baxter, and other Presbyterian minis1- ters, had been appointed Chaplains in ordinary to the king, in the month after his restoration. The Puritans appear to have deceived themselves into the belief that a happy concord would be estab lished ; and the Court, whether from duplicity or weakness, ap pears to have fostered the delusion. Some of the leading Puritan ministers, amongst whom were Calamy, Baxter, Ash, and Rey nolds, were introduced to the king ; and declared " their large hope of a happy union among all dissenters by his means." Baxter re cords that the king gave them a gracious answer ; professed his gladness to hear their inclinations for agreement ; suggested that both sides should abate somewhat of their pretensions ; nay, that he was resolved to see this agreement brought to pass ; — with • " Diary," October 4, 1660. CONVENTION PARLIAMENT DISSOLVED. 145 much more to the same effect; "insomuch that old Mr. Ash burst out into tears with joy, and could not forbear expressing what gladness this promise of his majesty had put into his- heart." * In less than a year the value of his majesty's promise was to be better understood, when the Act of Uniformity was passed. In two years non-conformity was made penal. We shall have briefly to notice these healing measures. Their general effect is set forth with all the bitterness of disappointed hope by the most eminent inter preter of the feelings of the Puritan divines — those who, " in times of usurpation had mercy and happy freedom," but who, " under the lawful governors which they desired, and in the days when or der is said to be restored, do some of us sit in obscurity and un profitable silence, and some lie in prisons, and all of us are accounted as the scum and sweepings and off-scourings of the earth." f The king's Declaration, and his promises to the Presbyterian ministers, were looked upon with satisfaction by honest men of both parties. There was a. possibility of such an agreement upon points of discipline as would have made the Protestant Church of England a real barrier against the revival of Popery, which was not altogether a frivolous apprehension; and, through the concord of earnest men who had long exercised an important spiritual influ ence, would have opposed a sober religious spirit equally removed from indifference or fanaticism, to the profligacy which was fast becoming fashionable. To render the king's Declaration effectual a Bill was brought into Parliament by Sir Matthew Hale. It- was opposed by the united power' of the courtiers in Parliament, and was rejected. This was the test by which the royal professions were to be tried. " Such as were nearest the king's councils well knew that nothing else was intended by the Declaration than to scatter dust in men's eyes, and to prevent the interference of Par liament." X Whilst the Convention Parliament lasted, all such awkward questions were tided over. It was dissolved on the 29th of December. Amongst the non-political Acts passed in this Parliament was the Navigation Act, which was in substance a re-enactment of the famous measure of the Long Parliament in 1651. § An Act for the establishment of a General Post Office in London was also framed upon the model of the Postal establishments of the Protectorate. * Baxter, " Life," Part II. p. 231 ; folio. t Ibid., Part I. p. 84. X Hallam, Chap. xii. § A nte, p. 20. Vol. IV.— i o 146 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. The complex arrangements which prevailed till our own time were prescribed by this Act— one rate for a single sheet, another rate for two sheets;— one rate for a distance not exceeding eighty miles, another rate for a greater distance. The rates for foreign letters were not exorbitant. No private persons were to carry let ters ; and all ship letters brought from foreign ports were to be delivered to the Postmaster General or his deputies. The Parliament had not risen longer than a week when an ex traordinary insurrection broke out in London. It was a renewal of that fanatical outbreak which Cromwell put down with a troop of horse on the 9th of April, 1657. The Fifth-Monarchy men again rose on the 6th of January, 1661, under their old leader, Thomas Venner, the wine-cooper. These men had a meeting house in the city : and some fifty or sixty of them, after an encoun ter with the feeble municipal police, marched to Caen-wood, near Highgate, and having been there concealed for two days, returned to encounter the trained bands, and even a regular body of guards, in the confidence that their cause, the establishment of the reign of Christ on earth, and the suppression of all other authority, would be miraculously upheld. The capital was in fearful alarm; the shops were shut ; the city gates barricaded. But these wild men drove all before them ; till a rally was made, and they were for the most part slaughtered, refusing quarter. Venner, and six teen of his followers who were secured, were tried and executed. This mad tumult was made the excuse for a proclamation for clos ing the conventicles of Quakers, Anabaptists, and other sectaries. The members of various sects throughout the country, who were proscribed as dangerous, were very numerous ; but the severity exercised towards them was really more favourable to their exten sion than the toleration of Cromwell. The Quakers especially held their ground against every severity — even against an Act of Parliament of 1662, by which they were to be fined for assembling for public worship, and for a third offence to be banished. The Coronation of the king took place on the 23rd of April. Every ceremony in Westminster Abbey, and Westminster Hall, was of the most gorgeous nature. In the streets there were bon fires out of number ; and " many great gallants, men and women " drinking the king's health upon their knees.* The people of Lon don had not recovered from their delirium. Throughout the land, men were equally intoxicated by the return to the ancient order * Pepys. CONFERENCES AT THE SAVOY. 1 47 of things. The May-poles had been again set up ; the Christ mas ale was again flowing in the squire's hall, the peasantry were again wrestling and cudgel-playing on the village-green ; the stocks were no longer a terror to the drunkard; the play-houses were open in London, and itinerant actors again gathered their gaping audiences in booth or barn. The old asceticism of the Puritans was bitterly remembered. Their zeal for liberty, their pure lives, their earnest religion, were regarded as disloyalty and hypocrisy. The great share which the larger number of them had taken in the restoration of the monarchy was also forgotten ; and amidst an ex aggerated contempt for their formal manners, and a real dislike of the restraint which they imposed upon audacious profligacy, the Cavaliers carried the elections for a new Parliament by immense majorities. The first Session lasted from the Sth of May to the 30th of July ; and in that short time reflecting persons began to see "how basely things had been carried in that Parliament by the young men, that did labour to oppose all things that were moved by serious men." * But "to oppose all things that were moved by serious men " was a very small part of the zeal of the Parliament of 1661. Far more eagerly than Charles himself, or his minister Clarendon, the royalist laboured as much as possible to prepare the way for the return of the glorious days of the Star-Chamber and the High Commission. The king and the chancellor carried on a little farther the artifice of a desire for agreement in ecclesiastical affairs. Before the meeting of Parliament, Conferences were held at the Savoy between the bishops and twelve of the leading Puritan divines, for the revision of the Liturgy. These discussions, which were protracted for more than three months, could only conclude in one way. The objections of those who called themselves " prim itive Episcopalians " were put with a due acknowledgment that the Book of Common Prayer is " an excellent and worthy work ;" but they desire that " such further emendations may be now made therein, as may be judged necessary for satisfying the scruples of a multitude of sober persons who cannot at all, or very hardly, com ply with the use of it as now it is." f The emendations which they desired were very numerous, both in the prayers and in the rubric. Whilst the churchmen were discussing these objections, sometimes not in the most Christian spirit, the Parliament was settling the question of conformity in a very summary manner ; and when the Liturgy, a few months after, came to be reviewed in Convocation, * Pepys, " Diary,'' August 4. t Baxter, " Life," Part II. p. 316. 148 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the points which gave offence to " tender consciences" were left untouched. The Anglican Church felt its power ; and the notion of conciliation, if ever seriously entertained, was soon supplanted by the readier and simpler princi2Dle of coercion. The altered character of the House of Commons was very soon indicated by its proceedings. The Parliament met on the 8th of May. On the 17th it was voted that every member should receive the sacrament according to the forms of the Anglican Church. It was also resolved that the Solemn League and Covenant should be burned by the hands of the common hangman. There was no hesitation now in proclaiming that the Presbyterians were a crush ed and degraded party. In the common hatred of all Puritans, the Independents were necessarily included. The one great prin ciple of the policy of Clarendon was to re-establish the Church of England in its ancient splendour ; and this desire 'would have been as commendable as it was natural, could it have been accomplished without a violation of those principles of religious freedom to which the royal word was pledged. But Clarendon, who in exile had been surrounded by suffering dignitaries of the Established Church, had contracted a violent hatred of the entire body of the Puritan Clergy ; and he constantly speaks of them in terms of contempt, which only indicate his real ignorance of the condition of the peo ple during the long period in which he was shut out from any in tercourse with the great majority of his countrymen. With him the whole body of the non-conforming ministers were "fellows." He bitterly opposed the inclination of the king to mitigate some of the evils which the temper of the Cavaliers was ready to inflict upon them. This temper is thus accounted for by our constitu tional historian : " The gentry, connected for the most part by birth or education with the episcopal clergy, could not for an instant hesitate between the ancient establishment and one composed of men whose eloquence in preaching was chiefly directed towards the common people." The gentry did " not for an instant hesitate " to deprive "the common people " of the spiritual instructors to whom they looked up with reverence; and to thrust upon them a new set of ministers who had little sympathy with their religious or political convictions. The inevitable consequence was that the indifference of " the higher classes " to all earnest principles grad ually spread through the whole community ; that the clergy were more intent upon preaching the doctrine of passive obedience so as to produce a nation of slaves and sycophants, than desirous of CHARACTER OF THE NEW PARLIAMENT. 1 49 setting forth the great truths of Christian doctrine and Christian morals, so as to separate " the common people " from the conta gion of the horrible profligacy of the Court. Lauderdale related to Burnet that the king told him to let presbytery go, " for it was not a religion for gentlemen." The religion which the king and his courtiers desired, was something that would be as kind to their merits as blind to their faults ; and their wishes were gratified to an extent which makes the most sincere friend of the Church of England look back with loathing at the servility, the intolerance, and the cowardice with which its hierarchy so long grovelled at the feet of tyranny and sensuality. But if Clarendon went beyond all the bounds of honest and wise statesmanship in his zeal to re place the Church in the position which it had occupied before the days of the Long Parliament, he manifested both wisdom and in tegrity in firmly clinging to the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion. At the opening of this Second Parliament he put the king forward to desire the confirmation of that Act, in stronger terms of entreaty than were usually placed in the mouth of the sovereign. Claren don himself says, " This Warmth of his majesty upon this subject was not then more than needful ; for the armies being now dis banded, there were great combinations entered into, not to confirm the Act of Oblivion,»which they knew without confirmation would signify nothing. Men were well enough contented that the king- should grant indemnity to all men that had rebelled against him ; that he should grant their lives and fortunes to them who' had for feited them to him : but they thought it unreasonable and unjust that the king should release those debts which were immediately due to them, and forgive those trespasses which had been com mitted to their particular damage." * One example of the extent to which the passions of the Cavaliers carried them away from the high feeling which was their general characteristic is very striking. The pen of the novelist has made us familiar with the real or fancied wrongs of the house of Stanley ; and there is an other record not quite so enduring as the laments of Scott's Char lotte de la Tremouillc : " At the earl of Derby's seat of Knowsley in Lancashire, a tablet is placed to commemorate the ingratitude of Charles II., in having refused the royal assent to a bill which had passed both Houses for restoring the son of the earl of Derby, who had lost his life in the royal cause, to his family estate. This has been so often reprinted by tourists and novelists that it passes * "Continuation of Life." 150 HISTORY OF ENGLAND, current for a great reproach on the king's memory. It was how ever, in fact, one of his most honourable actions. The truth is, that the C avalier faction carried through Parliament a Bill to make void the conveyances of some manors which lord Derby had vol untarily sold before the Restoration, in the very face of the Act of Indemnity, and against all law and justice. Clarendon, who, to gether with some very respectable peers, had protested against this measure in the Upper House, thought it his duty to recom mend the king to refuse his assent." * The firmness of the great minister of the Restoration in main taining the Act of Indemnity made him as unpopular with the ex treme Royalists, now all-powerful, as his somewhat extravagant zeal for the Church of England rendered him odious to the Puri tans, now all-humiliated. His position was one of extreme diffi culty. He was an object of dislike and ridicule to Charles and his courtiers because, from his age and his character, he looked dis approvingly upon their excesses. He had become connected in a remarkable way with the royal family, by the marriage of his daugh ter with the duke of York. Unless he conducted himself with the most extreme duplicity, the possible injurious consequences to himself of this unequal union appear to have terrified him beyond the bounds of sanity. The mother of two future reigning queens of England, had indulged the passions of the king's brother under an alleged betrothal. Six months after the king was placed on the throne, a private marriage was avowed, and, soon after, the lady gave birth to a son. Clarendon has himself recorded that he proposed to send his daughter to the Tower ; and he maintained that an Act of Parliament should be passed for cutting off her head, which he was ready himself to propose. The passion, real or feigned of the chancellor, received' on encouragement from the king ; and the licentious courtiers, after an attempt had been made to blacken the character of Miss Hyde, in the relation of circum stances which only the basest natures could have detailed, accepted the lawyer's daughter as a properly qualified duchess of York. The story is told in the " Memoirs of Grammont " with a dramatic force worthy of the imitation of "the dignity of history." Ham ilton, the author of these Memoirs, which so completely exhibit the character of the courtiers of Charles II., in their perfect un consciousness of their degradation, tells how the earl of Arran, Talbot, Jermyn, and Killigrew, at the desire of James himself, Hallam, chap. xi. PREROGATIVES OF THE CROWN. 15 1 each related " the particulars of what he knew, and more than he knew, of poor Miss Hyde." The duke then went into his brother's cabinet, and continued there a long while in secret con versation. The scandal mongers remained without, in eager ex pectation ; and when the duke came forth with marks' of agitation on his countenance, they had no doubt of the result of the confer ence. " Lord Falmouth began to be affected for her disgrace, and to relent that he had been concerned in it, when the duke of York told him and the earl of Ossory to meet him in about an hour's time at the chancellor's. They were rather surprised that he should have the cruelty himself to announce such a melancholy piece of news : they found his royal highness at the appointed hour in Miss Hyde's chamber: a few tears trickled down her cheeks, which she endeavoured to restrain. The chancellor, lean ing against the wall, appeared to them to be puffed up with some thing, which thev did not doubt was rage and despair. The duke of York said to them, with that serene and pleasant countenance with which men generally announce good news : ' As you are the two men of the court whom I most esteem, I am desirous you s'lould first have the honour of paying your compliments to the duchess of York : there she is.' " * Clarendon, really strengthened in power and influence by the high marriage of his daughter, met with little opposition in leading a willing Parliament to trample upon all dissent from the Episco pal Church ; to restore those prerogatives of the Crown which had been set aside by the Long Parliament ; and to keep alive the spirit of revenge against the republican party. The Act for the preser vation of the king and government increased the strictness of the law of treason ; and declared that no legislative power existed in the Parliament, except in conjunction with the king.f The Act for the command of the militia went rather beyond the constitutional principle of recognising the sole power of the Crown to command the forces by land or sea. It declared not only that neither House of Parliament could pretend to such power, but could not lawfully levy any war, offensive or defensive, against the king. { " These last words," says Mr. Hallam, "appeared to go to a dangerous length, and to sanction the suicidal doctrine of absolute non-re sistance." Tumultuous petitioning was provided against by limit ing the number to ten who should present a petition to the king or the Parliament ; with some stringent regulations as to the mode of * ' Memoirs of Grammont," Sir Walter Scott's Edition. t 13 Car. II. c. 1. X Ibid., 2, c 6. [S2 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. signing petitions.* The Corporation Act went much farther than justly attempting to restore the executive power to its due au thority in the state. Mingling the political and religious principles of coercion, it required that all persons elected to corporate offices should have' received the sacrament, according to the rites of the English Church, within one year before their election; and it re quired an oath from such officers that they believed it unlawful, on any pretence whatever, to take arms against the king ; and required them to abjure the traitorous position of taking arms by the king's authority against himself or his officers, f In the municipal bor oughs the supporters of the contest against Charles I. had been principally found — men equally resolved in their love of civil lib erty and their hatred of prelacy. The Corporation Act put as strong a restraint upon them as an oath could effect. The restora tion of the bishops to the House of Lords was accomplished with out any opposition by this Parliament, in which the Presbyterians had lost all influence. The crowning measure of ecclesiastical polity was the Act. of Uniformity. X By this Statute it was re quired that all the beneficed clergy, all fellows of colleges, and all schoolmasters, should declare their unfeigned assent and consent to all and everything contained in the Book of Common Prayer, as amended in Convocation and approved by the king. By another clause in this Act, episcopal ordination was required of all persons holding ecclesiastical preferments. Those of (he clergy who, pre vious to the Feast of St. Bartholomew, 1662, had not declared their acceptance of the Book of Common Prayer, in the terms of the Statute, were to be absolutely ejected from their livings. On that day more than two thousand ministers of religion went forth into the world without any provision for their future support. They had received a striking example of conscientious integrity in the refusal of the episcopal clergy to take the Covenant in 1643. § In that revolutionary crisis the ejected incumbents had not been wholly .unprovided for; one-fifth of the income of the new incum bents having been allotted to them. Such a merciful consideration for men of piety and learning — and most of the Puritan clergy were zealous in their callings and pure in their lives — was not granted by this revengeful Parliament. Measures of absolute per secution against the ejected ministers were subsequently enacted — measures which, in their application to all non-conformity, it re quired a long and arduous struggle to obliterate from the Statute- book. * 13 Car. II. u. 5. t Ibid., Session 2, c. 1. X 14 Car. II. c. 4. § See vol. iii. p. 488, SCOTLAND. 153 CHAPTER VII. Scotland. — The Scottish Parliament. — Execution of Argyle. — Episcopacy restored ill Scotland. —Temper of the English Parliament. — Trial of Vane and Lambert. — Execution of Vane. — Catherine of Braganza. — Marriage of the King. — Profligacy of the King and his Court. — Insurrection in the North. — Conventicle Act. — Repeal of the Triennial Act.— Dutch War.— The Plague.— The Five Mile Act.— The Settle ment Act. The real spirit of the Restoration is more clearly illustrated by the proceedings of the government in Scotland than by its actions at corresponding periods in England. Practically, since the vic tory of Dunbar, Scotland had ceased to be an independent king dom. For the true prosperity of both countries it was desirable that this union should have been continued. To give the Stuart a fair field for carrying matters with a high hand in his ancient king dom, it was expedient again to isolate the smaller and poorer por tion of the island from the larger and wealthier. Of course, when the survivors of the Committee of Estates, that had been nomina ted by Charles in 1651, were again called to resume the govern ment of Scotland ; when a Lord Commissioner and other high officers were appointed ; when a parliament was summoned to meet at Edinburgh, — the national pride was abundantly gratified, and Charles the Second was the best of kings. The people soon found that they had to pay a heavv price for this nationality, which was. to involve the loss of the civil and religious rights which were dear est to the nation. The Parliament which met at Edinburgh on the ist of January, 1661, has been honoured with the name of " the drunken parlia ment." Burnet says, " It was a mad roaring time, full of extrava gance ; and no wonder it was so, when the men of affairs were almost perpetually drunk." In England, the passions of the Cava liers were less fierce, and were held more in subjection by the obvious danger of provoking another Civil War. In Scotland, the dominant party had no thought beyond that of keeping its oppo nents under its feet. Argyle, as the great leader of the Cove nanters, was now to offer the satisfaction of his head for the fall of 154 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. his rival Montrose. Upon the restoration of Charles, Argyle had hastened to London to offer his homage to the king. He was ar rested ; and then sent to Scotland, to be brought to trial for his alleged offences. When questioned before the Parliament he pleaded the amnesty of 1651, and the English government deter mined to admit the plea. He was then accused of having received a grant from Cromwell ; of having aided the English invaders ; and of having sat in Richard Cromwell's parliament, and voted for a bill which abjured the rights of the Stuarts to the Crown. The fate of Argyle was sealed when a packet arrived from England, containing letters from him to Monk, inimical to the king and favourable to Cromwell. To produce such private letters against an old associate in the same cause, was as base in Monk as it was in famous in the Parliament to be moved by such treachery to Argyle's condemnation. He was sentenced to be beheaded within forty-eight hours. He accepted his fate with courage and resignation. At the same time Guthrie, a Presbyterian minister, violent and uncompro mising in his opinions, was put to death as an example to the clergy. He was personally obnoxious to Middleton, who in this, and in every other instance, went headlong to the gratification of his re venge. He procured the condemnation by the Scottish parliament of the son of the Marquis of Argyle, for writing a letter reflecting upon the acts of the government ; and he would have put this nobleman to death, under the barbarous law of " leasing making " — sowing dissensions by falsehood — had not Clarendon interfered to stop the iniquity. Amidst these excesses against individuals, the more extensive tyranny of forcing Episcopacy upon a people so devoted to Presbytery was resolutely pushed forward. James Sharpe, who had been sent to London on a mission from his Pres byterian brethren, returned Bishop of St. Andrew's and Primate of Scotland. Other prelates were appointed, of whom four were con secrated in London. In the parliament of 1662, by the first Act of the session, "the whole government and jurisdiction of the church in the several dioceses was declared to be lodged in the bishops, which they were to exercise with the advice and assistance of such of their clergy as were of known loyalty and prudence : all men that held any benefice in the church were required to own and sub mit to the government of the church, as now by law established."* The violence of the drunken Parliament was finally shown in the wanton absurdity of what was called the " Act Rescissory," by * Bumet, " Own Times," Book. TEMPER OF THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT. 155 which every law that had been passed in the Scottish parliament during twenty-eight years was wholly annulled. The legal founda tions of Presbytery were thus swept away. " The bill was put to the vote, and carried by a great majority ; and the earl of Middleton immediately passed it without staying for an instruction from the king. The excuse he made for it was, that since the king had by his letter to the Presbyterians confirmed their government as it was established by law, there was no way leftto get out of that, but the annulling all those laws." * The Parliament of England, as if to furnish a little excitement to the dull debates that had reference to non-conformity, in the beginning of 1662 turned its attention to the duty of shedding a little more blood, to expiate that of the royal martyr. The Parlia ment was hounded on to this work from the high places of the restored Church. The 15th of January was a general fast-day. " to avert God's heavy judgments on this land," the season being un usually rainy. Dr. Ryves, or Reeves, dean of Windsor, preached before the House of Commons, " showing how the neglect of ex erting justice on offenders (by which he insinuated such of the old king's murderers as were yet reprieved and in the Tower) was a main cause of God's punishing a land." f His text was from Joshua, c. vij. v. 13, "There is an accursed thing in the midst of thee, O Israel : thou canst not stand before thine enemies until ye take away the accursed thing from among you." In the week in which Evelyn coolly records this Christian exhortation to avert the judgments of God, he has looked upon " an accursed thing," against which the pulpit of Westminster has no denunciations — the passion of gaming " in a Court which ought to be an example of virtue to the rest of the kingdom." Mr. Pepys says of this roaring time, — " At Court things are in very ill condition, there being so much emulation, poverty, and the vices of drinking, swearing, and loose amours, that I know not what will be the end of it, but con fusion." Rumours of conspiracies were rife at this period ; and the virtuous Cavaliers of the Lower House thought with Dr. Ryves, that it would be a salutary measure to execute all the regicides whose fate, after conviction, had been suspended for the decision of Parliament. The Commons passed a Bill for their immediate ex ecution, in direct opposition to the feeling of the Convention Par liament that their lives should be spared. The Lords read this Bill a first time, and then let it drop. Charles, to his honour, said •Burnet, "Own Times," Book ii. t Evelyn " Diary." * Ij6 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. to Clarendon, " I am weary of hanging, except for new offences ;" and he trusted that the Bill against the regicides would not come to him; "for,'' said he, "you know that I cannot pardon them." Some of the minor offenders who had been excepted from the penalty of death, were now degraded from honours, and deprived of their estates: Lord Monson, Sir Henry Mildmay, and Robert Wallop, who were sentenced by Act of Parliament, * to be drawn upon sledges with ropes about their necks from the Tower to Tyburn, and back again, suffered this indignity. The nineteen condemned regicides were confined in various prisons, and wore out their lives in such hopeless captivity as Henry Marten endured at Chepstow. Three regicides, Okey, Corbet, and Barkstead, who had not surrendered upon the king's proclamation, were captured in Holland, in March, 1662, by the agency of Downing, who had been Cromwell's ambassador at the Hague. " The Dutch were a good while before they could be persuaded to let them go, they being taken prisoners in their land. But Sir G. Downing would not be answered so : though all the world takes notice of him for a most ungrateful villain for his pains." f They were executed on the 19th of April, and died defending the justice of their actions. The compliance of the Dutch government in the surrender of political offenders, contrasted unfavourably with the sturdy inde pendence of the little states of Vevay and Berne. Ludlow, and . others, received ample protection and liberal hospitality in Switzer land ; and the royalists thus failing to secure them, had resort to base attempts at assassination. One of these only was successful. John Lisle was shot at Lausanne, in 1664, as he was going to a church near the town-gate. For some time after the promise of the king to the Convention Parliament that Vane and Lambert, in their exception- from the Act of Indemnity, should not suffer death if found guilty of treason, they had remained prisoners in the Tower. On the 30th of Oc tober, 1661, Pepys enters in his Diary, " Sir Henry Vane, Lam bert, and others, are lately sent suddenly a\va;r from the Tower, prisoners to Scilly : but I do not think there is any plot, as is said, but only a pretence." Vane solaced his captivity by compositions which show how earnestly he sought the one true and abiding comfort in misfortune. His enthusiastic religion, his ardent as pirations for civil liberty, his unselfish life, his eminent ability, render him the most interesting of the republican party. Claren- * 13 Car. II. c. 15. t Pepys, "Diary," March 17. TRIAL OF VANE AND LAMBERT. 157 don sought his exemption from the Act of Indemnity because he was " a man of mischievous activity." On the 7th of March,. 1662, in a letter to his wife, Vane writes, " They that press so earnestly to carry on my trial do little know what presence of God may be afforded me in it, and issue out of it, to the magnifying of Christ, in my body, by life or by death. Nor can they, I am sure, imagine how much I desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ, which of all things that can befall me I account best of all." * Thus for tified against the worst, he was arraigned before the Court of the King's Bench on the 2nd of June, 1662, as " a false traitor."' The overt acts of treason alleged against Vane and Lambert were, their exercise of civil and military functions under the Common wealth. When we consider the number of men who had filled high offices during the suspension of the monarchy, and yet had been active instruments in its restoration, we marvel at the effron tery which should wrest the law to the conviction of two men who had been faithful servants of their country. The condemnation of Vane and Lambert was wholly against the spirit, if not the letter, of the statute of Henry VIIL, which declared indemnity for all persons rendering obedience to a king for the time being, although his title might be defective. By party reasoning, obedience to the Parliament, which stood in the place of the king, could not be deemed a crime against the king de jure. But the judges main tained that Charles the Second was a king de facto, and had never been out of possession. Vane, who defended himself throughout with marvellous ability, replied that if the king was never out of possession the indictment against him must fall to the ground ; for it alleged that he endeavoured to keep out the king. The courage, the proud consciousness of right, the lofty principles of Vane, were the reasons which would have induced a high-minded sovereign to adhere gladly to his promise that his life should be spared in the event of his condemnation. Charles was not a high- minded sovereign — he was selfish, corrupt,' faithless, shameless. The letter which he wrote to" Clarendon the day after Vane's trial is as characteristic of the man as any other of the acts of his un worthy life : "The relation that has been made to me of Sir Henry Vane's carriage yesterday in the hall is the occasion of this letter, which, if I am rightly informed, was so insolent as to justify all he had done, acknowledging no supreme power in England but a Parlia- * Quoted in Mr. Forster's " Life of Vant*," p. 210. V\' 158 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ment, and many things to that purpose. You have had a true ac count of all ; and if he has given new occasion to be hanged, cer tainly he is too dangerous a man to let live, if we can honestly put him out of the way. Tliink of this, and give me some account of it to-morrow, till when I have no more to say to you. — C. R. The deportment of a prisoner on his trial could not " give new occasion to be hanged," even if it had been most violent. Vane in his justification avoided every topic of offence to the king per sonally, as none of Vane's public acts had been marked by any personal hostility to him. The " if we can honestly put him out of the way," was not a scruple which Chirles would long enter tain. He was put out of the way on the 14th of June, dying with a courage which, says Pepys, "is talked on everywhere as a miracle." The life of Lambert was spared, according to that promise which the king did not scruple to violate when his victim was " too dan gerous a man to let live." Vane was the last of the sacrifices on the scaffold to the revenges of the monarchy. On the opening of the Parliament of 1 661, the king announced that he was about to marry " a daughter of Portugal." This marriage had been advised by Louis XIV., who, although he had engaged to Spain to give no support to Portugal in its struggles to maintain its independence, saw in this English alliance a mode of strengthening Portugal against the power which entered into rivalry with him. The Spanish ambassador in London opposed the match, declaring that Spain would never cease to maintain her claims against the House of Braganza. Vatteville, the ambassador from Spain, and Bastide, the ambassador from France, each pressed their opinions upon the Council of Charles. When the Portu guese alliance was settled, they entered into a personal contest, which is an amusing variety of the dull battles of protocols. They resolved to fight out, in the streets of London, the claims of the two Crowns for precedency. Charles issued a proclamation for bidding his subjects to take part in the conflict which was to take place on the expected entry of the Swedish ambassador. On the Tower Wharf was drawn up, on one side of the stairs, the carriage of the Spanish ambassador ; on the other side the carriage of the French ambassador. They were each surrounded by many liveried servants, on foot and horseback, fully armed. The Swede landed; and, occupying a royal carriage, went on his way. Then began the mighty strife of the representatives of the two greatest sovereigns in Europe, as to which should next follow. Their attendants MARRIAGE OF THE KING. *59 fought till fifty were killed or wounded ; but the Spaniard won the race, by cutting the traces of the Frenchman's carriage. Why should not the quarrels of courts always be fought out in this fashion, which might give ambassadors some real business that would allow them less leisure to embroil nations f In spite of the triumphant Vatteville, Charles married Catherine of Braganza. She was not remarkable for beauty, but she was sensible and amiable ; and the king professed himself fortunate, and avowed his resolution to seek his future happiness in conjugal affection. His first act of devotion to his queen was to present lady Castlemaine to her in the midst of the Court. It was known to all, and to the queen herself, that " the lady " was his avowed mistress. Catherine suppressed her indignation ; but the effort caused the blood to gush from her nose, and she was carried in a fit from the royal presence. The gracious king was indignant at the squeamishness of the queen ; and insisted that Castlemaine should be one of the ladies of her bed-chamber. Clarendon re monstrated with his master, and ventured to compare royal harlots with other lewd women ; but the remonstrances ended by the Chancellor undertaking to persuade the queen " to a full compliance with what the king desired." Catherine threatened to return to Portugal. Charles did more than threaten — he sent away her old servants, with the exception of a few, who were allowed to remain when the queen's spirit was humbled to ask a favour. Clarendon, in his ' Life,' tells the issue of this characteristic scoundrelism of "our most religious and gracious king '' — the title which the dis criminating bishops now gave Charles in the Liturgy : " The king pursued his point : the lady came to the court, — was lodged there, — was every day in the queen's presence, — and the king in con tinual conference with her, whilst the queen sat untaken notice of ; and if her majesty rose at the indignity and retired into her cham ber, it may be one or two attended her; but all the company remained in the. room she left, and too often said those things aloud which nobody ought to have whispered .... All these mor tifications were too heavy to be borne ; so that at last, when it was least expected or suspected, the queen on a sudden let herself fall first to conversation and then to familiarity, and, even in the same instant, to a confidence with the lady; was merry -with her in public, talked kindly of her, and in private used nobody more friendly." The Infanta of Portugal brought to Charles three hundred and 160 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. fifty thousand pounds as her dowry. The English Crown also acquired Tangier, a fort on the coast of Africa. The possession of Tangier, which the nation regarded as worthless, was to com pensate for the sale of Dunkirk, which the nation regarded as one of the chief triumphs of the foreign policy of the great Protector. Charles was more eager to put money into his purse, than to grat ify the national pride ; and Louis the Fourteenth was as desirous to obtain Dunkirk as Charles to convert the Gibraltar of that day into jewels for new mistresses. Louis made a cunning bargain. He gave four millions of livres in bills ; and then employed his own ready money to discount his own bills, at a saving of half a million. According to Louis's own account of the transaction, his rival in the treaty was the city of London, the lord mayor having been deputed to offer any sum, that Dunkirk might not be alienated. Clarendon had advised the sale, although he" had a little before, in a speech in Parliament, dwelt on the value of the place. The people, naturally enough, however unjustly, held that the Chan cellor had been bribed. The magnificent palace that he was build ing near St. James's was popularly called "Dunkirk House;'' and the national dislike of the sale of Dunkirk was one of the first symptoms that his power was on the wane. His participation in that sale subsequently formed an article of his impeachment. The popular opinion that the sale of Dunkirk was to supply new funds for the profligacy of the Court, was confirmed by the public de monstrations of that profligacy. Lord Buckhurst and Sir Charles Sedley had outraged all decency by an exhibition which Pepys recorded in cypher, but which his editor says is "too gross to print." Baxter gives us some notion of " the horrid wickedness " of these titled blackguards, " acting the part of preachers, in their shirts, in a balcony " in Covent Garden.* With such companions was Charles now generally surrounded. All thoughts of business were abhorrent to him. To lady Castlemaine 's lodgings he was followed by his " counsellors of pleasure," who laughed at the "old dotards " who presumed to talk in a serious vein. Rivals to " the lady " now sprung up, with the usual incidents of jealousies and pourings, to be averted by lavish presents to the old favourite, or heavier bribes to the new. The English Court became the ridicule of foreigneis. The Dutch caricatured the king in various of his characteristic positions. In one print he was shown with " pockets turned the wrong side outward, hanging out empty ; " in * " Life," Part iii. p. 13. INSURRECTION IN THE NORTH. l6l another, with two courtiers picking his pockets ; in a third, leading two ladies, whilst other ladies were abusing him. * The heartless swindler had appropriated great part of his queen's jointure to his rapacious mistresses. The people, who groaned under the tax of " chimney-money," and declared they would not pay it without force, were yet pleased with the gossiping familiarity of the king, as he sauntered among them, feeding his clucks in the new Canal in St. James's Park, or joining his nobles in a game at"Pell-Mell." The Chevalier de Grammont saw Cromwell, "feared at home, yet more dreaded abroad, at his highest pitch of glory." He then saw " an affectation of purity of manners instead of the luxury which the pomp of Court displays." He came to the Court of Charles IL, and "accustomed as he was to the grandeur of the Court of France, he was surprised at the politeness and splendour of the Court of England." What that " politeness and splendour " really covered is disgusting to look back upon, when we know that we are beholding the manners of our own countrymen. There were other men than the republican John Milton, who felt that they had "fallen on evil days." There were others than Puritans who list ened not to " the barbarous dissonance Of Bacchus and his revellers." But, taken as a whole, the nation was degraded. Its old spirit was gone. There was a feeble attempt at insurrection in the north in 1663. This outbreak was partly of a religious character, and partly of a political. The insurrection, which was put down by a few of the king's guards, was an excuse for persecuting some of the sur viving republicans, — amongst others, colonel Hutchinson, whose quiet and decorous life was an offence which was to be expiated by his death in the damp vaults of Sandown castle. The day. of retribution was not yet come : but the handwriting was on the wall. "We are much indebted," says Mr. Hallam, "to the memory of Barbara, duchess of Cleveland, Louisa, duchess of Portsmouth, and Mrs. Eleanor Gwyn. We owe a tribute of gratitude to the Mays, the Killigrews, the Chiffinches, and the Grammonts. They played a serviceable part in ridding the kingdom of its besotted loyalty. They saved our forefathers from the Star-chamber and the High- commission court ; they laboured in their vocation against standing armies and corruption ; they pressed forward the great ultimate * Pepys, November 28, 1663. 162 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. security of English freedom, the expulsion of the House of Stuart." The abortive insurrection of the autumn of 1663 was made the pretext for a new measure against non conformists in the session of 1664; and for an important change in the constitution of Parlia ment. The king, in his speech on the opening of this session, said, " You may judge by the late treason in the north, for which so many men have been executed, how active the spirits of many of our old enemies still are. . . . It is evident they have correspondence with desperate persons in most counties, and a standing council in this town. . . Some would insist upon the authority of the Long Parliament, of which, they say, they have members enough, willing to meet ; others have fancied to themselves, by some com putation of their own upon some clause in the Triennial BilL that this, present parliament was at an end some months since." The alleged connection of some Fifth Monarchy men with this trifling insurrection of Farnley Wood, near Leeds, — of which Bennet, one of Charles's ministers, said that the country was too ready to prevent the disorders — was made the pretext for " An Act to pre vent and suppress seditious Conventicles." * The preamble states that the Act is "for providing further and more speedy remedies against the growing and dangerous practices of seditious sectaries, and other disloyal persons, who under pretence of ten der consciencies do at their meetings contrive insurrections, as late experience hath showed." But, insolently assuming that all religious assemblies of non-conformists were seditious, it enacted that if five or more persons besides the household were present at "any assembly, conventicle, or meeting, under colour or pretence of any exercise of religion in other manner than is allowed by the Liturgy or practice of the Church of England," then every person so present should, upon record before two justices of the peace, or the chief magistrate of a corporate town, be liable to certain fines, imprisonment, or transportation, for a first, second, or third of fence. Under this abominable statute, puritan ministers who had been ejected from their benefices, and their admiring followers, were thrown into prison. Baxter has related in his plain and forcible manner how this law interfered with the ordinary affairs of life amongst serious people : " It was a great strait that people were in, especially that dwell near any busy officer, or malicious enemy (as who doth not ?). Many durst not pray in their families, " 16 Car. II. c.4. CONVENTICLE ACT. l6$ if above four persons came in to dine with them. In a gentle man's house it is ordinary for more than four, of visitors, neigh bours, messengers, or one sort or other, to be most or many days at dinner with them : and then many durst not go to prayer, and some durst scarce crave a blessing on their meat, or give God thanks for it. Some thought they might venture if they withdrew into another room, and left the strangers by themselves. But others said, ' It is all one if they be but in the same house, though out of hearing, when it cometh to the judgment of the justices.' In London, where the houses are contiguous, some thought if they were in several houses, and heard one another through the wall or a window, it would avoid the law. But others said, ' It is all in vain whilst the justice is judge whether it was a Meeting or no.' Great lawyers said, ' If you come on a visitor business, though you be present at prayer or sermon, it is no breach of the law, because you meet not on pretence of a religious exercise.' But those that tried them said, ' Such words are but wind when the justices come to judge you.' And here the fanatics called Quakers did greatly relieve the sober people for a time : for they were so resolute, and gloried in their constancy and sufferings, that they assembled openly (at the Bull and Mouth, near Aldersgate) and were dragged away daily to the common jail ; and yet desisted not, but the rest came the next day nevertheless ; so that the jail at Newgate was filled with them. Abundance of them died in prison, and yet they continued their assemblies still." * For years were the persecu tions under this Statute continued with all the severity that the government could call forth. Clarendon intimates that the Act was not rigorously executed, otherwise it would have produced a thorough reformation. Dr. Creighton, preaching before the king, said that "the greatest part of the lay magistrates in England were Puritans, and would not do justice ; and the bishops' powers were* so taken away and lessened, that they could not exercise the power they ought." f With accommodating magistrates, and a persecuting hierarchy, the times of the Star Chamber would soon have come back. But some magistrates were honest, and some church-dignitaries merciful and tolerant. The Parliament was still compliant enough. They were yet farfrom manifesting any serious doubts of the value of passive obedience. But their very intolerance towards Protestant dissenters was, in some degree, a result of their suspicion of the king's desire to show favour to the * " Life," p. 436. • t Pepys, " Diary," March 26, 1664. 164 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Papists. He claimed a dispensing power as to the relaxation of penal laws in ecclesiastical matters. The Parliament gently denied the king's right to this dispensing power, and a Bill to confirm that power was dropped, to Charles's great displeasure. In the constitutional point of the duration of Parliaments, the Crown was more successful in carrying out its own desires. By the Triennial Act of 1641, in default of the king summoning a new parliament within three years after a dissolution, the peers might issue writs ; or the sheriffs in default of the peers ; or in default of constituted authorities the people might elect their representatives without any summons whatever. These provisions against such violations of the constitution as had been seen in the time of Charles I., could not affect a sovereign who desired to govern in connection with Parliaments. Charles, in his opening speech in the session of 1664, said, " I need not tell you how much I love Parliaments. Never king was so much beholden to Parliaments as I have been ; nor do I think the Crown can ever be happy without frequent Par liaments. But, assure yourselves, if I should think otherwise, I would never suffer a Parliament to come together by the means prescribed by that Bill." * The first Charles, in the pride of his triumphant despotism, could not have made a more insolent avowal. The famous Triennial Act was repealed ; all its provis ions for holding Parliaments in defiance of an arbitrary power of the Crown were set aside ; and yet it was declared that Parlia ments should not be suspended for more than three years. Charles II. lived to violate this law. The first war in which the government of the restored mon archy was engaged originated in the commercial rivalry of the English and the Dutch. The African Company of England and the African Company of Holland quarrelled about the profits de rived from slaves and gold-dust. They had fought for some mis erable forts on the African coast ; and gradually the contests of the traders assumed the character of national warfare. Tbe mer chants petitioned Parliament to redress their injuries ; the House of Commons listened with ready ear ; the king saw plentiful sup plies about to be granted him, some of which might be diverted from their destined use ; the duke of York was desirous of show ing his prowess as Lord High Admiral. War was declared ; and on the 3rd of June, 1665, the fleets of the two great commercial nations were engaged off Lowestoffe. The victory was complete * " Parliament Hist," vol. iv. col. 291. THE PLAGUE. 1 65 on the side of England. The old sailors of the Commonwealth had still some animating remembrances of Blake, with which they inspired the emulation of their new comrades. The duke of York was not deficient in animal courage ; and the courtiers who served as volunteers had not lost the national daring in their self-indul gence. But the victory raised no shouts of exultation in the marts and thoroughfares of London. The great City was lying under the dread of the most terrible infliction, which was' approaching to sweep away a third of its crowded population. The destroying angel was abroad : his avenging weapon was The Plague ! The June of 1665 comes in with extraordinary heat. The pre vious winter and spring had been the driest that ever man knew. The summer was coming with the same cloudless sky. There was no grass in the meadows around London. " Strange comets, which filled the thoughts and writings of astronomers, did in the winter and spring a long time appear." The " great comet,'' says Burnet, " raised the apprehensions of those who did not enter into just speculations concerning those matters." The boom of guns from the Norfolk coast is heard upon the Thames ; and the mer chants upon Change are anxiously waiting for letters from the fleet. In the coffee houses, two subjects of news keep the gos- sipers in agitation — the Dutch fleet is off our coast, the Plague is in the City. The 7th of June, writes Pepys, was " the hottest day that ever I felt in my life. This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ' Lord have mercy upon us : writ there ; which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that to my remembrance I ever saw." The red cross upon the doors was too familiar to the elder population of London. In 1636, of twenty- three thousand deaths ten thousand were ascribed to the Plague. The terrible visitor came to London, according to the ordinary belief, once in every twenty years, and then swept away a fifth of the inhabitants. From 1636 to 1647 there had been no cessation of the malady, which commonly carried off two or three thousand people annually. But after 1648 there had been no record of deaths from the Plague amounting to more than twenty, in any one year. In 1664 the Bills of Mortality only registered six deaths from this cause. The disease seemed almost to belong to another generation than' that which had witnessed the triumph and the fall of Puritanism — which had passed from extreme formalism to extreme licentiousness. How far the drunken revelries of the five 1 66 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. years of the Restoration might have predisposed the population to receive the disease, is as uncertain as any belief that the sobri ety of the preceding time had warded it off. One condition of London was, however, unaltered. It was a city of narrow streets and of bad drainage. The greater number of houses were deficient in many of the accommodations upon which health, in a great degree, depends. The supply of water was far from sufficient for the wants of the poorer population ; and with the richer classes the cost of water, supplied either by hand labour or machinery, prevented its liberal use. The conduits, old or new, could only afford to fill a few water-cans dailv for household uses. There was much finery in the wealthy citizens' houses, but little cleanli ness. It is to be remarked, however, that the Plague of 1665 was as fatal in the less crowded parts of Westminster and its suburbs, as in the City within the walls. Building had been going forward from the time of Elizabeth in St. Giles's-in-the-Fields, and in St. Martin's-in-the-Fields ; and we might conclude that the streets would be wider and the houses more commodious in these new parts than in the close thoroughfares, over which the projecting eaves had hung for many a year, shutting out air and light. But in these suburban liberties the Plague of 1665 first raged, and then gradually extended eastward. On the loth of June the disease broke out in the City, in the house of Dr. Burnett, a physician, in Fenchurch Street. " I saw poor Dr. Burnett's door shut ; but he hath, I hear, gained great good will among his neighbours ; for he discovered it himself first, and caused himself to be shut up of his own accord — which was very handsome." This is a quaint com ment upon the good doctor's voluntary subjection to misery worse than death — to be shut up — with the red-cross on the door ; no one coming with help or consolation ; all stricken with the selfish ness of terror.* * There is a remarkable picture of a solitary man abiding in a house whilst the plague was around him, written by oue who has many of the qualities of the true poet. George Wither, during the Plague of 1G25, resolved to remain in his lodging in London, and thus he describes a night of " darkness and loneliness : " — " My chamber entertain'd me all alone, And in the rooms adjoining lodged none. Yet, through the darksome silent night, did fly Sometime an uncouth noise ; sometime a cry ; And sometime mournful callings pierc'd my room, Which came, I neither knew from whence, nor whom. And oft, betwixt awaking and asleep, Their voices, who did talk, or pray, or weep, Unto my list ning ears a passage found, And troubled me, by their uncertain- sound." THE PLAGUE. 1Q7 Defoe's famous "Journal, of the Plague Year "has made this terrible season familiar to most readers. The spirit of accuracy is now more required than when the editor of a popular work informed his readers that Defoe continued in London during the whole time of the plague, and was one of the Examiners appointed to shut up infected houses.* Defoe, in 1665, was four years old. Yet the imaginary saddler of Whitechapel, who embodies the 'stories which this wonderful writer had treasured up from his childhood, relates nothing that is not supported by what we call authentic history. The " Citizen who continued all the while in London," as the title of Defoe's Journal informs us, and whose dwelling was " without Aldgate, about midway between Aldgate church and Whitechapel bars," relates how, through May and June, the nobility and rich people from the west part of the city .filled .the broad street of Whitechapel with coaches and waggons and carts, all hurrying away with goods, women, servants, and children; how horsemen, with servants bearing their baggage, fol lowed in this mournful cavalcade, from morning to night ; how the lord mayor's doors were crowded with applicants for passes and certificates of health, for without these none would be allowed to enter the towns, or rest in any wayside-inn. The citizen of White chapel thought "of the misery that was coming upon the city, and the unhappy condition of those who would be left in it." On the 2istof June, Pepys writes, " I find all the town almost going out of town ; the coaches and waggons being all full of people going into the country." In the country the population dreaded to see the Londoners. Baxter remarks, " How fearful people were thirty, orforty, if not an hundred miles from London, of anything that they bought from any mercer's or draper's shop ; or of any goo'ds 'that were brought to them ; or of any persons that came to their houses. How they would shut their doors against their friends ; and if a man passed over the fields, how one would avoid another,- as we did in the time of wars ; and how every man was a terror to another." The Broadstone of East Redford, on which an ex change was made of money for goods, without personal communi cation, is an illustration of these rural terrors. A panic very soon took possession of the population of London. They talked of the comet, ". of a faint, dull, languid colour, and its motion very lieavy. solemn, and slow." They read ' Lilly's Almanac,' and ' Gadbury's -Astrological Predictions,' and ' Poor Robin's Almanac,' and these * *' Beauties of England and Wales." l68 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. books " frightened them terribly." A man walked the streets day and night, at a swift pace, speaking to no one, but uttering only the words " O the great and the dreadful God ! " These prognostica tions and threatenings came before the pestilence had become very serious ; and they smote down the hearts of the people, and thus unfitted them for the duty of self-preservation, and the greater duty of affording help to others. Other impostors thai the astrologers abounded. The mountebank was in the streets with his " infallible preventive pills," and "the only true plague-water." Pepys records that " my lady Carteret did this day give me a bottle of plague- water home with me." But gradually the astrologers and the quacks were left without customers, for London was almost wholly abandoned to the very poorest. Touchingly does Baxter say, " the calamities and cries of the diseased and impoverished are not to be conceived by those who are absent from them The richer sort remaining out of the city, the greatest blow fell on the poor." The Court fled on the first appearance of the disease. Some few of the great remained, amongst others the stout old duke of Albemarle, who fearlessly chewed his tobacco at his mansion of the Cockpit. Marriages of the rich still went on. Pepys is diffuse about a splendid marriage at Dagenham's, which narrative reads like the contrasts of a chapter of romance. " Thus I ended this month (July) with the greatest joy that ever I did any in my life, because I have spent the greatest part of it with abundance of joy, and honour, and pleasant journeys, and brave entertainments, and without cost of money." A week after, he writes, " Home, to draw over anew my will, which I had bound myself by oath to dispatch to-morrow night, the town growing so unhealthy that a man cannot depend upon living two days." The narrative of Defoe, and other relations, have familiarised most of us from our boyhood with the ordinary facts of this terrible •calamity. We see the searchers, and nurses, and watchmen, and buryers marching in ominous silence through the empty streets, each bearing the red wand of office. We see them enter a sus pected house, and upon coming out marking the door with the fatal red cross, a foot in length. If the sick within can pay, a nurse is left. We see the dead-cart going its rounds in the night, and hear the bell tinkling, and the buryers crying " Bring out your dead." Some of the infected were carried to the established pest- houses, where the dead-cart duly received its ghastly load. The saddler of Whitechapel describes what he beheld at " the great pit THE PLAGUE. IO9 of the churchyard of our parish at Aldgate :" — " I saw two links come over from the end of the Minories, and heard the bell man, and then appeared a dead-cart, as they called it, coming over the streets, so I could no longer resist my desire of seeing it, and went in It had in it sixteen or seventeen bodies ; some were wrapt up in linen sheets, some in rugs, some little other than naked, or so loose that what covering they had fell from them in the shooting out of the cart, and they fell quite naked amongst the rest ; but the matter was not much to them, nor the indecency to any one else, seeing that they were all dead, and were to be hud dled together into the common grave of mankind, as we may call it, for here is no difference made, but poor and rich went together ; there was no otner way of burials, neither was it possible there should, for coffins were not to be had for the prodigious numbers that fell in such a calamity as this." Soon, as Pepys tells us on the 12th of August, " the people die so, that now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by day light, the night not sufficing to do it in." The terrors which the sleek Secretary of the Navy feels when he thus encounters a dead body are almost ludicrous. The Reverend Thomas Vincent, one of the non-con forming clergy who remained in the city, has thus described the scenes of August : " Now people fall as thick as the leaves in au tumn when they are shaken by a mighty wind. Now there is a dismal solitude in London streets ; every day looks with the face of a Sabbath-day, observed with a greater solemnity than it used to be in the city. Now shops are shut in, people rare and very few that walk about, insomuch that the grass begins to spring up in some places, and a deep silence in every place, especially within the walls. No prancing horses, no rattling coaches, no calling in customers nor offering wares, nor London cries sounding in the ears. If any voice be heard it is the groans of dying persons breath ing forth their last, and the funeral knells of them that are ready to be carried to their graves. Now shutting up of visited houses (there being so many) is at an end, and most of the well are min gled among the sick, which otherwise would have got no help. Now, in some places where the people did generally stay, not one house in a hundred but what is affected ; and in many houses half the family is swept away ; in some, from the eldest to the youngest ; ' few escaped but with the death of one or two. Never did so many husbands and wives die together; never did so many parents carry their children with them to the grave, and go together into the 170 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. same house under earth who had lived together in the same house upon it. Now the nights are too short to bury the dead : the whole day, though at so great a length, is hardly sufficient to light" the dead that fall thereon into their graves." At the beginning of. September the empty streets put on another aspect, equally fearful. The bonfire, which was the exhibition of gladness, was now the token of desolation. Every six houses on each side of the way were- to be assessed towards the expense of maintaining one great fire in the middle of the street for the purification of the air, — fires, which were not to be extinguished by night or by day. A heavy rain put out these death-fires, and perhaps did far more good than this expedient. As winter approached, the disease began rapidly to decrease. Confidence a little revived. A few shops were again opened. The York wagon again ventured to go to London with passengers. At the beginning of 1666 "the town fills again." "Pray God," says Pepys, "continue the Plague's decrease; for that keeps the Court away from the place of business, and so all goes to rack as to public matters.'' He rides in Lord Brouncker's coach to Covent Garden : " What staring to see a nobleman's coach come to town. And porters everywhere bow to us : and such begging of beggars." The sordid and self indulgent now began to come back : " January 22nd. The first meeting of Gres- ham College since the plague. Dr. Goddard did fill us with talk, in defence of his and his fellow-physicians' going out of town in the plague-time ; saying that their particular patients were most gone out of town, and they left at liberty, and a great deal more." This is Pepys' entry of the 4th of February : " Lord's day : and my wife and I the first time together at church since the plague, and now only because of Mr. Mills his coming home to preach his first ser mon ; expecting a great excuse for his leaving the parish before anybody went, and now staying till all are come home : but he made but a very poor and short excuse, and a bad sermon." Mr. Mills. and his doings, and the doings of such as Mr. Mills, were not with out important consequences, which bring us back to the political history of this time of suffering, in which the few manifested a noble devotion to their duty, and the many exhibited the more general characteristic of their generation— intense selfishness. De foe tells, with the strictest accuracy, the mode in which the spiritual condition of the plague-struck city was attended to : " Though it is true that a great many of the clergy did shut up their churches, and fled as other people did, for the safety of their lives, yet all THE SETTLEMENT ACT. 171 did not do so ; some ventured to officiate, and to keep up the as semblies of the people by constant prayers, and sometimes sermons, or brief exhortations to repentance and reformation, and this as long as they would hear them. And dissenters did the like also and even in the very churches where the parish ministers were either dead or fled ; nor was there any room for making any dif ference at such a time as this was." Baxter also relates that, when "most of the conformable ministers fled, and left their flocks in the time of their extremity," the non-conforming ministers, who, since 1662, had done their work very privately, " resolved to stay with the people ; and to go into the forsaken pulpits, though prohibited ; and to preach to the poor people before they died ; and also to visit the sick, and get what relief they could for the poor, especially those that were shut up." The reward which the non-conforming min isters received for their good work was "The Five Mile Act." The Statute which popularly bore this name is entitled "An Act for restraining Non-conformists from inhabiting in Corporations."* In consequence of the plague raging in London, the Parliment met at Oxford on the 9th of October. Their first Act was for a sup ply of 1,250,000/. Their second was this " new and more inevita ble blow aimed at the fallen Church of Calvin." f All persons in holy orders who had not subscribed the Act of Uniformity were required to take the following oath : " I, A. B.,- do swear, that it is not lawful, under any pretence whatsoever, to take arms against the king ; and that I do abhor the traitorous position of taking arms by his authority against his person, or against those that are commis- sionated by him, in pursuance of such commissions ; and that I will not at any time endeavour any alteration of government either in Church or State." In default of taking this oath they were forbid den to dwell, or come, unless upon the road, wfthin five miles of any corporate town, or any other place where they had been minis ters, or had preached, under a.penalty of Forty Pounds and six months' imprisonment. They were also declared incapable of teaching in schools, or of receiving boarders. This Act had for its oDJect wholly to deprive the conscientious Puritans of any means of subsistence connected with their former vocation of Christian ministers, or instructors of youth. Mr. Hallam truly says, "The Church of England had doubtless her provocations ; but she made the retaliation much more than commensurate to the injury. No severity comparable to this cold-blooded persecution had been inflicted by. the late powers, even in the ferment and fury of a Civil • 17 Car. II. c. j. _ t Hallam. ' 172 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. war." An attempt was made to impose the non-resisting oath upon the whole nation ; but it was defeated by a small majority. The extent of the miseries inflicted by the Plague in London was probably diminished by " The Settlement Act " of 1662.* This was entitled " An Act for the better relief of the Poor." The preamble of the Statute declares the continual increase of the Poor, not only within the cities of London and Westminster, but also through the whole kingdom ; but there is little reason to doubt that the main object of the Bill was to thrust out from the parishes of the metropolis, all chargeable persons occupying tenements under the yearly value of ten pounds. By tl.is Act the power of removal was first established — a measure which, however modified, has done as much evil to the labouring population in destroying their habits of self-dependence, as a legal provision for their sup port, prudently administered, has been a national blessing. The Settlement Act was carried by the metropolitan members, with little resistance from the country members. " The habitual con gregating of the vagrant classes in London, and the dread of pesti lence likely to be thereby engendered, appear to have overborne or neutralised all other considerations at the time, and hastened the passing of the Act." f The united efforts made by the Londoners to carry this Bill, leave little room to doubt that they acted upon it very promptly and vigilantly ; and thus some considerable portion of the indigent population must have been driven forth from Lon don and Westminster, to seek their parishes under the old laws which determined their lawful place of abode. The ten pound rental, either in London or the country, could protect none of the really indigent. It gave a privilege only to the well-to-do artisan or tradesman who had no legal settlement by birth, apprenticeship, or other legal claim. In 1675, in a debate on a Bill for restraint of building near London, one member said that "by the late Act the poor are hunted like foxes out of parishes, and whither must they go but where there are houses ? " Another declared that " the Act for the settlement of the poor does, indeed, thrust all people out of the country to London."{ The intent of the framers of the Act had probably been defeated by the reprisals of the rural magis trates and overseers. The system of hunting the poor went on amidst the perpetual litigation of nearly two centuries ; and it is not yet come to an end. * 14 Car. II. c. 12. t SirG. Nicholls : " History of the English Poor Law," vol. i. p. 297. X" Pari. Hist." vol. iv. col. 679. NAVAL AFFAIRS. 1 73 CHAPTER VIII. Naval affairs. — Annus Mirabilis. — France joins the Dutch against England.— The sea- fight of four days. — The London Gazette. — Restraints upon the Press. — Ravages of the English fleet on the Dutch Coast. — The Great Fire of London. — Note, on Wreff s Plan for rebuilding the City. The naval victory of the 3rd of June, 1665, was a fruitless triumph, won at a lavish expenditure of blood. The most loyal of the subordinate administrators of public affairs considered that a great success had been thrown away. Evelyn writes, (June 8th) " Came news of his highness' victory, which indeed might have been a complete one, and at once ended the war, had it been- pur sued ; but the cowardice of some, or treachery, or both, frustrated that." When the Dutch fled from off Lowestoffe to their own shores, the English fleet commenced a pursuit ; but in the night the King Charles, the duke of York's ship, slackened sail and brought to. In a Council of War, as Burnet relates upon the au thority of the earl of Montague, Admiral Penn affirmed that they must prepare for hotter work in the next engagement ; for he well knew the courage of the Dutch was never so high as when they were desperate. The courtiers said that the duke had got honour. enough, and why should he venture .t second time. His royal highness went to sleep ; and in the night Brunkhard, one of his servants, delivered an order to the master of the King Charles to slacken sail, which order purported to be written by the duke. The House of Commons instituted an inquiry; and it was alleged that Brunkhard forged the order. Burnet says, " Lord Montague did believe that the duke was struck, seeing the earl of Falmouth, the king's favourite, and two other persons of quality, killed very near him ; and that he had no mind to engage again." Some members of the House of Commons thought it a very desirable thing for the nation that the king's brother should incur no more such dangers. The duke remained at home, to contribute his share to the scandals which the Court habitually provoked, whether at Whitehall or at Oxford. The Plague-year has passed; the "Year of Wonders" is come. '74 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Dryden called his Annus Mirabilis " an historical poem." In his preface he says, " I have taken upon me to describe the motives, the beginning, progress, and successes, of a most just and neces sary War ; in it, the care, management, and prudence of our king ; the conduct and valour of a royal admiral- and of two incomparable generals ; the invincible courage of our captains and seamen ; and three glorious victories, the result of all. After this, I have, in the Fire, the most deplorable, but withal the greatest, argument that can be imagined : the destruction being so swift, so sudden, so vast and miserable, as nothing can parallel in story." The year 1666 is, indeed, an eventful year ; and the relation of its miseries, so closely followmg upon the calamity of the Plague, carries with it the consolation that the spirit of the English people, founded upon their industrious habits and their passion for liberty, has always been able to surmount the greatest political evils, and to acquire, even under the severest dispensations of Providence, the courage and perseverance which convert chastisements into bless ings. At the beginning of 1666, Louis XIV., for objects purely per sonal, joined the Dutch against England, and declared war. This policy of the French Court had a tendency to make the war with the Hollanders more popular in England. Prince Rupert, who was now a resident in London, and who had a command in the engagement off Lowestoffe, was not regarded with any public con fidence ; and the king felt it necessary to associate the duke of Albemarle with him in the command of the fleet. On the Sth of May the two Generals were at the Nore with their squadrons. " I sailed to the buoy of the Nore to my Lord-General and Prince Rupert, where was the rendezvous of the most glorious fleet in the world, now preparing to meet the Hollander." * The people of London, dispirited by the ravages of the plague, many outraged by the persecutions against the non-conformists, unable or indis posed to pay the taxes for the war, had little enthusiasm as to its results. The 29th of May came, and Pepys is heavily afflicted at beholding few bonfires on the east-side of -Temple-bar. Clarendon says " Monies could neither be collected nor borrowed where the Plague had prevailed, which was over all the City, and over a great part of the country ; the collectors durst not go to require it or receive it." f On the 31st a public Fast-day was appointed to pray for the success of the fleet ; " but," says Pepys, " it is a pretty • Evelyn, " Diary," May S. t " Life." THE SEA-FIGHT OF FOUR DAYS. 1 75 thing to consider how little a matter they make of this keeping a Fast, that it was not declared time enough to be read in the churches, the last Sufiday ; but ordered by proclamation since : I suppose upon some sudden news of the Dutch having come out." The Dutch fleet had come out; and on the 1st of June it was in the Downs, with Monk in sight of -their formidable line of fighting vessels. On the 2nd there is a curious spectacle at Greenwich. The king and the duke of York have come down the river in their barge ; and they walk to the Park to hear the loud firing of the ships in the Channel. The group of lordly attendants on Greenwich- hill, whispering and pointing as the sullen boom of the guns comes up the Thames ; — Charles and James standing apart in puzzled conference, or laughing at some ill-timed jest ; — a bowing courtier approaching the royal presence to bring news just arrived at Whitehall, — this is a scene which painting might properly make its own. That distant roar of cannon was not imaginary. Monk and Rupert had separated. It had been believed that the Dutch fleet was not ready for sea ; and Monk, with fifty-four sail, had floated calmly from the Nore ; when behold, there are eighty Dutch men- ' at-war at anchor off the North Foreland. The surprise was un accountable ; but it is a proof how rashly naval warfare was con ducted when landsmen were the chief commanders. The English courage was too much relied upon ; the science and experience which can alone make courage truly efficient were thought subor dinate requisites. Monk was a hardy soldier, but a very imperfect naval tactician ; — moreover he was now elated and presumptuous. He dashed at the Dutch; fought all day; and at night looked round upon disabled ships. De Witt was in the fleet of Holland ; and chain-shot, of. which he was held to be the inventor, cut the English rigging to pieces.- They fired at our towering sails ; we at their high-raised decks. The battle was resumed at the early dawn of the 2nd of June. De Ruyter had received a re-inforcement of sixteen ships during the night. Monk was looking in vain for Rupert to come to his aid. . Another day of terrible fight, with losses severe enough on the English side, to have driven to despair a commander less resolute than Monk. Dryden has pictured him at nightfall, standing upon deck, while "the moon shone clear on the becalmed flood," musing on the probable issue of another day, and mournfully preparing for an ocean grave. On the 3rd he burnt some of his disabled ships, and retreated, fighting De Ruyter's rear-guard. The noblest ship of the English navy ran on the 176 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Galloper sand, and was lost. Late on the 3rd, Rupert arrived from St. Helen's ; and the battle *as renewed with more equality. The poet describes how the anxious prince had heard the cannon long, and drew dire omens of English overmatched.* The historian says, " he had received orders to return from St. Helen's on the first day of the battle ; nor was it ever explained why he did not join Albe marle till the evening of the third. "f The Diarist divides the blame between the government at home, and the proud prince, whose obsti nate self-reliance had produced so many of the royalist disasters in the Civil War ; " I to sir G. Carteret, who told me there hath been great bad management in all this; that the king's orders that went on Fri day for calling back the prince were sent but by the ordinary post on Wednesday ; and come to the prince his hands but on Friday ; and then, instead of sailing presently, he stays till four in the evening. And that which is worst of all, the Hampshire, laden with merchants' money, come from the Straits, set out with or but just before the fleet, and was in the Downs by five of the clock yesterday morning ; and the prince with his fleet come to Dover but at ten of the clock at night. This is hard to answer, if it be true. This puts great as tonishment into the king, and duke, and court, everybody being out of countenance. Home by the 'Change, which is full of people still, and all talk highly of the failure of the prince in not making more haste after his instructions did come, and of our managements here in not giving it sooner and with more care andoftener." The first desire of the court, and the more natural one, was to set forth that there had been a great victory. Newspapers, then, had no peculiar sources of information, to check the tendency of all gov ernments to deceive the people as to the results of their warlike en terprises — a tendency which only makes disappointment more se vere when truth comes out, and thus exhibits falsehood not only as a crime but as a fault The court had now got its " Gazette," which was first published at Oxford on the 7th of November, 1665; and soon after became "The London Gazette." Roger L'Estrange, Esquire, had commenced his "Intelligence pub lished foi the satisfaction and information of the People," and his " Newes," in 1663 ; the one issued on a Monday, the other on a Thursday. What real satisfaction and information the public could derive from these productions may be gathered from the address of their conductor. He was "Surveyor of the Imprimery and Printing Presses ; " and he tells his readers * " Annus Mirabilis," stanza cvi. f Lingard. THE PRESS. 177 that his sacred majesty has been pleased " to grant and commit the privilege of publishing all intelligence, together with the survey and inspection of the Press, to one and the same person. He can didly informs his subscribers that, " supposing the press in order, the people in their right wits, and news or no news to be the question, a public Mercury should never have my vote." He is of opinion that it makes the multitude " too familiar with the actions and counsels of their superiors, too pragmatical and censorious ; and gives them, not only an itch, but a colourable right and licence to be meddling with the government." To keep the multitude in the right course, he thinks " the prudent management of a Gazette may contribute to a very high degree." * This worthy Licenser was preceded in his high endeavours for the reformation of the prag matical andcensorious multitude by the Licensing Act of 1662, by which all books, according to their subjects, were to be licensed by the chancellor, the secretary of state, the bishops, and other great personages. All these authorities, practically, became merged in Roger L'Estrange, Esquire. The number of master printers in London was limited to twenty ; no books were allowed to be printed out of London, except at the two Universities and at York ; and all unlicensed books were to be seized, and the publisher punished by heavy penalties. The Stationers' Company was made a principal agency for carrying through these despotic regulations. We may well judge, therefore, that the real issue of the four days' fight in the Downs would be explained to the multitude after a fashion which the "prudent management" of the virtuous licenser of the Press, and candid monopolist of all intelligence, would prescribe. When Mr. Pepys entered in cipher in his Diary, " Lord, to see how melancholy the Court is under the thoughts of this last overthrow, for so it is, instead of a victory, so much and so unreasonably expected," it was the duty of Roger L'Estrange to make the ignorant multitude very joyful. Still there were material evidences of the truth. There were no Dutch prizes in the Thames ; and when Mr. Evelyn, with all his royalist devotion, went to Sheerness on the 15th of June, he made this record : " Here I beheld the sad spectacle — more than half that gallant bulwark of the kingdom miserably shattered ; hardly a vessel entire, but appearing so many wrecks and hulls, so cruelly had the Dutch mangled us." The "sad sight" makes him acknowledge that none knew '¦ for what reason we first engaged in this ungrateful war." There was a partial success when a portion * See Nicholi's " Literary Anecdotes," 1S12, vol. iv, p. 36. Vol. IV.— 12 178 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of the two fleets met again on the 25th of July, each being refitted. The Dutch were chased to their ports ; and Monk and Rupert kept their coasts in alarm. A squadron of boats and fire-ships en tered the channel at Schelling ; burnt two men-of-war and a hun dred and fifty merchantmen; and, to the disgrace of civilised warfare, reduced to ashes the thousand houses of the unfortified town of Brandaris. For this success, a day of Thanksgiving was appointed. It was kept ; "though many muttered that it was not wisely done, to provoke the Dutch, by burning their houses, when it was easy for them to do the like by us, on our sea-coasts." * De Witt saw the havoc of Brandaris ; and he swore a solemn oath, that till he had obtained revenge, he would never sheathe the sword. He kept his oath. The ' Annus Mirabilis ' was at an end before the great Dutch statesman inflicted a terrible retribution. At the close of the year came Dryden, intent upon earning the lau reate wreath, and proclaimed the glories of 1666, in magnificent quatrains : — " Already we have conquered half the war, And the less dangerous part is left behind: Our trouble now is but to make them dare, And not so great to vanquish as to find." t The story of the Great Fire of London has been related with minuteness by many trustworthy observers. We can place our selves in the midst of this extrordinary scene, and make ourselves as familiar with its details as if the age of newspapers had arrived, and a host of reporters had been engaged in collecting every strik ing incident. But it is not in the then published narratives that we find those graphic touches which constitute the chief interest of this event at the present time. Half a century ago the materials for a faithful record of the Great Fire were to be sought in the re port of a Committee of the House of Commons, in the State Trials, and in various tracts issued at the period. There are also several striking passages of Baxter's " Life," which relate to the fire. But such notices are meagre compared with the personal records in the two remarkable Diaries which have been rescued from obscurity during our own day. We are with Mr. Pepys in his night-gown at three o'clock in the morning of Sunday, the 2nd of September. looking out of his window in Seething Lane, at the east end of the City, and, thinking the fire far enough off, going to sleep again. * Baxter, " Life," part iii. p. 16. f " Annus Mirabilis," cccii. THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON. 1 79 We accompany him later in the morning to a high place in the Tower, and see the houses near London Bridge on fire. The weather is hot and dry, and a furious east wind is blowing. The active Mr. Pepys takes a boat from the Tower Stairs ; and slowly sculling up stream, looks upon the burning houses in the streets near the Thames ; distracted people getting their goods on board lighters ; and the inhabitants of the houses at the water's edge not leaving till the fire actually reached them. He has time to look at the pigeons — of which the Londoners generally were then as fond as the Spitalfields weavers of our time — hovering about the win dows and balconies till they burned their wings and fell down. There is nobody attempting to quench the fire in that high wind. Everything is combustible after the long drought. Human strength seems in vain, and the people give themselves up to despair. The busy Secretary of the Navy reaches Whitehall, and tells his story to the king, and he entreats his majesty to order houses to be pulled down, for nothing less would stop the fire. The king desires Pepys to go to the lord mayor and give him this command. In Cannon-street he encounters the lord mayor, who cries, like a faint ing woman, " Lord ! what can I do ? I am spent. People will not obey me." He had been pulling down houses. He did not want any soldiers. He had been up all night, and must go home and refresh himself: There is no service in the churches, for the people are crowding them with their goods. The worthy Pepys had invited a dinner-party on this Sunday ; and so he goes home ; . and, " we had an extraordinary good dinner, and as merry as at that time we could be." But he and his guests sit nof long over their feast. He walks through the streets ; and again he takes boat at Paul's Wharf. He now meets the king and the duke of York in their barge. They ordered that houses should be pulled down apace ; but the fire came on so fast that little could be done. We get glimpses in this confusion of the domestic habits of the citizens. " The river full of lighters and boats taking in goods ; and good goods swimming about in the water ; and I observed that hardly one lighter or boat in three that had the goods of a house in, but there was a pair of virginals in it." The severer Puritans had not driven out the old Engliish love of music ; the citizens' wives and daughters still had the imperfect spinet upon which Eliz abeth and her maids of honour played. That hot September eve ning is spent by our observer uppri the water. Showers of fire- drops are driving in his face. He sees the fiery flakes shooting up 150 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. from one burning house, and then dropping upon another five or six houses off, and setting that on flame. The roofs were in many streets only thatched : the walls were mostly timber. Warehouses in Thames-street were stored with pitch, and tar, and oil, and brandy. The night came on; and then Pepys, from a little ale house on the Bankside, saw the fire grow, and shoot out between churches and houses, " in a most horrid, malicious, bloody flame, not like the fire flame of an ordinary fire." And then, as it grew darker, he saw the fire up the hill in an arch of above a mile long. Then rose the moon shedding a soft light over the doomed city ; . and amidst the terrible glare and the gentle radiance the whole world of London was awake, gazing upon the conflagration,, or labouring to save something from its fury. We turn to the Diary of Mr. Evelyn — a more elegant writer than Pepys, but scarcely so curious an observer of those minute points that give life to a picture. He has seen the fire from the Bankside on Sunday afternoon ; and on Monday he returns to see the whole south part ofthe city burning. It was now taking hold of the great cathedral, which was surrounded by scaffolds for its repair. " The noise and cracking and thunder of the impetuous flames, the shrieking of women and children, the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses, and churches, was like a hideous storm ; and the air all about so hot and inflamed, that at the last one was not able to approach it, so that they were forced to stand still, and let the flames burn on, which they did, for near two miles in length and one in breadth. The clouds, also, of smoke were dismal, and reached, upon computation, near fifty miles in length. Thus I left it this afternoon burning, a resemblance of Sodom, or the last day.:' On Tuesday, the 4th, Evelyn saw that the fire had reached as far as the Inner Temple. " All Fleet-street, the Old Bailey, Lud- gate-hill, Warwick-lane, Newgate, Paul's-chain, Watling-street, now flaming, and most of it reduced to ashes ; the stones of Paul's flew like grenades, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness, so as no horse, nor man, was able to tread on them, and the demolition had stopped all the passages, so that no help could be applied; the eastern wind still more impetuously driving the flames for ward." On that day the houses near the Tower were blown up ; and the same judicious plan was pursued in other places. On the 5th the Court at Whitehall was in unwonted bustle. The king THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON. l8l and his brother had set an excellent example of personal activity; and gentlemen now took charge of particular streets, and directed the means of extinguishing the flames. The people now began to bestir themselves. The civic authorities no longer rejected the advice, which some seamen had given at first, to blow up the houses before the flames reached them, instead of attempting to pull them down. The wind abated. Large gags were made in the streets. The desolation did not reach beyond the Temple westward, nor beyond Smithfield on the north. On Wednesday, the 5th, the mighty devourer was arrested in his course. Three days and three nights of agony had been passed ; but not more than eight lives had been lost. Mr. Pepys at last lies down and sleeps soundly. He has one natural remark: "It is a strange thing to see how lonj> this time did look since Sunday, having been always full of variety of actions, and little sleep, that it looked like a week or more, and I forgot almost the day of the week." The contemporary accounts of the Fire, such as we find in a sensible pamphlet entitled ' Observations on the Burning of Lon don,' * have little pretension to be picturesque in their details. The more elaborate passages of Evelyn's ' Diary ' have been quoted again and again ; and, grouped together, they form the best connected narrative of an eye-witness. There is one passage in Baxter's ' Life ' which is not so familiar; but which, in its rapid eloquence, is as impressive as Evelyn, and more truly poetical than Dryden's vague sublimities : " It was a sight that might have given any man a lively sense of the vanity of this world, and all the wealth and glory of it, and of the future conflagration of all the world. To see the flames mount up towards heaven, and proceed so furiously without restraint : To see the streets filled with people astonished, that had scarce sense left them to lament their own calamity : To see the fields filled with heaps of goods ; and sump tuous buildings, curious rooms, costly furniture, and household stuff, yea, warehouses and furnished shops and libraries, all on a flame, and none durst come near to receive anything: To see the king and nobles ride about the streets, beholding all these desola tions, and none could afford the least relief : To see the air, as far as could be beheld, so filled with the smoke, that the sun shone through it with a colour like blood; yea, even when it was setting in the west, it so appeared to them that dwelt on the west side of the city. But the. dolefullest sight of all was afterwards, to see * Reprinted in " Harleian Mi---ceUany.'? . - - - t82 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. what a ruinous confused place the city was, by chimnies and steeples only standing in the midst of cellars and heaps of rub bish ; so that it was hard to know where the streets had been, and dangerous, of a long time, to pass through the ruins, because of vaults, and fire in them. No man that seeth not such a thing can have a right apprehension of the dreadfulness of it." Whilst indifferent spectators were gazing on the fire from Bank- side, and the high grounds on the south of the Thames, the fields on the north were filled with houseless men, women, and children. " I went," says Evelyn, " towards Islington and Highgate, where one might have seen two hundred thousand people, of all ranks and degrees, dispersed and lying along by their heaps of what they could save from the fire, deploring their loss ; and, though ready to perish for hunger and destitution, yet not asking one penny for relief." There were liberal contributions from the king, and the nobility, and the clergy. Collections were made and distributed in alms to the most needy. But the real difficulty must have been to ensure a supply of food, when all the usual channels of interchange were choked up. Proclamations were made for the country people to bring in provisions. Facilities were offered to the people io leave the ruins, by a command that they should be received in all cities and towns to pursue their occupations ; and that such recep tion should ^entail no eventual burthen on parishes. No doubt it was necessary to strive against the selfishness that vast calamities too often produce in the sufferers and the lookers-on. The coun try-people for miles around had gazed upon the flames. * There was an immense destruction of books ; and their half-burnt leaves were carried by the wind even as far as Windsor. The dense cloud of smoke shut out the bright autumn sun from the harvest- fields, and upon distant roads men travelled in the shade. The extent of the calamity was apparent. Yet it may be doubted if many of the great ones received the visitation in a right spirit. Pepys says, " none of the nobility came out of the country at all, * The author of this History, talking of the fire of London with a fiiend, in his 88th year, whose intellect is as bright as his knowledge is extensive, was much impressed by the fact that an event happening two centuries ago may have come to the ear of one now living, with only a single person intervening between himself and an eye-witness. Such a fr.ct ought to lead us not to reject traditional information as unworthy of historical record. Our friend was born in 1769. His aunt, who died at 84 years of age, was accustomed to talk with him about his great-grandfather, who died in 1739, at 03 years of age. That great-grandfather used to describe his impressions of the fire of London, which he. saw from a hill at Bishop's Stortford. THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON. I&J to help the king, or comfort him, or prevent commotions at this1 fire." Some of the insolent courtiers, exulted in the destruction : " Now the rebellious city is ruined, the king is absolute, and was never king indeed till now." * One profligate " young commander" of the fleet " made mighty sport of it ;" and rejoiced that the cor ruption of the citizens' wives might be effected at a very reduced cost, -f The Monument erected in commemoration of the Fire has an elaborate Latin inscription, in which it is set forth that the destruc tion comprised eighty-nine churches, the city-gates, Guildhall, many public structures, hospitals, schools, libraries; a vastnumber of stately edifices ; thirteen thousand two hundred dwelling-houses, four hundred streets. An account, which estimates the houses burnt at twelve thousand, values them at an average rent of 25/. a year, and their value, at twelve years' purchase, at £3,600,000. The public buildings destroyed are valued at ,£1,800,000; the private goods at the same rate. With other items, the total amount of the loss is estimated at £7,335,000. J But the interruption to industry must have involved even a more serious loss of the national capital. We have stated, on the authority of Clarendon, how the Plague had rendered it diffi cult to collect the revenue. He says of the necessities of the Crown in 1666, " Now this deluge by fire had dissipated the per sons, and destroyed the houses, which were liable to the re-imburse ment of all arrears ; and the very stocks were consumed which should carry on and revive the trade." § The Monument, which was erected on the spot where the fire first broke out, recorded that the burning of this protestant city was begun and carried on by the treachery and malice of a popish faction. The " tall bully " lifted his head and lied in choice Latin for a century and three-quarters ; and when the majority of men had grown more truly religious, and did not hold it the duty of one Christian to hate another who differed from him in doctrines and ceremonies, the Corporation of London wisely obliterated the offensive record. In the examinations before the Committee of the House of Commons, there was nothing beyond the most vague babble of the frightened and credulous, except the self-accusation of one Hubert, a French working-silversmith, who maintained that he was the incendiary. He was hanged, "much to the disgrace of the administration of justice. " Neither the judges," says Claren- * Baxter. t Pepys. X " Harleian Miscellany," vol. vii. p. 331. § " Life.'* 184 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. don, "nor any present at the trial, did believe him guilty; but that he was a poor distracted wretch, weary of his life, and chose to part with it this way." Dryden's stanzas on the Fire thus conclude, with reference to the popular superstition, which had its influence even upon the well-informed : " The utmost malice of the stars is past, And two dire comets, which have scourg'd the town, In their own Plague and Fire have breathed their last, Or dimly in their sinking sockets frown." A medal was struck in commemoration of the Plague and Fire. The eye of God is in the centre ; one comet is showering down pestilence and another flame. The east wind is driving on the flames. Death in the foreground is encountering an armed horse man. The legend is "Sic Punit" — So He punishes. NOTE ON WREN'S PLAN FOR BUILDING THE CITY. 185 NOTE ON WREN'S PLAN FOR REBUILDING THE CITY. Our noble Cathedral of St. Paul's, and many Churches which exhibit the genius of sir Christopher Wren in many graceful and original forms of towers and spires, grew out of the' Great Fire. But the occasion was lost for a nobler city to arise, of wide streets, and handsome quays. The old wooden fabrics were replaced by those of brick ; but the same narrow thoroughfares were preserved as of old. The owners of property could not be brought to unite in any common plan ; and each built his house up again, upon his own spot of ground. The constant labour of succeeding times, and of our own especially, has been to clear away, at enormous cost, what the fire had cleared away in three days and nights. This want of co-operative action was not the result of any ignorance of what required to be done. Wren's labours and wishes are thus recorded : " In order to a proper reformation, Wren, pursuant to the royal command, immediately after the fire, took an exact survey of the whole area and confines of the burning, having traced over with great trouble and hazard the great plain of ashes and ruins ; and designed a plan or model of a new city, in which the deformity and inconveniences of the old town were rem edied, by the enlarging the streets and lanes, and carrying them as near parallel to one another as might be ; avoiding, if compatible with greater conveniences, all acute angles; by seating all the parochial churches conspicuous and insular ; by forming the most public places into large piazzas, the centre of six or eight ways; by uniting the halls of the twelve chief companies into one regular square annexed to Guildhall ; by making a quay on the whole bank of the river, from Blackfriars to the Tower The streets to be of three magnitudes ; the three principal leading straight through the City, and one or two cross streets, to be at least ninety feet wide ; others sixty feet ; and lanes about thirty feet, excluding all narrow dark alleys without thoroughfares, and courts The practicability of this scheme, without loss to any man or infringement of any property, was at that time demonstrated, and all material objections fully weighed and answered. The only, and as it happened insurmountable, difficulty remaining, was the obstinate aversenesa of great part of the citizens to alter their old properties, and to recede from building their houses again on the old ground and foundations ; as also the distrust in many and unwil lingness to give up their properties, though for a time only, into the hands of public trustees or commissioners, till they might be dispensed to them again, with more advan tage to themselves than otherwise was possible to be effected The oppor ¦ tunity in. a great degree was lost of making the new City the most magnificent, as well as commodious for health and trade, of any upon earth." * * Wren's " Parentalia," p. 269. l86 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER IX. Meeting of Parliament. — Discontents. — Public Accounts. — Insurrection of Covenanters in Scotland. — State of the Navy.— Dutch Fleet at the Nore. — Ships burnt in the Medway, — Blockade of London. — Peace with the Dutch.— Clarendon deprived of Office. — He is impeached. — He leaves England. — The Cabal Ministry. — Treaty of Triple Alliance. — Secret Negotiations of the king with Louis the Fourteenth. The flames of London were still smouldering when the Parlia ment met at Westminster on the 21st of September. The king said, " Little time hath passed, since we were almost in despair of having this place left us to meet in ; you see the dismal ruins the fire hath made." There had been a prorogation for ten months. But money was wanting. " I desire," said Charles, " to put you to as little trouble as I can ; and I can tell you truly, I desire to put you to as little cost as is possible. I wish with all my heart that I could have the whole charge of this war myself, and that my sub jects should reap the benefit of it to themselves." No doubt it was very disagreeable that the king's subjects, being to be called upon to pay largely, should by any possibility take the liberty of asking what they were to pay for. Clarendon tells us of the some what dangerous temper which was spreading after the experience of six years and a half of the happy Restoration. " Though they made the same professions of affection and duty to the king they had ever done, they did not conceal the very ill opinion they had of the Court and the continual riotings there." * They were tend ing to the accomplishment of Harrington's prophecy : "Well ! The king will come in. Let him come in, and call a Parliament of the greatest Cavaliers in England, so they be men Tit estates, and let them sit but for seven years, and they will all turn Commonwealth's men."f A bill was brought in for the appointment of Commis sioners " to examine all accounts of those who had received or is sued out any moneys for this war; and where they found any per sons faulty, and who had broken their trust, they should be liable to such punishment as the Parliament should think fit." Sir George Carteret, and lord Ashley, who were chiefly aimed at, * " Life." t Aubrey's " Lives," vol. ii. p. 373. PUELIC ACCOUNTS. ¦ 187 " both applied themselves to the king for his protection m this point. His majesty was no less troubled, knowing that both had issued out many sums upon his warrant, which he would not suffer to be produced." To such- a bill the king was resolved never to give the royal assent. This is Clarendon's relation of the matter ; and yet he is not ashamed to say that he urged the king " to pre vent the excesses in Parliament, and not to suffer them to extend their jurisdiction to cases they have nothing to do with." Mr. Hallam says, " Such a slave was Clarendon to his narrow^prepos- sessions, that he would rather see the dissolute excesses which he abhorred suck nourishment from that revenue which had been al lotted to maintain the national honour and interests, and which, by its deficiencies thus aggravated, had caused even in this very year the navy to be laid up, and the coasts to be left defenceless, than suffer them to be restrained by the only power to which thoughtless luxury would submit." * Every effort was made to oppose the bill; f and the Parliament was prorogued in 1667 with out its being passed. Next year, 1668, the Parliament carried its salutary measure of control. A supply of _£i, 800,000 was granted ; and at the prorogation the king said, " I assure you the money shall be laid out for the ends it is given." The calamities which London had endured of Pestilence and Conflagration were not wholly unacceptable to the corrupt court. Clarendon informs us that there were those about the king, who assured him that the Fire " was the greatest blessing that God had ever conferred on him, his restoration only excepted ; for the walls and gates being now burned and thrown down of that rebellious city, which was always an enemy to the Crown, his majesty would never suffer them to repair and build them up again, to be a bit in his mouth, and a bridle upon his neck; but would keep all open, that his troops might enter upon them whenever he thought it necessary for his service, there being no other way to govern that rude multitude but by force." Charles was not pleased with these suggestions, adds Clarendon. Desirable as it might be to have the Londoners under his feet at this time of. their desolation, there was still the old spirit abroad in England. " Mr. Williamson stood, in a little place, to have come into the House of Commons, and they would not choose him; they said 'No courtier.' And, which is worse, Bab May went down in great state to Winchelsea with the duke of York's letters, not doubting to be chosen; and » " Constitutional HUtnrv.-- r. 1-. t Ante, p. 137. 188 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. there the people chose a private gentleman in spite of him, and cried out they would have no court pimp to be their burgess ; which are things that bode very ill."* The indiscretion of the king, to apply the least offensive term to his conduct, was sufficient to alienate the affection which had been so lavishly bestowed upon him, even if the people, with their bitter experience, stopped short of rebellion. There were large numbers of the humbler retainers of the royal household who, when Lady Castlemaine ordered of her tradesmen every jewel and service of plate that she fancied, and told her servant to send a note of their cost to the Privy Purse, were themselves absolutely starving. It sounds very like exagger ation when we read that one of the king's musicians, "Evans, the famous man upon the harp, having not his equal in the world, did the other day die for mere want, and was fain to be buried by the alms of the parish." But this is not idle gossip of Mr. Pepys. There is an account in existence of " The state of the Treasurer of' the Chamber, his office, at Midsummer, 1665," which shows the yearly payments due to officers of the king's household, and of the sums " behind unpaid." f There were forty-two musicians, to whom their salaries had been due for three years and one quarter. High and low, the Bishop Almoner and the rat-killer, the Justice in Oyer beyond Trent and the bird-keeper, footmen, falconers, huntsmen, bear-warders, wardrobe officers, watermen, messengers, yeomen of the guard, and many others, useful or useless, had been " behind unpaid," some for five years, some for four years, some for three or two years, very few only for one year. To three apothecaries, more than 5000/. was due. That these persons, fre quenting the coffee-houses or alehouses of London, did not spread abroad their griefs, cannot reasonably be imagined. A sullen dis content, a silent indignation, settled deep into the hearts of the whole community. If a sword had been drawn against the Eng lish people, there would have been another Civil War, with one certain result. Men were satisfied for twenty years longer to en dure and murmur. " It is strange how everybody do now-a-days reflect upon Oliver, and commend him, what brave things he did, and made all the neighbour princes fear him ; while here a prince, come in with all the love and prayers and good-liking of his peo ple, who have given greater signs of loyalty and willingness to serve him with their estates than ever was done by any people, * Pepys, " Diary," October 12, 1666. t Preface to " Secret Services of Charles II. and James II." Camden Society. TEMPER OF THE PEOPLE. 189 hath lost all so soon, that it is a miracle what way a man could de vise to lose so much in so little time." Not at all strange, Mr. Pepys, that the people looked back upon Oliver, and what brave things he did. But the vicissitudes of nearly twenty years — the dread of property becoming insecure — the religious divisions — the respect for the monarchical principle, however degraded in the im mediate wearer of the Crown — the love for the ancient Church, amidst all its pride and intolerance — these considerations kept Englishmen quiet. The government, moreover, was corrupt, but in England it was not cruel, beyond the cruelty of preventing men's religious opinions by statute. On this side the Tweed the govern ment provoked little more than the contempt of those whom it fined and imprisoned for non-conformity. In Scotland, it drove them to desperation ; and when they rebelled the thumbikin and the boot were ready to be administered to the victims, under the forms of justice by the apostate Lauderdale, or they were shot down and hanged by the brute Dalziel. The archbishops of St. Andrews and Glasgow hounded on the persecutors. The restoration of the monarchy was, to Scotland the establish- • ment of a policy of unmitigated despotism. The orders of. the king and council in matters ecclesiastical were to have the force of laws. A large army was raised to hold the people in subjection, whilst episcopacy, which they abominated, was established, with out any modification by general assemblies. The churches were deserted ; and the non-conforming preachers had immense con gregations in barns and fields ; on wild heaths and in the gorges of the mountains. The assemblies were dispersed by the soldiers ; but no violence could put them down. Those who were most zeal ous had soldiers quartered in their houses, to grind out of them the fines which they were unwilling or unable to pay. In the West of Scotland, where the Non-conformists were most numerous and most determined, sir James Turner, a fitting instrument of tyranny, was sent to enforce obedience by mulcts and severer penalties, levied at his bidding by his rapacious dragoons. To a resolute and hardy population, maddened by injuries, and defiant of danger, resistance in arms seemed not only a worldly policy but a sacred duty. A body of Covenanters of the West marched to Dumfries, and seized sir James Turner. They were for the most part peasants, with a few Presbyterian ministers amongst them. But they were not ig norant of military discipline, and soon became alarming in their numbers and their subordination. About three thousand set off to igo HISTORY OF ENGLAND. march from Lanark to Edinburgh, but these bands gradually dwindled to eight or nine hundred. When they had reached with in four miles of the city, they learnt that it was fortified, and its gates shut against them. They retreated to the Pentland Hills. On the evening of the 28th of November, Dalziel came upon them with a body of horse. Twice the insurgents drove back the cavalry, but their ranks were at last broken and they were utterly dispersed, The slaughter was inconsiderable ; but many were executed, and some tortured. " One Maccail, that was only a probation preacher, and who had been chaplain in sir James Stuart's house, had gone from Edinburgh to them ; it was believed he was sent by the party in town, and that he knew their correspondents ; so he was put to the torture, which in Scotland they call the boots ; for they put a pair of iron boots close on the leg, and drive wedges between these and the leg. The common torture was only to drive these in the calf of the leg ; but I have been told they were sometimes driven upon the shin-bone. He bore the torture with great con stancy; and either he could say nothing, or he had the firmness not to discover those who trusted him. Every man of them could have saved his own life, if he would accuse any other ; but they were all true to their friends. Maccail, for all the pains of the torture, died in a rapture of joy : his last words were, farewell sun, moon, and stars — farewell kindred and friends — farewell world and time — farewell weak and frail bod)- — welcome eternity — welcome angels and saints — welcome Saviour of the world, and welcome God the judge of all ; which he spoke with a voice and manner that struck all that heard it." * On the 31st of December, 1666, the official person who had the most intimate knowledge of the affairs of the navy thus writes in his Diary : " Thus ends this year of public wonder and mischief to this nation. Public matters in a most sad condition ; seamen dis couraged for want of pay, and are become not to be governed : nor, as matters are now, can any fleet go out next year. ... A sad, vicious, negligent court, and all sober men there fearful of the ruin of the whole kingdom this next year ; from which, good God deliver us." f Such ships as were in commission were command ed by haughty young nobles, wholly ignorant of naval affairs. One of these fair-weather captains, a son of lord Bristol, was heard to say that he hoped not to see " a tarpawlin " in command of a ship for a twelvemonth. The honest tarpawlins confessed that " the * Burnet's " History of his own Time." t Pepys. STATE OF THE NAVY. 191 true English valour we talk of is almost spent and worn out"* Direful calamities at the hands of the All-seeing had not broken the national spirit ; but the infamous corruption of the higher classes was eating into the foundation of England's greatness. Her people were losing that masculine simplicity; that healthy de votion to public and private duties, that religious earnestness — intolerant, no doubt, but rarely simulated by the followers of Calvin or the followers of Arminius in the greatest heat of their conflicts — the English were losing that nationality, whose excess may be ludicrous, but whose utter want is despicable. Their high intellect was being emasculated by a corrupt literature. Science was groping in the dark under the auspices of the Royal Society ; and Divinity was holdingforth from orthodox pulpits on the excesses of the early Reformers, and the duty of non-resistance to kings deriv ing their power direct from Heaven. These follies probably did little harm ; and men gradually shook off their delusions, and went forward to seek for experimental Science that had useful ends, and for practical Theology that would make them wiser and happier. But the corruptions of the Court soon worked upon the principles of the people, through a debasing popular Literature. The Drama had come back after an exile of twenty years. When the Drama was banished, Tragedy was still a queen wearing her purple and her pall ; and the " wood-notes wild " of Comedy were as fresh and joyous as those of the lark in spring. The Drama came back in the shameless garb, and with the brazen look, and the drunken voice, of the lowest strumpet. The people were to be taught that Shakspere was a barbarian, and not to be tolerated in his own sim plicity. He was, if heard at all, to furnish the libretto of an opera, to be got up with dresses and decorations by sir William D'Aven- ant. " I saw," says Evelyn in 1662, " Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, played ; but now the old plays began to disgust this refined age, since his majesty being so long abroad." This refined age, when it brought women to personate female characters, heard from the lips of Eleanor Gwynn and Mary Davis, the foulest verses, which they were selected to speak to furnish additional relish to the licentiousness of the poet. The theatre was at the very height of fashion when it was most shameless. The actresses were removed from " The King's House," to become the mistresses of the king, by their gradual promotion from being the mistresses of the king's servants. Nelly threw up her parts, and would act no more when * Pepys, October 29, 1666. 192 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. lord Buckhurst gave her a hundred a year, in 1667. In 1671, when Mr. Evelyn walked with the king through St. James's Park, Mrs. Nelly looked out of her garden on a terrace at the top of the wall, and there was " familiar discourse " between his majesty and the " impudent comedian," at which scene Mr. Evelyn was " heartily sorry." It was well for England that her salt had not wholly lost its savour ; that the middle-class of London, though they rushed to the savage Bull-baitings of the Bear-garden, which had been shut up during the time of the Long Parliament, were too indig nant at the costliness of the court to be enamoured of its gilded profligacy. It was better still for England that some little of the old Puritan spirit was left amongst the humblest classes — -that the Bible was read by the poor, and Rochester and Shadwell were to them unknown.* Amidst the abandonment of the Court to its pleasures, — the rapacity of the royal favourites, who received gratuities and pen sions not to be counted by hundreds but by thousands of pounds — the jealousy of the Parliament in granting money which they knew would be wasted — the spring of 1667 arrived, without any prepara tions for carrj'ing on the naval war. When the king's treasurer had. got some of the money which the House of Commons tardily voted, there were more pressing necessities to be supplied than the pay of sailors, or the fitting out of ships. The satirical verse of Andrew Marvell has represented this crisis with historic ac curacy : " Each day they bring the tale, and that too true, How strong the Dutch their equipage renew. Meantime through all the yards their orders run To lay the ships up, cease the keels begun. The timber rots, the useless axe doth rust ; Th' unpractised saw lies buried in its dust ; The busy hammer sleeps, the ropes untwine, The store and wages all are mine and thine ; Along the coasts and harbours they take care That money lacks, nor forts be in repair." t * We recommend to the genre painters subjects tor a Picture of two compartments, representing High Life and Low Life, after Sketches by Mr. Pepys, at Epsom, on Sunday, the 14th of July, 1667 : — " By eight o'clock to the Well, where much company. And to the town to the King' b Head ; and hear that my Lord Buckhurst und Nelly are lodged at the next house, and Sir Charles Sedley with them ; and keep a merry house. Poor girl I I pity her." " I walked upon the Downs, where a flock of sheep was ; and the most pleasant and innocent sight that ever I saw in my life. Wo found a shepherd, and his little boy reading, far from any houses or sight of people, tho Bihle to him." t " Instructions to a fainter about tl e Dutch Wars."— Works, vol. ii. p. IOi ; 1726. DUTCH FLEET IN THE MEDWAY. 193 On the 23rd df January the sailors were in mutiny at Wapping, and the Horse Guards; were going to quell them. They were in insur rection for the want of pay, When the money was obtained from' Parliament they still mutinied, for they were still unpaid. On the 5th of June the Portuguese ambassador had gone on board ' The Happy Return,' in the Hope, ordered" to sail for Holland; but the crew refused to go until they were paid. Other ships were in mutiny the same day. On the 8th of June the Dutch fleet of eighty sail was off Harwich.- It was time t0 stir. The king sent lord Oxford to raise the militia of the eastern counties ; and " my lord Barkeley is going down to Harwich also to look after the militia there; and there is also the duke of Monmouth, and with him a great many young Hectors, the lord Chesterfield, my lord Mande-> ville, and others; " but, adds Mr. Pepys, "to little purpose, I fear,-. but to debauch the country women thereabouts." On the 10th o£- June the Dutch were at the Nore. Then, indeed, the matter was: past the skill of the "young Hectors." The enemy had advanced '"' almost as high as the Hope. Monk has rushed down to Graves- end — " in his shirt," writes Marvell. Money is now forthcoming to' pay the revolted seamen ; but, sighs Pepys, " people that have been ' used to be deceived by us as to money won't believe us ; and we know not, though we have it, how almost to promise it." The Dutch fleet has dropped down to Sheerness. "The alarm was so. great," writes Evelyn, " that it put both country and city into fear — a panic and consternation, such as I hope I shall never see more ; everybody; was flying, none knew why or whither." Monk was at Gravesend, "with a great many idle lords and gentlemen." Op posite them was Tilbury. Did any of these " idle lords and gen tlemen, with their pistols and fooleries," think of the time when the, great queen stood like a rock upon, that shore ; and her people gathered round her with invincible confidence ; and the greatest armament that ever threatened England was scattered by her true gentlemen — the Raleighs and Carews, who loved their country with a filial love, and hurled foul scorn at the invader ? Charles, if not belied by the Dutch, was deliberating in Council on the propriety of a flight to Windsor, by way of example to his terrified people.* On the nth, news came to London that Sheerness was takenv The drums were beating all night for the trained bands to be in arms in the morning, with bullets and powder, and a fortnight's victuals. The Londoners were momentarily relieved of their panic ; * " Correspondence of Evelyn," vol. iS. p. 2 13 ; 10*52. Vol. IV.— 13 194 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. for the Dutch fleet had sailed up the Medway. Chatham was safe, the courtiers said. Monk had stopped the river with chains and booms ; and Upnor Castle was fortified. Chains and booms, and Upnor Castle, availed not long against the resolution of Ruyter and De Witt, who were about to exact the penalty for the wanton des olation of the coasts of the Texel. They went about their work in a manly way — not burning Gravesend, which was really defence less, but breaking through the defences of the Medway, behind which our ships lay unrigged. They were quickly set on fire. In Upnor Castle and the forts at Chatham, there was little ammuni tion ; and the Dutch " made no more of Upnor Castle's shooting, than of a fly." The proud ship which bore the king to England, "the Royal Charles," was secured by the invaders as a trophy; and when they had made their strength sufficiently manifest to the panic-stricken sycophants of the depraved court, they quietly sailed back to the Thames, and enforced a real blockade of London for many weeks. The spirit of patriotism was trodden out of the sailors by neglect and oppression. There were many of them on board the Dutch ships, who called out to their countrymen on the river, " We did heretofore fight for tickets ; now we fight for dol lars." The sailors' wives went up and down the streets of Wapping, crying, " This comes of your not paying our husbands." Mobs as sembled at Westminster, shouting for " a Parliament, a Parlia ment." They broke the Lord Chancellor's windows, and set up a gibbet before his gate. Had the Dutch gone up the Thames be yond Deptford, it is not impossible that the iniquities of the Stuarts might have more quickly come to an end. Such a con summation was not to be desired. The English people had to endure two more decades of misrule, that they might gather strength to fit themselves for constitutional government. Besides the disgrace and humiliation, England suffered little from the Dutch in the Thames and Medway. The Londoners were cut off from their supply of sea-borne coal — no irremediable evil in sum mer, but one that probably hastened a peace. On the 24th of June, Mr. Evelyn writes, " The Dutch fleet still continuing to stop up the river, so as nothing could stir or come out, I was before the Council, and commanded by his majesty to go with some others and search about the environs of the city, now exceedingly dis^ tressed for want of fuel, whether there could be any peat or turf fit for use." The report was, that there was abundance. On the 28th the Dutch fleet was lying triumphantly at the Nore, — "a CLARENDON DEPRIVED OF OFFICE. 195 dreadful spectacle," says Evelyn, " as ever Englishmen saw, and a dishonour never to be wiped off." It was aspectacle of dishonour ' which ias never been seen since, and will never be seen again, unless there should again be such a combination of anti-national elements as in the days of Charles the Second — a profligate and corrupt Court, avaricious and selfish ministers, a bribed Parlia ment, an intolerant Church, a slavish Bench of Justice. If such instruments of evil should again unite their forces, then the or dinary supineness of office may become a heartless indifference to every duty; then the pretentions of the high-born to engross all the functions of administration may become the most shameless avidity for the exorbitant pay of useless posts ; then the people may be gradually brought to lick the dust like oriental slaves ; then our soldiers and sailors may be marshalled in our enemy's ranks, and pilot our enemy's ships, and exult that they fight for dollars. The disgrace of 1667 will not have been in vain, if it teach the great lesson that the corruption of the high is the corruption of the national honour at its fountain head. On the 29th of July a treaty of peace between England, Hol land, and France, was concluded at Breda. The fall of lord Clarendon from power, in 1667, is one of those events whose causes can only be adequately developed, if they can ever be fully and satisfactorily set forth, through an intimate acquaintance with the public documents and private memorials of the period. To attempt such an exposition here, even if the materials for it were at our hand, would manifestly be beyond the scope of a History so general as this. The intrigues of rival statesmen, the vacillations of the sovereign, the passions of parlia mentary factions, require to be fully examined, if we would thoroughly comprehend the concurring influences which hurled the most eminent statesman of the Restoration from his high position. A faint outline of these combinations, in connection with an esti mate of the character of the fallen man, is all that we can pretend to offer. Sir Edward Hyde, of all the companions of the adversity of Charles, was by far the fittest minister to guide him through the extreme difficulties of his altered position. He was hated by the queen-mother. His habits of thought and action were diametri cally opposed to the levities and vices of the king and the younger courtiers. He had many early associations with the struggle for civil rights, which made him a stumbling-block in the way of any 196 , HISTORY OF ENGLAND. broad attempts to emulate the despotisms of other European mon archies. He was by principle and education devotedly attached to the Protestantism of the Church of England. He was thus no object of affection amongst many whose poverty he hadshared, but from whose habits he was altogether alien. But his great abilities were indispensable to Charles ; and thus sir Edward Hyde became the earl of Clarendon, Lord Chancellor, and the real minister of England, all other administrative functionaries being subordinate to him. It was necessary to govern through Parliaments ; and Clarendon, by his experience, his dignified carriage, his rhetorical and literary powers, was eminently fitted for the duties of a parlia mentary minister. He was for a while all-successful. The rooted dislike of the queen-mother was neutralised, even to the point of her graciously receiving the plebeian duchess of York. The king and his associates were compelled to manifest respect to the dec orous Chancellor, and to compensate their submission to his wisdom by their ridicule of his manners. Clarendon's notions of the prerogative, and of the rights of parliaments, were not in accord ance with the vague schemes of being " every inch a king," that silly nobles and slavish churchmen whispered to Charles ; but then Clarendon had imbibed none of the broader doctrines cf civil liberty which had entered into the popular mind since 1640, and was heartily disposed to re-model the monarchy upon the precedents of the days of Elizabeth and the first Stuart. Charles was indif- ¦ ferent to the Church of England, for which Clarendon was strenu ous ; and Charles was for such a toleration of Protestant Dissenters as would include the Catholic; but when Clarendon equally perse cuted Puritans and Papists, Charles let him have his way, for, a Papist at heart himself, if anything, he thought that a general per secution would hasten on a general toleration. There was thus, with the court, a perpetual compromise between the dislike of Clarendon's personal character and the desire to snatch from his policy such advantages as a less scrupulous minister could not have obtained from Parliament. He was hated by the king and the favourites because he had not, when the Parliament was lavish and the nation mad, extracted from the temper of the hour a far greater fixed revenue, such as would have made Parliaments less necessary for the king. But when Parliament had the presump tion to ask for an account of the disposal of the sums that had been voted, then Clarendon's opposition to any interferences with the old power of the Crown made his conscientious scruples about CLARENDON DEPRIVED OF OFFICE. 197 the limits of prerogative less obnoxious. The principles of the man were not fitted for the retrogressive objects of the Crown, ot the progressive movement of the Nation. He was a Conservative, to use the party name of our own day, clinging to the non-essen tials of old institutions and laws, with the obstinate tenacity which makes Conservatism a mere negation. The triumph of statesman ship are not to be accomplished like the victory of the deliverers of Gibeon, whilst the sun remains in the same place ofthe heavens. As early as 1663, the earl of Bristol, a Catholic peer, in his seat in Parliament, attributing to the Lord Chancellor all the evils under which the country laboured, impeached him of high-treason. The opinion of the judges was required ; and they answered, that by the laws of the realm no articles of high-treason could be origin ally exhibited in the House of Peers, by any one peer against another ; and that the matters alleged in the charge against the Lord Chancellor ' did not amount ' to treason. Personal hostility appears to have provoked this ill-judged attack. Four years after wards it was pretty well known that the king was alienated from his grave adviser. Clarendon had made enemies all around him by his faults as well as by his virtues. He was haughty and pas sionate. He was grasping and ostentatious. He had returned from exile in the deepest poverty. In seven years he had acquired a sufficient fqrtune to build a mansion superior to ducal palaces, and to furnish it with the most costly objects of taste and luxury. He was envied by the nobility. He was hated by the people ; for in the grandeur of what they called " Dunkirk House " they saw what they believed to be the evidence of foreign bribery. The duke of Buckingham had been banished from court through a quarrel with lady Castlemaine ; and revenge threw him into the ranks of those to whom the government was. obnoxious. Hebe- came the advocate of the sectaries ; he became the avowed and especial enemy of the Chancellor. For a short time he was sent to the Tower, upon the supposed discovery of some treasonable in trigues ; but he soon regained his liberty, and his royal master was propitiated when the duke had made his peace with " the lady." She interceded for Buckingham ; but at first was unsuccessful. The court tattle said that the king had called Castlemaine a jade that meddled with things she had nothing to do with ; and that Cas tlemaine called the king a fool, who suffered his businessesto be carried on by those who did not understand them.* But very * Pepys, July 12. I98 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. soon " the lady " carried her point ; Buckingham was restored to favour ; Clarendon was sacrified. Charges of the most serious nature were got up against him. The imputation of having sold Dunkirk for his private advantage was confidently maintained. It became known that whilst the Dutch were in the Thames, and the Treasury was without a guinea, he had resisted the advice of the Council that Parliament should be called together, upon the plea that it had been prorogued to a more distant day; but had recommended that money should be levied to pay the troops in the places where they were quartered, and that the sums so raised from individuals should be deducted out of their future taxes. That he had some schemes for forced contributions as a temporary expedient was admitted by himself. Other accusations, all of a very vague na ture, were poured into the king's ear ; who, no doubt, was not in disposed to get rid of one who was a severe monitor, and, though pliant in some things, was not an unscrupulous tool. Charles, through the duke of York, asked Clarendon to resign. He indig nantly refused, saying, that his resignation would amount to a con fession of guilt. After a conference of two hours the great minister saw that his disgrace was resolved upon — disgrace which "had been certainly designed in my lady Castlemaine's chamber." Her aviary looked into Whitehall garden ; and when he went from the king, she rushed from her bed at twelve o'clock at noon — " and thither her women brought her her night-gown; and she stood blessing herself at the old man's going away; and several of the gallants of Whitehall, — of which there were many staying to see the Chancellor's return — did talk to her in her bird-cage." * The king sen1;for the seals. Evelyn went to see Clarendon, and says, " I found him in his bed-chamber very sad. ... He had ene mies at Court, especially the buffoons and ladies of pleasure, be cause he thwarted some of them, and stood in their way." The Parliament had assembled. On the 15th of October, the two Houses voted an address of thanks to the throne for the removal of the Chancellor, and the king in his reply pledged himself never to employ lord Clarendon again in any capacity. This was not enough. Seventeen charges were prepared against him by a Committee of the Commons; and on the 12th of November, the House impeached him of high-treason at the bar of the Peers. There were animated debates in that House, in which Clarendon had * Pepys, August 27. THE CABAL MINISTRY. 199 many supporters. The two Houses got angry. The court became alarmed. Clarendon was advised to leave the kingdom clandes tinely, but he refused. Then the king sent him an express com mand to retire to the Continent. He obeyed ; addressing a letter, vindicating himself, to the House of Peers. An Act was passed on the 29th of December, banishing him for life, unless he should return by the following ist of February. The close of the political career of Clarendon, under circum stances of punishment and disgrace so disproportioned to his public or private demerits, has left no stain .upon his memory. Whatever were his faults as a statesman, he stands upon a far higher eleva tion than the men who accomplished his ruin. As to the king, his parasites and his mistresses, who were in raptures to be freed from his observation and censure, their dislike was Clarendon's high praise. In the encouragement which Charles indirectly gave to attacks upon the minister who had saved him from many of the worst consequences of the rashness of the royalists, and had laboured in the service of his father and himself for twenty-seven years, either in war, or in exile, or in triumph, with a zeal and ability which no other possessed, we see only the heartless ingrat itude of the king, and his utterly selfish notions of the duties of a sovereign. Clarendon had become disagreeable to him, through the very qualities which made the government endurable to high- minded and sober men. Nor was it from any desire to carry out more tolerant principles of ecclesiastical rule, nor from any convic tion that his Chancellor's notions of civil policy were antiquated and in many respects unsuited to the times, that the king sought other advisers. The men who succeeded the great minister made one attempt to remove some of the oppressions under which the Non-conformists laboured. They failed ; and their failure was followed by a more indiscriminate persecution. They made one bold endeavour' at a course of foreign policy which might have again placed England at the head of a union of Protestant free states. For a very brier period the influence of France was shaken off; and then England's king was the pensioner of Louis. Clar endon went into exile. He was some time before he was per mitted to find a resting place ; but he found it at last at Montpelier. Pie was probably never sincerely reconciled to the loss of power and grandeur ; but he believed' that he was reconciled ; and in dedicating himself to a renewal of that literary employment which has given him the best title to the respectful remembrance of 200 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. mankind, he found that consolation which industry never failed to bestow upon a robust understanding, that was also open to religious impressions. He says of himself : — " It pleased God, in a short time, after some recollections, and upon his entire confidence in Him, to restore him to that serenity of mind and resignation of himself to the disposal and good pleasure of God, that they who conversed most with him could not discover the least murmur or impatience in him, or any unevenness in his conversations." When the seals were taken away from Clarendon they were given to sir Orlando Bridgman. The conduct of affairs fell into new hands. Southampton, the most respectable of Charles's first advisers was dead. Monk was worn out. Buckingham first came into power with Arlington as secretary of state, and sir William Coventry. But soon the ministry comprised the five persons known as " The Cabal " — a name which signified what we now call The Cabinet ; but which name was supposed incorrectly to have been formed out of the initial letters of the names of the members, — Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, Lauderdale. The word Cabal had been used long before, to indicate a secret council. Of the new advisers of Charles, Buckingham was the most influen tial at Court, and he made great efforts to be at the same time the most popujar. When Buckingham was taken to the Tower, Clar endon was depressed by the acclamation of the people, who shouted round the prisoner. As Clarendon had supported the Church, Buckingham was the champion of the sectaries. Baxter says, " As the Chancellor had made himself the head of the pre- latical party, who were all for setting up themselves by force, and suffering none that were against them, so Buckingham would now be the head of all those parties that were for liberty of conscience." The candid Non-conformist adds, " For the man was of no religion, but notoriously and professedly lustful ; " but he qualifies his censure with this somewhat high praise, — " and yet of greater wit and parts, and sounder principles as to the interests of humanity and the common good, than most lords in fhe court." * The duke lived in York House, the temporary palace which his father had built, of which nothing now remains but the Water Gate. Here he dwelt during the four or five years of the Cabal administration, affording, as he always continued to afford, abundant materials for. the immortal character of Zimri : — * " Life," Part iii. d. 21. the Cabal ministry. zoi " A man so various, that he scem'd to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome: Stiff in opinion, always in the wrong, Was every tiling by starts and nothing long ; But, in the course of one revolving moon, Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon : Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking, Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking." * Ashley, afterwards earl of Shaftesbury— the Antony Ashley Cooper of the Protectorate, who clung to the Rump Parliament till he saw that Monk had sealed its fate, and then made his peace ' with Charles with surprising readiness — the ablest, and in some respects the most incomprehensible of the statesmen of his time, has had the double immortality of the satire of Butler as well as of Dryden. In Thanet House, in Aldersgate-street, Ashley was at hand to influence the politics of the city. When the mob were roasting rumps in the streets, and were about to handle him roughly as he passed in his carriage, he turned their anger into mirth by his jokes. When the king frowned upon him, he went straight from office to opposition, and made the court disfavour as service able to his ambition as the court's honours and rewards ; — " For by the witchcraft of rebellion Transform'd to a feeble state-cameleon By giving aim from side to side He never fail'd to save his tide ; But got the start of every state, And at a change ne'er came too late." t In a few years more Shaftesbury had earned the praise, or dis praise, of Dryden, " A daring pilot in extremity, Pleas'd with the danger when the waves run high." The history of the Cabal ministry, which extends over a period of six years, is not the history of a Cabinet united by a common principle of agreement upon great questions of domestic and foreign policy. Nor is it the history of a Sovereign asserting his own opinions, and watching over the administration of affairs, under the advice of a Council, and, through the agency of the great officers of State. The monarchs of England, from the Norman times, had been, for the most part, men of remarkable energy of character ; and in default of their capacity for warlike action and public business, some representative of adequate qualifications wielded the executive power. The great kings of the Plantagenet * Dryden, " Absalom and Achitophel.'' t " Hudibras," Part iii. 202 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. race were essentially their own ministers. Henry VIL, Henry VIIL, Elizabeth, were remarkable for their laborious attention to the duties of their great office. Charles I., whether aiming to be despotic, or struggling for his crown and his life, was zealous, active, and self-confident. Charles II. was absolutely indifferent to any higher objects than personal gratification ; and to this cir cumstance we must refer some of the extraordinary anomalies of the government after the fall of Clarendon. Abraham Cowley heard Tom Killigrew say to the king, •' There is a good, honest, able man that I could name, that if your majesty would employ, and. command to see all things well executed, all things would soon be mended ; and this is one Charles Stuart, who now spends his time in employing his lips about the Court, and hath no other employment ; but if you would give him this employment, he were the fittest man in the world to perform it." * Killigrew's estimate of the character of his royal master was altogether false. He was neither honest nor able, with reference to any aptitude for the condition of life to which he was called. He did not desire, he said, to sit like a Turkish sultan, and sentence men to the bowstring ; but he could not endure that a set of fellows should inquire into his conduct. Always professing his love of Parliaments, he was always impatient of their interference. There is something irresistibly -comic in the way in which he tried to manage the House of Lords, in 1669, by being present at their debates. He first sat decently upon the throne, thinking to prevent unpleasant reflections by this restraint upon the freedom of speech. But what he commenced out of policy, under the advice of the crafty Lauderdale, he continued for mere amusement. "The king," writes Burnet, " who was often weary of time, and did not know how to get round the day, liked the going to the House as a pleasant diversion : so he went con stantly. And he quickly left the throne, and stood by the fire, which drew a crowd about him, that broke all the decency of that House ; for, before that time every lord sat regularly in his place ; but the king's coming broke the order of their sitting as became senators. The king's coming thither had a much worse effect ; for he became a common solicitor, not only in public affairs, but even in matters of justice. He would in a very little time have gone the round of the House, and spoke to every one that he thought worth speaking to. And he was apt to do that upon the solicita tion of any of the tidies in favour, or of any that had credit with * Pepys, December 2, 1666. THE CABAL MINISTRY. 203 them." With such a sovereign, as utterly indifferent to the prop erties of his public station as to the decencies of his private life, we can scarcely expect that there should have been any consistent principle of administration. The terrible experience of thirty years imposed upon Charles some cautirfn in the manifestation of his secret desire to be as absolute as his brother Louis of France. The great Bourbon was encumbered with no Parliament ; he had not to humble himself to beg for supplies of insolent Commons ; he was not troubled with any set of fellows to inquire into his conduct and ask for accounts of expenditure ; he had the gabelle and other imposts which fell upon the prostrate poor, without exciting the animosity of the dangerous rich ; he was indeed a king, whose shoe-latchet nobles were proud to unloose, and whose transcendant genius and virtue prelates , rejoiced to com pare with the divine attributes. Such a blissful destiny as that of the Bourbon could not befall the Stuart by ordinary means. Charles would become as great as Louis, as far as his notion of greatness went, by becoming the tributary of Louis. He would sell his country's honour, — he would renounce the religion he had sworn to uphold,— for an adequate price. But this bargain should be a secret one. It should be secret, even from a majority of his own ministers. Upon this point hinges the disgraceful his tory of the Cabal. But though Charles and two of his ministers, Arlington and Clifford, were ready to go any length to make the policy of White hall utterly subservient to the policy of the Louvre, and to bring the creed of Lambeth into very near if not exact conformity with the creed of the Vatican — though Buckingham and Shaftesbury had some complicity in these iniquitous purposes — yet there was a power in the State which had become too 'formidable for king and ministers utterly to despise. The Parliament, servile and corrupt in many compliances, was yet a power that might be roused into sudden indignation by any outrageous exercise of prerogative, and, above all, by any daring attack upon the Protestant tendencies of the nation. The shiftings of politicians, of whom Shaftesbury was the type, from courtiers one day to demagogues the next, were the natural result of the want, during the first ten years of the Restora tion, of any great principle of action which would raise politicians on either side above the mere influences of personal ambition. The Monarchy was an accomplished fact : to fight again for a Commonwealth was no longer possible. The Church was re-estab- 204 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. lished, in triumphant intolerance : Presbyterians and Independents had no standing place for a new struggle. The Crown and the Parliament were both open to corruption ; and their venality taint ed, though not in an equal degree, the advocates of non-resistance and the enemies of that debasing principle. Placemen and patriots each held out the '¦ itching palm " to France. There was no mani fest struggle of opinion against power, till the design to bring back England to the communion of Rome became evident. The resist ance to this attempt roused the nation out of its apparent apathy. The intolerant passion of the multitude— blind, cruel, frantic in its fears — was quickly absorbed into the general determination that England should be Protestant, which identified itself with civil liberty. Religious liberty grew slowly out of the contest, when the reign of the great enemies of all freedom was terminated by their own folly and bigotry. The story of the next twenty years, which brings us to the great era of our modern history, would be incomprehensible, if we did not constantly bear in mind, that public opinion had become a real element in national progress. The Crown was constantly dreaming of the revival of despotism, to be accomplished by force and by corruption. Yet the Crown, almost without a struggle, was bereft of the power of imprisoning without trial, by the passing of the Habeas Corpus Act ; and it lost its control over the freedom of the Press by the expiration of the Licensing system. The Church thought it possible to destroy non-conformity by fines and fetters. In its earlier Liturgy it prayed to be delivered from "false doctrine and heresy ; " it now prayed for deliverance from " false doctrine, heresy, and schism." Yet when it had ejected the Puri tans from the Churches, and had shut up the Conventicles, it laid the foundation of schisms which, in a few years, made dissent a principle which churchmen could not hope to crush and statesmen could not dare to despise. How can we account for the striking anomaly, that with a profligate Court, a corrupt Administration, a venal House of Commons, a tyrannous Church, the nation during the reign of Charles II. was manifestly progressing in the essen tials of freedom, unless we keep in view that from the beginning of the century there had been an incessant struggle of the national mind against every form of despotic power ? The desire for lib erty, civil and spiritual, had become almost an instinct. The great leaders in this battle had passed away. The men who by fits aspired to be tribunes of the people were treacherous or inconstant; ATTEMPTS AT TOLERATION. 205 But the spirit of the nation was not dead. It made itself heard in Parliament, with a voice that grew louder and louder, till the tor rent was once again dammed up. A few more years of tyranny without disguise and then the end. The first movements of the Cabal ministry were towards a high and liberal policy — toleration for non-conformists, and an alliance with free Protestant States. A greater liberty to dissenters from the Church followed the fall of Clarendon. We see transient and accidental motives for this passing toleration, rather than the as sertion of a fixed principle. The bishops had supported Claren don, and the king and his new ministers and favorites were there fore out of humour with the bishops. The fire of London had rendered it impossible to carry on the spiritual instruction of the people by the established Clergy ; and therefore assemblies to hear the sermons of Presbyterians and Independents were not visited with the penalties of the Conventicle Act. It was, says Baxter, " at the first a thing too gross to forbid an undone people all public worshipping of God, with too great rigour ; and if they had been so forbidden, poverty had left them so little to lose as would have made them desperately go on."* Sir Orlando Bridg man, now Lord Keeper, desired a conference with Baxter, " about a comprehension and toleration," in January, 1668. The Lord Chief Baron Hale, and Bishop Wilkins, were agreed with the Lord Keeper iri promoting this salutary work. The king, says Burnet, " seemed now to go into moderation and comprehension with so much heartiness, that both Bridgman and Wilkins be lieved he was in earnest in it ; though there was nothing that the popish councils were more fixed in, than to oppose all motions of that kind. But the king saw it was necessary to recover the affec tions of his people." The opportunity of recovering the affec tions of the great Puritan body, scattered, depressed, but still in fluential, was thrown away. There were propositions on the part of the non-conformists ; and amendments were suggested and ac cepted. Baxter says that fourteen hundred non-conformable min isters would have yielded to these "hard terms;" but that when the Parliament met, the active prelates and prelatists prevailed to prevent any bill of comprehension or indulgence to be brought in ; " and the Lord Keeper that had called us, and set us on work, himself turned that way, and talked after as if he understood us not." In the king-'s speech, February 10, 1668, he recommended * "'Life," Part iii- p. 22. 206 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. that they would seriously think of some course to beget a better union and composure in the minds of his Protestant subjects in matters of religion. On the 8th of April, a motion in the House of Commons that his majesty should send for such persons as he should think fit, to make proposals to him in order to the uniting of his Protestant subjects, was negatived by 176 votes against 70. At the opening of the Session of Parliament in j668, the king announced that he had made a league defensive with the States- General of the United Provinces, to which Sweden had become a party. This was the Triple Alliance. The nation saw with rea sonable apprehension the development of the vast schemes of am bition of Louis XIV. He was at war with Spain ; but the great empire upon which the sun never set was fast falling to pieces — not perishing like a grand old house, overthrown by a hurricane's fury, but smouldering away with the dry-rot in every timber. France, on the contrary, was rising into the position of the great est power in Eifrope. Her able but vain-glorious king already looked upon the Spanish Netherlands as his certain prey. The United Provinces were hateful to him as the seat of religious and civil liberty. The crisis was come when England, by a return to the policy of Cromwell, might have taken her place again at the head of the free Protestant states of Europe. Was there any real intention in the king or in his ministry to raise up England as a barrier against the designs of France ? Or was the mission of Temple to the Hague, by which a defensive alliance was con cluded with De Witt in five days, a mere blind to conceal the dark and dangerous schemes for a secret alliance with France ? When Charles announced to Parliament this league with the United Provinces and Sweden, it was thought to be " the only good pub lic thing that hath been done since the king came into England."* It was a marvel of diplomacy. De Witt and Temple met as two honest men, without any finesse ; and they quickly concluded a treaty which they believed to be for the honour and safety of both their countries. "Their candour, their freedom, and the most confidential disclosures, were the result of true policy." f This treaty, says Burnet, "was certainly the masterpiece of king Charles's life ; and if he had stuck to it, it would have been both the strength and glory of his reign. This disposed the people to forgive all that was past, and to renew their confidence in him, which was shaken by the whole conduct of the Dutch war." • P«py»- t Burkt, " Regicide^Peace." THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE. 207 At the very time when the ambassador of England was nego tiating the treaty which promised to be " the strength and glory of his reign," the king was making proposals to Louis for a clandes tine treaty, by which England was to be " leased out " to France, " Like to a tenement or pelting farm." 208 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER X. Visit to England of the Duchess of Orleans. — Secret Negotiations of the king Louis XIV. — Renewed persecutions of Non -comformists. — Trial of William Penn. — The Coventry Act. — Assault on the Duke of Ormond. — Blood attempts to steal the Regalia. — The mystery of his pardon. — Shutting-up of the Exchequer. — Alliance with France. — War with Holland. — Naval War — Invasion of the United Provinces.— Murder of the De Witts. — The Prince of Orange. — Shaftesbury Lord Chancellor. — Declaration of Indulgence. — The Test Act. There is a brief record, in the Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, of an event, seemingly unimportant, which led to very serious consequences: "In the summer of 1670 the duchess of Orleans, the king's sister, came over to Dover, where she was met by the king, the duke of York, and the whole Court. Here it was that she confirmed his highness the duke in the Popish superstition, of which he had as yet been barely suspected. " * The duke of York required no confirmation in his belief. He had long been in secret a Roman Catholic, and attended the private rites of that religion ; but at the same time he was in communion with the Church of England. A Jesuit missionary remonstrated with him against this double dealing. James communicated to the king his determina tion publicly to embrace the Roman Catholic faith. Charles pro- •fessed the same desire. He, also, though known to be indifferent as to religious matters, had been suspected. Cosmo, the duke of Tuscany, came to England in 1669; and the author of the duke's travels says of Charles, that though he "observes with exact at tention the religious rites of the Church of England, there is rea son to believe that he does not exactly acquiesce, and that he may perhaps cherish other inclinations." Of the Cabal ministry Clif ford and Arlington were attached to the Church of Rome. Charles and James took these ministers into their confidence at the begin ning of 1669. The result was, a negotiation with France, which went on for many months ; and of which the duchess of Orleans came over, in 1670, to urge the points which the French king was anxious to accomplish by irresistible temptations. The • secret * " Travels and Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, ' 1S31 ; p. 171. SECRET NEGOTIATIONS WITH LOUIS XIV. 209 treaty -between Louis XIV. and Charles II. was concluded at Dover,' on the 22nd of May, 1670* Its principal stipulations were, that the king of England should publicly profess himself a Catholic, when he should consider it expedient to make such dec laration ; that he should join with the king of France in a war against the United Provinces ; that to enable Charles to suppress any insurrection of his own subjects, he should receive two mil lions of livres, and be aided with an armed force of six thousand men ; that of the conquests arising out of the joint war Charles should be satisfied with a part of Zealand. The secret treaty hav ing been accomplished, another treaty was prepared, in which the article concerning the king's change of religion was omitted ; and to this Shaftesbury, Buckingham, and Lauderdale were privy. Charles and his ministers went back to London, to carry on a sys tem of falsehood towards the nation, almost unmatehable amongst the frauds of Courts and Cabinets. The beautiful duchess of Orleans returned to France, to die a victim, as many believed, to the jealousy of her husband. At the meeting of Parliament in ¦October, 1670, the Lord Keeper Bridgman -who we may conclude -to have been ignorant of the atrocious confederacy of the king and his more confidential servants — set forth the advantages of the Triple Alliance, and the necessity of being prepared against the ambition of France, by an augmentation of the fleet. The Com mons voted that " his majesty should be supplied proportionably to his present occasions ; " and when a grant of eight hundred thousand pounds was obtained, the Parliament was prorogued. The manifestation of a tolerant principle at home, at the be ginning of 1668, was as short lived as the inclination to a high and honourable foreign policy. The Act of 1664 against Con venticles, whiqh was about to expire in 1670, was renewed in a more stringent shape. The 12th Clause of this Statute threw down the barriers against the most illegal exercise of its severities : " That this Act, and all clauses therein contained, should be con strued most largely and beneficially for the suppressing of Con venticles, and for the justification and encouragement of all per sons to be employed in the execution thereof ; and that no record, warrant, or mittimus to be made by virtue of this Act, or any pro ceedings thereupon, shall be reversed, avoided, or any way im- * It was published for the first time by Dr. Lingard, from the original in the posses sion of Lord Clifford. But the most important of the articles had long previously ap peared in sir -Jdhn Dalrymple's History. Vol. IV.— 14 2IO HISTORY OF ENGLAND. peached, by reason of any default in form." * Waller, who, at his advanced age, was still the wit of the House of Commons; said of the dissenters, " these people are like children's tops ; whip them, and they stand up ; let them alone, and they fall." f Calamy at tributes the saying to bishop Wilkins, who, with one other bishop, opposed this Statute. Sheldon, the primate, urged the most vig orous execution of the penal clauses, which were to drive the non conforming preachers from the boarded hovels, which they called tabernacles, fitted up by their congregations when the parish churches of London were in ruins. This Act, according to Bur net, " put things in such disorder, that many of the trading men of the city began to talk of removing with their stocks over to Hol land." The spirit of too many of the higher clergy was in decided opposition to the temper of bishop Wilkins. Parker, chaplain to Sheldon, and afterwards bishop of Oxford, laid himself open to the lash of Andrew Marvell, when he proclaimed that " tender consciences, instead of being complied with, must be restrained with more peremptory and unyielding rigour than naked and un- sanctified villainy." X Burnet says of this Statute against Con venticles, " the king was much for having it pass, not that he in tended to execute it, but h*. was glad to have that body of men at mercy, and to force them to concur in the design for a general toleration." This was a part of the scheme, upon which the Secret Treaty with France was built. Severity at one time against non-conformists, indulgence at another time, had one sole object in view,— to prepare the nation for such an exercise of the pre rogative as would dispense with the laws against Papists, and make the people indifferent to a Roman Catholic king, and a Ro man Catholic heir-apparent. It was not that Charles cared for any form of religion ; but he had an earnest longing for the wages of proselytism which Louis was to bestow. The fines and imprisonments under the Conventicle Act fell, for the most part, upon obscure persons. But there was one young man, whose father was of historical celebrity, and of an elevated station, who came under the penalties for non -conformity, and fought the battle of dissent in a manner very embarrassing to intolerant churchmen and arbitrary lawyers. William Penn, the only son of the famous admiral, much to the annoyance of his •Statutes of the Realm, 22 Car. II. c. i. vol. v. p. 656. t " Parliamentary History," vol. iv. col. 445. t See Marvell' s " Rehearsal Transprosed," vol. ii. p. 290, ed. 1673. TRIAL OF WILLIAM PENN. 211 family, had embraced the principles of George Fox, the founder of the sect of Quakers. He had manifested his spiritual tendencies when a student at Oxford. He had been imprisoned in Ireland, in 1667, for attending the meetings of Friends ; he had begun to preach and to publish in 1668. On the 14th of August, 1670, William Penn, who, in common with others of his fraternity, whol ly disregarded the Conventicle Act, going to the Meeting-house in Gracechurch-street, found the door closed and guarded ; and having addressed the people outside, was arrested. On the ist of September, he, with William Mead, a linen-draper, was indicted at the Old Bailey for preaching and speaking, to the great disturbance of the king's peace. On the 3rd of September they were brought to trial. It was altogether a remarkable scene ; in which the pris oners conducted themselves with unusual boldness ; the lord- mayor and recorder manifested more than the common insolence of authority in bad times ; and the jury could not be compelled to give a dishonest verdict. In the first instance the jury acquitted Mead, and found Penn guilty of speaking to an assembly in Grace church-street. They refused to find that it was an unlawful assembly, as the recorder insisted. They were locked up without fire or food through Saturday night. On Sunday, the'y again and again refused to amend their verdict. The recorder, Howel, a fitting predecessor of George Jefferies, who- afterwards carried "judicial infamy to its extreme height, in a paroxysm of fury de clared it would be never well with England, till something like the inquisition was introduced. For another night the jury were locked up, to endure hunger and thirst. When they were brought into court on Monday morning, they still clung to their first verdict. But the recorder maintaining it was no verdict, they jointly and separately pronounced William- Penn not guilty. The jury were each fined forty marks ; Penn was fined for contempt of Court. All refused to pay the fines, and were imprisoned. The jury ap pealed to the Court of Common Pleas, and were released by a decision of the judges. Penn's fine was paid without his knowl edge.* Doctor Parker, in his zeal for arbitrary power, had ventured to say " 'Tis better to submit to the unreasonable impositions of Nero and Caligula, than to hazard the dissolution of the State." Mar vell, with a terrible bitterness, pointed the moral of the crimes and * A full account of this trial is given in " William Penn, an Historical Biography," byW. H. Dixon. 2 12 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the fates of Nero and Caligula. * The profligacy of the Court had begun to show itself in more daring outrages than the indecencies and riots which rivalled the orgies of the lowest of mankind. " The jolly blades, racing, dancing, feasting, and revelling, more resem bling a luxurious and abandoned rout than a Christian Court," might scandalise decent loyal gentlemen such as Evelyn. f The new concubine, Mademoiselle Querouaille, that Louis had sent over to confirm Charles in his proposed apostasy to his religion and his treason to his country, might suggest some fears to honest states men such as Temple. But the great majority of the Parliament, and especially of the House of Commons, chosen in the royalist excitement of the Restoration, had long looked upon such matters with indifference. Another feeling was now growing up. Sus picions attached to the foreign policy of the Court. The nation felt disgraced in its extravagant profligacy. Murmurs were heard even amongst the habitual supporters of the government. In a Committee of Ways and Means it was proposed in the Commons that a tax should be paid " by every one that resorts to any play houses," of a shilling for a box-seat, sixpence for the pit, and three pence for other places. It was urged that the Players were the king's servants, " and a part of his pleasure." Sir John Coventry, member for Weymouth, asked " If the king's pleasure lay amongst the men or the women players ? "-{ The offence was visited with a very summary punishment, perpetrated under the order of the duke of Monmouth, the king's son, and, as was universally believed, with the king's connivance. As sir John Coventry was passing through the Haymarket, he was set upon by Sandys, lieutenant of Monmouth's troop, and a number of his men, and by these ruffians his nose was nearly cut off. The House had adjourned for the Christmas holidays, and upon its re-assembly the first business was to inquire into this breach of privilege. Some members wished the matter to be left to the course of law ; but the great body were resolved to have reparation for this outrage. Strong words were spoken, such as indicated that the spirit of 1640 was not dead. Are we to be under proscriptions, as in the times of Sylla and Marius, asked sir John Hotham. Sir Robert Holt exclaimed that Praetorian guards had been the betrayers of the empire. He alluded to a recent assault upon the duke of Ormond, saying, " Lords' noses be as ours are, unless they be of steel."* A Bill was passed " to * " Rehearsal Transprosed," vol. ii. p. 155. | " Diary," October 21, 1671. t '' Parliamentary History," vol. iv. c61. 461. BLOOD ATTEMPTS TO STEAL THE REGALIA. 213 prevent malicious maiming and wounding," It recited the outrage upon sir John Coventry on the 21st of December ; and setting forth that sir John Sandys and three others, who had been indicted for felony, had fled from justice, enacted that they should be banished for ever unless they surrendered by a given day. Other clauses of this Bill constitute what is known as the Coventry Act, by which malicious maiming is made a capital felony.* The king, as if to show his resentment of the humiliation to which he was subjected in giving his assent to this Bill, had the indecency to grant a par don to all the persons who, on the 28th of February, had assaulted the watch, and deliberately killed the beadle of the ward. His son, Monmouth, was the leader of that riot, as he was the contriver of the assault on sir John Coventry. The outrage upon the duke of Ormond, to which allusion was made in the House of Commons, took place on the 6th of Decem ber, 1670. He was returning in his carriage from a city dinner. Two footmen at the side of the carriage were suddenly stopped ; and the duke being dragged out, was placed on horseback behind a man to whom he was fastened by a bejt. Onward they sped towards Tyburn ; but the duke contrived to hoist his companion out of the saddle, and both coming to the ground together, the ruffian unloosed the belt, and fled upon the approach of some pas sengers. At Tyburn preparations were made for hanging the duke upon the common gallows. An inscrutable mystery surrounded this crime. Large rewards were offered, with pardon to accom plices. On Jhe 9th of May, 1671, five months after the assault upon the duke, the famous attempt was made to steal the regalia in the Tower. It was not till after the Restoration that the crown jewels were exhibited to strangers. In April a man in a clergy man's cassock, with his wife, came to see the regalia. The lady being taken ill, was kindly accommodated in the house of Talbot Edwards, the keeper of the jewel-office. An acquaintance com menced. The pious clergyman said the grace at dinner with the extremest unction ; proposed that his wealthy nephew should marry the keeper's daughter ; altogether a most fascinating man. The nephew was to come on a certain day. The clergyman was duly there, with three friends. One remained in the house, whilst the three others went with the keeper to behold the crown, and orb, and sceptre, and other regal splendours. They gagged the old man ; beat him till he was senseless ; began to file the sceptre into * 22 & 23 Car. II. c. 1 214 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. two pieces, but being disturbed by the unexpected arrival of Edwards' son, made off with the crown and orb. The alarm was given : and they were finally seized on the Tower Wharf. The matter being reported to the king, they were sent for to Whitehall ; and Charles was himself present at their examination. The chief in the robbery of the regalia was found to be a man known as colonel Blood. He boldly avowed that he was the leader of the assault upon the duke of Ormond, and that he meant to have hanged him at Tyburn. He once, he said, had been prepared to shoot the king himself, but awed by the presence of majesty, the pistol dropped from his hand. He might be put to death ; but there were three hundred ready to avenge his blood ; who, if he were spared, would become the king's faithful followers. Charles pardoned him ; asked the duke of Ormond to pardon him ; and gave him a pension. The king told Ormond that he had certain reasons for asking him to pardon Blood. There were mysteries about that Court of which the good nature of "the merry monarch " — to use the dainty words of glib historians — was the convenient veil. It is difficult to believe in such a state of society as we find recorded by Evelyn : " Dined at Mr. Treasurer's, in company with Monsieur de Grammont and several French noblemen, and one Blood, that impudent bold fel low who had not long before attempted to steal the imperial crown itself out of the Tower." How he came to be pardoned, and re ceived rewards, Evelyn says he could never come to understand. "This man," he adds, "had not only a daring but a villainous unmerciful look, a false countenance, but very well spoken, and dangerously insinuating." A supply having been obtained, the Parliament was prorogued on the 22nd of April. The king candidly said it was not his inten tion that they should meet again for almost a year. The proroga tion was hastened by the desire to put an end to a controversy between the two Houses, as to the right of the Lords to make alterations in Money-bills sent up from the Commons. The Lords had reduced the amount of an imposition on sugar. The Com mons had established the right of originating money-bills, but the Peers contended that the power of alteration, as well as of rejec tion, remained with them* With the Parliament got rid of, at least for a year, the government had now a clear field for carrying * The arguments of the Conferences are given fully in the Parliamentary History, and there is a very able summary of the historical question as to this right in Mr. Hallam's " Constitutional History," Chap. xiii. SHUTTING-UP OF THE EXCHEQUER. 215 out their foreign policy. France was now to receive the fullest support in its designs upon the United Provinces. The Triple Alliance was to be flung to the winds. Temple had come home in the autumn of 1670 ; had been coldly received by the ministers and the king ; and had been told by Clifford that he might declare publicly how the ministers of the States "were a company of rogues and rascals, and not fit for his majesty or any other prince to have anything to do with." * Temple retired from public life to his garden and his books. Clifford was prepared to find resources for a war with Holland — a treacherous, wanton, and anti-national war — in an act compared with which Blood's stealing the crown was a small villainy. Bankers and other possessors of capital had been accustomed to make advancements to the Exchequer, upon receiving assignments of some portion of the revenue, to be set aside for paying the principal and interest of the money borrowed. One million three hundred thousand pounds, were at this time pledged for immediate payment. A proclamation was issued, suspending all payments for one year ; but promising interest at the rate of six per cent. This interest was not paid for many years. The bankers made the advances to the government chiefly upon sums intrusted to them. Daniel Defoe, in 1671, was a boy of ten years' old' ; but he became early associated with trade, and he describes how the shutting the Exchequer came like a clap of thunder upon the city. The panic was universal. There was a run upon all the goldsmiths, whether their cash was in the Exchequer or in their own strong boxes. The most reputable traders were compelled to break. Private families were exposed to extreme distress. Widows and orphans were ruined, says Evelyn. The promise of payment in a year was, of course, not kept. There was not only the war to provide for ; but a new mistress, exceeding in prodigality all who had gone before her. Mademoiselle de Querouaille, the agent and spy of the French king,- became duchess of Portsmouth. The lady had been installed as chief " Miss," with ceremonies, short of those of the altar, " after the manner of a married bride." f " Rob me the Exchequer, Hal," said the king to Clifford ; and then " all went merry as a marriage-bell." Clifford hinted the scheme to Evelyn, "but," says he, " it will soon be open again, and everybody satisfied. " A scheme was concerted, as iniquitous as the shutting the Exchequer. At a * Letters of Temple in " Courtenay's Life," vol. i. p. 344. t Evelyn, 10th October, 1671. 2i6 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. time when the confidence of the government of the States in the faith of England was not wholly destroyed, it was decided to cap ture a fleet of Dutch merchantmen from the Levant as it passed up the Channel. The scheme, worthy of a band of pirates rather than of a great nation, signally failed. The Hollanders, though not prepared for any act of hostility, appointed a convoy to the vessels which bore the rich Smyrna merchandise. Sir Robert Holmes and lord Ossory had been appointed to the command of the fleet that was to make prize of the Dutch merchantmen. Holmes had no desire to share the prize with any other admiral, and therefore in his cruise asked no assistance from sir Edward Sprague's fleet from the Mediterranean, that he met at the back of the Isle of Wight. The English admiral was unprepared for the Dutch convoy of seven men of war. He was gallantly met ; and was repulsed, having captured only four sail out of sixty. The government of king Charles was not able to repay the subjects whom it had robbed, by the robbery of its neighbours, as it had proposed. The agents of this inglorious enterprise were ashamed of it. Lord Ossory deplored to Evelyn that he had been ever persuaded to engage in an expedition which revolted against his sense of honour and justice. The declaration of war from England against Holland appeared on the 17th of March, 1672. That of France was issued at the same time. Some show was made in the English declaration of causes of offence — commercial injuries ; refusal to strike to the English flag in the narrow seas ; insults to the king by defamatory publications. Supporters of the government in England, as well as its opponents, felt that it was a war of wrong and tyranny. Evelyn writes that the pretended occasion was that, " some time before, the Merlin yacht chancing to sail through the Dutch fleet, their admiral did not strike to that trifling vessel Surely this was a quarrel slenderly grounded, and not becoming Christian neighbours." It was a corrupt attempt to aid the powerful in oppressing the weak. At first successful, it ultimately failed. At the beginning of May, the duke of York took the command of the English fleet. Having united with a French squadron, they found the Dutch fleet lying near Ostend. But the skill of De Ruyter avoided an engagement, and the English fleet returned to the coast to take in further supplies of men and provisions. De Ruyter came out, and a stubborn battle took place on the 28th of May, in Southwold bay. The French had little share in the INVASION OF THE UNITED PROVINCES. 217 engagement. The fight lasted the whole day, with little advantage on either side. The earl of Sandwich and most of his crew were lost in the Royal James, which was blown up by a fire-ship. Evelyn insinuates that the earl was left to perish, fighting like a lion, though hating the war, " to gratify the pride and envy " of some -that were not his friends.* Whilst England was battling at sea with little real advantage, the French armies were pouring into Holland. The fortresses on the Rhine were quickly in their possession ; town after town of the United Provinces yielded without a struggle ; the outposts of the French were seen from Amsterdam. Then was the great com mercial republic on the point of becoming an easy prey to the ambition of that power that had already visions of universal domin ion. The Government of the United Provinces was torn by fac tions. Petty oligarchies presided over the separate States. The dignity of Stadtholder had expired with Prince William II. in 1650. His widow, the daughter of Charles I., gave birth to a son, a few days after her husband's death. That son was now twenty- two years of age — the head of the illustrious house of Orange- Nassau, but without power in his own country. The highest duties of the first magistrate of the republic had been honourably dis charged, by John de Witt, the Grand Pensionary of the Province of Holland. When the French invasion filled the people of the Seven Provinces with terror, their rage was not directed against their enemies, but against their government. The popular feeling in favour of the prince of Orange broke forth in the blind hatred of an infuriated multitude against the statesmen who desired the per manent suppression of the office of Stadtholder, a dignity almost monarchical. The young prince William was called to the com mand of the forces when the French troops entered the States., Cornelius de Witt was arrested, upon an accusation of having- plotted against the life of, prince William. The accusation could not be established ; and his brother John went to his prison at the Hague to convey him away. Both the brothers were murdered by an infuriated mob. Suspicious as was the commencement of his great career, the young prince of Orange proved the deliverer of his country. He roused the fainting courage of the, Deputies in the States General. He rejected all the overtures of Charles and Louis. No terms of advantage to himself would induce him to compromise the honour of his nation. Relationship with the * Evelyn, "Diary," May 31. 2 1 8 HISTORY OF ENGLAND Crown of England was to him nothing in comparison -with saving the Seven Provinces from the yoke of France. The dykes were opened. The land was subjected to the dominion of the water, an enemy less to be dreaded than a foreign foe. There was no sub sistence for the invading army in that desert of sand and sea. The French retreated. The guilty league of England and France was powerless. Louis returned to Paris, leaving some troops in the garrisons he had won. The Dutch admiral avoided another engage ment with the English fleet. The war went on languidly for two years, amidst the dissatisfaction of the English people. The treasury of Charles was exhausted. The promised payment to the public creditors was postponed by proclamation. The Parliament had been prorogued from the 22nd of April, 1671. It was called together on the 5th of February, 1673. For twenty-one months the government had pursued an unmolested career. It had now to meet an opposition, jealous and indignant, but more factious than high principled. In November, 1672, Anthony Ashley Cooper, who had been created earl of Shaftesbury in the previous April, was raised to the dignity of Lord Chancellor, upon the retirement, or dismissal, of Sir Orlando Bridgman from the office of Lord Keeper. The dislike which the lawyers of his time naturally felt at the elevation to the highest judicial office of a man not of the legal profession, may be found in the " Examen " of Roger North. His great offence was that he declaimed "against the tribe of the Court of Chancery, officers and counsel, and their methods of ordering the business of the Court. . . . For the Chancery, he would teach the Bar that a man of sense was above all their forms." * Shaftesbury possibly saw that a servile adherence to forms was a real impediment to the course of equity; and by a vigorous demonstration against forms which ruined the suitors by delay, was enabled to earn the high praise as a judge of the poet who was employed to blacken his character as a statesman. " Discerning eyes ; " " clean hands ; " " Swift of despatch ; " " easy of access ; " " Unbrib'd, unbought, the wretched to redress ; " are qualities which have some weight with us, although " the great. poet probably never was in the Court of Chancery in Iris life, and, though the first of English critics in polite literature, he could not have formed a very correct opinion as to the propriety of an order or decree in Equity." f Dryden, as is reported, displeased the » " Examen," p. 46. t Lord Campbell ; " Lives of Chancellors," p. 310. SHAFTESBURY LORD CHANCELLOR. 2 19 king by this tribute to the judicial virtues of Shaftesbury. Abhor ring the statesman, he ought not to have praised the judge. Another contemporary writer is to be disbelieved, according to lord Campbell, because his estimate of Shaftesbury was unmixed panegyric. The enemy, and the friend, are equally untrustworthy. " Except being free from gross corruption.be was the worst judge that ever sat in the Court." * How is this to be proved ? " There are a few of his decisions to be found in the books, but none of them are of the slightest importance." f We still hold ourselves free to believe Dryden, and the other contemporary,, who says that, under Shaftesbury, " justice ran in an equal channel, so that the cause of the rich was not suffered to swallow up the right of the poor ; " that " the mischievous consequences which commonly arise from the delays, and other practices, of that Court were, by his ingenious and judicious management, very much abated." + Nor do we consider that as Chancellor he " played fantastic tricks which could be expected only from a fool and a coxcomb,"§ because he revived the ancient form of the Chancellor and the Judges riding to Westminster Hall, on the first day of Hilary term, on which occasion Judge Twisden " was laid along in the dirt ; " and because he sat upon the bench " in an ash-coloured gown, silver laced." These amusing characteristics of one who, not wholly different from subsequent Chancellors, possessed some of the eccentricities with the more sterling qualities of genius, are set forth with much vivacity by Roger North, who hated Shaftesbury with an intensity that the opposite opinions of factions alone can engender. When ever we encounter this remarkable man in his future political career, we must judge him not uncharitably if we would judge him rightly. He was. long made the scapegoat for the political offences whether of the Court party or the Country party. It is very diffi cult to understand his principles or his policy ; but it is sufficient to make us cautious in his condemnation, to know that he was maligned by the supporters of arbitrary power, and looked up to by the advocates of freedom and toleration. Mr. Fox probably came to the safest conclusion upon his character when he said, "As to making him a real patriot, or friend to our ideas of liberty, it is impossible, at least in my opinion. On the other hand, he is very far from being the devil he is described." || The Parliament met on the 4th of February, 1673. In March, * Lord Campbell ; " Lives of Chancellors," p. 3 1 1. t Ibid. , p. 3 13- X " Rawleigh Redivivus." § " Lives of Chancellors," p. 307- II Introduction to " History of James II." 220 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 1672, two days before the war was declared against the United Provinces, Charles had issued a Declaration of Indulgence in re ligion, in which he declared his "will and pleasure to be, that the execution of all and all manner of penal laws in matters ecclesias tical, against whatsoever sort of non-conformists or recusants be immediately suspended1; and they are hereby suspended." The relief to Protestant dissenters may be estimated from the fact that John Bunyan, who for twelve years had been confined in Bedford gaol, during which long period he had written " The Pilgrim's Pro gress," was almost immediately released. It would be difficult to understand how such a measure of justice and humanity should not have been universally acceptable to all but the most bigoted, unless we take into account that through its general operation the laws against Papists were relaxed, as well as those against Protestant non-conformists. But the Declaration of Indulgence produced a ferment in the nation which rendered it unpopular even amongst the numerous class who had been harassed by the Act of LTni- formity, the Five Mile Act, and the Conventicle Acts. They were more favoured than the Roman Catholics, who were expressly re fused public places for their worship, though its private exercise was indirectly sanctioned. In a tract, written by John Locke^ the intimate friend of Shaftesbury, the arguments in favour of the Declaration of Indulgence are fully set forth. The writer of this " Letter from a Person of Quality to his friend in the country," says that he asked Lord Shaftesbury what he meant by supporting the Declaration, which seemed to assume a power to repeal and suspend all our laws, to destroy the Church, to overthrow the Pro testant religion, and to tolerate Popery. He represents the earl to have contended that a government ought to be enabled to sus pend any penal law, in the interval of the legislative power, but that the two Houses of Parliament ought to determine such indul gence, and restore the law to its full execution; that he had joined in the Declaration for preserving the Protestant religion, by open ing a way for the English Church to live peaceablv with the dis senters ; that Papists ought to have no pressure laid upon them except to be made incapable of office ; and he asked whether, in this age of the world, articles and matters of religion should become the only accessible ways to our civil rights ? * There was a pas sage in the Declaration which was sufficient to fill the people with * The letter is printed in Locke's Works ; also in " Parliamentary History," Vol. IV., Appendix V. DECLARATION OF INDULGENCE. 221 alarm: " We think ourselves obliged to-make use of that supreme power in ecclesiastical matters which is not only inherent in us, but hath been declared and recognised to be so by several statutes and acts of parliament." Upon their meeting, the Commons voted, Upon a division of 168 to 116, "that penal statutes, in matters ecclesiastical, cannot be suspended but by Act of Parliament." Mr. Love, one of the members for the city of London, strenuously supported the address to the king to withdraw the Declaration. A member said to him, " Why, Mr. Love, you are a Dissenter your self; it is very ungrateful that you who receive the benefit should object against the manner." Defoe, who calls Mr. Alderman Love " that truly English Roman," records his answer to the objection : " I am a Dissenter, and thereby unhappily obnoxious to the law ; and if you catch me in the corn you may put me in the pound. The law against the Dissenters I should be glad to see repealed by the same authority that made it ; but while it is a law, the king cannot repeal it by proclamation : And I had much rather see the Dissenters suffer by the rigour of the law, though I suffer with them, than see all the laws of England trampled under the foot of the prerogative, as in this example."* The Parliament and the nation were not sufficiently advanced to repeal all penal laws that affected the exercise of religion. To prevent the dangers which were almost universally dreaded of the growth of Romanism, the principle of intolerance was still upheld. The Court, not indeed from any sense of justice, but for the advancement of its covert objects, for some time resisted this vote of the Commons. But the spirit of opposition was too strong to be rashly braved. The king withdrew the Declaration of Indulgence, after Shaftesbury, in the House of Lords, had turned to the popular side, and declared it illegal. But the Country party, as opposed to the Court part)', were resolved to manifest their hostility to Popery by a practical measure which should reach the highest places. The duke of York's opinions were no secret ; the king was suspected ; the arti cles on religion in the treaty with France Could not be shrouded in impenetrable mystery ; the first duchess of York had died in the profession of Catholicism ; another alliance was about to be formed with a young Catholic princess, Mary of Modena. The barrier to be raised against the great dangers to repel which the nation was rousing itself, was the Test Act. The House of Commons resolved on the 28th of February, 1673, " that all persons who shall refuse * See Wilson's " Life of Defoe," vol. i. p. 58. 22 2 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, and receive the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England, shall be incapable of all public employments, military and civil." On tl*e 1 2th of March, the Test Act, entitled a " Bill to prevent the Growth of Popery," was read a third time. It required, in addition (o the oaths, that a declaration renouncing the doctrine of transub- stantiation should be made before admission to office. The pro posed law affected the Puritans as much as the Papists, in the point, of communion with the Church ; but they made little opposi tion. They partook of the common dread that Romanism might come back in some bold or insiduous form, and with it the arbi trary power which had so generally been its companion. An at tempt to give them a special measure of relief was defeated by the prorogation of Parliament. The effect of the Test Act was deci sive. The duke of York resigned his post of Lord High Admiral, and prince Rupert was appointed to the command of the fleet. Lord Clifford refused to take the test, and retired from his great office of Lord High Treasurer. The Commons voted the supplies with little reluctance, without going into the questions of the Dutch war or the shutting the Exchequer. There were six months of prorogation, during which the war was continued at sea with alter nate success and defeat. At home the signs of an approaching storm were becoming manifest. THE DANBY MINISTRY. 223 CHAPTER XI. The Danby Ministry. — State of Parties. — Separate Peace with Holland. — Charles pen sioned by Louis XIV. — Popular Discontents. — Coffee-houses closed by Proclama tion.— Re-opened. — Meeting of Parliament after fifteen months' prorogation. — Four Peers committed to the Tower. — Marriage of the Prince of Orange to the Princess Mary. — Violent contentions between the king and the Parliament. — Intrigues with France of the Parliamentary Opposition. — The Popish Plot. The Parliament had been prorogued to the 20th of October. The instant the Commons met they voted an address to the king, desiring that the intended marriage of the Duke of York with the princess of Modena should not take place. The Parliament was immediately prorogued for a week. On the 27th the king- opened the Session in person ; and his Chancellor, Shaftesbury, addressed the members in the us^ial terms of eulogy and hope. The address against the marriage of the Duke of York was presented ; and Charles returned for answer that the alliance " was completed, ac cording to the forms used amongst princes, and by his royal con sent and authority." A spirit of decided hostility against the gov ernment was now evident in the Commons. They refused a supply until "this kingdom be effectually secured from the dangers of Popery, and Popish counsels and councillors." They voted that a Standing Army was a grievance. They resolved upon a second Address on the subject of the duke's marriage. It was to have been presented on the 4th of November, but the king came sud- ¦ denly to the House of Lords, and ordered that the Commons should be summoned. A singular scene took place. The Speaker and the Usher of the Black Rod met at the door of the House of Commons ; and the Speaker having entered, the door was shut, and he was hurried to the chair. It was immediately moved that the alliance with France was a grievance ; that' the evil counsellors about the king were a grievance ; that the duke of Lauderdale was a grievance. The Black Rod was knocking at the door with im patient loudness ; the House resounded with cries of ' question ' ; the Speaker leapt out of the chair, and in a wild tumult the mem bers followed him to the House of Lords. The king then pro- 224 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. rogued the Parliament to the 7th of January. During the interval Shaftesbury was dismissed from the custody of the Great Seal ; Buckingham retired ; the Cabal ministry was broken up. Sir Thomas Osborne, soon after created earl of Danby, became the chief minister, and retained power till 1678; Shaftesbury became the great leader of the party opposed to the Court. The history of England for the next seven years is the history of a continual struggle between the Crown and the Commons, during which time we trace, amidst some honesty of purpose, an equal degradation of the principles of loyalty and of independence. Monarchical govern ment was never more profligate and anti-national, and representa tive government was never more factious and corrupt, than in the years from 1673 to 1681. The House of Commons elected after the Restoration first met on the 8th of May, 1661. It continued to sit till the 25th of January, 1679. Vacancies had been filled up from time to time by new elections ; and in these what was called the Country Party gradually preponderated. But the general com position^ the House was a curious admixture of by-gone and cur rent opinions. There is " A Letter from a Parliament Man to his Friend," published in 1675, and attributed to Shaftesbury, which describes with admirable humour, and probably with equal truth,. the composition of the House of Commons: * — "Sir, I see you are greatly scandalized at our slow and ,confused proceedings. I con fess you have cause enough ;. but were you but within these walls for one half day, and saw the strange make and complexion that this house is of, you would wonder as much that ever you won dered at it ; for we are such a pied Parliament, that none can say of what colour we are ; for we consist of Old Cavaliers, Old Round heads, Indigent Courtiers, and true Country-Gentlemen : the two latter are most numerous, and would in probability bring things to some issue were they not clogged with the humourous uncertain ties of the former. For the Old Cavalier, grown aged, and almost past his vice, is damnable godly, and makes his doting piety more a plague to the world, than his youthful debauchery was : he forces his Loyalty to strike sail to his Religion, and could be content to pare the nails a little of the Civil Government, so you would but let him sharpen the Ecclesiastical talons : which behaviour of his so exasperates the Round-head, that he, on the other hand, cares not what increase the interest of the Crown receives, so he can but diminish that of the Mitre ; so that the Round-head had rather en- * Printed in " Parliamentary History," vol. iv., Appendix IV. STATE OF PARTIES. 225 slave the man than the conscience; the Cavalier, rather the con science than the man ; there being a sufficient stock of animosity" as proper matter to work upon. Upon these, therefore, the Cour tier usually plays : for if any Anti-Court motion be made, be .'gains the Round-heads either to oppose or assent, by telling them, If they will join him now, he will join with them for Liberty of Con science. And when any affair is started on behalf of the country, he assures the Cavaliers, if they will then stand by him, he will then join with them in promotingabill against the Fanatics. Thus play they on both hands, that no motion of a public nature is made but they win upon the one or other of them : and by this art gain a majority against the country gentlemen, which otherwise they would never have : wherefore it were happy that we had neither Round head nor Cavalier in the House ; for they are each of them so prejudicate against the other, that their sitting here signifies no thing but their fostering their old venom, and lying at catch to snap every advantage to bear down each other, though it be in the de struction of their country." The same letter does not spare the Corruption of that very considerable body of members that it terms " Indigent;" a corruption which king Charles and king Louis each found availing with patriots as well as with placemen : " You now see all our shapes, save only the Indigents, concerning whom I need say but little, for their votes are publicly saleable for aguinea and a dinner every day in the week, unless the House be upon Money or a Minister of State ; for that is their harvest; and then they make their earnings suit the work they are about, which in clines them most constantly as sure clients to the Court. For what with gaining the one, and saving the other, they now and then ad venture a vote on the Country side ; but the dread of Dissolution makes them straight tack about. The only thing we are obliged to them for is, that they do nothing gratis, but make every tax as well chargeable to the Court as burdensome to the country, and save no man's neck but they break his purse." At the opening of the Session of Parliament In 1674, the king uttered these words with his own lips : " I know you have heard much of my alliance with France, and I believe it hath been very strangely misrepresented to yon, as if there were certain secret ar ticles of dangerous consequence ; but I will make no difficulty of letting the treaties, and all the articles of them, without any the least reserve, to be seen by a small committee of both Houses, who may report to you the true scope of them." Charles I. did not Vol, IV.— 15 226 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. hesitate to employ indirect falsehood ; but he never uttered such an audacious lie as his son now used, to stem the discontents which were gathering around him. Supplies were wanted to carry on the Dutch war; but the nation hated the war, and the Commons would not grant the supplies. To avert greater dangers a separate peace was made with Holland. The war went on between France and the United Provinces, who were now fully supported by Spain and the German powers. The noble resistance of the Prince of Orange to the ambition of Louis had saved his country ; but had England taken a more honest course, future wars arising out of the same lust of dominion might have been effectually prevented. The Parliament was in some degree propitiated by the separate peace with Holland ; but it was in a dangerous temper, and was quickly prorogued. It met again on the 13th of April, 1675. English troops under Monmouth had been left to assist the French, not withstanding the English peace with Holland. The House of Commons demanded their recall. The violent scenes between furious partisans were suddenly mitigated, as if a god had de scended to separate the combatants in a cloud. The god of money had effected this peacefulness. The English troops remained as auxiliaries of the French. After a protracted struggle to extend the oath required to be taken by officers of corporations to privy counsellors and members of parliament, which attempt was de feated by Shaftesbury, the Parliament was prorogued. There was another short Session. It was again prorogued for fifteen months on the 22nd of November. The alternations of indulgence towards non-conformists and their persecution was one of the most striking symptoms of the utter want of principle in the conduct of public affairs. The sufferings of a large body of people were never taken into account when the Court and the Parliament were each striving to rule by factions. Defoe, who well knew the system which had been in operation from his boyhood, said, " the persecution of Dissenters has been all along the effect of state policy, more than error of zeal or a mistake of religion." Persecution " has very seldom been carried on any where from mere zeal, but with a complication of private ends, in trigues, and all kinds of abstracted villainy." * Under Danby's administration, in 1675, the king issued proclamations enforcing the laws against non conformists. How these measures worked may be seen in Baxter's simple relation : " I was so long wearied * " Review,'' vol. ii. quoted in Wilson's " Life," vol. i. p. 60. CHARLES PENSIONED BY LOUIS XIV 227 with keeping my doors shut against them that came to distrain on my goods for preaching, that I was fain to go from my house, and sell all my goods, and to hide my library first and afterwards to sell it" He shifted his abode. " When I had ceased preaching I was, being newly risen from extremity of pain, suddenly surprised in my house by a poor violent informer, and many constables and officers, who rushed in and apprehended me, and served on me one warrant to seize on my person for coming within five miles of a Corporation, and live more warrants to distrain for an hundred and ninety pounds, for five sermons." * Though the king was strait ened in his means of extravagance by the jealousy ot Parliament, the prodigality of the Court was as manifest as ever. On the loth of September, 1675, Evelyn writes in his Diary: "I was casu- .ally showed the duchess of Portsmouth's splendid apartment at Whitehall, luxuriously furnished, and with ten times the rich ness and glory beyond the queen's ; such massy pieces of plate. whole tables, and stands of incredible value." The lady looked down with contempt upon her sister-strumpets. She affected a decency that was not characteristic of some other ladies. When the wit of Nell Gwynn was praised, "yes," exclaimed La Que- rouaille, " but anyone may know she has been an orange-wench by her swearing." The great duchess was the arbitress of the destiny of statesmen. She quarrelled with Buckingham, and he was driven into opposition. She corresponded with the French monarch, who settled an estate upon her for her valuable aid in the degradation of England. Time did not diminish her influence over the besot ted king. Incredible as it may appear, there is a record of partic ular payments to her out of the Secret Service Money in the one year of l68t, of 136,668/. 10s. f The most hidden crimes cannot wholly be concealed, especially when subordinate agents are con nected with them. The long prorogation of the Parliament in No vember, 1675, was a specific arrangement between Charles and Louis, for which the unworthy king of England received five hun dred thousand crowns. The two sovereigns, with the connivance of Danby and Lauderdale, concluded a formal agreement not to enter upon any treaties but with mutual consent ; and Charles ac cepted a pension, upon his pledge to prorogue or dissolve any Par liament that attempted to force such treaties upon him. The money was regularly paid by the French minister to Chiffinch,"the notpri- * " Life of Baxter," Part iii. pp. 172. 191. t " Monies received and paid for Secret Services ; " Camden Society. 228 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ous pander to the vices of his master ; and the degraded king reg ularly signed a receipt for the wages of his iniquity. Such things could not go on without exciting some suspicion. How could the extravagance of the Court be maintained ? Where did the money come from ? The annual revenue was large, but all knew that it was insufficient to meet the riots and follies of Whitehall. Seri ous thinkers began to murmur. Gossiping loungers about the coffee-booses began to sneer and whisper. Coffee-houses were in those days what clubs are in our day — the great marts for the in terchange of town talk, political, or literary, or fashionable, or scan dalous, or simply stupid. A Coffee-house, says a tract of 1673, " is an exchange where haberdashers of political small-wares meet, and mutually abuse each other, and the public, with bottom less stories." * Roger North takes a more serious view of Coffee house gossip, in 1675: "There was such licentiousness of sedi tious and really treasonable discourse, in coffee-houses, of which there were accounts daily brought to the king, that it was considered if coffee-houses ought not to be put down." f Clarendon, in 1666, had proposed either to put down coffee-houses, or to employ spies to frequent them and report the conversation. If in 1675 the king had daily reports of " treasonable discourse," we may pre sume that the spy-system had been tried, although it was not quite efficient. On the 29th of December, a proclamation appeared, re calling all the licences issued for the sale of coffee, and ordering all coffee-houses to be shut up, " because in such houses, and by the meeting of disaffected persons in them, divers false, malicious, and scandalous reports were devised and spread abroad, to the defamation of his majesty's government, and the disturbance of the quiet and peace of the realm." The licences were withdrawn, through a legal quibble upon the same Statute under which they had been issued. By the Act granting the king certain excise du ties in perpetuity, t a. ditty of fourpence was imposed " for every gallon of coffee made and sold, to be paid by the maker." The licence to sell was under a subsequent Act, by which the Justices in Sessions, or the Chief Magistrate of a Corporation, were to grant Licences for the selling of Coffee, Chocolate, Sherbet, or Tea, no Licence being to be granted unless the retailer had first given security for the payment of the clues to the king. § There was ho complaint that the securities had not been given, or that the * " Harleian Miscellany," vol. viii. p. 7. f "Lives ofthe Norths," vol. Up. 316. t ii C II. c. 12. S 15 Car. II. c. 11. COFFEE-HOUSES RE-OPENED. 229 dues were unpaid. The pretence under which the licences were recalled was, that as the Statute made no mention of a time for which the licences were granted, they might be recalled at any time by a higher authority than that of the magistrates who issued them. There never was a more flagrant violation of law under a show of some submission to law. The Coffee-houses were closed. "The great Coffee-house in Covent Garden" — -Will's Coffee house—where Mr. Pepys saw in 1664, "Dryden the poet, and all the wits of the town, and Harris the player, and Mr. floole of our college," was suddenly shut up at the merry Christmas time. Mr. Dryden had no longer there " his armed chair, which in the winter had a settled and prescriptive place by the fire." * His opera of " The State of Innocence and Fall of Man " was his last previous dramatic production ; and he could no longer tell to the groups around him, how when he went to the old blind schoolmaster in Bunhill-fields, and asked "leave to put his Paradise Lost into a drama, in rhyme, Mr. Milton received him very civilly, and told him he would give him leave to tag his verses." f Milton about a year before, had been carried to his last resting-place in Crip- plesrate-church ; and amongst the " treasonable discourse " of the fre quenters of the coffee-houses some might have uttered the thought that Milton was not far wrong when, in his last political treatise, he raised his warning voice against the way his countrymen were marching, " to those calamities which attend always and unavoid ably on luxury, all national judgments under foreign and domestic slavery." X Probably no political measure was more indicative of a disposition in the government to attack the liberties of the peo ple in their social habits than this shutting-up of the coffee-houses. The popular indignation soon compelled the government to retract its proclamation. " The faction was much incensed," writes North. "They said that Mr. Attorney [sir William Jones] should answer it in Parliament." Mr. Attorney was frightened ; and possibly some higher authorities were not at their ease. Permission was given to re-open the houses for a certain time ; under a severe ad monition to the keepers, that they should stop the reading of all scan dalous Dooks and papers, and hinder every scandalous report against the government. Despotism would be more dangerous though not more odious than it is, amongst nations with pretensions to civ * " Johnson's Lives of the Poets ; " Cunningham's edit. vol. i. p. 338. Aubrey, " Lives," vol. iii. p. 444. X " Way to establish a free Commonwealth." 230 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ilisation, if it had something less of the weakness and folly which always accompanies its measures for the repression of opinion. At the opening ofthe Session of Parliament on the 15th of Feb ruary, 1677, the Lord Chancellor, Finch, made an elaborate speech which, says Mr. Southey, " contains passages which are as worthy of attention now as they were when they were delivered."* Such a passage as the following would be more worthy of attention, had it not been repeated, with very slight variation, by every par liamentary orator from that day to this, with whom the dead calm of national apathy is the perfection of national happiness — the highest glory of a sovereign to " be rowed in state over the ocean of public tranquillity by the public slavery." f The words of Lord Chancellor Nottingham are these : " It is a great and a dangerous mistake in those who think that peace at home is well enough pre served, so long as the sword is not drawn ; whereas, in truth, nothing deserves the name of peace but unity ; such an unity as flows from an unshaken trust and confidence between the king and his people . from a due reverence and obedience to his law and his government • from a religious and an awful care not to disturb the ancient land marks." X These are the common-places which have been entered in many a book besides Mr. Southey's. " Trust and confidence between the king and his people " had been manifested by a pro rogation of Parliament for fifteen months. A fierce debate took place on this question. The duke of Buckingham maintained that the prorogation for so long a time amounted to a dissolution, being contrary to the statutes of Edward III., which required the annual calling of Parliament. Lords Shaftesbury, Salisbury, and Wharton supported this opinion ; and by way of silencing them were ordered to be sent to the Tower, unless they begged pardon of the king and the House. They refused, and were imprisoned. Such commit tals by either House terminate with the Session; but the govern ment contrived to keep these dangerous rivals out of the way for more than a year, by adjournments instead of prorogations. In the Commons, the Country party were in a minority upon this question. The bribery of the Lord Treasurer had been more effectual than the eloquence of the Lord Chancellor. The instalment of the king's pension from France, paid in February, was applied to get votes for a large grant. But the greater part of the supply was * " Southey's Common-place Book," vol. i. p. 106. t Marvell. " Rehearsal Transprosed," vol. ii, p. 293. I: '' Pari. History," vol. iv. Co 80 ,. MARRIAGE OF THE PRINCE OF ORANGE. 23 1 devoted to the support of the navy ; and with this sum the Com mons would not trust the Treasurer, but appointed their own re ceivers to superintend its disbursement. The French were now carrying all resistance before them in the Spanish Netherlands. The prince of Orange was defeated at Cassel. Valenciennes and Cambray were surrendered. The Commons voted an address praying the king to oppose the French monarch, and save the Netherlands from his grasp. Charles required an immediate grant as a preliminary to a declaration of war. The House refused it. Then was resorted to that disgusting system of foreign bribery by Spain to obtain the grant, by France to prevent it, which has brought such great disgrace upon many of the public men of this period, and which in some degree qualifies the same baseness in the king. The grant being refused, Charles adjourned the Par liament ; obtained an increase of his pension, from Louis ; and gave his promise accordingly that he would keep off the meeting of the troublesome representatives who urged him into war, and yet were afraid to give him the means of carrying it on. When sir William Temple, in 1668, having concluded the Triple Alliance, returned to the Hague as Ambassador, he described the prince of Orarige as " a young man of more parts than ordinary, and of the better sort ; that is, not lying in that kind of wit which is neither of use to one's self nor to any body else, but in good plain sense." Temple adds, never any body raved so much after England, as well the language, as all else that belonged to it." * William was then in his nineteenth year. When Temple went back to the Plague in 1674 the young man had applied his plain sense and his higher qualities — if most high qualities be not in cluded in plain sense — to take the position of the deliverer of his country. He had measured his strength with the great Conde; and in the battle of Seneffe, disastrous as it was, had earned from- the French veteran the praise that he had acted in everything like an old captain, except in venturing his person tod much like a young soldier. Temple in his second embassy had hinted at the possibility of an union with the daughter of the duke of York. The proposal was renewed more formally, but the prince of Orange did not then respond. He suspected the disposition of the Eng lish government to favour the designs of Louis XIV. He was himself resolved to struggle, "as he had seen a poor old man tug ging alone in a little boat upon a canal, against the eddy of a sluice. * Letter quoted in Courtenay's " Life of Temple," vol. i. p. 2S6. 232 I HISTORY OF ENGLAND. This old man's business, and mine, are too like one another."* But the desire for an English alliance overcame this repugnance to the union. Probably he looked far into the future. William came to England in 1677. On the 19th of October the marriage between him and Mary, the eldest daughter of the duke of York, was agreed upon. On the 4th of November it was solemnised—" to the great joy of the nation," says Reresby ; ''for his highness being a prot estant prince, this match in a great measure expelled the fears that the majority had conceived concerning popery." f Dr. Edward Lake, who was chaplain and tutor to the princesses Mary and Anne, in his diary of the 16th of November, writes : "The wind being easterly, their highnesses were still detained at St. James's. This day the court began to whisper the prince's sullenness or clownish- ness, that he took no notice of his princess at the play and ball, nor came to see her at St. James's the day preceding this designed for their departure." X With the usual earnestness of his character, Wil liam was labouring to induce the king his uncle to take a bold and honourable part in the negotiations for peace wilh France ; and it is very likely that he neglected to pay to his bride those attentions which policy, if not love, would have demanded. In after life Mary showed the depth of her affection for her husband, so cold in his demeanour, so high-minded in real deeds. The sweetness of her nature was eminently fitted for his support and consolation in the great trials, and the arduous duties, of his life. The chap lain records that Mary wept incessantly all the morning of their departure. " The queen observing her highness to weep as she -took leave of her majesty, would have comforted her with the con sideration of her own condition when she came into England, and had never till then seen the king ; to whom her highness presently replied, ' But, madam, you came into England ; but I am going out of England.' " § The marriage of the prince Orange with the princess Mary gave offence to the king of France. He regarded it as a breach of faith on the part of his pensioner, the king of England, and he stopped the payment of the sum for which Charles had agreed to prevent any meeting of Parliament till April, 1678. Before that time Louis expected to have been in a condition to dictate terms to the Allies. When the pensioner saw his pay stopped, he called the Parliament together, on the 28th of January. To attempt to unravel the knot * Conversation with Temple, " Life of Temple," vol. i. p. 4S8. t " Memoirs," p. 199. X " Camden Miscellany," vol. i. 5 [Aid. PARLIAMENTARY INTRIGUES. 233 of the complicated intrigues of this period would be as wearisome to our readers as unsatisfactory to ourselves. The king announced to the Parliament that he had made such alliances with Holland as were for the preservation of Flanders, and had withdrawn the auxiliary English troops from the French service. The king further asked for money to carry on the war against France, so as to support a fleet of ninety sail, and an army of forty thousand men. The fast- and-loose game which was played throughout this Session has lefta stain upon parliamentary government. It was impossible for the Dutch and their allies, and equally impossible for the English people, to understand the movements of the Court party and the Country party as exhibited in the votes of Parliament. Well m ight the prince of Orange say, " Was ever anything so hot and so cold as this Court of yours ? Will the king never learn a word that I shall never for get since my last passage to England, when, in a great storm, the captain was all night crying out to the men at the helm, ' Steady ! Steady ! Steady ! ' ? " The independent members of the House of Commons knew that a prompt assistance to tbe Allies was abso lutely necessary to control the ambitious designs of France. They urged the war, but they hesitated to vote the supplies, or clogged the vote by vexatious conditions. " Great debates," says Reresby, "had arisen upon this affair, and the reason of the violent opposi tion it met with was the desire in some to oppose the Crown, though in the very thing they themselves wished for, the nation being ever desirous of a war with France ; and a jealousy in others that the king indeed intended to raise an army, but never designed ' to go on with the war ; and, to say the truth, some of the king's own party were not very sure of the contrary." * There was a violent debate on the 14th of March, very imperfectly reported. Reresby says of this debate, " Several speeches were made in the House, full fraught of jealousies and fears, and particularly with regard to the army at this time levying ; as if it rather intended to erect absolute monarchy at home, than infest the enemy abroad."! The Commons on the 29th of April received a message from the king, desiring that the House would immediately enter into a con sideration of a supply for him, for his majesty must either disband the men, or pay them. The king and the representatives of the people now came to violent issues. A supply was refused unless a war was declared against France ; if not the army must be dis banded. The army had been raised, and was encamped on Hounslow * " Memoirs," p. 200 t Ibid,, p. 303. 234 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Heath. Evelyn there looked upon these forces on the 29th of June : " We saw the new-raised army encamped, designed against France, in pretence at least ; but which gave umbrage to the Par liament. His majesty and a world of company were in the field, and the whole army in battalia, a very glorious sight. Now were brought into service a new sort of soldiers called grenadiers, who were dexterous in flinging hand grenades, every one having a pouch full." What Evelyn, a steady loyalist, thought a pretence, is the only justification for the undoubted fact that some of the oppo sition to the Court was the result of a secret connexion formed with the Ambassadors of Louis by some of the parliamentary leaders. Money was bestowed upon the more unscrupulous. We cannot think, even if the designs of Charles upon the liberties of his coun try had been manifest to Hollis, and Russell, and Sidney, instead of being merely suspected, that they were justified in their in trigues with any foreign prince, and especially with a monarch so opposed to freedom and national independence as Louis XIV. Undoubtedly their conduct was some apology for Charles in that policy of evasion and delay which allowed France to conclude a peace upon far more advantageous terms than Louis could have obtained if William of Orange had been adequately supported. The peace of Nimeguen, concluded on the 4th of August, left Louis a large portion of his gains in this war of aggression. Eng land had the disgrace of the most complicated faithlessness to all honourable principle. She lost her national position in Europe, and became a by-word for despotic states, and a scandal to the few nations that were free. She stood alone in possessing a govern ment in which the opinions of the people were supposed to have a voice through their representatives. These manifestations of weakness and dishonour were held to be inherent in a mixed con stitution of king and parliament, and men were taught to think that arbitrary power was -a safer and more glorious thing than regulated freedom. Despotism is always ready to rejoice when the due bal ance of representative government is disturbed by the violence or the corruption of selfish factions. On the 8th of July an Act was passed for granting a supply*to the king of upwards of ^600,000, "for disbanding the army, and for other uses." On the 15th the Parliament was prorogued. Amidst the conflicts of party one Statute of this period marks the great fact that religious intolerance had assumed a milder form. " It is enacted " That the Writ commonly called Breve de Heret- THE POPISH PLOT. 235 ico comburendo, with all process and proceedings thereupon, in order to the executing such Writ, or following or depending there upon, and all punishment by death in pursuance of any Ecclesias tical Censures, be from henceforth utterly taken away and abol ished." * But if the progress of opinion had wiped out of the Statute Book the horrible law that heretics should be burnt, the recollection of the days when that law was no dead letter was still strong and vivid as ever in the popular mind. The dread of Po pery was the one inextinguishable spark in the temper of the people which the slightest breath might raise into a flame. The great bulk of the nation knew little of the vices of the Court; and even those who dwelt in and around Westminster looked with compla cency upon the tall swarthy gentleman who walked up and down the Mall in St. James' Park at his " wonted large pace ; '' and who, when very humble strangers were presented to him in the Long Gallery at Whitehall, would give them his hand to kiss, and say " God bless you." f They were accustomed to hear of the duke of York's irregular life, and little heeded his private indiscre tions ; but when he became a declared Romanist and had married a Catholic princess, there were no bounds to their dislike and their suspicion. Dissenters from the Church, who practically knew all the hardships of exclusion from civil offices, and from the privi lege of worship according to their own consciences, would hear of no scheme of toleration for Papists. Rousing themselves out of the apathy which had succeeded to their delirium of loyalty, the people had again begun to take a strong interest in public affairs. They felt that the nation had lost character in its foreign transac tions. They saw the old principles of servile obedience, which had been struck down in 1640, again proclaimed as the duties of subjects. They believed, with lord Shaftesbury, that " popery and slavery, like two sisters, go hand in hand ; and sometimes one goes first, and sometimes the other, but wheresoever the one enters the other is following close behind." In the temper that prevailed amongst the people in the summer of 1678, the excesses connected with what is known as the Popish Plot were, like Shakspere's characteristic of murder, " most foul ; " they were also " strange ; " but they were not " unnatural." The nation was under a panic which manifested itself in a temporary insanity. But we are not therefore to conclude that the panic was wholly unreasonable ; that the plot was a pure invention got up by witnesses altogethel * 29 Car. II. c 9. t See " Diary of Henry Teonge," p. 232 236 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. false, at the instigation of Shaftesbury and other unprincipled poli ticians ; that there was no design on the part of Romish intriguers to restore their religion in England, to which the near prospect of a Popish successor to the throne gave abundant encouragement. It is unquestionable that the Jesuits did believe, as was expressed in the letter of Coleman, the secretary of the duke of York, that for " the subduing of a pestilent heresy " — the "mighty work " on their hands — " there were never such hopes of success since the death of queen Mary, as now in our days, when God has given us a prince who is become zealous of being the author and instrument of so glorious a work." The zeal of James was neutralised by the indifference of Charles ; and therefore it was maintained that the destruction of the king was the first object of the Plot. Charles himself ridiculed the notion ; but that is no proof that he wholly disbelieved the existence of some wild scheme for his removal. The rumours of a Popish plot burst upon the nation at the be ginning of October. Evelyn records, under date of the first of this month, that he went to Dr. Tonge, the rector of St. Michael's Wood Street, to see and converse with him at Whitehall, and " with Mr. Oates, one that was lately an apostate to the Church of Rome, and now returned again with this discovery '' of the Popish plot. " Oates was encouraged," continues Evelyn, " and every thing he affirmed taken for gospel. The truth is, the Roman Catholics were exceedingly bold and busy everywhere." Reresby says (hat the first news of the plot, " a design of the Papists to kill the king," came to him in the country, on the loth of October. "Nobody can conceive that was not a witness thereof, what a fer ment this raised amongst all ranks and degrees." Burnet, who says that he was so well instructed in all the steps cf the plot, that he is more capable to give a full account of it than any man he knows, records that three days before Michaejmas Dr. Tonge came to him — "a very, mean divine, and seemed credulous and simple, but I had always looked on him as a sincere man. At this time he told me of strange designs against the king's person." Burnet communicated the information to the Secretary's office ; but learnt that Tonge had been already " making discoveries there, of which they made no other account, but that he intended to get himself to be made a dean." Burnet told Tonge's story "to Littieton and Powell, and they looked on it as a design of lord Danby's, to be laid before the next Session, thereby to dispose them to keep up a greater force, since the papists were plotting against the king's THE POPISH PLOT. 23.7 life." Roger North, on- the contrary, suggests that Shaftesbury " was behind the curtain, and in the depths of the Contrivance." * The generally received account is that one Kirby, on the 13th of August, warned the king, who knew him, not to walk alone in the Park ; ,that the same evening he brought Tonge to Charles, with a narrative of the plot ; that the king referred it to the Lord Treas urer ; that Charles was incredulous, and laughed at the simplicity of Danby in his wish to lay the narrative before the Privy Coun cil. But it may occur to some, bearing in mind the time that ..elapsed between the first information to tbe king and the official notification to the Council, that there was some ground for the conjecture of Littleton and Powel that the Court had its own ob jects in raising the alleged Plot into importance, by encouraging the witnesses in their extravagant relations. The objection of lord Halifax to this theory was reasonable enough. He told Bur net that "considering the suspicions all people had of the duke's religion, he believed every discovery of that sort would raise a flame which it would not be easy to manage." But the objection assumed that the contrivers of such state-engines were duly sensi ble cf the effects they might produce — that " the ingener might contemplate the possibility of being " hoist with his own petar." IX Danby stimulated the revelations of the plot to alarm the Com mons into granting supplies, it did not follow that he would foresee such a storm as would give a violent impulse to all the political movements of the next ten years. Shaftesbury, says Roger North, " was the dry-nurse, and took the charge of leading the monstrous birth till it could crawl albne." It is quite within the range of probability that the Court got up the Plot for its own purposes; and that "the discontented party" took it out of the Court's hands for its own purposes also. Burnet, who relates conversations that he had with the king, rep resents Charles as saying that after Tonge's audience he did not know but some of the particulars related to him might be true, and sent him to lord Danby, "The matter lay in a secret and remiss management for six weeks," till, on Michaelmas eve, Oates- was brought before the Council. He related many discourses he had heard among the Jesuits at St. Omer's of their design to kill the king ; he named persons, places, and times almost without num ber ; he accused Coleman, the duke's secretary. Many Jesuits were seized. Coleman removed, the bulk of his letters previous to his * " Exanjertj" p. 35. 2Tfi HISTORY OF ENGLAND. apprehension ; but two were accidentally left, addressed to the confessor of Louis XIV., which in some degree confirmed the be lief of a design to overthrow the government. Burnet went to Whitehall, and there found Oates and Tonge under a guard. Pre vious to Oates being examined a second time by the Privy Council, he went before sir Edmondbury Godfrey, a zealous Protestant justice of peace, and made oath to the narrative which he after wards published. A fortnight after, Godfrey was missing, having left his home on a Saturday morning. On the following Wednes day his corpse was found in a ditch at some distance out of the town, near Primrose-hill. His own sword was thrust through- his body, but no blood was on his clothes ; on his neck were the marks of strangulation. The Papists were, of course, suspected of his murder ; although the motive was altogether a mystery. On the other hand it was maintained that he had committed suicide. A medal was struck ridiculing this notion, in showing the unfortunate Justice walking with a halter about his neck after he is dead, and St. Denis on the obverse, with his own head in his hand. There was another medal with a portrait of Godfrey, and a representation of the murderers carrying his body on a horse. Roger North, who labours in every way to fasten the invention of the Plot upon the party opposed to the Court, describes the fury of the people on the discovery of this supposed murder; and says that their leaders would have hounded them on to any massacre and destruction, had the military not been in good order. The popular notion was that the murder of Godfrey was to deter all men from any further inquiry into the Plot. There was great excitement at the funeral of the Protestant magistrate, which North has described with sdme humour. "The crowd was prodigious, both at the procession, and in and about the church ; and so heated that anything called Popish, were it cat or dog, had probably gone to pieces in a mo ment. The Catholics all kept close in their houses and lodgings, thinking it a good composition to be safe there ; so far were they from acting violently at that time. But there was all this while up held among the common people an artificial fright, so as almost every man fancied a Popish knife just at his throat. And, at the sermon, besides the preacher, two other thumping divines stood upright in the pulpit, one on each side of him, to guard him from being killed, while he was preaching, by the Papists."* In this feverish state of the popular mind, the Parliament met on the 21st * " Examen," p. 204. THE POPISH PLOT. 239 of October. Charles alluded to information received by him of a design against his person by the Jesuits, but said he would leave the matter to the law. The Parliament immediately determined to take the subject into their own hands. They appointed a Commit tee to inquire into Godfrey's murder and into the Plot ; they ad dressed the king to appoint a solemn fast ; they further desired the removal of all Popish recusants from the metropolis and ten miles round ; before a week had elapsed, a bill was passed by the Com mons to exclude Catholics from both Houses. Oates was exam ined. Coleman's letters were read. On the 1st of November, the Commons came to a resolution, " That, upon the evidence that has already appeared to the House, this House is of opinion, that there hath been, and still is, a damnable and hellish Plot, contrived and carried on by Popish recusants, for the assassinating and murder ing the king, and for subverting the government, and rooting out and destroying the Protestant religion." The Lords unanimously agreed in the Resolution of the Commons. There are two descriptions by impartial witnesses which pre sent striking pictures of the state of the popular mind at this sea son. On the 17th of November, queen Elizabeth's birth-day, there was a mock procession which Calamy, the son of the famous non conformist, saw in his boyhood, and thus relates : " In the midst of vast crowds of spectators, who made great acclamations and showed abundance of satisfaction, there were carried in pageants upon men's shoulders through the chief streets of the city, the effigies of the Pope, with the representation of the devil behind him, whispering in his ear, and wonderfully soothing and caressing him (though he afterwards deserted him, and left him to shift for himself, before he was committed to the flames), together with the likeness of the dead body of sir Edmondbury Godfrey, carried be fore him by one that rode on horseback, designed to remind the people of his execrable murder. And a great number of dignita ries in their copes, with crosses; monks, friars, and Jesuits ; Popish bishops in their mitres, with all their trinkets and appurtenances. Such things as these very discernibly heightened and inflamed the general aversion of the nation from Popery ; but it is to be feared, on the other hand, they put some people, by way of revulsion, upon such desperate expedients as brought us even within an ace of ruin." Daniel Defoe, then also a youth, was greatly excited by the Popish plot, some of the credulities accompanying which he described in his maturer years : " I did firmly believe the reality 24° HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of the plot ; yet, when we ran up that plot to general massacres, fleets of pilgrims, bits and bridles, knives, handcuffs, and a thou sand such things, which people generally talk of, I confess, though a boy, I could not then, nor can now, come up to them. And my reasons were, as they still are, because I see no reason to believe the Papists to be fools, whatever else we had occasion to think of them. I cannot, indeed, spare room to examine the weakness of the notion of a general massacre in England, where the Papists all over the kingdom are not five to a hundred, in some counties not one, and within the city hardly one to a thousand. But, 'tis plain, these notions prevailed to a strange excess, made our city blunder busses to be all new burnished, hat and feathers, shoulder-belt, and all. our military gewgaws come in mode again, till the city trained-bands began to be so rampant, that, like other standing armies, they began to ride upon their masters, and trampled under foot the liberty of that very city they were raised to defend. They were made engines of oppression and disorder, disturbed meeting- bouses, possessed the Guildhall, chose sheriffs, got drunk upon guard, abused the citizens upon their rounds, and their prodigal drunken sentinels murdered several people upon pretence they would not stand at their command. In a populous city, it was im possible but innocent people, either ignorant or perhaps in drink, might run themselves into danger, not imagining they had to do with brutes that would kill their fellow-citizens for such trifles, with the same severity as if in an enemy's country, or on the fron tiers." As there was nothing in the terrors of massacres and inva sions ; of burnings of London and of the shipping in the Thames ; of Jesuits about to rule the land under the seal of the Pope, — too absurd for the multitude to credit ; so there was no eminent person, however loyal and peaceable, who might not become a victim to the accusations of those men who had brought a whole nation into a condition of senseless panic. "All Oates' evidence," says Bur net, " was now so well believed that it was not safe for any man to doubt any part of it." He named peers to whom the Pope had sent over his commissions. He accused Wakeman, the queen's physician, of a project to poison his sovereign. Bedloe, a man of notorious evil life, surrendered himself at Bristol, pretending that he was cognisant of the murder of Godfrey, and could point out the murderers and instigators ; and he then came forward in sup port of the accusations of Oates against certain peers who had THE POPISH PLOT. 241 been apprehended on Oates's charges. The consummation of the impudence of Oates was his attempt to involve the harmless queen in a charge of having concerted the murder of her husband. He told a story that the queen had sent for some Jesuits to Somerset House ; that he went with them, and standing behind a door, heard one in a woman's voice, there being no other woman in the room than the queen, assure them that she would assist in taking off the king. North relates that Oates, at the bar of the House of Com mons, said, " Aye, Taitus Oates, accause Catherine, Quean of England, of Haigh T'raison." * Burnet has a curious relation of his own conversation with the king on this delicate subject. The good bishop's relations have been considered, though perhaps un justly, a little open to doubt ; but we are not entitled to question what he relates of his personal knowledge. " The king spoke much to me concerning Oates's accusing the queen, and acquainted me with the whole progress of it. He said she was a weak wo man, and had some disagreeable humours ; but was not capable of a wicked thing; and, considering bis faultiness towards her in other things, he thought it a horrid thing to abandon her. He said he looked on falsehood and cruelty as the greatest crimes in the sight of God : he knew he had led a bad life, of which he spoke with some sense ; but he was breaking himself of all his faults ; • and he would never do a base and a wicked thing. I spoke on all these subjects which I thought became me, which he took well ; and I encouraged him much in his resolution of not exposing the queen to perish by false swearing." We have thus shown some ludicrous aspects of this famous Plot. The horrible realities connected with it present a fearful example of the atrocities that may be committed under the ex citement of religious animosity. The trials of the accused per sons commenced in November. Stayley, a Catholic banker, was first sacrificed, upon a ridiculous accusation brought forward by Carstairs, a Scotchman, who saw that the trade of false witness was prosperous. He swore that he heard the banker say in French, that the king was a rogue, and that he himself would kill him, if nobody else would. Burnet gave offence by shewing that Car- stairs was an infamous character; and Shaftesbury, as the bishop relates, told him "that all those who undermined the credit of the witnesses were public enemies." The poor banker was tried and was hanged. Coleman was next brought to trial upon charges * Scott, from this hint, has given Oates his peculiar dialect in ' ' Peveril of the Peak." Vol. IV.— 16 242 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. made against him by Oates and Bedloe. The evidence was very inconclusive ; but his letters were against him, although he main tained that he had no idea of bringing in the Catholic religion, but by a general toleration. He was convicted of high treason, and executed. Three Jesuits, Ireland, Grove, and Pickering, were the next victims. Green and Hill, two Papists, and Berry, a Protestant, were then convicted of the murder of sir Edmondbury Godfrey, upon the testimony of Bedloe, and the pretended confession of Prance, a silversmith. The prisons were filled with hundreds of suspected traitors. Five peers were confined in the Tower under impeachment. Scroggs, the Chief Justice, conducted himself, in all the trials, with the most ferocious determination to procure a verdict against the prisoners. Oates in a few months was at the height of his greatness. " He walked about," says North, "with his guards assigned for fear of the Papists murdering him. He had lodgings in Whitehall, and 1200/. per annum pension: And no wonder, after he -had the impudence to say to the House of Lords, in plain terms, that, if they would not help him to more money, he must be forced to help himself. He put on an episco pal garb, except the lawn sleeves; silk gown and cassock,- great hat, satin hatband and rose, long scarf, and was called, or most blasphemously called himself, the Saviour of the nation. Whoever he pointed at was taken up and committed ; so that many people got out of his way, as from a blast, and glad they could prove their two last years' conversation. The very breath of him was 'pestilential, and if it brought not imprisonment, or death, over such on whom it fell, it surely poisoned reputation, and left good protestants ar rant papists, and something worse than that, in danger of being put in the plot as traitors."* We have dwelt at some length upon this Popish Plot; and in their order of time we shall have to give a few other details. It may be thought that such an occurrence might be more briefly re lated; but it is not only strikingly illustrative of the temper of the people, but was really pregnant with important consequences. Dr. Wellwood, who wrote his 'Memoirs' some" twenty years after these events, has expressed, with tolerable impartiality, the view in which they were regarded after the Revolution : — " A great part of the Popish Plot, as it was then sworn to, will in all human probability lie among the darkest scenes of our English history. However, this is certain : the discovery of the Popish Plot had great and * " Examen." THE POPISH PLOT. 243 various effects upon the nation ; and it's from this remarkable period of time we may justly reckon a new era in the English ac count. In the first place, it awakened the nation out of a deep hthargy they had been in for nineteen years together ; and alarmed them with fears and jealousies that have been found to our sad experience but too well grounded. In the next, it gave the rise to, at least settled, that unhappy distinction of Whig and Tory among the people of England, that has since occasioned so many mis chiefs. And lastly, the discovery of the Popish Plot began that open struggle between King Charles and his people, that occa sioned him not only to dissolve his first favourite parliament, and the three others that succeeded ; but likewise to call no more during the rest of his reign. All which made for bringing in ques tion the Charters of London, and other Corporations, with a great many dismal effects that followed." * * " Memoirs of the most material Transactions," &c. 1736, p. 111 244 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER XII. Discovery of the intrigues' of the king with France. — Impeachment of Danby.- Dissolu tion of Parliament. — Elections. — The duke of York goes abroad.— Pretensibrs of Monmouth to legitimacy. — The king's declaration as to his marriage. — The new Council upon Temple's plan. The Exclusion Bill passed in the Commons. — The Habeas Corpus Act. — Continued trials for the -Popish Plot. — Analysis of Payments to the Witnesses. — Persecutions of Covenanters in Scotland — Murder of archbishop Sharp. — Claverhouse defeated at Drumclog. — Monmouth sent to Scotland as General. — Battle cf Bothwell Bridge. — Whig and Tory. — York and Monmouth rivals foi-the Succession. — Proclamation against Petitions. — Abhorrers. The political excitement of the Christmas time of 1678 had not been equalled since the early days of the Long parliament. In the very height of the fever of the Popish Plot a discovery was made of the intrigues of the king with France, which very soon led to the ruin of the Lord Treasurer, Danby. In the secret treaty between Charles and Louis in May, 1678, it was agreed that the English army should be disbanded. The French ambassador, Barillon, pressed its reduction to 8000 men ; which Charles as con stantly evaded; and he is said to have exclaimed, " God's fish ! are all the king of France's promises to make me master of my sub jects come to this ? or does he think that a matter to be done with 8000 men ? " Louis was out of humour with Charles, who appeared disposed to set up for a despot without his brother des pot's aid ; and he urged Ralph Montague, the English minister at Paris, to betray the secrets of their intrigues. Montague was also out of humour with his own government. He came home, and was elected a member of parliament. The Lord Treasurer dreaded Montague's disclosures ; and ordered his papers to be seized, un der pretence that he had held private conferences with the Pope's nuncio. A royal message to this effect was sent to the Commons. "But Montague," says Burnet, "understood the arts of a Court too well to be easily catched." He had put a box, in which certain letters were, "in sure hands, out of the way." The object in en deavouring to obtain possession of these papers was to destroy the evidence ofthe transactions of May, 1678. Montague, in his place in the House said, " I believe that the seizing my cabinets IMPEACHMENT OF DANBY. 245 and papers was to get into their hands some papers of great con sequences, that I have to produce, of the designs of a great minister of state." The box containing these was opened in the House ; and Montague read two letters, one of which, signed Danby, em powered him to stipulate for a payment to the king of six hundred thousand livres annually for three years, as the price of his neu trality. At the bottom of the letter were these words : " This letter is writ by my order, C. R." Mr. Hallam has forcibly ob served of the conduct of the king, as indicated by this letter, that it " bears date five days after an Act had absolutely passed to raise money for carrying on the war ; a circumstance worthy of particu lar attention, as it both puts an end to every pretext or apology which the least scrupulous could venture to urge in behalf of this negotiation, and justifies the Whig party of England in an invinci ble distrust, an inexpiable hatred, of so perfidious a cozener." * There was a passage in this letter of instructions to Montague, which gave dire offence to those in the House of Commons who felt as Englishmen. Charles asked for the pension, " because it will be two or. three years before he can hope to find his Parlia ment in humour to give him supplies, after your having made any peace with France." One member, Mr. Bennet, exclaimed, " I wonder the House sits so silent when they see themselves sold for six millions of livres to the French." Another, Mr. Harbord, said, " I hope now gentlemen's eyes are open, by the design on foot to destroy the government and our liberties." Sir Henry Capel, calling upon the House to impeach Danby of treason, said, " This minister has let the French king grow upon us, and let our king take money from him, to lay aside his people." f From this time the unity which the Lord Chancellor Finch so earnestly implored was impossible. The arts of the Court were met by counter-arts ofthe Opposition; the craft of the despot was resisted by the turbulence of the demagogue ; the same foreign hand which had bribed the king to degrade his country now bribed the Parliament to contend against the king. It is a sickening spectacle. The only consolation is that ultimate good came out of the instant evil. Danby was impeached of high treason. He had reluctantly writ ten this letter at the command of his unworthy master; but the penalty constitutionally fell upon the minister. He defended him self upon the plea that upon the matter of peace and war the king was the sole judge, and that he ought to be obeyed by his minis- * "Constitutional Histpry," chap. xiii. t '"Pari. Hist." vol. iv. 246 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ters of state, as by all his subjects. It is now well understood that the commands of the sovereign furnish no justification for evil measures of the Crown ; that the minister must have the re sponsibility. Danby, though a mere accomplice in guilt, was the one guilty minister ; for the letter said " To the Secretary [sir W. Coventry] you must not mention one syllable of the money." The continuance of proceedings against the Lord Treasurer was inter rupted by the prorogation of Parliament on the 21st of December, and by-its dissolution on the 24th of January, 1679. This was the last Session of the Parliament that had continued since 1661. It commenced in a frenzy of loyalty ; it ended in all the embitterment of discontent at the present, and in dread of the future. Roger North says that the vacation of Parliament " was indeed a dismal one. . . . All populous places were made unquiet with artificial fears and jealousies. . . . All incidents were made wonders, and odd accidents right down prodigies." The London ers were frightened, as if it- were a terrible omen, by a great dark ness in London on a Sunday morning, " so that the people in church could not read in their bibles." North asks a question which shows that our metropolitan atmosphere has not much changed during two hundred years. " To what end is this magnifying, so prodig iously, a common accident in London, there being seldom a winter without it ; for when a common mist mixes with the coal-smoke it must be so ; and out of town, where is no smoke, it is not half so much."* It was fortunate that the elections came to stir the peo ple into real political action, instead of their yielding to vain delu sions and idle fears. It seems, indeed, to have been a most stir ring time. There is a striking picture of an election scene at Nor wich, in sir Thomas Browne's letters. The return for the county of Norfolk was contested ; and a new election took place : " I do not remember such a great poll. I could not but observe the great number of horses which were in the town ; and conceive there might have been five or six thousand, which in time of need might serve for dragoon horses ; besides a great number of coach-horses, and very good saddle-horses of the better sort. Wine we had none but sack and Rhenish, except some made provision thereof before hand ; but there was a strange consumption of beer, and bread, and cakes. Abundance of people slept in the market place, and lay like flocks of sheep in and about the cross." f Evelyn laments that so many from the country came in to vote for his brother as knight of * " Examen," p. 534". t Sir T. Browne's Works, 1S36, vol. i. p. 241. PRETENSIONS OF MONMOUTH TO LEGITIMACY. 247 the shire for Surrey, " that I believe they ate and drank him out near to ,£2000, by a most abominable custom." Burnet says, " The elections were carried with great heat, and went almost everywhere against the Court." The duke of York, two days before the Parliament met on the 6th of March, was presuaded to go abroad. His absence might allay the heat which was manifested against him in the last Parlia ment, when there was a violent debate upon the proviso of the Lords, in the Bill for excluding Catholics from both Houses, that the duke should be exempted. * But the duke of York, before he left the country for a temporary exile, required that his interests in the succession to the Crown should be protected against the pre tended claims, of the duke of Monmouth. This supposed eldest of the many illegitimate children of Charles 1 1, was born at Rotter dam, in 1649. James II. in his "Advice to his Son" in the Stuart Papers, says, " All the knowing world, as well as myself, had many convincing reasons to think he was not the king's son, but Robert Sidney's." His mother, Lucy Waters, who was known as Mrs. Barlow, was a lady of somewhat disreputable life ; but Charles seems to have clung to her with unusual fidelity. She lived on terms of friendly intercourse with the sister of Charles, the princess of Orange, who in writing to her brother says, " your'wife desires me to present her humble duty to you." The term "wife" was probably used in jest by Charles's sister. Mrs. Ba'rlow came to England with the boy in 1656; and is said to have been received by some Cavaliers with attentions paid to royalty. Cromwell had her, in the first place, apprehended, and then sent an order to the Lieutenant of the Tower to release '' the lady of pleasure and the young heir." She went to Paris, and soon after died. The son was received with favour by the queen dowager, Henrietta Maria, and came with her to England in 1662. He was called Master Crofts, from having resided with lord Crofts, and is described by Evelyn as "a pretty spark." In 1663 he was created duke of Mon mouth, and was ordered " to take place of all dukes." He was also married at the same time to the young countess of Buccleugh, a lady of immense fortune. Monmouth did not deserve " the finest lady in the three kingdoms," for he became an abandoned profligate. Charles appears to have been more constantly attached to him than to any other human being ; and to this circumstance may be proba- * Cathoiics had been excluded from the Lower House previous to the statute of 1678 excluding peers. 248 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. bly attributed the very general belief that the king had been mar ried to his mother. The high offices bestowed upon Monmouth were far above his deserts or abilities ; although he had exhibited bravery and judgment in the war of 1673, in which the English as sisted Louis XIV. in his campaign. In 1677 he served on the other side, under the prince of Orange. The notion was either put into his head by the enemies of the duke of York, or he indulged in the delusion through some mysterious stories about documents in a black box, that he was the legitimate heir to the throne. The opinion was too general to be despised ; and it is not surprising, therefore, that .before the duke of York went abroad he should have required his brother to set the matter at rest by a solemn affirmation to the con trary. Charles, on the 3rd of March, declared to his Council, " in the presence of Almighty God, that he had never given or made any contract of marriage, nor was married to any woman whatsoever but his wife, queen Catherine, then living." James, with the duch ess of York, then departed for Brussels. The resumption of the impeachment against lord Danby, upon the meeting of Parliament involved two great constitutional ques tions. One was, whether an impeachment by the Commons in one Parliament could be continued in another Parliament. The Lords resolved that "the dissolution of the last Parliament did not alter the state of the impeachments brought up by the Commons in that Parliament."* The other question was on the right of the king to grant a pardon pending an impeachment. Danby, when he saw the proceedings revived against him, obtained a pardon under the great seal, which the king affixed without the knowledge of the Chancellor. The Commons declared that a pardon to set aside an impeachment could not be pleaded. After various contests, Danby was committed to the Tower, and when a prorogation took place, the impeachment fell to the ground. After the fall of Danby, a great experiment in Administration was resolved upon, on the suggestion of sir William Temple. His notion was that any select body of ministers, such as was known then as a Cabal, and is now called a Cabinet, should not be the principal advisers of the king ; that the Privy Council should be dissolved, and a Council smaller in number should be appointed, with which the management of affairs should be entrusted, the king pledging himself to submit all matters to their advice. This * There were subsequent reversals of this decision; but in the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the resolution of 1679 was affirmed in 1791. THE NEW COUNCIL. 249 new Council was to consist of thirty members, fifteen being high officers of state, and fifteen noblemen and gentlemen of wealth and independence. The wealth was an essential condition in the notion of the projector. The thirty members were to possess estates or revenues amounting to ,£300,000, a sum equal to three-fourths of the income, as then estimated, of the whole House of Commons. The principle was evidently to interpose some great authority in the State between the king and the representatives of the people — something that would be a counterpoise to the vast development of the power of the Lower House.* As an administrative body it • is evident that Temple's Council would prove a failure. It could not essentially differ from the old Privy Council ; for thirty mem bers would be as unfit for the united action of an executive as fifty. The Privy Council of Elizabeth and of James I., as in earlier times, gave orders and signed dispatches. When sovereigns were their own ministers, the inconvenience of a large executive body would interfere little with the rapid and secret conduct of affairs. There was a natural jealousy of Cabal or Cabinets ; but they had become indispensable in the time of Charles II. The opinions of the Lord Keeper Guilford upon the Cabinet Council, are illustrative of this gradual change in the functions of Administration. Roger North says that his relative intended to describe the transactions of the Court, and the state of the empire, during his ministry as Lord Keeper : " He begins with the state of the Cabinet Council, that consisted of those great officers, and courtiers, whom the king relied upon for the interior dispatch of his affairs. . . . This council was derived from the Privy Council, which, originally, was the same thing, and derived out of the magnum concilium. . . . Assemblies at first reasonably constituted of a due number and temper for dispatch of affairs committed to them, by improvident increase came to Jse formal and troublesome, the certain conse quence of multitude ; and thereby a new institution becomes neces sary; whereupon it is found easier and safer to substitute than to dissolve. Thus the Cabinet Council, which at first was but in the nature of a private conversation, came to be a formal Council, and had the direction of -most transactions of the government foreign and domestic." f This opinion of Lord Guilford was formed subsequent to the experiment of 1679, and had no reference to the newly constituted advisers of the Crown. But it is clear that * The design of Temple is most ably elucidated in Lord Macaulay's " Essays," vol. iii. t " Lives," vol. ii. p 50. 250 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Temple's Council would have been as unmanageable as an execu tive body as the Privy Council, which had become unfit for dispatch of affairs " by improvident increase." Some of the popular leaders were of this new Council, such as Russell. Shaftesbury was pro posed by the king, and was nominated president. There was great rejoicing at the formation of this Council. The people thought they should be better governed. The Parliament looked coldly upon the project. The ministers very soon formed into juntos. There was a Cabinet of four members within the Council. None of the hostility of the Commons to the duke of York was disarmed by this nominal union of men of conflicting opinions. The thirty had violent contentions ; and in a short time Shaftesbury appeared in the anomalous character of President of the Council, and leader of the parliamentary Opposition. The conduct of the king in this Council is recorded by the great eulogist of the Court, with singu lar admiration of the royal cleverness. The rolls of justices were laid before the Council, in order to be reformed. " It was pleasant to see with how much wit and good humour the king ordered affairs, to disappoint these reformers. He would not suffer the roll, that was begun with, to be out of his own hand, but pretended to mark the alterations upon it himself. Then, as many of the Council moved for alterations upon the account of good or bad men (terms of art, which for brevity, they used to signify such as the party liked, or would have put out, or not), if the king was content a man should out, he made a mark at his name ; but, if he would not part with him, he found some jocular reason to let him stand; as that he was a good cocker, understood hunting, kept a good house, had good chines of beef, kept good fox-hounds, or some such indifferent matter, which it was ridiculous to contradict or dispute upon. And, in this manner, he frustrated all their intent as to removes." * With such a Council and such a sovereign, it is manifest there could be no abatement of a violent temper in Par liament. The confirmed hostility to the duke of York was mani fested in a Bill for his exclusion from the succession to the throne. To prevent this passing, the Parliament was prorogued on the 26th of May to the 14th of August. The king took this step without communicating with his Council. The Exclusion Bill had passed a second reading of the Commons, and its clauses were being dis cussed in Committee. But there was a measure of greater import ance to the real and permanent interests of the country than this * " Examen,'' p. 77, • CONTINUED TRIALS FOR THE POPISH PLOT. 25 1 premature attempt to disturb the Succession. A great legal reform had been carried through both Houses, and waited the Royal Assent. On that 26th of May Charles, however reluctantly, sanc tioned the utterance of the three old words which make legislation law, when the Bill was presented to him, which now stands in our Statute Bopks-as " An Act for the better securing the Liberty of the Subject, and for Preventing of Imprisonments beyond Seas."* This is the Habeas Corpus Act, the noble enactment which made that clause of the Great Charter which secures the personal liberty of every Englishman a living principle instead of a dead letter. By the Common Law no subject could be illegally imprisoned, for he might sue for the writ of Habeas Corpus, and be heard in open court. But judges, sheriffs, gaolers, used every art to refuse and to evade the writ. The Privy Council would cause men to be confined beyond seas, in the king's foreign dominions, out of the jurisdiction of the Courts of Justice. Political offences, real or pretended, were thus punished more severely than the laws could punish. Suspicion stood in the place of evidence. Unhappy men lingered out years in distant prisons ; and their wrongs were never known except to their oppressors. The strictness and promptitude of the proceedings under the Habeas Corpus Act struck the old weapon of tyranny out of the hands of the powerful. To Shaftes bury, whatever may have been his demerits, we mainly owe the triumph of this great measure. On the same morning that the king gave his assent to the Habeas Corpus Act, he knocked off, perhaps unconsciously, the shackles of the Press. The Licensing Act of 1662 was to continue till the end of the next session of Parliament. All books had been under the control of the Licenser for seventeen years. By the prorogation of the 27th of May, that system came to a temporary close. There was many a struggle yet to be made before Englishmen could point to their own condi tion, and exultingly say, " This is true Liberty, when free-born men Having to advise the public, may speak free." f The Parliament was dissolved by proclamation before the 14th of August, to which day it had been prorogued. The fourth Parliament of Charles II. met on the 7th of October, 1679, but it was prorogued, again and again, for more than a year. During the summer of 1 679 the trials for the Popish Plot went forward, with no abatement of the * 31 Car. II. c. 2. t Milton's motto t) " Liberty of Unlicensed Printing," from Euripides. 252 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. popular outcry against the unhappy Roman Catholics. In June, two Jesuits, Whitbread and Fenwick, who had previously stood at the bar, and had been illegally remanded to prison in defect of evidence, were again indicted, with three others. The cross-swearing on these trials was astounding. The evidence of Oates went to prove a conspiracy of which he became cognizant in London in April 1678. Sixteen of the inmates of St. Omer's came over to the trial, and swore that Oates resided amongst them, uninterruptedly, from January to June. On the other side, eight persons swore that they had seen him in England at the beginning of May. The accused were all found guilty. Langhorne, a Catholic lawyer, was also tried and condemned. The six were executed on the 20th of June. The grossest partiality was manifested from the judgment seat in these trials. Scroggs, the Chief-Justice, kept no bounds of decency in urging the jury to convict. The other judges sat by his side, and interposed no opinion as to the credibility of the evidence. Roger North offers this excuse for his relative, and the rest ofthe ermined tools : " Nothing can qualify the silence, but the inconceivable fury and rage of the community, gentle and simple, at that time, and the consequences of an open opposition to the Chief, whose part it was to act, as he did, demanding no assistance of any of them ; which opposition might have been fatal in many respects : for the creditof the witnesses must have been impeached, which the time would not bear ; and it was not in their office to inter meddle ; for, as to the fact, the jury is to answer. When it is so done by the co-assessors, it is for discretion, and not duty ; the most cogent reason was, that the prejudice was so universal, and strong, that if an apostle had spoken against, no impression had taken place, nor had it done the prisoners any service ; but on the other side, not only the rabble, but even the parliament itself, had flounced at it ; which consideration turned the scales of the discretion, and made those judges rather let a vessel drive, which they could not stop, and reserve themselves for fairer opportunities, when such might happen, for them to do some good, without pre tending to remove mountains." * There was a stop at last to these disgraceful exhibitions. The English " rabble " are violent, but they are not blood-thirsty ; and the executions of men who maintained their innocence to the last wrought pity and disgust even amongst the most prejudiced. The trial of sir George Wakeman, the queen's physician, came on in * " Life of Lord Keeper Guilford," vol. i. p. 327. ANALYSIS OF PAYMENTS TO THE WITNESSES. 253 July. Oates and Bedloe were as positive in their testimony, as on former trials where they easily obtained convictions. But now, to their great astonishment, the bench allowed their assertions to be questioned ; and thus, after Oates had gone through his course of bold accusations against Wakeman, the Clerk of the Privy Council came forward, and testified that when the confident witness was asked by the Lord Chancellor if he knew anything personally of the queen's physician, he lifted up his hands to heaven, and pro tested he did not. Three Benedictine monks were indicted as accomplices with Wakeman in the design to poison the king. After a trial of nine hours the whole were acquitted. The believers in the plot gradually diminished. " The witnesses," says Burnet, "saw they were blasted ; and they were enraged on it, which they vented with much spite against Scroggs.'- The trials of common men were now laid aside. But Stafford and the four other lords were still in the Tower, waiting to be tried by their peers. The dissolution and repeated prorogations left their fate doubtful. In the meanwhile Oates and Bedloe were in comfortable quarters, and were receiving handsome gratuities, as well as Dugdale, an other of their tribe. There are records of many payments to these worthies, under the heads of " free gift and royal bounty ; " " for diet ; " for " charges about several witnesses ; " for " expenses about the plot ; " for " maintaining witnesses in town about the plot ; " for "a further discovery of the plot ; "for " expenses in prosecu ting ; " for " discovering a Jesuit ; " for " journeys ; " for " discover ing Papists harboured in Court ; " for " lodgings in Whitehall ; " ex tending over a period from March 30, 1679, to March 4, 1683. Of the previous payments to the " witnesses "during half a year, we have no record. We have made a careful analysis of about a hundred and twenty entries of payment to Oates, Bedloe, Tonge, and Dugdale as they appear in the accounts of moneys paid for Secret Services ; and we find that up to the 7th of September, 1681, Oates received 1660/. 8s. lod. ;' Bedloe, to July 1680, received 804/. ; Tonge, who died in January, 1681, received 344/., and for his funeral was also paid 50/. ; and Dugdale, who kept drawing the wages of iniquity to the 4th of March, 1683, received 1138/. 15s* After April, 1681, Oates and Dugdale, instead of being allowed to " sit at ten pounds a-week " like Falstaff, were reduced to a very ignoble two pounds for allowance. Dugdale seems to have held on, and received large sums, long after the supposed instiga- * " Moneys for Secret Services," Camden Society, pp. 3 to 67. 254 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. tors of a pretended Plot — Shaftesbury and his friends — had lost power or parliamentary influence. Whilst these fearful exhibitions of the dire effects of religious animosity were passing in England, there were even more signal displays of the same spirit, though in an entirely opposite direction, manifested in Scotland. We turn with equal loathing from the corrupt judgments of Scroggs, to the brutal slaughters of Claver- house. And yet these events must be recorded for instruction and for warning. Religious hatreds have not so entirely died out amongst us, that we can be quite sure that disputes about candles and flowers, about the Judaical observance of the Lord's day, about Jews in Parliament, about Maynooth, might be wholly set tled by furious orators and writers, without the sword and the halter, unless the darkness which surrounds such controversies were somewhat dispersed by the light of History. Men can only effectually learn to be tolerant and loving, by seeing what monsters bigotry has made of their forefathers. After the suppression of the insurrection of Covenanters, in 1666,* Scotland continued in an unquiet state ; not openly resist ing the government, but nourishing many elements of future dis turbance. Archbishop Sharp was especially feared and hated by the stricter Presbyterians. The most fanatical believed him to be the enemy of God, and that his destruction would be an acceptable service. In July, 1668, as the archbishop was getting into his coach, he was shot at ; and his companion, the bishop of Orkney, was wounded. No one attempted to seize the offender ; but the archbishop had noted his features and general appearance. He wandered about the country for a long time, and then returned to Edinburgh. Six years afterwards, Sharp fancied that a shop keeper who lived near him was the man who fired at him. His name was Mitchell. He was brought before the Council, and after a solemn promise that his life should be spared, he confessed his guilt. The Council doomed him to perpetual imprisonment on the Bass Rock, after having subjected him to the torture of the boot. Mitchell had been confined here three or four years when it was determined to bring him to trial, for his crime committed in 1668. Upon the duke of Lauderdale's becoming supreme in Scot land, in connexion with the Cabal ministry, he attempted to carry out the same policy of a compromise with non-conformists as was being attempted in England. Many Presbyterian ministers con- * Ante, p. 189. PERSECUTIONS OF COVENANTERS IN SCOTLAND. 255 formed under the Declaration of Indulgence. Burnet says that it was part of the plan to put " all the ousted ministers by couples in parishes;" but that Lauderdale, who governed by fits, "passing from hot to cold ones," neglected this precaution, and that many of the deprived ministers went about, holding conventicles. Very soon the principles of severity trampled down any disposition to moderate courses. Indeed the more violent of the Covenanters utterly despised any measure which would stop short of re-insta ting their church in triumphant domination. The Black Indul gence, as they termed the healing declaration, was denounced as a bait for the worldly-minded and ungodly. There were large as- senu lies in wild and solitary places, to which many came armed. The government went about the repression of these meetings with a frantic violence. To strike terror into the Covenanters they re moved Mitchell from his wave-beaten rock in the Frith, and brought him to Edinburgh for trial. His own confession was urged against him. The promise upon which that confession was extorted was suppressed. The archbishop, who had first employed an agent to obtain this confession, denied any promise. The lords Lauderdale, Rothes and Halton, swore that no such promise had been made by the Council. The Council books were not al lowed to be produced ; and the man was convicted. The distinct record of the promise was found in the Council books immediately after the conviction ; and yet the man was executed. " This ac tion," says Burnet, " with all concerned in it, was looked at by all people with horror ; and it was such a complication of treachery, perjury, and cruelty, as the like had not perhaps been known." The Covenanters were not deterred by this manifestation of vin- dictiveness, but continued to assemble, particularly in the western counties. Lauderdale determined to act as if the whole district were in rebellion. He required all the land-owners to execute bonds, not only for their own conformity in attending the church service and avoiding conventicles, but for their servants, tenants, and residents on their property. They refused, and Lauderdale asked for authority to reduce them to submission by military force. Charles consented. The Highlanders were brought from their mountains to live at free quarters, and to plunder, in the devoted district. The inhabitants were disarmed. Lauderdale's excesses became at last too much even for the government of Charles to bear. The king could not wholly justify the acts of his minister. " But when May, the master of the privy purse, asked him in his 256 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. familiar way, what he thought now of his Lauderdale, he answered, as May himself told me, that they had objected many damned things that he had done against them, but there was nothing ob jected that was against his service : such are the notions that many kings drink in, by which they set up an interest for them selves, in opposition to the interest of the people." * Hume terms the opinion of the king "a sentiment unworthy of a sovereign." It was a sentiment worthy of a captain of banditti. There are no historical events with which the most cursory reader is more familiar, than the murder of archbishop Sharp, and the battles of Loudon Hill and Bothwell Bridge. The narra tives of the atrocious tyranny which led to these events are suf ficiently obscure, whether they issue from the persecuted or the persecutors ; but they present a sufficiently distinct picture which scarcely requires the colouring of romance to .command our interest. That ancient hunter of Covenanters, Captain John Creichton, — who was introduced by Swift to the notice of the world in 1731, as "a very honest and worthy man, but of the old stamp," and who himself laments over " the wonderful change of opinions," — relates with the extremest glee his various exploits in dispersing conventicles, in apprehending preachers, and in delivering them to the proper authorities to be tortured and hanged. He attempts no sort of excuse for using deceptions, to find out his victims, quite unworthy of the fighting cavalier. He hunts " the rogues " as if he thoroughly enjoyed the chase. He cannot justify his "rashness " in such adventures, except that it manifests his loyalty to his prince, his zeal for the church, and his detestation of all rebellious principles. These narra tives of Creichton precede his account of the insurrection of 1679. It was in the western counties that " the booted apostles of prelacy " chiefly exercised their dragoonings. There the Cove nanters were most numerous and most persevering. But in the eastern districts there was the same spirit, though less openly displayed. -In the county of Fife, a few religious enthusiasts, encouraging each other in their secret prayer meetings, and accept ing the stern denunciations of the Hebrew scriptures to smite the wicked as holy impulses to murder the enemies of their own form of worship, resolved upon the sacrifice of the archbishop of St. Andrew's, and of Carmichael, the commissioner of the Council. Ten of this band of fanatics went forth in search of thejr intended * Bumet. Book iii. CLAVERHOUSE DEFEATED. 257 victims. John Balfour, known by the name of Burly, and his brother- in-law, Hackston of Rathillet, were the leaders in this design. Carmichael escaped. But they accidentally encountered archbishop Sharp ; and at once considered, in theirsavage enthusiasm, that God had delivered their great enemy into their hands. Dragged from his carriage as he was passing, in company with his daughter, over Magus Muir, near St. Andrew's on the 3rd of May, 1679, he was inhumanly butchered, his unhappy child struggling with the mur derers to save her aged father. The leaders fled into the west. Assembling some of the more violent of their own persuasion, their contempt of the civil government was manifested by their extinguish ing the bonfires which had been lighted on the 29th of May, in honour of the king's restoration, in the burgh of Rutherglen. They also burnt the Acts of Parliament for restoring prelacy and sup pressing conventicles. On the ist of June, being Sunday, they held a field conventicle at Loudon Hill. John Graham, 01 Claver- house, marched out from Glasgow with about a hundred and fifty cavalry, for the suppose of dispersing them. The number of the Covenanters had increased to five or six hundred ; armed chiefly with pikes and pitchforks. They had a few horse amongst them. On a marshy ground near the village of Drumclog, Claverhouse charged this irregular force. He was utterly discomfited, and was compelled to retreat to Glasgow. The insurgents followed the fugitives, their ranks receiving constant accessions, not only of the Cameronians who would admit no compromise of the Solemn League and Covenant, but of moderate Presbyterians, who were indignant at the tyranny under which the country groaned. But their camp was divided into rival sects, each despising the other as much as they hated their common oppressor. At Glasgow they were repulsed, in their first attack, by Claverhouse, who had raised barricades within the city; but their numbers becoming more and more formidable, he Withdrew his forces towards Edinburgh. What was at first the desperate revolt of a few became a vast tumultuous outbreak, approaching very nearly to a rebellion. The Council in London were in alarm. It was determined to send the Duke of Monmouth to Scotland to take the command of- the govern ment troops. There was no want of energy in the movements of Monmouth. He set out from London on the 18th of June. On the 22nd he was at the head of the royal army on Bothwell-moor, a few miles from Hamilton. The insurgents were encamped on the opposite side of the Clyde. They were dispirited and irresolute — Vol. IV.—I7 258 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. neither prepared to fight nor to yield. A deputation from the' more moderate had an audience of the duke ; at which they limited their demands to the free exercise of their religion, and would submit all matters of difference to a free Parliament, and a General Assem- bly of the Church. The duke called upon them to lay down theii arms, but refused to treat except after their implicit submission. Roger North has a curious relation of a secret arrangement for the employment of the duke as general of the forces, which appears to him a wonderful proof of the statesmanship of the duke of Lauder dale and of his royal master. Monmouth was first appointed with a latitude of power to fight, or treat, as he thought fit. The majority at the Council board " approved of such a trust in the General ; for why, said they, should so much blood, and of these deluded miserables, be spilt, if they are willing to lay down their arms on fit terms ? " None spoke to the contrary. " When the king rose from Council, the duke of Lauderdale followed him into the bedchamber, where, having him alone, he asked his Majesty if he intended to follow his father ? Why, said the king ? Because, sir, said the duke, ,you have given the General orders to treat ; •.he consequence of which is — encouraging and enlarging the rebel lion in Scotland, and raising another, by concert, in England, and then you are lost. Therefore,^ you do not change your orders, and send them positive to fight, and not to treat, the mischiefs that befell your father, in like case, will overtake you." These two worthies, according to North, then clandestinely altered the orders which had been approved in Council, and gave directions that they should not be opened but at a Council of War, and in sight of the enemy. " The event," says the sympathising chronicler of this duplicity, " sufficiently applauded this counsel." * That event was ¦ the slaughter at Bothwell Bridge. Tbe Covenanters had exhibited one commendable point of strategy in guarding this passage of the Clyde. But Hackston of Rathillet, who defended the bridge, was not adequately supported. The mass of the insurgents were panic- stricken when they saw the king's troops advancing upon them, whilst the artillery from the opposite bank of the river was break ing their ill-formed ranks. They fled on every side, Claverhouse exhorting his men to avenge their defeat at Loudon Hill. All accounts agree that Monmouth laboured to stop the butchery that this worst of miscalled heroes commanded ; — *" Examen," p. 8r. WHIG AND TORY. 259 *' Taking more pains when he beheld them yield, To save the fliers than to win the field." * From the name of contempt which was bestowed upon the poor Western Covenanters was derived the great party name of Whig. The nicknames of opposite factions are necessarily obscure in their origin, and the attempts at their explanation partake of the same party character as the names themselves. The nicknames which will live for ever in English history had each a very humble origin. Tory, according to North, came in about a year before Whig. In 1679 the discussions on the Exclusion Bill were accompanied with great heats in Parliament, and " without doors, the debates among the populace were more fierce, and agitated with extremity of opposite talk." The use of opprobrious words became common. The anti-exclusionists were first called Yorkists. Then Tantivy became a bye-word against them. The duke and the Irish were for the most part in agreement ; so the duke's supporters were first called Bogtrotters ; and then " the word Tory was entertained, which signified the most despicable savages amongst the wild Irish." North says, that " according to the common laws of scolding," the loyalists now looked out for rival nicknames, " to clear scores." Their adversaries were first called True Blues — not satisfied with the plain Protestant blue of the Church ; then Birmingham Protestants, " alluding to false groats counterfeited at that place. That term was " not fluent enough for the hasty repartee ; and, after divers changes, the lot fell upon Whig, which was very significative, as well as ready ; being vernacular in Scotland, from whence it? was borrowed, for corrupt and sour whey." f Defoe accepts this derivation of Whig; and says, the use of it began in Scotland "when the western men, called Came- ronians, took arms frequently for their religion It afterwards became a denomination to the poor harassed people of that part of the country." X The further we advance in the history of this miserable reign, the more are we perplexed by intrigues and counter-intrigues, indi cating the universal political corruption. After the dispersion of the Covenanters, duke of Monmouth is suddenly sent for from Scotland; Sir John Reresby goes to meet him at Doncaster on the 9th of July. " It happened to be understood, that after his victory he was about laying a foundation whereon to succeed in that kingdom, * Waller. t " Examen," p. 32 a. X " Review," quoted in Wilson's " Life of Defoe," vol. i.p. 73. 260 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. and by the industry of his agents making himself popular. * Charles was ill at Windsor. Monmouth was about his sick bed. " He thought," says Reresby, " he had the king to himself." Sud denly the duke of York, who had travelled from Brussels in dis guise, presented himself : The Court was in commotion. The king's brother, and the king's illegitimate son, had come to be con sidered as rivals for the succession. To preserve some tranquillity they were then both sent away — Monmouth to Flanders, James td Scotland, as Lord High Commissioner. At Edinburgh, this Pa pist prince manifested the sincerity of his desires for general toleration, by superintending with the most anxious vigilance the punishment of the Covenanters. Charles reproached Monmouth for having given the government so much trouble with prisoners after the fight of Bothwell Bridge, and Monmouth answered, that he could not kill men in cold blood. James exhibited a worse trait of Stuart nature by presiding over the examinations of prisoners under torture. Under his at' ministration the Presbyterians were subjected to the grossest violence of a licentious soldiery. The military despots had full power to exercise the privileges of the inquisition in the most summary manner. Do you renounce the Covenant ? Do you admit that it was murder to kill the archbishop of St. Andrew's ? Will you pray for the king ? To hesitate was to incur not only imprisonment but instant death. This violation of every form of law and every principle of justice went on for several years. The story of John Brown, " the Christian carrier," has been honestly told by Scott, in spite of his lurking admiration of Claverhouse.f The poor peasant, who had indeed been out with the insurgents of 1679, was again in his home. He is seized by dragoons as he is going to dig in some peat ground, and by the command of Claverhouse he is shot in the presence of his wife. To her the gallant butcher addressed himself: "What thinkest thou of thy husband now, woman ? " She replied, '• I thought ever much of him, and now as much as ever." He said, " It were but justice to lay thee beside him." She said, " If ye were permitted, I doubt not but your cruelty would go that length ; but how will ye make 4 swer for this morning's work ? " He said, "To man I can b ans - erable ; and for God I will take him in my own hand." Sue ere the scenes that Scotland witnessed in these days of her desolation. Unquestionably the duke of York * " Memoirs," p. 229 t Compare " Tales of a Grandfather," chapter Iii., with " Old Mortality." PETITIONERS AND ABHORRERS. 26 1 instigated the worst persecutions ; and the wretched instruments of tyranny, such as Claverhouse, thought that their atrocities would best exhibit their love and loyalty. Whilst James was doing his congenial work in Scotland, the efforts of the faction opposed to his succession to the crown were conducted with few conscientious scruples. All the prejudices of the people were still stimulated into an unchristian hatred of Roman Catholics. The processions of the 17th of November, were repeated amidst the blaze of a thousand torches, lighting up the hideous representations of nuns, and priests, and cardinals ; and the effigy of the pope was burnt at Temple Bar amidst the shouts of an enormous multitude, encour aged by men of rank, who huzzaed from the balcony of the King's Head Tavern. These were known as the King's Head Club; and then as the Green Ribbon Club. The annual pope-burnings were afterwards imitated at Edinburgh. The processions of Guy •Fawkes on the 5th of November, and the processions of the pope on queen Elizabeth's coronation-day, kept alive the intolerant spirit towards Roman Catholics long after their original party-ob jects had passed away. Shaftesbury is represented as the grand contriver of these demonstrations of 1679 and 1680. But the demagogue contrives in vain unless he has popular materials to work with. No doubt he well handled the multitude, which at that period first acquired the name of mob. They were the mobile vulgus of these exhibitions. Shaftesbury had now been dismissed from the Presidency of the Council ; and was the moving spirit of the popular party. On the 28th of November, Monmouth suddenly returned from Holland. The bells of the city welcomed his arrival. The bonfires were again lighted. Charles was angry, or affected to be so, at his son's disobedience. He deprived him of his offi ces. He ordered him to quit the kingdom, or incur the penalty of exclusion for ever from the royal presence. Monmouth obstinately remained. It was the policy of the king to prevent the Parliament assembling, for he had another scheme in hand to obtain a sum from the king of France, which would enable him to dispense with the advice of his troublesome subjects. The treaty failed ; but Charles had boldly prorogued the Parliament on its meeting in October. The Country party now set on foot all the powerful machinery of petitioning. Grand Juries, Common Councils, provincial Corporations, were suddenly moved, as by one impulse, to petition the king that the Parliament, should meet at the end of the first short prorogation. Charles became alarmed. He pub- 262 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. lished a proclamation, vague and absurd enough, against subscrib ing petitions against the known laws of the land. What these laws were, the proclamation did not set forth. But there was a re action. The timid were alarmed; the servile were zealous. Men who stood aloof from parties dreaded the signs of another Civil War. They joined in declarations of abhorrence of petitions for assembling of Parliament ; and those who supported the king in what they considered his prerogative of calling a Parliament when he pleased, of acting without parliamentary advice, and without reference to public opinion, were denominated abhorrers. The name abhorrer soon became merged in that of Tor-.'. Tory — Whig — in a few years forgot that they each owed their birth to "the common laws of scolding." The Irish savage grew up into a fine gentleman ; the sour whey became the richest cream. The names of opprobrium blossomed into names of honour. They flourished in full glory for about a century and a half ; and then passed into other distinctive titles, not so " fluent for the hasty repartee." Whatever may be said for or against party distinctions — and there is a great deal to be said in either view of the ques tion — one thing is clear : the invention of Tory and Whig has been a very pleasant boon for the writers upon politics and history. These once rival nicknames save many circuitous expletives ; and, if they do not exactly define political principles, they answer as well as if one large section of public men and their followers had been called red, the other blue — or one big-endians, the other little- endians. The terms of Whig and Tory are vernacular ; and we are thankful for their help in the labour that is before us. CHARLES THE SECOND'S ALTERATIONS AT WINDSOR. 203 CHAPTER XIIL Charles the Second's alterations at Windsor. — The Duke of York presented as a Rom ish Recusant. — Progress of the Duke of Monmouth. — James leaves for Scotland. — Parliament, — The Exclusion Bill. — Trial and execution of Lord Stafford. — The Par liament dissolved. — The Oxford Parliament. — Its sudden dissolution. — The King's Proclamation. — The Whig Vindication.— State Prosecutions. — Stephen College — Shaftesbury indicted for high \reason. — The Ignoramus. — Court mancevres for the choice of a sheriff of London. — Shaftesbury flies to Holland. — Persecutions of the Scotch Covenanters. Windsor Castle was now the summer residence of Charles II. In August, 1678, Evelyn went with the duke of Norfolk to Wind sor, " where was a magnificent Court, it being the first time of his majesty removing thither since it was repaired." Charles had changed the whole aspect of the Castle. By his command the palatial fortress had been adapted for those state-displays which were to rival the splendours of the Court of the great Bourbon. A new building, forming the most imposing feature of the north front, called the Star-building, had been erected from the plans of Wren ; and by the connexion of the suit of rooms thus obtained with the older portion, that splendid series of state apartments was produced which terminated in St. George's Hall. But in these alterations the ancient character of the proud dwelling of the Plan- tagenets was utterly destroyed. If Wren had not had a vio lent distaste of Gothic architecture ; if his royal employer had not been wholly wanting in that patriotism which would have preserved the main features of the Windsor of Edward III. and of Elizabeth, as associated with the glorious days of the monarchy — his incon gruous pile would not have remained for a century and a half a significant monument of the corrupt taste of the latter days of the Stuarts. To Frenchify Windsor Castle was worthy of the king who needed French gold to pay for his buildings and his mispress es ; to reward Signor Verrio for seating him enthroned amongst the cardinal Virtues, or as the grand arbiter of the destinies of Europe. Catherine of Braganza sits in serene majesty, surrounded by the gods, on one of Verrio's ceilings. Mrs. Eleanor Gwynn had the more solid honour of dwelling within view of the Castle, e&4 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. at Burford House, so called after her son, lord Burford, afterwards the duke of St. Albans.* Windsor is as characteristic of the age as Whitehall. Reresby describes Charles in 1680 as living an unusually quiet life whilst Wren was building and Verrio painting : " The king shewed me a great deal of what he had done to the house, which was indeed very fine, and acquainted me with what he intended to do more ; for then it was he was upon finishing that most majestic structure. He lived quite privately at this time ; there was little or no resort to him; and his days he passed in fish ing or walking in the park." t Charles was thus " sauntering " at Windsor when the denouement of the great drama of his house was rapidly approaching. Evelyn has this record in his Diary, on the 24th of July, 1680: "Went with my wife and daughter to Windsor, to see that stately court, now nearly finished. There was erected in the court the king on horseback, lately cast in copper, and set on a righ pedestal of white marble, the work of Mr. Gibbons, at the expense of Toby Rustat,a page of the back stairs, who, by his wonderful frugality, had ar rived to a great estate in money, and did many works of charity, as well as this of gratitude to his master, which cost him 1000/. He is a very simple, ignorant, but honest and loyal creature." There were many others of the simple, ignorant, honest, and loyal of Charles's subjects who would be ready to aver, with Toby Rustat, as the Latin inscription on the pedestal of this statue avers, that Charles II. was not only the most merciful of masters but the best of kings. The page of the back stairs who witnessed his never- failing urbanity would receive that quality as the evidence of every other merit. But from the more rational thinkers a severer judg ment was to be expected. The duke of York " now reigned abso lute in the king's affairs," writes Reresby. X Against the duke was all the Whig hostility now concentrated. The tale of Monmouth's legitimacy was revived. The king, oh the 3rd of June, renewed his declaration that he was never married to any other than the. queen. On the 26th of June, Shaftesbury, accompanied by several lords and commoners, came before the Grand Jury at Westmin ster, and presented the duke as a Popish recusant. The chief justice defeated this bold measure by discharging the jury, whilst * Windsor has at length found fit chroniclers of its various subjects of historical in terest, as well as of the minuter topographical details which illustrate manners and cus toms, in the elaborate work of Mr. Tighe and Mi Davis—" Annals of Windsor." 2 vols. 1858. t " Memoirs," p. 231. j /favt> p. 2J . PROGRESS OF THE DUKE OF MONMOUTH. 265 Shaftesbury was in consultation with some of the judges. The Par liament had been summoned to meet on the 21st of October. The great question of the exclusion of the duke of York from the suc cession to the throne was sure to be renewed. It was thought that the king could.be gained over to consent to this departure from the principle of hereditary right. The duchess of Ports mouth had been induced by the Whig leaders, by threats and promises, to undertake the recommendation of the exclusion to the king, he having the right of naming his successor by will. He was to receive an ample grant of money ; he might secure the power of naming his favourite son, Monmouth, to wear the crown after his decease. Burnet says that he was assured that the duch ess of Portsmouth " once drew the king to consent to it." James in his Memoirs implies this, when he found that " his being sent away again began to be more discoursed of than ever." He sus pected that " the king himself began to waver ; and accordingly he soon found by discoveries on that subject that his majesty now doubted whether he could stand by him or no. The duke repre sented to him his constant and late engagement to the contrary, but found him so changed that it gave him great reason now at last to apprehend what he had been oft told, but never believed, that his majesty would abandon him in the end." * The day be fore the meeting of Parliament the duke of York sailed for Scot land. The French ambassador, Barillon represents James as de claring that he would make his enemies repent — " as much as to say that he hopes to be able to excite troubles in Scotland and Ireland." Even in England his cause would not have been with out supporters. " The papists lifted up their crest in great arro gance." f It was a moment of deep anxiety. Two of Charles's ministers, Godolphin and Sunderland, advised him to consent to a Bill of Exclusion. The duchess of Portsmouth had bribes and blandishments to mould that royal will upon whose consistency there could be no reliance. But the intrigue failed. The king wanted the vote of money to precede the Exclusion Bill. The Whig leaders wanted his assent to the Bill before the vote of money. The Session was opened on the 21st of October — that first meeting of the new Parliament which had been prorogued seven times. Charles in his speech promised to support the Prot estant religion "against all the conspiracies of our enemies." He * Clarke's " Life of James II."— Extract from James's " Memf,i— " vol. i. p. 595. t Reresby, p. 232. 266 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. would concur " in any new remedies which shall be proposed, that may consist with preservingthe succession of the Crown in its due and legal course of descent." On the 26th lord Russell moved " that we may resolve to take into our consideration how to sup press Popery, and to prevent a Popish successor." On the 2nd of November, the Bill of Exclusion was brought in. With the projected exclusion of the duke of York was inti mately associated the design to set up the duke of Monmouth as the future heir to the Crown. The king's declaration of his son's illegitimacy was little heeded by the people. " This duke, whom for distinction they called the Protestant duke, though the son of an abandoned woman, the people made their idol." * Dryden has painted Shaftesbury remonstrating with Monmouth on his doubts and apprehensions, when a crown was within his view: " Did you for this expose yourself to show, And to the crowd bow popularly low ? For this your glorious progress next ordain, With chariots, horsemen, and a numerous train." t The " glorious progress " of Monmouth was in the West of England, in August, 1680. The country people -came from miles round to see him in his way to Longleat. At Ilchester the streets were strewed with flowers. At White Lackington House, near Ilminster, he was met by two thousand horsemen. A woman pressed upon him, and touched his hand, to be cured of the king's evil, as if he already sat in the chair of Edward the Confessor. A thousand young men, all clothed uniformly in white linen, went three miles out of Exeter to meet him, and preceded him, hand in hand, as he entered their city. X There were no riotous proceed ings; but these demonstrations were very significant of the feel ings of the middle classes towards the duke of York. The Pro testant duke and the Papist duke were in direct antagonism. Mon mouth understood how to keep alive this political cry. Ralph Thoresby went to see him at Whitehall after his progress. Being told " that we came from Leeds, the great clothing-place, he an swered, with a smile, we were not for Popery there, no more than they in the West, alluding to his extraordinary kind entertainment there, as in the public news." § There was no political dishonesty in thus appealing to popular opinion against the dreaded predomi- * Evelyn, " Diary," November 28, 1679. f " Absalom and Achitophel." X " Life of lames, Duke of Monmouth." By George Roberts, vol. i. chapter vii. § Thoresby's " Diary," vol. ' p. 66. THE EXCLUSION BILL. 267 nance of Popery. But to set up the son of Lucy Waters as a pre tender to the Crown was a great mistake of some of the Whig statesmen — a mistake which inevitably tended to disgust the sober- minded, and to lead to that re-action which enabled Charles to walk once more in the old ways of despotism. After many days' debate in the House of Commons, a Bill was passed on the 15th of November, " for securing of the Protestant religion, by disabling James, duke of York, to Inherit the imperial Crown of England and Ireland, and the dominions and territories thereunto belonging." It was carried to the Peers by lord Rus sell. " A great number of members accompanied him and it ; and as soon as it was delivered gave a mighty shout ; which tumultuous and barbarous way of proceeding had too great a resemblance of forty-one, not to convince all judicious persons that this would prove a prelude of the same tragedy, if not timely prevented." * The debate of the Lords was carried on with unusual heat. The two great orators, Shaftesbury and Halifax, were pitted against, each other in this contest, although their general principles were the same. All accounts of this debate assign to Halifax the honour of having thrown out the Exclusion Bill, by his almost unexampled eloquence. It was rejected on the first reading by a majority of 33 — 63 dividing against 30. Halifax and others who opposed the exclusion of the duke of York, desired to enact limitations of the sovereign power, should he succeed to the Crown. The constitu tional difference between these two propositions has been forcibly put by Mr. Fox, in his History of James the second : " The ques tion of what are to be the powers of the Crown is surely of supe rior importance to that of who shall wear it ? Those, at least, who consider the royal prerogative as vested in the king, not for his sake but for that of his subjects, must consider the one of these questions as much above the other in dignity, as the rights of the public are more valuable than those of an individual. In this view, the prerogatives of the Crown are in substance and effect the rights of the people ; and these rights of the people were not to be sacri ficed to the purpose of preserving the succession to the most favoured prince, much less to one who, on account of his religious persuasion, was justly feared and suspected." When Charles opened the Parliament on the 21st of October, he said, to give "the fullest satisfaction your hearts can wish for the security of the Protestant religion, I do recommend to you to * " Life of James II.," vol. i. p. 6i, . 268 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. pursue the further examination of the Plot, with a strict and an impartial inquiry. I do not think myself safe, nor you neither, till that matter be gone through with ; and therefore it will be neces sary that the lords in the Tower be brought to their speedy trial, that justice may be done." In his private conversation at this period he expressed the utmost contempt of the witnesses for the Plot. He "proved to a demonstration that many articles they had given in evidence were not only improbable but quite impossible." * To turn the wrath of the Parliament against his brother to some humbler personages, there were victims in the Tower ready for the sacrifice. The first and only victim selected from these prisoners was lord Stafford. This nobleman, iiiustrious in the blood of the Howards, venerable for his age and infirmities, was impeached by the Commons, and brought to trial before his Peers on the 30th of November. It was his sixty-ninth birthday. Westminster Hall had been fitted up with a more than ordinary preparation. Places were assigned to the king and queen, to the Peers, to the members of the House of Commons, to the managers of the impeachment, to the judges. " I think it was the deepest solemnity I ever saw," writes Reresby. The same forms were gone through, with the same ar rangements, as when Pym confronted Strafford, and the father of the peer now accused presided as High Steward. The forms and the arrangements of benches were the same ; but the spirit was essentially different. It was not a trial which was to determine whether England was to be a free monarchy or an absolute mon archy. It was the struggle of a faction for a temporarv triumph, to assert a power which was unable to reach the great delinquent. The witnesses against Stafford were Oates, and Dugdale, and Tur- berville. The accused peer defended himself with unexpected ability. He pointed out how unworthy Oates was of belief — one who pretended that he was never a Papist though he had gone over to the Church of Rome ; who avowed himself a spy at St. Omers, though he went through all the discipline of a proselyte. Evelyn, who was present, was much struck by this, and thought " sucha man's testimony should not be taken against the life of a dog." But Dugdale and others positively swore to Stafford's participation in a plot to assassinate the king. The majority of the peers, eighty- six to fifty-five, pronounced him guilty, each giving his judgment, with his hand upon his breast, " upon my honour." The unfortu nate nobleman was condemned on the 7th of December, and he was * Reresby, p. 234. THE PARLIAMENT DISSOLVED. 269 executed on the 29th. Though on the day of his trial he was assailed by popular invective, when he protested his innocence on the Scaffold the spectators cried, " We believe you, my lord — God bless you, my lord." The king, at the prayer of the House of Lords, had remitted that part of the sentence of a traitor upon which the most brutal could not look without disgust. The sheriffs raised a question, which they addressed to the House of Commons, whether the king could dispense with these barbarities. The House resolved that it was content that execution should be done upon lord Stafford by severing his head from his body. Lord Russell has been accused, upon the assertion of the historian Echard, of having sanctioned this interference with the dispensing power— of having,"according to Hume, " seconded in the House the barbarous scruple of the sheriffs." There is no proof that Russell took any part in the debate upon the queries of the sheriffs. We scarcely think that lord John Russell, whatever impartiality he may thus show to the memory of his ancestor, is quite warranted in thinking the testimony of Echard sufficient to give probability to the assertion of a circumstance regarding Russell which is, " if true, the most to be lamented in his whole life." * In the reign of James the Second, a Bill was passed by the Peers, for reversing the attainder of Stafford. It was interrupted in the Commons by more urgent matters. It was riot till the reign of George the Fourth, when religious animosity, if not wholly passed away, had lost their ancient character of vindictiveness, that by a special statute the attainder was annulled, and the descendants of lord Stafford were restored to the honours of their house. Whilst Stafford's blood was being shed upon evidence which the king considered that of false witnesses, he felt none of the qualms which his father felt when he consented to the death of the great eail who said " Put not your trust in princes." No one put any trust in the second Charles. Himself a Papist, he saw the Papist noble hunted to death without even a tear for his fate. On the 24th of December, says Reresby, " I was at the king's couchee, when there were but four present. His majesty was in a very good humour, and took up some time in displaying to us the fallacy and emptiness of those who pretend to a fuller measure of sanctity than their neighbours, and pronounced them \o be, for the most part, abominable hypocrites and the most arrant knaves." Even mitred heads came in for the royal sarcasms. " He was that night * " Life of William Lord Russell," vol. i. p. 235. 270 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. (wo full hours in putting off his clothes, and it was half an hour past one before be went to bed. He seemed to be quite free from care and trouble ; though one would have thought, at this time, he should have been overwhelmed therewith."* There was enough, Indeed, to overwhelm a king who would take any matter seriously to heart. The levity of Charles was his shield and buckler. The Commons were- not only resolute in their persistent hostility to the duke of York, but manifested an arbitrary violence in the arrest of some who had signed the declaration of '• abhorrence." They exercised a mere constitutional power in the impeachment of Chief Justice Scroggs for dismissing the Grand Jury when the duke of York was presented as a Romish recusant ; for stopping the publi cation of a newspaper called " The Weekly Packet of Advice from Rome ; " and for inflicting enormous fines upon publishers of news, and requiring excessive bail, declaring " he would have re gard to persons and their principles in imposing of fines." The House at last resolved that until the duke of York was excluded from the succession, they would not grant any supply. This im practicable Parliament was dissolved on the 18th of January, 1681. The distracted condition of public affairs at this juncture ex cited so great alarm, that superstitions, arising out of unwonted natural appearances, produced the same effect, even amongst the educated, as in the days before scientific knowledge, although of the humblest kind, had taught men to separate the aspects of the physical world from their supposed connexion with moral causes. On the 12th of December, 1680, Evelyn writes, " This evening, looking out of my chamber-window towards the west, I saw a meteor of an obscure bright colour, very much in shape like the blade of a sword, the rest of the sky very serene and clear. What this may portend God only knows. But such another phenomenon I remember to have seen in 1640, about the trial of the great earl of Strafford, preceding our bloody rebellion. I pray God avert his judg ments." The danger of another Civil War was not altogether to be as sociated with popular credulity. That great danger seemed approach ing when the new Parliament met at Oxford on the 21st of March. Some covert design on the part of the Crown was apprehended in thus departing from the ancient custom of assembling the Parlia ment at Westminster, except in times of the plague. The Oxford Parliament of Charles the First was no precedent for this meeting- pi ice of a new Parliament elected by the general voice of the natioa- * " Memoirs," p. 238. THE OXFORD PARLIAMENT. 27 1 The king went to Oxford surrounded by his guards. The Whig members went to Oxford accompanied by armed bands of re tainers, wearing in their hats ribbons inscribed "no Popery, no slavery." Charles was indifferent as to the temper of the Parlia ment on the question of supplies. On the day that he went to Oxford he had concluded a treaty with Louis XIV. for a new sub sidy of French gold. King James the Second records this trans action with the utmost nonchalance : " The king's necessities had been long so great, and the Parliament so refractory and insolent, that he had no way left of relieving one, without consenting to the unreasonable demands of ,the other, but by a private treaty with France. The duke first put the king iri the way of it, which the French at first answered only by compliments and in general terms. But at last it was concluded they should give the king fifty thousand pounds every quarter, the first payment to be at the end of June, 1681, without any condition on the king's side but that of friendship, but promises on the French part not to disturb Flanders nor Holland." * The Parliament of Oxford lasted seven days. The king and his Court were at Christchurch. The Commons sat in the Schools. Charles, in his' opening speech, spoke in a bolder tone than had been his wont : " The unwarrantable proceedings of the last House of Commons were the occasion of my parting with the last Parlia ment ; for I, who will never use arbitrary government myself, am resolved not to suffer it in others .... What I have formerly, and so" often, declared touching the succession, I cannot depart from. But to remove all reasonable fears that may arise from the possi bility of a Popish successor's coming to the Crown, if means can be found, that in such a case the administration of the government may remain in Protestants' hand, I shall be ready to hearken to any such expedient, by which the Religion might be preserved, and the Monarchy not destroyed." f The " expedient " which was proposed, with the sanction of the king, was to this effect — that the duke of York should be banished during his life to the distance of five hundred miles from the British dominions ;.that certain Roman Catholics of considerable estates should also be banished ; that on the decease of the reigning monarch the duke should assume the tide of king, but exercise no sovereign power, the government being administered by a regent — the princess of Orange being the first regent, and the lady Anne regent after the princess. The * " Life of James II.,"' p. 715. t " Parliamentary History,'' vol. iv. col. 1303: 272 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. expedient was rejected. The Commons again resolved, " That a Bill be brought in to exclude James, duke of York, from inheriting the imperial crowns of England and Ireland, and the dominions and territories thereunto belonging " The refusal of the Commons to agree to the proposed compromise is regarded by some as factious, by others as imprudent. James himself thought the ex pedient, which originated with Halifax, "fully as pernicious " as the Bill of Exclusion.* The majority of the Parliament thought the expedient futile. In a "Vindication" which we shall presently notice, it was said, " The Parliament, observing the precedents of former ages, did wisely choose rather to exclude him, than to leave him the name, and place the power in' a regent. For they could not but look upon it as folly to expect that one of his temper, bred up in such principles of politics as made him in love with arbitrary power, and bigoted in their religion which always propagates itself by blood, would patiently bear these shackles, which would be very disgustful unto a prince of the most meek disposition This would certainly have bred a contest; and these limitations of power proposed to keep up the government must unavoidably have destroyed it." During the eventful week of the Session at Oxford, the Commons were not only agitated by this great question of the succession, but the apple of discord was thrown between the two Houses, by the refusal of the Lords to entertain an impeachment by the Commons fcr high treason of an impudent spy and libeller, Fitzharris. The story of this man is merely the story of one of those miserable games of plot and counter-plot whicli disgraced these times. Being in the pay of the Court, he wrote a violent libel against the king, which it is conjectured that he intended to put into the pocket of some Whig leader, to implicate him in a treasonable design. Lady Russell, in writing to her husband, bids him look to his pockets. Fitzharris next pretended he had important discoveries to make of Court secrets ; and the Whigs turned to him as a valuable auxiliary. The Attorney-General then having been ordered to prosecute him at law, the Whigs resolved to save him by an impeachment from the certain destruction of a trial at law. The Lords voted that Fitzharris should be left to the ordinary course of justice. The Commons asserted their right to impeach any peer or commoner for high-treason, and held that the refusal oi the Lords to proceed upon this impeachment was a vio- * " Life cf James II., vol. i. 11.670. THE KINGS PROCLAMATION. 273 lation of the constitution of Parliament.* This dispute between the two Houses was a sufficient pretence for a dissolution. Charles accomplished this measure with a decision very unusual with him. The Theatre had been ordered to be fitted up for the Commons, who required more space than they found in the Schools. On Saturday, the 26th of March, the king was exceedingly busy amongst the workmen in the Theatre. On Sunday evening, he was describing to the circle about him how admirably his faithful Commons would be accommodated. On the Monday morning two sedan-chairs were moving out of Christchurch. At the door ofthe House of Lords the king got out of the first chair ; his robes were taken out of the second chair. But " the Garter robes were put up instead of the robes of State ; so the chair must go back, with an officer to bring the right." f A peer who saw the manoeuvre was forcibly detained till the robes of State arrived. Then the king went into the chamber of the Peers ; the Black Rod summoned the Commons ; and these unexpected words came from the royal mouth : " My lords and gentlemen : That all the world may see to what a point we are come, that we are not like to have a good end when the divisions at the beginning are such, therefore, my Lord Chan cellor, do as I have commanded you." My Lord Chancellor dis solved the Parliament. " The king immediately departed with all speed to London," says Reresby. " It was not to be expressed," writes North, "what clutter there was in town about getting off. The price of coaches mounted cent, per cent, in a quarter of an hour. It was the conceit of a foreign minister that the town looked as if it had been besieged, and just surrendered upon articles forth- ¦ with to remove." On the 8th of April the king published a Declar ation of the causes for the dissolution of the two last Parliaments. Undutiful as was the behaviour of those Parliaments, his majesty declared, " That nothing should ever alter his affection to the Pro testant religion as established by law, nor his love to Parliament : for he would still have frequent Parliaments."- During the four remaining years of the life of Charles no other Parliament was summoned. The royal Declaration was answered in a very elabor ate " Vindication of the proceedings of the two last Parliaments " — a calm and "logical paper, which assumed the existence of a real * Mr. Hallam maintains that the " inadvertent position of Blackstone, that a common er cannot be impeached for high treason, is contrary to the latest determination of the su preme tribunal." " Constitutional History," chap. xii. Lord Campbell is opposed to this opinion of Mr. Hallam j " Lives of the Chancellors," vol. ii. p. 357i etJit. ,s45- t North, " Examen," p. 104. Vol IV— 18 274 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. conspiracy for the establishment of Popery.* The king's Declaration was read in the churches. The arguments of the Vindication, set forth by Sydney, Somers, and Jones, produced little effect. The terrors of the Popish plot had passed away. The danger of an other Civil War excited, with few exceptions, an apprehension that the Whig leaders were looking beyond a constitutional re sistance to arbitrary government and to a Popish successor. Ad dresses of attachment and confidence were now as unmeasured in their servility as in the clays of the first James. Learned bodies sent their deputations to Whitehall to tell the king that he derived not his title from the people, but from God ; that to God only are kings accountable ; "that it belongs not to subjects either to create or cens' re, but to honour and obey their sovereign, who comes to be so by a fundamental hereditary right of- succession, which no religion, no law, no fault, no forfeiture, can alter or diminish." f Thuj encouraged, it can scarcely appear surprising that the king should have followed up his triumph at Oxford — his coup de maistre, as North terms the sudden dissolution, — by governing without Patliaments ; and by calling in all the machinery of tyrannous judges and corrupt juries to crush the leaders of the Opposition ; that he should have deprived adverse Corporations of their Char ters ; that he should have dispensed with the laws that interfered with his Papist brother; and have himself died with the avowal on his lips that contradicted the lie of his life, — the avowal that he belonged to the Romish Church. The lawyers had ample business on their hands immediately after the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament. Fitzharris was put upon his trial in the Court of King's Bench. He pleaded his impeachment in bar of the jurisdiction of that court. The judges evaded the plea ; and he was convicted of a treasonable libel, and was executed. Plunket, the titular archbishop of Armagh, was at the same time convicted of an Irish Popish plot. There is no infamy of the reign of Charles II. greater than this. The inno cence of the Roman Catholic prelate was believed even by his per secutors ; but he was sacrificed by the Court, that the popular suspicion of the Popish tendencies of the king might be removed by an ostentatious piece of bloodshedding. Thus far the law went in the old direction of religious intolerance. But the re-action of * It is printed in the " Parliamentary H.story," vol. iv. Appendix, No. xv. t Address of the Vice Chancellor of Cambridge, quoted from Wilkins' " Concilia," by Dr. Lingard. STEPHEN COLLEGE. 275 public opinion was not to be left unused. Some of the witnesses for the Plot were still in hand ; and they were now as ready to give evidence against Protestants as they had been to swear away the lives of Papists. Stephen College, a London joiner, commonly known as " the Protestant Joiner," had been swaggering at Oxford with sword and pistol. He was accused of a treasonable attempt to seize the person of the king. The evidence against him was chiefly that of Dugdale. A London grand-jury ignored the indict ment. College was then indicted in Oxfordshire, where a jury was more compliant. He was tried on the 17th of August, and on the trial Oates contradicted the evidence of Dugdale. We have shown the amount and duration of the payments to these witnesses.* It is to be observed that Oates ceased to be paid at this exact period. " To punish Oates for his conduct at this trial, his pension was taken from him, and he was turned out of his lodgings at White hall, ; says Dr. Lingard. The documents we referred to show that Dugdale received his wages for a year and a half longer. In spite of the contradictory evidence Stephen College was hanged ; the Lord Chief-Justice Guilford having manifested his fitness for the dirty work of the government by intercepting the papers that were handed to the prisoner as materials for his defence, and Wi'tholding some that he asserted were libellous. " It had been a prime jest," says Roger North, " if, under the pretence of a de fence, the criminal should be allowed to vent seditious libels, full of mutiny and reflection to amuse the people ; and so to come forth and be published in print." f Burnet says of this trial, " North's behaviour in that whole matter was such, that, probably, if he had lived to see an impeaching Parliament, he might have felt the ill effects of it." A man of far higher mark than " the Protestant Joiner " was now to be assailed through the great engine of the law. The Irish witnesses who came over to give testimony against the Roman Catholic primate had been believed by an English jury. Would they be less worthy of credit when they swore that they had been suborned by the earl of Shaftesbury to give false testimony against the queen, the duke of York, and other personages ? Shaftesbury was sent to the Tower in July. In November he was indicted of high-treason before a London grand-jury, preparatory to a tria» by his Peers in the Court of the High Steward. Had a true bill been found Shaftesbury would unquestionably have finished his career Ante, p 253. t " Life of Lord Keeper Guilford," vol. i. p. 301 276 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. on the scaffold, whether guilty or not. His judges would have been selected by the king ; " his subsequent trial would have b^en mere matter of form, as much as after sentence the warrant to behead him." * During the five months of his imprisonment, Shaftesbury, through his counsel, repeatedly applied for the pro tection of his own Habeas Corpus Act. The judges evaded the application. His character was to be blasted, so that the indict ment should come before a jury sufficiently prejudiced against the accused. Every weapon of abuse was employed against him. He was denounced from the pulpits as " the Apostle of Schism ; " he was characterised, in doggrel verse which preceded Dryden's im mortal satire, as Machiavel, as the devil's foster-brother, as Achit- ophel; the hint was taken, and a week before the indictment was presented at the Old Bailey, came out " Absalom and Achitophel." The king at this time " was more than usually serious, arid seem ingly under a greater weight of thought than had been observed of him on account of the most important business." Reresby, who notices this unusual demeanour of the king, says that Halifax maintained that it would be prudent to set Shaftesbury at liberty, upon terms ; but that " the king was resolved to prosecute him to the utmost" was the information of one of the secretaries. On the 24th of November the indictment was presented to the Grand Jury at the Old Bailey. North' and Pemberton sat on the Bench ; and, contrary to all precedent, it was resolved that the examina tion of the witnesses should be in open court. The foreman of the jury contended that they were sworn to keep the king's coun sel, their fellows' counsel, and their own, secret. North maintained that the king could dispense with the secrecy. The object of these tools of power was to help out the witnesses in their con tradictions, and to awe the jury. The evidence of the charge "for compassing and imagining the death of the king " was attempted to be supported by a paper. " containing no less than matter of high treason, which was sworn to have been found amongst the papers in his closet." \ It was a plan of an association, not in his handwriting, and without a signature. " The witnesses," savs Burnet, " swore many incredible things against him, mixed with other things that looked very like his extravagant way of talking." The jury retired for a short time, and brought back the indictment, with " Ignoramus " written on the back. A shout of joy went up in the hall, and was re-echoed through the streets. Bonfires were * " Livcj of Chancellors,'' vol. ii. p. 362. t Reresby, p. 25: . COURT MANOEUVRES. 277 lighted. A medal was struck to celebrate the triumph. The king discoursed to the foreign ambassadors " on the subject of the hard measure dealt to him by Lord Shaftesbury's jury ; " and, in a more sensible spirit, gave Dryden the hint for his poem of " The Medal." The poem made the Medal more popular ; and men pro claimed their opinions by wearing it hanging at the button-hole. The refusal of the Grand Jury to find a true bill against Shaftes bury was imputed to the selection of jurymen by the Whig sheriffs. To obtain obedient sheriffs who would summon pliant jurymen was now the great aim of the Court. This scheme was carried into effect in a very remarkable manner. The Lord Mayor of 1682, sir John Moor, was a more than average example of the weakness and vanity that sometimes clings to civic dignitaries. There was an old custom of the city which is thus described by Roger North. "At the Bridgehouse feast which is sometime before the 24th of June, the day of the election at Guildhall, the Lord Mayor. takes his time, and, out of a large gilt cup, drinks to some person he names by the title of Sheriff of London and Mid dlesex, for the year ensuing. If the person be present, the cup is immediately borne to him, and he pledges my Lord Mayor : if he be not present then the cup is conveyed in the great coach, with the sword-bearer and officers, openly, and in state, to the house of the person drunk to, and the officer declaring the matter, presents the cup to him ; and then he is called my Lord Mayor's Sheriff, and not long after he is summoned to the court of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, and there, if he holds, he enters into bond to take upon him the office at the time ; and if he fines off, then, in a like method, the cup is sent to another, till the person is pitched upon that will hold : and this way of drinking and fining off is of great use to the city, for it brings money into the chamber; and it is called going a birding for sheriffs. At Midsummer-day, when the Common Hall meets for the election of sheriffs, and the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen are come upon the Suggestum, called the Hustings, the common sergeant, by the common crier, puts to the hall the question for confirming the Lord Mayor's sheriff, which used to pass affirmatively of course. After that, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen rise and go up into the room they call the court of aldermen, leaving the floor or body of the livery men below to choose another sheriff by themselves, without their inter posing or being concerned in the choice." This is, in part, a mis representation. For forty years the cus'.om of nominating one of 278 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the sheriffs by the cup had been laid aside, and both sheriffs had been elected, without such nomination, lay the Common Hall. The Lord Mayor had been sent for by king Charles; and "the king himself encouraged him, with expressions not only of protec tion but command ; and at last, after much hesitation, he deter mined roundly to conform, and all at once promised the king to send his cup to any citizen his majesty should nominate to him. He was slow, but sure " * Jeffreys, the recorder, suggested that there was a rich Turkey merchant recently arrived from Constan tinople, who was the very man. Dudley North, c'-<2 brother of the Chief Justice, was a person of eminent ability, W-O had sounder notions of commerce and finance than most men of his time ; and it is painful to find one of such talent and knowledge- listening to these arguments of his cunning and servile brother : " He was made to understand what an advantage such an opportunity was to oblige a king who had power to gratify by employment any fit persons, such as he was." f And so the cup was sent, " in full parade and form " to Mr. Dudley North. Midsummer Day, June 24, witnessed a tremendous uproar in Guildhall. The refusal of the Lord Mayor's cup-sheriff was unmistakeable. The Lord Mayor retired. He came again and again to put the question, but with the same result. He then adjourned the Common Hall. It was contended that the adjournment was illegal. Counsel were brought on a subsequent day to argue the point, amidst the uproar of contending factions ; " This was midsummer work indeed, extreme hot and dusty ; and the partisans strongly disordered every way, with crowding, bawling, sweating and dust ; all full of anger, zeal, and filth in cw r -v They ran about up and down stairs, so that any one, not Decter nformed, would have thought the place rather an huge Bedlam thau a meeting for civil business. And yet, under such an awkward face of affairs as this was, the fate of the English government and monarchy depended but too much on the event of so decent an assembly." X Roger North, the encomiast of every measure that tended to convert the English monarchy into a pure despotism, has no hesitation in acknowledg ing that the fate of the existing government depended upon having a sheriff who would return corrupt jurymen. He says of the Court party, " If one good sheriff were gained, they did not fear whai hurt the other alone could do ; for both sheriffs made but one officer." The contest went on for several months. The city • "Examen," p. 600. t Ibid., p. 001. X " Examen." p. 606. SHAFTESBURY FLIES TO HOLLAND. 279 was in a continued fever. The Lord Mayor Opened a poll at which North and another Court candidate were elected ; the sheriffs opened a poll at which two popular candidates were elected. The Chief Justice and his tool Jeffreys bullied and intrigued : and in the end Dudley North and a fit coadjutor were sworn into office. It was clear that if another indictment had been presented against Shaftesbury, he would have had small chance of saving his head. He fled to Holland, accompanied by his constant friend, the famous John Locke. He died'in the following year. The duke of York, as High Commissioner in Scotland, had been manifesting the spirit in which he purposed to govern the two countries when the power should fall into his hands." He had put down an outburst of the puritan spirit in the followers of two min isters, Cargill and Cameron., known as Cameronians. The excess of fanaticism was met by the excess of tyranny ; and women, refus ing to cry " God bless the king," went to their deaths as martyrs. A Parliament was called. It voted that the succession to the Crown was indefeasible ; it enacted a test, which, as altered by a compromise of opposite parties, asserted the king's supremacy, renounced the Covenant, inculcated the doctrine of passive obedi ence, and disclaimed any attempt to change the civil or religious establishments ; but at the same time it expressed the adherence to the Protestant religion of the person taking the test. The court iers proposed that all princes of the blood should be exempted from the oath. The earl of Argyle opposed this, and he was con sequently marked for destruction. In taking the test himself, as a privy counsellor, he said that he did not mean to bind himself, in a lawful way, from wishing and endeavouring any alteration which he, might think to the advantage of Church or State, and not repug nant to the Protestant religion and his own loyalty. A few days after he was arrested ; was indicted for high treason ; and was found guilty of treason and leasing-making. He contrived to escape to Holland. His estate was confiscated. Scotland was wholly under the feet of the tyrant. Judicial murders, were committed in every district of the southern and western counties. Hundreds were outlawed. A seditious declaration was published by the maddened Presbyterians, renouncing allegiance to Charles Stuart. To com pel suspected persons to abjure the declaration was now the busi ness of a lawless soldiery and slavish magistrates. The Scottish administration of the duke of York is thus complacently recorded : " He stifled at its first birth a commotion of the fanatical party 280 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. which then happened to break out, whereof some were taken and made examples of, but many more were won over by the great esteem his presence had gained amongst them."* In his own Memoirs of this period, he wonders how men could apprehend danger from Popery, "while they overlooked the imminent danger of being swallowed up by Presbytery and Fanaticism." f Congenial as his pursuits in Scotland were to the duke of York, he desired to return to England. He accomplished this ob ject by enlisting the duchess of Portsmouth in his interest, by some secret arrangement for settling a pension upon her out of the income which he derived from the Post Office, upon which an nuity she might raise a hundred thousand pounds. The affair could not be managed; but Charles gave the duchess 10,000/. quarterly out of his French pension, and she went abroad. The duke came to England for a short time, and then returned to Scot land, having narrowly escaped shipwreck in his passage. He again came to give that impulse to the schemes for arbitrary power which Charles had not resolution himself to carry out. Halifax and Seymour, two of the king's ministers, opposed the duke's re turn to London. Charles wanted his brother to fortify his resolves to take "those vigorous councils and resolute methods the duke had long pressed him to." { The prince of Orange had been in England in 1681 ; and Charles then said to him that "he was con fident, whenever the duke should come to reign, he would be so restless and violent that he could not hold it four years to an end." § Charles permitted the duke to try his hand in government before he " should come to reign." The duke's biographer says, " He shewed by his management in Scotland a good example of the doctrine he preached, which, when his majesty followed, it set him at rest for the remainder of his days." || • " Life of James IL," vol. i. p. 644. t Ibid., p. 656. X Ibid., p. 799. § Burnet. 0 " Life of James II." p. 734. THE ARMY ESTABLISHME* T. 281 CHAPTER XIV. The army establishment. — Quo Warranto Information against the Corporation of Lon don. — Surrenders of the Charters of other CorporaUons. — The Rye-House Plot. — Arrests of Russell, Essex, and Sidney. — Trial ot Russell. — Russell's Execution. — Trial of Sidney. — Scottish persecution.— The duke cf York's power in England. — Decree of the University of Oxford.— Repeal of the Test Act.— Death of Charles the Second in the faith of the Romish Church. — William Penn. — Settlement of Pennsylvania. — Penn's Treaty with the Indians. The " rest for the remainder of his days " which Charles se cured, through following the doctrine which the duke of York preached, was something very different from the ease which he enjoyed in the early years of the Restoration. There were to come, two years of a desperate struggle against the liberties of the people, the termination of which struggle was to be left to the greater energy of his successor. All the real power seemed now to lie in the hands of the Crown. London bad lost its popular sheriffs ; the choice of other sheriffs throughout the land was chiefly directed by the Court ; the sheriffs could pack the jurymen upon state-trials ; the jurymen would be duly exhorted from every pulpit to believe, upon the authority of the Scriptures, that, as all resistance to authority was a sin, the support of authority in all its desires was a virtue. When a subject stood at the bar, indicted for treason or misdemeanor at king's command, it was neces sary for the country's peace that the Crown should have its wished- for verdict. A trial was a ceremony at which good men should as sist, by their unanimity of opinion with the king's judges and the king's attorney, to place the throne upon the solid foundation of the people's implicit obedience. There was now an army sufficient to make men understand the danger of insurrection. It was some thing more than two regiments of horse-guards, as in the recent days when the Parliament was jealous of a royal force, and relied for defence against external enemies upon a national militia. In addition to two regiments of household cavalry, there were two regiments of foot guards, a regiment of dragoons, and five other regiments of foot. There was no war to give employment to thk 262 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. small army. There was no foreign garrison to absorb any portion of that military strength which was available for the repression of sedition at home. Tangier, which, when it came to the English Crown as the dowry of queen Catherine, was held to be equivalent to Dunkirk, was abandoned in 1683, and the garrison was brought to England. Two millions had been expended upon the mole and fortifications. The Parliament had objected that the garrison was a nursery for a popish army. When the opinion of the Parliament had ceased to be regarded, Charles brought this army home ; after the works of Tangier had been utterly destroyed, and the harbour blocked up with the rubbish. With an adequate military power about the Court, the lesser wheels of the machinery of government would be all in order. The rebellious city of London was now to be taught its duty. In the corporate franchises of the metropolis, and in those of other cities and towns, rested the chief force of the middle classes. The old puritan spirit was not dead. Liberty and Protestantism were names which stirred the most sluggish spirits into patriotism ; and in the freedom of civic proceedings the tem per of the people found a lawful right of assertion. Take away the charter of the city of London, advised the slavish lawyers, and break up that strong-hold of democracy. We are " the finest flour," said the courtiers ; the common people are " the coarsest bran." * There was no precedent for a forfeiture of corporate privileges ; but such forfeiture was to be accomplished now by the example of the surrender ofthe abbeys to Henry VIII. An In formation, quo warranto technically called, was laid in the King's Bench against the Corporation of London for two misdemeanors — for having taken tolls under a by-law, and for having petitioned the king to assemble the Parliament, in 1679, which petition was pub lished. On the 1 8th of June the lord mayor, sheriffs, and alder men knelt before the king, and humbly petitioned that his majesty would not enter-up judgment against the City; and they were re quired to make no future election of mayor, sheriff, aldermen, re corder, or other officers, without the royal approbation ; that if the king should disapprove of the mayor, they should proceed to re election, when, upon a second disapproval, the mayor should be nominated by the king himself; that in the case of the sheriffs, if the king did not approve the first choice, he should at once nomi nate his own sheriffs. The Corporation, thus bound hand and foot, continued to be the slaves of the Court, till their shackles * See Chamberlayne's " Present State of England," 1687, p. 37. SURRENDERS OF THE CHARTERS. 283 were knocked off by the Revolution of 1688. Other corporations were terrified into the surrender of their Charters. In 1684 the Lord Chief Justice, Jeffreys, did " g<"eat matters towards bringing in the Charters, as it was called," in his Northern circuit ; and the king " was persuaded to present him with a ring, publicly taken from his own finger, in token of his majesty's acceptance of his most eminent services ; " and thus encouraged, Jeffreys " went down into the country, as from the king Legatus a Latere, es teemed a mighty . favourite ; which, together with his lofty airs, made all the Charters, like the walls of Jericho, fall down before him ; and he returned laden with surrenders, the spoils of towns." * There was little chance, -after this, that a Parliament should be chosen in which the burgesses of England, who had fought the battles of freedom for four centuries, should have any due share of parliamentary representation. Prudent royalists were alarmed at such proceedings. Evelyn saw nothing but evil in "these violent transactions " — :a learned recorder set aside to make way for an obscure lawyer — the Lord Mayor and two Sheriffs holding as cus- todes, at the king's pleasure. " The pomp and grandeur of the most august city in the world thus changed face in a moment : which gave great occasion of discourse, and thoughts of hearts, what all this would end in." \ The Court judged that resistance to its behests was now utterly at an end. The king " at last sub dued entirely that stubborn and rebellious city." { The duke of York had a little private revenge to accomplish : " He thought it necessary to terrify others by making an example of the late sher iff, Pilkington ; who having said, upon the duke's return, ' he had fired the city and was now come to cut their throats,' he caused him to be indicted, May 8, and the words being proved by two aldermen, the court assigned his royal highness a hundred thou sand pounds for damages." § The royal influence could not only effect the utter ruin of a citizen for hasty words, but it had a year before shown that it could so manage the administration of justice that a detestable murderer should escape unpunished. Lady Ogle, a widow of fifteen, had, against her wish, become the wife of Thomas Thynne, of Longleat, called, on account of his great wealth, " Tom of Ten Thousand." The rich man and his bride were parted for a time ; and she went abroad, where she had pre viously met Charles John, count Konigsmark. The intimacy was * " Examen," p. 625. t " Diary," October 4, 1683. X " Life of James II," vol. i. p. 738. § Ibid 284 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. probably renewed. On Sunday evening, the 12th of February, 1682, Thynne was passing in his coach along Pall Mall, and near a part then known as St. Alban's-street, where now stands the Opera-arcade, he was murdered by a mounted ruffian, attended by two others, who fired upon him with a blunderbuss loaded with four bullets. Thynne expired on the following morning. The as sassin, George Borosky, a Pole, and his confederates, two Swedes, were apprehended. Count Kbnigsmark was captured a week after, in endeavouring to escape from the country. The four were tried at Hick's Hall, on the 28th, the count being indicted as an acces sory before the fact. The Pole and the two Swedes were found guilty and were hanged. The count was acquitted. Sir John Reresby, who was very active in communicating with the king and the council about this murder, says, " being at the king's couchee on the 21 st, I perceived by his majesty's discourse that he was willing the count should get off." He was the first that carried the news of the count's acquittal to the king, " who seemed to be not at all displeased at it ; but the duke of Monmouth's party, who all appeared to add weight to the prosecution, were extremely dis satisfied that the count had so escaped." * Of Konigsmark's guilt there was not the slightest doubt. " Nothing," says the Memoirs of James, " now was wanting to make the king perfectly easy in his affairs but the duke's assist ance in the management of them The discovery of a cursed conspiracy, which in part they had already providentially escaped, but still in great measure hung over their heads, hasted the hike's re-admission into business for their mutual security."! The providential escape was from the assassination of the king and the duke, which it was alleged was intended to be accompUshed . Rye-House, in Hertfordshire. Keeling, a vintner, communicated to one of the Secretaries of State, that a plot had been devised for engaging forty men to way-lay the king and his brother, as they returned from Newmarket, at a farmhouse called the Rye, belong ing to Rumbold, a maltster; that, the king returning sooner than was expected, that scheme was given up, and a general insurrec tion was projected by certain eminent persons, amongst whom were the duke of Monmouth, lord Essex, lord Howard of Escrick, and lord William Russell. Some of the inferior persons accused were first apprehended. The Rye-House Plot was in every mouth. The place was not so well known to Londoners as at the present day, * " Memoirs," p. 26.-2. f •' Life of James II." vol. i. p. 738. ARRESTS OF RUSSELL, ESSEX, AND SIDNEY. 285 when hundreds of summer holiday-folks go to make merry at the Rye-House on the pleasant banks of the Lea. It was then de scribed as " a place so convenient for such a villainy as scarce to be found in England ; besides the closeness of the way over a river by a bridge, gates to pass, a strong hedge on one side, brick walls on the other." * The Rye-House Plot appears to have been a real conspiracy amongst obscure men. That the Whig leaders partici pated in the design of assassination was not considered probable even amongst royalists of the time. Upon the committal to the Tower of Russell, Essex, and Sidney, Evelyn writes, " The lords Essex and Russell- were much deplored, few believing they had any evil intention against the king or the church. Some thought they were cunningly drawn in by their enemies, for not approving some late counsels and management relating to France, to Popery, to the persecution of the Dissenters, &c." The duke of Mon mouth, lord Grey, sir Thomas Armstrong, and two others, for whose arrest a proclamation was made, escaped. The trials of three minor conspirators were hurried on, and they were convicted on the evidence of their associates. On the 13th of July, lord Russell was brought to trial. From the first he gave himself up for lost. As he entered the Tower he told his servant Taunton that he was sworn against, and his enemies would have his life. Taunton hoped that his master's enemies had no such power. '¦Yes," said Russell, "the devil is loose r" f According to the political creeds of men of a past age, it has been customary to speak of Russell and Sidney as martyrs in the cause of liberty, or as scoundrels who had no just notions of gov ernment. J To regard the conduct and character of either of these eminent men with enthusiastic admiration is to us as impossible, as to consider them as selfish and ambitious intriguers, ready to plunge the nation into civil war for the advancement of a faction, or the advocacy of a wild theory of a republic. Their notions of political perfectibility were essentially different. Russell, the calm and practical representative of a great party, sought to at tain freedom under a monarchy sufficiently checked by a Parlia ment, and to exercise religion under a Protestant establishment, toler ant to all forms of dissent but that of Roman Catholicism. Popery * " Autobiography of Sir John Bramston," p. 182. t " Lifa of William Lord Russell, by Lord John Russell, vol. ii. p. 25. t The Tory opinion is thus delivered by the Tory Johnson, with his usual vehemence. See Boswell's ".Johnson." 286 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. was his one great terror, and not unreasonably so. He was violent towards Papists, because he regarded Popery " as an idolatrous and bloody religion." He was their relentless and persecuting enemy when his party was all-powerful, for reasons which he thus expressed : " As for the share I had in the prosecution of the Popish plot, 1 take God to witness that I proceeded in it in the sincerity of my heart, being then really convinced, as I am still, that there was a conspiracy against the king, the nation, and the Protestant religion." * The political principles of Algernon Sidney were essentially different. He was the last of the old Common wealth-men, of the school of Vane. He hated the legitimate tyran ny of Charles as much as he hated the usurped power of Cromwell. He disliked Popery rather with the dislike of the philosopher than that of the Christian. Neither Russell nor Sidney con templated the removal of political evils by the assassination of the king. When Charles gave for his reason for denying mercy to Russell, " If I do not take his life he will soon have mine," he was thinking of his father's fate rather than of such danger as that of the Rye-House. He told Russell upon his first examination before the Council that nobody suspected him of any design against his person, but there was good evidence of his being in designs against his government. Russell was as conscious of his own political importance as Charles was aware that in removing him he removed the great obstacle to the designs which James now steadily advocated with the zeal of a bigot and the blindness of a despot. " Arbitrary government," said Russell to his chaplain, Mr. John son, " cannot be set up in England without wading through my blood." The trial of Russell derives its chief interest from a circum stance which associates it with the tenderness, the devotion, the fortitude of woman. The day before the trial, lady Russell, the daughter of the earl of Southampton, wrote a note to her husband in these words : "Your friends believing I can do you some ser vice at your trial, I am extremely willing to try ; — my resolution will hold out ; pray let yours. But it may be the Court will not let me ; however, do you let me try." On the 13th of July the forms of in dictment having been gone through, and the prisoner having in vain requested a postponement of the trial for a day, that he might produce witnesses not yet arrived, lie said, " May I have somebody to write, to help my memory ? " " Yes, a servant," was the answer. * Russell's paper delivered to the sheriff before his execution TRIAL OF RUSSELL. 287 " My wife is here to do it." And so, by her lord's side, sat that noble wife,-calmly doing her office amidst the most exciting scenes. Lord Howard of Escrick appears. He was Russell's relative. To save himself, he offered'to criminate his friends. He is put in the witness-box. His voice falters. "We cannot hear you, my lord," says one of the jury. Howard explains, " There is an unlucky ac cident happened which hath sunk my voice : I was but just now acquainted with the fate of my lord of Essex." The news ran through the court that Essex had committed suicide in the Tower. " This fatal news coming to Hicks's Hall upon the article of my lord Russell's trial, was said to have had no little influence on the jury and all the bench to his prejudice."* The Attorney-General said, " My lord Russell was one of the council for carrying on the plot with the earl of Essex, who hath this morning prevented the hand of justice upon himself." Men doubted whether Essex perished by his own hand. His head was so severed from his body " that an executioner could hardly have done more with an axe. There were odd reflections upon it." f The evidence of Howard and other witnesses went to show that Russell, before Shaftesbury left the country, had attended a meeting in the City, at which a rising was debated, and there was talk of the feebleness pf the king's guard at Whitehall. Howard also asserted that there was a cabal of six persons, Monmouth, Essex, Russell, Sid ney, Hampden, and himself; and that one of their objects was to draw the Scotch malcontents to join with them. Russell made a very short defence, in which he solemnly denied the charges im puted to him ; I have looked upon the assassination of any pri- 'vate person as an abominable, barbarous, and inhuman thing, tend ing to the destruction of all society. How much more the assas sination of a prince, which cannot enter into my thoughts without horror and detestation ; especially considering him as my natural prince, and one upon whose death such dismal consequences are but'too likely to ensue. ... As for going about to make or raise a rebellion, that, likewise, is a thing so wicked, and withal impracticable, that it never entered into my thoughts. Had I been disposed to it, I never found, by all my observation, that there was the least disposition or tendency to it in the people. And it is known, rebellion cannot be now made here, as in former times, by a few great men." | And yet we cannot doubt that " a few great * Evelyn " Diary," July 13. t Ibid. X Lord John Russell's "Life," vol. ii.p. 60. From the MS. in Lord W. Jtussell's handwriting. .;' ' 288 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. men " contemplated some coercion of the government, perhaps short of rebellion, despairing of " having things redressed in a legal parliamentary way." It is difficult to draw the line between legal and illegal resistance when men are hopeless of just government. Russell was convicted of treason, though certainly he was illegally convict ed. He had committed no overt act, imagining the king's death, which had brought him within the Statute of Treasons of Edward the Third. The Act of William and Mary, annulling his attainder says that he was, "by partial and unjust constructions of law, wrong fully convicted, attainted, and executed for high-treason." Russell went to his death with Christian fortitude. Extraordinary efforts were made to save his life, but Charles was not to be moved, even by the offer of a hundred thousand pounds. Russell was beheaded on the 21st of July, on a scaffold erected in. Lincoln's Inn Fields. His parting with his noble wife had something more touching than sobs and tears. " This flesh you now feel, in a few hours must be cold," he said. They then kissed and separated, in eloquent silence. The trial of Algernon Sidney was postponed till the 21st of November. Pemberton was Chief Justice when Russell was tried. He was removed to make room for Jeffreys. Lord Howard of Escrick was again the chief witness against the friend who had con fided in the betrayer's professions of republicanism. Two wit nesses were required by the Statute of Treasons. There was no second living witness against Sidney ; that defect was supplied by a manuscript found among Sidney's papers, in which treasonable principles, were held to be advocated. He approved of conspir acies against Nero and Caligula, and therefore was ready to com pass the king's death. Howard's depositions were different from those which he gave on the trial of Russell. Sidney appealed to the jury whether any credit was due to a man who deceived and betrayed his friends — who had said he could not get his own par don from the king till he had done " some other jobs." Of course Sidney was convicted in the utter absence of all legal evidence of treason. He was brought up for judgment on the 26th. When he heard his sentence he prayed God that, "if at any dayjhe shedding of blood that is innocent must be revenged, let the weight of it fall only on those that maliciously persecute me for righteous ness' sake." Jeffreys, although he had kept his brutal nature in some subjection to decency, then exclaimed, " I pray God to work in you a temper fit to go into the other world, for I see you are SCOTTISH PERSECUTIONS. 289 not fit for this." Sidney stretched out his arm, and said, "My lord, feel my pulse, and see if I am disordered." Evelyn records that on the 5th of December, he was at a wedding where he met Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys aad Mr. Justice Withings. " These great men spent the rest of the afternoon, till eleven at night, in drinking healths, taking tobacco, and talking much beneath the gravity of judges ; who had a day or two before condemned Mr. Algernon Sidney, who was executed the 7th on Tower Hill, on the single witness of that monster of a man, lord Howard of Escrick, and some sheets of paper taken in Mr. Sidney's study, pretended to be written by him, but not fully proved." Sidney died with a simple courage and unostentatious composure worthy of his strength of mind. " When he came on the scaffold, instead of a speech, he told them only that he had made his peace with God ; that he came not thither to talk, but to die ; put a paper into the sheriff's hand, and another into a friend's ; said one prayer as short as a grace ; laid down his neck, and bid the executioner do his office." * Connected with the other chief participators in the alleged conspiracy of 1683, we may mention that Monmouth was ultimately pardoned ; and that sir Thomas Armstrong was given up by the States of Holland, and executed without a trial upon his sentence of outlawry. He had surrendered within the year, during which the law allows the accused to claim a trial. Jeffreys rudely resisted this legal demand of Armstrong. The connexion of the English Whigs with the discontented in Scotland gave birth to a terrible persecution In that enslaved king dom. In England, even a Jeffreys could not go beyond a certain point under the forms of law. In Scotland those forms were utterly set at nought. Scotsmen, arrested in London, were sent to Edinburgh for their mock trials. Some eminent haters of the tyranny under which the land had fallen fled to Holland. Torture was administered to other suspected and accused persons with a ferocity exceeding even the times when the duke of York superin tended the process of the boot. Sentences of forfeiture were lavishly pronounced, by which such tools as Graham of Claver house were enriched. The prisons were crowded with Covenant ers. In England, James had openly succeeded to the chief admin istration of public affairs. He had not withheld his consent from the marriage of his daughter, Anne, to the Protestant prince 1 * Evelyn, " Diary." Vol. IV.— iq 290 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. George of Denmark. The king rewarded the duke by his restora tion to his offices of High Admiral and Privy Councillor.* Titus Oates was indicted for Scandalum Magnatum, and damages of 100,000/. for a libel against the duke were awarded. Tbe Rev. Samuel Johnson, chaplain to the late lord Russell, was summoned before the Council, to answer whether he was .the author of a book called "Julian's Acts and Methods to undermine and extirpate Christianity." He acknowledged that he was. He was com manded to produce one of the books. He said that he had sup pressed all the copies, " so that they were now his own private thoughts, for which he was not accountable to any power on earth." No copy could be obtained ; and he was therefore prosecuted for writing a book called "Julian the Apostate." He was condemned in a fine of five hundred marks, which he was unable to pay ; and was committed to prison. In prison he remained till the time when James had the regal power, and exercised it with a frantic violence, of which the barbarity perpetrated upon this exemplaiy clergyman, whose only fault was a love of his country's liberties, was one of the most hateful examples.! Arbitrary government had now its full swing. The Oxford divines came boldly forward to g've their aid to degrade the free monarchy of England into an unmixed despotism. They published a decree against pernicious books and damnable doctrines. They anathematised the seditious and impious principle that civil authority is derived originally from the people ; that there was any implied compact between a king and his people : passive obedience was the only concern of the subject with the government under which he lived. Sir George Mackenzie, the Lord Advocate of Scotland, published his treatise "Jus Regium," which he dedicated to the University of Oxford, in which he maintained that " whatever proves monarchy to be the best government, does, by the same reason, prove absolute mon archy to be the best government." Sir Robert Filmer's pos thumous work, which had the honour of calling forth the refutation of its doctrines by Locke, went to the same extremes. Mr. Hallam truly says, " We can frame no adequate conception of the jeopardy in which our liberties stood under the Stuarts, especially in this particular period, without attending to this spirit of servility which had been so sedulously excited." The confidence of the ultra- royalists was unbounded : " now the king had brought his affairs * " Life of James II.," vol. i. p. 745. t " Memorials of Mr. Samuel Johnson," prefixed to the folio volume of his works- 171a REPEAL OF TEST ACT. 29 1 to a more happy situation than ever they had been since the Res toration. He saw his enemies at his feet, and the duke his brother at his side ; whose indefatigableness in business took a great share of that burthen off his shoulders, which his indolent temper made uneasy to him." * Charles had his brother officially at his side through dispensing with the Test Act. Louis XIV. was carrying on his ambitions designs without any apprehension of the inter ference of England. By turns he bribed and he bullied the abject Charles. There were some even amongst Charles's advisers who felt the degradation. Halifax ventured to suggest the calling a Parliiment.. James was diametrically opposed to such a measure. Halifax advised that France should no longer dictate to England. James knew that the French alliance ratified the slavery of England. Charles was undecided — or pretended to be so. The great arbiter stepped in to settle many doubts and difficulties. On Sunday evening, the 1st of February, 1685, Evelyn was at Whitehall. A week after he recorded his impressions of the scene which he there witnessed : " I can never forget the inexpressible luxury and profaneness, gaming, and all dissoluteness, and as it were total forgetfulness of God, It being Sunday evening. The king sitting and toying with his concubines, Portsmouth, Cleveland, and Mazarine, &c. : a French boy singing love songs in that glorious gallery ; whilst above twenty of the great courtiers and other dissolute persons were at Basset around a large table, a bank of at least two thousand in gold before them." On Monday morning, the 2nd of February, the king was struck with apoplexy. On the Tuesday, he had somewhat recovered. On the Thursday his case was considered hopeless. Two bishops came to him ; he said he was sorry for what he had clone amiss; heard the form of absolution ; but declined to receive the sacrament. T/.e duchess of Portsmouth, who had manifested a real grief, told Barillon, the French ambassador, that Charles was really a Roman Catholic ; she urged Barillon to tell the duke that if any time were lost, his brother would die out of the pale of his Church. James tells the result himself. The duke "asked him if he desired he should send for a priest to him ? to which the king immediately replied, 'for God's sake, brother, do, and please to lose no time.' But then, reflecting on the consequences, added, ' But will you not expose yourself too much by doing it ? ' The duke, who never thought of danger when the king's service called, though but in a " Life of James II.," vol. i. p. 746. 292 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. temporal concern, much less in an eternal one, answered, ' Sir, though it cost me my life, I will bring one to you.'"* James found Father Huddlestqn, a Benedictine monk. The king con fessed, received extreme unction ; and then the Sacrament was administered by Huddleston. His natural children were called around the dying man's bed. Monmouth alone was absent, though his father had been privately reconciled to him. The queen sent to ask her husband's pardon for any offence she might have com mitted. " It is I that ought to ask her pardon," said Charles, with a passing remorse. " Do not let Nelly starve," he said to his brother. He apologised to the watchers around him for the trouble he was giving. The politeness of the gentleman remained with him to the last. Charles died at noon on Friday, the 6th of Feb ruary. The people of London, odious as was the government of the king, lamented for the man. In that lament was probably mingled the fear that a worse king was coming. About three years before the death of Charles the Second, an event took place which would then attract little of the regard of English courtiers and politicians, but which was fraught with im portant consequences never to be forgotten in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race. On the 5th of March, 1682, William Penn, who we last saw standing undaunted at the bar of the Old Bailey, was before the king In council at Whitehall. His father, the admi ral, had died in 1670, leaving his Quaker son a considerable prop erty. The duke of York, a friend of admiral Penn, had undertaken to be the young man's protector. Two years after his father's death William Penn applied to James to use his influence to pro cure some remission of the persecution of the Quakers. The duke made some of those professions of toleration which he had learnt to employ upon particular occasions. He was kind to Penn ; who became a person of consequence at Whitehall. A considerable sum, about 16,000/., was due from the Treasury to Penn as his father's heir — the amount of money lent by the admiral, with ac cumulated interest. He petitioned to have his claim settled, not by a money-payment, but by the grant of a large tract in America — a region of mountains and forests and prairies, accessible from the sea by the river Delaware. During sixty years the colonisation of the great North American continent by Englishmen had gone steadily forward. The plantation of Virginia, the plantation of New England in the reign of James I., laid the foundations of that * " Life of James II.," vol. i. p. 747. SETTLEMENT OF PENNSYLVANIA. 293 mighty community whose present marvellous progress appears but the faint realisation of its ultimate destinies.* In the reign of Charles the Second, Carolina was also settled. Maryland had been a pre vious acquisition; New Jersey had been conquered from the Dutch. The commercial importance of the English North American set tlements was stated by De Witt in 1669, when he wrote " The In terest of Holland." He says, " The long persecution of Puritans in England has occasioned the planting of many English colonies in America, by which they drive a very considerable foreign trade thither." Penn knew well that in the persecuted of his own sect he would find the best of settlers— men always remarkable for their industry and frugality. Not so solicitous for worldly profit, as for a home for his followers beyond the reach of penal laws, Penn assiduously pressed his suit ; and on the 5th of March, he stood before the king and council, to have his charter signed. The name suggested for this mountainous and wooded region was first New Wales ; and secondly, Sylvania. The king prefixed Penn to Sylvania. The Quaker legislator and his friend Algernon Sidney, the republican, drew up a constitution for the new colony. It was essentially democratic. Religious liberty was its great element, and with that was necessarily connected civil freedom. There was to be an executive Council, of which Penn, the proprietor, or his deputy, • was to be president'; which Council was to consist of seventy-two persons. There was to be an Assembly. Both were to be chosen by universal suffrage. It has bean justly observed, that "as the proprietor and legislator of a province which, being almost uninhabited when it came into his possession, afforded a clear field for moral experiments, he had the rare good fortune of being able to carry his theories into practice without any compro mises, and yet without any shock to existing institutions."! The Welcome, a vessel of three hundred tons, in which Penn was to embark, set sail from Deal on the ist of September, 1682. There were a hundred passengers on board, of whom a third died of the small pox during the voyage. On the 27th of October, the survivors, with their governor, landed at Newcastle, on the Dela ware. The next day Penn assembled the inhabitants, consisting of families of various nations, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, English. He produced his charters. He explained his svstem of government. Penn's relation, Colonel Markham, had arrived before him, and * See ante, vol. iii. p. 276. t Macaulay, " History," vol i. 8vo, p. 507. 294 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. had prepared the way for him, by calling an Assembly for the pur poses of legislation. In three days, Penn's constitution was adopt ed ; and supplementary laws were enacted to carry out its spirit. The industrial education of rich and poor was provided for ; justice was to be cheaply administered ; prisons were to be regulated with a view to the reformation of the criminal, death punishments, ex cept for murder and tr.ason, were to be abolished. The governor had much labour before him, but he went through it resolutely. The lands of the province were surveyed, and divided into lots for grant or purchase. Philadelphia was founded upon a plan which contemplated the growth of a magnificent city. In a year many houses had been built, and emigrants came in great numbers to be come farmers or traders in a land where men could dwell without fear of oppression. Schools were founded. A Printing-Press was set up. A Post was established. The great outworks of civilisa tion were won. The principles of justice, upon which the new col ony was founded, were to guide the conduct of the colonists to wards the native Indians. The treaty with the red men — the only treaty that was never sworn to and never broken, says Voltaire — was one of friendship, and brotherhood, and mutual defence. An American has painted the scene, with the vagueness of his time as to portraiture and costume ; but West's picture gives some notion of a solemn ceremony, in which the Great Spirit, the common Father of all, was appealed to in the pledge that the power of civ ilisation should not be abused by the exercise of force or injustice against the weakness of barbarism.* * The interesting Biography of William Penn, by Mr. Hepworth Dixon, furnishes a very complete view of the settlement of Pennsylvania, of which ours is necessarily the briefest sketch. ADDRESS OF JAMES THE SECOND. 295 CHAPTER XV. Address of James the Second to his Council. — He is proclaimed. — He goes openly to Mass. — Illegal levying of Customs. — The king's ministers. — Roman Catholic coun sellors. — Roman Catholics and Quakers released from prison. — Renewed severities against Covenanters. — Elections in England. — Money from France. — Constitution of Parliament. — Its meeting. — Conviction and punishment of Titus- Oates. — Conviction of Richard Baxter. — Argyle lands in Scotland. — Disastrous result of Ills expedition. — His execution, — Monmouth lands at Lyme. — His Declaration. — He enters Taunton in triumph. — He is proclaimed king. — March to Bristol. — Skirmish of Philip'r:- Norton. — Monmouth returns to Bridgewater. — Battle of Sedgemoor — Flight of Monmouth. — His apprehension. — His abject submission to the king.— His execution. — Military executions in the Western Counties. — The legal massacres under Jeffreys. — Transportations. — The Court traffic in convicts. — The legal traffic iu pardons. The chamber of death is closed. James retires for fifteen min utes to the privacy of his closet, and then comes forth as king to meet the Council. It was necessary that he should address the assembled counsellors. He declared that he would follow the ex ample of his brother in his great clemency and tenderness to his people ; he would preserve the government in Church and State as by law established ; he knew that the principles of the Church of England were for monarchy, and that the members of it were good and loyal subjects, and therefore he should always have to defend and support it ; he knew that the laws were sufficient to make the king as great a monarch as he could wish, and therefore, whilst he would never depart from the just rights and prerogatives of the Crown, he would never invade any man's property. Some mem bers of the Council asked for copies- of this " benign and gracious declaration." The king said that he had spoken from his heart without much premeditation, and had not his speech in writing. Finch, the Solicitor-General, stated that he thought he could write it down word for word. He did write a report; the king approved, and ordered it to be published. The biographer of James says that Finch worded the speech as strong as he could in favour of the established religion, and that James passed it over without re flection : " He was afterwards convinced it had been better ex pressed by assuring them he never would endeavour to alter the established religion, rather than he would endeavour to preserve 296 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. it ; and that he would rather support and defend the professors of it than the religion itself." * James the Second was proclaimed that same afternoon at Whitehall-gate, at Temple-bar, and at the Exchange. The Council, and other officers of State, accompanied the procession. On their return they all kissed the hands of the king and queen. " The queen," writes Evelyn, " was in bed in her apartment, but put forth her hand, seeming to be much afflicted, as I believe she was, having deported herself so decently upon all occasions since she came into England, which made her univer sally beloved." t Charles the Second was buried on the 14th, "without any manner of pomp." This absence of the usual cere monies is accounted for by the fact that the late king had died a Roman Catholic. That fact was not as yet public ; and the people blamed the parsimony of James, or his want of the .affection of a brother. The difficulty of conducting the funeral of Charles in accordance with " the greater ceremonies which imsst have been performed according to the rites of the church of England," J pressed with increased force when the Coronation-day arrived,- on the 23rd of April. Some alterations were made in the ritual ; and, "to the sorrow of the people, no Sacrament, as ought to have been." § The second Sunday after he came to the throne the king went openly to mass ; and within a month of Charles' death the Romanists " were swarming at Court with greater confidence than had been ever seen in England since the Reformation, so that everybody grew jealous as to what this would tend." || James had not been more than three days king, when his gov ernment committed an illegal act. The grant of customs for the life of the king expired on the death of Charles. A proclamation was issued ordering that the duties on merchandise should be levied as usual, till the royal revenue had been settled by Parliament. This was against the advice of the Lord Keeper, Guilford, who rec ommended that the duties should be collected and kept apart in the Exchequer, till the Parliament should dispose of them. The temper of the public was, then, so propitious to the Crown, that almost anything would be borne with, which, in other times, would have raised a flame." IT The counsellors chosen by the king for his especial confidence were his brother-in-law, Rochester; Sunder land, who had been Charles's Secretary of State ; and Godolphin, * " Life cf James IL," vol. ii., pp. 3 & 4. t " Diary," February 6. t " Life of James II.," vol. ii,, p. 6. § Evelyn, " Diary." || Ibid, March 5th. H North, " Life of Guilford," vol. ii., p. 113. THE MINISTRY. 297 who had been first lord of the Treasury : Halifax, who had held the Privy-seal, was appointed to the unimportant office of President of the Council. It was nominally a higher office, and therefore a witticism which he had used on the promotion of Rochester was applied to himself — he was kicked up-stairs. The king's other brother-in-law, Clarendon, was made Privy Seal. Sunderland had voted for the Exclusion Bill, and therefore his continuance in office was a matter of surprise. But, if we are to credit the king's own assertion, this crafty minister saw the policy of connecting himself, however secretly, with the Roman Catholic party. James, in his own " Memoirs," says that in a consultation soon after his accession to the throne between Lord Sunderland, Father Petre, Mr. Jermyn, and lord Tyrconnel, "it was agreed that Father Petre should be a Cardinal, lord Sunderland Lord Treasurer, lord Tyrconnel Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (who engaged to procure my lord Sunderland five thousand pounds per annum out of that king dom, or fifty thousand pounds in money,) and that Mr. Henry Jermyn should be made a lord, and captain of the Horse Guards." * Tyrconnel and Jermyn were Roman Catholics. The king did not stand alone in his inclination to tread a path, beset with dangers. The apologists of James have endeavoured to induce a belief that, soon after his accession, "he limited his views to the accom plishment of two objects, which he called liberty of conscience and freedom of worship, and which, had he been successful, would have benefited, not the Catholics only, but every class of religionists." Dr. Lingard expresses this opinion, after having stated that James " gave it in charge to the judges to discourage prosecutions in matters of religion, and ordered by proclamation the discharge of all persons confined for the refusal of the oaths of allegiance and supremacy." f It is implied that " the dissenters " were relieved by this tolerant disposition. The relief extended only to Roman Catholics and Quakers. The Puritan dissenters — Presbyterians, or Independents, or Baptists, — had evinced no objection to the oath which renounced the authority of the Pope. Those who con tinued in prison were there for offences under the Conventicle Acts and the Five Mile Act. The Roman Catholics would not take the oath of supremacy ; the Quakers would not take any oath. "I have not been able," says a high authority, "to find any proof that any person, not a Roman Catholic or a Quaker, regained his * " Life of James II. ," vol. ii., p. 77. t " History," 8vo edition, vol. xiv. p. 13. 298 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. freedom under these orders." * The orders, signed by Sunder land, were issued on the 19th of April. The relief to the Roman Catholics was a natural manifestation of the disposition of the gov ernment. The relief to Quakers was the result of a conviction that they were a harmless sect, who carefully abstained from all political action, and avoided even political conversation. The in fluence of William Penn, who had returned home from Pennsyl vania, was laudably exercised to obtain this relief for the Society of which he was a member. The number of Quakers liberated was estimated at above fourteen hundred. Roman Catholics were liberated to the amount of some thousands, j T ,r. real disposition of the government towards Protestant dissenters was . at that period amply manifested by the proceedings in the Scottish Parlia ment. The meeting of the Estates preceded that of the English Parliament by nearly a month. In obedience to a special letter from the king, calling for new penal laws against the Covenanters, it was enacted on the 8th of May, that the punishment of death, and confiscation of land and goods, should be awarded against those who should preach in a conventicle under a roof, or should attend a conventicle in the open air, either as preacher or auditor. The persecution of the times of Charles II. was continued with in creased fury. X The soldiery were let loose upon the districts where the Covenanters were still unsubdued, to kill and plunder. The tale of two unhappy women who were condemned to be drowned, and were tied to stakes when the tide had receded, there to await the lingering but certain death that would follow its return, is not a fiction. Romance has not imagined any cruelty so horrible as that perpetrated by the scoundrel Major Winram. Of the two women whose drowning he superintended, one was a girl of eigh teen, of the name of Margaret Wilson. She had seen her elder friend perish. She was half dead herself when she was taken out of the water. "Dear Margaret," said her neighbours, "only say God save the king." Her answer was, " God save him, if he will, for it is his salvation I desire." Beyond this she refused to go. She would not abjure the cause of her religion, and consent to attend the episcopal worship ; and she was again thrown into the engulphing waves. The old laws against non-conformists were severe enough, and were executed with sufficient ferocity, to jus- * Macaulay. " History," vol. i. 8vo, p. 50}. Note. t Lingarr'. t We anticipated the date of the murder of " The Christian Carrier," to indicate the mode of proceeding with the Covenanters by the sanguinary Claverhouse. See p. 260. ELECTIONS. 299 tify any resistance, even without the addition of the infamous law which James caused to be passed against those who attended con venticles. The biographer of James thus explains the motives of the sovereign who desired, according to his panegyrists, " liberty of conscience and freedom of worship : " — " The king's earnestness to have the field conventicles suppressed was not from any spirit of persecution — though those wretches deserved no quarter — but from an apprehension of new troubles." * He made the Puritan religion a pretence for manifesting his hatred of the Puritan love of freedom. The Parliament had been summoned to meet on the 19th of May. No one doubted that the House of Commons would exceed all former Parliaments in subserviency, looking to the influences which had been exercised in the returns of members. Burnet, the Whig, complains of " the injustice and violence used in elections, beyond what had been ever practised in former times." Evelyn, the Tory, writes, " Elections for the coming Parliament in Eng land were thought to be very indirectly carried on in most places." f Again, he says, " There are many of the new members whose elec tions and returns were universally censured, many of them being persons of no condition, or interest in the nation or places for which they served." The boroughs were almost wholly in the hands of the Court; the old Charters having been superseded by new Charters, which placed the returns in the power of a corrupt few, nominated by the Crown. " It was reported that lord Bath carried down with him [into Cornwall] no fewer than fifteen Char ters, so that some called him the Prince Elector." X James had some ambitious projects floating in his mind, and especially excit ing him to secure^ an obedient Parliament. The interference of the French king with the parliamentary system of England, during the reign of Charles, was perfectly known to his successor. James was not quitg so abject as his brother ; but nevertheless he was ready to receive the French livres, and to submit his policy to the wishes of his patron, till he could make himself sufficiently secure of a large revenue for life. Then he would manifest a real inde pendence. Meanwhile he talked to foreign ministers about main taining the balance of power in Europe. He aspired to vie with the Court of France in its ceremonial observances towards am- bassadors. His pride made him bear his yoke somewhat impa- * " Life of James II.," vol. i., p. T2. t " Diary." May io., * Ibid. May 22. 300 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. tiently. " He seemed resolved," says Burnet, " not to be gov erned by French counsels." He gave out that he would cultivate the friendship of the Prince of Orange and the United Provinces. The courtiers said that a prince now ruled who would make France as dependent on England as England had been dependent on France. Louis slily said that " for all the high things given out in his name, the king of England was willing to take his money, as well as his brother had done." * The Parliament assembled on the 19th of May. Under the Stuarts there had been a vast increase of the Peerage. In the reign of James the Second there were fifteen dukes and duchesses, two marquises, sixty-seven earls and countesses, nine viscounts, and sixty-six barons and baronesses, making a total of one hun dred and fifty-nine. Eighty years before, there was no duke, only one marquis, about nineteen earls, three or four viscounts, and forty lords .f The learned Doctor of Laws, from whose Court Calendar we derive this information, estimates that through luxury, licentiousness, and want of fit education, " it was lately difficult to find, as some "are bold to affirm, the courage, wisdom, justice, in tegrity, honour, sobriety, and courtesy of the ancient nobility." Of the riches of the Peerage he has no doubt. He computes the yearly revenue of all England to be about fourteen millions, and assigns one eleventh of the whole to the nobility. Including twenty-five spiritual Peers (the see of York was vacant), there were a hundred and eighty-one Lords of Parliament. The num ber of Members of the House of Commons was five hundred and thirteen.^ From the printed List of Members, it appeared that there were not more than a hundred and thirty-five who had sat in former parliaments. § The Whig majority was gone. The country gentlemen, whether Whig or Tory, who were returned for the Counties, were a weak minority compared with the representa tives of the newly chartered Corporations. The composition of the House of Commons was such that it would havelieen difficult for the people to over-estimate the extent to which their so-called representatives would go in placing the property and liberty of the country at the feet of the king. The language of James, in his Speech from the Throne, argues an undoubting confidence in the machinery which he had procured for obtaining a large revenue, * Burnet. t Chamberlayne, " Present State of England," 1687, Part I. p. 285. t Ibid., Part II- p. 91. § Evelyn, May 22. SERVILE SPIRrT OF THE COMMONS. 30I and for enforcing a due compliance with his projects for restoring the influence of his own religion. He repeated not only the sub stance, but the exact words, of the speech which he had addressed to the Privy Council on the day of his accession ; " the better," said the king, "to evidence to you that I spoke then not by chance." In demanding the settlement of the Revenue for his life, for the many weighty necessities of government, he added these words, " which I must not suffer to be precarious." Mr. Fox has pointed out that " in arguing for his demand, as he styles it, of revenue, he says, not that the Parliament ought not, but that he must not suffer the well-being of the government, depend ing upon such revenue, to be precarious ; whence it is evident, that he intended to have it understood that, if the Parliament did not grant, he purposed to levy a revenue without their consent." * Think not, says the incipient despot, that you are to supply me with a little money from time to time, out of your inclination to frequent parliaments. " This would be a very improper method to take with me. The best way to engage me to meet you often is always to use me well." And the whole House of Commons, with one exception, were awed by the " vultus instantis tyranni "—and voted unanimously that the grant of revenue should be for life. The one bold member was sir Edward Seymour, a Cavalier of the staunchest breed. He did not oppose the grant, but he main tained that the first thing to do was to ascertain who were legal members of the House. This was more especially a duty, he said, when the laws and religion of England were in evident peril. No member dared to follow up this attack of a man whose high an cestry gave a special impulse to Iiis proud courage. The members of this Parliament "were neither men of parts nor estates; so there was "no hope left of either working on their understandings, or of making them. see their interest in not giving the king all at once. . . . There was no prospect of any strength in opposing anything that the king should ask of them." f An attempt was made a few days later, to obtain some security in the matter of re ligion ; by passing a resolution in Committee " to assist and stand * Fox, " James II." t Burnet. The writer, David Hume, who has had the chief direction of the English historical mind for nearly a century, had the impudence to fabricate a d.bate in the House of Commons for this occasion, in which he makes the opposers of the grant use argu ments well worthy of a free and enlightened assembly. Mr. Fox pointed out that this was a pure invention,, utterly unsupported by any contemporary writers, .. even by tra dition. J02 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. by his majesty, according to our duty and allegiance, for the sup port and defence of the reformed religion of the Church of Eng land, as now by law established." This was a great deal more than his majesty desired. Nor was a concurrent resolution less unpalatable, — that the House be moved to make an humble Ad dress to his majesty, to publish his royal Proclamation " for put ting the laws in execution against all Dissenters whatsoever from the Church of England." Barillon, the French ambassador, writes that these votes gave great offence to the king and queen, and that orders were issued to the Court members to get rid of them. When tbe House had to decide upon, the resolution of its Com mittee, the previous question was moved; and it was resolved, unanimously, "That this House doth acquiesce, entirely rely, and rest wholly satisfied, in his majesty's gracious word, and repeated declaration, to support and defend tbe religion of the Church of England, as it is by law established, which is dearer to us than our lives." There were two remarkable trials at this period, which must have had a considerable influence upon public opinion. The one was the prosecution of Titus Oates for perjury ; the other the prosecution of Richard Baxter for libel. Of the justice of tbe conviction of Oates there can be little doubt. The atrocious severity of his punishment was to gratify the revenge of the Roman Catholics, who crowded Westminster Hall on his trial, on the 7th of May. Tbe chief witness to the Popish Plot had long been lying in prison, heavily ironed, in default of payment of the excessive fine imposed upon him on his conviction for libelling the duke of York. He had been accustomed to browbeat juries, and to be lauded to the skies by judges. He had now to bear all the tyrannous invective which judges thought it decent to use in state prosecutions ; and, what to his unabashed impudence was far more terrible, he was to be pilloried in Palace Yard, and at the Royal Exchange. He was to be whipped from Aldgate to Newgate on one day, and then again to be whipped from Newgate to Tyburn. He was to be im prisoned for life. He was to stand in the pillory five times every year. His conviction, says Reresby, "was a grateful hearing to the king." His majesty said " that Oates being thus convicted^ the Popish Plot was dead." Reresby is proud of his ready reply: " I answering, that it had long since been dead, and that now it would be buried, his majesty so well approved of the tutn, that going with him afterwards to the princess of Denmark, I h_,a-o CONVICTION OF RICHARD BAXTER. 303 him repeat it to her." * Whilst the small joke was circulating about the Court, the wretched Oates was tortured in a way which even the haters of his perjuries must have thought excessive. He was flogged at the cart's tail on the first day, almost tc death. In tercession was made to the king to remit the second flogging. The answer was, " he shall go through with it, if he has breath in his body." He did go through with it, and survived even seventeen hundred lashes. It is clear that the judges meant him to be flogged to death. He could not be executed for his offence ; but he could be subjected to the torments of a lingering execution. Flogging, under the government of James the Second, became a favourite punishment. Another of the plot witnesses, Dangerfield, was scourged for a libel, and he died. His death was laid upon a vio lent man who struck him with a cane, injuring his eye, as he was carried in a coach back to Newgate after his flogging; and that man, Francis, was hanged for murder. The lacerated body of Danger- field showed that the brutal assault of Francis was a secondary cause of Dangerfield's death. If Titus Oates was unmercifully scourged for the satisfaction of the Papists, Richard Baxter was harassed, insulted, fined, and im prisoned, for the terror of the Puritans. Baxter was tried for a seditious libel, contained in his Paraphrase on the New Testament, in which he somewhat bitterly complained of the wrongs of the Dissenters. Baxter's counsel moved for a postponement of the trial. " I would not give him a minute more to save his life," ex claimed the brutal Chief Justice : " Yonder stands Oates in the pillory, and if Baxter stood by his side the two greatest rogues and rascals in England would be there." The trial, if trial it could be called, went on. The barristers who defended the venerable man, now in his seventieth year, were insulted by the ermined slave of the Crown. Baxter himself attempted to speak, and he was thus met by Jeffreys • " Richard, Richard ! dost thou think we will hear thee poison the court ? Richard, thou art an old fellow, an old knave ; thou hast written books enough to load a cart ; every one is as full of sedition (I might say treason), as an egg is full of meat ; hadst thou been whipt out of thy writing trade forty years ago it had been happy. Thou pretendest to be a preacher of the gospel of peace, and thou hast one foot in the grave ; it is time for thee to begin to think what account thou intendest to give ; but leave thee to thyself, and I see thou wilt go on as thou hast be- * " Memoirs," p. 299. 304 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. gun ; but, by the grace of God, I'll look after thee. I know thou hast a mighty party, and I see a great many of the brotherhood in corners, waiting to see what will become of the mighty Don ; and a doctor of the party [looking to Dr. Bates] at your elbow, but by the grace of Almighty God I will crush you all." * The famous non-conformist, — he who, in the earnestness of his piety and the purity of his life, was unsurpassed by the greatest of the great di vines of the English Church from which he differed so little, — was of course found guilty. He was surrounded by friends and ad mirers, who wept aloud. " Snivelling calves ! " exclaimed Jeffreys. He was anxious, it is said, that the prisoner should be whipped at the cart's tail, but that was overruled by three other judges. Bax ter was unable to pay his fine of five hundred marks , and he re mained in prison for eighteen months ; when his pardon was ob tained. The king, in his speech to the two Houses on the 23d of May, informed them that he had received news that morning from Scot land, that Argyle had landed in the West Highlands, with men from Holland. The Houses sympathised with the king in his anger that Argyle had charged him with " usurpation and tyranny." The earl had been three years and a half in Holland, an exile under his unjust sentence. Many who had fled from the oppressions exercised upon the Presbyterians had gathered around him. He was the natural leader in any open resistance ; for five thousand of his vassals would immediately flock to his banner, and with the Covenanters in the western counties would form a considerable army. The duke of Monmouth had seen Argyle, and had been pressed by him to make a simultaneous attempt to raise an ii.urrection in England. Argyle was fully prepared with money and with arms. He had with him, to support the cause of his Church, men of rank and influence. Monmouth had made no preparations, and had very slight means of making any ; and his supporters were not men on whom great reliance could be placed. But Monmouth's adherents had this advantage over the followers of Argyle — they were not jealous of entrusting authority to one hand ; they were not dis tracted by minute differences, as the Covenanters had ever been distracted. Reresby says that at the beginning of May the govern ment had " advice that a store of arms had been bought up in Holland and conveyed to Scotland ; " and that Argyle and lord Grey, and even Monmouth, had gone with them. James had desired that the •" State Trials." EXPEDITION OF ARGYLE. 305 States of- Holland should interfere to prevent any expedition sail ing from their ports. The prince of Orange, it is alleged, was anxious to meet the wishes of his father-in-law, who had manifested some disposition to throw off his dependence upon France. But the authorities of the United Provinces were very slow in the ex ercise of their divided responsibilities ; and three ships, in one of which Argyle was on board, sailed out of the Zuy'der Zee on the 2nd of May. Monmouth and Grey were not with him. They re mained to prepare for their own desperate adventure. From the very first the expedition of Argyle was conducted with an imprudence which was the result of indecision. At Kirkwall, in the Orkneys, two men were allowed to go on shore. They were arrested; and the news of the armament quickly reached Edin burgh, whilst Argyle was lingering on the coast to obtain the release of his men. When he reached Lorn, and his son went on shore to summon the clans to gather round their chief, no person of mark came to join in the war-cry of the Campbells. Many hum ble vassals, however, assembled at Tarbet. Here the counsels of the insurgents became more dangerously opposed to any plan of concentrated action. Argyle wished to make a stand in his own Highlands. Sir Patrick Hume and Sir John Cochrane were for marching into the western Lowlands. The army divided. A squadron, bound for Ayrshire, sailed up the Clyde ; and Cochrane, having landed at Greenock, was convinced of the hopelessness of an attempt to rouse the population into revolt. Argyle was now in the isle of Bute and Cochrane returned to him. After various encounters with the king's troops, Argyle was marching upon Inverary, when the Lowlanders of his army refused to advance into the Highlands. He then, with a greatly reduced number of fol lowers, moved to Dumbartonshire, intending to march for Glasgow. Meanwhile his ships had been taken, and the stores which he had disembarked were also lost. Disaster followed upon disaster. When the rebel army crossed the Leven they were surrounded by the royal troops. It was determined not to risk an engagement, but to advance upon Glasgow by a night march. They mistook their course. The little army was reduced by desertion to a few hundred men. Their leaders fled. Argyle, disguised as a peasant, was at last captured in the manner quaintly described by lord Fountainhall : " Argyle himself, fieirig alone on a little pony, was overtaken by two men of sir John Shaw's, who would have had his pony to carry their baggage ; whereupon he fired a pistol at them, Vol. IV.— 20 306 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. for he had three on him, whereof I have two, which I got from his son-in-law, the second marquis of Lothian ; and thereafter took the water of Inchinan. But a webster, dwelling there, hearing the noise, came with a broadsword." The weaver would not quit Argyle, though the other two men would have let him go for gold ; and finally " the webster gave him a great pelt over the head with his sword, that he damped him so that he fell into the river, and in the fall cried, ' Ah, the unfortunate Argyle ! ' " His fate was now sealed. He was conducted to Glasgow, and thence to Edinburgh. The same humiliations were inflicted upon him as were inflicted upon Montrose. It was determined to execute him, without any further trial, under the flagitious sentence that had condemned him to death in 1681. All the innate nobleness of his character was developed in these his last hours of misery. He was threatened with torture ; but he refused to criminate any of his friends. He made no supplications for mercy, but he prepared himself for the scaffold, with the proud consciousness that he fell in a good cause, and with the calm fortitude of an undoubting faith. The placid sleep of the prisoner as the hour approached in which he was to die — that sleep . which the apostate who gazed upon him could scarcely hope again to enjoy — is a worthy subject for the historical painter, and it has been worthily treated by a living artist. On the 14th of June Evelyn makes the following entry in his ' Diary ' : — " There was now certain intelligence of the duke of Monmouth landing at Lyme in Dorsetshire." The fact had been communicated to Parliament the day before. At daybreak of the 11 th of June, three vessels were descried in the deepest part of the bay ; and at a creek five miles east of Lyme, three persons landed, and proceeded to White Lackington House, near Ilminster. This Was the scene of Monmouth's first progress. The surveyor of the port of Lyme, in the discharge of his official duty, put off in a boat to visit the three vessels. He was conducted to the duke ; was civilly treated ; but was not allowed to depart till late in the day. The surveyor belonged to a club, who met weekly to play at bowls and to dine. The members grew alarmed at their friend's absence. The post came in at five o'clock, and brought a newspaper, giving an account of three ships having sailed from a port in Holland. The alarm increased. The mayor and burgesses went on the cliffs to watch the suspicious vessels. »They talked of firing a great gun, but they had no powder or shot. It was now near sunset; and the terrified magistrates saw the king's revenue boat, with three other MONMOUTH'S DECLARATION. 307 boats, filled with men, rowing in-shore. The men landed. The few borough militia ran away. Some of the townsmen cried " A Monmouth! A Monmouth! The Protestant religion ! " Before night-fall the duke's standard was set up in the Market Place of Lyme, and a declaration was read. Monmouth had landed with only eighty-three followers.* The alacrity of the two Houses of Parliament to support the king " against James duke of Monmouth, his adherents and cor respondents," was manifested in a spirit of ultra-loyalty. Without the slightest evidence, beyond that of the mayor of Lyme, who had posted to London with his news, they passed in one day a Bill of Attainder against Monmouth; and they passed another Bill "for "the preservation of his majesty's royal person and government," in which, to assert the legitimacy of Monmouth, or to propose in Parliament any alteration of the succession to the crown, were made high treason. The duke's Declaration was ordered to be burnt by the common hangman. . A supply was voted to the king to meet the charges attending this rebellion, and the Lords and Commons were dismissed to their respective counties, by adjourn ment. The Declaration issued by Monmouth asserted the great principle that " Government was originally instituted by God, and this or that form of it chosen and submitted to by men, for the peace, happiness, and security of the governed, and not for the private interest and personal greatness of these that rule." It accused the existing government of attempting to turn " our limit ed Monarchy into an open Tyranny," and to undermine " our Religion by Popish Councils." It declared that "the whole course and series of the life of the present Usurper hath been but one continued conspiracy against the reformed Religion and rights of the nation." It then accused the duke of York of having contrived the burning of London ; of having fomented the Popish Plot ; of having assassinated the earl of Essex ; of having poisoned his own brother, the late king. It was not a wise Declaration. The vio lence which stimulated the passions 'of the ignorant was offensive to the reflecting and the moderate. There was no possibility of accommodation, when it was declared that the sword should not be sheathed till the reigning monarch was brought to condign punish ment. In asserting his. own legitimacy, and his consequent right to be king of England, the adventurer first said that he would leave * From a MS. in the British Museum, written by Samuel Dassell, a Customhouse- officer of Lyme, abstracted in Mr. Roberts' " Life of Monmonth," vol. i p. 220. 308 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. his claims to be decided by a free Parliament. In a subsequent manifesto he took other ground. Rash and impolitic as were many parts of Monmouth's Declaration — " full of much black and dull malice," as Burnet describes it — there were others besides the clowns and mechanics of the western shires who regarded " the Protestant duke " as their deliverer. The Independents of Ax- minster recorded in their " Church Book " their hopes " that the day was come in the which the good old Cause of God and religion, that had lain as dead and buried for a long time, would revive again." * The fervid expectations excited by the landing of Mon mouth were not entirely local in their character. Daniel Defoe, then twenty-four years of age, joined the blue banner of the duke, in the confidence that he came to do battle for civil and religious liberty. Defoe subsequently recorded some of the incidents of this short warfare — happily the last occasion in which Englishmen had to meet Englishmen in a deadly encounter for great principles. A royalist force had collected at Bridport, and Monmouth re solved to attack them. He had landed from his ships four pieces of cannon. He had fifteen hundred suits of defensive armour, a small number of muskets, carbines, and pistols, and about a thou sand swords and pikes. On the day after his landing, he had a thousand foot under his command, and a hundred and fifty horse. On that day dissension broke out amongst his followers. The celebrated Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, who was in command of Monmouth's horse, had received an insult from Thomas Dare, one of Monmouth's followers, who had been a goldsmith at Taunton ; and the fiery Scot shot the Englishman, who instantly died. Such summary vengeance was unsuited to the national character, and Fletcher was obliged to fly to Monmouth's ship. This was an om inous commencement. On the 14th lord Grey marched to Brid port ; fought with the militia there ; and then retreated in disorder to Lyme. In spite of quarrels and disasters numerous recruits flocked to Monmouth's head-quarters at the George inn at Lyme — an antique hostelry, which was burnt down about forty years ago. The duke of Albemarle, Lord Lieutenant of Devonshire, marched from Exeter, with four thousand of the trained bands. On the 15th he was met at Axminster by a large body of the insur gents. He thought it judicious to retreat. His men were not staunch. They threw away their arms and clothes ; and the road to Exeter was free to Monmouth. He was satisfied to march to * Roberts, vol. i. p. :i2. MONMOUTH'S ENTRY INTO TAUNTON. 309 Taunton, which he reached on the 18th of June. Situate in a val ley of unrivalled fertility, and abundantly prosperous in its serge manufacture, Taunton had long been conspicuous for its resolute adherence to the old spirit of puritanism. Oppressed as was its ¦ dissenting population under the various Statutes against Non-con formists, the principle of resistance was not extinguished amongst them. Their pulpits were burnt ; they evaded the statutory pen alties for non-attendance at church, by joining in the Liturgy be neath the tower of St. Mary Magdalen. But this was only surface obedience. Monmouth approached the town, and found that the population had possessed themselves of the arms stored in the belfrey of their church, ready for his service; Hundreds went out to meet their idol. They thronged around him in their narrow streets, every man with a green bough in his hat. The ways were strewed with flowers ; the windows were hung with garlands ; maidens of good families went in procession to offer him twenty- seven standards which they had worked with their own hands. One of them was " The Golden Flag," embroidered with J. R., and a crown. This reception at Taunton probably decided Monmouth to proclaim himself King. That resolve was not in accordance with his first Declaration. It was offensive to many of his fol lowers, who cherished the notion of a republic. Welwood says, " Ambitious he was,, but not to the degree of aspiring to the Crown, till after his landing in the West ; and even then he was rather passive than active in assuming the title of King. It was impor tunity alone that prevailed with him to make that step ; and he was inflexible, till it was told him, that the only way to provide against the ruin of those that should come in to his assistance, in case he failed in the attempt, was to declare himself king; that they might be sheltered by the Statute made in the reign of Henry VIL, in favour of those that should obey a king de facto." * This forced application of the statute of Henry VIL was altogether fallacious, Monmouth was himself too ready to forget its real meaning. Had Monmouth been king de jure, James was king de facto. And yet Monmouth proclaimed the adherents of James as rebels and traitors. The assumption of the regal title secured Monmouth no real accession of strength. Not a nobleman joined him ; not even any head of 11 n'ch and influential Whig family. His pretensions were ridiculed oven by those of the higher classes who had no af fection for the existing government. He issued Proclamation after * " Memoirs," p. 148. 310 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Proclamation, " from our camp at Taunton, in the first year of our reign." The Assembly sitting at Westminster, voting and acting as a Parliament under the usurper, James duke of York, were de sired to disperse, under the penalties of treason. All who collected and levied taxes for James duke of York were declared to be rebels and traitors. Christopher, duke of Albemarle, and his adherents, "now in arms at Wellington," were to be pursued as rebels and traitors. Monmouth marched out of Taunton on the 22nd of June. Al lemarle marched into Taunton on the 23rd. He immediately wrote a few brief words to Sunderland : " I came hither this night, where I found these several Proclamations, which I send to your lordship only for your diversion." * Monmouth marched from Taunton to Bridgewater with six thousand men. Many were armed with scythes, fixed on upright handles. This rustic weapon was so important, that warrants were issued to the tything-men " to search for, seize, and take all such scythes as can be found in your tything, paying a reasonable price for the same." f The large numbers that gathered round Mon mouth's standard was rather an embarrassment than an aid. They could not be provided with arms. They were a burthen upon the country through which they marched. But the general disposition of the humbler ranks of people to join Monmouth is evident from this fact: the Lords Lieutenant were ordered to call out the Militia, not so much to oppose the duke, " as to hinder the country from flocking in to him ; for the king could have littie'ccnfidence in the Militia of those parts, who were framed, to be sure, of the same mould and temper of their neighbours, who so readily had joined the invader." X On the 22nd of June the insurgents had marched to Glastonbury. The monastic ruins, and the churches, gave shel ter to the wearied men, who had travelled through a swampy dis trict under a drenching rain. The next day they had reached Shep- ton Mallet. The object of the march was to attack Bristol. On the 25th they crossed the Avon at Keynsham. The night before, a ship-had taken fire at the quay at Bristol. It was afterwards al leged against the Bristowans that they had fired the ship as a signal to the rebels. They were suspected by the authorities, for the duke of Beaufort, having a considerable body of Gloucestershire train bands with him at Redcliffe Mead, threatened to fire the city if they afforded any aid to Monmouth. The king's forces now sur- * EUis, "Original Letters, " First Series, vol. iii. p. 340. * Roberts, voi. i. p. 328. t " Life of James II." vol. ii. p, 29. SKIRMISH AT PHILIP's-NORTON. 31 1 rounded the insurgents. They became irresolute , and marched away to Bath. Monmouth grew dejected. The large reward of five thousand pounds had been proclaimed for " any who should kill him.'** He was deeply mortified at the manifest un willingness of the country gentlemen to engage in his support. He expected some of the royal army to come over to him. He had him self commanded a regiment, and was personally beloved. But those who knew him b.est knew the weakness of his character. He was brave in the field; but he had none of those high qualities which fitted him to contend, even with the enthusiastic support of large bodies of people, against the organised power of a government that was capable of inspiring dread if it failed to secure affection. Mon mouth made no attack upon Bath, which had a strong garrison. He marched to Philip's-Norton, half way between Bath and Frome. On the morning of the 27th the advanced guard of the king's army, under the earl of Feversham, was close to the insurgents. That guard was commanded by the duke of Grafton, the youngest of the illegitimate sons of Charles the Second. Through a narrow lane which led into Philip's-Norton, Grafton led his grenadiers against his eldest half-brother. A barricade stopped their progress ; and Monmouth attacked them in flank. Grafton cut his way through ; and got back to theimain body of the royal army. There was fight ing for several hours ; and the cause of the insurgents was strength ened by the proof, that, raw and undisciplined as they were, they could stand up against regular troops. The royal army retreated to Bradford. Defoe says, that if Monmouth had pursued his advan tage, he would have gained a complete victory. f The same night the insurgent army marched, under incessant rain, to Frome. This night-march, and the morning engagement, greatly reduced the number of Monmouth's followers. Many had thought of the glories of war — of a pleasant march- to London where their beloved duke would establish the liberties of his country, and reward his trusty friends. They had seen some of the dangers and miseries of real warfare, and they hastened to escape from them. At Frome Monmouth heard of the defeat and capture of Argyle. At Frome there were no joyful congratulations as at Taunton ; for the earl of Pembroke had a few days before put down a popular de monstration of those termed in the London Gazette " the rabble." * Evelyn. "• Wilson, " Life of Defoe," vol. i. p. 108. Philip's-Norton is erroneously called Chipping-Norton, in the passage quoted by Wilson. 312 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. The prospects of Monmouth became more and more dark. He was advised, according to some authorities, — he himself meditated, ac cording to other accounts, — to leave his followers to their fate, and escape to some foreign place of refuge. He had a devoted mistress to fly to, lady Wentworth, whose passionate attachment might con sole him for all the disappointments of his ambition. Lord Grey opposed this dastardly hope of the unhappy man, and he remained for a last struggle. At Wells his army had become unmanageable. They lived at free quarters, and attempted to deface the cathedral. On the 2nd of July they marched on towards Bridgewater. A de putation from the people of Taunton came now to entreat Mon mouth not to return to their town. There were symptoms enough that Iris cause was now desperate. He had marched out of Bridge- water with a confident army on the 22nd of June. He was again at Bridgewater with a broken and dispirited force on the 4th of July. In these eleven days he had accomplished nothing. On Sunday, the 5th, the earl of Feversham, at the head of the roval army, en tered the great moor, called King's Sedgmoor, which stretches in a south-easterly direction from below Bridgewater to Somerton. He encamped on this morass, on the west side of which flows the river Parret, and whose deep and broad ditches, called Rhines, and high causeways, showed how gradually the labour of man had con verted this dismal swamp into a region comparatively fertile. In this ancient region of waters Alfred had found refuge in its Isle of Athelney. The names of the villages, compounded of " Zoy '' — zee, sea — showed the maritime origin of the district. Feversham's horse were quartered in the village of Weston Zoyland. His in fantry were under canvas. On that Sunday the determination was taken by the insurgent leaders to attack the king's army at night, to anticipate the expected assault of Feversham. Monmouth, says Defoe, " went up to the top of the steeple, with some of his officers ; and viewing the situation of the king's army, by the help of per spectives, he resolved to make an attempt upon them by way of pre vention. He accordingly marched out of the town in the dead of the night to the attack."* Monmouth from the elevation of Bridge- water church could distinguish the regiment that he had once com manded. If he had these men with him, he exclaimed, he could not doubt of success. He had been told that the royal army was not entrenched. He saw a plain beneath him intersected by great ditches. He was promised to be led safely across them by guides. * " Tour through Great Britain,'' quoted by Wilson. BATTLE OF SEDGEMOOR. 313 He would not take the direct road from Bridgewater to Weston Zoyland, but would advance along the Eastern Causeway, across the North Moor and the Langmoor, and surprise his sleeping ene mies in their camp. By this circuitous route of six miles, .Mon mouth would avoid the royal artillery that commanded the direct road. But he had undertaken a night march of extraordinary dif ficulty. The biographer of Monmouth, whose local knowledge is evidently complete, says, " A guide was needed in the lanes, but was indispensable after the forces reached the open moor. Indeed, any person desirous of traversing the moor by daylight at the pres ent time, would be glad of direction to make a way to the cradle bridges across the great drain or cut." * The front of the royal army was covered by this great drain or cut, called the Old Bussex Rhine. It was filled by the recent heavy rains. Defoe, who may be regarded as an actor in these events, says of Monmouth, " Had he not, either by the treachery or mistake of his guides, been brought to an impassable ditch where he could not get over — in the interval of which the king's troops took the alarm by the firing of a pistol amongst the duke's men, whether also by accident or treachery is not known — I say, had not these accidents and his own fate conspired to his defeat, he had certainly cut the lord Fe versham's army all to pieces." The report of the pistol was heard in the royal camp. The mist lay heavy upon the moor, but the moon was at the full ; and in the uncertain light a body of men was seen approaching. The alarm was sounded by the beat of drum. Grey had advanced with the cavalry ; Monmouth was following at the head of the infantry. Suddenly the great Bussex Rhine intercepted their progress. Concealment was no longer possible. King Monmouth ! was shouted, with the old rallying word of the Puritans, " God with us ! " The king's troops fired across the ditch ; and the untrained cavalry horses of the insurgents were scattered about the peat- moor. Monmouth came up to the edge of the Rhine ; and shots were exchanged across that impassable ditch for some time. The whole royal army was now roused. Passing along the Weston Zoyland road they could soon be in the open plain. The sun was rising as the Life Guards scoured the moor, and the foot-guards and other regiments advanced in compact ranks. Monmouth fled from the field when he saw that his horsemen and his waggons had gone. The king's artillery was brought up, the bishop of Win- * Roberts, vol. ii. p. 63. 314 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Chester having applied his carriage-horses to drag the guns along the Bridgewater road. Yet the peasants and cloth-workers made a brave stand with their scythes and pikes. Their muskets were useless, for in vain they shouted " For God's sake, Ammunition ! " Another race of hardy men stood their ground to the last. " The slain," says Evelyn, " were most of them Mendip miners, who did great execution with their tools, and sold their lives very dearly." It is impossible to regard the fate of Monmouth without a large amount of commiseration. Bred up amidst all the follies and vices of a luxurious Court; pampered with every indulgence by his im prudent father; rendered independent at a very early age by mar riage with a rich heiress ; raised to the highest honours and employ ments ; made the tool of a party, unqualified as he was for any con sistent political action ; bewildered with popular applause ; he finally engaged in a desperate enterprise against a stern and relentless enemy. When he fled from the field of Sedgemoor, he had about him a pocketbook, in which there were certain entries which indi cate that Charles the Second had a design to get rid of the control of the duke of York, and restore Monmouth to his former position. On the 1 6th of February is this expressive memorandum : " The sad news of his death, by L. O cruel Fate ! " * After his defeat ' there was no hope for Monmouth. The price set upon his head made escape from the kingdom almost impossible. Before four o'clock of that July morning the fugitives from the fatal moor were hiding in every ditch and every hovel from their pursuers. By six o'clock Monmouth, with Grey, and two or three others, was twenty miles from the field in which he had better have died fight ing. They rode all day towards New Forest, till their horses were exhausted. Disguised as countrymen they proceeded on foot. Parties of militia were on the look-out on every side. Grey was taken early on the morning of the 7th, near Ringwood. Two men had been seen entering some enclosed grounds, intersected with' hedges, some of the fields affording the shelter of standing crops, and some overgrown with fern and brambles. The two men were Monmouth and Busse, a German. The place was surrounded all night with soldiers, after a fruitless search. Early on the morning of the Sth Busse was discovered. The soldiers were stimulated to greater exertion by the announcement that the reward offered for Monmouth's apprehension would be divided amongst his cap tors. The unhappy man, worn out with fatigue, starving, was * Wellwcod's " Memoirs," Appendix, xv. HIS SUBMISSION TO JAMES. 315 found in a ditch, in the garb of a shepherd. The same pockets that held the raw pease which had been his only food, contained the George with which Charles had invested his first-born son. The prisoner was conveyed to Ringwood, about six miles distant from the field now known as Monmouth's Close. The real char acter of him who had led so many devoted followers to ruin was now displayed. 'He did not rise out of -misfortune a nobler man, as Argyle had risen. His first act was to write an abject letter to king James, expressive of remorse for the wrongs he had done him. He had assured the prince and princess of Orange that he would never stir against his majesty, but horrid people had led him away with false arguments. He could say many things to move compassion, but he. only begged to have the happiness to speak to the king, for he had that to say which he hoped would give his majesty a long and happy reign. He had one word to say of too much consequence for him to write. After remaining at Ringwood two days, Monmouth and Grey were conducted to London under a strong escort. They were three days on the road. Monmouth was prostrated by his fears ; Grey was unmoved by his impending danger. Arrived at Whitehall, a scene ensued which the French ambassador, Barillon, considered opposed to the ordinary usage of other nations. The sovereign saw the prisoner whose life he had determined not to spare . Monmouth was brought pinioned into his uncle's presence. " He fell upon his knees, crawling upon them to embrace those of his majesty; and forgetting the charac ter of a hero, whicli he had so long pretended to, behaved himself with the greatest meanness and abjection imaginable, omitting no humiliation or pretence of sorrow and repentance, to move the king to compassion and mercy." This is the account given upon the supposed authority of king James's papers. It is not contra dicted by other narratives. The mean motive of the king in grant ing an audience which in ordinary cases implied a pardon, is ex hibited in this statement : " There appearing no great matters of discovery, there was no advantage drawn to either side by this unseasonable interview."* The "one word," if spoken, was of no avail to save the prisoner's life. Detailed narratives of executions for State offences occupy a considerable portion of most English histories ; and, we presume, they are attractive to the general reader. Whether those who died by the axe under Plantagenet, Tudor, or Stuart, were innocent or * "Life of James II.," vol. ii., p. 36. 316 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. guilty, were of pure or corrupt lives, the fortitude with which they looked death in the face — without shrinking even from the dis gusting preparations for the barbarities that accompanied death for high treason — is an almost universal characteristic of their un timely ends. The abjectness which Monmouth displayed when he deluded himself with hopes of life, appeared to the French ambas sador very different to the ordinary fortitude of Englishmen. Monmouth, however, recovered his courage when the last great trial was at hand. He had seen his wife in the presence of lord Clarendon, on the Monday when he was committed to the Tower. He saw her again on the Wednesday of his execution. The nature of these interviews is perhaps correctly given by Evelyn, who says that the duke received his duchess " coldly, having lived dis- Ronestly with the Lady Henrietta Wentworth for two years." The duchess was far more affected than her husband ; but he showed a proper consideration for her future safety by maintaining that she had been averse to his behaviour towards the late king, and knew nothing of the circumstances of his recent attempt. In his prison, and on the scaffold, Monmouth was attended by the bishop of Ely and the bishop of Bath and Wells. The conduct of these prelates, Turner and Ken, towards the unhappy man has been compared to that of " fathers of the Inquisition." * On the other hand it has been said, " they appear to have only discharged what they considered a sacred duty."-)- They pressed him to acknowledge the doctrine of Non-Resistance to be true, if he were of the Church of England. He would do no more than acknowl edge the doctrines of the Church of England, in general. Again and again he was exhorted to a positive declaration upon this point. Upon one subject his opinions were singularly illustrative of his defective moral training. He maintained that his inter course with lady Wentworth was not sinful ; for she had reclaimed him from licentiousness, and their mutual attachment was pro found and enduring. His disrespect for the conjugal tie was con sidered by the prelates as a reason for not administering the Sacra ment to one so imperfectly repentant. He was urged to speak to the soldiers, and say that he stood there, a sad example of rebel lion. He was urged to entreat the soldiers and the people to be loyal and obedient to the king. His answer was emphatic : " I have said I will make no speeches : I will make no speeches : I come to die." His death was a horrible butchery, through the * Roberts. -f Macaulay. MILITARY EXECUTIONS IN THE WESTERN COUNTIES. 317 unskilfulness of the executioner. The multitude around, who, for the most part, regarded the duke as martyred for the Protest ant religion, yelled with fury when they saw their idolised favourite thus mangled ; and as they dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood, the thought must have crossed many minds that the day would still come when new Monmouths should arise, to uphold the Cause with happier results. One of the dying man's answers to the questions with which he was assailed was expressive of his consistent humanity : " Have you not been guilty," he was asked, " of invasion, and of much blood which has been shed ? " He replied, " I am sorry for invad ing the kingdom and for the blood that has been shed." Again pressed upon this matter, he said, " What I have done has been very ill ; and I wish with all my heart it had never been. I never was a man that delighted in tblood : I was very far from it." Could the soft hearted Monmouth have looked forward to the slaughters that were still to be perpetrated upon his poor followers, he would have had still heavier reason for lamenting his brief career of civil warfare. It is 1 orrible to know that a king sat upon the English throne, in times not barbarous, who could command and sanction the execution of nearly four hundred of his subjects for their rash participation in a sudden revolt. It is still more odious to know that, not two centuries ago, there was an English judge so eager for bloodshed, and English juries so awe-stricken, as to condemn three hundred and thirty-one persons to the death of traitors, during one terrible Assize. In addition to those who suffered the extreme penalty, eight hundred and forty-nine of the insurgents were transported ; and thirty-three were fined or whip ped The record of such circumstances is chiefly valuable to show us the nature of the tyranny from which we have escaped. The professional atrocities of a colonel Kirke, however exaggerated, were natural results of the uncontrolled power of a brutal captain of a brutal soldiery. The calculating barbarities of a Chief Justice Jeffreys, under the forms of law, exhibit the excesses of an author ity far more dangerous to freedom than the passing inflictions of drum-head tyranny. When Kirke and his officers sit carousing at the White Hart at Taunton : and at every toast of the drunken crew a prisoner was hanged up for their merriment, and the drums were ordered to beat to give the quivering limbs music for their dancing, — we trace the degradation of the unchristian warriors, who brought the habits of their warfare with barbarians to be the 318 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. scourges of their own countrymen. But when the Chief Justice of England strains every faculty of his depraved intellect to procure the condemnation of a lady, whose only crime was giving a meal and a lodging to two fugitives, we may well believe that there is no more direct evidence of the fatal course of arbitrary power than its capacity to make the sword of Justice a far more terrible weapon of oppression than pike or gun, and to degrade the head of a learned and liberal profession to an office lower than that of the hangman. The lady Alice Lisle, then seventy years of age, calmly slept at the bar while Jeffreys charged the jury against her with the vehemence of an advocate ; and she went to the scaffold with a composure which her furious judge must have resented as the proof of his impotence to kill the soul. Alice Lisle was his first victim, and the only one at Winchester. Every exertion was made to obtain her pardon, but king, James was inexorable. It was nothing to the revengeful Stuart that the venerable lady had been illegally convicted as an accessory in concealing a traitor, before the trial and conviction of the said traitor himself. It was enough that she was the widow of John Lisle, the member of the Long Parliament and of the High Court of Justice. Jeffreys only fleshed his fangs upon Alice Lisle. In Dorsetshire he executed seventy-four persons. In Devonshire a mere thirteen were put to death. In Somersetshire two hundred and thirty-three suffered all the barbarous punishments of high-treason. The pitch caul dron was constantly boiling in the Assize towns, to preserve the heads and limbs from corruption that were to be distributed through the beautiful western country. As the leaves were drop ping in that autumn of 1685, the great oak of many a village green was decorated with a mangled quarter. On every tower of the Somersetshire churches a ghastly head looked down upon those who gathered together for the worship of the God of love. The directing post for the traveller was elevated into a gibbet. The labourer returning home beneath the harvest moon hurried past the body suspended in its creaking gimmaces (chains). The eloquent historian of this reign of terror has attested from his own childish recollections, that "within the last forty years peasants, in some districts, well knew the accursed spots, and passed them unwillingly after sunset." * The barbarous executions of this evil time can only be matched by the infamy of the great, in seeking to make a money advantage * Macaulay, vol. i. 8vo, p. 645. THE REWARDS OF JUDGE JEFFREYS. 319 in proportion to the number of prisoners to be transported. It was calculated that a thousand of these unfortunates were to be distributed amongst certain favoured persons ; and .Sunderland, writing to Jeffreys by order of the king, says, "the queen has asked for a hundred more of the rebels." They were to be sold by these merchants in human flesh for field labour in Jamaica, Barbadoes, and the Leeward Islands. Jeffreys did not approve of this- courtly generosity, that would assign to others the proper wages of the king and his instruments ; and he writes to James, " I beseech your majesty that I may inform you that each prisoner will be worth ten pounds, if not fifteen pounds a-piece ; and, Sir, if your majesty orders them as you have designed, persons that have not suffered in the service will run away with the booty." * The most notorious of these transactions was that of the claim of the Maids of Honour to make a profit out of the pardon of the young girls of Taunton, who had presented the embroidered ban ners to Monmouth on the day of his triumphal entry. More than two thousand pounds were paid to these ladies of the queen of England, to avert a prosecution of the innocent children who had graced the procession of the handsome duke whom they were told was their rightful king. Jeffreys returned from his bloody Circuit to be rewarded with the Great Seal. He boasted that he had hanged more for high treason than all the judges of England since William the Conquer or. In his proceedings he had a double gratification. He had a pleasure in hanging, and a more solid delight in reprieving. He sold his pardons for enormous sums ; and he was enabled by his lawful earnings in this fattening time to purchase estates of the value of thirty-four thousand pounds. * Roberts, vol. ii. p. 241. 320 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER XVI. Tendencies to Absolutism. — Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. — Meeting of Parliament — James announces his appointments of Romish Officers. — Address of the Commons. Dissatisfaction of the Peers. — Parliament prorogued. — Trials for treason. — Repeated prorogations, and final dissolution of the Parliament. — Preponderance of the Jesuit party in the government. — Embassy to Rome. — Dispensing power of the king. — Court of King's Bench affirms the royal power to dispense with the Test Laws. — Roman Catholics appointed to benifices. — The Ecclesiastical Commission. — The bishop of London suspended from spiritual functions. — Monastic bodies settle in London. — Mass at Oxford. — Trial of the Rev. Samuel Johnson. — Massey, a Roman ist, Dean of Christchurch. — Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge deprived. — Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, ejected. When the failure of Monmouth's expedition seemed almost inevitable, Louis the Fourteenth wrote to his ambassador in Eng land, " there is every appearance that he will soon meet with the same fate as the earl of Argyle ; and that his attempt will have served to render the king of England much more absolute in his kingdom than any of his predecessors." Louis made this incon trovertible deduction from the whole course of history. Tyranny never learns moderation from the resistance which is made to it. The resistance must be strong enough to crush the tyranny, or the second state of the enslaved people will be far worse than the first. The attempt of Monmouth was premature. The nation had vague fears of the disposition of the government, but those fears were not sufficient to justify insurrection. The system of James was not at that time fully developed. The man who undertook to at tack thatr system in its infant strength had not the confidence of the best part of the nation. YSt his rallying cry of " The Protes tant Religion " might have convinced any ruler less blind and obsti nate than James, that the principle which was sufficient suddenly to raise the industrious people of the western counties into an army of cloth-workers and miners, — to make the train-bands throw away their uniforms, and to leave it doubtful whether the militia would fight,— would, if provoked beyond a certain point, convert the whole nation into t' e opponents of the king. Fortunate was it for the future destinies of England that James the Second, who would have been the most dangerous of rulers a century earlier, was the REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES. 321 weakest of despots, in his utter ignorance of the new elements of society which had been called into real vitality during the struggles of his father. He was not wanting in ability and in decision of character; he was capable of serious application to business; he was not utterly prostrated by idleness and luxury as his brother was. But his personal merits were as the fuel to nourish the fire of his intense egoism. Every action of his life had reference to his personality. James, the king, was the one power in the State, that was to counterbalance every other power. If James, the king, could retain van Established Church, to proclaim his divine right to dispense with laws, and to share its honours and riches with the Romanists, till it should be wholly recovered to Rome, it were well. If James, the king, could maintain a large standing army, by the voluntary contributions of the people, it were well. But if Par liament should refuse supplies ; If the Church should preach of the supremacy of the law over the will of the sovereign ; if the people should murmur under a hated military domination, — then, Parliament should be dismissed; a High Commission should again purge the Church of all disloyalty ; the soldiers should familiarise burgess and yeoman with the benefits of free quarters. James was not a man to accomplish such designs. He ran straightfor ward, snapping as the mad-dog runs and snaps, and of course had the same mad-dog ending, as a public enemy. The Parliament was to meet on the 9th of November. Its meeting had been preceded by the dismissal of Plalifax from his office of President of the Council. The king could not induce the ablest man of his time to fall into his own views as to the removal of the Test Act. The schemes of James were maturing ; and he desired to be surrounded by ministers who would have no scru ples in seconding them. The removal of the barriers which op posed the admission of Roman Catholics to office ; the repeal of the Habeas Corpus Act; and the establishment of a large Standing Army, were the objects to which the king devoted himself without reserve. The Jesuits urged on the king, persuading him that " the present juncture is the most favourable one that can be hoped for," to strengthen his authority. " But the opulent and settled Catholics are alarmed for the future, and apprehend a change which may ruin them." So wrote Barillon, the French ambassador. This juncture was not altogether the most favourable. That persecution of the Protestants in France which was carried into effect by the Revo cation of the Edict of Nantes, took place in October. Under this Vol. IV.— 21 322 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Edict the Protestants had lived undisturbed in the exercise of their religion. The Edict had been originally declared to be a perpetual and irrevocable law. The most peaceful and industrious communities had flourished under this toleration ; and now the law was sudden ly abrogated at the will of a despotic king, to whom the people were no more than the beasts of the field. Louis had long carried on a petty warfare against the Calvinists — interfering with educa tion, seizing upon property, closing places of worship. But now, the Protestant religion was to be extirpated in France at one blow. The ministers ofthe reformed faith were suddenly banished orimpris- oned; children were taken away from their parents; women were driven into nunneries ; dragoons were let loose upon the people, to pillage andto destroy. Burnet has described the horrible scenes of what he terms "one ofthe most violent persecutions that is to be found in history." He says, " I went over the greatest part of France while it was in its hottest rage, from Marseilles to Montpelier. and from thence to Lyons, and so to Geneva. I saw and knew so many instances of their injustice and violence, that it exceeded even what could have been well imagined ; for all men set their thoughts at work, to invent new methods of cruelty. In all the towns through which I passed, I heard the most dismal accounts of those things possible ; but chiefly at Valence, where one Derapine seemed to exceed even the furies of inquisitors. One in the streets could have known the new converts, as they were passing by them, by a cloudy dejection that appeared in their looks and deportment. Such as endeavoured to make their escape, and were seized (for guards and secret agents were spread along the whole roads and frontier of France), Were, if men, condemned to the galleys ; and, if women, to monasteries. . . . The fury that appeared on this oc casion did spread itself with a sort of contagion : for the intendants, and other officers, that had been mild and gentle in the former parts of their life, seemed now to have laid aside the compassion of Christians, the breeding of gentlemen, and the common impres sions of humanity. The greatest part of the clergv, the regulars especially, were so transported with the zeal that their king shewed on this occasion, that their sermons were full of the most inflamed eloquence that they could invent, magnifying their king in strains too indecent and blasphemous to be mentioned by me." The persecuted families carried their industry to other countries. To England they brought their silk trade ; and they taught us to make the hats which we had been accustomed to buy from France. MEETING OF PARLIAMENT. 323 "The tyrant's revenue," says Evelyn, "was exceedingly diminish ed ; manufactures ceased." At the moment at which the Pro testant refugees were pouring into England, James was labouring to attain the same power that Louis had so wantonly exercised. There was no concealment about the matter. Evelyn writes, " I was shewed the harangue which the bishop of Valentia, on Rhone, made in the name of the Clergy, celebrating the French king, as if he was a God, for persecuting the poor Protestants ; with this ex pression in it : 'That as his victory over heresy was greater ihan all the conquests of Alexander and Cassar, it was but what was wished in England ; and that God seemed to raise the French king to this power and magnanimous action, that he might be in capacity to assist in doing the same here.' " * The king opened the Parliament with a bold declaration. The rebellion, he said, was suppressed, but the Militia was insufficient for such services. " There is nothing but a good force of well- disciplined troops in constant pay, that can defend us from such as, either at home or abroad, are disposed to disturb us." He had increased the number of that army. He asked for a supply answer able to the expenses of that force. " Let no man take exception, that there are some officers in the army not qualified, according to the late Tests, for their employments. The gentlemen, I must tell you, are most of them well known to me; and having former''/ served with me on several occasions, and always approved the loyalty of their principles by their practice, 1 think them now fit to be employed under me." He was afraid, he declared, that some men might be so wicked as to hope and expect that a difference through this might happen between the Parliament and himself ; but he did not apprehend that any such misfortune could happen as a division, or even a coldness; nor anything to shake their steadiness and loyalty to him. Up to a certain point the House of Commons would have borne anything. All the Municipal Cor porations of England might be destroyed ; corrupt juries might be terrified into false verdicts ; judicial massacres might be perpetrated without rebuke ; an alderman of London, Cornish, might be hanged at this very time upon the revived story of the Rye-House Plot ; a poor widow, Elizabeth Gaunt, might be burnt at Tyburn for giving shelter to a rebel who afterwards betrayed her ; there was no amount of Civil Despotism which a Parliament would not have sanctioned, and a Church declared righteous. — But to put the * " Diary," November 3. 324 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. power of the sword into the hands of Popish officers, and to ask the Protestant Commons to pay for this dangerous army, was something more than could be borne. We have happily lived to see these distinctions abolished ; but it may be a question if Eng lish Protestantism could have ultimately_ shown its capacity for doing a tardy justice to Roman Catholics, if its most violent pre judices had not been roused at this season, and had not acquired a real strength and dignity by finding that the Cause of religion was also the Cause of liberty. The House of Commons, however the majority was composed of the nominees of the Court, was still penetrated with the old instincts of freedom. It hesitated about voting supplies, before considering the king's address. It beat the Court in a division of 183 against 182. It then, cautiously and timidly, gave the king to understand that he had committed an illegal act in appointing officers without their taking the test ; and humbly hoped that " he would be graciously pleased to give such directions that no apprehensions or jealousies may remain in the hearts of his majesty's good and faithful subjects." He frowned upon the Commons. He did not expect such an Address. He had warned them against fears and jealousies. The reputation which God had blessed him with in the world ought to have created a greater confidence in him. The Commons were awe-struck by the threatening brow of this poor inflated creature. A country gentleman, Cook, of Derbyshire, said, he supposed they were all Englishmen, and not to be frightened from their duty by a few high words. The new-born independence of the House was laid low ; and Cook was committed to the Tower for daring to say a word of implied reproach. But the spirit of resistance began to spread. The Peers manifested a deeper indignation against the violation of the Test Acts avowed in the royal speech, than the Commons had dared to exhibit. The sarcasm of Halifax was sup ported by the zeal of Compton, the bishop of London, and by the boldness of lord Mordaunt, afterwards the famous earl of Peter borough. The king was present at a great debate. Jeffreys, the Chancellor, attempted to carry the brutality of the Bench to his new position on the Woolsack. The presence of his master was not sufficient to protect him from the indignation of the -proudest nobility of Europe. The government dared not divide upon the motion to take the king's speech into consideration ; and the next morning the Parliament was prorogued, without any supplies having been voted. PROROGATIONS, OF THE PARLIAMENT. 325 We have now come to the end of the first Act of the Drama of the English Revolution. The king's manifestation of a temper to govern despotically, and of a design to force an obnoxious creed •upon the nation, had been gradually becoming more evident. The suppression of Monmouth's rebellion had made him presumptuous. He had a large hereditary revenue, and he had obtained the vote for life of the most important imposts. He had established a powerful Standing Army, and his provident expenditure, amount ing almost to parsimony, would enable him to maintain it. The judges were his creatures. The Church might be awed or cajoled into any practical acceptation of its favourite doctrine of non- resistance. From the time of this first dissension with the most obsequious Parliament that had sat since the early years of the Restoration, James manifested the most perfect reliance upon his own self-sufficient power. Plis nature could brook no opposition. He held to his purpose with a firmness that would have been ad mirable, if it had been the result of any other principle than that proud stupidity which could see no danger and accept no warning. Having dismissed the Parliament, he had a little more judicial business to accomplish. He pardoned Grey for his part in Mon mouth's rebellion, because he could induce him to play the betrayer, having bought his life at a heavy money payment and the heavier price of his forfeited honour. Lord Gerard of Brandon, and John Hampden, were tried for their participation in the Rye-House Plot, upon Grey's confession. Their lives were spared. The earl of Stamford had been indicted upon the same charge ; but the prorogation of Parliament prevented his trial before his peers. Lord Delamere was tried before the Court of the High Steward. Jeffreys, who presided, had used every means to obtain a convic tion, by the selection of the triers from men opposed in politics to the prisoner, and he conducted himself on the trial with his usual coarse partiality. But Delamere was acquitted. The most courtly began to feel that enough vengeance had been taken for past offences. Lady Rachel Russell expressed the general sentiment when she wrote to her friend, " I do bless God that he has caused some stop to be put to the shedding of blood in this poor land." England was again to be governed without a Parliament. After the prorogation of the 20th of November, 1685, .it was twice pro rogued in 1686, and twice in 1687 ; and it was dissolved by proc lamation on the 2nd of July in that year. The course of the government towards abitrary power is a flood which has no con- 326 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. stitutional barrier to prevent it devastating the land. Will the old sea-wall ever be built up again ? A strong people is equal even to that work. A less vigorous race would have folded their hands, and have left their fairest possessions to the destroyer. At the beginning of 1686, king James was steering his state- vessel, with a blind fatality, towards the inevitable Rapids. Pru dent friends entreated him, while it was yet possible, to slacken sail ; to tack ; to veer round, or to seem to veer. Such counsel became offensive to him. His brothers-in-law, Clarendon and Rochester, were looked coldly upon, for they were sfedfast in their adherence to their Protestant convictions. Sunderland became the prime adviser of the king, for he had consented to embrace Catholicism. Having impaired his fortune by habitual gambling, he shamelessly received a pension of twenty-five thousand crowns from the king of France to espouse his interests, and prevent the re-assembling of the Parliament. The minister and the king had now a common bond of union, in the purpose of degrading their country abroad and enslaving it at home. The Jesuits, with Father Petre as their great director, were now paramount in the government of England. The moderate Roman Catholics locked with apprehension upon the rashness by which the habitual temper of the nation might easily be lashed into fury. The ostensible ministers of James were divided into two parties. The real power was with the secret cabal of Sunderland and Petre. It was deter mined to send an ostentatious embassy to the Pope, to replace the modest agency with which the diplomatic business with the Court of Rome had been previously conducted. Lord Castle maine, the husband of the duchess of Cleveland, one of the late king's mistresses, was appointed to this mission. The pontiff, Innocent XL, was not favourable to the Jesuits, and was opposed to the measures of the French king. Castlemaine was instructed to listen to the counsels of the General of the Jesuits and of the am bassador of France. The Pope sympathised with the feelings of the moderate English Catholics, who were satisfied to be unmo lested without hoping to be paramount. The Rector of the Jesuits' College at Rome congratulated Castlemaine that the flourishing Imperial Crown of England was at length added to the Papal Diadem. * The Pope's agent in England, Count d'Adda, had been instructed to solicit the intercession of James " with the French monarch, in favour of the French Protestants." t Although the • Wellwood, " Memoirs," Appendix xviii. f Lingard. AN EMBASSY SENT TO ROME. 327 king of England had at first exhibited some pity for the persecuted families who had sought shelter in his dominions, his real temper and views were now unmistakeably displayed. On the 5th of May, by the especial direction of the king in Council, and not without remonstrance from some of his counsellors, there was burnt at the Royal Exchange, by the common hangman, the translation of a small volume recently published on the continent. Evelyn de scribes this volume as " a translation of a book written by the famous Monsieur Claude, relating only matters of fact concerning the horrid massacres and barbarous proceedings of the French king against his Protestant subjects." The book was burned " without any refutation of any facts therein." Evelyn adds; " So mighty a power and ascendant here had the French ambassador, who was doubtless in great indignation at the pious and truly gen erous charity of all the nation, for the relief of those miserable sufferers who came over for shelter." The disposition of "the nation " never presented the slightest obstacle to the egoism of the Stuarts ; and they always had abettors, in such antiquated idolaters of royalty as sir John Bramston, who, now in his seventy- fifth year, being told that Claude's book had in it " expressions scandalous to his majesty the king of France," says, " if so, it was fitly burned, for all kings ought to be careful of the honour and dignity of kings and princes." * The time was close at hand when the old cry of the Cavalier, " Church and King ! " would be uttered " with bated breath." The king and the church were not unlikely to dissolve that partnership which Strafford and Laud attempted to perpetuate ; and for the maintenance of which the first Charles struggled at the risk of his crown and his life. The bishops, who had never ceased to preach the doctrine of passive obedience and non-resistance, and some of whom had been suspected of inclinations towards Popery, were now alarmed at the tendencies of the king. A brief had been ordered in Counc.il for collecting contributions for the French refugees. The collection was put off, under various pre texts. Previous to the- publication of the brief, Ken, bishop of Bath and Wells, exerted his eloquence in expressing " detestation of the cruelties of the French, and exhorting to constancy in the Protestant religion. This sermon was the more acceptable, as it was unexpected from a bishop who had undergone the censure of being inclined to Popery." f Other bishops manifested the same * "Autobiography," p. 228. t Evelyn, " Diary," March 14. 328 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. spirit ; which example was followed by many of the Anglican clergy. The king and his advisers would not be warned ; but in timated to the archbishop of Canterbury that he must warn his clergy not to preach on the miseries which the bigotry of Louis had inflicted on his unhappy Protestant subjects. Such warning was a significant fact. The clergy were not propitiated by the in tolerant resolution of the king that, in the distribution of alms to the refugees, the commissioners appointed to that duty should only relieve those who would conform to the Church of England, by receiving the sacrament according to its ritual. James was now resolved to bring to issue the question of the king's dispen sing power — that is, of the right of the sovereign to abrogate ex press laws by the exercise of his prerogative. This prerogative had been exercised in the earliest times of the Constitution ; but had gradually become more and more limited, as the legislative power had become more defined. It still continued to be exer cised in matters of trifling import, and especially with regard to laws which had fallen into disuse. To admit this dispensing power as a general principle, applicable to all Statutes affecting the well- being of the community, would be to render the monarchy of Eng land absolute. The Test Act had been passed, in direct opposi tion to the desire of Charles the Second, to prevent the admission of Roman Catholics to civil and military offices. James the Sec ond openly proclaimed his design to render the Test Act nuga tory by his dispensing power of admitting to all offices, secular or ecclesiastical. He had appointed sir Edward Hales, a Papist, to be governor of Dover Castle, and .colonel of a regiment. He re solved to make an effort to have his dispensing power sanctioned by the Courts of Law. Four of the judges, although not opposed to the politics of the Court, remonstrated with the king on the illegality of his proposed measure ; and they were dismissed from their offices. His Solicitor-General, Finch, held the same convic tion ; and he was also dismissed. Four subservient judges, and a crawling Solicitor, were appointed in their places. A collusive action was brought in the Court of King's Bench for the penalty incurred by sir Edward Hales, for not taking the Sacrament ac cording to the Test Act. The information was laid by his own servant. The object of the action was to obtain an authoritative decision as to the legality of the plea of the defendant, that he was enabled to hold his commission by letters patent authorising him to do so notwithstanding the Test Act. The king's dispen- ROMAN CATHOLICS APPOINTED TO BENEFICES. 329 sing power was now solemnly confirmed. " The new, very young, Lord-Chief Justice Herbert, declared on the bench, that the gov ernment of England was entirely in the King ; that the Crown was absolute ; that penal laws were powers lodged in the Crown to en able the King to force the execution of the law, but were not bars to bind the king's power; that he could pardon all offences against the law, and forgive the penalties ; and why could he not dispense with them ? By which [judgment] the Test Act was abolished. Every one was astonished." * The Attorney-General, "Sawyer, had refused to draw warrants, which the king required him to draw, by which members of the Church of Rome were au thorised to hold benefices of the Church of England. The Soli citor-General was more obsequious. The warrants were issued. Under one, Edward Sclater, described by Evelyn as " an apostate curate of Putney," was enabled to hold two livings ; and under an other, Obadiah Walker, Master of University College, Oxford, who, from the accession of James, had been a declared Roman Catholic, and had been busily engaged in the work of conversion, was enabled to hold his office and his benefices. The king's design to sap the foundation's, if not to destroy the whole edifice, of the Anglican Church, was now sufficiently manifest. One step remained to be taken. The powers of Ecclesiastical Supremacy which had been assumed at the Reformation for resisting the au thority of Rome, were now to be adopted with renewed vigour for re-establishing that authority. James determined to create a Court of Ecclesiastical Commission — a Court modelled upon the Court of High Commission, which had been solemnly abolished at the Restoration. The king, as the Head of the Church, had issued directions to the Clergy not to introduce into their pulpits any discussion upon doctrinal points which were matter of controversy. The whole question of the differences between the Anglican and the Roman Churches were to be excluded from the consideration of their con gregations. A royal licence was granted to an apostate Protes tant of the name of Hall, to be the King's Printer, for printing missals, lives of saints, and Roman Catholic tracts, whose pub lication was prohibited by various Acts of Parliament. The Pro testant pulpit was to be silenced ; the Papist pulpit was to be free. The Protestant press was to work under terror of venal judges and terrified juries ; the Papist press was to be sanctioned by royal * Evelyn, " Diary," June 27. 330 HISTORY OF ENGLAND licence. A divine of high reputation, Sharp, Rector of St. Giles'- in-the-Fields and Dean of Norwich, refused to submit to the de cree that the clergy were not to preach upon controversial topics. One of his parishioners earnestly begged to be informed of the reasons upon which the Church of England rested its claims to be a true national Church, in opposition to the universal pretensions of the see of Rome. He expounded, as he was requested to do, the essential differences of doctrine and practice between the two Churches. Compton, the bishop of London, was required to sus pend Dr. Sharp. He declined to do so ; but he requested the offending Dean to suspend his preaching for a season. The Ec clesiastical Commission was now in force. Jeffreys, the Chancel lor, to whom all religious and moral principle was a matter of in difference, was its president. Sancroft, the archbishop, would not act. The bishops of Durham and Rochester were more com pliant. Sunderland, the new convert to Rome, and Herbert, the advocate of the dispensing power, were two other commissioners. The Protestant convictions of Rochester, another of the commis sioners, were not strong enough to lead him to risk his loss of place. Compton was called before this partial and illegal tribunal, Jeffreys bullied him ; but the bishop was firm. The one question was, why he had disobeyed the king? Conscience, duty, were of no avail in this Court. He was suspended from his spiritual functions. The Crown did not dare to seize his revenues ; for the Courts of Law mus.t have restored them. The king has himself recorded some of the manifestations of his open encouragement of Roman Catholicism, which gave deep offence. His kingdom, he says, " grumbled at his taking the chapel of St. James into his own hands, which then lay useless; though to avoid all reasonable cause of complaint he took care to leave the chapel of Whitehall to the Protestants, and build one there from the ground for his own use. He settled fourteen Bene dictine monks in that of St. James, and gave leave to the Jesuits to build one in the Savoy, and settled a College there for the educa tion of children, in which they had so good success that in a little time there was at least two hundred Catholic scholars, and about as many Protestants, who were no ways constrained in their reli gion, or required to assist at mass or any of their public devo tions." * The chapel of Whitehall was opened with all the pagean try of the Romish ceremonial, at Christmas, 1686. A bishop was * " Life," vol.ii. p, 79. " His Own Papers." JESUITS SCHOOLS. 33 1 consecrated on the 29th of December* He sat in his rich copes and wearing his mitre ; Jesuits and priests stood around, " censing and adoring him ; " the silver crozier was put in his hand, " with a world of mysterious ceremony." The worthy courtier, Evelyiij was astonished : '' I could not have believed I should ever have seen such things in the king of England's palace." The Benedictine monks at St. James, the Jesuits' College in the Savoy, were only parts of a general system. The Franciscans had their chapel in Lincoln's Inn Fields ; the Carmelites settled in the city. The street presented the wondrous spectacles to English eyes of cowled and girdled friars mixing with the crowd ; and exultingly telling the wonderers that " they hoped in a little time to walk in proces sion through Cheapside." f Such things could not be, without exciting the violent dislike of a populace that regarded Popery with the traditional hatred of a hundred and fifty years. Riots took place in London. The priests were insulted in their worship in new chapels in the country. The school of the Jesuits in the Savoy, and the schools which they had set up in various towns, obtained little favour from their being opened to children of Prot estant as well as of1 Catholic parents. The dread of proselytism assumed a practical shape, in the rapid.- establishment of those Charity-schools throughout the land, to which popular education was almost wholly confined during the eighteenth century. The Jesuits' school in the Savoy gave the first impulse to private endow ments of those metropolitan schools for the poor, whose children of both sexes now annually gather beneath the dome of St. Paul's, to unite their five thousand voices in the simple hymns of a devo tion well adapted to the national character. The side-aisles of the great Protestant cathedral were appendages which James compelled Wren to introduce into his plan, in the hope that they might resound with the chants of Palestrina as the host was borne along amongst kneeling worshippers. Fortunate for our country that our forefathers preferred to join in Luther's Hymn ! The opposition of the Protestant mind of the latter years of the seventeenth cen tury to the secular teaching of the Jesuits was natural and inevita ble. No consideration of their ability as teachers could disarm the suspicion that they sought to make converts, under the guise of affording instruction adapted to all churches and sects. The same doubts of all religionists who profess to be merely secular teachers still linger amongst us under other forms ; and they will * Evelyn. " Diary." t Welwood. " Memoirs," p._>73. 332 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. continue to prevail between Protestant and Catholic, Churchman and Dissenter, until Christian worship rests upon a broader foun dation of Christian love. The measures of the king became day by day more clearly directed to the .gradual advancement, and ultimate supremacy, of his own creed. The popular discontent was growing serious. When the first Roman Catholic chapel was opened in the city, the train-bands hesitated to disperse the mob that insulted the priests. When Mass was first celebrated at University College, Oxford, in a chapel opened by Obadiah Walker, the dangers of the Church were proclaimed from pulpits in which it had been recently proclaimed that there was no danger and no sin to be compared to that of resistance to the divine authority of kings. The formation of a great camp on Hounslow Heath was naturally considered to be for the purpose of coercing a sinful generation, that obstinately refused to accept the gracious invitation to come back to the creed of Gardiner and Bonner. The ponderous folio of " Acts and Mon uments " was again brought out, and mothers gathered their children around their knees to hear the sad stories of Rowland Taylor and Anne Askew. The camp at Hounslow was supposed to be the evidence that, another time of fiery trial was at hand., " There were many jealousies and discourses of what was the meaning of this encampment," writes Evelyn. The Reverend Samuel Johnson chose to interpret its meaning, in his own incau tious fashion. He had been in prison since his conviction in 1683 for writing "Julian the Apostate."* A restless and dangerous man, Hugh Speke, was his fellow-prisoner ; and in the spirit of mischief he excited Johnson to write an address to the troops encamped at Hounslow, which Speke undertook to get circulated. It was entitled " An humble and hearty address to all the Protes tants in king James' army ; " and, says the biographer of Mr. Johnson, "he exhorted the Protestant officers and soldiers not to serve as instruments to enslave their country, and to ruin the reli gion they professed"! Johnson was discovered as the author. He had the generosity not to implicate Speke, and he alone suffered. He was convicted, on the 16th of November, of a libellous publica tion, and was sentenced to stand three times in the pillory, and to be publicly whipped. According to one account, when sentence was pronounced he said, " You whip, upon my back, Acts of Parlia- " Ante, p. 290. t " Memorials," p. xi. CONVICTION OF REV. SAMUEL JOHNSON. 333 ment and the Church of England." * According to another account, when told by the judge to be grateful to the Attorney-General that he was not tried for high treason, he exclaimed, " Am I, when my only crime is thai I have defended the Church and the laws, to be grateful for being scourged like a dog, while Popish scribblers are suffered daily to insult the Church, and violate the laws with impunity?" He was scourged like a dog; but previous to his punishment, he was stripped of his gown, by the bishops of Dur ham, Rochester, and Peterborough, Commissioners appointed for the diocese of London, during the suspension of Compton, the bishop. Johnson's cruel sentence was inflicted on the .ist of December, though strenuous endeavours were made to obtain* a remission of the whipping. " The king was deaf to all entreaties : the answer was, that since Mr. Johnson had the spirit of martyrdom, 'tis fit he should suffer." •"¦ His biographer says of the courageous endurance of the suffering, " He observed afterwards to one of his most intimate friends, that this t'.xt of Scripture, which came sud denly into his mind, ' He endured the cross, and despised the shame,' so much animated and supported him in his bitter journey, that had he not thought it would have looked like vain-glory, he could have sung a psalm while the executioner was doing his office, with as much composure and cheerfulness as ever he had done in the church ; though at the same time he had a quick sense of every stripe which was given him, with a whip of nine cords knotted, to the number of three hundred and seventeen." In addressing- the army of king James in a style which was an incentive to mutiny, Johnson went out of his province as a clergy man ; and thus brought himself under the cognizance of a law which could scarcely be considered as arbitrary. The censorship o£ the press had been revived ; and this Address to the Soldiers was one of the many publications that evaded all attempts at re pression. One class of publications, however, the licensing sys tem could not restrain — works of theological controversy.. There were divines then in England who were fully equal to the task of defending their Church against the advocates of Rome, whose pamphlets, encouraged by the Court, and issued by its printer, were boldly denounced by Johnson upon his trial. In this contro versy writers whose names live in honoured remembrance, ardently engaged — Sherlock and Tillotson, Stillingfleet and Prideaux. Such who filled the pulpits of London — others who were the ornaments * Bramston':; " Autobiography," p. 249. t " Memorials," p xii. 334 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of the Universities — had feeble opponents in the priests who ad dressed the learned in bad English, and sought to convert the mul- titude by legends of miracles, over which the shrewd artisan had his heartless laugh. The government could not touch the con troversial pamphlets, of which the Archbishop of Canterbury was the Licenser. Disputants without a professional privilege could be either punished or frightened away. At Amsterdam, the amus ing John Dunton tells us, he had the good fortune to meet with Doctor Partridge, " whose Almanacks had been so sharp upon Popery that England was too hot to hold him." * But the contest soon grew beyond the skirmishes of a paper-war. Before the close of the year 1686, the king's determination to thrust Roman Catholics into the higher offices of the Church and the Uni versities, was manifested by the appointment of John Massey to the deanery of Christchurch, Oxford. This Romanist convert was installed without opposition, on the 29th of December. The suc cess of this illegal act was encouraging. The fellowships of Ox ford and Cambridge were as freeholders, held by Protestant tenure. No one could be admitted to a degree without taking those oaths which had been provided by Acts of Parliament to exclude Cath olics from academical honours and offices. These Statutes king James resolved to violate. On the 7th of February a royal letter was sent to the authorities of the University of Cambridge, com manding that Alban Francis, a Benedictine monk, should be ad mitted to the degree of Master of Arts. The authorities required the Benedictine to take the oaths. He declined, and left Cambridge, hinting at the consequences of a refusal to submit to the sovereign will. There was an awkward precedent for granting degrees to foreigners. The Secretary to the Ambassador of Morocco, a Mahometan, had received the Master of Arts' degree. Burnet points out that a proper distinction was made between strangers, whose degree was merely honorary, and those who would have a vote in convocation, as the king's priests would have, if admitted upon the royal mandate. The University was twitted with the ob vious remark that a Papist was treated worse than a Mahometan. John Pechell, the Vice-Chancellor, had to endure an agonising con flict between obedience to the Statutes and obedience to the king. Learned dignitaries had been preaching and writing in support of the king's absolute power, and they were now to have a practical lesson of the real meaning of their doctrine. The terrified Vice- * Dunton's " Life and Errors," p. 210, 1705. VICE-CHANCELLOR OF CAMBRIDGE DEPRIVED. 33.5 Chancellor writes to our old friend Samuel Pepys, to relate his misery under his dread sovereign's frown : " Worthy sir, 'tis ex traordinary distress and affliction to me, after so much endeavour and affection to his royal person, crown, and succession, I should at last, by the providence of God, in this my station, be exposed to his displeasure." * The " princely clemency " upon which the Vice-Chancellor desired to cast himself, was sought in vain. The Vice-Chancellor and the Senate were summoned before the Eccle siastical Commission. Their judges were papists, or of papistical tendencies. Jeffreys, the Chancellor, to whom all principles were indifferent as long as he had the power to enforce arbitrary decrees by his own insolent demeanour, was the mouth-piece of this body. Pechell was frightened. The other delegates of the Senate in vain pleaded that they had acted in obedience to the laws. The Vice-Chancellor was deprived of his office, and suspended from the enjoyment of his revenue as Master of Magdalene College. The property-rights of the college, which were as sacred from any such interferences as the estate which Jeffreys had bought out of the price of his swindling pardons during his Bloody Campaign, were thus as openly violated as the Statutes of the realm. Cambridge was subject to no further molestation. At Oxford it was concluded that the spirit of -resistance might be easily kept down. Oxford had accepted a papist Dean of Christchurch. Ox ford had suffered mass to be performed in two of its colleges. The noble institutions of Oxford might gradually be made as available for the advancement of Catholicism as the College of Douay, or the' Jesuits' School in the Savoy. Had not Oxford, to use the words of Burnet, "asserted the king's prerogative in the highest strains of the most abject flattery possible, both in their addresses, and in a Wild decree they had made but three years before this, in which they had laid together a set of such high-flown maxims as must establish an uncontrollable tyranny ? " f Surely resistance would not come from Oxford, whatever might happen. There were pre monitory symptoms that the spirit of English gentlemen would at length be roused out of the sleep of slavery. Obadiah Walker was insulted and ridiculed in his popish seminary. The under graduates had long believed, as Colley Cibber represented his own school-boy belief in 1684 : •¦ It was then a sort of school doctrine to regard our monarch as a deity ; as in the former reign it was to in- * Letter of February 23, — in the Pepys' Correspondence. t " Own Times," Oxford edit. vol. iii. p. 146. -^6 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. sist he was accountable to this world, as well as to that above him." * The undergraduates of 1686 were a little veering round to this obsolete notion ; and in spite of the Oxford deification of James II. it was necessary to quarter a troop of dragoons in that loyal city, to allow " Ave Maria " to be sung in more than one chapel without interruption from the scurrilous songs of the street. The crisis was at hand. The presidency of Magdalen College was vacant. It was rumoured that Anthony Farmer was to be recom mended by a royal letter. This man was not qualified by the Statutes of the College, the presidency being limited to fellows of Magdalen or of New College ; he was of notoriously immoral life ; he had become a pervert to Rome. The fellows of Magdalen re monstrated in vain against the probability of this indecent choice. The royal letter came. In the hope of some compromise the election was postponed till it could be postponed no longer. John Hough, a man worthy of the office, was elected. The fellows were cited before the Ecclesiastical Commission. They produced such proofs of Farmer's unfitness, that no attempt was made to enforce his election ; but that of Hough was declared void. In -August a royal recommendation of Parker, bishop of Oxford, arrived. The fellows justly held that the right of election was in themselves ; that Hough was duly elected ; that the presidency was not vacant- The king had set out on a progress. On the 3rd of September he reached Oxford. He lodged at the deanery of Christchurch, and heard Mass in a chapel fitted up by the dean. The fellows of Magdalen College were sent for. William Blathwayte, the Clerk of the Council, writes to Mr. Pepys an account of what took place at this audience : " His Majesty being informed that the fellows of Magdalen College had refused to admit the bishop of Oxford to be their president in the stead of Mr. Farmer, sent for them yesterday, after dinner, to his anti-chamber in Christ-Church College, where his majesty chid them very much for their disobedience, and with much a greater appearance of anger than ever I perceived in his majesty ; who bade them go away immediately and choose the bishop of Oxford before this morning, or else they should certainly feel the weight of their sovereign's displeasure. The terms were to this effect ; and yet I hear this morning they have not obeyed his majesty's commands, the consequences of which I cannot yet learn." t The consequences were more full of peril to the threat- * " Apology for the life of Colley Gibber," — edit- 1756, p. 23. t Pepys' " Correspondence," September 5th, 1687. THE FELLOWS OF MAGDALEN COLLECE EJECTED. 337 ening tyrant, than to the fellows of Magdalen College. Resolute against the king's heaviest displeasure — unseduced by the arts of a man whose political faults all would willingly forget, but whose partial aberration from the path of duty can scarcely be disproved — the fellows of Magdalen College persisted in their right of election. Their legal president was ejected by a special commis sion, whose decrees were enforced by troops of cavalry. Hough refused to give up the keys of the college, and the doors were broken open. The bishop of Oxford was installed by proxy, only two fellows of the college giving their attendance. The other fellows at length consented to a modified submission to the authority which had been forced upon them. The king required a public acknowledgment that they had acted undutifully ; and that the appointment of the bishop of Oxford was legal : they must sue for pardon. They one and all refused to submit to this humiliation. They were one and all ejected from their college, and declared incapable of holding any ecclesiastical appointment. The Ecclesi astical Commission, by which this edict was issued, forgot that a power might be raised again, as it had once been raised, before which High Commissioners might be swept away, and even the throne might totter to its base. The immediate object of the king was accomplished. Magdalen College soon became a college of Papists, with a Roman Catholic bishop at its head ; for Parker, the bishop of Oxford, had enjoyed his dignity only during a few months, in which his authority was so openly resisted that he died, as men believed, of anxiety and mortification. A subscrip tion was raised for the ejected fellows. All but the most bigoted saw that the ties which bound the Church to the Throne were so loosened, that upon one more violent strain the union might be utterly broken. Vol. IV.— 22 338 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER XVII. Fall of the Hydes. — Tyrconnel Lord Deputy in Ireland. — Declarations in Scotland and England for Liberty of Conscience. — Abolition of Penal Tests.— Effects of the Declaration of Indulgence. — The camp at Hounslow Heath. — The Papal Nuncio publicly received by the King. — The King's policy towards Dissenters. — Dryden's Poem of " the Hind and the Panther " — The Declaration commanded to be read in Churches. — The Petition of the Seven Bishops. — They are committed to the Tower. — The public sympathy. — The trial and acquittal of the Bishops. — Birth of the Prince of Wales. The year 1687 opened with evil forebodings to those who were well-wishers to the Monarchy and the Church. One whose loyalty must have been sorely shaken by the dangerous experiments upon the temper of the nation thus records his impressions : " Lord Tyrconnel gone to succeed the Lord Lieutenant in Ireland, to the astonishment of all sober men, and to the evident ruin of the Prot estants in that kingdom, as well as of its great improvement going on. Much .discourse that all the White-Staff officers and others should be dismissed for adhering to their religion."* The Lord Lieutenant, to whom Tyrconnel is to succeed, is Clarendon. The White-Staff officers are to follow the dismissed Lord-Treasurer, Rochester. The fall of the two Hydes, the brothers-in-law of the" king, was of evil omen. It was seen that the ties of relationship, of ancient friendship, of fidelity under adverse circumstances, were of no moment when the one dominant idea of the king was to coerce all around him into his measures for forcing his creed upon a reluctant nation. From the highest minister of the Crown to the humblest country magistrate, all appointments were to be made with reference to this royal monomania: " Popish justices of the peace established in all counties, of the meanest of the people; judges ignorant of the law, and perverting it. So furiously do the Jesuits drive, and even compel princes to violent courses, and destruction of an excellent government both in Church and State." f Tyrconnel, whose violence and rashness were objected to even by moderate Catholics, was instructed to depress the English interest, and pro- * Evelyn, "Diary," January 17. t Evelyn, "Diary," January 17. TYRCONNEL LORD DEPUTY IN IRELAND. 339 portionately to raise that of the Irish ; " to the end that Ireland might offer a secure asylum to James and his friends, if by any subsequent revolution he should be driven from the English throne." * But Tyrconnel, says Dr. Lingard, " had a further and mors national object in view." He entered, with the sanction of the king, into secret negotiations with Louis XIV., " to render his native country independent of England, if James should die with out male issue, and the prince and princess of Orange should in herit the crown." Ireland was then to become a dependency of France — a truly " national object." Tyrconnel went about his work in a wild way. He displaced the Protestant judges, and filled their seats with Catholics. He terrified the cities and towns into surrender of their charters, and gave them new charters which made parliamentary representation a mockery. He had a scheme for dispossessing the English settlers of the property which they had acquired in the forfeitures of half a century previous. His projects were opposed by grave Catholic peers, who said that the Lord-Deputy was fool and madman enough to ruin ten kingdoms. His character and that of his master, were ridiculed in the famous ballad of Lilli-Burlero : " Dare was an old prophecy found in a bog, Lilli burlero, bullen a-la ; Ireland shall be ruled by an ass and a dog, Lilli burlero, bullen a-la." James was the ass and Tyrconnel the dog. This ribaldry of Lord Wharton was~adapted to a spirited air of Purcell, published ten years before. "The whole army," says Burnet, "and at last the people both in city and country, were singing it perpetually." Wharton afterwards boasted that he had rhymed James out of his dominions. He had produced a song, like many other songs of wondrous popularity, with little intrinsic merit. But those whose conviviality, even in our own days, had been stirred by its fascina ting melody,t may well believe that it was whistled and sung in every street in 1688 ; and that it had charms for Corporal Trim and his tellow soldiers in Flanders, when its satire upon the " new deputie '' who " will cut de Englishman's troat," was utterly for gotten. There is no error more common, even amongst educated per- * L'ngard. t "A very good song, and very well sung, J -lty companions, every one." 340 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. sons, than to pronounce upon the opinions of a past age according to the lights of their own age. In February, 1687, James issued in Scotland a Declaration for Liberty of Conscience. In April, 1687, he issued a Declaration for Liberty of Conscience in Eng land. Why, it is asked, were these declarations regarded with suspicion by Churchmen and by Dissenters ? Why could not all sin cere Christians, of whatever persuasion, have accepted the king's noble measures for the adoption of that tolerant principle which is now found to be perfectly compatible with the security of an Es tablished Church. It was precisely because the principle has been slowly making its wav during the contests of a hundred and fifty years, that it is now all but universally recognised as a safe and wholesome principle. It is out of the convictions resulting from our slow historical experience that all tests for admission to civil offices are now abolished for ever. Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Quaker, Methodist, Independent, Unitarian, Jew, all stand upon the same common ground as the Churchman, of suffering no re ligious disqualification for the services of their country. But to' imagine that such a result could have been effected by the inter ested will of a Papist king, who had himself been the fiercest of persecutors — who had adopted, to their fullest extent, the hatred of his family to every species of non-conformity, — is to imagine that the channels in which the great floods and little rills of reli gious opinion had long been flowing, were to be suddenly diverted into one mighty stream, for which time and wisdom had prepared no bed. King James announced to his people of Scotland that, " being resolved to unite the hearts and affections of his subjects, to God in religion, to himself in loyalty, and to their neighbours in Christian love and charity, he had therefore thought fit, by his sovereign authority, prerogative royal, and absolute power, which all his subjects were to obey without reserve, to give and grant his royal toleration to the several professors of the Christian religion after named." The moderate Presbyterians might meet in their houses ; but field conventiclers were still to be resisted with the utmost severity. Quakers might meet and exercise their worship in any place. Above all, the various prohibitions and penalties against Roman Catholics were to be void ; and all oaths and tests by which any subjects are incapacitated from holding place or office were remitted. The Council of Scotland made no hesitation about •" sovereign authority " and "absolute power;" for they had told James at his accession that " we abhor and detest all principles ABOLITION OF PENAL TESTS. 34I and positions which are contrary or derogatory to the king's sacred, supreme, absolute power and authority;" In Scotland, the experi ment appeared to be successful. The successors of John Knox made no sign of resistance to a decree which gave honour to the image-worshippers. James now summoned his English Council to proclaim to them his new charter of religious liberty. Freedom of conscience was conducive to peace and quiet, to commerce and population; during four reigns conformity in religion had been vainly attempted. All penal laws should be suspended by the royal prerogative. "A Daniel come to judgment," cried some short sighted Protestants of that day. "A wise and upright judge," cry some liberal philosophers of the nineteenth century. Whilst James was introducing his scheme to his Council, he was sounding every peer and influential commoner who approached him, as to the probability of Parliament sanctioning the" abolition of the Test Act. The Houses were shortly expected to meet. It was desirable, to secure the adhesion of the members to this ob ject, upon which the king had set his heart. He was met by cold ness or open refusal, by many upon whose loyalty he thought he could count ; and he believed that the loyalty which held kings to be divine would shrink from no sacrifices of higher principles. Upon those who held places he felt sure that he could successfully operate. " It was against all municipal law,"' said the king, "for free born subjects to be excluded the service of their prince, or for a prince to be restrained from employing such subjects as he thought fit for his service ; and that therefore he hoped they would be so loyal as not to refuse him their voices for annulling such unreason able laws." * Sir John Reresby was attacked by deputy : " The king ordered the judges, in their several circuits, to feel the pulses of the men ; in consequence of which I was, to my great surprise, accosted at York by the judge, who told me he had orders to talk with me on the subject." The prudent governor of York evaded giving a direct expression of his intentions : " Had I answered in the affirmative, I might have incurred the displeasure and cen sure of the greatest part of the nation ; if in the negative I should have utterly disobliged the king." Such negative would have for feited his place : " Every man that persisted in a refusal to com ply with this suggestion was sure to be outed." The labours of the king to gain the support of members of parliament, "even' to discoursing every one of them particularly in his closet, which # Reresby — " Memoirs," p. 320. 342 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. made the English call that way of conference closeting" * set the worldly courtiers upon devising the most polite forms of exprcs-- ing love and duty that committed them to nothing. When sir Dudley North was pressed, "he remembered an old TurU&ii say ing, viz., that a man is to say ' no ' only to the devil." f Penn went over to Holland to sound the prince of Orange. William told him " that no man was more for toleration in principle than he was ; he thought tho conscience was only subject to God ; and as far as a general toleration, even of papists, would content the king, he would concur in it heartily. But he looked on the tests as such a real security, and indeed the only one, when the king was of an other religion, that he would join in no councils with those that intended to repeal those laws that enacted them." J Penn under took to promise that if the tests were abolished, the king would secure toleration by a solemn and unalterable law. He was an swered by a demonstration of the value of irrevocable laws to a bigoted despot, — a blunt reference to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. James left off his closetings and his negotiations. His judges and lords-lieutenant were not required to persist in their labours of threat or persuasion. He resolved to do without the Parliament ; which he prorogued for six months, with a full determination to be truly the absolute king. On the 4th of April he issued his Declaration for entire liberty of conscience. He would protect the Established Church in its legal rights, but all penal laws against all non-conformists were suspended. All re ligious tests as a qualification for office were abrogated. Every form of worship, Roman Catholic or Protestant, might be publicly followed. The effects of this Declaration were instantaneous. Ralph Thoresby and his friends used to attend the preaching of " Mr. Sharp, in private, as we could get opportunity, for which we went several miles." The Declaration came, and " Mr. Sharp preached the first sermon in public." The Declaration of king James, he says, " gave us ease in this case ; and, though we dreaded a snake in the grass, we accepted it with due thankfulness." § Regarded simply as a matter of political expediency, without ref erence to higher principles of action, the Declaration of Indulgence of 1687 was a master-stroke worthy of the Jesuitical subtlety to which it doubtless owed its origin. The king had committed him self against the Church of England. The Church of England had * Father D'Orleans— " History of the Stuarts." t " Life of Sir Dudley North," p. iSi. X Burnet vol. iii- p. 133. § " Diary," vol. i. p. 186. EFFECTS OF THE DECLARATION OF INDULGENCE. 343 resented his manifest design of thrusting Roman Caih Tics into its preferments. "As he was apt," says Burnet, "to go warmly upon every provocation, he gave himself such liberties in discourse upon that subject, that it was plain, all the services they had done him, both in opposing the exclusion, and upon his first accession to the crown, were forgotten." * There were four bodies of dissenters, whose united support would be an important counterpoise to the dis satisfaction of the churchmen. These were, Presbyterians, Inde pendents, Anabaptists, Quakers. They had all been the victims of Conventicle Acts and of Two Mile Acts. Hundr:da of the Presby terian clergy, long ejected from their pulpits, had be^n supported by private charity. Some, up to the date of the Declaration, had been lying in the gaols, amongst felons and common debtors, un able to pay the fines which had been imposed upon them for preaching. The Declaration opened a new world to them. They were again free publicly to teach their followers. In new meet ing-houses, and in their old barns, they might again declaim against church discipline and set forms of prayer ; and warn their hearers against that Popery which was again lifting its head. But then Roman Catholics were equally freed from State-interference with their worship. Mass might be publicly performed ; auricular confession might be encouraged ; monastic institutions might once more flourish. The penal laws against Papists were utterly sus pended. Many dissenters were happy to embrace the relief which was thus afforded them. They were soothed by the high sounding professions of toleration which issued from the royal lips. They were flattered by the agents of the Court into the belief that they again could make head against the Church which had persecuted them. But they were warned by the examples of their two greatest ministers, Howe and Baxter, not to fall into the snare. Young Defoe said to his non-conformist brethren, " I had rather the Church of England should pull our clothes off by fines and forfeitures than that the Papists should fall both upon the Church and the dissent ers, and pull our skins off by fire and faggot." t The most elo quent and sagacious statesman of the day, Halifax, addressed them in his " Letter to a Dissenter " — a model of skilful popular argument: "There must be something extraordinary, when the Church of Rome setteth up bills, and offereth plaisters, for tender consciences. By all that hath hitherto appeared, her skill in chirur- *" Own Time," vol. iii. p. 151. t Quotjd in Wilson's " Life of Defoe," vol. i. p. 128. 344 HISTORY OF ENGLANL. gery lieth chiefly in a quick hand to cut off limbs ; but she is the worst at healing of any that ever pretended to it." He warns the dissenters against the temptation to enjoy a freedom from which they had been so long restrained ; " If the case then should be, that the price expected from you for this liberty is giving up your right in the laws, sure you will think twice before you go any further in such a losing bargain." * A large proportion of the Non-conformists held aloof from the blandishments of the Court, and ultimately made common cause with the Church. In his sub sequent indignation against the relapse of churchmen into intoler ance, Defoe exclaims, " Where had been the Church of England at this time, humanly speaking, if the dissenters had one and all joined in with the measures king James was taking to overthrow it?" The Church knew this, and made loud professions of brotherly regard to the separatists. The king and his papistical advisers, on the other hand, employed every device to manifest that the country was in favour of that dispensing power of a gracious king, which could bestow, not only toleration, but unlim ited blessings of national glory and prosperity, which were not to be bestowed by the old statutes or new enactments. Paternal gov ernment was the true remedy for all that was harsh and unequal in statutory laws. The corrupt Corporations sent fulsome ad dresses of thanks to the king. In these some Protestant Non conformists were induced to join. But the great body remained firm ; and a common danger brought them nearer to that union with the Church, which the Stuarts, during four unhappy reigns, had done their best to render impracticable. In the summer of 1687, a great Camp was again formed on Heunslow-heath. It was a military display of royal and aristocratic luxury, " the commanders profusely vying in the expense and magnificence of their tents." f The four troops of Horse Guards were commanded by the earl of Feversham, the duke of Northum berland, lord Churchill, lord Dover. The duke of Grafton com manded the first regiment of Foot Guards ; the earl of Craven the second regiment. There were nine regiments of Horse command ed by the earls of Oxford, Peterborough, Plymouth, Arran, Shrews bury, and Scarsdale ; by sir John Lanies, general Warden, and sir John Talbot. There were three regiments of Dragoons, com- * This letter is reprinted in the " Somers' Tracts," and in " Parhamentary History," vol. iv. t Evelyn, " Diary," Juneti. THE CAMP AT HOUNSLOW-HEATH. 345 manded by lord Cornbury, the duke of Somerset, and colonel Berkeley. Lastly, there were fourteen regiments of Foot, com manded by the marquis of Worcester; the earls of Dumbarton, Bath, Litchfield and Huntington : lord Dartmouth ; and by colo nels of the rank of commoners, amongst whom was the notorious colonel Kirke. The standing army had been trebled, as com pared with its number in 1683.* The courtly habits of its com manders caused the people to regard this army as the instrument by which the king could accomplish his designs against their liberties and their religion. And yet in the, hour of need this formidable army struck not a single blow ; and most of his courtly officers de serted the king — a lesson which princes, who rely upon military force, have often been taught, however slow they may be to learn. The Londoners went out in holiday parties to look upon the mag nificence of the camp at Hounslow. They mixed with the soldiers, who, with the exception of the household troops, were of their own rank as artisans and labourers. The temper of the nation was roused out of its apathy, to express itself with the freedom which Englishmen use when their political indignation is excited. A shrewd observer, then a very young man, thus describes this period : " It were almost incredible to tell you, at the latter end of king James' time — though the rod of arbitrary power was always shaking over us — with what freedom and contempt the common people, in the open streets, talked of his wild measures to make a whole Protestant nation Papists. And yet, in the height of our secure and wanton defiance of him, we of the vulgar, had no fur ther notion of any remedy for this evil, than a satisfied presumption that our numbers were too great to be mastered by his mere will and pleasure ; that, though he might be too hard for our laws, he would never be able to get the better of our nature ; and that to drive all England into popery and slavery, he would find, would be teaching an old lion to dance." f The camp at Hounslow was conveniently located between Whitehall and Windsor. It was at hand to suppress disturbances in the capital: it could be speedily summoned to protect the king in the castle upon which his brother had lavished his adornments. Windsor was now to be the scene of a gorgeous ceremony, such as could scarcely have been exhibited without danger in the streets • For full details of the military force of 1687, see Chamberlayne's " Present State of England " for that year. Part i. p. 176 ; Part ii. p. 143. t " Life of Colley Cibber," vol. 1. p. 48. 346 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of Westminster. James had knelt at the feet of the papal Nuncio, who in the royal chapel of Whitehall had been consecrated bishop of Amasia. He was now to receive this ambassador of the Pope, with a pomp that belonged to past generations. It was resolved that a duke should introduce the Nuncio to the king. James pro posed the honour to the duke of Somerset — the commander of the queen's regiment of dragoons, and a lord of the bed-chamber. This young nobleman, who afterwards obtained the distinction of being called " The proud duke of Somerset," behaved with a spirit on this occasion that wholly forfeited the royal favour: " He hum bly desired of the king to be excused; the king asked him his reason ; the duke told him he conceived it to be against law, to which the king said, he would pardon him. The duke replied, he was no very good lawyer, but he thought he had heard it said, that a pardon granted to a person offending, under the assurance of obtaining it, was void. This offended the king extremely. He said publicly, he wondered at his insolence ; and told the duke he would make him fear him, as well as the laws." * On the 3rd of July, Windsor was crowded with visitors. There was a procession to the castle of thirty-six coaches, each drawn by six horses. The Nuncio, robed in purple, was in the king's coach, with the duke of Grafton, who had agreed to introduce him. His own coaches fol lowed with ten priests. Then came the coaches of the ministers of State, and great officers of the household ; and in that train of equipages were the coaches of the bishop of Durham, and the bishop of Chester. The king and queen sat upon a throne in St. George's Hall." f The pensioner of France looked upon Verrio's painted walls, where the triumphs of the Black Prince were repre sented with no common skill. The devotee of Rome honoured its ambassador with manifestations of homage that reminded those who knew their country's history of the time when the ignoble John became " a gentle convertite." Although this outrage upon the popular feeling took place at Windsor, it was not done solely in the view of court attendants : " The town of Windsor was so full of all sorts of people, from all parts, that some of the inhab itants were astonished ; and it was very difficult to get provisions or room either for horse or man ; nay, many persons of quality, and Others, were forced to sit in their coaches and calashes almost all * Lord Lonsdale's Account. Note to Burnet, vol. iii. p. 178. \ Bramston' s " Autobiography," p. 280. THE KING'S POLICY TOWARDS DISSENTERS. 347 the day." * As if to mark that England was entering upon a new era of government, on the 4th of July, a Proclamation dissolving the Parliament appeared in the London Gazette. In the autumn of 1687, the king made a progress through some parts .of the West of England. One of his objects was to propi tiate the Dissenters, who had taken so prominent a part in the in surrection of Monmouth. Storms and birds of prey had not yet cleared the gibbets of Somersetshire of the rags and bones of the victims of 1685, when James went amongst the scenes of Jeffrey's campaign, to promise not only spiritual liberty but civil honours to the relatives and friends of those who had fought the battle which they thought all good Protestants should fight. He gained little by his blandishments. The answer which was given to him by the rich non-conformist, William Kiffin, the grandfather of two youths who were treated with marked severity at the especial in stance of the king, was perhaps not unknown in the West. " I have put you down, Mr. Kiffin, for an alderman of London," said James. " I am unfit to serve your Majesty, or the city," replied the old man : " I am worn out ; the death of my poor boys broke my heart." Others might have thought of their own bereavements ; and have felt a bitter contempt towards that king- who had talked of his capricious favour as the " balsam for such sores." f The government had forced new charters upon London, and upon many of the municipal corporations throughout the country. Although the •power of the Crown to nominate corporate functionaries, as well as to eject them, was disputed, the process of ejection was very sum marily exercised. The supporters of Church and King were thrust out ; the Papists and the Independents were noininated. Non conformists of different ranks of life were brought together in a way that offended the pride of the upper classes amongst them. Ralph Thoresby says, speaking of the Corporation of Leeds, "The places of such as were to be ejected were filled up with the most rigid Dissenters, who had put my name in the fag end of their reformed list, there being but one, a smith by trade, after me." X The process of regulation, as it was called, was not successful. Many of the Charters were consequently attempted to be called in ; but the resistance carried on in the Law Courts by Corpora tions was almost general. All- these arbitrary measures of the * Relation of the Nuncio's public entry. Printed in 1687. Reprinted in the Som- els' Tracts. t See Macaulaj. History, vol ii. p. 230, ist edition. t " Diary," rol. i. p. 186.- 348 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Crown had reference to the necessity which might arise of calling a Parliament, and to the readiest means of procuring a servile Par liament. Sir John Reresby tells us how, in his own case in 1688, this process was managed. The king commanded him to stand for York, in the event of an election. Reresby asked for his promise of more than ordinary support — " Whether he would assist me all he could to prevent my being baffled, and particularly by such means as I should propose to him. His answer was Yes ; and he gave immediate orders to the lords for purging the corpo rations, to make whatever change or alteration I desired in the city of York ; and to put in or out, which the king it seems had reserved to himself by the last charter, just as I pleased."* In London, James had put in an Anabaptist Lord Mayor — "a very odd ignorant person," as Evelyn reports. When the sheriffs in vited the king and queen according to custom, to feast at Guild hall, the king commanded them to invite the Nuncio. Burnet says the mayor and aldermen disowned the invitation, which must have offended the king, who said, " he saw the dissenters were an ill- natured sort of people, that could not be gained." This opinion seems to have been that usually received at Court, if we may judge from the Court Calendar of this year, in which the dissenters are denounced as " the private, sullen, discontented, niggardly non conformists." f At this time, Dryden published his famous poem of " The Hind and the Panther " — at a time of which he says, " The nation is in too high a ferment, for me to expect either fair war, or even so much as fair quarter, from a reader of the opposite. party. All men are engaged either on this side or that ; and though conscience is the common word which is given by both, vet if a writer fall among enemies, and cannot give the marks of their conscience, he is knocked down before the reasons of his own are heard." Dryden aims his satire at those he calls " the refractory and disobedient " — not against those " who have withdrawn them selves from the communion of the Panther, and embraced the gracious Indulgence of his majesty in regard to toleration." J The great poet, however, does not attempt to propitiate the Sectaries. "The Panther" — the Church of England — is "sure the noblest, next the Hind "—the Church of Rome. But the " Independent beast" is typified by "the Bear:." the Anabaptist is "the bristled Boar " who '¦ lurk'd in sects unseen ; " the Presbyterian is " the in- * " Memoirs," p. 351. t Chamberlayne's " Present State," p. 41. X Dryden's Preface to the Poem, DRYDEN S POEM OF THE HIND AND PANTHER. 349 satiate Wolf " who " pricks up his predestinating ears;" "False Reynard " is the Socinian. The Papist Laureate of James did not bid for popularity, when he thus addressed the countries whose names had been hateful in Fnglish ears from the days of queen Mary : " O happy regions, Italy and Spain, Which never did those monsters entertain! " We can now admire the beauty of his versification, and the energy of.his reasoning, in this poem of a period when Dryden thought his cause was triumphant. It may be doubted whether it produced many converts to Romanism, Or affected a' wider separation of the Panther from the Bear, the Boar, and the Wolf. Many who would scarcely heed his musical polemics would recollect his own heedless sarcasm against the teaching of an infallible Church : " The priest continues what the nurse began, And thus the child imposes ou the man.'* The year 1688 is come. Men were thinking of the correspond ing year of the previous century — of the glorious 1588, when the nation rallied round the great Elizabeth, and the invaders who came, with the papal blessing, to destroy the heretical islanders, perished in their pride. The contrast was humiliating. The king was now labouring to drive back the mind of England into the night of the fifteenth century. At this very time the great ally of this king was hunting his Protestant subjects to the death by his " dragoon mis- sioners." Could any other consummation be expected from an illegal Declaration of Indulgence, which, abolishing the tests under pretence of universal toleration, thrust Romanists into the highest civil and military offices, seated Father Petre amongst the Privy Counsellors of the kingdom, and turning out the members of cor porations who clung to a Protestant establishment, gave the muni cipal power to bigoted Papists or unscrupulous Dissenters. Thus reasoned-the great body of Englishmen when this ominous year arrived. It was opened with "a solemn and particular office of thanksgiving for her majesty being with child." An heir to the throne had long ceased to be expected as the issue of James and his queen. The priests every where proclaimed that the king had put up his prayers for such an event at the Well of Saint Winifred; and that his supplications had been heard. The .divines of the English Church were girding on their spiritual armour for a conflict Whilst, at the beginning of April, mass was being performed at one 350 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. chapel at Whitehall, the other chapel was crowded by eager mul titudes, to hear bishop Ken describe the calamity of the reformed church of Judah under the Babylonian persecution. As God had delivered Judah upon the repentance of her sins, so should the new Reformed Church be delivered, wherever insulted and per secuted.* The princess Anne, the daughter of James, was amongst the hearers. The contest soon assumed a more formidable shape than in the eloquence of the pulpit or the arguments of the press. The king issued a second Declaration of Indulgence on the 27th of April. It was a repetition of the Declaration of 1687, with an avowal that his resolution was immutable, and that he would em ploy no servants, civil or military, who refused to concur with him. He would hold a Parliament in the following November ; and he exhorted his people to choose representatives who would support him in his resolves. This proceeding was little regarded; for" all knew what the king meant, and knew also the pride and obstinacy of his character. But his next step was something more exciting. By an Order in Council of the 4th of May, he commanded the Declaration to be read in all churches and chapels throughout the kingdom, on two successive Sundays, by the ministers of all per suasions. The Gazette of the 7th of May fixed the 20th of that month for the first reading in London and the neigbourhood. In the country, the first reading was to take place on the 3rd of June. There was short time to collect the opinions of ten thousand minis ters of the Anglican Church. There were then very imperfect means of communication. The Gazette was wholly under the con trol of the government. Letters could not be sent through the post-office without the certainty that they would be opened, if sus pected, and would be stopped, if their contents were displeasing. Country clergymen would peruse the Order of Council in the Gazette, and some might hear that it was considered by their brethren in London as an insult to their order. But to disobey was to incur the danger of deprivation by the Ecclesiastical Com mission. The most eminent of the London clergy came to a res olution not to read the Declaration ; and a large majority joined in the same pledge. On the 18th a great meeting of prelates and other divines took place at Lambeth, and a petition to the king was drawn up by the archbishop of Canterbury on behalf of himself, of divers of the suffragan bishops of his province, and of the inferior clergy of their dioceses. They professed their averseness to dis- * Evelyn, " Diary," April i. PETITION OF THE SEVEN BISHOPS. 35 1 tribute and publish the king's Declaration for liberty of conscience, not from any want of duty and obedience, — for the "loyalty of the Church of England was unquestionable, — " nor yet," they said, " from any want of tenderness to Dissenters, in relation to whom we are willing to come to such a temper as shall be thought fit, when the matter shall .be considered and settled in Parliament and Convocation." Their averseness especially arose from the consid eration that the Declaration was " founded upon such a dispensing power as hath been often declared illegal in Parliament." It was so declared, they said, in 1662, in 1672, and at the beginning of his majesty's reign ; and therefore they could not in prudence, hon our, or conscience make themselves jjarties to the Declaration, as the distribution and solemn publication of it in God's house would amount to. They therefore prayed the king not to insist upon thSir distributing and reading this Declaration. The archbishop and six suffragan bishops signed this petition. Sancroft was not received at Court; and therefore, without . their head, bishops Lloyd, Turner, Lake, Ken, White, and Trelawney, immediately went to the king's palace, and were admitted to the royal closet. The king was unprepared for resistance to his mandate. When he read the petition he broke out into unseemly violence. " This is a standard of rebellion," he cried. Three bishops passionately disclaimed the imputation. " Did ever a good Churchman question the dispensing power before ? " Ken answered, " We honour you, but we fear God." The final threat of the king that they should disobey him at their peril was met by " God's will be done " from the lips of Ken. The petition of the prelates was circulated through London on that Friday night. It was imputed to them that they were instrumental to this publication; but they denied it. There was but one copy, which the king kept. Burnet and Dal rymple intimate that some one was concerned in the publication, to whom the king had shown the original. A commentator on Burnet, Bevil Higgons, says, "All agreed that' it must have been in the press, if not before, by the time it was delivered to the king, which was about five in the afternoon, and it came out that very night at twelve, and was so bawled and roared through the streets by hawkers, that people rose out of their beds to buy it." * Slow as were the operations of the printing press at that time, there was no necessity that the delivery of the petition, and printing, should have occurred at the same hour of five, if not before, to allow of its * Note to Burnet, Oxford edit. vol. iii. p. 220. 352 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. circulation at midnight. The printers of that age had learnt to do their work with speed during the Civil War, when the broadside stood in the place of the newspaper, and a ballad was as effective as a leading article. On the Sunday following this memorable Friday, the reading of the Declaration "was almost universally forborne throughout London." * One exception to this disobedi ence shows the direction of popular opinion. "I was then at Westminster school," says lord Dartmouth, " and heard it read in the Abbey. As soon as bishop Sprat, who was dean, gave order for reading it, there was so great a murmur and noise in the church that nobody could hear him ; but before he had finished, there was none left but a few prebends in their stalls, the choristers, and Westminster scholars. The bishop could hardly hold the proc lamation in his hands for trembling, and every body looked under a strange consternation." t In only four of the London churches was obedience yielded to the mandate of the king. Over all Eng land, not above two hundred of the Clergy read the Declaration. " One, more pleasantly than gravely, told his people, that, though he was obliged to read it, they were not obliged to hear it ; and he stopped till they all went out, and then he read it to the walls." J Sir John Reresby reports that he was told by lord Huntington, one ofthe Privy-council, "that had the king known how far the thing would have gone, he would never have laid the injunction he did, to have the Declaration read in churches." § In its blind self- reliance, tyranny rarely sees how far the thing will go. It puts the match to the combustible matter, and is then astonished at the, explosion. James had boasted that his past life ought to hiwe convinced his people that he was net a man to recede from any course which he had once taken. In this case he took more than a week to look about him before he proceeded on his perilous way. Some of his more prudent counsellors recommended that he should issue a conciliatory proclamation, stating his deep mortification at the proceedings of the Clergy, but admitting that, as their scruples might have been conscientious, he was unwilling to treat them with the severity due to their disobedience. This advice was rejected. It was determined to prosecute the bishops for a seditious Libel. They were summoned to appear on the Sth of June before the king in council. During this interval, there had been no signs of sub mission in the metropolis or in the country. The archbishop of * Evelyn. t Note to Burnet, vol. iii. p. 218. X Burnet, ibid. § " Memoirs," p. 345. THE BISHOPS COMMITTED TO THE TOWER. 353 Canterbury, and his six suffragans, came into the royal presence at Whitehall on the appointed afternoon. They were asked if they rcknowledged the petition to be theirs. They had received sound legal advice, and they refused to Criminate themselves. At length the archbishop said that if the king positively commanded him to answer he would do so, in the confidence that what he said in obedience to that command should not be brought in evidence against him. They were sent out, and upon their return the king gave the positive command. Sancroft and his brethren then acknowledged their hand-writing. They were immediately called upon to enter into recognizances to appear in the Court of King's Bench on a Criminal information for libel. They refused, main taining that as peers they could not be so called upon. Their firmness irritated and embarrassed the misguided king. He must still proceed on his dangerous course. A warrant was made out for their committal to the Tower. Then was presented a spectacle which struck terror into the soul of the despot. The people of London had, in many a year of trouble, seen the state-barge leave Palace-yard stairs with some unhappy peer proceeding from West minster Hall to his last prison. Often had they wept, as the axe was borne before some popular favourite. But never had there been such an outburst of feeling as on this evening of the 8th of June. The seven prelates, surrounded by guards, passed through lines of weeping men and women, who prayed aloud for their safety, and knelt to ask their blessing. When they entered their barge, the river was sparkling in the setting sun, as the oars of a thousand wherries dashed up its silver waters. From Whitehall to the Tower, as the twilight stole on, the voices of the people were heard in one solemn cry of " God bless your lordships." There was something in their popular sympathy far more elevating and consoling than the favour of kings which the Church had so laboured to earn. The Church was now in its right attitude — the champion of the national faith and the national freedom. It seemed as if the old contests for minute differences of doctrine and discipline were at an end. To manifest respect towards them would be to secure the resentment of the king; but the feeling towards them received no abatement. Their very guards in the Tower would drink no other health than that of the bishops. Day by day, such numbers of persons flocked to them " for their bless ing and to condole their hard usage," as Reresby relates, " that great and very extraordinary remarks were made both of persons Vol. IV.— 23 •54. HISTORY OF ENGLAND. and behaviour." The king saw with dismay, that his frown was powerless, even over a nobility that had been too long accustomed to fancy that the royal favour was their breath of life. Most indignant was James when ten non-conformist ministers — leading men amongst those whom he thought would be for ever at enmity with episcopacy, — visited the prelates in the Tower. " He sent for four of them to reprimand them; but their answer was, 'that they could not but adhere to the prisoners, as men constant and firm to the Protestant faith.'"* The bishops remained a week in confinement. On the 15th of June they were brought before the Court of King's Bench. There was the same throng of spectators begging their blessing. They were called upon to plead, after legal objections against their com mitment had been over-ruled. Their trial was fixed for the 27th, and they were then enlarged upon their own recognizances. The people fancied they were wholly released, and lighted up bonfires. The excitement went all through the land. The Dutch ambas sador expected an insurrection in London. The miners of Corn wall would come to the rescue of their countryman, Trelawney, the bishop of Bristol, as the burden of the old ballad declares : — "And shall Trelawney die ? There's twenty thousand underground Will know the reason why." t The day of trial came. Evelyn says there were " near sixty earls and lords on the bench." Westminster Hall and the whole neigh bourhood were thronged with eager crowds. The trial lasted from nine in the morning till six in the evening. Every point was ably contested by the lawyers on each side — for a nation was looking on. No one -could distinctly prove that the signatures to the petition were the hand-writing of the accused. The clerk of the Privy Council, B lath way te, was at last brought forward to swear that he had heard them confess that the}- had signed it. Then ensued a cross-examination which the counsel for the Crown tried in vain to stop ; for it might implicate the king on an implied promise that the confession should not be used against the peti tioners. The writing was thus proved. No evidence, however, could be obtained of the publication ; till Sunderland came to swear that the bishops had told him of their intention to present a petition to the king. The subject matter of the petition was at * Reresby, p. 347. t In the ruot.ition in Lord Mneau'ay's History, the words run, "thirty thousand Cornish boys." See " Quarterly Review," vol. cii. p. 314. TRIAL AND ACQUITTAL OF THE BISHOPS. 355. last argued. It was maintained that the bishops were, perfectly, right when they held that the dispensing power was illegal. Amongst their counsel there was one, a young man, John Somers, who that day took the high position which he ever after maintained, as the great constitutional lawyer and statesman of his time. The Chief-Justice, Wright, summed up that the petition was a libel. Justice Alibone held the same opinion. But the other two judges, Holloway and Powell, differed from them ; and Powell affirmed that the dispensing power, as then administered, was an encroach ment of the prerogative, and if not repressed, would put the whole legislative authority in the king. The jury were locked up all night. The king's brewer had fought stoutly for his royal custo mer; but he at last yielded ; and at ten o'clock the verdict of " Not Guilty" was delivered. The shouts went from the benches and galleries of the Court to Westminster Hall ; from the Hall to the streets and the river ; from London to every suburb. They were echoed by the camp at Hounslow, when an express came there to James to tell him of his great failure. He left directly for London. " He was no sooner gone out of the camp than he was followed by an universal shouting, as if it had been a victory obtained." * The king asked the cause of the uproar. He was answered that it was nothing; the soldiers only rejoiced that the bishops were acquitted. " Do you call that nothing ? " said the baffled tyrant. He muttered some threat of " so much the worse for them " — for whom the threat was meant was not quite clear. He had one revenge. The two judges, Holloway and Powell, as soon as the term was over, were dismissed from their seats on a bench where independence and honesty were qualities not to be endured. On the night of the 30th of June, London was one blaze of bonfires and illumina tions. The effigv of the pope again came forth to be burnt, as in the days of Shaftesbury. Pope-burners and bonfire lighters were indicted at the Middlesex Sessions ; "but," says Reresby, who was present as a justice, " the grand jury would find no bill, though they were sent out no less than three times ; so generally did the love of the bishops and the Protestant cause prevail." The Dec laration of Indulgence, and the Order in Council that the Clergy should publish it, appeared the climax of the king's determination to set his dispensing power above the law. The resistance of the, Clergy brought the question to issue between the king and the people. It was shrewdly observed that "a solemn declaration that a king will not govern according to law seems a formal renouncing * Burnet vol. iii. p. 226. 356 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of any right he has by it ; and when he has cut the bough he sat upon, he has little reason to be surprised if he falls to the ground." * Two days after the seven bishops were sent to the Tower, the Council announced to the lords-lieutenant of counties that it had "pleased Almighty God, about ten o'clock of this morning,, to bless his majesty and his royal consort the queen with the birth of a hopeful son, and his majesty's kingdoms and dominions with a prince." f In the language of the Council it was "so inestimable a blessing," that all the people would be called upon to unite in thanksgiving. Another language was held even by the staunch friends of the monarchy. Evelyn enters in his Diary of June loth, " A young prince born, which will cause disputes." The legitimacy of this young prince was long disputed. This birth was as little a blessing to the house of Stuart as it promised to be to the weary subjects of that house. A large majority of the nation was con vinced that this heir of the crown was supposititious. It was almost universally believed that imposture had been practised. The princess Arine did not give credit to the queen's alleged pregnancy. It was wholly disbelieved at the court of the prince of Orange. The birth arrived a month before it was said to be expected. The most ordinary precautions were not taken to put the fact beyond a doubt ; for none but those in whom the people had little confidence were in attendance on the occasion. That there was no imposture is now matter of historical belief ; but so convinced were many. political partisans that there was no real son of James IL, that, seventy years afterwards, Johnson drew the character of a violent Whig, who " has known those who saw the bed into which the Pretender was conveyed in a warming-pan." J Burnet devotes five or six pages of his folio volume to the various accounts of this pre tended birth — stories which Swift properly ridicules. The belief in this story is the only blot in the subsequent Declaration of William of Orange to the English people ; and James took the manly, though necessarily somewhat indelicate step, of instituting an inquiry and publishing all the evidence to refute the calumny. The most im portant influence of this birth upon the fortunes of England was, that the prospect of an heir to the Crown, born of a Catholic mother, and to be brought up in the bigoted school of a father who had cast aside Protestantism to be governed by Jesuits and apos tates, precipitated the Revolution. * Lord Dartmouth's Note in Burnet, vol. iii p. 228 t Letter to the Earl of Rochester. Eilis. Series I. vol. iii. p. 339. t " Idler," No. 10. WILLIAM. PRINCE OF ORANGE. 357 CHAPTER XVIII. William, Prince of Orange.— His character and position with regard to English affairs.— The Princess Mary, and the Succession — Invitation to the Prince of Orange. — Prep arations of William. — His Declaration. — Hopes of the English people. — Alarm of the king. — William sails from Helvoetsluys. — The voyage. — Landing at Torbay. — Public entry at Exeter. — The king goes to the army at Salisbury. — Desertions of his officers. — The Prince of Denmark and the Princess Anne. — James calls a Meeting of Peers.— -Commissioners to negotiate with the Prince of Orange.— The queen and child sent to France. — The king fiies.— Provisional Government.— Riots.— The Irish night— James brought back to London.— The Dutch guards at Whitehall.— The king again leaves London. — The Prince of Orange enters.— The Interregnum .—The Con vention. — William aud Mary King and Queen — The revolution the commencement of a new era in English history. At the village of Plurley, on the Berkshire side of the Thames between Henley and Maidenhead, stood, in 1836, an Elizabethan mansion called Lady Place, built on the site of a Benedictine mon astery by sir Richard Lovelace, who was created a peer by Charles I. This building was the seat of lord Lovelace in the reigns of Charles II. and James 1 1., — a nobleman whose lavish hospitality and expensive tastes were rapidly wasting " the king of Spain's cloth of silver " * which his ancestor, one of Drake's privateering followers had won. The spacious hall opening to the Thames, the stately gallery whose panels were covered with Italian landscapes, the terraced gardens— were ruined and neglected when we there meditated, some thirty years ago, upon the lessons of " Mutabil ity." All the remains of past grandeur are now swept away. But beneath the Tudor building were the burial vaults of the house of " Our Lady," which seemed built for all time, and which, we be lieve, are still undisturbed. In these vaults was a modern in scription which recorded that the Monastery of Lady Place was founded at the time of the great Norman Revolution and that "in this place, six hundred years afterwards, the Revolution of 1688 was begun." King William III., the tablet also recorded, visited this vault, and looked upon the " Recess," in which "several con sultations for calling in the prince of Orange were held." During the four years in which James had been on the throne, the question * " Worthies." 358 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of armed resistance had been constanty present to the minds of many Whigs ; and to the prince of Orange they looked for aid in some open attempt to change the policy of the government by force, — or, if necessary, to subvert it. The wife of the prince of Orange was the presumptive heir to the crown ; he was himself the nephew of the English king. His political and religious prin ciples, and those of the republic of which he was the first magis trate, were diametrically opposed to those of his uncle. The chief enemy of his nation was the chief ally of king James. The one great purpose of the life of William of Orange was to resist the overwhelming ambition of Louis XIV. . In 1688 he was thirty- eight years of age. When he was only in his twenty-second year, he had arrested the march of French conquest, and had saved his country. His uncle Charles had deserted his alliance, and had become the degraded pensioner of France. His uncle James equally crouched at the feet of the enemy of national independence, and of civil and religious liberty. William, under every difficulty, had in 1686 succeeded in forming the League of Augsburg, to hold in check this overwhelming ambition. His unrivalled sagacity and prudence had united rulers of Catholic as well as Protestant states, in a determination that the Balance of Power in Europe should not be destroyed. James of England was content that his country should remain in the degraded position in which it had been left by his brother, provided that a continuance of that deg radation would enable him to establish Jesuits and monks in the high places of the Church, and rule without Parliaments, by a power above the law. William of Orange must have long been con vinced that this system could not endure. Holland was the refuge of many an Englishman who had fled from persecution, when dis senters were the objects of king James's hatred. They had no confidence in his pretended toleration, because it was based upon absolute^ authority. The public opinion of Englishmen at home was uniting in the same conclusion. A crisis was at hand, not only in England, but in the general policy of Europe. William had stood aloof from any connexion with plots in the later years of Charles, or of insurrections in the first year of James. His object was that in England there should be union between the Crown and the Parliament; for then England would be strong, and capable of taking a part once more in such a joint system of action as was contemplated in the Triple Alli ance. That hope was now utterly gone. It was clear that James THE PRINCESS MARY AND THE SUCCESSION. 359 imd his people would never be at accord. It was equally clear that any bold and elevated foreign policy was hopeless. Unless he had determined wholly to separate himself from English affairs William of Orange would necessarily become associated with the leading men of England, who saw that the government was driving on to ruin. His original policy was to wait. The time might come when the princess of Orange would be queen, and then William would naturally be England's ruler. It was the desire of Mary that her husband, in that event, should be the real sovereign. Burnet relates this circumstance with some self-applause, but with evident truth : " I took the liberty, in a private conversation with the princess, to ask her what she intended the prince should be, if she came to the crown. She, who was new to all matters of that kind, did not understand my meaning, but fancied, that whatever accrued to her would likewise accrue to him in the right of mar riage. I told her it was not so. * * * I told her, a titular kingship was no acceptable thing to a man, especially if it was to depend on another's life : and such a nominal dignity might en danger the real one that the prince had in Holland. She desired me to propose a remedy. I told her, the remedy, if she could bring her mind to it, was, to be contented to be his wife, and to engage herself to him, that she would give him the real authority as soon as it came into her hands, and endeavour effectually to get it to be legally vested in him during life : this would lay the greatest obli gation on him possible, and lay the foundation of a perfect union between them, which had been of late a little embroiled. * * * She presently answered me, she would take no time to consider of any thing by which she could express her regard and affection to the prince ; and ordered me to give him an account of all that I had laid before her, and to bring him to her, and I should hear what she would say upon it. * * * She promised him, he should always bear rule; and she asked only, that he would obey the command of ' Husbands, love your wives,' as she should do that, ' Wives, be ^ obedient to your husbands in all things.' " * Dartmouth conjec tures that the prince ordered Burnet — whom he calls " a little Scotch priest" — to propose this to the princess, before he would engage in the attempt upon England. When the insane proceedings of James had rendered it more than probable that the event would happen which his brother Charles said should never happen to him — that he should be sent again upon his travels — the prince of * "Own Time," vol. iii. p. 129. 360 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Orange, with an ambition that was founded upon higher motives than mere personal advancement, might not unreasonably think that there was a shorter road to .the English crown than by succession. At the very climax of the folly of James, a son, or a pretended son, was born. William and his wife believed that their just rights were attempted to be set aside by an imposture. The leading men of England believed the same. The quarrel between the kingand the Church appeared to be irreconcileable ; and thus the most pow erful influence over the people had ceased to be committed to the doctrine of non-resistance to arbitrary power. The time for decis ion was come in the summer of 1688. Edward Russell had been over to the Hague in May, to urge the prince of Orange to a bold interference with the affairs of England. " The prince spoke more positively to him than he had ever done before. He said, he must satisfy both his honour and conscience, before he could enter upon so great a design, which, if it is miscarried, must bring ruin both on England and Holland ; he protested, that no private ambition nor resentment of his own could ever prevail so far with him, as to make him break with so near a relation, or engage in a war, of which the consequences must be of the last importance both to the interests of Europe and of the protestant religion : therefore he expected formal and direct invitation. Russell laid before him the danger of trusting such a secret to great numbers. The prince said, if a considerable number of men, that might be supposed to understand the sense of the nation best, should do it, he would ac quiesce in it." * Russell returned to England, and communicated with Henry Sidney, the brother Algernon: with the earl of Shrews bury; the earl of Danby; the earl of Devonshire ; and other peers. Compton, the suspended bishop of London, was also confided in. On the 30th of June, the great day of the acquittal of the seven bishops, an invitation to William of Orange, to appear in England at the head of a body of troops, was sent by a messenger of rank ; admiral Herbert. It was signed in cipher, by Shrewsbury, Devon shire, Danby, Lumley, Compton, Russell, and Sidney. William took his determination. He resolved on a descent upon En Edward VI. c. 5. CLOTHING TRADE OF THE WEST. 387 a great extent in the most advanced stage of manufacturing indus try. The clothing trade of the West was created by the adaptation of the district to sheep pasturage. On the grassy downs and wide plains of Wiltshire, innumerable flocks of sheep had yielded the fleece before the time when Stonehenge and Abury were mysteri ous ruins. The fleeces of the long-woolled sheep of the Cots wold Hills were famous in the fifteenth century; and Camden describes the substantial cotes with which this hill-district was covered, to shelter the flocks from the winter storm or the keen winds of the lambing season. The Mendip Hills supported a short-woolled breed, whose wool was as fine as that of Spain, which entered so largely into our woollen manufacture. The supply of wool was thus at hand for the clothiers who dwelt in the valley of the Lower Avon. The waters of that river, with its many branches, were especially fitted for fulling and dressing and dyeing cloth. The finest cloths were here fabricated. Frome, Bradford, Trow bridge, Devizes, with many adjacent towns then of great impor tance, were the seats of this " prodigy of a trade." * Frome had added ten thousand to its population in -thirty years, and was con sidered to have more inhabitants than Bath or Salisbury-! The clothing towns were surrounded with their tributary villages and hamlets, in which the work of spinning was performed by women and children. To the cottages where the hum of the wheel was ceaselessly heard, the clothiers of the towns sent their pack-horses laden with wool, and brought back the spun yarn, ready for the weaver's loom. The operative weaver was also in many cases a domestic worker. In the fulling and dyeing processes was com bined labour alone necessary. The forgotten poem of John Dyer, " The Fleece " — which Johnson disdained on account of " the meanness naturally adhering and the irreverence habitually annexed to trade and manufactures " — gives us many accurate as well as pleasing pictures of the weaving labours of the valleys of the Avon, the Air, and the Stroud. The young man, entering upon his career of industry, sets up his own loom ; he stores his soft yarn ; he strains the warp along his garden walk, or by the high way side ; he drives the thready shuttle from morn to eve ; he takes the web to the fulling mill near some clear-sliding river, where tumbling waters turn enormous wheels and hammers ; the wet web is often steeped, and often dragged by sinewy arms to the river's grassy bank ; it is hung on rugged tenters to brighten in * Defoe's " Tour," vol. ii. p. 35, ed. 1738. t Ibid., p. 34. 388 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the fervid sun ; the clothier's shears and the burler's thistle skim the surface ; and lastly, the snowy web is steeped in boiling vats, where woad or fustic, logwood or cochineal, give their hues to the purple of the prince, the scarlet of the warrior, and the black of the priest.* There can be no greater contrast than that of the Woollen trade of the West, a century and a half ago, with a Cloth factory of the North in our own times ; where, with the gigantic aid of steam, wool from every quarter of the habitable globe is carded, spun, woven by the power-loom, fulled, sheared, and dyed, in buildings one of which would turn out more cloth than a dozen old clothing-towns, with their tributary villages. The contrast between the semi-pastoral state of the great staple of England, and its factory perfection, is equally remarkable as regards the moral condition of the people. Tbe old loom is passing away : and so is the weaver of Kidderminster, who had his book before him as he threw the shuttle, and had " time enough to read or talk of holy things." t The Gloucestershire clothiers of Stroud and the neighbourhood were especially famous for- their fine cloths of scarlet and other gaudy hues, to which the purity of their streams was held as much to contribute as tbe skill of the dyer. It was the fineness and brilliancy of the English broad-cloths which gave them a value beyond their own silks and brocades to the Persian and the Turk, " even for their habits of ceremony." It was their intrinsic good ness — to preserve which so many statutory regulations had been prescribed for centuries — which recommended them to Spaniards and Portuguese, to Venetians and Italians, to the Greeks of the Levant and even to the Moors of Africa.} But this foreign trade was greatly straitened by circumstances and opinions. At the beginning of tbe eighteenth century the trade with France was gone. In 1674 a jealousy of that trade was the paramount idea of the commercial legislator; for England sent France only about eighty thousand pounds' worth of woollen manufactures, and im ported ten times that value of linen and silk manufactures, besides wine, brandy, paper, and many toys and luxuries. The difference, in the economical language of that day. was called the " Balance gained by the French from us yearly." § When, after the acces sion of William and Mary, the nation was at war with Louis XIV., » See Dyer's "Fleece," book iii. t See ante> v0,_ iy ^ J" Atlas Maritimus," 1727. § " Parliamentary History," vol. iv. Appendix, No. xi. FOREIGN TRADE. 389 all trade and commerce with France was prohibited ; and it was declared that it had been found by long experience that the im portation of the commodities of France " hath much exhausted the treasure of this nation, lessened the value of the native commodities and manufactures thereof, and greatly impoverished the English artificers and handicrafts." * The same proposition was repeated in the same terms in 1 704. f To compensate for the loss of the French trade, the North American colonies and the West Indies had become important customers for our woollen manufactures. The ports of Bristol and of North Devon thus continued to pros per ; Liverpool was growing into importance ; but many of the smaller ports of the channel were ruined. The towns of Wey mouth and Lyme, that drove a flourishing trade with France before • the Revolution of 1688, fell into decay. Lyme once sent large cargoes of woollen goods to Brittany, X and its " Cobb " was busy with little vessels laden with imports of French wines and linens. In 1 709, the cobb-dues were under fourteen pounds, and the houses were fast falling into decay. Ships were employed in foreign trade of a larger tonnage than was fitted for small ports. Great towns alone became the seats of external commerce. § Such a port was Bristol at the commencement of the eigh teenth century — the famous port of the West — the only port that could pretend to enter into competition with London, and to trade with an entire independence of the capital. || The Bristol shop keepers were also merchants — " Wholesale men " — and they con ducted an inland trade through all the Western counties by means of carriers, and extended their traffic through the midland districts, even to the Trent. Roger North had observed that at Bristol all the dealers were engaged in adventures by sea ; — " a poor shop keeper that sells candles will have a bale of stockings, or a piece of stuff, for Nevis or Virginia." f There was too much truth in his notice of one portion of the Bristol commerce — "rather than fail, they trade in men." The planters with whom the Bristol traders corresponded wanted labour, and in exchange for rum, and sugar, and tobacco, men were sent — wretched outcasts who had been kidnapped, or " small rogues " who were threatened by the justices with the extreme penalties of the law, and were instructed to pray for transportation " before any indictment was found * 1 Gul. & Mar. c. 33. t 3 & 4 Anne, c 12. X " British Merchant," 1713. § Roberts' " Southern Counties," p. 540. II Defoe's " Tour," vol. ii. p. 249. f " Life of Lord Guilford," vol. i. p. 25. 3QO HISTORY OF ENGLAND. against them. " * Bristol had this dishonour in the days of Charles II., as it was the last to cling to the dishonour of the slave trade in the days of George III. The Bristol traders, moreover, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, had to bear a reproach, which even the noble charities of one of their great merchants, and their old reputation for hospitality, which earned them the title of " the courteous Bristolians," t could not outweigh. Defoe,, in general no illiberal judge, complained of the inconveniences of Bristol — its narrow streets, its narrow river, and "also another narrow— that is, the minds of the generality of its people." He recommends them to travel to London — "from the second great trading town to the first ; and they will see examples worth their imitating, as well for princely spirit as for upright and generous dealings." X At that period Bristol was cursed with a very exclu sive prosperity , and its uneducated freemen, amongst whom strangers were jealously forbidden to settle, indulged, when their adventures were prosperous, in that vulgar display which is the general accompaniment of sudden riches. § It was also cursed with an exclusive municipal government. From this great port of the Severn, Sebastian Cabot, " a Bristol man born," went forth in 1497 to set his foot upon Newfoundland. Two centuries later Bristol was the great emporium for American produce, and Dam- pier, with other bold buccaneers, sailed from Avon to come back rich with Spanish prizes. A century and a half later', the " Great Western " steamed down between the narrow rocks of St. Vincent, on her first voyage to New York, caring little for tides and adverse winds, for she had a self-contained power which took away the un certainty of maritime communication, and made time and space "of small amount in commercial calculations. The difference between the Bristol of Cabot and the Bristol of Dampier, is not greater than the difference between the Bristol of William III., whose statue was worthily raised in Queen Square by her citizens, and the Bristol of Queen Victoria. The Avon is now far too narrow for the mighty vessels, crowded amongst the diminutive, that steam to her quays from South Wales and Ireland, from Africa and America. But the old commerce of wool and woollen manufactures, of which * " Life of Lord Guilford," vol. i. p. 250, and vol. ii. p. 24. t Fuller's "Worthies." X "Tour," vol. ii. p. 250- § Defoe perhaps wrote under the influence of some personal slight. He sought a ref uge in Bristol when under pecuniary difficulties ; and was there pointed at as " the Sun day gentleman." WATERING-PLACES OF THE COAST. 391 Bristol was the seat, is gone. The North has carried away the woollen manufacture from the West, to a very considerable extent. South Wales has far more productive industry than the making of flannels. The* hearth-money returns of Bristol show little above five thousand houses, which would give a population not much ex ceeding twenty-five thousand. Defoe says, " Bristol' is supposed to have a hundred thousand inhabitants within the city, and within three miles of its circumference." This is a material increase in less than forty years. A later writer observes that " Bristol, the second city in England, next to London has made the largest im provements since the Revolution, of any place in the kingdom, un- ess Manchester shall be thought an exception to this."* The great woollen manufacture extended itself in the eigh teenth century still further west. At Taunton Defoe found eleven hundred looms at work for the weaving of common stuffs ; and he was told that there was not a child in the town of above five years old who could not earn its own bread. At Honiton he first saw the serge manufacture of Devonshire, which occupied the whole county. At Exeter, a city then full of trade and manufacture, he looked with admiration upon the serge market, where the people as sured him that serges to the value of a hundred thousand pounds were sometimes sold in one week. The port of Topsham was then one of the most considerable amongst the smaller ports of Eng land ; and the woollen manufactures of Devonshire were thence largely exported to Holland, to Portugal and Spain, to Italy. The commerce of the Exe is now comparatively small. Devon shire has still its scattered woollen manufactures, which give em ploy to fifteen hundred males and two thousand five hundred females ; and five hundred males, and eight thousand five hundred females are now connected with the production of gloves and lace. But new populations have been created by circumstances of which the Devonians of a century and a half ago had no conception. It was for modern times to behold all the bays of the south-western coast where the myrtle is unharmed by the winter gales, transformed into flourishing towns, where a few fishermen once earned a pre carious livelihood. The rush to the coast for sea-bathing and sea- air was a fashion unknown in the middle of the last century. Still less was it the fashion to locate the invalid under the shelter of hills and promontories, where the south-west breeze might give its soft but invigorating freshness to those who were held to have been per- * Smith's " Memoirs of Wool," 1747. Vol. i. p. 263. 392 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ishing in the crowded city. Torquay was then a name for a few huts. Even more rare was the fashion of travelling for pleasure through scenes which we now call beautiful, but which our forefathers held to be horrible wastes. In the days of almost imp'assible roads, and when wheel conveyances were not common, the hills of Dev onshire and Derbyshire, the mountains of Wales and Westmore land, were left to their primitive occupants, unsought by the tour ist, and hated by the business traveller. No one sailed down the Wye and the Dart for pleasure ; the Dove and the Wharf were known in their inaccessible beauties only to the solitary angler. When the companion of Charles Cotton rides with him near Ash- bourn, the Essex man exclaims, " Bless me, what mountains are here ! " and when told that the hills bred and fed good beef and mutton, ejaculates, " They had need of all those commodities to make amends for the ill landscape." * To the eyes of Defoe, Westmoreland was a country eminent only for being the wildest, most barren, and frightful of any that he had passed over in Eng land, or even in Wales itself. He talks of the terrible aspect of the hills, and laments that all the pleasant part of England was at an end.f Gray was the first who looked at Windermere and Bor- rowdale, at Skiddaw and Saddleback, with the eve of the poet. Whateley was the first who described the Wye ; and Gray, who followed him, is in raptures with its "succession of nameless won ders." X Such a change in the taste of the present and the past century may be accounted for without imputing to our predecessors an indifference to the beauties of nature. Travelling was to them weary work. The most populous districts, with the least execrable roads, were to them the most attractive. The only inns were in the great thoroughfares. The chance hospitality of a cottage on a mountain side was not to their tastes. Long after the middle of the eighteenth century good roads were the exception. Turnpikes had done something to amend the evil. But up to 1770, when Arthur Young wrote, the roads of the North, and especially of Lancashire, were mostly execrable ; so that, speaking of the turn pike road from Preston to Wigan, this shrewd observer says, " Let me most seriously caution all travellers who may accidentally purpose to travel this terrible country, to avoid it, as they would the devil." § The love of the picturesque was not sufficient to bear the ordinary tourist through such difficulties. * " Complete Angler," Part ii. t " Tour," vol. iii. p, 18. X " Works," vol. iv. 1836. § " Six months' Tour in the North of England," vol. iv. p. 5S0. INLAND WATERING-PLACES. 393 In the West was the most celebrated watering-place of Eng land. From the earliest times the hot springs of Bath had been the resort of the invalid. The city at the beginning of the eigh teenth century was a small cluster of narrow streets, where the houses, although built of stone, were mean and ill-furnished. Yet it had long been the resort of the rich health-seekers and the rich pleasure-seekers. It was proverbial also for its beggars. Fuller, noticing the proverb, says that many repair to Bath from all parts of the land, " the poor for alms, the pained for ease." The beggars came, like fowl to the barn-door, where there was " the general confluence of gentry." Wood, the architect, changed Bath from a crowded nest of dirty lodgings into a city of palaces. But after these improvements were begun, Defoe compared "the close city of Bath " to a foul prison ; and laments that physicians, by not giving equal praise to the hot springs of Matlock and Buxton, had not encoiiraged the building there of " noble and convenient bathing places, and instead of a house or two, a city raised for the enter tainment of company." * The passion for drinking mineral waters, and for bathing in medicinal springs, sent the fashionable world, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, to a similar round of idle ness and dissipation, of card-playing and dancing, at the crowded cottages of Tunbridge Wells, and the fishing hovels of Scarborough. The virtues of the " Spa-waters " of the great sea-bathing place of the North were known in the days of Elizabeth, Those who walked from the town over the sands, to the mineral spring which issued from the cliff, never thought of a swim in the sea. There was then no gathering on the coast, east or west, north or south, to inhale the breeze or to float in the brine. The sea was as much dreaded by inland dwellers, as the mountains were hateful to the inhabitants of the plains. When the Prince of Orange landed at Brixham, the probability was that the governor of Plymouth would have opposed the descent. of a Dutch army upon the Western coast. The island of St. Nich olas had been fortified in the time of Elizabeth. The citadel had been built by Charles II. But at the end of the seventeenth cen tury Plymouth was not a great naval station. No fleets of men-of- war anchored in the Hamoaze ; no docks and victualling yards gave employment to two thousand five hundred workmen. William III. imparted the first impulse to 'the creation of the great arsenal which was to rival Portsmouth, by building two docks, which were * " Tour," vol. iii. p. 43. 394 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. begun in 1 69 1. But Plymouth, the noble estuary of the Tamar and the Plym, had long been the most considerable port for merchan dise of South Devon, as Bideford on the Torridge, and Barnstaple on the Taw, had chiefly absorbed the commerce of North Devon. The Plymouth of the end of the seventeenth century, and the Ply mouth of the middle of the nineteenth century, are as essentially different as the war ships of each period. The perils of the Eddy- stone rock, "whereon many a good ship hath been split," * were not averted by the warning light which has securely burnt there since the days of Smeaton. A light-house was commenced to be built on the Eddystone in 1696. In three years it was finished, and the dangers of the approach to the Sound were greatly les sened. The mighty storm of 1703, almost unequalled in its destruc tive violence, swept the first lighthouse away. There had been signals for help from the doomed fabric when the tempest began on the 24th of November. On the morning of the 26th, the people of Plymouth looked out upon the stormy sea with their perspective glasses, and behold, the lighthouse was gone. Its engineer, Win- stanley, perished with it. Another lighthouse, formed like the first, of wood upon a stone foundation, was commenced in 1706. It was destroyed by fire in 1755. The force of the South Western gales always made the anchorage of Plymouth harbour somewhat unsafe, till Telford's breakwater, one of the triumphs of modern engineer ing, rendered the port as eminent for its safety as it is unequalled for picturesque beauty. The ship-building of Plymouth Dock, of Portsmouth, and of the other naval stations, leads us to look at one of the most extraor dinary contrasts between the end of the seventeenth century and the middle of the nineteenth. What mighty efforts of invention ahd energy between England depending upon foreign countries for iron, and England supplying the whole world with iron : Eng land without iron to hold together its " wooden walls," and Eng land building iron ships ; using iron as the great material of the grandest as well as of the humblest purposes of constructive art; covering the whole island with iron roads for vehicles drawn by iron engines ; connecting opposite hills by iron viaducts, and car rying iron bridges over the narrowest river and the broadest estuary — the England of every tool and every machine produced from iron, and the England with scarcely iron enough to make its ploughshares. In such considerations of the grandeur of Art * Teonge's " Diary," p. 25.' IRON TRADE. — FOREST OF DEAN. 395 1 there is the poetical element, as deep if not so vivid, as in the con templation of the grandeur of Nature. To connect poetry with manufacture, according to Dr. Johnson, "is to couple the serpent with the fowl." Whateley, in a celebrated passage, described the smoky cloud of an iron forge on the Wye as adding to the grand eur of the scene at die New Weir. This was simply the pictur esque of poetry. But what images of the past, the present, and the future are connected with an incident of the iron manufacture on the same river. The first mass was performed in " the Cister- tian house of the blessed Mary of Tintern," in 1287. Now, five hundred and seventy years afterwards, the majestic ruins of the conventual church are the admiration of every visitor. To our minds the impressiveness of this noble monument of the piety of the days of Edward I. is enhanced by the solemn thought of the vast social changes of six centuries — changes never more striking ly manifested than in the fact that, within a few hundred yards of the Abbey, the best wire was manufactured for the Atlantic Tele graph. In the seventeenth century the forest of Dean was the prin cipal seat of the iron manufacture. It had been an iron-making district from the time of the Romans. The cinders from the old Roman iurnaces still lie like pebbles on the sea-shore on the left bank of the Wye, and deep cavities from which the iron-stone has been dug attest the labours of the industrious race whose coins are found in the same pits.* The work of smelting iron, which the Romans only half performed with imperfect mechanical aids, was carried through, though still imperfectly, by the miners of fourteen hundred years later. The woods of the forest of Dean were burnt for charcoal, in a country of pit-coal, and the best "sow- iron " was made from the half-smelted Roman cinders. This sow- iron was sent by the Severn into Worcestershire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, and Cheshire, and there made into bar-iron. The forges of Stourbridge, Dudley, Wolverhampton, Walsall, and Birmingham were chiefly kept at work by the fine iron from this Western country. " The forest of Dean," says Yaranton, " is, as to the iron, to be compared to the sheep's back, as to the woollen ; nothing being of more advantage to England than these two are."t Nevertheless, there were a fewiron works in Staffordshire and Warwickshire, in Worcestershire and Shrop shire, where iron of inferior quality, a " a short soft iron, commonly * Ante, vol. i.p. 48. 1 "England's Improvement," p. 58. 396 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. called cold-shore iron," was produced : it was chiefly used in the nail manufacture .* An Act of 1668 recites, that the wood and timber of the Crown in the forest of Dean had become totally de stroyed.! Tbe manufacture of iron was unpopular. Many said, " it were well if there were no iron works in England, and it was bet ter when no iron was made in England : the iron works destroy all the woods, and foreign iron from Spain will do better and last longer. X Drayton makes the trees of the Weald of Sussex utter their lament for "these iron times." Iron works had been nearly driven from Kent and Surrey by statutes of Elizabeth and James I. The iron railings round St. Paul's Churchyard were almost the last produce of southern iron-works. Plant woods to burn for charcoal, was the advice of those who believed that home-made iron was a necessity. A man wiser than others in his generation, Edward lord Dudley, obtained in 1619 a patent for smelting iron- ore by pit coal. He would probablyhave bestowed immense riches upon his country had not his iron-works been destroyed in an out break of that popular ignorance which had too often interrupted the course of scientific improvement. The notion of smelting the iron ore by coal was not fairly tried till after 1740, at which time the annual produce of iron in the whole country was only about seven teen thousand tons. What a contrast is the conveyance of iron from the mouth of the Wye in those days, and frora the mouth of the Taff in our day. The furnaces of South Wales produce as much pig-iron in one week, as all the furnaces of England produced in the whole year of 1740. The seventeen thousand tons, smelted by charcoal in that year, are only the hundred and fortieth part of all the iron produced in the United Kingdom in 185 1, and only the two-hundreth part of the produce of 1857. The iron of 1851, com pared with the population, was estimated at a hundred and sixty- eight pounds(i>£ cwt.). per head. The iron of 1740 gave less than seven pounds per head. The iron workers of Merthyr-Tydvii are greater now in number than the whole population of Glamorgan shire at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The western extremity of England was the most ancient seat of her mining riches. The Romans worked the tin-mines of Corn wall, as they worked the lead-mines of Derbyshire. The sea- coast is full of the traces of the earliest mining industry. At a comparatively modern period, the reign of John, the Jews were the chief workers of the tin-mines. In the middle of the eighteenth * " England's Improvements," p. 5S. t 19 & 20 Car. II. c. 8. t " England's Improvement," p. 56. THE MINES OF CORNWALL. 397 century the produce of these mines was about sixteen hundred tons ; and no great increase was observable for another half cen tury. That quantity is about a seventh of the present annual pro duce. The tin that was used to make the pewter dishes of the rich in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is now chiefly employed to produce the tinned iron plates that form the cooking utensils of the mansion and the cottage, and the tea-pots of Britan nia-metal and queen's-metal that are the luxuries of the mechanic's household. The first tin-plate manufactory was established in Monmouthshire in 1730. We now export tin-plates to the value, annually, of a million and a half sterling. The mines of Cornwall created the Stannary towns, of which Truro was the chief, for the stamping of tin, and the assessment of its " coinage," as the rev enue of the dukes of Cornwall. But the county, in the time of William III., was full of decayed boroughs, which successive gov ernments have reckoned amongst the best foundations of public security. Of the five hundred and thirteen representatives of England and Wales, Cornwall, with a population of a hundred and twenty-six thousand, sent forty-four members to parliament. It contained about a fiftieth part of the^ whole population, and it had a voice in the legislature as potent as if it contained a twelfth of all the inhabitants of the kingdom. This inequality did not contribute to the prosperity of the district. It was poor, and it was venal. The adventurers from Bristol who, at the beginning of the eigh teenth century, thought that copper. ore might be found in Corn wall; and Newcomen, the- engineer, who, in 1713, employed the first steam-engine to drain a tin-mine near Helstone ; conferred more substantial benefits upon Cornwall than all the privileges that kings and ministers had ever bestowed upon the Duchy. The Bristol traders set up mills in their cityfor the production of brass- ware, and to this use was the first copper ore applied. Sixty years afterwards, the copper produced from the ore of Cornwall was only about three thousand tons. In another century it had quadrupled in amount and value. The copper mines have brought about a commercial marriage between Cornwall and South Wales. The ore of the country which has no coal is conveyed across the Bristol Channel to the. country which has coal in abundance. The works for smelting copper upon the Neath and the Tawe are as remark able as the iron-works of the Taff. They are the more remarkable from the fact that the copper-ore of the Cornish mines now forms only a portion of the quantity smelted. The ship that has borne 39S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the copper of Australia ten thousand miles, now enters the port of Swansea in company with the small vessel that has only dared the roll of the Atlantic, as she sailed beneath the bold cliffs from the Land's End to Hartland Point. One great element of the mineral wealth of South Wales, whose existence is assumed in "this brief notice of her iron-works and her copper-works, is to be found in her coal-fields. The other coal districts of the West, those of Bristol and the Mendip hills, are small in comparison with the vast range that extends from the mouth of the Severn through the whole coast of Wales bordering on the Bristol Channel. The South Welsh coal-field covers a workable area of six hundred thousand acres. At the beginning of the eighteenth century this vast mineral wealth was scarcely worked. There was an export trade of coal from Swansea to Somersetshire, Devonshire, Cornwall, and Ireland ; and there was the same trade from Neath. * But no adequate machinery was employed in the mines, and the works were carried on very little below the surface, in pits which could be easily drained by hand- labour. The demands of London for the " sea-coal fire " very early made the Newcastle trade of importance. But Wales had no share of this large supply ; and the peculiar value of its coal was not felt till the age of steam-engines had arrived. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the industry of the West of England probably exhibited a greater variety of employ ments than any other district. The people were miners, fishers, cultivators, orchardists, shepherds, weavers, sailors. The Cornish tinners had been engaged in the same unvarying occupation, from times that make other branches of the manufacturing industry of England look as the mere growth of modern necessities. Their peculiar language has died out ; but there is the remnant of an old system of co-operative industry in the " tributer " system of their mining labour, which assigns each man a reward different from the ordinary system of wages.f Such arrangements especially belong to an early age of society, before capital had organised industry by its all-controlling power. The Cornish fisheries are conducted upon the same principle, which has probably prevailed from very remote times, when the shoals of pilchards came into the Western bays, and have never ceased to come, although Fuller * Defoe's "Tour," vol. ii. p. 283. t See Babbage's " Economy of Machinery," &c. p. ,„. VARIETIES OF EMPLOYMENT IN THE WEST. 395 thought they were "varying more westward, to Ireland."* The same system of co-operation prevailed in one of the industries of Somersetshire — the cheese-making of Cheddar — for which Fuller has the characteristic name of "Join-dairies." In this village under the ridge of the Mendip, the whole population were cow-keepers. They all united in manuring the common upon which their cows fed. Every cow-keeper brought his milk daily to a common-room, where the quantity was measured and recorded: The making of a great cheese went duly forward ; and when the milk of a poor man who kept but one cow was sufficient for one cheese, he received his cheese. The rich owner of many cows had his return earlier, " but the poor man was sure of his just share, f In the rural econ omy of the West there was nothing peculiar but the apple-growth. It was especially the " Cider-land." { The Christmas festivities were not complete, unless the old sacrifices to Pomona were kept up in sprinkling cider upon the apple-trees. § The superstition is gone ; but the ^.pple-orchards of the West have increased in fruit- fulness as they have increased in number. The payment by the farmer of a portion of his labourers' wages in cider is perhaps also a relic of an ancient system, which appears in our day to have become an evil. || Other distinguishing characteristics of this district have passed away. " The Western English " — the dialect of which the genuine characteristics are to be found in Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle If — has left no very marked traces. The Somersetshire school-boy would no longer translate, as Defoe heard, the words of the Canticles, " I have put off my coat ; how shall I put it on ? " into " Chow a doff 'd my coot ; how shall I donn't? '** The old tourist found the " jouring " dialect prevail when he had come " that length from London." Rapid and easy communication have nearly swept away all such peculiarities, and have made the Southern English absorb the Western, the Mercian, the Anglian, and the Northumbrian. * " Worthies," vol. i. p. 206. t Defoe's " Tour," vol. ii. p. 30. X J. Philips's "Cider," bookii. § " For more or less fruits they will bring As you do give them wassailing." — Herrick, " Hesperides." II "Journal of the Bath and West of England Society," vol. vi. p. 136. T " Quarterly Review," vol. Iv. p. 386. ** " Tour," vol. i. p. 319- 400 HISTORY OF KNGLAM). CHAPTER XIX. The West-Midland and North-Midland Coanties. — Birmingham. — Hardware.— The Potteries. — Glass. — Nottingham. — Stockings. — Lace. — Derby. — Silk. — Lead Mines. — Lincolnshire. — Salt. — Soda. — Soap. — Lancashire before the Cotton era. — Man chester.— Liverpool.— Linen Trade.— Yorkshire.— The Clothing Villages.— Leeds.— Sheffield.— Hull.— The Greenland Trade.— Newcastle. — Cumberland and Westmor land. — Scotland. — Agricultural Counties. — Norwich. — South-Eastern Coasts. — Cinque Ports — Brighton. — Dover. — Portsmouth. — Southampton. The progress of Manufactures in districts favourable to their pursuit is decidedly marked by the rapid increase of population. The extension and improvement of Cultivation are not ordinarily followed by any such proportionate increase of the numbers of the people. Thus, of the West Midland Counties, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire, did not add more than one fourth to their population throughout the eighteenth century. Warwickshire and Staffordshire, which before the end of that period had become great seats of the iron and hardware trade, and of the trade in earthenware, had doubled their population. In the same manner, though not in the same degree, of the North Midland Counties, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, which had grown up into large hosiery districts, added half to their numbers during that century. Of Lincolnshire, in the same period, the population was nearly stationary. Bishop Berkeley, in 1737, byway of example to the Irish of the rapid turning of money, asks " Whether the small town of Birming ham alone doth not, upon an average, circulate every week, one way or other, to the value of fifty-thousand pounds ? " * The iron ware of Birmingham was in repute long before the beginning of the eighteenth century. In the time of Henry VIII. Leland wrote that "a great part of the town is maintained by smiths, who have their iron and sea-coal out of Staffordshire." The people of Birmingham were then makers of knives, of bridle-bits, of nails In the reign of Charles II. they still manufactured scarcely any thing more than iron tools and husbandry implements. Their forges were open to the public streets, by the side of the rough * "The Querist" — Works, vol. ii. p. 273, ed. 1843. BIRMINGHAM — HARDWARE. 40 1 shop where the spade and the bag of nails were exposed for sale. Under the encouragement given by William III., Birmingham began in his reign to make fire-arms. But how insufficient at that period was the home production of iron articles we may judge from the table of duties on imports,* in which we have iron pots, backs for chimneys, frying-pans, anvils. The vast surface of the great coal and iron field around Birmingham was then scarcely penetrated. The blaze of the furnaces that now lights up the country for miles, was then a very feeble illumination from the few works where iron was smelted by wood. The anvils of Wol verhampton, Dudley, Walsall, Bilston, Wednesbury, were then employed in the humblest work of iron manufacture. Birmingham before the middle of the eighteenth century, had attempted no man ufactures in brass ; and the greater part of that wonderful variety of industry which has given Berkeley's " small town " a population of a quarter of a million of souls was quite unattempted. The great prosperity of Birmingham belongs even to a much later period than that in which Burke called it " the toy-shop of Europe." It was always employed at work more important than tOy-making. It supplied England and its Settlements with many articles of convenience and utility, before it became famous through the world for those manifold products of. ingenuity and taste which no nation can rival. Every house that was newly built in England during the eighteenth century gave a stimulus to the activity of Birming ham to provide its locks and bolts. Every acre of ground that was cleared for building in the American Plantations made a similar demand upon the labour of the iron-working district. The Sheffield axe hewed down the woods. The Birmingham spade trenched the ground, and the thorns crackled under the Birmingham caul dron. Slowly but certainly did the exports increase of those articles which we imported at the beginning of this eighteenth century, until; in 1856, the exports of hardware alone amounted to three millions seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling. In that district of North Staffordshire, now known as The Potteries — a district of many towns, extending, with few intervals, for eight miles — there was a manufacture of common cooking ware at one of these towns, Burslem, at the beginning of the eigh teenth century. It had been discovered that the Brown-ware could be glazed with salt, instead of with pulverised lead-ore ;.and thus Burslem, in 1700, had twenty-two glazing ovens. This district * 2 Gul. & Mar. Sess. 2. c. 4. Vol. IV.— 26 402 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. abounded in clays fit for earthenware ; but the art of producing the finer sorts was wholly neglected. These clays were prepared and dried in the sun ; and from these " sun-kiln potteries " was turned out a coarse porous ware, which was called "butter-ware " — from its property of keeping butter cool. Burslem was marked in maps as the " Butter Pottery." About the time of the Revolution, superior clays were introduced ; and an improved ware was manu factured in small quantities. Nevertheless, the coarse white ware of Holland, known as Delft, was a luxury for the rich. The wooden trencher was the plate of the cottager and the small tradesman. Any approach to a home manufacture of porcelain was far distant. The East India Company imported ornamented ware known as China, for which the introduction of Tea created a demand. The middle of the eighteenth century was passed, before Josiah Wedge- wood brought his science and taste to the manufacture of earthen ware ; and finally produced specimens as admirable for their beauty of design as for their general utility-. It is impossible to overrate the blessing to the great body of the people of cheap and good crockery. This is indeed a higher national advantage, even, than the amount of industry, and of high artistical skill, called into activity by our present manufacture of earthenware ; which employs thirty-six thousand persons, and of which the exports amount to nearly a million and a half sterling. The manufacture of Glass was one of those industries to which William III. was solicited to give encouragement. The govern ment, in the unwise spirit that has not altogether died out with reference to other manufactures, had thought fit to subject glass to an excise. The duties were partially repealed, and they were wholly removed before the end of the seventeenth century. By a Statute of 1698, they are declared to be very vexatious and trouble some, and of small advantage to the Crown ; would lessen the duties on Coals much more than 'the duty on Glass would yield ; and would endanger the loss of the manufacture to the kingdom." * In 1746 duties on glass were re-imposed; and for another century the profitable employment of capital and labour in this admirable manufacture was repressed. A wise statesman abolished the duties, and we look upon the result with wonder and admiration. The manufacture, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and during its first half, was principally confined to green glass and the commonest window glass. Defoe says, " there were, when I was * 10 Gul. III. ... 24. NOTTINGHAM — STOCKINGS. 403 there, no less than fifteen glass houses in Bris*l, which is more than are in the city of London." * The glass-houses of London had nothing of the character of factories about them. They were scattered in obscure districts amidst a wretched population. Colonel Jack, the hero of one of those fictions of Defoe which have all the truth of real life, says, " As for lodging, we lay in the summer-time about the watchhouses, and on bulk-heads and shop- doors, where we were known ; and in winter we got into the ash- holes and nealing-arches, in the glass-house called Dallow's Glass-house, in Rosemary Lane, or at another glass-house, in Ratcliff-H ighway . ' ' Leicestershire had the reputation of producing the largest sheep and horses in England. The graziers, in some places, were so rich that they had become gentlemen. | But Leicestershire was also a manufacturing county. The long wool of the Leicester sheep gave rise to the worsted stocking-trade. In the town of Leicester, and in other neighbouring towns, the weaving of stock ings by frames had become the general employment. " One would scarce think it possible," says the tourist of the early part of the eighteenth century, "that so small an article of trade could employ such multitudes of people as it does." X The wonder, no doubt, pro ceeded from the fact that the great body of the people did not wear stockings ; and hence stocking-weaving was " so small an article of trade." At Nottingham and Derby Defoe saw the same indus try affording general employment for labour in combination with machinery. The stocking-loom of William Lea was invented in 1589. In 1670 there were only six hundred and sixty looms in the kingdom, and these were chiefly employed upon silk stockings. At the close of the reign of queen Anne there were nine thousand looms. In the early part of the reign of queen Victoria, the stock ing-looms of Leicestershire, Derbyshire, and Nottinghamshire were computed at forty-three thousand. In the northern counties, stockings long continued to be made by hand. At Richmond there was "a market for woollen and yarn stockings, which they make very coarse and ordinary, and sell accordingly. Here you see great and small a-knitting." § It was the same in Westmor land. Machinery more effective than the stocking-frame is now extensively employed in the production of hosiery. Nottingham is at present the great seat of the Lace-trade — of * "Tour," vol. ii. p. 251. t Defoe, " Tour," vol. ii p. 332. t Ibid. § Ibid., vol. iii. p. 115. 404 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the Lace produi»d by that wonder of mechanical ingenuity, the Bobbin-net-frame, invented in 1809. But at the beginning of the eighteenth century the Western and Southern counties were the great seats of the bone-lace manufacture — of that lace which "the free maids who weave their thread with bones " had been fabrica ting in the days of Elizabeth and James I. In the reign of William III. the importation of foreign bone-lace was prohibited. The Flemings, who had been accustomed to send us their rich point- lace, refused in consequence to take our woollen cloth ; and then the prohibition was removed, " by being the occasion that our woollen manufactures are prohibited to be imported into Flanders." Bone- lace makingwasnotexclusivelyafeminine industry. There is a charm ing passage in Berkeley's " Word to the Wise," in which he exhibits the domestic industry of England, as a reproof to the Irish labourers " who close the day with a game on greasy cards, or lying stretched before the fire.'' " In England, when the labour of the field is over, it is usual for men to betake themselves to some other labour of a different kind. In the northern parts of thai industrious land, the inhabitants meet, a. jolly crew, at one another's- houses, where they merrily and frugally pass the long and dark winter evenings ; several families, by the same light and the same fire, working at their different manufactures of wool, flax, or hemp ; company meanwhile mutually cheering and provoking to labour. In certain other parts you may see, on a summer's evening, the common labourers sitting along the streets of a town or viUage, each at his own door, with a cushion before him, making bone-lace, and earn ing more in an evening's pastime than an Irish family would in a whole day." * Alas, for the bone-lace makers. Their industry was almost extinguished by the inexorable machine of 1809. But a change of fashion is bringing their labour again into repute. The endowment in 1626 of a free-school at Great Marlow, to teach twenty-four girls to knit, spin, and make bone-lace, had become a provision for the continuance of obselete arts and unprofitable labour. The revival of the prettiest "of these arts is one of the many proofs that whilst machinery does its proper work for the great bulk of comforts and luxuries, there are elegancies and nice ties of hand-labour which machines cannot wholly supersede. Lombe's famous silk-mill at Derby, completed in 17 17, was not the first attempt to supersede the foreign thrown, or spun, silk, by the conversion of the raw silk into what was called organzine. The - Work*, vol. ii. p. 227. DERBY. SILK. 405 silk-mill at Derby, " afterwards much improved by sir Thomas Lombe, was firi-t erected by one Soracole, a man expert in making mill-work, especially for raising water to supply towns for family use."* The almost exclusive use of woollen cloth had been trenched upon before the end of the reign of Charles II., by the silks of France, f In 1699, it was bitterly complained of, that " the unreasonable and indiscreet preference of India manufactures, especially that of India silks and stuffs, hath almost wholly over thrown, and unhinged, this profitable and necessary trade of silk throwing and weaving." X The clamour was so great against In dian silks and printed cottons, that after the 29th of September, 1 701, the wearing all wrought silks, of the manufacture of Persia, China, or East India, and all calicoes, painted, dyed, or stained therein, was absolutely prohibited. § If we may believe the advo cates of prohibition, this Statute had the effect of repeopling Spital- fields, " that looked before like a deserted place." || The weavers . went blithely to work; and an ingenious experiment was tried to furnish them with silk spun by machinery. Yet the weavers of silk would not be satisfied with the home manufacture. The mercer tried to palm off the wares of Spitalfields as French goods illicitly imported. If Bishop Berkeley, with the large view of a philosopher, saw the reason of this preference ; and, when the clandestine importation went on, to a great extent, in spite of all custom-house vigilance, asks "whether France and Flanders could have drawn so much money from England, for figured silks, lace and tapestry, if they had not had Academies for Design ? " We should have remained till this day inferior in design, and in every every other quality of the silk manufacture, had not a great states man, who was denounced as " a hard-hearted political economist," made a partial beginning of that system of free trade which has raised this particular manufacture, as it has raised so many others, to an eminence which utterly disregards every danger of foreign competition. The country which in 1825, was to be ruined by the importation of foreign silks,. now exports silk of native manufac ture, to an extent little short of two millions value in one year. The Lead mines of the High Peak, in Derbyshire, were worked in the period of which we write, without much mechanical aid. The miner descended into the pit by a narrow square opening * Defoe, " Tour," vol. iii. p. 33. t Smith on Wool, vol. i. p. 259. X Smith on Wool, vol. ii. p. 44. § 11 & 12 Gul. III. c. 10. II Smith, vol. ii. p. 191. t " English Tradesman," vol. ii. p. 199 406 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. called a groove, in the angles of which groove pieces of wood were inserted. He ascended with his load of ore in the same rude ¦fashion. "We saw," says Defoe, "the poor wretch working and heaving himself up gradually, as we thought with difficulty. * * * He was clothed all in leather ; had a cap of the same without brims ; and some tools in a little basket which he drew up with him. * * * Besides his basket of tools, he brought up with him about three-quarters of a hundred weight of ore." This poor man, who could not express himself intelligibly, signified through an in terpreter that he was at work sixty fathoms deep ; but that there were five other men of his party, two of whom were eleven fathoms deeper, and the other three fifteen fathoms deeper. These had an easier labour, for they had a way out at the side of a hill. Such was mining, in days before the steam engine. The lead mines have always been worked with the expectation of obtaining silver, for the extraction of which modern chemistry has afforded facili ties. In 1699 one impediment to such experiments was removed. By a Statute of Henry IV., the "multiplying" gold and silver was made felony. This law, directed against the alchemist, made the attempt to extract gold and silver, by refining metals, a high penal offence ; and men of " study, industry, and learning," who in met allurgy had " arrived to great skill and perfection, dare not exer cise their said skill." The Act of Henry IV. was therefore re pealed. * Such are the mistakes of legislation, when it fancies that matters wholly belonging to its own time will have a perpetual endurance. Our Statute book is full of such examples of blind lawgiving; and the remedy seldom comes till the evil has become insupportable. Lincolnshire is now universally acknowledged to be the most fertile county in England. At the beginning of the eighteenth century it numbered 40,590 houses, and a consequent population of about two hundred and three thousand. In 1S01 it contained a population only of about two hundred and eight thousand. In 1 85 1 its numbers reached four hundred and seven thousand. This is the most remarkable example of the increase of a purely agri cultural population, by the application, upon the largest scale, of the resources of mechanical and chemical science. Defoe looked upon the fen-country — the " often-drowned country," whose very ditches were navigable, and whose inhabitants went from town to town in boats. Here he heard the hoarse voice of the bittern. * 1 Gul. & Mar. c. 30. CHESHIRE.— SALT. 407 Here he saw the Decoys for wild-fowl, which were taken in incred ible quantities for the London market, The bittern no longer shakes " the sounding marsh ; " the Decoys are swept away to yield a better supply of beef and mutton. The drainage of the Fens was in progress when Defoe wrote ; and there were large outlays of capital upon this great undertaking. But, " notwithstanding all that hands could do, or art contrive, yet sometimes the waters do still prevail, the banks break, and whole levels are overflowed to gether." * The work which the Romans began ; which the skilful monks of the middle age continued ; which spirited adventurers undertook in the time of Charles I., but were interrupted by the rapacity of his unwise government, and the subsequent troubled times ; which was set on foot again in 1668 ; and which was an especial subject of legislation in 1697, — has steadily gone forward. The time may arrive when the Great level of the Fens may become as wholly firm land, as the remains of ancient roads and trees be low the surface show it once to have been. The contrast between the great corn-bearing and grazing country of our own times, and of the period of the Revolution, is sufficiently impressive, although some land has yet to be reclaimed from the dominion of the wa ters. The brine springs of Cheshire and of Worcestershire had been producing Salt from time immemorial. On all parts of the coast sea-water had been evaporated for salt, from days probably coeval with the earliest labour of the fisherman. In 1670, the first bed of rock salt was discovered at Nantwich, in Cheshire. Defoe men tions that after this discovery of rock-salt, the salt of the brine springs was not so much in request. At the beginning of the eighteenth century England was known to possess an unlimited supply of the material of salt ; yet the manufacture was so imper fect, that the only salt fit for the tables of the opulent was im ported. There was no gabelle, as in France, to prevent the free consumption of salt ; but the nauseous taste, and the deleterious effects, Of our common salt, necessarily limited its use. Then came the long era of injudicious taxation. A duty was imposed upon salt in the reign of William III., and in a century it was in creased to twelve times the value of the article taxed. But this was not enough for the grasp of self-defeating fiscal rapacity. The duty was raised at last to fifteen shillings a bushel, or forty times the value of the article taxed. In 1823 the salt duties were wholl) * " Tour," vol. ii. pp. 341-344. 408 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. abolished. Then this necessary of life was to be used without stint ; and salt was also to become one of the most important ma terials of chemical manufacture. It is curious to trace the changes in industry produced by the magic relief from taxation. The ab olition of the duty on salt produced the manufacture of soda. The cheapness of soda, and its certain and unlimited supply, wholly altered the manufacture of soap. The alkali which was obtained on every shore of England and Scotland, by burning the sea-weed to produce kelp, now comes from the chemical works of New castle and Glasgow, at a price which renders the labour of the meanest peasant who earned the scantiest pittance by collecting the weed, far too costly for the purposes of commerce. Every farmer, in the middle of the last century, endeavoured to prevent any clause being inserted in his lease to regulate his cutting of un derwood. He wanted not the underwood for his own hearth. He wanted to burn the wood to make ashes for the soap-boiler. In Suffolk, the soap-boiler's men were always travelling the round of the hamlets. They visited every house with light quartering carts, to collect the wood ashes. There were scarcely any roads imprac ticable to these vehicles. * The misery of a country with bad salt and dear soap — both evils chiefly produced by misdirected taxa tion — can scarcely be overestimated. The contrast of these mat ters of the present and the past is astounding. The annual con sumption of salt by every individual of the population of Great Britain was estimated at twenty-two pounds in 1839. f Upon a population of twenty-one millions, this would give a consumption of four hundred and sixty-two million pounds, or eight million two hundred and fifty thousand bushels. In addition, we now export thirty million bushels of salt. Soap duties are now also abolished. The first excise of a penny per pound was imposed in the reign of Anne. The duties on soap went on increasing, till they were ut terly repealed in the reign of Victoria. The consumption of soap in 1851 was four times as great as that of 1801. If the fire-nymphs and water-nymphs, and earth-nymphs of Darwin had been endued with the spirit of prophecy — if his "nymph Gossypia," X especially, had looked back upon the past, and predicted of the future — the population of Lancashire, when Darwin wrote in 1790, would have incredulously listened to facts * Cullum's Hawsted, p. 250. t M'Culloch. " Statistics of British Empire," vol. i. p. 592 J A name derived from Gossypium, the cotton plant. LANCASHIRE BEFORE THE COTTON IERA. 409 such as these, whether told in sonorous verse or simple prose : You numbered two hundred thousand souls at the beginning of the eighteenth century ; you will number two million souls in the mid dle of the nineteenth century. The vegetable fibre of which you scarcely, knew the use when the first ship entered the first clock of Liverpool, in the year 1700, and when Liverpool and Manchester had no water communication, shall be brought from North America, frora Brazil, from Egypt, and from India, in quantities that will annually reach a thousand millions of pounds. This cotton-wool shall be worked by machines which in their elaborate contrivances shall make the " spinning jenny " of Arkwright appear a feeble substitute for fingers. Enormous factories for converting the wool into yarn, and for weaving the yarn into cloth by mechanical power, shall rise up in barren districts, where the human foot now scarcely treads ; and villages, each with a few hundred souls scattered around its parish church, shall become enormous towns, with their thousands of inhabitants. The products of this industry shall fur nish twenty millions of our own nation with fabrics of wondrous cheapness, and of beauty far surpassing the painted calicoes of the 'East, which were so jealously prohibited about a century ago. Foreign nations shall purchase these cotton manufactures to the an nual amount in money value of nearly forty million pounds. This manufacture shall give direct employ to half-a-million of people in the factories, and to a hundred thousand engineers and machinists in connexion with these mills. All these wonderful results shall be accomplished by almost incredible skill and perseverance, during a period not longer than the ordinary term of human life. But the most marvellous expansion of this industry, and of all other indus tries, shall take place in the generation succeeding you ; and at the termination of the first half of the nineteenth century, three per sons shall subsist on this soil of Lancashire where one subsisted at its commencement ; and ten shall subsist where one subsisted a hundred years earlier. To look at the condition of Lancashire before the cotton era is to look at the Hercules in his cradle. But we must endeavour to continue the sketch which we have attempted of other districts about the beginning of the eighteenth century. Manchester, in the early part of the reign of Charles II. , was reckoned to contain six thousand people.* Fifty years later its population was estimated at fifty thousand ; but this estimate * Macaulay ; History, vol. i. 41 0 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. included "the suburb, or village, on the other side of the bridge."* There were no very precise data for this estimate, beyond the manifest increase of buildings and of trade ; • the increase of inhabitants having demanded a new church, that of St./Anne. " If this calculation be just, as I believe it really is," writes Defoe, " you have here an open village, which is greater and more popu1- lous than most cities in England : neither York, Lincoln, Chester, Salisbury, Winchester, Worcester, Gloucester, no, nor Norwich itself, can come up to it." f The social condition of Manchester, at the end of the seventeenth century, was very primitive. Its manufactures of fustian, girth web, ticking, tapes, were carried on by small masters, who had apprentices residing in their houses. These lads were employed in the servile offices of turning the warping-mills, and carrying packages from place to place. The master and his young men breakfasted together upon " water-pot- -tage, boiled thick,'' and a bowl of milk stood upon the table, into which all clipped their spoons," J In 1702 there was the porten tous entry in a tradesman's household book, of a sum expended for tea and sugar. In the reign of George I. it was held that " the luxury of the age will be the ruin of the nation ; and one of the proofs of this degeneracy was that "the wholesome breakfast of water-gruel and milk-pottage is changed for coffee and tea." § The present mill-owners of Manchester, each with his enormous trans actions, represented by hundreds of thousands of pounds in a year, furnish a remarkable contrast to " those travelling tradesmen whom we call Manchester-men." To every town the fustians and " small things called Manchester-ware " were borne by horse-packs ; "the Manchester men being, saving their wealth, a kind of ped lars who carry their goods themselves to the country-shopkeep ers everywhere." || The perils of their land journeys were not trifling : " The horse is driven avvay by some sudden flood, or falls down in the water and spoils the goods." Ij" Manchester had few rival neighbours in its trade of fustians and dimities, in which a little hand-spun cotton was used. Towns such as Bolton, to which " the cotton manufacture had reached," did not presume to compete with Manchester's warping-mills. and Manchester's looms, "which work twenty-four laces at a time," as is recorded with won dering commendation. At Bury, the cotton manufacture was * Defoe, " Tour," vol. iii. p. 174. t "Tour," vol. iii. p. 174. \ Aikin. § "Augusta Triumphans." II "Complete Tradesman," vol. i. ij /^^ voj# yu LIVERPOOL. 41 1 ended, and the woollen manufacture of coarse sorts begun. At Preston, the tourist "had come beyond the trading part of the country." This gay town, known as Proud Preston, was full of attorneys, proctors, and notaries. * Between the trading towns there was very imperfect communication ; and until the Mersey, the Irwell, and the Weaver were made navigable, land-carriage to and from Liverpool was an important addition to the cost of ex ported and imported goods. The traveller entering Lancashire from the Western part of the country would be ferried over the Mersey to Liverpool. Instead of steamers and magnificent landing-places adjusting themselves to the rise or fall of the tide, the traveller in the reign of Anne, having reached the flat shore in the ferry, was carried " on the shoulders of some Lancashire clown, who comes knee-deep to the boat's side to truss you up." j- Liverpool, at the date of the Revo lution, had no proper harbour and no quay. The trading-ships lay in the offing, and their cargoes were borne to them or from them in boats. In 1700 Liverpool had built a Dock — now known as the Old Dock. " The like of this Dock was not to be seen in any place of England, London excepted." J From the beginning of the eighteenth century the rapid progress of Liverpool may be dated. In 1709 it had eighty-four ships, and nine hundred sailors. Its Customs soon became next in amount to those of Bristol, which was only exceeded by London. Its warehouses were filled with tobacco and sugar from the Plantations. Thus Liverpool went on increasing for a century and a half, until in 1851 it numbered three hundred and seventy-five thousand inhabitants ; and the British and Foreign vessels entering the port exceeded four thousand in one year. When the detestable Slave Trade was abolished, the ruin of Liverpool was predicted. It had been engaged in that' traffic from the beginning of the eighteenth century, and it strove to rival Bristol in the extent of the iniquity. Yet we must not for get that in this matter the heart of trading England was long hardened. The merchants of Lyme, in 1700, petitioned Parlia ment against the apprehended monopoly of the African Company ; and prayed " to be allowed to trade to the plantations, and kidnap on the coast of Africa." § Warrington, whilst Manchester was making its dimities, .was the * " Tour," vol. iii. p. 1S0 — 83. t Defoe, " Tour," vol. iii. p. 164. X Ibid., p. 168. § Roberts' " Southern Counties," p. 467. 412 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. seat of a considerable Linen trade. The table-linen, called Huck- aback,-was extensively made in the neighbourhood of this place. But every discouragement was given to the English linen manu facture. It was maintained that Divine Providence had appointed, the especial employment of manufacturing England, and that the first acceptable sacrifice to His omnipotency was that of the flock. Ireland might grow flax and make linen, as some compensation for the injustice that had been committed towards her in absolutely prohibiting the importation of her cattle.* But let England at tempt no other manufacture than the woollen manufacture which had been for ages the support of the nation. f The same dread of permitting any wear for the living or the dead but that of woollen, made the flock-masters and clothiers frantic, when printed cottons, of English production, had become not only fashionable but com mon in 1719. Drapers' wives, and even maid-servants and children, it is alleged, wore calicoes or printed linen, attracted by their light ness, cheapness, and gaiety of colour. The example of the gentry- had corrupted the common people ; and so the manufacture tjf light woollen stuffs would be ruined. J The result of this clamour was an Act of 1721, to preserve and encourage the Woollen and Silk Manufactures, by prohibiting the use and wear of all printed, painted, stained, or dyed Calicoes, in apparel, household stuff, or furniture. § Of course such legislation was nugatory ¦ but here is the evidence, amongst many other proofs, of the supreme ignor ance and folly of law-makers, who, from the earliest days of the loom and the plough in England, have struggled to " regiment " all industry — to encourage or.to prohibit — to determine what wages labourers should be paid, and what should be the profit of cap italists — to crush rising industries by taxation — to compel the peo ple to eat dear food for the supposed benefit of the landowner — and, finally, to find out that the nation was never so universally prosperous as when its industry was wholly left to the care of itself, under the guidance of God's natural laws. Yorkshire had a population at the beginning of the eighteenth century of five hundred and thirty thousand. The great woollen manufacture, chiefly of the stuffs known as Yorkshire Kerseys, had .raised five centres of this manufacture, which were known as Clothing-towns — Bradford, Huddersfield, Wakefield, Halifax, Leeds. The inhabitants of these five towns are now equal to a * 18 Car. 1 1, c. 2. t Tract of i67j.— Smith on Wool, vol. i. p. 384. t Ibid., vol. ii. p. 195. § 7 Geo. I. c. 7. YORKSHIRE. — THE CLOTHING VILLAGES. 413 fifth of the whole population of Yorkshire. They were, a hundred. and fifty years ago, small places, but full of busy and enterprising dealers. It is noted as a remarkable proof of the importance of the commerce of this district, that a cross-post had been establish ed to connect the West of England with the North, which post began at Plymouth and ended at Hull.* Defoe followed the course of this post-road from Liverpool to Bury, and thence to Halifax. There are few things in the books of the modern tourist that can compare with his life-like picture of this country, then in some parts almost inaccessible, but now covered with a web of railways, more complicated than in any other portion of the island. It was the end of August. The snow, even then lying on the hills, appeared alarming. At Rochdale the travellers were offered a guide ; but they apprehended no danger, and went on, satisfied with a description of the land-marks. They ascended Blackstone Edge amidst a snow-storm, but the way down was a very frightful one. In the valley they had to cross a brook knee-deep. Again they had to mount a hill, and again to cross a stream ; and in a journey of eight miles they repeated this labour eight times, much to their discontent. The tourist records not the picturesque beauties of these Yorkshire valleys ; but he has given us a charming sketch of their industry. As he approached nearer to Halifax the houses were closer together, in every botton and on every hill-side. After the third hill was passed, the country became one continued vil lage, though every way mountainous ; and as the day cleared up, he could see at every house a tenter, and on almost every tenter a piece of white cloth, sparkling in the sun. Every house on the hill-side had its little rill, conveyed in gutters from the springs above ; and on the heights there was coal, so that the great necessaries of the manufacture were close at hand. In every house the women were carding and spinning. The men were some at the loom, some at the dyeing vat. Not an idle person was to be seen. The corn of- this region, and of other part of the great clothing district, was supplied from the East Riding, and from Lincolnshire and Not tinghamshire. In the autumn the markets for black cattle were prodigiously thronged, for the clothiers then bought as many oxen as would serve their families for the whole year, salted, and hung up in the smoke to dry. One product of Yorkshire was abundant amongst them — " the store of good ale which flows plentifully in the most mountainous part of this country." The domestic system * Defoe, "Tour," vol. iii. p. 72. 414 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ¦ of the cloth-making villages of Yorkshire has not been wholly driven out by the factory system ; but it is very different from the time when the clothier kept "his one horse to fetch home his wool and his provisions from the market, to carry his yarn to the spin ners, his manufacture to the fulling-mill, and, when finished, to the market to be sold."* If the inhabitants of the clothing villages are now essentially different in their mode of life, how much more striking is the dif ference between the Leeds of queen Anne and the Leeds that assembled a quarter of a million of people to greet queen Victoria in 1858. The great cloth-market of Leeds was, in the seventeenth century, kept upon the bridge over the Aire. As the market increased it was removed to the High-street. From the Bridge to the Market-house tressels were placed in the street, and a tempo rary counter was formed. The clothiers came in from the country, few bringing more than one piece of cloth ; and, after the refresh ment of a pot of ale, a bowl of porridge, and a trencher of beef, regularly provided for twopence by the public-house keepers, they were at their tressels by six o'clock in summer and by seven in winter. Each clothier placed his cloth lengthwise upon the coun ter ; — " a mercantile regiment drawn up in line." The factors come ; examine the cloth ; and conclude a bargain in a whisper. In a short time the clothiers begin to move, each bearing his piece of cloth to the buyer's house. In an hour the business is over, and the market is left to the shoemakers, hardware-men, and other retailers. Such was the Cloth-market also at Halifax and Brad ford, before the days of the Cloth Hall of Leeds, which was built in 171 1. •)- The Linen manufacture of Yorkshire did not then exist. There was no flax-factory to give employment to a thousand spin ners under one roof, attending upon the movements of innumerable steam-driven wheels and spindles. Yet in the small industry of the West Riding in the eighteenth century, we see the germ of its gigan tic operations in the nineteenth ; and we are by no means sure that in the twentieth century the mighty industry of our own day may not be looked upon as an imperfect development of the resources of English wealth and energy. Sheffield had been famous for its Cutlery from the time of Edward III. At the end of the seventeenth century it had machin ery which had lent no aid to the fabrication of the whittle which Chaucer's Miller of Trumpington wore in his hose. Sheffield had * Defoe, " Tour," pp. 73-84. t Thoresby's " Leeds " aud Defoe's " Tour.*' GREENLAND TRADE. 415 one mill for turning grindstones. The "grinders " of Sheffield are now of themselves a large population. It was boasted that around Sheffield were six iron-furnaces; supplied by its neighbouring woods. How many wood-furnaces would now be required for the produc tion of its steel, and for the almost innumerable products of this great metropolis of steel, giving employment to a population of a hundred and fifty thousand ? Hull was an exceedingly prosperous port at the beginning of the eighteenth century ; although it had no dock till 1788. Its com merce on the Northern shore of the Humber included shipments to London, to Holland, and to the Baltic, of the woollens of the West Riding, the hardwares of Sheffield, and the lead of Derby shire. Its imports were of iron, copper, flax, and linen. But the exports of corn from Hull exceeded those of any other port. One trade, however, was lost to Hull at this period. An Act of 1692 recites that " the trade to Greenland and the Greenland seas, in the fishing for Whales there, hath been heretofore a very beneficial trade to this kingdom ; " and the preamble concludes by saying that " the said trade is now quite decayed and lost." The Com pany then established had little success ; and ' the Whale Fishery was not resumed till 1750. England had little need of oil during the first half of the eighteenth century ; for London and all other towns were lighted chiefly by lanterns and link-boys. When light could no longer be dispensed with, the parliament granted a heavy bounty to all ships engaged in the Whale Fishery ; and many ships were sent out " as much certainly in the view of catching the bounty as of catching the whales." * The whales, however, shifted their course ; and the Greenland fishery came nearly to an end, in spite of the Act " for the regaining, encouraging, and settling the Greenland trade." f The tourist whom we have followed in his observant course, says that from Durham to Newcastle the mountains of Coal, lyiny at the mouth of numerous pits, gave a view of the unexhausted store which supplies not only London but all the South part of England. The people of London, he remarks, when they see the prodigious fleets of ships which come constantly in with coal for that increasing city, wonder whence they come, and " that they do not bring the whole country away." The quantity of sea-borne coal brought to London in 1856 was above three million tons, or ten times the amount required about the end of the seventeenth • M'Culloch, " Statistics," vol. i. p. 609 (ed. 1839). t 4 Gul. & Mar. c. 17. 416 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. century. But the foreign export of coal from the northern pits is now enormous ; and large quantities are borne by railway and canal. It has been calculated that if three million five hundred thousand tons of coals were raised annually, it would require a period of seventeen hundred years to exhaust the coal-pits of Durham and Northumberland. The colliers of the Thames will not speedily " bring the whole country away. " The wondrous coal-trade, and the other industries of the towns of Newcastle, Tynemouth, Gateshead, South Shields, and Sunderland, have raised up a population of nearly two hundred and fifty thousand, being considerably in ex cess of the entire population of Northumberland and Durham in the early part of the eighteenth centurv. But we must not forget that the vast expansion of mining and manufacturing industry which we have recorded in this our general view, may be dated, in great part, from a Private Bill of the tenth year of the reign of William III., entitled " An Act for the encouragement of a new Invention of Thomas Savery, for raising Water, and occasioning Motion in all sorts of Mill- Work, by the impellant force of Fire." Nor must we overlook the fact, that in the time of Charles IL, Roger North describes the admiration of his brother at the inge nuity of the coal-workers of Newcastle, whose "manner of carriage was, by laying rails of timber, from the colliery down to the river, exactly straight and parallel ; and bulky carts are made with four rowlets fitting these rails ; whereby the carriage is so easy that one horse will draw four or five chaldron of coals, and is an immense benefit to the coal-merchant." * The population of Cumberland and of Westmorland was, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, by far the smallest of any English county. The two counties did not contain more than twenty-one thousand houses, and a hundred and six thousand in habitants. They had increased by one half in r8oi ; which num ber was again increased by another half in 1851. They did not contribute much more than Rutland to the Aid of 1689. The Fells of Westmorland were held to be almost impassable. Kirkby- Lonsdale and Kirkby-Stephen, Appleby and Kendal, were con sidered pleasant manufacturing towns ; but all the rest of the dis trict was proclaimed to be wild, barren, and horrible. Penrith was said to be a handsome market-town, and of good trade. The peo ple made woollen cloth, as they had made from the old times when the outlaws of Sherwood were clothed in Kendal Green. Pack- » " Life of Lord Guilford." ? SCOTLAND. 417 horses travelled about the villages with cloth ; and the pedlar con tinued to be .the principal merchant, as he was up to the days of " The Excursion." Whitehaven was a port of shipping coals, chiefly to Ireland. The copper-mines of the Derwent Fells, which had been wrought in search of gold, in the time of queen Eliza beth, had been abandoned. The Black Lead mine of Borrowdale had also been worked at that period : it continued to be worked in the days when pencils were in small demand ; and it still yields its rare and valuable produce, but in quantities unequal to the demand of our own times. After the Union, the castles and great houses of the Border went most of them to ruin. Carlisle had its Cathe dral, its Castle, and its walls ; but it was a small city of old build ings ; and its population of twenty-six thousand had to be created after a century was past. There was one remarkable industry of this remote district. The salmon taken in the Derwent were car ried fresh to ' London, by horses which travelled day and night without intermission. They travelled faster than the post, and the extraordinary price of the luxury — from half-a-crown to four shil lings a pound — repaid the cOst of carriage.* Railways serve London with salmon at a cheaper rate. The Industry of Scotland before the Union, in 1707, was so limited in its character, that this is scarcely the period to attempt any comparison between its' productive and commercial power pre vious to that fortunate consummation, and its present condition of agricultural and manufacturing excellence. The two countries, when under separate legislatures, offered a wretched example of mutual prohibitions, under, which the smaller country was by far the greater sufferer. Scotland would not admit the English wool en-cloth. England would not permit a Scotch trade with her' Colonies. These miserable rivalries came to an end. A Glasgow vessel of sixty tons first crossed the Atlantic in 1718; and from that period Scotland steadily went forward in a noble career of generous emulation with her sister kingdom. Her progress was for many years slow. Capital was not rapidly accumulated after generations of clan hostility. The hordes of beggars, that Fletcher of Saltoun would have sold to slavery in 1698, could not be wholly removed by the absorption of profitable labour in a few years. The violent religious and political hostilities of six reigns could not wholly subside when George I. came to the throne. But the parochial school establishment of Scotland, which dates its efli- * Defoe, "T:mr," vol. iii. p. 192. Vol. IV— 27 418 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ciency from 1696, was to gradually produce the certain effects of general education upon a keen and energetic race. The mode of living amongst the peasantry of Scotland might be mean, as com pared with the diet of the peasantry of England ; but the agency was at work which would raise the condition of every labourer in Scotland to a level with his compeers beyond the Border. A humble lot in life was not incompatible with mental cultivation. Allan Ramsay, in the reign of Anne, was a worker in the lead- mines of the earl of Hopeton. Robert Burns, even in 1 781, sub sisted upon oatmeal when a flax-dresser. But if Johnson, with his usual prejudices, chose to describe oats as a grain eaten by horses in England and by men in Scotland, the time was fast approaching when the national food would cease to be associated with national poverty ; when agriculture, improved beyond all example, should fill the land with unprecedented fertility ; when, the mineral wealth of Scotland should be worked with the same diligence as the cultivation of the soil ; when the commerce of the Clyde should approach that of the Thames and the Mersey, and its iron steam-ships should go forth to every sea ; when cotton-factories, and print-works should emulate the gigantic mills of Lancashire ; when, in a word, there should be no distinctions of enterprise or wealth, and national jeal ousies should only put on the form of harmless local opinions, that belong to the past of romance, rather than to the past of his tory. In the purely Agricultural Counties of England the changes, even of a whole century, are not so remarkable as to demand from us any attempt to point out such extraordinary contrasts as we have heretofore dwelt upon. The great seats of tillage were the South Eastern, the South Midland, and the Eastern districts. The slow increase of population is the index of their progressive condition. Surrey, Kent, Sussex, Hants, and Berks, had an aggregate popula tion at the beginning of the eighteenth century of about seven hun dred thousand ; at the end of that century they were a little above ten hundred and fifty thousand. Herts, Bucks, Oxon, Northamp ton, Huntingdon, Bedford, and Cambridge, had, at the beginning of the same period, about five hundred and eighty-two thousand in habitants ; at its termination they had only about six hundred and forty thousand. The Eastern Counties had, during the same hun dred years, only increased from five hundred and eighty-two thou sand people to seven hundred and fifteen thousand. But it must AGRICULTURAL COUNTIES. 419 be remarked that the aggregate population of these fifteen counties had increased from about two millions and a half, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, to about four millions and a half at its • end. "The whole of the eighteenth century had been a period of very tardy improvement ip. cultivation. The first fifty years of the nineteenth had been a period of extraordinary development of agricultural resources. In the reign of Anne the quantity of land under cultivation in England and Wales was very little more than in the reign of James I. One solitary inclosure Act was passed in the reign of Charles II. There were two inclosure Acts passed in the reign of Anne. Field-turnips were cultivated in King William's time ; but their cultivation was not encouraged till the time of George II. The cultivation of clover was advocated by Andrew Yaranton be fore the Revolution ; but the peculiar value of green crops was little understood. The alternate system of husbandry — the growth of turnips or clover after a corn crop — -was recommended in the middle of the seventeenth century. But the old system of fallows, by which half of the cultivated land always lay idle, was steadily ad hered to. The horse-hoeing husbandry of Jethro Tull was con sidered only as a costly experiment which had ruined its originator. The value of manure was little understood by the improvident farmer ; and even the system of folding sheep upon ploughed lands is mentioned as " a new method of husbandry." * Improvement in the breeds of cattle was not attempted till the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1710 Davenant estimated the average net weight of the cattle sold at Smithfield at 370 lbs. The average nett weight in 1800 was 800 lbs. The sheep of 17 10 weighed 28 lbs. The sheep in 1800 weighed 80 lbs. Without the alternate hus bandry neither the ox nor the sheep could be supported through the winter, or adequately fattened at any time, except in low mead ows and marshes. The comparatively large population of London and Westmin ster, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, had a marked influ ence upon the agricultural industry of the South Eastern, South Midland, and Eastern Districts. A large quantity of corn was ne cessary for the consumption of the populous city, and much corn was grown within the districts most convenient for carriage. In 1696, it was estimated by Gregory King that the annual growth of wheat, oats, barley, rye, and beans in the whole kingdom, amounted * Defoe, " Tour,'- vol. i. p. 283. 420 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. to ten million quarters, of which growth wheat was only one- fifth. The greater portion of the wheat went to the large towns. The rural population lived upon rye-bread, and barley-bread; and oat-cake The Eastern counties of Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk, and the counties of Kent, Hampshire, and Sussex, had ready water- communication with London by the Thames, below-bridge. Surrey, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire, had the same facili ties by the Thames above-bridge. We may trace the incessant in dustry necessary to keep up the land and water communication with the capital, displaying itself in districts somewhat remote from the seaports and main-roads. With every natural advantage the com. munication was laborious and costly : and its cost added very con siderably to the price of grain and meat to the consumer. Some of the corn-trade of the port of London gradually resolved itself into the meal-trade. Farnham was the greatest commercial corn-mar ket in England, particularly for wheat, until the farmers of Sussex and Chichester ground their wheat, and sent the meal to London by sea. * This trade was increased when the Wey was made nav igable from Guildford, and thence to the Thames. By this navi gation of the Wey, timber was brought by land carriage, for a dis tance of thirty miles, from the woody districts of Sussex and Hamp shire, f The demand for timber to meet the increase of London was more profitable than its use in the iron-works of Sussex, which were still smelting iron ore, and casting cauldrons and chimney- backs, cannon and cannon-balls, in the reign of George II. } In Essex, we see the influence of the wants of London. There was little to be noticed at Chelmsford, but that it was a large thorough fare town, full of inns, maintained by the multitude of carriers and passengers on their way to London with droves of cattle, and with provisions and manufactures. § Not the least remarkable of these supplies for the capital by the eastern parts, were the droves of turkeys, crowding the roads from Ipswich, and making their way over the heaths and commons, in almost incredible quantities to the great devourer. From the farthest parts of Norfolk, and from the fen countries, droves of geese, sometimes a thousand or two thou sand in a drove, were slowly moving on to their fate, from the be ginning of August, feeding on the stubbles after harvest; and " thus they hold on to the end of October, when the roads begin * Defoe, "Tour," vol. i. p. 214. t /iia> p 21? X Ibid., p. 230. 5 Ibid> p 2J AGRICULTURAL COUNTIES. 421 to be too stiff and deep for their broad feet and short legs to march » * in. The- weaving industry of Norwich was more important at this period than the industry of any other city or town of England. The villages round Norwich were wholly employed in spinning yarn for what was known as the stuff-weaving trade, which had been there pursued for four centuries. Every inhabitant of Norwich was working at his loom, his c^mbing-shop, or his twisting-mill. The rich marshes watered by the Yare fed hundreds of black cattle from the Scotch hills ; so that the thickly populated districts of the eastern parts of Norfolk were plentifully supplied with animal food. The fishery. of Yarmouth not only furnished an enormous export of cured herrings, but gave all the towns and villages another cheap article of food. The whole country was full of business activity whether in manufactures or in sea-faring occupations ; a curious evidence of that unremitting industry being, that pheasants were unmolested in the stubbles, which showed, says Defoe, "that the country had more tradesmen than gentlemen in it." In the immediate neighbourhood of Cambridge there were pre sented, in the autumn Of every year, two remarkable spectacles, in striking contrast to each other. To Newmarket went William III. in 1695, with his staid court, as Charles II. had gone thither with his- troops of dissipated followers. But Newmarket was still a scene of vice and folly, of frantic gaming and wild profaneness. The highest of the land were at Newmarket, — "so eager, so busy, upon their wagers and bets, that they seemed just like so many horse-coursers in Smithfield ; descending from their high dignity and quality to picking one another's pockets." So writes the stur dy moralist, who speaks of vice in no courtly fashion, f The other scene near Cambridge was Stourbridge Fair — the greatest fair in England. Thither came to a row of booths called Cheapside, every sort of retailer from London. Here were prodigious whole sale transactions accomplished in wool and woollen goods, brought from Lancashire and Yorkshire and the Western Counties. But more extensive than any other traffic was that of hops. From this fair the whole country beyond Trent was supplied with hops, grown chiefly in Kent and Surrey, in addition to the supply of all the Midland counties. It is no small proof of the energy which overcame every natural difficulty of communication— bad roads • — imperfect water-carriage — that a produce of considerable bulk * Defoe. " Tour," vol. i. p. 62. t Ibid., p. 87. 42 2 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. should be brought from two distant counties to an inland common, thence to be distributed over the whole kingdom. The two great ports of the Eastern coast, Ipswich and Har wich, were not in a flourishing condition after the Revolution. Ip swich had lost its colliery trade, and its cloth trade. Much of its ancient splendour had gone. More than a century was to pass be fore it was to take the lead in carrying forward those great changes of agricultural economy, which were to mark the age of thrashing- machines, of sewing-machines and of the almost countless imple ments of scientific husbandry. Harwich was the packet-station for Holland. When the army of Marlborough was fighting, year after year, on the great battle-field of Europe, Harwich was the busiest of ports. Coaches went twice a week to carry London passengers from and to this famous place of embarkation and of landing. But when peace came, the Londoners set up passage-boats which went direct from the Thames ; the coaches ran no more ; and Harwich decayed. On the opposite South-eastern shore, Sheerness had been fortified ; and the Medway bristled with lines of guns ; so that the danger with which Chatham, the greatest naval arsenal, had been threat ened in the time of Charles II., was held to be sufficiently guarded against. Margate was a small port, the inhabitants making no boast of its summer visits of shoals of shrimp-eating Londoners, but of the frequent landings there of William III. Ramsgate boasted only of the more antique honour which it claimed, that Julius Caesar had there landed. The inhabitants of these little places long continued to be, as they were described by Camden, " amphibious creatures, and get their living both by sea and land. * * * The self-same hand that holds the plough steers the ship." The port of Sandwich had become choked with sand. Dover was prosperous as the principal packet-station for France. Folkestone was a mere village. The harbours of Rye and Winchelsea had been ruined by the inexorable changes of the coast-line. The sea had receded, and had left them desolate. Hastings was in little better condition. Winchelsea had still a trade remaining to it, that of electioneering venality ; and so had Shoreham, Bramber, and Steyning. Brighthelmstone was "a poor fishing town, old built, and on the very edge of the sea," which had at the beginning of the century swept away many houses ; so that the inhabitants had obtained a brief to beg money throughout England, to raise em bankments. These were estimated to cost eight thousand pounds ; " which," says the tourist of those times, "if one were to look on SOUTH-EASTERN COAST-TOWNS. 423 the town would seem to be more than all the houses in it are worth. Portsmouth was in a prosperous condition through the French war ; and was strongly fortified. Southampton was a port whose com merce had decayed ; but it had a noble High-street and a spacious quay. As we advance to the Western Coast, we find Purbeck prosperous in fitting out ships to carry paving-stone to London ; and the quarries of* Portland profitably worked, in furnishing the free-stone with which the new cathedral of St. Paul's, and other public edifices of London, were being built. 424 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER XXI. Gregory King's Scheme of the Income of the several families in England.— Degrees of , Society. — Town and Country Populations. — London. — Its Population. — Commerce. —Trading Companies.— Banking.— Unemployed Capital.— Projects for New Com panies.— Lotteries.— Tradesmen.— Their character and habits. — Extent of London. —Progress of Fashion Westward.— Street Economy, and Police.— Robberies and Outrages. In 1688, "A Scheme of the income and Expense of the sev eral Families in England " was calculated by Gregory King. He gives the number of families in each degree, and the number of persons. Of course there can be no absolute dependence upon such a document ; although other political arithmeticians gave it their approval. In 1851, the Census of that year included a minute return of the infinitely varied Occupations of the People. The Census of 1841 exhibits a general Classification, which is more available for some points of comparison with the " Scheme " of 1688. The changes in the component parts of Society in about a century and a half are very strikingly brought out by this com parison. I. The " Scheme," in the first place, gives us, of persons of in dependent means, 160 temporal lords, 800 baronets, 600 knights, 3000 esquires, 12,000 gentlemen. The income of an esquire is taken at ,£450, and that of a gentleman at ,£280. There were, moreover, 40,000 " Freeholders of the better sort," whose incomes are taken at ^91 each There were also 120,000 Freeholders of the lesser sort, each with an income of ,£55. These constituted the class of yeomen, and many, no doubt, farmed their own land. The Census of 1841 shows upwards of five hundred thousand per sons returned as independent; but three fourths of these are females. The more minute return of 1851 shows a large number of annuitants, chiefly females. This class has been created by those facilities of investment in the Government Funds and other Stock, which scarcely existed in 1688. II. We have next, in the "Scheme," 10,000 persons in the Civil Service of the country ; — 5000 being in the greater offices and DEGREES OF SOCIETY. 425 places, and 5000 in the lesser. The class of placemen was very numerous at. a period when places were openly sold, and were re garded as amongst the best of investments, for persons who de sired the happy lot of sinecurists. The Civil offices of our time are filled by about 16,000 persons of whom the greater number are amongst the hardest workers of the community. The offices now connected with local administration, and the servants of the dock yard?, are not included in this comparison. III. The mercantile class in 1688 was estimated at 2000 emi nent merchants and traders by sea — each with the modest income of ,£400 : and 8000 lesser merchants, each with an income of ,£200. The shopkeepers and tradesmen were taken at 50,000, each with an income of £4.5. The artisans and handicraftsmen at 60,000, each earning ^38 by the year. The adult males engaged in Com merce, Trade, and Manufacture, in 1841, exceeded two millions. The miners and other labourers were more than half a milion. IV. In 1688, there were, as we have mentioned, 160,000 Free holders. There were also 150,000 Farmers, each with an income of ^42 ioj. We may conclude that the greater number of the small owners, as well as the renters of land, were engaged in agricultural occupations. The Farmers and Graziers in 1841 were 309,000. Gregory King's estimate gives 364,000 labouring people and out-servants, and 400,000 cottagers and paupers. At a period when there was necessarily a great mixture of occupations, it is impossible to say that these heads of families, amounting to more than three-quarters of a million, were for the most part ag riculturists. But we apprehend that a large portion were chiefly engaged in occupations of a rural character. In 1841, the number of agricultural labourers and gardeners, amounted to about twelve hundred thousand. V. The naval officers of 1688 were estimated at 5000 ; the com mon seamen at- 50,000. The navy of the queen's and merchant service in 1841 was returned as comprising 220,000 men and boys. The officers of the army in 1688 were reckoned as 4000 ; the com mon soldiers as 35,000. In 1841 the army comprised 131,000 officers and men. In 1851 the numbers were largely increased. VI. The clergy were estimated in 1688 to consist of 2000 "eminent clergymen," each with an income of ,£72 ; and of 8000 "lesser clergymen," each with an income of ^50. In 1851 there were 18,587 ministers of the established Church ; 8521 Protestant dissenting ministers ; and 1093 Roman Catholic priests. The 426 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. "persons in liberal arts and sciences " in 1688 were reckoned as 15,000, each with an income of ^60. In 1841 the legal profession comprised 17,454 persons; and the medical 22,187. Other edu cated persons following miscellaneous pursuits were 143,836, of whom 34,618 were females. In looking at the amount of country and town population in Gregory King's estimate, we may take the number of persons to be as follows, in each of the preceding general divisions :— Country Population in 1688. Belonging to Families of Rank i53,52o Clergy (estimated portion of the whole) . . . 40,000 Freeholders 940,000 Fanners ..''.. . .... 750,000 Labourers and out-servants (half of the whole) . . . 637,500 Cottagers, &c .... 1,300,000 Vagrants ... 30,000 3,851,020 Town Population in 1688. Belonging to Families of Persons in Office - ... 70,000 Merchants ... .... 64,000 Clergy (remaining portion of the whole) . .... 12,000 Law . 70,000 Liberal Arts and Sciences 75*000 Shopkeepers and Tradesmen 255,000 Artisans 240,000 Army and Navy ... .... 256,000 Labourers and out-servants (half of the whole) . . . . 637,500 [,679,500 As nearly as we can judge from these imperfect data, the country population in 1688 comprised five-sevenths of the entire number of the people ; the town population comprised only two-sevenths. In 1 85 1, the town population slightly exceeded the population of the country; that of the towns being 8,990, 809; that of villages and detached dwellings in the country being 8,936,800. Of the town populations, that of London probably comprised one-third of the aggregate number. Three years before the Rev olution, the inhabitants of the metropolis were estimated by King at five hundred and thirty thousand. This was about one-tenth of the whole population of the kingdom. Sir William Petty estimated the inhabitants of London at a million of persons. This calcula tion was founded upon very loose data ; and still looser were the LONDON. — POPULATION. — COMMERCE. 42 7 assertions derived from the increase of houses, that in the reign of George I. the City, with Southwark and Westminster, contained a million and a half of people. Under the precise enumeration of the census of 1801 London contained less than a million inhabi tants. The entire population of England and Wales was then under nine millions. Compared with other large towns at the end of the seventeenth century, London was considered able to bear an assessment in Aid that indicated her superiority in wealth as much as in population. In 1693 she was called upon to pay a monthly tax six times as great as the united assessments of Bristol, Norwich, Exeter, Worcester, Chester, and Gloucester. In 1702, there be longed to the port of London 560 vessels, averaging 151 tons each, giving an aggregate of 84,560 tons. The number of merchant ves sels of all the ports of England was 3281, with an average of nearly 80 tons, and an aggregate of 261,222 tons. London thus engrossed about one third of the entire trade of the kingdom. The commerce of the port of London, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, inconsiderable as it was when compared with the gigantic operations of our own time, must have been sufficiently imposing to the foreigner, and even to those who habitually looked upon it. The magnificent docks of the Thames belong to the present century ; one small dock belonged to the earlier period of which we write. But the Pool was crowded in the reigns of William III. and Anne with colliers and coal-barges, waiting to deliver their cargoes at numerous private wharfs. Billingsgate, in 1699, was made a free market for the sale of fish ; and the fishermen of little vessels that now came with every tide laden with mackerel and soles, with lob sters and oysters, were no longer compelled to sell exclusively to the fishmongers, but were free to supply the street-hawkers. At three o'clock in summer, and at five in winter, this famous market was opened. The dispute of fishers and costermongers produced that variety of our language which was once termed "Billings gate;" but which is known by more general names since the great fish market has become refined. But more speculative commercial operations were going forward in the port of London than those connected with the supply of grain, or coal, or fish. During the quarter of a century from the accession of William and Mary to the death of Anne, there had been only four years and a half of peace. To the ordinary sea risks, at a time when marine insurance was little resorted to, was added the risk of capture by a foreign enemy, in distant seas, and not unfrequently in the Channel. 428 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Nevertheless,— although during the eight years and a half of war in the reign of William, the tonnage of English shipping declined by more than a half its previous amount, — immediately after the peace of Ryswick, in 1697, the commerce of the country took a sudden spring ; and although the war was renewed in 1 702, it went on increasing during the reign of Anne. Two East India Compa nies had been quarrelling for the twelve years succeeding the Rev olution ; but at Isngth their differences were composed; they established a common stock ; and the Old Company which was formed at the beginning of the seventeenth century was incorpo rated into the New Company at the beginning of the eighteenth. The anxiety of the merchants of London to overthrow the monopoly of the India Trade, which was in the hands of a few individuals of enormous wealth, was at last successful. The silks and painted calicoes of India were prohibited ; but the use of tea was spread ing amongst the higher and middle ranks, and a new source of profitable commerce was opened by the change of habits in the people. Even whilst tea and coffee were taxed in their liquid state, and families sent to the coffee-house for a quart of the pre cious infusions, it was observed that excess in drinking, especially about London, was somewhat lessened through their use.* Im mediately after the Revolution, tea and coffee were made subject to the Customs' duties. The shops of London then retailed the new luxuries, but at a price which must have forbidden their gen eral use. In 171 o, Bohea is advertised at twelve, sixteen, twenty and twenty-four shillings per lb. ; the lowest green at twelve shil lings, f Eighteen years afterwards, it is complained that " tea and wine are all we seem-anxious for." J There was another change-in the habits of the people produced by political causes operating upon the accustomed course of trade. The war with France was accompanied by a prohibition of French wines and brandy, of which the previous returns showed an annual consumption of twenty-two thousand tuns of wine, and eleven thousand tuns of brandy. The Mefnuen treaty of 1703, under which the wines of Portugal were put upon the most favoured footing, sent the wine consumers from Claret to Port, of which twenty-thousand pipes were imported into London in 1721. The loss of brandy was supplied by the con sumption of home made spirits ; and in a very few years " the * Chamberlayne's " Present State," 1637, p. 41. 1 Advertisement in "Tatler," No. 157, original edition. J " Augusta Triumphans," by Defoe, p. 311. TRADING COMPANIES. 429 distillers found out a way to hit the palate of the poor, by their new-fashioned compound water, called Geneva." * Several of the old trading Companies of London were at this period carrying on their adventures with success. The Russia Company, established in 1553, had certain privileges; but each member of the Company traded on his own account. The Turkey Company was formed in 1579; and two hundred years later was denounced by Adam Smith as "a Strict and oppressive monopoly." This was also what was called " a regulated Company," or a mo nopoly for individual traders. The African Company, which began its operations in 1530, was, on the contrary, a joint-stock Com pany, its constitution being such as that which the East India Company set forth as their own great claim to support, in which " noblemen, gentlemen, shopkeepers, widows, orphans, and all other subjects may be traders, and employ their capital in a joint-stock." The Hudson's Bay Company was chartered in 1670, for the purpose of opening a trade for furs and mineral's. For nearly two centuries the trade in furs, conducted by this Company and the North West Company, who were once rival but were at last united, was held to be the sole use to which a region some forty times larger than England could be applied. The minerals which prince Rupert sent out a ship to search for, in the time of Charles II., have been discovered in the time of queen Victoria. The reign of the Hudson's Bay Company has suddenly passed away upon the discovery of gold. A new Colony has been added to the British Crown, in the same year which has also seen the transfer of the sovereignty of India from a Joint-stock Company to the Im perial government. It is impossible to look upon such mighty changes without a conviction that events which may change the destinies of millions of Asiatics, and fill another American region of bbundless swamps and forests with the greatest civilising race of the European family, are amongst the most wonderful of the Special Providences of the Almighty. The system of Banking, which had been slowly growing up in London from the time of Charles 1 1., when the goldsmiths kept the cash of the merchants, and large business transactions were ar ranged by the payment of bills, 'or what we now call cheques, was not followed at all, or at least very imperfectly, in the country dis tricts. Remittances to London, even of the taxes collected for the government, were made in specie. In 1692 the collectors of the * " Complete Tradesman, ' vol. ii. p. 220. 430 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. tax-money of the North, carrying their precious burden on sixteen horses, were attacked in Hertfordshire, and the treasure being borne off, all the horses were killed by tbe robbers to prevent pur suit.* In the instructions ofthe " Complete Tradesman," at a much later period, we have this form of entry in the Account of Petty Cash " ; — " To the Exeter carriers, for carriage of money, 15s 3d." In 1694 the Bank of England was incorporated, and carried on its first operations, with fifty-four cashiers and clerks, in the hall of the Grocers' Company. This great Corporation commenced its functions under the most auspicious circumstances. Its subscribers anticipated the payment of a million two hundred thousand pounds of taxes voted by Parliament, and the Company was allowed eight per cent, upon the money advanced, besides an annual sum of four thousand pounds for management. The system which was recommended by the East India Company, under which the un employed capital of noblemen, gentlemen, shopkeepers, widows, and orphans, could be made profitable, was coming to be under stood. But the facilities for the development of the system were extremely few. Capital was raising its inarticulate voice for em ployment ; and there were projectors at hand to hold out the most tempting prospects of increase without labour and without risk. to the persons of every degree, whose money was unprofitably locked up in the strong-box. The age of Companies came very soon, after the Revolution. No scheme of fraud, no de lusion of folly, was transparent enough to make its victims stay their headlong pursuit of imaginary wealth. The mania never stopped. Several years after the ruin which was produced by the infatuation of the South Sea scheme — of which we shall make mention in due course — the management of Companies was thus spoken of : " We are so fond of Companies, it is a wonder we have not our shoes blacked by one, and a set of directors made rich at the expense of our very blackguards." f The fluctuations, soon after the Revolution, in the price of shares — not only of " new projects and schemes, promising mountains of gold," but of the es tablished trading Companies — were so excessive, that the business of the Royal Exchange, in its stock-jobbing department, might be compared to the operations of a great gambling-house. Indeed the spirit of gaming had taken possession of the people in the humblest as well as the highest transactions. In a Statute of 1698. it is recited that many evil-disposed persons, for divers years last • Evelyn, " Diary," 20th November. t - Augusta Triumphans." PROJECTS FOR COMPANIES. 43 1 past, had set up mischievous and unlawful games called Lotteries, in London and Westminster, and in other parts, and had fraudu lently obtained great sums of money from unwary persons. The Lotteries were therefore declared to be public nuisances. But the newspapers of 1710 are full of the most curious advertisements of Lotteries, called Sales. Some tickets were as high as two guineas : many as low as sixpence.* Mrs. Lowe, the milliner, next door to the Crown in Red Lion Street, has a sixpenny sale. Six houses in Limehouse, and ,£2499 in new fashionable plate, are to be disposed of by tickets, and the numbers are to be drawn by two parish boys, out of two wheels, at the Three Tun Tavern in Wood-street.f There is even a twopenny sale, at the Pasty-cook's, at Porter's-block, near Smithfield.^ But there are signs of the cheats coming to an end. The sale of goods for £7500, to be drawn on Wednesday last, is postponed for weighty reasons ; but it will certainly be drawn at Stationers' Hall, for eminent Counsel have given under their hands that this sale of goods is not within the Act for suppressing of Lotteries. 8 The Act was passed ; and the "heavy plate" and "stitched petticoats " had to find an honester market. Utterly opposed in principle to the spirit of Lotteries was the principle of Insurance. There were two Insurance Offices against Fire established before 1687— The Royal Exchange, and the Friendly Society. The Amicable Society for insuring Lives was chartered in 1706. But these most valuable institutions were imitated in a gambling spirit. Insurances upon births and mar riages were opened ; and became such covers for fraud that they were suppressed by Statute in 1710. The projectors of schemes for making all men suddenly rich, — the managers of fraudulent insurances — the sellers o'f plate, jew ellery, and mercery by lottery — all these, and many others, who trafficked in human credulity, were exceptions to the general spirit of the English tradesman. In an age of somewhat loose morality amongst the higher classes, Burnet, writing in 1708, says, " As for the men of trade and business, they are, generally speaKing, the best body in the nation; generous, sober, and charitable." He describes the inhabitants of cities as having " more knowledge, more zeal, and more charity, with a great deal more of devotion " than " the people in the country." Berkeley, who took a broader view of human affairs than the historian of his own time, points to * Advertisements in " Tatler," No. 239. + Ibid., No. 240. X Ibid., No. 245- i M*., No 25*. 432 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. " country gentlemen and farmers, and the better sort of trades. men," as believers in the efficacy of virtue to make a nation happji, rather than as confiding in the power of wealth. * Burnet rather qualifies his praise of " the best body in the nation," by admitting that in the capital city " there may be too much of vanity, with too pompous an exterior." + Of this vanity and pompous exterior there is various evidence. It was the natural result of a prosper ous social condition, in which there were very few industrious men who were not bettering their circumstances. It may seem somewhat strange at a period not very far beyond a time when the income of an eminent merchant was taken at four hundred pounds a year, and that of a lesser merchant at not more than two hun dred, that we find indications of a pompous exterior which would necessarily be very costly. We can understand how sir Josiah Child, who married his daughter to a duke's son, and gave ber a portion of fifty thousand pounds, should have lived at a splendid mansion at Wanstead, and covered acres with his plantations. We do not wouder at the large expenditure of sir Robert Clayton, who changed the barren hills of Marden, in Surrey, into a scene that " represented some foreign country, which would produce sponta neously pines, firs, cypress, yew, holly, and juniper." J But we cannot avoid thinking that the average mercantile income was under rated, when we know that the suburbs of London were full of country houses, to which merchants and retailers always repaired in the summer. Carshalton is described as crowded with fine houses of the citizens, some of which were built at profuse ex pense. § Other parts of Surrey presented the same show of wealth, in such retreats of the traders, " who in their abundance make these gay excursions, and live thus deliciously all die summer, re tiring within themselves in the winter, the better to lay up for the next summer's expense." || The frugality of the citizen's London dwelling, over his shop or over his warehouse, must not be too readily assumed. " It is with no small concern that I behold," says a correspondent of Mr. Bickerstaff, " in coffee-houses and public places, my brethren, the tradesmen of this city put off the smooth, even, and ancient decorum of thriving citizens, for a fan tastical dress and figure improper for their persons and charac- * " Alciphron," Works, vol. i. p. 337. t " Our Times," Conclusion, vol. vi. p. 203, Oxford ed. X Evelyn, " Diary," July 13, 1700. § Deioe, " Tour," i. 232. II Defoe, " Tour," i. p. 239. EXTENT OF LONDON. 433 ters." * The tradesmen and shopkeepers even aspired " to keep footmen as well as the gentlemen ; witness the infinite number of blue liveries, which are so common now that they are called the tradesmen's liveries." Again : " Citizens and tradesmen's tables are now the emblems, not of plenty, but of luxury." f Three or four maid-servants were said to be kept in a house, where two formerly were thought sufficient. Of course, there is the usual exaggeration, in much of this complaint. One of the most certain indications of an improving state of the middle classes is the more luxurious nature of their diet ; the wear of better clothing ; the employ of more domestic servants ; the furnishing their houses with articles of improved taste. It does not necessarily follow that convenience is more costly than discomfort, or refinement than coarseness. The satirist is not always to be relied upon who looks back to a past generation for his models of virtuous simpli city. What was denounced as vanity and extravagance in Anne's reign, might be held up as the most pattern frugality, to shame the universal love of display in our time. The rebuilding of the City after the great Fire, was a work of marvellous energy, which offers an example, rarely paralleled, of public spirit. It was scarcely to be expected that there -should have been no sacrifices to mere expediency ; that a houseless pop ulation should have set about the work of reconstruction by rais. ing up a city of wide streets instead of narrow alleys ; and of reg ular architecture instead of the diversified adaptations to individual means and wants. Yet much was accomplished. Brick or. stone houses replaced those of timber and plaster; and light and air were not excluded by the topmost story of every house almost touching its opposite neighbour. London was made more conveni ent, but infinitely less picturesque. In one respect the new city was not so airy as the old. Gardens behind many of the opulent traders' houses, and large side-yards, were built over. The nobil ity had migrated from the East to the West, and their old man sions in Bishopsgate, and Houndsditch, and Barbican, with vast courts and offices,' were covered with new squares. The fire of London gave habitations to a more numerous population ; and it was asserted that when the Citv had been rebuilt, four thousand additional houses stood upon the area that was desolated by the fire. If the new shops and warehouses and dwellings had no great architectural pretensions, many public edifices had risen, which * "Tatler," No. 270. t "Complete Tradesipan." Vol. IV.— 28 434 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. gave London a feature characteristic of its age. The churches which were destroyed had been mostly erected during the period when the old religion was in the ascendant. They were adapted to the ceremonials of Catholicism, and not for the accommodation of congregations to whom the sermon was the all-important part of public'worship. It was fortunate that a man of real genius existed at the time of the Fire, who had a higher notion of the functions of an Architect than to produce copies of buildings belonging to a past age. It was fortunate that Sir Christopher Wren did not set about re-producing a Gothic St. Paul's, but, after the labour of thirty-five years, gave London the noblest Protestant Temple of the world. It was fortunate that instead of repeating in his new Parish Churches the gabled roofs and lancet windows of the four teenth and fifteenth centuries, he left us, in his fifty-one Churches, built under every - possible disadvantage, edifices of consummate heauty and variety in one great feature of their external appear ance. He had to build these churches upon small areas, manv behind the main streets. He made his very difficulties the main cause of his success. " Wren, with consummate judgment put his strength into his steeples and campanili, which soar above the sordid and dingy mass of habitations, and, clustering like satel lites round the majestic dome of the Cathedral, impart to the gen eral aspect of the city a picturesque grandeur scarcely rivalled by Rome itself."* The accomplished artist from whom we quote truly characterises Wren as an inventor. After the fire of London, as the nobility and the opulent gentry had gone Westward for their dwellings, the course of retail trade took the same direction. In the latter years of Charles IL, the mercers occupied Paternoster Row ; the street was built for them ; it was thronged with coaches in two rows ; the neighbouring streets were occupied by dependants upon the mercery trade, by the lacemen and fringe-sellers. Gradually the court came no longer to the city to buy its silks and velvets ; and the mercers followed the court, and settled in Covent Garden.f Paternoster Row was deserted by the dealers in brocades, to be ultimately supplanted by the dealers in books, who, in like manner, deserted their old quarters in Little Britain. The " persons of quality " had begun to congregate a little north of Holborn. Great Ormond Street, with one side open to the fields, was a seat of fashion ; and so was * Mr. A. Poynter, in " Pictorial History of England," vol. iv. p. 742. t "Complete Tradesman." vol. ii. STREET ECONOMY, AND POLICE. 435 Bloomsbury Square. Spring Gardens, whose thickets were once the resort of gallants in laced ruffles and periwigs, and of ladies in masks, was now covered with gay houses. Covent Garden Square was the very centre of high life. Drury Lane had not quite lost the aristocratic perfume which belonged to Craven House and Clare House. The fashionable tenants of the side boxes of Drury Lane theatre, and of Lincoln's Inn Fields theatre, were not far removed from these two famous resorts of " the Town," which was now corrupted by Farquhar and Congreve, in lessons of human conduct only made more dangerous by their wit. Soho Square and St. James's Square were built before the Revolution. Golden Square was in fashion a quarter of a century later. The land ot gentility was gradually stretching away still westward, in the direc tion of Piccadilly. But in 1708 Bolton Street was the most west erly street of London, Albemarle Street, to erect which Claren don's proud mansion had been cleared away, was in an unfinished district of what are called " carcases," at the end of the eighteenth century. Squares were growing up towards Tyburn Road, which did not acquire its genteel name of Oxford Road, till it became the seat of a new Bear Garden. The hangman's cart duly travelled to the ancient gallows long after this road of deep sloughs had been formed into a street. Changes marking the changes of society were going on. May Fair, " held in Brookfield Market-place, at the east corner of Hyde Park," dwindled away; and the Brook which flowed from Tyburn was covered over by the houses of Brook Street. The May-pole in the Strand, which James duke of York employed his sailors to hoist up at the Restoration, to typify the downfall of Puritanism, v/as removed to Wanstead, to support "the largest telescope in the world." Puritanism lost its power of domination, and gradually slided into Dissent. At the Revolu tion there was a transient struggle, in which a little toleration was the only victory of the principle which had overthrown the mon archy. The New Church in the Strand took the place of the old May-pole. Addison's Tory Fox-hunter seeing this church of St. Mary le Strand half-built, thought that Dissent had triumphed, and that an old temple of the establishment was in process of demoli tion. He "was agreeably surprised to find that instead of pulling it down they were building it up, and that fifty more were raising in other parts of the town." * The Street Economy, as it may be called, and the Police of the *" Freeholder," No. 47, June 1, 1716. 436 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. London of the beginning of the eighteenth century, have so often been described, that we can merely glance at these subjects, which are the peculiar province of the essayist. It was a city, cleaner probably, and with more public conveniences than any other cap ital of Europe ; but in what we should now deem a condition most unfavourable to health, comfort, and security. There were no foot-pavements as distinguished from the carriage-road. There were lines of posts in the chief streets, within which it was only safe to walk. The carmen in the principal road were fighting with the hackney coach drivers. The chairmen drove the foot-passen gers off the railed-in way ; and the foot-passengers themselves struggled for the honour of the wall. Every square and open place was a deposit for rubbish and filth, gathering in heaps of abomina tion, to be very tardily removed by the dustman. The streets were resonant with the bawlings of higlers and wandering merchants of every denomination. The pick-pockets and ring-droppers had no pre ventive police to regulate the exercise of their profession. A crowd of vagabond boys were often pursuing their sports in the most crowded thoroughfares, of which sports foot-ball was the favourite. The apprentice in the merchant's counting-house enters in his pettv cash-book — " For mending the back-shop sashes broken by the foot-ball, is. bd. " * The Thames was the most convenient high way between the City and Westminster, with wherries employing four or five thousand watermen. The hackney-coaches, to the number of eight hundred, had not displaced them. But -*. more rugged set than the Thames watermen — more terrific to a timid squire from the country, or an ancient lady going down Blackfriars to take the air— it is impossible to conceive. Their shouts of " Next oars " and " Skullers," were appalling. No sooner was the boat on its way, up or down the stream, but every passenger in an other boat was assailed with a volley of " water compliments," com pared with which the " slang" of our politer day is soft as the oaths of Hotspur's wife.f It was at night that the real dangers of the street began. The Watch was in the most lamentable state of imbecility. The Court of Common Council, in 1716, decreed that the streets should be lighted— but the few glass lamps only made "darkness visible." Robberies were common in every great thoroughfare. The very link-boy was a thief. The resorts of bul lies and cut-throats, Whitefriars and the Savoy the Mint and the * " Complete Tradesman," vol. ii. t Vide (but you had better not) " Tom Brown's Works," vol. iii. p. 288, ed. r73o. ROBBERIES AND OUTRAGES. 437 Clink, were put down by Act of Parliament in 1697, as places of refuge for fraudulent debtors ; and the great haunts of villainy no longer bade defiance to the officers of the law. But the drunken outrages of the night-prowlers, " The Mohawks," who had " an out rageous ambition of doing all possible hurt to their fellow-crea tures," were denounced by the " Spectator," on the i2thof March, 1712; though on the 8th of April he says, some " are apt to think that these Mohawks are a kind of bull-beggars, first invented by prudent married men and masters of families, in order to deter their wives and daughters from taking the air at unseasonable hours." * Swift was terrified about them ; and a royal proclamation was issued offering a reward of .£100 for the detection of any person wound ing or maiming one of her majesty's subjects. There was probably much exaggeration in these terrors. The historian of London de duces their origin from "fictitious stories artfully contrived to in timidate the people ; " and adds, " It does not appear that ever any person was detected of any of the said crimes." He made all in quiry in places where they were said to have been chiefly commit ted, and could never learn of any one person having received the least hurt.f Nevertheless, the deportment of some of the rich, "'flown with insolence and" wine," was one of the reasonable terrors of a street guarded by decrepit old men, and during an adminis tration of justice which might beoften bribed by wealth and awed by rank. * Nos. 324 and 347. * " Maitlahd's London," i. 511 Comparative Table ofthe Number of Houses and estimated Population at the Revolu tion, and of the Populations of \ioi and 1851 ; with the Assessment for Aid in 1689 — arranged in Registration divisions. Hearth-money. Iieturn'of Houses. Population at 5 to a house. Population, 1801. Population, 1801. Aid,1689. South- Western Counties. Wilts - - - - - Dorset ..... Somerset- - vim 21,940 66,31025,37444,680 135,465 109,700 281,550 126,870223,430 183,820114,452 340,308 192581273,577 254,221184.207567,098 355,558443,916 £1966 13^432291540 2771 175,403 877,015 1104,438 1805.000 10,850 West Midland Counties. Gloucestershire - Herefordshire - Shropshire - Worcestershire - Warwickshire - Staffordshire - - - - 26,76415,00023,28420,63421,97323,747 133,820 75,000 116,420103,170109,865 118,735 250,723 88,436 169,248146,441 206,798 242,693 458,605115 489 229,341 27G.926 475.013 608,716 1808113112031053 1192 852 131,402 657.010 1,104,339 | 2,164,290 7.239 London Division. Middlesex and Westminster 69,139?30.9975 500,680 958,000 2,362,000 53040J 4291 South Eastern. Kent Sussex - Hants .... Berks .... 34,21839,24221,53726,851 16,906 171,090 196,210107,685 134.255 84,530 268,233308.667159,47121!),!'20 110,480 083,082615,766336,844 405.370170,065 1597 3326 182121891132 138,754 693,770 1,066,771 2,211,127 10,065 North Western. Lancashire - - 24.05440,202 120.270 201,010 192,305673,486 455,725 2,031,236 747 1006 64,256 321,280 865,791 2,486,961 1753 York 106.151 530.755 851,000 1,790.995 3469 South Midland. Bucks ..... Northampton - - - - Huntingdon - - - - Bedford Cambridge - 16,56918,390 19,007 24,808 8,217 12,17017-347 82,84591,950 95,035 124,040 41,08560,85086,735 97,393 10S.132111,977131,525 37,568 63393 •89,346 167.298163,723 170,439 212,380 64.183 124,478185,405 134.513151135 1413 653 896 1020 349Ely 116,508 582.540 639.34 1,087,896 8,126 Eastern. Essex - - .... 34.819 34,42247,180 174,095172.110 235,900 227,682214,401273,479 369,318 337,215442.714 3098 3298 3378 116,421 582.105 715,562 1,149,247 9774 Forth Midland. Leicester .... Nottingham - - - - Derbyshire .... 18,702 3,263 40,590 17,55421.155 93,51016,315 202,950 87,770 105 775 130.082 16,300 208,625 140,350 161.567 230,308 22,983 407.222270.427296,084 1084 240 2575 873 862 101.264 506.320 IVW.i-24 1.227,024 5634 Northern. Northumberland - Cumberland .... Westmorland - . - 15,984 22,741 14,825 6,501 79,920 113.705 74,125 32,505 149,384168,078 117.230 40,805 390,997 503.SG8195.492 58,217 823372 168 116 60.051 300,255 475,497 948,344 979 Wales and Monmouth 53,983 269,915 601,000 1,005.721 2939 438 FIXED POSITION OF THE VARIOUS CLASSES. 439 CHAPTER XXI. Fixed position of the various Classes. — Difficulty of passing from one position to another. — The Rural Population. — The Cottager. — The Agricultural Labourer. — Character of the Agricultural Labourer. — The Farmers and Small Freeholders. — The Gentle men and Esquires. — Character of the Country Gentleman. — His Animosities. — The NobjHty. — The Nobility and Esquires in London. — The Clergy. — Great Social Evils. — Neglect, — The Press. — Liberal Arts and Sciences. In considering the proportions of the various degrees of society, as presented by the approximating "Scheme" of 1688, and the exact Census of 1851, we must bear in mind that, a century and a half ago, the facilities possessed by the people of passing from one occupation to another occupation were very limited ; and that the power of what we term rising in the world was equally restricted. In the locality in which a labourer was born he generally remained to the end of his life. The laws of Settlement were attempted to be relaxed in 1697 ; for it was felt and avowed that paupers were created by the restraints which prevented them seeking employ where there was work to be done, and compelled them to starve upon the parochial pittance where there was no capital to support labour.* But the clumsy machinery for remedying the evil would not act ; and this semi-slavery continued unmitigated till our own time. The barriers which prevented the artificer or the trader from passing out of his first condition into one more eligible were almost as onerous. The severe enforcement of the laws of Ap prenticeship kept a man for ever in the particular pursuits for which he had served seven years of dreary education ; and the devices of Guilds and Companies and City-freedoms created a practical monopoly, which it was very difficult to overthrow. Some few men of great ability certainly overcame the impediments of birth and education, and rose to opulence and honours ; but the rise of the commonalty was always regarded with extreme jealousy by the born great. The servile literature of the days before the Revolution echoed this sentiment. It was sedulously inculcated, in the fashionable belief, that all the wealth of the community was *S & 9 Gul. iii., c. 3. 449 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. derived from the expenditure of the higher classes ; that the prod igality of the gentry was the sole cause " that cooks, vintners, innkeepers, and such mean fellows, enrich themselves ; and that not only these, but tailors, dancing-masters, and such trifling fellows, arrive to that riches and pride, as to ride in their coaches, keep their summer houses, to be served in plate, &c, an insolence insupportable in other well-governed nations."* Philosophers arose to tell the prodigal great that they were in the right course, for that private vices were public benefits ; and so, in very charity to the providers of luxuries, the country squire became a rake upon town, and his estates went to ruin, and all his poor dependents felt the curse of his licentiousness. It was this extreme depen dence of many of the peasantry upon the landowners, that held them bound in more ignoble chains than those of the old feudality. They might receive a capricious patronage, but they could not demand a constant protection. We may probably arrive at some view, however unsatisfactory, of the component parts and condition of the Rural Population, by a further analysis of Gregory King's scheme. We have assumed that the incomes of families of rank, independent of the incomes of those in " greater offices and places," are derived from their landed estates. This aggregate income is somewhat under six millions sterling. It is appropriated to sixteen thousand six hundred families, who altogether number about a hundred and fifty-four thousand persons, or between nine and ten in each family. This is an excess of five in each family above the usual rate of families, and it will show that eighty-three thousand servants and retainers are maintained in these great households. But there are also forty thousand "freeholders of the better sort," with an ag gregate income of more than three millions and a half, who have each two in family beyond the average. This gives another eighty thousand dependents. The aggregate income of a hundred and twenty thousand "freeholders of the lesser sort" is about six millions and a half ; and these maintain sixty thousand in their households beyond the usual proportion. There are thus two hundred and twenty thousand persons directly maintained by the expenditure of the independent classes— of the classes who are not dependent upon their industry for their support, or only partially so. These households, living upon a total revenue of sixteen millions and a half, comprise about eleven hundred thousand * Chamberlayne ; " Present State of England," 1687, P- 43. THE COTTAGERS. 44'I persons, or one-fifth of the whole population. The income from the land is very nearly equal to the total income of the other ac cumulating classes, — of the clergy, the lawyers, the physicians, the naval and military officers, the civil officers, the merchants, the men of science and arts, the traders, the artisans, and the farmers'. These possess an aggregate revenue from their industry of eigh teen millions, and maintain about sixteen hundred thousand per sons. The independent classes, and their dependents, and the other accumulating classes, comprise one-half of the population^ each person deriving twelve pounds- for his annual support. The remaining population of very nearly three millions have an income of nine million pounds, or three pounds for the annual support Of each person. The labouring people and out-servants have been supposed by us to belong, half to the town population and half to the country population. They are estimated to receive fifteen pounds for each family.. But the income of each family of the cottagers and pau pers is put as low as six pounds ten shillings, or one-sixth of the income of the artisan. We would recommend this consideration to those who are in the habit of asserting that in such happy times as the beginning of the eighteenth century, the English cottager was abundantly fed and clothed ; confortably housed ; was well cared for by his betters — a contented man, who enjoyed a golden age that will never return. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the enclosed land of England was estimated at half the area of the kingdom. Since that time there have been enclosed ten thousand square milesof land, which, a hundred and fifty years ago, was heath, morass, and forest. This vast tract of land, which was capable of yielding something to spade, cultivation, was the region in which Gregory King's " cottagers " gained their scanty livelihood. They were the "squatters" upon the edges of commons; and the farmer regarded, them with as much suspicion as he regarded the "va grants." The squire would toss them a penny when they opened a gate, or told him which way the fox was gone. The parson cared very little for them, for they were too ragged to appear in church. Undoubtedly the out-door agricultural labourer was in a better condition than this wretched class who were so much below him. His wages varied in different localities, from four shillings to six shillings a week,, without food. The average was probably five shillings. This rate agrees with King's calculation, that fifteen 442 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. pounds was the annual income for a labouring man's family. The mode in which we are accustomed to regard the difference in the value of money might lead us to the conclusion, that Ihe labourer had a better lot with five shillings a week, than with ten shillings in the present day. He indeed bought many things cheaper than the labourer of our time, but there were many articles of necessity or comfort much dearer than now, or wholly out of his reach. In 1706 wheat was forty shillings a quarter. The difference is not great between the price of 1858. But the labourer of the eighteenth century never ate wheaten bread. Woollen clothing of every sort was far dearer then. Linen was almost beyond the reach of his wife and children. There were no cheap calicoes for their shirts ; no smart prints equally cheap for their frocks. Tea and sugar, the comforts of the modern cottage, were wholly for the rich. Fresh meat was only eaten twice a week by half the working people ; and never tasted at all by the other half. The salt to cure the flesh of his hog was very dear, and frightfully un wholesome. His hovel with " one chimney," was unglazed, and its thatched roof and battered walls offered the most miserable shelter. Furniture he had none, beyond a bench and a plank on tressels, — an iron-pot, and a brown basin or two. All the minor com forts of the poorest in our age were absolutely wanting. He was no partaker of the common advantages that have accrued during a century and a half, to the humblest as well as to the highest. No commodity was made cheap to him by modern facilities of com munication, which in that age would have been considered miracu lous. He had the ague, and his children died of the small-pox, without medical aid. The village practitioner, who might be called in at the last extremity, was an empiric, to whom the knowledge and sagacity of Sydenham were unknown, and who had no faith in the theories of Harvey. Less fortunate than the peasant of the nineteenth century, he had, in England, not the slightest chance of going out of his condition through education ; or of making a humble lot more endurable by some small share of the scantily diffused stores of knowledge. His children were equally shut out from any broader view of life than that of their native hamlet ; for charity schools, few and mean as they were, founded for the educa tion of the poor, were only established in some favoured towns. Yet the peasant of the reigns of William and Anne was not an unhappy or degraded being. He had not been humiliated by a century of pauperism. He was emphatically a man— ignorant, in THE FARMERS AND SMALL FREEHOLDERS. 443 our sense of ignorance ; believing in witches and omens ; fond of rough sports, his wrestling and his cudgel-playing, and of some cruel sports, his cock-fighting, and his bull-baiting. He was not unfrequently a poacher, without any great sense of criminality. But he had a salutary respect for the constable and the justice, and was under a willing submission to the law, as were most other Englishmen. On rare occasions he freely took his glass of strong ale — at the fair or the wake, the sheep-shearing or the harvest home ; had his honest merriment on the village-green, and some times was asleep on the bench over which the arms of the parish squire creaked in the wind. But he was not an habitual drunkard. He had a clean smock frock for the day when he heard the bells tolling for church ; and he felt, when listening to the same words, and joining in the same ritual, as the lord of the manor heard or joined in, that he had some position in the human family. He was always a hard- worker; and he moreover knew that without industry he should fall to a condition below that in which God had placed him. " A neighbour of mine made it his remark," writes Berkeley, "in a journey from London to Bristol, that all the labourers of whom he inquired the road constantly answered without looking up, or interrupting their work, except one, who stood staring and leaning on his spade, and him he found to be an Irishman." * The Farmers, and the smaller Freeholders, were, with the exception of their greater command over the necessaries and com forts of life, at no great elevation above the husbandman who worked for wages. They were almost equally shut out from any very extensive commerce with the general world. They attended markets and fairs, but there the price of grain and of stock was the principal object of their inquiries. The local rate was the sole guide of their dealings. They_ had no price-currents to enable them to sell, or to hold back, according to the averages of the kingdom ; nor indeed had they the power, in their limited command of labour, and in their utter want of machinery more effective than labour, to take advantage of a sudden rise in the price of food. Their bargains were hurried and improvident. The laws against forestalling prevented speculation in corn, and interfered with the natural foresight against coming seasons of scarcity. After the harvest the grain was sold as speedily as possible, to provide cap ital for the labour of another season. The people consumed with out stint for a time ; and then came terrible scarcities, with * " Works," vol. ii., p. 229. 444 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. miseries innumerable in their train. The cultivators, as we have indicated, were slow to receive any improvement ; and in their pursuit, as in many commercial pursuits, it was held that labour- saving expedients were an injury to the poor. They worked with the same rough tools as their grandfathers had used ; for the plough and the harrow were incompetent to prepare the soil for seed with out being followed up by much manual industry. There was a rough hospitality in their households. The great kitchen served for all domestic uses. Their home-servants took their meals at the same board with themselves ; the children crowded about the floor ; the dogs and the poultry gathered up the bones and the crumbs. They were a sturdy race, full of the independence which they had inherited from the times which made them free of the old lords of the soil ; with many prejudices which had an intimate alliance with virtues — a very difficult race for courtiers and preachers of divine right to manage ; such a race as rallied round Hampden when he stood up against ship-money; such a race as Cromwell chose for his Ironsides ; men who preserved their traditions in their hatred of Popery, and of everything which approached Popery and arbi trary power. The forty thousand "Freeholders of the better sort," whose incomes are reckoned at ninety-one pounds a. year for each family, though entitled to some of the privileges of men of worship, were separated from the " Gentlemen " and the " Esquires " by barriers more difficult to pass than those of mere wealth. We have a pre cise description of the " yeoman of about a hundred pounds a year, an honest man." He may sport over his own lands without being informed against. " He is just within the Game Act, and qualified to kill a hare or a pheasant." He often earns his dinner with his gun. " In short, he is a very sensible man ; shoots flying, and has been several times foreman of the petty jury." * But there was an insurmountable obstacle to any approach to equality between even the richest yeoman and the most impoverished esquire. The genealogy of the esquire was at once his strength and his weak ness. His family pride kept him from meannesses unworthy of a gentleman ; but it did not always preserve him from excesses that would appear more properly to belong to the humble origin of the coarsest peasant. Too often he fancied that his rank exempted him from the ordinary restraints of decent society. Yet in the dissipation of the higher classes, which inevitably followed'a quar- * " Spectator," No. 122. CHARACTER Q.F THE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN. 445 ter of a century of profligacy that had almost destroyed the old English character, there was, we are inclined to believe, some struggle against the fashionable temptation, to which the great wholly abandoned themselves in the court of Charles II. The family ties were too often worn loosely ; but the belief in those -happy times " ere one to one was cursedly confined," * was not a general creed. The barbarous hospitality that induced " gentle men to think it is one of the honours of their houses that none must go out of them sober,"-!- was a little wearing away. One who looked at mankind from the philosophical as well as the re ligious point of view, attributes to idleness and ignorance the sen sual excesses of " the uneducated fine gentleman. v The English man is held to be " the most unsuccessful rake in the world. He is;at variance with himself. He is neither brute enough to enjoy his appetites, nor man enough to govern them." J Burnet boldly says of the, gentry of his time, " They are for the most part the worst instructed, and the least knowing, of any of their rank I ever met with." They are ill-taught and ill-bred; haughty and inso lent ; they have no love for their country, or of public liberty ; they desire to return to tyranny, provided they might be the un- der-tyrants. .In their marriages they look only for fortune. This is an awful picture, though some of the shadows may be ,a little too dark. Burnet was a Whig. The majority of the country gen tlemen, having set up a constitutional sovereign, were again howl ing for divine right, and manifesting their love for a Protestant Church by sighing for the old days of confiscation and imprison ment to sweep out non-conformity. The times are long past when a lover of his country's liberty had a right to be angry at this temper. We would rather look at it as a folly to be laughed at, as Addison looked at it. His Tory Fox-hunter is the true rep resentative of that class of " country gentlemen, who have always lived out of the way of being better informed." The Fox-hunter was of opinion that there had been no good weather since the Revolution; and that the weather was always fine in Charles I I.'s reign. He loved his spaniel, because he had once worried a Dis senting teacher. He chose an inn for his quarters because the landlord was the best Church of England man upon the road. England, he maintained, would be the happiest country in the world, if we could live within ourselves, for trade would be the * Dryden, "Absalom and Achitophel." t Burnet, " Own Time," vol. vi. p. 199. X Perkeley, " Alciphron," Works, vol. i. p. 34 446 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ruin of the nation.* The Toryism of sir Roger de Coverley, whom all love, was never offensive. He maintained the landed interest as opposed to the moneyed. He would not bait at a Whig inn. When he saw the headless statue of an English king in Westminster Abbey, and was told that it had been stolen, " Some Whig, I warrant you," says sir Roger. Burnet may de nounce the gentry of his time as ignorant and irreligious. A far greater historian may describe the squires who were in Charles I I.'s commissions of peace and lieutenancy — and they could not have changed much, in less than the term of one generation — as differing little "from a rustic miller or ale-house keeper of our time ; " and paint their wives and daughters " in tastes and ac quirements below a housekeeper or a still-room maid of the present day." f The country gentleman's " unrefined sensuality ; " his " language and pronunciation such as we should now expect to hear only from the most ignorant clowns ; " his " oaths, coarse jests, and scurrilous terms of abuse ; " his habitual intoxication "with strong beer;" his "bargains over a tankard with drovers and hop-merchants " — are given as characteristics of the country gentleman "of the time when the crown passed from Charles II. to his brother." But some sketches of the country gentleman, written in 171 1 — sketches which will endure as long as our lan guage — may be set in merciful contrast to the highly coloured composition of our eloquent contemporary, " derived from sources too numerous to be recapitulated." With the sir Roger de Cov erley of Addison and Steele we live for a month at his house in the country, and see only sober and staid servants, and a chap lain, who was chosen for plain sense rather than learning, and as " a man that understood a little of backgammon." Will Wimble, an idle younger brother to a baronet, describes a " large cock- pheasant," and how he caught "the huge jack;" but we do not see him and the host laid under the table. The knight's knowledge is not extensive. He takes care to parade his acquaint ance with Baker's Chronicle ; and tells that there is fine reading in the casualties of Henry IV.'s reign. But he does not pretend to be what he is not, and he has a reverence for the intellectual qualities of his visitor from London. Nor is he ill-bred, haughty, and insolent, as Burnet describes the class. With true politeness he lets his guest rise or go to bed when he pleases ; dine in his own chamber, or at the general table ; sit still and say nothing • " Freeholder," No. 22. t Macaulay, vol. i. chap. iii. . ANIMOSITIES OF THE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN. 44) without being called upon to be merry. He indeed is somewhat dictatorial and exclusive at church; and will suffer nobody to sleep in it besides himself ; counts the congregation to see if any of his tenants are missing ; and when John Mathews kicks h^s heels, calls out to him to mind what he is about, and not disturb the congregation. But he is compassionate even to the hare that he rescues from his hounds ; and when he is doubting whether he ought not, as a justice of the peace, to commit the gipsy as a va grant, he ends by crossing her hand with a piece of money. This, it may be said, is the fancy-picture of the most gentle of the great English humourists. But all the life-like traits of past manners must be derived from similar sources. Those who describe their own age with the greatest bitterness of satire are not always the most trustworthy. The exceptional- cases of gross vice and- de grading ignorance in the gentry may be as often mistaken as char acteristics of a class, as the ruffians and outcasts of a great city may be mistaken for specimens of the hard-working and ill-paid tenants of its hovels and garrets. The most repulsive feature in the character of the English Country Gentleman of the time of William and Anne is his politi cal and religious bigotry. He does not only avoid the company of his neighbour for their difference of opinion, but he positively hates him. This is not a quiescent humour, whose chief evil is to de stroy good fellowship. It takes the practical form of one contin ued struggle for political supremacy. The dominion of King with out Parliament he knows has passed away ; the most devoted Tory has no serious hopes that it can be brought back again. If the nation were to call over the son of James IL, he fancies that, al though the young Stuart is a papist, there will be no interference with the national religion ; and although the exiled family have been taught from their cradles to venerate a heaven-appointed des potism, that they will not be despots. Whig and Tory accept par liamentary government as an accomplished fact, and they will each see what they can make of it for their own advantage. Both par ties had their strongholds in the boroughs that had representatives without population. If they could manage the country districts that were populous, they might wholly control the troublesome cities and towns. The machinery of both sides was unlimited ,. bribery. The degradation of the briber was as great as that of the bribed. " This corruption has become a national crime, hav ing infected the lowest as well as the highest amongst us," writes 448 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Berkeley in 1721. The base politics of that age drew from thre high-minded churchman the following noble denunciation : " God grant the time be not near, when men shall say, ' this island was once inhabited by a religious, brave, sincere people, of plain uncor- rupt manners, respecting inbred worth rather than titles and ap pearances, assertors of liberty, lovers of their country, jealous of their own rights, and unwilling to infringe the rights of others ; improvers of learning and useful arts, enemies to luxury, tender of other men's lives and prodigal of their own ; inferior in nothing to the old Greeks or Romans, and superior to each of those people in the perfections of the other. Such were our ancestors during their rise and greatness ; but they degenerated, grew servile flat terers of men in power, adopted epicurean notions, became venal, corrupt, injurious, which drew upon them the hatred of God and man, and occasioned their final ruin.' " * The Nobility — the " temporal lords " — were, as they always had been, a most important portion of the rural aristocracy. Some resided for considerable periods of the year in their mansions upon their great estates. Their aggregate income was very nearly equal to one half of the income of the whole body of the esquires. They were the lords-lieutenant of counties, and, as such, had the control of the militia force of the kingdom. They were not attended to county meetings by hundreds of gentry wearing their liveries, as in the feudal days ; they could not call out to the field their thou sands of vassals. But they nevertheless mainly swayed the course of political action, under the system which we call " constitutional." As born legislators their direct power was far greater than in the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth, they made far more overt attempts to determine the composition of the Lower House. Yet, perhaps, all things considered, they were then, as a body, the most incapable of taking a large view of the destinies of their country, and of nourishing a deep sympathy with the condition of the peo ple. But nevertheless they could not segregate themselves from the people. They could not repose in safety upon exclusive pre tensions ; and thus they headed the Revolution, and imparted to it the somewhat aristocratic character which it has taken more than another century to repair. They made no attempt to propor tion representation by the numbers of the represented, or by the amount they paid in taxation. They had no very clear insight into the changes which had been produced by the rise of the trading * Berkeley, " Works," vol. ii. p. 197. THE NOBILITY AND ESQUIRES IN LONDON. 449 classes. They made no exertions to better the condition of the poorest. They did not train their children to discharge the high functions to 'which they were born. They had them taught dan cing, fencing, and riding. It looks like a satire when Burnet recom mends that the sons of the nobility should be instructed in geogra phy and history. Nevertheless, he admits that in his time, four or five lords, by their knowledge, good judgment, and integrity, had raised the house of peers to a pitch of reputation that seemed be yond expectation. * The desire of the nobility and other landowners to congregate in London was not an unnatural one, and was in some degree ab solutely necessary when the Parliamentary system of government became the rule under which England was to live. The jealousy of commerce, and of the use of foreign commodities, made the pa triot of the end of the seventeenth century mildly reprove the grow ing desire of the rich to gather round the seat of luxury and fash ion ; as the despot of the beginning of the century had attempted forcibly to restrain this desire. " Heretofore," writes the descend ant of John Hampden, " the gentry and nobility of England lived altogether in the country, where they continually spent the product of the land. Now they all flock to London, where their way of living is quite different from that used heretofore ; and they do not expend in proportion the third part of things of our product, to what they did when they lived among their neighbours." f We know, at the present day, that the chief evils of absenteeship are moral evils ; that the landlord who is a mere receiver of rents, without taking thought for the general welfare of the humbler classes upon his estates, does not do his duty in that state of life to which he has been called. " The yeomen and gentlemen of smaller estates," adds Mr. Hampden, " are now, generally speak ing, the only constant residents in the country." But even the gentle men of -smaller estates were frequently craving for -" a Journey to London." The dramatists and essayists exhibit the figures which the boorish squire, and his wife and daughters, presented in the novel pleasures and temptations of the metropolis. The squire was too often in the tavern, where he was told the wits and the quality were ready to welcome the stranger. Here he drank punch, the favourite beverage, and found it stronger than his strongest Octo ber ; or he played at hazard with sharpers, and went home penni- * " Own Time," vol. vi. p. 207. t Tract of 1692, in " State Tracts published during the reign of William III. Vol, IV— 29 45 O HISTORY OF ENGLAND. less. His ladies resorted to the theatre, which was not a school of morality. They walked in the New Spring Gardens * in their " hoop petticoats ; " and thus " invested in whalebone " thought themselves " sufficiently secured against the approaches of an ill- bred fellow." f But the smart gentlemen who hovered about " this new-fashioned rotunda " could still whisper such words of compli ment as ladies dare not now read in Wycherley and Congreve. "Tbe Folly," a floating Coffee House, where ladies of very different degrees of respectability were entertained by the beaux of the reign of Anne, was another place of genteel resort, which the lower popu lar literature has described with sympathising coarseness. To the country visitors of London the fashionable amusement of the mas querade was the most dangerous of pleasures. It was in vain that the preacher and the moralist denounced this as a contagion of the worst kind. The duchess and the courtezan equally frequented such an assemblage — the peer of the parliament and the mercer's apprentice from Covent Garden. The mask made the licentious even more free than in their ordinary talk ; and though an English lady could bear many coarse jokes and sly allusions without blushing, from the masquerade she would take back to her wondering friends such specimens of " polite conversation " as would corrupt the most secluded districts for half a century. These excursions of the gen try to London, however rare, at any rate spread the worst follies of the town. The neglect of the indigent at home — the neglect not of mere almsgiving but of kindly intercourse — was certainly one ofthe, evil consequences of the habitual residence, and even of the occa sional sojourn, of the gentry in the metropolis. The worldly estate of the great body of the Clergy may in some degree account for the low estimate of their condition and charac ter which had been taken at this period. Their political action we shall have to describe, in their senseless dislike of the great man who had saved the English Church from ruin, and their puerile hankerings after the dynasty that they had united to eject. The revenue of each of the twenty-six " spiritual lords " has been reck oned at about three times as much as that of an esquire. The in come of " eminent clergymen " is estimated for each at little more than one-fourth of that of a gentleman. The lesser clergyman ranks, in point of the annual means for the support of his family, as below the small freeholder; a little above the farmer; and not very much above the handicraftsman. These incomes being taken * Vauxhall. t " Spectator," No. 127, ,7„. THE CLERGY. 45 1 upon the average of ten thousand livings, would undoubtedly leave some of the clergy with a pittance not higher than that of the com mon seaman, and even of the out-door labourer. Can we wonder, therefore, that servility and coarseness were considered the charac teristics of the class ? They went from the Grammar-school to the College upon an exhibition or a sizarship which had its own humil iations. If fortunate, they began their career as Chaplains in noble or other privileged households, where it was a blessed fate if they were treated with a; much respect as was bestowed upon the butler. When they obtained a benefice they had to perform the most me nial labours to extract from it the means of subsistence. In this last stage, can we wjnder that some might be found, instead of taking rank as gentlemen, drinking ale and smoking with the vil lage cowkeeper ? Perhaps it was not the worst society for them. But in spite of these familiar pictures of the addiction of the coun try parson to low company, and of his necessary connection with mean labours, may we not conside'r that there were many who felt an honest pride in ploughing their own field, and feeding their own hogs ; whose wives were spinning the wool of their own sheep, and whose daughters were scouring their bricked kitchen, without men tal degradation ? Burnet, who was a severe censurer of his breth ren, admits that the greatest part of them live without scandal ; but in the very next sentence he says, " I have observed the clergy in all places throughout which I have travelled — Rapists, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Dissenters : but of them all our clergy are much the most remiss in their labours in private, and the least severe in their lives."* In another place he speaks of the zeal of the Romish clergy, and of Dissenters ; " But I must own, that the main body of our clergy has always appeared dead and lifeless to me, and instead of animating one another, they seem rather to lay one asleep." f The right reverend friend of William' 1 1 1, had sus tained many mortifications from the restlessness of the great body of the country clergy ; from their intolerance ; from their extravagant notions of Church supremacy ; from their narrow views of political affairs. The eminent divines of that day were great scholars and great reasoners. The whole course of human thought was tending to the actual rather than to the ideal. The philosophy of Locke ' may be traced in many a powerful religious argument which could confound the sceptic, but could not rouse the indifferent. TJie divinity of that generation, and indeed of the next, was for tho * " Own Time," vol. vi. p. 183. t Ibid., p. 179. 452 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. most part formal and unimpassioned. Methodism arose ; and the most ignorant of the human race found nourishment and hope in words which came home to their bosoms and understandings. Tillotson reasoning to the benchers of Lincoln's Inn, and White- field moving the colliers of Bristol to tears, are contrasts of which the lessons were not speedily learnt in the Church, but which when learnt could not be easily forgotten. The historian of his own time, to do him justice, saw what was chiefly wanting to make the clergy efficient for good. He exhorted them " to labour more," instead of cherishing extravagant notions of the authority of the Church. If to an exemplary course of life in their own persons, clergymen would add a little more labour, — not only performing public offices, and preaching to the edification of the people, but watching over them, instructing them, exhorting, reproving, and comforting them, as occasion is given, from house to house, making their calling the business of their whole life, — they would soon find their own minds grow to be in a better tem per, and their people would show more esteem and regard for them." We who have now the happiness to feel that the Clergy are the great civilisers, also know how slowly this sage advice was taken by them as a class. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, and long after, we see no struggle against great social evils, on the part of the clergy or the laity. Every attempt at social reform was left to the Leg islature, which was utterly indifferent to those manifestations of wretchedness and crime that ought to have been dealt with by the strong hand. Education, in any large sense, there was none. Disease committed its ravages, unchecked by any attempt to miti gate the evils of standing pools before the cottage door, and pesti lent ditches in the towns. These were not peculiar evils of the last century-; they continued long beyond that century, because they were the results of social ignorance. But there were evils so abhorrent to humanity, that their endurance without the slightest endeavour to mitigate or remove them was an opprobrium of that age. The horrible state of the prisons was well known. The nosegay laid on the desk of the judge at every assize proclaimed that starvation and filth were sweeping away far more than per ished by the executioner, terrible as that number was. The judge's chaplain ate the sheriff's dinner ; and all was well unless a few jurymen took the jail-fever. The justices never entered the jails. The vicar heeded not the Saviour's reproach, — " I was sick and ir GREAT SOCIAL EVILS. 453 prison, and ye visited me not." London, and all other great towns, were swarming with destitute children, who slept in ash holes and at the street doors. They were left to starve, or to become thieves and in due course be hanged. The Church, in 1701, established " the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts." The worse than heathen at home "were left to swell the festering mass of sin and sorrow, until the whole fabric of society was in peril from its outcasts, and no man's life orproperty was safe. The only evidence that was listened to of something wrong in the en tire social economy was this : one-fifth of the whole population were paupers. Locke attributed the rapid increase of the poor-rates to "the relaxation of discipline and the corruption of manners.'' Those who by their rank or their office were especially called to guide the ignorant, and to discourage the licentious, were certainly to be charged with some neglect of their great duties, if such were the causes of pauperism. The evils of society, at the opening of the eighteenth century, were not laid bare by publicity, the one first steplowards their remedy. There was only one popular writer who approached social questions with any practical knowledge joined to sound benevolence. He . was Daniel Defoe. He looked for remedies, not in drivelling schemes for setting the poor to work under paro chial superintendence, but he told the capitalist and the labourer how to raise their condition under the natural laws of demand and supply. His " Review " was the first periodical work that sought readers amongst the people. Addison and Steele saw that a popular Literature was to be created ; and from that time the lay preachers became effective. Newspapers multiplied. But even Addison could not see that they were capable of becoming great instruments of public good. It is remarkable that the man who did as much as any one to prove the efficiency of the Press, should have thus chosen to "hesitate dislike " against the humblest labour ers in the same field. Perhaps he had a foresight of the power that was to grow out of small beginnings. " Of all the ways and means by which this political humour hath been propagated among the People of Great Britain, I cannot single out any so prevalent and universal, as the late constant application, of the Press to the publishing of State matters. We hear of several that are newly erected in the country, and set apart for this particular use. For, it seems the people of Exeter, Salisbury, and other large towns, are resolved to be as great politicians as the inhabitants of London 454 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. and Westminster ; and deal out such news of their own printing, as is best suited to the genius of the market-people, and the taste of the county. One cannot but be sorry, for the sake of these places, that such a pernicious machine is erected among them." * We have left for the conclusion of this general view of the chief aspects of England's social condition about the beginning of the last century, a very brief allusion to those " liberal Arts and Scien ces," which were slowly, but very surely, to change the half-devel oped industry of the time of Anne to the marvellous proportions of the commercial era of the first sovereign lady who came after that queen. In the fifteen thousand engaged in these liberal pursuits in 1688, we must include the medical profession. The study of facts had succeeded to the theories and empirical remedies of the school before Harvey and Sydenham. Botany had been systema- tised by Ray ; and the medical student had the opportunity of be coming familiar with plants in the " Physic Garden." The Royal Society was incorporated by charter in 1662; and commenced the publication of its Transactions in 1665. This was a great step towards popularising science ; and if many of the papers which were read at the Society's meetings appear now to be frivolous, they kept alive a spirit of investigation which in time produced results beyond the amusement of the small knot of virtuosi in the capital, and in some of the chief towns. But, many years before the end of the seventeenth century, that great genius had arisen whose discoveries made the astonished philosopher of France figure Newton as " entirely disengaged from matter," and the enthusias tic poet of England exclaim, " God said let Newton be, and there was light." f In noticing the wondrous powers of intellect which called forth such tributes from contemporaries, and which succeed ing generations have gratefully echoed, we desire chiefly to point out that the discoverer of the law of universal Gravitation was equally fitted for the solution of a problem that might appear capable of being solved by minds of an inferior order. The great reform of the Currency, one of the most difficult operations of the ministers of William III., was carried through under the advice of Newton, working at the same question of practical utility with Locke. It is only just to the statesmen of the seventeenth century * " Freeholder," No. 53, June 22, 1716. t It is a worthy occupation of a life which, in its closing years, is more elevated by science than excited by politics, for Lord Brougham to preside over the iuauguration of a statute of Newton, at Grantham, on the 22nd September, 1858. LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES. 455 to point out that, in several instances, they manifested their con victions of the direct value of philosophical research and discovery. From the foundation of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, in 1676, may be dated the progress of scientific navigation. It would be impossible to calculate the amount of obligation which English Commerce alone owes to the labours of the great men who have followed in the track of Galileo and Kepler, from the Newton and Halley of the age which we have now imperfectly glanced at, to the Hers.chel and Airy of o^^r own time. Of the indirect power of Science to give its impulse to the commonest labours of man — to call forth new exercises of industry, to improve the processes already in existence, to furnish higher aims to manufactures and commerce, to bring remote regions within the range of maritime communication, to carry forward the heaven-ordained design of spreading the blessings of civilisation over the earth — no one who looks at what England was a century and a half ago, and what England is now, can have the smallest doubt. But it must not be forgotten that our country was a soil adapted for the reception of this seed ; that abstract Science would have remained in a great degree unproductive for practical ends, except its powers had been developed amongst an energetic race living under a system of public liberty. Amidst such a race the spark of knowledge does not glimmer in mere speculative thought, but becomes a fire, diffusing its warmth over an improving country. Governments may be slow in seeing this indissoluble connection between the discoveries of the philosopher and the province ofthe statesmen. But if in a land of freedom they retard not the work which they can never more than feebly aid, and even if they at tempt to retard it, mind will assert its own empire, and produce the results which constitute the essential differences between the age before the steam-engine and the age of the electric telegraph. 456 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. A Scheme of the Income and Expense of the several FUmilies in England, Calculated for the Year 1688. Number of Families. Ranks, Degrees, Titles, and Quali fications. Ileads per Family. Number of Persons. Yearly In come per Family. Yearly In come in General, 160 26 800600 3,000 12,000 5>«x> 5,000 2,000 8,000 10,000 z,ooo 8,000 40,000 120,000150,000 15,000 50,000 60,000 5,000 4,000 Temporal Lords Spiritual Lords Baronets Knights Esquires Gentlemen Persons in greater offices and places * Persons in lesser offices and places Eminent merchants and traders by sea . ._ Lesser merchants and traders by sea Persons in the law Eminent clergymen Lesser clergymen Freeholders of the better sort . Freeholders of the lesser sort. Farmers Persons in liberal arts and sci ences Shopkeepers and tradesmen Artisans and handicraftsmen.. , Naval officers , Military officers 500,586 50,000 364,000 400,000 35,000 Common seamen Labouring people and out-ser vants Cottagers and paupers Common soldiers Vagrants, as gipsies, thieves, beggars, &e i»349. 5&: Neat totals. 16 13 67655V2 5 4 5M3 3!i3>» 4l'3 6,400 520 12,800 7,800 30,00096,00040,00030,00c 16,000 48,000 70,00012,000 40,000 280,000 660,000 750,000 75,000 225,000240,000 20,000 16,000 2,675,520 150,000 1,275,000 1,300,000 70,000 5,500,520 £ 3.2°° 1,300 880 650450 280 240 o 120 o 400 o 200 o 154 o 72 o 50 o 91 o 55 ° 42 10 60 o 45 o 3380 60 15 6 10 512,000 33,800 704,000 390,000 1,200,000 2,88o,000 1,200,000 600,000 800,000 I,600,000 1,540,000 144,000 400,000 3,640,000 6,00,000 6,75,000 900,000 2,250,000 Z,2So,000 400,000240,000 34,488,800 1,000,000 5,460,0002,000,000 490,000 60,000 32 5 43,498,8oa Note.— Mr. Gregory King, the author of this Scheme, considers that the 21 classes, whose families amount to 500,586, are accumulators, spending less than their income ; and that the other classes require some support beyond their earnings— that they decrease the National Capital. There are some few discrepancies between the items and the totals in the above Table but they do not affect the conclusions to be derived from this " Scheme." CHARACTER OF WILLIAM. 457 CHAPTER XXIII. Resolution aud conduct of the Prince of Orange set forth in the Proclamation of William and Mary— Character of William. — Aspirants for office.— The king's ministers.— The judges.— Jealousy of William's Dutch friends.— The Convention declared to be a Parliament. — Oath of Allegiance. — Refused by some spiritual and lay peers. — Non jurors. — A Supply voted. — The principle of appropriation established. — Comprehen sion Bill.— Reform of the Liturgy.— The Test Act.— The Toleration Act.— High and Low Church.— Mutiny at Ipswich. — The first Mutiny Act. — Suspension of the Ha beas Corpus Act.— Bill of Indemnity postponed.— The Coronation Oath.— The Cor onation- —War with France. " Whereas it hath pleased Almighty God, in his great mercy to this kingdom, to vouchsafe us a merciful deliverance from Popery and arbitrary power ; and that our preservation is due, next under God, to the resolution and conduct of his highness the prince of Orange." Such were the opening words of the proclamation, which, on the 13th of February, 1689, announced to the people of England that William and Mary were king and queen of these realms. The same " resolution and conduct " which had delivered England from the most imminent dangers, had to support the man who was acknowledged as her deliverer, amidst perils and diffi culties of which not the least were the treachery, the self-seeking, the ingratitude of the greater number of those who had called him to rule over them. For thirteen years this Dutch William almost stood alone as the representative of what was heroic in England. He is not a hero to look upon, according to the vulgar notion of the hero. " He had a thin and weak body. . . . He was always asthmatical, and the dregs of the small-pox falling on his lungs, he had a constant deep cough." * This prince had no power of sub duing men to his will by rhetorical arts. He was a master of seven languages, speaking "Dutch, French, English, and German, equally well," as Burnet records. But his possession of this ne cessary accomplishment of a prince did not lead him to the ambition of employing words to conceal his thoughts. " He spoke little and very slowly, and most commonly with a disgusting dryness," | * Burnet, " Own Time," vol. iv. p. 547- t Ibid. 458 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. says Burnet. " He speaks well, and to the point," says one of the French negotiators of the peace of Ryswick He came amongst courtiers who recollected the charm of the manners of Charles the Second — -that fascinating gossip which always evaded " the point " — and in a few weeks they talked of "the morose temper of the prince of Orange." * Under this frjgid demeanour superficial ob servers could comprehend nothing of the marvellous energy of this man of action ; and they descanted upon " the slothful, sickly temper of the new king." f Though " he had a memory that amazed all about him," his great abilities were not generally recognised, for he had few of the showy qualities which pass for genius. Men of that time had not studied the science of Lavater and Spurz- heim, yet they had a notion that "foreheads villainous low," were symbols of imbecility : and when they looked upon the " large front " of this cautious undemonstrative stranger, they might per chance have thought that there was something in him, and that there was meaning in the silent eloquence of his bright and sparkling eyes." There was no vivacity in the man — "solemn and serious, seldom cheerful, and but with a few," says Bur net. Yet he managed to use his talents, such as they were, not for display but for service. In war he carried the hearts of all along with him by his fire and his daring. In negotiation he ac complished the most difficult objects by his perseverance, and, above all, by his truthfulness. Tallard, the ambassador from Louis XIV., writes to his master: "He is honourable in all he does; his conduct is sincere. ... If he once enters into a treaty with your majesty, he will scrupulously adhere to it." X The same impartial observer bears testimony to his sagacity : " He is very quick-sighted, and has a correct judgment, and will soon per ceive that we are trifling with him if we protract matters too much." § " Few men had stronger passions," according to Bur net ; but "few men had the art of concealing and governing pas sion more than he had." He disarmed the hostility of factions by his seeming imperturbability "The wishes of the king are checked," writes Tallard, " and it is only by his extreme patience, and by incessantly applying remedies to everything, that he suc ceeds in a part of what he desires." |[ And yet from the depths of this seemingly impassive nature breaks out the secret agony of • Evelyn, " Diary," January 29. t Ibid^ March 2q_ t Grimblot— " Letters of William and Louis," vol. ii, pp. a% and 56. J Ibid., p. 54. U /bid., vol. ii. p. 233. THE KING'S MINISTERS. 459 his real sensitiveness, told only to his friend Heinsius : " Matters in Parliament here are taking a turn which drives me mad." * Such was the man who was called to rule over England, in times when a statesman not to be treacherous, unpatriotic, corrupt, was a rare distinction. " He is generally hated by all the great men, and the whole of the nobility," says the French ambassador, after William had been ten years on the throne, f But Tallard adds : " It is not the same with the people, who are very favourably in clined towards him, yet less so than at the beginning." What this prince had done for England, from the beginning to the end, to raise her in the scale of nations, to save her from foreign dom ination, to keep her safe from domestic tyranny, to uphold that liberty of conscience which is the basis of true Protestantism, to make constitutional government a reality in spite of the low am bition of ignorant factions, — this, the people of that generation could not wholly appreciate, however they might feel that it was good for them to be under a ruler who knew that he had a work to do in the world, and who did it. " Innumerable were the crowds who solicited for and expected offices," says a bystander in 1689, who saw the progress of the game.t " The pasture was not large enough for the flock," writes an anonymous historian of the next generation. § In those days statesmen were justly open to the reproach of seeking high place out of the lust of gain, rather than for the gratification of an hon ourable ambition. The official salaries were extravagantly large. It was no part of the policy 'of the aristocratic movers in the settle ment of 1689 to disturb the lavish bounties of the Stuarts to their obsequious servants. But the people felt these burdens. In 1690, Sir Charles. Sedley, in a debate on the Supply, said of William, "He is a brave and generous prince, but he is a young king, en compassed and hemmed in by a company of crafty old courtiers. To say no more, some have places of 3000/., some of 6000/., and others of 8600/. per annum." | In the lower offices of the house hold and of the revenue, the pay was disproportionately large, and the perquisites still larger. The coach and six horses of the Comp troller of the Customs was a deep offence to the country gentlemen.Tf We may readily imagine that in such a total change as that of 1689, there was a scramble for office, in which the real principles * Grimblot— " Letters of William and Louis," vol. i. p. 355. t Ibid., vol. i. p. 466. t Evelyn, "Diary," February 21. § Ralph, "History," vol. ii. p- 57—1746. II "Parliamentary History," vol. v- col. 562, H Ibid., col. 670. 460 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. of public men were severely tested. The king — called to the suc cour of England by the united voice of men of all parties, and placed upon the throne with the partial approbation of many who were opposed to the principles of his most ardent supporters, — ventured upon an experiment in government, which to us would be perfectly unintelligible if we were to judge of it by the practice of modern times. He desired to govern by a balance of parties ; he sought to carry that desire into effect by choosing his ministers frora parties whose principles were diametrically ppposed, each to the other. To comprehend why it was thought possible to twist such a rope of sand into a state-cable, we must bear in mind that, under the system which had passed away, of governing as much as possible without parliaments, an administration was merely com posed of men who were thought qualified to serve the king in their respective offices without any common agreement upon particular measures. An active king, such as Charles I. and James II., was in many respects his own administrator. William III. was willing to give the same personal superintendence to the conduct of that great policy, whose advancement had chiefly moved him to contend for the English throne. He would himself conduct the foreign re lations of the country, for which duty, indeed, he was more fitted than any man. But his confidential advisers in domestic politics should be officers who had influence with the two great parties in the State, and with the sub-divisions of the Whig and Tory fac tions. There was Halifax, who was known as the Trimmer, — one who was selected to tender the crown to William and Mary, but who had, taken no part in the first steps which deprived James of the crown. There was Danby, who had been impeached under Charles II. for his arbitrary and corrupt practices, and who had only given a modified support to the present change of government. There was Nottingham, whose nomination to office was a propitia tion to the High Church party. There was Shrewsbury, who had borne a distinguished part in the battle which had resulted in the great victory of the Whigs. But the Revolution was the triumph of Whig principles ; and thus it was natural, in the hour of tri umph, after some concessions to open adversaries or doubtful friends, that the Whigs should have the larger share of the spoils. The Great Seal was put in Commission. The great office of Lord High Treasurer was not filled up, but Commissioners of the Treas ury were appointed. In the same way the duties of Lord High Admiral were entrusted to a Board. These arrangements for Com- THE KING'S DUTCH FRIENDS. 46 1 missions were considered as politic devices "to gratify the more." * One signal benefit of the great change was manifested to the na tion — there would be no attempt to suppress public opinion by the agency of corruption on the judgment seat : " Nothing gave a more general satisfaction than the naming of the judges. The king or dered every privy counsellor to bring a list of twelve; and out of these, twelve very learned and worthy judges were chosen." f Somers, to whose eloquence and sagacity the success of the Revo lution was so much indebted, was named Solicitor-General. In the spirit of that mean dislike of foreigners which character ises the vulgar Englishman, a writer of our own day thus records one of the complaints against the arrangements of 1689: "Three of the king's Dutch followers, Bentinck, Auverquerque, and Zuy- listein, were placed by him about his person, — with a disdain, not of the prejudices, but of the feelings of the nation, which might have recalled to mind his Norman predecessor." { There were others about William's person, who were amongst the most true- hearted of Englishmen. The Duke of Devonshire was Lord Steward ; the earl of Dorset was Lord Chamberlain ; Sidney, the brother of the republican, Algernon, was a gentleman of the bed chamber. Yet William is held to have outraged the national feel ing because he gave one place, not of political importance, but of necessary companionship, to Bentinck, the friend of his youth — the man who had nursed him in sickness, who had stood by him in battle ; because he gave another to Auverquerque, who had saved his life by personal intrepidity in the field of St. Dennis, in 1678 ; and another to Zuylistein, whose father had earned a debt of gratitude from the saviour of Holland, by perishing in his cause, when Luxemburg stormed his quarters in 1672. We doubt if the people — not the mere place-hunters — were so unreasonable as to expect that their deliverer, as they called him, should be isolated amongst strangers ; should have wholly to make new friends ; should cast aside all memories of old affections ; should forget all the associations of that life of toil and danger which he had endured from his twenty-second year to this his thirty-ninth. They could not surely forget that William was Stadtholder of Holland, as well as King of England ; that the interests of both countries were the same ; that the first magistrate of each of the two free states of Europe was embarked in a contest against the absolute monarch * Evelyu, " Diary," March 8. t Burnet, vol. iv. p. 7. t Continuation of Mackintosh's " History/' by William Wallace, vol. viii. p. 300. 462 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. who aimed at universal dominion ; that for the proper conduct of this great enterprise, it were well that he should have some few faithful friends, to whom he could pour out his heart without dread of fickleness and faithlessness. Yet against such popular preju dices It is hard to contend. William must have felt that the mere circumstance of his being a foreigner was a serious impediment to his power of doing his duty efficiently ; and thus amidst unde served suspicions, and causeless jealousies, he pined for that hap pier state from which he had been called ; he felt the want of that admiration which surrounded him at tbe Hague ; he intensely longed for the return of the tranquillity that he had thrown away when he quitted his quiet home at Loo. King William opened the Parliament on the 18th of February. He addressed the two Houses in a very brief speech, composed of the plainest words : " I have lately told you how sensible I am of your kindness, and how much I value the confidence you have reposed in me. And I am come hither to assure you, that I shall never do anything that may justly lessen your good opinion of me." The chief point of the speech was a recommendation " to consider of the most effectual ways of preventing the inconveniences which . may arise by delays ; and to judge what forms may be most proper, to bring those things to pass for the good of the nation, which I am confident are in all your minds, and which I, on my part, shall be always ready to promote." The possible delays to which the king alluded grew out of the agitation of the question, whether the Con vention which had altered the Succession could continue to sit as a Parliament. The Lords immediately passed a Bill "for removing and preventing all questions and disputes touching the assembly and sitting of this present Parliament," in which it was declared that the Convention which assembled on the 22nd of January are the two Houses of Parliament, " as if they had been summoned according to the usual form." But in.the Commons the question was debated with great violence, upon what were maintained as constitutional principles. There had been two months of excite ment since James had quitted the kingdom; and the inevitable re-action of opinion made many eager to unsettle the Settlement. Old Serjeant Maynard maintained that this was not a time to stand upon forms. " There is a great danger in sending out writs at this time, if you consider what a ferment the nation is in. I think the clergy are out of their wits." The outrages that James had attempted upon the national religion were by many forgotten. The OATH OF ALLEGIANCE. 463 dread of Popery was extinguished in the dread of Dissent. This was the first move of a powerful faction when they agitated the question whether the Convention were a Parliament ; thus to post pone the formal adhesion of the Church and the Laity to the new sovereign, and to delay the grant of supplies, at a time of impend- ding danger on every side. The state of the parlimentary con stituencies — a state that remained unaltered for nearly a.century and a half — presented a wide field for intrigue and corruption. The real opinion of the people upon such a vital question as that of uncompromising fealty to a new dynasty could not be fairly arrived at, when Cornwall, with its twenty-five thousand householders, returned one-third more members than Yorkshire with its hundred thousand ; and when Sussex, another great seat of decayed boroughs returned nearly four times as many members as Middlesex and London. In this question of the legality of the Parliament, the constituencies were not however called upon to decide. The Bill was passed ; and it was accompanied with a clause that no person should sit and vote in either House of Parliament without taking the prescribed oath to be faithful and bear true allegiance to king William and queen Mary, according to the form prescribed in the Declaration of Rights.* The ist of March was the day after which no seat could be taken in Parliament unless allegiance had thus been previously sworn. The archbishop of Canterbury and seven other spiritual peers absented themselves, as well as various lay peers. In the Commons the absentees were not so proportionately numerous. The Jacobite party sustained a defeat ; but the ex ample of the prelates operated upon many of the inferior Clergy, when the time arrived in which they also were to declare in the most solemn manner their adherence to the new government. An oath, in place of the old oath of allegiance and supremacy, was to be taken by all lay persons holding offices, and by all in possession of any benefice or other ecclesiastical preferment. Those church men who did not take this oath on or before the 1st of August were to be suspended ; and if at the end of six months they con tinued to refuse, were to be deprived.f About four hundred refused the oath, and, losing their benefices, were, during three reigns, a constant source of irritation and alarm, under the name, familiarised to us by our lighter as well as graver literature, of Nonjurors. Whatever opinions may be entertained of the wisdom of this resist ance, we must in this case, as in the previous cases of the Episcc- • * i Gul. & Mar. c. «. t Ibid., c. 8. 464 HISTORY Ol'' ENGLAND. palians ejected by the Long Parliament, and of the Puritans ejected after the Restoration, respect the self-denial of those who suffered for conscience sake. Their devotion to the principle of hereditary right might be a weakness, but it was not a crime. The policy of their deprivation was very questionable. Those who took the oaths, and satisfied their principles by intriguing and preaching against the government de facto, were really more dangerous than the eminent divines, such as Ken, and Sherlock, and Leslie, who openly refused to supjjort it by their declared allegiance. Violent and factious men might bring contempt on the name of Nonjurors ; but many of the less distinguished among them set about getting their bread by the honest exercise of their talents and learning. If some became fawning domestic chaplains to plotting Jacobite lords, others kept themselves above want by literary labours, however humble. John Blackbourn, the. ejected incumbent of two livings, earned his bread as corrector of the press for William Bowyer.* In this first Session of the first Parliament of the Revolution, amidst signal manifestations of a narrow and a factious spirit, we have abundant evidence of statesmanlike sagacity. The king looked upon many unsettled questions with a wider range of view than his own Council, or the Grand Council of the Nation. He was confident in the justice and necessity of the objects for which he desired to have his hands strengthened. The Parliament refused its confidence. The king desired to carry out the fullest principles of religious liberty that were consistent with the public 'safety. The Parliament thought that there was a very strict limit even for toleration. And yet, out of these differences, resulted much practi cal good. The king wished to have ample means for maintaining the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland, for the pacification of Scot land, for giving efficiency to the confederacy against the ambition of the French. The Commons manifested a greater jealousy of entrust ing the supplies to their deliverer than they had manifested towards their oppressor. There were immediate evil consequences. The Roman Catholic adherents of James devastated the Protestant set tlements in Ireland ; the standard of resistance was successfully reared in Scotland ; Louis threatened England with invasion, and was marching a great army upon Holland. But the benefits of the jealousy of the Commons are felt by us to this day. Those Whio-s who carried their confidence in the intentions of William to an extreme, were of opinion that the Revenue which had been settled * Nichols' " Literary Anecdotes," vol. iii. p. 252. APPROPRIATION ESTABLISHED. 465 upon king James for life should revert to the sovereign who had taken his place. Some Tories, who were adverse to the govern ment, but were eager to secure power by a simulated confidence in the king, agreed in this view. The majority in Parliament success fully resisted it. • William had proposed to his Council that the Hearth-money, or Chimney-tax, should be abolished. Sir Robert Howard told the house that the king said, "It was much in his thoughts." Sir Robert added, " I could wish the house had heard his discourse in all this business ; and in all his discourse from Exeter hither, he expressed his inclination to do good to the people." * To abolish the Hearth-money, an especial tax upon the poor, was a duty to which William was called by the earnest solici tations of the crowds who followed his march from Torbay to London. But he frankly said to Parliament, " as in this his majesty doth consider the ease of the subject, so he doth not doubt but you will be careful of the support of the crown." The official biographer of James II. sneers at William's self-denial; "He wheedled them [the Commons] with a remission of chimney-money, when he was well assured he should be no loser by his generosity, and that it would be only like throwing water into a dry pump to make it suck better below, and cast it out with more abundance above," f This was not exactly the best mode of wheedling the rich country gentlemen, by removing a tax from the cottage to put it in some shape upon the mansion. Yet the Commons respected the motive of the king, and substituted less oppressive taxes. But they declined to grant the temporary revenue for the lives of the king and queen. The hereditary revenue they did not touch. Moreover they resolved that whatever sums they voted should be appropriated to particular services, according to estimates. This principle, partially adhered to in the time 01 Charles II., but wholly disregarded by the parliament of his successor, has from the time of the Revolution been the great security of the nation against the wanton and corrupt expenditure of the Crown. Parliament may make lavish votes ; but there must be a distinct vote in every case for the service of a particular department. It is this which renders the legislative power so really supreme in England ; it is this which renders it impossible that an executive can subsist except in con cord with the representatives of the people. We therefore owe a debt of gratitude to the Parliament of the Revolution that they * " Parliamentary History," vol. v. col. 153. t " Life of James II." vol. ii., p. 310 Vol. IV.— 30 466 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. clung to a principle and established a practice which have never since been departed from. A temporary vote of credit is some times asked under extraordinary circumstances ; but the consti tutional right of appropriation, always secured in the express words of the grant of supply, is the general rule which no minister would dare to ask the representatives of the people to forego. But if the Parliament of William and Mary is to be commended for their jealousy of the king in the matter of Revenue, we may doubt if they were equally wise in halting far short of- his known wishes in the great questions of religious liberty, and religious union. If the king's abstract sense of what was due to the con sciences of men could have been carried out, we might have been saved from a century and a quarter of bitter animosities ; and the Church of England might have been more secure and more influen tial, than during the long period when the Test Act remained in force against Protestants, and Roman Catholics were not only ineligible to civil officers, but had to undergo what we now justly regard as persecution. But in this, as in all other cases, no reform can be permanent which is premature. William desired such an alteration in the ritual and discipline of the Church, as had been vainly attempted from the time of James I., so as to satisfy the scruples of non-conformists who were honestly averse to separation. He advanced so far as to have what was called a Comprehension Bill introduced into the House of Lords, by a zealous churchman, the earl of Nottingham. It passed the Peers in a mutilated shape ; was coldly received by the Commons ; and dropt through upon a reference to Convocation. That ecclesiastical parliament had transacted no real business since 1665, when they gave up the right of taxing themselves. They had now been summoned, as had been usual; but, contrary to use, important measures were to be submitted to them at a time of violent divisions amongst the Clergy. A considerable number of eminent divines were disposed to such changes in the Services of the Church as would conciliate the moderate Presbyterians and others who conscientiously ob jected to certain portions of the ritual. A Commission was ap pointed to consider what changes were desirable. A Report was drawn up by the moderate Churchmen, such as Tillotson, and submitted to the Convocation. The " rigid " or high-church party had there prevailed ; and their prolocutor, Dr. Jane, when presented to the bishop of London, proclaimed the resolve of the majority, in the words of the barons of Henry III., — " Nolumus leges Anglia THE LITURGY. — TEST ACT. 467 mutari." The Comprehension Bill, and the Reform of the Liturgy, went to the ground together. Another ruling desire of the king was that all Protestants should be eligible to employments. On the occasion of giving his assent to two Bills, on the 16th of March, he said, " I am, with all the expedition I can, filling up the vacancies that are in offices and places of trust by this Revolution. I know you are sensible there is a necessity of some law to settle the oaths to be taken by all persons to be admitted to such places. I recommend to your care to make a speedy provision for it; and as I doubt not you will sufficiently provide against Papists, so I hope you will leave room for the admission of all Protestants that are willing and able to serve." William proposed this at the time when the question was under debate, whether the Clergy should be required to take the oaths. He proposed it without consulting his Council, in the hope that the two violent parties would agree to a compromise — that the Whigs would not press the oath of allegiance upon the Clergy ; that the Tories would not press the Sacramental Test upon the Dissen ters. He was deceived in his expectations. The Test Act re* mained in force against nonconformists. The Bill which deprived the nonjuring Clergy of their benefices was carried. The last and the least objectionable wish of the kingwas agreed to, after long debate — that Dissenters should not be molested in the celebration of their worship. The Toleration Act — " An Act for exempting their majesties' Protestant subjects dissenting from the Church of England from the penalties of certain laws " — was a signal relief from a heavy burden, long borne by indignant sufferers. Judged by the opinions of our own day the Toleration Act was a very imperfect boon, requiring from dissenting ministers and teachers subscription to certain articles of faith, as contained in the Thirty-nine articles of the Church, with the exception of the 34th, 35th, and 36th Articles, and of those words of the 20th Ar ticle which declared that the Church had power to decree rights or ceremonies, and authority in controversies of faith. The Protest ants who "scruple the baptising, of infants," were further exempted from subscribing part of the 27th Article. The. Quakers were ex empted, upon a declaration of fidelity, and a simple profession of their Christian belief. The Act of Toleration only relaxed the severe enactments of the two former reigns, under this and other conditions, without providing for their repeal. Yet eventually, this famous Statute wasa measure of real'relief, f Or its cumbrous 468 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. and impracticable conditions gradually fell into disuse. We may judge of the satisfaction it gave to Dissenters, by the enthusiastic plaudits of Defoe, in calling, upon his dissenting brethren, " an nually to commemorate by a standing law among themselves, that great day of their deliverance, when it pleased God to tread down persecution, oppression, church-tyranny, and state-tyranny, under the feet of the law, and to establish the liberty of their consciences, which they had so long prayed for, in a public and legal tolera tion " * The ministers of dissenting meeting-houses had thus no longer reason to dread informations under the Act of Uniformity and the Five Mile Acts. Their followers were discharged from all apprehension of penalties for attending Conventicles, or for ne glecting the worship of the Establishment, provided they took the oath of allegiance, and subscribed the declaration against Popery prescribed by the Statute of Charles II. The Protestant Dissen ters were relieved by Act of Parliament from those restraints which James II. attempted to remove by the dispensing power. The Papists were specifically excluded from this relief ; and thus the statutory indulgence was welcomed by Presbyterians, Independ ents, Baptists, and Quakers, as much for what it denied to others as for what it gave to themselves. But inasmuch as it narrowed the area of state intolerance, it rendered a large proportion of the Clergy more than ever intolerant towards those legally tolerated. The kingwas brought up as a Calvinist ; and thus his tendencies towards religious freedom were always suspected as having for their end something adverse to the Anglican church. Swift, wri ting in 171 1, in the spirit of triumphant Toryism, says, "the Rev olution being wholly brdught about by Church of England hands, they hoped one good consequence of it would be the reliev ing us from the encroachments of Dissenters as well as those of Papists." The hope was happily disappointed. The Dissenters were no longer to be hunted by the constable, and imprisoned by the justice of peace. "They," says Swift, "had just made a shift to save a tide and join with the Prince of Orange, when they found all was desperate with their protector king James ; and ob serving a party then forming against the old principles in Church and State, under the name of Whigs and Low-churchmen, they listed themselves of it,' where they have ever since continued."! In a subsequent paper, Swift affirms that the distinction of High and Low Church, " which came in some time after the Revolution," * " Review," quoted in Wilson's "Defoe," vol. i., p. 181. t " Examiner," No. 37. MUTINY AT IPSWICH. 469 was raised by the Dissenters," in order to break the church party by dividing the members into high and low ; and the opinions raised that the high joined with the Papists, inclined the low to fall in with the Dissenters." * The unchristian hatreds of the Revolution gave their colour to the politics of two reigns. Since the accession of the house of Brunswick, these polemics have been gradually diluted, so as to impart at last the faintest tinge to the real course of public policy. Very slowly has the hold of intoler ance of all kinds been relaxed. But as past years have diminished the length and breadth of that debateable land, where deadly con troversialists once fought a. loutrance, may we not hope that suc ceeding years will completely reduce the old battle-field to the dimensions of a pleasant tilting-ground, where blunt lances and daggers of lath shall leave no scars after a gentle and joyous pas- sage-at-arms. One of the most important securities for the liberties of Eng land was accomplished at the Revolution. In the Declaration of Rights it was maintained " That the raising or keeping a Standing Army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be vvith con sent of Parliament, is against law." An accidental occurrence gave a legislative shape to this doctrine, which from 1689 has been invariably adhered to. The English regiments which had served under James II. were not in a complacent humour towards his foreign successor. They looked with jealousy upon the Dutch guards that had attended William to Whitehall ; and they took various occasions of manifesting their dislike to the new govern ment. They prevented the people lighting bonfires at Cirencester when the king and queen were proclaimed. At Newbury and Abingdon they would not allow the town crier to say, "God bless king William and queen Mary." " The old army is rather grown worse than mended," said a violent Whig. " I believe the black coats and the "red coats to be the grievances of the nation." f This discontent took an alarming form. Under the treaty of Nimeguen, England promisedv succours to the States-General, in the event of France being at war with them. France had declared war. Troops in the service of England were ordered to enbark for the continent. On the 1 5th of March, it was announced in the House of Commons that lord Dumbarton's regiment— composed chiefly of Scotchmen— had mustered at Ipswich ; had seized the artillery ; and had made proclamation of king James. The Com- * " Examiner," No. 44. t Howe. X " Parliamentary History," vol. vTtol. 137- 470 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. mons immediately voted an address to the king, " to desire him to take effectual care to suppress the soldiers that are now in rebel lion." The king quietly replied "that he had already appointed three regiments of dragoons, with orders to stop them, and bring ihem to their duty." One of the most distinguished of the Dutch officers headed these troops. He came up with them near Slea- ford, where, after a feeble show of resistance, they surrendered. They were marched up to London. They had been guilty of high treason, in levying war against the king ; and a few were brought to trial at the county assizes for Suffolk. But no life was forfeited. The government acted with a judicious mercy; and this regiment, now the first of the line, served William faithfully in his hard campaigns. This occurrence produced the first Mutiny Bill. The preamble of the Act sufficiently explains its necessity, and the caution with which the principle of a Standing Army, governed by martial law, was adopted: "Whereas the raising or keeping a Standing Army within this kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of Parliament, is against Law. And whereas it is judged necessary by their Majesties and this present Parliament, that during this time of danger several of the forces which are now on foot should be continued and others raised for the safety of the kingdom, for the common defence of the Protestant Religion, and for the reducing of Ireland. And whereas no man may be fore judged of life or limb or subjected to any kind of punishment by martial law, or in any other manner than by the judgment of his peers and according to the known and established laws of this realm. Yet nevertheless it being requisite for retaining such forces as are or shall be raised during this exigence of affairs in their duty, an exact discipline be observed. And that soldiers who shall mutiny or stir up sedition, or shall desert their majesties' service be brought to a more exemplary and speedy punishment than the usual forms of Law will allow."* The Mutiny Act was limited to a duration of six months. It was necessarilv/enewed, again and again, during the reign of William. A standing army became an integral part of the government of this country, whether during peace or during war. But Parliament always held its effectual control over the executive, so as to prevent any abuse of military power, by never passing a Mutiny Bill for a longer term than a year. For one hundred and sixty-nine years the statute book has continued to have its " Act for punishing Mutiny and * i Gul. & Mar. c. 5. THE FIRST MUTINY ACT. 47 1 Desertion ; " and in the Act of the 21st of Victoria, as in the Act of the ist of William and Mary, it is still recited that the raising or . keeping a Standing Army, unless it be with the consent of Parlia ment, is against law ; that a body of forces is necessary for the safety of the kingdom ; that no man can be punished except, by the laws of the realm ; yet nevertheless, &c. &c. This Act, now swollen to a hundred and seven Clauses, is to continue in force for one year, at dates commencing and ending according to the distri bution of the forces, whether in Great Britain or Ireland, or in the numerous stations in every region of the globe where the British flag now floats. Under the two constitutional principles, therefore, of an appropriation of the supply, and the passing of an annual Mutiny Bill, the power of the Crown cannot be maintained with out the co-ordinate power of Parliament. The sovereign cannot raise an army, or pay an army, without the consent of Parliament. The annual assembly of Parliament is therefore absolutely essen tial to the conduct of the government ; and if evil times should ever by possibility arise in which the Crown and the Parliament should be at issue, the maintenance of an army would be an act of pure despotism on the part of the executive power, only to be met by an equally unconstitutional assumption of executive power on the part of the legislature. The position .of the new government was necessarily a danger ous one. Triumphant as had been the first days of the Revolution, it was inevitable, especially whilst there was a civil war in Ireland, and whilst Scotland was distracted by party-strife, that plots should be formed in England for bringing back King James. William had notified to Parliament that he had caused several persons to be apprehended, on credible information that they were conspiring against the government ; and he asked for advice under the diffi culty of his unwillingness to act against law on the one hand, or to suffer dangerous men to avail themselves of the privileges of the Habeas Corpus Act on the other hand. The Lords, in an excess of loyal devotion, recommended the king to take extraordinary care of the public safety, by securing all disaffected persons. The Commons, much more wisely, passed a Bill for the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act till the 1 7th of April. This Act was twice renewed during the session. * If William thus thought it neces sary to strengthen his hands against existing dangers, he desired, as all high-minded possessors of power in troublous times should * 1 Gul. and Mar. c. 2, c. 7, and c. 77. 472 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. desire, that in a great degree there should be oblivion for past political offences. The cruel chancellor Jeffries ; the corrupt chief. justice Wright ; other unjust judges and agents of despotism, were in confinement. Many who had been manifest enemies of public liberty dreaded that the day of retribution was at hand. " The hottest of the Whigs," according to Burnet, would not for ward this honest design of the king. " They thought it best to keep many under the lash; they intended severe revenge for the blood that had been shed, and for the many unjust things that had been done in the end of king Charles's reign." They carried their opposition to the king by indirect means, rather than by sweeping exceptions to a general amnesty. " They proceeded so slowly in that matter, that the Bill could not be brought to ripeness during this Session." The people admired the mildness of the king's temper. The factious politicians got up an imputation against him that he desired "to make use of a set of prerogative men, as soon as he legally could." * The terms of the Coronation Oath, which for many years in the memory of some living was a fatal stumbling-block in the great heal ing measure of Roman Catholic relief, were debated in the first Par liament of William and Mary, as if the difficulty was foreseen that did arise under a very different condition of society. The ancient oath was declared to be " framed in doubtful words and expres sions with relation to ancient laws and constitutions at this time unknown." f This part of the preamble of the Act had espe cially reference to ecclesiastical laws. Those words of the new oath which were the subject of debate run thus : The archbishop or bishop is to ask the sovereign, " Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the laws of God, the free profession of the Gospel, and the Protestant reformed religion, established by law ? " And the sovereign promises so to do. It was moved " that the king, in the oath, swear to maintain the Protestant reli gion, as it is, or shall be, established by law." Those who con tended for the introduction of the words " shall be," amongst whom was Somers, were in a minority. They desired that no such con struction should be put upon the words " is established by law." as should lead a conscientious ruler to imagine that he was to sanc tion no legislative change that might affect the existing condition of the Church. The historian of this period says : " Every person who has read these debates must be fully convinced that the states- * Burnet, "Our Time," vol. iv. p. 26. t 1 Gul. & Mar. c. 6. THE CORONATION OATH AND CORONATION. WAR. 473 men who framed the Coronation Oath did not mean to bind the king in his legislative capacity."* It is indeed true that the ap prehension that the words " established by law " would make the laws unalterable, was felt as an absurdity by the soundest heads in that Parliament. " Not able to alter laws as occasion requires!" indignantly exclaimed sir Robert Cotton. They looked only to such alterations as might widen the limits of the Church by a liberal comprehension of Protestant Dissenters. Sir George Treby seems, if we rightly understand his words, to have looked further. " When we are dead and gone, all these debates will be in the air, and a greater scruple remain." f One greater scruple was that which harassed the mind of George III. Happily the question is set at rest by the common sense of our own times. The Coronation of king William and queen Mary took place on the nth of April, according to the ancient ceremonials. The arch bishop of Canterbury was absent. The bishop of London supplied his place. Burnet, now bishop of Salisbury, preached " with great applause," says Evelyn. The Members of the Lower House had especial places of honour ; tbey were feasted in the Exchequer- chamber, and had each a gold coronation medal. The honest citizens rang their bells and made their bonfires. The Jacobites circulated their doggrel against "the dainty fine king; " and the Dutch guards who kept the ground were abused as foreign mer cenaries. The House of Commons, two days after the Coronation, went up with a congratulatory address to the king and queen. But, eleven days later, the House presented an address of far greater import — declaring that they would support the crown in a war against the French king. The seconder of the address main- is o tained " that it is of absolute necessity to declare war against the most Christian Turk, who ravages all Christendom, and makes war more barbarously than the Turks themselves." To Louis was at tributed, in the address, " the present invasion of the kingdom of Ireland, and supporting your majesty's rebellious subjects there." William, in his answer, said, " I look upon the war to be so much already declared by France against England, that it is not so prop erly an act of choice, as an inevitable necessity, in our defence." The spirit of the king leapt up at this hearty support of the Com mons in the great contest for which he had been long preparing. He is reported to have exclaimed to one of his intimates — " This is the first day of my reign ! " * Macaulay, vol. iii. p. 117. t " Parliamentary History, vol. v. col. 210 474 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER XXIV. King James lands at Kinsale.— Schemes of Tyrconnel.— Condition of the Protestants in Ireland. — James enters Dublin. — Siege of Londonderry. — The Siege raised. — The Revolution in Scotland.— The Highlanders.— Dundee.— Battle of Killiecrankie.— Death of Dundee. "Wonderful uncertainty where king James was, whether in France or Ireland," writes Evelyn on the 29th of March. James had landed at the port of Kinsale on the 12th of March. There was no uncertainty when, on the 22d, the House of Commons had voted a Supply for six months "towards the reducing of Ireland," and a member of the government had said, " the French king has carried king James into Ireland." What then passed in Parliament was very imperfectly known to the public. The debates, in the state in which they have come down to us, were merely the brief notes of members for their private use. Even the Votes were unpublished. There was a great debate on a motion for printing the Votes, on the 9th of March. From this debate it appeared that members were in the habit of communicating the results of their proceedings to the constituencies. "It will only save the gentlemen the trouble of writing to their corporations," said Sir Thomas Lee. " You are told," says Sir Henry Capel, " of the Roll of the 9th of Henry IV. — that nothing is to be taken notice of in Parliament but what you communicate to the king. At that time there were no coffee-houses and no printing. If you could keep your votes out of coffee-houses, and suppress the licentiousness of printing," you might oppose printing your votes, "otherwise you make secrets here of what all the world knows." There were men who had the sagacity to see that concealment only produced the propagation of falsehood. " I would not have L'Estrange and Nevil Payne," says Mr. Arnold, "write false news beyond sea. I desire the truth to be known, and am for printing the votes.''* The House decided against the printing. The majority thouo-ht * L'Estrange was the Censor of the press Under Charles II. and editor of the " Public Intelligencer." Nevil Payne was as agent of James in Scotland, who was in corresponcV ence with the English Jacobites. JAMES IN IRELAND. — TYRCONNEL. 475 that the Clerks of the House, who were suspected of sending the Votes to coffee-houses, should be prevented from thus committing "a great crime ; " and that it was for the honour of the House not to print them. We can thus understand Mr. Evelyn's uncertainty in a world of contradictory rumours. In the midst of the popular ignorance of facts there was one consolation. They could freely abuse their rulers. " The new king being much blamed for neglect ing Ireland, now like to be ruined by the lord Tvrconnel and his Popish party, too strong for the Protestants," writes Evelyn, in the hour of' his uncertainty. The new king was betrayed, as he was doomed to be on many future occasions. The prince of Orange, under the advice of Irish noblemen and gentlemen, had during the interregnum opened a negotiation with Tyrconnel. Richard Hamilton, the brother of that wit of the court of Charles II., who wrote the most profligate Memoirs in the purest French, had come from Ireland to fight for king James against the prince of Orange, but was chosen to return to Ireland to arrange with Tyrconnel to preserve Ireland for king William. The son of sir William Temple gave a pledge that Hamilton would be faithful. Hamilton went to Tyrconnel and plotted with him how the Protes tants could be'best crushed, and James seated in Ireland as its Papist king. The too sensitive young Temple, when he found that his friend had abused his confidence, drowned himself. " He was so deeply oppressed with grief that he plunged himself out of a boat into the Thames, laden with weights to sink him." * The schemes of Tyrconnel succeeded. He persuaded lord Mountjoy to set out on a mission to James at St. Germain's, to represent to him " the moral impossibility of holding out against the power of England." He sent with him another envoy, chief baron Rice, " to give a quite different account to the king." Mountjoy was put into the Bastille. Tyrconnel had a clear course for his oper ations. " Accordingly this lord's back was no sooner turned but he began by degrees to pull off the mask. He caused all the Protestants in Dublin to surrender their arms ; he began to aug ment the standing forces ; and with as much prudence as dexterity soon put the kingdom in a tolerable state of defence." Such is the explanation of the alleged neglect, not given by a partizan of king William, but by the compiler of the Life of James II. from his own Memoirs. f * Alexander Cunningham — "History of Great Britain," vol. i. p. i»6. t " Life of James II. 476 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. James had quitted France with this remarkable wish of the great monarch at their parting — " the best thing I can desire for you is never to see you back again." The munificent favours of Louis — his generous as well as politic honours to a fallen brother — the adulation of courtiers, who looked upon a king, however power less, as a demi-god — these were to be exchanged for a doubtful struggle for a divided kingdom. Yet if James could maintain a position in Ireland, he might recover England. " If king James would quit his priests,'' said Danby, " he might still retrieve his affairs." * His prospects in Ireland were far from desperate ; they were in many particulars encouraging. The Protestants who, from the time of the plantation of Ulster in the time of James I., had been gradually changing a wild and profitless country into a flourishing seat of trade and manufactures, had recovered the ef fects of the massacre of 1641. Cromwell had replaced them in security by the terror of his strong arm. They were again the dom inant power; the native Irish were again a subjected race. James II. out of no sense of equal justice to save the aboriginal people from the tyranny of the smaller number, had determined to depress the colonisers and subject them to the less regulated tyranny of that hatred of their race and their religion which animated the Celtic population. In two years Ireland, under the rule of Tyr connel, was a kingdom in which the civil and military strength was almost wholl) in the hands of Papists. The Protestant militia had been disarmed early in the reign of James. Tyrconnel's soldiers seized upon all arms in the possession of Protestant householders, who were alone qualified by law to carry weapons. James entered Ireland when all those likely to oppose him were thought to be naked and defenceless. Before the Revolution was completed in England, the inhabit ants of Enniskillen and Londonderry had received such warnings from the attitude of the Irish government, and the temper of the native population around them, that they prepared to defend them selves against the same sort of attack which Londonderry had suc cessfully resisted in 1641. Enniskillen repelled the attempt to quarter Popish soldiers in their little town. Londonderry secured its gates against the entrance of a similar force. Mountjoy, who was afterwards betrayed into the mission to James, was well re ceived at Londonderry, and left a" Protestant garrison for their protection, under one of his officers, lieutenant-colonel Lundy. * Reresby's " Memoirs," p. 325. JAMES ENTERS DUBLIN. 477 Before William and Mary had_ received the crown, the whole Catholic population around the Protestants was preparing for rapine and revenge. The sovereigns of the Revolution were, how ever, proclaimed by the- staunch citizens of Londonderry and the small colony of Enniskillen ; and they abided the issue without shrinking. The men of Londonderry relied upon Lundy, as gov ernor, who had sent his adhesion to England, and had received from William and Mary a formal appointment to his command. Upon Hamilton, Tyrconnel had bestowed the reward of his treach ery, by placing him at the head of a body of troops to bring the Protestants of Ulster to submission. These troops desolated the country ; and the wretched inhabitants fled before them to Ennis killen and to Londonderry. The city, which had been founded by Englishmen upon the site of the old ruined city of Derry granted by James I. to the Corporation of London, had become the chief refuge for many thousands, in addition to its usual inhabitants. Amongst those who had fled hither for succour, was the rector of a neighbouring parish, George Walker, whose name will always live in honoured remembrance. The king of the Roman Catholics entered Dublin on the 24th of March. Devoted soldiers lined the streets ; the houses were hung with tapestry; his horse trod upon flowers and green leaves. He was met at the castle gate by the procession of the host, and he fell on his knees in adoration. Despatches received from Ham ilton, now a lieutenant-general, showed that there was work to do, beyond that of pageants and congratulations. The king himself at length determined to go amongst the troops to encourage them, taking with him the French officers that had accomjianied him to Ireland.* His march into Ulster commenced on the 13th of April. He travelled through a wasted country from which the inhabitants had fled, taking with them their moveable goods. The position of James and his followers was disagreeable enough. It was deter mined to return to Dublin ; and so they went back to Charlemont. But, says the Memoir, " the king received by an express a letter from the duke of Berwick, in the name of all the General officers as their opinion, that in case his majesty would return to the army, and but show himself before Derry, it would infallibly surrender." f James again changed his mind ; and setting out towards the ob stinate city the next morning, overtook the French general Rosen within two miles of the place where his mere presence was to * " Life of James II." vol. ii. p. 330 ; Own Memoirs. t Ibid., p. 332. 478 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. compel submission. The trumpeter sent by the king with a sum mons, found the inhabitants "in very great disorder, having turned out their Governor Lundy, upon suspicion."* The cause of this unexpected reception was the presence of " one Walker, a Min ister." He was opposed to Lundy, who thought the place unten able, and counselled the townsmen to make conditions ;. " but -the fierce Minister of the Gospel, being of the true Cromwellian or Cameronian stamp, inspired them with bolder resolutions." f James finally left Hamilton and the French generals to work their will upon the besieged, and upon the people who had not the shelter of the beleaguered city ; and he went back to Dublin to meet a Par liament called for the 7th of May. We must finish this story of heroic bravery and more heroic fortitude, although the events which we shall thus attempt briefly to relate, will detain us from other events of importance for more than three months of this busy year of 1689. Lough Foyle, the inlet of the sea which flows between the coun ties of Derry and Donegal, extends from its narrow entrance at Magilligan Point for about sixteen miles, when it meets the river Foyle at Culmore. The river is navigable for ships of heavy burthen to Londonderry, built by the colonists, on the left bank. This city, in 1689, was contained within the walls ; and it rose by a gentle ascent from the base to the summit of a hill, on the highest point of which was its cathedral. The streets were regularly laid out, in lines running to four gates, from a square in the centre, in which the Town-house and the Guard-house were placed. The gradual ascent of the city thus exposed it to the fire of an enemy. The small Bastions were insufficient for the defence of the Cur tain against a vigorous assault ; and there was no Moat nor Coun terscarp. A ferry crossed the Foyle from the east gate ; and the north gate opened upon a quay. On the east bank of the Foyle were woods and groves, with sites of villages destroyed by the marauding soldiery. On the west bank, close to the strand, was alaige orchard, which became a place of ambush. At the entrance of the Foyle was the strong fort of Culmore, with a smaller fort on the opposite bank. About two miles below the city were two forts, — Charles Fort on the west bank ; Grange Fort on the east.}: Lundy, the treacherous or perhaps panic-stricken governor, had persuaded Cunningham, the colonel who commanded two * " Life of James II." vol. ii. p. 333. X Ibid., p. 334. X Plan in Harris's " Life of William III." p. 193. SIEGE OF LONDONDERRY. 479 English regiments sent to assist in the defence of the place, to put his troops on board ship- and sail away. The indignation of. the English parliament was extreme when these troops returned home. Liindy's intention to surrender being manifest, the citizens, under. the advice of their reverend champion, and of a more regular sol dier, superseded the governor, and he was glad to escape in dis guise. The battle now commenced in earnest. The reverend George Walker and Major Baker were appointed governors during the siege. They mustered seven thousand and twenty soldiers, dividing them into regiments under eight colonels. In the town there were about thirty thousand souls ; but they were reduced to a less burdensome number, by ten thousand accepting an offer of the besieging commander- to restore them to their dwellings. There were, according to Lundy's estimation, only provisions for ten days. The number of cannon possessed by the besieged was only twenty. With such resources a protracted defence of Londonderry might well appear impossible. On the 20th of April the city was invested, and the bombardment was begun. A strong force was planted at Pennyburn Mill, to cut off the road from Culmore to the city, that fort then being in the hands of the Protestants. It was afterwards lost. On the 21st the garrison made a sortie, and routed this force with considerable slaughter. Maumont, one of the French generals, fell by a musket ball in this desperate sally. The bombardment went on, with demi-culverins and mortars. No impression was made during nine days upon the determination to hold out ;_ and on the 29th king James retraced his steps to Dublin, in considerable ill humour. He gave vent to that petulance which had so often alienated his friends, by exclaiming, " If my army had been English, they would have brought me the town, stone by stone, by this time." The siege went on, amidst bombardments and sorties, for six weeks, with little change. Hamilton was the commander of James's forces, in consequence of the death of Maumont; and another French officer, Persignan, who might have assisted Hamilton's inexperience,, was mortally wounded in a sortie of the sixth of May. The garrison of Londonderry and the inhabitants were gradually perishing from fatigue and insufficient food. But they bravely repelled an assault, in which four hundred of the assailants fell. Of the relief which had been promised from England there were no tidings. This solitary city had to bear, as it would appear, the whole brunt of the great contest for the fate of three king. 480 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. uoms. Large bodies of troops held the country on every side, keeping in awe the trembling and starving population, that could give no succour. No friendly ship could sail up the river without receiving the fire from hostile forts at its mouth and on its banks. No messenger could safely pass by land or by water to tell of the need there was for relief. The banks of the Foyle were lined with musqueteers. The roads on the East and on the West were blocked by masses of troops. Across the narrow part of the river, from Charles Fort to Grange Fort, the enemy stretched a great boom of fir timber, joined by iron chains, and fastened on either shore by cables of a foot thick. On the 15th of June, the anxious lookers out from the high places of the city descried a fleet of thirty sail in the Lough. The English flag floated in the great aestuary, but the deliverers came no nigher for weeks. Signals were given and answered ; but the ships lay at anchor, as if to- drive hope to despair. Provisions were now dealt out in quanti ties scarcely sufficient to sustain life ; and fever and dysentery seized upon their hundreds of victims. Gunpowder was still left ; but the cannon balls were shot away, and the resolute men cast lead round brick bats, and fired the rough missiles upon the be siegers. At the end of June, Baker, one of the heroic gov ernors, died. Hamilton had been superseded in his command by Rosen, when it was known in Dublin that an English fleet was in Lough Foyle. The prolonged resistance of two months by a city not fortified upon scientific principles, was too humiliating for the Frenchman, who was reported to have dragooned the Protestants of Languedoc ; and Rosen, who was invested with powers as "Marshal General of all his majesty's forces," is sued a savage proclamation, declaring that unless the place were surrendered by the first of July, he would collect all the Protestants from the neighbouring districts, and drive them under the walls of the city to starve with those within the walls. This was not a vain threat. For thirty miles round the remnant of the popula tion — the old man incapable of bearing arms, and the youno- wife with an infant at her breast— the children who lingered about their desolate homes, and the cripple who could fly nowhere for shelter — were driven in flocks towards the city where their friends were well nigh perishing. Some dropped on the road; some were mercifully knocked on the head. A famished troop came thus beneath the walls of Londonderry, where they lay starvino- for three days. The besieged immediately erected a gallows, within SIEGE OF LONDONDERRY. 4S1 yjew of their enemies ; and sent a message to . their head-quarters that priests might come in to prepare the prisoners within the city for death, for they would hang every man if their friends were not immediately dismissed. The threat had its effect, and the famished crowd wended back their way to their solitary villages. It is but justice to James to state, that he expressed his displeasure at this proceeding, and wrote to Rosen. " It is positively our will, that you do not put your project in execution as far as it regards the men, women, and children, of whom you speak ; but on tne contrary, that you send them back to their habitations without any injury to their persons." . Meanwhile the siege went, on. Batteries' were brought closer and closer to the city ; and the .firing was continued by day and night. At last a communication was effected with the fleet in the Lough. Major-General Kirk, the evil instrument of cruelty in -the expedition against Monmouth, was' now in the confidence of the new government. He it was who had come to the assistance of the besieged with men, arms, and provisions. He sent word by a little boy, who carried a letter in his garter — or in his button —that he found it impossible to get up the river ; that he expected six thousand more men from England ; and that then he would attack the besiegers by land. A doubtful hope. Famine was now doing its terrible work. The well-known substitutes for ordinary fpod, of horse-flesh, and dog's-flesh, of rats, of hides, were fast failing On the evening of the 30th of July, Walker preached in the Cathedral, exhorting his hearers still to persevere, for that God would at last deliver them from their difficulties. An hour after the sermon the lookers aut descried a movement in the Lough. Three vessels are sailing to the mouth of the Foyle. There are two merchantmen and a frigate. They are fired upon by the Culmore Fort and the New Fort. They returned the fire. They are in the river. They are within a mile of the boom. They heed not tbe shots of the musqueteers, noi the guns of the Charles Fort and Grange Fort. And now the foremost of the merchant vessels is kit awn by her build. She is the Mountjoy of Derry. She dashes at the boom. She breaks it, but she is driven ashore by the re bound. They are boarding. No. The frigate comes up and fires a broadside. The Mountjoy rights again. The three ships pass the boom safely. They are coming to the quay. We are saved. That night the four thousand three hundred of the garrison who, out of seven thousand four hundred, were left alive, feasted upon Vol. IV.— 31 482 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. something better than the nine lean horses and a pint of meal for each man, that were left. Of the abundance that was landed at the quay amidst the shouts of the brave defenders of Londonderry, there was enough to make every heart glad of that heroic popula tion, who thus fought and who suffered for a great principle. Bon fires are lighted. Bells are rung. The fire of the besiegers is the next day continued. But at nightfall a smoke arises from their camp, as if from the huts which had given them shelter for three months. Another night of watchfulness for the bosieged ; and as the sun of the first of August glimmers over the waters of Lough Foyle, it is seen that Rosen, with his half disciplined soldiers and his Rapparees, had marched away on the road to Strabane. Eight thousand of the besiegers had perished in this memorable strug gle. * At the period when Londonderry was saved, the men of En niskillen took the field, and won. the decisive battle of Newton Butler. On the 29th of July, the day before the great boom of the Foyle was broken, two English colonels, Wolseley and Berry, who had been sent by Kirk with a supply of arms and ammunition, sailed up Lough Erne to the isle of Enniskillen with their welcome cargo, and landed amidst the shouts of the people. Their arrival was very timely. A large force was advancing against Enniskillen under the command of Macarthy, Viscount Mountcashel. Wolse ley and Berry went forth with three thousand men to meet the five thousand who were thus coming with a confidence of success ; for the duke of Berwick was to attack Enniskillen from another quarter. The hostile forces were in presence of each other on the 30th. The larger number began to retreat ; the smaller fol lowed. Macarthy's dragoons at last turned to face the bold yeo manry, who were advancing with the determination of men whose dearest interests were at issue in this deadly strife. The Celtic army was routed amidst terrible butchery. As the besiegers of Londonderry halted on the ist of August at Strabane, they heard the news of this defeat. They became wholly disorganised, aban doning their stores and their sick and wounded. James was al ready out of heart. The king's intelligence from England assured » There are two original narratives of the siege of Londonderry, from which many of !ts incidents must be derived. One is, " A true account of the siege," by the famous George Walker, published in 1689- The other, published in .690, is "A Narrative of the Siege," by John Mackenzie, a Dissentme Minister, who was chaplain to one of the regiments in the city. These accounts are condensed and compared in the "life and Reign of William III." by Walter Harris. mm ana THE SIEGE RAISED 483 hhn of a speedy invasion from thence. The length of the siege of Derry, the badness of the weather, the frequent sallies, the unwholesomeness of the place of encampment "had in a manner destroyed the army, so as that no service could be expected from it for a considerable time." Add to this, " My;lord Mountcashel entirely routed." Such were the griefs which, when Schomberg landed with an army on the 13th of August, " struck such a con sternation amongst the generality, as made them give up all for lost."* We must revert to the close of the year 1688, to be able to pre sent a rapid narrative of the course of the Revolution in Scotland. The attempt of James to dispense with the Test Act was as ill received in Scotland as in England. The Episcopalians sus pected the motive ; the moderate Presbyterians did not welcome his limited indulgence ; the Cameronians spurned it, with a bitter hatred of their old oppressor, - and of all his evil instruments. But there was. in Scotland that strong feeling of attachment to their own race of kings which would not very enthusiasti cally welcome their sudden and complete downfall. There was sure to be a struggle, however it might terminate, for the superior ity of the Church of the minority, established by law ; and for the restoration of the Church of the majority, proscribed and persecuted. Conflicting interests and passions were certain to be brought into more immediate and direct hostility than in the English Revolution, in which an outrage upon the Church with a view to the preponder ance of Catholicism, united for a season the opjjosing principles of Establishment and of Dissent. In Scotland the government was wholly in the hands of those who had been the ministers of the intolerant tyranny of the king, and were the bitter enemies of those who clung to the Covenant. It was difficult to estimate what course events would take when the prince of Orange landed in England. The earl of Perth, the Chancellor, had declared him self a Roman Catholic on the accession of James. When the prince of Orange had landed, the Chancellor approached the Pres byterian ministers in Edinburgh with the statements of what king James had done for them, and how they ought to oppose the un natural invasion of that good king's nephew. He was answered, that the favours of the king had only for .their object to ruin the. Protestant religion. James fled ; and then the terrified Chancel lor attempted to fly also ; for,, says he, " Blair came from Edin- • " Life of James IL," vol. ii. p. 372. Original Memoirs. 484 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. burgh, and told me that the king was gone into France, and that if I did not immediately get away I was a gone man." * The earl and his lady went on board a sloop, where tbe men used them " with all the barbarity Turks could have done ; " and finally put them on shore " at the pier at Kirkcaldy, exposed to the mockery and hatred of the people." The mob of Edinburgh, on the 10th of December, had broken into the chapel of Holyrood House, which had been fitted up for the Roman Catholic service ; had de stroyed its decorations ; and had committed the sacrilege of dis turbing the graves of the old princes of Scotland. The rabble had been fired upon by captain Wallace, who was in command of a party of soldiers at the palace ; and the people of Kirkcaldy, says the earl of Perth, " got into a tumnlt to have me immediately sent to Edinburgh ; though the tide did not serve, and though they knew that at Edinburgh I should have been torn to pieces, for there they believed that Johnny Wallace was commanded by me to fire upon the people." f He was rescued from the furious multi tude of Kirkcaldy, " who began to call for cords ; " and was con veyed to Stirling Castle, where he was detained as a prisoner for four years. Such was the temper of the people towards dignita ries at whose frown they had so lately trembled. The Episcopal Clergy fared no better. The hatred of the Scottish Puritans against the observance of Christmas went far bevond the quarrel with mince-pie of the Commonwealth Puritans. On the Christ mas day of 1688, as if by universal agreement in the Western coun ties, the obnoxious ministers were, in the phrase of the day, " rab bled." Armed bodies of Covenanters terrified each clergyman in his manse; destroyed his furniture ; gave him notice to quit; or turned him and his family out of their houses. They burnt his Prayer Book, and they locked up his church. No lives were lost, and no wounds were inflicted, in these execrable outrages. In such a temper of a long oppressed people, William had issued his letters, as in England, for the assembly of a Convention. In England the strictest regard was paid to the existing state of the representation. In Scotland, the Act of 1681, which com pelled every elector to renounce the Covenant, was superseded by William's authority ; and Lords were summoned who had been de prived of their seats in the recent times of tyrannical rule. Mean while, in the interval of two months before the Convention was to assemble, furious passions were well nigh leading to a state ol * " Letters from James, Ear] cf Perth," 1845, p. 1. t liuL, p. 5. THE REVOLUTION IN SCOTLAND. 485 public confusion. Edinburgh Castle was held for king James by the duke of Gordon. The Whigs of Edinburgh and of the West were secretly arming. But each party was looking to the Conven tion as the test of their political strength, and each prepared for a contest which should decide the future fortunes of Scotland. No bles of each party were in London. The consistent opposers of the popish James flocked round the prince of Orange at Whitehall. The most ardent supporters of the Stuart king were not driven from the new court. The earl of Dundee, says Burnet, " had employed me to carry messages from him to the king, to know what security he might expect if he should go and live in Scotland without owning the government. 1 he king said, if he would live peaceably, and at home, he would protect him ; to this he answered, that, unless he were forced to it, he would live quietly." William was pressed to proscribe the Claverhouse who had borne so hateful a part in the days of persecution ; but he refused to make any ex ception to the general amnesty, by which he hoped to make Scot land in some degree a land of peace. Viscount Dundee arrived at Edinburgh at the end of February, in company with the earl of Balcarres. These noblemen were the confidential agents of James in Scotland; and from the day of their arrival the enemies ofthe Revolution had a rallying-point. The epis copal hierarchy were again full of hope that he they had called " the darling of Heaven," might be preserved and delivered by the mercy of God, by giving him the hearts of his subjects and the necks of his enemies.* Balcarres is an authority for some curious incidents of this crisis.f He and Dundee went to the duke of Gordon to urge him to hold the castle of Edinburgh. They met "all the duke's furniture coming out; " but they made him promise to keep the fortress "until he saw what the Cpnventibn would do." On the 14th of March the Convention met. The bishop of Edinburgh prayed for the safety and restoration of king James, without op position. The heir of the attainted Argyle took his seat, with only one protest. The conquerors and the conquered stood face to face. But the real strength was soon discovered. The duke of Hamilton had a majority of forty as President. Each party had put up a man that could not thoroughly be trusted. The marquis of Athol was as loose a politician as his opponent. But they were the heads of * Address to James, November 3, 1688. t " Account of the Affairs of Scotland relating to the Revolution in 1688, as sent to the late King James II., when in France," 1714. 486 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. powerful clans, and their rank and influence made them leaders of politicians who had as little honesty as themselves. It was alleged against the duke of Hamilton that he, and other western lords and gentlemen, " had brought publicly into town several companies of foot, and quartered them in the city ; besides great numbers that they kept hid in cellars, and in houses below the ground, which never ajupeared until some days after the Con vention had begun."* Dundee complained to Hamilton that in formation had come to his knowledge that he was to be assassinated. The allegation came before the Convention on the 15th of March ; and they took no concern in the matter. More important commu nications were to be laid before them. There was a letter to be read from king William in England ; and a messenger had arrived with a letter from king James in France. The communication from king William had the precedence, by a decision of the majority. It was a mild and sensible document, exhorting to the laying aside of animosities and factions, and suggesting a Union of the two nations, " living in the same island, having the same language, and the same common interest of religion and liberty." The letter of James was counter-signed by the earf of Melfort, a man execrated by all par ties. It breathed no spirit of peace. "He," the king, "would pardon all such as should return to their duty before the last day of that month inclusive, and he would punish with the rigour of his laws all such as should stand out in rebellion against him or his authority." When the seal of that letter was broken, the cause of James was felt to be lost. It was determined by Balcarres, Dun dee, and a few other Tories, to leave the Convention, and gather together at Stirling. Sunday intervened They were to start on the next day. Difficulties arose; and then Dundee, in his impa tience, resolved to set out alone. "Then," says Balcarres, "he went straight away with about fifty horse. As he was riding near the castle of Edinburgh, the duke of Gordon made a sign to speak with him at the West side of the Castle, where, though it be ex tremely steep, yet he told the duke all that was resolved upon, and begged that he would hold out the castle till the king's friends might get him released, which he positively promised to do." Dal rymple says, that when Dundee galloped through the city, "beino asked by one of his friends who stopped him, ' where he was going,' he waved his hat, and is reported to have answered, 'wherever the spirit of Montrose shall direct me.' " * " Account of the Affairs of Scotland relating to the Revolution in 1688, as sent to the late King James II., when in France," 1714. THE REVOLUTION IN SCOTLAND. 487 " The Gordon demands of him which way he goes — Where e'er shall direct me the shade of Montrose — Your Grace in short space shall hear tiJings of me, Or that low lies the bonnet of bonny Dundee." * The duke of Hamilton caused the doors of the Convention to be locked. The drums were beat in the streets. The Western Wliigs came forth from their hiding-places. "There was never so miserablea parcel seen," say Balcarres. Nevertheless, the notion of a rival Convention at Stirling was at an end ; and Dundee went his own course, to redeem, by his death in the hour of victory, some of the odium which, in spite of the romance of history, must always attach to the realities of his cruel and fanatical life. For he, a hater of fanatics, was amongst the worst who have borne that name, — one of " those exploded fanatics of slavery, who formerly maintained what no creature now maintains, that the Crown is held by divine, hereditary, and indefeasible right ; " t — one who, in the maintenance of this creed, divested himself of the ordinary attrib utes of humanity, to be as callous as an inquisitor, and as remorse less as a buccaneer. Disappointed in their scheme, the only thing, says Balcarres to James, that could be thought of by all your friends, " was to engage the duke of Gordon to fire upon the town, which certainly would have broke up the Convention." The duke was wiser. " He absolutely refused to do anything but defend him self until he had your majesty's order." The Convention now went fearlessly to work in the settlement of the kingdom. After long debates the House came to a resolu tion, which was embodied into an Act. " The Estates of the kingdom of Scotland find and declare, that king James VII. being a professed Papist, did assume the royal power, and acted as a King, without ever taking the oath required by law, and had, by the advice of evil and wicked counsellors, invaded the fundamental constitution of this kingdom, and altered it from a legal and limited monarchy to an arbitrary and despotic power ; and had governed the same to the subversion of the Protestant religion, and violation of the laws and liberties of the nation, inverting all the ends of government ; whereby he had forefaulted the crown, and the throne was become vacant." J An Act was also passed for settling the crown of Scotland upon William and Mary. On the day that the king and queen were cro.wned in England, they * Scott. " the Doom of Devorgoi'." t Burke. " French Revolution." X" Others were. for making use of an obsolete viori, forefaulting, used for a bird's forsaking ha nest."— Balcarres. 488 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. were proclaimed king and queen in Scotland. Commissioners were . appointed from the Convention to proceed to London, to invest their majesties with the government. They— the earl of Argyle, sir James Montgomery, and sir John Dalrymple — were introduced at the Banqueting House on the 17th of May. Argyle tendered the Coronation Oath, which concluded with this clause, " that they would be careful to root out all heretics and enemies to the true worship of God." Upon this William declared that " he did not mean by these words, that he was under any obligation to be a persecutor." The Commissioners replied, that " neither the mean ing of the oath, nor the law of Scotland did import it." " I take the oath in that sense," said William. In the Claim of Rights which the Convention had prepared it was set forth, " that Prelacy, and superiority of an office in the Church above Presbyters, is and has been a great and insupportable burthen to this nation, and contrary to the inclinations of the generality of the people ever since the Reformation, they having reformed Popery by Presbytery, and therefore ought to be abolished." When Dundee, with his fifty horsemen, who had deserted from the regiment in England which he once commanded, had left the castle of Edinburgh far behind him, he scarcely then paused to think whither the spirit of Montrose would direct him. He retired to his country house in Forfar. He would probably have remained there unmolested by the new government ; and he, as well as Balcarres, might have thought it most politic to continue quiet for a while. An agent of James arrived from Ireland, with letters recommending that nothing should be done till further orders ; and Melfort, by the same messenger, wrote to Balcarres and Dundee. The letters fell into the hands of the dominant party in the Con vention. Balcarres was arrested. Dundee had put the Tay be tween himself and his unfriends, " and having a good party of his own regiment constantly with him, they found it not so safe to ap prehend him." Balcarres was brought before the Convention, and the letters of Melfort to him were read. In one, savs Balcarres, " he expressed himself much after this manner : That he wished some had been cut off that he and I spoke about, and then things had never come to the pass they were at ; but when we get the power again, such should be hewers of wood, and drawers of water." Balcarres adds, addressing the king, that although he had never made any such proposition as that at which Melfort hinted, "noth ing could have been more to the prejudice of your affairs, nor for THE HIGHLANDERS. 489 my fuin, than this, which did show that nothing but cruelty would be used, if ever your majesty returned." When the order was given to arrest Dundee, he quitted his house with a few retainers ; and was soon at the head of a body of Highlanders. In the most picturesque history in our language there are no passages more picturesque than those in which the eloquent writer describes the Highlanders of this period.* He has produced his likeness of the Gael " by the help of two portraits, of which one is a coarse caricature, and the other a masterpiece of flattery." The caricature was produced out of the prejudices which existed up to the middle of the last century ; the flattery has been created by poetry and romance in our own time. " While the old Gaelic in stitutions were in full vigour, no account of them was given by any observer, qualified to judge of them fairly." f We venture to think that there is one account, not indeed very full or very striking, which contains many traits which appear to be the result of ob servation, and Which are not distorted by any violent prejudice. Alexander Cunningham, who left a manviscript history of Great Britain from the Revolution to the accession of George I., written in Latin,J was a native of Scotland, who is supposed to have been in Holland in 1688, and is held by his biographer to have been chosen by Archibald, earl of Argyle, to be travelling tutor to his son, lord Lome. His position would naturally give him an inter est in the state of the Highlands, and would probably enable him to describe the people from personal observation. " The Scotch Highlanders," he Says, " a race of warriors who fight by instinct, are a different people from the Lowlanders, of different mariners, and a different language." This may appear a trite observation to set out with ; but it was the case then, as it was much more re cently with many, that "by most Englishmen, Scotchman and Highlander were regarded as synonymous words." § Cunningham goes on to say, " Though of a very ready wit, they are utterly un acquainted with arts and discipline ; for which reason they are less addicted to husbandry than to arms, in which they are exercised by daily quarrels with one another." || The hostilities of clans was the great moving principle in every Highland adoption of a public quarrel, as we have seen in the career of Montrose and of Argyle. It was the principle upon which Dundee relied when he hurried to * Macaulay's History, vol. iii. c. xiii. t Ibid., p. 304. X Translated by'Thomas Hollihbury, D.D., 1788. § Macaulay, vol. iii. p. 3«- tl Cunningham, vol. 1. p. 120. 490 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the clans who were in arms for a private quarrel at Inverness. But the cause of king James had a hold upon their affections, be yond their desire to encounter the hostile chiefs who were the sup porters of king William. They knew nothing of the political and religious grounds of difference. The causes of the great Revolu tion of England weie to them unknown and uncared for. It was enough that " their minds, roused by the remembrance of former times, were easily drawn over by the viscount of Dundee, who was of the family of Montrose, to the interest of king James. They firmly believe that the ancient' kings of Scotland were descended from them, and wore the very same dress which they now wear ; and therefore they were easily persuaded that king James was of their own blood, and, by a kind of divine right, entitled to the crown." * Their hardihood under exposure to cold and wet; their habitual exercise ; their predatory excursions, are noticed by this historian. " Being in general poorly provided for, they are apt to covet other men's goods ; nor are they taught by any laws to dis tinguish with great accuracy their own property from that of other people. They are not ashamed of the gallows ; nay, they pay a re ligious respect to a fortunate plunderer." f Scott says that a foray was so far from being held disgraceful, that a young chief was ex pected to show hfs talents for command, by heading a plundering expedition. X To their chief " the common people adhere with the utmost fidelity, by whose right hand they are wont to swear." § Dundee knew the qualities of the race that he was going to lead against the regular troops of the new government. Their peculiar character and organisation were favourable for a dashing enter prise. They were perhaps most to be feared in the hour of suc cess. " In battle, the point to which they bend their utmost efforts, and which they are most anxious to carry, is their enemy's baggage. If that once falls into their hands, disregarding all dis cipline and oaths, and leaving their colours, home they run." || The clan which Dundee joined at Inverness had for its chief, MacDonald of Keppoch. This pugnacious warrior had recently won a battle against Macintosh of Moy; and he was now about to harry the Saxon shopkeepers of Inverness for having taken part against his clan. In Inverness there was " sneezing," and * Cunningham, p. 122. t Ibid., p. 121. t Notes to " Lady ofthe Lake." 5 " No oath, but by his chieftain's hand." Lady of the Lake," canto iii. II Cunningham, vol. i. p. 122. BATTLE OF KILLIECRANKIE. 49I sugar, and aqua-vita?. He had recently been,opposed to 1he sol diers of king James, who, under the direction of the Privy Coun cil, had gone forth with letters of fire and sword to waste and kill in the country of MacDonald of Keppoch. When Dundee ar rived, the chief thought less of the injuries which he had sustained from the government of king James than of the glorious opportu nity of plunder in a fight against the government of king William. A goat was slain, a fire was kindled, the points of a small wooden cross were seared in the flame, and then the sparks were extin guished in the blood of the goat. " Their religion is partly taken from the Druids, partly from Papists, and partly from Protes tants," says Cunningham. In the ceremony of preparing the Fiery Cross, we rnay readily trace the Pagan as well as the Popish ele ment. MacDonald of Keppoch sent the Fiery Cross through his district. It was the signal for arming and assembling at a given place of rendezvous. It was handed on by one swift messenger after another through the country of Keppoch's allies and friends. The name of the Graham was sufficient to arm all those who hated the Campbell. The deeds of Montrose were the favourite themes of the bards ; and now another Graham was come to lead the clans near Inverary, who had thrown off their submission to Argyle, against another Argyle, who might again reduce them to their old condition of dependence. Dundee first surprised the town of Perth, seizing the public treasure ; dispersed two troops of horse ; and then entered into the Highlands, to wait the arrival of aid from Ireland. The clans gathered around him in Lochaber, all eager to fight for the cause which had the Mac Callum More for its enemy. During the month of June active operations in the Highlands were suspended. But in the meantime Edinburgh Castle was sur rendered by the duke of Gordon. General Mackay had taken the command of the army in Scotland. " He was one of the best offi cers of the age, when he had nothing to do but to obey and execute orders ; for he was both diligent, obliging, and brave ; but he was not so fitted for command. His piety made him too apt to mis trust his own sense, and to be too tender, or rather fearful, in any thing where there might be a needless effusion of blood." * To shed blood needlessly is the greatest opprobrium of a commander. To mistrust himself in the fear of unavoidable slaughter is to pro duce a more fatal effusion of blood. It is not piety which produces * Burnet; vol. iv. p. 47. 49? HISTORY OF ENGLAND. such mistrust. Whether Mackay, the bravest of the brave, was open to this covert reproach, does not appear in the narratives of his conduct of the battle of Kibiecrankie. Dundee had learntthat the marquis of Athol, who had decided to take part with the ruling powers, had sent his son, lord Murray, into Athol to raise the clans ; but that his own castle of Blair had been held against him ; and that a large number of his clan had quitted the standard of the marquis. He had also learnt that Mackay was advancing to reduce Blair Castle, a post most important as the key of the Northern Highlands. Dundee had received three hundred Irish troops from Ulster, and he had collected again about three thousand High landers, who had been allowed to leave Lochaber for their own glens. Mackay was approaching Blair Castle, out of Perthshire. Dundee arrived there on the 27th of July. Mackay was advancing up the pass of Killiecrankie. On one hand of the narrow defile was the river Garry, rushing below the difficult ascent. On the other side were rocks and wooded mountains. One laden horse and two or three men abreast would fill the road-way. In this defile, the passage of Mackay might have been effectually resisted. Dundee chose to wait for his enemy till he had reached the open valley at the extremity of the pass. The troops were resting, when the alarm was given that the Highlanders were at hand. From the hills a cloud of bonnets and plaids swept into the plain, and the regular soldier was face to face with the clansman ; — " Veterans practised in war's game " on one side—" Shepherds and Herds men " on the other.* There had been firing from each for several hours. It was seven o'clock before Dundee gave the word for action. Unplaided and unsocked the Highlanders rushed upon the red soldier. They threw away their firelocks after a volley or two ; raised their war-yell, amidst the shriek of the bagpipes ; and darted upon Mackay's line. A few minutes of struggle, and then a headlong flight down the pass. What the poet calls " the precept and the pedantry of cold mechanic battle " could not stand up against the rush of enemies, as strange as the mounted Spaniard was to the Peruvian. The slaughter was terrible, as the Saxons fled through the gorge, with the Celts hewing and slaying amidst a feeble resistance. But there were no final results of the victory of Killiecrankie. The Highlanders did not follow up their success, for they were busy with the booty of the field; and Dundee had fallen. He was leading a charge of his small band of cavalry; * Wordsworth. DEATH OF DUNDEE. 493 and was waving his arm for his men to come on, when a musket ball struck him in the part thus exposed by the opening of his cui rass. He fell from his horse, and, after a few sentences, " word spake never more." * There was terror in Edinburgh when it was known that Mackay had been defeated. There was hope when the news came that Dundee had fallen. The Highlanders went back to their mountains, laden with plunder. In London there was ne cessarily alarm. " But when the account of Dundee's death was .known, the whole city appeared full of joy ; and the king's enemies,' who had secretly furnished themselves with arms, now laid aside all thoughts of using them." f The over-sanguine hopes of the enterprise of Dundee amongst the followers of king James, are thus expressed in a lament for his death : " Had he lived, there was little doubt but he had soon established the king's authority in Scotland, prevented the prince of Orange going or sending an army into Ireland, and put his majesty in a fair way of regaining England itself." X Certainly not ; whilst the real intentions of James towards Scptland and England continued to ooze out, as they were sure to do. Balcarres, in his account to king James of the affairs pf Scot land, has this anecdote of the characteristic Stuart policy: " Next day after the fight, an officer riding by the place where my lord Dundee fell, found lying there a bundle of papers and commissions, which he had about him. Those who stripped him thought them of but small concern, so they left them there lying. This, officer a little after did show them to several of your friepds, among which there was one paper did no small prejudice to your affairs, and would have done much more, had it not been carefully suppressed. It was a letter of the earl of Melfort's to my lord Dundee, when he sent him over your Majesty's Declaration, in wliich was contained not only an indemnity, but a toleration for all persuasions. This the earl of Melfort believed' would be shocking to Dundee, con sidering his hatred to fanatics ; for he writes, that notwithstanding of what was promised in your declaration, indemnity and indulgence, yet he had couched things so, that you would break them when you pleased ; nor would you think yourself obliged to stand to them." * The letter that it is pretended he wrote to King James is a transparent forgery. t Cunniugham, p. 123. X " Life of James II." vol. ii. p. 352. 494 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER XXV. Close of the first Session of the English Parliament. — The Irish Parliament. — Second Session of the English Parliament. — The Bill of Rights. — The Princess Anne. — Whig and Tory Factions. — Parliament dissolved — State of the Army in Ireland. — Abuses in Government Departments. — Opening of the New Parliament — Corrup tion. — Jealousy in settling the Revenue. — Act of Recognition. — Act of Grace.. — Wil liam goes to Ireland. — Landing and March of William. — The Boyne.— William slightly wounded.— Battle ofthe Boyne.— Flight of James.— His Speech at Dublin.— Naval defeat at Beachy Head. — Energetic Conduct of the Queen. The proceedings of the English parliament, from the period when the Commons went up to the king with an address, declaring that they would support him In a war with France, to the adjourn ment in August, are no doubt interesting when presented with char acteristic details, but are scarcely important enough to be related with minuteness in a general history. Less important Is it-to trace the factious disputes in which so many angry passions and so many petty jealousies were called forth, during the three or four latter months of the Session. It is satisfactory to know that the attain ders of William lord Russell, of Algernon Sidney, of Alice Lisle, and of alderman Cornish, were reversed. It is not so satisfactory to trace the revival of past animosities in the discussions upon the sentence of Titus Oates, who brought that sentence before the House of Lords by a writ of error. A majority of Peers affirmed the judgment ; but in the Lower House a bill annulling the sentence was brought in. The majority of the Lords looked at the infamous character of Oates. In the Commons the supporters of the bill for annulling the sentence looked to the illegality of the judgment. The difference between the two Houses was compromised. Oates was released from confinement, having received a pardon ; and the Commons moved an address to the Crown that he should be allowed a small pension for his support. In the case of Samuel Johnson, the Commons voted that his degradation from ecclesiastical func tions was illegal, and the king was asked to bestow some prefer ment on him. William, more wisely, gave him a thousand pounds and a pension. During this Session an Act was passed by which any Protes- THE IRISH PARLIAMENT. 495 tant clergyman of Ireland, who had been forced to leave that king dom, "for fear of the Irish rebels," should not be deprived of an Irish benefice by accepting ecclesiastical preferment in England.* Before the landing of James at Kinsale many Protestants had fled to England, in the dread of a repetition of the frightful atrocities of 1641. Many of these refugees were aided by a public subscrip tion ; and some of the clergy were appointed to lectureships and small livings, f The miseries produced " by fear of the Irish rebels " were small, compared with the tyrannous proceedings of the Parliament which king James opened in Dublin on the 7th of May. Of two hundred and fifty members of the Irish House of Commons, only six were Protestants. James told the Parliament in opening the Session, that he had always been for liberty of con science, and against invading the property of any man. The next day he issued a Proclamation in which he says that, since his ar rival in his kingdom of Ireland, he had made it his chief concern to satisfy his Protestant subjects " that the defence of their reli gion, privileges,- and properties, is equally our care with the recov ery of our rights." It has been alleged, as an excuse for James in furnishing a very speedy .proof of the futility of such professions, that he could not control the viole.nt spirit of his Parliament. They passed an Act of Toleration on one day ; they passed an Act of Confiscation on the next. The one Act consisted of unmeaning professions ; the other transferred all the lands held by Protestants under old Acts of Settlement to their ancient proprietors before, the rebellion of 1 641. Another Act transferred the tithe, for the. most part from the Protestant to the Catholic clergy, without com pensation. But the iniquity of the Act which deprived the holders of property for nearly forty years, whether acquired by grant, pur chase, or mortgage, was small when compared with the Act of at tainder by which two thousand six hundred persons were declared traitors and adjudged to suffer the pains of death and forfeiture. " The severity of this Act exceeded even that of the famous proscrip tion at Rome during the last Triumvirate." X The Act of Attainder affected the real estates of absentees thus declared to be traitors. Another Act vested in the king all their goods and chattels, debts and arrears of rent. The spirit of the Parliament was universally carried out. The arms of all Protestants were seized, whatever their political opinions. The Protestant clergy, mostly preachers of * 1 Gul. & Mar. c. 29. t See Journal of the Very Rev. Rowland Davies, 1857. X Harris's " Life of William III." p. 231. 496 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. divine right, were insulted and unprotected. The fellows and scholars of the university of Dublin were thrust out of their halls and chambers, and their property seized ; the sole condition of their personal liberty being that no three of them should meet to- together, "on pain of death." This was the ready phrase of ter ror applicable under all circumstances. The king, with the exam ple before him of iniquities long faded away, issued a coinage of brass money which was to pass as sixpences, shillings, and half- crowns. " Eight half-crowns of this money were not intrinsically worth two-pence." * The tradesmen of Dublin, if they refused the money, were threatened to be hanged by the Provost-Marshal. The government of king James, that was looking forward to the day when England and Scotland should come under the same merciful rule, decreed, by proclamation in the name of the king, that no cov etous person should give by exchange of the currency, intolerable rates for gold and silver, to the great disparagement of the brass and copper money, under pain of death. Such, when king William met his Parliament on the 19th of October, were the manifestations of what might be expected from the blessed rule of king James, should he be restored in England. It is recorded of William that, on the day before, he met the Council, and produced a draft of his speech, written by himself in French, when he thus expressed himself : " I know most of my predecessors were used to commit the drawing of such speeches to their ministers, who generally had their private aims and in terests in view ; to prevent which, I have thought fit to write it myself in French, because I am not so great a master of the English tongue : therefore, I desire you to look it over, and change what you may find amiss, that it may be translated into English." This was not complimentary to the king's ministers, nor accordant with our modern notions of ministerial responsibility. Yet it was an honest endeavour of William's common sense not to be mis understood. He said that it was a misfortune that, at the begin ning of his reign, he should have to ask such large supplies°for carrying on the wars upon which he had entered with their advice. He had not engaged in these out of a vain ambition, but from the necessity of opposing those who had so visibly discovered their designs of destroying the liberties and religion of the nation. He- asked that there should be no delay in determining what should be the supply for the charges of the war, because there was to be a * Harris's " Life of William III." p. 231. James at the Battle of the Boyne.— Vol. iv. 511. SECOND SESSION OF THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT. 497 meeting at the Hague, of all the princes and States who were engaged against Francie, arid his own resolutions would be deter mined by the means at his command. This was honest language ; which the Commons seconded by a vote that they would stand by the king in the reduction of Ireland and in a vigorous prosecution of the war with France. Yet there is nothing more painful to one who looks back upon the history of his country with an earnest desire to think the best of her public men, than to trace, amidst the bitter contests of factions, the slight predominance of the patriotic spirit. The second Session of the Convention Parliament is a melancholy exhibition of party intrigues for power, of rivalries that were to be made enduring by mean revenges, of desjperate attempts to revive the indiscriminate hatreds of the past in a frequent disregard of the necesisities of the present — hateful contests, that made William seriously purpose to throw up the government, and remove himself from a scene where he was unable to make men understand that there was a duty to their country, which ought to outweigh all selfish desires. The work for which this Session of Parliament is to be chiefly remembered in after time, was the passing of the Bill of Rights. This celebrated measure was the reduction to a Statute of the Declaration of Rights.* Some important jjrovisions were intro duced. It was enacted, to prevent the kingdom being governed by a Papist, that the sovereign should in Parliament, and at the Coronation, adopt by repetition and subscription, the declaration against Transubstantiation. It was also enacted that if the sov ereign should marry a Papist, the subject should be absolved from allegiance. The dispensing power of the Crown — the cause of so many fierce conflicts — was absolutely taken away.-f The Parlia ment in this Session left few other records of considerate legisla tion. They went wildly to work with impeachments. They impeached the earl of Peterborough and the earl of Salisbury, for departing from their allegiance, and being reconciled to the Church of Rome. They impeached the earl of Castlemaine, under a charge of trying to reconcile the kingdom to the Church of Rome. They raked up the accusations against those who had been acces sary to the convictions of Russell and Sidney, chiefly, in the hope to fasten some charge upon Halifax, who had retired from office. They carried their political hatreds ,eo far back into the region of history, as to accept a statement that " Major-General Ludlow is * Ante, vol. iv. p. 376. t r Gul. & Mar. Sess. 2, t. 2 Vol. IV.--32 498 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. come into England, and is in town ; and that his old accomplices do comfort, aid, and abet him ; " and thereupon they carried an address that the king would issue a proclamation for apprehending General Ludlow, who stood attainted of highjreason for the murder of Charles I. Old Colonel Birch, who asked for evidence of Ludlow being in London, made a sly allusion to the contrast between the present and the past: "I am in a new periwig, and pray let the House look upon me." * The men of the new periwigs seemed anxious that the passions of the old love-locks should never be forgotten. Ludlow returned to his asylum at Vevay ; to wonder, perhaps, what sort of Revolution was that of 1688, which had thus repudiated what it owed to the Puritans who had made the Bill of Rights a practicable thing. Amongst the annoyances to which William and Mary were subjected by party intrigues, there were none, probably, more personally distasteful than the misunderstandings which arose out of the position of the princess Anne. Upon her marriage with prince George of Denmark she had a settlement of ,£20,000 a year. From the circumstance of Anne being the presumptive heir of the Crown, it was not unnatural that she should desire a larger revenue. From the peculiarities of her character she was necessarily a fit subject for intriguing politicians to work upon. Sarah Churchill, afterwards duchess of Marlborough, had over her the most un bounded influence. The attachment of Mrs. Morley (Anne) to her dear Mrs. Freeman (Sarah) — or rather the dependence of a weak nature upon an imperious one — had an influence of long. duration upon the politics of England. The correspondence of the princess and the lady of the bed-chamber, under their fictitious names, would lead to the belief that real friendship was not in compatible with a court atmosphere, if we did not see beneath this seeming affection the schemes of one of the most cunning and domineering of her sex. The Tories, who looked to Anne, in 1689, as. one to be propitiated, had been moved to apply to Parliament for a large increase of her income. Sarah tells the story herself: " Her majesty, when some steps were made in Parliament towards settling a revenue on the prince and princess, taking her sister one night to task for it, she asked her, What was the meaning of these proceedings ? To which the princess answered, She heard her friends had a mind to make, her some settlement. The queen hastily replied, with a very imperious air, * Pray, what friends have * "Parliamentary History," vol. v. col. 414. WHIG AND TORY FACTIONS. 499 you but the king and me?'" The lady goes on to state how she urged the princess to persist' in applying to Parliament instead of depending upon the king ; how Shrewsbury (she erroneously calls him " duke ") came to her from the king, " who promised to give the princess ,£50,000 if she would desist from soliciting the settle ment by Parliament ; " and how she, the dictatress of the princess, - insinuated a doubt whether the king would keep his word ; upon which the princess herself told Shrewsbury,' "that she could not think herself in the wrong to desire a security for what was to support her."* The friends who had a mind to make the princess some settlement went too far. They asked for ,£70,000 a year, which the House would not grant; and, finally, Anne received the ,£50,000 which Shrewsbury was authorised to offer. The politics of the palace were passing annoyances from the troublesome movements of a faction, rather than jpermanent causes of uneasiness to the king. The Whigs, to whom he in a great de gree owed his crown, had manifested a violence towards their political opponents that rendered it impossible that he could wear that crown in tranquillity. They sought to obtain a considerable increase of power, by a bold manoeuvre which would materially strengthen them in a new Parliament. Without any attempt to 'legislate in the spirit of party, a Bill had been read twice for re- storingthe Corporations which had surrendered their Charters at the mandates of Charles II. and James II. There was a thin attend ance in the Houce. for it was the holiday tin'e of Christmas. But the Whigs by concert mustered in force, and engrafted upon the Bill two clauses disqualifying for municipal office every person who had been instrumental in surrendering the charter of a borough. The term proposed for the duration of this" disqualification was seven years. A large proportion of the parliamentary franchise was in the hands of corporations. The clause would have the effect of removing Tory electors, and substituting Whig electors. This attempt at a surprise was finally defeated. Thegross injustice of the clauses — their spirit of vindictiveness — produced a disgust in which the king participated as much as any man. Absent mem' bers rushed to London from every district — and the clauses were r* length rejected. The Tories, now triumphant, tried to carry the Bill of Indemnity for political offences, which had been laid aside in the last Session. So many exceptions to the measure of am nesty were introduced by the opposite faction, that it became a " Authentic!! Memoirs of the Lie of the Duchess of Marlborough," p. 89. 500 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. measure of proscription. William was worn out by these contests'. According to Balcarres, he told the duke of Hamilton, " that he wished he were a thousand miles from England, and that he' had never been king of it." * Burnet gives a circumstantial relation of the effect of these manifestations upon a mind so usually calm and imperturbable. " He was once very near a desperate resolution ; he" thought he could not trust the Tories, and he resolved he would not trust the Whig.". : so he fancied the Tories would be true to the queen, and confide in her, though they would not In him. He therefore resolved to go over to Holland, and leave the govern ment in the queen's hands : so he called the marquis of Carmar then, with the earl of Shrewsbury, and some few more, and told them, he had a convoy ready, and was resolved to leave all in the que3n's hands ; since he did not see how he could extr'cate him self out of the difficulties into which the animosities of parties had brought him : they pressed him vehemently to lay aside all such desperate resolutions, and to comply with the present necessity. Much passion appeared among them : the debate was so warm, that many tears were shed : in conclusion, the king resolved to change his first design; into another better resolution, of going over in person, to put an end to the war in Ireland." j This last res olution came to be known ; and it was determined by the Whigs to oppose it, as a step inconsistent with the health and safety of the king. William took a decisive course. He went to Parlia ment on tbe 27th -of January, determined to prevent any address that should interfere with his "purpose, in his speech from the throne he said, " It is a very sensible affliction to me, to see my good people burthened with heavy taxes ; but, since the speedy recovery of Ireland is, in my opinion, the only means to ease them and to preserve the peace and honour of the nation, I am resolved to go thither in person, and, with the blessing of God Almighty, endeavour to reduce that kingdom, that it may no longer be a charge to this." The Parliament was then prorogued : and, two day; after, dissolved. " There was fierce and great carousing about being elected in the new Parliament." Thus writes Evelyn on the 16th of Feb ruary. '• There was a great struggle all England over in elections," says Burnet; "but the Corporation Bill did so highly provoke all those whom it was to have disgraced, that the Tories were by far the greater number in the new Parliament." A year had passed * Ralph, vol. ii. note at p. ,86. ^ "Own Time," vol, jv.,p. 69. STATE OF THE ARMY IN IRELAND. 501 in which the foundations of civil and religious liberty had been widened and strengthened ; but the constitutional legislation of the Convention Parliament was not likely to excite much popular enthusiasm. The people were heavily taxed to carry on the war On the continent no effectual resistance had been offered to the ambition of France ; and in Ireland James was dictator, at the head of a large military force. A prince with the highest reputa tion for courage and sagacity had come to be king over England ; and yet her navy had been defeated in an encounter with the French ; and the army which had gone to Ireland under Marshal Schomberg had done nothing, and was perishing in its inaction. At the dinner table of the most influential minister, Carmarthen, "a very considerate and sober commander, going for Ireland, re lated to us the exceeding neglect of the English soldiers, suffering severely for want of clothes and necessaries this winter, exceed ingly magnifying their courage and bravery during all their hard ships." * Meagre as are the reports of debates in Parliament, we miy trace, in 1689, complaints of departmental neglect very similar to those which were so loudly outspoken in 1855. Mr, Waller gave an account at the bar of the House of Commons of the state of the army in Ireland. The baggage-horses were left behind at> Chester ; for profit was made by putting them to grass. The sick ness by which Schomberg's forces were terribly reduced, he imputed to tbe great defect of clothing; "all that were well clothed were in health!" He contrasted the care bestowed upon a Dutch regiment in camp with the neglect of the English : " Their officers looked upon their soldiers as their children, and would see them make their huts, pave them, and lay fresh straw ; in the whole Dutch camp scarce two died." Surgeons' medicines were very ill pro vided : " It was reported they had 1700/. worth of medicines, but I know not where they were." In that rainy season " the foreign ers were warmer clothed than our own men, in great coats over their close coats ; of which the English had none." Lastly, the troops " were not well furnished with shoes : some came late ;— they were not consigned to anybody." t The Commons naturally became furious at these recitals of neglect and peculation. Shales, the Commissary of the Stores, was the chief mark for their indigna tion. " If ever you have the war carried on with honour and suc cess," said Colonel Birch, " you must hang this man." The House wanted to criminate higher men than the Commissary of the Stores, * Evelyn, " pjary," February 19. t "fariiam^utary History," voj. .v. col.^. J02 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. whose experience in what was useful as well as what was dishonest had been acquired in the army of James. The Commons resolved upon an indecent address to the king, to ask him to inform them who had recommended Shales. William consulted his higher sense of honour by refusing to be an informer. A wiser course was adopted than hanging Shales. A Commission was sent to Ireland, to remedy these abuses. The state of the navy was not more satis factory than that of the army. The indefatigable Secretary of the navy, Pejpys, though now out of office, had his keen eye upon the abuses of that- department of which he had the most intimate knowl edge of any man. At a dinner at which Evelyn was present, Pepys " deplored the sad condition of our navy, as governed by inexperienced men since the Revolution." He was for building frigates. He desired " they would leave off building such high decks, which were for nothing but to gratify gentlemen-command ers, who must have all their effeminate accommodations, and for pomp. It would be the ruin of our fleets, if such persons were con tinued in command, they neither having experience, nor being cap able of learning, because they would not submit to the fatigue and inconvenience which those who were bred seamen would under go." * The Victualling of the Fleet was as notoriously infamous as the Commissariat of the Army. The Victuallers were ordered by the House into custody; but the affair seems to have evapor ated in talk. " I believe the fleet is as ill victualled as if our en emies had done it," was the sense of the House, thus expressed by Mr. Hampden. " You may talk of raising money, but not of raising seamen," said another member. The seamen would not serve to be starved and poisoned. With a Council in which there was far more hatred than concord ; with a Parliament in which the evils of Party greatly outweighed its advantages ; with a Church equally divided in opinion — "of whom the moderate and sober part were for a speedy reformation of divers things, which it was thought might be made in our Liturgy, for the inviting Dissenters, others more stiff and rigid, for no condescension at all ; " f with the dry rot of corruption in all the administrative departments of govern ment, we can scarcely be surprised that William panted for an other field of action, in which his own energies could be fairly put forth. "The going to a campaign," he said, "was naturally no un pleasant thing to him ; he was sure he understood that be'tter than how to govern England." X And so the sickly man advised with * "Diary," March 7. t Ibid., February 16. X Bumet, vol. iv. p. 8a. OPENING OF THE NEW PARLIAMENT. 503 sir Christopher Wren about building for him a house of wood, that should be carried with the army like a showman's booth ; and though hie constant cough had driven him from Whitehall to Ken sington for purer air, he resolved to take no heed of those who manifested a real or pretended concern for his health. He would see with- his own eyes if affairs in Ireland were irretrievable. Upon the king himself almost wholly devolved the duty of making a fit preparation for his campaign, by searching into the abuses of the military dejpartments, and of remedying evils of such disastrous magnitude He wrote to his friend Portland, after the ^prorogation of Parliament, "All will depend upon success in Irelan:!. I must apply myself entirely to regulate everything in the best way I can. There is no small work on my my hands, being so badly assisted as I am."* At the opening of Parliament on the 20th of March, 1690, some changes- had been made in the ministry, and in the le? ser offices, " so that," says Burnet, " Whig and Tory were now jpretty equally mixed ; and both studied to court the king by making advances upon the money-bills." f The king had a tolerably equal contempt for both factions ; and his sense of the baseness of some jpublic men is recorded by the historian of his own time. Sir John Trevor, who had been Master of the Rolls under James, "being a Tory in principle, undertook to manage that party, provided he was furnished with such sums of money as might purchase some votes ; and ty him began the jpractice of buying off men, in which hitherto the king had kept to stricter rules. I took the liberty once to complain to the king of this method. He said he hated it as much as any man could do ; but he saw it was not possible, considering the corruption of the age, to avoid it, unless he would endanger the whole." X The corruption of the age lasted through three genera tions. It had " lighter wings to fly " when paper-credit came. It grew more rampant under the second George than under the first. It flourished through half the reign of the third George. It would have lasted to our time if the people had not become fully acquaint ed with the proceedings of their representatives. It could not live in the light of public opinion, shed upon the nation by the free publication of the debates. We can scarcely blame king William for using the ready means of self-defence, whilst his enemies freely employed the subtlest arts for his overthrow. It was difficult for him to truit any one. His favourite minister was the Whig » Note in Macaulay, vol. iii. p. 537- * Burnet, vol. iv. p. 71. X Ibid., p. 74. 504 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Shrewsbury. Read his correspondence, and he appears the fairest of advisers. He writes to the king, " I wish you could have established your party upon the moderate and honest principled men of both factions ; but as there be a necessity of declaring, I shall make no difficulty to own my sense, that your majesty and the government are much more safe depending upon the Whigs, whose designs, if any against, are improbable and remoter than with the Tories, who, many of them, questionless, would bring in king James ; and the best of them, I doubt, have a regency still in their heads ; for though I agree them to be the properest instruments to carry the prerogative high, yet I fear they have so unreasonable a venera tion for monarchy, as not altogether to approve the foundation yours is built upon." * William manifested some favour to the Tories, and Shrewsbury resigned the seals as Secretary of State. Burnet says, "he saw the Whigs, by using the king ill, were driving him into the Tories ; and he thought these would serve the king with more zeal if he left his post." William, continues Burnet, "loved the earl of Shrewsbury." The man represented as so bullen and so cold, pressed his favourite Secretary, again arc! again, to hold the seals. Shrewsbury steadily refused, and 1. is '-aj'itation cf mind threw him into a fever that nearly coi.t I ir.i 1 is life." It has been proved, beyond doubt, that this friend of Willi m resigned the seals by the command of king James to whoi.i h.j lui.i tendered his services. James, in a paper submitted to the i rencli !_;ovcrnment in 1692, said, " There is the earl of Shrewsbury, who. being Secre tary of State to the prince of Oraii'.e. surrendered hi i charge by my order." \ Shrewsbury, from wc.iknci.s of character, was f.iitli- less to the master whom he admired ; and his alienation \v_s very temporary. Others were treacherous through the baseness 01 their natures ; and, in betraying the prince whom they had contributed to raise, did not hesiute to betray their country. Whatever may have been the amount of individual baseness, and of party violence, amongst the legislators of this period — how ever unpleasant their jealousy of arbitrary power might have been to a king who truly desired to rule over a free people — the spirit of the Long Parliament had not departed from the second Parliament of the Revolution. However desirous Whig or Tory might be to gain favour with the sovereign, they agreed in refusing to grant the duties of Customs to the crown for life, as they had been granted to William's two predecessors. "Why should they entertain a * Coxe, " Shrewsbury Correspondence," p. 15. t Macaulay, vcl. iii. p.- 596, note. JEALOUSY IN SETTLING THE REVENUE. 505 jealousy of me," the king said to Burnet, "who came to save their religion and liberties, when they trusted king James' so much, who intended to destroy them ? " Wisely and boldly did the bishop answer him: "King James would never have run into those coun sels that ruined him, if he had obtained the revenue only for a short term."* On a previous occasion, when this question of the settle ment of the revenue was raised, William said to Burnet, " he understood the good of a commonwealth as well as of a kingly government ; and it was not easy to determine which was best ; but he was sure the worst of all governments was that of a king without treasure and without power." f We may well believe that William had no desire to use treasure or power for despostic pur poses ; and yet we .may rejoice that the Commons of England stoutly resolved to prevent the possibility of the Crown becoming dangerous by being too independent. For out of the practical working of the Constitution, through many a struggle, it has come to be understood that the sovereign can" have no interest separate from the public advantage ; and that the representatives of the people would grossly err in any attemjjt to lower the personal dignity of the sovereign. The real relations of the executive and the legislative power have practically changed, without any change in the constitutional theory of their rights. Under the well under stood principle that the advisers of the Crown cannot exist with a minority in the House of Commons, the dignity of the Crown is in no degree lessened by any opposition which may enforce a change , of the servants of the Crown. It was otherwise when the sovereign was in a considerable degree his own minister ; and when his ser vants did not act under a joint responsibility. William drew a distinction between the good of a commonwealth and the good of a kinglv government. Practically, the distinction has almost ceased to exist in our times. But we venture to think that our constitu tional historian scarcely makes allowance for the remaining influence of the traditions of the monarchy when he says of William, " he could expect to reign on no other terms than as the chief of a com monwealth." X The Statute-book contains an Act of a dozen lines, which passed with little effectual opposition, although well calculated to produce a trial of strength between the two great parties. It is the Act whereby the Lords and Commons recognise and acknowledge that * " Own Time," vol. iv. p. 75. t Ibid., p. 60. X Hallam, " Constitutional History," chnp. xv. 506 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. William and Mary " were, are, and of right ought to be, by the laws of this realm, our sovereign liege lord and lady, king and queen. "* This Act also declares that all the Acts made in the Parliament assembled on the 13th of February, 1688 [1689], are laws and statutes of this kingdom. Upon-this point the Lords debated long and warmly. In the Commons, the question was settled in two days ; for Somers put the House in a dilemma. This parliament, he said, depends entirely on the foundation of the last. - If that were not a legal parliament, they who were then met, and had taken - the oaths enacted by that Parliament, were guilty of high treason : the laws repealed by it were still in force, so they must presently return to king James." t The Whigs had their triumph in so easily carrying this Bill. It was a triumph of comm6n sense. They were justly defeated upon an attempt to impose a new test upon the people. A Bill was introduced in the House of Commons, requiring every person holding office to abjure king James. To make the proposed measure still more odious, any justice of the peace was empowered to tender the oath of abjuration at his pleasure, and to commit to prison whoever refused to take it. The Bill was rejected by a small majority. The measure, with some modifications, was then tried anew in the House of Peers. " I have taken so many oathg in my time," said lord Wharton, who looked back to the days of the Long Parliament, " that I hope God will forgive me if I have not kept them all. I should be very unwilling to charge myself with more at the end of my days." The old Puritan interpreted the real feelings of every honest, man about the multiplication of political oaths. It was well known that William had no desire for such a measure as this oath ; and thus, after many angry words and insinuations, the abjuration of king James was abandoned. King William strengthened his throne far more effectually than by a test arbitrarily administered, by authorising Carmarthen to present to the Peers an Act of Grace for political offences. Bitter mem ories of the past had prevented the passing of Indemnity Bills. William resolved that the cause of the Revolution should not be disgraced with forfeitures and bloodshed, as was that of the Res toration. The exceptions to the Act of Grace were the surviving regicides — who had been excepted under the Act of Charles II. These were far out of the reach of such a visitation for the crime of forty years standing. Thirty of the evil instruments of James were excepted by name ; and, last of all, " George, lord Jeffreys, * 2 Gul. & Mar. c. 1. ? Burnet, vol. iv. p. 73. WILLIAM GOES TO IRELAND. 507 deceased." This " Act for the King and Queen's most gracious general and free pardon," was passed by both Houses without debate. It was one of the most effectual means to prevent a recur rence of "the long and great troubles and discords that have been within this kingdom." Yet the clemency of William was sneerecT at by those who received its benefits, and condemned by those who were baulked of th Jr revenges. The king closed the Session on the 20th of May ; and an Act having been passed to give the queen power to administer the government in his absence, he prepared to take the conduct of the war in Ireland. William left London on the 4th of June. He had selected nine privy-councillors to advise the queen in the conduct of affairs. It was difficult wholly to rely upon the honesty of this Council, in which there was a mixture of the leading men of the opposite factions. It was a time of great anxiety. Plots were in course of detection ; invasion might be expected. The king determined to go where the necessity was most pressing. " He seemed to have a great weight upon his spirits, from the state of his affairs, which was then very cloudy. He said, for his own part, he trusted in God, and would either go through with his business, or perish in it. He only pitied the poor queen, repeating that twice with great tenderness ; and wished that those who loved him would wait much on her, and assist her."* William had done everything in his power to ensure success in his great enterprise. Schomberg had been largely reinforced. His army had grievously suffered from sickness and neglect. The pestilence which had thinned its ranks was deemed by the court of king James, " a visible mark of --God's judgment upon that wicked and rebellious generation."! William, " a fatalist in religion " according to Smollett, had a rational confidence that God might manifest His judgments through the industry and zeal of His creatures ; and he had set about to repair all that had been amiss in the previous organisation of the Irish army. He had now in Ireland thirty-six thousand troops, well fed, properly clothed, not wanting in the munitions of war, pre pared by his own vigilant superintendence to take the field with those advantages without which the skill of a general, and the bravery of his men, may be thrown away. The English knew how carefully it had been endeavoured to repair the evils of the last autumn and winter. Still the people were anxious and doubtful. There is a curious instance of the uncertainty attached by publifi * Burnet, vol. iv. p. 82. t " Life of James II." vol. ii. p. 385. 508 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. opinion to the determination of the king to attempt the reduction of Ireland, — an instance also of the gambling spirit of that age. R0w<- land Davies, Dean of Ross, who had been ejected from his ben efices, is going with the army of Wiiliam as a Chaplain. He arid four of his friends desire to raise money ; and they borrow four hundred pounds under a bond, signed and sealed at Jonathan's Coffee-house, the great resort of stock-jobbers, " for the payrherit of six hundred pounds within a month after king William and queen Mary are in actual possession of Dublin and Cork." * Of the condition and prospects of king James, a lamentable account is given by his official biographer. The duke of Berwick had been beaten at Belturbet ; Charlemont had surrendered ; but these mis fortunes " were nothing in comparison of the disappointments the king met with from the court of France." Louis would not con sent to make England the seat of war instead of Ireland. He would not believe that the friends of James in England, at the head of an Irish and French army, would soon "make the English weary of resisting God and their duty." f Louis would only consent to send six thousand men into Ireland. The English were masters of Ulster. The Catholics who quitted it upon Schomberg's landing brought such prodigious flocks of cattle with them, as ate up the greatest part of the grass and corn of other counties, according to the lugubrious memoir writer. The Rapparees destroyed on all sides ; there was no corn nor meal to feed the army ; no cloth, no leather ; " and the brass money put an absolute stop to importa tion." — We cannot have a more striking picture of the effects of an improvident and iniquitous administration of public affairs. Ulster, at the beginning of June, was big with expectation of the arrival of king William. Absurd reports preceded him. An officer came from London to Belfast, and reported that the parlia ment was adjourned ; that the king was speedily to set out, "and will bring with him four hundred thousand men." j On the 7th, the busy chaplain, preaching one day, dining jovially in the English quarters on another, saw many troops landing at Carrickfergus, and the train of artillery in the harbour. On the loth, in the evening, on a false report that the king was landed, "all the country flamed with bonfires." § On the 14th, over a bowl of punch, " we received the news of the king' ; 1 mding, and being at Belfast, and spent the night jollily." On th . 15th, the officers of * "Journal" of Rowland Davies, p. 101. t "Life of James II." vol. i. p. 336. X Rowland Davies, p. 117. j j^id., p. 119. THE BOYNE. SC9 the various regiments crowded round William, and were presented to him. Troops continued to arrive, "insomuch that there was not less than five hundred sail of ships together in the Lough." William reviewed the troops on the 17th and on the 19th, and then gave orders that they should march after him. The army was- cotnposed not only of English and Englishers. There were Brandenburgers, Dutch, Danes, and French Huguenots. The spirit of the king triumphed over his feeble body. He was all animation. His eye sparkled with the exultation of hope. " I will not let the grass grow under my feet," he exclaimed. James ap peared equally alert at the call of danger. He left Dublin on the 16th of June. William's army was at Loughbrickland on the 26th of June, consisting of thirty-six thousand men. The troops had manifested a very different conduct from those of James, who had ravaged the country in the preceding year ; for William had issued an order that they " do so carry themselves both in garrison, quarters, and wheresoever they shall march, as persons ought to do who are under military discipline ; " that they, should not pre sume to rob or spoil, to do violence or extort, " but that they duly pay such reasonable rates for their provisions," as shall be ordered and appointed.* The captains of king William's forces paid in a better coin than the brass money of king James. It was expected that the Irish army would have disputed the passage of William at the pass near Moyra Castle, now known as Ravensdale ; but they left it open ; and on the 27th the English army was at Dundalk forming " a camp at least three miles in length, in two lines." f King James still retired as William advanced ; but at length, on the 30th, as the English army approached Drogheda, the enemy was seen encamped on the opposite south bank of the Boyne. The army of James was in a strong defensive position. The stream which divided the counties of Louth and Meath was be tween him and his rival. " The river was deep, and rose very high every tide ; and after these difficulties were surmounted, there was a morass to be passed, and behind it a miry ground." X The camp of James on the Meath side was defended by intrenchments and batteries. The fortress of Drogheda, on the Louth side, was held by the Irish, and displayed the ensigns of James and of Louis. The numbers of his enemy were variously reported to William. He had received tolerably accurate information from a man who » Harris, " Life of William," Appendix xl. t Rowland Davies, p. mi. } Harris, p. 266. 510 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. knew how to deal with exaggerations. An officer who had de serted from James's army greatly magnified their real amount. Mr. Cox, a civilian with sir Robert Southwell, bade the officer look upon the English camp and say what their numbers were. " He confidently affirmed them to be more than double their real num ber; whence his majesty perceived he was a conceited ill-' guesser." * William, surrounded by his generals, rode along the bank of the river on the morning of the 30th to inspect the posi tion of the enemy. "We shall soon be better acquainted with their numbers," he observed.f He alighted from his horse near the village of Old Bridge. It was a rising ground, within musket- shot of the river. His breakfast was spread on the grass, and he rested for an hour. On the opposite bank there were watchful eyes directed towards the group which surrounded William ; and it was soon perceived that no common enemy was within the reach of cannon. Two field pieces were quickly brought down from the hill, and planted in a ploughed field screened t>y a hedge. The king had remounted. One piece is fired, and the horse of prince George of Hesse is hit. Another shot, and William himself is struck. The ball has rent his buff-coat, and grazed his right shoulder. His officers crowd around, for the king stooped upon his horse's neck. He alights, and the slight wound is dressed. A shout went through the camp of James ; and the tale passed from mouth to mouth that the prince of Orange was killed. The rumour soon crossed the sea. On the 2nd of July feux-de-joie were fired in Paris, to proclaim the great triumph. The next day had its own tale, of which James himself was the bearer. William was soon riding through every part of his army ; and when the sun of that last of June was set, he was still in the saddle, making ar rangements by torchlight for the coming struggle. He had re solved to pass the river the next morning. The enterprise was thought by Schomberg too dangerous. William felt that there was greater danger in deiaying a decisive action. The event proved that the daring of the comparatively inexjpericuced prince was a better policy than the caution of the old hero of many a well foughten field. The right wing of William's army was the earliest in its move ments after day-break on that first of July. It was led by the son of marshal Schomberg, accompanied by the earl of Portland. There were twenty-four squadrons of horse and dragoons, and six * Harris, p. 267. t Ibid. BATTLE OF THE BOYNE. 5 II regiments of foot under the command of Meinhart Schomberg, the marshal's brave son. Every man had a green bough in his hat, according to an order issued by the king on the previous night. This right wing marched towards the bridge of Slane, about five miles from the main camp. Rowland Davies, who was with this division, says, " at two fords we passed the river, where there were six squadrons of the enemy to guard the pass." _ Other accounts represent the right wing as passing over the bridge of Slane. Whether by. the fords or by the bridge, the passage was resisted by some squadrons of horse, but they soon gave way. The French general Lauzun saw that the movement of the English right wing must be met, and he rajjidly moved his best troops to prevent the rear of James's army being attacked. " As soon as we passed the river," says Davies, "we saw the enemy marching towards us, and that they drew up on the side of a hill in two lines. " Portland recommended the horse and foot to be drawn up also in two lines, intermixing horse and foot, squadron with battalion — "grounded upon the example of Caesar, at the battle of Pharsalia."* Rowland Davies parades no such learned authority, in relating the same fact ; and he says, " thus the armies stood for a considerable time, an impassable bog being between thern." Reinforcements of foot having arrived, "we altered our line of battle, drawing all our horse into the right wing ; and so, outflanking the enemy, we marched round the bog and engaged them, rather pursuing than fighting them, as far as Duleek." t It was arranged that king William should lead the left wing, and pass the Boyne about a mile above Drogheda. This division consisted wholly of cavalry. Marshal Schomberg, commanding the centre, composed almost entirely of infantry, was to cross the river about half a mile higher up at the ford of Old Bridge. Count Solmes led his Dutch regiment of guards through the rapid water, though up to their middle. The English foot crossed up to their armpits. The Danes and French refugees also waded through the stream at other points. The south bank was bristling with Irish horse and foot. Some attempt at resistance was made by the Irish infantry while the greater part of the troops were still in the water; but at last the columns had crossed. Then the Irish foot would not face these resolute soldiers of many nations. An ancient fear of the Danes perhaps contributed to their jpanic. But the Irish cavalry, led by Hamilton, fought with desperate courage * Harris, p. 268. * Journal of Davies, p. 123. 512 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. against the infantry that had gained the shore, or were still in the bed of the river. The issue was very doubtful. Caillemot, the commander of the Huguenots, was killed. The veteran Schom berg saw the danger; and rushing to the river without waiting to put on his cuirass, crossed, and led the retreating Protestants, ex claiming, " Allons, messieurs ! Voila vos persecuteurs." Schom berg fell in the confusion ; his skull was cloven. On the same ground fell the heroic defender of Londonderry, George Walker. At this critical juncture William arrived on the field. He had brought his left wing across the stream, with some difficulty. There was a rapid tide. The bed of the stream was in some places a deep mud. His own horse floundered in the miry bot tom, or was carried along by the rushing tide. \ But the king and his cavalry were at last on firm ground. William drew his sword, and was soon in the heat of the fight. The Irish horse retreated tow ards Donore, about a mile from the pass. Here, from his tent on the hill near the church, now a ruin, king James had watched the pro gress of the battle. Here his retreating horse made a stand. They turned upon their pursuers, and William's cavalry began to give way. He rode up to the Enniskilleners, and exclaimed, " What will you do for me ?" " It is the king," said their officer. "You shall be my guards to day," cried William, and led on the yeomen who were conquerors on the field of Newton Butler. The battle of the Boyne was not yet won. Again and again " Little Will " * rallied his troops whenever they gave way, and brought them up to the charge. The fate of the day did not long remain in sus pense. Hamilton, the traitorous messenger to Tyrconnel, was taken prisoner. "Will the Irish fight any more ? " said William. " Yes, sir, upon my honour, I believe they will." " Your honour ! " exclaimed the injured prince ; and then directed that his prisoner's wounds should be looked to. There was little more fighting. James saw the day was going against him ; and he mounted his horse and fled, the French covering his retreat. At nine o'clock that night he arrived in Dublin. It is remarkable that a battle so momentous in its consequences, should have been attended with so small a sacrifice of life. The loss in James' army did not exceed fifteen hundred men, chiefly cavalry. On William's side the loss of men was not more than five hundred. If we may judge from a passage in Rowland Davies, • " Little Will, the scourge of France, No Godhead, but the first of men." — Prior. William III. at the Battle of the Boyne. —Vol. iv. 512. FLIGHT OF JAMES. — HIS SPEECH AT DUBLIN. 513 the steadiness of the Dutch guards repelled the attacks of the Irish horse, by a mode of fighting which is mentioned as if it were novel : " Count Solmes marched over the river with the blue Dutch regi ment of guards. No sooner were they up the hill, but the enemy's horse fell on them, ours with the king being about half a mile lower, passing at another ford. At the first push, tbe first rank only fired, and then fell on their faces, loading their muskets again as they lay on the ground. At the next charge, they fired a volley of three ranks. Then, at the next, the first rank got up and fired again,- which being received by a choice squadron of the enemy, consist ing mostly of officers, they immediately fell in upon the Dutch as having spent all their front fire. But the two rear ranks drew up in two platoons and flanked the enemy across ; and the rest, screw ing their swords into their muskets, received the charge with all imaginable bravery, and in a minute dismounted them all. The Derry regiment also sustained them bravely, and as they drew off maintained the same ground with great slaughter." Such was the battle of the Boyne, in which Protestant Europe was fighting against Roman Catholic ascendancy, in the island which had been distracted for a century and a half with the bitter est wars of religion. The Londoner, the Scot, and the English settler of Ulster, the Dutch Calvinist and the French Huguenot, stood the brunt of that first of July, with equal resolution and equal confidence in their leader. A great principle was manifested in this battle — a principle not always understood by statesmen or warriors — that the results of a victory are not to be estimated by the numbers of killed and wounded on the side of the vanquished — nor by the possession of the field of battle — not even by the submission of the district in which the conquering army has gathered its laurels. Looking at the mere material results of the ist of July, there was no sufficient cause for the dispersion of the Irish army, many of whom James had seen fighting bravely in his cause as he looked upon the valley of the Boyne from the hill of Donore. The real victory was in its moral consequences — in the instant and complete exposure of the character of th : man for whom the better part of the Irish Catho lics had been fighting, out of an honest conviction that they were in arms for the cause of their country and their religion. James first deserted them in his intense selfishness : he afterwards insulted them in his cowardly ingratitude. On the morning of the 2nd of July, he assembled the magistrates of Dublin. He said that he had 514 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. been often told, that when it came to the touch, the Irish would not bear the brunt of a battle. He had provided a good army, and had made all preparations to engage a foreign invader, and he had found the fatal truth of which he had been forewarned. Though the army did not desert him as they did in England, yet when the trial came they basely fled the field, and left it a spoil to his enemies. Thenceforward he determined never to head an Irish army, and now resolved to shift for himself, as they themselves .must do. He exhorted them to j>revent the plunder or destruction of the city ; and to submit to the prince of Orange, who was a merci ful man. After this, the most devoted slave of the house of Stuart would perfectly understand that this ungenerous and cruel attack of James upon his army was a mere selfish expedient to cover the ignominy of his own desertion of the cause for which his adherents had fought — some with admirable resolution ; others as well as the miserable discipline in which they had been trained would lead a reasonable man to expect. They had been trained to plunder, to ravage, to make war with the instinct of savages ; and when they had to meet the shock of civilized warfare, they fled as a lawless multitude always will flee, regardless of everything but their own safety. The battle of the Boyne manifested tbe utter disorganisa tion of the principle force by which Ulster had been wasted and harassed during a year of evil government. There was another battle being fought on the south-eastern coast of England, at the very hour when the shot that was fired across the Boyne had very nearly settled the question whether the Revo lution of 1688 should be a striking-jpoint in a race of honour and prosperity, or a broken trophy of one brief and useless effort for liberty and the rights of conscience. The departure of William for Ireland was the signal for an attack upon the English coasts, which was to be accompanied with an insurrection of the Jacobites. A fleet sailed from Brest under the Count de Tourville. The English fleet was in the Downs, under the command of the earl of Torrington. He sailed to the back of the Isle of Wight, and was there joined by a squadron of Dutch vessels under a skilful com mander, Evertsen. Queen Mary and her Council were aware that the French fleet had left Brest. It soon became known that the English admiral had quitted his position off St. Helen's, and had sailed for the Straits of Dover upon the approach of the French. The Council determined to send Torrington positive orders to fight. The French fleet was superior in vessels and guns to the ENERCETIC CONDUCT OF THE QUEEN. 515 combined English and Dutch fleet ; but the inequality was not so great that a man of the old stamp of Blake would have feared to risk a battle. Torrington did something even worse than hesitate to fight. He let the brunt of the conflict fall upon the Dutch. He put Evertsen in the van, and brought very few of his own squadron into action. The Dutch fought with indomitable cour age and obstinacy, but were at length compelled to draw off. The gazers from the high downs of Beachy Head witnessed the shame ful flight of a British admiral to seek the safety of the Thames. When the news came to London that Torrington had left the Channel to a triumphant enemy — when an invasion was imminent, for England was without regular troops — when jjlotters were all around, and arrests of men of rank, even of Clarendon, the queen's kinsman, were taking jjlace — then, indeed, there was an hour almost of despair such as was felt when Dc Ruyter sailed up the Medway. But the very humiliation roused the spirit of the people. The queen was universally beloved ; and, although studiously avoiding, when the king was at hand, any interference in public affairs, she took at once a kingly part in this great crisis. " The queen balanced all things with an extraordinary temper," writes Burnet. She sent for the Lord Mayor of London; and inquired what the citizens would do, should the enemy effect a landing ? The Lord Mayor returned to the queen with an offer of a hundred thousand pounds ; of nine thousand men of the city trainbands, ready instantly to march wherever ordered; and a proposal for the Lieutenancy to provide and maintain six additional regiments of foot; and of the Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council to raise a regiment of horse, and a thousand dragoons, by voluntary contributions.* The same spirit was manifested throughout the land. The people might grumble against the Dutch ; they might feel some commiseration for an exiled prince ; they might be divided about questions of Church government; they might com plain that the Revolution had brought them increased taxation. But they would have no Papist government thrust upon them by the French king. They would not undo the work of theii own hands. The gloom for the disaster of Beachy Head was quickly forgotten. On the 4th cf July a messenger had brought letters to the queen which told that a great victory had been won in Ireland, and that the king was safe ; and, says Evelyn in his quiet way, " there was much public rejoicing." * Maitland's " London," vol. i. 495. 516 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER XXVI. James embarks for France.— William enters Dublin.— The French devastate Teign. mouth.— William's march to Limerick.— Siege of Limerick.— The siege raised.— William goes to England.— Parliament — War supply.— England and Continental Politics.— William leaves for Holland.— Congress at the Hague.— Mons capitulates to the French.— Vacant sees in England filled up.— Plot of Preston and Ashton.— Treason laws. — Marlborough in F landers. — Limerick surrenders to Ginkell.— Treaty of Limerick. King James, "in compliance with the advice of all his friends, resolved to go for France, and try to do something more effectual on that side, than he could hope from so shattered and disheart ened a body of men as now remained in Ireland." * " Request of friends " is the apology for the foolish actions of the weak king as well as of the vain scribbler. On the 3rd of July, James quitted Dublin with all speed, about five in the morning; left two troops of horse at Bray, to defend the bridge there against any pursuers ; rode over , the Wicklow mountains, and baited near Arklow; "mended his pace" when four French officers maintained that the enemy was not far behind ; and never stopped till he got to Dun- cannon about sunrise. His attendants found a merchant ship at Passage. The captain was persuaded to take James on board in the evening. They sailed for Kinsale ; and the next day the royal fugitive was secure in a French frigate, and was landed safely at Brest. f James repaired to St. Germains, where "his Most Chris tian Majesty came to see him ; and in general terms promised all imaginable kindness and support." The sanguine exile having abandoned Ireland, had his ready scheme for invading England, " now naked and ungarnished of troops." Louis received the pro ject coldly ; and, finally, would have nothing to do with the affair ; although James magnanimously offered to go with a fleet, either with or without an army, for he was sure " his own sailors would never fight against one under whom they so often had conquered." X His Most Christian Majesty pretended illness when his brother of * " Life of James II." Own Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 401. t IbuU X Dalrymple. WILLIAM ENTERS DUBLIN. 517 England came to pester him with his new demands for ships and troops. " The court of France could not forbear speaking great disrespect, even in his own hearing; which the queen seemed much more sensible of than he did. " * The courtiers of Versailles could guess at the truth ; although " the few English courtiers who stayed with the queen in France, to justify the flight of their king, did not spare calumniating the Irish." They averred " that the Irish abandoned their prince, and left him exposed to the enemy; " and this version of the cause of James's return was so believed by the uninformed, that the Irish who had been refugees in France since the days of Cromwell, "durst not walk abroad or appear in the streets, the people were so exasperated against them." f On the day that James fled from Dublin, the citizens had to apprehend two sorts of danger. The forces of James, scattered about the vicinity, pressed by hunger, might return and rifle the town. The lowest of the Dublin populace, in a pretended zeal for religion, threatened to burn and plunder the houses of the Papists. The city was saved from these calamities chiefly by the firmness of captain Robert Fitzgerald. X On the 3rd, the camp of William on the Boyne was broken up. On the 4th, the Dutch guards took possession of Dublin Castle. On the 5th, the head-quarters of the king were at Ferns ; and on the 6th, being Sunday, he rode to Dublin, and in the cathedral of St. Patrick returned thanks to God for the success of his arms. William, however, continued to sleep in his camp. On the 8th, "his Majesty in person viewed and took a general muster of all the army, and was fourteen hours on horse back ; only for one quarter did he alight to eat and drink." § The news of the disgrace of Beachy Head had reached Ireland on the loth, when the king, contemplating a return to England, resolved to secure Waterford, as the most important harbour of the Eastern coast. On the nth of July the army was on its march. Rowland Davies records how. in defiance of the royal proclamation, the troops " robbed and pillaged all the road along." Execution fol lowed execution. On the 14th, on the march to Carlow, " as we passed, two of the Enniskillen dragoons hung by the wayside, with papers on their breasts exposing their crime ; and thereby our march was very regular without any such excursions or pillaging * Dartmouth's note in Burnet, vol. iv. p. 100. t "Macarhe Excidium," Camden Society edit. p. 41. X Harris, p. 273. § Rowland Davies, p. ia6. 518 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. as before." * On the 21st, Waterford was in possession of William's troops, the garrison having capitulated. Ihe king then determined to return to Dublin, with the view of embarking for England. With a French fleet in the Channel, there was now greater danger to be met on the English shores, than in the resist ance which continued to be made in Ireland. The forces which had been scattered on the ist of Jul)' had gathered around Limer ick, and were prepared to defend that city. Officers and soldiers, without orders from their superiors, without a leader, all flocked to Limerick, " as if they had been all guided thither by some secret instinct of nature." f But, irregularly fortified, and its defence left to the Irish, it was considered as likely soon to fall. On his road to Dublin, on the 27th, more accurate intelligence from Eng land had reached the king, and he determined to invest Limerick in person. The shameful discomfiture of the allied fleet at Beachy Head had not been followed up by the French so as to produce any re sults that should give serious alarm to William. On the 22nd of July, the French admiral, Tourville, was anchored in Torbay, with the fleet which had chased Torrington to the mouth of the Thames ; and he had been reinforced with a number of galleys, rowed by slaves. The whole fleet was employed to transport troops. The approach of danger had roused up the spirit of the July of 1588. The beacons are again blazing on the Devonshire hills. From every road in the interior the veomen of the West are gathering on the coast, not shrinking from trying their strength against the veterans of France. Tourville loses faith in the assur ances of the Stuart courtiers, that all England would be up to aid in his enterprise. All England is shouting ¦' God bless king Wil liam and queen Mary." But Tourville will do something. He lands some troops at Teignmouth, which Burnet calls a "misera ble village," but which the inhabitants represented as consisting of two towns, having three hundred houses. The people of Teign mouth obtained a brief for their losses : and in this document they say that " the French fleet, riding in Torbay, where all the forces of our county of Devon were drawn up to oppose their landing, several of their galleys drew off from their fleet, and made towards a weak unfortified place called Teignmouth, about seven miles to the eastward of Torbay." The narrative then continues to de scribe the ravages of these heroes :— " Coming very near, and hav- * Rowland Davies, p. 128. t " Macaria: Excidium. WILLIAMS MARCH TO LIMERICK. 519 ing played the cannon of their galleys upon the town, and shot near two hundred great shot therein, to drive away the poor in habitants, they landed about seven hundred of their men, and be gan to fire and plunder the towns of East and West Teignmouth- which consist of about three hundred houses ; and in the space of three hours ransacked and plundered the said towns, and a village called Shaldon, lying on the other side of the river, and burnt and destroyed one hundred and sixteen houses, together with eleven ' ships and barks that were in the harbour. And to add sacrilege to their robbery and violence, they in a barbarous manner entered the two churches of the said towns, and in the most unchristian manner tore the Bibles and Common Prayer-books in pieces, scat tering the leaves thereof about the streets, broke down the puhpits, overthrew the Communion-tables, together with many other marks of a barbarous and enraged cruelty. And such goods and mer chandises as they could not, or durst not, stay to carry away, for fear of our forces, which were marching to oppose them, they spoilt and destroyed, killing very many cattle and hogs, which they left dead in the streets." After these feats, Tourville sailed away to France ; and left behind him an amount of indignation that was worth more for defence than even the troops of horse raised by the citizens of London. The brief of the " poor inhabitants " of the towns of East and West Teignmouth and Shaldon, — who " be ing in great part maintained by fishing, and their boats, nets, and other fishing-craft being plundered and consumed in the com mon flames," had lost, as they alleged, eleven thousand pounds — went through every parish from the Land's-end to the East, South, and North ; and every penny that was dropped in the plate at the church door was accompanied with the pious hope that England might have strength from above to resist the Papists who burnt fishing-huts, and tore the Bible in pieces, and who would ravage this island as they had ravaged the Palatinate. On the 8th of August king William's main army was encamped at Cahirconlish, about six miles from Limerick. "As we came up," says Davies, " we saw houses in the country round on fire, which put the king into some concern." The earl of Portland had advanced with a large body of horse and foot within cannon-shot of the city ; and in the evening of the 8th William himself viewed the position in which the strength of the Irish Catholics was now concentrated. The French General, Lauzun, had declared that the place could not resist the attack of the advancing army. With 520 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the pedantry that sometimes clings to military science as well as to other sciences, he trusted more to walls and moats, such as Vau- ban constructed on the French frontier, than to resolute hearts, by which Limerick only could be defended. He left the Irish to thei'r fate. The Irish resolved to redeem the dishonour of the Boyne. They had an intrepid counsellor in Sarsfield, their general, who put his own resolute spirit into the twenty thousand defenders of the city. Lauzun and Tyrconnel had marched away to Galway, as the English advanced guard approached. As the setting sun flashed on the broad expanse of the Shannon, William would see an old town entirely surrounded by the main stream and a branch of the great river, and connected with another town by a single bridge. The town on the island, with its ancient castle built by king John on the bank of the stream, was known as the English town. The other was known as the Irish town. The eye of the tactician would quickly see the capacity for defence of this posi tion, even though its walls were not of the most scientific con struction. The English town was accessible only through the lower Irish town. The Shannon, in a season of wet, overflowed its flat margin. " The city of Limerick," says one at whom some may laugh as an authority, "lies, an' please your honour, in the middle of a devilish wet swampy country. * * * 'Tis all cut through with drains and bogs."* Thus naturally defended, a besieging army had many difficulties to encounter, and there could be no want of supjjlies to the besiegers from the open country of Clare and Galway. The river approach from the sea was commanded at this time by a French squadron. William looked upon Limerick, and determined to commence the siege. On the 9th the main body of his army advanced. "When we came near the town, and found all the bridges within a mile of the city lined by the enemy, the king or dered a detachment of grenadiers to go down and clear them, which theyimmediatelydid, with all the bravery imaginable."! ThepecuUar missiles of the grenadiers thus employed, are called " new invented engines ; " X and the Irishman of this period is represented as ready to give his one cow, if he could be safe " without these French and Dutch grenados." § Before the night of the 9th, the Irish town, according to Davies, was invested " from river to river." The ex- * Corporal Trim, in "Tristram Shandy." Sterne, says Lord Macaulay, "was brought up at the knees of old soldiers of William." t Davies. t " Macaria: Excidium." § Notes to the same, by Mr. Crofton Croker. SIEGE OF LIMERICK. 52 1 pression has reference to the remarkable curve of the Shannon in its course to the sea, before it reaches the island on which tfcs English town was built. The river thus encloses, in the form of a horseshoe, a long and narrow tongue of land, but not insulated from the country on the southern bank. William's position was taken up partly on this space between the windings of the stream, and partly on the south bank, near the Irish town. For several days the siege was not actively prosecuted, for the battering train had not arrived.. On the night of the 10th, Sarsfield, with about five hundred horse, passed out of Limerick, crossing the Shannon at Killaloe, with the object of intercepting the train of artillery and a supply of military stores and provisions, coming to the besiegers from Dublin. The convoy had arrived within eight miles of the English position. The ruined castle of Ballyneedy was at hand to offer a place of safety for the waggons and guns; but the escort was scattered about in the open plain, securely sleeping whilst a few sentinels watched. Sarsfield suddenly came down from the mountains ; killed most of the too confident escort, the rest flying for their lives ; loaded the guns to the muzzles, and half buried them ; heaped up the barrels of powder around the guns, with a pile of waggons and stores ; fired a train ; and was safe in Limerick before the dawn. Part of the army was at Drumkeen, waiting for the heavy cannon, which were expected to be within three miles of them on the night of the nth. "About three in the morning we were all awakened by the firing of two great cannon near us, which made our house shake, and all within it startle ; and about an hour after were alarmed by a man that fled to us almost naked, who as sured us that the enemy had fallen upon us, taken all our cannon, ammunition, and money, and cut off the guard." * Sarsfield attrib uted great importance to the success of this daring enterprise ; for he told a lieutenant who was taken prisoner, that if he had failed he should have given up all as lost, and have made his way to France. The loss of the cannon and stores was partially repaired by the arrival of two guns from Waterford. But that surprise was in some degree more fatal to the besiegers than in the actual havoc and loss. The success of the exploit gave new com age to those who resolved to defend their city against an army not greatly superior in numbers to themselves. The besiegers were propor tionately depressed, for they knew that the materials for a bombard ment were insufficient. On the night of the 17th the forces of * Davies's Journal, p. 136, 522 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. William entered the trenches of the besieged ; and the same des perate work went forward till the 27th, when a general assault was determined upon. The attack was unsuccessful. As the troops of William mounted a breach with the most determined bravery, the Irish repulsed them with equal resolution. A fort, called the Black Fort, was stormed and carried ; when a magazine was ex ploded, by which the greater part of a Brandenburg regiment was destroyed. After four hours of desperate fighting, the besiegers retired, with fearful loss on both sides. At a council of war on the 29th it was determined to raise the siege. On the 30th king William was on his way to Waterford ; and the next day the be siegers had quitted their trenches, and the camp was broken up. There was a reason for this determination of the council of war, even more powerful than the gallant resistance of the Irish. An other assault might be more successful ; for in this failure of the 27th some of the besiegers had penetrated to the very streets of the English town. But the elements were opposed to the farther progress of the siege. Evelyn writes in his Diary, " The unsea sonable and most tempestuous weather happening, the naval expe dition is hindered, and the extremity of wet causes the siege of Limerick to be raised." Tlje duke of Berwick asserted that when the siege was raised not a drop of rain had fallen. Rowland Davies, on the 25th of August, says, that day " proved so extremely wet that no one could stir ; " but he does not mention bad weather again till the 9th, when in the camp near Thurles the evening " proved extremely wet and stormy." In this uncertain condition of the evidence to disprove the insinuation of Berwick, that the wet weather was a pretence of king William to cover the shame of defeat, the testimony of the humourist who preserved " the tradi tions of the English mess tables," is worth something. "There was such a quantity of rain fell during the siege, the whole country was like a puddle ; 'twas that, and nothing else, which brought on the flux, and which had like to have killed both his honour and my self. Now there was no such thing, after the first ten days, con tinued the corporal, for a soldier to be dry in his tent, without cutting a ditch all around it, to draw off the water." * King William landed at Bristol on the 6th of September; and slowly travelled to London. The renown of his victory at the Boyne was slightly diminished by his repulse at Limerick; but the English of all ranks felt proud of their sovereign, and had confidence * " Tristram Shandy," vol. iii. c. xl. PARLIAMENT. — WAR SUPPLY. 523 in his energy and sagacity. His reception by the people was as en thusiastic as could be indicated by huzzas and bonfires, — by peals of bells and loyal addresses. The parliament was to meet on the 2nd of October. In the interval an .expedition had set sail for Ireland, tinder the command of Marlborough. On the 22nd of Sejptember the fleet was disembarking troops near Cork. The forces of Marl borough were soon joined by a portion of the army from Limerick, under the duke of Wtirtemberg. The German prince and the English earl settled a dispute about precedence, by agreeing that they should command on alternate days. Marlborough here dis played that genius which was to culminate in victories far greater than had ever been achieved by English generalshijp. Cork capitu lated, after a struggle of forty-eight hours, on the 29th. On the 30th the Protestant magistrates of Cork proclaimed the king and queen. Marlborough did not wait to receive the freedom of the city, in the silver box which the Corporation voted him. He was on his march to Kinsale ; and his cavalry arrived there in time to save the town from, destruction, it having been fired by the Irish. The garrison, after a short resistance, also capitulated. Marlbor ough accomplished these successes with no great loss of men in action ; but many perished from the diseases incident to the season and the climate. The duke of Grafton, who had accompanied the expeditions as a volunteer, was wounded in the attack upon Cork, and died on the 9th of October. The spot where he fell is now called Grafton's alley.* The second Session of the second Parliament of William and Mary was opened by the king on the 2nd of October. His partial success in Ireland was modestly alluded to, with one slight refer ence to his own exertions : " I neither spared my person nor my pains, to do you all the good I could." He told the Houses that the whole support of the Confederacy abroad would absolutely de pend upon the speed and vigour of their proceedings in that Session. The Parliament testified its belief that the support of the Confed eracy was a national object, by voting, in less than a fortnight, more than two millions and a half for maintaining an army ofnearly seventy thousand men ; and a further sum of eighteen hundred thousand pounds for the navy and ordnance. So large a supply had never before been voted by Parliament for warlike operations—" the vastest sum that ever a king of England had asked of his people." f This supply was to be raised by a monthly assessment on land, by * Note of the Editor of Davies's Journal. t Burnet, vol. iv. p. 113. 524 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. doubling the excise duties, and by increasing the customs' duties on certain articles imported. The community in every rank of life would thus feel the cost of this war. Yet the House of Commons was almost unanimous in voting tbe supply. Burnet wrote to Mr. Johnston, the English minister at Berlin, that the members " dare not go back into their countries, if they do not give their mouey liberally. * * * We seem not to be the same people that we were a year ago ; and the nation seems resolved to support the king in the war, to the utmost to which it can possibly stretch it self." * Burnet attributes this change to the outrages of the French at Teignmou'.h, and to the gallant behaviour of William in Ireland as contrasted with the meanness of James. This national conviction of the necessity of earning on the war with extraordi nary vigour may be ascribed to more general causes. Imperfect as were the sources of political information, the English people well knew that an European war against the preponderance of France was inevitable. The hostile attitude of the French kino- towards England was essentially connected with the long-formed determination of the prince of Orange, to organize a general resist ance to the designs of Louis against the independence of nations. William had freed England from a bigoted despotism, and at the same time had put himself at the head of the European coalition. Louis, in his determined endeavour to restore the deposed king — untaught as James was by misfortune, and as obstinate as ever to maintain the prerogatives which he claimed by Divine right — was attacking his continental enemies in the most vital part. William, as King of England, wielded an authority far greater than William as Stadtholder of Holland. When the English people took William as their king, they accepted the involvements 'of his continental politics as the unavoidable price of their liberty. Had they con tinued under the rule of James, they might have been spared the vast burdens of a continental war by remaining in a state of semi- vassalage to France. The condition of peace was slavery. They had made their election for freedom at what ever cost, and they were willing to abide by it. The Englishman of 1690 saw, what only dreamers have ever failed to see, that a state of isolation from continental quarrels was simply an impossibility, if his country were to hold her rank among the nations. He knew how she had sunk in all the attributes of honest greatness under the base gov ernment of the Restoration. He knew that she had again a leader, * Quoted in Ralph's History, vol. ii. p. 247. ENGLAND AND CONTINENTAL POLITICS. 525 who would strive to bring her back to the position in which Crom well had placed her as the head of the Protestant States. But he also knew that, the idea of the isolation of England from con tinental politics being a delusion, it was better for her to fight her battles on the banks of the Meuse or the Scheldt than on the banks of the Thames or the Humber. In the operations of the Confederacy to which England was committed by the sovereign of the Revolution, there might be the mistakes inseparable from conflicting interests. Perfect co-operation in such alliances was scarcely to be expected. The same summer that saw" the disgrace of Beachy Head and the havoc of Teignmouth, also saw the defeat of the allies at Fleurus by the greatest of French generals, Luxem burg. The thought might enter many minds that the power of the great French king was too mighty ; had such support in the most skilful of diplomatists ; was too entirely under the direction of one head, to be adequately resisted by any combination of jealous courts, held together onlv by the energy of a prince of infirm health, and blunt manners, who was indeed their natural and acknowedged leader, but as such leader of great kings and petty dukes — the pettiest the most proud and punctilious — exposed to intrigues that would mar every well-concerted project, and rivalries that would arrest every bold enterprise. The victory of the French over the Dutch at Fleurus was attributed to the want of concert of the elec tor of Brandenburg. Such want of organization might occur again, and the results of the alliance might only go to lead on the ambi tion of France to new encroachments. So might reason the refin ing politician of that period. But then would come the instinctive feeling of English common sense, that even a battle lost might not be wholly unprofitable. When William was fighting at the Boyne, England was under the apprehension of an invasion. The news of Fleurus arrived to make men anxious. But to the movements of the allies, connected with the doubtful and bloody day of Fleu rus, is attributed the fact that England was saved from the hostile descent of a great army. The French, says Burnet, " had suffered so much in the battle of Fleurus, and the Dutch used such dili gence in putting their army in a condition to take the field again, and the elector of Brandenburg bringing his troops to act in con junction with them, gave the French so much work, that they were forced, for all their victory, to lie upon the defensive, and were not able to spare so many men as were necessary for an invasion." * * " Own Time," vol. iv. p. 94. 526 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Many thoughtful minds in England would thus see that William was not sjpeaking with an un-English spirit when he said to his Parliament, " if the present war be not prosecuted with vigour, no nation in the world is exposed to greater danger." It was better for the jjurjiose of a continental war that the nation should be heavily taxed — that loans should be raised which should be felt in after time, rather as a precedent than for their actual amount ; that the commerce of the country should decay ; that even her population should dwindle ; than that the country should have peace and dishonour under the tutelage of Louis of France. It was not the French nation that was at war with England, to place a satrap of king Louis on the throne at Whitehall. The man who said he was " himself the State," was the enemy to be opposed. The only man to oppose him was he who shrank from no labour and no privation to earn the position which even Louis himself, a few years later, was obliged to concede to his merits. " I could not see him," writes the French king to Marshal Boufflers, "at the head of so powerful a league as that which lias been formed against me, with out having that esteem for him which the deference that the prin cipal powers of Europe have for his opinions seems to demand." * The mental qualities of William — what St. Simon describes as the capacity, the address, the superiority of genius, which acquired for him " the confidence, and, to say the truth, the complete dictator ship of all Europe, excepting France " — these qualities were not only the best security of England against the renewal of her degra dation under the Stuarts, but reflected some of their lustre upon the country which had chosen their possessor for its ruler. And thus, with treasons against him hatching at home ; with non-juring churchmen hating him for his toleration, and praying for a heaver.- ordained king though he were a papist ; with a popular feeling, not sufficiently propitiated by William himself, that he was more a Dutchman than an Englishman, he set out for the Congress at the Hague, and the nation at any rate felt that its honour was in safe hands. On the 5th of January, 1691, the king closed the Session of Parliament, with his thanks for the great dispatch they had used " in furnishing the supplies designed for carrying on the war." He was now at liberty, he said, to go into Holland. The wind was adverse for some days; but on the iSth he embarked at Grave send, with many distinguished persons of his court. The passage * Letter dated July 12, 1697, in Grimblot, " Letters," &c. vol. i. p. 24. CONGRESS AT THE HAGUE. 527 that is now made in twenty hours occupied five days. The man- of-war in which the king sailed was becalmed off the English coast ; and when the shores of Holland were neared, it was thought dan gerous to approach in the thick fog that shrouded the land from view. William was resolved to make the coast in an open boat; but a night of cold and darkness was passed, before a landing was effected on the island of Goree. . Covered with ice, the king and his nobles were too happy to enjoy the shelter and warmth of a peasant's hovel. The enthusiasm of his reception when he reached the Hague was an ample compensation for the disagree able incidents of his voyage, and for the perils at which "he him self was the only person nothing at all dismayed." * William had that hatred of parade which belongs to the truly great ; and he at first resisted the entreaties of his countrymen that he should make a public entrance at the Hague. He yielded at length to their wishes ; and on the 26th of January he passed through long files of his admiring compatriots, under triumphal arches, on which the chief actions of his life were painted. The pomp was soon over, and the real business began. The Tory historian, who has no af fection for the jjerson of William, writes, " Of the princes and min isters who attended his Majesty at the Congress, almost all au thors affect to give a long and jpompous list, in imitation perhaps of the tricks of the stage ; where it is used to form a court, or a train, of scenemen or other rabble, to raise a higher idea in the audience of the hero presented before them." f In place of such a list, let us endeavour to give some notion of the interests that were represented at this extraordinary assembly of potentates and ministers. The emperor of Germany had his representative at the Con gress. His real interests were essentially concerned in resisting the oppressions of France ; but his ruling desire was to succeed in his war against the Turks, chiefly with a view to the enlarge ment of his own dominions. He was a Roman Catholic, and had no sympathies for the Protestant coalition of England and Hol land. Charles II. of Spain was there represented by the marquis 'of Gastanaga, the governor of the Netherlands, the imbecile ser vant of a weak king and a decaying monarchy. The armies of France would soon have overrun the Spanish Netherlands, if they had not been defended "by some bolder arm than that of Spain. * " A Late Voyape to Holland, written by an English Gentleman attending the Court."— ifiqi. Reprinted in Harleian Miscellany. t Ralph, vol. ii. p. 264. 528 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ' These great Catholic sovereigns had not been hostile to the prince who had ejected the Pajpist king of England ; for at the time when the Revolution of 1688 was maturing, pope Innocent the Eleventh was not indisposed to encourage any opjjosition to his oppressor, the French king. His ministers, it is affirmed by the historian of the Popes, had personal knowledge of the designs of the prince of Orange upon England ; and if he knew not of the entire scheme, " it is yet undeniable that he attached himself to a party which was chiefly sustained by Protestant energies, and founded on Protes tant sentiments." * But at the period of the Congress at the Hague, Innocent the Eleventh was dead. His successor, Alex ander the Eighth, had indeed the same disposition to make com mon cause with those who opposed Louis. In July, 1691, that pope also died. His successor, Innocent the Twelfth, was of a more pacific disposition ; and the French king saw the necessity of making concessions to the papal see, and thus removing one cause of the strange union of Catholic and Protestant. Changes such as these rendered the task of William to hold the Coalition together a work of constant and increasing difficulty. At the Con gress, however, there were princes who joined the alliance with a zeal for the cause which William represented as the sovereign of Protestant England, and the first " magistrate of Protestant Hol land. The chief of these was Frederick the Third, elector of Brandenburg — subsequently Frederick, first king of Prussia. His mother was aunt to William ; and he succeeded to the electoral dignity seven months before his cousin landed in Torbay. William had sent him the Garter in 1690; and it is said that the youno- elector was indulging his taste for pageants in a solemn investiture of the insignia of the "most honourable and noble order," at the hands of the English envoy at Berlin, when he ought to have been marching to the Sambre to aid the prince of W'aldeck. We have been made somewhat more familiar with the person and character of our William's cousin, in his relation of grandfather to Frederick the Great, t Crooked, through an accident in his infancy; of weak nerves ; of a turn for ostentation ; an expensive prince ; but never theless a spirited man and str'.ctly honourable ; — this is he who, on the 3rd of February, 1691, is entertained by his cousin, the king and stadtholder, " at his house in the wood ; " and sits on Wil liam's right hand; whilst the duke of Norfolk is on his left, and * Ranke's " History of the Popes," translated by Mrs. Austin, vol. iii. d. 181. t Carlyle. " History of Friedrich II of Prussia." CONGRESS AT THE HAGUE. 529 great nobles, English and foreign, fill up the table. The gentle man who attended on one of these noble English lords tells us how "the first health was begun by the king, who whispered it softly to the elector, and the elector to the rest ; " and he also tells us how, ten days after, the king dined with the elector, "who went out m- the very street to receive him " when he came; and when he returned, " accompanied him to the very boot of his coach." * The Hohenzollern, " with his back half-broken," knew how to show respect to his heroic little cousin, with the constant asthma. Of other German jprinces at the Congress there were the elector of Bavaria, and the landgraves of Hesse Cassel and Hesse Darm stadt ; there were princes of Luxemburg, of Holstein, of Wiirtem- berg, of Anspach. Few came out of disinterested love for the cause of national independence. Of one of these potentates there is this curious notice by a contemporary : " The elector of Saxony, a bold man, and a hard drinker, as well as a zealous assertor of the Protestant religion, was brought into the confederacy by the promise .of money : ' For,' said he, 'our friendships, though ever so good, must be confirmed by presents.' " f Victor Amadeus, duke of Savoy, had already joined his fortunes to those of the Confederacy. At the period of the Congress he was defending his own dominions against the armies of France. The young prince had become weary of the domination exercised over him by the French court ; had for some time been secretly nego tiating with Austria ; and was watching the progress of the Revolu tion in England, with a view to make a decisive effort for indepen dence. The vigilance of the diplomatists of Louis frustrated his designs ; and, with the ultimate argument of an army marching upon ' Piedmont, Catinat, the French general, demanded for his master, that French troops should garrison Turin and Vercelli. Victor put on a bold front ; refused compliance ; and war was the inevitable consequence. An ambassador from Savoy came to London before William set out for the Hague, and in a formal ad- diess to the king said, "You have inspired my master with the hope of freedom after so many years of bondage." The first. military operations of the duke of Savoy were unfortunate ; and at the period of the Congress many an anxious thought of William must have been turned to Piedmont. The talent and bravery of -Victor were undoubted — a Capacity too much mingled with Italian . craft, but a courage that did not shrink from an encounter with • " A late Voyage to Holland." t Cunningham. " History," p. 133. Vol. IV.— ^4. 530 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. fearful odds. The dangerous position of the duke of Savoy enabled William to stipulate successfully that the Waldenses, who had been subjected to long and grievous persecution, should be allowed to exercise their religion in peace. A treaty containing a secret article for their toleration was signed on the 8th of February. 1691. The arrangements of the Congress had sufficiently ripened in a month to allow William to announce in the London Gazette, that the various powers had agreed to furnish certain contingents, which would enable an army of two hundred and twenty thousand men to take the field. But whilst the king of England was infus ing his spirit into his allies, some eager and confident, others tardy and lukewarm, most with some especial private interest to accom- j)lish — whilst, as the caricaturist of that day paid a homage to his powers, William was teaching his bears to dance* — Louis suddenly appeared in person at the head of a great army to besiege Mons, the strongly fortified capital of Hainault, and one of the chief bar riers of the Netherlands against France. The French troops, gradually converging to the frontier from every quarter of the territory of Louis, were opening trenches before this strong for tress, whilst the allied powers were deliberating and dining at the Hague. William, with his accustomed energy, at once broke up the Congress ; got together an army of fifty thousand men ; but arrived only in time to learn that the burning city had capitulated amidst the terrors of its population, after a bombardment which had destroyed one half of its dwelling places. Louis went back to Versailles to hear the well-rehearsed flattery, that wherever the great king appeared the genius of Victory was there ready with the laurel crown. William ran over to England, with his secrets of thefuturekeptclo.se in his own bosom. He arrived on the 13th of April. On the 1st of May, he was again on his way to Holland. In these seventeen days the king had important affairs to settle, which required the exercise of a clear intellect. The period had arrived when it was necessary to fill up the sees, vacant by the refusal to take the oaths, of the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops of Bath and Wells, Ely, Gloucester, Norwich, and Peterborough. Two other non-juring bishops, Worcester and Chichester, had died in the interval since the Revolution. A discovery had been made of a correspondence of Turner, the bishop of Ely, with the court of St. Germains. Burnet says, - the discovery of the bishop of Ely's correspondence and * "Macaulay," vol. iv. p.~S^ <£ VACANT SEES FILLED UP. 53 1 engagements in the name of the rest, gave the king a great advan tage in filling the vacant sees." Whether Turner was justified in stating to James that he was acting in concert with his brethren, when he advised that a French army should come into England, may reasonably be doubted. Sancroft and a few bishops denied the charge in a printed pajper, in answer to an anonymous pamphlet. Endeavours had been made to conciliate the non-juring prelate?. All that they would engage to do was to live quietly. Their de privation was no longer opposed, even by the king's Tory advisers. So Tillotson became archbishop of Canterbury, and Sharp arch bishop of York. Patrick, Stillingfleet, Moore, Cumberland, Fow ler, and Kidder, filled the other vacancies. " In two years' time the king had named fifteen bishops ; and they were generally looked upon as the learnedest, the wisest, and best men that were in the church." This was Burnet's opinion ; but from this opinion there were many dissentients. Tillotson was especially marked out for the hatred of the Jacobites. The violent high-churchmen saw cause of offence in all these preferments, for the successors of the non-juring bishops " were men both of moderate principles and calm tempers."* When the king closed the Session of Parliament on the 5th of January, he noticed " the restlessness of our enemies, both at home and abroad, in designing against the prosperity of this nation and the government established." It was impossible that such " rest lessness," and such dislike of "the government established," should not exist in some quarters. William alluded to the appre hension of lord Preston, with two other agents of the Jacobites, on the night of the 31st of December. They were seized on board a smack in the river, with papers addressed to James, containing propositions for his coming over with a small force during the absence of William, when the nation would be undefended, and the people would be complaining of the burthen of taxation. Pres ton and his humbler associate, Ashton, were tried for high treason in January, and were convicted upon very clear evidence. The altered character of the mode in which prisoners charged with political offences were treated by the judges and by the counsel for the crown, was strikingly exhibited in this trial. In the " Life of James " there is a curious observation of the compiler, which shows in what light the laws of the realm were considered by the champions of arbitrary power. The law which makes a corre- * Burnet, vol. iv. p. 132. 532 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. spondence with a foreign enemy treasonable is for the safety of the commonwealth, as every other portion of the law of treason con templates that safety. The biographer of James writes thus: " My lord Preston and Mr. Ashton (there not appearing evidence enough against Mr. Elliott) were brought to their trials, con demned, and the latter executed, being the first that suffered by a court of justice for the royal cause ; which was a new subject of grief to the king, for he knew not what would be the consequence when he found the laws, as well as the sword, turned against him."* The notion could never be driven out of the heads of those who had seen a king ejected for his contempt of the laws' ; that he alone was the source of all law ; and that with out him, the one legitimate head of the law, it was powerless to protect or to punish. The new head of the law, expressly chosen that the ancient laws, which gave the people security and freedom, should not perish, but should be strengthened by an infusion of principles having still higher regard for the general good, — this sovereign of the Revolution was always considered by James and his minions as an interloper having no legal rights. The solemn compact which had been entered into by the nation with William and Mary was to give them no real authority. William was but a Prince of Orange, who had traitorously and wickedly thrust out God's anointed ; and the assassin's knife was therefore too good a fate for him. Happy was it for England that this prince was a man of justice and clemency. We shall have to mention plot after plot against his life and his government. But we shall have to record no sweeping proscriptions, no demands for new. powers, no exercise of his own uncontrolled will. During the long continuance of plots and conspiracies, the laws of high treason were so modified as to assure the prisoner a much fairer trial than under the ancient system, bv affording him every facility for his defence. We may have incidentally to notice the publication of the most virulent libels against the person and principles of Wil liam. But we shall also have to record that, at the very time when these attacks were most frequent and most inflammatory, the laws against printing and publishing were relaxed instead of being made more stringent — the censorship of the press was abandoned. We may probably attribute to this moderation of the king, the circumstance that, although his reign was one of continual danger to his person ; that although he was surrounded by treacherous * " Life of James II." vol. ii. p. 443. PLOT OF PRESTON AND ASHTON. 533 servants and cold friends ; that although a systematic attack upon the principles that raised him to power -was constantly going for ward, — his power strengthened as it grew, out of the very absence of any attempt to prop it by unconstitutional devices. There might have been something in the character of the English people which led them to respect the equanimity which had no morbid dread of the conspirator or the libeller ; which was never diverted from its own course of duty by fear or by revenge. But certainly there must have been something very remarkable in the character of William — very different from the ordinary character of those who are termed usurpers — to direct him toward the noble policy of making himself secure by equal justice instead of irregular des potism, and of living down calumny instead of weakly attempting to forbid its utterance. We have been led to these remarks by the fact, that when William returned from the Continent in April, he had to occupy some portion of his short visit to England by learning the extent of the conspiracy of which Preston was the chief agent, and of determining as to the fate of some of those accused as conspirators. We cannot enter minutely into the details of the discoveries which had been made by his ministers in the king's absence. Preston had confessed, when his own fate appeared to depend upon his confession, that he was guilty himself, and that Clarendon, Turner the bishop of Ely, and William Penn, were implicated with him. When William returned to England, Preston was brought before him at the Council ; and he then said, " that Mr. Penn had told him the duke of Ormond, the earls of Devonshire, Dorset, Macclesfield, lord Brandon," * and others, were well affected to the plot. He also implicated lord Dart mouth. The accusation against these eminent persons was prob ably without foundation. Whether or not, William stopped the hearsay testimony of Preston. The biographer of James shows the value of this wise discretion : " It is probable the prince of Orange thought it not prudent to attack so great a body of the nobility at once ; that what he knew was sufficient either to be aware of them, or by forgiveness and a seeming clemency gain them to his " interest. Which method succeeded so well, that whatever sentiments those lords Which Mr. Penn had named might have had at that time, they proved in effect most bitter enemies to his Majesty's [king James's] cause ever afterwards." f And this is deliberately written by the habitual maligner of king William. t Ibid. 534 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Since the successes of Marlborough in the autumn of 1690, there had been no marked change in the positions of the two con tending parties in Ireland. To follow up his successes was not a trust assigned to the victor at Cork and Kinsale. Marlborough was chosen by William to accompany him in his Continental cam paign. He was entrusted to collect all the English troops, and to wait near Brussels till the king should arrive to take the command. William had much diplomatic work on his hands — to encourage the wavering, to assist the weak, and to bribe the hungry. Victor: Amadeus was in despair at the devastation of his country by the French armies : Schomberg was sent by William to raise the duke out of his despondency. The petty princes of the Germanic empire, striving, for the most part, for some personal dignity or profit, had each to be propitiated and kept in good humour. In the interval between the king's arrival at the Hague and his taking the command of the army, Marlborough was sorely tempted to make good some of the professions which he had secretly conveyed to the sovereign whom he had betrayed in 1688. It is recorded that Marlborough had, in London, told colonel Sackville, an agent of the court of St. Germains, " that he was ready to redeem his apostacy with the hazard of his utter ruin ; " and " proffered to bring over the English troops that were in Flanders if the king [James] required it." It is further stated that he wrote to the same effect to James himself, in January and May, 1691. " Never theless,'' says the compiler of James's life, "the king found no effects of these mighty promises ; for his majesty insisting upon his offer of bringing over the English troops in Flanders, as the greatest service he could do him, he excused himself under pre tence that there was some mistake in the message." Marlborough asked, however, for two lines under the hand of James, "to testify that he would extend his pardon to him." * James, it is stated, complied with this request. Whether the crafty Churchill really believed, as he assured James, that " in case the French were suc cessful in Flanders, or any ill accident should happen to the prince of Orange, his restoration would be very easy," it is pretty clear that he, like many others, saw nothing higher in politics than their own safety and their own profit. William had no suspicion of the man employed by him in a most important command. The oppor tunity was probably wanting for a decisive act of treachery in this * " Life of James II." vol. ii. p. 448. LIMERICK SURRENDERS TO GINKELL. 535 campaign, in which nothing great on either side was accomplished or even attempted But, if 1691 were a year of inaction in Flanders, it was a year of great events in Ireland. In the spring, Tyrconnel had arrived from France to assume his position as the viceroy of James ; and he was followed by a French general, Saint Ruth, as commander- in-chief of the Irish army. He took the command at Limerick, and made great exertions to bring the disorganized troojps into a state of efficiency. On the English side, an experienced Dutch officer, Ginkell, was appointed to the command-in-chief. His first opera- tion was to lay siege to Athlone. On the thirtieth of June, a day memorable with the English army, the grenadiers again put green boughs in their hats, and were led to the assault under the command of Mackay. The town was taken by a bold attack ; and Saint Ruth, who was encamped near, marched away on the road to Gal way. He took up a strong position at Aghrim, resolved to risk a general engagement. On the 12th of July, at five in the evening, the two armies joined battle. The Irish fought with the most desperate resolution. The English and Dutch attacked and fell back, again and again. The" issue was at one time very doubt ful. But at the very crisis of the engagement, the French general was killed by a cannon-ball, and his death was concealed. The other general, Sarsfield, was inactive with the reserve, waiting for orders. The Irish were overpowered, and were soon disorganized. The victory of the English was complete, and they did not use it with moderation. There were few prisoners ; and four thousand Irish lay dead on the actual battle-field. It is supposed that seven thousand altogether fell in the horrible carnage which accompanied the total rout of Aghrim. Ginkell followed up his victory by obtaining the capitulation of Galway ; its garrison, with the French general, D'Usson, being permitted to retire to Limerick. Here was the last stand made against the triumphant army of king Wil Uam. That army was now well supplied with artillery and the munitions of war. The same ground was occupied as in the pre- . rtous year ; but it was not in the same wet condition. Ginkell, by a bold manoeuvre, crossed the Shannon on a bridge of boats, and scattered the Irish horse that were encamped near the city. He then succeeded in carrying a detached fort, which commanded the bridge called Thomond's ; and a fearful slaughter of the garrison r.ccomjzianied this success. The bombardment was terribly effect ive. The garrison might hold out till the whole town was in ashes ; 536 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. but even then, unless the besiegers were compelled to retire on the approach of the wet season, hunger would effect what cannon- balls and bombs had left incomplete. The fall of the city became inevitable. In 1690 a French fleet commanded the approaches from the sea. Now, an English fleet rode in the Shannon. Hos tilities were suspended for some days during the progress of nego tiations. On the 1st of October, two treaties were signed — one military, the other civil. The civil treaty was signed by the Lords Justices, who had repaired to the camp. The first article of this civil treaty was in the following words : " It is agreed that the Roman Catholics of this kingdom shall enjoy such privileges in the exercise of their religion, as are consistent with the laws of Ireland, or as they did enjoy in the reign of king Charles the Second. And their majesties, as soon as their affairs will permit them to summon a Parliament in this kingdom, will endeavour to procure the said Roman Catholics such further security in this particular, as may preserve them from any disturbance on account of their said religion." An entire amnesty was promised to all who should take the oath of allegiance. Limerick bears the name of " the City of the Violated Treaty." -Years of unjust and vindictive penal laws, which are now happily swept away, have manifested that this reproach is not unfounded. The Parliament of Ireland became wholly Protestant, and laws were passed wliich not only denied the Roman Catholics "privilege, in the exercise of their religion," but deprived them of the most sacred civil rights — the rights of family. The war in Ireland was at an end — but not its woes. It was offered to the thousands of Irish troops at Lim erick, to make their election for entering the army of king Wil liam, or to become the soldiers of king Louis in France. The greater number decided for France. It had been promised by the Irish general that those who embarked for another country should be allowed to take their wives and families with them. The prom ise could only be partly realised. " When the ablest men," says the writer of " Macariae Excidium," " were once got on shipboard, the women and babes were left on the shore, exposed to hunger and cold, without any manner of provision, and without anv shelter in that rigorous season but the canopy of heaven ; and in such a miserable condition that it moved pity in some of their enemies." Ireland thus passed under the rule of the English colonizers. Happy would it have been, if years had not been suffered to elapse before it was felt that penal laws were the worst of all modes for TREATY OF LIMERICK. 537 securing religious conformity ; happy, if another series of years had not been wasted in attempts to maintain the Union of two nations without an equal participation of civil rights. The pres ent generation has honestly laboured to repair the injustice of the past; and the time may thus arrrive when even the name of the third William shall be pronounced without party hatreds. 538 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER XXVII. Scotland. — Affairs of Religion. — Plots. — The Highland Clans dispersed, — State of the Highlands in r69i. — Breadalbanc. — Proclamation of die Government. — The Master of Stair. — Tardy submission of Miclan. — Order as to rebels not submitted. — Ordcrfor Maclan of Glencoe, and his tribe. — Letters of the Master of Stair. — Highland troops arrive in Glencoe. — The Massacre of the MacDonalds. — Inquiry into the Massacre in 1695. — Resolutions of the Scottish Parliament. — Master of Stair dismissed. — The other persons implicated. — Breadalbane. — Misconceptions connected with the Massacre. — Character of William unjustly assailed. The politics of Scotland in the first two years after the Revolu tion were more comjDlicated than those of England. The ascend, ancy of the Presbyterians had been established ; but the Episco palians were still a formidable body. In 1689, although ejpiscopacy had been abolished, the church-government had not been defined. There was no supreme directing power in affairs of religion. In 1690, the Parliament of Scotland established the synodical author ity ; made the signature to the Confession of Faith the test of or thodoxy ; and Patronage was abolished, under certain small com pensations to the patrons. The dissensions connected with these arrangements gave courage to those who looked to discord as the means for restoring the Stuart king. A knot of turbulent and dis contented men, known as The Club, entered into schemes for re versing all that had been accomplished by the Revolution. Their leaders were frightened, and informed against each other. Lord Annandale implicated the unhappy Jacobite scribbler, Nevil Payne. He thought himself safer in Scotland than in London — a fatal mis take. We extract a passage in a letter from the earl of Crauford to the earl of Melville, the king's high-commissioner, to show how the ancient ferocity still lingered amongst the politicians of Scot- lind. The letter is dated December nth, 1690 : "Yesterday in the. afternoon, Nevil Penn (after near an hour's discourse with him, in name of the council, and in their presenc-, though at sev eral times, By turning him out and then calling him in again) was questioned upon some things that were not of the deepest concern, and had but gentle torture given him, being resolved to repeat it PLOTS.— HIGHLAND CLANS DISPERSED. 539 this day. Which accordingly about six this evening we inflicted On bdth thumbs and one of his legs, with all the severity that was consistent with humanity, even unto that pitch that we could not preserve life and have gone further ; but without the least success."* This was the last occasion on which Scottish statesmen were dis graced by endeavouring to extort evidence against political mal contents, by "all the severity that was consistent with humanity."! The noble actors in this plot offered up the obscure Nevil Payne as a sacrifice ; secured their own safety ; and suffered the Low lands to settle down into peace. After the victory of Killiecrankie, there was a hew gathering of Highland clans. The command was taken by general Cannon, who had come over from Ireland with the three hundred troops sent by James to the aid of Dundee. The chieftains soon began to fnanifest their repugnance to be under the control of a stranger, although he had served in the Netherlands, and brought his mili tary exjperience to aid their national mode of warfare. The com parative value of regular troofjs and mountaineers, who if they failed in the first rush were quickly disorganised, was again to be tried. The Cameronian regiment at Dunkeld was attacked by four or five thousand Highlanders. The place was obstinately defended by the successors of the old Puritans, and after four hours' fighting, the clans drew off ; the chiefs signed a pledge to support king James ; and their followers dispersed. The victorious army of Dundee melted away like a snow-drift. During 1690 there were various outbreaks of detached clans. But Mackay collected an overpowering force at Inverlochy; and there hastily built Fort William, and fixed a garrison there under the command of colonel Hill. King William, as early as March 1690, manifested a wise dis position to tranquillize the Highlands by gentle measures. His Warrant to George ' viscount Tarbet to treat with the Highland Chiefs, authorizes him to offer the leaders of the clans indemnity, with money and honours, upon their "return to their duty." Early in 1691, a message had been sent to James "by the loyal Highlanders who had continued in arms for him in Scotland, that unless those of the South joined them, or that his majesty sent speedy succours, it would be impossible to hold out any longer." * " Leven and Melville Papers," p. 582. t " The law of England was the only code in Europe which dispensed with judicial torture."— Burton, " History of Scotland," vol. i. p. 85. 540 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. His majesty returned for answer that his abilities to assist were exhausted by the pressing necessities ot Ireland; but that "ha had made a shift to send them some present relief of flour, salt, brandy, tobacco, medicinal drugs, flints, &c," and that if they could stand out no longer, he recommended " an outward com pliance." * In 1690 a negotiation had been opened with lord Breadalbane, to win him over to the government, and to employ his influence to conciliate the rebel chiefs. This negotiation failed. But in the autumn of 1691, Breadalbane, having made his submission to the government, was again authorized to treat with the heads of clans, and to expend twelve or fifteen thousand pounds in this work of pacification. It may well be doubted whether this Highland earl went about his trust in perfect good faith. He is described by his contemporary, John Macky, "cunning as a fox; wise as a serpent ; but as shppery as an eel." t At any rate, those who had the most intimate knowledge of the rivalries and petty interests of the chiefs doubted the practicability of the jplan, as they doubted the honesty of the man employed to work it. Colonel Hill, in May, 1691, had received an order from the Council, as he writes to the earl of Melville, "to fall upon those Highlanders within my reach that do not presently come in and take the oath of allegiance, and deliver up their arms." In a previous letter he says, " I could wish, if they rise again, that all the West country, and all the clans whom they have injured, may be let loose upon them till they be utterly rooted out. " X Utterly to root out a rebel lious clan was the ready method that presented itself to the military mind. At this time Hill says, " I expect several of them in, and the MTntoshes men in the Brae, and Glencoe men , if they fail, I'll put my orders in execution against them." On the 15th of May, he writes to Melville, " I have last night received an order to delay the severity prepared by the former order, till I hear further." § He took wiser measures than the plan of rooting out. He sent the clans the form of an oath, to which many chiefs subscribed. " The Appin and Glencoe men have desired they may go in to my lord of Argyle, because he is their superior, and I have set them a short day to do it in." || By a letter of sir Thomas Livingstone, who was chief in command of the king's forces, it appears that he " had * " Life of James II." vol. ii. p. 468. t Quoted in Burton's " Scotland," vol. i. p. 156, t " Leven and Melville Papers," pp. 610, 611. § Hid., p. 613. II Ibid., p. 618. PROCLAMATION OF THE GOVERNMENT. 541 been commanded by the Master of Stair, to order Hill not to act as yet any way vigorously on his side."* The Master of Stair, sir John Dalrymple, was secretary of state for Scotland, and was then in attendance upon king William in Holland and the Nether lands. The scheme of lord Breadalbane for bribing the chiefs to submission and loyalty was the cause of the direction to Hill not to act vigorously. Colonel Hill by no means approved of Breadal bane or his plan. He would, he writes, have had " much more of the people under oath had not my lord Breadalbane's design hind ered ; which I wish may do good, but suspect more hurt than good from it : for my part, hereafter if I live to have geese, I'll set the fox to keep them." f Breadalbane came into the Highlands, and made his overtures to certain chiefs. " He tells them the money he has for them is locked up in a chest at London ; but they be lieve, if he say true in this, he will find a way to keep a good part of it to himself." X On the 23rd of July, Dalrymple wrote to Livingstone from the camp at Gerpines, in the name of the king, to direct him to keep his troops on the Highland borders, but not to commit any acts of hostility against the Highlanders. § On the 29th of July, the Privy Council of Scotland expressed their opinion to the queen, that if the army had marched against those who held out when Hill was tendering the oath, "they would have submitted themselves, or been easily forced to it." | The plans of Breadalbane did not produce the effect that was contemplated. Hill writes on the 23rd of August, that the country was peaceable ; but that there were impediments to a general sub mission, through the oath of confederation amongst clans, " by which they are obliged to do nothing without the consent of each other." U" There was a strong suspicion that Breadalbane did get the lion's share of the money which he pretended to be in the chest at London, but which was really in his own coffers. According to a tradition preserved by Dalrymple, he refused to give any account of how it was applied, saying, " the money is spent— the Highlands are quiet — and this is the only way of accompting among friends." In the distribution of his gratuities he brought his own interests and passions into play. He was a great Highland lord, with large domains and hundreds of vassals , but his territories were often exposed to the depredations of the clans with whom he was at * " Leven and Melville Papers," p. 622. t Ibid., p. 623. XIbid.,p. 625. § Ibid., p. 631. II Ibid. p. 634. H Ibid., p. 641. 542 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. feud. The small clan, MacDonald of Glencoe, were bad neigh bours to Breadalbane ; and he took this occasion to require that the gratuity which he had to offer for their allegiance should be a set-off for certain claims of the Campbells for injuries committed by the MacDonalds. Maclan, their chief, as proud if not so great as Breadalbane, was wholly impracticable upon such terms. Others followed his example; and many clans remained in a state of inert rebellion. In August, the government determined to bring the submission of the Highland chiefs to a decisive issue, by a Proc lamation offering indemnity to all who should take the oaths, on or before the last day of December, 1691, and threatening the ex tremities of military execution, — in the old form of threatening the vengeance of fire and sword, — against all and each who should not submit to the government, and swear to live in peace. " Letters of fire and sword had been so ceaselessly issued against the High landers, that in the time of the Stuarts it was a usual and little noticeable form."* It would appear by a letter of the duke of Hamilton, dated as late as the 26th of December, that he regretted that sir Thomas Livingstone, who had that night returned from London, had not seen the king, which " would have contributed more to his service than commanding him back ; for he could have advised better measures than is taken, to have reduced the Highlanders, of which there is not one word signified to the Council." f Some of the chiefs had he-Id out to the very last. But on the 31st of December, all the clans had given their submission, with one exception — the MacDonalds of Glencoe. The submission of all the other chiefs who had been in arms against the government was an event which was not contemplated with satisfaction by the Master of Stair. Burnet says, " a black design was laid, not only to cut off the men of Glencoe, but a great many more clans, reckoned to be in all above six thousand persons." J This maybe a very loose asser tion ; but letters of Dalrymple, written to lieutenant-colonel Ham ilton early in December, prove that he had an especial grudge against the MacDonalds, " for marring the bargain which the earl of Breadalbane was doing with the Highlanders ; " and that he entertained a hope that the MacDonalds would "fall into the net" — that is, not comply with the Proclamation. He further intimates that the government is obliged to ruin some of the clans, " in order to weaken and frighten the rest." That Dalrymple contemplated * Burton's " History of Scotland," vol. i.p. 156. t " Leven and Melville Papers," p. 652. X " Own Time," vol. iv. p. 274. TARDY SUBMISSION OF MACIAN. 543 something like "the black design" mentioned by Burnet, is evident from his letter of instructions to the commander of the troops for his guidance, if the obnoxious clans should not have submitted by the prescribed day. He is directed to destroy entirely the country of Lochaber, Lochiel's lands, Keppoch's, Glengarry's, and Glencoe's. " Your power shall be large enough. I hope the soldiers will not trouble the government with prisoners." Mr. Burton considers that Dalrymple, from whose letters of this nature we now turn with such loathing, "only pursued the old policy of Scottish govern ments towards the Highlanders The rule had always been to show no more consideration to Highlanders than to wild beasts."* •The clan of the MacDonalds dwelt in the valley of Glencoe, under their' venerable chief Maclan. Their huts were scattered in several hamlets around his house — a small jjopulaticn of not two hundred adult males. f He had fought with his few hardy followers in the ranks of Dundee at Killiecrankie; he had the reputation of being one of the most daring of the Highland ma rauders ; he had driven off cattle in the territories of Argyle and Breadalbane. He was therefore an object of especial hatred to those proud nobles, who regarded him as a paltry robber to be crushed when the opportunity came. Maclan had his own pride, and de ferred his obedience to the Proclamation till the last moment. On the 31st of December he presented himself, with some of his clan, at Fort William, and offered to take the oaths before colonel Hill. The commander of the garrison had no legal power to receive them ; he was not a magistrate. Hill gave him a letter to the sheriff of Argyleshire, stating the application that had been made to him, and expressing a hope that the submission of the " lost sheep recovered " would be received. It was six days before he reached Inverary, over mountain paths covered with snow. The sheriff yielded to the old man's prayers and tears ; administered the oath, and sent to the Sheriff-Clerk of Argyle, then at Edinburgh, a certificate to be laid before the Council of the circumstances which had led him to do what was a departure from the letter of the Proclamation, but which was within its spirit. The Sheriff-Clerk first tendered the certificate, with a copy of Hill's letter, to the Clerks of the Council, who refused to receive it. He then applied to individual Privy Counsellors, who would not interfere in the * " History of Scotland," vol. i. p. 170. t Macaulay says " two hundred persons ; " certainly an error. 544 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. matter. The certificate was finally suppressed, and the general body of the Council were kept in ignorance of it. Amongst those who advised that the certificate should not be sent in, was the Lord President, father of sir John Dalrymple. Dalrymple, the Secretary, was the medium for the transaction of Scottish affairs with the king. It would appear that the general submission of the. clans was not quite certain; for the king had signed, on the nth of January, instructions to sir Thomas Livingstone, to pursue with fire and sword those Highland rebels who had not taken the bene fit of the indemnity ; but to allow them to surrender on mercy. Objections were taken to the use of the old term "fire and sword " in these instructions. On the 16th of January the instructions of - the nth were repeated, with verbal alterations, and with this addi tion : " As for Maclan of Glencoe and that tribe, if they can be well distinguished from the rest of the Highlanders, it will be jproper for the vindication of public justice to extirpate that sect of thieves." Burnet alleges that " the king signed this, without any inquiry about it ; for he was too ajpt to sign papers in a hurry." Those who doubt this, allege that it was not only signed but super scribed by the king. The Hon. William Leslie Melville says " that the king's having both superscribed and subscribed 'one unfortu nate sentence,' should not be received by all our historians and poets as a conclusive jproof of his being cognisant of their contents. I find numerous warrants and orders from him, some sup rscribed and subscribed, some only superscribed, some only subscribed, as a man in haste would dispatch business of form."* It is of some importance to bear in mind that what William superscribed and subscribed was a long letter of instructions containing several clauses. It was a duplicate, with alterations, of what he had sign ed five clays before. In this duplicate the "one unfortunate sen tence " was added. In a little book, very useful as a summary of events, the compiler prints the words beginning, " As for Maclan," and ending, " sect of thieves," with " William R." as the super scription of these four lines only, subscribed " W. R." He then rejects the notion that William signed without reading the docu ment, because it consisted " of so few words." f We attach no importance to Burnet's defence. In our view the character of William is best defended by assuming that he did read the order ; that he signed without knowing that Maclan had irregularly taken * Preface to " Leven and Melville Papers," p. xxxv. t Annals of England," vol. iii. p. 371. ORDER FOR MAC-IAN OF GLENCOE AND HIS TRIBE. 545 fhe oaths ; and that the words, " to extirpate that sect of thieves," who were represented in a state of rebellious warfare, was not to direct their butchery with circumstances of treachery and cruelty. We are inclined to believe that William not only signed the order with a complete knowledge ; but that the attempt to prevent any indiscriminate slaughter, by the words " if they can well be distin guished from the rest of the Highlanders," looks like an emanation from his mind. The Master of Stair would have little cared how ftiany were slaughtered in a loose construction of the exceptional case of the MacDonalds. Whether the argument that the word extirpate " would naturally bear a sense perfectly innocent, and would, but for the horrible event which followed, have been univer sally understood in that sense," * may admit of a difference of opinion. The word meant, no doubt, a complete suppression of a community not conforming to the laws of civilised society ; but, as ijt appears to us, it did not mean their indiscriminate slaughter. Hill, who appears to have been no cruel ojjpressor, desires that the rebellious clans " may be utterly rooted out." To extirpate, and to root out, are synonymous terms. We believe that William knew what the word implied. He had probably never read " The Tem pest ;" but used the word as" Shakspere used it when he makes the king of Naples hearken to the suit of Prospero's brother, that he " Should presently extirpate me and mine Out of the dukedom.' If the long letter of instructions, concluding with the short sentence relating to the MacDonalds, had run in the ancient form for the destruction of Highlanders, he might have hesitated : " To invade them to their utter destruction, by slaughter, burning, drowning, and other ways, and leave no creature living of that clan, except priests, women, and bairns." \ At any rate we may affirm, that it is a falsehood in the compiler of the Life of James II. to say, " By an order, which Nero himself would have had a horror of, the prince of Orange commanded one colonel Hill and lieutenant colonel Hamilton, to put Glencoe to death, and all the males of his line, [in age] not exceeding seventy." J It is observed by Walter Wilson, in his Life of Defoe, that "the inveteracy that marked the language of the Jacobites when speaking of king William, and with * Macaulay, vol. iv. p. 205. t " Spalding Club Miscellany." Quoted by Mr. Burton. X " Life of James II." vol. ii. p. 470. trrt, Ttr -,,. 546 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. which their works are so highly seasoned, has descended in full force to our own day." We have an example of this temper in the yaluable but somewhat jirejudiced " Annals " issued from Oxford, in which it is inferred " that Stair did not really go beyond Wil liam's instructions in planning the massacre of Glencoe, although the Parliament of Scotland had the complaisance to lay the greater blame on the minister." The Parliament of Scotland expressly said, as the first result of their investigation in 1695, " We found, in the first place, that the Master of Stair's letters had exceeded your majesty's instructions." William was, indeed, justly indig nant at this resolution; "frequently repeating that he thanked the Parliament of Scotland ; they had used him better than England had done his grandfather, for they had tried him for his life, and brought him in not guilty." * His pride was wounded that any investigation at all should have taken place as to his concurrence in the act of his minister. The Parliament had voted the Glencoe slaughter to be a murder ; and he thought it no compliment to be formally acquitted as an accessory before the fact. In transmitting from London the instructions signed bv the king on the nth of January, the Secretary of State for Scotland wrote to sir Thomas Livingstone, " I have no great kindness to Keppoch nor Glencoe ; and it is well that people are in merey. Just now, my lord Argyle tells me, that Glencoe hath not taken the oath, at which I rejoice. It is a great work of charity to be exact in rooting out that damnable sept, the worst of the High landers. ' When Dalrymple sent the instructions of the 16th; he wrote to Livingstone,"For a just example of vengeance, I entreat the thieving tribe of Glencoe may be rooted out to purpose." To colonel Hill he wrote on the same date, " That such as render on mercy might be saved ; " but entreats that " for a just vengeance and public example the tribe of Glencoe may be rooted out to pur pose. The earls of Argyle and Breadalbane have promised that they shall have no retreat in their bounds." During another fort night nothing was done towards accomplishing Dalrymple's entrea ties. On the 30th he wrote again to Livingstone : '¦ I am glad that Glencoe did not come within the time prefixed. I hope what is done there may be in earnest, since the rest are not in a condition to draw together to help. I think to harry their cattle, and burn their houses, is but to render them desperate, lawless men ; but I believe you will be satisfied it were a great advantage to the na- * Defoe, " History of the Union," p. 72. LETTERS OF THE MASTER OF STAIR. 547 tion, that thieving tribe were rooted out and cut off." To Hill he writes, on the same day, " Pray, when the thing concerning Glen coe is resolved, let it be secret and sudden." Colonel Hill sent his orders to lieutenant-colonel Hamilton, to march with eight hundred men straight to Glencoe ; " and there put in execution the orders you have received from the commander-in-chief." Hamilton ad dressed his orders to major Duncanson, his second in command ; concluding his letter by directing that the avenues be so secured, " that the old fox, nor none of his cubs get away : The orders are that none be spared, nor the government troubled with prisoners." Major Duncanson then despatched captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, to proceed to Glencoe, in advance of the other troops, with a detachment of a hundred and twenty men of Argyle's regi ment. He arrived there on the ist of February. The Valley of Glencoe has been variously described, according to the associations of those who have visited it. In the eyes of the picturesque historian of this period,— who regards it as a rugged desert, "valued on account of the shelter which it afforded to the plunderer and his plunder," — it is " the most dreary and melan choly of all the Scottish passes, the very Valley of the Shadow of Death."* To the equal minded tourist, "the scenery of this val ley is far the most picturesque of any in the Highlands." f To the enthusiastic believer in Ossian, it is the valley of Fingal, — having a name, indeed, signifying in the Celtic tongue, the Valley of Tears — " the most peaceful and secluded of narrow vales." " Here the matchless melody of the sweet voice of Cona first awaked the joy of grief." The blue stream of Ossian's Cona here bends its course to Lochleven. The glen, " so warm, so fer tile, so overhung by mountains which seem to meet above you," is described as " a place of great plenty and security." J The ad mirable historian of Scotland from the Revolution, tells us of the narrow slip of grazing ground between the Alpine walls of Glen coe ; and a few, still narrower, on the upper levels. If the Mac Donalds had not lived, he says, by plunder, their arid glen could not have supported the population. § Whether barren or fertile, whether filled by robbers, or by " born poets," who treasured up' "the songs of Selma,"— here dwelt the Maclans in patriarchal' * Macaulay, vol. iv. p. 191. t Pennant. t See Mrs, Grant's " Letters from the Mountains," Letter xi. 1773. § Burton, vol. i. p. 102. 548 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. simplicity. Campbell of Glenlyon, who came with his hundred and twenty Highlanders of the Argyle regiment on the Ist of Feb ruary, 1692, spent twelve days with his men amidst the somewhat unpoetical hospitalities of the clan. The Maclans had no affec tion for the Campbells ; but Glenlyon's niece was married to the second son of their chief ; and when he and his lieutenant, Lind say, said they came as friends, and asked for quarters, being sent to relieve the garrison of Fort William, who were overcrowded, they were received with cordiality. Undoubtedly the chief and his clansmen trusted to the indemnity of the governmeut which they thought had been secured by the oath which Maclan had taken before the Sheriff of Argyle. Here they lived for twelve days as Highlander with Highlander. They had beef and spirits without payment. They were sheltered from the snow storms in the huts of the poor people. Glenlyon became affectionate over his usquebaugh with the husband of his niece ; played at cards with the old chief; and entertained two of Maclan's sons at sup per on the night of the 1 2th. At that time he had the following letter in his pocket, from major Duncanson, dated on the 12th from Balacholis, in the immediate neighbourhood : " You are hereby ordered to fall upon the rebels, the MacDonalds of Glencoe, and put all to the sword under seventy. You are to have especial care that the old fox and his sons do on no account escape your hands. You are to secure all the avenues, that no man escape. This you are to put in execution at five o'clock in the morning precisely, and by that time, or very shortly after it, I'll strive to be at you with a stronger party ; it I do not come to you at five, you are not to tarry for me, but to fall on. This is by the king's spe cial command, for the good and safety of the country, that these miscreants may be cut off, root and branch. See that this be put in execution without fear or favour, else you may expect to be treated as not true to the king and government, nor a man fit to carry commission in the king's service. Expecting you will not fail in the fulfilling hereof, as you love yourself, I subscribe these with my hand." Captain Campbell did not tarry for his superior officer. He was strong enough to do his murderous bidding with out his aid. Sir Walter Scott thinks that the purposed crime was more foul, through its perpetration being " committed to soldiers, who were not only the countrymen of the proscribed, but the near neighbours, and some of them the close connexions of the Mac Donalds of Glencoe." He adds that, " the massacre has been un- HIGHLAND TROOPS ARRIVE IN GLENCOE. 549 Justly attributed to English troops." * We venture to believe that English troops had not the qualities which would have recom mended their employ. It is impossible not to see that the revenges of the Campbells had as much to do with this act, as " the king's special command." Argyle and Breadalbane were not promising that the clan MacDonald should have " no retreat in their bounds," without making known their desire to their people that "the old fox and his cubs " should be wholly " cut off." The cunning of the affair was characteristic of the mountain tribes : '¦ Highland his tory is crowded with incidents, which, in modern phraseology, would be stamped as treachery, but in the social system of the ac tors passed as dexterity." f Some agitation amongst the Argyle soldiers — whisperings and murmurs — had roused the fears of John Maclan. He went at midnight to the house of Inverriggen, in the hamlet where Glenlyon was quartered. The captain was up and his men about him. He was ordered, he said, to march against Glengarry's people. Could he be likely to harm his friends, and especially those amongst whom his niece had married ! Would he not have given a hint to Alaster ? The man was satisfied. The night was stormy. The valley lay quiet in mists and thick dai'k- ness. At five in the morning Glenlyon and his men slaughtered Inverriggen and nine other men. A child of twelve was stabbed by an officer bearing the name of Drummond. Lindsay and his party went to the house of the old chief, and killed him as he was dressing himself, roused by his faithful servants. His two sons escaped amongst the rocks. His wife was stripped of her trinkets by the savages, and died the following day from her ill-usage. In another hamlet, Auchnaion a serjeant of the name of Barbour, with his detachment, snot Auchentriater, and seven others, as they sat round the fire In the dark morning. It is reckoned that the number of the slaughtered was thirty-eight. Happily, the order that the avenues should be secured was not effectually carried out. Duncanson did not arrive in time. The reports of the murderous guns had alarmed the sleeping families, and three-fourths of the adults, with their wives and children, escaped by the passes before the troops of Hamilton had barred their way. No deed of blood remained for those who came to Glencoe, when the sun was high in the heavens, but to slay an old man of eighty. Their work was to burn the huts of the tribe, and drive off their cattle. But the unhappy fugitives who had escaped the slaughter had to endure all * " Tales of a Grandfather," chapter lviii. t Burton, vol. i. p. 165. 550 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. the extremities of hunger and cold in that inclement season. The number who perished in the snow ; sank exhausted in the bogs ; crept into caverns, and died for lack of food, was never ascer tained. In a short time, some few stole back to their half-ruined cabins, and in after years the valley had again a population. Amongst those who returned to the scene of desolation was the bard of the tribe. " The bard sat alone upon a rock, and looking down, composed a long, dismal song." * In an age of publicity the extraordinary occurrences of the val ley of Glencoe would have been known in a week in every corner of these realms. In an age when newspapers were uncommon, and gatherers of news by no means vigilant to minister to public. curiosity, no Londoner knew of this tragedy, or, if he heard some rumour, heeded it not. After some weeks had elapsed, there was a report that a robber tribe had been engaged with Scotch troops, and that the chief and some of his clan had been killed. At Edin burgh, jDeople in the coffee-houses began to talk. Glenlyon was conscious of the remarks upon him, and said that " he would dojt ao'ain, if it were again to be done. He would stab any man in Scotland or England without asking why, if he were commanded so to do." Argyle's Highland regiment was quartered at Brentford, in June, 1692 ; and it was afterwards published that the soldiers talked about the massacre, and that one said, " Glencoe seems to hang about Glenlyon night and day ; and you may see it in his face." Whilst public murmurings were faintly heard in Scotland — not " while public indignation was at the highest," as Scott says — Dalrymple wrote to Hamilton from the Hague, on the 30th of April, 1692, " For the people of Glencoe, when you do your duty in a thing so necessary to rid the country of thieving, you need not trouble yourself to take the pains to vindicate yourself, by showing all your orders, which are now put in the ' Paris Gazette.' When you do right you need fear nobody. All that can be said is, that, in the execution, it was neither so full nor so fair as might have been." Charles Leslie, the non-juring clergyman, obtained some particulars of the deliberate treachery and cold-blooded fe rocity which made the Glencoe massacre so peculiarly atrocious ; and he published the circumstances about the end of 1692. A pamphlet called " Gallienus Redivivus " followed up this attack. Burnet says that the transaction at Glencoe " raised a mighty outcry, and was published by the French in their Gazettes, and by * Mrs, Grant, INQUIRY INTO THE MASSACRE. 55 1 the Jacobites in their libels, to cast a reproach on the king's gov ernment as cruel and barbarous ; though in all other instances it had appeared that his own inclinations were gentle and mild, rather to an excess."* The affair would probably have rested with the French Gazettes and Jacobite libels, had not the Parlia ment of Scotland, after a recess of two years, met in 1695, when Glencoe was a subject which had roused the nation to demand in quiry; for the non-jurors and friends of king James had worked diligently in stirring up the popular feeling. Political hostility to the Master of Stair had something to do with the tardy indigna tion of the Scottish Estates. William had in 1693 authorized an investigation of tbe matter by the duke of Hamilton and others. The duke died, and the inquiry was left to die with him. The king war: now advised to take a more decided course, anticipating the measures of the Scotch Parliament. He issued a Commission of Precognition to the marquis of Tweeddale, and other privy coun sellors in Scotland. The inquiries were necessarily minute and complicated ; but the document was at last produced. From that document, and the letters and oral evidence accompanying it, is an authentic narrative of the massacre to be collected. The report of the Commission, with the depositions and let ters, were read in the Scottish Parliament on tjie 24th of June, 1695, and the results is thus recorded : " After hearing of the said Report, it was voted, nemine con- tradicente, that his Majesty's instructions of the nth and 16th days of January, 1692, touching the Highland rebels who did not accept in due time of the benefit of his indemnity, did contain a warrant for mercy, to all, without exception, who should offer to take the oath of allegiance, and come in upon mercy, though the first day of January, 1692, prefixt by the Proclamation of Indem nity, was past, and that therefore, these instructions contained no warrant for the execution of the Glencoe men, made in February thereafter. "Then the question stated and voted, if the execution and slaughter ofthe Glencoe men in February, 1692, as is represented, to the Parliament, be a murder or not, and carried in the affirma tive." It was then moved "that since the Parliament has found it a murder, that it may be inquired into, who were the occasion of it, "* " Own Times," vol. iv. p. 155. 552 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. and the persons guilty and committers of it, and what way and manner they should be prosecute." * On the ioth of July, the Parliament agreed to an Address to the king, which contains the following material passages : "We humbly beg that, considering that the Master of Stair's excess in his letters against the Glencoe men has been the original cause of thjs unhappy business, and hath given occasion in a great measure to so extraordinary an Execution by the warm directions he gives about doing it by way of surprise ; And considering the high station and trust he is in, and that he is absent, We do there fore beg that your Majesty will give such orders about him for vindication of your Government as you in your royal wisdom shall think fit. " And likeways considering that the Actors have barbarously killed men under trust, We humbly desire your Majesty would be pleased to send the Actors home, and to give orders to your Ad vocate to prosecute them according to Law, there remaining noth ing else to be done for the full vindication of your Government of so foul and scandalous an aspersion as it has lain under upon this occasion." f The Master of Stair was only dismissed from office by the king. The Parliament of Scotland did not accuse " the original cause of this unhappy business " as being participant in what they voted to be a murder. Whether the king ought to have placed the chief culprit on his trial for a great crime can scarcely be maintained without acknowledging that William had some excuse for his comparative lenity in the very mild recommendation of the Parliament "to give such orders about him, for vindication of your government, as you in your royal wisdom shall think fit." Most persons will nevertheless agree with the historian that "in return for many victims immolated by treachery, only one victim was demanded by justice ; and it must ever be considered as a blemish on the fame of William that the demand was refused." J The Scottish Parliament imputed no guilt to Livingstone or Hill ; they somewhat doubted about Hamilton and Duncanson ; but they were clear that captain Campbell and captain Drummond, lieuten ant Lindsay, ensign Lundy, and serjeant Barbour were the actors in the slaughter, and ought to be prosecuted. The king did not cause these to be prosecuted. He knew perfectly well that they * " Acts of Parliament of Scotland," vol. ix. p. 377. f ibid. p. .„. X Macaulay, " History," vol. iv. p. 580. MASTER OF STAIR DISMISSED. 553 had as sound a legal defence before a civil tribunal, as any of the privates who discharged their muskets under the orders of ser jeant Barbour. Defoe affirms that "his Majesty often saidf it was a moot-point in war, whether they had broken orders or no; and though I have the honour to know that his Majesty exceedingly resented the manner, yet it did not appear at all that they had laid themselves open to military justice in it." * There was one person connected with the Glencoe massacre, of whom we lose sight in the decisions of the Scottish Parliament as to "who were the occasion of it." That person is the earl of Breadalbane. But there is a further record in the Minutes of that Parliament which shows that the other great culprit besides Dal rymple had not been wholly overlooked: "July 1. A warrant granted to bring the earl of Breadalbane down to the Parliament House." f From the Parliament House he was committed to the castle of Edinburgh, on a charge of high treason. In the course of the Glencoe inquiries the Highland chief Glengarry, and others, deposed that in offering them money he alleged that he continued in the interest of king James, and pressed them to make a show of pacification, that they might be ready to serve him at some future time — the " outward compliance " which James had himself recom mended. Breadalbane contrived that the inquiry should stand over from time to time, till the Session of Parliament came to an end. He had pleaded his pardon from the Crown ; but the offences charged were subsequent to that pardon. Burnet says, " he pretended he had secret orders from the king, to say anything that would give him credit with them ; which the king owned so far, that he ordered a new pardon to be passed for him."4 It is impossible to fathom the depths of the intrigues of the Scottish statesmen and great lords at this jperiod. Burnet in his narrative of the Glencoe massacre, says of Breadalbane : that he might grat ify his own revenge, and render the king odious to all the High landers, he proposed that orders should be sent for a military exe cution on those of Glencoe." § We believe in no such refinement of Breadalbane's cunning. He and Argyle were glad to sweep out the MacDonalds, who annoyed them. Dalrymple would have ex terminated the whole Celtic population of Jacobites, Papists, and thieves — for the greater part were such in his mind — as his prede- * " History of the Union," p. 72. t " Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland," vol. ix. p. 389. X " Own Time," vol. iv. p. 274. § Hid-, P- 153- 554 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. cessors in power had,often hunted them down as wild beasts. Not three months before Dalrymple put the Order of January 1 6th be fore William to sign, he wrote to Breadalbane that no prince but William would have not been tempted to hearken to the earnest desires of all those he trusts in his government. '• to have made the Highlanders examples of his justice, by extirpating them." * William acceded to the one exception to his general clemency. urged upon him by Dalrymple, Argyle. and Breadalbane ; for it was a measure justified to his mind by the "laws of war." It is one of the most lamentable evils of these laws, that in some cases a violation of the rights of humanity ceases to be regarded as a crime ; and that in all cases implicit obedience to orders is the par amount duty of a soldier, however revolting to his moral sense. Sir Walter Scott, recalling his early recollections, says, that " on the 5th of November, 1 7SS. when a full century had elapsed after the Revolution, some friends to constitutional liberty pro posed that the return of the day should be solemnized by an agree ment to erect a monument to the memory of king William, and the services which he had rendered to the British Kingdoms." How was the proposal defeated ? By an anonymous letter in one of the Edinburgh newspapers, " ironically applauding the undertaking, and proposing as two subjects of the entablature for the projected column, the massacre of Glencoe, and the distresses of the Scot tish colonists at Darien." We have related the one story, with a scrupulous regard to facts. We shall have to tell the ether dis tressing narrative, with the same scrupulosity. Sir Walter Scott im presses upon his grandson this lesson : •' You may observe from this how cautious a monarch should be of committing wrong or injustice, however strongly recommended by what may seem political neces sity." t The great novelist left his juvenile readers, and his confid ing adult readers, to the full belief that king William was the princi pal person to be accused as the author of both calamities. There jsrobably is not a more striking instance of the blindness of a morbid nationality, than in this mode of attributing "wrong or injustice " to a sovereign who, in the one case, was wholly under the guidance of his Scotch ministers, acting in the spirit of all Scotch Statesmen towards the Highland clans ; and in the other case was whollv under the control of the English parliament, uttering the voice of the English nation in the commercial jealousies of the age. We have reached a period when all the false nationalities and party * Burton, Appendix, vol. i. + " Tales of a Grandfather," chap, lix. MISCONCEPTIONS CONNECTED WITH THE MASSACRE. .'555 sympathies embodied in romance, and in histories more fictitious than fiction, have very nearly done their work ; when we may look at kings and statesmen tl, rough that achromatic glass which shows them under no false colouring in their public characters. We may therefore doubt, with a Scottish historian who belongs to this more advanced age, whether, in a period when the Highland chief was acting after his kind in the indulgence of a fierce revenge — when the Scottish statesman was acting as Scottish statesmen had done for ages before him^it was likely that a "far-seeing and deeply judging prince " should desert his nature and habits so much as " to countenance, suggest, and urge on, the slaughter of those poor Highlanders." * The anonymous libeller who would have in scribed "Glencoe" on the entablature of a column to William, if he had read the evidence, would have known perfectly well that this slaughter was devised by Scottish statesmen ofthe Lowlands, and carried through by Scottish captains of the Highlands. He would have known that the treachery of this military execution was the device, in the old crafty and ferocious spirit of clan hostility, of the native soldiers to whom the slaughter was entrusted. He probably knew that Glencoe was not the last of the Highland massacres, sanctioned by no intervention of king William, but by the old " letters of fire and sword "granted by the Privy Council of Scotland. These. letters were not granted for any political object; but in the ancient spirit of revenge by which a favoured clan was authorized to destroy another less favoured. Six years after the Glencoe massacre, the laird of Mcintosh obtained letters of fire and sword against MacDonald of Keppoch. Mcintosh and his followers. with the assistance of the governor of Fort William, are authorized to hunt and take ; if necessary to put to death ; and if they retire to strongholds to " raise fire and use all force and warlike engines." This process, then a legal one, was not sent out against the king's rebels— for the pacification ofthe Jacobite clans had been accom plished—but to obtain restitution of lands alleged to be unjustly held by a clan that did not care for being " put to the horn." t It were well if those who repeat glibly "how -cautious a monarch should be," &c, would lead their readers to some real knowledge ofthe condition and manners ofthe Highlanders of those days, and of the mode in which the authorities of Scotland had for genera tions been accustomed to treat them. They would perhaps then be inclined to assign to its proper cause— a hatred of the political * Burton, vol. i. p. 173. t Hid., vol. i. p. 177. note. 556 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. and religious princijiles of the king of the Revolution — the imputa tion that to his " hard-heartedness " is to be ascribed " the massacre of Glencoe ; an enormity which has left a stain on William's memory that neither time, nor the services that he was providen tially the instrument of rendering to these kingdoms, can ever efface."* In narrating the circumstances which retarded the Union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland — a measure of which William observed, " I have done all I can in that affair, but I do not see a temper in either nation that looks like it" — Defoe says, " The affair of Glencoe was another step to national breaches." To us, looking calmly upon this affair at the interval of a hundred and sixty-six years, it would appear the most extravagant of national delusions to set up this as "a ground of national animosity." From the beginning to the end it was a Scottish affair. Not an English statesman was concerned in advising the proceeding. The char acter of the monarch who signed the order, as king of Scotland, is far more truly exemplified in one sentence of the Proclamation of Indemnity, which ought to have been the rule of conduct for those who urged on the massacre — " to interpret this indemnity in the most favourable and ample manner." * " Annals of England," vol. iii. p. 120. PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES. 557 CHAPTER XXVIII. Marlborough dismissed from office. — Parliamentary debates. — Independence of the Judges. — The king leaves for Holland. — Threatened invasion. — Declaration of James. — Battle of La Hogue.— Siege of Namur. — Grandval's plot to assassinate William. — Battle of Steinkirk. — Parliament. — Crime and public distress. — Commencement of the National Debt.— The Licensing Act expires — Place Bill.— Bill for Triennial Par liaments. — The King's Veto. — Murder of Mountfort. — Trial of Lord Mohun. " The king was pleased, without assigning any reason, to re move my lord Marlborough from his employments." Such is the brief notice of an important event by the wife of the great peer. Much fuller is her account of the circumstances which caused a serious disagreement between queen Mary and her sister, the prin cess Anne. The queen, three weeks after the dismissal of the earl, wrote to her sister that " it is very unfit lady Marlborough should stay with you, since that gives her husband so just a pretence of being where he ought not." Mary said, I need not repeat the cause he has given the king to do what he has done, nor his unwillingness at all times to come to such extremities, though people do deserve it." Anne refused to be separated from her beloved Mrs. Free man ; and Mrs. Freeman being commanded to leave the palace, Mrs. Morley left with her. Anne chose her abode at Sion House ; and the nation was scandalised at a quarrel between the occupier of the throne and the sister who might one day be called to oc cupy it. It is easy to imagine that no circumstance in the lives of of William and Mary produced more misery than this rujiture. The dismissal of Marlborough occurred on the 10th of January, at the very time when, in the view of some Candid persons, William was occupied in planning the slaughter of an obscure Highland clan. It was a period to the king of great political anxiety. Lady Marlbor ough says she could never learn " what cause the king had for his displeasure." The popular feeling regarded the earl's dismissal as a just punishment " for his excessive taking of bribes, covetous- ness, and extortion on all occasions from his inferior officers."* In another passage, Evelyn attributes Marlborough's disgrace to his * Evelyn, "Diary," January 24. 558. HISTORY OF ENGLAND. " having used words against the king" What Marlborough had really done has been revealed in a letter of James. The Lieuten- ant-General of William, who also held the domestic office of his Gentleman of the Bedchamber, had concerted witii the Jacobites to effect the recall of James by the subtlest of plots. He was or ganising a party to propose and carry in Parliament a motion that all the foreigners in the emjploy of the Crown, civil or military, should be sent out of the kingdom. The object was to produce a rupture between the king and the parliament. Then, says the letter of James, " my lord Churchill would declare with the army for the parliament; and, the fleet doing the same, they would have recalled me." James adds that some of his own imprudent friends, dreading that the scheme of Churchill had for its ultimate object to make the princess Anne queen, discovered it to Bentinck, and thus " turned aside the blow." * The Parliament was adjourned on the 20th of February, having met on the 2nd of the previous October. It was a Session of great debate ; but more remarkable for the discussion of important measures, than for their final enactment. The rival claims of the Old East India Company and of the New, were the subject of earn est argument, not unmingled with party feelings. But nothing was finally decided ; and a bill for the regulation ofthe India trade was suffered to drop, f A most important measure for regulating trials in cases of high treason was passed by the Commons ; but becom ing the subject of a great controversy between the two houses, as to the right of peers to be tried by the whole body of the Upper House as well during a recess as during a sitting of Parliament, that valuable bill also fell through. A few years later the jealousy of the Commons was removed. Another measure of great public advantage was defeated by the king's Veto. It was the first time in which William had exercised this power. The Judges had been made independent of the Crown as to their term of office. They were appointed by William and Mary " Ouamdiu se bene gesse- rint:" they could not be arbitrarily removed. But their salaries had not been fixed, as they ought to have been. The Houses passed a Bill for legally establishing this judicial independence ; also providing that each judge should be paid a thousand a year. But they charged the salaries upon the hereditary revenues of the * This letter, in French, is given by Macaulay, who mentions that a translation was published by Macpherson " eighty years ago." " History," vol. iv. p. 166. t See ante, p. 428. INDEPENDENCE OF THE JUDGES. 559 Crown, without the previous consent of the king having been ac- cotded. The king, says Hallam, "gave an unfortunate instance of his very injudicious tenacity of bad prerogatives in refusing his as sent." A later historian says that the circumstances under which the king used his veto have never been correctly stated. " William could defend the proprietary rights of the Crown only by putting his negative on the bill It was not till the provisions of the bill had been forgotten, and till nothing but its title was re membered, that William was accused of having been influenced by a wish to keep the judges in a state of dependence."* This great constitutional principle was determined by the Act of Settlement of 1701.(13 Gul. 3, c. 2), which provides that after the limitation of the Crown under that statute shall take effect, " Judges' Commis sions be made Quamdiu se bene gesserint, and their salaries as certained and established ; but upon the Address of both Houses of Parliament it may be lawful to remove them." f The king set out for Plolland on the 5th of March. At the be ginning of the Session he had told the Parliament that an Army of sixty-five thousand men would be required, and the Houses voted that number. The distribution of the land force gave about eleven thousand men for England, thirteen thousand for Ireland, two thousand for Scotland, and thirty-eight thousand to serve beyond the sea. The jprojDortion of regular troops for the defence of Eng land was thus comparatively small ; but then the militia of the kingdom could be immediately called out, and the regiments of London and Westminster were always in readiness for service. The Navy had been brought into a greater state of efficiency than at any previous jjeriod since the Revolution. If loyal songs are to be believed in, the war was j^ojpular; " Our army makes Lewis to tremble and quake He fearing that Moiis we again will retake." X Weavers, shoemakers, butchers, dyers, hatters — the men of Lon- * Macaulay, " History," vol. iv. p. 183. There is an exception to Lord Macaulay's wonted accuracy in his remarks on this subject. He says, " that great law (the Bill of Rights) had deprived the Crown of the power of arbitrarily removing the judges." The Bill of Rights contains not a word on the subject ; neither does the Declaration of Rights. t Mr. Hallam has pointed out that we owe the independence of the Judges to this statute, and not to George III., as we have long been taught to believe. Blackstone con tributed to this popular delusion, by ascribing vast importance to the statute 1 Geo. III., c. 23, which continued the commissions of the judges notwithstanding the demise of the Crown — a point befote doubtful. The recent editor of Blackstone, Dr. Kerr, has pointed out that " the learned commentator much exaggerates the value " ofthe statute of George III. X " Songs of the London Apprentices and Trades." Edited by Charles Mackay, p. 122. 560 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. don and the men of the West— were all ready to march under " renowned king William," says the popular doggrel. But some thing more effective than a broadside ballad was issued to stir up the country to defend its government. It was a Declaration by James himself, which was not suppressed by the queen and her Council, but reprinted, and widely circulated with appropriate com ment. There was in this document not a word of regret for the past ; not a word that could hold out a prospect of amendment for the future. It breathed vengeance against nobles and prelates who were proscribed by name ; it threatened whole classes with punishment as guilty rebels ; the judges and juries who had con victed Ashton and Cross, two of the plotting Jacobites ; and the " fishermen and all others who offered personal indignities to us at Feversham." Such was a Declaration issued to jirepare the people for receiving their ejected king with contrite tears, when he came back at the head of a French invading army. James had at last induced the king of France to hazard the chance of a landing in England. The minister who had constantly opposed that dan gerous project was dead. That minister was Louvois. He had been the chief military administrator of Louis for nearly a quarter of a century, but at last became obnoxious to his master. Louvois, says Burnet, "grew uneasy at the authority Madame de Maintenon took in things which she could not understand ; and was in con clusion so unacceptable to the king that once, when he flung his bundle of pajpers down upon the floor before him, the king lifted up his cane, but the lady held him from doing more." * Saint Simon tells something like the same story, with the variation of the king catching up the fire-tongs instead of lifting his cane. Louvois died suddenly, not without suspicion of poison. Saint Simon represents Louis as feeling free when he had got rid of his old servant; and then relates that, when an officer came from James at Saint Germains, with a compliment of condolence, Louis, " with an air and a tone more than perfectly easy " (plus que de'gage's) replied — " give my compliments and thanks to the king and queen of England, and say to them from me, that my affairs and their affairs will go on none the worse for what has happened." When the great war minister of France was saved by the hand of death from being sent to the Bastile, Louis was free to assist his confident brother at St. Germains with ten thousand French troops, and with the Irish regiments wliich had entered the service * "Own Time," vol. iv. p. 165. THREATENED INVASION. 56 1 of France. A camp was formed at La Hogue ; and James, in the Declaration which we have noticed, announced that the Most Christian King had now " lent us so many troops as may be abun dantly sufficient to untie the hands of our subjects, and make it safe for them to return to their duty and repair to our standard." * On the 24th of April, James joined his camp in Normandy. He relied upon his French and Irish army, but he relied as much upon the defection of the English fleet. Not only Admiral Russell, but other officers had been tampered with. Russell, however, had been disgusted into something like a sense of honour and duty by the insane declaration issued by James. He sent word to the rebel-threatener that he ought "to grant a general pardon, and that then he would contribute what he could to his restoration without insisting upon any terms for himself." f This crafty rene gade had still something of the Englishman about hiih ; for whilst he proposed to get out of the way with the fleet he commanded, so as to give the invaders an opportunity of landing, he declared that if he met the French fleet he would fight it, even though the king himself were on board." On the 1 5th of May, the English fleet was at St. Helen's. It had been joined by the Dutch fleet, the whole force amounting to ninety sail of the line. Russell was in command on board the Britannia. A scene took jplace in that flag-ship which is happily without a subsequent parallel in English history. A despatch had arrived from Nottingham, the Secretary of State, which Russell was commanded to read to the Commanders of the Fleet. In his cabin there were men whose names are inscribed amongst the great naval heroes of our land — sir George Rooke, — sir Cloudes ley Shovel. Such true hearts could have little suspected that he who read to them the magnanimous resolve of the queen was most obnoxious to its covert reproach. Nottingham said, in her majesty's name, that a report was spread abroad that some of the officers of her fleet were not hearty in their service, and that she had ordered many of them to be discharged. She further said that she believed the report was raised by the enemies of the govern ment, — that she retained an entire confidence in their fidelity and zeal for the service of the crown and the defence of the country, and was resolved not to displace any one. Then, with one accord, an address to the queen was signed — Russell probably not signing as being too exalted for suspicion to attach to him. It was an * " Life of James II," vol. ii. p. 479. t Ibid., p. 489. 562 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. address, not cold and formal, but full of the devotion of the heart, concluding in these earnest words, — " And that God Almighty may preserve your majesty's most sacred person, direct your counsels, and prosper your arms by sea and land against your majesty's enemies, let all the people say Amen, with your majesty's most dutiful and loyal subjects." * There was no time for the enthusiasm of that hour to cool. On the afternoon of that day the French fleet, under Tourville, was seen from the coast of Dorsetshire. On the 17th, the English and Dutch fleets were at sea. Tourville had with him only his own squadron, having sailed from Brest, and in his passage to Cape la Hogue had come within view of Portland. Off La Hogue the French transports were receiving troops. Tour ville was to convoy this fleet of the invaders. On the morning of the 19th, the two fleets came in sight of each other. Tourville immediately bore down upon an armament more than double his number The wind was favourable to him, and only half of the ships of the allies could come into action. The defection upon which he relied was nowhere to be seen. To vindicate their honour, the commanders of the English fleet urged their men with a zeal that made them invincible, and Russell even told the sailors of the ships that he visited, to throw over any commander that played false, himself not excepted. Carter, Rear-Admiral of the Blue — who is said to have disclosed that overtures had been made to him from the Jacobites — broke the French line at the onset, was mor tally wounded, and dying exclaimed, " Fight the ship as long as she can swim." The battle lasted five hours, when the wind changed, and the whole force of the allies was brought together. The victory was complete, the French flying in every direction to their own shores. Tourville's ship, the Royal Sun, the finest ves sel of that day, got to Cherbourg, with two other three-deckers. There were no docks at that time to afford security. The great men-of-war were hauled into the shoals, Admiral Delaval attacked them with his fire-ships and his boats' crews, and the pride of the French navy and the two other vessels were burned to the water's edge. Tourville, during the chase, had shifted his flag to the Ambitious, and with twelve other large ships had got into the bay of La Hogue. Here he lay, under forts and batteries, with the army of James close at hand, and the flags of England and France flying on one of the forts, for James himself was within. On the * The address is in Uie London Ga2ette of the 19th of May, and is quoted iu Ralph, vol. ii. p. 352. SIEGE OF NAMUR. JJ63 23rd of May, Admiral Rooke led a flotilla of two hundred boats and ' numerous fire-ships into the bay. The huge vessels fired with little effect. There was a cannonade from the batteries and volleys of musketry from the shore ; but on came the rowers, with the old battle-shout. The boats' crews of Tourville fled in confusion. The crews of the French ships abandoning them, the English sailors boarded, and set them on fire. At eight the next morning again came Rooke into the bay with his terrible flotilla. The remaining vessels were in like manner burned, after their guns had been turned against the French batteries. " The' defeat," says the biographer of James, " was too considerable to be redressed, and too afflicting to be looked upon, nor was it even safe to do it long." * Saint-Simon, mentioning that " the king of England ".looked on at this battle from the shore, says, " he was accused of letting some words escape him of partiality in favour of his nation, although none had made good the promises upon which he had counted when he had urged a naval battle." Tourville, says the same authority, had sent two couriers to Louis to represent the extreme danger of relying upon the assurances of James as to the probable good will of the English commanders, and his confidence in the defection of more than half the fleet during an action. Evelyn writes in his Diary of the 5th of June, " Reports of an invasion were very hot, and alarmed the City, Court, and People." On the 15th he writes, " After all our apprehensions of being invaded, and doubts of our success by sea, it pleased God to give us a great naval victory, to the utter ruin of the French fleet." The success was recognised by a temporary act of national gratitude, in a dis tribution of" thirty- seven thousand pounds amongst the sailors, and in the bestowal of gold medals upon the officers. A more per manent demonstration of the feelings called forth by the victory of La Hogue was a declaration by the queen, that the royal palace of Greenwich should become what we now look upon with patriotic pride — the noble asylum for the disabled "mariners of England." When the news of La Hogue reached the great supporter of James, the French army was besieging Namur. The army of the allies, under the command of William, was encamped in the neigh bourhood. The French general, Luxemburg, with an overwhelm- ino- force, prevented any near advance for the relief of the be sieged. Louis himself conducted the siege. " The fortified and threatening hill" looks over a "watery glade" of exquisite * "Life of James II," vol. ii. p. 496. 5-64 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. beauty;* but in the early summer of 1692 the Sambre had over- flowed its banks ; and the besiegers had to contend with other dif ficulties than those created by the science of Cohorn, the engineer of the States-General, who was in the citadel. Vauban, the great en gineer of France, was in. the lines with Louis. The magnificent mon arch so far relaxed the rigour of his wonted etiquette as to permit Vauban to dine with him ; at which distinction, says Saint-Simon, Vauban was overwhelmed. It was a time when the presence of the monarch was of some importance. Boileau describes the king, with the basest adulation of a venal muse, as directing the siege : "C'est Jupiter en personne." Saint-Simon shows him doing some service in a sensible human fashion, when it rained in torrents, and the trenches were full of mud and water. The soldiers were cursing Saint MeMard ; for that saint, like his brother of our calendar, was held to be in a rainy humour for forty days if he willed it to rain on his festival day, the 8th of June. Louis, who always travelled with a vast troup of idle lackeys and fine gentlemen of his household, com manded them to work in carrying corn to the army of Luxemburg. The roads were impassable for waggons, and the household troops and fine gentlemen were commanded to bear sacks of grain to the starving soldiers on the cruppers of their horses. Bitterly they complained ; but the king would be obeyed. Without his presence, says Saint-Simon, the siege would never have been successful. The besiegers were in extremity for want of provisions. Unfor tunately Cohorn was wounded. The governor of Namur and the garrison lost heart, and the town was first surrendered and after wards the citadel. During the siege of Namur the army of William had often a distinct view of the operations of the French array. On the ist of June the English were encamped at Ville, on the Mehaigne. The low grounds on each side of the river were so flooded by incessant rains, that it was impracticable to cross, so as to attack the enemy on the opposite side. On the sth the rains had destroyed most of the bridges over the Mehaigne. " I scarce see what we have to do here," writes one in the camp. On the 8th the allied army and the army of Luxemburg were each moving on opposite banks of the river. On the 13th the French army had drawn nearer to Na mur, and William continued to follow their movements, f Namur * See Wordsworth's Sonnet. t Letters of Vernon to Colt, printed in Tindal's " Continuation of Rapin," vol. iii. p. 206. BATTLE OF STEINKtRK. 565 surrendered on the 30th. " The king's conduct," says Burnet, " was on this occasion much censured ; it was said he ought to have put much to hazard, rather than suffer such a place to have been taken in his sight." Boileau concludes his ode with a taunt, to the enemies of France — " Go to Liege and Brussels, to carry the humble news of Namur taken under your eyes." Louis re turned to Paris with his long train of carriages filled with ladies of the court — his poets, his comedians, and the musicians — " accor ding to the old Persian luxury." William remained to watch Lux emburg, and to fight if opportunity offered. In the middle of July the allied camp was at Genappe. Three prisoners had been brought thither from Bois-le-duc, accused of a design to assassin ate William. Their movements had been watched for some time. Burnet had made it known that M. Morel, of Berne, who had been incarcerated in the Bastile for seven years on refusing to renounce his Protestantism, and had been released in April, had written to him that he had been out of curiosity to St. Germains to see king James ; and that returning in a public conveyance he met with a man named Grandval, whom he had observed in secret conversa tion with the exiled king. Grandval was very communicative, and said there was a design in hand that would confound all Europe — ¦ the prince of Orange would not live a month. Various other cir cumstances had led to the arrest of Grandval and two men that he had associated in his enterprise, Dumont, a Walloon, and the ' Baron de Leefdale, a Dutchman. These two accomplices of Grand val had no desire to carry through the project to which they had agreed. They gave warnings that there was a plot to remove Wil liam by assassination. Leefdale came with Grandval from Paris to the Netherlands. Dumont, having previously told something of what he knew to the duke of Zell, at Hanover, set out to meet Grandval. When apprehended, and brought to the camp at Gen appe, a court-martial of general officers commenced sitting on the 23rd of July, for the trial of Bartholomew de Liniere, Sieur de Grandvah The examination of the prisoner had been taken, and the witnesses were about to be confronted with him, when " greater matters intervening put a stop to the process of Grandval.* The " greater matters " were the sudden determination of William to attack Luxemburgj and the disastrous issue of the en terprise. The French army was encamped between Enghien and Steinkirk, a few miles to the north-west of Hal. The head-quar» * Letter of Vernon to Colt. 566 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ters of William's army were at Lambecque. Luxemburg had an ao-ent in the allied camp who gave him information of the move ments of the forces opposed to him— a secretary of the elector of Bavaria, named Millevoix. A letter from this man was accidentally picked up, and carried to the elector. His correspondence was discovered ; and William, with remarkable presence of mind, took advantage of the discovery, not by hanging the traitor, but by making his treachery serviceable. He dictated a letter of false in telligence to the terrified Millevoix, in which Luxemburg was in formed that the English would come the next day towards the French army to forage, and that a portion of the army would be at hand to protect the foragers. At dawn on the morning of the 3rd of August, the whole force of the allies was marching towards Steinkirk. Luxemburg was incredulous of the news which his scouts brought him, for he relied upon the informant in whom he thoroughly trusted. He at last roused himself. The nature of the ground was in his favour. The march had been tedious, for there were defiles to pass, and the country was enclosed The duke of Wiirtemberg led the vanguard, and drove the advanced bri gade of the French from hedge to hedge. But Luxemburg, with the rapidity of genius, had soon the main body of his army in or der of battle. The affair was no longer a surprise. We have before us an unpublished letter written by marshal Conway in 1774, on the occasion of a visit to this battle field: "From Ouden- arde and Enghien by Grammont the road lies through a beautiful country. Near the former we took horses to go and see the ground of the famous battle of Steinkirk, where king William took such good measures to surprise marshal Luxemburg ; but by the activity and quickness of that able antagonist, failed in his project, and was repulsed after a long and bloody engagement. The ground here remains, by all accounts, just as it was at that time, now eighty- two years ago." * As the ground was, eighty-two years after the battle, we may readily conclude that another term of eighty-two years has made no very material change. Commerce has not here created new towns, though a railway may cut through the hedges, and span the hollow ways, where the allied cavalry could not act, and the vanguard began to engage, while the main body of infantry was at some distance. Count Solmes, who was chief in command of the English, sent his horse to their relief ; but, says * From a MS. volume of Conway's Letters to his brother, the Marquis of Hertford, the property of the author of this history. DEBATE ON THE BATTLE OF STEINKIRK. 567 a great military critic, "What signified his marching the horse, where the ground was so strait, and the French had such a nation of hedges, and copses, and ditches, and felled trees laid, this way and that, to cover them." * The eloquent Corporal truly describes how five English regiments were cut to pieces; "and so had the English life-guards too, had it not been for some regiments upon the right, who marched up boldly to their relief, and received the enemy's fire in their faces, before any one of their own platoons discharged a musket." These brave fellows were led by Auver querque. They saved the English life-guards ; but they could not save the infantry who had been left without support. Mackay, their brave. leader, fell in the desperate conflict. The blame of this great reverse was imputed to count Solmes, who had probably to bear the mistakes of others as well as his own. It is clear that the nature of the ground was not perfectly understood ; and that the panic to be produced by a sudden attack was too confidently relied upon. William made every effort to bring up his men to relieve the vanguard ; but Luxemburg was now reinforced by Boufflers, who heard the firing, and marched from his neighbouring quarters. The king, it is said, looked upon the slaughter, and exclaimed, " Oh, my poor English, how are they abandoned." On each side there were about seven thousand killed and wounded. The allies marched from the field of battle in good order, to the camp from which they had unfortunately gone forth, as they believed to victory. The nation was dispirited. The army was indignant that Solmes, a foreigner, should have been placed in the command of English troops, and then look on while they were slaughtered. In the House of Commons, three months after, the public voice found an indignant vent. That House now fully exercised the right from which it has never since parted, of seeking occasion freely to comment upon warlike operations; — sometimes unjustly, often ig- norantly, but never without advantage to the discovery of truth. On the 22nd of November, these words were heard in the House : " None are ignorant of the melancholy story of Steinkirk ; every one knows that tragedy. The common soldiers had no opinion of their officers. I move," added sir Peter Colleton, " That none but natives should command Englishmen." Sir Edward Seymour asked, " What number have you fit for General Officers ? They are few ; and will you think to discharge and send away foreign ers till you have generals of your own ? " There can be no * " Tristiam Shandy." Jj68 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. doubt that during the lOng vassalage of the Stuarts to France, England had lost all the qualities of a military nation, except the best quality, the spirit of her people — the blood and bone of those who fought in her ranks. She wanted scientific as well as brave leaders, bred in her own bosom. Seymour truly said, "Men are not born generals." There were in the House of Commons at that time, as there have been ever since, officers of rank, who came from active service in the field to the senate, and said honestly what they knew. Lord Colchester, who commanded the third troop of horseguards, was one of these. He told his story simply and clearly ; and his relation confirms the ordinary historical ac counts in all essentials : " I find the business of Steinkirk stick with some gentlemen. The chief occasion of the ill-success there was the wrong information given to the king of the ground we were to pass, which was so full of hedges and woods, that we could not draw up one body to sustain another; horse and foot were mingled. I saw the attack made by Fagel ; Dutch, English, and all nations : they beat the French from hedge to hedge, but their very weight of men bore us down. The. French came upon us, and Auver querque came up, and behaved himself as well as any man in the world. He sent us two Danish regiments, and we retreated to the main" body, and from thence to the main camp." * The anger of the House centred upon Solmes. "When this attack was formed," said colonel Cornwell, " Solmes was there, with ten battalions to sustain them. Solmes said, ' That to send more was to slaughter more.' " The king withdrew his countenance from the obnoxious general, who had offended by his haughtiness as well as by his conduct in the battle of Steinkirk. He fell in a second unfortunate battle in the coming year. The Court-Martial on Grandval was re-opened in a week after the battle. Two of the Generals of whom it was originally com posed had fallen in the field — Mackay and Lanier. The duty of the court was not very embarrassing ; for the prisoner had made a circumstantial confession, " without any constraint or pain, or being in irons." So says the official relation of the Court-Martial. He declared that the late French minister, Louvois, had in 1691 entered into an agreement with Anthony Dumont, about the mur der of king William ; that upon the death of Louvois the design dropped, but that Barbesieux, the son of Louvois, who succeeded him as Secretary of State to the French king, revived the project, * " Parliamentary History," vol. v. col. 713. ILLNESS OF THE QUEEN. 569 and had several conferences with him, Grandval ; that he was en gaged in the affair with colonel Parker, in the service of king James ; and that with him, Barbesieux, and Dumont, the plan was arranged, which was that he should shoot William, when he ex posed himself during the campaign. Leefdale was then brought into the scheme. The most material averment of the prisoner was, that he had seen James at St. Germains, his queen being present, and that James said, " Parker has given me an account of the business ; if you and the other officers do me this service, you shall never want." Grandval was executed in the camp at Hal, according to his sentence. He declared in a letter to a friend that it cost him his life for having obeyed the orders of Barbesieux. The confession of Grandval was printed and circulated in several languages. No answer was made to its circumstantial statements, vouched for by ten distinguished officers of various' nations, who comjjosed the Court-Martial. The king returned to England on the 1 8th of October. The outward signs of a cordial welcome awaited him. There were illuminations as he passed through London to Kensington. There was a loyal address from the Corporation of London ; and the king dined at Guildhall on the Lord Mayor's day. There was a solemn thanksgiving for his safe return, and for the great victory at sea. But there were many symptoms of political and social distenrpers, which made sober men uneasy. In September the queen had issued two proclamations — one for the discovery of seditious libellers, the other for the apprehension of highwaymen. The one proclamation was far more effective than the other. The libellers worked their secret jiresses, and the furious zealots cir culated their productions without any material injury to the govern ment. The people grumbled a little more under the pressure of taxation, and under other evils of their daily life, when they read inflammatory pamphlets from Jacobites and Non-jurors ; but a return to the times before the Revolution was the farthest from their wishes. There was a good deal of alarm in that autumn of 1692, from the daring crimes that sometimes seem epidemic in a nation. Hence the proclamation against highwaymen. We have mentioned a robbery of the tax-collectors in Hertfordshire* Sim ilar gangs of banditti robbed mails and stage-coaches even in the day-time. William on his return took strong measures to put down these enormities. Many highwaymen were discovered and execu- * Ante, p. 430. 57O HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ted ; and a regiment of dragoons was used as a preventive police, and patroled all the great roads leading to the capital. Burglars were almost as bold and as numerous as footpads and highway men. We doubt whether there was any especial distress con nected with this particular juncture ; though it is said that there was a failure of the harvest — that the heavy rains had been fatal to the crops — that no fruit ripened — that the price of the quarter of wheat doubled.* Evelyn indeed writes in his Diary of the ist of October, " This season was so exceedingly cold, by reason of a long and tempestuous northeast wind, that this usually pleasant month was very uncomfortable. No fruit ripened kindly." But he says nothing of a bad harvest in England. He says, " France is in the utmost misery and poverty for the want of corn and sub sistence." The harvest of 1692 is represented as plentiful, so that England was- exporting corn.f Nevertheless there can be no doubt that amongst a jieople who had not previously borne such heavy burdens of taxation as four years of war had imposed upon them — and whose industry was not sufficiently developed to enable them to bear their burdens without being weighed down — there must have been much suffering and more discontent. The king opened the Parliament on the 4th of November.- He thanked them for their large supplies ; he would be compelled to ask for a further supjply to maintain a force by sea and land. He was sensible how heavy this charge was upon his people. It afflicted him to learn that it was not possible to be avoided, without exposing the kingdom to inevitable ruin and destruction. He hoped for their advice and assistance, which had never failed him. The House of Commons set about giving its advice ; but it did little more than display a good deal of ill-humour as to the conduct of the war. There were several important matters bearing upon the future condition of the country, arising out of the proceedings of this Session, which we shall briefly notice. Turning over the Index of the ponderous Statute-book, to look for Acts that have had a permanent influence on the condition of the country, we might perhaps pass over one Act that bears this lengthy title : " An Act for granting to their majesties certain rates and duties of excise upon beer, ale, and other liquors for securing certain recompenses and advantages in the said Act mentioned, to such persons as shall voluntarily advance the sum of ten hundred » Macauley, vol. iv. p. 204. t Tindal, vol. iii. p. 217. COMMENCEMENT OF THE NATIONAL DEBT. 57 1 thousand pounds towards carrying, on the war against France." * Under this statute commenced the National Debt of England. The million of money which was to supply a portion of the expenses of the war " in a manner that would be least grievous," as the preamble says, was expected to be voluntarily advanced on the credit of the special provision of the new duties of excise, which were to be set apart as they were paid into the Exchequer. The ten hundred thousand pounds were speedily subscribed ; for the industry of the people had created cajMtal which was seeking employment, although they had been far more heavily taxed during ' four years than at any previous period. Louis, although he was familiar with the system of loans, was somewhat amazed at the comparative ease with which taxes were raised and a million of ' money borrowed in England upon the credit of the taxes. He is said to have exclaimed, " My little cousin the prince of Orange is fixed in the saddle ; no matter ; the last louis d'or must carry it." f This was really a just view of the premises of success, though the great king's conclusions were fallacious. The people of England were in a far better condition than the people of France, to fight on without expending all to the last louis d'or. The working and accumulating Middle Class was far more powerful in the one nation than in the other. There can be no doubt that the means first created by the Act of 1693 for the investment of superfluous capital, have largely contributed to the progressive development of the national resources. There can be no doubt, on the other hand, that the facilities of borrowing by the creation of Stock, have often led to extravagant expenditure in wars- that have averted no real danger nor secured any public advantage. There can be nothing more true than the assertion of Mr. Ricardo that " there cannot be a greater security for the contin uance of peace, than the imposing on ministers the necessity of applying to the people for the taxes to support a war." He has further observed, speaking the language of common sense which is the language of all true political economy, that " the burdens of a war are undoubtedly great during its continuance, but at its ter mination they cease altogether. When the pressure of war is felt at once, without mitigation, we shall be less disposed wantonly to engage in an expensive contest, and if engaged in it, we shall be sooner disposed to get out of it, unless it be a contest for some * 4 Gul. & Mar. c. 3. t Ralph, vol. ii. p. 398. 572 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. great national interest."* Although the statesmen and the people of the reign of William III. felt that the war against the prepon derance of France, and the consequent subjection of England, was for a great national interest, they also felt that the burden could not be borne in the existing state of the country without resort to the system of loans. In the case before us they did not contem plate a permanent loan. In the next year, when the Bank of Eng land was established upon the condition of lending a sum of money to the government, of which the principal could not be demanded by the lenders, though the borrowers had the privilege of paying it off. a permanent debt was begun to be contracted. The system of borrowing went on for three years, till at the peace of Ryswick the debt amounted to twenty-one millions and a half. Nevertheless, so strong was the objection to the continuance of that system, that although engaged in a most expensive war for five years after the accession of Anne, the debt was reduced to sixteen millions. In half a century more it had increased to seventy-five millions. It was then the received opinion of financiers that if it ever reached a hundred millions the nation must become bankrupt. When we look at the one million borrowed on Life annuities in 1693, arid the eight hundred and three millions constituting the public debt of the United Kingdom in 1858, we may be amazed at the vast amount of the burthen which has been gradually accumu lating, but we also can now distinctly perceive how that burthen has been borne. It has not weighed down the country, because all the material resources of the country have been increasing with it. The increasing wealth — of which this vast debt owing by the nation to the nation is a symbol,— produced by the incessant appli cations of capital and labour, of science and invention, has increased the ability of the great body of the people to participate in the advantages to be derived from a ready and secure investment of their savings, with the condition that the sum so invested might be easily transferable. To this cause may be attributed the ease with which the government of that day could obtain loans by the crea tion of Public Funds at a fixed rate of interest, chiefly upon annuities. That facility shows the growing importance of the trading class, who most readily lent their surplus capital. Money, also, was no longer hoarded by those who had no means of employ ing, it commercially; although for a' considerable period, there were vast numbers who had not sufficient confidence in the govern- * " Works of David Ricardo," pp. 539 and 546. THE LICENSING ACT EXPIRES. 573 ment to lend. The time was far distant when there would be three hundred thousand persons receiving dividends upon stock, and when one million three hundred and forty thousand persons would also lend their small accumulations through the agency of Savings' Banks. The country was steadily growing more prosperous, as the National Debt went on increasing to six times the amount at the period when inevitable bankruptcy was predicted. It was six hundred millions at the jieace of Amiens. The eighteenth cen tury, deficient as it was in many social improvements which we now command, was a period of rapid progress in agriculture and manufactures ; and with this progress came a greater command of food and clothing, better dwellings, less frequent and less fatal epidemics for the great bulk of the people. The loan of 1693 has furnished data for a remarkable inquiry into the prolongation of life in the eighteenth century, consequent upon the bettered condi tion, and therefore improved health, of the population. That loan was a tontine. Every contributor of 100/. might name a life, to receive a fixed dividend during the duration of that life. As the annuitants dropped, their shares of the dividends were also to be divided amongst the survivors, till the whole number of annuitants was reduced to seven. In 1790, during, the ministry of Mr. Pitt. another tontine was negociated. The comparative results, as exhibiting the probable duration of life at the two periods, have been worked out by Mr. Finlaison, upon the assumption that the 438 females and 594 males named in 1693, and the 3974 females and 4197 males named in 1790, were the youngest and the health iest lives that the shareholders could select. Taking the dates at which the annuities of 1693 fell in, and estimating those of 1790 that had fallen or were still remaining in 1851, the calculation showed that in 1790 the expectation of life had increased one fourth.* In 1692, " An act for continuing certain laws that are expired and near expiring" was passed, in which the Act of Charles IL, continued by that of James II. , "for preventing abuses in printing seditious, treasonable, and unlicensed books and pamphlets, and for regulating printing and printing-presses," then about to expire, was continued to the 13th of February, 1692, and to the end of the next session of Parliament. If that renewed Act should expire, the Press, exempted from the superintendence of a licenser, would * We gather these facts from a paper by Dr. Southwood Smith, read at Birmingham in 185.7. 574 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. to a great extent be freed ; its real freedom would depend upon the law of libel, and its honest ajjplication. The licenser of the Stuarts, sir Roger Lestrange,-was ejected from his office at the Revolution. " His sting is gone," says John Dunton. That worthy chronicler of publishers and authors sketches the characters of the successors of the Tory licenser, saying, very libellously, "he would wink at unlicensed books if the printer's wife " kept up to the example of too many wives of that age. He describes Mr. Fraser " commonly called Catalogue Fraser, from his skill in books;" Dr. Midgley, "no bigot;" Mr. Heron, with "an air of pleasantness in his countenance ; " and " our last licenser, before the Act of Printing expired, Edmund Bohun, Esqre.," "a furious man against dissenters," and " a pretty author himself." * Edmund Bohun brought his own house down over his head. He carried his party feeling into his official occupation ; but had very strange notions which his party would not avow. He was bitterly attacked by a writer of very questionable notoriety, Charles Blount; and was more effectually damaged by a scheme of the same person " to ensnare and ruin him."f Blount wrote a pamphlet, which Bohun readily licensed— for it rested the rights of the sovereigns of the Revolution upon a principle which would confer upon them abso lute power. On the 22nd of January, complaint was made to the Commons, that a pamphlet, entitled " King William and queen Mary Conquerors, contained matter of dangerous consequence to their majesties, to the liberties of the subject, and to the peace of the kingdom." The House examined the matter; ordered the pamphlet to be burned by the common hangman ; and prayed the Crown to remove from his office Mr. Edmund Bohun, the licenser, who had suffered the pamphlet to be printed. With the removal of this licenser the system of licensing came to an end. The Act for regulating Printing expired. The House was in a libel-burning mood, with regard to the same description of offence : " Dr. Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury's book burnt by the hangman, for an expres-' sion of the king's title by conquest, on a complaint of Joseph Howe, a member of parliament— little better than a madman." X Some were for impeaching the bishop. The Pastoral Letter in which the doctrine was held was .written in 1689. There could be no impeachment ; for there had been an Act of Grace in 1690. The House of Commons has never failed to rejoice in any exhibi- * Dunton's " Life aud Errors," p. 351,- edit. 1705. t Macaulay. } Evelyn. "Diary," Feb. 4. PARLIAMENTARY REFORM. 575 tion of the power of some member to make a bad joke. At the cry of " Burn it, burn it," the book was sent to the flames at Char ing Cross. There were two attempts made in this Session to produce what may be called a Reform in Parliament. The Commons jaassed a Bill excluding all placemen from sitting in the House who should be elected after February, 1693. Men holding office of every kind, civil and military, were in Parliament. It was unwisely proposed to exclude all persons who should in future hold office under the Crown. It was prudently determined by the sitting members not to exclude themselves. They passed no " Self-denying Ordi nance." The Lords rejected this measure by a very small major ity. A Bill providing that the existing Parliament should end on the first of January, 1694, and that no Parliament should in future sit more than three years, was introduced to the House of Lords, by Shrewsbury, who represented the Whigs. It passed both Houses. On the last day of the Session, the king rejected the measure, in the words of Norman French which would now be the most fatal words ever spoken by a sovereign. The Constitution has worked itself clear of such contending powers. The use of the Veto was not then thought " an exercise of prerogative which no ordinary circumstances can reconcile either with prudence or a constitutional administration of government."* The Bill for triennial parliaments was passed in the next year, without opposi tion from the Crown. The most memorable circumstance con nected with the Bill which William rejected was, that having asked the advice of sir William Temple, that advice, to pass the Bill, was communicated to the king by the humble friend of the retired statesman, his secretary, Jonathan Swift. Slightly connected with the political transactions of the begin ning of 1693 was a tragical event that occasioned great public scandal. "After five days' trial and extraordinary contest, the lord Mohun was acquitted by the lords of the murderiof Mount fort, the player, notwithstanding the judges, from the pregnant witnesses of the fact, had declared him guilty. But whether in consideration of his youth, being not eighteen years old, though exceeding dissolute, or upon whatever other reason, — the king himself present some part, and satisfied, as they report, that he was culpable — sixty-nine acquitted him, only fourteen condemned him." t The people cried out that when blood was shed by the •Hallam. " Constitutional History," chap, xv- t Evelyn. " Diary," Feb. 4. 576 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. great there was no justice for the poor. Members of the House of Commons rejoiced that, in the last Session, they had so strenu ously opposed an extension of the privileges of the peers, who thus sheltered one of their own guilty members. William Mount fort, the player, according to Colley Cibber, was in tragedy the 'most affecting lover — in comedy, he gave the truest life to the fine gentleman. In 1694 he was in his thirty-third year — "tall, well- made, fair, and of an agreeable aspect." Nine years before, he was patronised by Jeffries, when at the height of his power; and at a lord mayor's feast the jovial chancellor made Mountfort " plead before him in a feigned cause, in which he aped all the great lawyers of the age in their tone of voice, and in their action and gesture of body " — very much to the scandal of sir John Reresby, who records the fact. This accomplished actor was the favourite of the town. But Mrs. Anne Bracegirdle was " the dar ling of the theatre." She was " the universal passion," but she admitted no favourite. Amongst the rakes and fops who fre quented the one theatre that now enjoyed the monopoly of the drama, it was a fashion " to have a taste of tendre for Mrs. Brace- girdle." * Amongst those who toasted this lively brunette over their bumpers of claret, were a captain Hill, and his friend and admirer, the debauched young peer. The captain had addressed the actress in terms which she rejected with contempt. He be came jealous, and his jealousy fixed upon Mountfort ; for Hill had writhed at seeing the handsome actor in love scenes, when the lady smiled upon her admirer with all the semblance of real pas sion. Hill, with the assistance of his noble friend, determined to carry off Mrs. Bracegirdle. They also determined to have no more trouble with the presumptuous player. They forced the actress into a coach as she was coming out of a house with her mother ; but she was rescued, and the courtly pair departed, vow ing vengeance on Mountfort. They loitered about the player's house till midnight. As he approached his home lord Mohun met him in Norfolk-street, entering into friendly conversation. Hill came behind, struck Mountfort on the head, and then ran him through the body. The Grand Jury found a true bill against Mohun and Hill for the murder. Hill escaped. The judges, at the request of Carmarthen, who presided at the trial, had given the opinion upon the case to which Evelyn alludes. • Cibber's "Apology." MINISTERIAL CHANGES. 577 CHAPTER XXIX. Ministerial Changes.— Preparations for the Campaign.— Louis and William with their , ('Armies— Louis returns to Versailles. — Battle of Landen. — Naval Miscarriages.— A Ministry formed.— Government by Party.— Preponderance of the Wlligs Financial difficulties. — Establishment of the Bank of England. — Expedition against Brest. — Illness of the Queen. — Her Death. King William had closed the Session of the English Parlia ment on the 14th of March. He. had made some important changes in official appointments. Sir John Somers had been promoted to the dignity of Keeper, the great seal having been so long in com mission, that " all people were now grown weary " of the dilatory and expensive proceedings in Chancery.* Russell was removed from the command of the fleet ; for, in consequence of fierce differ ences between him and Nottingham, the Secretary of State, they could not have held office together. At this juncture Burnet no tices the formation of a party " that studied to cross and defeat every thing." One of the principal leaders of this party was sir Christopher Musgrave, who " upon many critical occasions gave up some imjDortant points, for which the king found it necessary to pay him very liberally." f The memory of this senator has been preserved from the utter oblivion to which such patriotism is best consigned, by four lines of the great satirist of the next reign : — " Once, we confess, beneath the patriot's cloak, From the crack'd bag the dropping guinea spoke, And jingling down the back-stairs told the crew Old Cato is as great a rogue as you." X The amount of business done in this way was very considerable. The bribe at Kensington was too often found necessary to neu tralise the bribe from Versailles. William grew more and more cynical and sullen under these degrading affairs of state-craft, and gladly rushed away to hunt in Holland or to fight in Belgium. His Most Christian Majesty — "Jupiter en person ne "—is again * Burnet, vol. iv. p. r87. t Ibid-, p. 190. X Pope, " Epistle on the Use of Riches." trn, Ttr ni 578 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. about to take the field. What privations he is now to undergo for the glory of France ! He is fifty-seven years of age. He had been fifty-two years king ; but his real sovereign power did not com mence till the great minister, Mazarin, had closed his long career of intrigue. Then the magnificent sovereign burst forth in all the grandeur that can result from the implicit belief of one man that he is born to uncontrolled command, and that all that remains fen- millions of subject beings is to obey. The first maxim of government that Louis laid down was that kings are absolute lords ; that all property was theirs ; that the lives of their subjects were theirs also. He had the old feudal nobility of France at his feet. Their political power had burnt out in the wars of La Fronde. All that was left to them were their exclusive privileges, and their capacity of grinding tbe occupiers of land by every variety of exaction. They had nothing in common with the great body of the people ; they had no common rights to maintain ; they were no longer the pro tectors of the vassals from a greater tyranny than their own. AH the miseries of feudalism remained, with none of its security. The great lords of the soil had all become the slaves of the court. They were yet, to a certain extent, brave and warlike. They fought in their embroidery at Steinkirk, as their fathers had fought in their armour at Agincourt. But their reckless gallantry had no higher principle for its support than that of the liveried menial whose bravery is founded upon the arrogance and ostentation of his mas ter. Their adulation of their grand monarque was in some re spects a trade. He was the fountain of all honour and all prefer ment ; the grosser their flatteries the more certain their rewards. He was the sun that imparted life to all within its sphere. Where that sun did not shine, there was one universal thick darkness. But where did it not shine ? It was the great central power that vivified all France. The sun rose upon France when the chief valet went forth from the royal bedchamber and said, " the king is awake." Then the princes of the blood, and the dukes and counts who were waiting in the antechamber, enter in solemn state, with the pages of the wardrobe, who bear the surtouts and the wigs, with other inferior habiliments that majesty may condescend to wear. As the sublime operations of shaving and hand-washing go forward, those who have the privilege of "la premiere entre'e " gather round to behold how the Phoebus of France is gradually unfolding its beams. As that sun becomes more and more bril liant, " les grandes entries " take place, and marshals and bishops LOUIS AND WILLIAM WITH THEIR ARMIES. 579 look on with humble adoration while a duke hands Louis his shirt, and a marquis assists him to pull on his stockings. The waist coat, the coat, the blue ribbon, and the sword, complete the courtly investiture of this more than mortal, who stands in the relation of . Providence to France.* Such was the morning opening of the terrible routine day of Versailles — of its dreary etiquettes— its heartless splendours— its odious profligacies — the absolute king himself the merest slave of the artificial life which he enforced as the basis of his power. From such a monotony the king of France is about to seek relief in once more looking upon the pomp and cir cumstance of war. He departs from Versailles with his vast cav alcade of ladies, of cooks and valets, of actors and musicians. He puts himself at the head of the army of Boufflers, whilst Luxem burg with another army is near at hand. On the 24th of March William left London to embark at Harwich The wind was contrary, and he returned for a few days to Kensing ton. The court life of that suburban residence is as striking a contrast to the court life of Versailles, as the little villa is insignif icant itself when compared with the proud palace of the French king. The Kensington which William bought of lord Nottingham was then surrounded with only twenty-six acres of plantations and gardens — " a patched building," says Evelyn. Another observer of the time says, " the walks and grass are very fine." Queen Mary directed the laying out of the gardens, and William rejoiced to watch the growth of the evergreens in which he delighted. It was a seat well suited for a king of simple tastes. Versailles was well suited for an ostentatious king, who counted it amongst his great works to have expended ten millions in subjugating nature by art — building a vast palace, and creating magnificent gardens, in a desert of sand and swamjp. f A few days' quiet, and William is again hurrying with small retinue to the Hague. He has, as usual, to unite the discordant members ofthe confederacy; to soothe the rivalries of princes who each wanted some supreme command ; to tempt some with money, some with promised hon ours. At the beginning of June Lotfis was with the army of- Bouf flers, who had taken up a position at Gembloux. The ladies of the court were left in safety within the walls of Namur. The other army commanded by Luxemburg was only half a league distant * De Tocqueville says of the centralising system, " The French Government having thus assumed the place of Providence." t St. Simon. 580 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. from that of Boufflers. William had entrenched himself near Louvain. He had thus posted himself to prevent an advance of the French upon Liege or upon Brussels. However inferior in numbers, he was resolved to hazard a battle if the enemy should advance. He took no sanguine view of his situation when such a mighty force was so near, having a perfect command of supplies. St. Simon, who was serving in this campaign as a captain of cavalry, says of William, "we have since known that he wrote several times to his intimate friend, the prince de Vaudemont, that he was lost — that he could only escape by a miracle." Luxemburg urged Louis to advance. To the astonishment of the French armies the king announced his determination, on the Sth of June, to return to Versailles, and to send part of the great force into Germany. St. Simon attributes this resolution to the remembrance of the tears which Madame de Maintenon had shed at their part ing, and to the letters in which she urged the return of her royal lover or husband. The same shrewd witness of what was clearly regarded as pusillanimity in the great king, describes the bursts of laughter amongst friends, the sneers, the whispered indignation, which even the most extravagant loyalty could not suppress. Louis retraced his steps to Namur, and on the 25th of June he arrived with his ladies at Versailles. Boufflers had left the army of the Netherlands with the de tached force sent to the Rhine. Luxemburg was now in the sole command of the French army, which was still superior to that of William. But this ablest of the generals of Louis by his skilful manoeuvres contrived to weaken William's force. William had learnt that Luxemburg was advancing to lay siege to Liege, and he determined to detach a large body to assist in its defence, leaving his own entrenched camp near Louvain, and marching with his remaining fifty thousand men to a favourable position on the river Gette. The feint of Luxemburg was successful. He suddenly turned from the road to Liege ; and on the 28th of July, William was aware that he had been deceived, and that the enemy was coming fast upon him with a greatly superior army. He would not retreat. All that could be done was to strengthen his position. In one night of incessant labour entrenchments had been thrown up; redoubts had been constructed; the hedo-es and mud walls of the two villages which the allies occupied had been converted into barricades. <• It is incredible." says St. Simon, "that in so few hours, such an extent of regular defences could BATTLE OF LANDEN. 581 have been created." On the morning of the 29th of July, their value was to be tested. When Luxemburg suddenly changed his apparent determina tion to move upon Liege, he ordered the fascines to be burnt, with which each battalion had been provided for the siege. By a rapid march of eight leagues he had reached a plain within hearing of the multitudinous sound's of William's camp. All the night these noises were heard, and " we began to fear," says St. Simon, " that the enemy was about to retreat." The sun had scarcely risen when the batteries of the allied army gave effectual proof that no flight was meditated. The French artillery could not be brought up till an hour afterwards. " We then began to see," says St. Simon, " that the affair would be difficult." The allies occupied the heights, and the two villages of Neerwinden and of Bas-Landen, one on the right and the other on the left. A long entrenchment, on the high ground, connected one village with the other. As the French cavalry advanced, the batteries from their commanding entrenchment did great execution. The great struggle was for the possession of these villages, especially of Neerwinden. The French infantry attacked with the impetuosity of their nation, and they were repulsed by the English characteristic obstinacy. At Neerwinden their general Montchevreul was killed, and the young duke of Berwick was taken prisoner. The French cavalry endea voured to force the entrenchments, and were suffered to ajpproach within pistol-shot of the allied infantry, when, says St. Simon, "the enemy gave such a well-directed volley, that the horse wheeled round, and retired faster than they came." During four hours had this struggle been carried on. Twice had the French infantry been repulsed, and thrice the French cavalry. St. Simon relates how Luxemburg called the princes of the blood, and his fellow marshals, to a conference at a spot out of reach of the can non of the allies, and there for half an hour earnestly debated what course should be adopted, under the circumstances of such obsti nate resistance. A third time it was resolved to attack Neerwin den, but with such an overwhelming force as should carry the vic tory, if victory were to be won. The household troops of Louis, headed by the prince of Conti, attacked with irresistible fury. When they had carried the walled gardens and cleared the en trenched street, the carbineers and the cavalry poured in. The allies began to retreat as the French gained possession of Neer winden, from the top of whose clock-tower the curs' of the village 582 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. looked down upon the terrible struggle. Suddenly William ap peared at the head of his English guards ; and the famous house hold troops of France, " until now invincible," says St. Simon, gave way before him. But all was in vain. The entrenchments of the main line could not be adequately defended, whilst the brunt of the conflict had to be borne in the two villages on the ex treme right and left. The line was broken ; a retreat was neces sary ; but it was not a disorderly retreat. William, according to the sober narrative of St. Simon, fought to the last, and he^vith the elector of Bavaria passed over the bridge which the allies had constructed over the Gette, when he saw that there was no reason able hope in a further contest. A more enthusiastic relation thug paints the king : " Gallant mortal ! This moment, now that all is lost, I see him galloping across me, corporal, to the left, to bring up the remains of the English horse along with him to support the right, and tear the laurel from Luxemburg's brows, if yet 'tis possible — I see him with the knot of his scarf just shot off, infusing fresh spirit into poor Galway's regiment — riding along the line — then wheeling about, and charging Conti at the head of it — Brave ! brave by heaven! cried my uncle Toby, — he deserves a crown." It is the fire of genius which thus lights up the traditions of Sterne's boyhood. The daring of William, " when all was lost," was not " to tear the laurel from Luxemburg's brow," but to cover the retreat of his scattered forces, as they had to cross the tempo rary bridges, or plunge into the fords and climb the steep banks of the Gette. The exhausted victors remained upon the ground they had won. There had been twelve hours of fighting. Twenty thousand of both armies fell in that terrible battle-field, which the French call Neerwinden and the English call Landen. The vic tory of Luxemburg had no direct results. The retreat of William involved no greater disaster. He was not a fortunate general, but no one could deny his courage and his indomitable energy. He was one of those who possess the rare faculty of considering no misfortune, however severe, to be irretrievable. On the night of the battle he wrote a note to his friend Portland, in which he says, "These are great trials, which God has been pleased to send me in quick succession. I must try to submit to His pleasure without murmuring, and to deserve His anger less." In three weeks he had gathered all his forces around him at Brussels. The detach- ' ment that had been unfortunately sent to Liege had joined the head-quarters in safety. The crisis, William said, had been terri- NAVAL MISCARRIAGES. 583 ble ; but he thanked God it had ended no worse. The only suc cessful result of the campaign in which Louis took the field with a hundred and forty thousand men, to sweep the allies from the Netherlands was the taking of Charleroy, to which siege William offered no opposition. The biographer of James pours out his complaints that the court of France had not availed itself of the advantages gained over the Allies, especially " at the famous battle of Landen," to be zealous in the matter of his restoration to the crown of England ; "for there never was greater hopes of terrify ing the English into their duty than at this time." His Most Christian Majesty did not avail himself of the favourable occasion. James had published a Declaration in April, which promised all sorts of good things to his rebellious subjects, in which promises no- one 'confided. The dream so long indulged of " terrifying the English into their duty " was the last hope ; and that was doomed to disapfjointment. The French, says the biographer of James, " began to be so weary of the war, and were indeed so terrified themselves by the great scarcity which happened that year, that his Most Christian Majesty thought fit to make offers of peace, by mediation of the crown of Denmark." He adds, "It is not im probable but when the English saw the French so disheartened after such mighty advantages, that it allayed their apprehensions of the king's being forced upon them, and consequently their endeavours of restoring him themselves." * During the absence of the king, England had undergone other disasters besides that of Landen. She saw the operation of the Allies unsuccessful in every quarter. The French army which had been detached from. Gembloux crossed the Rhine, and en abled another French force to take Heidelberg, and repeat the ravages which had previously disgraced their arms in the Pal atinate. Catalonia was invaded, and the fortress of Rosas was taken by the French. The duke of Savoy sustained a memorable defeat at Marsiglia. Worst of all, through the mismanagement of naval affairs, the rich Smyrna fleet of English and Dutch mer chantmen, which was to be convoyed by English and Dutch men- of-war, was intercepted by Tourville, and captured, destroyed, or scattered. In the utter want of correct intelligence, the English admirals Killigrew and Delaval, had thought the squadron safe when they had sailed to a certain point beyond Ushant ; for they believed that Tourville was in Brest harbour. He had come out, * " Life of James II." vol. ii. p. 516. 584 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. and had joined the Toulon fleet. Rooke, against his remonstrances, was left with a very inadequate force, and the other admirals sailed homeward, ready to avert any attempt upon the English coasts. Off Cape St. Vincent, Rooke learnt that a French fleet was in the bay of Lagos. He soon found himself in presence of an enemy of four times his strength. The Dutch fought bravely, while Rooke made all speed with part of his unfortunate convoy to Madeira. The loss to the mercantile interest of England and Holland was enormous. The suffering merchants of London sent a deputation to the queen, to JJray for inquiry into the cause of this misfortune ; and Mary's conciliatory reply disarmed some portion of the anger of the jpeople. It was a time of great excitement. Violent pam- phlets against the government were scattered abroad from secret presses. A printer named William Anderson was indicted for high treason, was convicted, and was executed. It requires a rather violent stretch of historical partisanship to affirm that such a conviction was legal, although the tracts inculcated a general in surrection, and the nation was exhorted to free itself from its ty rant. There was no proof of the printing of these tracts at the press of Anderson beyond what resulted from a comparison of the types used with the types seized on his jiremises. Even if the proof of printing had been complete, we may conclude that there is " much danger in the construction which draws sprinted libels, unconnected with any conspiracy, within the pale of treason, and especially the treason of comfjassing the king's death, unless where they directly tended to his assassination."* The punishment of Anderson only increased the virulence of the Jacobite jsam- phleteers, as must ever be the case when extreme punishments are resorted to as the readiest means of prevention for political offences. The hanging of Anderson in London, and the torturing of Nevil Payne in Edinburgh, •)• did more injury to the cause of William than the defeats of Steinkirk or Landen. He came to put down the injustice and cruelty of arbitrary power; and yet, said his enemies with some truth, tyranny still walks abroad under the mask of freedom. At the beginning of November, William was again at Kensing ton. The Parliament was to meet on the 7th. A great change in * Hallam, "Constitutional Histnry,'' chap. xv. t We omitted to mention {.intf, p. 53.S), that the warrant for the torture of Nevil Payne bears William's signature ; a mere formal act, perhaps, but one which attaches ob loquy to his memory. A MINISTRY FORMED. 585 the administrative system of England was about to take place. The king for five years had endeavoured to govern by choosing his ministers from each of the two great parties of the State ; some times givihg the preponderance to the Whigs, at other times to the Tories. These ministers carried on the public affairs of their sev eral departments without very well defined principles of action, amidst personal hatred and jealousies which were too often highly injurious to the national interests. An experiment was now to be made to substitute for this individual direction of public affairs the administration of a party. The heads of departments were to be united by some common consent upon political principles. " Party divisions," says Burke, "whether on the whole operating for good o.- evil, are things inseparable from free government." He held it to be a duty for public men "to act in party," with all the modera tion consistent with vigour and fervency of spirit,* — a duty not very easy at any time, and almost impossible in the earlier stages of representative government, when all were going through a sort of education in constitutional principles. William was about to change some of his ministers ; at the same time to select new ad visers from those who would "act in party; " who would submit their own wills to a general agreement ; who would constitute what we now understand as a Ministry, whose possession of power under the authority of the sovereign, and with the command of a parliamentary majority, implied the superior influence of the gen eral principles which constituted their bond of political union. William had become convinced that he could best carry on his government through the party which had mainly accomplished the Revolution. He would not compose his administration exclusively of Whigs, but there should be such a preponderance of those who held Whig principles, that the Tory party, so closely bordering upon the Jacobite party, should be neutralised in what we may now call a Cabinet. The functions of the Privy Council had become merged in the Cabinet Council. In a debate in 1692, on Advice given to the king, one member exclaimed, " Cabinet Council is not a word to be found in our law-books. We knew it not before. We took it for a nickname." f Another member described what the Cabi net was : " The method is this ; things are concerted in the Cabinet, and brought and put upon them for their assent, without showing any of the reasons. That has not been the method of England. * " Observations on a late State of the Nation." t Waller, " Parliamentary History," vol. v. col. 731. 586 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. If this method be, you will never know who gives advice." * The objectors to a Cabinet desired that every counsellor should, in the acts of Council, set his hand to assent or dissent. This was to secure individual responsibility for evil measures — a responsibility which has vanished in the united responsibility of a Ministry. However strong was the Parliamentary jealousy of a Cabinet, the exclusion of the Privy Council from the real business of the State became more and more established in the reign of William. But the jealousy remained. In a clause of the Statute of the 12 & 13 Will. III., "for the further limitation ofthe Crown," it was enacted that " all matters and things relating to the well-government of the kingdom, which are properly cognizable in the Privy Council, by the laws and customs of this realm, shall be transacted there." This was a prosjiective clause, to take effect after the succession contemplated by the Act. It was repealed by the 4 & 5 of Anne, c. 20, where the clause is recited.f To make the supreme admin istration of affairs — the questions of armaments that required pro- found secresy, and of diplomacy whose success dejsended upon ministerial reserve — " properly cognizable in the privy Council," has been impossible even if it had been salutary, since the power and influence of England gradually assumed the extension and proportions which began to characterise her policy subsequent to the Revolution. As representative government gradually com pelled the sovereign to choose an administration founded upon the preponderance of a party, so this administration by party gradually broke up that unseemly division of the servants of the Crown into factions, which was occasionally manifested until the middle of the • eighteenth century. The earl of Sunderland had become a confidential adviser of king William. " By his long experience," says Burnet, "and his knowledge of men and things, he had gained an ascendancy over him, and had more credit with him than any Englishman ever had." J Sunderland's " knowledge of men and things," had been acquired in a long course of shaping his opinions by his conviction of what he thought the most expedient and profitable system for his own advancement and security. He had publicly supported the most tyrannous actions of James, however he might have secretly op posed some of them. To please his master, he had declared himself * Wharton, "Parliamentary History," vol. v. col. 731. t Curiously enough, the clause does not appear in the Act of William, as given in the " Statutes of the Realm." X " Own Time," vol. iv. p. 215. PREPONDERANCE OF THE WHIGS. 587 a Papist. To,make himself safe in the Revolution which he saw at hand, he had betrayed that master. He vanished from the scene of active politics when William became king, retired to Holland, and again declared himself a Protestant. He was ex cluded -from William's Act of Grace as one of the chief instru ments of the late tyranny. But he came back to England, and "made himself a necessity for the new government. He had cut off all hope of being reconciled to the Jacobite party ; he could be very useful to the party of the Revolution. " His long ex perience " made him master of all the complications of political action. He was the representative in 1693 of that class of un principled politicians of which Talleyrand was the representa tive when the Bourbons were restored to France. His advice was not to be despised, however the man might be odious. Speaker Onslow, in his Notes upon Burnet, Says, " I remember to have heard from a great personage, that when the earl of Sunderland came afterwards to be in king William's confidence, and pressed him very much to trust and rely more upon the Whigs fhan he had done, the king said, he believed the Whigs loved him best, but they did not love monarchy ; and though the Tories did not like him so well as the others, yet, as they were zealous for ¦monarchy, he thought they would serve his government best. To which the earl replied, that it was very true that the Tories were better friends to monarchy than the Whigs were, but then his majesty was to consider that he was not their monarch." * Sun derland, out of his knowledge of men and things, knew that the republican party had ceased to exist ; and William saw that Sun* derland's distinction between the affection for monarchy, and the love of the monarch de facto, was a sound one. William did trust and rely more upon the Whigs than he had done. Somers had been made his Keeper of the Great Seal ; the choice was wise. The attorney's son had rendered the highest service in that great crisis which was to establish the government of England upon the basis of law. He was the leader of his party, as much by his moderation as by his eloquence and learning. Russell, who had more than once been tempted to betray the government he served, but when the hour of trial came did his duty to his country, was restored to the command of the fleet. Thomas Wharton, the son of a .puritan peer, had led a life of dissipation in the time of Charles the Second, and continued his course of profligacy under the sober * Burnet, Oxford edition, vol. iv. p. 5. 588 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. regime of William. The man was hated, and yet he was popular. The hate with which he was regarded by the Tories was perhaps the result of his political consistency. When he died, a Tory wrote his elegy: — " Farewell, old bully of these impious times, True pattern of the Whigs, and of their crimes." * With Somers, Russell, and Wharton was joined, in William's new min istry, Charles Montague. He had cast off the honours of asecond-rate poet to become a first-class politician. His jjarliamentary eloquence was almost unrivalled. His financial abilities were more necessary to a government conducting a most expensive war, even than his eloquence. One more Whig was to be won, and he was Shrews bury. He re'signed the office of Secretary of State in 1690, when William favoured the Tories. He had been tampered with from St. Germains, and was faithless to his trust. But he had seen his error, and was now to be called back by William to a hearty allegi ance. The seals were again offered to Shrewsbury. The king had a personal regard for him ; but he refused to accept the office which Nottingham had relinquished. Before the meeting of Par liament a lady wrote to him, by the king's command : " He assured me," says her letter, " that when 1 e valued any body as he did you, he could easily forget some mistakes." f Again Shrewsbury re fused office. A female friend of this lady wrote to the coy earl, hinting that a dukedom would be the reward of his compliance. The ladies persevered for several months, and at last Shrewsbury yielded, and had his dukedom and the Garter. The chief female negotiator on the jjart of the king was Mrs. Villiers, — one whom the scandal of the time regards as his mistress — one of whom Bur net makes no direct mention, but to whom he is supposed to have alluded when he says of the prince of Orange and Mary, in 16S6, that "the perfect union between them had of late been a little em broiled." Elizabeth Villiers, maid of honour to the princess of Orange — afterwards married to the earl of Orkney — was a woman of remarkable ability, with whom Swift delighted to talk for hours ; who, in 1713, gave the great writer her picture; but who was not formed for the usual female conquests, however great her mental powers. " I think," writes Swift to Stella. " the devil was. in it the other day when I talked to her of an uglv squinting cousin of hers, and the poor lady herself, you knows, squints like a dragon." f * " The Lord Whiglove's Elegy," 1715. t Coxe, " Shrewsbury Correspondence," p. 20. t " Journal to Stella," letter liv. FINANCIAL DIFFICULTIES. 589 The king and his new ministers did not shrink from demanding from the Parliament a larger supply than ever for carrying on the war. Eighty-three thousand troops were voted for the service of 1694; and the naval estimates were also largely increased. The Whig majority in the House of Commons was strong enough to bear down all unreasonable ojpposition. There were violent debates on the naval miscarriages, but no blame was thrown on the conduct of the late disastrous campaign. How to raise the large sums necessary to maintain the land and sea forces was a matter of anxious discussion. A land-tax, a jDoll-tax, stamj>duties, a tax on hackney coaches, and a lottery, were the expedients. High and low were the adventurers in this new sj^stem of state gambling, -as Evelyn records : " In the lottery set up after the Venetian manner by Mr. Neale, sir R. Haddock, one of the Commissioners of the Navy, had the greatest lot, 3000/. ; my coachman, 40/." But money was still wanting. The necessity gave birth to one of the greatest public establishments of this or any other country, the Bank of England. The Statute under which this national institution was formed bears a very ambiguous title : " An Act for granting to their majesties several rates and duties inpon tonnage of ships and ves sels, and upon beer, ale, and other liquors, for securing certain re compenses and advantages in the said Act mentioned, to such persons as shall voluntarily advance the sum of fifteen hundred thousand pounds towards the carrying on the war against France." * The subscribers for the advance of a loan, ujxra the conditions set forth, were to be constituted a corporate body " by the name of the Governor and Company of the Bank of England." The money really required to be advanced was twelve hundred thousand pounds. f The subscription list was filled in ten days. The trad ing community had been sufficiently prepared for a right apprecia tion of the project which was carried in the House of Commons by the energy of Montague. The scheme of a Bank had been the subject of discussion for three years. William Paterson — a man whose name is associated with this most successful scheme of a great national bank for England, and with another most unfortunate project of a great national system of colonisation for Scotland — had in 1691 submitted proposals to the government somewhat sim ilar to the plan which was carried out in 1694. His scheme was ably supported amongst commercial men by Michael Godfrey, an * 5 & 6 Gul. & Mar. c. 20. t A nie, p. 430. 59° HISTORY OF ENGLAND. eminent London merchant ; and when the government at last adopted it, Godfrey's influence in the city was as useful as Mon tague's eloquence in Parliament. The original plan of a national bank was met by every sort of objection. Some said it was a new thing, and they did not understand it. Others said the project came from Holland, and there were too many Dutch things already.* In 1694, "the men who were sujiposed to have most money op posed and appeared against it [the bank] with all their might, pre tending it could not do without them, and they were resolved never to be concerned." f Tories said that a bank and a monarchy could not exist together. Whig's said that a bank and liberty were incompatible, for that the Crown would command the wealth of the bank. A clause was introduced in the Act, which jjrevented the Bank of England making loans to the government without authority of Parliament, which neutralised the Whig objection. With this. restriction the Bank of England has yet, in all times, been a pow erful ally of the government. The system of small loans came to an end, as thus described in a paper called " The Wednesday Club," written by Paterson himself, as his biographer affirms : " The state officers and privy counsellors of that time were brought to stoop so low as to become frequent solicitors to the Common Council of London, to borrow only ,£100,000 or ^200,000 at a time, on the part payment of the land-tax, all payable within two years, and then to stipulate and receive guineas at 22s. per piece, besides still further securing allowances on such occasions, which one may suppose to have been considerable. As the state-officers deigned to become suitors to the Common Council, so were the particular Common Councilmen to the inhabitants of their respective wards, going from house to house, as our parish officers do in case of briefs for fire, for building and repairing churches, or the like." J The king prorogued the Parliament on the 25th of April, and again set out for the Continent at the beginning of May. The campaign was in no degree remarkable for its gains or its losses. But the French had been arrested in their march to European dominion. They were held at bay. The naval plan of warfare was vigorously conceived in the cabinet of William, but it was de feated by what was once thought accident, but which is now proved to have been treachery. A great French fleet under Tour ville had sailed from Brest to the Mediterranean. A portion of the allied fleet of English and Dutch under Russell was to look * Bannister's " Life of William Paterson," p. 100. t Ibid., p. 96. X Ibid., p. 97. EXPEDITION AGAINST BREST. 591 after Tourville, and another portion under Berkeley was to form a secret expedition. Troops commanded by Talmash were taken on board Berkeley's squadron. The two admirals parted com pany west of Cape Finisterre. Russell sailed to the Mediterra nean ; Berkeley to Brest, which it was supposed was left without adequate defence. Berkeley and Talmash would not credit the re port of their own officer, that the French were prejpared for their reception. Eight English vessels entered Camaretbay; and were received with the fire of many batteries. Talmash attempted to land his soldiers from boats ; when strong bodies of cavalry and infantry appeared on the beach, and drove them back in confusion. The cannon of the fortifications that had been constructed in afew weeks, swejpt away more than a thousand brave English. Talmash himself was mortally wounded, but lived to reach Portsmouth, whither the armament had returned in all haste. The discomfiture was caused by the jpurpose of the expedition having become known to the French government. Vauban had been sent to Brest, and his science and promptitude had soon defended the entrance from the bay to the harbour with bombs and cannon, placed in the most commanding positions. William at the end of June wrote to Shrewsbury from the camp of Roseback, " You may easily con ceive my vexation when I learnt the repulse our troops had ex perienced in the descent near Brest ; and although the loss is very inconsiderable, yet in war it is always mortifying to undertake any- tiling that does not succeed." * A few days later the king wrote : " I am indeed extremely affected with the loss of poor Talmash ; for although I do not approve of his conduct, yet I am of opinion that his too ardent zeal to distinguish himself induced him to at tempt what was impracticable." f It is asserted that the resolu tion to attack Brest was betrayed to James by Godolphin, and also by a letter from Marlborough. :£ Of Marlborough's treachery to his country there is the unquestionable evidence of a letter written by him to James on the 4th of May, in which he says, that it has that day come to his knowledge that the expedition preparing at Portsmouth, is to be commanded by Talmash, and designed to burn the harbour of Brest, and to destroy the men of war that are there. He then says, " This would be a great advantage to Eng land ; but no consideration ever can, or shall, hinder me from let. " Shrewsbury Correspondence," p. 45. 1 Ibid., p. 46. X Dalrymple. 592 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. ting you know what I think may be for your service." * That Marlborough had in view the destruction of a rival general, Tal mash, is to load his memory with a charge of guilt even more atrocious than his systematic jjerfidy in affairs of state. Yet he did not lose a moment in soliciting a return to high employment when Talmash was no more. In a letter of Shrewsbury to the king, he says : " It is impossible to forget what is here become a very general discourse, the probability and conveniency of your majesty receiving my lord Marlborough into your favour. He has been with me since this news, to offer his service, with all the ex pressions of duty and fidelity imaginable." f William gave a very short answer to the recommendation of his Secretary of State : " As to what you wrote in your last letter concerning lord Marl borough, I can say no more than that I do not think it for the good of my service to entrust him with the command of my troops." X The failure at Brest was attempted to be retrieved by miserable expeditions against defenceless towns on the French coast. Dieppe, Havre, and Calais were bombarded. This wretched mode of attack upon an enemy's harmless people, though begun by the French, was felt to be useless and exasperating: — " a cruel and brutish way of making war, — an action totally adverse to humanity or Christianity." § William returned from the Continent on the 9th of Novem ber. He had to learn, what is as damaging to a government as ¦an unsuccessful attempt in war, that a State trial under a- special commission at Manchester, of some Lancashire gentlemen accused of high treason, had resulted in an acquittal. The government was set on to this prosecution by one of those dangerous sjpies that always start up in unquiet times, and too often foment the con spiracies they-are employed to discover. Before the trial, after swords and armour had been found in old houses, and arrests had been made, this Lancashire plot was turned into ridicule. At the trial the chief informer, when his brother spy had given evidence against the prisoners, swore that the alleged plot was an invention of their own. The Counsel for the Crown threw up his brief; the prisoners were acquitted ; and the presiding judges were hooted as tltey left Manchester. The Parliament was opened by the king on the 12th of Novem- * " Life of James," vol. ii. p. 522. Macpherson also prints the letter in his " Orig inal Papers." t " Shrewsbury Correspondence," p. 47. X ibid, p. 53. § Evelyn. ILLNESS OF THE QUEEN. 593 ber. The Commons adjourned for a week. When they met for business, they applied themselves in earnest to vote the Supplies and to discuss a bill "for the more frequent meeting and callino- of Parliament." This is the famous Triennial Bill which the king had rejected by his Veto in one Session of Parliament, and which the Commons had refused to pass in another Session. The Bill was now passed by both Houses without much opposition. On the 22nd of December, William came to Westminster. Great was the anxiety to know what words would now be uttered by the officer who spoke that voice of the Crown which confirmed or disallowed a measure of the two Houses. The words uttered were the old form of Assent, " Le roy et la royne le veulent." The king looked unhappy, but it was not a disquietude of state which moved him. Queen Mary was dangerously ill at Kensington. " The small-pox raged this winter about London," writes Bur net. To comprehend at this time the significance of the word "raged," we must carry our minds back, far beyond the period when Jenner discovered vaccination — beyond even the period when Lady Mary Wortley Montague made inoculation fashionable. When Burnet adds, that " thousands " were dying of this fatal disease, we must understand him literally. When the small-pox entered a house, it was considered as terrible a visitation as the plague. William went sorrowfully from the Parliament House to Kensington. Mary had been ill two days. She had never had the small-jjox ; but her regular physicians disputed about the symp toms. Ratcliffe, the most skilful " in all early and quick discovery of a distemper," — but, "proud of his fame in his profession, which fed his natural haughtiness, and made him think himself above, and refuse the attending of the highest personages when he had taken any prejudice against them," — declined at first to attend the queen when he was sent for.* He came at last and pronounced the fatal word " small-pox." William was in despair. " He called me," says Burnet, " into his closet, and gave free vent to a most tender pas sion. He burst out into tears, and cried out that there was no hope for the queen, and that from being the happiest, he was now going to be the miserablest creature on earth. He said, during the whole course of their marriage he had never known one single fault in her; there was a worth in her that nobody knew besides himself." Mary's fortitude and resignation were above all praise. The religious con solations which her faithful friend and counsellor, archbishop Til- * We find this character of Ratcliffe, and his refusal, in Onslow's Notes on Burnet. 594 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. lotson, would have administered to the dying queen were to be bestowed by his successor, Tenison. Tillotson had died five weeks before. When Tenison made Mary aware of her danger, but with " some address not to surprise her too much," she was per fectly calm. " She thanked God she had always carried this in her mind, that nothing was to be left to the last hour." Queen Mary died on the 28th of December, in the thirty-third year of her age. All parties agreed in acknowledging the beauties of her character. Burnet, the Whig, says, -" She was the most universally lamented princess, and deserved the best to be so, of any in our age, or in our history." Evelyn, the Tory, writes : "She was such an ad mirable woman, abating for taking the cr own without a more due apology, as does, if possible, outdo the renowned queen Elizabeth." She had many arduous duties to perform in the repeated absences of the king ; and not the least important was the distribution of ecclesiastical preferments. With a deep sense of religion she marked her preference for those divines who were moderate in their opinions, and earnest in the proper discharge of their high functions. When there were state affairs to attend to, she never shrunk from the proper duties of the sovereign. Her tastes were simple and unostentatious ; her morals of unblemished purity ; her charity was universal. Her deep attachment to her husband was founded upon her admiration of his high qualities. William's grief for her loss " was greater," says Burnet, " than those who knew him best thought his temper was capable of ; he went beyond all bounds in it. When she died, his spirits sunk so low, that there was great reason to apprehend that he was following her." Queen Mary was sumptuously interred in Westminster Abbey, although, " on opening a cabinet, a paper was found, wherein she had desired that her body might not be opened, nor any extraordinary expense at her funeral, whenever she should die : this paper was not found in time to be observed." * The funeral cost fifty thou sand pounds. A more worthy expenditure of public money in her honour took place when William determined to erect Greenwich Hospital, in compliance with that desire which she had expressed after the battle of La Hogue, to provide an asylum for disabled seamen. Mary, in following the fortunes of her husband and ac- capting with him the sovereign power of these kingdoms to the ex clusion of her father, discharged a higher duty even than that of filial affection. But she was always solicitous for that father's personal * Evelyn- " Diary," March I. DEATH OF THE QUEEN. 595 safety The paltriness of James's character was manifested upon his daughter's decease, in a manner which St. Simon thus records : " The king of England [James] prayed the king [Louis] that the Court should not wear mourning. All those who were related to the prince of Orange, including M. de Bouillon and M. de Duras, were forbidden to wear it. They obeyed and was silent ; but this sort of revenge was considered very petty." England. France, Germany. Papal States. Spain. Russia. I&55 \ ( Charles II. , King dejure. 1 Commonwealth. Louis XIV. Ferdinand III. Alexander VII. Philip III. Alexei Michaelowitch. 1658 — — Leopold I. — — — i66o Charles II. , King de facto. - - - - — 1665 - - - — Charles II. — 1667 - - - Clement IX. - - 1670 - - - Clement X. - - 1676 - - - Innocent XI. — Feodorell. 1682 - - - - - Ivan Alexandrowitch. 1685 James II. — - - - Peter the Great. 168c William and Mary. — — Alexander VIII. - - Great Britain. France. ^Germany. Prussia. Sweden. Russia. Spain. 1690 William and Mary Louis XIV. Leopold I. Frederic William Charles XII. Peter I. Charles II. >tar w o o o55HWgO >