country. The speaker of the House of Commons is our mouth, and if our mouth will be sullen and will not speak when we would have it, it should be bitten by the teeth, and ought to be made an example; and, for my part, I think it not fit you should escape without some mark of punishment to be set upon you by the House."

It was easier to speak of punishment than to inflict it. Maxwell, the usher of the Black Rod, was now knocking at the door with a message from the king. The moments were fast flying, and there was no time for longer deliberation. Charles had sent for his guard to force a way into the House. Not a minute was to be lost in idle recrimination. Holles threw himself into the breach. "Since that paper is burnt," he said, "I conceive I cannot do his Majesty nor my country better service than to deliver to this House what was contained in it, which, as I remember, was thus much in effect:

"Whosoever shall bring in innovation in religion, or by favor seek to extend or introduce popery or Arminianism, or other opinions disagreeing from the true and orthodox Church, shall be reputed a capital enemy to this kingdom and the commonwealth.

"Whosoever shall counsel or advise the taking and levying of the subsidies of tonnage and poundage, not being granted by Parliament, or shall be an actor or an instrument therein, shall be likewise reputed an innovator in the government, and a capital enemy to this kingdom and commonwealth.

"If any merchant or other person whatsoever shall voluntarily yield or pay the said subsidies of tonnage and poundage, not being granted by Parliament, he shall likewise be reputed a betrayer of the liberty of England, and an enemy to the same."

It was hopeless to apply again to speaker or clerk. Holles put the question himself. Hearty shouts of "Ay!" "Ay!" adopted the defiance which he flung in the face of the king. The House then voted its own adjournment. The door was thrown open at last, and the members poured forth to convey to the outer world the tidings of their high resolve. Eleven years were to pass away before the representatives of the country were permitted to cross that threshold again. . .

Immediately after the adjournment a proclamation for the dissolution of Parliament was drawn up and signed by the king. Charles threw the whole blame upon the insolence of those who had resisted his command to adjourn. Yet it was not without hesitation that the decisive step was taken. Coventry was sup

ported by a considerable following in the council in asking that a milder course should be adopted. Weston, whose impeachment had been called for by Eliot, argued strongly on the other side. For two days the contending parties strove with one another, and it was only on the 4th that the Proclamation was made public. The day before, Eliot and eight other members of the Commons had been summoned to appear before the board. Seven of them presented themselves before the council, and were committed either to the Tower or to other prisons. The other two were subsequently captured, and shared the fate of their friends.

CHAPTER III

ARCHBISHOP LAUD AND THE RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

DURING the period of personal government, Charles I did many things which irritated the people of England. He fined men who, though holding by military tenure lands worth £40 a year, had not been knighted, thus reviving a practice which men believed to be obsolete. He levied ship money to build up his navy, and to replenish his treasury resorted to many other schemes which stirred up a bitter opposition from those on whom the burdens fell. To these sources of discontent another was added in the appointment of Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury. In his own words, Laud "labored nothing more than that the external public worship of God, too much slighted in most parts of the kingdom might be preserved, and that with as much decency and uniformity as might be." Here were an ideal and a determination clearly athwart the temper of the growing Puritan party. The student, therefore, seeking the forces at work in the constitutional struggle must closely examine the policy and actions of Archbishop Laud.

§ 1. The Character of Archbishop Laud1

Soberness of judgment in matters of doctrine, combined with an undue reverence for external forms, an entire want of imaginative sympathy, and a quick and irritable temper, made Laud one of the worst rulers who could at this crisis have been imposed upon the English Church. For it was a time when, in the midst of diverging tendencies of thought, many things were certain to be said and done which would appear extravagant to his mind; and By

Gardiner, History of England, 1603-1642, Vol. VII, pp. 301 ff. permission of Longmans, Green, & Company, Publishers.

when the bond of unity which he sought to preserve was to be found rather in identity of moral aim than in exact conformity with any special standard. The remedy for the diseases of the time, in short, was to be sought in liberty, and of the value of liberty Laud was as ignorant as the narrowest Puritan or the most bigoted Roman Catholic.

Those who are most prone to misunderstand others are themselves most liable to be misunderstood. The foreign ecclesiastic, if such he was, who offered Laud a cardinal's hat, did not stand alone in his interpretation of the tendencies of the new archbishop. One Ludowick Bowyer, a young man of good family, who may have been mad, and was certainly a thief and a swindler, went about spreading rumors that Laud had been detected in raising a revenue for the pope, and had been sent to the Tower as a traitor. The Star Chamber imprisoned him for life, fined him £3000, ordered him to be set three times in the pillory, to lose his ears, and to be branded on the forehead with the letters L and R, as a liar and a rogue. "His censure is upon record," wrote Laud coolly in his diary, "and God forgive him. . .

The sharpness and irritability with which Laud was commonly charged were not inconsistent with a readiness to use persuasion rather than force as long as mildness promised a more successful issue. When once he discovered that an opponent was not to be gained over, he lost all patience with him. He had no sense of humor to qualify the harshness of his judgment. Small offences assumed in his eyes the character of great crimes. If in the Star Chamber, any voice was raised for a penalty out of all proportion to the magnitude of the fault, that voice was sure to be the archbishop's.

2. Laud and Ecclesiastical Discipline

Almost immediately after his promotion Laud received a letter from the king which was doubtless written at his own instigation. In this letter he was directed to see that the bishops observed the canon which restricted their ordinations to persons who, unless they held certain exceptional positions, were able to show that they were about to undertake the cure of souls. In this way the door of the ministry would be barred against two classes of men which were regarded by the archbishop with an evil eye, and at which he had already struck in the king's instructions issued four years before. No man would now be able to take orders with the intention of passing his life as a lecturer, in the hope that he would

thus escape the obligation of using the whole of the services in the Prayer Book. Nor would any man be able to take orders with the hope of obtaining a chaplaincy in a private family, where he would be bound to no restrictions except those which his patron was pleased to lay upon him. Only peers and other persons of high rank were now to be permitted to keep chaplains at all.

Undoubtedly the system thus attacked was an evil system. The separation between the lecturer who preached and the conforming minister who read the service was admirably contrived to raise feelings of partisanship in a congregation and a division amongst the clergy themselves. The lecturer who sat in the vestry till the prayers were over, and then mounted the pulpit as a being infinitely superior to the mere reader of prayers who had preceded him, was not very likely to promote the peace of the Church. The system of chaplaincies was fraught with evils of another kind. The chaplain of a wealthy patron might indeed be admitted as the honored friend of the house, the counsellor in spiritual difficulties, the guide and companion of the younger members of the family; but in too many instances the clergyman who accepted such a position would sink into the dependent hanger-on of a rich master, expected to flatter his virtues and to be very lenient to his faults, to do his errands and to be the butt of his jests. Promoters of ecclesiastical discipline like Laud, and dramatic writers who cared nothing for ecclesiastical discipline at all, were of one mind in condemning a system which brought the ministers of the gospel into a position in which they might easily be treated with less consideration than a groom.

Laud's intense concentration upon the immediate present hindered him from perceiving the ultimate consequence of his acts. His strong confidence in the power of external discipline to subdue the most reluctant minds encouraged him to seize the happy moment when the king, and, as he firmly believed, the law, was on his side. Deeper questions about the suitability of that law to human nature in general or to English nature in particular he passed over as irrelevant. He did not look to the king to carry out some ideal which the law knew nothing of. He had "ever been of opinion that the king and his people" were "so joined together in one civil and politic body, as that it" was "not possible for any man to be true to the king that shall be found treacherous to the State established by law, and work to the subversion of the people." In his eyes, no doubt the king possessed legal powers which the medieval churchman would have regarded as tyrannical