of common church and election in the reorganized nation church, from which they banished Exclusion both the bishops and the prayer-book, were able to derive but wealth little practical consolation from the king's promise to secure clergy from "liberty to tender consciences." Immediately after the land- livings; ing of Charles on May 26 the nine surviving bishops returned restoration to their sees without the aid of legislation, and in a short time of bishops; the eighteen vacant sees in England and Wales were filled up in the usual way.1 Not, however, until the next year was the act repealed which prevented the bishops from taking their places in the house of lords.2 In order to protect the commonwealth clergy, many of whom had not received episcopal consecration, from attack from the bishops who were thus set over them, Charles attempted to bring about a theological compromise which would enable all to live together in unity within the pale of the state church. While he was not able to secure for the presbyterians the liberal terms embodied in Bishop Usher's model, the only legislation enacted against them by the convention was embodied in an "Act for the "Act for confirming and restoring of ministers," a moderate measure ing and mainly for the benefit of the ejected clergy still alive, which restoring of was a mere foretaste of the radical policy of wholesale expulsion soon to be embodied in the new Act of Uniformity. Among the many delicate and difficult problems which thus Reorganipressed upon parliament for prompt solution no one was more of the urgent than that which demanded the reorganization of the finances: national finances upon a new basis. As a starting-point the fact was settled that at least £1,200,000 per annum were "necessary to support the king's crown and dignity," that is to say, the crown's ordinary expenses. After appropriating to that object the customs duties, a successful attempt was made to substitute a new source of income in lieu of the sums the crown had so long received as a part of its ordinary revenue from the incidents of feudal tenures, an obnoxious form of incidents taxation, which ceased to be enforced during the civil war tenures after the extinction of the court of wards and liveries, which abolished; sat for the last time February 24, 1645. In order to prevent 5 3 4 It was admitted that £900,000, the usual revenue in the time of Charles I., was inadequate. 5 For a full exposition, see Dowell, Hist. of Taxation, vol. ii. pp. 15-37. the confirm ministers." zation of feudal exceptions all tenures converted into free and com mon socage; tary excise; 2 a revival of that institution an act1 was passed which abolished the entire obsolete system of military tenures, together with with a few the court in which they were enforced. It was expressly declared that all kinds of tenures held of the king or others be converted into free and common socage, excepting only those in frankalmoign, copyholds, and the honorary services of grand serjeanty. And while the landed gentry were thus relieved of a burden peculiar to themselves, the nation as a whole was freed from the royal rights of purveyance and preemption. As a compensation for this surrender, it was agreed that £100,000 a year should be settled upon the crown, and that sum was an heredi- raised by the grant of an hereditary excise upon, beer, ale, and other liquors, a form of taxation which had been imported into England in the days of the commonwealth.3 A supplement was then granted in the form of a temporary excise for life, and in addition to that a new tax, of a French origin, was imposition granted in 1662 known as hearth-money or chimney-money, which, after exciting great resistance, was repealed immediately after the accession of William and Mary. In order to raise sums for extraordinary purposes resort was had during old Tudor the reign to poll taxes, to the old Tudor subsidy, and to the subsidy abandoned; monthly assessments first employed by the commonwealth. In 1663 four subsidies were granted by the temporality and four by the clergy, which, after being confirmed in the ancient form, produced only £282,000. It was then admitted that the subsidy as a form of taxation was obsolete, and it was never again employed. One important result of its discontinnew assess- uance was that when the assessment system which took its place was applied to the church, it was agreed between the applied to lord chancellor and the archbishop in 1664 that the clergy both clergy and laity; should be taxed like the rest of the nation, and as a natural consequence the right of suffrage in parliamentary elections was conceded to them by reason of their freehold tenures." of hearthmoney; ment system 1 12 Car. II. c. 24. See Digby, Law of Real Property, pp. 394–398. 2 The duke of Marlborough holds Woodstock by that tenure (see Woodstock Manor, by Rev. E. Marshall, M. A.); and the duke of Wellington, the Strathfieldsaye estate in the same way (see Burke's Peerage, s. v. Wellington). 8 First imposed by the Long Parliament in 1643. See above, p. 324. 412 Car. II. c. 23. This was a duplicate of the hereditary excise granted by 12 Car. II. c. 24. 5 13 & 14 Car. II. c. 10. When formed this tax finally produced £170,ooo a year. 6 Dowell, Hist. of Taxation, vol. ii. pp. 29, 30. 7 See vol. i. pp. 481, 482. of common Thus while it may be true that the commonwealth failed to one effect bequeath a single permanent organic law to posterity, the fact wealth must not be lost sight of that its legislation worked a revolu- legislation. tion in the methods of English taxation. for suprem royalists first minis the leaders parties; While the question still remained unsettled whether the Struggle presbyterians, who had taken the chief part in the restoration, acy between and who were in almost exclusive control of the magistracy as and presbywell as of local government in the shires and towns, or the terians; royalists, who stood closest to the king, were to control in the new settlement of the nation, Charles so organized his first ministry as to divide the great offices of state between the chiefs of the two factions, whose influence was nearly equal in the popular branch of the convention. Thus as leaders of the Charles' royalist faction Edward Hyde, who had clung to the king in try comhis exile, soon became earl of Clarendon and lord chancellor, posed of and Southampton lord treasurer, while the presbyterian inter- of both est was represented by Monk as lord-general, and by Sir Ashley Cooper, afterwards famous as the earl of Shaftesbury, as chancellor of the exchequer. As the chief of that group of constitutional royalists which in 1642 had broken with the Long Parliament under the lead of Falkland, Hyde, whose influence soon became supreme, promptly resolved to break through the system of balance and compromise imposed by the personal disposition of the king and the composition of parliament itself. With that end in view the convention was convention. dissolved in December1 and new elections ordered, which re- and royalist sulted in the return of a great royalist majority, confronted by majority a presbyterian opposition now reduced to not more than fifty members. Thus armed, Clarendon boldly entered upon the Clarendon's execution of his policy of reconstruction, which contemplated reconfirst the reëstablishment of the national church upon a basis struction. that would enforce uniformity upon all who had escaped from its fold; second, the restoration to the crown of all its prerogatives, except such as had been extinguished during the first session of the Long Parliament. dissolved returned; scheme of Charles' parliament 2. Charles' second parliament, which met on the 8th of May, second 1661, and which continued with long adjournments and proro- prolonged gations for nearly eighteen years, opened its session with an for nearly order that every member should take the communion, and that years; 1 Life of Clarendon, p. 76; Parl. Hist., vol. iv. pp. 141, 152. eighteen an act for regulating corporations; " the Solemn League and Covenant should be burned by the common hangman at Westminster. This condemnation of the creed of the presbyterians was promptly followed by a practical expedient for the suppression of the political influence of that party whose strongholds were the boroughs in which the corporation either actually returned the borough members, or at least exercised a powerful influence upon their election. In order to break down that influence by driving presbyterians from municipal offices, an act was passed "for the well-governing and regulating of corporations," 2 in which a religious test that compelled all office-holders and magistrates to take the sacrament according to the rites of the state church, and to renounce the League and Covenant, was supplemented by a political test that compelled them to subscribe to the royalist doctrine, then current, of non-resistance. But as both test and oath were soon accepted as a mere matter of form by those who regarded them as an insult to their consciences, Clarendon in the following year was prompted by his failure to devise a more drastic measure embodied in an Act of Uni- Act of Uniformity, the fourth since the Reformation, which formity, fourth since proposed to drive from the state church all Puritan ministers who would not accept without reservation the whole of the prayer-book, repudiate the Covenant and its principles, and submit before the feast of St. Bartholomew to episcopal ordination, in the event that the incumbent had not already received the same. A political test was then added, which required all clergymen to accept the doctrine of non-resistance together with a pledge not "to endeavour any change or alteration of government either in church or state." While Clarendon was driving on this radical measure, the king was striving to render it unnecessary by drawing together the leading divines of the two factions in what is known as the Savoy Conference, whose deliberations, which began on the 15th of April and ended on the 24th of July, were expected to provide a basis of compromise acceptable to both. In May, while this hopeless and fruitless conference was still going on, the bill passed, and on the 24th of August, St. Bartholomew's Day, about two the Re formation; fruitless Savoy Conference; 1 See Commons' Journals of May 17, 1661. 2 13 Car. II. st. 2, c. I. 8 13 & 14 Car. II. c. 4. 4 4 A clear and brief statement of the proceedings may be found in Blount, Reform. of the Church of Eng., vol. ii. pp. 556–563. of non clergy on Day; secure toler thousand1 rectors and vicars, at least one fifth of the clergy expulsion of the Church of England, were driven out as non-conformists. conformist The religious result of the expulsion of this strong and ag- Bartholgressive element, which ever since the Reformation had been omew's struggling to draw the English church into closer relations with the reformed churches of the Continent, was to end forever the result; that effort, and to fix it in the position of isolation which has continued until the present day; the political result was to infuse new life and vigor into the dissident body outside of the establishment, which under the pressure of a common persecution soon became welded into a fighting force that finally extorted from their adversaries the Act of Toleration.2 In the moment of his triumph, however, Clarendon, whose sole purpose was to crush by lawful means those who denied his right to make the state church the representative of the whole nation, was thwarted by Charles, who was equally intent upon so Charles' using churchmen against non-conformists as to secure tolera- attempt to tion for the catholics, to whose belief he was a secret devotee. ation for catholics; To promote that object the king, in the midst of the violence and persecution that followed the passage of the Act of Uniformity, issued in December, 1662, his first Declaration of first DeclaIndulgence, in which he undertook to suspend its operation Indulgence; in favor of "those who living peaceably do not conform themselves thereto through scruple and tenderness of misguided conscience, but modestly and without scandal perform their devotions in their own way." The counterblast of parliament parliamento this attempt to exercise the dispensing power, in a formula ay protest that applied to catholics as well as protestants, was an ad- dispensing dress which forced the king not only to withdraw the indulgence, but to issue a proclamation banishing all catholic priests. from the realm.3 The triumph which Clarendon, with parliament at his back, thus obtained over the king was emphasized by the passage, in 1664, of the Conventicle Act, in which it Conventicle was provided that every person over sixteen years of age present at a conventicle ("any meeting for religious worship at 1 Baxter in his Autobiography, p. 384, says from 1800 to 2000. See "An account of the ministers, etc., who were ejected or silenced after the Restoration in 1660, by, or before, the Act of Uniformity," by Edmund Calamy, 1713, forming vol. ii. of his Abridgment of 2 Green, Hist. of the Eng. People, 8 Cf. Parl. Hist., p. 517; Lingard, vol. ix. pp. 84–88. 4 16 Car. II. c. 4. ration of against power; Act of 1664; |