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139

in their nature mutually exclusive were brought, through love of faction and power, to walk hand in hand." Letters of the time amply confirm this description of the judicial historian.

Civil War.

The result of the "Second Civil War" was to prevent all real hope of an accommodation between king and parliament. In the negotiations at Newport, September 1648. Results of Charles was willing to agree to the establishment of the Second Presbyterianism for three years. Beyond that he would not go. He was determined in "the adhering to the Church-from which I cannot depart, no, not in show." He yielded, says our greatest authority, "all that he could reasonably be expected to yield"; and when he was asked to give up his friends to death as well as to permanently disestablish the Church, he had a double reason for firmness. At this point the army intervened. On November 20, they presented a Remonstrance. This declared that the king was but the chief functionary of the State and that if he deliberately abused his trust he must be brought to account, and that it was evident that nothing would bind Charles; and they insisted that he should be brought to trial. From this moment the end was inevitable. Cromwell soon came to see that, to clear the political arena, Charles must go to the block. He appealed to Providence; an infallible indication, says his great apologist, of a change of front. And Cromwell was the one strong man among soldiers and statesmen who saw difficulties but not the way out of them. Even then it needed force to purge the Parliament. On December 6, Colonel Pride expelled all members who could not be trusted to act as the army willed. The house became the mere instrument of the military power. As such, it erected the High Court of Justice, which condemned the king to death as a tyrant, traitor, and murderer, and a public enemy to the Commonwealth of England. At the last religion did not enter into the words of condemnation; but condemnation of the king. Charles and the people of England knew that it was because he would not surrender the Church that he came to die.

Pride s

Purge.

Trial and

His last thoughts were given to the one fixed loyalty of his life. He told his little daughter Elizabeth that he was to suffer for the laws and liberties of his country and for main

taining the true Protestant religion. He bade her read the sermons of Bishop Andrewes, Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, and Laud's controversy with Fisher. They were indeed the bases of his own Anglican faith-Andrewes taught the Catholic verities, Hooker and Laud gave the rational foundation of the English Reformation as against Geneva and Rome. Then, says his faithful servant Herbert—

His execu

"The king now bidding farewell to the world . . . he laid aside all other thoughts and spent the remainder of his time in prayer and other pious exercises of devotion in conference with that meek and learned Bishop Dr. Juxon who, under God, was a great support to him in that his afflicted condition." He was not suffered to rest undisturbed; but "when several London ministers wanted to pray with him, in regard he had made choice of Dr. Juxon (whom for many years he has known to be a pious and learned divine, and able to administer ghostly comfort to his soul suitable to his present condition), he would have none other." It was to tion, Jan. 30, Juxon that he made his last confession, and from 1649. him he received his last communion. In the last hours of his life, with that steady regularity of devotion which was the strength of the Anglicanism of the time, he said the morning prayer of the day. Nothing was varied; yet the very lesson of the day, St. Matthew xxvii., spoke directly to his heart. "Death is not terrible to me," he said, "I bless my God I am prepared." At the very last he declared that the hope of religious peace lay in the calling of a national synod: and he died, he said, “ a Christian according to the profession of the Church of England." So he

bowed his comely head

Down, as upon a bed.

"At

Lord Herbert thus tells how his body was laid to rest. such a time as the king's body was brought out of St. George's Hall, the sky was serene and clear, but presently it began to snow and fell so fast as by that time they came to the west end of the Royal Chapel the black velvet pall was all white (the colour of innocence) being thickly covered over with snow. . . . The king's body being by the bearers set down near the place of burial, the Bishop of London stood ready with the

...

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ΕΙΚΟΝ ΒASILIKE

141

Service Book in his hands to have performed his last duty to the king his master, according to the order or form for the burial of the dead set forth in the book of Common Prayer, which the Lords likewise desired but could not be suffered by Colonel Whitchcote, the Governor, by reason of the Directory, to which (said he) he and others were to be conformable.” And so in silence the last scene closed; and another pathetic memory was added to those which men treasured till the young king's return.

The Eikon

It

Charles, with all his failings, died for the Church. Nothing was more significant of the popular feeling that this was true than the enormous success of the Eikon Basilike, published February 1649, of which no less than forty- Basilike. seven editions were issued. It was, almost certainly, the work of Dr. John Gauden, one of Charles's chaplains. contained some of the king's prayers which had been in the hands of Juxon; and with a remarkable skill the writer managed throughout, in a pathetic fidelity, to convey Charles's true feelings when he knelt in penitence before God. If the book contained arguments for kingship it contained ten times as many for Anglicanism and the system of Laud. If it showed Charles at his best, it showed the Church as Laud longed for it to be.

Another apology for the monarchy was put out by the Royalists at Amsterdam in 1649, entitled Tragicum theatrum actorum et casuum tragicorum Londini publice celebratorum, in which the great heroes of the Cavaliers were commemorated, -Strafford, Laud, and the king himself,-and the young king and his followers were eulogised. It tried to tell Europe what the Eikon had told England.

Milton's answer, Eikonoklastes, October 1649, was little more than a mere piece of vulgar railing, and proved utterly ineffectual to stay the horror and pity which the Eikon had evolved. The Eikon Basilike was read everywhere, by every one: Puritans felt the genuineness of its piety, as churchmen felt the sincerity of the attachment to the Church which inspired it. "There are ways enough to repair the breaches of the state without the ruins of the Church" wrote the author; and when the ruin had come the people of England felt with him. "Peace itself is not desirable, till repentance have prepared us for it ;" and to repentance the sufferings which the war entailed

and the repression which followed its conclusion made men most seriously inclined. The execution of Charles made certain the restoration of Church and King.

AUTHORITIES.-Clarendon, Cromwell's Letters and Speeches; Hacket, Scrinia Reserata; the works of the chief divines, notably Laud, Hall; Warwick, Memoirs; Herbert, Memorials; Prynne's voluminous pamphlets, especially Canterburie's Doom; Heylin, Cyprianus Anglicus. The pamphlet literature of the time must be constantly consulted. Among modern authorities, Gardiner, History of England and History of the Great Civil War are the guides at every step; see also Lives of Laud, Juxon, Prynne, Stephen Marshall, Milton, in Dictionary of National Biography; Masson, Life of Milton; Todd, "Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury on the authorship of Eikon Basilike." For religion in the armies, see Firth, Cromwell's Army.

CHAPTER IX

THE COMMONWEALTH AND THE PROTECTORATE

1649-1660

The disestablishment of the Church.

THE years that followed the death of Charles I. may here be briefly sketched. The Church of England, the body established from old time under the sanction of the State, on its acceptance of the Catholic creeds and the Apostolic ministry, was no longer recognised by the State. Its worship was illegal, its ministry was deposed, and it was replaced by a fully established Presbyterian Church. The Universities, the strongholds of the National Church, were purged of all those who would not take the Covenant and accept the new religious order. And throughout England the process was carried out with increasing rigour. The Engagement, offered in 1649, by which a promise was given to be faithful to the Commonwealth as established, without a king and House of Lords, was not much more satisfactory to many of the clergy than was the Covenant. Several changes occurred at Oxford from refusal to take the Engagement, for, writes Calamy the biographer of Baxter, "the moderate Church party and the Presbyterians" rejected it.

After a sketch of the general action of Parliament towards the Church, and of its consequences, the history of the Church from 1649 to 1660 can best be followed by an examination of the religious position of Cromwell, of the ecclesiastical settlement under the Presbyterian system, the treatment of the dispossessed clergy, the nature of the toleration that was