case

THE HIGH COMMISSION

69

an important speech in defence of his measures. A third was that of Alexander Leighton, who scurrilously attacked the bishops. After a severe sentence he fled, but he was recaptured, and then was scourged and deprived of

an ear.

However small may have been the part which ecclesiastics played in these cases, and there can be no doubt that it was very greatly exaggerated in popular imagination; it is certain that the part they took was a grievous error, for which the Church itself had to suffer. Then, as in past

ages, clergy could not act prominently in secular affairs without great risk of scandal and danger. And the scandal and danger were not mitigated by the work of the Court of High Commission. This court was designed by Elizabeth to remedy, through its clear and swift procedure, the delays and abuses of the ordinary ecclesiastical courts. Through it she thought to exercise her supremacy in the matter of jurisdiction. Its purview, it would seem, had been extended; and cases of disobedience to the orders which issued from Lambeth were naturally brought before it. Nothing could have been more unfortunate. It is rare that the English people have complacently sanctioned the suspension or deprivation of the parochial clergy for offences unknown to the law but created by archiepiscopal opinion or rescript. The case of the opponents of Laud was no exception to this rule.

High Commission.

Recent investigations tend to the conclusion that the Court of High Commission has, even by eminent writers, been much too severely judged. Its great defects The Court of were, in an exaggerated form, those of the other law courts of the time. They were chiefly, the exercise of the "ex-officio oath," by which persons holding office in the Church or under the crown could be required to give evidence, in certain cases, against themselves; and the general style of browbeating and unfairness in the treatment of evidence which seems to us to be characteristic of all the tribunals of the time. The greatest modern authority on the history of the period says, "No one who has studied its records will speak of it as a barbarous or even a cruel tribunal." Unhappily the greater part of its records has been destroyed. Sufficient, however, survive to enable

us to give some account of the part which it played in the Laudian reformation. Its main work, and the main object of its judges, was moral.

Its action in favour of morality.

During the century which succeeded the Reformation the English Church was engaged in a strenuous, and in the end successful, struggle against wickedness in high places. The moral tone of the courts of Elizabeth and James I. was notoriously low, and it was too faithfully reflected among the nobility and country gentry. There was often difficulty in punishing high offenders, who thought "they were above the reach of other men or their power or will to chastise." This was intolerable to Laud, and from the time when his influence became supreme, "persons of honour and great quality," says Clarendon, "of the court and of the country, were every day cited into the High Commission Court, upon the fame of their incontinence, or other scandal in their lives, and were there prosecuted, to their shame and punishment and as the shame (which they called an insolent triumph upon their degree and quality, and levelling them with the common people) was never forgotten, but watched for revenge, so the fines imposed there were the more questioned and repined against, because they were assigned to the rebuilding and repairing of St. Paul's church, and thought therefore to be the more severely imposed, and the less compassionately reduced and excused." The cases of which we have record bear out this view. Moral offences of laity as well as clergy were most severely dealt with; and they were the most numerous cases.

Next to them come cases of ribaldry, scurrilous abuse, sacrilege, and the like, the majority of which seem as we read the account of the trials to have been committed

Cases of

sacrilege and by persons of unsound mind. There are many the like. cases too of blasphemy, which were doubtless due either to insanity or to the too literal interpretation, by persons of no education and of unbalanced minds, of the English version of the Holy Scriptures. The cases of suspension for refusal of the new orders are very rare, and degradation almost invariably was the punishment only for moral offences. In one case the Bishop of Rochester was careful to call attention to the charges which were often made against the

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UNPOPULARITY OF THE COURTS

71

"Let

court, and to note their divergence from the truth. men know," he said in the case of a clergyman named Harrison, "that he is not sentenced for not wearing the surplice, but for drunkenness, profaning of marriages, and making men live in perpetual adultery, that he is a briber, a beggar, a drunkard, a Bedlam." Laud added that it was time to punish such a man as this, "seeing they have sent us this printed libel from Amsterdam, wherein they accuse us for conniving with such men," and he read the words, "although he be the vilest wretch that lives under the sun, yet if he will wear the surplice, and cross the child with thumb, he shall be countenanced by you much better than the best." Other notable cases were those of Leighton, with whom the High Commission dealt only in degrading him after his sentence for libel by the Star Chamber; Ward, who was sentenced to suspension for contemning the Prayer-book and committed to prison because he would not acknowledge his offence; Barnard, who declared that the English bishops were Roman Catholics at heart, and no Roman Catholics could be saved; Lady Eleanor Davies, who was sentenced for foolish prophecies, and ought to have been recognised as insane, and again more severely when, "with a kettle in one hand and a brush in the other," she entered Lichfield cathedral church "to sprinkle some of her holy water (as she called that in the kettle) upon the (altar) hangings and the bishop's seat, which was only a composition of tar, pitch, sink-puddle water, etc., and such kind of nasty ingredients."

of the

of Laud.

Whatever may be thought of the wisdom of the acts of the High Commission, and whatever excuses may be made for the severity of its judgments, there can be no doubt that its activity was widely resented. Nor can it be General denied that the vehemence of Laud, his sharp unpopularity language and his bitter feeling towards those who courts and offended against the settled order of the king and realm, did much, though probably within a limited circle, to increase the rising animosity towards the rulers in Church and State, and to direct it, with special violence against the "urchin," the "little meddling hocus-pocus" (as Bishop Williams called him) himself. Good was done by the court, but harm was done also, and good was not done in the right

way. There was chapter and verse for all that was done for the decency and order of Divine worship, but it bore so much the air of being enforced by an unsympathetic power from London that it was bitterly resented, often by country squires and sometimes by country parsons.

In spite of this, the aims of the archbishop were to a very considerable extent realised even during the few years when he was in power. The age needed peace, order, tolerance, settled dwelling-places on a sure foundation. For these he built, and though what he built seemed to be swept away, he had gone deep and built sure. As time went on Reason suggested articles of peace on the lines which he had laid down. It was something also, to have seen clearly where the dividing line came. His measures made it clear to Englishmen that a rigid Calvinism and Presbyterian hierarchy were alike inconsistent with the principles of the Church of England. Two centuries and a half after his death the order and the worship of our parish churches represent his ideal: and it has been well said by Dr. S. R. Gardiner that "his refusal to submit his mind to the dogmatism of Puritanism, and his appeal to the cultivated intelligence for the solution of religious problems, has received an ever-increasing response, even in regions in which his memory is devoted to contemptuous obloquy."

AUTHORITIES.-The State Papers, Domestic (which are here sometimes quoted verbatim from the abridgment in the Calendars), and the pamphlet literature of the time are the most important. Next to these must be placed Laud, Works; Hacket, Scrinia Reserata; the correspondence of Laud and Strafford (Strafford Papers); the Visitation Articles of the chief bishops, especially Laud, Neile, Juxon, and Mountague. Much information as to the conduct of the different dioceses, and as to the charges against the bishops, is to be found in the Tanner MSS. (Bodleian Library), notably vols. clxviii., CCXX. Vol. lxx. fol. 124 sqq. contain the articles drawn up by the court lawyers against Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick, March 11, 1635. A New Discovery of the Prelates Tyranny (1641), by Prynne, contains his account of the trials of himself, Bastwick, and Burton. A full account of the period is to be found in Collier, Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain, and there are many documents in Rushworth, Historical Collection. See also S. R. Gardiner, History of England, vols. vii.-ix.

CALIFORNIA

CHAPTER VI

POLITICAL OPPOSITION TO THE CHURCH

Interaction

THUS far we have dealt chiefly with the internal history of the Church. We have now to see how the agitation against the measures associated with Laud and his school found expression in Parliament, and how that expression of politics and religion. made war inevitable. In one aspect the opposition to Laud's reforms was simply a part of the opposition to the policy of the crown, the policy of James and Buckingham, and of Charles, as seen after Buckingham's death, in his own personal government. "No bishop no king" was a phrase of double meaning. The critical divergence of view between king and Commons led inevitably to an attack upon the Church. No one can think that there would have been a rebellion of Puritans if there had been no rebellion of Parliamentarians. May, the historian of the Long Parliament, even considers that the just constitutional cause of the Commons suffered from the fanatics who would always put religion into the first place in every attack upon the government. But none the less the rulers of the Church were gravely unpopular. The country gentry resented the attack upon what they considered their privileges in Church matters, and resented the new dignity given to the clergy, whom they were too often accustomed to think of as dependents and "hedge-priests." Hacket in his Life of

Unpopularity

of the

bishops.

Williams says, "The clamour might have warned wisdom to stop. Policy ought to listen abroad to the talk of the streets and the market-places, and not to despise rumours when they are sharpened against the innovating of any discipline."