Part 3 (1/2)
[57:2] _Life of Laud_, 70.
[59:1] Winwood's _Memorials_, III. 136.
[59:2] Letter of January 5th, 1614, in _Court and Times of James I._
CHAPTER III
CHARLES THE FIRST'S BOOK-FIRES.
Few things now seem more surprising than the sort of fury with which in the earlier part of the seventeenth century the extreme rights of monarchs were advocated by large numbers of Englishmen.
Political servitude was then the favourite dream of thousands.
The Church made herself especially prominent on the side of prerogative; the pulpits resounded with what our ancestors called Crown Divinity; and in the reign of Charles I. the rival principles, ultimately fought for on the battlefield, first came into conflict over sermons, the immediate cause, indeed, of so many of the greatest political movements of our history.
The first episode in this connection is the important case of Dr.
Roger Manwaring, one of Charles's chaplains, who, at the time when the King was pressing for a compulsory loan, preached two sermons before him, advocating the King's right to impose any loan or tax without consent of Parliament, and, in fact, making a clean sweep of all the liberties of the subject whatsoever. At Charles's request, Manwaring published these sermons under the t.i.tle of _Religion and Allegiance_ (1627). But the popular party in Parliament resolved to make an example of him, and a long speech on the subject by Pym is preserved in Rushworth. The Commons begged the Lords to p.r.o.nounce judgment upon him, and a most severe one they did p.r.o.nounce. He was to be imprisoned during the House's pleasure; to be fined 1000 to the King; to make a written submission at the bars of both Houses; to be suspended for three years; to be disabled from ever preaching at Court, or holding any ecclesiastical or secular office; and the King was to be moved to grant a proclamation for calling in and burning his book.
On June 23rd, 1628, Manwaring made accordingly a most abject submission at the bars of both Houses, Heylin says, on his knees and with tears in his eyes, confessing his sermons to have been ”full of dangerous pa.s.sages, inferences, and scandalous aspersions in most parts”; and the next day Charles issued a proclamation for calling them in, as having incurred ”the just censure and sentence of the High Court of Parliament.” The sentence of suppression presumably in this case carried the burning; but, if so, there is no mention of any public burning by the bishops and others, to whom the books were to be delivered by their owners.
Fuller says that much of Manwaring's sentence was remitted in consideration of his humble submission; and Charles the very same year not only pardoned him, but gave him ecclesiastical preferment, finally making him Bishop of St. David's. Heylin attests the resentment this indiscreet indulgence roused in the Commons; but, unfortunately, as Manwaring was doubtless well aware, to have incurred the anger of Parliament was motive enough with Charles for the preferment of the offender, and the shortest road to it.
This is shown by the similar treatment accorded to the Rev.
Richard Montagu, who had made himself conspicuous on the anti-Puritan side in the time of James. In defence of himself he had written his _Appello Caesarem_, with James's leave and encouragement. It was a long book, refuting the charges made against him of Popery and Arminianism, and full of bitter invectives against the Puritans. After the matter had been long under the consideration of Parliament, the House prayed Charles to punish Montagu, and to suppress and burn his books; and this Charles did in a remarkable proclamation (January 17th, 1628), wherein the _Appello Caesarem_ is admitted to have been _the first cause of those disputes and differences that have since much troubled the quiet of the Church_, and is therefore called in, Charles adding, that if others write again on the subject, ”we shall take such order with them and those books that they shall wish they had never thought upon these needless controversies.”
It appears, however, from Rushworth that, in spite of this, several answers were penned to Montagu, and that they were suppressed. And what, indeed, would life be but for its ”needless controversies”?
Nothing could be more praiseworthy than Charles's attempt to put a stop to the idle disputations and bitter recriminations of the combatants on either side of religious controversy. Could he have succeeded he might have staved off the Civil War, which we might almost more fitly call a religious one. But in those days few men, unfortunately, had the cool wisdom to remain as neutral between Arminian and Calvinist, Papist and Protestant, as between the rival Egyptian sects which, in Juvenal's time, fought for the wors.h.i.+p of the ibis or the crocodile. Our comparatively greater safety in these days is due to the large increase of that neutral party, which was so sadly insignificant in the time of Charles.
May that party therefore never become less, but constantly grow larger!
Montagu, at the time of the proclamation of his book, had been appointed Bishop of Chichester, having been raised to that see in spite or because of his quarrel with Parliament. He was consecrated by Laud in August of the same year, and Heylin admits that his promotion was more magnanimous than safe on the part of Charles, being clearly calculated to exasperate the House. Ten years later (1638) he was preferred to the see of Norwich. All his life he remained a prominent member of the Romanising party.
These books of Manwaring and Montagu are important as proving clearly two historical points, viz.:--(1) The early date at which the Court party alienated even the House of Lords. (2) The fact that the original exciting cause of all the subsequent discord between Puritan and Prelatist came from a prominent member of the Laudian or Romanising faction.
The rising temper of the people, and its justification, is shown even in these literary disputes. But the popular temper was destined to be more seriously roused by those atrocious sentences against the authors of certain books which were pa.s.sed within a few years by the Star Chamber and High Commission. The heavy fines and cruel mutilations imposed by these courts were not new in the reign of Charles, but they became far more frequent, and were directed less against wrong conduct than disagreeable opinions. They are intimately connected with the memory of Laud, first as Bishop of London, and then as Archbishop of Canterbury, whose letters show that the severities in question were to him and Strafford (to use Hallam's expression) ”the feebleness of excessive lenity.” To the last Charles was not despotic enough to please Laud, who complains petulantly in his Diary of a prince ”who knew not how to be, or be made great.”
As the first ill.u.s.tration of Laud's method for attaining this end must be mentioned the case of a book which enjoys the distinction of having brought its author to a more severe punishment than any other book in the English language. Our literature has had many a martyr, but Alexander Leighton is the foremost of the rank.
He was a Scotch divine; nor can it be denied that his _Syon's Plea against the Prelacy_ (1628) contained, indeed, some bitter things against the bishops; he said they were of no use in G.o.d's house, and called them caterpillars, moths, and cankerworms. But our ancestors habitually indulged in such expressions; and even Tyndale, the martyr, called church functionaries horse-leeches, maggots, and caterpillars in a kingdom. Such terms were among the traditional amenities of all controversy, but especially of religious controversy. But since the Martin-Marprelate Tracts or Latimer's sermons the strong anti-Episcopalian feeling of the country had never expressed itself so vigorously as in this ”decade of grievances” against the hierarchy, presented to Parliament by a man who was too sensitive of ”the ruin of religion and the sinking of the State.”
The Star Chamber fined him 10,000, and then the High Commission Court deprived him of his ministry, and sentenced him to be whipped, to be pilloried, to lose his ears, to have his nose slit, to be branded on his cheeks with ”S. S.” (Sower of Sedition), and to be imprisoned for life! Probably with all this, the burning of his book went without saying; though I have found no specific mention of its incurring that fate.
The sentence was executed in November 1630, in frost and snow, making its victim, as he says himself, ”a theatre of misery to men and angels.” It was all done in the name of law and order, like all the other great atrocities of history. After ten years'
imprisonment Leighton was released by the Long Parliament, and a few years later he wrote an account of his sufferings, and a report of his trial in the Star Chamber. Therein we learn that Laud, the Bishop of London, was the moving spirit of the whole thing. At the end of his speech he apologised for his presence at the trial, admitting that by the Canon law no ecclesiastic might be present at a judicature where loss of life or limb was incurred, but contending that there was no such loss in ear-cutting, nose-slitting, branding, and whipping. Leighton, of course, may have been misinformed of what occurred at his trial (for he himself was not allowed to be present!); and so some doubt must also attach to the story that when the censure was delivered ”the Prelate off with his cap, and holding up his hands gave thanks to G.o.d who had given him the victory over his enemies.”
Shortly after his release, Leighton was made keeper of Lambeth Palace, and then he died, ”rather insane of mind for the hards.h.i.+ps he had suffered”; but, such is the irony of fate, the man who had paid so heavily for his antipathy to bishops became himself the father of an archbishop!
By an unexplained law of our nature the very severity of punishment seems to invite men to incur it; and Leighton's fate, like most penal warnings, rather incited to its imitation than deterred from it. The next to feel the grip of the Star Chamber was the famous William Prynne, barrister of Lincoln's Inn, and one of the most erudite as well as most voluminous writers our country has ever produced.
He was only thirty-three when in 1633 he published his _Histriomastix; or, the Player's Scourge_. His labour had taken him seven years, nor was it the first work of his that had attracted the notice of authority. In a thousand closely printed pages, he argued, by an appeal to fifty-five councils, seventy-one fathers and Christian writers, one hundred and fifty Protestant and Catholic authors, and forty heathen philosophers into the bargain, that stage-plays, besides being sinful and heathenish, were ”intolerable mischiefs to churches, to republics, to the manners, minds, and souls of men.” Little as we think so now, this opinion, which was afterwards also Defoe's, was not without justification in those days. But Prynne's crusade did not stop at theatres; and Heylin's account reveals the feeling of contemporaries: ”Neither the hospitality of the gentry in the time of Christmas, nor the music in cathedrals and the chapels royal, nor the pomps and gallantries of the Court, nor the Queen's harmless recreations, nor the King's solacing himself sometimes in masques and dances could escape the venom of his pen.” ”He seemed to breathe nothing but disgrace to the nation, infamy to the Church, reproaches to the Court, dishonour to the Queen.” For his remarks against female actors were thought to be aimed at Henrietta Maria, though the pastoral in which she took part was posterior by six weeks to the publication of the book![78:1] The four legal societies ”presented their Majesties with a pompous and magnificent masque, to let them see that Prynne's leaven had not soured them all, and that they were not poisoned with the same infection.”[79:1]