Volume II Part 7 (1/2)

I must here reckon, among the beneficial acts of this parliament, one that pa.s.sed some months afterwards, after the king's return from Scotland, and perhaps the only measure of that second period on which we can bestow unmixed commendation. The delays and uncertainties of raising troops by voluntary enlistment, to which the temper of the English nation, pacific though intrepid, and impatient of the strict control of martial law, gave small encouragement, had led to the usage of pressing soldiers for service, whether in Ireland, or on foreign expeditions. This prerogative seeming dangerous and oppressive, as well as of dubious legality, it is recited in the preamble of an act empowering the king to levy troops by this compulsory method for the special exigency of the Irish rebellion, that ”by the laws of this realm, none of his majesty's subjects ought to be impressed or compelled to go out of his country to serve as a soldier in the wars, except in case of necessity of the sudden coming in of strange enemies into the kingdom, or except they be otherwise bound by the tenure of their lands or possessions.”[175] The king, in a speech from the throne, adverted to this bill while pa.s.sing through the houses, as an invasion of his prerogative. This notice of a parliamentary proceeding the Commons resented as a breach of their privilege; and having obtained the consent of the Lords to a joint remonstrance, the king, who was in no state to maintain his objection, gave his a.s.sent to the bill. In the reigns of Elizabeth and James, we have seen frequent instances of the Crown's interference as to matters debated in parliament. But from the time of the long parliament, the law of privilege, in this respect, has stood on an unshaken basis.[176]

These are the princ.i.p.al statutes which we owe to this parliament. They give occasion to two remarks of no slight importance. In the first place, it will appear, on comparing them with our ancient laws and history, that they made scarce any material change in our const.i.tution such as it had been established and recognised under the house of Plantagenet: the law for triennial parliaments even receded from those unrepealed provisions of the reign of Edward III., that they should be a.s.sembled annually. The court of star-chamber, if it could be said to have a legal jurisdiction, traced it only to the Tudor period; its recent excesses were diametrically opposed to the existing laws, and the protestations of ancient parliaments. The court of ecclesiastical commission was an offset of the royal supremacy, established at the Reformation. The impositions on merchandise were both plainly illegal, and of no long usage. That of s.h.i.+p-money was flagrantly, and by universal confession, a strain of arbitrary power without pretext of right. Thus, in by far the greater part of the enactments of 1641, the monarchy lost nothing that it had anciently possessed; and the balance of our const.i.tution might seem rather to have been restored to its former equipoise, than to have undergone any fresh change.

But those common liberties of England which our forefathers had, with such commendable perseverance, extorted from the grasp of power, though by no means so merely theoretical and nugatory in effect as some would insinuate, were yet very precarious in the best periods, neither well defined, nor exempt from anomalous exceptions, or from occasional infringement. Some of them, such as the statute for annual sessions of parliament, had gone into disuse. Those that were most evident, could not be enforced; and the new tribunals that, whether by law or usurpation, had reared their heads over the people, had made almost all public and personal rights dependent on their arbitrary will. It was necessary, therefore, to infuse new blood into the languid frame, and so to renovate our ancient const.i.tution that the present aera should seem almost a new birth of liberty. Such was the aim, especially, of those provisions which placed the return of parliaments at fixed intervals beyond the power of the Crown to elude.

It was hoped that by their means, so long as a sense of public spirit should exist in the nation (and beyond that time it is vain to think of liberty), no prince, however able and ambitious, could be free from restraint for more than three years; an interval too short for the completion of arbitrary projects, and which few ministers would venture to employ in such a manner as might expose them to the wrath of parliament.

It is to be observed, in the second place, that by these salutary restrictions, and some new retrenchments of pernicious or abused prerogative, the long parliament formed our const.i.tution such nearly as it now exists. Laws of great importance were doubtless enacted in subsequent times, particularly at the Revolution; but none of them, perhaps, were strictly necessary for the preservation of our civil and political privileges; and it is rather from 1641 than any other epoch, that we may date their full legal establishment. That single statute which abolished the star-chamber, gave every man a security which no other enactments could have afforded, and which no government could essentially impair. Though the reigns of the two latter Stuarts, accordingly, are justly obnoxious, and were marked by several illegal measures, yet, whether we consider the number and magnitude of their transgressions of law, or the practical oppression of their government, these princes fell very short of the despotism that had been exercised, either under the Tudors, or the two first of their own family.

From this survey of the good works of the long parliament, we must turn our eyes with equal indifference to the opposite picture of its errors and offences; faults which, though the mischiefs they produced were chiefly temporary, have yet served to obliterate from the recollection of too many the permanent blessings we have inherited through its exertions. In reflecting on the events which so soon clouded a scene of glory, we ought to learn the dangers that attend all revolutionary crises, however justifiable or necessary; and that, even when posterity may have cause to rejoice in the ultimate result, the existing generation are seldom compensated for their present loss of tranquillity. The very enemies of this parliament confess that they met in November 1640 with almost unmingled zeal for the public good, and with loyal attachment to the Crown. They were the chosen representatives of the commons of England, in an age more eminent for steady and scrupulous conscientiousness in private life, than any, perhaps, that had gone before or has followed; not the demagogues or adventurers of transient popularity, but men well-born and wealthy, than whom there could perhaps never be a.s.sembled five hundred more adequate to redress the grievances, or to fix the laws of a great nation. But they were misled by the excess of two pa.s.sions, both just and natural in the circ.u.mstances wherein they found themselves, resentment and distrust; pa.s.sions eminently contagious, and irresistible when they seize on the zeal and credulity of a popular a.s.sembly. The one betrayed them into a measure certainly severe and sanguinary, and in the eyes of posterity exposed to greater reproach than it deserved, the attainder of Lord Strafford, and some other proceedings of too much violence; the other gave a colour to all their resolutions, and aggravated their differences with the king till there remained no other arbitrator but the sword.

_Impeachment of Strafford._--Those who know the conduct and character of the Earl of Strafford, his abuse of power in the north, his far more outrageous transgressions in Ireland, his dangerous influence over the king's counsels, cannot hesitate to admit, if indeed they profess any regard to the const.i.tution of this kingdom, that to bring so great a delinquent to justice according to the known process of law was among the primary duties of the new parliament. It was that which all, with scarce an exception but among his own creatures (for most of the court were openly or in secret his enemies),[177] ardently desired; yet which the king's favour and his own commanding genius must have rendered a doubtful enterprise. He came to London, not unconscious of the danger, by his master's direct injunctions. The first days of the session were critical; and any vacillation or delay in the Commons might probably have given time for some strong exertion of power to frustrate their designs. We must therefore consider the bold suggestion of Pym, to carry up to the Lords an impeachment for high treason against Strafford, not only as a master-stroke of that policy which is fittest for revolutions, but as justifiable by the circ.u.mstances wherein they stood. Nothing short of a commitment to the Tower would have broken the spell that so many years of arbitrary dominion had been working. It was dissipated in the instant that the people saw him in the hands of the usher of the black rod; and with his power fell also that of his master; so that Charles, from the very hour of Strafford's impeachment, never once ventured to resume the high tone of command congenial to his disposition, or to speak to the Commons but as one complaining of a superior force.[178]

_Discussion of its justice._--The articles of Strafford's impeachment relate princ.i.p.ally to his conduct in Ireland. For though he had begun to act with violence in the court of York, as lord-president of the North, and was charged with having procured a commission investing him with exorbitant power, yet he had too soon left that sphere of dominion for the lieutenancy of Ireland, to give any wide scope for prosecution, but in Ireland it was sufficiently proved that he had arrogated an authority beyond what the Crown had ever lawfully enjoyed, and even beyond the example of former viceroys of that island, where the disordered state of society, the frequency of rebellions, and the distance from all control, had given rise to such a series of arbitrary precedents, as would have almost excused any ordinary stretch of power.[179] Notwithstanding this, however, when the managers came to state and substantiate their articles of accusation, though some were satisfied that there was enough to warrant the severest judgment, yet it appeared to many dispa.s.sionate men that, even supposing the evidence as to all of them to be legally convincing, they could not, except through a dangerous lat.i.tude of construction, be aggravated into treason. The law of England is silent as to conspiracies against itself. St. John and Maynard struggled in vain to prove that a scheme to overturn the fundamental laws and to govern by a standing army, though as infamous as any treason, could be brought within the words of the statute of Edward III., as a compa.s.sing of the king's death. Nor, in fact, was there any conclusive evidence against Strafford of such a design. The famous words imputed to him by Sir Henry Vane, though there can be little reason to question that some such were spoken, seem too imperfectly reported,[180] as well as uttered too much in the heat of pa.s.sion, to furnish a substantive accusation; and I should rather found my conviction of Strafford's systematic hostility to our fundamental laws on his correspondence since brought to light, as well as on his general conduct in administration, than on any overt acts proved on his impeachment. The presumption of history, to whose mirror the scattered rays of moral evidence converge, may be irresistible, when the legal inference from insulated actions is not only technically, but substantially, inconclusive. Yet we are not to suppose that the charges against this minister appeared so evidently to fall short of high treason, according to the apprehension of that age, as in later times has usually been taken for granted. Accustomed to the unjust verdicts obtained in cases of treason by the court, the statute of Edward having been perpetually stretched by constructive interpretations, neither the people nor the lawyers annexed a definite sense to that crime. The judges themselves, on a solemn reference by the House of Lords for their opinion, whether some of the articles charged against Strafford amounted to treason, answered unanimously, that upon all which their lords.h.i.+ps had voted to be proved, it was their opinion the Earl of Strafford did deserve to undergo the pains and penalties of high treason by law.[181] And, as an apology, at least, for this judicial opinion, it may be remarked that the fifteenth article of the impeachment, charging him with raising money by his own authority, and quartering troops on the people of Ireland, in order to compel their obedience to his unlawful requisitions (upon which, and one other article, not on the whole matter, the peers voted him guilty), does in fact approach very nearly, if we may not say more, to a substantive treason within the statute of Edward III., as a levying war against the king, even without reference to some Irish acts of parliament upon which the managers of the impeachment relied.

It cannot be extravagant to a.s.sert that if the colonel of a regiment were to issue an order commanding the inhabitants of the district where it is quartered to contribute certain sums of money, and were to compel the payment by quartering troops on the houses of those who refused, in a general and systematic manner, he would, according to a warrantable construction of the statutes, be guilty of the treason called levying war on the king; and that, if we could imagine him to do this by an order from the privy council or the war office, the case would not be at all altered. On the other hand, a single act of which violence might be (in technical language) trespa.s.s, misdemeanour, or felony, according to circ.u.mstances; but would want the generality, which, as the statute has been construed, determines its character to be treason. It is however manifest that Strafford's actual enforcement of his order, by quartering soldiers, was not by any means proved to be so frequently done as to bring it within the line of treason; and the evidence is also open to every sort of legal objection. But in that age, the rules of evidence, so scrupulously defined since, were either very imperfectly recognised, or continually transgressed. If then Strafford could be brought within the letter of the law, and was also deserving of death for his misdeeds towards the commonwealth, it might be thought enough to justify his condemnation, although he had not offended against what seemed to be the spirit and intention of the statute. This should, at least, restrain us from pa.s.sing an unqualified censure on those who voted against him, comprehending undoubtedly the far more respectable portion of the Commons, though only twenty-six peers against nineteen formed the feeble majority on the bill of attainder.[182] It may be observed that the House of Commons acted in one respect with a generosity which the Crown had never shown in any case of treason, by immediately pa.s.sing a bill to relieve his children from the penalties of forfeiture and corruption of blood.

It is undoubtedly a very important problem in political ethics, whether great offences against the commonwealth may not justly incur the penalty of death by a retrospective act of the legislature, which a tribunal restrained by known laws is not competent to inflict. Bills of attainder had been by no means uncommon in England, especially under Henry VIII.; but generally when the crime charged might have been equally punished by law. They are less dangerous than to stretch the boundaries of a statute by arbitrary construction. Nor do they seem to differ at all in principle from those bills of pains and penalties, which, in times of comparative moderation and tranquillity, have sometimes been thought necessary to visit some unforeseen and anomalous transgression beyond the reach of our penal code. There are many, indeed, whose system absolutely rejects all such retrospective punishment, either from the danger of giving too much scope to vindictive pa.s.sion, or on some more abstract principle of justice.

Those who may incline to admit that the moral competence of the sovereign power to secure itself by the punishment of a heinous offender, even without the previous warning of law, is not to be denied, except by reasoning, which would shake the foundation of his right to inflict punishment in ordinary cases, will still be sensible of the mischief which any departure from stable rules, under the influence of the most public-spirited zeal, is likely to produce. The attainder of Strafford could not be justifiable, unless it were necessary; nor necessary, if a lighter penalty would have been sufficient for the public security.

This therefore becomes a preliminary question, upon which the whole mainly turns. It is one which does not seem to admit of a demonstrative answer; but with which we can perhaps deal better than those who lived at that time. Their distrust of the king, their apprehension that nothing less than the delinquent minister's death could ensure them from his return to power, rendered the leaders of parliament obstinate against any proposition of a mitigated penalty.

Nor can it be denied that there are several instances in history, where the favourites of monarchs, after a transient exile or imprisonment, have returned, on some fresh wave of fortune, to mock or avenge themselves upon their adversaries. Yet the prosperous condition of the popular party, which nothing but intemperate pa.s.sion was likely to impair, rendered this contingency by no means probable; and it is against probable dangers that nations should take precautions, without aiming at more complete security than the baffling uncertainties of events will permit. Such was Strafford's unpopularity, that he could never have gained any sympathy, but by the harshness of his condemnation and the magnanimity it enabled him to display. These have half redeemed his forfeit fame, and misled a generous posterity. It was agreed on all hands that any punishment which the law could award to the highest misdemeanours, duly proved on impeachment, must be justly inflicted. ”I am still the same,” said Lord Digby, in his famous speech against the bill of attainder, ”in my opinions and affections, as unto the Earl of Strafford; I confidently believe him to be the most dangerous minister, the most insupportable of free subjects, that can be charactered. I believe him to be still that grand apostate to the commonwealth, who must not expect to be pardoned in this world till he be despatched to the other. And yet, let me tell you, Mr. Speaker, my hand must not be to that despatch.”[183] These sentiments, whatever we may think of the sincerity of him who uttered them, were common to many of those who desired most ardently to see that uniform course of known law, which neither the court's l.u.s.t of power nor the clamorous indignation of a popular a.s.sembly might turn aside. The king, whose conscience was so deeply wounded by his acquiescence in this minister's death, would gladly have a.s.sented to a bill inflicting the penalty of perpetual banishment; and this, accompanied, as it ought to have been, by degradation from the rank for which he had sold his integrity, would surely have exhibited to Europe an example sufficiently conspicuous of just retribution. Though nothing perhaps could have restored a tolerable degree of confidence between Charles and the parliament, it is certain that his resentment and aversion were much aggravated by the painful compulsion they had put on him, and that the schism among the const.i.tutional party began from this, among other causes, to grow more sensible, till it terminated in civil war.[184]

But, if we pay such regard to the principles of clemency and moderation, and of adherence to the fixed rules of law, as to pa.s.s some censure on this deviation from them in the attainder of Lord Strafford, we must not yield to the clamorous invectives of his admirers, or treat the prosecution as a scandalous and flagitious excess of party vengeance. Look round the nations of the globe, and say in what age or country would such a man have fallen into the hands of his enemies, without paying the forfeit of his offences against the commonwealth with his life. They who grasp at arbitrary power, they who make their fellow-citizens tremble before them, they who gratify a selfish pride by the humiliation and servitude of mankind, have always played a deep stake; and the more invidious and intolerable has been their pre-eminence, their fall has been more destructive, and their punishment more exemplary. Something beyond the retirement or the dismissal of such ministers has seemed necessary to ”absolve the G.o.ds,” and furnish history with an awful lesson of retribution. The spontaneous instinct of nature has called for the axe and the gibbet against such capital delinquents. If then we blame, in some measure, the sentence against Strafford, it is not for his sake, but for that of the laws on which he trampled, and of the liberty which he betrayed. He died justly before G.o.d and man, though we may deem the precedent dangerous, and the better course of a magnanimous lenity unwisely rejected; and in condemning the bill of attainder, we cannot look upon it as a crime.

_Act against dissolution of parliament without its consent._--The same distrustful temper, blamable in nothing but its excess, drew the House of Commons into a measure more unconst.i.tutional than the attainder of Strafford, the bill enacting that they should not be dissolved without their own consent. Whether or not this had been previously meditated by the leaders is uncertain; but the circ.u.mstances under which it was adopted display all the blind precipitancy of fear. A scheme for bringing up the army from the north of England to overawe parliament had been discoursed of, or rather in a great measure concerted, by some young courtiers and military men. The imperfection and indefiniteness of the evidence obtained respecting this plot increased, as often happens, the apprehensions of the Commons. Yet, difficult as it might be to fix its proper character between a loose project and a deliberate conspiracy, this at least was hardly to be denied, that the king had listened to and approved a proposal of appealing from the representatives of his people to a military force.[185] Their greatest danger was a sudden dissolution. The triennial bill afforded indeed a valuable security for the future. Yet if the present parliament had been broken with any circ.u.mstances of violence, it might justly seem very hazardous to confide in the right of spontaneous election reserved to the people by that statute, which the Crown would have three years to defeat. A rapid impulse, rather than any concerted resolution, appears to have dictated this hardy encroachment on the prerogative. The bill against the dissolution of the present parliament without its own consent was resolved in a committee on the fifth of May, brought in the next day, and sent to the Lords on the seventh. The upper house, in a conference the same day, urged a very wise and const.i.tutional amendment, limiting its duration to the term of two years. But the Commons adhering to their original provisions, the bill was pa.s.sed by both houses on the eighth.[186] Thus, in the s.p.a.ce of three days from the first suggestion, an alteration was made in the frame of our polity, which rendered the House of Commons equally independent of their sovereign and their const.i.tuents; and, if it could be supposed capable of being maintained in more tranquil times, would, in the theory at least of speculative politics, have gradually converted the government into something like a Dutch aristocracy. The ostensible pretext was, that money could not be borrowed on the authority of resolutions of parliament, until some security was furnished to the creditors, that those whom they were to trust should have a permanent existence. This argument would have gone a great way, and was capable of an answer; since the money might have been borrowed on the authority of the whole legislature. But the chief motive, unquestionably, was a just apprehension of the king's intention to overthrow the parliament, and of personal danger to those who had stood most forward from his resentment after a dissolution. His ready acquiescence in this bill, far more dangerous than any of those at which he demurred, can only be ascribed to his own shame and the queen's consternation at the discovery of the late plot; and thus we trace again the calamities of Charles to their two great sources; his want of judgment in affairs, and of good faith towards his people.

_Innovations meditated in the church._--The parliament had met with as ardent and just an indignation against ecclesiastical as temporal grievances. The tyranny, the folly, and rashness of Charles's bishops were still greater than his own. It was evidently an indispensable duty to reduce the overbearing ascendancy of that order, which had rendered the nation, in regard to spiritual dominion, a great loser by the Reformation. They had been so blindly infatuated, as even in the year 1640, amidst all the perils of the times, to fill up the measure of public wrath by enacting a series of canons in convocation. These enjoined, or at least recommended, some of the modern innovations, which, though many excellent men had been persecuted for want of compliance with them, had not got the sanction of authority. They imposed an oath on the clergy, commonly called the _et caetera_ oath, binding them to attempt no alteration in the government of the church by bishops, deans, archdeacons, etc. This oath was by the same authority enjoined to such of the laity as held ecclesiastical offices.[187] The king, however, on the pet.i.tion of the council of peers at York, directed it not to be taken. The House of Commons rescinded these canons with some degree of excess on the other side; not only denying the right of convocation to bind the clergy, which had certainly been exercised in all periods, but actually impeaching the bishops for a high misdemeanour on that account.[188] The Lords, in the month of March, appointed a committee of ten earls, ten bishops, and ten barons, to report upon the innovations lately brought into the church. Of this committee Williams was chairman. But the spirit which now possessed the Commons was not to be exorcised by the sacrifice of Laud and Wren, or even by such inconsiderable alterations as the moderate bishops were ready to suggest.[189]

There had always existed a party, though by no means co-extensive with that bearing the general name of puritan, who retained an insuperable aversion to the whole scheme of episcopal discipline, as inconsistent with the ecclesiastical parity they believed to be enjoined by the apostles. It is not easy to determine what proportion these bore to the community. They were certainly at the opening of the parliament by far the less numerous, though an active and increasing party. Few of the House of Commons, according to Clarendon and the best contemporary writers, looked to a destruction of the existing hierarchy.[190] The more plausible scheme was one which had the sanction of Usher's learned judgment, and which Williams was said to favour, for what was called a moderate episcopacy; wherein the bishop, reduced to a sort of president of his college of presbyters, and differing from them only in rank, not in species (_gradu, non ordine_), should act, whether in ordination or jurisdiction, by their concurrence.[191] This intermediate form of church-government would probably have contented the popular leaders of the Commons, except two or three, and have proved acceptable to the nation. But it was hardly less offensive to the Scottish presbyterians, intolerant of the smallest deviation from their own model, than to the high-church episcopalians; and the necessity of humouring that proud and prejudiced race of people, who began already to show that an alteration in the church of England would be their stipulated condition for any a.s.sistance they might afford to the popular party, led the majority of the House of Commons to give more countenance than they sincerely intended to a bill, preferred by what was then called the root and branch party, for the entire abolition of episcopacy. This party, composed chiefly of presbyterians, but with no small admixture of other sectaries, predominated in the city of London. At the instigation of the Scots commissioners, a pet.i.tion against episcopal government with 15,000 signatures was presented early in the session (Dec. 11, 1640), and received so favourably as to startle those who bore a good affection to the church.[192] This gave rise to the first difference that was expressed in parliament: Digby speaking warmly against the reference of this pet.i.tion to a committee, and Falkland, though strenuous for reducing the prelates' authority, showing much reluctance to abolish their order.[193] A bill was however brought in by Sir Edward Dering, an honest but not very enlightened or consistent man, for the utter extirpation of episcopacy, and its second reading carried on a division by 139 to 108.[194] This, no doubt, seems to show the anti-episcopal party to have been stronger than Clarendon admits. Yet I suspect that the greater part of those who voted for it did not intend more than to intimidate the bishops. Pet.i.tions very numerously signed, for the maintenance of episcopal government, were presented from several counties;[195] nor is it, I think, possible to doubt that the nation sought only the abridgment of that coercive jurisdiction and temporal power, by which the bishops had forfeited the reverence due to their function, as well as that absolute authority over presbyters, which could not be reconciled to the customs of the primitive church.[196] This was the object both of the act abolis.h.i.+ng the high commission, which, by the largeness of its expressions, seemed to take away all coercive jurisdiction from the ecclesiastical courts, and of that for depriving the bishops of their suffrages among the peers; which, after being once rejected by a large majority of the Lords in June 1641, pa.s.sed into a law in the month of February following, and was the latest concession that the king made before his final appeal to arms.[197]

This was hardly perhaps a greater alteration of the established const.i.tution than had resulted from the suppression of the monasteries under Henry; when, by the fall of the mitred abbots, the secular peers acquired a preponderance in number over the spiritual which they had not previously enjoyed. It was supported by several persons, especially Lord Falkland, by no means inclined to subvert the episcopal discipline; whether from a hope to compromise better with the opposite party by this concession, or from a sincere belief that the bishops might be kept better to the duties of their function by excluding them from civil power. Considered generally, it may be reckoned a doubtful question in the theory of our government, whether the mixture of this ecclesiastical aristocracy with the House of Lords is advantageous or otherwise to the public interests, or to those of religion. Their great revenues, and the precedence allotted them, seem naturally to place them on this level; and the general property of the clergy, less protected than that of other cla.s.ses against the cupidity of an administration or a faction, may perhaps require this peculiar security. In fact, the disposition of the English to honour the ministers of the church, as well as to respect the ancient inst.i.tutions of their country, has usually been so powerful, that the question would hardly have been esteemed dubious, if the bishops themselves (I speak of course with such limitations as the nature of the case requires) had been at all times sufficiently studious to maintain a character of political independence, or even to conceal a spirit of servility, which the pernicious usage of continual translations from one see to another, borrowed, like many other parts of our ecclesiastical law, from the most corrupt period of the church of Rome, has had so manifest a tendency to engender.

The spirit of ecclesiastical, rather than civil, democracy, was the first sign of the approaching storm that alarmed the Hertfords and Southamptons, the Hydes and Falklands. Attached to the venerable church of the English reformation, they were loth to see the rashness of some prelates avenged by her subversion, or a few recent innovations repressed by incomparably more essential changes. Full of regard for established law, and disliking the puritan bitterness, aggravated as it was by long persecution, they revolted from the indecent devastation committed in churches by the populace, and from the insults which now fell on the conforming ministers. The Lords early distinguished their temper as to those points by an order on the 16th of January for the performance of divine service according to law, in consequence of the tumults that had been caused by the heated puritans under pretence of abolis.h.i.+ng innovations. Little regard was shown to this order;[198] but it does not appear that the Commons went farther on the opposite side than to direct some ceremonial novelties to be discontinued, and to empower one of their members, Sir Robert Harley, to take away all pictures, crosses, and superst.i.tious figures within churches or without.[199] But this order, like many of their other acts, was a manifest encroachment on the executive power of the Crown.[200]

_Schism in the const.i.tutional party._--It seems to have been about the time of the summer recess, during the king's absence in Scotland, that the apprehension of changes in church and state far beyond what had been dreamed of at the opening of parliament, led to a final schism in the const.i.tutional party.[201] Charles, by abandoning his former advisers, and yielding, with just as much reluctance as displayed the value of the concession, to a series of laws that abridged his prerogative, had recovered a good deal of the affection and confidence of some, and gained from others that sympathy which is seldom withheld from undeserving princes in their humiliation. Though the ill-timed death of the Earl of Bedford in May had partly disappointed an intended arrangement for bringing the popular leaders into office, yet the appointments of Ess.e.x, Holland, Say, and St. John from that party were apparently pledges of the king's willingness to select his advisers from their ranks; whatever cause there might be to suspect that their real influence over him would be too inconsiderable.[202]

Those who were still excluded, and who distrusted the king's intentions as well towards themselves as the public cause, of whom Pym and Hampden, with the a.s.sistance of St. John, though actually solicitor-general, were the chief, found no better means of keeping alive the animosity that was beginning to subside, than by framing the Remonstrance on the state of the kingdom, presented to the king in November 1641. This being a recapitulation of all the grievances and misgovernment that had existed since his accession, which his acquiescence in so many measures of redress ought, according to the common courtesy due to sovereigns, to have cancelled, was hardly capable of answering any other purpose than that of re-animating discontents almost appeased, and guarding the people against the confidence they were beginning to place in the king's sincerity. The promoters of it might also hope from Charles's proud and hasty temper that he would reply in such a tone as would more exasperate the Commons. But he had begun to use the advice of judicious men, Falkland, Hyde, and Colepepper, and reined in his natural violence so as to give his enemies no advantage over him.

The jealousy, which nations ought never to lay aside, was especially required towards Charles, whose love of arbitrary dominion was much better proved than his sincerity in relinquis.h.i.+ng it. But if he were intended to reign at all, and to reign with any portion either of the prerogatives of an English king, or the respect claimed by every sovereign, the Remonstrance of the Commons could but prolong an irritation incompatible with public tranquillity. It admits indeed of no question, that the schemes of Pym, Hampden, and St. John, already tended to restrain the king's personal exercise of any effective power, from a sincere persuasion that no confidence could ever be placed in him, though not to abolish the monarchy, or probably to abridge in the same degree the rights of his successor. Their Remonstrance was put forward to stem the returning tide of loyalty, which not only threatened to obstruct the further progress of their endeavours, but, as they would allege, might, by gaining strength, wash away some at least of the bulwarks that had been so recently constructed for the preservation of liberty. It was carried in a full house by the small majority of 159 to 148.[203] So much was it deemed a trial of strength, that Cromwell declared after the division that, had the question been lost, he would have sold his estate, and retired to America.

_Suspicions of the king's sincerity._--It may be thought rather surprising that, with a House of Commons so nearly balanced as they appeared on this vote, the king should have new demands that annihilated his authority made upon him, and have found a greater majority than had voted the Remonstrance ready to oppose him by arms; especially as that paper contained little but what was true, and might rather be censured as an ill-timed provocation than an encroachment on the const.i.tutional prerogative. But there were circ.u.mstances, both of infelicity and misconduct, which aggravated that distrust whereon every measure hostile to him was grounded. His imprudent connivance at popery, and the far more reprehensible encouragement given to it by his court, had sunk deep in the hearts of his people. His ill-wishers knew how to irritate the characteristic sensibility of the English on this topic. The queen, unpopular on the score of her imputed arbitrary counsels, was odious as a maintainer of idolatry.[204] The lenity shown to convicted popish priests, who, though liable to capital punishment, had been suffered to escape with sometimes a very short imprisonment, was naturally (according to the maxims of those times) treated as a grievance by the Commons, who pet.i.tioned for the execution of one Goodman and others in similar circ.u.mstances, perhaps in the hope that the king would attempt to shelter them. But he dexterously left it to the house whether they should die or not; and none of them actually suffered.[205] Rumours of pretended conspiracies by the catholics were perpetually in circulation, and rather unworthily encouraged by the chiefs of the Commons. More substantial motives for alarm appeared to arise from the obscure transaction in Scotland, commonly called the Incident, which looked so like a concerted design against the two great leaders of the const.i.tutional party, Hamilton and Argyle, that it was not unnatural to antic.i.p.ate something similar in England.[206] In the midst of these apprehensions, as if to justify every suspicion and every severity, burst out the Irish rebellion with its attendant ma.s.sacre. Though nothing could be more unlikely in itself, or less supported by proof, than the king's connivance at this calamity, from which every man of common understanding could only expect, what actually resulted from it, a terrible aggravation of his difficulties, yet, with that distrustful temper of the English, and their jealous dread of popery, he was never able to conquer their suspicions that he had either instigated the rebellion, or was very little solicitous to suppress it; suspicions indeed, to which, however ungrounded at this particular period, some circ.u.mstances that took place afterwards gave an apparent confirmation.[207]