Part 44 (1/2)
The first of these new laws was ent.i.tled the ”Corporation Act”
(1661). It ordered all holders of munic.i.p.al offices to renounce the Covenant[2] which had been put in force in 1647, and to take the sacrament of the Church of England. Next, a new Act of Uniformity (1662) (S382) enforced the use of the Episcopal Prayer Book upon all clergymen and congregations. This was followed by the Conventicle Act[3] (1664), which forbade the meeting of any religious a.s.semblies except such as wors.h.i.+ped according to the Established Church of England. Lastly, the Five-Mile Act (1665) forbade all dissenting ministers to teach in schools, or to settle within five miles of an incorporated town.
[2] Covenant: the oath or agreement to maintain the Presbyterian faith and wors.h.i.+p. It originated in Scotland (S438).
[3] See, too, on these acts, the Summary of Const.i.tutional History in the Appendix, p. xix, S20.
The second of these stringent retaliatory statutes, the Act of Uniformity, drove two thousand Presbyterian ministers from their parishes in a single day, and reduced them to the direst distress.
The able-bodied among them might indeed pick up a precarious livelihood by hard labor, but the old and the weak soon found their refuge in the grave.
Those who dared to resist these intolerant and inhuman laws were punished with fines, imprisonment, or slavery. The Scottish Parliament abolished Presbyterianism and restored Episcopacy. It vied with the Cavalier or King's party in England in persecution of the Dissenters,[4] and especially of the Covenanters (S438).
[4] The Scottish Parliament granted what was called the ”Indulgence”
to Presbyterian ministers who held moderate views. The extreme Covenanters regarded these ”indulged Presbyterians” as deserters and traitors who were both weak and wicked. For this reason they hated them worse than they did the Episcopalians. See Burton's ”Scotland,”
VII, 457-468.
Claverhouse, who figures as the ”Bonny Dundee” of Sir Walter Scott, hunted the Covenanters with bugle and bloodhound, like so many deer; and his men hanged and drowned those who gathered secretly in glens and caves to wors.h.i.+p G.o.d.[1] The father of a family would be dragged from his cottage by the soldiers, asked if he would take the test of conformity to the Church of England and the oath of allegiance to King Charles II; if he refused, the officer in command gave the order, ”Make ready--take aim--fire!”--and there lay the corpse of the rebel.
[1] See the historical poem of the ”Maiden Martyr of Scotland,” in the collection of ”Heroic Ballads,” Ginn and Company.
Among the mult.i.tudes who suffered in England for religion's sake was a poor tinker and day laborer named John Bunyan. He had served against the King in the civil wars, and later had become converted to Puritanism, and turned exhorter and itinerant preacher. He was arrested, while preaching in a farmhouse, and convicted of having ”devilishly and perniciously abstained from coming to church.”
The judge sentenced him to the Bedford county jail, where he remained a prisoner for twelve years (1660-1672). Later on, he was again arrested (1675) and sent to the town jail on Bedford Bridge. It was, he says, a squalid ”Denn.”[2] But in his marvelous dream of ”A Pilgrimage from this World to the Next,” which he wrote while shut up within the narrow limits of that filthy prison house, he forgot the misery of his surroundings. Like Milton in his blindness, loneliness, and poverty, he looked within and found that
”The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of h.e.l.l.”[3]
[2] ”As I walk'd through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where there was a Denn, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and as I slept I dreamed a dream.”--”The Pilgrim's Progress,” 1678.
[3] ”Paradise Lost,” Book I, 253.
473. Seizure of a Dutch Colony in America (1664).
While these things were going on in England, a strange event took place abroad. The Dutch had established a colony on the Hudson River.
It was on territory which the English claimed (S335), but which they had never explored or settled. The Dutch had built a town at the mouth of the Hudson, which they called New Amsterdam. They held the place undisturbed for fifty years, and if ”Possession is nine points of the law,” they seem to have acquired it. Furthermore, during the period of Cromwell's Protectorate (S455), England had made a treaty with Holland and had recognized the claims of the Dutch in the New World.
Charles had found shelter and generous treatment in Holland when he needed it most. But he now cooly repudiated the treaty, and, though the two nations were at peace, he treacherously sent out a secret expedition to capture the Dutch colony for his brother James, Duke of York, to whom he had granted it.
One day a small English fleet suddenly appeared (1664) in the harbor of the Dutch town, and demanded its immediate and unconditional surrender. The governor was unprepared to make any defense, and the place was given up. Thus, without so much as the firing of a gun, New Amsterdam got the name of New York in honor of the man who had now become its owner. The acquisition of this territory, which had separated the northern English colonies from the southern, gave England complete control of the Atlantic coast from Maine to northern Florida.
474. The Plague and the Fire, 1665, 1666.
The next year a terrible outbreak of the plague occurred in London, 1665, which spread throughout the kingdom (S244). All who could, fled from the city. Hundreds of houses were left vacant, while on hundreds more a cross marked on the doors in red chalk, with the words ”Lord have mercy on us,” written underneath, told where the work of death was going on.[1]
[1] Pepys writes in his ”Diary,” describing the beginning of the plague: ”The 7th of June, 1665, was the hottest day I ever felt in my life. This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses with a red cross upon the door, and `Lord have mercy upon us' writ there, which was a sad sight.”--Pepys, ”Diary,” 1660-1669.
Defoe wrote a journal of the plague in 1722, based, probably, on the reports of eyewitnesses. It gives a vivid and truthful account of its horrors.
The pestilence swept off over a hundred thousand victims within six months. Among the few brave men who voluntarily remained in the stricken city were the Puritan ministers, who stayed to comfort and console the sick and dying. After the plague was over, they received their reward through the enforcement of those acts of persecution which drove them homeless and helpless from their parishes and friends (S472).
The dead cart had hardly ceased to go its rounds, when a fire broke out, 1666, of which Evelyn, a courtier who witnessed it, wrote that it ”was not to be outdone until the final conflagration of the world.”[1]
By it the city of London proper was reduced to ruins, little more being left than a fringe of houses on the northeast.
[1] Evelyn's ”Diary,” 1641-1705; also compare Dryden's poem ”Annus Mirabilis.”