Volume V Part 10 (1/2)

[Sidenote: Laud and ritual.]

And as Laud aimed at a more Catholic standard of doctrine in the clergy, so he aimed at a nearer approach to the pomp of Catholicism in public wors.h.i.+p. His conduct in his own house at Lambeth brings out with singular vividness the reckless courage with which he threw himself across the religious instincts of a time when the spiritual aspect of wors.h.i.+p was overpowering in most minds its aesthetic and devotional sides. Men noted as a fatal omen an accident which marked his first entry into Lambeth; for the overladen ferry-boat upset in the pa.s.sage of the river, and though the horses and servants were saved, the Archbishop's coach remained at the bottom of the Thames. But no omen, carefully as he might note it, brought a moment's hesitation to the bold, narrow mind of the new Primate. His first act, he boasted, was the setting about a restoration of his chapel; and, as Laud managed it, his restoration was a simple undoing of all that had been done there by his predecessors since the Reformation. With characteristic energy he aided with his own hands in the replacement of the painted gla.s.s in its windows, and racked his wits in piecing the fragments together. The glazier was scandalized by the Primate's express command to repair and set up again the ”broken crucifix” in the east window. The holy table was removed from the centre, and set altarwise against the eastern wall, with a cloth of arras behind it, on which was embroidered the history of the Last Supper. The elaborate woodwork of the screen, the rich copes of the chaplain, the silver candlesticks, the credence table, the organ and the choir, the stately ritual, the bowings at the sacred name, the genuflexions to the altar made the chapel at last such a model of wors.h.i.+p as Laud desired. If he could not exact an equal pomp of devotion in other quarters, he exacted as much as he could. Bowing to the altar was introduced into all cathedral churches. A royal injunction ordered the removal of the communion table, which for the last half-century or more had in almost every parish church stood in the middle of the nave, back to its pre-Reformation position in the chancel, and secured it from profanation by a rail. The removal implied, and was understood to imply, a recognition of the Real Presence, and a denial of the doctrine which Englishmen generally held about the Lord's Supper. But, strenuous as was the resistance which the Archbishop encountered, his pertinacity and severity warred it down. Parsons who denounced the change from their pulpits were fined, imprisoned, and deprived of their benefices.

Churchwardens who refused or delayed to obey the injunction were rated at the Commission-table, and frightened into compliance.

[Sidenote: The Puritan panic.]

In their last Remonstrance to the king the Commons had denounced Laud as the chief a.s.sailant of the Protestant character of the Church of England; and every year of his Primacy showed him bent upon justifying the accusation. His policy was no longer the purely Conservative policy of Parker or Whitgift; it was aggressive and revolutionary. His ”new counsels” threw whatever force there was in the feeling of conservatism into the hands of the Puritan, for it was the Puritan who seemed to be defending the old character of the Church of England against its Primate's attacks. But backed as Laud was by the power of the Crown, the struggle became more hopeless every day. While the Catholics owned that they had never enjoyed a like tranquillity, while the fines for recusancy were reduced and their wors.h.i.+p suffered to go on in private houses, the Puritan saw his ministers silenced or deprived, his Sabbath profaned, the most sacred act of his wors.h.i.+p brought near, as he fancied, to the ma.s.s. Roman doctrine met him from the pulpit, Roman practices met him in the Church. It was plain that the purpose of Laud aimed at nothing short of the utter suppression of Puritanism, in other words, of the form of religion which was dear to the ma.s.s of Englishmen.

Already indeed there were signs of a change of temper which might have made a bolder man pause. Thousands of ”the best,” scholars, merchants, lawyers, farmers, were flying over the Atlantic to seek freedom and purity of religion in the wilderness. Great landowners and n.o.bles were preparing to follow. Ministers were quitting their parsonages rather than abet the royal insult to the sanct.i.ty of the Sabbath. The Puritans who remained among the clergy were giving up their homes rather than consent to the change of the sacred table into an altar, or to silence in their protests against the new Popery. The n.o.blest of living Englishmen refused to become the priest of a Church whose ministry could only be ”bought with servitude and forswearing.”

[Sidenote: Milton at Horton.]

We have seen John Milton leave Cambridge, self-dedicated ”to that same lot, however mean or high, to which time leads me and the will of Heaven.” But the lot to which these called him was not the ministerial office to which he had been destined from his childhood. In later life he told bitterly the story how he had been ”Church-outed by the prelates.” ”Coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving what tyranny had invaded in the Church, that he who would take orders must subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which unless he took with a conscience that would retch he must either straight perjure or split his faith, I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing.” In spite therefore of his father's regrets, he retired in 1633 to a new home which the scrivener had found at Horton, a village in the neighbourhood of Windsor, and quietly busied himself with study and verse. The poetic impulse of the Renascence had been slowly dying away under the Stuarts. The stage was falling into mere coa.r.s.eness and horror. Shakspere had died quietly at Stratford in Milton's childhood; the last and worst play of Ben Jonson appeared in the year of his settlement at Horton; and though Ford and Ma.s.singer still lingered on, there were no successors for them but s.h.i.+rley and Davenant. The philosophic and meditative taste of the age had produced indeed poetic schools of its own: poetic satire had become fas.h.i.+onable in Hall, better known afterwards as a bishop, and had been carried on vigorously by George Wither; the so-called ”metaphysical” poetry, the vigorous and pithy expression of a cold and prosaic good sense, began with Sir John Davies and buried itself in fantastic affectations in Donne; religious verse had become popular in the gloomy allegories of Quarles and the tender refinement which struggles through a jungle of puns and extravagances in George Herbert. But what poetic life really remained was to be found only in the caressing fancy and lively badinage of lyric singers like Herrick, whose grace is untouched by pa.s.sion and often disfigured by coa.r.s.eness and pedantry; or in the school of Spenser's more direct successors, where Browne in his pastorals and the two Fletchers, Phineas and Giles, in their unreadable allegories, still preserved something of their master's sweetness, if they preserved nothing of his power.

[Sidenote: His early poems.]

Milton was himself a Spenserian; he owned to Dryden in later years that ”Spenser was his original,” and in some of his earliest lines at Horton he dwells lovingly on ”the sage and solemn tones” of the ”Faerie Queen,”

its ”forests and enchantments drear, where more is meant than meets the ear.” But of the weakness and affectation which characterized Spenser's successors he had not a trace. In the ”Allegro” and ”Penseroso,” the first results of his retirement at Horton, we catch again the fancy and melody of the Elizabethan verse, the wealth of its imagery, its wide sympathy with nature and man. There is a loss perhaps of the older freedom and spontaneity of the Renascence, a rhetorical rather than pa.s.sionate turn in the young poet, a striking absence of dramatic power, and a want of subtle precision even in his picturesque touches. Milton's imagination is not strong enough to identify him with the world which he imagines; he stands apart from it, and looks at it as from a distance, ordering it and arranging it at his will. But if in this respect he falls both in his earlier and later poems below Shakspere or Spenser, the deficiency is all but compensated by his n.o.bleness of feeling and expression, the severity of his taste, his sustained dignity, and the perfectness and completeness of his work. The moral grandeur of the Puritan breathes, even in these lighter pieces of his youth, through every line. The ”Comus,” which he planned as a masque for some festivities which the Earl of Bridgewater was holding at Ludlow Castle, rises into an almost impa.s.sioned pleading for the love of virtue.

[Sidenote: Puritan fanaticism.]

The historic interest of Milton's ”Comus” lies in its forming part of a protest made by the more cultured Puritans at this time against the gloomier bigotry which persecution was fostering in the party at large.

The patience of Englishmen, in fact, was slowly wearing out. There was a sudden upgrowth of virulent pamphlets of the old Martin Marprelate type.

Men, whose names no one asked, hawked libels, whose authors.h.i.+p no one knew, from the door of the tradesman to the door of the squire. As the hopes of a Parliament grew fainter, and men despaired of any legal remedy, violent and weak-headed fanatics came, as at such times they always come, to the front. Leighton, the father of the saintly archbishop of that name, had given a specimen of their tone at the outset of this period by denouncing the prelates as men of blood, Episcopacy as Antichrist, and the Popish Queen as a daughter of Heth.

The ”Histriomastix” of Prynne, a lawyer distinguished for his const.i.tutional knowledge, but the most obstinate and narrow-minded of men, marked the deepening of Puritan bigotry under the fostering warmth of Laud's persecution. The book was an attack on players as the ministers of Satan, on theatres as the Devil's chapels, on hunting, maypoles, the decking of houses at Christmas with evergreens, on cards, music, and false hair. The attack on the stage was as offensive to the more cultured minds among the Puritan party as to the Court itself; Selden and Whitelock took a prominent part in preparing a grand masque by which the Inns of Court resolved to answer its challenge, and in the following year Milton wrote his masque of ”Comus” for Ludlow Castle. To leave Prynne however simply to the censure of wiser men than himself was too sensible a course for the angry Primate. No man was ever sent to prison before or since for such a sheer ma.s.s of nonsense; but a pa.s.sage in the book was taken as a reflection on the Queen, who had purposed to take part in a play at the time of its publication; and the sentence showed the hard cruelty of the Primate's temper. In 1634 Prynne was dismissed from the bar, deprived of his university degree, and set in the pillory. His ears were clipped from his head, and the stubborn lawyer was then taken back to prison to be kept there during the king's pleasure.

With such a world around them we can hardly wonder that men of less fanatical turn than Prynne gave way to despair. But it was in this hour of despair that the Puritans won their n.o.blest triumph. They ”turned,”

to use Canning's words in a far truer and grander sense than that which he gave to them, ”they turned to the New World to redress the balance of the Old.” It was during the years which followed the close of the third Parliament of Charles that a great Puritan migration founded the States of New England.

[Sidenote: Virginia.]

Ralegh's settlement on the Virginian coast, the first attempt which Englishmen had made to claim North America for their own, had soon proved a failure. The introduction of tobacco and the potato into Europe dates from his voyage of discovery, but the energy of his colonists was distracted by the delusive dream of gold, the hostility of the native tribes drove them from the coast, and it is through the grat.i.tude of later times for what he strove to do, rather than for what he did, that Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina, preserves his name. The first permanent settlement on the Chesapeake was effected in the beginning of the reign of James the First, and its success was due to the conviction of the settlers that the secret of the New World's conquest lay simply in labour. Among the hundred and five colonists who originally landed, forty-eight were gentlemen, and only twelve were tillers of the soil.

Their leader, John Smith, however, not only explored the vast Bay of Chesapeake and discovered the Potomac and the Susquehannah, but held the little company together in the face of famine and desertion till the colonists had learned the lesson of toil. In his letters to the colonizers at home he set resolutely aside the dream of gold. ”Nothing is to be expected thence,” he wrote of the new country, ”but by labour”; and supplies of labourers, aided by a wise allotment of land to each colonist, secured after five years of struggle the fortunes of Virginia.

”Men fell to building houses and planting corn”; the very streets of Jamestown, as their capital was called from the reigning sovereign, were sown with tobacco; and in fifteen years the colony numbered five thousand souls.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE AMERICAN COLONIES in 1640.]

[Sidenote: The Pilgrim Fathers.]

Only a few years after the settlement of Smith in Virginia, the church of Brownist or Independent refugees, whom we saw driven in Elizabeth's reign to Amsterdam, resolved to quit Holland and find a home in the wilds of the New World. They were little disheartened by the tidings of suffering which came from the Virginian settlement. ”We are well weaned,” wrote their minister, John Robinson, ”from the delicate milk of the mother-country, and inured to the difficulties of a strange land: the people are industrious and frugal. We are knit together as a body in a most sacred covenant of the Lord, of the violation whereof we make great conscience, and by virtue whereof we hold ourselves strictly tied to all care of each other's good and of the whole. It is not with us as with men whom small things can discourage.” Returning from Holland to Southampton, they started in two small vessels for the new land: but one of these soon put back, and only its companion, the _Mayflower_, a bark of a hundred and eighty tons, with forty-one emigrants and their families on board, persisted in prosecuting its voyage. In 1620 the little company of the ”Pilgrim Fathers,” as after-times loved to call them, landed on the barren coast of Ma.s.sachusetts at a spot to which they gave the name of Plymouth, in memory of the last English port at which they touched. They had soon to face the long hard winter of the north, to bear sickness and famine: even when these years of toil and suffering had pa.s.sed there was a time when ”they knew not at night where to have a bit in the morning.” Resolute and industrious as they were, their progress was very slow; and at the end of ten years they numbered only three hundred souls. But small as it was, the colony was now firmly established and the struggle for mere existence was over. ”Let it not be grievous unto you,” some of their brethren had written from England to the poor emigrants in the midst of their sufferings, ”that you have been instrumental to break the ice for others. The honour shall be yours to the world's end.”

[Sidenote: The Puritan migration.]

From the moment of their establishment the eyes of the English Puritans were fixed on this little Puritan settlement in North America. Through the early years of Charles projects were being canva.s.sed for the establishment of a new settlement beside the little Plymouth; and the aid which the merchants of Boston in Lincolns.h.i.+re gave to the realization of this project was acknowledged in the name of its capital. At the moment when he was dissolving his third Parliament Charles granted the charter which established the colony of Ma.s.sachusetts; and by the Puritans at large the grant was at once regarded as a Providential call. Out of the failure of their great const.i.tutional struggle and the pressing danger to ”G.o.dliness” in England rose the dream of a land in the West where religion and liberty could find a safe and lasting home. The Parliament was hardly dissolved when ”conclusions” for the establishment of a great colony on the other side of the Atlantic were circulating among gentry and traders, and descriptions of the new country of Ma.s.sachusetts were talked over in every Puritan household. The proposal was welcomed with the quiet, stern enthusiasm which marked the temper of the time; but the words of a well-known emigrant show how hard it was even for the sternest enthusiasts to tear themselves from their native land. ”I shall call that my country,” wrote the younger Winthrop in answer to feelings of this sort, ”where I may most glorify G.o.d and enjoy the presence of my dearest friends.” The answer was accepted, and the Puritan emigration began on a scale such as England had never before seen. The two hundred who first sailed for Salem were soon followed by John Winthrop with eight hundred men; and seven hundred more followed ere the first year of personal government had run its course. Nor were the emigrants, like the earlier colonists of the South, ”broken men,” adventurers, bankrupts, criminals; or simply poor men and artisans, like the Pilgrim Fathers of the _Mayflower_. They were in great part men of the professional and middle cla.s.ses; some of them men of large landed estate, some zealous clergymen like Cotton, Hooker, and Roger Williams, some shrewd London lawyers, or young scholars from Oxford. The bulk were G.o.d-fearing farmers from Lincolns.h.i.+re and the Eastern counties. They desired in fact ”only the best” as sharers in their enterprise; men driven forth from their fatherland not by earthly want, or by the greed of gold, or by the l.u.s.t of adventure, but by the fear of G.o.d, and the zeal for a G.o.dly wors.h.i.+p. But strong as was their zeal, it was not without a wrench that they tore themselves from their English homes.

”Farewell, dear England!” was the cry which burst from the first little company of emigrants as its sh.o.r.es faded from their sight. ”Our hearts,”

wrote Winthrop's followers to the brethren whom they had left behind, ”shall be fountains of tears for your everlasting welfare, when we shall be in our poor cottages in the wilderness.”

[Sidenote: New England.]