The Constitutional History of England. Hallam Henry

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СКАЧАТЬ tardy assent to the Petition of Right. During the interval before the ensuing session, those merchants, among whom Chambers, Rolls, and Vassal are particularly to be remembered with honour, who gallantly refused to comply with the demands of the custom house, had their goods distrained, and on suing writs of replevin, were told by the judges that the king's right, having been established in the case of Bates, could no longer be disputed.658 Thus the Commons re-assembled, by no means less inflamed against the king's administration than at the commencement of the preceding session. Their proceedings were conducted with more than usual warmth.659 Buckingham's death, which had occurred since the prorogation, did not allay their resentment against the advisers of the Crown. But the king, who had very much lowered his tone in speaking of tonnage and poundage, and would have been content to receive it as their grant, perceiving that they were bent on a full statutory recognition of the illegality of impositions without their consent, and that they had opened a fresh battery on another side, by mingling in certain religious disputes in order to attack some of his favourite prelates, took the step, to which he was always inclined, of dissolving this third parliament.

      Religious differences.—The religious disputes to which I have just alluded are chiefly to be considered, for the present purpose, in their relation to those jealousies and resentments springing out of the ecclesiastical administration, which during the reigns of the two first Stuarts furnished unceasing food to political discontent. James having early shown his inflexible determination to restrain the puritans, the bishops proceeded with still more rigour than under Elizabeth. No longer thwarted, as in her time, by an unwilling council, they succeeded in exacting a general conformity to the ordinances of the church. It had been solemnly decided by the judges in the queen's reign, and in 1604, that, although the statute establishing the high commission court did not authorise it to deprive ministers of their benefices, yet this law being only in affirmation of the queen's inherent supremacy, she might, by virtue of that, regulate all ecclesiastical matters at her pleasure, and erect courts with such powers as she should think fit. Upon this somewhat dangerous principle, Archbishop Bancroft deprived a considerable number of puritan clergymen;660 while many more, finding that the interference of the Commons in their behalf was not regarded, and that all schemes of evasion were come to an end, were content to submit to the obnoxious discipline. But their affections being very little conciliated by this coercion, there remained a large party within the bosom of the established church, prone to watch for and magnify the errors of their spiritual rulers. These men preserved the name of puritans. Austere in their lives, while many of the others were careless or irregular, learned as a body comparatively with the opposite party, implacably averse to everything that could be construed into an approximation to popery, they acquired a degree of respect from grave men, which would have been much more general, had they not sometimes given offence by a moroseness and even malignity of disposition, as well as by a certain tendency to equivocation and deceitfulness; faults, however, which so frequently belong to the weaker party under a rigorous government that they scarcely afford a marked reproach against the puritans. They naturally fell in with the patriotic party in the House of Commons, and kept up throughout the kingdom a distrust of the Crown, which has never been so general in England as when connected with some religious apprehensions.

      Growth of high church tenets.—The system pursued by Bancroft and his imitators, Bishops Neile and Laud, with the approbation of the king, far opposed to the healing counsels of Burleigh and Bacon, was just such as low-born and little-minded men, raised to power by fortune's caprice, are ever found to pursue. They studiously aggravated every difference, and irritated every wound. As the characteristic prejudice of the puritans was so bigoted an abhorrence of the Romish faith, that they hardly deemed its followers to deserve the name of Christians, the prevailing high church party took care to shock that prejudice by somewhat of a retrograde movement, and various seeming, or indeed real, accommodations of their tenets to those of the abjured religion. They began by preaching the divine right, as it is called, or absolute indispensability, of episcopacy;661 a doctrine of which the first traces, as I apprehend, are found about the end of Elizabeth's reign. They insisted on the necessity of episcopal succession regularly derived from the apostles. They drew an inference from this tenet, that ordinations by presbyters were in all cases null. And as this affected all the reformed churches in Europe except their own, the Lutherans not having preserved the succession of their bishops, while the Calvinists had altogether abolished that order, they began to speak of them not as brethren of the same faith, united in the same cause, and distinguished only by differences little more material than those of political commonwealths (which had been the language of the church of England ever since the Reformation), but as aliens to whom they were not at all related, and schismatics with whom they held no communion; nay, as wanting the very essence of a Christian society. This again brought them nearer, by irresistible consequence, to the disciples of Rome, with becoming charity, but against the received creed of the puritans and perhaps against their own articles, they all acknowledged to be a part of the catholic church, while they were withholding that appellation, expressly or by inference, from Heidelberg and Geneva.

      Differences as to the observance of Sunday.—The founders of the English reformation, after abolishing most of the festivals kept before that time, had made little or no change as to the mode of observance of those they retained. Sundays and holidays stood much on the same footing as days on which no work except for good cause was to be performed, the service of the church was to be attended, and any lawful amusement might be indulged in.662 A just distinction, however, soon grew up; an industrious people could spare time for very few holidays; and the more scrupulous party, while they slighted the church festivals as of human appointment, prescribed a stricter observance of the Lord's day. But it was not till about 1595 that they began to place it very nearly on the footing of the Jewish sabbath, interdicting not only the slightest action of worldly business, but even every sort of pastime and recreation; a system which, once promulgated, soon gained ground as suiting their atrabilious humour, and affording a new theme of censure on the vices of the great.663 Those who opposed them on the high church side, not only derided the extravagance of the Sabbatarians, as the others were called, but pretended that the commandment having been confined to the Hebrews, the modern observance of the first day of the week as a season of rest and devotion was an ecclesiastical institution, and in no degree more venerable than that of the other festivals or the season of Lent, which the puritans stubbornly despised.664 Such a controversy might well have been left to the usual weapons. But James I., or some of the bishops to whom he listened, bethought themselves that this might serve as a test of puritan ministers. He published accordingly a declaration to be read in churches, permitting all lawful recreations on Sunday after divine service, such as dancing, archery, May-games, and morrice-dances, and other usual sports; but with a prohibition of bear-hunting and other unlawful games. No recusant, or any one who had not attended the church service, was entitled to this privilege; which might consequently be regarded as a bounty on devotion. The severe puritan saw it in no such point of view. To his cynical temper, May-games and morrice-dances were hardly tolerable on six days of the week; they were now recommended for the seventh. And this impious licence was to be promulgated in the church itself. It is indeed difficult to explain so unnecessary an insult on the precise clergy, but by supposing an intention to harass those who should refuse compliance.665 But this intention, from whatever cause, perhaps through the influence of Archbishop Abbot, was not carried into effect; nor was the declaration itself enforced till the following reign.

      The House of Commons displayed their attachment to the puritan maxims, or their dislike of the prelatical clergy, by bringing in bills to enforce a greater strictness in this respect. A circumstance that occurred in the session of 1621 will serve to prove their fanatical violence. A bill having been brought in "for the better observance of the Sabbath, usually called Sunday," one Mr. Shepherd, sneering at the puritans, remarked that, as Saturday was dies Sabbati, this might be entitled a bill for the observance of Saturday, commonly called Sunday. This witticism brought on his head the wrath of that dangerous assembly. He was reprimanded on his knees, expelled the house, and when he saw what befell poor Floyd, might deem himself cheaply saved from their fangs with no worse chastisement.666 Yet when the upper house sent down their bill with "the Lord's day" substituted for "the Sabbath," observing, "that people do now much incline to words of Judaism," the Commons took no exception.667 The use of СКАЧАТЬ