Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/186

172 of passion lay Wentworth, and Mountnorris hearing the incident of the stool mentioned at the table of chancellor Loftus, said—"Perhaps Annesley did it as his revenge, but he has a brother who would not have taken such a revenge." This being repeated to Wentworth, he treated the observation as a suggestion to Annesley to perpetrate a more bloody revenge; and though he dissembled his resentment for some time, he then accused Mountnorris, who "was also an officer in the army, of mutiny, founded on this expression. Wentworth attended the court-martial to over-awe its proceedings, and obtained a sentence of death against Mountnorris The sentence was too atrocious to be carried into execution, but it served Wentworth's purpose, who cashiered Mountnorris, and gave his office to Loftus. Much as the Irish had suffered before, this most Lawless act excited a loud murmur of indignation throughout Ireland; but Wentworth had secured himself from any censure from the king by handing him six thousand pounds as the price of the transfer of Mountnorris's treasurership to Sir Adam Loftus.

The tyrannies of Laud in England, and of Wentworth in Ireland, were now fast driving the more independent and religious people to New England. The trial of John Hampden had now taken place in London, and Wentworth, in the insolence of his success in Ireland, had written to Laud, recommending that the great patriot should be whipped like Prynne and Lilburne. "Sir. Hampden," he wrote, "is a great brother (meaning puritan), and the very genius of that nation of people leads them always to oppose, both civilly and ecclesiastically, all that ever authority ordains for them. But, in good faith, were they rightly served, they should be whipped hence into their right wits; and much beholden they should be to any that would thoroughly take pains with them in that sort."

Not even Charles and Laud, however, were daring enough to apply the whip to the back of the great English patriot; and though Hampden, his kinsman Oliver Cromwell, and Haselrig, contemplated emigrating to America, in a great scheme set on foot by the lords Say and Brook, they remained to see the heads of the champions of the "thorough" fall, and that of the king after them.

The resentment of the Irish was becoming so strong against Wentworth, that the king thought it safest for him to come to England for a time; but so soon returned thither, with the additional favour of the monarch, where he remained till summoned by Charles to assist him by his counsels against the Scotch. But the fatal year 1640 was at hand, to close the story of his tyrannies. We must now retrace our steps, and bring up the conflicts of Scotland with the same blind and determined despots to that period.

The storm against the despotism of Charles had broken out in that country. From the moment of his visit to Edinburgh with his great apostle Laud, he had never ceased pushing forward his scheme of conforming the presbyterian church to Anglican episcopacy. He had restored the bishops on that occasion, given them lands, erected deans and chapters, and Laud had consecrated the High Church as a cathedral. As he could not persuade the Scottish peers to submit to the liturgy as used in England, which his father had attempted in vain before him, he consented that a liturgy should be drawn up by four Scottish bishops, who were also to frame a code of ecclesiastical canons. They were to introduce into the latter some of the acts of the Scottish assemblies, and some more ancient canons, to make the whole more palatable. These laws and the liturgy were afterwards revised by the archbishop of Canterbury, and the bishops of London and Norwich, and Charles ordered the amended copies to be published and observed.

None but a monarch so foolhardy as Charles, would have dared such an experiment on the Scotch, who had resisted so stoutly his father, and had driven his grandmother from the country for her adhesion to popery. The people received the publication of the canon with unequivocal indications of their temper; and when, therefore, the first introduction of the liturgy was fixed for the 23rd of July, 1637, at the High Church, they went thither in crowds, to give a characteristic reception. The archbishops and bishops, the lords of session, and the magistrates went in procession, and appeared there in all their official splendour. This display, however, so far from imposing on the people of Edinburgh, only excited their wrath and contempt, as the trumpery finery of the woman of Babylon.

No sooner had the dean ascended the reading-desk and began to read the collect for the day, than there was a burst of rage and indignation which must have been startling. The women of all ranks were most conspicuous in their demonstrations of disgust. They assailed the dean with the most opprobrious epithets, crying, "The mass has entered! Baal is in the church!" The dean was styled "a thief, a devil's gett, and of a witche's breeding." The noise and confusion were indescribable.

Amongst the women seated about the pulpit, or even on its steps, as you still see in Scotch churches, was a stout masculine dame, the keeper of a vegetable stall at the Tron Kirk, named Janet, or Jenny Geddes. Hearing a man repeat "Amen!" close behind her, she turned round, and cuffing his eare with both her hands, exclaimed—"Out, false thief, is there na ither pairt of the churche to sing mass in, but thou must sing it at my lugge."

The noise and riot increasing, the bishop who was to preach that day hastened up into the pulpit, over the head of the dean in the reading-desk, and entreated the people to listen to the collect. "Diel colic the wame o' thee!" cried Jenny Geddes, or "the devil send the colic into thy stomach," mistaking the strange word "collect" for that painful disorder; and with that she flung her joint stool with all her might at the bishop's head. A man near her diverted the course of the missile by trying to seize her arm, or, it was the opinion of those who saw it, the bishop had been a dead man. It swung on, however, past his ear with an ominous sweep, and was followed by the most frightful yells, and a shower of other heavy stools and clasped Bibles, sticks and stones, that speedily caused the evacuation of the pulpit. The bishop was followed in his descent from it by the cries of "Fox, wolf, and belly-god," for he was a very fat man.

The archbishop of St. Andrews, who was also lord chancellor, and some of the nobles having tried in vain to restore order, the magistrates rushed forward to the rescue, and by the aid of constables and beadles, the most prominent rioters were thrust out of the church, and the doors locked. The bishop