Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/30

16 new regulations were enforced. This was granted, but not strictly kept, for the new book of common prayer was immediately prepared and published by authority.

Thus ended this digracefuldisgraceful [sic] conference, which excited almost equal discontent amongst the high-church partisans and the dissenters. The bishops had consented to changes, out of fear of offending the king, which they by no means approved, and were in no haste to carry out; and the dissenters were greatly chagrined that their delegates had not more boldly and resolutely enforced their views. But with such a monarch as James nothing like fair argument was possible; he avowed the most despotic principles, and contradicted those who opposed him with the undignified rudeness of a pothouse politician. The reformers complained bitterly of this, but James himself was incapable of feeling the force of public opinion. He was inflated with the idea of his own unrivalled eloquence and ability. He boasted that he had "peppered the dissenters soundly; they fled me," he said, "from argument to argument like schoolboys."

The bishops and ministers of his council added to his absurd egotism, by actually pouring deluges of the most fulsome adulation upon him. Bancroft, bishop of London, flung him-self on his knees before him, and exclaimed "that his heart melted with joy, and made haste to acknowledge unto Almighty God his singular mercy in giving them such a king, as since Christ's time the like had not been;" and Whitgift, the primate, protested "that his majesty spake by the special assistance of God's spirit."

The lord chancellor Ellesmere, emulating the sycophants of the church, said that "the king and the priest had never been so wonderfully united in the same person;" and the peers echoed the plaudits, declaring that his majesty's speeches proceeded from the spirit of God operating on an understanding heart. "I wist not what they mean," wrote Harrington, in Nugæ Antiquæ; "but the spirit was rather foul-mouthed."

All parties connected with the church having thus admitted that the king was acting under the most luminous effusion of the divine spirit, ought not, therefore, to have murmured when soon afterwards, without waiting for Ecclesiastical sanction, he made his own alterations in the book of common prayer, and then issued a proclamation, warning all men neither to attempt nor expect any further alterations in the church, and commanding all ecclesiastical and civil authority to enforce the strictest conformity. Whitgift soon after died, and many attributed the acceleration of his death to his mortification at the king's ordering the affairs of the church by his own will and wisdom, which Whitgift had been one of the first to extol as infallible. Bancroft succeeded, and showed himself a ready instrument of James's bigotry, and ready to enforce whatever cruelty he would attempt.

James spent full half of his year in hunting, and if any person or party had an urgent matter to prefer, the only opportunity for it appeared by waylaying him in his rides to the forest. The dissenters, as the time approached for the enforcement of the new canons of the church, presented a petition to him near Newmarket, praying a prolongation of the time allowed them for conforming. James received them with savage fierceness; told them that it was from such petitions that the rebellion in the Netherlands originated; that his mother and ho had been haunted by puritan devils from their cradles; that he would sooner lose his crown than encourage such malicious spirits; and if he thought his son would tolerate them in his time, he would wish to see him that moment lying in his grave. The nonconformists complained that he persecuted the disciples whilst he favoured the enemies of the gospel. This was referring to his reception of catholics at court, and his promises not to molest them if they abstained from the open prosecution of their worship. But James left them under no mistake on that head: he expressed an equally vehement hatred of papists; and on the 22nd of February he issued a proclamation enjoining the banishment of all catholic missionaries. He went to the star chamber, framed regulations for the discovery and prosecution of all recusants, and issued orders to all magistrates to see the penal laws put in force against all persons, of whatever faith, who did not fully conform to the rites and ordinances of the church. Thus the miseries and oppressions of religious persecution were renewed with all their virulence; and the only consolation for those who refused to conform, was that they might persecute one another.

In the midst of this state of things, James was compelled to call a parliament. This assembled on the 19th of March, 1604. It was one of the most remarkable parliaments in our history, for it came together, on the part of both king and commons, prepared to contest the great principles of absolutism and constitutional liberty; a contest which never again ceased till the people had triumphed over the crown, and prescribed for it those limits within which it continues still to exist. The Tudors had made themselves absolute, but rather by acting than talking. They had willed, but had only occasionally boasted of the supremacy of their will. Whenever they had done so, especially in the person of Elizabeth, they received a protest so spirited from parliament, that they wisely again veiled their pretensions. But James, possessing all their personal vanity and love of unlimited power, had not the policy to keep his pretensions in the background. He protruded them on the public notice; he vaunted his towering belief of his earthly divinity, declaring that as God killed or made alive, so had he ordained kings to do the same at pleasure. Years before he came to England, he published these imperious and imprudent doctrines in a discourse "On the True Law of Free Monarchies; or, the Reciprogue and Mutual Duty betwixt a Free King and his Natural Subjects." This true law, according to him, consisted in a king doing as he pleased, independent of councils, peers, or parliaments. The king was to be all command, the subject all submission. In these lawless ideas of the British Solomon regarding government, are comprehended all the conflicts which succeeded between the princes of his family and the people, and which eventually drove them from the throne.

In the proclamation calling this parliament, James took care to set forth the supremacy of his prerogative, and commanded the sheriffs and other officers to make no returns of members but such as were wholly agreeable to his views; there were to be no "persons noted for their superstitious blindness in religion one way, or for their turbulent humour the other." That is, neither puritans nor catholics were to be elected. Instructions were sent down to the various counties and boroughs, naming such persons for candidates as were agreeable to the court. But the puritans were in no humour to comply with such unconstitutional orders. They were justly filled with resentment at the