Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/588

574 preferment, and to be licensed by a bishop even before he could teach a school. Having thus barred the church and corporations effectually to every honest man who did not hold the faith of the predominant church party to the tittle, the dissenters were pursued to their own meetings and punished there. An act against seditious conventicles, commonly called the conventicle act, was passed in 1661, by which every person found at a dissenting meeting where above five persons were present, was punishable by fine, or three months' imprisonment; and for a third offence was transported for seven years! Nor was this deemed enough. Thoroughly to crush all teaching of religion except in churches, a new act, called the five-mile act, was passed the following year, 1665, by which every dissenting minister found within five miles of the place where he had ever preached was fined forty pounds! Besides these most oppressive enactments, which let loose the base tribe of spies and informers on the whole dissenting world— this very world to which Charles, in his declaration of Breda, had promised liberty of conscience—a still more atrocious act was passed in 1670 against conventicles, by which even children above sixteen years of age were fined five shillings for attendance at such meetings, and ten shillings for a second and every subsequent appearance there; and the preacher was fined twenty pounds for the first offence, and forty pounds for every subsequent one; the master of the house where the meeting was held being fined twenty pounds each time. Authority was given to break open any man's door where he was informed that such meeting was holding, and take all present into custody. Where, then, was Magna Charta? Where the boast that every man's house was his castle? Lastly, there was the test act passed in 1673, extending the disabilities of dissenters and catholics from corporations, to parliament, and every office under the crown. In fact, instead of Charles not stretching the prerogative, and not violating the privileges of the subject, as Mr. Hallam asserts, there never was a time when all the safeguards of the constitution were more completely prostrated; for, besides these acts aimed at the suppression of all freedom of opinion, there were two other acts passed in his reign, and at the very commencement of it, too, in 1661, which perfected the subjection of the people—one, the act against tumults and disorders, which made it an offence punishable with a penalty of one hundred pounds and three months imprisonment to even solicit a signature to a petition to king or parliament which had more than twenty such signatures, unless such petition was sanctioned by three justices of the peace, or the majority of the grand jury of the county; whoever presented such petition was liable to the same penalty, or whoever was present at the presentation of a sanctioned petition, if there were more than ten persons attending it; and that the military powers might be prepared to back up effectually these despotic regulations, another act declared the whole of the military and naval power of the kingdom, including the militia and all places of strength in the kingdom, to be in the sole and absolute power and possession of the crown.

Is it possible to conceive a people more thoroughly enslaved—tied up hand, foot, tongue, and pen, for the press at the same time was under the strictest censorship? Is it possible to depict or imagine a monarch more absolutely master of all the laws and liberties of a nation than this same Charles, whom Mr. Hallam declares to have been so tender of the national freedom, so moderate in the exercise of the prerogative? But what is more astonishing is to find "Knight's Pictorial History "—a history generally so impartial and judicious—echoing and extending this most palpable fallacy. Subscribing to Mr. Hallam's statement, the writer of Knight's History says:—"We must admit that, however dark might be the designs of Charles, there were no such general infringements of the public liberty in his reign as had occurred before the Long Parliament. And when," he says, "we add to this the effective abolition of illegal or arbitrary imprisonment by the habeas corpus act, and the extinction of the practice of torture, noticed in the last book, it will be perceived that the paring the talons of the prerogative had undergone in the period now under review was far from inconsiderable. The scandalous practice of coercing or intimidating judges by fines or imprisonment, which had been of occasional occurrence in former times, may be said to have been put down in the reign of Charles II."

Perhaps a more unfortunate string of assertions than this never was made. We have shown how entire was the suppression of the liberty of the subject in the enumeration of the seven celebrated acts of this reign. True, in 1679, the 31st of Charles II., the habeas corpus act was passed; but this, so far from proving that the writ of habeas corpus was treated with respect, clearly of itself indicates that the refusal and defiance of it was become so outrageous, that even the servile parliament of Charles was roused to endeavour to enforce that great safeguard of the popular liberty. Writs of habeas corpus were of very ancient date, and, says Hallam, "It is a very common mistake, and that not only amongst foreigners, but many from whom some knowledge of our constitutional laws might be expected, to suppose that the statute of Charles II. enlarged in a great degree our liberties, and forms an epoch in their history." He goes on very truly to show that this act " conferred no right upon the subject," but was only intended to enforce the due issue of the writs of habeas corpus according to ancient practice, "and cut off the abuses by which the government's lust of power, and the servile subtlety of crown lawyers, had impaired so fundamental a privilege."

Here, indeed, Hallam unconsciously concedes all that we have been asserting against him. It was this lust of power in Charles's government, and the servile subtlety of crown lawyers, which had so firmly extinguished the security of the subject in this reign, and rendered an effort necessary to check these evils. But, as we have shown, Charles rendered the habeas corpus act a dead letter in his time by his system of corrupt judges who then depended entirely on him, by corrupt sheriffs, extinction of corporation charters, and packed juries. The difference betwixt his reign and that of his father was simply this—that in his father's time the nation was resolute for its liberties, and contended with him step by step for them; in his own time the reaction of royalty had for a long period quelled the public spirit, and given him a grand advantage over both parliament and people. The despotism was not less, but the resistance was less.