Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/366

Rh 346 ENGLAND [HISTORY. KKneu years without a parlia ment. Ship- money. the universities, and those wlio adopted an unpopular creed, and who at the same time showed tendencies to a more ceremonial form of worship, naturally fell back on the sup port of the crown. Charles, who might reasonably have exerted himself to secure a fair liberty for all opinions, promoted these unpopular divines to bishoprics and livings, and the divines in turn exalted the royal prerogative above parliamentary rights. He now proposed that both sides should keep silence on the points in dispute. The Commons rejected his scheme, and prepared to call in question the most obnoxious of the clergy. In this irritated temper they took up the question of tonnage and poundage, and instead of confining themselves to the great public ques tion, they called to the bar some custom-house officers who happened to have seized the goods of one of their members. Charles declared that the seizure had taken place by his orders. When they refused to accept the excuse, he dis solved parliament, but not before a tumult took place in the House, and the speaker was forcibly held down in his chuir whilst resolutions hostile to the Government were put to the vote. For eleven years no parliament met again. The extreme action of the Lower House was not supported by the people, and the king had the opportunity, if he chose to use it, of putting himself right with the nation after no long delay. But he never understood that power only attends sympathetic leadership. He contented himself with putting himself technically in the right, and with resting his case on the favourable decisions of the judges. Under any circumstances, neither the training nor the position of judges is such as to make them fit to be the final arbiters of political disputes. They are accustomed to declare what the law is, not what it ought to be. These judges, more over, were not in the position to be impartial. They had baen selected by the king, and were liable to be deprived of their office when he saw fit. In the course of Charles s reign two chief justices and one chief baron were dismissed or suspended. Besides the ordinary judges there were the extraordinary tribunals, the court of High Commission nominated by the crown to punish ecclesiastical offenders, and the court of Star Chamber, composed of the privy councillors and the chief justices, and therefore also nominated by the crown, to inflict fine, imprisonment, and even corporal mutilation on lay offenders. Those who rose up in any way against the established order were sharply punished. The harsh treatment of individuals only calls forth re sistance when constitutional morality has sunk deeply into the popular mind. The ignoring of the feelings and pre judices of large classes has a deeper effect, Charles s foreign policy, and his pretentious claim to the sovereignty of the British seas, demanded the support of a fleet, which might indeed be turned to good purpose in offering a counterpoise to the growing navies of France and Holland. The in creasing estrangement between him and the nation made him averse to the natural remedy of a parliament, and he reverted to the absolute practices of tha Middle Ages, in order that he might strain them far beyond the warrant of precedent to levy a tax under the name of ship-money, first on the port towns and then on the whole of England. Payment was resisted by John Hampden, a Buckingham shire squire ; but the judges declared that the king was in the right (1G38). Yet the arguments used by Hampden s lawyers sunk deeply into the popular mind, and almost every man in England who was called on to pay the tax looked upon the king as a wrong-doer under the forms of law. Any Government which, from want of sympathy with the feelings of the masses, offends the sense of right by the levy of taxes for which it does not venture to ask their consent, is also likely to treat with unfeeling harshness the rtligion of thinking men. So it was in the reign of Charles. gover He gave authority to William Laud, since 1633 archbishop tlie of Canterbury, to carry out his design of reducing the Chur&amp;lt; English Church to complete uniformity of ceremonial. The practice in most churches differed from the laws under which public worship was intended to be guided, Laud did his best to carry out the letter of the law, under the belief that uniformity of worship would produce unity of spirit, and in some cases he explained away the law in the direction in which he wished it to be bent. The com munion table was removed from the centre of the church to the east end, was spoken of as an altar, and was fenced in with rails, at which communicants were expected to kneel. At the same time offence was given to the Puritans by an order that every clergyman should read the Declaration of Sports, in which the king directed that no hindrance should be thrown in the way of those who wished to dance or shoot at the butts on Sunday afternoon. Many of the clergy were suspended or deprived, many emigrated to Holland or New England, and of those who remained a large part bore the yoke with feelings of ill- concealed dissatisfaction. Suspicion was easily aroused that a deep plot existed, of which Laud was believed to be the centre, for carrying the nation over to the Church of Borne, a suspicion which seemed to be converted into a certainty when it was known that Panzani and Con, two agents of the pope, had access to Charles, and that in 1637 there was a sudden accession to the number of converts to the Papal Church amongst the lords and ladies of the court. The rising feeling may be traced in the poems of Milton. L Alley ro and // Penseroso probably written in 1632 are full of thoughts which denote him to have been at that time of no special school. The COJHUS, written in 1634, is stamped with the impress of the Puritan ideal without the Puritan asperity; whilst the Lycidas, in 1637, contains lines directed aggressively against the system of Laud as serving merely as a stepping-stone to Rome. In the summer of 1638 Charles had long ceased to reign in the affections of his subjects. But their traditionary loyalty had not yet failed, and if he had not called on them for fresh exertions, it is possible that the coming revolution would have been long delayed. Men were ready to shout applause in honour of Puritan martyrs like Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick, whose ears were cut off in 1637, or in honour of the lawyers who argued such a case as that of Hampden. But no signs of active resistance had yet appeared. Unluckily for Charles, he was likely to stand in need of the active co-operation of Englishmen. He had attempted to force a new Prayer-Book upon the Scottish nation. A riot at Edinburgh in 1637 quickly led to national resistance, and when in November 1638 the General Assembly at Glasgow set Charles s orders at defiance, he was compelled to choose between tame submission and immediate war. In 1639 he gathered an English force, and marched towards the border. But English laymen, though asked to supply the money which he needed for the support of his army, deliberately kept it in their pockets, and the contributions of the clergy and of official persons were not sufficient to enable him to keep his troops long in the field. The king therefore thought it best to agree to terms of pacification. Mis- The S understandings broke out as to the interpretation of the |! ; treaty, and Charles having discovered that the Scotch were intriguing with France, fancied that England, in hatred of its ancient foe, would now be ready to rally to his standard. After an interval of eleven years, in April 1640 he once more called a parliament. The Short Parliament, as it was called, demanded -j-j&quot; redress of grievances, the abandonment of the claim to levy p ar ]j ?j ship-money, and a complete change in the ecclesiastical me ut.