The trial of Laud.

against him. On March 12, 1644 he was at last brought to the bar. The doctrine of cumulative treason, unknown to the law, was brought forward to procure a conviction. One of the articles, coming strangely from the Commons, then in arms against the Crown, charged him with an attack on the royal prerogative. The trial was a wonderful exercise of endurance on the part of the prelate, who was ready at every point with an answer, with chapter and verse for all he had done. But the conclusion was foregone. When the Lords refused to accept as treason anything not specified in the Statute of Edward III., the Commons resorted, as in the case of Strafford, to a bill of attainder. Never did Laud stir from his steadfast protestation of loyalty to the Church of England. In the last extremity he was firm. He thus described his condition. "My very pockets searched; my Diary, my very Prayer-book taken from me, and after used against me; and that in some cases not to prove but to make a charge. Yet I am thus far glad, even for this sad accident. For by my Diary your Lordships have seen the passages of my life; and by my Prayer-book the greatest secrets between God and my soul; so that you may be sure you have me at the very bottom: yet, blessed be God, no disloyalty is found in the one, no Popery in the other."

His defence.

And, so day by day, in answer to each particular charge as well as to the general, and so strained, indictment, the archbishop spoke in defence of his own religion and honour. He repeated his entire obedience to the laws and the religion of the land. To the charge of Popery he had a ready answer. He might have had far more honour and ease abroad than ever here in England: "for whatsoever the world may be pleased to think of me, I have led a very painful life, and such as I could have been very well content to change, had I well known how. And had my conscience led me that way, I am sure I might have lived at far more ease; and either have avoided the barbarous libellings, and other bitter and grievous stories which I have here endured, or at the least been out of the hearing. Nay, my lords, I am as innocent in this business of religion, as free from all practice, or so much as thought of practice, for any alteration to Popery, or any way blemishing the true Protestant religion

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And let nothing be

established in the Church of England, as I was when my mother first bare me into the world. spoken against me but truth, and I do here challenge whatsoever is between heaven and hell, to say their worst against me in point of my religion; in which, by God's grace, I have ever hated dissimulation; and had I not hated it, perhaps it might have been better with me, for worldly safety, than now it is. But it can no way become a Christian bishop to halt with God."

So again when the House of Commons, casting away all disguise of strict legality, and urged on by the easily manufactured petitions from the City of London, called him to their bar to answer, when the bill of attainder was brought in. "Mr. Speaker," he replied very simply, "I am very aged, considering the turmoils of my life, and I daily find in myself more decays than I make show of; and the period of my life, in the course of nature, cannot be far off. It cannot but be a great grief unto me, to stand at these years thus charged before ye. Yet give me leave to say thus much without offence: whatsoever errors or faults I may have committed by the way, in any my proceedings, through human infirmity—as who is he that hath not offended, and broken some statutelaws too, by ignorance, or misapprehension, or forgetfulness, at some sudden time of action ?—yet if God bless me with so much memory, I will die with these words in my mouth, 'That I never intended, much less endeavoured, the subversion of the laws of the kingdom; nor the bringing in of popish superstition upon the true Protestant religion established by law in this kingdom.""

On the 4th January 1645 the Lords passed his attainder: it was the day when they accepted the Directory: "and so the archbishop and the service book died attainder. together."

His

It was on Friday the 10th of January that he was brought forth to die. A pamphlet called "A Brief Relation of his Death and Sufferings," printed at Oxford a few His execudays later, expressed the feelings of all those who tion, Jan. 10, had come to recognise the steadfastness of his loyalty to the Church when it said: "So well was he studied in the act of dying (especially in the last and strictest

1645.

part of his imprisonment) that by continual fastings, watchings, prayer, and such like acts of Christian humiliation, his flesh was rarified into spirit, and the whole man so fitted for eternal glories that he was more than half in heaven before death brought his bloody (but triumphant) chariot to convey him thither. He that had so long been a confessor could not but think it a release of miseries to be made a martyr."

On the scaffold "his great care," says Heylin, "was to clear his majesty and the Church of England from any inclination to Popery." He preached, as it were, a last sermon on the scaffold. "Good people," he began, "this is an uncomfortable time to preach; yet I shall begin with a text of Scripture, Hebrews xii. 2-Let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God."

"I have been long in my race," he said, "and how I have looked to Jesus, the Author and Finisher of my faith, He best knows. I am now come to the end of my race, and here I find the Cross-a death of shame." As he spoke of the affliction and its end, he stoutly declared that he would not follow the imaginations that the people were setting up, as the three children would not worship the king's image. "Nor will I forsake the temple and the truth of God to follow the bleating of Jeroboam's calves in Dan and Bethel." The people were "miserably misled"; the king was "as sound a Protestant (according to the religion by law established) as any man in this kingdom"; the Londoners had cried round the Parliament house for blood; his predecessors had suffered before him, St. Alphege and Simon Sudbury-"though I am not only the first Archbishop, but the first man, that hath ever died by an ordinance in Parliament." And then he spoke of his religion and faithfulness to the laws. "What clamours and slanders I have endured for labouring to keep a uniformity in the external service of God, according to the doctrine and discipline of this Church, all men know and I have abundantly felt."

Thus he ended, "I have done. I forgive all the world, all and every of those bitter enemies which have persecuted

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me; and humbly desire to be forgiven of God first, and then of every man, whether I have offended him or not, if he do but conceive that I have. Lord, do thou forgive me, and I beg forgiveness of him. And so I heartily desire you to join with me." Till the very last moment he was pressed by bitter enemies to them he said that the best saying for a dying man was "Cupio dissolvi et esse cum Christo," and that his full assurance of faith lay in "the Word of God concerning Christ and His dying for us." This was his last prayer: "Lord, I am coming as fast as I can: I know I must pass through the shadow of death before I can come to Thee; but it is but umbra mortis, a mere shadow of death, a little darkness upon nature: but Thou, by Thy merits and passion, hath broken through the jaws of death. The Lord receive my soul, and have mercy upon me, and bless this kingdom with peace and plenty, and with brotherly love and charity, that there may not be this effusion of Christian blood amongst them, for Jesus Christ His sake, if it be Thy will." A moment in silence, and then he said, "Lord, receive my soul," and all was over.

He was buried, with the Church service, in the church of All Hallows Barking, on Tower Hill, where, before the century was over, the graves of many holy men clustered round.

The death of Laud synchronised with an attempt at an arrangement for peace. Commissioners from both sides met

The

at Uxbridge on January 29, 1645; but from the first the religious difficulty was seen to be at the Uxbridge root of the division. Charles was determined to Conference, Jan. 29, 1645. uphold Episcopacy. The Scots were equally determined to overthrow it; and they had the Parliament at their mercy. In vain the clergy at Oxford, the best representatives of the king's side in ecclesiastical matters, drew up a scheme of toleration, by which bishops were to exercise their jurisdiction only by the consent of a council of presbytery. Freedom in ceremony was to be allowed; and the clergy declared a genuine toleration. "We think it lawful that a toleration be given-by suspending the penalties of all laws-both to the Presbyterians and Independents." That this would have been accepted by the king is practically certain; but it was not accepted by his opponents. When

"Let my

they came into power it would be seen that there was no toleration for those who did not agree with them. If the king would have yielded further, peace might perhaps have been made; but he stood almost alone in the determination with which he wrote in the summer of 1645. condition be never so low, I resolve by the grace of God never to yield up this Church to the government of Papists, Presbyterians, or Independents." Already his cause had become hopeless. On June 14 was the crushing defeat of Naseby; on September 13 all chance of help from Scotland was destroyed by the battle of Philiphaugh.

Naseby was a victory for the Independents. Already in the Westminster Assembly they had shown their power. Based on the strong individualism of men who had formed Naseby and the their religious convictions anew from the beginning Independents. by intent study of the English Bible, and more particularly the Old Testament, wide enough to include men of learning like Milton, whose Areopagitica, a plea for the liberty of unlicensed printing (1644), was a protest against the despotism of Presbyterian censorship, and rough country folk whose religious enthusiasm led them into the wildest eccentricities, the Independent party found its great leader in Oliver Cromwell, and its strength in the New Model Army which he organised. It was with this party that Charles now found himself face to face. On May 5, 1646, he entrusted himself to the Scots. Then came months of difficult negotiation. The king was willing to allow the establishment of PresbyNewcastle. terianism, for a time, and the suppression of the Independents, in whom men like Baxter as well as the Scots already saw their most dangerous foes; but he insisted on the maintenance of some at least of the sees, as a security for freedom of Church worship and for the continuance of apostolic succession. The matter is worth detailed examination.

Charles at

At the time of Charles's interviews at Newcastle with the Presbyterian, Alexander Henderson, who tried to persuade him to consent to the extirpation of Episcopacy, it might seem as if the king hesitated for a moment. The following letter to Juxon explains his position; his curious conscience, strained, yet loyal to a fundamental principle, speaks in it characteristically: