CHAPTER I

THE ACCESSION OF CHARLES I.

The struggles

century.

THE seventeenth century was a time of crisis, as serious as the Reformation, in the history of the English Church. The masterful and moderating hand of Elizabeth once removed, men began to look out more freely over of the a wide expanse of thought and life, and to carry seventeenth the principles which they had adopted into vigorous action. The Thirty Years' War, the suppression of the political and ecclesiastical separation of the Huguenots, and the establishment of Protestant supremacy in the United Provinces, appealed to Englishmen as great religious questions. And in the freedom which they had won for themselves the sharp divisions of opinion in England tended to stand out more clearly. With the reign of Charles I. began the decisive struggle which was to fix the limits of the Reformation, and to determine whether the English Church should maintain the principles of doctrine and order enunciated in the Preface to her Book of Common Prayer and her Ordinal. The divergence between historic, traditional Christianity, with its creeds and its Episcopal system, and the new dogmas and disciplines which had been elaborated in Germany and Switzerland, and which were echoed from many English pulpits, was one which must eventually lead to open conflict. The years from 1625 to 1662 mark the duration of that conflict, and hardly before 1714 had its echoes died away.

In the period of which this book is to treat there is an

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extraordinary wealth of interest-doctrinal, disciplinary, constitutional, personal. Much of it must here be passed by with but slight notice, and attention will chiefly be directed to the important principles and the important characters as they are viewed from the standing-point of the Church as a continuous historic body. The interesting and fruitful history of the societies which now definitely separated from the Church must be put aside; and, for the same reason, the period of the Church's disestablishment will receive but scant notice. We must be content to trace how events moved, and why, to human view, they moved in the direction which they took.

On March 27, 1625, King James I. passed away at Theobalds. He made a pious end, spending all his last days in prayer, and receiving absolution and the Holy Communion. His only surviving son watched by him assiduously, and with him the friend for whom the dying king had done so muchGeorge Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.

The accession

Clarendon, looking back forty years afterwards, records that Charles, Prince of Wales, succeeded to the crown with as universal a joy in the people as can be imagined, of Charles I. and in a conjuncture when all the other parts of Christendom were very solicitous of his friendship; and he refused to look back into the past for the causes of the discontents which were soon to overthrow the monarchy. But the very days of mourning showed the disturbance of popular feeling; it was whispered that the late king had been poisoned by Buckingham, and eventually his physician, Sir William Paddy, was examined on the matter. The accusation was, of course, ridiculous, but it showed how popular feeling went. It was of ill omen for the young king that he so greatly trusted his father's favourite, the object of almost universal distrust and dislike.

On May 1, 1625, the king was married by proxy at Paris to Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henry IV. of France. On May 7 he attended the solemn funeral of his father in Westminster Abbey, an act of filial piety which was contrary to precedent. Williams, Bishop of Lincoln and Lord Keeper, preached a sermon on "Great Britain's Solomon." It was a time of national mourning, for the plague was rife, and a day of public fasting was held on July 2. When the plague

I

CORONATION OF CHARLES 1.

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abated it was at last possible for the coronation to take place, and, after a day of thanksgiving on January 29, 1626, the king was crowned on the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin.

Considerable interest attaches to the coronation of Charles I. At the crowning of his father the form had been drawn up in haste, and the new king desired that a special His revision of the office should be made. He issued coronation, Feb. 2, 1626. a commission to Abbot, the archbishop, and other prelates, to act in the matter. Of this committee an energetic member was William Laud, Bishop of St. David's, who, from the beginning of the reign, through the influence of the Duke of Buckingham, rose steadily in the king's favour. Laud also acted a special part in the coronation itself, being appointed to act as deputy for the Dean of Westminster-Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, who was already in disgrace. The most minute care was taken in the preparation of the form, and the manuscript notes of Laud on the printed text, which are extant, show with how scrupulous an exactness he prepared every detail. From the consecration of the oil to the ordering of the procession, from the warning of the king on the previous evening to spend his time in contemplation and prayer, down to the provision for his position at every point of the ceremony, all was settled with reference to ancient precedents. Question was made many years later as to the form of coronation oath which the king took, but it was proved to have been the same that was taken by his fatherthe form, in fact, which had continued with scarce an alteration of phrase since the days of the old English kings.

In the new king Englishmen saw a man who differed in notable particulars from his father. Charles had been trained in the doctrine and discipline of the English Church.

His

He was devout, temperate, chaste, serious-they are character. the very words of a Puritan lady-but reserved.

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Said a clerical critic, our sovereign had not the art to please." "A mild and gracious prince, who knew not how to be or to be made great," wrote Laud years later, in the bitterness of his grief at "the murder of Strafford." Sir Henry Wotton, diplomatist, ecclesiastic, and poet, wrote in 1633 a "panegyrick of his master, which happily expresses what churchmen thought

and courtiers knew about their young king eight years before. "When you had assumed the crown, before all other things there was resplendent in you a religious mind, the support of kingdoms, the joy of good men. The Chapel Royal was never more in order. The number of eminent divines daily increased. Sermons in no age more frequented; in none more learned; and the examples of the prince more effectual than the sermons. No execrations rashly proceeded from your mouth. Your ears abhorring not only any wanton but even the least sordid word." Such Charles seemed to his friends. Difficulties were to disclose weaknesses in his character, adversities to develop its genuine piety. But from first to last the king remained a devoted son of the Church.

His interests

He was a man of vicious life

He came to the throne with two attachments close to his heart and his mind. The first was the friendship that had begun with his boyhood for George Villiers, Duke and of Buckingham, the fascinating "Steenie" of his attachments. father, King James. Buckingham's was a charming personality, spoilt by success. but not of vicious heart, one who sinned and repented and sinned again, till he came to his sudden tragic end by the assassin's knife. Those who knew him saw how much good was in him. Laud, to whom he had confessed his sins, prayed constantly that he might be devout in God's truth and Church. He had listened seriously to the controversy held in the presence of his mother between English and Roman divines, and he had formed his opinions on those of the school of Andrewes. It was through him, there can be no doubt, that the new king was led to form the second great attachment of his life, an attachment rather of the mind than of the heart, but one durable in the principles which its influence instilled. On the night before the coronation it was the duty of Laud, as deputy for the Dean of Westminster, to advise the king of his duties and of how to prepare for them. Perhaps it was then that the bishop became the king's confessor. Certainly from that hour they worked hand in hand for Church and State. The great ecclesiastical figure of Charles's reign, overpowering all others by the breadth of his aims and the firmness of his determination, was Laud.

William Laud was born at Reading on October 7, 1573,