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taining the true Protestant religion. He bade her read the sermons of Bishop Andrewes, Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, and Laud's controversy with Fisher. They were indeed the bases of his own Anglican faith-Andrewes taught the Catholic verities, Hooker and Laud gave the rational foundation of the English Reformation as against Geneva and Rome. Then, says his faithful servant Herbert

"The king now bidding farewell to the world . . . he laid aside all other thoughts and spent the remainder of his time in prayer and other pious exercises of devotion in conference with that meek and learned Bishop Dr. Juxon who, under God, was a great support to him in that his afflicted condition." He was not suffered to rest undisturbed; but "when several London ministers wanted to pray with him, in regard he had made choice of Dr. Juxon (whom for many years he has known to be a pious and learned divine, and able to administer ghostly comfort to his soul suitable to his present condition), he would have none other." It was to tion, Jan. 30, Juxon that he made his last confession, and from 1649. him he received his last communion. In the last hours of his life, with that steady regularity of devotion which was the strength of the Anglicanism of the time, he said the morning prayer of the day. Nothing was varied; yet the very lesson of the day, St. Matthew xxvii., spoke directly to his heart. "Death is not terrible to me," he said, "I bless my God I am prepared." At the very last he declared that the hope of religious peace lay in the calling of a national synod: and he died, he said, "a Christian according to the profession of the Church of England." So he

His execu

bowed his comely head

Down, as upon a bed.

"At

Lord Herbert thus tells how his body was laid to rest. such a time as the king's body was brought out of St. George's Hall, the sky was serene and clear, but presently it began to snow and fell so fast as by that time they came to the west end of the Royal Chapel the black velvet pall was all white (the colour of innocence) being thickly covered over with snow. . . . The king's body being by the bearers set down near the place of burial, the Bishop of London stood ready with the

VIII

EIKON BASILIKE

141

Service Book in his hands to have performed his last duty to the king his master, according to the order or form for the burial of the dead set forth in the book of Common Prayer, which the Lords likewise desired but could not be suffered by Colonel Whitchcote, the Governor, by reason of the Directory, to which (said he) he and others were to be conformable." And so in silence the last scene closed; and another pathetic memory was added to those which men treasured till the young king's return.

The Eikon

Charles, with all his failings, died for the Church. Nothing was more significant of the popular feeling that this was true than the enormous success of the Eikon Basilike, published February 1649, of which no less than forty- Basilike. seven editions were issued. It was, almost certainly, the work of Dr. John Gauden, one of Charles's chaplains. It contained some of the king's prayers which had been in the hands of Juxon; and with a remarkable skill the writer managed throughout, in a pathetic fidelity, to convey Charles's true feelings when he knelt in penitence before God. If the book contained arguments for kingship it contained ten times as many for Anglicanism and the system of Laud. If it showed Charles at his best, it showed the Church as Laud longed for it to be.

Another apology for the monarchy was put out by the Royalists at Amsterdam in 1649, entitled Tragicum theatrum actorum et casuum tragicorum Londini publice celebratorum, in which the great heroes of the Cavaliers were commemorated, -Strafford, Laud, and the king himself,—and the young king and his followers were eulogised. It tried to tell Europe what the Eikon had told England.

Milton's answer, Eikonoklastes, October 1649, was little more than a mere piece of vulgar railing, and proved utterly ineffectual to stay the horror and pity which the Eikon had evolved. The Eikon Basilike was read everywhere, by every one: Puritans felt the genuineness of its piety, as churchmen felt the sincerity of the attachment to the Church which inspired it. "There are ways enough to repair the breaches of the state without the ruins of the Church" wrote the author; and when the ruin had come the people of England felt with him. "Peace itself is not desirable, till repentance have prepared us for it ;" and to repentance the sufferings which the war entailed

1

and the repression which followed its conclusion made men most seriously inclined. The execution of Charles made certain the restoration of Church and King.

AUTHORITIES.-Clarendon, Cromwell's Letters and Speeches; Hacket, Scrinia Reserata; the works of the chief divines, notably Laud, Hall; Warwick, Memoirs; Herbert, Memorials; Prynne's voluminous pamphlets, especially Canterburie's Doom; Heylin, Cyprianus Anglicus. The pamphlet literature of the time must be constantly consulted. Among modern authorities, Gardiner, History of England and History of the Great Civil War are the guides at every step; see also Lives of Laud, Juxon, Prynne, Stephen Marshall, Milton, in Dictionary of National Biography; Masson, Life of Milton; Todd, "Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury on the authorship of Eikon Basilike." For religion in the armies, see Firth, Cromwell's Army.

CHAPTER IX

THE COMMONWEALTH AND THE PROTECTORATE

1649-1660

The disestablishment

of the

Church.

THE years that followed the death of Charles I. may here be
briefly sketched. The Church of England, the body estab-
lished from old time under the sanction of the
State, on its acceptance of the Catholic creeds and
the Apostolic ministry, was no longer recognised by
the State. Its worship was illegal, its ministry was
deposed, and it was replaced by a fully established Presby-
terian Church. The Universities, the strongholds of the
National Church, were purged of all those who would not
take the Covenant and accept the new religious order. And
throughout England the process was carried out with increas-
ing rigour. The Engagement, offered in 1649, by which a
promise was given to be faithful to the Commonwealth as
established, without a king and House of Lords, was not
much more satisfactory to many of the clergy than was the
Covenant. Several changes occurred at Oxford from refusal to
take the Engagement, for, writes Calamy the biographer of
Baxter, "the moderate Church party and the Presbyterians"
rejected it.

After a sketch of the general action of Parliament towards the Church, and of its consequences, the history of the Church from 1649 to 1660 can best be followed by an examination of the religious position of Cromwell, of the ecclesiastical settlement under the Presbyterian system, the treatment of the dispossessed clergy, the nature of the toleration that was

Contra?

allowed by the Government to Christian and non-Christian bodies, and the causes which led to the reaction which restored the Church with the king. At this point it may be well to contrast the systems of Presbytery and Independency.

terians.

The former was originally of French origin. The scheme, the heirarchy of elders, the elaborate system of assembly and classes, the strict discipline enforced, were all The Presby derived from the institution of John Calvin. Adopted in Scotland through the genius of John Knox, advocated in England by able and influential writers such as Thomas Cartwright, the system was adopted as the ideal of those Puritans of Elizabeth's and James I.'s days, who regarded the Episcopal government of the Church of England as contrary to the word of God. This has been dealt with in the previous volume of this History of the English Church. In the reign of Charles I. and up to the triumph of the Parliamentary party through the aid of the Scots, the Presbyterians of England seem to have learnt nothing and to have forgotten nothing. They still desired to establish the system of jurisdiction which was the keystone of the Presbyterian system. It was this which they succeeded in formally setting up by law on June 1646. But it was soon found to be in every sense a foreign system in England.

Objections to it were advanced on two sides. First there were the Erastians, who desired to subject the Church entirely to the State, and were therefore utterly hostile to Unpopularity of their the encroaching supervision of the hierarchical system. system of Presbytery. When the system was established by law, ineffectually though it worked, it was found by men of different views from Milton, as well as by the poet himself, that "new presbyter is but old priest writ large. There was a strong feeling against the tyranny of the spiritual courts and the enforcement of civil penalties for spiritual offences. It was a foreign system out of harmony with the instincts of the English people.

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Secondly, there was Independency, which divided with the Church the enthusiasm of the really pious English The Inde- folk. It secured the allegiance of Cromwell, Milton, Vane, the three great names of the later years They would-in theory at least-free the

pendents.

of Revolution.

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