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IX

DEATH OF CROMWELL

175

up the severe laws against Popery and Prelacy. The Parliament of 1657 petitioned that toleration should extend to neither of these false faiths, and passed a very severe Act against recusants. On the other hand, liberty almost reached license. The inhabitants of Abbotsley parish, Hunts, were allowed liberty for any godly person whom they may procure to preach in the public meeting-place of the town, whereunto they may be summoned by a bell, and the incumbent and others concerned were not to interfere. Yet the persecution of the Quakers did not cease. they were "beaten, stoned, stocked, hauled out of our synagogues, cast into dungeons and noisome vaults, denied food for days together, not allowed pen, ink, and paper, and a legal trial refused or postponed for months or years." "Search

They complained that

the records," they said, "for you will hardly find so many in prison for conscience sake since the days of Queen Mary as now is in your day."

The end was clearly not far off. In March 1658 Cromwell put forth a proclamation that all cavaliers and papists must retire from London under pain of being proceeded against as delinquents; and 800 horse were quartered in St. Paul's, to be ready in case of a rising. The Protector died on September 3.

At every opportunity the people began to assert their attachment to the Church. Thus, when a minister at Luton refused to allow a burial with the Prayer-book service, the church was forcibly broken open and the old service was read. When Cromwell died it became more and more difficult to restrain public feeling. At Bagendon, in Gloucestershire, the minister who had been put in under "his late Highness's broad seal," was forcibly ejected by the parishioners, the former minister being restored. Almost to the last the restored Rump went on legislating as though Presbyterianism were to endure for ever. On March 14, 1660, they passed an Act "for approbation of ministers of the Gospel to benefices," and two days later one "for ministers and payment of tithes." But if their ears were shut the ears of England were open. At every street corner broadsheets proclaimed that the tyranny of the sects was dead, and that the Church should have her own again. A petition, claiming fifteen thousand

signatures, was presented to Parliament on April 27, 1659, protesting, inter alia, against tithes, but protesting very pertinently: "Is this our rest and the end of our work, and is this the Reformation that must be the price of so much blood? To set the magistrate in Christ's throne to try and judge who are fit to be his Ministers, and to send out and restrain whom he thinks fit, and to force a maintenance further, even from those that for conscience sake cannot hear them nor own them; but for Christ's sake, to whom the kingdom belongs, are made to testify against both magistrate and minister as intruders into Christ's place?"

Richard

Prynne, who had learnt some wisdom since his old enemy had gone to the scaffold, voiced the public feeling in his crabbed style, in "A short, legal, medicinal, Cromwell usefull, safe, easie prescription, to recover our Kingdom, Church, Nation, from their present dangerous, distractive, destructive confusion, and worse than Bedlam madnesse," and "the Republicans and others' spurious good old cause briefly and truly anatomised." Monk for a while hesitated as to Church as well as king. "As to a government in the Church, the want whereof hath been no small cause of these nations' distractions," he said to the reassembled Parliament on February 21, 1660, "it is most manifest that if it be monarchical in the State, the Church must follow and Prelacy must be brought in." But he professed to believe that moderate Presbyterian government, with a sufficient liberty for conscience, was the best solution. "Resolved," wrote a wit in "Several Resolves prepared by the Commanding Junto to pass the House," "that there be a restraint upon Presbytery as well as Popery and Prelacy, because it somewhat resembles Christianity."

Richard Cromwell's brief rule ended in a torrent of squibs and lampoons; the "good old cause," as the soldiers called it, was laughed at on every side: the end of the drama, that had had so many tragic scenes, was pure comedy. No movement in English history was more popular than that which brought back the Church with the king. Of what followed we do not now speak; but it must be remembered that if the majority of the nation was afterwards proved to desire new safeguards against another revolution, and to think

IX

THE RESTORATION

177

that they could be found only in intolerance, the Restoration itself came with a declaration of freedom beyond that which Cromwell had ever granted. The declaration from Breda contained these words:

"And because the passion and uncharitableness of the times have produced several opinions in religion, by which men are engaged in parties and animosities against Toleration

promised

at the

Restoration.

each other which, when they shall hereafter unite in a freedom of conversation, will be composed or better understood; we do declare a liberty to tender consciences, and that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matters of religion, which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom; and that we shall be ready to consent to such an Act of Parliament, as upon mature deliberation shall be offered to us, for the full granting of such indulgence."

We have passed away, in these concluding observations, from the great Protector himself; but in the months that followed his death his spirit appeared still to brood over the disturbed scene. It was his indomitable insistence which caused the execution of the king. It was his strength of will and absence of sympathy or foresight which made the difficulties of the Puritan rule insoluble. Puritanism, some

modern writers tell us, was incarnate in him. It was he, certainly, who more than any one man, was responsible for its fall.

AUTHORITIES. -Tanner MSS., Bodleian Library; Evelyn, Diary; Calendar of State Papers, Domestic; Pamphlet literature of the time; Shaw, History of the English Church, 1640-66; Clarendon, Great Civil War; Cromwell's Letters and Speeches; editions of Carlyle and Stainer; Walker, Sufferings of the Clergy; Baillie's Letters; Clark Papers, ed. Firth (Camden Society); Clarendon Papers, ed. Macray; Wolf, Menasseh ben Israel. Among modern biographies of Cromwell, those by S. R. Gardiner, C. H. Firth, and John Morley. Among pamphlets on the position of the sects not favoured by the Protector should be especially noticed A Dissertation of the present sufferings of above 140 of the people of God who are now in prison, 1660. Among refutations of the Covenant, etc., William Prynne, Concordia Discors, 1660. See also "Troubles in a City Parish under the Protectorate," English Historical Review, x. 41 sqq., and Calamy's Abridgment of Mr. Baxter's History of his Life and Times, 1702. Details of the later years of Usher and of Hall are found in the Life and Death of... Dr. James Usher (a sermon), by Nicholas Bernard, 1656, and Death's Alarum (a sermon), by John Whitefoote, 1656, and in the autobiographical memorials in Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Biography, vol. v. ed.

N

1810. The Life of Hacket, by Plume (ed. Walcott, 1865), and the Lives of Juxon, Hammond, Hall, Usher, in the Dictionary of National Biography, give information. As to the establishment of Presbyterianism, the formal terms may be observed in the Ordinance of the two Houses, published 1645 (1646) by John Wright. The best account of the condition of a diocese during the interregnum is that in the Diocesan History of Bath and Wells (W. Hunt), chap. viii. Tilenus the Trier was printed by R. Royston at the Angel in Fire Lane; the copy in the possession of the present writer has, in a contemporary hand, on the title page, "John Aston," which may possibly be the name of the writer. The copie of a paper presented, etc., London: printed by A. W. for Giles Calvert, at the Black Spread-eagle, at the West end of Paules, 1659. Speech printed by S. Griffin, 1659 (1660), on the order of "his excellency the Lord General."

CHAPTER X

THE CHURCH OF THE RESTORATION

Preparation for the Restoration.

THE Restoration meant much more than that, after a few months' unrest under an impossible government, Oliver Cromwell's successor was Charles Stewart. The Church was restored with even fewer conditions than the king. Statesmen were fearful, but their fears were groundless. When, in 1659, Thorndike published his Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England, in which he reiterated, clearly and unhesitatingly, the doctrines which the school of Laud had inherited from the divines of the Reformation and their historical ancestry, Catholic custom was to his mind still the unbroken rule of the Church: the historic Episcopate, the use of confession and of prayers for the dead, the restoration of the Epiklesis on the elements, for these he pleaded. His principle was the appeal to the Holy Scriptures as interpreted in the primitive church; outside this there was no compromise possible for churchmen. Such statements alarmed the cautious Hyde, the faithful counsellor of the exiled Charles as of his father, and afterwards famous as Earl of Clarendon. "What do our friends think of the book?" he asked, "and is it possible that he would publish it, without ever imparting it or communicating with them?" The king, he said, was apprehensive of danger; reports reached England from his court that " 'any Episcopacy, how low soever, would serve the turn and be accepted."

Some of the London clergy and laity "that adhered to the late king," drew up a declaration, in which they declared that they regarded their sufferings as inflicted by God, "and

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