VI CHARLES'S WANT OF JUDGMENT 95 wholesome order shall be severely punished according to law." At the end of the month there was an adjournment. On October 21 the House reassembled; and it was evident that there was now a definitely united party of Royalists and Churchmen. A bill for the exclusion of the bishops from the House of Lords was brought in and passed the Commons. The Lords delayed it till the trial of the thirteen bishops who had been impeached should begin. The appoint ments to bishoprics, 1641. At that very moment Charles showed the extraordinary want of understanding which at critical times constantly defeated his good intentions. He filled up five vacant bishoprics. Since Laud had been a prisoner in the Tower Juxon had advised the king on ecclesiastical matters. "I thank you," wrote Charles to Sir Edward Nicholas on September 19, 1641, "for putting me in mind of the vacancy of bishoprics; therefore I command you to direct the Bishop of London to send me a list of all the vacant bishoprics, and those notes which he and I made concerning the filling of those places." A month later Juxon sent "several bills for his Majesty's signature for the new bishops." They included bishops for Bath and Wells, Chichester, Exeter, Norwich, Bristol, Oxford, Winchester, and an archbishop for York. Some of these were translations; and, probably as an attempt to pacify the Commons, Williams was given the northern primacy. It is a strange comment on the disturbance of the times, if not on the nature of public justice, that the preferment of a bishop who had been convicted of grave offences (see above, p. 58) seems to have excited no comment. Usher, whom the rebellion had driven from Ireland, was given the see of Carlisle; the Puritan Prideaux, Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, became Bishop of Worcester-each an appointment at which Puritan churchmen would not grumble. But Hall and Duppa and Skinner, men who had fallen under the Commons' dire displeasure, were translated to better sees -a token of royal approval which was bitterly resented. And those who desired to abolish or limit Episcopal power still more loudly protetsed. Events moved rapidly. On November 22 the Grand Remonstrance was carried; on December 1 it was presented, and the king was asked to agree to the exclusion Exclusion of of the bishops. Charles in his reply declared that their presence among the peers was part of the fundamental laws of England. Day by day mobs surrounded the Houses; the Lords debated upon a view that they were no longer free. The bishops drew up a protest, which Williams was the bishops the first to sign, and perhaps to suggest, declaring House of that as it was with danger of their lives alone that Lords. they could attend the House, the Parliament was no longer free, and all its proceedings were illegal. This redoubled the popular tumult. The witty Butler a generation later thus described the scenes that followed : from the The oyster-women lock'd their fish up Of pudding-pies and gingerbread ; A gospel-preaching ministry; And some for old suits, coats, or cloak, No surplices or service book. In the Commons Pym impeached all the bishops who had signed the protest for high treason, and they were all arrested. For the most part these accusations were never pressed home. Specific charges were never brought to book. ment of Wren. The report of the House of Commons Committee, The impeach- July 5, 1641, for example, stated that "Matthew Bishop Wren, Bishop of Ely, excommunicated, deprived, or punished within the space of two years fifty godly, learned, and faithful ministers," and accused him of "practising superstition in his own person," among other enormities consecrating at the west side of the holy table; but he was never brought to trial. He prepared an elaborate answer to the articles of impeachment, in which he denied a large number of the charges. He argued, from Queen Elizabeth's Latin Prayer Book among other sources, that as to the position of the minister, "north part, north side, and north end were all one"; he declared that he had never called the holy table an altar; he affirmed, that while people made reverence to the empty seat of the king in the Parlialiament House, it was "no superstition, but a sign of devotion VI PETITIONS IN FAVOUR OF THE CHURCH 97 and of an awful apprehension of God's divine presence, to do Him reverence, at the approach into the house of God or unto the Lord's table." But though the House of Commons soon found that it had arrested far more of its opponents than it could deal with, it did not relax its hand, and the bishops remained in custody. The agitation within and without was not one which a weak king could withstand; Charles made a last desperate effort on January 4, 1642, he attempted to arrest the five members; on the 5th he went into the city in pursuit of them, and as he drove back a paper was thrown into his carriage"To your tents, O Israel!" Church. In fact, if not in name, the war was begun. The king made some concessions, acting no more wisely now than when he had resisted. He consented to the bill excluding Petitions in the bishops from the House of Lords. And while favour of the he consented, petitions were pouring in for the maintenance of Episcopacy, petitions from thirteen English and five Welsh counties, all firm in attachment to the Church government and the Prayer-book, "composed," said the Cheshire petition, "by the holy martyrs and worthy instruments of Reformation, with such general consent received by all the laity, that scarce any family or person that can read but are furnished with the book of Common Prayer, in the conscionable use whereof many Christian hearts have found unspeakable joy and comfort, wherein the famous Church of England, our dear mother, hath just cause to glory." The Kentish grand jury at Maidstone, on March 28, drew up a petition which was presented to Parliament. Its most significant words centred round the "solemn liturgy of the Church," and it spoke of the "interruptions, scorns, profanations, threats, and force of such men who daily do deprave it, and neglect the use of it in divers churches, in spite of the laws established"; and, still more significantly, it went on to pray "that Episcopal government might be preserved, and that all differences concerning religion might be submitted to a synod chosen by the clergy, and means taken to provide against the scandal of schismatical and seditious sermons and pamphlets, and some severe law made against laymen for daring to arrogate to themselves and to exercise the holy function of the ministry-to the advanc H ing of heresy, schism, profaneness, libertinism, anabaptism, atheism." The House of The presentation of this petition was treated by the House of Commons as a crime; and the petitioners were imprisoned. It was a crime not to agree with the dominant party. Commons For the High Commission and Star Chamber was supreme. substituted the House of Commons. And how this new supreme court was to act was prefigured by the Declaration of April 8, 1642, published in every market town of England and Wales: "The Lords and Commons do declare that they intend a due and necessary reformation of the government and liturgy of the Church, and to take away nothing in the one or the other but what shall be evil and justly offensive, or at the least unnecessary and burdensome; and on the better effecting thereof speedily to have consultation with godly and learned divines. And because this will never of itself attain the end sought therein, they will therefore use their utmost endeavours to establish learned and preaching ministers, with a good and sufficient maintenance throughout the whole kingdom, wherein many dark corners are miserably destitute of the means of salvation, and many poor ministers want necessary provision." What the bishops had done or failed to do the Parliament was to endeavour. Would it succeed better? Moderate though the tone of this was, it was in clear distinctness Erastian, and in probable application Presbyterian. The nineteen propositions sent by the two Houses of Parliament to the king at York on June 1 requested the king's assent to this practically in the same words. The claim was one of parliamentary supremacy. Ecclesiastical interests were on both sides bound to political affairs at their crisis. It was this which made peace impossible. AUTHORITIES.-Journals of the House of Lords. All the important constitutional documents are given in S. R. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution; State Papers, Domestic, as before; Laud, Works; Hacket, Scrinia Reserata; Journals of the House of Commons. The Thomason Collection of Tracts in the British Museum arranges the fugitive literature of the time according to dates. The Canons of 1640 are reprinted in Laud's Werks. Throughout the long period of political conflict covered by this chapter S. R. Gardiner's History of England, 1603-42, is invaluable. CHAPTER VII THE CHURCH AND THE CLERGY BEFORE THE CIVIL WARS THE years which immediately preceded the Great Rebellion seem, when we read the political history of the time, to have been almost entirely days of strife and confusion. But when we look below the surface we find that quiet religious work was quietly proceeding, and that in all classes there were men of deep piety who cordially approved of the action of those in high place, and that a deep-rooted attachment to the Church of England, "as opposed to Popish and Puritan innovations," existed, which sufficiently explains the warmth of devotion that followed her fortunes during the period of their eclipse, and of enthusiasm to welcome her when she received her own again. When Charles I. came to the throne old men could still remember the days of Queen Mary, and men still in middle life recalled old customs which had only gradually Church old days. died out. At the end of his life-he died in 1643 survivals of -Dr. Kettell, President of Trinity College, Oxford, would speak of the rood-lofts, and the wafers in the sacrament, which he remembered everywhere. They had become uncommon. The vestments were often preserved, sometimes used, in colleges, as well as in cathedral churches. Old customs of festal use survived even in small parish churches. The parish priest, according to George Herbert, would take order that his church was "at great festivals strawed or stuck with boughs and perfumed with incense." Among churchwardens' accounts are found (as in those of St. Mary's, Reading, where the charge is six shillings, and begins in 1622), "for |