Smart, one of the prebendaries, protested against the use of the canonical vestments and against the Cathedral service, and was in consequence of his contumacy deprived of his prebend. In 1630 Bishop Howson, who had been translated from Oxford to Durham, wrote to Laud, then Bishop of London, giving an historical narrative of the "innovations in the service in his cathedral church. They began, he said, with the omission of the prayers at six in the morning, intended especially for householders and servants, and usual in other cathedral churches. This alteration gave great offence, and at the request of Justice Hutton and many others the six o'clock prayers were restored, whereupon "the innovating part ordered the customary morning service so, by reading more than is usually read and by a great variety of music, that they wearied the congregation with extraordinary long service, beginning after eight of the clock and continuing till after eleven." To remedy this, Bishop Howson directed that the Nicene creed should occasionally be said instead of sung, as also the responses after the commandments. "These

alterations gave general content, the people, after their own parochial services, which were early, coming by troops to the cathedral, there being no set sermon in the morning in the whole city."

Letters such as these show both Laud's interest in the detailed arrangements of cathedral services and the important position which he had already assumed before the death of Abbot. He was consulted indeed on every subject of interest to the Church, by all classes, from the king and the lords of the council down to parish priests in difficulties "among false brethren."

Puritan

activity.

Of Laud's relations with the parochial clergy, a characteristic example is to be found in the letter of one Dr. Samuel Brooke, written to the Bishop of London on December 15, 1630. With a postscript skilfully eulogising Laud's tractate against Fisher as one of the most novel, pure, lively and yet substantial, judicious and learned pieces he ever read in his life, and with the commendation of a little tract of his own to such sober judgment as that of the author whose work he was commending, he concludes an acute summary of the situation with which the Episcopate

D

had to deal. "Predestination," he writes, "is the root of Puritanism, and Puritanism the root of all rebellion and disobedient intractableness, and all schism and sauciness in the country, nay, in the Church itself." It was this false doctrine which had made so many thousands of the people, and so great a part of the gentry of the land, opponents of the ancient Church teaching. These it was who began to speak as if their teaching was that of the Church, "they will have the Church of England to be theirs," and they wounded her "at the very heart, with her own name." There was a deeper cause of alienation too: "where nothing is done, the weeds will grow, as they do." All the while the activity of antagonism, which Dr. Brooke rightly observed was growing, and Parliamentary action was becoming in Laud's view distinctly dangerous. There is among the State Papers of the year 1628 an account of the purport of eight Bills, which, it is said, in the indorsement by Bishop Laud, "should have passed in the Commons against the Church in that session." They were against citations without a previous presentation by churchwardens: to take away the prohibited times for matrimony; to subject scandalous ministers to trial by temporal judges; to allow any man to leave his own parish church on Sundays if there be no sermons; that no clergyman shall be justice of peace; that no man shall be urged to subscribe but only to the articles of 1562; to deprive clergymen who teach contrary to the said articles; to limit the major excommunication to cases of heresy.

It is clear that Laud was watching the proceedings of Parliament with the keenest interest and with grave dissatisfaction. He made elaborate notes of what was done, collected precedents for royal action in view of further difficulties, and was prepared to resist all interference of the Commons in matters belonging properly to the Church. But endeavours still it was his chief aim to suggest "articles of to make peace." There can be no doubt that it was with this purpose that the king, under his advice, issued in November, 1628, the famous declaration now prefixed to the Thirty-nine Articles. Thus it runs :

Charles's

peace.

"For the present, though some differences have been ill raised, yet we take comfort in this, that all clergymen within

III

DECLARATION OF 1628

35

our realm have always most willingly subscribed to the Articles established; which is an argument that they all agree in the true, usual, literal meaning of the said Articles; and that even in those curious points, in which the present differences lie, men of all sorts take the Articles of the Church of England to be for them; which is an argument again, that none of them intend any desertion of the Articles established. That therefore in these both curious and unhappy differences, which have for so many hundred years, in different times and places, exercised the Church of Christ, We will, that all further curious search be laid aside, and these disputes shut up in God's promises, as they be generally set forth to us in the Holy Scriptures, and the general meaning of the Articles of the Church of England according to them. And that no man hereafter shall either print, or preach, to draw the Article aside any way, but shall submit to it in the plain and full meaning thereof: and shall not put his own sense or comment to be the meaning of the Article, but shall take it in the literal and grammatical sense."

"Predestination is the root of all Puritanism, and Puritanism the root of all rebellion and disobedient intractableness." Only in the plain teaching of the English Church, apart from Rome's hyperdefinite decisions, and Calvin's desperate ventures of distorted logic, did Laud look to find "articles of peace." It was in this hope that in September, 1633, he took up the work of Primate of All England, when Charles called him to Canterbury on the death of Abbot.

AUTHORITIES.-Hacket, Scrinia Reserata; Laud, Works; and the State Papers, Domestic, are the chief authorities for this chapter. Archbishop Abbot wrote a vindication of his action, which was published in Rushworth's Historical Collections, i. 435 sqq. (ed. 1659). The works of Sibthorpe and Mountague give their views: Laud's Letters to Wentworth, in Strafford Papers, 1739, give occasional illustrations: and the lives of Sibthorpe, Manwaring, and Mountague, in the Dictionary of National Biography, add details and refer

ences.

CHAPTER IV

OPPOSITION, PURITAN AND ROMANIST

LAUD as archbishop was confronted by two obvious dangers, the opposition of Puritans and the opposition of Romanists. When these have been considered, it will be well to sketch the work which he actually accomplished and the position of the Church of England during his primacy.

Puritanism in 1633 was practically an organised party, though it had somewhat indefinite limits. It traced all its

Puritanism

as a party.

"schism and sauciness" back to the days when Cartwright was confronted by Hooker, and when the Martin Marprelate tracts made vulgar mock of Church institutions. To destroy the episcopal constitution of the Church, as it had been destroyed under John Knox in Scotland, was the aim of the leaders of English Puritanism in 1633, as of their predecessors eighty years earlier. In the eyes of the State the position had little changed.

The policy

Stewarts in

The policy of the Stewarts in the treatment of the Puritans was simply a continuance of that of Elizabeth. James had an almost insane dread of political plotters and anarchists, and he had a very deep-seated belief in the wisdom of the of his mighty predecessor. His terrors too were relation to encouraged by the creatures of the court; and he theirs. fell readily into the policy, which commended itself also to his theological sympathies, of setting a watch on the nonconformists' agencies by the State. It was not the Church that was anxious to persecute. There is proof that every stir of episcopal activity had its origin in the court. It was James, not the bishops, who originated the maxim,

CHAP. IV

THE PILGRIM FATHERS

37

"No Bishop no King," and proceeded to draw from it a very definite course of action which was intended to defend the monarchy through an assertion of inquisitorial powers on behalf of the Church. Charles held the same opinions on the politics of Puritanism as his father, and he showed from the beginning of his reign that he was in favour of no tolerance.

Perhaps the best example that can be given of the views of the majority of the Puritans and of their consequent divergence from the National Church is to be found in the history of those who left England for conscience sake, and after settling temporarily in Amsterdam and Leiden eventually sailed for Virginia. With the action of these men may be compared the speeches of Lord Saye and Sele, concerning the Liturgy of the Church and upon the bishops' power in civil affairs, both of which were answered by Laud.

With regard to the "Pilgrim fathers" it is not very easy to speak. They have been dealt with in their place in an earlier volume of this history of the English Church. Of the theological opinions of the more distinguished The Pilgrim members two very different views might be obtained. We might hold that their objection to the Church was, like that of the Millenary Petitioners, a sincere and earnest repulsion from all that belonged to the historic and continuous Christian society. Bastwick blames their moderation. He writes in

1646: "The extremist extent of their desires reached but to the removal of all the Ceremonies and Innovations; the taking away of the service book [Book of Common Prayer]: and the pulling down of the High Commission Court (which was called the Court Christian, though it was rather Pagan), and the removal of the Hierarchy, root and branch; and the setting up and establishing of a godly Presbytery throughout the kingdom." And with this may be compared the declaration written at Leiden early in 1618, that “ we do wholly and in all points agree with the French Reformed churches, according to their public 'Confession of Faith.""

But, on the other hand, we may form a very different conclusion, when we find a declaration from the same conscientious men that they assent wholly to the Thirty-nine Articles, and that they acknowledge the Episcopal authority.