CHAPTER X Vigorous Reforms of the Long Parliament. Petitions against Episcopal Government. Speech of Sir Henry Vane on the Bill. Defence of Episcopacy by Lord Falkland. The King goes to Scotland. Begins to Collect his Adherents. Rebellion in Ireland. Dismisses Sir Henry Vane, the elder, from his post of Secretary of State, and the younger Vane from being Joint Treasurer of the Navy. Bill to deprive the Bishops of their Seats in the House of Lords. The King's Attempt to arrest the five Members. His Failure and Flight from London. DURING Strafford's trial the Commons had gone on pressing measures for the redress of grievances and for securing their own safety. The Star Chamber, the High Commission, the Council of the North, and the Marshal's Court were abolished, and all taxes raised without the consent of parliament declared illegal. A bill was passed prescribing the calling of a parliament every three years, and arranging how it might be called without the consent of the sovereign should he omit to do so. And on May 8, 1641, a bill was passed through both Houses that the existing parliament should not be adjourned, prorogued, or dissolved save with its own consent. Men were amazed when, two days after, this measure received the royal assent, since it not only surrendered a strong position held by the sovereign, but rendered the parliament independent of its own constituents. There were no daily newspapers nor shorthand reporters in those days, nor did the parliaments desire that their proceedings should be made public, but reports or résumés of the different speeches were printed and widely diffused. Most of these sheets are to be had in one library or another; but these debates, fluttering with eager interest at the time, deal with grievances no longer felt. The encroachment of the royal prerogative, Star Chamber, corrupt judges, forest laws, arbitrary imprisonments, ship-money, forced loans and monopolies are all unknown. The parliament is now supreme; the penal laws vex Catholics and Dissenters no more. Every man now can avow what belief he affects; but the Episcopal Church still remains, shorn of its powers to persecute, but still retaining the vices objected to it in the days of the Stuarts as inherent in its constitution. The episcopal fabric, the creation of the Tudors, still stands much as Laud left it, half way between the Church of Rome, whose ritual it affects, and the Protestant churches on whose ordinances it looks down with unconcealed disdain. The bishops are still in the House of Lords. There are still men within its body who more or less secretly adopt the doctrines of Catholicism. There are still conspirators within its walls anxious to surrender its standards, or to keep an open gate to Rome. Through this gate have gone two kings of England, one of its queens, and hundreds of the nobility and the scholars of the old universities, followed by a train of docile disciples who find it too great a trial to think for themselves, and are willing to starve their intellects to gratify their tastes. Within its walls too there are still men of learning and virtue, who uphold the ROOT AND BRANCH PETITION 159 tenets of the reformation; and so, when it was proposed in the Long Parliament that episcopacy should be abolished, many of the speeches, both for and against, might still be appropriately delivered in the present House of Commons. Five years after the assembly of the parliament a petition was presented with 15,000 with 15,000 signatures from the city of London, praying that the whole fabric of episcopacy should be destroyed, root and branch; others of the same tenor followed. On the opposite side many petitions signed by an incredible number of hands were brought in favour of preserving the church.1 On February 19, 1641, an order was adopted that a committee of thirty should take into consideration the ministers' remonstrance, a proposal of moderate reform, and the petition for the entire abolition of episcopacy. The root and branch men succeeded by a majority of 180 to 145 in getting the younger Vane, Holles, and Nathaniel Fiennes, the second son of Lord Saye, added to the commission. They inquired at great length upon the questions of divine right, of the church, and the conduct of the clergy. The younger Vane had now come to the front as an assailant of the Episcopal Church, while his father was one of its defenders. In March 1641 it was resolved in the House of Commons that the legislative and judicial power of the bishops is a great hindrance to the discharge of their spiritual functions. 1 The debates about these proposals are described with sufficient fullness in the History of the English Church during the Civil Wars, and under the Commonwealth, by William A. Shaw, London, 1900. Sir Edward Deering afterwards said that the bill for the abolition of the episcopal order and the sale of the deans' and chapters' lands, first read on May 27, was given to him by Sir Arthur Hesilrige, being brought unto him by Sir Henry Vane and Mr Oliver Cromwell. While all joined in condemning the conduct of the bishops and the scandalous lives of some of the lower clergy, the church itself found defenders within the parliament. In May and June warm speeches were made on both sides. We have an outline of Sir H. Vane's speech to the committee for the bill against episcopal government, Mr Hyde in the chair, delivered on June 11, 1641. Vane began by stating that the preamble of the bill carried the day before virtually decided the question that episcopal government hath been found by long experience to be a great impediment to the perfect reformation and growth in religion, and very prejudicial to the civil state. He argued that the same ground which supported the diocesan or metropolitan bishop supported the pope or universal bishop. "The spirit of this order," he goes on, "is a spirit of pride, exalting itself, in the temple of God, over all that is called God; first, exalting itself above its fellow presbyters, under the form of a bishop, then over its fellow bishops, under the title of archbishops, and the still mounting over those of its own profession, till it come to be pope, and then it sticks not to tread upon the necks of princes, kings, and emperors, and trample them under its feet. As itself came in by the back doore into the church, and was brought in by the spirit of VANE'S SPEECH ON EPISCOPACY 161 antichrist, so itselfe hath been the back doore and inlet of all superstition and corruption into the worship and doctrine of the church, and the means of hastening us back againe to Rome. For proofe of this, I appeal to all our knowledges in late years past, the memory whereof is so fresh, I need enter into no perticulars." "A second fruit of this government in the church hath been the displacing of the most godly and conscientious ministers: the vexing, punishing, and banishing out of the kingdome, the most religious of all sorts and conditions, that would not comply with their superstitious inventions and ceremonies; in one word, the turning the edge and power of their government against the very life and power of godliness; and the favour and protection of it unto all profane, scandalous, and superstitious persons that would uphold their party. Thousands of examples might be given of this, if it were not most notorious. A third fruit has been schism and fractions within, and alienation from all the reformed churches abroad." Vane offered the proviso to assign the power of supervision of the churches, in every diocese, to commissions of clergy and laity to be alike in number. This proposal was referred by the House to a sub-committee. In an eloquent speech for the church, Lord Falkland deplored the destruction of unity under pretence of uniformity, the strictness of the bishops against those who disliked ceremonies, and their neglect of immoralities. They neither preached themselves, nor employed those that should, nor suffered those that would. They brought in catechis Ꮮ |