DEATH OF STRAFFORD

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1641, meeting his end with great courage and composure.

Some writers, whose notions of history are regulated by their sense of the picturesque, have bewailed the injustice of Strafford's fate, but we consider that a people has a right to secure itself against a powerful and dangerous offender for whose transgression there is no punishment provided in the statute book. There are some crimes created by the law. It would be clearly unjust to punish a man for importing goods before they were declared contraband, or killing partridges before they were declared game; but there are acts which outrage the moral law and imperil public safety, and in a dangerous crisis society, which assumes the right to make wrong-doing punishable, has also the right to ensure its own safety by sacrificing the offender. Strafford compared his own case to a man who runs his barge down the Thames and splits upon an anchor where there was no buoy to warn him. But we know, in his own correspondence, he makes it a merit with the king that, through his high-handed actions to enlarge prerogative, he had put his own life in danger. This he assumes would happen if he fell into the power of those he was trying to deprive of their birthright of liberty for his own aggrandisement. Those who now sit secure in the liberties saved by their forefathers may easily forget, if they ever knew, the antecedent circumstances, and blame Pym and those who supported him because Strafford made an eloquent and pathetic defence; but the instinct, one may even say the common-sense of mankind will, in times of extreme danger, impel them to protect themselves after a similar fashion. History

will not blame the imprisonment of Napoleon for six years at St Helena, although there was no law to justify his detention after peace was concluded.

Apart from the advice to bring over the Irish army to England, it appears that the offences specified in the fifteenth article of impeachment1 of which Strafford was found guilty, fell within the statute of Edward III., viz., imposing great sums of money by his own authority upon some towns and places in Ireland, and quartering troops upon those who resisted with a view by acts of oppression to enforce payment. To those who carefully go over the trial, which occupied fifteen days, it will appear that Strafford failed to make a sufficient reply to the charges so strongly brought against him. Were those who took up the prosecution to acquit a man of whose conspiracy against the liberties of England there was no doubt, because a condemnation would be a disaster for his children? Those who listened to his pathetic reference to his second wife knew that he had espoused a third one within a year of her death. This lady seems to have been a kind mother to the children. The parliament did not carry their resentment against their adversary any farther. They expressly exempted his estate from the usual penalties of forfeiture which followed a conviction for high treason.

1 See Rushworth's Tryal of the Earl of Strafford, pp. 426-459. The weighty and eloquent remarks in Hallam's Constitutional History on the justice of the impeachment are most worthy of reference.

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

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tenets of the reformation; and so, when it was proposed in the Long 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 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.