VIII EIKON BASILIKE 141 Service Book in his hands to have performed his last duty to the king his master, according to the order or form for the burial of the dead set forth in the book of Common Prayer, which the Lords likewise desired but could not be suffered by Colonel Whitchcote, the Governor, by reason of the Directory, to which (said he) he and others were to be conformable." And so in silence the last scene closed; and another pathetic memory was added to those which men treasured till the young king's return. The Eikon Charles, with all his failings, died for the Church. Nothing was more significant of the popular feeling that this was true than the enormous success of the Eikon Basilike, published February 1649, of which no less than forty- Basilike. seven editions were issued. It was, almost certainly, the work of Dr. John Gauden, one of Charles's chaplains. It contained some of the king's prayers which had been in the hands of Juxon ; and with a remarkable skill the writer managed throughout, in a pathetic fidelity, to convey Charles's true feelings when he knelt in penitence before God. If the book contained arguments for kingship it contained ten times as many for Anglicanism and the system of Laud. If it showed Charles at his best, it showed the Church as Laud longed for it to be. Another apology for the monarchy was put out by the Royalists at Amsterdam in 1649, entitled Tragicum theatrum actorum et casuum tragicorum Londini publice celebratorum, in which the great heroes of the Cavaliers were commemorated, -Strafford, Laud, and the king himself,-and the young king and his followers were eulogised. It tried to tell Europe what the Eikon had told England. Milton's answer, Eikonoklastes, October 1649, was little more than a mere piece of vulgar railing, and proved utterly ineffectual to stay the horror and pity which the Eikon had evolved. The Eikon Basilike was read everywhere, by every one: Puritans felt the genuineness of its piety, as churchmen felt the sincerity of the attachment to the Church which inspired it. "There are ways enough to repair the breaches of the state without the ruins of the Church" wrote the author; and when the ruin had come the people of England felt with him. "Peace itself is not desirable, till repentance have prepared us for it ;" and to repentance the sufferings which the war entailed and the repression which followed its conclusion made men most seriously inclined. The execution of Charles made certain the restoration of Church and King. AUTHORITIES.-Clarendon, Cromwell's Letters and Speeches; Hacket, Scrinia Reserata; the works of the chief divines, notably Laud, Hall; Warwick, Memoirs; Herbert, Memorials; Prynne's voluminous pamphlets, especially Canterburie's Doom; Heylin, Cyprianus Anglicus. The pamphlet literature of the time must be constantly consulted. Among modern authorities, Gardiner, History of England and History of the Great Civil War are the guides at every step; see also Lives of Laud, Juxon, Prynne, Stephen Marshall, Milton, in Dictionary of National Biography; Masson, Life of Milton; Todd, "Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury on the authorship of Eikon Basilike." For religion in the armies, see Firth, Cromwell's Army. CHAPTER IX THE COMMONWEALTH AND THE PROTECTORATE 1649-1660 THE years that followed the death of Charles I. may here be briefly sketched. The Church of England, the body estab The disestablishment of the Church. lished from old time under the sanction of the State, on its acceptance of the Catholic creeds and the Apostolic ministry, was no longer recognised by the State. Its worship was illegal, its ministry was deposed, and it was replaced by a fully established Presbyterian Church. The Universities, the strongholds of the National Church, were purged of all those who would not take the Covenant and accept the new religious order. And throughout England the process was carried out with increasing rigour. The Engagement, offered in 1649, by which a promise was given to be faithful to the Commonwealth as established, without a king and House of Lords, was not much more satisfactory to many of the clergy than was the Covenant. Several changes occurred at Oxford from refusal to take the Engagement, for, writes Calamy the biographer of Baxter, "the moderate Church party and the Presbyterians" rejected it. After a sketch of the general action of Parliament towards the Church, and of its consequences, the history of the Church from 1649 to 1660 can best be followed by an examination of the religious position of Cromwell, of the ecclesiastical settlement under the Presbyterian system, the treatment of the dispossessed clergy, the nature of the toleration that was terians. allowed by the Government to Christian and non-Christian bodies, and the causes which led to the reaction which restored the Church with the king. At this point it may be well to contrast the systems of Presbytery and Independency. The former was originally of French origin. The scheme, the heirarchy of elders, the elaborate system of assembly and classes, the strict discipline enforced, were all The Presby derived from the institution of John Calvin. Adopted in Scotland through the genius of John Knox, advocated in England by able and influential writers such as Thomas Cartwright, the system was adopted as the ideal of those Puritans of Elizabeth's and James I.'s days, who regarded the Episcopal government of the Church of England as contrary to the word of God. This has been dealt with in the previous volume of this History of the English Church. In the reign of Charles I. and up to the triumph of the Parliamentary party through the aid of the Scots, the Presbyterians of England seem to have learnt nothing and to have forgotten nothing. They still desired to establish the system of jurisdiction which was the keystone of the Presbyterian system. It was this which they succeeded in formally setting up by law on June 1646. But it was soon found to be in every sense a foreign system in England. Objections to it were advanced on two sides. First there were the Erastians, who desired to subject the Church entirely to the State, and were therefore utterly hostile to Unpopularity of their the encroaching supervision of the hierarchical system. system of Presbytery. When the system was established by law, ineffectually though it worked, it was found by men of different views from Milton, as well as by the poet himself, that "new presbyter is but old priest writ large." There was a strong feeling against the tyranny of the spiritual courts and the enforcement of civil penalties for spiritual offences. It was a foreign system out of harmony with the instincts of the English people. Secondly, there was Independency, which divided with the The Independents. Church the enthusiasm of the really pious English of Revolution. IX PRESBYTERIANS AND INDEPENDENTS 145 Church from State control, and yet place religion under the guardianship of the State. Yet their system (which looked back also to Elizabeth's days and the teaching of Robert Brown, the Separatist) was the antithesis of the Presbyterian. Each congregation claimed the right to order all its own business, religious and secular, and to choose its own ministers. All spiritual offences were punished by spiritual penalties alone. It was the logical outcome of individual ideas. It Politically it avoided, in theory at least, the danger of a Church-governed State, and it was, as the great German historian Von Ranke observed, essentially republican. held out hopes of a wider toleration than seemed consistent with the views of other parties. It attracted to itself nearly all those who were not strongly attached to the English Church or the Presbyterian system. Attitude of the Church. The attitude of these two parties towards the Church was different. The Presbyterians claimed to reform it by substituting a system more purely spiritual but not less ecclesiastical,-one which would enter still more each towards deeply into every aspect of the individual and national life. This they claimed to do as in obedience to the direct instruction of Holy Writ, outside the words of which any Church government was unlawful. The Independents, on the other hand, desired to reform the Church in the direction of individual liberty, to loosen the bonds between Church and State, to establish a number of small self-governing societies hardly related to each other by more than brotherly love. It was natural that the Presbyterian party should come to the front during the earlier stages of the constitutional struggle and of the war. It alone was an organised party, with fixed principles, and a history behind it, and with examples of successful establishment among neighbouring nations. The characteristic expression of their views is to be found in the propositions made at Uxbridge in 1645, in which it was demanded that Charles should take the Covenant, assent to the abolition of the Prayer-book and of Episcopacy, and to the establishment of the Directory of Public Worship and the Presbyterian Church systems. It was a demand based on the conscientious belief that one form of government, with its concomitant expression in worship, had been established L |