to do; and say that they hope to induce them to receive the Blessed Eucharist every year in the English churches and will do whatsoever else may be done without the utter dissipation of their own congregations."

The ministers did protest too much, for in truth it was only a compliance of fear. When Laud was dead it was emphatically asserted that the persecuted folk had played the man; and a relation of the troubles of the three foreign churches in Kent caused by the injunctions of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, A.D. 1634, etc.," was "written by F. B., minister of the Word of God," with the motto, 66 et quorum pars magna fui." The French services were never again interfered with.

Laud and his Vicar General had a keen eye for dissent, and an impartial. No less care was taken in the visitation about Romanists than about other foreign recusants: inquiry was made whether the parish priests "endeavour and labour diligently with mildness and temperance to confer with, and thereby to reclaim, the popish recusants in their parishes from their errors."

The

asked.

For the decent order of the Church such questions as the following were asked in each parish. Was there a font of stone set up in the ancient usual place, a convenient questions and decent communion table standing upon a frame with a carpet of silk or some other decent stuff, and a fair linen cloth to lay thereon at the communion time? This had been asked by Laud as Bishop of London, and similar questions with regard to the duties of clergy and churchwardens and the condition of the parishes were now put. But on the whole little was done in the parish churches. The articles of inquiry into the obligations of the cathedral chapters, on the other hand, were minute. The statutes by which the capitular bodies were bound were investigated and searching questions were asked as to their fulfilment. It was found in many cases that the statutes sat very lightly indeed upon the prebendaries, vicars, and choristers. The reply was often of this tenour. 66 Our book of ancient statutes is neither punctually observed nor indeed acknowledged by most of us to be of any power. Answer will be made, we are sworn to

customs as well as statutes, and customs we make and break

V

THE STAR CHAMBER

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according to our ease." Yet the visitation met with little resistance, and there can be no doubt that its result everywhere told in favour of decency and order.

If there was some hesitation in certain dioceses as to the metropolitical visitation, as the letter of Bishop Williams given in Hacket's Life would show, the extension of the power of visitation to the universities might be expected to arouse considerable opposition, though it was clearly stated that matters ecclesiastical only were to be the subject of inquiry, and the college and university statutes were not to be interfered with. There was some stir even in Oxford, as the letters of Dr. Potter, Provost of Queen's College, show; but the university did not perhaps hardly could-generally object to the visitation of one who was its own chancellor. But at Cambridge formal protest was made; and only a decision of the king in Council overrode the opposition. The visitation, however, was never held.

It may be remarked in passing that the relations of ecclesiastical and civil jurisdiction were at the time very much complicated. The Council was often engaged Confusion on matters that would seem to have been more of jurisdiction. fitly dealt with by other courts. Thus, on January 24, 1638, there was an order of a Committee of the Council, on which sat both Laud and Juxon, in consequence of the petition of Arthur Heron, Vicar of Bardwell, Suffolk, complaining against Mr. Barrow, of the neighbouring village of Barningham, that he made a park of his land to the prejudice of the vicar, and of St. John's College, Oxford, the patron of the living, in the matter of tithes. Mr. Barrow's promise

that in no case should the tithe be diminished was ordered to be registered.

The close connection between Church and State which was characteristic of the times is very evident in the history of the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission. Of the history of these offshoots of the king's Council it is not necessary to speak, earlier than the reign of Charles I. It is sufficient to observe the fact that, though the origin and the jurisdictions of the two courts were quite distinct, many of their members were the same, and this tended to the confusion of their work which has survived in the books even of com

The Star

petent modern historians. The Star Chamber dealt with civil cases which were believed to be either outside the Chamber. Competence of the common law, or, through the condition of the parties concerned, or some special difficulty in the case itself, unlikely to be satisfactorily treated in the ordinary courts. Here then were brought a number of cases of libel, which touched upon ecclesiastical matters. Three of the cases need especial comment here. In 1632, William Prynne, a learned antiquary and lawyer but a man of crabbed and bitter temper, published a book called Histriomastix, in which he cast foul reflections, with hardly any disguise, on the queen and the king. He was condemned to stand in the pillory, to lose his ears, and to be imprisoned during the king's pleasure. Laud was a member of the Court of Star Chamber, and he favoured a severe sentence on Prynne. He was laying in store for himself a severe retaliation.

William

In 1635 Prynne, whose cruel sentence for his former offence had been lightly carried out, published his News from Ipswich, in which he definitely reprobated every Prynne. change which had been introduced during the last few years by the bishops and by the metropolitical visitation. The king and the bishops, he alleged, designed "to change the orthodox religion and introduce popery." Prynne was again summoned before the Star Chamber in 1637, and with him were charged Henry Burton, who had preached two violent sermons against the measures of Laud, and John Bastwick, who had written a mock Litany charging the bishops with being the authors of "ungodliness and unrighteousness, impiety and all manner of licentiousness." The condemnation of the Court was a foregone conclusion. The accused were sentenced, with the exaggerated severity that was in fashion, to punishments which it was never intended literally to carry out. They were to lose their ears, to be imprisoned for life in Guernsey, Scilly, and Jersey respectively, and to pay a fine of £5000 each. The cutting off the ears, revolting though the punishment seems, does not appear to have been done so literally as to be incapable of repetition. That Elizabeth would have dealt with the offenders even more severely is, as Laud said, certain. Laud and Juxon would not vote; but Laud took the occasion to deliver

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an important speech in defence of his measures. A third case was was that of Alexander Leighton, who scurrilously attacked the bishops. After a severe sentence he fled, but he was recaptured, and then was scourged and deprived of

an ear.

However small may have been the part which ecclesiastics played in these cases, and there can be no doubt that it was very greatly exaggerated in popular imagination; it is certain that the part they took was a grievous error, for which the Church itself had to suffer. Then, as in past ages, clergy could not act prominently in secular affairs without great risk of scandal and danger. And the scandal and danger were not mitigated by the work of the Court of High Commission. This court was designed by Elizabeth to remedy, through its clear and swift procedure, the delays and abuses of the ordinary ecclesiastical courts. Through it she thought to exercise her supremacy in the matter of jurisdiction. Its purview, it would seem, had been extended; and cases of disobedience to the orders which issued from Lambeth were naturally brought before it. Nothing could have been more unfortunate. It is rare that the English people have complacently sanctioned the suspension or deprivation of the parochial clergy for offences unknown to the law but created by archiepiscopal opinion or rescript. The case of the opponents of Laud was no exception to this rule.

Commission.

Recent investigations tend to the conclusion that the Court of High Commission has, even by eminent writers, been much too severely judged. Its great defects The Court of were, in an exaggerated form, those of the other High law courts of the time. They were chiefly, the exercise of the "ex-officio oath," by which persons holding office in the Church or under the crown could be required to give evidence, in certain cases, against themselves; and the general style of browbeating and unfairness in the treatment of evidence which seems to us to be characteristic of all the tribunals of the time. The greatest modern authority on the history of the period says, "No one who has studied its records will speak of it as a barbarous or even a cruel tribunal." Unhappily the greater part of its records. has been destroyed. Sufficient, however, survive to enable

us to give some account of the part which it played in the Laudian reformation. Its main work, and the main object of its judges, was moral.

Its action in favour of morality.

During the century which succeeded the Reformation the English Church was engaged in a strenuous, and in the end successful, struggle against wickedness in high places. The moral tone of the courts of Elizabeth and James I. was notoriously low, and it was too faithfully reflected among the nobility and country gentry. There was often difficulty in punishing high offenders, who thought "they were above the reach of other men or their power or will to chastise." This was intolerable to Laud, and from the time when his influence became supreme, "persons of honour and great quality," says Clarendon, "of the court and of the country, were every day cited into the High Commission Court, upon the fame of their incontinence, or other scandal in their lives, and were there prosecuted, to their shame and punishment and as the shame (which they called an insolent triumph upon their degree and quality, and levelling them with the common people) was never forgotten, but watched for revenge, so the fines imposed there were the more questioned and repined against, because they were assigned to the rebuilding and repairing of St. Paul's church, and thought therefore to be the more severely imposed, and the less compassionately reduced and excused." The cases of which we have record bear out this view. Moral offences of laity as well as clergy were most severely dealt with; and they were the most numerous cases.

Cases of

Next to them come cases of ribaldry, scurrilous abuse, sacrilege, and the like, the majority of which seem as we read the account of the trials to have been committed sacrilege and by persons of unsound mind. There are many the like. cases too of blasphemy, which were doubtless due either to insanity or to the too literal interpretation, by persons of no education and of unbalanced minds, of the English version of the Holy Scriptures. The cases of suspension for refusal of the new orders are very rare, and degradation almost invariably was the punishment only for moral offences. In one case the Bishop of Rochester was careful to call attention to the charges which were often made against the