dignities, and estates, to prepare the way for the kingdom of Christ. Their madness was not yet avowed; it was kept from breaking forth by the salutary restraint of ecclesiastical discipline. The purposes of the aristocratic republicans were more matured as well as more feasible, and the opportunity which they sought was afforded by an explosion in Scotland.

The reformation in that kingdom had been carried on with greater violence than in England, the government having been opposed to it at first, and afterwards too weak to direct its course. The turbulent nobles shared among themselves the spoils of the Church; and the fierce, uncompromising, high-minded, hardhearted zealots by whom the storm was raised, encouraged the populace to demolish the Abbeys and Cathedrals. They had not, however, been allowed to construct the Church Government altogether upon the Genevan model, for episcopacy was still retained in it; and James, when his authority was established, took measures for restoring to the Bishops the temporalities of which they had been despoiled, for bettering the condition of the Parochial Clergy, and for assimilating the service to that of the English Church; and he enjoined his successor to go on with what he should leave incomplete. These measures alarmed the great landholders, who dreaded lest the estates of which they had tortuously possessed themselves should be resumed; and provoked the Puritanical Clergy, to whom every vestige of Catholicism was an abomination, but who had succeeded to the intolerance of the Catholic priesthood, to their assumed infallibility, and were now claiming to inherit their spiritual despotism. These persons were joined by the discontented and the desperate, all who by means of public confusion hoped to advance or to retrieve their fortunes. On the part of the English Government there was a culpable disregard of forms and usages, as if it relied too proudly upon its meritorious intentions; on the part of its Scotch ministers there was imprudence in some, treachery in others. A popular commotion was easily raised, and then craftily directed. The people bound themselves by a solemn covenant to resist all innovations in religion, to the uttermost of that power which God had put into their hands; and not to be diverted from their course by allurement or terror, word or writ, but whatever aspersion of rebellion might be cast

upon them, labour to restore the purity and liberty of the Gospel. A saving clause was inserted for the defence of the King's Majesty, his person and authority, and the peace of the kingdom; and a solemn engagement was made to keep themselves and those under them, both in public and private, within the bounds of Christian liberty, and to be good examples to others of all godliness, soberness, and righteousness, and of every duty owing to God and man.

The people who through their fear of Popery were excited to this rebellious combination, were too ignorant to perceive how closely their leaders were imitating some of those very things, which had rendered the Papal cause deservedly odious; they did not know that the men, who, by means of the pulpit and the press, were stirring them to rebellion, used those very maxims and arguments of the Jesuits,' which had rendered the penal laws against the Catholics necessary; and that the covenant itself was an exact counter-part of that league, which had brought upon France an age of civil war and universal suffering. The storm was soon raised.2 The Scotch were in treasonable communication with the Dutch, and with Richelieu and the French Government; the heads of the popular party in England, with the Scotch. The resources of the government, which, though unduly raised, had been providently as well as worthily employed, were soon exhausted in the contest; for Charles was betrayed by his servants, by his generals, and still more fatally, by his own indecision. Necessity compelled him to call a Parliament it was hastily dissolved through the rash or malicious conduct of an unfaithful minister: the indiscreet dissolution increased the discontent of the nation; another Parliament was summoned, in which the enemies of government by their activity and talents, more than by their numbers, immediately took the lead; and they commenced those systematic attacks upon the crown, which were intended to make the Sovereign either their victim or their instrument.

3

1 Nalson, i. p. 3. Dodd, ii. p. 405. "Puritanism, indeed," says South, "is only reformed Jesuitism, as Jesuitism is nothing else but Popish Puritanism: and I could draw out such an exact parallel between them, both as to principles and practices, that it would quickly appear they are as truly brothers as ever were Romulus and Remus; and that they sucked their principles from the same wolf." Vol. iii. p. 535. 2 Aitzema, ii. pp. 521, 674. 3 Laud's History of his Troubles, pp. 83, 85. Whitelock, pp. 30, 32.

Prynne and his fellow sufferers were now released by order of Parliament; many who thought them well deserving of punishment, pitied them nevertheless for the cruelty with which they had been punished: others procured their enlargement for the purpose of letting them loose against the state, and prepared for them a triumphant entry into London. The attack upon the Church was begun by passing a resolution, that the Clergy had no power to make any canons without common consent in Parliament, though no other method had ever been pursued; and the Bishops were impeached for high treason upon this ground. They were reviled for the part which they bore in state affairs; and yet no persons took a greater share in national concerns, than the very preachers by whom they were reproached with the most vehemence on that score. None were so active in political intrigue as the seditious Clergy. If petitions tending to subvert the civil and ecclesiastical constitution were to be got up; if the subscriptions of honest men were to be obtained to a moderate paper and transferred to an inflammatory one, which they conscientiously disapproved; if mobs were to be collected for intimidating the House of Lords; if a cry was to be raised for the blood of an individual whom the faction feared or hated; if the trumpet of rebellion was to be blown, the Puritanical Clergy performed these services for their friends in Parliament. And it is worthy of notice that the most active in this work of wickedness, were not the men who had been suspended for nonconformity, but those of Abbot's school, who complying with the rubric as long as they stood in fear of Laud's vigilant superintendence, had hitherto enjoyed the benefices of the Church, while they waited for an opportunity to pervert its doctrine, overthrow its discipline, and proscribe its forms.

The Parliament began by marking Strafford for destruction, because they feared him. From hatred, and the viler motive of gratifying a deluded multitude, they accused Laud also of high treason. He had long known that the rabble thirsted for his blood, but this he said "was strange news to his innocency, having to the uttermost of his understanding served the King with all duty and faithfulness, and without any known or wilful disservice to the state there-while." So that when the charge was made, he declared with honest indignation his persuasion

that not a man in the house believed it in his heart. The Scotch also were instigated to present a memorial against these illustrious victims, as odious incendiaries, who had caused all the present calamities. Laud was committed to the Tower, and left there in the hope that age and imprisonment would free his persecutors from farther trouble. The impeachment against Strafford was vigorously pursued: it was intended to deprive the Bishops of the right of voting in his cause, upon the plea that it was a case of blood, in which the canons forbade them to take a part. They were persuaded voluntarily to withdraw, in the hope of obtaining favour, for the censure concerning the canons was hanging over them; and thus for the vain prospect of conciliating their declared enemies, (a purpose which never has been, and never will be obtained, by any concessions arising from fear or weakness,) they disheartened as well as displeased their friends, betrayed their own rights, and deserted an innocent and persecuted man in his hour of need. They soon perceived what was the reward of cowardice.

A petition had already been presented at the Commons by the notorious Alderman Pennington, for the total extirpation of episcopacy. As yet there were only three leading men in that house who were known to be for destroying root and branch, but these were men of great influence and ability, and two of them, Sir Henry Vane and Hambden, had the wisdom of the serpent in perfection. A bill was now brought in to take away the Bishops' votes in Parliament, and to leave them out in all commissions that had any relation to temporal affairs. Lord Falkland was persuaded to concur in this by the assurance of Hambden, that if that bill passed, nothing more would be attempted to the prejudice of the Church. It passed the Commons, but was not even committed by the Lords. Upon this a bill for the utter eradication of bishops, deans, and chapters, and all offices dependent on them, was prepared by St. John; and Sir Arthur Haslerig in conjunction with Vane and Cromwell, who now began to appear among the Rooters, as they were called, prevailed upon Sir Edward Dering to bring it forward.

Sir Edward Dering was a man of fine person and upright intentions, who possessed the most dangerous of all endowments, when unaccompanied with sound judgement, . . . . a ready elo

quence. He had inherited' puritanical opinions, and at a season when (in his own words) "many were more wise and some more wilful than in former time," fancied that he had devised a scheme by which the advantages of the presbyterian platform might be combined with those of an episcopal church. In this he had been influenced not more by his hereditary prejudices than by a feeling of hostility towards Laud, whom nevertheless he respected for his integrity, and for his erudition. It was his fortune to begin the attack upon him by preferring a complaint of some local grievances, which, as member for Kent, he had been instructed to bring forward. The string which had thus been struck, was (said he) "of so right a tune to them that are stung with a tarantula, that I was instantly voiced more as they would have me than I was." He found himself "with as many new friends as the Primate had old enemies;" but this which would have alarmed a wise man, inflated a vain one, and made him an apt instrument for the subtle revolutionists by whom, few as they still were in number, the House of Commons was in fact directed. Their present end was answered by this manifestation of their views, which would alike encourage their own faction and dismay their opponents; and they were, therefore, contented with bringing in the bill, and laying it by after the first reading, for a more convenient season.

Their next measure was to draw up a protestation (in imitation of the covenant) for the members of both houses, whereby they bound themselves to maintain "the true reformed protestant religion expressed in the doctrine of the Church of England, against all popery and popish innovation within this realm." And after the lords had taken it, they then, and not till then, explained that these words were "not to be extended to the maintaining of any form of worship, discipline, or government, nor of any rites or ceremonies of the said Church." The High Commission Court was now put down, a tribunal which during half a century had given offence to none but the enemies of the

It was one of the same name and family who, "preaching before Queen Elizabeth, told her, that when in persecution under her sister Queen Mary, her motto was tanquam ovis, as a sheep, but now it might be tanquam indomita juvenca, as an untamed heifer. But surely, says Fuller, the Queen retained much of her ancient motto as a sheep in that she patiently endured so public (and conceived causeless) reproof, in inflicting no punishment upon him, save commanding him to forbear further preaching at the Court." B. ix. p. 109.