heartily done the devil's work, being so effectually called and commanded to it in God's name."

...

The apostles of rebellion gloried in their work, and rejoiced in the condition to which they had reduced the country. "Thousands in England, which would have taken up arms to fight for the Service Book," said one of these incendiaries, "have been so hammered and hewed by the continuance of God's judgements upon us, that now they are come to this, ... let the Parliament and Assembly do what they will with prelacy and liturgy, so the sword may be sheathed!" "Now truth shall be welcome, so they may have peace!" "Our reformation would have been very low, had not God raised the spirit of our reformers by the length of these multiplied troubles. . . . As in matters of state, the civil sword, being so indulgent, would not take off delinquents, therefore the Lord still renews the commission of the military sword, to do justice till his counsel be fulfilled; and in the affairs of the Church, many poor deluded people of England were fond of these needless ceremonies, who probably would not have been weaned from them, had not God whipped them off by the continuance of their troubles!" "This vineyard," said another2 belwether of rebellion, to the House of Commons," whereof God hath made you keepers, cannot but see that nothing is wanting on your part, for you have endeavoured to fence it by a settled militia; to gather up malignants as stones; to plant it with men of piety as choice vines; to build the tower of a powerful ministry in the midst of it; and also to make a winepress therein for the squeezing of delinquents."

As the Parliament, now that the power was in their hands, committed the very same oppressive measures, which had been the first and only solid grounds of reproach against the King, such as illegal arrests, arbitrary punishments, breach of privileges, and the imposition of taxes, without consent of the other estates, in all which their little finger was heavier than his loins; so did the puritanical Clergy, who, in their horror of Popery and hatred of episcopacy, had brought about a civil war, assume to

Thomas Hill. "England's Season for Self-reflection," and "Advancing Temple-work," p. 29; preached August 13, 1644. 2 John Arrowsmith: Ded, to his Sermon preached Jan. 25, 1643.

themselves the most dangerous power of the Romish priesthood, and lay upon the consciences of their fellow subjects a yoke tenfold heavier than that of which they had complained as intolerable. The Pope's claim to the keys of St. Peter was not more dangerous to the civil authority, than their pretension to the sceptre of Christ; they maintained a Divine right in Presbytery; voted it in the Assembly of Divines, and would have carried a vote to the same effect in the Commons, if Whitelock (a man of good feelings and intentions, who adhered to a bad cause only because he wanted courage to suffer in a good one1) had not by his opposition saved the House from the absurd disgrace. The arguments which they set forth in support of their favourite doctrine, that the radical power of government belongs to the people, who have consequently a right to depose kings and to punish them, were produced in the very words of Father Persons, the most mischievous and treasonable of his books being now with little alteration pressed into the Puritan cause. They exercised a dispensing power, by virtue of which the parliamentary soldiers, who had been made prisoners and released by the King upon their oath that they would never bear arms against him again, were induced to break that oath, and engage a second time in rebellion. Indulgence for tender consciences had been their cry, when, rather than wear the surplice, use the sign of the cross in baptism, kneel at the sacrament, and bow at the name of their Redeemer, they were labouring to excite a civil war. Yet even then, such was their own bloody intolerance, they complained of the King for not putting to death the Romish priests who were in prison, and more than once required that the laws against them should be put in execution; . . . though these laws had never been executed, except in cases of those treasonable practices, which had rendered their enactment necessary. One priest, John Goodman by name, for reprieving whom they had reproached the King, actually petitioned Charles rather to let him suffer than increase the discontent of the nation, by continuing his mercy to him. The King washed his hands of this innocent blood by remitting the case entirely to Parliament, declaring at the same time, that neither under Elizabeth, nor his father, had any priest been put to death merely for religion: 1 Whitelock's Memorials, p. 99, 110. ed. 1702. Walker, p. 32.

and Goodman escaped, because they were ashamed of giving orders themselves for an act of cruelty, which they would fain have compelled the King to commit. But so strictly did they enforce restrictive laws, which nothing but the plainest state necessity could ever justify, that the Romanists were compelled to perform their worship at midnight, and that always in fear and danger.

By one of their laws the theatres were suppressed, and the players to be fined for the first offence, whipped for the second. By another Maypoles were to be taken down as a heathenish vanity, abused to superstition and wickedness. Some zealots having voluntarily agreed to fast one day in the week, for the purpose of contributing the value of the meal to what they called the good cause, an ordinance was passed, that all within the bills of mortality should pay upon every Tuesday, for three months, the value of an ordinary meal for themselves and families; and in case of non-payment, distress was to be made for double the amount; the intent of this being, that the burden might not rest alone upon the willing party. The monthly fast happening to fall on Christmas-day, was ordered to be observed with the more solemn humiliation; because, said these hypocrites, it may call to remembrance our sins and the sins of our forefathers, who have turned this feast, pretending the memory of Christ, into an extreme forgetfulness of him, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights.

Many of those venerable structures, which were the glory of the land, had been destroyed at the Reformation, by the sacrilegious rapacity of those statesmen and favourites, to whom they had been iniquitously granted. The remainder were now threatened with the same fate by the coarse and brutal spirit of triumphant puritanism. Lord Brooke (who had succeeded to the title and estates, not to the feelings and opinions, of one of the profoundest thinkers whom this or any other country has produced) said, he hoped to see the day, when not one stone of St. Paul's should be left upon another. A sentiment of vulgar malice toward Laud may have instigated the ruling faction, when they demolished with axes and hammers the carved work of that noble structure, and converted the body of the church 1 Laud's History of his Troubles, p. 201. Sir P. Warwick, p. 80.

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into a stable for their troopers' horses. But in other places, where they had no such odious motives, they committed the like and even worse indecencies and outrages, merely to show their hatred of the Church. It was such acts of sacrilege, which brought a scandal and an odium upon the reformed religion in France and the Low Countries, and stopped its progress there, which neither the Kings of France nor Spain could have done, if horror and indignation had not been excited against it, by this brutal and villanous fanaticism. In some churches they baptized horses or swine, in profane mockery of baptism: in others, they broke open the tombs, and scattered about the bones of the dead, or, if the bodies were entire, they defaced and dismembered them. At Sudley1 they made a slaughterhouse of the chancel, cut up the carcasses upon the communion table, and threw the garbage into the vault of the Chandoses, insulting thus the remains of some of the most heroic men, who, in their day, defended, and did honour to their country. At Westminster, the soldiers sate smoking and drinking at the altar, and lived in the abbey, committing every kind of indecency there, which the Parliament saw and permitted. No cathedral escaped without some injury; painted windows were broken; statues pulled down or mutilated; carvings demolished; the organs sold piecemeal for the value of the materials, or set up in taverns. At Lambeth, Parker's monument was thrown down, that Scott, to whom the Palace had been allotted for his portion of the spoils, might convert the chapel into a hall; the Archbishop's body was taken, not out of his grave alone, but out of his coffin; the lead in which it had been enclosed was sold, and the remains were buried in a dunghill. 2

A device was soon found for ejecting the loyal clergy, all indeed who were not prepared to go all lengths with the Root and Branch men. The better to secure the assistance of the Scotch against the king, the two Houses passed an act that the Covenant should be taken, whereby all who subscribed it bound themselves to endeavour the extirpation of episcopal Church government. All persons above the age of eighteen were required to take it; and such ministers as refused, were reported to Parliament as malignants, and proceeded against accordingly. No

'Mercurius Rusticus, p. 58. 2 Strype's Parker, p. 499.

fewer than seven' thousand clergymen were upon this ground ejected from their livings, so faithful were the great body of the Clergy in the worst of times. The extent of private misery and ruin which this occasioned, aggravated, in no slight degree, the calamities of civil war. It was not till some years had elapsed that a fifth part of the income was ordered to be paid to the wives and children of the sequestered ministers: the order had no retrospective effect; in most instances it was disregarded, for the principles by which the intrusive incumbents obtained their preferment very generally hardened their hearts,2... and the claimants were wholly at their mercy; and even had it been scrupulously paid, few were the cases, wherein such a provision could have preserved the injured parties from utter want. The treatment, indeed, of the loyal clergy, was to the last degree inhuman. Neither eminent talents, nor distinguished learning, nor exemplary virtues, could atone for the crime of fidelity to their order and their King. Chillingworth fell into the hands of Sir William Waller as a prisoner; he was of feeble constitution and ill at the time; but instead of showing that reverence to his person, which he would have obtained from any noble enemy, the Puritan clergy, who attended Waller's army, used him with such barbarity that he died within a few days; nor did their inhumanity cease even with his death, for Cheynel, one of the most outrageous preachers of the party, pronounced a speech of infamous abuse over his grave, and threw into it to3 rot, as he said, with its author, that book for which the name of Chillingworth ought to have been dear, not to the Church of England only, but to the whole Protestant world. In his case a peculiar degree of rancour may have been displayed, because Laud was his godfather and patron, and had reclaimed him from the Romish religion, into which he had been led astray; recovering thus for the Protestant cause one of its ablest and most distinguished champions. But even the doctrinal Puritans, who, opposing the Church in too many points, had thereby contributed to the succcess of those whom nothing short of its destruction would satisfy, were involved without discrimination, and without pity, in its ruin. They came under the common appellation of malignants, and 3 Clarendon, vol. ii. part ii. p. 708.

Walker, xviii. Walker, part ii. p. 63.

2 Ibid. p. 101.

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