Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

nautical surveying except in its rudest form. In many localities extraordinary changes had taken place in the configuration of the coast since the surveys had been made. Lights, buoys, beacons had been erected. Ports, formerly of no importance, and which had consequently been examined in the most cursory manner, were now open to commerce, and yet the charts remained as they were drawn fifty years ago, and were practically useless.

The urgent necessity for immediate action was pointed out to the Secretary of State for India by Mr. Clements Markham, Mr. Trelawney Saunders, Captain Taylor, and others; in consequence of which representation, Captain Taylor was sent out to India to consult with the government in Calcutta, and eventually after various delays and difficulties, originating, we are led to believe, with the hydrographer to the Admiralty, the present Marine Survey Department was established at Calcutta in 1874, the legitimate daughter of the old Indian Navy, and destined, we would hope, to rival her parent, not indeed in the arts of war, but in the arts of peace. The reputation of Captain Taylor, both as a surveyor and the editor of the East Indian Directory,' is almost a guarantee for the accuracy of the work which has been and will be turned out; and under his superintendence we may feel satisfied that the sequence of Indian hydrographers will be continued, that the merit of Indian hydrography will not pale.

ART. III.-The Personal Government of Charles I. A History of England from the Assassination of the Duke of Buckingham to the Declaration of the Judges on Ship Money. 1628-1637. By SAMUEL RAWSON GARDINER. In two volumes. London: 1877.

THE

[ocr errors]

HE times immediately preceding a period of revolution cannot fail to afford material of great interest for the historian to work upon, and yet it is no exaggeration to say that in Mr. Gardiner's History of the Personal Government ' of Charles I.' for the first time is to be read a full and consecutive narration of the events of the nine years extending from 1628 to 1637. The volumes before us, like their predecessors, represent the result of much study and research, on which a large amount of thought has been brought to bear; and form a complete political history of the time, in which events are treated in due proportion, new light is thrown upon Charles's transactions with foreign princes, the rise and development of

new principles in politics dispassionately traced. The book opens with a detailed account of the session of 1629, an accurate knowledge of which is indispensable for fairly apportioning the responsibility that rests with Charles and the Commons for the breach between the two that then took place. The chief causes of division were, the past levy of customs duties ungranted by Parliament, and the publication of a royal declaration, forbidding controversy on disputed points of doctrine, and shutting Parliament out from the sphere of ecclesiastical legislation. Charles, on his side, was eager to obtain a grant of the customs duties, but was not prepared to abandon the policy laid down in his declaration. The Commons on theirs called for the suppression of liberty to maintain doctrines or practise ceremonies not in accordance with the received Calvinistic theology of the day, and refused to pass a Tonnage and Poundage Bill until the King should give way to their demand. The course taken by the House in disputing the King's claims is severely censured by Mr. Gardiner. In dealing with the question of customs' duties, not content with seeking security for the future, they demanded satisfaction for the past. Thus they irritated the judges by questioning the law laid down by them; abandoned the strong position offered them by a close adherence to the principle that the taxing of the subject without consent of Parliament was unconstitutional, in order to vote that there had been a breach of privilege in the seizure of the goods of a member for refusal to pay duties; and, finally, deeply offended the king by proposing to call to account the Custom House officers engaged in the transaction, without regard to the fact that they had acted under the authority of royal warrants. In like manner, when they dealt with the religious question, instead of definitely taking their stand on the broad ground that the nation had a right to a voice in the settlement of its own religion, the Commons sought out charges against the foremost men of the High Church party, and rashly undertook to define the doctrines held by the Church of England. It cannot be doubted that the aggressive course pursued by the House gave needless offence to Charles, besides appearing unjustifiable to the nation, which was not as yet prepared to support Parliament in seizing the reins of government from the king's hand. Still it does not therefore follow that the responsibility for the breach rests solely or even mainly with the Commons. In forming a judg ment on that point the question to be asked is not only whether the Commons acted moderately, liberally, and advisedly in their mode of disputing the king's ecclesiastical settlement, but also

whether that settlement formed a possible meeting ground. If, as was the case, it did not, all possibility of union was from the outset precluded. The strongest justification of the Commons' refusal to accept it may be read in the pages of Mr. Gardiner's book describing the system of Church government pursued by Laud. Charles's justification of the dissolution of the Parliament was based on the ground that the Commons were making use of the formal right of granting the customs duties to grasp at supreme power. The answer was that the king, to use the words of Mr. Gardiner, was treating the religion of the nation as a matter in which the nation had no concern.

To ask the question which of the two religious parties, High Churchmen or Puritans, was the more tolerant, is to seek a line of distinction that did not exist. The idea that religious liberty was a good thing was nowhere admitted. On the Continent, indeed, in France and in Holland, the necessity of establishing internal unity in order that foreign enemies might be effectually resisted, was forcing on statesmen the adoption of principles of toleration. In England no such political necessity was apparent, while mutual fear of repression acted as a spur on the intolerant spirit of the age. Charles was wholly incompetent to play the part of mediator. Puritanism

was offensive to him if only because of the mental agitation and the self-reliant and independent habits of mind to which it gave rise; while no recognition of the principles of toleration or fear of the consequences of transgressing them was likely to keep him in a fairly equitable course. As the event proved, it was not merely fanatical prejudice, but true political sagacity, that led Eliot to attack the policy contained in the declaration, as preluding alterations in the religion of the country opposed to its hitherto essentially Protestant character. Laud acquired the large influence which he exercised over Charles because he had the brain to conceive, and the practical qualities requisite to carry out, a scheme for the suppression of Puritan fervour. In his mind secular and ecclesiastical politics were as closely interwoven as web and warp, to the disadvantage of his point of view alike as churchman and politician. His zeal as a churchman dulled his political insight, while the fact that in his government of the Church he never lost sight of political ends rendered him less heedful than he might otherwise have been of moral and spiritual interests. The highest duty of the Church in relation to the State was, in Laud's eyes, to prevent the growth of political division; the highest duty of the State in relation to the Church to enforce the carrying out of ecclesiastical law. National unity was to

be attained by unquestioning obedience to the royal will; formalism in religion to be used as the means of training men's minds in habits of submission to external rule and order. Free criticism of ministerial acts in Parliament; free discussion of religious questions in the pulpit; whatever led to political or religious excitement amongst the people, appeared to Laud to have its origin in purely factious motives. Never heretic,' he

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

says, 'rent the bowels of the Church, but he pretended he raked 'them for truth; never unquiet spirit disorders the union of the State, but he pretends some great abuses which his integrity 'would remedy.' Though Laud refused to the laity a voice in the settlement of ecclesiastical affairs, yet he claimed for his own order no right of church government independently of the royal authority; nor for the Church, as represented by the clergy, any independent position in right of spiritual authority by the side of the State, as represented by the king. His counter'part in our own times,' Mr. Gardiner writes, is to be found not in the ecclesiastics who magnify the authority of the • Church, but in the lawyers, who, substituting the supremacy of the House of Commons for the supremacy of the crown, 'strive in vain to reply to all spiritual and moral questionings by the simple recommendation to obey the law.' To this, however, it might be observed that the position which Laud in his system assigned to the king was rather that of overseer of the clergy than representative of the laity. The thoroughly practical point of view from which Laud regarded ecclesiastical questions helps in part to explain the large place that he gave to the royal supremacy, as also his inability to understand why he was so hated by the Puritans.

'For speculative thought Laud cared nothing. Not truth but peace was the object which he pursued. The pursuit of peace in preference to the pursuit of truth was certain to be accompanied by an exaggerated estimate of the importance of external influences over the mind. It was characteristic of him to speak of Aristotle, the philosopher who taught that virtue owed its strength to the formation of habits, as his great master in humanis. His love of outward observances, of the beauty of holiness, as he fondly calls it, was partly founded on a keen sense of the incongruity of dirt and disorder; partly upon the recognition of the educative influence of regularity and arrangement. There was in his mind no dim sense of the spiritual depths of life, no reaching forward to ineffable mysteries veiled from the eye of flesh. It was incomprehensible to him why men should trouble themselves about matters which they could not understand. His acts of reverence had nothing in common with the utter selfabnegation of the great Italian, falling as a dead body falls before the revelation of those things which eye had not seen, nor ear heard. If he

is called upon to defend his practice of bowing towards the altar upon entering a church, he founds his arguments not on any high religious theme, but upon the custom of the Order of the Garter. To him a church was not so much the temple of a living spirit as the palace of an invisible king. He had a plain prosaic reason for everything that he did.'

Mr. Gardiner has been careful to draw special attention to the fact that, although the party spirit displayed by the government between 1629 and 1633 awoke a considerable amount of disaffection, it does not appear that during these years the Puritans, as a body, desired either to break from the Church or alter the ecclesiastical institutions of the country. It was not until after Laud's promotion to the archbishopric of Canterbury in 1633 that uniformity was rigorously enforced throughout the whole country, while at the same time changes were introduced in the services of the Church against the wishes at once of ministers and congregations. The most marked innovation, and that which gave deepest offence, was the removal of the communion table from the position which it ordinarily occupied in the centre, to the east end of the church. The compulsory observance by royal and episcopal authority of practices regarded with strong disapproval by the Protestant of that time, because he attached a special meaning to them, was naturally bitterly resented by many besides Puritans. The number of the archbishop's enemies was further largely increased owing to his conception of the position that the Church ought to occupy in relation to the community at large, and the unflagging energy with which he set his hand to reform abuses, correct morals, and raise the position of the parochial clergy by employing them in the civil administration, and giving them a special if not a privileged position apart in the nation. His efforts on this side rendered him exceedingly unpopular with the upper classes, more especially as he carried on his work, causing churches to be repaired, recovering land that had once belonged to the Church from the hands of its lay possessor, calling to account the evil liver, regardless of the rank or social position of those with whom he came in collision. The means by which Laud sought to win the respect of the laity for the clergy and raise the standard of morality was, like much of his work, dealing with evil on the surface rather than attacking it at the root. In either case he could not do better than secure the services of a high class of men in the ministry. But so little regard did he pay to the scruples of conscience of others, that it was ever becoming more difficult for a really able and conscientious man who did not think with himself to

« ZurückWeiter »