History of the English People ... With ... maps

Chapter II

the popish plot. 1667—1688 LIST OF MAPS. I. map of America in 1640 Tojacep. 168 ii. map of marston moor1 „ 230 III. MAP OF NASEEY FIGHT1 ,, 242 IV. MAP OF EUROPE, WITH FRANCE AS IT WAS UNDER lewis xiv Page 419 1 By permission of Mr. Markham.

BOOK VII PURITAN ENGLAND.

1603—1660. 1 VOL III AUTHORITIES FOR

BOOK VII.

1603—1660. For the reign of James the First we have Camden's "Annals" of that king, Goodman's " Court of King James I.," Weldon's " Secret History of the Court of James I.," Roger Coke's "Detection," the correspondence in the " Cabala," the letters published under the title of "The Court and Times of James I.," the documents in Winwood's "Memorials of State," and the reported proceedings of the last two Parliaments. The Camden Society has published the correspondence of James with Cecil, and Walter Yonge's "Diary." The letters and works of Bacon, now fully edited by Mr. Spedding, are necessary for any true understanding of the period. Hacket's "Life of Williams" and Harrington's " Nugæ Antiquæ" throw valuable side-light on the politics of the time. But the Stuart system, both at home and abroad, can only fairly be read by the light of the state-papers of this and the following reign, calendars of which are now being published by the Master of the Rolls.

It is his employment of these as well as his own fairness and good sense which gives value to the series of works which Mr. Gardiner has devoted to this period ; his " History of England from the Acces- ' sion of James the First," his "History of the Spanish Marriages," "England under the Duke of Buckingham," and "The Personal Government of Charles the First." The series has as j'et been carried to 1637. To Mr. Gardiner also we owe the publication, through the Camden Society, of reports of some of the earlier Stuart Parliaments. Ranke's " History of England during the Seventeenth Century" has the same documentary value as embodying the substance of state-papers in both English and foreign archives, which throw great light on the foreign politics of the Stuart kings. It covers the whole period of Stuart rule.

With the reign of Charles the First our historical materials increase. For Laud we have his remarkable " Diary ; " for Strafford the " Strafford Letters." Hallam has justly characterized Clarendon's "History of the Rebellion" as belonging " rather to the class of memoirs " than of histories ; and the rigorous analysis of it by Ranke shows the very different value of its various parts. Though the work will always retain a literary interest from its nobleness of style and the grand series of character-portraits which it embodies, the worth of its 1—2 AUTHORITIES FOR

BOOK VII.

account of all that preceded the war is almost destroyed by the contrast between its author's conduct at the time and his later description of the Parliament's proceedings, as well as by the deliberate and malignant falsehood with which he has perverted the whole action of his parliamentary opponents. With the outbreak of the war he becomes of greater value, and he gives a good account of the Cornish rising ; but from the close of the first struggle his work becomes tedious and unimportant. May's " History of the Long Parliament" is fairly accurate and impartial; but the basis of any real account of it must be found in its own proceedings as they have been preserved in the notes of Sir Ralph Verney and Sir Simonds D'Ewes. The last remain unpublished ; but Mr. Forster has drawn much from them in his two works, " The Grand Remonstrance " and "The Arrest of the Five Members."

The collections of state-papersby Rushworth and Nalson are indispensable for this period. It is illustrated by a series of memoirs, of very different degrees of vahiefj&ch as those of Whitelock, Ludlow, Sir Philip Warwick, Holies, and Major Hutchinson, as well as by works like Mrs.Hutchinson's memoir of her husband, Baxter's "Autobiography," or Sir Thomas Herbert's memoirs of Charles during his last two years. The Diary of Nehemiah Wallington gives us the common life of puritanism during this troubled time. For Cromwell the primary authority is Mr. Carlyle's "Life and Letters of Cromwell," an invaluable store of documents, edited with the care of an antiquarian and the genius of a poet. Fairfax may be studied in the " Fairfax Correspondence," and in the documents embodied in Mr. Clements Markham's life of him.

Sprigge's "Anglia Rediviva " gives an account of the New Model and its doings. Thurlow's State Papers furnish an immense mass of documents for the period of the Protectorate ; and Burton's " Diary " gives an account of the proceedings in the Protector's second Parliament. For Irish affairs we have a vast store of materials in the Ormond papers and letters collected by Carte ; for Scotland we have " Baillie's Letters," Burnet's " Lives of the Hamiltons," and Sir James Turner's "Memoir of the Scotch Invasion." Among the general accounts of this reign we may name Disraeli's " Commentaries of the Reign of Charles I." as prominent on one side, Brodie's "History of the British Empire" and God win's "History of the Commonwealth" on the other. Guizot in his three works on " Charles I. and the Revolution," " Cromwell and the Protectorate," and " Richard Cromwell and the Restoration," is ac curate and impartial ; and the documents he has added are valu able for the foreign history of the time.

A good deal of information may be found in Forster's "Lives of the Statesmen of the Common wealth," and Sands ord's " Illustrations of the Great Rebellion." England at the death of ElixabetJi.

CHAPTER I. ENGLAND AND PURITANISM.

1603— 16C0. The death of Elizabeth is one of the turning-points of English history. The age of the Benascence and of the New Monarchy passed away with the Queen. The whole face of the realm had been silently changing during the later years of her reign. The dangers which had hitherto threatened our national existence and our national unity had alike disappeared. The kingdom which had been saved from ruin but fifty years before by the jealousies of its neighbours now stood in the fore-front of European powers. Erance clung to its friendship. Spain trembled beneath its blows. The Papacy had sullenly withdrawn from a fruitless strife with the heretic island. The last of the Queen's labours had laid Ireland at her feet, and her death knit Scotland to its ancient enemy by the tie of a common king.

Within England itself the change was as great. Beligious severance, the most terrible of national dangers, had been averted by the" patience and the ruthlessness of the Crown. The Catholics were weak and held pitilessly down. The Pro testant sectaries were hunted as pitilessly from the realm. The ecclesiastical compromise of the Tudors had at last won the adhesion of the country at large. Nor was the social change less remarkable. The natural growth of wealth and a patient good government had gradually put an end to all social anarchy. The dread of feudal revolt Chap. I England and Puritanism. Growth of social wealth. had passed for ever away. The fall of the Northern Earls, of Norfolk, and of Essex, had broken the last strength of the older houses. The baronage had finally made way for a modern nobility, but this nobility, sprung as it was from the court of the Tudors, and dependent for its existence on the favour of the Crown, had none of that traditional hold ou the people at large which made the feudal lords so formidable a danger to public order.

If the older claims of freedom had been waived in presence of the dangers which so long beset even national existence, the disappearance of these dangers brought naturally with it a revival of the craving for liberty and self-government. And once awakened such a craving found a solid backing in the material progress of the time, in the up-growth of new social classes, in the intellectual developement of the people, and in the new boldness and vigour of the national temper. The long outer peace, the tranquillity of the realm, the lightness of taxation till the outbreak of war with Spain, had spread prosperity throughout the land. Even the war failed to hinder the enrichment of the trading classes. The Netherlands were the centre of European trade, and of all European countries England had for more than half-a-century been making the greatest advance in its trade with the Netherlands.

As early as in the eight years which preceded Elizabeth's accession and the eight years that followed it, while the trade of Spain with the Low Countries had doubled, and that of France and Germany with them had grown three-fold, the trade between England and Antwerp had increased twenty-fold. The increase remained at least as great through the forty years that followed, and the erection of stately houses, marriages with noble families, and the purchase of great estates, showed the rapid growth of the merchant class in wealth and social importance. London above all was profiting by the general advance. The rapidity of its growth awoke the jealousy of the royal Council. One London merchant, Thomas Sutton, founded the great VII.] PURITAN ENGLAND. 1603-1660. 7 Chap. I England and Puritanism Growth of national spirit. hospital and school of the Charter House.

Another, Hugh Myddelton, brought the New Biver from its springs at Chadwell and Amwell to supply London with pure water. Ere many years had gone the wealth of the great capital was to tell on the whole course of English history. Nor was the merchant class alone in this elevation. If the greater nobles no longer swayed the State, the spoil of the Church lands, and the general growth of national wealth, were raising the lesser landowners into a new social power. An influence which was to play a growing part in our history, the influence of the gentry, of the squires— as they were soon to be called — told more and more on English politics. In all but name indeed the leaders of this class were the equals of the peers whom they superseded. Men like the Wentworths in the north, or the Hampdens in the south, boasted as long a rent-roll and wielded as great an influence as many of the older nobles.

The attitude of the Lower House towards the Higher through out the Stewart Parliaments sprang mainly from the consciousness of the Commons that in wealth as well as in political consequence the merchants and country gentlemen who formed the bulk of their members stood far above the mass of the peers. While a new social fabric was thus growing up on the wreck of feudal England, new influences were telling on its developement. The immense advance of the people as a whole in knowledge and intelligence throughout the reign of Elizabeth was in itself a revolution. The hold of tradition, the unquestioning awe which formed the main strength of the Tudor throne, had been sapped and weakened by the intellectual activity of the Benascence, by its endless questionings, its historic research, its philo sophic scepticism.

Writers and statesmen were alike discussing the claims of government and the wisest and most lasting forms of rule, travellers turned aside from the frescoes of Giorgione to study the aristocratic polity of Venice, and Jesuits borrowed from the schoolmen of the Chap. I. England and Puritanism. The spirit of religion. middle ages a doctrine of popular rights which still forms the theory of modern democracy. On the other hand the nation was learning to rely on itself, to believe in its own strength and vigour, to crave for a share in the guidance of its own life. His conflict with the two great spiritual and temporal powers of Christendom, his strife at once with the Papacy and the House of Austria, had roused in every Englishman a sense of supreme manhood, which told, however slowly, on his attitude towards the Crown.

The seaman whose tiny bark had dared the storms of far-off seas, the young squire who crossed the Channel to flesh his maiden sword at Ivry or Ostend, brought back with them to Enghsh soil the daring temper, the sense of in exhaustible resources, which had borne them on through storm and battle-field. The nation which gave itself to the rule of the Stewarts was another nation from the panic struck people that gave itself in the crash of social and religious order to the guidance of the Tudors. It was plain that a new age of our history must open when the lofty patriotism, the dauntless energy, the overpowering sense of effort and triumph, which rose into their full grandeur through the war with Spain, turned from the strife with Philip to seek a new sphere of activity at home. What had hindered this force from telling as yet fully on national affairs was the breadth and largeness which characterized the temper of the Benascence.

Through the past half-century the aims of Englishmen had been drawn far over the narrow bounds of England itself to every land and every sea ; while their mental activity spent itself as freely on poetiy and science as on religion and politics. But at the moment which we have reached the whole of this energy was seized upon and concentrated by a single force. For a hundred years past men had been living in the midst of a spiritual revolution. Not only the world about them but the world of thought and feeling within every breast had been utterly transformed. The work of Chap. I England and Puritanism. The Bible. VII.] PURITAN ENGLAND. 1603—1660. the sixteenth century had wrecked that tradition of religion, of knowledge, of political and social order, which had been accepted without question by the Middle Ages.

The sudden freedom of the mind from these older bonds brought a consciousness of power such as had never been felt before ; and the restless energy, the universal activity of the Renascence were but outer expressions of the pride, the joy, the amazing self-confidence, with which man welcomed this revelation of the energies which had lain slumbering within him. But his pride and self-reliance were soon dashed by a feeling of dread. With the deepen ing sense of human individuality came a deepening con viction of the boundless capacities of the human soul. Not as a theological dogma, but as a human fact man knew himself to be an all but infinite power, whether for good or for ill. The drama towered into subhmity as it painted the strife of mighty forces within the breasts of Othello or Macbeth.

Boets passed into metaphysicians as they strove to unravel the workings of conscience within the soul. From that hour one dominant influence told on human action : and all the various energies that had been called into life by the age that was passing away were seized, concentrated, and steadied to a definite aim by the spirit of religion. The whole temper of the nation felt the change. " Theo logy rules there," said Grotius of England only two years after Elizabeth's death ; and when Casaubon was invited by her successor to his court he found both king and people indifferent to pure letters. "There is a great abundance of theologians in England ; " he says, " all point their studies in that direction." Even a country gentle man, like Colonel Hutchinson, felt the theological impulse. " As soon as he had improved his natural understanding with the acquisition of learning, the first studies he exercized himself in were the principles of religion."

It was natural that literature should reflect the tendency of the time ; and the dumpy little quartos of controversy and Chap. I England and Puritanism. Its literary influence. piety which still crowd our older libraries drove before them the classical translations and Italian novelettes of the age of the Renascence. But their influence was small beside that of the Bible. The popularity of the Bible had been growing fast from the day when Bishop Bonner set up the first six copies in St. Baul's. Even then, we are told, " many well-disposed people used much to resort to the hearing thereof, especially when they could get any that had an audible voice to read to them." ..." One John Porter used sometimes to be occupied in that goodly exercise, to the edifying of himself as well as others. This Porter was a fresh young man and of a big stature ; and great multi tudes would resort thither to hear him, because he could read well and had an audible voice."

But the "goodly exercise " of readers such as Porter was soon superseded by the continued recitation of both Old Testament and New in the public services of the Church ; while the small Geneva Bibles carried the Scripture into every home, and wove it into the life of every English family. Religion indeed was only one of the causes for this sudden popularity of the Bible. The book was equaUy im portant in its bearing on the intellectual developement of the people. All the prose literature of England, save the forgotten tracts of Wyclif, has grown up since the trans lation of the Scriptures by Tyndall and Coverdale. So far as the nation at large was concerned, no history, no romance, hardly any poetry save the little-known verse of Chaucer, existed in the English tongue when the Bible was ordered to be set up in churches.

Sunday after Sunday, day after day, the crowds that gathered round the Bible in the nave of St. Paul's, or the family group that hung on its words in the devotional exercises at home, were leavened with a new literature. Legend and annal, war song and psalm, State-roll and biography, the mighty voices of prophets, the parables of Evangelists, stories of mission journeys, of perils by the sea and amon" the heathen, philosophic arguments, apocalyptic visions, all were 1603-1660. 11 Chap. I England and Puritanism. Its social influence. flung broadcast over minds unoccupied for the most part by any rival learning. The disclosure of the stores of Greek literature had wrought the revolution of the Renascence. The disclosure of the older mass of Hebrew literature wrought the revolution of the Reformation.

But the one revolution was far deeper and wider in its effects than the other. No version could transfer to another tongue the peculiar charm of language which gave their value to the authors of Greece and Rome. Classical letters therefore remained in the possession of the learned, that is, of the few; and among these, with the exception of Colet and More, or of the pedants who revived a Pagan worship in the gardens of the Florentine Academy, their direct influence was purely intellectual. But the language of the Hebrew, the idiom of the Hellenistic Greek, lent themselves with a curious felicity to the purposes of translation. As a mere literary monument the English version of the Bible remains the noblest example of the English tongue, while its perpetual use made it from the instant of its appearance the standard of our language.

For the moment however its literary effect was less than its social. The power of the book over the mass of Englishmen showed itself in a thousand superficial ways, and in none more conspicuously than in the in fluence it exerted on ordinary speech. It formed, we must repeat, the whole literature which was practically accessible to ordinary Englishmen; and when we recall the number of common phrases which we owe to great authors, the bits of Shakspere, or Milton, or Dickens, or Thackeray, which unconsciously interweave themselves in our ordinary talk, we shall better understand the strange mosaic of Biblical words and phrases which coloured English talk two hundred years ago. The mass of picturesque allusion and illustration which we borrow from a thousand books, our fathers were forced to borrow from one ; and the borrowing was the easier and the more natural that the range of the Hebrew literature fitted it and Puri tanism.

Its religious influence. for the expression of every phase of feeling. When Spenser poured forth his warmest love-notes in the " Epi thalamion," he adopted the very words of the Psalmist, as he bade the gates open for the entrance of his bride. When Cromwell saw the mists break over the hills of Dunbar, he hailed the sun burst with the cry of David : " Let God arise, and let his enemir s be scattered. Like as the smoke vanisheth, so shalt thou drive them away ! " Even to common minds this familiarity with grand poetic imagery in prophet and apocalypse gave a loftiness and ardour of expression that with all its tendency to ex aggeration and bombast we may prefer to the slip-shod vulgarisms of to-day. But far greater than its effect on literature or social phrase was the effect of the Bible on the character of the people at large.

The Bible was as yet the one book which was familiar to every Englishman ; and everywhere its words, as they fell on ears which custom had not deadened to their force and beauty, kindled a startling enthusiasm. The whole moral effect which is produced now-a-days by the rehgious newspaper, the tract, the essay, the missionary report, the sermon, was then produced by the Bible alone; and its effect in this way, however dispassionately we examine it, was simply amazing. The whole nation became a church. The problems of life and death, whose questionings found no answer in the higher minds of Shakspere's day, pressed for an answer not only from noble and scholar but from farmer and shopkeeper in the age that followed him. The answer they found was almost of necessity a Cal vinistic answer. Unlike as the spirit of Calvinism seemed to the spirit of the Renascence, both found a point of union in their exaltation of the individual man.

The mighty strife of good and evil within the soul itself which had overawed the imagination of dramatist and poet became the one spiritual conception in the mind of the Puritan. The Calvinist looked on churches and communions as con venient groupings of pious Christians ; it might be as even 1603-1660. 13 Chap. I England and Puritanism, Growth of Calvinism. indispensable parts of a Christian order. But religion in its deepest and innermost sense had to do not with churches but with the individual soul. It was each Christian man who held in his power the issues of life and death. It was in each Christian conscience that the strife was waged between Heaven and Hell. Not as one of a body, but as a single soul, could each Christian claim his part in the mystery of redemption. In the outer world of worship and discipline the Calvinist might call himself one of many brethren, but at every moment of his inner existence, in the hour of temptation and of struggle, in his dark and troubled wrestling with sin, in the glory of con version, in the peace of acceptance with God, he stood utterly alone.

With such a conception of human life Buri tanism offered the natural form for English religion at a time when the feeling with which religion could most easily ally itself was the sense of individuality. The 'prentice who sate awed in the pit of the theatre as the storm in the mind of Lear outdid the storm among the elements passed easily into the Calvinist who saw himself day by day the theatre of a yet mightier struggle between the powers of light and the powers of darkness, and his soul the prize of an eternal conflict between Heaven and Hell. It was thus by its own natural developement that the temper of Englishmen became above all rehgious, and that their religion took in most cases the form of Calvin ism. But the rapid spread of Calvinism was aided by outer causes as well as inner ones.

The reign of Elizabeth had been a long struggle for national existence. When Shakspere first trod the streets of London it was a question whether England should still remain England or whether it should sink into a vassal of Spain. In that long contest the creed which Henry and Elizabeth had constructed, the strange compromise of old tradition with new convic tions which the country was gradually shaping into a new religion for itself, had done much for England's victory. and Puri tanism. Puritanism and the people. It had held England together as a people. It had hindered any irreparable severance of the nation into warring churches. But it had done this unobserved. ' To the bulk of men the victory seemed wholly due to the energy and devotion of Calvinism. Rome had placed herself in the forefront of England's enemies, and it was the Calvinistic Puritan who was the irreconcileable foe of Rome.

It was the Puritan who went forth to fight the Spaniard in France or in the Netherlands. It was the Puritan who broke into the Spanish Main, and who singed Philip's beard at Cadiz. It was the Puritan whose assiduous preach ings and catechizings had slowly won the mass of the English people to any real acceptance of Protestantism. And as the war drifted on, as the hatred of Spain and resentment at the Papacy grew keener and fiercer, as patriotism became more identified with Protestantism, and Protestantism more identified with hatred of Rome, the side of English religion which lay furthest from all contact with the tradition of the past grew more and more popular among Englishmen. i To Elizabeth, whether on rehgious or political grounds, Calvinism was the most hateful of her foes. But it was in vain that she strove by a rigorous disciplineto check its advance.

Her discipline could only tell on the clergy, and the movement was far more a lay than a clerical one. Whether she would or no, in fact, the Queen's policy favoured the Puritan cause, It was impossible to befriend Calvinism abroad without furthering Calvinism at home. The soldiers and adventurers who "flocked from England to fight in the Huguenot camps came back steeped in the Huguenot theology. The exiles who fled to England from France and from the Netherlands spread their narrower type of religion through the towns where they found a refuge. As the strife with Rome grew hotter the government was forced to fill parliament and the magistracy with men whose zealous Protestantism secured their fidelity in the case of a Catholic rising. But a zealous 1603—1660. 15 Protestant was almost inevitably a Calvinist ; and to Chap. I. place the administration of the country in Calvinist hands England was to give an impulse to Puritanism.

How utterly andPuri- Elizabeth failed was seen at the beginning of her successor's — reign. The bulk of the country gentlemen, the bulk of the wealthier traders, had by that time become Puritans. In the first Parliament of James the House of Commons refused for the first time to transact business on a Sunday. His second Parhament chose to receive the communion at St. Margaret's Church instead of Westminster Abbey " for fear of copes and wafer-cakes." The same difficulty met Elizabeth in her efforts to check Puritanism the growth of Puritanism in the Church itself. At the i? tfie very outset of her reign the need of replacing the Marian bishops by staunch Protestants forced her to fill the English sees with men whose creed was in almost every case Calvinistic. The bulk of the lower clergy indeed were left without change ; but as the older parsons died out their places were mostly filled by Puritan successors.

The Universities furnished the new clergy, and at the close of Elizabeth's reign the tone of the Universities was hotly Puritan. Even the outer uniformity on which the Queen set her heart took a Puritan form. The use of the Prayer-book indeed was enforced ; but the aspect of English churches and of English worship tended more and more to the model of Geneva. The need of more light to follow the service in the new Prayer-books served as a pretext for the removal of stained glass from the church windows. The Communion table stood almost everywhere in the midst of the church. If the surplice was generally worn during the service, the preacher often mounted the pulpit in a Geneva gown. We see the progress of this change in the very chapel of the Primates themselves. The chapel of Lambeth House was one of the most conspicuous among the ecclesiastical buildings of the time ; it was a place "whither many of the nobility, judges, clergy, and per sons of all sorts, as well strangers as natives, resorted."

Chap. 1 England and Puritanism. Puritanism and politics. But all pomp of worship gradually passed away from it. ' Under Cranmer the stained glass was dashed from its windows. In Elizabeth's time the communion table was moved into the middle of the chapel, and the credence table destroyed. Under James Archbishop Abbott put the finishing stroke on all attempts at a high ceremonial. The cope was no longer used as a special vestment in the communion. The Primate and his chaplains forbore to bow at the name of Christ. The organ and choir were alike abolished, and the service reduced to a simplicity which would have satisfied Calvin. Foiled as it was, the effort of Elizabeth to check the spread of Puritanism was no mere freak of religious bigotry. It sprang from a clear realization of the im possibility of harmonizing the new temper of the nation with the system of personal government which had done its work under the Tudors.