The chief actors in the Puritan revolution

Front matter

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CHAPTER II. The Teansitiok Period : James the First , . . .25

CHAPTER HI.

The Anglo-Catholic Reaction : Archbishop Laud . . 65

CHAPTER rV.

Henrietta Maria ... 101

CHAPTER V, Charles the First 147

CHAPTER VI.

The Cotenastbrs, Charles II., and Argtlh . . 209

CHAPTER VII.

Montrose 257

CHAPTER VIII.

Milton 297

CHAPTER IX.

Sir Henry Vane 347

CHAPTER X.

Olivee Cromwell 387

CHAPTER XI.

Clarendon 435

I. Theee Centueies Ago

CHAPTBE I.

THBEE CENTURIES AGO.

WITH an abruptness almost startling, the leading phenomenon — the most prominent and massive fact — of the Puritan period announces itself as one which is constantly dealt with by the philosophers of to-day. The fact of impassioned faith in God, too broadly inscribed upon the Puritan period to escape the most cursory inquirer, is one which current philosophies of evolution profess to classify, to interpret, to explain. From our conception of what that fact meant — whence it arose, what it involved — ^will all our ideas of the Puritan period take shape and colour.

One school of evolutionists declare off-hand that the faith of Cavaliers and Puritans ahke was a foundationless dream. If there is no Universal Spirit — ^if man is but part and parcel of a " stupendous and inexorable " mechanical process — it is mere mental disease, mere folly and frenzy, to be haunted by beKef in God. According to this school, the abstract and brief chronicle of human history is, that man emerged from ignorant, unworshipping animahsm, feU under the influence of spectral illusions, has continued under their influence, except in individual cases, until this day, but wiU ultimately cease to beheve in Ues and tremble at. ghosts, and will develop into a knovidng and philosophical, but again unworshipping, animal. Human progress, therefore, has been from behef

1—2

Three Centuries Ago.

in delusion to belief in mechanical necessity ; all religions have been rooted in lies, and have blossomed into lies; and the right thing has always been not to dig about and dung them, not to graft or prune them, but to bum them up.

The other school of historical evolution — at the head of which are Goethe and Carlyle — ^hold that man signalised his elevation above the animal world by recognising himseK as the Child of the Infinite. The truth dawned upon him early, but at first the dawn, though glorious, was faint, inexpressibly faint ; as those tremblings of light on the waves which Dante and Virgil saw afar on the horizon when they had left behind them the kingdoms of despair, — as those first steps of the morning, blood crimson and fiery gold, which Turner saw and painted, high above the brow of the Ehigi. According to this school, all rehgions have been rooted in truth, and have blossomed, more or less, into blessing and beauty ; but no rehgion has ever embodied, or can ever embody, the whole truth. Nor is it in rehgion alone that man's relationship to the Infinite is attested. In art and in philosophy man reaches after the Infinite, and so soon as, in either, he ceases to aspire to an ideal perfection, he dwindles and pines. Even in pohtics he is inspired by the vision of a social heaven. No noble picture ever consisted of mere foreground, and without an opening to the Infinite the whole landscape of human life becomes petty. But the foreground has also its inexorable claims. All grandeur of aim, all elevation of character — all the sublime in history — depend upon the vividness with which man reahses his relation to the Infinite: aU earthly success, all material prosperity, all passionate enjoyment of the threescore years and ten, with reasonable prospect of maldng them fourscore and ten> depend upon clear recognition that things visible and tangible, from political and religious institutions down to

The Two-fold Lata of Progress.

paving-stones, from conceptions of God enshrined in sacred books down to street ballads, are imperfect, and ought to be improved, and that man has unhmited sovereignty over the second causes of nature, assured, without reservation, that God approves of his weKare, and of the regulation of his life in accordance with his ascertained needs and capacities. It is possible to overdo either of these mighty tendencies, which combine to constitute the eternal law of progress. If man feeds too much on sublimities, he goes mad, beautifully and graciously mad, like Saint Theresas and Saint Xaviers, and perhaps hke some of our Puritan friends, or grimly mad, hke inquisitors seated round an auto dafe;i£ he feeds on bread alone, he retrogrades into a beast.

It does not startle evolutionists of this type to be told that the ideas entertained respecting the Universal Spirit have at any particular period been crude. Imperfection must be admitted on both sides ; the point at issue is whether imperfection has been the partial perception of a truth, or whether it has been the partial dehverance from a He. If the heart of all true reUgion has been consciousness of relation to the Infinite, it is certain, from the obvious circumstance that the finite cannot comprehend the Infinite, that every rehgion which we can observe in the past wiU. be more or less defaced by error. The worshipping creature, be its object of worship but a stock or a stone, has passed into a different order from that of the wolf or the ape, which does not worship at all ; but the highest-mounted mind cannot, in image graven with the hand in silver or gold, or in image graven far more subtly and richly by the ideahsing faculty of the soul, or in creed or formula or theological system, set forth the Almighty to perfection.

These considerations may strike some as speculative and unsubstantial ; but to such I would remark, first, that in our day fundamental (Questions are discussed, nor neces-

Three Centuries Ago.

sarily discussed with frivolity (for no one habitually talks about what he has no care for), at dinner-tables and in widely-read novels ; and, secondly, that I do not know any way in which the historical phenomenon called the Puritan Revolution can be understood so well as by contemplating it as primarily a readjustment of conceptions and arrangements arising out of man's relation to the Infinite. Thus alone can we philosophically classify it among the revolutions of history.

All embodiments of the Infinite, all forms of creed and worship, being necessarily tentative and imperfect, there comes a time when each successive embodiment is first vaguely felt to be imperfect, then to be intolerably and wickedly imperfect, and, lastly, to be^ a thing that must be broken away from and shuddered at as idolatrous. Mankind have always recoiled from the. two extremes of atheism on the one hand, and idolatry on the other. The recoil from atheism has been natural and intuitive. A process of what may be called, according to the estimate formed of it, philosophy or sophistication, is necessary to overpower those imperious instincts of the reason and the conscience which enjoin man to seek a First Cause as the source of matter, and a Supreme WiU as the fountain of morals ; therefore atheism has always been the creed of a few. Those few have, for obvious reasons, been persons of exceptionally vigorous mental constitution, who make themselves visible and audible to an extent altogether disproportionate to their numbers, and, as clever, talMnf people have invariably done, take the ai-guments which convince themselves to be irresistible by the race, and "think their Uttle sect manldnd." But nature is against them— human nature; if they chooso to call it human folly, that will not alter the fact of its stubborn tenacity. Atheism has never been anytliing but the harbinf^er of change in rehgion. The atheists of antiquity had com-

Atheism and Idolatry.

pleted their demonstrations when a reKgion of slaves and paupers came up to possess the world. Our modern atheists write clever essays, which many persons sit at home to read in preference to going to church. But the Mormons and the Spirit-rappers make more converts in a week than Positivists make in a year ; and that, although Mr. Harrison and Mr. Congreve pathetically endeavour to heighten the attractiveness of atheism by caUing it a rehgion. I desire to speak with the respect I sincerely feel for Comte and his brilliant disciples ; but their system does not satisfy the cravings which connect man with the Infinite, and therefore it lacks the element that gives potency to even the rudest rehgion. Modern atheists will do sapping and mining work in the service of Ultramontanism, Mormonism, and other soaring or crawling isms ; but they wiU not recast the nature of man. 'Whatever estimate is formed of religion by the philosopher, the historian recognises it as a colossal fact. In his closet the philosopher may satisfy himseK that it is mist ; looking out on the world, the historian sees that it is mountain.

Opposition to idolatry, however, is not natural and universal in the same sense as the recoil from atheism. Since it is impossible for the finite mind to comprehend the Infinite, and since the very highest and most difficult act of the human intelligence is to beheve in an unseen and unimaginable Spirit, worship has, in aU ages, had recourse to symbols of the Divine ; and only at intervals, and through the impulse of individual men, has discontent with these symbols — opposition to idolatry — ^revealed itself vrith sufficient power to become an important force. At intervals, however, it has thus made itself manifest. All reUgious founders and reformers, all prophets and poetic seers, have been, strictly speaking, not asserters of the existence of God — ^that they held it practically impossible for man to disbeheve — ^but purifiers of worship, breakers of images.

denouncers of idolatry, and promulgators of more elevated conceptions of the Infinite Spirit. Such was Moses against the idolatries of Egypt ; such was Mahomet against the idolatries of Mecca; such the Eeformers and the Puritans declared themselves with a thousand voices to be against the idolatries of Eome, and of the imitators of Eome. The progress of mankind has" resulted from the development of rehgions, the removal of their excrescences and defacements, the blooming out of the less perfect into the more perfect, not from the obhteration of faith. That produces the landscape of Sahara — clear as crystal, flat as a grave-stone, leafless for ever.

The recoil from idolatry, the breaking of graven images, the recasting of creeds, has always been a difficult, painful, dehcate, and tragical business. To reverence the embodiment of the Divine, for the sake of the Infinite Spirit it represents, is a duty ; to abandon the embodiment when, from palpable inadequacy, it is felt to mzs-represent the Infinite Spirit, is also a duty. How apt are the two to clash ! "0 sacred be the flesh and blood to which she links a truth Divine ! " is the petition, addressed to the iconoclast, on behalf of the feminine devoutness which clings to symbols hallowed by reverent use, by the poet of a time when refinement, inteUigence, and gentleness abound; but iconoclasts have not generally observed this rule. They have been men of great force of character ; they have acted under intense emotional excitement; and they have taken their own hves in their hands. They have believed themselves to act in obedience to an imperative mandate, which, in most instances, they expressly regarded as the inspiration of God, and which they dared not disobey. Their temper has been that of Mahomet when he told his judicious, expostulatory uncle, Abu Thaleb, that, " if the sun stood on his riqht hand and the moon on his left, ordering him to hold his peace, he cox;ld not obey."

Image-Breaking.

They have had slight respect for feminine scruples. Image-breaking, symbol-changing, has always hitherto been a terrible business, with music of thunder-peals, the battle of the warrior, and garments roUed in blood. It was so in the Puritan period-

That it must of necessity remain always so were a hard conclusion. In past time, the iconoclast — notably the iconoclast of the Eeformation and Puritan period ^— has practically combined with his impassioned energy in destroying one embodiment of the Divine a persuasion, equally impassioned, that the embodiment which he proposed to put in its place was perfect and unchangeable. The symbol, the formula, long believed to be infallible, was found to be fallible, pernicious, despicable ; but another infalhbihty was put in its place, and he who dared to call in question the new infaUibiHty was thought worthy of death. If we would understand the actors in the religious revolutions of the past — if we would know how they felt, and penetrate the secret of their seK-respect — we must firmly apprehend this circumstance. They were confident that they had reached perfection, and woe to him who laid a sacrilegious finger upon the ransomed ark. But men of all shades of opinion have, in our days, become familiar with the idea that perfection is not the hkehest thing for any generation to attain ; and the clear and calm admission that there will always be room for new approximations to truth, and that there cannot possibly be sin in candidly investigating and judiciously modifying old forms of faith and worship, has at length furnished a basis, at once broad and logical, for toleration. Knowing that the Infinite cannot be perfectly embodied in finite symbols, we are not tempted to think that to alter the ■method of its embodiment is to blot out the sun from the sky. We are inexcusable if, not content with walldng in our own way to heaven, we try to force our neighbour to take the same track ; but our ancestors had more excuse in falling into this egregious error. A good proof that we have escaped this danger will be afforded, if we can put ourselves into the position of our fathers with true dramatic sjonpathy, and, divesting ourselves of prepossession, deal out justice even-handed to antagonistic parties.

Happily this even-handed justice has become a habit in the intellectual high places of our country and time. Perhaps the most eloquently fair and appreciative estimate of Calvin in the Enghsh language is from the pen of a writer who, in theology, holds with Servetus ; and the moral nobleness of the Eeformers and Puritans has been energetically acknowledged by one who, if I imderstand him aright, beheves that even Mr. Mill was too much disposed to theistic compromise. " To what quarter," says Mr. John Morley, " in the bright historic firmament, can we turn our eyes with such certainty of being stirred and elevated, of thinking better of human life and the worth of those who have been most deeply penetrated by its seriousness, as to the annals of the intrepid spirits whom the Protestant doctrine of indefeasible personal responsibility brought to the front in Germany in the sixteenth century, and in England and Scotland in the seventeenth?" The bold spirits in question stand in close intellectual and moral relationship to ourselves; for the United Kingdom is now what the batthngs of the seventeenth century made it ; and those who know England weU affirm that, after all superficial changes — EituaHst revivals, Broad Church eccentricities, ]philosophical gyrations — the backbone of the population continues Puritan and Biblical.*

There are periods in the history of nations as of men which determine their future — ^periods of transition, of

• I obsorvod lately an opinion to this eftoot in a shrewd leading article in tho Times newspaper.

English Puritanism. 11

crisis, of difficulty, of conflict — ^in which, like " iron dug from central gloom," they are

" Heated hot with burning feara.

And dipped in baths of hissing tears. And battered with the shocks of doom To shape and use."

Such, for England, was the Puritan period, and this is probably the chief reason why it has been commonly considered the most memorable in English history.

Prom the fourteenth century, or earher, there was Puritanism in England, in the sense of dissatisfaction with the religion of the Church. "Whether as represented by men eminent for abOity and culture, like Wicklyffe, or as embraced by the people, Puritanism was chiefly, if not solely, a resistance to the doctrine and practice of Popery, — to the idolatry by which the spiritual truth of Christ's reHgion was said to be corrupted and obscured, — ^rather than to the government of the Church by the Pope. In other words, it was primarily spiritual and personal, comparatively indifferent to theories and organisations, and laying stress upon the life rather than upon the raiment. Curious it is to observe how, amid change of names and badges, the character of a nation wiU remain substantially unchanged! This quality of indifference to system and insistence upon the thing practically wanted, accompanies us through six centuries of the history of popular rehgion in England. Wicklyffe translated the Bible, preached to those who would hear him, sent out his evangelists, without troubHng himself about formal modification of the government of the Church. Cromwell we shall find setting up his Court of Triers, cutting straight to the essential business of putting good ministers in and turning bad ministers out, exactly as he would have set about procuring efficient officers for his Ironsides, and continuing obstinately bHnd to the beauty of Episcopal system on the one hand, and

Presbyterian system on the other. Bunyan wrote the Pilgrim's Progress, which all innocently-devout persons, even if they call themselves Papists, like to read, and preached to immense audiences, without giving a hint of his ecclesiastical whereabouts. Whitefield and Wesley were great preachers and teachers ; and, even when organising, thought not of the organisation as sacred in itself or as of any importance except as subservient to the main work.

Wicklyffe was glad of assistance from the Crown to shield him from the Pope, and the early Puritans in general leant I to the side of the civil authority, not because they were more vnlling to obey the King than the Pope, if the King had wanted them to deny the truth, but because it was the Pope who made his sway irksome to them. Even when the King ordered them to the stake, it was the Pope and his instruments, the bishops and priests, who set him on. Hatred of Popery was thus hterally burnt into the heart of the English commonalty and middle classes. It was as the sweet glimpse of dawn after murldest night for the Puritans when the EngUsh sovereigns, who, indeed, had from of old been frequently in trouble vsdth the Pope, came to an irreparable breach with Bome. Henry VIII. and the councillors of his son, Edward VI., took in hand the remodelling of the Church, and converted it into the Anglican Estabhshment. Henry annexed the popedom, so far as that could be done within the realm of England. All who speak with authority on the point — that is to say, all who are not pledged to partisanship by professional honour as Anglican advocates or divines — have treated it as an indisputable proposition that the English Crown, in constituting itself head of the Church of England, absorbed all the authority previously wielded by the Pope, spiritual as well as temporal. What can be averred on the other side is that the Church, when in deed sm-rendering her liberties to licnry, attompted, by an evasive word, to retain Crown.

The Anglican EstahUshmeni. 13

rights for Christ. This fact will always famish a basis for the contendings of a hierarchical party in the Church, and was likely, when a weak monarch and a strong priest (say Charles Stuart and William Laud) came into conjunction, to have consequences. But the surrender was, in fact, complete.

Even the right and function of ordaining bishops, as Lord Macaulay unanswerably showed in controversy with the late Bishop Phillpotts, was explicitly appropriated by the Sovereign. The actual ordainers — those who transmitted the mystical influence that had descended from the finger-tips of the apostles — ^were commissioned, under Edward, to ordain, not by permission of, not even by authority of, but " vice," in the person of, the King. And on no point did the Parliamentary majority, when the day came for their taking to themselves the prerogatives of the Sovereign, entertain clearer ideas than on this. No Presbyterian charming, no pious generalship by the Puritan Synod of Westminster, could for one moment mystify Cromwell and the Long Parliament as to the complete and absolute subordination of the Established Church of England to the civil power.

Having assumed the rights and functions of the Pope, the English monarchs gradually began to find that they might encounter difficulties pecuhar to their new capacity. The tremendous agitation of the revolt against Bome, heralded by Wicklyffe and Huss, assisted by the scholars of the Renaissance, and, in point of fact, reaching its high-water mark rather than commencing, in Luther's defiance of Leo, had shaken to its foundations the ecclesiastical system of the Middle Ages, loosened every joint in the framework of feudaUsm, and filled all men with the fiery wine of new ideas. The slxunbrous old time, when the Commons had to be kept up by fines to the tiresome duty of serving in Parhament, was past. Taught by the Eeformers to tliink for themselves in matters of religion, and to read their Bibles ■without leave asked of Pope or priest, people began to think on all subjects, and to be conscious of political as well as of religious personality.

Theological as the impulse imparted by Luther primarily v?as, its influence corresponded to the large nature of the man in being a general revolt against superstition, against mental servility, against moral sickliness, against all artificial and monastic sanctities, and in favour of simplicity, industry, free thought, home-bred affection, and innocent enjoyment. He protested against sacerdotal domination in the name of God and of God's good gifts, Wein, Weib, und Gesaiig ; and it may prove that this first form of the great Protest of the sixteenth century vsras, after all, its deepest and vnll be its latest.

But the large-hearted German did, as a matter of fact, in so far as the w^est of Europe \?as concerned, only prepare the way for a Frenchman, not so large-hearted as he, but of still more astonishing quaUty of brain. Calvin exhibited in combination all the greatest traits of the French character, unfortunately not also all its best, for, like Pascal and Eobespierre, he lacked its gaiety, and was too dreadfully in earnest. But he had its finest courage, its tenacity, its intensity, and its superb capacities of logical method. The extent of his influence throughout Europe is unquestioned. Hooker's eloquent attestation has made it familiar to aU readers. "His writing but of three lines," Hooker tells us, " in disgrace of any man," was " as forcible as any proscription throughout aU Eeformed Chm-ches ; his rescripts and answers " were "of as great authority as decretal epistles." But the nature of his influence is now little understood, and the majority of educated Englishmen have probably no idea connected with him except that ho burnt Servetus, which it is absolutely certain he did not do.

Calvin. 15

He exerted himseK to procure a capital sentence against Servetus, and he succeeded ; but he tried to have the mode of execution changed to decapitation. This is expressly admitted by Dr. Wilhs in his panegyrical biography of Servetus recently pubUshed. Language does not furnish words too strong to express the vehemence vvith which aU men ought to disapprove of putting one to death for theological extravagance ; but in relation to Calvin's character and influence, the death of Servetus has no specific importance, except as illustrating his austere sense of duty and his behef in the infinite maHgnancy of theological error.

It may seem a paradox, but it is the expression of a fact, that the nature of Calvin's influence is obscured for us by •what we see and know as Calvinism. "We think of a creed, a framework of dogma ; a very different thing it was to have that creed in the form of burning enthusiasm and contagious fervour. The creeds and dogmas of modern Calvinism are as the slagg and lava, cold and hard, lying round the crater of a volcano that has gradually been fiUing itseh with snow. Or you may compare Calvinism, when the glow of its spiritual enthusiasm in Western Europe was at its height, to the illumination of a city by ten thousand jets of fiery light, and Calvinism, when the glow died off and the dogmas remained, to the metal framework along which ran the lines of lamlDent flame, when the illumination is over. In Calvin's letters, and in his Institutes of the Christian Eehgion, we still feel the throb of that moral fervour which was the secret of his power. His letters form the best example of rehgious inspiration which the world has seen since the letters of St. Paul. The Institutes are in all, save metrical form, a great rehgious poem, as imaginative in general scheme, and as sustained in emotional heat, as Paradise Lost, though, of course, not to be compared, for beauty of language or picturesqueness of detail, with Milton's poem. Calvin treats, in four successive books, of

10 Three Centimes Ago.

Ckrist the Creator, Christ the Eedeemer, Christ the Inspirer, and Christ the King ; if he had written in verse, avoided argumentative discussion, and called his work The Christiad, it would have been the most S3anmetrical epic in existence.

The grand principle of Calvin is contemplation of the universe in God revealed in Christ. In all place, in all time, from eternity to eternity, Calvin saw God. Such faith will be infinitely appalling or infinitely consoling, according to our conception of the Divine character. If God is cruel, capricious, arbitrary, it will be appalling ; but if God is infinite justice, infinite love, infinite truth, blended in one indivisible ray of whitest hght, then the thought of God's all-embracing sovereignty merely is that the universe sleeps in the arms of God as a babe in the arms of its father. The modem behever in the doctrine of universal mechanical necessity assumes that the God of the Calvinist was arbitrary and capricious. But this is a mistake. The God of the Calvinist was, by hypothesis, absolutely perfect, absolutely unchangeable. Given the universe : the mechanical fataUst says that its order is the order of physical force, how originating we know not, whither tending we know not, but fixed and unalterable, and therefore annihilating man's free will ; the Calvinist said that all things have been fixed from eternity by an infinitely wise intelligence, and that therefore man's free will is an illusion. It seems, prima facie, a more suflferable theory that all things ai'e immutably arranged by infinite inteUigence, than that all things crash along in everlasting struggle of bhnd forces according to no principle of order that can be indicated in language ; but, practically, the two systems issue in surrender of man's free will; and on man's free will, as an ultimate fact, attested by consciousness and verified by experience, though, of course, limited by the conditions of human, existence, it is necessary to insist against both. Wo knuio

The Dark Side of Calvinism. 17

mind as a principle of order; our primary conception of matter is of something not ordering, but ordered : there is, therefore, more rationality in absolute submission to Infinite Mind than in absolute submission to infinite matter; but the free spirit of man need be enslaved to neither.

The shadow-side of Calvinism is not its doctrine of God, which is sublime, but its doctrine of man. It removes all difficulties on the heavenward side by postulating infinite perfection — faultless justice, boundless love — on behalf of the Creator, and by simply announcing that He cannot be judged by the creature ; but it reduces man, except in the case of the elect, to a condition of piteous abjectness and desolation. It is one of the problems of history and of human nature — ^not, I think, insoluble, but most interesting — ^how a faith so appaUing in its conception of the lot of all except God's chosen people, should have been embraced with intense enthusiasm and by immense multitudes. Is it that man is so thoroughly religious a being — so profoundly penetrated with the instincts of faith and worship — that h6 cares more for the character of his God than for his awa., and arrives much sooner at that point of right and rational audacity which vnll question the justice of aU earthly beings and governors, than at that which dares to apply the most rudimentary tests of justice to what he has been taught to accept as the proceedings, in relation to mankind, of the Supreme Power ? I think so.

Admitting that reverence for what is above us is a worthy and honourable feeling, we moderns nevertheless cannot but wonder at the delight with which, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, audiences listened to sermons and readers pored over books, in which they were told that they came into the world like "the eggs of the asp" which "are justly broken," and "serpents new bred " which " are justly killed, though thej have poisoned none." To inquire firmly into the fairness of such an arrangement was to be "wickecUy acute." "If any of us," says a distinguished French theologian, whose work was translated into English and published in London five years before the meeting of the Long Parhament, " should crush to death an ant with his foot, no man would lay to his charge an action of injustice for it, although the ant hath not offended him, although he hath not given life to the ant, although he hath destroyed another's work which cannot be restored by man, and although between man and it there is no infinite inequality, but a kind of certain and finite proportion. But man hath grievously offended God, and yet God hath given life to man, and there is no proportion between God and man, but as infinite a distance as between a finite and infinite thing. If, therefore, God shall crush those sinful men, which He is able to save ; if, patiently tolerating the vessels of anger. He shall make them the matter of His glory, shall any man expostulate with God, or think goodness wanting in Him, or accuse His justice?"