19. The Victory of Personal Government. 1629-1632.Charles was now to show whether he could do better than the Commons. He had gained one great convert soon after the end of the first session of the last Parliament. Wentworth, satisfied, it is to be supposed, with the Petition of Right, and dissatisfied with the claim to sovereignty put forward by the Commons, came over to his side and was made first a baron and then a viscount, after which before the end of 1628 he was made President of the Council of the North (see p. 397). Wentworth was no Puritan, and the claim of the Commons, in the second session, to meddle with religion no doubt strengthened him in his conviction that he had chosen the right side. Before the end of 1629 he became a Privy Councillor. The most influential member of Charles's Council, however, was Weston, the Lord Treasurer. Peace was made with France in 1629, and with Spain in 1630. To bring the finances into order, the king insisted on collecting the customs without a Parliamentary grant, and Chambers, a merchant who refused to pay, was summoned before the Council, and then fined 2,000l. and imprisoned for saying that merchants were more wrung in England than they were in Turkey. The leading members who had been concerned in the disturbance at the last meeting of Parliament were imprisoned, and three of them, Eliot, Holles, and Valentine, were charged before the King's Bench with riot and sedition. They declined to plead, on the ground that the judges had no jurisdiction over things done in Parliament. The judges held that riot and sedition must be punished somewhere, and that as Parliament was not always sitting it must be punished by themselves. As the accused still refused to plead they were fined and imprisoned. Eliot died of consumption in the Tower in 1632. Charles had refused to allow him to go into the country to recover his health, and after his death he refused to allow his children to dispose of his body. Eliot was the martyr, not of individual liberty, but of Parliamentary supremacy. Charles hated him because he regarded him as the factious accuser of Buckingham.

20. Star Chamber Sentences. 1630-1633.-The first years of unparliamentary government were, on the whole, years of peace and quiet. The Star Chamber, which under Henry VII. had put down the old nobility, was now ready to put down the opponents of the king. Its numbers had grown with its work, and all of the Privy Councillors were now members of it, the only other members being two judges. It was therefore a mere instrument in the king's hands. In 1630 Alexander Leighton was flogged and

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mutilated by order of the Star Chamber for having written a virulent libel against the bishops; in which he blamed them for all existing mischiefs, including the extravagance of the dress of the ladies, and ended by advising that they should be smitten under the fifth rib. In 1633 the same court fined Henry Sherfield for breaking a church window which he held to be superstitious. The bulk of Englishmen were not touched by these sentences, and there was more indigna

Sir Edward and Lady Filmer: from their brass at East Sutton, Kent,
showing armour and dress worn about 1630.

tion when, in order to pay off debts contracted in time of war, Charles ordered the enforcement of fines upon all men holding by military tenure lands worth 40l. a year who had neglected to be knighted. The Court of Exchequer held that the fines were legal ; but the whole system of military tenure was obsolete, and those who suffered regarded themselves as wronged through a mere technicality.

21. Laud's Intellectual Position. 1629-1633.-For all matters relating to the Church Charles's principal adviser was William Laud, now Bishop of London. As far as doctrine was concerned Laud carried on the teaching of Cranmer and Hooker. He held that the basis of belief was the Bible, but that the Bible was to be interpreted by the tradition of the early church, and that all doubtful points were to be subjected, not to heated arguments in the pulpits, but to sober discussion by learned men. His mind, in short, like those of the earlier English reformers, combined the Protestant reliance on the Scriptures with reverence for ancient tradition and with the critical spirit of the Renascence. Laud's difficulty lay, as theirs had lain, in the impossibility of gaining over any large number of his fellow-countrymen. Intelligent criticism and intelligent study were only for the few. Laud, as he himself plaintively declared, was in danger of being crushed between the upper and lower mill-stones of Puritanism and the Papacy.

22. Laud as the Upholder of Uniformity. In all this there was nothing peculiar to Laud. What was peculiar to him was his perception that intellectual religion could not maintain itself by intellect alone. Hooker's appeals to Church history and to the supremacy of reason had rolled over the heads of men who knew nothing about Church history, and who did not reason. Laud fell back upon the influence of ceremonial. "I laboured nothing more," he afterwards said, "than that the external public worship of God— too much slighted in most parts of the kingdom-might be preserved, and that with as much decency and uniformity as might be; being still of opinion that unity cannot long continue in the Church when uniformity is shut out of the Church door." He, like Eliot and the Parliamentarians, was convinced that there could be but one Church in the nation. As they sought to retain their hold on it by the enforcement of uniformity of doctrine, Laud sought to retain his hold on it by enforcing uniformity of worship. To do this he attempted to put in force the existing law of the Church as opposed to the existing practice. What he urged men to do he believed to be wholly right. He himself clung with all his heart to the doctrine of the divine right of episcopacy, of the efficacy of the Sacraments, and to the sobering influence of appointed prayers and appointed ceremonies. What he lacked was broad human sympathy and respect for the endeavour of each earnest man to grow towards perfection in the way which seems to him to be best. Men were to obey for their own good, and to hold their tongues. The king was the supreme governor, and with his authority, as exercised

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in the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, Laud hoped to rescue England from Pope and Puritan.

1633-1634.—

23. The Beginning of Laud's Archbishopric. In 1633 Laud became Archbishop of Canterbury. He at once made his hand felt in every direction. By his advice, in consequence of an attempt of the judges to put an end to Sunday amusements, Charles republished the Declaration of Sports which had been

Archbishop Laud: from a copy in the National Portrait Gallery
by Henry Stone, from the Van Dyck at Lambeth.

issued by his father, authorising such amusements under certain restrictions. Where, however, James had contented himself with giving orders, Charles insisted on having the Declaration read in church by all the clergy, and roused the resistance of those who regarded Sunday amusements as a breach of the Sabbath. Laud was also anxious to see the Communion table standing everywhere at the east end of the church. No doubt his anxiety came in part

from his reverence of the holy sacrament for which it was set apart, but it also arose from his dislike to the base purposes for which it

was often made to serve.

Corporation of Bristol.

Men often put their hats on it, or used it as a writing table. The canons, or laws of the Church, indeed, directed that the position of the table should, when not in use, be at