a indulgence followed the downfall of Clarendon: but, in the year 1670, another act was passed, reviving that of 1664, with some mitigations of punishment, and amendments in the form of proceeding; but with several provisions of a most unusual nature, which, by their manifest tendency to stimulate the bigotry of magistrates, rendered it a sharper instrument of persecution. Of this nature was the declaration, that the statute was to be construed most favourably for the suppression of conventicles, and for the encouragement of those engaged in it, of which the malignity must be measured by its effect in exciting all public officers, and especially the lowest, to constant vexation and frequent cruelty towards the poorer Nonconformists, who were marked by such language as the objects of the fear and hatred of the legislature. After the defeat of Charles's attempt to relieve all Dissenters by his usurped prerogative, the alarms of the House of Commons began to be confined to the Catholics, and they relented towards their Protestant brethren, and conceived designs of union with the more moderate, as well as of indulgence towards those whose dissent was irreconcilable. But these designs proved abortive. The Court resumed its animosity to the Dissenters, when it became no longer possible to employ them as a shelter for the Catholics: the laws were already sufficient for all practicable purposes of intolerance, and the execution of them was in the hands of bitter enemies, from the Lord Chief Justice to the pettiest constable. The temper of the established clergy was such, that even the more liberal of them gravely reproved the victims of such laws for complaining of persecution. The inferior gentry, who constituted the magistracy, ignorant, intemperate, and tyrannical, treated dissent as rebellion, and in their conduct to Puritans were actuated by no principles but a furious hatred of those whom they thought the enemies of the monarchy. The whole jurisdiction, in cases of nonconformity, was so vested in that body, as to release them in its exercise from the greater part of the restraints of fear and shame. With the sanction of the legislature, and the countenance of the government, what indeed could they fear from a proscribed party, consisting chiefly of the humblest and poorest men? From shame they were effectually secured, since that which is not public cannot be made shameful. The particulars of the con * 22 Car. II. c. I (1670). b Stillingfleet. Mischief of Separation. viction of a Dissenter might be unknown beyond his village; the evidence against him, if any, might be confined to the room where he was convicted; and in that age of slow communication, few men would incur the trouble or obloquy of conveying to their correspondents the hardships inflicted with the apparent sanction of law, in remote and ignorant districts, on men at once obscure and odious, often provoked by their sufferings into intemperance and extravagance. It must also be observed, that imprisonment is, of all punishments, the most quiet and convenient mode of persecution. The prisoner is silently hid from the public eye; his sufferings, being unseen, speedily cease to excite pity or indignation he is soon doomed to oblivion. As imprisonment is always the safest punishment for an oppressor to inflict, so it was in that age, in England, perhaps the most cruel. Some estimate of the sad state of a man, in suffering the extremity of cold, hunger, or nakedness, in one of the dark and noisome dungeons, then called prisons, may be formed by the remains of such buildings, which industrious benevolence has not yet every where demolished. Being subject to no regulation, and without means of regular sustenance for prisoners, they were at once the scene of debauchery and famine. The Puritans, the most severely moral men of any age, were crowded in cells with those profligate and ferocious criminals with whom the kingdom then abounded. We learn from the testimony of the legislature itself, that "needy persons committed to goal many times perished before their trial." We are told by Thomas Ellwood, the Quaker, a friend of Milton, that when a prisoner in Newgate for his religion, he saw the heads and quarters of men executed for treason kept for some time close to the cells, and the heads tossed about in sport by the hangman and the more hardened malefactors." The description given by George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, of his own treatment when a prisoner at Launceston, too clearly exhibits the unbounded power of gaolers, and its most cruel exercise. It was no wonder that, when prison 18 et 19 Car. II. c. 9. Evidence more conclusive, from its being undesignedly dropped, of the frequency of such horrible occurrences in the gaol of Newgate, transpires in a controversy between a Catholic and Protestant clergyman, about the religious sentiments of a dying criminal, and is preserved in a curious pamphlet, called "The Pharisee Unmasked." 1687. Ellwood's Life. "This prison, where are so many, suffocatetb the spirits of aged ministers." Life of Baxter, part iii. 200. с George Fox. Journal, 186, where the description of the dungeon called "Doomsdale" surpasses all imagination. ers were brought to trial at the assizes, the contagion of gaol fever should often rush forth with them from these abodes of all that was loathsome and hideous, and sweep away judges, and jurors, and advocates, with its pestilential blast. The mortality of such prisons must have surpassed the imaginations of more civilised times; and death, if it could be separated from the long sufferings which led to it, might perhaps be considered as the most merciful part of the prison discipline of that age. It would be exceedingly hard to estimate its amount, even if the difficulty were not enhanced by the prejudices which led either to extenuation or aggravation. · Prisoners were then so forgotten, that tables of their mortality were not to be expected; and the very nature of that atrocious wickedness which employs imprisonment as the instrument of murder, would, in many cases, render it impossible distinctly and palpably to show the process by which cold and hunger beget long distempers, only to be closed by mortal disease. The computations have been attempted, as was natural, chiefly by the sufferers. William Penn, a man of such virtue as to make his testimony weighty, even when borne to the sufferings of his party, publicly affirmed at the time, that since the Restoration " more than five thousand persons had died in bonds for matters of mere conscience to God."a Twelve hundred Quakers were enlarged by James. The calculations of Neale, the historian of the Nonconformists, would carry the numbers still farther; and he does not appear, on this point, to be contradicted by his zealous and unwearied antagonist. But if we reduce the number of deaths to one half of Penn's estimate, and suppose that number to be the tenth of the prisoners, the mor'tality will afford a dreadful measure of the sufferings of twenty-five thousand prisoners; and the misery within the gaols will too plainly indicate the beggary; and banishment, disquiet, vexation, fear, and horror, which were spread among the whole body of Dissenters. The sufferings of two memorable Dissenters, differing from each other still more widely in opinions and disposition than in station and acquirement, may be selected as proofs that no character was "Good Advice to the Church of England." Address of the Quakers to James II. Clarkson, i. 492. London Gazette, 23d and 26th May, 1687. Grey's Examination of Neale. 3 vols. 8vo. 1738. d Fifteen thousand families ruined. 66 Penn's Good Advice." In this tract, very little is said of the dispensing power; the far greater part consisting of a noble defence of religious liberty, applicable to all ages and communions. a so high as to be beyond the reach of this persecution, and no condition so humble as to be beneath its notice. Richard Baxter, one of the most acute and learned as well as pious and exemplary men of his age, was the most celebrated divine of the Presbyterian persuasion. He was so well known for his moderation as well as his general merit, that at the Restoration he was made chaplain to the King, and a bishopric was offered to him, which he declined, not because he deemed it unlawful, but because it might engage him in severities against the conscientious, and because he was unwilling to give scandal to his brethren by accepting preferment in the hour of their affliction. He joined in the public worship of the Church of England, but preached to a small congregation at Acton, where he soon became the friend of his neighbour, Sir Matthew Hale, who, though then a magistrate of great dignity, avoided the society of those who might be supposed to influence him, and, from his jealous regard to independence, chose a privacy as simple and frugal as that of the pastor of a persecuted flock. Their retired leisure was often employed in high reasoning on those sublime subjects of metaphysical philosophy to which both had been conducted by their theological studies, and which, indeed, few contemplative men of elevated thought have been deterred by the fate of their forerunners from aspiring to comprehend. Honoured as he was by such a friendship, esteemed by the most distinguished persons of all persuasions, and consulted by the civil and ecclesiastical authorities in every project of reconciliation and harmony, Baxter was five times in fifteen years dragged from his retirement, and thrown into prison as a malefactor. In 1669, two subservient magistrates, one of whom was steward of the Archbishop of Canterbury, summoned him before them for preaching at a conventicle: Hale, too surely foreknowing the event, could scarcely refrain from tears when he heard of the summons. He was committed for six months; and, after the unavailing intercession of his friends with the King, was at length enlarged in consequence of informalities in the commitment. Twice he afterwards escaped by irregularities into which the precipitate zeal of ignorant persecutors had betrayed them. Once, when his physician made oath that imprisonment would be dangerous to his life, he owed his enlargement to the pity or prudence of Charles II. At last, in the year 1685, he was brought Baxter's Life, 281, 282. Baxter's Life. Calamy's Abridgment, part iii. 47-51, etc. to trial for supposed libels, before Jeffreys, in the Court of King's Bench, where his venerable friend had once presided, where two chief justices, within ten years, had exemplified the extremities of human excellence and depravity, and where he whose misfortunes had almost drawn tears down the aged cheeks of Hale was doomed to undergo the most brutal indignities from Jeffreys. The history and genius of Bunyan were as much more extraordinary than those of Baxter as his station and attainments were inferior. He is probably at the head of unlettered men of genius, and perhaps there is no other instance of any man reaching fame from so abject an origin; for the other extraordinary men who have become famous without education, though they were without what is called learning, have had much reading and knowledge, and though they were repressed by poverty, were not, like him, sullied by a vagrant and disreputable occupation. By his trade of a travelling tinker, he was from his earliest years placed in the midst of profligacy, and on the verge of dishonesty. He was for a time a private in the parliamentary army; the only military service which was likely to elevate his sentiments and amend his life. Having embraced the opinions of the Baptists, he was soon admitted to preach in a community which did not recognise the distinction between the clergy and the laity. Even under the Protectorate he was harassed by some busy magistrates, who took advantage of a parliamentary ordinance, excluding from toleration those who maintained the unlawfulness of infant baptism. But this officiousness was checked by the spirit of the government; and it was not till the return of intolerance with Charles II. that the sufferings of Bunyan began. Within five months after the restoration, he was apprehended under the statute of the thirty-fifth of Elizabeth, and was thrown into prison, or rather into a dungeon, at Bedford, where he remained for twelve years. The narratives of his life exhibit remarkable specimens of the acuteness and fortitude with which he withstood the threats and snares of the magistrates, and a a b "Grace abounding," by Bunyan himself. Ivimey's Life of Bunyan. Iv. Hist. of Baptists. Scobell's Ordinances, chap. 114. 22d April, 1618. This exception is omitted in a subsequent ordinance against blasphemous opinions (9th August, 1650), directed chiefly against the Antinomians, who were charged with denying the obligation of morality, the single case where the danger of nice distinction is the chief objection to the use of punishment against the promulgation of opinions. Religious liberty was afterwards carried much nearer to its just limits by the letter of Cromwell's constitution, and probably to its full extent by its spirit. Humble Petition and Advice, s. xi. 1656. Scob. 380. |