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hard to decide; but we may be sure that if he actively hated heresies about justification or predestination, it was rather as breaches of order than as either errors of intellect or corruptions of soul.

"He had few vulgar or private vices," says a contemporary," and, in a word, was not so much to be called bad as unfit for the state of England." He was unfit for the state of England, because, instead of meeting a deep spiritual movement with a missionary inspiration of his own, he sought no saintlier weapons than oppressive statutes and persecuting law-courts. It may be at least partially true that the nation had been a consenting party to the Tudor despotism, from which both statute and court had come down. Persecution has often won in human history; often has a violent hand dashed out the lamp of truth. But the puritan exodus to New England was a signal, and no statesman ought to have misread it, that new forces were arising and would require far sharper persecution to crush them than the temper of the nation was likely to endure.

In the early stages of the struggle between parliament and king, the only leader on the popular side on a level in position with Strafford and Laud was John Pym, in many ways the foremost of all our parliamentary worthies. A gentleman of good family and bred at Oxford, he had entered the House of Commons eleven years before the accession of Charles. He made his mark early as one who understood the public finances, and, what was even more to the point, as a determined enemy of popery. From the first, in the words of Clarendon, he had drawn attention for being concerned and passionate in the jealousies of religion, and much troubled with the countenance given to the opinions of Arminius. He was a puritan in the widest sense of that word of many shades. That is to say, in the expression of one who came later, "he thought it part of a man's religion to see that his country be well

CHAP. II

PYM

35

governed," and by good government he meant the rule of righteousness both in civil and in sacred things. He wished the monarchy to stand, and the Church of England to stand; to stand; nor was any man better grounded in the maxims and precedents that had brought each of those exalted institutions to be what it was.

Besides massive breadth of judgment, Pym had one of those luminous and discerning minds that have the rare secret in times of high contention of singling out the central issues and choosing the best battle-ground. Early he perceived and understood the common impulse that was uniting throne and altar against both ancient rights and the social needs of a new epoch. He was no revolutionist either by temper or principle. A single passage from one of his speeches is enough to show us the spirit of his statesmanship, and it is well worth quoting. "The best form of government," he said, "is that which doth actuate and dispose every part and member of a state to the common good; for as those parts give strength and ornament to the whole, so they receive from it again strength and protection in their several stations and degrees. If, instead of concord and interchange of support, one part seeks to uphold an old form of government, and the other part introduce a new, they will miserably consume one another. Histories are full of the calamities of entire states and nations in such cases. It is, nevertheless, equally true that time must needs bring about some alterations. . . . Therefore have those commonwealths been ever the most durable and perpetual which have often reformed and recomposed themselves according to their first institution and ordinance. By this means they repair the breaches, and counterwork the ordinary and natural effects of time."

This was the English temper at its best. Surrounded by men who were often apt to take narrow

views, Pym, if ever English statesman did, took broad ones; and to impose broad views upon the narrow is one of the things that a party leader exists for. He had the double gift, so rare even among leaders in popular assemblies, of being at once practical and elevated; a master of tactics and organising arts, and yet the inspirer of solid and lofty principles. How measure the perversity of king and counsellors who forced into opposition a man so imbued with the deep instinct of government, so whole-hearted, so keen of sight, so skilful in resource as Pym?

CHAPTER III

PURITANISM AND THE DOUBLE ISSUE

I

UNIVERSAL history has been truly said to make a large part of every national history. The lamp that lights the path of a single nation receives its kindling flame from a central line of beacon-fires that mark the onward journey of the race. The English have never been less insular in thought and interest than they were in the seventeenth century. About the time when Calvin died (1564) it seemed as if the spiritual empire of Rome would be confined to the two peninsulas of Italy and Spain. North of the Alps and north of the Pyrenees the Reformation appeared to be steadily sweeping all before it. Then the floods turned back; the power of the papacy revived, its moral ascendancy was restored; the counter-reformation or the catholic reaction, by the time when Cromwell and Charles came into the world, had achieved startling triumphs. The indomitable activity of the Jesuits had converted opinion, and the arm of flesh lent its aid in the holy task of reconquering Christendom. What the arm of flesh meant the English could see with the visual eye. They never forgot Mary Tudor and the protestant martyrs. In 1567 Alva set up his court of blood in the Netherlands. In 1572 the pious work in France began with the massacre of St. Bartholomew. In 1588 the Armada appeared in the British Channel

for the subjugation and conversion of England. In 1605 Guy Fawkes and his powder-barrels were found in the vault under the House of Lords. These were the things that explain the endless angry refrain against popery, that rings through our seventeenth century with a dolorous monotony at which modern indifference may smile, and reason and tolerance may groan.

Britain and Holland were the two protestant strongholds, and it was noticed that the catholics in Holland were daily multiplying into an element of exceeding strength, while in England, though the catholics had undoubtedly fallen to something very considerably less than the third of the whole population, which was their proportion in the time of Elizabeth, still they began under James and Charles to increase again. People counted with horror in Charles's day some ninety catholics in places of trust about the court, and over one hundred and ninety of them enjoying property and position in the English counties. What filled England with dismay filled the pertinacious Pope Urban VIII. with the hope of recovering here some of the ground that he had lost elsewhere, and he sent over first Panzani, then Cuneo, then Rossetti, to work for the reconquest to catholicism of the nation whom another Pope a thousand years before had brought within the Christian fold. The presence of the Roman agents at Whitehall only made English protestantism more violently restive. A furious struggle was raging on the continent of Europe. The Thirty Years' War (1618-48) was not in all its many phases a contest of protestant and catholic, but that tremendous issue was never remote or extinct; and even apart from the important circumstance that the Elector Palatine had espoused the daughter of James I., its fluctuations kept up a strong and constant undercurrent of feeling and attention in England.

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