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from the same land of absolute ideals, and Cromwell was in time already to hear, in full blast from the grim lips of his military saints, the rights of man as all the world knew them so well a hundred and fifty years later.

CHAPTER IV

THE INTERIM

I

WENTWORTH said in his early days that it was ill contending with the king outside of parliament. Acting on this maxim, the popular leaders, with the famous exception of Hampden, watched the king's despotic courses for eleven years (1629-40) without much public question. Duties were levied by royal authority alone. Monopolies were extended over all the articles of most universal consumption. The same sort of inquisition into title that Wentworth had practised in Ireland was applied in England, under circumstances of less enormity, yet so oppressively that the people of quality and honour, as Clarendon calls them, upon whom the burden of such proceedings mainly fell, did not forget it when the day of reckoning came. The Star Chamber, the Council, and the Court of High Commission, whose province affected affairs ecclesiastical, widened the area of their arbitrary jurisdiction, invaded the province of the regular courts, and inflicted barbarous punishments. Everybody knows the cases of Leighton, of Lilburne, of Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick; how for writing books against prelacy, or play-acting, or Romish innovations by church dignitaries, men of education and learned professions were set in the pillory, had their ears cut off, their noses slit, their cheeks branded, were

heavily fined, and flung into prison for so long as the king chose to keep them there.

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Even these gross outrages on personal right did less to rouse indignation than the exaction of shipmoney; nor did the exaction of the impost itself create so much alarm as the doctrines advanced by servile judges in its vindication, using a logic that left no man anything that he might call his own." The famous Italian who has earned so bad a name in the world for lowering the standards of public virtue and human self-esteem, said that men sooner forget the slaying of a father than the taking of their property. But Charles, with the best will to play the Machiavellian if he had known how, never more than half learned the lessons of the part.

The general alarms led to passive resistance in Essex, Devonshire, Oxfordshire. A stout-hearted merchant of the city of London brought the matter on a suit for false imprisonment before the King's Bench. Here one of the judges actually laid down the doctrine that there is a rule of law and a rule of government, and that many things which might not be done by the rule of law may be done by the rule of government. In other words, law must be tempered by reason of state, which is as good as to say, no law. With more solemnity the lawfulness of the tax was argued in the famous case of John Hampden for a fortnight (1637) before the twelve judges in the Exchequer Chamber. The result was equally fatal to that principle of no taxation without assent of parliament, to which the king had formally subscribed in passing the Petition of Right. The decision against Hampden contained the startling propositions that no statute can bar a king of his regality; that statutes taking away his royal power in defence of his kingdom are void; and that the king has an absolute authority to dispense with any law in cases of necessity, and of this necessity he must be the judge. This decision has been

CHAP. IV

THOROUGH

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justly called one of the great events of English history.

Both the system of government and its temper were designated by Strafford and Laud under the cant watchword of Thorough. As a system it meant personal rule in the state, and an authority beyond the law courts in the church. In respect of political temper it meant the prosecution of the system through thick and thin, without fainting or flinching, without half-measures or timorous stumbling; it meant vigilance, dexterity, relentless energy. Such was Thorough. The counter-watchword was as good. If this was the battle-cry of the court, Root-and-Branch gradually became the inspiring principle of reform as it unconsciously drifted into revolution. Things went curiously slowly. The country in the face of this conspiracy against law and usage lay to all appearance profoundly still. No active resistance was attempted, or perhaps whispered. Pym kept unbroken silence. Of Cromwell we have hardly a glimpse, and he seems to have taken the long years of interregnum as patiently as most of his neighbours. After some short unquietness of the people, says Clarendon, "there quickly followed so excellent a composure throughout the whole kingdom, that the like peace and tranquillity for ten years was never enjoyed by any nation." As we shall see, when after eleven years of misgovernment a parliament was chosen, it was found too moderate for its work.

It was in his native country that Charles first came into direct conflict with the religious fervour that was to destroy him. It only needed a spark to set in flames the fabric that king and archbishop were striving to rear in England. This spark flew over the border from Scotland, where Charles and Laud played with fire. In Scotland the Reformation had been a popular movement, springing from new and deepened religious experience and

sense of individual responsibility in the hearts and minds of the common people. Bishops had not ceased to exist, but their authority was little more than shadow. By the most fatal of the many infatuations of his life, Charles tried (1637) to make the shadow substance, and to introduce canons and a service-book framed by Laud and his friends in England. Infatuation as it was, policy was the prompter. Charles, Strafford, and Laud all felt that the bonds between the three kingdoms were dangerously loose, slender, troublesome, and uncertain. As Cromwell too perceived when his time came, so these three understood the need for union on closer terms between England, Scotland, and Ireland, and in accordance with the mental fashion of the time they regarded ecclesiastical uniformity as the key to political unity. Some Scottish historians have held that the royal innovations might have secured silent and gradual acquiescence in time, if no compulsion had been used. Patience, alas, is the last lesson that statesmen, rulers, or peoples can be brought to learn. As it was, the rugged Scots broke out in violent revolt, and it spread like flame through their kingdom. Almost the whole nation hastened to subscribe that famous National Covenant (February 27, 1638), which, even as we read it in these cool and far-off days, is still vibrating and alive with all the passion, the faithfulness, the wrath, that inspired the thousands of stern fanatics who set their hands to it. Its fierce enumeration of the abhorred doctrines and practices of Rome, its scornful maledictions on them, are hot with the same lurid flame as glows in the retaliatory lists of heresy issued from age to age from Rome itself. It is in this National Covenant of 1638 that we find ourselves at the heart and central fire of militant puritanism of the seventeenth century.

It is a curious thing that people in England were so little alive to what was going on in Scotland until

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