much time in hearing Puritan petitions. Such petitions came from sufferers under ecclesiastical oppression; from people dissatisfied with Anglican clergymen; from individuals scandalized at ceremonial innovations; and from different counties praying for redress of grievances in Church and State. The latter petitions were brought up to town by troops of horsemen. Such documents, accompanied by the denunciations of members who presented them, occasioned searching inquiries into Anglican superstition and intolerance. Persons alleged that communion-tables were set altar-wise; that anthems and organs were superseding plain and proper psalmsinging; that wax candles were burnt in churches in honour of our Lady; that copes of white satin were worn by ministers; that boys with lighted torches went in procession and bowed to the altar; and that Puritans were roughly handled for refusing to make a like obeisance. Further, such persons declared "flat Popery" had been preached, as well as performed; transubstantiation, confession, and absolution, being doctrines maintained in Anglican pulpits. 1 Cases were brought up of clergymen unrighteously suspended for refusing to read the "Book of Sports," and for similar offences. The private gossip of the day touching church matters reached the House through members anxious to stimulate their partizans. Though such reports appear undignified enough in senatorial speeches, they are welcome to the historian, because indicative of the staple talk round firesides in those boisterous days. Alderman Pennington told how an archdeacon's son had said, "God take the Parliament for a company of Puritanical factious fellows, 1 Memorials of English Affairs, Whitelocke, 38. Journal of Commons, Nov. 25, 1640, and pamphlets of the period. who would wiredraw the King for money, when a Spanish don would lend him two millions. The King would never have quiet until he had taken off twenty or more of their heads." In petitions, according to the Diurnals, very odd references occurred to the sayings and doings of High Churchmen. One declared "the Commissaries were the suburbs of heaven, and the High Commission the Archangels, and that to preach twice a day, or to say any prayers but the Common Prayers, was a damnable sin." Moreover, the same newspaper states, that a minister in Shoreditch stood charged with preaching on the man who went down to Jericho-saying, the King was the man, the Scots the thieves, the Protestant the priest, the formal Protestant the Levite, and the Papist the Good Samaritan.1 Another, being asked how he could maintain by Scripture the turning of the communion-table altarwise, replied, "the times were turned, and it was fit the tables should be turned also." A petition came from a churchwarden cited and punished for not prosecuting parishioners who refused to stand while hearing the creed, to bow at the name of Jesus, to kneel at public prayer, and to sit uncovered during sermon time. These breaches of prescribed ecclesiastical decorum were taken as proofs of Puritan irreverence; but when Puritans were threatened in consequence with legal penalties, such acts appeared to them to be full of heroic virtue. The growth of popery formed a fruitful topic of quaint declamation. The approach of any great personage, it was said, may be known by the sumpter mules sent on The minister complained of was John Squire, of whom Walker gives an account in his Sufferings of the Clergy, Part i. 68. These illus trations are gathered from Diurnals and other Tracts in the Library of the Brit. Museum. before. And when the Pope travels, altars, copes, pictures, and images precede his progress. High Church ceremonies announced the coming Mass. Clerical tricks of this description prepared for the revival of papal domination. Resistance had provoked persecution. Fire had come out of the bramble, and devoured the cedars of Lebanon.1 Stories, too, were told of a parsonage worth three hundred a year, where not even a poor curate remained to read prayers, catechise children, or bury the dead; and of a vicarage, where the nave of the church had been pulled down, the lead sold, the bells profaned, the chancel made into a dog-kennel, and the steeple turned into a pigeonhouse.2 The debate of the 14th and 15th of December, on the canons, was conducted in the same spirit as other proceedings. Convocation had met in April, at the opening of the Short Parliament; one of the first measures adopted being an imposition on the clergy of six subsidies of four shillings in the pound for six years. Canons had then been prepared, relative to the regal power for suppressing popery, also against Socinianism and sectaries, and further, for preventing Puritan innovations and for promoting uniformity. While discussions on these subjects were proceeding, Parliament had been dissolved, but Convocation had unconstitutionally 'Speech of Mr.Rouse in Rushworth, iv. 211. See also Speeches of Sir Ed. Dering and Sir John Wray. These particulars, and many more, are found in A Certificate from Northamptonshire, 1641." Brit. Mus. The" great scarcity of preaching ministers" was early noticed, and a sub-committee appointed to consider it. See Journals, 19th Decem ber, 1640. Extracts from the Register of the Archbishop of Canterbury, shew that the number of benefices in England was 8,803, whereof 3,277 were impropriations, and that the number of livings under £10 was 4,543; under £40, 8,659; and that only the remainder, being 144, were of the value of £40 and upwards.— Cal. Dom. 1634-5, p. 381. determined as a royal synod, to persevere sitting until it should be dissolved by the King's writ. Some of the clerical body had protested against this procedure, but the King, with the opinion of certain judges, had confirmed it, and Convocation, then acting as a synod under royal sanction, had completed the new canons.2 Parliament poured out vials of wrath on all these canons. They included protests against popery—the third being for the suppression of its growth, and the seventh charging the Church of Rome with "idolatry committed in the mass for which all popish altars were demolished," but the Puritans overlooked or regarded all this as only a pretence for covering assaults upon themselves. To have done so seems to us unfair, though considering the character of the men framing the canons, with whom members of the House of Commons were well acquainted, everybody must believe the authors of the new laws hated Puritanism more than Popery. The truth is, Anglicanism, though thoroughly opposed to papal supremacy, and to some of the dogmas and superstitions of Rome, fostered sympathy with much of the faith and worship characteristic of that church, while it had not a breath of kindness for Puritan sentiments. Such a state of things drove the two parties wide as the poles asunder, and we cannot wonder that on the question of the canons the House of Commons, revolting at Anglo-Catholicism, read all which Convocation had done in the light of those well-known principles by which Convocation was actuated. Whatever the bishops and clergy there, might honestly say about popish ceremonies and the idolatry of the mass, they were chiefly bent on crushing the Puritans, and 'Lathbury's Hist. of Con., 246. accordingly the Puritans grappled with the Anglicans as in a struggle for life. Matter enough existed in these new laws to provoke destructive criticism. The first propounded the divine right of kings, and claimed for them powers inconsistent with the English constitution. The canon against sectaries was extremely intolerant, and was so ingeniously contrived as to turn statutes for suppressing popery against all sorts of nonconforming Protestants. No one, however, of this ill-fated assembly's enactments had to run the gauntlet, like the canon relative to the et cetera oath. It speedily sank under torrents of argument and invective, ridicule, and satire. Also, the prolonging of convocation as a synod, after the dissolution of Parliament, incurred condemnation as wholly illegal ; the canons were pronounced invalid; and the entire proceedings subversive of the laws of the realm.2 Archbishop Laud had to bear, in no small measure, the odium of the new ecclesiastical measures. Doubtless, he had a leading hand in their origin, but it is also a fact, that before the opening of the Long Parliament, he wrote by His Majesty's command to the bishops of his province, to suspend the operation of the article respecting the et cetera oath. And when the House had been sitting a little more than three weeks, after Pym, Culpeper, Grimston, and Digby, had attacked this unpopular clerical 3 This oath "approved the doctrine and discipline of government established in the Church of England, as containing all things necessary to salvation;" and denied all"consent to alter the government of this Church by Archbishops, Bishops, Deans, Archdeacons, &c., as it stands now established." Heylyn declares that the et cetera was introduced in the draft to avoid tautology, and that the enu H meration was to be perfected before engrossment, but the king hastened its being printed, and so occasioned the mischief. Heylyn's Life of Laud, 444. 2 Journals of the Commons, Dec. 16, 1640.-The matter came before the House again on the 7th June, 1641. 3 The letter is in Laud's Works, Vol. vi. 584. |