CHAP. II WENTWORTH 29 committee; how unheard of a part it was for a few petty clerks to presume to make articles of faith. . . . But those heady and arrogant courses, they must know, I was not to endure; but if they were disposed to be frantic in this dead and cold season of the year, would I suffer them to be heard either in convocation or in their pulpits. (Then he gave them five specific orders.) This meeting then broke off; there were some hot spirits, sons of thunder, amongst them, who moved that they should petition me for a free synod. But, in fine, they could not agree among themselves who should put the bell about the cat's neck, and so this likewise vanished. All this marks precisely the type of man required to deal with ecclesiastics and rapacious nobles alike. The English colonist and his ecclesiastical confederate and ally were the enemy, and nobody has ever seen this so effectually as Strafford saw it. Bishops were said to be displaced with no more ceremony than excisemen. The common impression of Wentworth is shown in an anecdote about Williams, afterwards Archbishop of York. When the court tried to pacify Williams with the promise of a good bishopric in Ireland, he replied that he had held out for seven years against his enemies in England, but if they sent him to Ireland he would fall into the hands of a man who within seven months would find out some old statute or other to cut off his head. The pretty obvious parallel has often been suggested between Strafford and Richelieu; but it is no more than superficial. There is no proportion between the vast combinations, the immense designs, the remorseless rigours, and the majestic success with which the great cardinal built up royal power in France and subjugated reactionary forces in Europe, and the petty scale of Wentworth's eight years of rule in Ireland. To frighten Dean Andrews or Lord Mountnorris out of their wits was a very different business from bringing Montmorencys, Chalais, Marillacs, Cinq-Mars, to the scaffold. It is true that the general aim was not very different. Richelieu said to the king: "I promised your Majesty to employ all my industry and all the authority that he might be pleased to give me to ruin the Huguenot party, to beat down the pride of the great, to reduce all subjects to their duty, and to raise up his name among other nations to the height at which it ought to be." Strafford would have said much the same. He, too, aspired to make his country a leading force in the councils of Europe, as Elizabeth had done, and by Elizabeth's patient and thrifty policy. Unlike his master of flighty and confused brain, he perceived the need of system and a sure foundation. Strafford's success would have meant the transformation of the state within the three kingdoms, not into the monarchy of the Restoration of 1660 or of the Revolution of 1688, but at best into something like the qualified absolutism of modern Prussia. As time went on and things grew hotter, Wentworth's ardent and haughty genius drew him into more energetic antagonism to the popular claim and its champions. In his bold and imposing personality they recognised that all those sinister ideas, methods, and aims which it was the business of their lives to overthrow, were gathered up. The precise date is not easily fixed at which Wentworth gained a declared ascendancy in the royal counsels, if ascendancy be the right word for a chief position in that unstable chamber. In 1632 he was made Lord Deputy in Ireland, he reached Dublin Castle in the following year, and for seven years he devoted himself exclusively to Irish administration. He does not seem to have been consulted upon general affairs before 1637, and it was later than this when Charles began to lean upon him. It was not until 1640 that he could prevail upon the king to augment his political authority by making him Lord-Lieutenant and Earl of Strafford. CHAP. II ARCHBISHOP LAUD 31 If Strafford was a bad counsellor for the times, and the queen a worse, Laud,1 who filled the critical station of Archbishop of Canterbury, was perhaps the worst counsellor of the three. Still let us save ourselves from the extravagances of some modern history. "His memory,' writes one, " is still loathed as the meanest, the most cruel, and the most narrow-minded man who ever sat on the episcopal bench" (Buckle). We entertain more unmitigated contempt for him," says another, "than for any character in history" (Macaulay). It is pretty safe to be sure that these slashing superlatives are never true. Laud was no more the simpleton and the bigot of Macaulay, than he was the saint to whom in our day Anglican high-fliers dedicate painted windows, or whom they describe as Newman did, as being "cast in a mould of proportions that are much above our own, and of a stature akin to the elder days of the church." Burnet, who was no Laudian, says that he "was a learned, a sincere and zealous man, regular in his own life, and humble in his private deportment; but he was a hot, indiscreet man, eagerly pursuing some matters that were either very inconsiderable or mischievous, such as setting the communion-table by the east wall of churches, bowing to it and calling it the altar, the breaking of lectures, the encouraging of sports on the Lord's day; . . . and yet all the zeal and heat of that time was laid out on these." The agent of the Vatican described him as timid, ambitious, inconstant, and therefore ill equipped for great enterprises. Whitelocke tells us that his father was anciently and thoroughly acquainted with Laud, and used to say of him that he was "too full of fire, though a just and good man; and that his want of experience in state matters, and his too much zeal for the church, and heat if he proceeded For a fearful diatribe against Laud by James Mill, see Bain's Life of James Mill, p. 290. in the way he was then in, would set this nation on fire." It was indeed Laud who did most to kindle the blaze. He was harder than anybody else both in the Star Chamber and the High Commission. He had a restless mind, a sharp tongue, and a hot temper; he took no trouble to persuade, and he leaned wholly on the law of the church and the necessity of enforcing obedience to it. He had all the harshness that is so common in a man of ardent convictions, who happens not to have intellectual power enough to defend them. But he was no harder of heart than most of either his victims or his judges. Prynne was more vindictive and sanguinary than Laud; and a Scottish presbyter could be as arrogant and unrelenting as the English primate. Much of Laud's energy was that of good stewardship. The reader who laughs at his injunction that divines should preach in gowns and not in cloaks, must at least applaud when in the same document avaricious bishops are warned not to dilapidate the patrimony of their successors by making long leases, or taking heavy fines on renewal, or cutting down the timber. This was one side of that love of external order, uniformity, and decorum, which when applied to rites and ceremonies, church furniture, church apparel, drove English puritanism frantic. "It is called superstition nowadays," Laud complained, 66 for any man to come with more reverence into a church, than a tinker and his dog into an ale-house." That he had any leaning towards the Pope is certainly untrue; and his eagerness to establish a branch of the Church of England in all the courts of Christendom, and even in the cities of the Grand Turk, points rather to an exalted dream that the Church of England might one day spread itself as far abroad as the Church of Rome. Short of this, he probably aspired to found a patriarchate of the three kingdoms, with Canterbury as the metropolitan CHAP. II ARCHBISHOP LAUD 33 centre. He thought the puritans narrow, and the Pope's men no better. Churchmen in all ages are divided into those on the one hand who think most of institutions, and those on the other who think most of the truths on which the institutions rest, and of the spirit that gives them life. Laud was markedly of the first of these two types, and even of that doctrinal zeal that passed for spiritual unction in those hot times he had little. Yet it is worth remembering that it was his influence that overcame the reluctance of the pious and devoted George Herbert to take orders. This can hardly have been the influence of a mean and cruel bigot. Jeremy Taylor, whose Liberty of Prophesying is one of the landmarks in the history of toleration, was the client and disciple of Laud. His personal kindness to Chillingworth and to John Hales has been taken as a proof of his tolerance of latitudinarianism, and some passages in his own works are construed as favouring liberal theology. That liberal theology would have quickly progressed within the church under Laud's rule, so long as outer uniformity was preserved, is probably true, and an important truth it is in judging the events of his epoch. At the same time Laud was as hostile as most contemporary puritans to doubts and curious search, just as he shared with his presbyterian enemies their hatred of any toleration for creed or church outside of the established fold. He was fond of learning and gave it munificent support, and he had the merit of doing what he could to found his cause upon reason. But men cannot throw off the spirit of their station, and after all his sheet-anchor was authority. His ideal has been described as a national church, governed by an aristocracy of bishops, invested with certain powers by divine right, and closely united with the monarchy. Whether his object was primarily doctrinal, to cast out the Calvinistic spirit, or the restoration of church ceremonial, it would be D |
