The King had no intimate friend and adviser to take Buckingham's place; Bishop Laud had perhaps the most influence with him, but chiefly as concerned the Church, and the State only through it. The Earls of Carlisle, Dorset and Holland were ornamental members of the Court, though they sat in the Council. Lord Coventry was Lord Chancellor, Sir Richard Weston was created Earl of Portland and was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Sir John Cooke and Sir Dudley Carleton were Secretaries of State. Kings were still expected to be their own Prime Ministers, and always were so in fact, except when favouritism or helplessness placed some other person in the foremost place of influence.

When Parliament met again in 1629, and the King requested them to pass the grant of tonnage and poundage for life, they chose rather to consider the complaint of a merchant from whom it had been illegally collected. Also they announced that the business of kings of earth must give place to the business of the King of heaven. This meant that they were about to make a fresh attack on Dr. Montagu, who had recently been made Bishop of Chichester. When confirmed according to custom, in Bow Church, a bookseller named Jones had protested against him, and the Commons would fain have made out that this invalidated his election, but the case was argued by counsel and the law proved to be against them. They had a committee of religion, of which Mr. Pym was the chairman. It was said of him that he had so little religion of his own, that he had the more time for looking after other people's. Complaints were made that not one Papist had been hanged for becoming a priest! Also that Arminianism, the spawn of Popery, as it was called, was predominant. Pym proposed a conference with the Lords on these heads, and a petition was drawn up that a solemn fast day might be held on behalf of the lamentable state of the Reformed Churches abroad.

The King replied that in his opinion fighting would serve the Protestants abroad better than fasting, and again pressed for the grant of tonnage and poundage, but in vain. The Commons were resolved to attend to nothing till they had suppressed the tokens of a Catholic spirit which they hated so bitterly. In 1571, an edition of the Thirty-nine Articles' had appeared, in which the Puritan spirit had led to the omission of the words that the Church hath authority in controversies of faith. These had been restored, to the displeasure of the Puritans, and still more to their anger, the King had set forth a declaration, forbidding the Article on Justification by Faith to be explained otherwise than in its literal and grammatical sense.

This declaration was hotly denounced by Sir John Eliot as enslaving men's consciences. It never occurred to him that he was enslaving the consciences of those whom he termed Arminians. Other members indulged in invectives against the recent appointments of men of strong Church principles. For the first time the member for Hunt

ingdon, Oliver Cromwell, stood up and spoke against such promotions. Complaints were drawn up against Bishops Laud, Neile, Montagu and Mainwaring, and it was demanded that the book published by the latter should be burnt.

The King had put himself in the wrong by suppressing the edition of the Petition of Right in the form in which it had stood at last, and printing it with the evasive answer he had made at first, and had been forced to abandon. This proceeding did him much harm, and raised a distrust of his good faith, which envenomed the further discussions. The refusal to grant the supplies until the complaints of the injured had been heard was reiterated, and the attacks on the Bishops continued. Sir John Eliot was in the midst of a speech, strongly denouncing the whole system of government, when he was interrupted by the Speaker, Sir John Finch, who delivered a message from the King that the House was to adjourn for a week. Several members, holding that the House alone had the power to settle its adjournments, declared this to be a vexatious interference, and Eliot went on with the business in hand, and called on the Speaker to read a paper. The Speaker said he could not do so, the House being adjourned, and thereupon tried to rise from his chair, but Denzil Hollis and Mr. Valentine actually held him down in his chair, while other members locked the doors of the House and flung the keys on the table. Hollis swore they would sit as long as they pleased, but several gentlemen rushed to the assistance of the Speaker. He was hotly abused by many, and shed abundance of tears, but he staunchly refused to sanction the proceedings of the House. The King sent the Serjeant-at-Arms to take away the mace, but the doors being locked there was no getting in, and the Commons drew up their protest before separating, adjourning themselves till the 10th of March.

But on that day Charles repaired to the House of Lords, and dissolved the Parliament, without, as usual, sending for the Commons. He observed, in his speech on this unpleasing occasion,' as he termed it, that he knew he had many good and dutiful subjects, but that there were some vipers amongst them who had cast this mist before their

eyes.

At the same time Charles caused those whom he considered as the chief vipers to be summoned before the Privy Council. These were Eliot, Hollis, Selden, Valentine, Corbin, Hobart, Hayman, Long, and Stroud, the members who had been most active in holding the Speaker in his chair, and persevering in the proceedings after the royal message had been received. They refused to answer out of the House for the things they had said in it, and were thereupon committed to the Tower, the King intending to proceed against them in the Star Chamber. The Judges were privately consulted, but did not take so decided a view of the illegality of their proceedings as was expected. Meantime, the prisoners sued for their writs of habeas corpus, and were brought before the Court of King's Bench. The counsel for the

Crown, Heath, the Attorney-General, declared that they were detained under the King's warrant for stirring up sedition. He was answered by an appeal to the Petition of Right, and he fell back on the old power of the Crown, of imprisoning at will, as an indefeasible right, which could not be interfered with by the petition, that being only a confirmation of the ancient privileges of the subjects; and he adduced old authorities to prove that bail could not be given for prisoners committed under the Royal Seal.

The judges, however, sent to the Lord Keeper to intimate that by law the prisoners might be bailed, but in the meantime they had been transferred to other prisons, so that the writ of habeas corpus had to be sued out afresh to other jailers; and the whole matter was put off till after the vacation.

At Michaelmas, after thirty weeks' imprisonment, they were required not only to find bail, but sureties for their future good conduct, and this they utterly refused to do. Then came the charge against Eliot for seditious language, and Hollis and Valentine for the tumult in the House. They declared that they were not answerable to any other Court for what was done in the House, and refused to put in any other plea. Whereupon Mr. Justice Jones sentenced them to be imprisoned during the King's pleasure, Eliot to pay £2000, Hollis £1000, Valentine, £500, Long, who had sat in Parliament after being made sheriff, was also fined 2000 marks, and imprisoned.

Eliot was a man of great piety and a highly cultivated mind, who acted throughout from a sense of duty, regardless of personal consequences. The letters to his family, written in declining health, while he wasted away in prison, and no petitions in his favour were listened to, have excited general pity and indignation at the fate of such a patriot; but it is to be remembered on behalf of the other side, that he had led on what Charles could not but regard as seditious attacks on the power of the Crown, which the King held himself bound to preserve; that his persistent attacks on Buckingham had resulted in Felton's assassination, and that the Petition of Right itself seemed to Charles and his lawyers an encroachment extorted by force. Once granted, it ought not to have been eluded, and Charles would have done well to have freely accepted the reasonable demands of the people in State matters; but he had been bred up in traditions that absolutism was the privilege and duty of a king. He saw it enjoyed by all his fellow sovereigns. Even Gustavus Adolphus held himself only responsible to his Maker, and the endeavours of Parliament to control the royal will, and secure concessions which they called ancient rights, seemed to Charles seditious clamours, which he had every right to silence and elude.

And there lay his snare-that he tried to elude, where direct opposition had failed.

It was during the time that the prosecution of the members was pending, that the heir to the throne was born, on the 29th of May,

1630. He was baptized as Charles, and throve apace, but his mother's description of him during his first year, in her letters to her old favourite, Madame de St. George, is most comical: He is so ugly that I am ashamed of him, but his size and fatness supply the want of beauty. I wish you could see the gentleman, for he has no ordinary mien. He is so serious in all he does, that I cannot help deeming him far wiser than myself.'

Disputes between Charles and Henrietta had long ago ceased, and they were a most affectionate pair: indeed, the Puritans looked with disfavour on their union, being entirely persuaded that there was a deeply laid scheme for re-establishing the Roman Church.

A Scottish physician named Leighton, living in London, put forth a book named Sion's Plea, in which he denounced the Queen as a Canaanitish woman, a daughter of Heth, and an idolatress; rejoiced in the murder of Buckingham, praised Felton, and called the Bishops ravens and magpies that preyed on the State. He was brought before the Star Chamber and sentenced to be whipped, to have his nose slit and his ears cropped, the usual punishment for libel. He escaped to Bedford, but was captured and underwent his punishment.

6

Puritanism was exceedingly strong in London, and the endeavours made by Laud, as diocesan, to restore due reverence to Divine worship, and to bring praise and prayer to their due place rather than sermons, seemed to them part of the supposed Romanist conspiracy, and perfectly infuriated them. Kneeling, bowing at the Holy Name and Doxology, were freshly enjoined, and this caused a great outcry; and when Laud consecrated two churches, St. Catherine Cree and St. Giles's-inthe-Fields, with a service compiled by Bishop Andrewes from the old Pontifical, the same, in fact, as is in constant use at present, the whole party were greatly offended. They actually supposed the words from the opening Psalm, the 24th, Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in,' to be intended to apply to the entrance of the Bishop in procession. A devotional book of Dr. Cosin also raised a fierce storm. The ladies of Queen Henrietta's Court, struck with the regularity with which their Roman Catholic coadjutors observed their hours of prayer, wished for something to assist them in systematic devotion, and Dr. Cosin drew up a beautiful manual adapted to the canonical hours, and based on each of the six petitions of the Lord's Prayer. It is difficult to conceive how irreverent, shocking, and formal this appeared to the Puritans. The cozening devotions of Dr. Cosin,' as they termed the book, was genuinely held by sincerely good and earnest men to be full of fatal error, by its very regularity.

In 1630 the Earl of Pembroke, Chancellor of the University of Oxford, died, and in spite of the efforts of the Calvinistic party, Laud was elected in his stead. Already, as President of St. John's, he had been a great benefactor to the University, having enriched the library with an immense number of manuscripts in Greek, Hebrew, and other

Eastern languages, and he proceeded to enlarge the buildings of the old library to receive them. His vigour and liberality were everywhere felt. He was adding to and rebuilding St. John's, his own college; he caused St. Mary's, the University Church, to be repaired and a porch added to it; set up a Greek press at Oxford and in London, and made his hand felt in enforcing the observance of all the college statutes, which were almost forgotten or neglected. As Bishop of London he raised contributions for the restoration of St. Paul's Cathedral, which had been utterly neglected ever since the time of Bishop Bancroft. Inigo Jones was his architect, and raised buildings of a character more Byzantine than anything else, called Palladian, from the Italian Palladio, with a peculiar original beauty of their own, though neither exactly Greek nor exactly Gothic, and bearing the impress of a great man. The King bore the whole expense of the grand portico of St. Paul's, and was also building the magnificent palace of Whitehall, planned by Inigo Jones, and begun in the time of James I. The ceilings of the banqueting house were painted by the great Fleming, Rubens; and altogether, Whitehall, with its seven courts and splendid symmetry, was one of the most magnificent palaces ever inhabited by royalty.

Rubens was a knight and man of family, and through him propositions for peace with Spain were first made. Charles was already at peace with France. He could hardly undertake a foreign war, for he was resolved to avoid calling another Parliament except as a last resource. And the endeavour to carry on Government without parliamentary grants led to expedients which intensified all the discontents of the country party, and did much to justify the determined spirit of resistance which was biding its time.

Queen Elizabeth had had considerable private property of the Crown to fall back upon, but a large portion of this had been squandered on favourites by James I.; and Charles had besides to maintain his sister and all her children out of it; nor had he Elizabeth's utter callousness to the sufferings of her soldiers and sailors. Thus money had to be raised in every possible way. The tonnage and poundage continued to be levied, and rates on merchandise were raised.

Also, whereas royal property, such as the forests and other open ground, had been gradually clipped and nibbled by settlers at the borders, all such encroachments were diligently examined into, and compensation for the past unpaid rent was demanded. All gentlemen of a certain amount of property were, by ancient custom, supposed to come and receive knighthood from the Sovereign, and to pay a certain fee, and baronets' heirs on their father's death, had also to be admitted regularly into the order of knighthood. The custom had, however, fallen into desuetude, and many squires grudged the expense of an empty title. These had neglected the former summons of the heralds to come to receive the accolade at the coronation, and they now were called upon, not only to come and be knighted, but to pay a fine for