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Title: The Cabinet Portrait Gallery of British Worthies Vol 6 of 12
Date of first publication: 1846
Editor: Knight, Charles (1791-1873)
Date first posted: September 27 2012
Date last updated: September 27 2012
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This eBook was produced by: Marcia Brooks, L. Harrison
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  THE
  CABINET PORTRAIT GALLERY
  OF
  BRITISH WORTHIES.

  VOLUME VI.

  LONDON:
  CHARLES KNIGHT & CO., LUDGATE STREET.

  1846.




  London: Printed by W. CLOWES and SONS, Stamford Street.




PROSPECTUS.


'The Penny Magazine' has now been in the course of publication for
fourteen years; and _during the whole period the duties of Editor have
been discharged by_ Mr. KNIGHT, 'under the superintendence of the
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.' The time has arrived
when that 'superintendence' has merged in the individual
responsibility of the Editor.

Of the unexampled popularity of 'The Penny Magazine' it is unnecessary
here to speak. It has especially had the distinction of being the first
to diffuse, throughout the community, a source of enjoyment formerly
inaccessible except to the rich; it has made the productions of Art
cheap. The literature of 'The Penny Magazine' has invariably maintained
its ruling character,--that of dealing with general subjects in a grave
and earnest tone. Desirous only of advancing knowledge, it has laid no
claims to meretricious brilliancy. It has avoided, rather than sought,
the topics of the day. It has been a safe Miscellany, in which all
classes might find much information and some amusement.

The circulation of 'The Penny Magazine' is very large; its reputation
is unimpaired. But fourteen volumes having been completed in
accordance with the original intention of the work, which was to
combine miscellaneous information with expensive pictorial
embellishment, circumstances now point to the necessity of some
essential modification of plan. Left to his individual responsibility
in the conduct of the work, the Editor deems it his public duty to
take a new position, to enable him to carry out his views of what
should _now_ be the character of a widely circulated and eminently
cheap Miscellany. Such a periodical Work may command as high and as
various literary talents as the most lofty of its contemporaries: and
the best talents and acquirements may now be fitly employed in the
service of the people, instead of addressing themselves only to
readers of wealth and leisure. 'KNIGHT'S PENNY MAGAZINE' IS INTENDED
TO BE FOR THE PEOPLE OF 1846 WHAT 'THE PENNY MAGAZINE OF THE SOCIETY
FOR THE DIFFUSION OF USEFUL KNOWLEDGE' WAS FOR THE PEOPLE OF 1832.

Without any change in the objects for which 'The Penny Magazine' was
established--'to enlarge the range of observation, to add to the store
of facts, to awaken the reason, and to lead the imagination into
agreeable and innocent trains of thought,'--A NEW PENNY MAGAZINE may be
able to do much which its predecessor has, from the nature of its plan,
of necessity left undone. _Essentially a continuation of 'The Penny
Magazine' under the same Editorship_,--expecting the continued support
of the constant friends of that Miscellany,--it seeks a more extensive
circulation by aiming at _a wider range and a more varied character_. IT
WILL HENCEFORTH BE CHIEFLY A MAGAZINE OF READING. _Woodcuts_ will no
longer continue to be the prominent feature of the work; but will be
_frequently used_ as necessary illustrations and as specimens of Art. As
compared with 'The Penny Magazine,' the work now announced will be
printed on a larger sheet, but a smaller page; it will consist of
sixteen pages instead of eight; and will contain a much greater amount
of reading. It will be _printed in the best style_, _in a very clear
Type_; and the form being that of a HANDSOME PORTABLE BOOK, it will bind
in convenient Volumes four times a year, so as to constitute an
important addition to a 'Library for all Readers.'

This change of plan will allow not only increased variety, but general
expansion. _The articles will for the most part be longer_, permitting
more scope to individual writers. The connexion with AUTHORS OF
EMINENCE will be diligently sought, in the endeavour _to unite the
highest excellence with the lowest price_,--a combination of which no
reasonable man now doubts the practicability. To the one great object
of diffusing _useful knowledge_ will be added the constant desire to
make that _knowledge interesting_. The intention not to disregard some
_topics of the day_ will be subjected to the duty of treating such
topics with reference to a _permanent utility_. _Important subjects of
information_ will have their place in company with _amusing
narrative_, _real or fictitious_. Light sketches of _passing manners_
may freely range with sober essays on _permanent morals_; and the
highest obligations of _sacred truths_ may be enforced in _a cheerful
spirit_. _Old books_, our most precious legacies, may be analyzed and
quoted, while the _novelties of literature_, foreign as well as
English, are exhibited with honest praise or considerate blame. Whilst
the means of enjoyment within the reach of all, by the cultivation of
innocent and unexpensive pleasures,--_the love and study of nature_,
_horticulture_, _music_, _a taste for art_,--will be pointed out and
enlarged upon as some counterbalance to the inequalities of society,
the great practical objects of _social improvement_, which require the
stimulus of governments and associations to accomplish, will be
earnestly advocated. With reference to _public questions_, it is
scarcely necessary for the Editor to declare that he will avoid, as
carefully as ever, all party or polemical discussion; at the same time
not shrinking from the examination of opinions which he thinks
delusive and mischievous. An earnest desire for the advancement of the
great body of the people in knowledge and virtue, and therefore in
power and happiness, without violent changes in the constitution of
society, may be as efficient for good as the tawdry sentimentality
which holds all the high few to be oppressive, and the sickly
exclusiveness which believes all the humble many to be dangerous.

    'KNIGHT'S PENNY MAGAZINE' will be published, as previously
    indicated, in a Weekly Sheet, a Monthly Part, and a Quarterly
    Volume: and in all these forms it may hope to become a Fireside
    and a Travelling Companion, as universally sought as "in the most
    high and palmy" days of 'The Penny Magazine of the Society for the
    Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.'

    ⁂ NUMBER I. was published on Saturday, January 3, 1846; PART I. will
    be published on the 31st January; and VOLUME I. on the 31st March.




CONTENTS.


                       Page

  CHARLES I.              5

  STRAFFORD              27

  JOHN HAMPDEN           38

  ARCHBISHOP LAUD        50

  JOHN SELDEN            70

  ROBERT BLAKE           81




  CABINET PORTRAIT GALLERY
  OF
  BRITISH WORTHIES.




[Illustration: CHARLES I.]


The reign of Charles the First stands out by itself from all the other
English reigns since the beginning of the monarchy. We have had civil
wars in other reigns; but only in this a civil war of principles.
Opposite principles have struggled for the ascendancy in other reigns,
but only in this with the sword. Here is the only decided
turning-point, or hinge, as we may call it, in the progressive
movement of the constitution; the changes it has undergone at all
other times have been made gradually, and as it were by a bending
process; at this crisis it was forced, as if by a fracture, to
develop itself in altogether a new direction. The twenty years,
indeed, from 1640 to 1660, do make such a disruption as occurs nowhere
else in our history: they lie like a gulf beyond which everything is
old; on this side of which everything is comparatively new or modern.
Our original political system closes with the reign of Charles I.;
that system was then seen for the last time in its integrity. It never
was rebuilt from the ruin that then overtook it. For it is a great
mistake to suppose that even the Restoration was a restoration of the
spirit and actuating principle of that old system--that even the
misgovernment of the twenty-eight years which preceded, the Revolution
was at all a thing of the same nature with the monarchism which
prevailed before the meeting of the Long Parliament. Only think of a
House of Commons debating the exclusion of the next heir to the throne
under either Elizabeth or James I.! The truth is, that down to the
civil war the prerogative was, in the theory of the constitution,
above the law. It is not possible to deny it. There was nothing short
of the destruction of life (if even that was an exception) that might
not have been constitutionally done by the crown of its own authority.
The liberty of the subject was entirely at the mercy of the crown; any
man might at any time be apprehended and thrown into prison by the
government, and detained there without being brought to trial, for as
long as it chose. Men's property was scarcely better protected from
rights of purveyance, claims of wardship, and other arbitrary
exactions; if it was even held, which it scarcely was, that the crown
had no right of levying taxes in any circumstances by its own
authority. But upon that question we might refer to the decision of
the judges in the case of ship-money, and the arguments upon which it
was founded. Then, for security of person, any man might be charged
with a state crime, and in the absence of all evidence might thereupon
be put to the rack. Torture, indeed, was illegal, or contrary to law;
but it was according to prerogative, and it was in constant use,
because the prerogative, as we have said, was above the law. All this
ended with the reign of Charles I. He was our last prerogative, or, in
plain words, theoretically absolute, king.

He was the third son of the first of the Stewart kings of England,
James I., and of his wife Anne, daughter of Frederic II., king of
Denmark, whom James married in her sixteenth year, in 1589: he himself
being then twenty-three. Charles's two elder brothers were Henry (or
Henry Frederic), who was born in 1594, and died in 1612; and Robert,
of whom the genealogists only tell us that he died in infancy before
his father succeeded to the English crown. Charles was born at
Dunfermline, in Fife, on the 19th of November, 1600. Of four daughters
born to James and Anne, two were also older than Charles: Elizabeth,
who was born in 1596, and became the Electress Palatine and nominal
Queen of Bohemia; and Margaret, who was born in 1598, and died young.
The others, the only children whom James had after he came to England,
were Mary, who was born in 1605, and died in 1607; and Sophia, who was
born in 1606, and only lived two days. Charles, therefore, was the
youngest of the family who grew up, and, after the death of his
brother Henry, he and his sister Elizabeth, four years older than
himself, were all that remained to James of his seven children.

Spotswood says that "his christening was hastened because of the
weakness of the child, and that his death was much feared;" and, as no
authentic account makes mention of any bishop or even episcopally
ordained clergyman who officiated on the occasion, it has been
questioned whether he was really admitted with the usual ceremonies
into that church of which he is the only authoritatively recognised
saint and martyr. Be this as it may, when the family came to England,
"Baby Charles," by which designation and no other his father spoke and
wrote to him and of him to the end of his life, was committed to the
care of the lady of Sir Robert Cary, he who, having taken horse on the
instant, had brought James the first tidings of the death of
Elizabeth, and who was created Baron Cary in 1622, and Earl of
Monmouth in 1626. On the 6th of January, 1604, the child was created
Duke of York (the last person who bore that title having been Henry
VIII. in the lifetime of his elder brother Arthur), and was at the
same time made a Knight of the Bath. About two years after this, he
was put to be educated into the hands of Mr. Thomas Murray, who in
1621 was appointed Provost of Eton College, and died in 1623, when his
place was applied for by Bacon, recently deprived of his office of
lord chancellor, but was given to Sir Henry Wotton. It is remarkable
that this tutor of the future champion of the church was considered to
be by no means a very sound Episcopalian. They tried to get him to
take orders when he was made provost of Eton, as had been usual with
persons holding that place; but he fought shy. This is stated in a
letter to Buckingham by Bishop Williams, then lord keeper; and he adds
in a postscript, "I schooled him soundly against Puritanism, which he
disavows, though somewhat faintly." Charles is said to have proved an
apt scholar. It is told that one day when a number of the nobility and
bishops were assembled in the privy chamber, waiting for the king
coming out, the Prince of Wales took Archbishop Abbot's cap and put it
on his brother's head, saying, that if he was a good boy and minded
his book, he would one day make him Archbishop of Canterbury. Here
again we are reminded of Henry VIII., whose original destination is
also said to have been the church. Of the two Charles would certainly
have made the more suitable primate.

Charles became heir to the throne by the death of his elder brother, at
an age very little later than Henry VIII., or before he had completed
his twelfth year. But while Henry was created Prince of Wales almost
immediately, it was not till about four years after, or on the 4th of
November, 1616, that Charles was raised to that dignity. He succeeded to
the Dukedom of Cornwall, however, on his brother's death.

We hear scarcely any thing more of him till he became king, except his
famous scamper off to Spain with Buckingham in 1623. George Villiers,
a younger son of Sir Edward Villiers, of Brookesby, in Leicestershire,
had purchased the office of cup-bearer, and had come to court as such
in 1614. Early in the following year a plan was entered into, by the
principal persons about the king, for setting up the new-comer, whose
handsome person and elegant address had already excited the admiration
of his majesty, as a rival to the favourite Somerset. The king parted
with Somerset, with all his usual demonstrations of affection, on the
1st of August, 1615, and never saw him more. Meanwhile, on the
previous 23rd of April, Villiers had been made a gentleman of the
Privy Chamber, and on the following day had received the honour of
knighthood. After Somerset's dismissal and ruin, Villiers rose rapidly
to the height of greatness. In August, 1616, he was created Baron
Whaddon and Viscount Villiers; in January, 1617, Earl of Buckingham;
and Marquis of Buckingham in the beginning of the following year.
Meanwhile he had been made a Privy Counsellor and a Knight of the
Garter; and had been elevated to the office first of Master of the
Horse, and subsequently to that of Lord High Admiral. In July, 1618,
also, his mother had been created Countess of Buckingham for life. But
his honours and offices, rapid as their accumulation had been, very
faintly indicate his real power. Not only at court, but in every
department of the government, and in the church as well as in the
state, he was as nearly supreme as the royal favour could make him, at
a time when the king could do almost any thing he chose. All offices
and dignities were at his disposal; even causes at law were determined
by the judges in all the courts this way or that at his order; men of
all ranks were supplicants for his protection and patronage. Charles
is said to have at first, naturally enough, disliked Buckingham, but
James succeeded in making them friends. The affair of the Spanish
match, as it was called, began much about the same time with
Buckingham's career at court; and it was the chief public business
that occupied James's attention during the next seven or eight years.
He probably did not consider any other public object to be of equal
importance with that of procuring a daughter of one of the royal
houses of the first rank to be a wife for his son. The negotiation for
the hand of the Infanta Maria, sister of Philip IV., the reigning king
of Spain, was still in a somewhat uncertain though promising state,
when Charles and Buckingham set out, with James's consent, on their
extraordinary expedition. They left London privately on the 18th of
February, 1623, travelled through France in disguise, under the names
of John and Thomas Smith, and arrived unannounced in the dusk of the
evening of the 7th of March at the residence of the Earl of Bristol at
Madrid. Abundant particulars of this adventure are detailed in
Clarendon, in Howell's Letters, in the correspondence of the king with
his son and Buckingham published in the Hardwicke State Papers, and in
other books. It appears that the affair had been gone about with such
characteristic imprudence, that their departure was blown abroad a few
hours after they had left London; this we learn from a long letter
written by James on the 26th of February, beginning, "My sweet boys,
and adventurous knights, worthy to be put in a new romanso;" and
concluding, "Your poor old Dad is lamer than ever he was, both of his
right knee and foot, and writes all this out of his naked bed." "Dad,"
it is to be observed, is the reverential title by which Buckingham
always addresses his majesty; whose name of endearment, on the other
hand, for the favourite is Steenie, the Scotch diminutive of Stephen,
suggested, it is supposed, by Buckingham's resemblance to the
conventional representations of the young and handsome martyr. Their
arrival at Madrid is thus related by Howell, who was there at the
time:--"They alighted at my Lord of Bristol's house, and the Marquis
(Mr. Thomas Smith) came in first with a portmanteau under his arm;
then (Mr. John Smith) the prince was sent for, who staid a while on
t'other side of the street in the dark. My Lord of Bristol, in a kind
of astonishment, brought him up to his bed-chamber, where he presently
called for pen and ink, and dispatched a post that night to England,
to acquaint his majesty how in less than sixteen days he was come
safely to the court of Spain; that post went lightly laden, for he
carried but three letters. The next day came Sir Francis Cottington
and Mr. Porter, and dark rumours ran in every corner how some great
man was come from England; and some would not stick to say among the
vulgar it was the king. But towards the evening on Saturday the
marquis went in a close coach to court, where he had private audience
of this king, who sent Olivarez to accompany him back to the prince,
where he kneeled and kissed his hands and hugged his thighs, and
delivered how unmeasurably glad his Catholic majesty was of his
coming, with other high compliments, which Mr. Porter did interpret.
About ten o'clock that night the king himself came in a close coach
with intent to visit the prince, who, hearing of it, met him half-way;
and, after salutations and divers embraces, which passed in the first
interview, they parted late. . . . On Sunday following the king in the
afternoon came abroad to take the air, with the queen, his two
brothers, and the Infanta, who were all in one coach; but the Infanta
sat in the boot, with a blue ribbon about her arm, of purpose that the
prince might distinguish her; there were above twenty coaches besides,
of grandees, noblemen, and ladies, that attended them. And now it was
publicly known among the vulgar that it was the Prince of Wales who
was come; and the confluence of people before my Lord of Bristol's
house was so great and greedy to see the prince, that, to clear the
way, Sir Lewis Dives went out and took coach, and all the crowd of
people went after him. So the prince himself, a little while after,
took coach, wherein there were the Earl of Bristol, Sir Walter Ashton,
and Count Gondomar, and so went to the Prado, a place hard by, of
purpose to take the air, where they staid till the king passed by. As
soon as the Infanta saw the prince, her colour rose very high, which
we hold to be an impression of love and affection; for the face is
oftentimes a true index of the heart." The possession of the prince,
however, as ought to have been foreseen, raised the demands of the
Spanish court; and it was now proposed that before the marriage took
place the King of England should not only promise certain concessions
to his Roman Catholic subjects, but make some sort of acknowledgment
of the supremacy or special power of the Pope. In a letter written to
his "sweet boys," on the 17th of March, James observes that it has
ever been his way to go with the Church of Rome _usque ad
aras_--literally, as far as the altar, the meaning perhaps being that
what he principally stuck at was the dogma of transubstantiation. He
then runs on in the following curious and characteristic strain:--"I
send you also your robes of the order, which ye must not forget to
wear upon St. George's day, and dine together in them, if they can
come in time, which I pray God they may, for it will be a goodly sight
for the Spaniards to see my two boys dine in them. I send you also the
jewels, as I promised, some of mine, and such of yours, I mean both of
you, as are worth the sending. For my Baby's presenting his mistress,
I send him an old double cross of Lorrain, not so rich as ancient, and
yet not contemptible for the value; a good looking-glass, with my
picture in it, to be hung at her girdle, which ye must tell her ye
have caused it so to be enchanted by art magic, as, whensoever she
shall be pleased to look in it, she shall see the fairest lady that
either her brother or your father's dominions can afford. Ye shall
present her with two fair long diamonds set like an anchor, and a fair
pendant diamond hanging at them; ye shall give her a goodly rope of
pearls; ye shall give her a carguant or collar, thirteen great balls
rubies, and thirteen knots or conques of pearls; and ye shall give her
a head-dressing of two and twenty great pear pearls; and ye shall give
her three goodly peak pendant diamonds, whereof the biggest to be worn
at a needle in the midst of her forehead, and one in every ear. And
for my Baby's own wearing, ye have two good jewels of your own, your
round brooch of diamonds, and your triangle diamond with the great
round pearl; and I send you for your wearing the three brethren, that
ye know full well, but newly set; and the mirror of France, the fellow
of the Portugal diamond, which I would wish you to wear alone in your
hat with a little black feather; ye have also good diamond buttons of
your own, to be set to a doublet or jerkin. . . . . And now for the
form of my Baby's presenting of his jewels to his mistress, I leave
that to himself, with Steenie's advice and my lord of Bristol's; only
I would not have them presented all at once, but at the more sundry
times the better, and I would have the rarest and richest kept
hindmost." Meanwhile matters seemed to be going on as was to be
desired in what ought to have been considered the main respect. Here
is an extract from another letter of Howell's, addressed to Captain
Thomas Porter, and dated the 10th of July:--"I have seen the prince
have his eyes immoveably fixed upon the Infanta half an hour together
in a thoughtful speculative posture, which sure would needs be tedious
unless affection did sweeten it: it was no handsome comparison of
Olivarez, that he watched her as a cat doth a mouse. Not long since,
the prince, understanding that the Infanta was used to go some
mornings to the Casa de Campo, a summer-house the king hath on t'other
side the river, to gather May-dew, he rose betimes and went thither,
taking your brother (Endymion Porter) with him. They were let into the
house, and into the garden, but the Infanta was in the orchard; and
there being a high partition wall between, and the door doubly bolted,
the prince got on the top of the wall, and sprung down a great height,
and so made towards her. But she spying him first of all, the rest
gave a shriek and ran back. The old marquis that was then her guardian
came towards the prince and fell on his knees, conjuring his highness
to retire, in regard he hazarded his head if he admitted any to her
company. So the door was opened, and he came out under that wall over
which he had got in." Howell adds that he has seen him watch a long
hour together in a close coach in the open street to see the Infanta
as she went abroad. Yet he cannot affirm that they have ever talked
together in private; and whenever they have conversed in public, not
only his excellency, the English ambassador, has always necessarily
been present as interpreter, but King Philip too has taken his seat
hard by and overheard everything. A most uncomfortable courtship.
Among other attractions that the English Prince brought with him, or
that were sent after him, was, it appears, the court fool or jester.
"Our cousin Archy," says Howell, "hath more privilege than any, for he
always goes with his fool's coat where the Infanta is with her meninas
and ladies of honour, and keeps a blowing and blustering among them,
and flurts out what he lists."

Jester and jewellery, however, romantic expedition and Romanistic
concessions, all in the end availed nothing. The only person who seems
to have acted throughout with steadiness and sincerity was the Earl of
Bristol. James, much as his heart had long been set upon this Spanish
match, had hardly given his consent to the project of the prince's
journey when he repented, and in the absence of his son and the
favourite he was like a child deprived of its playthings. His letters
soon began to express the greatest impatience for their return. On the
11th of May he had been weak enough to send the prince, at the request
of the latter, a warrant in the following terms:--"We do hereby
promise, by the word of a king, that whatsoever you, our son, shall
promise in our name, we shall punctually perform." "It were a strange
trust," he writes in the accompanying letter to the prince and
Buckingham (by this time elevated to the rank of a duke), "it were a
strange trust that I would refuse to put upon my only son, and upon my
best servant. I know such two ye are will never promise in my name but
what may stand with my conscience, honour, and safety, and all these I
do fully trust with any one of you two: my former letter will show you
my conceit [conception of matters], and now I put the full power in
your hands, with God's blessing on you both, praying him still, that,
after a happy success there, ye may speedily and happily return, and
light in the arms of your dear Dad." But even their success or failure
speedily becomes a matter of no consequence, so that he may have them
back. Writing again on the 14th of June he urges them, if they can by
any means contrive to get leave, to come away, in any case, and give
over all treaty, at once. "And this," he adds, "I speak without
respect of any security they can offer you, except ye never look to
see your old Dad again, whom I fear ye shall never see, if you see him
not before winter. Alas, I now repent me sore that ever I suffered you
to go away. I care for match nor nothing, so I may once have you in my
arms again; God grant it--God grant it--God grant it!
Amen--amen--amen! I protest ye shall be as heartily welcome as if ye
had done all things ye went for, so that I may once have you in my
arms again; and God bless you both, my only sweet son, and my only
best sweet servant, and let me hear from you quickly with all speed,
as ye love my life. And so God send you a happy and joyful meeting in
the arms of your dear Dad." Again, on the 5th of August, he writes, "I
have no more to say, but if you hasten you not home, I apprehend I
shall never see you, for my extreme longing will kill me." But it had
already been determined by Buckingham that the affair should not go
on. He and the Spanish prime minister or favourite, Olivarez, had
quarrelled; and, instead of a matrimonial alliance, it had now become
the desire of both to bring about a war between the two countries. It
was arranged therefore that James should send a formal order
commanding his son to return home, which he did on the 10th of August.
On its arrival at Madrid, Charles immediately intimated his intention
of obeying it, but proposed to leave full powers with the Earl of
Bristol to have the marriage solemnized by proxy as soon as a
dispensation should come from the new pope, for the death of Gregory
XV. was held to render the one already obtained from him inoperative.
After promising upon oath that Bristol should act upon the said powers
within ten days after the dispensation should make its appearance,
Charles parted from the Spanish king, on the 9th of September, with
every profession of affectionate regard on both sides. The poor
Infanta now assumed the title of Princess of England, and had a court
formed for her as such. Nevertheless, soon after Charles and
Buckingham got home, express orders were sent to Bristol to proceed
no further in the business; and the enmity of Spain and the late
solemn contract were equally set at defiance.

This first public transaction in which Charles figured was not
calculated to strike the world with admiration of the openness and
sincerity of his nature. Besides the part he acted in making his
escape from Spain and from the match, it may be doubted if even his
apparent attachment to Buckingham was more than a show and a pretence.
Their characters were so dissimilar, or rather so opposite, that any
real regard or sympathy between them seems impossible. Or, if Charles,
with his outward decorum of life and professed principles of religion
and virtue, did consort intimately with so reckless a libertine as
Buckingham, he must have been a great dissembler. But what perhaps
gives us the worst impression of him is his treatment of the lady.
Notwithstanding all his elaborate ostentation of gallantry, it cannot
be believed, looking to his hollow and heartless leave-taking, that he
had ever cared for her. But he had assumed the character of a lover,
and he thought that to sit for half an hour in a thoughtful
speculative posture with his eyes fixed upon the object of his
pretended passion, like a cat watching a mouse, was the way to perform
such a part. We do not recollect that in his letters to his father he
ever expresses any admiration of the Infanta. It is not improbable
that he had already been captivated or at least prepossessed by the
superior attractions of the French Princess, Henrietta Maria, daughter
of Henry IV., and sister of the reigning king, Louis XIII., whom, it
is said, he and Buckingham had seen at a ball as they passed through
Paris on their way to Spain. At all events, as soon as the Spanish
Infanta had been shaken off, a negotiation was opened for the hand of
this daughter of France; and, after some difficulties and delays, the
marriage was at last agreed upon, in November of the following year,
1624. The marriage was celebrated at Paris on the 1st of May, 1625,
the Duke of Chevreuse acting as proxy for the bridegroom; and the
bride arrived in England on the 12th of June. Our epistolary friend
Howell, who saw her at her landing, describes her as "in true beauty
beyond the long-wooed Infanta;" "for she," he proceeds, "was of a
fading flaxen hair, big-lipped, and somewhat heavy-eyed; but this
daughter of France, this youngest branch of Bourbon, is of a more
lovely and lasting complexion, a dark brown. She hath eyes that
sparkle like stars; and, for her physiognomy, she may be said to be a
mirror of perfection." And Lord Kensington, who had been sent to
negotiate the marriage, thus writes to the prince from Paris, on the
26th of February, 1625, in a letter which is preserved in the
Cabala:--"You will find a lady of as much loveliness and sweetness to
deserve your affection as any creature under heaven can do. And, Sir,
by all her fashions since my being here, and by what I hear from the
ladies, it is most visible to me, her infinite value and respect unto
you. Sir, I say not this to betray your belief, but from a true
observation and knowledge of this to be so. I tell you this, and must
somewhat more in way of admiration of the person of Madame; for the
impressions I had of her were but ordinary, but the amazement
extraordinary to find her, as I protest to God I did, the sweetest
creature in France. Her growth is very little short of her age, and
her wisdom infinitely beyond it. I heard her discourse with her
mother, and the ladies about her, with extraordinary discretion and
quickness. She dances (the which I am a witness of) as well as ever I
saw any creature. They say she sings most sweetly. I am sure she looks
so." Even the austere Sir Symonds d'Ewes, when he saw her at dinner at
Whitehall after her marriage, thought her "a most absolute delicate
creature." "Besides," adds the strait-laced Puritan, "her deportment
amongst her women was so sweet and humble, and her speech and looks to
her other servants so mild and gracious, as I could not abstain from
divers deep-fetched sighs, to consider that she wanted the knowledge
of the true religion." Her eye in particular has been celebrated in
Waller's verse, where it is said that it might

                "on Jove himself have thrown
      As bright and fierce a lightning as his own."

And in truth it was soon found that the lightning would sometimes
become rather too fierce, and that the little woman could upon
occasion put on a scowl worthy of Juno herself.

But before the actual celebration of his marriage, though after the
affair had been finally arranged, Charles had lost his father. James
died on the 27th of March, 1625; and Charles became king. Before
presenting such a rapid summary as our limits will permit of the
history of his reign, we will advert for a moment longer to those
personal and domestic matters which come more properly within the
scope of biography.

The union of Charles and his queen was by no means a harmonious one
for some time at first. For this there would appear to have been two
principal causes: on the one side, the influence of her French
attendants, clergy, women, and others, with Henrietta; on the other,
the equal ascendancy maintained over her husband by Buckingham. There
are two letters in the Hardwicke State Papers, from Charles to
Buckingham, then at Paris, both dated from Hampton Court on the same
day, the 20th of November, 1625, less than six months after the
queen's arrival in England, in the first of which he intimates his
intention of cashiering or dismissing her monsieurs, on the ground of
their attempting to steal away his wife (perhaps the meaning is, to
steal away her affections), and of their making feuds with his own
subjects; and in the second of which he says, "You know what patience
I have had with the unkind usages of my wife, grounded upon a belief
that it was not in her nature, but made by ill instruments, and
overcome by your persuasions to me that my kind usages would be able
to rectify those misunderstandings. I hope my ground may be true, but
I am sure you have erred in your opinion; for I find daily worse and
worse effects of ill offices done between us, my kind usages having no
power to mend anything. Now necessity urges me to vent myself to you
in this particular, for grief is eased being told to a friend;" &c.
But the most detailed account we have of his grievances, from the
unfortunate husband, is in a letter of instructions despatched by him
from Wanstead, on the 12th of July, in this same year, to Lord
Carlton, then English ambassador at the French court, a copy of which
was found in his own hand among his papers taken by the parliamentary
army at Naseby, in 1645, and soon after printed under the title of
'The King's Cabinet Opened.' This curious statement is far too long to
be given in full; but two or three sentences may be quoted. His
majesty begins by referring to the knowledge which both the French
king and his mother already have of the unkindness and distastes which
had fallen out between his wife and himself, "which hitherto," he
continues, "I have borne with great patience (as all the world knows),
ever expecting and hoping an amendment; knowing her to be but young,
and perceiving it to be the ill crafty counsels of her servants for
advancing of their own ends, rather than her own inclination." Their
quarrelling began a very short time after their marriage. "Madame St.
George," says his majesty, "taking a distaste because I would not let
her ride with us in the coach, when there was women of better quality
to fill her room, claiming it as her due (which in England we think a
strange thing), set my wife in such an humour of distaste against me,
as, from that very hour to this, no man can say that ever she used me
two days together with so much respect as I deserved of her." And then
he relates various instances of her contumacy and violence;
concluding, "Thus having so long patience with the disturbance of that
that should be one of my greatest contentments, I can no longer suffer
those that I know to be the cause and fomenters of these humours to be
about my wife any longer; which I must do, if it were but for one
action they made my wife do, which is, to make her go to Tyburn in
devotion to pray; which action can have no greater invective made
against [it] than the relation." The affair here referred to was a
pilgrimage which Queen Henrietta's confessor made her perform one
morning, barefoot, all the way across Hyde-park, to the gallows at
Tyburn, on arriving at which she knelt and prayed to the Roman
Catholic sufferers who had been executed there in the two preceding
reigns, as so many saints and martyrs.[A] It was an act certainly for
which Charles might have been justified in locking her up as gone out
of her senses. But he satisfied himself with a milder course. He had
already, on the 1st of July, gone to Somerset House, where the queen's
foreign establishment was lodged, and had told the monsieurs and
madames that he neither could nor would any longer endure their
conduct; but finding they would take no hint, he was obliged a few
weeks after to employ stronger measures. We find him on the 7th of
August writing to Buckingham, in a letter printed by Sir Henry Ellis,
"Force them away, drive them away, like so many wild beasts, and so
the devil go with them." Accordingly they were all sent off a few days
after in a string of about forty coaches to Dover, which they reached
after a journey of four days, and whence they were transported to
France on the 12th of August. The Roman Catholic account is that there
were only sixty of them, and this appears to have been their original
number; but they are said to have received large accessions while
here, and one enumeration makes them to have amounted, when they were
turned off, to four hundred and forty in all, besides children. It is
affirmed that the keeping of them cost 240_l._ a day; and that the
payment of their debts, and of some presents and pensions bestowed
upon them at their departure, absorbed not less than 50,000_l._ Queen
Henrietta became a manageable wife after she was thus taken out of the
hands of her French priests and waiting-women; nay, she came, as was
generally believed, to manage her husband, who acquired for the rest
of his life the reputation of extreme uxoriousness, or obsequiousness
to the counsels and wishes of his wife. But in how far she is
chargeable with having been, as has been represented, the instigator
of some of his worst mistakes, or of those parts of his conduct which
would seem to have principally occasioned his misfortunes and eventual
ruin, may be doubted. There was enough in Charles's own character, and
indeed almost in his position, whatever his character had been, to
occasion and to account for all that happened.

At his accession circumstances and the minds of men were ripe for a
renewal of that struggle between the popular and the monarchical
principles of the constitution, which his predecessor had with
difficulty put down when it broke out in the parliament assembled in
1621. Charles began his reign by retaining as his chief adviser the
unpopular, unprincipled, and incapable Buckingham. And Buckingham's
first proceeding was to commence hostilities against Spain, and thus
to involve his master in pecuniary difficulties, which offered to the
popular party an opportunity of pursuing their objects too promising
to be neglected.

The reign commenced accordingly with a contest between the king and
the parliament, the latter firmly refusing to grant the supplies
demanded by his majesty until they had obtained both a redress of
grievances and a limitation of the prerogative. Charles on his part
met the resistance of the parliament both by insisting upon preserving
the prerogative entire and by boldly putting it in force. In the
course of this first contest three parliaments were successively
called together and dismissed. The first met on the 18th of June,
1625, and was dissolved the 12th of August, in the same year; the
second met the 6th of February, 1626, and was dissolved, before it had
passed a single act, the 15th of June; the third met the 17th of
March, 1628, was suddenly prorogued the 26th of June, was called
together for a second session the 20th of January, 1629, and was
finally dissolved the 10th of March of the same year. All this time
the proceedings of the king continued to be of the most arbitrary
character. Money was collected from the people by force; the influence
of the crown was exercised in the most open manner to overawe the
judges, in cases in which the liberty of the subject was concerned;
the first privilege of parliament itself was violated by the seizure
of members of the House of Commons, and their commitment to prison,
for words alleged to have been spoken by them in debate. Nor is
Charles free from the charge of having resorted to manœuvring and
subterfuge to escape from the demands with which he was pressed. He is
especially exposed to the charge of such insincerity and indirectness
by his conduct in the affair of the Petition of Right, which was
passed in the first session of his third parliament, and to which he
was eventually compelled to give his assent. This was the greatest,
indeed it may be said the only, victory obtained by the popular party
in the course of the struggle; and it was rendered ineffectual for the
present, by the temporary success of the king in the plan which he at
length adopted of governing without parliaments. Immediately before
entering on this line of policy, he wisely made peace, first, on the
14th of April, 1629, with France, with which power he had entered (in
July, 1626) into a foolish war, every operation in which was a
disgraceful failure; and secondly, on the 5th of November, 1630, with
Spain, the war with which had not been more creditable to his arms.
Meanwhile also, the assassination of Buckingham, on the 23rd of
August, 1628, had rid him of that evil adviser.

His principal advisers now were the queen, Bishop Laud, and Wentworth,
created Earl of Strafford. The state of things now established, and
which may be described as the complete subjugation of the constitution
by the prerogative of the crown, lasted for nearly eight years. The only
memorable attempt at resistance was that made by Hampden, who refused to
pay his assessment of ship-money, and whose case was argued before the
twelve judges, in April, 1637, and decided in favour of the crown.
Meantime, however, the opposition of the people of Scotland to the
episcopal form of church government, which had for some time been
established among them, suddenly burst out into a flame. The first
disturbances took place at Edinburgh, in the end of July, 1637; and by
the beginning of the following year the whole country was in a state of
insurrection against the royal authority. In these circumstances Charles
called together his fourth parliament, which met on the 13th of April,
1640. The temper which the members showed, however, induced him to
dissolve it on the 5th of May following. But the Scotch army having
entered England on the 20th of August, he again found himself forced to
have recourse to the representatives of the people. The result was, the
meeting, on the 3rd of November, of a fifth parliament, which is
generally known under the name of the Long Parliament.

The first proceedings of this assembly amounted to entering into a
complete alliance with the Scottish insurgents. By one bill after
another, the king was stripped of all the most objectionable of his
prerogatives. The commons also voted that no bishop should have any
vote in parliament nor bear any sway in temporal affairs, and that no
clergyman should be in the commission of the peace. Of his advisers,
Laud was sent to the Tower, and Strafford was executed, in conformity
with an act of attainder, his assenting to which has always been
regarded as one of the greatest stains on the character of Charles.
Laud also, as is more particularly related in a subsequent page, was
executed after he had remained a prisoner in the Tower more than four
years. After having yielded everything else, however, Charles refused
his assent to the Militia Bill, which was presented to him in
February, 1642, the object of which was to transfer all the military
power of the kingdom into the hands of the parliament. The first blood
drawn in the civil war which followed was at the indecisive battle of
Edgehill, fought on Sunday, the 23rd of October, in that year. After
this the war extended itself over the whole kingdom. For some time
success seemed to incline to the royal side, and at the beginning of
the year 1644, throughout both the west and the north of England, all
opposition to the king was nearly subdued. In February of that year,
however, another Scottish army crossed the border, and on the 2nd of
July, at Marston Moor, the royalists sustained a defeat from the
combined Scottish and parliamentary forces, which proved a fatal blow
to the king's affairs. The brilliant exploits of the Marquis of
Montrose in Scotland, at the end of this year and the beginning of the
next, were thrown away in the circumstances in which his royal master
now was. At length, on the 14th of June, 1645, was fought the battle
of Naseby, which may be said to have finished the war. On the 5th of
May, 1646, Charles delivered himself up to the Scotch army encamped
before Newark, who, on the 30th of January, 1647, gave him up to the
commissioners of the English parliament. On the 3rd of June he was
forcibly taken by Cornet Joyce out of the hands of the commissioners,
and carried to the army then lying at Triplow Heath, and now in open
rebellion against their old masters of the parliament. On the 16th of
August he was brought by the army to Hampton Court, from which he made
his escape on the 11th of November, and eventually sought refuge with
Hammond, the parliamentary governor of the Isle of Wight. Here he was
detained a close prisoner in Carisbrook Castle till the 30th of
November, 1648, when he was seized by Colonel Ewer, and carried to
Hurst Castle, on the opposite coast of Hampshire, by an order of the
council of officers in the army. Meanwhile risings in his favour,
which had been attempted in various parts of the kingdom, were all
suppressed without difficulty by the now dominant army. An army in the
Presbyterian interest, which was advancing from Scotland under the
conduct of the Duke of Hamilton, was met on the 17th of August, at
Langdale, near Preston, by Cromwell, who, after completely routing it,
penetrated as far as Edinburgh, and reduced everything to subjection
in that quarter. On the 6th of December, Colonel Pride took possession
of the House of Commons, with a strong detachment of soldiers, and
cleared it by force of all the members, except the minority of about
a hundred and fifty, who were in the Independent interest. On the 23rd
the king was brought in custody to Windsor, and on the 15th of
January, 1649, to St. James's. On the 20th, he was brought to trial in
Westminster Hall, before what was designated the High Court of
Justice. Sentence of death was pronounced against him on the 27th, and
he was executed by decapitation, on a scaffold erected in front of the
Banqueting House at Whitehall, at two in the afternoon of the 30th.

Charles I. had eight children by Queen Henrietta, of whom six survived
him; namely, Charles, Prince of Wales, and James, Duke of York,
afterwards Kings of England; Henry, created, in 1659, Duke of
Gloucester; Mary, married to William, Prince of Orange, by whom she
became mother of William, afterwards King of England; Elizabeth, who
died a prisoner in Carisbrook Castle, September 8th, 1650, in her
fifteenth year; and Henrietta Maria, who married Philip, Duke of
Orleans, from whom, through a daughter, is descended the Royal family
of Sardinia.

The literary works attributed to King Charles have been collected and
published under the title of 'Reliquiæ Sacræ Carolinæ.' A list of them
may be found in Horace Walpole's 'Royal and Noble Authors.' They
consist chiefly of letters and a few state papers, and of the famous
'Eikon Basilike,' which first appeared immediately after the death of
the king; but his claim to the authorship of this work has been much
disputed, and is now generally considered to have been disproved. His
majesty, however, was master of an easy and occasionally forcible
English style, and he was a great friend to the fine arts, which he
encouraged in the early part of his reign.

The original authorities for the history of the reign of Charles I.
are very numerous. Among those of greatest importance may be mentioned
Rushworth's 'Historical Collections;' Whitelock's 'Memorials of
English Affairs;' Clarendon's 'History of the Grand Rebellion;' and
May's 'History of the (Long) Parliament.' The general reader will
find a sufficiently ample detail of the events of the time in the
histories of Rapin, Hume, and Lingard. The most important of the
recent works on the reign of Charles I. are those of Brodie, Godwin,
and D'Israeli. The subject of the authorship of the 'Eikon Basilike'
has been re-agitated of late by Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, Master of
Trinity College, Cambridge, in a work in which he contends that the
book was the production of King Charles.

[Footnote A: Dr. Lingard, after professing, in a note, to examine the
evidence upon which this charge rests, comes to the conclusion that it
was a mere fiction invented by the enemies of the queen and her
religion; but he takes no notice of the passage quoted in the text
from the king's own letter.]




[Illustration: STRAFFORD]


Thomas Wentworth, afterwards Earl of Strafford, was born in
Chancery-lane, London, on the 13th of April, 1593. He was the eldest
son of Sir William Wentworth, of Wentworth Woodhouse, in the county of
York, where his family are said to have been settled since the time of
the Conquest. His family was one of the most opulent as well as
ancient of the class known in England under the name of gentry, and
had frequently intermarried with the higher aristocracy. The estate
which Wentworth inherited from his father was worth 6000_l._ a year, a
very large sum at that time, probably equal to more than three times
the amount in the present day. ('Strafford's Letters and Dispatches,'
vol. ii., pp. 105, 106, folio edition, London, 1739, and Dr. Knowler's
Dedication, prefixed to them.) He received part of his education at
St. John's College, Cambridge. In 1611 he married the Lady Margaret
Clifford, the eldest daughter of Francis, earl of Cumberland. The
accuracy of this date as that of his first marriage, given by his
friend Sir George Radcliffe, appears to be established by a letter
dated 11th January, 1611, from Sir Peter Frechevile to his father Sir
William Wentworth; although the compilers of his Life in the
'Biographia Britannica' have chosen, in direct opposition to the
statement of Radcliffe, the old and intimate friend of Wentworth, to
place his marriage after his return from the Continent, towards the
end of 1612 (by the old mode of reckoning, according to which the
legal year began on the 25th of March, but by the new about the
beginning of 1613), instead of in 1611, before his going abroad.

The same letter also shows that he was from his early years of
studious and regular habits. He appears to have taken almost as much
pains as Cicero recommends for the education of an orator. Sir George
Radcliffe informs us that the excellence possessed by him in speaking
and writing he attained first by reading well-penned authors in
French, English, and Latin, and observing their expressions; secondly,
by hearing of eloquent men, which he did diligently in their sermons
and public speeches; thirdly, by a very great care and industry, which
he used when he was young in penning his epistles and missives of what
subject soever; but above all, he had a natural quickness of wit and
fancy, with great clearness of judgment, and much practice, without
which his other helps of reading and hearing would not have brought
him to that great perfection which he had obtained. "I learned one
rule of him," adds Sir George, "which I think worthy to be remembered;
when he met with a well-penned oration or tract upon any subject or
question, he framed a speech upon the same argument, inventing and
disposing what seemed fit to be said upon that subject before he read
the book; then reading the book, compare his own with the author, and
note his own defects, and the author's art and fullness; whereby he
observed all that was in the author more strictly, and might better
judge of his own wants to supply them." ('Strafford's Letters and
Dispatches,' vol. ii. p. 435.)

In some of Strafford's earlier letters, particularly those to Sir
George Calvert, principal secretary of state in the time of James I.,
there is, though no marks of profound scholarship, a somewhat pedantic
display of trite Latin quotations. From these however, though we may
judge so far of the extent of Strafford's scholarship, it would be
incorrect to estimate his abilities, for they are mostly confined to
his early letters, and, among them, to his letters to courtiers.

Upon his early habits still further light is thrown by some advice
which he gives to his nephew, Sir William Savile, in a letter dated
"Dublin Castle, 29th September, 1633." Advising him to "distrust
himself and fortify his youth by the counsel of his more aged friends
before he undertakes any thing of consequence;" he adds, "It was the
course that I governed myself by after my father's death, with great
advantage to myself and affairs, and yet my breeding abroad had shown
me more of the world than yours hath done; and I had natural reason
like other men, only I confess I did in all things distrust myself,
wherein you shall do, as I said, extremely well if you do so too."
('Letters and Dispatches,' vol. i. p. 169.)

The letter from which the above quotation is made contains so much
good advice, so well and so weightily expressed, that it may bear a
comparison with Burleigh's celebrated 'Advice to his Son;' the
resemblance in some passages is striking. With respect to the greater
part of this advice, particularly what regards economy and regularity
in the management of his private affairs, temperance in drinking, and
abstinence from gaming, it was the rule by which Wentworth shaped his
own conduct, and to which, according to Radcliffe, he strictly
adhered. The part of the advice to which he himself least adhered was
that recommending calmness and courtesy of demeanour; for even his
most intimate friend Sir George Radcliffe admits that "he was
naturally exceeding cholerick," and the actions of his life show that
in that particular he was never able thoroughly to subdue nature.

In the same year in which he was married Wentworth went into France,
having previously been knighted. He was accompanied by the Rev.
Charles Greenwood, fellow of University College, Oxford, as his
"governor," or travelling tutor, for whom he entertained the greatest
respect and regard to the end of his life. In February, 1613, he
returned to England. He was returned and sat for the county of York in
the parliament which began April 5th, 1614. Radcliffe's account as to
this date, though rejected by the writers in the 'Biographia
Britannica,' and Mr. MacDiarmid, is confirmed by Browne Willis's
'Notitia Parliamentaria,' vol. iii. p. 169: "Co. Ebor., Jo. Savile,
kt., Thomas Wentworth, kt. and bart., anno 12 Jac. I., began April 5,
1614, and continued till June 7, and was then dissolved." During this
short parliament, which continued only two months, Wentworth does not
appear to have spoken. Mr. Forster, his latest biographer, says that
he has examined the Journals, and finds no trace of Wentworth's
speaking on either side in the great struggle that was then going on.
('Life of Strafford,' in the 'Cabinet Cyclopædia;' 'Lives of Eminent
British Statesmen,' vol. ii. p. 197.)

In 1615 Wentworth was appointed to the office of custos rotulorum for
the west riding of the county of York, in the room of Sir John Savile;
an office of which Savile attempted to deprive him about two years
after, through the influence of the favourite, Buckingham, but without
success, though he succeeded afterwards. The result was a feud between
Wentworth and the Saviles, the father and son, Sir John Savile the
younger, afterwards Lord Savile.

In 1621 Wentworth was again returned to parliament for the county of
York; and this time he brought in Sir George Calvert, one of the
secretaries of state, along with him. In Michaelmas term he removed
his family from Wentworth Woodhouse to London. He took up his abode in
Austin Friars, where in 1622 he had a "great fever." When he began to
recover he removed, about July, to Bow, where shortly after his wife
the Lady Margaret died. On the 24th of February, 1625, he married the
Lady Arabella Hollis, a younger daughter of the Earl of Clare, a
lady, observes Radcliffe, "exceeding comely and beautiful, and yet
much more lovely in the endowments of her mind."

Hitherto, though Wentworth had not taken a very prominent part in the
proceedings of parliament, still he was considered to have acted with
the party that opposed the court, as appears from the fact of his
being, on the eve of the calling together of a new parliament, among
the number of those whom Buckingham attempted to disable from serving,
by having them pricked sheriffs of their respective counties. In
November, 1625, Wentworth was made sheriff of Yorkshire. A passage
from one of his letters at this time shows that he was never inclined
to go the lengths that some others did in resistance to the royal
prerogative. ('Strafford's Letters and Dispatches,' vol. i. p. 33.)

In May, 1627, he was committed a prisoner to the Marshalsea by the
lords of the council for refusing the royal loan; and about six weeks
after, his imprisonment was exchanged for confinement at the town of
Dartford in Kent, from which place he was not to go above two miles.
About Christmas he was released; and shortly after the third
parliament of Charles began, in which Wentworth served as knight for
Yorkshire. Wentworth had now resolved to make the court party more
aware of the extent of his talents than they yet appeared to be. On
the discussion of the general question of grievances he spoke with an
ability and spirit which proved to them that he might turn out such an
enemy, that he was worth having as a friend. It has been usual to
speak of Wentworth as an apostate: but he never appears to have been
at heart on the popular, or rather the parliamentary side. His whole
conduct, both before and after he became the king's minister, shows
that he considered the general movement in modern Europe to be not
towards democracy, but towards the establishment of absolute monarchy.
The several springs of Wentworth's conduct are now fully laid bare in
a manner that they could hardly be to his contemporaries, and in a
manner that few men's have ever been to after-ages, by the
publication of the two large folio volumes of his 'Letters and
Dispatches,' one of the most valuable collections of papers, both in a
political and historical point of view, ever made public. In that
collection there are two letters (Strafford, 'Letters and Dispatches,'
vol. i. pp. 34, 35) to Sir Richard Weston, chancellor of the
exchequer, containing very unequivocal overtures, the non-acceptance
of which at the time would seem to have produced the indignant
outbreak of patriotic eloquence above alluded to.

In June, 1628, the parliament ended. In July, Sir Thomas Wentworth,
having been reconciled to Buckingham, was created Baron Wentworth. The
death of Buckingham, soon after, removed the only obstacle to higher
honours. In Michaelmas term he was made Viscount Wentworth, Lord
President of the North, and a privy councillor.

The establishment of the Council of the North originated in the
frequent northern rebellions which followed Henry VIII.'s suppression
of the lesser monasteries, and extended over the counties of York,
Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Durham. The commission,
though apparently only one of oyer and terminer, contained a clause
authorising the commissioners to hear all causes real and personal,
when either of the parties was poor, and decide according to sound
discretion. This clause was declared by all the judges to be illegal.
James issued a new commission, by which the commissioners were not
ordered to inquire "per sacramentum bonorum et legalium hominum" (by
the oath of good and lawful men), or to be controlled by forms of law,
but were merely referred to certain secret instructions which were
sent down to the council. Against this, however, the judges had the
courage to protest, and to issue prohibitions on demand to the
president and council; and the instructions were ordered to be
enrolled, that the people might have some chance of knowing them.

Dr. Knowler, the editor of the 'Strafford Papers,' in the adulatory
dedication of them to his patron, the grandson of the Earl of
Strafford, gravely observes that "Sir Thomas Wentworth, who was a true
friend to episcopal government in the church, and to a limited
monarchy in the state, could have no reason, when the Petition of
Right was granted, to refuse to bear his share of toil and pains in
the service of the public, or to withstand the offer of those honours
his majesty was graciously pleased to make him, especially when it
gave him an opportunity of setting an example of a wise and just and
steady administration." Wentworth's acceptance of the office of
president of this council was a flagrant violation of the fundamental
principle of the Petition of Right. His career in the office too did
not belie the promise of its acceptance. One of his first acts was to
declare that he would lay any man by the heels who ventured to sue out
a prohibition in the courts at Westminster. (Rushworth, vol. ii. p.
159.) And one of the judges (Vernon), who had the courage to resist
these encroachments on the ancient laws of the land, Wentworth tried
hard to have removed from his office. (Strafford, 'Letters and
Dispatches,' vol. i. pp. 129, 130.) Indeed, like his friend and
coadjutor Laud, Wentworth never let slip an opportunity of expressing
his bitter dislike of the interference of the judges and common
lawyers with his scheme of governing, not by the laws of England, but
according to "sound discretion."

In January, 1631, Wentworth was made lord deputy of Ireland. The
principle on which he set about governing there was in substance the
same as that of his government in the presidency of York. "These
lawyers," he writes to the lord marshal, "would monopolise to
themselves all judicature, as if no honour or justice could be rightly
administered but under one of their bencher's gowns." (Strafford,
'Letters and Dispatches,' vol. i. p. 223.) And he adds, a line or two
after, "Therefore if your lordship's judgment approve of my reasons, I
beseech you to assist me therein, or rather the king's service, and I
shall be answerable with my head."

It is remarkable how frequently he alludes to this last as the test of
the soundness of the policy of his measures. They were in the end so
tested, and being found wanting, he was taken at his word; he was
called upon to pay, and paid the forfeit. One of the principal means
by which Wentworth sought to squeeze money out of the people of
Ireland was by holding a parliament.

Wentworth's political economy was not very sound, yet he saw far
enough to discover that to enrich the king, the way was, to begin by
enriching the people. "For this is a ground," he says, "I take with
me, that to serve your majesty completely well in Ireland we must not
only endeavour to enrich _them_, but make sure still to hold them
dependent upon the crown, and not able to subsist without _us_."
('Strafford's Letters and Dispatches,' vol. i. p. 93.) But the plan he
proposed does not seem certainly very well adapted for enriching the
people. "Which will be effected," he proceeds, "by wholly laying aside
the manufacture of wools into cloth or stuff there, and by furnishing
them from this kingdom; and then making your majesty sole merchant of
all salts on that side; for thus shall they not only have their
clothing, the improvement of all their native commodities (which are
principally preserved by salt), and their victual itself from hence
(strong ties and enforcements upon their allegiance and obedience to
your majesty); but a means found, I trust, much to advance your
majesty's revenue upon salt, and to improve your customs. The wools
there grown, and the cloths there worn, thus paying double duties to
your crown in both kingdoms; and the salt outward here, both inward
and outward there." He thus sums up the advantages of the measures
proposed:--"Holding them from the manufacture of wool (which, unless
otherwise directed, I shall by all means discourage), and thus
enforcing them to fetch their clothing from thence, and to take their
salt from the king (being that which preserves and gives value to all
their native staple commodities), how can they depart from us without
nakedness and beggary? Which in itself is so weighty a consideration,
as a small profit should not bear it down." ('Letters and Dispatches,'
vol. i. p. 193.)

In one particular he did benefit Ireland. At his own risk he imported
and sowed a quantity of superior flaxseed. The first crop having
succeeded, he next year laid out 1000_l._ on the undertaking, set up a
number of looms, procuring workmen from France and Flanders, and sent
a ship to Spain freighted with linen at his own risk. Thus began the
linen manufacture of Ireland, which in some measure verified
Wentworth's prediction that it would greatly benefit that country.
(Strafford, 'Letters and Dispatches,' vol. i. p. 473.)

Wentworth appears to have been of very infirm health, which, taken
with the general course of his education and his position in society,
will in part account for the acerbity and irritability of temper, and
the impatience of any opposition to his will, which throughout his
career involved him in so many personal quarrels. The number of
powerful personal enemies which Wentworth thus arrayed against himself
appears to us to be a proof of the want of real political talent of a
high order. A really wise politician, such as Oliver Cromwell for
example, does not raise up such a host of powerful personal enemies.
Laud gives a good hint about this in one of his letters. "And yet, my
lord," he says, "if you could find way do all these great services and
decline these storms, I think it would be excellent well thought on."
(Strafford, 'Letters and Dispatches,' vol. i. p. 479.)

In 1639 Charles raised Wentworth to the dignity of an earl, which he
had in vain solicited formerly. He was created Earl of Strafford and
Baron of Raby, and invested with the title of lord-lieutenant, or
lieutenant-general of Ireland--a title which had not been borne since
the time of Essex.

In 1640 the earl of Northumberland being attacked by severe illness,
the king appointed Strafford in his place, to the command of the army
against the Scots. He does not appear to have performed anything here
to make good either his own high pretensions or the character for
valour given him by some writers. Of his impeachment at the opening of
the Long Parliament, Clarendon gives the following account:--"It was
about three of the clock in the afternoon [of November 11, 1640] when
the Earl of Strafford (being infirm, and not well-disposed in health,
and so not having stirred out of his house that morning), hearing that
both houses still sate, thought fit to go thither. It was believed by
some (upon what ground was never clear enough) that he made that haste
there to accuse the Lord Say, and some others, of having induced the
Scots to invade the kingdom; but he was scarce entered into the House
of Peers, when the message from the House of Commons was called in,
and when Mr. Pym at the bar, and in the name of all the Commons of
England, impeached Thomas, earl of Strafford (with the addition of all
his other titles), of high treason."

On the 25th of November (1640), at a conference between the two houses
in reference to the subject of this impeachment, Mr. Pym made a
speech, in which he attempted, with considerable though unsuccessful
ingenuity, to prove that the earl of Strafford was guilty of treason,
on the ground that "other treasons are against the rule of the law,
but this is against the being of the law." The laws against treason in
England having been made to protect the king, not the subject, it
would be in vain to look in the Statute of Treasons, the 25th Edward
III. st. 5, c. 2, which at that time constituted the English law of
treason (the statutes of Henry VIII., making so many new treasons,
having been repealed by 1 Mary, c. 1), for any definition or
description, or even any mention of that of which Strafford was
accused, viz., an attempt to increase the power of the king, and to
depress that of a subject. Pym was partly aware of this, and he
endeavoured to meet it by saying that this treason, of which he
speaks, "is enlarged beyond the limits of any description or
definition." But though it was not to be supposed or expected that the
Statute of Treasons of Edward III. (25 Edward III. st. 5, c. 2), being
made to protect the king, not the subject, would provide specially for
the punishment of such attempts as those of Strafford; it does
nevertheless appear that Strafford was punishable for having become
the instrument for administering the government of the Council of the
North, carried on in direct violation of the Petition of Right, which
during the time of Strafford's being president of that council was the
law of the land. However the Commons changed their course and
introduced a bill of attainder, which was passed on the 21st of April,
in the Commons, and soon after in the Lords. The king with tears in
his eyes, and other demonstrations of weakness characteristic of him,
signed a commission for giving the royal assent to the bill, and then
made some feeble and unavailing efforts to save the life of his
obnoxious minister. "The resort to the bill of attainder," observes
Mr. Forster ('Life of Strafford,' p. 404), "arose from no failure of
the impeachment, as has been frequently alleged, but because in the
course of that impeachment circumstances arose which suggested to the
great leader of the popular cause the greater safety of fixing this
case upon wider grounds. Without stretching to the slightest extent
the boundaries of any statute, they thought it better at once to bring
Strafford's treason to the condemnation of the sources of all law."

Strafford was beheaded on Tower-hill on the 12th of May, 1641. In his
walk from the Tower to the place of execution his step and manner are
described by Rushworth as being those of "a general marching at the
head of an army, to breathe victory, rather than those of a condemned
man, to undergo the sentence of death." Within a few weeks after his
death, the parliament mitigated the penalties of their sentence to his
children. In the succeeding reign, the attainder was reversed, and his
son was restored to the earldom.




[Illustration: HAMPDEN]


John Hampden, one of the most distinguished of the patriots of
England, was the head and representative of an ancient and opulent
family, which had received the lands of Hampden, in Buckinghamshire,
from Edward the Confessor, and boasted to have transmitted its wealth,
honours, and influence, unimpaired and increasing, in direct male
succession, down to this the most illustrious name of the house. He
was the eldest son of William Hampden, of Hampden, and of his wife
Elizabeth, second daughter of Sir Henry Cromwell, of Hinchinbrooke, in
Huntingdonshire, and aunt of the Protector, Cromwell. John Hampden was
born in London in 1594, and at the age of three years came, by the
death of his father, into possession of the family estates, which,
besides the ancient seat and extensive domain in Buckinghamshire,
comprehended large possessions in Essex, Oxfordshire, and Berkshire.
He was brought up at the free grammar-school of Thame, in
Oxfordshire; entered as a commoner at Magdalen College, Oxford, in
1609; and was admitted student of the Inner Temple in 1613, where he
made considerable progress in the knowledge of common law. His
classical attainments also seem to have been respectable, since he was
associated, oddly enough, with Laud, then Master of St. John's, in
writing the Oxford gratulatory poems on the marriage of the Elector
Palatine and the Princess Elizabeth; from which sprung Prince Rupert,
who led the Royalist troops when Hampden received his death-wound. In
1619 he married, at Pyrton, in Oxfordshire, his first wife Elizabeth
Symeon, only daughter of Edward Symeon. Inheriting a noble property,
he devoted himself, without suffering his literary habits to fall into
desuetude, principally to the business and amusements of a country
life, having, says Lord Clarendon, "on a sudden retired from a life of
great pleasure and license, to extraordinary sobriety and strictness,
and yet retained his usual cheerfulness and affability." His first
entrance into public life was in January, 1620-1, when he took his
seat in the Parliament then convened, for Grampound, at that time a
borough of wealth and importance: a prevalent error, that he sat for
the first time in the first Parliament summoned by Charles I. in 1625,
is corrected Lord Nugent, who in his 'Memorials' of Hampden has shown
that he sat in the Parliaments of 1621 and 1624; that he was active
and diligent in his attendance, and intimately connected himself with
Selden, Pym, St. John, and other leaders of the popular party; and
that, though he seldom spoke, his capacity for business was known and
respected, as appears from the employments in committees and
conferences imposed on him by the House.

In the first Parliament of Charles I., Hampden sat for Wendover, an
ancient borough of Buckinghamshire, which with two others had lately
regained their dormant privilege of returning members, chiefly by his
exertions and at his expense. In this and in the following Parliament
summoned in February, 1627, Hampden still appears to have taken no
leading part; but his influence, both in and out of parliament,
gradually increased, especially in his native county of Buckingham.
After the dissolution of the latter parliament, Charles began to put
in force his threat of raising supplies by unusual means, and required
a general loan, to which Hampden was called upon to contribute. This
he refused to do, and was in consequence imprisoned for a time in the
Gate House, and then sent, still under restraint, to reside in
Hampshire. The order for his release, with seventy-six others, is
dated March, 1627-8. On this occasion, he made the remarkable reply to
the demand, why he would not contribute to the king's necessities,
that "he could be content to lend as well as others, but feared to
draw upon himself that curse in Magna Charta, which should be read
twice a-year against those who infringe it."

In the new Parliament which met in March, 1628, Hampden again sat for
Wendover, and having become more generally known by the part which he
had taken in resisting the demands of the crown, from this time
forward, says Lord Nugent, "scarcely was a bill prepared, or an
inquiry begun, upon any subject, however remotely affecting any one of
the three great matters at issue--privilege, religion, or the
supplies--but he was thought fit to be associated with St. John,
Selden, Coke, and Pym, on the committee."

That Parliament, after framing the Petition of Right, voting supplies,
and taking resolute steps towards procuring a redress of grievances,
was hastily and angrily dissolved in May, 1629. Previous to this,
Hampden, "although retaining his seat for Wendover, had retired to his
estate in Buckinghamshire, to live in entire privacy, without display,
but not inactive; contemplating from a distance the madness of the
Government, the luxury and insolence of the courtiers, and the
portentous apathy of the people, who, amazed by the late measures, and
by the prospect of uninterruptedly increasing violence, saw no hope
from petition or complaint, and watched, in confusion and silence, the
inevitable advance of an open rupture between the King and the
Parliament. The literary acquirements of his youth he now carefully
improved; increasing that stock of general knowledge which had
already gained him the reputation of being one of the most learned and
accomplished men of his age; and directing his attention chiefly to
writers on history and politics. Davila's 'History of the Civil Wars
of France' became his favourite study, his _vade-mecum_, as Sir Philip
Warwick styles it; as if, forecasting from afar the course of the
storm which hung over his own country, he already saw the sad parallel
it was likely to afford to the story of that work. In his retirement,
he bent the whole force of his capacious mind to the most effectual
means by which the abuses of ecclesiastical authority were to be
corrected, and the tide of headlong prerogative checked, whenever the
slumbering spirit of the country should be roused to deal with those
duties to which he was preparing to devote himself." ('Memorials of
Hampden,' p. 175.) It may here be added that Hampden's religious
opinions were those of the Independent party, who were honourably
distinguished, no less from the Presbyterians than the Episcopalians,
by granting to all persons that freedom of conscience and full
toleration which they claimed for themselves. While thus awaiting,
with study and patient observation, the time when the active service
of a real patriot might benefit his country, his domestic happiness
received a severe blow by the death of his wife, August 20, 1634. She
left nine children, three sons and six daughters.

In the same autumn the scheme of raising a revenue by ship-money was
devised. Confined in the first instance to sea-port towns, it proved
so profitable, that the levy was soon extended to inland places. In
1636 the charge was laid, by order of council, upon all counties,
cities, and corporate towns, and the sheriffs were required, in case
of refusal or delay, to proceed by distress. Here Hampden resolved to
make a stand. The sum demanded of him was but thirty-one shillings and
sixpence; but the very smallness of the sum served to show that his
opposition was directed against the principle of the exaction, and
rested on no ground of personal inconvenience or individual injustice.
In 1637, proceedings being instituted in the Exchequer for recovery of
the money, the case was solemnly argued for twelve days in the
Exchequer chamber before the twelve judges, who severally delivered
their opinions, and by a majority of eight to four determined in
favour of the crown. "But the judgment," says Lord Clarendon,
"infinitely more advanced him, Mr. Hampden, than the service for which
it was given. He was rather of reputation in his own county, than of
public discourse or fame in the kingdom, before the business of
ship-money: but then he grew the argument of all tongues, every man
inquiring who or what he was that durst at his own charge support the
liberty and property of the country, as he thought, from being made a
prey to the court. His carriage throughout this agitation was with
that rare temper and modesty, that they who watched him narrowly to
find some advantage against his person, to make him less resolute in
his cause, were compelled to give him a just testimony."

These measures, which placed at the king's disposal the property of
the country, were accompanied by equally stringent attacks on its
liberties. Tutored by the lofty spirit of Wentworth, Charles resolved,
and seemed likely to succeed, to rule independently of Parliaments;
and in the sycophancy of the judges, and the unlimited and illegal
severities of the courts of the Star-Chamber and High Commission, he
had ample means of suppressing murmur and punishing the refractory. We
need not dwell upon the state to which the country was reduced, during
the eleven years which elapsed without the meeting of a Parliament: so
unpromising did it appear, that even the most resolute of that party
comprehended by the Royalists under the general name of Puritans had
already begun to withdraw from the tyranny of the court. The
government, in various ways, had rendered itself so odious, that
thousands of men of all ranks had already separated themselves from
their native land, and twelve millions of property was said to have
been thus withdrawn from the country. These emigrations, however, were
forbidden by an order in council, dated April 6, 1638, by which
masters of ships were prohibited to carry passengers to America,
without special licence. It has often been dwelt on as a very
remarkable circumstance, that Hampden, his cousin Oliver Cromwell, and
Pym, were at this time actually embarked for New England on board one
of eight ships then lying in the river Thames and freighted with
emigrants, and that these eight ships were specially ordered to be
detained.

A dawn of better times appeared, when in consequence of the king's
rash attempt to impose the English ritual upon Scotland, and restore
Episcopacy, that country rose in rebellion. The expenses of the war
rendered it imperative to obtain supplies; and Charles, fearing at
this juncture to resort to fresh impositions, saw no resource except
in summoning that which is commonly called the Short Parliament, which
met in April, 1640. Hampden was returned for Buckinghamshire. About
this time he had married his second wife, Letitia Vachell, daughter of
Mr. Vachell, of Coley, near Reading, in Berkshire, but the quiet
happiness of his home was henceforth entirely broken up by the
disturbances of the times, and he never returned to any settled
residence at his paternal mansion. In the short and energetic session
of this spring he displayed his usual diligence and activity; and his
influence was much increased in consequence of his resistance to the
demand of ship-money, which had attracted such notice, that Clarendon,
in speaking of the opening of the Long Parliament, in November
following, observes, "The eyes of all men were fixed upon him as their
Pater Patriæ, and the pilot that must steer the vessel through the
tempests and rocks which threatened it. And I am persuaded his power
and interest, at that time, was greater to do good or hurt, than any
man in the kingdom, or than any man of his rank hath held in any time;
for his reputation of honesty was universal, and his affections seemed
so publicly guided, that no corrupt or private ends could bias them."

The causes of the dissolution of the Short Parliament, and the history
of the second Scottish war which compelled Charles I. to summon the
Long Parliament, hardly form a part of our subject: it is to be
observed, however, that during the summer and autumn, Hampden, with
other leading persons of the popular party, was engaged in active
correspondence with the leaders of the Scottish insurrection, in whose
success, as tending to the further embarrassment of the king, they
placed their best hope of obtaining security for the maintenance of
the liberties and privileges of the English people. Of the first great
act of that Parliament, the impeachment of Strafford, he was a zealous
supporter, and a member of the committee of twelve appointed to
arrange the evidence, and to conduct that memorable trial. After the
Commons, for reasons which have never been satisfactorily explained,
thought fit to change the method of proceeding by introducing a bill
of attainder, the name of Hampden appears in none of the records; and
it is probable that he abstained from taking any part in the business.
It is important to keep this in mind, because the censure which has
justly been cast upon the proceedings of the House of Commons against
Lord Strafford applies solely to the attainder, not to the
impeachment. To the question, why, if Hampden disapproved of the
attainder, he did not as resolutely oppose it as he had supported the
impeachment, the following hypothetical answer is supplied by Lord
Nugent:--"In a case doubtful to him only as matter of precedent, but
clear to him in respect of the guilt of the accused person; in a case
in which the accused person, in his estimation, deserved death, and in
which all law, except that of the sceptre and the sword, was at an
end, if he had escaped it; when all the ordinary protection of law to
the subject throughout the country was suspended, and suspended mainly
by the counsels of Strafford himself, Hampden was not prepared to
heroically immolate the liberties of England in order to save the life
of him who would have destroyed them. Hampden probably considered the
bill which took away Strafford's life (and indeed it must in fairness
be so considered) as a revolutionary act undertaken for the defence of
the Commonwealth."

He was an active supporter of two important measures which occupied
the Parliament simultaneously with Strafford's impeachment, the
Triennial Bill, for securing the convocation of Parliaments, and the
bill for excluding bishops from the House of Lords. After the
rejection of the latter, he adopted the views of that more violent
party who urged the necessity of abolishing Episcopacy altogether.
But, notwithstanding his recognised position as a leader of his party,
and his known weight in determining the line of conduct to be pursued
by it, he was not a frequent speaker, and his name therefore occurs
less frequently than would be expected in the records of this eventful
period. "His practice was usually to reserve himself until near the
close of a debate; and then, having watched its progress, to endeavour
to moderate the redundancies of his friends, to weaken the impression
produced by its opponents, to confirm the timid, and to reconcile the
reluctant. And this he did, according to the testimony of his
opponents themselves, with a modesty, gentleness, and apparent
diffidence in his own judgment, which generally brought men round to
his conclusions." ('Memorials of Hampden,' ii. 47.) He was one of the
five members accused of treason, and who were demanded by Charles in
person in the House of Commons, January 6, 1642, "and from this time,"
says Clarendon, "his nature and carriage seemed much fiercer than it
did before." Unquestionably the ill-advised step was not likely to
conciliate those whose life was aimed at, but it is also clear that
before that event the party with whom he acted were preparing for a
struggle more serious than that in which they were as yet engaged. A
Committee of Public Safety was formed, of which Hampden was a member,
the power of the sword was claimed by the Ordinance of Militia, the
king on his part issued his Commission of Array, and at last raised
his standard at Nottingham, August 22, 1642.

In the military events of the first year of the war Hampden took an
active but subordinate share, as colonel of a regiment of infantry which
he himself raised in Buckinghamshire. Nor did he intermit, as the
exigencies of war allowed him, to continue his attendance in Parliament,
and to urge there that decisive course of action which he knew to be
necessary to the success of the cause, and which he laboured in vain to
impress upon the Earl of Essex, the Parliamentary general. At the battle
of Brentford, his troops, and those of Lord Brook, in support of the
London regiment under Hollis, bore the brunt of the day against superior
numbers, until the army arrived from London in the evening; and on this
occasion (as before at Edge Hill, where he arrived too late to take part
in the fight) he in vain urged Essex to convert, by a decisive forward
movement, the doubtful issue of the day into a victory. During the
winter months, while the king held his court at Oxford, and a
Parliamentary army lay between London and that city, Hampden's regiment
was quartered in Buckinghamshire, and his own time was divided between
the seat of war and the House of Commons.

To this period also is to be referred the association of six midland
counties for the purposes of the war, Bedford, Buckingham, Hertford,
Cambridge, Huntingdon, and Northampton; a step which proved of
material service in giving strength and union to the Parliamentary
cause, and which probably would not have been carried into operation
but for Hampden's peculiar talent of allaying jealousies, reconciling
conflicting interests, and smoothing away the obstacles to any
business which he undertook.

From March 1, to April 15, 1643, a cessation of arms was agreed to in
Oxfordshire and Bucks, while an attempt was made to arrange terms of
pacification. This treaty having been broken off, war recommenced with
an incessant and generally successful series of predatory incursions,
conducted by Prince Rupert, on the Parliamentary outposts, which lay
widely dispersed in the intricate country on the borders of
Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. In this district, with which his
early habits of the chace had made him familiar, Hampden's regiment
was quartered. He had laboured incessantly, but in vain, to promote
some great enterprise, which might give lustre to the seemingly
declining cause, and confidence to the adherents of the Parliament.
Failing in this, he manifested no less alacrity in performing his duty
than if his views and his suggestions had been adopted: indeed it
would be consonant to his character to suppose, that a strict sense of
what is due to military discipline, and a desire to avoid even the
appearance of slighting his commanding officer, led him to still more
zealous exertions. It was in a matter beyond the strict line of his
duty that He received his death-wound. On the evening of the 17th of
June, Rupert set out from Oxford with about 2000 men, and surprised
and burnt two villages, Postcombe and Chinnor, which were occupied by
the Parliamentary troops. When the alarm reached Hampden, he instantly
set out at the head of a small party of cavalry, which volunteered to
follow him, in hopes of being able to delay the Royalists sufficiently
to enable Essex to occupy the passes of the Cherwell, and cut them off
from Oxford. Strengthened by the accession of four troops of horse, he
overtook Prince Rupert, who drew up to receive the attack on
Chalgrove-field, June 18, 1643. Early in the action Hampden received
two bullets in the shoulder, which shattered the bone, and in an agony
of pain he rode off the field; "a thing," says Clarendon, "he never
used to do, and from which it was concluded he was hurt." Two others
of the chief Parliamentary officers present were killed or taken, and
the Royalists made good their retreat. Hampden expired at Thame, in
Oxfordshire, after six days' severe suffering. His last words are thus
given from a contemporary publication:--"O Lord God of Hosts, great is
thy mercy, just and holy are thy dealings unto us sinful men. Save me,
O Lord, if it be thy good will, from the jaws of death. Pardon my
manifold transgressions; O Lord, save my bleeding country. Have these
realms in thy especial keeping. Confound and level in the dust those
who would rob the people of their liberty and lawful prerogative. Let
the king see his error, and turn the hearts of his wicked counsellors
from the malice and wickedness of their designs. Lord Jesu, receive my
soul!" He then mournfully uttered, "O Lord, save my country--O Lord,
be merciful to" . . . . and here his speech failed him. He fell back
in the bed, and expired.

His death, according to Sir Philip Warwick, was regretted even by the
king, "who looked on his interest, if he could gain his affections, as
a powerful means of begetting a right understanding between him and
the two Houses." To his own party it was irreparable. It removed the
fittest person for the chief command of their troops, which it is not
unreasonable to suppose would, upon the removal of Essex, have been
vested in him; deprived them of a leader and adviser, who, of all, was
the most likely to have confined his wishes to the establishment of a
secure peace, on the basis of a strictly limited monarchy; and opened
the way to the ambition of Cromwell, which probably would never have
been developed if Hampden had lived to direct the counsels of the
Parliament.

A portion of Lord Clarendon's character of Hampden has already been
given from the 'History of the Rebellion,' book vii. As to the
estimation in which he was held by his countrymen, Clarendon says,
"The eyes of all men were fixed upon him as their _patriæ pater_, and
the pilot, that must steer the vessel through the tempests and rocks
which threatened it. And I am persuaded, his power and interest at
that time were greater to do good or hurt than any man's in the
kingdom, or than any man of his rank hath had in any time; for his
reputation of honesty was universal, and his affections seemed so
publicly guided that no corrupt or private ends would bias them."

Of his ability as a public speaker, Clarendon says, "He was of that
rare affability and temper in debate, of that seeming humility and
submission of judgment, as if he brought no opinion of his own with
him, but a desire of information and instruction; yet he had so subtle
a way of interrogating, and under the notion of doubts insinuating his
objections, that he infused his own opinions into those from whom he
pretended to learn and receive them." "He was indeed a very wise man,
and of great parts, and possessed of the most absolute spirit of
popularity and the most absolute faculties to govern the people of any
man I ever knew." "After he was among those members accused by the
king of high treason, he was much altered, his nature and carriage
seeming much fiercer than they did before; and without question when
he first drew the sword he threw away the scabbard." Of his personal
character and habits Clarendon says, "He was very temperate in diet,
and a supreme governor over all his passions and affections, and had
thereby a great power over other men's. He was of an industry and
vigilance not to be tired out or wearied by the most laborious, and of
parts not to be imposed upon by the most subtle and sharp, and of a
personal courage equal to his best parts; so that he was an enemy not
to be wished wherever he might have been made a friend; and as much to
be apprehended where he was so as any man could deserve to be." "What
was said of Cinna might well be applied to him, 'He had a head to
contrive, and a tongue to persuade, and a head to execute any
mischief.'" Clarendon thought that Hampden was engaged in a
mischievous cause; those who thought and think differently, instead of
'any mischief' would write 'any benefit.' The political bias of
Clarendon is obvious enough, but the character, of which we have only
selected certain portions, is drawn with much discrimination and skill.

A later and more elaborate account of this eminent patriot has been
given by Lord Nugent, from which the greater part of our memoir is
derived. But the memoirs and pamphlets of the time must be intimately
studied by those who wish for full information concerning Hampden's
parliamentary life.




[Illustration: LAUD]


The history of Laud is in a manner the history both of church and
state in England for some twenty or more most memorable years; and if
it were to be written with a copiousness corresponding to the quantity
of the materials, volumes on volumes might be filled with it. Indeed
it does actually stand recorded in several folios. Besides State
Trials, and Parliamentary History, and Strafford Letters, and other
collections of State Papers, in which he fills much space, there is
the history of his 'Life and Death' in one folio volume, by Dr. Peter
Heylin, and that of his 'Troubles and Trial' in another, considerably
larger, edited from his own papers by the learned Henry Wharton. We
have his own Diary, besides many of his letters, and a mass of other
authentic documents. The facts of the greater part of his history
therefore are before us in extraordinary distinctness. Whatever we may
think of him, there he is, the man and his acts, still, if we choose,
almost as plainly to be seen by us as by his contemporaries. Some
things respecting him, indeed, we know better than they did. His life
was more than most lives passed in the light, and few have had the
light so unsparingly let in upon them as he has had even in his
deepest privacies. We have his written words intended only for the eye
of the most intimate friendship, or for no eye but his own. We ought
not to forget, in judging him, this trying ordeal through which it has
been his fate to be made to pass.

Curiously enough, in all this plentiful supply of information, nobody
appears to know the Christian name of Laud's father. Laud himself has
not recorded it in his own Diary, which begins by telling us merely
that he was born on the 7th of October, 1573, at Reading, as if he had
been literally an _autochthon_, _terræ filius_, or "gum of the earth,"
as one of his brother bishops, Field of Llandaff, calls himself in a
begging letter to the universal patron the Duke of Buckingham, which
is preserved in the Cabala, and is one of the greatest curiosities
which have come down to us from that age. "Myself, a gum of the
earth," says Field insinuatingly, "whom some eight years ago you
raised out of the dust for raising but a thought so high as to serve
your highness." But Laud was not of this self-abasing temper. He had
no pleasure in looking back from his elevated fortunes upon the
comparative humility of his origin. His biographer Heylin tells us
that the libellers, who no doubt knew what would sting him, used
frequently to upbraid him in the days of his greatness with his mean
birth. Once Heylin found him walking in his garden at Lambeth "with
more than ordinary trouble in his countenance," "of which," continues
our author, "not having confidence enough to inquire the reason, he
showed me a paper in his hand, and told me it was a printed sheet of a
scandalous libel which had been stopped at the press, in which he
found himself reproached with so base a parentage as if he had been
raked out of the dunghill; adding withal, that though he had not the
good fortune to be born a gentleman, yet he thanked God he had been
born of honest parents, who lived in a plentiful condition, employed
many poor people in their way, and left a good report behind him."
After some little time, seeing his countenance beginning to clear up,
ready Heylin told him the story of Pope Sixtus the Fifth, who used to
say that he was _domo natus illustri_, "because the sunbeams, passing
through the broken walls and ragged roof, _illustrated_ every corner
of that homely cottage in which he was born." The Latin words, which
would be naturally translated _born of an illustrious house or
family_, will also bear this other interpretation, however strange it
may sound to the English reader. And the facetious anecdote, thus
aptly applied, quite succeeded, we are assured, in restoring the
equanimity of the ruffled prelate.

Laud's father, whatever was his name, was a master cloth-worker, and
is described as having been well to do in the world. "He kept," says
Heylin, "not only many looms in his house, but many weavers, spinners,
and fullers at continual work; living in good esteem and reputation
amongst his neighbours to the very last." His son, named William, was
his only child; but his wife had been married before to another
Reading clothier, John Robinson, by whom she had had a family. She was
a Lucy Webb, sister to Sir William Webb, who was lord mayor of London
in 1591. Of her children by Robinson, half-brothers and half-sisters
of the archbishop, his biographer mentions a William, the youngest
son, who became a doctor of divinity, prebend of Westminster, and
archdeacon of Nottingham; and two daughters, married, the one to a Dr.
Cotsford, the other to a Dr. Layfield. It is possible that these
relations of Laud's may have prospered the better in the world for
their connection with him; but his uncle at least, the lord mayor, had
made his way to eminence long before the great churchman had got upon
the ladder of preferment. It is more likely that he may have been of
service to some later Webbs and Robinsons: Heylin speaks of a grandson
of the lord mayor, also a Sir William Webb, as having died not long
before he wrote, that is to say, perhaps, about the time of the
Restoration; and his book, published posthumously, in 1671, is
dedicated by his son to a Sir John Robinson, Bart., his majesty's
lieutenant of the Tower of London, who is addressed as nearly related
to the subject of it, and who may therefore be presumed to have been a
descendant of Laud's mother's first husband.

Laud, who appears to have been designed for the church from his
boyhood, was sent first to the free grammar-school of his native town;
whence, in July, 1589, before he was sixteen, "which," Heylin remarks,
"was very early for those times," he was sent to Oxford, and entered a
commoner of St. John's. Here his tutor was Mr. Buckridge, one of the
fellows, a zealous opponent of Puritanism, which had troubled the
church almost from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, and, for
all that could be done to keep it down, was evidently enough growing
stronger every day. Buckridge's teaching was not thrown away upon Laud.

The events noted in his Diary for the next ten or twelve years are:
that he was chosen a scholar of his college in June, 1590, and
admitted a fellow in June, 1593; that his father died on Wednesday,
11th April, 1594; that he proceeded bachelor of arts in June of that,
year; that in 1596 he had a great sickness, and in 1597 another (he
had also been brought to death's door by an illness in his infancy);
that in July, 1598, he took his degree of master of arts, and the same
year was grammar reader; that at the end of that year he fell into
another great sickness; that his mother died 24th November, 1600; that
on the 4th of January, 1601, he was ordained deacon, and priest on the
5th of April thereafter.

He had already obtained a considerable academic reputation, and,
having been admitted in 1602 to read a divinity lecture then
maintained in his college, in which he acquitted himself to general
satisfaction, he became next year a candidate for the proctorship of
the university, and obtained it. In this year, 1603, Heylin says he
publicly maintained, either in his divinity lecture or in some other
chapel exercise, his famous doctrine of the perpetual visibility of
the church, as derived from the Apostles to the Church of Rome, and
continued in that church till the Reformation. The proclamation of
these opinions brought him at once into open collision with the
dominant party in the University, headed by Dr. George Abbot, Master
of University College (afterwards archbishop of Canterbury), who was
then vice-chancellor. Abbot did not profess to deny the constant
visibility of the church, or the apostolical succession; but he held a
different theory of it, "tracing it," says Heylin contemptuously, "as
well as he could from the Berengarians to the Albigenses, from the
Albigenses to the Wickliffists, from the Wickliffists unto the
Hussites, and from the Hussites unto Luther and Calvin." From the two
systems sprung what were called High Church and Low Church principles
and parties at a later date. Heylin affirms, on the authority of Laud
himself, that he was so violently persecuted by Abbot, and so openly
branded by him for a papist, or at least one very popishly inclined,
"that it was almost made an heresy for any one to be seen in his
company, and a misprision of heresy for any one to give him a civil
salutation as he walked the streets." He had followed up his lecture
or sermon of 1603 by maintaining the next year, in his exercise for
bachelor of divinity, the necessity both of baptism and of bishops,
and again by a sermon preached in St. Mary's church on the 21st of
October, 1606, for which he was called to account by Dr. Airy, then
vice-chancellor, as being in some passages a declaration of downright
popery; "the good man," says Heylin, "taking all things to be matter
of popery which were not held forth unto him in Calvin's _Institutes_."

But shortly before this Laud had got into a scrape of another kind.
Under the year 1605 we find him noting in his Diary: "My cross about
the Earl of Devon's marriage," with a very particular specification of
the day, as the 26th of December, a Thursday. He had, in September,
1603, been made chaplain to Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, recently
created Earl of Devon; and had been persuaded on that St. Stephen's
day two years after to solemnize a marriage between his noble patron
and the beautiful Lady Rich, divorced from the Lord Rich for adultery
with the earl. It is quite clear, whatever Heylin may endeavour to
make out, that herein Laud acted against his principles, or
convictions of what was right; he confesses as much in the penitential
prayer which his apologist quotes: "Behold," he there says, "I am
become a reproach to thy holy name, by serving my ambition and the
sins of others; which though I did by the persuasion of other men, yet
my own conscience did check and upbraid me in it." There can be no
reasonable doubt that, in consistency with the rest of his theological
system, he held the doctrine of the absolute indissolubility of the
sacrament of marriage, and he must therefore be considered to have
performed that solemnity between Lord Devon and Lady Rich, and so
sanctioned their living together, while he believed her to be the wife
of another man. He was afterwards accustomed to observe the festival
of St. Stephen as a day of fasting and humiliation; but even from the
account of his eulogistic biographer it would rather appear that he
did not arrive at this clear sense of his fault till after all his
expectations from his noble patron had been brought to an end by the
earl's death, which took place before the end of the following year.

Notwithstanding his repentance, too, the affair was long a standing
reproach against him, and, his biographer intimates, materially
retarded his preferment. Yet he cannot be said to have been entirely
neglected. In November, 1607, he was inducted into the vicarage of
Stamford, in Northamptonshire; the advowson of North Kilworth, in
Leicestershire, was given to him, as he records, in April, 1608, in
which year he proceeded Doctor of Divinity, and became chaplain to
Neile, Bishop of Rochester; in 1609 he exchanged North Kilworth for
West Tilbury, in Essex, to be near his new patron; and in September of
the same year he made his début as a courtier, by preaching before the
king at Theobalds. In May, 1610, his friend the Bishop of Rochester
preferred him to the rectory of Cuckstone, in Kent, which he exchanged
in November for Norton, in the same county, as a healthier residence.
Meanwhile Neile had in September been translated to Lichfield, and in
October Laud resigned his fellowship, "that so," says his biographer,
"he might more fully apply himself to the service of his lord and
patron, whose fortunes he was resolved to follow till God should
please to provide otherwise for him." Neile had held the Deanery of
Westminster _in commendam_ with his late bishopric; and before
resigning it he obtained for his friend, from the king, the reversion
of a prebend in that church; "which," says Heylin, "though it fell not
to him till ten years after, yet it fell at last, and thereby
neighboured him to the court." But Neile's translation proved also
immediately beneficial to Laud, for the new Bishop of Rochester was
his old tutor and steady friend Buckridge, and he had influence, in
spite of all that Abbot (now Bishop of London, and within a few months
to be elevated to the primacy) could do to prevent it, to get Laud
elected his successor in the presidentship of St. John's. He obtained
this office in May, 1611, and in November of the same year he was
sworn one of his majesty's chaplains in ordinary. It is true that he
appears also to have met with some crosses and disappointments in the
course of these years; we read in his Diary of his "unfortunateness
with T.;" and of his "next unfortunateness with E. M.;" and of a third
"unfortunateness by S. B.;" with sundry other notices of stays, and
troubles, and fits of sickness. The first entry, under date of 1612,
is of another "unfortunateness by S. S.;" and the second, of another
with A. D.; in January, 1613, began his "great business with G. B.,"
which "settled as it could in March;" and April, 1614, was signalized
by the beginning of his "great misfortune by M. S.," and also by "a
most fierce salt rheum" in his left eye, "like to have endangered it."
But on the other side of the account we find him noting that in the
same month his friend Neile, now Bishop of Lincoln, gave him the
prebend of Bugden in that church. Heylin informs us that the bishop
did this "to keep him up in heart and spirit," when he was sinking
under the disappointment of his hopes of court preferment; for, it
seems, "whenever any opportunity was offered for his advancement,
Archbishop Abbot would be sure to cast somewhat in his dish: sometimes
inculpating to him (that is, objecting against him to the king) all
his actings at Oxon, and sometimes rubbing up the old sore of his
unfortunate business with the Earl of Devonshire." In his despair Laud
was upon the point of returning to his college; but Neile prevailed
with him to try one year longer, and, for further encouragement, in
December, 1615, conferred upon him the archdeaconry of Huntingdon. At
last, "before the year of expectation was fully ended," to adopt
Heylin's words, "his majesty began to take him into his better
thoughts, and for a testimony thereof bestowed upon him the deanery of
Gloucester." The king gave him this in November, 1616; and he now
resigned his parsonage of Tilbury.

In March, 1617, James set out on a visit to his native kingdom, his
main object being to bring the Scots to conformity with the English
model in regard to religion; "a matter," observes Heylin, "of
consequence and weight, and therefore to be managed by able ministers,
such as knew how to wind and turn the Presbyterians of that kingdom,
if matters should proceed to a disputation." Laud, esteemed a person
of eminent theological learning and polemical ability, was one of
those selected to accompany his majesty; but when James came to
Edinburgh, "he soon found," says Heylin, "that he might have saved
himself a great part of his care, and taken such of his chaplains with
him as came next to hand; the Presbyterian Scots not being to be
gained by reason, as he had supposed. For he was scarce settled in
that city, when the Presbyters, conceiving that his coming was upon
design to work a uniformity between the churches of both kingdoms, set
up one Struthers to preach against it, who laid so lustily about him
in the chief church of Edinburgh, that he not only condemned the rites
and ceremonies of the Church of England, but prayed God to save
Scotland from the same. Laud, and the rest of the chaplains who had
heard the sermon, acquainted his majesty with those passages: but
there was no remedy: the Scots were Scots, and resolved to go their
own way, whatsoever came of it." Laud returned in the autumn; and on
his way home was inducted into the rectory of Ibstock, in the county
of Leicester, a living in the patronage of his friend Bishop
Buckridge, who let him have it in exchange for Norton.

He then rested as he was for some time. At last, in January, 1621, he
came into the enjoyment of the prebendal stall in Westminster, of
which he had secured the reversion ten years before. And greater
things followed fast. His own statement is, that on the 3rd of June
his majesty made a gracious speech to him concerning his long service,
being pleased to say that he had given him nothing but Gloucester,
which he well knew was a shell without a kernel; and that the sequel
was his receiving a grant of the bishopric of St. David's on the 29th
of the same month. But the most particular and curious account of the
way in which the affair was managed is given in Bishop Hacket's 'Life
of Archbishop Williams.' Williams, who was Dean of Westminster, had
recently been made Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and had soon after
been raised to the Bishopric of Lincoln, holding his deanery _in
commendam_, and retaining also his other preferments, of a prebend and
residentiary canonship in the cathedral of Lincoln, and the rectory of
Walgrave in Northamptonshire; "so that," as Heylin puts it, "he was a
perfect diocese within himself; as being bishop, dean, prebend
residentiary, and parson, and all these at once." Williams, in this
the height of his court favour (for it was the king himself who had
selected him for the great seal), was earnestly applied to by
Buckingham, to whom Laud, like everybody else, had paid court, to
commend the latter to his majesty. Buckingham's instructions to
Williams were, not to fear giving offence in urging this suit, and not
to desist for a little storm. Having watched his opportunity, "when
the king's affections," says Hacker, "were most still and pacificous,"
Williams besought his majesty to think considerately of his chaplain
the doctor, whose merits he urged with much earnestness. "Well," said
the king, "I perceive whose attorney you are; Stenny (Buckingham)
hath set you on. You have pleaded the man a good Protestant, and I
believe it; neither did that stick in my breast when I stopt his
promotion. But was there not a certain lady that forsook her husband,
and married a lord that was her paramour? Who tied that knot? Shall I
make a man a prelate, one of the angels of my church, who hath a
flagrant crime upon him?" Williams declared that the doctor was
heartily penitent for his share in this transaction; besides, he asked
James who would dare to serve him, good master as he was, if he would
not pardon one fault, even if it should be of a scandalous magnitude?
"You press well," replied his majesty, "and I hear you with patience;
neither will I revive a trespass any more which repentance hath
mortified and buried; and because I see I shall not be rid of you
unless I tell you my unpublished cogitations, the plain truth is, that
I keep Laud back from all place of rule and authority because I find
he hath a restless spirit, and cannot see when matters are well, but
loves to toss and change, and to bring things to a pitch of
reformation floating in his own brain, which may endanger the
steadfastness of that which is in a good pass, God be praised. I speak
not at random; he hath made himself known to me to be such a one. For
when, three years since, I had obtained of the Assembly of Perth to
consent to five articles of order and decency in correspondence with
this church of England, I gave them promise, by attestation of faith
made, that I would try their obedience no farther in ecclesiastic
affairs, nor put them out of their own way, which custom has made
pleasing unto them, with any new encroachments. Yet this man hath
pressed me to invite them to a nearer conjunction with the liturgy and
canons of this nation; but I sent him back again with the frivolous
draught he had drawn....For all this, he feared not mine anger, but
assaulted me again with another ill-fangled platform to make that
stubborn kirk stoop more to the English pattern; but I durst not play
fast and loose with my word. He knows not the stomach of that people;
but I ken the story of my grandmother, the queen-regent, that, after
she was inveigled to break her promise, made to some mutineers at a
Perth meeting, she never saw good day, but from thence, being much
beloved before, was despised of all the people. And now your
importunity hath compelled me to shrive myself thus unto you, I think
you are at your farthest, and have no more to say for your client."
Williams, however, as he had been instructed, did not allow this
characteristic oration to put him down; he still urged that Laud,
notwithstanding "the very audacious and very unbecoming attempt"
mentioned by his majesty, was "of a great and tractable wit," and if
he fell into an error would, at least as soon as any man, find a way
to get out of it. And his pertinacity was successful. James,
impatiently asking if there was nothing he could say that was not to
have its answer, exclaimed, "Here, take him to you, but on my soul you
will repent it." "And so," concludes Hacket, "went away in anger,
using other fierce and ominous words, which were divulged in the
court, and are too tart to be repeated."

Thus was Laud at last made a bishop. He was formally elected by the
chapter on the 10th of October, 1621, a few days after entering his
forty-ninth year. The king had given him leave to hold the
presidentship of St. John's _in commendam_ with his bishopric; "but by
reason," he writes in his Diary, "of the strictness of that statute,
which I will not violate, nor my oath to it, under any colour, I am
resolved before my consecration to leave it." And he did resign it
accordingly. It is worth noticing, that Laud's great enemy Prynne, in
the edition of the Diary which he very unhandsomely published in
September, 1644, while the archbishop yet lived, had the dishonesty to
omit all notice of this resignation; so that even Laud's biographer
Heylin, who wrote before the Diary was published in its integrity by
Wharton, in 1695, represents him as retaining his college office with
his bishopric. Laud himself, with all his passion, precipitation, and
short-sightedness, never committed anything so thoroughly base as this
suppression of the truth by the great Puritan lawyer and patriot.

In the next year, 1622, Laud obtained much reputation by a conference
or disputation which he maintained on the 24th of May, in presence of
his majesty and other distinguished personages, with Fisher the
Jesuit. Fisher had been for some time attempting to make a Roman
Catholic of the Countess of Buckingham, mother of the duke (or rather
marquis only, as yet); and it was apprehended that, if he should
succeed, her son also would be very likely to go over to the old
religion. But both at this public conference, at which the countess
and the marquis were present, and in private discourse with the lady,
Laud acquitted himself so ably as to satisfy her upon every point, and
thus to avert what was looked upon by many as a serious national
danger. Buckingham also from this time took him into his most intimate
confidence. "Being Whit-Monday," he records, under date of June 9th,
"my lord Marquess Buckingham was pleased to enter upon a near respect
to me: the particulars are not for paper." And under June 15th he
enters, "I became C. to my Lord of Buckingham" (meaning, it is
supposed, confessor). All the notices in the Diary of this affair are
carefully suppressed by Prynne, one of whose objects was to represent
the archbishop as having been all his life a thorough papist. Laud
himself published in 1624 an account of his argument with Fisher. He
notes that he had not previously appeared in print.

In January, 1623, Laud was inducted into the parsonage of Creeke, in
the diocese of Peterborough, which he was permitted to hold _in
commendam_, with his not very well endowed Welch bishopric. But the
new reign, which began in March, 1625, when he was in his fifty-second
year, was the beginning to him of new fortunes.

Yet his own account informs us that attempts were at first made to
prejudice the royal mind against him. Under date of Saturday, 9th of
April, he writes, "The Duke of Buckingham, whom, upon all accounts I
am bound for ever to honour, signified to me that a certain person,
moved through I know not what envy, had blackened my name with his
majesty King Charles; laying hold, for that purpose, of the error
into which, by I know not what fate, I had formerly fallen in the
business of Charles, Earl of Devonshire, 1605, December 26."[B] He was
too strong, however, in the favour of the royal favourite and most
powerful man in the kingdom, to be injured now by this stale story. At
the coronation, on the 2nd of February, 1626, he officiated as dean of
Westminster, in room of Bishop Williams, who had for the present
passed into the shade, and whom Charles would not have to take part in
the ceremony, so that he was obliged to make Laud, whom he cordially
hated, his deputy. On the 6th of March thereafter he resigned his
parsonage of Ibstock; on the 20th of June he was nominated to the
bishopric of Bath and Wells; in the beginning of October he was
appointed to the office of dean of the Chapel Royal, vacant by the
death of Bishop Andrews; in the end of April, 1627, he was sworn a
privy counsellor, which in those days implied that he was to take an
actual share in the government of the kingdom; and in July, 1628,
Charles succeeded in having him placed in the see of London, though
not till after some months had been spent in getting room made for him
by the removal of Bishop Mountain, which proved almost as difficult as
if he had been a real mountain that had to be got out of the way. The
scheme was that Mountain should go to Durham, from which Neile, Laud's
friend, was transferred to succeed Andrews at Winchester; but having
spent a great part of his life, as Heylin expresses it, "in the air of
the court," he looked upon such a relegation to the cold regions of
the North as "the worst kind of banishment, next neighbour to a civil
death;" however, before he was Bishop of Durham more than in form, the
death of Dr. Toby Matthews, archbishop of York, made another opening
for him, with which he was better satisfied; so that he presided over
three sees in succession in that year; and he died before the end of it.

Laud had already made himself so unpopular by his apparent preference
of ceremonies to spiritual religion, and his severe, not to say
violent measures against puritanism, as well as by his intimate
connexion with Buckingham, that when the House of Commons which met in
March, 1628, fell upon the duke, voting him to be the great cause of
all the grievances in the kingdom, they also drew up a remonstrance to
the king, in which, among other matters, they denounced Laud and his
friend Neile as unsound in their theological opinions, and the authors
or principal promoters of sundry innovations of a Romish character in
the services of the church. To this admonition, however, he paid no
heed. The parliament rose on the 26th, of June, and on the 23rd of
August Buckingham was assassinated. In April, 1630, Laud was chosen
their Chancellor by the University of Oxford. A few months later
occurred the first of several notorious cases of Laud's ferocity of
procedure in the High Commission Court,--that of Dr. Alexander
Leighton, "a Scot by birth, a doctor of physic by profession, a fiery
Puritan in faction," is Heylin's description of him--who was brought
before the court for publishing a tract entitled 'An Appeal to the
Parliament; or, Zion's Plea against Prelacy,' and was sentenced to pay
a fine of 10,000_l._, to be twice set in the pillory and whipped, to
have his ears cut off and his nose slit, to be branded in the face
with the letters S. S. (for Sower of Sedition), and to be imprisoned
in the Fleet for the remainder of his life. This barbarous sentence
was executed in all its parts; and Leighton (who was the father of the
learned, eloquent, and admirable Archbishop Leighton, who held the see
of Glasgow in the next age) lay in prison for ten years. On Sunday the
16th of January of the next year, 1630, took place Laud's famous
consecration of the church of St. Catherine Cree, London, on the north
side of Leadenhall Street, Prynne's satirical and probably somewhat
exaggerated account of which, in his 'Canterbury's Doom' (1646), has
been in substance incorporated by Hume in his History, and is familiar
to most readers. As a sample both of Laud and of Prynne, we will quote
the concluding paragraph in the original words:--"When the bishop
approached near the communion-table, he bowed with his nose very near
the ground six or seven times; then he came to one of the corners of
the table, and there bowed himself three times; then to the second and
third, bowing at each three times; but when he came to the side of the
table where the bread and wine were, he bowed himself seven times: and
then, after the reading of many prayers by himself, and his two fat
chaplains which were with him, and all this while upon their knees by
him, in their surplices, hoods, and tippets, he himself came near the
bread, which was laid in a fine napkin; and then he gently lifted up
one of the corners of the napkin, like a boy that peeped into a bird's
nest in a bush, and presently clapped it down again, and flew back a
step or two, and then bowed very low three times towards it and the
table. When he beheld the bread, then he came near, and opened the
napkin again, and bowed as before; then he laid his hand upon the gilt
cup, which was full of wine, with a cover upon it: so soon as he had
pulled the cup a little nearer to him, he let the cup go, flew back,
and bowed again three times towards it: then he came near again, and,
lifting up the cover of the cup, peeped into it; and seeing the wine,
he let fall the cover on it again, flew nimbly back, and bowed as
before. After these, and many other apish antic gestures, he himself
receded, and then gave the sacrament to some principal men only, they
devoutly kneeling near the table; after which more prayers being said,
this scene and interlude ended." Impossible as it may be for most
modern readers to enter fully into the spirit of the kind of devotion
practised on this and other occasions by Laud, and discordant with the
reigning popular feeling as it was even in his own day, so that his
attempt to revive it was a great miscalculation and blunder, it is to
our taste, we confess, at least as respectable as Prynne's wit.

Prynne, however, it must be confessed, had had something to make his
bitterness excusable. For his famous 'Histrio-mastyx,' an attack upon
stage-plays, in one passage of which he was accused of having
reflected upon the queen, he was, in 1633, sentenced in the court of
Star-Chamber to pay a fine of 5000_l._, to be expelled the University
of Oxford, and the society of Lincoln's Inn, to be degraded and for
ever disabled from exercising his profession of the law, to stand
twice in the pillory, to have both his ears cut off, and to suffer
perpetual imprisonment. And after he had had his ears sewed on again,
he was a second time brought up before the same court in June, 1637,
for a pamphlet which he had published since his incarceration, and
sentenced to have them again shorn off, to stand in the pillory as
before, and to be branded on both cheeks with the letters S. L. (for
Schismatical Libeller). He was accordingly consigned to Caernarvon
Castle, whence he was afterwards removed to Mount Orgueil Castle, in
the isle of Jersey; and there he lay till he was released, with other
victims of the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission, by an
order of the House of Commons, in November, 1640. It was at the same
time that Prynne received his second sentence that similar sentences
were passed upon Dr. John Bastwick, a physician (who had also been
fined and otherwise punished for a former book in 1633), for a
publication in which he had reflected upon the bishops; and upon the
Rev. Henry Burton, Rector of St. Matthew's Church, Friday-street,
London, for two sermons which he had preached, and a pamphlet which,
after he had been thrown into prison on account of the sermons, he had
published in their vindication. Bastwick lay in one of the Scilly
islands, and Burton in the island of Guernsey, until they were
released along with Prynne.

Meanwhile Laud had been mounting higher and higher. In June, 1632, he
had got his dependant, or at least his intimate friend, Mr. Francis
Windbank, made Secretary of State; he notes in his Diary that he had
obtained the place for him of the king. We may mention here that
Windbank was afterwards charged by the parliament with having been a
confederate of Laud's in his tyrannical and papistical system, but
escaped destruction by flying to the continent. About three weeks
after Windbank's appointment he got another firm ally, Dr. Juxon,
Dean of Worcester, made Clerk of the Closet; he had sued for this, he
tells us, that he might have some one whom he could trust near his
majesty, if he should himself grow weak and infirm: "as," he adds, "I
must have a time." In 1633 he attended the king on his visit to
Scotland; on the 15th of June he was sworn of the Privy Council of
that country; and on the 4th of August, a few days after his return to
London, news came to court of the death that morning of Abbot,
Archbishop of Canterbury; on which, he tells us, the king resolved
presently to give him the place. "That very morning," he also states,
"at Greenwich there came one to me seriously, and that avowed ability
to perform it, and offered me to be a cardinal. I went presently to
the king, and acquainted him both with the thing and the person."
About a fortnight afterwards, this offer was renewed: "but," says he,
"my answer again was, that something dwelt within me which would not
suffer that till Rome were other than it is." On the 14th of September
he was chosen Chancellor of the University of Dublin; and on the 19th
of the same month he was translated to the archbishopric and the
primacy of the English church.

To these ecclesiastical and academical preferments and honours were
added others of a less professional sort. On the 5th of February,
1635, he was made a member of the Committee of Trade and Revenue; on
the 14th of March, upon the death of the Lord Treasurer, the Earl of
Portland, he was named one of the Commissioners for the Exchequer; and
two days after, he was called by the king into the Foreign Committee,
that is, into the Committee of the Privy Council for foreign affairs.
But his crowning triumph was achieved when, on the 6th of March in the
following year, 1636, he got his friend Juxon, already Bishop of
London, appointed to the office of lord high treasurer of England. "No
churchman," he writes with manifest satisfaction, "had it since Henry
VII.'s time. I pray God bless him to carry it so that the church may
have honour, and the king and the state service and contentment by it.
And now, if the church will not hold up themselves, under God I can
do no more."

But all this greatness was suddenly brought to an end by some of the
first proceedings of the ever-memorable parliament which assembled on
the 3rd of November, 1640. On the 18th of December, Denzil Hollis, by
order of the House of Commons, impeached Laud of high treason and
other high crimes and misdemeanours, at the bar of the House of Lords.
On the 26th of February, 1641, the articles of impeachment, twenty six
in number, were brought up by Sir Harry Vane, the younger. He was
specially charged with having advised his majesty that he might levy
money on his subjects without consent of parliament; with attempting
to establish absolute power not only in the king, but in himself and
other bishops, above and against the laws; with perverting the course
of justice by bribes and promises to the judges; with the imposition
of divers new ecclesiastical canons, containing matters contrary both
to the laws and the royal prerogative; with assuming a papal and
tyrannical power in matters both ecclesiastical and temporal; with
endeavouring to subvert the true religion and to introduce popish
superstition; and with being the principal adviser and author of the
late war against the Scots. On the 23rd of October, at the instigation
of his old enemy Williams, now become a great man again, Laud's
archiepiscopal jurisdiction was sequestered by the House of Lords, and
made over to his inferior officers. About a year after, all the rents
and profits of his archbishopric, in common with those of all other
archbishoprics, bishoprics, deaneries, and cathedral offices, were
sequestered for the use of the commonwealth. On the 9th of May, 1643,
all his goods in Lambeth Palace, his books included, were seized. Soon
after, his room and person were searched by Prynne, under the
authority of a warrant from the House of Commons, and his Diary and
all his other papers taken from him. All this while, with the
exception of a few months at first, during which he was left in the
custody of Mr. Maxwell, Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, he had been
confined in the Tower. At last, on the 12th of March, 1644, he was
brought to trial before the lords assembled, as usual, in Westminster
Hall. Prynne says in his 'History of the Trial,' that "he made as
full, as gallant, as pithy a defence of so bad a cause, and spake as
much for himself as was possible for the wit of man to invent; and
that with much art, sophistry, vivacity, oratory, audacity, and
confidence, without the least blush, or acknowledgment of guilt in any
thing." It seemed very doubtful if the lords, overawed as they were,
would have consented to condemn him; at the end of the trial, which
lasted twenty days, they adjourned without coming to a vote on the
question of his guilt or innocence; and in this state matters remained
till the Commons, abandoning their impeachment, resorted to another
method of effecting their object. An ordinance, or bill, for his
attainder was brought into the House on the 13th of November, and two
days after was passed and immediately sent up to the Lords. They too,
at last, passed it in a very thin house, on the 4th of January; and on
the 10th Laud was, in conformity with this law overriding all law,
beheaded on Tower Hill. He met his death with great firmness.

Thus fell Laud; and, as Heylin observes, the church fell with him. "Of
stature," writes that sympathizing, but not indiscriminatingly
admiring biographer, towards the close of his narrative, "he was low,
but of a strong composition; so short a trunk contained so much
excellent treasure. . . . His countenance cheerful and well bloodied:
more fleshy, as I have often heard him say, than any other part of his
body; which cheerfulness and vivacity he carried with him to the very
block, notwithstanding the afflictions of four years' imprisonment,
and the infelicity of the times. . . . A gallant spirit being for the
most part like the sun, which shows the greater at his setting. . . .
Of apprehension he was quick and sudden, of a very sociable wit, and a
pleasant humour, and one that knew as well how to put off the gravity
of his place and person when he saw occasion, as any living man
whatsoever. Accessible enough at all times, but when he was tired out
with multiplicity and vexation of business, which some who did not
understand him ascribed unto the natural ruggedness of his
disposition." He built an hospital in his native town of Reading, and
was a munificent benefactor to the University of Oxford in various
ways; and Heylin mentions that these good works exhausted all the
fortune he had made himself master of "in so long a time of power and
greatness, wherein he had the principal managing of affairs both in
church and state."

Archbishop Laud's literary works, besides his account of the
conference with Fisher, already mentioned, which has been several
times printed, are Seven Sermons, originally published separately in
4to, and then collected and printed together in one 8vo. volume, at
London, in 1651; his Diary and History of his Troubles and Trial,
together with some other pieces published by Wharton in 1695; and his
History of his Chancellorship of Oxford, &c., forming the second
volume of that work, published in 1700.

[Footnote B: The entry is in Latin: the translation is Wharton's.]




[Illustration: SELDEN.]


John Selden was born at Salvington, near Worthing, in the county of
Sussex, December 16, 1584. His father, according to Wood, "was a
sufficient plebeian," who, through some skill in music, obtained as
his wife Margaret Baker, a daughter of a knightly family of the county
of Kent. The baptism of his eminent son, as well as his own musical
talents, are noticed in an existing parish registry in these words:
"1584,--Johnne, sonne of John Selden, the minstrell, was baptised the
XXXth day of December." The house in which the family lived was
called Lacies, and the estate of the father consisted, in 1606, of
eighty-one acres, of the annual value of about twenty-three pounds.
John Selden, the son, received his early education at the free
grammar-school of Chichester. At the age of fourteen he entered at
Hart Hall, Oxford, a foundation since merged in Magdalen Hall, Oxford.
After residing four years at the University, he was admitted, in 1602,
a member of Clifford's Inn, London, one of the dependencies of the
greater Inns of Court, in which students of law were formerly
accustomed to commence their legal education. He removed in May, 1604,
to the Inner Temple. His attention appears to have been early drawn to
the study of civil and legal history, and antiquities; he did not
court the more active business of his profession, and his employment
at the bar was limited. In 1607 he prepared for the press his first
work, entitled 'Analecton Anglo-Britannicon,' being a collection of
civil and ecclesiastical matters relating to Britain, of a date
anterior to the Norman Conquest. This was soon followed by three other
works of a similar character, and in 1614 he printed his 'Treatise
upon Titles of Honour.' The last of these works has been considered in
our courts of law to be of great authority, and has been usually
spoken of with much commendation. Pursuing his legal inquiries, he
edited, in 1616, two treatises, one of Sir John Fortescue, the other
of Sir Ralph Hengham, and in the same year wrote a 'Discourse on the
Office of Lord Chancellor.' In the next year he printed a work, 'De
Diis Syris,' which added to his celebrity, but is not compiled with
that attention to the value of the respective authorities cited, so
essentially necessary to the accurate consideration of historical
questions. His next work was a 'History of Tithes,' printed in 1618,
which excited against him the bitter hostility of the clergy. The
doctrine of divine right, as the foundation of many ecclesiastical
claims, was at this time jealously maintained, and was considered to
be peculiarly connected with the right of the clergy to tithes. Selden
drew no direct conclusion against the divine nature of the right to
tithes, but he had so arranged his authorities as to render such a
conclusion inevitable. The nature only of the title was contested, and
so far from the clergy having had any reason to look upon Selden as an
enemy, he in fact strengthened their claim to tithes by placing it
upon the same footing as any ordinary title to property. As soon as
the 'History' appeared it was attacked. The High Commission Court
summoned Selden before it, and to this tribunal he was compelled to
apologise. The terms of his submission very accurately state the
offence, and are expressive of regret that "he had offered any
occasion of argument against any right of maintenance _jure divino_ of
the ministers of the gospel." The work received several answers, but
Selden was forbidden by James I., under a threat of imprisonment, to
notice them. "All that will," said he, "have liberty, and some use it,
to write and preach what they will against me, to abuse my name, my
person, my profession, with as many falsehoods as they please, and my
hands are tied: I must not so much as answer their calumnies. I am so
far from writing more, that I have scarcely ventured for my own safety
so much as to say they abuse me, though I know it."

Hardly had this storm passed, when he became involved in the disputes
between the Crown and the House of Commons. One of the earliest steps
of that body, upon the convocation of Parliament in 1621, was to
present a remonstance on the state of public affairs. This was
succeeded by the memorable protestation of December 18, 1621, in which
the liberty of the subject was asserted, and the right of the Commons
to offer advice to the Crown was insisted on. This protestation was
erased from the journals of the House by the King's own hands, and the
parliament was dissolved. Selden, whose advice, though he was not then
a member, had been requested by the House in this dispute, was in
consequence imprisoned, and detained in confinement five weeks. His
release was owing to the intercession of Bishop Williams, who
represented him to be "a man who hath excellent parts, which might be
diverted from an affectation of pleasing idle people, to do some good
and useful service to his Majesty." On his release he dedicated to
Williams his edition of Eadmer's contemporary 'History of England from
the Norman Conquest to the death of Henry I.,' which he had prepared
for the press during his confinement.

Selden's first appearance in the House of Commons was as member for
Lancaster, for which place he was returned in the parliament which
assembled in 1623, the last Parliament of James I. In this year, on
being chosen reader of Lyons Inn, he refused to perform the office, an
instance of independence or self-will for which there is no apparent
reason. The register of the Inner Temple contains an order passed by
the Society in consequence of Selden's refusal, which decided that he
should be excluded from ever becoming a bencher. This order, however,
was rescinded in 1624.

On the accession of Charles I. a new parliament was called, which
assembled at Oxford, but was almost immediately dissolved. In this
"parliamentum vanum," as it was called, Selden sat for Great Bedwin. In
the next parliament, which was summoned almost immediately afterwards,
he again sat for Great Bedwin. The Commons immediately entered upon a
consideration of the conduct of the Duke of Buckingham, and his
impeachment being resolved on, Selden was one of the members appointed
to prepare the articles, and was named a manager for their prosecution.
These proceedings were stopped by another dissolution of parliament, in
June, 1626. But the necessities of the Crown requiring those supplies
which parliament refused without a redress of grievances, forced loans
were resorted to in the exercise of certain pretended powers of the
prerogative. In several instances these loans were refused; among others
by Sir Edward Hampden and four others, who were imprisoned in
consequence; and the illegality of their commitment was very ably argued
by Selden in the King's Bench. They were brought before the court by a
writ of Habeas Corpus, but Selden and his fellow-counsel were
unsuccessful in their endeavours to obtain the discharge of the
prisoners, who were all remanded on the judgment of Hyde. In the third
parliament, called by Charles I. in 1628, Selden sat for the borough of
Ludgershall; and in the debates which immediately took place upon
illegal commitments, the levy of tonnage and poundage, and the
preparation of the Petition of Rights, he took a very active share. The
attack upon the Duke of Buckingham was renewed, and it was proposed by
Selden that judgment should be demanded against him upon the impeachment
of the former parliament. As affecting a great constitutional question,
only finally determined in 1791, of the continuance of impeachments,
notwithstanding a dissolution of parliament, the suggestion was
remarkable. Further proceedings were, however, stopped by Felton's
assassination of the duke.

During the prorogation of parliament Selden again devoted himself to
literary pursuits. The Earl of Arundel, a great lover and promoter of
the arts, had received from the East many ancient marbles, having on
them Greek inscriptions. At the request of Sir Robert Cotton these
inscriptions were transcribed under the superintendence of Selden, and
were published under the title of 'Marmora Arundeliana.'

In January, 1629, parliament again assembled, and the debates upon
public grievances were renewed. The goods of several merchants, in the
interval of the meeting of parliament, had been seized by the crown,
to satisfy a claim to the duty of tonnage and poundage. Among the
sufferers was Rolls, a member of the House. It was moved that the
seizure of his goods was a breach of privilege. When the question was
to be put, the Speaker said "he durst not, for that the King had
commanded to the contrary." Selden immediately rose, and vehemently
complained of this conduct: "Dare you not, Mr. Speaker, to put the
question when we command you? If you will not put it, we must sit
still: thus, we shall never be able to do anything. They that come
after you may say that they have the King's commands not to do it. We
sit here by the command of the King under the great seal, and you are,
by his Majesty, sitting in his royal chair before both houses,
appointed for our Speaker, and now refuse to do your office." The
House then adjourned in a state of great excitement. When it
reassembled the Speaker was called upon to put the question, and again
refused. On this Holles and Valentine thrust the Speaker into the
chair, and held him down, while Sir Miles Hobart locked the door of
the House and took possession of the key. A declaration was then
produced by Sir John Eliot, which Colonel Stroud moved should be
read, and himself put the question. The motion was declared to be
carried; and the Speaker, refusing to act upon it, was charged by Sir
P. Heyman with cutting up the liberty of the subject by the roots.
Selden moved that the declaration should be read by the clerk, which
was agreed to. The House then adjourned to a day, previous to which
the King came to the House of Lords and dissolved the parliament, on
account of "the undutiful and seditious carriage of the Lower House,"
without the attendance of the Commons. Selden, and the other members
concerned in the violence offered to the Speaker, were committed to
prison. This was his last and most rigorous confinement. For some time
he was denied the use of pens, ink, paper, and books. When, after
eight months had elapsed, he was brought up with the other prisoners
before the King's Bench upon a writ of Habeas Corpus, their discharge
was offered upon condition of their finding bail for their good
behaviour. "We demand," said Selden, "to be bailed in point of right;
and if it be not grantable of right, we do not demand it. But finding
sureties for good behaviour is a point of discretion merely, and we
cannot assent to it without great offence to the parliament, where
these matters, which are surmised by the return, were acted." They
were remanded, and remained for a long time in the King's Bench
Prison, where Eliot, one of the ablest members of the popular party,
fell a victim to his confinement. The restraint, at least as far as
Selden was concerned, appears to have been less rigorous than it was
previously. This may be inferred from the fact that he was appointed
by the students of the Inns of Court to prepare a masque, which they
were desirous to represent before the royal family to show their
disapprobation of Prynne's 'Histrio-mastix.' The masque left Ely
Place, Holborn, in grand procession, and went down Chancery Lane and
along the Strand to Whitehall, where it was performed before the King.
During his imprisonment he wrote a treatise, 'De Successionibus in
Bona Defuncti secundum Leges Hebræorum, et de Successione in
Pontificatum Hebræorum, Libri II.,' which he dedicated to Archbishop
Laud; probably upon account of his being indebted to the Archbishop
for the loan of books. In 1634 Selden consented to give bail, and was
suffered to go at large. A petition to Charles I., to whom Selden
appears to have been less obnoxious than most of the others of his
party, either through admiration of his learning or from conviction
that his natural love of ease and retirement, which Clarendon speaks
of, would make him less likely to proceed to violent measures,
obtained for him, through the interest of Laud, his entire liberation.
He appears soon afterwards to have gained the personal favour of
Charles I., and dedicated to him his celebrated essay on the 'Mare
Clausum,' an argument in favour of the dominion of the English over
the four seas, copies of which were, by order of the Privy Council,
directed to be placed in the council chest, the Court of Exchequer,
and the Court of Admiralty.

To the Long Parliament, which commenced its sittings in 1640, Selden
was unanimously returned by the University of Oxford; but neither this
new connexion with the clergy nor the favour of Charles appears to
have affected his opinions. Upon the first day of the sitting of
parliament he was nominated a member of the committee to inquire into
the abuses of the Earl Marshal's Court, and was appointed with others
to draw up a remonstrance upon the state of the nation. He also sat
upon the committees which conducted the measures preparatory to the
impeachment of the Earl of Stratford, but he was not one of the
managers before the House of Lords; and his name was posted in Old
Palace Yard as one of "the enemies of justice," a title given to those
who were regarded as favourable to the Earl. It is not very clear what
his opinions upon the impeachment were. That he should have been
satisfied with all the steps taken by his party is not possible, for
his opinions were undoubtedly moderate, and his studious habits must
have checked any disposition to violence. He was also nominated to
frame the articles of impeachment against Laud, and was a party to the
resolutions against the legislative powers of the bishops. The court,
however, appears to have considered him favourable to its interests,
until he spoke against the commission of array. Upon this question
Clarendon represents the influence of his opinion upon the public to
have been very prejudicial to Charles I. About this time the great
seal was offered to him. He declined it, according to Clarendon, on
account of his love of ease, and "that he would not have made a
journey to York or have been out of his own bed for any preferment."
The reason which he himself assigned for refusing it was the
impossibility of his rendering any service to the Crown. He sat as
member of the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, and took the
Covenant; yet he was not well disposed towards the Puritans, and
declared that "he was neither mad enough nor fool enough to deserve
the name of Puritan." Upon the death of Dr. Eden, Master of Trinity
Hall, Cambridge, in August, 1645, Selden was elected his successor,
but declined to accept the office. About this time he appears to have
gradually withdrawn from public business. His fondness of ease and his
increasing age, and the silence he preserved upon many important
events, all contribute to leave the inference of his approval or
disapproval of much of the conduct of the parliamentary leaders open
to adverse parties. He certainly never openly abandoned the popular
side, nor does he appear to have forfeited its respect; and yet at the
same time he continued to be esteemed by many of the leading Royalists.

The studies of Selden were continued to the latest period of his life,
and he was near the age of seventy when his last work was published.
The influence he possessed with the parliamentary leaders was
frequently exerted in favour of letters. When Archbishop Laud's
endowment of the professorship of Arabic in the University of Oxford
was seized, on the attainder of that prelate, he procured its
restitution. When Archbishop Usher, having preached against the
divines of Westminster and excited their anger, was punished by the
confiscation of his library, Selden interfered, and saved it from sale
and dispersion. When prelacy was abolished, the library attached to
the see of Canterbury was by his efforts transferred to the University
of Cambridge, where it remained until the Restoration. Through his
entreaties, Whitelocke was induced to accept the charge of the medals
and books at St. James's, and thus secured their preservation. The
services which he rendered to the University of Oxford were no less
valuable, and were acknowledged in grateful terms by that learned
body; and it was through his interference that the papers and
instruments of Graves, the Professor of Mathematics, which had been
seized by a party of soldiers, were restored.

Selden died November 30, 1654, and was buried in the Temple church. He
left behind him no immediate relations, and he bequeathed nearly the
whole of his fortune, amounting to nearly 40,000_l._, to his four
executors, giving only one hundred pounds to each of the children of
his sister, the wife of John Barnard, of Goring. His books and
manuscripts he had originally given by his will to the University of
Oxford; but that body having demanded of him a heavy bond for the
restitution of a book which he desired to borrow from the public
library, the bequest was struck out, and they were directed to be
placed "in some convenient public library or college in one of the
universities." Sir M. Hale and his other executors, considering that
they were the executors "of his will, and not of his passion,"
transferred them to the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

To learned men Selden was liberal and generous; and there is a letter
from Casaubon in Parr's 'Life of Archbishop Usher,' in which that
distinguished scholar with great feeling says, "I was with Mr. Selden
after I had been with your Grace, whom, upon some intimation of my
present condition and necessities, I found so noble, as that he did
not only presently furnish me with a very considerable sum of money,
but was so free and forward in his expressions, as that I could not
find in my heart to tell him much (somewhat I did) of my intention of
selling, lest it should sound as a farther pressing upon him of whom I
had received so much."

Milton terms Selden "the chief of learned men reputed in this land;"
and Whitelocke states, "that his mind was as great as his learning,
being very generous and hospitable." He was intimate with Ben Jonson,
who addressed a poetical epistle to him, in which he styles his friend
"monarch in letters." Clarendon, who could not regard Selden with any
political partiality, though he had in early life been on terms of
intimacy with him, describes him to have been "a person whom no
character can flatter or transmit in any expressions equal to his
merit or virtue. He was of so stupendous learning in all kinds and in
all languages (as may appear in his excellent and transcendent
writings), that a man would have thought he had been entirely
conversant among books, and had never spent an hour but in reading and
writing; yet his humanity, courtesy, and affability were such, that he
would have been thought to have been bred in the best courts, but that
his good-nature, charity, and delight in doing good, and in
communicating all he knew, exceeded that breeding." Selden's name has
been made familiar to the public by a small volume entitled 'Table
Talk.' This valuable little collection of acute and learned remarks
was first published in 1689, thirty-five years after Selden's death,
in a quarto pamphlet with the title of 'Table Talk; being the
discourses of John Selden, or his Sense of various matters of Weight
and Consequence, relating especially to Religion and State.' The work
was compiled by Selden's amanuensis, who states in the dedication that
he had the opportunity of hearing Selden's discourses for twenty years
together, and that of what is here collected "the sense and notion is
wholly his and most of the words."

The motto adopted by Selden was περὶ παντὸς τὴν ἐλευθερίαν [Greek:
peri pantoz tên eleutherian] (above all things, liberty), and it is to
be found neatly written upon the first page of many of his MSS. Its
spirit he extended to religious questions; and there are many bold
and vigorous passages in his writings in which the necessity of
freedom of inquiry upon all subjects is strongly insisted on. Noticing
upon one occasion a certain class of ancient philosophers, he remarks,
"He who takes to himself their liberty of inquiry, is in the only way
that, in all kinds of studies, leads and lies open even to the
sanctuary of Truth; while others, that are servile to common opinion
and vulgar suppositions, can rarely hope to be admitted nearer than
into the base-court of her temple, which too speciously often
counterfeits her innermost sanctuary." From the nature of his studies
his writings are far from being popular, and are now but little read.
They obtained, however, for their author, during an age abounding with
illustrious and learned men, an honourable reputation, among the most
distinguished literary men of continental Europe, as well as among
those of his own country. His works were edited by Dr. Wilkins, in 3
vols. folio, in 1726, to which a Latin 'Life of the Author' is
prefixed.




[Illustration: BLAKE]


Robert Blake was born at the seaport town of Bridgewater, in
Somersetshire, in August, 1598. His father, Humphrey Blake, was a
merchant at Bridgewater, in which neighbourhood he purchased an
estate, having accumulated a considerable fortune in the Spanish
trade. Humphrey Blake had several children, of whom Robert was the
eldest. He was educated in the free school of Bridgewater, whence he
went to Oxford, and became a member of St. Alban's Hall in 1615,
whence he removed to Wadham College. In 1617 he took the degree of B.
A., and in 1619 was a candidate for a fellowship in Merton College,
but was unsuccessful, as he had previously been in standing for a
scholarship of Christ Church. He rose early, studied hard, and though
he was fond of field sports and other violent exercises, seems to have
acquired a fair quantity of scholastic learning. He returned to
Bridgewater when about twenty-five years old, and lived quietly on his
paternal estate till 1640, with the character of a blunt, bold man,
of ready humour and fearless expression of his sentiments, which, both
in politics and religion, were adverse to the pretensions of the
court. These qualities gained for him the confidence of the
Presbyterian party in Bridgewater, by whom he was returned to the
parliament of April, 1640. The speedy dissolution of that assembly
gave him no opportunity of trying his powers as a debater; and he lost
his election to the Long Parliament. But on the breaking out of the
civil war, he displayed his principles by entering the parliamentary
army, and was soon made a captain of dragoons.

We have little information concerning his services till 1643, when we
find him intrusted with the command of a fort at Bristol, under
Colonel Fiennes, when the city was besieged by the Royalists. Here his
impetuous temper had nearly brought him to an untimely death; for
having maintained his fort and killed some of the king's soldiers
after the garrison had surrendered, Prince Rupert was with difficulty
induced to spare his life, which was held to have been forfeited by
this violation of the laws of war. Blake served afterwards in
Somersetshire, as lieutenant-colonel, under Popham, who was governor
of Lyme. He took Taunton for the Parliament, by an unexpected attack,
and obtained ten pieces of cannon and a large quantity of ammunition.
In 1644 he was appointed governor of Taunton, which was a place of
great consequence, being the only Parliamentary fortress in that
quarter. In that capacity he distinguished himself by the skill,
courage and constancy with which, during two successive sieges, he
maintained the town against the Royalists in 1645; an important
service, for which the parliament voted 2000_l._ to the garrison, and
500_l._ to the governor. In 1646 Colonel Blake reduced Doncaster
Castle, which was nearly one of the last events of the war. Next to
Cromwell, he was probably the ablest and most successful military
officer in the Parliamentary army. It is recorded that he disapproved
of the extremity to which matters were pushed against Charles, and
that he was heard to say that he would as freely venture his life to
save the king's as he had ever done it in the service of the Parliament.

In February, 1649, Colonel Blake, in conjunction with two officers of
the same rank, Deane and Popham, was appointed to command the fleet.
It may be taken as a proof that, notwithstanding the fame of our early
navigators, the king's service at sea had never been treated with much
attention; that, down to later times than those of which we now write,
the chief command of a fleet seems never to have been given to a man
of naval education and habits. It is probable that the sea-service
then held out no inducements strong enough to tempt men of high birth
to submit to its inconveniences, and that the command of a fleet was
esteemed too great a post to be conferred on a man of humble origin.
For this new employment Blake showed signal capacity. When the embers
of the war were stirred up after the king's death, he was ordered to
the Irish Seas in pursuit of Prince Rupert, whom he blockaded in the
harbour of Kinsale for several months. Despair of relief induced the
prince at last to make a daring effort to break through the
parliamentary squadron, in which he succeeded; but with the loss of
three ships. Blake pursued him to the Tagus, where being denied
liberty to attack his enemy by the King of Portugal, in revenge he
captured and sent home a number of ships richly laden, on their way
from Brazil. Towards the latter end of 1650, Prince Rupert escaped out
of the Tagus, and Blake followed him up the straits, thence to
Carthagena, and thence to Malaga, which was a neutral port. In
January, 1651, he attacked, and, with the exception of two ships, in
one of which Prince Rupert and his brother Prince Maurice escaped,
destroyed the royalist fleet, in the harbour; a breach of
international law, which can only be justified on the alleged ground
that Rupert had destroyed British ships in the same harbour. These
services were recompensed by the Parliament with the post of Warden of
the Cinque Ports; and in March an act was passed constituting Blake,
with his colleagues Deane and Popham, admirals and generals of the
fleet for the year ensuing. In that capacity, he took Jersey,
Guernsey, and the Scilly Islands from the royalists; a service for
which he was again thanked by parliament. In this year he was elected
a member of the Council of State.

March 25, 1652, Blake was appointed sole admiral for nine months, in
expectation of a war with Holland. The Dutch United States and England
were at this time the two most powerful maritime countries in the
world; and it is hard to find any better reason than national rivalry
for the bloody war which broke out between them in the spring of this
year; a war which seems to have been begun on a point of etiquette, at
the discretion of the admirals, without orders for hostilities being
known to be given by the governments on either side. On May 18, a
fleet of forty-two Dutch ships, commanded by the celebrated Van Tromp,
appeared off the Goodwin Sands. Being challenged by Major Bourne, who
commanded a squadron in the Downs, they professed to have been driven
from their anchorage off Dunkirk by stress of weather; but, instead of
drawing off the coast as they were required to do, they sailed to
Dover and cast anchor, in a manner which showed the deliberate design
of insulting the British flag. Blake lay some distance to the westward
in Rye Bay. Intelligence was immediately sent to him, and on his
approach the Dutch weighed anchor, and seemed about to retreat; but
changing their course, they sailed direct for the English fleet. When
within musket-shot, Blake ordered a single gun to be fired at the
Dutch admiral's flag, which was done thrice. Van Tromp returned a
broadside, and a hot and well-contested action ensued, and was
maintained till nightfall. Under cover of the darkness the Dutch
retreated, losing two ships (one sunk, the other taken), and leaving
the possession of the field and the honour of the victory in the hands
of the English. The States appear neither to have authorised nor
approved of the conduct of their admiral; for they left no means
untried to satisfy the English government; and when they found the
demands of the latter so high as to preclude accommodation, they
dismissed Van Tromp, and intrusted the command of their fleet to De
Ruyter and De Witt. Meanwhile, Blake's activity was unremitting. He
gained a rich harvest of prizes among the Dutch homeward-bound
merchantmen, which were pursuing their way without suspicion of
danger; and, when he had sent home forty good prizes and effectually
cleared the Channel, he sailed to the northward, dispersed the fleet
engaged in the herring fishery, and captured a hundred of the vessels
composing it, together with a squadron of twelve ships of war sent out
to protect them. The hostile fleets again came to an engagement,
September 28, in which the advantage was decidedly in favour of the
English, the rear-admiral of the Dutch being taken, and three or four
of their ships disabled. Night put an end to the action: and though
for two days the English maintained the pursuit, the lightness and
uncertainty of the wind prevented them from closing with the enemy,
who escaped into Goree.

After this battle the drafting off of detachments on various services
reduced the English fleet to forty sail, and those, it is said, in
consequence of the negligence or jealousy of the executive government,
were ill provided with men and ammunition, and other requisite
supplies. Thus weakly furnished, Blake lay in the Downs, when Van
Tromp again stood over to the English coast, with eighty men-of-war.
Of that undaunted spirit which usually prompts the British seaman to
refuse no odds, Blake had an ample share; indeed, he did much to
infuse that spirit into the service. But there are odds for which no
spirit can make up, and as he had a brave and skilful enemy, the
result of his rashness was that he was well beaten. The action
commenced at two o'clock in the morning of November 29, and lasted
till six in the evening. Not more than half the ships on either side
were engaged; but out of this small number of English vessels, two of
war were taken, and four destroyed; the rest were so shattered that
they were glad to run for shelter into the river Thames. The Dutch
remained masters of the narrow seas; and Van Tromp, in an idle
bravado, sailed through the Channel with a broom at his mast-head, as
if he had swept it clear of English ships. However, neither the
admiral nor the nation were of a temper to submit to this indignity.
Monk and Deane were joined in the commission with Blake, and the fleet
was repaired with such diligence, that, on the 8th of February, 1653,
he sailed from Queenborough with sixty ships of war, and was soon
joined by twenty more from Portsmouth. On the 18th he fell in with Van
Tromp, with nearly equal force, conducting a large convoy of
merchantmen up the Channel. A running battle ensued, which was
continued during three consecutive days, until, on the 20th, the Dutch
ships, which, to suit the nature of their coast, were built with a
smaller draught of water than the English, obtained shelter in the
shallow waters of Calais. In this long and obstinate fight, the Dutch
lost only eleven men-of-war and thirty merchant vessels; but the
number killed is said to have amounted to 1500 on either side; a loss
of life of most unusual amount in naval engagements.

About the end of April Blake and his colleagues sailed over to the
coast of Holland with a fleet of 100 sail. The Dutch fleet took
shelter in the Texel, where they were watched by Deane and Monk while
Blake sailed to the north. The Dutch fleet however got out, and on the
3rd of June Deane and Monk brought them to an engagement off the North
Foreland. On the first day the Dutch seem to have had somewhat the
advantage: on the 4th Blake arrived with a reinforcement of eighteen
sail; the English gained a complete victory, and if the Dutch had not
saved themselves in the shallow waters of Calais the whole fleet would
doubtless have been sunk or taken. Ill health obliged him then to quit
the sea, so that he was not present at the last great victory of July
29, in which Van Tromp was killed. But out of respect for his services
the parliament presented him with a gold chain, as well as the
admirals who had actually commanded in the battle. When Cromwell
dissolved the Long Parliament in April, 1653, and afterwards assumed
the office of Protector, Blake, though in his principles a republican,
did not refuse to acknowledge the new administration. In conjunction
with Deane and Monk he published a declaration of their resolution,
"notwithstanding the late change, to proceed in the performance of
their duties, and the trust reposed in them, against the enemies of
the Commonwealth." He is reported to have said to his officers, "It is
not our business to mind state-affairs, but to keep foreigners from
fooling us." He sat in the two first parliaments summoned by the
Protector, who always treated him with great respect. Nor was
Cromwell's acknowledged sagacity in the choice of men at fault when he
chose Blake to command a strong fleet sent into the Mediterranean in
November, 1654, to uphold the honour of the English flag, and to
demand reparation for the slights and injuries done to the nation
during that stormy period of civil war, when our own discord had made
others daring against us. In better hands such a mission could not
have been placed. Dutch, French, and Spaniards alike concurred in
rendering unusual honours to his flag. The Duke of Tuscany and the
Order of Malta made compensation for injuries done to the English
commerce. The piratical states of Algiers and Tripoli were terrified
into submission, and promised to abstain from further violence. The
Dey of Tunis held out, confident in the strength of his
fortifications. "Here," he said, "are our castles of Goletta and Porto
Ferino: do your worst; do you think we fear your fleet?" Blake took
the same course against Tunis as Lord Exmouth did in more recent times
against Algiers. He bore right into the bay of Porto Ferino; engaged
the fortress within musket-shot, and in less than two hours silenced
or dismounted its guns; and sending a detachment of boats into the
harbour, burnt the shipping which lay there. This was in March, 1655.
After this example he found no more difficulty in dealing with the
African states.

War having been declared between Spain and England, in 1656, Blake took
his station to blockade the bay of Cadiz. At this period his
constitution was much broken, insomuch that, in the expectation of a
speedy death, he sent home a request that some person proper to be his
successor might be joined in commission with him. General Montague was
accordingly sent out with a strong squadron. Being obliged to quit the
coast of Spain in September to obtain water for his fleet, Blake left
Captain Stayner with seven ships to watch the enemy. In this interval
the Spanish Plate fleet appeared. Stayner captured four ships richly
laden with bullion; the rest escaped. Montague conducted the prizes
home, so that Blake was again left alone in the Mediterranean. In the
ensuing spring, having learnt that another Plate fleet had put into the
island of Teneriffe, he sailed thither, and arrived in the road of Santa
Cruz, April 20, 1657. The bay was strongly fortified, with a formidable
castle at the entrance, and a connected chain of minor forts all round
it. The naval force collected there was also considerable, and strongly
posted, the smaller vessels being placed under the guns of the forts,
the galleons strongly moored with their broadsides to the sea; insomuch
that the Spanish governor, a man of courage and ability, felt perfectly
at ease as to the security of his charge. The master of a Dutch ship,
which was lying in the harbour, was less satisfied, and went to the
governor to request leave to quit the harbour; "For I am sure," he said,
"that Blake will presently be among you." The governor made a confident
reply--"Begone if you will, and let Blake come if he dares." Daring was
the last thing wanting; nor did the admiral hesitate, as a wise man
might well have done, about the real difficulties of the enterprise in
which he was about to engage. The wind blowing into the bay, he sent in
Captain Stayner with a squadron to attack the shipping, placed others in
such a manner as take off, and, as far as possible, to silence the fire
of the castle and the forts, and himself following, assisted Stayner in
capturing the galleons, which, though inferior in number, were superior
in size and force to the English ships. This was completed by two
o'clock in the afternoon, the engagement having commenced at eight in
the morning. Hopeless of being able to carry the prizes out of the bay
against an adverse wind, and a still active enemy, Blake gave orders to
burn them: and it is probable that he himself might have found some
difficulty in beating out of the bay under the fire of the castle,
which was still lively, when on a sudden, the wind, which had blown
strong into the bay, suddenly veered round to the south-west, and
favoured his retreat, as it had favoured his daring approach. Of this,
the most remarkable as it was the last exploit of Blake's life,
Clarendon says, "The whole action was so incredible, that all men who
knew the place wondered that any sober man, with what courage soever
endowed, would ever have undertaken it; and they could hardly persuade
themselves to believe what they had done: while the Spaniards comforted
themselves with the belief, that they were devils and not men who had
destroyed them in such a manner. So much a strong resolution of bold and
courageous men can bring to pass, that no resistance or advantage of
ground can disappoint them; and it can hardly be imagined how small a
loss the English sustained in this unparalleled action, not one ship
being left behind, and the killed and wounded not exceeding two hundred
men; when the slaughter on board the Spanish ships and on shore was
incredible." It will be recollected with interest that, on the same
spot, Nelson lost his arm, in an unsuccessful night-attempt to capture
Santa Cruz with an armed force in boats.

For this service the thanks of parliament were voted to the officers
and seamen engaged, with a diamond ring to the Admiral worth 500_l._
Blake returned to his old station off Cadiz; but the increase of his
disorders, which were dropsy and scurvy, raised a desire in him to
return to England, which, however, he did not live to fulfil. He died
as he was entering Plymouth Sound, August 17, 1657. His body was
transported to London, and buried with great pomp in a vault in Henry
VII.'s Chapel, Westminster Abbey, at the public expense. After the
Restoration it was thought unworthy to remain in that treasure-house
of England's departed greatness; and with the bones of others who had
found a resting-place there during the short period of the
Commonwealth, it was transferred to St. Margaret's churchyard. It has
been disputed whether this was done with more or less of indecency;
but the matter is little worth inquiry. The real indecency and folly
lay in thinking that any ground, however sanctified by the reverent
associations of centuries, could be polluted by the tomb of a man
whose leading passion was the glory of his country, and who made the
name and flag of that country respected wheresoever he carried it: a
man of whom not one mean or interested action is recorded, and whose
great qualities extorted praise even from the Royalists. Bate, in his
'Elenchus Motuum,' speaks of him as a man "blameable in this only,
that he joined with the _parricides_;" and it may be remarked that Dr.
Bate's horror of a parricide did not prevent his being physician to
Cromwell, as well as to Charles I. and II. He was a man of the
strictest honesty, liberal to the extent of his fortune, and so
disinterested that he left only 500_l._ He was a man of low stature.

We conclude with Clarendon's character of this great man. "He was of
private extraction, yet had enough left him by his father to give him
a good education, which his own inclination disposed him to receive in
the University of Oxford, where he took the degree of a Master of
Arts, and was enough versed in books for a man who intended not to be
of any profession, having sufficient of his own to maintain him in the
plenty he affected, and having then no appearance of ambition to be a
greater man than he was. He was of a melancholic and sullen nature,
and spent his time most with good fellows, who liked his moroseness,
and a freedom he used in inveighing against the licence of the time
and the power of the court. They who knew him inwardly, discovered
that he had an anti-monarchical spirit, when few men thought the
government in any danger." After a short sketch of Blake's actions in
the civil war, the noble author continues, "He then betook himself
wholly to the sea, and quickly made himself signal there. He was the
first man that declined the old track, and made it manifest that the
science might be attained in less time than was imagined, and despised
those rules which had long been in practice, to keep his ship and his
men out of danger; which had been held in former times a point of
great ability and circumspection, as if the principal art requisite in
the captain of a ship had been to be sure to come safe home again. He
was the first man who brought the ships to contemn castles on shore,
which had been thought ever very formidable, and were discovered by
him to make a noise only, and to fright those who could be rarely hurt
by them. He was the first who infused that proportion of courage into
the seamen, by making them see by experience what mighty things they
could do, if they were resolved, and taught them to fight in fire as
well as upon water; and though he has been very well imitated and
followed, he was the first that gave the example of that kind of naval
courage, and bold and resolute achievements."

The earliest life of Blake which we have seen is in the second volume of
a collection entitled 'Lives English and Foreign,' published at the
beginning of the last century. Clarendon's History of the Rebellion,
Heath's Chronicle of the Civil Wars, the Memoirs of Ludlow, Whitelocke,
and other contemporary authorities, will furnish minute accounts of the
many battles of which we have here only made short mention.


  END OF VOL. VI.


  London: Printed by W. CLOWES and SONS, Stamford-street.




Transcriber's Note


  * Obvious punctuation and spelling errors repaired.

  * Footnotes moved to end of respective chapters.


[The end of _The Cabinet Portrait Gallery of British Worthies Vol 6 of 12_ by Charles Knight]