rain and showers, that we may receive the fruits of the earth to our comfort, and to Thy honour.” 1

Oct. 12.

Rising feeling

sects.

But it

It was hard to moderate between the disgust of a large part of the upper and more cultured class and the zeal of the many who were rushing headlong into the whirl of a religious excitement. Government there was none in England, save Pym's Committee. such as resided in the Committee of which Pym was the guiding spirit. That Committee did its utmost, after its fashion, to stem the tide. It ordered every disbanded soldier to return to his home. It strove to enforce the resolutions of the Commons as a mere declaration of the existing law. had a difficult part to play. The sense of insecurity provoked staid and nervous citizens to apprehension. The weight of taxation, especially of the terrible poll-tax, pressed heavily on rich and poor. The religious sense of a respectable minority in London, probably of a majority in the against the country, was deeply wounded. It was not against Presbyterianism that their anger was moved. The Root-and-Branch Bill had been a clear indication that the Commons had no wish to impose. Presbyterianism on England.j The present evil which was feared was the sudden uprising of the untaught multitude, that 'blatant beast' of which Spensen had written, forcing the acceptance of its uncouth shibboleths upon men of learning and education. "I think," wrote one who shared in this feeling, "it will be thought blasphemy shortly to name Jesus Christ; for it is already forbidden to bow at His name, though Scripture and the Church of England doth both warrant it and command it." Placards were already posted up against 'the precise Lords and Commons of the Parliament.' The authors of sedition, it was said, who had conspired with the Scots, must be expelled from Parliament, otherwise men would be found to take their lives, as enemies of God and the commonwealth. Similar placards were exposed to the public gaze in many parts of the country, and especially in Yorkshire.2

The greater part of this paragraph is founded on A Sermon preached at St. Paul's the 10th day of Oct. by T. Cheshire, E. 177.

2 Wiseman to Pennington, Oct. 7, S. P. Dom. Giustinian's despatch, Oct. Ven. Transcripts, R. O.

8

18'

Oct. 19.

known in

London.

of Parliament.

Parliament was to meet again on the 20th. On the 19th Pym read in committee the letters from Edinburgh telling of the murderous design which had been timely frusThe Incident trated. For the last ten days, he said, he had been receiving warnings that a similar design was enterRe-assembly tained in England. When the Houses re-assembled the shadow of the Incident was there to terrify them. "Other men," Essex and Holland thought, "were in danger of the like assaults." 1 D'Ewes moved in the Commons that the danger of a Popish plot should be the first subject of consideration, and that the Lords should be asked to join in settling religion, as a salve for all sores.. Hyde and Falkland fell back on blank incredulity as to there being any danger at all, and asked that the affairs of Scotland should be left to the Scottish Parliament, that they should not 'take up fears and suspicions without any certain and undoubted ground.' The House refused to listen to a plea which made so light of the peril, and the Lords were asked to concur in measures for the protection of Parliament. To this demand the Lords at once assented, and from that day a hundred men from the Westminster Trained Bands kept guard night and day in Palace Yard.2

Guard voted for Parliament.

Oct. 20. The Episcopalian party becoming a Royalist party.

The language of Hyde and Falkland was sufficient evidence that the Episcopalian party was in process of conversion into a Royalist party. But their failure to secure any large following as yet, and the prompt concurrence of the Lords with the Commons, was evidence that the conversion was not as yet entirely effected. Even at this time it may safely be affirmed that, if no other question had been at issue than the political one, there would have been no permanent division of parties, and no Civil War, with all its melancholy consequences.

Only partisan rancour can throw the blame of the Civil War on either side exclusively. Pym, far-sighted as he was on

1 C. 7. ii. 289. Clarendon, iv. 20.

D'Ewes's Diary, Harl. MSS. clxiv. fol. 241 b.

D'Ewes s Diary, Harl. MSS. clxii. fol. 12 b.

2 C. 7. ii. 290. Diurnal Occurrences, 329.

the constitutional question, had been bred up too long on The fault of the commonplaces of Puritanism to recognise boldly division falls that no settlement of the Church was likely to

on both

sides. Pym.

be permanent which did not provide for both the chief phases of opinion. Without being himself a fanatic, he had more sympathy with the fanatics than he had with the ceremonialists. The grand vision of religious liberty never lightened his path. The hard problem of toleration which his own generation and the next were called to solve never presented itself to his mind as a question worthy of consideration. He would have had but one Church, one form of worship, one dogmatic teaching, though he would no doubt have administered this system in a large and tolerant spirit. Fatal as his choice was, nothing else could fairly have been expected of him.. If he had not shared the errors of his followers he would never have been their leader. The belief that the State was to settle a definite Church order, to which all were bound to submit, was too deeply rooted in the English mind to be easily eradicated, and the unbending severity of Laud's government had called forth a reaction strong enough to remove far away the thought of toleration for any practices which seemed akin to the Laudian innovations.

Falkland.

The action of Falkland is still more disappointing than that of Pym. It might have been expected that with his broad culture and wide sympathies he would have made some overtures with the object of enlarging the formularies of the Church, in order to embrace all moderate men within its fold. The policy of comprehension, indeed, was not altogether a promising one. It would, in any case, have left too many outside the widest possible Church to be accepted as a permanent solution of the problem. But at least it would have acknowledged that the problem existed. No help of this kind was forthcoming from Falkland. His entire want of imaginative force left him without creative power. He was a critican amiable, truth-loving critic—but not a statesman. He had attacked Laudian Episcopacy in February. His delicate nerves were shocked in October by the systematic rigour of Presbyterianism and by the fanaticism of the

Oct. 21.

sects. He had said his last word in politics, and he now sank into a mere position of dependency upon a man in every respect, except rigidity of purpose, so inferior to him as Hyde.

The perma

the Long Parliament

ended.

What has yet to be told.

Like Falkland, the Long Parliament itself had said its last word in politics. Everything that it had done up to this point, with the single exception of the compulsory clauses nent work of of the Triennial Act, was accepted at the Restoration and passed into the permanent constitution of the country. Everything that it attempted to do after this was rejected at the Restoration. The first was the work of the whole Parliament, the second was the work of a majority. Failure, and it must be confessed deserved failure, was the result of Pym's leadership. Failure, and equally deserved failure, would have been the result of the leadership of Hyde. It does not follow that the historian should pause here and throw down his pen in despair. It does not follow that he is even called on to regret the sad and melancholy tale which has yet to be unrolled of Englishmen, born to be as brothers, flying at one another's throats in savage hatred; or, worse still, of Englishmen in despair casting away the high thoughts of their fathers to grovel in the slough of sensuality, except with that regret which is ever springing up afresh for the imperfections and weaknesses of human nature itself. Would England, it may well be asked, have been really the better if it had limited its desires to purely material objects, if it had been content to abolish ship-money and the Star Chamber, to seize the purse, and, with the purse in its hand, to enter into its inheritance of power? Such gains have never been sufficient for any nation or for any man. Liberty and authority are only permanent when they are grasped not for their own sake, but for the sake of higher and more beneficent aims. Our fathers, it is true, strove in error. They walked on paths which led not to wisdom and justice, but to folly and injustice. But wisdom and justice were the objects which they set before themselves. Each party contended for an ideal Church, which was not soiled in their minds by the admixture of material dross; and no man who strives even for a false ideal can fall so low as the man who strives for no ideal at all. The

error was great, and it was sorely expiated. He whose lot it is to tell the tale of the heroic and fatal strife may well look beyond the strife and the immediate relaxation of energy which followed its conclusion. Even in the Restoration he can foresee the Revolution and the reawakening of moral earnestness and intellectual insight which was the ultimate result of the Revolution. If it was in England that the great problem of the seventeenth century was solved by liberty of speech and thought, if England has from time to time raised herself above the temptations of material wealth to loose the bonds of the slave, and to redress the wrongs of the oppressed, if her greatest glory has been that she has been not only free herself but the mother of free nations, it is because at this crisis of her fate she did not choose to lie down and slumber as soon as she judged that the rights of property were safe.

Voices raised for toleration.

Even now voices were raised to point to the true path of safety; but they were not voices to which any man of authority was likely to listen. The desire for toleration naturally comes to the persecuted before it reaches the philosopher or the statesman, and the theory which had been struck out by the early Separatists retained its power over their July. successors. Henry Burton, who had been restored Burton's to his church in Friday Street, had been rushing Protested. forwards to extreme Puritanism, and in a pamphlet entitled The Protestation Protested,1 had sketched out that plan of a national Church surrounded by voluntary churches, which

Protestation

Lord Brooke's Discourse on Episcopacy.

was accepted at the Revolution of 1688 as the solution of the difficulty by which two generations had been troubled.2 Still more remarkable was A Discourse opening the nature of that Episcopacy which is exercised in England, the result of Lord Brooke's vacation

1 Its publication is mentioned in a letter of July 11, R. Hobart io J. Hobart, July 11, Tanner MSS. lxvi. fol. 109.

2 The Humble Petition of the Brownists, 1641, E. 178, declares for complete toleration even for Roman Catholics and for the Family of Love, on the ground that whatever is of God will prosper. The largeness of its charity is rather suspicious, and it was most probably intended as a cari

cature.