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for the generous devotion of his subjects. They crowded to the polls, impatient to prove their indignation against whoever desired to hinder or annoy him, and exulted in throwing the power of the Commons into the hands of men who proclaimed the loudest their reverence for the altar and the throne. At the meeting of Parliament, it appeared that only fifty-six Presbyterians had liament, de- been returned to that House. Lord Clarendon was now omnipotent. And, even had his temper resembled less than it did the temper of Laud, he might scarcely have been able to resist the angry cavaliers and churchmen who held the powers of the three estates of the realm.

A new Par

voted to the

King.

1661. May 8.

Fifth-Monar

Jan. 6.

When strong passions and a clear purpose meet, some pretence will never be wanting. There was a club of Fifth-Monarchy Men, which held meetings at a house in Coleman Street, in the City. Its principal memchy Men. ber was Venner, the cooper from Salem in Massachusetts, who had been troublesome in the Protector's time.1 One Sunday, when the King was at Portsmouth, Venner exhorted his hearers, about sixty in number, to take arms for setting up their own sovereign, King Jesus, and not lay them down till Babylon, the bloody city, should be made "a hissing and a curse." Assured by his promise that "one should chase a thousand, and two should put ten thousand to flight," they rushed into the street and made a riot, for which, the next day, about half of them were apprehended, and put in the guard-houses. The remnant were, however, joined by some other disorderly persons. train-bands fired upon this mob, killed twentytwo, and took prisoners twenty others, ten of whom, including the leader, were convicted and hanged; and the Fifth Monarchy was heard of no more.2

Jan. 9.

Jan. 21.

1 See above, p. 300, note.
But Pepys was told they were

The

"not in all above thirty-one." (Memoirs, I. 169; comp. 167.) He says,

Nothing could be more insignificant, in the way of danger to the administration, than this folly of a few frantic vagabonds; and nothing was more notorious than that Fifth-Monarchy Men had as little connection, and as little favor, with Presbyterians as with Prelatists. It is hard to imagine that the pretext was expected to impose upon any one. But it was convenient to have something to which to impute the breach of the royal word. The ultra-royalists professed to be in a fever of alarm. Reports were spread of a plot against the government, and against the person of the King; that the Presbyterians were engaged in it, and that Baxter was a leader.

The material fact is, that the Church-and-King party was now as powerful and confident as it was wrathful. Lord Clarendon was not impelled by the furious passions that possessed many of his followers; but none of them resented more implacably the popular triumphs of the past years, and none was more blindly bigoted to the hierarchical administration of the Church. Under such auspices the new Parliament opened its first session by excluding every member elect who should not receive the sacrament according to the liturgical form, and ordering the burning of the League and Covenant in Proceedings Westminster Hall by the common hangman.1 against DisThe strength of the dominant party was now Episcopacy. made manifest to itself; and at the next session May 17. it proceeded to carry out its policy with arrogant determination. By the Corporation Act, all officers Corporation of corporations, including magistrates of cities Act. and boroughs, were required to assert, under oath, the nullity of the Covenant, and the unlawfulness of offering resistance to the King under any circumstances whatso

Venner " I was much wounded before he could be taken" (Ibid., 172.)," and fought with courage amounting to desperation." Comp. Burnet, 160, 161.

senters from

1 The coronation had taken place on the 23d of April preceding. Pepys (Memoirs, I. 190-197) has a very entertaining account of it.

ever; and all persons were pronounced ineligible, for the future, to offices in corporations, who should not, within have received the sacrament from the hands of a priest of the national Church.1

a year,

Act of Uni

formity.

1662. May 18.

The still more monstrous Act of Uniformity was passed after some opposition, chiefly made in the House of Lords, which House appears to have been most sensible to the shame of the King's perfidy. The Act provided that all clergymen should not only conduct worship according to the Book of Common Prayer, but should expressly declare and subscribe their unfeigned assent and consent to everything therein contained; that no person should hold Church preferment, or administer the ordinances, unless he had been ordained by a bishop; and that all clergymen, officials of the Universities, and even private tutors, should sign a renunciation of the Covenant, and of the lawfulness of resisting the sovereign for any cause. The Act was to take effect in three months, on the next St. Bartholomew's day, a few weeks before the annual revenues from the livings became due. When the roistering readers of the Liturgy and the Homilies had been displaced by the stern sobriety of the Commonwealth, one fifth of the value of the livings had been set apart for their support; now no provision whatever was allowed to the learned and laborious pastors who were expelled. Rather than make the sacrifice required, some ministers chose to carry over to the Church, which was thus vindicating its purity, just so many unconscientious members. A mitre had been accepted by Dr. Reynolds. Bishoprics and deaneries had been offered to other Presbyterians in vain. On one and the same day England saw the becoming spectacle of two thousand ministers of Jesus Christ embracing penury rather than stoop to dishonest compliance. From College halls and Cathedral closes, from stately and from 2 Ibid., 696.

1 Statutes at Large, II. 685.

humble parsonages, endeared by the familiarity of happy and useful years, holy men led out their delicately nurtured families, not knowing whither they should go.

Conventicle

1663.

They were not sufficiently punished yet. Some measures which followed may be mentioned here, though three years passed before the series was completed. The ejected ministers found friends, who desired to be their hearers, though it should be obscurely, and in private houses. To meet this state of things, which revealed itself in a few months, the Conventicle Act was passed. It forbade the meeting, in any house, of Act. more than five persons besides the family there June. resident, "for any exercises of religion in any other manner than is the practice of the Church of England." The penalty for violating the statute-a fine of five pounds and imprisonment for three months—was doubled for a second transgression; for a third, the convict was to be banished for life to some American colony, -not, however, to New England, because there he would find sympathy and help. Finally, the Five-Mile Act tried what law could do to deprive Non-conformist ministers of the power of earning a living, or Act. of receiving it from the affection of old friends, or from the charity of pitying strangers possessing means for beneficence. It forbade them to come at any time within five miles of any parish which they had served, or of any corporate town whatever. The penalty was a fine of fifty pounds, and imprisonment for six months.2

Five Mile

1665.

The loss to England of so large a number of her working clergy, while it could at no time have been other than disastrous, could never have been more unseasonable than now. With the restoration of the royal house, immorality had come in upon England like a Decline of flood. The hatred of Puritanism extended it- morals. self to the venerable things that Puritans revered, 1 Statutes at Large, II. 758.

2 Ibid., 763.

and to those habits of blameless living that Puritans had attempted (not always wisely) to enforce. The King's example of ostentatious vice was attractive to loyal minds. The Court, with which the Church was enthusiastically allied, was flagitiously and impudently profligate. The fine gentleman scarcely maintained his character, unless, besides being a libertine and a scoffer, he was a pensioner and a pimp. The King's bishops had to keep on civil terms with the King's harlots. The latest historian is fain to record, as "an unquestionable and a most instructive fact, that the years during which the political power of the Anglican hierarchy was in the zenith, were precisely the years during which national virtue was at the lowest point."1

To the Presbyterians of his Northern kingdom Charles the Second had no recent promises to break, for he had made none. The penance which, while formerly in their hands, he had had to bear in listening to their lessons, and pretending to conform to them, had occasioned him inexpressible disgust at the time. But his nature was not vindictive, and his sufferings from long prayers and exhortations to lead a decent life were now recalled by him mainly as subjects of merriment. The simple usages of Presbytery were not to his taste; but they no longer obtruded themselves upon his notice, and, as questions merely of religion and conscience, all questions between different denominations of Protestants were re

garded by him with utter unconcern. In one aspect, however, they did seem to him well worth attention. Episcopacy had been the steadfast friend of the throne. The Presbyterians had overturned the throne; and fidelity to that claim for civil and religious freedom, which was involved alike in the spirit of their faith and in the necessity of their position, would impel them to be restless again as soon as opportunity for resistance

1 Macaulay, History, &c., I. 181.

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