grant leases, remit feudal services. and convert copyholds into freeholds, on certain charges. Privy seals were again issued to noblemen, gentlemen, and merchants, for the advance of loans, and London was called on to furnish one hundred and twenty thousand pounds; and as if the king already feared that his arbitrary acts might produce disturbance, under the plea of protecting the coasts, he ordered the different sea-ports to provide and maintain during three months, a certain number of armed vessels, and the lord lieutenants of counties to muster the people, and train troops to arms to prevent internal riot or foreign invasion.
At the moment that the king was thus daringly setting both parliament and the country at defiance, came the news that a terrible battle had been fought at Luttern betwixt the Austrians under Tilly, and the protestant allies under Charles's uncle the king of Denmark; that the allies were defeated and driven across the Elbe; all their baggage and ammunition lost, and the whole circle of Lower Saxony left exposed to the soldiers of Ferdinand. This was the death-blow to the cause of the elector palatine. But Charles seized on the occasion to raise money by a fresh forced loan on a large scale, on pretence of the necessity of aiding protestantism, and as if to make the lawless demand the more intolerable, the commissioners were armed with the most arbitrary powers. Whoever refused to comply with this illegal demand, they were authorised to interrogate on oath, as to their reasons, and who were their advisers, and they were bound by oath never to divulge what passed betwixt them and the commissioners.
Charles issued a proclamation, excusing his conduct by alleging that the necessities of the state did not admit of waiting for the reassembling of parliament, and assuming his loving subjects that whatever was now paid would be remitted in the collection of the next subsidy. He also addressed a letter to the clergy, calling on them to exhort their parishioners from the pulpit to obedience and liberality. But such were the relative positions of king and parliament, that people were not very confident of any speedy grant from that body, and the good faith of both Charles and his favourite had become so dubious, that many refused to pay. The names of these were transmitted to the council, and the vengeance of the court was let loose upon them. The rich were fined and imprisoned, the poor were forcibly enrolled in the army or navy, that "they might serve with their bodies, since they refused to serve with their purses."
In vain were appeals made to the king against this intolerable tyranny, he would listen to no one. Amongst the names of those who suffered on this occasion, stand those of Sir John Elliot and John Hampden, as well as of Wentworth, soon, as Strafford, to become a proselyte of absolutism.
In towns the people did not conceal their indignation at these proceedings. "Six poor tradesmen at Chelmsford stood out stiffly, not-withstanding the many threats and promises made them;" and the Londoner loudly shouted, "A parliament! a parliament! No parliament no money!" Still Charles went on in his mad course; no voice, mortal or immortal, could even for a moment break the spell of his delusion. Such of the judges and magistrates as appeared averse to enforce the detestable orders, were summarily dismissed. Sir Randolph Carew, the chief justice of the King's Bench, must give way to the more pliant Sir Nicholas Hyde, the adviser of Buckingham. But the lawyers in general were ready enough to break the laws by order of the court, and the clergy were still more so. Laud was now advanced, for his absolute and popish predilection, to the see of Bath and Wells, and sent forth a circular to the clergy enjoining them to preach up zealously the advance of money to the crown, as a work meriting salvation. He openly advocated a strict league and confederacy betwixt the church and state, by which they might trample over all schism, heresy, and disloyalty. There was no lack of time-servers to second his efforts. Roger Mainwaring, one of the king's chaplains, a true high-priest to the golden calf, with the most shameless prostitution of the pulpit, declared before the king and court at Whitehall, that the power of the king was above all courts and parliaments; that parliament, indeed, was but an inferior kind of council, entirely at the king's will; the king's order was sufficient authority for the raising of money, and that all who refused it were guilty of unutterable sin, and liable to damnation. He insulted the Scriptures by dragging them in to prove all this; and would have sold, not his own soul only, but the souls of the whole nation to obtain a bishopric. He had his desire; and the success of such religious toadyism inflamed the clergy in the country with a like abjectness. One Robert Sibthorpe, vicar of Brockley, in an assize sermon preached at Northampton, declared that even if the king commanded people to resist the law of God, they were to obey him, to show no resistance, no railing, no reviling,—to be all passive obedience. To demonstrate the scriptural soundness of his doctrine, he quoted this verse of the book of Ecclesiastes: "Where the word of the king is, there is power; and who may say unto him what dost thou?"
Abbot, the archbishop, was applied to, to license the printing of this sermon; but the old man, who had always had a puritan leaning, which his high post only prevented him more fully demonstrating, declined to do it. In vain the king insisted; the archbishop was suspended, and sent to his country house; and Laud, who was hankering earnestly after the primacy, licensed the sermon. Sibthorpe did not fail of his reward; he was appointed chaplain in ordinary—it might have been better termed extraordinary—and received a prebend in Peterborough, and the goodly living of Burton Latimer. Andrew Marvell designated these model churchmen as "exceedingly pragmatical, intolerably ambitious, and so desperately proud that scarcely any gentleman might come near the tails of their mules." Such insolence is the eternal concomitant of the reptiles which crawl most obscenely at the foot of a good loaf and fish throne. The subserviency of the clergy was not one of the least evils which a tyrannic court fostered. The people saw more clearly than ever, that the church under such circumstances would become the stanch ally of despotism; and many even of its own honourable members, in the higher walks of life, shrunk away from it, and joined the ranks of the puritans, for no other reason than that they were resolute for the liberty of the subject.
Whilst the unhappy king was thus busily sowing the dragon's teeth which were to devour him, his domestic peace was utterly punished by the perverse temper of his
