ministers. When the fatal day arrived, upwards of 2000 ministers of good repute resigned their preferments.

Similar reaction in Scotland.

Events had been following the same course in Scotland. Since the battle of Dunbar, Scotland had been virtually dependent upon England. At first the Scotch received with great warmth the King, who relieved them from this position and restored them their nationality. It was not long before they learnt to regret the change. On reaching London, Charles found ambassadors from Scotland begging for the establishment of the Presbyterian form of worship. The chief of these was James Sharp. At the same time the Secretary of State for Scotland was Lauderdale, who had been deeply implicated in the movements of the Covenanters. Seeing the direction which affairs were taking in England, and feeling sure of the strength of the Royalist reaction, these two men thought it well

Treacherous conduct of Lauderdale and Sharp.

entirely to betray their cause. Lauderdale henceforward gave all his ability to making good the most odious pretensions of the Crown, while Sharp, to whom the management of the Presbyterian negotiations had been absolutely intrusted, delivered those who had relied upon him bound into the hands of the reactionary party, and returned Archbishop of St. Andrews. The Presbyterians in Scotland had meantime been cajoled with the promise that the Establishment as settled by law should in no wise be altered. This promise was a piece of unexampled duplicity. Lauderdale remained in London to advise the Crown, the office of Royal Commissioner in Scotland being intrusted to John Middleton, a rough soldier of fortune, who had risen entirely from the ranks, and was now made an Earl. He was doubtless better fitted than the renegade Lauderdale for the immediate work in hand. He solved all difficulties by passing what was called an Act rescissory, by which all statutes passed in the Parliament of 1640 and subsequently were rescinded. This practically withdrew all legislation

Episcopalian

Church established.

since the year 1633. The consequence of this was that the Proclamation brought down by Sharp, declaring that the established worship, discipline, and government of the Church should not be changed, found that established discipline Episcopalian. In the hands of Middleton and those who acted with him, who, Burnet tells us, were generally drunk, it was not likely that the change in civil affairs should be more gentle than that in the Church. It was determined at once to strike some of the more important men of the Covenanted party. At the head of these was Argyle. It is true that he had been mainly instrumental in the

1662]

EPISCOPALIANISM IN SCOTLAND

729

Johnston and

sort of indemnity for An Act of Indemnity Its main feature was

restoration of Charles, that he trusted so implicitly to the pardon which had been given him in 1651 that he came in full confidence to meet the King in London, but neither services nor pardon weighed against the desire for vengeance, quickened by the knowledge of the almost royal power which he exercised in the Highlands. He was at once apprehended in London. There was no difficulty in finding charges that could be regarded as treason. He was exe- Execution cuted on the 27th of May. The other two victims of Argyle, selected were Johnston of Warriston, one of the earliest Guthrie. suggesters of the New Covenant, and Guthrie, the most vehement and active of the extreme Covenanting clergy. The Declaration of Breda had secured some the English, for the Scotch it secured nothing. was however completed in the autumn of 1662. the levy of large fines upon those who claimed its advantages. Between 700 or 800 were thus fined, and if the fines inflicted, which were very high, were not paid, the accused person still remained liable to the action of the laws of treason. But as the opposition of the Scotch to Charles had been principally on religious grounds, so now it was in the violence of the measures taken for the establishment of Episcopacy that the vengeance of the Court party was chiefly shown. The abjuration of the Covenant was ordered to be taken by all ministers of state, judges, and officials of all descriptions in the country. On the prorogation of the Parliament, its powers were continued in the Privy Council, and in that body was passed, on October 1, 1662, an Act insisting upon Episcopal ordination for Episcopal all those who had livings. The Council in which this Ordination Act. was passed is known as the Drunken Parliament. Every man of them, with one exception, is said to have been intoxicated at the time of passing it. Its effect was that 350 ministers were ejected from their livings. The apparatus of ecclesiastical tyranny was completed The Scotch by a Mile Act, similar to the Five Mile Act of England, Mile Act. forbidding any recusant minister to reside within twenty miles of his own parish, or within three miles of a royal borough; and by the establishment of a High Commission Court, with complete powers against all who acted against the discipline of the Church, or in general "all who expressed their dissatisfaction to his Majesty's authority by contravening Acts of Parliament or Council in relation to Church affairs." At the end of 1662 a rivalry arose between Middleton and Lauderdale, in which, after much intriguing, Lauder1 See page 732.

1

dale was victorious. Middleton was removed from his commissionership, and the government in Scotland passed into the hands of Lauderdale or his creature Rothes, assisted in ecclesiastical matters by the renegade Archbishop Sharp.

Character of Clarendon's government.

Both kingdoms had thus been forced to accept, with circumstances of considerable cruelty, the Episcopal form of Church government. Ardent attachment to the English Church, and antagonism both to Papacy on the one side and to Nonconformity on the other, are the main characteristics of the earlier period of this Parliament a period during which we may suppose it to have been under the management of Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. For a fervid admiration for the English Church was the chief characteristic of this statesman; a reformer in the earlier part of the Long Parliament, he had become, after the Great Remonstrance, the chief ostensible adviser of Charles I.; and although not answerable for all the actions of the King, who was constantly influenced by other and less constitutional friends, he had imbibed to the full the feeling of party spirit which the circumstances of a great revolution are certain to excite. He returned to England as the chief adviser of the young King, with his influence confirmed by the marriage of hic daughter Anne with the Duke of York, the King's brother, heirapparent to the throne, and bringing with him all the feelings and prejudices excited by an exile of many years passed in the constant service of a pretender. Ignoring his own earlier career, he took as his constitutional model the monarchy of Elizabeth. The growth of England in the last half century he wholly forgot. His desire was the establishment of a monarchy as strong as that of the Tudors, but kept as much as possible within the constitutional limits which had existed under those Princes, and of an orderly, established, Episcopal Church of the High Church model, but entirely dependent, as Elizabeth's Church had been, upon the King. In supporting these views, which he did consistently, and with a certain decorousness of life belonging to an older set of statesmen than those by whom he was surrounded, he frequently had to oppose the King's own wishes. For the King himself belonged to a very different class of men. Selfish, sensual, and debauched, neither Church nor Constitution was to him of much importance as contrasted with the gratification of his personal wishes. He had learnt his views of monarchy abroad. His ideal of a king was Louis XIV. To win a similar position-at the price of honour, at the price of overriding the Constitution, no matter at what price-was the poli

Charles's character.

1662]

CHARACTER OF CHARLES

731

tical object of his life. In religion he was by profession a sceptic, as were nearly all the fine gentlemen of the day; but such religious feelings as he had led him to believe that if any Church was better than another it was the Church of Rome. Moreover, during his exile, such assistance as he had received had been from Catholic monarchs, and he had promised more than once to do His Catholic what he could to relieve the Catholics of England, who tendencies. had also been staunch supporters of his father, from the heavy penal laws which oppressed them. He did not declare his Catholic tendencies till the close of his reign, yet it was impossible that they should be quite hidden. Courtiers who were opposed to the High Church Protestantism of Clarendon, such as Bristol, early adopted the Roman Catholic faith; the King's mistress, Lady Castlemaine, followed the same course, as did his brother the Duke of York; it is very improbable that they would thus have acted had they not known the tendency of his mind. He felt, however, that it was impossible as long as Clarendon was his minister that any general Act of toleration to the Catholics should be procured. His original plan would seem to have been, as indeed he asserted in his Declaration from Breda, to grant liberty of conscience. He was even intending to suspend the action of the Act of Uniformity for three months at the desire of the Presbyterians. Finding this impossible, he adopted a different course. He threw his influence on the side of those who wished to establish the strictest laws against Nonconformity, hoping that, when he had thus shown the Nonconformists how completely they were in his power, they would receive with gratitude any efforts he might make to secure them toleration, even though toleration of Papists was included in the effort. It was thus that shortly after the Act of Uniformity he published a declaration, declaring that he would use his influence in procuring some arrangement from Parliament which would enable him to make use of the power he claimed of dispensing with the statutes in favour of those who, while they did not agree with the Church, were yet harmless to the State.

He speedily found that he had miscalculated his influence. In 1663 the Commons presented him an address, in Checked by which they denied that he was in any way bound by the the Commons. promises of the Breda Declaration, and gave him to understand that he did not possess that dispensing power which he claimed. This was followed by the introduction of stronger laws against Popery, and was the work doubtless of Clarendon's friends, who were now at open war with the party of Bristol, who had ventured even to impeach

the Chancellor. It is to the same party and to their leaders, Clarendon and Archbishop Sheldon, that we must trace the rest of the cruel ecclesiastical legislation which disgraced Clarendon's tenure of office. A slight rising in Yorkshire was the excuse for the introduction of Conventicle Act. an Act against what its movers were pleased to call May 17, 1664. seditious conventicles. By this, any meeting for religious purposes, except in accordance with the practice of the Church of England, attended by more than five people beyond the family, was regarded as a conventicle; and a third offence was punished with transportation, after conviction before a single justice of the peace. A more nefarious law could scarcely be invented; it practically prevented even family worship, it offered the fullest opportunities to spies and informers, and deprived men of the common right of trial by jury. The gaols, we are told, were filled with Nonconformists.

Conduct of the Nonconformists during the plague,

The following year (1665) a still worse measure was passed, under circumstances of peculiar cruelty. The plague, which had long been approaching through Europe, made its appearance in the crowded streets of London. Its progress was rapid and fearful. House after house was marked with the fatal red cross, the emblem of infection. The streets were deserted till grass grew in them, and scarce a sound was heard but the gloomy bell of the dead-cart as it carried the corpses, uncoffined and unshrouded, to some of the great common graves that had been dug. The panic was universal, and in some respects shameful. Especially it is fair to blame the doctors and surgeons, who were among the first to fly, and the established clergy, who deserted their churches. The Nonconformists, a far more earnest set of men, felt it a shame that the thousands still left in London should be deprived of all spiritual privileges; they undertook the duties of the vacant parishes, visiting the sick and preaching in the empty pulpits. But this noble conduct only excited the anger of the jealous Episcopalians, and in the Parliament, which, on account of the plague, was held at Oxford, an Act

rewarded by

the Five Mile Act.

Oct. 30, 1665.

known as the Five Mile Act was passed, which forbad any clergyman to teach in schools, or to come within five miles of any corporate town or Parliament borough, who had not subscribed the Act of Uniformity, or who would not swear to the doctrine of passive obedience, and pledge himself that he would not at any time endeavour any alteration in the government of Church or State. Such clergy were, in fact, excluded from all their ordinary means of livelihood.

This was the last of Clarendon's triumphs. Already the Parlia