chisms-a Longer and a Shorter-the former of which, with the Scripture proofs, occupies 157 quarto pages, and the latter 40. The Shorter Catechism was intended for children, but its questions, turning upon abstruse and doubtful points, were altogether unsuited for the purpose. The doctrine of both Catechisms was, of

course, Calvinistic and Puritanical.

§ 18. The last act in which the Assembly was engaged was the compiling the heads of a Confession of Faith, intended to supersede the Articles of the Church of England. This was presented to Parliament at the beginning of December 1646.

§ 19. Soon after this the Assembly began to melt away. The Episcopal divines, nominated to it originally, had never attended its sessions. Many others had been irregular in their attendance. As the Presbyterian interest became day by day weaker in the country, the regular attendants, whose presence was not now much desired by Parliament, began to betake themselves to the benefices with which they had been plentifully provided; and, without any formal dissolution, the Westminster Assembly came to an end.

§ 20. No body of divines has been more vigorously abused than the "Westminster Assembly ;" but, assuming them to have conscientiously held their opinions, it must be admitted that they advocated them with learning, power, and fairness. The great

blot of their work was the adoption of the Scotch Covenant and the sanctioning its forcible imposition. In this it is to be feared that some of them were guilty of perjury, and the whole body of persecution. As for their directories, catechisms, confessions, and schemes of Church government, they cannot, of course, be acceptable to those who reverence antiquity and catholic tradition; but they appear to be quite equal in ability to other similar documents.

CHAPTER XXX.

THE PERSECUTION OF THE CLERGY.

1640-1649.

1. Character of the Persecution of the Clergy. § 2. The Grand Committee for Religion. § 3. The Committee for Scandalous Ministers. § 4. Its Subdivisions. § 5. Proceedings of the Committees. § 6. Publication of slanders against the Clergy. §7. The Committee for plundered Ministers. § 8. The Country Committees. § 9. The Earl of Manchester's Committees. § 10. The nominal provision for the Wives and Families. § 11. The Bishops. Bishop Hall at Norwich. § 12. Prevalence of Sacrilege. § 13. Archbishop Laud impeached before the House of Lords. § 14. Attainted in the House of Commons. § 15. His Execution. § 16. Visitation of Oxford. § 17. The King's fidelity to the Church of England. § 18. His Death.

§ 1. THROUGHOUT the period contained in the last two chapters, and the attempt to force upon the Church of England the greatest political and doctrinal changes, the individual clergy had to endure a persecution of the severest character, and of a unique and peculiar type. They were not only ejected from their livings, and deprived of maintenance, but they were assailed with the fiercest retaliatory attacks for that which was held to be their past misconduct. Sequestration of all their goods, imprisonment frequently under hatches in ships moored on the river,1 these even did not constitute the whole or the worst part of the punishment inflicted on them. They were deliberately and designedly assailed with charges of the most frightful immorality, and the weapon of slander was profusely used to blast their reputation and to strike them down, so that they might never rise again. It will be attempted in this chapter to give a connected view of the persecution, which a contemporary writer, who has chronicled some of its details, has not inaptly described as "the Eleventh Persecution of the Church."

§ 2. The House of Commons, greatly exasperated by the proceedings of the late Convocation, and by the way in which discipline had been administered and changes forced upon the country under the rule of Archbishop Laud, at once, on the meeting of Parliament, rushed eagerly to the work of revenge. On November 6 (1640), or three days after the opening of Parliament, a Grand Committee for Religion was established. To this committee all

1 Fell's Life of Hammond; Wordsworth, E. B., iv. 363.

those numerous petitions which at once flowed into Parliament, charging individual ministers with various alleged misdemeanours, were referred. Great pains had been taken by the enemies of the Church to have these petitions in readiness. It was not necessary that they should be signed by a majority of the parishioners of any accused clergyman. The names of two or three, or even one, was

sufficient. The accused was immediately sent for and examined on the charges, and if (as was almost invariably the case) he was held not to have established his innocence, he was committed to prison, his goods sequestered, and in course of time a successor appointed to his benefice. The charges made against a minister were sometimes those of immorality, but much more frequently, and, indeed, almost universally, even when others were also made, those of bowing at the name of Jesus, of causing the communicants to come up to the rails, of moving the communion table.

§ 3. So vast was the amount of petitions which were referred to this Committee, that, in order to facilitate proceedings, it quickly appointed various subdivisions of itself. On December 19 (1640), a sub-committee was appointed to consider the scarcity of preaching ministers, and to remove scandalous ministers. Of this latter body, Mr. John White, who was also chairman of the Grand Committee, was chairman. It has acquired an infamous reputation by its proceedings, and its chairman, by the publication which he put forth, must be considered as one of the basest and most malignant enemies of the Church which even these disordered times produced. The Committee for Scandalous Ministers, as it was usually called, issued a sort of manifesto declaring its appointment, and inviting accusations against the clergy to be made before it.

1

§ 4. It is said that above 2000 petitions were soon before it; and the business increased so fast that it was again subdivided into no less than four bodies, called, from their chairmen, Mr. White's Committee, Mr. Corbet's Committee, Sir Robert Harlow's Committee, and Sir E. Dering's Committee.

§ 5. The proceedings of these bodies-if we may at all trust contemporary accounts- -were not conducted with any sort of fairness or impartiality. Ex parte statements were freely adopted, and no rebutting evidence was admitted. Consequently the execution done upon the clergy by them was extremely rapid—some sort of ceremonial scandal, or if that failed, the vague accusation of popery, being easily made, and with difficulty disproved. As the quarrel

1 Walker's Sufferings of the Clergy, i. 64 (folio).

2 In White's Century we find that even in what were considered the worst cases, bowing at the name of Jesus, bowing towards the altar, removing the tables, etc., are quoted as crimes.

between the king and Parliament was developed, any exhortation of loyalty to the king was held amply sufficient to excuse deprivation. The accusations of the enemies of the Church were welcomed and at once acted upon; but it does not appear that any regard was paid to testimonials from his parishioners in a clergyman's favour, however considerable. Thus, charges having been made against Mr. Squire, rector of St. Leonards, Shoreditch, 230 of the most respectable of his parishioners presented a memorial in his favour, testifying to his constant preaching and catechising; to his continual warnings and instructions against popery; to his having zealously laboured among his people, even in the times of the prevalence of the plague; and to his blameless and devout life during a ministry of thirty years. To this no attention whatever was paid, and Mr. Squire was at once sequestered.1 What the clergy had to go through in attending these committees has been vividly sketched by an eye-witness of their troubles. "Mine ears still tingle at the loud clamours and shoutings then made (especially at the committee which sat at the Court of Wards) in derision of grave and reverend divines, by that rabble of sectaries which daily flocked thither to see this new pastime; when the committee members, out of their vast privilege to abuse any man brought before them without control, have been pleased to call the ministers of Christ, brought before them by jailers and pursuivants, and placed, like heinous malefactors, without their bar-bareheaded, forsooth-Saucy Jacks, base fellows, brazen-faced fellows; and in great scorn hath the cap of a known orthodox doctor been called to be pulled off to see if he were not a shaven popish priest; and upon a parson's evidence for one of his parishioners that he was no papist, it was replied by a committer, 'Have you no evidence but a base priest?'" 2 "I have been present," says the same writer, "at a committee for religion, consisting of five or six tradesmen or merchants of London, and an ignorant lawyer in the chair; yet these have judged doctrines by wholesale, executing ecclesiastical jurisdiction in an high act.” 3

§ 6. But the greatest injury done to the clergy was the deliberate publication of the basest slanders on their moral character, without any opportunity being afforded to them of refutation or explanation. In almost every one of the numerous orders made by the Parliament as to religion, it was openly asserted that great numbers of the clergy were of scandalous lives, and altogether de praved. And what was still worse, the parliamentary committees took care to publish the petitions and articles exhibited against the clergy, often full of the vilest accusations, and sometimes, as in the 2 Persecutio Undecima, p. 11. 4 Walker, i. 43.

Walker, i. 69.

3 lb. p. 18.

case of Pierce, Bishop of Bath and Wells, they added sidenotes commenting upon the charges, and suggesting jeering taunts founded upon them. That this was part of the deliberate policy of those who were then attacking the Church, is shown by the publication, in 1643, by Mr. White, the chairman of several of these committees, of a book called The First Century of Scandalous Ministers. In this he has selected a hundred cases of clergy accused before the committees, and has given publicity to the foulest accusations against them by name. These he prefaces with a general attack upon the clergy, in which he calls them "dumb dogs, ignorant, drunkards, whoremongers and adulterers, sodomites, men unfit to live, crawling vermin, popish dregs, priests of Baal, sons of Belial, unclean beasts," etc. Such abominable accusations from a man in high place, vented against the clergy by name, and supposed to be supported by irrefutable evidence gathered in the committees, were, of course, followed by open-mouthed railers of every sort, both clerical and lay, among whom one John Vicars obtained a bad pre-eminence.1 The king, greatly to his credit, restrained the loyal party from retaliating in the same kind, and publishing scandals against the Puritanical ministers.

§ 7. At the end of the year 1642, in addition to the committees already named, another committee was appointed by Parliament, called "The Committee for Plundered Ministers." The work of this Committee was the providing for those ministers who, being well disposed to the Parliament, had been ejected or plundered by the king's forces, and the placing them in parishes lately occupied by the malignant clergy, as those well disposed towards the king were usually termed. This Committee was the means of working a great transformation in the Church of England. It brought Puritanical ministers from every quarter, many now returning from abroad, and established them in the benefices from which the malignant clergy were ousted. Informations from the country as to the politics of the clergy were invited, and the Committee's work was felt even in the most remote districts, where the loyal clergy were driven from their homes to make way for intruders. As the first crop of victims fell before the accusations for immorality and obnoxious ceremonial, so the second crop was reaped by this Committee on the ground of malignancy.2 When the taking of the Covenant was enacted, and the Directory established in the place of the Common Prayer, another large crop of clergy, who had survived both these previous tests, was gathered into the net of the destroyer.

§ 8. This was mainly effected by another agency springing out 1 In his book called Jehovah Jireh, an abominable, foul-mouthed rant. 2 Walker, i. 73, sq.