Cassell's Illustrated History of England/Volume 3/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX.
PROGRESS OF THE NATION.
CONSTITUTION AND LAWS.
The entire break up of the ancient system of the kingdom, which occurred in the reign of Charles I., the destruction of the monarchy, which had lasted from the conquest 582 years, and the establishment of a commonwealth, attended by an equal revolution in the national religion, and numerous other changes of a more permanent and influential character, make it necessary for us to review the circumstances of the nation at a much shorter date than we have previously done. As monarchy after this period was again introduced and continued, it becomes absolutely necessary to treat of the portion of history including this great revolution at its termination, that we may contemplate as a whole its character and effects, not only immediate, but as operating under the revived form of monarchy, and continuing to operate as yet. We shall then have cleared the ground, and can start afresh, under regal institutions, more perspicuously.
In detailing the events of the reigns of James and Charles, and of the commonwealth itself, we have taken the opportunity to state our views of the characters of the chief actors in them, and the motives and causes which led to and effected such stupendous changes, so that our review may be the more brief and general.
The contests betwixt the crown and the aristocracy have occupied a prominent part of this history for the great period of the monarchy. During that long period of more than four hundred years, the people presented a comparatively unimportant feature in the nation. Their wishes were little regarded, their interests were scarcely recognised. Occasionally they rose in their strength, and reminded the higher classes that they were a power, if they were fully aware of it; but their soon sank again with the concession of their demands in quiescence, and an immense toleration of exactions and oppressions. But as the nobility declined, not only monarchy, but the people acquired additional importance. The distribution of the property of the church and of confiscated estates, and the progress of trade and general intelligence, rapidly raised the people into a visible third estate, and the commons in Elizabeth's reign assumed a position of considerable dignity and force, which even that high-spirited queen was compelled to bow to. But it was not merely the national benefits which the reformation brought to the people which developed their importance, it was the dissemination of the Bible, and its reading for themselves, which opened up to the general mass of the population a new idea of the great moral laws. In that august treasury of divine principles they saw the rights of the human race written in luminous and incontrovertible characters, and the whole framework of social polity became reversed in their minds. They perceived that the race was not made for the rulers, but the rulers for the race. That mankind was the great object of the divine intentions, the mere institution of kings and nobles were accidents which had grown out of the ascendency of physical power in barbarous times, and which had been invested with splendour, ceremony, and etiquette, by state-craft, to give them pre-eminence over the ignorant multitudes. This once discovered and reflected upon, men rose in the conscious dignity of their own nature, and very soon in England and Scotland, the third estate, as it was called, became in reality the first estate, for it was now perfectly aware that out of it proceeded the life-blood of the government, the supplies for all its exigencies, and that it had but to raise its voice to be heard throughout every department of the state, every corner of the realm.
The expression of this power did not become so apparent during the reign of the Tudors as the Stuarts; but under that haughty and dictatorial dynasty, the sentiment itself was growing and ripening rapidly, like seeds swelling and generating in the earth, though not yet emerged from it; and the whole was the more fervent and indomitable because it sprung from the same source, and grew with the same growth as the new discoveries in religion. These newly recognised rights were perceived to be the rights proclaimed by the universal Father, through the pages of the same book which brought spiritual life and immortality to light. By this common origin political principles were elevated into sacred ones, and invested with all the solemnity of duty.
James VI. of Scotland had been educated amid the intense fermentation of these discoveries. The very ground, as it were, heaved under his cradle with the convulsive energy of the awaking powers of the gospel amongst the serious people of his kingdom. Knox and his associates had imbibed in Geneva the most stern and most ascetic principles of the reformers. They were persuaded, with their master Calvin, that all human institutions must submit themselves to the church of Christ, and Calvin himself, in his condemnation of Servetus, gave them a practical proof of his persuasion that heresy as well political tyranny must be exterminated in its advocates. Thus not only their own rights, but the intolerance of the rights of others, were established in the minds of the earnest Scotch people; and accordingly their zeal burst forth in a most uncompromising and exacting form. They drove James's mother from the throne in their intolerance of her popery; and when he himself began to rule without the restraint of his guardians, the ministers of the reformed kirk assumed a censorship of his words and conduct, and treated him with a rude and overbearing familiarity, which excited in him an everlasting horror of presbyterianism, the form of worship which the bulk of the Scottish people had adopted.
In 1596 the general assembly sent a deputation of four ministers, including James and Andrew Melvil, to James, at Falkland, to admonish him of the wickedness of the country, the king's own habit of "banning and swearing," the queen's not repairing to the preaching of the word, but indulging in balls and dances, the encouragement of superstition in permitting pilgrimages, singing of carols at Yule, profanation of the sabbath, wanton games, drinking, tribes of idle, dissolute people, as fiddlers, pipers, sorcerers, strong beggars living in harlotry, and not having their children baptised, the neglect of justice, and the appointment of ignorant or wicked men to offices, as well as allowing such sacrilegious persons as abbots, priors, and dumb bishops, voting in parliament in the name of the kirk.
James growing out of patience at their catalogue of crimes and delinquencies, one of the ministers pulled him by the sleeve of his coat, telling him that the country was in danger of wreck through the truth not being told him; and informing him that though he was a king in a certain sense, yet of Christ's kingdom, that is, the kirk, he was neither king, nor head, nor lord, but only a member; and that neither king nor prince should be allowed to meddle in it. These visits to the king were frequent, and the same intended for the queen, but she seemed to avoid most of them. They then attacked her unmercifully from their pulpits, censuring, in the strictest terms, her neglect of their preachings, her going to episcopal clergymen, her not introducing religious exercises and virtuous occupation amongst her maids, nor having occasionally godly ministers to instruct them. One David Black, a minister of St. Andrews, from his pulpit declared that all kings were devil's bairns; that the devil was in the court, and the guardian of it; that the queen would never do them any good; that the nobilty were godless dissemblers and enemies to the church; and the members of the king's council hourglasses (that is, buffoons), cormorants, and men of no religion. When James summoned him for this gross language before the privy council, the kirk took it up, and declared no clergyman was amenable to any power but the kirk itself.
Copied from Authentic Sources.
It is no wonder that with this claim to independence of and indeed superiority to the state, and a disposition to make so free a use of its censures, James should feel no particular fondness for such a church, and should labour to restore episcopacy, which was always more respectful to royalty. In fact, though James in 1590 made the speech, so constantly recalled to his memory when he was doing his utmost to give the supremacy to episcopalism both in Scotland and England, declaring in the general assembly that "it was the purest kirk in the world," presbyterianism, though by far the most generally accepted religion in Scotland, was not acknowledged as the established church there till 1592; and in December, 1596, episcopacy was fully restored again both in church and state, so that it was only four years the legal establishment previous to James's accession to the English throne.
When James arrived in England, he found a very different state of things. Though dissent from the forms and ceremonies of the church was very extensive, it had been restrained with a high hand, and there was no other visible church which had risen face to face with the state church, so as directly to menace it or the monarch. Both in Scotland and England the doctrines of all believers were mainly the same; the difference was as to outward forms. The puritans, as they were called, still occupied established pulpits, for conventicles, as they were called—that is, dissenting chapels—were strictly restrained. What the non-conformists sought was freedom in the church for their more simple tastes in ceremonials. The celebrated Millenary Petition, presented to James on his way into England, signed by eight hundred ministers, demanded but a few and apparently unimportant concessions to preserve the unity of the church. They objected to the cross in baptism, the interrogatories to infants, baptism by women, the ring in marriage, confirmation, and a few other minor particulars; and these granted in the churches to those who had a conscience on such points, would have preserved the integrity of the church. The demands of the ministers at the Hampton Court conference were substantially the same.
James, therefore, surrounded by a different hierarchy, and seeing dissent assume so much humbler a form, suddenly felt himself inspired with a greater love for episcopacy, and an intenser horror of dissent, which, in its Scottish shape, had so wounded his kingly dignity. He therefore carried matters with a high hand both in church and state, and the insolence and intolerance of his archbishop Bancroft did more to drive the dissidents into open sectaries than all that had been done before. Charles, educated by his father in all his Jesuitry of kingcraft, and taught at once to believe in the divine right of kings, and to attach no sacredness to his word in seeking to acquire absolute power, being of a bolder and more sanguine temperament, soon marched headlong on destruction. We have already carefully detailed the steps by which Laud and Wentworth, and his own imprudent spirit, led him to the block. He had, following in the steps of James, roused all the zeal both of the politicians and the religionists against him, and in the war to the death which was waged by his subjects with him, these two principles went from first to last hand in hand. The oppression of conscience both in Scotland and England had created a deep sympathy betwixt the people of both countries, and vast numbers in England had adopted the same presbyterian idea of church government as prevailed almost universally in Scotland. When, therefore, the questions of ship-money, and other unconstitutional impositions, the king's forcible invasion of the privileges of the commons, and his evident intention to make himself independent of all restraints from his people, had brought his chief ministers to the block, and himself in arms against his parliament, the demand became not only for the restoration of the popular guarantees, but the destruction of episcopacy, and the substitution of presbyterianism. It now depended on the prevalence of different parties what form the future government, as well as the church, should assume.
Exiled Nonconformists Landing in America.
If those who objected to legal exactions, but dreamt neither of overturning the government nor the church, had prevailed, amongst whom we may include lord Falkland, Clarendon, Colepepper, lord Capel, lord Digby, and even Pym and Hampden, the crown would have received the necessary checks, and the episcopalian church would have continued. But some of these chiefs, as Falkland, Hampden, and Pym, died early in the struggle, and the rest joined with the king in endeavouring to resist further encroachments to the utmost and to the last. Had the presbyterian party prevailed, monarchy would have continued, but England might now have been existing without its episcopal hierarchy. But as it happened, men of more republican principles, and of still more liberal ideas of church government, proved the ablest heads, and gave for a time the decisive character to the nation. These were the independents, anabaptists, and fifth-monarchy men, who constituted the leaders of the army, and who leavened the whole of the forces with their principles.
These circumstances led to the destruction of the monarchy, and with it of the episcopal church as the state church. Among these republican chiefs, however, Cromwell, the independent, developed infinitely the most capacity for command and for government; and from the difficulties of his situation, surrounded by the conflicting parties of royalist presbyterians, who would suppress his free notions of religious government, and a mass of ultra republicans and religious zealots who went far beyond him, he was compelled to seize the entire reins of rule, and the commonwealth became a dictatorship. Had these violently opposing elements not existed to the extent which they did, England might then have "become and remained a pure republic, governed by its president and its parliament, or the descendants of Cromwell might have been to-day seated on the throne of England. But the same predominating impulses which deprived Cromwell of the power of riding by a free parliament, and compelled him to remain a dictator, equally foreshowed the inevitable termination of the prevalence of his principles of government with his life. The chaos of parties, political and religious, which raged around him, was certain, as it immediately did, to destroy itself, and leave open the way for monarchy and episcopacy.
We have, therefore, here only to consider what was the nature of Cromwell's dictatorship, and what its effects present and parliament. And in the first place we must admit that after all necessary concession to the charges against Cromwell of personal ambition, and of his having terminated all his professed struggles for liberty and constitutional right by seizing the helm of government himself, and ruling according to his own will, there is no other instance of military conquerors who have used their power so entirely for the public benefit, and so little to the restraint of individual freedom. His rule, though centring in himself, was not for himself, but for the people; it was not one of absolutism or oppression, but of cordial and earnest endeavour for the general welfare, and embraced the greatest freedom that had ever yet existed in England.
As the career of a mere country gentleman, scarcely raised above the condition of a gentleman farmer, and till upwards of thirty years of age distinguished for nothing but his retiring life and religious habits, and till forty-three ignorant of military command—'twas marvellous. Julius Caesar, to whom he has been compared, was educated as a great patrician, was practised in all the arts, and possessed of all the influence by which men distinguish themselves in the chief arena of a nation. He was a splendid orator, and an accomplished and experienced general; and when he seized on the dictatorship of his country, it was to repress liberty, and hold his station for his own glory by a rigorous and military repression. But though Cromwell had everything of the military science to learn when called upon to command, he soon showed that he had the genius and the conquering will. Every enemy, king, baron, and cavalier, whose profession was naturally of arms, fell or fled before him; and Marston Moor, Naseby, Dunbar, and Worcester, spread his fame as an invincible hero through the whole world. When he arrived at the chief power, he extended and confirmed this fame. He beat down the haughty insolence of the Dutch at sea, impressed France with the terror of his arms, and inflicted a terrible chastisement on Spain, which had so often sent her armadas against protestant England, and stirred up all the catholic animus on the continent against her. He made pope and pagan tremble, taught Savoy to respect the rights of conscience, and Algiers the rights of merchants; he did that in Scotland which no English monarch could ever accomplish before him, not even om- great martial Edwards and Henrys—he thoroughly subdued the hardy valour of the Scots, and kept that country in peaceful subjection till his death.
When he came to administer the civil government he would fain have given parliament the most perfect freedom, if it would only have consented to leave his own position unassailed. Even as it was, he permitted the most uninfringed personal liberty; and as to religion, there never had been so much freedom of conscience enjoyed since the Conquest. Though himself an independent, he permitted presbyterians or other professors to hold livings in the church, so that they preached sound doctrine, and maintained a religious life. He took immense pains by his commissioners to purge the ministry of corrupt, unsound, and inefficient preachers, and to introduce better men, without regard to the particular sect to which they belonged. If we compare the commonwealth, in respect to either civil or religious liberty, with the monarchy under the Tudors and the Stuarts, and what it became again after the restoration, the change is wonderful. Instead of burnings, brandings, cutting off of ears, slitting of noses, the torturings, fleecings, and insolent oppressions and cruelties of the Star-chamber and High Commission Court, the change might well be termed like one from hell to heaven. In all Cromwell's addresses to parliament, he urged on them the necessity of bringing the truth and purity of Christianity into the daily practice of fife and government, and his own court was in perfect keeping with his inculcations. There everything was orderly, decorous, and dignified. No scandalous libertines could find countenance there. He exhibited the same honest and patriotic spirit in sweeping away the corruptions of the law and the corruptions of the bench. His reform of the hideous court of chancery, and his appointment of upright judges, astonished the whole country; and such was the general vigour of both his foreign and domestic administration of affairs, that his very enemies, as we have seen, were compelled to express their admiration, and to name the days of his government "halcyon days," and to confess that the name of England never stood so high in the world.
Such were the effects of Cromwell's ride for the time; and the only remaining question is, what have been its permanent effects on the welfare of this country, and on history at large? It would be difficult to estimate the extent of the beneficial influence of the English commonwealth on general liberty and civilisation. The solemn and striking example of a nation calling its monarch to account for his attempts to destroy the liberties of his country, condemning and executing him for his treason to the state, was a lesson to all monarchs and all subjects, that will never be forgotten whilst the world stands, and has been already imitated in France. The very enormity of the military force by which Europe at present is held in slavery, is but a confession of the consciousness that the principles of the British wealth are now become the principles of all peoples; and we may safely assert that those principles, though defeated for a time, are only delayed in their inevitable action.
The commonwealth also laid down the great maxim that all power proceeds from the people, even that of deposing and electing kings. It thus destroyed for ever the pernicious doctrine of the divine right of kings—the cornerstone of all oppressions and all official insolence; and though this great principle seemed again destroyed by the restoration, it survived, and was established permanently in the British constitution at the revolution of 1688, the bill of rights expressly recognising it; and William of Orange, though the grandson of Charles I., and married to the daughter of James II., was not received by hereditary right, but avowedly by the election of the people. These are great hereditary legacies of the commonwealth to as and to the world. France has adopted the same principle and acted on it repeatedly. The United States have exercised the same right against us, and have become a republic; and there is no principle now more extensively diffused amongst all thinking people as a perfectly common sense truism, and though outwardly ignored by kings, not forgotten by their subjects.
A Friend's Meeting. From an Engraving of the 17th Century.
During the commonwealth many improvements were introduced into Ireland under Ireton's administration, particularly that of changing provincial courts into county courts, greatly to the convenience and relief of the people. The system of lease and release came into use in this kingdom; the greater feudal services were abolished; and, to the especial honour of the commonwealth, torture was disused. This practice, which was totally opposed to the law of England, and had been used in every reign of the government, often with cruelty equal to that of the Spanish inquisition, was abandoned by the commonwealth, and never again was restored. How far the great men of the commonwealth were in advance of their age in this respect, Mr. Jardiue, in his treatise on the subject, has shown by reminding us that torture was not abolished in Scotland till 1708; in France till 1789; in Russia till 1801; in Bavaria and Würtemburg till 1806; in Hanover till 1812; and in Baden till 1832; and not even then in reality in the prisons of those German states, for cudgelling was still employed there, in menacing prisoners to compel confession, as may be seen in the trials recorded in the Neue Pitavel, and especially in the case of Wendt, the cabinet-maker at Rostock.
Whatever constitutional principles, therefore, were violated in the struggle which resulted in the commonwealth, whatever miseries were inflicted during its violent warfare, and however brief was the period of its existence, the advantages to us and to all mankind were incalculable in their amount, and eternal in their nature. By it the royal, mysterious, indefatigable, and protean power called prerogative, a law above all law, was struck down, and, if not destroyed, made subject to parliament; and the powers and jurisdiction of parliament, the great legislative and judicial authority, placed on a clear and immovable basis. Since then kings have ceased to be a terror, no man is in peril of being dragged from his home to be tortured and robbed in Star-chambers and High Commission Courts, at the pleasure of the prince and his parasites; and if we are ill-governed we have only ourselves to thank for it. Such is the debt of everlasting gratitude that we owe to the great men of the commonwealth, and to none more than to Oliver Cromwell, the dictator.
RELIGION.
During the reign of James, and during that of Charles, so long as he might be said to reign, the great endeavour was, both in England and Scotland, to maintain the episcopal hierarchy, and to put down popery and puritanism. In this James succeeded to a considerable extent on the surface. He restored and strengthened episcopacy in Scotland, actually engrafted it on a presbyterian church, and it lasted his time. In England he carried his episcopalianism with a high hand. Dissent there yet, for the most part, was not visible, or lay half-concealed under the form of non-conformity; no great actual separation from the established church having taken place till his archbishop Bancroft forced this outward avowal and practical secession by his new book of canons, in 1604, the very year after James came to the English throne. These canons enjoined the ceremonies objected to by the nonconformists—bowing at the name of Jesus, kneeling at the sacrament, wearing the surplices, &c. These being enforced with rigour by Bancroft, in about six years no fewer than three hundred ministers were deprived or silenced. Here, then, commenced actual and public dissent, for the nonconformists being no longer able to exercise their spiritual functions in the established church, they and their congregations separated, and opened their own chapels, or conventicles, as they were called; and James and Charles continued to fine and persecute the papists on the one hand, and the dissenters on the other, till the resistance to Charles's liturgy in Scotland in 1636 and till the rebellion in England relieved both countries from the tyranny of royalty and episcopacy. In Scotland, indeed, the imposition of the canons of the episcopal church had not led to actual separation, but to these private meetings for worship after the people's own heart, in private houses and on moors and mountains, which, after the renewed persecutions of the restoration, became so prevalent amongst the covenanters. These practices commenced after the introduction of a liturgy by James in 1616, and were still more extended after the introduction of his "Five Articles" in 1621, and all the cruelties of fines, banishments, and imprisonments were put in force against them.
In England the church, encouraged by the crown, acted with a high and rigorous hand so long as royalty was in the ascendant. We have described the deeds of the tyrannic prelates of the Anglican church in these reigns, their Star-chamber and High Commission Court atrocities, their imprisonments, their torturings and brandings for conscience' sake. Their terrible treatment of Leighton, Prynne, Bastwick, Benton, and numbers of others. There was an ascent of prelatical evil through Parker, Whitgift, and Bancroft, to Laud, who completed the climax. No period of the Spanish inquisition presents more horrors than were perpetrated by those high priests in the name of religion. The catholics accuse Charles of having put to death ten of their clergymen in the early part of his reign, for the exercise of their religion.
But what was not less extraordinary was the fact, that whilst these cruelties were committed, because men would not conform to mere ceremonies, the most extensive and deep-seated heresy in doctrine crept into the church, and some of these very persecuting prelates were the heresiarchs. Though James took so violent and remorseless a part in persecuting the Arminian Vorstius, on his appointment to the professorship of divinity at Leyden, in 1611, and sent four English and one Scotch divine to the synod of Dort, in 1618, to assist in establishing the Five Points of Calvinistic faith—namely, absolute predestination; the limitation of the benefits of the death of Christ to the elect only; the necessity of justifying grace; the bondage of the human will and the perseverance of the saints—and never left the pursuit of Vorstius till he had ruined him; yet the doctrine of Arminius, that of free will, crept into his own church, and prevailed to a great extent, unnoticed by him, amongst the bishops and dignitaries. In fact, so long as the outward form and ceremony were maintained, little quest was made after doctrine. Laud, whilst he was persecuting the really orthodox in opinion with the frenzy of an inquisitor, was himself a thorough-going and undisguised Arminian, at the same time that he was a very catholic in pomp and parade of ceremony. In fact, in him and his adherents blazed forth that pseudo-catholicism which has revived again in our day under the name of Puseyism.
"The new bishops," says Neal, the puritan historian, "admitted the church of Rome to be a true church, and the pope the first bishop of Christendom. They declared for the lawfulness of images in churches, for the real presence, and that the doctrine of transubstantiation was a school nicety. They pleaded for confession to a priest, for sacerdotal absolution, and the proper merit of good works. They claimed an uninterrupted succession of episcopal character from the apostles through the church of Rome, which obliged them to maintain the validity of her ordinations when they denied the validity of those of foreign protestants. Further, they began to imitate the church of Rome in her gaudy ceremonies, in the rich furniture of their chapels, and the pomp of their worship. They complimented the Roman catholic priests with their dignitary titles, and spent all their zeal in studying how to compromise matters with Rome, whilst they turned their backs upon the old protestant doctrines of the reformation, and were remarkably negligent in preaching, or instructing the people in Christian knowledge."
When the church was struck down with the monarchy, the religious parties in the ascendant were the presbyterians and independents, besides a large mass of anabaptists and fifth-monarchy men; all were of the Calvinistic creed, and might have coalesced well enough on doctrinal points, but differed greatly as to modes of church government. Had the presbyterians succeeded in securing the supreme power, the nation would only have exchanged one religious despotism for another, for they were as intolerant of all other creeds and parties as the episcopalians themselves. Cromwell and his independents saved this nation from the gloomy asceticism, which in Scotland had established a right on the part of the ministers to exercise the most unheard of interference in the private habits of individuals and families, a watchfulness, a surveillance over all the motives, opinions, tastes, and wishes of every soul in their flocks, which not even the practice of confession amongst the catholics could exceed in pressure is a priestly yoke. The anabaptists and fifth-monarchy men were ultra-republicans. The former were the crude material of the modern English baptists, who gradually moulded their opinions and practices into very much the same character as those of the independents, except as it regarded their distinctive tenet of baptism itself. The fifth-monarchy men held that as there had been four great monarchies, the Assyrian, the Persian under Cyras, the Greek and the Roman, the fifth and last was to be that of Christ, who had promised to come and reign on earth. They were, therefore, for establishing this fifth-monarchy at once; their government was to be a theocracy, the people being only under their God. These zealots, believing in a grand truth, had only antedated the millennium by an indefinite time, and long before the world was ripe for it. Some of Cromwell's generals, Harrison especially, were enthusiastic fifth-monarchy men, and had to be held, and with difficulty, in check.
But the strong hand and sense of Cromwell, so long as he lived, had enabled him to maintain a free church, in which all men of red Christian faith and feeling were permitted to officiate, except insubordinate episcopalians and catholics. Moderate episcopalians, who could conscientiously hold livings, were not expelled, so that they were of religious lives, and did not interfere with the existing government even, says Cromwell, a few anabaptists were in it. To papists the liberality of Cromwell never reached; he considered them, with the rest of his age, as belonging to the mother of superstition, and objectionable as the avowed adherents of a foreign and hostile power. Though the protector was on the whole averse to persecution, yet the fines on recusants were dilligently levied, and the presbyterians, perhaps for the most part without his knowledge, persecuted other religionists under the commonwealth—a fact amply demonstrated by the history of the Society of Friends, for during the commonwealth arose that singular people.
The doctrines and conduct of the Friends, or, as they were Boon denominated, the Quakers, marked another epoch of that age in the advance towards the true understanding of Christianity, and the acquirement of its freedom. We have seen, that notwithstanding all that the nonconformists had suffered, notwithstanding all the great minds and noble hearts which had appeared among them, they had not yet come to perceive the full and true liberty of Christ. They objected to certain ceremonies and habits, and certain religions opinions, but they did not object at all to the establishment of a state religion,—many of them not even to the episcopal hierarchy, but were a part of it. The independents had made the nearest approach to the apprehension of perfect freedom; they had adopted and acted upon the opinion, that every congregation is independent of all others, and that no minister of the gospel possesses any jurisdiction over another; but they still admitted the right of a state establishment, and under Cromwell accepted office in one. The Friends not only proclaimed the doctrine that all state establishments of Christianity are unscriptural, but that they, violate the political rights of the subject; they therefore denounced all usurpation of human lordship over conscience; all hireling teachers of a state creed, tithes, church rates, and every ecclesiastical demand whatever. To George Fox we owe this bold and manly system, this sudden leap from the chains of long spiritual slavery, into the full freedom of the gospel law—a man to whom there has never yet been done full justice beyond the pale of his own society, and whom we have recently seen attacked by lord Macaulay with an animus extraordinary in a descendant of this society. Macaulay has represented Fox as half an idiot, but it would be far better for the world if it had more such idiots. It would be enough to set aside this splenetic opinion of a writer who has taken every opportunity to vilify the great men of Quakerism, to place against his opinion that of some great thinkers of our own country and time. Coleridge, from whom so many modern celebrities have drawn what is original in their philosophy, Emerson and Carlyle included, says, "There exist folios on the human understanding and the nature of man, which would have a far juster claim to their high rank and celebrity, if, in the whole huge volume, there could be found as much fulness of heart and intellect as burst forth in many a simple page of George Fox." Carlyle says, "This man, the first of the Quakers, and by trade a shoemaker, was one of those to whom, under ruder form, the divine idea of the universe is pleased to manifest itself; and across all the hills of ignorance and earthly degradation, shine through, in unspeakable awfulness, unspeakable beauty on their souls; who, therefore, are rightly accounted projects, God-possessed. Mountains of incumbrance, higher than Ætna, had been heaped over that spirit; but it was a spirit, and would not be buried there. That Leicester shoeshop, had men known it, was a higher place than Vatican or Loretto shrine. Stitch away, thou noble Fox! every prick of that little instrument is pricking into the heart of slavery and world-worship and the mammon god. Thy elbows jerk in strong swimmer strokes, bearing thee into lands of true liberty. Were the work done, there would be in broad Europe one free man, and thou art he."
The opinions of great men, English and American, might be numerously added, but they are the fruits by which we must recognise the tree; and from no religious reformer has the modern world received, and is receiving, more substantial benefit in weaning it from forms and task-masters to spiritual freedom. The awl of Fox still goes on pricking into the heart of slavery, world-worship, and the mammon god. I do not intend to exempt him from the charge of a certain degree of fanaticism—both he and his adherents were not altogether free from it; but the theory of his religious belief comprehended the ideal of all religious freedom. And this arose in part from that want of education which the outward-tending mind of Macaulay has seen only as a defect. Free from every educational dogma, he became struck with the importance of religion, and taking the Bible with him into the fields, he there carefully studied it, and soon discovered the true native of this beneficent 
Declaration of Independency at the Savoy, September 29, 1658
Arrest of Nonconformists.
Rev. John Owen, D.D.
Whatever his sagacious mind once embraced as truth, he had the integrity and boldness to proclaim everywhere. He advanced into the presence of princes, and declared it there with the same ease and freedom as amongst his own peers. It may well be imagined, that when numbers began to flock around him, and from every class of society, clergy, soldiers, magistrates, gentlemen, and men of the general mass, that his system would bring down upon him and his followers the unmitigated vengeance of the persecuting hierarchy. His was no partially reforming system; it did not object to this or that dogma, this or that ceremony in the state religion, but it assailed, root and branch, state religion itself. It was a system peculiarly odious to priests, because it was an entirely disinterested one, for it went even to declare that nothing should be received for preaching, where it could be at all dispensed with, nothing in any case without the consent of the people. The state clergy saw, that if it succeeded, priestcraft was gone for ever: royalty, on its restoration, saw that it would lop off the right arm of despotism—craft paid to preach the divine right of kings, and passive obedience of the people. But Fox and his friends were prepared to speak, write, and suffer for it. He himself traversed a great part of the kingdom, visited America and Holland, holding immense meetings in the open air, and addressed many letters to various princes and people in power on its behalf. Barclay delineated its features in his celebrated "Apology for the true Christian Divinity." Penn wrote boldly for it, and spoke boldly for it, too, on his trials, especially that with William Mead at the Old Bailey, an account of which has often been reprinted, as a splendid instance of the vindication of trial by jury. Anthony Pearson, who had been a justice of the peace, published his "Great Case of Tithes," in which all the evils and and-Christianity of the tithe system were duly exposed. Thomas Lawson wrote, "A Mite in the Treasury," and "The Call, Work, and Wages of the Ministers of Christ and of Antichrist," two most spirited and able expositions of political religion. Elwood wrote his interesting life, abounding with scenes of imprisonment and patient endurance for his principles. Besse compiled, from official documents of the Society of Friends, a work of everlasting condemnation to the priests of the church of England; and Sewell wrote the "History of the Society" at large, a work declared by Charles Lamb to be worth all other ecclesiastical history put together. In these and other works they asserted those great principles of religious freedom now so generally adopted, and for these they suffered. Seeing clearly how a royal religion disturbed and oppressed the real church of Christ, how it neutralised all its benign doctrines, they determined, cost what it would, to hold no communion with it. They would neither marry at its altars, nor bury in its soil, and for this their dead were torn out of their graves by the parish priests and their minions; and they were not only heavily fined and imprisoned for marrying at their own chapels, but their children were declared illegitimate. At Nottingham, in 1661, an attempt was made by a public trial to disinherit some orphans on this ground, but the worthy old judge Archer brought Adam and Eve as precedents, and declared that their taking each other in marriage in the presence of God was valid, and if those children were illegitimate, then we were all so. On this singular decision the marriages of Friends were recognised and made legal. But had it been otherwise, such was the sturdy firmness of the Friends, that they would have suffered loss of both property, liberty, and life, to the last man, sooner than concede an iota to this unjust system; and the whole fury of the executive power was let loose upon them. They were given up a prey to vindictive parsons, and ignorant, priest-ridden justices of the peace, and to the whole greedy rabble of informers, constables, and the lowest refuse of society.
The history of their full extent of persecutions belongs to a later period; but the rise and principles of this society demand a notice in the religious history of this period as one of the most important events of any age. Those principles—their effect, or field of influence—are not to be measured by the limited growth of the society which first promulgated them. Like many other bodies out of which great principles have sprung, it has become, as it were, fossilised, retaining the form, and even the reverence of the original body; but the principles themselves are the principles of Christianity, coextensive with the universe in their action on spiritual life. It was the mission of Fox to liberate them from the conventional forms in which outward and worldly motives had imprisoned them, to sweep away all the cobwebs of school and state sophistry from them, and to recall the conviction of man to them in all their simple and sublime beauty. The puritans in general had made little progress in the comprehension of religious freedom; what they claimed themselves they were ready to withhold from others. Cromwell and the independents made a great advance, yet withheld this liberty from catholics and episcopalians; but Fox demonstrated that the liberty of the Gospel was the equal birthright of all men. All these religious reformers were ready to permit or become themselves a state church. Fox reminded them that the "Kingdom of Christ was not of this world;" that when they had rendered to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, civil support and obedience, they must render to God the things which are God's, the rights of conscience, and the independence of his church. For all the civilising and angelising influences of religion—resistance to slavery, oppression, war, priestcraft, world-worship, and mammon-worship—which are the divine and eternal essence of the Gospel, the philosophy and the theology of George Fox asserted the independence and universality, and these principles, now adopted into nearly all creeds, are silently but perceptibly at work to leaven the whole mass of society, and in the course of ages to throw down every tyranny, every cruelty, every abomination, on every side of the globe.
PROGRESS OF THE ARTS, MANUFACTURES, AND COMMERCE.
In the reigns of James and Charles this country neither maintained the reputation of our navy acquired under Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, nor made great progress in foreign commerce. The character of James was too timid for maritime or any other war, and when he was forced into action it was only to show his weakness. He put to death the greatest naval captain of his time, Raleigh, who, if well employed by him, might have made him as much respected at sea as was Elizabeth. Yet he built ten ships of war, and for some years spent thirty-six thousand pounds a year on the navy. The largest ship which had yet been built in England was built by him, which, however, was only fourteen hundred tons. As for commerce, he was too much engaged in theological disputations, in persecution of papists, wrangling with his parliaments, and following his hawks and hounds, to think of it, and consequently there were every fresh session grievous complaints of the decay of trade. The Dutch were fast engrossing both the commerce and the carrying trade of this country. During this reign they traded to England with six hundred ships, and the English traded to Holland with sixty.
The naval affairs of Charles were quite as inglorious as those of his father. As James beheaded the best admiral of England, Charles chose for his the very worst in Europe, and the disgrace of Buckingham's expedition to the Isle of Rhé was the consequence. Charles's contests with his parliaments, which terminated only with his life, destroyed all chance of his promotion of our naval ascendancy, and of the cultivation of commerce. All this was wonderfully changed by the vigorous spirits of the commonwealth. The victories of Blake, by which the naval greatness of Holland and Spain were almost annihilated, raised the reputation of the British arms at sea as well as on land to the first place in the civilised world. St. John was no sooner despatched by the parliament to the Hague as ambassador, than, perceiving the immense advantage which Holland drew from being the great carriers of Europe, he drew and got passed the celebrated Navigation Act, which, providing that no produce of Africa, Asia, or America, nor of any English colony should be imported into England except in English ships, and that the manufactures or merchandise of no country in Europe should be imported except in English ships, or the ships of the nation where they were produced, at once transferred an enormous amount of maritime business to this country.
Sir Walter Raleigh, in a treatise on the comparative commerce of England and Holland, endeavoured to draw the attention of James I. to the immense advantages that the Dutch were drawing from our neglect. He showed that whenever there was a time of scarcity in England, instead of sending out our ships and supplying ourselves, we allowed the Dutch to pour in goods and reap the advantage of the high prices; and he declared that in a year and a half they had taken from Bristol, Southampton, and Exeter alone, two hundred thousand pounds, which over merchants might as well have had. He reminded the king that the most productive fisheries in the world were on the British coasts, yet that the Dutch and people of the Hanse Towns came and supplied all Europe with their fish to the amount of two million pounds annually, whilst the English could scarcely be said to have any trade at all in it. The Dutch, he said, sent yearly a thousand ships laden with wine and salt, obtained in France and Spain, to the north of Europe, whilst we, with superior advantages, sent none. He pointed out equally stinking facts of their enterprise in the timber trade, having no timber themselves; that our trade with Russia, which used to employ a large number of ships, had fallen off to almost nothing, whilst that of the Dutch had marvellously increased. What, he observed, was still more lamentable—we allowed them to draw the chief profit and credit even from our own manufactures, for we sent our woollen goods, to the amount of eighty thousand pieces, abroad undyed, and the Dutch and others dyed them, and reshipped them to Spain, Portugal, and other countries as Flemish baizes, besides netting a profit of four hundred thousand pounds annually at our expense. Had James listened to the wise suggestions of Raleigh, instead of destroying him, and listening to such silly, base minions as Rochester and Buckingham, our commerce would have shown a very different aspect.
It is true that some years after James endeavoured to secure the profit pointed out by Raleigh from dyed cloths; but instead of first encouraging the dyeing of such cloths here, so as to enable the merchants to carry them to the markets in the South on equal or superior terms to the Dutch, he suddenly passed an act prohibiting the export of any undyed cloths. This the Dutch met by an act prohibiting the import of any dyed cloths into Holland; and the English not producing an equal dye to the Dutch, thus lost both markets, to the great confusion of trade; and this mischief was only gradually overcome by our merchants beginning to dye their yarn, so as to have no undyed cloth to export, and by improving their dyes.
During the reign of James commercial enterprise showed itself in the exertions of various chartered companies trading to distant parts of the world. The East India Company was established in the reign of Elizabeth, the first charter being granted by her in 1600. James was wise enough to renew it, and it went on with various success, ultimately so little in his time, that at his death it was still a doubtful speculation; but under such a monarch it could not hope for real encouragement. In its very commencement he granted a charter to a rival company to trade to China, Japan, and other countries in the Indian seas, in direct violation of the East India Company's charter, which so disgusted the company, as nearly to have caused them to relinquish their aim. In 1613 they obtained a charter from the Great Mogul to establish a factory at Surat, and the same year they obtained a similar charter from the emperor of Japan. In 1615 Sir Thomas Roe went as ambassador from England to the Great Mogul, and resided at his court for four years. By this time the company had extensively spread its settlements. It had factories at Acheen, Zambee, and Tekoa, in Sumatra; at Surat, Amadavad, Agra, Azmere, and Burampore, in the Mogul's territories; at Firando, in Japan; at Bantam, Batavia, and Japara, in Java; and others in Borneo, the Banda Islos, Malacca, and Siam, in the Celebes; and at Masulipatam and Petapoli, on the Coromandel coast; and at Calicut, the original settlement of the Portuguese on the coast of Malabar. Their affiars were, in fact, extremely flourishing. and their stock sold at 203 per cent.; but this prosperity awoke the jealousy of the Dutch, who carried on a most profitable trade with Java and the Spice Islands, and in spite of a treaty concluded betwixt the two nations in 1619, the Dutch governor-general attacked and took from the company the islands of Lantore and Pido Rangoon. This was only the beginning of their envious malice, for in 1623 they committed the notorious massacre of the English company at Amboyna, and expelled the English out of all the Spice Islands. Had this occurred in Cromwell's days, they would soon have paid a severe retribution; but James was just then anxious to secure the aid of the Dutch in restoring his son-in-law, the count palatine, and these atrocities were quietly smoothed over and left unavenged. The consequence was, that the affairs of the company fell into a most depressed condition, and though in 1616, when their stock was worth 200 per cent., they had raised a new stock of one million six hundred and twenty-nine thousand and forty pounds, which was taken by nine bundled and fifty-four individuals, principally of the higher aristocracy, at the close of James's reign the stock had fallen half its value.
Charles did not prove a more far-sighted or just patron of the India Company than his father. In 1031 they managed to raise a new stock of four hundred and twenty thousand pounds, but whilst they were struggling with the hostilities of their rivals, the Dutch and Portuguese, the king perpetrated precisely the same injury on them that his father had done, by granting a charter to another company, which embroiled them with the Mogul and the Chinese, causing the English to be entirely expelled from China, and injuring the India Company to a vast extent. The civil war in England then prevented the attention of the government being directed to the affairs of this important company. At the end of Charles's reign the company's affairs were at the worst, and its trade appeared extinct. In 1649, however, the parliament encouraged the raising of a new stock, which was done with extreme difficulty, and only amounted to one hundred and ninety-two thousand pounds. But in 1654, the parliament living humbled the Dutch, compelled them to pay a balance of damages of eighty-five thousand pounds and three thousand six hundred pounds to the heirs of the murdered men at Araboyna. It required years, however, to revive the prosperity of the company, and it was only in 1657 that, obtaining a new charter from the protector, and raising a new stock of three hundred and seventy thousand pounds, it rose again into vigour, and traded successfully till the restoration.
During this period, too, the incorporated companies—Turkey Merchants or the Levant Company, the Company of Merchant Adventurers trading to Holland and Germany, the Muscovy Company trading to Russia and the North, where they prosecuted also the whale fishery—were in active operation, besides a great general trade with Spain, Portugal, and other countries. The Tm-key Merchants carried out to the Mediterranean our cloths, lead, tin, spices, indigo, calicoes, and other Indian produce brought home by our East India Company; and they imported thence the raw silks of Persia and Syria, galls from Aleppo, cotton and cotton yarn from Cyprus and Smyrna; drugs, oils, and camlets, grograms, and mohairs, of Angora. In 1652 we find coffee first introduced from Turkey, and a coffee-house set up in Cornhill. On the breaking out of the civil war, the Muscovy Company were deprived of their charter by the czar, because they took part with the parliament against their king and the Dutch adroitly came in for the trade.
These great monopolies of foreign trade were supposed to be necessary to stimulate and protect our commerce; but the system of domestic monopolies which were most destructive to enterprise at home, which had arrived at such a height under Elizabeth, was continued by both James and Charles to the last, notwithstanding the constant outcries against them, and their being compelled, ever and anon, by public spirit to make temporary concessions. The commerce of England was now beginning to receive a sensible increase by the colonies which she had established in America and the West Indies. One of the earliest measures of James was the founding of two chartered companies to settle on the coasts of North America. One called the London Adventurers, or South Virginia Company, was empowered to plant the coast from the 34th to the 41st degree, which now includes Maryland, Virginia, and North and South Carolina. The other, the company of Plymouth Adventurers, were authorised to plant all from the 41st degree to the 45th of north latitude, which now includes the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and New England. In 1612 a settlement was made in Bermuda. The state of New England was founded by the planting of New Plymouth in 1620, and about the same time the French were driven out of Nova Scotia, and the island of Barbadoes was taken possession of; and within a few years various other West India islands were secured and planted. James granted all the Caribbee Isles to his favourite, James Hay, earl of Carlisle, and the grant was confirmed by Charles, who also granted to Robert Heath and his heirs all the Bahama Isles and the vast territory of Carolina, including the present North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and the south of Louisiana. In 16;12 Charles also granted the present Maryland to lord Baltimore, a catholic, which became the refuge of the persecuted catholics in England, as the New England states did of the puritans.
These immense territories were gradually peopled by the victims of persecution and the victims of crime. According as the storm of religious persecution raged against the catholics, the puritans, or the episcopalians and royalists, they got away to New England, Maryland, or Virginia. By degrees the Indians were driven back, and cotton, tobacco, and in the West Indies the sugar cane became objects of cultivation. James abominated tobacco, and published his "Counterblast" against it, laying serious restrictions upon its growth; but as the high duties imposed upon it proved very profitable to the revenue, gradually these restrictions were relaxed, and all cultivation of it at home was prohibited in favour of the colonies, and has continued so ever since. The Dutch had managed to engross the carrying trade under James and Charles to our American and West India colonies, having a strong position at New Amsterdam, now New York; but of this the parliament, after the revolution, deprived them in 1646, and extended that regulation to all our foreign trade by the famous Navigation Act 1651. In 1650 Cromwell's conquest of Jamaica completed our power in the West Indies.
The growth of our commerce was soon conspicuous by one great consequence, the growth of London. It was in vain that both James and Charles issued repeated proclamations to prohibit fresh erections of houses, and to order the nobility and gentry to live more on their estates in the country, and not in London, in habits of such extravagance, and drawing together so much loose company after them. From the union of the crowns of Scotland and England, this rapid increase of the metropolis, so alarming to these kings, was more than ever visible. When James came to the throne in 1603, London and Westminster were a mile apart, but the Strand was quickly populated by the crowds of Scots that followed the court; and though St. Giles's-in-the-Fields was then a distinct town, standing in the open country, with a very deep and dirty lane, called Diury Lane, running from it, to the Strand, before the civil wars it had become united to London and "Westminster by new erections in Clare Market. Long Acre, Bedfordbury, and the adjoining neighbourhood. Anderson, in his "History of Commerce," gives us some curious insight into this part of London at this period. "The very names of the older streets about Covent Garden," he observes, "are taken from the royal family at this time, or in the reign of Charles II., as Catherine Street, Duke Street, York Street. Of James and Charles the I.'s time, James Street, Charles Street, Henrietta Street, &c., all laid out by the great architect, Inigo Jones, as was also the fine piazza there, although that part where stood the house and gardens of the duke of Bedford is of much later date, namely, in the reigns of king William and queen Anne. Bloomsbury, and the streets at the Seven Dials, were built up somewhat later, as also Leicester Fields, since the restoration of Charles II., as also almost all of St. James's and St. Anne's parishes, and a great part of St. Martin's and St. Giles's. I have met with several old persons in my younger days who remembered that there was but a single house, a cake-house, between the Mews-gate at Charing Cross and St. James's Palace-gate, where now stand the stately piles of St. James's Square, Pall Mall, and other fine streets. They also remembered the west side of St. Martin's Lane to have been a quickset hedge; yet High Holborn and Drury Lane were tilled with noblemen's and gentlemen's houses and gardens almost a hundred and fifty years ago. Those five streets of the south side of the Strand, running down to the river Thames, have all been built since the beginning of the seventeenth century upon the sites of noblemen's houses and gardens, who removed further westward, as their names denote. Even some parts within the bare of the city of Lounou remained unbuilt within about a hundred and fifty years past, particularly all the ground between Shoe Lane and Fewters, now Fetter Lane, so called, says Howell in his Londonopolis, from Fewters, an old appellation of idle people loitering there, as in a way leading to gardens; which, in Charles I.'s reign, and even some of them since, have been built up into streets, lanes, &c. Several other parts of the city have been rendered more populous by the removal of the nobility to Westminster, on the sites of whose former spacious houses and gardens whole streets, lanes, and courts have been added to the city since the death of queen Elizabeth."
The extension of the metropolis necessitate<l the introduction of hackney coaches, which first began to ply, but only twelve in number, in 1625. In 1634 sedan-chairs were introduced to relieve the streets of the rapidly increased number of hackney-coaches, and other carriages; and in 1635 a post-office for the kingdom was established, a foreign post having been for some years in existence. Li 1653 the post was farmed for ten thousand pounds a year.
NATIONAL REVENUE, MONEY, AND COINAGE.
The annual revenue of James I. has been calculated at about six hundred thousand pounds, yet he was always poor, and died leaving debts to the amount of three hundred thousand pounds. He was prodigal to his favourites, and wasteful in his habits. He left the estates of the crown, however, better than he found them, having raised their annual income from thirty-two thousand pounds to eighty thousand pounds, besides having sold lands to the amount of seven hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds. He still prosecuted the exactions of purveyance, wardship, &c., to the great anoyance of his subjects. On the occasion of his son being made a knight, he raised a tax on every knight's fee of twenty shillings, and on every twenty pounds of annual rent from lands held directly of the crown, thus raising twenty-one thousand eight hundred pounds; and on the marriage of his daughter Elizabeth to the prince Palatine, he levied an aid of twenty thousand five hundred pounds, the last of these odious impositions which were demanded. The customs on his coming to the throne brought in one hundred and twenty-seven thousand pounds a year; but towards the end of his reign, showing the great increase of commerce, they amounted to one hundred and ninety thousand pounds a year. But this was the tonnage and poundage which was so hateful to the nation, and which James had greatly augmented by his own act and deed; an encroachment which caused parliament to refuse to his son Charles the usual grant of those duties for life; and his persistence in levying them, in spite of parliament, was one of the chief causes of his quarrel with that body, and the loss of his crown.
James was also a great trader in titles of nobility. His price for a barony was ten thousand pounds, for the title of viscount, twenty thousand pounds, and for that of an earl, thirty thousand pounds. He also invented the new title of baronet, and raised two hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds by it, at the rate of one thousand and ninety-five pounds each baronetcy. From so dignified a source do many of our aristocracy derive their honours.
Charles, though he was driven to such fatal extremities to extort money from his subjects, Ls calculated to have realized the enormous revenue from 1637 to 1611 inclusive, of eight hundred and ninety-five thousand pounds, of which two hundred and ten thousand pounds arose from ship-money and other illegal sources. Both he and his father dealt in wholesale monopolies to their courtiers and others, the profits of which were so embezzled by those greedy and unprincipled men, that Clarendon says that of two hundred thousand pounds of such income in Charles's time, only one thousand five hundred pounds reached the royal treasury. Charles raised two hundred thousand pounds in 1626 by a forced loan, and another hundred thousand by exacting the fees or compensation for exemption from the assumption of knighthood by every person worth forty pounds a year.
The income and expenditure of the commonwealth are stated to have far exceeded those of any monarch who ever sate on the throne of these realms, and to have been not less than four million four hundred thousand pounds per annum. The post-office, as already stated, brought in ten thousand pounds per annum. A singular tax, called the Weekly Meal, or the price of a meal a week from each person, produced upwards of one hundred thousand pounds a year, or six hundred and eight thousand four hundred pounds in the six years during which it was levied. There was a weekly assessment for the support of the war, which rose from thirty-eight thousand pounds to one hundred and twenty thousand pounds per week, which was continued as a land-tax under the protectorate, producing from 1640 to 1659 no less than thirty-two million one hundred and seventy-two thousand three hundred and twenty-one pounds. The excise also owes its origin to this period, and produced, it is said, five hundred thousand pounds a year. Large sums were realised by the sales of crown and church lands. From the sale of crown lands, parks, &c., one million eight hundred and fifty-eight thousand pounds; from the sale of church lands, ten million pounds; from sequestration of the revenue of the clergy for four years, three million five hundred thousand pounds; eight hundred and fifty thousand pounds from the incomes of office sequestered for the public service; four million five hundred thousand pounds from the sequestration of private estates or compositions for them; one million pounds from compositions with delinquents in Ireland; three million five hundred thousand pounds from the sale of forfeited estates in England and Ireland, &c. The ministers and commanders are asserted to have taken good care of themselves. Cromwell's own income is stated at nearly two million pounds, or one million nine hundred thousand pounds; namely, one million five hundred thousand pounds from England, forty-three thousand pounds from Scotland, and two hundred and eight thousand pounds from Ireland. The members of parliament were paid at the rate of four pounds a week each, or about three hundred thousand pounds a year altogether; and Walker, in his "History of Independency," says that Lenthall, the speaker, held offices to the amount of nearly eight thousand pounds a year; that Bradshaw had Eltham Palace, and an estate of one thousand pounds a year, as bestowed for presiding at the king's trial; and that nearly eight hundred thousand pounds were spent on gifts to adherents of the party. As these statements, however, are those of their adversaries, they no doubt admit of ample abatement; but after all deduction, the demands of king and parliament on the country during the contest, and of the protectorate in keeping down its enemies, must have been enormous. Notwithstanding this, the rate of interest on money continued through this period to decline. During James's reign it was ten per cent.; in 1624, the last year of his reign, it was reduced to eight per cent., and in 1651 was fixed by the parliament at six per cent., at which rate it remained.
Coin of the value of Fifteen Shillings of the Reign of James I.
Coin of the value of Thirty Shillings of the Reign of James I.
James issued various coinages. Soon after his accession he issued a coinage of gold and one of silver. The gold was of two qualities. The first of twenty-three carats three and a half grains, consisting of angels, half-angels, and quarter-angels; value ten shillings, five shillings, and two-and-sixpence. The inferior quality, of only twenty-two carats, consisted of sovereigns, half-sovereigns, crowns, and half-crowns. His silver coinage consisted of crowns, half-crowns, shillings, sixpences, twopences, pence, and halfpence. These gold coins, being of more value than that amount of gold on the continent, were rapidly exported, and the value of the finest gold was then raised from thirty-three pounds ten shillings to thirty-seven pounds four shillings and sixpence. The next coinage at this value consisted of a twenty-shilling piece called the unity, ten shillings called the double crown, five shillings or the Britain crown, four shillings or the thistle crown, and two-and-sixpence or half-crown. This value of the gold was not found high enough, and the next year, a fresh coinage, it was valued at forty pounds ten shillings, and consisted of rose-rials of thirty shillings each, spur-rials fifteen shillings, and angels at ten shillings each. But gold still rising in Value, in 1011, the unity was raised to twenty-two shillings, and the other coins in proportion. In the next year there was a great rise in gold, and in 1612 James issued fresh twenty-shilling, ten-shilling, and five-shilling pieces, which became known as laurels, from the king's head being wreathed with laurel. The unity and twenty-shilling pieces were termed hood pieces. Besides the royal coinage, shopkeepers and other retailers put out tokens of brass and lead, which in 1610 were prohibited, and the first copper coinage in England, being of farthings, was issued.
Crown of Charles I.
Shilling of the Protector.
The coins of Charles were, for the most part, of the same nature as those of his father. During his reign silver rose so much in value that it was melted down and exported to a vast extent. Though betwixt 1630 and 1643 some ten million pounds of silver were coined, it became so scarce that people had to give a premium for change in silver. In 1637 Charles established a mint at Aberystwith, in Wales, for coining the Welsh silver, which was of great value to him during the war. From 1628 to 1640 Nicholas Briot, a Frenchman, superintended the cutting of the dies, instituted machinery for the hammer in coining, and his coins were of remarkable beauty. Charles erected mints at most of his head-quarters during the war, as Oxford, Shrewsbury, York, and other places, the coiners and dies of Aberystwith being used, and these coins are distinguished by the prince of Wales's feathers. Many of these coins are of the rudest character; and besides these there were issued obsidional or siege pieces, so called from the besieged castles where they were made, as Newark, Scarborough, Carlisle, and Pontefract. Some of these are mere bits of silver plate with the rude stamp of the castle on one side and the name of the town on the other. Others are octagonal, others lozenge-shaped, others of scarcely any regular shape.
William Shakespeare.
The commonwealth at first coined the same coins as the king, only distinguishing them by a P for parliament. They afterwards adopted dies of their own, having on one side a St. George's cross on an antique shield encircled with a palm and laurel, and on the other two antique shields, one bearing the cross and the other the harp, surrounded by the words God with us. Their small silver coins had the arms only without any legend. Those were all parliament money, but there were half-crowns, shillings, and sixpences with milled edges. The coins of the protectorate boar the head of Cromwell laurelled like a Cæsar, and round the head, Olivar. D. G. R. P. Amj. Sco. Hib. etc. Pro. On the reverse a shield, having in the first and fourth quarters St. George's cross, in the second St. Andrew's, in the third a harp, and in the centre a lion rampant on an escutcheon— Cromwell's own arms. This shield supported a royal crown. The circumscription was Pax quxrilur Bello, and the date 1656, or 1658. These coins were from the dies of Symonds, and were superior to any which had appeared since the time of the Romans. The coins of the commonwealth were the same for Ireland and Scotland as for England. This was not the case in the reigns of James and Charles, which, though bearing the same arms, had generally a very different value. For Ireland James coined silver and copper money of about three-quarters of the value of the English, and called in the base coinage used by Elizabeth in the time of the rebellion. Charles only coined some silver in 1641, during the government of lord Ormond, and therefore called Ormonds. Copper halfpence and farthings of that period are supposed to have been coined by the rebel papists of 1642.
AGRICULTURE AND GARDENING.
In these arts the English were still greatly excelled by their neighbours the Dutch and Flemings. Towards the latter part of this period our country began to imitate those industrious nations, and to introduce their modes of drainage, their roots and seeds. In 1652 the advantage of growing clover was pointed out by Bligh, in his "Improver Improved," and Sir Richard Weston recommended soon after the Flemish mode of cultivating the turnip for winter fodder for cattle and sheep. Gardening was more attended to, and both culinary vegetables and flowers were introduced. Samuel Hartlib, a Pole, who was patronised by Cromwell, wrote various treatises on agriculture, and relates that in his time old men recollected the first gardener who went into Surrey to plant cabbages, cauliflowers, and artichokes, and to sow early peas, turnips, carrots, and parsnips. Till then almost all the supply of these things in London was imported from Holland and Flanders. About that time, however, 1650, cherries, applet, pears, hops, cabbages, and liquorice were rapidly cultivated, and soon superseded the necessity of importation; but Hartlib says onions were still scarce, and the supply of stocks of apple, pear, cherry, vine, and chestnut trees was difficult from want of sufficient nurseries for them. There was a great tendency to cultivate tobacco, but that, as we have seen, was stopped in favour of the colonies. There was a zealous endeavour to introduce the production of raw silk, and mulberry trees and silk worms were introduced, but the abundant supply of silk from India, and the perfection of the silk manufactured in France, rendered this scheme abortive,—and to this circumstance we owe the general diffusion of the mulberry tree in this country. In Markham's "Farewell to Husbandry," published in 1620, the various agricultural and gardening implements may be seen.
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND THE FINE ARTS.
Whilst James was hunting and levying taxes without a parliament, and Charles was in continual strife with his people for unconstitutional power and revenue, literature and art were still at work, and producing or preparing some of the noblest and choicest creations of genius. Shakespeare and Milton wore the great lights of the age; but around and beside them burned a whole galaxy of lesser, but not less exquisite, luminaries, whose selected beauties are just as delightful now as they were to their contemporaries. The names of this period, to which we still turn with admiration, reverence, and affection, are chiefly Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Marlowe, Massinger, Webster, Selden, Herrick, Herbert, Quarles, Bunyan, Bishop Hall, Hales, Chillingworth, Jeremy Taylor, Raleigh, Sir Thomas Browne, Burton (of the "Anatomy of Melancholy"), and Drummoud, of Hawthornden. But there are numbers of others, more unequal or more scholastic, to whose works we can occasionally turn, and find passages of wonderful beauty and power.
As we come first to Shakespeare, who figured largely on the scene in the days of queen Bess, and whose poetry we have already renewed, we may take the drama of this period also in connection with him. A formal criticism on Shakespeare would be worse than superfluous—it would be almost an insult to any reader of the present day, who is as familiar with his character and his beauties as he is with his Bible, and perhaps, in many cases, much more so. There are whole volumes of comment on this greatest of our great writers both in this language and others. The Germans have written volumes on his genius and works, and pride themselves on understanding him better than ourselves. They cannot believe but that he must have been in Germany, to represent so completely their feelings and philosophies; and, were there any obscurity about his birthplace, would certainly claim him. The Scandinavians equally venerate him, and have an admirable translation of his dramas. Even the French, the tone and spirit of whose literature are so different from ours, have, of late years, began to comprehend and receive him. The fact is, Shakespeare's genius is what the Germans term spherical, or many-sided. He had not a brilliancy in one direction only, but he seemed like a grand mirror, in which is truly reflected every image that falls on it. Outward nature, inner life and passion, town and country, all the features of human nature, as exhibited in every grade of life—from the cottage to the throne—are in him expressed with a truth and a natural strength, that awake in us precisely the same sensations as nature itself. The receptivity of his mind was as quick, as vast, as perfect, as his power of expression was unlimited. Every object once seen appeared photographed on his spirit, and he reproduced these lifelike images in new combinations, and mingled with such an exuberance of wit, of humour, of delicious melodies, and of exquisite poetry, as has no parallel in the wide range of literature, including all ages and all countries. The learned have always been astonished that he could be all this without an academic education, as if the academy of God's universe did not include all lesser colleges, and as if God needed lectures and masters to instruct those whom he chooses to inform himself, and to produce as his elect and peculiar oracles.
It has been said that his dramas cast into the shade and made obsolete all that went before him; but, indeed, his great light is the shadow that obscures also all that has come after him. Where is the second Shakespeare of the stage? He still stands alone as the type of dramatic greatness and perfection, and is likely to continue so. When we recollect his marvellous characters—his Hamlet, his Macbeth, his Lady Macbeth, his Othello and 'Desdemona, his Shylock, his Lear, his Ophelia, his Juliet, his Rosalind—the humours and follies of Shallow, Slender, Dogberry, Touchstone, Bottom, Launce, Falstaff—or the ideal creations, Ariel, Caliban, Puck, Queen Mab, we scarcely hope for the appearance of any single genius who shall at once enrich our language with an affluence of such living and speaking characters, such a profound insight into all the depths and eccentricities of our nature, and such a fervent and varied expression of all the sentiments that are dearest to our hearts. But when we survey in addition the vast extent of history and country over which he has ranged, gleaning thence the most kingly personages, the most tragic incidents, the most moving and thrilling as well as amusing sensations and fancies, our wonder is the greater. Greece has lent him its Pericles, its Timon, its Troilus and Cressida—Rome its Cæsar, Brutus, Antony, Coriolanus—Egypt its Cleopatra. Ancient Britain, Scotland, and Denmark; all the fairest cities of Italy, Venice, Verona, Mantua; the forests of Illyria and Belgium, and the isles of the Grecian seas, are made the perpetually shifting arena of his triumphs. Through all these he ranged with a free hand, and, with a power mightier than ever was wielded by any magician, recalled to life all that was most illustrious there, and gave them new and more piquant effect from the sympathetic nearness into which he brought them with the spectator, the enchanting scenery with which he surrounded them. All this was done by the son of the woolcomber of Stratford—the youthful ranger of the woods of Charlecote, and the uplands of Clopton—the merry frequenter of country wakes, and then the player of London, who, so far as we know, was never out of his native country in his life.
If we are to take it for granted that after the year 1597, when he bought one of the best houses in his native town for his residence, Shakespeare spent his life there, except during the the theatrical season, the greater part of his last nineteen years would be passed in the quiet of his country tome. We may then settle his "Two Gentlemen of Verona," "The Comedy of Errors," "Love's Labour Lost," "All's Well that Ends Well," "Richard II." and " Richard III.," "King John," "Titus Andronicus" (if his), the first part of "Henry IV.," and "Romeo and Juliet," as produced in the bustle of his London life. But the far greater part, and the most magnificent and poetical, of his dramas have been composed in the pleasant retirement of his native scenes; namely, the second part of "Henry IV.," "Henry v.," "The Midsummer Night's Dream," "Much Ado about Nothing," and "The Merchant of Venice," in 1598 and 1600; the second and third parts of "Henry VI.,"
"Merry Wives of Windsor," 1601; "Hamlet," 1602; "Lear," 1608; "Troilus and Cressida " and "Pericles," 1609; "Othello" (not published till after the author's death, which was the case, too, with all his other plays, though brought on the stage in his lifetime), "The Winter's Tale," "As You Like It," "King Henry VIII.," "Measure for Measure," "Cymbeline," "Macbeth," "The Taming of the Shrew," "Julius Caesar," "Antony and Cleopatra," "Coriolauus," "Timon of Athens," "The Tempest," and "Twelfth Night." Shakespeare died in 1616. Of the envy which the unexampled splendour of Shakespeare's genius produced amongst inferior dramatic writers, we have an amusing specimen in the words of Robert Greene: "There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shakscene in a country."
Amongst the most remarkable dramatic contemporaries of Shakespeare, or those who immediately followed him, are Chapman, Bon Jonson, Webster, Middleton, Decker, Marston, Tailor, Tourneur, Rowley, Ford, Heywood, Shirley, and Beaumont and Fletcher. We can only give slight notices of them; those who wish to know more of their style and merits may consult Charles Lamb's Specimens, and Dilke's Old Plays, or Doilsley's Collection. Chapman wrote sixteen plays, and, conjointly with Ben Jonson and Marston, one more, as well;is three in conjunction with Shirley. The tragedies of Chapman are written in a grave and eloquent diction, and abound with fine passages, but you feel at once that they are not calculated, like Shakespeare's, for acting. They want the inimitable life, ease, and beauty of the great dramatist. Perhaps his tragedy of "Bussy D'Ambois" is his best, and next to that his "Byron's Conspiracy," and "Byron's Tragedy." Of his comedies, "Eastward Hoe!" partly composed by Jonson and Marston, "Monsieur d'Olive," and his "All Fools." But Chapman's fame now rests far more on his translation of Homer, which, with all its rudeness of style and extreme quaintness, has always seized on the imagination of poets, and has been declared by many to be by far the best translation of the Iliad and Odyssey that we have. Pope was greatly indebted to it, having borrowed thence almost all the felicitous double epithets which are found in him.
The most celebrated of Webster's tragedies, "The Duchess of Malfi," has been revised in our time by Richard Hartwell Home, and put on the stage at Sadler's Wells by Phelps with considerable success. He was the author of three tragedies, "Appius and Virginia," "Duchess of Malfi," and "The White Devil; or, Vittoria Corombona;" a tragi-comedy, "The Devil's Law-Case; or, When Women Go to Law, the Devil is full of Business," besides two comedies in conjunction with Rowley, and two others in conjunction with Decker. Webster exhibits remarkable power of language, and an imagination of wonderful vigour, but rather too fond of horrors. Undoubtedly he was one of the best dramatists of his age, and seemed fully conscious of it. That he had a true poetic vein in him is evidenced by such passages as the "Dirge of Marcello," sung by his mother, which reminds one of the like simple, homely ditties in Shakespeare:—
"Call for the Robin-red-breast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unhuried men.
Call unto his funeral dole,
The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole,
To raise him hillocks that shall keep him warm
And, when gray tombs are robbed, sustain no harm."
There are fine truths also scattered through his dramas as:—
"To see what solitariness is about dying princes! As heretofore they have unpeopled towns, divided friends, and made great houses inhospitable, so now, O justice, where are their flatterers? Flatterers are but the shadows of princes' bodies; the least thick cloud makes them invisible."
Of Middleton, who wrote from twenty to thirty plays, in some of which, according to a very prevalant fashion of that age, he called in the aid of Rowley, Decker, Fletcher, and Massinger; of Decker, who wrote the whole or part of about thirty plays; of John Marston, who wrote eight plays; of Tailor, Tourneur, Heywood, and Ford, we can only say that their dramas abound with fine things, and would well repay a perusal, though they are not destined to see the stage again. John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont require a more specific notice. These gentlemen wrote together on the same plays to the amount of upwards of thirty, whilst John Fletcher wrote fourteen or fifteen himself. In fact, Fletcher, so far as can be known, was the most voluminous writer of the two, Beaumont having written little in his own name, except a masque, a few farces, dramatic pieces, and translations. The style of the two, however, was so much alike, that there is little to distinguish their productions from those of an individual mind. Beaumont and Fletcher were, as stated by Dryden, far more popular in their time than Shakespeare himself. The truth is, that they had less originality and were more compliant with the spirit of their age. They sought their characters more in the range of ordinary life, and therefore hit the tastes of a large and commoner class. They were extremely lively and forcible in dialogue, and had a flowery and dignified style which oftener approached the poetical than became it. We are everywhere met by admirable writing, and a finely sustained tone, but we travel on without encountering those original characters that can never again be forgotten, that become a part of our world, or those exquisite gushes of poetry and poetic scenery, which are like the music of Ariel ringing in the memory long afterwards. At the same time we are continually offended by extreme grossness and jarred by slovenliness and incongruity. They are of the class of great and able play-wrights who command the popularity of their age, but whom future ages praise and neglect; and who are only read by the curious for the fragments of good things that they contain.
The fate of Ben Jonson has been nearly the same. With the exception of his comedies of "Every Man in his Humour," "Vulpone," "The Silent Woman," and "The Alchemist," we are content to read the bulk of his dramas, and wonder at his erudition and his wit. The genius of Jonson is most conspicuous in his masques and court pageants, which were the delight of James's queen, Anne of Denmark, and the whole court. In them the spirits of the woods seem to mingle with those of courts and cities; and fancy and a hue of romance give to royal festivities the impressions of Arcadian life. But the living poetry of the "Midsummer Night's Dream," or of "Comus," are yet wanting to touch them with perfection. Hence their chief charm died with the age which patronised them, and having once perused them, we are not drawn to them again by a loving memory, as we are to the Shakespeare woodlands and lyrical harmonies. In Jonson's graver dramas there is a cold classical tone which leaves the affections untouched and the feelings unmoved, whilst we respect the artistic skill and the learned dignity of the composition.
Massinger, who wrote nearly forty dramatic pieces, is a vigorous writer, eloquent and effective. He is extremely trenchant in his satire, and delights in displaying pride and meanness exposed and punished. Still he is greater as a dramatist than a poet. His "New Way to Pay Old Debts," and "The Fatal Dowry," are best known to the present lovers of the drama. The "City Madam" is a play which is full of strong features of the times. Decker assisted him in "The Virgin Martyr" and is supposed to have introduced a higher and richer vein of feeling than belonged to Massinger himself.
Altogether the dramatic writing of this period has never been surpassed, and in Shakespeare has never been equalled. There is mingled with much licentiousness and coarseness a manly and healthy strength in the writers of this department; and though the bulk of these compositions have vanished from the stage, they will be long examined with enjoyment by those who delight in living portraiture of past ages, and the strong current of genuine English sense and feeling. The arrival of the commonwealth put down all theatres and scenic amusements. The solemn religion of the puritans was death to what they called "the lascivious mirth and levity of players." After their suppression for six years, it was found that the ordinance of the Long Parliament was clandestinely and extensively evaded; and in 1648 an act was passed, ordering all theatres to be pulled down and demolished, and the players to be punished "as rogues according to law." Towards the end of the protectorate, however, dramatic representations again crept in cautiously, and Sir William Davenant at first giving musical entertainments and declamations at Rutland House, Charter House Square, and afterwards in Drury Lane, calling his entertainments operas, at length gave regular plays. The restoration at length set the imprisoned drama altogether free.
Besides dramatic writers, poets abounded. It has been calculated that from the reign of Elizabeth to the restoration, no less than four hundred writers of verse appeared; some of these, who attained a great reputation in their day, and whose works are still retained in our collections, were rather verse-wrights than poets, and would now tax the patience of poetical readers beyond endurance. Such were William Warner, the author of "Albion's England," a history of England in metre extending from Noah's flood to the reign of Elizabeth; Samuel Daniel, the author of the "Civil Wars of Lancaster and York," in eight books; and Michael Drayton, who also wrote the "Barons' Wars," in verse, "England's Heroical Epistles," but above all the "Polyolbion," a Topography, in Alexandrine verse, in thirty books, and thirty thousand lines. Next came Giles and Phineas Fletcher, who employed their strength in composing allegoric poems. Phineas, under the delusive appellation of "The Purple Island," wrote an anatomical description of the human body, with all its veins, arteries, sinews, and so forth. This was extended to twelve books, on which an abundance of very excellent language was wasted. Besides this, he composed "Piscatory Eclogues," and other poems; and Giles, choosing a worthier subject, wrote "Christ's Victory" in the Italian ottava rimé, or eight-lined stanzas. To such perversion of the name of poetry had men arrived in the age of Shakespeare.
There were sundry poets who were also translators. Of these Edward Fairfax, of the same family as lord Fairfax, was the most distinguished. He translated with singular vigour and poetic feeling Tasso's "Jerusalem Delivered," which, though since translated by Hoole, and far more admirably by Wiffen, has lost none of its racy strength by time. It is still referred to with intense pleasure by the lovers of our old poetry. Joshua Sylvester, who wrote like king James against tobacco, but in verse, "Tobacco Battered," &c., translated amongst other things, "The Divine Weeks and Works" of the French poet Du Bartas. Sir Richard Fanshawe translated the "Lusiad," by the Portuguese poet Camoens, since also translated by Mickle, and again by lord Strangford. Fanshawe, moreover, translated the "Pastor Fido" of Guarini, from the Italian, the "Odes" of Horace, the fourth book of the "Æneid," and the "Love for Love's Sake," of the Spaniard Mendoza. Fanshawe seemed to have a peculiar taste for the European languages derived from the Latin as for the Latin itself; thus he translated from Roman, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian poets, and from all with much taste and elegance.
Sir John Denham was a popular poet of the time, and his "Cooper's Hill" is still retained in our collections, and finds readers amongst admirers of descriptive poetry. "Writers of much more sterling poetry were Sir John Davis, Drummond of Hawthorne, bishop Hall, and Donne. Sir John Davis was long attorney-general, and chief justice of the King's Bench at the time of his death. He is author of a poem on dancing called the "Orchestra," but his great work is his "Nosce Teipsum," or "Know Thyself," a work which treats on human knowledge and the immortality of the soul. It is written in quatrains, or four-lined stanzas, and is unquestionably one of the finest philosophical poems in our language, as it was one of the first. There are a life and feeling in the poem which make it always fresh, like the waters of a pure and deep fountain. Speaking of the soul, he says:—
Yet under heaven she cannot light on aught,
That with her heavenly nature doth agree;
She cannot vest, she cannot fix her thought,
She cannot in this world contented be.
For who did ever yet in honour, wealth,
Or pleasure of the sense, contentment find?
Who ever ceased to wish when he had wealth,
Or, having wisdom, was not vexed in mind?
Then as a bee which among weeds doth fall,
Which seem sweet flowers with lustre fresh and gay,
She lights on that and this and tasteth all;
But pleased with none, doth rise and soar away.
Drummond of Hawthornden, a Scotch gentleman who wrote in English, besides considerable prose, wrote some exquisite poems and sonnets formed on the Italian model; and bishop Hall, in his satires, presents some of the most graphic sketches of English life, manners, and scenery. Dr. Donne, who was dean of St. Paul's, and the most fashionable preacher of his day, was also the most fashionable poet—we do not except Shakespeare. He was the rage, in fact, of all admirers of poetry, and was the head of a school of which Cowley was the most extravagant disciple, and of which Crashaw, Withers, Herrick, Herbert, and Quarles, had more or less of the characteristics. In all these poets there was a deep feeling of spirituality, religion, and wit, and in some of them of nature, dashed and marred by a fantastic style, full of quaintnesses and conceits. In some of them these were so tempered as to give them an original and piquant air, as in Herrick, Herbert, and Quarles; in others, as Donne and Cowley, they degenerated into disfigurement and absurdity. Donne, at the same time, had great and shining qualities, keen, bold satire, profound and intellectual thoughts, and a most sparkling fancy, embedding rich touches of passion and pathos, yet so disfigured by uncouth and strange conceits, that one scarcely knows how to estimate these compositions. In a word, they are the exact antipodes of the natural style, and this fashion was carried to its utmost extravagance by Cowley. A stanza or two from a parting address of a lover to his mistress, may show something of Donne's quality and manner:—
As virtuous men pass mildly away.
And whisper to their souls to go;
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
The breath goes new,—and some say, no.
So let us melt and make no noise,
No tear-floods nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys,
To tell the laity of our love.
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres.
Though greater far, is innocent.
George Withers has much less of what a contemporary happily styled the "Occult School." He says himself that he took "little pleasure in rhymes, fictions, or conceited compositions for their own sakes," but preferred "such as flowed forth without study; "and indeed, he has far more nature. He was confined for years in the Marshalsea prison, for publishing a biting satire called "Abuses Stripped and Whipped," and there he wrote a long allegorical poem, called "The Shepherd's Hunting," in which his description of poetry is a perfect gem of fancy and natural feeling. He says:—
By the murmur of a spring.
Or the least boughs rustling,
By a daisy, whose leaves spread,
Shut when Titan goes to bed;
Or a shady bush or tree,
She could more infuse in me
Than all Nature's beauties can
In some other wiser man.
Two songs of Withers', quoted in Percy's Reliques, "Tho Steadfast Shepherd," and the one beginning—
Shall I, wasting in despair.
Die because a woman's fair?
Or make pale my cheeks with care
'Cause another's rosy are?Be she fairer than the day,
Or the flowery meads in May;
If she be not so to me,
What care I how fair she be?
are exquisite lines, that no reader ever again forgets.
Of Crashaw's poems, Nicol, of Edinburgh, has just published a new edition in his "English Poets," edited by Gilfillan, who speaks rapturously of them. Crashaw was of a deeply religious tone of mind, and became a catholic. His finest poems are his religious ones, and they are full of music and passionate reveries, yet greatly marred by the Donne fashion, which Dryden, and after him Johnson, most inaccurately termed the Metaphysic School, instead of the fantastic or singularity school. His very first poem opening his volume, called "The Weeper," shows how he treated even sacred subjects:—
Hail, sister springs!
Parents of silver forded rills.
Ever bubbling things!
Thawing crystal, snowy hilts
Still spending, never spent, I mean
Thy fair eyes, sweet Magdalene.
Heavens thy fair eyes be,
Heavens of ever-falling stars;
'Tis seed time still with thee.
And stars thou sow'st. whose harvest dares
Promise the earth to countershine,
Whatever makes heaven's forehead shine.
John Bunyan
Carew, Suckling, Lovelace are poets whose merits, in their various styles, would deserve a separate examination, but we must pass on to three other poets, who have been made more known to modern readers, and who would of them selves have stamped their age as one of genuine inspiration—Herbert, Herrick, and Quarles. Herbert and Herrick, like Donne, were clergymen, and in their quiet country parsonage poured forth some of the most exquisite lyrics which enrich any language. Herrick may be said to be the born poet of nature—Herbert of devotion. Herrick was of an old family of Leicestershire, which yet remains. Had his poems not been most familiar to modern readers, and purchasable in cheap editions, we should lament the space which confines us to a mere mention. His lyrics are the very soul of nature's melody and rapture. He revels in all the charms of the country—flowers, buds, fairies, bees, the gorgeous blossoming May, the pathos and antique simplicity of rural life; its marriages, its churchyard histories, its imagery of awaking and fading existence. The free, joyous, quaint, and musical flow and rhythm of his verse, has all that felicity and that ring of woodland cadences which mark the snatches of rustic verse that Shakespeare scatters through his dramas. His "Night Piece to Juliet," beginning,—
Her eyes the glow-worm lend thee,
The shooting stars attend thee,
And the elves also,
Whose little eyes glow
Like sparks of fire, befriend thee!
is precisely of that character. His "Daffodils" express the beautiful but melancholy sentiment which he so frequently found in nature—
Fair daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early rising sun
Has not attained his noon.
Stay, stay,
Until the hastening day
Has run
But to the even song
And having prayed together, we
Will go with you along.
We have short time to stay as you,
We have as short a spring,
As quick a growth to meet decay
As you, or anything.
We die,
As your hours do; and dry
Away
Like to the summer rain,
Or as the pearls of morning dew,
Ne'er to be found again.
Château de Steen. Residence of Rubens
Herrick's works are his "Hesperides" and his "Noble Numbers," the latter being religious, and not equal to the former. In religious tone, intensity, and grandeur, Herbert is infinitely his superior. Herbert was in early life a courtier; his eldest brother was the celebrated sceptical writer, lord Herbert of Cherbury. Herbert's hopes of court preferment fortunately ceasing with the death of king James, he took orders, grew extremely religious, married an admirably suited wife, and retired to Bemerton parsonage, about a mile from Salisbury, where he died of consumption at the age of thirty-six. Herbert was the very personification of Chaucer's "Good Parson." His life was one constant scene of piety and benevolence. Beloved by his parishioners, happy in his congenial wife, and passionately fond of music and his poetry, his days glided away as
already in heaven. The music which he loved was found poured livingly into his poetry, which is solemn, overflowing with tender and profound feeling, with the most chaste and seraphic imagination, with the most fervent devotion. James Montgomery, in our own time, is the only poet who resembles him in his pure and beautiful piety; but there is in Herbert a greater vigour, dignity of style, and felicity of imagery than in Montgomery. There is a gravity, a sublimity, and a sweetness which mingle in his devotional lyrics, and endear them for ever to the heart that has once imbibed them. His "Temple" is a poetic fabric worthy of a Christian minstrel, and stands as an immortal refutation of the oft repeated theory, that religious poetry cannot be at once original and attractive. What can be more noble than the following stanzas from his poem entitled "Man:"—
For us the winds do blow;
The earth doth rest, heavens move, and fountains flow.
Nothing we see but means our good,
As our delight, or as our treasure:
The whole is either our cupboard of food
Or cabinet of pleasure.
The stars have us to bed
Night draws the curtain which the sun withdraws.
Music and light attend our head.
All things to our flesh are kind
In their descent and being; to our mind
In their ascent and cause.
Each thing is full of duty:
Waters united are our navigation;
Distinguished, our habitation;
Below, our drink—above, our meat:
Both are our cleanliness. Hath one such beauty?
Then bow are all things neat!
More servants wait on man
Than he'll take notice of: in every path
He treads down that which doth befriend him
When sickness makes him pale and wan.
Oh I mighty love! man is one world, and hath
Another to attend him.
Besides his "Temple," Herbert wrote a prose work, "The Priest to the Temple; or, the Country Parson," which is charmingly full of the simple, child-like piety of the author. He also collected a great number of proverbs, under the title of "Jacula Prudentum."
The third of the trio of poets who seem to class themselves together by their quaintness, their fancy, and their piety, is Francis Quarles, a man who has been treated by many critics as a mere poetaster, but who is one of the most sterling poets which this country, prolific in poetic genius, has produced. Quarles was a gentleman and a scholar; in his youth he was cup-bearer to Elizabeth of Bohemia, and was finally ruined by taking the royal side in the civil wars. He wrote various poetical works; "Argalus and Parthenia," "A Feast for Worms," "Zion's Elegies," and a series of elegies on the death of a friend, the son of Bishop Aylmer, which probably suggested a similar poem on a similar occasion, Tennyson's "In Meraoriam." But the great work of Quarles is his "Emblems," which originated in a Latin poem by Herman Hugo, a Jesuit, called "Pia Desideria." This book, condemned and overlooked by the great critics, like Banyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," has, from generation to generation, adorned with curious woodcuts circulated amongst the people in town and country, till it has won an extraordinary popularity: and that it has well deserved it. we need only read such verses as these to convince ourselves:—
I love, and have some cause to love, the earth:
She is my Maker's creature—therefore good;
She is my mother—for she gave me birth;
She is my tender nurse—she gives me food.
But what's a creature. Lord, compared with thee?
Or what's my mother, or my nurse, to me?
I love the air: her dainty sweets refresh
My drooping soul, and to new sweets invite me;
Her shrill-mouthed quires sustain me with their flesh,
And with their Polyphonian notes delight me.
But what's the air or all the sweets that she
Can bless my soul withal, compared to thee?
I love the sea: she is my fellow-creature—
My careful purveyor; she provides me store;
She walls me round, she makes ray diet greater;
She wafts my treasure from a foreign shore.
But, Lord of oceans, when compared to thee,
What is the ocean, or her wealth to me?
To heaven's high city I direct ray journey.
Whose spangled suburbs entertain mine eye;
Mine eye, by contemplation's great attorney,
Transcends the crystal pavement of the sky.
But what is heaven, great God, compared to thee?
Without thy presence, heaven's no heave:i to me.
Without thy presence, earth gives no refection;
Without thy presence, sea affords no treasure;
Without thy presence, air's a rank infection;
Without thy presence, heaven itselfs no pleasure.
If not possessed, if not enjoyed in thee,
What's earth, or sea, or air, or heaven to me?
Quarles also wrote "The School of the Heart," and "The Virgin Widow," a comedy, which title has been borrowed by the author of "Philip van Artevelde" for a very different drama; and a modern critic ranks him with "Grotius, Addison, Pascal, Johnson, Coleridge, and Isaac Taylor, as one of the eminent lay-brothers in the christian church, whose testimony is above all challenge, and whose talents left their religion above all contempt." In the love of the people he may be classed with the authors of "The Pilgrim's Progress," a work also written at this period, and "Robinson Crusoe." Quarles was the author also of two prose works, "Judgment and Mercy for Afflicted Souls," republished some years ago by Sir Egerton Brydges, and his "Enchiridion," a collection of maxims, divine and moral; declared by "The Retrospective Review" to be the best collection of maxims in the English language.
William Browne's "Britannia's Pastorals," written at this period, have been much and justly celebrated for their faithful transcripts of nature and country life. They are perfect photographic sketches, abound with most striking imagery, and, as has been observed, "give you a vivid glimpse of the country, which remains miraculously preserved in its pristine hues." The enormous poetic wealth of this epoch, however, compels us to pause. There are numbers of names yet that sue for recognition as among the genuine poets of those times—Raleigh, as a lyrical poet; Sir Henry Wotton; Henry Vaughan, the author of "Silex Scintillans" and "Olor Iscauus," a disciple of Herbert's, who would demand a notice were it only to show how freely Campbell borrowed the poem of "The Rainbow" from him:—
How bright wert thou when Shem's admiring eye
Thy burning, flaming arch did first descry.
When Zerali, Nahor, Haran, Abram. Lot,
The youthful world's gray fathers in one knot,
Did with attentive looks watch every hour
For thy new light.
And so Campbell.—
When on the green, undeluged earth,
Heaven's covenant, thou didst shine;
How came the world's gray fathers forth
To watch thy sacred sign.
Altogether, no age—not even our own—has produced such a constellation of poets, nor such a mass of exquisite, superb, and imperishable poetry. Whilst Shakespeare was fast departing, Milton was rising, and during this period wrote many of his inimitable smaller poems. Even the honest Andrew Marvel, when freed from his labours in the great struggle for the commonwealth, solaced himself with writing poetry, English and Latin, and some of it of no contemptible order—as in his boat-song of the exiles of the Bermudas:—
Thus they sang in the English boat
A holy and a cheerful note,
And all the way, to guide the chime.
They with the falling ours kept time.
So he forgot occasionally polemics and politics in "a holy and a cheerful note" of his own. Even the saturnine Sir Thomas Overbury, whom Somerset and his wife had murdered in the Tower, could brighten up in poetry as in his "Choice of a Wife:"—
If I were to chose a woman.
As who knows but I may marry,
I would trust the eye of no man.
Nor a tongue that may miscarry;
For in way of love and glory
Each tongue best tells his own story.
The prose of the age was equally remarkable. First and foremost stands Francis Bacon with his "Novimi Organum," a new instrument of discovery in philosophy, and other works of a kindred character. He tells us that in his youth, whilst he was only sixteen, he took a great aversion to the philosophy of Aristotle; being, he said, a philosophy only strong for disputations and contentions, but barren of the production of works for the life of man; and in this mind he continued through life. Besides other works of less note, in 1605 he published one of great importance on "The Advancement of Learning;" soon after he published the outline or groundwork of his Organum, under the title of "Cogitata et Visa; or, Things Thought Out and Seen," and proudly boasted of it as the greatest birth of time. He afterwards published the "Wisdom of the Ancients," and it was not till 1621, and when he had reached the summit of his profession, and been made Viscount of St. Albans, that he brought out his great work, "The Instauration of the Sciences," of which the "Novum Organum" is the second part. No work was so little understood at the time or has occasioned such a variety of opinions since. Bacon was well aware that such would be the case, for in his will he says that he leaves his name and memory to foreign nations, and to his own countrymen after some time be passed over. Bacon asserted that he had superseded the Aristotelian philosophy, and introduced a new and accurate method of inquiry, both into mind and matter, by experiment and induction. By one party he is declared to be the great renovator of true knowledge, and the father of the modern sciences by this method; by another, that he did nothing of the kind, and that modern discovery would have progressed as well without his new instrument; that Aristotle pursued this method of induction himself, and that Galileo discovered the motion of the earth by the same means that Bacon taught at the same time. But whoever has acquainted himself with the system of Aristotle, and, still more, with the loose and absurd method by which it was taught in the schools before Bacon's time, must see that Bacon, if he did not altogether introduce the system reduced it to precision and accuracy, and thus put an end to the windy logic and abortive practice of the schools. They were accustomed to assume false and visionary premises, and reason from them by syllogisms which, of course, proved nothing. Bacon, by proceeding by analysis and synthesis—by first extracting from a substance, or a topic, everything that did not really belong to it, and then bringing these expurgated matters into contrast, drew sure conclusions, and advanced towards positive discovery. True, Galileo worked by the same method; but Bacon taught it, and made it clear to all understandings. To say, therefore, that modern science owes nothing to Bacon is to utter a self-evident falsity. Both in experimental philosophy and in metaphysical inquiry, it is Bacon's light, and not Aristotle's, which is followed. That Bacon himself made no great discoveries in prosecuting his own method, proves nothing; because, though he was not sufficiently advanced in the actual knowledge of the properties of matter, he saw and taught clearly how such knowledge was to be acquired, and applied to the legitimate development of science. How completely ignorant was the age in which he appeared of real experimental philosophy, is shown by the ridicule and contempt which was cast on the "Novum Organum." Such men as Ben Jonson and Sir Henry Wotton expressed their profound admiration of it, but by the wits of the time Bacon was laughed at as little better than a maniac. Bishop Andrews, in allusion to his title of "St. Albans," said he was on the highway to Dunce-table. King James said, in his almost blasphemous way, that it was like the peace of God—passing all understanding; and lord Coke said—
It deserved not to be read in schools,
But to be freighted in the ship of fools.
He was represented by men eminent in the world's opinion as "no great philosopher—a man rather of show than of depth, who wrote philosophy like a lord chancellor." Abroad, as Bacon had foreseen, his work was received in a different manner, and pronounced by the learned one of the most important accessions ever made to philosophy. Our space does not admit of our going into an analysis of his great work; but whoever will carefully study it, will find not merely the exposition of his method, but views stretching into the heights and depths, not only of our own nature but of the nature and life of the universe in which we move, that stamp the mind of Bacon as one of the most capacious, many-sided, and profound that ever appeared.
Next to Bacon we should place the prose writings of Milton in general importance and intellectual greatness. As Bacon's were directed to the advancement of true liberty in philosophy, Milton's were directed to the liberation of the church and state from the tyranny of king and custom. His "Areopagitica," a speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing, is a grand plea for the freedom of the press; his "Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Cases," and the "Best Means of Removing Hirelings out of the Church," go to the root of all hierarchical corruption. Besides these, his "Defence of the People of England" in reply to Salmasius, his "Second Defence" in reply to Peter du Moulin, and his "Eikonoklastes" in refutation of the "Eikon Basiliké," attributed to Charles I., but written by Dr. Gauden, and others of his prose works, are written in a somewhat stiff, but lofty and massive style. They foreshow the great national poet of "Paradise Lost;" and cannot be read without a deep veneration for the great puritan champion of the liberties and fame of England.
Next to these we should name the great advocates of protestantism. Hales and Chillingworth. The "Discourse on Schism" is the writing of Hales which brought him into notice, and led to the most important consequences. It struck at the very root of tradition and submission to the authority of the fathers, which Laud and his party in the church had exerted themselves to establish; and this was followed out by Chillingworth in his great work, "The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation." In this work, which has since been styled the bulwark of protestantism, Chillingworth endeavoured to prove the divine authority of the Bible on the basis of historic evidence, and having done that to his entire satisfaction, he declared that the religion of protestants was the Bible, and nothing but the Bible. By this rule alone they are, in his opinion, to be judged; the Scriptures alone are to be the standard of their doctrines. He thus cut off all the claims of popery built on tradition, and established the right of private judgment. In this he served not only the established church, to which he belonged, but every body of christians whatever; for they had, according to his reasoning, the same right to interpret the Bible for themselves. This gave great scandal to the bigoted party in the church. They declared that he had destroyed faith, by reducing it to simple reason. He was violently attacked by both catholics and puritans. Knott, a Jesuit, and Dr. Cheynell, one of the assembly of divines, were his most determined opponents. Cheynell wrote against him, "Chillingworthi Novissima; or, the Sickness, Heresy, Death, and Burial of W. C, with a Profane Catechism selected out of his Works." Not satisfied with this, he attended his funeral, made a violent harangue against him, and flung the "Religion of Protestants" into his grave, crying, "Get thee gone, thou cursed book, which has seduced so many precious souls—get thee gone thou corrupt, rotten book, earth to earth, dust to dust, go and rot with thy author." The protestant church has fully acknowledged the signal services of Chillingworth. Even those who deem that there are other evidences of Christianity than the historic evidences, or even the deductions of criticism, admit that his arguments alone are sufficient to demonstrate the genuineness of the Bible records, and therefore of the christian religion. The highest encomiums have been paid to the masterly reasoning and convincing eloquence of Chillingworth, by Locke, Clarendon, Gibbon, Dugald Stewart, and all our great theological writers.
What Chillingworth did for protestantism, Cudworth, in his great work, "The True Intellectual System of the Universe," did for religion in general, demolishing most completely the philosophy of atheism and infidelity. Barrow, Henry More, and Jeremy Taylor added much wealth to the theological literature of the age. More and Barrow belong, however, more properly to the next period. Bishop Taylor, who was the son of a barber, became one of the most celebrated preachers of that period, and both his sermons and his other works have received from many of our chief critics and historians the most encomiastic praises. He has been represented as a modern Chrysostom. Much of this praise he undoubtedly deserves, but modern readers coming to him after such extravagant laudation, experience a sensible disappointment. His "Holy Living and Dying" may be taken as the most favourable specimen of his writings; and though grave, pleasing, and consolatory, it does not strike us by any means as highly or brilliantly eloquent. His sermons, especially on the "Marriage Ring" and on the "House of Feasting," are of the same character; they are full of piety, sweetness, and grace, but they are not eloquence of the highest class. His sentences are often wearyingly long, his illustrations do not always appear very pertinent, and his manner is too much that of the father of the fourth century, whom he appears to have greatly formed himself upon. On the whole, however, he is a great ornament to our religious literature, and will be more enjoyed by those who have not expected to be astonished and dazzled.
The writings of archbishop Usher, and the sermons of bishop Andrews deserve mention; but the works of Fuller, the author of the "Worthies of England," "The Church History of Great Britain," and various other histories, "Holy and Prophane States," &c., are undoubtedly the most witty and amusing of the whole period; and, next to Burton's "Anatomie of Melancholie," a work, too, of this time, has furnished to modern authors more original ideas, more frequent and pregnant sentiments and allusions than any others in the language. They have been rivers of thought to men who had very little of their own. Harrington's "Oceana," a political romance, written to illustrate the opinion that the great power of nations consists in its property, has been variously estimated, but has ideas to repay a reader who has leisure and patience. A writer who has always taken a high rank for originality, is Sir Thomas Browne, the author of "Religio Medici," "Urn Burial,"
"The Garden of Cyrus," &c. Browne ranges freely from the quincunx of the gardens of the ancients, to the highest flights of metaphysical speculation. He is quaint, abrupt, and singular, but at the same time he is extremely suggestive of thought, and extends the sphere of human inquiry and sympathy far beyond the physical limits of most writers of his class. There is also a school of historians of this age of eminent merit, at the head of which stands Sir Walter Raleigh with his "History of the World;" Knowles with his able "History of the Turks;" Daniel with his "History of England" to the reign of Edward III.; and Thomas May, with the "History of the Long Parliament," and his "Breviary of the History of Parliament," two invaluable works. Camden's "Britannia" and "Annals" appeared at this epoch. Various chronicles were also issued at this period—Hall's "Union of the Families of York and Lancaster," Grafton's "Chronicle," Holinshed's, and Baker's. The works of Stow and Speed appeared in the early part of it. Stow's "Summary of the English Chronicles," 1565; his "Annals," 1573; his "Flores Historiaruni," an enlarged edition of his chronicle, 1600; his "Survey of London," 1598; Speed's "Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain," 1606; and his "History of Great Britain," in 1614. Besides these appeared the "Memoirs of Rushworth." Thurloe's and Whitelock's were written, but did not appear till a later period. The commencement of the Long Parliament marked also a remarkable era that of the first English newspaper, under the name of "Diurnals," or daily records of parliamentary proceedings. The idea once started, newspapers rapidly spread, so that betwixt the commencement of the civil war and the restoration, nearly two hundred were published, but none more frequently than once a week for some time, nor afterwards oftenor than twice or three times a week. It was, moreover, an age of political tracts and pamphlets. In science the discovery of the circulation of the blood by Harvey, and of logarithms by Napier, were the great events of that department. On the whole, the intellectual development of the age was as great and marvellous as was its political advance. To no other modern nation can we point which in one and the same period has produced three such men as Shakespeare, Milton, and Bacon, amid a host of lesser, but scarcely less precious lights, at the same time that it was working out one of the most stupendous revolutions in human government, and the imperishable principles of it, that the world has seen. On reviewing this period, well might Wordsworth exclaim:—
Great men have been amongst us; hands that penned.
And tongues that uttered wisdom, better none;
The later Sydney, Marvel, Harrington,
Young Vane, and others who called Milton friend.
These moralists could act and comprehend;
They knew how genuine glory is put on;
Taught us how rightfully a nation shone
In splendour.
And well did he add:—
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spoke; the faith and morals hold
That Milton hold. In everything we arc sprung
Of earth's best blood,—have titles manifold.
MUSIC.
Some of the eminent musical composers mentioned at the close of our review, still continued to embellish the reign of James. Amongst these were Ford, Ward, Weelkes, and Orlando Gibbons. The three first are distinguished for their madrigals, and Weelkes for ballads, which are unrivalled. Ward's "Die not, Fond Man," is still as popular as ever. Gibbons composed both madrigals and cathedral music. He was organist of the royal chapel, and was made Doctor of Music by the University of Oxford. The sacred music of Gibbons is enough of itself to exempt this country from the often advanced charge of being unmusical. In 1622, Dr. Heyther, a friend of Camden, the antiquary, established a professorship of music at Oxford. Charles I. was not only fond of music, but played himself with considerable skill on the viol da gamba. Dr. William Child, himself an excellent composer, was the organist of his chapel, and Lawes, the friend of Milton, who is referred to in his sonnets and in "Comus," was patronised by him. Lawes was greatly admired, and justly, by other poets, especially Herrick and Waller. Charles I., however, set a bad example, by encouraging foreign musicians instead of his own subjects. He made Laniere, an Italian, a man in real musical science far inferior to several Englishmen then living, "Master of our Music," and his example has only been too diligently followed by our princes and nobles ever since.
The rise of the commonwealth was the fall of music in England. The stern puritans, and especially the Scotch presbyterians, who dubbed an organ "a kistful o' whistles," denounced all music as profane, and drove organs and orchestras from the churches. Nothing was tolerated but a simple psalm tune. Cromwell, however, did not partake of this fanaticsm. He was fond of music, and frequently had musical entertainments at Whitehall and Hampton Court. The great organ which had been pulled out of Magdalen College, Oxford, he had carefully conveyed to Hampton Court, where it was one of his greatest solaces. Under Cromwell, the lovers of music brought out their concealed instruments, and there was once more not only domestic enjoyment of music, but open musical parties.
PAINTING, ENGRAVING, AND SCULPTURE.
If the civil war in England was auspicious to liberty, it was disastrous to art. From the time of Henry VIII. the British monarchs had shown a decided taste for the arts. Henry had munificently patronised Holbein, and had made various purchases of foreign chefs-d'œuvres. Prince Henry inherited the taste of his mother, instead of the coarse buffoonery of his father, and showed a strong attachment to men of genius and to works of genius. He began a collection of paintings, bronzes, and medals, which fell to his brother Charles. Charles was an enthusiast in art, and had he not possessed his fatal passion for despotism, would have introduced a new era in this country as regarded intellectual and artistic pursuits. The study of Italian models,, both in literature and art, by the nobility, made them prepared to embrace the tastes of the monarch; and England would soon have seen the fine arts flourishing to a degree which they had never enjoyed here before, and which would have prevented the Gothic ages that succeeded. During Charles's early rule the greatest artists of the continent flocked over to this country, and found a liberal reception here. Rubens, Vandyck, Jansen, Vansomer, and Mytens, Diepenbeck, Polemberg, Gentileschi, and others visited London, and Vandyck, the greatest of them all, remained here permanently. The works of Vandyck, in this country, are numerous, and if we, perhaps except his famous picture of "The Crucifixion" at Slechlin, we possess the best of his productions. At Windsor Castle, Hampton Court, Blenheim, Wilton House, and Wentworth House, the bulk of his finest pictures are to be seen. His portraits of our princes and the chief nobility of the time are familiar to all English eyes, and place him only second to Titian in that department. At Wilton House alone there are twenty-five of Vandyck's paintings; the portrait of Philip, earl of Pembroke, with his family, is declared by Walpole to be itself a school of this master. His dramatic portrait of Stafford and his secretary, Mainwaring, at Wentworth House, Walpole asserts to be his masterpiece. Charles had proposed to him to paint the history of the order of the garter on the walls of the Banqueting House at Whitehall, but the sum he demanded, said to be eighty thousand pounds, but more probably a misprint for eight thousand pounds, caused Charles to delay it, and his political troubles soon put an end to that design. He painted three pictures of Charles on horseback, one of which is at Windsor, one at Hampton Court, and one at Warwick Castle.
Anthony Vandyck.
Rubens came only to this country as an ambassador, but Charles seized the opportunity to get him to paint the apotheosis of James on the ceiling of the Banqueting House at Whitehall. This he, however, merely sketched whilst here, and painted it at Antwerp, receiving three thousand pounds for it. The duke of Buckingham purchased Rubens's private collection of paintings, chiefly of the Italian school, but containing some of his own, for ten thousand pounds. These were sold by the long parliament, and now adorn the palaces of the Escurial at Madrid, and the Belvidere palace at Vienna. In our opinion, the large pictures in the latter gallery, "St. Francis Xavier preaching to the Indians," and "Loyola casting out Devils," are amongst the very finest of his productions—a great loss to this country.
Charles, besides making collections, and drawing round him great artists, projected the establishment of an academy of arts on a princely scale. But this remained only an idea, through the breaking out of the revolution. The parliament, in 1645, caused all such pictures at Whitehall as contained any representation of the Saviour or the Virgin, to be burnt, and the rest to be sold. Fortunately there were persons in power who had more rational notions, and much was saved. Cromwell himself secured the cartoons of Raphael for three hundred pounds, and thus preserved them to the nation, and as soon as he had the authority, he put a stop to the sale of the royal collections, and even detained many that were sold.
The native artists of this period were chiefly pupils of Rubens or Vandyck. Jamieson, called the Scotch Vandyck, was a pupil of Rubens at the same time with Vandyck—Charles sate to him. William Dobson, a pupil of Vandyck, was serjeant-painter to Charles, and Robert Walker, of the Vandyck school, was Cromwell's favourite painter, to whom we owe several admirable portraits of the protector. There were also several miniature painters of the highest merit—the two Olivers, Hoskins, and Cooper.
Up to this period engravings had become by no means prominent in England. That there had been engravers we know from various books having been illustrated by them. Geminus and Humphrey Lloyd were employed by Ortelius, of Antwerp, on his "Theatrum Orbis Terrarum." Aggas had executed a great plan of London, and Saxon county maps. Various Flemish and French engravers found employment here, as Vostermans, De Voerst, and Peter Lombard. Hollar, Bohemian, was employed extensively till the outbreak of the war, and illustrated Dugdale's, as well as other works. But the chief English engraver of this period was John Payne.
The Crucifixion. By Vandyck.
Sculpture was by no means in great advance at this period. There were several foreign artists employed in this country on tombs and monuments, but as they did not at that date put their names upon them, it is difficult to attribute to every man his own. Amongst these Le Soeur, who executed the equestrian statue of Charles I. at Charing Cross, Angier, and Du Val were the chief. John Stone, master mason to the king, was by far the most skilful native sculptor. Amongst his best efforts are the monuments of Sir George Hollis at Westminster, and the statue of Sir Finnis Hollis also at Westminster. Sir Dudley Carlton's tomb at Westminster, and Sutton's tomb at the Charter House are also his. But the greatest boon to sculpture was the introduction of the remains of ancient art by the earl of Arundel at this period, still called the Arundel Marbles.
Tomb of Sir Thomas Lucy in Charlecote Church
ARCHITECTURE.
This is the epoch of the commencement of classical architecture. The grand old Anglo-gothic had run its course. It fell with the catholic church, or continued only in a mongrel and degraded state, showing continually the progress of its decline. From Henry VII. to James this state of things continued; the miserable mesquin style, which succeeded the downfall of the picturesque Tudor, being the
West Front of Old St. Paul's, restored by Inigo Jones.
Old Hardwick Hall.
The great merit of Jones is that be imported Palladio's style substantially and completely, ready as it was to his hands, and wholly unknown in this country.
Castle Ashby.
By this means Jones acquired a reputation for genius which nothing that he has left justifies his claim to. He was first engaged in designing the scenery and machinery of the masques which Ben Jonson wrote for the queen of James I, He was appointed architect to the queen and prince Henry. On the death of the prince he returned to Italy, and on his return he was appointed surveyor-general of the royal buildings. The first thing which he planned was the design for an immense palace for James on the site of Whitehall. There is a simple grandeur in the drawings of it which are left, which may fairly entitle him to a reputation for the introduction of an elegant domestic architecture, but does not warrant the extravagant terms of eulogy as a gigantic genius, which have been lavished on him.
An Inn Yard.
The only portion of this palace which was built is the present banqueting House at Whitehall, being the termination of the great facade, and which certainly contains nothing very remarkable. Jones added a back front to Somerset House, and a west front to St. Paul's, neither of which remain. That Inigo Jones was far from having conceived the true principles of architecture was shown by the fact that his west front of old St. Paul's was a classical one engrafted on a Gothic building, and this solecism he was continually repeating. One of the most glaring instances of the kind, is a classical screen which he raised in the Norman cathedral of Durham. Amongst the chief remaining buildings of Inigo Jones, and from which an idea of his talent may be drawn, are St. Paul's Church, Covent Garden, of which Quatremere de Quincy says, the most remarkable thing about it is the reputation that it enjoys; York Stairs, Ashburnham House, Westminster, a house on the west side of Lincoln's Inn Fields, originally built for the earl of Lindsay, Surgeon's Hall, an addition to St. John's College, Oxford, and by far his finest work, Heriot's Hospital at Edinburgh.
The general aspect of our towns and streets remained the same at this period as in the former. James issued proclamation after proclamation, ordering the citizens to leave off the half-timbered style, and build the fronts at least entirely of brick or stone; but this was little attended to, and many a strange old fabric continued to show the fashions of past ages.
Old House in London.
MANNERS AND CUSTOMS.
If we are to believe the memoir writers and dramatists of this period, the national manners and morals had suffered a Elizabeth, there was a certain dignity and outward decorum preserved, but James introduced such a coarseness and grossness of manner, such low debauch and buffoonery, that ever the salutary restraint which fashion had imposed, was stripped away, and all classes exhibited the most revolting features. In the reign of Henry, Edward, and Elizabeth, we had such women as the daughter of Sir Thomas More, lady Jane Grey, Catherine Parr, and others, who cultivated literature and philosophy, the queens Mary and Elizabeth setting themselves the example in reading and translating the most illustrious classical authors. But after James came in, notwithstanding all his learned pedantry, you hear nothing more of such tastes amongst the court ladies, and it is very singular that amid that blaze of genius which distinguished the time under review, we find no traces of feminine genius there. On the contrary, both our own dramatists and foreign writers describe the morals and manures of women of rank as almost destitute of delicacy and probity. They are described as mingling with gentlemen in taverns amid tobacco smoke, songs, and conversation of the most ribald character. That they allowed freedoms which would startle women of the lowest rank in these times, were desperate gamblers, and those who had the opportunity were wholesale dealers in political influence. Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, boasts of the effect of the bribes that he was accustomed to distribute amongst them. Whilst such women as the decided deterioration. Licentious as was the court of queen infamous and murderous countess of Essex and the dowager countess Villers were the leading stars of the court, the tone of morals must be low indeed.
Tradesmen's Signs.
Whilst the ladies were of this stamp we cannot expect the gentlemen to have been better, and there is no doubt but that the honours and wealth and royal favour heaped on such men as Somerset, Hay, Ramsay, and Buckingham, made debauchery and villainy quite fashionable. The character of Englishmen on their travels, Howell tells us, was expressed in an Italian proverb:—
Ingkse Italianato
E Diavalo incarnato.
An Italianised Englishman is a devil incarnate. This was said from the debauched conduct of our young men on their travels.
A Sedan
At home they were a contemptible mixture of foppery and profanity. Buckingham and the other favourites led the way. We have recorded the audacious behaviour of Buckingham at the courts of France and Spain, and the enormous foppery of his apparel. He had a dress of uncut white velvet, covered all over with diamonds, valued at eighty thousand pounds, a great feather of diamonds, another dress of purple satin covered with pearls, valued at twenty thousand pounds, and his sword, girdle, hatbands, and spurs were thickly studded with diamonds. He had besides these, five-and-twenty other dresses of great richness, and his numerous attendants imitated him according to their means. They began now to patch their faces with black plaister, because the officers who had served in the German wars wore such to cover their scars; and the ladies did the same. Duelling was now introduced, cheating at play was carried to an immense extent, and the dandy effeminacy of the cavaliers was unexampled. They had the utmost contempt of all below them, and any attempt to assume the style or courtesies of address which they appropriated to themselves, was resented as actual treason. The term Master or Mr. was only used to great merchants or commoners of distinction; and to address such as gentlemen or esquires would have roused all the ire of the aristocracy. In proceeding through the streets at night, courtiers only were conducted with torches, merchants with links, and mechanics with lanthorns.
Old London Lamp.
We may imagine the feeling with which the sober and religious puritans beheld all this, and the proud contempt with which their strictures were received. When the civil war broke out, which was a war of religious reform as much as of political, the puritans displayed a grave manner, a sober-coloured dress. and chastened style of speech; and the cavaliers, in defiance and contempt, swore, drank, and indulged in debauchery all the more, to mark their superiority to the, "sneaking roundhead dogs."
A Coach of the time of King Charles I.
Charles endeavoured to restrain this loose all indecent spirit, but it was too strong for him; and though the puritans put it effectually down during the commonwealth, it came back in a flood with the lewd and ribald Charles II. Charles I. also introduced a more tasteful style of court pageants and festivities.
A Room in Shakespeare's House at Stratford.
Under James all the old fantastic masques and pageantries, in which heathen gods, goddesses, satyrs, giants, and the like prevailed. Charles gave to his pageantries a more classical character, and when the puritans came in they put them all down, along with Maypoles, and all the wakes, and church-ales, and the like, which James had encouraged by his "Book of Sports." The court festivals, so long as the monarchy remained, were marked by all the profusion, displays of jewellery, and of dresses of cloth of gold and embroidery, which prevailed in the Tudor times. The old-fashioned country life, in which the gentlemen hunted and hawked, and the ladies spent their leisure in giving bread to the poor and making condiments, preserves, and distilled waters, was rapidly deserted during the gay days of James and Charles, and the fortune-making of favourites.
A State Bed.
Merchants and shopkeepers were growing rich, though they still conducted their businesses in warehouses which would appear mean and miserable to our present city men, and in shops with open fronts, before which the master or one of his apprentices constantly paraded, crying, "What d'ye lack?" had their stately suburban houses, and vied with the nobles in their furniture and mode of living. The moral condition of the people of London at this period, according to all sorts of writers, was something inconceivably frightful. The apprentices, as we have seen, were a turbulent and excitable race, who had assumed a right to settle political matters, or to avenge any imagined attack on their privileges. At the cry of clubs, they seized their clubs and swords and rushed into the streets to ascertain what was amiss. They were easily led by their ringleaders against any body or any authority that was supposed to be invading popular rights. We have seen them surrounding the parliament house, demanding such measures as they pleased, and executing their notions of suitable chastisement of offenders by setting fire to Laud's house and breaking down the benches of the High Commission Court. They were equally ready to encounter and disperse the constabulary or the city guard, and to fight out their quarrels with the Templars, or others with whom they were at feud.
Rubens' Chair.
Baronial Hall, Charlecote
The riots of the apprentices, however, had generally something of a John-Bullish assertion of right and justice in them; But the streets and alloys of London were infested with an equally boisterous, and much more villainous crew of thieves and cut-purses. Pocket-picking was then, as now, taught as a science, and was carried to a wonderful perfection of dexterity. All kinds of rogueries were practised on country folk, the memory of which remains yet in rural districts, and is still believed applicable to the metropolis. These vagabonds had their retreats about the Savoy and the brick-kilns of Islington, but their great headquarters were in Whitefriars, called Alsatia, which possessed the right of sanctuary, and swarmed with debtors, thieves, bullies, and every species of miscreants, who were ready on an alarm, made by the sound of a horn, to turn out in mobs and defend their purlieus from constables and sheriffs' officers.
Ancient Kitchen with Dog Wheel.
Walking the streets in the daytime was dangerous from the affrays often going on betwixt the apprentices and the students of the Temple, or between the butchers and weavers, or from the rude jostling and practical jokes of bullies and swash-bucklers; but at night there was no safety except under a strong guard. Then Alsatia, the Savoy, and the numerous other dens of vice and violence, poured forth their myrmidons, and after nine o'clock there was no safety for quiet passengers. If we add to this description the narrowness of the streets and alleys, the unpaved and filthy state of the streets, and undrained and ill-ventilated houses, London was anything at this period but an attractive place. The plague was a frequent visitant, and we are told that kites and ravens were much kept to devour the offal and filth of the streets, instead of scavengers. In the country things were not much better. The roads were terrible, and were infested by sturdy bands of robbers. In the neighbourhood of Loudon, Finchley, Blackheath, Wimbleon, and Shooters Hill were places of well-known fame for daring highwaymen. It was high time for the puritans to come into power, and to put both town and country under a more wholesome discipline. Cromwell's soldiers, quartered in various parts of the metropolis, and his major-generals administering martial law in different parts of the country, soon altered the face of things. He shut up Spring Gardens, a place of nocturnal resort for assignations for traffickers in political corruption, and for various licentiousness; and instead of fellows prowling about the streets with sweetmeats in their pockets to kidnap children, and sell them to the plantations, he sent these scoundrels freely thither themselves. Amongst the gloomy features of this period, is the relentless persecution of old women, under the belief that they were witches; a practice commenced by James, but continued by the puritans, who sent out Hopkins, the notorious
Old English Merrymaking.
A Portrait of James I. dressed for Hawking. From an Engraving in " A Jewell for Gentrie," published 1614.
POPULAR SPORTS AND PASTIMES
The sports of the aristocracy, gentry, and merchant citizens were much the same that they had been. Hunting was the favourite pastime of James, and therefore was not likely to be neglected by the country gentry. He was also fond of hawking, and kept alive that pastime, which was dying out, some time longer.
Female Costume of the Reign of Charles ICopied from Tombs of the Period
Ball games had much superseded the jousts and tournaments of past times. Tennis retained its high favour, and billiards and pall-mall, or striking a ball through a ring suspended to a pole, were becoming fashionable. Bowling, cards, dice, dancing, masques, balls, and musical entertainments varied town life
Female Costume at the close of the Reign of James I, Copied from one of the Figures at the side of the Tomb of John Harpurin, Swarkestone Church, Derbyshire.
The common people stuck to their foot-ball, quoits, pitching the bar, cricket, shovel-board, bull and bear-baiting, and cock-fighting. The puritans put down May-games, Whitsun-ales, morrice-dances, and all amusements that savoured of a catholic origin. They also humanely suppressed, as far as they could, the savage sports of bear and bull-baiting. Pride and Hewson killed all the bears at the bear-garden to put an end to that cruel pastime, and thence originated Butler's Hudibras. The bowling-greens of the English were famous, and horse-racing was much in vogue. In Scotland the reformation put to flight all sorts of games, dancing, and merrymakings, as sinful and unbecoming of Christians, and polemic discussions were the only excitements which varied the ascetic gloom.
Patches on a Lady's Face.From "The Artificial Changeling,'" date 1630).
FURNITURE AND DOMESTIC EMBELLISHMENT.
The interiors of houses were in this period greatly embellished, and the splendour of hangings of beds and windows had strikingly increased. Each velvets and silks, embroidered with cloth of gold and cloth of silver, and coloured satins, of the most gorgeous hues, abounded. The cushions of couches and chairs were equally costly, and instead of the ancient tapestry, paper and leather hangings, richly stamped and gilt, covered the walls. The Flemish artists had been called in to paint the ceilings with historic
An Exquisite of the time of Charles I. Copied from a Broadside, Date 1646.
or mythologic scenes, and on the walls hung the masterpieces of Flemish and Italian art. Carpets were beginning to supersede rushes on the floors, but were more commonly used as coverings for tables.
Puritans. From Engravings published in 1646 and 1649.
In addition to the carved cabinets of oak, ebony, and ivory, and the richly covered cushioned and high backed chairs of the Tudor dynasty, Flemish and Dutch furniture of somewhat formal but still elegant design abounded. Superb ornaments of ivory and china had found their way from the East, and became heir-looms in great mansions. Altogether, the houses of the wealthy of these times presented a scene of stately elegance and luxury that has not since been surpassed.
COSTUME.
The costume of the reign of James was but a continuation of that of Elizabeth. The men still wore the stiff plaited ruff, occasionally varied by a plain horizontal one with lace on its hedges.
Dresses of the Protectorate.Copied from the tomb of Hyacinth and Elizabeth Sacheverel, date 1657.
The long peasecod-bellied doublet continued, and the large stuffed Gallic or Venetian hose, slashed and quilted, had assumed more preposterous dimensions from James's timidity; he having both these and the doublets quilted to resist the stabs of the stiletto. In such a suit we have James painted repeatedly. Towards the end of his reign a change was noticeable. Instead of the long-waisted doublet there were short jackets, with false hanging sleeves behind; the trunk hose were covered with embroidered straps, tucked short at the thigh, and the hose gartered below the knee, as we see in the figure of prince Henry at his martial exercises.
Boots of the Reign of Charles I.
We have noticed how they covered their cloaks and dresses with jewels on state occasions. They wore feathers at such times in their hats. Taylor, the water poet, says the gallants of his time,—
Wore a farm in shoestrings edged with gold.
And spangled garters worth a copyhold;A hose and doublet which a lordship cost,
A gaudy cloak, three mansions' price almost;
A beaver band and feather for the head,
Prized at the church's tythe, the poor man's bread.
The old cloth stockings were obsolete, and stockings of silk, thread, or worsted used.
"A Godly Dissenting Brother," and " A Brother of the Presbyterian Way." Copied from " A Pious and Reasonable Persuasive to the Sonnes of Zion," date 1616.
The ladies of the court were still in the stiff Elizabethan farthingale, elevated collar, and hair dressed in the lofty style. Anne of Denmark was Elizabeth over again. But in more domestic life we find the ladies painted in a far more natural style, without the farthingale, with falling collars, plain or edged with lace, and the hair with ringlets falling on each side; and this simple and more elegant fashion became more and more general, and at length universal in Charles's reign.
Citizens of the time of James I. Copied from the Charter of the Leather Sellers' Company.
The male costume of Charles's time was extremely elegant. At the commencement of the civil war no contrast could be greater than that of the appearance of the cavaliers and the roundheads. The cavalier dress consisted of a doublet of silk, satin, or velvet, with large loose sleeves slashed up the front, the collar covered by a falling band of the richest point lace, with Vandyck edging. The long breeches, fringed or pointed, met the tops of the wide boots, which were also commonly ruffled with lace or lawn. A broad Flemish beaver hat, with a rich hatband and plume of feathers, was set on one side of the head, and a Spanish rapier hung from a most magnificent baldrick or sword belt, worn sash-wise over the right shoulder, and on one shoulder was worn a short cloak with an air of carelessness.
Gentlemen of the Middle Temple.From a Pamphlet entitled "News from Hell", date 1641.
In war this short cloak was exchanged generally for the buff coat, which was also richly laced, and sometimes embroidered with gold and silver, and round the waist was worn a broad silk or satin scarf tied in a large bow behind or over the hip, or a buff jerkin without sleeves was worn over the doublet, and the lace or lawn on the boots dispensed with. The beard was worn very peaked, with small upturned moustaches, and the hair long and flowing on the shoulders. In contrast to this the parliamentarians wore their hair cut short—whence the name of roundhead—and studied a sober cut and colour of clothes. The first appearance of Cromwell in parliament, described by Sir Philip Warwick, has been taken as a sufficient specimen of his costume when protector. But Cromwell was then but a gentleman farmer, and appeared in careless rustic habit. "I came one morning into the house." says Warwick, "well clad, and perceived a gentleman speaking whom I knew not, very ordinarily apparelled, for it was a plain cloth suit, which seemed to have been made by an ill country tailor. His hat was without a hatband."
Musketeer of the time of James I.
But no one knew better than Cromwell what was necessary to the decorum of station, and very different is the account of his appearance when going to be sworn protector. "His highness was in a plain but rich suit, black velvet, with cloak of the same; about his hat a broad band of gold."
The ladies' dresses of Charles's time rapidly changed from the stiff ruft's and farthingales to a more natural and With Mrs. Turner, the introducer, went out in James's time the yellow starch ruff's and bands, for she appeared, when hanged for her concern in Sir Thomas Overbury's murder, in her own yellow ornaments at the gallows. But all ruffs grew obselete in Charles's reign, and a lady of that day would scarcely be distinguished from a lady of this. The hair was dressed much as in modern manner, the dress fell naturally without hoops, and the broad collar fell gracefully on the shoulders. The citizens' and puritans' wives, as well as country women, wore the broad high-crowned hat, and country women appeared still in plaited ruff, and a muffler over the mouth in cold weather, tied up to the back of the head. A lady had generally her feather fan in her hand, as the modern one has her parasol.
An Officer in a Suit of Armour, date 1611.
ARMS AND ARMOUR.
Armour was fast disappearing; it was of little use against cannon and matchlocks. James thought armour a very good invention, for it hindered a much as much from hurting his enemy as it defended himself. But in his time little but a cuirass for the body and a helmet or helmet was used. To the rest for the heavy matchlock in this reign was affixed a long rapier blade, called a "swine's feather," or "bristle," and used as the soldier now uses the bayonet. In the civil war most of the officers wore only a cuirass over a buff coat; and though some of the infantry were almost fully sheathed in armour, it was soon found to be too cumbersome for rapid movements, and with the exception of the cuirassiers, who were clad in armour except the legs, were seldom defended by more than a back and breastplate, and a head-piece. The cuirassiers, corrupted to kurasers, were the soldiers whose name has so puzzled Carlyle. During the parliament war the cavalry was divided into cuirassiers, lancers, harquebussiers, carbineers, and dragoons, according to the different weapon or armour which they carried, the cuirass, the lance, the musket, the heavy harquebuss, the carbine, or the dragon, a sort of blunderbuss. At this period the firelock was introduced by the poultry-stealers of Holland, and called after them the snaphahn, or hen-stealer. The superiority of the flint-lock over the match or cumbrous wheel-lock was soon seen and adopted.
An Armourer's Shop.
CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE.
The moral condition of the people, as we have just seen, was at this period deplorable. The neglect of education left the great bulk of the working class ignorant and depraved, and the long peace which the reigns of Elizabeth and James maintained had so greatly augmented the wealth and prosperity of the nation, that the insolence of illiterate abundance added to the public exhibition of rudeness and riot. In one respect, however, the whole people had become greatly enlightened—they had learned very extensively their political rights. The rise and opulence of the merchants and middle classes, through commerce, and through the destruction of church lands, had impressed them with a feeling of their importance, and led them no longer to bow and cringe before the nobles, but to claim their proper authority as the third, and, indeed, the greatest estate. From the time when Henry VIII. set a-going discussions regarding religious liberty, and permitted the Bible to appear in good plain English, the light which sprang up on the subject of human rights was wonderful, and could never be withdrawn or extinguished. The mistake, as regarded royal prerogative, was soon seen, and an endeavour was made to restrict the reading of the Bible to the noble and the classical only, but it was in vain. Those who had the Scriptures soon spread abroad their knowledge; of their great principles, and as the Stuart government was daily found to be weaker, the sense of popular right was growing stronger and more universal. So soon as the parliament began to resist the encroachments of the crown, and even to do it with arms in their hands, it became necessary to convince the people at large that their rights were at stake, and to explain what these rights were. Such knowledge as this could never be taken back again, and accordingly from this period the principle that all power proceeds from the people and exists for the people, became the great fixed sentiment of the nation, which, spite of temporary checks and appearances, has gone on strengthening and confirming itself, and diffusing itself to this hour, and must go on till it has entirely moulded government by the great and eternal principles of justice and individual right to its perfect form—a free government worthy of free men. Accordingly, we have seen that the army, that body of the people which rushed forward at the call of parliament to defend with their lives the public liberties, at once advanced into the most sweeping tenets of democracy, and demanded their adoption before the community was ripe for them.
The physical condition of the kingdom, therefore, during the reign of James, was evidently greatly improved, and almost justifies the glowing description of Clarendon, made to set off the mischiefs of resistance to royalty. "For twelve years before the meeting of the Long Parliament," he says, "the kingdom enjoyed the greatest calm, and the fullest measure of felicity that any people, in any age, for so long a time together, had been blessed with, to the wonder and envy of all other parts of Christendom." It was inevitable that much of this prosperity must be overthrown, or rather interrupted by a ten years' fierce contest, like that which arose betwixt the crown and the people. That not only were the people severely pressed by taxation to support this contest, but that they were harassed, plundered, and had their agricultural operations impeded, and their crops destroyed by the contending forces, is quite certain. Prince Rupert and his cavalry especially subsisted by marauding, and the rise of the clubmen in the vast bodies that we have described, show that the depredations on the rural population were extensive, and inflicted by both parties.
Great Seal of Charles II.
Consequently, during the great struggle, the price of country produce rose extremely. Wheat, which in the early part of Charles's reign was as low as 44s. a quarter, rose after 1640 to 73s.; 85s. in 1648; and in 1649 was 80s.; but no sooner was the commonwealth established, and peaceful operations renewed, than it fell as rapidly, being in 1650 76s. 8d., and falling so much that in 1654 it was down to 26s. This was the lowest, and it averaged during the remainder of the protectorate, 45s., as near as possible its price at the commencement of the struggle. Other articles of life rose and fell from the same causes in the same proportion; the prices of the following articles, except during the war, may be regarded as the average ones for this period:—A fat cygnet, about 8s.; pheasants, from 5s. to 6s.; turkeys, 3s. to 4s.; fat geese, 2s. each; ducks, 8d.; best fatted capons, 2s. 4d.; hens, 1s.; pullets, 1s. 6d.; rabbits, 7d.; a dozen pigeons, 6s.; eggs, three for 1d.; fresh butter, 6d. per pound. Vegetables, being so little cultivated, as we have stated, were very dear; cauliflowers. 1s. 6d. each; potatoes, 2s. per pound; onions, leeks, carrots, and potherbs, dear, but not so much so. Mutton and beef, about 3½d. per pound. The wages of servants hired by the year and kept, were for a farm servant man, from 20s. to 50s. a year, according to his qualifications; those obtaining more than 40s. were expected to be able to do all the skilled work, as mowing, thrashing, thatching, making ricks, hedging, and killing cattle and pigs for daily consumption. Women servants, who could bake, brew, dress meat, make malt, &c. obtained about 26s. a year, and other women servants, according to age and ability, from that sum down to 14s. a year. A bailiff obtained 52s. Labourers or artisans hired by the day, during harvest, had, a mower, 5d. a day and his food; a reaper, haymaker, hedger, or ditcher, 4d.; a woman reaper, 3d.; a woman haymaker, 2d.; if no food was given, these sums were doubled. At other times labourers received from Easter to Michaelmas, 3d. a day with food, or 7d. without; and from Michaelmas to Easter, 2d. with food, and 6d. without. Carpenters and bricklayers received 8d. a day with meat, or 1s. without; sawyers, 6d. with meat, or 1s. without; and other handicrafts nearly the same, through the year till Michaelmas, after that considerably less.
The great extension of foreign commerce, by the opening up of North and South America, the East and West Indies, the Mediterranean, and the North of Europe, the fisheries of Newfoundland, and the introduction of coffee, spices, cottons, and other new and tropical produce, must have greatly increased the comfort of domestic fife. Yet, with all this mutual prosperity, there still abounded much pauperism and vagabondism. The war naturally had this consequence—great numbers of the dispersed cavaliers and royal troopers taking to the highways, and to a loose and predatory life. There was an indisposition, too, on the part of many parishes, to burden themselves with the imposition of the poor laws, which had been strengthened by various enactments since the 43rd of Elizabeth, and they therefore drove out of their boundaries the unemployed to seek work elsewhere. This, of course, continued the evil of vagabondism and pilfering, and time only could enable the government to bring into general operation the poor-law.
Rejoicings on the Restoration of Charles II.
Not-withstanding the amount of pauperism, however, the nation was never in a more prosperous condition than during the government of Cromwell. All authorities admit this single fact. The author of the "World's Mistake in Oliver Cromwell" says, "When this tyrant, or protector, as some call him, turned out the Long Parliament in 1653, the kingdom had arrived at the highest pitch of trade, wealth, and honour, that it in any ago ever yet knew. The trade appeared by the greatest same offered them for the customs and excise—nine hundred thousand pounds a year being refused. The riches of the nation showed itself in the high value that land and all our native commodities bore, which are the certain marks of opulency." It was not, therefore, the pressure of their physical condition, but the perpetual political excitement and uncertainty which followed the death of Cromwell, which induced the people to receive monarchy again—the old leaven of king-worship not being thoroughly expurgated, but requiring fresh lessons of royal folly, wickedness, and oppression to compel them to put the ancient institution of kingship under proper constitutional restraint.