religious affairs, and the Puritans were treated with pitiless cruelty. They were imprisoned, whipped, and branded with red-hot irons; their ears were cut off. They fled from the country when they could, though they were not even allowed to do that in peace.

"Thor

Strafford, on his part, gave his mind to the other department. He formed a great scheme, which he called by the The scheme expressive name of "Thorough." This scheme was to make the king absolute; to put all the people, ough.' their liberty and their property, entirely in his power, so that he might imprison or tax them as he pleased; to put his will above the laws, and above the judges and the rights of the people. Being a wonderfully strong-minded man, Strafford did much towards establishing his scheme.

He was for some time governor in the north of 1631. England, and he and his council at York defied the law and set up the royal power to such a point that it was as if Magna Charta had never existed. He went afterwards to Ireland, and did the same there.

But though he had appeared to succeed so far, he felt that there was one weak point; the oppression might be so intolerable that the people would rise and rebel. This had often happened already in England. The king had no army; the hundred beef eaters or a few household guards would not avail much against a nation in arms. In France, where the king was now quite despotic, he had a standing army at his back. Strafford saw that to make his scheme Thorough" work, the king must have an army too. But here was a great difficulty; for a standing army is expensive, and the king could get no money.

66

The Crown lawyers and Strafford between them thought of what seemed a very crafty expedient. They dared not make any new taxes, so they fell back upon a very old one; so old, however, and so altered by them, that it almost seemed new.

Shipmoney.

In former times, when there was danger of invasion, and before the nation had a regular fleet, the government had been used to call on the counties and large towns on the sea-coast to provide ships to defend the country. Sometimes, if these towns had no ships ready or to spare, the king would take money from them instead, and fit out ships himself. Strafford and his associates determined to try this old plan again. But ships or

1637.

except in times of war, Nor had it ever been

ship-money had never been asked for and now it was a time of peace. asked for except from places on the coast; now it was demanded from all the inland counties too. Moreover, shipmoney had never been wanted except for fitting out ships; now the king was to do what he pleased with it; and the thing which he would please to do would, no doubt, be to raise an army.

This was a very terrible state of things; the whole country was alarmed and indignant. Some brave men, and notably Hampden, who lived in Buckinghamshire,

a long way from the sea, had the courage to refuse Hampden. to pay. It was a very small sum which was demanded of him, not more than a few shillings; but he saw that the matter at stake was nothing less than the liberty of England. His cause was tried before twelve judges; but judges at this time were almost tools of the king, who could set them up and put them down at his pleasure; and the majority gave judgment against Hampden. Even of those twelve, however, five were opposed to the king, and only seven were on his side, so that the decision was looked on almost as a victory to Hampden. He was honored and admired more than ever by the people, and more and more indignation was felt against the king and Strafford.

As if the king had not yet done mischief enough by alienating the people of England, he turned and exasperated Scotland. It was not by unjust taxes, but by Charles and an aggression which they resented still more deeply,

the Scotch.

an attack on their religion. We saw how far the Scotch Protestants had carried the Reformation; they detested the Church of England and its bishops nearly as bitterly as the Church of Rome and its Pope. They put Popery and Prelacy together, and they hated the English Prayer-book, the communion-service, the surplice, and the ceremonies vehemently. Just at this moment Charles and Archbishop Laud determined to compel the Scotch to use the liturgy of the English Church in all their churches.

The Scotch, who had always been a turbulent and ungovernable people, and who saw with great jealousy their Scotch kings turning into Englishmen, and Scotland sinking as they had feared into an appanage of England, resented this last insult and aggression more than all. 1638. They broke out into insurrection, as the Devonshire Cath

olics had done, on the same provocation. The rising began on a Sunday the first Sunday when the Prayer-book was to be read in the church. "No sooner was the book opened by the Dean of Edinburgh," it is Phillips, Milton's nephew, who tells the story, "but a number of the meaner sort, with clapping of their hands, and outcries, made a great uproar; and one of them, called Jane or Janot Gaddis (yet living at the writing of this relation), flung a little foldingstool whereon she sat at the dean's head, saying, 'Out, thou false thief! dost thou say the mass at my lug (ear)?' Which was followed with so great a noise" that the service could not go on at all. "All Edinburgh, all Scotland, and behind that all England and Ireland," says Carlyle, "rose into unappeasable commotion on the flight of this stool of Jenny's."

The king tried to put down the rebellion, but he had not soldiers enough, nor money enough. He and Strafford could see no alternative before them, after the eleven years they had had their own way, but to call a Parliament again; they dared not make any more attempts to raise taxes illegally, lest England should flame up as Scotland had done.

But when Parliament met, and showed ever so mildly a desire to have the bitter grievances of those eleven years looked into, the king, who could never learn wisdom, nor see that he was walking over a mine of gunpowder, sent them about their business. He tried once more to govern at his pleasure, and even more tyrannically still. Ship-money was levied with increased rigor; soldiers were enlisted by force. But these soldiers did him no good; they were more inclined to side with the nation, and did not wish to fight the Scotch. Everything went so ill that he was obliged to summon another Parliament.

1640.

!

CHAPTER XLVIII.

THE CIVIL WAR.

The Long Parliament. The five members. The war begins. Oliver Cromwell. His army. Trial and execution of the king. The military despotism. Battle of Worcester.

Parliament.

WHEN the Parliament first met, all the members seem to have been of one mind. The government had been so flagrantly oppressive and tyrannical that no one 1640. attempted to defend it. They all set vigorously to Meeting of work to restore freedom. The king could make no the Long head against them. Those odious courts, the High Commission, the Star Chamber, and the Council of York, were abolished at once; ship-money was declared illegal, and it was decreed that no interval of more than three years should ever elapse between Parliament and Parliament. Next they resolved to punish the tyrants. No one dreamed yet of punishing the king; but they were determined to be rid of those who had helped and advised him, especially of Strafford and Laud.

The men

and Laud.

Both these were imprisoned, and both-Strafford very soon, Laud after a few years were beheaded. on each side of this great conflict doubtless per- The end of suaded themselves that they were right; that they Strafford were fighting for God, religion, and honor; this is shown by the noble way in which they would go to death. Strafford and Laud died, the one like a hero, the other like a saint; speaking with their latest breath of their devotion to their religion, loyalty to their king, and affection to the peace and welfare of the kingdom.

that it

1641.

Things had, however, come to so bad a pass now, was not the death of those two men which could set them right. A rebellion broke out in Ireland. Strafford had ruled the people with a rod of iron, but he had Rebellion only kept them under for the time, and when he was gone their smothered rage broke out.

in Ireland.

The Irish indeed

had been oppressed by the English for centuries. They had hardly been looked on as fellow creatures, still less as fellow Christians. In earlier times it had even been said that it was no more sin to kill an Irishman than to kill a dog. No wonder they hated their oppressors. In punishment for some rebellion, a great number of English and Scotch Protestants had been settled in Ulster, turning out the old pos sessors of the land and their chiefs. The natives, who were devoted Catholics, now rose upon these foreign intruders, and a terrible massacre took place.

It was agreed on all hands that the Irish revolt must be put down, but great differences of opinion arose in the Parliament as to how much power ought to be confided to the king for the purpose. His whole previous career had given rise to the gravest distrust. He had shown himself arbitrary and faithless; he was also believed to be inclined to favor the Roman Catholic religion, under the influence of his wife, who was still more unpopular than he was. It was even rumored, though without the slightest foundation, that he had stirred up the Irish Catholics to murder the Protestants. After the death of Strafford, Charles had made advances towards conciliation, by taking as his chief ministers some of the more moderate of the members of Parlia The new ment, Falkland, Hyde, and Colepepper; men who ministers. were loyal and conservative, but who still loved liberty and justice. The king promised he would do nothing without their advice, and would tell them all he thought of doing. Could he but have kept his word! but that was the one thing he never could do.

That Charles was a good man, in a sense, no one will deny, but he had no principle of truth or honor in him in his dealings with his subjects. He had probably been bred The king's in the notion, so common among royal personages conscience. up of that period, that it was no sin to deceive the people under him. The Archbishop of York had told him, in so many words, that there was a private conscience and a public conscience, and that his public conscience as a king might not only dispense with, but oblige him to do, that which was against his private conscience as a man.

This doctrine, outrageous and immoral as it sounds, had, nevertheless, a certain truth in it. A constitutional sovereign, one who has to govern according to the sense of Parliament and the nation, can not and must not act always