Ever since the reign of Edward III. the merchants of England had paid the king three shillings on every tun of wine, and one shilling on every pound of other goods shipped in England, to enable the government to protect them from pirates or nations at war with England. The parliament generally granted this tonnage and poundage, as it was called, for the king's life, at the beginning of each reign; but they now granted it only for the coming year, thus keeping it in their own power. Charles, justly displeased, would not pass the bill.

However, the plague was a pressing danger: 1,200 people had died in one week in London, and on the 11th of July, Charles prorogued it until the 1st of August, when it met at Oxford. There was fierce debate and anger there. The Commons declared that they were called on to grant money for the men without knowing who was the enemy. They took it upon them to censure Montagu, they complained that eleven popish priests under sentence of death had been pardoned, and they showed an inclination to impeach Buckingham. There were cases of the plague at Oxford, and this gave Charles good reason for at once dismissing, and at the same time dissolving, a parliament so hard to deal with.

Henriette was at Hampton Court, and she and her train were not making it easier for him to allay the suspicions of his anti-papal subjects. Father Sancy was so loudly pressing on the point of having a chapel fitted up at S. James's that, finding it impossible to make him understand that, in the present temper of the people, such an open step would have been dangerous, Charles sent him home, while the public reported that his extradition was for making the Queen walk barefoot to Tyburn, to pray for the souls of Guy Fawkes and Father Garnet.

The King longed to get rid of the rest of the suite in the same manner. They surrounded the queen constantly. She talked nothing but French, and refused to learn English. Madame de S. George was constantly with her, and asserted her right to go in the same coach alone with the royal pair, and Madame de Chevreuse scandalised the English by swimming across the Thames at Richmond—and yet, in Charles's first ardour, he had, by the marriage articles, undertaken that all these numerous foreigners should be attached to his wife's train, as well as that their communion should enjoy a toleration which his subjects absolutely would not permit him to grant.

However, Buckingham persuaded him that a brilliant expedition of the fleet at Cadiz, after the fashion of Drake and Essex, would set all straight and gratify the nation, and fill the exchequer with treasure, as well as strike a blow in the cause of his sister. Every nerve was strained to raise money for the equipment of the fleet-by loans, by keeping salaries in arrears, by collecting tonnage and poundage. Ten thousand men were raised, a fleet fitted out of eighty ships, to which the Dutch added sixteen, and the destination was supposed to be a secret, but the Mercurius Gallo-Belgicus in the Low Countries, a sort of news letter, already published that it was bound for the Straits.

CAMEO XV.

Tonnage and Poundage. 1625.

CAMEO XV.

to Spain.

1625.

More unfortunately still, the entire command was given to Sir Edward Expedition Cecil, Lord Wimbledon, an old officer who had been notoriously unsuccessful in the Palatinate, and on whom the sailors looked with contempt; but it was a matter of interest. The expedition sailed in October, and suffered from storms in the Bay of Biscay. A ship called The Long Robin foundered with 170 men on board. There was utter confusion, and the Spanish vessels passed without being attacked; but at last Wimbledon landed his men, and took a little fort called Puntal, close to Cadiz, whence he moved to cut off the bridge to the Isla de Leon. He did not meet an enemy, but his ill-disciplined men broke open the wine cellars, and the whole army was in such an unmanageable state of intoxication that their officers could only get as many of them as possible back to the ships, leaving the rest to be murdered by the peasantry. He sailed away from Cadiz, still hoping to intercept the American treasure ships; but an infectious disease broke out on board one vessel, the Delaware, whereupon he commanded the sick men to be distributed in all the other ships, so that there was universal contagion and after eighteen days of misery, the ships came back in a wretched state to Plymouth, without a single prize.

There was such an outcry of indignation, that the King was forced to let an inquiry take place before the Privy Council. Wimbledon blamed the officers, they blamed Wimbledon ; but he declared that the command had been forced on him by Buckingham, and that he knew himself to be unfit for it, so that if he were punished, he would be his "excellency's martyr. ." The matter, therefore, was passed over, and supplies of money being necessary, Buckingham went to the Hague to negotiate a loan on the crown jewels. He also started for Paris, receiving letters from Charles about obtaining the consent of the court of France to the dismissal of most of the French attendants on the Queen-or, as the King termed it, "putting away the mounsers"--who were a serious annoyance to him. Madame de S. George wanted to take precedence of all the English ladies, and Henriette took her part with all her might; there were constant quarrels in the court, and the young Queen, not yet sixteen, behaved like a petulant, childish girl. Buckingham's previous presumption made Louis XIII. indignantly decline to receive him as ambassador, and he carried home an ill-will to France which boded ill for the future.

The plague abated in the winter, and on the 2nd of February, 1626, the Feast of the Purification, the coronation took place in Westminster Abbey; but to the extreme mortification of the King, Henriette absolutely refused to share in it, no doubt on account of the Communion which accompanied it. She would not even look on from a latticed box in the Abbey! The deprivation must have seemed a martyrdom to her, and as she stood in the bay window over the gateway at Whitehall, to watch the procession pass towards Westminster, her French ladies were seen frisking and dancing about, much to the disgust of the English.

Charles's dress was of white, and he thus first acquired the title of the CAMEO XV. White King. His mantle was of violet velvet. He did not ride from

He

Coronation

1626.

the Tower, lest the concourse should aggravate the plague, but only of Charles. went in full state from Westminster Hall to the Abbey, with the peers, bishops, judges, &c., in procession. Laud, then Bishop of S. David's, had been appointed to act as Dean of Westminster, and had overlooked the coronation service, and arranged everything. Archbishop Abbot, however, officiated, though he was now very old and feeble. presented the King, bareheaded, on the steps of the throne, to the lords and people of England, east, west, north, and south, and asked if they were prepared to render the service due to him. At first there was silence, no doubt from the old man's voice not being heard, for when the Earl Marshal called on the people to shout if they accepted the King, the Abbey rang with acclamations.

The Bishop of Carlisle preached the sermon on the text, "Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life." Then the Archbishop administered the coronation oath before the altar, the robes were offered on it, and then a screen was put up, behind which the anointing of head, shoulders, arms, and hands took place, while the choir chanted, "Zadok the priest anointed Solomon king over Israel.' Then Charles stood forth, and was arrayed in the robes of Edward the Confessor, and crowned by the Archbishop, the sword of Edward was girt upon him, the spurs bound on by the Duke of Buckingham. Afterwards he offered, first the sword, then gold and silver, then bread and wine at the Altar, and the Te Deum was sung while he was conducted to the chair of state, and received, one by one, the homage and oaths of fealty of the nobility. There followed the celebration of the Holy Communion by the Archbishop, four other Bishops, likewise in rich capes, receiving with the King. He went back to Whitehall by water, the ceremony having lasted from ten o'clock till four.

The contumacy of the Queen further enraged the King with the French household. The Bishop of Mantes, a youth of twenty, had been made her almoner, and had a great dispute with Rich, who had been created Earl of Holland. This brought matters to a crisis. Charles ordered off all the French from Whitehall to await his pleasure at Somerset House, and actually locked the door on his wife to keep her from flying after them. Then she tried to break the windows to call to them, and he was actually seen holding her by the arms as the impetuous girl struggled with him in her fury.

She was not allowed to see her friends again, but they lingered, on all sorts of pretexts, for a whole month, being paid their salaries with large gratuities, when Charles, in despair, sent his heralds and trumpeters to proclaim his commands, and thrust them out if they would not otherwise go. At last they were disposed of in coaches, where one of the mob threw a stone at Madame de S. George.

Only one dresser, and the Protestant Duchess de la Tremouille, were

Bassompierre's Mission. 1626.

CAMEO XV. left to Henriette. She was in despair, raged at her husband, and wrote piteous letters to her brother and mother, who were extremely angry, and sent her father's old friend, Marshal de Bassompierre, to compose matters. He had a hard task, and seems to have acted very prudently. He ended by giving the young wife a thorough lecture on her duties, and so reconciled matters that Charles and Henriette were a most affectionate couple ever after; but all these storms had not tended to the popularity of the French alliance.

THERE were two great battles to be fought out in the days of Charles I. One was whether the Catholic and Apostolic Church should mould the English people, or whether the loudest-voiced of the English people should manipulate religion, till all the essentials of a Church vanished under their hands. The other was whether the Crown or the House of Commons should be the first power in the nation, and the opponents of Church and Crown made common cause. Both were aggressive. Though the Commons might talk of Witen-a-Gemôts, and here and there the lawyers might discover a precedent, the truth was that after the Norman Conquest, the Crown had been supreme, and that Magna Charta had only thrown power into the hands of the turbulent nobility, while the Commons had only been called to grant supplies, with licence to mention their grievances, and that their claim to dictate to the whole kingdom was an absolute novelty, only rendered possible by the weakness of James I., and by their own conscious strength. As to meddling with the Church, and censuring doctrine or practice, for that they had not the slightest precedent in the history of the constitution. They could only assume it on the same grounds as the Lords of the Congregation in Scotland, or the Dutch republicans, who had persecuted the Arminians and slaughtered Barneveldt.

Calvinism, or, as they termed it, Puritanism, had been eating its way into the nation all through the last two reigns. Opposition to Spain and the Church she upheld had made all Elizabeth's great men strong Protestants, and, with the exception of Parker, all her higher clergy had been of the same mould, and thus the religious system had come to be an Episcopal Calvinism, with the Liturgy indeed, but with the utmost laxity of ritual, while controversial and political sermons and lectures

VOL. VI.

CAMEO

XVI.

The Strife

in the Church.