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CAMEO XXIII.

Investiga tion of Titles. 1635.

who had occupied Crown lands. There was, however, some informality, and Lord Falkland had avoided getting the resolution confirmed, as had Lord Cork and Chancellor Loftus, who governed in the interval between him and Wentworth, who thus thought himseif justified in throwing over the whole.

A severe investigation of titles, backed by 500 horsemen, and intimidation of juries, resulted in the recovery of large amounts of Crown lands, including the whole of Connaught, which was claimed for Charles as heir of the Irish Earls of Clare through the house of York. Wentworth meant to return three-fourths to the former possessors, reserving one-fourth to the Crown, and there making a "plantation" after a fashion of his own.

Complaints and appeals were constantly sent to Charles, but in 1636 Wentworth paid a brief visit to the English Court and fully satisfied the King. Of his perfect integrity there could be no doubt, nor of the grand statesmanlike ability which was making a new country of Ireland. The ragged, starving army, once terrible only to the peaceful, was now orderly, efficient, well clothed, fed, and paid; where there had been one ton of shipping in the harbours there were now a hundred; the land was peaceful and better cultivated; the nobles and gentry restrained from maltreating the unhappy Irish. The bishoprics were being filled up by conscientious men; their revenues, and those of the clergy, had been partly restored; doctrine and discipline were improving ; and learning beginning to thrive at the University of Dublin, of which, much against his will, Archbishop Laud had been elected Chancellor.

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Certainly Wentworth had been "thorough." His enemies held that all this had been effected by the most blood-thirsty injustice and tyranny, trampling on rights everywhere for the sake of personal ambition and greed. As to these two last, Wentworth gained nothing ; he simply worked for the King, and he prevented bloodshed. timidation there was, but it is to be remembered that the men he had to deal with were proverbially incapable of returning an honest verdict ; and as to their outcries about the injustice and oppression of Government, we have heard the like in our own day. The proprietors of English blood, and nobles of the English pale, had been used to lord it as they chose over both the Crown and the native population, and to trample the Church under their feet, and when they found themselves in the powerful grasp of a true king of men they laid up hot indignation against the time of vengeance.

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Now, however, all went well, the King was grateful to the only man who knew how to deal with Ireland; and Queen Henrietta, though she could not like any one so 'thorough" and earnest, pronounced that the Viscount Wentworth had the most beautiful hands in the Court, and Wentworth's fellow-worker was finding response of Church feeling in many quarters. Good George Herbert had just ended his beautiful and tranquil life at Bemerton, taken away from the evil to come, but

his poems and his Country Pastor were doing their work. And at Little Gidding, Nicolas Farrer with his mother, brother, nephews, and nieces were living, in a perpetual round of devotion and good works. The King and Queen made a state progress to Oxford, accompanied by their two eldest nephews, Charles Louis, the young Elector Palatine, and Rupert, who had been sent by their mother to visit him, and showed none of their father's aversion to the English Church.

The Archbishop received them as Chancellor, and Christ Church presented the King with a Bible, the Queen with a pair of gloves, Charles Louis with Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, and Rupert with a translation of Casar's Commentaries. They attended the cathedral service, where the King knelt very devoutly, "his long left lock shelving over his shoulder." He went daily to church, as usual, during his stay, and the evenings were mostly spent in seeing plays acted by the undergraduates.

This was the first visit of Charles's two nephews to England, under the care of their mother's champion, Lord Craven, and they were very happy there. They showed no objection to the English Church, and Rupert being bright of wit, Laud proposed to let him take Holy Orders and be provided for with a bishopric. But Rupert was too soldierly for such a course, and it was then proposed to make him Viceroy of Madagascar or St. Lawrence, as it was then called, while Charles Louis was to set up another kingdom in the West Indies. No one seems to have had any scruples as to the rights of the inhabitants, but the youths' mother put a stop to the plan by writing that she would have none of her sons go for knights errant. She said it was like Don Quixote's promise to make his trusty squire king of an island. Then there was a scheme of marrying Rupert to Marguerite de Rohan, daughter and heiress to the great Duke, but this fell through after long negotiation. The lads had been very happy in England, and when their mother recalled them to the Hague, fearful of the dissipations of Henrietta's Court, and of the spirit of proselytism there, Rupert, as he went out for his last hunt with his uncle, was heard wishing that he might break his neck that he might leave his bones in England.

He

There is a most graceful portrait of him at this period-when he was eighteen years of age, with a spirited, gentle face, long floating hair, and deep lace collar and cuffs; presented by his mother to Lord Cravenpainted by Antonio Vandyke, the Fleming, who was commemorating the gentlemen of the Court of England with unrivalled perfection. gave the King's features a wonderful dignity and pathos, such as made the Italian sculptor, for whom Charles's head was painted in three aspects, the full face and the two profiles, exclaim, "That man will die a violent death." His ladies were less successful, though the dress of the period was simple and tasteful; but his children, especially the royal ones, petticoated and tight-capped little things, were full of character. Elizabeth declared that "if her son had stayed ten days longer at St. James's he would have come back a Catholic," and,

CAMEO
XXIII.

Visit of Charles to Oxford. 1636.

CAMEO XXIII. Prynne's libel. 1637.

Henrietta rejoined, that if she had thought so she would have kept him.
But he showed that both ladies were wrong.

All these years, however, spent without convoking Parliament, were adding to the spirit of disaffection, which broke forth from time to time in libels. Prynne brought himself into trouble again with a bitterer book than ever, in which he spoke of the Archbishop as archagent for the devil, said, “ Beelzebub himself had been archbishop," and called the whole Bench "Luciferian lords, execrable traitors, devouring wolves." Bastwick, a doctor of medicine, wrote a book called Medico Mastix, in which he said the bishops were more disobedient and worse than the devils themselves, and called them "rook-catchers, murdering hirelings, atheists, a commonwealth of rats; "like the giants of old, making war against the clouds." Barton, a clergyman, preached two sermons with equally remarkable terms of abuse of the whole Bench"miscreants, traps and wiles of the dragon-dogs, new Babel-builders, blind watchmen, dumb dogs, ravening wolves, factors for antichrist, antichristian mush rumps." In an apology, or rather defence, he proceeded to term them "Jesuitical polypragmatics and sons of Belial."

The three authors were brought before the Star Chamber, sentenced to stand in the pillory, have their ears cut off, and be branded in the face, besides undergoing imprisonment at His Majesty's pleasure. Laud was in the court, but only to defend himself from their accusations, and he did not vote on their punishment. "I shall forbear to censure them,” he said, "and leave them to God's mercy and the King's justice."

Of course, it was well to silence such foul-mouthed railing. In the Tudor times this would have been done by death, and the mitigated law was still a savage one. The public punishment did nothing but harm. Prynne's ears had been only clipped before, now they were more cruelly hacked. The people cried out with sympathy, and Prynne, as he stood in the pillory, was stung by the pain into making a discourse on his wrongs, which embittered the people more and more. Laud was much concerned at the folly of allowing him to speak, and when, on their way to imprisonment in Caernarvon Castle, the Sheriff of Cheshire actually gave a public banquet to the prisoners, he was deservedly summoned to the Star Chamber, and fined for this contempt of the King's justice.

Bishop Williams had been under prosecution since 1627 for revealing the King's secrets; and a correspondence was discovered between him and Lawrence Osbaldistone, the Master of Westminster School, in which Laud was abused by the names of "the little urchin," and "the little meddling hocus-pocus." Williams was further accused of having embezzled the cathedral money as Dean of Westminster. This charge was not proved, and it was denied that the letter applied to the Archbishop; but there was evidently false swearing in the matter. The schoolmaster was sentenced to the pillory, but escaped. The

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revealing of secrets was sworn to by four gentlemen, and Williams was
imprisoned during the King's pleasure and fined. It would have been
wiser in Laud to have abstained from taking any part in the prosecution
of Williams, being known to be at enmity with him; but he knew the
Bishop of Lincoln to be a mischievous intriguer, exceedingly clever,
and his eager desire to prevent the affair from failing led him on.
good men have been more hated than William Laud, yet a good man
he was, and his errors arose from want of tact, from zeal and
impetuosity, which gave an opportunity to his enemies, and prevented
his high and noble aims from being understood. But for Laud's being
raised up, the English Church would have sunk into mere Puritanism
and forgotten her Catholicity. Nor could his work succeed save
through present failure and martyrdom. He and Wentworth were alike
"thorough," and they paid for it with their lives.

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CAMEO
XXIV.

French despotism.

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France.

1610. Louis XIII.

Rome.

1623. Urban VIII.

THERE can be little doubt that the condition of France greatly stimu lated the English dislike to "thorough.' There they saw an ecclesiastic dominating the King, and trampling on the liberties of the country, and they took warning. It was true that no two men could be more unlike than William Laud and Armand de Richelieu. The first was a priest above all things, only touching State affairs in the interest of religion; the second was a statesman by nature, a priest by accident or abuse.

But the English saw an iron hand ruling, all popular representation suppressed, the remnants of it-the provincial parliaments-kept harshly from remonstrance, the nobility forced into uselessness, except as soldiers, a dreadful weight of taxation weighing down the people, and the royal prisons, the Bastille, the Castle of Vincennes, and other more distant ones, peopled with all who gave umbrage to the tyrant, even premature inventors, almost all committed simply on the royal authority in a lettre de cachet, or sealed letter. No wonder the English shuddered. Yet in judging of Richelieu we must take into account what was the state of things that he found. France had only had a few years under Henri IV. to recover from the horrible convulsions of her religious The kingdom was a collection of old fiefs, each with a different constitution, and a parliament and a nobility all with varying privileges and jurisdiction, although for the most part these parliaments were nothing but law courts, except that their registration rendered a law valid in their own territory. The study of jurisprudence, however, and the exercise of the functions of judges had trained the magisterial functionaries of these parliaments into greater conscientiousness and public spirit than was to be found elsewhere in France, in spite of the

wars.

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