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King's

in their hearts wished to maintain the old order of things. The battle was transferred to the ecclesiastical ground. It was a battle in which the king had many chances, but he threw them all away. If he had stood upon the defensive, opinion might have rallied round him. Instead of that, he engaged in one intrigue after another, and at last his attack on the Five Members shocked those who feared what he might do if he regained his old authority.

$15. The Yet even then Charles had a strong force on his side. Supporters. Old attachment to the monarchy and conservative dislike of change drew to him many supporters, especially amongst the country gentry. There was also working for him the dread of which Hyde was the spokesmanlest the law should be swamped by the arbitrary wilfulness of a single House-and the dread of which Falkland was the spokesman at Court, and of which Chillingworth and Hales were the spokesmen amongst thinkers - lest independent thought should be swamped by the dogmatism of the Puritan clergy. Still greater was the terrifying effect of the outburst of sectarian gatherings in London and elsewhere. In the spring of 1642, as Milton tells us, the Royalists had forgotten to complain of the Puritans, in their alarm at the increase of the so-called Brownists. Yet none of Charles's new supporters had any power to construct a system under which Englishmen could live peaceably. Not only was no reliance to be placed on the king to carry out the reformed government in a befitting spirit, but there was weakness in the very proposals which were made by the statesmen whom he favoured. Hyde's constitutional theory was founded on the necessity of the co-operation between the king and the two Houses. He omitted to provide for the case, which sooner or later was certain to occur, when the king's will would be opposed to that of the Houses. He shrank from allowing the king to do as he pleased, and

to treat the Houses with contempt, as Charles in the days of his power had been in the habit of treating them. But he also shrank from allowing the Houses to override the resolute will of the king, to control the executive, or to enact laws to which the royal assent had not been given. His constitutional scheme therefore had the gravest of all defects. There was no force anywhere to give it unity of purpose, no absolute power of decision to direct the march of government. In the region of thought, too, Charles's best supporters were equally astray. Falkland and Hales and Chillingworth agreed that persecution was an evil, that religious ideas. should be accepted upon reason and not upon authority, and that religious worship should be simple in order that as many persons as possible might be able to join in it without finding anything to jar with their beliefs. They did not see that such a state of things could never have any real existence, that multitudes of men are so constituted as to have very great respect for authority and very little use of reason, that even with those who seek most keenly to know and understand, the power of habit, and the force of emotion have no small share in the direction of their intellect, and that even the simplest forms of worship would be but a mockery to those who found nothing in them answering to their own inner feeling, whilst it would be impossible to discover any form of worship whatever which would be acceptable to all. And if the best men on Charles's side could offer no true solution of the difficulties of the age, what was to be said of the bold riders who followed Rupert to the charge, and who had no principle beyond the hatred of rebels, and the love of a free life without constraint of morality or religion?

The constitutional ideas of the Parliamentary party were free from the weakness which was inseparable from

L

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$16. The Supporters of the Par

liament.

the system of Hyde. It is true that they were ready to maintain the form of the old constitution. The government was to consist of King, Lords, and Commons as before. But, if it came to a struggle, King and Lords must yield to the Commons in a way that they had never done before. The final decision must rest with the nation itself, and be recorded by its representatives. When once this point was settled, it would be time enough to meet Hyde's difficulties, and to provide how the transmission of the supreme authority from the King to the Commons could be surrounded with safeguards to hinder its degenerating into a tyranny. Yet the House of Commons as a whole, and still more the narrow majority of the House of Commons which remained at Westminster after the outbreak of civil war, was incapable of giving to the ecclesiastical problem a solution even as complete as that which satisfied Falkland. That House had been elected to combat false ideas, not to organise a new system, and its mood was more distinctly Puritan than was in accordance with the ordinary temper of the nation. Its determination to tread in the path of Puritan reform alienated at once a large minority of its own members, and ultimately more than half of the nation. What had begun as resistance to absolute government in Church and State ended in a civil war, in order that it might be settled which of the I contending ecclesiastical parties should prevail. Charles found himself supported by thousands who would not have fought for him for his own sake, but who had learned to value his authority as soon as it appeared that only its maintenance would preserve the Book of Common Prayer from rejection or mutilation. Those who took the side of Charles had to learn that with him as a leader success was impossible. Their adversaries rent in pieces the work of Laud, and were driven,

in part by their well-founded distrust of the king, to give their support to the Puritan clergy. To that clergy the orthodoxy of Calvinism was the only orthodoxy. Not only did they aim at the rigid maintenance of their own opinions and the proscription of all others, but they often exaggerated the strict morality which was the glory of their party, till they threw themselves across the very primary tendencies of human nature to enjoyment and pleasure, not by raising men to be nobler and better than they were, but by binding them down with unbending laws and harsh restrictions.

The struggle of the Civil War was in the main a struggle between the enfeebled spirit of the Renaissance and the spirit of Protestantism raised to its highest pitch. As the strife proceeded, the conduct of each party fell into the hands of those who were most completely filled with one or other of these spirits. The better part of Charles's advisers gave way to the worse, to the men of unbridled action and of mere hatred of Puritanism. If there were Pharisees in the opposite ranks, there were, as Chillingworth sadly preached, Sadducees and Publicans in his own. On the parliamentary side, the spirit of dogmatic Presbyterianism gained for a time the upper hand, in spite of the tendency of even the Puritan laity to shrink from putting their necks too far under the clerical yoke. There was to be but one form of church worship in England, but one religious creed for all Englishmen. When the first eighteen months of the war turned out badly for the parliamentary party, and the Scots were enticed to send aid by the adoption in England of their Solemn League and Covenant, it seemed as though the defeat of the king would stiffen the English Church and society into a doctrinal rigidity, as complete as the ceremonial rigidity of Laud.

From this fate England was saved by Cromwell and

CHAP,
VII.

$ 17. The Civil War.

CHAP.

VII.

§ 18. Cromwell

and the Sects.

$ 19. Supremacy of

the sects. These sects, especially the Independents, had learned by the experience of days when they found themselves practising their religion in hiding-places, or were driven to the New England settlements for a refuge, that it was well that the State should cease to meddle in religious matters at all. In opposition to the scholar-like doctrine of Chillingworth and Hales, they propounded ideas of the widest religious liberty based on the right of sectarian association, without which religious liberty can never be complete. They felt an absolute repulsion from a system under which conflicts were to be avoided by toning down strong religious expressions and strong religious feelings in a vast religious communion, including the most extreme varieties of belief and of moral conduct. What these men believed they believed strongly,-they had embraced with all the rugged strength of their natures the moral idea of purity which they had conceived. But they knew that there were but few ready to share with them in their efforts, and they formed small communities in which the members encouraged one another in running the Christian course, whilst they regarded all national interference with religion as an evil to be avoided. Of such men were formed the regiments which, at Marston Moor and Naseby, decided the civil strife. They were more energetic and at the same time better disciplined than other men. Their greatest difficulty arose when the fight was over. With Cromwell as their military and political leader, and with Milton as their literary spokesman, they claimed to have fought for religious liberty, and they refused to lay down their arms till this was secured.

The soldiers felt that a force in arms is not the the Army. proper guardian of religious liberty. They earnestly strove to place it under the care of the king, as the re