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When he resigned it a few years later, he left it with universal respect. Even Prynne allowed that he had done fairly well.

Juxon was a protégé of Laud's, one of the St. John's men whom he had drawn up with him. We know he had an enthusiastic admiration for Laud. He succeeded him at Lambeth, and in the guard-room their portraits hang side by side,— Juxon's evidently painted so as to be the precise counterpart of Laud's, the dress and pose precisely similar, so that they might hang somewhere side by side, or flank some central portrait-the fact is unmistakable.

Laud's work was now prodigious; he ruled the Church with a rod of iron. No recalcitrant was unknown to him; no schismatic writings made their appearance but he read and marked them. He was President of the Court of High Commission, First Minister of the Crown, a member of the Treasury Commission and the Foreign Council. Such was his amazing energy, that the very merchants who memorialized him owned him their master in his grasp of Economic problems. He was Chancellor of Oxford and Dublin Universities. His correspondence with the Vice-Chancellor and Senate of the former fills a large folio volume. Of the detailedness of his scrutiny we have some

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idea when we remember that in one letter he prescribes the dress of the undergraduates of noble birth, and in another desires the abolition of the Westminster dinner. He administered his own diocese without a suffragan; he corresponded with Strafford in Ireland; he entertained largely; he was much at Court; he preached frequently. And all this work is both comprehensive and detailed: he did not sketch bold lines of organization and leave the filling-in to others; he devised, organized, and executed, single-handed and indomitable.

The Pope, it used to be said, had longer arms than any prince in Christendom. The fingers of the Archbishop, which had long been groping uncomfortably from Land's End to John o' Groat's, at last crept into Scotland. On the whole the Scots had taken Episcopacy with a good grace. But there arose a sinister murmuring when vacancy after vacancy on the Scottish Bench began to be filled with English Laudian prelates; and it became still louder when Charles began to emphasize their political importance by calling them to the Council Board of Scotland, and appointing them to high offices of State. Spottiswoode, of St. Andrew's, was made Lord Chancellor. Perhaps if he had stopped there all might have been well. But he went farther instigated by Laud, whose disgust

SCOTTISH PRAYER-BOOK.

115

had been stirred on his two Scottish visits, with James and Charles respectively, by the repulsive aspect of the Churches, the king turned his thoughts to the restitution of a decent worship in Scotland. James had told Laud roughly that he did not know the temper of the people. Charles did not care about that. Laud had already informed the Scotch that the Reformation in Scotland had been little better than a deformation. Charles resolved to give them a good Prayer Book. It was drawn up by Laud; printed and reprinted till it reached typographical excellence. The last copy, still in the Lambeth library, received the final annotations of Laud. His additions are even more pronounced than those of the English ritual: e.g. he reinstated the eastward position. A decree was despatched ordering two copies to be purchased for every parish.

On the 24th of July, 1638, the book was to come into use. The attempt was not successful. At Edinburgh not only were the windows broken and the entire service made inaudible by groans and cries, but the Dean had a three-legged stool thrown at his head by one Jenny Geddes, and the Bishop had to be guarded home by the military. Then Charles's true nature came out. No attempt was made to discover why the book was so obnoxious.

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It did not occur to Charles that the advantages of a seemly ritual were more than counterbalanced by the opposition and hatred which the innovation produced. To make concessions to a popular outcry, especially when it had expressed itself by brutal and rebellious acts, was alien to his nature. Edinburgh must be punished, and a peremptory order was despatched removing the Council and Courts of Session to Glasgow.

The effect was prodigious: it meant the entire collapse of the place. Edinburgh was not a trading town; its industries depended on its position as capital. That a nation should be outraged by the capricious whim of a distant sovereign and a Pope of Canterbury, was too great a blow. A remonstrance was forwarded to Charles, but without effect. Into the progress of the dispute we cannot enter in detail. It is enough to say that the immediate result was the signing of the Scottish Covenant; the signing of the Scottish Covenant was the spark that kindled the rebellion. The action of the king, the action of Laud are unpardonable. The fact was, that they did not realize that they had anything to do but to govern; they did not understand that the democracy had but just become conscious, blindly but surely, of its thews and sinews. This was their fundamental mistake; on this rock they made shipwreck.

REBELLION IN THE AIR.

117

The candid historian is compelled to interpret this as an instance of the strange want of political sagacity and sympathetic foresight in Laud. Not so his Catholic supporters. "Happy is the servant," they say, "who is interrupted at such a task, going so intently about the Father's business."

One of the most piteous and humiliating spectacles of Charles's reign is the perpetual and unavailing cry for money that characterized it all along. Pledging the crown jewels, the sale of royal plate-these had been the first expedients, soon exhausted; enforced knighthood, meaning fees to the exchequer and fines for defaulters, heavy taxation of Roman Catholic residents in Great Britain, ship-money, are the later stages of the disorder. Into this political turmoil it is impossible to enter; we have to confine ourselves to the ecclesiastical aspect of affairs. With the Scottish Rebellion, Church politics, Church bickerings are drowned in the growing rumour of civil war. Under all this Laud worked quietly, blindly, ejecting recalcitrant curates, enjoining altar rails, silencing lecturers. It is a strange thing to find Laud thus busily at work, never dreaming of what was over him, with rebellion knocking at the doors. He had one or two warnings. A mob of five hundred besieged Lambeth for two hours at midnight. He had been informed of it, and had fortified the

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