68

THE COLDNESS OF LAUD'S FRIENDSHIP.

in his friendships; but passion was not in Laud's vocabulary. It is true he was bitterly moved, he fell to the ground "in animi deliquio" when he spoke the words of blessing. But there is little of the David and Jonathan about it: there is no hungering for the personal relation, of individual man for individual man, that is the essence of all friendship; there is an elated consciousness of the same solemn mission, a common attachment to a great intermediate cause. But the friendship is, so to speak, common, not mutual; it was not followed for itself, but sprang from circumstances, and kept circumstances in view all along. Such direct pleasure as the intimacy afforded was by the way, TáρEруov, not followed for itself. They were friends because they were patriots. Human nature cannot help wishing that they had been patriots because they were friends.

PURITAN HATRED OF LAUD.

CHAPTER VI.

IT will here be as well to give a brief account of some of the circumstances that brought Laud into extreme odium with the Puritan and democratic party. "Like a busie and an angry waspe, his sting is in the tail of everything," they said. His determined enmity to popular liberty as opposed to autocratic government may be said broadly to have been the cause of his downfall. I do not suppose that it was, even at the time, summed up in such words: "Liberty," "the rights of the masses," "the will of the people" were not party cries then ; but public opinion expressed itself in its extreme readiness to adopt any accusation, probable or possible, against him. In most minds this consisted in identifying him with the Papal tyranny, making him an ardent though secret advocate in the cause of reconciling the two Churches.

This will be illustrated by the three episodes which I have selected to indicate the line he

70

HIS FRIENDSHIP WITH THE QUEEN.

adopted, and the light in which it was viewed by his opponents,-his connection with the queen, the case of Richard Montague, and his censorship of the press.

It is clear that the queen obtained a gradual ascendency over Charles, an ascendency which she did not at first possess; and nothing in Laud's court life incurred such suspicion in the country as his intimate connection with her Majesty. It must be looked upon as a most unfortunate event that Charles should have chosen at that juncture a Roman Catholic wife, and that she should have been of that peculiarly un-English type that Henrietta Maria represented. But it was merely another stroke from that persistent ill fortune which pursued Charles from first to last.

She was a high-spirited child, of quick and generous emotions and passionate impulses; romantically interested in the young king at first, and blankly disappointed when she found he was not all she had imagined. But her freaks and fancies, her pettishness and her pathos, and, most of all, her religion, merely struck the hard gloomy Roundheads of the time with a sense of painful disgust. She chose, too, with fatal precision, the very prejudices at that time so dear to the Puritans to insult and mock at.

At Titchfield, when, against her wishes, the Protestant service was continued in the house in the king's absence, she disturbed the preacher by planning a malevolent laughing expedition into the room with her train of chattering maidens, and sweeping through, to the consternation of the assembled servants and the preacher staring over his cushions.

Again, what is more touching than her visit to Tyburn, in the course of a ramble, and the natural tears she shed in the sight of a gaping crowd at the thoughts of the martyrs who had there laid down their lives for the faith so dear to herself, and yet so hopelessly perished out of the land? It was this last performance that made Charles, for once in his life, ungentle. He locked her into the private apartments at Whitehall, and told her brutally that he had issued orders for the immediate banishment of all her ladies and attendants back to France. The poor young queen, passionately attached as she was to all that recalled her happier childhood and the sunny land she had left, hearing voices below, dashed her hand through the window-pane to call for help, and was actually dragged away by her irritated husband, with bleeding fingers. And what can be sadder or more human than Charles's own account of a bitter

72 HER GROWING INFLUENCE WITH THE KING.

interview that took place one night between them, after they were in bed, about her jointure? "Take your lands to yourself," said the queen. "If I have no power to put whom I will into those places, I will have neither lands nor houses of you. Give me what you think fit by way of pension."

Remember," said Charles, having recourse to his authoritative manner,-" remember to whom you speak. You ought not to use me so." At this the poor young queen broke down and cried, saying she was utterly miserable. She had no power. Business that she took an interest in fared worse for her recommendation. She was not of that base quality to be used so ill. At last Charles insisted upon being heard. "I made her end that discourse," he says.

Rough measure though it was to send away her friends, it had its desired effect. She learnt to lean on and to love her husband, and thus gained that influence over him which those who seem to lean on a stubborn nature will always gain. Charles began to show signs of making dangerous concessions. It is true he interfered when she took the Prince Charles to Mass, but he began to make great allowances for her religion.

About this time an emissary of the Pope's,