Puslapio vaizdai
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1662. sit six months in that place, covered with sackcloth. These things had a grave appearance. Their faults and defects were not so conspicuous. They had a very scanty measure of learning, and a narrow compass in it. They were little men, of a very indifferent size of capacity, and apt to fly out into great excess of passion and indiscretion. They were servile, and too apt to fawn upon and flatter their admirers k. They were affected in their deportment, and very apt to censure all who differed from them, and to believe and report whatsoever they heard to their prejudice. And they were superstitious and haughty. In their sermons they were apt to enlarge on the state of the present time, and to preach against the sins of princes and courts: a topic that naturally makes men popular. It has an appearance of courage and the people are glad to hear those sins insisted on, in which they perceive they have no share, and to believe that all the judgments of God come down by the means and procurement of other men's sins. But their opinions about the independence of the church and clergy on the civil power, and their readiness to stir up the people to tumults and wars, was that which begot so ill an opinion of them at this time in all men, that very few, who were not deeply engaged with them in these conceits, pitied them much, under all the ill usage they now met with. I hope this is no impertinent nor ungrateful digression. It is a just and true account of these men and those times, from which a judicious reader will make good inferences. I will conclude this with a judicious answer that one of the wisest and best of them, Colvil, who suck Strange inconsistent stuff. S.

ceeded Leightoun in the headship of the college of 1662. Edenburgh, made to the earl of Midletoun, when he pressed him in the point of defensive arms to tell plainly his opinion, whether they were lawful or not. He said, the question had been often put to him, and he had always declined to answer it: but to him he plainly said, he wished that kings and their ministers would believe them lawful, and so 158 govern as men that expected to be resisted; but he wished that all their subjects would believe them to be unlawful, and so the world would be at quiet.

episcopacy.

I do now return to end the account of the state Prejudices infused of that country at this time. The people were against much troubled, when so many of their ministers were turned out. Their ministers had, for some months before they were thus silenced, been infusing this into their people, both in public and private; that all that was designed in this change of church government was to destroy the power of godliness, and to give an impunity to vice; that prelacy was a tyranny in the church, set on by ambitious and covetous men, who aimed at nothing but authority and wealth, luxury and idleness; and that they intended to encourage vice, that they might procure to themselves a great party among the impious and immoral. The people, thus prepossessed, seeing the earl of Midletoun, and all the train that followed him through those counties, running into excesses of all sorts, and railing at the very appearance of virtue and sobriety, were confirmed in the belief of all that their ministers had told them. What they had heard concerning Sharp's betraying those that had employed him, and the other bishops, who had taken the covenant, and had forced it on

1662. others, and now preached against it, openly owning that they had in so doing gone against the express dictate of their own conscience, did very much heighten all their prejudices, and fixed them so in them, that it was scarce possible to conquer them afterwards. All this was out of measure increased by the new incumbents, who were put in the places of the ejected preachers, and were generally very mean and despicable in all respects. They were the worst preachers I ever heard: they were ignorant to a reproach and many of them were openly vicious. They were a disgrace to their orders, and the sacred functions; and were indeed the dreg and refuse of the northern parts. Those of them who arose above contempt or scandal, were men of such violent tempers, that they were as much hated as the others were despised. This was the fatal beginning of restoring episcopacy in Scotland, of which few of the bishops seemed to have any sense. foul, the most concerned, had none at all: for he fell into a paralytic state, in which he languished a year before he died. I have thus opened the first settlement in Scotland: of which I myself observed what was visible, and understood the more secret transactions from those who had such a share in them, that it was not possible for them to mistake them and I had no reason to think they intended to deceive or misinform me.

1660.

Fair

I will in the next place change the climate, and 159 give as particular an account as I can of the settleof England. ment of England both in church and state which,

The affairs

though it will be perhaps imperfect, and will in some parts be out of order, yet I am well assured it

will be found true; having picked it up at several 1660. times, from the earl of Lauderdale, sir Robert Murray, the earl of Shaftsbury, the earl of Clarendon the son of the lord chancellor, the lord Hollis, and sir Harbottle Grimstone, who was the speaker of the house of commons, under whose protection I lived nine years when I was preacher at the rolls, he being then master of the rolls. From such hands I could not be misled, when I laid all together, and considered what reason I had to make allowances for the different accounts that diversity of parties and interests may lead men to give, they too easily believing some things, and as easily rejecting others, as they stood affected.

After the king came over, no person in the house of commons had the courage to move the offering propositions for any limitation of prerogative, or the defining of any doubtful points. All was joy and rapture. If the king had applied himself to business, and had pursued those designs which he studied to retrieve all the rest of his reign, when it was too late, he had probably in those first transports carried every thing that he would have desired, either as to revenue or power. But he was so given up to pleasure, that he devolved the management of all his affairs on the earl of Clarendon; who, as he had his breeding in the law, so he had all along declared himself for the ancient liberties of England, as well as for the rights of the crown. A domestic accident had happened to him, which heightened his zeal for the former. He, when he began to grow eminent in his profession, came down to see his aged father, a gentleman of Wiltshire: who, one day, as they were walking in the field together, told

1660. him, that men of his profession did often stretch law and prerogative, to the prejudice of the liberty of the subject, to recommend and advance themselves: so he charged him, if ever he grew to any eminence in his profession, that he should never sacrifice the laws and liberties of his country to his own interests, or to the will of a prince. He repeated this twice: and immediately he fell into a fit of an apoplexy, of which he died in a few hours. This the earl of Clarendon told the lady Ranelagh, who put him often in mind of it: and from her I had it.

Clarendon's just and moderate notions.

160

He resolved not to stretch the prerogative beyond what it was before the wars, and would neither set aside the petition of right, nor endeavour to raise the courts of the star-chamber or the high commission again, which could have been easily done, if he had set about it: nor did he think fit to move for the repeal of the act for triennial parliaments, till other matters were well settled. He took care indeed to have all the things that were extorted by the long parliament from king Charles I. to be repealed. And since the dispute of the power of the militia was the most important, and the most insisted on, he was very earnest to have that clearly determined for the future. But as to all the acts relating to property, or the just limitation of the prerogative, such as the matter of the ship-money, the tonnage and poundage, and the habeas corpus act, he did not touch on these. And as for the standing revenue, 1,200,000l. a year was all that was asked: and, though it was much more than any of our kings had formerly, yet it was readily granted. This was to answer all the ordinary expense of the government. It was believed, that if two mil

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