JOHN PYM.

WHEN the English Parliament of 1628 came together, the King told them: "If you do not your duty, mine would then order me to use those other means which God has put into my hand." Charles's notion of Parliamentary duty was simply that the members should vote necessary supplies, and then leave the expenditures to the royal will. Parliament, however, insisted upon some assurances that abuses would not be repeated. The Petition of Right, as we saw in our account of Eliot, was the result. Though the King was obliged to give his assent to the petition, it soon became evident that he had no intention to carry out its provisions either in the letter or in the spirit. The liberal supplies granted by Parliament after the signing of the petition were soon exhausted. Every expe

dient of economy was resorted to in order to avoid the necessity of calling another Parliament.

At first there was perhaps no clearly defined purpose to cause any positive breach of constitutional obligation, but gradually the government drifted into a policy of the most flagrant oppression. No Parliament was called for eleven years. The powers of the prerogative were strained at every point. Knighthood was forced on the gentry in order that large sums might be extorted as the price of composition. Enormous fines were levied for removing defects in title deeds. Large sums were exacted of landowners for encroachments on the crown lands. London, in consequence of its open sympathy with the Parliamentary cause, became a special object of royal dislike. An edict was issued prohibiting the enlargement of the metropolis; and large districts in the suburbs were saved from demolition only by the payment of three years' rental to the royal treasury. The powers of the Court of Star

Chamber were applied to the trying of causes on the simple information of the King's attorney, and the court was authorized to adjudge any punishment short of death. Under its jurisdiction enormous fines were levied for the most trifling offences. A simple brawl between two wealthy lords had to be atoned for by the payment of £5,000, and more than twice that sum was exacted of a gentleman as a fine for contracting marriage with his niece. Monopolies, which had been formally abandoned both by Elizabeth and by James, were now revived in direct and open violation of the Petition of Right, in order that large sums might be realized from the persons receiving the privileges bestowed by the concession. Nearly every article of domestic necessity had to be procured directly or indirectly from some monopolist; and, consequently, the expense of living was very greatly increased. Customs duties were

levied just as if they had been voted by Parliament, and after a time writs were issued for a general levy of benevolences from the

shires. Thus, one by one, even the most flagrant of the abuses he had promised to abolish, were resorted to without hesitation and without scruple.

Not less flagrant were the abuses of a religious nature. The Commons, in the last moments of the session of 1629, had resolved that "whoever should bring in innovations in religion," as well as "whoever advised the levy of subsidies not granted in Parliament,” was to be regarded as “a capital enemy of the kingdom and commonwealth." And yet it was to "bring in innovations in religion" that the energies of the English church were now chiefly directed. At the head of the church was Archbishop Laud, whose determination was "to raise the Church of England to what he conceived to be its real position as a branch, though a reformed branch, of the great Catholic church throughout the world." He protested alike against the innovations of Rome and the innovations of Calvin. In his view the Episcopal succession was the essence of the church; and, therefore,

when the Lutheran and Calvanistic churches rejected the office of Bishop, they "ceased to be churches at all." As he rejected the church of the reformers, and as he acknowledged Rome as a true branch of the church, he drew constantly nearer to Rome, and removed further and further from the doctrines of the Reformers. In all parts of England ministers who refused to conform were expelled from their cures. It was this aggressive and revolutionary policy that drove thousands of Puritans to New England. Three thousand emigrants left England in a single year; and during the period between 1629 and 1640 no less than about twenty thousand Puritans found a refuge in the New World.

In Scotland resistance to the innovations of Laud took a more active turn. Royal proclamation had been made, reinstating the Episcopal forms; but when the Dean of Edinburgh opened the new Prayer Book, a murmur of discontent ran through the congregation, and a stool, hurled by one of the members, felled him