as accessory, but as prime minister. He corresponded constantly with the Scottish bishops as well as with the civil authorities in Scotland. To him they made their reports and their excuses, and his advice and direction were required and sought on all occasions.
The invasion of England by the army of the Cove- nanters at length compelled Charles once more to sum- mon the English Legislature. The Long Parliament met. Then the bubble burst; then the flaunting splen- dors of a luxurious and insolent court were exchanged for humiliation and deepening gloom ; then the vast machinery of ecclesiastical despotism, pushed to its ut- most tension of pride and tyranny, suddenly gave way with a crash, and the accumulated usurpations of royal prerogative hastened to their final and irreversible doom. The odious courts of the Star Chamber and High Com- mission were abolished, and all judges were henceforth made independent of the crown ; no taxes, of whatever description, were to be levied without authority of Par- liament, and Parliaments were bv law to be triennial. The earl of Strafford, lord deputy of Ireland, Laud's most intimate friend, the king's ablest political adviser, and the most skilful commander of the royal forces against the Scotch, was impeached for high treason. Laud's own impeachment soon followed, and he was forthwith committed to the Tower, where he was kept imprisoned three years (1641-5) ; his jurisdiction and all his offices and emoluments were sequestered by the House of Peers. Lambeth Palace was made a state
was the law enacted — not by the English Parliament, I prison, and Leighton, now almost a maniac, was put in
but by the Star Chamber — to protect, not the English Protestant Church, but the Laudian ecclesiastical sys- tem against the " Puritan faction."
The "Short Parliament" of 1610 had been dissolved af- ter a session of three weeks ; but as the Convocation con- tinued to sit, a set of new canons was drawn up under the influence and presidency of Laud, wliich contained the famous election oath ; and the first of which proclaimed that monarchy was of divine right, that the royal author- ity was independent, not only of the bishop of Rome, but of everj' other earthly power, and that it cannot be as- sailed on any pretence without resistance to the ordinance of God. Not only this canon, but the whole body of them, were of the most arbitrarj' character, especially enjoining, under severe penalties, the ceremonies to which the arch- bishop was notoriously attached ; and all this at a time most unwisely chosen, when the whole condition of the empire was imminently critical ; so that, as Clarendon remarks, " the season in which that synod continued to sit was in so ill a conjuncture of time that nothing could have been transacted there of a popiUar and prevailing influence."
The archbishop prime minister had so completely established uniformity in England that he now had leisure to turn his particular attention to the reforma- tion of Puritan abuses in the outlying islands of Jer- sey and Guernsej'. He claims to have brought Chilling- worth back from the Church of Rome. If he did, he certainly did not make that irrefragable defender of the religion of Protestants a disciple of his own system. He urged bishop Hall to write his treatise on Episcopacy; but Hall's claims were not put high enough to satisfy Laud, who was particularly offended because the pope was plainly called Antichrist. The plot now thickens. The Scottish troubles growing out of the attempted im- position of the new canons and liturgy ujion the Scottish people, beginning with the " profane imprecation" of the dame Janet Geddes, in St. Giles's, at the first reading of the detested service: "Out, out, thou false thief; dost thou say mass at my lug?" had now swollen into an irresistible storm of violence and rebellion. The uproar of the " old woman" in a church, and the brickbats of the mob around it, had turned into a national conspiracy. Through all the business Laud had adroitly managed to incur no responsibihty without the participation or au- thority of the king or the Scottish bishops; neverthe- less, it is evident he was mixed up with it all, not only
v.— S
charge of it; Prj-nne was made his warden in the Tower. The bishops were unseated from the House of Lords ; episcopacy and the liturgy were abolished by act of Parliament ; and Laud — having seen the complete tri- umph of the miserable " fanatical faction" over which he had wielded the rod of power and of punishment so long, the utter destruction and abolition of the hierar- chy and the ceremonies to whose aggrandizement and magnificence he had devoted his life, and the annihila- tion of all his fond dreams of personal grandeur, and glory, and lordly munificence — was at length condemned by an ordinance of Parliament, and suffered decapitation on Tower HiU, meeting his doom with perfect compos- ure and quiet dignity, on the 10th of January, 1645.
Thus fell the famous archbishop Laud, perhaps the' best praised and most blamed man that ever lived. As- to the formal legality of his sentence, it may be admit- ted that it cannot be constitutionally or technically jus- tified. As to the specific charges against him, it may be granted that they could not, except constructively,, amount to treason even if proved, and that few of any weight were proved with such evidence as would be sat- isfactory under the strict rules of an impartial court of justice. But it must be remembered that Laud was tried before a revolutionary tribunal; that, in such cir- cumstances, moral, not legal evidence swayed his j udges ; and that the general, known truth of the case, not the detailed proof of specific articles, determined the conclu- sion.