Chapter XIX: Reign of Charles I (4)

This sweeping reverse compelled the Emperor to recall Wallenstein to the chief command. Assembling forty thousand men at Znaim in Bohemia, he marched on Prague, and drove the Saxons not only thence but out of Bohemia altogether. Meanwhile Gustavus, issuing from his winter quarters on the Rhine, directed his course to Nuremberg, and so to Donauwörth, and at Rain on the Lech fought with Tilly and the Duke of Bavaria. Tilly was killed (April 30, 1632); and Gustavus advanced and took Augsburg in April, Munich on the 27th of May, and after in vain attacking Wallenstein before Nuremberg, he encountered him at Lützen, in Saxony, and beat him, but fell himself in the hour of victory (November 16, 1632). He had, however, saved Protestantism. Wallenstein lost favour after his defeat, was suspected by the emperor, and finally assassinated by his own officers (February 25, 1634). The generals of Gustavus, under the orders of Gustavus's great Minister Oxenstierna, continued the contest, and enabled the German Protestant princes to establish their power and the exercise of their religion, at the peace of Westphalia in 1648.

Charles, shamed into some degree of co-operation, had despatched the Marquis of Hamilton with six thousand men to the assistance of Gustavus; but the whole affair was so badly managed, the commissariat and general care of the men were so miserable, that the little army speedily became decimated by disease and was of no service. Hamilton returned home, and the remains of his forces under the command of the Prince Charles Louis, son of the Elector Frederick, were routed in Westphalia. Frederick himself, deprived of all hope by the fall of Gustavus, only survived him about a fortnight; and thus ended the dream of the restoration of the Palatinate.

At home Charles had determined to rule without a Parliament, but this necessarily drove him upon all those means of raising an income which Parliament had protested against, and which must, therefore, continue to exasperate the people. Between the dissolution of the Parliament in 1629, and the summons of another in 1640, these proceedings had apparently advanced the cause of despotism, but in reality they promoted the cause of liberty; the nation had been scourged into a temper which left no means but the sword of appeasing it. The first unceremonious violation of his pledge to the public conveyed in the granting of the Petition of Right was levying as unscrupulously as ever the duties of tonnage and poundage; and the goods of all such as refused the illegal payment were immediately distrained upon and sold.

The king next appointed a Committee to inquire into the encroachments on the royal forests, a legitimate and laudable object if conducted in a spirit of fairness and liberality. In every age gross encroachments have been made on these Crown lands, and especially in the reckless reign of James. But it would seem that the Commissioners proceeded in an arbitrary spirit, and, relying on the power of the Crown, often ruined those who resisted their decisions by the costs of law. The Earl of Holland--a noted creature of the king's--was made head of this Commission, and presided in a court established for the purpose. Under its operations vast tracts were recovered to the Crown, and heavy fines for trespasses levied. Rockingham Forest was enlarged from a circuit of six miles to one of sixty, and the Earl of Southampton was nearly ruined by the king's resumption of a large estate adjoining the New Forest. Even where these recoveries were made with right, they exasperated the aristocracy, who had been the chief encroachers, and injured the king in their goodwill. Clarendon says, "To recompense the damage the Crown sustained by the sale of old lands, and by the grant of new pensions, the old laws of the forest are revived; by which not only great fines are imposed, but great annual rents intended, and like to be settled by way of contract, which burden lighted most upon persons of quality and honour, who thought themselves above ordinary oppressions, and therefore like to remember it with more sharpness."

Besides the tonnage and poundage, obsolete laws were revived, and other duties imposed on merchants' goods; and all who resisted were prosecuted, fined, and imprisoned. But a still more plausible scheme was hit upon for extorting money. The old feudal practice, introduced by Henry III. and Edward I., of compelling persons holding lands under the Crown worth twenty pounds per annum, to receive knighthood, or to compound by a fine, had been enforced by Elizabeth and James, and was not likely to be passed over in this general inquisition after the means of income independent of Parliament. All landed proprietors worth forty pounds a year were called on to accept the title of knight and pay the fees, or were fined, and in default of payment thrown into prison. "By this ill-husbandry," says Clarendon, "which, though it was founded in right, was most grievous from the mode of proceeding, vast sums were drawn from the subject. And no less unjust projects of all kinds--many ridiculous, many scandalous, all very grievous--were set on foot, the damage and reproach of which came to the king, the profit to other men; inasmuch as of twenty thousand pounds a year, scarcely one thousand five hundred pounds came to the king's use or account."

A great commotion was raised by the king depriving many freeholders arbitrarily of their lands to enlarge Richmond Park, and he saw the necessity of making some compensation.

Another mode of raising money was by undoing in a great measure what the Parliament had done by abolishing monopolies. True, Charles took care not to grant these monopolies to individuals, but to companies; but this, whilst it arrested the odium of seeing them in the hands of courtiers and favourites, increased their mischief by augmenting the number and power of the oppressors. These companies were enabled to dictate to the public the price of the articles included in their patent, and restrain at their pleasure their manufacture or sale. One of the most flagrant cases was that of the Company of Soap-boilers, who purchased a monopoly of the manufacture of soap for ten thousand pounds, and a duty of eight pounds per ton on all the soap they made. The scheme was that of the renegade Noye; and all who presumed to make soap for themselves, regardless of the monopoly, were fined, the company being authorised to search the premises of all soap-boilers, seize any made without a licence, and prosecute the offender in the Star Chamber. There was a similar monopoly granted to starch-makers.

King James had formed the idea that London was become too large, and that its size was the cause of the prevalence of the plague and contagious fevers. He had not penetrated the fact that the real cause lay in the want of drainage and cleanliness, and he issued repeated proclamations forbidding any more building of houses in the Metropolis. The judges declared the proclamations illegal, and building went on as fast as ever. Here was a splendid opportunity for putting on the screw. Charles therefore appointed a Commission to inquire into the extent of building done in defiance of his father's orders. Such persons who were willing to compound for their offences, got off by paying a fine amounting to three years' rental of the premises. Those who refused, pleaded in vain the decision of the judges, for Charles had a court independent of all judges but himself, namely, the Star Chamber; and those who escaped this fell into another inquisition as detestable--the Court of the Earl Marshal. Sturdy resisters, therefore, had their houses actually demolished, and were then fleeced in those infamous courts to complete their ruin. A Mr. Moore had erected forty-two houses of an expensive class, with coach-houses and stables, near St. Martin's-in-the-Fields. He was fined one thousand pounds, and ordered to pull them down before Easter, under penalty of another thousand pounds, but refusing, the sheriffs demolished the houses, and levied the money by distress. This terrified others, who submitted to a composition, and by these iniquitous means one hundred thousand pounds were brought into the Treasury.

Simultaneously with these proceedings, Laud, Bishop of London, pursued the same course in the Church. He had long been the most abject flatterer of the royal power, and now, supported by Wentworth, went on boldly to reduce all England to the most complete slavery to Church and State. He was supposed to have the intention of restoring the Papal power; but such was far from his design. Neither Laud nor Charles dreamt for a moment of returning to the union with Rome, for the simple reason that they loved too well themselves the enjoyment of absolute power. Like Henry VIII., they could tolerate no Pope but one disguised under the name of an English king. Never did the Church more egregiously deceive itself than by suspecting Laud or Charles of any design to put on again the yoke of the Roman Pontiff. That spiritual potentate, deluded by such empty imagination, offered Laud a cardinal's hat, which was rejected with scorn.

On the 29th of May, 1630, the queen gave birth to a son, afterwards Charles II., who was baptised on the 2nd of July, the ceremony being performed by Laud, who composed a prayer for the occasion.

Charles had issued a proclamation forbidding any one to introduce into the pulpit any remarks bearing on the great Arminian controversy which was raging in the kingdom--Laud and his party in the Church on one side, the zealous Puritans on the other. Both sides were summoned with an air of impartiality into the Star Chamber or High Commission Court, but came out with this difference--that the orthodox divines generally confessed their fault, and were dismissed with a reprimand; but the Puritan ministers could not bend in that manner and sacrifice conscience to fear, so they were fined, imprisoned, and deprived without mercy. Davenant (Bishop of Salisbury), Dr. Burgess, Dr. Prideaux, Dr. Hall (Bishop of Norwich, whose poetry and liberality of spirit will long be held in honourable remembrance), and many others, were harassed because they did not preach exactly to the mind of Charles and Laud; but the treatment of Dr. Alexander Leighton, a Scottish Puritan preacher, was brutality itself. He had published a pamphlet called "An Appeal to Parliament, or Zion's Plea against Prelacy." It attracted the notice of the Government, which in June, 1630, had him dragged before the Star Chamber, where he was condemned to the following horrible punishment, than which the records of the Inquisition preserve nothing more infernal:--That he should be imprisoned for life, should pay a fine of ten thousand pounds, be degraded from his ministry, whipped, set in the pillory, have one of his ears cut off, one side of his nose slit, and be branded on the forehead with a double S.S., as a "sower of sedition." He was then to be carried back to prison, and after a few days to be pilloried again, whipped, have the other side of his nose slit, the other ear cut off, and shut up in his dungeon, to be released only by death.