The passages which I have thus largely quoted will, I trust, leave no doubt in any reader's mind that the Earl of Strafford was party in a conspiracy to subvert the fundamental laws and liberties of his country. For here are not, as on his trial, accusations of words spoken in heat, uncertain as to proof, and of ambiguous interpretation; nor of actions variously reported, and capable of some explanation; but the sincere unbosoming of the heart in letters never designed to come to light. And if we reflect upon this man's cool-blooded apostasy on the first lure to his ambition, and on his splendid abilities, which enhanced the guilt of that desertion, we must feel some indignation at those who have palliated all his iniquities, and even ennobled his memory with the attributes of patriot heroism. Great he surely was, since that epithet can never be denied without paradox to so much comprehension of mind, such ardour and energy, such courage and eloquence; those commanding qualities of soul, which, impressed upon his dark and stern countenance, struck his contemporaries with mingled awe and hate, and still live in the unfading colours of Vandyke.[100] But it may be reckoned as a sufficient ground for distrusting any one's attachment to the English constitution, that he reveres the name of the Earl of Strafford.
_Conduct of Laud in the church prosecution of puritans._--It was perfectly consonant to Laud's temper and principles of government to extirpate, as far as in him lay, the lurking seeds of disaffection to the Anglican church. But the course he followed could in nature have no other tendency than to give them nourishment. His predecessor Abbot had perhaps connived to a limited extent at some irregularities of discipline in the puritanical clergy, judging not absurdly that their scruples at a few ceremonies, which had been aggravated by a vexatious rigour, would die away by degrees, and yield to that centripetal force, that moral attraction towards uniformity and obedience to custom, which Providence has rendered one of the great preservatives of political society. His hatred to popery and zeal for Calvinism, which undoubtedly were narrow and intolerant, as well as his avowed disapprobation of those churchmen who preached up arbitrary power, gained for this prelate the favour of the party denominated puritan. In all these respects, no man could be more opposed to Abbot than his successor. Besides reviving the prosecutions for nonconformity in their utmost strictness, wherein many of the other bishops vied with their primate, he most injudiciously, not to say wickedly endeavoured, by innovations of his own, and by exciting alarms in the susceptible consciences of pious men, to raise up new victims whom he might oppress. Those who made any difficulty about his novel ceremonies, or even who preached on the Calvinistic side, were harassed by the high commission court as if they had been actual schismatics.[101] The most obnoxious, if not the most indefensible, of these prosecutions were for refusing to read what was called the Book of Sports; namely, a proclamation, or rather a renewal of that issued in the late reign, that certain feasts or wakes might be kept, and a great variety of pastimes used on Sundays after evening service.[102] This was reckoned, as I have already observed, one of the tests of puritanism. But whatever superstition there might be in that party's judaical observance of the day they called the sabbath, it was in itself preposterous, and tyrannical in its intention, to enforce the reading in churches of this licence or rather recommendation of festivity. The precise clergy refused in general to comply with the requisition, and were suspended or deprived in consequence. Thirty of them were excommunicated in the single diocese of Norwich; but as that part of England was rather conspicuously puritanical, and the bishop, one Wren, was the worst on the bench, it is highly probable that the general average fell short of this.[103]