Morley was fined ten thousand pounds for reviling, challenging, and striking, in the court of Whitehall, Sir George Theobald, one of the king's servants.[v*] This fine was thought exorbitant; but whether it was compounded, as was usual in fines imposed by the star chamber, we are not informed.
** Rush. vol. ii. p. 270; vol. iii. App. p. 106.
*** Rush. vol. iii. p. 333. Franklyn, p. 478.
v Strafford's Letters and Despatches, vol. ii. p. 117.
Allison had reported, that the archbishop of York had incurred the king's displeasure, by asking a limited toleration for the Catholics, and an allowance to build some churches for the exercise of their religion. For this slander against the archbishop, he was condemned in the star chamber to be fined one thousand pounds, to be committed to prison, to be bound to his good behavior during life, to be whipped, and to be set on the pillory at Westminster, and in three other towns in England. Robins, who had been an accomplice in the guilt, was condemned by a sentence equally severe.[*] Such events are rather to be considered as rare and detached incidents, collected by the severe scrutiny of historians, than as proofs of the prevailing genius of the king's administration which seems to have been more gentle and equitable than, that of most of his predecessors: there were, on the whole, only five or six such instances of rigor during the course of fifteen years, which elapsed before the meeting of the long parliament. And it is also certain, that scandal against the great, though seldom prosecuted at present, is, however, in the eye of the law, a great crime, and subjects the offender to very heavy penalties.
There are other instances of the high respect paid to the nobility and to the great in that age, when the powers of monarchy, though disputed, still maintained themselves in their pristine vigor. Clarendon[**] tells us a pleasant incident to this purpose: a waterman, belonging to a man of quality, having a squabble with a citizen about his fare, showed his badge, the crest of his master, which happened to be a swan; and thence insisted on better treatment from the citizen. But the other replied carelessly, that he did not trouble his head about that goose. For this offence, he was summoned before the marshal's court; was fined, as having opprobriously defamed the nobleman's crest, by calling the swan a goose; and was in effect reduced to beggary.