tween March, 1629, and July, 1632 (p. 293), completes the history of the sees for the present volume.

I. PROVINCE OF CANTERBURY.

THE ARCHBISHOPRIC. Promotion of Laud himself, on Abbot's death, Aug.

1633.

Bishopric of Bangor. Edmund Griffiths, D. D., an Oxford man, appointed

on the death of Dolben (1633); and William Roberts, D. D., a Cambridge man, on Griffiths' death (1637).

Bishopric of Bath and Wells. William Pierce, translated from Peterborough, on the translation of Walter Curle to Winchester (1632).

the king,

Bishopric of Bristol. Dr. Robert Skinner, an Oxford man, and chaplain to distinguished for some years as a Puritan preacher in London, but believed to have been drawn off by Laud and the chaplaincy, appointed on the translation of Coke to Hereford (1636).

Bishopric of Chichester. Dr. Brian Duppa, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford. and tutor to the prince, appointed on the translation of Montague to Norwich (May 1638).

Bishopric of St. David's. The notorious Roger Mainwaring, promoted to this see on the translation of Dr. Field to Hereford (Dec. 1635).

Bishopric of Ely. Dr. Matthew Wren, translated hither from Norwich on the death of Francis White (1638), having previously been promoted from the Mastership of Peterhouse, Cambridge, to the Deanery of Windsor, and the Bishoprics of Hereford and Norwich. Bishopric of Hereford. Dr. William Juxon succeeded the Church-historian Godwin, but held the see only a few months, when he was transferred to London. He was succeeded, in 1633, by Dr. Augustine Lindsell, translated from Peterborough; and on Lindsell's death in 1634, the see was given to Matthew Wren; on whose translation to Norwich (1635) it was given to Theophilus Field; on whose death (1636) it was given to Coke.

Bishopric of London.

(1633).

Juxon, appointed on Laud's elevation to the Primacy

Bishopric of Norwich. Wren succeeded on Corbet's death (1635), and was succeeded (1638) by Montague.

Bishopric of Peterborough. Dr. Francis Dee succeeded Lindsell (1634), and was succeeded by Dr. John Towers (1638).

Bishopric of Rochester. Dr. John Warner, an Oxford divine, appointed on the death of Bowle (1637).

Bishopric of Winchester. Dr. Walter Curle succeeded Neile (1632).

II. PROVINCE OF YORK.

Bishopric of Man. Dr. Wm. Foster succeeded Phillips (1633), and was succeeded by Dr. Richard Parr (1635).

Some of these appointments were good, as regarded the learning of the men appointed; for indifference to learning was not one of

Laud's faults; but to the country at large it seemed that by such appointments the government of the Church was not only being concentrated more and more in the hands of conspicuous Arminians and Prelatists, but was also, in some cases, receiving men of as avowedly weak Protestantism as Laud himself.

As primate of all England, Laud had ample means of developing his theory of Anglicanism, and of working even the most reserved portions of it into the practice of the Church without the éclat of new enactments. There are but three cases of any importance, in which, during the first five years of his Archiepiscopate, he had recourse to actual legislation. (1.) One of these was the case of the Sabbatarian Controversy. This controversy, not originally connected with the Reformation, but of subsequent origin, had been long gaining ground in the Church; and men had divided themselves upon it into the three parties whom Fuller names respectively the Sabbatarians, the moderate men, and the Anti-Sabbatarians. By the operation of affinities, both logical and historical, the Puritans, as a body, had embraced the more rigorous views of the obligations of the Sabbath; while, on the contrary, Laud and his school were strongly Anti-Sabbatarian, and regarded the very word "Sabbath," when used instead of "Sunday," as a wrong done to the Church, and a "secret magazine of Judaism." Sabbatarianism, in short, was a form or sign of Puritanism, worthy, in Laud's view, of compulsory suppression. He found an opportunity for a demonstration on the subject. In Somersetshire, as in other counties, there had long been a custom of revels and merry-makings in all the parishes on Sundays, under the name of wakes, church-ales, clerk-ales, and the like; and, these meetings having become offensive, in many cases, not only to Sabbatarian feeling, but also to public decency, Chief Justice Richardson and Baron Denham, on their circuit through the county, as judges, had been prevailed upon, by the county justices and others, to issue an order for their abolition. Laud and the government, hearing of the prohibition, not only caused it to be rescinded, but made it the occasion for expressing his majesty's displeasure with "those humorists, Puritans and precise people," and for republishing the Book of Sports, issued by King James in 1618, for the express purpose of making bowling, archery, dancing, and other games after divine. service, a stated Sunday institution in all the parishes of the kingdom. All ministers were required to read from their pulpits the king's Declaration accompanying the republication, an order exceedingly grievous to the Puritans, and which gave rise to the suspension of many ministers, and also to curious scenes of mockcompliance. Thenceforth, obstinate Sabbatarianism became a ground

of prosecution of clergymen both by their Diocesans and in the High Commission Court. (2.) Another legislative innovation of Laud consisted of injunctions issued by him in his Archiepiscopal capacity, and ratified by the king (1635), having for their effect the breaking up of the Dutch and Walloon congregations throughout England. There were about ten such congregations in all, numbering about five thousand persons, and consisting of Dutch and French manufacturers and their descendants. To such members of the congregations as had themselves been born abroad and had only settled in England, Laud was willing to continue the privilege of their separate worship and Liturgy, guaranteed them by former stipulations; but he required that all the English-born children or other descendants of such immigrants should conform to the Church of England, and attend the ordinary parish churches. There were vehement reclamations against these orders, both from the congregations, and from the localities where they were settled and which they benefited by their wealth and industry; but Laud was inflexible. The result was, that many of the immigrants removed from England, and that several flourishing manufacturing colonies in Kent, Norfolk, and other counties, were totally destroyed. (3.) It was in the Altar Controversy, however, that Laud made his greatest experiment in the possibility of forcing, by orders issuing from himself, a general and simultaneous change in the practice of the Church. Backed by a preliminary decision of the king and council in one particular case, he issued orders through his Vicar-General, for fixing the communion-table altarwise at the east end of the chancel, and with the ends north and south, in all the churches and chapels of his province, and for railing it in, and otherwise distinguishing it as a true altar. The effect of these orders was a general ferment throughout the kingdom. In many parishes the change was resisted by the churchwardens and the parishioners, both on the ground of expense and on the ground of conscience; the Puritan ministers, of course, abetted such resistance; and, in some cases where the change was made, communicants refused to receive the sacrament at the railed altar. Among the bishops themselves, the summary decision of what had hitherto been an open question in the Church, caused differences of conduct.

While pushing into the system of the Church new items of discipline derived from his own theory of Anglicanism, Laud did not the less avail himself of whatever means he had or could make for enforcing the conformity which he was rendering more difficult. In

1 Rushworth, II. 272-3; Neal's Puritans, III. 257-9; and documents in the State Paper Office.

Abbot's last report to the king of the state of his province (1632), he had returned a clean bill of health for the whole Church of England. "There is not in the Church of England left," he had said, "a single inconformable minister which appeareth." The statement had necessarily been interpreted with a good deal of latitude; and where Abbot had reported health, Laud soon found disease.

His first care had been to strengthen his hands and the hands of the other prelates by enlarging the ecclesiastical jurisdiction. He had hardly assumed the primacy when (1634) he caused to be addressed to himself in the king's name a warrant for fresh zeal, in the shape of a new edition of the royal instructions of 1629, containing, in addition to the former regulations respecting the residence of bishops, their vigilance over the lecturers in their diocese, etc. (see pp. 287-8), certain new articles, enjoining every bishop to give in an annual report of his diocese to his metropolitan, so that the report of the metropolitan to the king might be more exact. The effect of this order and of Laud's archiepiscopal visitations in stirring up the bishops, is visible in the series of his own reports of his province to the king, for the seven years from 1633 to 1639 inclusive. In the report for 1633 he mentions having received accounts, and these rather meagre, from but ten of the twenty-one dioceses of his province; but, in his reports for the remaining years, not more than three or four bishops are mentioned as defaulters. The laziest in reporting were the Romish Goodman of Gloucester, and Wright of Lichfield and Coventry; next in the order of reluctance seem to have been Thornborough of Worcester, and the Calvinistic Davenant of Salisbury; Williams always reports for Lincoln, but in terms which Laud evidently distrusts; and the bishops who coöperate with Laud most heartily are Juxon of London, Wren of Norwich, Curle of Winchester, Pierce of Bath and Wells, White of Ely, and Montague of Chichester. In the province of York, Archbishop Neile seems to have been more zealous of imitating Laud than any of his bishops. In both provinces the means by which the more zealous bishops carried out the instructions of their archbishops were somewhat novel. Not only did they hold courts in their own name for the citation, examination and censure of offenders; but, in order that they might have each parish individually under control, they introduced what were called Articles of Visitation, or lists of topics on which they required exact information, and also Churchwardens' Oaths, binding the churchwardens, as the official informers in every parish, to take these articles as the directories of their inquiries. The churchwardens' oath (a totally illegal imposition, and resisted as such by many

1 See the series of Reports in Wharton's Laud.

churchwardens) was the same or nearly so in different dioceses; but the several bishops drew up their own Articles of Visitation, and some were more strict than others. The strictest of all was Wren of Norwich, whose articles were 139 in number, involving 897 distinct queries! To these excesses of episcopal jurisdiction, add exemption claimed and accorded from interferences of the civil courts; also, a claim advanced by Laud, and at last decided in his favor by the king in council (June 1636), to the right of visitation of the two Universities in his character as metropolitan; and, finally, a considerable extension of the powers of the High Commission court.

A list, year by year, of prosecutions and punishments by ecclesiastical authority in England, from 1633 to 1638 inclusive, would be a very instructive document. Laud's annual Reports, and the records in Rushworth and in other collections, give a notion of its probable extent and composition.

First among the objects of his punitive energy, as being offenders of the most heinous class, were the Separatists, Schismatics, Brownists, Anabaptists or Fanatics (for all these names are applied to them indiscriminately), who had actually broken loose from the Church of England, thrown the institution of an ordained ministry aside as only a ceremony like the rest, and set up a secret worship of God in conventicles. Besides the ineradicable nests of such Separatists sheltered in the recesses of London,' there were little schools and colonies of them in other parts-in Lincoln, where one Johnson, a baker, was their leader; and at Ashton, Maidstone, and other places in Laud's own diocese of Canterbury, where three men named Brewer, Turner, and Fenner had "planted the infection." The plan of procedure in such cases was to put the leaders in prison and keep them there, and to excommunicate and otherwise punish all who were known to attend the conventicles. Year after year, however, Laud complains that he cannot root them out. "They are all of the poorer sort," he says, "and very simple, so that I am utterly to seek what to do with them." Their preachers also manage to escape from prison, and then, instead of leaving the country, have merely

1 As early as June 11, 1631, I find (Original Letter in State Paper Office) Bishop Hall of Exeter writing, rather officiously, to Laud, then Bishop of London, thus: "Right Rev. and Hon., with best services, I was bold the last week to give your Lordship information of a busy and ignorant schismatick lurking in London; since which time, I hear to my grief, that there are eleven several congregations (as they call them) of separatists about the city, furnished with their idly-pretended pastors, who meet together in brew

houses, and such other meet places of resort, every Sunday. I do well know your Lordship's zealous and careful vigilance over that populous world of men, so as I am assured your Lordship finds enough to move both your sorrow and holy fervency in the cause of God's Church; neither do I write this as to inform your Lordship of what you know not, but to condole the misery of the time." Hall then goes on to a matter of private concern to himself.