1657-60]

The Navy and the Restoration

485

board his ship on August 7, 1657, at the entrance to Plymouth Sound. His successor, Captain John Stoakes, maintained the power of England off the coast of Spain and in the Mediterranean; but the political troubles which preceded the Restoration were felt far away from the centre, and in June, 1659, Stoakes was recalled.

In the year 1657 the English military and naval forces found a new objective, and in alliance with France they were directed against Mardyk and Dunkirk. The share of the navy in this enterprise was limited to the maintenance of a fleet of twenty-six ships off Dunkirk to cover the military operations and to coöperate with the besieging army. In March, 1659, also, an English fleet under Mountagu was ordered to the Sound, to arrange, and if necessary to enforce, in conjunction with the Dutch, such a peace between Denmark and Sweden as should prevent the Baltic becoming a Swedish lake. The experience of the Dutch War had shown how important free access to Eastland commodities was to both the great naval Powers.

Meanwhile the tide of events was beginning to run strongly towards a Restoration. The revolutionary Governments of the period of the Commonwealth had been based upon military power, and except for Monck, who combined the parts, it may be said that the Restoration was effected by soldiers and not by seamen. But no opposition came from the navy. Mountagu's resolution in favour of the King was adopted on May 3, 1660, at a Council of War, without a dissentient voice; and Pepys tells us that "all the fleet took it in a transport of joy." On May 12 the fleet sailed from the Downs, and on the 25th it reappeared with the King on board; and thus the weapon of naval power first forged by the Stewart House passed into its keeping again. But in the interval this weapon had acquired a keener temper and had been wielded by stronger hands. England as a military State, disposing of a veteran army, must in any case have exercised an important influence upon the system of States to which she belonged. But England, armed on land, was also armed at sea, and a period which had begun with the ineffective expeditions of Charles I's reign, ended with intervention everywhere, supported by a naval and military force which seemed almost irresistible. Thus the Commonwealth may be regarded as a period of transition between the naval tradition of Elizabeth and the modern conception of the English navy. It is curious to find this most strikingly expressed by a statesman who during the impressionable years of youth had himself watched the great conflict between the English and the Dutch for naval supremacy. Shaftesbury, who served under Cromwell, and who was still a young man at the Restoration, had been nourished in a period of revolution upon the ideas of the future, and he put one of these into words when he said to the Pension Parliament: "There is not so lawful or commendable a jealousy in the world, as an Englishman's of the growing greatness of any Prince at sea.”

CHAPTER XVII

SCOTLAND FROM THE ACCESSION OF CHARLES I

TO THE RESTORATION

BEFORE the accession of Charles I Scotland had already had experience of an absentee King; in the twenty-two years during which James ruled the two kingdoms he had but once visited his native country, and his visit had extended to less than eleven weeks. But in the case of James there always remained the closest relation between himself and his northern subjects. Of none of their Kings had the Scots a more vivid impression than of the son of Mary Stewart an impression partly due to his personal idiosyncrasies, and partly to the peculiar circumstances of his reign. As the result of the Reformation, a national consciousness had been awakened which had quickened the popular interest in all the actions of the Government to a degree unknown at any previous period. Nor had any former King of Scots shown such a direct and persistent interest in every question that bore however remotely on the relations of the Crown to the subject. Thus it was that James and his Scottish people had come to a mutual understanding of each other's character and affinities which his long absence could not wholly efface. It was James' boast that he "knew the stomach" of his Scottish subjects, and his subjects had an equal knowledge of his own. In the case of his son it was wholly different. As we follow the events of Charles' reign, we have a difficulty in deciding whether King or people most completely misunderstood each other. Of the peculiarities of the Scottish intellect and temper, of the general conditions of the country which were the net result of its previous history, Charles to the last showed hardly a glimmering of knowledge, or even of appreciation. On the other hand, the Scots showed an equal inability to understand the character and motives and ends of a King whose ideals and methods of government seemed to them expressly directed against their national traditions and aspirations. In time they came to form a definite conception of him as their prince; but the man Charles remained to them a mystery to the end.

Policy of James VI

487

The Scottish Constitution, as Charles had inherited it from his father, made him virtually an absolute monarch. By a simple and effective process James had converted Parliament into a "baron court." As the business of the Scottish Parliament was arranged, it was directed and controlled by the "Lords of the Articles," and since their origin the election of these officials had been a ground of contention between the Crown and the Estates. The persistency and astuteness of James secured their election by the Crown, with the result that Parliament in all matters of high policy became the simple instrument of his will. From the date of his migration to England, indeed, it was not through Parliament but through his Privy Council that he governed Scotland, and of the one he was as uncontrolled master as he was of the other. In previous reigns the members of the Council had been chosen partly by the Estates and partly by the King; but, favoured by peculiar circumstances, James had succeeded in acquiring the sole privilege of nominating every member of the body. It was no vain boast, therefore, when James addressed his English Parliament in these words: "This I must say for Scotland, and may truly vaunt it: here I sit and govern it with my pen; I write and it is done; and by a Clerk of the Council I govern Scotland now - which others could not do by the sword."

In the Church James had made himself as supreme as in the State. It was mainly by the exercise of the royal authority that he had imposed Episcopacy on the country; for no collective expression of the national will had demanded it; and, as the new ecclesiastical system was constituted, it completed his conception of an ideal State. He nominated the Bishops on the same grounds as he nominated the Privy Councillors and the Lords of the Articles — the agreement of their views with his own on all questions that concerned the royal prerogative. But before the close of his reign James had been significantly reminded that there was a limit to his interference with the national conscience. He had successfully substituted the Episcopal for the Presbyterian form of Church government; but when, by the Five Articles of Perth, he sought to introduce novel rites and ceremonies (kneeling at Communion, Private Communion in cases of necessity, Private Baptism in like cases, the observance of the great annual festivals of the Christian Church, and Confirmation by the Bishops), he was warned alike by his ecclesiastical advisers and by the feeling of the nation that he was venturing on a dangerous way. Emboldened by his triumph over previous opposition, however, James through dexterous management procured the sanction of the Articles by both General Assembly and Parliament. But the double sanction commended them none the more to the nation. "And for our Church matters," wrote Archbishop Spottiswoode, who had from the first been James' most trusted adviser in Church affairs, "they are gone unless another course be taken." It was the heritage of these Five Articles that committed Charles to the policy which in his eyes was a Divine mission, but

488

Tendencies of Charles' government

[1625-33

which in the eyes of his subjects involved the forfeiture of his right to rule over them.

The period from the accession of Charles in 1625 till his coronation in the Chapel of Holyrood in 1633 was exempt from those civil commotions that were to give the remainder of his reign its disastrous distinction in the national history. Yet in Scotland as in England these years saw unmistakable symptoms of the future revolt that was to cleave both kingdoms in twain. During these eight years the train was effectually laid for that breach between Charles and his Scottish subjects which involved the National Covenant, the Solemn League and Covenant, and the collapse of the royal authority for a space of more than twenty years. It was through the joint action of the people and the nobility that these results were accomplished, and it was by Charles' policy during the opening years of his reign that the alliance between these two classes of his subjects was prepared. By an unhappy coincidence Charles at one and the same time alienated both his Scottish commons and nobility.

The prime concern of the people at large was the maintenance of that form of Protestantism which was their inheritance from the Reformation, and since Scottish Protestantism had come to birth it had been haunted by one constant dread - dread of Roman Catholicism, with which Scotland had yet more completely broken than any other country. But by the first acts of his reign Charles raised suspicions of the soundness of his Protestantism among his Scottish subjects, which were never allayed and rendered a mutual understanding impossible. His marriage with the Catholic Henrietta Maria, unpopular in England, was incomprehensible to Scottish Protestants, to whom any compromise with Rome was at once a menace to their faith and the abandonment of a fundamental principle. Charles' attitude towards the Five Articles of Perth (always regarded as a papistical backsliding) gave further ground for alarm regarding his future ecclesiastical policy. While he waived them in favour of such ministers as had taken Orders before their enactment, he made it distinctly understood that the Articles were henceforward to be the indisputable law of the Church. As yet the wide-spread discontent with these actions of the King could not express itself in open revolt; but by frequent meetings (prohibited by law), ministers and congregations mutually encouraged their fears and fostered the spirit which was to produce the Covenants.

Along other lines of his policy Charles equally alienated his nobles, by whose support, it is to be noted, his father had been enabled to give effect to his innovations in Church and State. Even under James the nobility had shown signs of restiveness at the status and authority that had been conferred on the Bishops. It was speedily seen, however, that Charles meant to go beyond his father in the bestowal of place and power on ecclesiastics. In reconstituting the Privy Council in 1626 he

1626-9]

The Act of Revocation

489

admitted five Bishops and the Primate Spottiswoode, who by Charles' express order was to take precedence of every subject. As in subsequent reconstructions of the Council Charles still further increased the number of ecclesiastical members, the nobles could not misunderstand his deliberate intention of giving the first place in his councils to churchmen, equally in affairs of Church and State. To the nobles of every shade of religious opinion, therefore, the whole episcopal order became a growing offence, and the overthrow of the Bishops was more than a subsidiary motive when as a body they threw themselves into the great revolt.

But it was another action of Charles, that, apart from purely religious motives, determined the Scottish nobles in joining the people in their uprising against his general policy. In this action, also, they saw only a deliberate purpose to weaken their order and to deprive them of their ancient standing in the country. In the first year of his reign Charles announced his intention of revoking all grants of Church and Crown lands since the beginning of the reign of Mary. Such an Act of Revocation was no new thing in Scotland; but previous revocations had been restricted to grants that had been made during each King's minority. There was hardly a family of consequence that would not in more or less degree be injuriously affected alike in its possessions and standing by the operation of Charles' measure. The nobles would be the main sufferers by the transactions, but the burghs, the Bishops, and even the lower clergy, all of whom had profited at one time or other by grants of Church lands, regarded the sweeping revocation with grave alarm.

In revoking the Church lands Charles might be accused of a highhanded action, taken mainly in the interest of the Crown; but conjoined with this measure there was another proposal which was undoubtedly in the public interest, and which Charles held out as the great inducement to the acceptance of his scheme. Besides the Church lands which had been so lavishly bestowed by the Crown, there had been equally lavish grants of the teinds or tithes, which had formed a substantial proportion of the revenue of the pre-Reformation Church. As these teinds had been promiscuously granted to persons other than the owners of the lands on which they were levied, the consequence had been equally disastrous to landowners and clergy. It was the intolerable grievance of the former that they could not remove their crops, exposed to all the changes of weather, till the "titular of the tithes," as he was called, had laid his hands on the proportion that accrued to him, while the clergy complained that they received only a fraction of the teinds, which by right should have been their exclusive property. Charles' proposal for remedying these evils was simple and effective: every landholder or heritor was to have the privilege, if he chose to use it, of purchasing his own teinds from the titulars. Alluring as this inducement must have been to many of his subjects, it was in defiance of opposition at every step that