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Cecil were exerting themselves on his behalf, and though his turn was to have been on the Monday, he too was reprieved, Cecil having interceded for them with the King, who had no delight in bloodshed, though he was easily terrified. He even prevailed to save Raleigh's manor of Sherborne from confiscation, though there were more than a dozen applicants for it.

The object of this scene was to satisfy James's mind whether Cobham would persist in his accusation to the end. The three more noted prisoners, Grey, Cobham, and Raleigh, were taken to the Tower, where Grey died after eleven years, and Cobham was released, and died in great poverty. Markham and two more of the conspirators were banished for life.

CAMEO II.

Reprieve of Raleigh. 1604.

CAMEO III.

Presbyterian address.

1603.

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EVERY man in England was anxious as to the part King James might take in Church matters. The Presbyterians had sent a Northampton|shire gentleman named Pickering to congratulate the King even before he left Scotland, and to endeavour to obtain a promise that he would favour their sect, as that in which he had been bred up; and Archbishop Whitgift sent Dr. Neville, the Dean of Canterbury, with com. pliments on his accession, and hopes that the King would continue to uphold the Church of England.

James replied that such was his full intention, and he showed that he was in earnest by warning off the Puritans who were hastening to him with petitions against the Church, and by a proclamation forbid. ding all innovations in doctrine or in discipline. The Roman Catholics likewise entreated him for toleration, and while in Scotland he had made them numerous promises. Some of his best friends had been Scottish Romanists, and he was inclined to favour them; but he was assured that to do so openly would be his destruction by offending his Protestant subjects, and he ended by deciding to refuse them all licence for freedom of worship. while he personally treated many of them with distinction. Thus of course he drove them to shifts and subterfuges. Priests circulated among them, and in most mansions of Romanist families there was a cunningly-contrived chamber, where such a guest might be hidden in case of danger. Some families compounded for the fine to which they were liable for not attending the parish church by paying a stated sum every year; some went to church often enough to avoid the penalty, others, in the districts favourable to them, took their chance, though always with the risk of being informed against and mulcted with all the arrears.

Conference with the Puritans.

1604.

Puritanism had more hope, though its great champion Cartwright CAMEO III. was just dead at the age of sixty. The party had often communicated with James while still in Scotland, and solicited his interposition with Elizabeth, and he, glad to obtain any partisans in England, and in the hands of his own Calvinist subjects, had seemed to lend them a willing ear. Thus they were encouraged to draw up a great petition, which was contrived chiefly by two gentlemen named Arthur Hildersham and Stephen Egerton. It attacked almost all the Catholic customs of the Church and prayed for relief from these observances. They intended that it should be signed by a thousand clergy, and therefore called it the Millenary petition, though they only obtained seven hundred and fifty. three names. There were others who termed it the Lying petition. They begged for a conference with their opponents, a thing to which Queen Elizabeth had never consented. She looked on the matter from the Catholic side, with her own mind fully made up, and making no concessions to Calvinism but what were wrung from her by necessity; while James, on the other hand, bred up by the Calvinists, weary of their tyranny, and dissatisfied with their doctrine, naturally and wisely desired to understand what the two parties in the Church which owned his supremacy had to say for themselves. It is therefore very unjust to him to say that he permitted the conference in order to display his own theological knowledge. His whole behaviour in the matter justified the saying, that he was the wisest fool in Christendom, or he might rather be said to have shown himself the most foolish wise man.

The conference took place at Hampton Court Palace in the January of 1604. The King nominated, to represent Puritan divines, Reynolds and Sparkes from Oxford, and Chatterton and Knewstubbs from Cambridge.

He would better have satisfied the party that justice was being done to them if he had let them choose their own delegates, and permitted the members to be more equally matched with those of the Church party, of whom nineteen were present, their offices marking them out. Archbishop Whitgift, now very old and infirm, left the chief debate to Bancroft, Bishop of London, and there were six more Bishops, all men of considerable learning and ability, also seven Deans, of whom the most noted were the saintly Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster, and Nicolas Overall, Dean of S. Paul's, who put the finishing touches to the Church Catechism. Archdeacon King was reputed one of the best speakers of his time, and was also there.

On the first day, the 14th of January, the King shut himself up with the Bishops, and the Puritans supposed it was to concoct measures against them; but the truth was that he wanted to be convinced in his own mind on certain points before throwing them into the arena. He wanted to understand the Church of England's defence of Confirmation, Absolution, and lay excommunication, and likewise to devise means of obtaining fit and able ministers for Ireland.

CAMEO III.

He did not approve of Confirmation being treated as a completion of The Hamp Baptism or an indispensable Sacrament.

ton Court Conference. 1604.

The Archbishop denied that the English Church held Baptism incomplete without Confirmation and referred to Apostolic practice, which Bancroft followed up with a reference to Hebrew vi. 2, observing further that "Mr. Calvin" had so expounded the text; Bishop Matthew of Durham also spoke of the laying of hands on the infants brought to our blessed Lord.

Then came Absolution, which James had heard likened to the Pope's pardons, and thought unnecessary except in cases of excommunication. Here Whitgift replied by showing him the forms of Confession and Absolution in the Daily Service, of which he approved; and Bancroft referred to the other two forms, supporting them by the mention of the subject in the Confessions of Augsburg, Saxony, and Bohemia, and again James fully approved.

But he much disliked lay Baptism even in cases of necessity, especially if it was to be performed by a woman; and the argument on this head lasted three hours, ending at last in the insertion of the words "curate or lawful minister" in the rubric for private Baptism. It was the only matter in which the Bishops yielded an old Catholic practice to his prejudice.

As to excommunication, it was the penalty for offences proved in ecclesiastical courts, and King James rightly held that it was not fitting that it should be pronounced by lawyers acting instead of the Bishops. This was agreed to, but the affairs of the Irish Church seem to have been forgotten or passed over.

On the ensuing Monday the real conference with the Puritan ministers took place. Prince Henry, though only eleven years old, was admitted to hear it, sitting on a stool by his father, and a Scotch minister, Mr. Patrick Galloway, was also present.

The four Puritans had the bad taste to appear, not in clerical gowns. bands, and cassocks, but in what were called Turkey gowns, a sort of undress approaching to a dressing-gown, perhaps as a means of avoiding the acknowledgment of any canonical dress, in which the Bishops and Deans would certainly appear.

James began by making them an address, in which he called them "the most grave, learned, and modest of the aggrieved sort," and bade them state their objections at large. Upon which Dr. Reynolds reduced his requests to four heads-purity of doctrine, appointment of good pastors, good Church government, revision of the Prayer-book, in which of course much more was included. He then began to except against certain sentences in the Thirty-nine Articles, but was interrupted by Bishop Bancroft, who reminded his Majesty that there was an ancient canon forbidding men to speak against what they had once subscribed, and then proceeded to attack the garb in which the Puritans had thought fit to appear. "Fain would I know the end you aim at, and whether you be not of Mr. Cartwright's mind, who affirmed that

we ought in ceremonies rather to conform to the Turks than the Papists. I doubt you approve his position because here appearing before his Majesty in Turkey gowns, not in your scholastic habits according to the order of the universities."

James, however, checked the Bishop, saying that there could be no order if each party did not speak at large without chopping.

On Confirmation there was a great debate, for the Puritans wished to establish the foreign Protestant fashion of a so-called Confirmation of young people by each parish pastor, and Dr. Reynolds averred that in a diocese of 600 parishes it was very inconvenient to permit Confirmation by a Bishop alone, and there could be no complete examination.

Bancroft replied that the Bishops' chaplains or other appointed ministers examined the children, and both he and the Bishop of Winchester defied Reynolds to show that in primitive times the rite was administered by any save Bishops. The result was to consider whether the word "examination" might not be added to "Confirmation."

Some discourse followed, in the course of which the opinion of Rosny was quoted, that if the reformed churches in France had kept the same order as that of England, there had been many more Protestants there.

A desire to add sundry negations to the Articles was answered by the King that it would make the book as big as the Bible and confound the reader.

Dr. Reynolds then said that the Church Catechism (then ending with the explanation of the Lord's Prayer) was too short, and that Dean Nowell's was too long. To this the King agreed, laying down two rules: First, that curious and deep questions be avoided in the fundamental instruction of the people; secondly, that there should not be so general a departure from the Papists that everything should be accounted an error wherein we agree with them.

To a petition for a fresh translation of the Bible there was ready con. sent, and there ensued a curious debate about the publication of Papist and seditious pamphlets in discussion between the Secular priests and the Jesuits, which his Majesty said might be furnished in order to nourish a schism among them!

That it was desirable that learned and godly ministers should be placed in every parish every one was agreed, but the actual incumbents could not be ejected; and lay patronage caused, as the Bishop of Winchester showed, one difficulty. The Bishop of London wisely observed that "a praying ministry" was the great need, and recommended that godly homilies should be read by ministers who had no gift of preaching. Then came the question of pluralities, mooted by Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, who wished that "some might have single coats before others have doublets." Bancroft said, "A doublet is necessary in cold weather," and the matter remained as it was for more than two centuries.

CAMEO III. The Puritan objection. 1604.

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