mint; piracy was become a project owned and authorized against the subject. For the peace we had, what peace was that which drew out the English to a needless and dishonourable voyage against the Spaniard at Cales? * Or that which lent our shipping to a treacherous and antichristian war against the poor protestants of Rochelle + our suppliants? What peace was that * Mr. D'Israeli, in his article on the Duke of Buckingham, has a curious pasquinade on this inglorious event, which he introduces by the following remarks:-"The war with Spain was clamoured for; and an expedition to Cadiz, in which the duke was reproached by the people for not taking the command, as they supposed, from deficient spirit, only ended in our undisciplined soldiers, under bad commanders, getting drunk in the Spanish cellars, insomuch that not all had the power to run away. On this expedition, some verses were handed about, which probably are now first printed, from a manuscript letter of the times; a political pasquinade which shows the utter silliness of this,' Ridiculus Mus.' 6 VERSES ON THE EXPEDITION TO CADIZ. 'There was a crow sat on a stone, When he fell down-then down fell he! When it returned-it came again!"" (Curiosities of Literature, iii. 445.) The Duke of Buckingham is said to have been making preparations for succouring Rochelle, when he was assassinated by Felton, (Clarendon, i, 49.) All thoughts, however, of affording aid to the protestants were abandoned after his death; (i. 80;) and in 1641, the parliament, in their "Remonstrance," reproached the king with "the loss of Rochelle, by first suppressing their fleet with his own royal ships, by which the protestant religion in France infinitely suffered." (ii. 50.) This is afterwards alluded to by the historian as one of the causes that led the Huguenots to side with the parliament against the court. (iii 363.) If we may give credit to Gerbier, a foreign tool of the duke's, there was at one time a real intention, at least on Buckingham's part, to relieve the Rochellois. See his relation in D'Israeli, (Curiosities of Literature, iii. 477, sqq.) who adds an epitaph on the duke, which contains as much truth as bitterness: "If idle trav'llers ask, who lieth here, Let the duke's tomb this for inscription bear: Paint Cales and Rhé, make French and Spanish laugh, which fell to rob the French by sea, to the embarring of all our merchants in that kingdom? which brought forth that unblest expedition to the Isle of Rhé, doubtful whether more calamitous in the success, or in the design, betraying all the flower of our military youth and best commanders to a shameful surprisal and execution. This was the peace we had, and the peace we gave, whether to friends or to foes abroad. And if at home any peace were intended us, what meant those Irish billetted soldiers in all parts of the kingdom, and the design of German horse to subdue us in our peaceful houses? For our religion, where was there a more ignorant, profane, and vicious clergy, learned in nothing but the antiquity of their pride, their covetousness, and superstition?† whose unsincere and leavenous doctrine, corrupting the people, first taught them looseness, then bondage; loosening them from all sound knowledge and strictness of life, the more to fit them for the bondage of tyranny and superstition. So that what was left us for other nations not to pity, rather than admire or envy, all those seventeen years, no wise man could see. For wealth and plenty in a land where justice reigns not is no argument of a flourishing state, but of a nearness rather to ruin or commotion. These were not "some miscarriages" only of government, "which might escape," but a universal distemper, and reducement of law to arbitrary power; not through the evil counsels of "some men," but through the constant course and practice of all that were in highest favour: whose worst actions frequently avowing he took upon himself; and what faults did not yet seem in public to be originally his, such care he took by professing and proclaming openly, as made them all at * This expedition against the island of Rhé is described by Clarendon as more unsuccessful and unfortunate than that of Cadiz. (History, &c. i. 6.) -ED. + Clarendon, though he makes a general eulogium on the order, admits that the clergy about Whitehall were occasionally guilty of much "indiscretion and folly ;" but is angry that one bad sermon should be more taken notice of than a hundred others, remarkable for their wisdom and sobriety. (i. 136.) Upon this Warburton justly remarks, that there was good reason for the distinction, " because that one sermon was supported, cried up, and adopted by the court, while the hundred were neglected and discountenanced." (vii. 518.) length his own adopted sins. The persons also, when he could no longer protect, he esteemed and favoured to the end; but never otherwise than by constraint yielded any of them to due punishment; thereby manifesting that what they did was by his own authority and approbation. Yet here he asks, "whose innocent blood he hath shed, what widows' or orphans' tears can witness against him?" After the suspected poisoning of his father, not inquired into but smothered up, and him protected and advanced to the very half of his kingdom, who was accused in parliament to be the author of the fact; (with much more evidence than duke Dudley, that false protector, is accused upon record to have poisoned Edward the Sixth ;) after all his rage and persecution, after so many years of cruel war on his people in three kingdoms! Whence the author of "Truths Manifest," a Scotsman, not unacquainted with affairs, positively affirms, "that there hath been more Christian blood shed by the commission, approbation, and connivance of king Charles, and his father, James, in the latter end of their reign, than in the ten Roman persecutions." Not to speak of those many whippings, pillories, and other corporal inflictions, wherewith his reign also, before this war, was not unbloody; some have died in prison under cruel restraint, others in banishment, whose lives were shortened through the rigour of that persecution wherewith so many years he infested the true church. And those six members all men judged to have escaped no less than capital danger, whom he so greedily pursuing into the house of commons, had not there the forbearance to conceal how much it troubled him, "that the birds were flown." If some vulture in the mountains could have opened his beak intelligibly and spoke, what fitter words could he have uttered at the loss of his prey? The tyrant Nero, though not yet deserving that name, set his hand so unwillingly to the execution of a condemned person, as to wish "he had not known letters." Certainly for a king himself to charge his subjects with high-treason, and so vehemently to prosecute them in his own cause, as to do the office of a searcher, argued in him no great aversation from shedding blood, were it but to " tisfy his anger," and that revenge was no unpleasing morsel to him, whereof he himself thought not much to be so dili sa gently his own caterer. But we insist rather upon actual, than what was probable. what was He now falls to examine the causes of this war, as a difficulty which he had long "studied" to find out. "It was not," saith he, 66 my withdrawing from Whitehall; for no account in reason could be given of those tumults, where an orderly guard was granted." But if it be a most certain truth, that the parliament could never yet obtain of him any guard fit to be confided in, then by his own confession some account of those pretended tumults "may in reason be given;" and both concerning them and the guards enough hath been said already. "Whom did he protect against the justice of parliament?" Whom did he not to his utmost power? Endeavouring_to have rescued Strafford from their justice, though with the destruction of them and the city; to that end expressly commanding the admittance of new soldiers into the Tower, raised by Suckling and other conspirators under pretence for the Portugal: though that ambassador being sent to, utterly denied to know of any such commission from his master. And yet, that listing continued: not to repeat his other plot of bringing up the two armies. But what can be disputed with such a king, in whose mouth and opinion the parliament itself was never but a faction, and their justice no justice, but "the dictates and overswaying insolence of tumults and rabbles?" and under that excuse avouches himself openly the general patron of most notorious delinquents, and approves their flight out of the land, whose crimes were such, as that the justest and the fairest trial would have soonest condemned them to death. But did not Catiline plead in like manner against the Roman senate, and the injustice of their trial, and the justice of his flight from Rome? Cæsar also, then hatching tyranny, injected the same scrupulous demurs, to stop the sentence of death in full and free senate decreed on Lentulus and Cethegus, two of Catiline's accomplices, which were renewed and urged for Strafford. He vouchsafes to the reformation, by both kingdoms intended, no better name than "innovation and ruin both in church and state." And what we would have learned so gladly of him in other passages before, to know wherein, he tells us now of his own accord. The expelling bishops out of the house of peers, that was "ruin to the state; the "removing" them "root and branch," this was "ruin to the church." How happy could this nation be in such a governor, who counted that their ruin, which they thought their deliverance; the ruin both of church and state, which was the recovery and the saving of them both? To the passing of those bills against bishops how is it likely that the house of peers gave so hardly their consent, which they gave so easily before to the attaching them of high-treason, twelve at once, only for protesting that the parliament could not act without them? Surely if their rights and privileges were thought so undoubted in that house, as here maintained; then was that protestation, being meant and intended in the name of their whole spiritual order, no treason; and so that house itself will become liable to a just construction either of injustice to appeach them for so consenting, or of usurpation, representing none but themselves, to expect that their voting or not voting should obstruct the commons: who not for "five repulses of the lords," no, not for fifty, were to desist from what in the name of the whole kingdom they dernanded, so long as those lords were none of our lords. And for the bill against root and branch, though it passed not in both houses till many of the lords and some few of the commons, either enticed away by the king, or overawed by the sense of their own malignancy not prevailing, deserted the par iament, and made a fair riddance of themselves; that was no warrant for them who remained faithful, being far the greater number, to lay aside that bill of root and branch, till the return of their fugitives; a bill so necessary and so much desired by themselves as well as by the people. This was the partiality, this degrading of the bishops, a thing so wholesome in the state, and so orthodoxal in the church, both ancient and reformed; which the king rather than assent to "will either hazard both his own and the kingdom's ruin," by our just defence against his force of arms; or prostrate our consciences in a blind obedience to himself, and those men, whose superstition, zealous or unzealous, would enforce upon us an antichristian tyranny in the church, neither primitive, apostolical, nor more anciently universal than some other manifest corruptions. But "he was bound, besides his judgment, by a most strict and indispensable oath, to preserve the order and the rights 2 c VOL. I. |