23—
The King and His Church

Religious issues could never for long remain in the background. The peoples of Charles's kingdoms were for the most part religious people, the majority of whom shared a spiritual zeal that for a couple of generations had been channelled into opposition to Spain and the Papacy. Since the defeat of the Spanish Armada the dread of popery and the Roman Catholic Church had gradually subsided, but a majority of Englishmen were still anti-papist under the skin. An irrational fear of 'popery' and 'papists', whatever the terms might mean, ran in many Englishmen who had nevertheless accepted a Catholic Queen and two peace treaties with Spain, and who had done little to help the Protestant Princess Elizabeth in her opposition to the Catholic bloc in Europe: Parliament had failed her, volunteers to fight for her numbered no more than a few thousands, money to support her arms amounted to only a trickle from the public at large. From time to time murmurs of a purely Protestant succession disturbed the English Court, but as Mary followed Charles, and James followed Mary, and Elizabeth followed James the rumours accorded less and less with reality. When the Prayer Book of 1636 was found to have omitted the customary prayer for the Queen of Bohemia and her family, the initial consternation was assuaged by the practical realization that there were now four English royal children to pray for.

Charles was never likely to make an issue of religion. So long, he always said, as a person accepted the fundamental belief of Christianity he had no quarrel with him. That he was basically tolerant his relations with his wife and his mother bore out. He had Catholic friends and advisers, he accepted the Puritan sympathies of Pembroke, he took as given the Calvinism of his brother-in-law Frederick and the staunch Protestantism of his sister; he had accepted, indeed loved, his Presbyterian tutor Thomas Murray and his Lutheran Uncle of

Denmark; he had understood and never quarrelled with Buckingham's religious vicissitudes. Theological disputation learned at his father's knee remained an enjoyable but superficial titillation of the intellect unaccompanied by any expectation of conversion. But the rules of the game had to be kept; when, as in Spain, he felt his opponents were not dealing fairly with him, he would break off the discussion immediately. From more earnest efforts at conversion he shied away, and he disliked his father's theological college at Chelsea for the very reason that it trained men to combat Romanism; it would be better, he considered, if instead of studying controversy it worked for union.^[1]

A man's religion is a reflection of his character and the very fastidiousness with which Charles shrank from any controversy that might sully his worship was basic to his nature. His need for order, without any adventurous intellectual probings, was reflected in his religion. In this respect his reliance upon Laud was of the same kind as his reliance upon van der Doort. As the one catalogued and cared for his pictures, leaving to Charles the aesthetic pleasure of viewing them, so the other ordered and arranged his Church, leaving to Charles the beauty of untroubled worship. Charles came increasingly close to Laud in an unemotional way, not only choosing him to preach on public occasions, but to baptize and bury the royal children, and he supported the efforts which Laud made, as Bishop of London, to bring the London churches into a condition not only of order but of conformity: for order must apply to the whole as well as to the parts, and order implied regularity. The extempore preaching of Puritan ministers, still less of the itinerant 'lecturers' who were accustomed to address Puritan congregations, had no place in this intended order, and Laud was zealous in securing their dismissal. He also took every opportunity of removing the communion table to the position of an altar, of embellishing the City churches with images, and doing reverence to them and to the crucifix. The repair of church fabric, essential in itself, too often became an issue between Puritans and the Bishop of London. Particularly notorious was the case of the reconsecration of St Mary Cray in the City when Laud's 'unseemly' kneeling and bowing was exaggerated and remembered to his cost. It was unfortunate, though natural, that the kind of uniformity Charles and his Bishop were insisting upon should raise afresh the spectre of an all-devouring Papacy. Puritans who had been watchful under Elizabeth, suspicious under James, became increasingly militant

under Charles. They were encouraged by the Bible, the pulpit, and the press.

Translations of the Bible had begun with Wycliffe's work at the end of the fourteenth century, but none had made a stronger mark than the new translation whose publication James authorized in 1611. This was made in the full flowering of an English language which was magnificent to listen to and splendid to roll on the tongue, and it caught the imagination of a generation accustomed to be moved by the power of words in the theatre of Shakespeare and Marlowe. Moreover, the people had their own theatre in the pulpit, their own actors in the preachers who told with shattering rhetoric of the power of the Lord, the terrors of hell, the wickedness of the devil, and of his representatives on earth, the Pope and the bishops. To the Bible and the pulpit were added a growing number of printed pamphlets and books. Since 1557 a monopoly of printing had rested with a Company of 97 London stationers and a few years later the right to license was vested in the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Bishop of London. It was then necessary for a book or pamphlet first to be licensed and then to be registered with the Stationers for publication. The regulations could not prevent the appearance of clandestine publications, and in opposition to Laud's policy printed sermons and tracts of all kinds proliferated.

Charles had ample warning of what was happening. There was, for example, the case of Alexander Leighton, a Scot by birth and early education. After practising as a preacher in Durham, Leighton finished his education in Leyden, allegedly in medicine but no doubt under the influence of the many sectarians in that city. The London College of Physicians failed to recognize his degree and back in London Leighton took again to preaching, which became increasingly, and popularly, anti-episcopal. In 1628 he had ready Sion's Plea Against Prelacy , a petition calling for the extirpation of bishops, to which he claimed 500 signatures. To evade censorship the petition, now swollen into a considerable treatise, was printed in Holland. A copy reached Laud, Leighton was arrested and the Star Chamber sentenced him to whipping, to stand in the pillory at New Palace Yard there to have one of his ears lopped off, his nose split, and his face branded with the letters S.S. for sower of sedition. He was later again to be whipped and pilloried at Cheapside where his other ear would be cut off. The fine of £10,000, which he had no means of paying, was an example of the exemplary fines imposed by the Star Chamber and

High Commission with the possible hope that a small sum might accrue to the Exchequer.

On 26 November 1630, when Leighton's punishment was carried out, the scene set the pattern for dozens that would follow: the procession of friends supporting him to Westminster; his wife glorifying his punishment; his own ecstacy. 'This is Christ's yoke!', he cried, as the pillory was clamped upon him. 'Blessed be God, if I had a hundred, I would lose them all for the cause!', he exclaimed as the executioner lopped off his ear. On Charles's orders further suffering at Cheapside was remitted; but the procedure had been established from beginning to end: the petition, the signatures, the printing in Holland, the inevitable discovery, the Star Chamber conviction (which was not unduly harsh for the time), the procession to the pillory, the speech to the people. Even the mixture of personal rancour and religious zeal shown by Leighton was to be present in later martyrs of the Puritan cause.^[2]

Another foretaste of the future was given in the same year when an unnamed oatmeal maker was brought before the High Commission for taking upon himself to preach. He refused to take off his hat and when asked why, said he would never doff it to bishops. 'But you will to privy counsellors?' he was asked. 'As you are privy counsellors', he responded, suiting the action to the words, 'I put off my hat, but as ye are rags of the beast, lo! I put it on again!' Towards the end of his interrogation the Bishop of Winchester arrived and took a vacant seat at the bottom of the table. 'Let us dismiss this frantic, foolish fellow', he advised, 'we do but lose our time.' 'Hold thy peace!', roared the oatmeal maker, 'thou tail of the beast that sittest at the lower end of the table!'.^[3]

All this was highly repugnant to Charles. Sectarianism polluted his religion, he believed with his father that it threatened the political stability of his kingdom, its very fervency appeared to him as raucous and ranting; its intolerance would breed its opposite: 'The neglect of punishing Puritans breeds Papists' as he would write on the margin of a Report from Archbishop Neile of York in January 1634. No disturbances among his courtiers upset the equilibrium of his life so much as this unseemly conduct of the Puritans. He was content that Laud should deal with them, intervening only, as he had done with Leighton, to let his natural compassion prevent too harsh a punishment.

Like other rulers of diverse territories Charles wished for greater unity between the various parts of his kingdom and he shared the feeling

which was growing on both sides of the border for a Coronation in Scotland and for a Scottish Parliament. Meantime the Scottish bishops who had been appointed by James to prepare a Prayer Book for their country had finished their work, though no attempt had been made to bring the book into public use. Though in form not unlike the English Book of Common Prayer the Scottish Book had a definitely Puritan slant. Many sections showed the influence of John Knox, it omitted certain rituals such as the sign of the cross in baptism, and it laid down that the altar might be placed as the minster found convenient. Laud advised that it could not be accepted and that 'it were best to take the English liturgy without any variation'. Charles agreed in spite of Scottish warnings that not only religion but national feeling was involved. And so the ill-fated decision was taken, and when Charles set out on 13 May 1633 he had resolved that the unity between the two countries should be religious as well as political. Henrietta-Maria could no more be crowned in Edinburgh than in London so he necessarily went alone, in some slight anxiety since she was again pregnant, though his spirits were high at the prospect of seeing at last the country where he was born.

It was no mean enterprise to convey the paraphernalia of a king's suite over the long route from London to Edinburgh, and Justices of the Peace were ordered well in advance to attend to the condition of the roads, an injunction which many of them took badly: it was too early in the year for road repairs, the weather was not seasonable, the highways were in deep clay, bridges were not completed, though fords, they grudgingly conceded, were passable. Many of the articles intended for use in the Chapel Royal, including musical instruments, were sent by sea from Tilbury to Leith in the Dreadnought , which was taken off her duty of guarding the narrow seas. Laud, as Dean of the Chapel Royal, was to accompany the King, orders for provisions and lodgings had been sent on ahead.

Charles hunted and enjoyed magnificent hospitality on his way.^[4] He called again at Little Gidding and stopped at Worksop, Stamford, Grantham and York, where he rode to see Lord President Went-worth's new park. He noted the condition of York Minster and of Durham Cathedral, later writing to their Deans to suggest improvements. He reached Edinburgh on June 15 when one of his first acts was to make Laud a Privy Councillor of Scotland, which was a severe affront to the Scots in seeming to emphasize the importance of an English bishop in Scottish affairs. The Coronation itself on June 18

was a splendid affair in which, again, Laud's prominent role offended the Scots. A question of precedence also marred the proceedings, Charles wishing the Church in the person of the Archbishop of St Andrews to take precedence of Lord Chancellor Hay, Earl of Kinnoul. He was very annoyed at having to give way, 'I will not meddle further with that old cankered goutish man!', he exclaimed angrily,^[5] showing a characteristic impatience at being crossed together with an unaccustomed lapse from courtesy. But mutual oaths were taken in the Cathedral, first by the King, who swore to observe the fundamental laws of the realm, then by the Scottish Lords who swore obedience and fealty to the Crown. Immediately the ceremony was over Charles despatched letters to the Queen that were delivered to her only forty hours after they were written. Charles was delighted with the affection shown him which, he wrote, surpassed all belief. At the royal table he was served by all the leading Earls, and he created twelve new knights, a Viscount, two Earls and a Marquis. There was nevertheless much disquiet at the form of the service in Holyrood chapel on the day of the Coronation. The Scots were quite unused to the sight of bishops in their robes and of clergy in white surplices genuflexing to the crucifix on an altar at the East end of the chapel. They were still more perturbed when similar practices were brought to the people's church at St Giles.

Two days after his coronation Charles opened the Scottish Parliament. He followed its business day by day in person, anxious, indeed, to get two particular Bills through, one confirming the church legislation passed in his father's reign, the other confirming his own right to settle the apparel of judges, magistrates and clergy — which meant, in effect, to insist upon the wearing of robes and surplices. The Bills passed, but only just. Charles anxiously noted the votes and there was even rumour of manipulation in order to achieve the desired result. He refused even to look at a supplication against the legislation. His other business in Scotland concerned the Prayer Book. Having quietly dropped the version prepared by the Scottish Bishops he allowed Laud to propose the introduction of the English Prayer Book instead. But the majority of Scottish Bishops were so insistent that such an action would be unwise that it was agreed to attempt a compromise, with the instruction that the new liturgy should be 'as near that of England as might be'.

Charles continued to show his usual good health and tirelessness. On July 1 he set out on a sentimental journey to Dunfermline, where

he was born, and to Stirling, Linlithgow and Falkland so closely associated with his family. He was greeted everywhere with the greatest enthusiasm. The only misadventure occurred when he was crossing the Firth of Forth from Burntisland to Edinburgh, where a sudden storm blew up and his boat capsized. Charles escaped unhurt but the incident was afterwards attributed to the malevolent influence of the witches Charles spoke to in 1634. On the 14th he set off for home. Outstripping his suite, he rode post from Berwick to London in four days, crossed to Greenwich from Blackwall to avoid the City, and was with Henrietta on the 20th. She was said to have been 'a perfect mourning turtle's in his absence, but she had nevertheless gone up river to visit the Duchess of Buckingham and had enjoyed racing her boat with George Goring.^[6] Three months after Charles's return she gave birth at St James's Palace to James, Duke of York.

On August 6, on his first visit to Charles after their return from Scotland, Laud received a new greeting: 'My Lord's Grace of Canterbury', said the King who had just received news of the death of Abbot on August 4, 'you are very welcome'. Although the appointment hardly changed the relationship of the two men it gave Laud greater authority, and one of his first actions was to send Sir Nathaniel Brent as his Vicar-General over the whole of England south of the Trent to report upon the state of the churches.

Brent found that church fabric was often decayed, that churchyards were overgrown and sometimes used as mustering grounds for the trained bands, that pictures and images were neglected. Irreverence in church took many forms. There was often a general tramping about and talking during service, even an exchange of remarks with the preacher; the altar was used as a hat-stand, as a table upon which people scribbled notes, or simply as a seat. It is hardly surprising that there was also a failure to bow at the name of Mary or Jesus. Indeed, one minister was so anxious to avoid this practice that he contrived to omit the names from his service. Many preachers were cheerfully conversational and breezily abusive. Reports of stipends received and duties neglected were common. For sheer desecration perhaps nothing exceeded the actions at Saxby of Lord Castleton's bailiff who stripped the lead from the church roof, melted it in the middle aisle of the church and, when some of the liquid lead ran through the floor on to a coffin beneath, took up the floor and recovered the lead by burning the coffin with the corpse in it.^[7]

The abuses were so diverse and so widespread, ranging from trifling to fundamental, that any attempt to impose uniformity and decency was an augean task. In clearing up obvious desecration, in insisting upon the repair of fabric, restoring impropriations, and calling abusive clergy to order, Laud was on safe enough ground. The question of ceremonies was far more difficult and nowhere was this more apparent than in the altar controversy. Permanently fixed at the East end of the church and railed, it would be safe from desecration but implied a form of worship remote and mystical, requiring priestly mediation in the act of worship rather than the direct relationship with God that the Puritan expected. The widespread use of extempore prayer was similarly difficult to deal with, insistence upon the use of the Prayer Book seeming to imply that the individual was incapable of direct communion. Besides, as Samual Ward of Ipswich said, it was impossible for anyone to carry about with him a manual of prayer suitable for all occasions. He declared further that a parrot might be instructed to use set forms and an ape might be taught to bow and gesticulate. Ward was brought before the High Commission and imprisoned.

Another matter on which Charles was opposed by his Puritan subjects was Sunday sport. James had found that many people were debarred by Puritan opinion from Sunday recreation and in his Declaration of Sports declared it his wish that, so long as they had attended church on the Sabbath, they should not be hindered from partaking of any lawful form of sport or dancing. Charles's notice was brought to the matter in connection with the church feasts called wakes, and in particular to the Somersetshire Ales which a Puritan magistrate had forbidden on the ground that they led to drunkenness and brawling. Charles intervened personally, brought the offending magistrate before the Council, commanded him to rescind his ban, and ordered the republication of The Book of Sports in October 1633. As a normal means of spreading information it was to be read from all the pulpits in the land. Refusals to read it were widespread and contributed further to the sources of conflict between Charles and the Puritans.^[8]

There was more behind the controversy than the issue as to whether or not the Sabbath should be reserved solely as a day of worship. Puritans would gather together after church service for further preaching and discussion, and their leaders had come to rely heavily upon these meetings for building up their organization. To them such an attractive alternative as Sunday sports was dangerous.

But they hardly realized the extent to which discussion was splitting their own ranks. Already Puritanism had taken two main forms — the Presbyterian based upon Calvin's Church-state at Geneva, in which authority was vested in groups of ruling elders and ministers known as Presbyteries and whose organization was as rigid as Laud's; and the Independents who had little use for organization but based their Church upon the instructions of Robert Browne that any group of believers constituted a Church 'without tarrying for any'. They recognized no separate priesthood, ministers and officers were elected from the whole congregation, their only requirement being the covenant they took with each other and with God to form a Church. Such people were open to the continual reception of new ideas. The parting words of Henry Robinson to the Mayflower  — 'If God reveal anything to you by other instruments of His, be as ready to receive it as ever you were to receive truth through me' — was the essence of a toleration even wider than that which the Independent Church claimed for itself. Access to the Bible in English; emphasis upon the sermon rather than the set pieces of the Prayer Book; a growing literature of unorthodoxy; increasing numbers of people from all walks of life who stood up on their own doorsteps to expound the word of God as they understood it; above all, the belief that 'form' was inessential and that only 'spirit' mattered gave vitality to the words of Browne and Robinson.

The Privy Council indicated its perception, as well as its dismay, when it complained that

there remain in divers parts of the Kingdom sundry sorts of separatists, novelists, and sectaries, as namely — Brownists, Anabaptists, Arians, Traskites, Familists, and some other sorts, who, upon Sundays and other festival days, under pretence of repetition of sermons, ordinarily use to meet together in great numbers in private houses and other obscure places, and there keep private conventicles and exercise of religion by law prohibited, to the corruption of sundry his Majesty's good subjects.

They ordered JPs to enter any suspicious house and to search every room for people and unlicensed books.

The heady wine of sectarianism was particularly strong in London, in whose narrow streets and alleys conventicles would form and secret printing presses be established. All over London, indeed, Puritanism in its widest sense was gathering large audiences to listen to preachers who denounced Laud and the bishops in the most lurid

terms and whose sermons were associated largely with vengeance and hell fire and to a lesser degree with forgiveness and the love of God. All had in common a belief in a predestination that marked them as God's Elect, certain of salvation, while those who failed to respond were certain of hell fire and everlasting damnation.

Puritanism needed its martyrs and was bound to have them. In June 1637 William Prynne, Henry Burton, and John Bastwick marched in procession to the pillory at Westminster as Leighton had done. Prynne was a lawyer who already had turned his amazing verbosity and violence of language against the practice of drinking healths (Health's Sickness ), and the fashion of wearing a lock of hair over one shoulder (The Unloveliness of Love-Locks ). In 1633 he published Histriomastix which fulminated against dancing and acting, the use of boys in women's roles, and the appearance of women upon the stage. Prynne's style was emphatic. In spite of the fact that his pamphlets ran to inordinate length and were embellished with a wealth of marginal notes, being, indeed, essentially boring, they were sparked into life by an excessive use of vituperation. He used his learning to draw on the classics and declared Nero's murder to be justified because of his fondness for the theatre. Those who enjoyed plays were 'devils incarnate', women actors were 'notorious whores'. Not surprisingly a reference to the Queen was assumed, and Prynne's punishment was severe. In May 1634 the Star Chamber fined him £5000, he was expelled from Lincoln's Inn, deprived of his Oxford degree, and shorn of both his ears while he stood in the pillory first at Westminster and then at Cheapside. He was to be imprisoned for life.

It was evidence of his Puritan connections that, in spite of his imprisonment, he contrived not only to continue to write but to publish unlicensed pamphlets. One of them, News from Ipswich , was a violent attack upon bishops and it was for this that in 1637 Prynne was once again standing in the pillory with his two friends. Henry Burton was vicar of the church at Friday Street in the City of London and had been in the households of both Prince Henry and Charles. He had preached and printed from a secret press two sermons fiercely attacking the Laudian injunctions to bow towards the East, to set up crucifixes, and to turn tables into altars. John Bastwick, the third of the trio, was a doctor of medicine from Essex, nurtured in the Puritan Emmanuel College at Cambridge and with fighting service in the Dutch armies to his credit. He had published several pamphlets in Latin attacking bishops before he put out the fiercely vituperative and

hard-hitting Letany in English: the prelates were the enemies of God and the King; they were the tail of the beast; the Church was as full of ceremonies as a dog is full of fleas. 'From plague, pestilence and famine, from bishops, priests and deacons, Good Lord deliver us!'

The punishment of the three men was a repetition of Leighton's seven years earlier. The wives of Burton and Bastwick accompanied their husbands to Westminster, the way was strewn with flowers and sweet herbs by well-wishers who offered words of sympathy and cheer. The victims were allowed to speak to the assembled crowds in Palace Yard, who followed every word of the argument and, afterwards, every action of the executioner and his victims. Prynne's stumps of ears were hacked a second time, the burning iron pressed into his cheek once, twice, then a third time because one of the letters had been incised upside down. The journeys to their remote and far-separated prisons were triumphant progresses.

Far away, to the north, in the county of Durham, in a small manor house in a little town called Thickley Punchardon, a boy had meanwhile been growing up in the Puritan tradition inculcated by his father, a modest landowner, and his uncles, business men in New-castle. Like many younger sons, John Lilburne came to London and was apprenticed to a cloth merchant in the City where he soon came under the influence of the Puritan preachers. He joined the crowds who thronged to see Bastwick at the Gatehouse prison before his sentence, and was honoured to be charged with the task of taking the manuscript of the Letany to Holland to be printed. The exercise was by now routine, so much so that the authorities found no difficulty in arresting Lilburne on his return and confiscating the offending pamphlets. He, in his turn, stood in Palace Yard in the spring of 1639, his flamboyant nature finding no difficulty in following, and even surpassing, the showmanship of the earlier Puritan martyrs. Like them he was thrust in prison; but he had a gift of words even greater than theirs and, since he was kept in the Fleet prison in London, the growing Puritan organization had the opportunity to supply him with pen and ink, to smuggle his manuscripts out of prison, and to get them printed, not only in Holland, but by various secret presses in the City of London itself.^[9] Thus there began the career of one of the most prolific, hard-hitting and influential of all the Puritan pamphleteers.

While Laud was holding his position against Puritanism with one hand, he was also aware of what appeared to be Charles's flirtation

with the Church of Rome. Charles never intended to go to Rome, he expected his Catholic officers to take the oath of allegiance, and he maintained the recusancy laws, albeit with a certain slackness. He also allowed his wife's Catholic chapels, and the chapels attached to foreign Catholic Embassies, to become more crowded, while he himself passed many hours in pleasant conversation with her Capuchin monks, finding with them a satisfaction he never found with his Puritan contacts. In the same way the example of Henrietta-Maria, observing the Church calendar, at mass with her friends and servants, making manifest the beauty of form and order, was in pleasing contrast to the strident improvisations of the Puritan worshippers of the conventicles. It was natural that he should think in terms of mutual understanding between the Church of England and the Holy See, and to that end a Scottish Roman Catholic, Sir Robert Douglas, arrived in Rome in October 1633.

The Papacy was well aware of the importance of this visit. Ever since Charles went to Spain it had watched him hopefully and the Papal Intelligence office, considering its reports on the state of England, noted both the harrying of Puritans and the growing number of Catholics, or near-Catholics, close to the King — Portland, Cottington, Porter, Windebank — as well as several important recent conversions which included the Dean of Lincoln. But, as it set to work to assess the situation, it had to take into account the King's sister and the Palatinate: for Charles to change his religion would seem like deserting her; possibly he was merely angling for Papal aid on her behalf. 'Charles's motives', wrote the aged Cardinal Bagna, to whom the matter was referred, 'as all who know him at all will admit, are beyond guessing.' Nevertheless, it would be unwise to let an opportunity slip, and throughout the 1630s there arrived at Charles' Court from the See of Rome a series of Papal envoys and a succession of valuable art treasures.

The Italianate influence which had come to Charles through his mother and her friends, enriched by the knowledge he had acquired of Italian art, made this contact with polished Italian intellectuals the greatest delight. They understood his relationship to art and to religion in a way that even Rubens, the Northerner, could not do, that certainly Laud could not achieve, and, indeed, that none of his friends, with the exception of Buckingham, ever did. First to arrive was Gregorio Panzani, who reached England in 1634. His first interview with the King was arranged quietly and privately by the Queen, and

Charles greeted him cordially, taking off his hat while Panzani kissed his hand, assuring him that no Catholic blood would be spilled in his reign and that Panzani himself would not be molested. When Puritan representatives tried to warn the King against the arrival of a Papal agent Charles merely smiled his tantalizing smile and said he was no stranger to Panzani's arrival.

Panzani found Charles 'a person of strict virtue and of great benevolence' and the nation as a whole 'not so bitter and scurrilous against the Pope' as formerly. He noted with great satisfaction that Cottington was a particular friend of the Jesuits and rejoiced at several recent conversions. Charles continued to maintain that there was much in the Roman Catholic religion with which he agreed, and that nothing would please him more than a healing of the breach between the Roman and the Anglican Church. He expressed himself strongly one day early in 1635, saying he would rather have parted with one of his hands than have had such a breach occur. One of his courtiers venturing to say that such sentiments were dangerous Charles instantly averred: 'I say it again: I wish I had rather lost one of my hands!' All this encouraged Panzani to such an extent that he was warned from Rome against optimism: 'The English are a mysterious people . . . The sea which you passed to visit them is an emblem of their temper.'

The Papal See nonetheless continued to woo Charles with the gifts most likely to influence him and there arrived a large picture of Bacchus by Guido and many presents for the Queen, including an exquisitely-worked relic case of gilt and crystal which particularly surprised and delighted him.^[10] When he heard some time later that further pictures were on the way from Italy his impatience knew no bounds. They arrived while the Queen was lying in of her sixth pregnancy, and she immediately ordered them to be taken to her bedchamber, whither Charles made all haste, and together they exclaimed at the amazing bounty of canvasses by Corregio, Veronese, Leonardo, Andrea del Sarto and many more. The Papacy also paid Charles the special honour of allowing Bernini to make a bust of him in the winter of 1636/37 from the triple portrait painted by Van Dyck. When it arrived in England in July 1638 Charles and Henrietta were both delighted. It was practically the only bust made by Bernini of a Prince not of the Roman Catholic church.^[11]

Meanwhile the talk went on and Panzani was succeeded by George Con, who had recently been made a Cardinal. It was fortunate,

remarked Panzani before he left England, that Charles had taken to Con, for 'it is well known that His Majesty is altogether immoveable in his affection and aversion'. The handsome and urbane Con was no less an Italianate Papist through being born a Scot, and his presence served to confirm Charles in his conviction that so long as a man became intellectually civilized his place of birth, or whether he went to mass or took communion, made little difference. Nothing was more typical of Charles's relations with the Papal envoys at this time than when he kept a Garter ceremony waiting in April 1637 while he completed a tour of his picture gallery with Con.

In the theological discussions of his private circle his mother-in-law as well as his wife would sometimes join. For the influence of Marie de Medici was at an end in France and she had been forced to leave her country in 1631, largely through the intrigues of Richelieu. After seven years in the Spanish Netherlands she decided to move to her daughter in England — much against the will of Charles, who knew too well the effect of a strong-minded, intriguing Roman Catholic Queen Mother upon his subjects and upon his relationship with France, as well as the drain of a dowager Queen and her Court upon his treasury. But when he learned she was on her way he accepted the inevitable gracefully, sent to welcome her at Harwich where she arrived on 19 October 1638, and himself rode to meet her at Chelmsford to bring her to St James's Palace through a London suitably, if not spontaneously, decked for the occasion. He made her an allowance far in excess of what he could afford for herself and an entourage far larger than he had expected.

Henrietta was in a whirl of excitement at the thought of seeing again the mother whom she had left thirteen years earlier in Amiens. She was again pregnant and it was arranged that she should be seated at the foot of the grand stairway of St James's Palace to welcome her parent. She had stationed herself at an upstairs window, however, where she could watch for the arrival, and when she saw the royal carriage approaching previous plans and discretion were thrown to the winds as she tore downstairs, her children after her, into the hall, out into the courtyard where, with trembling hands, she tried to open the carriage door. As her mother alighted Henrietta-Maria knelt on the ground with her children round her to receive the blessing she had foregone for thirteen years.^[12] The comfort of her mother's presence was marred three months later, on 29 January 1639, when Catherine was born and died on the same day.

The family was sitting together one day when Con again expressed his hope of Charles's conversion. Charles burst out laughing: 'My dear friend, I am a Catholic!' 'None could wish it more than I', responded Con, while the Queen Mother added, 'One must be an Apostolic Roman Catholic', to which Charles replied, 'You ladies will not understand me but he will: Est implicanties in adjecto .' Charles, indeed, used the term 'Catholic' in the sense of all-embracing or universal and meant by the Catholic Church the whole body of practising Christians. In no sense would he agree that a member of the Church of England was a schismatic. 'With your kind permission', he smilingly taunted Con, 'I too belong to the Catholic Church.'

Charles's position was precisely what it had been when he supported the Arminian, Montague, against the House of Commons. He did not believe in Papal supremacy, he would never admit the right of the Pope to interfere with a temporal ruler, but he found that the English Prayer Book had much in common with the mass book (as he had attempted to point out to his wife) and he found many of the tenets of Roman Catholicism thoroughly acceptable. He continued to believe in confession which was, indeed, a favourite topic with him. He would discuss it at dinner and it frequently formed the subject of sermons before him. Confession to him was moral discipline and he himself made use of the confessional. He went so far as to advocate, apparently in all seriousness, that celibacy in the clergy was necessary because a married man would not easily keep the seal of the confessional.^[13] Even to the thorny question of indulgences he turned a favourable eye, pointing out that the indulgence was not to condone the sin but to remit the penalty imposed for the sin, and there might be reason for doing this. For the Inquisition itself he could even find a good word: it was useful, he would say, for checking men's tongues and pens. It was in accord with his aesthetic appreciation that he should also welcome the use of images and ritual in his worship. He sent away to Spain for a crucifix and venerated a piece of what purported to be the holy cross found in the Thames. He refused to give it to his wife, but assured her it would be venerated and protected. He objected to an excessive cult of the Virgin, remembering how shocked he was in Spain to see people kneeling to the Madonna while only bowing to the Crucifix. Of fasting he approved — it was customary for his own Parliament to fast after its first meeting and in times of stress — but suggested that the food saved should be given to the poor, a sentiment in line with his general feeling for the under-privileged.

Between the Thirty-nine Articles of Faith of the English Church and the Roman Catholic Creed he could feel little essential difference. This, again, was a subject frequently disputed before him.

Small wonder that Charles felt that union with the Roman Catholic Church was not impossible. But it remained essential that the Pope should give up his claim to depose heretic Princes. 'You must induce the Pope to meet me half-way', he expostulated to Con. The astute envoy was equal to the situation. 'His Holiness will even come to London to receive you into the Catholic Church', he countered. And there, more or less, is how the matter ended. Charles was all along considering nothing more than a union between two Churches. The Papacy was interested in the conversion of Charles and, ultimately, of his whole kingdom. The second attempt to convert Charles to the Roman Catholic faith, like the first, had failed.