tration of Laud the Court became generally obnoxious. It sat for the last time on Oct. 22, 1640, at St. Paul's, when the London apprentices mobbed Laud at Lambeth, and made a tumult, tearing up the benches, and crying out 'No Bishops! No High Commission!' On Nov. 3 of that same year the Long Parliament met. The first week was spent,' says Whitelock, 'in naming general committees and establishing them, and revising a great many petitions, some from particular persons and some from multitudes, and brought by troops of horsemen from several counties, craving redress of grievances and of exorbitances both in Church and State. Among these, Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, Prynne, Barton, Bastwick, Leighton, Lilburne, Chambers, and many others imprisoned by sentence of the Star Chamber or Court of High Commission brought forward complaints of their treatment. A committee was appointed to investigate these complaints, and the sufferers were ordered to be brought to London. Prynne and his fellow 'martyrs,' as the spectators called them, recalled from their prisons, entered London in triumph, amidst the shouts of a great multitude who strewed laurel in their path. In 1641 an Act (c. 11) was somewhat hastily passed by the Long Parliament, which not only took away from the Crown the power of appointing visitors to superintend the Church, but also abolished all Ecclesiastical Courts without distinction.

After the restoration the cavaliers, who filled the House of Commons, remembering with bitterness the tyranny of the Court of High Commission under Laud, were by no means disposed to revive its jurisdiction. Although in the hatred. of Puritan ascendency Clarendon says that the king, he doubts not, had he been so inclined, might have restored the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission amid the indifference or even the applause of the people, they at the same time reasonably thought that the statute which had swept away all the Ecclesiastical Courts of the realm without providing any substitute was open to grave objection. They accordingly repealed that statute, with the exception of the part that related to the Court of High Commission. Thus the Archidiaconal Courts, the Consistory Courts, the Court of Arches, the Court of Peculiars, and the Court of

Delegates were revived, but the enactment by which Queen Elizabeth and her successors had been empowered to appoint Commissioners with visitatorial power over the Church was not only not revived, but was declared with the utmost strength. of language to be completely abrogated.

Lord Macaulay has told in the sixth chapter of his History of England, and in his most brilliant manner, the unconstitutional attempt of James II, in defiance of two Acts of Parliament, to place the whole government of the National Church in the hands of Commissioners who were to renew the power of that tribunal from which the Long Parliament had freed the nation. What the spirit of that Court was to be was shown by the King's directing that it should use the seal of the former Court of Commission, with the device of a rose and crown with the initial letter of the sovereign's name before the device, and after it the letter R, and with the superscription 'Sigillum Commissariorum regiae majestatis ad causas ecclesiasticas.' With the weapon of his royal supremacy James hoped that he might undo the work which his predecessors had done, and gradually bring back the Church of England to that Papal jurisdiction which Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Queen Elizabeth had thrown off. The attempt signally failed. Seven Commissioners were appointed in 1686 with Jeffreys at their head, and the first blow of the Commission was at Compton, Bishop of London. When the seven Bishops refused to order the clergy to read the Declaration of Indulgence,' and signed a temperate protest in which they declined to publish it, James ordered the Commissioners to deprive them of their sees; but in this matter even the Commissioners shrank from obeying him. With this weak and illegal attempt of James II the Court of High Commission in causes ecclesiastical vanished into space, or, to use Blackstone's phrase, was annihilated. By 6 and 7 Vict. c. 37, s. 11, it is provided that Her Majesty shall by order in Council direct that all appeals for Ecclesiastical or other Courts shall be referred to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

September 27, 1890.

THE EXACTION OF SHIP-MONEY IN THE ISLE OF WIGHT, A.D. 1637.

MR. CARLYLE has pointed out to us of this generation the effect of contemporary letters in throwing light upon past history. A letter from Sir John Oglander, a copy of which he has handed down in his MSS., is as good as any of its kind in the evidence which it furnishes of the manner in which the odious impost of ship-money was exacted. This letter, dated March 5, 1637, with the old spelling unchanged, and addressed to Colonel Worsley, of Appuldurcombe, is as follows:

'MR. WOORSELEY.-As you ar a gentleman whom I love and respect, so I desire you not to fforce mee to Distrayne your goods for his Maty's Shipmoneyes. I should be very loft to doo it to any, Espetially to your selfe. As yr monye must be payd to his Maty, so there is littel reason yt I should besydes my paynes and care pay it out of my owne purse. Thus hoping you will pay your rates imposed upon you I rest. -Your ffrynd to command,

JOHN OGLANDER, VIC.,'

(i.e. Sheriff).

John Hampden's resistance to the payment of ship-money is one of the commonplaces of English history, but this letter of Oglander's enables us to look face to face upon the hardships which this hateful tax entailed upon those who collected it as well as those who paid it. It will be recollected that the turn-coat Attorney-General Noy had fished up from old 'precedents' the writ of ship-money. The difficulty for Charles I in his attempt to govern without Parliament was how to raise money. Let it be said to the credit of Noy, who died before the writ came out, that he does not appear to have intended to put into force the more extensive scheme of ship-money as a general tax which was afterwards carried out. The king's evil counsellors induced Charles to encroach still further on the liberties of the

subject by the unprecedented exaction of this assessment. With a certain amount of statecraft the writ had required the local magistrates to deal lightly with the poor. The burghers of Newport and the smaller yeomen of the Isle of Wight were not summoned to pay ship-money, but men of good landed property, like Hampden in Buckinghamshire and Worsley in the Isle of Wight, as also the rich London traders. This interesting document contained in the Oglander Memoirs confirms to the very letter the instructions which are supplied by Rushworth and the other authorities on this subject. The sheriffs were directed to assess every landholder and other inhabitant according to their judgement of his means, and to enforce the payment by distress. Although easy-going and improvident men might satisfy themselves that the imposition was not very heavy and might not be repeated, even loyalists, like Worsley, showed more than symptoms of opposition to this extraordinary demand. A few months after Sir John Oglander had to write this letter, which upon the very face of it was most disagreeable to his feelings towards a friend and neighbour, on June 12, 1634, John Hampden's cause of ship-money was argued at great length before the twelve judges, when they all, except Croke and Hulton, gave judgement for the crown.

How the owner of Appuldurcombe fared we do not know. It was not this Worsley, but his kinsman, Mr. (afterwards Sir) Edward Worsley of Gatcombe, who was one of Charles's most devoted adherents during the king's imprisonment in Carisbrooke Castle, and his active and zealous agent in his attempts to escape. Sir Richard Worsley of Appuldurcombe, who died (so Oglander states) in the thirty-second year of his age, of small-pox, in 1620 or thereabouts,' left four sons, Henry, Richard, Thomas (godson of Sir John Oglander), and John; also three daughters, Anne, Elizabeth, and Dorothy. Sir Henry, who succeeded his father in the baronetcy, married Bridget, daughter of Sir Henry Wallop, afterwards Lord Lymington, and died in 1666. Sir Henry sat as member for Newport in the two last Parliaments of Charles I. As Oglander does not give his correspondent in this matter of the ship-money his proper title, it may be presumed that this 'Mr. Woorseley' was an uncle or older

relative of the baronet, who, from the age at which his father died, must have been quite a young man when Sir John Oglander's letter was written.

May 2, 1885.

HOW THE SUNDAY WAS KEPT IN

NEWPORT BY SOME, A. D. 1639.

THE manuscript collections of Sir John Oglander, preserved at the family seat of Nunwell, are well known as a storehouse of materials for the history of the Isle of Wight before and during the great struggle between Charles I and his Parliament. It is to be hoped that they may some day be published; in the meanwhile, I would, with your permission, lay before your readers some extracts from this valuable collection, which, as they have already appeared in print, are so far, I conclude, public property. My authorities for these extracts are:

1. Certain specimens from the Oglander MSS. privately printed by the Rev. Edmund Venables, Precentor of Lincoln, who has done so much for the archaeology and topography of this Island.

2. A volume of the Vectis Magazine, A. D. 1822, containing four papers of selections from these MSS., which, the writer asserts, have never before been transcribed.'

The Oglander MSS. commence about the year 1615, and is continued for many years in the shape of a diary.

Sir John Oglander was a country gentleman to the backbone, with a graphic power of delineation of character which would have made the fortune of a society journalist of the present day. His collections furnish,' so writes Mr. Venables, an Island gallery almost rivalling John Bunyan's life-like portraits.'

Some of Sir John's contemporaries were what our forefathers would have called Sabbath-breakers, for he speaks of