lay hold of all opportunities to discharge them their pulpits.' A common destruction overtook all faithful children of the Anglican Church. No distinctions were made. The Church Puritans who continued steadfast to their spiritual mother suffered just as much as their old opponents, the adherents of Laud. The remorseless bigotry of Presbyterianism persecuted with impartiality the genius and eloquence of Jeremy Taylor, the old age of the liberally disposed churchman, Hales, and the dying moments of Hales' like-minded friend, Chillingworth. The clergy were utterly ruined, their private fortunes confiscated, and their benefices sequestered. Laud was illegally beheaded on Tower Hill; Hall of Norwich was suffered to linger on in obscurity and to die almost in want of the necessaries of life. 'Multitudes of the clergy,' so writes Neal, the historian of Puritanism, 'left their cures and took sanctuary in the King's armies or garrison; . . about twenty were imprisoned on board of ships in the river Thames, and shut down under decks, no friend being allowed to come near them.' It was made penal to use the Book of Common Prayer, even in household worship; the churches were defaced to the lasting regret,' to use the words of Hallam,' of all faithful lovers of antiquities and architecture,' and the silenced Church was compelled to hide her head where she could.

Such was the sad plight of the Church of England when the negotiations of the Newport treaty commenced. Less surprise will therefore be felt at the concessions of Charles I; he was dealing with the triumphant Presbyterians, and was playing a waiting game. His chaplains, with whom he took counsel, probably acquiesced in this cautious policy from taking into consideration what seemed to them the desperate condition of the National Church. The Church of England had taken the side against the conquerors, and it shared the fate of the conquered party. When the sword has been once drawn in civil war, it is the misfortune of such a miserable state of things that one party must succumb. Compromise is impossible. At the outset the National Church made a fatal mistake in not performing its proper function of conciliation, and trying to moderate the extreme views of violent partisans on both sides. But once having

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taken her part, she could but submit to persecution, and wait for happier times. Her strength was to sit still, and, to use the touching language of Lord Falkland, 'act the part that was assigned to her in this tragedy.' The English mind could not be satisfied with the Presbyterian scheme of church government, which was declared by Parliament without qualification to be the established religion. a time there was a kind of church anarchy, the ministers of religion being allowed to take their own way in all points, except in using the Prayer Book. At last Cromwell, to whom all such disorder was abhorrent, proposed his own scheme of church government by nominating a supreme commission for the trial of public preachers. Most of these persons,' so writes Lord Macaulay (Hist. of England, vol. i. p. 158), 'were Independent divines, but a few Presbyterian ministers and a few laymen had seats. The certificate of the triers took the place both of institution and induction, and without such a certificate no person could hold a benefice. This was undoubtedly one of the most despotic acts ever done by an English ruler. Yet, as it was generally felt that without some such precaution the country would be overrun by ignorant and drunken reprobates, bearing the name and receiving the pay of ministers, some highly respectable persons who were not in general friendly to Cromwell allowed that on this occasion he had been a public benefactor. The presentees whom the triers had approved took possession of the rectories, cultivated the glebe-lands, collected the tithes, prayed without book or surplice, and administered the eucharist to communicants seated at long tables.' In 1653 marriages were ordered to be solemnized by the Justices of the Peace, and no other mode allowed to be valid. The clergy who remained faithful to the formularies of the Church of England were forbidden to act as schoolmasters (the only resource left to the majority). As late as the end of the year 1655 the service of the Church of England was openly performed in at least one church in London (St. Gregory by St. Paul's), but after Christmas Day in that year this ceased. Dr. Wild on that day, as Evelyn says, 'preached the funeral sermon of preaching,' and 'the church was reduced to a chamber and a

conventicle, so sharp was the persecution.' Cromwell was not a persecutor, but he did not relax the severity of the penal legislation against the Church of England, which went on her way suffering, abstaining, and quietly expecting.'

February 26, 1887.

SIR JOHN BOWRING AND CHARLES I
AT CARISBROOKE CASTLE.

A QUOTATION from the Antiquary, vol. i. p. 180, which J. W., of Carisbrooke, inserted in The I. of W. County Press of Sept. 3, 1887, opens up an important question to all who are interested in the detention of Charles I in Carisbrooke Castle. That question is how far Sir John Bowring's narrative may be considered authentic. Mr. Hillier, in his Narrative of the Attempted Escapes of Charles I from Carisbrooke Castle (London, 1852, pp. 127-130), has his doubts upon this point. It appears from Mr. Hillier's researches that in 1703 there was published amongst a collection of papers, purporting to have been found in the study of a nobleman lately deceased, a garrulous narrative written by a Sir John Bowring to Charles II for the purpose of recommending himself to that monarch's favour on account of 'many most occult considerable concerns and secret transactions relative to England's Royal proto-martyr.' According to Sir John Bowring's story, Colonel Hammond, the Captain of Carisbrooke Castle, was greatly influenced by the counsels of Mr. Lisle, a native of the Isle of Wight, so well-known as the regicide who was shot in the back in August, 1664, when going into a church at Lausanne, and as the husband of Alicia Lisle who was executed in 1685 on a charge of harbouring some who had been concerned in Monmouth's rebellion. Bowring represents himself to have been intimate with Lisle, and on telling the King in one of his interviews that he had been known to Lisle from childhood he received from Charles a special charge to keep

up his interest and friendship with so influential a personage as Lisle. 'It concerns me very much,' said his Majesty, and you may perchance do the greater service and be better able to perform it than any friend whatsoever; so that from the time his Majesty came to the Isle of Wight, he employed me to manage and transact his private and particular affairs, relying upon me in all things, principally of care and hazard to himself, and that which was not in the power of any other person living to do his Majesty any good, except they had a secret interest with Lisle: and this the King understood very well, because his Majesty knew that Hammond received his orders from Lisle in all things by reason that Hammond was otherwise a stranger in the Island.' In this service a Dr. Cade is stated to have been the coadjutor of Bowring, and the person who conducted a secret correspondence between him and the King.

It is certainly worthy of remark that there is not the slightest mention made of Bowring or Cade in all the old books which are so full of the Isle of Wight business and the King's plots for escape. This casts a suspicion over the whole story of Bowring's dealings with the captive King, and more especially so, as in other respects this narrative is only an enlargement of that told by Sir John Berkely, who rode with Charles I to the Isle of Wight, and was afterwards tutor to the Duke of York, the King's second son. I have had some conversation with J. W. on this subject, and he agrees with me as to the advantage of having the whole of this question respecting the authenticity of Bowring's narrative thoroughly sifted and examined. The writer in the Antiquary, who is responsible for giving currency to this story of Bowring's, which has been passed over by those who have written upon Charles's imprisonment in Carisbrooke Castle as unworthy of belief, may perhaps be able to throw some light upon the mistrust which not only Charles II but others have felt with regard to the statements of the knight, about whose promised baronetcy no record is as yet found in the Heralds' College.

I have received a very kind and courteous communication from the writer of the article in the Antiquary, to which your correspondent J. W.' (of Carisbrooke) referred, and on which I quoted Mr. Hillier's remarks in the latter's account of the attempted escapes of Charles I from Carisbrooke Castle. The writer of the article, whose name I am not permitted to give, I may state is a most diligent and cautious antiquary, and a well-known writer on such subjects. 'I wrote,' he says, 'the note in the Antiquary, vol. i. p. 180. My authority was the late Sir John Bowring, whom I knew well. Whatever he told me I believed and believe.'

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I was also acquainted slightly with the late Sir John Bowring, whom I met at the table of the late General Peronnet Thompson, who by his Corn-Law Catechism was, Mr. Cobden once remarked to me, 'the teacher of teachers' on that great question, which ended in the repeal of the Corn Laws. Sir John Bowring was a man of varied accomplishments, and had acquired a wide command over modern languages, especially of the Sclavonic class, for which he is now chiefly known in literature. He had not, I think, studied much the history of the Civil War in England, and at any rate was not acquainted with the documents which Dr. S. R. Gardiner and others have brought to light respecting this period.

With all respect to his memory and to the judgement of the learned writer in the Antiquary, I am disposed to say with Scotch jurymen not proven.' I may add by the way that this legal phrase in Scotland, which has managed to work its way into our current English, is, as Dr. Guest has shown, a barbarism-as 'proved,' not 'proven,' is the past participle of the word 'prove.' The English verb has two forms of conjugation, one of which makes the past participle end in n, the other in d. When foreign words were imported into the language and made to do duty as English verbs they were always conjugated according to the last of these forms, and accordingly the Anglo-Saxon verb prof-ian, to prove, formed its participle in d. But in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a custom sprang up among the Lowland Scots of conjugating these verbs according to the first form -hence their legal phrase of 'not proven,' which Dr. Guest,