preached the Word, and not those who brought chaff.' His own preaching seemed very like chaff to many of his congregation. He had a theory that Christmas Day ought to be kept in September. He had peculiar views about married life, which he enunciated with such plainness of speech as to give offence even in that plainspoken age. He held meetings of preparation before the administration of the Communion, and in his sermons he spoke scornfully, with irritating emphasis, of those who abstained from attending them. He told his congregation that it was a sin to receive the Sacrament except upon the Sabbath-day. He had warned them that persecution was at hand. A specimen of the objurgations with which he ventured to interlard the exhortation in the Communion Service was given : "Thou son of the devil," he cried out to one who presented himself before him, "thou art damned and the son of damnation. Get thee to the devil. Take hell for thy portion." The High Commission does not deserve blame for removing this man from his ministry at Stamford. He was, however, upon promise of obedience, subsequently reinstated in the ministry, but not in his cure.1

Ecclesiasti

On the whole, it would seem that as long as Abbot lived there was nothing done by the Court of High Commission likely to give offence to moderate men of either cal cases in party. We must look elsewhere for the two great ecclesiastical processes of the day, and even those processes aimed not so much at the suppression of any particular opinions as at the gathering up of all authority in the Church into the hands of the central governLaud was rather sharpening the instrument of power than making use of it in any special direction.

the Star Chamber and Exchequer.

ment.

1629.

In 1629 Henry Sherfield returned home to Salisbury from the Parliament in which he had represented the city with no kindly feeling towards bishops or ceremonies. He Sherfield at was recorder of the borough, and a member of the Salisbury. vestry of the parish of St. Edmund's. Like the great majority of the laity of his day, he had no objection to bring

S. P. Dom. c.lxi. fol. 5 b, 295 b.

1629

THE WINDOW AT SALISBURY.

255

against the services of the Church as he had been in the habit of seeing them carried out-that is to say, with some omissions. He had, however, been accustomed to kneel at the reception of the Communion, and had been active in punishing separatists. Together with his fellow-vestrymen he had a special grievance The painted to complain of. The windows of the church were of painted glass, and one of them contained a representation of the First Person of the Trinity as an old man measuring the world with a pair of compasses, and raising Eve out of the side of Adam.

windows at

St. Edmund's.

It was easy to take offence at such a picture; and, though to most persons entering the church it was probably a mere piece of coloured glass and nothing more, there were relics of old mediæval superstitions still floating about under the shadow of the most graceful of English cathedrals. One Emily Browne bowed before the window as she passed to her seat. "I do it," she replied to Sherfield's remonstrance, "to my Lord God.” "Why," said the Puritan lawyer, "where is He?" "In the

1630. Jan. 16. The vestry give orders

to remove it.

window, is He not?" was the answer he received. In February 1630 Sherfield brought the matter before the vestry, and the vestry directed him to remove the painting and to replace it by plain white glass. They did not, however, care to place on record the real motive of their decision. "The said window," they explained, "is somewhat decayed and broken, and is very darksome, whereby such as sit near the same cannot see to read in their books." 1

The bishop objects.

The affair was not long in reaching the ears of Davenant, the bishop of the see. Davenant was regarded as the theologian of the Calvinistic party in the Church, and had been one of the representatives of the King of England at the Synod of Dort. Nevertheless, he at once sent for the churchwardens of St. Edmund's, and forbade them to carry out the order of the vestry.

Accordingly no action was taken in the matter. About Michaelmas, Sherfield was called by business to the neighbouring village of Steeple Aston. The vicar showed him over the church. The windows glowed with 'painted images and

Order of the Vestry in Hoare's History of Wiltshire, vi. 371.

pictures of saints.

September. Sherfield's

visit to Steeple Aston.

Not far off a knight lately dead had left in his will a sum of money to put up windows representing works of mercy.' The mischief, as Sherfield considered it, was plainly spreading. "For my part,' he said to the vicar, "I do not like these painted windows in churches. They obscure the light, and may be a cause of much superstition." He then spoke of the window at St. Edmund's, and complained of the bishop's interference.1

Sherfield returned to Salisbury with his mind made up. He had personally received no official notice of the bishop's inhibition, and he resolved to set it at defiance.

October.

He breaks

Ob

taining the key of the church from the sexton's wife, the window. he went in alone, locked the door behind him, climbed up on the back of a seat, and dashed his stick through the glass. In his vehemence he lost his balance and fell to the ground.

1633. Feb. 8.

the Star

Chamber.

A Star Chamber prosecution was the result. The case was postponed till February 1633.2 It was Noy's first appearance as Attorney-General in an important State prosecution. He said something to show that Sherfield had The case in acted independently of the vestry's order; but the main scope of his argument went to urge that a vestry had no power to make such an order at all. It might make or mend seats, or place a reading desk in a more convenient position; but it was not in its power to carry out a change which implied a special religious view without the bishop's consent. If every vestry could deal at pleasure with the fabric of the building in its charge, one church might be pulled down because it was in the form of a cross, another because it stood east and west. One man might hold that to be idolatry which was not idolatry to another. These differences of opinion would engender strife, and strife would lead to sedition and insurrection.

The Star Chamber unanimously concurred in Noy's view

1 Webb's Deposition, Jan. (?) 1631, S. P. Dom. clxxviii. 58.

2 The date 163}, which even Mr. Bruce accepted (S. P. Dom. ccxi. 20) is clearly wrong. The fact that Windebank took part in the sentence is decisive against it.

1633

The sentence.

SHERFIELD'S SENTENCE.

257

of the case; but there was much difference of opinion as to the penalty to be inflicted. The lawyers-Coventry, Heath, and Richardson-were on the side of leniency; the bishops-Laud and Neile-were on the side of harshness. The sentence was at last fixed at 500l. and a public acknowledgment of the fault.

The bishops and the

Though on the general question Noy's argument was unanswerable, the objections of the lawyers in the court went deeper than the lowering or raising of a fine by a few hundred pounds. It was well that the authority lawyers. to remove such a window as had been removed by Sherfield should be in the hands of persons of larger views than the members of a parish vestry were likely to be; but it would be to little purpose to assign this authority to the bishops, if the bishops were to have as little sympathy as Laud had with the dominant religious feelings of the country. Works of art are worth preserving, but the religious sentiments of the worshippers demand consideration also. It was evident from the language employed by Coventry and the Chief Justices that, though they objected to the way in which Sherfield's act had been done, they shared his dislike of the representation which had given him offence. Laud was so occupied with his detestation of the unruly behaviour of the man that he had no room for consideration whether his dislike was justifiable or not. He treated the reasonings of the lawyers as an assault upon the episcopal order. He told them that the authority of the bishops was derived from the authority of the King, and that if they attacked that, they would fall as low as bishops had once fallen. Yet though Laud carried his point in referring all questions relating to the ornamentation of churches to the bishop of the diocese, the objection against the figure which had attracted such notice at Salisbury was too widely felt to be treated with contempt. Charles ordered Bishop Davenant to see that the broken window was repaired at Sherfield's expense, but to take care that it was repaired, as the vestry had before ordered, with white and not with coloured glass. Before long Sherfield made due acknowledgment of his fault to the bishop, but he

died not long afterwards, leaving the bill to be paid by his relatives.1

1625.

for impro

priations.

A few days afterwards a case of still greater importance was decided by the Court of Exchequer. In the beginning of the reign, four citizens of London, four lawyers, and four The feoffees Puritan clergymen of note had associated themselves for the purpose of doing something to remedy the evil of an impoverished clergy. They established a fund by means of voluntary contributions, from which they bought up impropriate tithes, and were thus enabled to increase the stipends of ministers, lecturers, and schoolmasters. Naturally the persons selected for their favours were Puritans, and Laud had early marked the feoffees for impropriations, as they were called, for destruction.

1630. July 11. Heylyn's sermon.

The first to lift up his voice publicly against them was Peter Heylyn, Laud's chaplain and future biographer. In a sermon preached at Oxford in 1630, he said that the enemy had been sowing tares. The feoffees were 'chief patrons of the faction.' They preferred those who were 'serviceable to their dangerous innovations.' In time they would have more preferments to bestow, and therefore more dependencies, than all the prelates in the kingdom.' 2

1632.

mation.

Laud took the matter up warmly. At his instigation, Noy exhibited against the feoffees an information in the Exchequer Chamber, a court of equity in which the Lord Noy's infor- Treasurer and the Chancellor of the Exchequer sat as judges by the side of the barons. The charge against the feoffees was that they had illegally constituted themselves into a body holding property without the sanction of the King. An argument of more general interest was that, instead of employing the money collected in the permanent increase of endowments, they had paid the favoured ministers or schoolmasters by grants revocable at their own pleasure.

1 Coke to Davenant, Feb. 15, Melbourne MSS. State Trials, iii. 519. Nicholas to E. Nicholas, written early in 1634, not in 1632, as calendared. S. P. Dom. ccxiv. 92. Narrative, March 15, 1633, S. P. Dom. cxxxiii. 89. Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, 199.