convoked before the end of the
year. The Lords would assuredly treat the sentence of deprivation as a
nullity, would insist that Sancroft and his fellow petitioners should be
summoned to Parliament, and would refuse to acknowledge a new Archbishop
of Canterbury or a new Bishop of Bath and Wells. Thus the session, which
at best was likely to be sufficiently stormy, would commence with a
deadly quarrel between the crown and the peers. If therefore it were
thought necessary to punish the Bishops, the punishment ought to be
inflicted according to the known course of English law. Sunderland
had from the beginning objected, as far as he dared, to the Order
in Council. He now suggested a course which, though not free from
inconveniences, was the most prudent and the most dignified that a
series of errors had left open to the government. The King might with
grace and majesty announce to the world that he was deeply hurt by the
undutiful conduct of the Church of England; but that he could not
forget all the services rendered by that Church, in trying times, to his
father, to his brother, and to himself; that, as a friend to the liberty
of conscience, he was unwilling to deal severely by men whom conscience,
ill informed indeed, and unreasonably scrupulous, might have prevented
from obeying his commands; and that he would therefore leave the
offenders to that punishment which their own reflections would inflict
whenever they should calmly compare their recent acts with the loyal
doctrines of which they had so loudly boasted. Not only Powis and
Bellasyse, who had always been for moderate counsels, but even Dover and
Arundell, leaned towards this proposition. Jeffreys, on the other hand,
maintained that the government would be disgraced if such transgressors
as the seven Bishops were suffered to escape with a mere reprimand.
He did not, however, wish them to be cited before the Ecclesiastical
Commission, in which he sate as chief or rather as sole judge. For the
load of public hatred under which he already lay was too much even
for his shameless forehead and obdurate heart; and he shrank from the
responsibility which he would have incurred by pronouncing an illegal
sentence on the rulers of the Church and the favourites of the nation.
He therefore recommended a criminal information. It was accordingly
resolved that the Archbishop and the six other petititioners should be
brought before the Court of King's Bench on a charge of sediti