LIFE QF RICHARD BAXTER. 37 sand, pounds, to make submission and acknowledgment, to be sus- pended three years, and to be incapable of holding any ecclesiasti- cal dignity, or secular office. As soon as the session was closed, the condemned criminal was not only pardoned by the king, but, as if he had earned a reward, was preferred to a valuable living, and a few years afterwards raised to "a bishopric. About the same time, Sibthorp received a similar reward; and Montague, another preacher and author of the same school, who, like Manwaring, was under the çensure of parliament, was elevated to a seat among the bishops. Demonstration was thus afforded, that the king, after all his concessions, was still in principle a despot. Not long after the prorogation of the parliament, all further proceedings against Buckingham, and all his schemes of mischief, were arrested by the dagger of an insane assassin. From this time, the prime minister, in church and in state, was William Laud, then bishop of London, and soon afterwards archbishop of Canterbury. When the parliament came together according to prorogation, early in the following year, (1629) they found new evidence of the king's unfaithfulnessevidence which must have wrought in manya mind the conviction that no confidence could be reposed in either his concessions or his promises. Not only had unauthor- ized taxes been levied, and illegal punishments been inflicted, as before, but the all-important petition of right, as published by au- thority, instead ofbearing that unqualified royal assent which made it a law, had, annexed to it, only an evasive and unmeaning answer from the king, which the parliament had refused to acknowledge as satisfactory. By such treacheries, so weak, so profligate, so contemptible, did this ill-starred monarch forfeit the confidence of his people, and make his own ruin inevitable. After all that had now been developed, what cordiality or co-operation could there be between the king and the parliament? Whatever followed was only the necessary result of what had gone before. The king was determined, and so were the people. The king was determined to be independent and absolute. The people were determined to submit to no authority but that which was lawful. The result could not have been avoidedbut by the people's abandoning their rights, and lying down to be trodden into the earth by the iron hoof ofusurpation, or by the king's abandoning his principles, and becoming, what so few kings have ever been, a plain and honest lover of his country. A bill had been introduced into the house of commons, for granting to the king, what he had levied from the beginning of his reign without law, and against many complaints both of par- liament and of people, the customary taxes on commerce. But
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