their tenure of office. The County Court is held at Ipswich by the order of Sir Simonds Dewes, High Sheriff. It is Monday, October 19, an 'extreme windy morning,' and at eight o'clock the writ is read. Of the three candidates, only North was present, the others breakfasting at the King's Head, sign of ill omen for those who should be returned. North was surrounded by a crowd of his party, who chaired him for about half an hour, to show him off. Henry North of Laxfield, and John Clench of Creeting, his uncles, Sir Robert Crane, Mr. John Smith of Cratfield, and Mr. Waldegrave, were there to see fair play for the young man, and some of them thought that Samuel Duncon, Constable of Ipswich, who had been assisting in taking the votes, had been dealing corruptly; nor did one of the party, Mr. Gardiner Webb of Elmswell, son of William Webb, attorney, of Ixworth, and the Gardiner heiress, spare the worshipful High Sheriff, saying that he had been damnedly base in all his carriage.' Duncon carried this 'outrageous and scandalous speech' to Dewes, to whom Webb justified his language, and, in defiance of all Dogberrydom, called the Constable 'base rascall and rogue.' It is not to be passed over that women in the heat of the contest tendered themselves to be sworn that their net estate valued clear forty shillings, but had their votes given for Barnardiston and Parker struck out. A riot was imminent between North's hot-blooded young friends and the sailors, whom they called Water-dogs. However, all passed off without bloodshed, and Parker with 2,240 voices at the least,' and Barnardiston with 2,140, were triumphantly returned over North, who received only 1,422. We owe Thomas Carlyle thanks for printing these documents. Sir Frederick Cornwallis was Sir Roger North's colleague at Eye.

The other Suffolk members of the Long Parliament were: for Ipswich, John Gurdon and William Cage; for Dunwich, Henry Cooke and Anthony Bedingfeld; for

Orford, Sir William Playters and Sir Charles le Gros; for Sudbury, Sir Simonds Dewes and Sir Robert Crane, who generally neutralized each other in all likelihood; for Aldborough, two of the Bence family, 'Squire' and Alexander; and for Bury St. Edmunds, Thomas Jermyn and Sir William Spring.

CHAPTER XVI.

FROM THE LONG PARLIAMENT TO THE REVOLUTION.

N°

O one ought to expect any pleasure from the annals of the Great Rebellion period. There is sensation enough in this chapter, chiefly the sensation of shame and degradation; records enough, the records of perverted efforts after Reverence, Truth and RighteousWhat is painful in every sense of the word to write can hardly be delectable reading. When men would do good, evil was present with them.

ness.

In the fierce heat of their controversy, the subtle aroma of the Teaching which was the Life of the world was evaporated, and the commonplace of regulations remained, changed a little in form, but the same in its inevitable necessity, the Westminster Directory instead of the Book of Common Prayer.

It is true that our local narrative will not set before us the gory battle-fields and blasted verdure of other counties. There is no Chalgrove Field, Cropredy Bridge, or Marston Moor in our bounds. The Suffolk heroes fell in scores and hundreds in these quarrels not their own, dying for God and the King, or for God and the Cause, or in many cases simply for their pay, all over the length and breadth of the land. Their names are irrecoverably gone. Old parchment registers record their baptism, perhaps their marriage, but not their burial. None the less, ay, all the more, for years and years the lonely

cottage mourned the day when John or Harry was torn from the home never to be seen again.

Then the ruined manor-houses, the exiled rectors and vicars and their starving families, the desecrated churches on the one hand, and on the other the snipped ears of ecclesiastical convicts, the practical banishment of many a worthy man for conscience' sake under the severity of episcopal rule, the ejectment of many another on St. Bartholomew's Day, 1662, present a picture with no tender neutral tints. The working of the devil is as plain through the whole accursed business as it is in the Ten Persecutions or in the funeral rites of the King of Dahomey.

An additional element of discomfort arises from the fact that this misery and disgrace was so largely the work of theologians, and from the apprehension that a theologian in treating of it may perpetuate the evil which he deplores. Yet should the perusal of the Long Parliament period deter any from the eager pursuit of an impossible ideal by the perception of what is inseparably bound up with that pursuit, our work will not be fruitless. Through the clouds the sun shines. The establishment of the British Constitution, the beneficent effect of Imperial England, the great United States of America, spring out of this seeming chaos. Powers of destruction work their dread work and quench themselves. The remainder of wrath shalt Thou restrain.'

The Scotch had been treating by commissioners with Charles I. for some time before 1640, with the usual negative result when each side is bent on having its own way, and large contributions had been made for the royal service. The smallest were thankfully received, as we find from the Cratfield book, where the moderate sum of sixpence was thrice doled out, on March 28, 1640, to two 'gentleman soldiers,' and afterwards to a 'gentleman traveller with a pass which had great loss,' and again to three gentleman soldiers with Sir Thomas Glemham's hand to their pass.' 'Many travellers' sent

by Sir Thurston Smyth, on July 10, only bled the parochial authorities of eightpence among the 'many'; but warily they handed over £3 to Mr. Eland, the Vicar, thus avoiding responsibility as to the disposal of it. Among the Suffolk names in the Army List of the expedition under the Earl of Northumberland against the Scotch, to join which these gentleman travellers were hasting, we find Peter Gleane, Lieutenant of the 15th Regiment, of the Southelmham family: Captain Thomas Cornewallis, from Brome, of the 18th; and Captain Thomas Pettus, from Chediston, of the 20th. In the autumn these gentlemen soldiers retired before their Presbyterian opponents, and shortly after the election scene under the elm at Ipswich a cessation of arms was agreed upon, and Dewes and Crane, Barnardiston and Parker, the two Bences, and the rest of the Suffolk burgesses, met their fellows from the other shires, cities, and towns of England, and in hot haste that work began which had to be repented of at leisure.

The Ipswich burgesses, John Gurdon of Great Wenham, and William Cage, one of their own portmen, who had a seat at Bungay, and was 'reputed a wise man,' as Gipps testifies of him, had experienced some whetting of the anti-prelatical appetite under the episcopate of Matthew Wren, formerly Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, who succeeded Bishop Corbet in 1635, and was translated to Ely in 1638. Though it pleased Harbottle Grimston to describe him in opprobrious terms, 'the least of all these birds, but one of the most unclean,' after-ages will do him the justice to acknowledge that much that he was striving after was not at all in excess of common decency and propriety, without bringing in the vexed matter of any peculiar reverence due to places set apart for sacred purposes. In many Suffolk churches, which as yet have escaped the ecclesiastical decorative metal standards, there remain the Communion-rails of a well-known balustrade type, set