fluenced to this step by any of the
political motives which actuated the Parliamentary leaders. He was no
revolutionist. He was as blind and unquestioning in his reverence for
the King's person and divine right, and as hearty in his hatred of
religious toleration and civil equality, as any of his clerical brethren
who officiated in a similar capacity in the ranks of Goring and Prince
Rupert. He seems only to have looked upon the soldiers as a new set of
parishioners, whom Providence had thrown in his way. The circumstances
of his situation left him little choice in the matter. "I had," he says,
"neither money nor friends. I knew not who would receive me in a place
of safety, nor had I anything to satisfy them for diet and
entertainment." He accepted an offer to live in the Governor's house at
Coventry, and preach to the soldiers of the garrison. Here his skill in
polemics was called into requisition, in an encounter with two New
England Antinomians, and a certain Anabaptist tailor who was making more
rents in the garrison's orthodoxy than he mended in their doublets and
breeches. Coventry seems at this time to have been the rendezvous of a
large body of clergymen, who, as Baxter says, were "for King and
Parliament,"--men who, in their desire for a more spiritual worship, most
unwillingly found themselves classed with the sentries whom they regarded
as troublers and heretics, not to be tolerated; who thought the King had
fallen into the hands of the Papists, and that Essex and Cromwell were
fighting to restore him; and who followed the Parliamentary forces to see
to it that they were kept sound in faith, and free from the heresy of
which the Court News-Book accused them. Of doing anything to overturn
the order of Church and State, or of promoting any radical change in the
social and political condition of the people, they had no intention
whatever. They looked at the events of the time, and upon their duties
in respect to them, not as politicians or reformers, but simply as
ecclesiastics and spiritual teachers, responsible to God for the
religious beliefs and practices of the people, rather than for their
temporal welfare and happiness. They were not the men who struck down
the solemn and imposing prelacy of England, and vindicated the divine
right of men to freedom by tossing the head of an anointed tyrant from
the scaffold at Whitehall. It was the so-called schismatics, ranters,
and levellers, the disputatio