officer's letter they laughed at him, and tore it in pieces. Some days after he, in a civil manner, sent a captain with them and other soldiers to Owthorpe, to inquire into their misdemeanours before their faces; which being confirmed to him, and he beginning to rebuke them, they set him at light, even before Mrs. Hutchinson's face, and made the poor man retire sneaped to his colonel; while these six rogues, in one week's space, besides the assessments assigned them to gather up, within the compass of five miles, took away violently from the country, for their own expense, above fiveand-twenty pounds.

(From Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson.)

BULSTRODE WHITELOCKE

[The author of Memorials of the English Affaires was the son of a judge, and was born in London in 1605. He was educated at Oxford under the eye of Laud, studied law, and was called to the bar before the accession of Charles I., at which point in history his Memorials begin. After a youth noted, it would seem, by frivolity, he was elected to the Long Parliament, and soon made his mark in it. Of all his impeachers, Strafford said "Palmer and Whitelocke used him like gentlemen." Originally a moderate Royalist, he offered a determined resistance to the attempt to make Presbytery jure Divino. Although he was a member of the Westminster Assembly, he lost no opportunity of fostering a reconciliation between King and Parliament, and was indeed fiercely assailed in the House of Commons for alleged treachery in the course of a private interview which Hollis and he had with Charles at Oxford. Later on, impelled by various motives, he veered round to the side of the more uncompromising opponents of the King. He even became the confidant of Cromwell, and had the courage, when sounded on the subject, to dissuade his chief from assuming the title of King. He was sent by Cromwell as ambassador to Sweden, and on his return resumed his place in Parliament and a practice at the bar, which, though often broken in upon by the exigencies of public affairs was, at some periods of his life, positively enormous. He was included in the Act of Oblivion, and died in 1675 in his house in Wiltshire. Whitelocke, who was married three times, was distinguished by his religious though not ultra-puritanical sentiments, and by a love of his family which justified, in his own eyes at least, the scrupulous care for his own interests that characterised his action at many critical moments in his life.]

WHITELOCKE wrote complete Annals of his life, of which the Memorials are mere extracts. Judged by the latter, which have alone survived, he has no claim to the title of historian. The Memorials are a diary, the mere raw material of history, For philosophical deductions and general views the reader must have recourse to the diarist's Parliamentary speeches, which are scattered liberally throughout the text. Apart from these, and the accounts of conversations, the work is the bald record of events almost no care being bestowed either on arrangement of facts or on style. Neither the excitement of debate nor the heat of battle seems to quicken his pulse or disturb the even flow of his pen.

Yet his language is naturally apt, and he has a keen appreciation of the value of the personal in narrative. Thus he hastily summarises an important but tedious portion of the proceedings against Strafford after this fashion: "A Bill was brought into the House of Commons to attaint the earl of high treason; upon debate whereof they noted him guilty of high treason." Yet he can spare time and space for a genuinely picturesque passage like this::-"The Earl was brought to the bar by the lieutenant of the Tower; his habit black, wearing his George in a gold chain; his countenance nearly black, his person proper, but a little stooping with his distemper or habit of body; his behaviour exceedingly graceful, and his speech full of weight, reason, and pleasingness." Only Whitelocke's speeches and records of conversations smell of the closet lamp. Yet, granted that he was able in the subsequent writing of his orations to heighten their polish, it is evident that he was an effective speaker. Though the best service he rendered to the public was the passing of a measure "for putting all the books of law and proceedings in the Courts of Justice into the English tongue," he did not disdain the rhetorical device of quotation, and his speeches are much more thickly studded with Latin phrases than with appeals to passion. The conversations which he commits to paper are stilted and formal. To sum up, the motto on the title-page of the Memorials is an index to the value of the book. It is important because it deals with events of which Whitelocke could say, Quæque ipse miserrima vidi, et quorum pars magna fui. He set down his impressions while they were fresh, and there is nothing in his character, so far as it is known, to lead us to suspect his bona fides. In his later years, living in enforced retirement, he wrote many religious books which were never published, but there is extant a posthumous volume of Essays, Ecclesiastical and Civil.

W. WALLACE.

SHIP MONEY

MR. JOHN HAMPDEN, my countryman and kinsman, a gentleman of an ancient family in Buckinghamshire, and of a great estate and parts, denied the payment of ship money, as an illegal tax. He often advised in this great business with Holborn, St. John, myself, and others of his friends and council. Several other gentlemen refused the payment of this tax of ship money whereupon the king was advised by the Lord Chief Justice Finch, and others, to require the opinion of his judges, which he did, stating the case in a letter to them.

After much solicitation by the chief Justice Finch, promising preferment to some, and highly threatening others whom he found doubting, as themselves reported to me, he got from them in answer to the king's letter and case, their opinions in these words:

We are of opinion, that when the good and safety of the kingdom in general is concerned, and the whole kingdom in danger, your majesty may by writ under the great seal of England, command all your subjects of this your kingdom, at their charge, to provide and furnish such number of ships, with men, victuals, and ammunition, and for such time as your majesty shall think fit, for the defence and safeguard of the kingdom, from such peril and danger. And that by law your majesty may compel the doing thereof in case of refusal, or refractoriness. And we are also of opinion, that in such case your majesty is the sole judge, both of the dangers, and when, and how the same is to be prevented and avoided.

This opinion was signed by Bramston, Finch, Davenport, Denham, Hutton, Jones, Croke, Trever, Vernon, Berkley, Crawley, Weston.

This opinion and subscription of the judges, was inrolled in all the courts of Westminster, and much distasted many gentlemen of the country, and of their own profession, as a thing