Another illegal project for raising money, was by a tax to provide and maintain a certain number of ships to guard the seas; and writs were sent all over the kingdom, An. 1636, for this purpose. Laud was peculiarly active in this affair; and as several persons refused to pay the sums they were rated at, they were summoned before the council table, where they were brow-beaten, and sentenced to jail by Laud, and others of the council.[352] Laud acknowledges he gave his vote with the rest, and he had an hand in these and almost all other illegal pressures for ship-money; and in his diary he tells us, that “Dec. 5, 1639. A resolution was voted at the council board,” when he was present, “to assist the king in extraordinary ways, if the parliament should prove peevish, and refuse, &c.” ----- Footnote 352: Wharton, vol. II. p. 233. ----- [353]The endeavouring arbitrarily to reduce the kirk of Scotland to the discipline of the church of England, was also by Laud’s persuasion and advice; who was ordered by the king to hold continual correspondence with the bishops and council of Scotland, and to take with them the necessary measures to accomplish the design. [354]The Scots bishops were so lifted up, says Burnet, with the king’s zeal, and so encouraged by Archbishop Laud, that they lost all temper. And when the violent measures that were used to impose the liturgy, &c. drove the Scots to an open rupture, he forwardly procured an order of council, directed to the two archbishops, to write their several letters to the bishops, that they might incite their clergy to assist the king to reduce the Scots. Laud accordingly wrote to his several suffragans, and raised by the clergy a very great sum on this occasion. The queen also wrote letters to promote contributions amongst the Roman catholics, to further the same good cause. So that Laud and his clergy, the queen and her papists, joined hand in hand to destroy or enslave the protestants of Scotland; who rose in their own defence, and to preserve themselves from the arbitrary measures of this tyrannical archpriest. ----- Footnote 353: Rapin, vol. II. p. 300. Footnote 354: Vol. I. p. 26. -----