absolutism. He failed because he had neither Elizabeth’s ministers nor
her knowledge of the English country landowners. James never realised
that Spain was the popular enemy, that a discontent had suddenly grown
up in parliament in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, and that the
English landowners--in many cases from their inherited possession of
the old Church lands--were generally bitterly hostile to the Roman
Catholic religion. James was tolerant in religion, and not inclined to
press Elizabeth’s penal laws against Roman Catholics, and this very
toleration brought him under the dislike of the country party. He
thought he could disregard the opinion of parliament and he found that
while a House of Commons submitted to a despotism when the country was
governed by a strong queen, it would not put up with the follies and
extravagance of the Duke of Buckingham.
James died before the strength of the growing movement for
parliamentary government was seen. Charles who was no more tyrannical
than his father, but even more blind to the signs of the times, fell
before that parliamentary movement--a movement which outraged all
the traditions of Tudor government--and with his fall brought down
the throne, the House of Lords, and the Established Church. By his
inability to understand the House of Commons, by his support of the
Anglican movement towards Catholicism in the Church of England, and
by the mistakes of his ministers, Charles ripened the desire for
constitutional monarchy till the desire was irresistible.
John Eliot gave forcible utterance to this desire, and died in prison
for his speech. John Pym carried on the work till the sword of civil
war was drawn. John Hampden, “the noblest type of parliamentary
opposition,” was content to back Pym as he had earlier backed Eliot,
and to die on Chalgrove Field. Brought up to regard as an alien creed
the old belief in papal supremacy in religion, unable to accept the new
doctrine of the Church of England that the king was supreme by divine
right (a doctrine begotten by the Tudors and dying with the Stuarts),
Eliot, Hampden, and Pym were all of the same Puritan type which found
its authority in the individual conscience.
Eliot was less afflicted than his colleagues by the theological
Protestantism of the age.[106] First and last he was the
straightforward country gentleman, with exalted views on the sacred
responsibility of civil government, and a high standard of personal
honour. For Eliot there was no nobler sphere of work for an Englishman
than the House of Commons, and his example has not been without
followers. Seneca and Cicero are on his lips, as the later Puritans
had the Bible on theirs, and his eloquence marks the beginning of
parliamentary oratory. With a strong and clear view of constitutional
government, Eliot was no republican; he held to the notion that the
king must depend on the decisions of parliament. Time was to show that
this notion, in the event of a collision between king and parliament,
was to make parliament the predominant partner.
On his first entry into the House of Commons as member for St. Germans,
in 1614, Eliot was the friend of Buckingham--whom he had met as a youth
abroad--and on Buckingham’s rise to the lord high admiralship Eliot was
knighted and became vice-admiral of Devon.
The fidelity of his service to the State as vice-admiral brought an
unpleasant experience of the will of princes. Grappling with the
scourge of piracy which afflicted the seaports and shipping trade
of the West of England, Eliot accomplished the arrest of Nutt, a
notorious sea-robber. But Nutt had friends in high places, and Eliot
found himself lodged in the Marshalsea prison over the business. He was
released on Buckingham’s return from the continent, for the charges
were absurd, and in 1624 returned to the House of Commons as member for
Newport. Two years later Eliot was estranged from Buckingham--convinced
that the favourite of the king was an evil counsellor--and had become
the recognized leader of the House of Commons. Once assured in his
mind that Buckingham was responsible for the policy of the king,
Eliot became his implacable opponent. For the policy of the crown in
not making war upon Spain, in relaxing the penal laws against Roman
Catholics, and for the mismanagement of the war on the continent in
support of the Protestants, Eliot held Buckingham responsible. In
answer to the demand of Charles for money in 1626, Eliot insisted
that an inquiry into past disasters should precede supply, and that
Buckingham should be impeached. Not the king but his minister is to
blame, Eliot maintained, for all that was wrong in the State, and
this very speech strikes the note of the campaign that was beginning.
Buckingham was not responsible to Charles alone, in the eyes of Eliot
and his friends, but also to parliament.[107]
Charles, quite unable to fathom the depth of the parliamentary
discontent, or to note the strength of the current against absolutism,
fell back upon the old Tudor doctrine of sovereignty, the doctrine of
the high Anglican party in the Church of England, that the king was
responsible for his acts to God alone. “Parliaments are altogether in
my calling,” he replies to the House of Commons.
Only twenty-five years had passed since Bacon had declared, “the Queen
hath both enlarging and restraining power: she may set at liberty
things restrained by Statute, and may restrain things which be at
liberty.” Twenty-three years more were to see monarchy abolished and
the king beheaded. Eliot, standing midway between Bacon and Bradshaw,
cleaves to the theory of constitutional government and persists in the
impeachment of a minister in whom parliament had no confidence.
The prologue of impeachment declared in the plainest language the
responsibility of the king’s ministers to parliament, and the
responsibility of parliament to the nation: “The laws of England
have taught us that kings cannot command ill or unlawful things, and
whatsoever ill event succeed, the executioners of such designs must
answer for them.”
And now the issue was fairly set, and the battle begun between Charles
and the House of Commons. In that year, 1626, no man in England could
foretell the result.
Charles, ill-advised to the end, believed he could overawe the Commons
by a display of might, and was beaten. Twice he had Eliot arrested
before the final imprisonment which ended Eliot’s life.
The loyalty of the House of Commons to its leader compelled Charles
to release Eliot, after sending him to the Tower for his attack on
Buckingham. Then dissolving parliament in June, 1626, and falling back
on a forced loan, the king was met by wide refusals, and Eliot, with
Hampden and others, suffered imprisonment over this. Eliot was also
deprived of his vice-admiralship and struck off the roll of justices of
the peace.
Driven to call a parliament for the third time in 1628, the king was
faced by a stronger opposition than ever.
Eliot, now member for Cornwall, throughout the session continued the
attack on arbitrary taxation, and with the lawyers Seldon and Coke
carried the Petition of Right to stop the illegal imprisonments, the
enforced billeting of soldiers, and forced loans. Buckingham, slain
at Portsmouth, no longer troubled the commonwealth; but Wentworth,
ambitious to use his powers in the service of the government, had left
the popular side for the king; while Laud, and Weston, the chancellor
of the exchequer, were daily preaching to Charles the divine right of
kings and to his subjects the duty of passive obedience.
The following year both Eliot and Pym attacked the ecclesiastical
policy of Laud. To them the established religion of England, settled
on the Protestant basis by Elizabeth, was being definitely changed
in a Catholic direction without the sanction of parliament, and in
the very teeth of the opposition of the House of Commons. High-church
clergymen, like Montague and Mainwaring, holding to the full a Catholic
interpretation of the Book of Common Prayer, were only censured by the
House of Commons to be promoted by the crown. Laud preaching a royal
supremacy undreamt of by the great archbishops before Henry VIII.,
combined with it a doctrine of ecclesiastical independence, owning no
allegiance to Rome, equally novel.
Eliot, stoical in his beliefs, and Pym, whose Calvinism was tempered
by common sense, regarded with horror the revival in the Church of
England of Catholic doctrines concerning the sacraments and the
priesthood. They had done what they could to check any indulgence to
Roman Catholics in England, and it was monstrous to them that the
Church of England, whose formularies and ritual had been defined by
parliament for the maintenance of Protestantism, should be expanded to
reintroduce doctrines and practices essentially Catholic. But for the
time the House of Commons was powerless in the matter, and only sixteen
years later was Laud to expiate on the scaffold his Anglo-Catholicism,
dying a veritable martyr for the high Anglican doctrine. “None have
gone about to break parliaments but in the end parliaments have broken
them,” declared Eliot on March 2nd, 1629, and Laud, no less than
Charles and Wentworth, was to prove the truth of the warning.
If parliament could do nothing in that year, 1629, to stop Laud’s
policy, it could at least defend the privileges of its members. The
goods of John Rolle, M.P., had been seized by the king’s officers
because their owner had refused to pay tonnage and poundage on demand,
and at once Eliot was up in arms in defence of the privileges of his
fellow member, whose liberties had been interfered with.
Pym was for a wider view of the matter--objecting to the question
being narrowed down to a breach of privilege. “The liberties of this
House,” he argued, “are inferior to the liberties of this kingdom. To
determine the privilege of this House is but a mean matter, and the
main end is to establish possession of the subjects, and to take off
the commission and records and orders that are against us.” With Pym it
was not Rolle, the member, who had been ill-used, but Rolle the British
subject, and it was for the liberties of the subject he strove, holding
the freedom of parliament as but a means to that end.
Eliot, a House of Commons man, through and through, saw in the welfare
of parliament the welfare of the nation, and stuck to his point,
carrying the House with him, that the privileges of a member extended
to his goods. To this Charles sent word that what had been done had
been done by his authority. The only question now was, how long would
it be before the king dissolved parliament.
On the second of March, when the House met, the speaker’s first
word was that the king had ordered an adjournment till the tenth,
and that no business could be transacted. Eliot insisted on moving
his resolutions, and the speaker was held down in his chair. Then
the serjeant-at-arms attempted to remove the mace, and was promptly
stopped, while the key of the House was turned from within.
Eliot moved his declaration, beginning with the famous words: “By the
ancient laws and liberties of England, it is the known birthright and
inheritance of the subject, that no tax, tallage, or other charge shall
be levied or imposed but by common consent in England; and that the
subsidies of tonnage and poundage are no way due or payable but by a
free gift and special act of parliament.”
The resolutions were carried with loud shouts of assent, two members
guarding the speaker, and the door was flung open; the sitting was over.
A royal proclamation for dissolving parliament followed on the fourth
of March, and Eliot, with eight other members, was summoned to appear
before the Privy Council.
From the hour of that summons John Eliot’s liberty was over, and not
for eleven years was England to have another parliament.
For the fourth time Eliot was a prisoner. He declined altogether to
give an account of what he had said in parliament, or to acknowledge
any right of interference with the proceedings in parliament. To the
crown lawyers his reply was to stand on the privileges of a member of
the House of Commons. “I refuse to answer,” he said, “because I hold
that it is against the privilege of parliament to speak of anything
which is done in the House.” He insisted that he was accountable to
the House alone, and that no other power existed with a constitutional
right to inquire into his conduct there.
At the end of October Eliot was removed from the Tower to the
Marshalsea, and then in January, 1630, he was charged in the King’s
Bench with two other members, Holles and Valentine, with conspiring to
resist the king’s lawful order, to calumniate ministers of the crown,
and to assault the speaker. Again Eliot refused to acknowledge the
jurisdiction. He was fined £2,000, and sent back to the Tower.
To the last Eliot’s loyalty to the House of Commons remained unshaken.
He had but to acknowledge that he had done wrong, to admit that he had
offended, and the prison doors would have opened to him. But to make
this acknowledgment was to deny the sacred liberty of parliament,
to admit wrong was to betray the House of Commons. To John Eliot the
welfare of the House of Commons was a national cause--dearer than life.
To betray its honour was to betray the State. The loyalty of John Eliot
to the House of Commons was interwoven with his devotion to the State,
but it was something England had never seen before, and never saw
again. “He learned to believe, as no other man believed before or after
him, in the representatives of the nation.” (Gardiner.)
The character and temperament of Eliot must be taken into account
in understanding this passionate belief in the House of Commons. It
was not as a great thinker but as a great orator he had risen to the
leadership of the House of Commons. He saw in his mind, as no other man
saw at the time, a perfectly balanced constitution of king, lords, and
commons. In parliament was the best wisdom of the country placed at the
service of the crown. In the crown was the appointed ruler who, with
his ministers, had but to come to parliament for advice and counsel.
So it seemed to John Eliot; and single-minded himself, he could not
realise that in the House of Commons were plenty of men of but passing
honesty, and that Charles and Laud and Wentworth were fundamentally
opposed to his views of constitutional government, and bitterly hostile
to the growing powers of the commons.[108]
[Illustration: JOHN PYM
(_From an Engraving by Jacob Houbraken._)]
Months passed, and John Eliot’s health gave way in the confinement in
the Tower, but his steadfastness was unchanged. He corresponded with
his friend John Hampden, wrote his treatise on the _Monarchy of Man_,
and calmly awaited his end. An application on behalf of his friends
and his son for Eliot’s release was made in October, 1622, on the
ground that “the doctors were of opinion he could never recover of his
consumption until such time as he might breathe in purer air.” The
reply of Chief Justice Richardson was “that, although Sir John were
brought low in body, yet was he as high and lofty in mind as ever; for
he would neither submit to the king nor to the justice of that court.”
On November 27th, 1632, the spirit of John Eliot, unbroken by
captivity, passed from the body his gaolers had deprived of life. A
last appeal from his son to the king for the removal of his father’s
body into Cornwall, there to lie with those of his ancestors at Port
Eliot, received the curt refusal, “Let Sir John Eliot’s body be buried
in the church of the parish where he died.” And so he was buried in the
Tower, and no stone marks the spot where he lies.
John Eliot was but forty-two when he laid down his life for the
principle of parliamentary government.
Any satisfaction that might have been felt by Charles and Laud at the
death of the foremost antagonist to their policy of absolutism was
fleeting. For if Eliot was dead, the cause he had championed with such
conspicuous sincerity and courage was alive, and John Hampden and John
Pym were at hand to carry on the fight till Cromwell and his Ironsides
were ready to end the battle.
Charles was determined that, until the commons should be more
submissive, he would call no parliament, but would govern through his
ministers alone. The difficulty was to find money.
In 1634 London and the seaports were persuaded to furnish supplies
for ships on the pretext that piracy must be prevented. A year later
and the demand was extended to the inland counties, and John Hampden,
taking his stand on the Petition of Right which Charles had granted
in 1628, declined to pay. Ten out of twelve of the king’s judges had
decided that ship-money might be enforced if the kingdom appeared to
be in danger, but against this declared legality there was the decree
of parliament forbidding forced loans or taxes without parliamentary
sanction.
On this resistance of the ship-money Hampden’s fame has been chiefly
built up. The amount was small--only a matter of some twenty
shillings--the issue was of a first importance. It was clear to Hampden
that if the king could raise money by such methods, what need would
there be in the royal mind for the calling of parliament at all? The
question was forced upon him: Was parliament an essential part of the
constitution? The judges had declared ship-money was legal, other
taxation and forced loans could easily find justification on the
judicial bench, and thus the crown obtain its revenue, and England
ruled without any let or hindrance from its citizens. To admit the
position was to see the work of centuries undone, and the old contest
in the land for liberties in return for taxes abandoned.
Hampden’s refusal to pay ship-money was a declaration for parliamentary
government. No more a republican than Eliot or Pym, Hampden could see
that either crown or parliament must be supreme in the affairs of
the nation.[109] The constitution was not to be balanced so evenly
as Eliot had believed. Eliot himself had been deprived of life for
maintaining, not the supremacy but the liberty of parliament. For John
Hampden the evils of royal supremacy were obvious and present: misrule,
the restoration of a religion banished by authority of crown and
parliament, and disliked and feared by the majority of serious-minded
people in the country, and the imprisonment of all who claimed the old
freedom of parliament.
The case was decided against him in the law courts, but five of the
twelve judges supported Hampden’s contention that the resistance to
payment was valid, and the arguments for his defence were published
far and wide. “The judgment proved of more advantage and credit to the
gentleman condemned than to the king’s service.”[110]
Three years later, and Charles was forced to summon parliament to get
money for his war in Scotland--the “Bishop’s War,” perhaps the most
hopeless of all his ventures.
Parliament met in April, and its temper was so unfavourable to the
desires of the king, for the forcible conversion of the Scots to
episcopacy, that it was dissolved in three weeks. John Pym was notable
in that “Short Parliament” as the spokesman of the aggrieved country
party, and the commons decided that the grievances of the nation
must be considered before supplies were voted. The Scotch war was
intolerable to Pym and Hampden. They had no objection to episcopacy as
long as bishops were men of Protestant convictions. It was Laud the
“Anglo-Catholic,” Laud the preacher of the divine right of kings, not
Laud the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom they detested, and they had no
relish for the expenditure of English life and treasure in the forcing
of Laudian doctrine on Protestant Scotland.
In the long eleven years of silence from the utterance of parliament
things had been going steadily from bad to worse in England, Pym
made out. Naturally conservative in mind, seeing in the constitution
of king and parliament an admirable instrument of government, and
in the Established Church of England an excellent expression of the
Protestant religion, Pym had found that with parliament suspended the
Protestantism of the Established Church had been steadily undermined by
Laud’s policy, and the revival of some estranged Catholic doctrines and
practices had proceeded apace. Without parliament there was no security
for national well-being. “Powers of parliament are to the body politic
as rational faculties of the soul to man,” he declares in April, 1640.
Pym had entered the House of Commons with Eliot in 1614, and had
been imprisoned in that year for his boldness. In 1620 he had been
one of the “twelve ambassadors” to James I., for whom that king had
ordered chairs to be set in Whitehall. With Eliot and Hampden he
had pressed for Buckingham’s impeachment and for the Petition of
Right. Now in 1640, John Pym, in his fifty-sixth year, was about to
become the accredited leader of the parliamentary party, to be called
“King Pym” by his enemies at the court, and to pass away when the
long constitutional struggle was being settled on the field of civil
war. Unimaginative, and averse from new ideas, Pym had a quite clear
perception of the business of the House of Commons, and of the fitting
relations of king and parliament. The crown, the lords, the commons
were all recognized and necessary elements in the constitution, but
their importance was not equal. The collective assembly of parliament
had prevailed over the crown more than once; to Pym, the Laudian
“divine right” was a novelty, and nonsense at that. Parliament could do
much of its work with or without royal approval, and of the two Houses,
if the Lords were unwilling to work with the lower House, the Commons
could “save the kingdom alone.”
In the autumn Charles was driven again to appeal to parliament, and
in November, 1640, the “Long Parliament” met, only to be dissolved
thirteen years later by the arms of Cromwell. To the eleven years
of “personal government” by Charles succeed thirteen years of
parliamentary government, and then the House of Commons, now too
enfeebled to endure, itself goes down before a military dictatorship.
Pym anticipated the coming struggle by riding over England on the eve
of the elections to the Long Parliament and urging the electors to
return men to the House of Commons resolute and alive to the crisis.
The response was unmistakable. Parliament assembled to find some remedy
for the distresses of the country before voting any money for the
purposes of the crown. Enormous numbers of petitions were presented,
and the House of Commons appointed its committees to attend to and
report on the complaints.[111]
Before the year closed the House of Commons had struck at the power of
Laud and Wentworth (now the Earl of Strafford), and the two ministers
lay in prison impeached for high treason. Windebank, Charles’s
secretary of state, and Finch, the chancellor, were already fled over
seas.
It was Pym who went to the bar of the House of Lords to summon
Strafford to surrender, and it was Pym who opened the charge of
impeachment the following March. As in Eliot’s time, Hampden is content
to be overshadowed by his friend, though his was the greater influence
in the House.
Clarendon has given us his view of Hampden at the opening of the Long
Parliament:
When this parliament began the eyes of all men were fixed upon
him, as their _patriae pater_, and the pilot that must steer
the vessel through the tempests and rocks which threatened it.
I am persuaded his power and interest at that time were greater
to do good or hurt than any man’s in the kingdom, or than any
man of his rank hath had in any time; for his reputation of
honesty was universal, and his affections seemed so publicly
guided, that no corrupt or private ends could bias them.
Baxter, it may be recalled, had written in the _Saints’ Rest_ that
one of the pleasures which he hoped to enjoy in heaven was the society
of John Hampden. The name of Hampden was blotted out in the copies
published after the Restoration. “But,” wrote Baxter, “I must tell
the reader that I did blot it out, not as changing my opinion of the
person.”