Parliament. The Star Chamber and High Commission Courts are abolished.
Ship-money and all enforced taxation unauthorised by parliament are
declared illegal. Oliver Cromwell’s motion for annual parliaments is
amended into an act for triennial parliaments to be called with or
without royal summons. Strafford--the only strong minister Charles
had--perished on Tower Hill in May, both Pym and Hampden supporting
impeachment instead of attainder, and voting for the fallen minister
to be allowed the use of counsel at his trial. That Strafford was a
criminal and a traitor ready to use his Irish army for the suppression
of the English parliament Pym had no doubt.
Still Charles would not admit the position lost, and still struggled
to govern, not through parliament, but by personal rule. The death of
Strafford, though approved by all supporters of the House of Commons,
rallied the king’s friends. The House of Lords was no longer quite at
one with the Commons in the contest. In the House of Commons a royalist
party emerges to oppose Pym, and the beginning of party government
is seen. Overtures are made by Pym to the queen--to be disregarded,
of course; though the tide is setting towards revolution, yet Pym
and Hampden are far from revolutionaries. They are willing to end
the political power of the bishops by turning them out of the House
of Lords, but have only moderate sympathy with the root-and-branch
Puritans who would abolish episcopacy.
In the Grand Remonstrance which Pym laid before the House of Commons in
November, 1641, the case for the Parliament was stated with frankness,
but the demands were not revolutionary. The main points were securities
for the administration of justice, and insistence on the responsibility
of the king’s ministers to parliament. The royalists fought the
Remonstrance vigorously, and in the end it was only carried by a
majority of eleven, 159 to 148. At the end of the debate the excitement
was intense: “some waved their hats over their heads, and others took
their swords in their scabbards out of their belts, and held them by
the pummels in their hands, setting the lower part on the ground.”
Violence seemed inevitable, “had not the sagacity and great calmness of
Mr. Hampden, by a short speech, prevented it.”
On the 1st of December the Remonstrance, with a petition for the
removal of grievances, especially in matters of religion, was presented
to the king at Hampton Court. “Charles had now a last chance of
regaining the affection of his people. If he could have resolved to
give his confidence to the leaders of the moderate party in the House
of Commons, and to regulate his proceedings by their advice, he might
have been, not, indeed, as he had been, a despot, but the powerful and
respected king of a free people. The nation might have enjoyed liberty
and repose under a government with Falkland at its head, checked by
a constitutional opposition under the conduct of Hampden. It was
not necessary that, in order to accomplish this happy end, the king
should sacrifice any part of his lawful prerogative, or submit to any
conditions inconsistent with his dignity.” So Macaulay wrote. But the
days of “governments” and “constitutional oppositions” were far off in
1641, and only the germ of party government is seen in the division of
the House of Commons. To “submit to any conditions” from parliament was
inconsistent with the king’s notions of royal dignity, fostered by Laud
to reject all criticisms as denials of the absolutism of the crown.
Charles promised an answer to the deputation which waited on him,
and the answer was seen on January 3, 1642, when the king’s attorney
appeared at the bar of the Lords, impeached Pym, Hampden, Holles,
Strode, and Hazlerig of high treason, in having corresponded with the
Scots for the invasion of England, and demanded the surrender of the
five members. “All constitutional law was set aside by a charge which
proceeded personally from the king, which deprived the accused of their
legal right to a trial by their peers, and summoned them before a
tribunal which had no pretence to a jurisdiction over them.”
The House of Commons simply declined to surrender their members, but
promised to take the matter into consideration.
Then Charles, with some three hundred cavaliers, went to Westminster,
and entered the House of Commons to demand the accused. But the five
members, warned of his coming, were out of the way and safe within the
city of London. “It was believed that if the king had found them there,
and called in his guards to have seized them, the members of the House
would have endeavoured the defence of them, which might have proved a
very unhappy and sad business.” As it was, the king could only retire
discomfited, with some words about respecting the laws of the realm and
the privileges of parliament, and “in a more discontented and angry
passion than he came in.”
The invasion of the Commons was the worst move Charles could have made,
for parliament was in no temper favourable to royal encroachments, and
it had a large population at hand ready to give substantial support.
The city of London at once declared for the House of Commons, ignored
the king’s writs for the arrest of the five members, and answered the
royal proclamation declaring them “traitors” by calling out the trained
bands for the escort of the members back to Westminster, and for the
protection of the House of Commons.
Falkland and the royalist members turned for the moment from Charles at
his unexpected attack on the House, the cavaliers of Whitehall, menaced
by the trained bands from Southwark and the city, fled, and Charles,
standing alone, left London.
War was now imminent. Pym and Hampden at once prepared for the struggle.
Pym secured the arsenals of Portsmouth and Hull for the parliament,
but his efforts to obtain the control of the militia in the counties
were frustrated for a time by the king’s natural refusal to consent to
the Militia Bill, which would have placed troops under the orders of
country gentlemen of the parliamentary party.
Both king and parliament had to break through all constitutional
precedent. The king levied troops by a royal commission, and Pym
got an ordinance of both Houses of Parliament passed appointing the
lords-lieutenant to command the militia, and thereby published the
supremacy of parliament over the crown. In April the king appeared at
Hull to obtain arms, and was refused admission to the town by Sir John
Hotham, the governor. Parliament expressed its approval of Hotham’s
act, the royalists gathered round Charles at York, and the final
proposals of parliament for ending absolute monarchy were rejected by
the king in June with the words, “If I granted your demands I should be
no more than the mere phantom of a king.”[112]
With this refusal all negotiations were broken off. Essex was appointed
commander of the parliamentary army, and in August Charles raised the
royal standard at Nottingham, and war was begun.
Hampden threw himself vigorously into the campaign. From his native
county of Buckingham, the county which made him its representative in
parliament in 1640, he raised a regiment of infantry. “His neighbours
eagerly enlisted under his command. His men were known by their green
uniform, and by their standard, which bore on one side the watchword
of the parliament, ‘God with us,’ and on the other the device of
Hampden, ‘_Vestigia nulla retrorsum_.’” In the first stages of the war,
before any decisive blow had been struck, Hampden was busy passing and
repassing between the army and the parliament. Clarendon praises his
courage and ability on the field.
A skirmish at Chalgrove, on June 18th, 1643, between bodies of horse
commanded by Rupert and by Hampden, ended in victory for the royalists.
Hampden was seen riding off the field, “before the action was done,
which he never used to do, and with his head hanging down, and resting
his hands upon the neck of his horse.” He was mortally wounded, for two
carbine balls were lodged in his shoulder, and reached Thame only to
die six days later.
The death of Hampden--at the age of 49--came at a dark hour in the
early fortunes of the parliamentary army, and deepened the gloom.
“The loss of Colonel Hampden goeth near the heart of every man that
loves the good of his king and country, and makes some conceive little
content to be at the army now that he is gone.” But Pym remained, and
Cromwell and Vane, and many another resolute House of Commons man.
Pym’s health was already broken when Hampden fell, but he lived to
accomplish the alliance of the English Puritans and the Scotch army,
and, as the price of this alliance, the abolition of episcopacy and
the adoption of Presbyterianism in the Church of England. The Solemn
League and Covenant was accepted by parliament, and imposed on the
nation in September. Henceforth the parliamentary army was pledged to
extirpate “Popery, prelacy, superstition, schism and profaneness”;
to bring “the Churches of God in the three kingdoms to the nearest
conjunction and uniformity in religion”; to “preserve the rights and
privileges of the parliament and the liberties of the kingdom; and to
unite the two kingdoms in a firm peace and union to all posterity.”
The taking of the covenant--a political necessity--was John Pym’s
last work. He was ten years older than Hampden, and his character
was ruggeder and sterner and without the charm of the younger man.
But Pym’s was the greater genius in politics, and his scheme of
constitutional government was to be fulfilled in England at a later
season.
John Pym died on December 8th, 1643, and his body was buried in
Westminster Abbey--only to be turned out at the Restoration and removed
to St. Margaret’s churchyard.
With Pym and Hampden gone, henceforth the conduct of parliament was in
other hands, and the day of moderate statesmanship had passed.
The war undertaken to preserve the liberties and establish the
supremacy of the House of Commons was to bring in its train not only
the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords, but the suppression
of the House of Commons itself.
Important to the nation as the issues at stake were, most people in
England took hardly any more part or interest in the great civil war
than they had done in the Wars of the Roses. “A very large number of
persons regarded the struggle with indifference.... In one case, the
inhabitants of an entire county pledged themselves to remain neutral.
Many quietly changed with the times (as people changed with the varying
fortunes of York and Lancaster). That this sentiment of neutrality
was common to the greater mass of the working classes is obvious from
the simultaneous appearance of the club men in different parts of the
country, with their motto, ‘If you take our cattle, we will give you
battle.’”[113]
How could it be otherwise? Supremacy of King, or supremacy of
Commons,--seed time and harvest remain, and the labourer and the
artizan must needs do their day’s work.
Not till the deposing of the Stuarts--forty-five years after John
Hampden’s death--is the supremacy of parliament over the crown arrived
at by general consent, to become a recognized and settled thing in
British politics. By the middle of the nineteenth century the House of
Commons is unmistakably the ruling power in the constitution, and the
labours of Eliot, Hampden and Pym are vindicated.
In our own day changes in the balance of constitutional power may be
noted. The supremacy of the House of Commons is quietly disappearing
before the growing popularity of the crown, the reawakened activity of
the House of Lords, and the steady gathering of the reins of power into
the hands of the Cabinet and Executive. As the crown in the last twenty
years has increased in popular esteem, so the influence and importance
of the Commons has waned in the country; and this waning influence of
the Lower House has been further diminished by the frequent rejection
and revision of its measures by the House of Lords.
The power of the Executive has also been obtained at the expense of the
power of the Commons. The Cabinet, rather than the House of Commons,
holds the supremacy to-day, and the direction of foreign policy, and
the making of international treaties are no more within the authority
of the House of Commons than are the administration of Egypt and India.
Pym and Hampden fought and gave their lives for the right of the House
of Commons to control the ministers of the crown and to order the
policy of these ministers. By its own consent, and not from pressure
from without, the House of Commons has silently surrendered this right,
and has agreed that the policy of its Foreign Minister for the time
being--whether he be Liberal or Conservative--must not be subject to
reproof, still less to correction. In home affairs administrative order
steadily supersedes statute law.
In theory ministers are still subject to the House of Commons. In
actual practice they can rely on not being interfered with as long as
their party has a majority in the House. When the price of effective
interference with the conduct of affairs is a defeat of the Cabinet
and a consequent dissolution, the payment is more than members of
parliament are prepared to make.
Given the sense of security of social order and of the administration
of justice, the nation, generally, no more heeds the passing of the
supremacy from the House of Commons, than it heeded the winning of
that supremacy.
The Laudian doctrine in the Church of England, revived at the
Restoration, disappeared with the passing of the non-jurors at the
close of the seventeenth century. But its Anglo-Catholic teaching was
renewed by the Oxford Movement, early in Queen Victoria’s reign, and
has largely changed the whole appearance of the Church of England. The
modern high Anglican, claiming, as Laud claimed, the right to interpret
the Book of Common Prayer as a Catholic document, but no longer the
advocate of any theory of divine right of kings, or the champion of any
particular political creed, has travelled indeed far beyond Laud’s very
limited success in winning support for Catholic doctrine and ritual in
the Church of England. Laud was beaten by the opposition of parliament;
his present day successors in the Church of England have prospered in
spite of that opposition, and have triumphed over acts of parliaments,
adverse judicial sentences, privations and imprisonments. But with Laud
the movement was directed by bishops and approved by the king, the
modern Laudian movement was banned by bishops and disfavoured by all in
high authority.
To-day nearly every Catholic doctrine, save papal supremacy, has its
expounders and defenders in the Church of England, and Catholic rites
and ceremonies are freely practised.
Laud, dying on the scaffold in 1645 at the hands of parliament,
is amply avenged in the twentieth century by the victorious
high-churchman. The Laudian clergy of the Established Church can now
maintain their Anglo-Catholic faith and practice, without any fear
of parliamentary interference. For generally they enjoy a popularity
and respect that the House of Commons does not willingly venture to
assail.
John Lilburne and the Levellers
1647–1653
AUTHORITIES: Lilburne’s Pamphlets; _Calendar of State Papers_; _Charles
I. and the Commonwealth_; _State Trials_; _House of Commons’ Journals_;
Whitelocke--_Memorials of English Affairs_; Clarendon--_History
of the Rebellion_; W. Godwin--_History of the Commonwealth_; S.
R. Gardiner--_History of the Great Civil War_; _History of the
Commonwealth and Protectorate_; G. P. Gooch--_History of Democratic
Ideas in the Seventeenth Century_.
JOHN LILBURNE AND THE LEVELLERS
1647–1653.
From his coming of age in 1637 till the near approach of death, when he
turned, a dying man, to the peaceful tenets of the Quakers, the life of
John Lilburne is a record of twenty years of strife and battle with the
rulers of the land.
He came of pugnacious stock, for John Lilburne’s father, a well-to-do
Durham squire, was the last man to demand the settlement of a lawsuit
by the ordeal of battle, and came into court armed accordingly--only
to be disappointed by an order from the crown, forbidding the proposed
return to such ancient and obsolete methods of deciding the differences
of neighbours.
Apprenticed to a wholesale cloth-merchant in London, John Lilburne
soon became acquainted with Bastwick and Prynne, then busy over
anti-episcopal pamphlets, and, keeping such company, naturally fell
into the clutches of the Star Chamber. The charge against him was that
he had helped to print and circulate unlicensed books, in particular,
Prynne’s _News from Ipswich_; and though Lilburne declared the charge
to be false, on his refusal to take the usual oath to answer truly all
questions put to him, the Star Chamber adjudged him guilty, and passed
sentence--Lilburne was to be whipped from the Fleet to Westminster, to
stand in the pillory, and to be kept in prison.
The sentence was carried out on February 13th, 1638, but Lilburne was
not cowed, for he scattered some of Bastwick’s offending pamphlets
on the road, and was gagged in the pillory to reduce him to silence.
In prison things went hardly with Lilburne, for the authorities had
him placed in irons and kept in solitary confinement, and only the
compassion of fellow prisoners saved him from actual starvation in the
two years and nine months of his imprisonment.
It was a rough beginning, and John Lilburne was henceforth an agitator
and a rebel.
At the end of 1640 one of the first things done by the Long Parliament
was to order Lilburne’s release, and in the following May the sentence
was pronounced “illegal and against the liberties of the subject.” But
illegal or not, the punishment had been inflicted, and with unbroken
spirit, passionately resenting the tyranny that could so wrong men,
Lilburne flew quickly to the attack on the authors of the injustice.
At Edgehill Lilburne held a captain’s commission, and at Brentford he
was taken prisoner by the royalists. Only the threat of swift reprisals
by the parliamentary army saved him from being shot as “a traitor,” and
the following year he was again at liberty on an exchange of prisoners.
Again, after fighting at Marston Moor, he fell into the hands of the
royalists, and, shot through the arm, was kept in prison at Oxford for
six months.
Brave soldier as Lilburne was, he left the army in 1645 (with the rank
of Lieutenant-Colonel and with £880 arrears of pay owing to him)
rather than take the covenant and subscribe to the requirements of
Cromwell’s “new model.”
And now monarchy having fallen from its high estate, Lilburne at once
saw elements of tyranny in the Parliamentary government, and did not
hesitate to say so. Courageous and intrepid, with considerable legal
knowledge, a passion for liberty, and clear views on democracy, John
Lilburne might have given invaluable service to the commonwealth. He
had shown skill and daring in the war, his character for fearless
endurance had been proved, his ability as a pamphleteer was
considerable, and his capacity for work enormous; the government had
either to treat Lilburne as a friend or foe--he was not to be ignored.
The government, unwisely, decided Lilburne was an enemy, and for the
next ten years he fought the rule of parliament and the army, his
popularity increasing with every new pamphlet he produced. The price
the commonwealth government paid for its opposition to Lilburne was to
be seen on the death of Cromwell.[114]
From 1645 to 1649 Lilburne’s vigorous criticisms of the men in power
provoked retaliation, and brought him to Newgate. But in prison or out
of prison Lilburne went on hammering away to establish a democratic
constitution. The time was to come when Cromwell would find the Long
Parliament had outlived its usefulness and would end it by main force.
Lilburne was anxious in 1647 for a radical reform of parliament and a
general manhood suffrage. His proposals were popular in the army, and
had Cromwell supported him the whole future of English politics would
have been changed.
When the Presbyterian majority in parliament proposed the disbandment
of the army in 1647, the regiments chose their agitators, and, refusing
to disband, drew up the “Agreement of the People” and the “Case for the
Army.” These documents give the political standpoint of the Levellers
and the particular grievances to be remedied.
The distribution of parliamentary seats according to the number of
inhabitants was the chief proposal in the “Agreement of the People,”
and the principles maintained are that “no man is bound to a government
under which he has not put himself,” and that “all inhabitants who have
not lost their birthright should have an equal voice in elections.”
The particular demands in the “Case for the Army” were the abolition
of monopolies, freedom of trade and religion, restoration of enclosed
common lands, and abolition of sinecures.
While Cromwell and Ireton were both bitterly against manhood suffrage,
the council of officers to whom the Levellers appealed agreed to
support it, without approving the rest of the programme.
Cromwell, relying on the army to prevent a royalist reaction--for
Charles was plotting from Carisbrooke for aid from Scotland, and
the royalists in the House of Commons were anxious to effect a
reconciliation--would give neither time nor patience to the demands of
Lilburne and the Levellers.
In vain the Levellers exclaimed, in 1648, “We were ruled before
by King, Lords, and Commons, now by a General, Court Martial, and
Commons: and, we pray you, what is the difference?” Cromwell, at all
costs, was determined to preserve the discipline of the army, and to
suppress mutiny with an iron hand. For him the army which had beaten
the cavaliers was the one safeguard against the return of the old
order in Church and State. Lilburne and the Levellers, with the “Fifth
Monarchy” men, had been the strength, the very life of the army that
had conquered at Marston Moor and Naseby. The petition of the Fifth
Monarchy men for the reign of Christ and His saints (which, according
to prophecy, was to supersede the four monarchies of the ancient
world) had no terrors for Cromwell; in other words, they demanded
government exclusively by the godly, Independents and Presbyterians
combining to elect all representatives, “and to determine all things
by the Word.” “Such a proposal might attract fanatics; it could not
attract the multitude. The Levellers who stood up for an exaggeration
of the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy were likely to be far more
numerous.”[115] To Cromwell the immediate thing was the royalist
danger; it was no season for embarking on democratic experiments
with which he had no sympathy. The breach between Cromwell and the
Levellers widened, and as Cromwell became more and more impatient
of their agitation, distrust and suspicion of Cromwell and of the
newly-appointed Council of State ripened, in 1649, into revolt.[116]
It is the perennial misunderstanding between the statesman and the
agitator. The one weighted by responsibility can rarely travel at
the pace of the other, untrammelled by office, and as the distance
between the two lengthens, it seems they are not even pursuing the same
course--as, indeed, very often they are not.
Lilburne had none of Cromwell’s anxieties as to a possible royalist
reaction; for him the danger could not come from the dethroned king
and his defeated cavaliers, but from a parliamentary oligarchy or
a military dictatorship. But he overestimated the strength of the
Leveller movement in the army. With the presentation of the “Agreement
of the People” the bulk of the discontent in the army diminished, and
while the Levellers who remained became in several regiments openly
mutinous, the movement generally died down, so that when the revolt
came, it was suppressed without difficulty.[117]
Lilburne was out of prison at the beginning of 1649. He took no part in
the trial of Charles I., and let it be known that he doubted the wisdom
of abolishing monarchy before a new constitution had been drawn up.