ON THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION FROM THE ACCESSION OF CHARLES I. TO THE
DISSOLUTION OF HIS THIRD PARLIAMENT
1625-1629
Charles the First had much in his character very suitable to the times
in which he lived, and to the spirit of the people he was to rule; a
stern and serious deportment, a disinclination to all licentiousness,
and a sense of religion that seemed more real than in his father.[629]
These qualities we might suppose to have raised some expectation of him,
and to have procured at his accession some of that popularity, which is
rarely withheld from untried princes. Yet it does not appear that he
enjoyed even this first transient sunshine of his subjects' affection.
Solely intent on retrenching the excesses of prerogative, and well aware
that no sovereign would voluntarily recede from the possession of power,
they seem to have dreaded to admit into their bosoms any sentiments of
personal loyalty, which might enervate their resolution. And Charles
took speedy means to convince them that they had not erred in
withholding their confidence.
Elizabeth in her systematic parsimony, James in his averseness to war,
had been alike influenced by a consciousness that want of money alone
could render a parliament formidable to their power. None of the
irregular modes of supply were ever productive enough to compensate for
the clamour they occasioned; after impositions and benevolences were
exhausted, it had always been found necessary, in the most arbitrary
times of the Tudors, to fall back on the representatives of the people.
But Charles succeeded to a war, at least to the preparation of a war,
rashly undertaken through his own weak compliance, the arrogance of his
favourite, and the generous or fanatical zeal of the last parliament.
He would have perceived it to be manifestly impossible, if he had been
capable of understanding his own position, to continue this war without
the constant assistance of the House of Commons, or to obtain that
assistance without very costly sacrifices of his royal power. It was not
the least of this monarch's imprudences, or rather of his blind
compliances with Buckingham, to have not only commenced hostilities
against Spain which he might easily have avoided,[630] and persisted in
them for four years, but entered on a fresh war with France, though he
had abundant experience to demonstrate the impossibility of defraying
its charges.
_Parliament of 1625._--The first parliament of this reign has been
severely censured on account of the penurious supply it doled out for
the exigencies of a war, in which its predecessors had involved the
king. I will not say that this reproach is wholly unfounded. A more
liberal proceeding, if it did not obtain a reciprocal concession from
the king, would have put him more in the wrong. But, according to the
common practice and character of all such assemblies, it was
preposterous to expect subsidies equal to the occasion, until a
foundation of confidence should be laid between the Crown and
parliament. The Commons had begun probably to repent of their hastiness
in the preceding year, and to discover that Buckingham and his pupil, or
master (which shall we say?), had conspired to deceive them.[631] They
were not to forget that none of the chief grievances of the last reign
were yet redressed, and that supplies must be voted slowly and
conditionally if they would hope for reformation. Hence they made their
grant of tonnage and poundage to last but for a year instead of the
king's life, as had for two centuries been the practice; on which
account the upper house rejected the bill.[632] Nor would they have
refused a further supply, beyond the two subsidies (about L140,000)
which they had granted, had some tender of redress been made by the
Crown; and were actually in debate upon the matter, when interrupted by
a sudden dissolution.[633]
Nothing could be more evident, by the experience of the late reign as
well as by observing the state of public spirit, than that hasty and
premature dissolutions or prorogations of parliament served but to
aggravate the Crown's embarrassments. Every successive House of Commons
inherited the feelings of its predecessor, without which it would have
ill represented the prevalent humour of the nation. The same men, for
the most part, came again to parliament more irritated and desperate of
reconciliation with the sovereign than before. Even the politic measure,
as it was fancied to be, of excluding some of the most active members
from seats in the new assembly, by nominating them sheriffs for the
year, failed altogether of the expected success; as it naturally must in
an age when all ranks partook in a common enthusiasm.[634] Hence the
prosecution against Buckingham, to avert which Charles had dissolved his
first parliament, was commenced with redoubled vigour in the second. It
was too late, after the precedents of Bacon and Middlesex, to dispute
the right of the Commons to impeach a minister of state. The king,
however, anticipating their resolutions, after some sharp speeches only
had been uttered against his favourite, sent a message that he would not
allow any of his servants to be questioned among them, much less such as
were of eminent place and near unto him. He saw, he said, that some of
them aimed at the Duke of Buckingham, whom, in the last parliament of
his father, all had combined to honour and respect, nor did he know what
had happened since to alter their affections; but he assured them that
the duke had done nothing without his own special direction and
appointment. This haughty message so provoked the Commons that, having
no express testimony against Buckingham, they came to a vote that common
fame is a good ground of proceeding either by inquiry, or presenting the
complaint to the king or Lords; nor did a speech from the lord keeper,
severely rating their presumption, and requiring on the king's behalf
that they should punish two of their members who had given him offence
by insolent discourses in the house, lest he should be compelled to use
his royal authority against them; nor one from the king himself, bidding
them remember that parliaments were altogether in his power for their
calling, sitting, and dissolution; therefore, as he found the fruits of
them good or evil, they were to continue to be or not to be, tend to
pacify or to intimidate the assembly. They addressed the king in very
decorous language, but asserting "the ancient, constant, and undoubted
right and usage of parliaments to question and complain of all persons,
of what degree soever, found grievous to the commonwealth, in abusing
the power and trust committed to them by their sovereign."[635] The duke
was accordingly impeached at the bar of the house of peers on eight
articles, many of them probably well-founded; yet as the Commons heard
no evidence in support of them, it was rather unreasonable in them to
request that he might be committed to the Tower.
In the conduct of this impeachment, two of the managers, Sir John Eliot
and Sir Dudley Digges, one the most illustrious confessor in the cause
of liberty, whom that time produced, the other, a man of much ability
and a useful supporter of the popular party, though not exempt from some
oblique views towards promotion, gave such offence by words spoken, or
alleged to be spoken, in derogation of his majesty's honour, that they
were committed to the Tower. The Commons, of course, resented this new
outrage. They resolved to do no more business till they were righted in
their privileges. They denied the words imputed to Digges; and,
thirty-six peers asserting that he had not spoken them, the king
admitted that he was mistaken, and released both their members.[636] He
had already broken in upon the privileges of the House of Lords, by
committing the Earl of Arundel to the Tower during the session; not upon
any political charge, but, as was commonly surmised, on account of a
marriage which his son had made with a lady of royal blood. Such private
offences were sufficient in those arbitrary reigns to expose the subject
to indefinite imprisonment, if not to an actual sentence in the
star-chamber. The Lords took up this detention of one of their body, and
after formal examination of precedents by a committee, came to a
resolution, "that no lord of parliament, the parliament sitting, or
within the usual times of privilege of parliament, is to be imprisoned
or restrained without sentence or order of the house, unless it be for
treason or felony, or for refusing to give surety for the peace." This
assertion of privilege was manifestly warranted by the co-extensive
liberties of the Commons. After various messages between the king and
Lords, Arundel was ultimately set at liberty.[637]
This infringement of the rights of the peerage was accompanied by
another not less injurious, the refusal of a writ of summons to the Earl
of Bristol. The Lords were justly tenacious of this unquestionable
privilege of their order, without which its constitutional dignity and
independence could never be maintained. Whatever irregularities or
uncertainty of legal principle might be found in earlier times as to
persons summoned only by writ without patents of creation, concerning
whose hereditary peerage there is much reason to doubt; it was beyond
all controversy that an Earl of Bristol holding his dignity by patent
was entitled of right to attend parliament. The house necessarily
insisted upon Bristol's receiving his summons, which was sent him with
an injunction not to comply with it by taking his place. But the
spirited earl knew that the king's constitutional will expressed in the
writ ought to outweigh his private command, and laid the secretary's
letter before the House of Lords. The king prevented any further
interference in his behalf by causing articles of charge to be exhibited
against him by the attorney-general, whereon he was committed to the
Tower. These assaults on the pride and consequence of an aristocratic
assembly, from whom alone the king could expect effectual support,
display his unfitness not only for the government of England, but of any
other nation. Nor was his conduct towards Bristol less oppressive than
impolitic. If we look at the harsh and indecent employment of his own
authority and even testimony, to influence a criminal process against a
man of approved and untainted worth,[638] and his sanction of charges
which, if Bristol's defence be as true as it is now generally admitted
to be, he must have known to be unfounded; we shall hardly concur with
those candid persons who believe that Charles would have been an
excellent prince in a more absolute monarchy. Nothing in truth can be
more preposterous than to maintain, like Clarendon and Hume, the
integrity and innocence of Lord Bristol, together with the sincerity and
humanity of Charles I. Such inconsistencies betray a determination in
the historian to speak of men according to his preconceived affection or
prejudice, without so much as attempting to reconcile these sentiments
to the facts which he can neither deny nor excuse.[639]
Though the Lords petitioned against a dissolution, the king was
determined to protect his favourite, and rescue himself from the
importunities of so refractory a House of Commons.[640] Perhaps he had
already taken the resolution of governing without the concurrence of
parliaments, though he was induced to break it the ensuing year. For the
Commons having delayed to pass a bill for the five subsidies they had
voted in this session till they should obtain some satisfaction for
their complaints, he was left without any regular supply. This was not
wholly unacceptable to some of his counsellors, and probably to himself;
as affording a pretext for those unauthorised demands which the
advocates of arbitrary prerogative deemed more consonant to the
monarch's honour. He had issued letters of privy seal, after the former
parliament, to those in every county, whose names had been returned by
the lord lieutenant as most capable, mentioning the sum they were
required to lend, with a promise of repayment in eighteen months.[641]
This specification of a particular sum was reckoned an unusual
encroachment, and a manifest breach of the statute against arbitrary
benevolences; especially as the name of those who refused compliance
were to be returned to the council. But the government now ventured on a
still more outrageous stretch of power. They first attempted to persuade
the people that, as subsidies had been voted in the House of Commons,
they should not refuse to pay them, though no bill had been passed for
that purpose. But a tumultuous cry was raised in Westminster Hall from
those who had been convened, that they would pay no subsidy but by
authority of parliament.[642] This course, therefore, was abandoned for
one hardly less unconstitutional. A general loan was demanded from every
subject, according to the rate at which he was assessed in the last
subsidy. The commissioners appointed for the collection of this loan
received private instructions to require not less than a certain
proportion of each man's property in lands or goods, to treat separately
with every one, to examine on oath such as should refuse, to certify the
names of refractory persons to the privy council, and to admit of no
excuse for abatement of the sum required.[643]
_Arbitrary taxation._--This arbitrary taxation (for the name of loan
could not disguise the extreme improbability that the money would be
repaid), so general and systematic as well as so weighty, could not be
endured without establishing a precedent that must have shortly put an
end to the existence of parliaments. For, if those assemblies were to
meet only for the sake of pouring out stupid flatteries at the foot of
the throne, of humbly tendering such supplies as the ministry should
suggest, or even of hinting at a few subordinate grievances which
touched not the king's prerogative and absolute control in matters of
state--functions which the Tudors and Stuarts were well pleased that
they should exercise--if every remonstrance was to be checked by a
dissolution, and chastised by imprisonment of its promoters, every
denial of subsidy to furnish a justification for extorted loans, our
free-born high-minded gentry would not long have brooked to give their
attendance in such an ignominious assembly, and an English parliament
would have become as idle a mockery of national representation as the
cortes of Castile. But this kingdom was not in a temper to put up with
tyranny. The king's advisers were as little disposed to recede from
their attempt. They prepared to enforce it by the arm of power.[644] The
common people who refused to contribute were impressed to serve in the
navy. The gentry were bound by recognisance to appear at the
council-table, where many of them were committed to prison.[645] Among
these were five knights, Darnel, Carbet, Earl, Heveningham, and Hampden,
who sued the court of king's bench for their writ of habeas corpus. The
writ was granted; but the warden of the Fleet made return that they were
detained by a warrant from the privy council, informing him of no
particular cause of imprisonment, but that they were committed by the
special command of his majesty. This gave rise to a most important
question, whether such a return was sufficient in law to justify the
court in remitting the parties to custody. The fundamental immunity of
English subjects from arbitrary detention had never before been so fully
canvassed; and it is to the discussion which arose out of the case of
these five gentlemen that we owe its continual assertion by parliament,
and its ultimate establishment in full practical efficacy by the statute
of Charles II. It was argued with great ability by Noy, Selden, and
other eminent lawyers, on behalf of the claimants, and by the
attorney-general Heath for the Crown.
The counsel for the prisoners grounded their demand of liberty on the
original basis of Magna Charta; the twenty-ninth section of which, as is
well known, provides that "no free man shall be taken or imprisoned
unless by lawful judgment of his peers, or the law of the land." This
principle having been frequently transgressed by the king's privy
council in earlier times, statutes had been repeatedly enacted,
independently of the general confirmations of the charter, to redress
this material grievance. Thus in the 25th of Edward III. it is provided
that "no one shall be taken by petition or suggestion to the king or his
counsel, unless it be (_i.e._ but only) by indictment or presentment, or
by writ original at the common law." And this is again enacted three
years afterwards, with little variation, and once again in the course of
the same reign. It was never understood, whatever the loose language of
these old statutes might suggest, that no man could be kept in custody
upon a criminal charge before indictment, which would have afforded too
great security to offenders. But it was the regular practice that every
warrant of commitment, and every return by a gaoler to the writ of
habeas corpus, must express the nature of the charge, so that it might
appear whether it were no legal offence; in which case the party must be
instantly set at liberty; or one for which bail ought to be taken, or
one for which he must be remanded to prison. It appears also to have
been admitted without controversy, though not perhaps according to the
strict letter of law, that the privy council might commit to prison on a
criminal charge, since it seemed preposterous to deny that power to
those intrusted with the care of the commonwealth, which every petty
magistrate enjoyed. But it was contended that they were as much bound as
every petty magistrate to assign such a cause for their commitments as
might enable the court of king's bench to determine whether it should
release or remand the prisoners brought before them by habeas corpus.
The advocates for this principal alleged several precedents, from the
reign of Henry VII. to that of James, where persons committed by the
council generally, or even by the special command of the king, had been
admitted to bail on their habeas corpus. "But I conceive," said one of
these, "that our case will not stand upon precedent, but upon the
fundamental laws and statutes of this realm; and though the precedents
look one way or the other, they are to be brought back unto the laws by
which the kingdom is governed." He was aware that a pretext might be
found to elude most of his precedents. The warrant had commonly declared
the party to be charged on _suspicion_ of treason or of felony; in which
case he would of course be bailed by the court. Yet in some of these
instances the words "by the king's special command," were inserted in
the commitment; so that they served to repel the pretension of an
arbitrary right to supersede the law by his personal authority. Ample
proof was brought from the old law books that the king's command could
not excuse an illegal act. "If the king command me," said one of the
judges under Henry VI., "to arrest a man, and I arrest him, he shall
have an action of false imprisonment against me, though it were done in
the king's presence." "The king," said Chief Justice Markham to Edward
IV., "cannot arrest a man upon suspicion of felony or treason, as any of
his subjects may; because if he should wrong a man by such arrest, he
can have no remedy against him." No verbal order of the king, nor any
under his sign manual or privy signet, was a command, it was contended
by Selden, which the law would recognise as sufficient to arrest or
detain any of his subjects; a writ duly issued under the seal of a court
being the only language in which he could signify his will. They urged
further that, even if the first commitment by the king's command were
lawful, yet when a party had continued in prison for a reasonable time,
he should be brought to answer, and not be indefinitely detained;
liberty being a thing so favoured by the law that it will not suffer any
man to remain in confinement for any longer time than of necessity it
must.
To these pleadings for liberty, Heath, the attorney-general, replied in
a speech of considerable ability, full of those high principles of
prerogative which, trampling as it were on all statute and precedent,
seemed to tell the judges that they were placed there to obey rather
than to determine. "This commitment," he says, "is not in a legal and
ordinary way, but by the special command of our lord the king, which
implies not only the fact done, but so extraordinarily done, that it is
notoriously his majesty's immediate act and will that it should be so."
He alludes afterwards, though somewhat obscurely, to the king's absolute
power, as contra-distinguished from that according to law; a favourite
distinction, as I have already observed, with the supporters of
despotism. "Shall we make inquiries," he says, "whether his commands are
lawful?--who shall call in question the justice of the king's actions,
who is not to give account for them?" He argues from the legal maxim
that the king can do no wrong, that a cause must be presumed to exist
for the commitment, though it be not set forth. He adverts with more
success to the number of papists and other state prisoners, detained for
years in custody for mere political jealousy. "Some there were," he
says, "in the Tower who were put in it when very young; should they
bring a habeas corpus, would the court deliver them?" Passing next to
the precedents of the other side, and condescending to admit their
validity, however contrary to the tenor of his former argument, he
evades their application by such distinctions as I have already
mentioned.
The judges behaved during this great cause with apparent moderation and
sense of its importance to the subject's freedom. Their decision,
however, was in favour of the Crown; and the prisoners were remanded to
custody. In pronouncing this judgment, the chief justice, Sir Nicholas
Hyde, avoiding the more extravagant tenets of absolute monarchy, took
the narrower line of denying the application of those precedents, which
had been alleged to show the practice of the court in bailing persons
committed by the king's special command. He endeavoured also to prove
that, where no cause had been expressed in the warrant, except such
command as in the present instance, the judges had always remanded the
parties; but with so little success that I cannot perceive more than one
case mentioned by him, and that above a hundred years old, which
supports this doctrine. The best authority on which he had to rely, was
the resolution of the judges in the 34th of Elizabeth, published in
Anderson's _Reports_.[646] For, though this is not grammatically worded,
it seems impossible to doubt that it acknowledges the special command of
the king or the authority of the privy council as a body, to be such
sufficient warrant for a commitment as to require no further cause to be
expressed, and to prevent the judges from discharging the party from
custody, either absolutely or upon bail. Yet it was evidently the
consequence of this decision, that every statute from the time of Magna
Charta, designed to protect the personal liberties of Englishmen,
became a dead letter; since the insertion of four words in a warrant
(per speciale mandatum regis), which might become matter of form, would
control their remedial efficacy. And this wound was the more deadly, in
that the notorious cause of these gentlemen's imprisonment was their
withstanding an illegal exaction of money. Everything that distinguished
our constitutional laws, all that rendered the name of England valuable,
was at stake on this issue. If the judgment in the case of ship-money
was more flagrantly iniquitous, it was not so extensively destructive as
the present.[647]
_A parliament called in 1628._--Neither of these measures, however, of
illegal severity towards the uncompliant, backed as they were by a timid
court of justice, nor the exhortations of a more prostitute and
shameless band of churchmen, could divert the nation from its cardinal
point of faith in its own prescriptive franchises. To call another
parliament appeared the only practicable means of raising money for a
war, in which the king persisted with great impolicy or rather blind
trust in his favourite. He consented to this with extreme
unwillingness.[648] Previously to its assembling, he released a
considerable number of gentlemen and others who had been committed for
their refusal of the loan. These were, in many cases, elected to the new
parliament; coming thither with just indignation at their country's
wrongs, and pardonable resentment at their own. No year, indeed, within
the memory of any one living, had witnessed such violations of public
liberty as 1627. Charles seemed born to carry into daily practice those
theories of absolute power, which had been promulgated from his father's
lips. Even now, while the writs were out for a new parliament,
commissioners were appointed to raise money "by impositions or
otherwise, as they should find most convenient in a case of such
inevitable necessity, wherein form and circumstance must be dispensed
with rather than the substance be lost and hazarded;"[649] and the
levying of ship-money was already debated in the council. Anticipating,
as indeed was natural, that this House of Commons would correspond as
ill to the king's wishes as their predecessors, his advisers were
preparing schemes more congenial, if they could be rendered effective,
to the spirit in which he was to govern. A contract was entered into for
transporting some troops and a considerable quantity of arms from
Flanders into England, under circumstances at least highly suspicious,
and which, combined with all the rest that appears of the court policy
at that time, leaves no great doubt on the mind that they were designed
to keep under the people, while the business of contribution was going
forward.[650] Shall it be imputed as a reproach to the Cokes, the
Seldens, the Glanvils, the Pyms, the Eliots, the Philipses, of this
famous parliament, that they endeavoured to devise more effectual
restraints than the law had hitherto imposed on a prince who had snapped
like bands of tow the ancient statutes of the land, to remove from his
presence counsellors, to have been misled by whom was his best apology,
and to subject him to an entire dependence on his people for the
expenditure of government, as the surest pledge of his obedience to the
laws?
_Petition of Right._--The principal matters of complaint taken up by the
Commons in this session were, the exaction of money under the name of
loans; the commitment of those who refused compliance, and the late
decision of the king's bench, remanding them upon a habeas corpus; the
billeting of soldiers on private persons, which had occurred in the last
year, whether for convenience or for purposes of intimidation and
annoyance; and the commissions to try military offenders by martial
law--a procedure necessary within certain limits to the discipline of an
army, but unwarranted by the constitution of this country which was
little used to any regular forces, and stretched by the arbitrary spirit
of the king's administration beyond all bounds.[651] These four
grievances or abuses form the foundation of the Petition of Right,
presented by the Commons in the shape of a declaratory statute. Charles
had recourse to many subterfuges in hopes to elude the passing of this
law; rather perhaps through wounded pride, as we may judge from his
subsequent conduct, than such apprehension that it would create a
serious impediment to his despotic schemes. He tried to persuade them to
acquiesce in his royal promise not to arrest any one without just cause,
or in a simple confirmation of the Great Charter, and other statutes in
favour of liberty. The peers, too pliant in this instance to his
wishes, and half receding from the patriot banner they had lately
joined, lent him their aid by proposing amendments (insidious in those
who suggested them, though not in the body of the house), which the
Commons firmly rejected.[652] Even when the bill was tendered to him for
that assent, which it had been necessary for the last two centuries that
the king should grant or refuse in a word, he returned a long and
equivocal answer, from which it could only be collected that he did not
intend to remit any portion of what he had claimed as his prerogative.
But on an address from both houses for a more explicit answer, he
thought fit to consent to the bill in the usual form. The Commons, of
whose harshness towards Charles his advocates have said so much,
immediately passed a bill for granting five subsidies, about L350,000; a
sum not too great for the wealth of the kingdom or for his exigencies,
but considerable according to the precedents of former times, to which
men naturally look.[653]
The sincerity of Charles in thus according his assent to the Petition of
Right may be estimated by the following very remarkable conference which
he held on the subject with his judges. Before the bill was passed, he
sent for the two chief justices, Hyde and Richardson, to Whitehall; and
propounded certain questions, directing that the other judges should be
assembled in order to answer them. The first question was, "Whether in
no case whatsoever the king may not commit a subject without showing
cause?" To which the judges gave an answer the same day under their
hands, which was the next day presented to his majesty by the two chief
justices in these words: "We are of opinion that, by the general rule of
law, the cause of commitment by his majesty ought to be shown; yet some
cases may require such secrecy, that the king may commit a subject
without showing the cause for a convenient time." The king then
delivered them a second question, and required them to keep it very
secret, as the former: "Whether, in case a habeas corpus be brought, and
a warrant from the king without any general or special cause returned,
the judges ought to deliver him before they understand the cause from
the king?" Their answer was as follows: "Upon a habeas corpus brought
for one committed by the king, if the cause be not specially or
generally returned, so as the court may take knowledge thereof, the
party ought by the general rule of law to be delivered. But, if the case
be such that the same requireth secrecy, and may not presently be
disclosed, the court of discretion may forbear to deliver the prisoner
for a convenient time, to the end the court may be advertised of the
truth thereof." On receiving this answer, the king proposed a third
question: "Whether, if the king grant the Commons' petition, he doth not
thereby exclude himself from committing or restraining a subject for any
time or cause whatsoever, without showing a cause?" The judges returned
for answer to this important query: "Every law, after it is made, hath
its exposition, and so this petition and answer must have an exposition
as the case in the nature thereof shall require to stand with justice;
which is to be left to the courts of justice to determine, which cannot
particularly be discovered until such case shall happen. And although
the petition be granted, there is no fear of conclusion as is intimated
in the question."[654]
The king, a very few days afterwards gave his _first_ answer to the
Petition of Right. For even this indirect promise of compliance, which
the judges gave him, did not relieve him from apprehensions that he
might lose the prerogative of arbitrary commitment. And though, after
being beaten from this evasion, he was compelled to accede in general
terms to the petition, he had the insincerity to circulate one thousand
five hundred copies of it through the country, after the prorogation,
with his first answer annexed; an attempt to deceive without the
possibility of success.[655] But instances of such ill faith,
accumulated as they are through the life of Charles, render the
assertion of his sincerity a proof either of historical ignorance, or
of a want of moral delicacy.
The Petition of Right, as this statute is still called, from its not
being drawn in the common form of an act of parliament, after reciting
the various laws which have established certain essential privileges of
the subject, and enumerating the violations of them which had recently
occurred, in the four points of illegal exactions, arbitrary
commitments, quartering of soldiers or sailors, and infliction of
punishment by martial law, prays the king, "That no man hereafter be
compelled to make or yield any gift, loan, benevolence, tax, or such
like charge without common consent by act of parliament; and that none
be called to answer or take such oath, or to give attendance, or be
confined or otherwise molested or disquieted concerning the same, or for
refusal thereof; and that no freeman in any such manner as is before
mentioned be imprisoned or detained; and that your majesty would be
pleased to remove the said soldiers and marines, and that your people
may not be so burthened in time to come; and that the aforesaid
commissions for proceeding by martial law may be revoked and annulled;
and that hereafter no commissions of the like nature may issue forth to
any person or persons whatever, to be executed as aforesaid, lest by
colour of them any of your majesty's subjects be destroyed or put to
death contrary to the laws and franchises of the land."[656]
_Tonnage and poundage disputed._--It might not unreasonably be
questioned whether the language of this statute were sufficiently
general to comprehend duties charged on merchandise at the outports, as
well as internal taxes and exactions, especially as the former had
received a sort of sanction, though justly deemed contrary to law, by
the judgment of the court of exchequer in Bates's case. The Commons,
however, were steadily determined not to desist till they should have
rescued their fellow-subjects from a burthen as unwarrantably imposed as
those specifically enumerated in their Petition of Right. Tonnage and
poundage, the customary grant of every reign, had been taken by the
present king without consent of parliament; the Lords having rejected,
as before-mentioned, a bill that limited it to a single year. The house
now prepared a bill to grant it, but purposely delayed its passing; in
order to remonstrate with the king against his unconstitutional
anticipation of their consent. They declared "that there ought not any
imposition to be laid upon the goods of merchants, exported or imported,
without common consent by act of parliament; that tonnage and poundage,
like other subsidies, sprung from the free grant of the people; that
when impositions had been laid on the subjects' goods and merchandises
without authority of law, which had very seldom occurred, they had, on
complaint in parliament, been forthwith relieved; except in the late
king's reign, who, through evil counsel, had raised the rates and
charges to the height at which they then were." They conclude, after
repeating their declaration that the receiving of tonnage and poundage
and other impositions not granted by parliament is a breach of the
fundamental liberties of this kingdom, and contrary to the late petition
of right, with most humbly beseeching his majesty to forbear any further
receiving of the same, and not to take it in ill part from those of his
loving subjects who should refuse to make payment of any such charges
without warrant of law.[657]
The king anticipated the delivery of this remonstrance by proroguing the
parliament. Tonnage and poundage, he told them, was what he had never
meant to give away, nor could possibly do without. By this abrupt
prorogation, while so great a matter was unsettled, he trod back his
late footsteps, and dissipated what little hopes might have arisen from
his tardy assent to the Petition of Right. During the interval before
the ensuing session, those merchants, among whom Chambers, Rolls, and
Vassal are particularly to be remembered with honour, who gallantly
refused to comply with the demands of the custom house, had their goods
distrained, and on suing writs of replevin, were told by the judges that
the king's right, having been established in the case of Bates, could no
longer be disputed.[658] Thus the Commons re-assembled, by no means less
inflamed against the king's administration than at the commencement of
the preceding session. Their proceedings were conducted with more than
usual warmth.[659] Buckingham's death, which had occurred since the
prorogation, did not allay their resentment against the advisers of the
Crown. But the king, who had very much lowered his tone in speaking of
tonnage and poundage, and would have been content to receive it as their
grant, perceiving that they were bent on a full statutory recognition of
the illegality of impositions without their consent, and that they had
opened a fresh battery on another side, by mingling in certain religious
disputes in order to attack some of his favourite prelates, took the
step, to which he was always inclined, of dissolving this third
parliament.
_Religious differences._--The religious disputes to which I have just
alluded are chiefly to be considered, for the present purpose, in their
relation to those jealousies and resentments springing out of the
ecclesiastical administration, which during the reigns of the two first
Stuarts furnished unceasing food to political discontent. James having
early shown his inflexible determination to restrain the puritans, the
bishops proceeded with still more rigour than under Elizabeth. No longer
thwarted, as in her time, by an unwilling council, they succeeded in
exacting a general conformity to the ordinances of the church. It had
been solemnly decided by the judges in the queen's reign, and in 1604,
that, although the statute establishing the high commission court did
not authorise it to deprive ministers of their benefices, yet this law
being only in affirmation of the queen's inherent supremacy, she might,
by virtue of that, regulate all ecclesiastical matters at her pleasure,
and erect courts with such powers as she should think fit. Upon this
somewhat dangerous principle, Archbishop Bancroft deprived a
considerable number of puritan clergymen;[660] while many more, finding
that the interference of the Commons in their behalf was not regarded,
and that all schemes of evasion were come to an end, were content to
submit to the obnoxious discipline. But their affections being very
little conciliated by this coercion, there remained a large party within
the bosom of the established church, prone to watch for and magnify the
errors of their spiritual rulers. These men preserved the name of
puritans. Austere in their lives, while many of the others were careless
or irregular, learned as a body comparatively with the opposite party,
implacably averse to everything that could be construed into an
approximation to popery, they acquired a degree of respect from grave
men, which would have been much more general, had they not sometimes
given offence by a moroseness and even malignity of disposition, as well
as by a certain tendency to equivocation and deceitfulness; faults,
however, which so frequently belong to the weaker party under a rigorous
government that they scarcely afford a marked reproach against the
puritans. They naturally fell in with the patriotic party in the House
of Commons, and kept up throughout the kingdom a distrust of the Crown,
which has never been so general in England as when connected with some
religious apprehensions.
_Growth of high church tenets._--The system pursued by Bancroft and his
imitators, Bishops Neile and Laud, with the approbation of the king, far
opposed to the healing counsels of Burleigh and Bacon, was just such as
low-born and little-minded men, raised to power by fortune's caprice,
are ever found to pursue. They studiously aggravated every difference,
and irritated every wound. As the characteristic prejudice of the
puritans was so bigoted an abhorrence of the Romish faith, that they
hardly deemed its followers to deserve the name of Christians, the
prevailing high church party took care to shock that prejudice by
somewhat of a retrograde movement, and various seeming, or indeed real,
accommodations of their tenets to those of the abjured religion. They
began by preaching the divine right, as it is called, or absolute
indispensability, of episcopacy;[661] a doctrine of which the first
traces, as I apprehend, are found about the end of Elizabeth's reign.
They insisted on the necessity of episcopal succession regularly derived
from the apostles. They drew an inference from this tenet, that
ordinations by presbyters were in all cases null. And as this affected
all the reformed churches in Europe except their own, the Lutherans not
having preserved the succession of their bishops, while the Calvinists
had altogether abolished that order, they began to speak of them not as
brethren of the same faith, united in the same cause, and distinguished
only by differences little more material than those of political
commonwealths (which had been the language of the church of England ever
since the Reformation), but as aliens to whom they were not at all
related, and schismatics with whom they held no communion; nay, as
wanting the very essence of a Christian society. This again brought them
nearer, by irresistible consequence, to the disciples of Rome, with
becoming charity, but against the received creed of the puritans and
perhaps against their own articles, they all acknowledged to be a part
of the catholic church, while they were withholding that appellation,
expressly or by inference, from Heidelberg and Geneva.
_Differences as to the observance of Sunday._--The founders of the
English reformation, after abolishing most of the festivals kept before
that time, had made little or no change as to the mode of observance of
those they retained. Sundays and holidays stood much on the same footing
as days on which no work except for good cause was to be performed, the
service of the church was to be attended, and any lawful amusement might
be indulged in.[662] A just distinction, however, soon grew up; an
industrious people could spare time for very few holidays; and the more
scrupulous party, while they slighted the church festivals as of human
appointment, prescribed a stricter observance of the Lord's day. But it
was not till about 1595 that they began to place it very nearly on the
footing of the Jewish sabbath, interdicting not only the slightest
action of worldly business, but even every sort of pastime and
recreation; a system which, once promulgated, soon gained ground as
suiting their atrabilious humour, and affording a new theme of censure
on the vices of the great.[663] Those who opposed them on the high
church side, not only derided the extravagance of the Sabbatarians, as
the others were called, but pretended that the commandment having been
confined to the Hebrews, the modern observance of the first day of the
week as a season of rest and devotion was an ecclesiastical institution,
and in no degree more venerable than that of the other festivals or the
season of Lent, which the puritans stubbornly despised.[664] Such a
controversy might well have been left to the usual weapons. But James
I., or some of the bishops to whom he listened, bethought themselves
that this might serve as a test of puritan ministers. He published
accordingly a declaration to be read in churches, permitting all lawful
recreations on Sunday after divine service, such as dancing, archery,
May-games, and morrice-dances, and other usual sports; but with a
prohibition of bear-hunting and other unlawful games. No recusant, or
any one who had not attended the church service, was entitled to this
privilege; which might consequently be regarded as a bounty on devotion.
The severe puritan saw it in no such point of view. To his cynical
temper, May-games and morrice-dances were hardly tolerable on six days
of the week; they were now recommended for the seventh. And this impious
licence was to be promulgated in the church itself. It is indeed
difficult to explain so unnecessary an insult on the precise clergy, but
by supposing an intention to harass those who should refuse
compliance.[665] But this intention, from whatever cause, perhaps
through the influence of Archbishop Abbot, was not carried into effect;
nor was the declaration itself enforced till the following reign.
The House of Commons displayed their attachment to the puritan maxims,
or their dislike of the prelatical clergy, by bringing in bills to
enforce a greater strictness in this respect. A circumstance that
occurred in the session of 1621 will serve to prove their fanatical
violence. A bill having been brought in "for the better observance of
the Sabbath, usually called Sunday," one Mr. Shepherd, sneering at the
puritans, remarked that, as Saturday was dies Sabbati, this might be
entitled a bill for the observance of Saturday, commonly called Sunday.
This witticism brought on his head the wrath of that dangerous assembly.
He was reprimanded on his knees, expelled the house, and when he saw
what befell poor Floyd, might deem himself cheaply saved from their
fangs with no worse chastisement.[666] Yet when the upper house sent
down their bill with "the Lord's day" substituted for "the Sabbath,"
observing, "that people do now much incline to words of Judaism," the
Commons took no exception.[667] The use of the word Sabbath instead of
Sunday became in that age a distinctive mark of the puritan party.
_Arminian controversy._--A far more permanent controversy sprang up
about the end of the same reign, which afforded a new pretext for
intolerance and a fresh source of mutual hatred. Every one of my readers
is acquainted more or less with the theological tenets of original sin,
free will, and predestination, variously taught in the schools, and
debated by polemical writers for so many centuries; and few can be
ignorant that the articles of our own church, as they relate to these
doctrines, have been very differently interpreted, and that a
controversy about their meaning has long been carried on with a
pertinacity which could not have continued on so limited a topic, had
the combatants been merely influenced by the love of truth. Those who
have no bias to warp their judgment will not perhaps have much
hesitation in drawing their line between, though not at an equal
distance between, the conflicting parties. It appears, on the other
hand, that the articles are worded on some of these doctrines with
considerable ambiguity; whether we attribute this to the intrinsic
obscurity of the subject, to the additional difficulties with which it
had been entangled by theological systems, to discrepancy of opinion in
the compilers, or to their solicitude to prevent disunion by adopting
formularies which men of different sentiments might subscribe. It is
also manifest that their framers came, as it were, with averted eyes to
the Augustinian doctrine of predestination, and wisely reprehended those
who turned their attention to a system so pregnant with objections, and
so dangerous, when needlessly dwelt upon, to all practical piety and
virtue. But, on the other hand, this very reluctance to inculcate the
tenet is so expressed as to manifest their undoubting belief in it; nor
is it possible either to assign a motive for inserting the seventeenth
article, or to give any reasonable interpretation to it, upon the theory
which at present passes for orthodox in the English church. And upon
other subjects intimately related to the former, such as the penalty of
original sin and the depravation of human nature, the articles, after
making every allowance for want of precision, seem totally
irreconcilable with the scheme usually denominated Arminian.
The force of those conclusions, which we must, in my judgment, deduce
from the language of these articles, will be materially increased by
that appeal of contemporary and other early authorities, to which
recourse has been had in order to invalidate them. Whatever doubts may
be raised as to the Calvinism of Cranmer and Ridley, there can surely be
no room for any as to the chiefs of the Anglican church under Elizabeth.
We find explicit proofs that Jewel, Nowell, Sandys, Cox, professed to
concur with the reformers of Zurich and Geneva in every point of
doctrine.[668] The works of Calvin and Bullinger became textbooks in the
English universities.[669] Those who did not hold the predestinarian
theory were branded with reproach by the names of free-willers and
Pelagians.[670] And when the opposite tenets came to be advanced, as
they were at Cambridge about 1590, a clamour was raised as if some
unusual heresy had been broached. Whitgift, with the concurrence of some
other prelates, in order to withstand its progress, published what were
called the Lambeth articles, containing the broadest and most repulsive
declaration of all the Calvinistic tenets. But, Lord Burleigh having
shown some disapprobation, these articles never obtained any legal
sanction.[671]
These more rigorous tenets, in fact, especially when so crudely
enounced, were beginning to give way. They had been already abandoned by
the Lutheran church. They had long been opposed in that of Rome by the
Franciscan order, and latterly by the jesuits. Above all, the study of
the Greek fathers, with whom the first reformers had been little
conversant, taught the divines of a more learned age, that men of as
high a name as Augustin, and whom they were prone to over-value, had
entertained very different sentiments.[672] Still the novel opinions
passed for heterodox, and were promulgated with much vacillation and
indistinctness. When they were published in unequivocal propositions by
Arminius and his school, James declared himself with vehemence against
this heresy.[673] He not only sent English divines to sit in the synod
of Dort, where the Calvinistic system was fully established, but
instigated the proceedings against the remonstrants with more of
theological pedantry than charity or decorum.[674] Yet this inconsistent
monarch within a very few years was so wrought on by one or two
favourite ecclesiastics, who inclined towards the doctrines condemned in
that assembly, that openly to maintain the Augustinian system became
almost a sure means of exclusion from preferment in our church. This was
carried to its height under Charles. Laud, his sole counsellor in
ecclesiastical matters, advised a declaration enjoining silence on the
controverted points; a measure by no means unwise, if it had been fairly
acted upon. It is alleged, however, that the preachers on one side only
were silenced, the printers of books on one side censured in the
star-chamber, while full scope was indulged to the opposite sect.[675]
The House of Commons, especially in their last session, took up the
increase of Arminianism as a public grievance. It was coupled in their
remonstrances with popery, as a new danger to religion, hardly less
terrible than the former. This bigoted clamour arose in part from the
nature of their own Calvinistic tenets, which, being still prevalent in
the kingdom, would, independently of all political motives, predominate
in any popular assembly. But they had a sort of excuse for it in the
close, though accidental and temporary, connection that subsisted
between the partisans of these new speculative tenets and those of
arbitrary power; the churchmen who receded most from Calvinism being
generally the zealots of prerogative. They conceived also that these
theories, conformable in the main to those most countenanced in the
church of Rome, might pave the way for that restoration of her faith
which from so many other quarters appeared to threaten them. Nor was
this last apprehension so destitute of all plausibility as the advocates
of the two first Stuarts have always pretended it to be.
_State of catholics under James._--James, well instructed in the
theology of the reformers, and inured himself to controversial
dialectics, was far removed in point of opinion from any bias towards
the Romish creed. But he had, while in Scotland, given rise to some
suspicions at the court of Elizabeth, by a little clandestine coquetry
with the pope, which he fancied to be a politic means of disarming
enmity.[676] Some knowledge of this, probably, as well as his avowed
dislike of sanguinary persecution, and a foolish reliance on the
trifling circumstance that one if not both of his parents had professed
their religion, led the English catholics to expect a great deal of
indulgence, if not support, at his hands. This hope might receive some
encouragement from his speech on opening the parliament of 1604, wherein
he intimated his design to revise and explain the penal laws, "which the
judges might perhaps," he said, "in times past have too rigorously
interpreted." But the temper of those he addressed was very different.
The catholics were disappointed by an act inflicting new penalties on
recusants, and especially debarring them from educating their children
according to their consciences.[677] The administration took a sudden
turn towards severity; the prisons were filled, the penalties exacted,
several suffered death,[678] and the general helplessness of their
condition impelled a few persons (most of whom had belonged to what was
called the Spanish party in the last reign) to the gunpowder conspiracy,
unjustly imputed to the majority of catholics, though perhaps extending
beyond those who appeared in it.[679] We cannot wonder that a
parliament so narrowly rescued from personal destruction endeavoured to
draw the cord still tighter round these dangerous enemies. The statute
passed on this occasion is by no means more harsh than might be
expected. It required not only attendance on worship, but participation
in the communion, as a test of conformity, and gave an option to the
king of taking a penalty of L20 a month from recusants, or two-thirds of
their lands. It prescribed also an oath of allegiance, the refusal of
which incurred the penalties of a praemunire. This imported that,
notwithstanding any sentence of deprivation or excommunication by the
pope, the taker would bear true allegiance to the king, and defend him
against any conspiracies which should be made by reason of such sentence
or otherwise, and do his best endeavour to disclose them; that he from
his heart abhorred, detested, and abjured as impious and heretical, the
damnable doctrine and position that princes, excommunicated or deprived
by the pope, may be deposed or murdered by their subjects, or any other
whatsoever; and that he did not believe that the pope or any other could
absolve him from this oath.[680]
Except by cavilling at one or two words, it seemed impossible for the
Roman catholics to decline so reasonable a test of loyalty, without
justifying the worst suspicions of protestant jealousy. Most of the
secular priests in England, asking only a connivance in the exercise of
their ministry, and aware how much the good work of reclaiming their
apostate countrymen was retarded by the political obloquy they incurred,
would have willingly acquiesced in the oath. But the court of Rome, not
yet receding an inch from her proudest claims, absolutely forbade all
catholics to abjure her deposing power by this test, and employed
Bellarmine to prove its unlawfulness. The king stooped to a literary
controversy with this redoubted champion, and was prouder of no exploit
of his life than his answer to the cardinal's book; by which he incurred
the contempt of foreign courts and of all judicious men.[681] Though
neither the murderous conspiracy of 1605, nor this refusal to abjure the
principles on which it was founded, could dispose James to persecution,
or even render the papist so obnoxious in his eyes as the puritan; yet
he was long averse to anything like a general remission of the penal
laws. In sixteen instances after this time, the sanguinary enactments of
his predecessor were enforced, but only perhaps against priests who
refused the oath;[682] the catholics enjoyed on the whole somewhat more
indulgence than before, in respect to the private exercise of their
religion; at least enough to offend narrow-spirited zealots, and furnish
pretext for the murmurs of a discontented parliament, but under
condition of paying compositions for recusancy; a regular annual source
of revenue which, though apparently trifling in amount, the king was not
likely to abandon, even if his notions of prerogative, and the generally
received prejudices of that age, had not determined him against an
express toleration.[683]
In the course, however, of that impolitic negotiation, which exposed him
to all eyes as the dupe and tool of the court of Madrid, James was led
on to promise concessions for which his protestant subjects were ill
prepared. That court had wrought on his feeble mind by affected coyness
about the infanta's marriage, with two private aims; to secure his
neutrality in the war of the Palatinate, and to obtain better terms for
the English catholics. Fully successful in both ends, it would probably
have at length permitted the union to take place, had not Buckingham's
rash insolence broken off the treaty; but I am at a loss to perceive the
sincere and even generous conduct which some have found in the Spanish
council during this negotiation.[684] The king acted with such culpable
weakness, as even in him excites our astonishment. Buckingham, in his
first eagerness for the marriage on arriving in Spain, wrote to ask if
the king would acknowledge the pope's spiritual supremacy, as the
surest means of success. James professed to be much shocked at this, but
offered to recognise his jurisdiction as patriarch of the west, to whom
ecclesiastical appeals might ultimately be made; a concession as
incompatible with the code of our protestant laws as the former. Yet
with this knowledge of his favourite's disposition, he gave the prince
and him a written promise to perform whatever they should agree upon
with the court of Madrid.[685] On the treaty being almost concluded, the
king, prince, and privy council swore to observe certain stipulated
articles, by which the infanta was not only to have the exercise of her
religion, but the education of her children till ten years of age. But
the king was also sworn to private articles; that no penal laws should
be put in force against the catholics, that there should be a perpetual
toleration of their religion in private houses, that he and his son
would use their authority to make parliament confirm and ratify these
articles, and revoke all laws (as it is with strange latitude expressed)
containing anything repugnant to the Roman catholic religion, and that
they would not consent to any new laws against them. The Prince of Wales
separately engaged to procure the suspension or abrogation of the penal
laws within three years, and to lengthen the term for the mother's
education of their children from ten years to twelve, if it should be in
his own power. He promised also to listen to catholic divines, whenever
the infanta should desire it.[686]
These secret assurances, when they were whispered in England, might not
unreasonably excite suspicion of the prince's wavering in his religion,
which he contrived to aggravate by an act as imprudent as it was
reprehensible. During his stay at Madrid, while his inclinations were
still bent on concluding the marriage, the sole apparent obstacle being
the pope's delay in forwarding the dispensation, he wrote a letter to
Gregory XV., in reply to one received from him, in language evidently
intended to give an impression of his favourable dispositions towards
the Romish faith. The whole tenor of his subsequent life must have
satisfied every reasonable inquirer into our history, of Charles's real
attachment to the Anglican church; nor could he have had any other aim
than to facilitate his arrangements with the court of Rome by this
deception. It would perhaps be uncandid to judge severely a want of
ingenuousness, which youth, love, and bad counsels may extenuate; yet I
cannot help remarking that the letter is written with the precautions of
a veteran in dissimulation; and, while it is full of what might raise
expectation, contains no special pledge that he could be called on to
redeem. But it was rather presumptuous to hope that he could foil the
subtlest masters of artifice with their own weapons.[687]
James, impatient for this ill-omened alliance, lost no time in
fulfilling his private stipulations with Spain. He published a general
pardon of all penalties already incurred for recusancy. It was designed
to follow this up by a proclamation prohibiting the bishops, judges, and
other magistrates to execute any penal statute against the catholics.
But the lord keeper, Bishop Williams, hesitated at so unpopular a
stretch of power.[688] And, the rupture with Spain ensuing almost
immediately, the king, with a singular defiance of all honest men's
opinion, though the secret articles of the late treaty had become
generally known, declared in his first speech to parliament in 1624,
that "he had only thought good sometimes to wink and connive at the
execution of some penal laws, and not to go on so rigorously as at other
times, but not to dispense with any or to forbid or alter any that
concern religion; he never permitted or yielded, he never did think it
with his heart, nor spoke it with his mouth."[689]
When James soon after this, not yet taught by experience to avoid a
catholic alliance, demanded the hand of Henrietta Maria for his son,
Richlieu thought himself bound by policy and honour as well as religion
to obtain the same or greater advantages for the English catholics than
had been promised in the former negotiation. Henrietta was to have the
education of her children till they reached the age of twelve; thus were
added two years, at a time of life when the mind becomes susceptible of
lasting impressions, to the term at which, by the treaty of Spain, the
mother's superintendence was to cease.[690] Yet there is the strongest
reason to believe that this condition was merely inserted for the honour
of the French Crown, with a secret understanding that it should never be
executed.[691] In fact, the royal children were placed at a very early
age under protestant governors of the king's appointment; nor does
Henrietta appear to have ever insisted on her right. That James and
Charles should have incurred the scandal of this engagement, since the
articles, though called private, must be expected to transpire, without
any real intentions of performing it, is an additional instance of that
arrogant contempt of public opinion which distinguished the Stuart
family. It was stipulated in the same private articles, that prisoners
on the score of religion should be set at liberty, and that none should
be molested in future.[692] These promises were irregularly fulfilled,
according to the terms on which Charles stood with his brother-in-law.
Sometimes general orders were issued to suspend all penal laws against
papists; again, by a capricious change of policy, all officers and
judges are directed to proceed in their execution; and this severity
gave place in its turn to a renewed season of indulgence. If these
alterations were not very satisfactory to the catholics, the whole
scheme of lenity displeased and alarmed the protestants. Tolerance, in
any extensive sense, of that proscribed worship was equally abhorrent to
the prelatist and the puritan; though one would have winked at its
peaceable and domestic exercise, which the other was zealous to
eradicate. But, had they been capable of more liberal reasoning upon
this subject, there was enough to justify their indignation at this
attempt to sweep away the restrictive code established by so many
statutes, and so long deemed essential to the security of their church,
by an unconstitutional exertion of the prerogative, prompted by no more
worthy motive than compliance with a foreign power, and tending to
confirm suspicions of the king's wavering between the two religions, or
his indifference to either. In the very first months of his reign, and
while that parliament was sitting, which has been reproached for its
parsimony, he sent a fleet to assist the French king in blocking up the
port of Rochelle; and with utter disregard of the national honour,
ordered the admiral, who reported that the sailors would not fight
against protestants, to sail to Dieppe, and give up his ships into the
possession of France.[693] His subsequent alliance with the Hugonot
party in consequence merely of Buckingham's unwarrantable hostility to
France, founded on the most extraordinary motives, could not redeem, in
the eyes of the nation, this instance of lukewarmness, to say the least,
in the general cause of the Reformation. Later ages have had means of
estimating the attachment of Charles the First to protestantism, which
his contemporaries in that early period of his reign did not enjoy; and
this has led some to treat the apprehensions of parliament as either
insincere or preposterously unjust. But can this be fairly pretended by
any one who has acquainted himself with the course of proceedings on the
Spanish marriage, the whole of which was revealed by the Earl of Bristol
to the House of Lords? Was there nothing, again, to excite alarm in the
frequent conversions of persons of high rank to popery, in the more
dangerous partialities of many more, in the evident bias of certain
distinguished churchmen to tenets rejected at the Reformation? The
course pursued with respect to religious matters after the dissolution
of parliament in 1629, to which I shall presently advert, did by no
means show the misgivings of that assembly to have been ill-founded.