THE BREAK WITH THE PARLIAMENT
1603-1611
[Sidenote: James the First.]
On the sixth of May 1603, after a stately progress through his new
dominions, King James entered London. In outer appearance no sovereign
could have jarred more utterly against the conception of an English
ruler which had grown up under Plantagenet or Tudor. His big head, his
slobbering tongue, his quilted clothes, his rickety legs stood out in as
grotesque a contrast with all that men recalled of Henry or Elizabeth as
his gabble and rhodomontade, his want of personal dignity, his
buffoonery, his coarseness of speech, his pedantry, his personal
cowardice. Under this ridiculous exterior indeed lay no small amount of
moral courage and of intellectual ability. James was a ripe scholar,
with a considerable fund of shrewdness, of mother-wit, and ready
repartee. His canny humour lights up the political and theological
controversies of the time with quaint incisive phrases, with puns and
epigrams and touches of irony which still retain their savour. His
reading, especially in theological matters, was extensive; and he was
already a voluminous author on subjects which ranged from predestination
to tobacco. But his shrewdness and learning only left him, in the phrase
of Henry the Fourth of France, "the wisest fool in Christendom." He had
in fact the temper of a pedant, a pedant's conceit, a pedant's love of
theories, and a pedant's inability to bring his theories into any
relation with actual facts. It was this fatal defect that marred his
political abilities. As a statesman he had shown no little capacity in
his smaller realm; his cool humour and good temper had held even
Melville at bay; he had known how to wait and how to strike; and his
patience and boldness had been rewarded with a fair success. He had
studied foreign affairs as busily as he had studied Scotch affairs; and
of the temper and plans of foreign courts he probably possessed a
greater knowledge than any Englishman save Robert Cecil. But what he
never possessed, and what he never could gain, was any sort of knowledge
of England or Englishmen. He came to his new home a Scotchman, a
foreigner, strange to the life, the thoughts, the traditions of the
English people. And he remained strange to them to the last. A younger
man might have insensibly imbibed the temper of the men about him. A man
of genius would have flung himself into the new world of thought and
feeling and made it his own. But James was neither young nor a man of
genius. He was already in middle age when he crossed the Border; and his
cleverness and his conceit alike blinded him to the need of any
adjustment of his conclusions or his prejudices to the facts which
fronted him.
[Sidenote: The foreign rule.]
It was this estrangement from the world of thought and feeling about
them which gave its peculiar colour to the rule of the Stuarts. It was
not the first time that England had submitted to foreign kings. But it
was the first time that England experienced a foreign rule. Foreign
notions of religion, foreign maxims of state, foreign conceptions of the
attitude of the people or the nobles towards the Crown, foreign notions
of the relation of the Crown to the people, formed the policy of James
as of his successors. For the Stuarts remained foreigners to the last.
Their line filled the English throne for more than eighty years; but
like the Bourbons they forgot nothing and they learned nothing. To all
influences indeed save English influences they were accessible enough.
As James was steeped in the traditions of Scotland, so Charles the First
was open to the traditions of Spain. The second Charles and the second
James reflected in very different ways the temper of France. But what no
Stuart seemed able to imbibe or to reflect was the temper of England.
The strange medley of contradictory qualities which blended in the
English character, its love of liberty and its love of order, its
prejudice and open-mindedness, its religious enthusiasm and its cool
good sense, remained alike unintelligible to them. And as they failed to
understand England, so in many ways England failed to understand them.
It underrated their ability, nor did it do justice to their aims. Its
insular temper found no hold on a policy which was far more European
than insular. Its practical sense recoiled from the unpractical
cleverness that, while it seldom said a foolish thing, yet never did a
wise one.
[Sidenote: The new policy.]
From the first this severance between English feeling and the feeling of
the king was sharply marked. If war and taxation had dimmed the
popularity of Elizabeth in her later years, England had still a
reverence for the Queen who had made her great. But James was hardly
over the Border when he was heard expressing his scorn of the character
and statecraft of his predecessor. Her policy, whether at home or
abroad, he came resolved to undo. Men who had fought side by side with
Dutchman and Huguenot against Spaniard and Leaguer heard angrily that
the new king was seeking for peace with Spain, that he was negotiating
with the Papacy, while he met the advances of France with a marked
coolness, and denounced the Hollanders as rebels against their king. It
was with scarcely less anger that they saw the stern system of
repression which had prevailed through the close of Elizabeth's reign
relaxed in favour of the Catholics, and recusants released from the
payments of fines. It was clear that both at home and abroad James
purposed to withdraw from that struggle with Catholicism which the
hotter Protestants looked upon as a battle for God. What the king really
aimed at was the security of his throne. The Catholics alone questioned
his title; and a formal excommunication by Rome would have roused them
to dispute his accession. James had averted this danger by intrigues
both with the Papal Court and the English Catholics during the later
years of Elizabeth; and his vague assurances had mystified the one and
prevented the others from acting. The disappointment of the Catholics
when no change followed on the king's accession found vent in a wild
plot for the seizure of his person, devised by a priest named Watson;
and the alarm this created quickened James to a redemption of his
pledges. In July 1603 the leading Catholics were called before the
Council and assured that the fines for recusancy would no longer be
exacted; while an attempt was made to open a negotiation with Rome and
to procure the support of the Pope for the new government. But the real
strength of the Catholic party lay in the chance of aid from Spain. So
long as the war continued they would look to Spain for succour, and the
influence of Spain would be exerted to keep them in antagonism to the
Crown. Nor was this the only ground for a cessation of hostilities. The
temper of James was peaceful; the royal treasury was exhausted; and the
continuance of the war necessitated a close connexion with the
Calvinistic and republican Hollanders. At the same time therefore that
the Catholics were assured of a relaxation of the penal laws,
negotiations for peace were opened with Spain.
[Sidenote: James and the Puritans.]
However justifiable such steps might be, it was certain that they would
rouse alarm and discontent among the sterner Protestants. For a time
however it seemed as if concessions on one side were to be balanced by
concessions on the other, as if the tolerance which had been granted to
the Catholic would be extended to the Puritan. James had hardly crossed
the Border when he was met by what was termed the Millenary Petition,
from a belief that it was signed by a thousand of the English clergy. It
really received the assent of some eight hundred, or of about a tenth of
the clergy of the realm. The petitioners asked for no change in the
government or organization of the Church, but for a reform of its
courts, the removal of superstitious usages from the Book of Common
Prayer, the disuse of lessons from the apocryphal books of Scripture, a
more rigorous observance of Sundays, and the provision and training of
ministers who could preach to the people. Concessions on these points
would as yet have satisfied the bulk of the Puritans; and for a while
it seemed as if concession was purposed. The king not only received the
petition, but promised a conference of bishops and divines in which it
should be discussed. Ten months however were suffered to pass before the
pledge was redeemed; and a fierce protest from the University of Oxford
in the interval gave little promise of a peaceful settlement. The
university denounced the Puritan demands as preludes of a Presbyterian
system in which the clergy would "have power to bind their king in
chains and their prince in links of iron, that is (in their learning) to
censure him, to enjoin him penance, to excommunicate him, yea--in case
they see cause--to proceed against him as a tyrant."
[Sidenote: Hampton Court conference.]
The warning was hardly needed by James. The voice of Melville was still
in his ears when he summoned four Puritan ministers to meet the
Archbishop and eight of his suffragans at Hampton Court in January 1604.
From the first he showed no purpose of discussing the grievances alleged
in the petition. He revelled in the opportunity for a display of his
theological reading; but he viewed the Puritan demands in a purely
political light. He charged the petitioners with aiming at a Scottish
presbytery, "where Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall meet, and at
their pleasure censure me and my Council and all their proceedings.
Stay," he went on with amusing vehemence, "stay, I pray you, for one
seven years before you demand that from me, and if you find me pursy and
fat and my windpipe stuffed, I will perhaps hearken to you, for let that
government be once up, and I am sure I shall be kept in health." No
words could have better shown the new king's unconsciousness that he had
passed into a land where parliaments were realities, and where the
"censure" of king and council was a national tradition. But neither his
theology nor his politics met with any protest from the prelates about
him. On the contrary, the bishops declared that the insults James
showered on their opponents were inspired by the Holy Ghost. The
Puritans however still ventured to question his infallibility, and the
king broke up the conference with a threat which disclosed the policy of
the Crown. "I will make them conform," he said of the remonstrants, "or
I will harry them out of the land!"
[Sidenote: The Parliament of 1604.]
It is only when we recall the temper of England at the time that we can
understand the profound emotion which was roused by threats such as
these. Three months after the conference at Hampton Court the members
were gathering to the first parliament of the new reign; and the
Parliament of 1604 met in another mood from that of any parliament which
had met for a hundred years. Under the Tudors the Houses had more than
once at great crises in our history withstood the policy of the Crown.
But in the main that policy had been their own; and it was the sense of
this oneness in aim which had averted any final collision even in the
strife with Elizabeth. But this trust in the unity of the nation and the
Crown was now roughly shaken. The squires and merchants who thronged the
benches at Westminster listened with coldness and suspicion to the
self-confident assurances of the king. "I bring you," said James, "two
gifts, one peace with foreign nations, the other union with Scotland";
and a project was laid before them for a union of the two kingdoms under
the name of Great Britain. "By what laws," asked Bacon, "shall this
Britain be governed?" Great in fact as were the advantages of such a
scheme, the House showed its sense of the political difficulties
involved in it by referring it to a commission. James in turn showed his
resentment by passing over the attempts made to commute for a fixed sum
the oppressive rights of Purveyance and Wardship. But what the House was
really set upon was religious reform; and the first step of the Commons
had been the naming of a committee to frame bills for the redress of the
more crying ecclesiastical grievances. The influence of the Crown
secured the rejection of these bills by the Lords; and the irritation of
the Lower House showed itself in an outspoken address to the king. The
Parliament, it said, had come together in a spirit of peace. "Our
desires were of peace only, and our device of unity." Their aim had been
to put an end to the long-standing dissension among the ministers, and
to preserve uniformity by the abandonment of "a few ceremonies of small
importance," by the redress of some ecclesiastical abuses, and by the
establishment of an efficient training for a preaching clergy. If they
had waived their right to deal with these matters during the old age of
Elizabeth, they asserted it now. "Let your Majesty be pleased to receive
public information from your Commons in Parliament, as well of the
abuses in the Church as in the civil state and government." Words yet
bolder, and which sound like a prelude to the Petition of Right, met the
claim of absolutism which was so frequently on the new king's lips.
"Your majesty would be misinformed," said the address, "if any man
should deliver that the kings of England have any absolute power in
themselves, either to alter religion or make any laws concerning the
same, otherwise than as in temporal causes, by consent of Parliament."
[Sidenote: The Canons of 1604.]
The address was met by a petulant scolding, and as the Commons met
coldly the king's request for a subsidy the Houses were adjourned. James
at once assumed the title to which Parliament had deferred its assent,
of King of Great Britain; while the support of the Crown emboldened the
bishops to a fresh defiance of the Puritan pressure. The act of
Elizabeth which gave parliamentary sanction to the Thirty-nine Articles
compelled ministers to subscribe only to those which concerned the faith
and the sacraments, and thus implicitly refused to compel their
signatures to the articles which related to points of discipline and
Church government. The compromise had been observed from 1571 till now;
but the Convocation of 1604 by its canons required the subscription of
the clergy to the articles touching rites and ceremonies. The king
showed his approval of this step by raising its prime mover, Bancroft,
to the vacant See of Canterbury; and Bancroft added to the demand of
subscription a requirement of rigid conformity with the rubrics on the
part of all beneficed clergymen. In the spring of 1605 three hundred of
the Puritan clergy were driven from their livings for a refusal to
comply with these demands.
[Sidenote: Fresh breach with the Catholics.]
If James had come to his new throne with dreams of conciliation and of a
greater unity among his subjects, his dream was to be speedily
dispelled. At the moment when the persecution of Bancroft announced a
final breach between the Crown and the Puritans, a revival of the old
rigour made a fresh breach between the Crown and the Catholics. In
remitting the fines for recusancy James had never purposed to suffer any
revival of Catholicism; and in the opening of 1604 a proclamation which
bade all Jesuits and seminary priests depart from the land proved that
on its political side the Elizabethan policy was still adhered to. But
the effect of the remission of fines was at once to swell the numbers of
avowed Catholics. In the diocese of Chester the number of recusants
increased by a thousand. Rumours of Catholic conversions spread a panic
which showed itself in an act of the Parliament of 1604 confirming the
statutes of Elizabeth; and to this James gave his assent. He promised
indeed that the statute should remain inoperative; but rumours of his
own conversion, which sprang from his secret negotiation with Rome, so
angered the king that in the spring of 1605 he bade the judges put it in
force, while the fines for recusancy were levied more strictly than
before. The disappointment of their hopes, the quick breach of the
pledges so solemnly given to them, drove the Catholics to despair. They
gave fresh life to a conspiracy which a small knot of bigots had been
fruitlessly striving to bring to an issue since the king's accession.
Catesby, a Catholic zealot who had taken part in the rising of Essex,
had busied himself during the last years of Elizabeth in preparing for a
revolt at the Queen's death, and in seeking for his project the aid of
Spain. He was joined in his plans by two fellow-zealots, Winter and
Wright; but the scheme was still unripe when James peaceably mounted the
throne; and for the moment his pledge of toleration put an end to it.
But the zeal of the plotters was revived by the banishment of the
priests; and the conspiracy at last took the form of a plan for blowing
up both Houses of Parliament and profiting by the terror caused by such
a stroke. In Flanders Catesby found a new assistant in his schemes,
Guido Fawkes, an Englishman who was serving in the army of the Archduke;
and on his return to England he was joined by Thomas Percy, a cousin of
the Earl of Northumberland and a pensioner of the king's guard. In May
1604 the little group hired a tenement near the Parliament House, and
set themselves to dig a mine beneath its walls.
[Sidenote: The Gunpowder Plot.]
As yet however they stood alone. The bulk of the Catholics were content
with the relaxation of the penal laws; and in the absence of any aid the
plotters were forced to suspend their work. It was not till the sudden
change in the royal policy that their hopes revived. But with the
renewal of persecution Catesby at once bestirred himself; and at the
close of 1604 the lucky discovery of a cellar beneath the Parliament
House facilitated the execution of this plan. Barrels of gunpowder were
placed in the cellar, and the little group waited patiently for the
fifth of November 1605, when the Houses were again summoned to assemble.
In the interval their plans widened into a formidable conspiracy. It was
arranged that on the destruction of the king and the Parliament the
Catholics should rise, seize the young princes, use the general panic
to make themselves masters of the realm, and call for aid from the
Spaniards in Flanders. With this view Catholics of greater fortune, such
as Sir Everard Digby and Francis Tresham, were admitted to Catesby's
confidence, and supplied money for the larger projects he designed. Arms
were bought in Flanders, horses were held in readiness, a meeting of
Catholic gentlemen was brought about under show of a hunting party to
serve as the beginning of a rising. Wonderful as was the secrecy with
which the plot was concealed, the family affection of Tresham at the
last moment gave a clue to it by a letter to Lord Monteagle, his
relative, which warned him to absent himself from the Parliament on the
fatal day; and further information brought about the discovery of the
cellar and of Guido Fawkes, who was charged with its custody. The
hunting party broke up in despair, the conspirators, chased from county
to county, were either killed or sent to the block; and Garnet, the
Provincial of the English Jesuits, was brought to trial and executed.
Though he had shrunk from all part in the plot, its existence had been
made known to him by way of confession by another Jesuit, Greenway; and
horror-stricken as he represented himself to have been, he had kept the
secret and left the Parliament to its doom.
[Sidenote: The Impositions.]
The failure of such a plot necessarily gives strength to a government;
and for the moment the Parliament was drawn closer to the king by the
deliverance from a common peril. When the Houses again met in 1606 they
listened in a different temper to the demand for a subsidy. The needs of
the Treasury indeed were great. Elizabeth had left behind her a war
expenditure, and a debt of four hundred thousand pounds. The first
ceased with the peace, but the debt remained; and the prodigality of
James was fast raising the charges of the Crown in time of peace to as
high a level as they had reached under his predecessor in time of war.
The Commons voted a sum which was large enough to meet the royal debt.
The fixed charges of the Crown they held should be met by its ordinary
revenues; but James had no mind to bring his expenditure down to the
level of Elizabeth's. The growth of English commerce offered a means of
recruiting his treasury which seemed to lie within the limits of
customary law; and of this he availed himself. The right of the Crown to
levy impositions on exports and imports other than those of wool,
leather, and tin, had been the last financial prerogative for which the
Edwards had struggled. They had been forced indeed to abandon it; but
the tradition of such a right lingered on at the royal council-board;
and under the Tudors the practice had been to some slight extent
revived. A duty on imports had been imposed in one or two instances by
Mary, and this impost had been extended by Elizabeth to currants and
wine. These instances however were too trivial and exceptional to break
in upon the general usage; but a more dangerous precedent had been
growing up in the duties which the great trading companies, such as
those to the Levant and to the Indies, were allowed to exact from
merchants, in exchange--as was held--for the protection they afforded
them in far-off and dangerous seas. The Levant Company was now
dissolved, and James seized on the duties it had levied as lapsing
naturally to the Crown.
[Sidenote: Bates's case.]
The Parliament at once protested against these impositions; but the
prospect of a fresh struggle with the Commons told less with the king
than the prospect of a revenue which might free him from dependence on
the Commons altogether. His fanatical belief in the rights and power of
the Crown hindered all sober judgement of such a question. James cared
quite as much to assert his absolute authority as to fill his treasury.
In the course of 1606 therefore the case of a Levant merchant called
Bates, who refused to pay the imposition, was brought before the
Exchequer Chamber. The judgement of the court justified the king's
confidence in his claim. It went far beyond the original bounds of the
case itself, or the right of the Crown to levy on the ground of
protection the dues which had been levied on that ground by the leading
companies. It asserted the king's right to levy what customs duties he
would. "All customs," said the judges, "are the effects of foreign
commerce; but all affairs of commerce and treaties with foreign nations
belong to the king's absolute power. He therefore who has power over the
cause has power over the effect." The importance of such a decision
could hardly be overrated. English commerce was growing fast. English
merchants were fighting their way to the Spice Islands, and establishing
settlements in the dominions of the Mogul. The judgement gave James a
revenue which was certain to grow rapidly, and whose growth would go far
to free the Crown from any need of resorting for supplies to Parliament.
[Sidenote: The Post-Nati.]
But no immediate step was taken to give effect to the judgement; and the
Commons contented themselves with a protest against impositions at the
close of the session of 1606. When they reassembled in the following
year their attention was absorbed by the revival of the questions which
sprang from the new relations of Scotland to England through their
common king. There was now no question of a national union. The
commission to which the whole matter had been referred had reported in
favour of the abolition of hostile laws, the establishment of a general
free trade between the two kingdoms, and the naturalization as
Englishmen of all living Scotchmen who had been born before the king's
accession to the English throne. The judges had already given their
opinion that all born after it were naturalized Englishmen by force of
their allegiance to a sovereign who had become King of England. The
constitutional danger of such a theory was easily seen. Had the marriage
of Philip and Mary produced a son, every Spaniard and every Fleming
would under it have counted as Englishmen, and England would have been
absorbed in the mass of the Spanish monarchy. The opinion of the judges
in fact implied that nationality hung not on the existence of the nation
itself, but on its relation to a king. It was to escape from such a
theory that the Commons asked that the question should be waived, and
offered on that condition to naturalize all Scotchmen whatever by
statute. But James would not assent. To him the assertion of a right
inherent in the Crown was far dearer than a peaceful settlement of the
matter; the bills for free trade were dropped; and on the adjournment of
the Houses a case was brought before the Exchequer Chamber; and the
naturalization of the "Post-nati," as Scots born after the king's
accession were styled, established by a formal judgement.
[Sidenote: James and Scotland.]
James had won a victory for his prerogative; but he had won it at the
cost of Scotland. To the smaller and poorer kingdom the removal of all
obstacles to her commerce with England would have been an inestimable
gain. The intercourse which it would have necessitated could hardly have
failed in time to bring about a more perfect union. But as the king's
reign drew on, the union of the two realms seemed more distant than
ever. Bacon's shrewd question, "Under which laws is this Britain to be
governed?" took fresh meaning as men saw James asserting in Scotland an
all but absolute authority, and breaking down the one constitutional
check which had hitherto hampered him. The energy which he had shown in
his earlier combat with the democratic forces embodied in the Kirk was
not likely to slacken on his accession to the southern throne. It was in
the General Assembly that the new force of public opinion took
legislative and administrative form; and even before he crossed the
Border James had succeeded in asserting a right to convene and be
personally present at the proceedings of the General Assembly. But once
King of England he could venture on heavier blows. In spite of his
assent to an act legalizing its annual convention, James hindered any
meeting of the General Assembly for five successive years by repeated
prorogations. The protests of the clergy were roughly met. When nineteen
ministers appeared in 1605 at Aberdeen and, in defiance of the
prorogation, constituted themselves an Assembly, they were called before
the Council, and on refusal to own its jurisdiction banished as traitors
from the realm. Of the leaders who remained the boldest were summoned in
1606 with Andrew Melville to confer with the king in England on his
projects of change. On their refusal to betray the freedom of the Church
they were committed to prison; and an epigram which Melville wrote on
the usages of the English communion was seized on as a ground for
bringing him before the English Privy Council with Bancroft at its head.
But the insolence of the Primate fell on ears less patient than those of
the Puritans he had insulted at Hampton Court. As he stood at the
council-table Melville seized the Archbishop by the sleeves of his
rochet, and shaking them in his manner, called them Popish rags and
marks of the beast. He was sent to the Tower, and released after some
years of imprisonment only to go into exile.
[Sidenote: Submission of the Kirk.]
The trial of Scotchmen before a foreign court, the imprisonment of
Scotchmen in foreign prisons, were steps that showed the powerlessness
of James to grasp the first principles of law; but they were effective
for the purpose at which he aimed. They struck terror into the Scotch
ministers. Their one weapon lay in the enthusiasm of the people; but,
strongly as Scotch enthusiasm might tell on a king at Edinburgh, it was
powerless over a king at London. The time had come when James might pass
on from merely silencing the General Assembly to the use of it in the
enslavement of the Church. Successful as he had been in gagging the
pulpits and silencing the Assembly, he had been as yet less successful
in his efforts to revive the power of the Crown over the Church by a
restoration of Episcopacy. He had nominated a few bishops, and had won
back for them their old places in Parliament; but his bishops remained
purely secular nobles, unrecognized in their spiritual capacity by the
Church, and without any ecclesiastical jurisdiction. It was in vain that
James had striven to bring Melville and his fellows to any recognition
of prelacy. But with their banishment and imprisonment the field was
clear for more vigorous action. Deprived of their leaders, threatened
with bonds and exile, deserted by the nobles, ill supported as yet by
the mass of the people, to whom the real nature of their struggle was
unknown, the Scotch ministers bent at last before the pressure of the
Crown. They still shrank indeed from any formal acceptance of
episcopacy; but they allowed the bishops to act as perpetual moderators
or presidents in the synods of their presbyteries.
[Sidenote: Restoration of Scotch Episcopacy.]
With such moderators the General Assembly might be suffered to meet.
Their influence in fact secured the return of royal nominees to
Assemblies which met in 1608 and in 1610; and in the second of these
assemblies episcopacy was at last formally recognized by the Scottish
Church. The bishops were owned as permanent heads of each provincial
synod; the power of ordination was committed to them; the ecclesiastical
sentences pronounced by synod or presbytery were henceforth to be
submitted for their approval. The new organization of the Church was at
once carried out. The vacant sees were filled. Two archbishops were
created at St. Andrews and Glasgow, and set at the head of Courts of
High Commission for their respective provinces; while three of the
prelates were sent to receive consecration in England, and on their
return communicated it to their fellow-bishops. With such a measure of
success James was fairly content. The prelacy he had revived fell far
short of English episcopacy; to the eyes of religious dogmatists such as
Laud indeed it seemed little better than the presbyterianism it
superseded. But the aim of James was political rather than religious. He
had no dislike for presbyterianism as a system of Church-government;
what he dreaded was the popular force to which it gave form in its
synods and assemblies, and which, in the guise of ecclesiastical
independence, was lifting the nation into equality with the Crown. In
seizing on the control of the Church through his organized prelacy James
held himself to have seized the control of the forces which acted
through the Church, and to have won back that mastery of his realm which
the Reformation had reft from the Scottish kings.
[Sidenote: England and the Prerogative.]
What he had really done was to commit the Scotch Crown to a lasting
struggle with the religious impulses of the Scottish people. The cause
of episcopacy was ruined by his triumph. Belief in bishops ceased to be
possible for a Scotchman when bishops were forced on Scotland as mere
tools of the royal will. Presbyterianism on the other hand became
identified with patriotism. It was no longer an ecclesiastical system;
it was the guise under which national freedom and even national
existence were to struggle against an arbitrary rule,--against a rule
which grew more and more the rule of a foreign king. Nor was the sight
of the royal triumph lost on the southern realm. England had no love for
presbyters or hatred for bishops; but as she saw the last check on the
royal authority broken down over the border she looked the more
jealously at the effort which James was making to break down such checks
at home. Under Elizabeth proclamations had been sparingly used, and for
the most part only to enforce what was already the law. Not only was
their number multiplied under James, but their character was changed.
They created new offences, imposed new penalties, and directed offenders
to be brought before courts which had no legal jurisdiction over them.
To narrow indeed the sphere of the common law seemed the special aim of
the royal policy; the four counties of the western border had been
severed from the rest of England and placed under the jurisdiction of
the President and Council of Wales, a court whose constitution and
procedure rested on the sheer will of the Crown. The province of the
spiritual courts was as busily enlarged. It was in vain that the judges,
spurred no doubt by the old jealousy between civil and ecclesiastical
lawyers, entertained appeals against the High Commission, and strove by
a series of decisions to set bounds to its limitless claims of
jurisdiction or to restrict its powers of imprisonment to cases of
schism and heresy. The judges were powerless against the Crown; and
James was vehement in his support of courts which were closely bound up
with his own prerogative. What work the courts spiritual might be
counted on to do, if the king had his way, was plain from the
announcement of a civilian named Cowell that "the king is above law by
his absolute power," and that "notwithstanding his oath he may alter and
suspend any particular law that seemeth hurtful to the public estate."
[Sidenote: The claims of the king.]
Cowell's book was suppressed on a remonstrance of the House of Commons;
but the party of passive obedience grew fast. Even before his accession
to the English throne James had formulated his theory of rule in a work
on _The True Law of Free Monarchy_, and announced that "although a good
king will frame his actions to be according to law, yet he is not bound
thereto, but of his own will and for example giving to his subjects."
With the Tudor statesmen who used the phrase, "an absolute king" or "an
absolute monarchy" meant a sovereign or rule complete in themselves and
independent of all foreign or Papal interference. James chose to regard
the words as implying the freedom of the monarch from all control by law
or from responsibility to anything but his own royal will. The king's
theory was already a system of government; it was soon to become a
doctrine which bishops preached from the pulpit, and for which brave men
laid their heads on the block. The Church was quick to adopt its
sovereign's discovery. Some three years after his accession Convocation
in its book of Canons denounced as a fatal error the assertion that "all
civil power, jurisdiction, and authority were first derived from the
people and disordered multitude, or either is originally still in them,
or else is deduced by their consent naturally from them; and is not
God's ordinance originally descending from him and depending upon him."
In strict accordance with the royal theory these doctors declared
sovereignty in its origin to be the prerogative of birthright, and
inculcated passive obedience to the Crown as a religious obligation. The
doctrine of passive obedience was soon taught in the schools. A few
years before the king's death the University of Oxford decreed solemnly
that "it was in no case lawful for subjects to make use of force against
their princes, or to appear offensively or defensively in the field
against them." But what gave most force to such teaching were the
reiterated expressions of James himself. If the king's "arrogant
speeches" woke resentment in the Parliaments to which they were
addressed, they created by sheer force of repetition a certain amount of
belief in the arbitrary power they challenged for the Crown. One
sentence from a speech delivered in the Star Chamber may serve as an
instance of their tone. "As it is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what
God can do, so," said James, "it is presumption and a high contempt in a
subject to dispute what a king can do, or to say that a king cannot do
this or that."
[Sidenote: Distrust of the king.]
"If the practice follow the positions," commented a thoughtful observer
on words such as these, "we are not likely to leave to our successors
the freedom we received from our forefathers." Their worst effect was in
changing the whole attitude of the nation towards the Crown. England had
trusted the Tudors, it distrusted the Stuarts. The mood indeed both of
king and people had grown to be a mood of jealousy, of suspicion, which,
inevitable as it was, often did injustice to the purpose of both. King
James looked on the squires and merchants of the House of Commons as his
Stuart predecessors had looked on the Scotch baronage. He regarded their
discussions, their protests, their delays, not as the natural hesitation
of men called suddenly, and with only half knowledge, to the settlement
of great and complex questions, but as proofs of a conspiracy to fetter
and impede the action of the Crown. The Commons on the other hand
listened to the king's hectoring speeches, not as the chance talk of a
clever and garrulous theorist, but as proofs of a settled purpose to
change the character of the monarchy. In a word, James had succeeded in
some seven years of rule in breaking utterly down that mutual
understanding between the Crown and its subjects on which all
government, save a sheer despotism, must necessarily rest.
[Sidenote: Robert Cecil.]
It was this mutual distrust which brought about the final breach between
the Parliament and the king. The question of the impositions had seemed
for a while to have been waived. The Commons had contented themselves
with a protest against their levy. James had for two years hesitated in
acting on the judgement which asserted his right to levy them. But the
needs of the treasury became too great to admit of further hesitation,
and in 1608 a royal proclamation imposed customs duties on many articles
of import and export. The new duties came in fast; but unluckily the
royal debt grew faster. To a king fresh from the penniless exchequer of
Holyrood the wealth of England seemed boundless; money was lavished on
court-feasts and favourites; and with each year the expenditure of James
reached a higher level. It was in vain that Robert Cecil took the
treasury into his own hands, and strove to revive the frugal traditions
of Elizabeth. The king's prodigality undid his minister's work; and in
1610 Cecil was forced to announce to his master that the annual revenue
of the Crown must be supplemented by fresh grants from Parliament. The
scheme which Cecil laid before the king and the Commons is of great
importance as the last effort of that Tudor policy which had so long
hindered an outbreak of strife between the nation and the Crown. Differ
as the Tudors might from one another, they were alike in their keen
sense of national feeling and in their craving to carry it along with
them. Masterful as Henry or Elizabeth might be, what they "prized most
dearly," as the Queen confessed, was "the love and goodwill of their
subjects." They prized it because they knew the force it gave them. And
Cecil knew it too. He had grown up among the traditions of the Tudor
rule. He had been trained by his father in the system of Elizabeth.
Whether as a minister of the Queen, or as a minister of her successor,
he had striven to carry that system into effect. His conviction of the
supremacy of the Crown was as strong as that of James himself, but it
was tempered by as strong a conviction of the need of the national
good-will. He had seen what weight the passionate enthusiasm that
gathered round Elizabeth gave to her policy both at home and abroad; and
he saw that a time was drawing near when the same weight would be
needed by the policy of the Crown.
[Sidenote: Protestantism in Germany.]
Slowly but steadily the clouds of religious strife were gathering over
central Europe. From such a strife, should it once break out in war,
England could not hold aloof unless the tradition of its policy was
wholly set aside. And so long as Cecil lived, whatever change might take
place at home, in all foreign affairs the Elizabethan policy was mainly
adhered to. Peace indeed was made with Spain; but a close alliance with
the United Provinces, and a more guarded alliance with France, held the
ambition of Spain in check almost as effectually as war. The peace in
fact set England free to provide against dangers which threatened to
become greater than those from Spanish aggression in the Netherlands.
Wearily as war in that quarter might drag on, it was clear that the
Dutchmen could hold their own, and that all that Spain and Catholicism
could hope for was to save the rest of the Low Countries from their
grasp. But no sooner was danger from the Spanish branch of the House of
Austria at an end than Protestantism had to guard itself against its
German branch. The vast possessions of Charles the Fifth had been parted
between his brother and his son. While Philip took Spain, Italy, the
Netherlands, and the Indies, Ferdinand took the German dominions, the
hereditary Duchy of Austria, the Suabian lands, Tyrol, Styria,
Carinthia, Carniola. Marriage and fortune brought to the German branch
the dependent states of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia; and it had
succeeded in retaining the Imperial crown. The wisdom and moderation of
Ferdinand and his successor secured tranquillity for Germany through
some fifty years. They were faithful to the Peace of Passau, which had
been wrested by Maurice of Saxony from Charles the Fifth, and which
secured both Protestants and Catholics in the rights and possessions
which they held at the moment it was made. Their temper was tolerant;
and they looked on quietly while Protestantism spread over Southern
Germany and solved all doubtful questions which arose from the treaty in
its own favour. The Peace had provided that all church land already
secularized should remain so; of the later secularization of other
church land it said nothing. It provided that states already Protestant
should abide so, but it said nothing of the right of other states to
declare themselves Protestant. Doubt however was set aside by religious
zeal; new states became Lutheran, and eight great bishoprics of the
north were secularized. Meanwhile the new faith was spreading fast over
the dominions of the House of Austria. The nobles of their very Duchy
embraced it: Moravia, Silesia, Hungary all but wholly abandoned
Catholicism. Through the earlier reign of Elizabeth it seemed as if by
a peaceful progress of conversion Germany was about to become
Protestant.
[Sidenote: The Catholic reaction.]
German Catholicism was saved by the Catholic revival and by the energy
of the Jesuits. It was saved perhaps as much by the strife which broke
out in the heart of German Protestantism between Lutheran and Calvinist.
But the Catholic zealots were far from resting content with having
checked the advance of their opponents. They longed to undo their work.
They did not question the Treaty of Passau or the settlement made by it;
but they disputed the Protestant interpretation of its silences; they
called for the restoration to Catholicism of all church lands
secularized, of all states converted from the older faith, since its
conclusion. Their new attitude woke little terror in the Lutheran
states. The treaty secured their rights, and their position in one
unbroken mass stretching across Northern Germany seemed to secure them
from Catholic attack. But the Calvinistic states, Hesse, Baden, and the
Palatinate, felt none of this security. If the treaty were strictly
construed it gave them no right of existence, for Calvinism had arisen
since the treaty was signed. Their position too was a hazardous one.
They lay girt in on all sides but one by Catholic territories, here by
the bishops of the Rhineland with the Spaniards in Franche Comte and the
Netherlands to back them, there by Bavaria and by the bishoprics of the
Main. Foes such as these indeed the Calvinists could fairly have faced;
but behind them lay the House of Austria; and the influence of the
Catholic revival was at last telling on the Austrian princes. In 1606 an
attempt of the Emperor Rudolf to force Catholicism again on his people
woke revolt in the Duchy; and though the troubles were allayed by his
removal, his successor Matthias persevered though more quietly in the
same anti-Protestant policy.
[Sidenote: The Union and the League.]
The accession of the House of Austria to the number of their foes
created a panic among the Calvinistic states, and in 1608 they joined
together in a Protestant Union with Christian of Anhalt at its head. But
zeal was at once met by zeal; and the formation of the Union was
answered by the formation of a Catholic League among the states about it
under Maximilian, the Duke of Bavaria. Both were ostensibly for
defensive purposes: but the peace of Europe was at once shaken.
Ambitious schemes woke up in every quarter. Spain saw the chance of
securing a road along western Germany which would enable her to bring
her whole force to bear on the rebels in the Low Countries. France on
the other hand had recovered from the exhaustion of her own religious
wars, and was eager to take up again the policy pursued by Francis the
First and his son, of weakening and despoiling Germany by feeding and
using religious strife across the Rhine. In 1610 a quarrel over Cleves
afforded a chance for her intervention, and it was only an assassin's
dagger that prevented Henry the Fourth from doing that which Richelieu
was to do. England alone could hinder a second outbreak of the Wars of
Religion; but the first step in such a policy must be a reconciliation
between King and Parliament. James might hector about the might of the
Crown, but he had no power of acting with effect abroad save through the
national good-will. Without troops and without supplies, his threat of
war would be ridiculous; and without the backing of such a threat Cecil
knew well that mediation would be a mere delusion. Whether for the
conduct of affairs at home or abroad it was needful to bring the
widening quarrel between the king and the Parliament to a close; and it
was with a settled purpose of reconciliation that Cecil brought James to
call the Houses again together in 1610.
[Sidenote: The Great Contract.]
He never dreamed of conciliating the Commons by yielding unconditionally
to their demands. Cecil looked on the right to levy impositions as
legally established; and the Tudor sovereigns had been as keen as James
himself in seizing on any rights that the law could be made to give
them. But as a practical statesman he saw that the right could only be
exercised to the profit of the Crown if it was exercised with the
good-will of the people. To win that good-will it was necessary to put
the impositions on a legal footing; while for the conduct of affairs it
was necessary to raise permanently the revenue of the Crown. On the
Tudor theory of politics these were concessions made by the nation to
the king; and it was the Tudor practice to buy such concessions by
counter-concessions made by the king to the nation. Materials for such a
bargain existed in the feudal rights of the Crown, above all those of
marriage and wardship, which were harassing to the people while they
brought little profit to the Exchequer. The Commons had more than once
prayed for some commutation of these rights, and Cecil seized on their
prayer as the ground of an accommodation. He proposed that James should
waive his feudal rights, that he should submit to the sanction by
Parliament of the impositions already levied, and that he should bind
himself to levy no more by his own prerogative, on condition that the
Commons assented to this arrangement, discharged the royal debt, and
raised the royal revenue by a sum of two hundred thousand a year.
[Sidenote: Attitude of the Commons.]
Such was the "great contract" with which Cecil met the Houses when they
once more assembled in 1610. It was a bargain which the Commons must
have been strongly tempted to accept; for heavy as were its terms it
averted the great danger of arbitrary taxation, and again brought the
monarchy into constitutional relations with Parliament. What hindered
their acceptance of it was their suspicion of James. Purveyance and the
Impositions were far from being the only grievance against which they
came to protest; they had to complain of the increase of proclamations,
the establishment of new and arbitrary courts of law, the encroachments
of the spiritual jurisdiction; and consent to such a bargain, if it
remedied two evils, would cut off all chance of redressing the rest.
Were the treasury once full, no means remained of bringing the Crown to
listen to their protest against the abuses of the Church, the silencing
of godly ministers, the maintenance of pluralities and non-residence,
the want of due training for the clergy. Nor had the Commons any mind to
pass in silence over the illegalities of the preceding years. Whether
they were to give legal sanction to the impositions or no, they were
resolute to protest against their levy without sanction of law. James
forbade them to enter on the subject, but their remonstrance was none
the less vigorous. "Finding that your majesty, without advice or counsel
of Parliament, hath lately in time of peace set both greater impositions
and more in number than any of your noble ancestors did ever in time of
war," they prayed "that all impositions set without the assent of
Parliament may be quite abolished and taken away," and that "a law be
made to declare that all impositions set upon your people, their goods
or merchandise, save only by common consent in Parliament, are and shall
be void." As to Church grievances their demands were in the same spirit.
They prayed that the deposed ministers might be suffered to preach, and
that the jurisdiction of the High Commission should be regulated by
statute; in other words, that ecclesiastical like financial matters
should be taken out of the sphere of the prerogative and be owned as
lying henceforth within the cognizance of Parliament.
[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Parliament.]
It was no doubt the last demand that roused above all the anger of the
king. As to some of the grievances he was ready to make concessions. He
had consulted the judges as to the legality of his proclamations, and
the judges had pronounced them illegal. It never occurred to James to
announce his withdrawal from a claim which he now knew to be wholly
against law, and he kept the opinion of the judges secret; but it made
him ready to include the grievance of proclamations in his bargain with
the Commons, if they would grant a larger subsidy. The question of the
court of Wales he treated in the same temper. But on the question of the
Church, of Church reform, or of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, he would
make no concession whatever. He had just wrought his triumph over the
Scottish Kirk; and had succeeded, as he believed, in transferring the
control of its spiritual life from the Scottish people to the Crown. He
was not likely to consent to any reversal of such a process in England
itself. The claim of the Commons had become at last a claim that England
through its representatives in Parliament should have a part in the
direction of its own religious affairs. Such a claim sprang logically
from the very facts of the Reformation. It was by the joint action of
the Crown and Parliament that the actual constitution of the English
Church had been established; and it seemed hard to deny that the same
joint action was operative for its after reform. But it was in vain that
the Commons urged their claim. Elizabeth had done wisely in resisting
it, for her task was to govern a half-Catholic England with a Puritan
Parliament; and in spite of constitutional forms the Queen was a truer
representative of national opinion in matters of religion than the House
of Commons. In her later years all had changed; and the Commons who
fronted her successor were as truly representative of the religious
opinion of the realm as Elizabeth had been. But James saw no ground for
changing the policy of the Crown. The control of the Church and through
it of English religion lay within the sphere of his prerogative, and on
this question he was resolute to make a stand. The Commons were as
resolute as the king. The long and intricate bargaining came on both
sides to an end; and in February 1611 the first Parliament of James was
dissolved.