CHARLES I. AND THE PARLIAMENT
1625-1629
[Sidenote: Charles the First.]
Had Charles mounted the throne on his return from Spain his accession
would have been welcomed by a passionate burst of enthusiasm. He had
aired himself as a staunch Protestant who had withstood Catholic
seductions, and had come to nerve his father to a policy at one with the
interests of religion and with the national will. But the few months
that had passed since the last session of Parliament had broken the
spell of this heroic attitude. The real character of the part which
Charles had played in Spain was gradually becoming known. It was seen
that he had been as faithless to Protestantism as his revenge had made
him faithless to the Infanta. Nor had he shown less perfidy in dealing
with England itself. In common with his father, he had promised that his
marriage with a princess of France should in no case be made conditional
on the relaxation of the penal laws against the Catholics. It was
suspected, and the suspicion was soon to be changed into certainty, that
in spite of this promise such a relaxation had been stipulated, and that
a foreign power had again been given the right of intermeddling in the
civil affairs of the realm. The general distrust of the new king was
intensified by the conduct of the war. In granting its subsidies the
Parliament of 1624 had restricted them to the purposes of a naval war,
and that a war with Spain. It had done this after discussing and
rejecting the wider schemes of the favourite for an intervention of
England by land in the war of the Palatinate. But the grants once made,
Buckingham's plans had gone on without a check. Alliances had been
formed, subsidies promised to Denmark, and twelve thousand men actually
despatched to join the armies on the Rhine. It was plain that the policy
of the Crown was to be as unswayed by the will of the nation as in the
days of King James. What it was really to be swayed by was the
self-sufficient incapacity of the young favourite.
[Sidenote: The king's policy.]
A few months of action had shown Buckingham to England as he really was,
vain, flighty, ingenious, daring, a brilliant but shallow adventurer,
without political wisdom or practical ability, as little of an
administrator as of a statesman. While projects without number were
seething and simmering in his restless brain, while leagues were being
formed and armies levied on paper, the one practical effort of the new
minister had ended in the starvation of thousands of Englishmen on the
sands of Holland. If English policy was once more to become a real and
serious thing, it was plain that the great need of the nation was the
dismissal of Buckingham. But Charles clung to Buckingham more blindly
than his father had done. The shy reserve, the slow stubborn temper of
the new king found relief in the frank gaiety of the favourite, in his
rapid suggestions, in the defiant daring with which he set aside all
caution and opposition. James had looked on Buckingham as his pupil.
Charles clung to him as his friend. Nor was the new king's policy likely
to be more national in Church affairs than in affairs of state. The war
had given a new impulse to religious enthusiasm. The patriotism of the
Puritan was strengthening his bigotry. To the bulk of Englishmen a fight
with Spain meant a fight with Catholicism; and the fervour against
Catholicism without roused a corresponding fervour against Catholicism
within the realm. To Protestant eyes every English Catholic seemed a
traitor at home, a traitor who must be watched and guarded against as
the most dangerous of foes. A Protestant who leant towards Catholic
usage or Catholic dogma was yet more formidable. To him men felt as
towards a secret traitor in their own ranks. But it was to men with
such leanings that Charles seemed disposed to show favour. Bishop Laud
was recognized as the centre of that varied opposition to Puritanism,
whose members were loosely grouped under the name of Arminians; and Laud
now became the king's adviser in ecclesiastical matters. With Laud at
its head the new party grew in boldness as well as numbers. It naturally
sought for shelter for its religious opinions by exalting the power of
the Crown; and its union of political error with theological heresy
seemed to the Puritan to be at last proclaimed to the world when
Montague, a court chaplain, ventured to slight the Reformed Churches of
the Continent in favour of the Church of Rome, and to advocate in his
sermon the Real Presence in the Sacrament and a divine right in kings.
[Sidenote: The Parliament of 1625.]
The Houses had no sooner met in the May of 1625 than their temper in
religious matters was clear to every observer. "Whatever mention does
break forth of the fears and dangers in religion and the increase of
Popery," wrote a member who was noting the proceedings of the Commons,
"their affections are much stirred." The first act of the Lower House
was to summon Montague to its bar and to commit him to prison. In their
grants to the Crown they showed no ill-will indeed, but they showed
caution. They suspected that the pledge of making no religious
concessions to France had been broken. They knew that the conditions on
which the last subsidy had been granted had been contemptuously set
aside. In his request for a fresh grant Charles showed the same purpose
of carrying out his own policy without any regard for the national will
by simply asking for supplies for the war without naming a sum or giving
any indication of what war it was to support. The reply of the Commons
was to grant a hundred and forty thousand pounds. A million would hardly
cover the king's engagements, and Charles was bitterly angered. He was
angered yet more by the delay in granting the permanent revenue of the
Crown. The Commons had no wish to refuse their grant of tonnage and
poundage, or the main customs duties, which had ever since Edward the
Fourth's day been granted to each new sovereign for his life. But the
additional impositions laid by James on these duties required further
consideration, and to give time for a due arrangement of this vexed
question the grant of the customs was made for a year only. But the
limitation at once woke the jealousy of Charles. He looked on it as a
restriction of the rights of the Crown, refused to accept the grant on
such a condition, and adjourned the Houses. When they met again at
Oxford it was in a sterner temper, for Charles had shown his defiance of
Parliament by promoting Montague, who had been released on bond, to a
royal chaplaincy, and by levying the disputed customs without authority
of law. "England," cried Sir Robert Phelips, "is the last monarchy that
yet retains her liberties. Let them not perish now." But the Commons had
no sooner announced their resolve to consider public grievances before
entering on other business than they were met in August by a
dissolution.
[Sidenote: The descent on Cadiz.]
To the shallow temper of Buckingham the cautious firmness of the Commons
seemed simply the natural discontent which follows on ill success. If he
dissolved the Houses, it was in the full belief that their
constitutional demands could be lulled by a military triumph. His hands
were no sooner free than he sailed for the Hague to conclude a general
alliance against the House of Austria, while a fleet of ninety vessels
and ten thousand soldiers left Plymouth in October for the coast of
Spain. But these vast projects broke down before Buckingham's
administrative incapacity. The plan of alliance proved fruitless. After
an idle descent on Cadiz the Spanish expedition returned broken with
mutiny and disease; and the enormous debt which had been incurred in its
equipment forced the favourite to advise a new summons of the Houses in
the coming year. But he was keenly alive to the peril in which his
failure had plunged him, and to a coalition which had been formed
between his rivals at Court and the leaders of the last Parliament. The
older nobles looked to his ruin to restore the power of the Council; and
in this the leaders of the Commons went with them. Buckingham's
reckless daring led him to anticipate the danger by a series of blows
which should strike terror into his opponents. The Councillors were
humbled by the committal of Lord Arundel to the Tower. Sir Robert
Phelips, Coke, and four other leading patriots were made sheriffs of
their counties, and thus prevented from sitting in the coming
Parliament.
[Sidenote: Eliot.]
But their exclusion only left the field free for a more terrible foe. If
Hampden and Pym are the great figures which embody the later national
resistance, the earlier struggle for Parliamentary liberty centres in
the figure of Sir John Eliot. Of an old family which had settled under
Elizabeth near the fishing hamlet of St. Germans, and whose stately
mansion gives its name of Port Eliot to a little town on the Tamar, he
had risen to the post of Vice-Admiral of Devonshire under the patronage
of Buckingham, and had seen his activity in the suppression of piracy in
the Channel rewarded by an unjust imprisonment. He was now in the first
vigour of manhood, with a mind exquisitely cultivated and familiar with
the poetry and learning of his day, a nature singularly lofty and
devout, a fearless and vehement temper. There was a hot impulsive
element in his nature which showed itself in youth in his drawing sword
on a neighbour who denounced him to his father, and which in later years
gave its characteristic fire to his eloquence. But his intellect was as
clear and cool as his temper was ardent. What he believed in was the
English Parliament. He saw in it the collective wisdom of the realm; and
in that wisdom he put a firmer trust than in the statecraft of kings. In
the general enthusiasm which followed on the failure of the Spanish
marriage, Eliot had stood almost alone in pressing for a recognition of
the rights of Parliament as a preliminary to any real reconciliation
with the Crown. He fixed, from the very outset of his career, on the
responsibility of the royal ministers to Parliament as the one critical
point for English liberty.
[Sidenote: The Parliament of 1626.]
It was to enforce the demand of this that he availed himself of
Buckingham's sacrifice of the Treasurer, Cranfield, to the resentment of
the Commons. "The greater the delinquent," he urged, "the greater the
delict. They are a happy thing, great men and officers, if they be good,
and one of the greatest blessings of the land: but power converted into
evil is the greatest curse that can befall it." But the Parliament of
1626 had hardly met when Eliot came to the front to threaten a greater
criminal than Cranfield. So menacing were his words, as he called for an
enquiry into the failure before Cadiz, that Charles himself stooped to
answer threat with threat. "I see," he wrote to the House, "you
especially aim at the Duke of Buckingham. I must let you know that I
will not allow any of my servants to be questioned among you, much less
such as are of eminent place and near to me." A more direct attack on a
right already acknowledged in the impeachment of Bacon and Cranfield
could hardly be imagined, but Eliot refused to move from his
constitutional ground. The king was by law irresponsible, he "could do
no wrong." If the country therefore was to be saved from a pure
despotism, it must be by enforcing the responsibility of the ministers
who counselled and executed his acts. Eliot persisted in denouncing
Buckingham's incompetence and corruption, and the Commons ordered the
subsidy which the Crown had demanded to be brought in "when we shall
have presented our grievances, and received his Majesty's answer
thereto." Charles summoned them to Whitehall, and commanded them to
cancel the condition. He would grant them "liberty of counsel, but not
of control"; and he closed the interview with a significant threat.
"Remember," he said, "that Parliaments are altogether in my power for
their calling, sitting, and dissolution: and therefore, as I find the
fruits of them to be good or evil, they are to continue or not to be."
But the will of the Commons was as resolute as the will of the king.
Buckingham's impeachment was voted and carried to the Lords.
[Sidenote: Impeachment of Buckingham.]
The favourite took his seat as a peer to listen to the charge with so
insolent an air of contempt that one of the managers appointed by the
Commons to conduct it turned sharply on him. "Do you jeer, my Lord!"
said Sir Dudley Digges. "I can show you when a greater man than your
Lordship--as high as you in place and power, and as deep in the king's
favour--has been hanged for as small a crime as these articles contain."
But his arrogance raised a more terrible foe than Sir Dudley Digges. The
"proud carriage" of the Duke provoked an attack from Eliot which marks a
new era in Parliamentary speech. From the first the vehemence and
passion of his words had contrasted with the grave, colourless reasoning
of older speakers. His opponents complained that Eliot aimed to "stir up
affections." The quick emphatic sentences he substituted for the
cumbrous periods of the day, his rapid argument, his vivacious and
caustic allusions, his passionate appeals, his fearless invective,
struck a new note in English eloquence. The frivolous ostentation of
Buckingham, his very figure blazing with jewels and gold, gave point to
the fierce attack. "He has broken those nerves and sinews of our land,
the stores and treasures of the king. There needs no search for it. It
is too visible. His profuse expenses, his superfluous feasts, his
magnificent buildings, his riots, his excesses, what are they but the
visible evidences of an express exhausting of the state, a chronicle of
the immensity of his waste of the revenues of the Crown?" With the same
terrible directness Eliot reviewed the Duke's greed and corruption, his
insatiate ambition, his seizure of all public authority, his neglect of
every public duty, his abuse for selfish ends of the powers he had
accumulated. "The pleasure of his Majesty, his known directions, his
public acts, his acts of council, the decrees of courts--all must be
made inferior to this man's will. No right, no interest may withstand
him. Through the power of state and justice he has dared ever to strike
at his own ends." "My Lords," he ended, after a vivid parallel between
Buckingham and Sejanus, "you see the man! What have been his actions,
what he is like, you know! I leave him to your judgement. This only is
conceived by us, the knights, citizens, and burgesses of the Commons
House of Parliament, that by him came all our evils, in him we find the
causes, and on him must be the remedies! Pereat qui perdere cuncta
festinat! Opprimatur ne omnes opprimat!"
[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Parliament.]
In calling for Buckingham's removal the Houses were but exercising a
right or a duty which was inherent in their very character of
counsellors of the Crown. There had never been a time from the earliest
days of the English Parliament when it had not called for the dismissal
of evil advisers. What had in older time been done by risings of the
baronage had been done since the Houses gathered at Westminster by their
protests as representatives of the realm. They were far from having
dreamed as yet of the right which Parliament exercises to-day of naming
the royal ministers, nor had they any wish to meddle with the common
administration of government. It was only in exceptional instances of
evil counsel, when some favourite like Buckingham broke the union of the
nation and the king, that they demanded a change. To Charles however
their demand seemed a claim to usurp his sovereignty. His reply was as
fierce and sudden as the attack of Eliot. He hurried to the House of
Peers to avow as his own the deeds with which Buckingham was charged;
while Eliot and Digges were called from their seats and committed
prisoners to the Tower. The Commons however refused to proceed with
public business till their members were restored; and after a ten-days'
struggle Eliot was released. But his release was only a prelude to the
close of the Parliament. "Not one moment," the king replied to the
prayer of his Council for delay; and a final remonstrance in which the
Commons begged him to dismiss Buckingham from his service for ever was
met on the sixteenth of June by their instant dissolution. The
remonstrance was burnt by royal order; Eliot was deprived of his
Vice-Admiralty; and on the old pretext alleged by James for evading the
law, the pretext that what it forbade was the demand of forced loans and
not of voluntary gifts to the Crown, the subsidies which the Parliament
had refused to grant till their grievances were redressed were levied in
the arbitrary form of benevolences.
[Sidenote: The Forced Loan.]
But the tide of public resistance was slowly rising. Refusals to give
anything "save by way of Parliament" came in from county after county.
When the subsidy-men of Middlesex and Westminster were urged to comply,
they answered with a tumultuous shout of "A Parliament! a Parliament!
else no subsidies!" Kent stood out to a man. In Bucks the very justices
neglected to ask for the "free gift." The freeholders of Cornwall only
answered that, "if they had but two kine, they would sell one of them
for supply to his Majesty--in a Parliamentary way." The failure of the
voluntary benevolence forced Charles to pass from evasion into open
defiance of the law. He met it in 1627 by the levy of a forced loan. It
was in vain that Chief Justice Crewe refused to acknowledge that such
loans were legal. The law was again trampled under foot, as in the case
of his predecessor, Coke; and Crewe was dismissed from his post.
Commissioners were named to assess the amount which every landowner was
bound to lend, and to examine on oath all who refused. Every means of
persuasion, as of force, was resorted to. The pulpits of the Laudian
clergy resounded with the cry of "passive obedience." Dr. Mainwaring
preached before Charles himself, that the king needed no Parliamentary
warrant for taxation, and that to resist his will was to incur eternal
damnation. Soldiers were quartered on recalcitrant boroughs. Poor men
who refused to lend were pressed into the army or navy. Stubborn
tradesmen were flung into prison. Buckingham himself undertook the task
of overawing the nobles and the gentry. Among the bishops, the Primate
and Bishop Williams of Lincoln alone resisted the king's will. The first
was suspended on a frivolous pretext, and the second was disgraced. But
in the country at large resistance was universal. The northern counties
in a mass set the Crown at defiance. The Lincolnshire farmers drove the
Commissioners from the town. Shropshire, Devon, and Warwickshire
"refused utterly." Eight peers, with Lord Essex and Lord Warwick at
their head, declined to comply with the exaction as illegal. Two hundred
country gentlemen, whose obstinacy had not been subdued by their
transfer from prison to prison, were summoned before the Council; and
John Hampden, as yet only a young Buckinghamshire squire, appeared at
the board to begin that career of patriotism which has made his name
dear to Englishmen. "I could be content to lend," he said, "but fear to
draw on myself that curse in Magna Charta, which should be read twice a
year against those who infringe it." So close an imprisonment in the
Gate House rewarded his protest "that he never afterwards did look like
the same man he was before."
[Sidenote: Charles and France.]
The fierce energy with which Buckingham pressed the forced loan was no
mere impulse of angry tyranny. Never was money so needed by the Crown.
The blustering and blundering of the favourite had at last succeeded in
plunging him into war with his own allies. England had been told that
the friendship of France, a friendship secured by the king's marriage
with a French princess, was the basis on which Charles was building up
his great European alliance against Spain. She now suddenly found
herself at war with Spain and France together. The steps by which this
result had been brought about throw an amusing light on the capacity of
the young king and his minister. The occupation of the Palatinate had
forced France to provide for its own safety. Spain already fronted her
along the Pyrenees and the border of the Netherlands; if the Palatinate
was added to the Spanish possession of Franche-Comte, it would close
France in on the east as well as the north and the south. War therefore
was being forced on the French monarchy when Charles and Buckingham
sought its alliance against Spain; and nothing hindered an outbreak of
hostilities but a revolt of the Protestant town of Rochelle. Lewis the
Thirteenth pleaded the impossibility of engaging in such a struggle so
long as the Huguenots could rise in his rear; and he called on England
to help him by lending ships to blockade Rochelle into submission in
time for action in the spring of 1625. The Prince and Buckingham brought
James to assent; but Charles had no sooner mounted the throne than he
shrank from sending ships against a Protestant city, and secretly
instigated the crews to mutiny against their captains on an order to
sail. The vessels, it was trusted, would then arrive too late to take
part in the siege. Unluckily for this intrigue they arrived to find the
city still in arms, and it was the appearance of English ships among
their enemies which forced the men of Rochelle to submit. While
Englishmen were angered by the use of English vessels against
Protestantism, France resented the king's attempt to evade his pledge.
Its Court resented yet more the hesitation which Charles showed in face
of his Parliament in fulfilling the promise he had given in the
marriage-treaty of tolerating Catholic worship; and its resentment was
embittered by an expulsion from the realm of the French attendants on
the new Queen, a step to which Charles was at last driven by their
insolence and intrigues. On the other hand, French statesmen were
offended by the seizure of French ships charged with carrying materials
of war to the Spaniards, and by an attempt of the English sovereign to
atone for his past attack on Rochelle by constituting himself mediator
of a peace on behalf of the Huguenots.
[Sidenote: The siege of Rochelle.]
But though grounds of quarrel multiplied every day, the French minister,
Richelieu, had no mind for strife. He was now master of the Catholic
faction which had fed the dispute between the Crown and the Huguenots
with the aim of bringing about a reconciliation with Spain; he saw that
in the European conflict which lay before him the friendship or the
neutrality of England was all but essential; and though he gathered a
fleet in the Channel and took a high tone of remonstrance, he strove by
concession after concession to avert war. But on war Buckingham was
resolved. Of policy in any true sense of the word the favourite knew
nothing; for the real interest of England or the balance of Europe he
cared little; what he saw before him was the chance of a blow at a power
he had come to hate, and the chance of a war which would make him
popular at home. The mediation of Charles in favour of Rochelle had
convinced Richelieu that the complete reduction of that city was a
necessary prelude to any effective intervention in Germany. If Lewis was
to be master abroad, he must first be master at home. But it was hard
for lookers-on to read the Cardinal's mind or to guess with what a
purpose he resolved to exact submission from the Huguenots. In England,
where the danger of Rochelle seemed a fresh part of the Catholic attack
upon Protestantism throughout the world, the enthusiasm for the
Huguenots was intense; and Buckingham resolved to take advantage of this
enthusiasm to secure such a triumph for the royal arms as should silence
all opposition at home. It was for this purpose that the forced loan
was pushed on; and in July 1627 a fleet of a hundred vessels sailed
under Buckingham's command for the relief of Rochelle. But imposing as
was his force, Buckingham showed himself as incapable a soldier as he
had proved a statesman. The troops were landed on the Isle of Rhe, in
front of the harbour; but after a useless siege of the Castle of St.
Martin, the English soldiers were forced in October to fall back along a
narrow causeway to their ships, and two thousand fell in the retreat
without the loss of a single man to their enemies.
[Sidenote: The Parliament of 1628.]
The first result of the failure at Rhe was the summoning of a new
Parliament. Overwhelmed as he was with debt and shame, Charles was
forced to call the Houses together again in the spring of 1628. The
elections promised ill for the Court. Its candidates were everywhere
rejected. The patriot leaders were triumphantly returned. To have
suffered in the recent resistance to arbitrary taxation was the sure
road to a seat. It was this question which absorbed all others in men's
minds. Even Buckingham's removal was of less moment than the redress of
personal wrongs; and some of the chief leaders of the Commons had not
hesitated to bring Charles to consent to summon Parliament by promising
to abstain from attacks on Buckingham. Against such a resolve Eliot
protested in vain. But on the question of personal liberty the tone of
the Commons when they met in March was as vehement as that of Eliot. "We
must vindicate our ancient liberties," said Sir Thomas Wentworth in
words soon to be remembered against himself: "we must reinforce the laws
made by our ancestors. We must set such a stamp upon them, as no
licentious spirit shall dare hereafter to invade them." Heedless of
sharp and menacing messages from the king, of demands that they should
take his "royal word" for their liberties, the House bent itself to one
great work, the drawing up a Petition of Right. The statutes that
protected the subject against arbitrary taxation, against loans and
benevolences, against punishment, outlawry, or deprivation of goods,
otherwise than by lawful judgement of his peers, against arbitrary
imprisonment without stated charge, against billeting of soldiery on the
people or enactment of martial law in time of peace, were formally
recited. The breaches of them under the last two sovereigns, and above
all since the dissolution of the last Parliament, were recited as
formally. At the close of this significant list, the Commons prayed
"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 make answer, or to take such
oaths, or to be confined or otherwise molested or disputed concerning
the same, or for refusal thereof. And that no freeman may in such
manner as is before mentioned be imprisoned or detained. And that your
Majesty would be pleased to remove the said soldiers and mariners, and
that your people may not be so burthened in time to come. And that the
commissions for proceeding by martial law may be revoked and annulled,
and that hereafter no commissions of like nature may issue forth to any
person or persons whatsoever to be executed as aforesaid, lest by colour
of them any of your Majesty's subjects be destroyed and put to death,
contrary to the laws and franchises of the land. All which they humbly
pray of your most excellent Majesty, as their rights and liberties,
according to the laws and statutes of the realm. And that your Majesty
would also vouchsafe to declare that the awards, doings, and proceedings
to the prejudice of your people in any of the premisses shall not be
drawn hereafter into consequence or example. And that your Majesty would
be pleased graciously for the further comfort and safety of your people
to declare your royal will and pleasure, that in the things aforesaid
all your officers and ministers shall serve you according to the laws
and statutes of this realm, as they tender the honour of your Majesty
and the prosperity of the kingdom."
[Sidenote: The Petition of Right.]
It was in vain that the Lords strove to conciliate Charles by a
reservation of his "sovereign power." "Our petition," Pym quietly
replied, "is for the laws of England, and this power seems to be another
power distinct from the power of the law." The Lords yielded, but
Charles gave an evasive reply; and the failure of the more moderate
counsels for which his own had been set aside called Eliot again to the
front. In a speech of unprecedented boldness he moved the presentation
to the king of a Remonstrance on the state of the realm. But at the
moment when he again touched on Buckingham's removal as the preliminary
of any real improvement the Speaker of the House interposed. "There was
a command laid on him," he said, "to interrupt any that should go about
to lay an aspersion on the king's ministers." The breach of their
privilege of free speech produced a scene in the Commons such as St.
Stephen's had never witnessed before. Eliot sate abruptly down amidst
the solemn silence of the House. "Then appeared such a spectacle of
passions," says a letter of the time, "as the like had seldom been seen
in such an assembly: some weeping, some expostulating, some prophesying
of the fatal ruin of our kingdom, some playing the divines in confessing
their sins and country's sins which drew these judgements upon us, some
finding, as it were, fault with those that wept. There were above an
hundred weeping eyes, many who offered to speak being interrupted and
silenced by their own passions." Pym himself rose only to sit down
choked with tears. At last Sir Edward Coke found words to blame himself
for the timid counsels which had checked Eliot at the beginning of the
Session, and to protest "that the author and source of all those
miseries was the Duke of Buckingham." Shouts of assent greeted the
resolution to insert the Duke's name in the Remonstrance. But at this
moment the king's obstinacy gave way. A fresh expedition, which had been
sent to Rochelle, returned unsuccessful; and if the siege was to be
raised far greater and costlier efforts must be made. And that the siege
should be raised Buckingham was still resolved. All his energies were
now enlisted in this project; and to get supplies for his fleet he bent
the king to consent in June to the Petition of Right. As Charles
understood it, indeed, the consent meant little. The one point for which
he really cared was the power of keeping men in prison without bringing
them to trial or assigning causes for their imprisonment. On this he had
consulted his judges; and they had answered that his consent to the
Petition left his rights untouched; like other laws, they said, the
Petition would have to be interpreted when it came before them, and the
prerogative remained unaffected. As to the rest, while waiving all claim
to levy taxes not granted by Parliament, Charles still reserved his
right to levy impositions paid customarily to the Crown, and amongst
these he counted tonnage and poundage. Of these reserves however the
Commons knew nothing. The king's consent won a grant of subsidy, and
such a ringing of bells and lighting of bonfires from the people "as
were never seen but upon his Majesty's return from Spain."
[Sidenote: Death of Buckingham.]
But, like all the king's concessions, it came too late to effect the end
at which he aimed. The Commons persisted in presenting their
Remonstrance. Charles received it coldly and ungraciously; while
Buckingham, who had stood defiantly at his master's side as he was
denounced, fell on his knees to speak. "No, George!" said the king as he
raised him; and his demeanour gave emphatic proof that the Duke's favour
remained undiminished. "We will perish together, George," he added at a
later time, "if thou dost." He had in fact got the subsidies which he
needed; and it was easy to arrest all proceedings against Buckingham by
proroguing Parliament at the close of June. The Duke himself cared
little for a danger which he counted on drowning in the blaze of a
speedy triumph. He had again gathered a strong fleet and a fine body of
men, and his ardent fancy already saw the harbour of Rochelle forced and
the city relieved. No shadow of his doom had fallen over the brilliant
favourite when he set out in August to take command of the expedition.
But a lieutenant in the army, John Felton, soured by neglect and wrongs,
had found in the Remonstrance some imaginary sanction for the revenge
he plotted; and, mixing with the throng which crowded the hall at
Portsmouth, he stabbed Buckingham to the heart. Charles flung himself on
his bed in a passion of tears when the news reached him; but outside the
Court it was welcomed with a burst of joy. Young Oxford bachelors, grave
London Aldermen, vied with each other in drinking healths to Felton.
"God bless thee, little David," cried an old woman, as the murderer
passed manacled by; "the Lord comfort thee," shouted the crowd, as the
Tower gates closed on him. The very forces in the Duke's armament at
Portsmouth shouted to the king, as he witnessed their departure, a
prayer that he would "spare John Felton, their sometime fellow-soldier."
But whatever national hopes the fall of Buckingham had aroused were
quickly dispelled. Weston, a creature of the Duke, became Lord
Treasurer, and his system remained unchanged. "Though our Achan is cut
off," said Eliot, "the accursed thing remains."
[Sidenote: The Laudian Clergy.]
It seemed as if no act of Charles could widen the breach which his
reckless lawlessness had made between himself and his subjects. But
there was one thing dearer to England than free speech in Parliament,
than security for property, or even personal liberty; and that one thing
was, in the phrase of the day, "the Gospel." The gloom which at the
outset of this reign we saw settling down on every Puritan heart had
deepened with each succeeding year. The great struggle abroad had gone
more and more against Protestantism, and at this moment the end of the
cause seemed to have come. In Germany Lutheran and Calvinist alike lay
at last beneath the heel of the Catholic House of Austria. The fall of
Rochelle, which followed quick on the death of Buckingham, seemed to
leave the Huguenots of France at the feet of a Roman Cardinal. In such a
time as this, while England was thrilling with excitement at the thought
that her own hour of deadly peril might come again, as it had come in
the year of the Armada, the Puritans saw with horror the quick growth of
Arminianism at home. Laud was now Bishop of London as well as the
practical administrator of Church affairs, and to the excited
Protestantism of the country Laud and the Churchmen whom he headed
seemed a danger more really formidable than the Popery which was making
such mighty strides abroad. To the Puritans they were traitors, traitors
to God and their country at once. Their aim was to draw the Church of
England farther away from the Protestant Churches, and nearer to the
Church which Protestants regarded as Babylon. They aped Roman
ceremonies. Cautiously and tentatively they were introducing Roman
doctrine. But they had none of the sacerdotal independence which Rome
had at any rate preserved. They were abject in their dependence on the
Crown. Their gratitude for the royal protection which enabled them to
defy the religious instincts of the realm showed itself in their
erection of the most dangerous pretensions of the monarchy into
religious dogmas. Their model, Bishop Andrewes, had declared James to
have been inspired by God. They preached passive obedience to the worst
tyranny. They declared the person and goods of the subject to be at the
king's absolute disposal. They were turning religion into a systematic
attack on English liberty, nor was their attack to be lightly set aside.
Up to this time they had been little more than a knot of courtly
parsons, for the mass of the clergy, like their flocks, were steady
Puritans; but the well-known energy of Laud and the open patronage of
the Court promised a speedy increase of their numbers and their power.
It was significant that upon the prorogation of 1628 Montague had been
made a bishop, and Mainwaring, who had called Parliaments ciphers in the
state, had been rewarded with a fat living. Instances such as these
would hardly be lost on the mass of the clergy, and sober men looked
forward to a day when every pulpit would be ringing with exhortations to
passive obedience, with denunciations of Calvinism and apologies for
Rome.
[Sidenote: The Avowal.]
Of all the members of the House of Commons Eliot was least fanatical in
his natural bent, but the religious crisis swept away for the moment
all other thoughts from his mind. "Danger enlarges itself in so great a
measure," he wrote from the country, "that nothing but Heaven shrouds us
from despair." When the Commons met again in January 1629, they met in
Eliot's temper. The first business called up was that of religion. The
House refused to consider any question of supplies, or even that of
tonnage and poundage, which still remained unsettled though Charles had
persisted in levying these duties without any vote of Parliament, till
the religious grievance was discussed. "The Gospel," Eliot burst forth,
"is that Truth in which this kingdom has been happy through a long and
rare prosperity. This ground therefore let us lay for a foundation of
our building, that that Truth, not with words, but with actions we will
maintain!" "There is a ceremony," he went on, "used in the Eastern
Churches, of standing at the repetition of the Creed, to testify their
purpose to maintain it, not only with their bodies upright, but with
their swords drawn. Give me leave to call that a custom very
commendable!" The Commons answered their leader's challenge by a solemn
avowal. They avowed that they held for truth that sense of the Articles
as established by Parliament, which by the public act of the Church, and
the general and current exposition of the writers of their Church, had
been delivered unto them. It is easy to regard such an avowal as a mere
outburst of Puritan bigotry, and the opposition of Charles as a defence
of the freedom of religious thought. But the real importance of the
avowal both to king and Commons lay in its political significance. In
the mouth of the Commons it was a renewal of the claim that all affairs
of the realm, spiritual as well as temporal, were cognizable in
Parliament. To Charles it seemed as if the Commons were taking to
themselves, in utter defiance of his rights as governor of the Church,
"the interpretation of articles of religion; the deciding of which in
doctrinal points," to use his own words, "only appertaineth to the
clergy and Convocation." To use more modern phrases, the king insisted
that the nation should receive its creed at the hands of the priesthood
and the Crown. England in the avowal of Parliament asserted that the
right to determine the belief of a nation lay with the nation itself.
[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Parliament.]
But the debates over religion were suddenly interrupted. In granting the
Petition of Right we have seen that Charles had no purpose of parting
with his power of arbitrary arrest or of levying customs. Both practices
in fact went on as before, and the goods of merchants who refused to pay
tonnage and poundage were seized as of old. At the reopening of the
Session indeed the king met the Commons with a proposal that they should
grant him tonnage and poundage and pass silently over what had been
done by his officers. But the House was far from assenting to the
interpretation which Charles had put on the Petition, and it was
resolved to vindicate what it held to be the law. It deferred all grant
of customs till the wrong done in the illegal levy of them was
redressed, and summoned the farmers of those dues to the bar. But though
they appeared, they pleaded the king's command as a ground for their
refusal to answer. The House was proceeding to a protest, when on the
second of March the Speaker signified that he had received an order to
adjourn. Dissolution was clearly at hand, and the long-suppressed
indignation broke out in a scene of strange disorder. The Speaker was
held down in the chair, while Eliot, still clinging to his great
principle of ministerial responsibility, denounced the new Treasurer as
the adviser of the measure. "None have gone about to break Parliaments,"
he added in words to which after events gave a terrible significance,
"but in the end Parliaments have broken them." The doors were locked,
and in spite of the Speaker's protests, of the repeated knocking of the
usher at the door, and the gathering tumult within the House itself, the
loud "Aye, Aye!" of the bulk of the members supported Eliot in his last
vindication of English liberty. By successive resolutions the Commons
declared whomsoever should bring in innovations in religion, or whatever
minister endorsed the levy of subsidies not granted in Parliament, "a
capital enemy to the kingdom and commonwealth," and every subject
voluntarily complying with illegal acts and demands "a betrayer of the
liberty of England and an enemy of the same."