When the English Parliament of 1628 came together, the King told
them: “If you do not your duty, mine would then order me to use
those other means which God has put into my hand.” Charles’s notion
of Parliamentary duty was simply that the members should vote
necessary supplies, and then leave the expenditures to the royal will.
Parliament, however, insisted upon some assurances that abuses would
not be repeated. The Petition of Right, as we saw in our account of
Eliot, was the result. Though the King was obliged to give his assent
to the petition, it soon became evident that he had no intention
to carry out its provisions either in the letter or in the spirit.
The liberal supplies granted by Parliament after the signing of the
petition were soon exhausted. Every expedient of economy was resorted
to in order to avoid the necessity of calling another Parliament.
At first there was perhaps no clearly defined purpose to cause any
positive breach of constitutional obligation, but gradually the
government drifted into a policy of the most flagrant oppression. No
Parliament was called for eleven years. The powers of the prerogative
were strained at every point. Knighthood was forced on the gentry in
order that large sums might be extorted as the price of composition.
Enormous fines were levied for removing defects in title deeds. Large
sums were exacted of landowners for encroachments on the crown lands.
London, in consequence of its open sympathy with the Parliamentary
cause, became a special object of royal dislike. An edict was issued
prohibiting the enlargement of the metropolis; and large districts in
the suburbs were saved from demolition only by the payment of three
years’ rental to the royal treasury. The powers of the Court of Star
Chamber were applied to the trying of causes on the simple information
of the King’s attorney, and the court was authorized to adjudge any
punishment short of death. Under its jurisdiction enormous fines
were levied for the most trifling offences. A simple brawl between
two wealthy lords had to be atoned for by the payment of £5,000,
and more than twice that sum was exacted of a gentleman as a fine
for contracting marriage with his niece. Monopolies, which had been
formally abandoned both by Elizabeth and by James, were now revived
in direct and open violation of the Petition of Right, in order that
large sums might be realized from the persons receiving the privileges
bestowed by the concession. Nearly every article of domestic necessity
had to be procured directly or indirectly from some monopolist; and,
consequently, the expense of living was very greatly increased. Customs
duties were levied just as if they had been voted by Parliament, and
after a time writs were issued for a general levy of benevolences from
the shires. Thus, one by one, even the most flagrant of the abuses
he had promised to abolish, were resorted to without hesitation and
without scruple.
Not less flagrant were the abuses of a religious nature. The Commons,
in the last moments of the session of 1629, had resolved that “whoever
should bring in innovations in religion,” as well as “whoever advised
the levy of subsidies not granted in Parliament,” was to be regarded
as “a capital enemy of the kingdom and commonwealth.” And yet it
was to “bring in innovations in religion” that the energies of the
English church were now chiefly directed. At the head of the church
was Archbishop Laud, whose determination was “to raise the Church of
England to what he conceived to be its real position as a branch,
though a reformed branch, of the great Catholic church throughout
the world.” He protested alike against the innovations of Rome and
the innovations of Calvin. In his view the Episcopal succession was
the essence of the church; and, therefore, when the Lutheran and
Calvanistic churches rejected the office of Bishop, they “ceased to be
churches at all.” As he rejected the church of the reformers, and as he
acknowledged Rome as a true branch of the church, he drew constantly
nearer to Rome, and removed further and further from the doctrines
of the Reformers. In all parts of England ministers who refused to
conform were expelled from their cures. It was this aggressive and
revolutionary policy that drove thousands of Puritans to New England.
Three thousand emigrants left England in a single year; and during
the period between 1629 and 1640 no less than about twenty thousand
Puritans found a refuge in the New World.
In Scotland resistance to the innovations of Laud took a more active
turn. Royal proclamation had been made, reinstating the Episcopal
forms; but when the Dean of Edinburgh opened the new Prayer Book, a
murmur of discontent ran through the congregation, and a stool, hurled
by one of the members, felled him to the ground. Petitions for the
removal of the Prayer Book were showered in upon the court. Various
writers were dragged before the Star Chamber and branded as “trumpets
of sedition.” To a petition presented by the Duke of Hamilton the
King replied: “I will rather die than yield to these impertinent and
damnable demands.” Of these seething discontents, what is sometimes
called the “Bishops’ War” was the result. The King was determined
to suppress opposition by force of arms, and for that purpose he
committed the fatal error of calling over Strafford from Ireland.
Scotland at once arose to resist him, while at his back all England was
at the point of revolt. A London mob burst into the Bishop’s palace
at Lambeth, and then proceeded to break up the sittings of the High
Commission at St. Paul’s. Charles, finding the army in no condition
to cope with the discontents of the time, at length, with great
reluctance, yielded to his advisers, and once more summoned the Houses
of Parliament.
In April of 1640, the newly-elected members came together. During the
eleven years that had elapsed since the dismissal of the Parliament
of 1629, many of the old leaders had passed away. Sir Edward Coke and
Sir Robert Philips were dead, and Eliot had perished as a martyr in
prison. But in the meantime a new leader had appeared. By the consent
of all, that distinction was now held by John Pym. This gentleman,
now fifty-four years of age, had been the companion of Eliot in the
third Parliament of Charles, and, next to Eliot and Wentworth, had
been acknowledged the most effective speaker in that body. But in the
course of the past eleven years his talents and his energy had caused
him everywhere to be hailed as the popular leader. He was a gentleman
of good family, a graduate of Oxford, and an Episcopalian in religion.
His influence was probably all the greater because he did not belong
to the extreme party. We are told that he was no fanatic, that he was
genial and even convivial in his nature. He has been called by Mr.
Forster the first great popular organizer in English politics. In
company with Hampden he rode through several of the English counties,
as Anthony Wood states, “with a view of promoting elections of the
puritanical brethren.” He urged the people to meet and send petitions
to Parliament, and by him the custom of petitioning was first organized
into a system. When the new House of Commons was called to order every
one looked to Pym as by a common instinct for guidance.
The speech with which Pym responded to this expectation is doubtless
one of the most remarkable in the history of British eloquence. It
abounds in passages which, for weight of argument and closeness of
reasoning, remind one of the compositions of Lord Bacon. Throughout the
whole there is a precision of statement, and a gravity of manner that
show plainly enough that he was not unconscious of the responsibility
that rested upon him. The speech has been a matter of general comment
with all the historians of the period, for there is abundant evidence
of its extraordinary influence on Parliament and on the people of
England. And yet, until within a few years, no complete copy of it was
known to be in existence. Several mutilated versions were published
in the seventeenth century, but these conveyed a very imperfect
impression of its power. Mr. May, the historian of the Long Parliament
says that “Mr. Pym, a grave and religious gentleman, in a long speech
of almost two hours, recited a catalogue of grievances which at that
time lay heavy on the commonwealth, of which many abbreviated copies,
as extracting the heads only, were with great greediness taken by
gentleman and others throughout the kingdom, for it was not then the
fashion to print speeches in Parliament.” These “abbreviated copies”
“of heads only,” were until recently supposed to be the only reports of
the speech in existence. But Mr. Forster, when writing his Life of Pym,
was led to institute a careful search among the world of papers in the
British Museum; and his effort was rewarded with success. He discovered
a report of the speech with corrections by Pym’s own hand. This
version, corrected by the orator himself, is the one here reproduced.
It is somewhat abridged by Mr. Forster; and the report given in the
third person is preserved. In unabbreviated form it has never been
published.