CHAPTER III.
ELEVEN YEARS OF ARBITRARY GOVERNMENT.--1629-1640.
ΚΡΕΩΝ. ἄλλῳ γὰρ ἤ μοι χρή γε τῆσδ᾽ ἄρχειν χθονός; ΑΙΜΩΝ. πόλις γὰρ οὐκ ἔσθ᾽ ἥτις ἀνδρός ἐσθ᾽ ἑνός. ΚΡΕΩΝ. οὐ τοῦ κρατοῦντος ἡ πόλις νομίζεται; ΑΙΜΩΝ. καλῶς ἐρήμης γ᾽ ἄν σὺ γῆς ἄρχοις μόνος.
CREON. For my behoof I have right to rule this land. HAEMON. It is no state where all belongs to one. CREON. Is not the state the sovereign’s property? HAEMON. A manless state how grand to rule--alone!--Soph. Ant. 739.
%CHARLES AND WENTWORTH.%
Charles had now made up his mind to govern without the aid of Parliament, and thus raise himself into the position of an absolute monarch. His education and his character had alike tended to blind his mind to the fact that, from the subjects’ point of view, such an intention was criminal. Princes rarely converse with their fellows on an equal footing, or hear their own opinions and actions freely criticized. They are, therefore, apt to grow up prejudiced. ♦Charles’ education and character.♦ Charles was especially unfortunate in this respect. In James’ court, no man could maintain a footing who was not obsequious enough to let his own opinion follow that of his Majesty. The divine right by which kings rule, the superiority of the prerogative to the law, the subject’s duty of passive obedience, were household words to the young prince. His social training was as bad as his political; the companions amongst whom he was thrown, were not only obsequious but immoral, and when he became king, his father’s influence lived on in one of the most worthless of his favourites. Edward I., indeed, a king whose only thought was for his people’s “security under fixed laws and customs” yet failed in inspiring his son with any such noble aims, though he banished the evil companions who were bent on marring that son’s mind. But Charles was in all points a prince far superior to Edward II. Had he been trained by a father endowed with the noble qualities of Edward I., he might have run a peaceful course and lived and died in accord with his virtues. Charles’ virtues, in fact, were his own, and displayed themselves in spite of his education. His manners and his tastes were refined, and his enemies were never able to deny that he was both a good husband and a good father. On the other hand, nature had bestowed on him no special gifts to counteract the evil effects of his political training. His character was cold and unbending, and he was without any generous sympathies, that might have brought him to recognize good in cause or man opposed to his own fixed ideas. Obstinate and opinionated when he came to the throne at twenty-four, so he remained to the last day of his life; no amount of experience proved sufficient to teach him the necessity of yielding to public opinion, or even of listening with patience to arguments that offended his high notions of what was due to himself as a king. With such an education and such a character, he was born in an evil time for himself. He had found a minister who could put his wishes into act, for Wentworth set himself, with all the energy of his nature, to the support of arbitrary government. Having shared in the counsels of the patriots, and knowing their deep-rooted love of liberty, this clear-sighted counsellor never deceived himself into thinking that any half measures were sufficient for success. On the Continent, many instances had proved that a standing army was the surest support to an arbitrary throne. ♦Advice of Wentworth too good for Charles.♦ With a fleet only and without such an army, Wentworth would say, a government had but ‘one leg to stand upon.’ To secure an army he must have money. At present much of the monies taken from the pockets of the people passed into those of courtiers and their dependents, instead of enriching the royal exchequer. It was easier to save money than to get it and Wentworth, therefore, advocated economy in administration, in fact, the true financial policy of getting money’s worth for money given. But Wentworth’s advice was too good and his energy too great for his master. The minister was to be like the dwarf in the fairy tale, he was not to prescribe prudence but to save his employer from the results of imprudence. Advancing Wentworth as he did, Charles shrank from opposing the wishes of his wife and curtailing the perquisites of his friends. Under these conditions, the king’s government might be violent, it could never be strong.
Wentworth speedily concluded peace with France (April, 1629) and Spain (Nov., 1630). Experience had already proved that it was impossible to carry on war without applying to Parliament for aid. To provide for the expenses of the court and government was no easy matter, even when the country was at peace.
%COURT AND QUEEN.%
♦Character of Henrietta Maria.♦ Charles’ vain and passionate wife, Henrietta Maria, who in an ill-temper could dash her hands through the panes of a window, or turn a whole company out of her presence with one of her royal scowls, was not a queen to be easily guided by a minister. With some, however, her smiles were as potent as her frowns, and she soon won an ascendancy over her husband equal to that which Buckingham once exercised. To her, happiness meant a gay life at Whitehall, with a constant series of balls and masques, so that the expenses of the court rose rapidly, and soon reached sums far larger than those considered enormous in the time of James. ♦Charles’ court and government corrupt.♦ Delighting, as she did, in the exercise of power and patronage, it was to the queen, and not to the king, or to Wentworth, that courtiers and their dependents applied, in order to obtain lucrative monopolies, offices, or pensions. The court offices were, indeed, regarded as a sort of booty. Fixed salaries there were none; but fees and perquisites were numerous, and every man’s hand was open to a bribe. There was no shame felt in the matter. The Earl of Dorset, a member of council, and a judge in the Star Chamber, openly declared that he thought it no crime for a courtier to receive a reward from one for whom he procured a favour.
Out of the royal revenue[34] had to be provided, not only money sufficient to satisfy the desires of the court, but also to keep up the navy, to provide for the repairs of castles and forts, the expenses of ambassadors, and the salaries of officers of the executive. Since Parliamentary grants were out of the question and the ordinary revenue did not nearly meet the demand, a raid was made upon the property of all classes of society.
%DESPERATE FINANCE.%
♦Money raised by illegal means.♦ The nobility and gentry suffered as much as any. Holders of land on the borders of royal forests were accused of having encroached on the king’s domains; the judges received orders to ferret out the weak points of titles, and when the cases came into court, to intimidate jurors into giving verdicts in the king’s favour. Adverse verdicts entailed fines of ruinous amounts, and the legal rule that no prescription holds good against the crown was carried so far that even lands held by a title of three hundred years were reclaimed as royal property. By these means, the bounds of Rockingham Forest were increased from six miles to sixty. But ‘depression of the nobility,’ says Bacon, ‘may make a king more absolute, but less safe.’ These, and similar encroachments, only helped to cement the alliance between peers and commoners.
There was an old feudal custom, long fallen into disuse, that on the accession of a new king, all who held land of him by knights’ service, worth above the paltry sum of £20 per annum, should receive the order of knighthood, or pay a fine. Fines were now exacted from noblemen and gentlemen in all parts of the country, for having neglected to be knighted when Charles came to the throne. The fines levied were three or four times the amount at which the delinquents would have been rated for subsidies. The Catholics in return for their support were allowed to compound at an easier rate.[35]
♦Old laws raked up.♦ The poor were also attacked. A statute, passed during the reign of Elizabeth, requiring that cottagers should have four acres of ground attached to their dwellings, had probably never been enforced, had certainly long since fallen into disuse; the poor householders were now held responsible, and complained that they were “mightily vexed,” for commissioners were sent twenty miles round London to search out and fine those who had disobeyed the statute. The commissioners employed were “needy men of no fame, prisoners out of the Fleet,” whose services, of course, could be cheaply bought; the money they collected mostly went to enrich two lords, who had received as a favour from the king, leave to put the commission into execution.
If no old law could be raked up, Charles would act by proclamation. For instance, he forbade by proclamation the building of new houses, in or about London. Builders either bought licences, or else ran the risk of being called to account and punished for disregarding the proclamation.[36] Thus one man was fined £1000, and ordered to pull down forty-two dwelling-houses, stables, and coach-houses, by a certain time, on pain of paying a second £1000. Any classes who refused such black mail were severely dealt with. The innkeepers of London were inhibited from dressing any meat, because they declined to pay an excise duty on wine, when levied by the sole authority of the Council. They were soon glad to compound.
%MONOPOLIES.%
♦Monopolies.♦ As a further means of raising money, the king granted or sold patents for the exclusive sale or manufacture of certain articles. The monopolists formed companies, of which all traders or manufacturers were forced to become members and obey the regulations. By these means taxes were laid on articles of every-day use and consumption, such as salt, corn, lace, tobacco, barrels, linen, cloth; but most of the money so raised, while impoverishing the nation by raising the price of all necessaries, enriched, not the king, but his courtiers and their dependents. For instance, out of every £12 raised by the monopoly of wine, only £1 reached the exchequer, the other £11 stopping by the way amongst the vintners and the owners of the patent. If the companies sold bad articles, there was no redress. The poor women in London complained that the soap made by the company burnt the linen, scalded their fingers, and was full of tallow and lime. The soap-boilers were Catholics, and got the queen’s laundress to subscribe to the goodness of the soap, but “she tells her Majesty she does not wash her linen with any other than Castile soap, and the truth is, most of the ladies that have subscribed have their linen washed with Castile soap.” The Lord Mayor, whom the women followed about in the streets, clamorously petitioning against the new soap, received a sharp reproof at the Council Board for giving too soft answers. The monopolies alienated London, which might have supplied the sinews of war to the king, as it eventually did for the Parliament. It was noted that “discontinuance of Parliaments brings up this kind of grain, which commonly is blasted when they come.”
%PRIVILEGE OF PARLIAMENT.%
Besides being extortionate and arbitrary, the government was often cruel; and the common law judges, instead of administering justice impartially between subject and sovereign, allowed themselves to be made the instruments of oppression. Upon the dissolution of the last Parliament, several members of the Commons were imprisoned on warrants signed by the king, charging them with having stirred up sedition. ♦Members of late Parliament committed illegally to prison.♦ Their counsel argued that sedition was a bailable offence, and that, therefore, they ought to be let free on bail. The judges, however, following the king’s instructions, required the prisoners, not only to find bail for the present charge, but securities for their good behaviour in the future. As they refused to comply with these demands, which would have kept them under the thumb of the court and its judges, they were ordered back into prison.
These country leaders, who led the opposition in Parliament, risked much--property, liberty, life. Sir John Eliot, being of too noble a nature to be wrought upon either by corruption or intimidation, naturally became the victim of a government that always required submission before it relaxed its hold. He had long since been obliged to give away his property in trust for his children, to preserve himself and his family from ruin. An information in the King’s Bench was now brought against Hollis and Valentine for raising a tumult in the Commons on the last day of the session, and against Eliot, for words spoken in the House. The three pleaded that the offences with which they were charged, being committed in Parliament, were not punishable in any other place. ♦Judgment of King’s Bench on Eliot, Hollis, Valentine.♦ The most important of all privileges of Parliament, freedom of speech concerning matters of Parliamentary debate, was here called into question; and the prisoners’ counsel brought forward many precedents to show that the liberties and privileges of Parliament could only be determined in Parliament, and not by any inferior court. The King’s Bench, however, decided that it had a right to judge the alleged offences, though committed in Parliament, and condemned the defendants to be imprisoned during the king’s pleasure; Eliot to pay a fine to the king of £2000, Hollis 1000 marks,[37] Valentine £500 (Feb. 12, 1630).[38]
%DEATH OF ELIOT.%
In the course of twelve months’ time, the other prisoners either consented to find sureties for good behaviour, or paid their fines, or were allowed to go at large on some excuse or other. Sir John Eliot alone refused to make any concession of principle, and was still closely confined in the Tower. Consumption attacked him, and his doctors prescribed air and exercise, but he was not allowed to pass out of the walls of his prison. “I am now,” he writes, “where candlelight may be suffered, but scarce fire;” and this, though his lodgings had been changed to a dark gloomy chamber. ♦End of Sir John Eliot.♦ He sent a petition to the king, informing him that he had fallen into a dangerous disease, and praying to be allowed to take some fresh air. Charles replied that the petition was not humble enough. Sir John sent a second by the hand of his son. “I am heartily sorry,” he wrote, “I have displeased your Majesty, and beseech you once again to command your judges to set me at liberty, that when I have recovered my health, I may return back to my prison.” But no order for release came: and the Lieutenant of the Tower offered to present a third petition with his own hand, and made no doubt but that Charles would grant it if Sir John would only write so as to acknowledge his fault, and humbly pray for pardon. “I thank you, sir,” replied Eliot, “for your friendly advice, but my spirits are grown feeble and faint, which when it shall please God to restore unto their former vigour, I will take it into consideration.” He did not mean to use the language of a culprit, and purchase his own life by betraying the cause of the nation. Death soon released him while still in the prime of his life (æt. 40). His son sent a petition to the king, begging that his father’s body might be buried in his own county of Cornwall. Charles wrote under the petition these words: “‘Let Sir John Eliot’s body be buried in the church of that parish where he died.’ And so he was buried in the Tower.” Such was the fate of one of the purest-hearted of patriots (1632).
%CHARACTER OF ELIOT.%
His history shows in an eminent degree the nobleness of the leaders of the opposition and the constitutional rectitude of their aims: with a true loyalty to his king, whom he tried in vain to urge into right courses, he won the leadership of the Commons, not more by his vivid eloquence than by the single-minded devotion of his character. There was a true pathos in his stoical bearing under suffering. In the solitude of his prison he bade his friends, ‘for their own sakes forbear coming to visit him.’ Dying in the Tower he appealed to his son at college not to let him ‘receive by any misconduct of his that wound which no enemy could give--sorrow and affliction of the mind.’ The limit he gently put to the intercessions of the friendly governor reminds us of the scene in Plato when Socrates put Crito’s appeal aside by telling him that he heard the laws of his land remonstrating with him ‘to think of right first, and of life and children afterwards.’ Thus, unlike the Royalist victim of the Revolution, he departed ‘as a sufferer and not a doer of evil.’[39] His country did not lose by his adherence to principle. In later times when the cause of liberty was in peril its defenders thought of Eliot and fought on.[40]
%ILLEGAL COURTS.%
♦Illegal courts. Court of the North.♦ Illegal judgments were now the curse of the nation. Where the common law courts could find no crime, the illegal courts came into action. North of the Humber, the Court of the North, of which Wentworth was president, took the place of the Star Chamber in the south. Its origin was even more questionable. Henry VIII., after an insurrection in 1536, issued a commission to the Archbishop of York and several gentlemen of the north, to examine into the grounds of the disorder, and to punish offenders in riots and conspiracies. But long after all traces of the insurrection had disappeared, the court remained, and its authority was gradually extended. The people dwelling north of the Humber complained that they were shut out from the protection of the common law courts at Westminster, and that their personal liberty and property were at the mercy of arbitrary judges, who sentenced according to their discretion. While the Court of the North was thus accused of encroaching even upon the civil jurisdiction of the Westminster courts, the Star Chamber was chiefly concerned with criminal cases, such as forgery, perjury, riot, libel, conspiracy, and every kind of misdemeanour. It adjudged any punishment short of death, as pillory, whipping, branding, cutting off the ears, fine, and imprisonment.
The customs were levied with rigour, though they had never been granted to Charles by statute.
♦Sentence of Star Chamber on Chambers.♦ Chambers, one of several merchants whose goods had been seized for refusing to pay illegal duties, vented his indignation by saying before the Council Board, “that the merchants in no part of the world were so screwed and wrung as in England; that in Turkey they had more encouragement.” The judges of the common law courts could have found no law by which to inflict a heavy punishment for a few hasty words. The judges of the Star Chamber, guided in their judgment by their discretion, declared the expressions used were likely to make the people believe that Charles’ happy government was a Turkish tyranny, and sentenced Chambers to pay a fine of £2000, and to sign a submission. Chambers wrote under the submission these words: “I do utterly abhor and detest the contents of this submission, and never, till death, will acknowledge any part thereof.” He was refused by the judges his habeas corpus, and remained a prisoner many years.
%WENTWORTH IN ENGLAND.%
Wentworth, as the councillor who possessed most influence in the government, incurred the hatred of all lovers of liberty, without gaining the friendship of the queen or the court. ♦Administration of Wentworth and Laud.♦ Regardless of the interests of courtiers and their dependents, he resolutely endeavoured, as far as he could obtain Charles’ support, to govern with a view to increase the power of the crown. This administration required the surrender of illicit gains, and the punishment of criminals, however close their connection with men in high places. While, therefore, its vices incurred the odium of the country, its virtues incurred the odium of the court. However much a Somerset or a Buckingham may have been hated by rival aspirants to royal favour, it was the men who were hated and not their régime. Under them, so long as the interests of the favourite remained untouched, free licence was given to all to make their fortunes by the first means that came to hand. The court and government of James had been thoroughly corrupt. The corruption of the courtiers under James had continued under Charles. But, where free rein was given him, Wentworth thus, not unaptly, describes the character of his administration: “Where I found a crown, a church, and a people spoiled, I could not imagine to redeem them from under the pressure with gracious smiles and gentle looks; it would cost warmer water than so.... True it was, indeed, I knew no other rule to govern by but by reward and punishment; and I must profess that where I found a person well and entirely set for the service of my master, I should lay my hand under his foot, and add to his respect and power all I might; and that where I found the contrary, I should not dandle him in my arms, or soothe him in his untoward humour, but if he came in my reach, so far as honour and justice would warrant me, I must knock him soundly over the knuckles.”[41] In Yorkshire, as president of the Court of the North, by preventing the proceeds of his trenchant measures from being filched by petty tax-gatherers, he succeeded in raising the royal revenue in the four northern counties to four or five times its previous amount. In London, Laud was also a zealous servant of the crown, and though ruthlessly trampling on recalcitrant merchants who refused to pay illegal customs, would try to remedy abuses and give ear to complaints, if trade were in any way injured for the advantage of a courtier.
%WENTWORTH IN IRELAND.%
♦Wentworth, Lord Deputy of Ireland.♦ In the year 1632 Wentworth was appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland. During the reigns of Elizabeth and James I., Ireland had for the first time been brought into complete subjection to English rule. English laws and English customs had been introduced into every province, and the Protestant Church established in place of the Catholic. The population was divided into three parts: 1st, the native Irish; 2nd, the old English settlers in Dublin and the neighbouring counties of Kildare, Louth, and the two Meaths, which constituted ‘the English pale’; 3rd, new English and Scotch settlers who had been planted upon lands taken from Irish rebels by Elizabeth and James.
♦State of Ireland.♦ The Irish and old English settlers, forming a large majority of the population, were Catholics; the new settlers Protestants. Though the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity had been enacted by an Irish Parliament, they were not fully put into force, because it was hardly possible to fine nonconformists, when ‘in six parishes scarce six came to church.’ Those, however, who refused to take the oath of supremacy when tendered, were shut out from holding any office in the State, or even from practising as lawyers. The people were ignorant and untaught. The Protestant clergy could not speak the same language as their flocks, and, while living with idle hands in a false position, had won for themselves an indifferent character. The Catholic bishops exercised far more power than the Protestant; the great lords, whether English or Irish, oppressed their tenants; the ministers of justice took bribes; the officers employed by the government, and the Protestant clergy, extorted large fees on every possible pretext; an undisciplined army was scattered over the country, living at free quarters; pirates from Dunkirk, Algiers, Spain, the Bay of Biscay, so infested the coasts, that the people were plundered in every creek; while the captains of the king’s ships refused to move against them, alleging want of victuals, though the crews--‘mere rabbles of disorderly people’--did the country more injury than the pirates themselves; meantime merchant vessels were run aground, rifled and burnt in sight of Dublin Castle; there was little trade; the taxes did not pay the expenses of the government, so that there was a debt of £100,000 owing by the crown.[42]
Wentworth was probably sent there because fair promises had been made to the Irish, which it was disagreeable to fulfil. The king hoped Wentworth’s genius would keep Ireland quiet; he could not yet have hoped it would forge Ireland into a weapon to use against English liberty.[43] ♦Wentworth’s administration.♦ Wentworth set himself to work to rule despotically, but after he had put first his master’s interest, he showed some regard for that of the people entrusted to him. No corruption was allowed; the fees received by the officers, high and low, in the government employ, were inquired into; judges were not allowed to act as mere instruments of great lords’ oppression: the army was remodelled; discipline enforced; Wentworth saw every single man himself, though it numbered nearly 4000; the soldier paid for all he took; captains were made to understand that for the future they must perform garrison duty, must drill their troops, and provide them with good arms and horses, instead of appropriating the funds for their own uses. They soon found that the lord deputy was not the sort of man to jest with; they had either to do as they were told, or leave the service. The navy was unfortunately independent of his control. In Wentworth’s own words, it grieved his heart that he had no power over the Admiralty. His grief indeed was no matter for wonder. The ship that was conveying over from England his wardrobe, furniture, and plate, was seized on the passage by that same Captain Nutt whom James I. and Secretary Calvert in 1623 let loose a second time upon the world.[44] As it was, to protect Dublin harbour from pirates, he fitted out a vessel at his own charge. He encouraged trade, but only so far as he thought the increase of Irish trade not detrimental to that of England. Thus in order to ensure to English manufacturers a readier sale for their cloths from the absence of Irish competition, he actually destroyed the woollen trade in Ireland. At the same time he introduced into Ulster the manufacture of linen from flax, erected looms, brought workmen from France and Flanders, and sent the first cargo of linen to Spain at his own risk. For this prohibitive policy in the supposed interest of England, Wentworth deserves no special blame. It is a blot attaching quite as much to the character of English parliaments as to that of English kings. What was special in that policy now, was the length to which it was carried. No deputy before Wentworth had been in possession at once of the necessary energy, determination, and disregard of human suffering, to uproot one branch of industry in the vain hope of seeing another spring up in a moment. Notwithstanding this suicidal act, the vigour of the government soon produced striking results; the debts of the crown were paid off, and in four years the customs were raised from £1200 to £40,000 and were still on the increase.
Yet the Irish felt no gratitude to the deputy, for if he protected them from the oppression of the government officers, and of their own aristocracy, he laid their property open to the rapacity of the king, and their personal freedom to his own vengeance.
The Irish had been required by Elizabeth and James to surrender their lands, in order to receive them back to hold by feudal tenure. The grants, by which the land had been restored, ought to have been enrolled in the Court of Chancery. But though the Irish of Connaught had paid £3000 for the purpose, the enrolment had in many cases been neglected, and James’ council had advised him on this pretext to forfeit the whole province, and to plant English Protestants on the lands thus taken from their rightful owners. When Charles came to the throne, the Irish, in terror of this project, proposed to support an army of 5000 men for three years, in return for fifty-three royal concessions or “graces.” Of these the most important were, that the inhabitants of Connaught should be allowed to enrol their grants; that the crown should lay claim to no estates that had been held for sixty years; and that an Irish Parliament should be held to confirm these graces. Charles had agreed, signed the graces, and promised that a Parliament should be summoned to confirm them.
%IRISH PARLIAMENT.%
♦Wentworth obtains a subsidy from Irish Parliament.♦ This Parliament was at last summoned by Wentworth, after the army had been supported for four, instead of for three years, the time originally agreed upon. It would seem hardly credible that neither the king nor his deputy, after having received the money, should have had the smallest intention of performing their part of the compact. Yet such was the case; it was only with great reluctance that Charles allowed a Parliament, “that hydra, cunning as malicious,” to be summoned at all. Wentworth, however, was confident that he should be able to manage it, by playing off the jealousies of Protestants against Catholics, and of Catholics against Protestants, and succeeded so well, that he persuaded the Parliament to grant the king six subsidies, giving the members to understand that after they had proved themselves such dutiful subjects, the king would be sure to grant them their desires. Never were men more deceived. The perfidious deputy, when sure of the money, turned round and told the Commons that most of the graces were prejudicial to the crown, and that it was his duty to beseech his Majesty not to grant them. They were helpless. A law called Poyning’s Law had been passed in 1495, by which no bills could be introduced into the Irish Parliament except such as had been first allowed by the king and the English council. Hence the Irish House of Commons was not nearly so independent in action as the English, and the Parliament was dissolved without the most important graces having been passed into law.
%WENTWORTH IN IRELAND.%
♦Lands in Connaught forfeited to crown.♦ The consequences were soon experienced. Wentworth travelled west into Connaught, and inquired into defective titles (1635). The Council Chamber, an arbitrary court, answering the same purpose as the Star Chamber in England, fined the first jurors who declared against the crown £4000 each. After this example, little resistance was made. Some lands were declared to belong to the crown, that had been held for 300 years, and landowners were glad to be allowed to pay a rent to the king for part of their lands, and to give up the rest for him to bestow on new Protestant settlers. This attack upon their property was far from being all that the Irish suffered. The deputy’s pride and vindictiveness were unparalleled. Any who offended he marked out for destruction, and hunted down. Lord Mountnorris, vice-treasurer in Ireland, and a captain in the navy, was suddenly summoned, with several other officers in Dublin, to attend the deputy at a council of war (12th Dec., 1635). Mountnorris found himself accused of having said, six months before, at a dinner table, that a gentleman, struck by Wentworth, “had a brother that would not have taken such a blow.” The court, composed mainly of councillors, then and there, in the presence of the deputy, sentenced the victim to be deprived of all office, and to be shot dead. The latter part of the sentence Wentworth only intended to be passed, not executed; the former he caused to be put in force, and prided himself on thus having humbled a man towards whom he had for a long time felt ill will.
♦Laws against Catholics not enforced.♦ His ecclesiastical policy was somewhat less severe. Though the endowments of churches had been given to Protestant bishops and clergymen, every parish was allowed its priest and its mass-house, simply because Wentworth did not feel himself strong enough to put the Act of Uniformity into full force. When the English should be more thickly settled, when there should be in the country an army composed entirely of Protestants, strong enough to crush rebellion, he looked forward to forcing every Papist to conform to the Protestant worship.
Meantime the success of his Irish government did not lessen the number of the deputy’s enemies at home. The queen and her tribe looked upon Ireland as a country where offices ought to be bestowed, as in England, upon her Majesty’s recommendation. Wentworth begged the king that no office might be given away without the deputy’s consent. Charles agreed, but ungenerously objected to make the denials himself. “You,” he wrote, “must take upon you the refusing part.” The disappointed courtiers displayed their spite by exclaiming against the deputy’s pride and tyranny. True, they said, he refused to take bribes, but he was none the worse off, for he never gave any, as others refused his presents. If Wentworth’s enemies in London might be believed, Mountnorris was actually shot, and people could even tell where the bullets had entered his body.
In spite of the great financial success of the Irish administration, the revenue raised in that country could not possibly be made to provide for the expenses of the English government. Hence although Wentworth carefully husbanded his surplus funds, and although so many illegal modes of taxation were resorted to in England, poverty prevented Charles from rendering the Protestant cause on the continent any effectual support either by arms or by negotiation.
%THIRTY YEARS’ WAR.%
♦Thirty Years’ War.♦ The Thirty Years’ War was still raging. The Emperor Ferdinand II., after his armies had overrun the north of Germany, nourished hopes, not only of rooting the Protestant doctrines out of Germany, but also of reducing the Catholic princes to dependence upon Austria (1628-1630). But at the moment when his power seemed greatest, the Protestants were saved by the break up of the Catholic camp. The Catholic princes of Germany feared they might lose their own independence if they suffered the emperor to overpower their Protestant fellows. The pope himself, Urban VIII., alarmed at the interference of Austria in Italy, joined the side of the French, and thus indirectly aided the Protestants. Finally Richelieu, still the chief minister of Louis XIII., eager as his successors for a divided Germany, called on Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, to help in restoring the German princes to their ancient rights, by overthrowing the tyranny of the emperor.
Gustavus, with a small army of 30,000 men, defeated the Imperial general, Tilly, at Leipzig (Sept., 1631), and penetrated into the heart of Bavaria. At Lutzen he defeated the celebrated Wallenstein, and lost his own life (Nov., 1632). After his death every nation engaged was fighting for some special interest, and the war continued for seventeen years with varied success. Frederic, prince of the palatinate, died in 1632, still an exile from his dominions, but leaving his son to continue his claims.
The course of Gustavus was followed in England with deep interest. English and Scotch volunteers, after serving in the Swedish armies, returned home to note with grief that while they had been fighting in defence of the Protestant faith and political rights, their own country was falling subject to the sway of a religion that differed little from the Romish, and of a tyranny in the State that threatened to make government by Parliaments a thing of the past. Wentworth’s influence, however, foiled the war-party; “Good my lord,” he wrote to Laud in 1637, “if it be not too late, use your best to divert us from this war [with Austria]; it will necessarily put the king into all high ways possible, else will he not be able to subsist under the charge of it, and if these fail the next will be but the sacrificing those who have been his ministers.”
%SHIP-MONEY.%
♦Coasts of Britain infested by pirates.♦ Not only, however, was Charles too poor to aid the Protestant cause, he could not even defend the coasts of his own kingdom. Dutch and French fishing vessels encroached on the English fisheries, refusing even to ‘vail their flags’ to the king’s ships, while pirates from Algiers made descents upon the coasts of both England and Ireland, and carried off captives to be slaves to the Mussulman.
♦Ship-money.♦ To raise a fleet, Charles ventured on a great strain of his prerogative. A lawyer, Noy, had found in the Tower some old writs, calling on the ports and maritime counties to provide ships for the public service. It was suggested by Finch, chief justice of the Common Pleas, that the same demand should now be made, not only on ports and maritime places, but also on inland counties, and that instead of causing each county to provide so many ships, a general tax under the name of ship-money, should be levied on land and property, in the same manner as a subsidy granted in Parliament.
People wondered, and even dependents of Wentworth ventured to express their dislike to the new imposition. “I would rather,” one wrote, “pay ten subsidies in Parliament, than ten shillings this new-old-way of dead Noy’s.” None, however, had yet resisted illegal demands with impunity, and no immoderate opposition being offered, Charles gained yearly a sum of about £200,000 by this tax. He employed, indeed, the money on the object for which it was nominally raised. The Dutch fishers one year bought licences, and Rainsborough led an expedition against Salee on the coast of Algiers, whence he brought back from slavery 370 Englishmen and Irishmen (1637). So far the fleet restored England’s supremacy, and the court gloried in the success of this high-handed policy. Privy councillors would laugh when the expression ‘Liberty of the subject’ was used before them; they said that the taxes and monopolies in England were nothing compared with those endured by other kingdoms, and that the people ought to be thankful for the happiness of England, which grew rich in long years of peace while cruel wars devastated the continent and its inhabitants perished from famine. ♦Discontent general in country.♦ The facts were true enough, but it offers no satisfaction to sufferers to be told that others suffer more. The English people, who prided themselves on the free constitution of their country, felt as though an insult were offered them when their condition was compared with that of the slavish peasant of France, who could call nothing his own.[45] Gentlemen, freeholders, artisans, would talk and argue about their rights, and regret their old government by Parliaments. The students at the Inns of Court were noted for their loyalty, but even they, in getting up a masque in the queen’s honour, could not forbear having a sly cut at the government. After the well-mounted masquers, with their gold and silver lace, their cloth of tissue, their silver spangles, followed the antimasquers, cripples, and beggars, on “poor lean jades;” amongst them a fellow with a bunch of carrots upon his head, and a capon upon his fist, who begged a patent of monopoly as the first inventor of the art to feed capons fat with carrots; after him came riding a man on a little horse with a great bit, who begged a patent that none might use any bits but such as were made by him. The crowd in the streets applauded, understanding a covert reproach at the monopolies, which raised the prices of the commonest necessaries of life.
%HAMPDEN--SHIP-MONEY CASE.%
♦Judgment of Court of Exchequer in Hampden’s case.♦ John Hampden, a gentleman of Buckinghamshire, was among the first to endanger his property and liberty in support of his country’s rights. He refused to pay the twenty shillings at which a piece of his land was rated for ship-money. Charles consented to allow the case to be tried at law. He thought himself sure of the judges, for he had already obtained the signatures of all twelve to an extra-judicial opinion, publicly read in the Star Chamber, ‘that his Majesty might command all his subjects to provide and furnish such number of ships with men, munition, and victuals, and for such time as he should think fit, for the defence and safeguard of the kingdom, and that he was the sole judge both of the danger, and when and how the same was to be prevented and avoided.’
The cause of Hampden was pleaded for twelve days before all the twelve judges of the Westminster courts, who by virtue of the Star Chamber opinion, stood in the same relation to the parties, as though previous to a trial for murder they had in a public and notorious manner declared their belief in the innocence of the accused. The whole nation, poor and rich, Puritans and Episcopalians, alike waited eagerly for the judgment.
Hampden’s counsel brought forward what seemed an overwhelming weight of evidence. They could point to the various statutes from Magna Charta to the Petition of Right, that declared taxation, without consent of Parliament, illegal. Even if precedents to the contrary were to be found in times when “the government was more of force than of law,” such, they argued, must give way before the authority of statute law. This was in fact unanswerable. But the crown lawyers maintained that absolute power--power to act without consent of Parliament--was innate in the person of the King of England. Some of the judges in giving sentence treated all constitutional statutes as waste paper. “Where Mr. Holborne,” said Justice Berkeley, “supposed a fundamental policy in the creation of the frame of this kingdom--that in case the monarch of England should be inclined to exact from his subjects at his pleasure, he should be restrained, for he could have nothing from them but upon a common consent in Parliament--he is utterly mistaken herein. The law knows no such king-yoking policy. The law is itself an old and trusty servant of the king’s; it is his instrument or means which he useth to govern his people by. I never read nor heard that lex was rex, but it is common and most true that rex is lex.” “The king,” said another, “may dispense with any law in cases of necessity.” Out of the twelve judges only two pronounced in favour of Hampden; one of these had intended to give his judgment on the side of the crown, but changed his mind through the persuasion of his wife, who bade him not to fear danger for himself or his family, for she would sooner suffer any want or misery with him, than that he should act against his conscience (1637-8).
But at the moment when the victory of the king seemed complete and courtiers were most exultant, danger was nearer than they thought. The decision gave universal discontent. It is hard to have your property taken from you illegally, but harder still to be told that that illegality is law. It was a Cadmean victory Charles had won; the levying of ship-money was more difficult after the verdict than before, and he could not put thousands into prison for expressing discontent. Wentworth, wiser than his master, had not approved of the trial at all--“Hampden,” like other opposers of tyranny, “had better have been whipped into his right senses;” “if the rod be so used that it smarts not, I am the more sorry.”
%FAVOURS TO CATHOLICS.%
The nation hated the government of the State as arbitrary, corrupt, and cruel; it hated, however, still more the connivance at Popery, which characterized the government of the Church. ♦Government of the Church.♦ During the reign of Elizabeth, several severe laws had been passed against Catholics, condemning priests and Jesuits to suffer death as traitors, forbidding the exercise of the Catholic worship, and ordering recusants who refused to attend service in the parish church, to pay a fine of £20 a month. But now these laws were not put into force; fines were not regularly levied: if priests were arrested, they were at once discharged on warrants signed by the king or his secretaries. A Catholic chapel, built at Somerset House for Queen Henrietta’s use, was publicly consecrated with three days’ ceremonies, masses, and singing of litanies. Agents from the court of Rome actually resided in London; they were known to everybody; their carriages rolled down the streets without any one daring to say a word against them. Many of the courtiers, some of the king’s council, and even some of the bishops, were open or concealed Catholics; court ladies constantly went over to Rome, and the queen’s Capuchin friars boasted that not a week passed but there were two or three conversions.
The king, however, all the time, had no thoughts of weakening his own prerogative by making the Church of England dependent on a foreign see. He was courting Rome to procure the pope’s interest for the restoration of the palatinate to Charles, eldest son of his sister, Elizabeth. The pope, on his side, was willing to keep on good terms with the heretical government, in order to save English Catholics from persecution. In itself this toleration was laudable. The motives, however, that influenced Charles to exercise it, were no enlarged views of religious toleration. He forbore to put the laws against Catholics in force, because the Catholics supported his pretensions to arbitrary power. The public law was set aside by a private agreement. At the same time, to make the contrast more bitter, Puritans, often guiltless of any crime at law, were suffered to pine away in prison under sentences of the courts of High Commission and Star Chamber.
%FEELINGS AGAINST CATHOLICS.%
♦Excuse for intolerance of Puritans.♦ Various causes afford excuse for the bitter and intolerant spirit with which the Puritan regarded his Catholic fellow-countrymen. Many still lived who could recall to mind the events of 1588, when the Armada threatened the shores of England. Thousands still lived who remembered the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. Jesuits had taught the doctrine, that heretic princes might be dethroned and murdered. Several attempts had been made upon Elizabeth’s life. William the Silent, the heroic maintainer of Dutch liberty, had perished by the hand of a fanatic. The same fate had befallen the great Henri IV. of France. Diversity in the Church was thought incompatible with unity in the State. On the continent, not only did Catholics persecute Protestants, and Protestants Catholics, but one Protestant sect could not tolerate another; in England Presbyterians approved of the persecution of sectarians. In fact the principles of toleration had hardly as yet been enunciated, much less had they received a fair trial. It is experience alone that gives confidence, and few are bold enough to enter upon an untried course of action. The ordinary Englishman regarded the free toleration of Catholics as a crime both against his God and his country; as a Protestant he considered it a direct encouragement to the spread of idolatry and superstition; as a patriot, an opening for Catholic priests to usurp political power, and bring England again into dependence upon a foreign jurisdiction.
%THE PURITANS.%
There were, indeed, grounds for the fear, entertained by many, that a union would finally be effected between the Established Church of England and of Rome. Altars and images were restored to churches; popish ceremonies were revived, popish doctrines taught; the work of the Reformation was in part undone; the worshipper was required to believe that all his church taught him was true and necessary for salvation, even though her teaching found no foundation in the Bible; and again, in order to hold communion with God, he must seek the aid of priests and assist in ceremonies he regarded as superstitious. ♦Character of the Puritans.♦ But though a Puritan, even if a Presbyterian or sectarian, could be forced to conform and attend his parish church, he could not be prevented from spreading his opinions and making them felt by others. For his manners and his conduct betrayed him, and they were such as to command approval. Morality was inculcated by the ministers of the Church, as much as by the more popular preachers, but practice is more than profession, and that Church was supported by a court which treated vice lightly and made a scoff of virtue. The genuine Puritan, on the contrary, was distinguished by his strict observance of the moral virtues. He sought in the Bible, but more especially in the books of the Old Testament, for the rules by which to guide his actions; he gained a vivid conception of a personal God, with whom his own soul could enter into direct communion, and beneath whose displeasure it was fatal to fall; and he felt with the Hebrew of the Old Testament, “he that keepeth the law, happy is he; its ways are ways of pleasantness and all its paths are peace; if thou hadst walked in its ways, thou shouldst have dwelt in peace for ever.”
Imbued with such feelings, a certain seriousness of demeanour characterized the Puritan, and he not unnaturally preferred to pass his time in listening to sermons, in prayer, and in attending to the business of his calling, to idly seeking amusement at the theatre, the fair, or the dance, where he was sure to hear coarse and profane language spoken, and to fall into the society of drunkards. Confident that his conduct was approved by God, he could look down upon the unregenerate, and regard their scoffs with contempt. Amongst uneducated tradesmen and artisans, there were many fanatics, who refused to take part in any amusements, however innocent; and who almost seemed to court ridicule by their austere mode of life, their ostentatiously plain dress, their close-cut hair, and their frequent use of the words of scripture.
%LAUD AS PERSECUTOR.%
♦Character of Laud.♦ At the head of the Church stood Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. A man more unsuited to assuage the religious passions of the times could hardly have held the position. However great a virtue in itself, sincere zeal, when untempered by charity, has produced the cruellest of persecutors. Some by nature are possessed of a largeness of mind that enables them to sympathize with the thoughts and feelings of others; while to some experience and education teach the duty, or at least the necessity of tolerating what they fail themselves to understand. Laud was sincere in his views, but nature had not generously gifted him with the quality of mercy. He came into power untutored by the experience won by working with others of different opinions. His abilities were only ordinary, and though his education was good for his time, it gave him learning rather than wisdom, and never succeeded in making up for the deficiencies of his heart. The new opinions seething around were nothing to him but a troublesome and dangerous fanaticism that required to be suppressed. Such sincere bigots placed in power have often wrought their country untold harm. They may by force succeed in stifling the new movement for years, perhaps for centuries; but, in either case, it is sure at last to break forth, possibly in some new form, and always with dangerous violence. Philip II., acting in the full belief that his work was sacred, drove freedom of thought out of Spain; hence, to this very day, the tyranny of extremes retards his country’s advance and prosperity. Happily for England, Laud’s success was of short duration. The reaction came in his lifetime, and he paid a heavy penalty for his rash attempt to force conformity upon a people panting for spiritual freedom.
%PRYNNE AND LILBURNE.%
♦Puritans forced to conform.♦ The courts held by bishops, as well as the Court of High Commission, called to account ministers and laymen who did not attend church, or who failed to perform every ceremony exactly as ordained in the Prayer-book, or, indeed, as prescribed by Laud on his sole authority. A minister of Durham, for speaking in a sermon against the use of pictures and images, was degraded by the Court of High Commission, fined £500, and placed in prison, where he waited eleven years for the hour of release. The Court of Star Chamber, in which Laud himself sat as a judge, was always ready to support the cause of the Church. Three professional men, Prynne, a lawyer; Burton, a London minister; and Bastwick, a doctor, had written books inveighing against the bishops. ♦Sentences of Star Chamber on Burton, Bastwick, Prynne.♦ On being brought before the Star Chamber, they were charged with felony, for having tried to stir up sedition, and sentenced to pay fines of £5000 each, to stand in the pillory in Palace Yard, Westminster, to have their ears cut off, and to be imprisoned for life.
“So far,” said Bastwick, addressing the crowd, surging round the pillories, “am I from base fear, or caring for anything that they can do, that had I as much blood as would swell the Thames, I would shed it every drop in this cause. Therefore, be not any of you discouraged, be not daunted at their power.” “Had we,” said Prynne, “respected (regarded) our liberties we had not stood here at this time.” “Sir,” said a woman to Burton, “there are many hundreds which, by God’s assistance, would willingly suffer for the cause you suffer for this day.” A mournful cry arose from the crowd, as the prisoners’ ears were cropped, and many pressed forward to dip handkerchiefs into the blood streaming down the scaffold.
♦Lilburne refuses illegal oath.♦ John Lilburne, a young man about twenty years old, was brought before the Star Chamber on a charge of being concerned in bringing seditious books over from Holland. He was required to swear, laying his hand upon the Gospels, to answer truly all questions put to him. He refused. “The oath,” he said, “is of the same nature as the High Commission oath, which oath I know to be unlawful, and withal I find no warrant in the word of God for an oath of inquiry, and therefore, my lords, I dare not take it.”[46] In accordance with his sentence, Lilburne was tied to a cart’s tail and whipped from the Fleet prison to Westminster Yard, at every two or three steps receiving on his bare back a blow from a knotted treble-corded whip. The young enthusiast never flinched, but all the way quoted texts of Scripture, exhorting the crowd to resist the bishops. At Westminster Yard he bowed to his judges, whom he saw looking out at him from the Court of Star Chamber window, and then sitting in the bent painful attitude required by the pillory, continued his exhortations. “I will never take the oath, though I be pulled to pieces by wild horses; neither shall I think that man a faithful subject of Christ’s kingdom, that shall at any time hereafter take it. My brethren, we are all at this present in a very dangerous and fearful condition, in regard we have turned traitors unto our God, in seeing His almighty great name and His heavenly truth trodden under foot, and yet we not only let the bishops alone in holding our peace, but most slavishly subject ourselves unto them, fearing the face of a piece of dirt more than the almighty great God of heaven and earth, who is able to cast both body and soul into everlasting damnation.” He was still addressing the people in the same strain, when the warden of the Fleet came and placed a gag on his mouth.
%PERSECUTION OF PURITANS.%
Such were the means taken by the archbishop to crush the spirit of the Puritans, and by him not considered sufficiently “thorough.” As if for the sole purpose of irritating his opponents, the king, by his advice, ordered a proclamation, called the Book of Sports, to be read by ministers after service, declaring that certain games, such as leaping, vaulting, and wrestling were lawful on Sundays. It had been originally published by James, but its reading not enforced. Now no minister might escape. Thirty who refused to obey in the diocese of Norwich--a stronghold of Puritanism--were suspended. Some temporized. A London minister read the proclamation, and after it the ten commandments. “Dearly beloved,” he said, “you have heard the commandment of God and of man, obey which you please.”
♦‘Lecturers’ put down.♦ The Puritans raised subscriptions for purchasing from laymen their right of presentation to livings and for hiring lecturers to preach on afternoons in market towns. But Laud, not content with ordering that lecturers should wear the surplice and read the service, determined to break up the whole association. The trustees were declared by the Court of Exchequer to have misused the funds with which they were entrusted, and the whole were forfeited to the king, to be used for the good of the Church and the maintenance of conformable ministers. The Church, however, lost its hold on the people, when it lost the most earnest and most popular of its preachers. Into the livings of the ejected Puritans were put ignorant men or court clergy, who bade their people be passively obedient, while they lost their cherished liberties. Of such pastors Milton wrote, as--
“Blind mouths that scarce themselves know how to hold A sheephook, or have learned aught else the least That to the faithful herdsman’s art belongs! What recks it them? What need they? They are sped; And when they list, their lean and flashy songs Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw; The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, But swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread; Beside what the grim wolf with privy paw[47] Daily devours apace, and nothing said.”
While Laud thus awoke the hate of Puritans by intolerance, he aroused that of the laity generally by endeavouring to raise the political importance of the Church. As a politician, he was both ambitious and unscrupulous, as might be expected of one who had risen to power at the heels of Buckingham. Courts held by bishops now sent out writs in their own names, instead of in that of the king. Clergymen were made justices of the peace in place of country gentlemen. Bishops sat in the king’s council and in the Court of Star Chamber. Juxon, Bishop of London, was appointed by the king to the influential and coveted office of lord treasurer. “Now,” wrote Laud in his diary, “if the Church will not hold themselves up under God, I can do no more.”
♦Emigration to America.♦ In order to escape persecution and tyranny, new homes were sought in America. In Virginia a Church of England colony had been founded by adventurers in 1607. The earliest settlers in New England were the Pilgrim Fathers, a body of persecuted sectarians, who had sailed across the Atlantic in the “Mayflower,” in 1620. Rhode Island was colonized in 1634, and liberty of conscience established. Lord Baltimore, a Roman Catholic, granted the same boon to all settlers in Maryland (1638). In the ten years preceding 1640, the number of emigrants to New England was estimated at 21,200.
The Presbyterian Church had been long since established in Scotland by an act of the Scotch Parliament (1592). James I., however, had succeeded by not very creditable means in restoring Scotch bishops to the possession of their former titles, though to little of their former influence and position.
%LITURGY FOR SCOTLAND.%
♦Episcopacy in Scotland.♦ Charles and Laud now determined on setting up a church government in Scotland, to answer in all respects to that established in England. Canons, to regulate the Church of Scotland, were drawn up by the Scotch bishops, and afterwards revised by Laud, in which no place was left for the action of any Presbyterian assemblies. The following year, in place of “Knox’s Liturgy,” as the Service-book ordinarily used by the Scots was called, a new Prayer-book, nearly the same as the English, was ordered to be read in all churches, from the 23rd July, 1637. In St. Giles’, the cathedral church of Edinburgh, no sooner had the dean opened the new liturgy, than all the lower order of people in the church began to scream, clap their hands, hiss and groan, making such a hideous outcry that no one could either hear or be heard. The cry was, “Sorrow, sorrow, for this dreadful day; they are bringing Popery amongst us.” Sticks, stones, Bibles, stools, were hurled at the dean’s head. In other places the Prayer-book received a like reception. By most it was looked on as little better than the mass itself. Its very exterior gave offence to the Presbyterian; the red and black type, the Gothic letters, pictorial capitals, and other illustrations, seemed to imply a revival of Catholic times. The nobles were afraid of being required to restore church property acquired at the Reformation; when not moved by religious fervour themselves, their interests made them at heart on the side of the rioters.
The whole nation was enraged. When James I. had introduced changes into the Presbyterian form of church government, he had at least obtained the sanction of a corrupt church-assembly and parliament. But Charles was endeavouring to establish the Episcopalian Church in the place of the Presbyterian, upon his own sole authority, as though he were indeed an absolute monarch, able to make laws without the consent of his subjects.
%THE SCOTCH COVENANT.%
The king, to whom a tumult raised by the rabble seemed no cause for alarm, sent orders that the new Service-book was still to be read. The lords of the Scotch council, however, dared not put his commands into execution. They were themselves assaulted in the streets of Edinburgh by an infuriated mob, and only rescued from death by the nobles and gentry, who now, following the example of the people, came flocking into the capital to sign an accusation against the bishops (18th Oct., 1637). ♦Scots enter into a covenant in defence of religious laws and liberties.♦ The tumults rapidly took the form of rebellion: a council was chosen, composed of members from the four classes, nobles, gentry, clergy, burgesses, which soon became a new power in the State, more formidable than the king’s council (15th Nov., 1637); at last, a national league was formed under the name of the Covenant (a forerunner of the ‘Solemn League and Covenant’ with the English in 1643), binding the signers to reject the new canons and liturgy, and to defend their sovereign, their religion, their laws, and liberties (1st March, 1638). An assembly of the Church, which met at Glasgow, refused to dissolve at the instance of the Duke of Hamilton, the king’s deputy (28th Nov., 1638), and proceeded to abolish liturgy, canons, and episcopacy itself. After thus defying the royal authority, the Covenanters prepared for war. The question of war had also to be debated in the king’s council at home. The critical moment was now come, when the strength of the government was put to the test. ♦War with Scotland.♦ “I am not for war,” wrote one of the privy council; “in the exchequer there is but £200; the magazines are totally unfurnished; commanders are there none for execution or advice; the people are so discontented, there is reason to fear a greater part of them will be readier to join the Scots than to draw swords in the king’s service.” Wentworth, who did not despair so quickly as these panic-stricken councillors, began to increase the size of the army in Ireland, and to call for sterner measures against defaulters. Yet to advise Charles to do nothing by halves, to introduce episcopacy into Scotland, and to govern that country as he himself governed Ireland, was much like telling a man with a palsied hand to drive the nail home. The deputy, so proud of his Irish government, could not, or would not, read aright the signs of the times. Some of the council advised the calling of a Parliament, but Charles could not hear the proposal with patience. Money was therefore raised by loans and other illegal means. ♦Charles and court proceed to York.♦ By the spring of 1639 an army of some 12,000 men was fitted out, and the king proceeded to York, followed, not only by his court, but by all the nobility and most influential gentry of the kingdom, whom he summoned to attend his person at their own charge, as had been customary in feudal times. He hoped by this display to overawe his needy Scottish subjects.
%PACIFICATION AT BERWICK.%
But the Scots were too much in earnest, and too well understood the state of feeling in England, to be easily overawed. By the time Charles reached Berwick, it was evident that they could not be reduced that summer. The first English force that saw the face of an enemy, made a precipitate retreat. The courtiers who longed for a return to their pleasures, the nobles and gentlemen who desired a redress of their wrongs, all urged the necessity of coming to an agreement with the Covenanters. ♦Pacification of Berwick.♦ Charles found himself obliged to sign a Pacification at Berwick, in which it was agreed that both a Parliament and a Church Assembly should be summoned in Scotland, for the settlement of all grievances, religious and civil (18th June, 1639).
The king, however, signed the agreement merely as a temporary measure, and with the full intention of raising a larger force and renewing the war next summer. The Scots had plenty of friends in England to warn them of the policy pursued; how Wentworth had been summoned from Ireland, and created Earl of Strafford; how the Irish army was being increased in size; how a new army was being raised in England, and every nerve strained to get money.
In foreign policy meantime Charles had been inconsistent and wavering. At one time he had entered into negotiations with France, at another with Spain, for the restoration of the palatinate to his nephew. ♦Foreign governments unfriendly to Charles.♦ Now, therefore, that he was involved in difficulties with his subjects, governments which had received cause of offence assumed an unfriendly attitude. The pope forbade the Catholics to be so ready in lending money and offering to serve in the army, for after all, Laud’s religion, which did not acknowledge the pope as head of the Church, was no more the Catholic religion than that of the Puritans. The Dutch grew so insolent that they destroyed a Spanish fleet which was riding in the Downs under Charles’ own protection, while the English ambassador wrote from Spain that the Spaniards were instigating the Irish to rebel. Richelieu, bearing in mind the expeditions in aid of Rochelle, now took the opportunity to repay his injuries by sending supplies of money and arms to the Covenanters. A copy of a letter written by the Scots to Louis XIII. was intercepted by Charles, who thought that with this proof of treason in his hand, he might venture on meeting a Parliament. But indeed, the necessity of calling a Parliament if the war were to be continued, was daily becoming more and more manifest. ♦Illegal demands opposed.♦ ‘Men’s consciences awoke,’ and forbade them to pay ship-money. Even in Yorkshire, where Strafford possessed so much influence, gentlemen refused to equip soldiers without receiving some security for repayment of the money. Strafford advised the lords of the council to send for them to London, and “lay them up by the heels.”[48] “What,” he asked, “should become of the levy of 30,000 men in case the other counties should return the like answer?” A pregnant question, for everywhere the same spirit was manifested; London refused loans, country gentlemen made excuses, and the king was at last driven to that resource, which last year he would not hear mentioned. He summoned his fourth Parliament on the 13th April, 1640.
%SHORT PARLIAMENT DISSOLVED.%
♦Charles’ fourth Parliament.♦ Charles asked for an immediate grant of money. Pym rose, and in a speech of two hours, while speaking respectfully of the king, laid bare the offences of the government against religion, justice, and the power and privilege of Parliament. The House, with deep attention, heard him out, and then voted that they would find a remedy for their grievances before granting the king a supply. The letter of the Scots to Louis XIII. did not trouble the Commons at all, and was no fair proof of treason, as it was dated before the Pacification of Berwick. “The people,” it was said, “would sooner pay subsidies to prevent the unhappy war than to carry it on.” Grievances formed such an ample subject of debate, that Charles, growing impatient, sent a message saying, if the Parliament would grant him twelve subsidies, to be paid in three years, he would never levy ship-money without consent of Parliament (4th May, 1640). Though the Commons felt indignant that they should be asked to purchase immunity from an illegal tax, they were about, after a long debate, to put the question to the vote, whether a supply should be given to the king, without, for the present, specifying any particular sum, when Sir Henry Vane, Charles’ secretary, rose and said it was of no use to put that question, for the king would not accept less than he had asked. In disgust the House broke up; and the next morning, Charles having lost patience, dissolved the Parliament (5th May, 1640).
%PEERS AT YORK.%
Arbitrary measures were now again employed to raise money for the war; and refusers of loans were imprisoned. But no severity was able to suppress the spirit of opposition. The gentry of Yorkshire sent a petition to the king, complaining of the billeting of unruly soldiers, “to whose violence and insolence we are so daily subject, as we cannot say we possess our wives and children in security. Wherefore,” continues the petition, “we are emboldened to present these our complaints, beseeching your Majesty that, as the billeting of soldiers in any of your subjects’ houses is contrary to the ancient laws of this kingdom confirmed by your Majesty in the Petition of Right, this insupportable charge may be taken off.”[49] ♦Soldiers mutinous; refuse to fight.♦ Riots broke out in London; the militia refused to serve; officers and soldiers said they would not fight ‘to support the power and pride of bishops.’ Soldiers had to be pressed, and artisans were daily dragged from the shops and forced on board the fleet. A disorderly army was at length formed; when formed it would not fight. Some regiments dispersed of themselves; others killed officers who were Catholics; others broke open the prisons, and made havoc of the country through which they passed. Before Strafford, the general of the army, reached the camp, his soldiers fled before the enemy; this was at Newburn Ford, on the borders of the two kingdoms (28th Aug., 1640). The Scots, having by this easy success gained possession of the passage of the Tyne, entered Newcastle without opposition, and continued to advance in the direction of York.
%LONG PARLIAMENT SUMMONED.%
Charles’ weakness was now proved. Doubtful and despondent, he knew not what to do or whither to turn for counsel. The Irish army, though in good training, was only about 5000 strong, and was required in Ireland to overawe the people. The Scots were in the kingdom, masters of the four northern counties, while his own army refused to fight. ♦Assembly of peers at York.♦ Yet a Parliament seemed a terribly caustic remedy to apply to his difficulties, and he bethought himself of calling an assembly, composed solely of peers, as had occasionally been the custom of English kings four centuries before, when the House of Commons was hardly recognized as an integral part of the government. Perhaps, thought some credulous courtier, this assembly of peers might even vote the king money. But the nation thought otherwise. “If,” said two lords consulted by the king’s council, “it be intended to raise money by any other way than a Parliament, it will give no satisfaction.”[50] Charles was left in no doubt of his subjects’ wishes; counties sent petitions for a Parliament; twelve of the chief peers of the realm signed a petition for a Parliament; the City of London petitioned for a Parliament; the Scots sent a petition: ‘they were loyal subjects, their grievances were the cause of their being in arms; they begged their king to settle a firm and durable peace by advice of a Parliament.’ So at last, forced by necessity, Charles yielded. ♦Charles summons his fifth Parliament.♦ When the peers met at York (24th Sept., 1640), he informed them that he had already sent out writs for a Parliament, and asked their advice for treating with the Scots. “They were so taken,” writes the king’s secretary, “with his Majesty’s speech and with his Majesty’s offer of a Parliament that whatever was afterwards proposed they yielded to.... There is no doubt but this black storm will be dispersed.”[51]
Sixteen peers, none of them favourable to arbitrary government, negotiated with eight Scottish commissioners at Ripon. It was agreed that a cessation of arms should be made for two months; that both armies should remain where they were; that the northern counties should support the Scottish army by paying it £5600 a week, until a peace should be concluded in London (23rd Oct., 1640). Then king, lords, and Scottish commissioners hastened to the capital, where Charles met his fifth and last Parliament (3rd Nov., 1640).
FOOTNOTES:
[34] The king’s ordinary revenue consisted--
(1.) Of fines paid by feudal tenants.
(2.) Of rents accruing from lands belonging to the crown.
(3.) Of fines and fees paid in courts of justice.
(4.) Of forfeitures of lands and goods for offences.
(5.) Of the first-fruits and tenths of all spiritual preferments in the kingdom. The first-fruits or annates were the first year’s whole profits by a valuation made in the thirteenth century (1288-1292). The decimæ were the tenth part of the annual profit of every living by the same valuation. These taxes, originally paid to the pope, were annexed to the crown by an act passed in the twenty-sixth year of Henry VIII. (By a statute of 2nd and 3rd Anne, the revenue of first-fruits and tenths has been vested in trustees for ever, to form a perpetual fund for the augmentation of poor livings.)
(6.) Of the custom duties, when granted to the king for life. To these however, Charles had no legal claim. See p. 31.
[35] Ellis, Orig. Letters, ii. cclxxi.
[36] Lawful proclamations were those--
(1) Issued by the crown in its purely executive capacity.
(2) Prohibiting acts already prohibited by law, or calling on the subject to perform some duty to which he was bound by law.
Unlawful proclamations were those usurping the legislative power, which the crown by right could only exercise in common with the two Houses of Parliament, as for instance, those granting individuals privileges against the rights of others, imposing duties not imposed by law, prohibiting under penalties acts which the law did not recognize as offences.
[37] 1 mark = 13s. 4d.; therefore, 1600 marks, £666 13s. 4d.
[38] In 1667, only seven years after the Restoration, the Commons resolved that the judgment now given against Eliot, Hollis, and Valentine, though right as regarded the imputed riot, was illegal in extending to words spoken in Parliament; the Lords concurred in the vote and reversed the judgment. This decision established, once for all, the privilege of freedom of speech in Parliament, unlimited by any authority except that of the House itself.
[39] See p. 98, and Plato, “Crito,” 54.
[40] See p. 105.
[41] Straff. Letters and Despatches, ii. 20.
[42] Straff. Letters and Despatches.
[43] See p. 89.
[44] See p. 18.
[45] During the reign of Henri IV. the prisons of Normandy were full of prisoners unable to pay the tax on salt. So many died, that 120 corpses were taken out at a time. The Parliament of Rouen begged his Majesty to take pity on his people; but the king, who had been informed that the tax was very productive, said he wished it to be continued, and seemed as though he would make a joke of the rest--‘Semblait qu’il voulût tourner le reste en risée.’--Lavallée, iii. 57.
[46] State Trials, I.
[47] For the conversions to Popery, see p. 69.
[48] _I.e._, to fetter, or put in gyves. See Shaks. Henry VIII. v. 3.
[49] Petition of Yorkshire gentry, 28th July, 1640, MSS. Clar. Pap. and Rushworth.
[50] Clar. State Papers, 1-112.
[51] Windebank to Sir A. Hopton, 1st Oct., 1640, MSS. Clar. Papers in Bodleian.