Part 27

Elizabeth had in fact safely piloted England through the struggle to assert its national independence in religion and politics and its claim to a share in the new inheritance which had been opened up for the nations of Europe; and the passionate loyalty which had supported her as the embodiment of England's aspirations somewhat cooled in her declining years. She herself grew more cautious and conservative than ever, and was regarded as an obstacle by the hotheads in war and religion. She sided with the "scribes," Burghley and Sir Robert Cecil, against the men of war, Essex and Raleigh; and she abetted Whitgift's rigorous persecution of the Puritans whose discontent with her _via media_ was rancorously expressed in the Martin Marprelate tracts. Essex's folly and failure to crush Hugh O'Neill's rebellion (1599), the most serious effort made in the reign to throw off the English yoke in Ireland, involved him in treason and brought him to the block. Parliament was beginning to quarrel with the royal prerogative, particularly when expressed in the grant of monopolies, and even Mountjoy's success in Ireland (1602-1603) failed to revive popular enthusiasm for the dying queen. Strange as it may seem, the accession of James I. was hailed as heralding a new and gladder age by Shakespeare, and minor writers (March 24, 1603). (A. F. P.)

VIII. THE STUART MONARCHY, THE GREAT REBELLION AND THE RESTORATION (1603-1689)

James I. 1603-1625.

The defeat of the Spanish armada in 1588 had been the final victory gained on behalf of the independence of the English church and state. The fifteen years which followed had been years of successful war; but they had been also years during which the nation had been preparing itself to conform its institutions to the new circumstances in which it found itself in consequence of the great victory. When James arrived from Scotland to occupy the throne of Elizabeth he found a general desire for change. Especially there was a feeling that there might be some relaxation in the ecclesiastical arrangements. Roman Catholics and Puritans alike wished for a modification of the laws which bore hardly on them. James at first relaxed the penalties under which the Roman Catholics suffered, then he grew frightened by the increase of their numbers and reimposed the penalties. The gunpowder plot (1605) was the result, followed by a sharper persecution than ever (see GUNPOWDER PLOT).

The Puritans were invited to a conference with the king at Hampton Court (1604). They no longer asked, as many of them had asked in the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, to substitute the presbyterian discipline for the episcopal government. All they demanded was to be allowed permission, whilst remaining as ministers in the church, to omit the usage of certain ceremonies to which they objected. It was the opinion of Bacon that it would be wise to grant their request. James thought otherwise, and attempted to carry out the Elizabethan conformity more strictly than it had been carried out in his predecessor's reign.

James I. and the Commons.

In 1604 the Commons agreed with Bacon. They declared that they were no Puritans themselves, but that, with such a dearth of able ministers, it was not well to lose the services of any one who was capable of preaching the gospel. By his refusal to entertain their views James placed himself in opposition to the Commons in a matter which touched their deeper feelings. As a necessary consequence every dispute on questions of smaller weight assumed an exaggerated importance. The king had received a scanty revenue with his crown, and he spent freely what little he had. As the Commons offered grudging supplies, the necessity under which he was of filling up the annual deficit led him to an action by which a grave constitutional question was raised.

From the time of Richard II. to the reign of Mary no attempt had been made to raise duties on exports and imports without consent of parliament. But Mary had, under a specious pretext, recommenced to a slight extent the evil practice, and Elizabeth had gone a little further in the same direction. In 1606 a merchant named John Bates (q.v.) resisted the payment of an imposition--as duties levied by the sole authority of the crown were then called. The case was argued in the court of exchequer, and was there decided in favour of the crown. Shortly afterwards new impositions were set to the amount of L70,000 a year. When parliament met in 1610 the whole subject was discussed, and it was conclusively shown that, if the barons of the exchequer had been right in any sense, it was only in that narrow technical sense which is of no value at all. A compromise attempted broke down, and the difficulty was left to plague the next generation. The king was always able to assert that the judges were on his side, and it was as yet an acknowledged principle of the constitution that parliament could not change the law without the express consent of the crown, even if, which was not the case in this matter, the Lords had sided with the Commons. James's attempt to obtain further supplies from the Commons by opening a bargain for the surrender of some of his old feudal prerogatives, such as wardship and marriage, which had no longer any real meaning except as a means of obtaining money in an oppressive way, broke down, and early in 1611 he dissolved his first parliament in anger. A second parliament, summoned in 1614, met with the same fate after a session of a few weeks.

The dissolution of this second parliament was followed by a short imprisonment of some of the more active members, and by a demand made through England for a benevolence to make up the deficiency which parliament had neglected to meet. The court represented that, as no compulsion was used, there was nothing illegal in this proceeding. But as the names of those who refused to pay were taken down, it cannot be said that there was no indirect pressure.

Attempted union with Scotland.

The colonization of Ulster.

The most important result of the breach with the parliament of 1614, however, was the resolution taken by James to seek refuge from his financial and other troubles in a close alliance with the king of Spain. His own accession had done much to improve the position of England in its relation with the continental powers. Scotland was no longer available as a possible enemy to England, and though an attempt to bind the union between the two nations by freedom of commercial intercourse had been wrecked upon the jealousy of the English Commons (1607), a legal decision had granted the status of national subjects to all persons born in Scotland after the king's accession in England. Ireland, too, had been thoroughly overpowered at the end of Elizabeth's reign, and the flight of the earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnel in 1607 had been followed by the settlement of English and Scottish colonists in Ulster, a measure which, in the way in which it was undertaken, sowed the seeds of future evils, but undoubtedly conduced to increase the immediate strength of the English government in Ireland.

The Spanish alliance.

Without fear of danger at home, therefore, James, who as king of Scotland had taken no part in Elizabeth's quarrel with Philip II., not only suspended hostilities immediately on his accession, and signed a peace in the following year, but looked favourably on the project of a Spanish marriage alliance, so that the chief Protestant and the chief Catholic powers might join together to impose peace on Europe, in the place of those hideous religious wars by which the last century had been disfigured. In 1611 circumstances had disgusted him with his new ally, but in 1614 he courted him again, not only on grounds of general policy, but because he hoped that the large portion which would accompany the hand of an infanta would go far to fill the empty treasury.

In this way the Spanish alliance, unpopular in itself, was formed to liberate the king from the shackles imposed on him by the English constitution. Its unpopularity, great from the beginning, became greater when Raleigh's execution (1618) caused the government to appear before the world as truckling to Spain. The obloquy under which James laboured increased when the Thirty Years' War broke out (1618), and when his daughter Elizabeth, whose husband, the elector palatine, was the unhappy claimant to the Bohemian crown (1619), stood forth as the lovely symbol of the deserted Protestantism of Europe. Yet it was not entirely in pity for German Protestants that the heart of Englishmen beat. Men felt that their own security was at stake. The prospect of a Spanish infanta as the bride of the future king of England filled them with suspicious terrors. In Elizabeth's time the danger, if not entirely external, did not come from the government itself. Now the favour shown to the Roman Catholics by the king opened up a source of mischief which was to some extent real, if it was to a still greater extent imaginary. Whether the danger were real or imaginary, the consequence of the distrust resulting from the suspicion was the reawakening of the slumbering demand for fresh persecution of the Roman Catholics, a demand which made a complete reconciliation between the crown and the Lower House a matter of the greatest difficulty.

Parliament and the monopolies.

In 1621 the third parliament of James was summoned to provide money for the war in defence of his son-in-law's inheritance, the Palatinate, which he now proposed to undertake. But it soon appeared that he was not prepared immediately to come to blows, and the Commons, voting a small sum as a token of their loyalty, passed to other matters. Indolent in his temper, James had been in the habit of leaving his patronage in the hands of a confidential favourite, and that position was now filled by George Villiers, marquess and afterwards duke of Buckingham. The natural consequence was that men who paid court to him were promoted, and those who kept at a distance from him had no notice taken of their merits. Further, a system of granting monopolies and other privileges had again sprung up. Many of these grants embodied some scheme which was intended to serve the interests of the public, and many actions which appear startling to us were covered by the extreme protectionist theories then in vogue. But abuses of every kind had clustered round them, and in many cases the profits had gone into the pockets of hangers-on of the court, whilst officials had given their assistance to the grantors even beyond their legal powers. James was driven by the outcry raised to abandon these monopolies, and an act of Parliament in 1624 placed the future grant of protections to new inventions under the safeguard of the judges.

Fall of Bacon.

The attack on the monopolies was followed by charges brought by the Commons before the Lords against persons implicated in carrying them into execution, and subsequently against Lord Chancellor Bacon as guilty of corruption. The sentence passed by the Lords vindicated the right of parliament to punish officials who had enjoyed the favour of the crown, which had fallen into disuse since the accession of the house of York. There was no open contest between parliament and king in this matter. But the initiative of demanding justice had passed from the crown to the Commons. It is impossible to overestimate the effect of these proceedings on the position of parliament. The crown could never again be regarded as the sum of the governmental system.

When the Commons met after the summer adjournment a new constitutional question was raised. The king was at last determined to find troops for the defence of the Palatinate, and asked the Commons for money to pay them. They in turn petitioned the crown to abandon the Spanish alliance, which they regarded as the source of all the mischief. James told them that they had no right to discuss business on which he had not asked their opinion. They declared that they were privileged to discuss any matter relating to the commonwealth which they chose to take in hand, and embodied their opinion in a protest, which they entered on their journals. The king tore the protest out of the book and dissolved parliament.

Then followed a fresh call for a benevolence, this time more sparingly answered than before. A year of fruitless diplomacy failed to save the Palatinate from total loss. The ill-considered journey to Madrid, in which Prince Charles, accompanied by Buckingham, hoped to wring from the Spanish statesmen a promise to restore the Palatinate in compliment for his marriage with the infanta, ended also in total failure. In the autumn of 1623 Charles returned to England without a wife, and without hope of regaining the Palatinate with Spanish aid.

The French alliance.

He came back resolved to take vengeance upon Spain. The parliament elected in 1624 was ready to second him. It voted some supplies on the understanding that, when the king had matured his plans for carrying on the war, it should come together in the autumn to vote the necessary subsidies. It never met again. Charles had promised that, if he married a Roman Catholic, he would grant no toleration to the English Catholics in consideration of the marriage. In the autumn he had engaged himself to marry Henrietta Maria, the sister of the king of France, and had bound himself to grant the very conditions which he had declared to the Commons that he never would concede. Hence it was that he did not venture to recommend his father to summon parliament till the marriage was over. But though there was but little money to dispose of, he and Buckingham, who, now that James was sick and infirm, were the real leaders of the government, could not endure to abstain from the prosecution of the war. Early in 1625 an expedition, under Count Mansfeld, was sent to Holland that it might ultimately cut its way to the Palatinate. Left without pay and without supplies, the men perished by thousands, and when James died in March the new king had to meet his first parliament burthened by a broken promise and a disastrous failure.

Charles I. 1625-1649.

When parliament met (1625) the Commons at first contented themselves with voting a sum of money far too small to carry on the extensive military and naval operations in which Charles had embarked. When the king explained his necessities, they intimated that they had no confidence in Buckingham, and asked that, before they granted further supply, the king would name counsellors whom they could trust to advise him on its employment. Charles at once dissolved parliament. He knew that the demand for ministerial responsibility would in the end involve his own responsibility, and, believing as he did that Buckingham's arrangements had been merely unlucky, he declined to sacrifice the minister whom he trusted.

The Petition of Right.

Charles and Buckingham did their best to win back popularity by strenuous exertion. They attempted to found a great Protestant alliance on the continent, and they sent a great expedition to Cadiz. The Protestant alliance and the expedition to Cadiz ended in equal failure. The second parliament of the reign (1626) impeached Buckingham for crimes against the state. As Charles would not dismiss him simply because the Commons were dissatisfied with him as a minister, they fell back on charging him with criminal designs. Once more Charles dissolved parliament to save Buckingham. Then came fresh enterprises and fresh failures. A fleet under Lord Willoughby (afterwards earl of Lindsey) was almost ruined by a storm. The king of Denmark, trusting to supplies from England which never came, was defeated at Lutter. A new war in addition to the Spanish war, broke out with France. A great expedition to Re, under Buckingham's command (1627), intended to succour the Huguenots of La Rochelle against their sovereign, ended in disaster. In order to enable himself to meet expenditure on so vast a scale, Charles had levied a forced loan from his subjects. Men of high rank in society who refused to pay were imprisoned. Soldiers were billeted by force in private houses, and military officers executed martial law on civilians. When the imprisoned gentlemen appealed to the king's bench for a writ of _habeas corpus_, it appeared that no cause of committal had been assigned, and the judges therefore refused to liberate them. Still Charles believed it possible to carry on the war, and especially to send relief to La Rochelle, now strictly blockaded by the forces of the French crown. In order to find the means for this object he summoned his third parliament (1628). The Commons at once proceeded to draw a line which should cut off the possibility of a repetition of the injuries of which they complained. Charles was willing to surrender his claims to billet soldiers by force, to order the execution of martial law in time of peace, and to exact forced loans, benevolences, or any kind of taxation, without consent of parliament; but he protested against the demand that he should surrender the right to imprison without showing cause. It was argued on his behalf that in case of a great conspiracy it would be necessary to trust the crown with unusual powers to enable it to preserve the peace. The Commons, who knew that the crown had used the powers which it claimed, not against conspirators, but against the commonwealth itself, refused to listen to the argument, and insisted on the acceptance of the whole Petition of Right, in which they demanded redress for all their grievances. The king at last gave his consent to it, as he could obtain money in no other way. In after times, when any real danger occurred which needed a suspension of the ordinary safeguards of liberty, a remedy was found in the suspension of the law by act of parliament; such a remedy, however, only became possible when king and parliament were on good terms of agreement with one another.

Crown and parliament.

That time was as yet far distant. The House of Commons brought fresh charges against Buckingham, whose murder soon after the prorogation removed one subject of dispute. But when they met again (1629) they had two quarrels left over from the preceding session. About a third part of the king's revenue was derived from customs duties which had for many generations been granted by parliament to each sovereign for life. Charles held that this grant was little more than a matter of form, whilst the Commons held that it was a matter of right. But for the other dispute the difficulty would probably have been got over. The strong Protestantism of Elizabeth's reign had assumed a distinctly Calvinistic form, and the country gentlemen who formed the majority of the House of Commons were resolutely determined that no other theology than that of Calvin should be taught in England. In the last few years a reaction against it had arisen especially in the universities, and those who adopted an unpopular creed, and who at the same time showed tendencies to a more ceremonial form of worship, naturally fell back on the support of the crown. Charles, who might reasonably have exerted himself to secure a fair liberty for all opinions, promoted these unpopular divines to bishoprics and livings, and the divines in turn exalted the royal prerogative above parliamentary rights. He now proposed that both sides should keep silence on the points in dispute. The Commons rejected his scheme, and prepared to call in question the most obnoxious of the clergy. In this irritated temper they took up the question of tonnage and poundage, and instead of confining themselves to the great public question, they called to the bar some custom-house officers who happened to have seized the goods of one of their members. Charles declared that the seizure had taken place by his orders. When they refused to accept the excuse, he dissolved parliament, but not before a tumult took place in the House, and the speaker was forcibly held down in his chair whilst resolutions hostile to the government were put to the vote.

For eleven years no parliament met again. The extreme action of the Lower House was not supported by the people, and the king had the opportunity, if he chose to use it, of putting himself right with the nation after no long delay. But he never understood that power only attends sympathetic leadership. He contented himself with putting himself technically in the right, and with resting his case on the favourable decisions of the judges. Under any circumstances, neither the training nor the position of judges is such as to make them fit to be the final arbiters of political disputes. They are accustomed to declare what the law is, not what it ought to be. These judges, moreover, were not in the position to be impartial. They had been selected by the king, and were liable to be deprived of their office when he saw fit. In the course of Charles's reign two chief justices and one chief baron were dismissed or suspended. Besides the ordinary judges there were the extraordinary tribunals, the court of high commission nominated by the crown to punish ecclesiastical offenders, and the court of star chamber, composed of the privy councillors and the chief justices, and therefore also nominated by the crown, to inflict fine, imprisonment, and even corporal mutilation on lay offenders. Those who rose up in any way against the established order were sharply punished.

Ship-money.

The harsh treatment of individuals only calls forth resistance when constitutional morality has sunk deeply into the popular mind. The ignoring of the feelings and prejudices of large classes has a deeper effect. Charles's foreign policy, and his pretentious claim to the sovereignty of the British seas, demanded the support of a fleet, which might indeed be turned to good purpose in offering a counterpoise to the growing navies of France and Holland. The increasing estrangement between him and the nation made him averse from the natural remedy of a parliament, and he reverted to the absolute practices of the middle ages, in order that he might strain them far beyond the warrant of precedent to levy a tax under the name of ship-money, first on the port towns and then on the whole of England. Payment was resisted by John Hampden, a Buckinghamshire squire; but the judges declared that the king was in the right (1638). Yet the arguments used by Hampden's lawyers sunk deeply into the popular mind, and almost every man in England who was called on to pay the tax looked upon the king as a wrong-doer under the forms of law.

The Church.

In his ecclesiastical policy Charles was equally out of touch with the feelings of his people. He shared to the full his father's dislike and distrust of the Puritans, and he supported with the whole weight of the crown the attempt of William Laud (q.v.), since 1633 archbishop of Canterbury, to enforce conformity to the ritual prescribed by the Prayer Book. At the same time offence was given to the Puritans by an order that every clergyman should read the Declaration of Sports, in which the king directed that no one should be prevented from dancing or shooting at the butts on Sunday afternoon. Many of the clergy were suspended or deprived, many emigrated to Holland or New England, and of those who remained a large part bore the yoke with feelings of ill-concealed dissatisfaction. Suspicion was easily aroused that a deep plot existed, of which Laud was believed to be the centre, for carrying the nation over to the Church of Rome, a suspicion which seemed to be converted into a certainty when it was known that Panzani and Conn, two agents of the pope, had access to Charles, and that in 1637 there was a sudden accession to the number of converts to the Roman Catholic Church amongst the lords and ladies of the court.

Charles and Scotland.