Part 15

Ket’s judgment failed him utterly on that last day of the rising. On the strength of an irrelevant old song he allowed his army to go to its doom unchecked, and at the very time when good generalship was wanted above all other things, Robert Ket seems to have lost his nerve, and to have been struck by some paralysis of the will, as though conscious of impending ruin.

The peasants poured down into the valley, and into the meadows beyond Magdalen and Pockthorp Gates, and fought with desperate courage, but they were simply cut to pieces by the professional soldiery. At four o’clock in the afternoon it was all over, the defeat utter and complete, and Robert Ket and his brother were in flight.

The remains of the rebel army laid down their arms, when Warwick himself offered pardon in the king’s name to those who would surrender.

The rising was at an end. The foreign mercenaries of the crown had triumphed over English peasants. Robert Ket was taken the same night at Swannington, eight miles north of Norwich. He had ridden away from the battle when the field was lost, but horse and rider were too tired to proceed further. Taking refuge in a barn, he was recognized by some men unloading a wagon of corn and seized. The farmer’s wife “rated him for his conduct, but he only prayed her to be quiet, and to give him meat.” That same night William Ket was taken, and the two brothers were delivered to the lord lieutenant of the county, and by him carried to London to be tried for their lives.

At Mousehold Warwick proved the worth of the pardons he had given by first having nine of the bravest of the peasants hanged, drawn, and quartered under the Oak of Reformation, and distributing their bodies in the city; and then by hanging 300 prisoners on trees, and then forty-nine more at the Market Cross in Norwich. The country gentlemen of Norfolk, backed by their wealthier citizens, called for more executions, till Warwick turned with disgust from the vindictive clamour of these bloodthirsty civilians, and pointed out in impatient reproof that no one would be left “to plough and harrow over the lands” if all the peasants were massacred.

And now the king’s authority having been re-established, a public service of thanksgiving was held in the church of St. Peter, Mancroft, and August 27th was ordered to be observed henceforth as “Thanksgiving Day” in Norwich. (This was done by prayers and sermon until 1667. In the grammar school, during Elizabeth’s reign, an account of the rising--_De Furoribus Norfolciensum_, written in Latin by Nevylle, and violently anti-popular in expression--was ordered to be used as a text book in place of the usual classics, and was so used for some years.)

On September 7th Warwick returned to London.[103] In November Robert and William Ket, after lying in the Tower for two months, were brought to trial. They offered no defence for what they had done: for having borne arms without the king’s permission, and for having striven to stop the robbery and oppression of the peasant without the authority of king and parliament.

On November 26th they were found guilty of high treason, their property confiscated, and they were condemned to death. On November 29th they were delivered out of the custody of the Tower to the high sheriff of Norfolk, and on December 1st the Kets were again in Norwich.

It was winter, and hope was dead. The last great rising of the English peasantry had failed, crushed without pity, and the leaders of the army of revolt, who had judged it better to give up ease and worldly honour rather than acquiesce dumbly in the enslavement of their poorer neighbours, were to die as traitors.[104] On December 7th the executions were carried out, and Robert Ket was hanged in chains outside Norwich Castle, while William Ket was taken to Wymondham (where he held the manor of Chossell--Church lands, bought years earlier from the Earl of Warwick), and there hanged in chains from the parish church.

The property of the Kets was duly taken by the servants of the crown, and the bodies of the rebel leaders swung in the wind--to remind unthinking men of the reward of rebellion, of the fate of all who challenge, without success, the arms of government.

The Norfolk Rising was the last great movement of the English people in social revolt. Riots we have known even in our times, and mob violence, but no such rising as those led by Wat Tyler, by Cade, and by Ket has England seen since the year 1549.

The country people sunk into hopeless poverty and permanent degradation under Edward VI. and Elizabeth, and with the rejection by the government of papal authority, the supremacy of the crown and of the ministers of the crown was established.

In the nineteenth century, when the working people in town and country once more bestirred themselves at the call of freedom, their wiser leaders advised political and not revolutionary methods of action, and the advice has been followed.

But if the year 1549 marks the end of organized democratic resistance to intolerable misgovernment, the coming centuries were to see the rise of the middle class with the insistent demand for the predominance of that class in the parliament of the nation, and the incurable belief that in a popularly elected House of Commons resided all the safeguards of civil and religious liberty.

Eliot, Hampden, Pym, and the Supremacy of the Commons.

1625–1643

AUTHORITIES: S. R. Gardiner--_History of England_, _History of Great Civil War_, _History of Commonwealth and Protectorate_; Clarendon--_History of the Great Rebellion_;, John Forster--_Life of Sir John Eliot_, _Life of Hampden_, _Life of Pym_, _The Grand Remonstrance_, _Arrest of the Five Members_; Nugent--_Memorials for Life of Hampden_; _Calendar of State Papers_; _House of Commons’ Journals_.

ELIOT, HAMPDEN, PYM, AND THE SUPREMACY OF THE COMMONS.

1625–1643

John Eliot, John Hampden, John Pym--by the work of these men comes the supremacy of the House of Commons in the government of England.

All three are country gentlemen of good estate, of high principle and of some learning.[105] They are men of religious convictions, of courage and resolution, and of blameless personal character. Two of them--Eliot and Hampden--are content to die for the cause of good government.

The strong rule of Elizabeth left a difficult legacy of government to James I. The despotism of the queen had been forgiven in the success of her State policy; and if she had no high opinion of parliament, Elizabeth had ministers who fairly represented the mind of the English middle class. Elizabeth’s absolutism in Church and State was the direct following of Henry VIII., and only at the very close of her reign was it threatened by the discontent of parliament. With a shrewd instinct for popularity Elizabeth at once yielded. Like her father, she saw the importance of retaining parliament on the side of the crown and making it the instrument of the royal will. There was no idea in the Tudor mind of parliament sharing the government with the crown. The business of the House of Commons of Elizabeth was to express its opinion and then decree the proposals of the crown. “Liberty of speech was granted in respect of the aye or no, but not that everybody should speak what he listed.” (1592.)

In religion Elizabeth had done her worst to exterminate the Roman Catholic faith, and by the fierceness of her persecution had kindled undying enthusiasm for the old beliefs and worship. But forty years of repression did their work, and a generation arose which only knew Catholicism as the faith of a proscribed and unpatriotic sect, who denied the absolute sovereignty of the crown and had another sovereign at Rome--the religion of Spain--popery, in short: a faith worse than Mahomedanism or heathenism--the scarlet woman of the Apocalypse--according to the fierce Puritan expounders of the Bible, and not to be counted as Christianity. That this very Roman Catholicism--so hateful because the penal laws kept it hidden and unknown, and because it was the religion of Spain, then the national enemy--had been the religion of all England for centuries, and that under it the earliest charters of public liberty had been wrung from the crown, and the principle of a representative parliament established, were facts uncontemplated.

But Elizabeth, while persecuting Roman Catholics, had left in the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England a sanction for ceremonial and for episcopal ordination, and a body of doctrine which were to be interpreted under the Stuarts by certain Anglican divines as witnesses to Catholicism. Such interpretation was to be found in Elizabeth’s reign as a pious opinion. With Laud it was an active principle, and it brought him to the scaffold. The Elizabethan bishops in the main were thoroughly Protestant, the queen was the head of the Church of England, and the ritual of the Church prescribed by her was reduced to a simplicity that average Protestants could accept.

If Elizabeth burnt anabaptists and hanged other nonconformists, her excuse was that the Church of England was sufficiently Protestant to include all well-affected persons. The extreme Puritans whom she persecuted had this in common with the Roman Catholics, that neither accepted the absolute supremacy of the crown, and the best Puritan teaching in England, even when it counselled conformity to the Established Church, was creating a mind and temper that only found expression in the Commonwealth.

James I. came to the throne in 1603 prepared to carry on the Tudor absolutism. He failed because he had neither Elizabeth’s ministers nor her knowledge of the English country landowners. James never realised that Spain was the popular enemy, that a discontent had suddenly grown up in parliament in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, and that the English landowners--in many cases from their inherited possession of the old Church lands--were generally bitterly hostile to the Roman Catholic religion. James was tolerant in religion, and not inclined to press Elizabeth’s penal laws against Roman Catholics, and this very toleration brought him under the dislike of the country party. He thought he could disregard the opinion of parliament and he found that while a House of Commons submitted to a despotism when the country was governed by a strong queen, it would not put up with the follies and extravagance of the Duke of Buckingham.

James died before the strength of the growing movement for parliamentary government was seen. Charles who was no more tyrannical than his father, but even more blind to the signs of the times, fell before that parliamentary movement--a movement which outraged all the traditions of Tudor government--and with his fall brought down the throne, the House of Lords, and the Established Church. By his inability to understand the House of Commons, by his support of the Anglican movement towards Catholicism in the Church of England, and by the mistakes of his ministers, Charles ripened the desire for constitutional monarchy till the desire was irresistible.

John Eliot gave forcible utterance to this desire, and died in prison for his speech. John Pym carried on the work till the sword of civil war was drawn. John Hampden, “the noblest type of parliamentary opposition,” was content to back Pym as he had earlier backed Eliot, and to die on Chalgrove Field. Brought up to regard as an alien creed the old belief in papal supremacy in religion, unable to accept the new doctrine of the Church of England that the king was supreme by divine right (a doctrine begotten by the Tudors and dying with the Stuarts), Eliot, Hampden, and Pym were all of the same Puritan type which found its authority in the individual conscience.

Eliot was less afflicted than his colleagues by the theological Protestantism of the age.[106] First and last he was the straightforward country gentleman, with exalted views on the sacred responsibility of civil government, and a high standard of personal honour. For Eliot there was no nobler sphere of work for an Englishman than the House of Commons, and his example has not been without followers. Seneca and Cicero are on his lips, as the later Puritans had the Bible on theirs, and his eloquence marks the beginning of parliamentary oratory. With a strong and clear view of constitutional government, Eliot was no republican; he held to the notion that the king must depend on the decisions of parliament. Time was to show that this notion, in the event of a collision between king and parliament, was to make parliament the predominant partner.

On his first entry into the House of Commons as member for St. Germans, in 1614, Eliot was the friend of Buckingham--whom he had met as a youth abroad--and on Buckingham’s rise to the lord high admiralship Eliot was knighted and became vice-admiral of Devon.

The fidelity of his service to the State as vice-admiral brought an unpleasant experience of the will of princes. Grappling with the scourge of piracy which afflicted the seaports and shipping trade of the West of England, Eliot accomplished the arrest of Nutt, a notorious sea-robber. But Nutt had friends in high places, and Eliot found himself lodged in the Marshalsea prison over the business. He was released on Buckingham’s return from the continent, for the charges were absurd, and in 1624 returned to the House of Commons as member for Newport. Two years later Eliot was estranged from Buckingham--convinced that the favourite of the king was an evil counsellor--and had become the recognized leader of the House of Commons. Once assured in his mind that Buckingham was responsible for the policy of the king, Eliot became his implacable opponent. For the policy of the crown in not making war upon Spain, in relaxing the penal laws against Roman Catholics, and for the mismanagement of the war on the continent in support of the Protestants, Eliot held Buckingham responsible. In answer to the demand of Charles for money in 1626, Eliot insisted that an inquiry into past disasters should precede supply, and that Buckingham should be impeached. Not the king but his minister is to blame, Eliot maintained, for all that was wrong in the State, and this very speech strikes the note of the campaign that was beginning. Buckingham was not responsible to Charles alone, in the eyes of Eliot and his friends, but also to parliament.[107]

Charles, quite unable to fathom the depth of the parliamentary discontent, or to note the strength of the current against absolutism, fell back upon the old Tudor doctrine of sovereignty, the doctrine of the high Anglican party in the Church of England, that the king was responsible for his acts to God alone. “Parliaments are altogether in my calling,” he replies to the House of Commons.

Only twenty-five years had passed since Bacon had declared, “the Queen hath both enlarging and restraining power: she may set at liberty things restrained by Statute, and may restrain things which be at liberty.” Twenty-three years more were to see monarchy abolished and the king beheaded. Eliot, standing midway between Bacon and Bradshaw, cleaves to the theory of constitutional government and persists in the impeachment of a minister in whom parliament had no confidence.

The prologue of impeachment declared in the plainest language the responsibility of the king’s ministers to parliament, and the responsibility of parliament to the nation: “The laws of England have taught us that kings cannot command ill or unlawful things, and whatsoever ill event succeed, the executioners of such designs must answer for them.”

And now the issue was fairly set, and the battle begun between Charles and the House of Commons. In that year, 1626, no man in England could foretell the result.

Charles, ill-advised to the end, believed he could overawe the Commons by a display of might, and was beaten. Twice he had Eliot arrested before the final imprisonment which ended Eliot’s life.

The loyalty of the House of Commons to its leader compelled Charles to release Eliot, after sending him to the Tower for his attack on Buckingham. Then dissolving parliament in June, 1626, and falling back on a forced loan, the king was met by wide refusals, and Eliot, with Hampden and others, suffered imprisonment over this. Eliot was also deprived of his vice-admiralship and struck off the roll of justices of the peace.

Driven to call a parliament for the third time in 1628, the king was faced by a stronger opposition than ever.

Eliot, now member for Cornwall, throughout the session continued the attack on arbitrary taxation, and with the lawyers Seldon and Coke carried the Petition of Right to stop the illegal imprisonments, the enforced billeting of soldiers, and forced loans. Buckingham, slain at Portsmouth, no longer troubled the commonwealth; but Wentworth, ambitious to use his powers in the service of the government, had left the popular side for the king; while Laud, and Weston, the chancellor of the exchequer, were daily preaching to Charles the divine right of kings and to his subjects the duty of passive obedience.

The following year both Eliot and Pym attacked the ecclesiastical policy of Laud. To them the established religion of England, settled on the Protestant basis by Elizabeth, was being definitely changed in a Catholic direction without the sanction of parliament, and in the very teeth of the opposition of the House of Commons. High-church clergymen, like Montague and Mainwaring, holding to the full a Catholic interpretation of the Book of Common Prayer, were only censured by the House of Commons to be promoted by the crown. Laud preaching a royal supremacy undreamt of by the great archbishops before Henry VIII., combined with it a doctrine of ecclesiastical independence, owning no allegiance to Rome, equally novel.

Eliot, stoical in his beliefs, and Pym, whose Calvinism was tempered by common sense, regarded with horror the revival in the Church of England of Catholic doctrines concerning the sacraments and the priesthood. They had done what they could to check any indulgence to Roman Catholics in England, and it was monstrous to them that the Church of England, whose formularies and ritual had been defined by parliament for the maintenance of Protestantism, should be expanded to reintroduce doctrines and practices essentially Catholic. But for the time the House of Commons was powerless in the matter, and only sixteen years later was Laud to expiate on the scaffold his Anglo-Catholicism, dying a veritable martyr for the high Anglican doctrine. “None have gone about to break parliaments but in the end parliaments have broken them,” declared Eliot on March 2nd, 1629, and Laud, no less than Charles and Wentworth, was to prove the truth of the warning.

If parliament could do nothing in that year, 1629, to stop Laud’s policy, it could at least defend the privileges of its members. The goods of John Rolle, M.P., had been seized by the king’s officers because their owner had refused to pay tonnage and poundage on demand, and at once Eliot was up in arms in defence of the privileges of his fellow member, whose liberties had been interfered with.

Pym was for a wider view of the matter--objecting to the question being narrowed down to a breach of privilege. “The liberties of this House,” he argued, “are inferior to the liberties of this kingdom. To determine the privilege of this House is but a mean matter, and the main end is to establish possession of the subjects, and to take off the commission and records and orders that are against us.” With Pym it was not Rolle, the member, who had been ill-used, but Rolle the British subject, and it was for the liberties of the subject he strove, holding the freedom of parliament as but a means to that end.

Eliot, a House of Commons man, through and through, saw in the welfare of parliament the welfare of the nation, and stuck to his point, carrying the House with him, that the privileges of a member extended to his goods. To this Charles sent word that what had been done had been done by his authority. The only question now was, how long would it be before the king dissolved parliament.

On the second of March, when the House met, the speaker’s first word was that the king had ordered an adjournment till the tenth, and that no business could be transacted. Eliot insisted on moving his resolutions, and the speaker was held down in his chair. Then the serjeant-at-arms attempted to remove the mace, and was promptly stopped, while the key of the House was turned from within.

Eliot moved his declaration, beginning with the famous words: “By the ancient laws and liberties of England, it is the known birthright and inheritance of the subject, that no tax, tallage, or other charge shall be levied or imposed but by common consent in England; and that the subsidies of tonnage and poundage are no way due or payable but by a free gift and special act of parliament.”

The resolutions were carried with loud shouts of assent, two members guarding the speaker, and the door was flung open; the sitting was over.

A royal proclamation for dissolving parliament followed on the fourth of March, and Eliot, with eight other members, was summoned to appear before the Privy Council.

From the hour of that summons John Eliot’s liberty was over, and not for eleven years was England to have another parliament.

For the fourth time Eliot was a prisoner. He declined altogether to give an account of what he had said in parliament, or to acknowledge any right of interference with the proceedings in parliament. To the crown lawyers his reply was to stand on the privileges of a member of the House of Commons. “I refuse to answer,” he said, “because I hold that it is against the privilege of parliament to speak of anything which is done in the House.” He insisted that he was accountable to the House alone, and that no other power existed with a constitutional right to inquire into his conduct there.

At the end of October Eliot was removed from the Tower to the Marshalsea, and then in January, 1630, he was charged in the King’s Bench with two other members, Holles and Valentine, with conspiring to resist the king’s lawful order, to calumniate ministers of the crown, and to assault the speaker. Again Eliot refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction. He was fined £2,000, and sent back to the Tower.

To the last Eliot’s loyalty to the House of Commons remained unshaken. He had but to acknowledge that he had done wrong, to admit that he had offended, and the prison doors would have opened to him. But to make this acknowledgment was to deny the sacred liberty of parliament, to admit wrong was to betray the House of Commons. To John Eliot the welfare of the House of Commons was a national cause--dearer than life. To betray its honour was to betray the State. The loyalty of John Eliot to the House of Commons was interwoven with his devotion to the State, but it was something England had never seen before, and never saw again. “He learned to believe, as no other man believed before or after him, in the representatives of the nation.” (Gardiner.)