Part 16

The character and temperament of Eliot must be taken into account in understanding this passionate belief in the House of Commons. It was not as a great thinker but as a great orator he had risen to the leadership of the House of Commons. He saw in his mind, as no other man saw at the time, a perfectly balanced constitution of king, lords, and commons. In parliament was the best wisdom of the country placed at the service of the crown. In the crown was the appointed ruler who, with his ministers, had but to come to parliament for advice and counsel. So it seemed to John Eliot; and single-minded himself, he could not realise that in the House of Commons were plenty of men of but passing honesty, and that Charles and Laud and Wentworth were fundamentally opposed to his views of constitutional government, and bitterly hostile to the growing powers of the commons.[108]

Months passed, and John Eliot’s health gave way in the confinement in the Tower, but his steadfastness was unchanged. He corresponded with his friend John Hampden, wrote his treatise on the _Monarchy of Man_, and calmly awaited his end. An application on behalf of his friends and his son for Eliot’s release was made in October, 1622, on the ground that “the doctors were of opinion he could never recover of his consumption until such time as he might breathe in purer air.” The reply of Chief Justice Richardson was “that, although Sir John were brought low in body, yet was he as high and lofty in mind as ever; for he would neither submit to the king nor to the justice of that court.”

On November 27th, 1632, the spirit of John Eliot, unbroken by captivity, passed from the body his gaolers had deprived of life. A last appeal from his son to the king for the removal of his father’s body into Cornwall, there to lie with those of his ancestors at Port Eliot, received the curt refusal, “Let Sir John Eliot’s body be buried in the church of the parish where he died.” And so he was buried in the Tower, and no stone marks the spot where he lies.

John Eliot was but forty-two when he laid down his life for the principle of parliamentary government.

Any satisfaction that might have been felt by Charles and Laud at the death of the foremost antagonist to their policy of absolutism was fleeting. For if Eliot was dead, the cause he had championed with such conspicuous sincerity and courage was alive, and John Hampden and John Pym were at hand to carry on the fight till Cromwell and his Ironsides were ready to end the battle.

Charles was determined that, until the commons should be more submissive, he would call no parliament, but would govern through his ministers alone. The difficulty was to find money.

In 1634 London and the seaports were persuaded to furnish supplies for ships on the pretext that piracy must be prevented. A year later and the demand was extended to the inland counties, and John Hampden, taking his stand on the Petition of Right which Charles had granted in 1628, declined to pay. Ten out of twelve of the king’s judges had decided that ship-money might be enforced if the kingdom appeared to be in danger, but against this declared legality there was the decree of parliament forbidding forced loans or taxes without parliamentary sanction.

On this resistance of the ship-money Hampden’s fame has been chiefly built up. The amount was small--only a matter of some twenty shillings--the issue was of a first importance. It was clear to Hampden that if the king could raise money by such methods, what need would there be in the royal mind for the calling of parliament at all? The question was forced upon him: Was parliament an essential part of the constitution? The judges had declared ship-money was legal, other taxation and forced loans could easily find justification on the judicial bench, and thus the crown obtain its revenue, and England ruled without any let or hindrance from its citizens. To admit the position was to see the work of centuries undone, and the old contest in the land for liberties in return for taxes abandoned.

Hampden’s refusal to pay ship-money was a declaration for parliamentary government. No more a republican than Eliot or Pym, Hampden could see that either crown or parliament must be supreme in the affairs of the nation.[109] The constitution was not to be balanced so evenly as Eliot had believed. Eliot himself had been deprived of life for maintaining, not the supremacy but the liberty of parliament. For John Hampden the evils of royal supremacy were obvious and present: misrule, the restoration of a religion banished by authority of crown and parliament, and disliked and feared by the majority of serious-minded people in the country, and the imprisonment of all who claimed the old freedom of parliament.

The case was decided against him in the law courts, but five of the twelve judges supported Hampden’s contention that the resistance to payment was valid, and the arguments for his defence were published far and wide. “The judgment proved of more advantage and credit to the gentleman condemned than to the king’s service.”[110]

Three years later, and Charles was forced to summon parliament to get money for his war in Scotland--the “Bishop’s War,” perhaps the most hopeless of all his ventures.

Parliament met in April, and its temper was so unfavourable to the desires of the king, for the forcible conversion of the Scots to episcopacy, that it was dissolved in three weeks. John Pym was notable in that “Short Parliament” as the spokesman of the aggrieved country party, and the commons decided that the grievances of the nation must be considered before supplies were voted. The Scotch war was intolerable to Pym and Hampden. They had no objection to episcopacy as long as bishops were men of Protestant convictions. It was Laud the “Anglo-Catholic,” Laud the preacher of the divine right of kings, not Laud the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom they detested, and they had no relish for the expenditure of English life and treasure in the forcing of Laudian doctrine on Protestant Scotland.

In the long eleven years of silence from the utterance of parliament things had been going steadily from bad to worse in England, Pym made out. Naturally conservative in mind, seeing in the constitution of king and parliament an admirable instrument of government, and in the Established Church of England an excellent expression of the Protestant religion, Pym had found that with parliament suspended the Protestantism of the Established Church had been steadily undermined by Laud’s policy, and the revival of some estranged Catholic doctrines and practices had proceeded apace. Without parliament there was no security for national well-being. “Powers of parliament are to the body politic as rational faculties of the soul to man,” he declares in April, 1640.

Pym had entered the House of Commons with Eliot in 1614, and had been imprisoned in that year for his boldness. In 1620 he had been one of the “twelve ambassadors” to James I., for whom that king had ordered chairs to be set in Whitehall. With Eliot and Hampden he had pressed for Buckingham’s impeachment and for the Petition of Right. Now in 1640, John Pym, in his fifty-sixth year, was about to become the accredited leader of the parliamentary party, to be called “King Pym” by his enemies at the court, and to pass away when the long constitutional struggle was being settled on the field of civil war. Unimaginative, and averse from new ideas, Pym had a quite clear perception of the business of the House of Commons, and of the fitting relations of king and parliament. The crown, the lords, the commons were all recognized and necessary elements in the constitution, but their importance was not equal. The collective assembly of parliament had prevailed over the crown more than once; to Pym, the Laudian “divine right” was a novelty, and nonsense at that. Parliament could do much of its work with or without royal approval, and of the two Houses, if the Lords were unwilling to work with the lower House, the Commons could “save the kingdom alone.”

In the autumn Charles was driven again to appeal to parliament, and in November, 1640, the “Long Parliament” met, only to be dissolved thirteen years later by the arms of Cromwell. To the eleven years of “personal government” by Charles succeed thirteen years of parliamentary government, and then the House of Commons, now too enfeebled to endure, itself goes down before a military dictatorship.

Pym anticipated the coming struggle by riding over England on the eve of the elections to the Long Parliament and urging the electors to return men to the House of Commons resolute and alive to the crisis. The response was unmistakable. Parliament assembled to find some remedy for the distresses of the country before voting any money for the purposes of the crown. Enormous numbers of petitions were presented, and the House of Commons appointed its committees to attend to and report on the complaints.[111]

Before the year closed the House of Commons had struck at the power of Laud and Wentworth (now the Earl of Strafford), and the two ministers lay in prison impeached for high treason. Windebank, Charles’s secretary of state, and Finch, the chancellor, were already fled over seas.

It was Pym who went to the bar of the House of Lords to summon Strafford to surrender, and it was Pym who opened the charge of impeachment the following March. As in Eliot’s time, Hampden is content to be overshadowed by his friend, though his was the greater influence in the House.

Clarendon has given us his view of Hampden at the opening of the Long Parliament:

When this parliament began the eyes of all men were fixed upon him, as their _patriae pater_, and the pilot that must steer the vessel through the tempests and rocks which threatened it. I am persuaded his power and interest at that time were greater to do good or hurt than any man’s in the kingdom, or than any man of his rank hath had in any time; for his reputation of honesty was universal, and his affections seemed so publicly guided, that no corrupt or private ends could bias them.

Baxter, it may be recalled, had written in the _Saints’ Rest_ that one of the pleasures which he hoped to enjoy in heaven was the society of John Hampden. The name of Hampden was blotted out in the copies published after the Restoration. “But,” wrote Baxter, “I must tell the reader that I did blot it out, not as changing my opinion of the person.”

The work of Pym and Hampden is conspicuous at the beginning of the Long Parliament. The Star Chamber and High Commission Courts are abolished. Ship-money and all enforced taxation unauthorised by parliament are declared illegal. Oliver Cromwell’s motion for annual parliaments is amended into an act for triennial parliaments to be called with or without royal summons. Strafford--the only strong minister Charles had--perished on Tower Hill in May, both Pym and Hampden supporting impeachment instead of attainder, and voting for the fallen minister to be allowed the use of counsel at his trial. That Strafford was a criminal and a traitor ready to use his Irish army for the suppression of the English parliament Pym had no doubt.

Still Charles would not admit the position lost, and still struggled to govern, not through parliament, but by personal rule. The death of Strafford, though approved by all supporters of the House of Commons, rallied the king’s friends. The House of Lords was no longer quite at one with the Commons in the contest. In the House of Commons a royalist party emerges to oppose Pym, and the beginning of party government is seen. Overtures are made by Pym to the queen--to be disregarded, of course; though the tide is setting towards revolution, yet Pym and Hampden are far from revolutionaries. They are willing to end the political power of the bishops by turning them out of the House of Lords, but have only moderate sympathy with the root-and-branch Puritans who would abolish episcopacy.

In the Grand Remonstrance which Pym laid before the House of Commons in November, 1641, the case for the Parliament was stated with frankness, but the demands were not revolutionary. The main points were securities for the administration of justice, and insistence on the responsibility of the king’s ministers to parliament. The royalists fought the Remonstrance vigorously, and in the end it was only carried by a majority of eleven, 159 to 148. At the end of the debate the excitement was intense: “some waved their hats over their heads, and others took their swords in their scabbards out of their belts, and held them by the pummels in their hands, setting the lower part on the ground.” Violence seemed inevitable, “had not the sagacity and great calmness of Mr. Hampden, by a short speech, prevented it.”

On the 1st of December the Remonstrance, with a petition for the removal of grievances, especially in matters of religion, was presented to the king at Hampton Court. “Charles had now a last chance of regaining the affection of his people. If he could have resolved to give his confidence to the leaders of the moderate party in the House of Commons, and to regulate his proceedings by their advice, he might have been, not, indeed, as he had been, a despot, but the powerful and respected king of a free people. The nation might have enjoyed liberty and repose under a government with Falkland at its head, checked by a constitutional opposition under the conduct of Hampden. It was not necessary that, in order to accomplish this happy end, the king should sacrifice any part of his lawful prerogative, or submit to any conditions inconsistent with his dignity.” So Macaulay wrote. But the days of “governments” and “constitutional oppositions” were far off in 1641, and only the germ of party government is seen in the division of the House of Commons. To “submit to any conditions” from parliament was inconsistent with the king’s notions of royal dignity, fostered by Laud to reject all criticisms as denials of the absolutism of the crown.

Charles promised an answer to the deputation which waited on him, and the answer was seen on January 3, 1642, when the king’s attorney appeared at the bar of the Lords, impeached Pym, Hampden, Holles, Strode, and Hazlerig of high treason, in having corresponded with the Scots for the invasion of England, and demanded the surrender of the five members. “All constitutional law was set aside by a charge which proceeded personally from the king, which deprived the accused of their legal right to a trial by their peers, and summoned them before a tribunal which had no pretence to a jurisdiction over them.”

The House of Commons simply declined to surrender their members, but promised to take the matter into consideration.

Then Charles, with some three hundred cavaliers, went to Westminster, and entered the House of Commons to demand the accused. But the five members, warned of his coming, were out of the way and safe within the city of London. “It was believed that if the king had found them there, and called in his guards to have seized them, the members of the House would have endeavoured the defence of them, which might have proved a very unhappy and sad business.” As it was, the king could only retire discomfited, with some words about respecting the laws of the realm and the privileges of parliament, and “in a more discontented and angry passion than he came in.”

The invasion of the Commons was the worst move Charles could have made, for parliament was in no temper favourable to royal encroachments, and it had a large population at hand ready to give substantial support. The city of London at once declared for the House of Commons, ignored the king’s writs for the arrest of the five members, and answered the royal proclamation declaring them “traitors” by calling out the trained bands for the escort of the members back to Westminster, and for the protection of the House of Commons.

Falkland and the royalist members turned for the moment from Charles at his unexpected attack on the House, the cavaliers of Whitehall, menaced by the trained bands from Southwark and the city, fled, and Charles, standing alone, left London.

War was now imminent. Pym and Hampden at once prepared for the struggle.

Pym secured the arsenals of Portsmouth and Hull for the parliament, but his efforts to obtain the control of the militia in the counties were frustrated for a time by the king’s natural refusal to consent to the Militia Bill, which would have placed troops under the orders of country gentlemen of the parliamentary party.

Both king and parliament had to break through all constitutional precedent. The king levied troops by a royal commission, and Pym got an ordinance of both Houses of Parliament passed appointing the lords-lieutenant to command the militia, and thereby published the supremacy of parliament over the crown. In April the king appeared at Hull to obtain arms, and was refused admission to the town by Sir John Hotham, the governor. Parliament expressed its approval of Hotham’s act, the royalists gathered round Charles at York, and the final proposals of parliament for ending absolute monarchy were rejected by the king in June with the words, “If I granted your demands I should be no more than the mere phantom of a king.”[112]

With this refusal all negotiations were broken off. Essex was appointed commander of the parliamentary army, and in August Charles raised the royal standard at Nottingham, and war was begun.

Hampden threw himself vigorously into the campaign. From his native county of Buckingham, the county which made him its representative in parliament in 1640, he raised a regiment of infantry. “His neighbours eagerly enlisted under his command. His men were known by their green uniform, and by their standard, which bore on one side the watchword of the parliament, ‘God with us,’ and on the other the device of Hampden, ‘_Vestigia nulla retrorsum_.’” In the first stages of the war, before any decisive blow had been struck, Hampden was busy passing and repassing between the army and the parliament. Clarendon praises his courage and ability on the field.

A skirmish at Chalgrove, on June 18th, 1643, between bodies of horse commanded by Rupert and by Hampden, ended in victory for the royalists. Hampden was seen riding off the field, “before the action was done, which he never used to do, and with his head hanging down, and resting his hands upon the neck of his horse.” He was mortally wounded, for two carbine balls were lodged in his shoulder, and reached Thame only to die six days later.

The death of Hampden--at the age of 49--came at a dark hour in the early fortunes of the parliamentary army, and deepened the gloom. “The loss of Colonel Hampden goeth near the heart of every man that loves the good of his king and country, and makes some conceive little content to be at the army now that he is gone.” But Pym remained, and Cromwell and Vane, and many another resolute House of Commons man.

Pym’s health was already broken when Hampden fell, but he lived to accomplish the alliance of the English Puritans and the Scotch army, and, as the price of this alliance, the abolition of episcopacy and the adoption of Presbyterianism in the Church of England. The Solemn League and Covenant was accepted by parliament, and imposed on the nation in September. Henceforth the parliamentary army was pledged to extirpate “Popery, prelacy, superstition, schism and profaneness”; to bring “the Churches of God in the three kingdoms to the nearest conjunction and uniformity in religion”; to “preserve the rights and privileges of the parliament and the liberties of the kingdom; and to unite the two kingdoms in a firm peace and union to all posterity.”

The taking of the covenant--a political necessity--was John Pym’s last work. He was ten years older than Hampden, and his character was ruggeder and sterner and without the charm of the younger man. But Pym’s was the greater genius in politics, and his scheme of constitutional government was to be fulfilled in England at a later season.

John Pym died on December 8th, 1643, and his body was buried in Westminster Abbey--only to be turned out at the Restoration and removed to St. Margaret’s churchyard.

With Pym and Hampden gone, henceforth the conduct of parliament was in other hands, and the day of moderate statesmanship had passed.

The war undertaken to preserve the liberties and establish the supremacy of the House of Commons was to bring in its train not only the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords, but the suppression of the House of Commons itself.

Important to the nation as the issues at stake were, most people in England took hardly any more part or interest in the great civil war than they had done in the Wars of the Roses. “A very large number of persons regarded the struggle with indifference.... In one case, the inhabitants of an entire county pledged themselves to remain neutral. Many quietly changed with the times (as people changed with the varying fortunes of York and Lancaster). That this sentiment of neutrality was common to the greater mass of the working classes is obvious from the simultaneous appearance of the club men in different parts of the country, with their motto, ‘If you take our cattle, we will give you battle.’”[113]

How could it be otherwise? Supremacy of King, or supremacy of Commons,--seed time and harvest remain, and the labourer and the artizan must needs do their day’s work.

Not till the deposing of the Stuarts--forty-five years after John Hampden’s death--is the supremacy of parliament over the crown arrived at by general consent, to become a recognized and settled thing in British politics. By the middle of the nineteenth century the House of Commons is unmistakably the ruling power in the constitution, and the labours of Eliot, Hampden and Pym are vindicated.

In our own day changes in the balance of constitutional power may be noted. The supremacy of the House of Commons is quietly disappearing before the growing popularity of the crown, the reawakened activity of the House of Lords, and the steady gathering of the reins of power into the hands of the Cabinet and Executive. As the crown in the last twenty years has increased in popular esteem, so the influence and importance of the Commons has waned in the country; and this waning influence of the Lower House has been further diminished by the frequent rejection and revision of its measures by the House of Lords.

The power of the Executive has also been obtained at the expense of the power of the Commons. The Cabinet, rather than the House of Commons, holds the supremacy to-day, and the direction of foreign policy, and the making of international treaties are no more within the authority of the House of Commons than are the administration of Egypt and India. Pym and Hampden fought and gave their lives for the right of the House of Commons to control the ministers of the crown and to order the policy of these ministers. By its own consent, and not from pressure from without, the House of Commons has silently surrendered this right, and has agreed that the policy of its Foreign Minister for the time being--whether he be Liberal or Conservative--must not be subject to reproof, still less to correction. In home affairs administrative order steadily supersedes statute law.

In theory ministers are still subject to the House of Commons. In actual practice they can rely on not being interfered with as long as their party has a majority in the House. When the price of effective interference with the conduct of affairs is a defeat of the Cabinet and a consequent dissolution, the payment is more than members of parliament are prepared to make.