Victory of Parliament Over the Stuarts
When he came to the throne in 1603, James I. was prepared to govern with all the Tudor absolutism, but he had neither Elizabeth’s Ministers—Cecil excepted—nor her knowledge of the English mind. The English Parliament and the English people had put up with Elizabeth’s headstrong, capricious rule, because it had been a strong rule, and the nation had obviously thriven under it.50 But it was another matter altogether when James I. was king.
“By many steps the slavish Parliament of Henry VIII. grew into the murmuring Parliament of Queen Elizabeth, the mutinous Parliament of James I., and the rebellious Parliament of Charles I.”
The twenty years of James I.’s reign saw the preaching up of the doctrine of the divine right of kings by the bishops of the Established Church, and the growing resolution of the Commons to revive their earlier rights and privileges. If the Stuarts were as unfortunate in their choice of Ministers as Elizabeth had been successful, the House of Commons was equally happy in the remarkable men who became its spokesmen and leaders. In the years that preceded the Civil War—1626-42—three men are conspicuous on the Parliamentary side: Eliot, Hampden, and Pym. All three were country gentlemen, of good estate, high principle, and religious convictions51—men of courage and resolution, and of blameless personal character. Eliot died in prison, in the cause of good government, in 1632; Hampden fell on Chalgrove Field in 1643.
As in earlier centuries the struggle in the seventeenth century between the King and the Commons turned mainly on the questions of taxation. (At the same time an additional cause of dispute can be found in the religious differences between Charles I. and the Parliamentarians. The latter were mainly Puritan, accepting the Protestantism of the Church of England, but hating Catholicism and the high-church views of Laud. The King was in full sympathy with high Anglicanism, and, like his father, willing to relax the penal laws against Catholics.)
“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.”
In these memorable words began the declaration moved by Sir John Eliot in the House of Commons on March 2nd, 1629. A royal message ordering the adjournment of the House was disregarded, the Speaker was held down in his chair, and the key of the House of Commons was turned against intrusion, while Eliot’s resolutions, declaring that the privileges of the Commons must be preserved, were carried with enthusiasm.
Charles answered these resolutions by dissolving Parliament and sending Eliot to the Tower.
For eleven years no Parliament was summoned. Eliot refused altogether to make any defence for his Parliamentary conduct. “I hold that it is against the privilege of Parliament to speak of anything which is done in the House,” was his reply to the Crown lawyers. So Sir John Eliot was left in prison, for nothing would induce this devoted believer in representative government to yield to the royal pressure, and three years later, at the age of forty-two, he died in the Tower.
It was for the liberties of the House of Commons that Eliot gave his life. Wasted with sickness, health and freedom were his if he would but acknowledge the right of the Crown to restrain the freedom of Parliamentary debate; but such an acknowledgment was impossible from Sir John Eliot. For him the privilege of the House of Commons in the matter of free speech was a sacred cause, to be upheld by Members of Parliament, even to the death—a cause every whit as sacred to Eliot as the divine right of kings was to the Stuart bishops.
Charles hoped to govern England through his Ministers without interference from the Commons, and only the need of money compelled him to summon Parliament.
John Hampden saw that if the King could raise money by forced loans and other exactions, the days of constitutional government were over. Hence his memorable resistance to ship-money. London and the seaports were induced to provide supplies for ships in 1634, on the pretext that piracy must be prevented. In the following year the demand was extended to the inland counties, and Hampden refused point blank to pay—though the amount was only a matter of 20s.—falling back, in justification of his refusal, on the Petition of Right—acknowledged by Charles in 1628—which declared that taxes were not to be levied without the consent of Parliament. The case was decided in 1636, and five of the twelve judges held that Hampden’s objection was valid. The arguments in favour of non-payment were circulated far and wide, so that, in spite of the adverse verdict, “the judgment proved of more advantage and credit to the gentleman condemned than to the King’s service.”52
The personal rule of Charles and his Ministers, Laud and Strafford, came to an end in the autumn of 1640, when there was no choice left to the King but to summon Parliament, if money was to be obtained. Earlier in the year the “Short Parliament” had met, only to be dissolved by the folly of the King after a sitting of three weeks, because of its unwillingness to vote supplies without the redress of grievances.
The disasters of the King’s campaign against the Scots, an empty treasury, and a mutinous army, compelled the calling of Parliament. But the temper of the men who came to the House of Commons in November was vastly different from the temper of the “Short Parliament.”53 For this was the famous “Long Parliament” that assembled in the dark autumn days of 1640, and it was to sit for thirteen years; to see the impeachment and execution of Laud and Strafford, the trial and execution of the King, the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords, the establishment of the Commonwealth; and was itself to pass away finally only before Cromwell’s military dictatorship.
Hampden was the great figure at the beginning of this Parliament. “The eyes of all men were fixed upon him, as their patriæ pater, and the pilot that must steer the vessel through the tempests and rocks which threatened it. I am persuaded (wrote Clarendon) 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 at 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.”
Politically, neither Hampden nor Pym was Republican. Both believed in government by King, Lords, and Commons; but both were determined that the King’s Ministers should be answerable to Parliament for the policy of the Crown, and that the Commons, who found the money for government, should have a definite say in the spending of that money. As for the royal claim of “Divine right,” and the royal view that held passive obedience to be the duty of the King’s subjects, and saw in Parliament merely a useful instrument for the raising of funds to be spent by the royal pleasure without question or criticism—these things were intolerable to Hampden, Pym, and the men of the House of Commons. The King would not govern through Parliament; the House of Commons could govern without a King. It was left to the Civil War to decide the issue between the Crown and Parliament, and make the House of Commons supreme.
Things moved quickly in the first year of the Long Parliament. The Star Chamber and High Commission Courts were abolished. Strafford was impeached for high treason, and executed on Tower Hill. Archbishop Laud lay in prison, to be executed four years later. The Grand Remonstrance of the House of Commons was presented to Charles in December, 1641. The demands of the Commons in the Remonstrance were not revolutionary, but they stated, quite frankly, the case for the Parliament. The main points were the need for securities for the administration of justice, and an insistence on the responsibility of the King’s Ministers to the Houses of Parliament. The Grand Remonstrance was only carried by eleven votes in the House of Commons, 159 to 148, after wild scenes. “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.” Actual violence was only prevented “by the sagacity and great calmness of Mr. Hampden, by a short speech.”
Charles promised an answer to the deputation of members who waited upon him with the Grand Remonstrance, and early in the new year came the reply. The King simply demanded the surrender of five members—Pym, Hampden, Holles, Strode, and Hazlerig—and their impeachment on the charge of high treason. 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 justification over them. On the refusal of the Commons to surrender their members, Charles came in person to Westminster with 300 cavaliers to demand their arrest. But the five members, warned of the King’s venture, were well out of the way, and rested safely within the City of London—for the citizens were strongly for the Parliament. “It was believed that if the King had found them there (in the House of Commons), 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, Charles could only retire “in a more discontented and angry passion than he came in.” The step was utterly ill-advised. Parliament was in no mood to favour royal encroachments, and the citizens of London were at hand, with their trained bands, to protect forcibly members of the House of Commons.
War was now imminent. “The attempt to seize the five members was undoubtedly the real cause of the war. From that moment, the loyal confidence with which most of the popular party were beginning to regard the King was turned into hatred and suspicion. From that moment, the Parliament was compelled to surround itself with defensive arms. From that moment, the city assumed the appearance of a garrison.
“The transaction was illegal from beginning to end. The impeachment was illegal. The process was illegal. The service was illegal. If Charles wished to prosecute the five members for treason, a bill against them should have been sent to a grand jury. That a commoner cannot be tried for high treason by the Lords at the suit of the Crown, is part of the very alphabet of our law. That no man can be arrested by the King in person is equally clear. This was an established maxim of our jurisprudence even in the time of Edward the Fourth. ‘A subject,’ said Chief Justice Markham to that Prince, ‘may arrest for treason; the King cannot; for, if the arrest be illegal, the party has no remedy against the King.’”54
Both King and Parliament broke rudely through all constitutional precedents in their preparations for hostilities.
The King levied troops by a royal commission, without any advice from Parliament, and Pym got an ordinance passed, in both Houses, appointing the Lords-Lieutenant of the counties to command the Militia without warrant from the Crown.
A last attempt at negotiations was made at York, in April, when the proposals of Parliament—nineteen propositions for curtailing the power of the Monarchy in favour of the Commons—were rejected by Charles with the words: “If I granted your demands, I should be no more than the mere phantom of a king.”
By August, Charles had raised the royal standard at Nottingham, and war was begun.
Five years later and Charles was a prisoner, to die in 1649 on the scaffold. That same year monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished by law; the Established Church had already fallen before the triumphant arms of the Puritans.
Then, in 1653, the House of Commons itself fell—expelled by Cromwell; and the task of the Lord Protector was to fashion a constitution that would work.55 What happened was the supremacy of the army. Parliament, attenuated and despised, contended in vain against the Protector. On Cromwell’s death, and the failure of his son, Richard, the army declared for Charles II., and there was an end to the Commonwealth.