A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1.

by Carlton J. H. Hayes

CHAPTER VIII

THE TRIUMPH OF PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND

CONFLICTING POLITICAL TENDENCIES IN ENGLAND: ABSOLUTISM VERSUS PARLIAMENTARIANISM

Through all the wars of dynastic rivalry which have been traced in the two preceding chapters, we have noticed the increasing prestige of the powerful French monarchy, culminating in the reign of Louis XIV. We now turn to a nation which played but a minor rôle in the international rivalries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Later, from 1689 to 1763, England was to engage in a tremendous colonial struggle with France. But from 1560 to 1689 England for the most part held herself aloof from the continental rivalries of Bourbons and Habsburgs, and never fought in earnest except against Philip II of Spain, who threatened England's economic and political independence, and against the Dutch, who were England's commercial rivals. While the continental states were engaged in dynastic quarrels, England was absorbed in a conflict between rival principles of domestic government—between constitutional parliamentary government and unlimited royal power. To the triumph of the parliamentary principle in England we owe many of our modern ideas and practices of constitutional government.

[Sidenote: Absolutism of the Tudors, 1485-1603]

Absolutism had reached its high-water mark in England long before the power and prestige of the French monarchy had culminated in the person of Louis XIV. In the sixteenth century—the very century in which the French sovereigns faced constant foreign war and chronic civil commotion—the Tudor rulers of England were gradually freeing themselves from reliance upon Parliament and were commanding the united support of the English nation. From the accession of Henry VII in 1485 to the death of his grand-daughter Elizabeth in 1603, the practice of absolutism, though not the theory of divine-right monarchy, seemed ever to be gaining ground.

How Tudor despotism was established and maintained is explained in part by reference to the personality of Henry VII and to the circumstances that brought him to the throne. [Footnote: For the character and main achievements of Henry VII (1485-1500), see above, pp. 4 ff.] It is also explicable by reference to historical developments in England throughout the sixteenth century. [Footnote: For the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth, see above, pp. 86, 97 ff., 150 ff.] As Henry VII humbled the nobility, so Henry VIII and Elizabeth subordinated the Church to the crown. And all the Tudors asserted their supremacy in the sphere of industry and commerce. By a law of 1503, the craft gilds had been obliged to obtain the approval of royal officers for whatever new ordinances the gilds might wish to make. In the first year of the reign of Edward VI the gilds were crippled by the loss of part of their property, which was confiscated under the pretext of religious reform. Elizabeth's reign was notable for laws regulating apprenticeship, prescribing the terms of employment of laborers, providing that wages should be fixed by justices of the peace, and ordering vagabonds to be set to work. In the case of commerce, the royal power was exerted encouragingly, as when Henry VII negotiated the Intercursus Magnus with the duke of Burgundy to gain admittance for English goods into the Netherlands, or chartered the "Merchant Adventurers" to carry on trade in English woolen cloth, or sent John Cabot to seek an Atlantic route to Asia; or as when Elizabeth countenanced and abetted explorers and privateers and smugglers and slave-traders in extending her country's maritime power at the expense of Spain. All this meant that the strong hand of the English monarch had been laid upon commerce and industry as well as upon justice, finance, and religion.

The power of the Tudors had rested largely upon their popularity with the growing influential middle class. They had subdued sedition, had repelled the Armada, had fostered prosperity, and had been willing at times to cater to the whims of their subjects. They had faithfully personified national patriotism; and the English nation, in turn, had extolled them.

Yet despite this absolutist tradition of more than a century's duration, England was destined in the seventeenth century to witness a long bitter struggle between royal and parliamentary factions, the beheading of one king and the exiling of another, and in the end the irrevocable rejection of the theory and practice of absolutist divine- right monarchy, and this at the very time when Louis XIV was holding majestic court at Versailles and all the lesser princes on the Continent were zealously patterning their proud words and boastful deeds after the model of the Grand Monarch. In that day a mere parliament was to become dominant in England.

[Sidenote: Accession of the Stuarts: James I, 1603-1625]

The death of Elizabeth, the last of the Tudors, and the accession (1603) of her cousin James, the first of the Stuarts, marked the real beginning of the struggle. When he was but a year old, this James had acquired through the deposition of his unfortunate mother, Mary Stuart, the crown of Scotland (1567), and had been proclaimed James VI in that disorderly and distracted country. The boy who was whipped by his tutor and kidnapped by his barons and browbeaten by Presbyterian divines learned to rule Scotland with a rod of iron and incidentally acquired such astonishing erudition, especially in theology, that the clever King Henry IV of France called him "the wisest fool in Christendom." At the age of thirty-seven, this Scotchman succeeded to the throne of England as James I. "He was indeed," says Macaulay, "made up of two men—a witty, well-read scholar who wrote, disputed, and harangued, and a nervous, driveling idiot who acted."

[Sidenote: The Stuart Theory of Absolutist Divine-right Monarchy]

James was not content, like his Tudor predecessors, merely to be an absolute ruler in practice; he insisted also upon the theory of divine- right monarchy. Such a theory was carefully worked out by the pedantic Stuart king eighty years before Bishop Bossuet wrote his classic treatise on divine-right monarchy for the guidance of the young son of Louis XIV. To James it seemed quite clear that God had divinely ordained kings to rule, for had not Saul been anointed by Jehovah's prophet, had not Peter and Paul urged Christians to obey their masters, and had not Christ Himself said, "Render unto Cæsar that which is Cæsar's"? As the father corrects his children, so should the king correct his subjects. As the head directs the hands and feet, so must the king control the members of the body politic. Royal power was thus the most natural and the most effective instrument for suppressing anarchy and rebellion. James I summarized his idea of government in the famous Latin epigram, "a deo rex, a rege lex, "—"the king is from God, and law from the king."

[Sidenote: Stuart Theory Opposed to Medieval English Tradition]

It has been remarked already [Footnote: See above, pp. 4-7] that in one important respect the past governmental evolution of England differed from that of France. While both countries in the sixteenth century followed absolutist tendencies, in France the medieval tradition of constitutional limitations upon the power of the king was far weaker than in England, with the result that in the seventeenth century the French accepted and consecrated absolutism while the English gave new force and life to their medieval tradition and practice of constitutional government.

[Sidenote: Restrictions on Royal Power in England: Magna Carta]

The tradition of English restrictions upon royal power centered in the old document of Magna Carta and in an ancient institution called Parliament. Magna Carta dated back, almost four centuries before King James, to the year 1215 when King John had been compelled by his rebellious barons to sign a long list of promises; that list was the "long charter" or Magna Carta, [Footnote: Magna Carta was many times reissued after 1215.] and it was important in three respects. (1) It served as a constant reminder that "the people" of England had once risen in arms to defend their "rights" against a despotic king, although as a matter of fact Magna Carta was more concerned with the rights of the feudal nobles (the barons) and of the clergy than with the rights of the common people. (2) Its most important provisions, by which the king could not levy extraordinary taxes on the nobles without the consent of the Great Council, furnished something of a basis for the idea of self-taxation. (3) Clauses such as "To no man will we sell, or deny, or delay, right or justice," although never effectively enforced, established the idea that justice should not be sold, denied, or delayed.

[Sidenote: Parliament]

Parliament was a more or less representative assembly of clergy, nobility, and commoners, claiming to have powers of taxation and legislation. The beginnings of Parliament are traced back centuries before James I. There had been an advisory body of prelates and lords even before the Norman conquest (1066). After the conquest a somewhat similar assembly of the king's chief feudal vassals—lay and ecclesiastical—had been called the Great Council, and its right to resist unjust taxation had been recognized by Magna Carta. Henceforth it had steadily acquired power. The "Provisions of Oxford" (1258) had provided, in addition, for "twelve honest men" to represent the "commonalty" and to "treat of the wants of the king; and the commonalty shall hold as established that which these men shall do."

[Sidenote: House of Lords and House of Commons]

For the beginnings of the House of Commons we may go back to the thirteenth century. In 1254 the king summoned to Parliament not only the bishops, abbots, earls, and barons, but also two knights from every shire. Then, in an irregular Parliament, convened in 1265 by Simon de Montfort, a great baronial leader against the king, two burgesses from each of twenty-one towns for the first time sat with the others and helped to decide how their liberties were to be protected. These knights and burgesses were the elements from which the House of Commons was subsequently to be formed. Similar bodies met repeatedly in the next thirty years, and in 1295 Edward I called a "model Parliament" of archbishops, bishops, abbots, representative clergy, earls, and barons, two knights from every shire, and two citizens from each privileged city or borough,—more than four hundred in all. For some time after 1295 the clergy, nobility, and commoners [Footnote: I.e., the knights of the shires and the burgesses from the towns.] may have deliberated separately much as did the three "estates" in France. At any rate, early in the fourteenth century the lesser clergy dropped out, the greater prelates and nobles were fused into one body—the House of "Lords spiritual and temporal,"—and the knights joined the burgesses to form the House of Commons. Parliament was henceforth a bicameral body, consisting of a House of Commons and a House of Lords.

[Sidenote: Powers of Parliament: Taxation]

The primary function of Parliament was to give information to the king and to hear and grant his requests for new "subsidies" or direct taxes. The right to refuse grants was gradually assumed and legally recognized. As taxes on the middle class soon exceeded those on the clergy and nobility, it became customary in the fifteenth century for money bills to be introduced in the Commons, approved by the Lords, and signed by the king.

[Sidenote: Legislation]

The right to make laws had always been a royal prerogative, in theory at least. Parliament, however, soon utilized its financial control in order to obtain initiative in legislation. A threat of withholding subsidies had been an effective way of forcing Henry III to confirm Magna Carta in 1225; it proved no less effective in securing royal enactment of later "petitions" for laws. In the fifteenth century legislation by "petition" was supplanted by legislation by "bill," that is, introducing in either House of Parliament measures which, in form and language, were complete statutes and which became such by the united assent of Commons, Lords, and king. To this day English laws have continued to be made formally "by the King's most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same."

[Sidenote: Influence on Administration]

The right to demand an account of expenditures, to cause the removal of royal officers, to request the king to abandon unpopular policies, or otherwise to control administrative affairs, had occasionally been asserted by Parliament, but not consistently maintained.

[Sidenote: Parliament under the Tudors]

From what has been said, it will now be clear that the fulcrum of parliamentary power was control of finance. What had enabled the Tudors to incline toward absolutism was the fact that for more than a hundred years they had made themselves fairly independent of Parliament in matters of finance; and this they had done by means of economy, by careful collection of taxes, by irregular expedients, by confiscation of religious property, and by tampering with the currency. Parliament still met, however, but irregularly, and during Elizabeth's reign it was in session on the average only three or four weeks of the year. Parliament still transacted business, but rarely differed with the monarch on matters of importance.

[Sidenote: James I and Parliament]

At the end of the Tudor period, then, we have an ancient tradition of constitutional, parliamentary government on the one hand, and a strong, practical, royal power on the other. The conflict between Parliament and king, which had been avoided by the tactful Tudors, soon began in earnest when James I ascended the throne in 1603, with his exaggerated notion of his own authority. James I was an extravagant monarch, and needed parliamentary subsidies, yet his own pedantic principles prevented him from humoring Parliament in any dream of power. The inevitable result was a conflict for political supremacy between Parliament and king. When Parliament refused him money, James resorted to the imposition of customs duties, grants of monopolies, sale of peerages, and the solicitation of "benevolences" (forced loans). Parliament promptly protested against such practices, as well as against his foreign and religious policies and against his absolute control of the appointment and operation of the judiciary. Parliament's protests only increased the wrath of the king. The noisiest parliamentarians were imprisoned or sent home with royal scoldings. In 1621 the Commoners entered in their journal a "Great Protestation" against the king's interference with their free right to discuss the affairs of the realm. This so angered the king that he tore the Protestation out of the journal and presently dissolved the intractable Parliament; but the quarrel continued, and James's last Parliament had the audacity to impeach his lord treasurer.

[Sidenote: Political Dispute Complicated by Religious Difference]
[Sidenote: Calvinists in England]
[Sidenote: The "Puritans">[

The political dispute was made more bitter by the co-existence of a religious conflict. James, educated as a devout Anglican, was naturally inclined to continue to uphold the compromise by which the Tudors had severed the English Church from the Roman Catholic hierarchy, yet had retained many forms of the Catholic Church and the episcopal organization by means of which the sovereign was able to control the Church. During Elizabeth's reign, however, a large part of the middle class—the townsmen especially—and many of the lower clergy had come under the influence of Calvinistic teaching. [Footnote: On the doctrines of Calvinism, see above, pp. 139 ff., 156, 164 ff.] The movement was marked (1) by a virulent hatred for even the most trivial forms reminiscent of "popery," as the Roman Catholic religion was called; and (2) by a tendency to place emphasis upon the spirit of the Old Testament as well as upon the precepts of the New. Along with austerity of manner, speech, dress, and fast-day observance, they revived much of the mercilessness with which the Israelites had conquered Canaan. The same men who held it a deadly sin to dance round a may-pole or to hang out holly on Christmas were later to experience a fierce and exalted pleasure in conquering New England from the heathen Indians. They knew neither self-indulgence nor compassion. Little wonder that Elizabeth feared men of such mold and used the episcopal administration of the Anglican Church to restrain them. Many of these so-called Puritans remained members of the Anglican Church and sought to reform it from within. But restraint only caused the more radical to condemn altogether the fabric of bishops and archbishops, and to advocate a presbyterian church. Others went still further and wished to separate from the Established Anglican Church into independent religious groups, and were therefore called Independents or Separatists.

[Sidenote: Hostility of James I to the Puritans]

These religious radicals, often grouped together as "Puritans," were continually working against Elizabeth's strict enforcement of Anglican orthodoxy. The accession of James was seized by them as an occasion for the presentation of a great petition for a modification of church government and ritual. The petition bore no fruit, however, and in a religious debate at Hampton Court in 1604 James made a brusque declaration that bishops like kings were set over the multitude by the hand of God, and, as for these Puritans who would do away with bishops, he would make them conform or "harry them out of the land." From this time forth he insisted on conformity, and deprived many clergymen of their offices for refusing to subscribe to the regulations framed in 1604.

[Sidenote: Hatred of the Puritans for James I]

The hard rule of this monarch who claimed to govern by the will of God was rendered even more abhorrent to the stern Puritan moralists by reports of "drunken orgies" and horrible vices which made the royal court appear to be a veritable den of Satan. But worst of all was his suspected leaning towards "popery." The Puritans had a passionate hatred for anything that even remotely suggested Roman Catholicism. Consequently it was not with extreme pleasure that they welcomed a king whose mother had been a Catholic, whose wife was suspected of harboring a priest, a ruler who at times openly exerted himself to obtain greater toleration for Roman Catholics and to maintain the Anglican ritual against Puritan modification. With growing alarm and resentment they learned that Catholic conspirators had plotted to blow up the houses of Parliament, and that in his foreign policy James was decidedly friendly to Catholic princes.

The cardinal points of James's foreign policy,—union with Scotland, peace, and a Spanish alliance,—were all calculated to arouse antagonism. The English, having for centuries nourished enmity for their northern neighbors and perceiving no apparent advantage in close union, defeated the project of amalgamating the two kingdoms of England and Scotland. James's policy of non-intervention in the Thirty Years' War evoked bitter criticism; he was accused of favoring the Catholics and of deserting his son-in-law, the Protestant elector of the Palatinate. The most hotly contested point was, however, the Spanish policy. Time and time again, Parliament protested, but James pursued his plans, making peace with Spain, and negotiating for a marriage between his son Charles and the Infanta of Spain, and Prince Charles actually went to Spain to court the daughter of Philip III.

[Sidenote: Interconnection of Puritanism, Commercialism, and
Parliamentarianism]

It was essentially the Puritan middle classes who were antagonized by the king. The strength of the Puritans rested in the middle class of merchants, seamen, and squires. It was this class which had profited by the war with Spain in the days of "good Queen Bess" when many a Spanish prize, laden with silver and dye woods, had been towed into Plymouth harbor. Their dreams of erecting an English colonial and commercial empire on the ruins of Spain's were rudely shattered by James. It was to this Puritan middle class that papist and Spaniard were bywords for assassin and enemy. By his Spanish policy, as well as by his irregular methods of taxation, James had touched the Puritans in their pocketbooks. The Puritans, too, were grieved to see so sinful a man sit on the throne of England, and so wasteful a man squander their money. They were even hindered in the exercise of their religious convictions. Every fiber in them rebelled.

Puritans throughout the country looked to the large Puritan majority in the House of Commons to redress their grievances. The parliamentary struggle became then not only a defense of abstract ideals of democracy but also a bitter battle in defense of class interests. Parliamentary traditions were weapons against an oppressive monarch; religious scruples gave divine sanction to an attack on royalist bishops; consciousness of being God's elect gave confidence in assailing the aristocracy of land and birth. For the present, the class interests of the Puritans were to be defended best by the constitutional limitation of royal power, and in their struggle with James's son and successor, Charles I (1625-1649), they represent by chance the forces of democracy.

[Sidenote: Charles I, 1625-1649]
[Sidenote: A True Stuart in Devotion to Absolutism]

For a time it appeared as if the second Stuart king would be very popular. Unlike his father, Charles seemed thoroughly English; and his athletic frame, his dignified manners, and his purity of life contrasted most favorably with James's deformities in character and physique. Two years before his father's death Charles had been jilted by his Spanish fiancée and had returned to England amid wild rejoicing to aid Parliament in demanding war with Spain. He had again rejoiced the bulk of the English nation by solemnly assuring Parliament on the occasion of his marriage contract with Henrietta Maria, sister of Louis XIII of France, that he would grant no concessions to Roman Catholics in England. As a matter of fact, Charles simultaneously but secretly assured the French government not only that he would allow the queen the free exercise of her religion but that he would make general concessions to Roman Catholics in England. This duplicity on the part of the young king, which augured ill for the harmony of future relations between himself and Parliament, throws a flood of light upon his character and policies. Though Charles was sincerely religious and well-intentioned, he was as devoted to the theory of divine-right monarchy as his father had been; and as to the means which he might employ in order to establish absolutism upon a firm foundation he honestly believed himself responsible only to God and to his own conscience, certainly not to Parliament. This fact, together with a certain inherent aptitude for shirking the settlement of difficulties, explains in large part the faults which historians have usually ascribed to him—his meanness and ingratitude toward his most devoted followers, his chronic obstinacy which only feigned compliance, and his incurable untruthfulness.

Just before Charles came to the throne, Parliament granted subsidies in expectation of a war against Spain, but, when he had used up the war- money without showing any serious inclination to open hostilities with Spain, and had then demanded additional grants, Parliament gave evidence of its growing distrust by limiting a levy of customs duties to one year, instead of granting them as usual for the whole reign. In view of the increasingly obstinate temper manifested by the House of Commons in withholding subsidies and in assailing his worthless favorite, the Duke of Buckingham, Charles angrily dissolved his first Parliament.

[Sidenote: Continued Conflict between King and Parliament]
[Sidenote: The Petition of Right, 1628]

The difficulties of the administration were augmented not only by this arbitrary treatment of Parliament but also by the miserable failure of an English fleet sent against Cadiz, and by the humiliating result of an attempt to relieve the French Huguenots. Meanwhile, a second Parliament, more intractable even than its predecessor, had been dissolved for its insistence on the impeachment of Buckingham. Attempts to raise money by forced loans in place of taxes failed to remove the financial distress into which Charles had fallen, and consequently, in 1628, he consented to summon a third Parliament. In return for grants of subsidies, he signed the Petition of Right (1628), prepared by the two houses. By it he promised not to levy taxes without consent of Parliament, not to quarter soldiers in private houses, not to establish martial law in time of peace, not to order arbitrary imprisonment.

Even these concessions were not enough. Parliament again demanded the removal of Buckingham, and only the assassination of the unpopular minister obviated prolonged dispute on that matter. The Commoners next attempted to check the unauthorized collection of customs duties, which produced as much as one-fourth of the total royal revenue, and to prevent the introduction of "popish" innovations in religion, but for this trouble they were sent home.

[Sidenote: "Personal" Rule of Charles I, 1629-1640]

Charles was now so thoroughly disgusted with the members of Parliament that he determined to rule without them, and for eleven years (1629- 1640) he successfully carried on a "personal" as distinct from a parliamentary government, in spite of financial and religious difficulties.

Without the consent of Parliament, Charles was bound not to levy direct taxes. During the period of his personal rule, therefore, he was compelled to adopt all sorts of expedients to replenish his treasury. He revived old feudal laws and collected fines for their infraction. A sum of one hundred thousand pounds was gained by fines on suburban householders who had disobeyed a proclamation of James I forbidding the extension of London. The courts levied enormous fines merely for the sake of revenue. Monopolies of wine, salt, soap, and other articles were sold to companies for large sums of money; but the high prices charged by the companies caused much popular discontent.

[Sidenote: "Personal" Rule of Charles I, 1629-1640]
[Sidenote: "Ship money">[

The most obnoxious of all devices for raising money were the levies of "ship-money." Claiming that it had always been the duty of seaboard towns to equip ships for the defense of the country, Charles demanded that since they no longer built ships, the towns should contribute money for the maintenance of the navy. In 1634, therefore, each town was ordered to pay a specified amount of "ship-money" into the royal treasury, and the next year the tax was extended to inland towns and counties. [Footnote: The first writ of ship-money yielded £100,000 (Cunningham).] To test the legality of this exaction, a certain John Hampden refused to pay his twenty shillings ship-money, and took the matter to court, claiming that ship-money was illegal taxation. The majority of the judges, who held office during the king's pleasure and were therefore strictly under royal influence, upheld the legality of ship-money and even went so far as to assert that in times of emergency the king's prerogative was unlimited, but the country rang with protests and Hampden was hailed as a hero.

[Sidenote: Devotion of Charles I to the Anglican Church: Archbishop
Laud]
[Sidenote: Puritan Opposition]

Opposition to financial exactions went hand in hand with bitter religious disputes. Charles had intrusted the control of religious affairs to William Laud, whom he named archbishop of Canterbury, and showed favor to other clergymen of marked Catholic leanings. The laws against Roman Catholics were relaxed, and the restrictions on Puritans increased. It seemed as if Charles and his bishops were bent upon goading the Puritans to fury, at the very time when one by one the practices, the vestments, and even the dogmas of the Catholic Church were being reintroduced into the Anglican Church, when the tyrannical King James was declared to have been divinely inspired, and when Puritan divines were forced to read from their pulpits a royal declaration permitting the "sinful" practices of dancing on the green or shooting at the butts (targets) on the Sabbath. [Footnote: It is an interesting if not a significant fact that the Puritans with their austere views about observance of the Sabbath not only decreased the number of holidays for workingmen, but interfered with innocent recreation on the remaining day of rest. One aspect of the resulting monotonous life of the laborer was, according to Cunningham, the remarkable increase of drunkenness at this period.] So hard was the lot of the extreme Protestants in England that thousands fled the country and established themselves in America. [Footnote: In the decade 1630- 1640 some 20,000 Englishmen sailed for the colonies. Many of these, however, emigrated by reason of strictly economic distress.]

[Sidenote: The Scotch Covenant, and Beginnings of Armed Opposition to
the King]
[Sidenote: Convocation of the Long Parliament, 1640]

In his Scotch policy Charles overreached himself. With the zealous coöperation of Archbishop Laud, imprudently attempted to strengthen the episcopacy (system of bishops) in the northern kingdom, and likewise to introduce an un-Calvinistic order of public worship. Thereupon the angry Scotch Presbyterians signed a great Covenant, swearing to defend their religion (1638); they deposed the bishops set over them by the king and rose in revolt. Failing in a first effort to crush the Scotch rebellion, the king summoned a Parliament in order to secure financial support for an adequate royal army. This Parliament—the so-called Short Parliament—was dissolved, however, after some three weeks of bootless wrangling. Now unable to check the advance of the rebellious Scotch forces into northern England, Charles in desperation convoked (1640) a new Parliament, which, by reason of its extended duration (1640-1660), has been commonly called the Long Parliament. In England and Scotland divine-right monarchy had failed.