James writhed under this plain and direct denial of his assumed authority, and refused to surrender the question. He found in the bishops a body, on the whole, ready to co-operate with him in his attempt to destroy the Constitution; and Bancroft, the Primate, led the way with unblushing baseness. Under his leadership the whole High Church party echoed the king's most absolute dogmas, and claimed for him all the divinity which he professed to possess. The king, according to their creed, being divine, so were the bishops who were appointed by him, and therefore this divine Crown and Church were above all law. The ecclesiastical courts carried this theory into daily practice, and encroached on the temporal courts as pertinaciously as the king did on Parliament. There was a grand struggle between the common and the civil law. The judges, who saw this arrogance of the clergy with jealousy and disgust, began to relax their enmity against the Puritans and to regard them as the natural allies of law against absolutism.
On the other hand, the king and bishops sought out fresh means in support of their doctrine, and one of these was to bring forward Dr. Cowell who, in his "Interpreter, or Law Dictionary," broached unmitigated maxims of despotism. He declared that the king inherited all the powers which had been exercised by the Emperors of Rome; as if the empire of the Romans had never ceased in England, or as if the civil law being still used by the Church, it became in all its forms imperative on the nation. This work was dedicated to Bancroft, and he and the king eulogised it as maintaining all the rampant maxims of absolutism which James had ever uttered. The king, Cowell declared, was "solutus à legibus," "freed from all restraint of laws;" and though he took an oath at his coronation to maintain all the laws unchanged, yet he was at full liberty to quash any laws that he pleased; and, in a word, he contended "that the King of England is an absolute king."
The Commons called upon the Lords to unite with them in punishing this apologist, who, not content with selling his own birthright for a mess of pottage, was endeavouring to sell that of the nation too. The case was so flagrant that the Lords could not decline the challenge. And Bacon, who had shortly before been the advocate of the royal prerogative, now conducted the case for the Commons in the conference against Cowell, who was sent to prison for a time; his book was suppressed by the king's proclamation, poor James himself being obliged to condemn his own champion.
Having triumphed in this particular, the Commons proceeded to much older grievances. They demanded the abolition of that den of injustice and extortion, the Court of High Commission, in which the king exercised that unrestrained despotism which he claimed over the whole kingdom; where men were sentenced and fined at the arbitrary will of the king and its council, without jury or evidence admitted in their defence: but this was an institution so dear to James's heart, that he would not listen to any abatement of its power. They next complained of the growing abuse of substituting royal proclamations for established law, "by reason of which," said the Commons, "there is a general fear conceived and spread amongst your majesty's people, that proclamations will, by degrees, grow up and increase to the strength and nature of laws." To this James simply replied that his proclamations should not exceed the warranty of law. They further complained of the delay of the courts in granting writs of habeas corpus and prohibition, and of the encroachment of the Council of Wales, which extended its jurisdiction over neighbouring counties where it had no real authority; as well as of various monopolies, taxes on public-houses and on sea-coal.
The licenses to public-houses he agreed to revoke, but he demanded a perpetual revenue in lieu of the income thence derived. This the Commons refused, alleging that he had no right to impose that tax in the first instance; and they further demanded that the feudal burthens of tenure by knights' service, wardships, and purveyance, should cease. As to the first, James absolutely refused compliance, on the plea that he would not reduce all his subjects, "rich and poor, noble and base, to hold their lands in the same ignoble manner;" but as to wardships, the marriages of infants and widows, and other odious services, including purveyance, he was willing to barter them for a sum of money. The sum which he demanded was three hundred thousand pounds per annum. The Commons only offered one hundred thousand pounds, but after a long course of haggling, like chapmen in a fair, the king descended to two hundred and twenty thousand pounds, and the Commons rose to one hundred and eighty thousand pounds. Here the matter paused till James moved a dissolution, when the Commons advanced to two hundred thousand pounds, and the king accepted the sum. But here again the king and his advocates had boasted so much of his being above the law, and of his power to quash, of his own will, any statute to which he had consented, that the Commons were cautious in their proceedings, and they had moreover to determine out of what funds this revenue should be raised. These discussions had now driven on the Session to the middle of July, and it was agreed that they should vote one subsidy, and one tenth and fifteenth for the present Session, and defer the final settlement of the other grant till the next.
The interval was utilised by James and his ministers in attempts to corrupt some of the members of the Opposition, and thus to enable him to concede less and obtain more; but the Commons had employed the time in weighing the slippery nature of the man with whom they had to deal. His continual boasts of his superiority to all laws, and of an actually divine power of dispensing with his most solemn obligations, made them doubtful of the possibility of binding him to any terms; and the growing extravagance and rapacity of both king and courtiers deepened their fears.
When they met they were in a far less compliant humour than when they separated. They insisted on seeing the promised reforms before they voted the two hundred thousand pounds. James was growing desperate for money; his coffers were empty, and the officers of the Crown were clamorous for their arrears of salary. He therefore sent for them to Whitehall, and a deputation of about thirty members attended. The king demanded of them whether they thought that he was really in want of money, as his Treasurer and the Chancellor of the Exchequer had informed them? "Whereto," says Winwood, "when Sir Francis Bacon had begun to answer in a more extravagant style than his majesty did delight to hear, he picked out Sir Henry Neville, commanding him to answer according to his conscience. Thereupon Sir Henry Neville did directly answer that he thought his majesty was in want. 'Then,' said the king, 'tell me whether it belongeth to you, that are my subjects, to relieve me or not?' 'To this,' quoth Sir Henry, 'I must answer with a distinction: where your majesty's expense groweth by the commonwealth, we are bound to maintain it, otherwise not.'" Sir Henry reminded the king that in this one Parliament they had already given four subsidies and seven fifteenths, which was more than any Parliament at any time had given, and yet they had no relief of their grievances. James demanded what these grievances were—as though he had not heard them enumerated often enough before—and desired Sir Henry to give him a catalogue of them. Sir Henry adverted to the difficulties of obtaining justice in courts of law, to the usurped jurisdiction in the marches of Wales, and would have gone through the whole list had not Sir Herbert Croft interrupted him.
THE STAR CHAMBER.
Finding that nothing was to be drawn from the resolute House, James again prorogued them for nine weeks, in order to try every means of drawing over to him individual members. But these efforts were as abortive as the former: the Commons were determined not to part with their money till they had a guarantee for the redress of their grievances, and James about this time lost his two right-hand men, Bancroft and Cecil. Bancroft, had died in November, 1610, staunch to the last in his exhortations to James not to give up the High Court of Commission; assuring him that though the Lords had thrown out the Bill, the Commons would bring it in again, and that nothing but unflinching firmness would defeat them. Cecil died on the 24th of May, 1612. He was grievously chagrined at the failure of his favourite scheme for setting the king above all his difficulties. In default of that, the old expedient of the sale of Crown lands was resorted to for the raising of money, and privy seals for loans of money were despatched into different counties. Meanwhile James was subsisting on a subsidy of six shillings in the pound granted by the clergy, and both king and ministers were in terror lest the privy seals should be "refused by the desperate hardness of the people." They raised, however, one hundred and eleven thousand pounds.