The knighthood fines affected all the gentry and all men in easy circumstances; the extension of the forests threatened chiefly the nobility and persons of quality; the revival of the monopolies aggrieved all classes alike. The King, it was calculated, got £38,000 a year from the wine monopolists, the patentees received from the vintners £90,000, and the vintners raised the price of wine to the consumers so that the nation paid £360,000. And besides the wine monopoly there were monopolies of soap, of iron, of tobacco, of salt, of gunpowder, and of many other commodities.
On the one hand, the King’s financial measures discontented the nation, and on the other they failed to meet the wants of the Government. In 1635, the ordinary revenue of the Crown was about £600,000, and the King’s debts were about £1,200,000. When the safety of the seas and the exigencies of foreign policy required a fleet, it became necessary to resort to direct taxation, and Ship-money was invented. In 1634, it was levied on the maritime counties only, and brought in £100,000; in 1635, it was extended to the inland counties, and produced twice that amount.
It was useless to appeal to the law courts for protection or redress. The judges, removable at the King’s pleasure, declined to arbitrate between King and people, and preferred to regard themselves as the servants of the Crown. When called upon to decide on the lawfulness of Ship-money, their decision was avowedly dictated by political rather than legal considerations. One judge declared that the law was the King’s old and trusty servant, that it was not true that lex was rex, but common and most true that rex was lex. Another asserted that no acts of Parliament could take away the King’s right to command the persons and the money of his subjects, if he thought a sufficient necessity existed. It was well said that the reasons alleged by the judges were such as every man could swear were not law, and that their logic left no man anything which he might call his own. To enforce his will, the King had at his disposal, besides the ordinary courts of law, the exceptional courts which the Tudors had created. Their jurisdiction was enlarged at the King’s pleasure. In 1632, the powers of the Council of the North were increased. The Privy Council assumed legislative power by its proclamations, “enjoining this to the people that was not enjoined by law, and prohibiting that which was not prohibited by law.” The Star Chamber enforced the proclamations by fine and imprisonment, and punished opponents or critics with inordinate severity.[[1]] The fate of Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick showed that no profession could exempt its members from barbarous and ignominious penalties.[[2]] The fate of Eliot and his friends proved that the privileges of Parliament were no protection against the King’s vindictiveness.[[3]] There were Privy Councillors who “would ordinarily laugh when the word liberty of the subject was named,” and to wise men it seemed that the very foundations of right were in danger of destruction.
If Englishmen wished to know what the aim of the King’s ministers was they had only to look across St. George’s Channel. “The King,” wrote Wentworth from Ireland in 1638, “is as absolute here as any prince in the world can be.”[[4]] Parliaments still existed, but the Lord Deputy managed them as he chose, and, as Pym said, Parliaments without parliamentary liberties were but plausible ways to servitude. Juries existed, but when they gave verdicts against the Crown they were fined for their contumacy. The highest officials and the richest noblemen felt the weight of Wentworth’s hand, and submitted to do his bidding. Trade increased, order reigned where it had never reigned before, and the poor lived freer from the oppressions of the great than the poor in Ireland had ever dreamt of doing. But not a vestige of self-government remained save a few idle forms; the government was a machine in which all motion, all force, came from the royal authority. The people had nothing to do but to obey the King. “Let them,” said Wentworth, “attend upon his will, with confidence in his justice, belief in his wisdom, and assurance in his parental affections,” instead of feeding themselves “with the vain flatteries of imaginary liberty.”
Amongst Englishmen the King’s use of his absolute power did not foster this blind faith in his superior wisdom.
A vigorous foreign policy directed towards national ends might have reconciled some of his subjects to the substitution of personal rule for self-government. But Charles had no European policy. When he dissolved his third Parliament he was at war with France and Spain, and want of money obliged him to make peace as soon as possible. In European politics, his only object was to procure the restoration of the Palatinate to his sister and her children. For this he offered his alliance simultaneously to Gustavus Adolphus and to Ferdinand II. For this he negotiated with France and Spain as he negotiated a few years later with Presbyterians and Independents. His policy was a series of intrigues which failed, and a succession of bargains in which he asked much, offered little, and got nothing. As it was purely dynastic in its aim, and at once unprincipled and unsuccessful, it left him with no ally in Europe.
One result it had, attributed by panegyrists to his wisdom, and held by courtiers a compensation for the loss of freedom—England kept out of war. “It enjoyed,” says Clarendon, “the greatest calm and the fullest measure of felicity that any people for so long a time together had been blessed with, to the wonder and envy of all the parts of Christendom.” The Thirty Years’ War was turning fruitful Germany into a wilderness, and its cities into heaps of ruins. All other countries were impoverished or devastated by war, but England was, as it were, “the garden of Christendom” and “the Exchange of Europe.” “Here,” sang a poet, “white peace, the beautifullest of things, had fixed her everlasting nest.” Never had the English Court been gayer, more brilliant, more luxurious; never were masques and banquets more frequent than during the crisis of Protestantism in Germany.
“Let the German drum bellow for freedom,” wrote the poet of the Court, “its noise
“Disturbs not us, nor should divert our joys.”
Puritans felt that these German drums were a call to England to be up and doing. With anxious or exultant eyes, they followed each turn of fate in the death-struggle of Catholicism and Protestantism. It cheered Eliot’s prison in the Tower to think of the progress of “the work abroad.” When Tilly fled before Gustavus at the Breitenfeld, Eliot cried that now “Fortune and Hope were met.” When Gustavus fell at Lützen, every Puritan’s heart sank within him. “Never,” wrote D’Ewes, “did one person’s death bring so much sorrow to all true Protestant hearts—not our godly Edward’s, the Sixth of that name, nor our late and heroic Prince Henry’s—as did the King of Sweden’s at this present.”