Constitutional History of England, Henry VII to George II. Volume 1 of 3

by Henry Hallam

Tonnage and poundage disputed.—It might not unreasonably be questioned whether the language of this statute were sufficiently general to comprehend duties charged on merchandise at the outports, as well as internal taxes and exactions, especially as the former had received a sort of sanction, though justly deemed contrary to law, by the judgment of the court of exchequer in Bates's case. The Commons, however, were steadily determined not to desist till they should have rescued their fellow-subjects from a burthen as unwarrantably imposed as those specifically enumerated in their Petition of Right. Tonnage and poundage, the customary grant of every reign, had been taken by the present king without consent of parliament; the Lords having rejected, as before-mentioned, a bill that limited it to a single year. The house now prepared a bill to grant it, but purposely delayed its passing; in order to remonstrate with the king against his unconstitutional anticipation of their consent. They declared "that there ought not any imposition to be laid upon the goods of merchants, exported or imported, without common consent by act of parliament; that tonnage and poundage, like other subsidies, sprung from the free grant of the people; that when impositions had been laid on the subjects' goods and merchandises without authority of law, which had very seldom occurred, they had, on complaint in parliament, been forthwith relieved; except in the late king's reign, who, through evil counsel, had raised the rates and charges to the height at which they then were." They conclude, after repeating their declaration that the receiving of tonnage and poundage and other impositions not granted by parliament is a breach of the fundamental liberties of this kingdom, and contrary to the late petition of right, with most humbly beseeching his majesty to forbear any further receiving of the same, and not to take it in ill part from those of his loving subjects who should refuse to make payment of any such charges without warrant of law.[657]

The king anticipated the delivery of this remonstrance by proroguing the parliament. Tonnage and poundage, he told them, was what he had never meant to give away, nor could possibly do without. By this abrupt prorogation, while so great a matter was unsettled, he trod back his late footsteps, and dissipated what little hopes might have arisen from his tardy assent to the Petition of Right. During the interval before the ensuing session, those merchants, among whom Chambers, Rolls, and Vassal are particularly to be remembered with honour, who gallantly refused to comply with the demands of the custom house, had their goods distrained, and on suing writs of replevin, were told by the judges that the king's right, having been established in the case of Bates, could no longer be disputed.[658] Thus the Commons re-assembled, by no means less inflamed against the king's administration than at the commencement of the preceding session. Their proceedings were conducted with more than usual warmth.[659] Buckingham's death, which had occurred since the prorogation, did not allay their resentment against the advisers of the Crown. But the king, who had very much lowered his tone in speaking of tonnage and poundage, and would have been content to receive it as their grant, perceiving that they were bent on a full statutory recognition of the illegality of impositions without their consent, and that they had opened a fresh battery on another side, by mingling in certain religious disputes in order to attack some of his favourite prelates, took the step, to which he was always inclined, of dissolving this third parliament.

Religious differences.—The religious disputes to which I have just alluded are chiefly to be considered, for the present purpose, in their relation to those jealousies and resentments springing out of the ecclesiastical administration, which during the reigns of the two first Stuarts furnished unceasing food to political discontent. James having early shown his inflexible determination to restrain the puritans, the bishops proceeded with still more rigour than under Elizabeth. No longer thwarted, as in her time, by an unwilling council, they succeeded in exacting a general conformity to the ordinances of the church. It had been solemnly decided by the judges in the queen's reign, and in 1604, that, although the statute establishing the high commission court did not authorise it to deprive ministers of their benefices, yet this law being only in affirmation of the queen's inherent supremacy, she might, by virtue of that, regulate all ecclesiastical matters at her pleasure, and erect courts with such powers as she should think fit. Upon this somewhat dangerous principle, Archbishop Bancroft deprived a considerable number of puritan clergymen;[660] while many more, finding that the interference of the Commons in their behalf was not regarded, and that all schemes of evasion were come to an end, were content to submit to the obnoxious discipline. But their affections being very little conciliated by this coercion, there remained a large party within the bosom of the established church, prone to watch for and magnify the errors of their spiritual rulers. These men preserved the name of puritans. Austere in their lives, while many of the others were careless or irregular, learned as a body comparatively with the opposite party, implacably averse to everything that could be construed into an approximation to popery, they acquired a degree of respect from grave men, which would have been much more general, had they not sometimes given offence by a moroseness and even malignity of disposition, as well as by a certain tendency to equivocation and deceitfulness; faults, however, which so frequently belong to the weaker party under a rigorous government that they scarcely afford a marked reproach against the puritans. They naturally fell in with the patriotic party in the House of Commons, and kept up throughout the kingdom a distrust of the Crown, which has never been so general in England as when connected with some religious apprehensions.

Growth of high church tenets.—The system pursued by Bancroft and his imitators, Bishops Neile and Laud, with the approbation of the king, far opposed to the healing counsels of Burleigh and Bacon, was just such as low-born and little-minded men, raised to power by fortune's caprice, are ever found to pursue. They studiously aggravated every difference, and irritated every wound. As the characteristic prejudice of the puritans was so bigoted an abhorrence of the Romish faith, that they hardly deemed its followers to deserve the name of Christians, the prevailing high church party took care to shock that prejudice by somewhat of a retrograde movement, and various seeming, or indeed real, accommodations of their tenets to those of the abjured religion. They began by preaching the divine right, as it is called, or absolute indispensability, of episcopacy;[661] a doctrine of which the first traces, as I apprehend, are found about the end of Elizabeth's reign. They insisted on the necessity of episcopal succession regularly derived from the apostles. They drew an inference from this tenet, that ordinations by presbyters were in all cases null. And as this affected all the reformed churches in Europe except their own, the Lutherans not having preserved the succession of their bishops, while the Calvinists had altogether abolished that order, they began to speak of them not as brethren of the same faith, united in the same cause, and distinguished only by differences little more material than those of political commonwealths (which had been the language of the church of England ever since the Reformation), but as aliens to whom they were not at all related, and schismatics with whom they held no communion; nay, as wanting the very essence of a Christian society. This again brought them nearer, by irresistible consequence, to the disciples of Rome, with becoming charity, but against the received creed of the puritans and perhaps against their own articles, they all acknowledged to be a part of the catholic church, while they were withholding that appellation, expressly or by inference, from Heidelberg and Geneva.

Differences as to the observance of Sunday.—The founders of the English reformation, after abolishing most of the festivals kept before that time, had made little or no change as to the mode of observance of those they retained. Sundays and holidays stood much on the same footing as days on which no work except for good cause was to be performed, the service of the church was to be attended, and any lawful amusement might be indulged in.[662] A just distinction, however, soon grew up; an industrious people could spare time for very few holidays; and the more scrupulous party, while they slighted the church festivals as of human appointment, prescribed a stricter observance of the Lord's day. But it was not till about 1595 that they began to place it very nearly on the footing of the Jewish sabbath, interdicting not only the slightest action of worldly business, but even every sort of pastime and recreation; a system which, once promulgated, soon gained ground as suiting their atrabilious humour, and affording a new theme of censure on the vices of the great.[663] Those who opposed them on the high church side, not only derided the extravagance of the Sabbatarians, as the others were called, but pretended that the commandment having been confined to the Hebrews, the modern observance of the first day of the week as a season of rest and devotion was an ecclesiastical institution, and in no degree more venerable than that of the other festivals or the season of Lent, which the puritans stubbornly despised.[664] Such a controversy might well have been left to the usual weapons. But James I., or some of the bishops to whom he listened, bethought themselves that this might serve as a test of puritan ministers. He published accordingly a declaration to be read in churches, permitting all lawful recreations on Sunday after divine service, such as dancing, archery, May-games, and morrice-dances, and other usual sports; but with a prohibition of bear-hunting and other unlawful games. No recusant, or any one who had not attended the church service, was entitled to this privilege; which might consequently be regarded as a bounty on devotion. The severe puritan saw it in no such point of view. To his cynical temper, May-games and morrice-dances were hardly tolerable on six days of the week; they were now recommended for the seventh. And this impious licence was to be promulgated in the church itself. It is indeed difficult to explain so unnecessary an insult on the precise clergy, but by supposing an intention to harass those who should refuse compliance.[665] But this intention, from whatever cause, perhaps through the influence of Archbishop Abbot, was not carried into effect; nor was the declaration itself enforced till the following reign.

The House of Commons displayed their attachment to the puritan maxims, or their dislike of the prelatical clergy, by bringing in bills to enforce a greater strictness in this respect. A circumstance that occurred in the session of 1621 will serve to prove their fanatical violence. A bill having been brought in "for the better observance of the Sabbath, usually called Sunday," one Mr. Shepherd, sneering at the puritans, remarked that, as Saturday was dies Sabbati, this might be entitled a bill for the observance of Saturday, commonly called Sunday. This witticism brought on his head the wrath of that dangerous assembly. He was reprimanded on his knees, expelled the house, and when he saw what befell poor Floyd, might deem himself cheaply saved from their fangs with no worse chastisement.[666] Yet when the upper house sent down their bill with "the Lord's day" substituted for "the Sabbath," observing, "that people do now much incline to words of Judaism," the Commons took no exception.[667] The use of the word Sabbath instead of Sunday became in that age a distinctive mark of the puritan party.

Arminian controversy.—A far more permanent controversy sprang up about the end of the same reign, which afforded a new pretext for intolerance and a fresh source of mutual hatred. Every one of my readers is acquainted more or less with the theological tenets of original sin, free will, and predestination, variously taught in the schools, and debated by polemical writers for so many centuries; and few can be ignorant that the articles of our own church, as they relate to these doctrines, have been very differently interpreted, and that a controversy about their meaning has long been carried on with a pertinacity which could not have continued on so limited a topic, had the combatants been merely influenced by the love of truth. Those who have no bias to warp their judgment will not perhaps have much hesitation in drawing their line between, though not at an equal distance between, the conflicting parties. It appears, on the other hand, that the articles are worded on some of these doctrines with considerable ambiguity; whether we attribute this to the intrinsic obscurity of the subject, to the additional difficulties with which it had been entangled by theological systems, to discrepancy of opinion in the compilers, or to their solicitude to prevent disunion by adopting formularies which men of different sentiments might subscribe. It is also manifest that their framers came, as it were, with averted eyes to the Augustinian doctrine of predestination, and wisely reprehended those who turned their attention to a system so pregnant with objections, and so dangerous, when needlessly dwelt upon, to all practical piety and virtue. But, on the other hand, this very reluctance to inculcate the tenet is so expressed as to manifest their undoubting belief in it; nor is it possible either to assign a motive for inserting the seventeenth article, or to give any reasonable interpretation to it, upon the theory which at present passes for orthodox in the English church. And upon other subjects intimately related to the former, such as the penalty of original sin and the depravation of human nature, the articles, after making every allowance for want of precision, seem totally irreconcilable with the scheme usually denominated Arminian.

The force of those conclusions, which we must, in my judgment, deduce from the language of these articles, will be materially increased by that appeal of contemporary and other early authorities, to which recourse has been had in order to invalidate them. Whatever doubts may be raised as to the Calvinism of Cranmer and Ridley, there can surely be no room for any as to the chiefs of the Anglican church under Elizabeth. We find explicit proofs that Jewel, Nowell, Sandys, Cox, professed to concur with the reformers of Zurich and Geneva in every point of doctrine.[668] The works of Calvin and Bullinger became textbooks in the English universities.[669] Those who did not hold the predestinarian theory were branded with reproach by the names of free-willers and Pelagians.[670] And when the opposite tenets came to be advanced, as they were at Cambridge about 1590, a clamour was raised as if some unusual heresy had been broached. Whitgift, with the concurrence of some other prelates, in order to withstand its progress, published what were called the Lambeth articles, containing the broadest and most repulsive declaration of all the Calvinistic tenets. But, Lord Burleigh having shown some disapprobation, these articles never obtained any legal sanction.[671]

These more rigorous tenets, in fact, especially when so crudely enounced, were beginning to give way. They had been already abandoned by the Lutheran church. They had long been opposed in that of Rome by the Franciscan order, and latterly by the jesuits. Above all, the study of the Greek fathers, with whom the first reformers had been little conversant, taught the divines of a more learned age, that men of as high a name as Augustin, and whom they were prone to over-value, had entertained very different sentiments.[672] Still the novel opinions passed for heterodox, and were promulgated with much vacillation and indistinctness. When they were published in unequivocal propositions by Arminius and his school, James declared himself with vehemence against this heresy.[673] He not only sent English divines to sit in the synod of Dort, where the Calvinistic system was fully established, but instigated the proceedings against the remonstrants with more of theological pedantry than charity or decorum.[674] Yet this inconsistent monarch within a very few years was so wrought on by one or two favourite ecclesiastics, who inclined towards the doctrines condemned in that assembly, that openly to maintain the Augustinian system became almost a sure means of exclusion from preferment in our church. This was carried to its height under Charles. Laud, his sole counsellor in ecclesiastical matters, advised a declaration enjoining silence on the controverted points; a measure by no means unwise, if it had been fairly acted upon. It is alleged, however, that the preachers on one side only were silenced, the printers of books on one side censured in the star-chamber, while full scope was indulged to the opposite sect.[675]

The House of Commons, especially in their last session, took up the increase of Arminianism as a public grievance. It was coupled in their remonstrances with popery, as a new danger to religion, hardly less terrible than the former. This bigoted clamour arose in part from the nature of their own Calvinistic tenets, which, being still prevalent in the kingdom, would, independently of all political motives, predominate in any popular assembly. But they had a sort of excuse for it in the close, though accidental and temporary, connection that subsisted between the partisans of these new speculative tenets and those of arbitrary power; the churchmen who receded most from Calvinism being generally the zealots of prerogative. They conceived also that these theories, conformable in the main to those most countenanced in the church of Rome, might pave the way for that restoration of her faith which from so many other quarters appeared to threaten them. Nor was this last apprehension so destitute of all plausibility as the advocates of the two first Stuarts have always pretended it to be.