XXI.
HOW THE GREAT CIVIL WAR BEGAN AT HULL.
In four different centuries has England suffered the pangs of that deplorable kind of war which we are accustomed to describe by the adjective ‘Civil.’ And in each case has the cause of the war been the same—a disagreement as to who should be the ruler of the country’s destinies. In the twelfth century it was a struggle between the King and a would-be Queen, in the thirteenth a struggle between the King and his barons, in the fifteenth a struggle between two royal families, and in the seventeenth a struggle between King and Parliament. It is the fourth of these wars that has gained, from the bitterness of the struggle and the catastrophe which ended it, the additional description of ‘Great.’
Both King and Parliament are among the oldest of our national institutions. In the days of the Angles and Saxons the head of the Government was the King, but his power had not been absolute. There was a body of King’s Counsellors, the Witena-gemōt, who had power to depose the King if necessary, and in whose hands rested the elections to the throne.
No idea of hereditary right to the throne then existed, and after the Norman Conquest the same right of election by the people—expressed through the Great Council—remained. It was not, in fact, till the accession of Edward I. that the principle of hereditary succession to the throne of England became firmly recognised. Edward I. was the first of our sovereigns to become King simply because he was the son of his father, and without an expression of the will of the nation.
On the death of Queen Elizabeth it happened that the throne of England fell to the King of Scotland—a King who may be described as one-fourth English, one-fourth French, and one-half Scots, in blood. It is, therefore, not altogether strange that James I., ‘the wisest fool in Christendom,’ should fail to see things from an Englishman’s point of view, or that he should be unable to understand English customs and English institutions.
Thus it was that the King began to quarrel with his Parliament, and when Charles I. became King in his father’s stead things grew rapidly worse. According to his view, he was King of England by the manifest will of God, and as the elect of God he was bound to consult none but God; while all his subjects were bound to obey his will, as they would the will of God.
But according to the view taken by Parliament, the King was one factor only in the Government. Commons, Lords Temporal, Lords Spiritual—the ‘Three Estates of the Realm’—had the King for their head. He was, as it were, the keystone of the arch, of no power by himself, but of very great power when fitted into his place in the government of the country. Such was the view of Parliament in the early years of King Charles’ reign. Later on the Members of Parliament thought they had made a new discovery—that the arch would hold itself up without the help of its keystone.
When Charles came to the throne, England was engaged in a war upon the Continent. From his first Parliament the King demanded supplies of money to carry on this war, but was told that he must first redress the ‘grievances’ under which the nation suffered. This not being the reply that he had expected, he dissolved Parliament and began to raise money by a system of compulsory loans obtained from all townsfolk who were deemed wealthy enough to provide them. From the town of Hull the two Commissioners, who attended at the Town Hall for the purpose, demanded and received the sum of £332 13s. 4d.
At the same time seaport towns were ordered to provide armed vessels towards a fleet of one hundred ships which was being equipped. Hull’s share was three ships large enough to transport 1350 men.