Some of “the bold speakers,” as the heads of the opposition are frequently designated in the manuscript letters, have now risen into notice. Sir John Eliot, Dr. Turner, Sir Dudley Digges, Mr. Clement Coke, poured themselves forth in a vehement, not to say seditious style, with invectives more daring than had ever before thundered in the House of Commons! The king now told them—“I come to show your errors, and, as I may call it, unparliamentary proceedings of parliament.” The lord keeper then assured them, that “when the irregular humours of some particular persons were settled, the king would hear and answer all just grievances; but the king would have them also to know that he was equally jealous to the contempt of his royal rights, which his majesty would not suffer to be violated by any pretended course of parliamentary liberty. The king considered the parliament as his council; but there was a difference between councilling and controlling, and between liberty and the abuse of liberty.” He finished by noticing their extraordinary proceedings in their impeachment of Buckingham. The king, resuming his speech, remarkably reproached the parliament—
Now that you have all things according to your wishes, and that I am so far engaged that you think there is no retreat, now you begin to set the dice, and make your own game. But I pray you be not deceived; it is not a parliamentary way, nor is it a way to deal with a king. Mr. Clement Coke told you, “It was better to be eaten up by a foreign enemy than to be destroyed at home!” Indeed, I think it more honour for a king to be invaded and almost destroyed by a foreign enemy than to be despised by his own subjects.
The king concluded by asserting his privilege to call or to forbid parliaments.
The style of “the bold speakers” appeared at least as early as in April; I trace their spirit in letters of the times, which furnish facts and expressions that do not appear in our printed documents.
Among the earliest of our patriots, and finally the great victim of his exertions, was Sir John Eliot, vice-admiral of Devonshire. He, in a tone which “rolled back to Jove his own bolts,” and startled even the writer, who was himself biassed to the popular party, “made a resolute, I doubt whether a timely, speech.” He adds Eliot asserted that “They came not thither either to do what the king should command them, nor to abstain when he forbade them; they came to continue constant, and to maintain their privileges. They would not give their posterity a cause to curse them for losing their privileges by restraint, which their forefathers had left them.”[287]
On the 8th of May the impeachment of the duke was opened by Sir Dudley Digges, who compared the duke to a meteor exhaled out of putrid matter. He was followed by Glanville, Selden, and others. On this first day the duke sat out-facing his accusers and out-braving their accusations, which the more highly exasperated the house.[288] On the following day the duke was absent, when the epilogue to this mighty piece was elaborately delivered by Sir John Eliot, with a force of declamation and a boldness of personal allusion which have not been surpassed in the invectives of the modern Junius.
Eliot, after expatiating on the favourite’s ambition in procuring and getting into his hands the greatest offices of strength and power in the kingdom, and the means by which he had obtained them, drew a picture of “the inward character of the duke’s mind.” The duke’s plurality of offices reminded him “of a chimerical beast called by the ancients Stellionatus, so blurred, so spotted, so full of foul lines that they knew not what to make of it! In setting up himself he hath set upon the kingdom’s revenues, the fountain of supply, and the nerves of the land. He intercepts, consumes, and exhausts the revenues of the crown; and, by emptying the veins the blood should run in, he hath cast the kingdom into a high consumption.” He descends to criminate the duke’s magnificent tastes; he who had something of a congenial nature; for Eliot was a man of fine literature. “Infinite sums of money, and mass of land exceeding the value of money, contributions in parliament have been heaped upon him; and how have they been employed? Upon costly furniture, sumptuous feasting, and magnificent building, the visible evidence of the express exhausting of the state!”
Eliot eloquently closes—
Your lordships have an idea of the man, what he is in himself, what in his affections! You have seen his power, and some, I fear, have felt it. You have known his practice, and have heard the effects. Being such, what is he in reference to king and state; how compatible or incompatible with either? In reference to the king, he must be styled the canker in his treasure; in reference to the state the moth of all goodness. I can hardly find him a parallel; but none were so like him as Sejanus, who is described by Tacitus, Audax; sui obtegens, in alios criminator; juxta adulatio et superbia. Sejanus’s pride was so excessive, as Tacitus saith, that he neglected all councils, mixed his business and service with the prince, seeming to confound their actions, and was often styled Imperatoris laborum socius. Doth not this man the like? Ask England, Scotland, and Ireland—and they will tell you! How lately and how often hath this man commixed his actions in discourses with actions of the king’s! My lords! I have done—you see the man!
The parallel of the duke with Sejanus electrified the house; and, as we shall see, touched Charles on a convulsive nerve.