SIR JOHN ELIOT
(From a Steel Engraving by William Holl.)
ELIOT, HAMPDEN, PYM,
AND THE SUPREMACY
OF THE COMMONS. 1625–1643
John Eliot, John Hampden, John Pym—by the work of these men comes the supremacy of the House of Commons in the government of England.
All three are country gentlemen of good estate, of high principle and of some learning.[105] They are men of religious convictions, of courage and resolution, and of blameless personal character. Two of them—Eliot and Hampden—are content to die for the cause of good government.
The strong rule of Elizabeth left a difficult legacy of government to James I. The despotism of the queen had been forgiven in the success of her State policy; and if she had no high opinion of parliament, Elizabeth had ministers who fairly represented the mind of the English middle class. Elizabeth’s absolutism in Church and State was the direct following of Henry VIII., and only at the very close of her reign was it threatened by the discontent of parliament. With a shrewd instinct for popularity Elizabeth at once yielded. Like her father, she saw the importance of retaining parliament on the side of the crown and making it the instrument of the royal will. There was no idea in the Tudor mind of parliament sharing the government with the crown. The business of the House of Commons of Elizabeth was to express its opinion and then decree the proposals of the crown. “Liberty of speech was granted in respect of the aye or no, but not that everybody should speak what he listed.” (1592.)
In religion Elizabeth had done her worst to exterminate the Roman Catholic faith, and by the fierceness of her persecution had kindled undying enthusiasm for the old beliefs and worship. But forty years of repression did their work, and a generation arose which only knew Catholicism as the faith of a proscribed and unpatriotic sect, who denied the absolute sovereignty of the crown and had another sovereign at Rome—the religion of Spain—popery, in short: a faith worse than Mahomedanism or heathenism—the scarlet woman of the Apocalypse—according to the fierce Puritan expounders of the Bible, and not to be counted as Christianity. That this very Roman Catholicism—so hateful because the penal laws kept it hidden and unknown, and because it was the religion of Spain, then the national enemy—had been the religion of all England for centuries, and that under it the earliest charters of public liberty had been wrung from the crown, and the principle of a representative parliament established, were facts uncontemplated.
But Elizabeth, while persecuting Roman Catholics, had left in the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England a sanction for ceremonial and for episcopal ordination, and a body of doctrine which were to be interpreted under the Stuarts by certain Anglican divines as witnesses to Catholicism. Such interpretation was to be found in Elizabeth’s reign as a pious opinion. With Laud it was an active principle, and it brought him to the scaffold. The Elizabethan bishops in the main were thoroughly Protestant, the queen was the head of the Church of England, and the ritual of the Church prescribed by her was reduced to a simplicity that average Protestants could accept.