Leaders of the People: Studies in Democratic History

by Joseph Clayton

If Elizabeth burnt anabaptists and hanged other nonconformists, her excuse was that the Church of England was sufficiently Protestant to include all well-affected persons. The extreme Puritans whom she persecuted had this in common with the Roman Catholics, that neither accepted the absolute supremacy of the crown, and the best Puritan teaching in England, even when it counselled conformity to the Established Church, was creating a mind and temper that only found expression in the Commonwealth.

James I. came to the throne in 1603 prepared to carry on the Tudor absolutism. He failed because he had neither Elizabeth’s ministers nor her knowledge of the English country landowners. James never realised that Spain was the popular enemy, that a discontent had suddenly grown up in parliament in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, and that the English landowners—in many cases from their inherited possession of the old Church lands—were generally bitterly hostile to the Roman Catholic religion. James was tolerant in religion, and not inclined to press Elizabeth’s penal laws against Roman Catholics, and this very toleration brought him under the dislike of the country party. He thought he could disregard the opinion of parliament and he found that while a House of Commons submitted to a despotism when the country was governed by a strong queen, it would not put up with the follies and extravagance of the Duke of Buckingham.

James died before the strength of the growing movement for parliamentary government was seen. Charles who was no more tyrannical than his father, but even more blind to the signs of the times, fell before that parliamentary movement—a movement which outraged all the traditions of Tudor government—and with his fall brought down the throne, the House of Lords, and the Established Church. By his inability to understand the House of Commons, by his support of the Anglican movement towards Catholicism in the Church of England, and by the mistakes of his ministers, Charles ripened the desire for constitutional monarchy till the desire was irresistible.

John Eliot gave forcible utterance to this desire, and died in prison for his speech. John Pym carried on the work till the sword of civil war was drawn. John Hampden, “the noblest type of parliamentary opposition,” was content to back Pym as he had earlier backed Eliot, and to die on Chalgrove Field. Brought up to regard as an alien creed the old belief in papal supremacy in religion, unable to accept the new doctrine of the Church of England that the king was supreme by divine right (a doctrine begotten by the Tudors and dying with the Stuarts), Eliot, Hampden, and Pym were all of the same Puritan type which found its authority in the individual conscience.

Eliot was less afflicted than his colleagues by the theological Protestantism of the age.[106] First and last he was the straightforward country gentleman, with exalted views on the sacred responsibility of civil government, and a high standard of personal honour. For Eliot there was no nobler sphere of work for an Englishman than the House of Commons, and his example has not been without followers. Seneca and Cicero are on his lips, as the later Puritans had the Bible on theirs, and his eloquence marks the beginning of parliamentary oratory. With a strong and clear view of constitutional government, Eliot was no republican; he held to the notion that the king must depend on the decisions of parliament. Time was to show that this notion, in the event of a collision between king and parliament, was to make parliament the predominant partner.

On his first entry into the House of Commons as member for St. Germans, in 1614, Eliot was the friend of Buckingham—whom he had met as a youth abroad—and on Buckingham’s rise to the lord high admiralship Eliot was knighted and became vice-admiral of Devon.

The fidelity of his service to the State as vice-admiral brought an unpleasant experience of the will of princes. Grappling with the scourge of piracy which afflicted the seaports and shipping trade of the West of England, Eliot accomplished the arrest of Nutt, a notorious sea-robber. But Nutt had friends in high places, and Eliot found himself lodged in the Marshalsea prison over the business. He was released on Buckingham’s return from the continent, for the charges were absurd, and in 1624 returned to the House of Commons as member for Newport. Two years later Eliot was estranged from Buckingham—convinced that the favourite of the king was an evil counsellor—and had become the recognized leader of the House of Commons. Once assured in his mind that Buckingham was responsible for the policy of the king, Eliot became his implacable opponent. For the policy of the crown in not making war upon Spain, in relaxing the penal laws against Roman Catholics, and for the mismanagement of the war on the continent in support of the Protestants, Eliot held Buckingham responsible. In answer to the demand of Charles for money in 1626, Eliot insisted that an inquiry into past disasters should precede supply, and that Buckingham should be impeached. Not the king but his minister is to blame, Eliot maintained, for all that was wrong in the State, and this very speech strikes the note of the campaign that was beginning. Buckingham was not responsible to Charles alone, in the eyes of Eliot and his friends, but also to parliament.[107]

Charles, quite unable to fathom the depth of the parliamentary discontent, or to note the strength of the current against absolutism, fell back upon the old Tudor doctrine of sovereignty, the doctrine of the high Anglican party in the Church of England, that the king was responsible for his acts to God alone. “Parliaments are altogether in my calling,” he replies to the House of Commons.

Only twenty-five years had passed since Bacon had declared, “the Queen hath both enlarging and restraining power: she may set at liberty things restrained by Statute, and may restrain things which be at liberty.” Twenty-three years more were to see monarchy abolished and the king beheaded. Eliot, standing midway between Bacon and Bradshaw, cleaves to the theory of constitutional government and persists in the impeachment of a minister in whom parliament had no confidence.

The prologue of impeachment declared in the plainest language the responsibility of the king’s ministers to parliament, and the responsibility of parliament to the nation: “The laws of England have taught us that kings cannot command ill or unlawful things, and whatsoever ill event succeed, the executioners of such designs must answer for them.”