Leaders of the People: Studies in Democratic History

by Joseph Clayton

And now the issue was fairly set, and the battle begun between Charles and the House of Commons. In that year, 1626, no man in England could foretell the result.

Charles, ill-advised to the end, believed he could overawe the Commons by a display of might, and was beaten. Twice he had Eliot arrested before the final imprisonment which ended Eliot’s life.

The loyalty of the House of Commons to its leader compelled Charles to release Eliot, after sending him to the Tower for his attack on Buckingham. Then dissolving parliament in June, 1626, and falling back on a forced loan, the king was met by wide refusals, and Eliot, with Hampden and others, suffered imprisonment over this. Eliot was also deprived of his vice-admiralship and struck off the roll of justices of the peace.

Driven to call a parliament for the third time in 1628, the king was faced by a stronger opposition than ever.

Eliot, now member for Cornwall, throughout the session continued the attack on arbitrary taxation, and with the lawyers Seldon and Coke carried the Petition of Right to stop the illegal imprisonments, the enforced billeting of soldiers, and forced loans. Buckingham, slain at Portsmouth, no longer troubled the commonwealth; but Wentworth, ambitious to use his powers in the service of the government, had left the popular side for the king; while Laud, and Weston, the chancellor of the exchequer, were daily preaching to Charles the divine right of kings and to his subjects the duty of passive obedience.

The following year both Eliot and Pym attacked the ecclesiastical policy of Laud. To them the established religion of England, settled on the Protestant basis by Elizabeth, was being definitely changed in a Catholic direction without the sanction of parliament, and in the very teeth of the opposition of the House of Commons. High-church clergymen, like Montague and Mainwaring, holding to the full a Catholic interpretation of the Book of Common Prayer, were only censured by the House of Commons to be promoted by the crown. Laud preaching a royal supremacy undreamt of by the great archbishops before Henry VIII., combined with it a doctrine of ecclesiastical independence, owning no allegiance to Rome, equally novel.

Eliot, stoical in his beliefs, and Pym, whose Calvinism was tempered by common sense, regarded with horror the revival in the Church of England of Catholic doctrines concerning the sacraments and the priesthood. They had done what they could to check any indulgence to Roman Catholics in England, and it was monstrous to them that the Church of England, whose formularies and ritual had been defined by parliament for the maintenance of Protestantism, should be expanded to reintroduce doctrines and practices essentially Catholic. But for the time the House of Commons was powerless in the matter, and only sixteen years later was Laud to expiate on the scaffold his Anglo-Catholicism, dying a veritable martyr for the high Anglican doctrine. “None have gone about to break parliaments but in the end parliaments have broken them,” declared Eliot on March 2nd, 1629, and Laud, no less than Charles and Wentworth, was to prove the truth of the warning.

If parliament could do nothing in that year, 1629, to stop Laud’s policy, it could at least defend the privileges of its members. The goods of John Rolle, M.P., had been seized by the king’s officers because their owner had refused to pay tonnage and poundage on demand, and at once Eliot was up in arms in defence of the privileges of his fellow member, whose liberties had been interfered with.

Pym was for a wider view of the matter—objecting to the question being narrowed down to a breach of privilege. “The liberties of this House,” he argued, “are inferior to the liberties of this kingdom. To determine the privilege of this House is but a mean matter, and the main end is to establish possession of the subjects, and to take off the commission and records and orders that are against us.” With Pym it was not Rolle, the member, who had been ill-used, but Rolle the British subject, and it was for the liberties of the subject he strove, holding the freedom of parliament as but a means to that end.

Eliot, a House of Commons man, through and through, saw in the welfare of parliament the welfare of the nation, and stuck to his point, carrying the House with him, that the privileges of a member extended to his goods. To this Charles sent word that what had been done had been done by his authority. The only question now was, how long would it be before the king dissolved parliament.