On the second of March, when the House met, the speaker’s first word was that the king had ordered an adjournment till the tenth, and that no business could be transacted. Eliot insisted on moving his resolutions, and the speaker was held down in his chair. Then the serjeant-at-arms attempted to remove the mace, and was promptly stopped, while the key of the House was turned from within.
Eliot moved his declaration, beginning with the famous words: “By the ancient laws and liberties of England, it is the known birthright and inheritance of the subject, that no tax, tallage, or other charge shall be levied or imposed but by common consent in England; and that the subsidies of tonnage and poundage are no way due or payable but by a free gift and special act of parliament.”
The resolutions were carried with loud shouts of assent, two members guarding the speaker, and the door was flung open; the sitting was over.
A royal proclamation for dissolving parliament followed on the fourth of March, and Eliot, with eight other members, was summoned to appear before the Privy Council.
From the hour of that summons John Eliot’s liberty was over, and not for eleven years was England to have another parliament.
For the fourth time Eliot was a prisoner. He declined altogether to give an account of what he had said in parliament, or to acknowledge any right of interference with the proceedings in parliament. To the crown lawyers his reply was to stand on the privileges of a member of the House of Commons. “I refuse to answer,” he said, “because I hold that it is against the privilege of parliament to speak of anything which is done in the House.” He insisted that he was accountable to the House alone, and that no other power existed with a constitutional right to inquire into his conduct there.
At the end of October Eliot was removed from the Tower to the Marshalsea, and then in January, 1630, he was charged in the King’s Bench with two other members, Holles and Valentine, with conspiring to resist the king’s lawful order, to calumniate ministers of the crown, and to assault the speaker. Again Eliot refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction. He was fined £2,000, and sent back to the Tower.
To the last Eliot’s loyalty to the House of Commons remained unshaken. He had but to acknowledge that he had done wrong, to admit that he had offended, and the prison doors would have opened to him. But to make this acknowledgment was to deny the sacred liberty of parliament, to admit wrong was to betray the House of Commons. To John Eliot the welfare of the House of Commons was a national cause—dearer than life. To betray its honour was to betray the State. The loyalty of John Eliot to the House of Commons was interwoven with his devotion to the State, but it was something England had never seen before, and never saw again. “He learned to believe, as no other man believed before or after him, in the representatives of the nation.” (Gardiner.)
The character and temperament of Eliot must be taken into account in understanding this passionate belief in the House of Commons. It was not as a great thinker but as a great orator he had risen to the leadership of the House of Commons. He saw in his mind, as no other man saw at the time, a perfectly balanced constitution of king, lords, and commons. In parliament was the best wisdom of the country placed at the service of the crown. In the crown was the appointed ruler who, with his ministers, had but to come to parliament for advice and counsel. So it seemed to John Eliot; and single-minded himself, he could not realise that in the House of Commons were plenty of men of but passing honesty, and that Charles and Laud and Wentworth were fundamentally opposed to his views of constitutional government, and bitterly hostile to the growing powers of the commons.[108]
