JOHN PYM
(From an Engraving by Jacob Houbraken.)
Months passed, and John Eliot’s health gave way in the confinement in the Tower, but his steadfastness was unchanged. He corresponded with his friend John Hampden, wrote his treatise on the Monarchy of Man, and calmly awaited his end. An application on behalf of his friends and his son for Eliot’s release was made in October, 1622, on the ground that “the doctors were of opinion he could never recover of his consumption until such time as he might breathe in purer air.” The reply of Chief Justice Richardson was “that, although Sir John were brought low in body, yet was he as high and lofty in mind as ever; for he would neither submit to the king nor to the justice of that court.”
On November 27th, 1632, the spirit of John Eliot, unbroken by captivity, passed from the body his gaolers had deprived of life. A last appeal from his son to the king for the removal of his father’s body into Cornwall, there to lie with those of his ancestors at Port Eliot, received the curt refusal, “Let Sir John Eliot’s body be buried in the church of the parish where he died.” And so he was buried in the Tower, and no stone marks the spot where he lies.
John Eliot was but forty-two when he laid down his life for the principle of parliamentary government.
Any satisfaction that might have been felt by Charles and Laud at the death of the foremost antagonist to their policy of absolutism was fleeting. For if Eliot was dead, the cause he had championed with such conspicuous sincerity and courage was alive, and John Hampden and John Pym were at hand to carry on the fight till Cromwell and his Ironsides were ready to end the battle.
Charles was determined that, until the commons should be more submissive, he would call no parliament, but would govern through his ministers alone. The difficulty was to find money.
In 1634 London and the seaports were persuaded to furnish supplies for ships on the pretext that piracy must be prevented. A year later and the demand was extended to the inland counties, and John Hampden, taking his stand on the Petition of Right which Charles had granted in 1628, declined to pay. Ten out of twelve of the king’s judges had decided that ship-money might be enforced if the kingdom appeared to be in danger, but against this declared legality there was the decree of parliament forbidding forced loans or taxes without parliamentary sanction.
On this resistance of the ship-money Hampden’s fame has been chiefly built up. The amount was small—only a matter of some twenty shillings—the issue was of a first importance. It was clear to Hampden that if the king could raise money by such methods, what need would there be in the royal mind for the calling of parliament at all? The question was forced upon him: Was parliament an essential part of the constitution? The judges had declared ship-money was legal, other taxation and forced loans could easily find justification on the judicial bench, and thus the crown obtain its revenue, and England ruled without any let or hindrance from its citizens. To admit the position was to see the work of centuries undone, and the old contest in the land for liberties in return for taxes abandoned.
Hampden’s refusal to pay ship-money was a declaration for parliamentary government. No more a republican than Eliot or Pym, Hampden could see that either crown or parliament must be supreme in the affairs of the nation.[109] The constitution was not to be balanced so evenly as Eliot had believed. Eliot himself had been deprived of life for maintaining, not the supremacy but the liberty of parliament. For John Hampden the evils of royal supremacy were obvious and present: misrule, the restoration of a religion banished by authority of crown and parliament, and disliked and feared by the majority of serious-minded people in the country, and the imprisonment of all who claimed the old freedom of parliament.