The wind of opposition was rising to a gale. With the sitting of the Long Parliament, which convened on the 3rd November, 1640, the tempest broke. The immediate occasion of the summons was the universal demand of the people and the peers for a session of Parliament, coupled with emptiness of the treasury which came with the commencement of the disastrous Scottish war. The composition of the commons was overwhelmingly anti-regal;[370] the popular leaders had been at work in the counties ever since the dissolution of the Short Parliament looking to the return of a strong majority in opposition to the king. The assembly convened full of the idea that “they had now had an opportunity to make their country happy by removing all grievances and pulling up the causes of them by the roots, if all men would do their duties.”[371]
Parliament lost no time in setting about its work. Proceedings were immediately instituted looking to the impeachment of the Earl of Strafford, Archbishop Laud, Finch, and six of the judges who had figured in the ship money case. Various victims of the tyrannical jurisdiction of the Star Chamber were set at liberty. The commons exhibited their uncompromising hostility to the king by voting assistance to their “brethren” the Scots, whose army was in possession of much territory on the English side of the border. They granted them £25,000 a month as long as their stay in England should be needful, and in addition £300,000 as an indemnity.
With such acts of open opposition to the king in process, it was natural that Parliament should set itself to clean up all the abuses which of recent times had crept into the government. Its actions were not subversive of the constitution; on the contrary it left unassailed many prerogatives of the king. On the 22nd June, 1641, Parliament granted to the king tunnage and poundage for a length of time somewhat less than two months[372] and in the same bill declared, “that it is and hath been the ancient right of the subjects of this realm, that no subsidy, custom, impost, or other charge whatsoever ought or may be laid or imposed upon any merchandise exported or imported by subjects, denizens,Royal exaction of tunnage and poundage declared illegal or aliens without common consent in Parliament.”[373] The Act prescribed also the punishment which should be inflicted upon officers who in time to come should exact payments not sanctioned by Parliament. They were to “incur and sustain the pains, penalties, and forfeitures ordained and provided by the Statute of Provision and Premunire made in the sixteenth year of King Richard II, and shall also from thenceforth be disabled during his life to see or implead any person in any action real, mixed, or personal, or in any court whatsoever.” Thus was it enacted that tunnage and poundage exacted by authority of the crown was illegal, and protected merchants from being sued by the customs officers in case of refusal to pay the unlawful imposition. The king received tunnage and poundage by six subsequent acts for short terms down to the 2nd July, 1642.
The Ship Money Act, 7th August, 1641
Six weeks later, on the 7th August, 1641, Parliament turned its attention toward the matter of ship money. On that date it passed an “Act for the declaring unlawful and void the late proceedings touching Ship-Money, and for the vacating of all records and process concerning the same.”[374] The act cites the Hampden Case and others of a similar nature and outlines the plea of the royal prerogative as given in the extra-judicial opinion of the judges. It condemns “all which writs and proceedings” as being “utterly against the law of the land.” In greater detail it enacts “that the said charge imposed upon the subject for the providing and furnishing of ships commonly called ship money, and the said extra-judicial opinion of the said justices ... and the said judgment against John Hampden, were and are contrary to and against the laws and statutes of this realm, the right of property, the liberty of the subjects, former resolutions in Parliament and the Petition of Right.” The act also provided that all particulars desired in the Petition of Right should be “strictly holden and observed as in the same Petition they are prayed and expressed.” The ship writs and the Hampden judgment are specifically annulled.[375]
Thus came to an end the long chain of statutes which Parliament from its inception had been forging to fetter the arms of the king straining toward the prize of arbitrary taxation. The virtue of the Long Parliament is thus commented upon by Hallam: “In the first place,” he says, “it will appear ... that they made scarce any material change in our constitution, such as it had been established and recognized under the house of Plantagenet.... Thus in by far the greater part of the enactments of 1641, the monarchy lost nothing that it anciently possessed; and the balance of our constitution might seem rather to have been restored to its former equipoise, than to have undergone any change.... It is to be observed in the second place, that by these salutary restrictions, and some new retrenchments of pernicious or abused prerogative the Long Parliament formed our constitution such nearly as it now exists.”[376] The legislation of 1641 in effect restored to Parliament what power it nominally held two centuries before.
A current of reaction now set in favorable to the king. The leaders in the commons discovered that the popular support to their measures was becoming weak, that the royalist party was recruiting adherents from the former supporters of the opposition, that their own backing was by a party, not by the nation. With the hope of winning back full national adherence to Parliament,The Grand Remonstrance, 1st December, 1641 the Grand Remonstrance was framed by the House of Commons and presented to the king, on the 1st December 1641.[377] It purported to show the present state of the kingdom, the evil conditions which Parliament had succeeded in bettering, and the darkness of the future, if support were withdrawn from Parliament. With respect to taxation, the Remonstrance recites the various illegalities and abuses which the crown had practiced and the steps which the commons had taken to provide for their correction. For future safeguard against their return it suggests “that for the better preservation of the liberties and laws, all illegal grievances and exactions should be presented and punished at the sessions and assizes; and that judges and justices should be sworn to the due execution of the Petition of Right and other laws.”
The Puritan Revolution
With the delivery of the Grand Remonstrance, the contest for Parliamentary taxation became of relatively small moment in the great conflicts of the Puritan Revolution. The struggle over the impeachment of Pym and the popular leaders in the House, the attempt of the king to secure absolute command of the militia, the battles on the field and in the House of Commons during the Civil War, the events which led up to the execution of Charles—these were neither immediately caused by the conflict over taxation nor did they have immediate effect upon it. Taxation up to 1641 was a prime cause of opposition to the crown; thereafter it ceased to be of so great importance.
Accession of Charles II, 1660