There were far more serious troubles ahead. If the King could raise money without summoning Parliament, he could rule absolutely. If Parliament could control not only the raising, but the expenditure of money, it would be the supreme source of power, and the King but a figure-head; in other words, the government would be put upon the basis on which it has actually stood during the present century. For many reigns the Commons had been accustomed to vote to each king for life, at the outset of his reign, the duties on exports and imports, known as tonnage and poundage; but during the years immediately past men had been forced to think much on liberty and self-government. Parliament was in no mood to surrender absolute power to the King.
With the right to lay taxes and to supervise the expenditure of money—that is, to conduct the government—was intertwined the question of religion. The mass of Englishmen adhered rather loosely to the Anglican communion, and were not extreme Puritans; on certain points, however, they were tinged very deeply with Calvinism. They were greatly angered by the attitude of those bishops, who under the lead of Laud showed themselves more hostile to Protestant than to Catholic dogmas. These bishops preached not only that the views in Church matters held by the bulk of Englishmen were wrong, but furthermore that it was the duty of every subject to render entire obedience to the sovereign, no matter what the sovereign did, and they insisted that parliaments were of right mere ciphers in the State. Such doctrines were not only irritating from the theological stand-point; they also struck at the root of political freedom. The religious antagonism was accentuated by the fact that at this time the Protestant cause in Germany had touched the lowest point it ever reached during the Thirty Years’ War, and the anger and alarm of the English Protestants, as they saw the Calvinists and Lutherans of Denmark and North Germany overcome, were heightened by the indifference, if not satisfaction, with which the King and the bishops looked at the struggle.
In 1629 the Commons, under the lead of Eliot and Pym, took advanced ground alike on the questions of religion and of taxation. Pym was supplementing Eliot’s work, which was to make the House of Commons the supreme authority in England, by striving to associate together a majority of the members for the achievement of certain common objects; in other words, he was laying the foundation of party government. Under the lead of these two men, the first two Parliamentary and popular leaders in the modern sense, the House of Commons passed resolutions demanding uniformity in religious belief throughout the kingdom and condemning every innovation in religion, and declaring enemies to the kingdom and traitors to its liberties whoever advised the levying of tonnage and poundage without the authority of Parliament, or whoever voluntarily paid those duties. The first clause hit Catholics and Dissenters alike, but was especially aimed at the bishops and their followers, who stood closest to the King; and the second was, of course, intended to transfer the sovereignty from the King to Parliament—in other words, from the King to the people. Charles met the challenge by dissolving Parliament. Eleven years were to pass before another met. Meantime, the King governed as a despot; and it must be remembered that when he deliberately chose thus to govern as a despot, responsible to no legal tribunal, he at once threw his subjects back on the only remedies which it is possible to enforce against despotism—deposition or death.
Charles was bitterly angry at the sturdy independence shown by the Commons, and marked out for vengeance those who had been foremost in thwarting his wishes. His course was easy. The Petition of Right formulated a principle, but as yet it offered no safeguard against an unscrupulous king; while the Star Chamber court, and the other judges for that matter, held office at his pleasure, and acted as his subservient tools in fining and imprisoning merchants who refused payment of the duties, or men whose acts or words the king chose to consider seditious. Eliot and some of his fellow-members were thrown into prison because of the culminating proceedings in Parliament. Eliot’s comrades made submission and were released, but Eliot refused to acknowledge that the King, through his courts, had any right to meddle with what was done in Parliament. He took his stand firmly on the ground that the King was not the master of Parliament, and of course this could but mean ultimately that Parliament was master of the King. In other words, he was one of the earliest leaders of the movement which has produced English freedom and English government as we now know them. He was also its martyr. He was kept in the Tower without air or exercise for three years, the King vindictively refusing to allow the slightest relaxation in his confinement, even when it brought on consumption. In December, 1632, he died; and the King’s hatred found its last expression in denying to his kinsfolk the privilege of burying him in his Cornish home.
Charles set eagerly to work to rule the kingdom by himself. To the Puritan dogma of enforced unity of religious belief—utterly mischievous, and just as much fraught with slavery to the soul in one sect as another—he sought, through Laud, to oppose the only less mischievous, because silly, doctrine of enforced uniformity in the externals of public worship. Laud was a small and narrow man, hating Puritanism in every form, and persecuting bitterly every clergyman or layman who deviated in any way from what he regarded as proper ecclesiastical custom. His tyranny was of that fussy kind which, without striking terror, often irritates nearly to madness. He was Charles’s instrument in the effort to secure ecclesiastical absolutism.
The instrument through which the King sought to establish the royal prerogative in political affairs was of far more formidable temper. Immediately after the dissolution of Parliament Wentworth had obtained his price from the King, and was appointed to be his right-hand man in administering the kingdom. A man of great shrewdness and insight, he seems to have struggled to govern well, according to his lights; but he despised law and acted upon the belief that the people should be slaves, unpermitted, as they were unfit, to take any share in governing themselves. After a while Laud was made archbishop; and Wentworth was later made Lord Strafford.
Wentworth and Laud, with their associates, when they tried to govern on such terms, were continually clashing with the people. A government thus carried on naturally aroused resistance, which often itself took unjustifiable forms; and this resistance was, in its turn, punished with revolting brutality. Criticism of Laudian methods, or of existing social habits, might take scurrilous shape; and then the critic’s ears were hacked off as he stood in the pillory, or he was imprisoned for life.
Archbishop Laud.
From the portrait at Lambeth Palace, painted by Vandyke.
By permission of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The great fight was made, not on a religious, but on a purely political question—that of Ship Money. The king wished to go to war with the Dutch, and to raise his fleet he issued writs, first to the maritime counties, and then to every shire in England. He consulted his judges, who stated that his action was legal: as well they might, for when a judge disagreed with him on any important point, he was promptly dismissed from office. But there was one man in the kingdom who thought differently, John Hampden, a Buckinghamshire ’squire, who had already once sat as a silent member in Parliament, together with another equally silent member of the same social standing, his nephew, Oliver Cromwell. Hampden was assessed at twenty shillings. The amount was of no more importance than the value of the tea which a century and a half later was thrown into Boston Harbor; but in each case a vital principle—the same vital principle—was involved. If the King could take twenty shillings from Hampden without authority from the representatives of the people in Parliament assembled, then his rule was absolute: he could do what he pleased. On the other hand, if the House of Commons could do as it wished in granting money only for whatever need it chose to recognize in the kingdom, then the House of Commons was supreme. In Hampden’s view but one course was possible—he was for the Parliament and the nation against the King; and he refused to pay the sum, facing without a murmur the punishment for his contumacy.