[1630 A.D.] majesty may command all your subjects to furnish a certain number of ships, with ammunition and provisions, and compel all who refuse to obey. Your majesty alone, too, has to decide whether such danger exists, and when and how it is to be averted." This decision of the judges was everywhere published,1 and adopted by the authorities as the standard of their conduct.i The counties on the seaside complied with a good grace. It would have been against established custom if they had refused to provide vessels for the defence of the shore, and they compounded for the sums at which they were assessed, instead of furnishing the actual ships. But the inland counties had never been subject to this impost. They had defended the land with archers and horsemen, and the men of Warwickshire, Oxford, or Buckingham had never seen a ship. The collectors, however, went their rounds. When they came to the village of Great Kimble in Buckinghamshire, they discovered that the whole population, two squires, twenty-nine yeomen, clerk of the vestry, beadles, bellman, and all, had refused to advance a farthing, and had written a protest to this effect, signed with their names. The first name to this document was one which afterwards grew very great in England. It was John Hampden, Esquire, of Hampden Manor and many other noble domains near the Chiltern Hills; a man to whom the one pound eleven and sixpence, at which he was assessed, was of no consequence, but to whom the arbitrary exaction of the odd sixpence was of very great consequence indeed. JOHN HAMPDEN (1594-1643) The judges, we are to remember, were either promoted for political subserviency or had bought their places. They were removable by the king, and considered that in representing the majesty of the law they were to attend principally to the personal interests of their master. All England was anxiously on the watch for news of the decision. When it became known that two members of the bench had protested against the verdict which condemned Hampden and established the validity of the hated impost, the adverse decision was attributed to the servility of the majority, and justice and law were believed to have prompted the virtuous pair. But the victory was ostensibly with the court, and Wentworth and Laud were more resolved on their avowed policy of "thorough" than before. ['Richard Chambers, who had bravely resisted the illegal levy upon his merchandise, was again imprisoned because he declined to pay his assessment of ship-money. When the case was taken into the courts at Westminster, one of the judges refused to hear counsel, and said there was a rule of law and a rule of government, and that many things which could not be done by the first rule might be done by the other. It is to such that Clarendon c alludes when he says "the damage and mischief cannot be expressed that the crown and state sus tained by the deserved reproach and infamy that attended the judges, by being made use of in this and like acts of power; there being no possibility to preserve the dignity, reverence, and estimation of the laws themselves but by the integrity and innocency of the judges." Vaughani notes that "Chambers does not deserve less of his country than Hampden."] [1630 A.D.] There was nothing now to hinder their wildest schemes. The judges had proclaimed the legal fact that this was an absolute monarchy. "The law was only a servant of the king." "You cannot have a king without those royal rights, no, not by act of parliament. "Acts of parliament cannot hinder a king from commanding the subjects, their persons and goods, and, I say, their money too. No acts of parliament can make any difference." Such was the chorus of falsehood and adulation sung by ten out of the twelve judges of England.b In the words of Gneist, k "The disloyal treatment of the office of judge, which was common to all the Stuarts, was first made evident through the ship-money. The dismissal of the lord chief justice Sir Edward Coke on political grounds had already occurred under James I, by whom a shameless system of the sale of judgeships was introduced, which shattered the honourable repute gained by the courts of law under the Tudors. Under Charles I this filling up of appointments became a political contrivance." a The whole nation felt what an infinitely important question was involved in this apparently trifling suit, and the great majority took part with the accused. In fact every unprejudiced person must still agree in this view of the case, for only one thing was proved by the court party and granted by its opponents, namely, that the king is the head of the state, and as such has the right, in a moment of sudden and extreme danger, to adopt every means for the security of the kingdom. In this correct sense Elizabeth acted in 1588 and met with universal approbation, but on the present occasion there was no imminent or great danger, and the palpable object was merely to establish a right in the king to levy taxes independently of parliament. But such a right had not only been abolished by law before the time of the Stuarts and Tudors, but had lately been again most clearly annulled by the Petition of Right. THE TYRANNY OF LAUD The church presented a counterpart to this confusion in the affairs of the state; the prevailing Episcopal system stigmatised on the one hand Catholicism as superstitious and tyrannical, on the other, the Reformed and Puritans as arbitrary and anarchical. In order to strengthen itself against the attacks of these two parties the church entered into strict alliance with the court and justified the newly founded royal papacy, for which it was gratefully allowed to employ it in many points for its own advantage. Laud, in particular, acted in this spirit with that vehemence which is usually produced by firm conviction and narrow views. The Roman Catholics, pressed on all sides, hoped for the protection of the queen; while the king was not inclined either to offend the Protestants or to violate his coronation oath. And yet this was done, when he dispensed with the Ecclesiastical Laws for money, and endeavoured to secure the assent of the Catholics to his absolute mode of government. For this, the latter became doubly odious, and, besides, were divided among themselves into a Jesuitical and an Antijesuitical party. When Laud, to make the celebration of divine worship more solemn, caused paintings, crosses, altars, etc., to be restored, he was called a papist, though he certainly never thought of laying his power at the feet of Rome. When he and the king allowed all kinds of diversions on Sunday, this was called promoting the most horrible corruption of morals, though no more was intended than to prevent gloomy austerity and arbitrary condemnation of what was innocent. Laud certainly acted in all respects without tact, [1630-1637 A.D.] and everything that he did to make the clergy more respected-for instance, conferring many offices upon them-only exposed them to envy, and doubled the reproaches of the Puritans against the worldly mindedness and corruption of the Episcopal church. Instead of allaying by mildness the violence of opposition, Laud summoned the most distinguished people before him, and inflicted punishment if they had in any manner transgressed the laws of church discipline. He attempted to support morals by means which included an undue tyranny, and were worse than the evils which they were intended to combat: the extent of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction was daily enlarged, all innovations opposed (though Laud himself innovated), the censorship of books made more severe, dissenters removed from their posts, and even laymen refused permission to leave their country and live according to their religious persuasion elsewhere, till they produced an ecclesiastical certificate of their entire agreement with the laws and customs of the church. As always happens in these cases, intolerance and resistance increased together; nay, the attacks on the Episcopal church soon exceeded all bounds of moderation and decorum-for example, in the writings of Leighton, Bastwick, Burton, and Prynne. They called the archbishop an arch officer of the devil, the bishops, satanical lords, abominable traitors, ravening wolves, unjust assertors of the royal rights, contemners of the Holy Scriptures, promoters of superstition, popery, and impiety, servants of the devil, etc.i Alexander Leighton had written a bitter and fanatical pamphlet against prelacy and priestcraft-a learned man, though crazed, like many of his brethren at that time, on religious subjects. Laud brought him before the Star Chamber, and he was condemned to stand in the pillory, to have his nostrils slit and his ears cut off, to be publicly whipped, and to be branded on the cheeks with a hot iron bearing the letters S. S., for "spreader of sedition." As the man had two nostrils, two ears, and two cheeks, the entertainment was repeated, and he was brought out at the end of a week, after half the sentence had been executed, and underwent the remainder, to the satisfaction of the admirers of uniformity.b In Prynne's Histriomastix we read: "Our English shorn and frizzled madams have lost all shame-so many steps in the dance, so many steps towards hell; dancing is the chief honour, plays the chief pleasure of the devil. Within two years forty thousand plays have been sold, better printed and more sought after than Bibles and sermons. Those who attend the playhouse are no better than devils incarnate; at least like those who hunt, play at cards, wear wigs, visit fairs, etc., they are in the high road to damnation. And yet their number is so great that it is proposed to build a sixth chapel to the devil in London; whereas in Rome, in the time of Nero, there were only three." These and similar expressions gave the greatest offence, because it was supposed that Prynne meant to compare the king with Nero, and to insult the queen, who was fond of balls and masquerades. These ultra-Puritans, it was affirmed, “demand a new church, new laws, new amusements, a new king, and endeavour to excite discontent in the people." Prynne said in his defence "that he intended only to attack abuses and express his conviction, but by no means to offend individuals, and least of all the king and queen, or to compare his majesty's government with that of Nero. On the 30th of June, 1637, the court sentenced Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton to pay together a fine of £15,000, to lose their ears, to stand in the pillory, to be branded on both cheeks, and imprisoned for an indefinite period. [1637 A.D.] In the execution of the sentence deliberate cruelty was employed; they were put into the pillory at noon, that their faces might be exposed to the burning heat of the sun; with Prynne's ear, part of the cheek was cut off; their friends were forbidden to visit them in prison, they were allowed neither books nor writing materials, and even those were punished who had hospitably received them. In like manner, Wharton and Lilburne were punished, put in the pillory, whipped, and mutilated. All suffered with the greatest composure, called to mind the sufferings of Christ, and spoke with such energy of enthusiasm and conviction that they excited compassion in all, and in many the persuasion that it was only for truth and right that they could suffer with such courage. The laws and regulations prove that a false expectation was entertained of making real improvements by the interference of government in petty matters: taxes on wine and other articles, regulations for the weight of wagons, the packing of butter, the number of hackney-coaches,1 and numberless other things.i The expedients to which the majesty of England was reduced to raise a revenue would have been laughable if they had not brought such misery in their train. His first proceeding was not very severe, but it yielded him a hundred thousand pounds. He threatened every person who held land of the value of forty pounds a year with knighthood. The fine, however, for exemption was very generally paid, and the ridicule of a whole nation of Sir Johns and Sir Thomases was avoided. His second proceeding was worse. He discovered old definitions of forest bounds on which the neighbouring gentry and freeholders had encroached for hundreds of years. Stately mansions were standing in pastoral regions twenty miles from the limits of the royal chase, as they had been known for ten generations. They were forfeited and released at a high value, or carried to the king's account. A forest of six miles' circuit was increased to sixty, and no man could feel secure that his estate had never been included in some forgotten hunting-ground in the days of the deer-loving kings. His next was more injurious still. He re-established many monopolies in direct contradiction to the Petition of Rights, and enriched himself with the sale of the sole right to sell or make articles of universal use.2 In all these actions he was prompted by his legal advisers, Littleton and Noy, who had so lately incurred his displeasure by protesting against the slightest exercise of his prerogative.b He extorted fines for disobedience to proclamations, even when he knew that such proclamations were illegal. In the last reign James had persuaded himself that the contagious maladies which annually visited the metropolis arose from the increase of its size and the density of its population; and to check the evil he repeatedly forbade the erection of additional buildings. But as the judges had declared such proclamations contrary to law, the prohibition was disregarded; new houses annually arose, and the city extended its boundaries in every direction. The rents of these buildings were calculated at one hundred thousand pounds per annum; and Charles appointed commissioners to go through each parish, and summon the owners before them. [Hackney-coaches were forbidden in London under severe penalties, because they incommoded the king, the queen, and the nobility, were the cause of danger, and made hay and straw dear. John Taylor, the Water-poet, said the hackneys impeded the butchers when they drove their cattle through the streets. Sedan chairs, introduced in 1634, now obtained great vogue.] [Thus, for example, the corporation of soap-boilers paid for their patent ten thousand pounds, and engaged to pay a duty of eight pounds on every ton of soap.] |