THE STUARTS: 1603-1689

The theory of divine right, by which the Stuarts laid claim to a sovereignty as irresponsible as it was far-reaching, in practice came into direct conflict with another theory which had been taking shape for some four centuries, the supremacy of Parliament. In the field of taxation the issue is scarcely less apparent. Parliament asserted the supremacy of its will over all kinds of taxes, indirect as well as direct. The crown, on the other hand, hesitating to close with the representatives of the people over a question of their authority in direct taxation, maintained that unchecked royal power extended to indirect taxes, including duties at the ports. Furthermore, the crown, whenever occasion arose, sought to elude the hold of Parliament upon direct taxation, by resorting to the familiar resources of benevolences and the sale of monopolies, and at last to the levy of ship money.

With the issue so direct, the great question was that of strength. Should the crown with its array of adherents, upholding as their ideal the perfect exercise of the royal prerogative, prove itself stronger than the House of Commons? Or were the commons to prevail, standing for the principle that the representatives of the people sitting in Parliament should have complete control over the public purse?

James Stuart, swollen with intellectual pride, was, according to the Duc de Sully, “the wisest fool in Europe.” Worse than his vanity were his unsteadiness and his insincerity, traceable, perhaps, to the Italian-Gallic stock whence he was bred.[293] Divine right, a doctrine by its nature offensive to Englishmen, was in him doubly hateful because he was not born king, but was proclaimed by the Council, an act ratified, however, by popular voice, and subsequently acquiesced in by Parliament.[294] In the matter of religion, he was not more agreeable; suspected at times of plots to further Roman Catholicism, he assumed toward the Puritans especial animosity, they standing in his mind not so much as preachers of religion as propagandists of republicanism.

He wasted no time in getting things started. In the proclamation by which he summoned his first Parliament, he assumed the power of dictating what manner of men should compose it, and directed that his Court of Chancery should decide whether or not the certificates of election fulfilled the royal conditions, “and if any shall be found to be made contrarie to this proclamation, the same is to be rejected as unlawful and insufficient.”[295] The commons, however, shortly after their convening, vindicated their privilege in the case of Goodwin and Fortescue, and succeeded in maintaining thereafter their right to decide upon the legality of returns.[296] In their “Apology of the House of Commons, made to the king, touching their Privileges,” nearly at the close of this session, the commons complained against the monopolies possessed by the great trading companies in the face of many statutes to the contrary, and the oppressive exercise of the ancient prerogative of purveyance.[297]

In the department of regular taxation, however, James at first adopted a conciliatory attitude. On the 26th June, 1604, James sent to the commons a letter “written with his own hand but corrected as to the spelling,” in which he expressed his pleasure as to a subsidy.[298] He stated his confidence in their good-will, assuring them “in the word of a King” that he would “be so far from taking it unkindly, their not offering” to him a subsidy, and that he would “only interpret it to proceed from the care they have, that our people should not have any occasion of distaste.” James’s letter accomplished for him what may well have been his purpose; the commons immediately granted to him tunnage and poundage for the space of his life.[299]

At the two subsequent sessions of 1605-6 and 1606-7 there was constant friction between king and commons, yet there were no very remarkable assertions of royal prerogative or of parliamentary privilege. At the session of 1605, Parliament granted the king three entire subsidies and six fifteenths, designed principally to meet the royal indebtedness, some of which held over since the time of Elizabeth.[300] After the prorogation, James called no session of Parliament until the 9th February, 1609-10.

But James could not meet his obligations with the ordinary revenues of the crown. He was spending between £500,000 and £600,000 a year, and his income was in the neighborhood of £400,000; his annual deficit, therefore, was not far from £150,000.[301] James was obliged to turn elsewhere, and the consequence of his action was the famous Bate Case, the decision in which was a step toward freeing the king from parliamentary control over his revenues.

In 1603, in answer to the agitation against the great monopolies, an Eastern trading The Bate Case company, known as the Levant Company, surrendered its charter. This company, amongst other privileges, had enjoyed the right of collecting a duty on currants from other merchants trading in them, and paid to the crown in return for the franchise £4,000 a year. When, therefore, the company yielded up its charter, the crown was the loser by £4,000 annually. In order to make up for the loss, the crown itself proceeded to lay a duty on currants.[302] In 1605, the Levant Company again received a charter, but James levied upon it, nevertheless, his duty on currants, the rate being five shillings on the hundred-weight over and above that granted to him by Parliament in its tunnage and poundage bill. It was a merchant of the Levant Company, John Bate, who raised the question of the legality of the imposition. The case was taken to the Court of Exchequer for decision. Had the barons confined themselves to the strict laws of the matter, there would not have been great ground for objection to their decision. Precedent drawn from the time of the Tudors and statutes of the same period, were capable of being brought forward in a fair adjudication of the case, and would have substantiated the contention of the crown, thus returning customs exactions, nearly to the situation of 1300.[303] The fact that the four barons decided the case unanimously against John Bate could not, therefore, be reasonably reprehended. But they permitted themselves to slip off into philosophical generalizations which struck the people as absolutist in tenor.

“It seemeth to me strange,” says Baron Clarke in his opinion, “that any subjects would contend with the King in this high point of prerogative.... As it is not a kingdom without subjects and government, so he is not a king without revenues.... The revenue of the Crown is the very essential part of the Crown, and he who rendeth that from the king pulleth also his crown from his head, for it cannot be separated from the crown.” He proceeded to advance the opinion that the Statute of Edward III[304] which prohibited to the crown the right of levying new impositions on wool, woolfells, and leather, and which provided that there be only imposed “the custom and subsidy granted to the king,” had no effect in the present instance, because it extended to Edward III alone, “and shall not bind his successors, for it is a principal part of the Crown of England which the King cannot diminish.”

The opinion of Chief Baron Fleming was scarcely less sweeping. “The King’s power is double,” he said, “ordinary and absolute.... That of the ordinary is for the profit of particular subjects, for the execution of civil justice ... in the ordinary courts, and nominated ... with us the common law; and these laws cannot be changed without Parliament.... The absolute power of the king is not that which is converted or executed to private use, ... but is only that which is applied to the general benefit of the people.... This power is not guided by the rules which direct only at the common law, and is most properly named policy and government.... The matter in question is material matter of state, and ought to be ruled by the rules of policy, and if it be so, the king hath done well to execute his extraordinary power. All customs, be they old or new, are no other but the effects and issues of trades and commerce with foreign nations; but all commerce and affairs with foreigners ... are made by the absolute power of the king; and he who hath power of causes hath power also of effects.”[305]

Parliament took its stand on the subject of the impositions even before the decision was published. In the Petition of Grievances sent up by the commons at the end of the session of 1606, a list which contained so many complaints that James remarked that “they had sent an oyes through the nation to find them,” the plea was made that no such duty could be demanded legally without the consent of Parliament. The decision was announced to them when they reassembled in November 1606, but they took no action and for a time the matter rested.

But it was James himself who, in his characteristic tactless obstinacy, forced the issue. On the 29th July, 1608, taking advantage of The Book of Rates published under decision in the Bate Case, 1608 the Bate decision, he published under the authority of the Great Seal his Book of Rates, which laid heavy duties upon almost all articles of merchandise, “to be forever hereafter paid to the king and his successors on pain of his displeasure.”[306] The statement of James’s own views on the subject could not be more clearly put than he himself expressed them in the commission for the levy of the impositions addressed to the Earl of Salisbury, Treasurer of England. “This special power and prerogative,” he asserted, “(amongst many others) hath both by men of understanding in all ages and by the laws of all nations been yielded and acknowledged to be proper and inherent in the persons of princes, that they may according to their several occasions raise to themselves such fit and competent means by levying of customs and impositions upon merchandise transported out of their kingdom or brought into their dominions ... as to their wisdoms and discretions may seem convenient.”[307]

Even with the money thus obtained, James was obliged at last after a lapse of nearly two years and a half to turn to Parliament. He summoned it for the 9th February 1609-10. The commons, almost unanimously opposed to the exercise of the royal prerogative in the matter of the imposition, came prepared to dispute the decision in the Bate Case. The discussion, carried on in the face of a royal prohibition, was managed by Hakewill, Yelverton, and Whitelocke.[308] The upshot was Remonstrance from the Commons, 1609-10 a remonstrance in which the commons reminded the king that “the policy and constitution of this your kingdom appropriates unto the kings of this realm, with the assent of the Parliament, as well the sovereign power of making laws as that of taxing or imposing upon the subjects’ goods or merchandises wherein they have justly such a property as may not without their consent, be altered or changed.” Further, they pointed to the former occasions when the commons had complained in Parliament of similar impositions, and upon which redress was forthcoming. Reference was made to the action of “famous kings,” who “agreed that this old fundamental right should be further declared and established by act of Parliament, wherein it is provided that no such charges should ever be laid upon the people without their common consent, as may appear by sundry records of former times.” They went on to say, “We, therefore, your Majesty’s most humble Commons assembled in Parliament, following the examples of this worthy case of our ancestors, and out of a duty to those for whom we serve, finding that your Majesty, without advice or consent of Parliament, hath lately, in time of peace, set both greater impositions, and far more in number than any of your noble ancestors did in time of war, have with all humility presumed to present this most just and necessary petition unto your Majesty: That all impositions set without the assent of Parliament may be quite abolished and taken away; and that your Majesty, in imitation likewise of your noble progenitors, will be pleased that a law may be made during this session of Parliament to declare that all impositions set or to be set, upon your people, their goods and merchandises, save only by common assent in the Parliament, are and shall be void.”[309] The outcome was unsatisfactory. A bill framed to prohibit further impositions than those already in existence, was passed by the House of Commons, but was cast out in the upper chamber. The king was still able to cover himself with the decision in the Bate Case.

The attitude of James toward a book “lately published by one Doctor Cowel” and esteemed to “contain certain matters of scandal and offence toward the high court of Parliament,”[310] all but brought him into active conflict with the commons. This publication called “The Interpreter” contained a defense of the royal prerogative in such terms as greatly to offend the power of Parliament. Doctor Cowel had this to say under the head of “Subsidy:”

“... A tax or tribute assessed by Parliament, and granted by the Commons to be levied of every subject according to the value of his lands or goods, after the rate of 4s. in the pound for land and 2s. 8d. for goods, as it is not commonly used at this day. Some hold opinion that this subsidy is granted by the subject to the Prince, in recompense or consideration, that whereas the Prince of his absolute power might make laws of himself, he doth of favor admit the consent of his subjects therein, that all things in their own confession may be done with the greater indifferency.”[311]

King James had been thoughtless enough to let fall words of commendation for the book, and his approval was followed by a request from the commons for a conference with the lords. James, however, wisely withdrew from his position and issued a proclamation prohibiting the further circulation of the work and recalling the copies already issued. Thus did the storm blow over.

At this same session of Parliament, James, through the Lord Treasurer, offered to accept a composition for the incidents of feudal tenure, including the right of purveyance. By this so-called Great Contract, Parliament was to provide for an annual payment to the king of £200,000. But the idea, which at first was distasteful to the commons, shortly became equally out of favor with the king. The amount of money required seemed excessive, and the commons feared that it might make the king independent of them. The king, on the other hand, arrived ultimately at the conclusion that by careful manipulation he could readily increase his income to a sum larger than that stated in the Great Contract. Final consideration was put over to the session of Parliament called for the 16th October following. At the last moment, however, when an agreement seemed by no means hopeless, a religious misunderstanding intervened, and the negotiations fell through.

The matter of a subsidy was treated with somewhat greater favor, though with small generosity. Parliament granted the king one entire subsidy and one fifteenth and tenth.[312] Parliament was dissolved 9th February, 1611, and for three years James tried to carry on his government without it.

James’s attempt at absolutism was not a financial success; a court which was as extravagant as it was dissolute helped him increase his deficit; he ran behind about £200,000 a year, notwithstanding the fact that he set in motion all the machinery of Petty extortion after the dissolution of Parliament petty extortion that he dared. He tried to force loans on the security of his privy seal but frequently met with refusal from which there was no appeal. The jurisdiction of the Star Chamber was used as a means to lay fines which were usually unjust and always excessive. He sold peerages and raised money on the crown lands, and induced the French king and the Dutch to pay up old debts owing to England.

His enormous annual deficit forced him in 1614 to summon his second Parliament. It came with a great and active majority lined up against the king. It speedily passed by a unanimous vote a resolution against the king’s right of imposing taxes without the consent of Parliament, and demanded a conference on that subject with the House of Lords;[313] the lords, however, turned to the judges hoping to obtain from them enlightenment on the legal points involved, but the judges, by the words of Chief Justice Coke, refused to render an extra-judicial opinion. The conference was then refused. The king, becoming impatient at the delay of the commons in accomplishing the purpose for which he had summoned them to Parliament, with his usual failure to adapt himself to circumstances, sent a message to the House threatening a dissolution of Parliament unless procedure were immediately taken in the direction of granting supplies.[314] The commons met the issue squarely; they said that they were determined to conclude the matter of the impositions before granting a supply. On the 7th of June, two months and two days after the date upon which it had been convened, James redeemed his word and dissolved Parliament. It had not passed a single bill and thus earned the title by which it is known to history,—the “Addled” Parliament. But it had succeeded in maintaining its principle of making supply wait upon redress of grievances, and some of its members had shot barbed shafts at the king, wherefore James locked up those who had aimed most surely.

With the hope gone of securing a grant, James had to return to his old courses of obtaining income. Forced loans, monopolies, heavy fines, feudal payments rigorously exacted, and the systematic extortion of Resort to extortion benevolences, figured in his programme. The Council sent out orders to all the sheriffs and magistrates to send in contributions from all men of ability to pay; to those who refused, suggestions were made of impending evil. The judges of assize were especially urged to recommend payments. The benevolences netted less than £43,000 for the three years during which they were made.[315]

But the nation did not submit tamely. Several counties sent up protests against the demand, recalling in defense of their position the Statute of Richard III which forbade the levying of “exactions, called benevolences.” Case of Oliver St. John The refusal of Oliver St. John to the request for a benevolence by the mayor of Marlborough, brought him into immediate conflict with the king. His written reply to the mayor maintained the illegality of the demand on the ground that it was contrary to Magna Carta and to the Statute of Richard III. He further charged the king with breaking his coronation oath, and declared that all who paid the benevolence were incriminated with him. He was haled before the Star Chamber and sentenced by it to pay a fine of £5,000 and to imprisonment during the king’s pleasure. Thus it was that James tried to rule without a Parliament.

But the rule could not long continue. James summoned his third Parliament for the 30th January, 1620-21. He addressed both Houses in a conciliatory manner, hopefully and with many promises. “For you to hunt after grievances,” he said, “to the prejudice of your king and yourselves, is not the errand: deal with me as I deserve at your hands; I will leave nothing undone that becomes a just king, if you deal with me accordingly.”[316] The commons were in a good temper and a reconciliation seemed far more likely to eventuate than a struggle.

As for the royal advice about grievances, the commons were slow to take it. When, shortly after the beginning of the session, it was moved that the House proceed to the consideration of a supply, it was stated that supply and redress of grievances Supply waits upon redress of grievances should go “hand in hand together,” that they were “as twins; to go together and have no precedency.”[317] It was resolved that the business of the supply be not decided independently of a consideration of grievances and of a petition to the king for freedom of speech, thus recalling the imprisonment of members in 1614 at the time of the dissolution of the Addled Parliament.

High in the list of grievances was the granting of monopolies. Patents of monopoly subserved a number of diverse purposes, some of which were entirely legitimate. Objection could not be made to restrictions in the sale of certain commodities such as liquors and explosives, nor to the assurance given to an inventor that he had an exclusive right to profits accruing from his invention. But James was free with his grants of monopoly for the enrichment of his courtiers and himself. Parliament laid by the heels the monopolists who had most abused their privileges, and Revival of impeachment by the Commons impeached and condemned Sir Giles Mompesson and Sir Francis Mitchell.[318]

Before the judgment was given, however, but not before it was clearly discernible what was to be the trend of events, the commons set themselves to the consideration of a supply bill and on the 18th March passed it unanimously. It provided for two entire subsidies. “In the midst of their inquiries into public grievances,Granting of a supply the commons had thought fit to consider the necessities of the State and grant the king a supply.”[319]

The major part of the session was spent in reforming abuses, both by impeaching the officials responsible for them, and by framing legislation for their correction. Chief amongst those who fell under condemnation at the bar of the House of Lords was Lord Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England, convicted of bribery. King James in the early part of the session seemed not out of sympathy with these efforts to reform the administration, but as time wore on and the commons still busied themselves with investigations of official misconduct, he wearied, and on the 28th May, the Lord Treasurer declared to the lords the king’s determination to adjourn Parliament. Two of the five reasons assigned for the adjournment were these: “For that the profits of his Majesty’s revenues are, as it were, at a stand;” and “The omission of the State.”[320] A week later, after great complaint by the commons, the session was adjourned to reassemble on the 14th November. Throughout the four months during which it had sat, no complaint had been registered against the impositions at the outports. Apparently the commons were willing for the moment James in a temper adjourns Parliament to let them rest, or else, as is more likely, were quite unmindful of them.

Parliament met on the 20th November for its final session. Lord Treasurer Cranfield reported that the exchequer was depleted, that the two subsidies which had been granted the previous March had been spent in furthering the interests of James’s son-in-law, Frederic, Elector Palatine, and “that the business now in hand required a great and speedy supply.”[321] It was understood that the cost of maintaining an army in the Palatinate would be not far from £900,000 a year.Dilatory action on a subsidy The Lord Treasurer wished “that the Commons would so handle this business as to make his Majesty in love with the Parliaments.”

But they took some time to consider it. At the end of the first week, the commons resolved in committee of the whole house upon a single subsidy, which, since it was to be levied doubly upon papists, would provide some £100,000 for the prosecution of war in the Palatine.[322] That was as near an actual grant as the commons came during the session. On the 1st December, they fell into a conflict with the king over matters of privilege, which had its rise in the imprisonment of Sir Edwin Sandys during the last recess of Parliament, presumably for utterances made in the House. There were petitions to James and replies from him, culminating in a remarkable Protestation asserting the right of free speech in the House.[323] On the day of the presentation of this Protestation, the 18th December, James adjourned Parliament to the 8th February; he then sent for the Journal of the House of Commons and tore from it the objectionable entry with his own hand. In the stress of these events, the proposed subsidy was allowed to slip out of mind; only did the lords propose a meeting with the commons to consider a supply, and this came to naught. On the 6th January, 1621-22, James saw fit not to await the reassembling of Parliament, but issued a proclamation of dissolution in which he denounced those who had questioned his prerogatives in the House of Commons as “ill-tempered spirits.” Then he committed to prison such of them as he regarded as being most hostile, amongst whom were Sir Edward Coke, Pym, Selden, and Mallory.[324]

James convened his last Parliament on the 19th February, 1623-24. In the interval which had elapsed since the dissolution, James recovered his conciliatory attitude toward the commons. The plan of marrying the Prince of Wales, the young Prince Charles, to the Infanta of Spain, had been given up, and thus Englishmen were relieved of what to them had been a pro-popish plot, and had been deprecated again and again as the odious Spanish Match. The programme with respect to the Palatinate favored by the king was that favored by the commons, and the reign of James seemed to be approaching a happy conclusion. Supply granted for the Palatine war The commons came forward with a grant of three subsidies and three fifteenths and tenths, providing a somewhat greater sum than £300,000.[325] The money was voted on the condition that, in order to insure its application to the naval and military establishments, it be paid into the hands of commissioners appointed by the commons, and be expended by them upon direction of the council of war. The sympathy existing between king and Parliament was further exhibited in the successful passage of an act forbidding monopolies in the sale of any merchandise or in practicing any trade, the only legislative act of constructive importance in his reign.[326] Parliament was dissolved on the 29th May, 1624.

Less than a year later King James died. Apparently at the end of his reign he was learning wisdom for he was beginning to understand Parliament. He left his crown to the keeping of a son who had in no wise profited by the father’s experience. Charles I, brought up in an atmosphere of divine right, was predisposed to pursue that theory to the end. But worse than that, in arguing his melancholy destiny, was his faithlessness. An odious policy executed without respect for truth brought him at last to death outside his palace of Whitehall.

The first Parliament of Charles I recalls vividly the mid-reign experiences of James. It convened on the 18th June, 1625, and was met with a request for a large and unconditional grant with which to prosecute the war which Charles had inherited from his father. The commons, however, were careful; they looked rather for a solid establishment of government at home than for a war abroad. Breaking the habit of two centuries, they offered Charles tunnage and poundage for a year instead of the term of his life, a measure which, because of lack of precedent, was rejected in the House of Lords; and granted only two subsidies.[327] On the 10th August, the chancellor delivered a message to the commons from the king. He desired “a present answer about his supply: If not, he will take care of their healths Worry about the supply more than they themselves, and make as good a shift for his present occasions as he could.”[328] The House spent the rest of the day debating the matter, and on the next proceeded in the consideration of grievances, postponing the supply. Delay the king would not brook; perceiving that the commons were bent upon a redress of grievances before the granting of further aid, and because in the debates they had presumed “to reflect upon some great persons near himself,” on the 12th August he dissolved Parliament,[329] and looked to his privy seal as a means of revenue.

Six months later, on the 6th February, 1625-26, Charles opened his second Parliament and met with no better success. The commons did not consider immediately the question of a supply, but to the immense irritation of the king, proceeded to inquire into the conduct of the Duke of Buckingham, the favorite of Charles. He sent a message to the commons saying that he would “not allow any of his servants to be questioned amongst them, much less such as are of eminent place and near unto him.” But the chief significance of his message was in its conclusion. “I wish you would hasten my supply,” so it ran, “or else it will be worse for yourselves; for if any ill happen, I think I shall be the last that shall feel it.”[330] The commons replied with a grant of three subsidies and three fifteenths, but the conditions were such as to make it A grant with hard conditions almost worse for Charles than no grant at all. The bill was not to be brought in until the king should have given answer to their list of grievances, and among the grievances the Duke of Buckingham was chief.[331] Later a fourth subsidy was added and a movement was put on foot to give Charles tunnage and poundage for life; but in the bill it was specified that a remonstrance should be drawn up against his taking those duties without the previous consent of Parliament.[332] Then the commons went on with their formal impeachment of Buckingham. But before the matter was settled, and consequently before the Commons had made final grants of the promised subsidies, Charles, in the hope of relieving the desperate plight of his favorite, dissolved Parliament, on the 15th June.

The dissolution left Charles without the means with which to carry on the proposed war with Spain. He turned again to old expedients; he forced loans, exacted benevolences, and suspended penal laws for a consideration. The loans took the form of a general levy according to the well-known rate of the subsidy and were thus in effect assessments of a general tax by the arbitrary power of the crown. Of great importance in the light of subsequent history, was the requisition made upon the seaport towns for ships armed and equipped, the precursor of the demand for ship money. Imprisonment, impressment into the royal navy, the quartering of soldiers upon the inhabitants, the dismissal from offices held of the crown, were the several rewards of those sufficiently courageous to stand by the principle that taxes be laid only by the assent of Parliament.[333] By an order in Council it was declared, “that all customs, duties, and imposts on all goods and merchandizes exported and imported, which, for many ages had been continued, and esteemed a principal and necessary part of the revenue of the crown, should be levied and paid.” The hope was expressed that these levies “might receive an absolute settlement by Parliament,” when that body should again assemble.[334]

Not being content with the financial difficulties incident to the war with Spain, Charles, at the suggestion of Buckingham, slipped into a war with France. Buckingham led an expedition to the Isle of RhÉ, met with disaster and ignominy, and succeeded in using up the ready money of the king. Charles Charles’s third Parliament, 1627-28 had to call his third Parliament in order to obtain supplies. It met 17th March, 1627-28. The king attempted to propitiate the commons by releasing the prisoners whom he still held for refusing to meet the demand for the general loan. In his opening speech, Charles took the wrong tack. “There is none here,” he said, “but knows that common danger is the cause of this Parliament, and that supply at this time is the chief end of it.... If you, (which God forbid) should not do your duties in contributing what the State at this time needs, I must in discharge of my conscience, use those other means which God hath put into my hands, to save that which the follies of some particular men may otherwise hazard to lose.”[335] Nor was this bold assertion of the divine right of a king to put his hand in the pockets of his subjects enough. The lord keeper said in addition, Threats of non- Parliamentary exaction“This way (of obtaining a supply), as his Majesty hath told you, he hath chosen, not as the only way, but as the fittest; not as destitute of others, but as most agreeable to the goodness of his own most gracious disposition, and to the desire and weal of his people. If this be deferred, necessity and the sword of the enemy will make way to others. Remember his Majesty’s admonition: I say, remember it.”[336]

The House immediately set itself to the consideration of grievances,Grievances have precedence chief amongst which were “raising money by loans, by benevolences, and privy seals: and what was too fresh in memory, the imprisonment of certain gentlemen who refused to lend.”[337] The matter of a supply was debated, but passed by in favor of the grievances. On the 3rd April, the commons agreed unanimously to certain highly significant resolutions against the powers assumed by the king. “No freeman ought to be committed, or detained in prison, or otherwise restrained,” they said, “by command of the king, or the Privy Council, or any other,” except for lawful cause expressed in a lawful warrant; and “that the ancient and undoubted right of every freeman is, that he hath a full and absolute property in his goods and estate;Denunciation of extortions and that no tax, tallage, loan, benevolence, or other like charge, ought to be commanded or levied by the king or his ministers, without common assent of Parliament.”[338]

For the space of two months the commons and the House of Lords engaged themselves in conference and separately in the consideration of a petition defining, the rights asserted in the resolutions. On the part of the commons the chief advocates were Selden, Littleton, and Digges; Sir Edward Coke, whose unwillingness to bend the judicial knee to King James had procured his dismissal long since from the chief-justiceship; and Noy, the genius who was shortly to turn against the Commons and in his invention of ship money furnish a means whereby to lay taxes without parliamentary assent. The interest of the crown was defended by attorney-general Heath and Sergent Ashley. The king was in a dilemma; he could not permit the petition to be brought in, in parliamentary form, and he could not dissolve Parliament without losing five subsidies which the commons had signified their willingness to grant him.[339] He therefore tried to steer a middle course; he offered to Parliament his royal word not to imprison unjustly and expressed his willingness to confirm the charters. Coke, however, insisted upon a specific statement of issues; any such hazy settlement of difficulties as the king proposed was unlikely to be permanent; definiteness was essential. To that end he proposed the drawing up of a Petition of Right.

When the instrument was at last drawn up, it was sent to the House of Lords. The lords attempted to introduce an amendment designed “to leave entire that sovereign power,” as the proposed change itself ran, “wherewith your Majesty is trusted for the protection, safety and happiness of your people;”[340] but the commons would have none of it, and at last the lords yielded their assent. The king at first gave a cumbersome, evasive answer to the petition which was in reality no answer at all,[341] and roused thereby a storm of indignation, which exhibited itself in a movement to censure Buckingham. This the king averted by signing the Petition of Right in the usual manner, and received in consequence his five subsidies.[342]

The Petition which thus became a regularly passed Act of Parliament, is of transcendent importance in the development of the control of the people over the public purse. In terms absolutely unequivocal,The statutes cited in the Petition it asserts that “your subjects have inherited this freedom, that they should not be compelled to contribute to any tax, tallage, aid, or other like charge, not set by common consent in Parliament.” The statutory sources whence that freedom was inherited are cited in detail. The citations, are, however, ill-taken. Statutum de tallagio non concedendo was in all likelihood no statute at all, but a chronicler’s abstract of Edward I’s Confirmatio Cartarum, or perhaps an unauthoritative copy of the pardon which was granted to Humfrey Bohun and Roger Bigod at approximately the same time with the Confirmation of the Charters. It is not unlikely that the citation of the statute of the 25th of Edward III was an error; at any rate, the text of the statute has not been discovered,[343] and the date at which it was said to be enacted was at the height of the great plague, a time scarcely adapted to the assertion of a great constitutional principle. But the precise historical foundation upon which Sir Edward Coke and his associates based their charges against the king, is of quite secondary importance. The true value of the Petition of Right lies in this, that Charles I had been obliged to subscribe to a statutory provision by which no man thereafter was to “be compelled to make or yield any gift, loan, benevolence, tax, or such like charge, without common consent by Act of Parliament.” That was indeed supremely important.

But the language of the Petition of Right might reasonably be taken to refer only to internal taxes and that the matter of customs duties, the charges upon merchandise at the outports, was left still in the air. Protests had indeed been made against the exaction of these duties by the crown, especially during the reign of James The Petition of Right and customs duties in the great agitation over the Book of Rates, but no statute had been passed providing definitely for parliamentary control. To that end, the commons delayed the passage of a bill which gave the king tunnage and poundage for life, pending the acceptance by him of a remonstrance against impositions. The remonstrance as framed by the commons declared that “there ought not any imposition to be laid upon the goods of merchants, exported or imported, without the common consent by Act of Parliament.”[344] It further made assertion that the laying of impositions at the outports was contrary to the Petition of Right. The king’s attitude was decisive; before the remonstrance was handed to him, he evaded the issue by proroguing Parliament. Never, so he said, would he give away tunnage and poundage; he must needs retain them for himself. The session ended 26th June, 1628.[345]

During the six months which elapsed before the reassembling of Parliament, Charles continued to Tunnage and poundage levy tunnage and poundage upon his own authority, relying still upon the decision in the Bate Case for his justification. Several merchants who refused to pay were promptly clapped into prison; among those whose goods were seized for the same reason was Henry Rolles, a member of the House of Commons. The second session of Parliament was called for the 20th January, 1628-29; the commons came together with no pretense of smothering their indignation against the conduct of the king. A number of plans were brought forward as means of rectifying the abuses. The evident determination of the commons to conclude the matter, daunted the king. Summoning both Houses to Whitehall, he renounced the right of levying tunnage and poundage. “It ever was, and still is my meaning,” so were his words, “by the gift of my people to enjoy it, and my intention in my speech at the end of the last session was not to challenge tunnage and poundage as of right, but de bene esse, showing you the necessity, not the right, by which I was to take it until you had granted it to me, assuring myself according to your general professions that you wanted time and not good-will to give it me.”[346] For a moment it appeared as though this abandonment of position by the king would end the conflict. Three days after his reception of the Houses at Whitehall, Mr. Secretary Cooke moved the reading of a bill granting him tunnage and poundage for life. But it never passed. The commons were distracted by a question of religious innovation, talked at great length over their religious grievances, and allowed their momentary flush of cordial feeling toward the king to cool. Mr. Secretary Cooke on the two days following that upon which he made his motion regarding tunnage and poundage, delivered messages from Charles urging haste in the consideration of the measure.[347] On the 2nd February, the commons acknowledged the receipt of the messages, but rather than pass a bill satisfactory to the king in this particular, they stated their intent to “proceed with religion.”[348]

On the 19th February they began a lengthy consideration of the breach of privilege committed against the House of Commons in the seizure of the goods of Henry Rolles, the merchant member of the House, who had refused payment of tunnage and poundage during the recent recess. The officers who had participated in the seizure of his goods were summoned before the commons that they might answer for contempt. The stand was taken against the king on this ground of privilege, instead, as Pym advised, of objecting on the broad constitutional ground that Parliament had not granted the tax. This hostility was too much for the conciliatory spirit which Charles had evinced at the opening of the session. Through Mr. Secretary Cooke, he announced his unwillingness to have his officers questioned, since “what they did was by his own direct command, or by order of the council-board, his Majesty himself being present, and therefore, would not have it divided from his act.”[349]

The question was fought out on the 2nd March, when the commons reassembled after a brief recess. The king, hoping to arrange the difficulty privately with the leaders of the House, ordered the recess to be continued until the 10th March. To this the commons entered vigorous protest; at the putting of the question, the vote was overwhelmingly against adjournment.Tumult in the Commons The speaker, Sir John Finch, in obedience to the royal will, attempted to leave his chair, and thus break up the session; but Holles and Valentine, two members most eager for the consideration of the matters pressing for attention, pushed him back into his seat. Sir John Eliot, who had drawn up three resolutions expressing the mind of the commons on the questions of religion and taxation, read them above the uproar. The speaker and the clerk refused to put the vote and the king’s guard was already on its way to make a forcible end to the proceedings. At the moment when the guardsmen were at the door, Holles read the resolutions and they were carried by acclamation. The House then adjourned in a tumult until the 10th March.[350]

The resolutions were most explicit. The two which concerned the impositions said: “Whosoever shall counsel or advise the taking and levying of the subsidies of tunnage and poundage, not being granted by Parliament, or shall be an actor and instrument therein, shall be likewise reputed an innovator in the government and a capital enemy to this kingdom and commonwealth.” And: “If any merchant or other person whatsoever shall voluntarily yield or pay the said subsidies of tunnage and poundage not being granted by Parliament, he shall likewise be reputed a betrayer of the liberty of England, and an enemy to the same.”[351]

When the House reconvened on the 10th March, the king dissolved Parliament without further ado. With respect to such of the commons as merited his displeasure he remarked that the vipers amongst them would meet with their rewards.

With the dissolution of his third Parliament, Charles entered upon a new epoch in his reign; and at the conclusion of it, he found that his game had been for too heavy stakes, and that he had lost.Charles’s eleven years without Parliament, 1629-40 For eleven years he did without a Parliament. He began by issuing a Declaration addressed to his “loving subjects” in which he told the history of the late session from his own point of view,—that he was in extreme need of money with which to meet the necessities of England and relieve the “miserable afflicted state” of Protestants abroad, that Parliament had proved itself intractable, and had greatly delayed, contrary to all precedent, in the matter of tunnage and poundage; not only that, but upon his graciously yielding to Parliament the power of granting him tunnage and poundage, it had raised up still another cause for delay in the case of Henry Holles.[352] In a proclamation issued two weeks later he plainly exhibited his intention to rule without a Parliament; “the calling, continuing, and dissolving of them,” he said, “being always in the King’s own power. And his Majesty shall be more inclinable to meet in Parliament again when his people shall see more clearly into his intents and actions, when such as have bred this interruption shall receive their condign punishment.”[353]

He imprisoned accordingly Holles, Strode, Sir John Eliot and others whom he included amongst the vipers of the commons, and removed such of them to the Tower as were able to sue out their writs of habeas corpus, in order that he might thus elude the service of the writs. But imprisonment was scarcely a means of relief to the king’s financial exigencies. His financial expedients He turned to expedients which were exceedingly oppressive, and most of them clearly illegal. He rigorously extorted tunnage and poundage by the arbitrary authority of the crown; he reËstablished the monopolies abolished under James I, and applied them to nearly every article in common use; he revived laws long since dead and applied them stringently for the sake of their fines; he revived forest legislation and increased the limits of the royal woodlands, mulcting the owners of adjoining property for encroachment; he searched titles of estates for defects which would make them liable to reversion to the crown; he went back to the old practice of compulsory knighthood for those who had £40 or more in lands or rents.

But the supreme grievance was the extortion of ship money. Sir William Noy, lately leader in the commons in defense of popular power against royal prerogative, now become by the grace of the king attorney-general and a chief supporter of that same royal prerogative, shut himself up in the Tower for some days that he might better consult the ancient authorities. “Shaking off the dust of ages from parchments in the Tower,” says Hallam, “this man of venal diligence and prostituted learning discovered that the seaports and even maritime counties had in early times been sometimes called upon to furnish ships for the public service; nay there were instances for a similar demand upon some inland places.”[354] The first writ of ship money was directed to the magistrates of London and other seaport towns, and was issued on the 20th October, 1634. It recited the depredations of pirates, “Turks, enemies of the Christian name,” and the prevalence of war upon the continent. It enjoined upon the magistrates the furnishing of ships of specific tonnage and equipage by the 1st of the following March. They were empowered to assess all the inhabitants according to their substance, both for the fitting out of the ships and the maintenance of their crews for the space of six months. Refusals to pay were punishable by imprisonment. The writ was issued by the king with the advice of the Privy Council.[355]

The show of precedent was barely an extenuation, not a justification of the demand. As a matter of fact, it was virtually an extortion of a tax, and as such was a distinct violation of the Petition of Right. London, being the only port in the kingdom capable of constructing and equipping ships of the character designated in the writs, was the only town able to make literal compliance with the demand. The rest were obliged to make money payments. But the matter was to come up later in the courts, and the legality or The true occasion for the levy illegality of the writs was there to be decided. As for the occasion of the requisition denominated in the ordinance, that was false. The design was not against “Turks, enemies of the Christian name,” but against the Dutch Republic. Charles had proposed a secret treaty with Spain whereby the government of the Lowlanders should be overthrown and its territory be divided between England and Spain.[356] Not only was this act of Charles a breach of his recent great compact with the nation, but it had for its purpose an act of aggression against the people who stood for the highest political ideals then known in Europe, and was based on a lie.

Sir John Finch, the chief justice of common pleas, the same who, as speaker of the commons, had been forcibly held in his chair in order to keep the House in session at the close of the last Parliament, undertook the levying of ship money upon the death of Noy; he advanced the fortunes of the writs by making them applicable to the entire kingdom.Second writ, 4th August, 1635. Its general application On the 4th August, 1635, the demand made its second appearance; it was to cover not only the needs of a navy, but to furnish “a spring and magazine that should have no bottom, and for an everlasting supply for all occasions.”[357] Instructions were included in the writs to the sheriffs, by which the ships could be compounded for by the counties, and the amount transmitted to the treasurer of the navy for his Majesty’s uses. Payment was to be enforced.

A year later, the 9th October, 1636, the third assessment was laid. Murmuring against the writs, which was common enough amongst the lower classes in 1635, now spread to men of great position. The earls of Danby and Warwick and other peers protested to the king, not so much against the amount of the tax, as against the unconstitutional manner of its levy. But Charles found it too profitable a means of income to let go; he was the richer each year by some £200,000.

The courts, however, seemed of contrary mind to the rest of the nation. In November, 1635, at the instance of Sir John Finch, the following extra-judicial opinion was delivered Extra-judicial opinions by the judges:—“I am of the opinion that, as when the benefit doth more particularly redound to the ports or maritime parts, as in case of piracy or depredations upon the seas, that the charge hath been, and may be lawfully imposed upon them according to precedents of former times; so when the good and safety of the kingdom in general is concerned, and the whole kingdom in danger (of which his Majesty is the only judge), then the charge of the defence ought to be borne by all the realm in general. This I hold agreeably both to law and reason.”[358]

On the 7th February, 1637, Charles laid the case before the judges of the Exchequer extra-judicially in much the same terms as the opinion of 1635. He requested an answer to the following question:—“When the good and safety of the Kingdom in general is concerned, and the whole Kingdom in danger, whether may not the King, by writ under the Great Seal of England, command all the subjects of our Kingdom at their charge to provide and furnish such a number of ships, with men, victuals, and munition, and for such time as we shall think fit for the defence and safeguard of the kingdom from such danger and peril, and by law compel the doing thereof, in case of refusal or refractoriness: and whether in such a case is not the King the sole judge both of the danger, and when and how the same is to be prevented and avoided?”[359] The opinion of the judges was ostensibly unanimous in favor of the crown; Coke and Hutton as a matter of fact dissented, but subscribed on the principle that the opinion of the majority should be that of the whole body.

In the face of this sweeping and conclusive opinion delivered privately to the king, there was apparently no hope for any one who should have to answer in that court for refusal. Hampden’s Case, 1637 Shortly thereafter, however, such a case came up. John Hampden, a gentleman of Buckinghamshire, had refused to pay the assessment of 20s. which was laid upon some of his lands, and by reason of his refusal was summoned to the Exchequer. He appeared and answered to the charge in November, 1637. He was defended by the brilliant Oliver St. John and Mr. Holborne. Solicitor General Littleton and Attorney General Bankes conducted the case for the crown.

The question upon which the case was argued may be phrased as follows: “Whether the king had a right on his own allegation of public danger to require an inland county to furnish ships, or a prescribed sum of money by way of commutation, for the defense of the kingdom?”[360] The argument for Hampden can be summed up under five heads:

I. The law and constitution of England provide certain ordinary revenues for the defense of the realm. These comprehend the military forces provided by those holding lands by military tenure; the liability of the Cinque Ports and others holding similarly to provide a quota of ships, by reason of their tenure; the feudal and other revenues inherent in the crown; the customs on wool and leather, and tunnage and poundage, and other special dues which were wont to be granted to the king in time of danger.[361]

II. The law and constitution of England provide certain extraordinary revenues when the ordinary revenues should prove insufficient, and for the defense of the realm. Chief among these were the subsidies and aids which were granted in Parliament. That Parliament was the only body capable of levying these charges was exhibited by the fact that the kings of England were wont to denominate their arbitrary exactions as “loans” and “benevolences.”

III. The statutes of the realm provided in most emphatic language that no tax should be levied on the subject without the consent of Parliament. The charter of the Conqueror, Magna Carta, especially Confirmatio Cartarum and De Tallagio non Concedendo, the statutes passed subsequently under Edward III, and more than all the others, the Petition of Right, showed the utter illegality of the ship money.

IV. The citations by the crown of exactions similar to the ship money did not demonstrate the lawfulness of the demand; they merely showed precedents of such a general levy. The case must be decided by law, not by precedents,—“judicandum est legibus non exemplis.”

V. In the present instance, the perils which the king cited were insufficient to justify an unusual demand for money. The precedent of the arbitrary actions of Queen Elizabeth at the time of the Armada could in no wise be taken as a justification for so great an exercise of the prerogative when the nation was at peace with the world; the piratical acts of Turkish corsairs or even the insolence of rival neighbors could not be reckoned amongst those imminent perils for which a Parliament could provide too tardily.[362]

The judgment was in favor of the crown seven to five. Three of the minority based their decision upon the particular rather than on general grounds; Croke and Hutton, however, denied the general contention of the crown absolutely. Croke maintained that taxation save by authority of Parliament is contrary to the common law and to the statutes; that the exaction could not be defended upon the plea of imminent danger; and that the extension to inland counties was not legal or warranted by any legal precedent. The seven judges whose opinions were favorable to the king, upheld the prerogative of the crown as against the legislative power of Parliament. Sir John Finch, chief justice of the common pleas, stated their attitude clearly. “No act of Parliament,” he said, “can bar a king of his regality, as that no lands should hold of him, or bar him of the allegiance of his subjects or the relative on his part, as trust and power to defend his people; therefore acts of Parliament to take away his royal power in the defense of his kingdom are void; they are void acts of Parliament to bind the king not to command the subjects, their persons, and goods, and I say their money too; for no acts of Parliament make any difference.”[363]

The effect of this decision upon the minds of the people was immediate; it changed the payment of the ship money from a semi-voluntary gift to the king into an extortion enforced by him. Previously they had supposed that the ship money was paid out of sufferance, that if it became too heavy, an appeal to the courts would be sufficient to remove it; now they felt that the king had them by the throat and could force them to do as he willed. Never was there a clearer issue; the king and his prerogative against the commons and their long-developing rights; the power of the king to levy taxes upon his own arbitrary authority against taxation by the will of the taxed as expressed in Parliament.

The Scottish rebellion of 1638 which was waged for the defense of religious freedom, and the interval of peace, beginning the 18th June, 1639, which was used by Scots and English alike as a period of armament, proved too much for Charles’s irregular financial supply. Reluctantly he called his Fourth Parliament, commonly known as the Short Parliament,The Short Parliament, 1640 for the 13th April, 1640. The assembly was, strange to say, most moderate and loyal to the king. Charles through the ex-Speaker Sir John Finch, now Lord Keeper, asked for a large supply immediately, saying that he would listen to grievances afterwards.[364]

The commons recalled instances wherein the royal word had been broken, and preferred to withhold supply until the end of the session, according to their familiar habit. They proceeded to inquire into the Hampden case, and considered in detail the various occasions upon which the law had been broken during their eleven years’ recess. They appointed a committee to confer with the lords over a long list of grievances, divided into the three departments of innovations in religion, invasions of private property, and breaches of parliamentary privilege.[365] At this Charles came forward with a gigantic piece of tactlessness; thinking he saw a hole through which he could escape, he tried to win the lords to his standard. Applying to them, they voted and communicated to the House of Commons that “his Majesty’s supply should have the precedency, and be resolved on before any other matter whatsoever.”[366] To the commons this appeared an arrant breach of privilege,Clash between the Houses it being their right that money bills should originate in their House. The lords immediately adopted a conciliatory tone; they renounced any intention of offending the commons. “The bill of subsidies,” they admitted, “ought to have its inception and beginning in your House; and that when it comes up to their lordships, and is by them agreed unto, it must be returned back to you and be by your House presented.”[367]

The king had reason to regret his intrusion since the dispute which he had caused delayed a supply from the commons so much the more. He now had recourse to a compromise. He offered the withdrawal of his claim to ship money in consideration of a grant of twelve subsidies,[368] payable in three years. The commons, perceiving that the proposition, if acceded to, involved the tacit admission that the ship money had been justly laid, insomuch as its removal was obtainable only by purchase, refused to enter into the agreement. But the effect of the message was not quite lost; on the contrary it seemed as though the king would shortly receive his grant. At the moment when the commons were on the point of deciding upon a supply, the amount to be determined subsequently, Sir Henry Vane, secretary of state, precipitated a crisis. He asserted that the supply would not be accepted unless it were to the amount and in the manner designated in the king’s message.[369] The next day, the 5th May, the king dissolved his three-weeks-old Parliament, to his own great distress and the trepidation of the nation.

Charles employed the six months which intervened between the dissolution of Parliament and the summons of the Long Parliament in his usual occupations. He locked up several members of the House. He exacted forced loans, created new monopolies, and levied ship money. Prosecutions followed swiftly upon refusals to pay. “Coat and conduct money,” a new exaction from the counties, was demanded to cover the traveling expenses of recruits on their way to fight against the Scots. He obtained six subsidies from the clergy whom he illegally kept in convocation after the dissolution of Parliament.

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.

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.”

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.

Charles II came to the throne in 1660 after the English people had made an eleven years’ trial of a military despotism under a good and moderate despot. His first Parliament, that of 1660, granted him the proceeds of the customs for life. During the period of the Commonwealth, the freedom from the feudal charges had been most agreeable to those holding of the crown. Consequently, this Parliament set itself to regulate the confused system of military tenure by the simple expedient of abolition. The Great Contract which had been proposed under James I for the same purpose, had been advocated in vain. Now, however, the effort was successful. The feudal incidents, such as wardships, marriages, knight’s service, as well as the three feudal aids, knighting the king’s son, ransoming the king, and furnishing dowry for his eldest daughter, were done away with. By this great deprivation, the royal revenue was naturally much prejudiced. Parliament made up the loss by granting to the crown an hereditary excise on beer and some other liquors, increasing the royal revenue to the annual value of £1,200,000.[378]

In 1665 the expenses incident to the Dutch War made it possible to establish a principle which had been touched upon from time to time since the days of Henry III. Sir George Downing, in the subsidy bill of that year, introduced the provision that the money raised in accordance with the bill, £1,250,000, be applicable solely to the prosecution of the war, and that the money could not be paid out by the Exchequer save by special warrant stating that as the purpose of the payment. Clarendon opposed the measure as an encroachment upon the honor of the crown, but Charles himself was not averse to it, mainly by reason of his belief that the promised revenue would be thus more acceptable to bankers as the security for loans. The appointment in the following year of a commission to examine the public accounts in order to determine the faithfulness with which the provision was carried out, clinched the principle underlying its original passage. The bill was the natural consequence of the liberty of appropriation enjoyed under the Commonwealth. The exercise of the principle of appropriating supplies in detail was not carried to its full extent until after 1689. Its importance is difficult to overestimate. It placed the executive power in a position of perfect dependence upon the will of Parliament, for the money requisite for any administrative act was to be forthcoming only in accordance with the previously expressed intent of Parliament.

The reign of James II, who came to the throne in 1685 at the death of Charles, was retrogressive. He assumed the crown with the full intention of exercising arbitrary authority, and if he had not tried to substitute Catholicism for the Established Church, there is little to show that he would not at least for a time have succeeded. Before the summons of his Parliament, which he called reluctantly notwithstanding a lapse of five years under Charles without one, he continued to himself the payment of the customs duties by proclamation. This illegal act met with no serious objection from Parliament when it met. Nor was this all; Parliament raised the permanent revenue of the king to the annual amount of £2,000,000, and on the suppression of Monmouth’s rebellion, gave him £700,000 more wherewith to support a standing army. Thus did Parliament make James financially independent, provided he was content to live within reason, and gave him an army in addition. This was a combination of powers which on the Continent had sufficed to create despotisms.

That it did not create a despotism in England is not greatly to be wondered at. James set himself to fighting the battle of the Roman Catholic church in England. The result was almost immediate disaster. On the 5th November, 1688, William, Prince of Orange, and Stadtholder of the United Provinces, landed at Torbay in Devonshire. He was requested by seventy of the lords spiritual and temporal (all who were then in London), by the members of the House of Commons which met in the last Parliament of Charles II, and the corporation of the City of London, to assume the provisional government of the kingdom pending a session of Parliament. This was called for the 22nd January, 1688-89. On the 13th February following, a tender of the crown was made to William, on the conditions denominated in the recently framed Declaration of Right. In it the illegal acts of King James were recited and the announcement was made that the throne had been abdicated; it was asserted also that certain specified acts of King James were illegal, and a resolution was appended settling the crown on William and Mary. William, speaking for himself and for the Princess Mary, “thankfully accepted what had been offered them.”

The Declaration of Right, with some slight but essential changes, was incorporated at the second session of this Parliament, the 25th October, 1689, in statutory form known subsequently as the Bill of Rights.[379] In the matter of taxation, it sums up in a few clauses the whole principle which had been in course of evolution since the German chieftains received gifts of cattle and fruits from their people.

It states that King James “did endeavor to subvert and extirpate ... the laws and liberties of this kingdom ... by levying money for and to the use of the crown, by pretense of prerogative, for other time and in other manner than the same was granted by Parliament.” Then follows the definite assertion, “that levying money for or to the use of the crown by pretense of prerogative, without grant of Parliament for longer time or in other manner than the same is or shall be granted, is illegal.” The clause which gave to these statements the force of law, emphasizes the power of Parliament. “All which their Majesties are contented and pleased,” so it goes, “shall be declared, enacted, and established by authority of this present Parliament, and shall stand, remain, and be the law of this realm forever; and the same are by their said Majesties, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords spiritual and temporal, and Commons, in Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, declared, enacted and established accordingly.”

With the passing of the Bill of Rights the principle was vindicated in its fullness that Parliament rather than the crown has the power to tax. Within Parliament itself the power of laying taxes had undergone further differentiation in that the House of Commons claimed the sole right of initiating tax levies. The theory deduced therefrom, that the House of Commons has sole control over money bills and that interference by the House of Lords is an assumption of power beyond the constitutional rights of that House, came up for fuller definition 220 years later. The corollary principle that Parliament has the power to appropriate supplies for specific purposes and that it can demand an accounting for the money so appropriated were accorded general acquiescence then and thereafter.