2 the monop ence to laws established." The petitioners then declared that they "have not come in any Puritan or Brownist1 spirit to introduce their parity, or to work the subversion of the state ecclesiastical as now it stands." In order that "a perpetual uniformity may be enjoined and observed," they asked only that certain ceremonies should be abolished, that certain abuses should be corrected, and "that the land might be furnished with a learned, religious, and godly ministry." Descending, then, from questions of conscience to questions of trade, the attack upon commons finally addressed themselves to the task of breaking olies; up the practical monopoly of the commerce of the kingdom as carried on by certain great trading companies whose members were chiefly Londoners. The bill introduced upon that subject, and which fell through in the lords, did not propose to abolish the companies, but, by depriving them of their monopolies, to throw the trade of the kingdom open alike to all. In the mean time the vital question of supply was neglected; the no grant was made, upon the ground that a considerable part of supply; of the last subsidies had not been levied, it being contrary to precedent to grant a fresh one before the preceding had been fully paid. On the 26th of June, James assured the commons in a letter that he did not desire that they should burden themselves in order to supply his wants, and on the 7th of parliament prorogued, July he prorogued the first session of his first parliament, after July making a bad-tempered speech, in which he told the house that he would depart from the usual custom: "I will not thank where I think no thanks due." 5 question assumed King of Britain; canons Shortly after the prorogation James assumed the title of James King of Great Britain, to which parliament had refused its the title of assent, and proceeded to sharpen the persecution of the Puri- Great tan clergy' by demanding of them the more rigid conformity prescribed by the canons adopted in the convocation of 1604 of the conat the instigation of Bancroft, who was now promoted, for his 1604; 1 A sect which took its name from Robert Browne, a kinsman of Lord Burleigh, whose principles were probably identical with those of the later Independents. See Blount, Dict. Sects, etc. 2 Parl. Hist., vol. i. p. 1020; State Papers, Dom., vol. viii. p. 70. 8 See Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, vol. ii. p. 164; Cunningham's Growth of Eng. Industry and Com- 4 Commons' Journals, vol. i. p. 246. 6 Green, Hist. of the Eng. People, vol. iii. p. 61. 7 See Wilkins, Conc., vol. iv. pp. 408, 409. vocation of Puritan clergy who refused to subscribe driven from their livings; persecution of the Plot; second session until zeal, to the vacant see of Canterbury. The refusal of the Puritan clergy to subscribe to the articles touching rights and ceremonies, which the statutes of Elizabeth had not required, resulted in the driving of three hundred1 of them from their livings in the spring of 1605. Through the enforcement by the judges of the new act against Jesuits, seminary priests, and recusants, passed by parliament before the close of the session, James at the same time drove the catholics to such despair that a conspiracy for the destruction of king, lords, and commons, which Catesby had been for a long time concocting, assumed serious proportions, and came very near a successful issue in the fall of the same year. By reason of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, the second session of the adjourned parliament, which met on November 5, was adjourned until the 21st of January, 1606.3 The only constitutional conflict that occurred during this session arose between the houses themselves out of the peremptory rejection by the lords of a bill upon the subject of purveyance, sent up to them by the commons shortly after they had refused their assent to a previous bill upon the same subject,1 an occurrence which proposed in probably established for the first time the rule that a bill cannot be twice proposed during the same session. The sympathy that arose between the crown and the commons out of their deliverance from a common danger seems to have suspended for a moment the battle over privilege and prerogative, and the result was the grant of subsidies and fifteenths 5 sufficient to pay the debt which Elizabeth had bequeathed to James, it being understood that the fixed charges of the crown should be paid out of the permanent and ordinary revenue. A material element of such revenue was the customs duties, a brief account of which has already been given down to the accession of the January 21, 1606; origin of the rule that a bill cannot be twice the same session; 1 Gardiner, Hist. Eng., vol. i. p. 197, vember 5 a day of thanksgiving forand note 3. 2 See Challoner's Missionary Priests, vol. ii. p. 44; Jardine, Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, p. 44. The best complete statements are to be found in Gardiner, Hist. Eng., vol. i. pp. 234-264; and in Lingard, Hist. Eng., vol. vii. PP. 37-96. 8 An act (3 Jac. I. c. 1) was then passed, which continued in force for two centuries and a half, making No ever. 4 Parl. Hist. Journals, pp. 274, 278, etc.; Hallam, Const. Hist., vol. i. p. 308, and note t. 5 Three subsidies and six fifteenths and tenths from the laity, and four clerical subsidies. 3 Jac. I. cc. 25, 26. Cf. Dowell, Hist. of Taxation, vol. i. p. 159. The whole was estimated at £453,000. Abstract of His Majesty's Revenue, p. II. of the in their the reign VIII.; by Mary through council; sovereigns of the house of Tudor, all of whom received life- life-grants grants of the subsidies on wool, skins, and leather, tonnage customs; and poundage, likewise made to James I. in the first session of his first parliament.1 Near the close of the reign of Henry decrease VIII. a material decrease in the relative value of the port relative duties set in, in consequence of the general advance in the value in price of all merchandise. To prevent the deficiency which of Henry thus arose, as well as to enforce the protective or mercantile system against foreign goods, Mary, by an order in council, increased laid an impost upon short cloth, and in 1556 increased by and impost the duty on sweet wine to correspond with the in- Elizabeth crease in the price of wine. Elizabeth followed the examples orders in set by her sister by the making of a special impost upon wines; and in October, 1586, a new book of rates was published.2 Following in the path of his predecessors, James, in order to James also imposed a increase the customs revenue of the crown, which at the be- new impost ginning of his reign amounted to but £112,400,3 and for the upon Virginian purpose of protecting Virginian against Spanish tobacco, put tobacco; a new impost upon that article by virtue of a royal ordinance.1 This power, to levy new impositions by virtue of the royal authority only, had also been exercised in the reign of Elizabeth by the grant of a monopoly to the "Levant Company," a like which was authorized to exact 5 s. 6 d. the hundredweight as upon customs upon all currants imported by merchants not mem- exacted bers of that company. When, after the issuance of James' pro- through the clamation against monopolies, the "Levant Company" surren- Company;" dered its charter as such, the crown claimed the right to impose directly, in addition to a statutory poundage of 2 s. 6 d. the hundredweight, the duty upon currants which it had originally delegated. Of this imposition the merchants complained to parliament, and at the end of the second session now under consideration, the house demanded in the petition of grievances then presented that neither the royal impost on cur 1 See above, p. 16, and note 6. 2 Cf. Dowell, Hist. of Taxation, vol. i. pp. 178–181. 8" This was the rate at which it was farmed for seven years, from 1604," -Hall, A Hist. of the CustomRevenue, pt. i. p. 174. etc. 4 Ibid., pp. 174-177. 5 The great case of Impositions. Lane's Reports, p. 22; Howell, State 6 For the text of this petition, see impost currants "Levant James espoused the cause of the bishops; "God's silly vassal," told him there were two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland. "There is Christ Jesus the King, and his kingdom the church, whose subject James VI. is, and of whose kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member. And they whom Christ has called and commanded to watch over his church, and govern his spiritual kingdom, have sufficient power of him and authority so to do, both together and severally; the which no Christian king nor prince should control and discharge, but fortify and assist." 1 In order to put an end to this condition of things, which threatened to subvert the power of the monarch as it had subverted that of the bishops, James resolved to make their cause his own. Το restore the episcopate became with him a matter of settled policy; "No bishop, no king" became an axiom in his political philosophy. And at the same time, in order to prevent the collisions which constantly occurred between two national assemblies legislating independently of each other, often upon the same subject-matter, it was deemed wise to devise some scheme through which representatives of the church could be admitted to a share in the deliberations of the parliament. As a concession to that demand, the estates, at the close of 1597, passed an act authorizing such persons to sit in their midst as the their right king might appoint to the office of bishop or abbot, or to any other prelacy. The settlement thus attempted proved, however, equally unsatisfactory to both parties: to the kirk, because it had demanded the admission not of royal nominees, but of representatives of the clergy chosen by themselves; to the king, because the new bishops whom he finally appointed under the act in the fall of 1600 were not acknowledged by the church as having any spiritual status or jurisdiction. Thus did James fail to put in practice the ideas embodied in his 'Basilicon Doron," in which he had only a short time before settlement announced the hope of reëstablishing his authority over the wrote the Scotch kirk by the restoration of the bishops as the agents "Basilicon through whom his absolute and divine right could be asserted over every class within the realm. Such was the mental temper and such the political experience of the man who, on the in 1597 the estates conceded to sit with them; in the midst of the failure of this attempted James Doron." 1 J. Melville's Diary, pp. 368–371. 15, 1600, State Papers, Scotl., vol. lxvi. p. 96; Gardiner, vol. i. p. 77, and note I. 24th of March, 1603, assumed the task of governing a people with whose political institutions and habits of thought he never became thoroughly familiar. iar system passed to unim conciliar jurisdiction Tudor 3. In order to estimate clearly the extent to which James The conciland Charles were able to put in force their personal ideas of of the government, the fact must be kept steadily in view that the Tudors highly centralized system of "government by councils," which the Stuarts the Tudors had organized and employed for more than a cen- paired: tury, passed into their hands with all of its organs unimpaired. In the account heretofore given of the growth of that system the statement was made that, owing to the decline which had taken place in the constitution of the national assembly at the end of the civil war, Henry VII. and his successors were able to transfer the centre of gravity of the state from the king in parliament to the king in council. Out of that new condition of things grew the necessity for a subdivision of the labors of the council among a number of committees, to each of which was assigned a definite class of official duties. In that way the council gradually became a body of trained administrators, scope of whose duty it was to direct and supervise the entire state machinery, from the parliament itself down to the local self- in the governing bodies, and to mark out for punishment, in special time; cases, all persons, whether in or out of parliament, who undertook to defy or obstruct royal mandates. An enumeration has already been made of the agencies employed by the council as agencies it existed in the days of Elizabeth in order to make its influ- which the through ence all-pervading, chief among which were the inquisitorial powers of high commission and the dreaded star chamber.1 The mo- were tive power, the guiding force of this great central machine, was the king himself, under whose eye everything was supposed to the king's personal pass, and who was all in all. If such an abnormal centraliza- influence; tion of power was necessary in the days of Henry VII. in order to bring peace and law out of the anarchy which the civil war had left behind it, if it was necessary in the days of his son to bear England safely through the crisis of the Reformation, if during those days it gave birth to much administrative organization invaluable to later times, certain it is that the peaceful and prosperous conditions which existed at the accession of the house of Stuart made it imperative that the 1 See above, pp. 176–183. the council exercised; |