not pro the king's mation in the star chamber. After the king, in deference to the terms of the Petition of Right, had made a return to the king's bench, in which he stated the ground of the committal to be the commission of notable contempts against himself and his government, and the stirring up of sedition in the state, the counsel for the petitioners undertook to convince the judges that the offence assigned was clearly bailable, for the reason that the contempt and sedition charged did not constitute treason.1 When Charles saw that the judges were likely to yield to that contention, instead of producing the prisoners prisoners in court on the day set, he conveyed them all to audin the Tower, where they were to be held "until they were deliv- court; ered by due course of law."2 Finally, in order to solve the question, Heath in October presented an information in the the inforking's bench against the ringleaders, Eliot, Holles, and Valen- mation in tine, in which they were directly charged with a conspiracy bench; formed in parliament itself to calumniate the ministers, to assault the speaker, and to defeat the king's lawful order of adjournment. After a plea to the jurisdiction of the court plea to over such acts had been fully argued, the judges held that their overruled; jurisdiction was clear, reserving, however, the question whether the prisoners were really guilty of the offence with which they were charged. When the three still persisted in their refusal to plead in a court whose jurisdiction they denied, a judgment defendants was finally rendered, as upon confession, imposing heavy fines and upon them all, and declaring that they should be held in custody until they should acknowledge their offence and give security for their good behavior. After Eliot's associates had secured Eliot alone their release through the acceptance of these terms which he refused to scornfully rejected, he was left behind prison bars to fight out liberty on humiliating the great battle single-handed and alone. Into the proceedings terms; of the parliament which had adopted the Petition of Right he had infused his spirit, and the question now was whether the guarantee which that new charter was intended to give to the personal liberty of every Englishman was to be whispered away Strode, Hobart, and Long. Eliot did not join. 1 State Trials, vol. iii. pp. 241, 242. • Controlment Roll, King's Bench, 51 Membr. 65. The next day (June 24) the king wrote a letter to the judges, proposing to produce Selden and Val He entine. Rushworth, vol. i. p. 680. 8 State Trials, vol. iii. p. 320. jurisdiction fined impris oned; accept his Tower by a judgment from servile judges who held, in substance, that while the king might be forced to keep the letter of the Petition by assigning the cause of the commitment, he might defeat its real object by holding the prisoner in custody, no matter what the cause shown might be. Against that ultimate exercise of tyranny Eliot opposed a lofty and unbending spirit died in the of protest, which ended only with his death in the Tower on the November, 27th of November, 1632. During his long and painful confinement this first martyr in the new struggle for liberty embodied in a political and philosophical treatise, which he called Monarchy the "Monarchy of Man,"1 his ideal of government, while in a last letter 2 addressed to Hampden, he unconsciously revealed the fact that in the maintenance of that ideal he was sustained his self- by the spirit of self-abnegation which moved the king of the abnegation. Greeks, in the Homeric story, to cry out : 27, 1632; his of Man;' Charles now insisted upon his right to levy customs; "Let me be deem'd the hateful cause of all, And suffer, rather than my people fall." 8 Charles' last tribute to such a man was recorded upon the petition in which Eliot's son asked permission to take away his father's remains for burial at the Devon home in which he was loved and honored by all: "Let Sir John Eliot," wrote the king, "be buried in the church of that parish where he died." 4 While Charles was thus trampling upon that part of the Petition of Right which was designed to prevent arbitrary imprisonment, he was also attempting to destroy by like means. its opening clause, which was supposed to render impossible all forms of taxation "not sett by common consent in parliament." Whether the royal right to impose the port duties was taken away by the limited terms of the petition was certainly a doubtful question, and Charles frankly stated, shortly after its approval, that it was not his intention that it should "take away my chief profit of tonnage and poundage." As a last word upon the subject, the house in the resolutions heretofore set forth had declared that any merchant who should pay such duties, authorized only by royal authority, would "be reputed a betrayer of the liberty of England, and an enemy to 1 Harl. MSS., 2228. The work has been published by Dr. Grosart. 2 March 29, 1632. 3 Pope's translation. 4 See Gardiner, vol. vii. p. 228. 1629, that all them; of this of the the same." 1 Regardless, however, of that anathema, the council on the 7th of March, 1629,2 promptly ordered that all March 7, persons refusing to pay such duties should be held in prison at ordered the king's will, "or that they be delivered by order of law;" in council and thus by royal warrant only the port duties continued to should be imprisoned be levied until 1641,8 the efforts made first by Chambers and who refused then by Vassall5 to resist payment by judicial means having to pay proven equally abortive. How vitally important to Charles was this resource can be well understood when the statement is made that in 1635, the year in which a new book of rates was importance issued, the port duties, by reason of the great increase in trade, branch amounted to £328, 126, more than half of the average ordinary revenue; revenue of the crown, estimated for that year at £618,379.6 With the port duties as a basis, the council continued to enforce every other financial branch of the prerogative, including some that were dormant, in the hope of supplying the deficit in the exchequer without any open and palpable breach of constitutional law. In that way large sums were drawn from other forms the landed gentry through compositions accepted for the re- taxation; of royal fusal of knighthood, which was vigorously forced upon them; through a revival of the odious forest laws whereby compositions were drawn from the neighboring landowners who had encroached upon the royal domain;7 through fines exacted for the curing of defects in title-deeds; through the pitiless enforcement of enormous fines through the star chamber, whose indefinite powers were given the widest extension; through the revival and application of monopolies, abandoned by Elizabeth and abolished by parliament in the preceding reign, to almost every article of ordinary consumption; and finally, through the enforcement against Puritan London of 1 See above, p. 278. 2 Council Register. 8 Dowell, Hist. of Taxation, vol. i. pp. 193, 195. 4 Chambers, who refused to submit, was sentenced in the star chamber, May 6, 1629. See State Trials, vol. iii. P. 374 Vassall, who refused to pay the duties on currants, had his goods sold in June, 1631, by an order made in the exchequer. Exchequer Decrees and Orders, vol. viii. pp. 269, 309 b.; vol. ix. p. 204 b.; xi. p. 466 b. 6 State Papers, Charles I., cccxiv. Strafford's Letters, vol. ii. p. 117. 9 Cf. Dowell, Hist. of Taxation, vol. by strict economy ordinary revenue made equal to ordinary budget; proclamations prohibiting its extension, by virtue of which the householders in the great suburban districts were forced to pay three years' rental to the crown in order to save their houses from demolition.1 By the employment of such means as these, and by the practice of strict economy, the king, who, in 162930 had made peace with both France and Spain, was able during the six years' interval without a parliament that ended with the death of Lord Treasurer Portland in March, 1635, to greatly reduce the debt, while the ordinary revenue was made nearly to equal the ordinary budget.2 It thus appeared that if peace was to continue, the crown could maintain itself without the aid of parliamentary subsidies. It was equally certain, however, that with the breaking out of hostilities, foreign or domestic, an appeal to the nation would become inevitable, unless Charles could find in the arsenal of the prerogative some new or dormant source of supply sufficiently fruitful to in 1634 Noy satisfy extraordinary demands. When, in 1634, war with the suggested Dutch became imminent, Noy, the attorney-general, suggested that a fleet could be equipped without a resort to parliament by a revival of the precedent through which the maritime counties and port towns had been compelled to provide ships for the war against Spain in 1626,3 a precedent which dated back to the very beginning of English taxation in pre-Norman times. that war could be carried on by ship writs only. The writs of 1626 limited to and maritime counties; In 1628, as heretofore explained, Charles resolved to widen the precedent of 1626 by levying ship-money as such all upon port towns counties, inland as well as maritime, and the writs for that purpose issued in February of that year were suspended only for the moment in the face of a popular opposition which it was not expedient to brave at that time. What Noy really proproposed to posed in 1634 was to revive the precedent of 1626, and in precedent; accordance therewith writs were issued October 20 of the year first named only to the authorities of the port towns and of Noy only revive that 1 Cf. Fœdera, vol. xviii. pp. 33, 97. "The Treasury gained a hundred thousand pounds by this clever stroke, and Charles gained the bitter enmity of the great city whose strength and resources were fatal to him in the coming war." - Green, Hist. of the Eng. People, vol. iii. p. 146. 2 See the comparative statement of revenue and expenditure in the Appendix to Gardiner, vol. x. p. 222, 223. Ibid., vol. vii. p. 356. Noy died August 10, 1634, before the writs were issued, and Sir Edward Coke died on the 3d of the next month. 4 See above, p. 265. purpose for be used; places along the coast, commanding them to provide a given number and kind of ships, which were to be brought to Portsmouth by the 1st of March, and authorizing them at the same time to assess the places in question for a sum sufficient to provide for the fitting out and maintenance of the ships and their crews during a period of six months.1 The real purpose the real for which the fleet was to be used was to reassert England's which the claim of sovereignty over the narrow seas against the growing fleet was to maritime influence of the Dutch Republic and of France, a monstrous pretension put forward about that time in a book,2 by Sir John Borough, the keeper of the records of the Tower, who maintained that it had sometimes been acquiesced in by foreign nations at an earlier day. As reasons of state made it inexpedient to disclose the real purpose for which the ships were intended, the writs vaguely stated that they were needed the purpose to defend the realm against "certain thieves, pirates, and rob- the writs; bers of the sea, as well as Turks," who had combined to attack it. Some of the cities interested complained that the burden had been unequally adjusted, while London, which was called upon to bear one fifth of the whole demand, insisted that it should not have been imposed at all. But a sharp rebuke all oppofrom the council to the lord mayor at once broke down the rebuked by opposition of the capital, and so, as we are told by the Vene- the council; tian ambassador, "did this most important affair begin and end. If it does not altogether violate the laws of the realm, as some think it does, it is certainly repugnant to usage and to the forms hitherto observed." 4 stated in sition announced extend While the ship writs of 1634 were thus confined to the port in June, towns and the maritime counties, they clearly asserted the the king 1635, general principle, first put forward in 1628, that "that charge is inten of defence which concerneth all men ought to be supported tion to by all, as by the laws and customs of the kingdom of England ship writs hath been accustomed to be done." In accordance with that declaration Coventry, the lord keeper, in June of 1635, in a time of profound peace, announced to the judges of assize previous to their going on circuit, the king's intention to extend 1 For the form of the writ, see Rushworth, vol. ii. p. 257. 2 His book was entitled Sovereignty of the Sea. See Harl. MSS., 4314. 8 £20,688 out of 104,252. State Papers, cclxxvi. 8. 4 Correr's despatch, December 26, 1634. Ven. MSS., cited in Gardiner, vol. vii. p. 376. to inland counties; |