"1 earl of writ of breach of privilege the lords resented, and after a prolonged contest Charles was forced to release the earl, upon the ground stated in a remonstrance drawn up on April 19, "that no lord of parliament, the parliament sitting, or within the usual times of privilege of parliament, is to be imprisoned or restrained without sanction or order of the house, unless it be for treason or felony, or for refusing to give surety for the peace." Against a more dangerous enemy of the favorite, the earl of case of the Bristol, who was ambassador to Spain at the time of the visit Bristol; of Charles and Buckingham to Madrid, and who had thus become possessed of dangerous secrets, the king directed a blow at once novel and revolutionary. Bristol, who had been for two years deprived of his liberty, and who had on two occasions failed to receive a writ of summons, complained of that denied his breach of privilege to the peers,2 who declared through a com- summons; mittee appointed to investigate the subject that there was no instance of record in which a peer capable of sitting in parliament had been refused his summons.3 Under the pressure of that report Charles consented to send Bristol his writ, but writ finally along with it went a letter from the lord keeper, Coventry, informing him that he could only avail himself of it on pain of bidding the royal displeasure. Ingeniously assuming that a writ under the great seal took precedence of a lord keeper's letter, the earl obeyed the mandate of the former and came to London,1 in order to lay the correspondence with Coventry before the peers, for which offence he was promptly impeached 5 by the attorney-general, acting under the king's direction, with high Bristol, treason at the bar of the lords. To that attack Bristol replied charged by impeaching Buckingham, and on the 1st of May the upper treason, house ordered that the two accusations should be heard impeached Buckingtogether, saving in that way Bristol's right to testify against ham. sent with letter for its use; who was with Charles commons replied by a remon strance; Buckingham.1 Thus it was that the favorite became the subject of two impeachments: the one presented by an individual peer, the other by the commons acting as the grand inquest of the realm. While the lower house was thus engaged in pressing the demanded doctrine of ministerial responsibility, on the one hand, and the passage of supply bill; peers in defending their privileges, on the other, the urgent question of supply which they had been called upon to solve was held in abeyance. Worn out by the delay, the king demanded on the 9th of June that the subsidy bill should be passed before the end of the following week, at the same time indicating that if it were not, he would be compelled "to use other resolutions." 2 The commons replied that the question of supply must be preceded by a remonstrance in which, after denying that tonnage and poundage could be lawfully imposed without their consent, they demanded the dismissal of Buckingham, upon the ground "that until this great person be removed from intermeddling with the great affairs of state, we are out of hope of any good success; and do fear that any money we shall or can give will, through his misemployment, be turned rather to the hurt and prejudice of this your kingdom than otherwise." Having failed to induce the peers to pronounce judgment against the favorite, the commons attempt to thus attempted to use the money power as a means of forministerial cing Charles to concede ministerial responsibility in a form which involved a direct admission of their supremacy over the The king's response was embodied in a resolve for an immediate dissolution. In reply to a petition from the peers for a postponement he answered, "No, not a minute;" parliament and so on the 15th of June his second parliament ended its existence. And as a manifestation of his contempt for the remonstrance with which the house had closed its labors, a proclamation was issued ordering all copies of it to be destroyed; and not long after, Sir John Eliot, who was mainly responsible for what had occurred, was declared by the council to be unworthy to hold any longer the office of vice-admiral of Devon. force responsi bility by use of money power; dissolved June 15; remonstrance ordered to be destroyed. crown. 1 Elsing's Notes, 1624-26, p. 154. 4 Lords' Journals, vol. iii. p. 682; Parl. or Const. Hist., vol. vii. p. 290. 5 Fœdera, vol. xviii. p. 719. 6 October 26. money France; its causes; tion; The failure of the subsidy bill, the failure to authorize tonnage and poundage, the debts of the crown, the pending war Need for with Spain, created a need for money such as had never be- increased fore been known, a need soon increased by the beginning of by war with a war with France, which resulted from the expulsion from the realm of the French attendants of the new queen, through Charles' failure to keep that stipulation of the marriage contract that promised toleration of catholic worship, from the seizure of French ships charged with carrying war materials to the Spaniards, and finally from the king's attempt to act as the champion of the Huguenots in atonement for his past conduct against them. In the vain hope of supplying the exchequer under such circumstances through the unaided resources of the conciliar system, Charles and Buckingham struggled on for a year and a half without a parliament. After fresh imposing tonnage and poundage by an order in council, as had attempts to impose been done after the dissolution of the Oxford parliament,1 a royal taxademand was made upon the counties in July, 1626, for a free gift, which was to be raised by the justices of the peace, who were instructed by letter to exhort their counties to voluntarily supply the amount of the four subsidies provided for in the act that parliament had failed to pass. To this demand, which struck at the very existence of the parliamentary system, sharp resistance came from Westminster and the rest of Mid- a free gift dlesex, where the cry was raised of "a parliament ! a parlia- in Westment! else no subsidies;" from Kent, which stood out to a minster and man; and from Bucks, where even the justice neglected to ask for the free aid.3 The difficulties thus encountered in collecting such an imposition in the very teeth of the statutes against benevolences drove Charles in September of the same year to resort to a forced loan under the name of privy seals, which privy seals were of less doubtful legality. The resistance to this new resisted; device, however, rapidly developed; the judges themselves signed a paper in which they personally refused to consent to the chief it; and when Chief Justice Crew, who was sent for by the missed for king, refused to yield to pressure, he was promptly dismissed to pay; 1 Act of council, July 8, Council Register. From 1625 to 1641 the port duties were levied without parliamentary sanction. See Dowell, Hist. of Taxation, vol. i. pp. 194, 195. 2 State Papers, Dom., xxxi. 30, 31; Fadera, xviii. 764. 8 See the answers of the counties in the Domestic State Papers for August and September. resisted Middlesex; levied and justice dis his refusal imprison ment of those who commis sioners, 1627; and Man on the 10th of November, and his office given to Hyde.1 But as the necessities of the crown could brook neither opposition nor delay, commissioners authorized by the council began a circuit of the counties in January, 1627, in order to assess the amounts the landowners were required to lend, and to examine on oath all that refused. To the widespread opposition offered to the commissioners by a long list of country gentlemen, inresisted the cluding Hampden, Eliot, and Wentworth, the council responded by imprisoning, by the king's special command, a large number, who were held in confinement, without trial, far from their homes. And in order to reconcile the royal demands to the conscience of the nation, that section of the clergy which supported the court was appealed to, and in February and July, Sibthorpe Sibthorpe and Manwaring, following in the servile path that Laud had marked out for them, preached sermons 3 exalting waring preached the power of the king to absurd heights, and calling upon all passive obedience; to submit to his mandates on pain of eternal damnation. A few months later, five of the country gentlemen who were still in custody appealed to the court of king's bench for a the king's habeas corpus to test the legality of their imprisonment. On the 15th of November they were brought to the bar, and on the 22d the argument was begun on their behalf by eminent counsel, who contended that they were protected by that clause of the Great Charter which provides that "no freeman shall be imprisoned . . . unless by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land." The last clause of that provision, as interpreted by certain statutes of Edward III., meant, they said, "due process of law," which a committal by the privy council, even by special order of the king, was not. After the attorney-general, relying mainly upon the famous dictum contained in Anderson's Reports, had argued that such a commitment, although it assigned no cause, was "due process of law," - because the judges should so far trust the king as to case of bench; 1 Court and Times, vol. i. pp. 160, 165; Gardiner, vol. vi. p. 149. 2 Rushworth, vol. i. p. 426; Strafford Papers, vol. i. pp. 36-41; Lingard, vol. vii. p. 310. The poor who resisted were enrolled in the army or navy. 8 Two of Manwaring's, printed under the title "Religion and Allegiance," are in the Library of Sion College. Gardiner, vol. vi. p. 209, note 1. These were licensed (State Trials, vol. iii. p. 351). Abbot, however, refused to license Sibthorpe's, for which he was ordered into confinement. 4 Sir T. Darnel, Sir J. Corbet, Sir W. Erle, Sir J. Heveningham, and Sir E. Hampden. The return was that they were held under warrant from the privy council by special command of the king. believe that he had good reason for withholding from them for the moment the real cause of the imprisonment, - a judgment was rendered (November 28) by Chief Justice Hyde, refusing bail refused bail, but without holding directly that the king could never be required to show cause.1 them. of ship of 1008; as such maritime Elizabeth's While well-known devices were thus employed to raise reve- Origin nue, a new expedient was also put forward, which rested upon money; a tradition dating back to the beginning of English taxation in pre-Norman times. The statement has heretofore been made assessment that the assessment of 1008, in which is to be found the origin of ship-money, was an extraordinary tax levied by the king and the witan, not only for the purpose of buying off the invader, but also for the raising of fleets by requiring each county to furnish in kind its quota of ships. And according to Earle, who is quoted by Freeman, "this would apply as well to theinland districts as to those on the seaboard." 2 In accordance ships with the practice existing in the time of the Plantagenets, a demanded part of the fleet which took Cadiz in Elizabeth's reign had of the been supplied by a levy on the maritime counties, and in June, counties in 1626, Charles had ventured to command such counties to join reign; the port towns in sending out a fleet. When the Dorsetshire magistrates attempted to resist the demand, they were told by the council that "state occasions, and the defence of the kingdom in times of extraordinary danger, do not guide themselves by ordinary precedents;" and when the citizens of London ventured to complain that the twenty ships at which that city was assessed were more than had been formerly demanded, they were told by the same authority "that the precedents of former times were obedience and not direction," an admonition before which the city finally gave way in August. In February, 1628, when all other means had failed him, Charles con- Charles ceived the idea of levying ship-money as such upon all counties, the idea in and letters were accordingly issued, commanding that the sum demanding assessed upon each shire should be paid into the exchequer money in by the 1st of March. In view, however, of the opposition ships; 1 State Trials, vol. iii. p. 1. 2 See vol. i. p. 187, note 3. 3 Extracts from the public records, State Papers, Dom., cclxxvi. 65. 4 For a list of the ports called upon to furnish ships, see State Papers, Dom., xxx. 81, June. As to the ships required from Exeter, see Hamilton, 5 See Proceedings in Council, July 6 For a list of the sums levied upon the counties, amounting for all Eng conceived 1628 of lieu of |