the terms of informed them that if they did not intend to go on with the "Great Contract," he could find some other way to supply his wants. In vain were the terms of the bargain then debated again and again; in vain did the king offer to consider the case of the four counties, and to grant the demands of the house as to proclamations and impositions. A vital subject of difference still remained. The king was immovable in his pur- failure to pose neither to permit any modification whatever in the ritual agree upon of the state church, nor to suffer any reform in the constitu- the "Great tion of the ecclesiastical courts by permitting their jurisdiction to be narrowed, either by an act of parliament, or by the courts of common law.1 Angered and disheartened by a state of things in which the commons, while denouncing his Scotch favorites, withheld all supply, James adjourned the house; and shortly thereafter dissolved the parliament on February 9, parliament 1611, after an existence of nearly seven years. As the mem- in anger bers returned to their homes, the ominous news was carried February 9, to every borough and to every shire "that the monarchy had broken with the great council of the realm.” 2 Contract; " dissolved 1611. in the New During the life of James' first parliament, thus brought to Seeds of a close, a momentous event occurred in the history of the Eng- constituthe English lish Constitution, whereby its seeds were sown in the virgin tion sown soil of another hemisphere, where they ripened into the group World; of local self-governing communities out of whose union has arisen the federal republic of the United States. Before the close of the sixteenth century, every attempt at permanent settlement made by Englishmen in America had ended in failure and disappointment,3 and Raleigh, whose adventurous spirit had planted in 1587 the lost colony in the land to which Elizabeth had given the name of Virginia, was confined by James behind prison bars. But the time had now come for Raleigh's dream to be realized. Under a charter granted by charter of the Virginia James on April 10, 1606,5 at the instance of Chief Justice Company; Popham, a company was organized, which sent out three small vessels from the Thames on the 19th of the following Decem For the proceedings of this session, see Parl. Deb. in 1610, pp. 126-145. 2 Green's Hist. of the Eng. People, vol. iii. p. 82. 8 See vol. i. p. 16. 4 As to the fate of that colony, see Andrews, Hist. of the U. S., vol. i. p. 5 Hening, Statutes of Virginia, vol. ber, containing the one hundred and five colonists who made the first permanent English settlement upon the soil of the New World. After naming the headlands between which they sailed upon their arrival in the Chesapeake Cape Henry and Cape Charles, in honor of the royal princes, they gave the king's name to the river upon which they built Jamestown. In spite of a bitter struggle for existence, this colony so steadily advanced that from the towns, hundreds, and plantations into which it was subdivided were summoned the twenty-two delegates who, on the 30th of July, 1619, organized in the chancel of the church at Jamestown the first American representative assembly. assembly.2 the settle ment at Jamestown; first American representative Marked change in internal of conciliar dates from 6. With the memorable dissolution that took place on the 9th of February, 1611, ended that oneness of aim, that singlemechanism ness of purpose, which had united the crown and the nation system during the storms of the Reformation; and from that time can also be dated a marked change in the internal mechanism of the conciliar system itself, which became in a sense never before known subject to the king's personal will. Even in the days of Henry VIII., the great statesmen who sat at the council board had stood as a constitutional check upon the arbitrary exercise of the prerogative; and throughout the reigns of Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth, the same influence had remained as an arbitrating force, ever ready to mediate in the event of a conflict between the royal and the national will. When James accepted Cecil as his chief councillor, he accepted with him the Tudor tradition which he embodied, and so long as he lived, the king was more or less restrained by the guiding hand of his great minister. But when Cecil, the last of the Tudor 24, 1612; statesmen, passed away on the 24th of May, 1612, after having failed to reconcile the king and the nation through the execution of the "Great Contract," James was relieved of the yoke of which he had become weary, and he at once took into his own hands the personal direction of affairs by putting the treasury into commission, and by resolving to act as his own secretary of state. While the entire conciliar system was Cecil's death, May 1 Smith's Hist. of Virginia, 41; Purchas, iv. 1683-1733. 2 See vol. i. p. 21. at the time was no less a person than Sir Julius Cæsar. 4 As to the king's objections to any 8 The chancellor of the exchequer candidate for the vacant office sup of court Carr made a peer; Scotchman the real thus passing under the personal control of James, the king himself was passing under the sway of a court favorite, a appearance familiar influence in the royal system of Scotland, which had favorites; not been heard of in England since the days of Gaveston and De Vere.1 A year before the death of Cecil, Robert Carr, a Robert young countryman who had won James' heart by his personal beauty, was raised to the peerage with the title of Viscount Rochester, after having been enriched by the grant of a manor of which the imprisoned Raleigh had been despoiled for his benefit.2 In December, 1613, Rochester, the first Scotchman first to obtain a seat in the house of lords, was created earl of to sit in Somerset, a few weeks before his marriage to Frances Howard, the upper the daughter of the earl of Suffolk, who, in order to consummate her guilty union with the new favorite, had prosecuted a scandalous proceeding for divorce, which the king himself had aided and abetted. This upstart, who had no title to distinc- becomes tion save the king's favor, soon became not only James' sole chief of confidant, but his sole minister, the real chief of state. From state; a dispatch of the Spanish ambassador written only a year after Cecil's death, we learn that "the Viscount Rochester, at the council table, showeth much temper and modesty, without seeming to press or sway anything, but afterwards the king resolveth all business with him alone." Without the slightest sympathy with the popular party, Somerset had urged James to dissolve his first parliament, and in the second he voted in the upper house against a conference of that body with the commons upon the subject of impositions. But while the breach between the crown and the parliament was thus being widened through the influence of a mere adventurer, the king was fortunate in having at his side the greatest thinker of the age, whose advancement had no doubt been retarded by Cecil's jealousy. In the parliament of 1604, Bacon had appeared as Bacon as a a reconciling statesman, and in that year it was that he was statesman; made a king's counsel; and in 1607 he was made solicitorgeneral. When in August, 1613, the death of Fleming made a vacancy in the chief justiceship of the king's bench, Bacon ported by parliament, see Court and 2 For a full statement of that transaction, see Gardiner, vol. ii. pp. 42-47. 8 Ibid., p. III. 4 Sarmiento's dispatch sent home by Digby, September 22, 1613, State Papers, Spain. reconciling made attorneygeneral; revenues; found a fresh opportunity for advancement by inducing the king to raise his bitter adversary, Coke, to that position from the more congenial and more lucrative place of chief justice of the common pleas. The vacancy thus created by Coke's "penal promotion" was filled by Hobart, the attorney-general, into whose office Bacon was at once inducted. Such was the character of James' legal adviser when, at the close of 1613, he was compelled by the pressure of debts upon him to determine whether or no he could attempt to carry on the government any longer through the mere enforcement of legal rights incident to the prerogative, without the aid of parliaexpedients ment. Since the last had refused to give him subsidies, every for raising expedient had been employed in the effort to raise revenues. Loans had been made on privy seals; debts due from France and the Dutch had been collected; fines due through the star chamber had been enforced with a fresh severity; lands had been sold which were to have been indissolubly annexed to creation of the crown; and the hereditary title of baronet now created the title of baronet; was offered to all reputable knights and esquires possessed of lands worth £1,000 a year, provided they would pay to the exchequer £1,080 for their patents. Not until after all these expedients had failed to supply even approximately the king's calling of a wants, did a majority of the council advise him in February of 1614 to call a parliament.2 Some time before, both Bacon and Neville had urged him to that course, and both had ventured to suggest a way in which all differences could be settled between the nation and the king. Neville, who, in 1612, had drawn up a memorial on the subject, even went so far as to undertake that the house of commons would be liberal in the grant of supplies, if the king would make the required concessions,3 a circumstance which gave for the moment to him and the "under his associates the title of "undertakers." A suspicion that some kind of a compact had thus been made with the view of packing the approaching parliament with royal nominees parliament resolved upon; takers;" 1 It was expected that this new order of hereditary knights would number two hundred. See Collins' Baronetage, vol. iv. p. 289. Only ninetythree patents, however, were sold in the first six years. Abstract of the King's Revenue, pp. 36-38; Somers' Tracts, vol. ii. p. 254. 2 Council to the king, February 16, State Papers, Dom., lxxvi. 22. 8 State Papers, Dom., lxxiv. 46; Carte, Hist., vol. iv. p. 17. James afterward denied that he had any bargain with the "undertakers." Parl. Hist., p. 1149. resulted in the rejection of the government candidates on every hand, and in the return to Westminster of three hundred members, nearly two thirds of the whole house, who were elected for the first time.1 Among the new men who thus Eliot and came upon the stage were John Eliot and Thomas Wentworth, worth. destined to bear such mighty parts in the time to come.2 Went second James' second parliament, which met on the 5th of April, James' 1614, at once emphasized the fact that it had inherited the parliament spirit of its predecessor by promptly rejecting as inadequate met April 5, 1614; the unimportant concessions offered in the king's speech, and by announcing that no supply could be granted until a settlement should first be made of the open questions involved in the impositions, the ecclesiastical grievances, and in the monopolies. After the matter of impositions had been reargued for the subject of imposithe benefit of the new members, a resolution was reached to tions ask a conference with the lords, who were to be invited to join revived; the house in a petition to the king upon that all-important subject. The lords, however, declined the conference, and refused to accept the invitation to lead the constitutional resistance to the crown by calling upon the judges to give opinions upon the legal point in which was involved the whole issue. But the judges, led by Coke, prudently declined the judges responsibility by suggesting that they might be called upon to to give judge the question judicially.5 In the course of the debate opinions which took place in the lords the commons were sorely of- extrajudicially; fended by a denunciation pronounced against them by Bishop Neile, who said that men who had taken the oaths of supremacy and allegiance could not in good conscience even discuss the subject of impositions, whose consideration would only lead to disloyal and seditious speeches, to which the peers should not even listen.6 When the lower house was about to make the false step of appealing to the king for action, they the were rescued by a motion for redress to the lords themselves, question of privilege who, after calling the bishop to account in that particular case, involved in plainly intimated that in future they would not permit a mem- case; 1 A list of this parliament, printed from the Kimbolton MS., is in the Palatine Note-Book, vol. iii. No. 30. 2 The statement that Pym sat in this parliament as a member from Calne is now known to be erroneous. He did not appear in that capacity until 1621. 8 For details, see Commons' Journals, vol. i. pp. 481, 486. 4 Commons' Journals, vol. ii. pp. 707, 5 Lords' Journals, vol. ii. p. 706. decline upon it Neile's |