France; attempts 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 its causes: 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 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.2 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 Middlesex; 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 justice disit; 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. 3 See the answers of the counties in the Domestic State Papers for August and September. resisted levied and his refusal imprisonment of those who resisted the commissioners, 1627; and Man waring 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, including 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 preached the power of the king to absurd heights, and calling upon all 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 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 passive case of the five knights in the king's 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. as such maritime Elizabeth's While well-known devices were thus employed to raise reve- Origin of shipnue, 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 of 1008; 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 the inland 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. 8 Extracts from the public records, State Papers, Dom., cclxxvi. 65. 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 which the unheard-of demand at once provoked, the king promptly revoked the order, and thus suspended the new device until a later day.1 In the midst of such desperate efforts to raise revenue, the council did not neglect to issue commissions to compound with recusants for a suspension of the penal laws, while soldiers and sailors whose pay was in arrears were billeted upon counties, where their conduct was often scandalous. But in spite of all such expedients, Charles was at last forced to give way. The ignominious failure of Buckingham's expedition for the relief of Rochelle, the broken fragments of which landed at Portsmouth and Plymouth in November, 1627, and the pressing need for more money to carry on the war with France, compelled the king to yield to the inevitaforced the ble, and on the 30th of January, 1628, orders were given that writs should issue for a new parliament. As an attempt at conciliation, seventy-six persons, who had either been imprisoned or banished to counties other than their own for having refused to pay the forced loan, were permitted to return to their homes; and of that number twenty-seven, including Sir Thomas Wentworth, were at once elected to the house, which imprisoned proved itself to be more determined even than the last to the house. resist all assaults upon the liberties of the nation. pressing need for money calling of a new parliament; twentyseven of those lately returned to Third 17, 1628; 4. Just how pressing was the need which forced Charles to met March call together his third parliament, which met on March 17, 1628, was clearly disclosed when it was known that the council of war had sent in an estimate of nearly £600,000 for the army and navy during the coming year, besides an immediate demand of nearly £700,000 for munitions and repairs.1 While the king never dared to ask for the entire sum required, he opened the session with a threatening speech, in which he speech; said, "There is none here but knows that common danger is the cause of this parliament, and that supply at this time is the chief end of it. . . . Every man must do according to his conscience; wherefore, 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 Charles' threatening land to £173,000, see State Papers, 1 Court and Times, vol. i. pp. 322, 2 See State Papers, Dom., xcii. 85. 8 The release of prisoners was ordered on January 2. Cf. State Papers, Dom., xci. 52. 4 State Papers, Dom., xcviii. 1; Estimate, March 22. leaders of griev should means, which God hath put into my hands to save that which the follies of some particular men may otherwise hazard to lose." In anticipation of the coming storm the leaders of popular the popular party had gathered, a few days before parliament resolved met, at the house of Sir Robert Cotton, where it was resolved that redress that before any supplies whatever were granted, the king ances should be forced to promise, not only to vindicate the rights of precede supply; his subjects which he had so ruthlessly violated, but also to remedy the maladministration caused by the incompetency and greed of Buckingham.2 The active work of the session began with expositions, by the popular orators, of the particular grievances for which they demanded immediate and practical redress. The great lawyers of the opposition were Sir Edward Coke and Selden, and the former, in order to deprive the Coke's crown of the right of arbitrary imprisonment so lately as- ment bill imprisonserted in the case of the five knights, introduced on March 21 an imprisonment bill, which provided that no person, not under sentence, could be held without trial for more than two months, if he could give bail, or for more than three months if he could not; and at a later day he made a statement of his view of the law, in which the right of the crown to commit without naming the cause was sharply controverted. In reply Shilton, the solicitor-general, overwhelmed Coke for the mo- attacked by the ment, not only by referring to the apparently adverse opinion solicitorcontained in the Reports of Chief Justice Anderson, but also general; by producing a resolution arrived at in the king's bench, in 1615, in which Coke himself had approved the doctrine that the cause of imprisonment need not be stated when an offender was committed by an order in council. But after Coke had found a means of escape by putting his own construction upon a report of Anderson's opinion, in his own handwriting, brought forward by the heirs of the chief justice during the debate, the house passed three resolutions, in which it was resolutions passed as declared that no freeman should be committed without cause to the right shown; that every one, however committed, had a right to corps; to habeas |