Eliot's resolutions upon taxation and religion offered by Holles ; after the questions were put, the house adjourned itself; Eliot and eight others committed to the Tower. Finch succeeded in breaking away, he was again seized and made to submit to physical force. During the moment of quiet that then ensued, Eliot made an effort to submit to the house some resolutions upon the subjects of taxation and religion, which, after having been burned by their author, who despaired of obtaining a formal vote upon them, were reproduced from memory by Holles in the following form:1 "Whosoever shall bring in innovation in religion, or by favour seek to extend or introduce Popery or Arminianism, or other opinions disagreeing from the true and orthodox church, shall be reputed a capital enemy to this kingdom and the commonwealth. "Whosoever shall counsel or advise the taking and levying of the subsidies of tonnage and poundage, not being granted by parliament, or shall be an actor or an instrument therein, shall be likewise reputed an innovator in the government, and a capital enemy of this kingdom and commonwealth. "If any merchant or other person whatsoever shall voluntarily yield or pay the said subsidies of tonnage and poundage, not being granted by parliament, he shall likewise be reputed a betrayer of the liberty of England, and an enemy to the same."2 Knowing that it would be useless to apply again to the speaker to put the question, Holles put it himself, and after the defiant resolutions had been thus adopted, the commons of their own motion adjourned themselves until the 10th. Thus it was that the career of the house and of its great leader came to an end. Immediately after the adjournment, Eliot and eight of his associates were committed to the Tower or to other prisons, and on the day set for its reassembling, Charles, after making a declaration justifying the act, dissolved the parliament in which Eliot had made his last and Oliver Cromwell his first speech,5 and whose successor was not to be called until after the lapse of eleven years of personal rule. 3 1 For the events of that day, see journals of both houses; Rushworth, vol. i. pp. 655-672; Whitelock, pp. 12, 13; Nicholas' Notes; State Papers, Dom., cxxxviii. 6, 7. The best restatement of it all is to be found in Gardiner, vol. vii. pp. 67-76. 2 Parl. Hist., vol. ii. p. 491. 3 Holles, Valentine, Selden, Strode, Hobart, Long, Coryton, and Heyman. After referring to the "dissobedient carriage of the lower house," Charles declared that "the vipers among them should meet with their reward." Parl. Hist., vol. viii. p. 333. 5 Cf. Carlyle's Letters and Speeches, p. 52. separatists; went and thence 1620; 5. Before the close of the reign of Elizabeth, it was esti- Rise of the mated that there were in England some 20,000 persons, popularly known as Brownists, who, rejecting the original Puritan idea of reforming the national church from within, had resolved to break away from it altogether. Among the several independent congregations set up by these separatists will ever be remembered that organized at Gainsborough, Lincoln- the congregations at shire, which, under the pressure of persecution, emigrated Gainsbor under the pastoral care of John Smith to Amsterdam in ough and Scrooby; 1606; and that planted at Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, which, after an unsuccessful attempt to sail from Boston in 1607, finally escaped to Amsterdam in the course of the following year. In 1609 the Scrooby church removed in a body from the latter Amsterdam to Leyden under the leadership of Robinson, and to Leyden, there remained until the summer of 1620, when a second move to the New was made to the New World under a patent granted the year World in before by the London or South Virginia Company, which authorized them to make a settlement near the mouth of the Hudson River.5 After resting on the way at Southampton and Plymouth, the little band of emigrants sailed in the May- Mayflower flower from the port last named on September 6, and arrived arrived off Cape Cod off Cape Cod on the 9th of September. As they were then November 9; outside the limits of the South Virginia Company, its patent was useless, and the settlement made at Plymouth after their landing on the 11th of December would have been without any control whatever, had not the emigrants agreed beforehand on shipboard to a political compact under which John political Carver was elected the first governor. At a later day a license shipboard; was obtained from the Plymouth or North Virginia Company, charter whose domain had thus been invaded without its authority.7 granted On the 4th of March, 1629, two days after the memorable 1629, to adjournment of his third parliament, Charles I. granted a royal of the charter to "the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts setts Bay;" the famous compact on March 4, "Company Massachu colony became ent in Bay in New England," 1 under which gathered the settlements made at Salem, Boston, and Charlestown by the later Puritan emigrants, who, having been drawn from the professional and middle classes of Lincolnshire and the eastern counties, were men of a higher culture than the first comers. The only dependence under which the self-governing colony thus planted suffered at the outset grew out of the fact that it was subject to the control of a corporation in England composed of those by whom its organization had been brought about. But that tie was severed, and the Massachusetts colony became practically practically an independent commonwealth, when in August, independ- 1629, its government was transferred to America by a vote of August; the company itself,2 upon an offer made by Winthrop and eleven other gentlemen to emigrate upon the happening of that event. Thus was established upon the soil of the New World the colony of Massachusetts Bay, into which the Plymouth settlement was finally incorporated in 1691. With the departure of Winthrop the migration to New England began in earnest, and it is estimated that between the sailing of his expedition and the meeting of the Long Parliament, two hundred emigrant ships crossed the Atlantic,5 bearing to their new homes in the west twenty thousand Englishmen, whose first thought was to find in the wilderness freedom from the religious persecution which Laud was relentlessly enforcing against all who beginnings bore the name of Puritan. The history of the beginnings of of political political organization that thus arose has been summarized already, from which it appears that the active governing unit in New England was the township, formed as a general rule "before the county, the county before the state." The government of the township was vested in a primary assembly purely democratic, the principle of representation not coming into use until the primary plan became inapplicable to the larger units which arose out of the process of aggregation. And yet upon this purely democratic substructure the Massachusetts colony did not fail to impose a serious limitation. In 1631 the general court resolved "that no man shall be with departure of Winthrop migration began in earnest ; organization; 6 5 Green, Hist. of the Eng. People, vol. iii. p. 171. 6 Vol. i. pp. 28-31. admitted to the freedom of this body politic, but such as are members of some of the churches within the limits of the same," ,"1 and thus it was that the blended church and state the blended passed under the yoke of a democratic theocracy, utterly blind church and at first to the idea of religious toleration. state. in which began his 1629; no one to 6. The bitter and determined spirit in which Charles entered Spirit upon his new career of personal government was expressed in Charles no uncertain terms in a proclamation against false rumors personal issued on the 27th of March, just a week after the dissolution, rule; in which, after denouncing Eliot as "an outlawed man, desper- tion of proclamaate in mind and fortune," he declared, "we shall account it March 27, presumption for any to prescribe any time unto us for parliaments, the calling, continuing, and dissolving of which is always suggest the calling of in our power, and we shall be more inclinable to meet in par- parliament; liament again when our people shall see more clearly into our intents and actions, when such as have bred this interruption shall have received their condign punishment, and those who are misled by them, and by such ill reports as are raised in this occasion, shall come to a better understanding of us and themselves." "2 The great lesson which Charles thus proposed to teach the nation during the period in which parliaments were to be indefinitely suspended was that the king in council was so entirely independent of the king in parliament that adequate revenue could be supplied and the entire machinery of the government carried on by the unaided resources of the government conciliar system. While such a suspension of parliamentary life was in itself a revolution, the king had no intention of council employing in the execution of his designs anything but purely legal methods, or such as should be declared so to be by the dependent judiciary which his father and himself had reduced to servility. Bacon, in one of his essays, had instructed both with the aid in the belief that the judges should "be lions, but yet lions judges; under the throne, being circumspect that they do not check or oppose any points of sovereignty," and so faithfully did Charles adhere throughout to that theory that Grimston was able to say in the Long Parliament that "the judges have overthrown the law, and the bishops the gospel." And yet, in the proceedings which the king now instituted for the "condign pun 1 Dexter, Congregationalism of the 2 Fœdera, vol. xix. p. 62. Last Three Hundred Years, p. 420. to be carried on by the only, of servile tance in the case of Eliot, Holles, and others. their reluc- ishment" of Eliot, Holles, Valentine, Selden, and the rest who had been imprisoned just before the dissolution for their part in the stormy events that transpired when the speaker was seized and held in his chair, the judges descended very reluctantly to the servile place their master assigned them, stimulated as they were by the terms of the Petition of Right, which were intended to strengthen their hands as arbitrators between the crown and the nation. Eliot refused to speak of anything done in When in March the examination of the prisoners began, Eliot at once presented the mighty issue involved by replying to every question: "I refuse to answer, because I hold that it the house; is against the privilege of the house of parliament to speak of anything which was done in the house."1 Alarmed by this bold assertion of parliamentary privilege, whose extent at that time had not been distinctly defined, Charles resolved to consult the judges in advance, who were called upon to express their views in response to a series of questions 2 propounded to them by the attorney-general, Heath. While the judges declined in reply to define the exact extent of parliamentary privilege prior to full argument, they finally indicated that the prisoners could be proceeded against in the star chamber, provided they were permitted the help of counsel. Guided by the infor- that intimation, Heath, on May 7, filed an information against them in that court, the gravamen of which was that on the great day in the house upon which Eliot and his associates had made sweeping charges against privy councillors, they had been guilty of a conspiracy to publish false rumors in order to bring the king and government into disrepute. After pleas to the jurisdiction had been presented and argued, the star chamber referred the questions involved to three of its members, the two chief justices and the chief baron, who, after withholding their opinions for a long time, advised that the proceedings should be dropped, as the matter was then pending in the king's bench upon an application for habeas corpus there made upon the day before Heath filed his infor mation in the star chamber; habeas corpus proceedings in the king's bench; 1 State Papers, Dom., cxxxiv. 7. 2 State Trials, vol. iii. pp. 235, 238; Rushworth, vol. i. p. 662. Mr. Gardiner expresses the opinion that the two sets of questions are quite distinct from each other. See vol. vii. p. 88, note 1. 8 Parl. Hist., vol. ii. p. 507; State Papers, Dom., cxliii. 4-13. 4 State Papers, Dom., cxliv. 37; Court and Times, vol. ii. p. 17; Gardiner, vol. vii. pp. 90, 92, note 1, 109. By Selden, Holles, Valentine, |