and ward imposed. Before that conclusion was reached, however, full purveyance consideration was given to the old questions involving the king's ship; surrender of the right of purveyance and the emoluments which still resulted from feudal tenures, specially those arising out of wardship and marriage, when it was ascertained, after a debate in which Bacon1 elaborated the feudal branch of this complicated subject, that the king would make all necessary concessions for an adequate pecuniary compensation. Next in constitutional importance stood the abuse made of the abuse of the ordaining ordaining power of the king in council by means of proclama- power; tions, an abuse of which the commons complained because "there is a general fear conceived and spread amongst Your Majesty's people, that proclamations will by degrees grow up and increase to the strength and nature of laws, . . . and this fear is the more increased by occasion of certain books lately published, which ascribe a greater power to proclamations than heretofore had been conceived to belong to them." Reference was thus made to a new law dictionary lately published by Dr. Cowell, Cowell's reader in civil law at Cambridge, in which the new notions of tionary; the prerogative had led the author to assert that the king "is above the law by his absolute power; and though for the better and equal course in making laws he do admit the three estates. into council, yet this in divers learned men's opinion is not of constraint, but of his own benignity, or by reason of the promise made upon oath at the time of his coronation." 2 In order to satisfy the indignation excited by this ridiculous publication, the king issued a proclamation suppressing the book, admitting beforehand "that he was a king by the common law of the land," and that he "had no power to make laws of himself, or to exact any subsidies de jure without the consent of his three estates, and, therefore, he was so far from approving the opinion, as he did hate those that believed it."4 While James still held on to the right to issue proclamations beyond the law in cases of emergency, when parliament was not sitting, he agreed to consult the judges and the council upon the 1 Letters and Life of Bacon, vol. iv. p. 163. See also Parl. Deb. in 1610, p. 164. 66 2 See the articles entitled "King," "Prerogative," Parliament," "Subsidy." 8 The proclamation may be found in the preface to the 1708 ed. of the Interpreter. 4 Such was the report made by Salisbury to the lords. Parl. Deb. in 1610, p. 24. law dic suppressed by proclamation; the president and James subject, and to cause those already issued to be amended1 To the demand made by the house that he should exempt the four counties on the Welsh border from the jurisdiction of the president and council of Wales, a court which was a mere council of agency of the conciliar system, the king replied that he could Wales; not solve a question of such difficulty without further inquiry.? If nothing more had remained, an amicable settlement might have been reached. But such a result became impossible by reason of James' refusal to make any concessions whatever to the demands of the commons upon the subject of ecclesiastical grievances. To the requests that the deprived ministers should be allowed to preach upon certain conditions, that the old grievances of pluralities and non-residence should be removed, that the conflict of jurisdiction, which had arisen out of the efforts made by the court of king's bench to limit the powers of the high commission by writs of prohibitions should be settled against the latter by a restraining statute, the house could obtain no satisfactory responses whatever.3 parliament Under these discouraging circumstances the parliament was prorogued 23d of July; prorogued on the 23d of July. refused to redress ecclesiastical grievances; judges to define extent of ordaining power. Two months after that event the king, in accordance with called upon his promise to consult the judges as to his power to issue proclamations, summoned Coke, the chief justice of the king's bench, to appear before the council, where he was asked by Salisbury, first, whether the king could by proclamation prohibit the building of new houses in London, in order to check the overgrowth of that city; second, whether he could in the same way forbid the manufacture of starch from wheat, in order to prevent the diminution of the supply for purposes of food. After conference with three of his brethren, an opinion was delivered by the four a few days later, in the presence of the council, against the king's pretensions, in terms which have been set forth already.* Fifth and last session On the 16th of October, when the fifth and last session began Oc began, the commons took up the task of opposition at the point at which it had been broken off, and on the 31st the king tober 31; 1 Gardiner, Hist. Eng., vol. ii. p. 86. 2 Upon that question, see Mr. Heath's introduction to the " Argument on the Jurisdiction of the Marches," in vol. vii. of Bacon's Works. 8 Such was the nature of the king's answer read in the lords at the prorogation, in answer to the memorial there presented on the 21st. 4 See above, p. 180, and note 7. the terms of Contract;" 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 As the mem- in anger 1611, after an existence of nearly seven years. 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 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 1 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. See vol. i. p. 16. As to the fate of that colony, see Andrews, Hist. of the U. S., vol. i. p. 5 Hening, Statutes of Virginia, vol. the settle ment at Jamestown; first American representative assembly. Marked change in internal of conciliar dates from ber, containing the one hundred and five colonists who made the first permanent English settlement upon the soil of the New World.1 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.2 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 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 24, 1612; 1 Smith's Hist. of Virginia, 41; Pur- at the time was no less a person than chas, iv. 1683-1733Sir Julius Cæsar. 4 As to the king's objections to any 2 See vol. i. p. 21. 8 The chancellor of the exchequer candidate for the vacant office sup a appearance of court Carr made Scotchman the real thus passing under the personal control of James, the king himself was passing under the sway of a court favorite, 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 a peer; 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 house; 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; reconciling 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. |