admitted to the freedom of this body politic, but such as are members of some of the churches within the limits of the same," and thus it was that the blended church and state the blended passed under the yoke of a democratic theocracy, utterly blind state. at first to the idea of religious toleration. church and in which no one to calling of 1 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 began his personal issued on the 27th of March, just a week after the dissolution, rule; proclamain which, after denouncing Eliot as "an outlawed man, desper- tion of ate in mind and fortune," he declared, "we shall account it March 27, 1629; presumption for any to prescribe any time unto us for parliaments, the calling, continuing, and dissolving of which is always suggest the 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. "12 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 on by the 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 pun1 Dexter, Congregationalism of the 2 Fadera, vol. xix. p. 62. Last Three Hundred Years, p. 420. to be carried only, of servile tance in the case 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." 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 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 the infor mation in the star chamber; habeas corpus proceedings in the king's bench; 3 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. 375 Court and Times, vol. ii. p. 17; Gardiner, vol. vii. pp. 90, 92, note 1, 109.. By Selden, Holles, Valentine, 3 not pro mation in the king's mation in the star chamber. After the king, in deference to the terms of the Petition of Right, had made a return to the king's bench, in which he stated the ground of the committal to be the commission of notable contempts against himself and his government, and the stirring up of sedition in the state, the counsel for the petitioners undertook to convince the judges that the offence assigned was clearly bailable, for the reason that the contempt and sedition charged did not constitute treason.1 When Charles saw that the judges were likely to yield to that contention, instead of producing the prisoners prisoners in court on the day set, he conveyed them all to duced in the Tower, where they were to be held "until they were deliv- court; ered by due course of law."2 Finally, in order to solve the question, Heath in October presented an information in the the inforking's bench against the ringleaders, Eliot, Holles, and Valentine, in which they were directly charged with a conspiracy bench; formed in parliament itself to calumniate the ministers, to assault the speaker, and to defeat the king's lawful order of adjournment. After a plea to the jurisdiction of the court plea to over such acts had been fully argued, the judges held that their jurisdiction jurisdiction was clear, reserving, however, the question whether the prisoners were really guilty of the offence with which they were charged. When the three still persisted in their refusal to plead in a court whose jurisdiction they denied, a judgment defendants was finally rendered, as upon confession, imposing heavy fines imprisupon them all, and declaring that they should be held in custody oned; until they should acknowledge their offence and give security for their good behavior. After Eliot's associates had secured Eliot alone their release through the acceptance of these terms which he refused to scornfully rejected, he was left behind prison bars to fight out liberty on the great battle single-handed and alone. Into the proceedings terms; of the parliament which had adopted the Petition of Right he had infused his spirit, and the question now was whether the guarantee which that new charter was intended to give to the personal liberty of every Englishman was to be whispered away Strode, Hobart, and Long. Eliot did entine. Rushworth, vol. i. p. 680. He not join. 1 State Trials, vol. iii. pp. 241, 242. * Controlment Roll, King's Bench, 51 Membr. 65. The next day (June 24) the king wrote a letter to the judges, proposing to produce Selden and Val then wrote a second letter, saying he 8 State Trials, vol. iii. p. 320. overruled; fined and accept his humiliating by a judgment from servile judges who held, in substance, that while the king might be forced to keep the letter of the Petition by assigning the cause of the commitment, he might defeat its real object by holding the prisoner in custody, no matter what the cause shown might be. Against that ultimate exercise of tyranny Eliot opposed a lofty and unbending spirit died in the of protest, which ended only with his death in the Tower on the November, 27th of November, 1632. During his long and painful confinement this first martyr in the new struggle for liberty embodied in a political and philosophical treatise, which he called "Monarchy the "Monarchy of Man," 1 his ideal of government, while in a last letter 2 addressed to Hampden, he unconsciously revealed the fact that in the maintenance of that ideal he was sustained by the spirit of self-abnegation which moved the king of the abnegation. Greeks, in the Homeric story, to cry out : Tower 27, 1632; his of Man;" his self Charles now insisted upon his right to levy customs; "Let me be deem'd the hateful cause of all, And suffer, rather than my people fall."8 Charles' last tribute to such a man was recorded upon the petition in which Eliot's son asked permission to take away his father's remains for burial at the Devon home in which he was loved and honored by all: "Let Sir John Eliot," wrote the king, "be buried in the church of that parish where he died." 4 While Charles was thus trampling upon that part of the Petition of Right which was designed to prevent arbitrary imprisonment, he was also attempting to destroy by like means its opening clause, which was supposed to render impossible all forms of taxation "not sett by common consent in parliament." Whether the royal right to impose the port duties was taken away by the limited terms of the petition was certainly a doubtful question, and Charles frankly stated, shortly after its approval, that it was not his intention that it should "take away my chief profit of tonnage and poundage." As a last word upon the subject, the house in the resolutions heretofore set forth had declared that any merchant who should pay such duties, authorized only by royal authority, would "be reputed a betrayer of the liberty of England, and an enemy to 1 Harl. MSS., 2228. The work has been published by Dr. Grosart. 2 March 29, 1632. 3 Pope's translation. 4 See Gardiner, vol. vii. p. 228. 5 1629, "' in council that all to pay of this of the the same." 1 Regardless, however, of that anathema, the council on the 7th of March, 1629,2 promptly ordered that all March 7, persons refusing to pay such duties should be held in prison at ordered the king's will," or that they be delivered by order of law; and thus by royal warrant only the port duties continued to should be imprisoned be levied until 1641,3 the efforts made first by Chambers and who refused then by Vassall to resist payment by judicial means having them; proven equally abortive. How vitally important to Charles was this resource can be well understood when the statement is made that in 1635, the year in which a new book of rates was importance issued, the port duties, by reason of the great increase in trade, branch amounted to £328, 126, more than half of the average ordinary revenue; revenue of the crown, estimated for that year at £618,379.6 With the port duties as a basis, the council continued to enforce every other financial branch of the prerogative, including some that were dormant, in the hope of supplying the deficit in the exchequer without any open and palpable breach of constitutional law. In that way large sums were drawn from other forms of royal the landed gentry through compositions accepted for the re- taxation; fusal of knighthood, which was vigorously forced upon them; through a revival of the odious forest laws whereby compositions were drawn from the neighboring landowners who had encroached upon the royal domain; through fines exacted for the curing of defects in title-deeds; through the pitiless enforcement of enormous fines through the star chamber, whose indefinite powers were given the widest extension; 8 through the revival and application of monopolies, abandoned by Elizabeth and abolished by parliament in the preceding reign, to almost every article of ordinary consumption; and finally, through the enforcement against Puritan London of 1 See above, p. 278. 2 Council Register. 3 Dowell, Hist. of Taxation, vol. i. PP. 193, 195. 4 Chambers, who refused to submit, was sentenced in the star chamber, May 6, 1629. See State Trials, vol. iii. P. 374 5 Vassall, who refused to pay the duties on currants, had his goods sold in June, 1631, by an order made in the exchequer. Exchequer Decrees and Orders, vol. viii. pp. 269, 309 b.; vol. ix. p. 204 b.; xi. p. 466 b. 6 State Papers, Charles I., cccxiv. Strafford's Letters, vol. ii. p. 117. 9 Cf. Dowell, Hist. of Taxation, vol. |