Chapter VII: Part 7

These abound in delights; and compassed with the fullness of
all things, and consumed with vain pleasures, thirst only after
gain, inflamed with the burning delights of their desires.

But ourselves, almost killed with labour and watching, do
nothing all our life long but sweat, mourn, hunger, and thirst.
Which things, though they seem miserable and base (as they are
indeed most miserable), yet might be borne howsoever, if they
which are drowned in the boiling seas of evil delights did not
pursue the calamities and miseries of other men with too much
insolent hatred. But now both we and our miserable condition
is a laughing stock to these most proud and insolent men--who
are consumed with ease and idleness. Which thing (as it may)
grieveth us so sore and inflicteth such a stain of evil report,
so that nothing is more grievous for us to remember, nor more
unjust to suffer.

The present condition of possessing land seemeth miserable
and slavish--holding it all at the pleasure of great men; not
freely, but by prescription, and, as it were, at the will and
pleasure of the lord. For as soon as any man offend any of
these gorgeous gentlemen, he is put out, deprived, and thrust
from all his goods.

How long shall we suffer so great oppression to go unrevenged?

For so far as they, the gentlemen, now gone in cruelty and
covetousness, that they are not content only to take all by
violence away from us, and to consume in riot and effeminate
delights what they get by force and villainy, but they must
also suck in a manner our blood and marrow out of our veins and
bones.

The common pastures left by our predecessors for our relief and
our children are taken away.

The lands which in the memory of our fathers were common,
those are ditched and hedged in and made several; the pastures
are enclosed, and we shut out. Whatsoever fowls of the air or
fishes of the water, and increase of the earth--all these do
they devour, consume, and swallow up; yea, nature doth not
suffice to satisfy their lusts, but they seek out new devices,
and, as it were, forms of pleasures to embalm and perfume
themselves, to abound in pleasant smells, to pour in sweet
things to sweet things. Finally, they seek from all places all
things for their desire and the provocation of lust. While
we in the meantime eat herbs and roots, and languish with
continual labour, and yet are envied that we live, breathe, and
enjoy common air!

Shall they, as they have brought hedges about common pastures,
enclose with their intolerable lusts also all the commodities
and pleasures of this life, which Nature, the parent of us all,
would have common, and bringeth forth every day, for us, as
well as for them?

We can no longer bear so much, so great, and so cruel injury;
neither can we with quiet minds behold so great covetousness,
excess, and pride of the nobility. We will rather take arms,
and mix Heaven and earth together, than endure so great cruelty.

Nature hath provided for us, as well as for them; hath given us
a body and a soul, and hath not envied us other things. While
we have the same form, and the same condition of birth together
with them, why should they have a life so unlike unto ours, and
differ so far from us in calling?

We see that things have now come to extremities, and we will
prove the extremity. We will rend down hedges, fill up ditches,
and make a way for every man into the common pasture. Finally,
we will lay all even with the ground, which they, no less
wickedly than cruelly and covetously, have enclosed. Neither
will we suffer ourselves any more to be pressed with such
burdens against our wills, nor endure so great shame, since
living out our days under such inconveniences we should leave
the commonwealth unto our posterity--mourning, and miserable,
and much worse than we received it of our fathers.

Wherefore we will try all means; neither will we ever rest
until we have brought things to our own liking.

We desire liberty and an indifferent (or equal) use of all
things. This will we have. Otherwise these tumults and our
lives shall only be ended together.

Revolutionary as this manifesto is, Robert Ket is seen all through the rising exerting his authority on behalf of law and good order, curbing anarchy and checking ferocity in the rebel camp.

Only one day was spent at Eaton Wood. Ket’s plan was to advance to Mousehold, a wide stretch of high, well-wooded ground to the east of Norwich. Here the camp was fixed on July 12th, the river having been crossed at Hailsdon, and a night’s halt called at Drayton--for the mayor of Norwich, Thomas Cod, positively refused to allow the rebels to pass through the city. Ket, anxious to unite citizens and peasants in a common cause, willingly avoided altercation, and Cod, alarmed at the rising, and unable to dissuade the insurgents from their enterprise, was careful to refrain from all hostile demonstrations. Cod’s one purpose was to exclude Ket’s army from the city, and to accomplish this he kept on friendly terms with Ket, even while appealing to the government to send down troops to suppress the rising. Ket’s purpose was to break down landlord rule in Norfolk, extend the area of revolt, and to get the king to attend to the complaints of his subjects.

Ket’s company at Mousehold numbered no more than 2,600 on July 12th; but the ringing of bells and the firing of beacons brought in thousands of homeless men. At the end of a week 20,000 men were enrolled under the banner of revolt, and now Ket had all his work to do in maintaining discipline and in arranging for provisions for the camp.

It is clear Robert Ket was the right man for a leader.[100] The people trusted him and obeyed his orders. Cod and two other reputable citizens of Norwich--Aldrich, an alderman, and Watson, a preacher--attended the camp daily, and along with Ket and his brother William sat under a great tree, known as the Oak of Reformation, and administered justice. The 20,000 hungry, disinherited men carried out in as orderly way as they could the instructions they received.

Ket’s first business was to send to the king a plain statement of “Requests and Demands.” He knew what was wanted for rural England, and refused to admit that his purpose was disloyal or that his conduct was rebellion.

The “Requests” were twenty-nine, and they contained a full statement of the grievances of the country folk. The chief requests were for the stoppage of enclosures, the enactment of fair rents, the restoration of common fishing rights in sea and river, the appointment of resident clergymen in every parish to preach and instruct the children, and the free election or official appointment of local “commissioners” for the enforcement of the laws. One significant prayer was “that all bond men may be made free, for God made all free with His precious bloodshedding.”

This document, which was signed by Ket, Cod and Aldrich,[101] was answered by the arrival of a herald from the king with a promise that parliament should meet in October to consider their complaints, and that something should be done to redress their grievances, if in the meantime they would quietly disperse to their homes.

All this was too vague and uncertain for Ket. Not till some definite step was taken by king or parliament to end the present distress was he willing to lay down his arms and bid his followers disperse. He had put his hand to the plough, and no turning back was possible while the evils he had risen against flourished unchecked.

So Ket put his house in order on Mousehold Heath. The Oak of Reformation was boarded over “with rafters,” and to this place of summary justice landowners were brought and tried for making enclosures. Two men were chosen by the commons from every hundred to assist in the work of administration, and all the people were strictly admonished “to beware of robbing, spoiling and other evil demeanours.” As the army had to be victualled, Ket sent out men armed with his official warrant requiring the country houses to provide cattle and corn, “so that no violence or injury be done to any honest or poor man,” and this requisition brought in guns, gunpowder and money, in addition to “all kinds of victual.” The smaller farmers sent their contributions “with much private good will,” while on the landowners a great fear had fallen, and it seemed that the day of their might was passed.

A royal messenger bearing commissions of the peace to various country gentlemen falling into the hands of Ket, he was at once deprived of these documents and sent on his way. Ket filled in the names of men who had joined the rising on these commissions, and these new magistrates gave assistance in maintaining order.

Cod and Aldrich were shocked at the arrest of landowners. “Notwithstanding were divers gentlemen taken and brought to prison, some in Norwich Prison, some in Norwich Castle and some in Surrey Place.”--St. Leonard’s Hill.

In every case the lives of the landowners were spared. Stern and unmoved by respect of persons was Robert Ket, but there was no taint of cruelty, meanness or bloodthirstiness in his rule. It was not his purpose to raise civil war or leave a festering sore of hatred by putting his neighbours to death. To destroy the power of the landlords and ensure the right of an evicted people to live on the land was the aim of the Norfolk Rising.

At the end of the first week relations became strained between Cod and the army on Mousehold.

It was the custom to have prayers every day under the Oak, and Dr. Conyers, vicar of St. Martin’s, Norwich, acted as chaplain. “Grave persons and good divines” would come out from the city and preach under the Oak, and on one occasion Dr. Matthew Parker, a Norwich man, who had been chaplain to Anne Boleyn, and who was to become Archbishop of Canterbury under Elizabeth, filled the pulpit. Parker’s sermon, full of rebukes on the rising and praise of Edward VI., was so obnoxious, for “he touched them for their living so near that they went near to touch him for his life,” that Conyers only prevented a riot by striking up the “Te Deum” in English, and during the singing Parker withdrew “to sing his part at home.”

Matthew Parker was a great man in Norwich (his brother Thomas became mayor), and the incivility he had received at Mousehold gave great offence. Cod and the aldermen sent off Leonard Sutherton, a respectable burgess, to report to the king’s council the doings in Norfolk, and Sutherton brought back from London a royal herald, who went out to Mousehold and promised the king’s pardon to all that would depart quietly to their homes.

The people cheered and shouted “God save the king’s majesty,” but to Ket this talk of pardon was altogether beside the mark. With some dignity he informed the herald that “kings and princes are wont to pardon wicked persons, not innocent and just men,” and added, “I trust I have done nothing but what belongs to the duty of a true subject.”

The herald then called on John Petibone, the sword-bearer of Norwich, who with other civic notables was standing by, to arrest Robert Ket. But the thing was impossible. Ket had 20,000 men at his back, and the sword-bearer was supported by half-a-dozen elderly members of the town council. All that could be done was to escort the herald into the city, leaving Ket to his own devices.

There was no more peace between the camp at Mousehold and the city of Norwich after this. Hitherto Mayor Cod had retained the keys of the city, and his authority had been respected by Ket. At the same time Ket’s men had gone freely to and fro throughout the city without let or hindrance. Now all was changed. First the landowners were being arrested and despoiled, then the learned doctor, Matthew Parker (was he not master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge?) had been interrupted and hooted, and now a king’s herald was contemned! Cod ordered the city gates to be made fast, commanded Ket’s prisoners to be released, and placed the city’s ordnance in the meadows by the river. This amounted to a declaration of war, and Ket replied by bringing up his guns.

The night of July 21st was spent “in fearful shot on both sides,” but little injury was done. For Ket’s guns brought “more fear than hurt to the city,” and “the city ordnance did not much annoy the enemy.”

In the morning Ket sought to renew peace by asking permission for the transport of victuals through the city, “as the custom was of late,” and warning the mayor that refusal would provoke fire and sword.

Cod refused permission, and Ket opened fire on the city gates. But “for lack of powder and want of skill in the gunners the ordnance was spent to small and little purpose.” A desperate encounter followed, with bows and arrows for the chief weapons of offence. Boys from Mousehold, “naked and unarmed, would pluck the arrows from their bodies and hand them to the rebels to fire at the city.” At Bishopsgate a number of men swam the river and forced their way into the city, and on the night of July 22nd Norwich was in the hands of Robert Ket.

No reprisals followed. The herald made a last attempt to induce the insurgents to disperse by promising pardons, and was greeted derisively. “Depart with a plague on thee!” they cried. “To the devil with these idle promises. We shall only be oppressed afterwards.” Forthwith the herald did depart, with eight pounds of gold in his pocket from the mayor.

Ket retired to Mousehold, the passage through the city having been secured, and Cod accompanied him, leaving a deputy, Augustine Steward, who lived in the big house in Tombland, opposite Erfingham Gate, to act as mayor.

Judgment went on as before under the Oak of Reformation, and people clamoured for the landowners to be hanged. “So hated at this time was the name of worship or gentleman, that the basest of the people, burning with more than hostile hatred, desired to extinguish, and utterly cut off, not only the gentry themselves, but if it were possible, all the offspring and hope of them.” (Nevylle.)

But Ket was as strong in his mercy as in his resistance to the land enclosers. The gentry were imprisoned, and made to pay tribute: their fences were pulled down, but their lives were spared, and no hurt befell them. In the city Steward, no friend to Ket, was left undisturbed in authority.

At the end of July came William Parr, Marquis of Northampton, with 1,500 soldiers, mostly Italian mercenaries, and a number of country squires with their retainers, to put down the rising. Steward at once admitted him to the city; but Northampton--Henry VIII.’s brother-in-law--was neither a soldier nor statesman, and after two days’ hard fighting he fled from Norwich, utterly defeated.

Ket’s men were badly armed, but they had numbers on their side, and they fought for freedom and for very life. They swam the river, as before, and forced an entrance. “Half dead, drowned in their own and other men’s blood, they would not give over; but till the last gasp, when their hands could scarce hold their weapons, would strike at their adversaries.”

Lord Sheffield fell in the fight on August 1st, killed by a stalwart rebel--one Fulke, a butcher and carpenter by trade--and some hundred of Ket’s men lay dead. The city suffered. Several houses and city gates were fired, and only a heavy rain prevented the flames from spreading. (This same rain drove many of the rebels to take refuge in the cathedral, much to the annoyance of the dean and chapter.)

And now for three weeks Ket had to take charge of Norwich as well as of Mousehold camp, for it was impossible to trust Steward. Many of the wealthier townsmen hastened away to Cambridge and London, leaving their wives and families behind. Trade was at an end.

The state of the city began to be in most miserable case, so
that all men looked for utter destruction, both of life and
goods. Then the remnant that feared God, seeing the plague
thus of sorrow increasing, fell to prayer and holy life, and
wished but to see the day that after they might talk thereover,
looking never to recover help again, nor to see their city
prosper.

The women resorted twice a day to prayer, and the servants
(except what must needs stay at home) did the same. When Ket’s
ambassadors were sent to any private house they were fain
to bake or brew or do any work for the camp, else they were
carried as traitors to the Oak. As for trading, there was none
in the city, people being forced to hide up their choicest
goods, and happy were they that had the faithfullest servants.

They that did keep open their shops were robbed and spoiled,
and their goods were measured by the arm’s length and dispersed
among the rebels; their children they set away for fear of
fire. I, the writer (who was then above twenty-two years of
age, and an eye-witness) was present after prayer during this
dolorous state, when people met and bewailed the miserable
state they were in. (Sutherton.)

But for all their misery the tradesmen of Norwich were in no fear for their lives. The city had done its best to thwart the rising, but Ket treated it generously, allowing neither pillage nor bloodshed--though he did not scruple to take what goods were necessary for his army.[102] It was beyond the power of man to prevent all thieving during those first few weeks of August, for the civic magistracy was gone, and Ket had large responsibilities on his hands.

The hope that the rising would become general turned to disappointment in the weeks that passed after the flight of Northampton. In Suffolk a number of men rose at Ket’s call, and made an unsuccessful attempt to take Yarmouth. A small camp set up at Rising Chase was dispersed, but for a fortnight the peasants gathered at Watton, and stopped the passages of the river at Thetford and Brandon Ferry. For want of leadership they then came on to Mousehold. At Hingham a rising was put down by Sir Edmund Knyvett. And while Ket waited, hoping against hope for better news, the fugitive citizens from Norwich had already persuaded Somerset to send down an army to crush the revolt.

On August 21st the Earl of Warwick, with 14,000 troops, reached Cambridge, and three days later was at Norwich.

Warwick, Henry VIII.’s high chamberlain, the son of Dudley, Henry VII.’s minister, was a man of war and resolution. Sent down to suppress the rising he did his work, but not till he had tried an appeal to the peasants to disperse without further trouble.

Halting outside the city, Warwick sent a herald to proclaim pardon to all who should now return to their homes, and, as before, the people shouted, “God save King Edward!” Ket himself talked with the herald on the high ground near Bishop’s Gate.

Negotiations ended abruptly. Some ill-mannered boy gave an indecent and offensive salute to the herald, and was shot dead by an arrow from the herald’s escort. At once the cry of “treachery” was raised by the people, and all talk of peace was at an end. While the herald tried to persuade Ket to come to the Earl of Warwick under a flag of truce, the rebels gathered round their leader and besought him not to forsake them. To Ket there could be sure reliance on royal promises of pardon, and no surrender of the charge he had undertaken. His reply to the herald was to retire on Mousehold and prepare for battle.

Warwick at once entered the city, and began the business of pacification by promptly hanging sixty men in the Market Place, by Norwich Castle, “without hearing the cause”; and by issuing a proclamation that all who were out of doors would receive similar treatment. Then came a mishap, for the greater part of Warwick’s artillery fell into Ket’s hands. The drivers of the gun-carriages, entering the city after the soldiers, by St. Bennet’s Gate on the west, and ignorant of the way, actually passed out at Bishop’s Gate on the east on the very road towards Mousehold, and were quickly taken. Ket had now the advantage in ordnance, and there was fighting in the city all Sunday, August 25th. So uncertain was the issue that the burgesses feared Warwick would suffer Northampton’s fate, and prayed him to depart without further loss. But Warwick, waiting for reinforcements, and knowing that 1,400 German mercenaries were close at hand, was not the man to beat an ignominious retreat.

The hireling “lanznechts” arrived next day, and on Tuesday, August 27th, came the fatal battle.

Instead of remaining at Mousehold, where a strong resistance might have been made, the rebels decided to march out boldly from their camp and meet the king’s army in the open country that lay between Mousehold Heath and the city. An old song was recalled, which, it seemed, foretold victory in such a case:

The country gnoffes (churls), Hob, Dick, and Rick,
With clubs and clouted shoon,
Shall fill the vale
Of Dussindale
With slaughtered bodies soon.

But the country churls were to be the slaughtered, and not the slaughterers.

Warwick marched out by the north-east gate of St. Martin-at-the-Oak, and for the last time a herald promised pardon to all who would surrender. But the hangings in the market place had destroyed all confidence in such proclamations, and the answer to the herald was that they “perceived this pardon to be nothing else but a cask full of ropes and halters.”

Ket’s judgment failed him utterly on that last day of the rising. On the strength of an irrelevant old song he allowed his army to go to its doom unchecked, and at the very time when good generalship was wanted above all other things, Robert Ket seems to have lost his nerve, and to have been struck by some paralysis of the will, as though conscious of impending ruin.

The peasants poured down into the valley, and into the meadows beyond Magdalen and Pockthorp Gates, and fought with desperate courage, but they were simply cut to pieces by the professional soldiery. At four o’clock in the afternoon it was all over, the defeat utter and complete, and Robert Ket and his brother were in flight.

The remains of the rebel army laid down their arms, when Warwick himself offered pardon in the king’s name to those who would surrender.

The rising was at an end. The foreign mercenaries of the crown had triumphed over English peasants. Robert Ket was taken the same night at Swannington, eight miles north of Norwich. He had ridden away from the battle when the field was lost, but horse and rider were too tired to proceed further. Taking refuge in a barn, he was recognized by some men unloading a wagon of corn and seized. The farmer’s wife “rated him for his conduct, but he only prayed her to be quiet, and to give him meat.” That same night William Ket was taken, and the two brothers were delivered to the lord lieutenant of the county, and by him carried to London to be tried for their lives.

At Mousehold Warwick proved the worth of the pardons he had given by first having nine of the bravest of the peasants hanged, drawn, and quartered under the Oak of Reformation, and distributing their bodies in the city; and then by hanging 300 prisoners on trees, and then forty-nine more at the Market Cross in Norwich. The country gentlemen of Norfolk, backed by their wealthier citizens, called for more executions, till Warwick turned with disgust from the vindictive clamour of these bloodthirsty civilians, and pointed out in impatient reproof that no one would be left “to plough and harrow over the lands” if all the peasants were massacred.

And now the king’s authority having been re-established, a public service of thanksgiving was held in the church of St. Peter, Mancroft, and August 27th was ordered to be observed henceforth as “Thanksgiving Day” in Norwich. (This was done by prayers and sermon until 1667. In the grammar school, during Elizabeth’s reign, an account of the rising--_De Furoribus Norfolciensum_, written in Latin by Nevylle, and violently anti-popular in expression--was ordered to be used as a text book in place of the usual classics, and was so used for some years.)

On September 7th Warwick returned to London.[103] In November Robert and William Ket, after lying in the Tower for two months, were brought to trial. They offered no defence for what they had done: for having borne arms without the king’s permission, and for having striven to stop the robbery and oppression of the peasant without the authority of king and parliament.

On November 26th they were found guilty of high treason, their property confiscated, and they were condemned to death. On November 29th they were delivered out of the custody of the Tower to the high sheriff of Norfolk, and on December 1st the Kets were again in Norwich.

It was winter, and hope was dead. The last great rising of the English peasantry had failed, crushed without pity, and the leaders of the army of revolt, who had judged it better to give up ease and worldly honour rather than acquiesce dumbly in the enslavement of their poorer neighbours, were to die as traitors.[104] On December 7th the executions were carried out, and Robert Ket was hanged in chains outside Norwich Castle, while William Ket was taken to Wymondham (where he held the manor of Chossell--Church lands, bought years earlier from the Earl of Warwick), and there hanged in chains from the parish church.

The property of the Kets was duly taken by the servants of the crown, and the bodies of the rebel leaders swung in the wind--to remind unthinking men of the reward of rebellion, of the fate of all who challenge, without success, the arms of government.

The Norfolk Rising was the last great movement of the English people in social revolt. Riots we have known even in our times, and mob violence, but no such rising as those led by Wat Tyler, by Cade, and by Ket has England seen since the year 1549.

The country people sunk into hopeless poverty and permanent degradation under Edward VI. and Elizabeth, and with the rejection by the government of papal authority, the supremacy of the crown and of the ministers of the crown was established.

In the nineteenth century, when the working people in town and country once more bestirred themselves at the call of freedom, their wiser leaders advised political and not revolutionary methods of action, and the advice has been followed.

But if the year 1549 marks the end of organized democratic resistance to intolerable misgovernment, the coming centuries were to see the rise of the middle class with the insistent demand for the predominance of that class in the parliament of the nation, and the incurable belief that in a popularly elected House of Commons resided all the safeguards of civil and religious liberty.

Eliot, Hampden, Pym, and the Supremacy of the Commons.

1625–1643

AUTHORITIES: S. R. Gardiner--_History of England_, _History of Great Civil War_, _History of Commonwealth and Protectorate_; Clarendon--_History of the Great Rebellion_;, John Forster--_Life of Sir John Eliot_, _Life of Hampden_, _Life of Pym_, _The Grand Remonstrance_, _Arrest of the Five Members_; Nugent--_Memorials for Life of Hampden_; _Calendar of State Papers_; _House of Commons’ Journals_.

(_From a Steel Engraving by William Holl._)]

ELIOT, HAMPDEN, PYM, AND THE SUPREMACY OF THE COMMONS.

1625–1643

John Eliot, John Hampden, John Pym--by the work of these men comes the supremacy of the House of Commons in the government of England.

All three are country gentlemen of good estate, of high principle and of some learning.[105] They are men of religious convictions, of courage and resolution, and of blameless personal character. Two of them--Eliot and Hampden--are content to die for the cause of good government.

The strong rule of Elizabeth left a difficult legacy of government to James I. The despotism of the queen had been forgiven in the success of her State policy; and if she had no high opinion of parliament, Elizabeth had ministers who fairly represented the mind of the English middle class. Elizabeth’s absolutism in Church and State was the direct following of Henry VIII., and only at the very close of her reign was it threatened by the discontent of parliament. With a shrewd instinct for popularity Elizabeth at once yielded. Like her father, she saw the importance of retaining parliament on the side of the crown and making it the instrument of the royal will. There was no idea in the Tudor mind of parliament sharing the government with the crown. The business of the House of Commons of Elizabeth was to express its opinion and then decree the proposals of the crown. “Liberty of speech was granted in respect of the aye or no, but not that everybody should speak what he listed.” (1592.)

In religion Elizabeth had done her worst to exterminate the Roman Catholic faith, and by the fierceness of her persecution had kindled undying enthusiasm for the old beliefs and worship. But forty years of repression did their work, and a generation arose which only knew Catholicism as the faith of a proscribed and unpatriotic sect, who denied the absolute sovereignty of the crown and had another sovereign at Rome--the religion of Spain--popery, in short: a faith worse than Mahomedanism or heathenism--the scarlet woman of the Apocalypse--according to the fierce Puritan expounders of the Bible, and not to be counted as Christianity. That this very Roman Catholicism--so hateful because the penal laws kept it hidden and unknown, and because it was the religion of Spain, then the national enemy--had been the religion of all England for centuries, and that under it the earliest charters of public liberty had been wrung from the crown, and the principle of a representative parliament established, were facts uncontemplated.

But Elizabeth, while persecuting Roman Catholics, had left in the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England a sanction for ceremonial and for episcopal ordination, and a body of doctrine which were to be interpreted under the Stuarts by certain Anglican divines as witnesses to Catholicism. Such interpretation was to be found in Elizabeth’s reign as a pious opinion. With Laud it was an active principle, and it brought him to the scaffold. The Elizabethan bishops in the main were thoroughly Protestant, the queen was the head of the Church of England, and the ritual of the Church prescribed by her was reduced to a simplicity that average Protestants could accept.

If Elizabeth burnt anabaptists and hanged other nonconformists, her excuse was that the Church of England was sufficiently Protestant to include all well-affected persons. The extreme Puritans whom she persecuted had this in common with the Roman Catholics, that neither accepted the absolute supremacy of the crown, and the best Puritan teaching in England, even when it counselled conformity to the Established Church, was creating a mind and temper that only found expression in the Commonwealth.

James I. came to the throne in 1603 prepared to carry on the Tudor absolutism. He failed because he had neither Elizabeth’s ministers nor her knowledge of the English country landowners. James never realised that Spain was the popular enemy, that a discontent had suddenly grown up in parliament in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, and that the English landowners--in many cases from their inherited possession of the old Church lands--were generally bitterly hostile to the Roman Catholic religion. James was tolerant in religion, and not inclined to press Elizabeth’s penal laws against Roman Catholics, and this very toleration brought him under the dislike of the country party. He thought he could disregard the opinion of parliament and he found that while a House of Commons submitted to a despotism when the country was governed by a strong queen, it would not put up with the follies and extravagance of the Duke of Buckingham.

James died before the strength of the growing movement for parliamentary government was seen. Charles who was no more tyrannical than his father, but even more blind to the signs of the times, fell before that parliamentary movement--a movement which outraged all the traditions of Tudor government--and with his fall brought down the throne, the House of Lords, and the Established Church. By his inability to understand the House of Commons, by his support of the Anglican movement towards Catholicism in the Church of England, and by the mistakes of his ministers, Charles ripened the desire for constitutional monarchy till the desire was irresistible.

John Eliot gave forcible utterance to this desire, and died in prison for his speech. John Pym carried on the work till the sword of civil war was drawn. John Hampden, “the noblest type of parliamentary opposition,” was content to back Pym as he had earlier backed Eliot, and to die on Chalgrove Field. Brought up to regard as an alien creed the old belief in papal supremacy in religion, unable to accept the new doctrine of the Church of England that the king was supreme by divine right (a doctrine begotten by the Tudors and dying with the Stuarts), Eliot, Hampden, and Pym were all of the same Puritan type which found its authority in the individual conscience.

Eliot was less afflicted than his colleagues by the theological Protestantism of the age.[106] First and last he was the straightforward country gentleman, with exalted views on the sacred responsibility of civil government, and a high standard of personal honour. For Eliot there was no nobler sphere of work for an Englishman than the House of Commons, and his example has not been without followers. Seneca and Cicero are on his lips, as the later Puritans had the Bible on theirs, and his eloquence marks the beginning of parliamentary oratory. With a strong and clear view of constitutional government, Eliot was no republican; he held to the notion that the king must depend on the decisions of parliament. Time was to show that this notion, in the event of a collision between king and parliament, was to make parliament the predominant partner.

On his first entry into the House of Commons as member for St. Germans, in 1614, Eliot was the friend of Buckingham--whom he had met as a youth abroad--and on Buckingham’s rise to the lord high admiralship Eliot was knighted and became vice-admiral of Devon.

The fidelity of his service to the State as vice-admiral brought an unpleasant experience of the will of princes. Grappling with the scourge of piracy which afflicted the seaports and shipping trade of the West of England, Eliot accomplished the arrest of Nutt, a notorious sea-robber. But Nutt had friends in high places, and Eliot found himself lodged in the Marshalsea prison over the business. He was released on Buckingham’s return from the continent, for the charges were absurd, and in 1624 returned to the House of Commons as member for Newport. Two years later Eliot was estranged from Buckingham--convinced that the favourite of the king was an evil counsellor--and had become the recognized leader of the House of Commons. Once assured in his mind that Buckingham was responsible for the policy of the king, Eliot became his implacable opponent. For the policy of the crown in not making war upon Spain, in relaxing the penal laws against Roman Catholics, and for the mismanagement of the war on the continent in support of the Protestants, Eliot held Buckingham responsible. In answer to the demand of Charles for money in 1626, Eliot insisted that an inquiry into past disasters should precede supply, and that Buckingham should be impeached. Not the king but his minister is to blame, Eliot maintained, for all that was wrong in the State, and this very speech strikes the note of the campaign that was beginning. Buckingham was not responsible to Charles alone, in the eyes of Eliot and his friends, but also to parliament.[107]

Charles, quite unable to fathom the depth of the parliamentary discontent, or to note the strength of the current against absolutism, fell back upon the old Tudor doctrine of sovereignty, the doctrine of the high Anglican party in the Church of England, that the king was responsible for his acts to God alone. “Parliaments are altogether in my calling,” he replies to the House of Commons.

Only twenty-five years had passed since Bacon had declared, “the Queen hath both enlarging and restraining power: she may set at liberty things restrained by Statute, and may restrain things which be at liberty.” Twenty-three years more were to see monarchy abolished and the king beheaded. Eliot, standing midway between Bacon and Bradshaw, cleaves to the theory of constitutional government and persists in the impeachment of a minister in whom parliament had no confidence.

The prologue of impeachment declared in the plainest language the responsibility of the king’s ministers to parliament, and the responsibility of parliament to the nation: “The laws of England have taught us that kings cannot command ill or unlawful things, and whatsoever ill event succeed, the executioners of such designs must answer for them.”

And now the issue was fairly set, and the battle begun between Charles and the House of Commons. In that year, 1626, no man in England could foretell the result.

Charles, ill-advised to the end, believed he could overawe the Commons by a display of might, and was beaten. Twice he had Eliot arrested before the final imprisonment which ended Eliot’s life.

The loyalty of the House of Commons to its leader compelled Charles to release Eliot, after sending him to the Tower for his attack on Buckingham. Then dissolving parliament in June, 1626, and falling back on a forced loan, the king was met by wide refusals, and Eliot, with Hampden and others, suffered imprisonment over this. Eliot was also deprived of his vice-admiralship and struck off the roll of justices of the peace.

Driven to call a parliament for the third time in 1628, the king was faced by a stronger opposition than ever.

Eliot, now member for Cornwall, throughout the session continued the attack on arbitrary taxation, and with the lawyers Seldon and Coke carried the Petition of Right to stop the illegal imprisonments, the enforced billeting of soldiers, and forced loans. Buckingham, slain at Portsmouth, no longer troubled the commonwealth; but Wentworth, ambitious to use his powers in the service of the government, had left the popular side for the king; while Laud, and Weston, the chancellor of the exchequer, were daily preaching to Charles the divine right of kings and to his subjects the duty of passive obedience.

The following year both Eliot and Pym attacked the ecclesiastical policy of Laud. To them the established religion of England, settled on the Protestant basis by Elizabeth, was being definitely changed in a Catholic direction without the sanction of parliament, and in the very teeth of the opposition of the House of Commons. High-church clergymen, like Montague and Mainwaring, holding to the full a Catholic interpretation of the Book of Common Prayer, were only censured by the House of Commons to be promoted by the crown. Laud preaching a royal supremacy undreamt of by the great archbishops before Henry VIII., combined with it a doctrine of ecclesiastical independence, owning no allegiance to Rome, equally novel.

Eliot, stoical in his beliefs, and Pym, whose Calvinism was tempered by common sense, regarded with horror the revival in the Church of England of Catholic doctrines concerning the sacraments and the priesthood. They had done what they could to check any indulgence to Roman Catholics in England, and it was monstrous to them that the Church of England, whose formularies and ritual had been defined by parliament for the maintenance of Protestantism, should be expanded to reintroduce doctrines and practices essentially Catholic. But for the time the House of Commons was powerless in the matter, and only sixteen years later was Laud to expiate on the scaffold his Anglo-Catholicism, dying a veritable martyr for the high Anglican doctrine. “None have gone about to break parliaments but in the end parliaments have broken them,” declared Eliot on March 2nd, 1629, and Laud, no less than Charles and Wentworth, was to prove the truth of the warning.

If parliament could do nothing in that year, 1629, to stop Laud’s policy, it could at least defend the privileges of its members. The goods of John Rolle, M.P., had been seized by the king’s officers because their owner had refused to pay tonnage and poundage on demand, and at once Eliot was up in arms in defence of the privileges of his fellow member, whose liberties had been interfered with.

Pym was for a wider view of the matter--objecting to the question being narrowed down to a breach of privilege. “The liberties of this House,” he argued, “are inferior to the liberties of this kingdom. To determine the privilege of this House is but a mean matter, and the main end is to establish possession of the subjects, and to take off the commission and records and orders that are against us.” With Pym it was not Rolle, the member, who had been ill-used, but Rolle the British subject, and it was for the liberties of the subject he strove, holding the freedom of parliament as but a means to that end.

Eliot, a House of Commons man, through and through, saw in the welfare of parliament the welfare of the nation, and stuck to his point, carrying the House with him, that the privileges of a member extended to his goods. To this Charles sent word that what had been done had been done by his authority. The only question now was, how long would it be before the king dissolved parliament.

On the second of March, when the House met, the speaker’s first word was that the king had ordered an adjournment till the tenth, and that no business could be transacted. Eliot insisted on moving his resolutions, and the speaker was held down in his chair. Then the serjeant-at-arms attempted to remove the mace, and was promptly stopped, while the key of the House was turned from within.

Eliot moved his declaration, beginning with the famous words: “By the ancient laws and liberties of England, it is the known birthright and inheritance of the subject, that no tax, tallage, or other charge shall be levied or imposed but by common consent in England; and that the subsidies of tonnage and poundage are no way due or payable but by a free gift and special act of parliament.”

The resolutions were carried with loud shouts of assent, two members guarding the speaker, and the door was flung open; the sitting was over.

A royal proclamation for dissolving parliament followed on the fourth of March, and Eliot, with eight other members, was summoned to appear before the Privy Council.

From the hour of that summons John Eliot’s liberty was over, and not for eleven years was England to have another parliament.

For the fourth time Eliot was a prisoner. He declined altogether to give an account of what he had said in parliament, or to acknowledge any right of interference with the proceedings in parliament. To the crown lawyers his reply was to stand on the privileges of a member of the House of Commons. “I refuse to answer,” he said, “because I hold that it is against the privilege of parliament to speak of anything which is done in the House.” He insisted that he was accountable to the House alone, and that no other power existed with a constitutional right to inquire into his conduct there.

At the end of October Eliot was removed from the Tower to the Marshalsea, and then in January, 1630, he was charged in the King’s Bench with two other members, Holles and Valentine, with conspiring to resist the king’s lawful order, to calumniate ministers of the crown, and to assault the speaker. Again Eliot refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction. He was fined £2,000, and sent back to the Tower.

To the last Eliot’s loyalty to the House of Commons remained unshaken. He had but to acknowledge that he had done wrong, to admit that he had offended, and the prison doors would have opened to him. But to make this acknowledgment was to deny the sacred liberty of parliament, to admit wrong was to betray the House of Commons. To John Eliot the welfare of the House of Commons was a national cause--dearer than life. To betray its honour was to betray the State. The loyalty of John Eliot to the House of Commons was interwoven with his devotion to the State, but it was something England had never seen before, and never saw again. “He learned to believe, as no other man believed before or after him, in the representatives of the nation.” (Gardiner.)

The character and temperament of Eliot must be taken into account in understanding this passionate belief in the House of Commons. It was not as a great thinker but as a great orator he had risen to the leadership of the House of Commons. He saw in his mind, as no other man saw at the time, a perfectly balanced constitution of king, lords, and commons. In parliament was the best wisdom of the country placed at the service of the crown. In the crown was the appointed ruler who, with his ministers, had but to come to parliament for advice and counsel. So it seemed to John Eliot; and single-minded himself, he could not realise that in the House of Commons were plenty of men of but passing honesty, and that Charles and Laud and Wentworth were fundamentally opposed to his views of constitutional government, and bitterly hostile to the growing powers of the commons.[108]

(_From an Engraving by Jacob Houbraken._)]

Months passed, and John Eliot’s health gave way in the confinement in the Tower, but his steadfastness was unchanged. He corresponded with his friend John Hampden, wrote his treatise on the _Monarchy of Man_, and calmly awaited his end. An application on behalf of his friends and his son for Eliot’s release was made in October, 1622, on the ground that “the doctors were of opinion he could never recover of his consumption until such time as he might breathe in purer air.” The reply of Chief Justice Richardson was “that, although Sir John were brought low in body, yet was he as high and lofty in mind as ever; for he would neither submit to the king nor to the justice of that court.”

On November 27th, 1632, the spirit of John Eliot, unbroken by captivity, passed from the body his gaolers had deprived of life. A last appeal from his son to the king for the removal of his father’s body into Cornwall, there to lie with those of his ancestors at Port Eliot, received the curt refusal, “Let Sir John Eliot’s body be buried in the church of the parish where he died.” And so he was buried in the Tower, and no stone marks the spot where he lies.

John Eliot was but forty-two when he laid down his life for the principle of parliamentary government.

Any satisfaction that might have been felt by Charles and Laud at the death of the foremost antagonist to their policy of absolutism was fleeting. For if Eliot was dead, the cause he had championed with such conspicuous sincerity and courage was alive, and John Hampden and John Pym were at hand to carry on the fight till Cromwell and his Ironsides were ready to end the battle.

Charles was determined that, until the commons should be more submissive, he would call no parliament, but would govern through his ministers alone. The difficulty was to find money.

In 1634 London and the seaports were persuaded to furnish supplies for ships on the pretext that piracy must be prevented. A year later and the demand was extended to the inland counties, and John Hampden, taking his stand on the Petition of Right which Charles had granted in 1628, declined to pay. Ten out of twelve of the king’s judges had decided that ship-money might be enforced if the kingdom appeared to be in danger, but against this declared legality there was the decree of parliament forbidding forced loans or taxes without parliamentary sanction.

On this resistance of the ship-money Hampden’s fame has been chiefly built up. The amount was small--only a matter of some twenty shillings--the issue was of a first importance. It was clear to Hampden that if the king could raise money by such methods, what need would there be in the royal mind for the calling of parliament at all? The question was forced upon him: Was parliament an essential part of the constitution? The judges had declared ship-money was legal, other taxation and forced loans could easily find justification on the judicial bench, and thus the crown obtain its revenue, and England ruled without any let or hindrance from its citizens. To admit the position was to see the work of centuries undone, and the old contest in the land for liberties in return for taxes abandoned.

Hampden’s refusal to pay ship-money was a declaration for parliamentary government. No more a republican than Eliot or Pym, Hampden could see that either crown or parliament must be supreme in the affairs of the nation.[109] The constitution was not to be balanced so evenly as Eliot had believed. Eliot himself had been deprived of life for maintaining, not the supremacy but the liberty of parliament. For John Hampden the evils of royal supremacy were obvious and present: misrule, the restoration of a religion banished by authority of crown and parliament, and disliked and feared by the majority of serious-minded people in the country, and the imprisonment of all who claimed the old freedom of parliament.

The case was decided against him in the law courts, but five of the twelve judges supported Hampden’s contention that the resistance to payment was valid, and the arguments for his defence were published far and wide. “The judgment proved of more advantage and credit to the gentleman condemned than to the king’s service.”[110]

Three years later, and Charles was forced to summon parliament to get money for his war in Scotland--the “Bishop’s War,” perhaps the most hopeless of all his ventures.

Parliament met in April, and its temper was so unfavourable to the desires of the king, for the forcible conversion of the Scots to episcopacy, that it was dissolved in three weeks. John Pym was notable in that “Short Parliament” as the spokesman of the aggrieved country party, and the commons decided that the grievances of the nation must be considered before supplies were voted. The Scotch war was intolerable to Pym and Hampden. They had no objection to episcopacy as long as bishops were men of Protestant convictions. It was Laud the “Anglo-Catholic,” Laud the preacher of the divine right of kings, not Laud the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom they detested, and they had no relish for the expenditure of English life and treasure in the forcing of Laudian doctrine on Protestant Scotland.

In the long eleven years of silence from the utterance of parliament things had been going steadily from bad to worse in England, Pym made out. Naturally conservative in mind, seeing in the constitution of king and parliament an admirable instrument of government, and in the Established Church of England an excellent expression of the Protestant religion, Pym had found that with parliament suspended the Protestantism of the Established Church had been steadily undermined by Laud’s policy, and the revival of some estranged Catholic doctrines and practices had proceeded apace. Without parliament there was no security for national well-being. “Powers of parliament are to the body politic as rational faculties of the soul to man,” he declares in April, 1640.