Chapter VII: The Stuarts, 1603-1689 236 (5)

Under Edward IV, whose reign dates from 1461, the forms of taxation by authority of Parliament were indeed gone through with. In that respect his reign was typical of the period. His early taxation, levied while the struggle with the Lancastrians was still in progress, was not particularly heavy; but being laid by Parliaments sympathetic with the Yorkist cause, Edward had little difficulty in exerting supreme influence over it. Four years after his accession, he was given the subsidy on wool and tunnage and poundage for life.[263] Beside these, Parliament granted him frequent fifteenths and tenths. Not content, however, with the grants made by Parliament, he had recourse to a new form of extortion known by the euphemistic title of benevolence. The benevolence was a gift made to the king by individuals or groups of them, ostensibly in charity, but in reality under enforcement. It differed from the forced loan, the exaction of which is mentioned in the list of charges leading to the deposition of Richard II, in that by it the king incurred no obligation for repayment. Henry VIII in later years proved himself a genius at obtaining both of these means of income. Edward found also that the revival of obsolete statutes and the laying of fines for breaches of them could be turned to profit; the collection of ancient debts due to the crown, and the utilization of the royal power to advance his own mercantile interests, Edward pushed to the extreme in order to supplement the not infrequent regular grants of Parliament.

Dowell retells the story given in Hall’s _Chronicle_ of Edward and a certain rich widow to whom he applied in person for a benevolence. In his younger days Edward was one of the handsomest men in the land, and the widow received his advances with favor. He asked her for a gift and she promptly gave him £20.

“By my troth,” says she, “for thy lovely countenance thou shalt have even twenty pounds.”

Edward, who had “looked for scarce half that sum, thanked her and lovinglie kissed her.” Thereupon the lady doubled the benevolence, paying him a second £20, either, as the Chronicler remarks, “because she esteemed the kiss of a king so precious a jewele” or “because the flavour of his breath did so comfort her stomach.” Such was a fifteenth-century conception of royal courtesy.[264]

[Richard III, 1483-1485]

Upon Edward’s death in 1483, the crown for a moment rested on the head of his young son, Edward V, only to be snatched away in favor of the lad’s uncle Richard III. Richard received from Parliament in 1484 a grant of tunnage and poundage and the subsidy on wool for life.[265] His death on Bosworth Field the next year gave the world no opportunity to see what use he would make of the freedom which Parliament thus gave him.

[Prohibition of benevolences, 1484]

During the brief three years of Richard’s ascendancy, however, there occurred an assertion of right and its complementary statute which assume great importance in the light of later events. When Richard was invited to become king, he was presented with a remarkable address, which, among other things, cited the benevolences of the late reign as “extorcions, ... agenst the Lawes of God and Man,” and as more intolerable than “jopardye of deth.”[266] At his only Parliament, held in 1484, benevolences were declared unlawful, and were to be “dampned and annulled forever.”[267]

[The Tudors]

Henry VII, the first of the Tudors, ascended the throne upon the successful issue of the battle of Bosworth. The wonder of the era which he introduced lies not in any increase in the powers of Parliament, but rather that they existed at all when the period closed. The one hundred and twenty years of the Tudor epoch exhibits no progress toward the realization of parliamentary supremacy; on the other hand, the trend was in the opposite direction. The Tudors were not tyrannical enough to rouse opposition to the fever heat as did John; they knew rather how to bridle their despotism in time to check revolt, and especially how to make unlawful acts assume the aspect of legality. Furthermore, the immense activity of commerce, the progress of literature, the religious reconstitution during the sixteenth century, were in themselves reasons for slow advance in matters of government; the stress of trade consequent upon the discovery of a new world, the absorbing interest in new subjects for thought, the intensity and magnitude of new religious conceptions, engaged the minds of men on subjects other than those of Parliament and king. As long as these worked in apparent harmony and the results did not greatly offend, men were content to let well enough alone. So it was that the Tudors, surrounding themselves with a new nobility attached to the throne by reasons of their very origin and continuance, were able to follow their own devices and raise money almost as seemed to them good.

[Parliaments of Henry VII The “new-found” subsidy]

In all the twenty-four years of Henry VII’s reign he called Parliament only seven times, and six of the seven Parliaments sat within the first eleven years of his kingship. Each was the occasion of a demand for money. At his first Parliament, that of 1485, he received a grant of tunnage and poundage and a subsidy on wool for life.[268] Three years later, however, the consequences of heavy taxation were disastrous. Need arising for the enlistment of an army with which to aid the Duke of Brittany against the King of France, a tax was devised which not only exacted a tenth of incomes from freeholders, but applied as well to movables, laying imposition upon articles used in trade and even merchants’ stocks. This “new-found subsidy” proved so intolerable to the lower classes that a great insurrection broke out in the north against it.[269] The king with Tudor wisdom, remitted some £48,000 of the £75,000 which the tax was designed to raise, and Parliament gave him in return a fifteenth and tenth. In 1497, a similar rebellion occurred in Cornwall against a tax levied for the Scotch War.

With these examples of parliamentary taxation before him, Henry turned away to fields at once more profitable and less dangerous, at least in their immediate consequences.

[Morton’s crotch]

He turned to the old expedient of the benevolence, despite the statute of Richard III prohibiting its imposition. The methods used in laying a benevolence are illustrated in the famous account by Lord Francis Bacon of the dilemma devised by Bishop Morton, Henry’s Chancellor, “to raise up the benevolence to a higher rate; and some called it his fork and some his crotch. For he had couched an article in the instructions to the commissioners who were to levy the benevolence, that if they met with any that were sparing, they should tell them that they must needs have, because they laid up; and if they were spenders, they must needs have, because it was seen in their port and manner of living; so neither kind came amiss.”[270] Parliament, subservient to the king, actually registered for the moment its approval of the practice of levying benevolences, when in 1492 it passed the “Shoring or Under-propping Act” making debts still owing on gifts promised to the king legally collectable.

The benevolence was not the only means by which the ingenious monarch increased his income. Like Edward IV, he revived obsolete statutes and rigorously exacted fines in consequence of every infraction of them; but worse than that was his perversion of every function of the courts of law into a means of extortion. His odious instruments in that work were Richard Empson and Edmund Dudly who later were made to suffer for the evil practices of the father in the reign of the son. Beside these forms of imposition, the king pushed to the extreme the exaction of feudal dues accruing to the crown.

[Henry VIII’s early taxation]

Henry VIII succeeded to the crown in 1509. With his hand always on the pulse of the nation, he knew when he could carry his designs into execution and when he must wait for a fever to subside. His attitude toward taxation was not characterized by the same uniform regard for constitutional formalities that distinguished his other acts, nor was Parliament on the other hand quite as subservient to his will as in matters farther from their purses. His first Parliament showed its trust in him by granting tunnage and poundage for life, but with the distinct provision that it be not taken into precedent. Beside this, the Parliaments of 1513 and 1514 made generous grants of a poll-tax, of a fifteenth and tenth and of two subsidies of six pence in the pound.[271] Despite the magnitude of the grant, no opposition seems to have been provoked, an unfailing sign of increasing wealth.

[Cardinal Wolsey’s breach of privilege, 1523]

At the Parliament of 1523, the first since 1515, Cardinal Wolsey committed a distinct breach of Parliamentary privilege. Under Henry IV it had been admitted by the king that both houses of Parliament were to commune apart, and that the king should have no knowledge of the progress of a grant until the two houses be of one accord.[272] Wolsey, as representative of the royal power, reversed the usual process. Going into the House of Commons with all his following, “with his maces, his pillars, his pole-axes, his cross, his hatte, and the great seale too,”--in the words of the speaker, Sir Thomas More,--he asked for no less than £800,000 and required that it be paid in four years; he suggested that it “be raised out of the fifth part of every man’s goods and lands.”

To the demand of the cardinal the commons maintained perfect silence. The speaker “with many probable arguments endeavoured to shew the cardinal that his manner of coming thither was neither expedient nor agreeable to the ancient liberties of that House.”[273] Wolsey thereupon departed in a rage. The next day the matter was argued by the commons and the contention was made that “though some men were well-monied, yet in general it was known that the fifth of men’s goods was not in plate or money, but in stock and cattle. And that to pay away all their coin would alter the whole frame and intercourse of things.”[274] For fifteen days the commons debated the question and at the end of that time granted to the king a graduated property tax, much smaller in amount and covering four years in the payment. Wolsey’s displeasure was very great and he made a second journey to the commons in the hope that he might induce them to be more generous. He told them that he “desired to reason with those who opposed his demands.” He was answered that “it was the order of that House to hear, and not to reason but amongst themselves.”[275] Thus rebuffed, the cardinal went away.

[Henry’s commissions and benevolences]

Henry did without Parliament for the next seven years, but he was not deprived thereby of money with which to carry on the business of government. In 1526, commissions were issued for the collection of a sixth from the goods of the laity and a fourth from the clergy.[276] The people immediately evinced their knowledge of the law and complained that the proceedings were illegal; the clergy led the movement asserting that “the King could take no man’s goods without the authority of Parliament.”[277] The people began to murmur and insurrection seemed imminent. “If men should geue their goodes by a Commission,” they said, “then wer it worse than the taxes of Fraunce, and so England should be bond and not free.”[278] In Suffolk rebellion actually broke out; in London and in Kent the people were in a ferment. Henry, being what he was and knowing the nature of his subjects, eased the tension by shoving the responsibility of the measure on to the shoulders of Wolsey,[279] and declared that he would receive no money save as an “amiable graunte,” which was collected in 1528, and was nothing more agreeable than a benevolence. To this the citizens of London raised objection on the ground of the statute of Richard III. The judges thereupon handed down an opinion that that statute, being the work of an usurper, was void. Thus did the courts evince their subservience to the crown, and showed themselves as open to royal influence as the tribunals of the Stuarts a hundred years later.[280] So in theory Henry’s attempt at arbitrary taxation was frustrated; in practice, however, the imposition, though its burden was transferred from the turbulent lower classes to the more amenable people of substance, merely underwent a change of name. The exaction was unparliamentary whether it was levied as a king’s tax or under the thin guise of a benevolence.

[Forced loans, 1522 and 1544]

But Henry had other strings to his bow, and of these the forced loan was one which served him well. In 1522 commissioners were appointed throughout the kingdom to ascertain the value of every man’s possessions and to require a certain part for the king, on the understanding that they be repaid out of the grants from the next Parliament. The promise of repayment was under the king’s privy seal.[281] In 1544, forced loans were again exacted, this time from all persons rated at £50 and more per annum. Parliament, subservient to the king, far from protesting because of these arbitrary demands upon the pockets of the people, in two instances released the king from liability to payment. In 1529, Parliament “for themselves and all the whole body of the realm which they represent, freely, liberally, and absolutely, give and grant unto the King’s highness ... all and every sum and sums of money which to them and every of them, is, ought, or might be due by reason of any money ... advanced or paid by way of trust or loan.”[282] This caused much murmuring, but, as Hall’s Chronicle rightly puts it, “Ther was no remedy.” In 1544 a similar act of a servile Parliament not only gives the king the funds borrowed under the forced loan of 1542, but commands the refunding of sums already paid by him to his creditors in discharge of debts so incurred.[283]

[Profits of the English Reformation]

The Reformation in England redounded to the financial benefit of the Crown. In 1532 the clergy were relieved by act of Parliament from the payment of annates or first fruits, the sums which the ordaining authorities exacted from those accorded any preferment in the church, and which amounted sometimes to as much as a year’s income from the benefice. The exactions were denounced as having risen by “an uncharitable custom, grounded upon no just or good title,” and through them “great and inestimable sums of money have been daily conveyed out of this realm, to the impoverishment of the same, and to the advantage of the court of Rome.”[284] The same Parliament, meeting for its fifth session on the 15th January, 1533-4, reënacted the statute without the contingencies which had conditioned the other.[285] Closely following came a statute that deprived the Pope of his petty exactions which for generations he had drawn from the English Church. Thus were discontinued peter-pence, procurations, fruits, fees for dispensations, licenses, faculties and grants.[286] The sixth session of this Parliament, meeting at the end of the year 1534, turned the procedure into comedy by attaching to “the King’s imperial crown forever” the first-fruits and tenths of the annual income of all ecclesiastical benefices, the very payments which it had declared to be in conformity with an “uncharitable custom.”[287]

[Parliament the confirming authority in clerical grants]

Furthermore, at the session of 1533-4, Parliament had laid very definite restrictions upon the clergy in the matter of regular taxation.[288] Since the early part of the fourteenth century, indeed, almost since the beginning of Parliament itself, the lesser clergy had attended the sessions with great irregularity, and had voted their taxes for the most part in provincial assemblies. Now, however, came the general prohibition that the clergy should not enact or execute ordinances binding upon themselves without the king’s license and without his approval when once they were made. Included within the meaning of this prohibition was the granting of taxes. From thenceforward until the time of Charles II, when, without any special enactment but by simple process of evolution, the clergy began to be taxed in the same manner and according to the same rate as the laity, clerical grants were submitted to Parliament for confirmation.

Henry VIII died in 1547. Notwithstanding the heavy taxation, parliamentary and unparliamentary, which had been exacted during his reign, he remained popular with the great majority of his subjects to his death. His many vices were counterbalanced by his successful wars, the heavy taxation by the growing trade of England, and his semi-independence of Parliament by most efficient administration.

[Elizabeth’s accession, 1558]

After the lapse of eleven years, which in so far as they concern the evolution of the taxing power of Parliament, composed in effect an interregnum, Elizabeth succeeded to the throne of England. Elizabeth’s government was a despotism and was illegal; but it was so by sufferance, not because the nation was ignorant of its true character or because the people were unable to control it. When in later years the attempt was made to create a despotism against the voice of the people, the result was a Cromwell and his Charles I. Queen Elizabeth was loved by her subjects and they put their trust in her. The sympathy existing between queen and people could not be illustrated better than by the following anecdote, which suggests that under her rule benevolences were really made with the good will of the givers.

The queen, being at Coventry, is presented by the mayor with a purse heavily filled with gold.

“I have few such gifts, Mr. Mayor,” says the queen; “it is a hundred pounds in gold!”

“Please, your grace,” the mayor answers, “it is a great deal more we give you.”

“What is it?” asks the queen.

“It is,” the mayor replies, “the hearts of your loving subjects.”

And the queen makes answer, “We thank you, Mr. Mayor; it is a great deal more indeed.”[289]

[Liberality of Elizabeth’s Parliaments. Her extra-Parliamentary exactions]

Subsidies were granted in Parliament with liberality and readiness. Forced loans were indeed exacted from the wealthy, but Elizabeth took care to repay honorably and as promptly as she could. A means of revenue which relieved her from the frequent necessity of applying to Parliament was the granting of monopolies, based upon the right of the crown to assure to an inventor or orginator the exclusive benefits of his invention or innovation. By 1601, however, the royal power had encroached so far upon the rights of the individual that the grants of monopoly comprised exclusive control over many of the necessaries of life. The list which was read in the House of Commons in 1601, included:--currants, iron, powder, cards, transportation of leather, vinegar, sea-coal, lead, oil, starch, glass, and even salt. The matter had been first discussed in the Parliament of 1571, was brought up again in 1597, and in 1601 Elizabeth with the tact which she could summon on occasion, sent a message to the House to allay if possible the agitation which was going on there over the subject of monopolies. It gave satisfaction. “Understanding that divers patents” so ran the message, “which she had granted had been grievous to her subjects, some should be presently repealed, some superseded, and none put in execution but such as should first have a trial according to the law for the good of the people.”[290] Thus was this means of indirect taxation by the crown done away with, until the time when James I, putting his clumsy shoulder to the wheel, should seek to introduce it again.

[Commons assert their right to originate money bills, 1593]

Toward the close of the reign of Elizabeth there was another evidence of the growing realization on the part of the commons that their powers were not to be tampered with. In this instance, the vindication was not against the prerogative of the sovereign, but against an arrogation of power on the part of the House of Lords. The incident was based upon the decreasing liberality of the commons in the years after the Armada. They had risen nobly to the defense of the nation against the peril, but, with the passing of it, their generosity had faded. In 1593, it was represented that, though the queen had spent upon the war some £1,030,000 of her own, the grants of the commons persisted in being inadequate. A message was sent down from the lords which remarked upon the need for a supply and requested the appointment of a committee of conference. Sir Robert Cecil, reporting from the committee, stated that the lords would assent to no smaller grant than three entire subsidies.[291] The commons, on the other hand, had shown a disposition to grant no more than two. Francis Bacon stated the issue. He yielded to the subsidy, “but disliked,” he said, “that this house should join with the upper house in granting it. For the custom and privilege of this house hath always been, first to make offer of the subsidies from hence, then to the upper house; except it were that they present a bill unto this house, with desire of our assent thereto, and then to send it up again.”[292] The commons refused to have further conference with the lords, so determined were they to vindicate their right to originate money bills, by the vote 217 to 128. Notwithstanding this scrupulous adherence to principle, they accepted the suggestion and came forward with a grant of three subsidies, six tenths and six fifteenths.

The death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, brought to an end the Tudor period and cleared the throne for James Stuart. The Tudor era was one which can be passed lightly over in a strict account of progress toward parliamentary supremacy in taxation. In such a study the period of the Tudors is a bywater. Yet the fact that the principles enunciated in the years prior to their accession stayed alive despite the attacks of Tudor subtlety, points to a vitality sufficient to down the Stuarts, and to establish permanent parliamentary control over the laying of taxes.

VII

THE STUARTS: 1603-1689

[Divine right as against Parliamentary supremacy]

THE theory of divine right, by which the Stuarts laid claim to a sovereignty as irresponsible as it was far-reaching, in practice came into direct conflict with another theory which had been taking shape for some four centuries, the supremacy of Parliament. In the field of taxation the issue is scarcely less apparent. Parliament asserted the supremacy of its will over all kinds of taxes, indirect as well as direct. The crown, on the other hand, hesitating to close with the representatives of the people over a question of their authority in direct taxation, maintained that unchecked royal power extended to indirect taxes, including duties at the ports. Furthermore, the crown, whenever occasion arose, sought to elude the hold of Parliament upon direct taxation, by resorting to the familiar resources of benevolences and the sale of monopolies, and at last to the levy of ship money.

With the issue so direct, the great question was that of strength. Should the crown with its array of adherents, upholding as their ideal the perfect exercise of the royal prerogative, prove itself stronger than the House of Commons? Or were the commons to prevail, standing for the principle that the representatives of the people sitting in Parliament should have complete control over the public purse?

[James I, 1603-1625]

James Stuart, swollen with intellectual pride, was, according to the Duc de Sully, “the wisest fool in Europe.” Worse than his vanity were his unsteadiness and his insincerity, traceable, perhaps, to the Italian-Gallic stock whence he was bred.[293] Divine right, a doctrine by its nature offensive to Englishmen, was in him doubly hateful because he was not born king, but was proclaimed by the Council, an act ratified, however, by popular voice, and subsequently acquiesced in by Parliament.[294] In the matter of religion, he was not more agreeable; suspected at times of plots to further Roman Catholicism, he assumed toward the Puritans especial animosity, they standing in his mind not so much as preachers of religion as propagandists of republicanism.

[James I dictates the composition of the Commons, 1604]

He wasted no time in getting things started. In the proclamation by which he summoned his first Parliament, he assumed the power of dictating what manner of men should compose it, and directed that his Court of Chancery should decide whether or not the certificates of election fulfilled the royal conditions, “and if any shall be found to be made contrarie to this proclamation, the same is to be rejected as unlawful and insufficient.”[295] The commons, however, shortly after their convening, vindicated their privilege in the case of Goodwin and Fortescue, and succeeded in maintaining thereafter their right to decide upon the legality of returns.[296] In their “Apology of the House of Commons, made to the king, touching their Privileges,” nearly at the close of this session, the commons complained against the monopolies possessed by the great trading companies in the face of many statutes to the contrary, and the oppressive exercise of the ancient prerogative of purveyance.[297]

[James receives tunnage and poundage for life]

In the department of regular taxation, however, James at first adopted a conciliatory attitude. On the 26th June, 1604, James sent to the commons a letter “written with his own hand but corrected as to the spelling,” in which he expressed his pleasure as to a subsidy.[298] He stated his confidence in their good-will, assuring them “in the word of a King” that he would “be so far from taking it unkindly, their not offering” to him a subsidy, and that he would “only interpret it to proceed from the care they have, that our people should not have any occasion of distaste.” James’s letter accomplished for him what may well have been his purpose; the commons immediately granted to him tunnage and poundage for the space of his life.[299]

[Royal poverty]

At the two subsequent sessions of 1605-6 and 1606-7 there was constant friction between king and commons, yet there were no very remarkable assertions of royal prerogative or of parliamentary privilege. At the session of 1605, Parliament granted the king three entire subsidies and six fifteenths, designed principally to meet the royal indebtedness, some of which held over since the time of Elizabeth.[300] After the prorogation, James called no session of Parliament until the 9th February, 1609-10.

But James could not meet his obligations with the ordinary revenues of the crown. He was spending between £500,000 and £600,000 a year, and his income was in the neighborhood of £400,000; his annual deficit, therefore, was not far from £150,000.[301] James was obliged to turn elsewhere, and the consequence of his action was the famous Bate Case, the decision in which was a step toward freeing the king from parliamentary control over his revenues.

[The Bate Case]

In 1603, in answer to the agitation against the great monopolies, an Eastern trading company, known as the Levant Company, surrendered its charter. This company, amongst other privileges, had enjoyed the right of collecting a duty on currants from other merchants trading in them, and paid to the crown in return for the franchise £4,000 a year. When, therefore, the company yielded up its charter, the crown was the loser by £4,000 annually. In order to make up for the loss, the crown itself proceeded to lay a duty on currants.[302] In 1605, the Levant Company again received a charter, but James levied upon it, nevertheless, his duty on currants, the rate being five shillings on the hundred-weight over and above that granted to him by Parliament in its tunnage and poundage bill. It was a merchant of the Levant Company, John Bate, who raised the question of the legality of the imposition. The case was taken to the Court of Exchequer for decision. Had the barons confined themselves to the strict laws of the matter, there would not have been great ground for objection to their decision. Precedent drawn from the time of the Tudors and statutes of the same period, were capable of being brought forward in a fair adjudication of the case, and would have substantiated the contention of the crown, thus returning customs exactions, nearly to the situation of 1300.[303] The fact that the four barons decided the case unanimously against John Bate could not, therefore, be reasonably reprehended. But they permitted themselves to slip off into philosophical generalizations which struck the people as absolutist in tenor.

[Opinions of the Barons in the Bate Case]

“It seemeth to me strange,” says Baron Clarke in his opinion, “that any subjects would contend with the King in this high point of prerogative.... As it is not a kingdom without subjects and government, so he is not a king without revenues.... The revenue of the Crown is the very essential part of the Crown, and he who rendeth that from the king pulleth also his crown from his head, for it cannot be separated from the crown.” He proceeded to advance the opinion that the Statute of Edward III[304] which prohibited to the crown the right of levying new impositions on wool, woolfells, and leather, and which provided that there be only imposed “the custom and subsidy granted to the king,” had no effect in the present instance, because it extended to Edward III alone, “and shall not bind his successors, for it is a principal part of the Crown of England which the King cannot diminish.”

The opinion of Chief Baron Fleming was scarcely less sweeping. “The King’s power is double,” he said, “ordinary and absolute.... That of the ordinary is for the profit of particular subjects, for the execution of civil justice ... in the ordinary courts, and nominated ... with us the common law; and these laws cannot be changed without Parliament.... The absolute power of the king is not that which is converted or executed to private use, ... but is only that which is applied to the general benefit of the people.... This power is not guided by the rules which direct only at the common law, and is most properly named policy and government.... The matter in question is material matter of state, and ought to be ruled by the rules of policy, and if it be so, the king hath done well to execute his extraordinary power. All customs, be they old or new, are no other but the effects and issues of trades and commerce with foreign nations; but all commerce and affairs with foreigners ... are made by the absolute power of the king; and he who hath power of causes hath power also of effects.”[305]

[The position of Parliament]

Parliament took its stand on the subject of the impositions even before the decision was published. In the Petition of Grievances sent up by the commons at the end of the session of 1606, a list which contained so many complaints that James remarked that “they had sent an oyes through the nation to find them,” the plea was made that no such duty could be demanded legally without the consent of Parliament. The decision was announced to them when they reassembled in November 1606, but they took no action and for a time the matter rested.

[The Book of Rates published under decision in the Bate Case, 1608]

But it was James himself who, in his characteristic tactless obstinacy, forced the issue. On the 29th July, 1608, taking advantage of the Bate decision, he published under the authority of the Great Seal his Book of Rates, which laid heavy duties upon almost all articles of merchandise, “to be forever hereafter paid to the king and his successors on pain of his displeasure.”[306] The statement of James’s own views on the subject could not be more clearly put than he himself expressed them in the commission for the levy of the impositions addressed to the Earl of Salisbury, Treasurer of England. “This special power and prerogative,” he asserted, “(amongst many others) hath both by men of understanding in all ages and by the laws of all nations been yielded and acknowledged to be proper and inherent in the persons of princes, that they may according to their several occasions raise to themselves such fit and competent means by levying of customs and impositions upon merchandise transported out of their kingdom or brought into their dominions ... as to their wisdoms and discretions may seem convenient.”[307]

[Remonstrance from the Commons, 1609-10]

Even with the money thus obtained, James was obliged at last after a lapse of nearly two years and a half to turn to Parliament. He summoned it for the 9th February 1609-10. The commons, almost unanimously opposed to the exercise of the royal prerogative in the matter of the imposition, came prepared to dispute the decision in the Bate Case. The discussion, carried on in the face of a royal prohibition, was managed by Hakewill, Yelverton, and Whitelocke.[308] The upshot was a remonstrance in which the commons reminded the king that “the policy and constitution of this your kingdom appropriates unto the kings of this realm, with the assent of the Parliament, as well the sovereign power of making laws as that of taxing or imposing upon the subjects’ goods or merchandises wherein they have justly such a property as may not without their consent, be altered or changed.” Further, they pointed to the former occasions when the commons had complained in Parliament of similar impositions, and upon which redress was forthcoming. Reference was made to the action of “famous kings,” who “agreed that this old fundamental right should be further declared and established by act of Parliament, wherein it is provided that no such charges should ever be laid upon the people without their common consent, as may appear by sundry records of former times.” They went on to say, “We, therefore, your Majesty’s most humble Commons assembled in Parliament, following the examples of this worthy case of our ancestors, and out of a duty to those for whom we serve, finding that your Majesty, without advice or consent of Parliament, hath lately, in time of peace, set both greater impositions, and far more in number than any of your noble ancestors did in time of war, have with all humility presumed to present this most just and necessary petition unto your Majesty: That all impositions set without the assent of Parliament may be quite abolished and taken away; and that your Majesty, in imitation likewise of your noble progenitors, will be pleased that a law may be made during this session of Parliament to declare that all impositions set or to be set, upon your people, their goods and merchandises, save only by common assent in the Parliament, are and shall be void.”[309] The outcome was unsatisfactory. A bill framed to prohibit further impositions than those already in existence, was passed by the House of Commons, but was cast out in the upper chamber. The king was still able to cover himself with the decision in the Bate Case.

[Cowel’s “Interpreter”]

The attitude of James toward a book “lately published by one Doctor Cowel” and esteemed to “contain certain matters of scandal and offence toward the high court of Parliament,”[310] all but brought him into active conflict with the commons. This publication called “The Interpreter” contained a defense of the royal prerogative in such terms as greatly to offend the power of Parliament. Doctor Cowel had this to say under the head of “Subsidy:”

“... A tax or tribute assessed by Parliament, and granted by the Commons to be levied of every subject according to the value of his lands or goods, after the rate of 4_s._ in the pound for land and 2_s._ 8_d._ for goods, as it is not commonly used at this day. Some hold opinion that this subsidy is granted by the subject to the Prince, in recompense or consideration, that whereas the Prince of his absolute power might make laws of himself, he doth of favor admit the consent of his subjects therein, that all things in their own confession may be done with the greater indifferency.”[311]

King James had been thoughtless enough to let fall words of commendation for the book, and his approval was followed by a request from the commons for a conference with the lords. James, however, wisely withdrew from his position and issued a proclamation prohibiting the further circulation of the work and recalling the copies already issued. Thus did the storm blow over.

[The “Great Contract,” 1610]

At this same session of Parliament, James, through the Lord Treasurer, offered to accept a composition for the incidents of feudal tenure, including the right of purveyance. By this so-called Great Contract, Parliament was to provide for an annual payment to the king of £200,000. But the idea, which at first was distasteful to the commons, shortly became equally out of favor with the king. The amount of money required seemed excessive, and the commons feared that it might make the king independent of them. The king, on the other hand, arrived ultimately at the conclusion that by careful manipulation he could readily increase his income to a sum larger than that stated in the Great Contract. Final consideration was put over to the session of Parliament called for the 16th October following. At the last moment, however, when an agreement seemed by no means hopeless, a religious misunderstanding intervened, and the negotiations fell through.

The matter of a subsidy was treated with somewhat greater favor, though with small generosity. Parliament granted the king one entire subsidy and one fifteenth and tenth.[312] Parliament was dissolved 9th February, 1611, and for three years James tried to carry on his government without it.

[Petty extortion after the dissolution of Parliament]

James’s attempt at absolutism was not a financial success; a court which was as extravagant as it was dissolute helped him increase his deficit; he ran behind about £200,000 a year, notwithstanding the fact that he set in motion all the machinery of petty extortion that he dared. He tried to force loans on the security of his privy seal but frequently met with refusal from which there was no appeal. The jurisdiction of the Star Chamber was used as a means to lay fines which were usually unjust and always excessive. He sold peerages and raised money on the crown lands, and induced the French king and the Dutch to pay up old debts owing to England.

[James’s second Parliament, 1614, known as the “Addled Parliament”]

His enormous annual deficit forced him in 1614 to summon his second Parliament. It came with a great and active majority lined up against the king. It speedily passed by a unanimous vote a resolution against the king’s right of imposing taxes without the consent of Parliament, and demanded a conference on that subject with the House of Lords;[313] the lords, however, turned to the judges hoping to obtain from them enlightenment on the legal points involved, but the judges, by the words of Chief Justice Coke, refused to render an extra-judicial opinion. The conference was then refused. The king, becoming impatient at the delay of the commons in accomplishing the purpose for which he had summoned them to Parliament, with his usual failure to adapt himself to circumstances, sent a message to the House threatening a dissolution of Parliament unless procedure were immediately taken in the direction of granting supplies.[314] The commons met the issue squarely; they said that they were determined to conclude the matter of the impositions before granting a supply. On the 7th of June, two months and two days after the date upon which it had been convened, James redeemed his word and dissolved Parliament. It had not passed a single bill and thus earned the title by which it is known to history,--the “Addled” Parliament. But it had succeeded in maintaining its principle of making supply wait upon redress of grievances, and some of its members had shot barbed shafts at the king, wherefore James locked up those who had aimed most surely.

[Resort to extortion]

With the hope gone of securing a grant, James had to return to his old courses of obtaining income. Forced loans, monopolies, heavy fines, feudal payments rigorously exacted, and the systematic extortion of benevolences, figured in his programme. The Council sent out orders to all the sheriffs and magistrates to send in contributions from all men of ability to pay; to those who refused, suggestions were made of impending evil. The judges of assize were especially urged to recommend payments. The benevolences netted less than £43,000 for the three years during which they were made.[315]

[Case of Oliver St. John]

But the nation did not submit tamely. Several counties sent up protests against the demand, recalling in defense of their position the Statute of Richard III which forbade the levying of “exactions, called benevolences.” The refusal of Oliver St. John to the request for a benevolence by the mayor of Marlborough, brought him into immediate conflict with the king. His written reply to the mayor maintained the illegality of the demand on the ground that it was contrary to Magna Carta and to the Statute of Richard III. He further charged the king with breaking his coronation oath, and declared that all who paid the benevolence were incriminated with him. He was haled before the Star Chamber and sentenced by it to pay a fine of £5,000 and to imprisonment during the king’s pleasure. Thus it was that James tried to rule without a Parliament.

[James’s third Parliament, 1620-21]

But the rule could not long continue. James summoned his third Parliament for the 30th January, 1620-21. He addressed both Houses in a conciliatory manner, hopefully and with many promises. “For you to hunt after grievances,” he said, “to the prejudice of your king and yourselves, is not the errand: deal with me as I deserve at your hands; I will leave nothing undone that becomes a just king, if you deal with me accordingly.”[316] The commons were in a good temper and a reconciliation seemed far more likely to eventuate than a struggle.

[Supply waits upon redress of grievances]

As for the royal advice about grievances, the commons were slow to take it. When, shortly after the beginning of the session, it was moved that the House proceed to the consideration of a supply, it was stated that supply and redress of grievances should go “hand in hand together,” that they were “as twins; to go together and have no precedency.”[317] It was resolved that the business of the supply be not decided independently of a consideration of grievances and of a petition to the king for freedom of speech, thus recalling the imprisonment of members in 1614 at the time of the dissolution of the Addled Parliament.

[Revival of impeachment by the Commons]

High in the list of grievances was the granting of monopolies. Patents of monopoly subserved a number of diverse purposes, some of which were entirely legitimate. Objection could not be made to restrictions in the sale of certain commodities such as liquors and explosives, nor to the assurance given to an inventor that he had an exclusive right to profits accruing from his invention. But James was free with his grants of monopoly for the enrichment of his courtiers and himself. Parliament laid by the heels the monopolists who had most abused their privileges, and impeached and condemned Sir Giles Mompesson and Sir Francis Mitchell.[318]

[Granting of a supply]

Before the judgment was given, however, but not before it was clearly discernible what was to be the trend of events, the commons set themselves to the consideration of a supply bill and on the 18th March passed it unanimously. It provided for two entire subsidies. “In the midst of their inquiries into public grievances, the commons had thought fit to consider the necessities of the State and grant the king a supply.”[319]

[James in a temper adjourns Parliament]

The major part of the session was spent in reforming abuses, both by impeaching the officials responsible for them, and by framing legislation for their correction. Chief amongst those who fell under condemnation at the bar of the House of Lords was Lord Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England, convicted of bribery. King James in the early part of the session seemed not out of sympathy with these efforts to reform the administration, but as time wore on and the commons still busied themselves with investigations of official misconduct, he wearied, and on the 28th May, the Lord Treasurer declared to the lords the king’s determination to adjourn Parliament. Two of the five reasons assigned for the adjournment were these: “For that the profits of his Majesty’s revenues are, as it were, at a stand;” and “The omission of the State.”[320] A week later, after great complaint by the commons, the session was adjourned to reassemble on the 14th November. Throughout the four months during which it had sat, no complaint had been registered against the impositions at the outports. Apparently the commons were willing for the moment to let them rest, or else, as is more likely, were quite unmindful of them.

[Dilatory action on a subsidy]

Parliament met on the 20th November for its final session. Lord Treasurer Cranfield reported that the exchequer was depleted, that the two subsidies which had been granted the previous March had been spent in furthering the interests of James’s son-in-law, Frederic, Elector Palatine, and “that the business now in hand required a great and speedy supply.”[321] It was understood that the cost of maintaining an army in the Palatinate would be not far from £900,000 a year. The Lord Treasurer wished “that the Commons would so handle this business as to make his Majesty in love with the Parliaments.”

But they took some time to consider it. At the end of the first week, the commons resolved in committee of the whole house upon a single subsidy, which, since it was to be levied doubly upon papists, would provide some £100,000 for the prosecution of war in the Palatine.[322] That was as near an actual grant as the commons came during the session. On the 1st December, they fell into a conflict with the king over matters of privilege, which had its rise in the imprisonment of Sir Edwin Sandys during the last recess of Parliament, presumably for utterances made in the House. There were petitions to James and replies from him, culminating in a remarkable Protestation asserting the right of free speech in the House.[323] On the day of the presentation of this Protestation, the 18th December, James adjourned Parliament to the 8th February; he then sent for the Journal of the House of Commons and tore from it the objectionable entry with his own hand. In the stress of these events, the proposed subsidy was allowed to slip out of mind; only did the lords propose a meeting with the commons to consider a supply, and this came to naught. On the 6th January, 1621-22, James saw fit not to await the reassembling of Parliament, but issued a proclamation of dissolution in which he denounced those who had questioned his prerogatives in the House of Commons as “ill-tempered spirits.” Then he committed to prison such of them as he regarded as being most hostile, amongst whom were Sir Edward Coke, Pym, Selden, and Mallory.[324]

[James’s last Parliament, 1623-24]

[Supply granted for the Palatine war]

James convened his last Parliament on the 19th February, 1623-24. In the interval which had elapsed since the dissolution, James recovered his conciliatory attitude toward the commons. The plan of marrying the Prince of Wales, the young Prince Charles, to the Infanta of Spain, had been given up, and thus Englishmen were relieved of what to them had been a pro-popish plot, and had been deprecated again and again as the odious Spanish Match. The programme with respect to the Palatinate favored by the king was that favored by the commons, and the reign of James seemed to be approaching a happy conclusion. The commons came forward with a grant of three subsidies and three fifteenths and tenths, providing a somewhat greater sum than £300,000.[325] The money was voted on the condition that, in order to insure its application to the naval and military establishments, it be paid into the hands of commissioners appointed by the commons, and be expended by them upon direction of the council of war. The sympathy existing between king and Parliament was further exhibited in the successful passage of an act forbidding monopolies in the sale of any merchandise or in practicing any trade, the only legislative act of constructive importance in his reign.[326] Parliament was dissolved on the 29th May, 1624.

[Death of James I, 27th March, 1625]

Less than a year later King James died. Apparently at the end of his reign he was learning wisdom for he was beginning to understand Parliament. He left his crown to the keeping of a son who had in no wise profited by the father’s experience. Charles I, brought up in an atmosphere of divine right, was predisposed to pursue that theory to the end. But worse than that, in arguing his melancholy destiny, was his faithlessness. An odious policy executed without respect for truth brought him at last to death outside his palace of Whitehall.

[First Parliament of Charles]

[Worry about the supply]

The first Parliament of Charles I recalls vividly the mid-reign experiences of James. It convened on the 18th June, 1625, and was met with a request for a large and unconditional grant with which to prosecute the war which Charles had inherited from his father. The commons, however, were careful; they looked rather for a solid establishment of government at home than for a war abroad. Breaking the habit of two centuries, they offered Charles tunnage and poundage for a year instead of the term of his life, a measure which, because of lack of precedent, was rejected in the House of Lords; and granted only two subsidies.[327] On the 10th August, the chancellor delivered a message to the commons from the king. He desired “a present answer about his supply: If not, he will take care of their healths more than they themselves, and make as good a shift for his present occasions as he could.”[328] The House spent the rest of the day debating the matter, and on the next proceeded in the consideration of grievances, postponing the supply. Delay the king would not brook; perceiving that the commons were bent upon a redress of grievances before the granting of further aid, and because in the debates they had presumed “to reflect upon some great persons near himself,” on the 12th August he dissolved Parliament,[329] and looked to his privy seal as a means of revenue.

[His second Parliament. Buckingham]

[A grant with hard conditions]

Six months later, on the 6th February, 1625-26, Charles opened his second Parliament and met with no better success. The commons did not consider immediately the question of a supply, but to the immense irritation of the king, proceeded to inquire into the conduct of the Duke of Buckingham, the favorite of Charles. He sent a message to the commons saying that he would “not allow any of his servants to be questioned amongst them, much less such as are of eminent place and near unto him.” But the chief significance of his message was in its conclusion. “I wish you would hasten my supply,” so it ran, “or else it will be worse for yourselves; for if any ill happen, I think I shall be the last that shall feel it.”[330] The commons replied with a grant of three subsidies and three fifteenths, but the conditions were such as to make it almost worse for Charles than no grant at all. The bill was not to be brought in until the king should have given answer to their list of grievances, and among the grievances the Duke of Buckingham was chief.[331] Later a fourth subsidy was added and a movement was put on foot to give Charles tunnage and poundage for life; but in the bill it was specified that a remonstrance should be drawn up against his taking those duties without the previous consent of Parliament.[332] Then the commons went on with their formal impeachment of Buckingham. But before the matter was settled, and consequently before the Commons had made final grants of the promised subsidies, Charles, in the hope of relieving the desperate plight of his favorite, dissolved Parliament, on the 15th June.

[Forced loans at the rating of a subsidy]