Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/54

40 The postponement of the payment of the debt of Holland was extremely embarrassing to Cecil. On the death of the earl of Dorset, in 1608, he succeeded to the office of treasurer, and to the clamorous demands which had been made upon Dorset. His carriage had been stopped in the streets by the servants of the king's household, who were loud in their demands for their long arrears of wages, and the purveyors refused to bring in any more supplies till they were paid their advances. Cecil, on examining the accounts, found James one million three hundred thousand pounds in debt, and exceeding his income at the rate of upwards of eighty thousand pounds per annum. He set to work resolutely to curtail this expenditure, and to devise means of raising money. James always claimed an authority paramount to all laws; and Cecil ventured to put in practice the idea of prerogative in raising the necessary funds. He called in rigorously the unpaid remains of the last-voted subsidies, and then proceeded to lay on duties and impose monopolies of the most odious nature, without any sanction of parliament. His predecessor Dorset has set him the example by levying an import duty on currants by letters patent. This illegal demand had been resisted, and Bates, a Turkey merchant, was proceeded against for refusal to pay, in the court of exchequer. This court was base enough to decide in favour of this unconstitutional stretch of power, and James was delighted at so auspicious a concession of the justice of his doctrine of prerogative. Cecil pressed on in the path thus opened, and laid on import and export duties on various articles by orders under the great seal. He imposed a feudal aid towards the knighting of the prince Henry, of twenty shillings on each knight's fee; but this produced only twenty-eight thousand pounds. He then extended his duties to almost every species of imported and exported goods, at the rate of five pounds per cent. on the value of the goods, which he calculated would produce three hundred thousand pounds per annum; and he sold to the Dutch a right of fishing on the coasts of England and Scotland. Cecil himself was the farmer of these duties. They were, however, of a character to excite the utmost dissatisfaction; trade fell off under their influence, fewer ships came into the English ports, and there was at length no alternative but to summon a parliament, which met on the 24th of February, 1610.

The great topics which occupied this parliament were, of course, the king's want of money, and his continual violations of magna charta. Cecil, seeing the desperate state of the royal finances, made a bold demand that six hundred thousand pounds should be at once voted to liquidate his debts, and that an annual addition of two hundred thousand pounds should be consented to, as a permanent pension, to prevent his getting into debt again. But Cecil committed a great blunder, both in business routine and in sound policy, by proposing this money measure to the lords instead of to the commons, whose proper business it was. The commons resented this course, and were more determined than ever in demanding a departure from the unconstitutional practice of imposing duties without their consent. They declared that the imprisonment of Bates for opposing this practice, though sanctioned by the exchequer, was nevertheless illegal. Francis Bacon and Sir John Davis endeavoured to justify the despotic proceeding, but only to the greater exasperation of the house. It was declared that if the taxing of merchandise by prerogative was permitted, the taxing of their lands would soon follow. James sent them word to desist from such discussions; but the commons were not to be thus silenced, whereupon James sent for both houses to Whitehall, and delivered a most blasphemous speech in vindication of his inflated notions of kingly authority. "Kings," said he, "are justly called gods, for they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power upon earth. For if you will consider the attributes of God, you shall see how they agree in the person of a king. God hath power to create or destroy, to make or unmake, at his pleasure; to give life or send death, to judge all, and to be judged of nor accountable to none; to raise low things, and to make high things low, at his pleasure; and to God both body and soul are due. And the like power have kings. They make and unmake their subjects; they have power of raising and casting down, of life and of death; judges over all their subjects, and in all cases, and yet accountable to none but God only. They have power to exalt low things and abase high things, and make of their subjects like men of chess—a pawn to take a bishop or a knight; and to cry up or down any of their subjects as they do their money. And to the king is due both the affection of the soul, and the service of the body of his subjects." To resist the king in any of his acts or impositions, he declared was sedition; for the king was above all law, and laws were, in fact, but granted by kings to the people as a matter of favour.

We, who have seen the result of this spirit and this language, cannot but recognise in them the fatal power which placed the block and whetted the axe for his son. James had the mind essentially of a pedant, and not of a philosopher. With all his affected wisdom, and with occasional gleams of knowingness, he saw only the surface of things; and could no more penetrate into the depths of their causation, than a butterfly in a flower can dream of the roots which supply the honey to its glands. He was the incurable fool of absolutism. Before him stood a rising and mighty power, a people growing rich, independent, and cognisant of their rights; but he was as blind to the formidable apparition as Balaam was to the angel in his way, though his very ass could see it.

The commons would not listen to such insane language. They told the king that in extolling the power of kings, he forgot the existence of magna charta, which set eternal and impassable bounds to that power; and they appointed a committee to search for the legality or illegality of all such practices. The crown lawyers in committee argued that "the reverence of past ages, and the possession of present times," sanctioned the king's doctrine; and that the right of imposing duties had been exercised by the three first Edwards by their own will, and independent of parliament; and that if it had been interrupted from Richard II. to Mary, yet that princess had reassumed the royal privilege, and that it was continued by Elizabeth. But the commons replied that in all these cases the monarchs had violated magna charta, the statute de tallagio non concedendo, and twelve other parliamentary enactments; that no time or