Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/55

1610.] practice could establish a right against those great bulwarks of popular liberty. And the commons therefore demanded that a law should be made during this session, declaring that all such impositions of duties or taxes, without consent of parliament, should be pronounced for ever void. And they accordingly passed such a bill, which, however, was rejected by the more subservient lords.

James writhed under this plain and direct denial of his assumed authority, and refused to surrender the question. He found in the bishops a body, on the whole, ready to cooperate with him in his attempt to destroy the constitution; and Bancroft, the primate, led the way with most unblushing baseness. Under his leadership the whole high church party echoed the king's most absolute dogmas, and claimed for him all the divinity which he professed to possess. The king, according to their creed, being divine, so were the bishops who were appointed by him, and therefore this divine crown and church were above all law. The ecclesiastical courts carried this pernicious theory into daily practice, and encroached on the temporal ones as pertinaciously as the king did on parliament. There was a grand struggle betwixt the common and the civil law. The judges, who saw this arrogance of the clergy with jealousy and disgust, began to relax their enmity against the puritans, and to regard them as the natural allies of the law against absolutism.

On the other hand, the king and the bishops sought out fresh means, and one of these was to bring forward a base slave, called Dr. Cowell, who, in his "Interpreter, or Law Dictionary," broached the most unmitigated maxims of tyranny. He declared that the king inherited all the powers which had been exercised by the emperors of Rome; as if the empire of the Romans had never ceased in this country, or as if the civil law being still used by the church, it became in all its forms imperative on the nation. It was dedicated to Bancroft, and he and the king highly eulogised this infamous production, which maintained all the rampant maxims of absolutism which James had ever uttered. The king, Cowell declared, was soliitus à legibus, freed from all restraint of laws; and though he took an oath at his coronation to maintain all the laws unchanged, yet he was at full liberty to quash any laws that he pleased; and, in a word, "that the king of England is an absolute king."

The commons called upon the lords to unite with them in punishing this miscreant, who, not content with selling his own birthright for a mess of pottage, was endeavouring to sell that of the entire nation. The case was so flagrant that the lords could not decline the challenge. And Bacon, who had shortly before been the advocate of the royal prerogative, now conducted the case for the commons in the conference against Cowell, who was sent to prison for a time, and his book was suppressed by the king's proclamation, poor James himself being obliged to condemn his own champion.

Having triumphed in this particular, the commons proceeded to much older grievances. They demanded the abolition of that den of injustice and extortion the Court of High Commission, in which the king exercised that unrestrained despotism which he claimed over the whole kingdom; where men were sentenced and fined at the arbitrary will of the king and of its council, without jury or evidence admitted in their defence: but this was an institution so dear to James's heart, that he would not listen to any abatement of its power. They next complained of the growing abuse of substituting royal proclamations for established law, "by reason of which," said the commons, "there is a general fear conceived and spread amongst your majesty's people, that proclamations will, by degrees, grow up and increase to the strength and nature of laws." To this James simply replied that his proclamations should not exceed the warranty of law. They further complained of the delay of the courts in granting writs of habeas corpus and prohibition, and of the encroachment of the council of Wales, which extended its jurisdiction over various neighbouring counties, where it had no real authority; as well as of various monopolies, taxes on public-houses, and on sea-coal.

The licenses to public-houses he agreed to revoke, but he demanded a perpetual revenue in lieu of the income thence derived. This the commons refused, alleging that he had no right to impose that tax in the first instance; and they further demanded that the feudal burthens of tenure by knights' service, wardships, and purveyance, should cease. As to the first, James absolutely refused compliance, on the plea that he would not reduce all his subjects, "rich and poor, noble and base, to hold their lands in the same ignoble manner;" but as to wardships, the marriages of infants and widows, and some other odious services, including purveyance, he was willing to barter them for a sum of money. The sum which he demanded was three hundred thousand pounds per annum. The commons only offered one hundred thousand pounds, but by a long course of haggling, like chapmen in a fair, the king descended to two hundred and twenty thousand pounds, and the commons rose to one hundred and eighty thousand pounds. Here the matter paused till James moved a dissolution, when the commons advanced to two hundred thousand pounds, and the king accepted it. But here again the king and his advocates had boasted so much of his being above the law, and of his power to quash, of his own will, any statute to which he had consented, that the commons were cautious in their proceedings, and they had, moreover, to determine out of what funds this revenue should be raised. These discussions had now driven on the session to the middle of July, and it was agreed that they should vote one subsidy, and one tenth and fifteenth for the present session, and defer the final settlement of the other grant till the next.

The interval was employed by James and his ministers in attempts to corrupt some of the members of the opposition, and thus to enable him to concede less and obtain more; but the commons had employed the time in weighing the slippery nature of the man with whom they had to deal. His continual boasts of his superiority to all laws, and of an actually divine power of dispensing with all his most solemn obligations, made them doubtful of the possibility of binding him to any terms; and the growing extravagance and rapacity of both king and courtiers deepened their fears.

When they met they were in a far less complying humour than when they separated. They insisted on seeing the promised reforms before they voted the two hundred