Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/364

Rh ENGLAND [HISTORY. Question of the im posi tions. Breach between the king and the Com- inous. Attempt ed union with Scotland. The coloniza tion of Ulster. placed himself in opposition to the Commons in a matter which touched their deeper feelings. As a necessary con sequence every dispute on questions of smaller weight assumed an exaggerated importance. The king had re ceived a scanty revenue with his crown, and he spent freely what little he had. As the Commons offered grudging sup plies, the necessity under which he was of filling ip the annual deficit led him to an action by which a grave con stitutional question was raised. From the time of Richard II. to the reign of Mary no attempt had been made to raise duties on exports and im ports without consent of parliament. But Mary had, under a specious pretext, recommenced to a slight extent the evil practice, and Elizabeth had gone a little further in the same direction. In 1606 a merchant named Bate resisted the payment of an imposition as duties levied by the sole authority of the crown were then -called. The case was argued in the Court of Exchequer, and was there decided In favour of the crown. Shortly afterwards new impositions were set to the amount of 70,000 a year. When parlia ment met in 1610 the whole subject was discussed, and it was conclusively shown that, if the barons of the exchequer had been right in any sense, it was only in that narrow technical sense which is of no value at all. A compromise attempted broke down, and the difficulty was left to plague the next generation. The king was always able to assert that the judges were on his side, and it was as yet an acknowledged principle of the constitution that parliament could not change the law without the express consent of the crown, even if, which was not the case in this matter, the Lords had sided with the Commons. James s attempt to obtain further supplies from the Commons by opening a bargain for the surrender of some of his old feudal preroga tives, such as wardship and marriage, which had no longer any real meaning except as a means of obtaining money in an oppressive way, broke down, and early in 1611 James dissolved his first parliament in anger. A second parlia ment, summoned in 1614, met with the same fate after a session of a few weeks. The dissolution of this second parliament was followed by a short imprisonment of some of the more active mem bers, and by a demand made through England for a benevolence to make up the deficiency which parliament had neglected to meet. The court represented that, as no compulsion was used, there was nothing illegal in this pro ceeding. But as the names of those who refused to pay were taken down, it cannot be said that there was no indirect pressure. The most important result of the breach with the parlia ment of 1614, however, was the resolution taken by James to seek refuge from his financial and other troubles in a close alliance with the king of Spain. His own accession had done much to improve the position of England in its relation with the Continental powers. Scotland was no longer available as a possible enemy to England, and though an attempt to bind the union between the two nations by freedom of commercial intercourse had been wrecked upon the jealousy of the English Commons (1607), a legal decision had granted the status of national subjects to all persons born in Scotland after the king s accession in England. Ireland, too, had been thoroughly overpowered at the end of Elizabeth s reign, and the flight of the earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnnel in 1607 had been followed by the settlement of English and Scottish colonists in Ulster, a measure which, in the way in which it was undertaken, sowed the seeds of future evils, but undoubtedly conduced to increase the immediate strength of the English Govern ment in Ireland. Without fear of danger at home, therefore, James, who as king of Scotland had taken no part in Elizabeth s quarrel with Philip II., not only suspended hostilities immediately on his accession, and signed a peace in the following year, but looked favourably on the project of a Spanish alliance, in order that the chief Protestant and the chief Catholic powers might join together to impose peace on Europe, in the place of those hideous religious wars by which the last century had been disfigured. In 1611 circumstances had disgusted him with his new ally, but in 1614 he courted him again, not only on grounds of general policy, but because he hoped that the large portion which would accom pany the hand of an infanta would go far to fill the empty treasury. In this way the Spanish alliance, unpopular in itself, was formed to liberate the king from the shackles imposed on him by the English constitution. Its unpopularity, great from the beginning, became greater when Raleigh s execu tion (1618) caused the Government to appear before the world as truckling to Spain. The obloquy under which James laboured increased when the Thirty Years War broke out (1618), and when his daughter Elizabeth, whose husband, the Elector Palatine, was the unhappy claimant to the Bohemian crown (1619), stood forth as the lovely symbol of the deserted Protestantism of Europe. Yet it was not entirely in pity for German Protestants that the heart of Englishmen beat. Men felt that their own security was at stake. The prospect of a Spanish infanta as the bride of the future king of England filled them with suspicious terrors. In Elizabeth s time the danger, if not entirely external, did not come from the Government itself. Now the favour shown to the Roman Catholics by the king opened up a source of mischief which was to some extent real, if it was to a still greater extent imaginary. Whether the danger were real or imaginary, the consequence of the distrust resulting from the suspicion was the reawakening of the slumbering demand for fresh persecution of tho Roman Catholics, a demand which made a complete recon ciliation between the crown and the Lower House a matter of the greatest difficulty. In 1621 the third parliament of James was summoned to provide money for the war in defence of his son-in-law s inheritance in the Palatinate, which he now proposed to undertake. But it soon appeared that he was not prepared immediately to come to blows, and the Commons, voting a small sum as a token of their loyalty, passed to other matters. Indolent in hiy temper, James had been in the habit of leaving his patronage in the hands of a confidential favourite, and that position was now filled by George Villiers, marquis and afterwards duke of Buckingham. The natural consequence was that men who paid court to him were promoted, and those who kept at a distance from him had no notice taken of their merits. Further, a system of granting monopolies and other privileges had again sprung up. Many of these grants embodied some scheme which was intended to serve the interests of the public, and many actions which appear startling to us were covered by the extreme protectionist theories then in vogue. But abuses of every kind had clustered round them, anc in many cases the profits had gone into the pockets of hangers-on of the court, whilst officials had given their assistance to the grantors even beyond their legal powers. James was driven by the outcry raised to abandon these monopolies, and an Act of Parliament in 1621 placed the future grant of protections to new inventions under the safeguard of the judges. The attack on the monopolies was followed by charges brought by the Commons before the Lords against persons implicated in carrying them into execution, and sub sequently against Lord Chancellor Bacon as guilty of corruption. The sentence passed by the Lords vindicated The peace with Spain. The Spanis allianc The Thirty Years War. The tt parlia ment &amp;lt; James Mono] lies at tacked Kail oi Bacon.