Page:Readings in European History Vol 2.djvu/276

 2 3 8 Readings in European History Ship money Monopolies in the king's interest. Court of Star Chamber. Court of High Com- mission. And although all this was taken upon pretense of guard- ing the seas, yet a new unheard-of tax of ship money was devised, and upon the same pretense, by both which there was charged upon the subject near ^"700,000 some years; and yet the merchants have been left so naked to the violence of the Turkish pirates that many great ships of value and thousands of his Majesty's subjects have been taken by them, and do still remain in miserable slavery. . . . The monopolies of soap, salt, wine, leather, sea coal, and in a manner of all things of most common and neces- sary use. . . . The Court of Star Chamber hath abounded in extrava- gant censures not only for the maintenance and improve- ment of monopolies and other unlawful taxes, but for divers other causes where there hath been no offense, or very small ; whereby his Majesty's subjects have been op- pressed by grievous fines, imprisonments, stigmatizings, mutilations, whippings, pillories, gags, confinements, ban- ishments; after so rigid a manner as hath not only deprived men of the society of their friends, exercise of their profes- sions, comfort of books, use of paper or ink, but even vio- lated that near union which God hath established between men and their wives, by forced and constrained separation, whereby they have been bereaved of the comfort and con- versation one of another for many years together, without hope of relief, if God had not, by his overruling providence, given some interruption to the prevailing power and coun- sel of those who were the authors and promoters of such peremptory and heady courses. . . . The High Commission grew to such excess of sharpness and severity as was not much less than the Romish Inqui- sition. . . . The bishops and their courts were as eager in the country ; although their jurisdiction could not reach so high in rigor and extremity of punishment, yet were they no less grievous in respect of the generality and multipli- city of vexations, which, lighting upon the meaner sort of tradesmen and artificers, did impoverish many thousands, and so afflict and trouble others that great numbers, to avoid