The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins

by Will Durant

  Charles’s first Parliament met on June 18, 1625. One hundred lords—peers and bishops—sat in the upper house; five hundred men, three fourths of them Puritan,55 had been elected to the Commons by various forms of financial or political skulduggery;56 there was no pretense of democracy. Probably the level of ability in this Parliament was higher than an adult suffrage would have returned; here were Coke, Selden, Pym, Sir John Eliot, Sir Thomas Wentworth, and others marked for history. The total wealth of the Commoners exceeded threefold the wealth of the lords.57 The Commons showed its temper by demanding the full enforcement of the anti-Catholic laws. The King asked for an appropriation for governmental expenses and the war with Spain; Parliament granted him £ 140,000 ($7,000,000?), which was purposely inadequate; the fleet alone required twice that sum. For two centuries the English monarchs had been granted, for the duration of their reigns, the right to levy export and import duties, usually of two to three shillings per tun (a large cask), and six to twelve pence per pound; now the Parliament’s “tonnage and poundage” bill allowed Charles this right for one year only. It argued that previous appropriations had been squandered in the extravagance of James’s court; it complained that taxes had been levied without its consent; it was resolved to compel hereafter an annual summoning of Parliament and an annual examination, by Parliament, of governmental expenditures. Charles took umbrage at these economies and intentions, and when plague threatened London he seized the excuse to dissolve the Parliament (August 12, 1625).

  The government was now in the hands of Buckingham. Charles had not merely inherited the amiable, reckless Duke from his father; he had been brought up with him, had traveled with him, in a companionship that made it difficult for the King to see in his friend an unwise and disastrous counselor. Buckingham, with the support of Parliament, had led James into war with Spain; Parliament now refused to finance the war. The Duke organized an armada to go out and capture Spanish spoils or ports; it failed utterly, and the returning soldiers, unpaid and demoralized, spread rape, robbery, and defeatism in the coastal towns.

  Desperate for funds, Charles resigned himself to calling his second Parliament. The opposition grew stronger with his needs. The House warned him not to levy taxes without parliamentary sanction. Eliot, once a friend of the Duke, excoriated him as a corrupt incompetent who had grown richer with each failure of strategy or policy. Parliament appointed a committee to investigate Buckingham; Charles rebuked it, saying, “I would not have the House to question my servants, much less one that is so near me.” Eliot advised Parliament to withhold any grant of funds until the King admitted its right to demand the removal of a minister; Charles angrily reminded Parliament that he could at any time dismiss it; the Commons replied by formally impeaching Buckingham—accusing him of treason and demanding his dismissal (May 8, 1626); it informed the King that until this was done it would grant no funds. The King dissolved the Parliament (June 15). The issue of ministerial responsibility was left to the future.

  But Charles was again destitute. A large quantity of royal plate was sold. “Free benevolences”—gifts to the King—were asked of the country; the yield was slight; British money was pro-Parliament. Charles ordered his agents to collect tonnage and poundage dues despite lack of Parliamentary consent, and to seize the goods of merchants who failed to pay; he commanded the ports to maintain the fleet; he allowed his agents to impress men into military service. English and Danish troops, fighting for Protestantism in Germany, were being overwhelmed by the Imperialists; England’s Danish allies demanded the subsidy she had promised them. Charles ordered a forced loan—every taxpayer was to lend the government one per cent of the value of his land, five per cent of the worth of his personal property. Rich opponents were jailed, poor opponents were hustled into the army or the navy. Meanwhile English merchants delivered materials at Bordeaux and La Rochelle to Huguenots embattled with Richelieu; France declared war on England (1627). Buckingham led a fleet to attack the French at La Rochelle; the expedition failed. The £ 200,000 raised by the loan was soon spent, and Charles was again at his money’s end. He summoned his third Parliament.

  It met on March 17, 1628. Coke, Eliot, Wentworth, and John Hampden were returned, and, for the first time, Huntingdon Borough sent up a sturdy squire named Oliver Cromwell. Charles, in his speech from the throne, sternly called for funds, and added, with reckless insolence, “Take not this as threatening; I scorn to threaten any but my equals.”58 Parliament proposed £ 350,000, but, before voting it, required the King’s consent to a “Petition of Right” (May 28, 1628) which became a historic landmark in the rise of Parliament to mastery:

  TO THE KING’S MOST EXCELLENT MAJESTY:

  We humbly show unto our sovereign lord the King … that whereas it is declared and enacted by a statute … of Edward I … that no tallage or aid shall be laid or levied by the King … without the good will and assent of the archbishops, bishops, earls, barons, knights, burgesses, and other the freemen of the commonalty … your subjects have inherited this freedom, that they should not be compelled to contribute to any tax, tallage, aid, or other like charge not set by common consent in Parliament.

  The petition went on to protest against forced loans, and the King’s violation of the rights of habeas corpus and trial by jury as embodied in the Magna Charta of 1215. “We shall know by this [petition] if Parliaments live or die,” said Coke. Charles gave it an ambiguous consent; Parliament demanded a clearer reply, and still held up the appropriation; Charles gave formal consent. London felt the significance of the surrender; there broke out such ringing of bells as had not been heard there for years.

  Parliament, moving forward, requested the King to dismiss Buckingham; Charles refused. Suddenly both sides were startled to find this issue taken out of their hands. John Felton, a wounded ex-soldier weighed down with debts, angry at the arrears of his pension, and inflamed by pamphlets, bought a butcher’s knife, walked sixty miles from London to Portsmouth, plunged the weapon into Buckingham’s breast, and yielded himself to the authorities (August 23, 1628). Buckingham’s wife, soon to give birth, collapsed at sight of the corpse. Felton, overcome with remorse, sent her his apologies and begged her forgiveness; she gave it. He was executed without torture.

  The Parliament admonished the King that his continued collection of tonnage and poundage dues violated the Petition of Right; Charles replied that such dues had not been mentioned in the document; Parliament encouraged merchants to refuse to pay them.59 Reasserting its right to legislate for religion despite the ecclesiastical supremacy of the king, it proclaimed a strictly Calvinist, anti-Arminian interpretation of the Thirty-nine Articles as the law of England; it proposed, of its own authority, to enforce religious conformity on this basis, and to deal out penalties to Catholics and Arminians alike.60 Charles ordered the Parliament to adjourn; the Speaker, obeying, left the chair; but Parliament refused to adjourn, and members compelled the Speaker to resume the chair. Sir John Eliot now (March 2, 1629) offered three resolutions which made it a capital crime to introduce “Popery, or Arminianism, or other opinions disagreeing from the true and orthodox Church,” to counsel, or take any share in, the collection of tonnage or poundage dues not sanctioned by Parliament, or to pay such unsanctioned dues. The Speaker refused to put the motions to a vote; a member put them; the House acclaimed and passed them. Then, learning that the King’s troops were about to enter and dismiss the Parliament, it moved its own adjournment and dispersed.

  On March 5 Charles ordered the imprisonment of Eliot, Selden, and seven other members of Parliament on charges of sedition. Six of them were soon released; three were condemned to heavy fines and long imprisonment; Eliot died in the Tower, aged thirty-eight (1632).

  VII. CHARLES ABSOLUTE: 1629–40

  Eleven years—the longest such interval in English history—were to pass without the assembling of Parliament. Charles was now free to be an absolute king. Theoretically he was claiming no more than James, Elizabeth, and Henry VIII; practical
ly he was claiming more, for they had never stretched the royal prerogative so near the breaking point as Charles was doing by levying unsanctioned taxes, forcing loans, billeting soldiers on citizens, making arbitrary arrests, denying prisoners the rights of habeas corpus and trial by jury, extending the tyranny and severity of the Star Chamber in political, and of the Court of High Commission in ecclesiastical, trials. But Charles’s basic mistake was his failure to recognize that the wealth now represented by the House of Commons was much greater than that wielded by or loyal to the King, and that the power of Parliament must be increased accordingly.

  Amid this crisis, before it drew the nation’s blood, the economy prospered, for Charles, like his father, was a man of peace and, through most of his reign, kept England out of war, while Richelieu exhausted France and Germany became a wilderness. The harassed King did what he could to mitigate the natural concentration of wealth. He ordered a halt to enclosures, annulled all those made in five Midland counties between 1625 and 1630, and fined six hundred recalcitrant landlords.61 He had the wages of textile workers raised in 1629, 1631, 1637; he bade the justices of the peace exercise better control over prices; he appointed commissions to protect the wage scale and supervise poor relief; and Laud made new enemies by warning employers not to “grind the faces of the poor.”62 But at the same time the government granted, and profited from, monopolies in soap, salt, starch, beer, wine, and hides; it kept to itself a monopoly in coal, buying it at eleven shillings a caldron and selling it for seventeen in summer and nineteen in winter;63 and these monopolies too ground the faces of the poor. During this period over twenty thousand Puritans emigrated to New England.

  Charles pleaded that he had to find some ways to pay the costs of government. In 1634 he tried, disastrously, a new tax. Precedents existed for requiring coastal cities, in return for the protection afforded them by the navy, to fit out vessels for it in time of war, or, instead, to contribute “ship money” to the government for the maintenance of the fleet. Charles now (1635), without precedent, exacted this ship money from all England in time of peace, alleging the (quite real) need to rebuild the dilapidated navy for emergency and to protect British commerce from Channel piracy. Many resisted the new levy. To test its legality John Hampden refused to pay it; he was indicted, but was left free. He was a well-to-do Puritan of Buckinghamshire, no firebrand, but a quiet man (said the Royalist Clarendon) of “extraordinary sobriety and strictness,”64 who hid firmness in courtesy and leadership in modesty.

  His trial was long delayed, but came to court at last in November 1637. The lawyers for the Crown cited precedents for the ship-money tax, and held that the king, in time of peril, had the right to call for financial aid without waiting to assemble Parliament. Hampden’s attorneys replied that there was no emergency, there had been plenty of time to call Parliament, and the exaction violated the Petition of Right accepted by the King. The judges voted seven to five for the Crown, but public sentiment supported Hampden, and questioned the impartiality of judges subject to royal retaliation; Hampden was soon released. Charles continued till 1639 to collect ship money, and he used most of it to build the navy that fought victoriously against the Dutch in 1652.

  Meanwhile he had extended his blunders to Scotland. He shocked the Presbyterian Scots by marrying a Catholic and extending the authority of the bishops over the presbyteries of the Kirk. He alarmed half the nobility by an “Act of Revocation” (1625) revoking all grants of Church or Crown lands made to Scottish families since the accession of Mary Stuart. He named to the Privy Council of Scotland five bishops and an archbishop, John Spottiswoode, and (1635) made this prelate Chancellor—the first churchman to be appointed to that office since the Reformation When, after irritating delays, he came to Scotland to be crowned (1633), he allowed the bishops to carry out the ritual with the almost Catholic ceremonies of the Anglican Church—vestments, candles, altar, and crucifix. Determined to enforce their authority over the presbyteries, the Scottish bishops drew up a set of liturgical rules, which, because emended and approved by the Archbishop of Canterbury, came to be known as “Laud’s Canons.” These gave the king full jurisdiction over all ecclesiastical matters, forbade assemblies of the clergy except at the king’s call, restricted the right of teaching to persons licensed by a bishop, and limited ordination to candidates accepting these canons.65 Charles sanctioned the canons and ordered them proclaimed in all Scottish churches. The Presbyterian ministers protested that half the Reformation was thereby annulled, and they warned that Charles was preparing to submit Britain to Rome. When an attempt was made, in St. Giles’s Church, Edinburgh, to conduct a service according to the new formulas, a riot broke out; sticks and stones were hurled at the officiating dean; Jenny Geddes flung her stool at his head, crying, “Thou foul thief, wilt thou say Mass at my lug [ear]?”66 Petitions from all classes were sent to Charles to revoke the canons; he replied by branding such petitions treasonable. Scotland now set the pace in revolt against the King.

  On February 28, 1638, representatives of the Scottish ministry and laity signed at Edinburgh the National Covenant, reaffirming the Presbyterian faith and ritual, rejecting the new canons, and pledging themselves to defend the Crown and the “true religion.” Nearly all Scotland, urged on by the ministers, subscribed to this covenant. Spottiswoode and all but four of the bishops fled to England. The General Assembly of the Kirk at Glasgow repudiated all bishops, and declared the Kirk to be independent of the state. Charles sent orders to the Assembly to disperse or be charged with treason; it continued its sittings. The King mustered an unenthusiastic army of 21,000 men and advanced toward Scotland; the “Covenanters” raised 26,000 men aflame with patriotic and religious fervor. When the two forces came face to face Charles agreed to submit the issues to a free Scottish Parliament and an unhindered Assembly of the Kirk; a truce was signed at Berwick (June 18, 1639), and the “First Bishops’ War” ended without shedding blood. But the new Assembly, convened at Edinburgh (August 12, 1639), confirmed the “treasonable” decisions of the Glasgow conference, and the Scottish Parliament ratified the acts of the Assembly. Both sides prepared for the “Second Bishops’ War.”

  In this crisis Charles called to his aid a man as resolute and thorough (this word was his motto) as the King was vacillating and incompetent. Thomas Wentworth had reached Parliament at twenty-one (1614), and had often voted against the King. Charles won him over by making him president of the Council of the North, rewarded his vigorous enforcement of the royal policies by appointing him to the Privy Council, and sent him as Lord Deputy to Ireland (1632), where his “Thorough” policy of merciless efficiency stamped out rebellion and created an angry peace. In 1639 he was made Earl of Strafford and chief counselor to Charles. He advised the King to raise a large army, suppress the Covenanters, and face a recalcitrant Parliament with an irresistible force. But a large army required large funds, which could hardly be raised without Parliament. Reluctantly, Charles summoned his fourth Parliament. When this “Short Parliament” met (April 13, 1640), he displayed to it an intercepted letter in which Covenanters had solicited the aid of Louis XIII;67 against such treason, argued the King, he had the right to organize an army. John Pym secretly communicated with Covenanters, decided that their cause was akin to Parliament’s case against the King, and persuaded the Parliament to deny the King the subsidies and arrange an alliance with the Scots. Charles dissolved the Short Parliament as traitorous (May 5, 1640). Riots broke out in London; a mob attacked the palace of Archbishop Laud; not finding him, it killed a Catholic who refused to join in Protestant worship.68

  Charles moved north with an improvised army. The Scots came down over the border, defeated the English (August 20, 1640), and took possession of northern England. The helpless monarch agreed to pay them 850 a day until a satisfactory treaty could be concluded; he could not pay, and the Scottish army remained around Newcastle as a decisive ally of the English Parliament in its war with the King. Bewildered and desperate, Charles called
a council of peers to meet him at York. They advised him that his authority was on the verge of collapse, and that he must find some accommodation with his enemies. For the last time he summoned a Parliament, the longest and most fateful in English history.

  VIII. THE LONG PARLIAMENT

  It assembled at Westminster November 3, 1640. The House was composed of some five hundred men, the “flower of the English gentry and the educated laity … an aristocratic and not a popular house,”69 representing the wealth, rather than the people of England, but standing clearly for the future against the past. The majority of the Short Parliament were returned, brooding revenge. Selden, Hampden, and Pym were again on hand, and Oliver Cromwell, though not yet a leader, was a man of mark.

  It is impossible, at this distance, to picture him objectively, for since his rise and till today historians have described him as an ambitious hypocrite70 or a statesman-saint.71 A personality so ambivalent probably encloses—sometimes he harmonizes—in his character the opposite qualities that beget such contradictory estimates. This may be the key to Cromwell.

  He was one of those landowners without pedigree who stood outside the glamour of government, but paid uncomfortably for its maintenance. And yet he too had ancestors. His father, Robert Cromwell, had a modest estate in Huntingdon, worth three hundred pounds a year; his great-grandfather, Richard Williams, the nephew of Henry VII’s minister Thomas Cromwell, changed his name to Cromwell, and received, from minister or King, manors and revenues confiscated from the Catholic Church.72 Oliver was one of ten children and was the only one who survived infancy. His grammar-school instructor was a fervent preacher who wrote a treatise proving the pope to be Antichrist, and another recording the divine punishment of notorious sinners. In 1616 Oliver entered Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where the headmaster was Samuel Ward, who died in prison (1643) for taking a strong Puritan stand against Laud’s innovations and Charles’s “Declaration of Sports.” Apparently Oliver left Cambridge without graduating. Later (1638) he accused himself of some youthful wickedness: