Their fall came more swiftly than their resurrection. Northampton died in 1614; Somerset and his wife were banished for murder; and Frances’s father Suffolk, who pillaged the Treasury to pay for his vast mansion of Audley End, was cashiered in 1618.7 The only Howard remaining close to power was the Earl of Arundel, made a Privy Councilor in 1616. Perhaps by chance, on Christmas Day 1615, he had repudiated “the worthy example of his blessed father,” St Philip Howard, who had died a martyr in the Tower, and converted to the Church of England.8 The Howards’ fall created the vacuum filled by George Villiers, who rose quickly from an untitled gentleman of the Bedchamber (with duties as assigned) to member of the Privy Council and Earl of Buckingham, and, in 1619, with no knowledge of the Navy, to Lord Admiral of England.9 He was the worst of the political liabilities that James left his son.
Member of Parliament
John Bankes’s first parliament was James’s last. The neophyte represented Wotton Basset in Wiltshire, which tended to return strangers, particularly courtiers and lawyers, who did not need local financing.10 The session of 1624 offered an unusual opportunity for a newcomer to shine owing to the king’s invitation to its members to speak freely. That they did, particularly about James’s Spanish policy, still supported, in February 1624, by Catholic sympathizers such as Arundel, Cottington, Richard Weston (Chancellor of the Exchequer), and Lionel Cranfield (Lord Treasurer). Parliament demanded that James break with Spain. Being broke, James broke.11 The prince and the duke then purged the government of opponents to a Spanish war and charged the Earl of Bristol (the ambassador to Spain) with disobeying instructions from London. Bankes witnessed at first hand the working of a system with no space for reasoned dissent. Officials whose advice displeased went to the wall. Sometimes, like Cottington, Arundel, and Bristol, they bounced back. Or, like Cranfield, did not. He spiraled away from the royal sun like a “strange and prodigious comet.” What he possessed of the earth passed to Buckingham.12
On the great question, war or peace, the parliament of 1624 favored war. But against whom? As we know, it granted the inadequate sum of £300,000 for warlike purposes, including defense of the “true religion of Almighty God.” James accepted the money but declined to name the enemy. No wonder! He wanted a coalition against the Austrian Habsburgs; his son and favorite wanted a direct attack on Spain; the Commons preferred piracy. At James’s insistence, parliament removed the phrase about true religion lest it hamper his efforts to bring Catholic powers into his imaginary coalition. In domestic matters, the Commons grieved as usual over illegal exactions, impositions, monopolies, and arbitrary imprisonment.13
Bankes made himself known to parliamentary leaders during the first few days of the session. He gave seven recorded speeches and earned thirty-two committee nominations. His first speech advocated benefits for the impoverished northern counties from which he sprang. Less parochially he worked to correct abuses in the application of habeas corpus, which he took to be the foundation of English liberties. The common law is the common foundation of law! Bankes advised, and sometimes chaired, committees on financial matters of national importance. He attacked big monopolists like the Merchant Adventurers, declaring their charters illegal and their corner on cloth exports a grievance. “[T]rade should not be left to be governed by a few private men who seek but their profit.” Evenhandedly, he denounced the Crown for taxing cloth exports. He did not succeed, however, in delaying proceedings against Cranfield—not because he objected to going after a royal official, but because he judged the case too weak. And, if he behaved as other lawyers, he opposed the Crown over foreign policy and dynastic wars.14
Although Bankes’s experience in the frank parliament of 1624 left him with a taste and ambition for public service, he did not return for the session that Charles called almost immediately after his accession. The king needed money desperately to carry on no fewer than three simultaneous wars: one, against his was-to-be brother-in-law Philip, for insults received in Spain and other mischief; another, against his new brother-in-law Louis, for persecution of Huguenots in France; and still another, in favor of his old brother-in-law Frederick, for recovery of the Palatinate. As parliament declined to be drawn further into warfare, the warrior king killed it, after eight weeks of life.15 Without adequate means or preparation, Lord Admiral Buckingham’s Navy attacked Cadiz and La Rochelle, disasters both. They added to Charles’s burdens a swarm of disgruntled, unpaid veterans. He had no choice but to call another parliament.16 It assembled in February 1626, with Bankes sitting for Morpeth in Northumberland, where Lord William held the manor. The inaugural session began with prayers and an uncompromising sermon by the new Bishop of Bath and Wells, William Laud, who declared that “all inferior powers of nobles, judges, and magistrates” derived from the king.17 Bankes’s political ideas did not include subordination of judges to kings. Nor did the leader of his faction, Lord Arundel, accept that he owed his status to the reigning monarch. He did not have to listen to Laud, however, as he had been sent to the Tower for opposing continental wars and marrying his son against royal wishes.18
On the second day, after the Speaker of the Commons had praised the English constitution and the Chancellor had advised that it exercise the privileges graciously extended to it with discretion, the king asked parliament to authorize £1,067, 221, plus 13 shillings and tuppence, for the year’s military and naval operations.19 The staggered Commons offered subsidies amounting to about a fifth of it and turned to impeaching Buckingham for mishandling his many offices. The Lord Admiral had become the loudest voice in the Privy Council and the Bedchamber, Master of the Horse, Stewart-Constable of several castles, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, Chief Magistrate of all royal forests south of the Trent, and the main and most expensive route to royal patronage.
Bankes spoke to all these matters. Against Buckingham he criticized the state of the Navy, sought the cause of the Cadiz disaster, and advised, if the impeachment succeeded, that the duke be expelled from the Lords and imprisoned indefinitely. Against the Chancellor’s implicit claim that parliament’s privileges derived from the Crown, he insisted that, as the highest court in the land, it had aboriginal authority and liberties; “as ancient as is our Commonwealth are our privileges.” In other speeches (of fifteen recorded) he attacked restraints on trade (making common cause with Edwin Sandys) and discussed bills of grievance.20 He might have said more had the king not dissolved parliament in June. Unable even to contemplate Buckingham’s impeachment, he forfeited the grant, even to the tuppence, he needed. That was to do himself and the Commons serious injury. “Infinite almost was the sadness of each man’s heart and the dejection of his countenance that truly loved the church and commonwealth at the sudden and abortive breach of the present Parliament.”21 Thus did the Calvinist member Simonds D’Ewes, taking time from blasting the “blasphemies of Arminius” and other “brazen-faced…Popish points,” lament the break with his king.22 Charles defiantly added the Chancellorship of Cambridge University to the employments of his Pooh Bah and sent two leaders of the Commons, John Eliot and Dudley Digges, to the Tower for orchestrating the impeachment.
To carry on, Charles continued to collect the custom duties (Tonnage and Poundage (T&P)) that his first parliament had given for a year only and its successor had not extended; and he asked for voluntary loans from his loving people, who did not prove spontaneously generous. By adding some force to his requests, he extorted the large sum of £236,000. Some merchants refused to pay on principle. Charles jailed five of these knights without specifying a charge. An important legal battle ensued. Bankes’s colleague Selden argued that the imprisonment of the Five Knights without charge violated Magna carta; the Attorney General, Robert Heath, replied that secret reasons of state required their detention; the Court of King’s Bench, purged of its chief justice, who had refused to declare the forced loan legal, decided for the Crown. In the opinion of the greatest of common lawyers, Edward Coke, the cowardly verdict in the Five Knights’ Case was the gr
avest threat ever to the liberties of Englishmen. It set up a showdown in which Bankes took part when parliament assembled again in March 1628.23
Charles’s methods of extra-parliamentary finance occupied the background. He had continued to collect T&P, recusancy fines, and impositions while raising one-time money from the sale of Crown lands and jewels, empty titles, and monopolies.24 He continued to fantasize about relieving La Rochelle and fulfilling his promise to support his uncle Christian, who had suffered a major defeat in August 1626. Charles could do nothing. Christian was able to make an advantageous peace with the emperor, by which he lost little beyond any respect or affection he had had for his nephew.25 The nephew was still bent on bending France, Spain, and the empire to his will. The resources? Charles asked the parliament he called in 1628 for the unrealistically large sums of £700,000 immediately and £600,000 a year subsequently. The Commons preferred to discuss grievances. John Bankes, again representing Morpeth, again spoke to all the main ones, thirteen speeches in all. His earlier performance and capacity for business earned him appointment to the committee on T&P, of which he became chairman. Its deliberations sometimes ascended to the full House under Bankes’s gavel; but, as parliament could not decide whether to punish the custom agents (and so exonerate the king) or take up the general revenue problem (and so confront the king), it managed to do nothing useful about either.
Bankes also sat on the key committee charged with drawing up a bill of grievances and occasionally chaired it too. He spoke out against the royal practice of granting monopolies; against arbitrary arrest and confiscation of property; and against the quartering of troops and the unilateral declaration of martial law. To ensure the liberties of the subject, he presented a bill to confirm Magna carta and similar statutes.26 Against Bankes’s bill, Attorney General Heath argued that common lawyers were too inflexible (too “mathematical,” as Mr Attorney put it) in refusing exceptions to Magna carta for reasons of state. Bankes and other common lawyers replied that Magna carta was the bulwark of English liberties and permitted no exceptions. The Lords hesitated. The king resolved the impasse by asking whether parliament would not “rest upon his royal word and promise.” The Lords thought it safer to follow the mathematical way of the Commons, thus almost exposing the fiction that blamed ministers, never their master, for breaches of trust.27
Although he placed the common law above the royal will, Bankes took care not to press its priority so far as to uncover the fiction of divine-right prerogative. “I will not derogate from the power of kings. Subjects have their rights, and kings their prerogatives…Liberties and prerogatives have many hundred years gone together in sweet harmony.” But, then, what happens when the king imprisons without charge and the courts refuse habeas corpus? The question took Bankes to an uncomfortable position. He advised that arbitrary arrest not be asserted as a grievance; rather, parliament should condemn the practice and expect the king to refrain from it. And so back to the good old times: “We will not be authors of new opinions, but maintain the old.” To insure our rights and pass them on we must look backward, seek precedent, become antiquaries.28 Above all, let us have nothing new: “We possess laws providing first in general against all forms of innovation.”29 The doctrine that all changes are for the worst had defeated John Dee’s advice to Elizabeth to adopt the Gregorian calendar.30 The leader of the Commons of 1628 asserted the same stultifying principle: “[T]ime must needs bring about some alterations, and every alteration is a step and a degree towards a dissolution.”31
The Commons decided to put forward arbitrary commitment to prison together with forced loans, quartering of troops on civilians, and military rule in peacetime as grievances in a Petition of Right, which, of course, they advanced with the fiction that it contained no novelties. Of the four grievances, the most difficult for Charles to redress was just the power Bankes had identified as a locus of constitutional conflict, commitment without charge. Its loss, the king said, would “soon dissolve the foundation and frame of our monarchy.” For the rest, he was pleased to affirm the laws and statutes of the land. This response caused great lamentation in the Commons, “some weeping, some expostulating, some prophesying of the fatal ruin of our kingdom.” A little harassing of Buckingham brought his master around, almost. On 7 June 1628, Charles agreed to the petition with the tacit reservation, based on a secret poll of the judges of King’s Bench, that its provisions did not bind him.32 Parliament turned its attention to Bankes’s work on T&P. Charles prorogued it for four months and took the opportunity of its enforced vacation to promote Laud and other Arminian churchmen most offensive to the Calvinist Commons.33
During the prorogation, Buckingham met his end at the hands of an unpaid veteran, John Felton, who knew that the admiral had lied about the extent of his military disasters. Unhealthily given to reading, Felton armed himself with the Petition of Right and a knife and killed Buckingham two weeks before Charles’s forced-loan fleet sailed for La Rochelle and another disaster.34 The murder, perpetrated on 23 August 1628, delighted the crowd and devastated the king. It took from him his best friend and trusted adviser just as he faced a new session of an increasingly hostile parliament. He prepared for its return in January 1629 by appeasing Arundel, Wentworth, and other opposition leaders, and by raising Chancellor of the Exchequer Weston, who sat in a Howard seat in parliament, to Lord Treasurer.35 Although as Treasurer Weston retrenched on household expenses and pensions and increased income from Crown lands, he could not hope to balance the royal books without T&P.36 The Commons of 1629, led by the lawyers Selden and the future Attorney General William Noy, refused to hand it over. They had stiffened their backbones by reading Bankes’s report, which exposed unauthorized impositions as threats to parliament’s existence. A constitutional crisis loomed: “[We] take this as a highe point of priviledge, and his Majestie takes it as a highe point of a Soveragnety.”37 Charles did not like the trend of events and ordered parliament to adjourn. That was a bad miscalculation.
When the Speaker John Finch—Bankes’s longtime colleague at Gray’s Inn—tried to follow the king’s order to end the session, several members pinned him to his chair while the House hurriedly passed resolutions put forward by Eliot: anyone pursuing T&P without the consent of parliament, or anyone countenancing Catholicism or Arminianism or other innovation in religion, would be “a capital enemy of the Commonwealth.”38 Charles responded by sending nine members to the Tower, including Selden and the unfortunate Eliot, who, despite the Petition of Right, never saw freedom again. Charles explained that he dissolved parliament in 1629 because the “malevolent…vipers” who led the Commons had poked into royal policy on religion and trade and the conduct of his principal officers, to the “unsufferable disturbance and scandal of justice and government.” To sidestep these “innovations” (both sides used this gambit), to preclude parliament’s seizing a “universal over-swaying power to themselves, which belongs to us,” Charles would do without the Houses.39 At first he did better that way. Weston continued to collect T&P, and even to increase it, without precipitating a revolution. Peace with France was achieved in April 1629 and with Spain, after lengthy negotiations, in November 1630. Without wars to pay for, Weston almost balanced the budget.
The common lawyers who had written the Petition of Right made every effort to free the nine members imprisoned without bail in violation of its terms. Charles claimed that the prisoners had no recourse by right but might be released by grace, if they asked for it. They refused: they had committed no crime. Nonetheless, the tame judges of King’s Bench would not grant bail, since, technically, they did not know the unspecified crime involved. Eventually all but Eliot found words with which to buy their freedom. For example, Selden regained full liberty by humbly requesting Charles to pardon him for any displeasure he had inflicted. He requested a grace for causing annoyance, not for committing a crime.40
Until 1639, when he went to war again, Charles might have lived within his means. Over the five years preceding
Weston’s death in 1635, the average ordinary annual expenses of the Crown, at £636,000, exceeded income by only £18,000. It would not have been difficult to remove it. Foreign visitors were amazed at the size of Charles’s household, which descended from a bedchamber of two dozen gentlemen who counseled and protected him through ushers, carvers, cupbearers, guards, wardrobe keepers, cleaners, and kitchen staff to the thirty falconers and forty huntsmen who catered to his hobbies. The combined households of Charles, Henrietta Maria, and the infant Prince of Wales occupied at least 2,000 people.41 The cost of wars and other extraordinary expenses amounted to £2.85m over the decade 1626–35 against an income of £2.60m. In 1635 the total debt stood at £1.17 million, some £340,000 less than when Weston took over as Treasurer. Although Weston managed to cut pensions, he could not quash lavish gifts to courtiers and absurd provisions for the infant Prince of Wales (born in 1630), whose household of 200 or 300 included two physicians, an apothecary, and an Attorney General.42 The first incumbent of this last office was John Bankes.
Mr Attorney
With the assassination of Buckingham and the beginning of personal rule without the cash and counsel of parliament, Charles found himself much in need of reliable advisers and clever lawyers able to devise ways of augmenting his income. He turned to men who had demonstrated their abilities in parliament by opposing him, Wentworth, Arundel, Noy, Digges, and others. They joined the government out of ambition sometimes moderated by a sincere desire to replace Buckingham’s erratic impetuosity with considered counsel.43 John Bankes entered the lower ranks of the tergiversators as general counsel to the future Charles II, then, in 1631, a litigious infant a year old.44 The easy duties gave Bankes the opportunity to free himself from a mathematical interpretation of Magna carta and Charles the opportunity to assess further a former opponent in parliament who had not wanted to raise arbitrary arrest to a grievance.
The Ghost of Galileo Page 10