CHAPTER III.

CHARLES I.*

1625-1629.

King's marriage. First parliament.-Expedition to Cadiz.-Impeachment of Buckingham.-Arbitrary taxation.-War with France.-Expedition to Rochelle.-Petition of Right.-Murder of Buckingham.-Sir Thomas Wentworth.—Third parliament.—Harsh treatment of sir John Eliot.

He

THE new monarch, now in the twenty-fifth year of his age, offered in his morals and character a favourable contrast to his father. He was grave and serious in his deportment, regular in his conduct, an enemy to licentiousness and riot of every kind, a lover and a patron of the fine arts†. had, however, imbibed to the fullest extent his father's absurd notions of the divine rights of kings, and their accountability to God alone for the discharge of the duties of their high office. Any attempts to limit his authority he regarded as usurpation and rebellion, and, as we shall see, he held that any concessions extorted from the monarch were revocable, as contrary to his duty to God to grant. Charles was sincerely attached to the episcopal form of government in the church. To his misfortune, he was also blindly devoted to the insolent, rapacious, selfwilled, domineering upstart whom the folly of his father had gorged with wealth and offices ‡ and made ruler of himself and his kingdom.

* The principal authorities for the reign of Charles are, Clarendon, Whitelock, and Rushworth. See the Appendix (A.)

† See Mrs. Hutchinson's Life of Colonel Hutchinson, p. 65. 4to edit.

He was lord high-admiral of England and Ireland, warden of the cinque ports, master of the horse, justice in eyre of the forests and chases this side the Trent, constable of Windsor Castle, knight of the garter, &c. &c. The wealth that had been heaped upon him is almost past computation. Some one cited by Mrs. Hutchinson said beautifully and correctly of him, “He seemed as an unhappy exhalation drawn up from the earth, not only to cloud the setting but the rising sun."

The first care of Charles was to celebrate his marriage with the princess Henrietta Maria. The nuptials were performed by proxy at Paris (May 1), whither the duke of Buckingham repaired with a splendid train to conduct the young queen into England. The king met her at Dover, and thence took her to Hampton Court, as the plague was raging in London.

On the 18th of June Charles's first parliament met at Westminster. The king submitted to it the state of his finances; he was encumbered by a debt of his father's to a large amount; he had all the expenses of his marriage and other charges to meet, and he was about to be engaged in a war against the whole house of Austria. To meet all these, "the house of commons," Hume sarcastically observes, "conducted by the wisest and ablest senators that had ever flourished in England, thought proper to confer on the king a supply of two subsidies, amounting to 112,000l.!" Such conduct appears to be, as that partial writer represents it, a cruel mockery of an innocent and a confiding young monarch. When carefully examined, however, it will perhaps appear in a different light. We will, for this purpose, take a brief view of the composition of the two houses of parliament.

nours.

During the whole of the Tudor period we have seen the house of lords the humble instruments of the will of the crown, to whose bounty they owed their wealth and hoBut nearly a century's possession of the monastic lands had inspired many of them with a feeling of security and independence; and as they gazed on the venerable turrets of Wilton, Woburn, and the other abbeys and priories which now formed their abodes, they caught a portion of the spirit which had animated the barons of the days whose memory these stately piles recalled. Their honors, too, had acquired the sanction of time, and they viewed with disdain the dignities of the upstart Buckingham, whose pride, insolence, and rapacity galled their souls. An opposition to the crown, composed of these men and of the

1625.]

COURT AND COUNTRY PARTIES.

325

maintainers of puritan doctrines, now appeared in the lords, and its strength may be estimated by the circumstance of the earl of Pembroke, its head, being the holder of ten proxies, only three less than those of Buckingham, the dispenser of wealth and favor*.

In the commons there were the two parties essential to a popular assembly in a monarchy, the supporters of the crown and its measures, and the opponents of abuses and advocates for the rights and privileges of the subjects; that is, the court- and the country-party. The former were a minority, and they felt the necessity of proceeding with caution, extenuating and softening rather than defending abuses. The latter were mostly puritans, zealous against all that appeared to them superstitious in religion, hostile to the exorbitant powers exercised by the prelates, and perhaps in many cases secretly inclined to the presbyterian form; but at the same time sincerely anxious for the national rights and liberties. There were other members (afterwards known by the name of patriots,) who were more zealous for civil liberty than for changes in religious ceremonies, and who did not view with any great abhorrence the cope and surplice or the wedding-ring. Such were sir Edward Coke, sir Thomas Cotton, John Selden, John Pym, and others.

Puritans and patriots were alike animated by a zeal against popery, which they knew well, and viewed in its true character, as the inveterate foe of both mental and civil liberty. Toleration was at that time unknown, and to the declaimers in its favor we may remark, that the experience of two centuries has shown that this vaunted panacea has in no single instance succeeded in mitigating the

* It was shortly afterwards resolved that no peer should hold more than two, which continues to be the rule. This practice, by the way, supposes either a superlative degree of wisdom, or an unreasoning spirit of party in peers, who thus vote on all questions without having heard the arguments for and against them.

†That there was such a spirit abroad is evident from the demands made at the Hampton-court conference. See above, p. 280.

ferocity of the spirit of popery; that it is as persecuting, as intolerant, as faithless, as hostile to knowledge and to social improvement, at the present day, as in its most flourishing period*. After this ample experience we should hesitate at the call of infidels and sciolists to look on such men as Coke, Selden, and Pym, as narrow-minded illiberal bigots.

One of the first proceedings of the commons was to require every member to receive the sacrament in St. Margaret's church, and thus testify his attachment to the protestant religion; for there was now a regular establishment of capuchin friars at Somerset-house, the residence of the queen, and these men boldly paraded the streets in their habits; the jesuits and other priests also began to show themselves openly in various places, and the court was known to be full of catholics. The commons then petitioned the king to enforce the laws against recusants. Dr. Montague, one of the court-divines, having published a work called 'Appello Cæsarem,' recommending the catholics to the favour of government, and representing the puritans as a people desiring an anarchy, and therefore to be discouraged, he was summoned to answer for it at the bar of the house of commons. The Arminians exerted themselves in his favour; the king declared that he was one of his chaplains; but all availed not; he was forced to give securities to answer the charge of contempt of the house, and impugning the articles of the church of England.

The object of the king was to obtain an immediate supply of money; the commons wished to couple with it a redress of grievances. They saw that the king was a mere puppet in the hands of Buckingham, and they now had their doubts of the justice of the war with Spain, into which he was about to plunge the nation. They were loath

* We must request the reader not to misunderstand or misrepresent us. All our remarks on popery in these volumes relate to the system, not to the individual members of the church of Rome, among whom may be found numerous examples of the sincerest piety and the most exalted virtue.

1625.]

DISSOLUTION OF PARLIAMENT.

327

to vote a large sum without conditions, and they could not with a good grace refuse supplies. They therefore adopted a middle course; they voted two subsidies (about 140,0007.) for immediate use. They also, instead of voting, as had long been the usage, the duties of tonnage and poundage to the king for life, granted them only for a year. The lords, however, rejected this bill. At the request of the two houses, on account of the plague, there was an adjournment for three weeks, when they were to meet at Oxford.

The parliament now learned the following circumstance. King James had promised the French king to aid him by a loan of eight armed vessels to be employed against Spain in the Mediterranean. These ships, under admiral Pennington, came to Dieppe, and there the crews suspected, or rather discovered, that they were to be employed against the Huguenots of Rochelle. They forthwith drew up a round robin, and laid it under the admiral's prayerbook; and Pennington declaring that he would rather be hanged for disobedience in England than fight against his fellow-protestants in France, returned to the Downs. Buckingham, by false representations, induced them to return to France; but when they found that they had been deceived, they, with the exception of one gunner, abandoned their vessels, which were taken by the French and employed against Rochelle.

The knowledge of this did not prepossess the commons much in favour of the king and Buckingham. They therefore still talked of a redress of grievances as preliminary to a supply; they put sundry questions to the duke, asking, among others, if he had not broken off the match with Spain out of spleen to Olivarez, and whether he had not made that with France on still less favourable terms? They were in train to impeach him, but the king to save him dissolved the parliament contrary to the advice of his privy council.

It is usual, with the advocates of Charles, to make it a heavy charge against the parliament, that they had involved