A History of Britain, Volume 2 (10 page)

Standing firm in their belief in the supreme rationality of the English common law, the resisters were now taking to the courts to test both the legality of non-parliamentary taxation and the right of the government to imprison without showing due cause, something a Marlborough lawyer, Oliver St John, had said in 1614 violated the Magna Carta. In this case, the courts upheld the legality of the loan and thus the right of the Crown to confine resisters. And once the furore abated, the king should still have been able to contain the political fall-out, fierce though it was. But two events, both of them disastrous, made sure the book was not yet closed on the debate about taxation.

In October 1627 Buckingham turned in yet another hideous fiasco by failing – at huge expense – to take the French Atlantic fort of the Ile de Ré, not least because the organizational genius of the navy had failed to notice that the scaling ladders supplied for the siege were 15 feet too short to do the job. This single débâcle ate up £200,000 of the £267,000 collected by the loan. The duke was mercilessly pilloried by ballad-mongers and newsletter-writers. But even worse was to come. In March 1628 it was revealed that the terms of the judgement handed down in the challenge to the legality of the loan had been deliberately falsified by the attorney-general with the express knowledge and encouragement of the king. What the judges had ruled was that a forced loan was legitimate in this particular military emergency. What was published was a ruling that the king was entitled to make extra-parliamentary levies whenever he judged them to be appropriate to the kingdom's needs. It was a bombshell. Those who had believed the king found their trust badly shaken. Those who had taken the worst possible view of Charles's intentions, on the other hand, had a field day with the revelation. With the wind at their backs the guardians of the ‘immemorial constitution' turned an argument over a specific measure into an all-out battle of constitutional principles. As a precondition of any further grants, they demanded a Bill of Rights declaring the illegality of non-parliamentary taxes, the prohibition of any imprisonment without trial by the king for unspecified ‘reasons of state', and the unlawfulness of martial law and forced billets. The warriors for parliamentary liberties were, however, still in a minority in both the Commons and the Lords. The crisis was, in effect, a three-way showdown, with the party of moderate criticism in the middle, calling the tune. In the House of Lords the Earl of Warwick and Viscount Saye and Sele (both serious Puritans in their personal and religious life) decided, with a large measure of support, on the less confrontational form of a Petition of Right. A petition embodied the same points of substance as a bill, but crucially allowed Charles to save face and protect James's compulsively reiterated principle (restated as recently as 1621) that such rights were granted by grace, not acceded to as of right.

This should have been the end of the crisis. The assassination of Buckingham in August 1628 was a body blow to Charles, but it neatly took the vexed question of what to do about the widely detested favourite out of the political equation. In shocked mourning, Charles was convinced that the parliamentary demonization of the duke had contributed directly to his death. (The assassin, John Felton, had, in fact, imagined that he was ridding the country, and his king, of a diabolical monster.) Smarting at being deprived of his effective power to wage war, Charles mounted a
counterattack, asserting his control over matters not expressly specified in the Petition of Right. It's hard not to imagine the king burning the candle at both ends as he pored over the petition to find loopholes to exploit, a legitimate but politically foolhardy impulse. He pounced on two significant omissions. First, he now claimed the right to go ahead and impose those ‘tonnage and poundage' customs duties without waiting for parliamentary permission. Still more controversially, his appointment of Montague to the bishopric of Chichester and Laud to that of London said as loudly as possible that the king had no intention of conceding anything about his monopoly of wisdom and power in matters spiritual. Like his father, he thought of himself as God's ‘lieutenant on earth'.

But the norms of politics and what could or could not be legitimately accepted as sovereign authority were changing under him even as Charles reiterated what he assumed to be the self-evident truths of his sovereignty. Yet even if he were incapable of compromising those principles, the arts of political management called for something other than noble obstinacy. The parliamentary moderates, who had cobbled together an artful resolution of conflict the previous year, were prepared to try again and were called to a negotiation with the king, however bleak the prospects. In the meantime, though, Charles had ordered a suspension of parliamentary proceedings to allow discussions to proceed without further public polarization. The order, of course, was construed as an enforced shut-down, and the militants in the House of Commons loudly advertised it as an infringement of their rights to debate. On 2 March 1629 the Speaker, Sir John Finch, attempted to adjourn proceedings in compliance with the king's order but was told that he was the Commons' servant, not the king's, and would not be allowed to suspend debates until a resolution attacking and condemning ‘innovations in religion' and extra-parliamentary taxes had been read. In an awkward bind, Speaker Finch replied, rather pathetically: ‘I am not the less the king's servant for being yours. I will not say I will not put it to the question but I must say I dare not.' He had no choice. Sir Miles Hobart had locked the door of the House and kept the key. With the king's officer hammering on the door and Denzil Holles, the member for godly Dorchester (and a big man), pushing the Speaker down in his chair and making sure he stayed there, the most eloquent leader of the radicals, Sir John Eliot, held the floor, warning that ‘none had gone about to break parliaments but in the end parliaments have broken them'. Resolutions of startling fierceness were then read, declaring ‘whoever should bring innovation of religion . . . advise the taking and levying of subsidies not granted by parliament' to be ‘a capital enemy of the kingdom and Commonwealth and every
subject voluntarily complying with illegal exactions a betrayer of the liberties of England and an enemy to the same'. Shouts of acclamation, ‘Aye, Aye, Aye', rang through the battle-hot House. Two days later Hobart, Holles, Eliot and six others were arrested and sent to the Tower. Parliament dissolved on 10 March.

It is not much, is it, this shift from speaking to shoving and shouting? On the other hand, it's everything: a startling violation of decorum in an age when body language spoke volumes about authority and its vulnerability. Holles's roughness and his evident contempt for polite procedure presuppose a collapse of deference that was genuinely ominous for the status quo. And along with it came something equally pregnant with consequences for the future – the creation of a public sphere of politics, the birth, in fact, of English public opinion. Although debates in parliament were still largely supposed to be confidential, lengthy, detailed reports were being written by specialist scriveners, sometimes on commission, sometimes for a news-hungry market, and reproduced in multiple copies. Thus the great theatre of debate inside parliament became news, and for the first time it was possible to make a living from selling it. John Pory, who was also a geographer and foreign adventurer, had a network of correspondents through the country, and he collated their information into a newsletter, which he sold to subscribers for £20 a year. Ralph Starkey, another of these pioneers of the mail-order news business, offered a range of products and services, from ‘20 shillings a quire' for parliamentary reports to £10 a copy for the Black Book Proceedings of the Order of the Garter. The newsmongers recognized the importance of keeping it hot and juicily divisive. By hiring a team of copyists it took just a few days for a vendor of ‘separates' to get the word out (on paper) of the latest debates. So the news business, in a recognizably modern guise, first saw the light of day during the battles between Crown and parliament in 1628–9. Its emphasis on conflict may not, as the revisionist historians reasonably insist, reflect any kind of actual polarization in the country at large, but it has always been the mischievous genius of news to shape politics even while pretending to report it. And the marked preference of the newsmen of early seventeenth-century England for offering a theatre of the bad and the good, the court and the country, may well have had the effect of making it happen by virtue of saying it was so. The circulation of newsletters did something else, too, of fundamental significance for the future: it connected events in London to a provincial public (and on occasion local events could be turned into ‘national' news). Reports of speeches would not be printed until the Long Parliament in 1642, but the sixpenny ‘separates' travelled
along the king's highway, taking all kinds of liberties with his sovereign prerogatives.

News always needs heroes, and the heavy hand of royal government made sure it got them. For bad things had happened to the militant critics of the Crown. Denzil Holles, Sir Miles Hobart and Sir John Eliot were all in the Tower, and Eliot died there in 1632. In the circles of parliamentary opposition to Stuart absolutism, Eliot's fate made him the protomartyr of their resistance. John Hampden, a Buckinghamshire gentleman and MP, was one of those who kept the torch burning by corresponding with Eliot, visiting him in the Tower and acting as guardian to his two teenage sons. Whether the opposition was dormant or secretly indignant made no difference to the king. Parliament would not be called again until 1640.

In the 1950s, the textbook assumption was still that this long period of non-parliamentary government was a bandage applied so tightly over an open wound as to ensure that the wound would fester, not heal, and that the body politic would become quietly but morbidly infected. The condition of England was said to be one of sullen acquiescence in ‘ship money' and the quasi-Catholicization of the Church, while the gagged and bound champions of parliamentary freedom waited for the great day when they could recover the liberties of the nation. Not much of this story has survived drastic revision. A recent history of the personal rule goes so far as to argue that the 1630s were the ‘halcyon days' of disinterested royal government, when an energetic administration responded to the wishes of an austere but public-spirited king.

Perhaps somewhere between these two poles (though not, I think, at the mid-point) lies the truth. The suspension of parliamentary government was certainly not thought of as some sort of royal
coup d'état
heralding the introduction of a Habsburg–Bourbon Catholic despotism. Long periods without parliament were not unknown in the English system, and Charles made it quite clear that he did not see this one as signifying the end of the ‘king-in-parliament' tradition. Should parliament itself wish to return to what he called its ‘ancient' and reasonable way of conducting business, especially the business of providing him with money to secure the nation's defence, it would be back in business. And, of course, the Jacobean and Caroline parliaments were not yet thought of as the elected tribunes of the people. Most of the members of the Commons had taken their seats as a result of consensual and uncontested selection in the counties and boroughs. Some of the most radical of their number, like John Pym, owed their place to a not merely exiguous but virtually non-existent electorate in a pocket borough owned by the Earl of Bedford. By and
large, members of parliament were the same kind of people who were the natural governors of the county community as magistrates, deputy lord-lieutenants and sheriffs, and whatever their misgivings about the misuse of Crown prerogatives they still had no problem accepting its offices. It was thus perfectly possible for upright Puritans, like Sir Robert Harley, who had been incensed by the forced loan and by Arminian appointments in the Church, to fill the lucrative position of Master of the Mint, from 1626 to 1635 when he lost office.

On the other hand, neither was England between 1629 and 1640 quite the land of sleepy contentment and harmony that has lately come to dominate the revised histories. What had happened in 1628 and 1629 had happened. Barriers of politeness had been breached. Unforgivable and unforgettable things had been said on both sides. There had been excitement, agitation. Matters had turned physical. And even if those who had been exercised by the theatre of the extreme played out in those stormy years were only a tiny minority, they were a tiny minority with a long memory and access to the newsletters. If there was no sense of ‘biding their time' (though this surely was the case for John Pym), neither would the deep grievances and arguments that had been aired at the end of the 1620s completely evaporate in some sort of cloud of resignation and goodwill. It's often said that had there been no furore in Scotland in 1637, the Long Parliament might never have happened. But that Scottish furore was not simply something that happened out of the blue, from causes utterly unrelated to Charles I's vision in the 1630s of a docile Britannia. On the contrary, what happened in Scotland, as we shall see, was, root and branch, sturdily connected to the royal trunk.

The problem with Charles Stuart was not his authoritarianism, his deviousness nor his political tin-ear, all of which have been overstated in the understandable interests of making the civil war seem more likely than it actually was. The problem with Charles Stuart was his good intentions, and the stubborn literalness with which he meant them to take effect. Conversely, in retrospect one can see quite clearly what enormous political assets his father's natural laziness and low threshold of distraction really were. (Uncannily, the same would be true of Louis XV and Louis XVI. Benign torpor should perhaps have been on the list of recommended virtues for successful princes.) James I's tendency to leave government to others, both in the Privy Council and in the shires, so that he could get off after the hare at Royston, was, since those others happened to be of the calibre of Robert Cecil and Francis Bacon and Lionel Cranfield, the best thing he could have done for the country. Charles I, on the other hand, was positively driven by the itch to govern. To be fair, since he
inherited James's gargantuan debts and a war to boot, he did not have much choice in the matter. But once England and Scotland settled back into a peace imposed on the king by fiscal stringency and political opposition, Charles was not one to spend the rest of his life hunting or posing for Van Dyck (though he was, in his way, partial to both). Just as it had for Augustus, for Constantine and, especially, for Alfred the Great, whose biography was commissioned by the king, Duty Called!