History of the World/History of the World (Bureau Development, Inc.)(1992).BIN/dp/0000/00003.txt

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Title:       Abolition Of The Court Of Star-Chamber
Author:      Hallam, Henry;Macaulay, Lord

Abolition Of The Court Of Star-Chamber

Popular Revolt Against Charles I, A.D. 1641

     Before the accession of Charles I, in 1625, the separation between the
Church of England and the Puritans, which had been slowly widening for half a
century, had become so serious as to be a menace to the peaceful stability of
the kingdom.  Charles began his reign with repressive measures against the
Puritan influences.  His use of the Star-chamber and similar tribunals is an
important subject of study in connection with the preliminary steps on both
sides which led at last to the great civil war.

     From the first, Charles aimed at despotic power, which he was wont to
seek in "dark and crooked ways." The House of Commons stood against him on the
popular side.  He dissolved his first Parliament and levied taxes by his own
will; dissolved another Parliament, and did the same, adding other acts of
usurpation and oppression.  His third Parliament showed increased opposition
to his methods, and accordingly he decided to change them.  The Parliament
passed (1628) the Petition of Right, the second English Magna Charta, and
Charles ratified it.  By this act the King was bound to raise no more moneys
without consent of Parliament, not to imprison anyone contrary to law, not to
billet the military in private houses, and to subject none to martial law.
From 1629 to 1640 Charles governed without a parliament, replenishing his
exchequer by various extraordinary means.

     In the following accounts of the previous workings of the Star-chamber,
Charles' star-chamber methods, his illegal procedures, his violations of the
Petition of Rights, and of the consequent changes in the relations of his
person and government to the people, a very significant period of transition
in English history is summarized by the ablest hands.

By Henry Hallam

     The levies of tonnage and poundage without authority of Parliament; the
exaction of monopolies; the extension of the forests; the arbitrary restraints
of proclamations; above all, the general exaction of ship-money, form the
principal articles of charge against the government of Charles, so far as
relates to its inroads on the subject's property.  These were maintained by a
vigilant and unsparing exercise of jurisdiction in the Court of Star-chamber.
It was the great weapon of executive power under Elizabeth and James; nor can
we reproach the present reign with innovation in this respect, though in no
former period had the proceedings of this court been accompanied with so much
violence and tyranny.  But this will require some fuller explication.

     I hardly need remind the reader that the jurisdiction of the ancient
Concilium Regis Ordinarium, or Court of Star-chamber, continued to be
exercised, more or less frequently, notwithstanding the various statutes
enacted to repress it; and that it neither was supported by the act erecting a
new court in the 3d of Henry VII nor originated at that time.  The records
show the Star-chamber to have taken cognizance both of civil suits and of
offences throughout the time of the Tudors.  But precedents of usurped power
cannot establish a legal authority in defiance of the acknowledged law.  It
appears that the lawyers did not admit any jurisdiction in the council, except
so far as the statute of Henry VII was supposed to have given it. "The famous
Plowden put his hand to a demurrer to a bill," says Hudson, "because the
matter was not within the statute; and, although it was then overruled, yet
Mr. Sergeant Richardson, thirty years after, fell again upon the same rock,
and was sharply rebuked for it." The chancellor, who was the standing
president of the Court of Star-chamber, would always find pretences to elude
the existing statutes, and justify the usurpation of this tribunal.

     The civil jurisdiction claimed and exerted by the Star-chamber was only
in particular cases, as disputes between alien merchants and Englishmen,
questions of prize or unlawful detention of ships, and, in general, such as
now belong to the court of admiralty; some testamentary matters; in order to
prevent appeals to Rome, which might have been brought from the ecclesiastical
courts; suits between corporations, "of which," says Hudson, "I dare undertake
to show above a hundred in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII, or
sometimes between men of great power and interest, which could not be tried
with fairness by the common law"; for the corruption of sheriffs and juries
furnished an apology for the irregular, but necessary, interference of a
controlling authority.  The ancient remedy, by means of attaint, which renders
a jury responsible for an unjust verdict, was almost gone into disuse, and,
depending on the integrity of a second jury, not always easy to be obtained;
so that in many parts of the kingdom, and especially in Wales, it was
impossible to find a jury who would return a verdict against a man of good
family, either in a civil or criminal proceeding.

     The statutes, however, restraining the council's jurisdiction, and the
strong prepossession of the people as to the sacredness of freehold rights,
made the Star-chamber cautious of determining questions of inheritance, which
they commonly remitted to the judges; and from the early part of Elizabeth's
reign they took a direct cognizance of any civil suits less frequently than
before, partly, I suppose, from the increased business of the court of
chancery and the admiralty court, which took away much wherein they had been
wont to meddle, partly from their own occupation as a court of criminal
judicature, which became more conspicuous as the other went into disuse. This
criminal jurisdiction is that which rendered the Star-chamber so potent and so
odious an auxiliary of a despotic administration.

     The offences principally cognizable in this court were forgery, perjury,
riot, maintenance, fraud, libel, and conspiracy.  But, besides these, every
misdemeanor came within the proper scope of its inquiry; those especially of
public importance, and for which the law, as then understood, had provided no
sufficient punishment; for the judges interpreted the law in early times with
too great narrowness and timidity, defects which, on the one hand, raised up
the overruling authority of the court of chancery as the necessary means of
redress to the civil suitor who found the gates of justice barred against him
by technical pedantry, and on the other, brought this usurpation and tyranny
of the Star-chamber upon the kingdom by an absurd scrupulosity about punishing
manifest offences against the public good.

     Thus corruption, breach of trust and malfeasance in public affairs,
attempts to commit felony, seem to have been reckoned not indictable at common
law, and came, in consequence, under the cognizance of the Star-chamber.  In
other cases its jurisdiction was merely concurrent; but the greater certainty
of conviction and the greater severity of punishment rendered it incomparably
more formidable than the ordinary benches of justice.  The law of libel grew
up in this unwholesome atmosphere, and was moulded by the plastic hands of
successive judges and attorneys-general.  Prosecutions of this kind, according
to Hudson, began to be more frequent from the last years of Elizabeth, when
Coke was attorney-general; and it is easy to conjecture what kind of
interpretation they received.  To hear a libel sung or read, says that writer,
and to laugh at it and make merriment with it, have ever been held a
publication in law. The gross error that it is not a libel if it be true, has
long since, he adds, been exploded out of this court.

     Among the exertions of authority practised in the Star-chamber which no
positive law could be brought to warrant he enumerates "punishments of breach
of proclamations before they have the strength of an act of Parliament; which
this court hath stretched as far as ever any act of Parliament did.  As in the
41st of Elizabeth, builders of houses in London were sentenced, and their
houses ordered to be pulled down, and the materials to be distributed to the
benefit of the parish where the building was; which disposition of the goods
soundeth as a great extremity, and beyond the warrant of our laws; and yet,
surely, very necessary, if anything would deter men from that horrible
mischief of increasing that head which is swollen to a great hugeness
already."

     The mode of process was sometimes of a summary nature; the accused person
being privately examined, and his examination read in court, if he was thought
to have confessed sufficient to deserve sentence, it was immediately awarded
without any formal trial or written process.  But the more regular course was
by information filed at the suit of the attorney-general or, in certain cases,
of a private relator.  The party was brought before the court by writ of
subpoena, and, having given bond, with sureties not to depart without leave,
was to put in his answer upon oath, as well to the matters contained in the
information as to special interrogatories.  Witnesses were examined upon
interrogatories, and their depositions read in court.  The course of
proceeding, on the whole, seems to have nearly resembled that of the chancery.

     It was held competent for the court to adjudge any punishment short of
death.  Fine and imprisonment were of course the most usual.  The pillory,
whipping, branding, and cutting off the ears grew into use by degrees.  In the
reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII, we are told by Hudson, the fines were not
so ruinous as they have been since, which he ascribes to the number of bishops
who sat in the court, and inclined to mercy, "and I can well remember," says
he, "that the most reverend Archbishop Whitgift did ever constantly maintain
the liberty of the free charter, that men ought to be fined, salvo
contenemento.  But they have been of late imposed according to the nature of
the offence, and not the estate of the person.  The slavish punishment of
whipping," he proceeds to observe, "was not introduced till a great man of the
common law, and otherwise a worthy justice, forgot his place of session, and
brought it in this place too much in use." It would be difficult to find
precedents for the aggravated cruelties inflicted on Leighton, Lilburne, and
others; but instances of cutting off the ears may be found under Elizabeth.

     The reproach, therefore, of arbitrary and illegal jurisdiction does not
wholly fall on the government of Charles.  They found themselves in possession
of this almost unlimited authority.  But doubtless, as far as the history of
proceedings in the Star-chamber are recorded, they seem much more numerous and
violent in the present reign than in the two preceding. Rushworth has
preserved a copious selection of cases determined before this tribunal.  They
consist principally of misdemeanors, rather of an aggravated nature, such as
disturbances of the public peace, assaults accompanied with a good deal of
violence, conspiracies, and libels.  The necessity, however, for such a
paramount court to restrain the excesses of powerful men no longer existed,
since it can hardly be doubted that the common administration of the law was
sufficient to give redress in the time of Charles I, though we certainly do
find several instances of violence and outrage by men of a superior station in
life, which speak unfavorably for the state of manners in the kingdom.

     But the object of drawing so large a number of criminal cases into the
Star-chamber seems to have been twofold: first, to inure men's minds to an
authority more immediately connected with the crown than the ordinary courts
of law and less tied down to any rules of pleading or evidence; secondly, to
eke out a scantly revenue by penalties and forfeitures.  Absolutely regardless
of the provision of the Great Charter, that no man shall be amerced even to
the full extent of his means, the counsellors of the Star-chamber inflicted
such fines as no court of justice, even in the present reduced value of money,
would think of imposing.  Little objection, indeed, seems to lie, in a free
country, and with a well-regulated administration of justice, against the
imposition of weighty pecuniary penalties, due consideration being had of the
offence and the criminal.  But, adjudged by such a tribunal as the
Star-chamber, where those who inflicted the punishment reaped the gain, and
sat, like famished birds of prey, with keen eyes and bended talons, eager to
supply for a moment by some wretch's ruin, the craving emptiness of the
exchequer, this scheme of enormous penalties became more dangerous and
subversive of justice, though not more odious, than corporal punishment.

     A gentleman of the name of Allington was fined twelve thousand pounds for
marrying his niece.  One, who had sent a challenge to the Earl of
Northumberland, was fined five thousand pounds,; another for saying the Earl
of Suffolk was a base lord, four thousand pounds to him, and a like sum to the
King.  Sir David Forbes, for opprobrious words against Lord Wentworth,
incurred five thousand pounds to the King and three thousand pounds to the
party.  On some soap-boilers, who had not complied with the requisitions of
the newly incorporated company, mulcts were imposed of one thousand five
hundred pounds and one thousand pounds.  One man was fined and set in the
pillory for engrossing corn, though he only kept what grew on his own land,
asking more in a season of dearth than the overseers of the poor thought
proper to give.  Some arbitrary regulations with respect to prices may be
excused by a well-intentioned though mistaken policy.  The charges of inns and
taverns were fixed by the judges; but even in those a corrupt motive was
sometimes blended.  The company of vintners, or victuallers, having refused to
pay a demand of the lord treasurer, one penny a quart for all wine drunk in
their houses, the Star-chamber, without information filed or defence made,
interdicted them from selling or dressing victuals till they submitted to pay
forty shillings for each tun of wine to the King.

     It is evident that the strong interest of the court in these fines must
not only have had a tendency to aggravate the punishment, but to induce
sentences of condemnation on inadequate proof.  From all that remains of
proceedings in the Star-chamber, they seem to have been very frequently as
iniquitous as they were severe.  In many celebrated instances, the accused
party suffered less on the score of any imputed offence than for having
provoked the malice of a powerful adversary, or for notorious dissatisfaction
with the existing government.  Thus Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, once
lord-keeper the favorite of King James, the possessor for a season of the
power that was turned against him, experienced the rancorous and ungrateful
malignity of Laud, who, having been brought forward by Williams into the favor
of the court, not only supplanted by his intrigues, and incensed the King's
mind against his benefactor, but harassed his retirement by repeated
persecutions.  It will sufficiently illustrate the spirit of these times to
mention that the sole offence imputed to the Bishop of Lincoln in the last
information against him in the Star-chamber was that he had received certain
letters from one Osbaldiston, master of Westminster school, wherein some
contemptuous nickname was used to denote Laud.

     It did not appear that Williams had ever divulged these letters; but it
was held that the concealment of a libellous letter was a high misdemeanor.
Williams was therefore adjudged to pay five thousand pounds to the King and
three thousand to the Archbishop, to be imprisoned during pleasure, and to
make a submission; Osbaldiston to pay a still heavier fine, to be deprived of
all his benefices, to be imprisoned and make submission, and, moreover, to
stand in the pillory before his school in Dean's yard, with his cars nailed to
it.  This man had the good fortune to conceal himself; but the Bishop of
Lincoln, refusing to make the required apology, lay about three years in the
Tower, till released at the beginning of the Long Parliament.

     It might detain me too long to dwell particularly on the punishments
inflicted by the Court of Star-chamber in this reign.  Such historians as have
not written in order to palliate the tyranny of Charles, and especially
Rushworth, will furnish abundant details, with all those circumstances that
portray the barbarous and tyrannical spirit of those who composed that
tribunal.  Two or three instances are so celebrated that I cannot pass them
over.  Leighton, a Scots divine, having published an angry libel against the
hierarchy, was sentenced to be publicly whipped at Westminster and set in the
pillory, to have one side of his nose slit, one ear cut off, and one side of
his cheek branded with a hot iron; to have the whole of this repeated the next
week at Cheapside, and to suffer perpetual imprisonment in the Fleet.
Lilburne, for dispersing pamphlets against the bishops, was whipped from the
Fleet prison to Westminster, there set in the pillory, and treated afterward
with great cruelty.  Prynne, a lawyer of uncommon erudition and a zealous
Puritan, had printed a bulky volume, called Histriomastix, full of invectives
against the theatre, which he sustained by a profusion of learning.  In the
course of this he adverted to the appearance of courtesans on the Roman stage,
and, by a satirical reference in his index, seemed to range all female actors
in the class.  The Queen, unfortunately, six weeks after the publication of
Prynne's book, had performed a part in a mask at court.  This passage was
accordingly dragged to light by the malice of Peter Heylin, a chaplain of
Laud, on whom the Archbishop devolved the burden of reading this heavy volume
in order to detect its offences.

     Heylin, a bigoted enemy of everything Puritanical, and not scrupulous as
to veracity, may be suspected of having aggravated, if not misrepresented, the
tendency of a book much more tiresome than seditious.  Prynne, however, was
already obnoxious, and the Star-chamber adjudged him to stand twice in the
pillory, to be branded in the forehead, to lose both his ears, to pay a fine
of five thousand pounds, and to suffer perpetual imprisonment.  The dogged
Puritan employed the leisure of a jail in writing a fresh libel against the
hierarchy.  For this, with two other delinquents of the same class, Burton a
divine, and Bastwick a physician, he stood again at the bar of that terrible
tribunal.  Their demeanor was what the court deemed intolerably contumacious,
arising, in fact, from the despair of men who knew that no humiliation would
procure them mercy.  Prynne lost the remainder of his ears in the pillory; and
the punishment was inflicted on them all with extreme and designed cruelty,
which they endured, as martyrs always endure suffering, so heroically as to
excite a deep impression of sympathy and resentment in the assembled
multitude.  They were sentenced to perpetual confinement in distant prisons.
But their departure from London and their reception on the road were marked by
signal expressions of popular regard; and their friends resorting to them even
in Launceston, Chester, and Carnarvon castles, whither they were sent, an
order of council was made to transport them to the isles of the Channel.

     It was the very first act of the Long Parliament to restore these victims
of tyranny to their families.  Punishments by mutilation, though not quite
unknown to the English law, had been a rare occurrence; and thus inflicted on
men whose station appeared to render the ignominy of whipping and branding
more intolerable, they produced much the same effect as the still greater
cruelties of Mary's reign, in exciting a detestation of that ecclesiastical
dominion which protected itself by means so atrocious.

By Thomas Babington Macaulay

     Now commenced a new era.  Many English kings had occasionally committed
unconstitutional acts; but none had ever systematically attempted to make
himself a despot, and to reduce the Parliament to a nullity.  Such was the end
which Charles distinctly proposed to himself.  From March, 1629, to April,
1640, the Houses were not convoked.  Never in our history had there been an
interval of eleven years between Parliament and Parliament.  Only once had
there been an interval of even half that length.  This fact alone is
sufficient to refute those who represent Charles as having merely trodden in
the footsteps of the Plantagenets and Tudors.

     It is proved, by the testimony of the King's most strenuous supporters,
that, during this part of his reign, the provisions of the Petition of Right
were violated by him, not occasionally, but constantly, and on system; that a
large part of the revenue was raised without any legal authority; and that
persons obnoxious to the government languished for years in prison, without
being ever called upon to plead before any tribunal.

     For these things history must hold the King himself chiefly responsible.
From the time of his third Parliament he was his own prime minister.  Several
persons, however, whose temper and talents were suited to his purposes, were
at the head of different departments of the administration.

     Thomas Wentworth, successively created Lord Wentworth and Earl of
Strafford, a man of great abilities, eloquence, and courage, but a cruel and
imperious nature, was the counsellor most trusted in political and military
affairs.  He had been one of the most distinguished members of the opposition,
and felt toward those whom he had deserted that peculiar malignity which has,
in all ages, been characteristic of apostates.  He perfectly understood the
feelings, the resources, and the policy of the party to which he had lately
belonged, and had formed a vast and deeply meditated scheme which very nearly
confounded even the able tactics of the statesmen by whom the House of Commons
had been directed.  To this scheme, in his confidential correspondence, he
gave the expressive name of Thorough.

     His object was to do in England all, and more than all, that Richelieu
was doing in France: to make Charles a monarch as absolute as any on the
Continent; to put the estates and the personal liberty of the whole people at
the disposal of the crown; to deprive the courts of law of all independent
authority, even in ordinary questions of civil right between man and man; and
to punish with merciless rigor all who murmured at the acts of the government,
or who applied, even in the most decent and regular manner, to any tribunal
for relief against those acts.

     This was his end; and he distinctly saw in what manner alone this end
could be attained.  There was, in truth, about all his notions a clearness, a
coherence, a precision, which, if he had not been pursuing an object
pernicious to his country and to his kind, would have justly entitled him to
high admiration.  He saw that there was one instrument, and only one, by which
his vast and daring projects could be carried into execution.  That instrument
was a standing army.  To the forming of such an army, therefore, he directed
all the energy of his strong mind.  In Ireland, where he was viceroy, he
actually succeeded in establishing a military despotism, not only over the
aboriginal population, but also over the English colonists, and was able to
boast that, in that island, the King was as absolute as any prince in the
whole world could be.

     The ecclesiastical administration was, in the mean time, principally
directed by William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury.  Of all the prelates of
the Anglican Church, Laud had departed furthest from the principles of the
Reformation and had drawn nearest to Rome.  His theology was more remote than
even that of the Dutch Arminians from the theology of the Calvinists.  His
passion for ceremonies, his reverence for holidays, vigils, and sacred places,
his ill-concealed dislike of the marriage of ecclesiastics, the ardent and not
altogether disinterested zeal with which he asserted the claims of the clergy
to the reverence of the laity, would have made him an object of aversion to
the Puritans, even if he had used only legal and gentle means for the
attainment of his ends.  But his understanding was narrow; and his commerce
with the world had been small.  He was by nature rash, irritable, quick to
feel for his own dignity, slow to sympathize with the sufferings of others,
and prone to the error, common in superstitious men, of mistaking his own
peevish and malignant moods for emotions of pious zeal.

     Under his direction every corner of the realm was subjected to a constant
and minute inspection.  Every little congregation of Separatists was tracked
out and broken up.  Even the devotions of private families could not escape
the vigilance of his spies.  Such fear did his rigor inspire that the deadly
hatred of the Church, which festered in innumerable bosoms, was generally
disguised under an outward show of conformity.  On the very eve of troubles,
fatal to himself and to his order, the bishops of several extensive dioceses
were able to report to him that not a single dissenter was to be found within
their jurisdiction.

     The tribunals afforded no protection to the subject against the civil and
ecclesiastical tyranny of that period.  The judges of the common law, holding
their situations during the pleasure of the King, were scandalously
obsequious.  Yet, obsequious as they were, they were less ready and less
efficient instruments of arbitrary power than a class of courts the memory of
which is still, after the lapse of more than two centuries, held in deep
abhorrence by the nation.  Foremost among these courts in power and in infamy
were the Star-chamber and the High Commission, the former a political, the
latter a religious, inquisition.  Neither was a part of the old constitution
of England.  The Star-chamber had been remodelled, and the High Commission
created, by the Tudors.

     The power which these boards had possessed before the accession of
Charles had been extensive and formidable, but had been small indeed when
compared with that which they now usurped.  Guided chiefly by the violent
spirit of the primate, and freed from the control of Parliament, they
displayed a rapacity, a violence, a malignant energy, which had been unknown
to any former age.  The government was able through their instrumentality, to
fine, imprison, pillory, and mutilate without restraint.  A separate council
which sat at York, under the presidency of Wentworth, was armed, in defiance
of law, by a pure act of prerogative, with almost boundless power over the
northern counties.  All these tribunals insulted and defied the authority of
Westminster hall, and daily committed excesses which the most distinguished
royalists have warmly condemned.  We are informed by Clarendon that there was
hardly a man of note in the realm who had nor personal experience of the
harshness and greediness of the Star-chamber, that the High Commission had so
conducted itself that it had scare a friend left in the kingdom, and that the
tyranny of the Council of York had made the Great Charter a dead letter on the
north of the Trent.

     The government of England was now, in all points but one, as despotic as
that of France.  But that one point was all-important.  There was still no
standing army.  There was therefore no security that the whole fabric of
tyranny might not be subverted in a single day; and if taxes were imposed by
the royal authority for the support of an army, it was probable that there
would be an immediate and irresistible explosion.  This was the difficulty
which more than any other perplexed Wentworth.  The Lord Keeper Finch, in
concert with other lawyers who were employed by the government, recommended an
expedient which was eagerly adopted.  The ancient princes of England, as they
called on the inhabitants of the counties near Scotland to arm and array
themselves for the defence of the border, had sometimes called on the maritime
counties to furnish ships for the defence of the coast.  In the room of ships,
money had sometimes been accepted.  This old practice it was now determined,
after a long interval, not only to revive, but to extend.  Former princes had
raised ship-money only in time of war: it was now exacted in a time of
profound peace.  Former princes, even in the most perilous wars, had raised
ship-money only along the coasts: it was now exacted from the inland shires.
Former princes had raised ship-money only for the maritime defence of the
country: it was now exacted, by the admission of the royalists themselves,
with the object, not of maintaining a navy, but of furnishing the King with
supplies which might be increased at his discretion to any amount, and
expended at his discretion for any purpose.

     The whole nation was alarmed and incensed.  John Hampden, an opulent and
well-born gentlemen of Buckinghamshire, highly considered in his own
neighborhood, but as yet little known to the kingdom generally, had the
courage to step forward, to confront the whole power of the government, and
take on himself the cost and the risk of disputing the prerogative to which
the King laid claim.  The case was argued before the judges in the exchequer
chamber.  So strong were the arguments against the pretensions of the crown
that, dependent and servile as the judges were, the majority against Hampden
was the smallest possible.  Still there was a majority.  The interpreters of
the law had pronounced that one great and productive tax might be imposed by
the royal authority.  Wentworth justly observed that it was impossible to
vindicate their judgment except by reasons directly leading to a conclusion
which they had not ventured to draw.  If money might legally be raised without
the consent of Parliament for the support of a fleet, it was not easy to deny
that money might, without consent of Parliament, be legally raised for the
support of an army.

     The decision of the judges increased the irritation of the people.  A
century earlier, irritation less serious would have produced a general rising.
But discontent did not now so readily, as in an earlier age, take the form of
rebellion.  The nation had been long steadily advancing in wealth and in
civilization.  Since the great northern earls took up arms against Elizabeth
seventy years had elapsed; and during those seventy years there had been no
civil war.  Never, during the whole existence of the English nation, had so
long a period passed without intestine hostilities.  Men had become accustomed
to the pursuits of peaceful industry, and, exasperated as they were, hesitated
long before they drew the sword.

     This was the conjuncture at which the liberties of the nation were in the
greatest peril.  The opponents of the government began to despair of the
destiny of their country; and many looked to the American wilderness as the
only asylum in which they could enjoy civil and spiritual freedom.  There a
few resolute Puritans, who, in the cause of their religion, feared neither the
rage of the ocean nor the hardships of uncivilized life, neither the fangs of
savage beasts nor the tomahawks of more savage men, had built, amid the
primeval forests, villages which are now great and opulent cities, but which
have, through every change, retained some trace of the character derived from
their founders.  The government regarded these infant colonies with aversion,
and attempted violently to stop the stream of emigration, but could not
prevent the population of New England from being largely recruited by
stout-hearted and God-fearing men from every part of the old England.  And now
Wentworth exulted in the near prospect of Thorough.  A few years might
probably suffice for the execution of his great design.  If strict economy
were observed, if all collision with foreign powers were carefully avoided,
the debts of the crown would be cleared off: there would be funds available
for the support of a large military force; and that force would soon break the
refractory spirit of the nation.

     At this crisis an act of insane bigotry suddenly changed the whole face
of public affairs.  Had the King been wise, he would have pursued a cautious
and soothing policy toward Scotland till he was master in the South.  For
Scotland was of all his kingdoms that in which there was the greatest risk
that a spark might produce a flame, and that a flame might become a
conflagration.  The government had long wished to extent the Anglican system
over the whole island, and had already, with this view, made several changes
highly distasteful to every Presbyterian.  One innovation, however, the most
hazardous of all, because it was directly cognizable by the senses of the
common people, had not yet been attempted.  The public worship of God was
still conducted in the manner acceptable to the nation.  Now, however, Charles
and Laud determined to force on the Scots the English liturgy, or rather a
liturgy which, wherever it differed from that of England, differed, in the
judgment of all rigid Protestants, for the worse.

     To this step, taken in the mere wantonness of tyranny, and in criminal
ignorance or more criminal contempt of public feeling, England owes her
freedom.  The first performance of the foreign ceremonies produced a riot. The
riot rapidly became a revolution.  Ambition, patriotism, fanaticism, were
mingled in one headlong torrent.  The whole nation was in arms.  The power of
England was, indeed, as appeared some years later, sufficient to coerce
Scotland; but a large part of the English people sympathized with the
religious feelings of the insurgents, and many Englishmen who had no scruple
about antiphonies and genuflexions, altars and surplices, saw with pleasure
the progress of a rebellion which seemed likely to confound the arbitrary
projects of the court and to make the calling of a parliament necessary.

     For the senseless freak which had produced these effects Wentworth is not
responsible.  It had, in fact, thrown all his plans into confusion.  To
counsel submission, however, was not in his nature.  An attempt was made to
put down the insurrection by the sword; but the King's military means and
military talents were unequal to the task.  To impose fresh taxes on England
in defiance of law would, at this conjuncture, have been madness.  No resource
was left but a Parliament; and in the spring of 1640 a parliament was
convoked.

     The nation had been put into good humor by the prospect of seeing
constitutional government restored and grievances redressed.  The new House of
Commons was more temperate and more respectful to the throne than any which
had sat since the death of Elizabeth.  The moderation of this assembly has
been highly extolled by the most distinguished royalists, and seems to have
caused no small vexation and disappointment to the chiefs of the opposition;
but it was the uniform practice of Charles - a practice equally impolitic and
ungenerous - to refuse all compliances with the desires of his people, till
those desires were expressed in a menacing tone.  As soon as the Commons
showed a disposition to take into consideration the greivances under which the
country had suffered during eleven years, the King dissolved the Parliament
with every mark of displeasure.

     Between the dissolution of this short-lived assembly and the meeting of
that ever-memorable body known by the name of the Long Parliament, intervened
a few months, during which the yoke was pressed down more severely than ever
on the nation, while the spirit of the nation rose up more angrily than ever
against the yoke.  Members of the House of Commons were questioned by the
privy council touching their parliamentary conduct, and thrown into prison for
refusing to reply.  Shipmoney was levied with increased rigor.  The lord mayor
and the sheriffs of London were threatened with imprisonment for remissness in
collecting the payments.  Soldiers were enlisted by force. Money for their
support was exacted from their counties.  Torture, which had always been
illegal, and which had recently been declared illegal even by the servile
judges of that age, was inflicted for the last time in England in the month of
May, 1640.

     Everything now depended on the event of the King's military operations
against the Scots.  Among his troops there was little of that feeling which
separates professional soldiers from the mass of a nation and attaches them to
their leaders.  His army, composed for the most part of recruits, who
regretted the plough from which they had been violently taken, and who were
imbued with the religious and political sentiments then prevalent throughout
the country, was more formidable to himself than to the enemy.  The Scots,
encouraged by the heads of the English opposition, and feebly resisted by the
English forces, marched across the Tweed and the Tyne, and encamped on the
borders of Yorkshire.  And now the murmurs of discontent swelled into an
uproar by which all spirits save one were overawed.  But the voice of
Strafford was still for Thorough; and he even, in this extremity, showed a
nature so cruel and despotic that his own pikemen were ready to tear him in
pieces.

     There was yet one last expedient which, as the King flattered himself,
might save him from the misery of facing another House of Commons. To the
House of Lords he was less averse.  The bishops were devoted to him; and
though the temporal peers were generally dissatisfied with his administration,
they were, as a class, so deeply interested in the maintenance of order and in
the stability of ancient institutions that they were not likely to call for
extensive reforms.  Departing from the uninterrupted practice of centuries, he
called a great council consisting of lords alone.  But the lords were too
prudent to assume the unconstitutional functions with which he wished to
invest them.  Without money, without credit, without authority even in his own
camp, he yielded to the pressure of necessity.

     In November, 1640, met that renowned Parliament which, in spite of many
errors and disasters, is justly entitled to the reverence and gratitude of all
who, it any part of the world, enjoy the blessings of constitutional
government.

     During the year which followed, no very important division of opinion
appeared in the Houses.  The civil and ecclesiastical administration had,
through a period of nearly twelve years, been so oppressive and so
unconstitutional that even those classes of which the inclinations are
generally on the side of order and authority were eager to promote popular
reforms and to bring the instruments of tyranny to justice.  It was enacted
that no interval of more than three years should ever elapse between
Parliament and Parliament, and that, if writs under the great seal were not
issued at the proper time, the returning officers should, without such writs,
call the constituent bodies together for the choice of representatives.  The
Star-chamber, the High Commission, the Council of York were swept away.  Men
who, after suffering cruel mutilations, had been confined in remote dungeons
regained their liberty.  On the chief ministers of the crown the vengeance of
the nation was unsparingly wreaked.  The lord keeper, the primate, the lord
lieutenant were impeached.  Finch saved himself by flight.  Laud was flung
into the Tower.  Strafford was put to death, beheaded by act of attainder. On
the day on which this act passed, the King gave his assent to a law by which
he bound himself not to adjourn, prorogue, or dissolve the existing Parliament
without its own consent.