Constitutional History of England, Henry VII to George II (Vol. 1-3). Hallam Henry

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ did not enjoy; and this has led some to treat the apprehensions of parliament as either insincere or preposterously unjust. But can this be fairly pretended by any one who has acquainted himself with the course of proceedings on the Spanish marriage, the whole of which was revealed by the Earl of Bristol to the House of Lords? Was there nothing, again, to excite alarm in the frequent conversions of persons of high rank to popery, in the more dangerous partialities of many more, in the evident bias of certain distinguished churchmen to tenets rejected at the Reformation? The course pursued with respect to religious matters after the dissolution of parliament in 1629, to which I shall presently advert, did by no means show the misgivings of that assembly to have been ill-founded.

      It was neither, however, the Arminian opinions of the higher clergy, nor even their supposed leaning towards those of Rome, that chiefly rendered them obnoxious to the Commons. They had studiously inculcated that resistance to the commands of rulers was in every conceivable instance a heinous sin; a tenet so evidently subversive of all civil liberty that it can be little worth while to argue about right and privilege, wherever it has obtained a real hold on the understanding and conscience of a nation. This had very early been adopted by the Anglican reformers, as a barrier against the disaffection of those who adhered to the ancient religion, and in order to exhibit their own loyalty in a more favourable light. The homily against wilful disobedience and rebellion was written on occasion of the rising of the northern earls in 1569, and is full of temporary and even personal allusions.694 But the same doctrine is enforced in others of those compositions, which enjoy a kind of half authority in the English church. It is laid down in the canons of convocation in 1606. It is very frequent in the writings of English divines, those especially who were much about the court. And an unlucky preacher at Oxford, named Knight, about 1622, having thrown out some intimation that subjects oppressed by their prince on account of religion might defend themselves by arms; that university, on the king's highly resenting such heresy, not only censured the preacher (who had the audacity to observe that the king by then sending aid to the French Hugonots of Rochelle, as was rumoured to be designed, had sanctioned his position), but pronounced a solemn decree that it is in no case lawful for subjects to make use of force against their princes, nor to appear offensively or defensively in the field against them. All persons promoted to degrees were to subscribe this article, and to take an oath that they not only at present detested the opposite opinion, but would at no future time entertain it. A ludicrous display of the folly and despotic spirit of learned academies!695

      Those, however, who most strenuously denied the abstract right of resistance to unlawful commands, were by no means obliged to maintain the duty of yielding them an active obedience. In the case of religion, it was necessary to admit that God was rather to be obeyed than man. Nor had it been pretended, except by the most servile churchmen, that subjects had no positive rights, in behalf of which they might decline compliance with illegal requisitions. This, however, was openly asserted in the reign of Charles. Those who refused the general loan of 1626, had to encounter assaults from very different quarters, and were not only imprisoned, but preached at. Two sermons by Sibthorp and Mainwaring excited particular attention. These men, eager for preferment which they knew the readiest method to attain, taught that the king might take the subject's money at his pleasure, and that no one might refuse his demand, on penalty of damnation. "Parliaments," said Mainwaring, "were not ordained to contribute any right to the king, but for the more equal imposing and more easy exacting of that which unto kings doth appertain by natural and original law and justice, as their proper inheritance annexed to their imperial Crowns from their birth."696 These extravagances of rather obscure men would have passed with less notice, if the government had not given them the most indecent encouragement. Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, a man of integrity, but upon that account as well as for his Calvinistic partialities, long since obnoxious to the courtiers, refused to license Sibthorp's sermon, alleging some unwarrantable passages which it contained. For no other cause than this, he was sequestered from the exercise of his archiepiscopal jurisdiction, and confined to a country-house in Kent.697 The House of Commons, after many complaints of those ecclesiastics, finally proceeded against Mainwaring by impeachment at the bar of the Lords. He was condemned to pay a fine of £1000, to be suspended for three years from his ministry, and to be incapable of holding any ecclesiastical dignity. Yet the king almost immediately pardoned Mainwaring, who became in a few years a bishop, as Sibthorp was promoted to an inferior dignity.698

      General remarks.—There seems on the whole to be very little ground for censure in the proceedings of this illustrious parliament. I admit that, if we believe Charles the First to have been a gentle and beneficient monarch, incapable of harbouring any design against the liberties of his people, or those who stood forward in defence of their privileges, wise in the choice of his counsellors, and patient in listening to them, the Commons may seem to have carried their opposition to an unreasonable length. But, if he had shown himself possessed with such notions of his own prerogative, no matter how derived, as could bear no effective control from fixed law or from the nation's representatives; if he was hasty and violent in temper, yet stooping to low arts of equivocation and insincerity, whatever might be his estimable qualities in other respects, they could act, in the main, no otherwise than by endeavouring to keep him in the power of parliament, lest his power should make parliament but a name. Every popular assembly, truly zealous in a great cause, will display more heat and passion than cool-blooded men after the lapse of centuries may wholly approve.699 But so far were they from encroaching, as our Tory writers pretend, on the just powers of a limited monarch, that they do not appear to have conceived, they at least never hinted at, the securities without which all they had obtained or attempted would become ineffectual. No one member of that house, in the utmost warmth of debate, is recorded to have suggested the abolition of the court of star-chamber, or any provision for the periodical meeting of parliament. Though such remedies for the greatest abuses were in reality consonant to the actual unrepealed law of the land; yet, as they implied, in the apprehension of the generality, a retrenchment of the king's prerogative, they had not yet become familiar to their hopes. In asserting the illegality of arbitrary detention, of compulsory loans, of tonnage and poundage levied without consent of parliament, they stood in defence of positive rights won by their fathers, the prescriptive inheritance of Englishmen. Twelve years more of repeated aggressions taught the long parliament what a few sagacious men might perhaps have already suspected, that they must recover more of their ancient constitution from oblivion, that they must sustain its partial weakness by new securities, that, in order to render the existence of monarchy compatible with that of freedom, they must not only strip it of all it had usurped, but of something that was its own.

      FOOTNOTES

1. Cf. Historical Essays and Studies, vol. ii. p. 505

2. Europe during the Middle Ages, Chapter VIII. Part 3. I may remind the reader that Hallam regarded his Constitutional History as a continuation of this chapter, which sketches the development of the constitution from the earliest times down to the accession of Henry VII., the point at which the present work begins.

3. English Law at the Renaissance, p. 27.

4. Middle Ages (12th ed.), ii. p. 267.

5. This statute is not even alluded to in Ruffhead's edition, and has been very little noticed by writers on our law or history. It is printed in the late edition, published by authority, and is brought forward in the First Report of the Lords' Committee, on the dignity of a Peer (1819), p. 282. Nothing can be more evident than that it not only establishes by a legislative declaration the present constitution of parliament, but recognises it as already standing upon a custom of some length of time.

6. The pleadings, as they are called, or written allegations СКАЧАТЬ