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Noy, Glanville, Crew, and the other members by whom it was drawn up and supported; but the history of the affair is anything rather than a proof of the existence of the rights in question, either actually or legally, at the time they were thus claimed. The issue of the business is recorded in a Memorial, dated Whitehall, the 30th of December, which James caused to be immediately printed and dispersed over the country. It begins by stating that "his most excellent Majesty coming this day to the Council, the Prince his Highness, and all the Lords and others of his Majesty's Privy Council, sitting about him, and all the Judges then in London, which were six in number, there attending upon his Majesty, the Clerk of the Commons' House of Parliament was called for, and commanded to produce his Journal-book, wherein was noted and entries made of most passages that were in the Commons' House of Parliament." With the Protestation, it is then intimated, his Majesty was justly offended; and a long recapitulation of the circumstances is entered into to show why, "so contrived and carried as it was," his Majesty thought it "fit to be razed out of all memorials and utterly to be annihilated, both in respect of the manner by which it was gained, and the matter therein contained." Among other things it is affirmed that the Protestation, "made to whom appears not," was brought into the House at six o'clock at night by candlelight; "and at that time of night it was called upon to be put to the question, there not being the third part of the House then present; whereas in all matters of weight their usual custom is, to put nothing of importance to the question till the House be full; and at this time many of them that were present expected the question would have been deferred to another day and a fuller House; and some then present stood up to have spoken to it, but could not be seen or heard in that darkness and confusion." And in conclusion it is said, "These things considered, his Majesty did, this present day, in full assembly of his council, and in the presence of the Judges, declare the said Protestation to be invalid, annulled, void, and of no effect; and did further, manu sua propria (with his own hand), take the said Protestation out of the Journal-book of the Clerk of the Commons' House of Parliament; and commanded an act to be made thereupon, and this act to be entered in the register of council causes." Nor was this all: that day week the parliament was dissolved by a very long proclamation, in which his Majesty recounted, in his own way, the whole course of conduct on the part of the Commons which had forced him to that step, imputing the heats and distempers that had been raised in the House to certain " ill-tempered spirits," and "evil-affected and discontented persons," who, after daring "to treat," says James, "of our high prerogatives, and of sundry things, that, without our special direction, were no fit subjects to be treated of in parliament,” had persuaded the rest, "in an unseasonable hour of the day, and a very thin House," to conclude and enter a protestation for their liberties, "in such ambiguous and general words," continues his Majesty, "as might serve for future times to invade most of our inseparable rights and prerogatives annexed to our imperial crown; whereof not only in the times of other our progenitors, but in the blessed reign of our late predecessor, that renowned Queen Elizabeth, we found our crown actually possessed; an usurpation that the majesty of a king can by no means endure:" and immediately after, Sir Edward Coke and Sir Robert Phelips, the two most eminent of the "ill-tempered

spirits," were committed to the Tower, and Mr. Selden, Mr. Pymm, and Mr. Mallory, were consigned to other prisons. Coke's chambers in London, and in the Temple, were also sealed up, and his papers seized; and Sir Thomas Crew, Sir Dudley Digges, and other two members, who had distinguished themselves in the affair of the Protestation, were, by way of a lighter punishment, exiled, on pretence of being sent upon a commission of inquiry, to Ireland, and a fifth member, Sir Peter Hayman, to the Palatinate. Crew in particular has obtained great renown for his patriotic exertions on this occasion; but we find him wonderfully mollified after getting home again from his Irish expedition: in the next parliament, which met in February 1623, he was chosen by the Commons to the office of their Speaker, and graciously confirmed therein by the King; upon which he commenced the customary address of thanks in the following strain:"Most gracious sovereign, since I cannot bring an olive-branch in my hand as a sign of my peace, and that God, in whose hands are the hearts of kings, without whose providence a sparrow doth not fall to the ground, whom no man can resist, hath inclined your Majesty to cast your eye of grace on me, and to confirm me in this place, I am taught in the best school that obedience is better than sacrifice, and will only say with a learned father, Da, Domine, quod jubes, et jube quod vis (Give, Lord, what thou orderest, and order what thou wilt)." It does not seem very clear whether these words are to be understood as addressed to the Deity, or to James :-possibly the ambiguity was intentional.

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XXXI. THE HOUSE OF COMMONS:-No. 2.

(Continued from No. XXX.)

THE Scottish Solomon, as we have seen, was able in some sort to keep up to the end of his reign the same almost absolute authority over the House of Commons which had been exercised by Elizabeth; indeed he asserted the subjection of that assembly to the crown in louder and more comprehensive words than had ever been employed by his more politic predecessor, and he probably thought that in so doing he strengthened the royal prerogative as much as he elevated and extended it. But the bow, in being so far bent, was only the nearer breaking. James was not an Elizabeth: still less was the age of James that of Elizabeth. It may be more than doubted if all the talent and policy of that great princess, aided by old authority and the prestige of her glorious name, could have much longer kept back the tide of democratic power and pretension that had been rising ever since the Reformation. The violent methods which James took to repress it only exhausted the strength of the crown, and at the same time infuriated the gathering force which he vainly attempted to subdue. We know how it came down like a great flood upon, his predecessor, overwhelming and sweeping away him and his throne together, and whatever else would have opposed its

VOL. II.

G

victorious course. Charles I. began by treating his parliament much in the style his father had been accustomed to do. In the beginning of May, 1626, he committed two members of the House of Commons, Sir John Eliot and Sir Dudley Digges, to the Tower, for certain expressions they were said to have used at a late conference with the Lords. But the matter was immediately taken up with spirit by the Commons, who resolved that they would not proceed in any other business till they were righted in their liberties; and the result was that the imprisoned members were set at large after a few days' detention; on which the House at once and unanimously resolved that neither of them had exceeded his commission in anything which he had spoken at the conference. An ominous commencement of the new contest between prerogative and the popular power! Nor did Charles gain more in the long-run by his next attempt, however successful it seemed to be for the moment. Immediately after the dissolution of the parliament, in March, 1629, a number of the most conspicuous of the opposition members, Eliot, Holles, Selden, and six others, were committed to prison; when they were brought up by writ of habeas corpus before the Court of King's Bench, and demanded to be discharged or admitted to bail, Charles withdrew them from the protection of the judges, and consigned them all to the Lieutenant of the Tower, prohibiting him from allowing them to appear in court; and criminal informations were afterwards filed against three of them, Eliot, Denzil Holles, and Benjamin Valentine, upon which judgment was given that all three should be imprisoned during the royal pleasure, and that Eliot should be fined in two thousand pounds, Holles in a thousand marks, and Valentine in five hundred pounds. Long, another of the members who had been taken up, was prosecuted in the Star Chamber, and fined two thousand marks. Eliot, the chief of this band of martyrs, died in the Tower, after an imprisonment of three years; and in the hush of the reign of terror all resistance to the royal will might seem to be at an end. But the spirit of freedom was neither dead nor asleep, though the doors of St. Stephen's Chapel were kept locked, and its voice was no longer heard from that constitutional arena; after a space of eleven years it was found necessary to summon another parliament; and as soon as the new House of Commons assembled, in March, 1640, it took up the subject of the treatment of Eliot and his associates. This House of Commons was dismissed before it had sat a month; and the very day after two of its members, Sir Henry Bellasye and Sir John Hotham, were committed to the Flect, and a third, Mr. Crewe, to the Tower. But it was followed by another, which met the same year, and which, continuing to sit for more than a dozen years, did, or undid, the work of almost a dozen centuries, not separating till it had struck down both the crown and the head that wore it, and sent all the coronets and mitres in the land tumbling after them, making itself King, Lords, and Commons all in one, or something mightier than all three united had ever been before. But even before the Long Parliament assumed the attitude of sovereignty, it passed a series of resolutions, on the 6th and 8th of July, 1641, declaring the issuing of the warrants on which Holles and the others had been compelled to appear before the Privy Councilthe committing of those members to prison-the searching and sealing of their chambers, studies, and papers-and the exhibiting of the informations against them, to be breaches of privilege; and it committed the person who had searched

Eliot's trunks and papers to the Tower. Nay, in the less violent times that succeeded the Restoration, and after nearly forty years had passed, the House of Commons, on the 23rd of November, resolved that the judgment given in the King's Bench against Eliot, Holles, and Valentine, was "an illegal judgment, and against the freedom of privilege of parliament;" and on the 11th of December following the Lords assented to this resolution.

But the last and boldest attempt to exercise the prerogative, thus at length quietly inurned, had been made on the memorable 4th of January, 1642, when Charles I. came down in person to seize the five members-Holles, Hazlerig, Pym, Hampden, and Strode-who, along with Lord Kimbolton, had been the day before impeached of high treason by the Attorney-General, in name of the King, at the bar of the House of Lords. When the Lords declined to order the accused persons to be taken into custody, his Majesty sent a sergeant-at-arms to the Commons, who, having, after he had laid aside the mace he carried, been called in to the bar, required the five members of the Speaker, that he might arrest them of high treason. This was on Monday, the 3rd. The Speaker, by command of the House, addressing the five members one after the other, enjoined them to be careful to give their attendance from day to day till the House should take further order; and it was at the same time ordered that on the morrow morning at ten o'clock the House should resolve itself into a grand committee, to take the King's message into consideration. Before the House broke up, also, it was directed that Sir William Killigrew and the other persons who were stated to have sealed up the studies and doors of the five members should be apprehended by the sergeant-at-arms, and detained in his custody till the House should further determine. It had been ordered before the King's messenger appeared that the sergeant-at-arms should be authorised to break open the doors, trunks, &c., which the House was informed these persons were sealing

up.

On the next day, Tuesday, the five members had come into the House after dinner, and had just taken their places, when "the House," says Rushworth, "was informed by one Captain Langrish, lately an officer in arms in France, that he came from among the officers and soldiers at Whitehall, and, understanding by them that his Majesty was coming with a guard of military men, commanders and soldiers, to the House of Commons, he passed by them with some difficulty, to get to the House before them; and sent in word how near the said officers and soldiers were come." Curiously corroborative and illustrative of this account is what is related by Lilly, the astrologer :-"It was my fortune that very day to dine in Whitehall, and in that room where the halberts newly brought from the Tower were lodged for the use of such as attended the King to the House of Commons. Sir Peter Wych, ere we had fully dined, came into the room I was in, and brake open the chests wherein the arms were, which frighted us all that were there; however, one of our company got out of doors, and presently informed some members that the King was preparing to come into the House, else, I believe, all those members, or some of them, would have been taken in the House. All that I could do further was presently to be gone. But it happened also, the same day, that some of my neighbours were at the court of guard at Whitehall, unto whom I related the King's present design, and conjured them to defend the

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