Authorities: S. R. Gardiner—History of England, History of Great Civil War, History of Commonwealth and Protectorate; Clarendon—History of the Great Rebellion;, John Forster—Life of Sir John Eliot, Life of Hampden, Life of Pym, The Grand Remonstrance, Arrest of the Five Members; Nugent—Memorials for Life of Hampden; Calendar of State Papers; House of Commons’ Journals.

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ELIOT, HAMPDEN, PYM,
AND THE SUPREMACY
OF THE COMMONS. 1625–1643

John Eliot, John Hampden, John Pym—by the work of these men comes the supremacy of the House of Commons in the government of England.

All three are country gentlemen of good estate, of high principle and of some learning.105 They are men of religious convictions, of courage and resolution, and of blameless personal character. Two of them—Eliot and Hampden—are content to die for the cause of good government.

The strong rule of Elizabeth left a difficult legacy of government to James I. The despotism of the queen had been forgiven in the success of her State policy; and if she had no high opinion of parliament, Elizabeth had ministers who fairly represented the mind of the English middle class. Elizabeth’s absolutism in Church and State was the direct following of Henry VIII., and only at the very close of her reign was it threatened by the discontent of parliament. With a shrewd instinct for popularity Elizabeth at once yielded. Like her father, she saw the importance of retaining parliament on the side of the crown and making it the instrument of the royal will. There was no idea in the Tudor mind of parliament sharing the government with the crown. The business of the House of Commons of Elizabeth was to express its opinion and then decree the proposals of the crown. “Liberty of speech was granted in respect of the aye or no, but not that everybody should speak what he listed.” (1592.)

In religion Elizabeth had done her worst to exterminate the Roman Catholic faith, and by the fierceness of her persecution had kindled undying enthusiasm for the old beliefs and worship. But forty years of repression did their work, and a generation arose which only knew Catholicism as the faith of a proscribed and unpatriotic sect, who denied the absolute sovereignty of the crown and had another sovereign at Rome—the religion of Spain—popery, in short: a faith worse than Mahomedanism or heathenism—the scarlet woman of the Apocalypse—according to the fierce Puritan expounders of the Bible, and not to be counted as Christianity. That this very Roman Catholicism—so hateful because the penal laws kept it hidden and unknown, and because it was the religion of Spain, then the national enemy—had been the religion of all England for centuries, and that under it the earliest charters of public liberty had been wrung from the crown, and the principle of a representative parliament established, were facts uncontemplated.

But Elizabeth, while persecuting Roman Catholics, had left in the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England a sanction for ceremonial and for episcopal ordination, and a body of doctrine which were to be interpreted under the Stuarts by certain Anglican divines as witnesses to Catholicism. Such interpretation was to be found in Elizabeth’s reign as a pious opinion. With Laud it was an active principle, and it brought him to the scaffold. The Elizabethan bishops in the main were thoroughly Protestant, the queen was the head of the Church of England, and the ritual of the Church prescribed by her was reduced to a simplicity that average Protestants could accept.

If Elizabeth burnt anabaptists and hanged other nonconformists, her excuse was that the Church of England was sufficiently Protestant to include all well-affected persons. The extreme Puritans whom she persecuted had this in common with the Roman Catholics, that neither accepted the absolute supremacy of the crown, and the best Puritan teaching in England, even when it counselled conformity to the Established Church, was creating a mind and temper that only found expression in the Commonwealth.

James I. came to the throne in 1603 prepared to carry on the Tudor absolutism. He failed because he had neither Elizabeth’s ministers nor her knowledge of the English country landowners. James never realised that Spain was the popular enemy, that a discontent had suddenly grown up in parliament in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, and that the English landowners—in many cases from their inherited possession of the old Church lands—were generally bitterly hostile to the Roman Catholic religion. James was tolerant in religion, and not inclined to press Elizabeth’s penal laws against Roman Catholics, and this very toleration brought him under the dislike of the country party. He thought he could disregard the opinion of parliament and he found that while a House of Commons submitted to a despotism when the country was governed by a strong queen, it would not put up with the follies and extravagance of the Duke of Buckingham.

James died before the strength of the growing movement for parliamentary government was seen. Charles who was no more tyrannical than his father, but even more blind to the signs of the times, fell before that parliamentary movement—a movement which outraged all the traditions of Tudor government—and with his fall brought down the throne, the House of Lords, and the Established Church. By his inability to understand the House of Commons, by his support of the Anglican movement towards Catholicism in the Church of England, and by the mistakes of his ministers, Charles ripened the desire for constitutional monarchy till the desire was irresistible.

John Eliot gave forcible utterance to this desire, and died in prison for his speech. John Pym carried on the work till the sword of civil war was drawn. John Hampden, “the noblest type of parliamentary opposition,” was content to back Pym as he had earlier backed Eliot, and to die on Chalgrove Field. Brought up to regard as an alien creed the old belief in papal supremacy in religion, unable to accept the new doctrine of the Church of England that the king was supreme by divine right (a doctrine begotten by the Tudors and dying with the Stuarts), Eliot, Hampden, and Pym were all of the same Puritan type which found its authority in the individual conscience.

Eliot was less afflicted than his colleagues by the theological Protestantism of the age.106 First and last he was the straightforward country gentleman, with exalted views on the sacred responsibility of civil government, and a high standard of personal honour. For Eliot there was no nobler sphere of work for an Englishman than the House of Commons, and his example has not been without followers. Seneca and Cicero are on his lips, as the later Puritans had the Bible on theirs, and his eloquence marks the beginning of parliamentary oratory. With a strong and clear view of constitutional government, Eliot was no republican; he held to the notion that the king must depend on the decisions of parliament. Time was to show that this notion, in the event of a collision between king and parliament, was to make parliament the predominant partner.

On his first entry into the House of Commons as member for St. Germans, in 1614, Eliot was the friend of Buckingham—whom he had met as a youth abroad—and on Buckingham’s rise to the lord high admiralship Eliot was knighted and became vice-admiral of Devon.

The fidelity of his service to the State as vice-admiral brought an unpleasant experience of the will of princes. Grappling with the scourge of piracy which afflicted the seaports and shipping trade of the West of England, Eliot accomplished the arrest of Nutt, a notorious sea-robber. But Nutt had friends in high places, and Eliot found himself lodged in the Marshalsea prison over the business. He was released on Buckingham’s return from the continent, for the charges were absurd, and in 1624 returned to the House of Commons as member for Newport. Two years later Eliot was estranged from Buckingham—convinced that the favourite of the king was an evil counsellor—and had become the recognized leader of the House of Commons. Once assured in his mind that Buckingham was responsible for the policy of the king, Eliot became his implacable opponent. For the policy of the crown in not making war upon Spain, in relaxing the penal laws against Roman Catholics, and for the mismanagement of the war on the continent in support of the Protestants, Eliot held Buckingham responsible. In answer to the demand of Charles for money in 1626, Eliot insisted that an inquiry into past disasters should precede supply, and that Buckingham should be impeached. Not the king but his minister is to blame, Eliot maintained, for all that was wrong in the State, and this very speech strikes the note of the campaign that was beginning. Buckingham was not responsible to Charles alone, in the eyes of Eliot and his friends, but also to parliament.107

Charles, quite unable to fathom the depth of the parliamentary discontent, or to note the strength of the current against absolutism, fell back upon the old Tudor doctrine of sovereignty, the doctrine of the high Anglican party in the Church of England, that the king was responsible for his acts to God alone. “Parliaments are altogether in my calling,” he replies to the House of Commons.

Only twenty-five years had passed since Bacon had declared, “the Queen hath both enlarging and restraining power: she may set at liberty things restrained by Statute, and may restrain things which be at liberty.” Twenty-three years more were to see monarchy abolished and the king beheaded. Eliot, standing midway between Bacon and Bradshaw, cleaves to the theory of constitutional government and persists in the impeachment of a minister in whom parliament had no confidence.

The prologue of impeachment declared in the plainest language the responsibility of the king’s ministers to parliament, and the responsibility of parliament to the nation: “The laws of England have taught us that kings cannot command ill or unlawful things, and whatsoever ill event succeed, the executioners of such designs must answer for them.”

And now the issue was fairly set, and the battle begun between Charles and the House of Commons. In that year, 1626, no man in England could foretell the result.

Charles, ill-advised to the end, believed he could overawe the Commons by a display of might, and was beaten. Twice he had Eliot arrested before the final imprisonment which ended Eliot’s life.

The loyalty of the House of Commons to its leader compelled Charles to release Eliot, after sending him to the Tower for his attack on Buckingham. Then dissolving parliament in June, 1626, and falling back on a forced loan, the king was met by wide refusals, and Eliot, with Hampden and others, suffered imprisonment over this. Eliot was also deprived of his vice-admiralship and struck off the roll of justices of the peace.

Driven to call a parliament for the third time in 1628, the king was faced by a stronger opposition than ever.

Eliot, now member for Cornwall, throughout the session continued the attack on arbitrary taxation, and with the lawyers Seldon and Coke carried the Petition of Right to stop the illegal imprisonments, the enforced billeting of soldiers, and forced loans. Buckingham, slain at Portsmouth, no longer troubled the commonwealth; but Wentworth, ambitious to use his powers in the service of the government, had left the popular side for the king; while Laud, and Weston, the chancellor of the exchequer, were daily preaching to Charles the divine right of kings and to his subjects the duty of passive obedience.

The following year both Eliot and Pym attacked the ecclesiastical policy of Laud. To them the established religion of England, settled on the Protestant basis by Elizabeth, was being definitely changed in a Catholic direction without the sanction of parliament, and in the very teeth of the opposition of the House of Commons. High-church clergymen, like Montague and Mainwaring, holding to the full a Catholic interpretation of the Book of Common Prayer, were only censured by the House of Commons to be promoted by the crown. Laud preaching a royal supremacy undreamt of by the great archbishops before Henry VIII., combined with it a doctrine of ecclesiastical independence, owning no allegiance to Rome, equally novel.

Eliot, stoical in his beliefs, and Pym, whose Calvinism was tempered by common sense, regarded with horror the revival in the Church of England of Catholic doctrines concerning the sacraments and the priesthood. They had done what they could to check any indulgence to Roman Catholics in England, and it was monstrous to them that the Church of England, whose formularies and ritual had been defined by parliament for the maintenance of Protestantism, should be expanded to reintroduce doctrines and practices essentially Catholic. But for the time the House of Commons was powerless in the matter, and only sixteen years later was Laud to expiate on the scaffold his Anglo-Catholicism, dying a veritable martyr for the high Anglican doctrine. “None have gone about to break parliaments but in the end parliaments have broken them,” declared Eliot on March 2nd, 1629, and Laud, no less than Charles and Wentworth, was to prove the truth of the warning.

If parliament could do nothing in that year, 1629, to stop Laud’s policy, it could at least defend the privileges of its members. The goods of John Rolle, M.P., had been seized by the king’s officers because their owner had refused to pay tonnage and poundage on demand, and at once Eliot was up in arms in defence of the privileges of his fellow member, whose liberties had been interfered with.

Pym was for a wider view of the matter—objecting to the question being narrowed down to a breach of privilege. “The liberties of this House,” he argued, “are inferior to the liberties of this kingdom. To determine the privilege of this House is but a mean matter, and the main end is to establish possession of the subjects, and to take off the commission and records and orders that are against us.” With Pym it was not Rolle, the member, who had been ill-used, but Rolle the British subject, and it was for the liberties of the subject he strove, holding the freedom of parliament as but a means to that end.

Eliot, a House of Commons man, through and through, saw in the welfare of parliament the welfare of the nation, and stuck to his point, carrying the House with him, that the privileges of a member extended to his goods. To this Charles sent word that what had been done had been done by his authority. The only question now was, how long would it be before the king dissolved parliament.

On the second of March, when the House met, the speaker’s first word was that the king had ordered an adjournment till the tenth, and that no business could be transacted. Eliot insisted on moving his resolutions, and the speaker was held down in his chair. Then the serjeant-at-arms attempted to remove the mace, and was promptly stopped, while the key of the House was turned from within.

Eliot moved his declaration, beginning with the famous words: “By the ancient laws and liberties of England, it is the known birthright and inheritance of the subject, that no tax, tallage, or other charge shall be levied or imposed but by common consent in England; and that the subsidies of tonnage and poundage are no way due or payable but by a free gift and special act of parliament.”

The resolutions were carried with loud shouts of assent, two members guarding the speaker, and the door was flung open; the sitting was over.

A royal proclamation for dissolving parliament followed on the fourth of March, and Eliot, with eight other members, was summoned to appear before the Privy Council.

From the hour of that summons John Eliot’s liberty was over, and not for eleven years was England to have another parliament.

For the fourth time Eliot was a prisoner. He declined altogether to give an account of what he had said in parliament, or to acknowledge any right of interference with the proceedings in parliament. To the crown lawyers his reply was to stand on the privileges of a member of the House of Commons. “I refuse to answer,” he said, “because I hold that it is against the privilege of parliament to speak of anything which is done in the House.” He insisted that he was accountable to the House alone, and that no other power existed with a constitutional right to inquire into his conduct there.

At the end of October Eliot was removed from the Tower to the Marshalsea, and then in January, 1630, he was charged in the King’s Bench with two other members, Holles and Valentine, with conspiring to resist the king’s lawful order, to calumniate ministers of the crown, and to assault the speaker. Again Eliot refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction. He was fined £2,000, and sent back to the Tower.

To the last Eliot’s loyalty to the House of Commons remained unshaken. He had but to acknowledge that he had done wrong, to admit that he had offended, and the prison doors would have opened to him. But to make this acknowledgment was to deny the sacred liberty of parliament, to admit wrong was to betray the House of Commons. To John Eliot the welfare of the House of Commons was a national cause—dearer than life. To betray its honour was to betray the State. The loyalty of John Eliot to the House of Commons was interwoven with his devotion to the State, but it was something England had never seen before, and never saw again. “He learned to believe, as no other man believed before or after him, in the representatives of the nation.” (Gardiner.)

The character and temperament of Eliot must be taken into account in understanding this passionate belief in the House of Commons. It was not as a great thinker but as a great orator he had risen to the leadership of the House of Commons. He saw in his mind, as no other man saw at the time, a perfectly balanced constitution of king, lords, and commons. In parliament was the best wisdom of the country placed at the service of the crown. In the crown was the appointed ruler who, with his ministers, had but to come to parliament for advice and counsel. So it seemed to John Eliot; and single-minded himself, he could not realise that in the House of Commons were plenty of men of but passing honesty, and that Charles and Laud and Wentworth were fundamentally opposed to his views of constitutional government, and bitterly hostile to the growing powers of the commons.108

Months passed, and John Eliot’s health gave way in the confinement in the Tower, but his steadfastness was unchanged. He corresponded with his friend John Hampden, wrote his treatise on the Monarchy of Man, and calmly awaited his end. An application on behalf of his friends and his son for Eliot’s release was made in October, 1622, on the ground that “the doctors were of opinion he could never recover of his consumption until such time as he might breathe in purer air.” The reply of Chief Justice Richardson was “that, although Sir John were brought low in body, yet was he as high and lofty in mind as ever; for he would neither submit to the king nor to the justice of that court.”

On November 27th, 1632, the spirit of John Eliot, unbroken by captivity, passed from the body his gaolers had deprived of life. A last appeal from his son to the king for the removal of his father’s body into Cornwall, there to lie with those of his ancestors at Port Eliot, received the curt refusal, “Let Sir John Eliot’s body be buried in the church of the parish where he died.” And so he was buried in the Tower, and no stone marks the spot where he lies.

John Eliot was but forty-two when he laid down his life for the principle of parliamentary government.

Any satisfaction that might have been felt by Charles and Laud at the death of the foremost antagonist to their policy of absolutism was fleeting. For if Eliot was dead, the cause he had championed with such conspicuous sincerity and courage was alive, and John Hampden and John Pym were at hand to carry on the fight till Cromwell and his Ironsides were ready to end the battle.

Charles was determined that, until the commons should be more submissive, he would call no parliament, but would govern through his ministers alone. The difficulty was to find money.

In 1634 London and the seaports were persuaded to furnish supplies for ships on the pretext that piracy must be prevented. A year later and the demand was extended to the inland counties, and John Hampden, taking his stand on the Petition of Right which Charles had granted in 1628, declined to pay. Ten out of twelve of the king’s judges had decided that ship-money might be enforced if the kingdom appeared to be in danger, but against this declared legality there was the decree of parliament forbidding forced loans or taxes without parliamentary sanction.

On this resistance of the ship-money Hampden’s fame has been chiefly built up. The amount was small—only a matter of some twenty shillings—the issue was of a first importance. It was clear to Hampden that if the king could raise money by such methods, what need would there be in the royal mind for the calling of parliament at all? The question was forced upon him: Was parliament an essential part of the constitution? The judges had declared ship-money was legal, other taxation and forced loans could easily find justification on the judicial bench, and thus the crown obtain its revenue, and England ruled without any let or hindrance from its citizens. To admit the position was to see the work of centuries undone, and the old contest in the land for liberties in return for taxes abandoned.

Hampden’s refusal to pay ship-money was a declaration for parliamentary government. No more a republican than Eliot or Pym, Hampden could see that either crown or parliament must be supreme in the affairs of the nation.109 The constitution was not to be balanced so evenly as Eliot had believed. Eliot himself had been deprived of life for maintaining, not the supremacy but the liberty of parliament. For John Hampden the evils of royal supremacy were obvious and present: misrule, the restoration of a religion banished by authority of crown and parliament, and disliked and feared by the majority of serious-minded people in the country, and the imprisonment of all who claimed the old freedom of parliament.

The case was decided against him in the law courts, but five of the twelve judges supported Hampden’s contention that the resistance to payment was valid, and the arguments for his defence were published far and wide. “The judgment proved of more advantage and credit to the gentleman condemned than to the king’s service.”110

Three years later, and Charles was forced to summon parliament to get money for his war in Scotland—the “Bishop’s War,” perhaps the most hopeless of all his ventures.

Parliament met in April, and its temper was so unfavourable to the desires of the king, for the forcible conversion of the Scots to episcopacy, that it was dissolved in three weeks. John Pym was notable in that “Short Parliament” as the spokesman of the aggrieved country party, and the commons decided that the grievances of the nation must be considered before supplies were voted. The Scotch war was intolerable to Pym and Hampden. They had no objection to episcopacy as long as bishops were men of Protestant convictions. It was Laud the “Anglo-Catholic,” Laud the preacher of the divine right of kings, not Laud the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom they detested, and they had no relish for the expenditure of English life and treasure in the forcing of Laudian doctrine on Protestant Scotland.

In the long eleven years of silence from the utterance of parliament things had been going steadily from bad to worse in England, Pym made out. Naturally conservative in mind, seeing in the constitution of king and parliament an admirable instrument of government, and in the Established Church of England an excellent expression of the Protestant religion, Pym had found that with parliament suspended the Protestantism of the Established Church had been steadily undermined by Laud’s policy, and the revival of some estranged Catholic doctrines and practices had proceeded apace. Without parliament there was no security for national well-being. “Powers of parliament are to the body politic as rational faculties of the soul to man,” he declares in April, 1640.

Pym had entered the House of Commons with Eliot in 1614, and had been imprisoned in that year for his boldness. In 1620 he had been one of the “twelve ambassadors” to James I., for whom that king had ordered chairs to be set in Whitehall. With Eliot and Hampden he had pressed for Buckingham’s impeachment and for the Petition of Right. Now in 1640, John Pym, in his fifty-sixth year, was about to become the accredited leader of the parliamentary party, to be called “King Pym” by his enemies at the court, and to pass away when the long constitutional struggle was being settled on the field of civil war. Unimaginative, and averse from new ideas, Pym had a quite clear perception of the business of the House of Commons, and of the fitting relations of king and parliament. The crown, the lords, the commons were all recognized and necessary elements in the constitution, but their importance was not equal. The collective assembly of parliament had prevailed over the crown more than once; to Pym, the Laudian “divine right” was a novelty, and nonsense at that. Parliament could do much of its work with or without royal approval, and of the two Houses, if the Lords were unwilling to work with the lower House, the Commons could “save the kingdom alone.”

In the autumn Charles was driven again to appeal to parliament, and in November, 1640, the “Long Parliament” met, only to be dissolved thirteen years later by the arms of Cromwell. To the eleven years of “personal government” by Charles succeed thirteen years of parliamentary government, and then the House of Commons, now too enfeebled to endure, itself goes down before a military dictatorship.

Pym anticipated the coming struggle by riding over England on the eve of the elections to the Long Parliament and urging the electors to return men to the House of Commons resolute and alive to the crisis. The response was unmistakable. Parliament assembled to find some remedy for the distresses of the country before voting any money for the purposes of the crown. Enormous numbers of petitions were presented, and the House of Commons appointed its committees to attend to and report on the complaints.111

Before the year closed the House of Commons had struck at the power of Laud and Wentworth (now the Earl of Strafford), and the two ministers lay in prison impeached for high treason. Windebank, Charles’s secretary of state, and Finch, the chancellor, were already fled over seas.

It was Pym who went to the bar of the House of Lords to summon Strafford to surrender, and it was Pym who opened the charge of impeachment the following March. As in Eliot’s time, Hampden is content to be overshadowed by his friend, though his was the greater influence in the House.

Clarendon has given us his view of Hampden at the opening of the Long Parliament:

Baxter, it may be recalled, had written in the Saints’ Rest that one of the pleasures which he hoped to enjoy in heaven was the society of John Hampden. The name of Hampden was blotted out in the copies published after the Restoration. “But,” wrote Baxter, “I must tell the reader that I did blot it out, not as changing my opinion of the person.”

The work of Pym and Hampden is conspicuous at the beginning of the Long Parliament. The Star Chamber and High Commission Courts are abolished. Ship-money and all enforced taxation unauthorised by parliament are declared illegal. Oliver Cromwell’s motion for annual parliaments is amended into an act for triennial parliaments to be called with or without royal summons. Strafford—the only strong minister Charles had—perished on Tower Hill in May, both Pym and Hampden supporting impeachment instead of attainder, and voting for the fallen minister to be allowed the use of counsel at his trial. That Strafford was a criminal and a traitor ready to use his Irish army for the suppression of the English parliament Pym had no doubt.

Still Charles would not admit the position lost, and still struggled to govern, not through parliament, but by personal rule. The death of Strafford, though approved by all supporters of the House of Commons, rallied the king’s friends. The House of Lords was no longer quite at one with the Commons in the contest. In the House of Commons a royalist party emerges to oppose Pym, and the beginning of party government is seen. Overtures are made by Pym to the queen—to be disregarded, of course; though the tide is setting towards revolution, yet Pym and Hampden are far from revolutionaries. They are willing to end the political power of the bishops by turning them out of the House of Lords, but have only moderate sympathy with the root-and-branch Puritans who would abolish episcopacy.

In the Grand Remonstrance which Pym laid before the House of Commons in November, 1641, the case for the Parliament was stated with frankness, but the demands were not revolutionary. The main points were securities for the administration of justice, and insistence on the responsibility of the king’s ministers to parliament. The royalists fought the Remonstrance vigorously, and in the end it was only carried by a majority of eleven, 159 to 148. At the end of the debate the excitement was intense: “some waved their hats over their heads, and others took their swords in their scabbards out of their belts, and held them by the pummels in their hands, setting the lower part on the ground.” Violence seemed inevitable, “had not the sagacity and great calmness of Mr. Hampden, by a short speech, prevented it.”

On the 1st of December the Remonstrance, with a petition for the removal of grievances, especially in matters of religion, was presented to the king at Hampton Court. “Charles had now a last chance of regaining the affection of his people. If he could have resolved to give his confidence to the leaders of the moderate party in the House of Commons, and to regulate his proceedings by their advice, he might have been, not, indeed, as he had been, a despot, but the powerful and respected king of a free people. The nation might have enjoyed liberty and repose under a government with Falkland at its head, checked by a constitutional opposition under the conduct of Hampden. It was not necessary that, in order to accomplish this happy end, the king should sacrifice any part of his lawful prerogative, or submit to any conditions inconsistent with his dignity.” So Macaulay wrote. But the days of “governments” and “constitutional oppositions” were far off in 1641, and only the germ of party government is seen in the division of the House of Commons. To “submit to any conditions” from parliament was inconsistent with the king’s notions of royal dignity, fostered by Laud to reject all criticisms as denials of the absolutism of the crown.

Charles promised an answer to the deputation which waited on him, and the answer was seen on January 3, 1642, when the king’s attorney appeared at the bar of the Lords, impeached Pym, Hampden, Holles, Strode, and Hazlerig of high treason, in having corresponded with the Scots for the invasion of England, and demanded the surrender of the five members. “All constitutional law was set aside by a charge which proceeded personally from the king, which deprived the accused of their legal right to a trial by their peers, and summoned them before a tribunal which had no pretence to a jurisdiction over them.”

The House of Commons simply declined to surrender their members, but promised to take the matter into consideration.

Then Charles, with some three hundred cavaliers, went to Westminster, and entered the House of Commons to demand the accused. But the five members, warned of his coming, were out of the way and safe within the city of London. “It was believed that if the king had found them there, and called in his guards to have seized them, the members of the House would have endeavoured the defence of them, which might have proved a very unhappy and sad business.” As it was, the king could only retire discomfited, with some words about respecting the laws of the realm and the privileges of parliament, and “in a more discontented and angry passion than he came in.”

The invasion of the Commons was the worst move Charles could have made, for parliament was in no temper favourable to royal encroachments, and it had a large population at hand ready to give substantial support. The city of London at once declared for the House of Commons, ignored the king’s writs for the arrest of the five members, and answered the royal proclamation declaring them “traitors” by calling out the trained bands for the escort of the members back to Westminster, and for the protection of the House of Commons.

Falkland and the royalist members turned for the moment from Charles at his unexpected attack on the House, the cavaliers of Whitehall, menaced by the trained bands from Southwark and the city, fled, and Charles, standing alone, left London.

War was now imminent. Pym and Hampden at once prepared for the struggle.

Pym secured the arsenals of Portsmouth and Hull for the parliament, but his efforts to obtain the control of the militia in the counties were frustrated for a time by the king’s natural refusal to consent to the Militia Bill, which would have placed troops under the orders of country gentlemen of the parliamentary party.

Both king and parliament had to break through all constitutional precedent. The king levied troops by a royal commission, and Pym got an ordinance of both Houses of Parliament passed appointing the lords-lieutenant to command the militia, and thereby published the supremacy of parliament over the crown. In April the king appeared at Hull to obtain arms, and was refused admission to the town by Sir John Hotham, the governor. Parliament expressed its approval of Hotham’s act, the royalists gathered round Charles at York, and the final proposals of parliament for ending absolute monarchy were rejected by the king in June with the words, “If I granted your demands I should be no more than the mere phantom of a king.”112

With this refusal all negotiations were broken off. Essex was appointed commander of the parliamentary army, and in August Charles raised the royal standard at Nottingham, and war was begun.

Hampden threw himself vigorously into the campaign. From his native county of Buckingham, the county which made him its representative in parliament in 1640, he raised a regiment of infantry. “His neighbours eagerly enlisted under his command. His men were known by their green uniform, and by their standard, which bore on one side the watchword of the parliament, ‘God with us,’ and on the other the device of Hampden, ‘Vestigia nulla retrorsum.’” In the first stages of the war, before any decisive blow had been struck, Hampden was busy passing and repassing between the army and the parliament. Clarendon praises his courage and ability on the field.

A skirmish at Chalgrove, on June 18th, 1643, between bodies of horse commanded by Rupert and by Hampden, ended in victory for the royalists. Hampden was seen riding off the field, “before the action was done, which he never used to do, and with his head hanging down, and resting his hands upon the neck of his horse.” He was mortally wounded, for two carbine balls were lodged in his shoulder, and reached Thame only to die six days later.

The death of Hampden—at the age of 49—came at a dark hour in the early fortunes of the parliamentary army, and deepened the gloom. “The loss of Colonel Hampden goeth near the heart of every man that loves the good of his king and country, and makes some conceive little content to be at the army now that he is gone.” But Pym remained, and Cromwell and Vane, and many another resolute House of Commons man.

Pym’s health was already broken when Hampden fell, but he lived to accomplish the alliance of the English Puritans and the Scotch army, and, as the price of this alliance, the abolition of episcopacy and the adoption of Presbyterianism in the Church of England. The Solemn League and Covenant was accepted by parliament, and imposed on the nation in September. Henceforth the parliamentary army was pledged to extirpate “Popery, prelacy, superstition, schism and profaneness”; to bring “the Churches of God in the three kingdoms to the nearest conjunction and uniformity in religion”; to “preserve the rights and privileges of the parliament and the liberties of the kingdom; and to unite the two kingdoms in a firm peace and union to all posterity.”

The taking of the covenant—a political necessity—was John Pym’s last work. He was ten years older than Hampden, and his character was ruggeder and sterner and without the charm of the younger man. But Pym’s was the greater genius in politics, and his scheme of constitutional government was to be fulfilled in England at a later season.

John Pym died on December 8th, 1643, and his body was buried in Westminster Abbey—only to be turned out at the Restoration and removed to St. Margaret’s churchyard.

With Pym and Hampden gone, henceforth the conduct of parliament was in other hands, and the day of moderate statesmanship had passed.

The war undertaken to preserve the liberties and establish the supremacy of the House of Commons was to bring in its train not only the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords, but the suppression of the House of Commons itself.

Important to the nation as the issues at stake were, most people in England took hardly any more part or interest in the great civil war than they had done in the Wars of the Roses. “A very large number of persons regarded the struggle with indifference.... In one case, the inhabitants of an entire county pledged themselves to remain neutral. Many quietly changed with the times (as people changed with the varying fortunes of York and Lancaster). That this sentiment of neutrality was common to the greater mass of the working classes is obvious from the simultaneous appearance of the club men in different parts of the country, with their motto, ‘If you take our cattle, we will give you battle.’”113

How could it be otherwise? Supremacy of King, or supremacy of Commons,—seed time and harvest remain, and the labourer and the artizan must needs do their day’s work.

Not till the deposing of the Stuarts—forty-five years after John Hampden’s death—is the supremacy of parliament over the crown arrived at by general consent, to become a recognized and settled thing in British politics. By the middle of the nineteenth century the House of Commons is unmistakably the ruling power in the constitution, and the labours of Eliot, Hampden and Pym are vindicated.

In our own day changes in the balance of constitutional power may be noted. The supremacy of the House of Commons is quietly disappearing before the growing popularity of the crown, the reawakened activity of the House of Lords, and the steady gathering of the reins of power into the hands of the Cabinet and Executive. As the crown in the last twenty years has increased in popular esteem, so the influence and importance of the Commons has waned in the country; and this waning influence of the Lower House has been further diminished by the frequent rejection and revision of its measures by the House of Lords.

The power of the Executive has also been obtained at the expense of the power of the Commons. The Cabinet, rather than the House of Commons, holds the supremacy to-day, and the direction of foreign policy, and the making of international treaties are no more within the authority of the House of Commons than are the administration of Egypt and India. Pym and Hampden fought and gave their lives for the right of the House of Commons to control the ministers of the crown and to order the policy of these ministers. By its own consent, and not from pressure from without, the House of Commons has silently surrendered this right, and has agreed that the policy of its Foreign Minister for the time being—whether he be Liberal or Conservative—must not be subject to reproof, still less to correction. In home affairs administrative order steadily supersedes statute law.

In theory ministers are still subject to the House of Commons. In actual practice they can rely on not being interfered with as long as their party has a majority in the House. When the price of effective interference with the conduct of affairs is a defeat of the Cabinet and a consequent dissolution, the payment is more than members of parliament are prepared to make.

Given the sense of security of social order and of the administration of justice, the nation, generally, no more heeds the passing of the supremacy from the House of Commons, than it heeded the winning of that supremacy.

The Laudian doctrine in the Church of England, revived at the Restoration, disappeared with the passing of the non-jurors at the close of the seventeenth century. But its Anglo-Catholic teaching was renewed by the Oxford Movement, early in Queen Victoria’s reign, and has largely changed the whole appearance of the Church of England. The modern high Anglican, claiming, as Laud claimed, the right to interpret the Book of Common Prayer as a Catholic document, but no longer the advocate of any theory of divine right of kings, or the champion of any particular political creed, has travelled indeed far beyond Laud’s very limited success in winning support for Catholic doctrine and ritual in the Church of England. Laud was beaten by the opposition of parliament; his present day successors in the Church of England have prospered in spite of that opposition, and have triumphed over acts of parliaments, adverse judicial sentences, privations and imprisonments. But with Laud the movement was directed by bishops and approved by the king, the modern Laudian movement was banned by bishops and disfavoured by all in high authority.

To-day nearly every Catholic doctrine, save papal supremacy, has its expounders and defenders in the Church of England, and Catholic rites and ceremonies are freely practised.

Laud, dying on the scaffold in 1645 at the hands of parliament, is amply avenged in the twentieth century by the victorious high-churchman. The Laudian clergy of the Established Church can now maintain their Anglo-Catholic faith and practice, without any fear of parliamentary interference. For generally they enjoy a popularity and respect that the House of Commons does not willingly venture to assail.

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