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"infamous licentiousness," the very remembrance of which must give "horrible displeasure t," is said to have been the cause which disposed the English monarch, in his later years, to avoid intercourse with men of rank and understanding t. The reign of James was followed by that of his enemies, and it is still sometimes intimated, that his memory has suffered unjustly from this cause. With what justice such a conclusion has been formed, the above facts may enable the reader to determine §.

APPENDIX.

Leading principles of the English Constitution-Authority of Parliament with respect to taxation-how infringed-Its legislative rights-how invaded-Adminis tration of justice-Liberty of the subject-Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission-Dispensing Power-Testimonies of Aylmer, Hooker, and Sir Thomas Smith, to the nature of the English Constitution and Government-Commerce-State of London-Manners of the Court-Society in the Capital-and in the Country-Literature, the Arts, Architecture, and Science.

BEFORE we proceed to the important reign of Charles the First, it may be proper to advert in this place to various matters relating to the time of his predecessor, some of which have been touched upon but lightly, if at all, in the preceding narrative. Compared with the limits within which we propose to exhibit the history of the house of Stuart, we have already given what may seem a disproportionate space to the reign of James the First. But this has been done advisedly. By this method we have hoped to render the causes of the events which characterize the reign next in succession more evident, and our narrative as a whole more readily intelligible.

*Paillardice."

+"Deplait horriblement."

Ibid., ii. 266, 269, 274-276, 278, 279.

Dalrymple's Memorials, i. 168, 169. Weldon, 102. 103. Somers's Tracts, with Sir Walter Scott's Notes, ii. 488. This last authority will show how difficult it is for the most candid mind to avoid these unfavourable conclusions as to the tendencies of this monarch, if fully acquainted with the information which has reached us concerning him. With all this, too, religion was so far mixed up, that when the countess of Buckingham, the mother of the favourite, turned catholic, the king held a theological conference, or rather disputation, to reconvert her:-" and if souls are to be converted by screaming, swearing, and denying God and all the saints," says Tillieres (crier, jurer, et renier Dieu et tous les saints) "the countess has done very wrong not to follow his doctrine." Raumer, ii. 271, 272. The true spring of this protestant zeal on the part of the king, no doubt, was his vanity in such matters; and on the part of the favourite, the fear lest the incident should be made to work him injury-particularly if employed for that purpose by the puritans. As to Buckingham, there is no want of charity in supposing him willing to become catholic, or anything else, to which vanity or ambition might have prompted him.

Much has occurred in the preceding chapters to show the state of the Leading prin- English constitution and government during this period. ciples of the The two great principles of the constitution with which its constitution: freedom in all respects is mainly connected are,―first, that Englishmen should not be taxed without their consent virtually given through the medium of their representatives in the national council; and secondly, that the concurrent voice of lords and commons in parliament assembled should be necessary to the adoption of every regulation having the force of law. Long before James ascended the throne, both these principles had been established by many enactments, and they were generally acknowledged, though not so completely as to have been secure from occasional attempts to break in upon them, even down to a comparatively recent period.

of taxes some

of Loans and

The great provision, which required that no tribute should be exacted -its provision from the property of the subject without consent of parliawith respect to ment, was sometimes infringed by the government in callthe imposing ing for certain contributions under the name of a loan or times infringed a benevolence. These loans were obtained by means of by the exaction royal letters, called privy seals, addressed to the persons Benevolences. required to become contributors; and the sums thus obtained were not only obtained without interest, but could not be recovered by any process of law,—a benevolence was distinguished from a loan as being a gift to the crown. As there was no law to authorize either kind of exaction, so there was no direct punishment that could be inflicted on such as refused to part with their money when thus solicited. But the government, by quartering soldiers on such persons, or by forcing them to go on some distant mission for the crown, possessed the power of making such acts of disobedience both inconvenient and costly. From a period considerably carlier than the accession of the house of Tudor, it had not been pretended that this method of raising money was the constitutional one, the plea on such occasions being that of necessity, or peculiar emergency, to which the cumbrous movement of assembling the council of the nation was not applicable. Besides the provisions against all such exactions so expressly made in the Great Charter, it was enacted in the twenty-fifth year of Edward III., "that no person should make any loan to the king against his will, because such loans are against reason and the franchise of the land." Edward IV. solicited a contribution from the country, under the name of a benevolence. But, in so doing, according to Lord Bacon, he "sustained much envy;" and during the reign of Richard III. another law was enacted on this subject, which declares "that the king's subjects shall from henceforth in no wise be charged by such charge, exaction, or imposition, called benevolence, nor by such like charge; and that such exactions, called benevolences, before this time taken, be taken for no example, to make any such, or any like charge of the king's subjects

hereafter, but shall be damned and annulled for ever." In the year 1492, Henry VII. would have evaded these important statutes, but the attempt was resisted by the people, and in consequence abandoned. In 1505 he made a similar attempt with more success, and was fortunate enough to escape the interposition of the legislature. Even in the tyrannical reign of Henry VIII. an effort to raise money in contempt of this prohibition led the people generally to remark, that "if men should give their goods by a commission, then were it worse than the taxes of France, and so England should be bond and not free." So loud indeed were the complaints occasioned by this proceeding, that Henry deemed it prudent to recall his warrants, and obtained the needed assistance by a vote of parliament*.

Conduct of

and benevolences.

It would have been quite in accordance with Elizabeth's high notions concerning her prerogative, had she shown a disposition to obtain her supplies in this manner:—but it is to be observed Elizabeth in here, that through the course of the almost half century regard to loans during which that princess occupied the throne, she abstained from soliciting a single benevolence, and that not. more than two instances occur of her obtaining loans, both of which were solicited to meet a pressing state of affairs, and both were honourably repaid t. To avoid such applications to her people, Elizabeth is known. to have given twelve, and even fifteen per cent. for the loan of money on her own responsibility . James, we have seen, was much less scrupu

1 Ric. III. c. 2. Stat. ii. Henry VII. c. 10. Hall. folio, p. 138. Bacon's History of Henry VII., 602, 631.

The first of these was on occasion of the northern rebellion, the second at the time of the Spanish Armada. At the end of twelve months, the queen was not able, according to her promise, to repay the first of these loans, and the collectors were instructed to use all their influence with the lenders, that they might be "content to forbear the demand for the space of seven months"-"at which time, or before," said her majesty, "you may assure them an undoubted payment." Murdin, State Papers, 181.

Murdin, 181, 632. Haynes, 518, 519. Strype's Works, ii. 102, iii. 585. Brodie, i. 248-266. It thus appears there had been just five attempts to raise money in the manner adverted to, before the accession of the house of Stuart, only one of which can be said to have been made with success. Yet Mr. Hume states that Elizabeth often raised money in this way, and describes the practice as so common in the history of the English government, that scarcely any one thought of questioning it. The benevolence adverted to by this writer as declined by Elizabeth in 1585 was an ordinary parliamentary supply, of which the term benevolence had long been, and still continued to be, the frequent technical designation. In the only authority to which Mr. Hume refers, this grant is expressly mentioned as made by "the parliament." In D'Ewes's Journals, the word benevolence occurs, as denoting a regular parliamentary grant, not less than twenty times. Brodie, i. 260-263. Mr. Hume has cited a passage from Cotton's Abridgment of the Statutes, in which it is said that such persons as had "reasonable excuse" for not lending to the king should not be put to any "travail or grief" on that account; a law, says this historian, which "ratified the king's prerogative of exacting loans." It appears however that the loan referred to was one negotiated by the parliament with certain merchants; and that the men whose language Mr. Hume has cited were concerned to protest against the issuing of privy seals with any threat or compulsion as contrary to the law of the land. Rot. Parl, iii. 62. No. 30. 2nd Richard II. Cotton's Abridgment, 193, 194.

lous in this respect. Indeed to obtain money by such means was the almost constant employment of his ministers, though, happily, with only a moderate share of success.

But it was not merely by soliciting loans under the name of privy seals, or gifts under the name of a benevolence, that the English government had sometimes obtained pecuniary aid from the subject without consent of parliament. In the earlier period of our history, the duty laid upon merchandise at the ports, now known by the name of the customs, was sometimes imposed, though contrary to an express provision of the Great Charter, by the sole authority of the crown; and while this power was in any measure conceded to the government, the authority of parliament, as the medium of taxation, was necessarily imperfect. James and his ministers availed themselves of every precedent, however remote, in favour of such exercises of the prerogative. With what success this was done, has already appeared ;—an instance from the reign of Mary, which upon examination totally failed, being the only semblance of a precedent to be adduced in favour of this pretension on the part of the crown, from the time of Edward III., a space of more than two centuries*. It was not by such means, but principally by the sale of monopolies, that Elizabeth contrived to replenish her treasury beyond the extent in which she judged it prudent to ask the assistance of her parliament. On this subject her parliaments uttered loud complaints, and not without considerable success †.

This was in accordance with a statute of the 25th of Edward III., which required that all existing loans should be paid, and declared that to compel men to lend was contre reson, et la fraunchise de la terre." Rot. Parl. ii. 239. No. 16. The loan exacted by Edward IV. was of the sort which Mr. Hume describes, but all the authorities he has cited describe it as a novelty.

* See pages 76, 77, of this volume. The reader who would study this great question in our constitutional history, must be particularly directed to the grand inquest upon it, as set forth in the second volume of Howell's State Trials, pp. 373-534. Dyer's Reports, 164, 165. Strype's Annals, i. 15. Sir John Davies's work on Impositions, which is a great authority with Hume, is composed on the assumption that statutes on such a question can be of no force, because the prerogative cannot be restrained.

D'Ewes, 653-659. Elizabeth, in prospect of her coronation, sent to the customhouse prohibiting the export of any crimson silk, until her own wants in that article were supplied. This pitiable act of the great queen has been described as a specimen of the freedom with which English sovereigns could employ their prerogative to lay on embargoes, and to extort money from traders. (Hume, Hist. Eliza. Ap.) But so far was the queen from regarding herself as only doing a thing of course in this instance, that the persons required to see her pleasure accomplished were enjoined "to keep the matter secret." Strype's Ann. i. 27. See Hargrave's Tracts, Pars ii. c. 9. A considerable power in this respect is still left to the crown, the check on which is found in public opinion, and in the provisions of law much older than the age of the Stuarts, which forbid its being employed as a source of private profit. In fact the laws in regard to the ports, and the regulating of foreign trade, were, in substance, under Elizabeth, what they are now.

Our laws respecting leaving the kingdom and entering to it had been, from an early period, more or less arbitrary—but then it was thus as the effect of law, and not, as sometimes represented, as matter of prerogative, though the instances in which the law should be enforced rested, in this case, as in many others, very much with the sovereign.

Mr.

Such, then, was the state of the first great provision of the constitution on the accession of the house of Stuart-it was the law and Legislative usage of the realm that its property should not be taxed power of parwithout consent of parliament. The second great principle times infringliament somerelates to the legislative power of parliament. This was ed by means of less perfectly understood and secured than the former, but proclamations. by no means so imperfectly as it has been sometimes represented. In the reign of Henry VIII., a royal proclamation possessed nearly the whole force of a statute; but the servile enactment which had conceded this extravagant authority to that monarch was rescinded in the next reign. In the reign of Elizabeth, however, proclamations were frequent, principally in consequence of the long intervals between the meetings of parliament. So long as these royal announcements were founded on existing laws, they were, in the language of Sir Edward Coke, "of great force," and their operation might be highly beneficial; but the evil was, that they sometimes made that to be an offence which the law had not so made, and led to the infliction of penalties in some cases, which the law did not warrant. The dangers attendant on our foreign relations, and those domestic animosities which continued through the whole reign of the last of the Tudors, made it almost necessary that something like this temporary power of legislation should be vested in the government, lest any sudden juncture of affairs, for which existing enactments might not be found to have sufficiently provided, should prove fatal to the state. Elizabeth sometimes abused the confidence thus reposed in her discretion, but very rarely, and her subjects always regarded this branch of her authority with peculiar jealousy *. James issued proclamations in greater number than his predecessors, often assuming the full tone of the legislator; but the degree in which his injunctions were obeyed depended on the matter to which they referred, and on the temper of the moment in which they happened to be published. The

Mr. Hume mentions "new year's gifts from the nobility, and from the more considerable gentry," as a source of revenue to the crown under the Tudors. His authority is Strype, Eccl. Mem. i. 137, from which it appears that Henry VIII., in the year 1532, received presents of this sort from nearly forty persons, amounting to somewhat less than 8007. Only fourteen of the contributors were laymen. The attempt, however, to extort from this circumstance a proof of "the arbitrary manner" in which our sovereigns were wont to extort money " is almost ingenuous, if compared with the effort of the same writer to deduce a precedent for ship-money from the voluntary supply of shipping and men by the sea-ports, when the country was in expectation of the Spanish Armada.

16

*The proclamations of Elizabeth, which are often adverted to as showing the arbitrary temper of her government, were mostly founded on preceding statutes, and expressed, in a great degree, in the language of those statutes. This cannot be said of her well-known proclamation against the cultivation of woad, but the parliament complained of this stretch of the prerogative, and the proclamation was recalled. D'Ewes, 652, 653. Townsend's Journals, 250. There is good reason to believe that her alleged interference about the long ruffs worn by the gallants of her time never took place; and with respect to obliging those persons to wear shorter swords, she had both reason and law for what was done. Strype's Ann., ii. 602, et seq. Coke, 3rd Inst. 162, and Chap. 73, 95. D'Ewes, 134, 188, 594. Stowe, ii. 441.

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