The Nonconformists had no rest; Puritan clergymen must conform; Puritan laymen must suffer under the power of the church, which, dominated by its bishops and wedded to its idols, was becoming steadily more powerful and all-inclusive. The reign of Charles was not marked by the pa.s.sage of harsher laws against the Puritans, but it was distinguished from all periods that preceded or followed it by the continuous, steady, and thorough-going application of those already in existence.
It was under this regime that the great Puritan migration to America took place. The Puritans represented a cla.s.s of society which was much more ready to emigrate than the Catholics. As early as 1597 some imprisoned Brownists sent a pet.i.tion to the Privy Council asking that they might be allowed to settle in America; and four men of the same persuasion even went on a voyage to examine the land. [Footnote: Eggleston, Beginners of a Nation, 167.] In 1608 many Puritans seem to have prepared to emigrate to Virginia, when by Archbishop Bancroft"s influence they were forbidden by the king to go, except with his express permission in each individual case. [Footnote: St.i.th, Hist, of Virginia, book II., year 1608.]
The Separatists early became wanderers on the face of the earth, a now famous group of them leaving their English homes for Amsterdam, migrating thence to Leyden, and then, after hesitating between a Dutch and an English colony and between North and South America, a portion settling themselves on Plymouth Harbor. [Footnote: Griffis, Pilgrims in Their Three Homes.] In all the history of early colonization there have been few such occasions as that of the year 1638, when fourteen ships bound for New England lay in the Thames at one time, and when three thousand settlers reached Boston within the same year. [Footnote: Authorities quoted in Eggleston, The Beginners of a Nation, 344] Almost all the Englishmen who were ever to emigrate to New England left their homes during the twelve years between 1628 and 1640. Unfavorable economic conditions at home and the prospect of greater prosperity in the colony doubtless had their influence; but of the more than twenty thousand who pa.s.sed from the old England to New England during that time, it is fair to presume that by far the greater number were more or less influenced by their Puritan opinions.
The most decisive proof of this motive for emigration is the slacking of the tide of Puritan expatriation after 1640. When Parliament, after eleven years of intermission, met in that year at Westminster in the full appreciation of its power, one of its first actions was to order the impeachment and arrest of Archbishop Laud. At last the Puritans had their turn, and the a.s.sembling of Parliament found them no longer a scattered, disorganized, diversified element in the English church and nation; but, thanks to long persecution, a compact body, austere in morals, dogmatic in religious belief, ready to make use of political means for religious ends, and determined to impose their asceticism and their orthodoxy on the English people so far as they might be able.
[Footnote: Eggleston, Beginners of a Nation, 133.]
A majority of Parliament, small but sufficient, were Puritans, as had probably been true of every Parliament for many years, had they been free to act. Their intentions showed themselves in a prompt inception of reforms in the church, and the burdens of official ecclesiastical oppression were rapidly transferred to the shoulders of those who had previously bound the loads upon Puritan backs. In 1641 orders were issued by the House of Commons for the demolition of all images, altars, and crucifixes. [Footnote: Commons Journals, II., 279.] A commission known as the "Committee of Scandalous Ministers" was appointed, and proceeded to discipline the clergy and to hara.s.s the universities. Demands for the harsher treatment of priests and Jesuits were soon followed by plans for the diminution of the power of archbishops and bishops of the established church. The Court of High Commission was abolished July 5, 1641. [Footnote: 16 Chas. I., chap.
ii.] The archbishops and bishops were removed from the House of Lords and the Privy Council by the act of February 13, 1642. [Footnote: Ibid., chap, xxvii.]
The Solemn League and Covenant of September 25, 1643, pledged Parliament and the leaders of the now dominant party to extirpate "church government by archbishops, bishops, their chancellors and commissaries, deans, deans and chapters, archdeacons, and all other ecclesiastical officers depending on that hierarchy"; and to reform religion in England "in doctrine, worship, discipline, and government, according to the word of G.o.d and the example of the best reformed churches." [Footnote: League and Covenant, Sub Section 1, 2.]
By this time the quarrel between Charles and Parliament had been put to the arbitrament of the sword, and the distinction of Cavalier and Roundhead to a certain extent superseded that between Anglican and Puritan. In 1645 came the catastrophe of Naseby, then the long series of futile negotiations ending in the execution of the king at Whitehall in 1649. From the general confusion emerged the commonwealth, "without any king or House of Lords," the church organized on Presbyterian lines, the spirit of Puritanism dominating, although there was toleration for every form of Christian belief, "provided this liberty be not extended to popery or prelacy." [Footnote: Instrument of Government, Section 37.] For full twenty years the Anglican church was under a cloud, first Presbyterianism and then Independency being the official form of the church of England. The ill-fortunes of the royalist party in the civil war and under the commonwealth, and the religious oppression imposed by the Puritans upon churchmen, now combined to send to the colonies the very cla.s.ses which had so recently been the persecutors. From 1640 to 1660 Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas received an influx of English churchmen escaping from conditions at home as intolerable to them as, those which drove the Pilgrims and Puritans to New England during the previous decades.
The commonwealth was not merely a triumph of Puritanism, it was a birth-time of new religious sects. The excitement of a period of civil war, the breaking down of old standards, the disappearance of old authority, the opportunities offered by the quasi-democracy of the commonwealth, the preoccupation of the seventeenth-century mind with questions of religion, all combined to cause almost a complete disintegration of religious organization. Here and there a man began to preach religious truth and duty as they looked to him; he obtained adherents, a congregation was organized, the tenets of this body spread, and branches were formed; till shortly a new religious society had come into existence, with its creed, organization, missionary spirit, and more or less vigorous hope of converting all men and absorbing all other religious organizations. An almost indefinite number of such religious bodies arose during the middle years of the seventeenth century--Millenarians or Fifth Monarchy Men, Baptists or Anabaptists, Quakers, Ranters, Notionists, Familists, Perfectists, and others. Most of them died out within the brief period which gave them birth, but some survived to become great religious denominations, extending into America as well as throughout England. [Footnote: Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, chap. viii.]
Of these the Quakers are the most interesting in their relations to the New World. The spirit from which they arose was closely similar to that which gave birth to the Baptists of England, the Anabaptists, Mennonites, Pietists, and Quietists of the Continent. Their movement was an extreme revolt against the formalism, corporate character, and externality of established religion. It contained a deep element of mysticism. The Quakers declared all believers, irrespective of learning, s.e.x, or official appointment, to be priests. [Footnote: Fox, Letters, No. 249.] They a.s.serted the adequacy of the "inner light" to guide every man in his faith and in his actions. They opposed all forms and ceremonies, even many of those of ordinary courtesy and fashion, such as removing the hat or conforming the garb to changing custom.
George Fox, the representative of these ideas, began his public preaching in 1648, and his doctrines at once found wide acceptance. In 1652 there were said to be twenty-five Quaker preachers pa.s.sing through the country; by 1654 there were sixty, some of whom were women, who, by the principles of their teachings, should preach as freely as men.
Their missionary journeys led them to Scotland and Ireland, and later even to Holland and Germany and the far east of Europe. Organization among the Quakers proceeded somewhat slowly. This was due partly to the individualist character of their beliefs, partly to the lack of constructive interest on the part of Fox and the other leaders during the early period of their missionary work. Nevertheless, "meetings"
were gradually organized, took definite shape, and kept up regular communication with one another, so that there came to be a net-work of such bodies over the whole country. In 1659 it is estimated that there were thirty thousand Quakers in England.
Notwithstanding the religious liberty guaranteed by the Instrument of Government of 1653, the teachings and practices of the Quaker preachers brought them into much turmoil. Their vituperation of the clergy, their intrusion into church services and ceremonies, already reduced only too frequently to confusion by the rapid changes of the time, their objection to the payment of t.i.thes, their refusal to take an oath, their outspoken denunciation of all whose actions they disapproved, the prominence of women in their propaganda, and, in early times, suspicions that they were connected with political plots, could not but subject them to ridicule, abuse, and actual persecution. They habitually violated numerous laws on the statute-book, ranging from those requiring good order to those forbidding what was construed as blasphemy. They were, therefore, beaten and stoned by the mob; abused, fined, and imprisoned by the magistrates; ridiculed and prosecuted by the clergy; subjected to starvation, exposure, and other hardships by sheriffs and jailers. [Footnote: Besse, Sufferings of the Quakers, I., chaps, iii., iv, xi., xviii., II, chap. i., etc.]
In 1660 Charles II. was recalled to the throne. This event was a restoration of the church even more than a restoration of the monarchy.
The royal power could never again be what it had been before the civil war, the execution of a king, and the establishment of a republic. But the church, with the longevity and recuperative power of all religious organizations, arose again to a life apparently as vigorous and despotic as in the times of Laud. The year 1662 found four thousand two hundred Quakers in the jails of England; [Footnote: Sewel, Hist. of the Quakers, 346.] and the popular reaction against the austerity of the Puritan regime subjected Quakers to much ill-treatment by the rabble.
Yet just at this juncture the dignity of the body was strengthened and its power of self-a.s.sertion increased by the adherence to it of men of higher education and social position. The Quakers of the commonwealth period were almost all of the middle and lower-middle or trading cla.s.ses. Soon after the Restoration a number of men of good family and some means threw in their fortunes with the persecuted sect. One of them, Robert Barclay, reduced to order and system the scattered and incoherent statements of its theology. In his Apology, published in 1675, he set forth a logical and consistent statement of beliefs, couched in clear and graceful language and supported by calm reasoning and example. [Footnote: Thomas, Hist. of the Society of Friends in America, chap ii., 200, 201.] Of the same cla.s.s was William Penn, an educated, wealthy, polished, and genial English gentleman. Yet he was also a serious-minded and devout Quaker preacher, missionary, and writer, and as he saw and shared in the sufferings of the faithful he might well despair of better conditions in England and think of a "Holy Experiment" in America, where Quakers from 1675 onward were settling in West New Jersey. [Footnote: Fiske, The Dutch and Quaker Colonies, II., 99, 167; Andrews, Colonial Self-Government, chap. vii.]
Under Charles II. the att.i.tude of the king was favorable to the Quakers, while in the short reign of James II. they had the great advantage of the personal friendship of the king for Penn. Yet no matter what should be the favor of the king, or even their more moderate treatment by the authorities of the established church, Quakers could not hope for material comfort or ease of mind in surroundings so alien to their ideals as England was in the last decades of the seventeenth century. They, still more than the Puritans in the time of Laud or the churchmen in the time of Cromwell, suffered because of the incongruity of the ordinary law and custom with their ideals. It was the realization of this incompatibility, along with the attraction of a community under Quaker government, cheap and abundant land, a promise of a growing population and lucrative business opportunities that set flowing to Pennsylvania the tide of Quaker emigration and created in a few years a great Quaker commonwealth in America.
Besides Puritans, Anglicans, and Quakers, another great stream of emigration poured into the central colonies of America--the Presbyterian Scotch-Irish. To understand their coming, it is necessary to return to the early years of the seventeenth century and to consider the policy of James I. towards rebellious Ireland. At the opening of, his reign James found in Ireland an opportunity to plant a colony near home. [Footnote: Walpole, Kingdom of Ireland, 130-135.] When Englishmen and Scotchmen had been established in Ireland, the Irish sore would be healed, and that restless Catholic community be transformed into an outlying district of England. The "Plantation of Ulster" began in 1611.
The t.i.tles of the natives were ruthlessly forfeited, the six counties of the province of Ulster were re-divided, and the land was re-granted to proprietors who engaged to settle colonists from England and Scotland upon it according to a fixed system.
This system was skilfully devised and rigidly carried out. It required the new land-owners to establish freeholders, small tenants, laborers, and artisans upon the soil in proportion to the amount of land they received, allowing only a certain minimum number of the Irish natives to be retained as laborers. The proprietors were largely merchants of London and merchandising n.o.blemen of the court; the tenants they introduced were mostly from the towns and country districts of the north of England and the lowlands of Scotland. Men of Puritan tendencies showed the same readiness to emigrate to Ireland that they showed soon afterwards as to New England, and as a result the settlers of Ulster, during the first two decades of the seventeenth century, were almost universally Presbyterians.
Under these new and somewhat anomalous conditions a population grew up in the north of Ireland which was almost as distinct in race and religious organization from the people of England and Scotland as it was from the Catholic and Celtic population which it had displaced. Its religion, without being proscribed, was not acknowledged, for Anglicanism was the established church of Ireland, though it numbered but few adherents. Ulster"s industrial interests were, from the beginning, subordinated to those of England, as completely as were those of the natives. [Footnote: Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, II., 136.] As the century progressed the economic evils under which the Scotch-Irish suffered became more p.r.o.nounced. The navigation acts were so interpreted as to exclude Ireland from all their advantages and to cut her off from any direct trade with the colonies. Tobacco-growing was forbidden, and the exportation of cattle to England placed under prohibitory duties. The wool manufacture was crushed by heavy export taxes, and the linen manufacture neglected or discouraged. In 1642 and again in 1689 came war and new conquests of the country, to add to its disorganization and chronic sufferings.
Kidnapping, enforced service in the colonies, and traffic in political prisoners were indulged in by the government. Ireland, as a dwelling- place for Catholics or Protestants, for Celts or Saxons, for natives or English and Scotch settlers, was a country of ever-renewed distress.
To economic disabilities is to be added religious persecution of a mild type, especially after 1689. All the laws that interfered with the religious equality of the Presbyterians in England were extended to Ireland; and they seemed more vexatious there because in Ulster the Presbyterians were in the vast majority and the established church almost unrepresented, except by t.i.the collectors and absentee landlords. At the close of the seventeenth century there were more than a million Ulster Presbyterians. But soon, as a result of this combined economic and religious oppression, they began to migrate in a narrow stream which by 1720 became a wide river. They formed the largest body of emigrants that left Europe for the American colonies. Before the eighteenth century was over the Presbyterian population of Ireland was reduced by at least a half; [Footnote: Fiske, The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America, II., 354.] and the missing moiety was to be found scattered along the whole line of the Appalachian mountain-chain, at the backbone of the English colonies, extending eastward and westward and forming a prolific and influential element of the American people.
CHAPTER XIII
THE POLITICAL SYSTEM OF ENGLAND (1500-1689)
An earlier chapter of this work has been devoted to the political inst.i.tutions of Spain, France, and the Netherlands, and each had its share of influence on American history; but it is England from which the American nation really sprang, of which it was for more than a century and a half a dependency, and to whose traditions, inst.i.tutions, and government we must look back for the origins of our own. The oldest political inst.i.tution in England is the monarchy. Older than Parliament, older than the law-courts, older than the division of the country into shires, the monarchy dates back to the consolidation of the petty Anglo-Saxon states in the ninth century--and these were themselves kingdoms.
At no time in this long course of English history were the claims of the monarchy more exorbitant than under James I. and Charles I., from 1603 to 1642, just when the tide of immigration began to flow towards America, and when the governments of the colonies were being established. "What G.o.d hath joined, then, let no man separate. I am the husband and all the whole isle is my lawful wife. I am the head and it is my body. I am the shepherd and it is my flock. . . ." [Footnote: Prothero, Select Statutes, 283.] So King James wove metaphors, when he addressed Parliament at its opening in 1604. When disputes had arisen in 1610 he declared: "The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth, for kings are not only G.o.d"s lieutenants upon earth and sit upon G.o.d"s throne, but even by G.o.d himself they are called G.o.ds. ... As to dispute what G.o.d may do is blasphemy, ... so is it sedition in subjects to dispute what a king may do in the height of his power." "Encroach not upon the prerogative of the crown; if there falls out a question that concerns my prerogative or mystery of state, deal not with it till you consult with the king or his council, or both, for they are transcendent matters." [Footnote: Ibid., 293, 294.]
This absolute prerogative of the king was attributed to him by others, as well as claimed by himself. Dr. Cowell, professor of civil law at Cambridge, declared that the king "is above the law by his absolute power"; [Footnote: Cowell, Interpreter, under word "king."] and Sir Walter Raleigh wrote that attempts to bind the king by law justified his breach of it, "his charters and other instruments being no other than the surviving witnesses of unconstrained will." [Footnote: Raleigh, Prerogative of Parliament, Preface.] But this definition of the prerogative of the king was an exaggerated description of his real position in the English system of government, and was either academic or argumentative. As properly used, absolute monarchy merely meant an all-powerful not an autocratic government; government was supreme, but the king was not necessarily supreme in the government. As government had been developed in England, in the course of time it had grown up around the monarchy as its centre and found in it its embodiment.
In Anglo-Saxon England government was crude and embryonic, but even then the king held a general oversight over the exercise of its few functions. In the later Middle Ages, when government was somewhat more highly developed, its more numerous functions, in so far as they were not performed by feudal lords or church officials, were fulfilled by the king. It was by the monarchy that the law-courts were formed and commissioned, that Parliament was summoned and given the opportunity for self-development, that the system of taxation and of military life was organized. The great advance in the organization and effectiveness of government which marked the reigns of the Tudor rulers consisted in the elaboration and increased activity of the administrative or royal element in the government.
The royal prerogative might, therefore, be conceived of as the function of keeping the machine of government running. The king was the director and controller of an aggregate of governmental powers. All officials were commissioned in his name, and those of higher rank were actually selected and appointed by him. All foreign intercourse was carried on in his name, and in the main directed by him; Parliament was called, prorogued, and adjourned at his will, and he kept at least a negative control over its actions. All justice, was exercised in his name, and his interests and known wishes sometimes influenced decisions. All charters, whether to cities, to guilds, to possessors of mercantile monopolies, or to commercial and colonizing companies, were issued under his name and seal, and the powers granted in them could not be in opposition to his will. [Footnote: Smith, The Commonwealth of England, book I., chap, ix., book II., chap. iv.]
The powers of the king were, therefore, very real, even if the philosophic contentions of James and other theorists be disregarded; but they were powers restricted in every direction by actual conditions, and exercised through ministers whose familiarity with precedent, whose control over the details of administration, whose dignified offices, and whose personal weight of judgment and character made them, though nominally servants of the king, a real power in the government.
Much of the royal power was exercised through the three great law- courts, King"s Bench, Exchequer, and Common Pleas; through the courts of equity, held by the chancellor, the master of the rolls, and the master of requests; through the half-administrative, half-judicial bodies, the council of the north and the council of the marches of Wales, and through the circuit courts of a.s.size. Much was exercised through higher and lower administrative officers, through the Exchequer, and through lower offices such as the wardrobe and the admiralty.
But the real centre of gravity of the executive powers of the government at this time is to be found in the Council or Privy Council, two terms which are used indiscriminately. [Footnote: Dicey, The Privy Council, 80] This body was made up of seventeen or eighteen members, including all the great ministers of state, the lord chancellor, or, as he was sometimes called, lord keeper of the great seal, the high treasurer, the two secretaries, the great master and the comptroller of the household, the chamberlain and the great admiral, besides a certain number chosen as members of the Privy Council without otherwise occupying office. [Footnote: Acts of the Privy Council, 1594-1597]
There were usually from six to ten members of the council present, the membership of some of the ministers being somewhat perfunctory.
As a body, however, its services were as far from perfunctory as can well be conceived. Its sessions were held almost daily and its sphere of activity was apparently coextensive with the life of England and of all its dependencies. Scarcely an interest, public or private, escapes its attention, whether it is the organization of a campaign in France or the settlement of a family quarrel between father and son; [Footnote: Acts of the Privy Council, 1591-1592, pp 160, 193, 256-258, 292, 327, 414, 476, etc.] whether it is "Sir John Norreis, knight, and Thomas Diggs, esquire," or a Lord Morley, or the chief baron of the Court of Exchequer, Lord Manwood, or some merchants or poor artisans or an "Elice Gailer, of Berton, yeoman," that appear before the council at its summons; whether it is engaged in formulating rules for articles contraband of war, or trying to put an end to illicit coinage on the borders of Wales; whether engaged in one or other of a hundred different interests, the council is always active, intrusive, and high- handed. [Footnote: Ibid, 231, 305, 314, 378, 449, 572.] It regulated manufactures and trade, protected foreigners, disciplined recusants, kept the oversight of customs and other officials, settled disputes between colleges and their tenants, bishops, deans, and government officers, instructed sheriffs and justices of the peace as to their duty, made provision for the keeping up of military and naval forces, and performed other duties so numerous and varied as to defy enumeration or cla.s.sification.
A special duty of the Privy Council was to keep up correspondence with the officials of outlying districts under the dominion of the crown and not within the systematic administration of sheriffs, a.s.size courts, justices of the peace, or other regular governance. These regions included the marches of Wales and of Scotland, certain counties of England, Ireland, and the Channel Islands, the last two of these having been placed under the direct supervision of the Privy Council by statute. [Footnote: Poynings"s Act (1495), Dicey, The Privy Council, 90.] As colonies grew up they fell, naturally, under the special care of the Privy Council. The duty of hearing appeals from colonial courts became and is still a duty of the council; to the Privy Council were referred colonial laws for approval or veto; and the successive bodies formed for the oversight of the colonies, culminating in the Board of Trade and Plantations of 1696, were either committees of the Privy Council or boards acting under its control and reporting to it.
Although most of this control over the colonies was still far in the future, the power exercised by the council over England"s nearest dependency, Ireland, may fairly be taken as antic.i.p.atory of it. Irish matters during the later years of Queen Elizabeth and the early years of James I. demanded much attention and time from the Privy Council, notwithstanding the existence of an Irish Parliament, a lord deputy, various provincial officials, and the whole framework of a subordinate government in Ireland. All the variety of cases that came before the council from England were duplicated from Ireland. In fact, Ireland was treated much as if it were an English county, or better, perhaps, one of those regions of England, like the marches of Wales, which had a somewhat peculiar jurisdiction.
The most important form of oversight of Ireland exercised by the Privy Council was that based upon "Poynings"s Act" of 1495. Sir Edward Poynings, a type of that cla.s.s of vigorous officials of middle rank which were such useful instruments of the Tudor government, was sent, in 1494, to Ireland as lord deputy; the next year he called a parliament at Drogheda and obtained its a.s.sent to a number of statutes designed to introduce order into that disturbed country, and to make real the power of English government by diminishing that of the turbulent lords of the Pale. [Footnote: Morris, Hist. of Ireland, 1496- 1868, pp. 58-63.] As a means of reaching the latter object, the Irish Parliament, which had long been under their control and which had lately made some a.s.sertion of its right of independent action, [Footnote: Irish Statutes, 37 Henry VI.] was to be curbed, and that by its own ordinance.
It was therefore enacted that in the future no bill should be introduced into the Irish Parliament unless its heads had first been submitted to the English Privy Council and obtained the approval of that body and of the king. [Footnote: Irish Statutes, 10 Henry VII., chap. iv.] Moreover, this approval must be given before Parliament met.
This reduced the Irish Parliament to a mere registering body for royal enactments. In 1556 an explanatory act was pa.s.sed [Footnote: Irish Statutes, 3 and 4 Philip and Mary, chap. iv.] amending Poynings"s Act so far as to make it allowable for the Irish Parliament to pa.s.s any bills which had received the approval of the crown and of the English Privy Council at any time during its session. The regular practice of Irish legislation under these acts was as follows: any member of either house of the Irish Parliament might bring in heads of a bill, which, if approved by both houses, were submitted to the viceroy, who referred them to the Irish Privy Council; that body sent them, altered or unaltered, to the king, who referred them to the English Privy Council; this body then approved, rejected, or modified them; and they were returned, through the viceroy, to the Irish Parliament in the form of a bill, to be accepted or rejected as a whole, but not to be further modified. [Footnote: Walpole, Kingdom of Ireland, 253, 254.]
By this c.u.mbrous method only could the Irish Parliament legislate. It was, moreover, subject not only to the English Privy Council, but to the English Parliament. One of the clauses of Poynings"s Act had provided that all statutes which up to that time had been pa.s.sed by the English Parliament should bind Ireland also. [Footnote: Irish Statutes, 10 Henry VII., chap. xxii.] Many laws were subsequently pa.s.sed by the English Parliament for Ireland, thus ignoring the Irish Parliament; but it was not till later than the period we are considering that a claim of the superiority of the English Parliament was definitely made. In the eighteenth century a member of the Irish Parliament published a book called The Case of Ireland Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England Stated. This was formally condemned by the English Parliament and ordered to be burned by the common hangman. [Footnote: Walpole, Kingdom of Ireland, 252.] When still later the Irish House of Lords protested against the reversal of one of its judgments, on appeal, by the English House of Lords, the English Parliament, in 1720, pa.s.sed an act depriving the Irish House of Lords of any appellate jurisdiction, and declaring that "the English Parliament had, hath, and of right ought to have full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the people of Ireland" [Footnote: 6 George I., chap, v.]--a precedent of portentous applicability to the American colonies when a similar question came up in regard to them a half-century later. The power of Parliament over external dependencies was destined to come into greater prominence in the future. The question at issue at the beginning of the seventeenth century was the extent of its power over England itself. Was it, like the Privy Council, the law-courts, and other such bodies, merely a creation and dependency of the crown? Or was it, although in form an a.s.sembly of royal councillors, meeting only when the king summoned it and ceasing to exist when he ordered its dissolution, a branch of the government co-ordinate with or even in certain relations superior to him?
In the organization of Parliament there were several grave deficiencies, if it were to be considered an independent body. It was a composite a.s.sembly of two ill-related parts. The House of Lords, which consisted at this time of some fifty members, [Footnote: D"Ewes, Journals, 599] had an existence as a royal council quite apart from the House of Commons, and there were still many evidences that it was the original body and the House of Commons a later accretion. In 1601, when Elizabeth appeared in the House of Lords to open her last Parliament, the Commons, who were waiting in their own chamber, did not hear of her presence promptly, and when they hastened to the Lords" chamber the door was closed and they could not obtain admission, so they "returned back again into their own House much discontented." [Footnote: Ibid, 620.] The Lords had various privileges and const.i.tutional rights of their own: as individuals, of trial by peers, of being represented by proxies, of entering individual protests, of audience with the sovereign, of certain advantages of procedure in the courts of common law; as a body, of trying impeachments brought by the House of Commons, and of acting as a final court of appeal for all lower courts whether of law or equity. [Footnote: Pike, Const.i.tutional History of the House of Lords, chaps. ix., xi.-xiv.]
The House of Commons was composed of two knights or gentlemen elected for each shire; and one or two representatives for each of nearly three hundred cities and boroughs. The system of representation was crude and antiquated. The knights of the shire were elected by the "forty- shilling freeholders"--that is to say, by all who had a tenure approaching ownership in lands whose annual rental value reached that sum. This was an electorate that reached far down in the social scale, but it was limited by the tendency of English land to remain in the hands of large owners, and by the influence, legitimate and illegitimate, of the gentry, the great county n.o.ble families, and the crown. The knights of the shire, therefore, as a matter of fact, not only belonged to, but were elected by and reflected the interests and feelings of, the great body of rural gentry; while the yeomen exercised little influence in Parliament, as the laboring cla.s.ses certainly exercised none at all.
There were vast differences in the system of election by the towns which were represented in Parliament, varying all the way from appointment by patrons, in some towns, down through divers grades of extension of the franchise to an almost universal suffrage in a few.
Nevertheless, from the towns, as from the counties, it was representatives of the upper and middle cla.s.ses that sat in the Commons. There was no approach to equality in the const.i.tuencies represented in the House of Commons; members were elected often by outside influence and always by a narrow const.i.tuency, and no control was possessed by the electors over their representatives.
Yet these defects were more apparent than real. The special powers of the House of Lords were becoming shadowy, and almost the only real significance of the peerage was when it was united with the House of Commons and made a part of the larger whole of Parliament. [Footnote: 36 and 37 Henry VIII., f. 60 (Dyer, Reports, pt. i, 327).]
In the House of Commons was the real source of power of Parliament.
Whatever the imperfections in the method of election, whatever the irregularity of const.i.tuencies, whatever the crudity of the idea of representation, the five hundred or more knights, country gentlemen, lawyers, and merchants who made up the Commons at this time [Footnote: Names of Members Returned to Serve in Parliament, pt. i., 442-448.]
were convinced that in some way they stood for the whole nation. When Parliament had been once summoned and organized, it became a body with three hundred years of precedent back of it; and in the days of the Stuarts it confronted the king with claims to a very different position and power from those he was inclined to concede to it. So far from a.s.similating their position to that of the law-courts, Privy Council, and other such bodies, at the very opening of the reign of James the Commons declared "there is not the highest standing court in this land that ought to enter into competency either for dignity or authority with this high court of Parliament which with your Majesty"s royal a.s.sent gives laws to other courts, but from other courts receives neither laws nor orders." [Footnote: Apology of the Commons, 1604; Petyt, Jus Parliamentarium, 227-247.]
The course of time intensified this difference of opinion. "Set chairs for the amba.s.sadors," James cried, mockingly, when the deputies from the House of Commons visited him with a pet.i.tion during the dispute of 1621. To the king Parliament seemed to be making a claim to sovereignty against which the only proper argument was a jest. Shortly afterwards he wrote to the speaker of the House of Commons, "These are, therefore, to command you to make known in our name unto the House that none therein shall presume henceforth to meddle with anything concerning our government or deep matters of state." He insisted that "these are unfit things to be handled in Parliament except your king requires it of you.
"As to the privileges of Parliament James wrote, "We cannot allow of the style calling it your ancient and undoubted right and inheritance, but could rather have wished that ye had said that your privileges were derived from the grace and permission of our ancestors and us." [Footnote: Letter of the king to the House of Commons, December 10,1621.]
The Commons, on the other hand, a week later, placed this protestation on their minutes: "That the liberties, privileges, and jurisdictions of Parliament are the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England, and that the arduous and urgent affairs concerning the king, state, and defence of the realm, and of the church of England and the maintenance and making of laws, and redress of mischiefs and grievances which daily happen within this realm, are proper subjects and matters of counsel and debate in Parliament; and that in the handling and proceeding of those businesses every member of the House of Parliament hath and of right ought to have freedom of speech to propound, treat, reason, and bring to conclusion the same."
[Footnote: Rushworth, Historical Collections, I., 53.] It is true that James sent for the Journal and tore this page from its records, but he could not tear the belief in its statements from the hearts of a great part of the people of England.