CHAPTER XXX STRUGGLE IN ENGLAND FOR CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT 183. The great question which confronted England in the seventeenth century was whether the king should be permitted to rule the people, as God's representative, or should submit to the constant control of the nation's representatives, i.e., Parliament. In France the Estates General met for the last time in 1614, and thereafter the French king made laws and executed them without asking the advice of any one except his immediate counselors. In general, the rulers on the continent exercised despotic powers, and James I of England and his son Charles I would gladly have made themselves absolute rulers, for they entertained the same exalted notions of the divine right of kings which prevailed across the English Channel. England finally succeeded, however, in adjusting the relations between king and Parliament in a very happy way, so as to produce a limited, or constitutional, monarchy. The long and bitter struggle between the house of Stuart and the English Parliament plays an important rôle in the history of Europe at large, as well as in that of England. After the French Revolution, at the end of the eighteenth century, the English system began to become popular on the continent, and it has now replaced the older absolute monarchy in all the kingdoms of western Europe. On the death of Elizabeth in 1603, James I, the first of the Stuarts, ascended the English throne. He was, it will be remembered, the son of Mary Queen of Scots, and was known The question of absolute or limited monarchy in England. Accession of James I, 1603-1625. James' belief in the divine right' of kings. His own expression of his claims. in Scotland as James VI; consequently England and Scotland now came under the same ruler. This did not, however, make the relations between the two countries much happier, for a century to come at least. The chief interest of James' reign lay in his tendency to exalt the royal prerogative, and in the systematic manner in which he extolled absolute monarchy in his writings and speeches and discredited it by his conduct. James was an unusually learned man, for a king, but his learning did not enlighten him in matters of common sense. As a man and a ruler, he was far inferior to his unschooled and light-hearted contemporary, Henry IV of France. Henry VIII had been a heartless despot, and Elizabeth had ruled the nation in a highhanded manner; but both of them had known how to make themselves popular and had had the good sense to say as little as possible about their rights. James, on the contrary, had a fancy for discussing his high position. "As for the absolute prerogative of the crown," he declares, "that is no subject for the tongue of a lawyer, nor is it lawful to be disputed. It is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what God can do: . . . so it is presumption and high contempt in a subject to dispute what a king can do, or say that a king cannot do this or that." The king, James claimed, could make any kind of law or statute that he thought meet, without any advice from Parliament, although he might, if he chose, accept its suggestions. "He is overlord of the whole land, so is he master over every person who inhabiteth the same, having power over the life and death of every one of them: for although a just prince will not take the life of one of his subjects without a clear law, yet the same laws whereby he taketh them are made by himself and his predecessors; so the power flows always from himself." A good king will act according to law, but he is above the law and is not bound thereby except voluntarily and for good-example giving to his subjects. These theories, taken from James' work on The Law of Free Monarchies, seem strange and unreasonable to us. But he was really only claiming the rights which his predecessors had enjoyed, and such as were conceded to the kings of France until the French Revolution. According to the theory of "divine right," the king did not owe his power to the nation but to God, who had appointed him to be the father of his people. From God he derived all the prerogatives necessary to maintain order and promote justice; consequently he was responsible to God alone, and not to the people, for the exercise of his powers. It is unnecessary to follow in detail the troubles between James and his Parliament and the various methods which he invented for raising money without the sanction of Parliament, for all this forms only the preliminary to the fatal experience of James' son, Charles I. In his foreign policy James showed as little sense as in his relations with his own people. He refused to help his son-inlaw when he became king of Bohemia.' But when the Palatinate was given by the emperor to Maximilian of Bavaria, James struck upon the extraordinary plan of forming an alliance with the hated Spain and inducing its king to persuade the emperor to reinstate the "winter king" in his former possessions. In order to conciliate Spain, Charles, Prince of Wales, was to marry a Spanish princess. Naturally this proposal was very unpopular among the English Protestants, and it finally came to nothing. The theory of divine right.' James I's foreign policy. Literature in the time of and James I. Although England under James I failed to influence deeply the course of affairs in Europe at large, his reign is distinguished by the work of unrivaled writers who gave England a literature which outshone that of any other of the European countries. Shakespeare is generally admitted to have been Shakespeare, the greatest dramatist the world has ever produced. While he wrote many of his plays before the death of Elizabeth, 1 See above, p. 467. 1564-1616. Francis Bacon, 1561-1626. Othello, King Lear, and The Tempest belong to the reign of James. Francis Bacon, philosopher and statesman, did much for the advancement of scientific research by advocating new methods of reasoning based upon a careful observation of natural phenomena instead of upon Aristotle's logic. He urged investigators to take the path already indicated over three centuries earlier by his namesake, Roger Bacon." The most worthy monument of the strong and beautiful English of the period is to be found in the translation of the Bible, lation of the prepared in James' reign and still generally used in all the countries where English is spoken.2 The King James trans Bible. Charles I, 1625-1649. 184. Charles I was somewhat more dignified than his father, but he was quite as obstinately set upon having his own way and showed no more skill in winning the confidence of his subjects. He did nothing to remove the disagreeable impressions of his father's reign and began immediately to quarrel with Parliament. When that body refused to grant him any money, mainly because they thought that it was likely to be wasted by his favorite, the duke of Buckingham, Charles formed the plan of winning their favor by a great military victory. After James I had reluctantly given up his cherished Spanish alliance, Charles had married a French princess, Henrietta Maria, the daughter of Henry IV. In spite of this marriage Charles now proposed to aid the Huguenots whom Richelieu was besieging in their town of La Rochelle. He also hoped to gain popularity by prosecuting a war against Spain, whose king was energetically supporting the Catholic League in Germany. Accordingly, in spite of Parliament's refusal to grant 1 See above, p. 273. 2 See the translators' dedication to James I in the authorized version of the Bible. Only recently has it been deemed necessary to revise the remarkable work of the translators of the early seventeenth century. Modern scholars discovered very few serious mistakes in this authorized version, but found it expedient for the sake of clearness to modernize a number of words and expressions. him the necessary funds, he embarked in war. With only the money which he could raise by irregular means, Charles arranged an expedition to take Cadiz and the Spanish treasure ships which arrived there once a year from America, laden with gold and silver. The expedition failed, as well as Charles' attempt to help the Huguenots. In his attempts to raise money without a regular grant from Parliament, Charles had resorted to vexatious exactions. The law prohibited him from asking for gifts from his people, but it did not forbid his asking them to lend him money, however little prospect there might be of his ever repaying it. Five gentlemen who refused to pay such a forced loan were imprisoned by the mere order of the king. This raised the question of whether the king had the right to send to prison those whom he wished without showing legal cause for their arrest. of Right This and other attacks upon the rights of his subjects roused The Petition Parliament. In 1628 that body drew up the celebrated Petition of Right,' which is one of the most important documents in the history of the English Constitution. In it Parliament called the king's attention to his illegal exactions, and to the acts of his agents who had in sundry ways molested and disquieted the people of the realm. Parliament therefore "humbly prayed" the king that no man need thereafter "make or yield any gift, loan, benevolence, tax, or such like charge without consent of Parliament; that no free man should be imprisoned or suffer any punishment except according to the laws and statutes of the realm as presented in the Great Charter; and that soldiers should not be quartered upon the people on any pretext whatever. Very reluctantly Charles consented to this restatement of the limitations which the English had always, in theory at least, placed upon the arbitrary power of their king. 1 See Lee, Source-book of English History, pp. 348-352. |