(This article was written by Professor Christopher
Thompson. He has given his permission to post it on my blog).
The debate about the origins of the English Civil War is
as old as the conflict itself. The view taken by S.R.Gardiner and C.H.Firth
that it was largely the result of the constitutional and religious struggles
between the early Stuart kings and their subjects long ago ceased to be
regarded as adequate. The focus of investigation switched to economic and
social causes and beyond to the examination of urban and county history. Such
has been the pace at which these enquiries were conducted that no new orthodoxy
or synthesis commanding widespread assent has emerged.
The seminal influence of Wallace Notestein and his
colleagues and pupils in the United States ensured that the importance of
Parliamentary proceedings in this period was not forgotten. Our debt to the
work of American scholars in this field has grown considerably in the last
decade and a half with the publication of some of the major sources for the
subject and a flow of studies on individual sessions and institutional procedures.
Here in England, the influence of the History Schools of Oxford and Cambridge
has been equally apparent in recent years. But the piecemeal work of revision
in both countries has been superseded with the publication by Conrad Russell of
a series of articles and a remarkable book on the Parliamentary politics of the
1620s. Together, they constitute a radical challenge to the old orthodoxies
about early Stuart Parliamentary history.
The genesis of Russell’s work lies in a conscious protest
against the ‘Whig’ view that Parliament was set on a collision course with the
Crown leading inevitably to a struggle for supremacy in the state. He therefore
set out to confute the belief that Parliament was a powerful institution and to
undermine the contention that there was a constitutional struggle between
‘government’ and ‘opposition’. His polemically brilliant article,
‘Parliamentary History in Perspective, 1604-1629’, was devoted to demonstrating
that the withholding of supply was not an effective bargaining counter.
There
was indeed no systematic attempt to make supply conditional on the redress of
grievances: on the one occasion that this was tried – over impositions in 1614
– the manoeuvre failed. And there was relatively little effort until 1626 to
bargain over the amount of supply demanded by the Crown. His further denial
that the House of Commons had wide-ranging constitutional aims or that it
intended to restrict the prerogatives of the monarch and enlarge its own powers
struck at the heart of Whig views. On the contrary, as he showed in his book,
Parliaments and English Politics, 1621-1629, the constitutional ideas of M.P.s
were conservative, aiming at consensus within the House and harmony with the
king. It was for this reason that they were more reluctant to force
confrontation with the monarch over their privileges than has sometimes been
supposed. Because there was no clear Court or government policy, let alone a
substantial legislative programme, because of the breadth of the Court’s
political and religious patronage, because, indeed, Court support was vitally
necessary for a successful career in the counties, it was institutionally and
ideologically impossible for there to be a fundamental ‘Court-Country’
division.
It was not until the late-1620s that the rise of
Arminianism made religion a controversial subject. The persistent localism of
M.P.s made them reluctant to accept responsibility for financing the war into
which the Duke of Buckingham and Prince Charles had led them in 1624. As a
result, the administrative machinery of the kingdom proved increasingly unable
to cope with the burden placed on it by the war effort. Parliament’s failure to
accept its responsibilities inevitably raised questions about its continuing
existence and it was no surprise that it was dispensed with after 1629. To
interpret the Parliamentary history of the period since 1604 as a contest for
power between government and opposition is an illusion. “Before 1640,
Parliament was not powerful, and it did not contain an ‘opposition’.”
Professor Russell’s case is a formidable one, argued with
great learning and winning general acceptance from his reviewers. Many of his
arguments – about the basic conservatism of M.P.s and their desire to preserve
a harmonious balance between the rights of the subject and those of the king or
on the contribution that Court faction made to the revival of Parliamentary
judicature in the 1620s – were already familiar. His attempt to reassess
Parliamentary history in the light of the research conducted into county
politics in the early seventeenth century is a welcome one. If his general
analysis is sound, then our view of the political history of the period must be
profoundly altered. It is on this point that there has been most reaction.
There have been
vigorous counter-attacks to re-capture the intellectual territory he has taken,
to re-establish the importance of long-term constitutional and ideological
differences and to re-emphasise the significance of social conflict. The use of
the term ‘opposition’ has been strongly defended. But it is noticeable that
none of these attempts to undermine the bastions of his position have tempted
Professor Russell out of his citadel.
It may therefore be of interest to look again at some of
the central issues he has raised to see how far his claims can be fully
sustained. It may then be possible to reconsider, however schematically, the
analytical framework in which he has placed the politics of the period.
The terms in which Russell formulated his original
argument and subsequently developed it are of prime importance. He was
concerned with the “ingrained assumption of English Parliamentary historians
that Parliament, well before the Civil War, was already set on a course which
led to serious challenges to the Crown and ultimately to political supremacy.”
The theory of the ‘high road to Civil War’ marked by periodic constitutional
milestones implied in his view the belief that Parliament was a powerful
institution: “ it is only if Parliament is thought of as a great power in the
State that it can be made to fill the role for which it is cast, as a potential
challenger to the king for supreme power.”
Its corollary is the belief that “the Parliaments of
these years witnessed a constitutional struggle between two ‘sides’, government
and opposition, or, in modern language, court and country.” It is on these
propositions “logically implied in statements made by well-known historians”
which “have gained the status of received opinions” that he wreaked such
terrible destruction. What is striking about his analysis, quite apart from the
exculpation of Notestein from wholehearted subscription to its provisions, is
that its adherents are nowhere identified nor are their views cited in detail.
I have no doubt that some statements along these lines can be found but I am
not persuaded that they have enjoyed much scholarly currency in recent times.
My second
reservation is more serious. It is not essential to view Parliament as “a great
power in the State” in order to argue that there were persistent areas of
conflict with the Crown: its role, or more particularly that of the House of
Commons, as defender of the rights and liberties of the subject and its
responsibilities as the representative body of the kingdom provide a more
satisfying explanatory framework.
To argue furthermore from the contents of the opening
speeches by King James to successive meetings that there was little or no
Conciliar desire to legislate (apart from the issue of the Union with Scotland)
and therefore much less power for either House to obstruct royal wishes
involves a drastic foreshortening of perspective. It renders inexplicable the
Earl of Salisbury’s efforts to manage the business of the first Parliament of
the reign, the bills of grace prepared by the Privy Council and offered on the
King’s behalf in 1614, Conciliar preparations for dealing with grievances
before the 1621 Parliament and the measures taken in the light of proceedings
then which paved the way for some of the legislation of 1624. It is in the mid-1620s,
as D.H.Willson pointed out, that the break in preparations comes. The
contraction in the Crown’s legislative programme to little more than a demand
for supply and the decline in the arts of Parliamentary management was a slower
process than Russell recognised.
The importance of the process of bargaining
between the King and the Privy Council on the one hand and the House of Commons
on the other over supply and the redress of grievances is thereby partially
obscured. As a result, the explanation for the deterioration in relations
between them and the development of sustained criticism of the Crown’s methods
of raising finance is reduced to Court faction and localist resistance to
taxation. This is much too rigid a formula to sustain the explanatory burden.
It is true that Russell was able to support his initial
analysis by offering a test of Parliamentary power over the granting of supply
and the redress of grievances. “A monopoly of the power of extraordinary
taxation was the only means by which Parliament could, in a situation of
conflict, hope to force its will on a reluctant Crown.” But this apparently
potent weapon proved surprisingly ineffective in practice. The ability to link
subsidies with the redress of grievances did not confer any significant
bargaining power on the House of Commons in the first Parliament of King James
and the attempt to force the Crown to abandon its right to levy impositions in
1614 ended in dismal failure. It was even further from the minds of M.P.s to
use this power as a lever in 1621 when they voted two subsidies to the King
just over a fortnight after the opening of the session. Subsidies were voted in
1624 before grievances were discussed.
Admittedly, the House of Commons went through the motion
of requesting redress before supply in 1625 but this was not successful and the
attempt to grant Tonnage and Poundage for only one year backfired when Charles
went on collecting it without statutory authority. It was only in 1626 that a
belated attempt was made to link supply with the redress of grievances by
voting subsidies early and then delaying the bill in committee to see how the
King would respond to the attack on Buckingham. But Charles’s decision to
dissolve Parliament and his success in collecting the Forced Loan called the
point of this manoeuvre into question.
Its repetition in 1628 did not prevent Charles evading
the restrictions of the Petition of Right. “The conclusion appears irresistible
that the withholding of supply was not a powerful bargaining counter. At the end
of the Parliament of 1628, the King still had impositions, Tonnage and
Poundage, Buckingham, and, as the event was to show, the powers of arbitrary
taxation and arbitrary imprisonment. Parliament’s inability to sustain a
constitutional struggle with the Crown appeared to have been clearly proved.
The one challenge in James’s reign had achieved nothing, and three in four
years at the beginning of Charles’s reign had merely called Parliament’s
survival into question ... if Parliament was to continue at all, it would be on
the King’s terms.”
This appears to be a convincing explanation of the
relative impotence of Parliament in general and of the House of Commons in
particular. It is very doubtful, however, whether the test of financial
coercion which Russell applies is a valid one. In the first place, it ignores
the other sources of revenue – from the sale of land or titles, the resources
of the customs farms and other levies on external trade, the granting of
patents and monopolies, the exploitation of feudal rights and, ultimately, of
the Crown’s emergency powers – which were available right up until the autumn
of 1640 in default of Parliamentary supply. It is not, therefore, enough for
Russell to contend that the sums offered were too small to be worth bargaining
for or that the concessions Parliament sought were worth more than the
prospective supply.
There were alternatives open to James and Charles up to
and after the Short Parliament. Secondly, the argument is hardly compatible
with the prolonged negotiations that took place between the two Houses and King
James over the surrender of wardship and purveyance in return for an assured
annual income in the Parliament of 1604 to 1610. It was precisely the power of
the House of Commons and the House of Lords to sanction an alternative means of
raising supply from the subject that made a bargain with Parliament so
attractive to Salisbury and the King. On the subject of the negotiations over
the Great Contract, Russell says absolutely nothing. His remarks to the effect
that supply in 1614 was conditional on the abandonment of impositions are
misleading: the House of Commons decided to defer discussion of supply until
the issue of impositions had been resolved but informed the King that supply
would be granted at the end of the session. The quarrel with the House of Lords
over Bishop Neile’s remarks on the subject prevented any further progress. Even
when James’s ultimatum on supply had been delivered, the Commons offered supply
if he would hear the arguments against impositions in the normal Parliamentary
way.
There is no sign in the records of the King being “asked
to choose between impositions, at £70,000 a year, and a sum unlikely to exceed
two subsidies, of £70,000 each, with no certainty that they would be followed
by more.” It was James’s insistence on supply regardless of the redress of
grievances that precipitated the dissolution. Nor is it true to say that “the
issue of impositions remained unmentioned” in the next Parliament until
December, 1621.
There was a persistent stream of complaints about the
burden impositions placed on trade from February of that year onwards. Sir
Robert Phelips, whom Russell quotes as his authority for stating that the lower
House had not discussed the issue before 5th December, had explicitly denied
the King’s right to impose a week earlier. Serjeant Hitcham’s attempt to defend
impositions in April, 1624 resulted in his speech being erased from the
Journal. The charges against Lord Treasurer Middlesex included, as Russell
himself notes, allegations over the unauthorised levying of impositions. This
is hardly “the most deafening” of silences.
Attempts were subsequently made to
settle the issue along with that of the collection of Tonnage and Poundage in
1625, 1626, 1628 and 1629. The comparison Russell draws with the apparent lack
of protest over the collection of Tonnage and Poundage without Parliamentary
sanction and the absence of objections from M.P.s to its continuing collection
is poorly chosen. The draft declaration made by the House of Commons in June,
1626 and the formal one of June, 1628 specifically condemned the taking of
Tonnage and Poundage and other impositions, in the latter case because it was a
breach of the fundamental laws of the kingdom.
Russell’s handling of the issue of supply is just as
wayward in other instances. In February, 1621, King James’s initial attempt to
gain supply on the 5th, the first full day of business, was frustrated when the
House of Commons refused to discuss the subject until the attempt to restrict
members’ freedom of speech was abandoned: the move was effective enough to
induce James to make concessions ten days later whereupon a free gift of two
subsidies was agreed.
The further
subsidy offered in November, 1621 was intended to keep the army in the
Palatinate in being while the Commons incidentally completed the passage of
legislation: a full discussion of supply for war was envisaged in a session
after Christmas. There was no sign here of “a sharp fall ... in the bargaining
power control of the subsidy conferred on the House of Commons.” The claim that
the subsidies voted in March, 1624 were granted “before grievances were
discussed” is not supported by his own subsequent account of proceedings in the
lower House and is in implied conflict with his observation that “there was no
possible further concession for which members could have been holding out.”
Even with the exception of 1614, it is impossible to accept his assertion that
“on almost every other occasion up to 1626, they voted as many subsidies as
were asked of them and did so with a reasonably good grace.” King James was
obliged to explain away the request he made for a grant in June, 1604 and the
addition of a third subsidy and a final two fifteenths to a grant made in 1606
was carried by a single vote. In July, 1610, the grant of one subsidy and one
fifteenth had to be carried by a division and was followed by the defeat of a
proposal to grant two subsidies.
It is clear, too,
that the single subsidy offered in November, 1621 fell far short of what was
anticipated. James’s demand for five subsidies and ten fifteenths for the
“great business” of the Palatinate plus a further one subsidy and two
fifteenths each year until his debts were paid had to be hurriedly explained,
qualified and reduced by Buckingham and Prince Charles in March, 1624. The two
subsidies granted to the new King in July, 1625 were a free gift. But there is
nothing surprising at all in the House’s discussion of a further grant at
Oxford in August, 1625. Since the request came from Charles himself, the
Commons could do no less. But, despite personal pleas by the King and Duke,
Russell’s dictum did not hold good: there was no offer of supply and no grace
whatever about the attack on Buckingham that followed.
The problem with Russell’s entire account of the
interaction between supply and the redress of grievances in early Stuart
Parliaments springs from the mechanistic criteria on which his judgment is
based. His adoption of Professor Koenigsberger’s suggestion that “a Parliament
which failed to insist on redress of grievances before supply had no chance of
winning its struggle with the monarchy” led him to the conclusion, once he had
examined the early seventeenth century evidence, that “the English Parliament
before 1629 was heading for extinction.”
Yet this test is not one which accords with Tudor
Parliamentary practice or, as his analysis shows, with that of early Stuart
Parliaments. His idea that delaying or threatening to delay supply was not used
as a device to secure concessions until the mid-1620s is equally fallacious. It
had been discussed in Elizabethan Parliaments and was actually employed in 1601
when the threat to delay the subsidy bill in the House of Commons produced
almost immediate concessions over the grievance of monopolies.
The Earl of
Salisbury warned his fellow Councillors before the 1606 session that the King’s
programme, which included supply, might be delayed in the lower House “because
it is not unlike that many which have desires of their own will at least
protract the consent until they see some hope of retribution, and others which
have absolute indisposition to all, or part of them, will come prepared with as
many arguments as wit or will can furnish.” Lord Chancellor Ellesmere
complained of M.P.s in 1610 who planned to prevent any grant being made at all.
Delaying tactics were certainly employed in 1614 and 1621.
Bargaining over supply and the redress of grievances took
place throughout the period. It did so within a set of conventions that the artificial
test applied by Russell ignores. The House of Commons was perfectly capable of
challenging royal exactions and of refusing concessions from the monarch if the
subject was expected to pay too high a price. It could and did delay discussion
on supply to persuade the King to consider concessions on controversial issues
well before 1626. The result was that the Crown was forced to turn towards a
more vigorous exploitation of its prerogative revenues in peacetime and of its
emergency powers in the military crisis of the late-1620s. Both evoked a
fundamental challenge from the House of Commons.
The second theme strongly developed in Russell’s work
involves a shift in focus away from Parliament. The majority of important
political events in England took place, so he argues, outside its walls: major
decisions were usually taken at Court. Diplomatic manoeuvring over Prince
Charles’s marriage, the trade depression of the 1620s, county reactions to the
billeting of soldiers later in the decade, etc., “all deserve more prominence
than the echoes of these events which can be heard at Westminster.” Parliaments
were thus “ad hoc gatherings of men reacting to events elsewhere” and their
deliberations ought to be seen “in part, as second-hand history.” The Court itself,
especially under James and “throughout Buckingham’s period of power”, was open
to men of widely differing political and religious persuasions.
James’s lack of energy and of enthusiasm for political
programmes precluded him from presiding over an ideologically polarised
country. He came to the last years of his reign being served by a
crypto-Catholic Secretary of State, Sir George Calvert, and an Archbishop of
Canterbury, George Abbot, “who was as nearly Puritan as most of the House of
Commons.” Buckingham avoided such polarisation by the sheer universality of his
patronage. He was the patron of the Puritan divine, John Preston, and of the
Arminians in the Church: the York House conference between them in February,
1626 was not a contest between ‘ins’ and ‘outs’: it was a contest between rival
groups of his supporters. And the quarrel over predestination and free will
remained “first and foremost a dispute within the Court” in the years before
1629. Even so, Buckingham’s dominance was never absolute and it was possible
for a major Court figure like the Earl of Pembroke to use Parliament to attack
him and to survive. In fact, Court faction fed the revival of Parliamentary
judicature. But to have opposed a Court whose leading figures displayed such a
range of views “would have required a formidable feat of political gymnastics.”
Few M.P.s were “so eccentric that they could not find one among the many
potential court patrons to share their political objectives.”
Court favour was, in any case, necessary to enable the
most rustic of country gentlemen to perform his local duties. The good will of
the King and the Privy Council was a prerequisite for appointment to office and
for promotion: hence, the concern of men like Eliot, Phelips and Wentworth to
keep open their links with the Court. But they also had to accommodate
themselves to the views of their neighbours and countrymen in their localities
and when they represented them in Parliament. Under the strain of war, which
had been entered more in a spirit of compliance than of enthusiasm in 1624,
their loyalties came under increasing pressure: service to the Court conflicted
with duty to the Country. The attempt to put local administration on a war
footing brought relations between the centre and the localities and between the
King and Parliament to the point of collapse. It was only the commitment of
Charles to customary ways that kept the institution in being for so long.
There is no doubt about the compelling nature of this
synthesis and the deep mark it has left on subsequent studies. It offers a
persuasive combination of analysis and narrative based on the concept of an
‘open’ Court interacting with the constraints imposed by the relatively closed
world of county politics. More cogently still, it provides a key to the
functional breakdown of administration which hamstrung the war effort in the
late-1620s.
Nonetheless, it is not entirely convincing. First of all,
it lacks a sustained analysis of Court and Conciliar politics without which the
Parliamentary history of the period is deprived of a vital dimension. The
interplay between Conciliar politics and the debates in the two Houses is only
illuminated intermittently in Russell’s work. Secondly, it implies that the
Court remained ‘open’ and that the range of its political and religious
patronage did not contract during the 1620s. It is highly doubtful whether this
is true after the spring or summer of 1626 when the resort to the emergency
powers of the Crown and the rise of Arminian influence in the Church altered
the political perspective and religious complexion of the Court. The domestic
conflict that ensued clearly involved an ideological element.
Finally, it is altogether too simple to explain
Parliamentary protest in 1628 as the result of the pressure the war measures
adopted since 1624 put on county administration. Men, money and munitions were
provided on a scale not seen since the late-sixteenth century. The machinery
linking central and local government did work under this pressure. The problem
lies in explaining how this was achieved and why the effort could not be
sustained.
Russell’s analysis of the evolution of Court politics in
the early-1620s and the effects of this process on the Commons’ debates on
foreign policy illustrate my case. The major issue of this period concerned the
role England should play in the developing crisis over Bohemia and the
subsequent invasion of the Palatinate by Spanish and Imperial forces. King
James and an important group of pro-Spanish Privy Councillors led by the Earl
of Arundel were committed to resolving the crisis without imperilling England’s
diplomatic relationship with Spain: others, including the Earls of Pembroke and
Southampton and Archbishop George Abbot, were more inclined to support overt
intervention on behalf of James’s son-in-law, the Elector Frederick. The
picture Russell offers is of an initially quiescent House of Commons drawn by
conciliar invitation into a debate on foreign policy in November, 1621 and led
(or, perhaps, misled) by confusion over the Court’s official line into raising
the issue of Prince Charles’s proposed marriage to the Infanta, thereby
provoking the dispute on privilege which led to the dissolution. The failure,
however, of the marriage negotiations meant that the House of Commons had to be
cajoled by the Prince and the Duke of Buckingham aided by Pembroke and his
allies into supporting a breach of the treaties and into providing supply for a
war. The succession of Charles to the throne in the spring of 1625 confirmed
the Duke’s supremacy at Court and quietened his critics there. But the attempt
to win further supply foundered on the resistance of the lower House to the war
policy. It was the only Court-Country confrontation of the decade.
Unfortunately, the elaboration of this analysis and the conclusions drawn from
it are largely wrong.
There was an entirely clear ‘Court’ line articulated by
Lord Digby, Lord Treasurer Middlesex and Lord Keeper Williams, later repeated
by their fellow Privy Councillors, Edmondes and Weston, in the autumn of 1621
that supply should be given for the Palatinate and the broader issues of war
strategy forborne. The call for an expedition to the West Indies, which Russell
attributes to Solicitor General Heath and uses as evidence of official
encouragement for a wider war, was actually made by George Shilleto. Goring’s
famous intervention on 29th November indicates that the Palatinate was the
central objective in Court policy and a threat of war against Spain a useful
bargaining point in the conflict envisaged in the Empire. Even those like Sir
Thomas Wentworth, Sir Edward Coke and Sir Francis Seymour who, according to
Russell, wished merely to pass bills, were prepared to support supply for the
forces already in the Palatinate and to discuss the war strategy in detail
after Christmas.
The Court’s objectives were much more clearly defined in
1621 than a reading of Russell’s work suggests. So, too, was the willingness of
the House of Commons to fund a war. But the failure to obtain supply then and
the need to override the resistance of the pro-Spanish group in the Council
made the difficulties of managing the House of Commons in 1624 all the greater.
New allies – Oxford and Say and Sele in the House of Lords, Sandys, Phelips and
Diggs in the Commons – had to be sought by the Prince and the Duke.
It is true that the king would have preferred to have
continued to use diplomatic means to recover the Palatinate but he was by no
means as isolated at Court as Russell implies. A persuasive case has been put
forward by Dr Ball to suggest that James had the assistance and support of the
Earl of Pembroke and, indirectly, of Sir Benjamin Rudyerd in seeking adequate
supply before foreign adventures were contemplated. There is a marked lack of
appreciation of the tactical manoeuvring that went on in the Commons before it
was agreed to vote three subsidies and three fifteenths on 20th March. It is
difficult to agree that “war had been forced on the House of Commons in
circumstances most of its members did not understand” when they were apparently
able, as subsidy commissioners, “to go back to their homes and make speeches
explaining why they had voted money.” The divisions at Court were not settled
by Charles’s accession. All the contemporary evidence from Lord Keeper
Williams’s correspondence, the dispatches of the French and Venetian
Ambassadors, and the fragments in the State Papers runs directly against
Russell’s view that the “one necessary ingredient to an explosive Parliament,
an openly divided court” was missing in 1625. These divisions explain why the
request for further supply at Westminster in July had to be laid aside. The
strain on Conciliar solidarity was equally apparent at Oxford in August where
Buckingham tried to use complaints over the lax enforcement of the recusancy
laws to bring the Lord Keeper down and where Arundel and Pembroke were questioned
in the Privy Council about accusations in the lower House against the Duke.
The renewal of the plea for supply provoked an assault
that was clearly the prelude to impeachment proceedings. Russell’s failure to
notice any of this material on Court conflicts vitiates his entire account.
Just as the Parliament of 1624 witnessed the defeat of the pro-Spanish group on
the Privy Council and the widening of the range of the Prince and Duke’s
contacts, so that of 1625 marked the estrangement of many of their
Parliamentary allies from the previous year. The Court was no longer ‘open’ in
the sense it had been in 1621 with room for differing views on foreign policy:
the nature of the war policy adopted since 1624 meant that its representative
character had been partly lost and that its range of Parliamentary contacts was
contracting sharply.
The political contraction of the Court was accompanied by
a notable change in its religious complexion. Under James, the episcopate was
largely filled by men who were doctrinal Calvinists. But a minority of men like
Neile, Andrewes and Montagu existed who rejected predestinarian teaching and
who profited from the King’s distaste for criticism tinged with Calvinist
undertones during the negotiations for the Spanish match. The prospect of
winning Prince Charles’s support is known to have been discussed by them in
1623 and it is likely that the publication of Richard Montagu’s ‘New Gag’,
which reduced the number of issues disputed with Rome and which specifically
repudiated predestinarian Calvinism, was intended as a deliberate challenge.
There is some evidence to suggest that the petition from
Yates and Ward complaining about the book to the House of Commons in 1624 had
the indirect backing of Archbishop George Abbot. But the lower House’s decision
to refer the work to Abbot to deal with was frustrated by King James’s action
in passing it to a small group of sympathisers – Williams, Neile and Dean White
of Carlisle – for examination. Montagu’s clarification of his views in ‘Appello
Caesarem’ was equally provocative to his Parliamentary opponents. The
condemnation of his doctrines in the House of Commons in July, 1625 revealed
that he was the servant and chaplain of the King himself. Montagu and his
episcopal supporters - Laud, Howson and Buckeridge – responded by appealing to
Buckingham with a denial of Parliament’s jurisdiction. The issue was barely
taken any further in the second session at Oxford. But the King’s personal
support for the Arminians could be detected in the exclusion of bishops of
Calvinist persuasion from appointments to episcopal committees. Buckingham was
placed in the position of having to choose between Montagu, whose doctrines
were debated at York House on 11th and 17th February, 1626, and John Preston,
the noted Puritan divine he had advanced since 1622. John Cosin, one of
Montagu’s supporters, closed his account of the conferences by recording that
the King “swears his perpetual patronage of our cause.”
It is significant that
this was the moment chosen for the establishment of the Feoffees for
Impropriations. Montagu was inevitably the target for a renewed attack in the
House of Commons. The 1626 Parliament witnessed an attempt to pass a bill
giving statutory authority to the Irish Articles of 1615, thereby rendering
Montagu’s doctrinal position untenable since they confirmed Calvinist teaching
on grace. It was also a riposte to a royal proclamation forbidding religious
controversy. But the dissolution of Parliament in June, 1626 meant that, to all
intents and purposes, predestinarian teaching was forbidden. The struggle for
control of the Church at its highest level had been won by the Arminians.
These conflicts seriously weakened the King’s control
over the House of Lords. The view that the upper House was of secondary
importance in the politics of the period is open to question: it was, if
anything, of growing importance to the Crown in the late-1620s because its
direct influence was so much stronger there than in the Commons. The combined
presence of a large number of Privy Councillors and the bench of Bishops
provided a solid nucleus of support which was buttressed by the proxy system.
The adoption of
the war policy in 1624 was preceded by a series of reconciliations with peers
like Oxford and Southampton who had been confined for their criticism of the
Spanish match in 1621 and with Lord Say and Sele who had been committed and
interrogated for resisting the benevolence of 1622. It was even easier to win
the support of figures like the Earl of Essex, who had served as a volunteer on
the continent in the preceding three years, and the Earl of Warwick. Of course,
these new allies were only obtained at the cost of alienating the old. It is
clear that Arundel opposed a breach with Spain, a view courageously expressed
by his ally, Sir George Chaworth, in the House of Commons in March, 1624 and
that he was prepared to do what he could to help Bristol and Middlesex stem the
tide of charges brought against them. By July, he, Calvert and Williams had
been excluded from the negotiations with France. Arundel’s plea to Charles at
his accession to allow the Privy Council a share in advising him was not heeded
and he came to be suspected of supporting the lower House’s attacks on the
Duke. The loss of Pembroke’s support was more serious still. He had been much
more cautious about the consequences of breaking the treaties with Spain than
Buckingham and Prince Charles had wished. Pembroke is known to have been
anxious to secure a firm alliance with France before war with Spain began. By
the spring of 1625, he was openly sceptical about the terms Buckingham had
obtained. He doubted whether there would be any benefit from the adjournment of
Parliament to Oxford and complained to the Earl of Leicester in October, 1625
that “Buckingham carried all business in his heart.”
It was not just Buckingham’s monopoly of influence that
exposed him to criticism. The Earl of Essex was alienated by his experiences on
the disastrous Cadiz expedition and by the exculpation of Sir Edward Cecil, its
incompetent leader, by the Privy Council on his return. The last chance of
retaining the support of Warwick and Say was sacrificed at the York House
conferences in February, 1626. Amongst the peers, the same pattern – of
expansion in the range of the Court’s contacts in 1624 and of contraction in
1625 – can be detected.
The attack on Buckingham in the Parliament of 1626 is one
of the best known and least understood set-pieces of the period. The exclusion
of half-a dozen of the Commons’ leaders of 1625 by pricking them as Sheriffs
allowed M.P.s like Eliot and Diggs to play much more prominent roles.
Buckingham also had to take account of his enemies in the upper House from the
beginning of the session. On 25th February, a vote was carried against his
advice to limit the number of proxies a peer might hold to two in future
sessions. A little over a week later, Arundel showed unmistakable signs of
interest in the case of the seized French vessel, the St. Peter of Le Havre,
which Eliot was charged with pursuing in the Commons.
The discovery that Arundel’s son had secretly married a
royal ward without the King’s consent was used as an excuse to confine him and
remove an enemy with five proxy votes at his command. The Duke’s efforts to
divert the developing attack by sheltering behind royal orders or attempting to
provoke disputes on privilege between the two Houses proved unavailing.
Furthermore, the position of his supporters in the Lords was gradually
undermined. The investigation of precedents undertaken after complaints from
the Earl of Lincoln and from Viscount Say and Sele revealed that no peer had
previously been committed during a Parliamentary session. Charles was
accordingly asked for Arundel’s release on April 19th.
It was the first of a
series of requests that the King attempted to evade. The charges that the Earl
of Bristol, who had successfully defied an order not to attend, brought against
Buckingham made every vote vital. A request for the Duke’s confinement sent up
by the House of Commons after it had presented its charges was lost by only
four votes: the four new peers who were immediately created to bolster
Buckingham’s position were described as “heavenly Lords as do need no land to
walk upon.” Indeed, there is every sign that the House was deliberately dealing
as slowly as possible with Bristol’s charges against Buckingham and the King’s
counter-allegations against Bristol. Not a single afternoon session – which was
customary when the House was pressed for business – was held between April 1st
and June 8th. The Lords even adjourned for a week at the end of May when
Charles merely promised a reply on Arundel’s release before the end of the
Parliament. Eventually, the King was forced to give in: on 8th June, Arundel
returned. The tempo of business at once picked up and afternoon sessions were
resumed. But the risk that Buckingham might be condemned by the House of Lords
was one the King dared not face. On 15th June, against the wishes of the
majority of the Privy Council, Parliament was adjourned.
Buckingham’s escape from impeachment meant that the
succession struggle that had been going on at Court since the autumn of 1623
was over. His rivals had been defeated and were, with the important exception
of Pembroke, driven out. But this was only achieved at the cost of losing
almost all the allies acquired in 1624 and by leaving the composition of the
inner circle of the King’s advisers narrower than ever before.
The Privy Council lost much of the representative
function it had hitherto played. There was furthermore a distinct hardening in
the King’s attitude towards Parliament. Far from being the patient but puzzled
figure Russell portrays, he was increasingly intolerant of what he regarded as
factious opposition and inclined to stress his determination to uphold his
royal authority. He found support from Buckingham and his allies on the Privy
Council for this view and from a small group of Buckingham’s supporters – the
Earls of Dorset and Bridgewater and Bishops Laud and Neile – in the House of
Lords.
The King’s overt hostility to Parliament and the
ideological alliance between the adherents of royal authoritarianism and the
Arminian party in the Church is an established feature of English politics
after 1626. To finance the military and naval effort for which he could no
longer obtain consent in Parliament, Charles turned to his prerogative and
emergency powers. There was nothing new in the forced loan, martial law,
billeting, etc., but they led to theoretical justifications of prerogative rule
and the visible persecution of those who resisted. Leading country gentlemen
like Eliot or Phelips or Wentworth whose Court contacts had withered on the
vine looked to Parliament for salvation. The decline in their local prestige
caused by the loss of places on the Justices’ bench or removal from the post of
Deputy Lieutenant could partly be repaired by victory at the polls. They
certainly understood the national function of the House of Commons as their
predecessors had done to be to seek remedies for the grievances of the subject.
That is why they concentrated on the task of re-establishing the subject’s
personal liberties in 1628 and on restoring the purity of religion in 1629.
It is because Russell’s mastery of the resources is so
uncertain, because his analysis of the tactics and manoeuvres of the leaders in
the two Houses is so fragile, because, indeed, his understanding of the
structure of politics in the 1620s rests upon rigid criteria, that the
framework within which he has tried to place the Parliaments of this period
must be suspect. The weakness of his analysis is partly due to the procedure he
adopted in examining the Parliaments in turn. The choice of a single account as
a base text for proceedings in the House of Commons carries with it inevitable
dangers. Unfortunately, the accounts attributed to Pym for 1621, 1624 and 1625
are not ‘diaries’ taken on the floor of the House at all but edited versions
written up later. Some of the comments they contain can be shown to be
misleading when checked against other evidence. The use of Stowe Ms.366 in 1628
is open to similar but less serious objections.
Apart from the published letters of John Chamberlain and
Sir Thomas Wentworth and the manuscript correspondence of Sir Robert Phelips,
there is a surprising lack of reference to other sources. Sir John Eliot’s
Negotium Posterorum is used but not his letter-book or his collection of
Parliamentary papers at St. Germans. There is only one reference supplied by Dr
Tite to the vast Petyt collection in the Inner Temple Library and none at all
to the Loseley manuscripts at Guildford. More surprising still, he appears to
have missed one of the principal sources for Pym’s career.
The description of the French and Venetian Ambassadors’
reports as “gossip” is particularly unfortunate: they provide, when checked
against other sources, the best insight available into the politics of the
Court. The Mede to Stuteville letters are directly cited only for 1621. Other
important printed sources like the Cornwallis correspondence, the Fairfax
papers, James Howell’s letters and the autobiography of Sir John Bramston find
no mention.
Neither the
printed extracts nor the extensive originals of the Scudamore manuscripts are
mentioned. His failure, moreover, to consult the theses of Miss Dawson and Dr
Stoddart on the House of Lords was a serious omission. No one scholar can do
everything but there are some things which must be done if a study of the kind
Russell has written is to prove sound.
There is an even more fundamental problem at the heart of
his work. It has long been apparent that many members of the Commons in the
1620s had ‘Court’ connections through marriage or office or patronage and that
many office-holders expressed criticisms in the House of the policies of James
and Charles. Because of this overlap and because there is now a better
understanding of the role of Court faction, attempts to employ the contemporary
terms ‘Court’ and ‘Country’ for political analysis have invariably run into
difficulties. Russell’s more flexible approach stressing the importance of
local interests in many M.P.s’ minds promises dividends it does not fully pay.
The fact that Westminster was a permanent part of Sir
Robert Phelips’s way of life is used in one place to explain his support for
war in 1624: elsewhere, he takes the view that the interests of Somerset
outweighed those of England in Phelips’s list of priorities. The latitude
permitted by this approach suggests that the analytical problem has not been
solved at all. There is a curious contrast drawn, moreover, between members
with a localist approach and others like Pym, Rich and Rudyerd whose freedom of
action was, so it is claimed, dependent on a lack of responsibility to an
electorate. Whether this is a real distinction seems highly doubtful since no
evidence is adduced to support it. It overlooks, in any case, the more
plausible hypothesis that the rhetoric of localism is part of the process of
bargaining with the centre: the need to respond to royal fiscal and military
demands was in itself a unifying national experience for the governors of the
counties. Far too little is said about who controlled the debates, managed the
business and manned the committees of the two Houses.
When we are told that a lower House containing Sir Edward
Coke, Sir Edwin Sandys, Sir Robert Phelips, Sir Dudley Diggs, Sir Thomas
Wentworth and many other prominent figures lacked “any effective leadership” in
1621, it is impossible to accept this unadorned assertion. There are whole
sections of the narrative – on the debates in the House of Commons leading up
to the Petition of Right in May, 1628, for example – in which no attempt at
political analysis is made. But it is perfectly possible, as John Ball showed a
generation ago, to identify different groups amongst the leaders in the House
of Commons, to describe their views and analyse the evolution of their tactics.
It is also possible to show, often in detail, how the politics and debates of
the two Houses are connected. What Russell offers is a study of Parliamentary
history with many of these ingredients missing and the vacuum filled with
localism. The echoes produced make no sense in the study of a national
institution.
Conrad Russell’s work is an important contribution and
will stimulate debate in the years to come. The assumption of Parliamentary
weakness on which it is based is, however, highly questionable. It has always
been recognised that the early Stuart monarchs had extra-Parliamentary
resources which they could and did exploit. Even so, the financial difficulties
confronting James and Charles in the 1620s made recourse to Parliament
essential if there was to be effective intervention in the European struggle
then raging. It is this rather than any principled belief in Parliamentary
institutions on the part of King Charles that explains the meetings in 1626,
1628 and 1629. Any practical alternative would have been welcome to him. But
the methods by which King James had raised revenue inevitably aroused
controversy in 1621 and 1624.
Without the necessary expertise to manage the lower
House, it proved essential to employ some of the most prominent members as
intermediaries to obtain supply for war in 1624. Unfortunately, the war policy
proved an expensive and oppressive failure. It is perfectly true that there was
no struggle for power between the King and Parliament in the late-1620s. But
there was a bitter and prolonged effort to set limits to the exercise of the
royal prerogative and emergency powers. This conflict transformed the
complexion of the upper ranks of the episcopate and undermined royal control of
the House of Lords. It left a permanent legacy of distrust for the King and his
circle of advisers that was to be a powerful influence in the crisis of 1641.
It is this conflict and this connection that Russell has left essentially
unexplored. The history of the Parliaments of the 1620s and of their place in
English politics has still to be written.
[Seminar paper delivered at the University of Cambridge
in 1981 and the University of Birmingham in 1985. Published by The Orchard
Press, Wivenhoe, Essex (ISBN 0 948206 15 2) in January, 1986. Copyright:
Christopher Thompson]
