Sir John EliotSIR JOHN ELIOT
Parliament was not only intimidated by Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, its membership was recruited by nominees of the Crown.[49]And then it is also to be borne in mind that both Henry and Elizabeth made a point of getting Parliament to do their will. They governed through Parliament, and ruled triumphantly, for it is only in the later years of Elizabeth that any discontent is heard. The Stuarts, far less tyrannical, came to grief just because they never understood the importance of Parliament in the eyes of Englishmen in the middle ranks, and attempted to rule while ignoring the House of Commons.
Elizabeth scolded her Parliaments, and more than once called the Speaker of the House of Commons to account. The business of Tudor Parliaments was to decree the proposals of the Crown. "Liberty of speech was granted in respect of the aye or no, but not that everybody should speak what he listed." Bacon declared, "the Queen hath both enlarging and restraining power; she may set at liberty things restrained by statute and may restrain things which be at liberty."
Yet Elizabeth raised no objection to the theory that Parliament was the sovereign power, for her authority controlled Parliament; and so we have Sir Thomas Smith writing in 1589 that "the most high and absolute power of the realm of England consisteth in the Parliament."
In his "Ecclesiastical Polity," Book I. (1592-3), Hooker argues that "Laws human, of what kind soever are available by consent," and that "laws they are not which public approbation hath not made so"; deciding explicitly that sovereignty rests ultimately in the people.
When he came to the throne in 1603, James I. was prepared to govern with all the Tudor absolutism, but he had neither Elizabeth's Ministers—Cecil excepted—nor her knowledge of the English mind. The English Parliament and the English people had put up with Elizabeth's headstrong, capricious rule, because it had been a strong rule, and the nation had obviously thriven under it.[50]But it was another matter altogether when James I. was king.
"By many steps the slavish Parliament of Henry VIII. grew into the murmuring Parliament of Queen Elizabeth, the mutinous Parliament of James I., and the rebellious Parliament of Charles I."
The twenty years of James I.'s reign saw the preaching up of the doctrine of the divine right of kings by the bishops of the Established Church, and the growing resolution of the Commons to revive their earlier rights and privileges. If the Stuarts were as unfortunate in their choice of Ministers as Elizabeth had been successful, the House of Commons was equally happy in the remarkable men who became its spokesmen and leaders. In the years that preceded the Civil War—1626-42—three men are conspicuous on the Parliamentary side: Eliot, Hampden, and Pym. All three were country gentlemen, of good estate, high principle, and religious convictions[51]—men of courage and resolution, and of blameless personal character. Eliot died in prison, in the cause of good government, in 1632; Hampden fell on Chalgrove Field in 1643.
As in earlier centuries the struggle in the seventeenth century between the King and the Commons turned mainly on the questions of taxation. (At the same time an additional cause of dispute can be found in the religious differences between Charles I. and the Parliamentarians. The latter were mainly Puritan, accepting the Protestantism of the Church of England, but hating Catholicism and the high-church views of Laud. The King was in full sympathy with high Anglicanism, and, like his father, willing to relax the penal laws against Catholics.)
"By the ancient laws and liberties of England it is the known birthright and inheritance of the subject that no tax, tallage, or other charge shall be levied or imposed but by common consent in England, and that the subsidies of tonnage and poundage are no way due or payable but by a free gift and special Act of Parliament."
In these memorable words began the declaration moved by Sir John Eliot in the House of Commons on March 2nd, 1629. A royal message ordering the adjournment of the House was disregarded, the Speaker was held down in his chair, and the key of the House of Commons was turned against intrusion, while Eliot's resolutions, declaring that the privileges of the Commons must be preserved, were carried with enthusiasm.
Charles answered these resolutions by dissolving Parliament and sending Eliot to the Tower.
For eleven years no Parliament was summoned. Eliot refused altogether to make any defence for his Parliamentary conduct. "I hold that it is against the privilege of Parliament to speak of anything which is done in the House," was his reply to the Crown lawyers. So Sir John Eliot was left in prison, for nothing would induce this devoted believer in representative government to yield to the royal pressure, and three years later, at the age of forty-two, he died in the Tower.
It was for the liberties of the House of Commons that Eliot gave his life. Wasted with sickness, health and freedom were his if he would but acknowledge the right of the Crown to restrain the freedom of Parliamentary debate; but such an acknowledgment was impossible from Sir John Eliot. For him the privilege of the House of Commons in the matter of free speech was a sacred cause, to be upheld by Members of Parliament, even to the death—a cause every whit as sacred to Eliot as the divine right of kings was to the Stuart bishops.
Charles hoped to govern England through his Ministers without interference from the Commons, and only the need of money compelled him to summon Parliament.
John Hampden saw that if the King could raise money by forced loans and other exactions, the days of constitutional government were over. Hence his memorable resistance to ship-money. London and the seaports were induced to provide supplies for ships in 1634, on the pretext that piracy must be prevented. In the following year the demand was extended to the inland counties, and Hampden refused point blank to pay—though the amount was only a matter of 20s.—falling back, in justification of his refusal, on the Petition of Right—acknowledged by Charles in 1628—which declared that taxes were not to be levied without the consent of Parliament. The case was decided in 1636, and five of the twelve judges held that Hampden's objection was valid. The arguments in favour of non-payment were circulated far and wide, so that, in spite of the adverse verdict, "the judgment proved of more advantage and credit to the gentleman condemned than to the King's service."[52]
The personal rule of Charles and his Ministers, Laud and Strafford, came to an end in the autumn of 1640, when there was no choice left to the King but to summon Parliament, if money was to be obtained. Earlier in the year the "Short Parliament" had met, only to be dissolved by the folly of the King after a sitting of three weeks, because of its unwillingness to vote supplies without the redress of grievances.
The disasters of the King's campaign against the Scots, an empty treasury, and a mutinous army, compelled the calling of Parliament. But the temper of the men who came to the House of Commons in November was vastly different from the temper of the "Short Parliament."[53]For this was the famous "Long Parliament" that assembled in the dark autumn days of 1640, and it was to sit for thirteen years; to see the impeachment and execution of Laud and Strafford, the trial and execution of the King, the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords, the establishment of the Commonwealth; and was itself to pass away finally only before Cromwell's military dictatorship.
Hampden was the great figure at the beginning of this Parliament. "The eyes of all men were fixed upon him, as theirpatriæ pater, and the pilot that must steer the vessel through the tempests and rocks which threatened it. I am persuaded (wrote Clarendon) his power and interest at that time were greater to do good or hurt than any man's in the kingdom, or than any man of his rank hath had at any time; for his reputation of honesty was universal, and his affections seemed so publicly guided, that no corrupt or private ends could bias them."
Politically, neither Hampden nor Pym was Republican. Both believed in government by King, Lords, and Commons; but both were determined that the King's Ministers should be answerable to Parliament for the policy of the Crown, and that the Commons, who found the money for government, should have a definite say in the spending of that money. As for the royal claim of "Divine right," and the royal view that held passive obedience to be the duty of the King's subjects, and saw in Parliament merely a useful instrument for the raising of funds to be spent by the royal pleasure without question or criticism—these things were intolerable to Hampden, Pym, and the men of the House of Commons. The King would not govern through Parliament; the House of Commons could govern without a King. It was left to the Civil War to decide the issue between the Crown and Parliament, and make the House of Commons supreme.
Things moved quickly in the first year of the Long Parliament. The Star Chamber and High Commission Courts were abolished. Strafford was impeached for high treason, and executed on Tower Hill. Archbishop Laud lay in prison, to be executed four years later. The Grand Remonstrance of the House of Commons was presented to Charles in December, 1641. The demands of the Commons in the Remonstrance were not revolutionary, but they stated, quite frankly, the case for the Parliament. The main points were the need for securities for the administration of justice, and an insistence on the responsibility of the King's Ministers to the Houses of Parliament. The Grand Remonstrance was only carried by eleven votes in the House of Commons, 159 to 148, after wild scenes. "Some waved their hats over their heads, and others took their swords in their scabbards out of their belts, and held them by the pummels in their hands, setting the lower part on the ground." Actual violence was only prevented "by the sagacity and great calmness of Mr. Hampden, by a short speech."
Charles promised an answer to the deputation of members who waited upon him with the Grand Remonstrance, and early in the new year came the reply. The King simply demanded the surrender of five members—Pym, Hampden, Holles, Strode, and Hazlerig—and their impeachment on the charge of high treason. All constitutional law was set aside by a charge which proceeded personally from the King, which deprived the accused of their legal right to a trial by their peers, and summoned them before a tribunal which had no pretence to a justification over them. On the refusal of the Commons to surrender their members, Charles came in person to Westminster with 300 cavaliers to demand their arrest. But the five members, warned of the King's venture, were well out of the way, and rested safely within the City of London—for the citizens were strongly for the Parliament. "It was believed that if the King had found them there (in the House of Commons), and called in his guards to have seized them, the members of the House would have endeavoured the defence of them, which might have proved a very unhappy and sad business."
As it was, Charles could only retire "in a more discontented and angry passion than he came in." The step was utterly ill-advised. Parliament was in no mood to favour royal encroachments, and the citizens of London were at hand, with their trained bands, to protect forcibly members of the House of Commons.
War was now imminent. "The attempt to seize the five members was undoubtedly the real cause of the war. From that moment, the loyal confidence with which most of the popular party were beginning to regard the King was turned into hatred and suspicion. From that moment, the Parliament was compelled to surround itself with defensive arms. From that moment, the city assumed the appearance of a garrison.
"The transaction was illegal from beginning to end. The impeachment was illegal. The process was illegal. The service was illegal. If Charles wished to prosecute the five members for treason, a bill against them should have been sent to a grand jury. That a commoner cannot be tried for high treason by the Lords at the suit of the Crown, is part of the very alphabet of our law. That no man can be arrested by the King in person is equally clear. This was an established maxim of our jurisprudence even in the time of Edward the Fourth. 'A subject,' said Chief Justice Markham to that Prince, 'may arrest for treason; the King cannot; for, if the arrest be illegal, the party has no remedy against the King.'"[54]
Both King and Parliament broke rudely through all constitutional precedents in their preparations for hostilities.
The King levied troops by a royal commission, without any advice from Parliament, and Pym got an ordinance passed, in both Houses, appointing the Lords-Lieutenant of the counties to command the Militia without warrant from the Crown.
A last attempt at negotiations was made at York, in April, when the proposals of Parliament—nineteen propositions for curtailing the power of the Monarchy in favour of the Commons—were rejected by Charles with the words: "If I granted your demands, I should be no more than the mere phantom of a king."
By August, Charles had raised the royal standard at Nottingham, and war was begun.
Five years later and Charles was a prisoner, to die in 1649 on the scaffold. That same year monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished by law; the Established Church had already fallen before the triumphant arms of the Puritans.
Then, in 1653, the House of Commons itself fell—expelled by Cromwell; and the task of the Lord Protector was to fashion a constitution that would work.[55]What happened was the supremacy of the army. Parliament, attenuated and despised, contended in vain against the Protector. On Cromwell's death, and the failure of his son, Richard, the army declared for Charles II., and there was an end to the Commonwealth.
In all these changes the great mass of the people had neither part nor lot; and the famous leaders of the Parliamentary Party, resolute to curtail the absolutism of the Crown, were no more concerned with the welfare of the labouring people than the barons were in the time of John. The labouring people—generally—were equally indifferent to the fortunes of Roundheads and Cavaliers, though the townsmen in many places held strong enough opinions on the matters of religion that were in dispute.[56]
That the common misery of the people was not in any way lightened by Cromwell's rule we have abundant evidence, and it cannot be supposed that the substitution of the Presbyterian discipline for episcopacy in the Church, and the displacement of Presbyterians by Independents, was likely to alleviate this misery.
Taxation was heavier than it had ever been before, and in Lancashire, Westmorland, and Cumberland the distress was appalling.
Whitelocke, writing in 1649,[57]notes "that many families in Lancashire were starved." "That many in Cumberland and Westmorland died in the highways for want of bread, and divers left their habitations, travelling with their wives and children to other parts to get relief, but could find none. That the committees and Justices of the Peace of Cumberland signed a certificate, that there were 30,000 families that had neither seed nor bread-corn, nor money to buy either, and they desired a collection for them, which was made, but much too little to relieve so great a multitude."
Cromwell, occupied with high affairs of State, had neither time nor inclination to attend to social reform. Democracy had its witnesses; Lilburne and the Levellers made their protest against military rule, and were overpowered; Winstanley and his Diggers endeavoured to persuade the country that the common land should be occupied by dispossessed peasants, and were quickly suppressed.
Lilburne was concerned with the establishment of a political democracy, Winstanley with a social democracy, and in both cases the propaganda was offensive to the Protector.
Had Cromwell listened to Lilburne, and made concessions towards democracy, the reaction against Puritanism and the Commonwealth might have been averted.[58]
John Lilburne had been a brave soldier in the army of the Parliament in the early years of the Civil War, and he left the army in 1645 with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel (and with £880 arrears of pay due to him) rather than take the covenant and subscribe to the requirements of the "new model."
The monarchy having fallen, Lilburne saw the possibilities of tyranny in the Parliamentary government, and at once spoke out. With considerable legal knowledge, a passion for liberty, clear views on democracy, an enormous capacity for work, and great skill as a pamphleteer, Lilburne was not to be ignored. The Government might have had him for a supporter; it unwisely decided to treat him as an enemy, and for ten years he was an unsparing critic, his popularity increasing with every fresh pamphlet he issued—and at every fresh imprisonment.
Lilburne urged a radical reform of Parliament and a general manhood suffrage in 1647, and the "Case for the Army," published by the Levellers in the same year, on the proposal of the Presbyterian majority in Parliament that the army should be disbanded, demanded the abolition of monopolies, freedom of trade and religion, restoration of enclosed common lands, and abolition of sinecures.
Both Cromwell and Ireton were strongly opposed to manhood suffrage, and Cromwell—to whom the immediate danger was a royalist reaction—had no patience for men who would embark on democratic experiments at such a season.
Lilburne and the Levellers were equally distrustful of Cromwell's new Council of State. "We were ruled before by King, Lords, and Commons, now by a General, Court-martial, and Commons; and, we pray you, what is the difference?" So they put the question in 1648.
To Cromwell the one safety for the Commonwealth was in the loyalty of the army to the Government. To Lilburne the one guarantee for good government was in the supremacy of a Parliament elected by manhood suffrage. He saw plainly that unless steps were taken to establish democratic institutions there was no future for the Commonwealth; and he took no part in the trial of Charles I., saying openly that he doubted the wisdom of abolishing monarchy before a new constitution had been drawn up.
But Lilburne overestimated the strength of the Leveller movement in the army, and the corporals who revolted were shot by sentence of courts-martial.[59]
In vain the democratic troopers argued, "the old king's person and the old lords are but removed, and a new king and new lords with the commons are in one House, and so we are under a more absolute arbitrary monarchy than before." The Government answered by clapping Lilburne in the Tower, where, in spite of a petition signed by 80,000 for his release, he remained for three months without being brought to trial. Released on bail, Lilburne, who from prison had issued an "Agreement of the Free People," calling for annual parliaments elected by manhood suffrage and the free election of unendowed church ministers in every parish, now published an "Impeachment for High Treason against Oliver Cromwell and his son-in-law, James Ireton," and declared that monarchy was preferable to a military despotism. At last, brought to trial on the charge of "treason," Lilburne was acquitted with "a loud and unanimous shout" of popular approval.[60]"In a revolution where others argued about the respective rights of King and Parliament, he spoke always of the rights of the people. His dauntless courage and his power of speech made him the idol of the mob."[61]
Lilburne was again brought to trial, in 1653, and again acquitted, with undiminished enthusiasm. But "for the peace of the nation," Cromwell refused to allow the irrepressible agitator to be at large, and for two years Lilburne, "Free-born John," was kept in prison. During those years all power in the House of Commons was broken by the rule of the Army of the Commonwealth, and Parliament stood in abject submission before the Lord Protector. Only when his health was shattered, and he had embraced Quaker principles, was Lilburne released, and granted a pension of 40s. a week. The following year, at the age of 40, Lilburne died of consumption—brought on by the close confinement he had suffered. A year later, 1658, and Cromwell, by whose side Lilburne had fought at Marston Moor, and against whose rule he had contended for so many a year, was dead, and the Commonwealth Government was doomed.
The "Digger" movement was a shorter and much more obscure protest on behalf of the people than Lilburne's agitation for democracy; but it is notable for its social significance.
While Lilburne strove vigorously for political reforms that are still unaccomplished, Gerrard Winstanley preached a revolutionary gospel of social reform—as John Ball and Robert Ket had before him. But Winstanley's social doctrine allowed no room for violence, and included the non-resistance principles that found exposition in the Society of Friends. Hence the "Diggers," preaching agrarian revolution; but denying all right to force of arms, never endangered the Commonwealth Government as Lilburne and the Levellers did.
Free Communism was the creed of more than one Protestant sect in the sixteenth century, and the Anabaptists on the Continent had been conspicuous for their experiments in community of goods and anarchist society.
Winstanley confined his teaching and practice to common ownership of land, pleading for the cultivation of the enclosed common lands, "that all may feed upon the crops of the earth, and the burden of poverty be removed." There was to be no forcible expropriation of landlords.
"If the rich still hold fast to this propriety of Mine and Thine, let them labour their own lands with their own hands. And let the common people, that say the earth isours, notmine, let them labour together, and eat bread together upon the commons, mountains, and hills.
"For as the enclosures are called such a man's land, and such a man's land, so the Commons and Heath are called the common people's. And let the world see who labour the earth in righteousness, and those to whom the Lord gives the blessing, let them be the people that shall inherit the earth.
"None can say that their right is taken from them. For let the rich work alone by themselves; and let the poor work together by themselves."[62]
With the common ownership and cultivation of land, an end was to be made of all tyranny of man over his fellows.
John HampdenJOHN HAMPDENAfter the Engraving by G. Houbraken.
"Leave off dominion and lordship one over another; for the whole bulk of mankind are but one living earth. Leave off imprisoning, whipping, and killing, which are but the actings of the curse. Let those that have hitherto had no land, and have been forced to rob and steal through poverty; henceforth let them quietly enjoy land to work upon, that everyone may enjoy the benefit of his creation, and eat his own bread with the sweat of his own brow."
Winstanley's argument was quite simple:
"If any man can say that he makes corn or cattle, he may say,That is mine. But if the Lord made these for the use of His creation, surely then the earth was made by the Lord to be a Common Treasury for all, not a particular treasury for some."
Two objections were urged against private property in land:
"First, it hath occasioned people to steal from one another. Secondly, it hath made laws to hang those that did steal. It tempts people to do an evil action, and then kills them for doing it." It was a prolific age for pamphlets, the seventeenth century; the land teemed with preachers and visionaries, and Winstanley's writings never attracted the sympathy that was given to the fierce controversialists on theological and political questions.
Only when Winstanley and his Diggers set to work with spade and shovel on the barren soil of St. George's Hill, in Surrey, in the spring of 1649, was the attention of the Council of State called to the strange proceedings. The matter was left to the local magistrates and landowners, and the Diggers were suppressed. A similar attempt to reclaim land near Wellingboro' was stopped at once as "seditious and tumultuous." It was quite useless for Winstanley to maintain that the English people were dispossessed of their lands by the Crown at the Norman Conquest, and that with the execution of the King the ownership of the Crown lands ought to revert to the people; Cromwell and the Council of State had no more patience with prophets of land nationalisation than with agitators of manhood suffrage. Indeed, the Commonwealth Government never took the trouble to distinguish between the different groups of disaffected people, but set them all down as "Levellers," to be punished as disturbers of the peace if they refused to obey authority.
Winstanley's last pamphlet was "True Magistracy Restored," an open letter to Oliver Cromwell, 1652, and after its publication Gerrard Winstanley and his Diggers are heard of no more.
To-day both Lilburne and Winstanley are to be recalled because the agitation for political democracy is always with us, and the question of land tenure is seen to be of profound importance in the discussion of social reform. No democratic statesman in our time can propose an improvement in the social condition of the people without reference to the land question, and no social reformer of the nineteenth century has had more influence or been more widely read and discussed than Henry George—the exponent of the Single Tax on Land Values.
Winstanley was very little heeded in his own day, but two hundred and fifty years later the civilised countries of the earth are found in deep debate over the respective rights of landowners and landless, and the relation of poverty to land ownership. State ownership, taxation of land values, peasant proprietorship, co-operative agriculture—all have their advocates to-day, but to Winstanley's question whether the earth was made "for to give ease to a few or health to all," only one answer is returned.
Under the Commonwealth the landowners were as powerful as they had been under the monarchy. Enclosures continued. Social reform was not contemplated by Cromwell nor by Councils of State; democracy was equally outside the political vision of government. Church of England ministers were dispossessed in favour of Nonconformists, Puritanism became the established faith, Catholicism remained proscribed.
The interest in ecclesiastical and theological disputes was considerable, and Puritanism was popular with large numbers of the middle-class. But to the mass of the people Puritanism was merely the suppression of further liberties, the prohibition of old customs, the stern abolition of Christmas revels and May-day games.
Lilburne did his best to get Cromwell to allow the people some responsibility in the choice of its rulers. Winstanley proposed a remedy for the social distress. To neither of these men was any concession made, and no consideration was given to their appeals.
Hence the bulk of the nation, ignored by the Commonwealth Government, and alienated by Puritanism, accepted quite amiably—indeed, with enthusiasm—the restoration of the monarchy on the return of Charles II., and was unmoved by the royalist reaction against Parliamentary Government that followed on the Restoration.
The House of Commons itself, when Monk and his army had gone over to the side of Charles, voted, in the Convention Parliament of 1660, "that according to the ancient and fundamental laws of this Kingdom, the government is, and ought to be, by King, Lords, and Commons," and Charles II. was received in London with uproarious enthusiasm.
The army was disbanded; a royalist House of Commons restored the Church of England and ordered general acceptance of its Prayer Book. Puritanism, driven from rule, could only remain in power in the heart and conscience of its adherents.
To the old Commonwealth man it might seem, in the reaction against Puritanism, and in the popularity of the King, that all that had been striven for in the civil war had been lost, in the same way as after the death of Simon of Montfort it might have appeared that "the good cause" had perished with its great leader. In reality the House of Commons stood on stronger ground than ever, and was to show its strength when James II. attempted to override its decisions. In the main the very forms of Parliamentary procedure were settled in the seventeenth century, to remain undisturbed till the nineteenth century. "The Parliamentary procedure of 1844 was essentially the procedure on which the House of Commons conducted its business during the Long Parliament."[63]
With Charles II. on the throne the absolutism of the Crown over Parliament passed for ever from England. Cromwell had set up the supremacy of the army over the Commons: this, too, was gone, never to be restored.
Henceforth government was to be by King, Lords, and Commons; but sovereignty was to reside in Parliament. Not till a century later would democracy again be heard of, and its merits urged, as Lilburne had urged them under the Commonwealth.
For nearly two centuries—from 1660 to 1830—England was governed by an aristocracy of landowners. Charles II. kept the throne for twenty-five years, because he had wit enough to avoid an open collision with Parliament. James II. fled the country after three years—understanding no more than his father had understood that tyranny was not possible save by consent of Parliament or by military prowess. At the Restoration the royal prerogative was dead, and nothing in Charles II.'s reign tended to diminish the power of Parliament in favour of the throne. Charles was an astute monarch who did not wish to be sent on his travels again, and consequently took care not to outrage the nation by any attempt upon the liberties of Parliament. Only by the Tudor method of using Parliament as the instrument of the royal will could James II. have accomplished the constitutional changes he had set his heart upon. In attempting to set up toleration for the Roman Catholic religion, and in openly appointing Roman Catholics to positions of importance, James II. set Parliament at defiance and ranged the forces of the Established Church against himself. The method was doomed to failure. "None have gone about to break Parliaments but in the end Parliaments have broken them."[64]In any case the notion of restoring political liberty to Catholics was a bold endeavour in 1685. Against the will of Parliament the project was folly. To overthrow the rights of corporations and of the Universities, and to attempt to bully the Church of England, after Elizabeth's fashion, at the very beginning of a pro-Catholic movement, was to provoke defeat.
Parliament decided that James II. had "abdicated," when, deserted by Churchill, he fled to France, and William and Mary came to the throne at the express invitation of Parliament. The Revolution completed the work of the Long Parliament by defining the limits of monarchy, and establishing constitutional government. It was not—this Revolution, of 1688—the first time Parliament had sanctioned the deposing of the King of England and the appointment of his successor,[65]but it was the last. Never again since the accession of William and Mary have the relations of the Crown and Parliament been strained to breaking point; never has the supremacy of Parliament been seriously threatened by the power of the throne.
The full effects of the Revolution of 1688 were seen in the course of the next fifty years. Aristocracy, then mainly Whig, was triumphant, and under its rule, while large measures of civil and religious liberty were passed, the condition of the mass of labouring people was generally wretched in the extreme. The rule of the aristocracy saw England become a great power among the nations of the world, and the British Navy supreme over the navies of Europe; but it saw also an industrial population, untaught and uncared for, sink deeper and deeper into savagery and misery. For a time in the eighteenth century the farmer and the peasant were prosperous, but by the close of that century the small farmer was a ruined man, and with the labourer was carried by the industrial revolution into the town. The worst times for the English labourer in town and country since the Norman Conquest were the reign of Edward VI. and the first quarter of the nineteenth century.
The development of our political institutions into their present form; the establishment of our Party system of government by Cabinet, and of the authority of the Prime Minister; the growth of the supreme power of the Commons, not only over the throne but over the Lords also: these were the work of the aristocracy of the eighteenth century, and were attained by steps so gradual as to be almost imperceptible. No idea of democracy guided the process; yet our modern democratic system is firm-rooted upon the principles and privileges of the Constitution as thus established. Social misery deepened, without check from the politicians; and the most enlightened statesmen of the Whig regime were very far from our present conceptions of the duties and possibilities of Parliament.
James II. was tumbled from the throne for his vain attempt to establish toleration for Catholics and Nonconformists without consent of Parliament. Yet the Whig aristocracy which followed, while it did nothing for Catholics, laid broad principles of civil and religious liberty for democracy to build upon.[66]
The Declaration of Right, presented by Parliament to William and Mary on their arrival in London, was turned into the Bill of Rights, and passed into law in 1689. It stands as the last of the great charters of political liberty, and states clearly both what is not permitted to the Crown, and what privileges are allowed to the people.
Under the Bill of Rights the King was denied the power of suspending or dispensing, of levying money, or maintaining a standing army without consent of Parliament. The people were assured of the right of the subject to petition the Crown, and of the free election of representatives in Parliament, and of full and free debate in Parliament. Any profession of the Catholic religion, or marriage with a Catholic, disqualified from inheritance to or possession of the throne.
So there was an end to the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, and four hundred non-juring clergymen—including half-a-dozen bishops—of the Church of England were deprived of their ecclesiastical appointments for refusing to accept the accomplished fact, and acknowledge William III. as the lawful King of England. By making William King, to the exclusion of the children of James II., Parliament destroyed for all future time in England the belief in the sacred character of kingship. The King was henceforth a part of the constitution, and came to the throne by authority of Parliament, on conditions laid down by Parliament.
William resented the decision of Parliament not to allow the Crown a revenue for life, but to vote an annual supply; but the decision was adhered to, and has remained in force ever since. The Mutiny Act, passed the same year, placed the army under the control of Parliament, and the annual vote for military expenses has, in like manner, remained.
The Toleration Act (1689) gave Nonconformists a legal right to worship in their own chapels, but expressly excluded Unitarians and Roman Catholics from this liberty. Life was made still harder for Roman Catholics in England by the Act of 1700, which forbade a Catholic priest, under penalty of imprisonment for life, to say mass, hear confessions, or exercise any clerical function, and denied the right of the Catholic laity to hold, buy or inherit property, or to have their children educated abroad. The objection to Roman Catholics was that their loyalty to the Pope was an allegiance to a "foreign" ruler which prevented their being good citizens at home. Against this prejudice it was useless to point to what had been done by Englishmen for their country, when all the land was Catholic, and all accepted the supremacy of the Pope. It was not till 1778 that the first Catholic Relief Bill was carried, a Bill that "shook the general prejudice against Catholics to the centre, and restored to them a thousand indescribable charities in the ordinary intercourse of social life which they had seldom experienced."
The last Roman Catholic to die for conscience' sake was Oliver Plunket, Archbishop of Armagh, who was executed at Tyburn, when Charles II. was King, in 1681. After the Revolution, Nonconformists and Catholics were no longer hanged or tortured for declining the ministrations of the Established Church, but still were penalised in many lesser ways. But the spirit of the eighteenth century made for toleration, and the Whigs were as unostentatious in their own piety as they were indifferent to the piety of others.
The killing of "witches," however, went on in Scotland and in England long after toleration had been secured for Nonconformists. As late as 1712 a woman was executed for witchcraft in England.[67]
William III. began with a mixed ministry of Whigs and Tories, which included men like Danby and Godolphin, who had served under James II. But the fierce wrangling that went on over the war then being waged on the Continent was decidedly inconvenient, and by 1696 the Whigs had succeeded in driving all the Tories—who were against the war—out of office. Then for the first time a united ministry was in power, and from a Cabinet of men with common political opinions the next step was to secure that the Cabinet should represent the party with a majority in the House of Commons. Our present system of Cabinet rule, dependent on the will of the majority of the Commons, is found in full operation by the middle of the eighteenth century. The fact that William III., George I., and George II. were all foreigners necessitated the King's ministers using considerable powers. But George III. was English, and effected a revival in the personal power of the King by his determination that the choice of ministers should rest with the Crown, and not with the House of Commons. He succeeded in breaking up the long Whig ascendancy, and so accustomed became the people to the King making and unmaking ministries, that on George IV.'s accession in 1820 it was fully expected the new King would turn out the Tories and put in Whigs. William IV. in 1835 did what no sovereign has done since—dissolved Parliament against the wish of the government.
From 1696 to 1701 the Whigs were in office. Then on the death of William and the accession of Anne, Tory ministers were included in the government, and for seven years the Cabinet was composite again. But Marlborough and Godolphin found that if they were to remain in power it must be by the support of the Whigs, who had made the support of the war against France a party question; and from 1708 to 1710 the ministry was definitely Whig. By 1710 the war had ceased to be popular, and the general election of that year sent back a strong Tory majority to the House of Commons, with the result that the Tory leaders, Harley (Earl of Oxford) and Henry St. John (Bolingbroke) took office. The Tories fell on the death of Anne, because their plot to place James (generally called the Chevalier or the old Pretender), the Queen's half-brother, on the throne was defeated by the readiness of the Whig Dukes of Somerset and Argyll to proclaim George, Elector of Hanover, King of England. By the Act of Settlement, 1701, Parliament had decided that the Crown should pass from Anne to the heirs of Sophia, Electress of Hanover and daughter of James I.; and the fact that the Chevalier was a Catholic made his accession impossible according to law, and the policy of Bolingbroke highly treasonable.
George I. could not speak English, and relied entirely on his Whig ministers. Bolingbroke fled to the Continent, but was permitted to return from exile nine years later. Oxford was impeached and sent to the Tower. The Whigs were left in triumph to rule the country for nearly fifty years—until the restiveness of George III. broke up their dominion—and for more than twenty years of that period Walpole was Prime Minister. Cabinet government—that is, government by a small body of men, agreed upon main questions of policy, and commanding the confidence of the majority of the House of Commons—was now in full swing, and in spite of the monarchist revival under George III., no King henceforth ever refused consent to a Bill passed by Parliament.
The Whigs did nothing in those first sixty years of the eighteenth century to make the House of Commons more representative of the people. They were content to repeat the old cries of the Revolution, and to oppose all proposals of change. But they governed England without oppression, and Walpole's commercial and financial measures satisfied the trading classes and kept national credit sound.
Walpole remained in power from 1720 to 1742 by sheer corruption—there was no other way open to him. He laughed openly at all talk of honesty and purity, and his influence lowered the whole tone of public life.[68]But he kept in touch with the middle classes, was honest personally, and had a large amount of tact and good sense. His power in the House of Commons endured because he understood the management of parliamentary affairs, and had a genius for discerning the men whose support he could buy, and whose support was valuable.
George III. went to work in much the same way as Walpole had done, and only succeeded in breaking down the power of the Whig houses by using the same corrupt methods that Walpole had employed. The "King's friends," as they were called, acted independently of the party leaders, and in the pay of the King were the chief instrument of George III.'s will.
But George III. not only turned the Whigs out of office, he altered permanently the political complexion of the House of Lords. From the time of the Revolution of 1688 to the death of George II. in 1760, the Lords were Whiggish, and the majority of English nobles held Whig principles. They were, on the whole, men of better education than the average member of the House of Commons, who was in most cases a fox-hunting squire, of the Squire Western type. The House of Lords stood in the way of the Commons when, in the Tory reaction of 1701, the Commons proposed to impeach Somers, the Whig Chancellor, a high-minded and skilful lawyer, "courteous and complaisant, humane and benevolent," for his share in the Second Partition Treaty of 1699, and this was the beginning of a bitter contest between the Tory Commons and the Whig Lords. An attempt was made by the Commons to impeach Walpole on his fall in 1742, but the Lords threw out a Bill proposing to remit the penalties to which his prosecutor might be liable, and the King made Walpole a peer. George III., by an unsparing use of his prerogative, changed the character and politics of the Upper House. His creations were country gentlemen of sufficient wealth to own "pocket" boroughs in the House of Commons, and lawyers who supported the Royal prerogative.[69]
From George III.'s time onward there has always been a standing and ever-increasing majority of Tory peers in the House of Lords. And while the actual number of members of the Upper House has been enlarged enormously, this majority has became enlarged out of all proportion. Liberal and Tory Prime Ministers were busy throughout the nineteenth century adding to the peerage—no less than 376 new peers were created between 1800 and 1907; but comparatively few Liberals retained their principles when they became peers, and two of the present chiefs of the Unionist Party in the House of Lords—Lords Lansdowne and Selborne—are the sons of eminent Liberals.
So it has come about that while the House of Commons has been steadily opening its doors to men of all ranks and classes, and in our time has become increasingly democratic in character, the House of Lords, confined in the main to men of wealth and social importance, has become an enormous assembly of undistinguished persons, where only a small minority are active politicians, and of this minority at least three-fourths are Conservatives.
This change in the House of Lords began, as we have seen, in the reign of George III., when the Whig ascendancy in Parliament had passed. But the Whigs did nothing during their long lease of power to bring democracy nearer, and were entirely contemptuous of popular aspirations. At the very time when the democratic idea was the theme of philosophers, and was to be seen expressed in the constitution of the revolted American colonies, and in the French Revolution, England remained under an aristocracy, governed first by Whigs, and then by Tories. It is true democracy was not without its spokesmen in England in the eighteenth century, but there was no popular movement in politics to stir the masses of the people, as the preaching of the Methodists stirred their hearts for religion. Democratic ideas were as remote from popular discussion in the eighteenth century as they had been made familiar by Lilburne for a brief season in the seventeenth century.
A word must be said about John Wilkes, a man of disreputable character and considerable ability, who for some ten years—1763-73—contended for the rights of electors against the Whig Government. The battle began when George Grenville, the Whig Prime Minister, had Wilkes arrested on a general warrant for an article attacking the King's Speech in No. 45 of theNorth Briton, a scurrilous newspaper which belonged to Wilkes. Chief Justice Pratt declared the arrest illegal on the ground that the warrant was bad, and that Wilkes, being at the time M.P. for Aylesbury, enjoyed the privilege of Parliament. A jury awarded Wilkes heavy damages against the Government for false imprisonment, and the result of the trial made Wilkes a popular hero. Then, in 1764, the Government brought a new charge of blasphemy and libel, and Wilkes, expelled from the House of Commons, and condemned by the King's Bench, fled to France, and was promptly declared an outlaw. He returned, however, a year or two later, and while in prison was elected M.P. for Middlesex. The House of Commons, led by the Government, set the election aside, and riots for "Wilkes and Liberty" broke out in London. The question was: Had the House of Commons a right to exclude a member duly elected for a constituency?—the same question that was raised over Charles Bradlaugh, a man of very different character, in the Parliament of 1880. Again and again in 1768 and 1769 Wilkes was re-elected for Middlesex, only to be expelled, and finally the House decided that Wilkes' opponent, Colonel Luttrell, was to sit, although Luttrell was manifestly not chosen by the majority of electors. The citizens of London replied to this by choosing Wilkes for Sheriff and Alderman in 1770, and by making him Lord Mayor four years later. The Government gave up the contest at last, and Wilkes was allowed to take his seat. Besides vindicating the right of constituencies against the claim of Parliament to exclude undesirable persons, Wilkes did a good deal towards securing that right of Parliamentary debating which was practically admitted after 1771.
But the "Wilkes and Liberty" movement was no more than a popular enthusiasm of the London mob for an enemy of the Government, and a determination of London citizens and Middlesex electors not to be brow-beaten by the Government. Wilkes himself always denied that he was a "Wilkesite," and he had no following in the country or in Parliament.