municated if they acted so as to endanger the State. When his proposal was rejected, to conciliate English Protestants James banished Catholic priests. Then followed Gunpowder Plot; and, instead of Parliament, toleration for Catholics was blown to the winds. James' first Parliament, which met in 1604, contained a majority of Puritans who still conformed to the Church of England, hoping to change it from within. James probably saw that Dutch political disunion lay behind English puritanism, since he continued Elizabeth's policy of insisting upon conformity and epitomised his views in the statement: "Nobishop, no King.' It is almost certain that the great majority of Englishmen would have supported the King, although the majority in Parliament opposed him. The fortyshilling franchise and the enclosures had limited the number of electors in the counties, and in the towns. close corporations had so restricted the franchise that borough members represented the merchants in much the same way as delegates to the States represented the merchants of Holland. When they shelved James' scheme for the union of England and Scotland, members of the English Parliament proved that they were not out of sympathy with the Dutch particularist and mercantile policy. They had no wish to share England's trade with the Scotch. When Church lands were confiscated and common lands enclosed, something was done to protect the poor, who had been fed by the monks. The lands were sold at low rates, subject to heavy fines if the poor were neglected by the new owners. This condition of sale was, however, systematically disregarded. In the first year of Edward VI. Parliament passed a savage Act, punishing those who did no work for three consecutive days with branding and slavery for two years. The Act ends with a pious hope that the unemployed, who were too infirm for work, would be cared for by the localities in which they were born or were residing. Another ineffectual Act for relieving the poor was passed in 1555. In 1572 a poor-rate was first sanctioned by Parliament, and in 1597 and 1601 the system of official poor relief was definitely organised. In 1589 an Act was passed forbidding the building of cottages without the provision of at least four acres of land to each cottage. Nevertheless, the vicious system of enclosing common lands, which had made these laws necessary, was continued. In 1607 the peasants rose in the Midland Counties; Levellers were soon busy destroying the fences which excluded the poor from the common lands; and it seemed as if Ket's rebellion would be repeated. But Government acted promptly. The revolt was suppressed, not without bloodshed and executions. Once more dragon's teeth were sown from which should spring those armed men who surrounded the scaffold at Whitehall when James' innocent son was publicly murdered. Some attempt was apparently made in the reign of James I. to enforce the obligation which the buyers of Church lands had accepted in the reign of Henry VIII. As the holders of Church lands had incurred a penalty of 6l. 13s. 4d. for each month of their neglect, their lands might have been forfeited to the Crown. But this was too bold a step for James to take in the teeth of a Parliament which had made him feel its power. He therefore acceded to the request of his Parliament and remitted the penalty in 1623. This incident illustrates the difficulties which the early Stuarts had to face. They repeatedly tried to act in the interests of the people; they were thwarted at every turn by Parliaments elected by the wealthy. On the scaffold Charles I. proclaimed that he died a "martyr for the people," and he was justified in making this claim. The sufferings endured by all under the Commonwealth were required to teach the rich in England that they, too, would suffer if they neglected the English poor. XXII RELIGIOUS CONTENTIONS IN ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES IN 1606 a merchant, John Bates, refused to pay a duty on currants which had been imposed by the Crown before the accession of James I. Bates pleaded that the imposition was illegal because it had not been sanctioned by Parliament. The case was exhaustively argued in the Exchequer Chamber, and the judges, after the most careful consideration, found for the Crown. Recent research has proved that in this judgment there was no straining of the constitution or law of England. The scale of tariffs was then revised by Lord Salisbury with that moderation which was a characteristic of the Cecils. The royal revenue derived only a small benefit, but the decision was a severe blow to the Puritan merchants who wished to imitate the Dutch free-traders. The judicial decision was attacked in Parliament. That the House of Commons is not a good court of appeal was then illustrated. In order to support their case freetraders treated "De tallagio non concedendo," a paragraph written by a monkish historian, as a statute of the realm. For centuries this fiction was believed by Englishmen. Thus Carlyle could write: "Customhouse Duties, a constant subject of quarrel between Charles and his Parliaments hitherto, had again been levied without parliamentary consent; in the teeth of old 'Tallagio non concedendo' . . .” Ignorance of this kind has led the English to label the early Stuarts as tyrants and their judges as venal sycophants. Judges, in the seventeenth century, still regarded fees paid them by suitors as perquisites which they could accept without shame, though they could not openly defend their practice. The difficulty of settling the quarrel between King and Parliament which had begun was complicated by the absence of an impartial judicial body to whom disputes could be referred. But the royalist lawyers were no more corrupt than those who opposed the Crown. Coke was made Chief Justice of the Common Pleas in 1606. Unscrupulous and ambitious, he tried to make the court over which he presided the supreme tribunal in England. The administration of the navy had become hopelessly corrupt. A commission appointed by the Crown to reform the administration and punish offenders was obstructed in 1613 by lawyers who supported the pretensions of the Court of Common Pleas. Coke, himself, interfered in 1615 on behalf of swindlers whose victims had obtained from Chancery the justice denied them by Common Law. Coke was dismissed in 1616, and after vainly trying to regain royal favour by marrying his daughter to the brother of the King's favourite, Buckingham, the ex-judge obtained a seat in Parliament where he led the opposition to the Crown. In 1621 Coke avenged himself # 1 |