Under the Tudors it was clearly understood that the right to manage the Commons, like the right of summons and dissolution, lay exclusively with the monarch. For this reason, the Speaker, who was expected to control the royal agenda, was chosen by the monarch rather than by the Commons, whose Members merely confirmed the Crown’s own nominee.
The Speaker was customarily supported by a team of privy councillors, who positioned themselves strategically around the chair. Indeed, those councillors without peerages were normally expected to find seats. However, no matter how numerous they were or how skilful they may have been as parliamentary managers, the councillors in the Commons were always too few to control business. Consequently, under Elizabeth they often called upon the assistance of a network of friends, kinsmen and fellow officeholders with seats in the House. The members of this network, dubbed by Elizabethan scholars ‘men-of-business’, have been described as ‘the key to top-down management of the Elizabethan House of Commons’, though they did not constitute a formal organization or party.
Sir Francis Bacon, a veteran of seven Elizabethan parliaments, was in little doubt that this system had served the late queen well. Parliaments under Elizabeth had been ‘so well settled and disposed’, he wrote, that whenever the queen had demanded something ‘it was seldom denied’, and whenever she had laid claim to something it was ‘never inquired’ into.
To some degree the view that Elizabethan parliaments were invariably well managed reflects the Gloriana myth that grew up after the queen’s death. Neale concluded that the Crown lost control of the Commons in the 1584/5 Parliament, while Graves has maintained that the 1601 assembly ‘was not a well managed Parliament’.
However, the extent of the Council’s managerial difficulties towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign should not be exaggerated. Despite their dwindling numbers, the Crown’s spokesmen in 1601 performed remarkably well. In addition to stifling the widespread hostility towards grants of monopoly, they secured for the queen the largest grant of subsidies of her reign, in spite of the economic hardship of the previous decade.
The parliamentary assumptions of James I
Neither by training nor temperament was the new king well equipped to handle the Commons. Although he learned a great deal about English affairs in the years leading up to Elizabeth’s death as a result of his correspondence with both the queen and Robert Cecil, James had never before visited England.
In the first place England’s Parliament – the largest representative institution in Europe – was far bigger than Scotland’s. Indeed, in March 1604 the House of Commons alone was composed of 478 Members. The size of the Westminster Parliament presented the Crown with formidable problems of management, but publicly James alluded only to the difficulty this gave the Commons. ‘It is not possible’, he told the House in May 1614, ‘but you must in such a multitude be divided in opinion how to deal and proceed with me’.
One of the key differences between the English and Scottish parliaments was their attitude to free speech. In Scotland views regarded as unwelcome by the Crown were easily stifled, not everyone was entitled to participate in debate and ‘business did not wait upon the discussion of grievances and principle’.
There can be little doubt about which of these two parliamentary systems – the English and the Scottish – James preferred. Following Sir Christopher Pigott’s violent outburst against the Scots in February 1607, an angry James drew the Commons’ attention to the practice of the Scottish Parliament, where Members ‘must not speak without the lord chancellor’s leave; and if any man speak seditious or uncomely speeches, he is straight interrupted and silenced by the chancellor’s authority’. By contrast, in the English House of Commons, he complained, any Member enjoyed the liberty ‘to speak what he list, and as long as he list’.
In my government by-past of Scotland (where I ruled amongst men not of the best temper) I was heard not only as a king, but, suppose I say it, as a counsellor. Contrary, here nothing but curiosity from morning to evening to find fault with my propositions. There, all things warranted that come from me; here all things suspected ...
The Stuart Constitution, 41.
Far from challenging and questioning his every wish, James expected the Commons to acquiesce in his demands, but instead, as he found during the Union debates of 1604, the majority of Members were ‘transported with the curiosity of a few giddy heads’.
Just as shocking for James as the Commons’ rude and uncooperative behaviour was the independent-minded nature of many of its Members. Even the friends, clients and kinsmen of privy councillors could not necessarily be relied on for their support. This was made apparent as early as April 1604, during the Buckinghamshire election dispute. Francis Moore, Ellesmere’s unofficial spokesman in the Commons, opposed the right of Chancery to adjudge election returns even though he owed his legal preferment to the lord chancellor, to whom he may have been distantly related.
The degree to which many Members were not amenable to conciliar control was something that James, inexperienced as he was in English parliaments, found difficult to grasp. To him it was axiomatic that clients ought to be politically subservient to their patrons, and he often upbraided Cecil for his inability to control his kinsman Henry Yelverton, who between 1604 and 1607 caused considerable trouble in the Commons. Cecil was obliged to explain that ‘I have no such interest in Mr. Yelverton as to think to lead him, he stands so even on his own grounds’. On the contrary, Yelverton ‘lays such sure foundations, and so prosecutes them with such strength, as he is liker to draw me than I remove him’.
Cecil’s admission was not so much a confession of weakness as a statement of political reality, but it was lost on James, who suspected from the outset that his chief minister was giving tacit support to leading troublemakers in the Commons. These suspicions were not without some justification. On 26 April 1604, the day on which Sir Edwin Sandys delivered his devastating criticism of the Union, the French ambassador reported that those in the Commons most opposed to the Union were secretly receiving comfort and assistance from members of the Council.
The expectation that English parliaments would prove as compliant as their Scottish counterparts was one of several mistaken assumptions with which James ascended the English throne. Another was that James expected his English subjects to share his view, expressed in print in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies of 1598, that monarchies predated parliaments.
Since he held that parliaments owed their existence to the king, James was inclined to believe that kings resorted to parliaments out of convenience rather than necessity. From this it followed that, were parliaments to prove troublesome or obstructive, they might be dispensed with, despite legislation enacted in the fourteenth century guaranteeing their summons every year. James expressed this view most clearly in May 1610, at the height of the impositions debate, when he declared that:
Many things I may do without Parliament, which I will do in Parliament, for good kings are helped by Parliament not for power but for convenience … But … be not misled that the more wayward you shall be I shall be the more unwilling to call you to Parliament, for such behaviour will make me call you the seldomer to council. If a great action of war were in hand, would not I be glad of your advice in it, yet you know I can do it without you.
Procs. 1610 ed. E.R. Foster, ii. 105.
This outlook goes a long way towards explaining James’s determination to rule without parliaments for as long as possible after 1610.
Another of James’s assumptions, and one which followed logically from the premise that parliaments existed for reasons of convenience rather than necessity, was that the king was entitled to levy taxes without reference to Parliament. Many Englishmen, however, were deeply wedded to the principle that taxation required the consent of the subject in Parliament, and were shocked that James, being a Scot, did not share their constitutional outlook. Nicholas Fuller undoubtedly spoke for many in May 1610 when he remarked that ‘though the king were in truth very wise yet is he a stranger to this government. … The king speaks of France and Spain what they may do; I pray ... let him know what by the laws of England he may do’.
These fundamental differences between the king and his English subjects might have remained confined to the realm of theory had James proved capable of managing his finances. However, James’s notorious prodigality, coupled with underlying weaknesses in the Crown’s financial base, meant that, within two or three years of ascending the throne, he was obliged to raise regular extra-parliamentary taxation in the form of impositions. These were additional duties on luxury imports, and although a few were in existence from the middle of the sixteenth century, their scope was greatly increased after 1605 by Salisbury and Lord Treasurer Dorset, both of whom were desperate to plug the deficit in the Crown’s finances caused primarily by James’s fecklessness. The Commons was appalled, particularly after the king’s right to levy impositions was upheld by the judges in Bate’s Case (1606). Were a monarch to be capable of raising taxes without consent, there would soon be little need for further parliaments. As James Whitelocke reportedly remarked in July 1610, ‘if this power of imposing were quietly settled in our kings, considering what is the greatest use they make of assembling of parliaments, which is the supply of money, I do not see any likelihood to hope for often meetings in that kind, because they would provide themselves by that other means’.
Since James was, as he himself later confessed, ‘an apprentice’ in English affairs, a monarch who ‘knew not the laws and customs of this land’, prudence dictated that, initially at least, he would rely upon his Council for advice regarding the handling of Parliament. Both at the time and in later years, James was keen to foster the impression that, in respect of Parliament, as in other matters, his ministers had guided him, often very poorly. At the start of the 1621 Parliament, as in 1614, he protested to the Commons that at his ‘first coming’, when he ‘knew not the laws and customs of this land’, he had been ‘led by the old councillors that I found, which the old queen had left’.
James’s belief that his Council misled him, particularly during the early years of his reign, was not without some justification, but it should not be taken wholly at face value.
Aside from causing irritation by frequent and often ill-judged interventions, James was apt to bore the Commons with long-winded speeches, as he himself confessed. These ‘tedious discourses’ – often delivered with a smile that suggested insincerity – were also frequently counter-productive. At the opening of the 1621 Parliament, James declared that in earlier sessions many in the Commons, ‘through a spice of envy’, had ‘made all my speech heretofore turn like spittle against the wind upon mine own face and contrary to my expectation’.
Perhaps the most striking illustration of the Commons’ tendency to throw James’s words back in his face is to be found in the Union debates of 1607. On 31 March, as Parliament was about to rise for Easter, James attempted to reassure the doubters in the Commons while at the same time rebutting in detail many of the arguments employed by the leading opponents of the Union.
While careless utterances and lengthy speeches helped to make James his own worst enemy, so too did ignorance. James initially failed to appreciate the extent of English hostility towards the Scots or the legal complexities involved in merging his two kingdoms. As early as April 1604 he expressed astonishment, through Bacon, that the Union had given rise to ‘so many discourses and disputes’. He had expected that it should have passed as easily as the Act recognizing his right to the English throne.
when I first propounded the Union, I then thought there could have been no more question of it than of your declaration and acknowledgement of my right unto this Crown; and that as two twins, they would have grown up together. The error was my mistaking: I knew mine own end, but not others’ fears.
Ibid. 358a.
This extraordinary admission may partly be explained by the fact that James was ‘not learned in the laws of his realm of England’, as Sir Edward Coke pointed out in 1608.
The Privy Council and the management of the Commons, 1604-1610
Following James’s accession it soon became apparent that reversing the decline in the number of councillors who sat in the Commons formed no part of the new king’s strategy for managing the lower House. In 1603 James conferred peerages on several members of the privy, most notably his chief minister Sir Robert Cecil, the treasurer of the Household Sir William Knollys and the comptroller of the Household Sir Edward Wotton, all of whom might otherwise have been eligible to sit. By the time elections were held early in 1604 only three councillors were capable of holding seats in the Commons. Of these, one – the vice-chamberlain of the Household, Sir John Stanhope – was a figure of only moderate importance while the other – Secretary of State Sir John Herbert – was a parliamentary nonentity. According to the Venetian ambassador, whose dispatches for this period are remarkably well informed, James considered that weak conciliar control of the Commons was vital to the success of the Union. By dispensing with the services of an ‘undertaker’ – by which the ambassador meant the principal member of the Council charged with laying ‘all matters before the House’ – James reasoned that he would earn the gratitude of the Commons, which would then embrace a statutory union of England and Scotland without demur. Furthermore, by reducing the emphasis on conciliar control of the Commons, James consciously rejected the methods of his predecessor, Elizabeth, whom he was never able to forgive for the execution of his mother.
Shortly after the Parliament assembled, James weakened still further the Council’s presence in the Commons. The most experienced member of the trio of councillors elected to the lower House was the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, Sir John Fortescue, whose return for Buckinghamshire was deemed invalid by the House. Asked by the Commons ‘to hear, moderate and judge the case himself’, James initially supported Fortescue against Chancery, which claimed the sole right to adjudge election returns itself. However, driven by the fear that unless he gave way the Commons would not consider let alone endorse the Union, he quickly capitulated.
There were now only two, largely ineffective, councillors in the Commons. This situation – without parallel under the Tudors – created the potentially dangerous impression that the new king held the Commons in contempt. It was a view that was certainly held by the veteran Member Sir Edward Hoby. As early as May 1604 Hoby pointedly told the Commons that it enjoyed the right to debate foreign policy ‘how slightly soever others may esteem of us’. Two years later he privately opined that ‘the State scorneth to have any privy councillors of any understanding in the House’.
Despite damaging the Commons’ sense of its own standing in the eyes of the king, the Council’s inadequate representation in the Commons did not necessarily pose an insuperable obstacle to the Crown’s successful management of the lower House. Although the two councillors with seats in the House were both relatively insubstantial figures, Stanhope at least proved useful in mustering support for the 1604 bill to confirm the Berwick property of Sir George Home, chancellor of the Exchequer and lord treasurer of Scotland.
Although these Crown servants were needed to support the two lone councillors in the Commons, it was also imperative for Cecil to guide proceedings from his seat in the Lords. At the beginning of the 1604 session this must have seemed to Cecil an entirely realistic objective. After all, more than thirty years earlier his own father, the queen’s chief minister, Sir William Cecil, had done precisely that by means of a network of men-of-business after being elevated to the peerage. Sure enough, within days of the opening of the new Parliament, it became clear that Cecil had adopted his father’s strategy. Through Sir Robert Wroth, a longstanding Cecil client, he signalled to the Commons that the king might be willing to abolish the unpopular feudal duty known as wardship in return for an annual cash payment. Over the next few months, Wroth acted ‘as the faithful and regularly briefed spokesman for Salisbury’s plans for wardship’.
By falling back on his father’s tried and trusted methods, Cecil appeared to be well able to manage a large part of the Commons’ business from the Lords. However, despite having formulated his plan to ask the Commons to compound for wardship as early as the summer of 1603, Cecil had failed to take the elementary precaution of sounding out the officers of the Court of Wards. By 24 May it was apparent not merely that the officers were implacably opposed to the scheme but that the Crown could not afford to compensate them for the loss of their offices. After checking the calculations himself, Cecil announced on 26 May, through his spokesman Wroth, that he was no longer in favour of composition, a change of tack that has not only been described as ‘staggering’ but which also created turmoil and resentment in the Commons, whose Members understandably felt that they had been led up the garden path. Sir John Holles was doubtless speaking for many when he declared that ‘it is bootless to endeavour good for the public when the ablest operators disavow us’.
Cecil’s employment of Wroth to advance and then disown a scheme of which he himself was the author cast grave doubt on his ability to handle the Commons from his seat in the Lords. However, worse was yet to come, for from the middle of May Cecil and the rest of the Council were preoccupied in negotiating a formal end to the Elizabethan war with Spain. These negotiations inevitably kept Cecil from giving the Commons his full attention, and afforded James, who left the treaty with Spain to the Council,
The matter on which James chose to intervene was subsidies. Early in the session it was reported that James had resolved not to apply for subsidies unless he was sure that he would get them. However, after the Commons rejected his proposal for a statutory Union, James allowed himself to be persuaded ‘that it was a thing both honourable and reasonable’ for him to seek supply.
Despite this setback, Sir Francis Hastings, a veteran of seven parliaments and a hot Protestant, was instructed to sound out the mood of the Commons and to report back to the king. This instruction, and the fact that Hastings was not a Cecil client, indicates that James was now personally involved, and that it was he rather than Cecil who picked Hastings for this delicate task. Certainly James and Hastings were in contact, for during the previous month the committee for religion, of which Hastings was the chairman, had attended a series of meetings in the Council chamber, some of which James had attended in person.
Hastings’ advice was unequivocal, and ought to have persuaded James and Cecil to abandon any further thought of obtaining a grant of supply. Instead, one week later, Hastings, seconded by Cecil’s cousin Sir Edward Hoby, moved a vote of subsidies.
The Commons’ rejection of the Crown’s request was a humiliating rebuff to James, whose predecessor Elizabeth had never been denied supply. As an object lesson in managerial failure it ranks alongside Cecil’s earlier mishandling of the issue of wardship. Had Cecil not then been distracted by the peace negotiations with Spain it might, perhaps, have been avoided, but as matters stood it was not until Parliament assembled for its second session that Cecil was in a position to give its affairs his full attention. Fortunately for the Crown he proved more sure-footed than he had in 1604.
One of Cecil’s first tasks, when the Commons reassembled in January 1606 after a brief meeting the previous November, was to seek legislation to prevent the king’s subjects from serving in the armed forces of Spain and her allies. Under the terms of the 1604 Treaty, Englishmen remained free to volunteer to enlist in the armies of either Spain or the United Provinces if they wished. Little thinking that Spain or her Flemish allies would benefit by this provision, Cecil and the Council had thereby hoped to maintain the flow of English recruits to the Dutch. However, to Cecil’s embarrassment, many English Catholics proved only too willing to take service with the Spanish forces in the Low Countries. Fortunately for him, the wave of anti-Catholic feeling generated by the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, provided a golden opportunity to close the loophole in the 1604 peace treaty.
Initially at least, Cecil, now earl of Salisbury, may have intended to employ Wroth as his spokesman, but shortly after the Commons assembled Sir Robert died unexpectedly. Salisbury turned instead to his client Sir Christopher Parkins, and also to Sir Edwin Sandys. On 6 February Parkins, supported by Sandys, eloquently drew attention to the ‘seminary of martial men’ in the Spanish Netherlands. Those among the king’s subjects who served the archduke ‘did not aim at the Low Countries’, declared Parkins, ‘but intended all their purposes against England’. Parkins’ intervention, playing as it did on the fears aroused by the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, was so well judged that later that session service in the armies of Spain and her allies was prohibited by statute.
Four days after Parkins delivered his well-received speech, the Crown made a fresh attempt to secure supply. On 7 February Salisbury, hoping to exploit the general mood of relief at the narrow escape of the king and Parliament from destruction at the hands of the Gunpowder plotters,
The size of grant agreed by the Commons represented quite a coup for Salisbury, since it was hard to justify a large vote of supply when England was no longer at war. Unfortunately, however, it soon became apparent that James remained dissatisfied. On 14 February Lord Treasurer Dorset, addressing the representatives of both Houses, implied that the proposed grant would be insufficient to restore the royal finances to health, since the king was in debt to the tune of £734,000. Consequently, Salisbury found himself in the awkward position of having to ask for an increase. This was a tall order, for by now many in the House were alert to James’s spendthrift habits. During the supply debate of 12 March, for example, Thomas Gawen queried whether it would ever be possible to fill the king’s coffers, ‘for if the bottoms be out then can they not be filled’, while John Hoskins declared that whatever they decided to give ‘we cannot give that [which] may suffice’.
It took all of Salisbury’s managerial skills to accomplish the king’s wishes. An initial attempt to persuade the Commons to grant an increase was spearheaded on 6 March by Ridgeway and Sir William Maurice, and supported the following day by Secretary Herbert. When this failed to bear fruit, the attorney of the Court of Wards, Sir Henry Hobart, was ordered to take charge. According to his own account, Hobart not only briefed the recorder of London, Sir Henry Montagu, but repeatedly pressed the House to consider the matter. Salisbury, however, seems to have been unconvinced that Hobart was trying hard enough, and despite the attorney’s protestations he had Sir Robert Hitcham present the Crown’s case on 14 March. Hobart nevertheless remained keen to lend a hand, and when Hitcham’s motion ran into a barrage of criticism he came to the rescue by setting out in detail the king’s financial position. Salisbury, meanwhile, concerned himself not only with senior figures in the Commons who might help, but also with some of the lesser fry, for behind the scenes he also enlisted the support of his kinsman, Sir Robert Drury, who sat for Suffolk. Drury’s support ultimately proved crucial, for when the House divided on 18 March over whether to increase the supply to be granted, Drury’s last-minute appearance in the chamber enabled those who favoured the motion to win the vote by the narrowest possible margin.
The time and trouble taken by Salisbury to cultivate minor parliamentary figures like Drury demonstrates clearly that by 1606 the Crown was belatedly seeking to build up a body of supporters in the Commons. Before the start of the 1604 session the king, being a stranger to the English parliamentary system, had largely neglected the Crown’s electoral interests, and although it was the case that around ten per cent of the House were members of the royal Household this did not mean that the king had at his disposal a loyal body of followers in the Commons.
Both before and during the negotiations for the Great Contract, Salisbury made strenuous efforts to populate the Commons with as many of his friends, clients and relatives as possible, with the result that men like George Calvert, Sir Edward Conway and Sir Arthur Ingram entered the chamber in 1610.
Undoubtedly the most important Member to join the Commons during the Contract negotiations was Sir Julius Caesar. In July 1607 Caesar was returned for the borough of Westminster, where Salisbury was high steward, following the ennoblement of the previous Member, Sir Thomas Knyvett. As well as being a welcome addition to the privy councillors in the Commons, Caesar was chancellor of the Exchequer, and as such was intimately familiar with Salisbury’s proposed Great Contract. Not surprisingly, during the spring session of 1610 Caesar served as the Crown’s chief spokesman in the Commons, where he vigorously pressed the case for the Contract. Caesar was the first of two privy councillors who joined the Commons in the latter stages of the Parliament. The second, Sir Thomas Parry, was chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster and was returned for St. Albans following a by-election in January 1610.
Although Salisbury strengthened the Crown’s position in the Commons between 1605 and 1610, his clients were too few to stem the avalanche of hostility towards the Union, nor was he able to prevent the Commons from formulating and presenting to the king enormous petitions of grievance in 1606 and 1610. Furthermore, despite securing the Commons’ agreement in principle in July 1610 to provide the king with £200,000 each year by way of ‘support’, Salisbury ultimately proved unable to muster the majority needed to persuade the Commons to endorse the Great Contract. For this latter failure James held Salisbury largely to blame, telling his chief minister after the dissolution that it had been Salisbury’s idea to summon Parliament in 1610 and Salisbury’s hope, not his, ‘to draw honey out of gall’.
In the dying days of the Parliament the king evidently despaired of Salisbury’s abilities as a parliamentary manager as he decided once more to take matters into his own hands. Desperate for supply, in mid-November he privately summoned thirty of the leading Members of the House to Whitehall in the hope of persuading them to use their influence with their colleagues.
On learning of the outcome of the debate James was incandescent with rage, for this was the second time that his demand for subsidies had been flatly refused. In a letter written by Lake two days later, Salisbury was reminded that James ‘hath now had patience with this assembly these seven years, and from them received more disgraces, censures and ignominies than ever prince did endure’. Even were the Commons to vote supply in a future session, James would not accept it were it to be offered with the same ‘taunts and disgraces’ to which he had been subjected, some of which ‘reach very near to the point of treason’.
James was now convinced that the lower House, far from being amenable to royal control, had made itself ‘a confederacy and bulwark for the protection of all extravagant humours and conceits among the people’. Its repeated assaults on ‘his dignity, his sovereignty and all things that are near to a prince (his soul only excepted)’ mystified him, but he had begun to suspect the existence of a sinister purpose, that of ‘a desiring to lay the foundations of a popular state’.
Undertakers, Sir Henry Neville and the Addled Parliament
In his belief that the Commons was a hot bed of anti-monarchical radicalism, James was encouraged by Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, who had himself suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Commons in 1604. In a paper prepared for the king shortly after the dissolution, Ellesmere complained that ‘the popular state, ever since the beginning of His Majesty’s gracious and sweet government, hath grown big and audacious’. In each successive session, he claimed, the ‘popular’ element within the Commons had ‘swelled more and more’, and if the king continued to give way to this group ‘it is to be doubted what the end will be’, for ‘grant wilful folly what it desireth, it will never be satisfied’. Instead of pursuing the king’s agenda, ‘which ought to have been first treated of’, the Commons had chosen to pursue ‘some men’s private devices’. Indeed, some Members had held private meetings at which they had ‘devised and set down special plots for the carrying of business in the House according to their own humour and drifts’. Six of the leading Members, he added, had even planned to sabotage the subsidy debate of July 1610.
Despite James’s distaste for the English Parliament, the state of the Crown’s finances was so parlous that a fresh meeting in the near future could not be discounted. Shortly after the death of Salisbury in May 1612, James was urged to summon another Parliament by the chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Julius Caesar, who concluded that it was impossible to eliminate the royal debt, which had now fallen to £500,000, except ‘by aid of Parliament’. In order to ensure that this new Parliament was more successful than the last, Caesar recommended that, before it met, the king and his Council should ‘remember the defects hindering the good success of the last Parliament’ and ‘amend them in substance or manner of proceeding’. To help them in this task, he added, they should seek ‘the advice of some besides ourselves who are like to be principal members of that House [of Commons]’.
As a result of Caesar’s suggestion, two months later James turned to Sir Henry Neville, who had been lobbying to manage the Commons on behalf of the king as early as October 1611, ‘to know his opinion in [sic] Parliament’.
Neville’s assumption that the problems that had beset the first Jacobean Parliament could be avoided if only James became more closely involved in the affairs of the Commons took no account of the fact that many of the difficulties encountered by the king in 1604 had actually stemmed from James’s attempts to manage the Commons in person. Moreover, despite Neville’s assurance that his scheme would ‘avoid jealousies’, the Commons was unlikely to relish allowing only a handful of its Members access to the king. Those selected, rather than the House in general, would naturally gain the credit for anything done by the Commons at the request of the king. Moreover, their privileged status would threaten the right of the Commons to consider its affairs in private, since James would inevitably discover from these chosen Members the details of every important debate. As William Hakewill observed in November 1610, were James to send for twenty or thirty Members at a time to ‘know the opinion of the whole House’ it would be ‘a great infringing of our privileges’.
Despite these obvious objections, Neville, desperate to be appointed to the vacant position of secretary of state, carefully tailored his advice to suit James’s preferred method for managing the Commons. This preference, which owed much to James’s Scottish background and experience, had been made clear to Neville and the rest of the Commons in May 1610. Then, at the height of the crisis over impositions, the king had most unusually dined a delegation of Members sent to him at Greenwich, and then invited the lower House to send him groups of ten or twelve Members to consult him informally from time to time.
Neville tried to add weight to his ‘Advice’ by claiming that it reflected the views of many of the leading Members of the previous Parliament, with whom he had ‘conversed inwardly’. He also pointed out that, since the dissolution of the previous Parliament, he had remained in contact with many of the leading lights in the Commons. This was something which James knew to be true, since in June 1612, after observing that many of the former leading Members of the Commons were flocking to Neville thinking that he would soon be promoted, he declared he would not have a secretary of state foisted upon him by Parliament.
Following the presentation of the ‘Advice’ and ‘Memorial’, Neville was granted a second interview with the king lasting two hours. At this fresh meeting, held in September 1612, Neville received ‘good approbation in the most of his advices, and by conference made good the rest’.
In deciding to summon another Parliament, James had taken the advice of his Council, most of whose members were adamantly opposed to a French marriage for the prince. Those councillors most keenly in favour of a Parliament – the earls of Suffolk and Pembroke – calculated that, were the Parliament to vote substantial supply, James might be persuaded to shelve his plans for a French Match. However, it was clear that if the Commons were to be induced to loosen its purse-strings it would need careful management. Since both Suffolk and Pembroke had scant experience of the Commons, having never sat in the lower House themselves, they not surprisingly turned to Neville, who demanded as the price of his support the office of secretary of state. Attaining this position would not only enable Neville to realize a long-cherished ambition but would also mean that, once in the Commons, he would be well placed to steer the business of the lower House on behalf of the Crown. Suffolk, though, was unwilling to disappoint his own client, Sir Thomas Lake, who wished to secure the secretary’s seals of office for himself. Rather than let Neville know this, Suffolk resolved ‘to play the knave’ with Neville and his allies, as he privately admitted to his son-in-law the earl of Somerset. He explained that James would only bestow the secretaryship on Neville once he and the rest of the Commons had made amends for ‘the faults they made last Parliament’.
In the absence of Neville’s support, James and his councillors were thrown back on their own resources. The strategy that was adopted owed much to both Neville and the late earl of Salisbury. In return for a generous vote of supply, the Commons would be offered a series of grace bills, among which was a bill to forbid the taking up of carts by royal purveyors, a measure which James expected to be particularly prized.
Although he hoped that the grace bills would induce the Commons to be cooperative, James wished to make doubly sure from the outset that the lower House was more compliant than its predecessor. He had not forgotten that before the last Parliament he and his Council had failed to exploit their electoral patronage to the full, a mistake that he was determined not to repeat. On 19 February, the day on which writs of election were issued, he instructed the members of his Council to use their influence in those boroughs where they had ‘credit or power’ to ensure ‘that the House be furnished of men of good disposition and apt to have due consideration of him and his estate’.
James had also learned from bitter experience the value of having a sufficient body of capable councillors in the lower House. His scope for increasing their number was severely limited, however, since most of his councillors now had peerages. As early as June 1612 James tried to persuade the comptroller of the Household, Edward, Lord Wotton, and the treasurer of the Household, William, Lord Knollys, to surrender their staffs of office in return for cash payments so that he might appoint replacements capable of sitting in the Commons.
It was not only the size of this team that was inadequate: its principal member, Winwood, had never before sat in the Commons and was therefore ill equipped to manage the lower House. The Speaker, too, was largely inexperienced, having sat only once before, in the short session of 1593. He seems to have been chosen because he was a client of Lord Chancellor Ellesmere rather than because it was thought that he might command respect. The inexperience of both Winwood and the Speaker was exacerbated by divisions within the councillors in the Commons. Winwood was hated by his colleague Lake, who resented having been passed over for the secretaryship, and also, to a lesser extent, by Caesar, who had now lost the supremacy that he had enjoyed in 1610. Both men conspicuously did nothing to assist Winwood when he ran into difficulty, although Caesar’s disappearance from the parliamentary record between mid April and the end of May was perhaps caused by the death of his wife rather than sour grapes. Bacon, who after the Parliament pointedly told the king that in future he ‘should go to a Parliament with a Council united and not distracted’,
The smallness of the team of royal spokesmen, and the divisions among its members, augured badly for the Parliament, but it is doubtful whether a larger, less divided team could have prevented the assembly from collapsing only two months after it began. Neville’s well-advertized offer to manage a future Parliament for the king had created the worst of all possible worlds. The king had failed to strike an agreement with Neville, and yet it was widely believed that he had. When, only a week after the Parliament opened, Winwood demanded an immediate vote of supply, the suspicion of a secret undertaking appeared to be confirmed, as it was unusual to raise the subject of subsidies so early in a Parliament. Even Sir Edwin Sandys, himself previously vilified as an ‘undertaker’ for having met the earl of Salisbury privately in Hyde Park in July 1610 to discuss the Great Contract, declared that he suspected that the rumours of an undertaking were well founded on the grounds that subsidies were ‘too eagerly followed’ by some of his colleagues.
Further evidence that a secret undertaking existed appeared to be provided by James’s attempts to secure seats ahead of the Parliament for his own servants. To James, who only wanted to find places for those on whose support he could count, it must have seemed that he was doing no more than following the example set by Salisbury between 1605 and 1610. To the world at large, however, it looked to be ‘a kind of packing’, as Chamberlain remarked.
The perception that the king was trying to pack the English Parliament was likely to be extremely damaging, as James well knew, since it was a fear that had helped to poison the atmosphere of the 1604 session. During the Buckinghamshire election dispute, one Member had observed that if Goodwin’s election were quashed ‘a chancellor may call a Parliament of what persons he will by this course’.
The principal casualty of the rumours of a secret undertaking was not Parry, however, but the cohesion of the House, as such rumours engendered suspicion and distrust. Ignorant of the fact that they were barking up the wrong tree, those Members not privy to the plans laid by Neville were indignant ‘that a House of Parliament should become the shadows and followers of a few’. Sir Roger Owen, who chaired the committee to draft a petition intended to reassure James that whatever Members decided to do would be motivated ‘merely out of the love of the whole House to him’, made the extreme claim on 2 May that undertakers were ‘worse than the powder traitors’ because they had subverted the House by stealth.
Faced with a witch-hunt, and resentful at being cast as disloyal, those Members who had encouraged Neville in his scheme to manage a Parliament for the king fought back. As a result the Commons was riven with faction fighting. ‘The manifest distraction which reigned in the House between the Undertakers and the Anti-undertakers’, declared Bacon, caused the House greater trouble than anything else, and made Members so suspicious of their fellows that they did ‘look rather upon the persons one of another how they were sided, rather than regard the matter they spake’, a state of affairs ‘which did cut off all means of persuasion and consent’.
Until the rumours of a secret undertaking were dispelled, the likelihood of persuading the Commons to vote subsidies was remote. On 4 May, one month after the Parliament assembled, James attempted to clear the logjam. He told the Commons that, although he had indeed been approached with a scheme to manage a Parliament, he had not taken up the authors on their offer. He also implied that those responsible were worthy of thanks rather than condemnation, as they had helped persuade him that his subjects ‘did not hate me’.
To the king and his ministers, it seemed that the way was now clear for the Commons to vote supply, the purpose for which the Parliament had been summoned. However, far from paving the way for a debate on subsidies, Neville’s confession and exoneration provided the cue for the House to turn its full attention to impositions, which many Members wanted to see abolished before they agreed to vote supply. Aside from the marriage of the prince to a Catholic, this was the one issue that the king was anxious to prevent the Commons from discussing, for were he to consent to the abolition of impositions his annual income, already too small to meet his needs, would fall by £70,000.
James clearly calculated that these threats would suffice to cow the Commons, which had already given a bill condemning impositions two readings, into submission. Instead, he merely provoked expressions of disbelief. Speaking the following morning, John Hoskins declared that there was ‘no fear of not calling of Parliament[s]’, as ‘the king gains by them, not the subject’, while Edward Alford announced that ‘his only fear’ was that ‘we shall not part with the king in love’. The one Member to take James’s threat seriously was Sir Thomas Roe, who four weeks later described the impending dissolution as ‘the ending, not only of this, but of all parliaments’.
Since a majority in the Commons clearly believed that James was bluffing, there was no immediate possibility of forcing the Commons to debate supply. When Sir Herbert Croft proposed on 5 May that the House turn its attention to subsidies the following morning, his motion was ignored. Instead, most Members were inclined to agree with Sir Edwin Sandys, who urged that the matter of supply ‘might stay’ till the issue of impositions had been determined.
The collapse in the Speaker’s authority
The king’s inability to compel the Commons to debate supply rather than impositions demonstrates quite clearly that James had lost the power to control the parliamentary agenda. This was an astonishing development, for under Elizabeth the Commons had generally been kept on a tight rein. However, it was an inevitable consequence of the king’s refusal to accept that taxation necessarily required the subject’s consent. Before 1614 it would have been unthinkable to challenge openly the king’s ultimate right to determine the agenda, but James’s attempt to close down the debate on impositions caused one Member at least to fall back on the argument that the Commons’ right to free speech trumped the king’s right of veto. On 5 May, after Leonard Bawtree, one of the few lawyers in the House prepared to defend impositions, argued that there was ‘not always freedom of speech here’, Lawrence Hyde retorted that there was ‘no power in the king to direct our proceedings’, for when the House sat it did so as ‘a free council, to proceed as we shall think fit’.
The collapse in the king’s ability to manage the Commons was mirrored by a decline in the authority of the officer primarily responsible for controlling the agenda on behalf of the king – the Speaker. Traditionally the occupant of this office was a Crown servant, and as such he was expected to do the monarch’s bidding, but he was also the mouthpiece of the Commons, and for that reason he was entitled to be regarded as ‘the best commoner in England’.
The Speaker of the first Jacobean Parliament, Sir Edward Phelips, was an unpopular choice among his fellow Members. Under Elizabeth the Commons had always acquiesced without demur in the Crown’s choice of Speaker, but in 1604, for reasons that remain unclear, several Members openly suggested alternative candidates.
Phelips’s successor as Speaker, Sir Ranulphe Crewe, ultimately fared no better. On 5 May Sir John Savile and Sir Herbert Croft complained of the ‘disorders of the House’ and wished that ‘better respect’ be shown towards the Speaker by those who failed to observe the rule requiring the Speaker to leave the chamber first at the end of each day’s proceedings.
Just as the king was ultimately powerless to force the Commons to do his bidding, so too Members found it impossible to force the Speaker to do theirs. This did not prevent some of them from trying. After Speaker Phelips repeatedly failed to attend the Commons at a critical moment in the Union debates of March 1607, Nicholas Fuller, a Member not known for his moderation, assured his colleagues that they had the power to elect another Speaker if they wished, since he is ‘but one of ourselves’ and is ‘only to moderate’. He was answered by Sir George More, one of the king’s most loyal supporters, who correctly observed that ‘the king must give leave, and must approve after choice’.
Before 1629, however, few in the Commons were willing to challenge the king’s right to appoint the Speaker. This meant that the only option left was to bypass the Speaker altogether. One of the key parliamentary developments of the early seventeenth century was the emergence of the committee of the whole House, which met under the auspices of a chairman chosen by the Commons itself rather than the Speaker. These grand committees, which first made their appearance in 1606, were ostensibly developed for procedural reasons, since Members were not restricted to speaking only once during debate as they were when the Speaker was in the chair.
The Jacobean Personal Rule and the advice of Sir Francis Bacon
In the immediate aftermath of the dissolution of 1614, James blamed the failure of the Parliament not on his own inability to manage the Commons, but on the Commons itself, which, he angrily told the Spanish ambassador, was too large to be handled, leaderless and unruly.
Although James attributed the failure of his first two parliaments to the lower House, it was plain that he needed help if a future House of Commons were to be managed successfully. Consequently, in September 1615 the Council, after agreeing that James should call another meeting, turned its attention to this problem. Correctly, the Council appreciated that it was just as important to remove any obstacles to a successful meeting before Parliament assembled as it was to manage the Commons when it finally met.
Although the king received advice from his Council, he also turned to the attorney-general, Sir Francis Bacon. Though not yet a member of the Council, Bacon had long experience of the Commons. Moreover he had drafted for the king a memorandum in 1613 advocating the summoning of a fresh assembly and had helped James prepare his opening speech to Parliament in 1614.
Although bargaining with the Commons had weakened the king’s ability to manage a Parliament, Bacon declared that an even greater error had been committed at the start of the 1614 assembly by Secretary Winwood, who had announced that the sole purpose of the meeting was to supply the king’s wants and pay off his debts. In Bacon’s eyes this admission, while entirely honest, had done ‘great hurt, by putting upon the king the person of a mendicant’. Rather than go to the Commons cap in hand, James should make it appear that he was capable of solving his financial difficulties without the help of a Parliament, even if, in reality, this was quite impossible. To this end he ought to enter into marriage negotiations with Spain, whose king had made it clear he would pay a large dowry if James were to agree to match Prince Charles to a Spanish Infanta. The Commons, most of whose Members were notoriously anti-Spanish, would be desperate to prevent such a marriage and would therefore be only too eager to furnish the king with money. Consequently, Bacon advised that, when a Parliament finally met, ‘let there be an utter silence, as of the king’s part, of matter of money or supply, or of the king’s debts or wants’. Sooner or later ‘some honest man’ would rise to his feet and urge the House to vote money, as had happened in 1606, when Sir Edward Montagu had initiated a subsidy debate. This latter observation was incorrect, as in 1606 it had been Sir Thomas Ridgeway rather than Montagu who had proposed a vote of subsidies, and he had almost certainly been acting on Council instruction. However, Bacon undoubtedly had a point when he observed that ‘the meeting and parting of the king and his Parliament ... will ever suffer as long as money is made the mere object of the Parliament’.
At least two members of James’s Council did not share this view. In September 1615 Bacon’s hated rival Sir Edward Coke, far from advising the king to remain silent about his financial needs, recommended that the best way to induce the Commons to vote supply would be for James to disclose to the Commons the details of his spending since his accession. This would demonstrate that James’s demands ‘proceeded not only out of facility and prodigality’ but from unavoidable necessity, and so combat the belief, prevalent in the Commons, that James was primarily the author of his own financial misfortunes. This view was naturally warmly endorsed by Coke’s ally, Winwood. Yet, despite their sharply different approaches, Bacon and Coke saw eye to eye with respect to another aspect of Commons’ management. Both men agreed that the attempt to pack the previous Parliament had been ill advised. In Bacon’s opinion it had detracted from the ‘ancient dignity and splendour’ that parliaments had once enjoyed, while Coke argued that the interference of councillors and other ‘great men’ in elections had not only been widely regarded as ‘very offensive’ but had also proved counterproductive, since it had created a backlash whereby ‘many had crept in ... who had shown themselves most adverse from the king’.
A great deal of Bacon’s advice to James can be reduced to the proposition that if the king wished to manage the Commons successfully he should eschew the novel practices of recent years and revert to the tried and trusted methods of his predecessors. This meant not only abandoning such things as bargaining and packing but also restoring to the lord chancellor the right to make the oration customarily delivered to the Commons at the beginning of each Parliament.
Bacon assured James that the failure of the 1614 Parliament was not sufficient reason to avoid calling another meeting, any more than ‘the opening of a body dead of disease ought to fear a man in health’. However, James remained unconvinced, and when the Dutch ambassador offered to buy back the Cautionary Towns he abandoned his plans to summon another Parliament in 1616.
In view of his attempts to tutor James in the art of Commons’ management, it is hardly surprising that Bacon, by now lord chancellor, was entrusted with the prime responsibility for planning the forthcoming Parliament. At first it appeared that James had taken careful note of Bacon’s advice, for on 2 October 1620 the king instructed Bacon and the members of the committee who were to assist him to avoid ‘packing or degenerate arts’.
Bacon also enjoyed only mixed success with respect to his advice to James on handling the opening of the new Parliament. His principal achievement was to persuade James to restore the lord chancellor’s oration. In this address, delivered on 3 February, Bacon set out at some length the behaviour that the king expected of the Commons. For example, while Members were encouraged to bring the complaints of their constituents to Parliament they were warned not to ‘hunt after grievances’ and to ‘be careful not to cast scandal upon the state’.
The first parliamentary sitting of 1621
If the unwillingness of James and Buckingham to heed Bacon’s advice augured badly for the Crown, so too did the outcome of many key elections to the Commons. Writing to Buckingham on 16 December, Bacon declared that the election returns thus far sent into Chancery indicated that ‘the prognostics are not so good as I expected’.
The difficulties posed by the meagre complement of councillors in the House were exacerbated by the selection of Sir Thomas Richardson as Speaker. Richardson had never before sat in the Commons, and consequently was unfamiliar with the procedural rules that he was expected to uphold. No previous Speaker – or certainly none during the preceding century – had been so destitute of parliamentary experience, and it is therefore not altogether surprising that when Richardson, as custom required, announced at the beginning of the Parliament that he was a poor choice for Speaker he was taken at his word by Arthur Goodwin, who recommended that another be elected in his stead.
Richardson’s inexperience quickly caused irritation among his fellow Members. In March 1621, after two Members rose simultaneously to speak, he flippantly remarked ‘that he hoped the wisest would sit down first’, whereupon William Noye demanded that he be punished.
Ultimate responsibility for selecting Richardson lay with James and his chief minister, Buckingham, but it was almost certainly Bacon who was behind his nomination, since Richardson was a client of his and owed his seat at St. Albans to him. Certainly, Bacon was deeply involved in the selection process, for on 29 November 1620 he had sent Buckingham a shortlist of names, along with a strong verbal recommendation in favour of one of the candidates.
Aside from the obvious weaknesses in the Speaker and the team of Crown spokesmen in the Commons, one of the surest signs that the government was ill prepared to manage the 1621 Parliament was its failure to solve the explosive problem of impositions. Supported by Bacon, Sir Lionel Cranfield had recommended turning all existing impositions into legitimate customs duties by revising the Book of Rates.
A further ill omen was the wording of the Proclamation issued ahead of the writs of summons. On 24 October James, anxious that both the Spanish Match and the crisis in the Palatinate had become popular subjects of conversation among the people at large, had issued a Proclamation ‘against excess of lavish and licentious speech of matters of state’.
By the time the Parliament assembled in February 1621, it must have seemed to many observers that the stage was now set for another violent confrontation between James and the Commons. The Crown’s failure to resolve the problem of impositions, Buckingham’s unwillingness to take action against the most unpopular monopolies before Parliament met, and the size and composition of the team of royal spokesmen in the Commons, all pointed to an unsuccessful meeting, as did the Proclamation that apparently prevented the Commons from exercising its traditional right to free speech. Yet seven weeks into the new Parliament the Venetian ambassador observed ‘that Parliament is working harmoniously with the king and each strives [to see] which can please the other most’, while John Chamberlain remarked that James was ‘very graciously inclined’ towards the Commons, which ‘receives daily very gracious messages, ... whereby they are much animated’.
James himself later looked back on the period before Easter 1621 with nostalgia. Writing in January 1622, he declared that ‘the House of Commons at the first ... showed greater love and more respect than ever any House of Commons did to us, or we think to any king before us’. Before Easter there had been ‘such harmony between us and our people as cannot be paralleled by any former time’.
The relatively harmonious atmosphere in which the Commons met between February and April 1621 is one of the unexplained mysteries of early Stuart parliamentary history. By all accounts the Parliament should, like its immediate predecessor, have collapsed quickly. That it did not do so points to either a remarkable transformation in the managerial abilities of James and his ministers, or to some other, hitherto unidentified factor.
One possible explanation for the extraordinary outbreak of harmony is that, before the Parliament opened, an agreement was secretly reached with the leading Members of the Commons. In return for a swift vote of supply and a willingness to turn a blind-eye to impositions, James may have promised to allow the Commons a free hand, most notably over monopolies. However, if such a backstairs agreement was ever brokered, some trace of it ought to be discernible in the surviving records. After all, as the parliaments of 1614 and 1624 clearly demonstrate, secret undertakings were extremely hard to conceal. In fact, beyond a statement made by the French ambassador shortly before the election writs were issued, that the ‘puritans’ had promised not to touch the royal prerogative,
A more likely explanation for the Commons’ willingness to vote supply and unwillingness to debate the legality of impositions is that many of its Members were desperate to avoid a premature dissolution. Recent events on the Continent, in particular the Spanish invasion of the Lower Palatinate and the defeat of James’s son-in-law the Elector Palatine, made it essential that England should be capable of entering the Thirty Years’ War on the Protestant side. This might prove impossible, however, if the Commons resumed its earlier quarrel with the king over impositions and refused to vote subsidies. Moreover, in 1614 many had assumed that James had been bluffing when he threatened to dispense with further meetings with his subjects unless the Commons voted subsidies and abandoned its opposition to impositions. The events of the last six-and-a-half years, however, had demonstrated that he had been in deadly earnest. Indeed, in the aftermath of the Addled Parliament it was widely believed ‘that no Parliament will be held again in England’.
The fear that James might at any moment dissolve the Parliament and revert to personal rule was never very far from the minds of Members in 1621. Indeed, it helps to explain much of the panic that gripped the Commons following James’s announcement, on 28 May, of an imminent adjournment. The recorder of London, Heneage Finch urged that, ‘whatsoever becomes of the bills’ that had not yet passed, ‘let us have a care to preserve the Parliament’,
The one sure way to realize these fears and precipitate a swift return to personal rule was to broach the subject of impositions. Since most Members had no wish to trigger the collapse of the Parliament, they were understandably wary of doing so. Against a backdrop of a serious trade depression, avoiding the subject of impositions was easier said than done, as the burden on trade created by these duties inevitably made a bad situation worse. Members overcame this difficulty by restricting their complaints to the economic impact of impositions rather than the king’s right to levy them and by directing their anger at a private corporation, the Merchant Adventurers’ Company, rather than at the king. In so doing, as one historian correctly observed, ‘they were walking a tightrope’.
The awareness of Members that they were treading on eggshells was not restricted to the subject of impositions, though, as any quarrel with James over the House’s right to free speech was capable of causing the Parliament to collapse.
There is no need to invoke a private agreement between the Crown and the leading Commons Members to explain why the lower House fought shy of debating the legality of impositions in 1621 or proved so willing to vote supply. However, the principal men in the Commons must certainly have arrived at an understanding among themselves. Unofficial meetings between Members to debate strategy and tactics, though impossible to document, were perfectly commonplace. In 1628 Edward Alford, who had first entered the Commons in 1593, observed that ‘in ancient times 14 of us or more usually went privately and had conference together what was fit to be moved’.
The collapse of the 1621 Parliament
Although the opening months of the 1621 Parliament proved unexpectedly harmonious, John Chamberlain correctly predicted that ‘this fair weather cannot always last’.
The main focus of Cranfield’s suspicion in the Commons was Sir Edwin Sandys, who was closely linked to Southampton through the Virginia Company. In mid June, after the Commons adjourned, Sandys, like Southampton, was arrested on the king’s orders. In the list of interrogatories that was subsequently put to him was the question ‘what conference he had [had], and with which of the Lords, at any time, in the committee chamber of the upper House?’ Sandys was also quizzed about his dining arrangements on 28 May, the day on which the adjournment had been announced.
The government’s fear that private interests were secretly managing the 1621 Parliament helps to explain why James called a temporary halt to its proceedings in early June. When the Parliament reconvened in November, these fears had evidently abated, as both Sandys and Southampton conspicuously failed to resume their seats. The purpose of the fresh meeting was spelled out by the lord keeper and the lord treasurer at a conference between both Houses on 21 November. Ordinary business would be deferred until money was voted to help defend the Lower Palatinate, which was in imminent danger of being overrun. The subsidies that had already been granted were now all spent, and the king remained heavily indebted. In order to keep an army in the field for one year, the Commons was told that £900,000 would be needed.
In demanding a further grant of subsidies, James evidently believed that he was being realistic. After all, shortly before the summer recess had not the Commons given vent to its anti-Spanish feelings by promising ‘to adventure the lives and estates of all that belong unto us, or wherein we have interest, for the maintenance of the cause of God, and of His Majesty’s royal issue’?
Since James was no longer on hand, the detailed management of the Commons fell to the Privy Council, many of whose members had been pressing for a war since the summer of 1620. However, their chances of obtaining subsidies were nearly spoiled by the Commons’ reaction to the absence of Sir Edwin Sandys. Many in the Commons believed that Sandys was being prevented from resuming his seat for offences committed during the previous sitting.
Once the furore over Sandys had died down, the Commons turned its attention to supply. Not surprisingly, the subsidy debate of 26 November bears all the hallmarks of having been carefully stage-managed. It was initiated by Sir Dudley Digges, a former pupil of Archbishop Abbot, one of the principal members of the war party on the Council. He was supported by Sir Benjamin Rudyard and Sir James Perrot, both of whom were clients of Abbot’s close ally, the earl of Pembroke, and by Sir Miles Fleetwood, the receiver-general of the Court of Wards and a man later closely associated with Buckingham.
Despite its careful attempts to orchestrate the subsidy debate, the Council enjoyed only limited success. The proposition that supply should be voted twice in one year proved to be highly controversial. Just as John Hoskins had observed in 1604 that he knew of no sheep that produced two fleeces in a year, so Thomas Crewe and Edward Alford now remarked that two grants of subsidy required two harvests.
These concerns were both genuine and entirely predictable, but the Crown’s only strategy for dealing with them was to promise that Parliament would reconvene in February 1622 to deal with bills and grievances. This unsatisfactory state of affairs was compounded by James’s blithe assumption that he could rely for additional supply on the desire of Protestant Englishmen to rally to the defence of the Palatinate. For a variety of reasons this assumption was misplaced. First, it was unclear what sort of war James envisaged, as he had not stated whether he was demanding money to fund a general war with Spain or a more limited struggle to defend the Palatinate. If the latter, then the Commons was being asked, as Sir Edward Giles put it, to ‘fight with the Spaniards in the Palatinate and be friends with them everywhere else’, which was absurd.
The king’s failure to address the Commons’ understandable concerns meant that Members were placed on the horns of a dilemma. ‘If we should not now give’, observed John Pym on 27 November, ‘we frustrate the king’s expectation grounded on our own declaration, and we lose assuredly the Palatinate and our reputation’, but ‘if we do nothing but give we shall have the discontent of the people, and increase their fears of religion, and bring a disreputation to ourselves, having sat so long and effected no bills’.
James’s failure to set clear policies that would enable his councillors to manage the Commons successfully on his behalf ultimately led not only to a disappointing outcome to the subsidy debate but also to the eventual collapse of the Parliament. Ever since the Parliament began, the Commons had quietly accepted limitations to its right of free speech, on the grounds that not offending the king was more important than risking extinction. However, if there was one issue more important than the survival of parliaments it was the survival of English Protestantism. On 3 December the Commons petitioned the king to have Prince Charles ‘timely and happily married to one of our own religion’.
The failure of the 1621 Parliament confirmed, if indeed confirmation were needed, that James was incapable of managing the Commons, despite the tuition he had received from Bacon. It could, of course, be argued that James did not actually seek to manage this Parliament at all after it reconvened in November. Not only did he retire to Newmarket, thereby making rapid communication between himself and the Commons impossible, but he is also said to have sabotaged the Parliament’s proceedings in order to avoid a war with Spain.
The Parliament of 1624
Following the collapse of the 1621 assembly James was more determined than ever to dispense with parliaments.
The idea of excluding individual troublemakers in order to make it easier to manage the Commons was a new departure, though the idea had been floated before 1623. In the winter of 1615 James had pricked Sandys as sheriff of Kent ahead of the Parliament that was planned to meet the following spring, and in November 1622, when there had been talk of calling another Parliament following the loss of Heidelberg and Mannheim, it was rumoured that many of those chosen to serve as sheriffs had been selected because of their awkward behaviour in the Commons.
In the aftermath of the 1621 Parliament, those in favour of a fresh meeting were forced to confront James’s frustration at not being able to exercise some control over the composition of the Commons. This explains why, in October 1622, it was suggested to James that he institute a new order of knighthood, that of ‘vidom’, whose holders would be senior to knights-bachelor but junior to baronets. Apart from raising badly needed money, this dignity’s chief advantage to the Crown was that its holders would automatically enjoy a ‘place in the lower House of Parliament as the barons have in the Higher House’.
Up until then, James, like Elizabeth before him, had normally used his powers of patronage to strip troublesome Members of the Commons of local office rather than to disqualify them from service altogether. In 1607, for example, several were struck off the commission of the peace for their outspoken hostility to the Union, while Nicholas Fuller, who had also attacked the court of High Commission, was removed from the London and Middlesex commissions for gaol delivery and oyer and terminer.
James’s determination to exclude Sandys and Coke threatened to make managing the forthcoming Parliament difficult, since barring two of its leading Members would create a breach with the Commons from the outset. This was clearly understood by the earl of Pembroke and the marquess of Hamilton, both of whom remonstrated with James in Council.
The intervention of Charles and Buckingham is scarcely surprising, since the 1624 Parliament came about largely as a result of the pressure they exerted on James. To prevent this Parliament from failing as ignominiously as the three previous assemblies had done, Charles and Buckingham evidently arranged to manage this meeting themselves, thereby freeing James from all responsibility. To this end, and before the Parliament met, Buckingham opened up communication with many of those Members who had been punished after the collapse of the 1621 Parliament. Chief among them was Coke’s close ally Sir Robert Phelips, the son of the former Speaker Sir Edward Phelips. Sometime over the autumn of 1623 Phelips and Buckingham thrashed out a deal, the details of which may have been mediated by Phelips’ Court contact, Nathaniel Tomkins, clerk of the prince’s Council. This agreement, preserved among Phelips’s own papers in the form of a written dialogue between a courtier and a gentleman, committed Buckingham to undertake to persuade the king and Council to call a Parliament. Buckingham also promised to try to get James to break off the Spanish marriage negotiations and bring about a war with Spain. In return, Phelips undertook, albeit reluctantly, not to mention impositions.
These undertakings were astonishing. In effect, several leaders of the Commons had consented to help manage the lower House in the interests of the Crown. This was precisely the sort of arrangement that had been envisaged by Sir Henry Neville ten years earlier, and though Neville’s scheme had never been carried into effect, it was generally acknowledged that its existence had done much to poison the atmosphere in which the Parliament of 1614 had met. However, while news of these private agreements soon became widespread, the Commons did not divide along the lines of undertakers and anti-undertakers as it had in 1614, nor did it institute an inquiry. Most Members were just as anxious as Buckingham and Phelips to end the Spanish Match and commence hostilities with Spain, and were therefore unwilling to upset the apple cart. Even so, news of the deals aroused widespread disgust. In March 1624 Chamberlain reported that the Commons refused to be led along by Sandys, Digges and Phelips, who ‘have so little credit among them that though they speak well and to the purpose sometimes, yet it is not so well taken at their hands for still they suspect them to prevaricate, and hold them for undertakers’.
Although the agreements reached with the Commons’ leaders may have done more harm than good, they formed an important part of Charles and Buckingham’s strategy for managing the Commons. Another key part of the planning process involved the choice of Speaker. In the previous three parliaments the Speaker had been poorly regarded by many of his colleagues in the Commons because he was justifiably regarded as little more than a tool of the king. In 1624, however, the Crown chose as Speaker Sir Thomas Crewe, who had been severe in his criticism of impositions in 1610 and 1614, and had narrowly escaped arrest for his role in the latter stages of the 1621 Parliament. It seems unlikely that James was directly responsible for his selection, for in 1618 he had declared that Crewe was the one man in the kingdom whose candidacy for the recordership of London he absolutely forbade. It is much more likely that Crewe was singled out by Lord Keeper Williams, who made him a serjeant and recommended him to the king as a man ‘warm in the care of religion, and a chief among them that were popular in the defence of it; a great lover of the laws of the land, and the liberties of the people’.
As is well known, the Parliament of 1624 was the most harmonious meeting of James’s reign. The Commons and Lords were broadly united behind Charles and Buckingham in their desire to break off the Spanish Match and wage war with Spain, and thanks to Buckingham the Commons found a way of ensuring that the money voted for war would not be misappropriated for the payment of the king’s debts. In legislative terms, too, the Parliament was more successful than its immediate predecessors. Whereas the previous two meetings had failed to enact any legislation (with the sole exception of the Subsidy Act in 1621) the 1624 Parliament passed a whole raft of new laws. Moreover, in the Commons Sir Thomas Crewe enjoyed such a cordial relationship with the House that on the final day of the session Edward Nicholas declared him to have been ‘the most able Speaker ... that had held that place in many years before’.
The Parliament of 1625
The accession of Charles I in March 1625 held out the prospect of a permanent improvement in relations between the king and the House of Commons. Unlike his late father, Charles had no direct experience of the Scottish Parliament, nor had he yet developed any great distaste for the English Parliament, for despite having privately described in November 1621 some individual Members of the Commons as ‘seditious fellows’, the new king appears to have been sincere when he professed in 1628 that ‘at the first I liked parliaments’.
Buoyed up in the knowledge that he enjoyed the goodwill of his subjects, Charles approached the first Parliament of his reign with the same feeling of optimism as his father in 1604. However, whereas James had been determined to make a clean break with the practices of his predecessor, Charles expected to be able to continue where the 1624 Parliament had left off. Consequently Sir Thomas Crewe was selected to serve a second term as Speaker. Many contemporaries regarded Crewe’s reappointment as ‘a good omen to the work’ and a symbol of the ‘new marriage and conjunction between the king and people’,
These errors and oversights might have proved less serious had the Commons not met against the backdrop of a serious outbreak of plague. Many Members were desperate to leave Westminster as early as possible to avoid infection but, despite the sense of urgency communicated by the lord keeper, more than two weeks elapsed, during which time the Crown’s spokesmen failed to raise the subject of supply. Eventually, on 30 June, Sir Francis Seymour sparked off such a debate on his own initiative. Seymour was no friend of Buckingham’s, and far from proposing a large grant he offered just a single subsidy and one fifteenth. As there were then no councillors present, it fell to the Pembroke client Sir Benjamin Rudyard to protest that the sum this would yield was entirely inadequate. However, Rudyard’s objections fell on deaf ears, as a majority of Members present shared Seymour’s concern to restrict the size of the grant. Led by Phelips, who reminded the House that it had not yet received an account of the subsidies voted in 1624, it was agreed that the king should receive just two subsidies. Less than a week later a bill for such a grant received a second reading.
On learning that the subsidy bill was close to completion, Buckingham, far from feeling grateful to the Commons, was horrified. Two subsidies would yield only around £160,000, whereas the Crown’s financial needs were far higher. He immediately rode to Hampton Court, where the king was staying.
After convincing the king to seek additional subsidies, Buckingham returned to London at around midnight on 7 July. Despite the late hour, he summoned those of his friends and clients with seats in the Commons and informed them that he wished the matter of supply to be reopened the next day.
By the time the Commons reassembled the following morning, many of its Members, thinking that their duty was done, had fled the capital. Those who remained behind gave the subsidy bill its third and final reading as soon as morning prayers were said. A short while later, however, Buckingham’s client John Coke rose to his feet and, after thanking his colleagues for voting subsidies without waiting to be asked, declared that the sum to be provided was wholly insufficient. After detailing the size of the king’s financial engagements, he announced that ‘a present resolution for money is not expected’. However, he advised the Commons to provide the king with a line of credit by promising to finance the war for as long as it lasted, for otherwise Charles would be forced to ‘strain some other way’ to raise the necessary funds. Many Members were naturally offended at this sign of royal ingratitude, and at the brazen attempt to exploit a thinly attended chamber. As Sir Robert Phelips later remarked, Coke’s intervention looked more like a ‘surprise of enemies’ than ‘an overture from friends’.
Coke was extremely angry at the hostile reaction to his speech, which he had carefully prepared overnight on the express instructions of Buckingham, but the Commons’ response had been entirely predictable. When, early that morning, the privy councillors with seats in the House had learned that Buckingham intended to seek a further grant of supply, they had been horrified, since it was unusual to vote subsidies twice in one session. Sir Humphrey May, the chancellor of the duchy, understood that any attempt to revisit the question of supply immediately would poison relations with the Commons, and he remonstrated with the duke’s client Sir John Eliot, whom he urged to speak to Buckingham. In the meantime he undertook to prevent Coke from delivering his speech until Eliot’s return. Eliot, who shared May’s concern, thereupon made his way to Buckingham’s Thames-side residence, where he found the duke still in bed. Over the course of the next two hours he attempted to persuade Buckingham to countermand his instructions to Coke, but to no avail. The displeasure of the councillors in the Commons on learning that their wishes had been set aside was evident from the fact that none of them rose to second Coke after he had finished speaking.
In the aftermath of this fiasco Buckingham blamed everyone but himself for the failure of Coke’s motion. Those whom he had summoned to the midnight meeting – his ‘privados’, as his close friends and confidants were known – were roundly ‘condemned as remiss and negligent in the service’.
Buckingham’s failure to act in concert with the councillors in the Commons was a serious error of judgment, but whether it was due to hubris, as Eliot believed, or to the fact that the two chief councillors in the Commons – Sir Humphrey May and Sir Thomas Edmondes – were not his clients is unclear. One hitherto unexplored possibility is that Buckingham’s confidence in the effectiveness of the Crown’s official spokesmen in the Commons had diminished sharply. At the beginning of a new reign it was customary for Parliament to grant the monarch the right to collect the customs duties known as Tunnage and Poundage for life. However, on 5 July the Commons, fearful that these duties would be used to justify the continued levy of impositions, which many Members still regarded as illegal, placed the Tunnage and Poundage bill in committee for alteration. This anxiety was by no means unreasonable, for in 1624 the Tunnage and Poundage Act of 1604 had been used to justify the raising of additional duties known as the pretermitted customs, which the Commons had condemned as a grievance. Rather than enact legislation for the lifetime of the new king, the Commons decided, on the recommendation of Sir Robert Phelips, to redraft the bill so that it would expire in a year. That would give time to draft a satisfactory measure while still allowing the king to receive Tunnage and Poundage. Not surprisingly, the councillors present opposed Phelips’ suggestion ‘with much solicitation and endeavour’, arguing that a temporary measure would incline the king to think that his subjects held him in less regard than his predecessors. However, despite the force with which they pressed their case, their wishes were disregarded, and on 7 July, the day before the subsidy bill received its third and final reading, the newly reworded Tunnage and Poundage bill was ordered to be engrossed.
By the time the king adjourned the Parliament on 11 July it was clear, as Eliot later observed, that ‘the winds were turned’.
Williams’ offer to manage the Commons on behalf of the king was not taken up, nor was his advice to avoid summoning the Parliament to Oxford heeded. When the Parliament reconvened in early August the demand for additional supply was repeated. This time the Crown’s spokesmen presented a united front, as the councillors in the Commons, doubtless under direct instructions from the king, seconded John Coke, who once again made the case for a second grant. However, as Williams had predicted, this fresh request provided the cue for a full-scale assault on Buckingham. On 5 August, the day after further subsidies were demanded, Sir Robert Phelips and Sir Edward Coke launched a scathing attack on the mismanagement of the royal finances, during the course of which Buckingham was deemed unfit to hold high office. Both men accused the duke of monopolizing power, while Phelips asserted that the king had received bad advice.
The fate of the Parliament was now on a knife-edge. Several of Buckingham’s closest supporters impressed upon the duke the need ‘to endeavour an accommodation with the Parliament’. Sir John Eliot in particular urged Buckingham to cast the blame for the failures in naval administration on the Navy Commissioners, who were led by Eliot’s arch enemy John Coke. He was also urged to withdraw the royal protection accorded to the Arminian cleric Richard Montagu, whose published writings, coupled with the king’s recent marriage to a French princess (Henrietta Maria), had continued to fuel fears for the survival of English Protestantism. At first it seemed that Buckingham would adopt the course of action suggested by Eliot,
By now it was plain that control of the Commons had slipped out of the hands of Charles and Buckingham. Egged on by the duke’s enemies in the House of Lords, most Members were more interested in pursuing their own agenda than the king’s. On 10 August the king announced that, while he was pleased that the Commons desired ‘to reform many things tending to his particular service’, he required that immediate attention be given to the matter of supply, ‘that he may send his navy’.
The Parliament of 1626
Before Parliament met again it was plain that Charles and Buckingham would need to be both better prepared and more receptive to the advice of those around them. It was also essential to clear away the obstacles that would otherwise hinder the king’s smooth management of the Commons. One of the chief barriers to success was the fact that, following his marriage, the king had relaxed the penal laws against Catholics. Shortly after the dissolution Charles took steps to remedy this situation, issuing a Proclamation requiring that the laws against Catholics be more vigorously enforced. However, if Charles hoped that this concession would suffice to win over a future House of Commons he was, as the Tuscan ambassador shrewdly observed in September 1625, bound to be disappointed.
Charles may have hoped that the opposition to Buckingham would melt away once the fleet, which finally sailed in early October, returned in triumph. Certainly a victory over the Spanish would have made it difficult for Buckingham’s enemies to mount a second attack on him. However, planning for a new Parliament could not be postponed until the fleet returned, for whatever the outcome of the expedition, additional money would be needed the following year. Consequently, as early as September 1625 the king began to contemplate a fresh meeting with his subjects. Despite the unhappy experience of his first Parliament, Charles was not unduly troubled by the attacks on Buckingham, and believed that the stormy mood of the Commons had been entirely attributable to ‘the distemper of 5 or 6 men’.
By reversing the limited toleration granted to Catholics at the beginning of his reign, and by ensuring that the most troublesome Members of his first Parliament would not be able to sit, Charles hoped to create the conditions necessary to manage the Commons. However, his chances of handling a future lower House were dealt a devastating blow at the end of the year, when the fleet returned from Cadiz, battered and broken, having accomplished nothing. Now, instead of summoning Parliament in the warm glow of victory, Charles would be compelled to order it to meet against a backdrop of defeat. To make matters worse, the attempt to draw France into the war against Spain had gone disastrously wrong. A squadron of English ships loaned to the French king in anticipation of an Anglo-French naval assault on the Spanish held port of Genoa had been used, without English permission, to quell the rebellious Huguenots of La Rochelle. English guns had therefore been turned not on the Spanish, but on England’s co-religionists. Charles was incensed, but he was denied the opportunity to repair the damage and so save the reputation of Buckingham, because in January 1626 the French king and the Huguenots signed a treaty of peace.
When the Parliament opened the following month it quickly became clear that the exclusion from the Commons of several of its former Members had accomplished little. Charles soon discovered that the Commons was like a hydra, as cutting off some of its heads only resulted in others taking their place.
The principal mechanism by which the House now pursued the favourite was the committee of the whole House. On 24 February, at the suggestion of Christopher Wandesford, the House established a special grand committee known as the committee for evils, causes and remedies. Existing alongside the grand committee for grievances, which it largely overshadowed, and chaired by Wandesford himself, the committee was instructed to ‘hear the people’ and ‘search into the causes of those evils that like an inundation have overwhelmed us’.
Like its parent body, Eliot’s subcommittee consisted of the entire membership of the Commons rather than a select group of Members. However, on 21 April the House established a select committee consisting of just twelve named Members, ostensibly for the purpose of reducing the charges into form and to search out precedents. The four chairmen of the standing grand committees were included, as was Eliot, the chairman of the subcommittee for the causes of causes, and the other leading malcontents in the Commons, among them Sir Dudley Digges, John Glanville and John Selden. However, it soon became clear that the new committee of twelve wished to conduct its own investigations, independently of the grand committee for evils, causes and remedies, for the next day various Members with close links to Buckingham were instructed by the committee to give their attendance. Unlike the earlier investigations carried out by the committee for evils, these inquiries were conducted in private, to the dismay of many ordinary Members, since it was virtually unheard of for Members to be barred from attending any committee. Not surprisingly, on 24 April a complaint was lodged and a division was forced. Under normal circumstances the committee of twelve might have expected to lose this vote, but in the event it not only won the ensuing division by a comfortable margin but also received carte blanche to investigate any new matter that was brought to its attention. This was an astonishing development, for never before had the leadership of the House separated itself formally from the rank and file. The reason for this extraordinary turn of events lies in the extreme sensitivity of a particular piece of information that had recently been brought to the attention of the Commons’ leaders. The committee of twelve had learned that Buckingham had administered certain medicines to James in his final illness without the sanction of the royal physicians. The implications of this revelation were potentially explosive, because they might ultimately lead to the conclusion that Buckingham had poisoned the late king. However, were the committee of twelve to be forced to carry out its investigation of this charge in the full glare of an open committee, the king would inevitably discover what was afoot and cause the inquiry to be stopped. The only way to prevent this was to allow the committee to conduct its investigations in secret.
The Commons’ investigation into Buckingham constituted a direct challenge to the king’s control of the House’s agenda. Charles clearly understood this, and from the outset he tried to close down this inquiry and force the Commons to attend to the matter that he regarded as forming the main business of the Parliament, the voting of subsidies. On 15 March, four days after Pembroke’s client Dr. Turner declared that there must be a general cause for all the nation’s grievances, and that ‘common fame presents one man to be this cause’, Charles expressed astonishment that the Commons had Buckingham in its sights, declared that he would not allow his servants to be questioned and demanded that the House turn its attention to preparing a subsidy bill. These words fell on deaf ears, and therefore on 29 March Lord Keeper Coventry informed the House that it was the king’s ‘express and final command’ that it desist from attacking Buckingham. Far from bringing the Commons to heel, however, Charles’s instructions merely ‘roused a bitter and obstinate feeling’ among a majority of Members, who not only ‘adhered resolutely to the course which they had begun’ but also ‘resumed their debates with equal ardour’.
Faced with a Commons that defiantly refused to do his bidding, Charles might have been expected to dissolve the Parliament forthwith and resort to extra-parliamentary methods of raising money to solve his financial difficulties. This, after all, is what his father had done in 1614 when the Commons, after repeated warnings, had refused to cease debating impositions. More than once during the Parliament, Charles certainly threatened to return to personal rule. On 29 March he famously reminded the Commons that ‘parliaments are altogether in my power for the calling, sitting and continuance of them’, before adding that ‘as I find the fruits either good or evil they are for to continue or not to be’. Moreover, on 20 April he instructed the House to tell him within four or five days how much money it was prepared to vote, otherwise ‘both the time of the year and occurrences ... will force him to new counsels’.
Charles’s reluctance to bring down the curtain on his second Parliament was due to financial weakness rather than a lack of resolve, for it was difficult to see, in the midst of a war, how the king could do without parliamentary supply. While there remained a reasonable prospect that the Commons would eventually grant him subsidies, Charles knew, as did the Commons, that his threats were empty. By exploiting the king’s financial weakness, the Commons, in effect, now controlled the agenda, as Charles himself angrily conceded on 29 March. ‘Now ... you have things according to your own wishes, and I am so far engaged that you think there is no retreat’, he complained, ‘you begin to set the dice and make your own prize’. Charles was adamant that ‘this is not a parliamentary way, nor a way to deal with kings’,
There were only two ways open to Charles to regain control of the agenda. The first was to increase the number of Buckingham’s supporters in the Commons. According to the Tuscan ambassador, Charles hoped to use the Easter recess to win over some Members.
The second way in which Charles might hope to restore a degree of control over the Commons was to reach an accommodation with Buckingham’s enemies. In return for abandoning their attack on the duke, Buckingham would mend his ways, perhaps by giving up some of his offices. An attempt to strike just such a deal seems to have been made at the end of April and beginning of May, as the Commons stood poised to transmit the charges of impeachment to the Lords. On 29 April, in an apparent reversal of policy, Charles announced that he would, after all, allow the investigation into the duke to proceed.
Although Buckingham’s enemies in the Commons clearly had the upper hand for much of the time, they were acutely aware from the outset that if they concentrated on drawing up charges against Buckingham to the exclusion of considering supply they would merely bring about an early dissolution. It is significant that on the day that he proposed the creation of the committee for evils, causes and remedies, Christopher Wandesford mentioned the king’s need for money.
Protracting the subsidy negotiations so that they did not outstrip the impeachment proceedings involved considerable managerial skill on the part of the Commons’ leaders, and every now and then the king seemed poised to take back charge of the agenda. One such moment occurred on 23 March, when Secretary Coke tried to initiate a subsidy debate. After setting out in detail the king’s wants, Coke was seconded by Rudyard. Taken by surprise, a panic-stricken Wandesford declared that whatever sum was asked for ‘we cannot possibly give’, and demanded that continuation of the debate be postponed until the following Monday (the 27th).
In general, however, it proved impossible for Charles to force the Commons to set aside its business in favour of his. When Eliot and Digges were arrested on his orders for traducing Buckingham on 8 May the Commons, far from feeling cowed, simply refused to conduct any more business until the two men had been restored to the House. One of the clearest symptoms of the king’s loss of control is to be found in the changed attitude of many in the Commons to their Speaker. In 1624 Sir Thomas Crewe had enjoyed such amicable relations with his colleagues that he had been feted on all sides for his successful management of the Commons. However, this improvement in the relations between the Commons and its Speaker had not been a reflection of Crewe’s own talents but had primarily stemmed from the fact that Charles and Buckingham were then held in high regard by the lower House. Crewe conspicuously failed to gain the same approval from his fellow Members in 1625, as six days into the Parliament Members had to be reminded that they would be fined if they rushed out of the chamber ahead of the Speaker when the House rose.
The decline in the Speaker’s standing was mirrored by his loss of role. As in 1621, those Members determined to manage their own affairs increasingly regarded the Speaker as an irrelevance. On 1 July 1625, when the Commons was debating a particular matter in grand committee, Crewe told Secretary Conway that his colleagues did not require his presence, and so ‘I come not unless I be sent for’.
The Parliament of 1628-9
In the aftermath of the 1626 Parliament a disillusioned Charles reportedly questioned the queen’s almoner, the bishop of Mende, about ‘the means used by the kings of France to rid themselves of Parliament’.
Charles’s decision to call a fresh Parliament represented a victory of the moderate members of his Council, among whom were Sir John Coke and Sir Humphrey May, over the hardliners led by Sir John Savile, the earl of Dorset and Bishop Laud, who warned that the Commons would ‘begin where they left’ or ‘at least ... look to sacrifice somebody’.
By opening his third Parliament with a threat to close it down should it fail to act as required, Charles has attracted scholarly criticism for ‘showing his usual lack of tact’.
Whether Charles was consciously emulating his father is unclear, but it soon became apparent that there were some in the Commons who were desperate to please him. Chief among them was Sir Edward Coke, who had been prevented from sitting in 1626 by the king himself. During the subsidy debate of 2 April Coke declared himself to be in favour of a ‘bountiful supply’, and two days later he not only advocated a grant of five subsidies but also drew attention to the decline in the value of the subsidy caused by under-assessment. Coke’s enthusiasm for subsidies was so marked that during the martial law debate of 11 April he broke off in mid speech to remind Members that they had so far failed to appoint a time for the collection of the money they had voted in principle. Criticized by Sir Francis Nethersole as ‘untimely’, this motion was regarded with such suspicion that Coke was obliged to protest that it ‘came merely from myself, not from Court’.
One of the main ways in which the Commons pleased the king early in the Parliament was by not renewing its attack on Buckingham. According to the Venetian ambassador, Contarini, there were still many in the Commons who, given the recent failure of the expedition to the Ile de Ré, would dearly have liked to force the king to replace the duke as lord admiral with someone more experienced in naval affairs, but were prevented from doing so by ‘fear of destruction’.
How the decision to avoid attacking Buckingham was reached remains uncertain. It has been widely assumed that before the Parliament opened some of the Commons’ leaders privately met the Crown’s representatives.
Although it remains impossible to establish whether the Commons’ leaders privately came to an arrangement with the Crown before the Parliament, the moderates on the Council with seats in the Commons quickly sought to take charge of proceedings. Led by Secretary Coke, Sir Humphrey May and Sir Thomas Edmondes, they initially proved surprisingly successful. Just eighteen days into the meeting the Commons agreed in principle to vote five subsidies, an unprecedented grant. On hearing the news Charles was so pleased that he declared ‘I shall delight to meet with my people often’. Buckingham was equally ecstatic, and announced that henceforth he would dedicate himself to promoting unity.
For one brief moment the Crown appeared at last to have found the secret of managing the Commons. However, the moderate councillors’ success in obtaining an agreement to vote subsidies was more apparent than real, as the Commons had not yet drafted, let alone passed, a subsidy bill. Moreover, during the early stages of the Parliament Secretary Coke had not been quite as successful in managing the Commons as is sometimes claimed.
The hollowness of the moderate councillors’ triumph was exposed on 11 April when the Commons, fearing that if it passed the subsidy bill before grievances were redressed the king would dissolve the Parliament, resolved that completion of the subsidy bill would be delayed until the heads of a bill to preserve the liberties of the subject had been agreed. On learning of this decision, Charles was furious. He complained of ‘an unexpected stop, almost beyond all expectation after so good [a] beginning’.
For the remainder of the session it was the Commons, not the king, who set both the agenda and the pace of proceedings. In mid May Charles again came within a hair’s breadth of dissolving the Parliament,
Charles was deeply resentful at having been forced to pursue an agenda dictated to him by the Commons, and once the subsidy bill had completed its passage he gave vent to his anger. When the Commons presented him with its Remonstrance against Buckingham on 17 June he refused to dignify it with an answer, but merely declared, on the final day of the session, that ‘I am sure no wise man can justify it’.
Such an arrangement can hardly be described as the king managing the Commons. Nevertheless, Sir John Coke at least believed that a corner had been turned. Writing in November 1628 to the earl of Carlisle, he declared that the king had eliminated ‘all distempers which have transported men’s minds’ and prophesied that Parliament would ‘settle our home affairs in unity and regularity’. One reason for Coke’s new-found optimism was that over the summer Buckingham, who was widely hated, had been assassinated by a disgruntled soldier while inspecting the fleet at Portsmouth. Like many of the king’s subjects, Coke did not mourn the death of his former patron, who had done so much to hinder the smooth management of parliaments. Instead, he looked hopefully to Sir Richard Weston, who had recently been elevated to the peerage as Lord Weston and promoted to lord treasurer, to steer the Commons from his seat in the Lords.
When the Parliament reconvened in January 1629, however, it soon became clear that little had changed. The main business of the session, so far as the king was concerned, was the bill for Tunnage and Poundage. In 1625 the Commons had proposed to put this legislation on a temporary footing to allow time for a more satisfactory version to be drafted, but the Lords had rejected this manner of proceeding, leaving Charles with little option but to levy Tunnage and Poundage without statutory authority. He continued to raise these duties even after he signified his acceptance of the Petition of Right, thereby contravening the Petition, which prohibited him from levying any taxes not warranted by Parliament. Charles was aware that this situation was unsatisfactory, and at the start of the new session Secretary Coke laid a draft measure before the Commons with a request that it should be given precedence over all other matters. However, the Commons flatly refused to agree to this, ostensibly on the grounds that it would be improper to deal with a subsidy bill so early in the session. Two days later Coke tried again, whereupon the Commons promised merely to deal with the matter ‘in fit time’.
Far from giving priority to the king’s wish to place Tunnage and Poundage on a statutory footing, the Commons, emboldened by its success in setting the agenda the previous year, was instead intent on dealing with matters that it considered of greater importance. The first was the threat to the Church of England posed by the creeping Arminianism within its ranks, for although Charles had ordered the suppression of Appello Caesarem he had also, since the previous session, preferred those clergymen most suspected of Arminian sympathies – Laud, Neile, Montagu and Manwaring. The second was the seizure by the customs officers (known as customers) of the goods of those merchants who had refused to pay Tunnage and Poundage on the grounds that it was illegal. This latter issue was political dynamite, partly because one of the merchants concerned – John Rolle – was a Member of the Commons, entitled to parliamentary privilege for his goods, but also because the customers were supported by the king, who claimed that they had been acting on his direct authority. Were the customers to be punished as delinquents for obeying Charles’s instructions, no servant of the Crown could be expected to carry out the king’s commands, and royal government would grind to a halt. For this reason Sir Humphrey May urged the Commons to let the matter rest. However, by now, as Lockyer has remarked, the Commons ‘had ceased to defer to the wishes of the privy councillors’,
In refusing to back down, Eliot and his allies greatly miscalculated their strength. The Commons now enjoyed far less bargaining power than it had in recent sessions, since the king was asking for parliamentary confirmation of Tunnage and Poundage ‘out of goodwill, not out of need’. Moreover, he had no intention of seeking a further grant of supply, for now that La Rochelle had fallen and Buckingham was dead there seemed little point in continuing the war with Spain and France. Besides, not all the subsidies voted in 1628 had yet been collected.
By preventing the Commons from continuing to pursue its own agenda, Charles now brought to a head the struggle for control of the Speaker that had been taking place ever since 1604. When Finch, in accordance with the king’s instructions, tried to leave the chamber after announcing the adjournment, Eliot and his supporters insisted that he should first read a Remonstrance condemning Arminianism and the continued levy of Tunnage and Poundage. Finch was thereupon faced with a terrible dilemma, for he could not carry out both of these instructions. Not surprisingly, he chose to obey Charles, but on making for the door he was dragged back to his seat and held down. In the ensuing fracas, punches were thrown as the privy councillors present vainly tried to free the Speaker. Eliot’s supporters were livid that Finch had decided to set aside the Commons’ wishes, and some of them demanded that another Speaker be chosen in his stead. At this Finch protested that he dared not disobey the king, and demanded to know ‘what would you have me to do, if you were in my place?’ His question led William Strode to reply that the Speaker’s principal obedience was to the House rather than the king: ‘his servant you are to whom you obey; if not us you are none of our servant’. This was nub of the issue, but rather than admit that he was first and foremost the king’s servant, Finch took refuge behind the age-old fiction that the Speaker acknowledged two masters: ‘it doth not make me to be none of your servant because I am the king’s servant’.
The events of 1629 demonstrated clearly that the king’s automatic right to determine the Commons’ main agenda was now no longer accepted by many Members of the lower House. To Charles they showed, with equal clarity, that the Commons was no longer capable of being managed by the Crown, for although he conceded that the House still contained many dutiful subjects, he had been powerless to prevent the ‘few vipers amongst them’ from casting a ‘mist of undutifulness over most of their eyes’. Charles now recognized that his late father’s suspicion that there were elements within the lower House which sought ‘to erect an universal over-swaying power to themselves’ was correct.
An unmanageable Commons?
The Crown’s attempt to manage the Commons between 1604 and 1629 is, very largely, a story of failure. Aside from the Parliament of 1624, none of the meetings between monarch and subjects were well managed, even allowing for such episodes as Salisbury’s success in narrowly securing an increase in supply in March 1606, or the triumph of the moderate members of Charles’s Council in the early stages of the 1628 session. Elizabeth’s parliaments, by contrast, were on the whole better handled. Although many of the meetings between the queen and her subjects were far from harmonious, it was rare for Elizabeth’s councillors to lose control of business in the Commons, and unlike the early Stuarts she was never refused supply.
The contrast between Elizabeth and her early Stuart successors did not escape contemporary notice. In the dialogue between a courtier and a gentleman compiled shortly before the 1624 Parliament, Sir Robert Phelips, in the guise of the gentleman, noted that Elizabeth, unlike James, had never detested parliaments. Instead she, ‘like a wise princess, well understood the frame and structure of this commonwealth, and that parliaments were most necessary to order and regulate her government, and to preserve her people ... from being oppressed by corrupt and naughty ministers’. The clear implication of Phelips’s remark was that Elizabeth had succeeded where James had failed. Phelips was far from being the only Englishman to come to this conclusion, for the 1620s witnessed a revival of interest in engravings and paintings of Elizabeth, a revival which tells us as much about the popularity of James as it does of the last of the Tudors. However, Buckingham, while conceding that ‘happy success in Parliament was none of the least glories which attended the late queen’s government and memory’, carefully refused to be drawn into a discussion of Elizabeth’s skills as a parliamentary manager, except to say that he was unable to discern whether Elizabeth’s ‘prosperousness’ was down to ‘the wise conduct of her affairs, or to the disposition of the times’.
On the face of it, the inability of the early Stuarts to manage the Commons is puzzling, since many of the techniques they used had been employed successfully under Elizabeth. When Charles had Eliot and Digges arrested in the midst of a Parliament in May 1626 he was doing no more than Elizabeth had done in 1587, when she sent Peter Wentworth and his allies to the Tower, or in 1593, when James Morice was placed under house arrest. Yet whereas the prompt action of Elizabeth and her Council had served to nip danger in the bud, Charles’s incarceration of Eliot and Digges served only to enrage the Commons, which refused to transact any further business until the two Members had been freed.
One reason why Elizabeth was more successful in managing her parliaments than James was that she, unlike her immediate successor, did not threaten England’s existence as an independent, sovereign state, nor did she set aside the constitutional convention that required the monarch to obtain the subject’s consent to taxation. Writing in the aftermath of the Addled Parliament, Sir Walter Ralegh condemned impositions and noted that under the late queen there had been no new fiscal expedients based on the prerogative, ‘neither head-money, nor sheep-money, nor escuage ... but only the ordinary subsidies, and those as easily granted as demanded’.
The accession of Charles I in 1625 did nothing to bring England closer to the way it had been governed under Elizabeth, and because of this Charles found it just as hard to manage the Commons as his father. Under Charles, the erosion of the subject’s property rights continued. Most Members of the Commons believed that these rights were protected by Magna Carta, and were horrified to discover that those who refused to contribute to the Forced Loan were liable to arbitrary imprisonment. A thoroughly frightened and angry Commons was therefore forced to insist in 1628 that, before it would attend to the king’s business, Charles should give binding assurances that he would rule in accordance with the law.
Another factor that made the Commons less manageable than it had been under Elizabeth was religion. During the queen’s reign religious divisions within the Church of England had certainly existed, but there was never any suspicion that Elizabeth and her ministers were quietly steering the Church back to Rome. The Spanish Match, the relaxation of the penal laws following Charles’s marriage to Henrietta Maria, and the growth of Arminianism within the English Church changed all that. Now the Calvinist majority in the Commons had not only to worry about the erosion of the subject’s property rights and the future existence of parliaments, but also the survival of English Protestantism. The failure of the early Stuart kings to settle these fears goes a long way towards explaining why the Commons proved impossible to manage for much of the 1620s.
The Crown’s mismanagement of the Commons was not, however, entirely attributable to the fears that were set in train under James and Charles. It was also, in part, down to a mixture of poor judgement, complacency and incompetence. Both James and Charles neglected to make adequate preparation for the first parliaments of their reign since both assumed, falsely, that the goodwill of their subjects meant that no preparation was needed. James’s belief that, as a monarch of longstanding, he was automatically qualified to manage an English Parliament proved no less disastrous, since it led him to weaken the presence of official Crown spokesmen in the Commons in favour of managing affairs in person. Similar arrogance led him to persist with the Union after 1604, when it ought to have been obvious that a formal fusion of the two kingdoms was unachievable. To his credit, James seems to have realized in the aftermath of his first Parliament that he needed help if he were not to repeat his earlier mistakes. However it was unfortunate, to say the least, that he initially turned for assistance to Sir Henry Neville, whose desire for advancement led him to offer the sort of advice that James wished to hear. By ignoring the fundamental difficulty posed by impositions, and by offering to manage a Parliament for the king through his own extensive network of kinsmen and friends, Neville did more to wreck the 1614 Parliament than anyone else, with the possible exception of the earl of Northampton.
Charles proved just as inept as his father, for while it was fortunate that he was not verbose like James, he had not, as Bishop Williams observed, ‘the art to please’.
By their behaviour outside Parliament, James and Charles unwittingly encouraged the Commons to assume greater control of its own affairs. Through the committee of the whole House, which emerged in 1606, the Commons developed a mechanism that not only freed up debate but also enabled it to bypass the Speaker. However, the inability of James and Charles to control the lower House was not entirely of their own making. The opportunity to make a fresh start in 1625 was ruined as much by the plague as by Crown mismanagement. Had Members not been so anxious to quit Westminster, it seems unlikely that an inadequate subsidy bill would have been rushed through the House in June 1625. There would then have been no need for the Crown to insist on a second grant, a demand which did so much to poison the parliamentary atmosphere.
There are also grounds for claiming that both monarchs were not always well served. While Cecil moved heaven and earth to increase the number of those in the Commons who would be willing to support the Great Contract in 1610, he and his fellow councillors mismanaged business in 1604. Moreover, Cecil and his colleagues on the Council may actually have connived with leading Members of the Commons to wreck James’s cherished hopes of achieving a formal Union. Likewise, in 1614 Pembroke and Suffolk, neither of whom had ever sat in the Commons, mistakenly encouraged James to believe that they were capable of managing a Parliament for the king out of a desire to sabotage the French marriage negotiations. However, it is Buckingham, who also had never held a parliamentary seat, who provides the most striking example of ministerial incompetence. In July 1625 the duke did much to destroy the goodwill that had been created in 1624 by refusing to listen either to his own client Eliot or to the councillors in the Commons, all of whom warned him that it was folly to demand additional supply. Had the amount demanded been large his behaviour might have been understandable, but during the Oxford sitting it became clear that the Crown needed only an extra £40,000 to set out the fleet.