âsubjects may disobey and refuse an unworthy kinge his command or request if it be more than of duty we owe unto him.â
Standing firm in their belief in the supreme rationality of the English common law, the resisters were now taking to the courts to test both the legality of non-parliamentary taxation and the right of the government to imprison without showing due cause, something a Marlborough lawyer, Oliver St John, had said in 1614 violated the Magna Carta. In this case, the courts upheld the legality of the loan and thus the right of the Crown to confine resisters. And once the furore abated, the king should still have been able to contain the political fall-out, fierce though it was. But two events, both of them disastrous, made sure the book was not yet closed on the debate about taxation.
In October 1627 Buckingham turned in yet another hideous fiasco by failing â at huge expense â to take the French Atlantic fort of the Ile de Ré, not least because the organizational genius of the navy had failed to notice that the scaling ladders supplied for the siege were 15 feet too short to do the job. This single débâcle ate up £200,000 of the £267,000 collected by the loan. The duke was mercilessly pilloried by ballad-mongers and newsletter-writers. But even worse was to come. In March 1628 it was revealed that the terms of the judgement handed down in the challenge to the legality of the loan had been deliberately falsified by the attorney-general with the express knowledge and encouragement of the king. What the judges had ruled was that a forced loan was legitimate in this particular military emergency. What was published was a ruling that the king was entitled to make extra-parliamentary levies whenever he judged them to be appropriate to the kingdomâs needs. It was a bombshell. Those who had believed the king found their trust badly shaken. Those who had taken the worst possible view of Charlesâs intentions, on the other hand, had a field day with the revelation. With the wind at their backs the guardians of the âimmemorial constitutionâ turned an argument over a specific measure into an all-out battle of constitutional principles. As a precondition of any further grants, they demanded a Bill of Rights declaring the illegality of non-parliamentary taxes, the prohibition of any imprisonment without trial by the king for unspecified âreasons of stateâ, and the unlawfulness of martial law and forced billets. The warriors for parliamentary liberties were, however, still in a minority in both the Commons and the Lords. The crisis was, in effect, a three-way showdown, with the party of moderate criticism in the middle, calling the tune. In the House of Lords the Earl of Warwick and Viscount Saye and Sele (both serious Puritans in their personal and religious life) decided, with a large measure of support, on the less confrontational form of a Petition of Right. A petition embodied the same points of substance as a bill, but crucially allowed Charles to save face and protect Jamesâs compulsively reiterated principle (restated as recently as 1621) that such rights were granted by grace, not acceded to as of right.
This should have been the end of the crisis. The assassination of Buckingham in August 1628 was a body blow to Charles, but it neatly took the vexed question of what to do about the widely detested favourite out of the political equation. In shocked mourning, Charles was convinced that the parliamentary demonization of the duke had contributed directly to his death. (The assassin, John Felton, had, in fact, imagined that he was ridding the country, and his king, of a diabolical monster.) Smarting at being deprived of his effective power to wage war, Charles mounted acounterattack, asserting his control over matters not expressly specified in the Petition of Right. Itâs hard not to imagine the king burning the candle at both ends as he pored over
Standing firm in their belief in the supreme rationality of the English common law, the resisters were now taking to the courts to test both the legality of non-parliamentary taxation and the right of the government to imprison without showing due cause, something a Marlborough lawyer, Oliver St John, had said in 1614 violated the Magna Carta. In this case, the courts upheld the legality of the loan and thus the right of the Crown to confine resisters. And once the furore abated, the king should still have been able to contain the political fall-out, fierce though it was. But two events, both of them disastrous, made sure the book was not yet closed on the debate about taxation.
In October 1627 Buckingham turned in yet another hideous fiasco by failing â at huge expense â to take the French Atlantic fort of the Ile de Ré, not least because the organizational genius of the navy had failed to notice that the scaling ladders supplied for the siege were 15 feet too short to do the job. This single débâcle ate up £200,000 of the £267,000 collected by the loan. The duke was mercilessly pilloried by ballad-mongers and newsletter-writers. But even worse was to come. In March 1628 it was revealed that the terms of the judgement handed down in the challenge to the legality of the loan had been deliberately falsified by the attorney-general with the express knowledge and encouragement of the king. What the judges had ruled was that a forced loan was legitimate in this particular military emergency. What was published was a ruling that the king was entitled to make extra-parliamentary levies whenever he judged them to be appropriate to the kingdomâs needs. It was a bombshell. Those who had believed the king found their trust badly shaken. Those who had taken the worst possible view of Charlesâs intentions, on the other hand, had a field day with the revelation. With the wind at their backs the guardians of the âimmemorial constitutionâ turned an argument over a specific measure into an all-out battle of constitutional principles. As a precondition of any further grants, they demanded a Bill of Rights declaring the illegality of non-parliamentary taxes, the prohibition of any imprisonment without trial by the king for unspecified âreasons of stateâ, and the unlawfulness of martial law and forced billets. The warriors for parliamentary liberties were, however, still in a minority in both the Commons and the Lords. The crisis was, in effect, a three-way showdown, with the party of moderate criticism in the middle, calling the tune. In the House of Lords the Earl of Warwick and Viscount Saye and Sele (both serious Puritans in their personal and religious life) decided, with a large measure of support, on the less confrontational form of a Petition of Right. A petition embodied the same points of substance as a bill, but crucially allowed Charles to save face and protect Jamesâs compulsively reiterated principle (restated as recently as 1621) that such rights were granted by grace, not acceded to as of right.
This should have been the end of the crisis. The assassination of Buckingham in August 1628 was a body blow to Charles, but it neatly took the vexed question of what to do about the widely detested favourite out of the political equation. In shocked mourning, Charles was convinced that the parliamentary demonization of the duke had contributed directly to his death. (The assassin, John Felton, had, in fact, imagined that he was ridding the country, and his king, of a diabolical monster.) Smarting at being deprived of his effective power to wage war, Charles mounted acounterattack, asserting his control over matters not expressly specified in the Petition of Right. Itâs hard not to imagine the king burning the candle at both ends as he pored over
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