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charters. Both prerogative and privilege were liable to misconstruction, and sometimes overflowed their banks; but the King always spoke with respect of the liberties of his subjects, even when he illegally imprisoned their persons; and the people professed their veneration for monarchy, even when they deposed their king. Queen Elizabeth, acting in this spirit, abjured the notion of infringing the rights of her subjects, at the same time that she occasionally encroached upon and always confined those rights within the narrowest limits. She acknowledged the liberties of the people without doubt or hesitation but made use of her own dictionary for the definition of the term. James attempted a new system: he denied the existence of privileges altogether, except by sufferance; and without possessing the wisdom of an ordinary man, he claimed, in an enquiring age, the infallibility of the Deity. His sayings do him credit as a wit; his learning was not unbecoming a scholar; but his conduct made him contemptible as a king, How vain then to pretend that all the ancient privileges of the English nation were to depend upon his nod!

55

CHAP. VII.

CHARLES THE

First

There was ambition, there was sedition, there was violence; but no man shall persuade me that it was not the cause of liberty on one side, and of tyranny on the other.

LORD CHATHAM, quoted by GRATTAN, (Letter to the Citizens of Dublin, 1797.)

AN An attempt has been made to throw upon the first Parliament of Charles the charge of bad faith and want of generosity, because they did not, previously to all enquiry into grievances, grant to their young king a sufficient sum to enable him to prosecute with due vigour the war which they had brought on by their advice and encouragement. Now, even if it were true that the Commons were the authors of the war, still it would not follow that they did wrong in con

sidering the abuses of the executive government, before they supplied it with fresh means of setting law and economy at defiance. A rigid enquiry into the public means, and the public expences was at all events justly due to the nation, of which they were the representatives. But, in fact, the war was not theirs, but Buckingham's it had been refused to the parliamentary address of the people; and granted to the private pique of the favourite.*

:

In considering the requests of the House of Commons from the commencement of the reign, we must never lose sight, as they never lost sight, of the ancient statutes of the realm. By Magna Charta it is established, that no freeman is to be imprisoned, or otherwise injured, but by the judgment of his peers, or the law of the land: therefore the judgments of the StarChamber, and the commitments by the sovereign's pleasure were anomalous innovations. By a law of Edward I. no taxes were to be raised

* "Instead of judiciously mollifying the misunderstandings betwixt the two houses and the king, he unadvisedly (for in Spain he had received some affronts upon some arrears he had made) ruins the King into a war with that nation."

WARWICK'S Memoirs, p. 13.

Sir Philip Warwick was a courtier.

except by the authority of Parliament; therefore forced loans, benevolences, and monopolies, were illegal. By two laws of Edward III. parliaments were ordained to be held once a-year or oftener: therefore an attempt to govern without the regular advice, and continual authority of Parliament, amounted to a subversion of the established constitution of the state. Nor is it to any purpose, even as an argumentum ad hominem, to say that frequent violations of all these laws took place under the reign of particular sovereigns, especially the Tudors. The uninterrupted practice of trial by jury, the solemn usage of granting supplies in parliament, and the frequent meetings of that high court, prove that none of these rights had become obsolete, and that the exercise of prerogatives incompatible with them were irregularities to be amended, and not examples to be followed.

Lord Strafford, most unfortunately for himself, for his king, and his country, fell out of the ranks of the friends of liberty, and encouraged Charles to persist in a resistance, which, perhaps, he might otherwise have abandoned. Devoid of all public principle, and the slave of

his malignant passions, even the patriotism of Strafford is to be attributed to his animosity to the Duke of Buckingham. With a mixture of baseness and boldness seldom equalled, he made himself the tool of his personal enemy, for the purpose of breaking down all those safeguards of the subject, contained in that petition of right, which he had been amongst the foremost to ask for and obtain. He had not the excuse of saying that he opposed new pretensions of the Commons, or that he had left his friends when they went beyond the bounds of legality and loyalty. The measures in which he assisted were violations of those laws which it was his glory to have recognized and established. He had himself said, "We must vindicate:—what? new things? no:- our antient, legal, and vital liberties; by reinforcing the laws enacted by our ancestors; by setting such a stamp upon them, THAT NO LICENTIOUS SPIRIT SHALL DARE HENCEFORTH TO INVADE THEM." When Deputy in Ireland, he made large promises to the Roman Catholics to serve the King's present convenience, without any intention of keeping them. He solicited an earldom

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