Eliot question, Eliot preferred first to take in hand a question or privilege which had arisen by the seizure of the goods of a member of the house who had refused to pay the duties. The officers of the customs who had effected the seizure were summoned to the bar, but the king intervened, and directed the adjournment of the house, that an attempt might be made in the interval to discover a compromise. On his direction of a second adjournment on 2 March, the speaker was held down in his chair, while Eliot, amidst increasing tumult, read out three resolutions which were intended to call the attention of the country to the king's proceedings in respect to religion and taxation. The resolutions were actually put by Holies, just as the king arrived to prorogue parliament.
On 4 March Eliot, with eight other members, was sent to the Tower, and on the 10th parliament was dissolved. When on the 18th Eliot was examined as to his conduct, he replied: 'I refuse to answer, because I hold that it is against the privilege of parliament to speak of anything which was done in the house.' Eliot's position was that he was accountable to the house only, and that no power existed with a constitutional right to inquire into his conduct in it. Charles struck at Eliot not merely as a political antagonist, but as the assailant of Buckingham, and in his anger described him as 'an outlawed man, desperate in mind and fortune.'
With all their wish to strike at Eliot and his fellows, the crown lawyers had some difficulty in discovering the best method of procedure. They did not like to accuse them of words spoken in the house, and it was not till October that Attorney-general Heath determined to bring an information against Eliot, Holles, and Valentine in the court of king's bench. On 29 Oct. Eliot was removed to the Marshalsea, a prison specially connected with that court. On 26 Jan. 1630 the three appeared at the bar of the king's bench. The charge against them was not that they had spoken certain words, but that they had 'formed a conspiracy to resist the king's lawful order, to calumniate the ministers of the crown, and to assault the speaker. The court decided that it had jurisdiction in the case. Eliot simply continued to refuse to acknowledge that jurisdiction, and on 12 Feb. was sentenced, in his absence through illness, to a fine of 2,000l.
Eliot was once more sent back to the Tower. A word of acknowledgment that he was in the wrong would have given him his liberty, but for him to make that acknowledgment was to surrender those privileges of parliament which in his eyes were equivalent to the liberties of the nation. He solaced himself in his confinement by writing an account of the first parliament of Charles I, under the title of the 'Negotium Posterorum,' and a political-philosophical treatise, which he styled 'The Monarchy of Man.' Eliot was not a republican. His ideal state was one in which the king governed with very extended powers, but in which he received enlightenment by constantly listening to the advice of parliament. Eliot's revolutionary work, in short, was rather in tendency than in deliberate judgment. The result of his action, if carried on by his successors, would be the subordination of the crown to parliament; but he was an enthusiastic orator rather than a logical thinker, and he was himself unconscious of the complete change in the balance of force which his genius was creating. It was left for Pym to systematise that which had been sketched out by Eliot.
The spring of 1632 saw Eliot in the beginning of a consumption. In a letter to Hampden, written on 29 March, he expressed his abounding cheerfulness in contemplation of God's goodness towards him. In October he petitioned for leave to go into the country for the benefit of his health. As he still refused to acknowledge that he had erred, Charles rejected his petition, and on 27 Nov. he died. The implacable king closed his ears to a request of his son for permission to transport his corpse to Port Eliot. 'Let Sir John Eliot,' he wrote on the petition, 'be buried in the church of that parish where he died.' By his wife, who died in 1628, Eliot had five sons and four daughters. John, the eldest son, was M.P. for St. Germans from 1660 till 1678, and died in 1685. Elizabeth, the eldest daughter, married Colonel Nathaniel Fiennes.
The following works by Eliot were privately printed for the first time from manuscripts at Port Elliot by Dr. Grosart:
- 'The Monarchie of Man,' 1879.
- 'An Apology for Socrates (being a vindication of Sir J.E. by himself),' and 'Negotium Posterorum,' 1881.
- 'De Jure Majestatis, a Political Treatise of Government,' and the 'Letterbook of Sir John Eliot,' 1882.
[The materials for Eliot's Life are to be found in Forster's Life of Sir John Eliot. For criticisms on that work, see Gardiner's Hist. of England, 1603-42, vols, v-vii. passim.]
ELIOT, JOHN (1604–1690), styled 'the Indian Apostle' (T. Thorowgood, Jews in America, 1660, p. 24) and by Winslow 'the Indian evangelist,' was born either at Widford, Hertfordshire, where he was baptised on 6 Aug. 1604 or at Nazing, where his father
