short imprisonment of some of the more active members, and
by a demand made through England for a benevolence to make
up the deficiency which parliament had neglected to meet. The
court represented that, as no compulsion was used, there was
nothing illegal in this proceeding. But as the names of those
who refused to pay were taken down, it cannot be said that
there was no indirect pressure.
The most important result of the breach with the parliament of
1614, however, was the resolution taken by James to seek refuge
from his financial and other troubles in a close alliance
with the king of Spain. His own accession had done
much to improve the position of England in its relation
Attempted union with Scotland.
The colon-ization of Ulster.
with the continental powers. Scotland was no longer
available as a possible enemy to England, and though an attempt
to bind the union between the two nations by freedom of commercial
intercourse had been wrecked upon the jealousy of the
English Commons (1607), a legal decision had granted the status
of national subjects to all persons born in Scotland after the king’s
accession in England. Ireland, too, had been thoroughly overpowered
at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, and the flight of the
earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnel in 1607 had been
followed by the settlement of English and Scottish
colonists in Ulster, a measure which, in the way in
which it was undertaken, sowed the seeds of future
evils, but undoubtedly conduced to increase the immediate
strength of the English government in Ireland.
Without fear of danger at home, therefore, James, who as king of Scotland had taken no part in Elizabeth’s quarrel with Philip II., not only suspended hostilities immediately on his accession, and signed a peace in the following year, but looked favourably on the project of a Spanish The Spanish alliance. marriage alliance, so that the chief Protestant and the chief Catholic powers might join together to impose peace on Europe, in the place of those hideous religious wars by which the last century had been disfigured. In 1611 circumstances had disgusted him with his new ally, but in 1614 he courted him again, not only on grounds of general policy, but because he hoped that the large portion which would accompany the hand of an infanta would go far to fill the empty treasury.
In this way the Spanish alliance, unpopular in itself, was formed to liberate the king from the shackles imposed on him by the English constitution. Its unpopularity, great from the beginning, became greater when Raleigh’s execution (1618) caused the government to appear before the world as truckling to Spain. The obloquy under which James laboured increased when the Thirty Years’ War broke out (1618), and when his daughter Elizabeth, whose husband, the elector palatine, was the unhappy claimant to the Bohemian crown (1619), stood forth as the lovely symbol of the deserted Protestantism of Europe. Yet it was not entirely in pity for German Protestants that the heart of Englishmen beat. Men felt that their own security was at stake. The prospect of a Spanish infanta as the bride of the future king of England filled them with suspicious terrors. In Elizabeth’s time the danger, if not entirely external, did not come from the government itself. Now the favour shown to the Roman Catholics by the king opened up a source of mischief which was to some extent real, if it was to a still greater extent imaginary. Whether the danger were real or imaginary, the consequence of the distrust resulting from the suspicion was the reawakening of the slumbering demand for fresh persecution of the Roman Catholics, a demand which made a complete reconciliation between the crown and the Lower House a matter of the greatest difficulty.
In 1621 the third parliament of James was summoned to provide money for the war in defence of his son-in-law’s inheritance, the Palatinate, which he now proposed to undertake. But it soon appeared that he was not prepared immediately to come to blows, and the Parliament and the monopolies. Commons, voting a small sum as a token of their loyalty, passed to other matters. Indolent in his temper, James had been in the habit of leaving his patronage in the hands of a confidential favourite, and that position was now filled by George Villiers, marquess and afterwards duke of Buckingham. The natural consequence was that men who paid court to him were promoted, and those who kept at a distance from him had no notice taken of their merits. Further, a system of granting monopolies and other privileges had again sprung up. Many of these grants embodied some scheme which was intended to serve the interests of the public, and many actions which appear startling to us were covered by the extreme protectionist theories then in vogue. But abuses of every kind had clustered round them, and in many cases the profits had gone into the pockets of hangers-on of the court, whilst officials had given their assistance to the grantors even beyond their legal powers. James was driven by the outcry raised to abandon these monopolies, and an act of Parliament in 1624 placed the future grant of protections to new inventions under the safeguard of the judges.
The attack on the monopolies was followed by charges brought by the Commons before the Lords against persons implicated in carrying them into execution, and subsequently against Lord Chancellor Bacon as guilty of corruption. The sentence passed by the Lords vindicated the right Fall of Bacon. of parliament to punish officials who had enjoyed the favour of the crown, which had fallen into disuse since the accession of the house of York. There was no open contest between parliament and king in this matter. But the initiative of demanding justice had passed from the crown to the Commons. It is impossible to overestimate the effect of these proceedings on the position of parliament. The crown could never again be regarded as the sum of the governmental system.
When the Commons met after the summer adjournment a new constitutional question was raised. The king was at last determined to find troops for the defence of the Palatinate, and asked the Commons for money to pay them. They in turn petitioned the crown to abandon the Spanish alliance, which they regarded as the source of all the mischief. James told them that they had no right to discuss business on which he had not asked their opinion. They declared that they were privileged to discuss any matter relating to the commonwealth which they chose to take in hand, and embodied their opinion in a protest, which they entered on their journals. The king tore the protest out of the book and dissolved parliament.
Then followed a fresh call for a benevolence, this time more sparingly answered than before. A year of fruitless diplomacy failed to save the Palatinate from total loss. The ill-considered journey to Madrid, in which Prince Charles, accompanied by Buckingham, hoped to wring from the Spanish statesmen a promise to restore the Palatinate in compliment for his marriage with the infanta, ended also in total failure. In the autumn of 1623 Charles returned to England without a wife, and without hope of regaining the Palatinate with Spanish aid.
He came back resolved to take vengeance upon Spain. The parliament elected in 1624 was ready to second him. It voted some supplies on the understanding that, when the king had matured his plans for carrying on the war, it should come together in the autumn to vote the The French alliance. necessary subsidies. It never met again. Charles had promised that, if he married a Roman Catholic, he would grant no toleration to the English Catholics in consideration of the marriage. In the autumn he had engaged himself to marry Henrietta Maria, the sister of the king of France, and had bound himself to grant the very conditions which he had declared to the Commons that he never would concede. Hence it was that he did not venture to recommend his father to summon parliament till the marriage was over. But though there was but little money to dispose of, he and Buckingham, who, now that James was sick and infirm, were the real leaders of the government, could not endure to abstain from the prosecution of the war. Early in 1625 an expedition, under Count Mansfeld, was sent to Holland that it might ultimately cut its way to the Palatinate. Left without pay and without supplies, the men perished by thousands, and when James died in March the new king had to meet his first parliament burthened by a broken promise and a disastrous failure.
