The Rise of the Democracy Part 7

But though the method was revolution and the goal social democracy, Ket was no anarchist. He proved himself a strong, capable leader, able to enforce discipline and maintain law and order in the rebel camp. And with all his pa.s.sionate hatred against the rule of the landlord, Ket would allow neither ma.s.sacre nor murder. There is no evidence that the life of a single landowner was taken while the rising lasted, though many were brought captive to Ket's judgment seat.

Ket was equally averse from civil war between the citizens of Norwich and the peasants. When the Mayor of Norwich, Thomas Cod, refused to allow Ket's army to cross the city on its way to Mousehold Heath, where the permanent camp was to be made, Ket simply led his forces round by Hailsdon and Drayton, and so reached Mousehold on July 12th without bloodshed. A week later, and 20,000 was the number enrolled under the banner of revolt--for the publication of "The Rebels' Complaint" and the ringing of bells and firing of beacons roused all the countryside to action.

On Mousehold Heath, Robert Ket, with his brother William, gave directions and administered justice under a great tree, called the Oak of Reformation.

Mayor Cod, and two other respected Norwich citizens, Aldrich, an alderman, and Watson, a preacher, joined Ket's council, thinking their influence might restrain the rebels from worse doings.

Twenty-nine "Requests and Demands," signed by Ket, Cod, and Aldrich, were dispatched to the King from Mousehold, and this doc.u.ment gave in full the grievances of the rebels. The chief demands were the cessation of enclosures, the enactment of fair rents, the restoration of common fishing rights, the appointment of resident clergymen to preach and instruct the children, and the free election or appointment of local "commissioners" for the enforcement of the laws. There was also a request "that all bond men may be made free, for G.o.d made all free with His precious bloodshedding."

The only answer to the "Requests and Demands" was the arrival of a herald with a promise that Parliament would meet in October to consider the grievances, if the people would in the meantime quietly return to their homes.

But this Ket would by no means agree to, and for the next few weeks his authority was supreme in that part of the country. He established a rough const.i.tution for the prevention of mere disorder, two men being chosen by their fellows from the various hundreds of the eastern half of the county.

A royal messenger, bearing commissions of the peace to certain country gentlemen, falling into the hands of Ket, was relieved of his doc.u.ments and dismissed. Ket then put in these commissions the names of men who had joined the rising, and declared them magistrates with authority to check all disobedience to orders.

To feed the army at Mousehold, men were sent out with a warrant from Ket for obtaining cattle and corn from the country houses, and "to beware of robbing, spoiling, and other evil demeanours." No violence or injury was to be done to "any honest or poor man." Contributions came in from the smaller yeomen "with much private good-will," but the landowners generally were stricken with panic, and let the rebels do what they liked. Those who could not escape by flight were, for the most part, brought captive to the Oak of Reformation, and thence sent to the prisons in Norwich and St. Leonard's Hill.

Relations between Ket and the Norwich authorities soon became strained to breaking point. Mayor Cod was shocked at the imprisonment of county gentlemen, and refused permission for Ket's troops to pa.s.s through the city on their foraging expeditions. Citizens and rebels were in conflict on July 21st, but "for lack of powder and want of skill in the gunners" few lives were lost, and Norwich was in the hands of Ket the following day. No reprisals followed; but a week later came William Parr, Marquis of Northampton--Henry VIII.'s brother-in-law--with 1,500 Italian mercenaries and a body of country squires, to destroy the rebels. Northampton's forces were routed utterly, and Lord Sheffield was slain, and many houses and gates were burnt in the city.

Then for three weeks longer Robert Ket remained in power, still hoping against hope that some attention would be given by the Government to his "Requests and Demands." Protector Somerset, beset by his own difficulties, could do nothing for rebellious peasants, could not countenance in any way an armed revolt, however great the miseries that provoked insurrection.

The Earl of Warwick was dispatched with 14,000 troops to end the rebellion, and arrived on August 24th. For two days the issue seemed uncertain--half the city only was in Warwick's hands. The arrival of 1,400 mercenaries--"lanzknechts," Germans mostly--and a fatal decision of the rebels to leave their vantage ground at Mousehold Heath and do battle in the open valley that stretched towards the city, gave complete victory to Warwick.

The peasants poured into the meadows beyond Magdalen and Pockthorpe gates, and were cut to pieces by the professional soldiers.

When all seemed over Ket galloped away to the north, but was taken, worn out, at the village of Swannington, eight miles from Norwich.

More than 400 peasants were hanged by Warwick's orders, and their bodies left to swing on Mousehold and in the city. Robert Ket and William Ket were sent to London, and after being tried and condemned for high treason, were returned to Norwich in December for execution. Robert Ket was hanged in chains from Norwich Castle, and William suffered in similar fashion from the parish church at Wymondham--to remind all people of the fate that befall those who venture, unsuccessfully, to take up arms against the government in power.

So the Norfolk Rising ended, and with it ended all serious popular insurrection in England. Riots and mob violence have been seen even to our own time, but no great, well-organised movement to overthrow authority and establish a social democracy by force of arms has been attempted since 1549.

The characters of Robert Ket and his brother have been vindicated by time, and the rebel leader is now recognised as a disinterested, capable, high-minded man. Ket took what seemed to him the only possible course to avert the doom of a ruined peasantry, and failed. But his courage and humaneness are beyond question.[47]

The enclosures did not end with the sixteenth century, and for another one hundred years complaints are heard of the steady depopulation of rural England. In the eighteenth century came the second great series of enclosures--the enclosing of the commons and waste s.p.a.ces, by Acts of Parliament. Between 1710 and 1867 no less than 7,660,439 acres were thus enclosed.

To-day the questions of land tenure and land ownership are conspicuous items in the discussion of the whole social question, for the relations of a people to its land are of very first importance in a democratic state.

CHAPTER IV

THE STRUGGLE RENEWED AGAINST THE CROWN

PARLIAMENT UNDER THE TUDORS

The English Parliament throughout the sixteenth century was but a servile instrument of the Crown. The great barons were dead. Henry VIII. put to death Sir Thomas More and all who questioned the royal absolutism.

Elizabeth, equally despotic, had by good fortune the services of the first generation of professional statesmen that England produced. These statesmen--Burleigh, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sir Walter Mildmay, Sir Thomas Smith, and Sir Francis Walsingham--all died in office. Burleigh was minister for forty years, Bacon and Mildmay for more than twenty, and Smith and Walsingham for eighteen years.[48]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SIR JOHN ELIOT]

Parliament was not only intimidated by Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, its membership was recruited by nominees of the Crown.[49] And then it is also to be borne in mind that both Henry and Elizabeth made a point of getting Parliament to do their will. They governed through Parliament, and ruled triumphantly, for it is only in the later years of Elizabeth that any discontent is heard. The Stuarts, far less tyrannical, came to grief just because they never understood the importance of Parliament in the eyes of Englishmen in the middle ranks, and attempted to rule while ignoring the House of Commons.

Elizabeth scolded her Parliaments, and more than once called the Speaker of the House of Commons to account. The business of Tudor Parliaments was to decree the proposals of the Crown. "Liberty of speech was granted in respect of the aye or no, but not that everybody should speak what he listed." Bacon declared, "the Queen hath both enlarging and restraining power; she may set at liberty things restrained by statute and may restrain things which be at liberty."

Yet Elizabeth raised no objection to the theory that Parliament was the sovereign power, for her authority controlled Parliament; and so we have Sir Thomas Smith writing in 1589 that "the most high and absolute power of the realm of England consisteth in the Parliament."

In his "Ecclesiastical Polity," Book I. (1592-3), Hooker argues that "Laws human, of what kind soever are available by consent," and that "laws they are not which public approbation hath not made so"; deciding explicitly that sovereignty rests ultimately in the people.

VICTORY OF PARLIAMENT OVER THE STUARTS

When he came to the throne in 1603, James I. was prepared to govern with all the Tudor absolutism, but he had neither Elizabeth's Ministers--Cecil excepted--nor her knowledge of the English mind. The English Parliament and the English people had put up with Elizabeth's headstrong, capricious rule, because it had been a strong rule, and the nation had obviously thriven under it.[50] But it was another matter altogether when James I. was king.

"By many steps the slavish Parliament of Henry VIII. grew into the murmuring Parliament of Queen Elizabeth, the mutinous Parliament of James I., and the rebellious Parliament of Charles I."

The twenty years of James I.'s reign saw the preaching up of the doctrine of the divine right of kings by the bishops of the Established Church, and the growing resolution of the Commons to revive their earlier rights and privileges. If the Stuarts were as unfortunate in their choice of Ministers as Elizabeth had been successful, the House of Commons was equally happy in the remarkable men who became its spokesmen and leaders. In the years that preceded the Civil War--1626-42--three men are conspicuous on the Parliamentary side: Eliot, Hampden, and Pym. All three were country gentlemen, of good estate, high principle, and religious convictions[51]--men of courage and resolution, and of blameless personal character. Eliot died in prison, in the cause of good government, in 1632; Hampden fell on Chalgrove Field in 1643.

As in earlier centuries the struggle in the seventeenth century between the King and the Commons turned mainly on the questions of taxation. (At the same time an additional cause of dispute can be found in the religious differences between Charles I. and the Parliamentarians. The latter were mainly Puritan, accepting the Protestantism of the Church of England, but hating Catholicism and the high-church views of Laud. The King was in full sympathy with high Anglicanism, and, like his father, willing to relax the penal laws against Catholics.)

"By the ancient laws and liberties of England it is the known birthright and inheritance of the subject that no tax, tallage, or other charge shall be levied or imposed but by common consent in England, and that the subsidies of tonnage and poundage are no way due or payable but by a free gift and special Act of Parliament."

In these memorable words began the declaration moved by Sir John Eliot in the House of Commons on March 2nd, 1629. A royal message ordering the adjournment of the House was disregarded, the Speaker was held down in his chair, and the key of the House of Commons was turned against intrusion, while Eliot's resolutions, declaring that the privileges of the Commons must be preserved, were carried with enthusiasm.

Charles answered these resolutions by dissolving Parliament and sending Eliot to the Tower.

For eleven years no Parliament was summoned. Eliot refused altogether to make any defence for his Parliamentary conduct. "I hold that it is against the privilege of Parliament to speak of anything which is done in the House," was his reply to the Crown lawyers. So Sir John Eliot was left in prison, for nothing would induce this devoted believer in representative government to yield to the royal pressure, and three years later, at the age of forty-two, he died in the Tower.

It was for the liberties of the House of Commons that Eliot gave his life.

Wasted with sickness, health and freedom were his if he would but acknowledge the right of the Crown to restrain the freedom of Parliamentary debate; but such an acknowledgment was impossible from Sir John Eliot. For him the privilege of the House of Commons in the matter of free speech was a sacred cause, to be upheld by Members of Parliament, even to the death--a cause every whit as sacred to Eliot as the divine right of kings was to the Stuart bishops.

Charles hoped to govern England through his Ministers without interference from the Commons, and only the need of money compelled him to summon Parliament.

John Hampden saw that if the King could raise money by forced loans and other exactions, the days of const.i.tutional government were over. Hence his memorable resistance to ship-money. London and the seaports were induced to provide supplies for ships in 1634, on the pretext that piracy must be prevented. In the following year the demand was extended to the inland counties, and Hampden refused point blank to pay--though the amount was only a matter of 20s.--falling back, in justification of his refusal, on the Pet.i.tion of Right--acknowledged by Charles in 1628--which declared that taxes were not to be levied without the consent of Parliament. The case was decided in 1636, and five of the twelve judges held that Hampden's objection was valid. The arguments in favour of non-payment were circulated far and wide, so that, in spite of the adverse verdict, "the judgment proved of more advantage and credit to the gentleman condemned than to the King's service."[52]

The personal rule of Charles and his Ministers, Laud and Strafford, came to an end in the autumn of 1640, when there was no choice left to the King but to summon Parliament, if money was to be obtained. Earlier in the year the "Short Parliament" had met, only to be dissolved by the folly of the King after a sitting of three weeks, because of its unwillingness to vote supplies without the redress of grievances.

The disasters of the King's campaign against the Scots, an empty treasury, and a mutinous army, compelled the calling of Parliament. But the temper of the men who came to the House of Commons in November was vastly different from the temper of the "Short Parliament."[53] For this was the famous "Long Parliament" that a.s.sembled in the dark autumn days of 1640, and it was to sit for thirteen years; to see the impeachment and execution of Laud and Strafford, the trial and execution of the King, the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords, the establishment of the Commonwealth; and was itself to pa.s.s away finally only before Cromwell's military dictatorship.

Hampden was the great figure at the beginning of this Parliament. "The eyes of all men were fixed upon him, as their _patriae pater_, and the pilot that must steer the vessel through the tempests and rocks which threatened it. I am persuaded (wrote Clarendon) his power and interest at that time were greater to do good or hurt than any man's in the kingdom, or than any man of his rank hath had at any time; for his reputation of honesty was universal, and his affections seemed so publicly guided, that no corrupt or private ends could bias them."

Politically, neither Hampden nor Pym was Republican. Both believed in government by King, Lords, and Commons; but both were determined that the King's Ministers should be answerable to Parliament for the policy of the Crown, and that the Commons, who found the money for government, should have a definite say in the spending of that money. As for the royal claim of "Divine right," and the royal view that held pa.s.sive obedience to be the duty of the King's subjects, and saw in Parliament merely a useful instrument for the raising of funds to be spent by the royal pleasure without question or criticism--these things were intolerable to Hampden, Pym, and the men of the House of Commons. The King would not govern through Parliament; the House of Commons could govern without a King. It was left to the Civil War to decide the issue between the Crown and Parliament, and make the House of Commons supreme.

Things moved quickly in the first year of the Long Parliament. The Star Chamber and High Commission Courts were abolished. Strafford was impeached for high treason, and executed on Tower Hill. Archbishop Laud lay in prison, to be executed four years later. The Grand Remonstrance of the House of Commons was presented to Charles in December, 1641. The demands of the Commons in the Remonstrance were not revolutionary, but they stated, quite frankly, the case for the Parliament. The main points were the need for securities for the administration of justice, and an insistence on the responsibility of the King's Ministers to the Houses of Parliament. The Grand Remonstrance was only carried by eleven votes in the House of Commons, 159 to 148, after wild scenes. "Some waved their hats over their heads, and others took their swords in their scabbards out of their belts, and held them by the pummels in their hands, setting the lower part on the ground." Actual violence was only prevented "by the sagacity and great calmness of Mr. Hampden, by a short speech."

Charles promised an answer to the deputation of members who waited upon him with the Grand Remonstrance, and early in the new year came the reply. The King simply demanded the surrender of five members--Pym, Hampden, Holles, Strode, and Hazlerig--and their impeachment on the charge of high treason.

All const.i.tutional law was set aside by a charge which proceeded personally from the King, which deprived the accused of their legal right to a trial by their peers, and summoned them before a tribunal which had no pretence to a justification over them. On the refusal of the Commons to surrender their members, Charles came in person to Westminster with 300 cavaliers to demand their arrest. But the five members, warned of the King's venture, were well out of the way, and rested safely within the City of London--for the citizens were strongly for the Parliament. "It was believed that if the King had found them there (in the House of Commons), and called in his guards to have seized them, the members of the House would have endeavoured the defence of them, which might have proved a very unhappy and sad business."

As it was, Charles could only retire "in a more discontented and angry pa.s.sion than he came in." The step was utterly ill-advised. Parliament was in no mood to favour royal encroachments, and the citizens of London were at hand, with their trained bands, to protect forcibly members of the House of Commons.

War was now imminent. "The attempt to seize the five members was undoubtedly the real cause of the war. From that moment, the loyal confidence with which most of the popular party were beginning to regard the King was turned into hatred and suspicion. From that moment, the Parliament was compelled to surround itself with defensive arms. From that moment, the city a.s.sumed the appearance of a garrison.