Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660
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counsellor who poisoned the channels of royal authority, spilled over from
parliament into the capital and the country at large, though not to the extent
that it would do in the case of Strafford. And already anxiety was expressed
about the possibility of an armed coup d’état which distantly prefigured the
feverish response to the Army Plots of 1641.
Charles eventually gave his assent to the Petition of Right in a form that
made it as binding as a statute, and received his five subsidies. He was con-
scious of defeat, and he resented it deeply. But his concession did not halt the
progress of the Remonstrance, which culminated in a forthright request for
Buckingham’s removal, and after it was presented the Commons went ahead
with a second remonstrance, declaring that the king’s collection of tonnage
and poundage and other impositions not granted by parliament was ‘a breach
of the fundamental liberties of this kingdom’ and contrary to the Petition of
Right. Before it could be presented Charles prorogued parliament, declaring
as he did so ‘that I owe an account of my actions to none but to God alone’.
5
By delaying his acceptance of the inevitable he had widened the constitution-
al quarrel to a degree hardly conceivable in his father’s lifetime, and all in a
mere three years.
Two months after the dissolution, a melancholic naval lieutenant who had
been on the Rhé expedition stabbed Buckingham to death with a tenpenny
knife that he had bought for the purpose. He was motivated partly by per-
sonal grievances, but also on his own admission by the Commons’ Remon-
strance. Charles was utterly grief-stricken, and the public jubilation over his
friend’s murder must have wounded him more than all the bonfires and bell-
ringing that had celebrated his final assent to the Petition of Right. But Hen-
rietta Maria hastened to his side, and quite soon she began to fill the void in
his heart that Buckingham’s death had left. She was still only eighteen, and so
far her relationship with him had been neither easy nor close. Now it blos-
somed; soon she was pregnant, and the royal couple’s delight in each other’s
company was the talk of the court. Charles for the first time began to discuss
affairs of state with her, but she told him truthfully that she had no ambition
to influence him in such matters. That would change with time, but it would
be another nine years or so before she became a serious force in English pol-
itics. Nevertheless the king’s devotion to her meant that more indulgence was
shown to her catholic entourage, and to the English catholics who wor-
shipped in her chapel. Her friends naturally tended to become his friends too,
and the growing catholic presence at court was to be a constant source of
rumour and disquiet.
58 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640
5
S. R. Gardiner (ed.), The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–1660
(Oxford, 3rd ed. 1906), p. 73. See ibid. for the draft Bill of Rights, pp. 65–6, the Petition of Right
and the king’s two answers to it, pp. 66–70, and the remonstrance against tonnage and
poundage, pp. 70–3.
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Meanwhile Charles decided to recall parliament for a second session in
January 1629 and give it one more chance (as he saw it) to enable him to con-
tinue governing ‘in a parliamentary way’. The touchstone was to be the
Commons’ willingness to regularize his collection of tonnage and poundage
with a formal grant. But he had seriously damaged his credit with them by
perverting the record of the Petition of Right. His printer had produced 1,500
copies of it, as both Houses and he himself had agreed, with his second
and binding answer following the text. As soon as the last session ended,
however, he had had this edition suppressed and destroyed, and a new one
printed with only his evasive first answer, followed by two further speeches
which put his own gloss on the whole document.
6
Not surprisingly, the
Commons launched an investigation into the deceit as soon as they met, and so
far from voting tonnage and poundage they took up the case of the merchants
who had refused to pay them and had had their goods seized in consequence.
One such was a member of their own House, and when they summoned the
customs officers concerned to appear before them, Charles forbade them to
proceed. An angry confrontation developed, but though tonnage and
poundage was superficially the primary issue, there was a deeper one between
king and Commons over religion, as both sides soon recognized.
Charles had made some attempt to damp down religious controversy by
republishing the Thirty-Nine Articles and requiring all clergymen to ‘agree in
the true usual literal meaning’ of them, as expressing the doctrine of the
Church of England. But he had insisted on licensing for publication a sermon
which Roger Manwaring had preached before him, and which had justified
the Forced Loan in such blatantly absolutist terms that its author was
impeached for it; and in the recess he had not only saved Manwaring from the
Lords’ sentence by granting him a pardon but had given him a rich benefice
and made him a royal chaplain. At the same time he issued special pardons to
three other high churchmen who were in trouble for their words or deeds,
John Cosin, Robert Sibthorpe, and Richard Montagu, and it was now that he
made Montagu a bishop. More disturbing was his advancement of Laud to
London and Neile to Winchester, and his appointment of both to the privy
council. He also made Laud Chancellor of Oxford University and gave the
influential deanery of Windsor to Matthew Wren. So far from holding a
balance between ecclesiastical factions, as his father had done, he was show-
ing a strong partiality for one of them, and the more unpopular.
The situation called for restraint and statesmanship in the Commons, but
both were lacking. Old age had taken Coke into retirement, and Thomas
The New Reign 59
6
The full story is told by Elizabeth Read Foster in ‘Printing the Petition of Right’, Huntington
Library Quarterly XXXVIII (1974), and more briefly in Russell, Parliaments and English
Politics 1621–1629, pp. 401–2, and L. J. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cam-
bridge, 1989), pp. 91–2.
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Wentworth, another who had tempered opposition with discretion, had
accepted a barony and the presidency of the Council in the North. The threat
of Arminianism clouded the judgement of even such a politician as Pym, as
the threat to parliamentary authority did that of the great lawyer John Selden.
Eliot and his fellow-hawks gradually gained an ascendancy over the House,
which lost the sense that it had had in the first session of what Charles could
with patience be brought to accept. At its direction, a powerful sub-committee
drafted a set of resolutions on religion for presentation to the king which
plainly stated that he had been ill advised and that both church and kingdom
were in imminent danger from papists and Arminians. They comprehensive-
ly attached the teachings and practices of his favourite churchmen, stated
where the church’s true doctrines were to be found, and proposed ten drastic
means whereby its abuses should be remedied.
7
The implied claim was that
parliament had the ultimate power to declare what the religion of the Church
of England was. Queen Elizabeth must have been turning in her grave.
On the day fixed for the House to debate the resolutions, and in all pro-
bability to adopt them, the king ordered a five days’ adjournment. When it met
again on 2 March, the Speaker announced that the king had ordered a further
adjournment to the 10th. On his putting the motion for it, there were shouts
of ‘No!’ on all sides. The king had personally commanded the Speaker to
leave the chair immediately if anyone tried to speak, but when he attempted
to do so two members, Denzil Holles and Benjamin Valentine, thrust him
back into it and held him down. After further impassioned scenes and a wild
speech by Eliot, the House passed three resolutions by acclamation, while the
Usher of the Black Rod was waiting outside its locked doors with a message
from the king, and with a guard sent by him to force a way in if necessary. The
first resolution was that whosoever should make innovation in religion or
seek to introduce popery or Arminianism ‘shall be reputed a capital enemy to
this kingdom and commonwealth’. The second laid the same anathema on
anyone who advised or participated in the collection of tonnage and poundage,
and the third condemned anyone who paid those dues as ‘a betrayer of the
liberty of England, and an enemy to the same’.
8
Such language was profoundly ominous. A capital enemy to the kingdom,
one deserving death, must mean a traitor; but treason was by law a crime
against the king, as the personification of the nation-state. It consisted in plot-
ting the king’s death, or levying war against him, or adhering to his enemies.
Yet here was the House of Commons holding forth a kind of secondary trea-
son against the whole community of the realm (‘kingdom and common-
wealth’), of which a subject might be guilty to the point of incurring the death
penalty if he did what the king commanded, or if he propagated religious
60 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640
7
Text in Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, pp. 77–82.
8
Ibid., pp. 82–3.
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beliefs which the king, the church’s Supreme Governor, showed every sign of
holding. We should not try to squeeze too much out of words that were re-
cited in heat, and by memory from a paper that Eliot had just burnt, and we
should not suppose that he or anyone else involved in that angry scene was
remotely contemplating the possibility of civil war; but the ideas implicit in
the Three Resolutions were uncomfortably prophetic of those that the Long
Parliament would be taking up in 1642. The inevitable dissolution followed,
accompanied by a long declaration in which the king blamed the failure of
the session on ‘some few malevolent persons’. Ten of them—Eliot, Holles,
Valentine, Selden, and five other members who had resisted the adjourn-
ment—had already been committed to prison by the council, and only one of
them secured his early release by making the total submission that Charles
required. Except for those prisoners, it was no bad thing that the country
should be given a respite from parliamentary activity, since it had gone so
sour. What remained to be seen, however, was whether or not the opportun-
ity would be taken to begin mending the rifts in the political nation.
There was certainly a sense of crisis in the air during the first weeks and even
months after the dissolution. The popular support for Eliot in his own west
country was vociferous enough to threaten public order. Many prominent
men, peers included, visited him and his fellow-prisoners to express their
sympathy. The third of the Three Resolutions led many merchants to refuse
to pay customs duties; indeed the Merchant Adventurers, who handled most
of England’s cloth exports, ceased all trading until the middle of May, and so
did many Dutch merchants in London. Foreign commerce did not return to a
normal level until late in the summer. But public reaction did not run all one
way, for much of it was critical of the Commons’ conduct during the last
session, especially at the end of it. There was a real fear abroad that Charles
was so outraged by their conduct that he had formed a resolution to rule with-
out parliament indefinitely, perhaps even to suppress it permanently.
That does seem to have been his first reaction, but wiser counsels dissuaded
him from publishing such an intention, notably those of his Secretary of
State Dudley Carleton, Viscount Dorchester, who knew how essential the
continuance of parliament was to the pursuit of an active foreign policy in
support of the protestant cause. Dorchester drafted an important ‘proclam-
ation for the suppression of false rumours touching parliament’, which the
king worked over carefully and published on 27 March. In it Charles claimed
to have demonstrated his ‘love to the use of parliaments’ by his frequent call-
ing of them; ‘yet [he went on] the late abuse having for the present driven us
unwillingly out of that course, we shall account it presumption for any to pre-
scribe any time unto us for parliaments, the calling, continuing and dissolving
of which is always in our own power’. He would be more inclined to summon
The New Reign 61
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them again ‘when our people shall see more clearly into our intents and
actions’, and when those who had been misled by the ‘false and pernicious
rumours’ surrounding the recent dissolution ‘shall come to a better under-
standing of us and themselves’. But first the men who had ‘bred this interrup-
tion’ must ‘receive their condign punishments’.
9
This proclamation probably expressed what Charles truly felt and intend-
ed at the start of the personal rule, once he had got over his first sense of out-
rage over the behaviour of Eliot and his colleagues. No one any longer
describes the period now commencing as the Eleven Years’ Tyranny, though
assessments of its character and achievements vary very widely. Charles, sure
as he was of his own good intentions, really believed that he had been tra-
duced by men who wished him and his people no good, and that a substantial
spell of benevolent government, uninterrupted by parliamentary broils,
would in time win from his subjects the loyalty that he felt he deserved. But
the men who had alienated them from him must be punished, and he would
not have mere subjects telling him when to call another parliament. Within
the circle of his government, however, there were always some ministers
about him who desired an early return to parliamentary rule, and though sev-
eral episodes indicate that his aversion to the prospect remained strong, he
never closed his mind to it, or seriously contemplated a systematic royal abso-
lutism. The weakness of parliament’s position at the start of this eleven-year
intermission was to a considerable extent its own fault, because by persist-
ently living in the past in its reckoning of the government’s financial needs,
and by expecting heavy concessions in return for inadequate supplies, it had
made the king and many of his ministers wonder whether the game was worth
the candle.
Rather than attempt a comprehensive outline history of England in the
1630s, the rest of this chapter will focus on five topics that were to be of par-
ticular concern to parliament and people when the personal rule eventually
collapsed. They are, in roughly ascending order of importance, the treatment
of the members imprisoned for their part in the violent end of the last parlia-
ment, the winding up of the wars and the abandonment of the Elector Pala-
tine, the financial expedients whereby the crown managed to get by without
parliamentary grants, the general quality of provincial government in the
absence of a parliamentary safety-valve, and the religious policies of the king
and Archbishop Laud.
Charles was not totally unforgiving to those who had shown opposition in
his early parliaments. Several besides Wentworth received preferment during
the personal rule, including Sir Dudley Digges, who had launched the
62 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640
9
Text in J. F. Larkin (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, II (Oxford, 1983), pp. 226–8; quoted
and illuminatingly discussed in Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule, pp. 109–12.
ch3.y8 25/9/02 4:42 PM Page 62
impeachment of Buckingham with a speech that had landed him in the Fleet
prison, William Noy, who had defended in the Five Knights’ Case and
became Attorney-General in 1631, and Edward Littleton, a promoter of the
Petition of Right (like Digges) and counsel for Selden after his arrest, who
rose through successive high legal offices in the 1630s to become Lord Keep-
er of the Great Seal in 1641. But towards Eliot and his associates whom he
held responsible for the last parliament’s violent end Charles was implacable.
They were in the King’s Bench prison pending trial, and for many months to
come the eyes of the public were closely upon them. Their case is significant
because it illustrates Charles’s conviction that the law must bend before
reason of state, or to put it bluntly his regal authority, and because it was
remembered with still warm indignation by the members of the Long Parlia-
ment when they drew up the Grand Remonstrance.
Whatever was thought of their conduct, an important point of parliamen-
tary privilege was at issue, for the prisoners were being arraigned for what
they had said and done in the House of Commons. For that reason Eliot and
his bolder fellows refused to reply to the privy council’s interrogations and
denied that either the common law courts or Star Chamber had jurisdiction
over them; they were (they claimed) accountable only to a parliament. In
Charles’s view on the other hand they were guilty at the very least of sedition,
wherein privilege should not protect them, so he was determined not to
release them unless they admitted their guilt and threw themselves on his
mercy. The judges, however, did not fully share his assumptions about their
criminality, and it was clear that if they were brought to an open state trial in
King’s Bench they would take a stand for the rights of parliament that could
do him grave political damage. His wiser councillors urged him to make a ges-
ture of clemency and conciliation, but unless the prisoners submitted he
would not forgive them. If he could not secure their conviction, he would
punish them by long confinement. They naturally took out writs of habeas
corpus, and Littleton bravely and brilliantly contended for their right to bail.
The justices of King’s Bench duly decided in favour of bail, but the king com-
manded them to deliver no judgment until all the judges had been consulted.
He then put the prisoners out of the court’s reach by transferring them from
the King’s Bench prison to the Tower, where they were held in close captivity
all summer. Two did submit after this, one because his counsel was too fright-
ened to appear for him. Before the Michaelmas law term began in October,
the crown relented to the extent of granting bail on condition that they gave
bonds for their good behaviour, but five refused, demanding their bail as of
right. To cut a long and complex story short, the crown eventually communi-
cated their alleged offences to the King’s Bench, whose judges, under heavy
royal pressure, sentenced Eliot, Holles, and Valentine in February 1630 to
large fines and imprisonment at the king’s pleasure, despite their refusal to
The New Reign 63
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plead. Holles, Selden, and Sir Miles Hobart were released during 1631 upon
giving security for their good behaviour. Not so Eliot; Charles had him
moved to a fireless room, because rumours of a new parliament were bring-
ing him a stream of visitors. He developed consumption, but his petition for
leave to go into the country for his health was refused, and he died in Novem-
ber 1632. Valentine and Strode were kept in captivity until 1640. Both were
elected to the Long Parliament, which voted them compensation; Strode and
Holles were among the five members whom Charles disastrously attempted
to arrest in January 1642.
10
One obvious price that he had to pay for ruling without parliament was to
wind up the wars with France and Spain. The Peace of Susa with the former
was swiftly concluded in April 1629, but the Treaty of Madrid with Spain
was not signed until the following November. The reason for the longer and
more difficult negotiation was that Charles felt real compunction about aban-
doning the cause of his sister Elizabeth and her husband the Elector Palatine,
whose various territories were currently occupied by the forces of Spain, the
Empire, and Maximilian of Bavaria. To make matters worse, the Emperor
had transferred Frederick’s electoral title to Maximilian. Eventually Charles
got an empty promise from Philip IV of Spain that he would do all he could to
get Frederick’s lands restored to him, and arguably this was the least hopeless
diplomatic course to pursue, though some of Charles’s best servants were
shocked by the peace. Dorchester wrote to Elizabeth in admiration of ‘our
godly people, who, weary of this wicked land, are gone (man, woman and
child) in great numbers to seek new worlds’. Her friend Sir Thomas Roe,
ambassador, explorer, and patriot, who under another monarch would sure-
ly have had a career worthier of his talents, had earlier written to her that ‘if
there be an America I can live’.
11
The Great Migration was indeed under way,
for 1630 was the year in which John Winthrop and his little fleet sailed to
Massachusetts and founded Boston. Dorchester and Roe, like Winthrop, felt
a kinship with the international protestant interest that the Palatines personi-
fied for most Englishmen; Charles did not, though he remained committed to
doing what he could for his sister, little though it was while he declined to
meet another parliament.
Peace made the drain on the crown’s finances less ruinous, but it came at a
time when the king could no longer pay for the provision of his own house-
hold. When Richard Weston took over the treasurership in 1628 he inherited
a debt of around £2 million, roughly the equivalent of three years’ peacetime
expenditure in the mid-1630s. Crown lands were being sold on a vast scale to
make ends meet; £640,000 worth went in the first ten years of the reign, most
64 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640
10
For the full story of the proceedings against the imprisoned MPs, see Larkin (ed.), Stuart
Royal Proclamations, II, ch. 5.
11
Ibid., pp. 111 (Roe), 210 (Dorchester).
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of them in the first five. But this of course was living on capital, and by 1635
there was not a lot left to sell. The customs, the largest source of revenue, were
depressed by the stop of trade in 1629 and did not make a full recovery until
1631. Thereafter they throve on the increasing share of the carrying trade that
English merchants took over while the Dutch and (from 1635) the French
were at war; they yielded £358,000 in 1635, well over half the Exchequer’s
total receipts, and rose to £482,000 by 1640. But they stirred a steady under-
current of resentment for three reasons: they had not been granted by parlia-
ment, they included the disputed impositions as well as tonnage and
poundage, and the greater part of them was farmed. The crown, instead of
collecting customs through its own officials, negotiated a rent for them with
syndicates of financiers (the farmers), who took the task over and made what
profit they could. This suited the crown because the rent was paid in advance,
and because in time of need the farmers could usually be called upon for large
loans or anticipatory payments. But they were unpopular, partly because
they were levying duties that parliament had not voted, partly because their
profits were generally large, and partly because when the government did
have enough funds to repay loans the farmers got paid first.
To the merchant community in general the crown was a bad creditor and
often an unwelcome interloper in their business interests. A large loan that
James had raised from the corporation of London in 1617, to take one ex-
ample, was still being repaid in the 1630s. A gap was widening between the
middle rank of merchants, whom Charles’s personal rule did much to alien-
ate, and a smallish elite of really rich concessionaires who profited from the
crown’s needs. They included, besides the customs farmers, the brokers of
some lucrative patents and monopolies, from some of which they wrung
more profit than the crown. The sale of monopolies had been a grievance
under James I, but the 1624 parliament thought it had remedied it with its
Statute of Monopolies. That act, however, had exempted companies and cor-
porations for trade from its ban, intending thereby to safeguard the exclusive
rights of such bodies as the Merchant Adventurers, the Levant Company, and
the London livery companies. Charles I exploited this loophole by granting
monopolies under charters of incorporation, and by the late 1630s a whole
vexatious range of them was bringing him nearly £100,000 a year, of which
over £30,000 came from a particularly oppressive monopoly for soap.
Very little of his revenue during the personal rule came from unobjection-
able sources; most of them were to be declared illegal by the Long Parliament,
or (in the case of the customs) brought firmly under parliamentary control. It
is difficult to say how strongly the fiscal expedients of the 1630s were resented
at the time, and historical opinion varies quite widely on the subject. They fell
mainly on those who could afford to pay, and by European standards Eng-
land remained a lightly taxed country—far less burdened than it was to be in
The New Reign 65
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the 1640s and 1650s. The chief objections to them were that they were often
arbitrary in their incidence and that they were blatant devices to enable the
king to dispense with parliament.
Some of them were ancient, and no longer bore any relation to political and
social realities. Wardship was the most famous of these sources; parliament
had sought to abolish it in 1604, and again in the Great Contract. It fell on
landlords who held their estates as tenants-in-chief of the crown, as most of
the gentry did. If such a landowner died leaving an heir under age or an
unmarried heiress, the king had the right to all the rents and profits of the
estate until the boy reached his majority or the girl married, and to a further
payment when that event occurred. The historic justification was that a
tenant-in-chief owed him service in war as a mounted knight, and that if he
could not serve in person the crown needed his revenues to hire a substitute.
But feudal military service had long passed into history, and the general prac-
tice of the Court of Wards was to sell the wardship to the family of the heir
for a large lump sum. Sometimes, however, the king granted valuable ward-
ships by way of reward to royal servants or favoured courtiers. Wardship was
therefore a matter of demographic luck; most families survived, but two or
three minorities in near-succession could ruin a house. In Charles’s reign,
mainly from 1635 onward, wardships were sold more dearly and their yield
almost doubled, reaching about £84,000 a year by 1640. Purveyance was
another archaic due whose abolition parliament had long been seeking. It
entitled the crown to purchase provisions, cartage, and other services below
the market rate; it dated from the days when the royal household was peri-
patetic, but it was levied on counties that never saw the court. Its burden too
was increased, to the accompaniment of much vexation, until it brought in
nearly £38,000 a year.
To these old examples of fiscal feudalism a newly reinvented one, distraint
of knighthood, was added in the 1630s. By reason of that same obligation of
mounted military service that lay behind wardship, landowners worth £40 a
year had anciently been required to present themselves at the king’s coron-
ation to be knighted, or incur a fine in default. Knighthood, however, had long
been an honour conferred by the crown, and thanks to the great inflation £40
was only about five per cent of the mean landed income of actual knights in
the 1630s. Nevertheless in that decade 9,280 men, ranging from peers down
to well-to-do farmers, were fined for failing to claim a title which most of
them had no right to assume, and which they did not acquire by paying up.
But pay up they had to do, and they brought the Exchequer more than
£174,000.
Even more widely unpopular, because it affected many more people, was
the revival of ancient crown rights over vast areas of what had once been
royal forest, reserved for the king’s hunting or for timber for his ships. Whole
66 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640
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counties were mulcted; Essex is an example. All the inhabitants of such areas
could be fined for encroaching on forest land, and most were; the sums were
from the shillings demanded of poorer tenants to the £20,230 imposed on Sir
John Winter (though he negotiated a reduction to £4,000, as most of the more
heavily taxed did). Another lucrative dip into fiscal antiquarianism was the
fining of many people who had built in London’s spreading suburbs, under an
ancient ban on building ‘under the wall’, because houses outside their perim-
eter would provide cover for the sappers and miners of a besieging army. The
walls were already largely non-existent, and ironically the only enemy that
London was ever likely to have to defend itself against (at least before Hitler)
was Charles I. A revenue-raising scheme that aimed more genuinely at
improvement was that for the drainage of the fens, but it aroused great local
hostility because of its failure to provide adequately for the dispossessed
poor, its disproportionate benefit to foreigners and courtiers, and general dis-
trust of the government’s motives. The fenlands, like the forests, witnessed
serious rioting during the personal rule, and there were cases where local gen-
try and poor commoners joined in protest against the court concessionaires.
The divisions wrought in both fens and forests would be reflected in their
inhabitants’ choice of allegiance when it came to civil war.
Ship Money was the most controversial of the financial devices of the
personal rule, though for five years it was the most successful. It had ancient
origins, for since Plantagenet times the crown had occasionally, in times of
special need, required the ports and maritime counties to furnish ships for the
navy or money in lieu. James I had levied £48,555 in Ship Money in 1619.
What was new was its extension to the whole country. Charles’s government
first tried this in 1628, issuing demands for a total of £173,411, but it with-
drew them in face of hostile reactions from many counties; the Forced Loan
was still being collected then. Ship Money was next demanded in 1634, from
the maritime counties in the traditional way, and it was collected
without undue difficulty. There was more protest when fresh writs were sent
out less than a year later, this time to all inland as well as seaboard counties,
and for an unprecedented total of £218,500—nearly as much as parliament’s
five subsidies had realized in 1628–9. Yet nine-tenths of this sum was brought
in within a year, and the arrears eventually came down to little more than a
fiftieth. When further writs were issued in 1636 it was clear that Ship Money
was to be an annual levy instead of an infrequent expedient, warranted by
national emergency, and protest mounted. A remonstrance against it was pre-
pared for presentation to the king, and the Earl of Warwick told him frankly
that he doubted its legality. Viscount Saye and Sele refused to pay it, and sued
a constable who distrained two of his oxen in consequence, but the govern-
ment preferred to avoid a test case at this stage. The king put the question for-
mally to the judges in February 1637. They replied that by law he could
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