" Even the famous
Petition of Right, to which some nine years previously, in 1628, he had
given a solemn, though reluctant, consent, had been ruthlessly violated.
Taxes had been levied by the Royal authority; patents of monopoly had
been granted; the course of justice had been tampered with, and judges
arbitrarily deposed; troops had been billeted upon the people; old
feudal usages had been revived for the express purpose of harassing and
defrauding the citizens; and, as if to exhaust every means to sap the
loyalty and wear out the patience of the people, Puritans of every shade
of opinion had not only been silenced but relentlessly persecuted, while
High Church bishops preached passive obedience, declaring the persons
and the property of subjects to be at the absolute disposal of the
sovereign, and in the name of religion inaugurating a systematic attack
on the rights and liberties of the nation.
The people whose representatives a quarter of a century previously, in
1604, had met the insolent claims of James the First with the dignified
rejoinder, that "your Majesty should be misinformed if any man should
deliver that the kings of England have any absolute power in themselves
either to alter religion, or to make any laws concerning the same,
otherwise than in temporal causes by consent of Parliament,"[25:1] were,
however, not easily to be intimidated. Despite a Royal order to adjourn,
the House of Commons of 1629, holding the Speaker by force in the Chair,
supported the immortal Eliot in his last assertion of English liberty,
and by successive resolutions declared that whosoever shall bring in
innovations in religion, or whosoever shall counsel or advise the taking
and levying of the subsidies of tonnage and poundage, not being granted
by Parliament, "a capital enemy to this kingdom and commonwealth," and
any person voluntarily yielding or paying the said subsidies, not being
granted by Parliament, "a betrayer of the liberty of England, and an
enemy to the same.
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