Buckingham's wars and the second Parliament
At this time Buckingham held the reins of government. Charles had not only 'inherited' this bold and likable duke from his father; he had grown up and traveled with him, and become so attached that he could not see the faults of this ignorant and ill-omened adviser. With Parliament's help Buckingham had drawn James into war against Spain, but Parliament then refused the money to carry it on. So Buckingham fitted out ships to seize Spanish ports and plunder, and met with complete failure. The soldiers who came home, unpaid and disheartened, took to theft and violence and spread a spirit of defeat through the coastal towns.
Charles, in sore need of money, had to summon Parliament a second time, but as his needs grew so did Parliament's opposition. It reminded him that no tax could be laid without its consent. Eliot, once a friend of Buckingham, called him an incompetent bribe-taker who had grown richer with every military and political failure. When Parliament resolved to appoint a committee to inquire into Buckingham's conduct, Charles refused, saying that he would not let Parliament meddle with his servants, least of all with one so close to him. Eliot advised Parliament to vote no money until the king accepted its right to remove ministers, and Charles angrily told it that he could dissolve it at any moment. The Commons formally impeached Buckingham for treason and demanded his dismissal (8 May 1626). The king dissolved Parliament, and the question of ministers' responsibility was left to the future.
Forced loans and a war with France
Charles was again short of money and had to sell his gold plate. The government also asked the nation for gifts to the king, but little came in. So Charles ordered his officers to collect the old customs duties even without Parliament's consent, and to seize the goods of any merchant who refused to pay. He then ordered the ports to keep up the government's ships, and allowed his agents to force men into the army. The English and Danes who were fighting for the Protestants in Germany were beaten by the Catholic armies, and the Danes, England's allies, asked it to honor its promises of help. Charles turned to a forced loan, requiring each taxpayer to lend according to one hundredth of the value of his land and five per cent of his personal property (the book's figures). Wealthy opponents were jailed, and poor ones were forced into the army or navy.
Meanwhile English merchants at Bordeaux and La Rochelle were supplying goods to the French Protestants who were fighting Richelieu, so France declared war on England (1627). Buckingham sailed at the head of a fleet to attack the French at La Rochelle and was beaten. The 200,000 pounds raised by the loan (the book's figure) was soon spent, and Charles needed money again. So he called Parliament a third time.
The Petition of Right
The third Parliament met on 17 March 1628. Coke, Eliot, Wentworth and John Hampden returned to it, and for the first time a sturdy man named Oliver Cromwell was elected as the member for Huntingdon. In a speech from the throne Charles demanded money roughly and said boldly that they should not take this as a threat, for he scorned to threaten any but his equals. Parliament was ready to give 350,000 pounds (the book's figure), but before voting it asked the king to agree to a Petition of Right (the source dates this 28 May 1628, which is when the Commons passed it; royal assent came in June). This statement opened a great chapter in the growth of Parliament's power. It began:
To the King's most excellent majesty: humbly show to your majesty that, by a statute of the time of Edward I, no tax or aid shall be levied by the king without the goodwill and assent of the archbishops, bishops, earls, barons, knights, burgesses and other freemen of the commonalty; your subjects have inherited this freedom, that they should not be compelled to pay any tax or aid in the form of a tax, or any charge, against the will of Parliament.
The Petition complained that people had been forced to lend, and that the king had thrown them into prison without inquiring into the cause, breaking the principle of trial by jury, all of which was contrary to Magna Carta (1215). Coke said afterward that through this petition they would learn whether Parliament would live or die. Charles gave a vague answer, but Parliament asked for a plainer one and held back the money, so Charles had to give his assent. The people of London felt that he had yielded, and the bells rang out as they had not for years.
Buckingham's death and a quarrel over religion
Seeing a favorable moment, Parliament went further and asked the king to remove Buckingham, which Charles refused. Suddenly both sides found, to their dismay, that nothing more could be done about this. A former soldier named Felton, who was wounded, deep in debt, behind in his pension and angered by pamphlets he had read, bought a butcher's knife, walked a hundred kilometers from London to Portsmouth and killed Buckingham, then gave himself up to the authorities (23 August 1628). Buckingham's wife, who was expecting a child, fainted when she saw her husband's body. Felton, who regretted what he had done, begged her pardon, and she granted it. He was nonetheless executed.
Parliament told the king that if he went on taking the customs revenue for himself he would in fact be violating the Petition. Charles answered that these dues were not named in the Petition. Parliament encouraged merchants to refuse to pay them. Although the king was head of the church, it also claimed the right to legislate in religion, declared the Thirty-nine Articles the law of England and fully in accord with Calvin and against the views of Arminius, and tried to impose religious unity on that basis, punishing Catholics and Arminians. When Charles ordered Parliament to adjourn, the Speaker obeyed, but the members would not, and forced him to keep the House at work. Sir John Eliot then proposed three resolutions making it a crime to spread popery or Arminian doctrine or any belief opposed to the true church, or to collect or pay a tax not voted by Parliament. The Speaker refused to put them to a vote, but another member did so, and the rest applauded and passed them. Then, learning that the king's troops were moving to disperse the members, Parliament closed its sitting and broke up.
On 5 March Charles ordered the arrest of Eliot, Selden and seven other members for sedition. Six soon came out, and three others were sentenced to long imprisonment and fines. But Eliot died in prison (1632), at thirty-eight by the source's count (he was born in 1592, so the figure looks wrong).
The eleven years of personal rule
Parliament did not meet for eleven years, the longest recess in English history, and Charles had time to rule as an absolute monarch. His powers were no greater than those of James, Elizabeth or Henry VIII, but he wanted more in practice, and those rulers had never broken the law so far. Charles collected taxes that had not been voted, forced loans, quartered soldiers in private houses, kept prisoners from appearing in court and from trial by jury, and extended the oppression of the Star Chamber in politics and the injustice of the Court of High Commission in religion. His chief mistake was failing to see that the Commons were richer than he and his supporters were, and that Parliament's power had to be greater in the same proportion.
In this critical period England's economy actually grew before it began to drain the nation's blood, because Charles, like his father, was a lover of peace and kept England out of war through most of his reign, while Richelieu weakened France and Germany became a ruin. Charles, hard pressed, used every effort to check the natural concentration of wealth. He ordered a halt to the enclosing of fields and restored the enclosed lands in the five Midland counties (1625 to 1630, as the source gives it), and fined six hundred of his landlord opponents. In 1629, 1631 and 1637 he ordered a rise in the pay of textile workers, made the county magistrates watch prices more closely, and appointed boards to safeguard wages and to oversee poor relief. Laud also warned employers not to grind the faces of the poor, and so made new enemies for himself. Yet the government at the same time handed out monopolies in soap, salt, starch, beer, wine and hides and took a share of the profit, and kept the coal monopoly for itself, buying at 11 shillings and selling at 17 in summer and 19 in winter, which also ground the faces of the poor. During these years more than two hundred thousand Puritans emigrated to New England (the book's figure, which looks greatly inflated).