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Home Charles I and Domestic Affairs, 1625-42 1629-1640 1629-1640; Part 3 |
1629-1640; Part 3The difficulties of Charles during this period of eleven years were mainly financial. He, of course, possessed the Crown lands and feudal dues, and still continued to levy tunnage and poundage and other impositions. But his income from these sources was insufficient, and he fell back upon various expedients for enlarging it. He caused all those who held lands by feudal tenure or of a certain value—over £40 a year—to become knights and to pay fees for the honour, or else to be fined for refusing it. He fined nobles and others whose ancestors had encroached—perhaps hundreds of years before—on the limits of the Crown forests. Various companies, on agreeing to pay certain annual payments, were granted monopolies of the commonest articles of use, such as bricks, salt, and soap (They were not, strictly speaking, monopolies, but they came to the same thing. For instance, the sale of soap by independent makers was forbidden unless it was certified as being "sweet and good" by the soap company—a certificate which, however excellent the soap might be, it was difficult to procure). Then in 1634 Charles wished to enlarge the fleet. He accordingly levied for that purpose a tax called ship-money from the coast towns of England, for which there was a precedent in Anglo-Saxon times. The tax was sufficiently successful for a "second writ of ship-money", as it was called, to be issued not only to coast towns, but to inland counties as well; and, though there was grumbling, much money was collected.Up till 1637, though there had been great dissatisfaction, there was little resistance to the king. With that year, however, the struggle began—it has been well called the first year of the Revolutionary Epoch. Popular feeling had the opportunity of showing itself in June. Prynne, a lawyer, Burton, a clergyman, and Bastwick, a doctor, were sentenced, for attacks on the bishops (It must be confessed that the attacks were of a somewhat scurrilous character. The bishops, Bastwick had written, were the enemies of God and the king, and the Church which they governed was as full of ceremonies as a dog is full of fleas), to lose their ears, to be fined £5000, and to be imprisoned for life. They suffered the first part of this sentence in Palace Yard. Prynne had already lost part of his ears for an attack upon the stage four years previously, but his case had then aroused little interest. Now, however, all London came to show its sympathy. His path and that of his fellow sufferers was strewn with flowers, many people wept, and there was an angry yell when Prynne's ears—or what remained of them—were sawn off. Then in November 1637 carne the famous trial of John Hampden, which showed that the gentlemen of England were beginning to resist the Monarchy. The king had issued a third writ of ship-money; Hampden, a Buckinghamshire squire of importance, had refused to pay. The case was heard, and the judges decided by seven to five that ship-money was legal. But the case, though it had been lost, had aroused intense interest, and the arguments of Hampden's lawyers were circulated over the entire kingdom. In the same year the opinions of the greatest literary figure of the period on Laud's rule were shown in the writing by Milton of Lycidas. |
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