CHAPTER EIGHT THE RIGHTS-BEARING ENGLISHMAN Early Statements in Parliament In the early days of the Long Parliament, George Digby, MP for Dorset, made a passionate plea for those liberties that ‘speak us Englishmen’ and moved for a committee to consider the deplorable state into which the nation had fallen.1 Digby was both a royalist and also (at this point in time) a critic of the excesses of royalism. He would later find himself very much on King Charles’ side in the Civil War. In his original position in 1640, how- ever, he showed himself to be a very typical parliamentarian. It had become largely a matter of political consensus that inherited liberties con- stituted true Englishness and that the moderate exercise of regal power was desirable and indeed necessary for the preservation of the nation. What we witness is a process whereby Englishness becomes a key political language from about 1610 onwards, bandied about by parliamentarians and lawyers, all of whom would have considered themselves reasonably conservative and none of whom would have gone out of their way to be subversive. By 1640, the congerie of idea was well-established and Digby’s comment was nothing more – or less – than a commonplace. But the decade then beginning would transform a parliamentary commonplace into an explosive populist language used by highly-politicised laymen to argue for ends as extreme as adult masculine suffrage. How did such evo- lutions and revolutions occur? This immensely significant and varied polemic about Englishness emerged out of the conflicts about money which besmirched the reputa- tions of both the early Stuarts and did so much to sour political relations in the polity. Undoubtedly neither James nor his son, Charles intended to unleash such a furore, had not expected to fall foul of such powerful forms of protest as called their very identity and status into question, but in their 1 Parliamentary History of England, vol. 2, p. 664. Recorded as being spoken by George Digby. There is a note to say that the speech is undated but that it is likely to have been spoken at the beginning of the session in November. It was then that he proposed the committee. © Hilary Larkin, 2014 | doi:10.1163/9789004243873_010 Hilary Larkin - 9789004243873 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NCDownloaded 4.0 license. from Brill.com09/25/2021 04:26:48AM via free access <UN> <UN> 214 chapter eight urgent need for money, they both became involved in technically legal but practically and politically repugnant means to achieve it. The controver- sies in question – notably the Impositions, the Five Knights’ Case, Ship Money, the granting of monopolies – have been well worked-over in the literature, and for those who like to read the signs of encroaching civil war, there is plenty of evidence in each which provides background explana- tion. But my interest in the controversies does not so much lie in this conventional framework of interpretation. Money matters have a ten- dency of transcending themselves and in this case, they touched upon a whole range of susceptibilities and ignited latent and novel views about the status of an Englishman. These much-hated Stuart fiscal experiments gave debates about identity a vitality and a contemporary political rele- vance that they had not possessed before when trailed merely on sociocul- tural phenomena. At no other time in England’s early-modern period, I would contend, was the fiscal question so intimately bound up with powerful constructions of what it was to be English. Indeed, construction is an optimum word for what was being done. It implies agency and invention. Those who use the free Englishman as their parliamentary or public platform are doing something essentially new, for all that so many of them say that they are merely faithful witnessing to the past. It becomes clear when considering the sources that in thrashing out the constitutional and legal issues raised by the usage of the royal preroga- tive, parliamentarians and polemicists are not primarily reflecting on the pre-existing state of the Englishman. They may say that they are doing this. They will be found constantly claiming to be restoring the past. They will even claim that the current debates are about the past. They are not. Their usage of historical example and tradition is entirely politicised and agenda-driven. Arcane and mainstream medieval precedents are dusted down and polished up for contemporary usage. They desperately want to prove their point. This was from first to last a contemporary language, informed by the contexts of the day. It is not always an establishment language – the Levellers would become notorious for taking it to what many thought an unacceptable extreme – but notably, it started off by being eminently respectable. Its early state- ments come from the interiors of Westminster; its expression is the doing of well-educated, cautiously-minded parliamentarians, proud of their sta- tus but anxious also to preserve their relationship with the King. Nobody could accuse the common lawyers who were such a prominent force in Stuart parliaments of undue radicalism. Yet it was precisely because they Hilary Larkin - 9789004243873 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 04:26:48AM via free access <UN> <UN> the rights-bearing englishman 215 were given respect for their mandarin-like capacity to unveil the myster- ies of medieval laws that they were able to be more radical than they seemed or even aspired to be. The potential for radicalism was most often hidden from themselves. The opening drama occurs in the fierce debates that characterised the fourth session of James I’s first parliament in 1610. Here it is possible to single out some key strands of thought which laid the basis for subsequent depictions of the Englishman as historic rights-bearer. Impositions were the issue at stake. The value of an earlier parliamentary subsidy (1605–06) had not stretched as far as the extravagant James needed and he had decided to resort to exacting impositions without parliamentary consent, that is to say without the consent of the body of free Englishmen legally convoked.2 The test case for this in 1606 ruled in favour of the King against John Bates, a wayward merchant of the Levant Company who had been unwilling to pay a duty on currants. This bold decision did not fill parliamentarians with confidence, more especially as the Barons of the Exchequer claimed that the King had absolute as well as ordinary power, and that the former was for the safety of the nation and could vary with circumstance, according to his royal wisdom. It seemed to constitute a nefarious precedent for future actions of the sort and when parliament did gather in 1610, its members were determined to make the point that such hand-handed behaviour was unacceptable. Much has been written about parliament’s defence of its own rights and liberties in this context: the debates are a veritable treasure-trove for considerations of custom, precedent and privilege. They are also the first time when we witness a deliberate politico-legal proclamation of what it is to be an Englishman in this newly threatening context. Apart from Thomas Hedley’s contribution, which will be discussed at a later point, there were three whose interventions lay themselves open to this kind of reading. All three were lawyers who made their mark as prom- inent critics of the Impositions. The most arresting contribution is that of James Whitelocke. Born in 1570, he was an Oxford man and a product of the Inns of Court. An outspoken critic of recent government policy, he was in 1610 responsible for transforming the terms of the debate between roy- alty and parliament into something which cut much more deeply than a mere matter of financial disagreement. His central accusation was that 2 See Coward 2003, pp. 140–142; Hirst 1999, pp. 89–92. Hilary Larkin - 9789004243873 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 04:26:48AM via free access <UN> <UN> 216 chapter eight James’ actions were essentially unconstitutional. England was a distinc- tive entity and impositions eroded that very distinctiveness. [T]he ancient frame of the commonwealth is much altered in points wherein it differs in fortune and blessedness from many other commonwealths. He proceeds to get to the core of what he thinks makes Englishmen distinctive. One is that we are masters of our own and can have nothing taken from us without our consents; another that laws cannot be made without our con- sents, and the edict of a prince is not a law; the third is that the parliament is the storehouse of our liberties.3 Several ideas bear commentary here. The notion of mastery is a crucial one. In this conscious or unconscious allusion to classical ideals, Whitelocke wanted to conjure up the host of desirable values and virtues involved in being a political master. Only those who had self-mastery could govern their passions, their households and indeed take part in good government. He was not beholden to others but had attained to full, ratio- nal masculinity. The giving and withholding of consent was intimately related to mastery and freedom. In that simple act, one showed the capac- ity to determine communal destiny as regards tax or trade or whatever the matter was. Being deprived of such a power was felt to be akin to slavery – a tacit implication here but one which would, in due course, receive much airing. Nicholas Fuller’s weighty speech of 23 June, which provoked such ‘a great Silence’ in the Commons, was another example of an intervention in which deeper issues were put forward and assumptions laid bare.4 It can appear to be a straightforward and conservative plea to the King that ‘all clerks and laymen of this land shall have their laws, liberties, and free customs as largely and wholly as they have used to have the same at any time when they had them best’ yet there is more to it.5 Speaking from a lawyer’s perspective – and one with previous experience of conflict with government – he elaborates upon an argument for the ‘freedom of the subject’ that enthrones the legal inheritance of the land.6 3 Proceedings in Parliament, 1610, vol.