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hope of relief or protection from parliament might encourage opposition, Charles issued a proclamation, in which he declared; "that whereas for "several ill ends the calling again of a parliament is "divulged, though his majesty has shewn by frequent meetings with his people, his love to the "use of parliaments; yet the late abuse having for "the present driven him unwillingly out of that "course, he will account it presumption for any "one to prescribe to him any time for the calling "of that assembly." This was generally considered as a declaration, that during this reign no more parliaments were intended to be summoned, and every measure of the king's confirmed that suspicion.

Tonnage and poundage continued to be levied by the royal authority alone; the former additional impositions were still exacted, and even new impositions laid on several kinds of merchandize.

The custom-house officers received orders from the council to enter into any house, warehouse, or cellar, to search any trunk or chest, and to break any bulk whatever, in default of the payment of

customs.

In order to exercise the militia, and to keep them in good order, each county, by an edict of the council, was assessed in a certain sum, for maintaining a muster-master appointed for that service.

Compositions were openly made with recusants, and became a regular part of the revenues. This was the only persecution which the catholics underwent under Charles's reign.

A commission was granted for compounding with such as were possessed of crown-lands upon defective titles, and on this pretence some money was exacted from the people.

Commissioners were appointed for fixing the rates

of composition, to be paid by those who, being possessed of forty pounds a year and upwards, had neglected to receive the order of knighthood.

Ann. 1631 to 1633.

Subscriptions are set on foot for repairing and rebuilding St. Paul's; and the king encourages them by his countenance and example.

A stamp duty is imposed on cards. Monopolies are revived. It is affirmed by Clarendon, that so little profit was reaped from this oppressive way of levying money, that of two hundred thousand pounds thereby produced scarcely one thousand five hundred pounds came into the king's coffers. The court of star-chamber extends its authority, and encroaching upon the jurisdiction of the other courts, imposes heavy fines, and inflicts punishments beyond the usual course of justice.

In the month of June 1633, the king made a journey to Scotland attended by his court, to hold a parliament there, and pass through the ceremony of his coronation. Besides obtaining some supplies in this parliament, the king was empowered to regulate the habits of clergymen, a matter which was deemed of too much importance at that time to be ordered without the sanction of a particular

statute.

The archbishopric of Canterbury being vacant by the death of Abbot, Laud is promoted to that see, and obtains for his friend Juxon the bishopric of London.

Ann. 1634.

Ship money is levied on the whole kingdom, and each county rated at a particular sum assessed afterwards with equality upon the people. The amount

of the whole tax was very moderate, and not exceeding two hundred thousand pounds, and was entirely expended on the navy.

More considerable sums were procured by fines or compositions for encroachments on the king's forests. One Morley was fined ten thousand pounds for reviling, challenging, and striking, in the court of Whitehall, sir George Theobald, one of the king's servants. Among other instances of the high respect paid to the nobility and to the great, in that age, Clarendon relates, that a waterman, belonging to a man of quality, having a squabble with a citizen about his fare, shewed his badge, the crest of his master, which happened to be a swan; and thence insisted on better treatment from the citizen, who replied carelessly, that he did not trouble his head about that goose. For this offence he was summoned before the marshal's court; was fined as having opprobriously defamed the crest of the nobleman, by calling a swan a goose, and was in effect. reduced to beggary.

Ann. 1635.

The parliaments in their grievances had omitted to complain of that unlimited part of the legislative power, which, from the reign of Henry VIII., the king alone was entitled to exercise by proclamations, which were to be considered and executed as all other laws. Therefore, their authority, as well as the power of issuing them, stood still unimpaired. Charles, imitating the example of Elizabeth and James, had issued a proclamation forbidding the landed gentlemen and the nobility to live idly in London, and ordering them to retire to their country seats. Many were indicted by the attorneygeneral and fined in the star chamber for having disobeyed this proclamation.. This occasioned dis

contents, and the sentences were complained of as illegal,

Another proclamation of this year prohibited hackney-coaches from standing in the street. There were not, at that time, above twenty coaches of that kind in London. There are at present eleven hundred.

In the course of this year one Parr, one hundred and fifty-two years old, and in very good health, was presented to the king. He was born in the last year of the reign of Edward IV.

Ann. 1636.

The advantageous effects of the ship-money-tax were this year very conspicuous. A fleet of sixty sail, the most formidable that England had ever put to sea, was equipped under the earl of Northumberland, and sent to attack the herring-busses of the Dutch, which fished in what were called the British seas. The Dutch were contented to pay thirty thousand pounds for a licence during this year, though they openly denied the claim of doninion in the seas beyond the friths, bays, and shores; a general principle of the law of nations, the application of which, however, among maritime powers, occasionally admits of more or less latitude, according to the respective strength of their navy.

In the mean time a squadron was sent against Sallee, and, with the assistance of the emperor of Morocco, destroyed that receptacle of pirates, by whom the English trade, and even the English coasts, had been infested..

This period of Charles's reign, when there were neither foreign wars nor parliamentary quarrels, hardly offers to history any other remarkable occurrences than the extraordinary cases in which heavy fines were pronounced by the star-chamber, and

rigorous sentences issued in religious matters, and which are ascribed to Laud's passionate disposition and intemperate zeal. Among other instances, one Prynne, a barrister of Lincoln's-inn, having written a libel against the ceremonies, rites, and government of the church, was condemned to be put from the bar, to stand in the pillory in Cheapside and Westminster, to lose both his ears, one in each place, to pay five thousand pounds fine to the king, and to be imprisoned during life. Four years after he was tried again for a similar offence, and, together with another fine of five thousand pounds, was condemned to lose what remained of his ears.

Ann. 1637.

A great number of Puritans embark for America, where they undertake to lay the foundation of a government which might insure them both religious and civil liberty. The king is prevailed on by their enemies to stop these emigrations by a proclamation. Eight ships, lying in the Thames and ready to sail, were detained by order of the council; and in these were sir Arthur Hazelrig, John Hambden, John Pym, and Oliver Cromwell, who had resolved for ever to abandon their native country. Charles had afterwards too good reason to repent this exercise of his authority. It must be confessed, however, that during the interval which elapsed from the dissolution of the parliament in 1628, to the beginning of the long parliament in 1640, the British nation, as it is observed by Clarendon, was blessed with the greatest calm, and might have enjoyed a fuller measure of felicity than any people in any age for so long time together, bona si sua norint, and had it not been for that political rage, that feverish fermentation, which agitated all classes of men, owing to those controver