God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [30]
This assassination occurred close to the climax of a crisis of parliaments. During the 1620s James and Charles had faced pressure to join the defence of Protestantism in the Thirty Years War, particularly in pursuit of an actively anti-Spanish foreign policy. They had not been able to get the money from parliaments to pay for it, though. The crown blamed this on the reluctance of parliaments to pay on a realistic scale; in fact, it seems, the reluctance arose at least as much from a sense that the crown was fighting the wrong wars, in the wrong way. At the same time Charles in particular was castigated for extending patronage and favour to Arminians. The difficulties of raising money and men for war had also intersected with divisions over foreign policy. Political difficulties over money and troops led to policies which raised constitutional concerns, while the direction of foreign policy alarmed the hotter sort of Protestant, a reaction compounded by the promotion of anti-Calvinists. It was not only the paranoid who could see here an intertwining threat to religion and liberty.23
War with Spain came in 1625, but its fruit was a disastrous expedition to Cadiz, where, among other problems, some soldiers found that their muskets did not have fire holes and that many of the bullets were the wrong size. Parliament met the following February but failed to produce more money for war, preferring instead to impeach the Duke of Buckingham. Exasperated, Charles sought to raise money without Parliament by means of a forced loan. Direct pressure was applied to individuals, and those who refused to pay risked having troops billeted on them, or imprisonment. Five prominent resisters were imprisoned at the King’s pleasure. When they sued for the protection of habeas corpus (the fundamental right of the accused to have cause for their arrest shown), the King successfully sought to persuade Attorney Heath that he had the right to imprison in these circumstances without showing cause. It is likely that these men, the ‘Five Knights’, had intended to secure a day in court in order to test the legality of the loan; instead their cause had become a test case of the King’s right to arbitrary imprisonment. It was later said that Charles had caused the records of this opinion to be falsified, in order to make it a matter of record that he had the right to imprison without showing cause: the judges claimed that they had merely adjourned the matter for a later hearing. This use of the prerogative powers of the crown, and possibly felonious falsification of judicial records, raised questions not just about foreign policy and military affairs, but about the balance of the constitution. It caused a sensation in the parliament of 1628.24 If Felton threatened a lawless politics so too, in a way, did arbitrary royal power.
In the meantime England had gone to war with France as well and in 1627 an expedition was launched to La Rochelle and the Île de Ré. Once again it was a military disaster, which came nowhere near achieving its objective despite the cost in lives and money.25 Although the military dividend was negligible the expeditions to Cadiz and La Rochelle had imposed considerable burdens on the country – impressment of troops, rates to pay for the food and clothes, billeting and martial law.26 The disaster at La Rochelle was freely criticized when a new parliament met in its aftermath and this gave encouragement to Felton in his murderous response. The attacks on Buckingham in the 1628 parliament further soured relations between crown and Parliament, and fears about the crown’s attitude