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By Root 1121 0

towards the law culminated in the passage of the Petition of Right. Once thought to be a manifesto for parliamentary resistance to the crown, it is now often seen as a measure specific to its time – offering statutory protections against forced loans and the unpopular measures taken to achieve the failed military expeditions. Charles at first gave it an unwelcoming response but was persuaded to accept it. With the King’s approval secured, it was enrolled on the parliament roll, with a number, which seemed to suggest that it had the power of a statute. When it was printed, however, there was no statute number, and it was published with both the King’s answers, not just the more welcoming one. Charles’s line, throughout, was that it simply declared the situation as it existed: Parliament had won nothing from him.27 It was in the course of these debates about the Petition of Right that the House of Commons had drawn up a remonstrance against Buckingham; in the aftermath, a new force was gathered at Portsmouth for a renewed assault on La Rochelle. While it was in harbour, waiting for parliamentary moneys to arrive, Felton had struck his fatal blow against the regime. A few weeks earlier Dr Lambe, Buckingham’s doctor, had been attacked and killed by a crowd in a London street, amidst accusations of witchcraft.28

In one sense these were symptoms of practical problems, matters of policy; but they revealed and helped to harden quite different views of the political world. English constitutional thought was a common-sense system, not a theoretical one. It had many elements, some of which were apparently contradictory, but which could co-exist so long as it was understood that particular arguments worked in particular circumstances and not others. While the common law and parliamentary statute were acknowledged to be supreme, the royal prerogative existed to deal with areas or circumstances beyond their reach. So, for example, the prerogative was used to regulate international affairs and to deal with conditions of emergency. A number of monarchs had raised revenue using the prerogative by imposing duties on overseas trade (impositions), or by creating monopolies over particular trades and raising fines for breaches of the monopolies. To the extent that these were measures for the regulation of trade these were clearly matters for the prerogative. To the extent that they were revenue devices they threatened the role of Parliament in authorizing taxation, and the common law in protecting the property of the subject. There was then a crucial ambiguity as to whether the impositions should be seen as illegal taxes, or revenues arising from the legitimate use of the prerogative to regulate international trade – an area beyond the common law. The trick was to avoid making people have to choose, but in the later 1620s and then again during the 1630s the questions were put quite clearly by a number of financial and military policies.29 When consensus failed, fundamental issues were raised: about the relationship between the subject and the crown, the nature of political liberty, and the means by which it was to be preserved.30

An important element of fears about fundamental threats to liberty was of course anti-popery: those seeking to subvert religion would first need to subvert the law. Buckingham had also been a prominent patron of Arminians or anti-Calvinists in the English church. This rising tendency was characterized by a suspicion of predestinarian preaching, even an active hostility to the doctrine, and a correspondingly stronger emphasis on the practices and rites of the visible church. It had roots in the tradition represented by Hooker, and enjoyed increasingly powerful backing during the 1620s, but it elicited stringent criticism from opponents and disrupted the uneasy Calvinist consensus that had prevailed in the English church under Elizabeth and James. These anti-Calvinist churchmen tended to be less worried by the threat of the Antichrist than their opponents and more concerned about stability and order in the visible church.