Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [466]
NATHANIEL: If the king needs money for war, his loyal subjects should support him.
EDMUND: To any amount? Is that right?
NATHANIEL: The Parliament just called granted him nothing. Is that right?
EDMUND: May the king summon men before his prerogative courts and ignore ancient common law?
NATHANIEL: He has the right.
EDMUND: Do you approve?
NATHANIEL: No. But this is not cause to take up arms against him.
EDMUND: So – you believe then, that the king is not subject to the laws and customs of this realm but may do as he pleases?
Here was the heart of the matter. The privileges of Parliament, the ancient common laws, the liberties of Magna Carta, the custom, won centuries before, that the king cannot tax without the consent of Parliament: these were the rights that the parliamentary lawyers claimed that the king must observe. If a king is free to alter ancient privileges and customs, then, they claimed, the liberties of the people are left at the whim of tyrants.
NATHANIEL: The law derives from the king.
EDMUND: Not in England.
Indeed, part of the trouble between king and Parliament was that the constitution of England was not the Stuarts’ model. In Spain and France, Catholic rulers were building absolute, centralised monarchies beyond anything Charles I tried, that were to last another hundred and fifty years. But then they had not the combination of Puritan merchants and an ancient Parliament trained in dispute and conscious of its privileges to oppose them.
OBADIAH: Do you refuse the rights of Puritans to worship as they please?
NATHANIEL: I support the English Church – as does the king.
OBADIAH: So he says. Do you support Laud and his bishops then?
Nathaniel laughed. He had hardly ever met a man that did, certainly not in Sarum.
The High Church Laud, whose authoritarian ways had driven numbers of Puritans across the dangerous ocean to America, was scarcely popular even with Charles’s supporters, and least of all his attempts to summon laymen to answer charges before his ecclesiastical courts. In Sarum, such ideas were especially unpopular.
For early that century, after over three centuries of dispute, the townspeople of Salisbury had at last persuaded the king to grant them a charter of their own. The town was no longer subject to the bishop’s court: now the bishop only ruled the close. The interfering churchmen were being driven back.
NATHANIEL: Laud has improved the discipline and church services. I support the rule of bishops.
OBADIAH: And papists? Do you want England papist? With a foreign papist army in the hands of the king to impose his will upon us?
NATHANIEL: I trust the papists will not rule the king.
OBADIAH: They already do. We may expect an army of Irish papists here any day.
And now Nathaniel blushed. For the subject of Charles’s sympathies for the papists was one that made many of his fervent supporters uncomfortable. His queen, Henrietta Maria of France, was Catholic. Her priests were at court. The increasingly Puritan people of England had not forgotten Mary Tudor – Bloody Mary – and her terrible burnings; nor the wily Jesuits who urged treason and supported Spain in the reign of good Queen Bess. They had not forgotten the plots, real or supposed, of that other Frenchified Catholic, Mary Queen of Scots, nor, most terrible of all, the plot of Guy Fawkes and other Catholic extremist to blow up the houses of Parliament – King, Lords, Commons and all – one fifth of November, early in James’s reign.
As for the threat of an avenging army of Irish papists being brought over, that had been terrifying Englishmen for the last two years.
EDMUND: It seems to me, Nathaniel, that you disapprove what the king does, yet you defend his rule. What have we seen recently that makes you think the king will change his ways?
Indeed, the series of events that started the Civil War, the spark that lit the conflagration, had shown Charles