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Yes, you can access Sir Edward Coke and "The Grievances of the Commonwealth," 1621-1628 by Stephen D. White in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & European History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
In both 1621 and 1624, Coke played an extraordinarily prominent role in Parliament’s proceedings. In terms of sheer activity, he must be reckoned the leading member of the lower house in these years, because he delivered more speeches and committee reports in both years than any other member and ranked first in 1621 and second in 1624 in the number of committees on which he served. He was not, however, merely an active member of these parliaments. He was also a highly influential leader who proposed many remedies for the commonwealth’s grievances and who frequently bore the main burden of justifying or legitimating the Commons’s actions. In spite of his prominence in these two parliaments, he lacked the power to direct or control their proceedings. He was rarely in a position to initiate a whole new line of parliamentary inquiry or action; and he usually responded to events over which he had little control and acted in accordance with the Commons’s collective decisions. As a result, his parliamentary speeches from these years cannot be viewed as self-contained, self-explanatory statements of his views on particular subjects. Rather, they must be regarded as public remarks that were profoundly influenced by the political and procedural context in which they were made. It is therefore impossible to understand his parliamentary behavior in 1621 and 1624 (or, indeed, during the entire 1620s) without considering some of the more general features of the parliamentary sessions in which he participated.
A striking feature of James I’s last two parliaments was their ambiguous and transitional character. Like earlier, Tudor parliaments, they served largely as occasions for transacting important but limited govern-mental business and acted as integral, albeit occasional, parts of the English central government. In both of these years, however, the Commons sometimes tended to assume greater responsibility for formulating general policies, to become a center of opposition to acts and policies of the court, and to serve as a forum for abstract constitutional debates. When these tendencies became more fully developed under Charles I, Parliament became a new kind of body that either could not act or else acted in novel and ultimately revolutionary ways; but in James I’s last years, Parliament still functioned in a relatively traditional manner.1 In 1621 and 1624, the Commons, the Lords, and the king still regarded parliamentary meetings primarily as occasions on which they could remedy the grievances of the commonwealth by making slight adjustments in the governance of the kingdom. Many of the grievances that were discussed in these two years were ones that had been attacked in previous, Tudor parliaments; and they were generally treated as isolated defects in an otherwise sound social system and as discrete violations of generally accepted principles of law, government, and policy. Members of Parliament usually blamed these grievances on individual evildoers and expected to eliminate them by providing for proper legal enforcement, or else by slightly modifying the law so as to cover new ways of committing old offenses. Almost all remedies for grievances considered in 1621 and 1624 reflected this traditional view of abuses and of Parliament’s role in eliminating them. They were usually very specific and presupposed the existence of a general consensus among the governing classes about basic legal and social values and about how Parliament should use its power to defend or promote these values. These remedies were also designed to mesh with the preexisting policies and procedures of other governmental bodies. Parliamentary members often argued about what the real grievances of the commonwealth were, about how generally accepted norms should be defended or applied in particular cases, and about whether particular parliamentary remedies were appropriate or lawful in particular cases. They knew, however, that they had to settle some of these differences if Parliament was to carry out its appointed governmental function, and in 1621 and 1624 they were able to resolve their disagreements much more frequently than is commonly supposed.
Nevertheless, in these two years, some members of the Commons were beginning to talk about their grievances in ways that were relatively new and that threatened Parliament’s ability to function.2 They were more ready to claim that these different grievances were interconnected and to treat them not just as sporadic violations of fundamental legal and social principles but as serious threats to these norms. They were also more prone to blame them on the court. This new perception of grievances led them to support new kinds of parliamentary action and, ultimately, to develop a new view of English constitutional structure. Some members were increasingly inclined to propose their own general remedies for what they saw as general grievances,3 to reassert and redefine abstract principles of law and governmental policy, and to interpret their own privileges and powers more broadly and take a narrower view of the king’s authority. They came closer to seeing themselves as a distinct body having a unique responsibility to govern the commonwealth and a duty to oversee and sometimes oppose the actions of the court. As the Commons became more aware of the range of their grievances and more ready to propose general remedies for them, as they became more anxious to assert and define the rights of subjects and their own privileges, and as they expressed more general opposition to the court, Parliament had more and more difficulty in reaching the kinds of compromises that were necessary if it was to function in traditional ways or at all.
In spite of these forward-looking tendencies, the main outlines of Parliament’s activities in 1621 and 1624 still conformed generally to the model set by previous parliaments. These two parliaments differed markedly not only from the Long Parliament but also from the parliaments of the later 1620s. In 1621 and 1624, members of the Commons did not mount a full-scale assault on a favored royal minister, nor did they issue a scathing indictment of court policy. They adopted no statement of constitutional principle comparable to the Petition of Right; and they never suggested, as they did in the later 1620s, that Parliament should join with the king to reform the realm. In 1621 and 1624, even outspoken members of the lower house did not yet express fears of “the civil tyranny of an arbitrary, unlimited, confused government,” controlled by a “wicked and malignant party” of “jesuited papists,” bishops and “corrupt” clergy, and certain “councillors and courtiers,” who had “a malignant and pernicious design of subverting the fundamental laws and principles of government, upon which the religion and justice of this kingdom are firmly established.”4 They did not attempt to abolish important governmental institutions. They made few attempts to state formally either their own privileges or the liberties of the subject, and they rarely tried to implement general policies that differed from those of the crown. Above all, they were generally willing to compromise on substantive, procedural, and constitutional issues so that they could remedy at least some of their grievances.
Two issues dominated Parliament’s proceedings in 1621 and 1624: the so-called cause of religion abroad and at home, and the many grievances of the commonwealth. Late in 1620 the deepening religious and political crisis on the continent had induced James I to call a parliament for the first time in almost seven years.5 He now needed money to aid his son-in-law, the elector Frederick V, against the recent Spanish invasion of the Palatinate. But although the king wished to aid the Protestant husband of his daughter Elizabeth, he still intended to follow a conciliatory policy towards both Catholic powers on the continent and domestic English recusants. He wanted Parliament to supply him for a limited war against Spain in the Palatinate, but he still planned to marry his son Charles to a Catholic Spanish princess and was determined to resist any parliamentary pressure for a more aggressively anti-Spanish policy. The king also wished to continue his mild policy towards domestic Catholics and would not listen to those pressing for a more repressive one.
James I asked the parliament of 1621 to trust in his “care and piety and forwardness in religion.”6 But many of its members—especially in the Commons—lacked faith in his policy of negotiation abroad and persuasion at home, and their concern about the “cause of religion” was so intense that they came close to expressing this lack of faith publicly. They were determined to deal with the recusant threat at home and the Spanish threat abroad; and they were particularly intent upon doing so because they were convinced that these two threats to the commonwealth were closely connected. In both 1621 and 1624 the Commons angered the king by urging him to enforce existing laws against recusants and by proposing the enactment of even more repressive measures.7 They were even more aggressive in 1621 in voicing their dissatisfaction with the king’s foreign policy. Many members of the lower house opposed the proposed marriage of Prince Charles to a Spanish princess and preferred a sea war with Spain to military intervention in the Palatinate. In the fall of 1621 they expressed these views about war and foreign policy, first in a formal petition and later in a declaration. Their actions led to a constitutional confrontation with the king over their privilege of free speech, and when they adopted an extreme “Protestation” of their liberties in December 1621, James adjourned and then dissolved Parliament.8 By 1624, however, royal foreign policy had changed in such a way as to make James I’s last parliament a relatively “happy” one.9 The court had abandoned the Spanish match, and it was now willing to allow the Commons far greater freedom than before to discuss war and foreign policy. Throughout this session some possibility remained that the king would again dissolve Parliament if its actions displeased him.10 But the Parliament of 1624 concluded with the passage of many notable statutes and a subsidy bill in which Parliament formally expressed its views on foreign policy and war.11
Although James I’s last two parliaments were marked by tensions and disagreements, they were not dominated by constitutional or political conflicts. Their members reached numerous compromises on both substantive and constitutional issues and successfully remedied at least as many grievances as any Elizabethan parliament. The term “grievance” was a very vague one—and conveniently so. Members could apply it to any practice, institution, law, policy, or procedure that they disliked without having to demonstrate its illegality.12 It was generally assumed that “grievances” damaged “the public good,” but members did not always explain precisely how they did so and usually attacked “grievances” that were of relatively little concern to most English men and women. Some grievances were said to harm farmers, apprentices, or the poor.13 But whereas such claims may well have been accurate, it seems unlikely that a list of grievances drawn up by these subjects would have closely resembled the list of grievances considered by the Commons in 1621 and 1624. Although the Commons’s efforts to remedy grievances in these two years did not constitute a crass attempt to use parliamentary power to promote class interest, and although these efforts may have brought some benefit to groups for whom members had relatively little concern, the rhetoric used by the spokesman of the House cannot be taken at face value. It did not simply describe what the Commons were doing; it also served to explain and justify the House’s actions. One of the ways in which members tried to lend greater legitimacy to their proposals for remedies for grievances was to claim that in calling for such remedies they were speaking for the whole commonwealth. But even though these members were elected by a relatively large number of English subjects, their parliamentary speeches did not necessarily express the views of all commonwealth members, or even of the people who voted for them.14 Among the specific abuses most frequently discussed in the lower house in 1621 and 1624 were particular patents of monopoly, specific practices of trading companies, corruption in the customs system, problems in the organization of the wool and cloth trades, excessive legal and court fees, the corrupt practices of court officials, delays in justice, the characters of juries, and the use of legal procedures for the purposes of harassment and avoidance of legal obligations.15 The Commons sometimes organized these grievances under the two main headings of abuses in law and abuses in trade, but they did so largely for procedural reasons and developed no coherent program for legal or economic reform. Although they frequently claimed that trade should be free and that the subject’s liberties should be maintained intact, they rarely explained what they meant by “free trade” or “the liberties of the subject,” or expressed consistent views about how law or government should be reformed so as to promote the public good. Instead, they simply attacked impediments to free trade and alleged violations of the subject’s liberties.
In attempting to remedy grievances in these ways, the Commons were doing nothing very new in 1621 or 1624, but they were particularly eager in these years to seize the opportunity afforded by a parliament to remedy certain grievances of the commonwealth. Their eagerness to do so was mainly due to three facts. First, no new statutes had been enacted in almost a decade; and although later Elizabethan and Jacobean parliaments had made numerous new laws, they had not passed many bills that had been well supported in the Commons. In 1621 and 1624 members therefore hoped to pass many bills whose enactment they regarded as long overdue.16 Second, the king’s recent grants of monopoly patents and the duke of Buckingham’s use of his increasing powers of patronage had exacerbated a concern about governmental corruption that had probably been mounting since the 1590s.17 A meeting of Parliament gave members a chance to voice this concern and to convert it into parliamentary action. Third, members were particularly concerned about economic grievances in 1621 and 1624, because they were meeting during a severe trade depression that they hoped to alleviate partly by parliamentary action. Their inquiries into its causes, moreover, led them to discover new grievances and provided them with a pretext for attacking other long-standing abuses.18
For these reasons the Commons gave particularly close attention to specific grievances in 1621 and 1624. In each of these years they established a Committee for Courts to investigate legal abuses, a Committee of Trade to inquire into the depression and other economic problems, and...
