GREAT HAMPDEN, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE: John Hampden, leader of the opposition to King Charles’ eleven-year campaign to impose despotic rule on England, and who the monarch attempted to arrest in January on charges of treason, is raising a regiment of foot in his native Buckinghamshire.

Hampden, whose resistance to the King's “Ship-Money” raid on private property mesmerized the kingdom and inspired widespread refusal to pay the doubtfully legal tax, is rallying the shire-men even as Charles, from his headquarters in York, calls those who claim allegiance to the crown – with special solicitude, it’s said, for those who yet submit, a century after Henry VIII declared England’s independence, to the spiritual tyranny of Rome.

“King Charles has sought the complete and utter alteration of the laws and religion of England,” Hampden said. “He has meant to overwhelm and extinguish the liberty, peace, and prosperity of this kingdom. Resistance is not merely a right. It is a duty.”

Hampden will beat the drum for recruits on Friday, August 1 in the market-square of Aylesbury, Saturday in Wendover, and Sunday in Tring, the country where his family has lived from ancient times and which he represents for Parliament. His regiment will wear jackets of dark green wool, and bring to the field 600 pikes and 400 muskets.

Personal Rule

The Edinburgh-born Charles Stuart, first of his name, is the second Scot to occupy the throne of Edward the Confessor. His theory of kingship is similarly foreign. “God made you a little god to sit on his throne and rule over men.” So taught his father, James Stuart, the fourth of Scotland and first of England. “It is presumptuous and high contempt in a subject to dispute what a king can do.” Charles observed despostic rule at first-hand on youthful forays to Spain and France. Crowned in 1625, he applied those lessons immediately, imprisoning five knights who refused to pay into a “loan” the monarch, as perennially impecunious as his Stuart forebears, demanded of the nobility. He dissolved his first two Parliaments after their attacks on his close advisor the famously corrupt and legendarily incompetent Duke of Buckingham.

To recreate the pageantry of the Louvre and the Escorial requires money.  The Crown, absent productive ability of its own, can raise revenue only though taxation. In England -- unlike France and Spain, where an impoverished populace wallows in ignorance beneath the boot of an overweening State -- any tax sought by the King requires the approval of Parliament. Charles — intelligent, devoted to his family, deeply religious, and despite a slight stutter an eloquent speaker — banked on charming the assembly into granting all he required. But he dissolved his third Parliament in the spring of 1629, as members led by Sir John Eliot protested Charles’ expropriation of the custom duties. Eliot, a great friend of John Hampden, was imprisoned in the Tower. He died there in 1632. Eliot’s son asked that his father’s body be returned to his home parish. "Let him be buried where he died," was the answer of Charles Stuart.

And since then Charles ruled alone, consulting only the likes of the late Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, and William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Together they crafted a policy known as “Thorough,” through which the King has appeared, like an unwelcome guest with no intention of leaving until the larder is bare, into every aspect of English life. Authority has been shifted from the shires to a sprawling bureaucracy ensconsed the Palace of Whitehall. Laud and his bishops teach that Charles is “the essence of justice under God,” to whose edicts it is the first duty of the Christian to submit. To Charles,  “the representative of Christ on earth,” belongs everything, and to him the right to dispose of it as he sees fit.

Bowing, Groveling

Charles has granted his favorites monopolies on soap, salt, wine, coal, and leather; imposed regulations on shipping that force merchants to land goods at ports most convenient to the monopolists; required patents for the manufacture of bricks, starch, salt, and beer, and revised the customs rates sharply higher. He revived a three-hundred-year-old law that requires property-holders to purchase knighthoods -- then forces them to pay higher taxes based on this increase in status. He appointed himself guardian of wealthy orphans, and sold estates that are by law their just inheritance.

And he has sought to undo the work of the Reformation, the cleansing of the church wrought by Henry VIII, Sir Thomas Cromwell, Archbishop Cranmer, Edward the VI,  and Elizabeth of the bright memory. Laud has instituted such innovations as bowing at the name of Jesus; naming the communion table an “altar” and sequestering it behind rails; requiring believers to approaching said altar in a groveling manner and kneel at said rail to receive a Lord’s Supper served on ostentatious silver plate; dressing prelates in surplices and similar adornments, and replacing the active preaching of the Gospel with the rote chanting of memorized prayers. These practices create a gulf between the Christian and the Saviour, which can be bridged only by a member of the prelatical caste to whom the believer must surrender his conscience and reason. There is no difference between the practice of Laudism and that of the See of Rome.

And indeed, those near the throne have hinted at reconciliation with the Papacy even as the armies of Spain, long the Pontiff's military arm, wage wars of unprecedented brutality against the Protestants of the Low Countries and Germany, and as the Kings of France, from the massacre of St Bartholomew’s to the siege of La Rochelle, torment the Huguenots. Charles has viciously persecuted the Puritans, those of England most zealous in the defense of Christian and civil liberty, harrying them from the land to Holland, New England and other parts of America — where they, the most industrious of the kingdom, have taken their manufactures of cloth and other goods, much to the impoverishment of England’s capital stock.

Then came “Ship-Money.”

A long-forgotten custom from the time of the Plantagenets, records of it discovered by Charles in the Tower during one of his periodic trawls for antique laws that might yet yield new revenues, ship-money was originally a levy on coastal counties to defray the cost of their defense during times of war. Charles immediately recognized an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to invoke a little-used royal prerogative that permits taxation without consent of Parliament during times of national crisis. For the King, it was the descent of the dove, the Damascus road.

The Spanish are assembling for assault! So shouted Charles. The French are gathering for attack! The Barbary pirates are wreaking terror from Cornwall to Devon! I must have ship-money, Charles said: not merely from the coast, but every country of England! It is, he said piously, for your own good: the good, he added threateningly, of which I am sole judge and arbiter.

For John Hampden, who had watched the progress of “Thorough” with increasing alarm from his estates in Buckinghamshire, it was the final straw.

Permanent Crisis

“We told the King that we would happily vote subsidies for war against Spain and the Catholic powers,” Hampden said. He spoke at Hampden House in Great Hampden, as sheep grazed on the gentle slopes of the Chilterns, and a gentle wind rustled the ancient oaks in the park. “And we counsel vigilance, constant vigilance, against the designs of Rome, which has ever been the enemy of England. But three simultaneous armadas would not justify a Fleet of the size that could be built with the money Charles demanded from Ship-Money.”

It was clear to Hampden that Ship-Money, once instituted, would be permanent. And it would be only the first of an endless series of emergencies, each more dire than the last, each demanding immediate redress, each demanding ever-higher taxes on every piece of property and every activity of every Englishman, until, eventually, we would be reduced to the status of tenants on our own land.

Hampden said No. He refused to pay a Ship-Money assessment of 20 shillings on land in the parish of Stoke Mandeville. Charles sought to destroy him. Hampden was hauled before the Court of Exchequer. He made the plain case that taxation was, by the law and custom of England, the right of Parliament alone. The King’s prosecutors rejected any notion that the King’s will might be hindered, stated that Rex was Lex, that his Right was Divine, and that obedience was an ordinance of God.

Seven justices found for Charles. Five found for Hampden. Ship-money became the law of the land. But many, if not most, of the kingdom agreed with Justice Sir George Croke, who found for Hampden: “I desire God to guide me to a true judgment, and according to my conscience, I think that judgment ought to be given to the defendant.”

Answered Prayers

Ship-Money was a utter failure. A plurality of the people of England, inspired by Hampden, decided the levy was illegal, and could in good conscience be ignored. By 1640, less than a third of the monies demanded by the writs had been collected. Some counties, including Buckinghamshire, paid not a cent.

Charles predicated Ship-Money upon crises requiring fierce, urgent and immediate action. And soon enough, he had all any king could hope for.  He and Laud devised a new prayerbook for the Church of Scotland. The Scots, repulsed by its rituals and ceremonialism, rejected it with scorn. Charles declared war. Needing funds, he called Parliament, his first in eleven years. It assembled on April 13, 1640, and was dissolved three weeks later, after the kingdom’s representatives refused to approve subsidies without redress of grievances.

But six months later Charles, defeated by the Scots, called Parliament again. This time, the demands could not be ignored. Strafford and Laud were impeached, the former executed for advising Charles to use the army in Ireland to crush opposition to his rule in England. Ship-money was declared unlawful. The Grand Remonstrance catalogued Charles’ assaults on the liberties of England and called for an abolition of illegal taxes, the removal of Laud’s bishops from the House of Lords, a cleansing of foreign rituals from the Church of England, and Parliamentary right of approval over the King’s counselors.

Cruel Necessity

Then, in October of 1641, rebellion exploded in Ireland. Towns were besieged, the countryside laid waste, Protestants murdered wholesale by Catholic insurgents. King and Parliament agreed an army was needed to suppress the uprising. But Parliament could not agree to Charles at its head — particularly as the Irish rebels, who butchered and burned with the King's name on their lips, were recognized as the vanguard of a force Charles would use to impose his will on England, as he had been counseled by Strafford.

Hampden fought to transfer control of England’s army from the King to Parliament. Charles accused him of treason. In January, in an outrageous breach of Parliamentary privilege, he burst into St Stephen’s Chapel, seeking the arrest of Hampden and four of his allies. But Charles was too late. The birds, warned by a sympathizer in Court, had flown.

Charles withdrew from London, first to Windsor Castle, then to the North. He made to seize the magazine at Hull, largest in the North, but was rebuffed when Sir John Hotham, the governor of the Yorkshire port, refused the King entrance to the town.

Queen Henrietta fled to The Hague, where she pawned the Crown Jewels and purchased arms from Spanish agents. These were landed on the Humber estuary earlier this month, a cargo of seven field pieces, two hundred barrels of powder, eight hundred muskets, and two thousand pikes.

Parliament placed the Kingdom in a posture of defense. The Fleet in Portsmouth, commanded by the Earl of Warwick, declared for Parliament. The Trained-Bands of London drill daily in the Artillery Garden, led by Sir Philip Skippon, veteran of the Palatinate and the Netherlands.

Two nights ago ten thousand who answered the call for volunteers paraded in Moorfields, and will soon be placed in regiments under the command of the Earl of Essex, Lord-General.

“War is upon us,” Hampden said. “Battle is mere weeks away. It is war, and of cruel necessity."

The curtain is rising on a tragedy eleven years in the making. And in the lead role, where he has been for eleven years, is is John Hampden of Buckinghamshire.