or merchandise, save only by common consent in Parliament, are and shall
be void." As to Church grievances their demands were in the same spirit.
They prayed that the deposed ministers might be suffered to preach, and
that the jurisdiction of the High Commission should be regulated by
statute; in other words, that ecclesiastical like financial matters
should be taken out of the sphere of the prerogative and be owned as
lying henceforth within the cognizance of Parliament.

[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Parliament.]

It was no doubt the last demand that roused above all the anger of the
king. As to some of the grievances he was ready to make concessions. He
had consulted the judges as to the legality of his proclamations, and
the judges had pronounced them illegal. It never occurred to James to
announce his withdrawal from a claim which he now knew to be wholly
against law, and he kept the opinion of the judges secret; but it made
him ready to include the grievance of proclamations in his bargain with
the Commons, if they would grant a larger subsidy. The question of the
court of Wales he treated in the same temper. But on the question of the
Church, of Church reform, or of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, he would
make no concession whatever. He had just wrought his triumph over the
Scottish Kirk; and had succeeded, as he believed, in transferring the
control of its spiritual life from the Scottish people to the Crown. He
was not likely to consent to any reversal of such a process in England
itself. The claim of the Commons had become at last a claim that England
through its representatives in Parliament should have a part in the
direction of its own religious affairs. Such a claim sprang logically
from the very facts of the Reformation. It was by the joint action of
the Crown and Parliament that the actual constitution of the English
Church had been established; and it seemed hard to deny that the same
joint action was operative for its after reform. But it was in vain that
the Commons urged their claim. Elizabeth had done wisely in resisting
it, for her task was to govern a half-Catholic England with a Puritan
Parliament; and in spite of constitutional forms the Queen was a truer
representative of national opinion in matters of religion than the House
of Commons. In her later years all had changed; and the Commons who
fronted her successor were as truly representative of the religious
opinion of the realm as Elizabeth had