e more modern phrases, the king insisted
that the nation should receive its creed at the hands of the priesthood
and the Crown. England in the avowal of Parliament asserted that the
right to determine the belief of a nation lay with the nation itself.

[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Parliament.]

But the debates over religion were suddenly interrupted. In granting the
Petition of Right we have seen that Charles had no purpose of parting
with his power of arbitrary arrest or of levying customs. Both practices
in fact went on as before, and the goods of merchants who refused to pay
tonnage and poundage were seized as of old. At the reopening of the
Session indeed the king met the Commons with a proposal that they should
grant him tonnage and poundage and pass silently over what had been
done by his officers. But the House was far from assenting to the
interpretation which Charles had put on the Petition, and it was
resolved to vindicate what it held to be the law. It deferred all grant
of customs till the wrong done in the illegal levy of them was
redressed, and summoned the farmers of those dues to the bar. But though
they appeared, they pleaded the king's command as a ground for their
refusal to answer. The House was proceeding to a protest, when on the
second of March the Speaker signified that he had received an order to
adjourn. Dissolution was clearly at hand, and the long-suppressed
indignation broke out in a scene of strange disorder. The Speaker was
held down in the chair, while Eliot, still clinging to his great
principle of ministerial responsibility, denounced the new Treasurer as
the adviser of the measure. "None have gone about to break Parliaments,"
he added in words to which after events gave a terrible significance,
"but in the end Parliaments have broken them." The doors were locked,
and in spite of the Speaker's protests, of the repeated knocking of the
usher at the door, and the gathering tumult within the House itself, the
loud "Aye, Aye!" of the bulk of the members supported Eliot in his last
vindication of English liberty. By successive resolutions the Commons
declared whomsoever should bring in innovations in religion, or whatever
minister endorsed the levy of subsidies not granted in Parliament, "a
capital enemy to the kingdom and commonwealth," and every subject
voluntarily complying with illegal acts and demands "a betrayer of the
liberty of England and an enemy of the same."

CHAPTER VI