One of the most influential and controversial figures in the parliaments of the 1620s, Eliot was born into a minor gentry family of east Cornwall. His ancestors hailed from Devon, but in the mid-sixteenth century his great-uncle leased the manor of Cuddenbeak at St. Germans from the bishops of Exeter, and converted an old episcopal palace into a mansion house which he named Port Eliot. These properties passed in 1577 to Eliot’s father, Richard, who was noted for his hospitality but played no discernible role in local government. Eliot attended Exeter College, Oxford, the customary resort of West Country gentlemen, but left without a degree. His father died in June 1609, leaving him a royal ward, though the hasty solemnization of his marriage to Radigund Gedy a few months earlier limited the Crown’s influence during his minority. The seat of Cuddenbeak had been made over to the young couple in anticipation in 1608, and Eliot made it his permanent home, preferring to lease out Port Eliot.
According to the eighteenth-century historian, Laurence Echard, Eliot first encountered George Villiers, the future duke of Buckingham, while travelling abroad. While this account cannot be corroborated from contemporary sources, Villiers was certainly on the Continent between the spring of 1609 and 1612/13, and it is not implausible that Eliot also crossed the Channel during the final years of his minority.
Knighted in 1618, Eliot became a Cornish magistrate in February 1621, shortly after a new Parliament met. He is not known to have stood for election that year, but he possibly lost out in a competition for seats at St. Germans, where the customary presentation of one place to a nominee of the borough’s principal landlord, the bishop of Exeter, left only the remaining seat for the local gentry to fight over. On this occasion the second burgess-ship was secured by the Kekewich family for their kinsman Sir Richard Buller.
I. The 1624 Parliament
At the 1624 general election, Eliot once more secured a seat in the Commons, although he had to look beyond his home borough to Newport. He almost certainly owed his return there to his father-in-law, whose seat lay nearby, and who, as the serving sheriff of Cornwall, played a prominent role in the county’s elections. However, he perhaps also received backing from the local manorial steward, Sir Robert Killigrew*, one of Buckingham’s most prominent clients.
Although Eliot was still a relatively inexperienced Member, he wasted little time in drawing attention to himself in the Commons. On 24 Feb. he moved that the scheduled meeting with the Lords to hear Buckingham report on the Spanish Match negotiations should be moved from the Painted Chamber to the Banqueting House in Whitehall. Although this idea was dismissed out of hand, his intervention was vindicated shortly afterwards when the peers themselves made the same proposal.
Eliot’s motive in delivering this last speech, which was evidently well-rehearsed, remains a matter of conjecture. Most scholars have concluded that Eliot, acting on his own initiative, presumptuously raised what he imagined would be a popular topic in a bid to attract notice. However, it has also been suggested that Eliot was acting as a spokesman for Buckingham, who hoped to smooth the path towards a breach with Spain by promoting the message that king and Commons could work in harmony.
Eliot certainly embraced the project for an anti-Habsburg war with enthusiasm. On 3 Mar. he was appointed to the conference with the Lords to agree a list of reasons for breaking off the negotiations with Spain, and he formed part of the deputation which delivered this document to the king two days later. When James’s equivocal response threatened to undermine the drive to war, Eliot insisted that the king had reacted positively, and successfully moved on 8 Mar. for James’s answer to be circulated in writing to all Members. On 11 Mar. he was appointed to the conference with the Lords to discuss the country’s readiness for military action, while on 19 Mar. he called passionately for a war regardless of the financial consequences: ‘when he considers the plots and practices put upon our king ... and that he finds religion, the honour of the king, prince and nation at the stake, he cannot but think a sudden pain better than a continued grief’.
Although Eliot was particularly active in promoting war, he apparently sought to please Buckingham on other fronts as well. On 17 Mar., he supported Sir Robert Phelips’s motion for a sub-committee to receive petitions of complaint against lord keeper Williams, whose opposition to war had offended the duke. Eliot further proposed that the committee should consist of independent country gentlemen, not lawyers or government clients, perhaps with a view to making it easier for Buckingham’s allies to manipulate it.
Nevertheless, there were also occasions when Eliot’s own convictions ran counter to the duke’s schemes. Like many of the so-called ‘patriots’ in 1624, he preferred not to face up to the financial consequences of military action. Typically, his confident assertion on 1 Mar. that the king was intent on war, and that the fleet should be set in readiness, was offset by his naïve proposal that forfeitures from recusants could provide the necessary funds.
Eliot was still learning how to judge the mood of the House, and his inexperience, combined perhaps with the inconsistencies in his performance, meant that Members were not yet guaranteed to give heed to his views. On 23 Mar. a clumsy intervention during a debate on a bill to regulate legal processes was slapped down by Sir Thomas Savile: ‘the last that spoke not needful to be answered’. His proposal on 24 Apr. that subsidy money should be paid into the chamber of the city of London was also ignored.
Eliot probably returned from Westminster content with what he had achieved. The way had been paved for war with Spain, and he had at least intermittently demonstrated his usefulness to the government. The Crown, too, seems to have been satisfied, despite the earlier episode involving Nutt, for during 1624 he was appointed a piracy commissioner for both Devon and Cornwall, and named to the prestigious commission of oyer and terminer for the western counties. However, Eliot’s probity and sense of loyalty to the duke were distinctly questionable. As a vice-admiral he was obliged to hand over half of his profits to Buckingham, but, as his accounts over the following year indicate, he concealed sums in excess of £300. By December 1624 (Sir) John Coke, the leading navy commissioner and scrupulously honest Buckingham client, had noticed the financial discrepancies, and Eliot thought it worthwhile to solicit his favour through the mediation of the bishop of Exeter. A few months later he was obliged to defend his accounting practices to the duke himself. For the time being his explanations were accepted, but his prospects were beginning to look far from secure.
II. The 1625 Parliament
In October 1624 Eliot purchased the borough of St. Germans from Richard Daniel*, thereby consolidating his local electoral influence. At the parliamentary elections in April 1625, he presented a seat there to his friend, the Admiralty Court judge Sir Henry Marten, though Sir John Coke once more claimed the other place, courtesy of the bishop of Exeter.
The 1625 assembly is the only Parliament for which Eliot left his own account of events. The Negotium Posterorum is not a conventional diary, however, but a narrative fragment of what was probably intended to be a treatise on early Stuart Parliaments in general. Composed no earlier than 1628, and completed perhaps around 1631, it is replete with the judgments of hindsight and is demonstrably inaccurate in places. For example, Eliot indicated that the Tunnage and Poundage bill cleared the Commons on 5 July instead of 8 July, and that it successfully completed its passage through the Lords. He certainly drew extensively on original sources such as John Pym’s diary, but edited and embellished these texts in line with his own recollections and biases. As a guide to his own conduct in 1625, the Negotium must therefore be approached with caution, particularly with regard to material which is found nowhere else. This includes both invaluable accounts of the political manoeuvrings outside the Commons, and a number of anonymous speeches which have been ascribed to the author.
If the Negotium is to be believed, Eliot approached the new Parliament with considerable optimism. Still keen to show his support for the government, and with his enthusiasm for war undimmed, he fully expected his new monarch to advance the cause of militant Protestantism. Certainly he re-entered the Commons on a high note, being nominated on 21 June to the prestigious committee for privileges, while two days later he was appointed to help confer with the Lords over a petition requesting the king to grant a general fast.
As in 1624, Eliot had proved either unwilling to or incapable of consistently following or promoting the government’s policies. He still enjoyed personal access to the duke, but it was hardly surprising that the views of more reliable clients such as John Coke now carried more weight with the favourite, especially regarding war finance, the realities of which Eliot had already shown a reluctance to grasp. On 30 June, despite unambiguous warnings about the scale of the Crown’s financial requirements, the Commons settled on a paltry grant of two subsidies to pay for the war. A week later, Charles and Buckingham decided to request a second grant. Two votes of supply within the same session was unheard of, and even members of the government were alarmed. Early on 8 July Eliot was dispatched to Buckingham by the privy councillor (Sir) Humphrey May* in a last-ditch effort to dissuade the duke from seeking additional supply. However, despite more than two hours’ conversation there was no meeting of minds. For the duke, financial necessity took priority, whereas Eliot remained convinced that the government must work with the political nation, regardless of the immediate funding crisis. In the Negotium, Eliot noted that this interview was the moment when he began to nurse serious misgivings about his patron. With one eye on posterity, he chose to portray his doubts as purely constitutional in nature, but it is not difficult to detect his personal disappointment at Buckingham’s rejection of his advice. As Eliot feared, the Commons angrily rejected the Crown’s request. However, to his astonishment, the king then adjourned Parliament to Oxford for a second sitting, during the course of which additional supply would again be requested. On 11 July Eliot seconded a motion designed to encourage Members to re-assemble in Oxford, but his loyalty to the government was now under severe strain.
During the recess Eliot resumed his official duties in the West Country, from where he attempted to impress on the Crown the need to dispatch warships to combat piracy. However, when the Privy Council (in the absence of Buckingham, who was then in France) responded by ordering ships to be fitted out it was ignored by Coke and his fellow navy commissioners, who allegedly claimed that they were not subject to the Council’s authority and that there were ‘greater preparations then in hand’.
During the Oxford sitting, Eliot found it increasingly difficult to avoid criticizing royal policy, but managed to refrain from launching an outright attack on Buckingham, whom he still seems to have regarded as his patron. On 1 Aug. the news broke that some Catholic priests had been pardoned during the recess, contrary to undertakings made to Parliament prior to the adjournment. Eliot (assuming that an anonymous speech in the Negotium records his own words) sought to shift the blame from the king onto his ministers, though he hesitated to point the finger at an individual. The next day brought a renewed attack on the anti-Calvinist Richard Montagu, but Eliot, probably aware that this cleric enjoyed the king’s favour, limited himself to a mild observation on Montagu’s current custodial status, rather than joining in the general abuse being heaped on Arminianism and its advocates.
Eliot had reached a crossroads in his career. Dismayed by the recent military setbacks and the collapse of the political consensus, but intellectually incapable of questioning the convention that the king could do no wrong, he sought an alternative scapegoat. Given Buckingham’s dominance in government, and the increasingly strained relations between the two men, it is not surprising that Eliot now found himself sympathetic to the duke’s critics. That the failure of the 1625 Parliament dwelt heavily on his mind is suggested by the fact that many of the themes introduced by Buckingham’s critics on 5 and 10 Aug., from the dangers of overmighty subjects to the need for an overhaul of the Crown’s ordinary revenues, reappeared in his own pronouncements in the next Parliament.
III. The 1626 Parliament
The first firm indication of Eliot’s altered loyalties came with the elections for the new Parliament. On 22 Jan. the bishop of Exeter informed secretary Coke that Eliot was blocking his efforts to present him with his accustomed seat at St. Germans. Indeed, Eliot himself was returned there alongside Sir Henry Marten. While it is possible that the intense competition for seats at Newport had deterred Eliot from standing there again, it seems more likely that his decision to stand at St. Germans was primarily calculated to block Coke’s election.
It is difficult to say whether at this stage Eliot was acting on his own initiative or was already following the promptings of Pembroke and his allies. His early emphasis on the worsening relations with France was doubtless agreeable to the earl, who shared his concern that this would undermine the conflict with Spain. However, there was little in his preliminary tactics which he could not have devised by himself. On 18 Feb. he was named to a select committee to examine complaints from merchants whose goods had been confiscated in France in reprisal for the earlier seizure of French cargoes by the English government. This appointment allowed him to pursue the case of the St. Peter of Le Havre, which had been re-arrested on Buckingham’s orders after the Admiralty Court had authorized its release, an incident which was alleged to have sparked the French retaliation. Eliot, who reported to the Commons on 22 Feb., could rely on his friend Sir Henry Marten as a witness to these events, which were presented as evidence that the duke had damaged relations with France by acting on his own authority. The distinction between Buckingham’s own authority and that of the Crown was an important one, because the Commons were entitled to investigate the acts of private individuals, but not to inquire into affairs of state.
Far from being the end of the campaign against the duke, however, this was merely the conclusion of the first phase. That same day saw the launch of a new strategy, more firmly associated with Pembroke’s circle, to bring charges against the duke on grounds of common fame. Eliot co-operated with this scheme, which was orchestrated in the Commons primarily by Sir Dudley Digges, but found it difficult to take a back seat. On 14 Mar. he successfully postponed discussion of the king’s letter complaining about Dr. Samuel Turner, who had made the fresh allegations against Buckingham, but two days later, he tried for a second time to have the St. Peter incident voted a grievance, causing Digges himself to intervene to halt this distraction.
Later that same day, the House heard Dr. Turner’s written defence of his allegations against Buckingham, prepared in response to the king’s demand for the Commons to discipline him. Weston issued a stark warning that if punishment was not forthcoming, Charles would take further action. However, Eliot remained unperturbed, and while agreeing that Turner deserved censure if he was proved guilty, he opined that the issues at stake were so serious that the House should carefully establish whether there was any substance to the charges. At a stroke, this stratagem established the framework for a full-blown attack on the duke. Although Eliot failed on 20 Mar. to delay discussion of supply, he moved successfully for a new committee to consider the origins of the grievances which the Commons had already identified, the so-called ‘causes of causes’. As chairman of this committee, he once more took a leading role in the attack, although he continued to act in tandem with Digges and his friends. On 21 Mar., he also secured the establishment of a committee to look for precedents in Turner’s case. Three days later, he delivered his first report from the ‘causes of causes’ committee, informing the House that Buckingham had encouraged the spread of popery in the north of England by promoting Catholic sympathizers to local government. This highly questionable allegation forced the government spokesmen into a rapid defence of the duke’s own religious orthodoxy, which served to remind some Members that Buckingham had recently shown favour towards the infamous anti-Calvinist, Richard Montagu. Nothing was proved against the duke during the debate, but it demonstrated the effectiveness of the new tactics for damaging his reputation. Later that day, Eliot resumed his report, this time blaming Buckingham for the failure to guard the Channel properly. When secretary Coke tried to refute this charge, and suggested that the duke was being accused ‘unjustly’, Eliot forced him into a humiliating apology for maligning his committee.
The stakes were now getting higher. On 25 Mar. Eliot persuaded the House to set a deadline four days hence for Buckingham to answer the charges against him. When supply was debated two days later, he cited medieval precedents which showed that Parliament had demanded the removal of ministers before granting supply, provoking Sir Robert Harley to complain that Eliot was trying to bargain with the king. The House rejected this charge at Eliot’s request, but in essence Harley was correct. On 29 Mar., the day of Buckingham’s deadline, Charles delivered his own ultimatum: the Commons must stop attacking Buckingham and make a better offer of supply, or face the consequences. By this stage, however, Eliot was in no mood to back down. When the House reconvened the next day to consider its response, he admitted that he might have gone too far with his precedents on 27 Mar., but he nevertheless insisted that the Commons were well within their rights to investigate Buckingham, and moved for a Remonstrance asserting the legitimacy of their proceedings. Shortly afterwards, the Members learnt that the king had decided to withdraw his threat of dissolution, and allow them more time to discuss supply. Emboldened, Eliot on 31 Mar. renewed his call for a Remonstrance, the drafting of which occupied him for the next few days. On 5 Apr., the Remonstrance was presented, and the Commons adjourned for Easter while Charles considered his response.
The House reconvened to find that the king had decided to postpone any confrontation over the Remonstrance, and was merely urging Members to get on with their proper business, particularly the consideration of supply. Where Eliot was concerned, this was a vain hope. On 17 Apr., in one of his rare speeches on religion during this Parliament, he called for the punishment of Richard Montagu, who was now recognized as enjoying Buckingham’s patronage. He then resumed his direct assault on the duke himself. When, on 18 Apr., (Sir) Dudley Carleton reported the imminent return of the ships loaned to France, and implied that agreement had been reached with France for the recovery of the Palatinate, Eliot thanked him for his ‘exquisite narration’, then proceeded to dismiss it out of hand. He reminded him that there had been similar talk of an anti-Habsburg alliance during the 1625 Parliament, and that there were no guarantees that the loaned ships would be recovered. This helped to keep the Commons focused on Buckingham rather than supply, and on 20 Apr. the king issued a fresh warning that his patience was running out. Eliot responded by arguing that the attack on Buckingham should remain the priority: ‘the treasure, laws, persons, actions of the kingdom, the kingdom itself suffers under the too great power of one man’. There would soon be time to satisfy the king’s wishes, he added, since the inquiry into the duke’s misdeeds was almost complete. He made a further report from the committee for the causes of causes that afternoon, and on 21 Apr. Digges moved for a further committee to be established to pull the evidence together. Eliot was naturally appointed one of its members.
For the next two weeks, with the new committee being managed primarily by Digges and John Glanville, Eliot focused on those charges in which he had taken particular interest. The issue of the loan ships was discussed again on 21 Apr., when Edward Nicholas and Sir John Coke attempted to ameliorate Buckingham’s role, confirming the correct but seemingly implausible explanation of events which the duke himself had given on 30 March. Confronted with the truth, Eliot had no choice but to deny it, hammering home the point that Buckingham had indeed sought to hand the vessels over to a foreign power, and insisting that he was now trying to conceal his private actions behind his government role, a course of action which dishonoured the king. It would clearly be an uphill task to make such an allegation stick, but Eliot, who was still obsessively gathering shreds of possible evidence on all fronts, was apparently unable to see this. Ironically, on 28 Apr., during consideration of the charge that Buckingham had contributed to James I’s death, he chose to pontificate on the merits of open-minded inquiry, ‘for by debate and reasoning pro and con truth comes to light’.
Nothing illustrated his own tunnel vision better than his perseverance with the St. Peter allegations. On 29 Apr., the day that the king finally consented to charges being brought against Buckingham, the Commons heard a fresh complaint of French reprisals against English merchants arising, yet again, from the St. Peter’s arrest. Eliot took advantage of this on 1 May to repeat his version of events, only to have it flatly contradicted by Sir Dudley Carleton, who insisted that the embargo had not been triggered by the St. Peter’s detention alone. Moreover, Sir John Savile reminded the House that the duke had acted on the king’s instructions. Eliot tried to wriggle out of this corner by arguing that the king could not have ordered the second arrest, since it was clearly illegal, and that in any case Buckingham had not formally authorized the stay of the ship in the king’s name. Fortunately for him, the Commons was swayed by his arguments, and his demand that the incident involving the St. Peter be adopted as a grievance was finally accepted. The following day it was resolved to impeach Buckingham, but there was still opposition to the inclusion of the St. Peter case in the charges. Eliot was therefore obliged to retreat yet further, now asserting that the point at stake was not actually the circumstances of the second arrest at all, but rather the fact that goods had been unjustly confiscated, a breach of fundamental property rights which must not go unchallenged. On that basis, the charge was admitted as an impeachment article, but Eliot saw to it that during the drafting phase the original allegations of embezzlement and abuse of personal authority were reinstated. When the article was reported back to the Commons on 6 May, a furious Carleton insisted on the text being recommitted, but then proved unable to get the content changed.
Blind to the weakness of the charges which he had pushed through, Eliot was now confident, perhaps overly so, that the impeachment would succeed. On 4 May, noting that Buckingham had been accused of high treason by the earl of Bristol (Sir John Digby*), he proposed that a message be sent to the Lords recommending the duke’s immediate imprisonment, only to be reminded that this would constitute a flagrant breach of convention. On the same day he again backed calls for measures to improve the Crown’s revenues, and on 5 May he moved for a committee to draft the subsidy bill’s preamble, while still denying that he was trying to bargain with the king over Buckingham.
In his diary Lord Montagu noted that Eliot had employed ‘very foul speeches against the duke nothing pertinent to the matters of charge’. The king reacted more forcefully, and on 11 May Eliot and Digges, the other principal architect of the Commons’ attack on Buckingham, were arrested at the door of the House, and dispatched to the Tower. Charles resented the implication that he was the tyrannical Tiberius to Buckingham’s Sejanus, an inference which Eliot himself most likely never intended. He also took deep offence at Eliot’s remarks about the late king’s final illness, which seemed to imply foul play, and his false suggestion that the loaned ships had not really been returned. Although protests from the Commons procured Digges’s release after five days, Charles continued to detain Eliot, claiming that he was being held on charges unconnected with his behaviour in Parliament. The government strongly suspected that he had conspired with Blainville, the French ambassador, over the St. Peter allegations, but intense questioning and a search of Eliot’s study failed to generate any proof. On 19 May the Commons were informed of his release, and he resumed his seat the next day, securing a vote that he had not exceeded his commission during the impeachment hearing. However, he seems not to have recovered his confiscated papers until the end of the month.
Not surprisingly, Eliot was somewhat more subdued during the remainder of the Parliament, even displaying a measure of circumspection. On 3 June, condemning a clumsy speech by John More II on the comparative merits of the English and French governments, he was quick to insist that Charles was ‘a pious prince and so will be still’, free from any taint of tyranny. Hence, ‘in regard of the many aspersions cast upon our proceedings’, and to send a clear signal to the king of the Commons’ loyalty, he recommended that More be expelled and imprisoned. While offering sporadic support for the Remonstrance against Buckingham which had developed out of the protests over his own arrest, he continued to nurse hopes of a successful outcome to the impeachment, agitating on 9 June for the House to obtain copies of the answers which Buckingham had finally submitted. On 12 June, he argued that the Commons should debate these answers before giving any further consideration to a grant of supply, and insisted that the attack on the duke was not based on personal malice: ‘it was begun at Oxford and by those that are now absent’. However, he clearly feared that the Parliament would not last much longer, for on 13 June he called for the customary end-of-session collection for the Commons’ officers to be taken. Later that day he pessimistically defended the Remonstrance: ‘tis nothing we desire but justice, and we see the power of this great man such that we can scarce come to accuse him, nor witnesses to testify against him’. To the last, Eliot maintained that the House had simply tried to do its duty. When the long-expected dissolution was announced on 15 June, he attempted one final justification of the Parliament’s proceedings, urging a general acclamation of loyalty and affection to the king, but the proposal was rejected.
Barely had the Commons begun to disperse when Eliot received notice from the attorney-general, Sir Robert Heath*, that he and the other 11 Members who had led the impeachment were to remain in London. The king had decided on a mock trial of Buckingham in Star Chamber to refute the charges against him, and now expected Eliot and his colleagues to substantiate their accusations. After careful deliberation, however, they responded that they had acted on the Commons’ instructions, and were therefore not at liberty to add to the evidence already presented before the Lords.
In fact, it took another act of provocation by Eliot to achieve his next incarceration. In late 1626, the government, having failed to obtain a subsidy grant from Parliament, launched the Forced Loan. This demand for money deeply offended Eliot, who believed firmly in supply being levied with the consent of the political nation, and with his friend William Coryton*, another Pembroke client who had recently lost local office, he emerged as the focus of Cornish opposition to the Loan. Bagg naturally kept Buckingham informed, and in April 1627 both Eliot and Coryton were summoned before the Privy Council. By early June they were in prison, a development which was widely interpreted in Cornwall as further evidence of Buckingham’s displeasure.
IV. The 1628 Parliamentary Session
Once free, Eliot wasted little time in staging his political comeback. In early February he and Coryton challenged their Cornish enemies head-on by standing as knights of the shire in the forthcoming parliamentary elections. John Mohun and his allies first tried to pressurize them into withdrawing, accusing them of damaging Cornwall’s interests by taking this step, and when this failed they attempted to mobilize support against them. In reply, Eliot and Coryton appealed directly to the 40-shilling freeholders, claiming that they had suffered for their country. Mohun and Sir Richard Edgcumbe stood against them, but they were fighting a losing battle, and by the time of the election on 10 Mar. the result was such a foregone conclusion that Mohun and his friends opted not even to attend.
Back at Westminster for the fifth time, and with the added prestige of representing his county, Eliot was once again nominated to the committee for privileges. Very much to the fore of the Commons’ business still, he delivered more than 160 recorded speeches during the 1628 session.
A dual strategy thus emerged, but there were frustrations in store. First, Mohun and his associates delayed their journey to London, pleading urgent business at home. On 21 Apr. Eliot persuaded the Commons to summon them as delinquents, but over the next few days the House consented to spare Sir Bernard Grenville and Sir Reginald Mohun* on the grounds of age, while Buckingham rescued John Mohun by obtaining his elevation to the peerage. Sir Richard Edgcumbe, who was already in the House as a Member for Bossiney, was examined, but no further action was taken against him.
The pursuit of the Mohun faction was of course an attack on Buckingham’s West Country patronage network, but until June 1628 Eliot held back from a direct assault on the duke. Although the details are sketchy, it appears that before Parliament re-assembled, an agreement was reached by some of its leaders to abandon the strategy employed in 1626, not least because Pembroke’s continuing rapprochement with Buckingham effectively ruled out a fresh attempt at impeachment. If Eliot was privy to such discussions, as Forster claimed, the documentary evidence no longer survives, and he certainly struggled to contain his hatred of the duke.
This early emphasis on complex legal dilemmas placed Eliot at a disadvantage. He possessed no training in this field, and, as he demonstrated on 30 May during the debate about Sir Thomas Monson’s patent for making process, he was impatient of the subtleties of precedent on which so much rested. His strength lay rather in identifying grievances and urging others to action, as on 22 Mar., when he attacked the argument that arbitrary taxation was justified by necessity: ‘it is not for monies, or the manner how to be levied, but the propriety of goods, whether there be a power in the law to preserve our goods ... Where is law? Where is meum et tuum? It is fallen into the chaos of a higher power’. Consequently, most of his interventions at this stage were limited to reminders of his own imprisonment over the Forced Loan, or reports of the disorders in Cornwall arising from long-term billeting (25 Mar., 2 April). His most significant contribution was almost accidental. At the end of March, discussion turned to legal rulings on the Crown’s prerogative to imprison people without stating the cause, including the 1592 ‘Resolution of the Judges’ recorded in chief justice Anderson’s Reports. The government claimed, on the basis of a corrupted text, that this ruling supported its current stance. However, thanks to Anderson’s son, a fellow Loan refuser, Eliot possessed an accurate manuscript copy of the resolution, which stated that the Crown should reveal the cause of detention to the judges upon an application for bail. He duly made the book available to Sir Edward Coke, who used it to great effect on 1 April. This in turn helped to pave the way for the Commons’ own resolutions on the same day, opposing arbitrary imprisonment.
By early April the usual tension was developing between the government’s desire for speedy supply, and the Commons’ wish for redress of grievances. For Eliot the priority was undoubtedly the latter. On 3 Apr. he insisted that the House would never stint in its ‘labour and duties to the satisfaction of His Majesty’, but he also joined calls for the Commons’ next steps in defending personal liberty and property to be considered in a committee, to which he was promptly nominated. During the following day’s supply debate, he became alarmed at the generous grant being proposed, and moved for any decision to be delayed for three days, to allow more time for deliberation. With some Members pushing for five subsidies, he backed four, and complained that it would be impossible to collect even that number ‘without soldiers’. However, the unprecedented higher total was eventually approved.
By now, however, the Lords were emerging as a significant obstacle to the Commons achieving their objectives. For many peers, the propositions on the liberty of the subject which the Lower House had submitted to them went too far in constraining the royal prerogative. By 12 Apr., Eliot was aware that the Lords were planning to consult the judges about imprisonment, and called urgently for a conference to address areas of doubt, but his proposal was rejected. Two days later, it was reported that the earl of Suffolk (Theophilus Howard*) had expressed the view that John Selden* deserved to be hanged. In the ensuing furore, Eliot urged the Commons not to leap to conclusions, while at the same time emphasizing the affront to the House. He was actively involved in the subsequent inquiry, and when it emerged that the incident had indeed occurred, despite Suffolk’s denials, he was selected to deliver a formal complaint to the Lords.
While this new strategy of a bill of liberties offered a way out of the immediate impasse, there was no firm agreement within the Commons over what shape it should take. Wentworth believed that a habeas corpus bill would resolve the problem of arbitrary imprisonment without encroaching too obviously on the contentious issue of the royal prerogative. Eliot, like Sir Edward Coke, favoured a more confrontational restatement of the propositions agreed in the House on 1 April. In fact, neither approach was likely to prove acceptable to the king, but Eliot, convinced that the Commons were doing no more than restoring the effectiveness of existing laws, was blind to this reality. As he put it on 30 Apr., ‘I conceive nothing is new. All that we seek is but the explanation of the law, but the old put in fuller sense’. Consequently, he reacted badly the next day to the king’s message challenging the House to accept his undertaking of 28 Apr., and avoid legal innovations. When the messenger, Secretary Coke, elaborated by affirming that committal without a stated cause was sometimes justified, Eliot accused him of misrepresenting the Commons’ intentions, and abusing the trust vested in him as a Member of the House.
For the new strategy of a petition to stand any chance of success, the Commons once more required the Lords’ co-operation, and on 8 May, when the drafting was complete, Eliot requested that a message be sent to the peers reassuring them that the Petition was simply a development from earlier discussions. A measure of goodwill on Charles’s part would also be helpful, and the Commons accordingly resumed discussion of supply, finally settling the precise timetable for payments. Eliot, doubtless conscious that the House had effectively reverted to bargaining, reported talk in Westminster Hall that the subsidies were being voted out of fear of the king, not from love, a claim which he hastened to refute. Inevitably, the Lords sought to amend the Petition. Charles encouraged this by sending them a letter promising not to imprison for Loan refusal, although he continued to insist on his prerogative right to detain people for reasons of state without stating the cause. Believing that the king would accept a Petition which embraced this compromise, the Lords sent both the letter and their revised text to the Commons on 12 May. Eliot successfully moved for discussion of these matters to be deferred until the next day, to allow time for reflection, and overnight he resolved to reject this overture. When debate on the Petition resumed, he immediately advised the House not to consider the king’s letter at all, as it was not addressed to the Commons. He also objected to various new phrases, and, unsurprisingly, was named to a committee to draft the Commons’ reasons for not changing the Petition’s content.
There seems little doubt that Eliot was already planning a fresh initiative of his own. The trigger was the king’s first answer to the Petition of Right on 2 June, which failed to address the Commons’ concerns. When the House considered its response the next day, Eliot first moved to defer further debate on the Petition until the House was fuller, then launched his own alternative strategy. Reminding Members that they sat as the king’s Great Council, with a duty to advise the monarch of the nation’s grievances, he then expounded at length on the perils which the country faced, from the threat of popery, through the recent military disasters, to the exhaustion of the Crown’s revenues and ‘oppression of the subject’. Warning darkly of the enemies within, he concluded by calling for a Remonstrance which would set out these dangers, and invite Charles to provide remedies. Ultimately, Eliot remained convinced that Buckingham and his policies lay behind England’s problems, and that there could be no real progress until he was removed. Given the failure of the 1626 impeachment, and the difficulties attendant on negotiations with the Lords, a Remonstrance offered a final opportunity for the Commons to address these grievances by themselves. When accused by Sir Thomas Jermyn of a knee-jerk reaction to the king’s answer to the Petition, Eliot retorted that a Remonstrance had been under discussion for some time, and that he had merely been waiting for a suitable opportunity to raise the idea. He subsequently obtained a committee to consider his proposal, but many in the House initially shied away from the prospect of another confrontation with the king over his favourite. What tipped the balance in Eliot’s favour was Charles’s own clumsy attempts in the next few days to stifle this development with the announcement of imminent prorogation, and warnings against attacks on ministers. On 5 June Eliot was interrupted by the Speaker when he tried to broach the issue of the king’s servants, prompting fears that the most basic parliamentary freedoms were under threat. In the ensuing debate, Sir Edward Coke led Members in specifically naming Buckingham, and the Commons finally threw themselves fully behind the drafting of a Remonstrance. By the next day paranoia was setting in, and Eliot’s lurid allegation that the troops billeted near London were being maintained for some nefarious purpose went virtually unchallenged. The apparent confirmation on 7 June that foreign mercenaries were being brought to England served to raise the temperature still further.
In this atmosphere, the king’s popular decision the same day to give his full assent to the Petition of Right did nothing to divert Eliot from his course. On 11 June he backed Sir Robert Phelips’ motion that the Remonstrance should specifically blame the nation’s ills on Buckingham’s excessive power, insisting that this could scarcely offend Charles since it was no more than had been stated in 1626, and the Commons were now merely reporting the problem, not demanding action. However, the temptation to go further was considerable, and on 13 June he supported John Selden’s proposal that the Remonstrance should also include a request for the duke’s dismissal. By now Eliot had abandoned his efforts to delay the subsidy bill, and indeed on 12 June he pushed for some of the revenues to be assigned to clearing the backlog of billeting debts in Cornwall. His final manoeuvre on this front occurred on 16 June, when he proposed that the granting of supply before redress of grievances should not be taken as a precedent for future parliaments.
Although Eliot had identified Buckingham as one of the principal causes of misgovernment, the duke’s assassination in August 1628 actually changed very little, beyond clearing the way for him to resume his investigations into Lord Mohun’s conduct as vice-warden of the Cornish stannaries. In November he obtained legal opinion that Buckingham’s death had effectively voided his own patent as vice-admiral of Devon, but when he applied to the Admiralty Court for formal dismissal his case was referred to the duke’s executors, and he remained officially in limbo.
V. The 1629 Parliamentary Session
Despite such causes for concern, the final months of 1628 witnessed a sustained effort by the Crown’s more moderate ministers to prepare the ground for a successful parliamentary session, and when the Commons reconvened in January 1629, Eliot found little support for a wide-ranging attack on the government. On 21 Jan., on the motion of John Selden, a search of the various official records of the Petition of Right in Parliament and the courts was undertaken. It shortly emerged that it was the king’s first, unsatisfactory answer which had been preserved for posterity, a blatant attempt by the government to deny that the Petition was legally binding. Eliot, who had been quick to back Selden’s initiative, was named to the committee appointed to investigate this provocation, but his call for the committee to be given a wider remit to pursue other breaches of the subject’s liberties fell on deaf ears. Indeed, he had little more success in drumming up interest in a renewed campaign against Lord Mohun, and seems to have got no further than obtaining a warrant on 30 Jan. for the summoning of witnesses.
The issues which fixated the Commons in 1629 were religion and Tunnage and Poundage. Eliot initially saw the debates on religion as a distraction from the fight against arbitrary taxation, but they gradually influenced his thinking as the session progressed. On 29 Jan. he affirmed his confidence in the king’s orthodoxy, while airing doubts about some of his advisers. Although he warned the Commons against dabbling in theological controversy, he feared that Convocation could not be relied on to take a stand against Arminianism. He therefore advised the House to adopt some suitably Protestant statement of faith which might be used as a benchmark for testing other opinions. His preference, expressed on 3 Feb., was for the firmly Calvinist Lambeth Articles of 1595, which had been approved for use in the Irish church, but not in the Church of England. Such a step would pave the way for firm action against popery and Arminianism.
Nevertheless, it was the Crown’s continuing unstatutory collection of Tunnage and Poundage on which Eliot chose to focus his energies. Predictably, he was determined to obtain the redress of grievances before granting supply, and the announcement on 22 Jan. by John Rolle, a fellow Cornish Member, that he had had goods seized for non-payment of these customs duties gave him the pretext he was looking for. Asserting that not just Rolle’s rights but the liberties of the subject and the Commons’ privileges had been infringed, he was named to the committee appointed to investigate the case, and successfully called for the customs farmers involved to be summoned for questioning. When Secretary Coke brought in the latest Tunnage and Poundage bill on 26 Jan., Eliot raised every objection he could think of to prevent it being debated, though in fact the decision by the House shortly afterwards to turn its attention fully to religious grievances proved a bigger obstacle to the Crown’s agenda than did any of Eliot’s delaying tactics.
The final act of this session was played out on 2 March. Anticipating a further adjournment ahead of dissolution, Eliot and a group of his friends planned a set-piece protest. With Denzil Holles and Benjamin Valentine pinning the Speaker to his chair to prevent him from leaving the chamber, Eliot proffered a paper which the Speaker, understandably, refused to read out. A brief stand-off followed, before Eliot presented the declaration himself, a stark warning of the perils facing king and country. Buckingham might be dead, but his spirit lived on in lord treasurer Weston, who was encouraging popery and Arminianism, and destroying the nation’s wealth through his policy on Tunnage and Poundage. Still unable to accept that the king was responsible for the policies which he loathed, Eliot once more identified an alternative canker at the heart of government, an evil genius promoting the new counsels which threatened both true religion and the liberty of the subject. He concluded by proposing a Protestation against all who either collected or paid unparliamentary Tunnage and Poundage, though he made no attempt to secure an immediate vote. This was both a publicity exercise and a shot across the government’s bows. Eliot affirmed that if he was still a Member of the Commons when Parliament next met, he would raise these issues again, and encourage a full investigation. In the short term, however, chaos ensued. By the time John Selden called for the declaration to be read by the clerk, Eliot had panicked and burnt his paper, leaving Holles to summarize its main points from his own rough notes. According to some accounts the Protestation, which also included an article attacking innovators in religion, was then approved by the House. Finally Eliot himself moved the adjournment, and a tearful Speaker completed the formalities.
Such a direct affront to the king’s authority could not go unpunished. Eliot was summoned before the Privy Council on the following day, and imprisoned in the Tower. Along with eight others who were believed to have planned the protest on 2 Mar., he was prosecuted in Star Chamber on a charge of riot in the House of Commons. However, Eliot refused to account for his actions on the grounds that he would be breaching parliamentary privilege; the king had no legal knowledge of what happened in the Commons unless the House chose to communicate the information, and offences committed there were examinable only by the Members themselves. Much to Charles’s fury, the judges declined to dispute this argument, and the Star Chamber action was dropped in June.
Of the original nine prisoners, only Eliot, Valentine and William Strode remained obdurate, the latter two holding out until the king released them without terms in 1640, shortly before Parliament was recalled. Eliot was not so fortunate. For over two years he passed his time in the Tower in literary endeavour. The fruits of this labour were a justification of his constitutional stand, the Apology for Socrates, an ethical study, The Monarchie of Man, the unfinished Negotium Posterorum, and De Iure Majestatis, a summarized translation of a Latin treatise by Henningus Arnisaeus.
However, the controversies stirred by Eliot in life were not stilled by his death. Charles’s vindictiveness proved to be entirely counter-productive, and within a decade Eliot was widely perceived as a martyr. On 8 July 1641 the House of Commons resolved that the 1630 King’s Bench prosecution constituted a breach of parliamentary privilege. In the following November the drafters of the Grand Remonstrance dwelt at length on ‘the cruelty and harshness of his imprisonment, which would admit of no relaxation, notwithstanding the imminent danger of his life did sufficiently appear by the declaration of his physician, and his release, or at least his refreshment, was sought by many humble petitions’. In an emotive phrase almost certainly aimed at the population at large, the writers concluded that Eliot’s ‘blood still cries for either vengeance or repentance’. The King’s Bench judgment was finally overturned on 11 Dec. 1667.
Few politicians have prompted such wildly differing assessments of their achievements. To Laurence Echard in the early eighteenth century, the battle against Buckingham was essentially a personal feud. Eliot, in his view, ‘help’d to blow up such a flame in the House, as was never extinguished: a remarkable consequence of a restless and indefatigable malice, when mix’d with the plausible appearance of a public good’. At the opposite extreme, John Forster, Eliot’s nineteenth-century biographer, presented a selfless hero, a matchless orator ‘with a breadth and largeness of wisdom unapproached by any other speaker’, under whose inspired leadership the Commons resisted the evils of arbitrary government.