When the House reconvened on the 10th March, the king dissolved Parliament without further ado. With respect to such of the commons as merited his displeasure he remarked that the vipers amongst them would meet with their rewards.
[Charles’s eleven years without Parliament, 1629-40]
With the dissolution of his third Parliament, Charles entered upon a new epoch in his reign; and at the conclusion of it, he found that his game had been for too heavy stakes, and that he had lost. For eleven years he did without a Parliament. He began by issuing a Declaration addressed to his “loving subjects” in which he told the history of the late session from his own point of view,--that he was in extreme need of money with which to meet the necessities of England and relieve the “miserable afflicted state” of Protestants abroad, that Parliament had proved itself intractable, and had greatly delayed, contrary to all precedent, in the matter of tunnage and poundage; not only that, but upon his graciously yielding to Parliament the power of granting him tunnage and poundage, it had raised up still another cause for delay in the case of Henry Holles.[352] In a proclamation issued two weeks later he plainly exhibited his intention to rule without a Parliament; “the calling, continuing, and dissolving of them,” he said, “being always in the King’s own power. And his Majesty shall be more inclinable to meet in Parliament again when his people shall see more clearly into his intents and actions, when such as have bred this interruption shall receive their condign punishment.”[353]
He imprisoned accordingly Holles, Strode, Sir John Eliot and others whom he included amongst the vipers of the commons, and removed such of them to the Tower as were able to sue out their writs of habeas corpus, in order that he might thus elude the service of the writs. But imprisonment was scarcely a means of relief to the king’s financial exigencies. He turned to expedients which were exceedingly oppressive, and most of them clearly illegal. He rigorously extorted tunnage and poundage by the arbitrary authority of the crown; he reëstablished the monopolies abolished under James I, and applied them to nearly every article in common use; he revived laws long since dead and applied them stringently for the sake of their fines; he revived forest legislation and increased the limits of the royal woodlands, mulcting the owners of adjoining property for encroachment; he searched titles of estates for defects which would make them liable to reversion to the crown; he went back to the old practice of compulsory knighthood for those who had £40 or more in lands or rents.