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No doubt ship-money was necessary, and it was the patriotic thing to give it up, and no doubt the same applies to men for the Army: but when it came to the principle of the King taking money without the consent of Parliament, John Hampden thought it his duty to the traditions of his country to resist, just as Sir John Simon thought it his duty to the traditions of the British conscience to passively protest but that again, I say, is a matter for Englishmen.
Hobbes wondered that a Parliament man worth thousands of pounds, like Hampden, to pay twenty shillings for ship-money, as if the amount had anything to do with the principle that taxes could only be levied by the House of Commons. Henry's vices are dust in the balance against the fact that he stood for England against Rome.
Suddenly, in a house-agent's catalogue, we came across an astonishing advertisement. Hampden House, on the Chiltern Hills, the ancestral home of John Hampden, of ship-money fame, was to let for the summer, and for a rent not beyond our powers. The new Lord Buckinghamshire, who had inherited it, was not then able to live in it.
He therefore considered the Stamp Act as a nullity, as a document of no more validity than Charles's writ of ship-money, or James's proclamation dispensing with the penal laws. This doctrine seems to us, we must own, to be altogether untenable. Between these extreme courses lay a third way.
In the meanwhile Essex, after several messages from the parliament, had removed from Reading, and fixed his head-quarters at Tame. It was in this action that the celebrated Hampden received the wound of which he died. The reputation which he had earned by his resistance to the payment of the ship-money had deservedly placed him at the head of the popular leaders.
It included also a great tenacity of the subject's rights as against the State the spirit of Hampden refusing payment of ship-money and a disposition to look on the law and the Courts as the bulwarks of such rights against Government.
Ship-money, doubtless, was a doomed impost, even if there had been no particular individual called John Hampden. The practical despotism of the Stuart dynasty would doubtless have come to an end long before the present day, even if Oliver Cromwell and William of Orange had never existed.
Take a state martyr, one that for his good behaviour hath paid the excise of his ears, so suffered captivity by the land-piracy of ship-money; next a primitive freeholder, one that hates the king because he is a gentleman transgressing the Magna Charta of delving Adam.
The courts levied enormous fines merely for the sake of revenue. Monopolies of wine, salt, soap, and other articles were sold to companies for large sums of money; but the high prices charged by the companies caused much popular discontent. The most obnoxious of all devices for raising money were the levies of "ship-money."
But now that all show of judicial independence was taken away, and the judges debased into mere mouthpieces of the king's will, the weight of their judgements came to an end. The nation had bent before their decision in favour of the Post-Nati; it had never a thought of bending before their decision in favour of Ship-money.
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