Note 152 — Chapter VIII · (continued 2)

May; Clarendon. The latter says, upon the dissolution of this parliament: "It could never be hoped that so many sober and dispassionate men would ever meet again in that place, or fewer who brought ill purposes with them." This, like so many other passages in the noble historian, is calculated rather to mislead the reader. All the principal men who headed the popular party in the long parliament were members of this; and the whole body, so far as their subsequent conduct shows, was not at all constituted of different elements from the rest: for I find, by comparison of the list of this parliament, in Nalson's Collections, with that of the long parliament, in the Parliamentary History, that eighty, at most, who had not sat in the former, took the covenant; and that seventy-three, in the same circumstances, sat in the king's convention at Oxford. The difference, therefore, was not so much in the men, as in the times; the bad administration and bad success of 1640, as well as the dissolution of the short parliament, having greatly aggravated the public discontents.

The court had never augured well of this parliament. "The elections," as Lord Northumberland writes to Lord Leicester at Paris (Sidney Papers, ii. 641), "that are generally made of knights and burgesses in this kingdom, give us cause to fear that the parliament will not sit long; for such as have dependence upon the court are in divers places refused, and the most refractory persons chosen."

There are some strange things said by Clarendon of the ignorance of the Commons as to the value of twelve subsidies, which Hume, who loves to depreciate the knowledge of former times, implicitly copies. But they cannot be true of that enlightened body, whatever blunders one or two individuals might commit. The rate at which every man's estate was assessed to a subsidy was perfectly notorious; and the burden of twelve subsidies to be paid in three years, was more than the charge of ship-money they had been enduring.