An Industrious Mind by McGee J. Sears

Author:McGee, J. Sears [McGee, J. Sears]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2015-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

SHIP MONEY AND THE PRAYER BOOK REBELLION

On the domestic front, two matters loomed large in 1637 and 1638. They were the result of two new policies imposed by King Charles I: the ship money levy in England and the use of the Book of Common Prayer in Scotland. Near the end of his autobiography, Simonds inserted a thunderous blast against the levy. After his summary of foreign news for 1635, he wrote a lengthy diatribe that began: “At home the libertie of the subjects of England receiued the most deadlie & fatall blow” it had suffered for five centuries. This was because writs were sent out the preceding summer to “all the sheriffs of England, to leuie great summes of monie” throughout England and Wales “vnder pretext & coleur to prouide shipps for the defence of the kingdome.” Although, he asserted, England was altogether at peace and “the roiall fleete was neuer stronger,” the government nevertheless demanded the payment of £320,000. If this proved lawful, the monarch could then “vpon the like pretence” collect “the same summe tenne twentie or an hundred times redoubled and soe to infinite proportions vpon any one shire, when & as oft as hee pleased: & soe noe man was in conclusion worth anie thing.”53 His elaborate argument against the legality of the ship money levy continues for nearly two thousand words and will be discussed more fully in the next chapter in the context of his term as sheriff of Suffolk. Interestingly, however, as Peter Salt pointed out, “even in his private correspondence with close friends such as Joachimi, ship money and its implications received no explicit mention at this stage.”54 There can be no doubt that Simonds knew about what the king was doing and about Sir John Hampden’s legal challenge to it. A lawyer of the Inner Temple, Richard Edwards, wrote to him on April 14, 1638, that “the newes of the moment now in Towne is that this day Judge Crooke,” a justice of the Court of the Exchequer, “argued possitiuely against the kinge & for the liberty of the subject in his Estate, the truth & the dischargeinge of his Conscience beinge his Apologie. And his Argument verie sound & honest.”55 In another letter just over a fortnight later, Edwards told Simonds that there was “noe other materiall newes” than that of “the vnanimous concurrence in Opinion of those 2 most graue Reuerend & Learned Judges Justice Crooke & Justice Hutton in the business of the Shippmoney.” “By report,” the spreading awareness of their stance had severely undermined efforts to collect the tax.56 Simonds’s silence, at least with regard to what he put in writing, was surely due to lawyerly caution and self-protection rather than any lack of certainty on his part about the illegality of the levy.

With respect to religion in Scotland, Simonds’s attitude received some attention in the previous chapter concerning his remark in a 1629 letter to Joachimi in which he lauded John Knox as “the Scottish

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