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rnment as much as "eminent citizens" nowadays, is said to have told the king, "If your majesty had many such Chambers, you would soon have no Chamber left to rest in." The merchant was tried before the "commissioners" at the Star-Chamber, and fined L2,000, and condemned to make a "submission for his great offence,"[28] which the stout Puritan refused to do, and was kept in prison till the Court of King's Bench, faithful to the law, on Habeas Corpus, admitted him to bail: for which they were reprimanded. Laud and all the ecclesiastical members of the "commission" wished his fine L3,000. [Footnote 28: 3 St. Tr. 373; Franklyn, 361; 2 Hallam (Paris, 1841), 6 _ac etiam_ 13; 2 Mrs. Macaulay, 16, 45, 65.] 5. In his place in Parliament in 1629, Sir John Eliot, one of the noblest men in England's noblest age, declared that "the Council and Judges had all conspired to trample underfoot the liberties of the subject." Gentlemen, the fact was as notorious as the advance of the Slave Power now is in America. But a few days after the king (Charles I.) had dismissed his refractory Parliament, Eliot, with Hollis, Long, Selden, Strode, and Valentine, most eminent members of the commons, and zealous for liberty and law, was seized by the king's command and thrown into prison. The Habeas Corpus was demanded--it was all in vain, for Laud and Strafford were at the head of affairs, and the priests and pliant Judges in Westminster Hall--Jones was one of them--clove down the law of the land just as their subcatenated successors did in Boston in 1851. The court decreed that they should be imprisoned during the king's pleasure, and not released until making submission and giving security for good behavior. Eliot was fined L2,000, Hollis and Valentine in smaller sums. Eliot--the brave man--refused submission, and died in the Tower. Thus was the attack made on all freedom of speech in Parliament![29] [Footnote 29: 3 St. Tr. 293; 1 Rushworth; 2 Hallam, 2; 2 Parl. Hist. 488, 504; Foster's Eliot, 100; 2 Mrs. Macaulay, ch. i. ii.] 6. In 1630, the very year of the first settlement of Boston, on the 4th of June, Rev. Dr. Alexander Leighton was brought before the Court of High Commission, in the Star-Chamber, to be tried for a seditious libel. He had published "An Appeal to the Parliament, or a Plea against Prelacy," a work still well known, remonstrating against certain notorious grievances in church and State, "to the end the Parliament might t
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