es before
entering on other business than they were met in August by a
dissolution.

[Sidenote: The descent on Cadiz.]

To the shallow temper of Buckingham the cautious firmness of the Commons
seemed simply the natural discontent which follows on ill success. If he
dissolved the Houses, it was in the full belief that their
constitutional demands could be lulled by a military triumph. His hands
were no sooner free than he sailed for the Hague to conclude a general
alliance against the House of Austria, while a fleet of ninety vessels
and ten thousand soldiers left Plymouth in October for the coast of
Spain. But these vast projects broke down before Buckingham's
administrative incapacity. The plan of alliance proved fruitless. After
an idle descent on Cadiz the Spanish expedition returned broken with
mutiny and disease; and the enormous debt which had been incurred in its
equipment forced the favourite to advise a new summons of the Houses in
the coming year. But he was keenly alive to the peril in which his
failure had plunged him, and to a coalition which had been formed
between his rivals at Court and the leaders of the last Parliament. The
older nobles looked to his ruin to restore the power of the Council; and
in this the leaders of the Commons went with them. Buckingham's
reckless daring led him to anticipate the danger by a series of blows
which should strike terror into his opponents. The Councillors were
humbled by the committal of Lord Arundel to the Tower. Sir Robert
Phelips, Coke, and four other leading patriots were made sheriffs of
their counties, and thus prevented from sitting in the coming
Parliament.

[Sidenote: Eliot.]

But their exclusion only left the field free for a more terrible foe. If
Hampden and Pym are the great figures which embody the later national
resistance, the earlier struggle for Parliamentary liberty centres in
the figure of Sir John Eliot. Of an old family which had settled under
Elizabeth near the fishing hamlet of St. Germans, and whose stately
mansion gives its name of Port Eliot to a little town on the Tamar, he
had risen to the post of Vice-Admiral of Devonshire under the patronage
of Buckingham, and had seen his activity in the suppression of piracy in
the Channel rewarded by an unjust imprisonment. He was now in the first
vigour of manhood, with a mind exquisitely cultivated and familiar with
the poetry and learning of his day, a nature singularly lofty and
devout, a fear