Crown, the subsidies which the Parliament
had refused to grant till their grievances were redressed were levied in
the arbitrary form of benevolences.

[Sidenote: The Forced Loan.]

But the tide of public resistance was slowly rising. Refusals to give
anything "save by way of Parliament" came in from county after county.
When the subsidy-men of Middlesex and Westminster were urged to comply,
they answered with a tumultuous shout of "A Parliament! a Parliament!
else no subsidies!" Kent stood out to a man. In Bucks the very justices
neglected to ask for the "free gift." The freeholders of Cornwall only
answered that, "if they had but two kine, they would sell one of them
for supply to his Majesty--in a Parliamentary way." The failure of the
voluntary benevolence forced Charles to pass from evasion into open
defiance of the law. He met it in 1627 by the levy of a forced loan. It
was in vain that Chief Justice Crewe refused to acknowledge that such
loans were legal. The law was again trampled under foot, as in the case
of his predecessor, Coke; and Crewe was dismissed from his post.
Commissioners were named to assess the amount which every landowner was
bound to lend, and to examine on oath all who refused. Every means of
persuasion, as of force, was resorted to. The pulpits of the Laudian
clergy resounded with the cry of "passive obedience." Dr. Mainwaring
preached before Charles himself, that the king needed no Parliamentary
warrant for taxation, and that to resist his will was to incur eternal
damnation. Soldiers were quartered on recalcitrant boroughs. Poor men
who refused to lend were pressed into the army or navy. Stubborn
tradesmen were flung into prison. Buckingham himself undertook the task
of overawing the nobles and the gentry. Among the bishops, the Primate
and Bishop Williams of Lincoln alone resisted the king's will. The first
was suspended on a frivolous pretext, and the second was disgraced. But
in the country at large resistance was universal. The northern counties
in a mass set the Crown at defiance. The Lincolnshire farmers drove the
Commissioners from the town. Shropshire, Devon, and Warwickshire
"refused utterly." Eight peers, with Lord Essex and Lord Warwick at
their head, declined to comply with the exaction as illegal. Two hundred
country gentlemen, whose obstinacy had not been subdued by their
transfer from prison to prison, were summoned before the Council; and
John Hampden, as yet only a young Bu