Trump Is Following in the Footsteps of a Failed English King

Charles’s taxation efforts fueled discontent across the English countryside. Historian Jonathan Healey described it as “the most controversial of all the Crown’s financial policies, and something that would become the defining constitutional issue of the decade.” Among those unhappy with paying ship money was John Hampden, a wealthy landowner in Buckinghamshire. His refusal to pay in 1637 set up a test case of sorts on the legality of the taxes. Charles and his advisers welcomed it because they assumed the 12 royally appointed judges would rule in his favor and legitimize the taxes.

Oliver St. John, who would serve in the Cromwellian government after the Civil War, was among the lawyers who represented Hampden. A complete rejection of royal authority was still years away. Instead, he argued that Charles could only lawfully demand ship money in a genuine emergency. “St. John accepted that the king was the ‘fountain of justice,’ but claimed that ‘though all justice which is done within the realm flows from this fountain, yet it must run in certain and known channels,’” Healey noted in a recent book on the fraught and fateful era, with St. John referring to Parliament and the courts.

The king’s lawyers, as one might expect, took a more expansive view of his powers. “Bankes made the royalist case eloquently,” Healey wrote. “‘This kingdom, it is a monarchy,’ he said, ‘it consists of head and members, the king is the head.’ The head, he continued, ‘is furnished with entire power and jurisdiction.’ It was an emergency because the king said it was, and it was in the monarch’s power to anticipate danger and to act in the public interest.” It did not matter if the king’s claims were pretextual or not; all that mattered was that he made them.