The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore | Page 3

there only in the bud. The king's right to hale whom he
would into his service being practically undisputed, a threat of reprisals
in the event of disobedience answered all purposes, and even this threat
was as yet more often implied than openly expressed. King John was
perhaps the first to clothe it in words. Requisitioning the services of the
mariners of Wales, a notoriously disloyal body, he gave the warrant,
issued in 1208, a severely minatory turn. "Know ye for certain," it ran,
"that if ye act contrary to this, we will cause you and the masters of
your vessels to be hanged, and all your goods to be seized for our use."
At this point in the gradual subjection of the seaman to the needs of the
nation, defensive or the contrary, we are confronted by an event as
remarkable in its nature as it is epoch-making in its consequences.
Magna Charta was sealed on the 13th of June 1215, and within a year
of that date, on, namely, the 14th of April then next ensuing, King John
issued his commission to the barons of twenty-two seaports, requiring
them, in terms admitting of neither misconstruction nor compromise, to
arrest all ships, and to assemble those ships, together with their
companies, in the River of Thames before a certain day. [Footnote:
Hardy, Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum, 1833.] This wholesale embargo
upon the shipping and seamen of the nation, imposed as it was
immediately after the ensealing of Magna Charta, raises a question of
great constitutional interest. In what sense, and to what extent, was the

Charter of English Liberties intended to apply to the seafaring man?
Essentially a tyrant and a ruthless promise-breaker, John's natural
cruelty would in itself sufficiently account for the dire penalties
threatened under the warrant of 1208; but neither his tyranny, his
faithlessness of character, nor his very human irritation at the
concessions wrung from him by his barons, can explain to our
satisfaction why, having granted a charter affirming and safeguarding
the liberties of, ostensibly, every class of his people, he should
immediately inflict upon one of those classes, and that, too, the one
least of all concerned in his historic dispute, the pains of a most
rigorous impressment. The only rational explanation of his conduct is,
that in thus acting he was contravening no convention, doing violence
to no covenant, but was, on the contrary, merely exercising, in
accordance with time-honoured usage, an already well-recognised,
clearly denned and firmly seated prerogative which the great charter he
had so recently put his hand to was in no sense intended to limit or
annul.
This view of the case is confirmed by subsequent events. Press
warrants, identical in every respect save one with the historic warrant
of 1216, continued to emanate from the Crown long after King John
had gone to his account, and, what is more to the point, to emanate
unchallenged. Stubbs himself, our greatest constitutional authority,
repeatedly admits as much. Every crisis in the destinies of the Island
Kingdom--and they were many and frequent--produced its batch of
these procuratory documents, every batch its quota of pressed men. The
inference is plain. The mariner was the bondsman of the sea, and to him
the Nullus liber homo capiatur clause of the Great Charter was never
intended to apply. In his case a dead-letter from the first, it so remained
throughout the entire chapter of his vicissitudes.
The chief point wherein the warrants of later times differed from those
of King John was this: As time went on the penalties they imposed on
those who resisted the press became less and less severe. The death
penalty fell into speedy disuse, if, indeed, it was ever inflicted at all.
Imprisonment for a term of from one to two years, with forfeiture of
goods, was held to meet all the exigencies of the case. Gradually even
this modified practice underwent amelioration, until at length it dawned
upon the official intelligence that a seaman who was free to respond to

the summons of the boatswain's whistle constituted an infinitely more
valuable physical asset than one who cursed his king and his Maker in
irons. All punishment of the condign order, for contempt or resistance
of the press, now went by the board, and in its stead the seaman was
merely admonished in paternal fashion, as in a Proclamation of 1623,
to take the king's shilling "dutifully and reverently" when it was
tendered to him.
In its apparent guilelessness the admonition was nevertheless woefully
deceptive. Like the subdued beat of drum by which, some five years
later, the seamen of London were lured to Tower Hill, there to be
seized and thrown bodily into the waiting fleet, it masked under its
mild exterior the old threat of coercion in a new