"Charles had recourse to many subterfuges in hopes to elude the passing of this law; rather perhaps through wounded pride, as we may judge from his subsequent conduct, than much apprehension that it would create a serious impediment to his despotic schemes. He tried to persuade them to acquiesce in his royal promise not to arrest anyone without just cause, or in a simple confirmation of the Great Charter and other statutes in favour of liberty. The peers, too pliant in this instance to his wishes, and half receding from the patriot banner they had lately joined, lent him their aid by proposing amendments (insidious in those who suggested them, though not in the body of the house) which the commons firmly rejected. Even when the bill was tendered to him for that assent which it had been necessary, for the last two centuries, that the king should grant or refuse in a word, he returned a long and equivocal answer, from which it could only be collected that he did not intend to remit any portion of what he had claimed as his prerogative. But on an address from both houses for a more explicit answer, he thought fit to consent to the bill in the usual form. The commons, of whose harshness towards Charles his advocates have said so much, immediately passed a bill for granting five subsidies, about £350,000; a sum not too great for the wealth of the kingdom or for his exigencies, but considerable according to the precedents of former times, to which men naturally look. ... The Petition of Right, ... this statute is still called, from its not being drawn in the common form of an act of parliament." Although the king had been defeated in his attempt to qualify his assent to the Petition of Right, and had been forced to accede to it unequivocally, yet "he had the absurd and audacious insincerity (for we can use no milder epithets), to circulate 1,500 copies of it through the country, after the prorogation, with his first answer annexed; an attempt to deceive without the possibility of success. But instances of such ill-faith, accumulated as they are through the life of Charles, render the assertion of his sincerity a proof either of historical ignorance or of a want of moral delicacy." _H. Hallam, Constitutional History of England, volume 1, chapter 7._ The following is the text of the Petition of Right: