A royal message ordering the adjournment of the House was disregarded, the Speaker was held down in his chair, and the key of the House of Commons was turned against intrusion, while Eliot's resolutions, declaring that the privileges of the Commons must be preserved, were carried with enthusiasm.
Charles answered these resolutions by dissolving Parliament and sending Eliot to the Tower.
For eleven years no Parliament was summoned.

Eliot refused altogether to make any defence for his Parliamentary conduct.

"I hold that it is against the privilege of Parliament to speak of anything which is done in the House," was his reply to the Crown lawyers.

So Sir John Eliot was left in prison, for nothing would induce this devoted believer in representative government to yield to the royal pressure, and three years later, at the age of forty-two, he died in the Tower.
It was for the liberties of the House of Commons that Eliot gave his life.
Wasted with sickness, health and freedom were his if he would but acknowledge the right of the Crown to restrain the freedom of Parliamentary debate; but such an acknowledgment was impossible from Sir John Eliot.

For him the privilege of the House of Commons in the matter of free speech was a sacred cause, to be upheld by Members of Parliament, even to the death--a cause every whit as sacred to Eliot as the divine right of kings was to the Stuart bishops.
Charles hoped to govern England through his Ministers without interference from the Commons, and only the need of money compelled him to summon Parliament.
John Hampden saw that if the King could raise money by forced loans and other exactions, the days of constitutional government were over.