April: Short Parliament convenes

"Opponents of the Crown get a forum for their views following eleven years of personal rule."

The Parliament of the 1640s was very different to the one we know now. No Prime Minister's Question Time, highly organised parties, or leaders of the opposition. All MPs and Lords were assumed to be loyal to the Crown. There was no concept of an 'official' or 'loyal' opposition. Yet there were parties and groups within the Commons. And in the 1640 Parliament, there was a clear split between a Court party, many of whom were ministers in Charles' administration, and an unofficial, opposition group who were inspired by religious and constitutional hostility to the King.

After eleven years of personal rule and no representation, Parliament was back. Throughout the 1630s, Charles had governed without calling a Parliament. Some condemned it as tyranny but it was not a totally abnormal procedure. Parliaments were only called when monarchs needed revenue from taxes or wider support for war or social and religious reforms. Elizabeth went for years without summoning a Parliament, while James VI/I governed without Parliament for seven years.

Charles' situation in 1640 was fraught because during the eleven years of personal rule, he had operated without a proper income from tax revenue. Parliament was required to sanction a proper taxation revenue, so for eleven years, Charles kept himself and his administration afloat through a variety of levies which Parliament hadn't sanctioned. The most notorious was Ship Money - a tax for the navy which Charles extended from coastal counties to the whole country and then siphoned off for his own use. There were other revenue raising schemes, such as fines on encroaching royal forests or the sale of monopoly licences, all of which served to alienate the wealthy, political classes (the King's natural allies) many of whom were MPs. And they'd had eleven years to build up their anger.

When Parliament met in April 1640, Charles hoped for a show of loyalty from his English subjects. However, the bruises of the 1630s were there for all to see. Petitions flooded in complaining about Ship Money and Laudian church policy. The Commons held out the prospect of twelve subsidies for Charles but linked them to a long list of grievances. Before they gave any money, they wanted some reforms to church policy and taxation.

The Court party in Parliament abjectly failed to govern the direction of debate. And when it began to emerge that some Parliamentarians sympathetic to Presbyterianism were, in fact, in contact with the Scottish Covenanters, and were supportive of their struggle, the very purpose of calling a Parliament (to help beat the Scots) now seemed futile. Few Parliamentarians could see precisely what the Covenanters had done wrong. They were more worried by Laud's religious innovations in England than any Presbyterianism in Scotland. The King was now being conspired against by some within Parliament who were working hand in glove with the Covenanter rebels. After three weeks of tumultuous debate, Charles pulled the plug and dissolved what became known as 'the Short Parliament.'

August: Second Bishops War commences

Acting on Strafford's advice, Charles again attempts to teach the Scots a lesson- the Scots respond by seizing Newcastle.

Following the dissolution of the Short Parliament, Strafford's advice was clear. He pressed Charles to 'go on with a vigorous war as you first designed ...loosed and absolved from all rules of government. Being reduced to extreme necessity, everything is to be done that power might admit, and that you are to do. They refusing, you are acquitted towards God and man.'

Charles needed little encouragement and once more prepared for war. Although Strafford promised to rally a 10,000 strong force of troops from Ireland to help the invasion, Charles ultimately remained dependent for military support on an English aristocracy increasingly hostile to a war against their fellow Protestants in Scotland. Once again, like the grand old Duke of York, Charles marched a rag-bag army up via York to face the might of a disciplined Covenanter army.

Informed by their allies in Parliament of the King's military strategy, the Covenanters didn't hang around. They crossed the border, routed the English at Newburn and bypassed the heavily defended Berwick to capture a defenceless Newcastle - as the centre of coal production, an important city and port. Charles called an emergency Council of Peers at York. He hoped to gain renewed support from the Lords and detach them from their less obedient Commons colleagues.

Yet the Lords were of one mind - in a heated meeting they demanded an end to the Scottish War, the sacking of war-hungry Strafford, and the calling of another Parliament. With the Covenanters occupying Newcastle, Durham and most of Northumberland and with little support from his peers, Charles' room for manoeuvre was limited. He signed the ignominious Treaty of Ripon with the Covenanters and called another Parliament in November 1640. An English Parliament now convened under the long, occupying shadow of the Scottish forces.

November: Long Parliament assembles

With the Scots controlling the north of England, Charles is forced to call a second Parliament.

As the Commons reassembled, at the centre of the opposition party to the King stood a thick-set, intense and slightly shabby lawyer called John Pym. A West Countryman of passionate Puritan beliefs, he was a child of the Elizabethan age and saw all the old Protestant virtues of Good Queen Bess being betrayed by an effeminate, quasi-Catholic King. His obstinacy and sanctimonious self-belief were to be disastrous for Charles. Pym was as convinced of his own righteousness as Charles. But unlike the King, he was a strategist of the first order whose knowledge of Parliamentary procedure and grasp of political initiative was striking.

Pym, like Strafford, had been an MP in 1629 when Charles had closed down Parliament. But during the 1630s, while Strafford grew ever more loyal to the King, Pym saw his nation being betrayed by a closet Papist sitting on the throne. Declaring war on fellow Protestants in Scotland was the final straw.

If Pym couldn't get to the King, then his old adversary Strafford was the next best thing. The official charge was Strafford's attempt to import an Irish army to crush the Scots. Pym alleged that this force would then be used against Parliament itself. But in truth, Pym wanted to try Strafford for the 'crimes' of the 1630s - for a different vision of Church and State. Many MPs thought that if only they could separate Charles from his evil advisers, men such as Strafford and Laud, then everything would be alright.

Pym was only the front-man for a much broader coalition of interests centred around the trading organisation, the Providence Island Company, formed to exploit trade and settlement in North America. The company's directors, men like the Earl of Essex and Lord Saye and Sele, were the real opponents of Charles. Known as the 'Twelve Peers', they were Protestant nobles who looked back fondly to the old certainties of the Elizabethan age when England championed the Protestant cause against Catholic Spain and monarchs listened to grand noblemen.

Since the Scots victory at Newburn, the Twelve Peers had entered into an alliance with the Covenanters. And so, when the 'Long Parliament' met, Pym argued for a more Presbyterian Church of England and the prosecution of Strafford as a war-monger who tried to use Irish troops to quell religious opposition in Scotland. English problems between King and Parliament were now intricately bound up with the British problem of a multiple kingdom.

Pym worked Parliament brilliantly. He played on the irritation which had built up during the years of personal rule and the disgust felt at waging war on the Scots. Within a week of the opening session, the Commons impeached Strafford for treason. By December, Archbishop Laud was gaoled on similar charges.

Content last updated: 07/01/2001

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