The King had always found it difficult to like Strafford. So had the Queen. But both recognized in him, as did William Laud, a man of forceful authority whose thoroughgoing policies had brought order and some measure of prosperity to Ireland and might extricate England from its present troubles. Strafford’s advice was accepted: in April 1640 the Members of what was to become known as the Short Parliament assembled in the chamber of the House which had remained empty and silent for so long.
Most of these Members, elected for the first time, were inexperienced in the ways and customs of the House. They gazed about the chamber, one of them said, wondering ‘who should begin’. Some looked towards John Hampden, Member for Buckinghamshire, who was described by Edward Hyde, Member for Wootton Bassett, as ‘the most popular man in the House’. The eldest son of a Buckinghamshire landowner of ample fortune, Hampden had first been elected to Parliament in 1621, and had since achieved national fame by undergoing a term of imprisonment for refusing to pay Ship Money. Respected as Hampden was, though, he was not much of an orator and had always shown more aptitude for committee work than for public debate.
It was left, therefore, to an older member who had first entered Parliament in 1614 to take the lead. This was John Pym, a thickset, scholarly-looking man, intense and studious, with a rough and shaggy appearance which gained him the nickname ‘Ox’. Like Eliot and Hampden and so many other Parliamentary leaders of his time, he came from an old country family. The son of a gentleman from Somerset, he had been at Oxford before entering the Middle Temple; and, though he was never called to the bar, his speeches were those of a clever lawyer, precise, considered, telling, quite without the frantic rhetoric of Sir John Eliot’s harangues.
He had earned the dislike of the King by his speaking against the Duke of Buckingham, and he now alienated his erstwhile friend the Earl of Strafford by advising his fellow Members of the Commons to refuse to vote any money for the King’s war against the Scots until the country’s grievances had been considered and satisfied. Strafford reacted characteristically to this provocation: he advised the dissolution of Parliament and, since an army strong enough to subdue the Scottish rebels could not be raised in England, the use against them of an army from Ireland. The situation, Strafford insisted, was getting out of hand: there was rioting in the City; south of the river a mob had surged towards Lambeth Palace, forcing the Archbishop to seek shelter in Whitehall; apprentices, dock hands and watermen were marching through the streets with drums, waving staves at passers-by and shopkeepers. ‘Unless you hang up some of them,’ Strafford warned the King, ‘you will do no good with them.’ Several rioters were accordingly imprisoned; two of the ringleaders were hanged; and the rack was brought out for the last time in England to torture one of them. Order for a time was restored. But the City Aldermen continued to refuse to contribute to the loan which was essential to a successful prosecution of the Scottish war.
The English army which marched north that summer against the Scottish rebels was consequently both underpaid and ill-supplied as well as ill-disciplined: two Roman Catholic officers were murdered by their men, who then deserted. Nor did it have the undivided support of the civilians it left behind. Before it marched two of its soldiers fell into conversation with two clothiers in the Green Dragon Tavern in Bishopsgate Street. The clothiers expressed sympathy for the Scots, whereupon one of the soldiers said they must be Puritans. One of the clothiers asked if ‘he could tell what a Puritan was, whereat [the soldier] flew into such a rage he threw a trencher, and hit him on the head’.
The English army, defeated at Newburn on 28 August, met the fate which all sensible men had predicted; and the terms to which the King was obliged to agree were deeply humiliating: the Scottish army was to be paid £850 a day until its claims were settled; and it was to be left in control of Northumberland and Durham. The Scottish provincial government was also to be paid its expenses. So yet another Parliament would have to be called in London, and it was not likely to accept dissolution as tamely as had its predecessor, nor to rest until the King’s ‘evil counsellors’ had been removed from office.
The Members of this new Parliament, which, summoned in November 1640, was to become known as the Long Parliament, directed their attack first against Strafford, whom they had arrested and taken away to the Tower. Then William Laud was impeached and sent to join him there. Several less courageous counsellors slunk abroad.
The Queen took it upon herself to stiffen her husband’s resolve. Distressed by the death of their little daughter Anne, frequently in tears, sleeping badly and feeling ill, she pleaded with the King to stand firm against the demands of Parliament, not to disband the Irish army, at one moment plotting to rescue Strafford from the Tower, at another trying to placate John Pym and his fellow Puritans by reducing the number of Roman Catholics in her household and by arranging for the marriage of her eldest daughter Mary to the Protestant Prince of Orange, whose requests for the hand of her second daughter Elizabeth had previously been rejected with scorn, constantly badgering the King not to give way to the Commons’ demands.
The King’s policy, such as it was in these alarming months, was to wait upon events, promising and prevaricating, standing his ground as long as possible, then reluctantly giving way, endeavouring to persuade the Commons that their revolutionary demands threatened to bring the whole country to disaster, and that, as he put it to them himself, a skilful watchmaker might improve the working of a watch by taking it to pieces and cleaning it, provided that, when he put it together again, he left ‘not one pin out of it’.
Yet the determination of Strafford, endorsed by the Queen, to remain in the Tower for ever rather than to advise the King to surrender to Parliament in exchange for his freedom made a reconciliation with the Commons difficult to achieve, while the need to pay the Scottish rebels to prevent them advancing south made a break with Parliament impossible to contemplate.
The King, therefore, felt unable to resist a whole series of measures which declared monopolies and taxes levied without Parliamentary consent illegal, required the calling of Parliament every three years, reversed the judgements in several Ship Money cases, abolished prerogative courts, settled the limits of the royal forests, roundly condemned Laudism, and, in March 1641, demanded that the Earl of Strafford should be brought to trial on a charge of High Treason.
The conduct of this trial in Westminster Hall demonstrated only too painfully to the King’s friends how far his Majesty had fallen in public esteem. Sitting in a small curtained room at the back of the throne, he was ‘little more regarded’ than the guards upon the doors. There was ‘loud clattering’, so a witness recorded, and ‘much public eating not only of confections but of flesh and bread, and bottles of beer and wine going from mouth to mouth without cups, and all this in the King’s eye’.
The accused looked tired and ill, his beard grey, his back bent, though he was not yet fifty. But he answered the questions that were put to him quickly, calmly, occasionally with contempt, gaining much support by his skill and courage, obliging his accusers to conclude that a charge of High Treason would not serve their purpose and that instead they should bring in a Bill of Attainder which, if Parliament would pass it and the King assent to it, would secure the prisoner’s execution on the grounds that it was necessary for the safety of the state.
Mobs paraded about the streets demanding Strafford’s death. Robert Baillie, the Scottish Presbyterian divine who was in London at the time, recorded that ‘on Monday some thousands of citizens and prentisses awaited all day at Westminster, cryed to every Lord as they went in and in a loud and hideous voyce for justice against Strafford and all traitors…On Wednesday a sudden bruite ran through the Citie that the Papists had set the Lower House on fyre and had besett it with armies; in a clapp all the Citie is in alarum: shops closed, a world of people in armes runnes down to Westminster.’
The Commons passed the Bill by a majority of 204; the Lords’ majority was seven. Strafford’s life now depended upon the King, who had given him his word that he would never let his minister suffer ‘in life,