Summoned next day to be examined by the Privy Council, Strode refused to appear, and was arrested in the country, spending some time in the Tower after he had doggedly refused bail linked to a good-behaviour bond. He was still in gaol in January 1640, when he was finally released. This was supposed to be a reconciling, peacemaking move. In fact, he was a kind of living martyr for the Good Old Cause before it was properly formed. He was not a maker of policy, but he was exceedingly bitter against Charles. Clarendon calls him ‘one of the fiercest men of the party’, and MP Simonds D’Ewes describes him as a ‘firebrand’, a ‘notable profaner of the scriptures’, and one with ‘too hot a tongue’. Strode was also animated by the same sense of godly mission that was motivating the Covenanters themselves. Like their wilder spirits, he was fervently anti-episcopal. It was these godly views that led him to assert Parliamentary authority over prerogatives, the guarantee of religious rectitude and a bulwark against the crafts of popery.
One of the new MPs was Henry Marten, who was joining his father as an MP for a Berkshire seat dominated by the county town of Abingdon, later to become a godly stronghold during the war. He had already refused to contribute to a new Forced Loan to fund the Scottish wars. Marten was not, however, an obvious or orthodox member of the godly faction led by John Pym and his allies. Indeed, Marten was widely known as a rake and a rascal. Seventeenth-century biographer John Aubrey called him ‘a great lover of pretty girls’, and he had been rebuked for it by the king himself, who called him ‘ugly rascal’ and ‘whore-master’. Aubrey claims Marten never forgot the insult, and it may have been this which made him different from his much more moderate father and brother-in-law. Marten emerged quickly as a radical voice and was to develop a career as a key man on committees later, but during the Short Parliament he was not an obvious leader. He was, however, one of many MPs who were determined to assert the Commons’ ‘ancient rights’ and restrain the king’s attempts to diminish them. He played no role; he made no speeches. But he was there, and his later career shows that he was convinced. The calling of the Short Parliament created an opportunity for men like Strode to win those like Marten to their view of events, and to make them allies. Led by Pym, those concerned about religion were able to do so very effectively.
Hence when the Commons met, and Secretary Windebank read the Scottish Covenanters’ letter to Louis XIII, he was met by an MP called Harbottle Grimston, who explained courteously that there were dangers at home that were even greater than those to which the letter referred. The liberty of the subject had been infringed, contrary to the Petition of Right. The king’s bad ministers were not giving him the right advice. All this was reinforced when John Pym rose for a two-hour speech in which he explained that ‘religion was the greatest grievance to be looked into’, and here he focused on what he described as a campaign to return England to popery. ‘The parliament is the soul of the commonwealth’, the intellectual part which governs all the rest. As well, he said, the right to property had been infringed. It was embarrassingly clear that he meant Ship Money, and when the Commons sent for the records of the Ship Money trials, it became even clearer. Finally, the Commons said firmly that it could give the king nothing until he clarified his own position.
After only a few days, it was evident to most that there was little hope of compromise. Charles offered a last-ditch deal; he agreed to abandon Ship Money in exchange for twelve subsidies for the war. This was less than he needed, but to Parliament it seemed like an enormous amount. MPs wondered about their constituents’ reactions. Charles could see there was no prospect that MPs would agree. Pym had been in touch with the Scots, and some whispered that he might bring their grievances before the House. Thus it was that by 5 May 1640 Charles had – equally hastily – decided to dissolve Parliament again. The Short Parliament was a sign of Charles’s short fuse, and a tactical disaster. The whole grisly mess to come might have been averted if Charles had only managed to endure people shouting critically at him for more than a month. But the insecure boy still alive and well in Charles Stuart simply couldn’t do it. He wanted to believe that Parliament would go away if he told it to, as it had in 1629. He wanted to believe that the problem was the rebellious Scots and their co-conspirators in London, and that defeating the former would put an end to the latter. He didn’t want to believe that John Pym, MP, had managed to talk others into sharing his own world-view. And so he couldn’t get together the money he needed to prosecute the Scottish war again.
But he was determined to try. On 20 August 1640 Charles left London to join his northern army, while the Scots crossed the Tweed and advanced towards Newcastle. The king had managed to scrape up around 25,000 men, but they were untrained, raw. And they were hungry; the army brought no bakeries, no brewhouses. And they were cold; no one except the senior officers had tents. Their pistols were often broken across the butt, making them more likely to explode.
They were explosive in other ways, too. They fired guns through tents, including the king’s tent. They were mutinous. They were beggarly. They were more fit for Bedlam (London’s asylum) or Bridewell Prison than the king’s service. They murdered a pregnant woman in Essex and beat up Oxford undergraduates. And some were vehement iconoclasts, which illustrated the incongruity of the war itself. In Rickmansworth, a quiet Sunday morning service was disrupted when Captain Edmund Ayle and his troop smashed the altar and rails. It was a taste of things to come; so too were the complaints from families whose larders were eaten bare by the hordes of soldiers, families who found themselves playing host to drunken soldiers.
When the hungry, ill-disciplined English clashed with the Scots at Newburn, on 28 August 1640, the Scots easily drove them back, securing their first victory over the English since Bannockburn. To the Scots, it was proof of their divine election. Bishops, thought one Covenanter, were ‘the panders of the Whore of Babylon, and the instruments of the devil’.
So when Charles had to call Parliament again, on 3 November 1640, John Pym had his chance, and he also had experience, allies, and knowledge of the system.
One of the first things done by the Parliament that opened on 3 November 1640 was to release William Prynne and Henry Burton from prison (John Bastwick came home to London a week later, to similar acclaim). All three had been imprisoned – Prynne first in Caernarvon, which the government hoped would be remote enough to allow the whole matter to be forgotten, then in Jersey when this hope proved vain – because of their vigorous objections to the Laudian Church and their agitation for godly reform. Prynne had first been gaoled for attacking the wickedness of stage plays, with a sly hostile glance at the queen, and from prison had written an angry denunciation of bishops; loathing of the episcopate was Bastwick’s and Burton’s crime too. All of them had become symbols of the sufferings of true Protestants under the regime of Charles and Laud.
Their release was therefore the beginning of a campaign against the personal rule of Charles, launched with a graphic political message. The release of the three was a sign that England was once more a nation fit for the godly, and that the Commons would keep it so. Prynne, Burton and Bastwick had all been sentenced during Charles’s personal rule to be mutilated by having their ears cropped, and then fined, and imprisoned for life for their writings in 1637. Each man, free but forever disfigured, was a walking advertisement for Parliament’s clemency and the king’s tyrannical cruelty.
They arrived in London on 28 November 1640, after a momentous journey. Their way was strewn with