Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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Netherlands for 4,400 veterans to ﬁght against the Scots. The privy council

was not told of his mission. Nothing came of any of these proposals, but they

add to the evidence that those who scented a popish plot were not just im-

agining things.

Imagination certainly inﬂated their suspicions, but catholic indiscretion

gave them something to feed on. From early in the year a special contribution

to the king’s military expenses had been demanded from catholics through-

out the country, and it was known as the queen’s contribution because she

pressed it so strongly. Protestants denounced it as a device to stave off the call-

ing of a parliament, and most of the provincial catholic gentry paid up so

reluctantly that it was hardly worth the hostility that it aroused. Far from

bringing in the £50,000 expected, the ﬁrst £10,000 was not collected until

after the Paciﬁcation of Berwick, and its ﬁnal yield was only about £14,000.

The number of catholic ofﬁcers in the king’s army was not very large, but the

presence of some well-known courtiers among them made them conspicuous.

Taken together with Charles’s readiness to employ Antrim’s catholic Ulster-

men in mainland Scotland, and his desire to bring over a contingent from

Wentworth’s largely catholic army, it is no wonder that zealous English

protestants wondered whose side they should be supporting.

The catholic presence at court was swollen by aristocratic refugees from

Richelieu’s France. Their political inﬂuence was not great, but they fuelled

the king’s hostility towards the cardinal, whom he suspected of colluding

with the Covenanters. The queen saw much of them, especially that arch-

conspirator the Duchess of Chevreuse, who was later to make even more

trouble for Cardinal Mazarin than she had for Richelieu. She moved to Eng-

land from Spain in May 1638 and stayed for two years. An even more illus-

trious and troublesome guest was Marie de Medici, the queen-mother of

France, who arrived in October 1638 with scores of her hard-up courtiers.

The king did not desire her visit, which was politically very unpopular and

horribly expensive, but he could not deny her the honours due to fellow-

royalty and his own mother-in-law. He did ﬁnally stop her pension in Janu-

ary 1641, but not before she had cost him £800,000 (according to Henrietta

Maria), which was not far short of the bill for the ﬁrst Bishops’ War. She

ﬁnally left for Italy late in June, but died before she got there.

Wentworth’s presence was soon felt after he arrived in London on 21 Sep-

tember. It was probably on his advice that Charles set up a committee for

Scottish affairs consisting of eight privy councillors. Unfortunately Hamilton

was the only Scot among them, but at least it brought Scottish policy formal-

ly within the purview of the English government. The committee gave

Traquair a rough reception when it heard him report on the Scottish situation

on 27 November, which was somewhat hard, since he had incurred the wrath

128 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

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of the Covenanters as a creature of the court. The occasion was historic, how-

ever, because Wentworth seized on it to urge that the only remedy now lay in

calling an English parliament. Laud and Hamilton supported him; the com-

mittee concurred, and the king was soon persuaded. The full privy council

unanimously endorsed their advice on 5 December. The Spanish party had

hitherto resisted a parliament, fearing an onslaught upon popish counsels and

upon catholics generally, but the affair in the Downs had lowered their stock.

Laud must have accepted the necessity reluctantly, but Wentworth had a

more positive attitude. He had ﬁrst made his political reputation in the House

of Commons, and in 1634–5 he had managed an Irish parliament with con-

siderable skill. To prevent the forthcoming assembly from over-exploiting the

crown’s ﬁnancial needs, this same council meeting pledged its members to a

loan totalling £300,000. Wentworth headed the list with £20,000, and

£200,000 was brought in by Christmas. In January, Charles marked his trust

in his new chief minister by making him Earl of Strafford and promoting him

from Lord Deputy to Lord Lieutenant.

Charles’s sole object in conceding a parliament was to raise the money he

needed to renew the war. When the Covenanters sent four commissioners to

protest against the prorogation of the Scottish parliament and to request his

assent to the acts prepared by the Lords of the Articles, he kept them waiting

more than a month before granting them a few strained audiences in late Feb-

ruary and March. He then forbade them to leave London, detaining them vir-

tually as hostages. He had got hold of a letter that some leading Covenanters,

including Rothes, Loudoun, Mar, Montrose, and Alexander Leslie, had just

sent to Louis XIII, justifying their conduct and begging him to intercede for

their people with his cousin of England. He conﬁdently hoped that it would

be a trump card when he faced the coming parliament. In his own frankly

expressed view, he was making one last trial of the traditional way of raising

supplies for his and the kingdom’s necessities, and if the parliament failed in

its duty he would be justiﬁed in using extraordinary means. He felt no need to

consult it about his recourse to arms, though in the recent campaign he had

been the ﬁrst English monarch to go to war without calling a parliament since

1323. As he saw it, he had no obligation to seek the estates’ advice, for what

he faced was rebellion and they had an unquestionable duty to assist him in

suppressing it. It was of course inconceivable that the Commons would vote

the million or so pounds that he needed without ﬁrst securing the redress of at

least the major grievances that had been piling up for eleven years.

Historians disagree about the depth and motivation of the opposition that

Charles faced when at last he had to listen to parliament. In extreme reaction

against the traditional Whig interpretation, which depicted a House of Com-

mons steadily increasing its initiative and striving for a stronger voice in gov-

ernment from Elizabeth I’s reign onwards, one revisionist view is that during

The Bishops’ Wars 129

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the personal rule Charles and his ministers built up a viable and not seriously

unacceptable system of government, which was brought to an end only by the

avoidable error of provoking rebellion in Scotland. England was merely con-

forming, a little late, to the declining trend of medieval representative institu-

tion in Europe as a whole. On this reading, the opposition that exploded in

the Short Parliament, and in the ﬁrst session of the Long, was largely oppor-

tunist, factional, and shallow-rooted, and with the emergence of a royalist

party in 1641–2 a large part of the political nation rejected its policies.

Those who ﬁnd this version unconvincing do not have to revert to the old

Whig mythology in order to furnish an alternative one. There is evidence of a

groundswell of discontent in the 1630s, growing stronger as the interval

between parliaments stretched out longer and the ﬁnancial expedients

through which they were avoided became more blatant. Dislike of the

changes in the Caroline church was by no means universal, but neither was it

narrowly based or shallow. The expression of such discontents was muted for

several reasons: because the king had publicly warned that pressure for a par-

liament would be taken for disaffection, because the presses were controlled

and private correspondence sometimes intercepted, but above all because

government had to go on. Unpopular government was a lesser evil than lack

of government, and if gentry magistrates had refused to accept the directions

of the privy council they would have courted anarchy, not to mention the dis-

grace of dismissal. If the king declined to call a parliament there was not much

they could do about it, but that does not mean that they suffered gladly the

long denial of the traditional mechanism for the expression and redress of

grievances. Their hankering for such a remedy did not imply any desire to

change the fundamental constitution of the realm, indeed it was consistent

with a profound conservatism. It is undeniable that the personal rule was

shattered by the Scottish rebellion; the question is how long its ﬂimsy struc-

tures could have survived if that misfortune had been avoided. Any war, sure-

ly, would have brought them tumbling down, and there is no evidence that

Charles ever intended to renounce war permanently in order to preserve

them. If some continental entanglement had not provided the trigger, Ireland

could well have done so.

The elections to the Short Parliament are a very imperfect gauge of current

public opinion, because the majority of elections were still uncontested. In the

county constituencies the principal landowners traditionally pre-selected two

candidates, and only two, on the basis of social standing rather than political

stance. In many cities and boroughs the corporation, often in collusion with

the local gentry, presented the electors with a similar fait accompli, and in

130 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

This is an over-compressed summary of the interpretation advanced by Sharpe in Personal

Rule of Charles I.

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many more an individual patron had a virtual right of nomination. Contest-

ed elections, which gave the choice to the populace, were reckoned to mark

the failure of the local elite to settle the representation in its own interest. But

except in unshakably ‘close’ boroughs, responsiveness to the electorate was

increasing, as was the total number of voters in the country. Only thirteen

elections had been contested in James’s ﬁrst parliament, but the number

ranged between twenty and forty in the 1620s, and with the Short Parliament

it rose signiﬁcantly to sixty-two. Since two-member constituencies were

almost universal, that meant that a quarter of all MPs reached Westminster

through a contest of some sort. Nor is that the full measure of this election’s

response to public feeling, since in many cases where the elite did get their

nominees elected unopposed they had to take care, in selecting them, to avoid

rousing popular antagonism, and hence rival contenders, by putting forward

politically unpopular candidates. By 1640, too, the gentry’s own choice often

reﬂected their collective antagonism to the policies of the court, and there

were certainly counties in which the godly interest ran a concerted campaign

to secure the return of men of their own kind. One way and another, ques-

tions of national policy, rather than merely local interests, were of more con-

cern than ever before to both the typical selectors of candidates and to the

broader electorate. The sentiments that emerged most widely were hostility

towards courtiers and disquiet over the advance of popery—two attitudes

closely linked in the public mind. Their expression was to become still more

marked in the second elections of the year, in the autumn.

After so long a gap there were far more new faces in the Commons than

usual when parliament assembled on 13 April. Only John Pym and Sir Fran-

cis Seymour were there out of the score or so of really prominent parliament-

men of the 1620s. Seymour typiﬁed the conservative gentry who had been

antagonized by Charles I’s policies but had no wish for constitutional change.

He had been made a sheriff in order to keep him out of the 1626 parliament

and he had refused to pay Ship Money in 1639, but he was to accept a peer-

age early in 1641 and ultimately to ﬁght for the king, alongside his elder

brother the Marquis of Hertford. Pym by contrast was not a typical member

at all. He had no real territorial base and spoke for no county community; nor

did he owe his inﬂuence to favour at court. Since 1607 he had been an ofﬁcial

in the Exchequer as receiver of crown lands for Wiltshire, Hampshire, and

Gloucestershire, and the Exchequer remained the chief focus of his loyalties

until far into the 1620s. So far, his legendary prominence in the Short and

Long Parliaments would have been unpredictable, though he had made his

mark in the proceedings against Buckingham and (still more) in the struggle

for the Petition of Right. By the 1630s he had leased out his small estate, and

he lived in London until his friend Richard Knightley took him into his home at

Fawsley in Northamptonshire. His emergence as a major politician is largely

The Bishops’ Wars 131

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to be explained by two changes in his life, both dating roughly from the

accession of Charles I. One was the patronage that he won from Francis, Lord

Russell, who became Earl of Bedford in 1627, and also in time from the Earl

of Warwick; the other was the new direction that ecclesiastical policy took

under Charles, for this gave him a cause in which he believed passionately.

Bedford and Warwick were two of the most powerful puritan peers in Eng-

land, and Pym was closely associated with the latter in the Providence Island

Company, which was founded in December 1630 with the purpose of found-

ing an ideal puritan settlement in a rather insalubrious Caribbean Island. As a

colonizing venture it was largely unsuccessful, but it kept some of the most

inﬂuential future leaders of the Long Parliament in close touch during the

long years of non-parliamentary rule. Alongside Warwick, Viscount Saye

and Sele and Lord Brooke were among its most active members, as were

Knightley, John Hampden, Oliver St John, Saye’s son Nathaniel Fiennes, and

Sir Thomas Barrington. They met regularly at Saye’s London house, or at his

seat at Broughton. Pym was their treasurer and general factotum, and though

he kept his Exchequer post the company absorbed most of his energies in the

1630s. Many of its members refused to pay Ship Money, whose legality the

company was responsible for getting tested before the courts. Hampden’s

case made him a national ﬁgure, and St John won scarcely less fame as

his counsel; he and Pym spent months in planning strategy with Hampden

before the trial opened. Another puritan colonizing enterprise with a largely

overlapping membership was the Saybrook Company, named after the

two peers most actively involved, and with territory in what is now Con-

necticut. Pym, Hampden, and Knightley were active in this venture too. Both

companies displayed a typical combination of colonizing and commercial

initiative with a spirit of constitutionalism and a quest for a truly godly

community.

Pym had always been deeply concerned for the purity of religion, though he

had not felt it to be in serious danger under James. Never an extremist, he had

been angered by those who sought to brand all godly protestants as puritans.

But with the Caroline innovations and the rise of the divines whom Pym and

his kind called Arminians, religion became a matter of profound concern to

him. He had already emerged as a defender of the ancient constitution and an

upholder of the supremacy of the law, not least because he believed the true

protestant religion to be protected by both. When he found religion, law, and

constitution simultaneously under threat, his zeal for all three redoubled. He

became the leading champion of the powers and privileges of parliament, not

just for their own sakes, but because they were impugned by the likes of Mon-

tagu, Neile, and Laud, and because parliament had to take responsibility for

preserving the national church against popery when neither its hierarchy nor

its Supreme Governor could be trusted to do so.

132 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

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It was the Speaker of the last parliament, who had been held down weep-

ing in his chair during its violent ﬁnal scene eleven years ago, who made the

opening speech to the Short Parliament, by virtue of his new ofﬁce of Lord

Keeper. Lord Finch, as he now was, had dealt brutally with several opponents

of the prerogative in Star Chamber, and as Lord Chief Justice he had pro-

nounced judgment for the crown in the Ship Money case. Speaking now in

the king’s presence and by his instructions, he conspicuously failed to make

any mention of Ship Money, though he did ask for an act to conﬁrm his mas-

ter’s right to tonnage and poundage from his accession onward. His main

request, however, was for an immediate, unconditional, and generous grant

of subsidies. If that was forthcoming, the king would call another session in

the late autumn and would then grant redress of ‘just’ grievances, though he

would expect a further supply then. Finch’s rhetoric pitched the king’s divine

right to determine matters of state uncomfortably high, and there was no mis-

taking the implied warning against any questioning of his policy towards the

Scots, who were guilty of ‘foul and horrid treason’.

As soon as Finch sat

down, Charles himself introduced the Covenanters’ letter to Louis XIII,

which he commanded the Lord Keeper to read. Through Finch, he made great

play of the fact that it was endorsed ‘Au Roy’, claiming that its authors had

thereby acknowledged the King of France as their sovereign. That was

absurd, and probably struck his hearers so; the two words were probably

meant merely to direct the bearer and distinguish it from others addressed to

other contacts in France—Richelieu, for instance.

On the ﬁrst day of more than formal business, Windebank read the letter

again to the Commons. Harbottle Grimston answered him that there were

dangers at home as great as any that he had presented; the liberty of the sub-

ject had been widely infringed, contrary to the Petition of Right, and it was

parliament’s duty to expose ‘the authors and causers of all our miseries and

distractions in church and commonwealth’.

We shall meet Grimston again,

as Speaker of the Convention Parliament twenty years later, welcoming King

Charles II home with expressions as fulsome as any of Finch’s, but now he

was taking the lead in putting grievances before supply, and focusing on the

king’s evil counsellors. Sir Francis Seymour struck the same note: ‘though the

king be never so just, his bad ministers may corrupt his justice’.

That same

opening day witnessed heated exchanges in the Lords, after Laud moved that

according to custom they should not sit the next day because the bishops

would be in convocation. Saye objected, maintaining that their presence was

not essential for the House’s proceedings to be valid, and Finch eventually

The Bishops’ Wars 133

Proceedings of the Short Parliament of 1640, ed. Esther S. Cope and Willson H. Coates

(Camden Society, 4th series, XIX, 1977), pp. 115–18.

Ibid., p. 137.

Ibid., p. 141.

ch5.y8 27/9/02 10:35 AM Page 133

saved their faces from the chair by pleading his own indisposition, upon

which the House voted to adjourn during his enforced absence.

There was a crucial debate in the Commons next day, and the key speeches

were by Pym and his older half-brother Francis Rous, a moderate puritan

of profound conviction and author of widely respected theological works.

The two had spoken in concert before, in 1629, and this time Rous rose ﬁrst.

Contrary to the rules of the House, both men spoke from scripts, and their

speeches were early examples of a genre that was addressed as much to the

public as to the House itself. They were widely copied and circulated in manu-

script, though it was not until the licensing laws began to break down in the

following year that Pym’s appeared in print. Rous declared that ‘the root of

all our grievances’ was ‘an intended union betwixt us and Rome’,

and

repeated the now familiar complaint that upholders of the true protestant

religion were being stigmatized as puritans. Conscientious ministers were

subjected to illegal burdens, suspended, and driven out. He touched more

brieﬂy on Ship Money and other secular discontents, but left these largely

to Pym.

Pym spoke for two hours, which was a length to which parliaments were

quite unaccustomed, but his masterly exposition of the nation’s grievances

was an immediate success with the House. Religion, he agreed with Rous,

was ‘the greatest grievance to be looked into’, but he would turn ﬁrst to the

liberties and privileges of parliament, because verity in religion depended on

parliament’s freedom of debate. In words that Charles must have found

deeply subversive, he declared that ‘the parliament is as the soul of the com-

monwealth, that only is able to apprehend and understand the symptoms of

all such diseases which threaten the body politic’. It was ‘the intellectual part

which governs all the rest’; so much for the king’s claim to a unique capacity

to comprehend and decide matters of state. The ﬁrst breach of its liberties of

which Pym complained was the silencing of debate when the last parliament

had been dissolved before grievances had had redress, or even full expression.

He spoke for the members who had been wrongfully imprisoned; the judges

had had no right to question them over what had gone on in the House, for

‘the court of parliament is a court of the highest jurisdiction and cannot be

censured by any law or sentence but its own’. He dealt next with grievances

concerning religion, starting with the ofﬁcial encouragement given to papists,

their intrusion into places of power, their virtual immunity from the recu-

sancy laws, and the presence of a papal nuncio at court. It amounted to a

campaign to convert England to Rome, and the bishops’ claim to authority

jure divino and the popish ceremonies that they inculcated were part of it.

Finally he expounded comprehensively the abuses of civil government and

134 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

Cope, p. 146.

ch5.y8 27/9/02 10:35 AM Page 134

infringements to rights of property, stating them with precision and moder-

ation. The true cause of all these evils, he said, was the long intermission of

parliaments, which by law should be held every year. He desired that all these

grievances should be set down, after debate, in a remonstrance, with a

petition from both Houses for redress.

Before the Commons rose that day, three members proffered petitions con-

cerning grievance from their counties, and four more followed suit the next

morning. Between them they covered much the same ground as Pym had

done, and they bear the signs of a concerted operation, for the puritan inter-

est was highly organized in all the constituencies involved (Middlesex, Hert-

fordshire, Essex, Suffolk, Norwich, Northamptonshire, and Northampton

town). The counties of origin were contiguous, and all the members who pre-

sented the petitions were to be prominent parliamentarians. It was a tech-

nique to be more fully exploited in the Long Parliament, with the dual

purpose of swaying the Houses and publicizing the issues in the shires and

cities concerned. On this ﬁrst manifestation, however, it struck some unsym-

pathetic hearers as smacking of the practices of the Covenanters.

Pym’s speech set the agenda for the Commons’ next two working days,

most of which they spent in grand committee. This was a procedural device

of Jacobean origin, otherwise known as the committee of the whole House,

which facilitated freer discussion by replacing the Speaker with an elected

chairman, suspending the record in the Journal and relaxing the formal rules

of debate. So ready were the members to follow Pym in taking up the un-

ﬁnished business of the last parliament that they fastened for hours on end on

the ﬁrst of the grievances he had put to them, namely the violent manner of its

ending and the proceedings against the eleven imprisoned members. It was

the last straw for the king when they sent for the judicial records of the Ship

Money case, and he peremptorily summoned both Houses to Whitehall on

the afternoon of 21 April. Because of his stammer, he again entrusted the

Lord Keeper with the delivery of his message. It was a disadvantage to him

that his spokesman was just coming under the Commons’ hostile scrutiny,

both for his conduct as Speaker in 1629 and for his more recent pronounce-

ments on Ship Money, but it was a self-inﬂicted one, since he had appointed

Finch to the ofﬁce which gave him this function after he had decided to call a

parliament. In a long speech delivered at very short notice,

Finch set forth

the crown’s ﬁnancial needs as cogently as he could, truthfully declaring that

the army now afoot was costing £100,000 a month and that the Ship Money

ﬂeet was a far greater charge than tonnage and poundage or any other

The Bishops’ Wars 135

Ibid., pp. 148–57; lengthy extracts from the printed version are in Kenyon, Stuart Con-

stitution, pp. 183–9.

Proceedings of the Short Parliament, pp. 164–7, 303–5.

ch5.y8 27/9/02 10:35 AM Page 135

regular revenue could support. In defending Ship Money, however, he

strained belief when he afﬁrmed that the king ‘never had so much as a thought

to make it an annual revenue’, nor was his citing of the Irish parliament’s

recent generosity as an example likely to impress the Commons. In urging the

latter to vote large supplies without delay, he had no speciﬁc concessions to

offer in return, and he—or rather Charles—was courting trouble when he

told the Lords that their assistance would be expected if the Commons were

backward in their duty. Charles had yielded to his council’s advice so far as to

call a parliament, but not so far as to pay the necessary price for a successful

one. The very minimum that members could be expected to take back to their

‘countries’ as a justiﬁcation for a record load of subsidies were the abolition

of Ship Money and a guarantee of frequent parliaments in the future. In

imagining otherwise he simply displayed a lack of political competence.

The Commons spent another day on their own business before going into

grand committee to consider the king’s demand. They debated at length

whether they should put supply before redress, and ﬁnally decided to request a

conference with the Lords on the nation’s grievances. To their minds, ‘Till the

liberties of the House and kingdom were cleared, they knew not whether they

had anything to give or no’.

On hearing of this, Charles angrily broke off his

supper and summoned an emergency meeting of the council to consider an

immediate dissolution. Strafford advised him instead to go to the Lords next

morning before the Commons’ message was read, and to appeal to them to

support him in seeking an immediate supply and the postponement of redress

of grievances to a winter session. Charles agreed, and before the smaller audi-

tory and familiar faces of the Upper House he spoke in person. His necessities,

he said, were ‘so urgent that there can be no delay’, and he expected a pledge

of the Lords’ concurrence and assistance before they rose that day. A tough

debate ensued, in which all the noble councillors had evidently been briefed

to support his plea. But Strafford’s repeated appeals to their loyalty were

repeatedly countered by Saye, who stubbornly stood up for the Commons’

sole right to initiate votes of supply. Eventually the Lords did resolve that in

the present situation supply ought to have precedence over grievances, but of

the sixty-eight lay peers present (the bishops being of course solidly for the

king) twenty-ﬁve voted against the motion.

When the conference with the Lords that the Commons had requested was

held on 25 April, a Saturday, it was devoted not as they had intended to griev-

ances but to a report of the king’s speech and the peers’ resolution. The result,

when the Commons sat again on the Monday, was entirely predictable. They

took great offence at the Lords’ invasion of their historic initiative in matters

136 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

Quoted in Gardiner, History of England, IX, 108.

Proceedings of the Short Parliament, pp. 69–79; Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies,

pp. 111–12.

ch5.y8 27/9/02 10:35 AM Page 136

ﬁscal, and after much debate they voted it a breach of privilege. The Lords in

turn took umbrage, and voted by a massive eighty to two that it was nothing

of the kind. Strafford’s tactics had succeeded in setting the two Houses

against each other, but had split the Lords and brought the desperately

needed subsidies no nearer. Very possibly, however, his main purpose by now

was to put the Commons in the wrong and so place an early dissolution, if it

came to that, in a better light.

Meanwhile trouble was brewing on the ecclesiastical front. On 24 April the

Commons threatened a serious challenge to the king’s authority as Supreme

Governor of the church by questioning the commission that he had recently

given to convocation, empowering it to make new canons. In a long debate of

religious grievances on the 29th, two things were clear: a fair number of more

conservative members were not prepared to go all the way with the godly

party, but the great majority, including many future royalists, were pro-

foundly alienated by what had been happening to the church under Charles

and Laud. Another conference with the Lords on 1 May, however, and an-

other message from the king through Secretary Vane the next day, brought

them back to the matter of supply. ‘A delay will be as destructive as denial’,

Vane told them, adding that the king wanted an answer that day. They knew

now, if they did not already, that they were debating under imminent threat of

dissolution, and they were so unhappy about it that they were seriously divided.

They failed to reach a conclusion, and since it was a Saturday they appointed

Monday for a deﬁnite answer to the king’s demand. When Monday came,

Vane brought them a ﬁnal offer from him: he would give up Ship Money in

return for twelve subsidies, spread over three years. They would have been

worth £840,000 at the yield of 1621, though considerably less in 1640, and

Charles actually needed about £1m for the current year’s campaign. What he

was offering to give up was worth on paper around £200,000 a year, but Ship

Money was already collapsing, for payments had fallen off drastically as soon

as elections were called, in the general expectation that parliament would

condemn the levy. However, although twelve subsidies fell far short of his

needs, no parliament had ever voted so many before, and some members said

they could not face their constituents if they granted so much. Others tried to

add other concessions to the price ticket, including the abolition of coat-

and-conduct money. The debate dragged on till six in the evening, ten hours

after the House met, without its coming to a vote.

That was enough for Charles, and he dissolved the parliament the next day.

He probably had a further reason, besides its persistent failure in its duty, as

he saw it. In the last two days of debate an occasional voice had been raised

against the war itself, and that he would not stand. Sir Robert Cooke, for

instance, had said how ill an opinion the country had of the war, adding that

the king stood in greater need of hearts than of men or purses, but that this

The Bishops’ Wars 137

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