Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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war only took heart from some great clergymen, who themselves called it

bellum episcopale.

There is some evidence, though it is not conclusive, that

some members had been conferring with the Scots commissioners with a view

to bringing Scotland’s grievances formally before the House, and that Pym

was planning to speak in support of their printed vindication of their case on

the very day of the dissolution. Immediately after it, Saye, Brooke, Pym,

Hampden, and Erle had their studies searched, presumably for evidence of

correspondence with the Scots. None was found, but three other members

were brought before the council to answer questions about their speeches in

the House, and were imprisoned when they declined to reply. Charles’s atti-

tude to parliamentary privilege had not changed much in the past eleven

years.

The parliament had lasted a mere three weeks, and it had not passed a sin-

gle bill. Was its failure inevitable? Success was certainly impossible on

Charles’s terms of an unprecedented and unconditional grant of supplies on

the spot and a vague assurance of redress of grievances (but which griev-

ances?) next winter. If Strafford thought any differently, it shows how far he

had lost touch with the political nation. Yet this House of Commons was a

more moderate body than its successor in the Long Parliament, and was genu-

inely divided over whether to go some way towards meeting the crown’s

needs without delay. Compared with its successor, most of it was less pro-

Scottish, and less disposed to religious and constitutional change; a return to

the Elizabethan and Jacobean status quo in church and state would have sat-

isﬁed the majority. If Charles had offered to renounce Ship Money on the ﬁrst

day of this parliament instead of the penultimate one, he might even have got

those subsidies.

So can it be argued, as some have done, that he missed a great chance by not

coming to terms with the Short Parliament, since he would have had to part

with less of his prerogative than he was forced to do later? Any such argument

has to assume that Charles was other than the man he was. But even if he had

suddenly become amenable to political reason, he could not wipe out the

record of his reign so far, and given that he was wholly bent on continuing his

war against the Covenanters, twelve subsidies were not going to change the

outcome of the coming summer’s campaign. In face of the accumulated dis-

contents of eleven years, and after he had gone to war without calling a par-

liament and then failed to win it, no conceivable package of concessions was

likely to swing the hearts and minds of his English subjects wholly behind him

in his quarrel with the Scots, or ﬁre his unwilling conscripts with the will to

ﬁght Leslie’s army. If he had been ready to come to terms with the Scots as

138 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

Proceedings of the Short Parliament, pp. 187–97; The Short Parliament Diary of

Sir Thomas Aston, ed. Judith D. Maltby (Camden Society, 4th series, XXXV, 1988), pp. 120–44.

ch5.y8 27/9/02 10:35 AM Page 138

well as with the parliament, the latter might have helped him to a face-

saving peace and paid off his troops; but such a change of course was never in

his mind, and nor as yet were the guarantees against non-parliamentary rule

in the future that would surely have been asked of him.

But if a resumption of personal rule was no longer a viable option for

Charles, nor was any lasting solution to be found in merely reafﬁrming an

idealized ancient constitution, as conservative parliament-men were content

to do. They still had no realistic conception of the crown’s ﬁnancial needs.

Sooner or later, the Commons were going to have to face a fundamental

restructuring of the ﬁnancial system, going even deeper than the Great Con-

tract would have done—something on the lines of the future Restoration

settlement, though with a better estimate of the actual yield of the main

revenues than the Convention Parliament was to make. There is no sign that

such an exercise was contemplated in the spring of 1640, though something

like it was to be forced upon the Long Parliament.

As soon as Charles returned to Whitehall after the dissolution, he called a

meeting of the committee for Scottish affairs. A great deal hung on its debate,

and Vane took notes of it. The key question was whether, without parlia-

mentary subsidies, it was still possible to carry on the war. The Earl of

Northumberland, who had been designated commander-in-chief, more than

hinted his doubts, and Vane advised a merely defensive war. But Charles had

summoned them for advice, not on whether to take the offensive—his mind

was made up on that—but on how to. Strafford made the crucial speech, and

it was just what the king wanted to hear. A defensive war he utterly rejected;

only ‘loss of honour and reputation’ could come of it. ‘Go on with an offen-

sive war as you ﬁrst designed’, he urged. Having appealed to parliament for

supply and been denied it, the king was ‘acquitted towards God and man’.

Indeed ‘being reduced to extreme necessity’, he was ‘loose and absolved from

all rules of government’ and justiﬁed in resorting to naked power. He need

not fear disaffection at home, for ‘the quiet of England will hold out long’. A

forced loan of £100,000 from the City and a sharp drive to collect Ship

Money would sustain a short campaign, and Strafford was ‘conﬁdent as any-

thing under heaven’ that Scotland would succumb within ﬁve months. ‘You

have an army in Ireland’, he said, that ‘you may employ here to reduce this

kingdom’.

Those last words, more than anything else in his record, were to cost Straf-

ford his life a year later. He was referring to the army of 8,000 that he was

currently raising in Ireland, and in the context it is quite clear that by ‘this

The Bishops’ Wars 139

Quoted in Gardiner, History of England, IX, 120–3, from Vane’s notes; I have made one

change in the order of sentences.

ch5.y8 27/9/02 10:35 AM Page 139

kingdom’ he meant Scotland. But his words were somehow leaked, and with-

in days the rumour was spreading that he had advised the bringing over of

catholic Irish soldiers to crush opposition in England. That was never on the

cards before the Civil War, but why was the Irish army not used against the

Scots? Probably because it was not ready in time; it looked to England for

arms and horses, which were in too short supply to be spared.

In assuring Charles that ‘the quiet of England will hold out long’, Strafford

was right in that the country was nowhere near the brink of revolt, but quiet

did not imply willing support, and in London it was not unbroken. Immedi-

ately after the dissolution the City apprentices began to threaten violence

against Laud—‘William the Fox’, their placards called him—whom they

unreasonably blamed for it, and on 11 May they attacked Lambeth Palace. In

another riot three days later they broke open the White Lion prison, where

two of their comrades were held, and released them. Charles was sufﬁciently

alarmed to order an extra guard for his children, who were not in the least

threatened. He also wrote with his own hand the warrant whereby John

Archer, who beat the drum at the apprentices’ march on Lambeth, was put to

judicial torture before being executed—the last Englishman ever thus pun-

ished. The privy council, not trusting the City’s own militia, mobilized 6,000

of the trained bands of Essex, Hertfordshire, and Kent, but there was no

sequel to these brief disorders, and London remained generally calm until

Strafford’s fate stirred it to fever nearly a year later.

If organized resistance was not a threat to Charles’s and Strafford’s plans,

wholesale non-cooperation was. The drive to collect Ship Money was being

thwarted, not only because individuals were refusing to pay it but because

local ofﬁcials right down to parish constables were refusing to collect it.

Some admitted that they were more afraid of their neighbours than of the

government, and spontaneous violence was becoming a real threat. Coat-

and-conduct money was by now even more resented than Ship Money

and it too was widely refused, despite threats to conscript those who would

not pay. On top of these there was billeting money for troops on the move or

awaiting marching orders. The legality of these levies was more and more

questioned.

During the spring and summer of 1640 the king aimed to raise an army of

30,000 men, drawn from the trained bands throughout the whole of England.

Mustering and drilling were supposed to have begun before the parliament

met, and all counties were ordered to hold a general muster and review on

20 May. The intention was to use impressment as little as possible, but the

reluctance of militiamen to serve and their wholesale resort to substitution

resulted in a serious shortfall and a high proportion of untrained and

unarmed men among those were embodied. Deputy lieutenants often had the

utmost difﬁculty in raising their county quotas, and were ﬁnding their once

140 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

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prestigious jobs so disheartening that the government had to forbid them to

resign without special licence.

Before this ill-starred army was even assembled, however, a new religious

grievance in England and political deﬁance in Scotland weakened the king’s

position still further. Normally, when a parliament was dissolved, convoca-

tion came to an end with it, but this time Charles decided to keep it in being

and directed Laud to proceed with the new canons that it was framing. They

were ready by the end of May and published by royal authority on 16 June.

The canons themselves, and especially the royal preamble to them, unmis-

takeably bear Charles’s stamp as well as Laud’s. Their purpose was to justify

the ecclesiastical policies of the reign, to ‘prove’ that these made no innov-

ations but were in accord with the Elizabethan settlement, and by requiring

stricter conformity to expose any unsound churchmen who might be inclined

to take the Scots’ side in the present quarrel. They began by afﬁrming that

‘The most high and sacred order of kings is of divine right, being the ordi-

nance of God himself’; moreover the Scriptures accord kings ‘a supreme

power’ and commit to them ‘the care of God’s Church’. ‘Tribute, and custom,

and aid, and subsidy’ are due from subjects to kings for the public defence ‘by

the law of God, nature and nations’, and this obligation does not conﬂict (so

it was afﬁrmed) with subjects’ right to their property. The assertion of the

doctrines of divine right and non-resistance were even more high-ﬂown than

brief quotations can convey, and they were none the more digestible for being

followed by directions that in every church and chapel the communion table

should stand sideways under the east window and be ‘decently severed

with rails’.

But the most controversial canon was the one intended to demonstrate that

the church was committed to oppose all innovations and to maintain the

order established by law. It imposed an oath on all the clergy never ‘to alter

the government of this church by archbishops, bishops, deans and arch-

deacons, etc. as it stands now established’. What, it was asked, might not the

Arminian prelates and their church courts read into that deceitful ‘etc.’? Was

it to shut the door on further reformation of religion through the common

consent of King, Lords, and Commons? No wonder that the ‘Etcetera Oath’

soon became the butt of vehement protest, and not only by radical puritans.

Its unhappy form probably derived from clumsy drafting rather than sinister

intent, but what had been designed to unite and reassure became in itself a

fresh source of division.

Meanwhile the date (2 June) had come to which the king had prorogued the

Scottish parliament. He had decided in May to prorogue it again until 7 July,

The Bishops’ Wars 141

For generous excerpts from the canons see Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, pp. 149–53 and

for the best commentary Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church (Oxford, 1992),

ch. 7.

ch5.y8 27/9/02 10:35 AM Page 141

but most of its members came to Edinburgh for the earlier date, and at a cru-

cial meeting the leading Covenanters not only decided that it should open that

day but planned what should be done in it. Among themselves, they discussed

the theoretical right of subjects to depose a king who invaded or deserted his

kingdom, and though they almost certainly stopped short of seriously con-

templating the actual deposition of King Charles there was talk of a tempor-

ary dictatorship. Parliament duly assembled without the presence of either

king or commissioner, publicly declaring its right to sit on the grounds that

the Paciﬁcation of Berwick had committed to it the ratiﬁcation of the

Edinburgh General Assembly’s acts and the settlement of all matters civil. It

further declared that Scotland was threatened with destruction by war, and in

just ten days it enacted a veritable constitutional revolution.

It permanently excluded bishops, indeed any churchmen, from its mem-

bership. It ﬁnally struck off the shackles of the Lords of the Articles, ruling

that if parliament should decide to appoint them (which it did not), they were

to be freely chosen by each estate and to consider only what the full parlia-

ment referred to them. All grievances and matters of substance were to be

debated in full parliament. Over eight months ahead of England’s Triennial

Act, it enacted that in future parliaments must meet at least once every three

years. It naturally ratiﬁed the acts of the previous year’s General Assembly

and the National Covenant. It appointed a new executive committee of

estates, comprising twelve each of nobles, lairds, and burgesses, and invested it

with full power over the army and civil government. It adjourned on 11 June,

but declared its own continuance until 19 November. It said nothing of ask-

ing the king’s consent to its acts; it just assumed that they were binding with-

out it. So much for its repeated declaration that it had no intention of

entrenching upon his civil authority!

During June and July the Covenanters consolidated their hold on what had

been disputed territory in Scotland. A plundering expedition into Gordon

country ﬁnally subdued the north-east; Huntly along with other royalists had

already retired to England. By late July it was possible to hold a General

Assembly at Aberdeen without any challenge by royalists or episcopalians,

though few Covenanting nobles attended it; the measures that they most

cared about had already been passed in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and they

were busy preparing for war. From mid-June to early August Argyll marched

a force of 4,000 men through a very broad sweep of Highland territory,

which ended for the time being any threat to the Covenanters’ dominance

from that quarter. It did, however, widen the growing breach between Argyll

and Montrose, which stemmed partly from territorial rivalry and partly from

political differences.

Charles’s original plan had been for a three-pronged assault on Edinburgh,

but by July the question was less and less whether an English army would

142 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

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invade Scotland, and more and more whether the Scots would invade Eng-

land. A desperate shortage of money and arms forced the king to put off the

rendezvous of his forces twice, the second time to 1 July. His persistent hopes

of getting veteran troops from the Spanish service were ﬁnally killed when

disorder in Catalonia swelled into full rebellion during June, for from then on

the King of Spain had troubles enough of his own. In desperation, the gov-

ernment early in July seized £130,000-worth of bullion, belonging to the

Spanish crown, which was lodged in the Tower of London and waiting to be

minted into Spanish coin for transport to the Netherlands. It promised repay-

ment in six months’ time, but the City merchants were aghast at the breach of

faith and fearful of reprisals. This disreputable shift was said to have been

Hamilton’s idea, but Strafford was behind a still worse plan launched on 11

July, for a debasement of the coinage. There was to be a huge issue of copper

shillings, worth only a quarter of their face value. Bowing to the outraged

protests of the mercantile community, the government restored the bullion

and abandoned the debasement, but not before the crown’s credit had sunk

to its nadir. Or almost, for in August Cottington, the Chancellor of the

Exchequer, seized about £70,000-worth of pepper from an incoming ship

of the East India Company and sold it at around 30 per cent of its market

value. The amount that the crown ﬁnally raised in 1640 was quite consider-

able, but most of it came in too late to pay and arm the troops who faced

the Scots.

Among those troops, desertion and indiscipline were even more rife than in

1639. Quite a number of them, on their march to the general rendezvous at

Selby, broke open gaols and released the prisoners. Others threw down enclos-

ures, but there was on the whole comparatively little violence against private

property. In at least ﬁve counties they destroyed the altar rails in churches,

though that is not necessarily evidence that they were puritans; in some cases

we know that they were not. The targets on which the soldiers most often

vented their anger and resentment suggest a generalized sense that authority

had been abused, both in church and state. Mutinies were frequent through-

out the summer, and since martial law had been so expressly condemned by

the Petition of Right there was a real problem in dealing with them. Arms

were desperately short, and there were cases where even though they were

available the temper of the men was such that their ofﬁcers dared not distrib-

ute them. Only two cases are certainly known of ofﬁcers being murdered by

their men (both were reputed catholics), but many more feared it. Somewhere

between a third and a quarter of all the king’s infantry were still unarmed

when they faced battle in August. Well before then, Northumberland was put

out of action by chronic illness, probably malaria, and Strafford took over the

generalship. But he himself was suffering miseries from gout and the stone, so

the main military responsibility fell upon Viscount Conway, the commander

The Bishops’ Wars 143

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of the cavalry, and Sir Jacob Astley, a veteran of the continental wars since the

1590s, who did what could be done as commander of the foot.

The Covenanters had been thinking of striking ﬁrst since June, but they

wanted ﬁrst some assurance of active support from highly placed sympa-

thizers in England. They sought it through the channel of Lord Savile, the son

of Strafford’s bitter rival in Yorkshire; Johnston of Wariston wrote to him on

23 June. Savile tried to engage some of the greatest puritan nobles—Bedford,

Essex, Warwick, Brooke, Mandeville, and Scrope—but in their joint reply to

Wariston the seven peers stated that they could not invite the Scots into Eng-

land or take up arms with them, since that would be treason. They would,

however, stand with them in all such ways as honour and the law permitted.

Understandably, that was not enough for the Covenanters, but Savile’s

fellow-correspondents would go no further. He then, at about the end of July,

sent the Scots another letter, assuring them of the whole group’s unqualiﬁed

support if they invaded, and very skilfully forging the signatures of the other

six. The shamelessness of his subsequent career supports an impression that

he was motivated by hatred of Strafford rather than by anything that could be

called principle. How much difference his action made it is impossible to say,

for by this time the Scots may have found reason enough for taking the

military initiative in the wretched state of the opposing army.

During July General Leslie had encamped his own army at Duns, less than

ten miles from the border. Against him, Conway intended to defend the line

of the River Tyne, but most of the king’s forces remained in Yorkshire, to the

misery of that unhappy county. Not unexpectedly, the Scots struck ﬁrst.

Their decision to invade was taken with apparent unanimity by a meeting of

the committee of estates and the senior army commanders on 3 August, but it

did not command the assent of all the Covenanting nobles, and least of all

that of Montrose. He was the chief author of a pact called the Cumbernauld

Band (or Bond), which was secretly drawn up early in August and signed,

then or later, by eighteen or nineteen other noblemen. It was a studiously

vague document, afﬁrming its signatories’ ‘duty to religion, king and country’

and their continued adherence to the Covenant in defence of all three, but

objecting to ‘the particular and indirect practicking of a few’.

They did not

pledge themselves to any speciﬁc line of action, however, and while a few like

Montrose were to go over to the king, others remained ﬁrm Covenanters.

What bound them at this point in time was doubt about an offensive war and

dislike for current talk about deposition or dictatorship. That course would

have been bound to confer huge power on Argyll, and the Cumbernauld Band

is chieﬂy signiﬁcant for its evidence that Argyll’s command of the Covenant-

ing nobility was never total.

144 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

A Source Book of Scottish History, ed. W. Croft Dickinson and Gordon Donaldson (1954),

p. 121.

ch5.y8 27/9/02 10:35 AM Page 144

The Covenanters supported their invasion with fresh propaganda directed

at their ‘brethren of England’. It is not easy to gauge how much English sup-

port they could call upon in 1640. In denouncing Laud and Strafford as the

twin enemies of both peoples, and in calling for a common front against a

popish plot to subvert the true protestant religion in the churches of both

countries, they could draw upon widespread sympathy. But far fewer con-

curred with the speciﬁc Presbyterian church polity enshrined in the Covenant,

not only because the majority of English people remained attached to the

liturgy and government of the pre-Caroline Church of England, but also

because a considerable proportion of puritans preferred the congregational

way, as adopted in New England, to Presbyterianism. Sympathy was also off-

set by the old chauvinistic dislike of Scotsmen, especially at popular level; by

doubts about the legitimacy of a war waged by subjects against their king;

and by the hurt that national pride suffered through armed invasion of Eng-

lish soil. The Scots were certainly dismayed by the lack of welcome that they

found as they marched through north-east England, though they won some

respect by their discipline and by their practice of paying for what they took

on the way.

They crossed the border on the night of 20 August, bypassing the garrison

at Berwick and striking boldly south towards the Tyne. Charles had set out

from London only hours earlier to place himself at the head of his army in

York. Strafford, who had just assumed command as Lieutenant-General

from the stricken Northumberland, was forced by illness to break his own

journey north, and did not reach York until the 27th. His forces were at this

point divided, with about 12,000 foot and 500 horse based around York and

10,000 foot and 2,000 horse forward in the vicinity of Newcastle under Con-

way. The Scots had all but reached the Tyne, and were on the brink of a dra-

matic victory; but before they won it, Charles was already under heavy

pressure to call a new parliament, and it was not only military defeat that

made him give way. Three days before he arrived in York the gentry of York-

shire petitioned him for a parliament for the second time in a month, in order

to relieve the heavy burdens that their county suffered through the presence

of his forces and to redress their more general grievances. A more powerful

plea for a parliament, together with a blunt and comprehensive summary of

the nation’s grievances, starting with the war itself, was signed four days

later by twelve peers, most of whom were to play a very prominent role when

that parliament met. They were Bedford, Essex, Warwick, Saye, Brooke,

Mandeville, Rutland, Bolingbroke, Exeter, Mulgrave, Howard of Escrick,

and Hertford, who was the only future royalist among them. Their petition

was drawn up at Bedford House in the Strand, allegedly by Pym and St John;

Hampden was also present at the meeting, but only the peers signed it. They

called for an early meeting of parliament so that the authors and counsellors

The Bishops’ Wars 145

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of England’s ills could be brought to trial and punishment, and the present

war ended without bloodshed.

The only blood to be shed in battle in the Bishops’ Wars was spilt on the

very day that the twelve peers met. Conway had rightly guessed that Leslie’s

objective was Newcastle, and that he would attack its almost defenceless

southern side rather than its fortiﬁed northern approach. The Scots would

therefore cross the Tyne before developing their assault, and Conway

reckoned that they would do so by the bridge at Hexham, twenty miles

upstream. He divided his forces accordingly; but Leslie chose to ford the river at

Newburn, only six miles from Newcastle, and although a high tide delayed

his attempted crossing for some hours—long enough for the English to throw

up some hasty earthworks—he had at least three times as many men as

Conway managed to range against him in the time. The ﬁre of the English

musketeers repelled the ﬁrst attempt of the Scottish horse to ford the river, but

Leslie had at least forty cannon in skilfully concealed placements, besides

many snipers, and the sheer weight of his cannonade put the inexperienced

infantry—mostly Somerset men—to ﬂight. Some of the English cavalry,

notably those led by Commissary-General Henry Wilmot and Captain George

Vane, son of the Secretary, fought very bravely to stem the Scottish advances,

but they were overwhelmed, and the defeat became a rout. It was the ﬁrst

Scottish victory on English soil in anything more than a raid since Chevy

Chase in 1388. Newcastle being indefensible on the southern side, Conway

pulled his forces out of the city, and the Scots occupied it on the 30th. They

were relieved to ﬁnd it well stocked with victuals, for their own had almost

run out.

Newburn was a small-scale and one-sided action in comparison with what

was to come in the 1640s, but it ﬁnally determined that the royal authority

would never again be what Charles conceived it to be, in either kingdom. It

ensured too that the Scots would be a major force in the politics of both for

years to come, and that their Kirk would permanently preserve its identity,

despite the eclipse between the Restoration and the Revolution of 1688.

Leslie very soon resumed his advance, conﬁdent that there was no line that the

English could hold north of the Vale of York. What the Scots wanted, how-

ever, was not more territory than they could hold but a settlement that would

secure for them what they had fought for. They were in communication now

with some at least of the twelve petitioning peers, and the chief intermediary

seems to have been Saye’s son Nathaniel Fiennes, who wrote to them with

intelligence of the state of the king’s forces and advice as to how they and

the peers could best work to a common end. So after Leslie had occupied

Durham on 4 September, the Scots sent the king a respectful supplication,

146 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, p. 134.

ch5.y8 27/9/02 10:35 AM Page 146

asking for a treaty through which peace terms might be agreed, with the

advice of an English parliament.

Charles’s reaction to the political and military situation was very different

from that of most of his councillors. He still assumed that he could continue

the war and rally the country behind him. He did not receive the twelve peers’

petition until the day after the Scots’s request for a treaty, for it had been pre-

sented to the privy council, the greater part of which remained in London; but

he was not seriously shaken by it. Strafford wrote to him in cheerful terms,

but in a letter to his friend Sir George Radcliffe he confessed to a deep despon-

dency. The councillors in London reacted to the news of Newburn with some-

thing like panic, issuing orders for the defence of Whitehall and the Tower

against full-scale military attack. They took the twelve peers’ petition very

seriously, especially when they became aware that it was intended as a signal

for a national petitioning campaign for a parliament, and they opened con-

tacts with its authors. Some of them felt that nothing but a parliament would

meet the case, and said so, but they decided instead to advise the king to

summon a Great Council. This was an assemblage of all the peers of Eng-

land—a thoroughly archaic institution, revived only once before since the ﬁf-

teenth century, and then on the inauspicious occasion when Mary Tudor had

announced her impending marriage to Philip of Spain. But it was one way of

getting formal negotiations with the Scots moving, and in advising Charles to

bow to the inevitable, as it surely would, such an assembly would shift some

of the odium from the privy council’s shoulders.

Charles duly summoned a Great Council to meet at York on 24 September,

and when he opened it he announced that writs would be issued for a

parliament to meet on 3 November. He had been forced to realize that he

could not carry on the war without more money, and that without a parlia-

ment he could not get it. He was discouraged by the news that Edinburgh

Castle had surrendered on 15 September, after holding out against the

Covenanters since the spring. He had doubtless already made up his mind

when he received a petition for a parliament signed by 10,000 Londoners on

the 22nd. He evidently still hoped that the peers would support his quarrel

with the Scots, for he called on Traquair to restate his case against them.

But the Earl of Bristol, whose record of political independence earned him

the respect of most of his fellow peers, bravely assumed the task of bringing

him to a sense of realities. Bristol moved to appoint a committee to negotiate

with the Scots and consider their grievances, and defended the necessity

for doing so against Strafford’s protests at treating with rebels. The Great

Council, in response, named sixteen lords as commissioners to negotiate a

treaty, and of these ten proved sympathetic to the Scots’ cause. In answer to

the king’s request for assistance in raising an urgently needed £200,000,

Bristol again eased the way to a loan from the City, which had so long

The Bishops’ Wars 147

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