Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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1614. Within the gentry elite, those of the godly interest strove to advance

men of their own kind. To take one famous example, it is most unlikely that

Oliver Cromwell would have been elected for Cambridge twice in 1640,

against opposition, if he had not been on the fringe of the Earl of Warwick’s

puritan circle, for in the 1630s he had been far below the social level of the

county families and had had to work for his living.

Even more widely than in the spring elections, petitions of grievances were

drawn up in the name of the constituents and presented to their members-to-

be, sometimes after being read out and acclaimed in the county court where

the election was held. Such petitions were produced in at least eighteen

counties and in a number of towns, including Newcastle, Boston, and Scar-

borough. On the ﬁrst day of more than formal business in the Commons,

member after member rose to voice what his electors had charged him to put

before the House and to present their petitions, and more followed two days

later. This was not just a one-sided campaign by an organized opposition, for

of the sixteen members named as speaking to their constituents’ petitions by

John Rushworth, the House’s Clerk Assistant and chronicler, ten were to take

the king’s side when it came to civil war. The most striking feature of these

petitions is the priority that most of them gave to the threat to true religion,

and the depth of feeling with which they spoke of it. The other main griev-

ances that they expressed were the predictable ones: the long intermission of

parliaments, the ﬁnancial exactions and the various other breaches of the rule

of law during the personal rule. But they voiced no desire for revolutionary

change. The general assumption was that the king had been ‘seduced by evil

counsel’, and that if parliament recovered its control over taxation, ensured

its own regular meeting, and upheld the supremacy of fundamental law, all

would be well. Inside parliament a particular party had a more speciﬁc

programme, as will be seen shortly, but it too was far from revolutionary in

its aims.

For the Scots as well as the English, the meeting of the Long Parliament was

an important event, and they depended much on its goodwill. At the Treaty

of Ripon they had already secured that the ﬁnal peace terms should be ratiﬁed

by the English parliament, rather than being subject to the mere will of the

king, and that England should pay their occupying army until those terms

were settled. That meant that parliament would have to ﬁnd the money. The

Scottish commissioners appointed at Ripon had been greeted by cheering

citizens when they arrived in London at the end of October, and they had

enough friends among their English opposite numbers to be conﬁdent of the

outcome. There were eleven of them—Henderson, Wariston, and three repre-

sentatives of each lay estate—and four leading ministers accompanied them.

158 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

J. S. Morrill, ‘The making of Oliver Cromwell’, in Oliver Cromwell and the English Revo-

lution, ed. J. S. Morrill (1990), pp. 43–5.

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Parliament assigned a church to their use, and Londoners thronged to hear

the Scottish preachers, who fuelled the already strong anti-episcopal feeling

in the capital. The commissioners’ ﬁrst objective was to get the sweeping

recent acts of their own parliament ratiﬁed, and their ﬁrst public demand was

that the king should publish them in his own name. Charles tried to baulk

them by attending the negotiations in person, but they steadfastly refused to

treat in the presence of anyone except the commissioners appointed at Ripon.

To look ahead for a moment, Charles (after some wriggling) surprisingly

agreed on 3 December to publish the acts of the Scottish Parliament. Thereby

he not only bowed to the rejection of the prayer book, the abolition of epis-

copacy, and the other religious changes enacted by the Glasgow and Edin-

burgh assemblies; he accepted regular triennial parliaments, shorn of bishops

and ofﬁcers of state, and uncontrolled by compliant Lords of the Articles. He

held out longer against the demand that ‘incendiaries’—men held responsible

for inﬂaming the quarrel between him and his peoples—should be brought to

justice by their respective parliaments. The commissioners were eventually

satisﬁed with his assurance that he would not employ anyone whom the Scot-

tish parliament judged incapable—and well they might be, for it gave that

body a veto on his choice of Scottish councillors and ofﬁcials. One cannot

believe that he intended these concessions to be permanent, for they were

quite inconsistent with his stance at the start of the treaty, when he had tried

to insist that the peace terms should go no further than the Paciﬁcation of

Berwick. They probably reﬂected his bitter education in the true temper of the

Westminster parliament during the ﬁrst month of its sitting. When he realized

what a contest he had on his hands there, he wanted the Scots and their army

out of the way at all costs, because their occupation of northern England was

his English opponents’ strongest suit.

But much though the Scots had gained by the end of the year, they hoped

for much more. Their long-term aims were to persuade the English parlia-

ment to abolish episcopacy, agree with them in a common church polity, con-

fession of faith, and directory of worship, and join in imposing them on all

Charles’s three kingdoms. They overestimated, however, the amount of pos-

itive support in England for their rigid Presbyterianism, both in the country

generally and in parliament, where only about 15 peers and a core of around

130 MPs were prepared to go all the way with them. They were more realis-

tic in looking to the English parliament to put it out of the king’s power to

make war on them ever again without its consent.

The political leaders at Westminster welcomed the Scots’ support, in so far

as they had a common interest in asserting parliamentary power. They knew

how much they beneﬁted from the Scottish military presence, since Charles

was virtually denied his prerogative of dissolution while money had to be

raised to pay Leslie’s army and the English regiments facing it. But as time

Climacteric I: ‘a Posture of Defence’ 159

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went on the occupying force was perceived to be wielding a two-edged sword,

for its continuing cost could erode parliament’s popularity, and Scottish pres-

sure for some widely unpopular objectives, especially in the sphere of reli-

gion, could jeopardize the more moderate policies that the leading spirits in

both houses favoured. Between them and the Scottish commissioners there

was always a mutual wariness.

For Ireland too a great deal hung on the transactions of the Long Parlia-

ment, though the prospect of its spelling good news for the majority of the

Irish nation was bleak. A brief retrospect of Irish affairs in the earlier part of

Charles’s reign is overdue. In its ﬁrst three years, when he was at war with

Spain and France, he was aware of the danger (as was said at the time) of hav-

ing the pope as keeper of the keys of his back door, so he felt a strong need to

expand his small Irish army. Since he could not ﬁnance it from England, he

needed to draw upon the tax-paying classes in Ireland without jeopardizing

their already strained loyalty. What strained it were the burdens and disabil-

ities they bore as catholics and the threat posed to their landed property by the

policy of plantation. Traditional Irish law gave them all too little security in

their estates; what they craved was a ﬁrm title, recognized by English law. The

prospect of a deal was opened by two large meetings of nobles in 1626–7,

which were sweetened by an offer to suspend the collection of recusancy ﬁnes

from propertied catholics. The nobles and gentry were asked for voluntary

subsidies, to pay for an enlarged Irish army, and a representative delegation

of eight Old English catholics and three protestant settlers was sent to Eng-

land early in 1628 to treat. They negotiated a mixed bundle of concessions

that came to be known as the Graces, some of which eased the strains that the

law imposed on the consciences and purses of Irish catholics. The most prac-

tically important Grace, however, would have extended to Ireland the bene-

ﬁt of a recent English statute which laid down that sixty years’ possession of

an estate conferred a valid title. That would have given most Irish land-

owners the security of title that they wanted so badly. They were led to believe

that this and the other concessions would be laid before an Irish parliament,

which was scheduled to meet in November 1628.

But the Graces were strongly opposed by the Irish Privy Council, whose

members (being mainly New English) had a vested interest in extending Eng-

lish colonization into new areas, and by the Church of Ireland. Archbishop

Ussher and his fellow prelates published a statement accusing the king of

putting the people’s souls up for sale and making the state a party to the

damnation of those who died in the idolatrous Church of Rome. By the latter

part of 1628, with peace in the ofﬁng, the need for a larger Irish army ceased

to be pressing. The promised parliament was deferred and then in effect can-

celled; the recusancy laws, though little enforced, remained unrepealed, and

the Graces, unconﬁrmed, fell into limbo.

160 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

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When Sir Thomas Wentworth arrived as Lord Deputy in 1632, his imme-

diate need was to get the subsidy negotiated with the Old English renewed, so

he gave them to understand that he would use his inﬂuence with his master to

get the Graces implemented. But this was just a short-term tactic. His ultimate

aim was not only to make the government of Ireland ﬁnancially self-support-

ing but to raise a surplus for the king’s use in England. A large-scale plantation

of Connaught, which the Graces would have precluded, was an essential part

of his plans. By 1634 he felt conﬁdent enough to call an Irish parliament, the

only one to meet between 1615 and 1640. Thanks to a combination of pres-

sure, deceit, and gerrymandering, it was almost as blatantly managed as the

Scottish parliament of a year earlier. Wentworth played off the Old and the

New English against each other; the indigenous Irish were as always grossly

under-represented. He promised two sessions: the ﬁrst, limited by the king’s

commission to three weeks, was to be devoted to supplying the crown’s needs,

while the second, in the following spring, was to attend to the interests of its

subjects. The Old English, being led to expect the conﬁrmation of the Graces,

gave their support to a handsome grant of subsidies in the ﬁrst session, but

were cheated in the second. The vital sixty-year title to their land was denied

them, and a committee was set up to plan the plantation of Connaught.

After seeming to ally with the Old English in the ﬁrst session, Wentworth

made some show of siding with the New English in the second, but the

appearance was almost equally deceptive. Not without reason, he regarded

the established New English politicians as self-serving and dishonest, and he

soon confronted them head-on: ﬁrst the Earl of Cork and Lord Wilmot, and

then (after a brief tactical alliance) Lord Mountmorris. He had a genuine

aversion to corruption, factiousness, and procrastination in government, and

he had made his name as a ﬁgure of opposition in the parliaments of the

1620s. But he was convinced by the conduct of the last one that parliament

could not be trusted to provide the remedies, and thenceforward he pursued

an ideal of strong, disinterested royal government, standing above faction

and venality. He was set on establishing himself as the crown’s all-powerful

viceroy in Ireland, and he ruled with the help of able friends whom he brought

with him and of a circle of like-minded associates from the settler commun-

ity. He dealt with opposition ruthlessly through the Court of Castle Chamber

in Dublin, a prerogative agency of similar status to Star Chamber in England,

though much more deserving of Star Chamber’s posthumous reputation for

tyranny. It wore the trappings of a judicial tribunal, but it was composed of

members of the executive, and it became the arbitrary instrument whereby

anyone who thwarted the intentions of Wentworth’s government could be

ﬁned, imprisoned, or corporally punished. It did, however, display a certain

brutal impartiality, in that it was almost as ready to dispossess New English

as Old English landowners.

Climacteric I: ‘a Posture of Defence’ 161

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Wentworth certainly transformed the administration of Ireland, improv-

ing its efﬁciency, increasing its revenue, making it more amenable to royal

direction, and curbing corrupt self-interest. But he did so at the cost of alien-

ating all the main interest-groups in the country, and he sacriﬁced any claim

to the moral high ground by his own rapacious self-enrichment. The Old Irish

saw him as an enemy because of his drive to extend plantation and subjugate

them increasingly to English rule. Despite his recognition that it was not

politic to enforce recusancy ﬁnes for the present, they rightly suspected that

his ultimate goal was protestant uniformity throughout Ireland. The Old Eng-

lish shared many of their fears; they also felt robbed of their old ascendancy

and cheated over the Graces, and they resented their exclusion as catholics

from ofﬁces of proﬁt in central and provincial government (though not from

unpaid commissions such as JP and sheriff ). Most of the New English saw

Wentworth as governing through his own friends in the interests of a distant

king, and thrusting them out of the power and the pickings that they re-

garded as their right, sometimes by methods as dubious as their own.

His relations with the Church of Ireland also became strained. He found it

already a divided body when he took up ofﬁce. One part of it, a minority, was

represented by William Bedell, Bishop of Kilmore, who had come to Ireland at

56 to take up the Provostship of Trinity College Dublin, which he held from

1627 to 1629. Though English himself, Bedell appointed Irish-speaking

parish clergy whenever he could, and minimized the differences between his

church’s faith and that of the catholic population. He was denounced for his

maverick stance on a range of issues, and he fell out with Archbishop Ussher,

who had the support of the majority of the bishops—men as Calvinistic as

himself. The divergence between Ussher’s Church of Ireland and Laud’s

Church of England widened with the growing inﬂux of Scottish settlers, for

the former connived at the ordination of Presbyterian Scots to minister to

parishes where they predominated. This was anathema to Laud, and Laud

was Wentworth’s close friend and constant correspondent. John Bramhall

came to Ireland as Wentworth’s chaplain in 1633, and after being made

Bishop of Derry next year he attained a power to rival Ussher’s. It was Went-

worth’s and Bramhall’s aim to model the Church of Ireland as closely as

possible on the Laudian Church of England, and in 1634 the Lord Deputy

compelled it to accept the latter’s Thirty-Nine Articles in place of Ussher’s

distinctive Irish articles of 1615. Laud’s inﬂuence became more direct after he

was made Chancellor of Trinity College. Many Church of Ireland clergy

sensed a sinister plan to ‘draw us back again into popery’,

and gave Went-

worth most of the blame for it. In 1638–9 he seriously antagonized the

162 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Quoted by Aidan Clarke, ‘The 1641 rebellion and anti-popery in Ireland’, in Ulster 1641:

Aspects of the Rising, ed. Brian Mac Cuarta (Belfast, 1993), p. 148.

ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 162

Scottish settlers by forcing them to take an oath—the black oath, they called

it—abjuring the Scottish National Covenant and swearing allegiance and

obedience to King Charles. A fair number returned to Scotland rather than

submit to it.

Wentworth, when the king called him home, left Ireland a better governed

country than he found it, though all its disparate elements had one grievance

in common: they felt they had been subjected to a despotism. His power was

still intact, and he left an able Lord Deputy (he being now Lord Lieutenant) in

his friend Christopher Wandesford, but it could not survive the collapse of

that of his master. He counted on Ireland to make a substantial contribution,

both ﬁnancial and military, to defeating the Scottish rebellion. He was raising

a new Irish army for the purpose, and he was conﬁdent enough to persuade

the king to call a new Irish parliament for March 1640. He had paved the way

by disfranchising some of the less reliable boroughs and tampering with the

charters of others, so with the help of some heavy electoral pressure by his

henchmen the spring session went tolerably well for him. Irish fears of the

rabidly anti-popish pronouncements of the Scottish Covenanters and their

English puritan sympathizers helped him to get the subsidies he needed to pay

his new regiments. But there were already enough signs of opposition,

especially from the Old English, to give pause to a man less sanguine than

Strafford, and when parliament reassembled for a second session in June it

was already out of control. Wandesford hurriedly prorogued it until October.

The government party was disintegrating, because outside the ranks of Straf-

ford’s personal supporters most of the New English inclined more towards

the parliamentary opposition in England, as manifested by the Short Parlia-

ment, than towards the king, and many aligned themselves with the Scots.

The Irish council itself reﬂected these divisions, and could no longer be relied

upon. The interests of the Old English chimed more with the king’s, and if he

had been in a position to grant them the Graces and at least a de facto toler-

ation of their religion he could have drawn on a great deal of Irish support.

So when the Long Parliament met, the hopes and prospects of the several

interests in Ireland differed considerably, but for the present they could near-

ly all join in attacking Strafford. In the Irish parliament’s autumn session,

Wandesford was powerless to prevent the Commons from adopting a remon-

strance which amounted to a massive indictment of his master’s oppressive

rule. They sent it over to England, in deﬁance of his prohibition, in the charge

of thirteen members who spanned the whole gamut from Irish and Old Eng-

lish catholics to New English puritans and Scottish Presbyterians. They

included Sir Donagh McCarthy, who as Viscount Muskerry was to join the

Irish rebels in the name of the king, and Sir Hardress Waller, who was to ﬁght

against them as Cromwell’s major-general of foot, after signing the king’s

death warrant. The remonstrance was intended as much for the English

Climacteric I: ‘a Posture of Defence’ 163

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parliament’s ears as for the king’s, and Pym conveyed the substance of it to

the Commons on 19 November, three weeks before Charles agreed to receive

it. There was not a hint in it of the Irish separatism that the coming rebellion

would eventually unleash; it invoked Magna Carta, and claimed for Ireland

an equal right to be governed according to the fundamental laws of England.

Wandesford, Strafford’s devotedly loyal lieutenant, died on 3 December, per-

haps lucky in the hour of his going. To replace him, Charles appointed two

lords justices of considerably lesser stature, Sir John Borlase, an elderly

soldier, and Sir William Parsons, a veteran of the old Dublin administration

and a member of the Court of Castle Chamber.

The removal of Strafford was high on the agenda of the parliamentary lead-

ership at Westminster, and the evidence from Ireland was essential to the case

against him. Pym launched his impeachment on 11 November, and the Lords

promptly concurred in it. But more than four months were to pass before he

was brought to trial, and for at least the ﬁrst two of them the records of the

Commons’ proceedings leave one half wondering whether they had any clear

agenda at all. The early sittings were dominated by matters that members had

been commissioned to put before the House by their constituents, in petitions

or otherwise. This led to a lot of repetition, for the same predictable griev-

ances recurred again and again. In response, the House showed a far clearer

sense of what it disliked than of what it positively desired; many of its votes,

well into the new year, seem directed more to making its members feel better

than to ﬁnding constructive remedies for the real ills of the body politic.

The speech that best caught its mood on its ﬁrst day of free debate, judging

by its wide dissemination in manuscript and later in print, was made by Sir

Benjamin Rudyerd. Its content and its popularity stand as warnings against

any supposition that there were clear political camps in the Commons at this

stage. Rudyerd was a contemporary and friend of Ben Jonson, a poet in his

own right, and an intimate of the Earl of Pembroke, the highest ofﬁcer in the

king’s household (and incidentally the co-dedicatee of Shakespeare’s ﬁrst

folio). He himself held the very lucrative ofﬁce of Surveyor of the Court of

Wards. The complete courtier, you might think; but Rudyerd was also a

member of the Providence Company and a close friend of Pym, with whom

he had sat in all the parliaments of the 1620s. His speech reads like a reafﬁrm-

ation of the typical Jacobean values of his early manhood. Urging the

House to give precedence to religion, he began by lamenting ‘what disturb-

ance hath been brought upon the church for vain petty triﬂes’, such as the

positioning of the altar and the Book of Sports’ encouragement of dancing on

Sundays. Those who troubled it over such matters were hostile to preaching

per se, he said, ‘for I never yet heard of any but diligent preachers that were

vexed with these and the like devices . . . They would evaporate and dispirit

164 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

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the power and vigour of religion, by drawing it out into solemn, specious

formalities, into obsolete, antiquated ceremonies new furbished up’. As for

traditionalists in church and state like himself, ‘They have brought it to pass

that under the name of puritans, all our religion is branded’, for ‘whosoever

squares his actions by any rules, he is a puritan; whosoever would be

governed by the king’s laws, he is a puritan; he that will not do whatsoever

other men would have him do, he is a puritan’. Rudyerd was typical in seeing

the country’s religious and political ills as closely linked; for ‘it is a known and

practised principle, that they who would introduce another religion into the

church, must ﬁrst trouble and disorder the government of the state, that so

they may work their ends into a confusion, which now lies at the door’. The

ﬁrst remedy, therefore, must be to remove the authors of such counsels, who

‘have almost spoiled the best instituted government in the world, for sover-

eignty in a king, liberty to the subject; the proportionable temper of both

which, makes the happiest state for power, for riches, for duration’. ‘I am

zealous for a through reformation’, he concluded, ‘which I humbly beseech

this House, may be done with as much lenity, as much moderation, as the

public safety of the king and kingdom can possibly admit.’

That same day Pym also made a carefully prepared speech, two hours long.

He too put religious grievances ﬁrst, and he too maintained that the threats to

the church and to the laws and the constitution came from the same source,

though he diagnosed it more explicitly as a design to return the country to

popery. As in his famous oration to the Short Parliament, he presented a com-

prehensive exposition of the evils from which the country was suffering. He

was not speciﬁc, however, about the long-term remedies, apart from frequent

parliaments and the upholding of the rule of law. Prominent though he was

in the House’s proceedings from the start, because of his ﬂair for articulating

its sentiments and his experience of all the parliaments of the 1620s, it should

not be supposed that he yet had clear plans for the whole set of constitution-

al reforms enacted in 1641, let alone for the further demands that would lead

to civil war. His reputation as ‘King Pym’, loved or loathed, lay almost a year

ahead. His present standing owed much to his practised skill as a House-

of-Commons man, but much also to the patronage of the Earl of Bedford,

and to the conﬁdence of other puritan peers and politicians that he had earned

as a tireless and effective man of business in the Providence Company. He

was the chief representative in the Commons of a small and mainly aristo-

cratic group of men who had been working out a programme for political

settlement since the famous twelve peers had publicly petitioned for a parlia-

ment last August, and perhaps for longer. Bedford, the leading signatory, was

at the centre of the group; his associates in the Lords included Saye, Brooke,

Climacteric I: ‘a Posture of Defence’ 165

J. Rushworth, Historical Collections (8 vols., 1680–1701), III, pt. i, 24–6.

ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 165

Essex, Warwick, and Mandeville, and in the Commons Pym, St John, Hamp-

den, Denzil Holles (the Earl of Clare’s son), Nathaniel Fiennes, and William

Strode. These men had a possible channel of communication with the king

through the two Sir Henry Vanes. The elder was from February 1640 Secre-

tary of State, and his son a Treasurer of the Navy, a friend of Pym and an alto-

gether more radical ﬁgure, in both religion and politics. The members of the

group were not of one mind as regards religion, but they had close contacts

with Archbishop Ussher and with John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, who

was shortly to succeed Neile at York. Most of them would probably have

settled for a scheme of limited episcopacy that Ussher had recently worked out

in an attempt to ﬁnd common ground between Anglican and Scottish forms of

church government. More will be said about it shortly.

Deeply though some of the group cared about religion, however, their pri-

mary concerns in the winter of 1641–2 were to detach the king from the ‘evil

counsels’ that had landed the country in a fratricidal war (and in Pym’s view

threatened it with popery), to put the government in safe hands, and to make

it ﬁnancially viable. The essence of their plan was that the king should give the

key ofﬁces of state to members and associates of the group, in return for which

they would place his revenues on a sound and permanent footing. Central to

the deal was that Bedford should become Lord Treasurer and Pym Chancel-

lor of the Exchequer. Pym’s plans for making the crown solvent included an

excise, a greatly enhanced customs revenue (by bringing the rates at which

duty was levied into line with current prices), and the sale of the lands of the

deans and chapters of cathedrals, which were let at grossly undervalued rents.

The terms on which the nobility and gentry held their lands as tenants-in-chief

of the crown were to be changed, so that they would be freed of anachron-

istic burdens like wardship, but would have to pay both an annual rent and

an entry ﬁne on ﬁrst inheriting.

In principle, the scheme carried echoes of the Great Contract and in some

ways preﬁgured the Restoration settlement. But more basically it was of the

kind that parliaments had always sought to impose on monarchs whose exer-

cise of their regal powers had become intolerable, ever since parliament had

existed. The substance of all such attempts was to oblige the king to take

advice from, and entrust authority to, ministers who had the conﬁdence of his

parliament, and now as in the past it was assumed that a large role would fall

to his ‘natural’ counsellors, the heads of great noble houses with very broad

acres. Pym played an important role, of course, but his most frequent employ-

ment in these early months, before the trial of Strafford absorbed him, was

not in drafting legislation, nor in steering Commons’ committees (he sat on a

number, but others sat on more); it was in acting as a messenger from the

Commons to the Lords and as a spokesman for the former in conferences

between the two houses. He was very little involved in the introduction and

166 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

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preparation of all but one of the major constitutional acts of 1641, which

were to place unprecedented limitations on the royal prerogative and change

the whole balance between crown and parliament. The one exception, and

the only such measure to become law during the ﬁrst six months of the

parliament’s existence, was the Triennial Act, which had its third reading on

20 January. It laid down procedures which ensured that parliament would

meet in every third year at the least, whether the king summoned it or not,

though it did not set any limit to the duration of a particular parliament or

require elections at regular intervals. Regular sessions, however, were not

only nationally desired, as many petitions attested, but were essential to the

Bedford–Pym scheme, since its ﬁnancial provisions would need to be subject

to regular parliamentary renewal if its beneﬁciaries were to be sure of their

tenure of the seats of power. It should come as no surprise that further limit-

ations of royal authority were not seriously pursued until the scheme was

facing failure. If the group succeeded in gaining the dominance that it sought

in the king’s counsels, curbing his prerogative in other spheres than the ﬁnan-

cial would only limit its own power.

There were obvious obstacles in the way of the scheme’s success. Charles

would need to be convinced that it would do more for him than any other

strategy still available to him, and that was not going to be easy. He was loath

to give up his inherited right to choose his own ministers, and still more reluct-

ant to throw Strafford to the wolves. He would ﬁght hard against conceding

to parliament the ultimate authority over the church, and Ussher’s plan for it

was to be quite unacceptable to him. For their part, the Bedford–Pym con-

nection had to maintain the support of both houses of parliament if it was to

deliver the goods that it offered, and the Commons’ response to some of

Pym’s earlier ﬁnancial proposals were not encouraging. Furthermore it had to

keep up its alliance with the Scots, lest the king should make his own terms

with them behind its back and resort to another sudden dissolution. Admit-

tedly, Charles was most unlikely to satisfy the Scots’ religious demands, but

those demands were something of a millstone round the group’s own neck.

Finally, the group was not monolithic; the strains imposed by its dealings

with the king, the two houses and the Scots eventually opened breaches in its

own unity.

One almost instinctive reaction of the Commons in their early days was to

take up the hue-and-cry against papists. Among various measures against

them that they considered was a particularly unpleasant proposal by Pym

himself (thankfully not adopted) that papists should be made to wear a

Climacteric I: ‘a Posture of Defence’ 167

On Bedford’s group and its plans see Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, especially ch.

6, ‘The projected settlement of 1641’.

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