Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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distinctive mark or badge. On a more positive note they instituted the ﬁrst of

the many public fasts, when all business was nationally set aside to seek God’s

guidance in prayer, that were to punctuate the parliament’s proceedings

throughout its long life. The sermons preached to the Commons in St Mar-

garet’s church were regularly published, and provided an important channel

through which an idealized picture of the parliamentarian cause was dis-

seminated to a wider public. On this ﬁrst occasion two famous puritan

divines, Stephen Marshall and Cornelius Burges, both sounded the call of the

Reformation in danger and of a design to reimpose the Roman yoke. Burges

dwelt on Israel’s delivery from Babylon by an army from the north, a bold

allusion when the Scottish forces were still on English soil.

The Commons did not altogether neglect secular grievances. They pro-

nounced Ship Money illegal in a resounding declaration on 7 December,

afﬁrming that no plea of public danger could justify the king in raising any tax

without parliament’s consent, but they showed little urgency about facing up

to the crown’s real ﬁnancial predicament. It was easier to impeach Lord

Keeper Finch, chieﬂy for his leading part in the Ship Money judgment, and six

other judges (who were never brought to trial). But the Laudian church and the

threat of popery remained the most popular targets. The canons of 1640 were

condemned without a dissentient voice on 9 December, though the three-day

debate preceding the vote did hint at some of the religious differences to

come, especially as to where the power to legislate for the national church

ultimately lay. Pym initiated the impeachment of Laud himself on 18 Decem-

ber, and the two bishops who had executed his policies most zealously, Wren

and Piers, were impeached a few days later. More than three years were to

pass before Laud was brought to trial, and the other two never were, though

Wren was to spend nineteen years in the Tower of London. An earlier victim

of impeachment was Secretary Windebank, for signing letters saving priests

and other catholics from the rigour of the laws, though he had probably done

no more than the king and queen instructed him to do. He ﬂed abroad rather

than face trial (as did Finch), and was received into the Roman Catholic

church shortly before he died in Paris in 1646.

The Commons took special pleasure in rehabilitating Laud’s victims.

Within a week of their ﬁrst meeting they took up the petitions of Prynne,

Burton, and Bastwick, and proceeded not only to release them but to declare

their Star Chamber convictions illegal and to vote them reparations (which

were never paid). The triumphal reception that greeted Prynne and Burton in

late November (Bastwick followed a fortnight later), both along the road to

168 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (1981), pp. 92–4; Russell, Fall of

the British Monarchies, pp. 174–5. On the fast sermons generally, see H. R. Trevor-Roper, ‘The

fast sermons in the Long Parliament’, in his Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (1967),

and J. R. Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament (Princeton, 1969).

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London and still more on their arrival there, testiﬁed to a genuine popular

hatred for the repressive side of the Caroline church and Caroline govern-

ment. This surfaced again in an uglier manner when Laud was transferred to

the Tower. A crowd gathered as soon as he was identiﬁed and reviled him all

along the way, threatening to kill him in his coach; the Lieutenant of the

Tower had to call out the yeomen of the guard to quell the riot.

Another prisoner to be swiftly freed was young John Lilburne, the future

leader of the Levellers. He had fallen foul of Star Chamber in 1638 for smug-

gling Bastwick’s most notorious anti-episcopal tract to Holland, to be print-

ed there for redistribution in England. He had been ﬁned £500, far beyond his

capacity to pay, and ﬂogged all the way from the Fleet prison to Westminster,

tied to the back of a cart. Despite receiving (at his own guess) two hundred

lashes, he had still found strength to harangue a sympathetic crowd until he

was gagged. Back in the Fleet, he had been kept in irons ever since, even

through weeks of serious illness. The member who pleaded his case to the

House was then probably less well known in London than Lilburne was;

Sir Philip Warwick, proud of being as well dressed as a Lord Treasurer’s sec-

retary ought to be, noted disdainfully this backbencher’s plain ill-cut suit, his

none too clean linen (with a spot or two of blood on it to suggest that his

‘swollen and reddish countenance’ had had a rough shave), his ‘sharp and

untunable’ voice, and (to Warwick’s mind) his exaggeratedly fervid elo-

quence.

The speaker was Oliver Cromwell, making his ﬁrst speech in the

Long Parliament and perhaps the second that he had ever made at Westmin-

ster, the only previous one on record having been in 1629. His championship

of Lilburne might appear ironic in the light of the later antagonism between

them, but there is no reason to suppose that he ever regretted it.

The Commons spent a great deal of time during November and December

in considering petitions concerning particular acts of injustice by the courts

and alleged oppressions by individual churchmen, so many indeed that there

was a danger of their clogging national business. But not all petitions secured

a favourable response, especially when they aroused suspicion of popular or

factional pressure. The most famous case of this kind was the original petition

for the abolition of episcopacy ‘root and branch’, which was brought to

Westminster by about 1,500 London citizens, headed by two aldermen. Sev-

eral hundred of them crowded into Westminster Hall, to the scandal of Sec-

retary Vane, while Alderman Isaac Pennington, one of London’s four MPs,

presented it to the House. It was the work of a group of radical London min-

isters, and its sponsors had been gathering signatures to it for weeks. They

were hand in glove with the Scots; Robert Baillie, the best known of the

Climacteric I: ‘a Posture of Defence’ 169

Sir Philip Warwick, Memoirs of the Reign of King Charles I (1701), quoted in W. C. Abbott,

The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (4 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1937–47), I, 121.

ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 169

chaplains who accompanied the Scottish commissioners, had been shown it

almost as soon as they arrived in London. The language of the Root and

Branch Petition was strong and its demands uncompromising. It blamed the

government of the church by archbishops and bishops, and their claim to an

immediate calling from Christ, for all the evils of the time, and not only for

the religious ones such as the silencing of godly ministers, the ban on the

preaching of predestination, the profusion of idle and ignorant parish clergy,

the censorship of godly books and the free circulation of lewd and subversive

ones, the unchecked increase of popery, priests, and Jesuits, the pushing of the

Church of England’s liturgy and ceremonies ever closer to those of Rome, the

profanation of the sabbath, the rottenness of the church courts, and the abuse

of excommunication; it even blamed the bishops for Ship Money, impositions,

and monopolies. In a ﬁnal paragraph that may have been added by Baillie it

warned that

The present wars and commotions happened between his majesty and his subjects of

Scotland . . . will not only go on, but also increase to an utter ruin of all, unless the

prelates with their demandings be removed out of England who as we . . . do verily

believe and conceive have occasioned the quarrel.

The Root and Branch Petition was not welcome to Pym and his allies, for

they knew how divisive it would be. The Scots were urged by their friends in

parliament to help hold it back, at least until Strafford’s trial was sure of a

successful conclusion. But while bishops survived in England they did not

believe that their own church order was safe, and they were bent on convert-

ing England to it; Root and Branch could clear the way. They mistook the

religious temper of the English nation, however, and overestimated the sup-

port they enjoyed among it, for London was not England. Whereas most

Scots were anxious to guard against the subjection of the spiritual authority

to the civil, most Englishmen were temperamentally suspicious of clerical

power as such. In a phrase that was to be much repeated, Bedford’s son-in-

law George Digby warned the Commons against exchanging a bishop in

every diocese for a pope in every parish.

The Laudian church as it stood in 1640–1 found no defenders in the House,

but between that extreme and the Scottish Presbyterian model, there were

three main positions among the members. Many believed like Digby and

Lord Falkland that episcopacy should not be destroyed but reconstituted, by

bringing bishops back to what they had been under Queen Elizabeth and

asserting parliament’s ultimate authority over church matters. In the country

at large, that position probably commanded the widest support, though not

the most vociferous. Then there were the Erastian abolitionists who wanted

170 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, pp. 137–44.

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to replace the bishops’ authority, not with presbyteries and synods but with a

mainly lay commission in each diocese, appointed by parliament. This was

what the Root and Branch Bill was to propose, when it was eventually intro-

duced in May 1641. Thirdly there was the scheme devised by Archbishop

Ussher, whose profound erudition and personal goodness even Strafford had

acknowledged. Drawing on the practice of the earliest churches, he aimed to

build bridges between the Anglican and Scottish forms of church govern-

ment. He proposed that parish ministers should be assisted by elders, who

could be the long-familiar churchwardens and sidesmen, and whose duty it

would be to present any who lived scandalously for admonition and reproof.

In every rural deanery the ministers of the constituent parishes were to meet

in a monthly synod under a suffragan, and exercise the power of excommu-

nication. Twice a year, representatives of the monthly synods were to meet in

a diocesan synod under a bishop or superintendent (‘call him what you will’,

wrote Ussher), and in every third year the provincial synods of Canterbury

and York should combine in a national council, sitting in time of parliament

as convocation did. It was ingenious, for it offered close parallels with Scot-

land’s consistories, presbyteries, provincial synods, and general assembly,

while preserving an episcopal framework. But it provided for no lay partici-

pation above parish level, and anyway the Scots would have no truck with

‘limited prelacy’; one of them published a tract against it in January. Charles

for his part would never have submitted to an ecclesiastical polity that cut him

out as Supreme Governor, or countenanced bishops in whose choice he had

no say. ‘A purely clerical compromise’, Professor Trevor-Roper has called it;

‘a combination, at the expense of the laity, of new Presbyter and old Priest’.

Nevertheless it was very seriously considered, and it would surface again

more than once during the next twenty years.

The Commons were much divided as to whether to receive the Root and

Branch Petition at all. They ﬁnally agreed to consider it on 17 December, but

what with pressure of business, and perhaps a reluctance to grasp the nettle,

they did not actually do so until 8 February. Before then, the London petition

proved to be the harbinger of a campaign of similar petitions from the

counties—thirteen of them by the end of January and six more later in the

year. Most came from areas where ‘Arminian’ bishops had been particularly

zealous. So unpopular were those prelates that some people signed the

petitions who did not really want to see episcopacy totally abolished. Sir

Edward Dering, for instance, the knight of the shire who presented

Kent’s petition, had already presented an earlier anti-episcopal petition in

November and was to introduce the Root and Branch Bill in May; yet by

Climacteric I: ‘a Posture of Defence’ 171

Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh’, in his Catholics, Anglicans

and Puritans (1989 ed.), p. 152.

ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 171

November 1641 he was singing the praises of ‘good’ bishops, especially the

‘incomparable’ Ussher.

Hoping to check the anti-episcopal pressure, and at the same time to has-

ten parliament’s overdue provision for the two armies and the navy, Charles

addressed the two Houses at Whitehall on 25 January. He would concur with

them, he said, in investigating all innovations in church and state, for his

intention was ‘to reduce all matters of religion and government to what they

were in the purest time of Queen Elizabeth’s days’.

But he deplored the wave

of root-and-branch petitions, and he would never consent to depriving the

bishops of their votes in the Lords, let alone to abolishing them; nor would he

assent to the Triennial Bill while it prescribed means for assembling parlia-

ment in default of his summons. The trouble with Charles, now and later, was

that his ‘never’ too often turned out to mean ‘not until the temperature gets

hotter’.

He had just aroused angry suspicion by reprieving a Jesuit priest named

John Goodman, who had been sentenced to death under the harsh Eliza-

bethan law that made it treason for members of his order simply to be on Eng-

lish soil; it was suspected that Charles was deliberately creating a precedent

for future reprieves of Strafford and Laud. This not only provoked a clamour

for Goodman’s execution, but caused the City to suspend a vital £60,000

loan, and spurred the Commons into one of their periodic drives against

catholics in the royal entourage. They demanded the banishment from court

of Sir Kenelm Digby, Wat Montagu, Toby Matthew, the queen’s secretary

Sir John Winter, and the papal nuncio Count Rossetti, who had succeeded

Con late in 1639. They sent for the ﬁrst two and examined them on their part

in raising the so-called queen’s contribution to the Scottish war. Outside par-

liament Henrietta Maria herself was coming under attack from the godly

party. Understandably upset by the nasty scriptural parallels with which they

insulted her, she set afoot a tactical rumour that she would soon be leaving for

France.

At this point Charles began to make concessions, partly to take the heat out

of the situation, partly to sow divisions among his opponents. He agreed to

leave Goodman to the justice of parliament, which declared itself satisﬁed

and left him to lie in prison, where he died in 1645. On 29 January he appoint-

ed St John to the ofﬁce of Solicitor-General, and during the next four inter-

esting weeks it looked as though the Bedford connection’s scheme for a

settlement might be coming to fruition. Two or three days later Bedford, Saye,

and Pym were reported to have been closeted with the queen, who bewildered

the Commons on 4 February with a cordial message, assuring them that

172 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Rushworth, Historical Collections, III, pt. i, 426; D. Hirst, ‘The defection of Sir Edward

Dering 1640–1’, Historical Journal XV (1972).

Key passages of the speech are in Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, pp. 17–18.

ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 172

Rossetti was about to return to Rome, excusing her part in persuading

catholics to contribute to the Scottish war, and promising to do all she could

to promote a good understanding between her husband and the parliament.

Then on the 16th Charles unexpectedly gave his assent to the Triennial Bill,

with its offensive clauses intact, and three days later he created seven new

privy councillors. They included six of the twelve peers who had petitioned

for a parliament, among them such leading promoters of the settlement

scheme as Bedford, Saye, Essex, and Mandeville. Charles is said to have hated

appointing them, but to have been persuaded to it by Hamilton. It was an

astute move, calculated to drive a wedge between these powerful men and the

Scots, split the ranks of the Root-and-Branch party, and maybe save Strafford

from the scaffold. But despite persistent rumours that Bedford was to receive

the crucial ofﬁce of Lord Treasurer he never did, nor did Pym get the Exche-

quer. Promotion to the privy council brought little power, because from now

on Charles rarely summoned it.

There were other signs that his tactic was to divide Bedford’s group rather

than suffer a loss of political initiative by submitting to it. He bowed to anti-

papist pressure by issuing a proclamation, which his new councillors signed,

banishing all priests and Jesuits, but the Commons were clamouring for all

recusants to be removed from the court, including the queen’s servants, and

speciﬁcally Winter. Bedford’s allies in both Houses were disunited on the

matter. They split again over the larger issue of Root and Branch. After the

moderate episcopalians had tried and failed to get it rejected out of hand, the

Commons at last took the London petition into consideration on 8 and 9 Feb-

ruary. At the end of long and inconclusive debates they referred it to a com-

mittee, but reserved the central question of whether to preserve or abolish

episcopacy to the House itself. Strafford was another source of division, some

of Bedford’s group supporting his pleas for more time to prepare his case,

others pressing that he should be tried for his life forthwith. He was given a

further week, and 24 February was appointed for him to present his answer

to the charges against him in the House of Lords. Charles saw him privately

for an hour before the hearing began; then he unexpectedly took his seat on

the throne in the Upper House, and by his solicitous, even tender demeanour

towards the accused man he made his sympathies abundantly clear. The

Lords were incensed, and on his departure they declared their proceedings in

his presence to be void and went through them all again. The king’s demon-

stration, however, gave notice that it would be difﬁcult for his new council-

lors, all of them peers, to vote for Strafford’s death and keep their places.

On the same day that Strafford appeared before the Lords, the Scots, to

whom the Commons had voted a ‘Brotherly Assistance’ of £300,000, played

into the king’s hands by clumsily intervening. A paper drafted by Henderson,

demanding the execution of Strafford and the abolition of episcopacy in

Climacteric I: ‘a Posture of Defence’ 173

ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 173

England, was circulated to members of parliament, but it was leaked to a sta-

tioner and publicly sold as a pamphlet. The Scots were seen trying to apply

rather gross pressure on their English allies, especially the new privy council-

lors, to choose between the king and themselves. Charles was understandably

furious and said that the Scottish commissioners deserved to be hanged as

traitors. Their paper won them no friends in the Commons either, for the

debate on it revealed a new strength of anti-Scottish and anti-puritan feeling.

Members like Edward Hyde, Sir John Culpepper, Sir Ralph Hopton, and

George Digby, who had been eager for the redress of the grievances of the

1630s, were beginning to display the sentiments that would gradually turn

them into constitutional royalists. For his part Charles, who had seemed so

isolated during the parliament’s ﬁrst two months, began to see a better way

out of his troubles than by bending to ministers not of his choosing and to

policies not to his liking. He glimpsed the possibility of cultivating a party

that would unite old loyalists with men who had been moderate opponents—

a party with the common bonds of love for the historic Church of England,

traditional loyalty to the throne, attachment to the ancient constitution, dis-

like of the Scots, and belief in social order. With the latter went a revulsion

against riotous demonstrations, threatening petitions, fanatical iconoclasm,

and other manifestations of popular pressure.

As for the bishops, the Commons voted on 10 March that they should be

deprived of their legislative and judicial role and be barred from secular

employment, which plainly implied that they were not to be abolished alto-

gether. But the question remained deeply divisive, and it was not until 1 May

that they sent a bill to exclude bishops from parliament up to the Lords. It met

with predictable hostility there, and it sowed dissension between the two

Houses just when the prosecutors of Strafford most needed to hold them on a

common course.

But the case of Strafford in itself opened divisions between the Houses and

within each; indeed it split the Bedford–Pym connection. Scarcely anyone dis-

agreed that he had to be removed from the political stage, and permanently;

for his Irish army posed a real threat while the king persisted in refusing to dis-

band it, and if ever Charles saw a chance to cast off parliament’s shackles

through a sudden dissolution, Strafford could quickly become his all-power-

ful minister again. But had he committed treason, and did he deserve death?

He was not the apostate from parliamentary constitutionalism or the rene-

gade exponent of royal absolutism that the old Whig historians used to por-

tray, but he had fallen considerably short of his own self-projection as the

disinterested executant of ﬁrm, benevolent, incorruptible, faction-free royal

government. His arrogance and self-righteousness had made him many en-

emies in his native Yorkshire before ever he went to Ireland; the same qual-

ities, and the record of his ruthless treatment of his Irish opponents, made him

174 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 174

many more after his return. The Lords had proposed on 18 February that he

should be removed from all his public employments, but that was widely felt

not to go far enough. Permanent disqualiﬁcation from ofﬁce might have been

a solution, or even banishment. But the Bedford–Pym group was divided as to

whether the possibility of sparing his life might be used as a lever to exact fur-

ther concessions from the king, or whether his crimes were so heinous (or the

danger he still posed so great) that death was the only appropriate penalty. If

that was the case, the charge had to be treason, and a conviction for treason

was what the Commons determined to press for.

The weakness of the prosecutors’ case was that nothing Strafford had done

constituted treason by any unforced interpretation of the law of England.

Treason was a crime against the king, in whom the state was personiﬁed:

making war upon him, or plotting his death, or siding with his enemies. But

Strafford had had the king’s total trust, and his offence was that he had

sought not to diminish his master’s authority but to raise it too high. It was

just possible to argue, as had been done against Empson and Dudley when the

young Henry VIII was courting popularity, that making a division between

the king and his people amounted to treason, but that was a charge that could

be retorted on Strafford’s accusers. Pym’s way round the problem was to con-

tend that there was a higher treason than that, classically deﬁned in the statute

of 1352, against the monarch: a treason against the constitution itself, the

‘fundamental laws’ in which the king’s powers were enshrined and demar-

cated. Strafford’s policies and practices (Pym argued), by perverting those

laws, made the king the fountain not of justice but of injustice, not of peace

but of confusion, not of protection but of public misery and calamity. ‘This

treason would have dissolved the frame and being of the commonwealth’, he

maintained; ‘it is a universal, a catholic treason.’

So although the crimes

charged against Strafford might not singly constitute treason, they did so

cumulatively when considered together, and amounted to a so-called ‘con-

structive treason’. This was dangerous doctrine, and Strafford exposed its

legal and intellectual ﬂaws with searing eloquence. But the case against him

was fuelled more by hatred and fear than by law or reason, and men as dif-

ferent as Arundel, Essex, Pembroke, and the elder Vane were scarcely less

eager than Pym to see him dead.

His trial eventually opened on 22 March, and it was designed to be a great

semi-public spectacle. Impeachment was a process in which the whole body

of lay peers acted as judges (but not the bishops, when the charge carried the

death penalty), and a committee of ‘managers’ prosecuted on behalf of the

Commons. It was normally conducted in the House of Lords, but for this trial

the much larger space of Westminster Hall had been prepared with elaborate

Climacteric I: ‘a Posture of Defence’ 175

Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, pp. 191–3.

ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 175

carpentry. Steep banks of benches on either side accommodated the Com-

mons, the Scots commissioners, some other privileged persons, and anyone

else who could ﬁght their way in. In the central enclosure the peers lined either

side, in two ranks. There was a raised throne at one end, but the king did not

occupy it because the peers were not prepared to proceed if he was formally

present. He and the queen watched the proceedings from a box, just behind

the throne and a little to one side; a lattice had been inserted to screen them

from view, but Charles promptly removed it. At the opposite end, Strafford

stood or sat in a dock on a raised platform, with four of his secretaries behind

him and several lawyers, whom he was allowed to consult on points of law.

The new Lord Keeper, Edward Littleton, should have presided, but he was

unwell, and the Lords chose Arundel to take his place. His chair was immedi-

ately below the throne, with the judges seated in front of him to give him such

legal advice as he might need.

The chairman of the Commons’ managers was Bulstrode Whitelocke, a

35-year-old lawyer who was to hold high ofﬁce under the Commonwealth,

but it was Pym who opened their case with a scalding attack on Strafford’s

alleged tyranny and corruption in Ireland. Strafford, however, defended him-

self with extraordinary eloquence and skill, though he was far from well. As

the days went by his unrufﬂed courage, matched against the dubious rhetoric

and the harassing tactics of his prosecutors, won him some sympathy. By

5 April, when they came to what they regarded as their deadliest charge, his

alleged advice a year earlier that the king had an army in Ireland which he

might ‘employ here to reduce this kingdom’, they had already lost some

ground. Secretary Vane, their chief witness, stuck to his allegations that Straf-

ford had indeed spoken the words (which was very likely true) and that by

‘this kingdom’ he had meant England, not Scotland (which was palpably

false). But Vane proved to be their sole witness, for the other councillors pres-

ent at the time remembered Strafford’s words differently, and for proof of

treason the law required two. Thereafter every day that passed seemed to

make it more uncertain that the peers would ﬁnd him guilty.

Then on 10 April the case was given an entirely new direction by Sir Arthur

Haselrig, a newcomer to parliament in 1640 and still in his early thirties, but

a brother-in-law of Lord Brooke and already displaying the political thrust

that would carry him high in the next dozen years. That day, without con-

sulting the managers of the impeachment, he introduced a bill of attainder

against Strafford. Whereas impeachment was a judicial process, requiring

proof, an act of attainder was a piece of legislation; it simply declared the

accused to be guilty and enacted, by the authority of King, Lords, and Com-

mons, that he should suffer the appropriate penalties. Haselrig’s bill indicted

Strafford for ‘endeavouring to subvert the ancient and fundamental laws and

government . . . of England and Ireland, and to introduce an arbitrary and

176 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 176

tyrannical government against law.’

Speciﬁc offences, which his prosecu-

tors had been hard put to substantiate, were stated as facts, though very sum-

marily, for the whole bill ﬁlls less than two printed pages. The attainder was

in effect a confession of the impeachment’s failure, and Pym and Hampden

were at ﬁrst among those who opposed it, though Pym came round to it when

he became convinced that there was no other sure way of bringing Strafford

to the scaffold. The Lords were greatly angered by it, and carried on with the

trial in Westminster Hall. There on the 13th Strafford made a noble ﬁnal

speech in his own defence, and once more rebutted his accusers’ depiction of

him as a ruthless promoter of unfettered royal absolutism. ‘I ever did incul-

cate this [he said]: the happiness of a kingdom consists in [the] just poise of

the king’s prerogative and the subject’s liberty, and that things should never

be well till these went hand in hand together.’

Pym drew on his own best elo-

quence in reply, but there were moments when he and Strafford seemed in

principle not so very far apart, as when he said: ‘if the prerogative of the king

overwhelm the liberty of the people it will be turned into tyranny; if liberty

undermine the prerogative, it will grow into anarchy’.

Strafford’s fate, however, hung not so much on his principles as on the

emotions aroused by his political role in the last two years. It was determined

by the bill of attainder, which passed its third reading on 21 April by 204

votes to 59. It may seem surprising that on a matter of such intense public

interest little more than half the House was present, whereas a few weeks earl-

ier 379 members had voted on whether to send an obscure clergyman to the

Tower for saying from the pulpit ‘From lay puritans and lay parliaments good

Lord deliver us’.

The explanation is that many members absented them-

selves, either because they felt (as we know Hampden did) that to kill Straf-

ford without convicting him by due process of law was an abuse of

parliamentary power, or because they were afraid of exposing themselves by

voting against the bill. Their fear was not unreasonable, for the names of the

‘Noes’ were posted up around London and Westminster under the heading

‘These are the Straffordians, the betrayers of their country’. A crowd of

10,000 brought a petition to the House for his execution. Pym himself took

the bill up to the Lords.

Various moves were afoot behind the scenes to save Strafford’s life. Bed-

ford was quite ready to bargain over it, but his associates in the former settle-

ment scheme, which ﬁnally perished now if it was not dead already, were

utterly divided. Saye was being tempted with the very lucrative ofﬁce of

Master of the Wards, which Pym’s ﬁnancial plans would have abolished, and

he was invested with it a few days after Strafford’s death. Essex by contrast

Climacteric I: ‘a Posture of Defence’ 177

Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, pp. 156–8.

Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, pp. 193–5.

Ibid., p. 196.

Quoted in Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, p. 279.

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