Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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would have no compromise; ‘stone dead hath no fellow’, he said.

Pym is

reported to have been twice with the king during April, and when Cottington

resigned the Chancellorship of the Exchequer on the 27th he was very hotly

tipped to succeed him. He is said to have actually been offered the post but to

have declined it. He could hardly do otherwise. He had deeply and publicly

committed himself to securing Strafford’s death, and reports of his contacts

with the court were damaging his standing in the House. He also knew that

until Strafford’s head had fallen the City would never advance the loans that

the next Chancellor would desperately need.

Charles was intensely anxious to save his minister, and wrote to him on 23

April, promising ‘that, upon the word of a king, you shall not suffer in life,

honour or fortune’.

Unfortunately he was dabbling in a conspiracy whose

ultimate effect was to strengthen the clamour for Strafford’s death, even

though Strafford had no part in it. There had been growing discontent among

the ofﬁcers of the king’s army in the north over the chronic shortage of pay,

the unsympathetic attitude (as they saw it) of the House of Commons and the

civil courts, and the very doubtful legality of martial law, without which they

could hardly hold their forces together. They drew up a petition stating their

grievances on 20 March, and sent it to their sick general Northumberland in

London by one Captain Chudleigh. This ofﬁcer was taken to see the queen,

and was drawn into what at ﬁrst were two distinct plots. Both were well

known to the king by the end of March. One, which he fully supported, was

managed by Northumberland’s brother Henry Percy, and the gist of it was

that the army should put pressure on the parliament by petitioning it for the

Irish army to be kept up, for episcopacy to be preserved, and for the king’s

revenue to be made good. The other, a courtiers’ conspiracy involving Henry

Jermyn, the poet Sir John Suckling, William Davenant (the future pioneer of

English opera), and Sir George Goring, was a wilder scheme to seize control of

the Tower and procure Strafford’s escape, while simultaneously bringing the

army south. Charles was highly interested, but other courtiers were opposed

to this plot, and when Chudleigh, back in Yorkshire, sounded a meeting of

ofﬁcers at Boroughbridge on 3 April the response was generally cool. Lieu-

tenant-General Sir John Conyers, the senior ofﬁcer in the north, got wind of

it and responsibly reported what he knew to Northumberland. The Com-

mons were soon informed, and voted on 6 April that anyone who moved the

army without parliament’s advice and consent would be accounted ‘enemies

to king and state’. At about this time Goring revealed ‘the main of the busi-

ness’ to Saye, Bedford, and Mandeville, among others; Charles reportedly

countermanded the wilder plot when he heard of the poor response to it at

178 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, ed. W. D. Macray (6 vols.,

Oxford, 1888), III, 318–21.

Quoted in Gardiner, History of England, IX, 340.

ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 178

Boroughbridge, but it has been plausibly suggested that he encouraged Gor-

ing (who lost none of his favour) to leak it to the parliamentary leaders, in

order to warn them that if they pursued Strafford to death they ran the risk of

a military coup.

If this was indeed Charles’s tactic, he was playing with ﬁre.

Although the design to bring the army south was in abeyance by the time

Strafford was attainted, the plot to seize the Tower remained very much alive.

Three days after the Commons passed the attainder, Suckling set about

recruiting a hundred men under Captain Billingsley, an ofﬁcer of Strafford’s

Irish army—not a large force, but sufﬁcient to overcome the forty Yeomen

Warders of the Tower. On 28 April a plot for Strafford’s escape was discov-

ered; a ship had been chartered and was waiting for him at Tilbury. Three

days later the Commons were summoned to the Lords’ chamber to hear the

king address his parliament. They feared a sudden dissolution, but Charles

was intent only on saving Strafford. He gave his minister’s judges certain

assurances, including a belated undertaking never to employ Strafford again

in any capacity (which might have been helpful earlier in the year); then he

declared that his conscience would never allow him to assent to the bill of

attainder. Since the Lords had not yet passed the bill, he was in effect claim-

ing that his royal conscience was a bar to the will of parliament. To Laud’s sad

thinking, this personal intervention brought his friend’s death nearer.

Charles made an even worse misjudgement early on 3 May when he

ordered Billingsley and his men into the Tower. The Lieutenant, Sir William

Balfour, refused to admit them, and some watchful citizens who witnessed

the incident promptly alerted the Lords, who immediately sent the Earl of

Newport, Master of the Ordnance, to secure the Tower. Charles was forced

to back down and discharge Billingsley, while the peers who assembled that

day to consider the bill of attainder had to pass through a huge crowd of

mainly respectable, well-to-do London citizens, shouting ‘justice and execu-

tion!’ The debate on Strafford’s fate could hardly have opened under more

inauspicious circumstances. When on the same day Alderman Pennington

reported Billingsley’s failed attempt to the Commons, Pym promptly made

capital of it. It was part of a design by the papists to overthrow the kingdom,

he said, and members must bind themselves to maintain the liberties of the

subject against any such conspiracies. Others, notably Henry Marten,

invoked the Elizabethan precedent of an oath and bond of association. A

committee was set up to draft what became one of the key documents of the

next year and more, the so-called Protestation. Reported, debated, amended,

and passed that same day, it was intended to be subscribed not only by

members of both Houses but by men of goodwill throughout the kingdom.

Climacteric I: ‘a Posture of Defence’ 179

Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, pp. 291–3; C. Russell, ‘The ﬁrst Army Plot of 1641’,

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, XXXVIII (1988), esp. pp. 100–1.

ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 179

Deploring the designs of priests and Jesuits to undermine the established

protestant religion, the preamble alleged that there still were ‘endeavours to

subvert the fundamental laws of England and Ireland, and to introduce the

exercise of an arbitrary and tyrannical government by most wicked counsels,

practices, plots and conspiracies’. The core of the Protestation was a solemn

vow to maintain and defend ‘the true reformed protestant religion expressed

in the doctrine of the Church of England’, the king’s person and estate, and

the powers and privileges of parliaments. Those who took it pledged them-

selves to bring to condign punishment all who did anything contrary to these

ends, and to promote union and peace between the three kingdoms.

Its pro-

moters conceived it as almost an equivalent to the Scottish National

Covenant, and soon afterwards passed a bill to impose it on all Englishmen.

The Lords eventually rejected this, but all the protestant peers present took

the Protestation on 4 May, and it was soon circulating widely for signatures,

ﬁrst in London, than further aﬁeld.

A rougher mob, armed with swords and staves, noisily beset the Upper

House on the 4th and threatened those lords whom they took to be Strafford-

ians. But the peers were very angry over the army plot, and let the Commons

know that only their unwillingness to act under crude popular pressure was

holding up their ﬁnal decision on the attainder bill. That same day, Strafford

wrote a brave and moving letter to the king, releasing him from his promise

and beseeching him to pass the bill, rather than incur ‘the many ills that may

befall your sacred person and the whole kingdom should yourself and parlia-

ment part less satisﬁed one with the other than is necessary for the preserva-

tion both of king and people’.

There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his

gesture, but he probably hoped that Charles would divulge the letter to the

parliament, and there is some evidence that he advised him to do so. Perhaps

there was just a hope that the Lords might be moved by such magnanimity in

a fellow peer, but the advice, if given, was not acted upon.

The tumults around the Palace of Westminster continued during the next

few days. On the 5th Pym disclosed all he knew of the army plot to the Com-

mons, and embellished it with unfounded statements that French troops were

massing near the Channel coast, allegedly with Portsmouth as their objective.

Since Goring had recently been fortifying Portsmouth, and the queen had

packed all her plate with the intention of taking refuge there from the threat-

ening Londoners, the House’s reaction came close to panic. When a board in

the gallery broke with a sharp crack, a member cried that he smelt gun-

powder and set off an ignominious rush for the lobby; the spreading wave

of rumour that ensued brought out the City trained bands. In sober fact, Car-

180 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Text in Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, pp. 155–6.

Wedgwood, Thomas Wentworth, pp. 373–5, where almost all of Strafford’s letter is

printed.

ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 180

dinal Richelieu was totally unsympathetic to Henrietta Maria’s appeals for

French assistance to her husband and had strongly advised her not to return

to France. But the army plot fever was inﬂamed next day by the news that

Percy, Jermyn, Suckling, and Davenant had ﬂed; the ﬁrst three got away to

France, but Davenant was captured. In those febrile days of early May both

Houses, but especially the Lords, began to take direct executive action in

areas that traditionally lay ﬁrmly within the king’s prerogative. They dis-

posed of the trained bands and the command of the king’s ships, and they

secured Portsmouth, which Goring handed over to parliament’s commission-

ers. They also requested changes in the Lords Lieutenant, to ensure that the

militia should be in safe hands. For the ﬁrst time they sensed a threat of civil

war in the air, and their reactions anticipated much of what they were to do

in 1642. Such was the fear that Charles would resort to a sudden dissolution,

rather than assent to the attainder, that a bill providing that the present

parliament (and only the present one) could not be dissolved or adjourned

without its own consent was rushed through all its stages in both Houses in

four days.

There was a considerable exodus from the Lords before they gave the

attainder bill its third reading on Saturday 8 May. The catholic peers had

ceased to attend after refusing the Protestation, and the bishops had with-

drawn on a motion by Williams of Lincoln. Others who might have voted

against the bill may have been deterred by the intimidatory mobs, others

again by a more responsible fear of a general breakdown of order if parlia-

ment tore itself apart on the issue. London was still in a violent mood, gripped

that day by a false report that a French ﬂeet had seized Jersey and Guernsey.

Only the French ambassador dissuaded the queen from ﬂeeing immediately,

by warning her that she was sure to be stopped on her way to Portsmouth

(neither of them knew that it was already in parliamentary hands). The Lords

passed the attainder bill, according to Secretary Vane’s contemporary report,

by 51 votes to 9; a later account gave the ﬁgures as 26 to 19.

Either way it

was a thin house, for there were nearly 120 peers in England, including

minors, and some recent attendances had been much higher.

The parliamentary delegation that took the bill to the king for his assent

was followed by an armed multitude, and on and off during that weekend

Whitehall Palace was beset with threatening mobs, shouting for Strafford’s

blood. Charles agonized for long before coming to a decision. On his moral

dilemma he received conﬂicting advice from the ﬁve bishops whom he

Climacteric I: ‘a Posture of Defence’ 181

Russell in Fall of the British Monarchies, pp. 296–8, cautiously accepts 51: 9; Fletcher in

Outbreak of the English Civil War, p. 14, opts for 26: 19, as do several other historians. The

latter ﬁgure derives from A briefe and perfect relation of the answers and replies of Thomas Earle

of Strafford (1647), p. 85. The evidence of the Lords’ Journal is lacking because the record of the

vote was expunged at the Restoration.

ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 181

consulted, but most of the privy council, who found him in tears when they

met at his summons on the Sunday, advised him to give way. On the Monday

he did so, moved by fear for the safety of his terriﬁed wife and his children. It

lay on his conscience for the rest of his life.

Strafford received the news with apparent shock, which suggests that he

had really hoped that his letter to the king might save him. He asked in vain

for a last meeting with Laud, but sent him a message by Ussher, bidding him

be at his window when he went by on his way to the scaffold. As the proces-

sion passed, he bowed low to his old friend, who managed to raise his hands

in prayer and blessing before falling to the ground in a faint. Strafford met his

death on Tower Hill, before a hostile crowd of 100,000, with that touch of

the heroic that had characterized the best parts of his ﬂawed career. What

might his talents have achieved, one may wonder, if he had served a wiser

master, within a sounder political framework.

At the same time as he passed the attainder, Charles assented to the bill

whereby he gave up his prerogative right to terminate the present parliament.

It could now be dissolved only be an act of parliament, and adjourned only by

order of each House. The Lords had tried unsuccessfully to limit its operation

to two years, but neither they nor anyone else can have foreseen that all but

twenty years would pass before the Long Parliament enacted its own dissolu-

tion. These were not Charles’s only concessions, for two days earlier he had

ordered the disbandment of the army that Strafford had raised in Ireland. He

could see no way of raising the money to pay it.

His dabbling in schemes for some kind of military coup had not only done

Strafford more harm than good; it had seriously set back his own best hope

for the future, that of building up a party of conservative constitutionalists on

the basis of a common devotion to the established church and the principle of

order. He dealt a further blow to such a prospect when he announced, with-

in a week of Strafford’s execution, that he intended to visit Scotland as soon

as the peace treaty, now in its ﬁnal stages, was concluded. The English parlia-

ment took its time in approving the terms of the Treaty of London, but got

through it by the end of June. The Scottish parliament passed it on 24 July,

and the king ratiﬁed it on 10 August, just before he set out for Scotland. The

Scottish army pulled out of England later in the month, and all but three regi-

ments were disbanded. The slow disbandment of the English army began at

the same time. This should have led to détente, but relief over the reduction of

these costly forces was offset by suspicion of Charles’s motives in travelling

north of the border. Four future royalist lords, including Montrose and

Napier, were being held in Edinburgh Castle for what the Covenanters called

a plot, but what they saw as the pursuit of an alternative policy for Scotland.

Charles was interested in exploring what they had to offer, and hoped to

build a party for himself in Scotland.

182 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 182

He would have been better engaged in an exercise of damage limitation

in England, for the full investigation of the army plot by a parliamentary

committee did him great harm, especially in the House of Lords. But far

from learning his lesson, he proceeded to involve himself in a second army

plot. Late in May or very early in June, he sent Daniel O’Neill, his agent in

the ﬁrst plot, back to the army in the north with the draft of a petition,

initialled by himself, intending that it should be circulated for signatures.

It deplored the turbulent spirits who were advancing new and unreason-

able demands, backed by a tumultuous multitude who threatened a total

subversion of government, and it purported to offer the army’s services for

the defence of the king, the parliament and the established laws. The

design came to nothing because the army’s responsible commanders

would have nothing to do with it, and it was not made public until the

autumn, but it almost certainly came to Pym’s knowledge well before the

end of June.

In the immediate aftermath of Strafford’s execution the two Houses

continued to be divided, both internally and in their relations with each

other, over the question of episcopacy. The Lords did not throw out the

Bishops’ Exclusion Bill until 8 June, but they made their intentions clear on

25 May by voting that the bishops should continue to sit in their House. The

Commons retorted on the 27th with a bill to abolish bishops root and

branch, which passed its ﬁrst reading by 139 votes to 108. The majority prob-

ably included others besides its introducer, Sir Edward Dering, who were

moved more by detestation of ‘Arminian’ bishops and exasperation with the

Lords than by a desire to abolish episcopacy totally. Until the approach of

civil war removed the royalists from Westminster in the following year, there

never was an outright majority in either house opposed to episcopacy in

principle. The bill proved deeply divisive, and the long debates on it played a

considerable part in turning devoted Anglicans like Hyde, Falkland, and

Culpepper towards the king. It never reached the Lords, though it was

much elaborated in committee during the summer months. It did not satisfy

the Scots, for what it proposed in place of bishops were not presbyteries and

synods but commissioners, some lay and some clerical, appointed by parlia-

ment. The result would have been as Erastian as the system it replaced,

and the main purpose of most of its promoters was not so much to reform reli-

gion as to ensure that the king never controlled the church again. The hours

that it consumed and the contentious feelings that it aroused helped to frus-

trate other bills with a more positively religious purpose, such as those for

requiring ministers to preach regularly, checking pluralism, removing scan-

dalous clergy, tightening sabbath observance, and abolishing idolatry and

superstition. A bill to disarm Roman Catholics came back from the Lords too

heavily amended for the Commons to accept it, though even they laughed

Climacteric I: ‘a Posture of Defence’ 183

ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 183

down a proposal by Sir John Clotworthy for a bill to castrate priests

and Jesuits.

Although religious issues continued to divide the two Houses, the reper-

cussions of the army plot and distrust of the king’s intentions brought them

closer together on constitutional issues. Between late June and early August

the Long Parliament passed a series of acts which placed unprecedented

limitations on the royal prerogative and proved to be its most enduring work.

These measures, unlike the attacks on episcopacy and the prayer book, gen-

erally had the support of the future constitutional royalists in both Houses.

The ﬁrst tackled the sixteen-year-old conﬂict over tonnage and poundage by

granting these essential dues, the largest single source of the crown’s revenue,

for an initial period of less than two months. It therefore strengthened parlia-

ment’s security against a dissolution because it needed frequent renewal, but

its enduring feature was its unequivocal denial that any duties whatsoever

could be imposed on either imports or exports without parliament’s consent,

for this settled the much older controversy over impositions.

Two more acts, to which the king gave his reluctant assent on 5 July, abol-

ished the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission. Both derived their

authority from the royal prerogative, and their abrogation at the instance of

parliament diminished the monarch’s powers signiﬁcantly. Henceforth the

courts of common law were to be the sole arbiters between his interests and

the rights of his subjects, and the only ways in which he could interfere with

their sometimes archaic and dilatory processes was through his power of par-

don or by exercising direct pressure on the judges, whom he still had the power

to appoint or dismiss. Star Chamber had played a useful part in mitigating the

deﬁciencies of the common law and had been a generally popular institution

until its authority had been abused in the notorious political cases of the 1630s.

Had it not been for those it would not have come under attack. The High Com-

mission, however, had few if any mourners outside the Laudian clergy, though

they had themselves to thank for its peak of unpopularity in 1641.

These measures were followed early in August by acts declaring Ship

Money to be illegal, setting ﬁrm limits to the royal forests (and hence to the

ﬁnes inﬂicted under the forest laws), and prohibiting the exaction of ﬁnes for

failing to assume knighthood. Taken with the Tonnage and Poundage Act,

they closed all the signiﬁcant loopholes through which taxes had been raised

without parliamentary consent and made a recurrence of the personal rule

legally impossible. It might look as though the king had suffered a serious

political defeat by the time that he departed for Scotland on 10 August. Yet

the parliament’s position was less happy than it might appear, and there were

184 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Fletcher, Outbreak of the English Civil War, pp. 69–70. Pym, however, gave the proposal

a serious reply: Russell, Fall of the English Monarchies, p. 340.

ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 184

serious issues, in addition to the religious ones, on which it remained divided.

The Bedford–Pym group’s scheme for a settlement lay in ruins, not just

because Bedford had died on 9 May but because such unity of purpose as it

once possessed had disappeared. Charles had made enough ‘bridge appoint-

ments’ to split it apart, but not enough to make him part with the power of

decision. Just before he left for Scotland he balanced the recent ‘country’

appointments to his privy council by adding three court-oriented peers to it,

but since it had seldom met since February this made no signiﬁcant difference.

The crucial problem of ensuring that royal policies were guided by min-

isters whom parliament trusted, and of securing the removal of ministers

whom it did not, had not been solved. Pym, probably under the immediate

stimulus of his personal knowledge of the second army plot, signalled a rad-

ical new approach to it in a speech to the Commons on 23 June. What he pro-

posed was referred to a committee of seven to put into deﬁnitive shape and

carried to the Lords next day in the form of Ten Propositions. The most vital

one, somewhat toned down by the Commons, was that both Houses should

petition the king ‘to remove such evil counsellors against whom there shall be

any just exceptions’, and that he should commit the affairs of the kingdom ‘to

such counsellors and ofﬁcers as the parliament may have cause to conﬁde

in’.

This was as far as the majority of members would go for the present in

matching the Scottish parliament’s new power to control the appointment of

councillors and ministers, but for Pym and his allies the intention was the

same. Pym also raised the other major issue that was to lead to civil war, the

control of the armed forces, but the drafting committee moderated his ﬁrst

proposal that all the lord lieutenants and deputy lieutenants, who had charge

of the trained bands, should be nominated in parliament and that the forces

of every county should be ‘put into a posture of defence’. What the two Houses

finally requested was ‘That there may be good lord lieutenants and deputy

lieutenants’, that the trained bands should be fully armed and made ﬁt for ser-

vice, and that all who commanded them should take a special oath, to be

framed by parliament. Many in the Commons were prepared to bid higher; in

July they gave two readings to a militia bill which would have put the trained

bands under named commissioners for nine months, but it went no further

after the king left for Scotland.

Others of the Ten Propositions were particularly offensive to the queen,

who was to be allowed no Jesuits or British-born priests in her service and was

to be attended by a guard to prevent the resort of papists to her. The educa-

tion of the royal children was to be committed to protestants, the college of

Capuchins at Somerset House was to be dissolved and its members banished,

Climacteric I: ‘a Posture of Defence’ 185

Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, pp. 163–6, prints the Ten Propositions as they

emerged from the Commons’ committee. On their passage through parliament and their reper-

cussions see Fletcher, Outbreak of the English Civil War, ch. 2.

ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 185

and it was to be made treason for a papal nuncio or agent to enter the king-

dom. The Lords demurred only at the most gratuitous of these affronts to the

queen; they agreed to all the rest of the Propositions with striking readiness.

Pym’s personal standing was now nearing its peak, but he had difﬁculty in

managing parliament because so many members of both Houses were slip-

ping off home. It had already been an unprecedentedly long session, and with

plague and smallpox spreading seriously from the City to Westminster it was

dangerous as well as uncomfortable to stay in the capital through the hot

summer months. From July onward there was often difﬁculty in assembling a

quorum of forty members, especially early in the morning and after a break

for dinner. But the leadership felt it essential to keep the parliament sitting

through August and beyond, because they simply did not feel safe until the

armies—especially the king’s, of course—were disbanded. In one way their

task was easier, since it was mainly the lukewarm who went home, and about

sixty activists who enabled them to keep going. In consequence the religious

temper of the House became less moderate and more aggressively anti-papist.

Late in July the Commons sent up an oppressive bill to compel all Englishmen

to sign the Protestation or face the penalties of recusancy; peers who refused

it were to be debarred from parliament. When the Lords predictably rejected

the bill, the Commons published a vote declaring that all who refused the

Protestation were unﬁt for ofﬁce in church or state. This they had printed and

sent out to their constituencies, to the Lords’ intense resentment. They also

instituted impeachment proceedings against thirteen bishops for their alleged

part in preparing the 1640 canons.

Despite such irritants, however, Pym usually found enough support among

the dwindling number of peers still at Westminster to get essential business

done. In the hazardous situation created by the king’s departure, while two

armies were still afoot, the two houses went further than before in taking

executive action of a kind that had never belonged to the legislature. During

the last three weeks of the session they issued the ﬁrst ﬁve parliamentary

ordinances. Most of these were relatively innocuous measures, justiﬁable by

the king’s absence. But the ordinance for disarming recusants, which the

Lords were now willing to pass, went further than enforcing existing law, for

it extended the deﬁnition of recusancy to include new categories of offenders

and suspects, and added to the catholics’ disabilities. That great lawyer John

Selden warned the Commons that it ‘made new laws which it could not’.

was a signiﬁcant step towards the assertion of parliamentary sovereignty that

would become explicit in the following spring.

186 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Quoted in Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 76–7. Fletcher explains the objections to the ordinance

more fully than is possible here.

ch6.y8 27/9/02 10:40 AM Page 186

The ninth of September was the date appointed for a six weeks’ adjourn-

ment, and as it drew close the attenuated House of Commons was overcome

by a sense that it had not done enough to restore the purity of religion. On its

own sole authority it published an order on the 8th, commanding the church-

wardens in every parish to move the communion table away from the east end

of the church, take down the rails, and remove any cruciﬁxes, images of the

Virgin Mary, and ‘scandalous pictures of any one or more persons of the

Trinity’. The order forbade bowing at the name of Jesus, as well as dancing

or other sports on the Lord’s Day.

It was not passed without exposing deep

differences among the members; it angered the Lords and caused great div-

ision in the country generally. Much of what it banned was neither contrary to

law nor universally disliked, and it led to much destruction of medieval carv-

ing and stained glass. The iconoclasm that was so often ascribed uncritically

to ‘Cromwell’s soldiers’ began nearly a year before the Civil War, and much

of it was carried out by civil agencies on the orders of the people’s represen-

tatives. The Lords responded by publishing an order of their own, ﬁrst passed

in January, commanding that divine service be performed as appointed by

acts of parliament, and not otherwise. On these discordant notes the two

houses adjourned themselves until 20 October.

Each named a committee to look after parliament’s interests in the interim,

and to correspond with a joint committee that they had appointed to attend

the king in Scotland. The Commons nominated forty-seven MPs, but attend-

ance sometimes sank as low as twelve; the plague was at its worst in Octo-

ber. Pym as their chairman, however, was never more powerful, and many of

their executive orders bore his sole signature. It was at this time that he began

to be called King Pym; but the sobriquet was not used affectionately, and he

was quite widely unpopular. Many backbenchers disliked the tactics where-

by his policies were driven through parliament, and he and his faction were

attacked in printed libels, scattered and posted up in the streets of London.

They were particularly accused, unjustly, of working hand in glove with sec-

taries, tub-preachers, and other radical puritans of the City. They themselves

were totally convinced of the need to curb the king’s powers further than they

had yet done, and though they may have been unduly alarmist about his pres-

ent capacity to cast off the restraints imposed by their recent measures, and

unrealistically obsessed with popish plots, they were not mistaken about his

long-term intentions or his trustworthiness. They had not succeeded, how-

ever, in conveying their sense of urgency to the provinces, where there was by

now quite a widespread reaction in Charles’s favour. This stemmed partly

from a dislike of the activities and pretensions of the godly interest, but many

Climacteric I: ‘a Posture of Defence’ 187

Text in Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, pp. 197–8; the Lords’ order of 9 Sep-

tember is on p. 199.

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