Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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king could not use against opponents even nearer home. Early in December

the Commons, with the rebellion in mind, did pass an Impressment Bill,

which would have empowered parliament to conscript men for military ser-

vice, but many peers shared the king’s objection that it was his sole preroga-

tive right to raise armed forces, and it stuck in the Lords. On the 7th

Sir Arthur Haselrig introduced a more sweeping Militia Bill which would

have appointed three generals, one north of Trent and two south, with power

to raise men and money and to exercise martial law. But this was a still gross-

er invasion of the prerogative, and it died in the Commons. It had little to do

with Ireland anyway, and the Dublin government’s military needs were to

remain neglected at Westminster until the crucial question of who ultimately

controlled England’s military resources had been settled. Charles chose a

most unfortunate way to emphasize his own claim. Since the disbandment of

his army in the north, many unemployed ofﬁcers had collected in London,

some to press for their arrears of pay. Conspicuous among them was a brutal

and disreputable soldier of fortune called Thomas Lunsford, who had been

gaoled seven years earlier for attempted murder, though he had partly

redeemed himself by his courage in trying to stem the rout at Newburn.

Charles, partly to reassert his prerogative and partly to secure a more than

symbolic stronghold in his troubled capital, dismissed the Lieutenant of the

Tower and on 23 December appointed Lunsford in his place. Sober London-

ers were horriﬁed, and the concerted protests of the Lord Mayor, Common

Council, and House of Commons persuaded him to dismiss Lunsford three

days later—though with a knighthood and a pension to console him. It was

only a partial climb-down, and it helped Charles little, for the new Lieutenant

he appointed, Sir John Byron, continued to ﬁll the Tower with soldiers and

ammunition. In the wake of the worse crisis that Charles was to precipitate

early in January, pressure for Byron’s removal made his position so intoler-

able that he was pleading to be relieved.

Well before that Charles lost the considerable inﬂuence that the crown had

hitherto wielded over the government of the City of London. Normally the

Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen ran it as they thought ﬁt, but certain

decisions and functions such as the making of bye-laws required the consent

of the Common Council, a larger body (numbering 237 in 1641) elected

annually by the City’s wards. It met only when the Lord Mayor summoned

it—typically ﬁve or six times a year, though less during Charles’s personal

rule—and it normally considered only what had already been approved by

the Court of Aldermen. Most common councilmen were very wealthy, gener-

ally with an interest in more than one trade and livery company, and a fair

number beneﬁted (like so many aldermen) from lucrative crown concessions,

so they were not inclined in normal times to rock the political boat. But a

signiﬁcant proportion of them were strong puritans, receptive to the

208 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:45 AM Page 208

campaigning zeal of London’s puritan ministers and lecturers. Those clergy

were a close-knit group, and they were extremely active in 1641–2, canvass-

ing for anti-episcopal petitions, holding house-to-house collections, and (so it

was alleged) using their pulpits to organize popular demonstrations. They

brought a special inﬂuence to bear on the 1641 elections to the Common

Council, which fell on 21 December. The result was an exceptional inﬂux of

new men, who for the ﬁrst time tilted the balance decisively in favour of Pym

and the parliamentary leadership. As soon as they took their seats the Com-

mon Council showed a new self-assertiveness; in particular it challenged the

cosy oligarchies in the vestries which had traditionally managed its elections

and claimed that all the freemen of the City had the right to vote. It also set up

a committee of its own to adjudicate disputed elections. The large political

results of this quiet revolution will be seen shortly.

Meanwhile the Grand Remonstrance had been presented to the king on

1 December, prefaced by a petition asking him ‘to concur with the humble

desires of your people in a parliamentary way’ by agreeing to exclude the

bishops from parliament, abolish ‘oppressive and unnecessary ceremonies’ in

church services, and remove his offending councillors in favour of such as

could command parliament’s conﬁdence. He promised an answer at a later

date, but when two weeks passed without one the Commons, after several

hours’ debate, ordered the Remonstrance to be printed. This angered him,

and on the 23rd he published a reply which had been skilfully drafted for him

by Hyde to appeal to fellow constitutional royalists and lovers of the Church

of England. It was an answer to the petition only, since Charles considered the

Remonstrance itself to be unparliamentary, proceeding as it did from one

House only. Concerning religion, he said he would continue to concur with

his people’s just desires in a parliamentary way, but the bishops’ membership

of the Lords was grounded in the fundamental law of the kingdom and the

constitution of parliament, and (since the bill to exclude them was still stuck in

the Lords) he would give no further answer at present. As for alleged corrup-

tions in religion and church government, he was convinced ‘that no church

can be found upon the earth that professeth the true religion with more pur-

ity of doctrine than the Church of England doth, nor where the government

and discipline are jointly more beautiﬁed and free from superstition, than as

they are here established by law’. He would maintain it in its purity and glory,

‘not only against all invasions of popery, but also from the irreverence of

those many schismatics and separatists, wherewith of late this kingdom and

this city abounds’.

If he had held to this widely popular course and waited

Three Kingdoms in Crisis 209

On London’s role in 1640–2, see Valerie Pearl’s masterly London and the Outbreak of the

Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1961); pp. 132–40 deal with the 1641 Common Council elections.

Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, pp. 202–5 for the petition accompanying the Grand

Remonstrance, pp. 233–6 for the king’s answer.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:45 AM Page 209

for his opponents to make false moves, Pym and his party might have been

thrown back on their heels, at least temporarily.

Parliament took only two days off for Christmas, and there were serious

disorders when it reassembled on the 27th. A large mob ﬁlled Palace Yard and

crowded into Westminster Hall, shouting ‘No bishops!’. Lunsford and some

fellow-swordsmen happened to be there, to press for their arrears and solicit

employment in Ireland. Under some provocation they drew their swords and

chased the citizens from the hall, shedding blood in the process; the demon-

strators pelted them with stones and roof-tiles in reply. But the mob’s main

object was to prevent the bishops from getting to the House of Lords, whether

by coach or by barge, and it certainly made their passage difﬁcult. Archbishop

Williams, who had recently been translated from Lincoln to York, grabbed at

one insolent youth, and was roughly handled by the lad’s comrades until a

couple of peers came to his rescue. Worse things were to happen in the com-

ing years than Williams’s torn tippet, but on the 29th he and eleven other

bishops presented a protest to the king, claiming that since they had been vio-

lently prevented from attending the Upper House, its proceedings in their

absence were null and void. This angered the Lords, who only the day before

had rejected a motion declaring that because of the mob’s pressure parlia-

ment was not free. For Pym the bishops’ protest was a windfall, and he imme-

diately moved the impeachment of all its twelve signatories. The earlier

impeachment of thirteen bishops for their part in the 1640 canons had been

hanging ﬁre in the Lords, despite frequent proddings from the Commons,

probably because many peers saw it as a stratagem to deprive the bishops of

their votes; but this time the Lords felt their own privileges offended and

promptly accepted the charges against the twelve, who spent a cold winter’s

night in prison while church bells tolled and bonﬁres blazed in the City. Their

folly had brought the two Houses closer after some weeks of strained rela-

tions, and it hastened the nineteen-year eclipse of their order. That same night

Charles entertained Lunsford and about 120 other former ofﬁcers to dinner

at Whitehall.

By the turn of the year Charles and Pym each nursed a fear of a violent coup

by the other. On 30 December Pym dramatically moved that the door of the

House should be shut, and announced that there was a plot afoot to destroy

it that very day. Next day, after long debate, the Commons sent a request to

the king to provide them with a guard of City trained bands under the com-

mand of Essex. What they feared was the growing number of ex-ofﬁcers

gathered around the court at Whitehall—four or ﬁve hundred ‘desperate and

loose persons’, they were told on 3 January.

Charles for his part felt that it

was Whitehall that most needed a guard, and indeed on New Year’s Eve

210 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, ed. Coates, pp. 365–6, 372–3, 376.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:45 AM Page 210

about two hundred demonstrators with swords and staves did beset the

palace, clashing with the swordsmen, who injured a few of them. It was

around this time that the popular names that were to stick to the two sides in

the Civil War ﬁrst became current: Cavaliers, denoting the swashbuckling

military types who associated with Lunsford and swaggered around White-

hall, and Roundheads, referring to the sort of puritan City agitators whose

tumults the Commons were accused of encouraging: men of the middling sort

and lower orders who wore their hair cropped, instead of long like gentlemen.

Charles genuinely feared that the queen’s life was in danger from these

London mobs. A rumour was spreading that she was about to be impeached,

and he believed it. He resolved to forestall such a move by himself impeach-

ing those he thought likely to attempt it, but before doing so he strengthened

his government by taking on board two leading constitutional royalists, in

both of whom parliament should have had every ‘cause to conﬁde’. He had

already, on returning from Scotland, dismissed the elder Vane from his Sec-

retaryship of State, since his loyalty was becoming more and more suspect,

and the younger Vane from his Treasurership of the Navy. What with Winde-

bank’s ﬂight to France, Charles had both secretaryships to dispose of, and he

had appointed the faithful Sir Edward Nicholas to one of them. Now, on

2 January 1642, he gave the other to Lord Falkland, and at the same time

made Sir John Culpepper Chancellor of the Exchequer. Their friend Edward

Hyde was already his close adviser, but preferred for the present to remain

without ofﬁce. Writing to his wife, Sir Edward Dering transmitted an extra-

ordinary story that hours before giving the Exchequer to Culpepper, Charles

sent for Pym and offered it again to him. This has to be mentioned, since some

distinguished historians, including Gardiner, have been inclined to believe it;

but it is scarcely credible that Charles could have contemplated giving a key

place in his government to a man who he believed to be threatening his wife’s

life, or that he could have supposed that at this stage Pym might be tempted

by such a poisoned chalice. The time when political rifts might have been

mended by ‘bridge’ appointments had surely passed with Bedford’s death,

Strafford’s execution, and the ﬁrst army plot.

Pym in fact headed the list of those whom Charles now charged with trea-

son. The others of the famous Five Members were Pym’s close ally and friend

Hampden; Holles and Strode, who had been imprisoned (Strode all through

the personal rule) for their part in the stormy closing scene of the 1628–9 par-

liament; and the much younger Haselrig, a prime mover in the Root and

Branch Bill, Strafford’s attainder, and the recent Militia Bill. By an after-

thought Charles added a single peer, Manchester’s son Lord Mandeville. The

Attorney-General, Sir Edward Herbert, laid articles of impeachment against

the six before the House of Lords on 3 January, but he had had no part in

framing them. His own account, given admittedly when he was threatened

Three Kingdoms in Crisis 211

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:45 AM Page 211

with impeachment himself, was that he presented them only at the king’s

peremptory command, after he had twice tried earnestly to dissuade him

from proceeding with them. Charles was acting under strong pressure from

Henrietta Maria, and was himself probably responsible for their content. They

sound like an attempt to retort the charges against Strafford upon his accusers’

heads. The six were arraigned for ‘traitorously endeavour[ing] to subvert the

fundamental laws and government of the kingdom of England’ by placing an

arbitrary and tyrannical power in mere subjects, of alienating the affections

of the people by their foul aspersions upon their sovereign, of inviting a for-

eign power (the Scots) to invade England, and of actually levying war against

the king.

Not all the accusations (there were seven) were preposterous, and

the Five Members could have had an uncomfortable time answering them

if the majority of the Lords had been as staunch for the king as he imagined.

It was all very well to invoke parliamentary privilege, as the Five loudly did,

but privilege did not avail against treason. Nevertheless most of the peers, and

not only the future parliamentarians, saw the king’s move as an attack on the

authority of parliament itself, and they doubted whether his manner of pro-

ceeding was lawful. Historically, in impeachments, the Commons preferred

the charges and appointed prosecutors, and the Lords collectively sat as

judges. For the crown to assume the prosecutor’s role was not only unprece-

dented but contrary to the spirit of this great judicial process. So instead of

ordering the immediate arrest of the accused, as Charles had expected, the

Lords appointed a committee to consider whether the Attorney-General’s

procedure was according to law.

Charles, however, was so determined that the Five Members should not

escape arrest that he decided to go to the House of Commons in person next

day to apprehend them. Late at night he sent a messenger to the Lord Mayor,

forbidding him to send any of the City trained bands to protect the parliament-

house, but authorizing the militia to ﬁre on the crowd if there should be any

tumults. At Whitehall on the 4th, where Lunsford had charge of the guard, he

assembled about four hundred armed men to accompany him. Pym, thanks

to his friend Essex and to the French ambassador, was fully informed of

Charles’s intentions and movements. He and his fellow-accused took their

seats, determined not to spare the king the irreparable harm that he was evi-

dently about to do himself. When they got word at about three in the after-

noon that he was on his way, they left the House and took a waiting barge to

the City. Charles, on arriving, left most of his cavalcade outside, but about

eighty men armed with pistols and swords entered the lobby behind him, and

remained visible and threatening through the open door. He entered the

Chamber with his nephew the Elector Palatine at his side and took over the

212 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, pp. 236–7.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:46 AM Page 212

Speaker’s chair. He announced his purpose, making many pauses while his

eyes searched in vain for the ﬁve whose arrest he demanded. He called for

Pym, then for Holles, by name; he was met by total silence. He asked the

Speaker where they were. Lenthall was a timorous man by nature, but on this

occasion he found words that have become immortal. ‘May it please your

Majesty,’ he said, falling to one knee, ‘I have neither eyes to see, nor tongue to

speak in this place, but as this House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I

am here.’

He begged the king’s pardon that he could give no further answer.

Charles groped for some face-saving words, but passionate anger showed on

his face as he left the chamber, followed by shouts of ‘privilege! privilege!’

from the members.

That same day, all the shops in the City were shut, and the Common Coun-

cil took the unprecedented step of electing a Committee of Safety, consisting

almost entirely of the more prominent supporters of the parliamentary lead-

ership. It later assumed control of London’s trained bands. Pym’s allies

among the City fathers henceforth wielded unchallenged power in the cap-

ital, and Lord Mayor Gurney’s authority was cut from under him. Charles

cannot have been aware of this development when he rode to the Guildhall

next day to make a personal demand that the City should hand over the fugi-

tive Five. He was evidently shaken, however, by the hostility of the crowds

through which he passed, and by their repeatedly shouted slogan: ‘privileges

of parliament!’ The same cry was echoed in his presence by members of the

Common Council, though others shouted ‘God bless the king’. His fruitless

visit was a second humiliation within two days.

On 6 January the Commons voted by two to one to seek the City’s protec-

tion and adjourn until further order to the Guildhall. Legally they could not

change their venue without the king’s command, but they got round this by sit-

ting as a committee open to all members to attend. That night, London rocked

to an alarm that Charles was sending in horse and foot to arrest the Five

Members by force. Their supporters went round the streets, knocking from

door to door and shouting ‘arm! arm!’ It was reckoned (no doubt with some

exaggeration) that 40,000 citizens turned out completely armed, while

100,000 more stood to in their houses with halberds, swords, or clubs. Yet

when the alarm proved false, the streets were cleared within an hour. Next day

in the Guildhall the Commons voted that power over the City’s armed forces

lay with the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council, ‘or the greater

numbers of them’, which meant that the now friendly majority of the Com-

mon Council could outvote their royalist or neutralist seniors. On the 10th,

after consulting with their Common Council friends, the Commons voted

that until the City ordered otherwise its forces should be commanded by

Three Kingdoms in Crisis 213

Gardiner, History of England, X, 140.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:46 AM Page 213

Sergeant-Major-General Skippon, a seasoned professional who had risen

from the ranks and had the common touch, as well as being a strong puritan

and parliamentarian. By way of reinforcement, Hampden announced that

some thousands of his Buckinghamshire constituents were marching towards

London, and there were offers of support from the apprentices, the Southwark

trained bands, and the seamen on the Thames.

Charles now decided that his capital had become too hot to hold him. He

left it for Hampton Court in the night of the 10th, never to see it again until

he was brought back seven years later as a prisoner, to be tried for his life.

Through his attempt to silence his parliamentary opponents by proceeding

against them as traitors, he had strengthened their hold on the Commons,

boosted their popularity in the country, alienated the Lords, and dealt a fatal

blow to what was left of his support in the City. Next day the Commons

returned to Westminster by barge, to the sound of martial music and volleys

of shot from a whole regatta of festively decked boats, while Skippon’s

trained bands, 2,400 of them, marched to the same destination by way of the

Strand and Whitehall. Many of them bore copies of the Protestation on their

pikes and muskets, and many citizens hung the printed sheets like little ban-

ners on lines strung between their houses. It had become the very emblem of

the parliamentary cause.

Charles was constantly being spurred by his queen to stand up to his enemies,

and his ﬁrst actions after leaving London suggest that he already wanted

to go to war. He and she believed that away from the seditious politicians and

subversive preachers of the capital he could draw on a great fund of loyalty in

provincial England. They were planning that she should go to Holland with

a substantial part of the crown jewels, to pawn or sell them and procure both

men and arms. The Commons were alarmed to hear on 12 January that

Lunsford had mustered a considerable body of cavaliers at Kingston-upon-

Thames, where the county magazine of Surrey was stored. Lord Digby had

come over from Hampton Court with instructions from the king, and it may

have been part of a plan to secure Portsmouth, where Charles was probably

hoping to embark his wife. Lunsford’s party, however, was dispersed after a

scufﬂe by the Surrey trained bands.

Charles also tried to secure control of Hull, which was important not only

as a fortiﬁed port where Dutch or Danish troops might be landed, but because

its magazine held most of the weapons and artillery that had been collected

for the war with Scotland—enough to arm 16,000 men. On 11 January he

secretly appointed the Earl of Newcastle as governor of Hull, and sent Cap-

tain Legge, his agent in the army plot, to secure its magazine and ensure the

214 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, pp. 392, 398, 400–1; Pearl, London and the Outbreak of

the Puritan Revolution, pp. 141–5; Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, pp. 450–1; Manning,

English People and the English Revolution, pp. 96–8.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:46 AM Page 214

citizens’ obedience. But the Commons got wind of the design and ordered Sir

John Hotham, member for nearby Beverley, to take Hull over with the York-

shire trained bands, with instructions not to deliver it up without orders from

parliament. His son Captain John Hotham, MP for Scarborough and a

soldier like himself, got to Hull before Legge and held it safe until his father

arrived and took command. It was a striking example of the Commons’ readi-

ness to give direct orders in a sphere that undoubtedly lay within the royal

prerogative, but with the king threatening war it was an act of self-defence.

The issues over which the war would be fought were fast becoming deﬁned.

Cromwell, who was prominent by now among the ‘ﬁery spirits’ in the House,

successfully moved on 14 January for a large committee to consider how to

put the kingdom in a posture of defence. Four days later it recommended that

the militia in every county should be put under the command of a lord lieu-

tenant and deputy lieutenants appointed by an ordinance of parliament. No

one quarrel led so inexorably to war as that over the resultant Militia Ordin-

ance, which went to the Lords on 15 February and won their immediate

assent. On 17 January the committee of the whole House resolved, on a

motion by Pym, that the king should be requested to dismiss all his present

privy councillors and to appoint in their place such men as the two Houses

should advise. The Commons were ahead of the Lords on this issue, but it was

the most sweeping bid so far for parliamentary control over the composition

of the executive. To show who was the real master of the king’s servants, they

impeached the Attorney-General for preferring the articles of impeachment

against the Five Members, even though he had done so reluctantly, under the

king’s written command, and though Charles had subsequently withdrawn

them. Despite an order from the king not to proceed, the Lords eventually

found him guilty, and after a brief imprisonment banned him from London

and Westminster. They would not give their consent, however, to an order of

the Commons on 20 January for a printed letter to be sent from the Speaker to

the sheriff of each county, requiring all males over eighteen to swear to the

Protestation, and directing that the names both of those who complied and of

those who refused should be recorded. The letters were nevertheless sent, and

during the ensuing weeks much of the country was sworn village by village,

often after Sunday service. For those outside court circles, and not of the

catholic faith, it was the ﬁrst real whiff of parliamentary tyranny. It was not

to be the last.

Charles had moved to Windsor on 13 January. His court there was

small, and consisted too much of swordsmen and sycophants. Essex, his

Lord Chamberlain, and Holland, his Groom of the Stool, had refused to

obey his command to attend him, and few other lords came to Windsor.

Sir John Holland MP, who went there on parliamentary business on the

28th, ‘found a desolate court, saw not one nobleman and scarce three

Three Kingdoms in Crisis 215

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:46 AM Page 215

gentlemen’.

Charles seriously lacked good counsel and sound intelligence

about the state of feeling in the country, but he nevertheless came to realize

that war was not an option for the present, since far too few of his subjects

would be prepared to take up arms for him. He would have to rally them per-

sonally in those regions that he believed still loyal, so he needed time. Sensing

that his opponents were running ahead of public opinion, he now sought to

take the wind out of their sails by offering a prospect of negotiated agreement.

He wrote to both Houses on 20 January, asking them urgently to draw up a

single document, stating what they intended to do to settle his revenue, what

further safeguards they desired for the privileges of parliament and the prop-

erty and liberty of the subject, and what they proposed for ‘the security of the

true religion now professed in the Church of England’ and for settling its

ceremonies. He promised that he would respond so graciously that if the

kingdom’s present distractions did not ‘end in a happy and blessed accom-

modation’, he would call on God and man to witness that it would be through

no failure on his part.

It was a skilful appeal to all who longed for a peace-

ful settlement and loved the established church, and the Lords responded

with warm thanks. But when their answer came before the Commons for

their concurrence, Hampden moved and carried an addition to it, asking that

the Tower, the other forts, and all the trained bands should be put in the

charge of men whom parliament could trust. The Tower was still com-

manded by Sir John Byron, the royalist Lieutenant with whom Charles had

replaced Lunsford, and though he was virtually blockaded by Skippon’s

trained bands, London’s citadel had symbolic signiﬁcance. Hampden’s add-

ition irritated the Lords and greatly offended the king, but it gauged not

unfairly the sincerity of Charles’s intentions. It effectively blocked the negoti-

ation that he sought, as it was intended to do.

While Charles was courting the religious conservatives the Commons were

alienating them. In response to a petition from puritan Colchester, they voted

on 21 January that the present liturgy stood in need of reformation, and they

resolved next day that no one should be penalized for omitting any of its cere-

monies pending parliament’s intended revision of it. The Book of Common

Prayer had come under threat before, but this was the ﬁrst time that its

defenders had failed to stave off a speciﬁc condemnation of it. Hitherto the

Lords could have been trusted to come to its rescue, but at the end of the

month the king, feeling his isolation at Windsor, summoned fourteen faithful

peers to join him there. Other royalist lords followed them, and the balance

in the Upper House changed critically. It passed the Bishops’ Exclusion Bill

216 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

The Private Journals of the Long Parliament, 3 January to 5 March 1642, ed. W. H. Coates,

A. S. Young, and V. F. Snow (New Haven, 1982; hereafter Private Journals, I), pp. 71–3, 218,

356–9, 363.

Lords’ Journal, IV, 523, also printed with one omission in Private Journals, I, 125.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:46 AM Page 216

on 5 February and the Impressment Bill soon after. It gave an immediate

welcome to the Militia Ordinance, though for many peers, as Conrad Russell

has well said, ‘the object seems to have been, not to enable the Commons to

start a war against the king, but to disable the king from starting a war against

the Commons’.

Charles, however, was still pursuing the path of conciliation, if only

because he was so anxious to get the queen and her chests of treasure safely

out of England. As he travelled with her towards Dover, he ﬁnally dropped

the charges against the Five Members, and gave his assent ﬁrst to the Bishops’

Exclusion Bill and then to the Impressment Bill. He also yielded to Byron’s

plea to be released from his untenable position as Lieutenant of the Tower,

and to his replacement by Sir John Conyers, who was parliament’s choice.

Unkind winds delayed Henrietta Maria’s departure for a tense week, during

which Charles was presented with the Militia Ordinance for his assent. This

was too much for him, and he temporized. It was a matter of such high import-

ance, he said, that he would defer an answer until he had seen the queen safe-

ly on her way to Holland. She sailed on 23 February, but without waiting for

a fuller reply the Commons declared on the 21st that his response was ‘as

unsatisfactory and destructive as an absolute denial’.

The Lords ﬁnally

passed the ordinance on 5 March, over the recorded protests of sixteen peers,

and both Houses claimed for it the force of law, despite the withholding of

the royal assent. It was not the ﬁrst ordinance of parliament, though no

previous one had attempted anything as momentous as the assumption of

control over the kingdom’s land forces.

It is probable that for some time now neither King Charles nor King Pym

had had any serious hopes of a negotiated settlement, unless one side or the

other could be forced to accept terms of virtual surrender. But Charles had to

ﬁnd a party to ﬁght for him, and the parliamentary leaders had to persuade

the gentry of provincial England that their differences with him could not be

resolved through what everyone was calling an accommodation. Here we are

given an unusually broad view of local feelings, because between December

1641 and May 1642 no fewer than thirty-seven of England’s forty counties

sent petitions to parliament, while others came in from Wales and from a

number of English towns. Most were the fruit of close liaison between MPs

and leading ﬁgures among their constituents, and they obviously convey the

views of future parliamentarians rather than of royalists. But they are not to

be discounted, as they used to be, as a mere propaganda campaign, orches-

trated by the activists at Westminster. As Anthony Fletcher has demon-

strated, most of the petitions were submitted for discussion and approval to

Three Kingdoms in Crisis 217

Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, p. 472; Private Journals, I, 384–5.

Private Journals, I, 431.

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